Don’t be a bookworm.

Be a bookwyrm.

Hoard books. Eat your enemies. Kill all dissenters. Terrorize the english countryside.

Justice for Muslims

Today I reblogged a post of picture with the statement  “Justice for Muslims”. (@arse-thetic​)

A few hours later, I got a message from an unknown tumblr account. He sent me a photo of a murdered, damaged body of a christian pastor, and proceeded to tell me how a muslim murdered him and sent his cut-up body back to his family even after receiving the $120,000 ransom. He tried to convince me how innately violent and evil muslims are. 

Yes, that is a terrible crime. But how can one blame this on an entire religious group?

He then sent me a list of crimes committed by muslims, the number of terrorists attacks, and more. He made a post with a list of quotes from Quran that he believes to be promoting violence.

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The problem of accuracy or validity of the statistics. The problem of how one set of statistics can easily be used for any purposes. The problem of how words can be interpreted differently when they are out of context. He did not realize the fallacies and problems in his words. 

Some people say that there are more scenes of violence in the Bible than in Quran. Some people say how Buddhism promotes violence. There are caucasians, asians, americans, koreans, canadians, japanese, catholics, christians.. committing murder, rape, and acts of violence. Yet some people still believe that one group of people has certain characteristics or behaves in certain ways. 

Psychopathy or brutality or malice does not belong to a racial or religious group. Looking at the photo he sent me, and reading all his messages, still gave me no reason to hate muslims. And it shouldn’t to anyone.

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It was heartbreaking, as I loved tumblr because so many people were supportive of the diverse ideals others believed in. It was terrifying to see how real the issue is. Islamophobia, discrimination, and hate crime were not just words written on my MUN resolution. They were not just phrases in the news. It was very much alive. 

I feel anger towards whoever committed the crimes he told me about. To the individuals who committed the acts of terrorism he was referring to. I have no respect for them. But hating on a whole religious group? No, it shouldn’t be that way.  -

I wish I could do so much more than writing a post.  Sending so much support and love for those who are going through this. 

#justiceformuslims

I love every single person who reblogged this

I don’t think people realize how much of an impact this kind of support can have, I don’t think everyone knows what these little things can mean to us.

It may just be me, I don’t know. But every single time I see this on my dash or on someone’s blog or anywhere else, I kind of just breathe a sigh of relief. That’s one more person who cares. That’s one more person who doesn’t hate me.

Because it means so much, especially when all the media is spewing out is that I’m a terrible person and no one wants people like me near them. It means so much because I’m tired of people who won’t sit next to me in class, or who choose to join the longer line at the grocery store because they don’t want to be beside me and my family. It means so much when I have to lift my head any time someone says the words Islam or Muslim because I’m scared that they’ll say something that’ll hurt, when I have to pay attention to the news because who knows what so and so is saying now, who knows which of my people are being attacked now, who knows what’s going to happen to me now.

It means so much because I’ve been given the idea that the world is against me. And a huge part of it may be, but at least I’ve been reminded that some of it, just a small group of people, acknowledges that I’m a person too. That people like me are just that, people.

Maybe it’s just me, I don’t know. But now you do, so thank you for believing that I’m human when so many people don’t.

Have a great day x

Go unfollow this blog all you want, I am reblogging this. 

I am aware this does not follow this blog’s style, however, I find it necessary to reblog this

Reblog this. It’s so important #justiceformuslims

it’s saddening how this statement must still be said, because justice should be for everyone. so much love and support for the muslim community ♡

I’ve been rereading Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, one of my favorites. The rhythm of the first paragraph caught me, so I drew it.

(I wasn’t sure which Richard Plantagenet Merricat is referring to—there are a lot. Wikipedia somewhat arbitrarily says it’s Richard of Eastwell, who does seem he might be interesting to her, but Richard II might also appeal to her sense of drama. I chose Eastwell, though.)

update: you can get this as a print.

Giveaway Contest: Thanks to the generosity of @harperperennial, we’re giving away all eight of the new, limited edition 2016-17 Harper Perennial Olive Editions! Won’t these look lovely on your shelf? :D To win these books, you must: 1) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblog this post. We will randomly choose a winner on December 15, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, Harper Perennial has agreed to make this an International giveaway! Easy, right? Good luck!

settle this for me once and for all

is “chai” a TYPE of tea??! bc in Hindi/Urdu, the word chai just means tea

its like spicy cinnamon tea instead of bland gross black tea

I think the chai that me and all other Muslims that I know drink is just black tea

i mean i always thought chai was just another word for tea?? in russian chai is tea

why don’t white people just say tea

do they mean it’s that spicy cinnamon tea

why don’t they just call it “spicy cinnamon tea”

the spicy cinnamon one is actually masala chai specifically so like

there’s literally no reason to just say chai or chai 

They don’t know better. To them “chai tea” IS that specific kind of like, creamy cinnamony tea. They think “chai” is an adjective describing “tea”.

What English sometimes does when it encounters words in other languages that it already has a word for is to use that word to refer to a specific type of that thing. It’s like distinguishing between what English speakers consider the prototype of the word in English from what we consider non-prototypical.

(Sidenote: prototype theory means that people think of the most prototypical instances of a thing before they think of weirder types. For example: list four kinds of birds to yourself right now. You probably started with local songbirds, which for me is robins, blue birds, cardinals, starlings. If I had you list three more, you might say pigeons or eagles or falcons. It would probably take you a while to get to penguins and emus and ducks, even though those are all birds too. A duck or a penguin, however, is not a prototypical bird.)

“Chai” means tea in Hindi-Urdu, but “chai tea” in English means “tea prepared like masala chai” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish “the kind of tea we make here” from “the kind of tea they make somewhere else”.

“Naan” may mean bread, but “naan bread” means specifically “bread prepared like this” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish between “bread made how we make it” and “bread how other people make it”.

We also sometimes say “liege lord” when talking about feudal homage, even though “liege” is just “lord” in French, or “flower blossom” to describe the part of the flower that opens, even though when “flower” was borrowed from French it meant the same thing as blossom. 

We also do this with place names: “brea” means tar in Spanish, but when we came across a place where Spanish-speakers were like “there’s tar here”, we took that and said “Okay, here’s the La Brea tar pits”.

 Or “Sahara”. Sahara already meant “giant desert,” but we call it the Sahara desert to distinguish it from other giant deserts, like the Gobi desert (Gobi also means desert btw).

English doesn’t seem to be the only language that does this for places: this page has Spanish, Icelandic, Indonesian, and other languages doing it too.

Languages tend to use a lot of repetition to make sure that things are clear. English says “John walks”, and the -s on walks means “one person is doing this” even though we know “John” is one person. Spanish puts tense markers on every instance of a verb in a sentence, even when it’s abundantly clear that they all have the same tense (”ayer [yo] caminé por el parque y jugué tenis” even though “ayer” means yesterday and “yo” means I and the -é means “I in the past”). English apparently also likes to use semantic repetition, so that people know that “chai” is a type of tea and “naan” is a type of bread and “Sahara” is a desert. (I could also totally see someone labeling something, for instance, pan dulce sweetbread, even though “pan dulce” means “sweet bread”.)

Also, specifically with the chai/tea thing, many languages either use the Malay root and end up with a word that sounds like “tea” (like té in Spanish), or they use the Mandarin root and end up with a word that sounds like “chai” (like cha in Portuguese).

So, can we all stop making fun of this now?

Okay and I’m totally going to jump in here about tea because it’s cool. Ever wonder why some languages call tea “chai” or “cha” and others call it “tea” or “the”? 

It literally all depends on which parts of China (or, more specifically, what Chinese) those cultures got their tea from, and who in turn they sold their tea to. 

The Portuguese imported tea from the Southern provinces through Macau, so they called tea “cha” because in Cantonese it’s “cha”. The Dutch got tea from Fujian, where Min Chinese was more heavily spoken so it’s “thee” coming from “te”. And because the Dutch sold tea to so much of Europe, that proliferated the “te” pronunciation to France (”the”), English (”tea”) etc, even though the vast majority of Chinese people speak dialects that pronounce it “cha” (by which I mean Mandarin and Cantonese which accounts for a lot of the people who speak Chinese even though they aren’t the only dialects).

And “chai”/”chay” comes from the Persian pronunciation who got it from the Northern Chinese who then brought it all over Central Asia and became chai.

(Source) 

This is the post that would make Uncle Iroh join tumblr

Tea and linguistics. My two faves.

I love this

it’s not just english, that’s just how borrowings work in languages. the borrowed word typically undergoes specialization (like with chai) or broadening of meaning. i’d even risk saying that while being adapted to english chai went through a bit of a semantic shift, as its meaning moved from a type of drink to a combination of spices (chai latte etc). it was explained very nicely by the people above me. basically what i’m trying to say is don’t say people use chai as a modifier because they don’t know better, cause they use the word correctly within the context of the english language. alterations of meaning are natural adaptation processes that are unavoidable when speakers of different languages interact, especially if the borrowed words come from languages belonging to vastly different cultures and the speakers of the borrowing language need to adjust the original meaning to their contextual needs.