Chookytime

did u know u could just draw bad and nothing happens did u know that

girlies are u doing ok

oh no girlies

ben-the-gay-rat

Also you can do finger painting like whenever you want

and with anything u want

clawmarks

Le Jardin des plantes : description complète, historique et pittoresque du Museum d'histoire naturelle, de la ménagerie, des serres, des galeries de minéralogie et d'anatomie et de la vallée suisse - c.1842-1843 - via Gallica

storybookprincess

so a very long time ago, my dad worked with an arson investigator

this guy was often one of the first people on the scene following a suspected arson, once emergency services had done what they needed to do. at times, there were also civilians on the periphery. often, they were freaking out, and understandably so; their home or workplace had just, quite literally, gone up in smoke

this investigator wouldn’t try to calm them down. he wouldn’t comfort them or be a shoulder to cry on.

instead, he’d walk up to the person most visibly losing their shit, hand them a fire extinguisher, and say “hey, can you keep an eye out for any other fires, and if you see one, can you put it out with this?”

of course, there was no actual risk of another fire. he wouldn’t be on the scene investigating if there was even a chance that the fire wasn’t completely put out. but the bystander didn’t need to know that

because that person, without fail, would immediately pull it together, take the fire extinguisher, and stand guard. they were, at least temporarily, calm enough for this investigator to do this job

my dad has told me the parable of the fire extinguisher a hundred times, and i think about it a lot. i think about what it says about people and crises. i think about what it says about the grounding power of having a purpose. and i think about the importance of letting someone help me through something, even if that help is just going to be another casserole to throw into the freezer, because useless or not, that fire extinguisher might be the only thing holding them together

We want the government to make sex variations a protected characteristic under the Equality Act.

hey can we try this

ukppl only please

this has an insultingly small number of signatures, tumblr i KNOW we can fix this.

if you are liking this and not sharing it i want to know why

excessivebookshelf

“As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

koko-mochi

Do y’all ever think about how absolutely bananas Lake Baikal is? It’s the world’s largest lake by volume. It’s the world’s deepest lake. It’s the world’s oldest lake. It contains nearly a quarter of the planet’s surface freshwater. It’s a rift lake, caused by the earth’s crust literally coming apart at the seams. It would be deeper than the Mariana Trench except the bottom is covered in a sediment layer that is miles deep. There are trains that have sunk to the bottom because Russia tried to build a railroad over the ice. The entire lake surface freezes for half the year. The lake is a focal point of multiple indigenous cultures. The lake has its own species of seal, which is the only exclusively freshwater pinniped in the world. There are unique ice formations formed by convection from the depths of the lake. There are 330 inflowing rivers.

I dunno, Lake Baikal sure is a thing.

weaselle

a truly unique and magnificent Feature on our planet, as singular and fascinating as Jupiter's Great Red Spot

weaselle

in the words of farmboy, as you wish

the lake is quite cold, and as a result, these seals are very loaf

the babbeez are white poofs with lil eyebrowses

it is incredibly deep, and over a thousand species of plant and animal live ONLY there

robotlyra

Lake Baikal Seals' faces look way too much like grey aliens for my liking. Those eyes have SEEN shit in the depths.

hellenhighwater

Lake animal...

ebonykain

OH NO THEY'RE TINY???

THAT! THAT'S AN ADULT BAIKAL SEAL? SO LITTLE? S HUGGABLE???? AND SEAL JUST??? CHILLING???? PICKED UP UNDER THE FLIPPER PITS AND WALKED AROUND UNTIL PUT ON THE XRAY TABLE AND JUST?? DOESN'T CARE??

All the seals where I live are so much bigger.... If the photo of the baby baikal seal hadn't been up there in the thread I would have thought this dude was holding a baby 🥺

sunflowerlovergirl

hatesaltrat

The road to the childrens’ hospital

@swedishfalcon-actual

enchantingsorceress

I hope this joke outlives the context that made it, leaving future generations baffled.

enki2

warsmithbelashk

Are we gonna pass on the fire bit at the bottom?

My brain socialist

My heart anarchist

My eyes pacifist

My blood revolutionary

scarlettohairdye

My tits: OUT

mortimermcmirestinks

My teeth SOMEONE ELSE'S

so the poem is by adrian Mitchell whose work i strongly recommend you look up

I think it's funny that in French the word for "unicorn" is "licorne" because:

The word "unicorne" was first reanalyzed as "une icorne"

The definite article was then added, making it "l'icorne"

The new definite form was reanalyzed once again, resulting in "une licorne"

Before any anglophones get on the French people's case on this, consider for a second what y'all did when you reanalyzed the Spanish "el lagarto" ("the lizard") as "alligator."

Reanalysis is fun.

jkcorellia

Oh yeah, everybody does this*. Another English example is "apron", which was once "napron" until we reanalyzed the initial N as part of the indefinite article (a napron -> an apron).

A fun one in Arabic is the city of Alexandria in Egypt. Quite understandably, Arabic speakers heard the initial "Al" and thought "ah yes, the ubiquitous definite article" and Alexandria became al-’Iskandariyya.

In the opposite direction, Spanish adopted hundreds of Arabic words during the Middle Ages due to Andalusian/Islamic influence, and there are very few Spanish words that start with al- that aren't of Arabic origin (and in fact, many words that start with A without being followed by an L, as in about half of cases in Arabic the L in "al-" is elided).

Reanalysis occurs in many other places besides article-noun combos, of course, but it's an extremely common case.

*citation needed, but reanalysis is extremely common

Oh, this actually explains something I'd just attributed to a quirk of sequence constraints or something; why Alexander is realized as Iskander/Iskandar in Arabic! It makes sense to analyze it as al-Iskander in Arabic!

grungeygoddess

Same thing happened with the word alchemy! Started out as the Arab term "al-kimiya", and when it was transported to Europe, it became "alchemy". This is actually really interesting, because as the term evolved more, it became "chemistry", effectively un-reanalyzing the word!

Oh actually there's another layer of fun there: the Arabic "al-kimiya" is actually a loan of the Ancient Greek χῠμείᾱ (khumeíā), which was used to refer to the art of alloying metals. Arabic borrowed a lot of Greek terminology owing to Arabic translations of Greek classics (many of which were actually lost in Europe until they were retranslated from Arabic). So, yeah, the Greek khumeíā made a round trip through Arabic, then into medieval Latin as "alchemia," and from there we eventually do get chemistry!

valtharr

Not quite the same thing, but this reminded me of one of the funniest phenomena in the German language.

So, you may or may not know that x-rays were discovered by a guy called Röntgen (or Roentgen, though the ö is the proper spelling). Because of that, they're called "Röntgen rays" in German. Now, the thing is that in the German, the infinitive of a verb is always formed with an -en at the, so, for example, "to run" is "rennen" or "to sleep" is "schlafen." And because of that, it just so happened that the verb for performing x-rays became... "röntgen."

ich röntge, du röntgst, er/sie/es röntgt, wir röntgen, ihr röntgt, sie röntgen

official-linguistics-post

In the X-rayed lab, straight röntgin it

official linguistics post

scaffoldingchair

Ooh, this reminds me of a fun phenomenon in English-to-Finnish, although it’s not a reanalyzing situation but it’s similar to the Röntgen one.

So we know USB ports? In Finnish, it’s very common to loan English words by doubling the last consonant and slapping an ”i” in the end.

Tape [teip] -> teippi (scotch tape)

Hit -> hitti (a hit, e.g. a hit song)

Etc.

So USB ports are just called ”USB-portti”. Except that ”portti” is already a Finnish word that means ’gate’.

And it took me literal years to realize that for a Finn, the metaphor is completely different than for an English speaker. Finns talk about USB gates, in essence, and not ports. No-one says ”USB-satama”, not even the nitpicky techies who insist on using the Finnish translations of every other technical structure. (As a nitpicky techie myself, I feel like I can say this.)

Finns just went ”oh, it’s like a gate as in stuff goes through, got it, close enough” and loaned the word ”port” on top of an existing word because fuck it, it’s two syllables where the translation would be three.