me: wakes up
me: ahh what a lovely day
me literally ten minutes later: i have no future and will never be able to pursue my dreams
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ

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ojovivo
occasionally subtle
cherry valley forever

JVL
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Show & Tell
One Nice Bug Per Day
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@theartofmadeline
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❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
d e v o n
seen from Brazil

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@huntingdxle
me: wakes up
me: ahh what a lovely day
me literally ten minutes later: i have no future and will never be able to pursue my dreams
eden
The zombie outbreak started 2 years ago now you find yourself cornered by a decaying zombie when you do the unthinkable and bite it first when it falls to the floor and grows its skin back and sits up and asks what is going on
This may be the best subversive idea for zombie apocalypse stories i think I’ve ever seen.
“How the fuck did you know that would work?”
“I didn’t, dude, I just fucking panicked.”
“Love isn’t something that’s necessary. The things that are necessary are things you can see with your own eyes. Afterall, kissing is no more than a tool.”
Tuxedo Jin for a happy Valentine’s Day! ♥️
okay but things that are tragically funny in High School Musical 2:
Troy Bolton being weird and passive-aggressive because he thinks his gay classmate, Ryan, is trying to steal his girlfriend
Ryan not picking up on this heterosexual bullshit and being genuinely baffled when his polite small talk doesn’t get the expected reaction
“i don’t judge people based on race, creed, color, or gender. i judge people based on spelling, grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure.”
i hate to burst your pretentious little bubble, but linguistic prejudice is inextricably tied to racism, sexism, classism, xenophobia, and ableism.
ETA: don’t send me angry messages about this…at all, preferably, but at least check the tag for this post before firing off an irate screed.
no one seems to be following the directive above, so here’s the version of this post i would like all you indignant folk to read.
no, i am not saying that people of color, women, poor people, disabled people, etc, “can’t learn proper english.” what i’m saying is that how we define “proper english” is itself rooted in bigotry. aave is not bad english, it’s a marginalized dialect which is just as useful, complex, and efficient as the english you’re taught in school. “like” as a filler word, valley girl speech, and uptalk don’t indicate vapidity, they’re common verbal patterns that serve a purpose. etc.
because the point of language is to communicate, and there are many ways to go about that. different communities have different needs; different people have different habits. so if you think of certain usages as fundamentally “wrong” or “bad,” if you think there’s a “pure” form of english to which everyone should aspire, then i challenge you to justify that view. i challenge you to explain why “like” makes people sound “stupid,” while “um” doesn’t raise the same alarms. explain the problem with the habitual be. don’t appeal to popular opinion, don’t insist that it just sounds wrong. give a detailed explanation.
point being that the concept of “proper english” is culturally constructed, and carries cultural biases with it. those usages you consider wrong? they aren’t. they’re just different, and common to certain marginalized groups.
not to mention that many people who speak marginalized dialects are adept at code-switching, i.e. flipping between non-standard dialects and “standard english,” which makes them more literate than most of the people complaining about this post.
not to mention that most of the people complaining about this post do not speak/write english nearly as “perfectly” as they’d like to believe and would therefore benefit by taking my side.
not to mention that the claim i’m making in the OP is flat-out not that interesting. this is sociolinguistics 101. this is the first chapter of your intro to linguistics textbook. the only reason it sounds so outlandish is that we’ve been inundated with the idea that how people speak and write is a reflection of their worth. and that’s a joyless, elitist idea you need to abandon if you care about social justice or, frankly, the beauty of language.
and yes, this issue matters. if we perceive people as lesser on the basis of language, we treat them as lesser. and yes, it can have real ramifications–in employment (tossing resumes with “black-sounding names”), in the legal system (prejudice against rachel jeantel’s language in the trayvon martin trial), in education (marginalizing students due to prejudice against dialectical differences, language-related disabilities, etc), and…well, a lot.
no, this doesn’t mean that there’s never a reason to follow the conventions of “standard english.” different genres, situations, etc, have different conventions and that’s fine. what it does mean, however, is that this standard english you claim to love so much has limited usefulness, and that, while it may be better in certain situations, it is not inherently better overall. it also means that non-standard dialects can communicate complex ideas just as effectively as the english you were taught in school. and it means that, while it’s fine to have personal preferences regarding language (i have plenty myself), 1) it’s worth interrogating the source of your preferences, and 2) it’s never okay to judge people on the basis of their language use.
so spare me your self-righteous tirades, thanks.
Oh my gosh YES, this post got so much better.
this is sociolinguistics 101. this is the first chapter of your intro to linguistics textbook.
and
and yes, this issue matters. if we perceive people as lesser on the basis of language, we treat them as lesser. and yes, it can have real ramifications
I don’t agree. The school system has abandoned minorities for far too long. To let these young people go into their adult lives without the ability to read, spell, or properly punctuate is a shame. To pat them on the head and say, “write how you want because you’re a minority” is telling them that you don’t care about their education or their capacity to learn. Furthermore you’re okay with that because they’re minorities? Have you no shame?
with all due respect, this is a terrible comment. truly terrible.
first of all, i went into great detail about how other dialects and usages, while perhaps not appropriate in every context, are valid, useful, and complex, so blathering on about how students just don’t know how to read, write, or spell completely misses the point. saying that certain usages are just wrong is a value judgment made overwhelmingly about language common to marginalized people (who are not necessarily minorities, but anyway). this is not a new or bold assertion. this is fundamental to the field of sociolinguistics, and i’ve never seen anyone present a compelling case in favor of linguistic prejudice. no one’s patting anyone on the head–we’re saying that grammar cops suffer from a basic misunderstanding of how language works. as i wrote in the very long post you don’t appear to have read, the point of language is communication, so if people are communicating effectively, language is functioning exactly as it’s meant to.
but what really gets me about this abysmal response is your assumption that linguistic descriptivism = not teaching grammar, spelling, or reading at all. that’s not even remotely the case–in fact, here’s a post i wrote about my success in bringing a descriptivist approach to the classroom. i’ve done this same kind of thing in one-on-one tutoring and have found it far more effective than any “this is wrong, this is right, grammar is set in stone” approach. teaching descriptivism leads to better writing, a deeper understanding of grammar, and fewer assholes.
in conclusion, please take your melodramatic “have you no shame?” bullshit as far away from me as possible.
I really love languages. I love being able to understand people who don’t speak the same language I learnt when I was a child. It’s fantastic, it’s magical. I love it when I hear people speaking a foreign language and I love it even more when a native speaker listens to them and their eyes go wide and a smile crosses their faces. I love being able to speak with people from all over the world. I love the languages I speak and the ones I don’t. I love accents, I really enjoy listening to different accents, they are all beautiful and every one of them tell us a different story. Languages are not only a tool, they’re also part of our identity and that is why I love them. I do not express myself the same way in English or in my native language and that’s wonderful. It doesn’t matter if a language is spoken by millions of people or just a few thousands. Every language is amazing and perfect and everyone should be aware of that. Learning a language is hard and requires a lot of effort but it pays off because it brings people together and it makes us better as individuals. Go learn a language guys, you won’t regret it.
We finally get to hear Wakandans speak Xhosa!
There’s so much rhythm in this language
marvel is lazy as fuck for choosing Xhosa as the language
Well John Kani who played T’Chaka is from South Africa and speaks Xhosa so when he took on the role he brought that with him and taught Chadwick how to speak it. So they more so follows his wishes. Don’t see why you have such an issue
Y’all be mad at everything.
Lazy?? If I spoke Xhosa, I’d be offended as hell if someone considered the cast “lazy” for learning it.
Yess for a clicking languange!!
One thing im not looking forward to is how great this movie is gonna be, but due to the hype how many people are just waiting to pick it apart and find issue in the TINIEST, most insignificant details… I’m over it already.
Ok, like, picking Xhosa really isn’t that trivial a detail. Xhosa is spoken in South Africa whilst Wakanda has consistently been placed in East Africa (somewhere between Uganda and Ethiopia) by the MCU.
That’s some 6000km.
Other places similarly far away are China and Ireland.
This is symptomatic of a much more general problem with black panther where it presents a vision of Wakanda a utopian nation with cultural touchstones taken from across one of the most diverse continents I’m the world; cultural touchstones that have no business existing next to each other and someone who recognises the importance of one will probably not recognise it in any of the others. This blending of the myriad of African cultures into one single “Africa” is part of the legacy of imperialism which has always treated such distinctions as trivial.
As @metsew has pointed out, across most of Africa (with some notable exceptions such as South Africa), most Africans identify far more strongly with finely grained ethnic labels than they do with race so, from that pov, speaking Xhosa as Wakandan ought not be any less shocking than them speaking Irish or Mandarin.
This film is a big and important step forwar for African-Americans, but it is a continuation of a long history of imperialism for Africa
It’s cultural imperialism. At least someone says it who isn’t myself.
The MCU films actually give us a good alternative model to compare to in Sokovia.
Now we’ve not seen it in as much detail as we see Wakanda in Black Panther, but what we do see contrasts quite well.
Sokovia is placed with a similar level of vagueness, being somewhere between the western border of Slovakia and the northwest of the black sea in Ukraine. They write in Cyrillic (some people online are saying the Serbian variant rather than the more plausible Ukrainian or Belarusian variants, which would be a little off, but I didn’t actually see any of the Serbian characters so I’m not sure how accurate that is) and speak a Slavic language. Their flag uses the panslavic colours (albeit rotated from their usual horizontal configuration) with a crowned eagle. The architecture, dress, and customs of the Sokovians appear to all be consistent with a post-soviet Eastern European country.
The biggest incongruity there is in using the Serbian alphabet (if they actually are) which depending on the exact placement of the country is at most 1000km away (remember, Wakanda is 6000km from any significant Xhosa population). That same distance could get you from Sokovia to Xi'an in China or to Mumbai in India.
A Sokovia portraying Eurasia similarly to how Wakanda portrays Africa could have people in salwar kameezes watching Turkish wrestling, be speaking Tundra Nenets whilst doing vodka shots over fish and chips all in a Venetian Palazzo. I mean, it’s all Eurasia right so who’s going to sweat the little differences between those cultures?
If you’re going “but that’s different, those cultures are completely different and the people with those cultures are of different races” I’ve got some news for you: Africa is at least as culturally diverse as Eurasia and race was socially constructed deliberately to lump all of Africa into one group that could all be dismissed as primitive.
Black panther is an important film and I am excited to see it, but these sorts of apologia for its (major) flaws serve no-one and continue the very harmful legacy of non-Africans ignoring the many, many differences between various African peoples.
As ever, all media is flawed. That doesn’t mean you have to entirely disregard it, just acknowledge those flaws and engage critically with the work rather than glossing over and/or ignoring them
Bilingual culture is switching languages on Netflix 3 times per episode because you’re really intrigued by how they translated that one pun.
can you believe after so many years of using french’s “c'est la vie” because the nuance doesn’t translate, we’ve finally obtained a flawless translation with “that’s just the way it is on this bitch of an earth"
“Y’all motherfuckers” is a gender neutral speech opener
When you feel that post-Olympics depression start setting in:
“They are the greatest ice dancers of their generation, maybe of all time.”
Yuzu in slow-mo.
The war on drugs is rooted in racist policies . The failure of the war and drugs is obvious. We need to find a better solution, because people of color should never be the victims of racist policies. White Americans are more likely than black Americans to have used most kinds of illegal drugs, including cocaine and LSD. Yet blacks are far more likely to go to prison for marijuana, which is not a hard drug. Moreover , even when white people get caught , they get less time in prison.
…is that Rachael Leigh Cook, the same actress who did the original anti-drug ad when she was a teenager?
It is indeed.
She grew up, realized she’d been exploited to further a racist government agenda, and turned around to bite the hand that feeds. Awesome.
no offense but… whats the point in saying something rude about someone’s favorite things to their face just bc you don’t personally like it or have the same taste as them… like what do u get out of that interaction other than prove that you can’t respect your friend’s interests