Oldie But Goldie: First Steps

vegans make peace with honey

no shut up do it

you know what fuck it, I love you historical spelling. I love you weird fossilised preservations of obsolete alphabets, grasping for something that exists now like mist, like liquid, its true pronunciation lost to time but not quite forgotten, not yet. a ghost remains, a friendly one, comfortable in this old house. I love you repurposed letters for phonemes that neither the old language nor the variety they were borrowed into has any need for anymore. I love you sensible vowel pairings that have grown - improbably - centuries later, into unwieldy diphthongs, quietly thriving in an ever-shifting environment like weeds nestled cosily beneath the shade of grander plants that have long since turned to mulch. I love the word 'diphthong' (the little thicket of consonants in the middle of it, sprouting up from nowhere to trouble tongue and penmanship alike). I love how Phoenician fingerprints remain in a Norman revision of an Anglo-Saxon reworking of a Roman borrowing of a Greek repurposing, all these shapes and signs moulded again and again like clay, like mud, spun like flax to carry all those lovely glides and nasals and obstruents which come and go and come and go over time as the sounds mutate and grow apart, and the people grow and age and die, leaving behind nothing except (sometimes) a page. a poem. a piece of themselves, their voice, rendered in imperfect beautiful scratchings whose contours match the ceaseless flow of time, heavy with all that history and somehow also light with the sheer urgency of being written. look at it, isn't it wonderful? this moment in time that holds within it yet other moments? other echoes calling down through the centuries? this is how we spoke, this is what we sounded like, once. this is how we thought our ancestors would have said it. I love the inconvenience. English is so hard to learn. the spelling is so illogical. so cumbersome. it's frustrating. it makes no sense. it's inconvenient. yes and yes and yes, and yet you too are inconvenient, you too are inchoate and too much and you fail to resolve into a neat and comprehensible order. but look at you. how lovely you are. I treasure you. why should the words you speak be any less lovely.

日干しする者たち

高画質

No fucking way LMFAO

i lowkey ship tumblr ♠ twitter now

you can make nearly any object into a good insult if you put ‘you absolute’ in front of it

example: you absolute coat hanger

You know we don’t actually have an accurate count of how many bilingual people there are in the US because our census asks people “do you speak a language other than English at home?” and not what some other countries might ask which is “can you comfortably have a conversation in a language other than your native language” or something similar.

When people say “20% of Americans are multilingual” they mean that 20% of Americans speak a language at home other than English.

This doesn’t account for people that speak English at home but also speak another language. I personally know multiple people who speak Spanish or another language even though they speak English at home. I know someone who speaks six languages conversationally and she’s not getting counted by these statistics because she speaks English at home.

We don’t actually know accurately how multilingual the US is. Like imagine if they just asked Dutch people if they speak a language other than Dutch at home. The Netherlands has a multilingualism rate of something like 95% but that number would probably go down substantially if you just asked if they speak Dutch at home or not.

why are british people always so mad when people make jokes about their accents. sorry you say yewchube. it’s funny though innit