Some Day Dear Heart

sometimes I'm amazed that people still quote vines, even though vine died in 2017

“As far as words go, ‘crying’ is louder and ‘weeping’ is wetter. When people explain the difference between the two to English-language learners they say that weeping is more formal, can sound archaic in everyday speech. You can hear this in their past tenses—the plainness of ‘cried’, the velvet cloak of ‘wept’. I remember arguing once with a teacher who insisted ‘dreamt’ was incorrect, dreamed the only proper option. She was wrong, of course, in both philological and moral ways, and ever since I’ve felt a peculiar attachment to the t’s of the past: weep, wept, sleep, slept, leave, left. There’s a finality there, a quiet completion, of which ’d’ has never dreamt.”

Subtitles and Closed Captions that say things like “[SPEAKS GERMAN]” or “[SPEAKS NATIVE LANGUAGE]” are an accessibility failure and studios should do better.

Honestly, yeah. The only time captions should be doing this is if it’s a non-specific language (e.g., “alien language”) or a language that is not directly transcribable due to having no written form (e.g., Harsusi, pretty much any sign language, etc.).

Hi, caption writer here. And I want you to understand that IT IS NOT OUR FAULT. This is not a choice that WE make. This is not something that we are even allowed to change.

“As far as words go, ‘crying’ is louder and ‘weeping’ is wetter. When people explain the difference between the two to English-language learners they say that weeping is more formal, can sound archaic in everyday speech. You can hear this in their past tenses—the plainness of ‘cried’, the velvet cloak of ‘wept’. I remember arguing once with a teacher who insisted ‘dreamt’ was incorrect, dreamed the only proper option. She was wrong, of course, in both philological and moral ways, and ever since I’ve felt a peculiar attachment to the t’s of the past: weep, wept, sleep, slept, leave, left. There’s a finality there, a quiet completion, of which ’d’ has never dreamt.”