let’s talk about something new and fun, y’all literally are boring the fuck out of me.
new topic: for our wills and last testicles and stuff, we need to start coordinating our funerals like awards shows, then robotizing our dead bodies so we can host them and hand out awards for like “best person I’ve ever slept with” or “person who was the catalyst to my worst mental breakdown”. we need to have guest performances, and orchestras that cut people off when they talk about how much of a maniac i am for this, and everything. and since i’ll be dead and cold, you can call it…. the clammys.
word play
holy shit, you guys, i just had the most exciting breakthrough on what the fuck is happening with the playful manipulation, deconstruction, and recombination of language you see on tumblr and twitter. like i’ve been chewing on this for years: is it post-modernism? is it post-structuralism? is it absurdism? is it surrealism?
it’s cubism.
“In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up and reassembled in an abstracted form—instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context.[6]” (wikipedia)
look at birds_rights, fruitsoftheape100, or rate-my-reptile. it’s not simply oversimplified grammar like lolcats. every sentence is set up to fully convey meaning, but in as absurd a jumble as possible. like this birds_rights tweet:
“hi Merica. I know it your birtday. But maybe you can a little less TRY TO EXPLOSION ME OUT OF THE SKY???? Thank.”
or a rate-my-reptile comment:
“EXCUSE ma, lamma go!!! Got get to to work! Gots a interviu, and a Jobberpumpipty!9.6271/10 Babbie Businis is Still.. Busness!(try a not hold lizats by they tails! but, just a touche is usual fine tho!)”
see, you know what they’re saying, but if you sat down to mark what was formally wrong it’d be exactly like trying to redline the anatomy of a woman in a picasso painting: rendering a clear communication of a single thing, at a single point, from a single perspective isn’t the priority.
“Aimed at a large public, [Salon Cubists’] works stressed the use of multiple perspective and complex planar faceting for expressive effect while preserving the eloquence of subjects endowed with literary and philosophical connotations.[4]” (wikipedia)
every part of rate-my-reptile’s post is being approached from a different grammatical angle, and then you have the employment of misspellings, typos, and melodious abstraction, respectively ‘lamma’, ‘interviu’ , and ‘jobberpumpipty’, and these individual abstractions all collaged into a coherent— but not clear— message.
cubist dialogue.
versesineunoia THIS IS WHY I LIVE
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.
Fast food workers in NY just won a $15/hr wage.
I’m a paramedic. My job requires a broad set of skills: interpersonal, medical, and technical skills, as well as the crucial skill of performing under pressure. I often make decisions on my own, in seconds, under chaotic circumstances, that impact people’s health and lives. I make $15/hr.
And these burger flippers think they deserve as much as me?
Good for them.
Look, if any job is going to take up someone’s life, it deserves a living wage. If a job exists and you have to hire someone to do it, they deserve a living wage. End of story. There’s a lot of talk going around my workplace along the lines of, “These guys with no education and no skills think they deserve as much as us? Fuck those guys.” And elsewhere on FB: “I’m a licensed electrician, I make $13/hr, fuck these burger flippers.”
And that’s exactly what the bosses want! They want us fighting over who has the bigger pile of crumbs so we don’t realize they made off with almost the whole damn cake. Why are you angry about fast food workers making two bucks more an hour when your CEO makes four hundred TIMES what you do? It’s in the bosses’ interests to keep your anger directed downward, at the poor people who are just trying to get by, like you, rather than at the rich assholes who consume almost everything we produce and give next to nothing for it.
My company, as they’re so fond of telling us in boosterist emails, cleared 1.3 billion dollars last year. They expect guys supporting families on 26-27k/year to applaud that. And that’s to say nothing of the techs and janitors and cashiers and bed pushers who make even less than us, but are as absolutely crucial to making a hospital work as the fucking CEO or the neurosurgeons. Can they pay us more? Absolutely. But why would they? No one’s making them.
The workers in NY *made* them. They fought for and won a living wage. So how incredibly petty and counterproductive is it to fuss that their pile of crumbs is bigger than ours? Put that energy elsewhere. Organize. Fight. Win.
Jens Rushing (via accidentalambience)
I love how, because of that “Beautiful Cinnamon Roll Too Good For This World, Too Pure” Onion headline, “cinnamon roll” has become a commonly accepted phrase for “a character who is cute and kind and typically gets more pain in canon than they deserve”.
Like, we didn’t have a real phrase for that common phenomenon (wubbie maybe, but that has negative connotations ie “this character has been wubbiefied by the fandom”) and then someone used a screenshot of a headline from a satire news website to describe it, and then everyone else was like “yes good let’s use this”. You couldn’t make that shit up. I bet there are people who use that phrase now who didn’t even see that headline.
Language is evolving right before our eyes in a very weird and beautiful way and I am very very sorry for future linguist who have to puzzle this shit out.
Reblogging this because I didn’t know where “cinnamon roll” came from and I’ve been trying to figure it out for weeks.
All language is composed of memes if you think about it. All language is viral.
Something about being strung up on a wall and left to my own, er, devices.
You know how there’s a theory that no two people see a colour the exact same way.
Does that mean colour is like
a pigment of your imagination.
YOU FUCKING DIDN’T
Huehuehue
No one understands Will Smith’s jokes and it took Jada 3 hours to notice the popsicle stick
Relationship goals.
Rules to learning English
StandardSir: I’m coming home now and I’ll marinade the meat. How hungry are you?
Me: Not that hungry.
Sir: Want to fuck?
Me: Haha sure let’s fuck.
Sir: While it sits in marinade for like 30 min.
Me: Lol I hope you mean the pork and not your dick.
Sir: Pork: what I want to eat and what I want to do.
Me: Oh God.