Please let this become a Thing

no i dont want to ‘ask chatgpt’ i want to go to a wikipedia page and spend half an hour reading an article like a real person

one may think "language" is french or spinach for "the nguage". this is a folk etymology myth, it is actually more like mile -> mileage. "How much language are you getting out ofthose words"

my yearly struggle

here is my gift-buying advice,. it NEVER steers me wrong. i got it from an episode of News Radio where andy dick buys Bill Gates a ball of twine. if you have someone to buy a ift for who doesnt need anything and hasnt ASKED for anything:

SUMMARY: buy them something they havent thought of themselves, wont buy for themselves, but have a pre-existing use case for. you will look like a genius and get lots and lots of thank yous. keep it small and inexpensive and easy to throw away/store/hide in case they politely do not like it. that's my method and it has never failed me since ive started doing it

great image, helpful infographic. that being said this is the most useful reaction image ive seen in my life

fucked up how cooking and baking from scratch is viewed as a luxury…..like baking a loaf of bread or whatever is seen as something that only people with money/time can do. I’m not sure why capitalism decided to sell us the idea that we can’t make our own damn food bc it’s a special expensive thing that’s exclusive to wealthy retirees but it’s stupid as hell and it makes me angry

bread takes like max 4 ingredients counting water and sure it takes a couple hours but 80% of that is just waiting around while it does the thing and you can do other things while it’s rising/baking plus im not gonna say baking cured my depression bc it didn’t but man is it hard to feel down when you’re eating slices of fresh bread you just made yourself. feels like everything’s gonna be a little more ok than you thought. it’s good.

bread is amazing and it’s also been sold to us as something really hard to make? Every time I tell someone I made a loaf of bread I get reactions like “you made it yourself???” and “do you have a bread machine then?” I haven’t touched a bread machine in probably 10 years. You CAN make your own bread, folks, and it’s actually pretty cheap to do so. I believe the most expensive thing I needed for it was the jar of yeast. It was about $6 at the grocery store and lasted me MONTHS (just keep it in the fridge.) The packets are even cheaper. destroy capitalism. bake your own bread.

You can also make your own yeast by making a sourdough starter, so that cuts cost even more.

But you have to feed the starter daily/weekly and that means it grows quickly, but there are tons of recipes online for what to do with your excess starter. Cookies, pretzels, crackers, pancakes, waffles, you name it!!

Here’s a link to The Home Baking Association’s site. It has recipes and tips.

Make it even easier - “No-Knead Bread”. All YOU do is mix the ingredients together and wait until it’s time to heat the oven. The yeast does all the rest.

Here’s @dduane​’s first take on it and the finished product. We’ve made even more photogenic batches since.

Kneading is easy as well; either let your machine do it, or if you don’t want to or don’t have one, get hands-on. It’s like mixing two colours of Plasticine to make a third. Flatten, stretch, fold, half-turn, repeat - it takes about 10 minutes - until the gloopy conglomeration of flour, yeast, salt and water that clings to your hands at the beginning, becomes a compact ball that doesn’t stick to things and feels silky-smooth.

Here’s what before and after look like.

My Mum used to say that if you were feeling out of sorts with someone, it was good to make bread because you could transfer your annoyance into kneading the dough REALLY WELL, and both you and the bread would be better for it.

Then you put it into a bowl, cover it with cling-film and let it rise until it doubles in size, turn it out and “knock it back” (more kneading, until it’s getting back to the size it started, this means there won’t be huge “is something living in here?” holes in the bread), put it into your loaf-tin or whatever - we’ve used a regular oblong tin, a rectangular Pullman tin with a lid, a small glass casserole, an earthenware chicken roaster…

You can even use a clean terracotta flowerpot.

Let the dough rise again until it’s high enough to look like an unbaked but otherwise real loaf, then pop it in the preheated oven. On average we give ours 180°C / 355°F for 45-50 minutes. YM (and oven) MV.

Here’s some of our bread…

Here’s our default bread recipe - it takes about 3-4 hours from flour jar to cutting board depending on climate (warmer is faster) most of which is rise time and baking; hands-on mixing, kneading and knocking-back is about 20 minutes, tops, and less if using a mixer.

Here ( or indeed any of the other pics) is the finished product. This one was given an egg-wash to make it look glossy and keep the poppy-seeds in place; mostly we don’t bother with that or the slash down the middle, but all the extras were intentional as a “ready for my close-up” glamour shot.

I think any shop would be happy to have something this good-looking on their shelf. We’re happy to have it on our table.

Even if your first attempts don’t work out quite as well as you hope, you can always make something like this…

can we have more posts like this in future please? this is really useful and could help those who are struggling

i love this post!

I was watching tiktok a couple years ago when the algorithm decided I needed nothing but videos of people’s Italian grandmothers making things by hand. By about the 7th or 8th basic bread video it dawned on me

Bread. Existed. Before. Standard. Measurements.

And in that moment a light bulb went off in my head and the spirit of someone’s Magical Bread Nona said “this one is ready!” And she reached down from heaven and delivered unto me, with a spiritual smack upside my head, the will and the know-how to keep it simple, stupid and just bake the bread.

And I did. I didnt have a recipe. I didnt even reference the videos I had seen. The concept was easy enough. The ingredients list was 6 items long. I put them together and made bread.

And I have used that recipe, mostly unchanged, nearly every week since that first loaf.

You can too

Italian-ish Bread (I just call it “Ish Bread)

4-ish cups flour (Bread flour or All Purpose)

1 tablespoon-ish salt

1 tablespoon-ish instant yeast (or one packet)

4-ish cups warm-ish water

1 tablespoon-ish plain white sugar (or honey)

2 tablespoons - ish olive oil

Put flour salt and yeast in a large bowl and mix with a whisk to combine.

Put sugar in warm water and mix to combine.

Pour 1 ish cup of the water and the olive oil into the flour mixture and stir until clumps start to form.

Add water ½ ish cup at a time (I usually only end up using 3-ish cups of the water total), stirring in between. (Switch to kneading in the bowl with your hands when it seems easier to do so.) Do this until dough forms and is tacky-ish, but not sticky. (It should “clean up after itself” by picking bits of dough of the side of the bowl. If you add too much water and the dough is sticky just add more flour to rebalance it out.)

Remove dough from bowl and knead on counter until dough becomes velvety-ish to the touch and it springs back if you poke your finger into it. This usually takes me about 10-ish minutes.

Make sure there’s no dough left stuck to the bowl you were using and use about 1 teaspoon-ish of olive oil and a paper towel to coat the whole inside of the bowl with oil.

Roll dough into a ball and place in the oiled bowl. Cover with saran wrap or damp-ish kitchen towels

Let rise for 1.5 hours-ish or until doubled-ish

Remove cover and punch down dough. Remove from bowl and shape into desired loaf shape and place on baking tray

Cover with damp-ish kitchen towels and let rise for 40-ish minutes

When theres 10 min left to go on the rise, Preheat oven to 400 degrees

When oven has preheated, remove cover slash top of loaf with a sharp knife 3-ish times

Place in oven

Bake for 45ish minutes or until top has browned deeply

Allow to cool on wire rack if available

Slice and enjoy

And everywhere i say “ish” I mean it. I dont even use a real tablespoon measuring spoon for this, just the bigger of the two place setting spoons from my silverware drawer. I dont even pay attention to how much water by volume I pour in. I just pay attention to the dough. Thats the key.

Is it perfect? No. But it makes great sandwich bread and toast. Can it be improved? Sure! I empower you to fuck with it and make it your own.

Go enjoy bread.

afaik the only augmentative suffix in English is -zilla.

You are forgetting "2: Electric Boogaloo".

-apalooza, perhaps?

-ocalypse, -ocalyptic, -tastic.

fuckzilla, fuck 2: electric boogaloo, and fuckapalooza work, fucktastic definitely works, but fuckocalyptic doesn't sounds right 🤔

-athon, for duration

training for a half fuckathon

Its actually -pocalypse, as in fuckpocalypse, but as an irregular augmentative you can shorten it in whatever way works best. I'm not sure fuckalypse hits as hard as fuckpocalypse, though

-itude, like "not with that fuckitude it won't"

Fuckalyptic works great

Lest we forget -gate, e.g. “this post is a linguistic fuckergate.”

I think it's funny that in French the word for "unicorn" is "licorne" because:

Before any anglophones get on the French people's case on this, consider for a second what y'all did when you reanalyzed the Spanish "el lagarto" ("the lizard") as "alligator."

Reanalysis is fun.

Oh yeah, everybody does this*. Another English example is "apron", which was once "napron" until we reanalyzed the initial N as part of the indefinite article (a napron -> an apron).

A fun one in Arabic is the city of Alexandria in Egypt. Quite understandably, Arabic speakers heard the initial "Al" and thought "ah yes, the ubiquitous definite article" and Alexandria became al-’Iskandariyya.

In the opposite direction, Spanish adopted hundreds of Arabic words during the Middle Ages due to Andalusian/Islamic influence, and there are very few Spanish words that start with al- that aren't of Arabic origin (and in fact, many words that start with A without being followed by an L, as in about half of cases in Arabic the L in "al-" is elided).

Reanalysis occurs in many other places besides article-noun combos, of course, but it's an extremely common case.

*citation needed, but reanalysis is extremely common

Oh, this actually explains something I'd just attributed to a quirk of sequence constraints or something; why Alexander is realized as Iskander/Iskandar in Arabic! It makes sense to analyze it as al-Iskander in Arabic!

Same thing happened with the word alchemy! Started out as the Arab term "al-kimiya", and when it was transported to Europe, it became "alchemy". This is actually really interesting, because as the term evolved more, it became "chemistry", effectively un-reanalyzing the word!

Oh actually there's another layer of fun there: the Arabic "al-kimiya" is actually a loan of the Ancient Greek χῠμείᾱ (khumeíā), which was used to refer to the art of alloying metals. Arabic borrowed a lot of Greek terminology owing to Arabic translations of Greek classics (many of which were actually lost in Europe until they were retranslated from Arabic). So, yeah, the Greek khumeíā made a round trip through Arabic, then into medieval Latin as "alchemia," and from there we eventually do get chemistry!

Not quite the same thing, but this reminded me of one of the funniest phenomena in the German language.

So, you may or may not know that x-rays were discovered by a guy called Röntgen (or Roentgen, though the ö is the proper spelling). Because of that, they're called "Röntgen rays" in German. Now, the thing is that in the German, the infinitive of a verb is always formed with an -en at the, so, for example, "to run" is "rennen" or "to sleep" is "schlafen." And because of that, it just so happened that the verb for performing x-rays became... "röntgen."

ich röntge, du röntgst, er/sie/es röntgt, wir röntgen, ihr röntgt, sie röntgen

In the X-rayed lab, straight röntgin it

official linguistics post

you ever have situations that make you want to take people by the shoulders and go "you are not 15 any longer. this behavior is no longer quirky and cute. it is exhausting for you and everyone else to act like a teenager you haven't been in a decade or longer. knock it the fuck off"

lots of ppl making this about adults who have interests they find cringe but let me be clear this is about emotional immaturity. idgaf if you're 35 and like goku okay but can you have an adult conversation without making yourself the victim is the matter at hand here

I fucking love language and linguistics, I love the social aspects of it, the storytelling, the music, the sounds, the comparisons, the loanwords, the differences, the history, the changes, the communication, things that transcend that, non-verbal languages, the dialects, unconventional ways of communication, the mixes of languages, the pigins and creoles, the bilingual or multilingual speakers, codeswitching-

I love it all. I love how humans express themselves. How sometimes translation isn't needed because everyone understands anyway. How it can catch you offguard, how words aren't possible to translate-

How silences are often louder than words.

"i want to work on a hobby but i wont because i should be doing more important things" <- person who isnt gonna do either of those

Learned the word 三日坊主（みっかぼうず）today, which basically means someone who starts something but quits quickly, eg they say they're gonna write a novel, get the first two pages written in a day, spend the next day staring at their Scrivener document, and then never touch it again. 坊主 = Buddhist priest, 三日 = 3 days. "3-day priest." Pretty sure we've all been there are some point in our lives 😅

worst part of using discord with a lot of fun custom emotes is that they become an instinctual part of your texting vernacular. what do you mean i can't just drop an :ashbaby: or :bergentruck: wherever i choose. these glyphs are central to my twisted version of the written english language; communicating without them is like casting a yet-fledged angel from the heavenly balusters and commanding it to soar

shoutout to my wife who is experiencing her favorite part of my hobby: bullying me during the part of language construction where I make noises to myself to test how they sound