#tragedyandme

don draper??

screaming

how would i make it obvious that i'm don??? (besides running around with a glass of straight vodka l m a o

s a m e ugh

wait u mean there is something actually threatening to (idk if theres a term for this) not preserve the english language? like what? that is interesting

language evolves over time and english is a super great example of this bc you can go back to something that is still as well-studied as shakespeare from not actually that long ago and your average high school student will find that difficult to understand--a lot of things have undergone changes since then

for example we used to have 'thou' as a singular form of 'you' and 'you' was the plural but then people started using 'you' as a singular second person pronoun, denoting respect (this is pretty common cross-linguistically actually (i think)), and eventually 'you' was the only one used at all, and 'thou' became archaic

(people kind of make fun of 'y'all' as southern american english but it is filling an actual semantic gap in english, wherein there isn't a distinction of whether you are addressing one or more than one person when you say 'you'; my dialect actually has 'you guys' as the typical second person plural pronoun)

and like meaning can shift a lot over time; i was looking at 'discomfit' last week and it used to mean 'defeat in battle' but now means 'make someone feel uneasy', mostly because of its similarity to the word 'discomfort', even though the two are actually not related at all--but this isn't people misusing 'discomfit' the meaning has actually changed and the standard definition reflects that

but around the 1800s we started becoming obsessed with standardizing english and freezing meaning, grammar, spelling, pronunciation, etc.--this is when we started having dictionaries that said 'this is how you spell this thing!' (it used to be that you could spell english however the fuck you wanted and it would be intelligible)

(and it's funny because the last big pronunciation shift happened after we solidified spellings so a ton of english is not said at all like you'd expect hahaha)

and we got stupid ass 'grammar rules' imported from latin and greek (because obviously they knew what was up, language-wise! those guys were smart!) like the idea of not ending a sentence with a preposition--syntactically impossible in latin but totally cool in english! until a bunch of guys arbitrarily decided it wasn't cool so we could be more like latin

so now english is kind of...frozen? the way we approach language is very strict and there is a lot of power in the standard and a lot of prejudice against people who use non-standard english (ex. african american vernacular english is frowned upon in an academic setting), and there's a lot of pressure against natural language change

of course, it isn't actually possible to stop it entirely--for example, there's the 'californization' or 'westernization' of american english, in which many vowel distinctions are going away (i am from california and have never distinguished a lot of the vowels that are clearly distinct here in new england); plus a whole host of other pronunciation changes in general (glares at the t in 'often'); and a lot of non-standard grammatical forms are becoming more and more accepted

not to mention the striking effect of the internet/technology etc. on the speech of young people oh goodness we're just changing language left and right

but people WANT to stop it, they want to keep english exactly as it is right now, and sorry bro that's just not going to happen

anyway yeah i was just thinking about 'lay' and 'lie' and how if language just does its thing then they'll conflate into a single verb probably (instead of 'he is laying on the bed' and 'he laid on the bed' both being incorrect ugh shut up who even cares)

O.M.G.  The fact that the most gorgeous face in all of Tumblr just called me pretty gives me more feels than a Britin scene. Your face is so fucking beautiful it's painful to look at, sometimes!