#Citing sources properly

[latest-info]

A Beginner's Guide to Researching Like a Pro

Research is an essential skill in today’s information-driven world. Whether you’re a student, a professional, or just someone with a curious mind, being able to research effectively can help you find accurate information, make informed decisions, and solve problems efficiently. This guide will walk you through the steps to research like a pro, covering everything from defining your topic to…

[a-very-tired-jew]

I've seen this particular quote trotted out by antisemites time and time again as a kind of "gotcha" against Zionism. "The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies." This is from Theodor Herzl's diary, which can be found on page 84. However, if you've been around the internet in any context for the past few decades then you would likely realize that a singular quote out of context is not as damning as someone wants you to think. In fact, this is actually a fallacious argument (quoting out of context) that lawyers will get warnings from judges about in their own arguments. You could also categorize it as a lie of omission as well.

Why?

Well let's look at the entire diary entry this particular quote is from.

In context this quote is about using antisemites that are respected in their community to assuage the fears that Jews leaving would not negatively impact the community and country. It pretty much talks about making sure the antisemitic conspiracy that Jews were puppet masters controlling these goyim to liquidate their assets did not also arise.

In short, the entry is about understanding how antisemitism and antisemites act and acting within that frame so as to not cause a negative response and thereby allow the Jews to leave in a peaceful manner.

Why?

Because Jews often enriched a country's economy and people benefited from our presence. There are multiple instances in history of Jews being expelled for antisemitic reasons by a monarch and then being invited back by a subsequent monarch after their economy essentially crashed from kicking us out because the jobs they relegated us too were essential and beneficial. But in every scenario Jews were seen as lesser but beneficial. They wanted us there, but wanted us gone. When we left and returned we were harmed in almost every instance and were accompanied by a host of conspiracies about us. Understanding that behavior and pattern and using it is what Herzl is detailing in this section.

But that's the thing with antisemites. They latch onto a singular sentence out of context and use that to further their narrative about "evil Zionist Jews". All the while they handwave away their own antisemitic rhetoric and bigotry and the actions of the violent antisemites they support in the name of "fighting evil Zionists".

[writeitinsharpie]

gdi why did the queer video essayist i liked turn out to be a plagerizer

[river-gale]

jane eyre and fairy tale references in the mars house by natasha pulley

Let's talk about folklore! TMH references it near-constantly. This post was originally just going to be me chatting about individual references for fun and enrichment, but now I want to talk about what purpose they serve.

A few of them are to describe situations or scenery:

This one is a Sleeping Beauty reference, used to describe what happens when the internet goes out. Sleeping Beauty is also a ballet with music by Tchaikovsky, completed in 1899; a lot of ballets are based on fairy tales, so it makes sense that these are the stories the narrator picks. The story is from January's perspective, and he's a former ballet principal—it's a neat bit of characterization.

He also uses them to talk to and about Gale:

(If you know a specific Tang dynasty novel this is referencing, please tell me, I will give you my hand in marriage.)

This is the plot of Bluebeard!

The second one here is Selene and Endymion. The first one is Jane Eyre, which is not technically a folk tale—it's a novel, a work of Gothic literature by Charlotte Brontë—but, like TMH, it follows the same archetypal plot of plenty of folk tales. A vulnerable person, usually a young woman and sometimes poor, has to marry someone powerful and monstrous—an animal, a dragon, an invisible god, a serial murderer, a nobleman who's keeping his ex-wife locked in the attic, or in the case of TMH, a CEO who is also a xenophobic demagogue who may or may not have murdered their last spouse. This is why January references Bluebeard. He's in the exact same type of story.

There's an equivalent feminine archetype of the Monster Bridegroom—the Swan Maiden and related tales—but the allusions in TMH tend towards the Monster Bridegroom version, just because it works better for the themes of power dynamics and different kinds of power.

The thing that makes TMH interesting, though, is that it isn't just an Monster Bridegroom folktale from January's perspective. It's also one from River's. January is marrying an incredibly wealthy and influential politician who wants people like him permanently disabled; River is marrying someone with superhuman strength who belongs to the same group as the person who recently ripped off their leg. If we take "monstrous" to mean alien, powerful, and potentially dangerous, then that's exactly what they are to each other—and what the animal spouses in Monster Bridegroom myths are.

And the allusions in the book reflect that, because they're also used to describe January.

Could be a lot of things—many different cultures have Things In Ponds That Eat You, and that's beautiful—but my first thought is kelpies.

A generic one.

January's Swan King thing! (And then they kiss about it!!)

I don't have a quote for this one, but Earthstrongers—and January in particular—are often compared to polar bears. (He's got polar-bear-colored hair.) It's very East of the Sun, West of the Moon.

The double fairy tale plot of this book is super cool—they're each the same fairy tale archetype to each other—but possibly even cooler is that Jane Eyre does a really similar thing with its fairy tale allusions!

The first speaker is Rochester, and the second is Jane. He's her monster bridegroom (due to the attic wife situation), but he frequently alludes to changeling and fairy stories when speaking about her. It adds some depth to the Jane Eyre reference in TMH!

It also recalls this passage from TMH:

Because at their hearts, Jane Eyre and TMH are both stories about class boundaries and power dynamics being transcended by the ability to match someone's freak.

[acheronist]

so as far as i can tell, he got hit with a moment of Existential Panic And Misery and then wrote down his account of his entire sailing career to add in next to his issued ID papers in the wallet. so if the wallet survived then we would know who he was. thanks bestie the clues did help.

[brilliantorinsane]

kdfjhg does Ronald Howard accidentally call Watson 'Holmes' at 3.47 in The Shy Ballerina. I could well be mishearing but

[german-enthusiast]

@strengthisyellow, I absolutely understand your frustration and of course you're right and I'll come back to why later, but first I want to use this as a jumping off point about

⭐German Vowels⭐

⭐Number of German Vowels

German has a LOT of them. Out of 564 languages surveyed by WALS, 93 had 2-4 vowels (16%), 287 had 5-6 vowels (51%) and 184 had 7-14 vowels (33%) German has 8 vowels letters (a, e, i, o, u, ä, ö, ü <- graphemes). Yet we have 16 vowel sounds (phonemes)! (not counting diphthongs here)

The number 16 comes about, because most vowel can be realized long/shortly (gespannt vs. ungespannt). Minimal pairs (two different words that only differ in exactly one sound) are a great way to show this:

These minimal pairs can also give you an idea of how the phonologial differences are marked in the spelling!

⭐Vowel-amounts in various languages

Here's a comparison of different languages and their vowels (without diphthongs, because those are the combination of two adjacent vowel sounds).

⭐L1-phoneme inventory

Now what's super interesting about learning a first language, is that shortly after birth, babies can hear and distinguish all possible sounds (across the world, there are around 600 consonant sounds and 200 vowel sounds; in sum, 800 different phones), yet at 10-12 months old, they can only distinguish those sounds present in their first language (aka their language's phonemes)! A japanese child, for example, would hear no difference betwen "radio" and "ladio", because /l/ and /r/ are not phonemes in Japanese.

I get to encounter this first hand with German-learners who struggle to produce, but most importantly even hear the difference between [ˈmʊtɐ ] (Mutter; mother) and [ˈmʏtɐ] (Mütter, mothers). (So far, I've specifically asked beginner/intermediate students with en-US and es-MX as their L1 about this - both US-English and (Mexican) Spanish do not have [ʏ] as a phoneme, so they get generalized and instead perceived as [ʊ].

Put simply, within its first year, a baby builds up a "phoneme inventory" made up of all the sounds that make a difference in its language, and loses the ability to distinguish between the ones that don't because those simply don't matter.

Good news is that you can and likely will train yourself to hear and distinguish sounds outside your current phoneme inventory (depending on your phoneme inventory and your TL's phonemes, this might be harder or easier).

⭐German Vowels and Spoonerisms

Back to the schulkrank-tags: The issue lies not as much in the letters as in the sounds, but OP continues to be right. "kühl" and "kuhl" are NOT the same, because they differ in a phoneme, which (by definition) changes the meaning of the word. What's additionally interesting, is that spoonerisms (switching of sounds or morphemes between two words of a phrase, like "blushing crow" instead of "crushing blow") are much more likely to occur if the words that come out of it are real words again! ("The Lord is a shoving leopard." (instead of "a loving shepherd") is more likely than "The shord is a loving leopard" because "shord" isn't a real word)

The US-American coworker (who probably speaks a little German if he enjoys German spoonerisms) made "schulkrank" out of "Kühlschrank". That is something a native would never do because instead of merely switching sounds, he switched and changed one, thus it's not a real spoonerism anymore. Yet to him it was probably entirely correct because he literally doesn't hear a difference.

[kingethera]

Unknown side effect of hbomberguy: College essays becoming infinitely better written because I imagine him watching over my shoulder for plagiarism

[ramenwithgyoza]

I like the previous reblog bc its good to know that it was actually normal

[dankovskaya]

The whole plagiarism thing and particularly the phenomenon of people watching a documentary/reading a book and then regurgitating it practically word for word as if it were original content without engaging with it in any way is crazy and I've been thinking about that a lot lately because in one of my classes our final paper has to be an argumentative essay using what we learned in the class as evidence to make some claim about ancient Roman society or whatever. And it doesn't even have to be something crazy and never before seen but for literally the last full month of classes the professor had to clarify again and again and again almost every class with increasing exasperation that you can't just DESCRIBE a particular topic or artwork that you liked in detail. That would literally just be reciting her own lectures back at her. Even in the last week she had to keep reminding people that you have to actually have a thesis and make an individual claim that you are able to SUBSTANTIATE with material from the class and outside sources so I have to assume it was a relatively sizable portion of the class that was just not getting it. And that sort of basic inability to differentiate between just repeating information that you were given by someone else and actually USING that information to fuel a unique idea I think is a massive contributing factor here NOT to imply that a great deal of plagiarists don't know exactly what they're doing or have conniving intentions from the get go. Lmfao. But the passion with which some of these people defend themselves or justify the Borrowing Of Ideas just reeks of like.... no one ever taught you how to write an essay and you did not let that stop you from becoming a video essayist. And that's crazy.

[kvetchinglyneurotic]

my hot writing tip is that if you need to remember to go back and fix something, put it in a different colour

[amorremanet]

in honor of how many clones he xuan has running around the various realms at any given time, i’ve decided that a modern au he xuan should be engaged in absolutely msscribe and/or jordan wood/andy thanfiction levels of batshit ridiculous sock-puppetry on the internet

like, modern au he xuan should make msscribe and thanfiction seem like amateurs with their legion of sockpuppet accounts and how much chaos they can cause with said sockpuppets

[goatmilksoda]

Man, it would be so cool if I could get PAID to write shit. If I stopped writing for a newspaper "for exposure", for school assignments, and strange age regression fanfiction for myself it would he all over for you people.

[willosword]

FUCK MY STUPID BAKA LIFE my professor gave me exactly 90% on the dumb philosophy paper i tried so hard to half-ass ;_; IT DESERVED C+ AT BEST

[raininyourblackeyes]

4th year of university and I am still one of the only people who know how to properly cite sources in papers... and those same people have audicaty for getting angry at a prof for returning their paper because it was plagiarised (according to them: "But we didn't copy-paste it all! We used similar words and even changed the sentence structure a bit!") Literally kill me.

[karinyosa]

i found this like 3m video essay style thing i made in hs for class and it is. THEEEEE most gayboy with my taste in movies/media thing i’ve ever seen. nothing changes