That “I think I fucked up” was timed perfectly

Scream this is iconic….

i really love how you can tell how much happier she is

"Friends outside of Minnesota please read. I'm sharing a post written by a personal friend and medical doctor: Friends outside MN, you need to know what is happening here. Everyone knows that ICE shot and killed a woman here on Wednesday. But that’s not the only thing that’s going on:

Please if you have a chance, report this GoFundMe!

Here’s the Report Fundraiser link: https://www.gofundme.com/contact/suggest/fraud

And here’s the ICE agent’s GoFundMe which you’ll need to copy and paste into the report: https://www.gofundme.com/f/ice-offuver-jonathan-ross

re-posting bc reblogs got turned off etc

The resilience of Palestinians.

(source)

Shaking in excitement for re9

Booksmith sells online! They even have book mystery boxes based on other books you love. Let's show them (and others) that they made a good business AND moral choice.

Please give these people money

this is killing me

i’m literally so fucking stupid. i don’t know why my hypochondriatic ass went on fucking google to google why the fuck i’ve been itching for two days—bitch—it might just be because i’m having a reaction to something, but fucking google wants to go and say, “oh, it’s fucking liver disease!” bitch, so do you know where i’m going right now? i’m going to the fucking ER, because it cannot be liver disease. no, no, no. honestly, like, i just, i just can’t move. get the fuck out of my way, bitch, i’m turning on my hazards. this is ridiculous. this is a fucking emergency—liver disease!—li—google, wh—liver disease? why are you, what? what do you mean? li—oh, no, no no no, not the liver disease, yeah (oh my fucking gosh)

How it feels to settle into bed and close my eyes and return to the totally made-up scenario I was last engrossed in

The idea of “but everyone knows that” needs to stop.

I saw a post about someone chiding Millennials for not knowing about JKRowlings transphobia, and asking how it is at all possible that people can exist in the world and the internet and, you know, not know.

Which I mean, I get. It is so present in so many of my online spaces that it seems astounding that someone could simply be ignorant! It feels impossible!

But let me tell you a story:

I went on a girls trip with a bunch of friends. All of us are rather incredibly liberal and all of us are incredibly online.

One girl would not stop talking about Harry Potter.

At one point, another girl asked her why she was ok with supporting it, and she had no real clue that JK Rowling was at all transphobic. She had heard that she likes to support Lesbian causes and thought “oh ok cool!” And that was it. She was AGOG with the news and rather horrified.

I must once again emphasize that she was an incredibly online person. She’s a foodie and a restaurant blogger.

Later in the trip we were picking restaurants and I suggested one I found on Google, and she gasped at me. Actually gasped, asking how I could ever be okay picking that one.

The shock must’ve been on my face, because she then told me all of the shitty things that restaurateur does. He abuses staff. Underpays them. Fires them on a whim. Is known for being one of the worst people to his employees in the entire restaurant business on this coast.

And she was so shocked I had never heard of this. Because in her mind, I was just as online as her. And in her online world, EVERYONE knew about this guy.

So I think the moral of this story is: always approach the other person with some empathy. Even online people, even people you think MUST know about how bad people are, may not have heard. It may truly be just them being on a different sphere of the internet than you.

So be gentle, be kind when letting people know they might not have heard about the cancellation of XYZ person. Don’t assume that everyone knows all the same info as you.

By all means, let them know so they can make informed decisions, but being kind will go a lot further than attacking them for some info they might not know yet.

attackdog puppyplay where I rip your enemies to bloody pieces and then lay my head in your lap to hear ‘attaboy’ and feel fingers in my sweaty, bloody hair

once again needing to remind some people that mispronouncing foreign words isn't just about not knowing how to say it; if your language doesn't have that sound, in many cases you can't hear it properly. You won't be able to hear yourself say it wrong because you probably can't distinguish between the sounds a native speaker can. It will sound right to you and you will be wrong.

Most languages use relatively similar sound inventories overall, but make distinctions others don't. And the way the our language centers work is they group these sounds together, allowing us to recognize that things within a given range constitute a recognizable phoneme. If your languages groups together sounds another language makes a distinction between, your brain cannot tell.

So everyone on those posts congratulating themselves for looking up pronunciation and saying "It's Not That Hard?" Surprise, you might have still got it wrong and can't even tell. You can look up the IPA chart and still flub it completely because what sounds right to your brain and what a native speaker will understand are totally different things!

"I might have butchered that, please let me know" is sometimes an excuse for lack of research, but it is, unfortunately, also a much more accurate self-assessment than confidently fucking it up after mouthing along to a wav file a few times.

This is one of the reasons that, historically, many people would take on or be granted new names if they stayed any length of time in another culture; it's very common for the names from one language to simply not map to the sounds of another!

this just in apparently; accents are just affectations and every ESL person who has ever struggled to understand or pronounce a word is a lazy white person

(I first need to say that it is folly to overexamine a slogan, and the slogan as it stands is never intended to be examined; it is a tool for provocation and a rally to do better, and can never be “incorrect.” I am not criticising the intention of the slogan.)

When Black Americans have addressed the genuinely shameful failures of white Americans to pronounce Black names, it is, firstly, absolutely necessary. This has been done in the past with the slogan, “white people can pronounce Tchaikovsky and Schwarzenegger.”

This is intended to highlight the entirely correct point that white Americans have made more efforts to address names that are considered “foreign” and “difficult” but are associated with “white” cultures, than to address Black names. The slogan is provocative, useful, and highlights the hypocrisy of white Americans. It is a challenge to do better. Because Americans often perceive z’s and v’s to be “foreign” and “difficult” it is an especially pointed dig.

However. Let us briefly lump together Americans, all English-speaking Americans of various backgrounds dialects, into one American lump and stand back.

Respectfully: you HAVE to be American to believe that Americans have learned to pronounce “Tchaikovsky” and “Schwarzenegger” correctly.

Although Americans firmly and confidently believe that they can take on “Schwarzenegger,” German speakers… don’t. That’s just not how you say those sounds. One particular letter gets mangled.

It isn’t even an accent problem; you can say it correctly with a strong American accent. The American reinvention of “Schwarzenegger” represents a failure to understand how German sounds work, which is fine - hey, they’re “difficult” and “foreign” - but it is paired with total unearned confidence on the part of ALL Americans of ALL dialects that “of course we know how to say it. It’s a celebrity who was on the TV, he’s a governor, that’s how everyone says it.”

If you listen to Arnold saying HIS OWN NAME, which he does, you can tell that AMERICANS ARE NOT EVEN SAYING HIS NAME LIKE HE DOES. Even British people land a better attempt. It is a function of American cultural hegemony that Americans do not notice this. It is an inherently American view of the world to believe that a consistent, confident mispronunciation of someone’s name is a respectful, educated and correct handling.

(Tchaikovsky is interesting because it’s an Anglicisation of a French version of the spelling of Чайковский, which was possibly settled on because it was the easier way to get English speakers to perceive it. American English tried a different version in his own lifetime, as you can see below, but which would have led to Americans putting a “cow” in it.)

Again, it doesn’t cancel the slogan, the slogan is good-quality - but it shows how this is invisible to those who have not learned otherwise.

Outside of America, all Americans are perceived as American together, and Yanks join the ranks of English speakers. English speakers are famed around the world for having the same “bash and mangle it into something that sounds similar, and insist that it’s correct, because you don’t hear the difference” approach.

It will help in learning other languages to try. It will help a lot to take the loss with grace and accept correction!

Although the OP sort of accidentally implies that you “can’t” hear certain nuanced sounds - it is entirely possible to distinguish and perceive most nuanced sounds even in extremely nuanced languages, with intention and attention and training, especially with the guidance of a native speaker. Even if you can’t get it perfect it is still possible to improve and worthy to try!

IMO of the most fascinating ways for an English native speaker, especially an American one, to understand this is to watch how Mr Yang teaches Chinese students how to use American handling. “Soften up on the K sound” “throw in a little SpongeBob to it” you will suddenly hear things you probably weren’t ready to hear.

Here is a British person making a respectful attempt at Schwarzenegger, followed by Schwarzenegger saying it himself. One person has a British accent, and Schwarzenegger’s Austrian accent is considered distinctive to German speakers, but ideally, once you try to notice it, even if you are American, you should be able to hear what Americans are doing wrong.