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makesongsnotmistakes

howlinattheimpala

iwasrorya-deactivated20130504

What the… but… how… wha…. how did this person…. I…

magick-missile

buttchair

i just wrote -2-2x= like 75 times on a paper oh god

i filled up both sides

astroidbelt-moved

what just happened

wendy-darling-forever

this makes me uncomfortable,

kateinator

then do =x+2+ for the next part

fraud-monet

for “or blow me a kiss, and that’s lucky too” it’s =+1=+1

sailorkitkat

What is this sorcery?!?!

floretsilva

this is my favorite post on tumblr

the ending is: 12=x1=

ollieofthebeholder

So I just worked out the whole song, and here you go:

- 2 - 2 x = = x + 2 + - 2 - 2 x = = x + 2 + = + 1 = + 1

- 7 2 + 7 = x + 2 + = 2 + 2 1 = x + 2 +

- 2 - 2 x = = x + 2 + - 2 - 2 x = = x + 2 + - 2 - 2 x = = x + 2 + - 2 - 2 x = = x + 2 +

- 7 2 + 7 = x + 2 +

- 7 2 + 7 = x + 2 + = 7 7 2 + = x + 2 + = x - 7 - 2

- 2 - 2 x = = x + 2 + = x + 2 1 = x + 2 + 1 2 = x 1 =

finaltennessee

My mind just broke

kiarabearaa

*writes furiously*

Mom: Are you writing an essay?

Me: Hm? Wha-oh yeah. An essay. Definitely.

cutesleepygirl

super cute and detailed flower tattoos by soltattoo

allthingslinguistic

How that simple dot at the end of the sentence became something you use to tell people you’re mad. Right. Now.

Here’s an example from an article in the New Republic:

On text and instant message, punctuation marks have largely been replaced by the line break. I am much more likely to type two separate messages without punctuation:

sorry about last night next time we can order little caesars

Than I am to send a single punctuated message:

I’m sorry about last night. Next time we can order Little Caesars.

And, because it seems begrudging, I would never type:

sorry about last night. next time we can order little caesars.

I talked about this in a post last year (Do you end a text with a period?), concluding that I use periods to varying degrees in text messages, sometimes for snark and especially when a textversation is longer (multiple sentences) or more formal. The comments/notes on that post, about other people’s text punctuation are also interesting. I wonder if anything has changed since then: feel free to check your own texts and report back!

I also liked the discussion of exclamation marks as a sincerity marker:

Nearly everyone has struggled to figure out whether or not a received message is sarcastic. So people began using exclamation points almost as sincerity markers: “I really mean the sentence I just concluded!” (This is especially true of exclamation points used in sequence: “Are you being sarcastic?” “No!!!!!”)

Especially in medium-formal emails, I often use exclamation marks to indicate cheerfulness or lightheartedness (compare “Looking forward to meeting you!” with “Looking forward to meeting you.”). Since emoticons aren’t quite acceptable in a more formal context, I end up using exclamation marks as a substitute when I want to make sure that I’m coming off as friendly.

A related phenomenon, I think, is the use of capitals and/or punctuation to indicate sarcasm. For example, notice the contrast between these two imagined texts:

don’t be late we’ve got some very important people coming

don’t be late we’ve got some Very Important People coming

In the second one, capitalizing Very Important People when it doesn’t need to be capitalized makes the sender seem sarcastic or at least as if they’re speaking with a raised eyebrow.

However, sometimes periods are also used for emphasis, and in combination with capitalization perhaps they cancel each other out and become sincere again. For example, I recently found myself saying the following, which is clearly sincere.

Best. Response. Ever.

On the other hand, I’ve noticed that text messages have gotten more likely to include apostrophes and capitals for things like proper names because our phones automatically fill them in, and it would be way too much effort to take them out. (This being said, I’ve trained my phone to use lowercase “internet” and non-hyphenated “email” because using the default versions made me feel like an old fogey.)

allthingslinguistic

2 years of All Things Linguistic

Thursday marked the second anniversary of All Things Linguistic. Since I post daily and so much has happened since then, I have a LOT of favourite posts! Here are some of them.

Explaining things:

Phonotactics, or why Spanish speakers drink Esprite (with follow-up)

Giving a shit about negative polarity items (examples from Parks & Rec)

Jabberwocky: How do you translate a word that doesn’t mean anything?

Contrastive focus reduplication (the difference between milk and milk milk)

How did John Travolta get from Idina Menzel to Adele Dazeem?

Why didn’t “fetch” happen?

Writing systems:

Why the Korean alphabet is brilliant

A discussion of types of writing systems, such as abugidas and syllabaries, including Devanagari and Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics

Beatboxing written in IPA

More technical:

How to remember the IPA vowel chart

A detailed explanation of sonorants, obstruents, and sonority

The pin/pen merger in Fangirl (with response from Rainbow Rowell)

How linguistics is like coding

28 tips for doing better in your intro linguistics course (plus bonus parody tips for doing worse)

Debunking myths:

Hyperbolic “literally” is actually fine

Why do we get confused about “you and me”?

8 myths about language and linguistics

Accents and Dialects:

How to do an Australian accent

Talking Canadian - an old but good documentary on Canadian English

Teaching codeswitching in American schools

Accents in the British Isles (see notes for comments on accuracy and lack thereof)

How Canadians really pronounce “about” (for Grammar Girl)

Old-school British vs American accents (for The Toast)

Dialects of Sign Language: Black ASL

Double modals: You might could like them

Pronouns:

Every argument you’ll ever need for singular “they”

Inventing nonbinary pronouns

What does “she” in science fiction tell us about languages on Earth?

General Fun:

Linguistics Hulk on twitter

We’re up all night for linguistics (a Get Lucky parody)

Negation in Welcome to Night Vale (which was also my first appearance on Grammar Girl)

On the invention of Parseltongue

There is a Noam Chomsky garden gnome

What if punctuation came with sound effects and gestures?

Linguists Against Humanity

We also talked a lot about expletive infixation (how de-fucking-lightful!)

Outreach:

Who are the science communicators for linguistics?

Linguistics summer camps

Editing Wikipedia

We had a tumblinguist meetup at the LSA in Ann Arbor

I started compiling linguistics videos as I came across them (especially by Tom Scott and DS Bigham)

Internet linguistics:

Many things on because x: where it probably came from, why it’s not a preposition, when it won Word of the Year, and when I talked about it on CBC Spark.

What makes an effective synonym for Benedict Cumberbatch? (my first article for The Toast)

The grammar of doge for The Toast, from which came this quote post (which currently has just over 13.7k notes, what?). The French doge example and why no one knows how to say “doge” were fun too, as of course was talking to the BBC about it.

Assorted other internet linguistics:

What makes a good fandom pairing (ship) name?

Gender differences in emoticon usage

On adding a period after a text message

Elaborate ways to lose your ability to even

The stylistic effects of strikethrough

The syntax of shipping

Slides from a keynote I gave about internet syntax

What makes a socially successful Facebook status? (At least in 2009)

What do we mean by “the fandom”?

Series: the protolinguist series was mostly last year, although the master post came up this year. This year I also started the linguistics jobs series, which is a still-ongoing collection of resources and interviews.

Looking forward to another year with you all!

allthingslinguistic

Ending utterances with a comma is definitely A Thing

Yesterday, I wondered whether ending sentences with a comma like in this example was becoming a thing. Over a dozen people reported back that it either is already a thing for your speech community or is in the process of becoming one, so thank you!

First, a correction of my earlier assumption: the first, constructed example from stancarey is more like a full sentence (well, it’s a noun phrase fragment where it would be conventional to use a period).

There are far worse things than prepositions to end a sentence with. A comma, for example,

But the tumblr construction is explicitly not sentences or noun phrase fragments, they’re fragments which introduce a subordinate clause but don’t complete it, since the meaning can be recovered from context. (Hmm, that reminds me of another type of subordinate clause fragments with implied content that we’ve seen recently.) Here are a selection of comments, chosen to minimize overlap, and with the commenter @-mentioned where tumblr would allow me:

timeturnersong said:

It’s not supposed to be the end of the sentence. It’s not even a sentence. It’s like ellipses for trailing off - reader is supposed to assume the rest of the common sense rant.

shorm said:

Definitely becoming a thing! It’s sort of similar to ending a sentence with “, so.”, I think, but because it’s more abrupt it comes off as funnier.

Here’s some further commentary on sentence-ending so, but, and so on.

Another reblogger said they’d been seeing it for two years, but that comment was made in a tag so I’m not quoting it directly. (Let me know if that was you and you’d prefer I did differently — I’m not sure the ethics of acknowledging tag comments.)

coderedalert said:

[insert incredulous+pompous dissertation here] [actually forget the disertation ya dumb i cant be bothered *throws aside*] is how it feels to me

wildcraic said:

I thought this was a play off of the “if…, how is it that i, …,” meme that was popular a while back y/n? memologists? memographers? wuqs?

dysanic said:

I also see it on that then how is it I, a bird, or whatever it is meme

This reminded me of the style of Birds Rights Activist on Twitter, but I just searched through its entire archives for “how” and “why” and I don’t actually see any examples. It does still seem familiar though.

zombiekittensandmadscientists said:

I think it’s fairly limited to contexts like that. I pretty much only see it, I think, in the context of “i, [appositive phrase],” It seems to be the same phenomenon as “I can’t even”, that is, leaving a sentence deliberately incomplete. In this situation, for example, it would be presumably something like “I, a proud owner of a washing machine, am able to keep it clean” or something similar. The earliest examples I can think of are the older meme “If Tumblr is such an accepting place, why is it that I, a straight white man,” (or other privileged group)

nomica said:

the “ending sentences with a comma” meme suggests that there is more to the sentence, but the part that is written is supposed to suggest the important thing (“if tumblr is so accepting, why is it that i, a brony,” i.e. the word brony explains why subject is not accepted)

sparklepetal also pointed out this example.

At the moment, I’d really just like to see more examples so I could try to analyze them more. It’s obviously hard to search for “sentence fragment ending in comma” so anyone has any more you could pass along (especially with a link to the original post), or counter-examples that might complicate things, I’d really appreciate it!

superlinguo

It’s easy to tell the depth of a well.

This is one of the ‘Harvard Sentences’, a set of “phonetically balanced” sentences developed in the 1960s for use in audio and speech transmission systems testing.

Find the full list of Harvard Sentences here online. (There’s a certain poetry to them, don’t you think?)

Read more about their inception and use on Gizmodo. Here’s an excerpt from that article:

“During World War II, the boiler room under Harvard’s Memorial Hall was turned into a secretive wartime research lab. Here, volunteers were subjected to hours of noise as scientists tested military communications systems.

Out of this came the Harvard sentences, a set of standardized phrases still widely used to test everything from cellphones to VoIP. Few know about the sentences themselves other than speech scientists and audio engineers, but the technologies they’ve helped build are everywhere. Verizon’s real-life “Can you hear me now?” guy uses them. Speech-to-text software engineers use them.

Speech scientists studying cochlear implants say them out loud all the time. “These materials have been the gold standard,” says David Pisoni, director of the Speech Research Laboratory at Indiana University.” “

(via superlinguo)

allthingslinguistic

An interesting overview of forensic linguistics in the Washington Post. Excerpt:

In an episode of the CBS show “Criminal Minds” that aired last year , an FBI team is on a frantic hunt for a missing 4-year-old. The team soon realizes that the girl has been given away by a relative, Sue, and that there’s no way Sue is going to reveal her whereabouts. A crucial break comes when FBI profiler Alex Blake puts her “word wisdom” to work. Blake, who is also a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, notices that Sue uses an unusual turn of phrase during an interview and in a written statement: “I put the light bug on.” The FBI team launches an Internet search and soon discovers the same misuse of “light bug” for “light bulb” in an underground adoption forum: “I’ll switch the light bug off in the car so no one will see.” Same author, right? On that assumption, the team springs into action and — bingo! — the missing child is found. Inspiration for Blake’s expertise came from former FBI special agent and linguist James R. Fitzgerald, who became an adviser to “Criminal Minds” in 2008. Blake, he says, is a combination of him and his fiancee, Georgetown associate linguistics professor Natalie Schilling. (Read the rest.)

Previously about forensic linguistics.

Caroline Bingley makes me SO MAD UGH BINGLEY IS RIGHT FOR YOU JANE no matter how many times I read the book/see the movie this part makes me so mad uGH

#pride and prejudice feelings