This is not meant to sound hostile or vague anyone but this is bothering me. "Inshallah" means "if God wills it". If your intention is to say you hope the hips don't lie but whether the hips lie or not is up to God, then you say "Inshallah the hips don't lie" but if you're trying to say "wow, the hips don't lie" or something similar, which I think is what the op was getting at, then you say "Mashallah the hips don't lie" which means "God has willed it, the hips don't lie"

No googling, curious about something

Seeing someone mention subtitel translation and I just randomly remembered the most memorable subtitle I've seen watching Deep Space Nine (since it is leaving Netflix soon). Spoiler alert: mention of season 6 plot.

There's one line in the episode "Call to Arms" that before the war started everybody was preparing for battle and Julian was speaking with Jake. He tells Jake that when he write his report don't forget to remember "Bashir spells with an I"(or something like that I can't remember clearly) while the Chinese subtitle on Netflix translate it as “巴希尔的希是希望的希"which literally meaning the H in Bashir stands for Hope. (It's a bad explanation of it but Bashir is translated as 巴希尔in Chinese and 希is a common character for Shi sound and with a pinyin of Xi, which is the first character in the phrase 希望meaning Hope. The character 希itself means rare or hope/wish in general)

And that was the best subtitle translation I've ever seen, it just fit so well in the context, with the original language, and with the translated language (Chinese) so well. Don't forget this is the last episode of season five, the Dominion war started in 20 minutes after this line is said, and deep space nine is being taken by the cardassian and dominion again. It's a shame that this feeling of having hope in a name is not something other language can share and I never seen this type of translation in anywhere else and that just stays in my mind.

mixed metaphors are funny as hell someone in my creative writing class wrote “it dawned on me like a sack of flour”

reading this as someone who does cross stitch but is scared of the other kinds of embroidery is like overhearing an incredibly tall and buff person say they have beef with Mr. Tom, the kitten that chills at the bookstore

FUCK Mr. Tom and his stupid little fluffy tail ok. And his little charted designs.

Okay, but this neglects the true villain of embroidery stitches: the French knot

Don't you dare malign my girl again

Ok the french knot is very useful but it is a BITCH to do it consistently

We talk about how this website’s hate mail game is insane, but this might just be a new level

"skill issue" made entirely from French knots is a next level roast. no coming back from that one. damn

The most impressive communal shitpost I’ve yet seen from a linguistics Facebook group

official linguistics post

The joy this brought me…. Unspeakable

ok this tag really got me

...girl

immortalizing these tags

When me and my brother were toddlers and we spilled anything liquid, my mom would singsong, "[Name] Valdez! [Name] Valdez!"

Eventually, as we grew up, this morphed into just saying "Valdez!" whenever we spilled something. As far as I was concerned "Valdez" was just a word for "oops!" specifically in this context.

It wasn't until I was probably a teenager that I discovered she was referencing the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989.

its cool how every language has wordplay.... we created language like ok step 1) convey info so we can stay alive 2) get silly with it

Occasionally as an Australian you'll be talking to someone from overseas, and you'll discover a common phrase you took for granted is, in fact, not universally known outside of our country.

Turns out casually dropping "fuck me dead" into conversation will give unsuspecting Americans an aneurism.

The more you know.

Imagine being on a work call with an Aussie and they suddenly announce they're gonna blow a load in response to a problem.

Not Aussie but I asked an American once if she was taking the piss ( i.e. pulling my leg, joking. Perfectly cromulent and friendly english expression)

and she got really upset because she thought I was threatening to piss ON her

This is killing me

Rifling through the tags, here's some other terms which are apparently causing mass carnage whenever they escape our borders:

When you fuck up a work call so bad it gets your entire country trending on social media

A NATIONAL NEWS HOST has now weighed in on this post 😭

We are not a serious country

I can't believe nobody mentioned "don't piss in my pocket", meaning "don't pretend you're doing me a favour"

I'm not american but I swear to god some of these if not most had to have been made up on the spot... It's like someone fell off Babel and hit their head really fucking hard

Well played Merriam-Webster.

“There is artificial intelligence, and there is actual intelligence” 🎤🫳

an interesting linguistics find! so I'm reading this text from 1908 and it keeps referencing "hp" in the context of "not being at full hp" "applying your full hp to a task" etc

and I'm like....... okay that is a perfectly normal way to describe energy and reads totally clear to me, but I KNOW you don't mean hit points/health points which is the first place my brain goes, so what are YOU using hp to mean

and it's not explained in-text, which means it was common enough to not warrant explanation to the 1908 audience, so gotta look elsewhere

horsepower. turns out it's horsepower.

and I'm absolutely FASCINATED that a commonly used initialism from 1908 now stands for something different AND YET the contextual meaning is still the same to a 21st-century reader

I could hand this guy my nintendo switch and he'd be like, ah yes I understand, this ''''pokemon'''' loses horsepower throughout the fight

language is amazing

Sand writing

"Huh, I wonder what sand writing i-- ARE YOU KIDDING ME?"

You ever see something that makes you think "wow I didn't even know that could be a talent or skill but that's amazing"

There b some specific ass forms of calligraphy in this world

Oh good, now I have a cheat sheet for Uncensored Nate

since mrs, ms, and mr are all descended from the latin word magister, i propose the gender neutral version should be mg, short for "mage"

some people think this is a shitpost so i want to clarify that i am dead fucking serious. make mage the official gender neutral honorific NOW. i want it on my passport. i want it on my bank account. i want doctors and judges to use it for me. i don't care if it sounds a little silly. people thought "missus" sounded crass at first. call me mg.

benefits of mg:

drawbacks:

I had to find this from somewhere and reblog it again because I work at a high school summer camp and told the kids to call me Mg. Day during our first day programming today.

They went NUTS for it! Not only did they love it, but there was an immediate click in understanding about they/them pronouns *from the entire cohort* that I haven’t experienced in 3 years of programming.

And linking it back to the root words Mister and Missus as OP so wonderfully provided helped establish that using they/them or neopronouns isn’t just playing around or “Miss but different” the way it can be with Mx. I used to try to go by Teacher Day because I was still getting she/her’d all the time but that also came with the problems of the students only being able to see me in the role of Teacher and being intimidated by the educational institution and their grades (I don’t even work for the school I’m external staff I don’t even have WiFi access). And I’d still get she/her’d all the time.

As soon as I introduced Magister they saw that a nonbinary person could be an Adult with a *societal* role outside the binary. It was immediately visible in their ecstatic faces. And I didn’t get misgendered today.

The only downside is I’m gonna have to practice my card tricks because I did promise I could do magic!