Meanwhile, “utter” works for the first (e.g., “you utter floorboard”) but somehow “utterly” doesn’t seem to work as well for the second (“I was utterly floorboarded”).
Utterly doesn’t work for drunk because it’s the affix for turning random objects into terms for *shocked*, obviously.
… huh. I thought that might just be the similarity to “floored”, and yet “I was utterly coat hangered” does seem to convey something similar.
I have to tell you, I am utterly sandwiched at this discovery.
Completely makes the phrase mean “super tired”.
“God, it’s been a long week, I am completely coat-hangered.”
I started Hebrew, which is why I’ve been dead on this blog, but I don’t think I can ever properly convey to you guys the sheer cultural whiplash of spending years learning Japanese from Japanese teachers and then trying to learn Hebrew from an Israeli
Japanese: you walk into class already apologizing for being alive Hebrew: you walk into class, the teacher insults you and you are expected to insult her back
Japanese: conjugates every single verb based on degree of intended politeness, nevermind keigo and honorifics Hebrew: Someone asked my teacher how to say “excuse me” and she laughed for several seconds before saying we shouldn’t worry about remembering that since we’ll never need to say it
Japanese: if you get one stroke wrong the entire kanji is incomprehensible Hebrew: cursive? script? fuck it do whatever you want, you don’t even have to write the vowels out unless you feel like it
Japanese: the closest thing there is to ‘bastard’ is an excessively direct ‘you’ pronoun Hebrew: ‘bitch’ translates directly
Fun fact: Israel has possibly the lowest power-distance metric of any culture in the world, while Japan has one of the highest. I didn’t realize that the CTO of my company was the CTO until somebody else told me, because everybody called him by his first name and engaged in mutual shit-talking/playful insults with him.
In Japan, even calling your boss by the wrong honorific is liable to get you in trouble.
And apparently there’s some sciencey cooperative venture going on between Israel and Japan in an official diplomatic capacity. I want to be a fly on the wall when Japanese and Israeli scientists work together.
Why the UK can, and should, make space for our indigenous minority languages.
The ten languages indigenous to the British Isles and still spoken today are English, Scots, British Sign Language, Welsh, Gaelic, Irish, Cornish, Manx, Angloromani and Shelta.
Signal boost for this! It’s the same in France. Most of french people don’t even know that their country is originally – and still is – a multilingual country.
Yes, Occitan, Catalan, Breton, Gallo, Flamand, Picard, Basque etc are still spoken. But France refuses to sign the European charter for minority languages. Good job destroying the cultural patrimony that we are so proud of.
“To say there is no worth in learning a language that isn’t economically
useful is like saying there’s no point in being friends with somebody
unless they’re going to help you get a better job. It’s a spectacular,
cynical miss of the point. It’s also inaccurate.”
My brother saved this document and everytime he gets angry at our neighbours for being loud he prints it to their wireless printer and you can hear the wife shout “Why the fuck would you print this AGAIN?!” to her son.
every time we serve chicken at work i think of this post
1. If you were wondering, you can type the numbers in the works cited into google and they appear to be medical journal articles about using medical imaging to detect and diagnose a rare form of Gastritis.
2. Please enjoy the offical powerpoint presentation of this paper at an academic conference by the original author, complete with Q&A:
Why the fuck would language evolve in such a completely illogical way like this
Which is why cursive is dying a much needed death. (don’t argue with me on this point, you won’t convince me, I have trauma and a background in functional graphic design.)
ok ok ok ok ok but Russian how do you tell cursive lower case Ls from cursive lower case Ts from cursive lower case Ms from oh my god it’s all just. Cursive lower case и looks like ш. It’s all. I don’t know! I don’t know. I’m trying to write properly in script in my own notes but I have to write it in block caps next to the lower case cursive because the lower case cursive just looks like someone wrote “minimum” in english without dotting the i’s. AND WHY IS YOUR PRINTED T A REAL T BUT IN HANDWRITING SUDDENLY IT’S m. WHY. WHY. WHYYYYY.
I was told recently about a school that was shamed into changing its school motto. The motto was “I hear, I see, I learn.” Nothing wrong with that per se. Unfortunately the motto was in Latin, and the Latin for “I hear, I see, I learn” is “audio, video, disco”.
What the fuck that’s the best school motto ever change it back
Your yearly reminder that “I learn through suffering” can be translated into Latin as “Disco Inferno.”
i really love our generation’s joke trend of like, very calm but incredibly inflated hyperbole. like nobody says “oh she’s pretty” anymore we say “i would willingly let her murder me” and everyone is just like “lol same”
i think “same” is also great and “me,” i love when somebody reblogs a picture of like, a lizard, and just says “me” and we all know exactly what they mean. the current online Humor Discourse is remarkable because we trade exclusively in metaphors and implications and nobody ever, ever says anything outright and yet EVERYBODY understands each other perfectly
This reminds me of the time when I was on vacation with my family and we were hiking, and after using a rest stop, the conversation turned to the grossness of outhouses and port-a-potties, and I said that if I ever got splashback from a port-a-potty, “my soul would depart my body.” My parents found that hilarious, and my dad commented that my generation can be so clever with words bc he would only think to say something like “It would be disgusting” which doesn’t convey the sentiment nearly as well as “my soul would depart my body.”
I find this so intriguing because it opens up so many possibilities for future writers to connect with their readers.
Does that mean we’re literally “Darmok and Jalad”-ing language? We speak in stories and references and memes, never saying what’s actually going on, just making reference to other things.
Synonyms are weird because if you invite someone to your cottage in the forest that just sounds nice and cozy, but if I invite you to my cabin in the woods you’re going to die.
My favourite is explaining the difference between a butt dial and a booty call
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