A Witch Who Hits

if you think ppl who are too poor to attend a four year university for all four years, or that ppl who are too poor to/don’t want to get their bachelor’s/master’s/doctorate are “stupid” then i have news for you:

do they mean it’s that spicy cinnamon tea

(Sidenote: prototype theory means that people think of the most prototypical instances of a thing before they think of weirder types. For example: list four kinds of birds to yourself right now. You probably started with local songbirds, which for me is robins, blue birds, cardinals, starlings. If I had you list three more, you might say pigeons or eagles or falcons. It would probably take you a while to get to penguins and emus and ducks, even though those are all birds too. A duck or a penguin, however, is not a prototypical bird.)

“Chai” means tea in Hindi-Urdu, but “chai tea” in English means “tea prepared like masala chai” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish “the kind of tea we make here” from “the kind of tea they make somewhere else”.

“Naan” may mean bread, but “naan bread” means specifically “bread prepared like this” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish between “bread made how we make it” and “bread how other people make it”.

We also sometimes say “liege lord” when talking about feudal homage, even though “liege” is just “lord” in French, or “flower blossom” to describe the part of the flower that opens, even though when “flower” was borrowed from French it meant the same thing as blossom. 

We also do this with place names: “brea” means tar in Spanish, but when we came across a place where Spanish-speakers were like “there’s tar here”, we took that and said “Okay, here’s the La Brea tar pits”.

 Or “Sahara”. Sahara already meant “giant desert,” but we call it the Sahara desert to distinguish it from other giant deserts, like the Gobi desert (Gobi also means desert btw).

English doesn’t seem to be the only language that does this for places: this page has Spanish, Icelandic, Indonesian, and other languages doing it too.

Languages tend to use a lot of repetition to make sure that things are clear. English says “John walks”, and the -s on walks means “one person is doing this” even though we know “John” is one person. Spanish puts tense markers on every instance of a verb in a sentence, even when it’s abundantly clear that they all have the same tense (”ayer [yo] caminé por el parque y jugué tenis” even though “ayer” means yesterday and “yo” means I and the -é means “I in the past”). English apparently also likes to use semantic repetition, so that people know that “chai” is a type of tea and “naan” is a type of bread and “Sahara” is a desert. (I could also totally see someone labeling something, for instance, pan dulce sweetbread, even though “pan dulce” means “sweet bread”.)

It literally all depends on which parts of China (or, more specifically, what Chinese) those cultures got their tea from, and who in turn they sold their tea to. 

The Portuguese imported tea from the Southern provinces through Macau, so they called tea “cha” because in Cantonese it’s “cha”. The Dutch got tea from Fujian, where Min Chinese was more heavily spoken so it’s “thee” coming from “te”. And because the Dutch sold tea to so much of Europe, that proliferated the “te” pronunciation to France (”the”), English (”tea”) etc, even though the vast majority of Chinese people speak dialects that pronounce it “cha” (by which I mean Mandarin and Cantonese which accounts for a lot of the people who speak Chinese even though they aren’t the only dialects).

And “chai”/”chay” comes from the Persian pronunciation who got it from the Northern Chinese who then brought it all over Central Asia and became chai.

It’s the Oedipus Complex

Salvation through skating | Dana Whitney Hayes | TEDxDirigo

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Finding your life’s passion at the roller derby rink: Monica Mitchell at TEDxSenecaCollege

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Hard Hits & Hard Lessons: Founding of Woman’s Roller Derby League: Jennifer McMahon at TEDxEureka

And then Mark’s just like HEYYYYY!

- coconut oil in massive bottles. get that stuff in bulk, it’s exactly the same as the overpriced shit from whole foods or w/e

- cool unique drinks like mango and lychee juice and coconut water with jelly. also limca and thums up, which are soooooo good. trust me.

- super cheap pretty jewelry. maybe not real gold and silver, but you’ll find the same types of bangles and chains that UO constantly rips off for muuuuch cheaper

- sometimes super cheap designer knockoff bags, if that’s your thing lol

- henna! I know there’s a lot of debate over whether this product can be used by non-brown people, but if for whatever reason you’re going to use it (please avoid traditional designs if ur not from a culture that uses it), do yourself a favor and buy yourself tubes of the paste from south asian markets. they’re usually really precise and easy to use, and unless you have an allergy to the plant, better for your skin than those sketchy artificial stick-on stencil messes they sell at hobby lobby or w/e

- henna hair dye too! and other nice hair products like neem oil

- maybe this is just our old local store, but ive seen many pirated (and non-pirated) copies of Bollywood movies on their shelves

- incense!! they usually have nice varieties and also cute holders and candles too

- obviously, there is also lots of great food and produce typically available. Asian desserts and snacks are really unique and fun to try, so check those out too

In the twenty years before Albert Einstein died, he very rarely accepted invitations to speak at universities. In 1946, however, he accepted an invitation to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania which was the first school in America to grant college degrees to African American students.