I like languages. This is my account to access West Lemmy.

she/xe/it/thon/seraph | NO/EN/RU/JP

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • This happens sometimes for me too. You can try opening it in browser, but I’ll write a transcription for our screen-reader-using friends, too.

    Transcription:


    tlirsgender | Nov 6, 2020

    Weird peeve time. Calling lab grown gemstones “fake” is stupid because it’s the same shit just not formed naturally. An artificially grown diamond is the same shit as a natural diamond it is the exact same material bro it’s all fuckign carbon


    spacefroggity | 45m ago

    It’s carbon it’s pretty and it didn’t involve slave labor what’s not to love??? Hi I’m having geology opinions tonight apparently. And I’m right


    spacefroggity | 45m ago

    There is so much bullshit in the diamonds industry to be mad about tbh. It also ties into the bullshit of the wedding industry as a whole but we don’t have the time to unpack all that


    val-ritz | Nov 29, 2020

    not even going to lie, the day i learned i could get like 15 lab grown rubies the size of dimes for $20 is the day i spent $20 on rubies, and i have never once said to myself "man, i wish this cost $1,600 and the lives of eight children to produce


    fuckyeahmineralogy | Dec 8, 2020

    We are a pro-lab-grown mineral blog here, not only is it massively cheaper but massively more ethical as well in many cases.


    thegreenpea | Mar 8, 2021

    another very cool lab grown gem is Moissanite. It has a 9.25 on the mohs hardness scale where diamond is a 10. Moissanote also has a 2.69 refractive index in comparison to diamond’s 2.419 and here is the difference

    Diamond on left and moissanite on right: moissanite's refraction consists of long, thin beams almost in rainbow colors, whereas diamond's refraction has shorter, thicker, whitish beams

    and the best thing about moissanite? It is all lab grown and it costs only a fraction of what diamond costs. So fuck the diamond indsutry and buy lab grown gems which cost significantly less


    rubixpsyche | Aug 6, 2021

    Also it’s just cool to think of some mad scientist lookin person doing shit against the law of the universe and making pretty gems for you. Like cmon. This shouldnt be allowed probably. But humans really be like on gOD i want some shiny an just started MAKIN em


    dadzathechaosgod | 46m ago

    for years people wanted alchemy, well now we have alchemy and we’re making gemstones out of it and suddenly “it doesn’t count” anymore



  • Erika2rsis@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoCurated Tumblr@sh.itjust.worksLoanpost
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    1 year ago

    I guess another way to put it is that “i.e.” is more specific while “e.g.” is more general. So “i.e.” carries an energy of “I am referring very specifically to the following” while “e.g.” means “there are other things that I’m not mentioning”. So the use of “i.e.” in the Tumblr post would imply that “tattoo”, “sushi”, and “guillotine” are the only loanwords in the English language.


  • Anyone looking to remember the difference: “id est” (that is) vs “exemplī grātiā” (for the sake of an example). You use the first to clarify meaning, and the second to begin a non-exhaustive list of examples.

    What matters is ultimately if you can convey your ideas, so using the wrong term is fine when people can still figure out what you meant. But it’s still a good idea to learn the difference, because there will be times when mixing up “i.e.” and “e.g.” will create ambiguity or misunderstanding.

    The best idea is maybe to use “for example” or “that is to say”. The former could be abbreviated to “f.ex.” like in Norwegian, and the latter could be abbreviated “t.i.t.s.”

    …Alright, on second thought maybe don’t abbreviate that one.

    In any case, the Wikipedia Manual of Style recommends avoiding use of “e.g.” and “i.e.” in regular running text altogether, saying that these abbreviations are better fit for parentheticals, quotations, citations, tables, and lists. This is because there is no word or character limit on Wikipedia, nor is there on Tumblr, and so the language is more clear when abbreviations are avoided. Even when someone is using “i.e.” and “e.g.” in the prescribed way, that doesn’t guarantee that the reader knows the distinction.




  • That’s the thing: you can use basically whichever pronunciation or grammar you want. Since it’s already non-standard language, prescribing how to use it is beyond pointless. But if you absolutely need prescriptions, then my own tendency is to use the paradigm ꙮ/ꙮm/ꙮr/ꙮrs/ꙮself with singular agreement, and the readings I use are seraph/seraphim/seraphir/seraphirs/seraphimself, sometimes indicated with ruby characters. But again, you’re under no obligation to use even remotely the same inflections or readings — that’s part of the fun.

    As for the background:

    The character is the Cyrillic multiocular O, which appeared exactly once in exactly one 15th century Old Church Slavonic manuscript to write the phrase “many-eyed seraphim”. That is, ⟨ꙮ⟩ was originally a fanciful variant of the Cyrillic O, meant to look like a bunch of creepy eyes. After the letter was encoded into Unicode, it became a somewhat popular symbol online, often used for a sort of comedic horror effect, for instance by writing “ꙮwꙮ” instead of “OwO”. This would’ve been at the peak of the whole “biblically accurate angel” craze.

    It was from this horror-comedic usage of ⟨ꙮ⟩ that my closeted self first started replacing my deadname with ⟨ꙮ⟩ in certain contexts, under the pretense that I was “just being silly” and that “these people don’t really need to know my real name, do they?”. Later on, I saw that a few other people were using ⟨ꙮ⟩ as a neopronoun, so I decided to start experimenting with using that character as a neopronoun, too. I think that an essentially unpronounceable image of a bunch of eyes really captures the whole “wrong planet” vibe, and these sorts of Unicode/emoji neopronouns in general are a really creative use of language, since they’re basically a form of mixed-script writing.




  • I currently list my pronouns as she/xe/it/thon/ꙮ, with the idea being that people will have a range of options regarding which word to use: if they like, they can choose to just stick with one pronoun, probably she or it, and forget the rest; and if people do choose to refer to me using a neopronoun, then they can more or less use the spellings or pronunciations or inflections or agreements that work best for them. And this seems to be how most neopronoun users are: virtually all neopronoun users also go by an auxiliary pronoun (he, she, they, and/or it) for accessibility’s sake, and virtually all neopronoun users are also very forgiving about how their neopronouns are used.

    For me it goes a step further, since I’m good with being called pretty much any neopronoun, even though xe/thon/ꙮ are my favorites; and I’m even OK with being called he or they in a few specific contexts. I don’t really bother explaining all that, though, since nobody wants to hear a treatise about autistic non-binary transfemininity in the middle of a pronoun circle, so that’s why I usually just list my five favorite pronouns and call it a day.

    So all in all, while we all have our linguistic preferences or sometimes complicated feelings regarding how we’re referred to, the main thing that matters is that people just try to use our pronouns at all. So the problem with neopronouns, in my experience, is that most people end up either dismissing “made-up words” out of hand, or they get so hung up on using the neopronouns “correctly” that they end up just not using the neopronouns at all. So either way, it all comes back to people’s discomfort with using non-prestigious, non-standard language, and this discomfort is sort of justified by the stereotype that people have about neopronoun users being 100% self-centered and unaccommodating.

    I think part of the problem is that most neopronoun users don’t really think or know much about the linguistics (especially the pragmatics) of neopronouns, and this causes neopronoun users to be worse advocates for neopronoun usage… But I also don’t think that people need to have a scientific knowledge of which words they prefer to be called, in order to have their preferences respected.





  • “Oh those poor, poor ESLs, who are far too stupid to learn the intricacies of Our Tongue, surely we must dumb it down for their sake!”

    Listen, as the child of an immigrant and a language learner in xyr own right, the problem with people being forced to learn a complex language is not that the language is complex but that people are forced to learn it. Making the world accessible for ESLs or non-Anglophones does not mean berating native speakers of English as “malicious” for developing their own language to suit their own needs.