crewdlydrawn:

allthingslinguistic:

hyperboreanhapocanthosaurus:

gifmethat:

So you know what I don’t get? Why people repeat words. (x)

Grammar time: it’s called “contrastive reduplication,” and it’s a form of intensification that is relatively common. Finnish does a very similar thing, and others use near-reduplication (rhyme-based) to intensify, like Hungarian (pici ‘tiny’, ici-pici ‘very tiny’).

Even the typologically-distant group of Bantu languages utilize reduplication in a strikingly similar fashion with nouns: Kinande oku-gulu ‘leg’, oku-gulu-gulu ‘a REAL leg’ (Downing 2001, includes more with verbal reduplication as well).

I suppose the difficult aspect of English reduplication is not through this particular type, but the fact that it utilizes many other types of reduplication: baby talk (choo-choo, no-no), rhyming (teeny-weeny, super-duper), and the ever-famous “shm” reduplication: fancy-schmancy (a way of denying the claim that something is fancy).

screams my professor was trying to find an example of reduplication so the next class he came back and said “I FOUND REDUPLICATION IN ENGLISH” and then he said “Milk milk” and everyone was just “what?” and he said “you know when you go to a coffee shop and they ask if you want soy milk and you say ‘no i want milk milk’” and everyone just had this collective sigh of understanding.

Another name for this particular construction is contrastive focus reduplication, and there’s a famous linguistics paper about it which is commonly known as the Salad Salad Paper. You know, because if you want to make it clear that you’re not talking about pasta salad or potato salad, you might call it “salad salad”. The repetition indicates that you’re intending the most prototypical meaning of the word, like green salad or cow’s milk, even though other things can be considered types of salad or milk. 

Can I make love to this post?… Is that a thing that’s possible?

fieldbears:

wildwomanofthewoods:

mindblowingfactz:

In a private cemetery in small-town Arkansas, a woman single-handedly buried and gave funerals to more than 40 gay men during the height of the AIDS epidemic, when their families wouldn’t claim them.
–Source

One person who found the courage to push the wheel is Ruth Coker Burks. Now a grandmother living a quiet life in Rogers, in the mid-1980s Burks took it as a calling to care for people with AIDS at the dawn of the epidemic, when survival from diagnosis to death was sometimes measured in weeks. For about a decade, between 1984 and the mid-1990s and before better HIV drugs and more enlightened medical care for AIDS patients effectively rendered her obsolete, Burks cared for hundreds of dying people, many of them gay men who had been abandoned by their families. She had no medical training, but she took them to their appointments, picked up their medications, helped them fill out forms for assistance, and talked them through their despair. Sometimes she paid for their cremations. She buried over three dozen of them with her own two hands, after their families refused to claim their bodies. For many of those people, she is now the only person who knows the location of their graves.

How have I never heard of this?

People like her should be remembered. And even more importantly, we must remember that there was a time in our history when we needed someone like her.

questionableadvice:

silvermarmoset:

questionableadvice:

~ “Progress”,  1915 editorial cartoon

Society despairs of the Modern Woman, 1915 style

History geek note: Now I’m imagining an editorial cartoon from 1615 comparing “Ye Moderne Bible Reading Woman” with the good, old-fashioned women from 1315 who didn’t insist on learning to read the bible for themselves but were content to have a learned Man of the Church interpret it for them. I’d try drawing it myself if I could draw anything other then stick figures.

The editorial cartoon from 1615 you imagine actually exists! Or at least, something a lot like it.

This is an illustration from the 1600s. First picture shows the good old days, when people carried around lances to stab people with and we actually read literature and wore spurred boots. The second picture is THE DEGENERATE PRESENT, where all these 1600s millennials wear RIBBONS and play DICE and SMOKE and DRINK STUFF FROM SNAKE FLAGONS. Damn 1600s hipsters. It was better when I was your age. 

Humanity, never change.

Look! Silvermarmoset posted an editorial cartoon from the 1600s, providing more proof that no matter what century you were born into you always just missed the good old days.