[nordic-at-heart]

Today on “rules of English language I didn’t realise were a thing until someone pointed it out”

[lucyaudley]

“ The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge is a play about a Mariner and his crew on their shit, experiencing some uncanny events “

Why proofreading is important folks.

[shadowwraiths-deactivated201711]

Ladies and Gentlemen, The English Language…

[nest-of-bears-blog]

This makes me so mad

[holyromanhomo]

This is giving me traumatic flashbacks to me taking the LSAT because it’s these sort of linguistic rules that they use to fuck with you

[a-spectacular-pigeon]

This reminds me of the one where the sentence “I never said she took his money” can mean seven different things depending which word you stress. 

[overfalls]

IT’S NOT ‘PEEKED’ MY INTEREST

OR ‘PEAKED’

BUT PIQUED

‘PIQUED MY INTEREST’

THIS HAS BEEN A CAPSLOCK PSA

[owlbearcounter]

THIS IS ACTUALLY REALLY USEFUL THANK YOU

[ranetree]

ADDITIONALLY:

YOU ARE NOT ‘PHASED’. YOU ARE ‘FAZED.’

IF IT HAS BEEN A VERY LONG DAY, YOU ARE ‘WEARY’. IF SOMEONE IS ACTING IN A WAY THAT MAKES YOU SUSPICIOUS, YOU ARE ‘WARY’.

ALL IN ‘DUE’ TIME, NOT ‘DO’ TIME

‘PER SE’ NOT ‘PER SAY’

THANK YOU

[tassiekitty]

BREATHE - THE VERB FORM IN PRESENT TENSE

BREATH - THE NOUN FORM

THEY ARE NOT INTERCHANGEABLE

WANDER - TO WALK ABOUT AIMLESSLY

WONDER - TO THINK OF IN A DREAMLIKE AND/OR WISTFUL MANNER

THEY ARE NOT INTERCHANGEABLE (but one’s mind can wander)

[fairywails]

DEFIANT - RESISTANT DEFINITE - CERTAIN

[melancholicmarionette]

WANTON - DELIBERATE AND UNPROVOKED ACTION (ALSO AN ARCHAIC TERM FOR A PROMISCUOUS WOMAN)

WONTON - IT’S A DUMPLING THAT’S ALL IT IS IT’S A FUCKING DUMPLING

[proletariatbitch]

BAWL- TO SOB/CRY

BALL- A FUCKING BALL

YOU CANNOT “BALL” YOUR EYES OUT

[soggywarmpockets]

AND FOR FUCK’S SAKE, IT’S NOT “SIKE”; IT’S “PSYCH”. AS IN “I PSYCHED YOU OUT”; BECAUSE YOU MOMENTARILY MADE SOMEONE BELIEVE SOMETHING THAT WASN’T TRUE.

THANK YOU.

[everylineeverystory]

*slams reblog*

[leonawriter]

IT’S ‘MIGHT AS WELL’. ‘MIND AS WELL’ DOES NOT MAKE GRAMMATICAL SENSE.

[penbrydd]

SLEIGHT - DEXTERITY, ARTIFICE, CRAFT (FROM ‘SLY’) SLIGHT - VERY LITTLE, FRAIL, DELICATE

IT’S ‘SLEIGHT OF HAND’.

[maverlok]

[celynbrum]

DISCRETE - SEPARATE, DISTINCT, PARTED

DISCREET - SUBTLE, STEALTHY, DIPLOMATIC

[ceruleancynic]

AND TO CONTINUE THE OP’S THEME

IT’S SNEAK PEEK

NOT SNEAK PEAK

A SNEAK PEAK WOULD BE A MOUNTAIN ENGAGED IN ESPIONAGE

THEY ARE VERY LARGE AND WOULD FIND THIS GENERALLY DIFFICULT 

THANK

(OH AND ONE OTHER THING

BULLION = PRECIOUS METAL

BOUILLON = STOCK, FROM THE FRENCH “BOUILLER,” TO BOIL)

[jumpingjacktrash]

SHUDDER:

SHUTTER:

NOT SAME NOT SAME

[the-real-seebs]

sleight of hand: magic tricks slight of hand: President-Elect

[lilacandgoooseberries]

I love this post so much oh my god 😂

“A MOUNTAIN ENGAGED IN ESPIONAGE” I’m losing my shit

[archival-hogwash]

To my followers who speak & write in English as a second language: the caps locks and the frustration might come across as scary or even personally pointed, but all the information is valuable, even (and lbr ESPECIALLY) to native English speakers & writers!

[gladiolus---amicitia]

when you’re asking a group of people for approval, you are asking them to say “AYE”, not “I”!! “aye” means yes and you’re looking for confirmation that they agree, not that they exist!!

[dragon-in-a-fez]

IT IS “CLOSED-MINDED”, AS IN A MIND THAT IS NOT OPEN. “CLOSE MINDED” WOULD MEAN A MIND THAT IS SOMEWHERE NEARBY.

[m0nk3y-bl0g]

Also (and I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t learn this until this year)

SEGUE: TO SEAMLESSLY MOVE FROM ONE SONG/MELODY/SCENE/ETC. TO ANOTHER

SEGWAY: 

[marcvscicero]

writing style: author from the 1800s with a severe love of commas whose sentences last half a page 

[fencer-x]

I came out here, to this point, to this place, hoping against all hope and despite signs and portends suggesting otherwise that I might, somehow, find myself having a pleasant experience, and yet here I stand, alone against the world, feeling assaulted, attacked on all fronts, knowing not my enemy’s name nor his face nor whether our battle is done.

[allthingslinguistic]

much doge. so linguistics. wow.

I have written a grammar of doge: here’s a highly informative summary picture. The full article is up right now at The Toast and I’m very excited about it.   

Here’s a note on something that I couldn’t fit into the Toast article: the main exception to the shockingly conventional spelling typically found in the doge meme (especially as compared to LOLcat) is precisely in those doge phrases that don’t match the typical pattern of beginning with so, much, many, such, or very, for example in “sekund generashun” above. I created the image so I might be a bit biased here, but it would have felt wrong to spell that part conventionally. However, text-only examples of doge tend to stick very rigidly to the doge phrase syntax and have correspondingly un-creative spelling. 

[runecestershire]

So “my name is Cow… i lik the bred” seems to be the Hot New Meme, and I like it. Here’s an odd thing about it, though; a lot of the cutsey animal talk I see on the internet (especially birb-speak) sometimes reminds me of Middle English, but “lik the bred” takes it even further and sounds downright Chaucerian, and it isn’t just the rhyme and cadence. Some of the “lik the bred” pastiches I see around don’t really work because they’re in just plain doggo-fran speak (haven’t decided if Doggo-fran and Birb are the same thing or not), but the ones that really hit all the same notes as the original have something going on with the mangled vowels and spelling that’s not the same as the mangling in Doggo and/or Birb. Maybe some time I’ll gather up some examples and look closely at the vowels and spelling and try and sort out precisely what’s up.

[darkersolstice]

@hobbitguy1420

[hobbitguy1420]

my name is Cow i make yu think of likking bred and tayking drink i studdy buks that i have herd so wen yur gon i rite the werd.

[hobbitguy1420]

now yu may think wen reeding this “yu typ with hoofs, wy dont yu miss?” i ask yu now be pashent, plees i type with tung i lik the kees

[trisshawkeye]

Re: the OP - I don’t think Doggo-fran and Birb-speak are the same at all, but it’s tricky to articulate why (probably because I’m not actually a linguist). I think Doggo-fran revolves around intentionally switching out syllables in words (or adding them onto mono-syllabic words) - although actually I’m not sure precisely what @runecestershire is referring to here but the other thing that comes to mind is the ‘bork’ meme speak which revolves mostly around the nonsense sentence structure ‘you are doing me a [verb]’. Both cases seem to me to be a lot more specific in usage than Birb-speak. Birb-speak revolves more around intentionally bad spelling and grammar, often with an overblown sense of urgency to imitate something being typed (and thus spoken) loudly, at high speed and with little accuracy (although there are two slightly different memetic forms of Birb-speak - one originating from the @probirdrights Twitter and the other from the @importantbirds Tumblr and their styles, while similar, are not identical). But the OP is indeed correct that proper-sounding ‘i lik the bred’ poems have a very specific structure and language to them which is distinct again from the other examples.

[false-senpai]

I have also noticed this! I thought I was alone in thinking they sounded like middle english!!

A few of the spellings used in the “i lik the bred” poems are almost exactly the same as those in my Chaucer text.

[allthingslinguistic]

One of the things that I’ve noticed about the class of stylized ungrammatical animal memes is that they tend to go for either orthographic stylization, often indicating modified, cute pronunciation (lolcat: teh kitteh, pupper: y r u so smol, birb: popsackles) or morphosyntactic stylization (doge: such meme, wow. lolcat: i made you a cookie but i eated it. birb: i get it you can wear pant. doggo/snek: gosh hecking darn it, doing you a frighten, booping the snoot). Even though some of these memes have both orthographic and grammatical options, they often pick just one for a particular utterance.  

In this context, “i lik the bred” does several things differently. For one, it involves both orthography and constraints on metre at the same time. Although other memes often involve a sense of comedic timing (and there’s at least one poem written in lolcat), I haven’t seen a strictly metred meme before. I also haven’t seen an animal meme not originally associated with captioned images, for that matter. 

The particular orthography is also interesting. Memish animals speak in internetspeak or babytalk, sometimes at the same time. But the stylized spelling in “i lik the bred” isn’t internettish or childish, and in particular isn’t designed to be pronounced differently – see for example the version sung to the tune of Greensleeves.

I think the Chaucerian overtones are no accident at all – the original “i lik the bred” poem by poems_for_your_sprog was indeed inspired by a historic story, technically about the 18th century but one must allow *some* poetic license. 

Despite the animal subject matter and stylized linguistic form, the origins of “i lik the bred” in text rather than images and its more sober style has more in common with tumblr text-based memes like spiders georg, the horoscope meme, regional gothic, and so on. 

[rdjdumbgenius-deactivated201812]

wanna watch Coriolanus?

http://goo.gl/nq5ocr (part 1)

http://goo.gl/Apg439 (part 2)

(john-sassy-watson)

[marcvscicero]

writing style: author from the 1800s with a severe love of commas whose sentences last half a page 

[fencer-x]

I came out here, to this point, to this place, hoping against all hope and despite signs and portends suggesting otherwise that I might, somehow, find myself having a pleasant experience, and yet here I stand, alone against the world, feeling assaulted, attacked on all fronts, knowing not my enemy’s name nor his face nor whether our battle is done.

[seeliequeene]

Haunt me then be with me always take any form, drive me mad but don’t leave me

the moral of frankenstein is if youre going to build a monster out of dead body parts dont make him like 8 feet tall and super strong

[nopeyourejustanazi]

or just love your super strong 8 feet tall son

[smokesforharris]

Like, don’t abandon him because you are scared of him. Like you met him a second ago. He just wants a family

[feynites]

The moral of the story is that you need to be prepared for the realities of parenthood before you commit. Sometimes you get what you expected, sometimes you get an eight foot tall super strong patchwork zombie child, sometimes you get neither of those things. No take-backs.

[i-will-not-be-caged]

I’m tricking my students into writing a research paper by having them write an open letter and then strengthen their argument by adding evidence. They were allowed to write about anything they wanted for the first draft of their open letter, and one of my 10th grade boys decided he wanted to write about girls who only like bands because the members are cute and don’t really care about the music.

I let him do it because I’ve found that shutting down a student’s idea at the first draft stage tends to make them more obstinate about the topic. I figured we’d get to the evidence-gathering stage, he wouldn’t be able to find scholarly sources and he would change his topic.

Well lo and behold, today he comes into class and tells me he’s changing his topic. Apparently, he couldn’t find any evidence and he figured he was being kind of hypocritical because he gets really excited about athletes he doesn’t even know and the only reason that’s different than fangirls is because it’s him. He actually told me that he realized that writing that first letter would be pretty condescending. He’s going to write about LGBT rights instead.

This next generation, y’all. There’s some good stuff happening.

[knitmeapony]

EXCELLENT TEACHING METHOD A++++

[grec1a-deactivated20170207]

No proofreading we die like men

[annabrecke]

Ghost: Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing

To what I shall unfold.

Hamlet: Speak; I am bound to hear.

Ghost: Hi, bound to hear, I'm dad

[annabrecke]

Tfw a student asks if you know what memes are

[annabrecke]

Frankenstein's monster in the movie: Rawr

Frankenstein's monster in the book: Instead of threatening I am content to reason with you. I am malicious because I am miserable. Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind? You, my creator, would tear me to pieces and triumph; remember that, and tell me why I should pity man more than he pities me? You would not call it murder if you could precipitate me into one of those ice-rifts and destroy my frame, the work of your own hands. Shall I respect man when he contemns me? Let him live with me in the interchange of kindness, and instead of injury I would bestow every benefit upon him with tears of gratitude at his acceptance.

[shitmystudentswrite]

Works cited

“JSTOR: An Error Occurred Setting Your User Cookie.” JSTOR: An Error Occurred Setting Your User Cookie. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Nov. 2011