@puddox on Tumblr

Hi! I’m Puddox (pud for short) or Ducky (Synecdoche for long), prouns are she/her or thon/thons, and I'm 22

My biggest interest is in linguistics, particularly the typology of morphosyntax, and i’m also interested in historical linguistics and phonology, and I speak toki pona!

the art in my profile picture was made by @chicorygrart

i have a sideblog for funny stuff from wikipedia, both my own findings and reblogs, @wikipediahmms i try to keep the number of blogs i follow fairly low; and I don't see following someone as an indicator of friendship, just that they consistently post things that I want on my blog, so If I unfollow you that doesn't mean I don't like you or that you did anything wrong.

#woooo i have a pinned post now #like this if you want to let me know that you've seen it #edited one of my 0 note flops into this which is why the date is in june

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funny-leg

everythingfox

He was just tryna chill :(

Source: instagram.com

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meepermantis

p2ep

i fucking lvoe call ducks every time i see a pic that looksd like this it assures me that life is beautiful

p2ep

the little guy!!!!!!!!@!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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throw-your-boat

max1461

I think one of my very favorite things about linguistics is that the subject matter is so available. We're almost all native speakers of a language, and language is all around us every day. Making observations about language is cheap and easy. And linguistics is a young field, so most questions are open and there's lots of low-hanging fruit. Of course you have to put in the work if you want to answer a linguistic question to a high epistemic standard, but when it comes to just playing around you really can do linguistics—meaningful, new linguistics—wherever and whenever. You can just zero in on some thing you notice about how people talk, and bam, that's a research question. It's like a constant smorgasbord of intellectual stimulation. I really cannot recommend getting into linguistics enough.

official-linguistics-post

official linguistics post

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hbmmaster

rainbowfic

But there was a period of friction, when “hello” was spreading beyond its summoning origins to become a general-purpose greeting, and not everyone was a fan. I was reminded of this when watching a scene in the BBC television series Call the Midwife, set in the late 1950s and early 1960s, where a younger midwife greets an older one with a cheerful “Hello!” “When I was in training,” sniffs the older character, “we were always taught to say ‘good morning,’ ‘good afternoon,’ or ‘good evening.’ ‘Hello’ would not have been permitted.” To the younger character, “hello” has firmly crossed the line into a phatic greeting. But to the older character, or perhaps more accurately to her instructors as a young nurse, “hello” still retains an impertinent whiff of summoning. Etiquette books as late as the 1940s were still advising against “hello,” but in the mouth of a character from the 1960s, being anti-hello is intended to make her look like a fussbudget, especially playing for an audience of the future who’s forgotten that anyone ever objected to “hello.”

Because Internet, Gretchen McCulloch

loki-zen

Posts that remind me to nerd out about the intricacies of historical fiction writing

jackironsides

This isn't historical fiction, but period fiction, but I remember having a jarring OH reaction when discovering something that's just a standard part of English now was less than a hundred years old by reading a book. the book was Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers, published in 1930, and in the first chapter a judge is speaking:

‘It is not necessary for him, or her, to prove innocence; it is, in the modern slang phrase, “up to” the Crown to prove guilt...’

allthingslinguistic

There are several particularly good examples of this in books by Frances Hodgson Burnett, who lived in both the UK and the US and several times depicts characters from those two places encountering each other. For example, The Shuttle was published in 1907 and has this delightful passage of two British characters encountering an American:

“Upon my word,” Mr. Penzance commented, and his amiable fervour quite glowed, “I like that queer young fellow—I like him. He does not wish to 'butt in too much.' Now, there is rudimentary delicacy in that. And what a humorous, forceful figure of speech! Some butting animal—a goat, I seem to see, preferably—forcing its way into a group or closed circle of persons.” His gleeful analysis of the phrase had such evident charm for him that Mount Dunstan broke into a shout of laughter, even as G. Selden had done at the adroit mention of Weber & Fields. “Shall we ride over together to see him this morning? An hour with G. Selden, surrounded by the atmosphere of Reuben S. Vanderpoel, would be a cheering thing,” he said. “It would,” Mr. Penzance answered. “Let us go by all means. We should not, I suppose,” with keen delight, “be 'butting in' upon Lady Anstruthers too early?” He was quite enraptured with his own aptness. “Like G. Selden, I should not like to 'butt in,'” he added.

And the more I see historical examples of people encountering novel expressions that are utterly unremarkable to us now, the more I think, you know what, I might as well approach language change with gleeful delight rather than a fussbudgety sniff.

#one fun example of this is that sibling is a relative new term

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shotoria

zzoupz

tumblr are you telling me something

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His water dance

the floor???

you know how it is with legos

Source: instagram.com

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taafyt

jollyfurydragonballer

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throw-your-boat

whitepeopletwitter

lonesplashy

Honestly why would you hide this in the notes

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elpuntthing

dimetrodone

I have long accepted the weird fact that sea spiders's digestive systems extend into their legs, but did not know that this also applies to their gonads..

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funny-leg

hatingongodot

curlicuecal

does it indicate anything about me that I immediately recognized what paper this figure is from

curlicuecal

so I had to immediately go and pull this other amazing figure from the paper, which is "THE HEXAGON" a device with six rooms for fruit flies to have sex in and a central room for a fruit fly to observe six couples having sex at once

szgrey

they made a fruit fly sex panopticon and no one told me about it, what is science education coming to

a10wea

Now I must know, what the hell were they trying to determine with this paper???

derinthescarletpescatarian

Whether fruit flies can have a culture.

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foxgirlchorix

garaks-padded-bra

I had a dream i got to explain tf2 to my friend and i remember being crazy excited because someone finally wanted me to explain tf2 to them, but then almost as soon as i started my alarm went off and i woke up. And i was so angry. And it took me until halfway through my morning shower to realise I wasnt actually explaining tf2 i was telling lies about how scout had a sun hat and it would get bigger every time he respawned so scouts with big hats were bullied relentlessly. Thats what inspired that raw anger.