cozi:
when i was 12 i got banned from yahoo answers and when i emailed support to be like “what did i do??” i got a really vague answer that just said “you know what you did” and it still haunts me to this day
When I was 10 I was in a AOL chatroom for kids and we were all making this Homer Simpson face (8^(|) but this one girl Crystal forgot to put the nose in the face so I said “You forgot the nose crystal” and I immediately got booted offline and no one in my family could log on. My Mom talked to someone from AOL and they said I was trying to sell drugs to minors because I said “nose crystal”
When I was like 10 I roleplayed with people on Neopets, completely innocent stuff like ‘high school AU’ or ‘wolf AU’ and the like. I made a thread called ‘See the Sea Hotel’ and it went on for a few replies until I randomly got my account frozen and after explaining to my mom for a good 30 minutes that ‘frozen’ didn’t mean the computer wouldn’t respond, she got on to try and send an email to Neopets’ staff and they said that ‘hotel’ was a restricted word because it included ‘ho’ in it
I had a similar experience around that age with an online music game called Audition.
I said something like “Can I get the speed to 2x speed?” and it automatically changed my message to “Can I get the **** to **** ****?”, and a moderator saw that modified message and suspended my account for offensive language.
It turned out that I couldn’t say ‘speed’ because it had ‘pee’ in it, and I when I contacted support to say it was a mistake on their part and asked if I could be unsuspended, they said that I was also writing numbers, and writing numbers was strictly forbidden just in case they were a phone number.
I remember playing Phantasy Star Online back in like 2001 – it was one of the first console MMOs, if I remember correctly – and you didn’t get banned for saying “bad words”, but they did get censored. their list of inappropriate words was….extensive, and one in particular created a real problem for people trying to make plans to play together. because of course the most common day of the week to do that would be Saturday, right? but. that has the word “turd” in it. so. every time. you tried to say “do you want to play Saturday”. it would say. “do you want to play $%&@%#+%”. and the other person is just. sitting there. wondering. what the fuck did you just ask them to play
This is called the Scunthorpe Problem and it always cracks me up.
Tag: enlighs
The funniest thing about being multilingual is that my brain sometimes doesn’t notice the difference between languages. I mean, my brain is aware that “honey”, “miód” and “miele” look different and sound different but at the same time it doesn’t matter. You could say “I have to buy miód” instead of “I have to buy honey” and I wouldn’t even give it a single thought.
Sometimes I watch a movie or read something in my second or third language and then I forget ??? what language ??? that was in ??? I mean, I remember what was being said clearly but I can’t remember the language being used.
“This poem doesn’t rhyme.”
Dude about to make haikus:
“Oh you haven’t heard?”
fuck you
The first line is six syllables.
THIS
POEM
DOES-N’T
RHYME
That’s 5 syllables
Poem is two syllables. Po-em.
Poem is ONE syllable, who the fuck uses two syllables to say poem?
What the fuck are you on about? Literally just say it out loud. Po-em. One syllable would be like Pome.
“Pome” IS how you say it you neanderthal. Who the fuck says PO-EM?
“pome” is how you
say it you neanderthal who
the fuck says po-em
^Haiku^bot^9. I detect haikus with 5-7-5 format. Sometimes I make mistakes.
We have come full circle.
My linguistics teacher just said that the greatest difference between French and English is that when you hear a word in French, you have no idea how you’re gonna write it, and when you read a word in English, you have no idea how you’re gonna pronounce it
And that’s the truest shit I’ve ever heard
Wait, so… does -copter come *from* helicopter?
Yep! This is called rebracketing. Another famous example would be “-burger”: the original food item is named after the German city, [Hamburg]+[er], but got semantically reinterpreted as [ham]+[burger]. Now it’s used as a suffix indicating a type of sandwich.
i cant believe americans on tv really say rock paper scissors like???? its paper scissors rock omg do u irl americans actually say rock paper scissors????
rb this with whether u say paper scissors rock or rock paper scissors
me normally: linguistic differences are so interesting and cool! I love hearing different dialectal variations.
me, reading “paper, scissors, rock” with my own two eyeballs: the lord is testing me
if anyone ever tells you that english isn’t ridiculous remember that the reason why we have a silent b in debt is because a group of guys got together to standardise english spelling and got to the word debt, which at the time was primarily spelled either ‘dett’ or ‘det’. so they basically went:
‘everyone speaks latin, right? so let’s put a silent b in debt. like debitum, which is latin for debt. problem solved.’
also the reason why there is a h in ghost is because when the printing press first came to england the only people trained to operate it were flemmish speaking, and they put a h after g because that’s what you do in flemmish. they put shit like ghirl and ghoose, but the only reason why ghost stuck is because people saw ‘the holy ghost’ in the bible and were like ‘well, that MUST be right’.
so yeah english is a really stupid language with some of the most ridiculous spelling
Anyone telling you that English isn’t a bullshit Frankenstein language is lying.
English mugs other languages in dark alleys and rifles through their pockets for spare vocabulary. Pass it on.
you can make nearly any object into a good insult if you put ‘you absolute’ in front of it
example: you absolute coat hanger
as well u can just add ‘ed’ to any object and it’s sounds like you were really drunk
example: i was absolutely coat hangered last night
Meanwhile, “utter” works for the first (e.g., “you utter floorboard”) but somehow “utterly” doesn’t seem to work as well for the second (“I was utterly floorboarded”).
Utterly doesn’t work for drunk because it’s the affix for turning random objects into terms for *shocked*, obviously.
… huh. I thought that might just be the similarity to “floored”, and yet “I was utterly coat hangered” does seem to convey something similar.
I have to tell you, I am utterly sandwiched at this discovery.
Completely makes the phrase mean “super tired”.
“God, it’s been a long week, I am completely coat-hangered.”
Something is
Something is wrong with our language
I think you mean something has gone horribly right.
#language
“they” (1 word) is shorter than “he or she” (3 words)
“they” is more inclusive than “he/she”
“themself” flows more naturally than “him or herself”
“they” is less clunky than “(s)he”
it’s time to replace the awkward “she or he”
“hey can you go ask they what does they want for dinner, and when is they coming over to watch movies with they?”
“Hey, can you go ask them what they want for dinner, and when they’re coming over to watch movies?”
Step one is learning how to talk like a human person.
[completely ignores the basic rules of english grammar] ummmm using they/them doesn’t make sense sweaty :))))))))))))))))
I don’t even know. It’s from a book about languages my friend’s been reading. (it’s creepy that I can understand it …)
It was actually invented with that purpose: anyone who spoke any European language should be able to understand esperanto. It was meant to be a lingua franca.
STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING Y’ALL AND TELL ME IF YOU UNDERSTAND THIS
I,understand about a half of it, I speak some dutch
“What Happened? Did your computer catch a virus? Did you suddenly develop BSE [mad cow disease]?”
Between German, English, Latin, a bit of French, Dutch, Spanish and Italian that was actually pretty readable to me.
I speak English and a very little spanish, and I can read it.
Super legible and I love it.
There are a few movies done partly or entirely in Esperanto, the most famous probably being Leslie Stevens’ Incubus (1966), a horror film starring William Shatner!
Speak English, know some Spanish and German. I could read this without much hassle and now I’m in awe.
I speak English, German, French and some Itailian, so this feels pretty natural to me. It makes a lot of sense to me, actually, because that’s just an extreme example of how multilingual people actually talk.
I speak English and studied Latin in high school… I can follow about eighty, ninety percent of this.
Pass Through Fire 