uptownsnail

[uptownsnail]

Accessibility takes too goddamn fucking long.

My brother was paralyzed in October 2023. We got him home from the hospital (in Texas, when we live in Iowa) in a clunky old hospital chair. He hated it. He was scared and angry and in pain and his life had just changed forever and he couldn’t do anything for himself in that wheelchair. His first goal (aside from learning how to transfer) was to get a wheelchair. My family was lucky enough to afford one so we thought it would be easy enough. Nope.

We couldn’t buy him a wheelchair. He needed a prescription. For a wheelchair. A doctor had to examine him and declare him in need of a wheelchair. It wasn’t good enough that he had scans and tests showing tumors cutting off his spinal cord. He needed his primary care doctor to examine him during a physical and write a prescription. He was making 2-4 transfers a day, tops. He had no energy to get to a doctor. Home health was in and out every day. He had no time to get to a doctor. He didn’t get a prescription for almost a month. Then it had to go through insurance.

We asked if we could skip insurance and just buy a wheelchair for him. Nope. They wouldn’t sell us one, not even at full sticker price. It needed to be approved by Medicare. We ordered a wheelchair, a nice one, a good shade of green, sporty, small. It would let him move around the house. He would be able to cook, to reach drawers and get stuff from the fridge and brush his teeth and put his contacts in at a sink. We were told it would take awhile, maybe two months. Silently we all hoped he would be around to see two more months.

He went on hospice care on a Saturday in March. On Monday, I was calling his friends to come see him before he died. I got a call on his phone. It was the wheelchair company. They were about to order his wheelchair, she said, but there was an issue with insurance— had he stopped being covered by Medicare? Well, yes. When he started hospice care, he got kicked off Medicare. The very nice woman I talked to told me to call her if he resumed Medicare coverage so she could order his wheelchair. He died less than 12 hours later.

We ordered that chair for him in early December. Medicare didn’t approve the order until March. He was dead before they got around to it. He wanted that fucking wheelchair so badly. The only reason he had any semblance of independence and any quality of life for the last five months of his life was because the wheelchair company lent him an old beater chair, a very used model of the chair he ordered. If I could go back and change one thing about his end-of-life, I would get him his dream wheelchair. He told me again and again he couldn’t wait to get it, so that he could feel like a person again. He made the best of what he had with that old beater chair, but it still makes me mad to this day. He was paralyzed. He needed a chair that afforded him dignity. We had the money for it. And yet, we were left waiting for five months, for a chair that wouldn’t even get ordered until the day he died.

[uptownsnail]

[uptownsnail]

~ any book recommendations..? Could be any genre ~

[uptownsnail]

i NEED it to be fall!!!!

[uptownsnail]

i believe you can always get back to yourself. you can always soften into being again. no matter how long you might be stuck in a pattern of unhappiness, of being jaded, of feeling guarded from the world in some way. there is always a path back. give yourself a chance to find it.

[uptownsnail]

My Linguistics Masterpost

Hej! I’m Espen and I’m a master’s student in linguistic studies. This is my masterpost about all the linguistic topics i made posts about:

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-> 💬 Linguistics Challenge 📚 - January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November

-> The Big Lingblr Community Challenge

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Linguistic Branches

What the linguistic branches mean and what they analyse

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Phonetics & Phonology 

Linguistic abbreviations, consonants, and vowels

International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

Pronunciation of English consonants & vowels

Stress in sentences

Unstressed [i] & [u]

Phonetics #1: Basic Acoustics

Phonetics #2: Types of Sounds

Speech Production & Voicing

Linguistic Liaison

Phonological Assimilation

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Morphology 

Morphemes

Allomorphs of {-s} and {-ed}

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Word formation 

Word formation

How new words are created

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Syntax 

Word classes (sentence structure #1)

Phrases (sentence structure #2)

Clause elements & clause types (sentence structure #3)

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Semantics 

Ferdinand de Saussure: Sign, Signifier & Signified

Sense relations

Basic Colour Terms

Components of Meaning & Componential Analysis

What is a ‘lexical item’?

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Pragmatics

Speech Acts

Indirect Speech Acts

Deixis & distance

Cooperative Principle & Gricean Maxims

Implicature

‘Face’ and Politeness

Conversation Structures

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Text Linguistics:

What is a text?

Text types, text forms, and text form variants

Coherence & cohesion

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Sociolinguistics:

Dialects & accents, pidgins & creoles (language varieties #1)

Style and Register (language varieties #2)

Pidgins & Creoles

General American

AAVE (African American Vernacular English)

Australian English & New Zealand English

South African English (SAE)

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Language Acquisition:

Characteristics of Human Language

How do animals communicate?

How did languages emerge? (Continuity vs. discontinuity hypotheses)

Linguistic Relativity vs. Linguistic Universalism

Language Acquisition - how do children learn languages?

First Stages of Speech Production in Children

What is a 'wug’?

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Historical Linguistics:

The periods of the English language (History of English #1)

Diachronic vs. synchronic (History of English #2)

Proto-Languages (History of English #3)

Language Families (History of English #4)

Old English: 450 (700) - 1100

Middle English: 1100 - 1500

Early Modern English: 1500 - 1700

What happened in the year 1066 and why it was so important for the English language

Why is English such a global language?

i-mutation

Great Vowel Shift (GVS)

Inkhorn terms

Chain shifts

The 'minim problem’

Association/Consociation vs. Dissociation

Processes of Meaning Change

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English Linguistics:

Loan words in the English language

Loan words #2: Doublets

English tenses #1 - present tense

English tenses #2 - past tense

English tenses #3 - some differences between the tenses

English tenses #4 - future tenses & expressions with future meaning

Kachru’s Model of World Englishes

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Other Linguistic Topics:

Analytic vs. Synthetic Language

Translation strategies

Translations: Functional Analysis of the Source Text

Corpus linguistics

Bouba & Kiki

What is a 'hapax legomenon’?

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My recommendations:

Book/film recommendations for language enthusiasts & advanced linguistic topics

Recommendations for Reading/Activities before starting Linguistic Studies

Sources for Research on English Linguistics, Literature, and Culture

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-> you can find all my answered asks by searching for #ask, #ask response or #request

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[uptownsnail]

Linguistic Branches & what they analyse

Phonetics & Phonology

Phonetics deals with the production and reception of speech sounds. Phonology analyses the different speech sounds of a language, their patterns, and how they create meaning.

Morphology

Morphology analyses the parts that make up a word, e.g. uninvited = {un-} {invite} {-ed}.

Word-formation

Word formation looks at how new words are created in a language.

Syntax

Syntax analyses the formation and structure of phrases and sentences, and how the different parts of such sentences are (grammatically) interrelated.

Semantics

Semantics analyses linguistic meaning in a language and the speaker’s intuition / knowledge of meaning when using language.

Pragmatics

Pragmatics deals with how context influences meaning and how language is used in communication, beyond ‘literal’ communication.

Text linguistics

Text linguistics mainly focuses on the question ‘What is a text?’. It deals with the structure of texts, text definition, text classification, formal texture, semantic texture, and textual intentions.

Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics analyses how society and culture influences language, e.g. the social aspects of language use and how different groups use language.

Historical linguistics

Historical linguistics looks at how and why languages change over time, and how past languages and their pronunciation can be reconstructed, and how languages are related to each other.

[uptownsnail]

💬 Linguistics Challenge 📚 - July

This challenge will teach you the basics of linguistics step-by-step over the course of 12 months.

This month, we’ll look at: sociolinguistics & language variation.

Each month you get a few exercises (depending on how complex the topic is), so you can take breaks in between days or use those days to revise and practice. I’ve put links to all the topics on which i made blog posts, but you’re very welcome to do your own research online.

This challenge is based on what I learned in the first semesters of my linguistic studies at uni, and it’s aimed at giving you a broad introduction and teaching you the most important concepts from several different fields of linguistics.

Throughout the month, you’ll get the chance to apply your new knowledge in some exercises and tasks. If you want, you can share your work via reblog with the tag #linguisticschallenge, i’d love to see your contributions :)

Also, feel free to follow me so you won’t miss next month’s challenge!

Inform yourself about the field of sociolinguistics and what it analyses

Look at Kachru’s model of World Englishes

Look at dialects and accents, and how they are differentiated

Inform yourself about the differences between the General American accent & the general British accent

Inform yourself about Australian English

Inform yourself about New Zealand English

Inform yourself about South African English

Inform yourself about African American Vernacular English

Look at creoles and pidgins

Task: Find one creole language and do some research on its history and linguistic features

Task: Find one pidgin language and do some research on its history and linguistic features

Look at style and register

If you’re quick or want to learn more, you could check out my linguistics masterpost to see if i made any new posts on this topic after creating this challenge. You could also take a look at these book tips:

Book tips:

Gramley, S. The History of English - An Introduction. Routledge. 2012.

Crystal, David. English as a global language. Cambridge University Press. 2003

Wolfram, W. and N. Schilling-Estes. American English. Blackwell. 2006.

Kortmann, B. & E. Schneider. A handbook of varieties of English. Vol. 2. De Gruyter. 2008.

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Next month, we’ll start looking at historical linguistics (part 1).

(Link to last month’s challenge)

[uptownsnail]

As pride month begins, let us not forget our Palestinian brothers and sisters.

[uptownsnail]

[uptownsnail]

i want this as a tattoo so bad

[uptownsnail]

spanish resource lists for learners

a list of lists!! levels are estimated.

refold has a crowdsourced resource list for spanish, curated & with notes | A1 to C2

dreamingspanish on reddit has a crowdsourced spreadsheet with over 90 channels geared towards learners | A1 to C2

learn natively has a huge deck of spanish books sorted by difficulty by learners | A1 to C2

prensa escrita has a list of news websites sorted by country & sometimes city | B1 to C1 probably

the CI wiki has an editable list of CI resources and a couple of native content links | A1 to like B2?

comprehensible hub has tons of spanish podcasts for learners | A1 to B2

letterboxd has a ton of very fun #español lists, e.g. movies mentioned in the wild project podcast, latin american female directors, made in puerto rico | ~B2 to C2

there are also a ton of moocs in spanish for intermediate to advanced learners (moocs are online courses, usually free) | B1 to C2

[uptownsnail]

- Evelyn Waugh, from Brideshead Revisited (1945)

[uptownsnail]

I'm in awe of how we ran historical revisionism on the civil rights movement so bad that people truly believe it was quiet self-sacrifcial non-disruptive christ-like activism that forced progress and not — like — the incredible economic pressure of boycotts and outbreaks of illegal civil disobedience

Yapping to the choir but eughhh it burns me up girl effective protests have to be loud and inconvenient for change to happen because silent cries die in the dark that's the entire pointtt

[uptownsnail]

nauseous i may or may not have abandoned like 3 of my classes for the last month and now the semesters ending LMFAO

[uptownsnail]

@academia-lucifer

[uptownsnail]

Dear professor this assignment did not nourish my fundamentally curious soul so i did not do it No penalty full 100 points please Goodbye!