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?
Can we please recognize that “fancy-shmancy” and the rest of the
“ever-famous “shm” reduplication" came into English usage through Yiddish. Thank you
Ok so I was looking for historical slang terms for penis (gotta be era-accurate when writing vintage dick jokes) and I came across….something
some linguist compiled a literal timeline of genitalia slang–a cock compendium, if you will–that dates back all the way to the fucking 13th CENTURY. This motherfucker tracked the evolution of erection etymology through 800+ years, because if he doesn’t do it, who else will? Thank you for your service, Johnathon Green.
Some of my favorites include:
Shaft of Delight (1700s)
Womb Sweeper (1980s)
Master John Goodfellow (1890s)
Nimble-Wimble (1650s)
Corporal Love (1930s)
Staff of Life (1880s)
Spindle (1530s)
As good as ever twanged (1670s)
Gaying Instrument (1810s)
Beef Torpedo (1980s)
and last but not least, the first recorded use of the word Schlong, which was in 1865 CE. Tag yourself, I’m Nimble Wimble
And are the lovely ladies feeling left out? not to worry! Johnathon’s got you covered, gals, because he also made one for vaginas. Highlights:
Mrs. Fubb’s Parlor (1820s)
Poontang (1950s)
Spunk Box (1720s)
Ringerangroo (1930s)
Ineffable (1890s)
Itching Jenny (1890s)
Carnal Mantrap (1890s – a busy decade apparently)
Bookbinder’s Wife (1760s)
Rough Malkin (1530s)
Socket (1460s)
and a personal favorite, crinkum-crankum, circa approximately 1670.
but tell me you wouldnt wear at least one of these
Is this the equivalent of americans wearing poorly-translated Chinese/Japanese t-shirts around the early 2000’s? And can i please have every single shirt up there?
WHO THE FUCK IS JESUS
My undergrad alma mater had an exchange program where we had an entire class of Japanese university students spend a year at our school studying in English immersion each year. Which was awesome, they were really cool and they loved to socialize with the American kids.
One of my best friends had one of the exchange students as her roommate; she was about four foot eleven and maybe ninety pounds, and she had a passion for huge platform boots and shirts with English slogans on them. She explained exactly that – it was cool to wear shirts with English lettering on them, even if you didn’t exactly know what it meant (this was in the late 90s/early 00s).
Her absolute favorite shirt was black with BITCH picked out in enormous rhinestones. She’d worn it three times before I asked her if she knew what it meant, and she said she’d been told it meant “Like a baby dog, the cutest dog? A really cute girl puppy.”
So I explained to her that it wasn’t quite an accurate translation, and as I elaborated on what it meant, from “female dog” on up to “a name you call a woman you don’t like” and all the reasons you might call someone that, her eyes got wider and wider until finally she yelled “THAT’S BETTER, THAT’S THE BEST! BITCH IS EVEN BETTER THAN CUTE!”
i hate when people in movies/tv are reading ancient languages and they translate everything really smoothly and poetically, as if when people who study ancient languages aren’t consulting three different commentaries and sobbing profusely when we read
ok so like…. it says
“come you all into the deepest cavern, or maybe that’s fireplace, depends on usage, and having come may you give your…. treasures? Skin? Pants? I don’t know, something…. to the….. about-to-be-adored guy, that one who…. okay, he either causes earthquakes or sleeps a lot, I think this might be an idiom….”
“ok, sorry that took so long and i hate to disappoint but i’m still not entirely sure what it means, like, it could be something about a religious ceremony or it could be a dick joke. leaning towards dick joke, might be both. knowing the ancients, probably both. this could very well be an ancient dick temple and we should probably leave.”
Funnest part is when you get shit like this:
Why yes that is a text comprised of almost exclusively crocodile hieroglyphs.
We also can’t get a coherent translation because the grammar makes absolutely no sense. Participles and Participial statements all the way. Sobek who is Crocodile of Crocodopolis who advances the Crocodile for the Crocodiles….
The crocodile hieroglyph is also used to write sovereign and an adjective meaning power…so the text is suuuuuuuper confusing.
I can’t help but wonder if the crocodile hieroglyph text (which I never knew about, that is AMAZING) is the ancient equivalent of a sestina or another complex poem form. With the crocodile symbol meaning so many different things, and the result being so difficult to translate, it might make more sense as a poem or some other stylistically rigid text.
Either that, or it was the Egyptian equivalent of a student being made to write lines on the chalkboard.
I will not take the name of Lord Sobek in vain
I will not take the name of Lord Sobek in vain
I will not take the name of Lord Sobek in vain
I will not…“Shakes out chiseling hand” Take the name of Lord Sobek in vain….
Looks like an ancient shitpost to me.
mai nayme is hep and wen i wryt upon the wal so smooth and wite i bless the kynnge commend his akh but then get tyred and carve the croc
It’s the equivalent of “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.”
we, in a manner akin to that of a man who once was, in Rome, an orator of significant skill, who was then for his elegance of speech renowned and now for his elaborate structure of sentences cursed by generations of scholars of Latin, the language which he spoke and we now study, Cicero, write, rather than by any efficiency, functionality, or ease of legibility have our words, our honors, the breaths of our hearts, be besmirched.
Not many jnſtances of Punctuation – but for many Daſhes – et words Capitaliz’d for emphavſis, but not logicaly – ſpeeling and word Endings varied Gratelie – and the long S – ſ – vſed in at the ſtart and Centre of wordes – & the short “s” vſed only at the end – as with the U and V, and the I and J – but v and j only at the ſtart of wordes (we diſtinguishe not between Vouels and Conſonants, only decoratiue Letteres). Ye letter “y” being in lookes cloſe to an Olde letter “þ” which is vſed as “th” – Y may be vſed in the place of TH – but only ſparingly – and ſtill Pronounc’d the ſame as TH. Long and rambling ſentences – ſeeminglie without end – a paragraph can conſiſt of One whole ſentence, and ſhort ſentences are rare – we ſcribe like hiſtorical Modern English – and other european Languages.
And furthermore, Carthage is to be destroyed.
I hate all of you.
Okay, I’ve now lived to see someone *else* use the word “boustrophedon” in a Tumblr post. I can now die content. 🙂
Just remember. There is no such thing as a fake geek girl. There are only fake geek boys. Science fiction was invented by a woman.
Specifically a teenage girl. You know, someone who would be a part of the demographic that some of these boys are violently rejecting.
Isaac Asimov.
yo mary shelley wrote frankenstein in 1818 and isaac asimov was born in 1920 so you kinda get my point
If you want to push it back even further Margaret Cavendish, the duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673) wrote The Blazing World in 1666, about a young woman who discovers a Utopian world that can only be accessed via the North Pole – oft credited as one of the first scifi novels
Women have always been at the forefront of literature, the first novel (what we would consider a novel in modern terms)was written by a woman (Lady Muraskai’s the Tale of Genji in the early 1000s) take your snide “Isaac Asimov” reblogs and stick it
even in terms of male scifi authors, asimov was predated by Jules Verne, HG Wells, George Orwell, you could have even cited Poe or Jonathan Swift has a case but Asimov?
PbbBFFTTBBBTBTTBBTBTTT so desperate to discredit the idea of Mary Shelly as the mother of modern science fiction you didn’t even do a frickin google search For Shame
And if you want to go back even further, the first named, identified author in history was Enheduanna of Akkad, a Sumerian high priestess.
Kinda funny, considering this Isaac Asimov quote on the subject:
Mary Shelley was the first to make use of a new finding of science which she advanced further to a logical extreme, and it is that which makes Frankenstein the first true science fiction story.
Even Isaac Asimov ain’t having none of your shit, not even posthumously.
You know what else was invented by women? Masked vigilantes, the precursor to the modern superhero. Baroness Emma Orczy wrote The Scarlet Pimpernel in 1905.
The character would later inspire better known masked vigilantes such as Zorro and Batman.
Got that?
Stick that in your international pipe and smoke it
I have literally been telling people this for over a year.
the first extended prose piece – ie a novel, was not, as many male scholars will shout, Don Quixote (1605) but The Tale of Genji (1008) written by a woman
The first autobiography ever written in English is also attributed to a woman, The Book of Margery Kempe (1430s).
The day may come when I find this post and do not reblog it, but it is not this day.
argentina: ni idea, pero es un pendejo (idk, but he is a pendejo)
méxico:
(pendejo in mex = insult. pendejo in arg= young boy)
méxico: wait a sec, i’m gonna eat a concha.
argentina:
(concha in mex = a type of bread. concha in arg = pussy)
spanish woman: hi, my name is concha
argentina:
(concha in spain = seashell and a female name. concha in arg = pussy)
mex: i love cajeta, it’s so sweet!
arg:
(cajeta in mex = dulce de leche [caramel]; cajeta in arg = pussy)
spanish speaker: h-
argentina: thats pussy, babe!!
So, Argentina is the Australia of the Spanish speaking world?
I don’t….i don’t think that anglos understand.
This is not about México or Argentina….this is about this:
EVERY SINGLE ONE of the countries of Latinoamerica has this problem. Yes, Brasil too (portuguese and spanish are really similar…until they are not, so you have one word with two different meanings in a stracture that its the same in both languages). Some words are shared, some words are not, a country can have 215 dialects depending the region, there’s a lot of mixed up dialects/languages in the limits with the other country….
If you are from here and you are used to talk w inmigrants/in the internet, you already know that if you talk with someone from another region/country you are gonna insult them or say something really dirty. It’s a fact, a curse, no one can avoid misunderstandings. Here are some examples:
“Oh, how hard it’s to understand spanish. If you learn it, stay in only one region!”
“Straw has over 20 different words, and all of them mean something dirty to somebody”
“what about torta? for some people that it’s vagina too, but it’s just a sandwich here” (i’m from Argentina, here means cake or lesbian)
and it’s not only with “dirty words”….daily words are all mixed up too.
“FRE-SAS” “FRU-TI-LLAS”
So, the next time that all of you anglos/gringos fight about “color” or “colour”…
you will hear all the latines laughing in the background
This is legit. My husband, sitting across the room, looks over and says, “IS THAT SOMEONE SHOWING HOW TO CONVERT ENGLISH TO TENGWAR? BECAUSE THAT’S THE WAY!”
Believe this man. He owns atlases of Middle Earth, the complete history of Midle Earth (leatherbound), and has read the books at least 150 times. Also: speaks elvish.
Yes.
For future reference. 🙂
So I was never the only one who learned this in my schooltime instead of French or Spanish? Such a relief, indeed! People like you make life worth living. *o*
wupacing 