Your Sixth Most Recent Emoji Is How Your Guardian Angel Feels About You

the joy of realizing someone is a similar type of freak as you

the way ppl have designated cuddling as a purely romantic thing and is weird outside of that context has done widespread damage to our pack animal nature

I've just written the introduction and the "Why are we even having this conversation?" part of my argumentative essay, (note: I have yet to even start my argument), and I have already used up half my wordcount???? Oh lord have mercy

Man, I'm having such a weirdly nostalgic time with Love and deepspace, not because anything in that game is nostalgic in specific but the way it CONSUMES my waking thoughts, the way I CANNOT stop reading fanfiction, and the pain of not being able to play the game itself due not having any device to run it on pains me. And THAT is nostalgic, the way Undertale and the FNAF games formed me during my younger years despite not being able to play them, the way the community fed me well, kept me interested, engaged, it really is a very fun part of the internet

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

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.

The thing about living in Europe is that everyone is at least vaguely aware that if you don't support the military defense efforts of the countries with a border with Russia, then you are going to be in a country with a border with Russia.

me and my homies support real artists who put their passion into their pieces instead of a machine who rips off the hard work of talented peeps

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.

One of my friends recommended Hades (the game) to me, and as I'm waiting for it to download on my Switch, I can't help but laugh, as it is right next to Animal Crossing New Horizons, which is next to Undertale, which is next to Hello Kitty and Friends Happiness Parade and oh god, it's just so poetic