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Misplaced Lens Cap
Xuebing Du
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taylor price

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todays bird
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$LAYYYTER
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Product Placement

ellievsbear
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year

pixel skylines

JBB: An Artblog!
NASA

Love Begins

oozey mess
cherry valley forever
we're not kids anymore.
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@ghostrally
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Inktober Day 11 - Sting
Farciile on da bike
honestly the original USDA food pyramid was funny as fuck for recommending 6-11 servings of bread a day. like honestly don't mind if I do
i don’t know how people care about sports but it’s okay
it’s really not.
i’m tired of pretending it’s okay. we have to kill them
if somone made pixel art of mulch id be very happy boy
enjoy your mulch
throwback to the time i didn’t realize that mulch was the name of someone’s fursona
i cant call this cloud gate. i cant call this cloud gate. but what am i supposed to call it??
some affirmations
Stone Cold Steve Austin toasts his newly won WWF Championship. WrestleMania XV March 28, 1999
WEEEEE SON I'M HAVING A GREAT TIME ON MY QUAD BIKE SON GIMME A HELL YEAH I'VE BEEN DRINKING ALL NIGHT.
AAAAAHHHHHHHH HELP SON
WEEEEE SON I'M HAVING A GREAT TIME ON MY QUAD BIKE SON GIMME A HELL YEAH I'VE BEEN DRINKING ALL NIGHT.
AAAAAHHHHHHHH HELP SON
sockeye salmon bear commission
a lot has been said about how racist it is to treat the australian wilderness as some evil wasteland death world, but it should be noted it's also very hypocritical of americans to pretend australia has a monopoly on dangerous wildlife
"australia has spiders and snakes and wild dogs!" girl we have all that too. we're a country with multiple species of bear, get real.
Not to mention moose.
let’s be bear hugged by mama (literally)
ultimately I think the place where I will never see eye to eye with the "you can do whatever you want forever" people is in the precision of language. I do think it is genuinely important for words to have widely agreed upon definitions that are only flexible to the same degree that the rest of a given language is. a word whose definition is whatever suits the speakers preference and makes them the most comfortable doesn't have any real reason to exist and serves no linguistic function. i support anyone's desire to do whatever they want so long as it's not hurting anyone, but there are always going to be words that accurately describe what they're doing and ones that don't.
i think it sounds really obvious when stated but i took me a long time of hanging out with language nerds to realize that prescriptivism/descriptivism are morally neutral
"does someone have the right to dictate how another person uses language" severely lacks context without real life examples
"'i been' is incorrect english" -> prescriptivism as racism, aave as incorrect english
"white people need to stop using 'woke' wrong, it has a serious political meaning in aave and got laundered into a meme word by right wing reactionaries" -> descriptivism as racism; "words mean whatever they're commonly used to mean" needs to reckon with the ways white cultural usage can steamroll black cultural usage overnight. what are the processes by which "common usage" (or the perception of) comes to be
"male means born with a penis female means born with a vagina" -> prescriptivism as transphobia
ultimately language it a collaborative effort for communities to reach a mutual agreement on how to effectively communicate with each other, but i think "words need commonly agreed upon meanings" also needs to reckon with the mechanics of how that agreement is established and the relationship of that process to power.. i do struggle to think of examples of words people disagree about how to use that don't on some level have a power struggle driving the disagreement
i.e. who is telling whom how to use or not use a word and what is the power relationship between those folks
#apologies if this is out of left field or tangential to what your post is about#with all due respect op your post about the precision of language is incredibly vague i cannot see exactly what you are trying to get at#so i am just going for it basically
this post is a bit vague, but mostly it is out of context. when i say "a word whose definition is whatever suits the speakers preference and makes them the most comfortable" that's not a nebulous, hyperbolic description of language use i disagree with, that's a good few people's genuine self-admitted opinion on how identity labels should function linguistically, and it's one i vehemently disagree with. this was made directly following me discussing a screenshot of someone arguing that if men who are attracted to women feel that their attraction to women is queer, they should be considered lesbians if that's the label they prefer. this is a way of understanding both queerness and lesbianism that i think is pretty much entirely nonfunctional and ultimately detrimental.
i understand that words' definitions are not divinely handed down units of fact devoid from any social/moral context, and their use needs to be subject to scrutiny and open to debate. which to me falls under the umbrella of "flexible to the same degree that the rest of a given language is." however, i think the idea that a specific individual's preferences and comfort take precedent over a collective agreement on what shared traits define a specific marginalized goes beyond that flexibility, and is almost an anti-language stance. like you said, we need to reckon with the mechanics of how that agreement is established, but if someone's stance is that reaching any sort of agreement on the subject is inherently exclusionary and restrictive "gatekeeping", is it possible to meet them in the middle? i have a hard time seeing how.
as mortalityplays said, anyone is free to attempt to push language in the direction they want it to go, but you can't force other people to understand you. imo nobody who has advocated for these hyper-individualistic and vibes-based constructions of romantic and sexual identity has made a case for their perspective that manages to go beyond "why should you care how anyone else identifies! what gives you the right to tell anyone how to describe themselves!" i personally believe we have a lot of reasons to care about how other people use language, for many reasons that overlap with the points you've brought up above. and although i don't have either the "right" or the ability to actually control how anyone else refers to themselves or others, what i can do is continue make a case for my own perspective. does that clear things up?
Orufrey + love to the point of invention