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UNESCO recognizes it as a vulnerable language (Gaelic is considered more severely as “endangered”).

The Scots Wikipedia is exactly what it sounds like, an alternate wikipedia where the articles are all written in Scots. There are other wikipedias that provide content for other languages the same way. It helps preserve and give access to a threatened and underrepresented language, which is invaluable.

About 16 hours ago, it was discovered that an American teenager has been editing and writing articles not in Scots, but in an American’s disrespectful phonetic take on what he thinks Scots sounds like. 

“The problem is that this person cannot speak Scots. I don’t mean this in a mean spirited or gatekeeping way where they’re trying their best but are making a few mistakes, I mean they don’t seem to have any knowledge of the language at all. “

This problem isn’t unique to this incident. Frequently on tumblr I see Americans making jokes about Scottish actors making what they’ve called “garbled Scottish sounds” and attempting (and failing) to type in Scots. Scottish languages have been decimated over the centuries, and Scots Wikipedia should be an amazing language resource.

The worst part? He’s apparently been at this for YEARS. He’s edited or penned nearly 1/3 of Scots Wikipedia. Apparently when Scots speakers have corrected him in the past, he’s had a “haughty attitude,” claiming that other Scots speakers (who were never present, unsurprisingly) approved of his failed attempts at writing in Scots.

The damage is heart wrenching:

“Potentially tens of millions of people now think that Scots is a horribly mangled rendering of English rather than being a language or dialect of its own, all because they were exposed to a mangled rendering of English being called Scots by this person and by this person alone.

They wrote such a massive volume of this pretend Scots that anyone writing in genuine Scots would have their work drowned out by rubbish. Or, even worse, edited to be more in line with said rubbish.

Wikipedia could have been an invaluable resource for the struggling language. Instead, it’s just become another source of ammunition for people wanting to disparage and mock it, all because of this one person and their bizarre fixation on Scots, which unfortunately never extended so far as wanting to properly learn it.”

Even worse, many people are praising this kid as the all-time most dedicate “troll,” as funny, etc. It’s inexcusable.

The penguin, on the other hand, never expressed anything at all. It’s designed almost explicitly with purpose of not expressing anything. It’s practically featureless, with only the bare minimum of detail necessary to tell you it’s a penguin. It has a face, but it never uses it. It has no sclera, meaning it stares straight ahead at all times. It actively repels most attempts to ascribe any emotion to it – at best, you can feel that it is coldly satisfied, perhaps detachedly frustrated. I’d say it’s like a robot wearing the skin of an animal, but that’s literally the villain of A Close Shave, and he was pretty expressive.

I had a molecular biology professor who referred it to “vacuum packing” where many extinct animals are rendered slimmer or muscular than they may have been, since things like body fat and fur are not preserved during fossilization. So our view of animals like dinosaurs may be entirely inaccurate.

There’s actually a book, All Yesterdays, in which the artist, CM Koseman, draws modern animals as we might have interpreted them to look if we found them extinct the same way do dinosaurs.

Fun examples include:

The manatee

An elephant

Swans

And literally the picture of the hippo

all the duck pokemons but as actual ducks + cramorant

Generations of readers have been led to believe that murder victims most often are women killed by men and that Black serial murderers are rare. Neither assertion is true. According to the FBI, the majority of homicide victims are men killed by other men, and the race of serial murderers is commensurate with the racial makeup of the U.S. as a whole.

The fallout extends beyond misperception into policy, and it has for decades. For example, as Rachel Monroe detailed in her 2019 book “Savage Appetites,” the rise of the victims’ rights movement, led by the mother of Sharon Tate—a white actress whose murder at the hands of Manson Family members has been documented ad nauseam—led directly to the rights of defendants being restricted. The severity of punishment is rarely even questioned. “[True crime] frames the justice system as inherently just, and it frames long prison sentences as something to aspire toward,” says journalist Rachelle Hampton. “It very much sets up a neat line between us—people who are not incarcerated—and them, people who are incarcerated.”

To this day, reporters enable law enforcement to spread misleading statistics—to suggest, with scant evidence, that major cities, including New York, are suffering through an unprecedented rise in crime. That, too, is false.

“We end up misrepresenting what the world actually looks like,” says Lowery.