feathersmoons:

thebotanophile:

dedalvs:

bloogybloog:

seudag:

annakendrickofficial:

a shout out to all the people who started saying “same” as a joke once in awhile but now use it for the most random things like a car honking their horn at another car

good luck to linguistics in the future trying to explain this

@dedalvs explain. You are the future of linguistics! 😀

Future?! I’m the ghost of linguistics past! The future are those here on Tumblr who have yet to take the reins. Seize ye your day like a man taking a picture of a hotel carpet! (Because that’s literally mostly what I do now.)

Every language has a way of expressing this idea (i.e. that we feel the same way as someone else or something suggested by another situation). In English, some that used to be popular are “I feel ya” or “I know the feeling” or “Tell me about it” or “You’re telling me”. Those’ve been used in reference to situations before for humorous effect (I’m kicking my brain trying to remember a specific one on The Simpsons, but it hasn’t come to me yet). “Same” is great because it’s short and expresses the same idea. (I swear, I feel like the younger generation is better at coming up with short stuff like this. My generation is the generation of wordy phrases like “too much information” and “I know you are but what am I”, which sounds positively Shakespearean by today’s standards.)

“Same” has also really interested me because I’ve seen the exact same expression years before it came into vogue in English, but in American Sign Language. ASL has a sign that means “same” and you can use it in the standard way, but you can also use it the Tumblr way. We basically learned it as a way to say “me too”. I doubt the one influenced the other (convergent evolution seems more likely), but it does set Tumblorgs up to know this small facet of ASL grammar rather intuitively. There’s a nice explanation of the sign on this site. Image below from that site:

And actually, just let me copy this paragraph from the explanation on that site, since I think it’s so perfect:

The sign for same is “directional.” By that I mean, the direction in which you do the sign can provide information about the subject and object of the verb. For example, if I slide the “Y” hand back and forth between you and me the sign can mean:“me too”  "you and me, both"  "I agree with you" “I’m similar to you”  You don’t have to add a separate “ME” or a separate “YOU” sign, the meaning is created by the direction of the sign.

So yes, there’s actually more grammar in the ASL sign than in English “same”, but if you see how directionality works with this in ASL, you’ll see how it’s very simple to extrapolate from using it with someone you’re talking to to say “me too”, or using it with someone nearby to say “just like them”, or even using it with a situation to say “I feel just like that hedgehog which can’t even right now”:

Anyway, that’s about the gist of it…? Think I went on a bit of a tangent. Oh well. The point is this: Why isn’t anyone using my word “Tumblorg” for someone who uses Tumblr?! I swear, I will make Tumblorg happen!

True story, a Japanese friend of mine who is very fluent in English mused on her FB:

“Tell me about it” -this phrase is just confusing. It actually means I don’t need to talk about it anymore? Hmm.“

I explained what it meant, she said:

“Thinking
back on Japanese, we also have similar expressions. We say “keep going”
when someone gets annoying and we don’t want to listen anymore.“

… I need to use that hedghog gif now.