Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

i’m just curious

ofrum:

reblog this and put in the tags languages you can at least somehow communicate in

(Source: osgoods, via starklyjd)

friendlyneighborhoodcommiescum:

A cunning vampire door-to-door salesperson who stands in people’s doorways and talks until they can find a convenient moment to drop their pen and the person picks it up and the vampire says oh “Thank you” and the person says “you’re welcome” and the vampire smiles a big fangy grin and steps inside

And that’s this vampire’s modus operandi for decades And then the language starts to change and suddenly millenials have homes and the vampire thanks them and they say “oh, no problem” and the vampire is like ???????????????? this was not the plan

(Source: cupofcoffin, via dukeofbookingham)

grizzlyhills:

flightcub:

interretialia:

life-of-a-latin-student:

ratwithoutwings:

i’m so upset

I just realized that the reason ghosts say Boo! is because it’s a latin verb

they’re literally saying ‘I alarm/I am alarming/I do alarm!!

I can’t

present active boō, present infinitive boāre, perfect active boāvī, supine boātum

Recte!

if it comes from the latin word, they’re actually saying “I’M YELLING!” which is even cuter

do they speak latin because it’s a dead language

AMO.  ILLE OPTIME EST.

MORTUUS SUM.  BOO!

(Source: pidgeling, via anacfranco)

Some of my favourite linguistic developments

toddmonotony:

‘Is that a thing?’ for ‘does that exist?’

Deliberate omission of grammar to show e.g. defeatedness, bewilderment, fury. As seen in Tumblr’s ‘what is this I don’t even’.

‘Because [noun]’. As in ‘we couldn’t have our picnic in the meadow because wasps.’

Use of kerning to indicate strong bewilderment, i.e. double-spaced letters usually denoting ‘what is happening?’ This one is really interesting because it doesn’t really translate well to speech. It’s something people have come up with that uses the medium of text over the internet as a new way of communicating instead of just a transcript of speech or a quicker way to send postal letters.

Just the general playing around with sentence structure and still being able to be understood. One of my favourites of these is the ‘subject: *verbs* / object: *is verb*’ couplet, as in:

Beekeeper: *keeps bees*
Bees: *is keep*

or

Me: *holds puppy*
Puppy: *is hold*

I just love how this all develops organically with no deciding body, and how we all understand and adapt to it.

(via lupinatic)

recoverykitty:

On the phone with my friend in korea and he’s explaining to me in english that he must stop smoking because he doesn’t want to become impotent. 

Walking down Gangnam street he says (in english) “I must stop smoking for my dick. My dick is important. If my dick does the broken I cannot sex.”

and I hear in absolute plain english behind him “WHAT” 

(via yea-lets-do-this-shit)

kiriamaya:

mare-akami:

noregretsjustfrontbutts:

beyonceprivilege:

i’m doing all this research on when “like” is used as a filler vs. “um” or “uh” or whatever & i’m really loving this

basically my fav pattern so far is how these teen girls use “like” pretty exclusively when they’re sharing these concepts that are unknown to them or  just guess work, ya know? 

they’ll say “here’s the, um, living room” but then they’ll say “in this picture my brother is, like, howling or something” 

& i love it i mean i love the way they use “like” to express uncertainty and idk pensiveness? “um” expresses a break in a sentence, some disfluency. but “like” holds actual semantic meaning and is an indicator that expresses what follows isn’t gonna be totally accurate but just to the speaker’s best estimation.

i mean, he’s, like, howling or something, right? 

girl talk is cool talk 

I actually just wrote a 45 page thesis on this so here’s some more info on that if you wanna know more.

1. Like used in this way can be considered either a discourse particle or an approximative adverb.  A discourse particle is a focusing agent which shows that hte information directlyt foloowing it is the main point of the utterance.  It’s a language-efficiency tool and makes it more direct.  IT is also used in moments of high excitement for this reason–you want people to know the point and you want it to hit them in the fucking face.  An approximative adverb like is used to show that the information it’s modifying is imprecise and therefore, approximate.

2. This isn’t girl talk! Like’s usage is barely different among genders of the same age group, but is heavily stratified by age.  THe reason it’s commonly thought of as “girl talk” is because it illustrates uncertainty and impreciseness–this is an example of sexism in language, because it intones that women don’t actually know what they’re talking about (FUCK THAT).  It was once true that like was used primarily by women, but with shifting power paradigms, its usage is becoming more equal by gender.

3. You mentioned before that you uncovered this information concerning like while researching its relation to uh or um: this usage of like is known as a hesitation marker and has no semantic content, and is therefore unrelated to the type of like you’re describing.  Hesitation marker like is often thought of as all the unconventional uses of like which is why people think that it’s a garbage filler word (though I don’t think there’s any such thing as a garbage word tbh), but it has so many unique uses which aren’t represented in English in other forms.

4. FUNFACT: A related use of like is as a quotative complementizer.  I won’t delve into the syntax portion of what a complementizer is, but the quotative part obviously refers to quoted information.  Here, like can be used to show either that the quoted information is estimated to the best of the speaker’s ability or that there is a storytelling aspect, typically with exaggeration or acting.  YOU CAN TELL THE DIFFERENCE AND YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW IT.  When the quoted information preserves the tenses in the original utterance, it is intended to be a direct quote.  When the verb tenses are adapted to the present conversation, it is the second category, and is either an exaggerated quote or the speaker is just trying to convey the gist of the original utterance.

5. Language fucking rules.

I love you, Marie. I was even going to text you after work about this…I wanted to know your sources!

:D

(via bonehandledknife)

runecestershire:

prismatic-bell:

atomicairspace:

copperbooms:

when did tumblr collectively decide not to use punctuation like when did this happen why is this a thing

it just looks so smooth I mean look at this sentence flow like a jungle river

ACTUALLY

This is really exciting, linguistically speaking.

Because it’s not true that Tumblr never uses punctuation. But it is true that lack of punctuation has become, itself, a form of punctuation. On Tumblr the lack of punctuation in multisentence-long posts creates the function of rhetorical speech, or speech that is not intended to have an answer, usually in the form of a question. Consider the following two potential posts. Each individual line should be taken as a post:

ugh is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use like god put that back we have to pay for that stuff

Ugh. Is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use? Like god, put that back. We have to pay for that stuff.

In your head, those two potential posts sound totally different. In the first one I’m ranting about work, and this requires no answer. The second may actually engage you to give an answer about hoarding sauce packets. And if you answer the first post, you will likely do so in the same style. 

Here’s what makes this exciting: the English language has no actual punctuation for rhetorical speech–that is, there are no special marks that specifically indicate “this speech is in the abstract, and requires no answer.” Not only that, it never has. The first written record of English (actually proto-English, predating even Old English) dates to the 400s CE, so we’re talking about 1600 years of having absolutely no marker whatsoever for rhetorical speech.

A group of teens and young adults on a blogging website literally reshaped a deficit a millennium and a half old in our language to fit their language needs. More! This group has agreed on a more or less universal standard for these new rules, which fits the definition of “language.” Which is to say Tumblr English is its own actual, real, separate dialect of the English language, and because it is spoken by people worldwide who have introduced concepts from their own languages into it, it may qualify as a written form of pidgin. 

Tumblr English should literally be treated as its own language, because it does not follow the rules of any form of formal written English, and yet it does have its own consistent internal rules. If you don’t think that’s cool as fuck then I don’t even know what to tell you.

Tumblr English isn’t quite different enough to be its own language [yet? maybe give it a hundred years], but it’s absolutely a dialect. What’s interesting, though, is that it’s a written dialect. Along with all the various specialised and slang terms and usages, Tumblr English has its own grammatical and stylistic quirks that only show up in how punctuation and capitalisation is used.

Up until very recently, nearly all written English was assumed to be either  formal English or a record of colloquial spoken English, and it’s only with the advent of the internet that written English is developing separately from spoken English as its own form of the language.

Sure, people communicated casually via written English before the internet, but not to the same extent. I have friends with whom I use written English exclusively, and so instead of written language being a stand-in for or transcription of the speech we’d normally use, it is the speech we normally use. I think this says something really interesting about languageb – language isn’t necessarily as dependant on sound as a lot of people might assume (I’m sure there’re some really interesting parallels to be made between internet written English and various sign languages, but I don’t speak any sign languages so I’m not in a position to really see them).

(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)

neverbat:

farorescourage:

kaplands:

we should talk more about how ‘macaroni’ in 18th century england was used to mean ‘fashionable’ because a bunch of rich young dudes went to italy and really liked the stuff there

language is weird

humans are weird

#’stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni’ #THAT USED TO CONFUSE ME SO MUCH WHEN I WAS LITTLE
it finally makes sense

WELL THAT’S ONE FUCKING LIFELONG MYSTERY SOLVED

(via clockwork-mockingbird)

thedailyetymology:

mecanyddol:

if anyone ever tells you that english isn’t ridiculous remember that the reason why we have a silent b in debt is because a group of guys got together to standardise english spelling and got to the word debt, which at the time was primarily spelled either ‘dett’ or ‘det’. so they basically went:

‘everyone speaks latin, right? so let’s put a silent b in debt. like debitum, which is latin for debt. problem solved.’

also the reason why there is a h in ghost is because when the printing press first came to england the only people trained to operate it were flemmish speaking, and they put a h after g because that’s what you do in flemmish. they put shit like ghirl and ghoose, but the only reason why ghost stuck is because people saw ‘the holy ghost’ in the bible and were like ‘well, that MUST be right’.

so yeah english is a really stupid language with some of the most ridiculous spelling

Holy shit actually though. From mentalfloss

also

(Source: veesnake, via cthulhu-with-a-fez)

staff:

prismatic-bell:

atomicairspace:

copperbooms:

when did tumblr collectively decide not to use punctuation like when did this happen why is this a thing

it just looks so smooth I mean look at this sentence flow like a jungle river

ACTUALLY

This is really exciting, linguistically speaking.

Because it’s not true that Tumblr never uses punctuation. But it is true that lack of punctuation has become, itself, a form of punctuation. On Tumblr the lack of punctuation in multisentence-long posts creates the function of rhetorical speech, or speech that is not intended to have an answer, usually in the form of a question. Consider the following two potential posts. Each individual line should be taken as a post:

ugh is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use like god put that back we have to pay for that stuff

Ugh. Is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use? Like god, put that back. We have to pay for that stuff.

In your head, those two potential posts sound totally different. In the first one I’m ranting about work, and this requires no answer. The second may actually engage you to give an answer about hoarding sauce packets. And if you answer the first post, you will likely do so in the same style. 

Here’s what makes this exciting: the English language has no actual punctuation for rhetorical speech–that is, there are no special marks that specifically indicate “this speech is in the abstract, and requires no answer.” Not only that, it never has. The first written record of English (actually proto-English, predating even Old English) dates to the 400s CE, so we’re talking about 1600 years of having absolutely no marker whatsoever for rhetorical speech.

A group of teens and young adults on a blogging website literally reshaped a deficit a millennium and a half old in our language to fit their language needs. More! This group has agreed on a more or less universal standard for these new rules, which fits the definition of “language.” Which is to say Tumblr English is its own actual, real, separate dialect of the English language, and because it is spoken by people worldwide who have introduced concepts from their own languages into it, it may qualify as a written form of pidgin. 

Tumblr English should literally be treated as its own language, because it does not follow the rules of any form of formal written English, and yet it does have its own consistent internal rules. If you don’t think that’s cool as fuck then I don’t even know what to tell you.

Hey cool

(via starwarsisgay)