estufar

book from the sky (tianshu) xu bing, 1989-91

I was so excited to see a copy of this in real life bc it's something I studied in art history. this is a book that was typeset and printed by hand using wooden blocks but every one of the characters was invented for the sake of the piece and does not correspond to any word in the Chinese language

yes. he invented and hand carved 4000 characters. it is a CRAZY project that resulted in an intentionally unreadable book. I love it

Xu Bing you're legendary to me !!!!

"Spigot" and "sprocket" are such cool, fun words to say. Plumbers really went off with those two

apparently one of the ways to say "shaved my head" in Japanese is "頭を坊主にした" which is literally something like "did the monk thing to my head"

this post is going around again, with good reason.

with the fullness of time, i can admit i was wrong. "do the monk thing to my head" would be more like "頭を坊主した" or "頭を坊主ことした"

the literal translation of this is closer to "did my head up monkly"

straight up monkin it and by it i mean, haha, well lets just say. my hed

I mean that about sums it up

having to internalize the gender binary again so I can learn a new Romance language

Mfw the Duolingo owl reminds me carrots are female

love the term "nothingburger", yanquis were unable to comprehend the concept of nothingness until it was explained with burgers

many great homophones out there. none better than wanton/wonton

"the wonton excess" bro how many

"I'll have the wanton soup" righteo how slutty should it be?

honestly christianity really hit the jackpot with "jesus christ" rolling off the tongue as an expletive so well. the number one problem with fantasy settings is that whatever names you come up with to take in vain will never hit as well as "jesus christ"

this guy gets it!!!!! this is the kind of rock solid phonetic structural integrity you have to compete with!!!! and no amount of marika's tits or thal's balls or odin's beards will ever get close because with ol jeezy boy his name alone has all the features you need

official linguistics post

i think in terms of quirks of the english language one of my favorites is the way you can reduce "good morning", "goodnight" and such to just saying the time of day all naked on its own. every time someone says "morning" or "night" to me as a fully constructed sentence i am so delighted! yes that id in fact the time of day that it is currently, thank you. i will say it back to you, like a fellow cool guy

don't even get me started on "night night"

#now if you really want to be obnoxious # interpret ‘fursona’ as neuter plural rather than feminine singular and insist that the singular form is ‘fursonum’

Ok but what about fursona as the feminine declension of fursonum, the perfect passive participle. This raises the question, what are the other three principal parts?

[Image transcription – A reply from Tumblr user forebod-ing reading as follows:

fursono, fusonere, fursui, fursonus est.

nb: i am going with fursui rather than the somewhat more plausible fursoni because the third person singular perfect indicative would thus be “fursuit”.]

I have become a regular at the local cafe. I sit at the lunch counter with my laptop to write. The workers keep me updated on all the tea.

Barista: Oh god here he comes.

Me: who?

Barista: White Ferrari guy. Hes banned from the other cafe. All he ever does is tell the same stories about the pyramids. Or ghosts. Or his car. Don't make eye contact with him. If he talks to you he won't leave you alone- Hi hello welcome!

I almost immediately accidentally made eye contact with him. He practically beelined to the chair next to me, and stares at my notebook. The vibe is immediately strange. I understand why he was banned from the other cafe.

White Ferrari Guy: What're you writing?

Me: (fuck it) I'm developing a script!

WFG: A what?

Me: A script. I'm developing an alternate script for the international phonetic alphabet. My goal is to make it one grapheme represent a single syllable, rather than one grapheme per phoneme. I'm happy with the consonants, but the vowels still need work. I'm experimenting with kerning based on Georgian script-

I look up, he is staring past me completely dead-eyed. He could not be less interested in what I'm saying. He leaves about a minute later.

[sheathes this notebook like a katana] your autism is weak, old man.

my first favorite hobby is yapping. second is being extremely quiet and not talking ever at all ever.

prima mea delicia est blaterare. secunda est valde silere nec umquam loqui in perpetuum.

There's a LATIN guy now??????

Num est iam LATINUS??????

fascinated by how "dislocate" seems to be a word used almost exclusively to refer to the misalignment of bodies, or parts of the body, from their proper place. it's distinctly anatomical. you don't say "i dislocated my keys" for instance, even though that's technically a correct and coherent sentence.

on the other hand, it would be really funny to say "i misplaced my shoulder" to announce a devastating injury

it went that way 👉

my favorite thing is when words are identical between two languages but their meanings are slightly to the left of each other. like raisin! it means grape in french, but in english it only means grape specifically if it's dried. makes me giggle

anyone know more words like this?

i hate that "that that" is grammatically correct. why is english the joke language

by the way, this post was inspired by some writing i was doing last night where i wrote "that that" and got so mad that i had to take a break for the rest of the evening

it's understandable that that "that that" that ended your writing session would inspire a post like that

Another one that frustrates the hell out of me is the grammatical correctness of "had had"

It makes me want to set the document on fire every single time

for sure, i would say that "had had" had that "that that" effect as well