I find things wonderful

Enid vs. The Hurt

Paul Julian was a background artist at Warner Brothers animation during the golden age, and he provided the voice for the Roadrunner. He once clarified that the Roadrunner’s sound effect is spelled “hmeep hmeep.”

Say hi-diddily-ho to a Ned Flanders-themed metal band

Despite Ned Flanders’ religious benevolence and gentle demeanor, he tends to inspire quite a bit of musical hate. With an assist from David Byrne, Homer Simpson expressed frustration toward his neighbor with the castigation “Everybody Hates Ned Flanders.” And in real life, there’s now an aggressive Phoenix quintet called Okilly Dokilly, which calls itself “the world’s only Nedal band.” Besides appropriating Flanders’ slang, the band members—dubbed “Head Ned,” “Bled Ned,” etc.—mimic his fashion sense: All sport dark-green sweaters, a pink collared shirt, bushy mustaches, and dorky glasses.

This is really exciting, linguistically speaking.

Because it’s not true that Tumblr never uses punctuation. But it is true that lack of punctuation has become, itself, a form of punctuation. On Tumblr the lack of punctuation in multisentence-long posts creates the function of rhetorical speech, or speech that is not intended to have an answer, usually in the form of a question. Consider the following two potential posts. Each individual line should be taken as a post:

ugh is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use like god put that back we have to pay for that stuff

Ugh. Is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use? Like god, put that back. We have to pay for that stuff.

In your head, those two potential posts sound totally different. In the first one I’m ranting about work, and this requires no answer. The second may actually engage you to give an answer about hoarding sauce packets. And if you answer the first post, you will likely do so in the same style. 

Here’s what makes this exciting: the English language has no actual punctuation for rhetorical speech–that is, there are no special marks that specifically indicate “this speech is in the abstract, and requires no answer.” Not only that, it never has. The first written record of English (actually proto-English, predating even Old English) dates to the 400s CE, so we’re talking about 1600 years of having absolutely no marker whatsoever for rhetorical speech.

A group of teens and young adults on a blogging website literally reshaped a deficit a millennium and a half old in our language to fit their language needs. More! This group has agreed on a more or less universal standard for these new rules, which fits the definition of “language.” Which is to say Tumblr English is its own actual, real, separate dialect of the English language, and because it is spoken by people worldwide who have introduced concepts from their own languages into it, it may qualify as a written form of pidgin. 

Sometimes I Feel Like I’m The Only One Trying To Gentrify This Neighborhood

“My friends insist they’re happy where they are. But if they only saw the idealized neighborhood I see, where that rundown old health clinic is turned into a tattoo parlor, and that Last Supper mural is replaced with one featuring Radiohead or a stylized corporate octopus, they’d come around.”

Stagger down memory lane with 46 of The Simpsons’ greatest visual gags