transiences:andywooo:animeasuka:wafflesforstephanie:yosb:
welcome to harvard: linguistics 101
Is this reality?
Abso-fucking-lutely.
yo the word fucking is actually really interesting because it’s one of american english’s only infixes
YES THIS IS ACTUALLY REALLY COOL MY AP ENGLISH TEACHER WENT ON A 5-MINUTE RANT ABOUT “FUCK” AND HOW IT’S THE ONLY WORD YOU CAN INSERT INTO OTHER WORDS
I JUST HAVE A LOT OF FEELINGS ABOUT THE WORD “FUCK” OKAY
#probably the best explanation of a device in the tv history
This is literally my fourth or fifth time reblogging this.
It’s still hillarious.
One of my favorite lines
I kinda feel like the writers wrote this line specifically to drive the kind of fans who want to figure out how sci-fi tech would theoretically work crazy. They’re like “nope! We’re not going to give you any techno babble to tear apart or investigate or mull over to tell us how we’re doing it wrong, or how it compares in effectiveness to similar tech in other franchises.”
I also feel like this is one of those times when the TARDIS’s translation circuit just gave the fuck up. Like the ‘physics physics physics’ scene, where he is imparting secrets of the universe and the TARDIS is like THERE ARE NO WORDS FOR THIS IN ENGLISH DAMN IT DOCTOR OH HELL FUCK IT.
OH MY GODS she TOTALLY edits his speech. I be he actually swears a fuckton but the TARDIS is like THERE ARE CHILDREN
transiences:andywooo:animeasuka:wafflesforstephanie:yosb:
welcome to harvard: linguistics 101
Is this reality?
Abso-fucking-lutely.
yo the word fucking is actually really interesting because it’s one of american english’s only infixes
YES THIS IS ACTUALLY REALLY COOL MY AP ENGLISH TEACHER WENT ON A 5-MINUTE RANT ABOUT “FUCK” AND HOW IT’S THE ONLY WORD YOU CAN INSERT INTO OTHER WORDS
I JUST HAVE A LOT OF FEELINGS ABOUT THE WORD “FUCK” OKAY
This is actually really cool because technically “fuck” can’t even be an infix, as it’s a meaningful free morpheme and those can’t be used as grammatical morphemes (also in English infixes only exist in fossilized form) but the use of “fuck” for inflectional word formation is actually fascinating
As I see it, the more and more frequent use of a word as a suffix implies that it’s undergoing semantic bleaching
Soon, possibly not during our generation’s or our children’s or grandchildren’s lifespan, the word “fuck” may eventually lose its meaning and become a grammatical intensifying suffix or possibly the only actual inflix in the English language
and if you don’t think that’s at least kinda cool then I feel sorry for you son because linguistics is an amazing field of study and gdi I love the English language
Reblogging again for the commentary from the wonderful weresquirrel
“Well it certainly illustrates the diversity of the word.”
