Be Gay Do Witchcraft

Some things I wanna make clear because I’m seeing some said repeatedly in the reblogs:

- I’m no longer friends with Friend 2 and I haven’t been for a while, at least couple months. Most of my friend group cut off contact with him too (including Friend 1) after many situations that just made him look creepy, including not being able to set any boundaries (most tries ended up with him throwing a tantrum)

- a big chunk of people is suggesting polyamory in the reblogs, but I wouldn’t expect him to get even one gf, let alone two, given how he finds scared women hot and his favorite trope is “reversed mommy” situation (punishing the woman for dominating you)

- lots of people are also suggesting it’s an egg kinda situation, and I obviously can’t say yes or no to that, but I wanna mention how he once said he wouldn’t mind bottoming for a trans girl and how it’s one of the reasons he considers himself bi. Do with that info what you want

- Friend 1 is trans. Also we’re friends to this day and I love hanging out with her, she’s a diva

there’s sixteen Colorado counties that their most searched was “wolf furry”, plus thirty-odd counties (not counting either Arapahoe or any of the ones marked here as “Insufficient Data”) which may well have had plenty of searches for “wolf furry”, just fewer than for whatever they’re labeled here

and “skunk furry” searches in Arapahoe County outnumbered “wolf furry” searches in the entire state of Colorado

Human: I mean ... It sounds like you're talking about Bigfoot, who isn't real, he's just a Cryptid.

Human: I mean, what if I asked you about Megalomaidens?

ID: A youtube comment with 11 likes by Niceone, it says "I've lived 46 years without knowing this. How nice of life to save some of the best bites for later." End ID.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote: “When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of “getting to know you” questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.

And he went WOW. That’s amazing! And I said, “Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.”

And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.”

Yeah, accents are how we pronounce words, and yes, it's not the best term for the phenomenon referenced by OP. And I'm not going to argue with an expert's definition of idiolect, however, I am going to point something out about your definition of "small."

Tumblr's user base is small only in comparison to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, or TikTok. According to SQ Magazine, in 2025 there were 12 million daily active users from the U.S. alone. It we assume that say, only a tenth of those users find themselves referencing the plinko horse in casual conversation, that's 1.2 million people. For reference, the "Hoi Toider" family of dialects from the Outer Banks of North Carolina is spoken by maybe less than a couple thousand people? (I've seen the number 150 floated, but I'm pretty sure that's just from one island - geographically the accent is spread out over several islands of the Outer Banks and some limited areas of the mainland.) Personally, I think once we've gone over a thousand people, we're out of the "small" category anyway.

Plus, the examples given by your professor (school, company, family) generally include elements of direct proximity or some sort of specific geographic anchor point. They all are going to be made up of people who live in close proximity to one another and/or who return to a centralized location more often than not. There's also a centralized hierarchy of authority figures that form the nucleus of the unit, whether that's a school administration, executives and managers in a company, or parents/elders in a family.

And I was actually thinking about this already, but arguably, Tumblr's particular vernacular may just extend to pronunciation/enunciation even though it's not actually an accent! Our ludicrous speech patterns are shaped by the fact that Tumblr is heavily text-based. Text really is the preferred mode of communication, with lots of visual modifiers and enduring meme references that indicate tone and subtext.

That's where subvocalization comes in. Subvocalization is where your larynx (voice box) and other muscles involved in speech actually move as if forming words while you read. You generally cannot feel it, but subvocalization can be detected by specialized machines.

You know how people learning to read usually have to start out reading out loud before they can read silently? Reading is actually a VERY complicated cognitive skill, in no small part because rendering spoken language into symbols adds a lot of cognitive load to your brain, especially to your working memory. It's thought that subvocalization helps lighten the load because you may not realize it, but your throat is silently creating the sounds of the words you're reading. You get physical feedback that might act as a memory aid.

Now what does that have to do with the Hellsite Vernacular?

Read the following examples to yourself out loud:

I think I have covid.

2. I think I hauve covid

3. ithinkihavecovid

4. I tHiNk I hAvE cOvId

5. I think ☝️ I have covid.

6. I 👏think 👏I 👏have 👏covid.

Yes, you could read all of these statements completely flat, ignoring the visual shenanigans and formatting, but, more than likely, you ended up preserving the gags in your verbalization because each one is communicating different information! In example 2, you probably preserved the misspelling as a diphthong because that's part of the joke. Number 3 you might read as basically one word because there's no spaces. Number 4 might have some variation in interpretation, but I usually read it in a jerky cadence with my pitch going up on capital letters and lower on lower case letters. Other people might get louder on capitals and softer on lowers or use the capitalization pattern to determine stress patterns. You might have interpreted the emojis as punctuation marks, or used them as theatrical directions.

And even if you didn't say those phrases out loud - you still used subvocalization to help map what they should sound like.

For visual gags like emojis, formatting, and spellings, you're going to tend to say them out loud the way you silently read them because you're already basically practicing them via subvocalization. When I perform the ole Random Capitalization gag out loud, I emphasize the capitalized words because that's how I read them silently. When I verbalize the clap-emoji joke, I either punctuate each word or actually clap. For memes based on short videos or performances like "the sacred texts!" or "okay, noun-boy" the tendency is probably to preserve the original cadence and tone of the source meme.

Now yeah, specific enunciation choices can differ person to person, but if spoken aloud, we're still trying to preserve the information that each differing format would communicate to another Tumblrina. Speaking Tumblrish will have you using enunciation and pronunciation outside of your typical accent. And all of that is on top of the syntax gags and verbiage that's more classically associated with Cringe Unhinged Microblogging English.

But no, I do agree that in technical terms, "accent" isn't the most accurate description of what's going on, however, I do argue that we're not just a bunch of individuals or small groups - Tumblr is a community. We have a shared culture, history, and lingua franca even when we might hold wildly different opinions on like say, trans women and their rights to not have all their posts marked mature or have their accounts deactivated on a whim. (Yes, @staff, I'm staring right at you, you've been doing okay on not fuckin up the UI lately but we all know you can do better.) And this community is in reality, pretty large, geographically spread out with no central anchor or authority figures, has multiple sub-cultures, and in practice, speaks with multiple distinct accents even when we might sometimes share enunciation and pronunciation references.

Idiolect is too narrow, accent doesn't actually encompass what's going on - in my opinion, we should call it a dialect or vernacular.

But! ☝️This is also Tumblr, where the humor is in the text gags. In the gaining net zero information on posts, the Vanilla Extract, the rent lowering shots, the color of the sky, and the Goncherovs. Our cultural pastimes are posting a photo with a blatant lies attached a la Bitch, That's The Tubby Custard Machine and That's Not Were-Ralph That's Adam Driver, creating wacky bracket challenges like deciding a Tumblr Sexyman or Tumblr's Most Breedable Man, celebrating holidays from the joyously adorable to the laughably absurd such as Neil Banging Out the Tunes and the Ides of March, and we still tend to communicate important news to one another via Jensen Ackles's emotionally constipated face.

"Hellsite Vernacular" or "Cringe Unhinged Microblogging English (CUME)" might be more accurate, but insisting on an inaccurate name that communicates incorrect information is very On Brand for us.

I don't know if this has been done already, but anyway...

~ Pateman, Matthew. "'You Say Tomato' Englishness in Buffy the Vampire Slayer," Cercles 8 (2003): 103-113

When defining Giles’ character, the most common tendency is to define him in relation to the Scoobies. This is what leads to the propagation of misconceptions such as "Giles is an authority figure," or "Giles is the Scoobies' father figure." Due to his age and his role as Buffy’s mentor, Giles is often automatically slotted into the role of “father of the group” and loaded with all sorts of traits that stereotypically go along with that paternal role, but don’t necessarily apply to him, or, at least, are not major components of his character. The above quotation, from an article on representations of Englishness in Buffy, is somewhat unique because it defines Giles not in relation to the rest of the Scoobies, but in terms of his Englishness. It is still looking at the character from a particular angle, but it is closer to an assessment of him on his own terms, which is why it is more accurate than many definitions, and why I am taking it as my starting point. Pateman’s association of Giles with the Victorian period (earlier in the article he also writes, “Giles might be thought in some ways to reflect and trade upon a… Victorian version of Englishness” [107]) is what I particularly find interesting, because it agrees with what I consider to be really the essence of Giles’s character.

The Victorian era was one of great change, in which modernity often came into conflict with tradition (which is itself an interesting way to regard Giles’ character, but not what I consider essential to him), but in terms of literature and art it was largely continuous with the Romantic era. Despite the period’s rational, stiff-upper-lip pretenses, the Victorians were concerned with writing about emotion, mythology and folklore, beauty and a search for ideals. In “The Dark Age” (BtVS 2.8) we learn that Giles’ favourite author is E. M. Forster (the script actually says “Forrester” but The Annotated Buffy concludes, and I agree, that that’s a mistake), a popular writer of the Romantic genre. His best known work is probably A Room With a View (made into a film by Merchant-Ivory starring Helena Bonham Carter), in which a major theme is love and passion overcoming emotional repression and social restrictions. Jenny Calendar describes the particular book in question as “so romantic,” and that is what I consider Giles to essentially be: at heart a Romantic.

***This is an essay I wrote on LiveJournal in freaking 2007. I wanted to bring it over here, because I still think Giles' Romanticism/idealism is a major component of his character that doesn't get acknowledged nearly enough. Continued under the cut. I've edited it only very slightly.***