ash - 21

gf core ! (cr.)

pride discourse generator

good work guys

Bothering the beast

Lobby of the Renaissance Center, Detroit, Michigan, designed by John Portman in 1977

if it's supposed to be renaissance why is it brutalism?

no piece of supernatural commentary will ever be as impactful as ‘what happened to all the pussy on supernatural’

Been on my mind

this is the amazon review that dean leaves on carver edlund's latest book after googling and failing his 20th online Am I Gay test

legend 🙌

Out of context genshin story quests

Part 1

And they were roommates

I’ve been thinking of this scenario for a whilee 👀⚡

i

strawberry snake

when did tumblr collectively decide not to use punctuation like when did this happen why is this a thing

it just looks so smooth I mean look at this sentence flow like a jungle river

ACTUALLY

This is really exciting, linguistically speaking.

Because it’s not true that Tumblr never uses punctuation. But it is true that lack of punctuation has become, itself, a form of punctuation. On Tumblr the lack of punctuation in multisentence-long posts creates the function of rhetorical speech, or speech that is not intended to have an answer, usually in the form of a question. Consider the following two potential posts. Each individual line should be taken as a post:

ugh is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use like god put that back we have to pay for that stuff

Ugh. Is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use? Like god, put that back. We have to pay for that stuff.

In your head, those two potential posts sound totally different. In the first one I’m ranting about work, and this requires no answer. The second may actually engage you to give an answer about hoarding sauce packets. And if you answer the first post, you will likely do so in the same style. 

Here’s what makes this exciting: the English language has no actual punctuation for rhetorical speech–that is, there are no special marks that specifically indicate “this speech is in the abstract, and requires no answer.” Not only that, it never has. The first written record of English (actually proto-English, predating even Old English) dates to the 400s CE, so we’re talking about 1600 years of having absolutely no marker whatsoever for rhetorical speech.

A group of teens and young adults on a blogging website literally reshaped a deficit a millennium and a half old in our language to fit their language needs. More! This group has agreed on a more or less universal standard for these new rules, which fits the definition of “language.” Which is to say Tumblr English is its own actual, real, separate dialect of the English language, and because it is spoken by people worldwide who have introduced concepts from their own languages into it, it may qualify as a written form of pidgin. 

Tumblr English should literally be treated as its own language, because it does not follow the rules of any form of formal written English, and yet it does have its own consistent internal rules. If you don’t think that’s cool as fuck then I don’t even know what to tell you.

i love this post

This is super cool! Also idk if this has any relevance whatsoever but if you wanna have an argument inside one tag you cannot have commas in it so that’s a real existing constraint that has forced tumblrites to construct commaless sentences and perhaps this has helped in adopting the custom into posts as well ok I have no idea if this is what’s happened just I think it’s a reasonable assumption there might be a connection

^this.

The tags are absolutely a factor. You want someone to take a breath in the middle of a sentence, you start a new tag. You want to have, as seen here, this removable piece between commas (does it have a name?) - you have 5 tags in this sentence alone. And sometimes you just

pause in the middle of a sentence…

and let your voice

trail away

look at all you precious brilliant nerds nerding about language you make me so fucking happy omg

language is this constantly evolving thing tbh, it doesn’t remain the same unless it’s dead and the people who used it gone so seeing the evolution of the language used on tumblr is literally so fucking amazing i want to cry with joy at it

because we also add in words from other languages, or make entirely new words up as additional terms to denote something (see ‘tol’ and ‘smol’ in relation to ‘tall’ and ‘small’) and this is constant. we are doing this daily without any sort of breathing space because there’s millions of us on this hellsite and we are constantly talking and so the language changes day-by-day until we have general, universal rules for what to do in a post, what to add in our tags, how to add it, why we add it, what we mean by it

we’ve created a language in the same way our ancestors all did: by building on the ones that came before and changing them to suit our needs and our system

and that’s fucking awesome okay

awesome

I love this so much and language is so great and I’ve noticed the lack of punctuation thing recently, even on twitter, and used it for like a specific kind of rhetorical effect. idk it’s so fun I fucking love linguistics and the evolution of language

I also loved that the following one-word responses all sound drastically different out loud and showcase different reactions:

What?

What.

what

you know it also occurs to me that due to how - unlike twitter - we indulge in memes for weeks or months at a time, to the point of some of them becoming shorthand used for years after the fact, we also have a lot of our own oft-incomprehensible-if-translated-literally idioms, of a sort! (not PRECISELY idioms, but they’re something more than just a funny meme, a lot of times, y’know?)

AND many of them are visual idioms or w/e, is that a thing? we use specific images (or images clearly based on the original image) to indicate a certain emotion or response, often with either not enough words to actually convey the response on their own, or no words at all! But those of us fluent in this dialect know what’s meant by it and it actually communicates quite clearly. Which is hella cool. :D

Tumblr is one of those sites that’s insular enough that it’s essentially ended up coming up with a language and culture of its own, to the point where if I interact with someone online whose main social media is Twitter or Reddit I can more or less instantly tell that they’re Not From Around Here. It’s cool and a little freaky at the same time.

Tumblr is an island ecosystem and we are the finches evolving more and more highly specialized bills.

MEMETIC, ICONOGRAPHIC LANGUAGE, MY BELOVED:

and, of course, the og:

@the-vagabond-tabby

bbkaz