lordofseagulls:

Lil Nas X should not be allowed to be this funny

eyebrowpunk:

emo-56:

rooooool

captain-price-unofficially:

heystephen:

heystephen:

actually i really love that every taylor swift song is someone’s fave. like even the songs where you’re like, super meh about it and always skip . there’s someone who would go to war for that song

even while drafting this post i kept trying to think of one song that was the exception to jokingly add on at the end like “except (song). no one rides for that one” but every song i came up with still had at least one person ive seen in the trenches for it .

yeahiwasintheshit:

alright

sic-semper-hominibus:

sic-semper-hominibus:

i’m not the praying sort, but i’ll probably always have a soft spot for the astronaut’s prayer

for those who aren’t familiar with it, it’s a possibly-spurious quote by alan shepard (and is thus sometimes referred to as the shepard’s prayer) on the launchpad of Freedom 7, immediately before he became the first american in space. it goes like this:

“Dear Lord, please don’t let me fuck up.”

dedalvs:

geekhyena:

startedwellthatsentence:

tvalkyrie:

breadpocalypse:

ilovejohnmurphy:

furryputin:

ilovejohnmurphy:

corntroversy:

ilovejohnmurphy:

is “chai” a TYPE of tea??! bc in Hindi/Urdu, the word chai just means tea

its like spicy cinnamon tea instead of bland gross black tea

I think the chai that me and all other Muslims that I know drink is just black tea

i mean i always thought chai was just another word for tea?? in russian chai is tea

why don’t white people just say tea

do they mean it’s that spicy cinnamon tea

why don’t they just call it “spicy cinnamon tea”

the spicy cinnamon one is actually masala chai specifically so like

there’s literally no reason to just say chai or chai 

They don’t know better. To them “chai tea” IS that specific kind of like, creamy cinnamony tea. They think “chai” is an adjective describing “tea”.

What English sometimes does when it encounters words in other languages that it already has a word for is to use that word to refer to a specific type of that thing. It’s like distinguishing between what English speakers consider the prototype of the word in English from what we consider non-prototypical.

(Sidenote: prototype theory means that people think of the most prototypical instances of a thing before they think of weirder types. For example: list four kinds of birds to yourself right now. You probably started with local songbirds, which for me is robins, blue birds, cardinals, starlings. If I had you list three more, you might say pigeons or eagles or falcons. It would probably take you a while to get to penguins and emus and ducks, even though those are all birds too. A duck or a penguin, however, is not a prototypical bird.)

“Chai” means tea in Hindi-Urdu, but “chai tea” in English means “tea prepared like masala chai” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish “the kind of tea we make here” from “the kind of tea they make somewhere else”.

“Naan” may mean bread, but “naan bread” means specifically “bread prepared like this” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish between “bread made how we make it” and “bread how other people make it”.

We also sometimes say “liege lord” when talking about feudal homage, even though “liege” is just “lord” in French, or “flower blossom” to describe the part of the flower that opens, even though when “flower” was borrowed from French it meant the same thing as blossom. 

We also do this with place names: “brea” means tar in Spanish, but when we came across a place where Spanish-speakers were like “there’s tar here”, we took that and said “Okay, here’s the La Brea tar pits”.

 Or “Sahara”. Sahara already meant “giant desert,” but we call it the Sahara desert to distinguish it from other giant deserts, like the Gobi desert (Gobi also means desert btw).

English doesn’t seem to be the only language that does this for places: this page has Spanish, Icelandic, Indonesian, and other languages doing it too.

Languages tend to use a lot of repetition to make sure that things are clear. English says “John walks”, and the -s on walks means “one person is doing this” even though we know “John” is one person. Spanish puts tense markers on every instance of a verb in a sentence, even when it’s abundantly clear that they all have the same tense (”ayer [yo] caminé por el parque y jugué tenis” even though “ayer” means yesterday and “yo” means I and the -é means “I in the past”). English apparently also likes to use semantic repetition, so that people know that “chai” is a type of tea and “naan” is a type of bread and “Sahara” is a desert. (I could also totally see someone labeling something, for instance, pan dulce sweetbread, even though “pan dulce” means “sweet bread”.)

Also, specifically with the chai/tea thing, many languages either use the Malay root and end up with a word that sounds like “tea” (like té in Spanish), or they use the Mandarin root and end up with a word that sounds like “chai” (like cha in Portuguese).

@dispatchrabbi @jenesaispourquoi

Thank you @startedwellthatsentence. And English is NOT the only language to do this, either. Spanish words like Alhambra, alcalde, albóndiga, alcohol, etc. all take el or la in the definite, but you know what? All these words come from Arabic where the al means “the”. So if you say el alcalde, you’re saying “the the mayor”—etymologically, anyway. But it doesn’t matter, because alcalde is the Spanish word now that has a specific meaning used in Spanish. Same thing with “chai” in English—or “sushi” or “burrito” or “salsa”. Seriously, in Spanish, salsa means “sauce”, so saying “salsa sauce” in English is redundant. But listen. That’s what happens when languages borrow words. A language doesn’t get to decide to take a word back if a language has borrowed it incorrectly. It just happens. And after a while, the “borrowing” isn’t a borrowing anymore: It’s now a word. And the language of origin can’t change the meaning any more than we can change the modern meaning of Japanese サラリーマン (from English “salary man”). It’s their word now.

steampoweredwerehog:

damazcuz:

*explaining kitchen appliances to my pet medieval knights* The microwave, or Micheal the Wavious, and metal fork, or Sir Silver Prong, are sworn enemies and can never cross paths lest their meeting spell destruction for all.

fuckysuckybrigade:

fuckysuckybrigade:

I love to use my disability “as an excuse.” Fuck yeah my disability is an excuse. It’s the most valid excuse I have. I’m not helping you lift that box/etc because my disability would make it fucking painful. Not wanting to be in pain is a good enough reason. I’m not going to put myself in pain to comfort your sensibilities.

Yes I’m using my disability as an excuse because I refuse to hurt myself for you. If you’re mad about it you can cry! ❤️

Happy disability pride month.

In honor of my chronic pain flareup that I could’ve avoided by asking my wife for help here’s your reminder to say no to stuff when it is safe to do so!! Ask for help!!

This month practice saying “I can’t do that. It would hurt me.” or “can I have help with (x)?” Start with a friend or family member who you feel comfortable asserting your boundaries with and keep saying no.