Maybe I Am A Simple Being. But, Consider, Maybe Being Simple Isn't All That Bad. Maybe, Just Maybe, Being

Today's fun observation: I know my campus is huge and a lot of people go to my uni but it is so incredible funny how so many of them just, I don't know, hibernate for the colder days??

I attend (almost) every lecture and have to walk between different buildings for them, so all winter I've been walking past these sad, cold, empty benches (and trust me, there's a LOT of them) and now, that sunlight is becoming a common occurrence (it's not even the temperature, it's still pretty cold) there are suddenly people not only enjoying sunlight on previous mentioned benches but also attending lectures more frequently.

It's a pretty fun thing to think about, just how simple we truly are (but like, in a cute way)

a lot has been said about this incident but i think we should never forget the time a prominent hungarian anti-gay conservative politician was caught at a gay orgy in brussels that got busted because it was held against quarantine regulations, and he tried to escape the cops by climbing out of the window and down the drain pipe, with drugs in his backpack. i just think we should talk about this more.

Having to clean the shower is so fucking annoying. It’s clean in there. That’s where I go to get clean. It’s clean dude trust me. Stop fucking growing bacteria and stuff man this is the clean locale. You’re embarrassing me in front of the sink

To elaborate on this one: it really hurts my pride that I am no longer considered smart when it comes to academics, since uni level is LEAGUES ahead of the ~academicness~ I grew up in, but ah well, I'm, the little simple creature, will get the same degree as these smart people and I think I have less hatred in my heart then them

Maybe I am a simple being. But, consider, maybe being simple isn't all that bad. Maybe, just maybe, being intelligent isn't all that fun. Just a thought.

love how when i get a new interest, i’m like “oh god it’s happening again” and i’m stuck like that for about a week until everything explodes and any interest i’ve had prior is completely dwarfed for an unknown amount of time

theres this trend between my mutuals and mutual-in-laws like "x's 100 favorite films/artists -- how many have you watched/listened?" and everytime i come across one of these i'm reminded of how much of an i-dont-like-change-or-new-stuff bitch i am. i rly circle through the same 10 things that i love.

dear god i am an npc. i will never be special. sir middest of boringestshire.

“what’s your aesthetic” it’s super niche actually it’s called clothes i like. hope this helps

What is a ‘wug’?

If you’ve been to linguist tumblr (lingblr), you might have stumbled upon this picture of a funny little bird or read the word ‘wug’ somewhere. But what exactly is a ‘wug’ and where does this come from?

The ‘wug’ is an imaginary creature designed for the so-called ‘wug test’ by Jean Berko Gleason. Here’s an illustration from her test:

“Gleason devised the Wug Test as part of her earliest research (1958), which used nonsense words to gauge children’s acquisition of morphological rules‍—‌for example, the “default” rule that most English plurals are formed by adding an /s/, /z/ or /ɨz/ sound depending on the final consonant, e.g., hat–hats, eye–eyes, witch–witches. A child is shown simple pictures of a fanciful creature or activity, with a nonsense name, and prompted to complete a statement about it:

This is a WUG. Now there is another one. There are two of them. There are two ________.

Each “target” word was a made-up (but plausible-sounding) pseudoword, so that the child cannot have heard it before. A child who knows that the plural of witch is witches may have heard and memorized that pair, but a child responding that the plural of wug (which the child presumably has never heard) is wugs (/wʌgz/, using the /z/ allomorph since “wug” ends in a voiced consonant) has apparently inferred (perhaps unconsciously) the basic rule for forming plurals.

The Wug Test also includes questions involving verb conjugations, possessives, and other common derivational morphemes such as the agentive -er (e.g. “A man who ‘zibs’ is a ________?”), and requested explanations of common compound words e.g. “Why is a birthday called a birthday?“ Other items included:

This is a dog with QUIRKS on him. He is all covered in QUIRKS. What kind of a dog is he? He is a ________ dog.

This is a man who knows how to SPOW. He is SPOWING. He did the same thing yesterday. What did he do yesterday? Yesterday he ________.

(The expected answers were QUIRKY and SPOWED.)

Gleason’s major finding was that even very young children are able to connect suitable endings‍—‌to produce plurals, past tenses, possessives, and other forms‍—‌to nonsense words they have never heard before, implying that they have internalized systematic aspects of the linguistic system which no one has necessarily tried to teach them. However, she also identified an earlier stage at which children can produce such forms for real words, but not yet for nonsense words‍—‌implying that children start by memorizing singular–plural pairs they hear spoken by others, then eventually extract rules and patterns from these examples which they apply to novel words.

The Wug Test was the first experimental proof that young children have extracted generalizable rules from the language around them, rather than simply memorizing words that they have heard, and it was almost immediately adapted for children speaking languages other than English, to bilingual children, and to children (and adults) with various impairments or from a variety of cultural backgrounds. Its conclusions are viewed as essential to the understanding of when and how children reach major language milestones, and its variations and progeny remain in use worldwide for studies on language acquisition. It is “almost universal” for textbooks in psycholinguistics and language acquisition to include assignments calling for the student to carry out a practical variation of the Wug Test paradigm. The ubiquity of discussion of the wug test has led to the wug being used as a mascot of sorts for linguists and linguistics students.”

Here are some more illustrations from the original wug test:

Sources: 

Wikipedia, All Things Linguistic

I know this specifically refers to fanfiction BUT it applies to the internet as a whole! It's YOUR feed! YOUR timeline! YOUR recommendations! There is a "not interested" button for a reason, use it!!! But also, if you know a certain type of content pisses you off just don't click on it! There's enough misery in the world, don't waste your precious freetime on things you do not like :)

"i'm tired of seeing-" use your filters.

"but there was an icky ship-!" use your filters.

"i don't like that tag-" use your filters.

don't like what you're seeing? use. your. filters.