THESE ARE THINGS

Sometimes things are way cool and I love them. Harry Potter, Nerdfighteria, Doctor Who, White Collar, LotR, Graceland, Firefly. Bookish things, queer things, EPL things, amusing things, etc. Say hello and ask me stuff!

[ruinedchildhood]

[trudybecker]

still not sure how this a bad thing

[purpleswift]

Getaway Car

[herswiftreputation-deactivated2]

Taylor’s two moods on this album

[allamericansbitch]

IF A MAN TALKS SHIT THEN I OWE HIM NOTHING. I DON’T REGRET IT ONE BIT BECAUSE HE HAD IT COMING.

[waffleswiftt]

this is what happiness looks like

[stargazerfirefly-deactivated201]

The evolution of “dress”

When you think happiness I hope you think that little black dress

I don’t know why but with you I’d dance in a storm in my best dress, fearless

I talked to your dad - go pick out a white dress

The girl in the dress cried the whole way home/wrote you a song

No amount of vintage dresses gives you dignity

Spinning like a girl in a brand new dress

And it was like slow motion, standing there in my party dress

Say you’ll remember me, standing in a nice dress staring at the sunset, babe

You’re still all over me like a wine-stained dress I can’t wear anymore

Only bought this dress so you could take it off

@taylorswift you’ve grown up

[historical-nonfiction]

You rarely see a “wend” without a “way.” You can wend your way through a crowd or down a hill, but no one wends to bed or to school. However, there was a time when English speakers would wend to all kinds of places. “Wend” was just another word for “go” in Old English. The past tense of “wend” was “went” and the past tense of “go” was “gaed.” People used both until the 1400s, when “go” became the preferred verb, except in the past tense where “went” hung on, leaving us with an outrageously irregular verb.

[bahtmun-deactivated20240623]

Harry Potter film series part 36

[brutereason]

The main thing to take away from new additions to the dictionary is that they are not declarations of which words are “real” or “official” and which ones are not. Rather, dictionaries are simply recording the way certain words are being used now, acting more as an archivist than a dictator trying to look hip. When a word like “woke” or “manspreading” has made it into the dictionary, it’s not because an all-mighty institution is telling the masses what words are appropriate to use. It’s because the masses are the real authority on language and humble dictionary makers are the recorders and researchers of what’s already going on. Dictionaries don’t create language. Communities of people do.

Why “woke” was added to the dictionary | The Outline (via brutereason)

[bisexualitydating-blog]

No matter you are gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, queer, asexual, or other LGBT+, we are pride.

[stability]

he has a point

[hardyness]

Star Wars + “I have a bad feeling about this”

[filenames]

[intercal]

This is the American Gothic. If you’ve never been to the USA, this image sums it up pretty well.

[catbountry]

#I feel like I’ve driven past this before#been exactly here#but at the same time I’m not sure

Same, actually.

[glubtier]

I had to find out where this really was because looking at it, I felt like I knew exactly where it was. It turns out it’s in Breezewood, PA, and i have never been there, which only serves to highlight the OP’s point. 

[inevitableships]

[missalsfromiram-deactivated2020]

It is my firm belief that emojis - as tiny, standardized emotive, expressive, or symbolic illustrations placed in-line with text that carry para- or non-linguistic meaning - are one of world history’s great innovations in linguistic technology, alongside the rebus principle, the alphabet, punctuation, and movable type.

[lesbiskifisering]

when u swear by all the salt in u

[runecestershire]

So “my name is Cow… i lik the bred” seems to be the Hot New Meme, and I like it. Here’s an odd thing about it, though; a lot of the cutsey animal talk I see on the internet (especially birb-speak) sometimes reminds me of Middle English, but “lik the bred” takes it even further and sounds downright Chaucerian, and it isn’t just the rhyme and cadence. Some of the “lik the bred” pastiches I see around don’t really work because they’re in just plain doggo-fran speak (haven’t decided if Doggo-fran and Birb are the same thing or not), but the ones that really hit all the same notes as the original have something going on with the mangled vowels and spelling that’s not the same as the mangling in Doggo and/or Birb. Maybe some time I’ll gather up some examples and look closely at the vowels and spelling and try and sort out precisely what’s up.

[darkersolstice]

@hobbitguy1420

[hobbitguy1420]

my name is Cow i make yu think of likking bred and tayking drink i studdy buks that i have herd so wen yur gon i rite the werd.

[hobbitguy1420]

now yu may think wen reeding this “yu typ with hoofs, wy dont yu miss?” i ask yu now be pashent, plees i type with tung i lik the kees

[trisshawkeye]

Re: the OP - I don’t think Doggo-fran and Birb-speak are the same at all, but it’s tricky to articulate why (probably because I’m not actually a linguist). I think Doggo-fran revolves around intentionally switching out syllables in words (or adding them onto mono-syllabic words) - although actually I’m not sure precisely what @runecestershire is referring to here but the other thing that comes to mind is the ‘bork’ meme speak which revolves mostly around the nonsense sentence structure ‘you are doing me a [verb]’. Both cases seem to me to be a lot more specific in usage than Birb-speak. Birb-speak revolves more around intentionally bad spelling and grammar, often with an overblown sense of urgency to imitate something being typed (and thus spoken) loudly, at high speed and with little accuracy (although there are two slightly different memetic forms of Birb-speak - one originating from the @probirdrights Twitter and the other from the @importantbirds Tumblr and their styles, while similar, are not identical). But the OP is indeed correct that proper-sounding ‘i lik the bred’ poems have a very specific structure and language to them which is distinct again from the other examples.

[false-senpai]

I have also noticed this! I thought I was alone in thinking they sounded like middle english!!

A few of the spellings used in the “i lik the bred” poems are almost exactly the same as those in my Chaucer text.

[allthingslinguistic]

One of the things that I’ve noticed about the class of stylized ungrammatical animal memes is that they tend to go for either orthographic stylization, often indicating modified, cute pronunciation (lolcat: teh kitteh, pupper: y r u so smol, birb: popsackles) or morphosyntactic stylization (doge: such meme, wow. lolcat: i made you a cookie but i eated it. birb: i get it you can wear pant. doggo/snek: gosh hecking darn it, doing you a frighten, booping the snoot). Even though some of these memes have both orthographic and grammatical options, they often pick just one for a particular utterance.  

In this context, “i lik the bred” does several things differently. For one, it involves both orthography and constraints on metre at the same time. Although other memes often involve a sense of comedic timing (and there’s at least one poem written in lolcat), I haven’t seen a strictly metred meme before. I also haven’t seen an animal meme not originally associated with captioned images, for that matter. 

The particular orthography is also interesting. Memish animals speak in internetspeak or babytalk, sometimes at the same time. But the stylized spelling in “i lik the bred” isn’t internettish or childish, and in particular isn’t designed to be pronounced differently – see for example the version sung to the tune of Greensleeves.

I think the Chaucerian overtones are no accident at all – the original “i lik the bred” poem by poems_for_your_sprog was indeed inspired by a historic story, technically about the 18th century but one must allow *some* poetic license. 

Despite the animal subject matter and stylized linguistic form, the origins of “i lik the bred” in text rather than images and its more sober style has more in common with tumblr text-based memes like spiders georg, the horoscope meme, regional gothic, and so on.