goldieslearning

Latest Posts by goldieslearning

jackson wang is so fucking cool like he's my language goal he speaks cantonese mandarin korean japanese and english like what the fuck AND hes hot

(literature girl summer) we're back to finishing a book in two days

me: [delusional] I will learn 4 languages simultaneously

person w adhd experiencing symptoms of adhd: why the fuck can’t I do this thing . I wish there was some explanation for this

Hello, Sherlock Holmes adaptation writer. I have trapped you in this room. It is fully furnished and comfortable. On the table, you will notice a copy of A Scandal in Bohemia by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, of which redistribution is perfectly legal, as the work is in the public domain. You will notice it is rather thin. You have 24 hours to read the approximately 8,550 words in this story. To exit this room, all you must do is summarize the plot of the story without referring to Irene Adler as a seductress or implying she is attracted to Sherlock Holmes. Good luck.

the first rule of detective fiction is that the detective in question should ALWAYS just be the nosiest person alive and never be a cop

i finished reading your story and i must say that, while it's alright, there's so many plot holes because the characters made irrational decisions and didn't think logically 100% of the time. consider fixing this next time please

someone put this screenshot in my notes and i wasn't gonna put the op on blast but i cannot stop thinking about it. this is up there as one of the funniest doubling downs i've ever seen. "it's called craft. it's called storytelling." is going to enter my meme vernacular and no one is going to have any idea what i'm talking about. the count of monte cristo shows a clear lack of craft in its wordcount. if only ernest hemingway's editor had killed more of his darlings while he wrote for whom the bell tolls. readers and editors alike are always complaining about how fucking long to kill a mockingbird is.

Sure public school is bad but was it really that bad that it caused you to unlearn basic facts about the world around you or do you just like being an incurious dumbass

[ID: a google doc with the italicized text: “orpheus loves eurydice.” “loves” has a blue underline under it, which is signalling that it should be autocorrected to “and.” End ID.]

literally emo over this autocorrect . like it’s right… there’s no need for “orpheus loves eurydice” as a statement. the evidence is already there: orpheus and eurydice

Dandelions have a symbiotic relationship with little kids who make wishes

people who haven't opened a book since high school love calling shit pretentious it's like a little bump of k to them

[Image ID: A picture of a bee and a wasp, both labeled. Both are colored yellow and black. Facts are listed about each one in their respective columns.

Bee:

Cute and fuzzy, like a friend

Make honey

Come in pretty colors with different occupations (blue orchard bee, carpenter bee)

Pollinators!

Freeloaders who will come build hives in the walls of your house

Communicate with dancing

According to all known laws of aviatin, honey bees can fly up to 15 mph

Like sweet things

Over 20,000 species--not just honeybees!

Wasp:

Cool and sleek, like a motorcycle

Prey on pests

Come in pretty, iridescent colors (ruby tailed wasp)

Will try to mooch off your drinks (so check your cans!)

Pollinators!

Leave you paper nests that you can sell to collectors

Communicate with smells

Like sweet things

Over 30,000 species--not just [kind I hate]

At the very bottom, in smaller text, is the URL bug-maniac.tumblr.com. /End ID]

NO ANTI-WASP SENTIMENTS ON THIS POST

For my linguistsics degree, I did a project on why I'm seeing more people saying "on accident" instead of "by accident." I looked at almost a million pieces of writing pulled from news sites, blogs, academic articles and television transcripts. I found almost three hundred cases of "on accident" being used. It was a surprisingly even spread across sources. Even more interesting, I organized the hits by date and tracked an upward swing in use as time goes on. This means that the use of "on accident" is increasing over time, and may eventually supplant and drive out the classic usage of "by accident." I like to call this prepositional shift.

Now, looking at my data and looking at the age ranges of the writers or speakers, the majority of them were under the age of thirty. So I interviewed a panel of people, choosing twenty with a spread of about half above thirty, and half below. Those older than thirty years of age felt "strongly" or "very strongly" that "on accident" was wrong in all cases, and that "by accident" was the only correct phrase. However, those younger than thirty were much less rigorous, with more than half feeling "ambivalent" or "less strongly" about which was correct. This demonstrates a generational link in preposition usage.

When presented with options for the definitions of "by" and "on," we also get some interesting data. For by, there are two main definitions according to the Oxford English Dictionary: 1. Identifying the agent performing an action. Or 2. Indicating the means of achieving something. Whereas "on" has many more definitions, the pertinent ones being 1. To indicate the manner of doing something or 2. To indicate active involvement in a condition or status. By the above definitions, either "by accident" or "on accident" is a correct usage of the term. However, native speakers of English could not successfully define either preposition, instead just choosing one, the other, or both as "sounding correct."

The only evidence for a rule-based shift that I could find was a correlation with the paired phrase for the opposite condition "on purpose." While the younger interviewees were ambivalent about the correctness of "on accident," they uniformly rejected the correctness of the suggested phrase "by purpose." So the shift can only be in one direction according the the native ear, towards the preposition "on."

Whether this means that the particular usage of "by" is becoming archaic or the definition of "on" is expanding is a possible subject of further study using a wider range of phrases. But I found the wider acceptance of "on accident" versus "by accident" to be a fascinating look at how prepositions can shift meaning and usage over time.

So now I'm curious, five years from my initial study (and itching to try the Tumblr poll feature):

*copying the thai alphabet* ooh loopies hell yeah this is so cool

*reading typed thai* where are all the loopies

*blows a kiss to the whales* for spock

I love Spock I love him soooo much they were like let’s make a character that’s nerdy and a pacifist and a vegetarian and he’s also a mommas boy and a sensitive musician. But he should also be. A straight up Bitch

sent an email without exclamation points #mean #meanie #meancore #evilgirl #hurtingyou #indifferent #gayandrude

I decided to make some positive translation memes

[ID: a picture of kitten looking at a phone edited to be crying and surrounded by heart emoji with text reading 'when a translator worked hard for me to be able to access a piece of media']

I feel like the only person not tempted to use ChatGPT like it doesn't even occur to me as an option

crazy that, for a linguistics degree, i had to learn all the muscles and mechanisms involved in the breathing process, latin names for the different parts of the oral cavity plus bone structure, statistics, corpus linguistics, physics and maths

only for it to be called a bachelor of ARTS 😩

My boyfriend's professor doesn't believe I exist, so I sent this email

And his professor responded with this

Back when I used to walk around my college in a corduroy blazer and slacks I didn't call it "dark academia" I called it "professor drag" and the purpose was to smoothly walk into parts of campus I wasn't supposed to access

language is so fun. yippee! language is a game and im winning. competitive ranked language. professional language player

The Needle Galaxy, NGC 4565 // galactic_surfer

Cosmic web in the Tarantula © ESA/Hubble

09/03/21 • poem made from the handout for a lecture on the fragmentary historical sources and missing tomb of alexander the great

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