Title s matter

Edward Steichen was taken by the beauty of delphiniums and hybridized many new varieties at his Connecticut farm. This photo is from the 1940s.

Pretty sure that only Brits of a certain age will get this one. I’ve been laughing for about an hour now.

When English isn’t your first language, reading fanfics in your first language (if there are even any) becomes so much more embarrassing???? And sometimes I wonder why native English speakers don’t get that feeling when they are reading in their native language???

scrolling through the comments on this people with at least three separate native languages have chimed in to agree that English is the porn language. This… is amazing. I never knew.

oh oui. tu m’étonnes.

There is actually an interesting cultural/linguistic theory of explanation for this! I’m not a linguistics expert, just a person who likes learning languages, so my explanation will probably be a bit muddled, but I hope people find it interesting anyhow. You can read a relevant paper here; the authors of the paper call this phenomenon (or a phenomenon that’s very similar to it, at least) “emotion-related language choice theory,” but I don’t know if there’s a widely accepted term for it yet, despite the fact that people have been studying it for– I think close to 20 years? Quite a while, anyhow.

So basically, the cultural “naughtiness” of swear words/taboo words in your first language is something that’s very deeply ingrained– you might not hear these words at all in your early years, and if you do hear them there’s a good chance that there was some shame/reproach/anger involved if someone slipped and used them around you, or if your peers whispered them to each other on the playground to show how cool and grown-up they were. Also, people are generally very thoroughly versed in the complex nuances of how and when to use swearwords in their first language, and they fully understand the cultural weight of using these words to convey intense emotions.

When we’re reading, speaking, or writing in a non-primary language, however, we don’t bring all of that cultural baggage with us. For years linguists assumed assumed that it was easier to talk about highly emotional topics in one’s native language, because people generally feel more comfortable speaking the language(s) they’ve grown up with. A newer theory, however, posits that sometimes it’s actually easier to discuss these very taboo topics in a second or non-primary language, because we don’t have that culturally loaded sense of shame and emotional intensity weighing us down. Reading, for instance, smutty fanfic in a second language allows us to have a degree of removal from the topic at hand, which can be very liberating, because we get all the fun and excitement of reading smut with a great deal less socio-cultural nonsense.

(There’s another at least tangentially relevant thing here that I know even less about, which is a recently-studied mechanism wherein our brains basically refuse to fully translate non-primary language words with negative connotations all the way back to our native language, which lets us maintain a greater degree of distance from the negative thing, but I’ve been rambling for long enough, so I’m just gonna link the paper, and if people want to hear more about it I’d be happy to expound: link).

Lol. Yeah. And different languages also affect how you behave. I am more outgoing and bold when speaking English; my stance is more “come at me bro. Fight me bro.” But when I speak my native tongue I become more reserved and think more…. logically?? Point is, if I read fanfic in my native language I’d be so embarrassed that I can’t even finish the first 500 words.

Thank YOU for this! It’s amazing reading something that I knew *deep down* for years, but never had paused to really consider or write down. Absolutely true. 

Paradise

Happy Birthday Sade!

For @titlesmatter, my oldest Tumblr friend. A bit of her country in downtown Toronto 😄

Thank you <3333 Obrigada! It’s Little Portugal alright!

MERMAIDS [1990] dir. Richard Benjamin

Portugal went 100% renewable in March!

103.6% to be exact!

Here is a source

And another

Aaaand another

Stephen King, Pet Sematary (via 365daysofterror)

i just found out merriam webster has a time traveler feature that tells you some of the words that were “born” the same year as you. it’s pretty neat yall should do this

I’m the same age as glass ceiling and horndog.

Sea monkey and soccer mom.

and so is love I kate bush

Graham with his cittern, Jan 2017 (via fyldeguitars.com)

- Fyldeguitars added: Graham sent me a picture of himself with his new Cittern.

Canned Cheet 

Ocean Colour Scene - “It’s My Shadow”

When you find that things are getting wild, is that the hardest smile, that you can ever feel?