Fluorine fueled fantasies

Mostly lurking 💚 Love the queer pirate show, ATLA, LOTR and all things dwarrow, RWRB, Heartstopper and some basic fandoms, as one does. The icon is the wonderful and fantastic Mister Top Hat by a-kind-of-merry-war! Aro and Ace, Any pronouns are fine, I don't care, whatever!

[animedads-deactivated20210108]

[gilkenansmonsterhouse2006-deact]

i have not seen this meme in so long im loving it

[adulthoodisokay]

one of the reasons i love tumblr is that occasionally classic memes like this show up on my dashboard

[initiala]

As much as I think it would be fun to have emotive anthropomorphic ears, I also recognize I can barely control my facial expressions. Like hell can I keep from Angry Ears-ing during meetings

[initiala]

This is who you’re having a meeting with, by the way.

[gaygoatshane]

VENI VIDI VICI

[copperbooms]

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

[rodimuss]

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

[prismatic-bell]

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.

[sussexbound]

i love this post

[willowgrovecreates]

This is super cool! Also idk if this has any relevance whatsoever but if you wanna have an argument inside one tag you cannot have commas in it so that’s a real existing constraint that has forced tumblrites to construct commaless sentences and perhaps this has helped in adopting the custom into posts as well ok I have no idea if this is what’s happened just I think it’s a reasonable assumption there might be a connection

[sanerontheinside]

^this.

The tags are absolutely a factor. You want someone to take a breath in the middle of a sentence, you start a new tag. You want to have, as seen here, this removable piece between commas (does it have a name?) - you have 5 tags in this sentence alone. And sometimes you just

pause in the middle of a sentence…

and let your voice

trail away

[obaewankenope]

look at all you precious brilliant nerds nerding about language you make me so fucking happy omg

language is this constantly evolving thing tbh, it doesn’t remain the same unless it’s dead and the people who used it gone so seeing the evolution of the language used on tumblr is literally so fucking amazing i want to cry with joy at it

because we also add in words from other languages, or make entirely new words up as additional terms to denote something (see ‘tol’ and ‘smol’ in relation to ‘tall’ and ‘small’) and this is constant. we are doing this daily without any sort of breathing space because there’s millions of us on this hellsite and we are constantly talking and so the language changes day-by-day until we have general, universal rules for what to do in a post, what to add in our tags, how to add it, why we add it, what we mean by it

we’ve created a language in the same way our ancestors all did: by building on the ones that came before and changing them to suit our needs and our system

and that’s fucking awesome okay

awesome

[adora-korra]

I love this so much and language is so great and I’ve noticed the lack of punctuation thing recently, even on twitter, and used it for like a specific kind of rhetorical effect. idk it’s so fun I fucking love linguistics and the evolution of language

[elenorasweet]

I also loved that the following one-word responses all sound drastically different out loud and showcase different reactions:

What?

What.

what

[solitarelee]

Oh hey! This is the post that caused me to write a thesis. Yall know this post is cited in like five different academic papers that I found while researching for it? @prismatic-bell is a username I see screenshots of in academia these days. P sure they’re in the tumblr book too. Wild. 

[prismatic-bell]

I’m sorry, I WHAT?!

[flyora]

yeah that's my emotional support sketching therapy

[bogkeep]

there's something so deeply dystopian to me how tech companies don't understand that a forced convenience is not a convenience at all. i'm sure autocorrect is helpful for many, but a function that forcibly changes my actual written words and punctuation is taking away my language. photo filters can be nice but i need to choose using them myself or else i have lost the ability to take the picture i want. i don't want a machine to draw or write for me. taking away the option for me to do things manually feels like violence!!!! all this talk of endless opportunity, why are you RESTRICTING me

[bogkeep]

disgustedly throws youtube autodubbing onto the pyre pile

[fairycosmos]

i love you avril lavigne

[sluttyquarantinetheory]

The concept that married people live longer is interesting. I'm sure there is some merit to the idea that if you're married there is someone there to nag you about going to the doctor, but I think much larger factors are having the finances of dual incomes and access to an immediate support person.

Surgeries require having a designated person to look after you. Many injuries require driving to somewhere like an emergency room which can be hard to do if you are the one injured. If you're home with the flu, it's hard to tell when it's bad enough to go to the hospital without another person checking on you. And if you pass out it requires another person to find you like that to get medical aid.

You can prop it up as the benefits of marriage, but I think there's a much deeper discussion to be had about how we've built society around marriage as an inevitable conclusion and neglected to build support systems that function outside of romantic pairings.

[sluttyquarantinetheory]

thinking about this further, people often cite this as a sort of See It's Better To Be Married and mostly accept it as a fact that being married is better for you overall and proceed to breakdown why marriage leads to longer lives. Instead I think we need to be looking at why the system is failing single people and what we could do to close that gap. What structural societal changes can we make to help single people rather than treat it as a Well Obviously foregone conclusion that everyone will eventually pair up.

It's not Why Are Married People Healthier? It's Why Aren't Single People as Healthy? And then actually examine the causes rather than hand waving it away with whichever stereotype of being single or half remembered memory of the last time you were single in your early 20s.

[a-silly-poll-side-blog-yay]

you just teleported to the last game you played how is it going? {you're plot involved}

good

bad

great

awful

dead

I don't play games/results

Voting ended onAug 11

Soma 😔

[exuberantocean]

Nothing like going to bed. Yay I get blanket time!

[exuberantocean]

Nothing sadder than wake up time. What do you mean I need to leave the kingdom of warms?

[batmanshole]

crisp glass of water moodboard

[linuxbian]

DESPERATELY trying to find the source of this image. where do you come from. i need to find you. you're like my dead wife

[soft-stims]

Sea bunnies/slugs stimboard for anon

x x x - x x x - x x x

[kholran]

It’s finally happened.

After almost a decade on this site, I found another Tumblr user in the wild. I stopped to tie my shoe with rainbow laces this morning outside the silversmith at Colonial Williamsburg, and I heard it.

“I like your shoelaces.”

Oh. Oh no.

I responded the only way I could. “Thanks.” And then I reluctantly added, “I stole them from the president…and if that makes sense to you, I’m very sorry.”

The poor man, in full Colonial dress, stared at me for a long moment. And then burst into laughter. And said, “I haven’t thought about that in YEARS and this has never happened to me before.”

Yeah. Me neither. Not until today.

Tumblr rite of passage. Achievement unlocked.

[beggars-opera]

@victoriansecret I found your friend!!!

[beggars-opera]

[rabbitrah]

Me thinking why a whale (big) would eat krill (small) and then I remembered rice (yum)

[rabbitrah]

so few people appreciate the wisdom I have to offer.........

[femmeberlin]

A terrible fact of fandom is that sometimes people who absolutely suck and have stupid takes are going to enjoy the exact same things you do and the only thing you can do about it is sit there with your mutuals who don’t suck like:

[myboobsaresentientbeeings]

"the block button, my liege?" will enter my vocabulary now

[kirbily]

Gif sets are SO important to me. Yes, please take this scene and break it up into 4 or 6 three second loops that I can study over and over to appreciate the small details of it