#that's power

[wincaraz]

Absolute power destroys absolutely

[draqul]

YouTube grammar isn't a problem in and of itself. It is absolutely fine to be "wrong" in English. The problem is what decreased fluency demonstrates about how too many of us engage with our own language - and language is the heart of and key to human knowledge.

You don't need to learn all the rules, because most of them are fake and inconsistent. Languages only have "rules" when they're dead, and English, unkillable, wriggles like a trout when you try to pin it down. For all the attempts to impose Latin grammar on the Norman layer, English is fundamentally not a romance language, and it has wantonly shucked most of its Germanic complexity too.

English said: what if we fuck off everything we possibly can from our nouns, pare our verb forms down to a minimum, and make a handful of particles signpost everything instead? Sure, native speakers now face a baffling difficulty curve when they need to understand concepts like "object" and "genitive" in order to learn any other language, but now we have SO much room in our panniers for words and words and words and words and words and words and words and words and words and words. Thank you we'll have that word. Thank you we want that one too. Thank you, great root there, we'll take that and mix it with a stem from somewhere else. Consistent spelling and pronunciation? No thank you, we need more space for words and words and words and words and words.

Think about the term lingua franca. It literally means French, which was once THE language for international communication, and has been thoroughly dethroned. The Academie tried to lock it down with rules, and it began to die. English would never. English has never had an authoritative rule book and none will ever exist. What we have are style guides: localised and specific for purpose. When they try to put rules on English it's out the window, down the drain pipe, through next door's window, rummaging in the silverware drawer looking for stuff to nick.

All this to say, you can let that misplaced apostrophe go. You can accept meme speak in Merriam Webster and drifting definitions. But that doesn't mean you stop studying your language, because the beauty and strength of English is in its capacity to express context, nuance and social grounding through word choice. There are entire anthropologies hidden in common turns of phrase (the equestrian influence on metaphors about ruling and control - free rein, give him his head, took the bit between his teeth - is the long shadow of the titled class system). When you ask why a writer or speaker didn't "just" use a simpler or more familiar word or phrase, you are admitting you don't understand the privilege you have as a passenger on one of the longest and most unstoppable trains in the history of human communication.

You must be curious, hungry, devouring. When you encounter a new word or phrase, you should question it, delight in it, and file it away. Eat everything. Read, watch, push outside your borders constantly, encounter, roll over and engulf new sources of information. Consume and add to your glory. Celebrate novelty and enfold it in your loving embrace. Be gluttonous and show your receipts. Be English, in the only sense of the word that retains any pride.

[bethanydelleman]

Me watching period dramas from multiple counties and thinking to myself... what really brings humans together across time, culture, and country is our desire to exhibit our wealth by having extraordinarily fancy sleeves.

"Do you doubt my great wealth and power? Have you seen my sleeves? The lace is VERY FINE! LOOK HOW MUCH UNNECESSARY FABRIC THERE IS! Did you notice that they have embroidery? BOW BEFORE MY MAGNIFICENT ARM COVERINGS!!!"

And yet today, where are our fancy sleeves?

WHERE ARE THEY?

This is clearly where modern society has gone wrong...

[queengreendown]

Saturday night

[linoguy]

why is thunderous chan the best chan that exists like.

[chaos0pikachu]

Can you imagine your game in bed is so strong that it almost makes a man crash his car?

Sky can. 

[swarmkeepers]

“i need a fucking weapon” is SO powerful and i’m not going to be over it but i just keep thinking about how helpless ricky must be feeling. the dream team has two weeks of downtime and ricky doesn’t have his own activity, he gets looped into cody’s. they cast locate object but they can only do it five times a day and they find nothing. ricky goes to work at helping hands and he comes home to esther doing her work at the society conning the order and it’s not that ricky doesn’t love his work and his normal life but there’s a dragon egg and three spirits he’s connected to and null and iga being gone and normalcy feels wrong.

when ricky gets home he runs upstairs but even six seconds is too late. he rolls investigation and he gets a nat one, because ricky’s job isn’t to know things and usually that’s okay but now it’s really not. sofia finds the pregnancy test in the bathroom and ricky doesn’t. it doesn’t feel like betrayal—sofia’s his friend and esther’s friend and ricky doesn’t have a problem with her knowing, if he thinks about it—but it feels like failure. because ricky’s job isn’t to know things but he should know this. he should know esther. he should be the kind of person who esther can trust.

ricky stammers and grasps for a spell, any spell that can help, because nothing’s there for him to hit. he tries locate object again and thinks esther’s staff, esther’s jewelry, i need to find her and it hasn’t worked for him for weeks and we don’t even know if it works this time because kingston’s already texting everyone to go to gramercy!

when ricky matsui calls out “i need a fucking weapon” and esther sinclair’s silver bat slams into his hand it’s SO much. it’s something of esther’s telling him that this weapon belongs in his hand but also that their relationship and their connection is real and concrete and powerful. it’s an arcane focus arcing with lightning (part of him notes that that’s a fire risk) telling him he is magical even when he’s been casting spell after spell and not having them work. it’s a weapon that ricky can do something with because ricky matsui’s been feeling helpless but he has always been and will always be a hero no matter what’s in his hand