#what's-a-hashtag @treewatersflowers - Tumblr Blog

restless spirits

used to think it terribly silly (and kinda funny) when fantasy or sci-fi stories would have people refer to major recent historical events as The Flood or The Incident or The Revolution, and im sure historians fucking hate that because it's not helpful or descriptive, but we sure do be calling it The Pandemic

neovagina-penisis-evangelion

When people argue that food from Chinese and Mexican restaurants in the US are not 'real' representations of that culture's cuisine ignore the historical reality that these dishes were developed by diasporic communities striving to recreate the flavors of home with available resources. Such criticism frames adaptation as a loss of authenticity, rather than recognizing it as a sincere and evolving expression of culture by people separated from their homeland.

ninhaoma-ya

Too good to leave in the tags

ruhaniya

"you should be at the club" i should be by the sea. i should be in the mountains. i should be at the moon. i should be awestruck and rendered speechless by the majesty of the natural world. if you even care.

yujateaandpi

Was driving with my grandmother and in broken English she says “no eyes… no nose… no face. Don’t trust.” To which I looked around wildly in search of this omen of ill portend.

Cybertruck. It was a cybertruck.

titsay

housegoblin

lifes so hard

achillesinhighheels

sorry i never replied. everyday is blending together and i'm losing sense of time

voidandradiance

the most disorienting thing thats ever happened to me was when a linguistics major stopped in the middle of our conversation, looked me in the eye, and said, "you have a very interesting vernacular. were you on tumblr in 2014?" and i had to just stand there and process that one for a good ten seconds

booksandchainmail

#i was in a car with a linguist i had never met before the car trip and like half an hour in he looked at me#after i finished describing a geology thing that was happening out the window and asked if i'd ever spent much time on tumblr#the fuckor of it all#and then we spent six more hours driving#it sure does leave linguistic markers! i'm not sure i'm good with it (tags via @thoughtsformtheuniverse)

issela-santina

it is one thing to be a linguist and another to be a linguist who knows enough of 2010s Tumblr to spot one of its enjoyers

lierdumoa

Oh! @meret118 see above comment! The use of the word "enjoyers" instead of "users" or "bloggers" -> You left a comment a while back asking, "Does this just mean vocabulary words? Other than blorbo and sweet cinnamon roll etc, I can't think of what a Tumblr accent would be." I almost never see anyone use the word "enjoyer" anywhere outside of tumblr, but I see it on tumblr fairly frequently.

Another one is the verb "perceive" i.e. "don't perceive me" "I am perceiving" "I am being percieved." That's something that feels very specific to tumblr parlance.

There's the thing where people on tumblr have an emotional reaction to something and instead of, or in addition to telling you how they feel about it using emotion words, they will narrate a fictional action in the present progressive tense. "I am gnawing at the bars of my enclosure "I am kissing you on the mouth" "you are going into the soup" "you are getting all of the awards"

I once saw someone use that response format in ... I think it was a restaurant review, or a doordash review, or something like that. It was very unexpected seeing it outside of a tumblr post.

There are a lot of other tumblr linguistic quirks I can't currently remember off the top of my head, but I'll instantly recognize them if I see/hear them outside of tumblr. It's always a bit startling to see them out of context.

pacificnorthwhore

i-wear-the-cheese

when I was in university one of my modules was about internet slang and for our grades project we had to compile and analyse a small database of 100 words used by a specific community of our choice. I chose tumblr and that's how I stumbled across Gretchen McCulloch's research and discovered that yes not only did tumblr have its own vernacular and syntax (as @lierdumoa demonstrates), it was at the time a crucible of slang and memes probably unrivalled by any other part of the internet. and it's stayed that way! even the very title is McCulloch's book because internet is an example of this specific phraseology.

sadly my project is lost due to the website being wiped from the university database after graduation and my then laptop having a major hardware failure. backup your backups people! but the crux of the entire module was that the internet is full of communities using language not only as jargon for specific purpose but also to signal membership in said community. I even wrote a bit about non capitalisation and punctuation useage as a visual cue on tumblr and how including information in the reblog body or the tags indicated different levels of importance or intimacy of thought

I am holding the side of your face and looking deep in your eyes and telling you that love is stored in the syntax, and that we are rotating words together all at once as we all nod at their new and baffling meanings. if the devils sacrament be tumblr then the devils gospel is our collective voice. thanks for coming to my tedtalk

weirdchristmas

I am being perceived.

ieatratsyummy

They could never make me hate you, complex female character whose reaction to trauma was not pretty and digestible like how people think it should be.

liquidstar

"only 90s kids remember-" wrong, if you're poor and/or rural enough, old tech and fashion doesn't just disappear when it stops being trendy. We had dial-up until 2012

clingyduoapologist

The lesson of avatar was never “killing bad people makes you just as bad as them” it was “you cannot be letting fascists dictate what counts as a win or loss” guys like come on it’s been 20 years

clingyduoapologist

Katara doesn’t forgive Yon Rha and hug him and dry him off and walk him home she leaves him scared and sniveling and crying in the mud but she leaves him alive because she realized in that moment that she was only doing this because she felt like she had to. She hates this man, therefore she should want to kill him, right? The narrative isn’t saying wow Katara killing a mass murdering fascist dickwad is just as bad as said dickwad killing an innocent wife and mother during a raid on her home, it’s saying wow isn’t it fucked up that this little girl has been forced to carry this deep seated anger in her for most of her life to the point where the only outlet she believes she has for it is killing a man in cold blood? And like… yeah! That is pretty fucked!