You know what I think is really cool about language (English in this case)? It’s the way you can express “I don’t know” without opening your mouth. All you have to do is hum a low note, a high note, then another lower note. The same goes for yes and no. Does anyone know what this is called?

These are called vocables, a form of non-lexical utterance - that is, wordlike sounds that aren’t strictly words, have flexible meaning depending on context, and reflect the speakers emotional reaction to the context rather than stating something specific. They also include uh-oh! (that’s not good!), uh-huh and mm-hmm (yes), uhn-uhn (no), huh? (what?), huh… (oh, I see…), hmmn… (I wonder… / maybe…), awww! (that’s cute!), aww… (darn it…), um? (excuse me; that doesn’t seem right?), ugh and guh (expressions of alarm, disgust, or sympathy toward somebody else’s displeasure or distress), etc.

Every natural human language has at least a few vocables in it, and filler words like “um” and “erm” are also part of this overall class of utterances. Technically “vocable” itself refers to a wider category of utterances, but these types of sounds are the ones most frequently being referred to, when the word is used.

Reblog if u just hummed all of these out loud as you read them

How the hell did the internet come to the conclusion that differing opinions on indoor vs outdoor cats is ANIMAL ABUSE

Because of science and statistics. Outdoor cats live shorter lives and die crueler deaths than indoor cats. That's not a matter of "differing opinion" it's a conclusion based on observable evidence. The "differing opinion" is based on arrogance and refusal to change behavior to improve your husbandry

It's hard for a lot of people to hear, because if you have had outside cats a lot of your life it's very heartbreaking to hear something that seems to say that you abused your animals, especially if you really loved them.

Also a lot of us as kids had outside cats and we didn't have any control over their living conditions, but it still creates much guilt.

That's not the point though. The point is that culture changes and we know more and have a better ability to do right by our creatures, and we can do Our Best now just as we did Our Best in the past.

Many people are not conscious of cats being non-native predators, don't think of them as invasive species because they were never told that. It's fine to not have known something.

It's also fine to not have known that cats can thrive indoors and they don't need to go outside unsupervised to be happy. There are very common myths about how cats can't be trained and how cats don't get enriched by interaction by their owners that dogs do.

With that said—it is a good idea to keep cats inside. I grew up with outdoor cats and had so many of them get gruesome injuries or diseases and die very young. There is the occasional lucky cat that makes it a long time, but most outside cats die well before their time. They get in fights with other cats, they get mauled by dogs, they get hit by cars, they get all sorts of worms and other parasites, and they get poisoned or shot by malicious people who don't want cats on their property. One of my childhood cats, I found under a bush with her guts ripped out. Things like that happen to the cats that "disappear."

These things can happen even to a smart cat. You can't be sure your neighborhood is safe. Your neighbor two doors down might get a Husky tomorrow that mauls cats. A drunk driver might tear through your otherwise quiet neighborhood.

Your cat doesn't have a cell phone that they can call 911 if something is trying to kill them. They can't yell "Help me!" if they are stranded somewhere with a broken back or some horrible injury.

A cat isn't thinking, "I'm confident that I can deal with all the dangers out here!" when it goes outside. Cats roam around because instinct makes them feel that it's a good idea to maintain a big perimeter of territory, not because they necessarily like doing it. They don't know what a disease is. They just catch a disease and they know that they hurt and feel awful, and sometimes they die.

For all these reasons I think the choice that makes sense is to keep your cats inside when you can't supervise them or keep them in an enclosed space. They're animals that don't know what we know, and we have the ability to keep them safe from lots of things. So I think we should.

and these wakeup calls come in waves. I never had outdoor cats, but my wakeup call was learning that declawing isn’t just a matter of ‘cutting the nail off,’ but amputating the entire fingertip. My late cat Oni went 15 years walking on the stubs of her toes because the gruesome realities of declawing weren’t common knowledge when I was a kid. Once we learned better, and committed to not declawing any of our other cats, this set her up to get bullied by younger cats who still had natural weapons she lacked. It’s a sucky situation. 

This is like that. We’re brushing the veneer of normalcy off of ignorant animal-keeping practices that have led to short, tragic lives. We’re presented with the opportunity to do better.

Yeah, most of the time I don't think people are maliciously ignorant and I think they care about their animals. I think there's a pressure to not have ever been ignorant about certain things, and it feels like if you're wrong about this thing you're just an awful person forever.

Y'all know how people say that "animal abusers" are unspeakably evil people that have something wrong with them. That's hard to reconcile with the fact that ~40 years ago, everyone you knew raised their animals a certain way, and you're pretty sure they weren't all evil people.

But sometimes you have to be like "I was doing my best then, and I will do my best now, and it's worthwhile that my best now is better than it was then."

People who try to educate others online about this, unfortunately, have had the same conversation 70 thousand times with strangers who often have no desire at all to learn. Which makes it hard to begin every conversation with the same amount of grace.

Reblogging this again

Confession time; while I may have started making my girlfriend lunches purely because I love her there’s now a little bit of gay spite involved as well. I want the straight girls she works with to see what they’re missing and hold their men to higher standards.

Operation Gay Spite has claimed its first straight relationship! I’m not sure I’ve ever been prouder of anything in my life!

If making lunch broke them up it was never a good one in the first place

He gets it.

I’m genuinely curious how the lunches caused the breakup to happen, and I fully support the Gay Spite lunches

Literally since my bf saw this he’s started doing other things to model relationship goals for other guys. He’s always been lovely to me, but he’s made more of a point to show off the things we do for each other and raise people’s standards. He told his friend that we make dinner for each other every night and that guy went home and made his gf enchiladas. He posted about doing my laundry while I was at work (he does stuff like that all the time but usually isn’t public about it) and 2 other guys cleaned stuff up before their ladies came home.

Basically what I’m saying is that @solarpunkarchivist has started a chain reaction of straight people doing better and setting better examples and we appreciate it.

My dad has always sung to my mom on their birthday*, their anniversay, and the winter solstice because that’s her least favorite day of the year. He did this well before they got married, and he kept doing it after they started working in the same office building, walking over to her cubicle a few times a year with a dozen roses and singing a love song from broadway or an operetta. More often, he came over with a hot takeout lunch, or fresh salad or a dessert and would double-check who was picking me up today and what Mom wanted him to make for dinner if he was getting home first.

Some men gave him shit about doing that, bitching and moaning about “Maaaaaan you’re raising the bar!” or “Isn’t picking up the kids your wife’s job?” and so on.

But more men- many more men- came to him for advice. “Where did you learn to sing?” “My wife’s allergic to flowers and doesn’t like chocolate. What should I get her for her birthday?” “How did you get time off to pick up your kids early?” “I wanna do something nice for our anniversary, but it’s right before tax day and I never remember and I feel like an ass. How do you remember?” Net, he thinks setting a good example like that ended two relationships and saved five.

Setting a good example is a good idea to inspire people to realize they deserve better, but even better is that there are lots of people out there who want to do better and will glady take notes from you.

*they have the same birthday 4 years apart.

Rating: CUTE

These bugs are all good species to handle - none of them are dangerous and none of them are nervous by nature. All of them are being handled correctly.

“young adult dystopian novels are so unrealistic lmao like they always have some random teenage girl rising up to inspire the world to make change.”

a hero emerges 

And just like in the novels, grown men and women are going out of their way to destroy her. Support our hero.

And it’s not even like it doesn’t happen regularly.  

Teenage girls are amazing.

Sometimes they’re not even teenagers

Reblog every time a girl is discredited/ignored

Who they are:

Emma Gonzalez

Malala Yousafzai

Ruby Bridges

Greta Thunberg

Mari Copeny

Autumn Peltier

Afreen Khan

Sophie Cruz

Charlottesville Black Students Union

Naomi Wadler

DAPL protestors (names not found)

Ahed Tamimi

This isn’t a coincidence. Revolutions almost always happen when the population of a country is at its youngest and that’s a lot more true nowadays with social media.

Claudette Colvin was actually the first one to refuse her seat in Montgomery, Alabama to a white passenger. The movement chose to promote Rosa Parks as the figure for that form of protest because Claudette was a pregnant 15-year-old girl.

Barbara Rose Johns was a 16-year-old who organized a student strike protesting segregated schools. This strike, after gaining support of the NAACP, became a lawsuit that turned into Brown vs. The Board of Education and resulted in the desegregation of U.S schools nationally.

7th-grader Mary Beth Tinker, disturbed by the Vietnam War, decided to wear an arm band with a peace sign on it in protest. Her school suspended her. Her family filed a suit, Tinker vs. Des Moines, which reached the Supreme Court and ruled in her favor, ensuring that students and teachers maintain their right to free speech while in school.

Freddie & Truus Oversteegen were sisters who joined a Dutch resistance movement in WWII in their teens. They lured, ambushed, and assassinated Nazis and Dutch collaborators. They also blew up a railway line, transported Jewish refugees to new hiding places, and worked in an emergency hospital. 

Our history books may like to showcase male figures, but behind every movement is a young girl ready to make a change. It was true then, it’s true now, and future generations of teenage girls will go on to inspire progress, whether they’re credited or not.

This is Lepa Radic, a 17 year old girl who fought against the Nazis in Yugoslavia. She was executed when she refused to give the names of her Partisan comrades.

And this is Sophie Scholl, part of the White Rose group, also against the Nazis. She was 21 when she was killed.

Girls are at the front of every movement

And non-binary people. Emma Gonzalez uses they/them pronouns.

I do get the impulse to celebrate young girls when they are so derided, but sometimes there are even more marginalised people you’re marginalising further when you do so without care.

I’d like to encourage a shift towards celebrating young activists of all genders. Like, YES, there is a very real point to be made that if you’re not male, you’re more likely to be overlooked. But if you’re not a girl or woman either, you’re even more likely to be overlooked, and then misgendered if you are recognised.

Oh I didn’t know that Emma is nonbinary. Thanks for the addition!

I did know that they were bisexual, but I wasn’t aware that they are nonbinary as well.

There should be way more pictures of modern zoos so i just add some more

Seriously zoos do so much important conservation work as well I hate when people shit all over zoos as if the animals are locked up and not looked after

The SF Zoo has two sea lions. Now, if you know SF, you know that sea lions are a Thing. They’re all over Pier 39 and various other beaches in N California. In fact, the zoo is near the ocean, so there are sea lions not 200 yards from the zoo entrance. So having sea lions in the zoo seems sort of superfluous.

Except the sea lions are blind. One was found as an adult after suffering a gun shot wound to the face that destroyed his eyes. The other was found as an adolescent, weak and starving because it had been blinded and unable to hunt. So they were rescued and introduced and the zoo built them a nice pool where they can swim and sunbathe and people toss them fish. It’s not the biggest exhibit, or the fanciest. But it’s a home for them, where they’re safe and well fed. Sea lions aren’t the most romantic of animals, but they’re a part of SF culture and a lot of us have a soft spot for the loud, bulbous things. And because of zoos, these two get to live long, happy lives.

Whenever anyone complains about zoos, I think about Silent Knight and Henry. 

I think it’s St. Louis zoo that is saving big cats in Africa. Scientists couldn’t figure out what was killing off the local lion population. They were dying off from Canine Distemper. The local unvaccinated dogs of the towns would spread the disease to other animals or have it themselves. When the lions ate the infected animals they would catch it as well. You know what that Zoo is doing to stop this disease? They are going over to those towns and vaccinating the dogs for free. The community loves it and people from other villages comes for miles to get their dogs vaccinated as well.

They also do work with camel populations because the local human population use the camels for food sources the zoos help monitor the camels health.

Another zoo, I want to say it’s the Oregon zoo but don’t quote me on that, is helping female inmates. The zoo works with the female prisons by encouraging the inmates to assist in the breeding and raising of endangered species of butterflies. They plant the specific plants that the butterflies and catapillars need, raise them, and release them. These inmates get noted in any scientific journals that get published. They are giving these inmates a sense of accomplishment and validation.

Zoos not only save species but bring together and assist communities in an effort to save the environment. Zoos, good zoos, are essential to the future and I will fight anyone who tries to say otherwise.

PS you don’t see PETA doing any of this.

One of the local zoos in my area at one point rescued a bald eagle that had been shot and kept it in the zoo to let it recuperate until they freed it again. Some of the zoos in my state will keep injured animals there until they heal again.

Helsinki Zoo is the world leader in snow leopard and Amur leopard conservation, in their care these endangered species have managed to breed more than anywhere else in captivity and this in turn has enabled the re-introduction of these animals back to their native habitats. https://www.korkeasaari.fi/helsinki-zoo/

I work at a zoo that is instrumental in the California Condor recovery program (among dozens of other conservation projects). We went from 42 surviving individuals left to over 400, over 200 of whom are in the wild. We’re part of the amur leopard species survival plan with two young animals who are eagerly attempting to make babies. We host one of North America’s only bachelor troops of western lowland gorillas, preserving the social structure of wild gorillas. All of our bald eagles are rescues who would not survive in the wild. All our keepers participate in field research and conservation work in addition to a full time team of conservationists. We host the most genetically valuable male Masai giraffe in North America, who has sired 5 offspring with 1 on the way, increasing the genetic diversity of his entire species. If you’re against zoos, you don’t know what zoos do.

Super, SUPER important thread.

Also zoos tend to do a lot of breeding and conservation work with smaller, less charismatic species like invertebrates and amphibians. Those species are extremely important in the ecosystem but don’t get the same notoriety as the charismatic megafauna.

Wildlife Safari and Wildlife Images here in Oregon are really great to visit and they do so much. Wildlife Safari helps with Cheetah conservation among other things and Wildlife Images helps with conservation of North American wildlife.

I live in a very small town, and a few years ago someone illegally brought pumas to the mountains nearby. It was a whole thing, as we are a farming town, and pumas are not a native species to this area, so they had nothing to eat but our farm animals. The zoo from a few towns over sent specialists that eventually managed to track and safely capture all the pumas, and they gave them a safe and happy home at the zoo.

The alternative would’ve been people in my town relentlessly hunting them as they slowly ate all our cattle.

I think they planned to eventually reintegrate them into their natural habitat, but I was young & the details are fuzzy, so idk.

How come we can't just have villains anymore

What if the evil fashion designer wanted to skin puppies because she was evil? What if the guy that stabbed a bunch of teenagers did that because he wanted to stab a bunch of teenagers? What if the evil witch wanted to cook and eat children because she was--you guessed it!--evil? Why's everybody gotta have some tragic backstory for sympathy points? Boo! I want to see some unrepentant bastard do bastardly things and, perhaps, a woman covered in blood, also.

Everyone thinks their villain can be goob from meet the robinsons. Your villain will never be goob from meet the robinsons. Just make them evil.

cute couple things i’ve seen on campus this semester that make me want a stupid boyfriend

Im-

How was this only posted in 2019 i feel like i read it in another lifetime

The FIELD museum in Chicago has taken a note from Shedd Aquarium’s breakout move of letting the penguins roam the aquarium to explore and…

Bonus: 

What this pandemic has taught me is that every museum in the country has this costume hiding in their basement and they are VERY excited to use it.

Graham Norton: You’re so good at it! (twirling/spinning a lightsaber). EWAN MCGREGOR: I spent months doing it!

Know the facts

Me duele la cabeza

This is actually examples of the field of mathematics called topology and it’s fucking bullshit wizard shit.

finally, applied mathematics

Baby bird season is incoming and I’d like to remind everyone that birds do not have a significant sense of smell. Bird parents will not reject birdlets because you have handled them.

If you see smol birbs with few or no feathers on the ground, you can safely put them back into their nest, bird parents will still care for them.

If you see smol birbs with some or most feathers on the ground, please leave them there, as bird parents are probably nearby watching and feeding.

nakey bird = accidentally fell out, is cold and scared, put back in nest! if you can’t reach the nest, try to put it on a wide branch or fork so predators can’t get at it as easily.

scruffy feather bird = starting to try the fly thing, not very good at it. only put in nest/branch if predators abound, i.e. you have four outdoor cats and they’re licking their chops.

fluffy feather bird = smol fly guy! do nothing. can probably get away from predators and will flip its shit if you pick it up.

Reblogging this because I’d always heard the ‘Don’t touch a distressed bird its mom will reject it’ thing treated as fact before now, I didn’t realise it wasn’t true…

Spring is coming, time to reblog this again.

I want to be loved loudly. deeply. purely. genuinely.

58 seconds to demonstrate EXACTLY why professionalism requires manners.

For those of you who do not speak Corporate, this is just:

“Fuck you.” “Fuck you, too.”

This gave me hives

Me in the office

January 20, 2021

I hate that I fully understand this

Another woman utterly failed by our society’s devaluation of women’s reproductive health. We can’t wait around for male doctors to decide what we need to know. This is why we need to take control and educate ourselves about our own bodies.

and here’s some comments i saw under the post. why is this a pattern?? why is this a recurring theme?? why is this information not common knowledge? what the fuck are doctors doing??

This is news to me so let’s share it so people will know!

Gross tmi: but i passed a pretty big clot after having my daughter. It was about the size of a baseball. It actually hurt worse because while 15 hours of labor opened my cervix, i passed the clot in 30 minutes. I knew it was a possibility because of my midwife and reading, but everyone Ive told after this (mostly other pregnant women) were shocked that this could happen.

In our culture, it’s much more common to do deep research about what family cars we want to buy than we do about childbirth when we ’re pregnant.

Tmi: I passed a huge clot after birth in the bathroom of my hospital room and called the nurse sobbing because I didn’t know it was normal. She treated me like an idiot, but NO ONE told me it was a possibility. And the pain associated with healing for the first couple of weeks after birth was worse than the labor imo. Again, I had no idea. They didn’t tell me a thing besides “sitz bath regularly and change your pads.” Before discharging me from the hospital.

I was most definitely told about this in school. Fucking hell, 4-6 weeks of bleeding? My periods were/are bad enough, why the hell don’t we get told this?

I didn’t know it could last so long, wtf? Is the bleeding inevitable after birth? 

Bleeding is inevitable after birth - your uterine wall is shedding a fuck ton of lining. It can last from three to six weeks (possible longer) and it tapers off.

More TMI - I passed a MASSIVE clot after my fourth birth. At this point I already knew this could happen - it’s normal. What I DIDN’T know, was that I had caused it.

My post birth contractions were so bad after the birth that it felt like full transition labor. And they don’t give you anything for the pain. So I used a hot water bottle, without the nurses knowing, and it caused me to bleed even more. I lost so much blood that by the first time they sat me up to go to the bathroom, I fainted. It took three more tries until I could sit up.

Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is, the next morning I passed a clot the SIZE OF ANOTHER PLACENTA I KID YOU NOT, and I know what is and is not normal. So I called for the nurse and through the door told her I had passed a huge clot, and her response was - “It’s not big. I know what big is.” She hadn’t even looked. So I rolled my eyes and said, “Yeah, no. It’s big, I’m telling you.”

So, sounding extremely put upon, she asked me to open the door. I did, and after a long pause she goes, “Okay, yeah, that’s a little big.”

YOU DON’T SAY.

The point I’m trying to get across is that this shit is so common - women not knowing this stuff is so expected, and it keeps getting reinforced. People don’t expect you to know anything, don’t teach you anything, and then make you feel like you’re totally ignorant and a burden for your lack of knowledge when THEY WON’T SHARE.

Fucking learn EVERYTHING you can when it comes to childbirth, girls. It is the single most empowering thing you can do for yourself. And if you missed something, that’s okay. But the more knowledge you arm yourself with, the more in control of your situation you’ll be.

A few post partum tips:

This is just a few things, but PLEASE feel free to send me an ask if you have any questions about ANYTHING childbirth/pregnancy/nursing related. I have four incredible kids. I’ve done it all - c-section, vacuume birth, episiotimy, stitches, with an epidural, without an epidural. I’m here.

….I know I keep reblogging this but people keep adding super important information.

I feel like no one tells women this stuff because if a woman was even a little on the fence about having a baby before this would kinda make them run for the damn hills.

…..you are correct, typing.

300% EXTRA SURE I’M NOT HAVING BABIES. 

peri bottles, witch hazel or anti-pain anticeptic spray are your friends. Also passing large clots after birth is a WARNING SIGN. Bigger than a half dollar is a sign that you have not passed your entire placenta (this is most common in hospital vaginal births where the mother is not allowed to naturally birth the placenta and instead has it ripped out by the doctor) if there is any placenta left in your uterus you can get extremely ill. This happened to both myself and my mother in law

WOW I didn’t know any of this and I’m terrified of what more I’m unaware of about my own body :( Honestly when will we fucking abolish this taboo about the female body…

I had pretty great sex ed in school (lots of contraceptive information, and totally acknowledged that teenagers might have sex) and all of this is news to me.

And, as a 28-year-old person with a uterus, I’m extremely appalled I’m just learning this.

Long, but very important information, even for those who don’t plan to have children, because you will almost certainly know someone who will, and you might be able to to help them. Or at least increase your level of empathy for them.

…HOLY HELL. REBLOG TO SAVE A LIFE, SERIOUSLY.

people loooove to make out like pregnancy and childbirth are this beautiful thing that a woman’s body is made to do, and leave out all this incredibly important and scary info.

the healthcare system fails women in so so many ways, especially around sexual and reproductive health, and it needs to stop.

More TMI but no one told me what pregnancy discharge was and it was horrible. Like it’s a greater quantity of liquid coming out of you than on the heaviest day of your period. Sometimes I would stand up and a bunch would just run out of me. I was so scared and unprepared. Also, tampons are a VERY bad idea when your cervix is still dialated.

We are, as a culture, *amazingly* reluctant to talk about pregnancy and childbirth and recovery unless there’s a punchline involved.

Friendly reminder to wait at least one hour after you eat or drink to do anything that requires you to bend at the waist after giving birth because you can and will just puke by accident since your cardiac sphincter will probably never be the same