The art and beauty of English

keepcalm-andpartyyon:

A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.

A question mark walks into a bar?

Two quotation marks “Walk into” a bar.

A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to drink.

The bar was walked into by a passive voice.

Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They drink. They leave.

(via gallifreyan-stories)

Some Writing Prompt Generators

sauntering-vaguely-downwards:

pibsims:

needlekind:

Serendipity (names, places, mapbuilding, etc.)
Quick Story Idea
Full Story Idea
Writing Challenges
General Character
Quick Character
really just all of Seventh Sanctum
RPGesque generators
Writing Prompts
Inspiration Finder
Story Arc
Fantasy Story Situaton
Adventure
Chaotic Shiny is just really good in general
Random Plot 

reblog for my own reference

/high pitched screeching

(via tiny-jewish-santa)

crowleyaziraphale:

edgebug:

turnabout-taisa:

my-singing-soul:

why is it that all the most popular posts on tumblr

are written like this

with no capitals

and no punctuation

i just really want there to be a popular and grammatically correct post on tumblr

I think the majority of Tumblr’s dialect (is there a word for a written dialect? Hardly anyone speaks Tumblr.) comes from influence within the tag system.

My theory is that the lack of capitalization is stylized, ironic laziness (same reason as the increasingly popular use of abbreviations such as idek and ikr, and particles like desu), whereas the punctuation stems from the tag system, where commas split up tags. So, “this is like, so totally cool” would be tagged “this is like” “so totally cool.”

With commas struck from the tumblr blogger’s arsenal, they rely on run-on sentences and other means to show emphasis. One such means, spacing, is another quirk influenced by the tags. If you repeat a tag, it will only show once, which is why you get “really r e a l l y weird things like this.”

Also common on Tumblr are people who show their enthusiasm through their text by pretending their haNDS ARE FRKEAKIGN OUT AN D THEY CANT TPYE OMFGGGG. This adaptation is actually pretty cool, I think, as it serves to communicate tone across a very toneless medium.

Did you hear that noise? That was the sound of my desk breaking. My linguistics boner just snapped it in half.

 #we’ve created our own language with its own set of rules and guidelines #based on the environment #that is cool #if you don’t think that’s cool you’re wrong

(via psychoglossia)

bonegrammaticality:

thisisbensilver:

bonegrammaticality:

NO LISTEN, SERIOUSLY GUYS

1. What you call “correct grammar” is a social construct which is useful to know specifically because people will equate it with your level of education when you are trying to, say, apply for jobs, or get a book published, or the like. It is otherwise mainly a tool to divide people with a certain level of education from people without.
2. What you call “incorrect grammar” is colloquial language, it is the native English learned by that speaker during childhood, and it follows complex rules of its own. NO NATIVE SPEAKER OF ENGLISH SPEAKS BAD OR STUPID ENGLISH. THAT’S NOT HOW LANGUAGE WORKS.
3. THEREFORE, when you call people on “incorrect grammar,” the effect is often that of drawing attention to speech patterns that are perceived as signifiers of a person’s social background or education level. It is particularly important to keep this in mind when you are addressing a person’s language when they are in a space where they feel more comfortable or safe, and thus might want to use their native grammar rather than the socially imposed standard. 

I’m pretty sure that most of you don’t intentionally do that sort of thing, so you should probably be aware that that’s what you’re doing.

Yeah? Except that a huge symptom of this is the stagnation of language development and also the breakdown of communication. Every misused adverb lowers the bar. When is too low? You get phrases like ‘I could care less,’ or, ‘I literally died.’ It should never be the burden of the listener to decode or infer the real meaning when you misappropriate words (That was really clever, I think.)

The reason that correct grammar is so important is because it resolves ambiguity.

You want  to pander to the lowest common denominator. What happens when you apply your same logic to morality? To business? To a craft or trade?

We are in a unique time in history, and language has never been as it is now.

It is our solemn duty to keep grammar.

Almost everything is a social construct. That doesn’t make it any less real or valid. We don’t let violent crime go unpunished just because the perpetrator  didn’t agree with the social construct. We live in a society. We are a part of a social contract. 

As the rules of grammar start to break down, it becomes more difficult to convey an idea.

That is exaclty how language works.

It is fluid, but it is purposeful.

That is exactly how language works.

As soon as you cannot resolve ambiguity you have an inherently wrong language. That is objective.

I’m sorry but that’s not actually how language works. Are you upset that we’re not still speaking Old English? And I’m not talking Early Modern English, or Shakespeare, I mean actual Old English.

Fæder ūre þū þe eart on heofonum,
Sī þīn nama ġehālgod.
Tōbecume þīn rīċe,
ġewurþe þīn willa, on eorðan swā swā on heofonum.
Ūre ġedæġhwāmlīcan hlāf syle ūs tō dæġ,
and forgyf ūs ūre gyltas, swā swā wē forgyfað ūrum gyltendum.
And ne ġelǣd þū ūs on costnunge, ac ālȳs ūs of yfele.
Sōþlīċe.

From your stance, do we treat the change from this to, say, Shakespeare’s language as a “deterioration” of English grammar? Because to be honest, we “lost” a lot in that time period, in a certain way. We lost a complex case system and a lot of the inflections on the verb. We lost the ability to inflect modal verbs entirely. And even more changes were going on while Shakespeare himself wrote, and he used a little bit of the old system and a little bit of the new.

Language isn’t breaking down, it’s just changing the way it always has, and the way it always does. There’s nothing unique or special about what’s going on with the language now. When you are experiencing change in a language firsthand, your perspective is going to be biased and limited. But when people look back at the early 21st century, trust me, they’re not going to see language “breaking down” or “deteriorating.” They’re going to see business as usual.

And no, your problem with ambiguity isn’t “objective.” It’s impossible to uphold. You’re only focusing on the ambiguity you see, but you use ambiguous language every day of your life without paying it the least bit of attention. Really, you do. And it works out just fine.

(Source: hereincoherent, via psychoglossia)

Aisle vs. Isle

psychoglossia:

This is a rather common mistake I keep seeing, so I’d like to clarify.

Aisle:

• A clear corridor in a supermarket with shelves on both sides containing goods for sale.
• There are other definitions, but they’re not as common.

Isle:

• (obsolete or poetic) An island.

Examples:

• Aisle: I found milk in the dairy aisle.
• Isle: We traveled to a Hawai’ian Isle for our honeymoon.

If you like to think etymologically,

• Aisle comes from Latin ala, meaning “wing” (another meaning of aisle, particularly of a building).
• Isle comes from Latin insula, meaning “island.” (Humourously enough, insula didn’t give us the English “island”; it is actually a Germanic word in origin.)

Hopefully you’ve found this informative.

Though imagining someone finding food out in the middle of a sea instead of a grocery store is kinda funny.

One thing that baffles me is the extent that people are averse to language change.

psychoglossia:

Short ‘n sweet.

So if you’ve Internetted long enough, you’ve seen grammatical arguments, because as a recent meme has pointed out, if you’re losing an argument, correct your opponent’s grammar.

A recurring one of these is the classic argument of “a lot vs. alot”.

And quite frankly, it just baffles me.

When we finally do add “alot” to our collective vocabulary, it will be a drop in the bucket that is filled with compound words. It will be amongst its brethren, even, of “alright” and “altogether.” We’d of course still have its separated form of “a lot” in vestigal phrases where it’s emphasized further; “A whole lot of cheese.” But “a lot” as two words conveys a single meaning; that meaning being a quantifier. Grammatically speaking, “A lot of cheese” and “Alot of cheese” mean exactly the same thing. The only difference is treating the quantifier either as a phrase or as a word.

Another prime example is compound nouns. You have words like “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” or “businessman,” but if you decide to not place a space between the words “best” and “friend,” may the Lord have mercy on your Internet soul. But why? What is so wrong with expressing an idea that is composed of two words instead as one?

Etymologically, the aforementioned* words are all of the format [adjective+noun], but as their usage became widespread, it simply made more sense to express the idea as a single, and more specific, noun. Again, grammatically, using the word “bestfriend” just makes sense. Maybe we just don’t like seeing two stops (/t/ and /f/) right next to each other? Who knows.

Furthermore*, if you’ll notice my asterisks, combining multiple words into one is not unheard-of whatsoever*. Grammaticalizing words is absolutely nothing new to any language. Technology especially has inspired compound words. Download, harddrive, ragequit, etc., etc.

Nouns and verbs are also incredibly subject to grammaticalization. Whenever there is an itch in my eye, and I tend to it, I call it “itching my eye.” Using the word “scratch” just doesn’t seem befitting of the behaviour, so “itching” it makes more sense to me. Humourously enough, my mother disapproves this usage because it’s simply not right. However, nouns have a history of being verbified. The best example I can give is: Google. Google started out as the name of the company, probably inspiring usages like, “I’m going to search Google for how to shear sheep.” Over time and thanks to its ubiquity, it got verbified; “I’m going to Google how to shear sheep.”

“But lo!” you are surely thinking to yourself, reading this post through your small reading glasses, a dated novel sitting beside you, “allowing these corruptions of the English language will surely lead to its downfall! We’ll be using Newspeak in no time thanks to your outrageous claims that this is perfectly normal!”

First of all, Newspeak is just the kind of compound noun that I was referring to. Good try, though.

Secondly, I would like to direct your attention to one simple little word: “okay.” An expression of agreement or acknowledgement, it’s used universally, transcending the English language and finding its way into others such as German.

But etymologically, it spells doom for those of the prescriptivist mindset.

While there are a plethora of proposed etymologies for the word, one has stood tall. Simply, way back in the 1830s, a fad surfaced that was to deliberately misspell words so as to give them comical abbreviations. (Sounds a little familiar, doesn’t it? Or do u not liek cheezburgers?) None others survived, but one did. That abbreviation was “O.K.” In its day as an abbreviation, it stood for “Oll Korrect,” because those silly 1800s folk were just wacky. Due to heavy and widespread usage, it appears to have been grammaticalized from an abbreviation into a “real word,” being “okay.”

History repeats itself. Doesn’t “okay“‘s histroy sound a little familiar?

Take a look at “lol” and “lawl.”

In short (or tl;dr, or teal deer), language changes, meanings change, words change; the way we communicate is in a constant state of flux.

And it’s kickass.*