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Oh, your favorite ship was canonized by the author? Well, just call you Elcid Barrrett, because you might have a letter of marque from the king but that's still the scummiest vessel I've ever seen

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you say that as if loving lord of the rings was unique to internet nazis

what is it about lord of the rings that makes internet nazis love it

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I believe that the primary appeal of this game is clockety clackity tiles and you have so much time to gossip

Mahjong is proof sent by Satan himself that game design doesn't actually matter.

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Another side effect of human culture being emergent is that there is never a true "core" to any culture or group, positive or negative. There's just what everyone agrees that it is, which an ever-shifting battlefield that can reference the past but not settle it thereby.

There isn't, for instance, a True Spirit of America as either a Racist Colonial State or Shining City on the Hill. There are historical facts, sure, about the actions of the government and the people, but those don't prove anything about the True Spirit of America, then or now. Plenty of American denizens were able to sew but that's not ever brought up as reflecting some deep truth because no one ever gave a shit; it's all Being White or Immigrant or Christian or Tolerant, because those were/are the big arguments of the day, and everyone wants their values to be considered the American Spirit.

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Mahjong is proof sent by Satan himself that game design doesn't actually matter.

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Human culture isn't designed intentionally by anyone. Human culture is emergent, and is built continuously by everyone through the constant feedback loop of interaction with other people, individual experience, and social learning. No one is designing it from the top down.

It is a mistake to assume that any aspect of human culture is "for" anything in the narrow sense. Certainly culture emerges out of a historical process which can often be traced, and certainly there is the broad sense of "purpose" in which an aspect of culture might be perpetuated because it benefits certain people in certain ways, etc., but this is all an unplanned, decentralized, non-directed process. There have been efforts in human history by powerful institutions—like states—to shape culture in particular ways, and sometimes they see some amount of success, but the vast, vast majority culture is not produced in this way.

There's a particular post I'm vaguing here, whose political orientation I don't even particularly disagree with, but it significantly rubbed me the wrong way because it was worded as if culture was basically something engineered from the top down, in which everything has a discernible, coherent "purpose" that can be logically deduced. No! I don't think that's actually true!

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Okay, the meme is funny, but I’m going to have to be annoying and dust off my linguistic background again because I've seen people say this a lot, and I want to point out that exonyms (words for countries and people used by people outside of that group) being different from endonyms (words people use to describe themselves and their own country) is extremely common in every language, and doesn’t actually say anything about the amount of education people have about that place or group of people lol. Like, people aren’t saying a different word or different pronunciation of a country out of stupidity, they’re saying it…because they’re speaking a different language.

Let me give you another example: “I don’t want to hear your opinion if you call it ‘Japan’ instead of ‘Nihon’ 😤 I don’t want to hear your opinion of you call it ‘Germany’ instead of ‘Deutschland’ 😤”

Seems a little silly now, doesn’t it? These are just the words and pronunciations that people grow up learning, and words from other languages are modified to fit a language’s phonotactics (pronunciation rules) all the time! It’s just how language works, and sometimes places are even pronounced differently by speakers of the same language with different accents (I know when someone isn’t from my city when they pronounce certain street names differently).

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Friendly reminder that you're not required to publicly take sides in any geopolitical conflict you don't understand.

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Types of linguistics posts you see online:

Linguistics content

Blatantly false etymologies

"What's the reason for German being the ugliest language alive?"

College freshman who just reinvented the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis from scratch

"I just learned my sixth language. What language should I learn next?"

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no but. really. if ur feminism starts and ends with policing the actions of other women. u r patriarchy's strongest soldier actually.

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i’m sick and tired of people pretending that burger isn’t delicious just to clown on americans. america deserves the ridicule, but why’s burger catching strays? burger did nothing wrong

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what is your least favorite irrational number

no it's not

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why do some birders hate squirrels so much to the point that they actually have beef with these rodents. they are simply creatures also

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gender is a construct and baby I get +1/+1 for each artifact I control

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The reactions to the Royai fake out though:

Everyone ships it

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There’s being queer/lgbt+ and there’s not being that and then there’s a grey area in between the two and I’m still inviting those people to the party tbh

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One thing I love about Aurora is the fact that Kendal and Alinua are literally just friends. No romance. Just best buddies who like the cuddle and say nice things to each other. And that is nice - a nice change from a lot of similar fantasy media and generally just a super cute dynamic