Thekingsbutler - Hiding In The Butler's Pantry

This is heinous

Do y'all have any favorite card games?

Things to consider.

Roman mosaic floor discovered under a vineyard in Negrar di Valpolicella, Veneto.

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

I made these as a way to compile all the geographical vocabulary that I thought was useful and interesting for writers. Some descriptors share categories, and some are simplified, but for the most part everything is in its proper place. Not all the words are as useable as others, and some might take tricky wording to pull off, but I hope these prove useful to all you writers out there!

(save the images to zoom in on the pics)

https://twitter.com/profannieoakley/status/1357768408671027202

 This thread is gold… make your own here: https://htck.github.io/bayeux/#!/

Happy Beloved Tumblr holiday of Ides of March.

I tried to put these in a story telling order, because I have issues.

Most anti phone advice is so inane and regurgitated to me but one thing I’ve been thinking about for days is “social media is okay, but the real danger comes in when you think your phone should be your go to during your limited pockets of leisure” like that’s literally the truest thing ever

So hey, to anyone who does femme historical fashion anywhere between 1885 and 1950-

Cornell University has the entire archives of Good Housekeeping up from that time period. And Good Housekeeping used to have English-language fashion plates with clear instructions as to fabric, colour, and cut.

They were ads for the personal shopping service Good Housekeeping apparently??? ran around this time???? and they are a fucking goldmine if you're remotely interested in fashion history or if you're looking to build a 20th century historical wardrobe.

Just, like, look at this?????

An itemized layout of every piece of a young bride's (aspirational) wardrobe in 1930. Including prices. And then below it, a fashion plate, with English-language descriptions of what all these things are and what fabrics they're made of. And an ad for Good Housekeeping's fucking personal shopping service again. XD

IDK, most people who do historical fashion on any kind of serious level probably already know about this??? but I didn't and was stunned and overjoyed to find out that this existed. my research at the library gave me a bunch of high-level overviews that weren't helpful for more than colour and cut.

SO YEAH. THANK YOU CORNELL UNIVERSITY.

1m ago

Miki The Pet Bot

Collage for Miki from Rogue Protocol of the Murderbot series to celebrate my finally finishing my Miki POV Fic.

Find the fic here

The super cool Murderbot art on the left side is done by Tommy Arnold!