Come to Asia! It’s really only Indo-European languages that have gendered honorifics. In Japan, service workers always use “Honored Guest”.
If you watch anime, notice how words like “senpai” and “-san” aren’t gendered at all.
Linguistic gender was invented in Proto-Indo-European as a neat party trick to make it clearer which pronoun referred to what. And then most languages in the world came to be descended from it. But the languages that aren’t don’t make random words gendered.
My native dialect of English technically *has* sir/ma’am but doesn’t use them much†, and it weirds me out when my co-workers call customers “sir” and “ma’am”. I just don’t call customers anything: there’s really no need to add *any* word to the end of, to use OP’s example, “your total is $11.60”.
(Boss, Meta-Boss, and Boss^3 have all witnessed me talking to customers a fair bit, and none of them have ever complained about this. Boss^3 specifically complimented my customer interaction!)
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†I’m not sure I can articulate or whether I even consciously understand what the exceptions are, but I think it’s something about the power differential needing to be *vast*. People who are only a level or two above you in the social hierarchy don’t get honorifics; those are for, like, CEOs and political leaders. (or maybe it’s about them needing to be very highly ranked in absolute terms: I poked my intuition with some more hypotheticals and it seems to feel less weird to call a barely-above-you man “sir” if you yourself are already pretty high up)
Tags:
#reply via reblog #language #death mention #gender #in which Brin has a job
Okay look. Stephanie Meyer contributed four (4) cool things to the contemporary fantasy genre, which I shall now list here in the hopes of getting it out of my system. In descending order of importance:
1. Writing a story about a girl who wants something. Plot driven by a woman’s (non-vilified) desire. Truly dreadful execution but still a good idea, sort of a literary incarnation of the “he a little confused but he got the spirit” meme.
2. The fact that when Bella becomes a vampire she can still breathe but “there’s no relief tied to the action” which I remember verbatim because it fucking slapped. The idea of human physical sensations being partially defined by our mortality and the sensations still exist after you become undead but your experience of them is fundamentally different because you no longer need any of it? Extremely cool. The closest Meyer came to taking an interesting stance on vampires being dead.
3. Werewolves are immortal but they can literally stop whenever they want. That shit’s hilarious. Curse of immortality who.
4. The fact that vampires don’t sleep or get tired so their communally-raised baby doesn’t have a crib because she is always in someone’s arms. That was extremely cute and there’s a different, better book contained somewhere in that specific concept.
5. Depression being represented by like 6 blank chapters titled with months.
…wait, did you guys never lie awake at night as kids wondering what breathing would feel like if you didn’t *need* to do it
practicing holding your breath, partly to expand the *total* length of time you can hold it but also to try to expand the time length of the initial segment, of neither breathing nor feeling the lack
(though all too aware that feeling it for a few seconds at a time is probably a very different experience from feeling it indefinitely, from *knowing* that you can feel it indefinitely)
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(I remember I started at a total length of around thirty seconds and managed to work my way up to about sixty, maybe sixty-five. I haven’t practised in ages, but just now I tried it and was able to do sixty seconds on the first try, and might have been able to squeeze a few more seconds out of it. Is it like riding a bike? Does puberty do something to increase your lung capacity relative to your oxygen consumption?)
Tags:
#Twilight #death tw #asphyxiation cw #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #reply via reblog #my childhood #(for anyone with their proofreader goggles on or otherwise paying close enough attention to notice: #there are two different spellings of the verb form of ”practise” in this post and both of them are deliberate) #(child!me spoke American and adult!me speaks Vaguely Canadian Mishmash) #((although I did start experimenting with Canadian spelling fairly young #–I knew from the age of 8 that one day I would live in Canada– #and that time period probably did overlap)) #((but I think ”practise” was among the later ones I adopted)) #(((I started off with ”favourite” and ”colour”))) #tag rambles #our home and cherished land #(((also I played a lot of Neopets and Runescape so some Britishisms leaked through from there))) #(((but there was definitely an aspect of ”I’m going to have to get used to it someday and might as well start now”))) #language
(someone asked for an example of a dear dentist joke, so here’s my favorite)
My Dear Dentist, I have a problem. Please inspect me, I need your help!
My Client, please open your mouth. Oh, I see, there’s a chip in your tooth.
My Dear Dentist, I have a chip in my tooth! What shall I do?
My Client, if you have a chip in your tooth, then you must apply a hornet!
Tags:
#Amenta RP #Amenta #puns #bugs #language #unreality cw? #now see this is the kind of amazing bullshit we need more of #I went and dug it up to show you guys
Things that should happen in a Sci-Fi story with a Universal Translator
One character who constantly makes bad puns … except the UT totally fails to translate them. “I guess you could say he … had a bad time”, “Well, I don’t think they’ll be … visiting again any time soon”. There’s some other aliens of the same species who groan every time
A group of aliens who share a common language get into a discussion about grammar … but the UT translates the word they’re arguing about the same way every time. “It looks like they left in a hurry … or is it ‘left’?” “You’re expressing uncertainty, so you have to use the subjunctive form ‘left’” “No, you don’t use the subjunctive here, you’re expressing a deduction based on evidence, so you have to use the deductive form ‘left’” “Wait, you say ‘left’ for the deductive? Are you from the Southern Continent?” “Yes, I am. Wait, what’s it in your dialect?” “We say ‘left’ where I’m from”
A character unexpectedly becomes angry at another character. At the end of the episode you find out that the first character had switched verb forms to a more affectionate form when speaking to the second character and was mad that they were ignoring the obvious indication of their feelings
The captain nearly derails tense diplomatic negotiations because of a UT slip up, inadvertently implying a definite claim to a particular planet, as opposed to a tentative claim subject to negotiation
The crew is visited by a group of aliens whose UT is a few centuries out of date, so they’re greeted with Early Modern English
An alien recites the equivalent of Jabberwocky and the UT just completely gives us “’Twas something and the something something did something and something in the something …”
okay but I once went researching pumpkin names in French and Google autotranslated and I read with my own eyeballs the sentence, “Pumpkins, pumpkins and pumpkins are all different from each other.”
‘no es lo mismo ser que estar’, or in english, ‘being and being are not the same thing’
Tags:
#language #story ideas I will never write #yes this #some of these would be a bit embarrassment-squicky for my *personal* taste in stories #but still #and anyway when writers ignore translators sometimes they *still* end up with cringe-comedy mistranslations by accident #so it’s not perfect protection #(like in one of the comments that I will be rounding up soon) #((Cardassians try to hold a detective denouement #but due to a translation error half the people there think it’s a trial and try to apply a trial’s rules))
Do you ever think about Aziraphale going out of his way to learn internet lingo just to make Crowley cringe in his own skin? Cause I do. (I’m still not entirely unconvinced that wasn’t why he learned to do sleight of hand magic. “You’r an angel, Angel! You can just summon the right card!” “But wouldn’t that rather be like cheating!” “IT’S HUMAN MAGIC, IT’S ALL CHEATING”)
Like the first time he says “LOL” out loud. “Ell-oh-ell, as the kids say” he says cheerfully and Crowley nearly slams the Bentley into a duck pond cause his brain just tried to escape what his ears just heard and subsequently goes off on a ten minute rant about how no one says it out loud, you’re not supposed to say it out loud, Angel. All the while Aziraphale is feigning politely confused ignorance, and thoroughly enjoying the tangent Crowley has now sneeringly diverted onto, snipping and snarling his way through his syllables, eventually admitting that while he claimed responsibility for the addition of YouTube comments on videos, that was just another thing humans came up with all on their own.
“Fascinating,” is all the angel has to say for himself, and the incident is quite forgotten until he does it again, this time responding to something Crowley says simply with “meirl” and for a split second Crowley thinks it’s some sort of German word he’s actually forgot exists until he realizes Aziraphale just said “me in real life” and whatever last few dregs of his soul that exist shrivel and die.
And it just keeps happening until one day Crowley catches the flutter of amusement behind Aziraphale’s benign and guileless expression and realizes the smug git has been trolling him this whole time, and he’s simultaneously torn between being hopping mad about it (because that’s his job dammit) but also weirdly proud.
“You bastard,” he says, unable to keep the serpentine smile from spreading over his face, “how long were you going to keep that up?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, my dear,” the angel replies placidly, taking a sip from his teacup and pulling a face, “this tea however is absolutely scorching. I do hope I don’t spill any. That would be quite the mood.”
SCREAMING
Tags:
#Good Omens #language #fanfic #embarrassment squick #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(I have not seen the show‚ and have not read the book in a long time) #(but some of the stuff coming out of the fandom right now is hilarious even at my current level of context) #(so you will be seeing some Good Omens reblogs)
We’re doing Postmodernism is Sociology, and the teacher was talking about ‘language games’— language that is so specialised that unless you’re part of a specific group it’s totally incomprehensible.
And, as an example, he gave us this monstrosity:
And, what’s even worse— I fucking UNDERSTOOD IT. I had to EXPLAIN this to my fucking sociology class.
This is why we should never have let the millenials become teachers.
Tags:
#oh my god #language #I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #I cannot believe I actually understand this
shit, talking to plumbers is about the only time I talk real Australian
Me: strewth how about that pipe hey, it’s a bit alright?? call me a drongo but I’ve gone and buggered it with the wrench! now I may be smoking a galah’s tail, but whaddya reckon we chuck some silicone on the socket here and it should be all beaut by tomorrow arvo!
Plumber: what the fuck are you saying
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #language #Australia
if u make clark kent say soda you are grossly mischaracterizing him and i wont stand for it
the real reason no one thinks clark is superman is bc they’re all east coasters who constantly mock clark’s usage of “pop” so they never connect mr. “soda” superman to mr. clark “pop” kent
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(I moved from the East Coast to the Great Lakes) #(and often I will say pop just to keep people from giving me That Look) #(you can’t just say ”soda” without it being a Statement) #(and I’m not here to make Statements I’m just trying to ring up your food) #our home and cherished land #food #in which Brin has a job #Superman
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