shoutout to aromantics. cause like. me too. we are so cool and awesome. you agree. reblog

I agree. rebolg.

follow me on twitter (x) for more memes and personal updates!! (ps i follow back!)

The fucking job market is abysmal

We are normal and can be trusted with large amounts of money

ITS NOT DEMONS GUYS I PROMISE

i think it would be funny if people occasionally arose from the dead. like if that was a real-life one-in-a-million but well-documented Thing That Sometimes Happens, and the entire legal system around death (laws on inheritance & marriage & murder etc) had to include caveats for the unlikely-but-scientifically-possible event that the dead person in question might spontaneously self-resurrect, even years or decades after death. it would raise so many inconvenient and absurd possibilities

#imagine the legal system in that timeline. property laws and inheritance laws and bigamy laws--what happens if your spouse resurrects 10 years after they die? think how AWKWARD that would be. what happens if you inherit from someone who comes back, do you have to give the inheritance back? what if u used it to buy stuff? does the jetski u bought with the money your grandpa left u 15 years ago in college now belong to grandpa? or is there a statute of limitations?

#if the guy you got convicted of murdering returns from the dead does your conviction get changed from murder to grievous harm? how is the grievousness of the harm measured? in the number of years the guy spent as a corpse? what if you spend 20 years in prison and the victim comes back to life and it turns out grievous harm would have landed you only 5ish years. do you get reimbursed for the extra 15 years u spent in prison?

#what is the legal process for proving you have come back to life? what are the minimum legal requirements for establishing a revenant's identity #does it become regulation to make fingerprint/dental records of every single person who dies just on the off chance one of them comes back? #what happens if it's someone from like 300 years ago?the world has changed and everyone they know is dead. is there a social services department that can help with that?

#there would be a whole branch of counseling services for people who have reanimated or had a loved one reanimate. #grief 2.0 counselors

#grief uncounselling

a wizard has invented a new type of crystal—and you don’t want to be left behind when he activates it!

how to spice things up in the bedroom using the polymorph spell: 12 helpful tips (you won’t BELIEVE number 10)

Dragothrawn’s astral hoard is about to change the ethereal plane’s economy—FOREVER !

i scried into Tartarus for 90 days straight. here’s 7 ways it warped my mind and body

lost your soul to a demon? LMAO!

local witch says being the 6th son of a 6th son might be better than magic powers (LEARN WHY)

Never quit never give-up!

It's really this. And some people (guess who) really hate it.

We have in this equation many, many people who, more than anything else, fear their own deaths... the final and most dreadful loss of control. After they die (and here comes their greatest terror!) the young will remake the world in their own image... there being no (putative) grownups any more to stop them.

So they're presently trying to alter political structures all over the planet in such a way as to prevent the Naughty Youngs from too quickly undoing everything their (theoretically Wise Old) elders have done. They're intent on running your lives by their rules for absolutely as long as possible, even after they're dead.

...Now. There's a lot of "Don't expect the young to save us!" stuff out there, and sometimes I half suspect those other People are behind that too. (Admittedly, it's too easy when you're young and busy to blink your eyes open after a long night out and mutter "Yeah, you made this mess, save yourselves!")

But there's a way in which this is also ridiculous. Because... honestly. They expect a generation (indeed, more than one generation) raised on Luke Skywalker to fall for that?

Pitiful.

There are way too many potential heroes out there. Likely enough you're one. You don't even have to blow up a fully operational battle station to manifest this heroism! Just vote. Or help someone vote. Or more than one someone. Help voters in your community to register. Help defeat obvious attempts to gerrymander voters out of control of their own districts. Do the little things. Enough little things can't be stopped by the forces that assume everybody else to be as lazy and selfish as they are.

You outnumber the fascists. Stand up and act like it. "Snowflakes", they call us? Get enough snowflakes together and you've got an avalanche. Tried standing in front of one of those lately?

Meanwhile, I for one have no problems with saying, loudly, "Save us, O Young! You're our only hope." (Imagine me as a holographic projection if you must.) :)

And for now, I'll be out there doing what one person can.

Please, you do that too!

Cringe started as a verb describing a physical reaction, i.e.: "I cringe when I see [x]."

Modern slang has turned cringe into an adjective describing anything to which a person might have such a reaction.

.

This shift in language is illustrative of a shift in culture.

.

For a while there, in the early 2000s, there was this big sex positivity movement and we talked openly about kink and queer sexuality and creating a culture of consent that broke away from traditional conservative ideas of moral respectability.

And now we are in the midst of this giant purity culture backlash, this giant push for rigid conformity all over the internet. Anything that deviates from the norm even remotely is ridiculed.

And this cultural shift is perfectly encapsulated in this singular linguistic shift, this verb becoming a noun.

The Revenge of the Pearl Clutchers

That's what "cringing" is. It's pearl clutching.

When the pearl clutchers turned cringe into an adjective, they turned a reaction into an accusation. The pearl clutchers don't want to take responsibility for their own kneejerk emotions. They want to blame YOU.

They are saying, "My disgust isn't the fault of my own backwards prejudices. It is YOU who are inherently disgusting. My inability to cope with even the slightest deviation from norm is not the problem here. YOUR refusal to rigidly conform is the problem. I am not the one who is cringing. YOU are the one who is cringe."

Fuck 'em.

.

Take the word back.

Cringe is not something people are.

It's something judgmental assholes do.

This. THANK YOU.

Item: finally, a mace that deals fire damage without the danger of open flames. Sadly it does appear to be corded, requiring a source of electricity to function; maybe just make sure the party includes a, uh, [pauses to look up creatures that can generate electricity] Pikachu

An Angel

just feel like sharing some trivia since a lot of ppl seem to like this drawing. This creature's appearance was inspired by bomb chipped concrete I saw a lot when visiting a friend in Irpin :0

Different priorities 

"I love you. You are safe."

types of academic interactions: 

-one or both of us is bad at eye contact

-Shakey Me Legg

-symbiotic infodumping

-Neither Of Us Know How To Make Conversation In A Conventional Human Format, Conversation Continues Chaotically

-””””normal””””

-one or both of us is bad at eye contact CHALLENGE MODE: we are talking in a group at a table and one or all of us are bad at eye contact

-’dont get me fucking started’ *gets fucking started*

-one person infodumps while others sit enraptured 

-Zippy Me Zipper

-80 year old retired professor begins stories about life in the field, results may vary

-There Is A Language Barrier Between Us But God Damn If That’s Going To Stop Us From Communicating A Very Important Infodump, Mutual Excitement Is Maintained As Charades Begin

-somebody takes out their computer and u know ur about to see Some Shit

-somebody takes out their phone and u know ur about to see the research-related object of their greatest admiration

-We Are Having This Conversation In A Very Strange And Inconvenient Location But No One Wants To Interrupt The Conversation To Suggest We Move

-socialanxiety.png

-how do we socialize? are we socializing? what do we talk about? who am i

-Neither Of Us Know How To End A Conversation Despite Both Of Us Wanting To End The Conversation Oh God Oh No

-We’ve only ever seen each other on zoom and wow you are much taller than I expected

-We’ve only ever seen each other on zoom and wow you are much shorter than I expected

-I’ve cited you a million times I cannot believe I am in your presence

-I’ve cited you a million times but after this conversation I’m never doing it again because you’re a Flaming Pile of Garbage

- I’ve cited you a million times but it’s always been to say you’re extremely wrong oh god i didn’t realize that was you

Components of Meaning & Componential Analysis

To determine the meaning of a word, we often use the "process of breaking down the sense of a word into its minimal components" (Leech). One of Leech's examples is the following table:

Another way of showing the meaning of these words is by combining their features in formulae, so-called "componential definitions". The formulae would look like this:

The dimensions (i.e. the + attribute and the -- attribute) are called semantic oppositions (though not all semantic contrasts are binary, more on that below).

By using these formulae, we can, for example, show synonymy (two words with the same 'meaning', or in this case the same componential definition), as well as polysemy (one word has several different meanings). Here are two examples:

These sort of analyses are called componential analyses.

Another example for why such somponential analyses may be useful is the problem with antonyms (= word of opposite meaning). For example: what is the opposite of "woman"? Is it "man"? Or is it "girl"? Both answers are valid antonyms of "woman", but from different semantic dimensions. Here, the term "incompatibility" becomes useful: "two componential formulae, or the meanings they express, are incompatible if the one contains at least one feature contrasting with a feature in the other" (Leech).

-> here, there's a contrast between the ADULT components, therefore "woman" and "child" have incompatible meanings (i.e. they do not have the same meaning)

Another semantic relation that can be analysed is the so-called hyponymy (one word belongs to a superordinate group, e.g. "seagull" and "bird", or "oak" and "tree"): "this relationship exists between two meanings if one componential formula contains all features present in the other formula" (Leech).

-> thus, "woman" is hyponymous to "grown-up", as it includes all features present in the formula of the superordinate term "grown-up"

Hyponymous relations are presented within unbroken borders, like this:

As stated above, componential analyses can indicate polar opposites, but there are also so-called multiple taxonomies. To these belong, for example, types of metal, species of animal, or tree, or fruit, etc. primary colours, noises, and types of vessel.

Ask yourself: what is the opposite of the colour gold? What is the opposite of an orange? Or of a vase?

Here's an example of how to portray the multiple taxonomies of the colour gold (each possibility gets its own representative symbol):

While we're at opposites, there's also a problem with some polar opposites, namely that they can come on a scale. For example, there may be different stages between "rich" and "poor" (compared to definite opposites such as "dead" and "alive"). These stages are symbolised by Leech through the use of arrows: ↑ RICH, ↓ RICH.

Another type of opposites are those of ordering relations, which involve a contrast of direction. Examples are: above / below, parent / child, teacher / pupil, etc. Showing that (a) is the parent of the child (b) can be done by using a constant component like this:

or by keeping the two syntactic positions constant and changing the components:

Arrows like these can also be used to show reciprocal relations, in which the relation operates in both directions at once:

There are also other, less common, types of opposites:

'Signese'

Because of all of these imprecisions and endless possibilites in meaning, Leech states that "we need special notations, like that of componential analysis, for representing meanings" (Leech). Therefore, Leech has built "a language which directly represents the meanings of English: an artificial FORMAL language (...)" (Leech), which he calls 'Signese'.

This language is unambiguous (i.e. every expression has only one meaning) and graphically arbitrary (i.e. "any written symbol can be arbitrarily replaced by some other written symbol, so long as this substitution is consistent and does not lead to ambiguity" (Leech)).

Sources:

teich.jpg

"Northern Germany" i talk like that too and i'm from NRW

やみよにからす

Literally: (a) crow (or bird) in the dark night

Meaning: something indistinct

Kickass additions, thank you!

i found out about a language with one recorded word left a few weeks ago and i can’t stop thinking about it

i was reading random stuff and the reference to “the sole recorded word” of a language just struck me in a way. but i can really only just look at the one word there is and think about how a whole society once spoke a whole language and now there’s one word left to speak for that language. one word left that that society spoke. and people make all kinds of speculations about that society based on the one and only known word. just a random word that someone bothered to write in a document that happened to survive til now. just one word left. just one word.