#FUCK I LOVE ENGLISH

[docholligay]

When you hear an accent/dialect/we're not going to get into that debate here that sounds 'odd' to your ear, think about that! Not even in a "Wow, I hate that" way, or a "I need to examine my classism/racism/etc way I am a bad person way, but in a secret third way called, "curiosity and openness to experience"

I was EXTREMELY EXTREMELY FORTUNATE to have a required class in college called "History of the English Language" which was one of the 'weeder classes' for the English majors at my school. It was very very difficult, but the man who taught it had an INSANE passion for English. He LOVED IT, he would talk about it all goddamn day, and it taught me so much about how and why things get changed and said the way they do, and it made me so CURIOUS about why something is unusual or fun for my brain to listen to.

So now, anytime I hear someone pronounce something or verbalize something in a way I think of as "odd" I get so excited and curious*. What is it I haven't heard before? Sometimes my tongue will move around my mouth trying to figure out how they make that sound (I am REAL bad at this. Accents are in no no no way my forte, which is annoying because I'm very good at HEARING them and hearing the differences between them, I just can't DO it) because it is so interesting and cool all the different ways one fucking language has been DONE over so many years.

Anyway I so far off track I am no longer a train, but looking at dialects as you might look at an interesting bug instead of like a pop song on the radio or a sign font is a really good way to start opening your mind to language as something other than a value marker. And that doesn't HAVE to be another way of whipping yourself for being a piece of shit--I assume you have plenty of reasons--but a way of going, "Oh, something unexpected!"

*Also not to attempt to introduce nuance on the 'no nuance we die like men' website, but I think there is a big difference between loving teasing and mockery/cruelty. I don't actually mind if friends, especially ones with VASTLY different ways of speaking, imitate my accent I think it's fuckin funny as hell! Jetty has the WORST rural western accent on the planet, and I love to make fun of whatever the fuck she's got going on there, but it is FUN and there is a sense of LOVE that comes with it. And it's not even a "well yeah, Holligay, when you've known someone for a long time" No no, I once sat in a shitty pub on the east end, now closed (rip) and me and my mom ending up striking up a conversation with two old-school cockney guys, and as soon as he tried to say "Montana" the way I did, the race was ON, and it was FUNNY, and we all laughed and had a good time, it is about attitude.

And I know I'm gonna get something about "well how do you KNOW and that is why i turned off reblogs but come on y'all, 9 times out of 10 you can tell when something is done with deep affection or camaraderie or because even just something feels cool in your mouth it's fun to try. I can't do 87% of the linguistic features I think FUCK SEVERELY (intrusive R, the way a word that genuinely does not start with the letter h has a different sound than a word when the h is uptaken (this has a fucking word and I cannot find it it's making me nuts)) but I LOVE them.

Quick quiz to help though: Are you affecting this accent to in some way sound stupid/ridiculous? We can go back and forth about that a little: one of my buddies says "well shiiiiit" exactly the way I do, for funsies, but it just...feels neat. What I'm saying is you have to use some discernment here and I know we are all allergic to that but give it a shot/go/whatever the hell Australians say for this.

Post script: All of this reminds me also about how I studied the phonemes and linguistics of English with intense fervor in college, and got REAL COCKY, and then in the Orkneys had my very first ever, in life, "We are both speaking English but damn" moment. Normally I am The One for this. I am unruffled. My wife gets confused by the word takeaway (she is smart I swear) but I'm rock-solid. Until. Hubris.

This guy is rollin on up in his van, which is the 'bus system' on Rapness, and it's cute as hell as a system, but I ask him something stupid about the timetable, and he answers me in what I can only describe as a Nordic-flavored Scottish accent. It is actually really remarkable and I went on a weird deep dive of the Orkneys afterward because I had never heard anything like it but I digress. I DID NOT GET A FUCKING WORD. And so, because I panic, I do what I always do when I feel flustered or emotional or angry: I sound like Yosemite fucking Sam. So now he can't understand what I am asking him!

Good news is, we both give a little bit of a laugh, I go, 'Let's try that again" and I do manage to exchange that this van picks up outside of the Pierowall hotel in time for the ferry.

[avonsdrabbles]

Hi! I seem to have rambled on to your blog

Weird question! How did you get into (if you ever did) examining and taking apart literature?

For us it's Merlin BBC cuz nothing new has come out for it in over a decade. It's 5 seasons long but at some point you just run out of content but yk, still wanting to talk about it we started drawing on narrative themes picking apart and inspecting the dialogue to figure out each character's intention. I'm glad to say it held up really well

& we're asking people whom have interacted with the degree that forces literature upon you how they started cuz it's interesting

On ask? On my main? It's more likely than you'd think--

Anyways, hi, love the snakes, love the planet, love the ask! It's unsurprisingly a little complicated for me, so bear with me.

I knew I liked English in middle school, but that wasn't dissecting text, that was writing. But that's where a love for language formed, and I started writing more and more. Back then, tho, I HATED dissecting literature, because it felt so pointless. "What did the author mean by this?" I don't know, I can't ask them, Margie! Ugh.

But then, I had the worst English teacher in my entire life in high school. She was, simply put, batshit. She rambled on and on about how fairies were going to take her soul and stole kids things, how cameras were the work of the devil and could also take your soul, how English would heal people's souls...

Really obsessed with souls ngl. Bit weird.

Anyways -- she was god awful. And she changed the curriculum multiple times so we could read what she wanted. The year I was supposed to read Romeo and Juliet, we read Midsummer Nights Dream instead. And by god, everything this woman said pissed me the fuck off. SHE FOCUSED ON THE IMABS? IMABIC PENTAMETERS???? I'm sorry, woman, can we discuss the puns here?! Can we discuss the authorial context of Shakespeare making this play within a play something commoners could enjoy while mocking nobility and the scandals at play, while (sorry, foaming at the mouth in rage and lust over literature).

Needless to say, I dove straight in. I'm one of the lucky ones who could understand Shakespeare without trying. It didn't take any energy on my part to parse the iambs, and I found a lot of beauty in the poetic nature of it all.

The next year, I was ready to fight, but I promptly had the best English teacher of my entire life, the one who taught me more about teaching than anyone else, and who I cite as the reason I became an English teacher. And she really fucking opened my eyes to the intricacies of subjectiveness in English. See, I'm a very stubborn person, and I'm very my-way-or-the-highway. I used to be very mathmatically inclined because there's only one right answer. Sure, you can get that answer a lot of different ways, but only one thing is right. English frustrated me because it seemed like I could say any fucking bullshit and have someone nod and say "Profound."

This is the teacher that taught me that's a feature, not a bug.

Through a little something called Waiting For Godot.

It is, by far, the worst play I've read. It's also my favorite. What sort of 10th grader gets to read an analysis of God that features pet play BDSM? THIS one. (This was also outside of the standard curriculum, but it was the end of the year, so all bets were off I guess).

This was the play where we dove in, read it, and without any discussion of the play, had to write an essay about the theme the author was presenting. All of us felt so lost. The symbolism didn't make any sense. There seemed to be no theme, beyond maybe "Waiting for someone who will never come is painful."

And then, the day before we had to write the essay... We had a substitute, following her lesson plans, and he was one of my favorite SEIAs (special ed instructional assistants). He was the exact same level of batshit as I am.

He SLAMMED his hand on the whiteboard, stared at us as we looked back in shock, and screamed, "ABORTION." He then went into a 40 minute diatribe about how the author of the text was very clearly explaining pro-life VS pro-choice mentality, leaning pro-life, but conversely making a pro-choice argument through the use of the discussion of Christian free will. He used sources. He used text evidence. By the end of the talk, all of us were nodding, clapping, acknowledging that he HAD to be correct!

And he stopped, stared at us, and laughed. "That was all bullshit."

He'd pulled it all out of his ass. And it made perfect sense to us all.

That's when I figured out that literature is what YOU make of it. Literature is all about interpretation; sure, there's tropes to follow that help guide our interpretations, but at the end of the day, words mean whatever you think they mean.

THAT'S what got me into lit analysis.

(And, oddly, homestuck)

[cubbyhole-for-flea-bee]

Macaque spent the whole season Big-Damn-Hero-ing and was NOT happy about it xD

[morningsaidthemoon]

Excerpt from The Song of Roland, translated by Norma Lorre Goodrich (Medieval Myths)

[inkskinned]

one of the things about being an educator is that you hear what parents want their kids to be able to do a lot. they want their kid to be an astronaut or a ballerina or a politician. they want them to get off that damn phone. be better about socializing. stop spending so much time indoors. learn to control their own temper. to just "fucking listen", which means to be obedient.

one of the things i learned in my pedagogy classes is that it's almost always easier to roleplay how you want someone to act. it's almost always easier to explain why a rule exists, rather than simply setting the rule and demanding adherence.

i want my kids to be kind. i want them to ask me what book they should read next, and i want to read that book with them so we can discuss it. i want my kid to be able to tell me hey that hurt my feelings without worrying i'll punish them. i want my kid to be proud of small things and come running up to me to tell me about them. i want them to say "nah, i get why this rule exists, but i get to hate it" and know that i don't need them to be grateful-for-the-roof-overhead while washing the dishes. i want them to teach me things. i want them to say - this isn't safe. i'm calling my mom and getting out of this. i want them to hear me apologize when i do fuck up; and i want them to want to come home.

the other day a parent was telling me she didn't understand why her kid "just got so angry." this woman had flown off the handle at me.

my dad - traditional catholic that he is - resents my sentiment of "gentle parenting". he says they'll grow up spoiled, horrible, pretentious. granola, he spits.

i am going to be kind to them. i am going to set the example, i think. and whatever they choose become in the meantime - i'm going to love them for it.

[kavebot]

i think they went into the wrong game 🧩

[cupid-tune]

Sometimes I get curious about the alpha troll session, how much we don't know about and can only speculate on. I really enjoy the interpretations people come up with, the multitude of possibilities there are.

I'm especially interested in the events already talked about, I want to know exactly what happened and what caused them. There's so much left in the dark about Mituna's accident, how much of it was an accident, how much was planned.

With the ties Kurloz and Damara have to Lord English's arrival, I'm sure there was a lot of planning that went through to the other sessions.

But an Heir of Doom would've been too dangerous for their plans, able to snuff out the preparations and prepare everyone for battle before they even knew of English's existence.

He had to be stopped before that, it wasn't worth the risk.

So I wonder if Kurloz had anything to do with the actual accident, or he really was just a bystander happening to witness that fated moment.

Who knows if there really was any danger, if Mituna's incident really was something heroic that saved the others.

Or if Mituna played right into the tricks, and Kurloz only created a threat to make him and the others feel better. To give reason to his accident.

I do think he would still feel guilt about what he did, but it had to be done regardless. It's the same with Meulin, Kurloz didn't mean to cause this much damage, nor was it part of the plan. He's shrouded in mystery to the point that no one knows how he really feels, his actions don't align with his grief. It must be frustrating to know all the harm you caused to those closest to you was all in vain, that with the loss of everything you worked so hard for, you really are just a bad person at the end of the day.

[objektum]

OBJECTUM PEOPLE. How did you figure out you're objectum. GO

[peepeepoopoomonster69420]

heh :3

[assassin-artist]

this kills her in one hit [original meme here]

[kyonshi-8610]

ᜉᜓᜆᜁᜈ ᜀᜅ᜔ ᜎᜃᜐ᜔ ᜅ᜔ ᜂᜎᜈ᜔ ᜀᜇᜏ᜔ ᜀᜇᜏ᜔ ᜊᜓᜋᜊᜑ potaina ang lakas ng ulan araw araw bumabaha

[bottombaron]

So, I'm going to either make this joke more or less funny by explaining it, Colin Robinson-style:

Nandor isn't being an idiot by misspelling 'knowledge', he's spelling it phonetically.

Why? Well, it's probably not just that English is a horrendous abomination sent by god to punish us and an even worse trail for English learners either, but Persain is a (mostly) phonetic language!

This means each letter has a corresponding sound and words are phonetic in spelling (again, for the most part), unlike 'knowledge' in English where there are like...at least three?? unnecessary extra letters.

So, what's the phonetic spelling of 'knowledge' look like?

nolij

[slavhew]

dropping a nuke on him

[o-ana-posts]

I made a tribute for Torikago-san! An amazing artist and one of the sweetest people ever!

They had done this one, and I drew it again in my style! I hope you like it!

[flowerakatsuka]

my shimamatsu artbook came in so i finally got to see the rest of the unreleased teacher set...

scans of gym teacher oso from this set can be found here!

choro's a math teacher, which i feel like is pretty fitting for her. they drew her very cute, peak froggy expression.

ichi's a science teacher, like in teacher matsu merch by movic. he's also setting a bad example for his students by wearing open-toed shoes which is against standard lab safety rules, for shame smh.

jyushi is an art teacher! very cute, he's definitely fitting the bill of the zany art teacher stereotype.

totty's an english teacher. he's really meant it when he said he doesn't want to work bc he's giving us NOTHING in that awakened art. his outfits are very cute, though.

" gee, mj. where's kara? wasn't he the one you were the most curious about? " wELL. i waited to share him last bc...

when i tell you that i opened to this page in art book to find this set, saw kara, and then immediately closed the book...

he's a japanese / literature teacher, which i do think fits. ( still such a missed opportunity to have him as a music teacher... ) * puts my face in my hands * he's such a dork.

[hamable]

He might as well have said I’m Kacchan “Sugoi” Midoriya bitch and you will refer to me as such that’s right I’m marrying him now you fucking asshole