Boromir said: of course the tree is dead. You donât need a wizard to tell you that.
Faramir said: he says itâs because itâs a stupid way to keep a tree. he says it always ends up dying, every time, because we donât keep it propply.
Boromir said: donât talk like a baby. And donât say that! Mithrandir has never understood the duties of Stewards.
Faramir said: he says it isnât politics, itâs gardening. he says we donât let the roots go down deep enough, and they always hit stone, and white trees would keep growing forever-and-ever, if you let them; and if their roots canât grow any more they always die, âcos it starves them, and thatâs mean. it ought to be in the ground, and you shouldnât keep a grown big tree on a - a - a - a PATIO, and not one at the top of a tower neither, a thousand feet above the plain, without enough food for a tree to eat. And thatâs mean of us.
Boromir said: Mithrandir talks a lot of rubbish.
Faramir said: he says Minas Tirith has a proud tradition of killing saplings that are very rare, and he will only give us houseplants or tomatoes for presents until we get better at it. and he says thatâs why the Lawn of Ecthelion is always yellow in summer too. Underneath the grass, thereâs just a little dirt we brought here, and underneath that thereâs the stone of the tower, which âvaporates, and it canât hold very much water, for the grass to keep between rains.
Boromir said: actually - I do believe that. But the Lawn of Ecthelion always lives again - as soon as it rains.
Faramir said: yellow lawn grass isnât dead, itâs just doormat. Waiting for the rain.
Boromir said: dormant.
Faramir said: maybe.
Boromir said: fine, fine, fine -
Boromir said: okay, Faramir, maybe youâre right. So what? What of it?
Faramir said: well, I donât know. But I donât like the tree anymore.
Boromir said: you donât like the White Tree of Gondor.
Faramir said: I donât like how it looks like we failed it. I donât like it being dead. I donât like to think of it starving to death. And I donât like how itâs everywhere.
Boromir said: but the White Tree is alive everywhere else.
Faramir said: no look at it, Boromir, itâs dead.
Boromir said: no it isnât, look. Itâs alive on you and itâs alive on me. Look on mine. Look at the leaves. Whatâs that made of?
Faramir said: Broidery.
Boromir said: People donât embroider all those leaves just to be on a dead tree.
Faramir said: is mine alive?
Boromir said: they all are. The only dead one is the one on the tower, and honestly, maybe youâre right. Maybe itâs a stupid place for a real tree.
Iâm not Christian, I donât go to church anymore, and my pastor died, but when he was alive Iâd sometimes go to his sermons and I remember one time he said âit feels good to hate, but we know that it isnât allowed, so when weâre told that weâre allowed to hate someone we get so excited that we forget weâre supposed to loveâ, and if my humble atheist ass might borrow some church talk Iâd like to perhaps submit that
Anyhow sometimes on the day to day I feel disgust or revulsion and I have to ask myself âis this a danger to anyone at all or am I just looking for something Iâm allowed to hateâ and a solid 98/100 times itâs the latter so once again thank you pastor D
You know what. As someone who also isn't religious (semi Christian... It's complicated). I've been thinking about this all dang day. Thank you @teaboot AND pastor D.
Love of corporate bullshit is correlated with bad judgment
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
I'm a writer, so of course I care about words! But I'm a writer, so I also think that words are improved by their malleability, duality and nuance.
This is one of the things I love about being a native English speaker â this glorious mongrel language of ours is full of extremely weird words, like "cleave," which means its own opposite ("to join together" and "to cut apart"). English is full of these words that mean their own opposite, from "dust" to "oversight" to "weather":
This is what you get when you let a language run wild, with meaning determined (and contested) by speakers. Not for nothing, my second language is Yiddish, another glorious higgeldy-piggeldy of a tongue with no authoritative oversight and innumerable dialects.
Semantic drift is a feature, not a bug. It's how we get new words, and new meanings for old words. I love semantic drift! I mean, I'd better, since, having coined "enshittification," I'm now destined to have a poop emoji on my headstone. Having coined a word â and having proposed a precise technical meaning for it â I am baffled by people who make it their business to scold others for using enshittification "incorrectly." "Enshittification" is less than five years old, and we know when and how it was invented. If you like it when I make up a word, you can't categorically object to other people making up new meanings for this word. I didn't need a word-coining license to come up with enshittification, and you don't need a semantic drift license to use it to mean something else.
I wrote a whole danged essay about this, but still, hardly a day goes by without someone trying to enlist me in their project to scold and shame strangers for using the word incorrectly:
The fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn â or apply â the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of "enshittification" is worse than a self-limiting move â it would be a self-inflicted wound.
Colloquialization doesn't dilute language, it thickens it. Using a powerful word to describe something else can be glorious. It's allusion, metaphor, simile. It's poesie. It's fine. Bemoaning the "tsunami" of bad news doesn't cheapen the deaths of people who die in real tsunamis. Saying that the Trump administration "nuked" the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau doesn't desecrate the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Calling creeping authoritarianism a "cancer" doesn't denigrate the suffering of people who have actual cancer.
What's more, devoting your energies to "correcting" other people's allusive language makes you a boring, tedious person. Sure, you can have a conversation with a comrade about making inclusive word choices, but interrupting a substantive debate to have that discussion is unserious. The words people use matter (I care a lot about words!) but they matter less than the things people mean. Keep your eye on the prize (metaphorically) (for avoidance of doubt, there is no prize) (both the prize and the eye are metaphors).
(By all means, get angry at people who intentionally use slurs. None of this is to say that you should tolerate â or be subjected to â language that is intended to dehumanize you.)
It's time we admitted that it's no good replacing an offensive term with a phrase that no one understands. Calling it "child sexual abuse material" is a good idea, but no one actually calls it that. The customary phrase is actually "child sexual abuse material, which most people call 'child porn,' but which we should really call 'child sex abuse material.'" If your goal is to avoid saying "child porn" (a laudable goal!), this isn't achieving it.
None of this means that I am immune to being rubbed up the wrong way by other people's language choices. Having been mentored by the science fiction great Damon Knight, I have been infected by many of his linguistic peccadillos, which means that if you say "out loud" in my earshot, I will (mentally) "correct" it to "aloud" (yes, "out loud" is fine, but Damon had a thing about it and it got stuck in my brain).
I am especially perturbed by "business English," the language of the commercial class, their cheerleaders in the press, and (alas) many of their critics. Anytime someone refers to a sector as a "space" (as in "I'm really getting into the AI space") it's like they're making me chew tinfoil. Superlatives like "thought-leader" are so self-parodying I have to check every time someone utters one aloud (see?) to verify that they're not being sarcastic. Objects of derision should be referred to by their surnames, not their given names ("Musk" is vituperative, "Elon" is friendly â though, thanks to the glorious and thickening contradictions of language, calling someone by their surname can also be affectionate). I steer clear of jargon used by firms to lionize themselves, like "hyperscaler."
I share the impulse to impose my linguistic preferences on the people around me. I just (mostly) suppress that impulse and try to focus on substance rather than style, at least when I'm trying to understand others and be understood by them. But yes, I do silently judge the people around me for their word choices â all the time.
That's why I immediately pounced on "The Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale: Development, validation, and associations with workplace outcomes," an open access paper in the Feb 2026 edition of Personality and Individual Differences by Shane Littrell, a linguistics postdoc at Cornell:
Littrell set out to evaluate "corporate bullshit," a linguistic category that is separate from mere "jargon." Jargon, Littrell writes, is a professional vocabulary that serves a useful purpose: "facilitat[ing] communication and social bonding, increas[ing] fluency, and help[ing] reinforce a shared identity among in-group members."
Bullshit, meanwhile, is "semantically, logically, or epistemically dubious information that is misleadingly impressive, important, informative, or otherwise engaging." There's a whole field of bullshit studies, with investigations into such exciting topics as "pseudo-profound bullshit" (think: Deepak Chopra).
Littrell borrows from that field and others to investigate corporate bullshit, formulating a measurement index he calls the "Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale." In a series of three experiments, Littrell sets out to determine who is the most susceptible to corporate bullshit, and what the correlates of that receptivity are.
Littrell concludes that corporate bullshitters themselves are pretty good at identifying bullshit (they have a high "Organizational Bullshit Perception Score"). In other words, bullshitters know that they're bullshitting. When a corporate leader declares that:
This synergistic look at our thought leadership will ensure that we are decontenting and avoiding reputational deficits with our key takeaways as effectively as we can in order to sunset our resonating focus.
they know it's nonsense.
This reminded me of the idea that cult leaders tell obvious lies to their followers as a way of forcing them to demonstrate their subservience. When Trump demands that his followers wear clown shoes:
He's engaging in a dominance play that forces his feuding princelings and their lickspittles to humiliate themselves and reaffirm his supremacy.
There are plenty of rank-and-file workers inside corporations who have high OBPSes and know when they're being bullshitted, but Littrell also identifies a large cohort of low-OBPS workers who are absolutely taken in by corporate bullshit.
Here we get to a fascinating dichotomy. Both the low-OBPS and high-OBPS workers can be described as being "open minded," but "open" has a very different meaning for each group. Workers who are good at spotting bullshit score high on open-mindedness metrics like "willingness to engage" and "willingness to reflect," both characteristic of the "fluid intelligence" that makes workers good at solving problems and doing a good job.
Meanwhile, workers who are taken in by bullshit are "open minded" in the sense that they are bad at analytical reasoning and thus easily convinced. These people test poorly on metrics like "logical reasoning" and "decision-making," and score high on "overconfidence in one's intellectual and analytic abilities." They are apt to make blunders that "expose organizations to financial, reputational, or legal risks."
But they're also exactly the workers who score high on "job satisfaction," "trust in one's supervisor," and "degree to which they are inspired by corporate mission statements." These people are so open minded that their brains start to leak out of their ears. Or, as Carly Page put it in The Register: "jargon sticks around not just because executives enjoy using it, but because many people respond to it as if it were genuine insight":
This creates a feedback loop where bosses get rewarded for using empty and maddening phrases, and their workforce gets progressively more skewed towards people who are bad at spotting bullshit and at exercising their judgment on the job. It's quite a neat â and ugly â explanation of why bullshit proliferates within organizations, and how organizations come to be completely overrun with bullshit.
This is a fascinating research paper, and while I've focused on its conclusions, I really suggest going and reading about the methodology, especially the tables of "corporate bullshit" phrases they generated for their experiments (Tables 1, 2 and 3). This is some eldritch horror bullshit:
By solving the pain point of customers with our conversations, we will ideate a renewed level of end-state vision and growth-mindset in the market
between us and others who are architecting to download on a similar balanced scorecard.
What's more, these are all based on real examples of corporate bullshit from leaders at large corporations, with a few words rotated to synonyms drawn from the business-press.
I'm a writer. I really do care about language. Sure, I get frustrated with scolds who rail against semantic drift or engage in petty, pedantic corrections, but not because words don't matter. They matter, a lot. But language isn't math (which is why double negatives are intensifiers, not negators). It can obscure (as with bullshit) or it can enlighten (as with poesie) or it can enable precision (as with jargon). Arguments about language matter, but what matters about them isn't subjective aesthetics, nor is it a peevish obsession with "correctness." What matters is the way that language operates on the world (and vice versa).
when I worked as a technical writer, I learned how to write in both of these styles, while still maintaining them separate from my normal internet "speaking" voice. I would spend an hour crafting my bullshit emails for the correct tone and simplification for maximizing audience absorption. I took the jargon from developers and made jargon docs and "consumables" (for the general corporate working populous, half jargon and half gentle instruction/pictures with red boxes and arrows). the higher up the ladder the emails went, the bullshit to jargon ratio gets higher too. I've sent emails with less substance than a light morning fog to CEOs and execs. with attachments of jargon documents that I know they would simply never open.
Also, my personal word superiority pet peeve is "alot" bc of hyperbole and a half's alot
The reblog chain is one of the things that makes Tumblr unlike anywhere else. All the notes on reblogs are attributed to the original post, no matter which branch people actually liked or reblogged. We want to keep encouraging conversations, and give contributors the recognition they deserve.Â
Soon, you'll be able to like, reblog, or reply to any part of a reblog chain, and that note will go to that reblog's author. Each reblog will have its own counts, instead of one aggregated number from every version of the post. And yes, youâll be able to like multiple posts in one chain.
If a reblog doesn't add anything, the love flows up to the last person in the chain who did. Your post doesn't lose notes just because people spread it quietly.
Past notes will stay on the original post â we're only changing what happens from here on out. Retroactively re-attributing all of them would be... a lot.
This is just the beginning. More changes are coming as we keep building this out â stay tuned!
Itâs very clear that you all have strong feelings about Tumblr and about this change. We hear you. The passion people have for how Tumblr works is one of the things that makes this place special.
As this rolls out over the next few days and you explore it, weâll keep reading your replies and reblogs, so please keep sharing your questions, concerns, and ideas.
Your creativity has always been the heart of Tumblr, whether youâre the original poster or adding something brilliant in the reblogs, and nothing about this change is meant to limit that.
If youâd like to talk directly beyond the comments, leave a reply and weâll follow up with as many of you as we can. We want to work with you to make Tumblr better.
My brotherâs friend went exploring in a mine shaft and found a ringtail and thought it was a âsketchy ass catâ and decided to pet it and it bit him and he had to go to the hospital for rabies shots DONT DO DRUGS KIDS
if this becomes a heritage post my life would be complete although i feel i should provide some more context as this post begins to blow up:
-the video is from a time before sharing files across devices was trivial, which is why it looks so bizarre. my brother took the original video which i believe was a snapchat video which somehow got uploaded onto my parentsâ computer, where my brother showed it to me. i immediately recognized the comedic gold and insisted on getting my own copy, so i re-filmed it on my own digital camera, which is why my brother is narrating what the video will be about before it starts. i then managed to get it onto my tumblr through a series of dark magic rituals. this is why it has an old mac toolbar AND a weird caption AND a vidlab watermark. simpler times indeed
-i was not involved in the act of exploring an abandoned mine shaft (extremely dangerous, do not do this) or touching the wild animal (extremely dangerous, do not do this) or hanging out with my brother (extremely dangerous, do not do this) and i do not endorse any of the behavior depicted here. leaving me notes and comments explaining that this was a bad idea is not a productive use of your time. i have known that everything my brother and his friends do is stupid and dangerous my entire life but at least in this instance we get to enjoy the fruits of their poor choices
-preston was fine. he was scratched up and got some rabies shots but this was not the first, last, or worst injury incurred by a young man who decided to follow my brotherâs recommendations for what would be a good and cool idea to do. (his best friend was taken from our house to the ER six times over the course of middle and high school.) to my knowledge the ringtail was also fine despite his encounter with the cast of temu jackass.
-THIS IS PRESTON, GETTING EATEN, BY AâŠ.SKETCHY ASS CAT. MILESUNDERGROUND
Consider this a sequel to this morningâs post talking about that SOS from that woman.
To kidnap people, starve them, beat them, torture them and even rape the whole taking their personal belongings? HOW does someone NOT being here âlegallyâ justify that EVIL treatment?? Because guess what fuck sticks? NO ONE but Native Americans are here legally.
But thankfully a group called Haven Watch is formed to help these victims. You can donate if you can but if you canât just spread the word!
No One Walks Alone
My mom and her teacher friends have a similar group here in New York and me and my friends have a similar kind of group going on.
Because this is NOT about differing opinions BUT of whatâs morally right and I donât want to look in the mirror 20 years from now regretting not what j could have done.
When youâre in the middle of playing hockey, you donât have much time or lungpower to spare for lengthy chats, so hockey players develop a lot of on-ice shorthand. Some of this is probably limited to beer leagues like mine, but Iâve definitely heard a few of these phrases caught on the rink-level mics during NHL games, so I thought maybe some of yâall who donât play hockey might be interested in translations of a few of the things hockey players yell at each other mid-game.
OFF = You are offside.
OOOOOOOFF = You are offside and donât seem to realize it; stop trying to touch the puck and move your ass out of the fucking zone before you force a whistle.
CHANGE = Youâve been on the ice a long time.
CHAAAAAAANGE = Are you aware that there are other people on this team who would like to play hockey at some point?
ONE ON = An opposing player is trying to get the puck away from you and it appears that you havenât noticed.
GOT TIME = Donât panic and fling the puck into Siberia, thereâs no one close enough to take it away from you right this second.
ICE IT = Weâve been in our zone for three minutes and everyone on the ice is nearing collapse, so go ahead, panic and fling the puck into Siberia.
IâM OPEN = Pass toward the sound of my voice right fucking now.
ALL YOU = Take the puck forward yourself; everyone else is far enough behind you that you should not rely on getting any backup on this developing play.
I GOT YOU = You are so egregiously out of position that it makes more sense for us to just switch jobs for a minute.
I GOT IT = If we both skate hard to the puck at the same time, as is currently happening, there will be no one to pass it to and also we are liable to collide in an unproductive fashion, so just let me handle it.
I GOT IT I GOT IT I GOT IT = You did not listen to me and we are about to collide in an unproductive fashion.
edited to add: NOOOOOOOOOOO = The ref has signaled no icing on this play, so quit gliding while you wait for a whistle and move your damn feet. (This is probably the most confusing one to overhear if you donât know what it means XD)
back in the day this post made the rounds in hockey RPF and in Check Please and I am pleased to see once again a hockey-based fandom full of people who know nothing about hockey circulating this crucial info XD for the record I am always happy to splain hockey at pretty much anyone who asks!
oh that just means theyâre a goalie. there is no explaining goalies. one time I asked my goalie why he didnât use a gear bag with wheels (goalie bags almost always have wheels bc they have more/heavier equipment) and heâbent almost double under the weight of his gigantic bagâlooked me straight in the eye and said âit makes me appreciate the game more.â I once knew a goalie who communicated solely via gifs of porn bloopers. thereâs one NHL goalie whose pregame ritual is to go sit in the empty arena and stare at the empty ice surface for literal hours. each goalie is a full subculture that no one understands but themselves
kianamaiart
germansingergirl
romaincrisis
tangentwithtanner
vaporwave
