do u guys think the universal translator sometimes has to add context for words that aren’t directly translatable. Like a human calls a vulcan a nerd and it comes out as smart (derogatory)
personally I don't think if you're a kid you should be using your real name on the internet. very easy for people to find out too much about you. instead you should spend years using a different made-up name that becomes part of your persona to an arguably even greater degree than your actual name and then when you grow up and find out you're trans you have a ready-made name to switch to even if it's probably like Leaf or something
idk if this is a “i dont believe you” what or a “you mean there are people who havent seen these??” what but allow me to enlighten you
i havent watched this commercial in 10 years (which was also when it was posted) but yes i remember this playing on TV when i was younger
heres an article from 2009
heres an interview from 2009
in fact, these were so culturally relevant that i distinctly remember watching a dane cook special where he had a bit about it (i think he also mentions rape so tw for that)
i grew up hearing gay be thrown left and right as a derogatory term, and its a small part of why i dont identify with the word.
if youre going to say that queer is a slur, then you have to mention that gay is used as one as well. otherwise, youre just spewing t///er/////f propaganda and im not about that bullshit
hey, i’m 31 and actually lived through the period where gay was used as a derogatory slur. It was the major formation of my highschool and middle school years. Kids constantly would call each other, ideas, concepts, things “Gay” when they meant “stupid”. I literally had to retrain my brain for 5 years to not use it and I am part of the lgbtqia community. I was just too young to know better.
This absolutely happened and is a major reason why we gotta be not only aware of our words but also understanding that people change.
I'm 35 and queer and I lived through that era, too. "Lesbian" was a term for any girl that was disliked, spoken in various intonations of disgust. Kind of used the same way incels spit the word "feminist," now that I think about it.
But there's more to it that some people aren't getting, either.
"Gay" and "Lesbian" were used as weapons; even if someone wasn't queer, if they were hated enough, the rumors spread. "Don't hang out with her, she's a lesbian." "Hey, should (name) be allowed to change in the locker room? You know they're gay, don't you?" And so on. Depending on where you were, especially if you were trying to have a career (like a teacher) being labeled "gay" enough times to be believed cost someone their career, because of "concerns," especially if the job involved particularly young kids. And that's just the people who got lucky enough to only lose a job.
Anything used to label us is coated in blood. Even the "good words" came from a bad past.
I lived through this shit as well, when I was being viciously bullied in middle school they used to call me a lesbian all the time, as a way so to indicate how awful gross and terrible I was. You’ll still run into people my age using gay as a synonym for stupid and bad.
I'm 33 and one of my coworkers (in her 60s) still uses 'gay' to mean 'cheap, tacky, or low-class' even though she knows that I am queer and will not stop.
My roommate still uses gay to mean stupid. Even though she knows I’m bi and her best friend (bi woman) has told her multiple times to stop because it’s offensive to her.
@ this one small business in my town neither I or my roommate’s gf (who has lived here over a year longer than me) have ever seen open until today, inexplicably
Funding woes push widely used resource behind a higher paywall
An article in Science Magazine about the difficulties of funding language databases. Excerpt:
It was 2015 when Gary Simons knew that something had to change. That was the year spare funds started to dry up at the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), a Bible translation group that helped revolutionize the documentation of endangered languages in the mid–20th century. SIL’s budget had long supported Simons’s passion project: Ethnologue—or “the Ethnologue” as many researchers call it—a massive online database considered by many to be the definitive source for information on the world’s languages.
Ethnologue’s users—and there are hundreds of thousands—can track how many people speak each of the world’s tongues, from Hebrew to Hausa to Hakka (9.3 million, 63.4 million, and 48.2 million, respectively). The database indicates, on a scale of one to 10, every language’s risk of extinction. It also gives a surprisingly clear answer to the squishy question, “how many languages exist?” (7111, by the latest count). For linguists, it’s a resource of reference; for students, it’s a window into the diversity of human language.
But for Simons, a computational linguist who has run Ethnologue for almost 20 years, it’s been a growing heartache. To help cover its nearly $1 million in annual operating costs, Ethnologue got its first paywall in late 2015; most nonpaying visitors were turned away after several pages. Since October 2019, the paywall has taken a new form: It lets visitors access every page, but it blots out information on how many speakers a language has and where they live. Subscriptions now start at $480 per person per year.
Read the whole thing.
Previously about Ethnologue’s subscription service and whether a reference work created as part of a project to translate the Bible into every language in the world can really help revitalize them.
signed up for a one credit coding class that just is solving coding problems online and submitting them. realized today, the first day of class, that this is a way to get college credits for a national coding competition for which you can choose whether or not you actually compete, but can compete through the class for regionals representing my uni if you want to, in which case the competition is 5 hours long, there are three of you, and you are only allowed one computer to complete all 10 problems. given that i signed up for this class on a whim because my three brain cells Leik Puzzel im not sure im the designated audience for this but im not backing out now
prguitarman
annaxmalina
turnnoffyourmind
pixelskylines
ellievsbear
vaporwave
