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We've Got Magic to Do

@peacekindnesspossibility / peacekindnesspossibility.tumblr.com

Taylor || 24+ || Going between East Coast America and West Coast Canada Utter science fiction nerd. Forever in love with dynamic female characters. Shall we begin?
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Victoria Sawchyn and Kathryn Lake being “best friends” for the entirety of Trigger (2010)

This is love: I secretly believe that I'm unlovable, and then I meet you. You tell me that you love me. I love you because you love me, but that has nothing to do with you; it's about you loving me. I only love you because I imagine myself unlovable, and you, against all odds, love me. And then, and some point, you do something that makes me think that you don't love me, which I'm more ready to believe than you loving me because I'm unlovable, so I stop loving you; I only love you because you love me, and I'm unlovable.”
“What about the other person? The person who loves you?
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wow i wonder if that 300 year gap could be explained by any outside factors…….whoa! for some reason it lines up with the timeline of britain’s invasion and subsequent colonization of ireland! wild, huh? i wonder if the two are connected in some way? i guess the world will never know….

“why do the Irish hate the English so much? It couldn’t have been *that* bad!!”

This was in place till 1973.

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commie-cosmo

Seeing non irish people reblogging this makes me happy

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thinking about all times i went through something or had a pivotal or even a mundane experience in my life then read a book or watched a movie or listened to an album and was so pleasantly surprised at how much i could resonate (almost at an alarming level) and how comforted it made me feel. it's so lovely.......the timing of the universe and how it always offers you little pieces of art like books, movies, tv shows, songs and albums and slowly nudges it your way exactly when you need those things at a certain stage in your life, perhaps to make you understand your life and your experiences better and to sharpen the thoughts you already had, or clarify ones you didn't even know you had

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pansoph

for chinese new year they get all these famous actors and comedians together and they do a lil show and one of the comedians was like “i was in a hotel in america once and there was a mouse in my room so i called reception except i forgot the english word for mouse so instead i said ‘you know tom and jerry? jerry is here’

jerry is here

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eruriholic

my chinese teacher once shared this story in class about someone who went to the grocery to buy chicken, but they forgot the english word for it, so they grabbed an egg, went to the nearest sales lady and said “where’s the mother”

When I was a teenager, we went to Italy for the summer holidays. We are German, neither of us speaks more than a few words of Italian. That didn’t keep my family from always referring to me when they wanted something translated because “You’re so good with languages and you took Latin”. (I told them a hundred times I couldn’t order ice cream in Latin, they ignored that.) Anyway, my dad really loved a certain cheese there, made from sheep’s milk. He knew the Italian word for ‘cheese’ – formaggio – and he knew how to say ‘please’. And he had already spotted a little shop that sold the cheese. He asked me what ‘sheep’ was in Italian, and of course, I had no idea. So he just shrugged and said “I’ll manage” and went into the shop. 5 mins later, he comes out with a little bag, obviously very pleased with himself. How did he manage it? He had gone in and said “'Baaaah’ formaggio, prego.”

I was done for the day.

This makes me feel better about every conversation I had in both Rome and Ghent.

I once lost my husband in the ruins of a French castle on a mountain, and trotted around looking for him in increasing desperation. “Have you seen my husband?” I asked some French people, having forgotten all descriptive words. “He is small, and English. His hair is the color of bread.”

I did not find my husband in this way.

In rural France it is apparently Known that one brings one’s own shopping bags to the grocery store. I was a visitor and had not been briefed and had no shopping bag. I saw that other people were able to conduct negotiations to purchase shopping bags, but I could not remember the word for “bag.”

“Can I have a box that is not a box,” I said.

The checkout lady looked extremely tired and said, “Un sac?” (A sack?)

Of course. A fucking sack. And so I did get a sack.

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kat2107

I once was at a German-American Church youth camp for two weeks and predictably, we spoke a whole lot of English. 

When I phoned my mom during week two I tried to tell her that it was a bit cold in the sleeping bag at night. I stumbled around the word in German because for the love of god, I could remember the Germwn word for sleeping bag.

“Yeah so, it’s like a bag you sleep in at night?”

“And my mother must probably have thought I lost my mind. She just sighed and was like ‘So, a Schlafsack, yes?”

Which is LITERALLY Sleeping sac … The German word is a basically a one on one translation of the English word and I just… I failed it. At my mother tongue. BIG

My former boss is Italian and she ended up working in a lab where the common language was English. She once saw an insect running through the lab and she went to tell her colleagues. She remembered it was the name of a famous English band so she barged in the office yelling there was a rolling stone in the lab…

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backonrepeat

I’m Spanish and have been living in the UK for a while now. I recently changed jobs and moved to a new office which is lost somewhere in the Midlands’ countryside. It’s a pretty quaint location, surrounded by forest on pretty much all sides, and with nice grounds… full of pheasants. I was pretty shocked when I drove in and saw a fucking pheasant strolling across the road. Calm as you please.

That afternoon I met up with some friends and was talking about the new job, and the new office, and for the life of me I couldn’t remember the English word for pheasants. So I basically ended up bragging to my friends about “the very fancy chickens” we had outside the office.

Best thing is, everyone understood what I meant.

I love those stories so much…

Picture a Jewish American girl whose grasp of the Hebrew language comes from 10+ years of immersion in Biblical and liturgical Hebrew, not the modern language. Some words are identical, while others have significantly evolved.

She gets to Israel and is riding a bus for the very first time.

American: כמה ממון זה? (”How much money?” but in rather archaic language)

Bus Driver: שתי זוזים. (”Two zuzim” – a currency that’s been out of circulation for millenia)

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learningftw

that’s hilarious

I am officially screamlaughing at my desk from that last one OH MY 

Does everyone know the prime minister who promised to fuck the country?

So in Biblical Hebrew the word for penis and weapon are the same. There is a verb meaning to arm, which modern Hebrew semanticly drifted into “fuck”: i.e. give someone your dick.

The minister was making a speech while a candidate, bemoning the state of the world. “The Soviet Union is fucking Egypt. Germany is fucking Syria. The Americans are fucking everyone. But who is fucking us? When I am prime minister, I will ensure we are fucked!”

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andhishorse

What the hell Biblical Hebrew.

Just guessing: The path from something like “give someone a blade” to “give someone a blade, if you know what I mean ;)” is probably not that difficult or unlikely.

^Given that the Latin word for sheath (like, for a sword) is literally “vagina”, I can verify that this metaphor is a time-honored one. 

Oh yeah and one time my Latin professor was at this conference in Greece and his flight was canceled, so he needed to extend his hotel stay by one more night.

Except he doesn’t speak a lick of modern Greek, and the receptionist couldn’t speak English.  Or French.  Or German.  Or Italian.  (He tried all of them.)

Finally, in a fit of inspiration, he went upstairs and got his copy of Medea in the original Greek (you know, the stuff separated from modern Greek by two and a half thousand years).  He found the passage where Medea begs Jason to let her stay for one more day, went downstairs, and read it to the receptionist.

She laughed her head off, but she gave him the extra night.  

All of these *chef’s kiss* but the Medea one is hands down the best

s/o to my classics professor who managed to get a tire changed on his rental car while doing research in Greece by telling them his chariot had broken down

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“After thirty years of intensive research, we can now answer many of the questions posed earlier. The recycle rate of a human being is around sixteen hours. After sixteen hours of being awake, the brain begins to fail. Humans need more than seven hours of sleep each night to maintain cognitive performance. After ten days of just seven hours of sleep, the brain is as dysfunctional as it would be after going without sleep for twenty-four hours. Three full nights of recovery sleep (i.e., more nights than a weekend) are insufficient to restore performance back to normal levels after a week of short sleeping. Finally, the human mind cannot accurately sense how sleep-deprived it is when sleep-deprived.”

Matthew Walker PhD, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams (via themedicalstate)

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It’s black history month, so here’s a few black wlw from history!

Stormé Delavarie, activist involed in the Stonewall Riots (1920 - 2014)

Josephine Baker, performer, civil rights activist and World War 2 spy (1906 - 1975)

Audre Lorde, writer and activist (1934 - 1992)

Gladys Bentley, singer and performer (1907 - 1960)

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Bessie Smith, blues singer (1894 - 1937)

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Lorraine Hansberry, author and playwright (1930 - 1965)

Black lesbians and bisexual women are and always have been absolutely instrumental to the LGBTQ community, and we owe them so much.

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