AU where ‘friend’ and ‘boyfriend’/‘girlfriend’ are the same word. imagine how confusing that would be! you would tell somebody about your ‘friend’ but they literally wouldn’t know what your relationship is because……..
oh wait sorry this isn’t an AU. German, I was talking about German. Imagine German.
I love the phrase “what the entire fuck” because it implies that there exists some scenario that warrants only a “what the partial fuck”.
Similarly “what the actual fuck,” implying “what the figurative fuck” or “what the imaginary fuck”.
“What the actual fuck” is an interesting one because “actual” has so many distinct shades of meaning.
“Entire” generally means “whole” or “complete”, but depending on the particular context, “actual” can denote any or all of “real”, “literal”, “concrete”, “truthful”, “grounded” or “factual”.
Thus, when deriving the contrastive phrase, in addition to “what the imaginary fuck” and “what the figurative fuck”, we could also reasonably arrive at “what the hypothetical fuck”, “what the fraudulent fuck”, “what the fanciful fuck” or “what the counterfactual fuck”.
Language is fun!
i’m personally a fan of “what the actual and entire fuck” because never do what you can overdo.
We actually used to use ‘what in the hypothetical fuck’ in law school. Also ‘what the alleged fuck’.
If writers took every bit of writing advice that was in the format ‘Don’t use X part of the English language’, all English fiction would read like Spot the dog
i hate writing historical fic because every five sentences you’re googling random shit like “when did billiards become popular in america” & i’ll have you know it was the 1820s
fun fact my pals the word ‘okay’ or ‘O.K.’ (the abbreviation for the old timey spelling of ‘all correct’) was popularized in 1840 by Van Buren’s US presidential election slogan and seeing it in historical fiction before then feels like a little glitch in the matrix, but seeing it in an Old Timey Fantasy setting sends me down the rabbit hole of how a fantasy world language would be brutal to translate, and language in general is a trip, and nothing means anything, probably
I just want to add a correction: O.K. was not an abbreviation for an “old-timey” spelling of “all correct”; it is in fact an abbreviation for an INTENTIONAL MISSPELLING of “all correct.” There was a short-lived period in the 1800s where it became amusing and trendy to flagrantly misspell conversational phrases and then abbreviate them, and “O.K.” is the only one to survive to the present day.
IF IT HAS BEEN A VERY LONG DAY, YOU ARE ‘WEARY’. IF SOMEONE IS ACTING IN A WAY THAT MAKES YOU SUSPICIOUS, YOU ARE ‘WARY’.
ALL IN ‘DUE’ TIME, NOT ‘DO’ TIME
‘PER SE’ NOT ‘PER SAY’
THANK YOU
BREATHE – THE VERB FORM IN PRESENT TENSE
BREATH – THE NOUN FORM
THEY ARE NOT INTERCHANGEABLE
WANDER – TO WALK ABOUT AIMLESSLY
WONDER – TO THINK OF IN A DREAMLIKE AND/OR WISTFUL MANNER
THEY ARE NOT INTERCHANGEABLE (but one’s mind can wander)
DEFIANT – RESISTANT DEFINITE – CERTAIN
WANTON – DELIBERATE AND UNPROVOKED ACTION (ALSO AN ARCHAIC TERM FOR A PROMISCUOUS WOMAN)
WONTON – IT’S A DUMPLING THAT’S ALL IT IS IT’S A FUCKING DUMPLING
BAWL- TO SOB/CRY
BALL- A FUCKING BALL
YOU CANNOT “BALL” YOUR EYES OUT
AND FOR FUCK’S SAKE, IT’S NOT “SIKE”; IT’S “PSYCH”. AS IN “I PSYCHED YOU OUT”; BECAUSE YOU MOMENTARILY MADE SOMEONE BELIEVE SOMETHING THAT WASN’T TRUE.
THANK YOU.
*slams reblog*
IT’S ‘MIGHT AS WELL’. ‘MIND AS WELL’ DOES NOT MAKE GRAMMATICAL SENSE.
please be aware that the correct way to replace ä, ö, ü, ß is turning them into ae, oe, ue, and ss, not just taking the dots away or typing “B”.
Otherwise you can get things like,
“Das Wetter ist sehr schwül heute.” = “The weather is very hot and humid today.”
“Das Wetter ist sehr schwul heute.” = “The weather is very gay today.”
well I now know how to call the weather gay
So, it’s like in Polish.
“Zrobić łaskę” means “Do mercy to someone”
but
“Zrobić laskę” means “Make a blowjob”.
I cannot think of a case where removing the dots of ä and ö in Finnish would result in something naughty (if you can, please contribute) but the same thing applies, ä and ö are completely different from a and o, and one does not simply remove the dots.
Finnish:
Näin appelsiineja = I saw oranges.
Nain appelsiineja = I fucked oranges.
its even worse in turkish doe cus like
Sık dişini?? Hang in there/Endure
Sik dişini?? Literally just fuck your tooth
that’s it
amazing
Even in Spanish:
Feliz año nuevo = happy new year
Feliz ano nuevo = happy new butthole
Irish:
Tá mo chroí briste = My heart is broken.
Tá mo chroí bríste = My heart is trousers.
Danish:
Bølle = thug
Bolle = fucking
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a language that uses diacritics must have a minimal pair with and without diacritics that means something rude.
In American sign language, if you sign “I’m hungry” with a repetitive motion for “hungry” you’re actually signing “I’m horny”
The best part of ‘me, an intellectual’ is that the grammatically correct pronoun would be ‘I’.
you: me, an intellectual
me, an intellectual: I, an intellectual
hi where the fuck do you think that fragment is getting nominative case. listen to me. subjects of transitive verbs in nom-acc languages get nominative case by agreeing with a tense node. are you listening. fragments are accusative in english because that’s the default case when there’s no case-assigning node. meet me in the pit behind the denny’s and i will explain this to you. bring a whiteboard
you: The best part of ‘me, an intellectual’ is that the grammatically correct pronoun would be ‘I’.
kirby, a linguist:
meet me in the pit behind the denny’s and i will explain this to you. bring a whiteboard
Throwback to the time my poor German teacher had to explain the concept of formal and informal pronouns to a class full of Australians and everyone was scandalised and loudly complained “why can’t I treat everyone the same?” “I don’t want to be a Sie!” “but being friendly is respectful!” “wouldn’t using ‘du’ just show I like them?” until one guy conceded “I suppose maybe I’d use Sie with someone like the prime minister, if he weren’t such a cunt” and my teacher ended up with her head in her hands saying “you are all banned from using du until I can trust you”
God help Japanese teachers in Australia.
if this isnt an accurate representation of australia idk what is
Australia’s reverse-formality respect culture is fascinating. We don’t even really think about it until we try to communicate or learn about another culture and the rules that are pretty standard for most of the world just feel so wrong. I went to America this one time and I kept automatically thinking that strangers using ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am’ were sassing me.
Australians could not be trusted with a language with ingrained tiers of formal address. The most formal forms would immediately become synonyms for ‘go fuck yourself’ and if you weren’t using the most informal version possible within three sentences of meeting someone they’d take it to mean you hated them.
100% true.
the difference between “‘scuse me” and “excuse me” is a fistfight
See also: the Australian habit of insulting people by way of showing affection, which other English-speakers also do, but not in a context where deescalating the spoken invective actively increases the degree of offence intended, particularly if you’ve just been affectionately-insulting with someone else.
By which I mean: if you’ve just called your best mate an absolute dickhead, you can’t then call a hated politician something that’s (technically) worse, like a total fuckwit, because that would imply either that you were really insulting your mate or that you like the politician. Instead, you have to use a milder epithet, like bastard, to convey your seething hatred for the second person. But if your opening conversational gambit is slagging someone off, then it’s acceptable to go big (”The PM’s a total cockstain!”) at the outset.
Also note that different modifiers radically change the meaning of particular insults. Case in point: calling someone a fuckin’ cunt is a deadly insult, calling someone a mad cunt is a compliment, and calling someone a fuckin’ mad cunt means you’re literally in awe of them. Because STRAYA.
Australia is fuckin’ bonkers, man.
Even if you managed to become immune to the infinite hellscape of animals trying to consume you, the people then proceed to confuse you with their treatment of insults as compiments and the dangerous web of escalation an deescalation of those insults.
Look, we love you, but we can’t come see you, we’d DIE
sparksoffandommagic 