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for chinese new year they get all these famous actors and comedians together and they do a lil show and one of the comedians was like “i was in a hotel in america once and there was a mouse in my room so i called reception except i forgot the english word for mouse so instead i said ‘you know tom and jerry? jerry is here’

jerry is here

my chinese teacher once shared this story in class about someone who went to the grocery to buy chicken, but they forgot the english word for it, so they grabbed an egg, went to the nearest sales lady and said “where’s the mother”

When I was a teenager, we went to Italy for the summer holidays. We are German, neither of us speaks more than a few words of Italian. That didn’t keep my family from always referring to me when they wanted something translated because “You’re so good with languages and you took Latin”. (I told them a hundred times I couldn’t order ice cream in Latin, they ignored that.) Anyway, my dad really loved a certain cheese there, made from sheep’s milk. He knew the Italian word for ‘cheese’ – formaggio – and he knew how to say ‘please’. And he had already spotted a little shop that sold the cheese. He asked me what ‘sheep’ was in Italian, and of course, I had no idea. So he just shrugged and said “I’ll manage” and went into the shop. 5 mins later, he comes out with a little bag, obviously very pleased with himself. How did he manage it? He had gone in and said “'Baaaah’ formaggio, prego.”

I was done for the day.

This makes me feel better about every conversation I had in both Rome and Ghent.

I once lost my husband in the ruins of a French castle on a mountain, and trotted around looking for him in increasing desperation. “Have you seen my husband?” I asked some French people, having forgotten all descriptive words. “He is small, and English. His hair is the color of bread.”

I did not find my husband in this way.

In rural France it is apparently Known that one brings one’s own shopping bags to the grocery store. I was a visitor and had not been briefed and had no shopping bag. I saw that other people were able to conduct negotiations to purchase shopping bags, but I could not remember the word for “bag.”

“Can I have a box that is not a box,” I said.

The checkout lady looked extremely tired and said, “Un sac?” (A sack?)

Of course. A fucking sack. And so I did get a sack.

I once was at a German-American Church youth camp for two weeks and predictably, we spoke a whole lot of English. 

When I phoned my mom during week two I tried to tell her that it was a bit cold in the sleeping bag at night. I stumbled around the word in German because for the love of god, I could remember the Germwn word for sleeping bag.

“Yeah so, it’s like a bag you sleep in at night?”

“And my mother must probably have thought I lost my mind. She just sighed and was like ‘So, a Schlafsack, yes?”

Which is LITERALLY Sleeping sac … The German word is a basically a one on one translation of the English word and I just… I failed it. At my mother tongue. BIG

My former boss is Italian and she ended up working in a lab where the common language was English. She once saw an insect running through the lab and she went to tell her colleagues. She remembered it was the name of a famous English band so she barged in the office yelling there was a rolling stone in the lab…

I’m Spanish and have been living in the UK for a while now. I recently changed jobs and moved to a new office which is lost somewhere in the Midlands’ countryside. It’s a pretty quaint location, surrounded by forest on pretty much all sides, and with nice grounds… full of pheasants. I was pretty shocked when I drove in and saw a fucking pheasant strolling across the road. Calm as you please.

That afternoon I met up with some friends and was talking about the new job, and the new office, and for the life of me I couldn’t remember the English word for pheasants. So I basically ended up bragging to my friends about “the very fancy chickens” we had outside the office.

Best thing is, everyone understood what I meant.

I love those stories so much…

Picture a Jewish American girl whose grasp of the Hebrew language comes from 10+ years of immersion in Biblical and liturgical Hebrew, not the modern language. Some words are identical, while others have significantly evolved.

She gets to Israel and is riding a bus for the very first time.

American: כמה ממון זה? (”How much money?” but in rather archaic language)

Bus Driver: שתי זוזים. (”Two zuzim” – a currency that’s been out of circulation for millenia)

that’s hilarious

I am officially screamlaughing at my desk from that last one OH MY 

Does everyone know the prime minister who promised to fuck the country?

So in Biblical Hebrew the word for penis and weapon are the same. There is a verb meaning to arm, which modern Hebrew semanticly drifted into “fuck”: i.e. give someone your dick.

The minister was making a speech while a candidate, bemoning the state of the world. “The Soviet Union is fucking Egypt. Germany is fucking Syria. The Americans are fucking everyone. But who is fucking us? When I am prime minister, I will ensure we are fucked!”

What the hell Biblical Hebrew.

Just guessing: The path from something like “give someone a blade” to “give someone a blade, if you know what I mean ;)” is probably not that difficult or unlikely.

^Given that the Latin word for sheath (like, for a sword) is literally “vagina”, I can verify that this metaphor is a time-honored one. 

Oh yeah and one time my Latin professor was at this conference in Greece and his flight was canceled, so he needed to extend his hotel stay by one more night.

Except he doesn’t speak a lick of modern Greek, and the receptionist couldn’t speak English.  Or French.  Or German.  Or Italian.  (He tried all of them.)

Finally, in a fit of inspiration, he went upstairs and got his copy of Medea in the original Greek (you know, the stuff separated from modern Greek by two and a half thousand years).  He found the passage where Medea begs Jason to let her stay for one more day, went downstairs, and read it to the receptionist.

She laughed her head off, but she gave him the extra night.  

Reblogged just for Medea

The way I have to find anything on this website. Hair the color of bread, me, 2016.

We had a neighbour a few years back who did not speak any swedish, so my dad helped her with grocery shopping. At one point she asked him about some product, wondering what was in it. My dad, not knowing how to say “dill” in english, tries his best to describe the herb: what it looks like, what dishes its used in, etc. Which eventually lead to this exchange:

“Oh! You mean dill?”

“… yes”

“Whats it called in swedish?”

“Dill”

This is why art is important, in case you were wondering.

There's something so deeply calming about watching megafauna prance and gambol about like they're little lambs

Bison pronking is already so magical, and then the double rainbow and the happy birdsong just put it way over the top

like one of the really interesting things that people are awfully quiet about is that......over the last thirty years, an enormous amount of progress has been made towards the goals of companion animal welfare movements

there are many areas of the country where demand for adoptable rescue dogs outstrips supply, where competition is legitimately fierce to get your hands on one of these dogs

spay/neuter campaigns have been enormously effective among many demographics, to the point where people get very upset about the idea of a dog having gonads at all

81% of all animals that entered animal shelters in 2022 were saved. only 8.6% were euthanized "needlessly" (no definition provided for what that means). [x]

really, the forefront of animal welfare at this point is human welfare.

most often, animals are being surrendered to animal shelters for human reasons that have little to do with the animals themselves. 31% of owner surrenders are driven by housing issues, health issues, financial issues, or the death of the caretaker (see linked source above)

if you really care about pet homelessness and animal welfare, at some point you have to stop being an outrage-addicted, self-righteous keyboard warrior and start actually caring about other people

Based

I want to show you an actual training slide from my customer service job that I had to see yesterday.

There’s a regular at the fabric superstore. She’s at least 80 years old, and she just got back into sewing after giving it up for 40 years. We’ll call her Irma.

I love Irma.

Irma is constantly surprised by the newfangled sewing gadgets our store sells. Today she bought some extra-fine glass-head pins and a magnetic pincushion. As I’m ringing her purchases up, she tells me very seriously, “did you know, if you’re careful, you can sew RIGHT OVER those pins? You don’t need to take them out!”

I told her that I liked that you can’t accidentally melt the head of the glass pins with your iron, and she nodded. “They used to all be like that, but times changed.”

I love old sewing machines and asked what kind of machine she has, and she goes, “Oh, it’s an old Singer Featherweight that my husband bought me when we were first married. It’s probably not worth anything anymore, but the thing sews fine. Have you seen the ones those girls over there–” indicating the sewing machine sub-store in my location “–have? Those things go in every direction and the needle always comes to the top when you stop sewing! Imagine how handy that is!”

I mention that I used to sew on my grandmother’s Featherweight but now there’s a intra-family war about who owns Grandma’s Featherweight and so no one gets to use it. It’s genuinely the best portable straight-stitch machine I’ve ever used.

I warn her to never let anyone tell her that Featherweight isn’t worth something. “I know, I miss my husband and it’s always going to have a place in my heart, just like your grandma’s.”

“I mean, Irma, there’s that, but they’re also worth a really notable amount of money. The Singer Featherweight is really financially valuable. I almost never see them for sale around here for less than about $400, and that’s in bad condition.”

“It’s a good thing my husband’s dead, honey, because if you told him that he managed to buy a sewing machine that’s worth more in 2021 than he bought it for in 1950, well, he’d be so smug that I just wouldn’t be able to tolerate driving home with him.”

Some recent bats.

hey, hi, I was just on the former bird app and came across this info from a brand new study and now I cannot stop screaming internally??? what the actual fuckkkk

theres' an article from the guardian here and here is the actual study:

OH MY GODS THEY SAID IT

ASSUMPTION OF MARY

Today, August 15, Catholics of the Latin rite celebrate the Assumption of Mary. The Eastern Orthodox Church celebrates the Dormition of the Theotokos (Mother of God) on August 14.  Like most of the Marian feasts, they were first established in the East and then adopted by the West at a later date. The feast of the Dormition dates back to the 4th century. The earliest celebration of the feast in the West is dated in the mid 7th century.

Image: The Assumption or The Dormition,  a fresco in the Cathedral of San Pedro de los Milagros (Saint Peter of the Miracles) in Antioquia (Colombia)

Greater Blue-eared Glossy-starling (Lamprotornis chalybaeus), family Sturnidae, Kruger National Park, South Africa

photograph by PanWoyteczek

Bird identification is so fucked up in a really fun way you can’t understand until you get into it. For example, there is a type of goose called the cackling goose that looks exactly like a Canada goose except smaller and “cuter”. The cackling goose is way, way, more rare in most places than its relatively common cousin, so it’s on tons of birders life lists. Everyone wants to see a cackling (look in any bird ID group to see lots of hopeful people posting petite Canada geese). The two species regularly commingle, so sometimes a flock of those common parking lot birds will have the equivalent of a Pokémon shiny just hanging out in the middle of them.

How ridiculous and fun is that? I can never look at a big group of Canada geese without scrutinizing their ranks for an adorable little extremely rare cutie pie cackling goose. It reminds me a bit of mushroom harvesting minus the risk of death if you get it wrong

For anyone who wants to look for them too I found an ID guide that calls their necks stubby so you know this one's good.

reminds me of when some old church in Sweden was cleaning out their storage and they forgot they had left like 80 medieval corpses in some ikea bags during renovations so somebody opened a closet door and it’s just

i think grossness is a vital aspect of life btw and we all experience it and i think its important to represent in art and i think oversanitization of popular media is 100% our downfall. things are gross and disgusting and yucky and thats life we cannot deny ourselves this

I keep thinking about this in the context of caring for my ageing patients. No one TELLS them, before they’re old, how things are going to change, or why. No one talks about the loss of elastin, and how that doesn’t just affect your skin looking old, but also how it heals. No one warns them that their skin will become paper-thin if they live long enough, incredibly fragile and easy to tear. Just “hurr dur wrinkly!!!”

No one tells them their bowels are going to lose strength and coordination, so it gets more and more difficult to have bowel movements. No one warns them about obstipation, much less bowel obstructions. I have a saying I repeat often in clinic: “Proper pooping prevents problems!” I say it because it makes people chuckle, because it destigmatizes needing to poop. Everyone poops. And it turns out pooping requires both a complex network of nerves to create peristalsis, and stools soft enough to move through the bowels, and I have watched more than one elderly patient die because their bowels stopped working right.

No one talks about hemorrhoids, so I have patients coming in terrified by blood in their stools–and listen, blood in your poop is definitely a good reason to see a doctor; if you’re over 50 and you haven’t had a colonoscopy, get one. It’s the best health screening we have evidence for, in my opinion. Colon cancer is a bitch. But more commonly, people have bloody stools because they have either hemorrhoids that are bleeding or because they have an anal fissure after straining on a hard bowel movement. Do you know what a hemorrhoid is? I didn’t, until I was well into medical school. Everyone has them. They’re venous columns that surround the rectum and anus. Internal ones can bleed; external ones can itch. Most people will get them eventually. Be kind about them.

Everyone is going to have trouble peeing if they live long enough. Men can’t start, women can’t stop. Because people with prostates will often have benign enlargement of the prostate–it’s not cancer, but it gets bigger–and the urethra, the tube that lets urine leave the bladder, goes through the prostate. Bigger prostate = compressed tube, less flow. Meanwhile, people with uteruses have much shorter urethras, which means that when we lose that beautiful collagen and elastic, we also lose it in the two sphincters that help us keep from leaking urine, and so we leak urine. Especially when something triggers an increase in intra-abdominal pressure, like a sneeze or a cough or a laugh.

All these things people are taught to be ashamed of and embarrassed about–they are so common. They’re normal parts of having a human body and doing the things one does with a human body. Poop trouble? Welcome to the club! People have been writing about their cures for constipation for as long as written language has existed. Listen, you are not alone. You are not alone. You are not alone. And that means that when someone else has a gross problem, you must be kind to them, because that is going to be you. There will be a day when you have diarrhea, because viral gastroenteritis spreads like wildfire every winter. There will be a day when you cough a huge glob of mucus comes out, because mucus is a natural defense mechanism and kind of miraculous but also nasty. Every gross thing a body can do, yours is likely to do, if not now then later.

Be kind.

How to spot signs and symptoms of Breast Cancer 

Reblog to literally save a life

official boob post

is this orange or yellow.

its yellow you are all wrong i have decided just now

hey op, what does this say?

nice try but i’m not colorblind it says 71

Am I tripping?

Is that not 71?

You’re slightly colorblind, that is 74 and the color of the car is orange.

world heritage post

It’s orange

it’s literally 71

Bestie it’s 74

Y’all it clearly fucking says 21

where are you getting that from?

Babes it’s 81 what r yall seeing

its 74 bestie you might be colorblind

That 81 person can see shrimp colors

I took exactly the same image, increased the saturation, and shifted it to a part of the spectrum most people can see better.

For all your no-YOU-have-the-weird-color-vision argument-solving needs.

Also, the car is orange.

Posting this in case anyone is color blind and doesn’t know it lmao

being a christian w mental illness is like . asks the creator and sustainer of every layer and detail of all existence for help cleaning my room

You know, I saw this, and it’s funny, but also very fitting? I feel like I hear a lot of “Jesus, being fully man, knows what you’re going through,” which is true, but I find it’s almost more helpful in some ways to apply it to tiny little struggles. For example, Jesus almost certainly had the experience of waiting in long and slowly-moving lines. God Himself knows what it’s like to have an annoying coworker, or a paper cut, or having onions on your sandwich when you specifically asked for no onions. (I assume sandwiches were different in the year 15, but probably people still got special orders wrong.)

Moreover, that layer of existence, too, is something that God made and maintains. He made your room and presumably has some interest in it. So… I don’t want to be too dogmatic about this, because I don’t know that I can point to a specific source, but I very much doubt that God feels bored by this struggle. He both knows how annoying it is to clean a room, and has a professional interest in it, as the inventor of matter and thus of rooms. On that note, I should probably go do dishes.