Am I the only person who thought this was really fucking funny
A lot of the really funny moments in Lord of the Rings come from Tolkien playing with language like this, where we have relatively formal, archaic, “high” language responded to with informal, modern, “low” language.
another hilarious example:
my absolute favorite example of tolkien switching registers in this way is
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
Is it a glitch or a feature?
Feature
we don’t have anything like this in French and it offers a range of expressibility that I wish we could properly translate back. it is a feature, i concur
just so younger people are aware: a few years ago it was sorta impossible to google how words were pronounced. and it sucked. it was super terrible. the next time an aging asshat tries to shame you for being young, just know I have been pronouncing my vowels wrong my entire life and am still extremely bitter over this. I would strangle countless condescending boomers for the chance to drag even this tiny bit of technological progress back to my primary school days.
the good old days were never good. next time an adult tells you that, look em dead in the eye n tell them they’re either an idiot or a sellout
What words have you been mispronouncing
deign
caveat
perogies
macabre
necronomicon
epitaph
motif
analogous
comparable
colonel
egregious
hyperbole
ignominious
superfluous
malleable
insatiable
chaos (i pronounced it ‘cha-chose’ in my head I have no idea why)
sweetmeats are vegetarian and sweetbreads are made of meat
human language was a mistake and we are cowards for continuing to speak
sweetmeat: an item of confectionery or sweet food
sweetbread: culinary name for the thymus or pancreas of calf and lamb
humans shouldn’t be allowed to name anything
I’m a historical linguist! Have some explanation!
The word meat comes from Old English mete and originally just meant food in general. The word underwent semantic change (specifically: metonymy) so that eventually the word was used for a specific type of food, i.e., meat. So what did they call meat in OE if mete was food? Flæsc, which turned into ModE flesh (kind of like German Fleisch)(’Sup, West Germanic language family). So why do we have sweetmeat instead of, idk, sweet food? Idk. Compounds are weird, man, and the less often a word is used / more dialectal it is (never used “sweetmeat” where I came from), the less likely it is to undergo semantic change (Dr W actually talked about this in class Tuesday past).
So as to sweetbread. The -bread part in this is not etymologically related to bread. Bread, as in the stuff made from grain, came from OE… bread (which, funny story, actually use to mean “crumb” or “bit”; the original OE word was hlaf which then later turned into ModE loaf, and whose traces are in the words lord and lady [lord < hlaford < hlafweard “guardian of the loaf”; lady < hlæfdig, -dig < dæge “loaf maid; maker of the loaf”][these are some of my all-time favourite etymologies], but sometime in OE there was a meaning change and there you go). The -bread in sweetbread has kind of shaky etymology, coming (possibly) from OE bræd (æ could have possibly be written ae and then someone, probably a monk scribing somewhere, made a typo, and then people copied that typo, and then it became a thing due to analogy with bread [this is actually why the present tense and past tense of read are spelled the same way: past tense was ræd, with a long æ, but some monk made a typo and then the GVS happened and the rest is history]) which apparently also meant “meat”.
Why they decided to call it sweetbread as opposed to, idk, savourybread or somesuch is beyond me.
I’m sorry I’m such a huge nerd.
this is cool but am I still allowed to resent the outcome?
idk I just love how we Young People Today use ~improper~ punctuation/grammar in actually really defined ways to express tone without having to explicitly state tone like that’s just really fucking cool, like
no = “No,” she said.
no. = "No,” she said sharply.
No = “No,” she
stated
firmly.
No. = “No,” she snapped.
NO = “No!” she shouted.
noooooo = “No,” she moaned.
no~ = “No,” she said with a drawn-out sing-song.
~no~ = “No,” she drawled sarcastically.
NOOOOO = “No!” she screamed dramatically.
no?! = “No,” she said incredulously.
I’ve been calling this “typographical nuance” and I have a few more to add:
*no* = “No,” she said emphatically.
*nopes on out of here* = “No,” she said of herself in the third person, with a touch of humorous emphasis.
~*~noooo~*~ = “No,” she moaned in stylized pseudo-desperation.
#no = “No,” she added as a side comment.
“no” = “No,” she scare-quoted.
wtf are you kidding no = “No,” she said flatly. “And I can’t believe I have to say this.”
no no No No NO NO NO NO = "No,” she repeated over and over again, growing louder and more emphatic.
nooOOOO = “No,” she said, starting out quietly and turning into a scream.
*no = “Oops, I meant ‘no,’” she corrected, “Sorry for the typo in my previous message.”
I cannot express how strongly I absolutely love language and writing and communication but if anyone asks why I will be showing them this post from now on
this is great, but I got to “no no No No NO NO NO NO” and immediately started singing “mamma mia, mamma mia, mamma mia let me go”
no no no nO (no no no)= “No,” she said, sticking to the status quo
nuuuuuuuuu= “Oh no,” she said sympathetically, trying to stifle her laughter
god im just thinking about how much going to public school in the MCU would’ve made me hate captain america. every time i got caught giving some bitch the finger or writing on bathroom walls or ditching class or stealing books from the library cause i got a fine or what have you, and then they gave me lunch detention or ISS and i sat in that dumbass eraser-smelling room and im in My Chair (the chair i always sit in and yell at anyone else who tries to take it), fuming, arms crossed, full of teen angst and hating everyone around me, and AGAIN had to watch this stupid fucking video ive already seen so many times that i know it by heart and every word grates on my eardrums and i’d just see this fuckin familiar face
and i would be ready to LOSE MY SHIT
Villain Origin Story
god imagine Steve giving Peter his Captain America is Disappointed in You face/lecture over something dumb and Peter just fucking dissociating and zoning back in to “Peter! Are you even listening to me???” and looking him in the eye and being like “I’m completely immune at this point. You can’t even touch me.” and walking the fuck away
canon.
the real reason why Peter agreed to fight cap at the airport
I also firmly believe that not a single teen in the MCU would take Captain America seriously. I’m positive he’d be a total meme, and anytime some sort of disaster is happening, all the kids would just laugh, like “good luck.”
The News: Captain America may be our only hope.
High school kids, snorting: What’s he going to do, tell the villain he’s disappointed in them and to make better choices?
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
Gen-X Supervillian confronting cap after years of PSAs: Oh no, it’s the star-spangled saint coming to tell me to make better choices. Whatcha gonna do, Cap, help an old lady cross the street at me?
Captain America, AKA Steve Rogers the pissed-off-Brooklynite who spent his youth getting into alley fights: The fuck are you talking about? Eat fist, dipshit.
Cap leans into it after four villains in a row get thrown for a loop by him insulting their mothers and swearing a blue streak during battles so he plays up the oh-shucks thing during interviews. That works great until the news catches him on camera saying “It was propaganda, you nazi fuckwit” while decking a superpowered alt-right millennial who came to attack a BLM march.
“It Was Propaganda, You Nazi Fuckwit” becomes the next meme. There are photo edits, there are tee shirts.
