the water walks barefoot in the wet streets

Wannabe writer, proud Hufflepuff, vegan, lover of kitties and cupcakes and the ocean. Blog title from Pablo Neruda.

[talmudicsuggestions]

use the torah to disprove the torah

[kyliaquilor-archive]

If your language lost, it should die with dignity, not be put on artificial life-support because ‘reasons’

[domhnall-na-feannaig]

#Sorry but I have no sympathy for that fight#let the dead languages be dead#grumping#controversial opinions#because people always get annoyed with me when I say this#but Gaelic (for example) shouldn’t still exist

———–

Gaelic hasnt been lost.  It’s never died or been brought back.  There’s an unbroken line of native speakers going back to the beginning of the language.  That doesn’t seem like a ‘lost’ language to me.  Furthermore I’m not sure what ‘artificial life-support’ means in this context.  Gaelic is given funding for schools because there’s still native speakers of the language.  It’s no more artificial than money being given to schools for English language lessons.

[domhnall-na-feannaig]

If anything is ‘artificial’ its the imposition of a foreign language (English) into a Gaelic majority zone and native speakers having to fight for decades to be able to be taught in their own language.  Native speakers being forced to learn English to exist within their own regions because a central government would not allow services to be given in a people’s own language.

But then the clock only goes back so far with people who wish that minority languages would just die.  There’s nothing artificial about shooting someone but suddenly it becomes an ‘artificial’ act to maybe phone an ambulance?

[calystarose]

“There’s nothing artificial about shooting someone but suddenly it becomes an ‘artificial’ act to maybe phone an ambulance?” — THIS RIGHT HERE

[fenrir-kin]

Also just gonna point out here:

In the UK, the languages Gaelige, Gaelic, Cymraeg and Kernewek (that’s Irish, Scottish, Welsh and Cornish respectively) didn’t just “die out.” There was a concerted effort by the English to kill them off. 

For example, in Wales, if a child was heard speaking Welsh in a classroom, they’d be given a “Welsh Not”, a wooden plaque engraved with “WN” to hang around their neck. They’d pass it onto the next child heard speaking Welsh, and whoever had the Welsh Not at the end of the day was punished - usually with a beating. 

Kernewek was revived after a long hard struggle by the Cornish folk, and is now being taught again, but a lot about it has been lost because everyone who grew up speaking it has died.

And languages are never revived “just because.” The language of a place can offer so much insight into its history, so if you’re content to let a language die then you’re content to let history die.

People talk about “dead” languages as if they dwindle away gradually, naturally coming to an end and evolving into something else, but that’s rarely the case. Languages like Cymraeg and Gaelige and especially Kernewek didn’t have the chance to die with dignity, they were literally beaten out of my parents and grandparents. 

Is it any wonder every other country hate the English? We invade their country, steal their history, claim pieces of their history as ours or flat out re-write it, and kill every part of their culture that we can. 

It’s a miracle that any of the Celtic languages survived, so even if you don’t see the point in keeping them alive, the actual natives of each country we’ve fucked over are clinging onto what heritage they have left through the only thing they can: their language. 

[inali]

Hey OP, póg mo thóin!

[katjohnadams]

*snerk* xD

[prismatic-bell]

I would like to point all of these “just let it die” assholes directly at Hebrew.

The language was effectively dead. It had been murdered and forced-assimilated away.

But there was this dude named Ben Yehuda.

And he said “no.”

“The language of my people for four thousand years or more,” he said, “should not stop existing because of a bunch of assholes.” (Okay, this is a dramatic retelling. He probably didn’t actually say assholes.)

So he started an official movement to recreate Hebrew as closely as possible to how it had been spoken about a thousand years prior.

Today, ancient Hebrew is spoken by millions of Jews around the world weekly in our prayers and Torah readings, and modern Hebrew is the official language of eight and a half million people–many of them having been born speaking it as a first language. Many people in the first group also speak at least some modern Hebrew–and it’s possible you do, too! A lot of loan words from Hebrew and Yiddish have made their way into English (like klutz, mensch, and kibitz).

That’s hardly “on life support.” Hebrew is growing, living, and thriving because of the Enlightenment efforts of the 1800s. The same COULD be done for languages like Welsh, Navajo, and Basque if the larger powers that be said “this is important” rather than forcing a giant bastion of culture–the language in which a people lived, loved, thought, told stories, and explained their world–to die.

[mellowmoonballoon]

0 languages die “naturally”. A whole river of Romani languages in central europe died because the people were all slaughtered in WW2. Very “natural”. Every tribe that was forcefully ripped from their culture and pushed into english language and white culture in americas, in africa, in south asia, none of them lost their language “naturally” pass me with this. 

[jewish-privilege]

by Janaki Challa

I never thought about the etymology of the verb “gypped” until the end of college, when my friend, lamenting his stolen iPod, said the word and immediately retracted it. “Isn’t that offensive?” he wondered. Until that moment, I had never thought about it either. What sparked our unease was the sudden realization that “gypped” was somehow tied to “gypsy.”

“Gypsy” is commonly used to describe the Romani people. But the term carries many negative connotations, and its derivative carries even more: when somebody is “gypped,” they are, according to Merriam-Webster, “defrauded, swindled, cheated.”

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first known recorded definition of the term “gypped” dates back to the 1899 Century Dictionary, which says that it is “probably an abbreviation of gypsy, gipsy, as applied to a sly unscrupulous fellow.”

It also appears in 1914, in Louis Jackson & C. R. Hellyer’s Vocabulary of Criminal Slang. The noun “gyp” was described at the time as “current in polite circles,” and “derived from the popular experience with thieving Gypsies.” As a verb, the term is defined as “to flim-flam” and to “cheat by means of guile and manual dexterity.” Proper usage? “Gyp this boob with a deuce.” I’m not exactly sure what gyp this boob with a deuce means, but it sounds like something stuck between ribald and ridiculous.

F. Scott Fitzgerald used the word in his iconic novel The Great Gatsby: “We had over twelve hundred dollars when we started, but we got gyped out of it all in two days.” Simone de Beauvoir used the word in her 1965 book Force of Circumstance: “Turning an incredulous gaze toward that young and credulous girl, I realize with stupor how much I was gypped.”

Many people have limited knowledge of the term’s origins, and so the word “gypped” isn’t quickly going out of fashion. On April 30, 2013, a publisher released a book in a New York Times bestselling series by Carol Higgins Clark titled Gypped: A Regan Reilly Mystery. The book — the 15th installment of the long-running thriller series — had nothing to do with the Roma people, but instead is a murder mystery full of financial scams and intrigue set in sunny California.

After multiple allegations of racist intent with her choice of title, Clark issued a statement that read: “I am truly sorry for any offense caused by using the word ‘Gypped’ as the title of my book. It was a familiar word since childhood which no one I knew associated with its origin. Since this issue arose, I’ve asked many people who also had no idea of any negative connotation.”

Clark’s experience rings true: many people just don’t know what the word means, or where it comes from.

“I encounter a lot of people who tell me that they never knew the word ‘gypped’ had anything to do with gypsies, or that it’s offensive — especially when the word is heard not read,” says University of Texas at Austin professor Ian Hancock, who was born in Britain to Romani parents. “My response to them is, That’s okay. You didn’t know but now you do. So stop using it. It may mean nothing to you, but when we hear it, it still hurts.”

Hancock tells me the word “gypsy” itself is an “exonym” — a term imposed upon an ethnic group by outsiders. When the Roma people moved westward from India towards the European continent, they were mistaken to be Egyptian because of their features and dark skin. We see the same phenomenon across several languages, not only English. Victor Hugo, in his epic Hunchback of Notre Dame, noted that the Medieval French term for the Roma was egyptiens. In Spanish, the word for gypsy is “gitano,” which comes from the word egipcio, meaning Egyptian — in Romanian: tigan, in Bulgarian: tsiganin, in Turkish: cingene — all of which are variations of slang words for “Egyptian” in those languages.

The Roma people originated thousands of years ago not in Egypt, but in Northern India. They were displaced during a series of 11th-century Muslim invasions during the Ghaznavid Empire. Many were taken as prisoners of war back to what is now modern-day Turkey, during the Ottoman plunder of the Byzantine Empire. A majority of already-displaced Romani people later migrated to Eastern and Southern Europe. The Roma language is derived from ancient Sanskrit and still phonetically, grammatically and linguistically resembles tongues with Sanskrit roots like Hindi or Rajasthani. Romani music is still strikingly similar to Indian folk music, and their spiritual practices — despite conversion to local religions over time — still resemble aspects of Hindu cosmology.

The effort to substitute the word “Roma” for the far better-known term “Gypsy” may strike some as futile, but few other groups carry the burden of such heavy stereotypes with so little reprieve.

Earlier this year, Romani faced several high-profile accusations of child kidnapping. In October, Code Switch colleague Gene Demby wrote:

“In one case, the police received a tip that a blond, blue-eyed girl was living with a Roma family in a Dublin suburb. The tipster believed that the 7-year-old didn’t look like the Roma family with whom she lived. The police came and removed the child from the home, despite protests from the Roma family that the child was part of their family.”…

[elizabitchtaylor-deactivated202]

 biggest joke of depression or any other mental illness is that you need to use your broken brain to fix your broken brain. like what kind of self drag is that.

[untitled1559]

as someone who adores literature, my ongoing dilemma is choosing between reading or writing

[nobodywritesstuff-deactivated20]

[untitled1559]

how dare you attack me like this

[fur-bies-deactivated20180106]

i let the furby skins soak in fabric softener after i washed them and my sis found them and sent me:

and i have never laughed so hard x’D

[eeeeeeeeeeeek]

never do i ever want to hear the words “furby skins” uttered ever again

[dracota]

You never peeled a furby?

[princessesfanarts]

By FDASuarez

[dirthymns]

the thing folks living in Christian dominant cultures gotta realize is that even if you’re not Christian, your basic understanding of religion and spirituality and morality is still being filtered through a Christian lens. your very concept of what religion is and does is filtered through that lens.

[evilwickedme]

This is what I call cultural Christianity, for those who are still confused

[benepla-deactivated20200506]

can we give it up for Suzanne Collins for fucking off into oblivion with her money after hunger games fucking destroyed the YA market for like 6 years. everything YA was dystopian “EVERYONES IN A DIFFERENT QUADRANT” shit from 2010 to 2016 and we didnt hear a peep from her. true fucking power.

[ruby-white-rabbit]

And she hasn’t said a word since. Rowling could take some pointers

[galaxiepresdechezvous]

Yeah but in Collins defense, her book was really good. She perfectly showed PTSD, Katnis trauma from when her mom mentally “abandoned” her when her dad died and the parallel with Katnis depression at the end of the series, perfectly depicted the society and its inherent problems, Finick’s back story, socio-economic disparities based on skin colour, Rue and the 11th district, President Coin and how she was as bad as Snow but in an other angle, distrinct 13 and the capitol trying to use her image for the war even though she did want to, and way more stuff I can’t think of right now.

I mean the following Y/A distopian books were mostly bad knock off who thought that the reason the HG had such success was because of the love triangle, but in reality Collins created such a complexe yet very realistic world that makes a parallel to our society of entretainment and war

[whatisthisplaceidonteven]

The Hunger Games was baby’s first intro to social justice for a lot of kids back in the early 2010s. They were brilliant books that introduced a lot of complicated concepts in a way teens could understand and enjoy - plus, addictive, well-plotted adventure stories with A+ characterization and worldbuilding. But all the general public seems to remember about them is the love triangle, and I will always be salty about that.

[princecaviar-deactivated2022113]

The irony of the Hunger Games is that the media in the book and the media in the real world both chose to focus on the love story instead of the rebellion.

[poeticallyunkind]

[reckless-driver]

Let’s kill the idea that the only audience that matters is the one that can pay for the ticket 😉

[dailybipuns]

Okay, hot take? Bisexual and pansexual are functionally synonyms, and the decision to ID as one or the other comes down to personal preference and interpretation, and any attempt to further separate the two is driving a wedge between two communities that should have nothing but love and solidarity for one another. 

We have more in common than not, and the words for our respective identities should not be pitted against each other. 

[swordshapedleaves]

Yeah with overlapping identities like this I just go for whichever one I like the pride flag the most.

[dailybipuns]

That’s so valid. 

[buttastic]

how many other elementary schools had compulsory square dancing lessons

[buttastic]

why the hell is this so universal

[shea]

I’m sorry you had WHAT

[dedalvs]

k so I happened to run into this Twitter thread late last year, and following up, it appears to be true, despite the fact that it sounds outlandishly ridiculous. Here it is: The ubiquitousness of square dancing was actually a plot by Henry Ford to eradicate jazz, which he believed was a Jewish conspiracy.

So, first, article, if you’d like to read up on it.

To start, here’s an actual quote by Henry Ford in a book he wrote called The International Jew:

Many people have wondered whence come the waves upon waves of musical slush that invade decent homes and set the young people of this generation imitating the drivel of morons. Popular music is a Jewish monopoly. Jazz is a Jewish creation. The mush, slush, the sly suggestion, the abandoned sensuousness of sliding notes, are of Jewish origin.

So…yeah. In order to prevent moral decay in America, Henry Ford started pouring a lot of money into the promotion of square dancing—and that included schools. From the article:

Nonetheless, Ford saw these dances as intrinsically white, and thus more intrinsically wholesome. Along with his wife and their square dance instructor Benjamin Lovett, he campaigned to bring square dancing to the physical education classes of students across the country, believing it would teach children “social training, courtesy, good citizenship, along with rhythm.” The schools agreed, and by 1928, almost half the schools in America were teaching square dancing and other forms of old-fashioned dancing to students.

At this point, schools have compulsory square dancing simply because they’ve always had it, but originally they had it because Henry Ford wanted to save white America.

So hey, if you think the whole square dancing unit at your school is totally lame, informing the school about its history might be a way to get rid of it!

[yekkes]

What on fucking earth

[memes-to-show-my-therapist]

[dankmemeuniversity]

[justsomeantifas]

what does measuring intelligence even fucking accomplish, because being intelligent doesn’t necessitate innovation, and creation, or the ability to care for another, and so on, like … especially with the way it’s defined now

as far as I’m concerned all it is today is a goddamn dick measuring contest, regardless of what the people with high IQs actually do or accomplish. 

it doesn’t mean anything, it doesn’t tell me anything about that person, it doesn’t tell me what their views are, it doesn’t even tell me what they’re good at.

[sakkaya-ditthi]

The concept of “intelligence” itself is very much rooted in racism and always has been.

It also ignores the fact that there are a variety of types of intelligence, some of which can’t even be measured by a standard IQ test. And a functional society needs people of MANY kinds of intelligence.

[slimegargoyle]

growing up finding girls attractive without registering it as attraction sucks because you basically end up weirdly fixated on them but also super insecure and competitive

[catchymemes]

Snowing at sea

[thecryptocreep]

Why do I never think about the possibility of snow on the ocean??? Now I see why, because it’s too ethereal