EXPRESSION | Être tiré à quatre épingles ➽ https://bit.ly/Expression-Tire-Epingles Être très soigné dans sa mise. Cette locution proverbiale a été empruntée à la toilette des femmes dont le fichu est tendu par quatre épingles pour rendre sa position plus régulière
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J'anticipe vachement mais s'il y a quelqu'un.e ici qui est calé.e en Ancien Français et veut bien m'aider si un jour j'ai des questions je serais très redevable
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Highlights from the conference room where they nominated contenders for Word of the Year 2023:
• They put Skibidi Toilet on the projector to explain what “skibidi” means.
• Baby Gronk was mentioned.
• We discussed the Rizzler.
• “Cunty” was nominated.
• “Enshittification” was suggested for EVERY category.
• “Blue Check” (like from Twitter) was briefly defined as “Someone who will not Shut The Fuck Up”
• The person writing notes briefly defined babygirl as “referencing [The Speaker]”. He is now being called babygirl in the linguist groupchats.
• MULTIPLE people raised their hand to say “I cannot stress this enough: ‘Babygirl’ refers to a GROWN MAN”
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I'm gonna reblog with some videos of people speaking various American Indian/indigenous American languages, because I think most people don't even know what they sound like. Not to be judgement of that—just, you know, I think people who want to be informed should know what they sound like!
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look, I know I've talked about this essay (?) before but like,
If you ever needed a good demonstration of the quote "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", have I got an exercise for you.
Somebody made a small article explaining the basics of atomic theory but it's written in Anglish. Anglish is basically a made-up version of English where they remove any elements (words, prefixes, etc) that were originally borrowed from romance languages like french and latin, as well as greek and other foreign loanwords, keeping only those of germanic origin.
What happens is an english which is for the most part intelligible, but since a lot everyday english, and especially the scientific vocabulary, has has heavy latin and greek influence, they have to make up new words from the existing germanic-english vocabulary. For me it kind of reads super viking-ey.
Anyway when you read this article on atomic theory, in Anglish called Uncleftish Beholding, you get this text which kind of reads like a fantasy novel. Like in my mind it feels like it recontextualizes advanced scientific concepts to explain it to a viking audience from ancient times.
Even though you're familiar with the scientific ideas, because it bypasses the normal language we use for these concepts, you get a chance to examine these ideas as if you were a visitor from another civilization - and guess what, it does feel like it's about magic. It has a mythical quality to it, like it feels like a book about magic written during viking times. For me this has the same vibe as reading deep magic lore from a Robert Jordan book.
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Every single person studying a language when they recognize the most basic word of the language in a text or a video
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EXPRESSION | Avoir maille à partir avec quelqu'un ➽ https://bit.ly/Expression-Maille-Partir C’est avoir un débat ou même seulement une discussion avec une personne ; c’est même quelquefois se quereller pour une bagatelle
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one of those pop linguistic lists of untranslatable words except they don't tell you what they mean (because they are untranslatable)
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Husband = בעל/Ba'al, with a ע
Onion = בצל/Batzal, with a צ
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In the native dialect of Lesbos, Sappho's name is spelled "Psappho". I sometimes picture what it would have been like if that had been the spelling modern English had gone with. Imagine being psapphic.
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posted in the editor's Facebook group I'm in, I thought y'all would get a kick out of it too
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