Geoffrey Nunberg on twitter, January 3, 2018 (via linguisten)

monolingual parents: *didn’t raise me bilingual*

me: uh… rude.

old people really need to learn how to text accurately to the mood they’re trying to represent like my boss texted me wondering when my semester is over so she can start scheduling me more hours and i was like my finals are done the 15th! And she texts back “Yay for you….” how the fuck am i supposed to interpret that besides passive aggressive

Someone needs to do a linguistic study on people over 50 and how they use the ellipsis. It’s FASCINATING. I never know the mood they’re trying to convey.

I actually thought for a long time that texting just made my mother cranky. But then I watched my sister send her a funny text, and my mother was laughing her ass off. But her actual texted response?

“Ha… right.”

Like, she had actual goddamn tears in her eyes, and that was what she considered an appropriate reply to the joke.I just marvelled for a minute like ‘what the actual hell?’ and eventually asked my mom a few questions. I didn’t want to make her feel defensive or self-conscious or anything, it just kind of blew my mind, and I wanted to know what she was thinking.

Turns out that she’s using the ellipsis the same way I would use a dash, and also to create ‘more space between words’ because it ‘just looks better to her’. Also, that I tend to perceive an ellipsis as an innate ‘downswing’, sort of like the opposite of the upswing you get when you ask a question, but she doesn’t. And that she never uses exclamation marks, because all her teachers basically drilled it into her that exclamation marks were horrible things that made you sound stupid and/or aggressive.

So whereas I might sent a response that looked something like:

“Yay! That sounds great - where are we meeting?”

My mother, whilst meaning the exact same thing, would go:

‘Yay. That sounds great… where are we meeting?”

And when I look at both of those texts, mine reads like ‘happy/approval’ to my eye, whereas my mother’s looks flat. Positive phrasing delivered in a completely flat tone of voice is almost always sarcastic when spoken aloud, so written down, it looks sarcastic or passive-aggressive.

On the reverse, my mother thinks my texts look, in her words, ‘ditzy’ and ‘loud’. She actually expressed confusion, because she knows I write and she thinks that I write well when I’m constructing prose, and she, apparently, could never understand why I ‘wrote like an airhead who never learned proper English’ in all my texts. It led to an interesting discussion on conversational text. Texting and text-based chatting are, relatively, still pretty new, and my mother’s generation by and large didn’t grow up writing things down in real-time conversations. The closest equivalent would be passing notes in class, and that almost never went on for as long as a text conversation might. But letters had been largely supplanted by telephones at that point, so ‘conversational writing’ was not a thing she had to master. 

So whereas people around my age or younger tend to text like we’re scripting our own dialogue and need to convey the right intonations, my mom writes her texts like she’s expecting her Eighth grade English teacher to come and mark them in red pen. She has learned that proper punctuation and mistakes are more acceptable, but when she considers putting effort into how she’s writing, it’s always the lines of making it more formal or technically correct, and not along the lines of ‘how would this sound if you said it out loud?’

German Sex Vocabulary {NSFW obvs}

Inspired by @languagesandshootingstars ’s Finnish sex vocabulary list!

Sex (m) - Sex

Geschlechtsverkehr (m) - Sexual intercourse

beischlafen - To have sexual intercourse

Beischlaf (m) - Sexual intercourse (not used often)

miteinander schlafen; schlafen mit - To have sex; sleep with

kopulieren - To copulate

Sex haben - To have sex

Liebe machen - To make love

jemanden flachlegen - To shag someone (lit. To lay someone flat)

vögeln - To shag (capitalization is important here, ex. ‘Ich bin gut zu vögeln’ means ‘I’m a good fuck’ but ‘ich bin gut zu Vögeln’ means 'I am good to birds’)

ficken (vulgar) - To fuck

rummachen - To make out

küssen - To kiss

kuscheln - To cuddle

Striptease (m) - Striptease

Ejakulation (f) - Ejaculation

ejakulieren - To ejaculate

abspritzen (slang) - To ejaculate

kommen - To cum

Erektion (f) - Erection

Latte (f) - Boner

Morgenlatte (f) - Morning wood

Penis (m) - Penis

Schwanz (m) - Dick

blasen - To blow

befriedigen - To satisfy

jemanden oral befriedigen (formal-ish) - To satisfy someone orally

Selbstbefriedigung (f) - Masturbation

sich selbst befriedigen - To pleasure oneself

onanieren; masturbieren - To masturbate

sich einen runterholen (slang) - To masturbate; jack off

oral - Oral

anal - Anal

Vagina (f) - Vagina

Muschi (f) - Pussy

lecken - To eat out

fingern - To finger

feucht - wet

Blümchensex (m) - Vanilla sex

Gummi (m); Kondom (n) - Condom

Geburtenkontrolle (f) - Birth control

Antibabypille (f) - Birth control pill

Geschützter Sex (m) - Protected sex

Safer Sex (m) - Safe sex

Vorspiel (n) - Foreplay

schmutzig reden - To talk dirty

geil - Horny

erregen - To arouse

erregt - Turned on; Aroused

Wollust (f) - Lust

Liebe (f) - Love

Jungfrau (f) - Virgin

Unterwäsche (f) - Underwear; Lingerie

Damenunterwäsche (f) - (women’s) Lingerie

Reizwäsche (f) - (very sexy 😏) Lingerie

intim - Intimate

Dreier (m) - Threesome

Orgie (f) - Orgy

Gruppensex (m) - Group sex

Thank you to my sexy German friend @historyandlanguages for helping out a lot with this list!

Lmao did someone actually just unmatch me one tinder for saying “I don’t use lsd”

Listen, I don’t want to be That Person™ but I’ve made the important and entirely unfortunate discovery that el anillo “ring” is just a diminutive of el ano “anus”

Have fun putting a little anus on your fingers, if you need me I’ll be kinkshaming the entire Spanish language

wouldn’t little anus be ‘anito’ not anillo?

Okay so you’re not totally wrong, but today it’s more of a regional thing.

Spain tends to have diminutives that end in -illo/a, while Latin America tends to have diminutives ending in -ito/a. That’s a big oversimplification, and it overlooks the other diminutives, but that’s sort of what it amounts to.

For example, el problemilla sounds more like Spain, while el problemita is more Latin American for “little problem”

You sort of see it with chiquillo/a vs. chiquito/a for the diminutive of chico/a “small” or “boy/girl”

Like… when I say “ladder” I say la escalerilla while I think that would be more common for Spain. When I look it up in Latin American dictionaries, it tells me la escalera / las escaleras which to me mean "staircase / stairs”, so to me it makes sense to say “little stairs”

Especially in cases where Spanish borrows a word from older languages like Latin to make a newer-but-still-related word. Linguistically, you also sometimes run into “this word came from a plural in Latin” like la semilla "seed”

For example, cultellus comes from culter and that’s how you get el cuchillo “knife”, or el colmillo “fang/sharp tooth” which came from columella which is a diminutive of columna for Latin

Another is la manteca “lard/fat” [which isn’t Latin as far as I know], but then la mantequilla “butter”, or la trampilla “trap door” related to la trampa “trap”

(There are also diminutive words from feminine words in Latin, but they don’t usually have the -illo/a from what I know, like la aguja “needle” comes from acucula which comes from acus)

Today, I think the diminutives are more regionalized, but I think of -illo/a as very Spain in modern Spanish. It’s probably way more nuanced than I’m making it sound, so there might be unspoken rules I don’t know.

Lol I love when I see a post by a straight white person bitching about how “not everything is that deep” when it comes to subtler forms of discrimination in society, and it’s got a bunch of likes that are all also straight white people. I just love it when people who couldn’t possibly fathom what it’s like to be a stark minority in nearly every social situation you’re in, who couldn’t possibly fathom having their rights to employment, housing, fuck, even love, be a point of political discussion, who couldn’t possibly fathom living in a world where what you’re given is sub-par and if you ask for better, you’re uppity and ‘triggered’, thinks it’s their place to get up on that social media soap box and tell those who are begging for something as simple as decent treatment to sit down and shut up. When you live in a society in which everything is structured and tailored for people who aren’t like you, it is “that deep”. So go ahead, gripe on Facebook with your other short sighted close minded fuckers about why queer people, black people, women, etc. ought to stop calling attention to their own poor treatment. We’re all too tired to argue anyway.

Saying “that’s illegal” as a reason not to do something is like saying “because I said so”. If you can’t think of a legitimate reason something is wrong aside from the threat of state coercion, it probably isn’t wrong.

Body language in Norwegian

Translated from suggestions made by @norwegianlearner !

Å gestikulere - To gesticulate, to make gestures

En gest / En gestikulasjon / En fakte  - A gesture

Å riste på hodet - To shake one’s head

Å nikke (på hodet) - To nod (one’s head)

Å bukke - To bow

Å trekke på skuldrene - To shrug one’s shoulders

Å lute seg fremover - To hunch one’s shoulders, to hunch forward

Å himle med øynene - To roll one’s eyes

Å gni seg i øynene - To rub one’s eyes

Å myse (med øynene) - To squint (one’s eyes), to narrow one’s eyes

Å heve øyenbrynene - To raise one’s eyebrows

Å rynke pannen, å rynke brynene - To knit one’s eyebrows, to furrow one’s brows 

Å snu (på) hodet - To twist one’s head

Å klø seg i hodet/ansiktet - To scratch one’s head/face

Å klø seg på nesen/nesa - To scratch one’s nose

Å stryke seg på/over haken - To stroke one’s chin

Å snyte seg / Å snyte nesen/nesa - To blow one’s nose

Å rynke på nesen/nesa - To crinkle one’s nose

Å holde seg for nesen/nesa - To squeeze one’s nose, To hold one’s nose

Å krysse armene - To fold your arms

Å slå armene rundt/om - To clasp your arms around

Å krysse be(i)na - To cross your legs

Å ønske seg noe - To make a wish

Å krysse fingrene - To cross one’s fingers

Å dra seg i øret - To tug on one’s ear

Å gjøre/gi en high-five - To high-five

Å rekke tunge / Å geipe - To stick out one’s tongue

Å legge hodet på skakke - To tilt one’s head

Å lage en grimase - To make a face

Å hytte med neven (mot) - To shake one’s fist (at)

Å knytte neven - To clench one’s fist

Å slå ut med armene - To throw one’s hands up (usually in frustration or resignation)

Å knipe sammen leppene / Å knipe leppene sammen - To press one’s lips together

Å bite seg i leppa - To bite one’s lip

Å bite sammen tennene / Å bite tennene sammen - To grit one’s teeth, to clench one’s jaw

Å kremte / Å klare stemmen- To clear one’s throat

Å få øyekontakt - To make eye contact

Å unngå øyekontakt - To avoid eye contact

Å håndhilse - To shake hands

Å tvinne tomler - To twiddle one’s thumbs

Å tromme med fingrene - To tap one’s fingers

Å stampe med føttene - To stamp one’s feet

Å bite negler - To bite one’s nails

Å plukke på neglene sine - To pick at one’s nails

Å rive negler - To tear at one’s nails

Å gynge seg / Å vagge (frem/fram og tilbake) - To rock oneself (back and forth)

Å vri seg i hendene - To wring one’s hands

Å dra fingrene gjennom håret - To run one’s hand through one’s hair

Å rødme - To blush

Å stirre på - To stare at

Å skule på - To glare at

Å blunke mot - To blink at - 

Å blunke til - To wink at

Å rynke pannen (mot) - To frown (at)

Å peke på - To point at

Å lene seg inn/på/mot - To lean in/on/against

Å vinke - wave

Å klappe i hendene - To clap one’s hands

Å furte - To pout, to sulk

Å vike (unna) - To flinch

Å døse av - To nod off

Å våkne med et rykk - To jerk awake 

Feel free to correct any mistakes or typos I might have made! Happy learning! <3

Toxische Maskulinität (Symbolbild)

Christmas vocab list - Czech

Czech christmas:

Vánoce - Christmas  Veselé Vánoce! - Merry Christmas!  Šťastné a veselé! - another way of saying Merry Christmas (lit. happy and merry!) Prosinec (m) - December  Advent (m) - advent (the period of 4 weeks before Christmas) Adventní věnec (m) - advent wreath Adventní kalendář (m) - advent calender Vánoční trhy - Christmas markets Mikuláš (m) - Saint Nicolas (5th December) Anděl (m) - angel Čert (m) - devil Štědrý den (m) - Christmas Day (24th) (Vánoční) koleda (f) - christmas carol Dárek (m) - present Balící papír (m) - wrapping paper Ježíšek (m) - baby Jesus (brings presents) Přání (n) - christmas card (Vánoční) stromeček (m) - christmas tree  Svíčka (f) - candle  Světlo (n) - light  Ozdoba (f) - ornament zdobit - to decorate Hvězda (f) - star Sníh (m)  - snow  Sněhová vločka (f) - snowflake  Rampouch (m)  - icicle  Sněhulák (m) - snowman  Tradice (f) - tradition Rodina (f) - family Pohádky (f) - fairy tales Červený/á/é - red  Zelený/á/é - green Bílý/á/é - white  Ryba (f) - fish Kapr (m) - carp Bramborový salát (m) - potato salad Křížaly - dried apple pieces Vánočka (f) - (apparently, according to google translate) Christmas cake Perníček (m)  - gingerbread cookie Sladkosti (pl) - candy  Cukroví (n) - christmas baked sweets Čokoláda (f) - chocolate  Krb (m) - fireplace Půlnoční mše (f) - midnight mass Ježíš - Jesus Narození (n) - birth Betlém (m) - nativity scene  Slavit - to celebrate Sněžit - to snow Koulovat se - to have a snowball fight Anglophone christmas: skřítek, elf (m) - elf (Santa’s helper) sob (m) - reindeer  sáně (m) - sleigh  Severní pól - North Pole

kinda taken from Essi

walks into the scandinavian mcdjønalds

orders a hæmbjørger