Sure, they’re cute now, but in a second, they’ll get mean. They’re gonna get ugly somehow, then there’ll be a million more…Did you guys ever WATCH the show?

~ The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, and Manual of Politeness, Florence Hartley, 1872

I checked to see if this was advice to a child, or satire

it is not

I am full of questions

GIRLS THAT'S FUCKING TERRIFYING,, PLEASE FACTORY RESET YOUR PHONES GET NEW ONES IF YOU HAVE TO GET AN INDEPENDENT SIM card WHAT IS HAPPENING

I'M BEGGING YOU

THEY CANT DO THIS TO YOU PLEASE

that is stalking

its stalking when it happens to children also btw

Hey just so you know... if you're a legal adult you have the option to just not. You can take that shit off your phone, you don't have to pick up your phone every time they call, you don't have to tell them where you're going all the time, you can just not.

I know it's scary. I know they will threaten to cut off your phone plan or any financial support they're giving you or whatever to keep you under their control. But if you can at all manage it... do it. Set a boundary and MEAN it.

At nineteen, I allowed my mom to cut off my phone plan because she would SCREAM at me over the phone until I was sobbing because I didn't call her often enough (...turns out I have ADHD and time blindness but we didn't know that then). At a certain point I just turned to my partner and asked if we could survive without my mom paying for our phone plan, and we could, and I didn't speak to my mother again for 15 years or so. And my life is better for that.

Your parents don't control the apps on your phone if you're a grown adult, and I'm not saying this to shame anyone in this position, I'm trying to let you know this is abusive and you can get free of it even when feels like you're trapped.

Your parents don't control your phone or your life. They simply don't. You do.

i'm not normally one to make jokes about dialect or accent. but the way that British people pronounce "lieutenant" feels like an in-joke i'm not privy to

Aww, you're feeling lieut out?

Once upon a time there was the Latin word "locus", meaning "place", which had various different declensions, but somewhere along the line in the vernacular in the areas conquered by Rome it had a strong tendency to shift towards something that dropped the last syllable (so "loc" instead of "locus") and then fucked around with the vowel in all kinds of directions.

But then the speakers of Gallo-Romanic dialects went even further and they got rid of the "k" sound entirely and started just saying the l and the vowel, which eventually got us to the Old French "leu".

Now the thing is, right, that in the old languages the spelling is very much a sort of consensus thing. It's not perfectly phonetic, because it can't be: all of the languages in question had phonemes that weren't exactly the same as the Latin that existed when and where the Latin alphabet was formalized, right? So as people wrote down the Old French vernacular, they basically took the letters they were taught and they used them to represent the sounds they were making.

This happens with all the languages; there's a really neat thing where if you look at Visigothic manuscripts, writing in the area that would become Spain and the vernacular form that would eventually be Spanish, you can see the difference between the sound of "v" and the sound of "b" disappearing, so that there are manuscripts where "Ave Maria" is written "Abe Maria", because to the people reading it, b and v made the same sound.

This is relevant to the question because of a fun little fact about mediaeval orthography! Which is that the characters that we now feel are absolutely separate, different letters - that is u and v - were both used for both sounds. It's not that "u" and "v" were the same letter exactly - they weren't - but that the character you used was the same and which you used depended more (properly) on where in the word the letter came, than which one it was.

So the word "hut" would indeed be written with "u", but the word "university" might well be written "vniuersity".

But it gets worse from here, because the sound of the letter we now call "v" and the letter we call "f" were also often used interchangeably. So it might actually be written "vnifersity".

If your eyes are crossing, remember that we still randomly stick "qu" in places to be "kw" and there's quite complicated rules about when the character "c" says a hard back of throat sound the same as the letter "k" and when it says a soft sibilant like "s" and also sometimes when it does something completely different.

Now as it happens the point of writing is to be able to take words from your head, put them on paper (or parchment, in this case), and then send them much farther away in both time and space to someone who absolutely cannot hear you say these words, and then put those thoughts in their head.

Which meant that you have this sort of weird liminal thing where "leu" could be spelled "lev", because u and v were interchangeable, and then also this thing where v and f were interchangeable, and both were being sent around to various places and read to others who may, or may not, do a lot of reading as opposed to a little, or may be reading in a different dialect than they speak (because remember, we're talking about mediaeval France, which means we're actually talking about a country with two major language divisions - Langue D'oc and Langue D'oïl - which then inside of them have a reasonable fuckload of languages that are mostly mutually intelligible most of the time), and so on, which means that the noise for u and the noise for f meet in the middle and may both be represented by "v" and while we're at it they may all just be pronouncing the word differently, and as you saw in the whole move from "locus" to "leu" in the first place, that can involve ending up in quite a different place through a totally logical means.

We don't know for absolute certain if this is why the word "leu", ported over to English with the Normans and added to our language, changed its pronunciation and spelling to "lief" or "liev". You will note that along the way both to Middle English and to Middle French, it grew an "i" in before the "e" sound, because words do that.

We do have some records of Old French that are spelled "leuf" or "lef"; we also got our Frenchishness from the Norman Conquest, which is to say the brand of French very specifically spoken by a bunch of Francicized Scandinavians who spoke a very specific one of those Langues D'oïl. So we do know that the idea that this word ended in the sound we might associate with the letter "f" had already took up in a bunch of different places.

The original idea of "lieutenant" is quite literally a "placeholder" - it was someone you left in your place. So if you were your overlord's "lieutenant" you were the person who gave other people orders in his place, the person he delegated to. Much like "captain", when these words were first used they did not designate a specific rank in a highly developed system with rigid relationships, but rather were the names for roles that people occupied in relationship to the enterprise/activity/whatever.

This is why in the books, the Witch King of Angmar is referred to frequently as Sauron's "lieutenant" - Tolkien knew this shit preeeeetty well and liked using words in those contexts.

So in French, they moved along the path of saying "lieu" as the word is said in French today, with no consonant at the end. Their "lieutenant", their "placeholder", maintained that pronunciation. Americans then actively wanted to distance themselves from the British and were at the time buddy-buddy with the French, so they took that pronunciation on.

Meanwhile at some point Middle English - arising from Old English and Norman French - had shifted to the "liev", the one that had a fricative on the end, which was one of the pronunciations attested in the spelling shift to "leuf".

Et voila.

This is fascinating.

Lieutenant is also pronounced leftenant in Canadian English, incidentally.

although you can get into great fights about it with people who’ve only ever heard the word on American TV.

For any of my fellow Canadians for whom this is true: the name of the rank in our military is pronounced leftenant in English. Yes even in your province. Yes I know you’ve only heard the other one, that’s because you watch american tv shows.

why is everything a dead wife to you people.

my dead skateboarding cousin

Memento Throckmori

Two conclusions to be drawn from this picture:

1 - the geese in the background show that the fake coyote doesn't deter geese

2 - the fact they needed to put up a sign implies that the fake coyote did deter humans

Third possible conclusion:

3 - geese can read

Fourth Possible Conclusion:

4 - This photo was taken in Canada, where the geese are coyote deterrent

Confirmed Bachelor and Eligible Bachelor are dating

I am manifesting wenclair for season 3!

I love that opera sits in this limbo where it's extremely well-known but not really beyond a surface level recognition, so you get commercials for makeup or whatever to the tune of the I Hate Women So Much It's Unreal aria

#in the first bridgerton book daphne describes her crush feelings as if her heart is playing the queen of the night aria from the magic flute#which i can totally see if you have never found out what the words mean. very high and fluttery.#but the lyrics are along the lines of THE VENGEANCE OF HELL BOILS IN MY HEART. IF YOU DON'T MURDER THAT MAN I WILL DISOWN YOU.#and i laughed so hard i had to put the book down

via @tophatandboots

oh my god??

@lymeandcoconut

#lmaooooo #my fave is that episode of white collar where neil is doing a theft #and the music they play over it is leporello's 'here's the list of all the hundreds of women my boss has fucked' aria from don giovanni #it's supposed to just sound grand and sophisticated but the guy is singing about how DG fucks tall women short women #fat women skinny women princesses and peasants he fucks them all! #and here's the numbers broken down by nationality! #he's fucked over 1000 women in spain you know!

#oh and he's singing all this to a former conquest who tracked DG down because he promised to marry her then ditched her #anyway it's a lot

[ID copied from alt: handshake meme with "opera lovers" on left side, "ornithologists" on right side, "they're singing about fucking" at center. End ID]

Lust For Life, Little Pink Houses, Jack And Diane, Born In The USA: They have no idea

Opera: You don't say

Literally true

My man Jesus

What story is that?

Matthew 18:9

“And if your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away.”

“Jesus, how can I avoid sin when all these hussies keep revealing the fact that they have bodies?!”

“Hmmm, tough call bro. Have you tried gouging out your eyes so you don’t have to see all those bodies anymore?”

“wut”

“What?”

“Shouldn’t you tell them to… stop dressing like that or something?”

“Don’t see why. It’s not their fault that the fact that they have bodies makes you a fucking sinful horndog. Gotta fix that problem yourself, buddy. Go on, blind yourself.”

“Uh….”

“Or learn to keep it in your g’damn pants no matter what they’re wearing.”

He goes on for like several examples too.

“How can I avoid like, an accidental slip of the hand when…they’re dressin like that?”

“Cut it off.”

“wut”

“Cut it off. Your hand. If it’s a problem, stop having a hand.”

“wut”

“What”

“Did I fucking stutter?”

"I don't know a single person who [insert thing here]" isn't a great metric not only due to selection bias, but also due to sheer chance. Like, I know lots of people who work retail, but by coincidence none of them work at grocery stores. That doesn't mean nobody works at grocery stores.

“Do you think you deserve it?”

“Dunno boss, you tell me.”

HNNNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG

must feel good as fuck to curse a prince for being rude to you while you were larping as an old woman for no reason

... you know. If I could transform into someone a CEO is ethically obligated to help and then punish them for failing to do so, in such a way that they can only be accepted into society again if they learn basic moral lessons about decency, I don't think I would do anything else ever again.

that post that's like "if Hamlet and Othello swapped plays, their tragedies would've been avoided" except it's for Andy Weir protagonists

Mark Watney would've been banging on Stratt's door demanding he be tested for the Hail Mary mission, resume in hand before she had time to finish her first speech on the matter

Rocky and Ryland Grace working together would get off of Mars before NASA even realized Grace was alive, Grace would just roll up like "oh hey guys! look! I made a friend, he gave me a ride home!"

Heartbreking

When you draw a really good hand

And Eugene comes in and covers it xD

(definitely still working to squeeze all three of these dummies into this panel)