vaguely Disreputable space wizard™

Working in retail is really fun, and the times when major fuck-ups happen, they can be either anxiety-attack inducing, or make it possible to get through the rest of your god-awful shift with a smile depending on the customer. My all-time favorite absolute fuck-up is as follows:

This kind woman is just doing her thing. She scans her membership card from her keychain. The register beeps to acknowledge the scan. We continue as usual. Neither of us notice right away, but after I’ve scanned a few more items, I hear a very quiet, “Um,” from the lady, very polite. I look at her. She is looking at the screen of my register, blinking. I, too, look.

And lo and behold. There is a charge of over four-thousand dollars ($4,000) worth of garlic bread staring us in the face. There are no words for a minute. We’re just… in awe. How did this happen? How the hell did this happen?

She didn’t even have garlic bread in her cart.

I sputter a partial apology - I was incapable of forming actual sentences in the moment - and try to void the garlic bread. Since there was no garlic bread to scan, I try to manually remove $4,000-some from this transaction.

Well, the registers don’t like it when you try to void off more than five dollars ($5) from a transaction, so naturally it pings my manager for confirmation, but she’s not by her pager.

At this point, both myself and the lady are just… dumbfounded. She’s not even mad. I’m not even all that embarrassed. Both of us are just looking at the screen. There’s a bit of laughter, but it’s mostly just… confusion.

I have to call through the whole store for my manager on the intercom because she’s not answering. She shows up, ready to override and void it, when she too, sees what exactly is being voided.

“What… did you do?”

“I genuinely. Have literally. No. Idea.”

She voids it, and I go to finish the transaction and tell the woman her total (minus the garlic bread). My register pings. It tells me that she hasn’t scanned her membership card. Odd. I distinctly remember her doing that. The woman goes to scan her card again, and I notice that her library card is stuck to her membership card. I tell her gently, and she separates the two and scans her card.

My manager, hovering nearby still, sees this and says, “I think it mistook the barcode of her other card for garlic bread, and the remaining digits were read as the price.”

And that’s when the laughter really came over us. There were no hard feelings at all. In fact, the woman was incredibly glad that the receipt still showed the garlic bread and the voiding of. I will remember it until the end of time, my only regret in the entire situation being that I didn’t take a damn picture, because she has proof and I don’t. But I swear to God it happened.

*if comfortable doing so, you may include your age range/generation in the tags for helpful demographic data

Hate to do this, but just a heads up - any listings you see for this pattern (which I wrote and have made available FOR FREE on Ravelry) are not authorised by me. I've found two different listing this morning. If you see them, please report them if you can. Really disappointed.

curiosity (temptation)

— (trevor & alucard)

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the first time they acknowledge the Thing between them, and the first time they actually do something about it.

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.

There’s regular text, exact writing system type depends on the writer’s language.

There’s text with emojis. The emojis are generally used to indicate mood, emotion, and sometimes punctuation. I think this still counts as “whatever the writer’s language’s writing system is.”

Then there’s the images. You can reply to something with just an image and Tumblrina’s will see and interpret that, sometimes as words, sometimes as feelings, sometimes something else.

I would argue that the images constitute an ideographic or logographic writing system (depending on who you ask, they may or may not be the same thing). In this sort of writing system, individual symbols represent entire concepts or ideas. A modern day example is Chinese (including its dialects). An ancient, but well-known, example would be Egyptian Hieroglyphs.

If I post a red-tinted pictures with just Obama’s eyes, that is interpreted and understood in a pretty universal way on here (then perish).

But here, they are absolutely used like hanzi or kanji right down to the fact that they can be combined!

Off the top of my head I can think of at least four posts that are nothing but nesting image memes because we love playing with jpegs like paper dolls. God, I still cackle over the political compass-man hook car hand-loss.jpg trifecta. And each one of those combinations ends up with a different shade of humor based on the component parts.