A Suspicious Stick of Cheese

A questionable cube of queso

[tayalla]

got tricked into majoring in linguistics because they said they had PIE and IPA. thought I was getting dessert and beer, got all these nerdy tables and diagrams instead.

[batsandboba]

“scientists don’t want you know” is a phrase that always cracks me up because if you actually meet a scientist they will be shaking and crying like an overstimulated chihuahua with the need to let you know

[milliekr]

GO hot take apparently

Imagine finding out you have 90 minutes to tie up a love story that's developed over thousands of years. You create something beautifully in character and completely on point for the plot. You pay homage to the original writer's legacy in a fitting and poetic way and create an ending that not only shows the depth of two people's love for each other but the wider love they have for the thing that brought them together in the first place.

And then you go online to find the loudest outcry is that everyone hates it and "THEY DIDN'T EVEN KISS!"

I feel sorry for people who didn't get anything out of that stunning finale.

[renzilla-exists]

coming online as someone who liked the finale

[army-of-bee-assassins]

okay i'm reading the semantics chapter of my language development textbook now and i know i've already posted a bit about the wacky methods researchers have employed to test infants' and toddlers' linguistic knowledge, but this is a really fucking great one.

so they were trying to figure out if children use syntactic knowledge to learn new vocabulary, specifically in this case they were researching two year olds. with verbs, some are done to a person ("x hit y") and some only have a doer ("x laughed"), and they wanted to see if these different sentence structures had an effect on how toddlers learn.

they got some grad students, put one in a rabbit costume and one in a duck costume. they had the rabbit repeatedly push the duck into a crouching position using their left hand. at the same time, both the rabbit and the duck were moving their right hands in a repetitive circling motion. they had a bunch of two years olds watch this. with half of the kids, they said "the rabbit is gorping the duck!" and with the other half, they said "the rabbit and duck are gorping!" afterwards, they showed two videos at the same time to the kids, one with the rabbit pushing the duck down but no circling motion, and one with both making the circling motion but no pushing. then they said "where's gorping now? find gorping!" and the kids who had heard the first statement would consistently look towards the video of the pushing motion, while the kids who heard the second statement would consistently look towards the video of the circling motion.

so it provided good evidence that kids do learn new words using their knowledge of sentence structure! my textbook says it's called the "syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis", which is also a fun term. anyway, i just think it's a fucking hilarious way to have tested this. imagine being a linguistics grad student and your advisor is like "hey i got this furry suit. i'm gonna need you to put this on for research purposes."

[foone]

ever since I took a developmental psychology class in college I've wanted this job. I want to be a professional baby-confuser, for SCIENCE

[happyoracle]

[salemwitchtrials-deactivated202]

‘Agamemnon,’ Aeschylus (translated by Anne Carson)

[ceruleanheaven]

doing it for the love of the game and i dont even love the game

[asksloyxp]

Maybe if I just work harder, this empty cup will pour again

[shinyrock6498]

Maybe the cup needs a bit of time to rest and refill?

[asksloyxp]

Maybe the cup needs to lock the fuck in???

[ravioliet]

god's weakest soldier is scrolling tumblr instead of being productive or participating in any of their hobbies

[wonwoodrivethru]

me talking about a linguistics project: something something reduplication is a morphological process something something

my guy friend who knows nothing about linguistics: is that some omegaverse shit

[hyperculture]

OH OKAY......

[angeltreasure]

Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.

- Matthew 5:7

[byjove]

The human body has so many random kill switches and major design flaws. Sometimes our teeth explode when they’re badly infected and this can kill us.

[m00wd]

Sometimes you need to sleep, sleep a lot. Not to escape, but to rest your soul from your feelings. Because everything, absolutely everything devours you. Completely.

—Brain

[partywithponies]

I love vague labels that make people go "but that's confusing" or "but that could mean anything" Good. Keep guessing lol

[partywithponies]

"Queer doesn't actually tell me anything" who says I wanted to tell you anything. Who even are you.

[brucespringsteencomments]