[prokopetz]

Death of the author: Treating the author’s stated interpretation of their own work as merely one opinion among many, rather than the authoritative Word of God.

Disappearance of the author: Treating the context and circumstances of the work’s authorship as entirely irrelevant with respect to its interpretation, as though the work had popped into existence fully formed just moments ago.

Taxidermy of the author: Working backwards from a particular interpretation of the work to draw conclusions about what the context and circumstances of its authorship must have been.

Undeath of the author: Holding the author personally responsible for every possible reading of their work, even ones they could not reasonably have anticipated at the time of its authorship.

Frankenstein’s Monster of the author: Drawing conclusions about authorial intent based on elements that are present only in subsequent adaptations by other authors.

Weekend at Bernie’s of the author: Insisting that the author would personally endorse your interpretation of the work if they happened to be present.

[waral]

I thought this was going to be a joke, but these are all very real things you see people do.

[prokopetz]

I’m never more serious than when I’m joking.

[theonedeepa]

Biblical redaction criticism is basically Frankenstein’s Monster of the author

[memesandlaughs]

[cantanopeshitthatwastaken]

[sushinfood]

I MEAN THAT’S ESSENTIALLY IT

[weltinator]

[allthingslinguistic]

“While careful experimentation has shown that having words for concepts makes them easier or faster to name, it is not true that lacking a concept means you cannot conceive of it, and vice versa. For instance, many languages have gender-neutral pronouns (the same word is used for he and she) but are spoken in cultures with very poor levels of gender equality. This might seem obvious – it’s Orwell’s Newspeak (from 1984) in action. In Orwell’s dystopia, the word “free” was stripped of all meaning of individual freedoms and could be used only in the sense of a dog being free from lice, which in turn was supposed to remove the ability of the citizens of Oceania to conceive of such freedom. But it is not just science fiction. There is an important note of caution that linguists are always aware of: making claims about other cultures risks “exoticising” them. At worst, this results in racism. The Hopi people of Arizona, who are sometimes claimed to have no way to express time based on a misunderstanding of Benjamin Lee Whorf’s work on their language, were assumed by some to be incapable of following bus timetables or arriving at work on schedule, a mistaken belief that led to obvious problems. But even an apparently benign conclusion about how some Australian languages encode space with compass directions (“north”) rather than ego-relative position (“my left-hand side”) suggests English speakers often miss out on knowledge about language and cognition because they are busy measuring things against an arbitrary English-centric benchmark. Different language conventions are usually not exotic or unusual; it’s just that English speakers come from a position of very great privilege because their language is the default. People who speak other languages are seen as different, as outsiders.”

— Laura Bailey, Language: ‘untranslatable’ words tell us more about English speakers than other cultures

[allthingslinguistic]

A Spectre is Haunting Unicode

In 1978 Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry established the encoding that would later be known as JIS X 0208, which still serves as an important reference for all Japanese encodings. However, after the JIS standard was released people noticed something strange - several of the added characters had no obvious sources, and nobody could tell what they meant or how they should be pronounced. Nobody was sure where they came from. These are what came to be known as the ghost characters (幽霊文字).

An interesting article about Japanese and Unicode. Excerpt: 

In 1978 Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry established the encoding that would later be known as JIS X 0208, which still serves as an important reference for all Japanese encodings. However, after the JIS standard was released people noticed something strange - several of the added characters had no obvious sources, and nobody could tell what they meant or how they should be pronounced. Nobody was sure where they came from. These are what came to be known as the ghost characters (幽霊文字). […]

By interviewing the catalogers involved in the creation of the standard, the investigators established that some characters were inadvertently invented as mistakes in the cataloging process. For example, 妛 was an error introduced while trying to record “山 over 女”. “山 over 女” occurs in the name of a particular place and was thus suitable for inclusion in the JIS standard, but because they couldn’t print it as one character yet, 山 and 女 were printed separately, cut out, and pasted onto a sheet of paper, and then copied. When reading the copy, the line where the two little pieces of paper met looked like a stroke and was added to the character by mistake. The original character (𡚴) was not added to JIS or Unicode until much later and doesn’t display on most sites for me.

Read the whole thing. 

[allthingslinguistic]

A very long list of linguistics YouTube channels and other free online videos about linguistics

Want to teach yourself linguistics on youtube? Looking for online courses about linguistics? Want to supplement the linguistics resources available for your linguistics class? Here’s an extensive list for you to pick from, with a few notes on style and content. 

General linguistics youtube channels: 

NativLang (animated)

Xidnaf (animated)

The Ling Space (person talking with a bit of animation, see also their summary post)

David J. Peterson’s conlanging youtube channel (person talking)

Arika Okrent (whiteboard videos)

Groups of videos or short series on specific topics: 

Tom Scott’s Language Files (person talking with graphic effects)

Artifexian’s conlanging videos

North Caroline Language and Life project

Common sounds in Australian Indigenous languages

Verner’s Law and how the Germanic languages developed from Proto-Indo-European (person talking plus animation)

How to apply for a Documenting Endangered Languages (DEL) grant

Videos illustrating Gricean Maxims  

Cuando Muere una Lengua / When a tongue dies - Videos in Mexican Indigenous languages from the project 68 voces (68 voices)

Christmas-themed stories told in ASL by an adorable child (ASL Nook)

Individual interesting videos: 

Do Sign Languages Have Accents? 

Sign Language Isn’t Universal

A cute video about doing linguistic studies with children (and a puppet) from the University of Connecticut

Structural Ambiguity (LingVids) and an example from Animaniacs

How English Sounds to Non-English Speakers  

Prisencolinensinainciusol (fake English song)

Is Cereal Soup? and Zipf’s Law from Vsauce 

The Dangerous Ambiguity of Prepositions

Can You Speak Emoji? PBS Idea Channel

World-record fast talkers (and how that works in the brain)

Crash Course Psychology: Language

How much information? (Veritasium)

Cross-sections of the head or vocal tract while speaking: 

Music video (Better Man Than He)

ArticulatoryIPA: many individual short videos of specific sounds showing them produced in the vocal tract 

eNunciate: ultrasound videos of the inside of the mouth superimposed on the side of a speaker’s face 

X-ray gif and animated gif

Beatboxer in MRI machine (plus IPA)

Two videos of the inside of the vocal tract (note: kinda gross)

Structured series or online course, introduction to linguistics: 

Introduction to Linguistics (TrevTutor - whiteboard, Khan Academy style)

Another intro linguistics series (DS Bigham, person talking)

The Virtual Linguistics Campus at Marburg University (person talking)

“Miracles of Human Language” (on Coursera from Leiden University)

Structured series or online courses on a specific topic (might be useful to follow some of the intro material first): 

Phonology (TrevTutor)

Mathematical linguistics (TrevTutor)

Syntax (TrevTutor)

A syntax series following the chapter structure of a free online syntax textbook (University of Edinburgh)

Sign Language Structure, Learning, and Change (on EdX from Georgetown University, in ASL with English subtitles and voiceover)

Language Revival: Securing the Future of Endangered Languages (on EdX from the University of Adelaide)

Long videos (documentaries or lectures): 

The Linguistic Society of America’s youtube channel has both public lectures from prominent linguists (tend to assume some background knowledge of linguistics) and some recordings of professional development webinars, such as how to write an abstract

The Five Minute Linguist talks: 2017 and 2018 (one long video of many short, engaging talks about linguistics)

Steven Pinker: Linguistics as a Window to Understanding the Brain

MIT OpenCourseware: Listening, Speaking, and Pronunciation lectures

Introduction to Optimality Theory in Phonology (UC Berkeley)

Rising voices/Hótȟaŋiŋpi, a documentary about revitalizing the Lakota language, in full on youtube (it’s just under an hour long)

A classic documentary on Canadian English

The Adventure of English (BBC documentary series)

A few linguistically-relevant TED and TEDx talks (NOT a complete list): 

Endangered languages: why it matters (Mandana Seyfeddinipur)

Deaf children need sign language (Drisana Levitzke-Gray)

Robots talking with Robots - How Lingodroids invent their own language (Janet Wiles)

Four reasons to learn a new language (John McWhorter)

Several short language-related videos from TED-Ed

American and British Politeness (Lynne Murphy)

Hacking Language Learning (Conor Quinn)

The linguistic genius of babies (Patricia Kuhl)

What makes a word “real”? (Anne Curzan)

Redefining the dictionary (Erin McKean)

See also my linguistics videos tag for an automatically-updated list of linguistics videos, often from sporadically-updated or smaller channels. 

For more documentaries and longer videos about linguistics, most of which aren’t online, see A very long list of linguistics movies, documentaries, and TV show episodes. 

For more resources to learn linguistics, including linguistics podcasts, blogs, books, and other advice, check out How to teach yourself linguistics online for free. 

Know of something that isn’t on one of these lists and should be? Feel free to let me know!

[allthingslinguistic]

“To hear some sticklers talk, you’d think that somewhere, in a classified location, there’s a top-secret grammar law library that houses the voluminous Grammar Penal Code: an official list of all the things you’d be “wrong” to do. It’s wrong to split an infinitive, some say. It’s wrong to end a sentence with a preposition. It’s wrong to begin a sentence with and. It’s wrong to use take to mean bring. Hang around these people long enough, and you see the list of no-nos is endless. Their source, conveniently, is never revealed. They know what’s wrong and they’re not telling you how they know—as if they have a copy of the Grammar Penal Code and you don’t, so you’re forever at their mercy. With every word you speak or write, you’re in danger of getting busted for breaking a rule you never knew existed. Here’s where these nitpickers get their information: someone—a teacher, a parent, a know-it-all friend—told them there’s a rule against saying a certain thing, and they believed it. It’s as if they, too, were fooled into believing there exists some list of grammar crimes that only their teacher, parent, or friend was privy to. It’s a grammar snob Ponzi scheme.”

— June Casagrande, Grammar Purity is One Big Ponzi Scheme 

[theonedeepa]

“Grammar Purity is One Big Ponzi Scheme” - I need this on a mug

[sifofwar-blog]

//I just bought a “learn old Norse”app. This has gone too far.

[guthbrand]

Is it this one? http://www.libphil.ca/old-norse.php

[autumnia]

That looks awesome!

[science-of-noise]

They have so many!  Latin, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Old English, Gothic.  And plenty of modern languages, too.  All European, but still cool.

[penguinflu]

reblogging for future reference cause I wanna get back into Sanskrit 

[downtroddendeity]

So, just for fun, while I was doing my annual Night Watch reread, I decided to map out the barricades over the course of the story.

These are just the big ones and the ones that are explicitly mentioned. Most of the fighting happened on Heroes Street, somewhere in the vicinity of the big red arrow, but the map doesn’t show enough to guess if the barricades are at the edge of the page or a little farther out. The People’s Republic definitely extends a good ways farther down, too; they’ve got contingents on both gates that they control. The red on the bridges it where Vimes had traps laid down to stop people coming across, and the dotted ones are where I’d assume there have to be pretty major barricades, but Vimes also ordered most of the little alleyways blocked with carts.

Dunno if this is interesting to anyone else, but hey.

[amare-ancora]

[historical-nonfiction]

The Americas' Linguistic Diversity

There were dozens of language families, each the equivalent of the Indo-European family, before 1492. This map is a “simplified” one. In today’s California, for instance, languages that are spoken by neighboring tribes are as different as French and Chinese.

Why did the Americas develop such linguistic diversity? Many linguists suspect that at least some of these separate families date back to separate migrations of different tribes from Asia who originally spoke unrelated languages.  Linguistic and archaeological data hint at more than one migration from Asia into the Americas, all of them through Alaska.

Extra Fun Fact: see “Eskimo-Aleut” in northern North America? It is not colored because there is no evidence those languages are related to any other indigenous American languages!

[thefirstdayofhalloween]

Can u believe there are plants that are illegal Plants

[mylourrydiary]

Can you believe there is love that is illegal Love

[w-for-wumbo]

can you believe it’s not butter butter

[tardis-mind-palace]

the fact that Tumblr can fit weed, bestiality and diary products all into one post doesn’t even phase me anymore

[monopx]

i really dont think they meant bestiality

[catsbeaversandducks]

[starrynightcat]

Give Dobby a sock…

[unravelingsofanarrator]

If crookshanks had been at hogwarts a book sooner..

[jinliveblogsshit]

when I first started watching classicaloid I had 0 classical music knowledge and just kind of assumed the characters were like that for comedic effect but the more I learn from people like you the more I realize classical composers were just unhinged as fuck

i’m laughing os hard oh my god

but yeah no all the composers were pretty out there one way or another. for more ridic shit about some other composers including hte classicaloids

erik satie refused to eat anything that wasn’t white. he only wore grey suits. he hated the sun. he also named some pieces some of the weirdest shit, like “veritable flabby preludes (for a dog)” or “desiccated embryos”

arnold schoenberg had a fear of the number thirteen. like a ridiculously wild fear, despite being born on the 13th… and dying on friday the 13th on his 76th birthday, 7+6 being 13

hector berlioz was an opium user, so you end up with pieces like “symphonie fantastique” which basically follows the story of an artist who poisoned himself with opium because unrequited love sucks and then experiences witches and Dies irae. this is just like… one of several other things. berlioz did some weird shit

mozart fucking loved potty jokes. especially about farting and poop. like they’re found everywhere in his letters

also another thing about mozart, one of his most beloved operas, don giovanni… well, some of it was literally written the day before and day of the premiere because #yolo

j.s. bach once pulled a sword on a bassoonist who accused him of slander and supposedly called him a “nanny-goat bassoonist”

he also ended up in jail for a month or so because he pissed off his boss by illegally looking for a job somewhere else while employed

joseph haydn was cheeky af and wrote a lot of music that kind of showed that (surprise symphony, farewell symphony, to name some)

or there would be some high class drama like

johannes brahms had the biggest crush on robert schumann’s wife, clara schumann (who to be fair, is a total catch because she was a fab pianist and composer). it was pretty unrequited tho so he was left just pining for her

the ever popular story of how igor stravinksy’s rite of spring starting a riot (literally) on the day of its premiere. people were so angry with the music that they just started… punching and shit

or the fact that richard wagner went off and married franz liszt’s daughter (and they’re from different schools of thought), and liszt was so livid that this all happened

welcome to classical music :___)

[dentondeathmetal]

The fact Richard Wagner bankrupted an opera house and then slept with the owner’s wife because he is t e r r i b l e

The time Beethoven was performing and his piano accidentally caught on fire and he just kept fucking going

Schubert was arrested for backtalking a police officer. Schubert also supposedly met beethoven once. He brought his music along and was so nervous to meet his idol. When bee pointed out a single error in his music Schubert got super flustered and left.

His letters are also a fucking trip and solidify him as “world’s most relatable composer”

Chopin was turned on by the sound of the female voice. He was also Liszt’s drinking buddy even though they could not be more different (exceptionally highlighted in Hark! A vagrant’s Chopin / Liszt comic)

Lisztomania. Just fucking lisztomania. The fact you could tell where the women were seated apparently by the dampness of the seats no i am not kidding. People would try stealing his hair.

Tchaikovsky’s mother fucking CANNONS. Also he hated the nutcracker.

I’m sorry I just I love composer facts

[hexaviolet]

also js bach wrote an entire cantata on coffee addiction, the most notable line being “bring me my coffee or i will turn into a shriveled-up goat”

[chronicallypainful]

All of my Spoonie Student Resources - Updated Spring 2017

For my student followers (and anyone else who could benefit from this info).

We’re (for the most part) a few weeks into our semesters now, so I thought it would be a good time to share some spoonie student resources.  I’ve written quite a bit on these topics over the past few years, so it feels relevant to collect all of that info in one place.  So, here we go, all of my spoonie student resources/advice, organized by category.

General Advice/Tips:

general advice on studying and academics

a collaborative list with concussedperspective

exam week tips

A professor’s wise advice: “You don’t get extra points for trying extra hard.”

Communicating with Professors and others:

“Brief” guide to talking to your professors about  your chronic illness/disability (I called it brief, but it’s actually rather long…)

Communicating chronic pain in educational settings

Reflections on how I learned to communicate my pain and disability

Remember to say Thank You

Remember your perspective is not universal

Surviving Campus Life:

Dorm living and roommate advice

dealing with sensory issues on campus

A more-portable shower chair alternative

Dealing with the Disability Services Office:

What are my accommodations?

Do I use a testing center?

How did I get a reduced course load?

Productivity & Time Management:

done list

Some Encouragement:

For students with sleep disorders

Why Accommodations Matter (also a bit of a story about how things can get better as a disabled student)

Picking a School:

general advice on picking a school

reflections on disability services during my graduate school search

affirmations that I used during my grad school search

Educationally-relevant Assistive Technology:

pencil/pen grips from hair curlers

Levo book stand

Overview of speech-to-text tools

Options for computer input: pointing devices (part 1 & part 2)

math without handwriting

Workrave: a tool for managing computer use time

my study space (from my old apartment, features several pieces of assistive tech)

AT you shouldn’t buy (because you can get it for free!)

Low cost eye-tracking

Using low cost eye-tracking to write computer code

Email templates:

request for disability-related meeting at beginning of semester

textbook info request template

Example emails:

Online training I couldn’t complete

Housing Concerns

Asking for a shuttle schedule

Email I drafted for a fellow spoonie returning to classes after surgery

I’m sorry I can’t stay awake!

Oral Exams

Basics: what are oral exams and why might they be a good accommodation?

General advice on prepping for oral exams

How do math exams work with process vs. theory?

Do I prefer written or oral exams

Art & Other Reflections on Academic Ableism

“So what you mean is…”

“All students are welcome here”

Intro programming text is super ableist

Ableism in systems vs. people

Some personal experiences & reflections that may help you feel less alone:

Nobody waits…

Bureaucracy at a new school (and a follow up!)

Non functional door openers

Non accessible IT resources

Poor accessibility on campus

Elevators and invisible illness/disability

Jokes in poor taste

Scholarships and reduced course load

Brainstorming academic accommodations pre grad school

Some reflections on academic ableism

ableism in final exams

ableism in grad school search

more academic ableism

yep, I had a research meeting in my pajamas

writing from a place of frustration: should I be a student?

Reflections on negative experiences with disability services

You know you’re a chronically ill college student when… (an attempt at humor)

Please feel free to share this (and/or any of the posts linked here) if you find it helpful!

Also, if there are other topics you’d like to know (more) about, feel free to send an ask.  (No promises on when I’ll  have time to write a full post, though.)

[mandolincrow-deactivated2017082]

A painting inspired from my recent trip to the Temple of Poseidon on Cape Sounion, Greece. Ink, watercolor, and acrylic ink on paper. Available on Etsy | Prints

[mypsychology]

For more posts like these, go to @mypsychology​

[culturenlifestyle]

Paralysed Rescue Cat Becomes Nurse For Sick Animals And Saves Lives

Meet Lucifer - or as she prefers to be called Luc. A black  cat with green eyes that is paralysed from the legs down. She suffered a spine injury when she was squeezed between a door, which left her unable to walk. After being adopted by her new owners, she spends most of her days working as a nurse and comforter for sick animals in an animal clinic in Perm, Russia.

Keep reading