moonblossom:

lnnguages:

laserelectric:

can you imagine how f***ing relieved the french must have been when we reached the year 2000? 

they went from having to say “mille neuf cents quatre-vingt-dix-neuf” to just having to say “deux mille” to say the year

I personally avoid talking about anything that happened before 2000 for that very reason…

Seriously at this point I refer to anything that happened pre-2000 as “Quand j’étais jeune”

allthingslinguistic:

swampwyvern:

your fave is problematic: adjectives

  • cannot be characterized in terms of a prototype
  • not a semantically definable class of concepts
  • lexicalize properties or characteristics that are indeterminate or variable in terms of time stability

No but seriously there are entire academic papers about how problematic adjectives are. (I also strongly endorse the book that this quote is from, Describing Morphosyntax.)

kingfucko:

gollyplot:

flittering-sylph:

Man I hate it when people use the pronoun “you” as a singular pronoun in an informal setting. “You” is plural, unless thou dost speak to an unfamiliar person. The correct singular second person pronoun is “thou” in most cases. Grammar never changes. Pronouns must always stay one way until the end of time. Learn thy proper English. *sigh* Kids these days.

If thou this mistake shouldst make on thine own blog, then know, villain, that thou art a dirty descriptivist, and no friend of mine. Ne’er should language itself alter, it doth remain fixèd as such, untouch’d by change. Wouldst thou, vile descriptivist, that we forget the heritage of our great tongue? Nay, say I. Thou art but a dickhead who sayest so.

stynt ðy clappe! beoð ðo writerris be wetleas knafen. ðy langag o engelond diffoulened be, ille usenid bi sclaundrous novelri.

medievalpoc:

MPoC on Twitter: because you never know when you might need Saint Augustine’s thoughts on musical farting.

Medieval Farts

On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages, Valerie Allen: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1488073.On_Farting

The Stag Fart song:

[Bulluc sterteþ, bucke uerteþ,
~The bullock stirs, the stag farts,
Murie sing cuccu!
~Merrily sing, Cuckoo!]

#InterdisciplinaryFartStudies

friendlyneighborhoodcommiescum:

A cunning vampire door-to-door salesperson who stands in people’s doorways and talks until they can find a convenient moment to drop their pen and the person picks it up and the vampire says oh “Thank you” and the person says “you’re welcome” and the vampire smiles a big fangy grin and steps inside

And that’s this vampire’s modus operandi for decades And then the language starts to change and suddenly millenials have homes and the vampire thanks them and they say “oh, no problem” and the vampire is like ???????????????? this was not the plan