i really love our generation’s joke trend of like, very calm but incredibly inflated hyperbole. like nobody says “oh she’s pretty” anymore we say “i would willingly let her murder me” and everyone is just like “lol same”
i think “same” is also great and “me,” i love when somebody reblogs a picture of like, a lizard, and just says “me” and we all know exactly what they mean. the current online Humor Discourse is remarkable because we trade exclusively in metaphors and implications and nobody ever, ever says anything outright and yet EVERYBODY understands each other perfectly
This reminds me of the time when I was on vacation with my family and we were hiking, and after using a rest stop, the conversation turned to the grossness of outhouses and port-a-potties, and I said that if I ever got splashback from a port-a-potty, “my soul would depart my body.” My parents found that hilarious, and my dad commented that my generation can be so clever with words bc he would only think to say something like “It would be disgusting” which doesn’t convey the sentiment nearly as well as “my soul would depart my body.”
Holy shit this is fascinating. The text in the image is tiny, so I’ve copied it out here:
Hyperbaton is when you put words in an odd order, which is very, very difficult to do in English. Given that almost everything else in the English language is slapdash, happy-go-lucky, care-may-the-Devil, word order is surprisingly strict. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien wrote his first story aged seven. It was about a ‘green great dragon’. He showed it to his mother who told him that you absolutely couldn’t have a green great dragon, and that it had to be a great green one instead. Tolkien was so disheartened that he never wrote another story for years.
The reason for Tolkien’s mistake, since you ask, is that adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out. And as size comes before colour, green great dragons can’t exist.
There are other rules that everybody obeys without noticing. Have you ever heard that patter-pitter of tiny feet? Or the dong-ding of a bell? Or hop-hip music? That’s because, when you repeat a word with a different vowel, the order is always I A O. Bish bash bosh. So politicians may flip-flop, but they can never flop-flip. It’s tit-for-tat, never tat-for-tit. This is called ablaut reduplication, and if you do things any other way, they sound very, very odd indeed.
The importance of English word order is also the reason that the idea that you can’t end a sentence with a preposition is hogwash. In fact, it would be utter hogwash anyway, and anyone who claims that you can’t a sentence with up, should be told up to shut. It is, as Shakespeare put it, such stuff as dreams are made on, but it’s one of those silly English beliefs that flesh is heir to.
Still, it’s a favourite line of English teachers who Haven’t Thought It Through. The rule is often unfairly blamed on a chap called Robert Lowth… [extract ends]
I just mentioned it in the tags but I have to say it again because it makes me ridiculously happy
In ‘proper’ classic Sindarin, spoken by most Elves, the word for rider/horseman/knight is rochir and the plural would be rochirrim and if, by some chance, there was a whole land of them, that place would be Rochand. But in Gondor there’s a linguistic shift–it might have actually happened in Númenor, but as Tolkien specifically mentions it as a Gondorian thing I tend to think not–where certain consonants are softened. So it’s rohir and rohirrim and Rohan.
It’s not the existence of linguistic evolution that makes me happy–well, it does, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Tolkien explicitly said that the rohir in Elrohir is the same as in Rohirrim. In pure Sindarin it would be Elrochir.
But it’s not.
So Elrond named his sons in an Elvish language, but an Edainic dialect–the dialect of his brother’s people. And in actual meaning, both their names refer to both sides of their heritage, too.
Happy birthday to one of my favourite linguistics blogs!
The apostrophe first appeared in English sometime in the 16th century, possibly ganked into English printing from Italian or French conventions. Not much is written on the development of the apostrophe, but we know that when it first showed up in English print, it was used to signal that a letter (or several letters) had been omitted in a construction. “She’ll” is a contraction of “she will” or “she shall”; “’tis” is a contraction of “it is”; “‘zbud” and “‘sbodkins” are contractions of “God’s blood” and “God’s bodkins” and truly magnificent in the way that only 17th-century euphemisms can be.
This habit continued well into the 17th and 18th centuries, growing beyond its little garden plot. Apostrophes were sometimes used to clarify pronunciation for the reader, especially in poetry: “banish’d” was clearly meant to be spoken as two syllables to keep scansion tidy and look very Byronic, whereas “banished” could be three, particularly in some florid Drydenesque constructions. Daniel Defoe took this further: he used “cou’d” and “wou’d” in his writings to show that the “l” in “could” and “would” was silent, though I’d wager that most people who were reading Defoe likely knew about “could” and “would.”
That damn’d apostrophe was so handy that sometime around the end of the 17th and beginning of the 18th centuries, people began to use it to signal possession. It makes a great deal of sense: does “Drydens harrumphing” refer to the harrumphing of one John Dryden, or to a whole army of John Drydens making their displeasure known? We can make that clear with just one blob of well-placed ink! And so the apostrophe was liberally sprinkled among all our nouns and pronouns to mark possession.
Nouns AND pronouns, mind. So while we have the now-familiar “Dryden’s harrumphing” and “dog’s breakfast,” we also ended up with “her’s,” “their’s,” “our’s,” “your’s,” and–yes, gird thy loins–“it’s,” which were in use as possessive pronouns through the 17th and 18th centuries. Boo, you cry, stupid, but not at all. It’s very logical: if that apostrophe was going to mark possession, then it was going to mark possession goddamned everywhere.
As a possessive marker, the apostrophe is fairly straightforward unless the base word ends in “-s,” and then everything falls all to hell. Is it “Davy Jones’s locker,” or “Davy Jones’ locker?” Yes. Is it “Jesus’s wounds?” Good lord no, of course it is not, why would you even think that? It is “Odysseus’ journey” but “Zeus’s shenanigans.” Why? Heed my words, O nerd: where were you when I laid the foundations of the possessive?
We had punctuation mania: by the 19th century, we were using apostrophes to make single letters plural, as in “p’s and q’s.” There is no logical explanation for this, apart from the fact that “ps and qs” looks odd and might result in some hapless chump spitting all over himself trying to pronounce “qs” as if it were Arabic and not KEWS. The pluralizing apostrophe also shows up by the 20th century in numbers (“alternative banjo music of the 1890’s”) and when referring to a word as a word (“too many ‘apostrophe’s’ in this blog post”), and then later in abbreviations (“RSVP’s”) and with symbols (“&’s”), because why the hell not? Never mind that the apostrophe initially was just intended as a stand-in for elision: we wrested it away from those Europeans with all their diacritic corsetry and let it breathe. […]
And here’s the rub: the rules are continuing to change. We’re slowly losing those plural apostrophes in “the 1890s” and “RSVPs.” In Britain especially, the possessive apostrophe in some business names like “Harrod’s” and “Waterstone’s” has scarpered. These changes are themselves inconsistent. “RSVPs” but “OD’d”; “the 1890s” but “the ’90s.” […]
Considering all this, it’s not too surprising that the grocer’s apostrophe flourishes, that people still send out holidays cards signed “The Jones’s,” that even smart people confuse “it’s” and “its.” None of us–not a single one of us–has gotten the apostrophe right in every circumstance because “right” is a moving target, and that’s the thing that we lose sight of during National Grammar Day. I like grammar in all her forms (both linguistic and populist), but I will not hold her up as the eternal unchanging ideal to which all people’s intelligence and fitness must be compared.
Actually, ‘fall’ has its origins as an Anglo-Saxon word, and was popularized for use to denote the season around the 16th century from the poetic term ‘the fall of leaf.’ In the language that would develop after 1066, words that were coded as being common or lowly generally had Anglo-Saxon roots while the ‘educated’ words of the elite had French and Latin roots. This is why, even in modern English, we use ‘cow,’ which has an Anglo-Saxon origin, for the animal out in the field and ‘beef,’ which has a French origin, for the food to be consumed. The poor handle the animal while the rich eat the meat, and that is reflected in the language. The language of the conquerors was elevated while the language of the conquered was made base and common. If ‘autumn’ sounds smarter than ‘fall,’ that is only the linguistic snobbery of history talking.
I fucking hate this post a passion anytime I see it and whenever it comes around with the rebuttal attached I enthusiastically reblog
Although we call the language spoken by the Anglo-Saxons Old English, English speakers today won’t find much in common between it and the language we have now. More than 1000 years ago, English was still being written using long-abandoned letters like þ (known as “thorn”), ƿ (“wynn”) and ð (eth or thæt). It had a different phonology and a much more complex grammatical structure than we have today that relied on a complicated series of word endings and inflections to convey meaning rather than a predictable syntactic word order.
Old English also had a rich array of inventive and intriguing words, many of which have either long since dropped out of use or were replaced by their continental equivalents after the Norman Conquest of England, and so would be all but unrecognisable to modern English speakers—which is a shame, given just how imaginative the Old English vocabulary could be. Here are the origins and meanings of 20 fantastic, long-forgotten Anglo-Saxonisms.
1. ATTERCOPPE
First recorded in a medical textbook dating from the 11th century, attercoppe was the Old English word for a spider; it literally means “poison head.” The word remained in use in English right through to the 1600s, but only survives today as attercop or attercap in a handful of British English dialects.
2. BREÓST-HORD
Breóst-hord literally means “breast-treasure,” and was used in Old English literature to refer to what we might call the heart, the mind, or the soul today—namely, a person’s inner workings and feelings.
3. CANDELTREOW
Old English had the word candelstæf for what we’d call a candlestick today, but it also had the word candeltreow—literally a “candle-tree”—for a candelabra, or a candlestick with more than one branch.
4. CUMFEORM
Cuma (a “comer”) meant a houseguest, a visitor, or a stranger in Old English, while feorm referred to food or supplies and provisions for a journey. Cumfeorm, ultimately, is “stranger-supplies”—another word for hospitality, or for entertaining strangers.
5. EALDOR-BANA
Ealdor or aldor is related to the modern English word elder and was used in Old English to mean either an ancestor or superior, or a life or lifespan in general. A bana meanwhile was a killer or a destroyer, or a weapon that had been used to cause a death—so an ealdor-bana, literally a “life-destroyer,” was a murderer or something with fatal or murderous consequences.
6. EARSLING
No, not another name for a ear bandage. Earsling actually brings together the Old English equivalent of “arse,” ears or ærs, and the suffix –ling, which is related to the –long of words likelivelong, headlong and endlong. It ultimately means “in the direction of your arse”—or, in other words, backwards. Just like attercop, happily arseling also still survives in a handful of English dialects.
7. EAXL-GESTEALLA
Eaxle was the Old English word for your shoulder or armpit (which is still sometimes called youroxter), or for the humerus bone of the upper arm. An eaxl-gestealle is literally a “shoulder-friend”—in other words, your closest and dearest friend or companion.
8. EORÞÆPPLA
Cucumbers were “earth-apples”—eorþæppla—in Old English.
9.
FRUMBYRDLING
As far as words that should have never left the language go, frumbyrdling is right up there at the top of the list: it’s an 11th century word for a young boy growing in his first beard.
10. GESIBSUMNES
Gesibsumnes (the ge– is roughly pronounced like “yeah”) literally means something along the lines of “collective peacefulness.” It referred to the general feeling of friendship, companionship, or closeness between siblings or members of the same family.
11. GLÉO-DREÁM
Dreám meant “joy” or “pleasure” in Old English (so not “dream,” which was swefen). Gléo-dreámliterally means “glee-joy,” but it specifically referred to the feeling of pleasure that comes from listening to music. The sound of a musical instrument, incidentally, was sometimes called orgel-dreám (literally “pride-pleasure”), while the art of ability to play an instrument was dreámcræft.
12. HLEAHTOR-SMIÞ
This “laughter-smith” is someone who makes you laugh.
13. HLEÓW-FEÐER
Hleów-feðer means “shelter-feather,” but is used figuratively in some Old English literature to refer to a protecting arm put around someone.
14. INSTICCE
It’s not entirely clear what the Old English insticce, or “inside-stitch,” actually referred to, but if not meant to describe a painful “stitch” caused by physical exertion, it probably meant a general prickling or tingling sensation—what we’d now call pins and needles.
15. LÁRÞÉOW
Lárþéow—which later became lorthew before it disappeared from the language in the mid-13th century—was an Old English word for a schoolteacher. It literally means “teaching-slave.”
16. MEOLCLIÐE
Meolcliðe, meaning “milk-soft,” was used to describe anything or anyone exceptionally gentle or mild-tempered.
17. ON-CÝÐIG
On-cýðig literally means “un-known,” but that’s not to say that it meant the same as “unknown.” Although its exact meaning is debatable, it’s thought on-cýðig referred to the despondent feeling caused by missing something that is no longer close at hand—in other words, the feeling of “knowing” about something or someone, and then either having to leave it behind, or having it taken from you.
18. SÆFLOD
The “sea-flood” was the incoming tide in Old English.
19. SELFÆTA
A “self-eater” was a cannibal—or, by extension, an animal that preyed on other animals of the same species.
20. UNWEDER
And when the weather gets bad, it’s no longer “weather” but “un-weather”—an Old English word for a storm.
Meg's Mumbles 