h.

she/her. indonesian.

[soloorganaas]

I forgive you.

[shamebats]

Cats getting caught doing crimes

[flipocrite]

it takes quite a bit of social intelligence for a creature to understand:

I know what I am doing is wrong

I know there is an activity that looks similar that is not wrong

If I am quick I can plausibly pass one off as the other

[gingerhastoomanyobsessions]

these cats are displaying remarkable theory of mind skills by not only registering that the humans can perceive them but actively trying to manipulate that perception! that requires one to be aware that other individuals have complicated interior thoughts of their own, to know that those thoughts are not always based on truth, and to quickly decide on the best possible “lie” for the situation. this is why I despise animal intelligence tasks based on obedience— some of the most clever moments stem from intelligent disobedience.

[thesaltofcarthage]

I'm impressed at how many people were just clearing their throats meaningfully at the cats to make them stop. We use the hiss sound for discipline. Clearly these folks are several levels ahead of us.

[kalira]

I clear my throat at my cats too! Not to scold them but to make them aware I'm aware of what they're doing. If they know (they know, they always know) (almost always) they shouldn't be doing that, they'll often course correct.

I also say things like "excuse you sir!" (madame, ma'am; I have for unknown reasons started saying "miss ma'am" to Dora) and also I felt the don't eat my plants! person; I conversationally reprimand/redirect my cats all the time. Also in vein of "Tables are not for Tachibanas!"

[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?!

[raptorjax]

Linguistics is fascinating in this context because there are so many different ways to convey tone, rhythm and mentality just through how one writes on here.

[thequeenofsastiel]

English was always my best class, and I’ve edited more than a few pieces of fanfiction, but because Tumblr doesn’t allow you to use commas, I’ve noticed that I’ve stopped using commas where appropriate. Which surprises me when I notice it. But the idea that a lack of punctuation, especially commas, indicates rhetorical speech, makes a lot of sense, and puts the fact that I don’t always use commas at times when I would have before Tumblr, in a very different light.

FUCK I love linguistic nerds. Y'all are fantastic.

[e-rated-beardo]

so was anybody going to link @solitarelee’s thesis or any the five papers they read while researching or am I going to have to go searching for @prismatic-bell in Scopus myself

[prismatic-bell]

Nobody’s has in all this time, so like, if you do go looking, let me see? This is still wild to me.

[e-rated-beardo]

Well I know what I’m doing this evening.

[majnoonathelibrarian]

I want in on this. The book that made me go into linguistics was Word Play: What Happens When People Talk by Peter Farb (1974). The next book to grab me that hard was Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, Gretchen McCulloch (2019). If reading all this made you hot and tingly, too, you’ll probably enjoy these books as well.

[e-rated-beardo]

Ok! So! I probably have not found the exact texts solitarelee referred to, of course, but I have found this (which, you may note, is decidedly fewer than five, but nnn I’ve had limited time ok):

a tumblr book, edited by McCracken, Cho, Stein, and Hoch (ISBN: 978-0-472-12695-8; https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11537055) – published in 2020, so fairly likely to be “the tumblr book” solitarelee mentions in their October 2021 reblog. This post is quoted on page 5.

The first (??) academic citation of this post, at least according to what I’ve read in the past 2.5-3h so grains of salt and all that but whatever, seems to be Tumblinguistics: innovation and variation in new forms of written CMC by Harley Grant (MA thesis, University of Glasgow, 2015), page 18. I eventually found a copy through this post (the Google Drive link is the only one that works, interestingly; academia.edu fails me no matter what link I use including the one in the pinned post on @tumblinguistics); maybe it still exists somewhere more official, idk.

Another thesis cited by McCracken et al. is Welcome to my Twisted Thesis: An Analysis of Orthographic Conventions on Tumblr by Molly Ruhl (MA thesis, San Francisco State University, 2016). It cites Grant. I haven’t had time to read all of it, but it looks super nerdy and amazing. Ruhl mentions how tumblrites sometimes choose to use formal punctuation and orthography to signal seriousness, scholarliness, or gravitas, and now I can’t type anymore without looking at this reblog from the outside like an academic help Anyway I found this one on ResearchGate; idk if it exists in a formal database anywhere.

Some non-academic quotations:

Richard Godwin in The Guardian, 2019: How the internet is changing language as we know it (ikr lol)

Lauren Hockenson on The Next Web, 2015: Tumblr users just rationalized their own punctuation-less teenspeak (my remark: jfc, de-aged to a teenager again eh)

Languagehat: Rhetorical speech on Tumblr

Also, @majnoonathelibrarian, according to a tumblr book, Because Internet also quotes this post on page 165, although I haven’t double-checked that assertion myself.

Also also, I need you all to know how much I want to absorb ALL OF THIS RESEARCH into my brain and how much I DO NOT HAVE TIME for that shit when I’ve got actual assignments to write and a master’s thesis topic of my own to come up with

[sarahthecoat]

Because Internet is written by one of the hosts of @lingthusiasm , a podcast about linguistics, which is super interesting. also an entry into a very big rabbit hole if you decide you want more.

[changgkyun]

SHOWNU IN 'DO WHAT I WANT' M/V.

[danielhowell]

howley and aziraphil are here to save the world

howley and aziraphil are here to save the world

[egberts]

hopefully they never take away the way you can drag the little post icons around the screen on the android app

[egberts]

iPhone user WISH they had this

[star-mom-selkie]

everyone on android mobile stopped to do this after seeing the gif

[veepangwin]

posts that remind you to play with your balls(Android users only)

[goldenpinof]

DAN'S BIRTHDAY CHARITY STREAM (donate here)

[thief-puppy21]

that's my fucking girl

[perths]

real

[loth-catgirl]

this gets funnier the older you reblog it

[intheheatherbright]

Costume. Chitons.

[intheheatherbright]

Marjorie & C. H. B.Quennell, Everyday Things in Archaic Greece (London: B. T. Batsford, 1931).

[killerchickadee]

Wait, wait…. Is that seriously it? How their clothes go?

[treewizarded]

that genuinely is it

[itwashotwestayedinthewater]

yeah hey whats up bout to put some fucking giant sheets on my body

[sourcefieldmix-deactivated20161]

lets bring back sheetwares

[hostagesandsnacks]

also chlamys:

and exomis:

[hidingthemane-deactivated201801]

trust the ancients to make a fashion statement out of straight cloth and nothing but pins

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

Wrap Yourself In Blankets, Call It a Day

[awhiffofcavendish]

Wear blanket. Conquer world.

[goys2men]

That last one looks dope

[moniquill]

Squares and rectangles: easy to weave!! No cutting means no hemming.

[hc-svnt-dracones]

And easy to construct, you don’t have to have complicated seaming and patterning to turn fabric into clothing!

[pendragyn]

ancient Egyptian robes

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

This sort of clothing solution wasn’t just for the Mediterranean, or northern Africa, either. Behold the Belted Plaid:

(auto generated captions)

[marlynnofmany]

Has anyone already reblogged this with saris? It’s cool how many cultures have similarities like this hidden in plain sight.

[tieras]

https://kalaavarsha.com/how-to-wear-or-drape-a-saree/

[deliciouswastelandgoddess]

The lungi is a traditional garment worn in many southern states of India. It's different from the dhoti, in that it is a tubular shape (like

Since we are here might as well share the dhoti and the lungi

https://www.wikihow.com/Wear-a-Lungi

https://www.wikihow.com/Wear-a-Pancha-Kachcham?amp=1

It’s only men in the photos but really anyone can wear them. I am wearing a lungi right now.

I also know Thailand and Sri Lanka have their versions of a lungi as well.

[assessthatdress]

[minzbins-moved]

JUNGMO Cheese (2023)

[dangerthrillryanson]

[tastefullyoffensive]

A novel. By Beef Biltong.

[tulipfemme-deactivated20240718]

being girlunproductive in my girlbed as i girlrot away

[alexxuun]

Everyday, it’s a-gettin’ gayer~🎶

[nicostiel]

Good Omens 2 + Text Posts

[daphneblqke]

Barbie + hitting a little too close to home