schnilf

Latest Posts by schnilf

For those not in the know, this is one of the Amanita mushrooms referred to as a Destroying Angel. Never, ever, ever, ever forage with an app. Especially for mushrooms.

I am once again thinking about digging holes

It's so fucked up that digging a bunch of holes works so well at reversing desertification

I hate that so much discourse into fighting climate change is talking about bioenginerring a special kind of seaweed that removes microplastics or whatever other venture-capital-viable startup idea when we have known for forever about shit like digging crescent shaped holes to catch rainwater and turning barren land hospitable

love this !! unfortunately for me tho i took the mulder route and became insane and deranged

Some women are conditioned to be fragile and weak, and to believe that it's a sin to outperform a man. Her feminism would involve allowing women to be strong.

Some women are expected to be strong at times when they can't. Her feminism would involve reassuring her that it's okay to not be strong.

Some neurodivergent people are raised to believe that they're too stupid to ever amount to anything. Their disability activism would involve reassuring them that they're capable.

Some neurodivergent people are raised to believe that they're smart and gifted, and are expected to live up to impossible standards. Their disability activism would involve allowing them to fail, make mistakes, be stupid, etc.

Some children are constantly reminded "you're the child, I'm the adult" in order to deny their autonomy. Their youth rights activism would involve treating them like an adult at times when they feel ready for it.

Some children are treated like adults in order to justify increased expectations or to downplay abuse against them. Their youth rights activism would involve allowing them to be a child.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to oppression. Each individual person's experience is different. Whatever trauma is caused by their oppression, the activism should focus on undoing it.

after lengthy investigation I have come to the conclusion a flying centaur is anatomically impossible

one of the most enduringly obnoxious things about algorithmic feeds is that there is genuinely no amount of blocking and tailoring and "not interested in this" and "show me less content like this" that will ever ever convince the algorithm that you don't want to be shown content promoting weight loss

lately ive been bedridden with a terrible case of i dont wanna

Anyone else annoyed that the default gender for a hypothetical butch is, "He"?

Whoever wrote this, slayed so hard with all these statements, truer words have never been spoken

“the ways you have learned to survive may not be the ways you wish to continue to live“

sorry for romanticising the mundane. i have little else

people who enter my home will be shown an assortment of objects

real yearners know that they can even feel nostalgic about the present moment

Your first pride story was touching and all but you still married a man.

Yeah, bisexuals do that sometimes.

I don't know. I just don't know

the inability to recognize bait has severely impacted the internet

What is a ‘wug’?

If you’ve been to linguist tumblr (lingblr), you might have stumbled upon this picture of a funny little bird or read the word ‘wug’ somewhere. But what exactly is a ‘wug’ and where does this come from?

The ‘wug’ is an imaginary creature designed for the so-called ‘wug test’ by Jean Berko Gleason. Here’s an illustration from her test:

“Gleason devised the Wug Test as part of her earliest research (1958), which used nonsense words to gauge children’s acquisition of morphological rules‍—‌for example, the “default” rule that most English plurals are formed by adding an /s/, /z/ or /ɨz/ sound depending on the final consonant, e.g., hat–hats, eye–eyes, witch–witches. A child is shown simple pictures of a fanciful creature or activity, with a nonsense name, and prompted to complete a statement about it:

This is a WUG. Now there is another one. There are two of them. There are two ________.

Each “target” word was a made-up (but plausible-sounding) pseudoword, so that the child cannot have heard it before. A child who knows that the plural of witch is witches may have heard and memorized that pair, but a child responding that the plural of wug (which the child presumably has never heard) is wugs (/wʌgz/, using the /z/ allomorph since “wug” ends in a voiced consonant) has apparently inferred (perhaps unconsciously) the basic rule for forming plurals.

The Wug Test also includes questions involving verb conjugations, possessives, and other common derivational morphemes such as the agentive -er (e.g. “A man who ‘zibs’ is a ________?”), and requested explanations of common compound words e.g. “Why is a birthday called a birthday?“ Other items included:

This is a dog with QUIRKS on him. He is all covered in QUIRKS. What kind of a dog is he? He is a ________ dog.

This is a man who knows how to SPOW. He is SPOWING. He did the same thing yesterday. What did he do yesterday? Yesterday he ________.

(The expected answers were QUIRKY and SPOWED.)

Gleason’s major finding was that even very young children are able to connect suitable endings‍—‌to produce plurals, past tenses, possessives, and other forms‍—‌to nonsense words they have never heard before, implying that they have internalized systematic aspects of the linguistic system which no one has necessarily tried to teach them. However, she also identified an earlier stage at which children can produce such forms for real words, but not yet for nonsense words‍—‌implying that children start by memorizing singular–plural pairs they hear spoken by others, then eventually extract rules and patterns from these examples which they apply to novel words.

The Wug Test was the first experimental proof that young children have extracted generalizable rules from the language around them, rather than simply memorizing words that they have heard, and it was almost immediately adapted for children speaking languages other than English, to bilingual children, and to children (and adults) with various impairments or from a variety of cultural backgrounds. Its conclusions are viewed as essential to the understanding of when and how children reach major language milestones, and its variations and progeny remain in use worldwide for studies on language acquisition. It is “almost universal” for textbooks in psycholinguistics and language acquisition to include assignments calling for the student to carry out a practical variation of the Wug Test paradigm. The ubiquity of discussion of the wug test has led to the wug being used as a mascot of sorts for linguists and linguistics students.”

Here are some more illustrations from the original wug test:

Sources: 

Wikipedia, All Things Linguistic

hush little baby dont you cry. mamas gonna buy you a big horse fly. and if that big horse fly dont fly. mamas gonna buy you another horse fly

all cirstresponders are bastards

Saw someone on Bluesky say “ACAB doesn’t include firefighters”

…it never did??? What do you think the ‘C’ is?

I’m guessing it’s because cops, firefighters and paramedics are grouped as ‘first responders’ but still.

i made this based on the original, do what u will with it

the existence of "maybe", "perhaps", "perchance", and "mayhaps" suggests there should also be "maychance" and "perbe"

it is so ingrained in me that i have to “earn” things like eating and resting that i forget that logically i. Do not have to earn that. inherently i am just allowed to do those things.

I just got described as an "ad hating commie" by someone because I said a minute of youtube ads is unpleasant. fully spent 5 minutes arguing and defending youtube ads. insane stuff