Oh! I actually know the answer to this one! American newspaper ads charged by the letter, so a lot of people would eliminate unnecessary letters like the second L in “cancelled” or the U in “colour”. Some of these spelling changes were used so often that they stuck, and now Americans just spell some words differently.
In summary: Americans spell things weird because capitalism
One of my favorite things about history is how little bits of it are preserved through traditions and mythology and we don’t even notice it. Like how we still say “’Tis the season” at Christmastime. Who says ‘tis anymore? No one, it’s dead except in this tiny phrase. I had a friend once tell me that she noticed the only group of people who could consistently identify a spinning wheel were girls between the ages of 4 and 7. Why? Sleeping Beauty. There are little linguistic quirks that have been around for centuries, bits of slang we use that people 400 years ago would recognize, but unless you showed someone a 400 year old dictionary, they’d never believe it. Whispers of the past are always there.
precisely! There’s far more of them than you’d realize. A pothole is from when potters used to harvest clay from the side of the road. Pot. Hole.
Your phone goes boinkey bleep but we still call it ringing, from when phones had actual bells on the outside of actual boxes.
Have you ever had to explain to a Gen Z why we “roll down” a car’s window?
Lowercase and uppercase are from typesetting, storing lead letters into boxes or cases for print.
The daily grind is from when a day’s use of grain was ground for bread.
“Fire!” as the command to shoot, in English, only picked up with gunpowder, as you’d light or fire the guns. To fire is to set fire to something. Prior to that, the command for a bunch of archers isn’t and has never been Fire, it’s Loose. Notice this little anachronism in most medievaloid films.
I don’t understand why people hate puns, they’re language taken and twisted and wielded to create a special brand of humour; they’re the result of thousands of years of language evolution and combined with the finest wit, and resulting in an universal reaction of laughter and groaning ; in a way it’s a form of magic, if you consider magic as the power of words on the world.
All these fucking books! What could anyone possibly do with them all?!?!?!?! Do you eat books to absorb their powers instead of read them?
A better guess would be that you got into a moral panic over the name of a certain Renaissance statue and maybe after reading three pages of Edith Hamilton or the first paragraph of a Wikipedia article. And then used that to castigate and demean not only the people who actually take their limited time to create gorgeous art but also to denigrate modern day worshippers of Persephone and Hades?
Maybe next time, you stringy piece of over-boiled okra, you might want to take your own advice and pick up a book, instead of reducing the feared and respected Queen of the Underworld who held power equal to or in many interpretations GREATER than her husband into a meaningless pastiche of female disenfranchisement that you seemingly plucked from your own ass.
JESUS CHRIST THANK YOU
I don’t often reblog posts of people getting owned, but when I do…
man the ancient greeks didn’t dare to speak persephone’s name she was that powerful and venerated (they called her Kore, “the maiden”), hades didn’t get that honour
Rebagel for those book links, I find the Persephone and Hades stuff on here fascinating and I want to research it more
Book links, owning and the sheer badassery that is Persephone.
reblog forever
Reblogging for the links until this misapprehension finally ceases.
@thoughtsontomes you realize that every time I see Haides and Persephone I will be completely unable to not tag you, right? ;D
Holy shit as someone who is dedicated to these two in particular this post is a goldmine, especially because it’s nearly impossible to find information about Persephone!!
On a linguistic level, it’s easy for us today to kneejerk at the term “the rape of Persephone” but in this context it’s derived from the original meaning of the Latin raptus, which meant “snatching,” “carrying-off,” or, you guess it, “abduction.” This is the same root as that of “rapture.” Over the years, the English derivative rape evolved until it referred specifically to sexual violation, but when used in a literary sense (such as mythology), the meaning switches back to that of the orignal Latin. We also see this usage in stories like “the rape of Ganymede,” “the rape of Europa,” “the rape of the Sabines,” etc.
To be clear, bridal kidnapping IRL was (and is) a very serious issue and often does coincide with violence and sexual assault. However, in some cultures, it became a ritualised part of a wedding (or even an elopement) rather than a horrific crime. The violent practice was thus “tamed” and became the foundation for both ritual abduction (as a part of consensual weddings) and the Persephone myth. And before you go off, this “civilised taming” of old practices is a visible phenomenon in virtually every single culture on the planet, alive or dead, including western Anglophone cultures. Just look at fathers walking their daughters up the aisle in weddings, and the traditional etiquette of who pays for what part of the ceremony. All that is derived from dowry and bride-price traditions. Yes, there is of course plenty of room for feminist critique of these things (and there should be), but it certainly can’t be used to determine whether or not a marriage is consensual. Declaring a union non-consensual based solely on unfamiliar wedding rituals is problematic both on an intercultural and historical level.
Anyway, there’s every indication that the ancient Greeks read the rape of Persephone as a dramatised (or even originating) version of traditional wedding rituals. They apparently viewed Hades and Persephone as a consensual and happy couple, especially considering that (unlike so many other Greek gods and goddesses) they were never depicted as cheating on each other or working against each other (afaik). So, no, nobody forced Persephone into Hades’ bed. She’s quite happy there, and people are allowed to use Hades and Persephone as inspiration for whatever romantic stories they want to write, thank you very much.
i am eternally aggreived on behalf of people who were clearly never taught what literary analysis can be. people who were never shown the incredible satisfaction when you see something in a piece of literature and you can /prove/ it’s there, the slow and careful tugging at an image, at chasing implication and meaning, at pushing and pushing until it all falls into place.
sometimes that looks like catching a “throwaway” line in a novel (“[the drawings] remembered Beardsley”) and chasing that single image until you have five thousand words about attempted freedom, conformity, and inescapability.
sometimes that looks like noticing a motif of reused roman ruins and going through and through until you can argue about colonising gaze and welsh devolution.
sometimes that means reading a novel where every chapter tells a story of someone telling a story and proving that that is an attempt at catharsis that fails.
it’s not all “the curtains are blue therefore the character is sad”
and besides, that’s actually “this character seems sad but the author never says so > how does the author create that? > oh hey there sure are a lot of washed out or cool colours in this scene > wait hold on the furnishings are almost obsessively described > does that say something about material culture? can i parallel that against appearances vs reality? > “in this essay i will argue that this short story interrogates arts and crafts aesthetic ideals by portraying an obsession with furnishings that ultimately leads the main character into despair. In order to do so let me first demonstate the connection between the furnishings and the emotional state of the main character”
If I may add on to this: I study English lit at uni, and I struggled with it for a little while because I didn’t truly understand what I was writing about. There would be little glimmers of things that caught my eye and excited me in my essays, but a lot of it was just regurgitating other people’s arguments. And a lot of my class felt the same way, they kept saying that they couldn’t have their own opinions because they had to back everything up with sources, and how everything felt like a reach. And I will admit i did, and sometimes still do, refer to essay writing as the academic circlejerk. It seemed like everything was just grasping at circumstantial evidence to back up an argument made in the 70s!
But THEN, I think the moment it really clicked for me was last semester. I was taking a class on gothic literature which I was really excited about, and I pushed myself to read all the extra material, which was really easy because I actually enjoyed it and engaged with it! I was chewing through heavy theories and as I read then I was making connections back to my notes and actually really enjoying the process. I would show up to class like a conspiracy theorist with red string links between x theory and y text and z cultural phenomenon. So when it came to writing my essays I already had things that fascinated me enough to dig into.
I wrote about how Kristeva’s theories of abjection (how horror can be created by transcending physical boundaries, and how the (cis) female form is inherently abject due to its childbirth abilities) permeated the female driven narratives of the texts we studied. How it intertwined with theories of the grotesque and reinforced the otherness of the characters. How the stories reinforce or subvert the marginalisation of these women through these devices.
I spent months of that class arguing with my teacher and my class about the way witchcraft is represented in british folk horror, and so I took that frustration and I turned it into another essay. I wrote about the way witchcraft is used as an easy signpost for evilness and otherness in these stories, and how it is often removed from its historical context and yet irrevocably linked to it, so by showing witchcraft as a simple force of evil which threatens rational peoples despite the fact that it was a way to oppress marginalised groups, we reinforce that cultural knee jerk response to otherness, prioritise ‘British rationality’ which is constructed through stories like these, and never challenge the preconceptions of the readership. ‘Why should we fear otherness?’ I ranted, backed up with academic sources, ‘look at the society we have created through this mentality’.
I ended up getting some of the best grades of my life that semester. Every assignment I did across the board got a 1st degree grade. That’s not a brag, it was a breakthrough for me, realising that if I let myself enjoy the process and get experimental and write about things I cared about, then that would be reflected in the work I was producing.
It has opened my eyes as well, and I see these connections in everything I read. Some people say it ruins books to read them like this, but it makes them all the more wonderful to me. Critical analysis of text trains your brain to make connections and unearth meaning, and it helps you reassess or reinforce the way you look at the world. The way literature shapes it and reflects it. For two and a half years I thought my classes were just a fun piss take, and I’m so sad that I didn’t appreciate them more and sooner.
Tl;dr – listen to your English teachers!
As a recovering English major, I endorse this post.
Also: The kind thought this process primes your brain for is one of the most undervalued skills in our society today. We laugh at English majors and Art history majors, because poetry and novels and paintings are “merely decorative,” and have no bearing on The Market – like Statistics and Engineering do.
But once you learn how to follow the thread of an idea through a story (or multiple stories), and articulate its political implications in the culture at large, then you can use those same skills on politicians’ speeches, and advertising, and all the other ways language is used to leverage power.
There’s a reason “The Pen is Mightier than the Sword” is a truism.
Everything We Do Is A Narrative.
This includes things like Science and Engineering: they turn numbers into stories.
Understanding how the human mind creates narratives will help you understand how scientific theories are developed – and the hidden assumptions they contain. It will help you understand how and why structures and systems are designed, and heir failure modes.
Everything We Do Is A Narrative.
Precisely.
Here’s an excerpt of an essay I wrote on Storytelling some 20-ish years ago (edited to fix spelling errors, and to bold my thesis statement):
Humans are the only [creatures] I’ve
seen who gather in large groups and focus all their attention on one
among them, who, alone, does all the speaking. The crowd falls silent.
Their eyes get wide. Their jaws go slack. And, except for inching
forward to the edge of their seats, they remain motionless. In other
words, humans are the only creatures I’ve seen that engage in storytelling.
Even babies and toddlers who have not yet mastered speech sit still
longer for a story than for other activities. It’s not a phase we
outgrow, either – to our dying day, we find joy in telling and
listening to stories. And, just as there is no time in our individual
lives when stories do not move us, there is no human culture on Earth
without its own, unique body of stories. Since it is both unique to,
and universal among, humans, I cannot help but think that is
storytelling, rather than language, per se, that separates us from other animals. Perhaps our languages became so complex and varied because we needed
them to be in order to tell better stories. You can tell simple
stories, after all, without any language, by acting them out, or drawing
a picture. But with language, you have the tools of metaphor, idiom,
inflection and rhythm – all features that give each language on Earth
its own distinct beauty, and all features which draw in an audience’s
attention and holds it.
When we gather for a story (whether
literally, as around a campfire, or figuratively, as when we go to the
movies, watch T.V. or buy a book), we surrender our imaginations to the storyteller’s control.
We abandon, for a while, our private worries, speculations, and
daydreams, to experience a vision created by someone else. A skilled
storyteller can hold and shape our attention, knowing when to fan the
flames of our emotion, and when to let them die down, until the balance
of energy is just right, until that focused energy is released with the
final word. This ability to share our visions, to hold and guide the
attention of our comrades must have helped us hunt animals bigger
and stronger than ourselves, to plant and gather our crops, and to
build our shining cities. The world we live in today has been shaped by
the stories told in our past. And the world of our future is being
shaped by the stories of today.
I was quite glad to receive this post in my dash because for the past three weeks of 11th grade I’ve come to realize how random English in is taught in America. In my AP English Language class, half of the students who had this one teacher in 10th grade, knew grammar really well, while the other half were absolutely lost. However, above all, the number one problem for everyone was that no one could really say that they knew how to write an essay or analyze text. For years of my life, my english classes were always repetitively, memorize vocabulary, read a book, take a test on vocabulary, take a test on the reading, random essay here and there, every single year. I don’t remember ever once understanding how to truly write an essay. An essay that is more than just words in a sentence on paper, but one that can grasp my reader. I don’t ever remember really understanding the complexity and the depth of the words of the author. We were always thrown into doing all of these things without ever being taught how to do it in the first place. Similarly to what is said above, I do not understand what I am arguing for when I write an essay. I’ve come to realize how inept I am when it comes to creative writing, especially after realizing that I want to make a comic. This is partly due to the fact that for years it was always academic writing only. No room for creativity. No room to explore. None. After finding my newfound passion for story telling, I’ve found many more topics that I’ve become interested for the sake of story telling. I want to learn creative writing. I want to learn how to improve my writing. I want to learn the skill of literary analysis. If anyone has tips, advice, or materials/sources to recommend to me please freely message me.
The Window Socket offers a neat way to harness solar energy and use it as a plug socket. So far we have seen solutions that act as a solar battery backup, but none as a direct plug-in. Simple in design, the plug just attaches to any window and does its job intuitively.
Also QED, “quod erat demonstrandum” meaning “thus it has been demonstrated.“
Remember:
e.g. stands for exempli gratia, “for [the sake of an] example”
i.e. stands for id est, meaning “that is [to say]” or “in other words”
This post is a perfect example of why literal translation will get you every time.
Yes, the image in the original post correctly states the literal meaning of each of those phrases.
However, Latin phrases that have entered colloquial English often have very specific connotations that aren’t obvious from their literal translations.
For example, to be “caught in flagrante delicto“ literally means to be apprehended in the act of wrongdoing, but in its customary usage in contemporary English, it typically means to be walked in on while having sex.
HOLY SH*T. THEY FOUND NITROGEN-FIXING CORN BRED BY INDIGENOUS PEOPLE IN MEXICO. @botanyshitposts
“The study found the Sierra Mixe corn obtains 28 to 82 percent of its nitrogen from the atmosphere. To do this, the corn grows a series of aerial roots. Unlike conventional corn, which has one or two groups of aerial roots near its base, the nitrogen-fixing corn develops eight to ten thick aerial roots that never touch the ground.
During certain times of the year, these roots secrete a gel-like substance, or mucilage. The mucilage provides the low-oxygen and sugar-rich environment required to attract bacteria that can transform nitrogen from the air into a form the corn can use.
“Our research has demonstrated that the mucilage found in this Sierra Mixe corn forms a key component of its nitrogen fixation,“ said co-author Jean-Michel Ané, professor of agronomy and bacteriology in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences at UW–Madison. “We have shown this through growth of the plant both in Mexico and Wisconsin.”
…
“
Researchers are a long way from developing a similar nitrogen-fixing trait for commercial corn, but this is a first step to guide further research on that application. The discovery could lead to a reduction of fertilizer use for corn, one of the world’s major cereal crops. It takes 1 to 2 percent of the total global energy supply to produce fertilizer. The energy-intensive process is also responsible for 1 to 2 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
“
I’ve written about this before, this is one of those ‘saving the planet’ levels of discovery. No joke.
I know when this discovery first broke I got like 5236834 messages about it through like 800 channels and all “____ girls make do” memes aside….if something permanent isn’t done about the nitrogen problem ASAP, the fertile soils we depend upon will literally be rendered unusable in 100-200 years.
this is a FANTASTIC approach and I’m unironically hyped to see where this research leads. money talks, so what the corporations will be looking for is:
-yield
-insect resistance
-brittle snap (does the corn’s stem break easily? we don’t want it to)
-root health
-growth speed
because this is a native bred cultivar, we can probably assume that it’s very healthy in terms of root health, anatomical strength, and being resistant to insects in its native environment. growth speed should be fine as long as it flowers at the same time as all the other corn, so my main concern would be yield; this is what companies look for. if the researchers can get about 300-400 bushels of corn reliably yielded by this variety (where the industry is at right now), it might just be able to break into the industry to become a thing that everyone grows, which…god, that would be fucking fantastic, not only for the environment but for the farmers who wouldn’t have to pay for nitrogen spraying in their fields anymore.
And if it doesn’t have industry-breaking yield, it can most likely be bred or otherwise engineered to increase the yield
Queer Fiction Writer 
