Linguistic Subtleties

“Ha… right.”

Like, she had actual goddamn tears in her eyes, and that was what she considered an appropriate reply to the joke.I just marvelled for a minute like ‘what the actual hell?’ and eventually asked my mom a few questions. I didn’t want to make her feel defensive or self-conscious or anything, it just kind of blew my mind, and I wanted to know what she was thinking.

Turns out that she’s using the ellipsis the same way I would use a dash, and also to create ‘more space between words’ because it ‘just looks better to her’. Also, that I tend to perceive an ellipsis as an innate ‘downswing’, sort of like the opposite of the upswing you get when you ask a question, but she doesn’t. And that she never uses exclamation marks, because all her teachers basically drilled it into her that exclamation marks were horrible things that made you sound stupid and/or aggressive.

So whereas I might sent a response that looked something like:

“Yay! That sounds great - where are we meeting?”

My mother, whilst meaning the exact same thing, would go:

‘Yay. That sounds great… where are we meeting?”

And when I look at both of those texts, mine reads like ‘happy/approval’ to my eye, whereas my mother’s looks flat. Positive phrasing delivered in a completely flat tone of voice is almost always sarcastic when spoken aloud, so written down, it looks sarcastic or passive-aggressive.

On the reverse, my mother thinks my texts look, in her words, ‘ditzy’ and ‘loud’. She actually expressed confusion, because she knows I write and she thinks that I write well when I’m constructing prose, and she, apparently, could never understand why I ‘wrote like an airhead who never learned proper English’ in all my texts. It led to an interesting discussion on conversational text. Texting and text-based chatting are, relatively, still pretty new, and my mother’s generation by and large didn’t grow up writing things down in real-time conversations. The closest equivalent would be passing notes in class, and that almost never went on for as long as a text conversation might. But letters had been largely supplanted by telephones at that point, so ‘conversational writing’ was not a thing she had to master. 

On my old server, there was a character named ßillyßadass.

This never failed to make me laugh, because that letter is not pronounced like B. It is a sharp S. 

Д as an aesthetic A? Дon’t be a дumbass.

И as an aesthetic N? don’t be sillи.

П as another aesthetic N? stoп it.

У as an aesthetic Y? ty bad.

Ш or Щ as an aesthetic W? nope. it’s “sh” and “shch”!

Я as an aesthetic R? surprise! it’s “ya”.

His profile picture on Facebook is of our much-loved family dog and a charcoal grill with two hamburger patties. He never knew a problem which couldn’t be fixed with a good whooping.

When he did cook dinner for our family, it was a special occasion and it was one of two meals, either hamburgers or breakfast for dinner, which meant biscuits from a mix, eggs, bacon, and country gravy. Breakfast for dinner was a big deal. It didn’t happen very often and it took a lot of coordination to cut out the biscuits while the bacon was going, time the eggs scrambling with the biscuits finishing up, keep the biscuits warm while the gravy came together, etc. We hung around while he narrated: these are cat’s head biscuits because they’re big as a cat’s head, this is a critical time for the gravy, shoot I added too much milk, these aren’t looking brown enough. We had lines to say: This is finer than split frog hairs. (Frogs don’t have hair!) That’s how fine it is! Sometimes (after we were all around the table and halfway done, when he was in some kind of mood: pleased, happy, self-indulgent, boyish, uninhibited?) he put butter and honey in a bowl and whisked it with a fork until smooth. I don’t remember what he called this but he liked it on his last biscuit of the meal and my mom would put up a fight as if it were so much more unhealthy than jam but eventually she would grant us some honey butter too. My mother’s meals were for everyday. They were dutiful and sustaining. My father’s meals got to have impulse and craving. They were one-off, happy shows. 

Now I feel sad every day for everything no one else will ever know and I will never know either, because I forget everything and so little in the future will bear any relation to the present. Even now it feels like I am nowhere. I’ve always felt this way on trains here but the feeling is overflowing into other places now. On trains, you miss all the proper cities and see only unmarked places, just fields, empty construction sites, horizons. The stations at each stop are nowhere, too. They have broken windows and analog clocks. One of my clearest memories is of the time when it snowed two feet over a weekend in October, when Julia and I waited for a train to Veliko Tarnovo that never came. It was stuck in snow on the tracks, we guessed. No one could tell us anything about it even at the information desk. In the nowhere inside the station we bought hot chocolates from the coffee machines. There were no lights on. The light from outside was cool and white, reflected by the white snow and white lace curtains on the windows. We waited for about forty-five minutes.

Some people can speak easily.

Some people always have difficulty speaking.

Some people never speak at all.

Some people can speak, but at a cost that’s not worth it.

Some people are better off communicating in other ways.

Some people speak sometimes, and type other times.

Some people have words all the time; some don’t.

Some people can speak fluidly, but only on certain topics. (Just like how one can be fluent in some topics in a foreign language, but be unable to read the news).

Some people lose speech at certain levels of stress.

Some people rely on hand movements and stimming in order to find words.

Some people have a monotone and convey tone through motion.

Some people make a lot of mistakes with words, and rely heavily on tone to make themselves understood.

Some people rely heavily on scripts, and only sound normal when they stay on-script.

Some people use phrases from television.

Some people communicate by repeating themselves, and tend to be perceived as not communicating.

Some people say a lot of words they don’t understand, and are perceived as having meant them.

Some people substitute one word for another a lot, and don’t always realize it.

Some people can answer questions even when they’re having trouble initiating speech.

Some people who find speech easy sound odd.

Some people who find speech difficult sound normal.

You don’t really know how someone communicates until you’ve communicated with them substantially, and even then, you only know in the context you’ve communicated in. Appearances can be deceiving. 

These are the basic shapes I was taught, and I use. Standard lipsync shapes;; 

You have your closed mouth to open, to clenched teeth, to oohs, and your (often optional) F, L, and TH mouths.

Tips!

Your top teeth don’t move;  I mean, stylistically it happens sometimes (Gravity falls does it fairly well, as much as I haaaaate that), but your lipsync will prolly look better if they don’t.

My clenched teeth (SH) mouth is always a bit wider than my biggest AH mouth. It adds variation and helps your shapes blend more nicely. Conversely, my biggest AH mouth is narrower than my SH mouth and my closed (M) mouth.

My L mouth is a tiny bit more closed than my biggest AH, and not as closed as my second biggest AH. It fits between them nicely so that if you have to go from an L to an AH mouth, like you would for the word “Like” or “Love”, it doesn’t pop or look weird.

My R and oo mouths move forward on the face a bit, it adds dimension, and if you leave it all in the same place and have the mouth just shrink into a circle it miiiight look weird.

Aaaaand I think that’s it?  Never go from a SH mouth to a TH mouth, it’ll pop and look weird…uhhh;   Also! It’s alright to skip some shapes;; So below is a lipsync I made using the above shapes;

It’s clear what they’re saying, the mouth is moving nicely, but there’s only one problem. Veeeery rarely do they give you enough time to use all the mouths you want to make it move nice. Voice actors talk fast to fit everything in and holycrap do we hate  love them for it.

So here’s a fast one.

Dummies Guide To: Basic Sign Language (all still images, no videos)

ASLPro (video dictionary)

nightblogging is like “What if apples screamed when we bit them?”

Shitposting is like “a crisp one donger bill”