I love that four different people on my feed scheduled this joyous person to reblog by 8am on June 1. I look forward to seeing this a dozen more times today.
A Vulcan named Stork works at the Terran adoption agency. Parents always request that he be the one to deliver their child to them.
It’s years before anyone explains it to him.
People keep gifting him robes with long white birds on them.
The fun thing is he would understand why people were getting him outfits with storks on them. That’s a word, it’s his name, straightforward. All the humans get him the same gag gift, but like, they’re putting effort in at least. This is a genuinely nice outfit. Stork will be a walking zero-effort pun sometimes, rather than waste a perfectly fine robe.
It’s fine. This is a readily comprehensible human illogic. Exactly the kind of thing he expected from moving to Earth.
Six years in he finds out about the stork bringing babies.
Stork has a good long meditation session about this myth, his name, his job, the outfits, the whole shebang (or whatever Vulcan concept is the equivalent).
And he decides he’s honored by it, in a humanly illogical way.
The humans are asking him to do what is after all his job, and specifically requesting him for the joy his name brings them on top of an already agreeable and satisfying task. He has no objection to engendering positive emotions in others. Harm hastens the heat-death of the universe, Surak teaches, so happiness must logically slow it down.
Plus, Vulcans of his generation love puns. There were two decades of punning competitions in colleges across the planet. So when he realizes that he is a walking zero-effort pun, and that the humans also love the pun, he is all for it. He is the Joe Cool of the entire Vulcan population in his city.
And via this pun, the humans are including him in a cherished and traditional myth, by casting him as the literal bringer of life and the expander of families.
There’s no downside. Stork wears his robes, pins, keychains, and other bird-related tchotchkes with genuine pride.
YES IT’S BACK ON MY DASH AT LAST
For real though working together with some human social workers, a Vulcan would be an excellent caretaker for children in an adoption center.
Child has a meltdown? Imagine Stork, perfectly calm and unbothered, approaching the kid and saying “You appear quite upset, Eliza. If you would please allow me to relocate you to the ‘bean-bag-chair,’ we can discuss the source of your distress.”
A Vulcan educated in medicine and child psychology would be endlessly patient with a kid with behavioral issues. Stork wouldn’t get or upset or frustrated. After all, these are children with medical and psychological conditions. It would be illogical to blame the child or to not treat them with the appropriate care.
Even if the a little one was having a bad day or was just overtired, Stork wouldn’t get angry. He might even be a calming presence. Any new kids acting out would learn real quick that they’d have better luck trying to arm-wrestle a Klingon than get a rise out of Stork.
Not only that, Vulcans live much longer than humans. Imagine Stork looking virtually unchanged as decades pass. Kids he’d helped years ago would turn up fully grown, maybe there to adopt their own kids, and run into Stork, looking almost exactly as they remember him.
And he’d probably remember them too. “Welcome back, Eliza.”
“…Harm hastens the heat-death of the universe, Surak teaches, so logically happiness must slow it down…”
When she was a baby and sat playing on the floor of the family home, Lizzie’s older sisters built a tower of books around her. She was so agreeable about it, they kept going until she was entirely concealed. Then—losing interest in the game—they wandered away and forgot about her. When the Alcott family discovered that baby Lizzie was missing, they searched and searched. Eventually they found her “curled up and fast asleep in her dungeon cell,” Louisa wrote in her journal. “[She] emerged so rosy and smiling after her nap that we were forgiven for our carelessness.”
There are so many ways to read this story. Lizzie as inherently passive. Lizzie as a good-natured child. Lizzie as a character in a novel engaging in some good, old-fashioned foreshadowing. That last one is the one I cannot shake: Lizzie sitting obediently as her family built a sepulcher of words around her.
from one of my favorite short essays. it’s about Louisa May Alcott’s sister, who inspired the character of Beth March in Little Women. You can read it here.
been reading cicero’s rant about words being given obscene meanings and i don’t think i’ve ever seen a latin sentence that made me burst into such immediate and violent laughter before
had a couple people be like “i have no idea what this means” so to clarify: the word penis in latin originally meant tail and only later got the sense of, uh. penis. so this is cicero complaining that nowadays all these hooligans are using the word “penis” for naughty purposes
Thank you for this post, I will be showing it to every boomer who ever complains about how the kids these days are butchering the language.
Which is especially funny because the Romans had a very rich vocabulary for being rude. And a lot of it got very well preserved, unlike some other ancient cultures where the only people who could write were scholars and priests and the like, who weren’t going around talking about slurs all that much. Not the Romans. We have a city full of rude graffiti that got preserved when the nearby volcano asploded, and poets like Catullus who loved to get FILTHY. He wrote poems about love and lust, for men and women, and he wrote poems about people he fucking hated, and he spared no invective.
So the Latin has a bunch of rude words, we still know about them, and the hilarious thing about this quote is that it’s an ancient Roman complaining about a word for penis… And it’s the one WE STILL USE, SOME TWO MILLENNIA LATER.
I sorry Cicero, you lost this battle, hard.
He could have been complaining about peniculus (little brush), mentula (prick), sopio (penis), vomer (plowshare), verpa (hard on/ literally penis with retracted foreskin).
But nope. He picked the one word that ended up in English.
BTW one of my favorite things about English vocabulary that you can’t not see once you realize it’s there: there was a period in Englandwhere the upper classes spoke romance languages and the lower classes were germanic, before this all melted together into the Frankenstein’s monster we call English
So English has a lot of cases where we have two words for the same thing, but one is formal and medical and polite, and the other is rude.
Why is copulation clinical and fucking rude? Because “copulation” is Latin and “fucking” is germanic. Same goes for “feces” and “shit”, “vagina” and “cunt”, and so on.
Interestingly this goes for some other words too, in a way that makes sense if you think about it. You know how we have different words for some animals and the food made from those animals? Like, “cow” vs “beef”, “sheep” vs “mutton”, “deer” vs “venison”.
It’s the same thing! Just not always going back to Latin, sometimes it’s just to old French. The animal is germanic, the meat is romance/Latin.
Why? Well, think about it. You’ve got a class system. You’ve got upper-class rich people eating their fancy meals, and a bunch of poor working class people raising the animals on the farms. The animals get germanic names, and the meat get romance names, because Lord Snooty What'sHisFuck only ever sees a cow when it’s cooked up and on his plate. So he calls it “beef”, since he speaks something like French, and the guy who raised Tasty Betsy called her a “Cow” because he speaks something like German.
English has centuries of linguistic classism built into our very vocabulary! And it’s really neat to notice and see how prevalent it is.
BTW to get back to Latin, another fun thing about how their assorted dirty words worked is that it implies a lot about their value system, and how they saw gender and sexual roles. See, they had a real thing about what we now would call “top” vs “bottom”. We still have some of that, of course, but we tend to make it more gendered, and more about straight vs. gay.
The Romans didn’t think “gay” was an insult. They did have a word for that! But they did use “cinaedus” as an insult, and the closest term we have is “cocksucker”. Except they didn’t really imply the homosexual nature of that insult… For them it was just about being the bottom in oral sex. “cocksucker” or “pussylicker”, it’s all the same. Similarly they had “irrumo, irrumare”, which means “to make someone suck your cock”, which is an expression of dominance. Again, it’s not about the possible homosexuality: it’s the topping.
And similarly, they had “pathicus”, an insult that means something like the f-slur. But as always, it’s not about homosexuality, as that’s fine: it’s about being the bottom. One of the worst slurs you could call a Roman man was one that meant he let people fuck him in the ass.
The bottom line (no pun intended): Linguistics are always interesting because they tell you so much about the culture that speaks that language. Romans had a culture-wide hang-up about topping and bottoming, and to this day English has a big formal/informal divide in our vocabulary because of who won The Battle of Hastings in 1066.
[ID: Text that reads: “hodie penis est in obscenis.” End ID]
also: WHALE FALLS BUT IN SPACE? dead purgil and abandoned venator-class ships becoming sources of life for the Galaxy? giant creatures wearing lost ships as shells, learning how to use distress beacons to lure in more ships like angler fish coaxing fish into their mouths with their camouflaged lures? sentient races who do not use ships at all, but have tamed space creatures and live inside them symbiotically, using them as living ships????? there is SO MUCH YOU CAN DO IN SPACE!!!!
Hey tumblr. Are you trying to learn to cook for yourself? I sure am. My roommate just got me this book and I am totally blown away — it’s an entire cooking course in one book easy and accessible, taking you from following recipes to making up your own by teaching you the science behind it all. Do you love science? I love science. I especially love DIAGRAMS!
You can’t quite see it, but this tells you not just what parts to eat, but how to prepare it. I’m always in grocery stores staring at veg going “okay but what do I DO with it?” and this book actually answers that in clear, simple language and beautiful watercolours.
What’s the difference when recipes call for different types of frying? Hey, I guess I know now!
Illustrations instead of photos encourage you to play around instead of trying to get the exact same result.
Samin Nosrat, the author, is incredibly personable along with being a great writer and chef. The prose parts of the book are clearly worded and full of personality. It explains details of cooking that lots of other cookbooks leave out, meaning a intermediate cook like me can actually grasp skills like breaking down a whole chicken or getting the heart out of fresh artichokes.
The first half of the book is meant to be read straight through and explains the theory behind the elements of food in a casual writing style. Then it has 100 recipes that are meant to teach you all the basic skills and are a jumping-off point, because what she really wants you to do is EXPERIMENT! I can’t wait to eat a bunch of this stuff.
I don’t know about you, but I failed to learn cooking from my mom even though she’s a great cook. I regret it now and want to learn to be comfortable in the kitchen, because I love eating and I want to take back control of the food I eat. When I got this book, the first random page I flipped to had a matrix explaining what works well with avocado. I knew right away it was going to be my kind of book. (I ended up staying up late reading it.)
So if you’re also trying to learn to cook, to take back control of what you eat, want a really pretty illustrated cookbook, whatever — I can’t recommend this enough.
Her Netflix show based on this was incredible and she also reads the audiobook, so you can enjoy this no matter what format you like best.
I love Salt Fat Acid Heat - She’s really really good at breaking down why things taste good and what makes food do the things it does. I have changed how I prepare brisket because of her, and it’s so much better now. If you want to understand how food goes together so that you can move beyond following a recipe and into being able to improvise with food and make up your own recipes, tailoring the recipes you find to your own preferences, Salt Fat Acid Heat is like… the graduate-level class you need.
The Netflix collection (same name) is phenomenal. Saving goes to different parts of the world to explore the four elements of her book-Salt, Fat, Acid, and Heat- and the different ways they are prepared, stored, used, and passed down.
For example, in the episode about salt, she visits Japan, and learns from soy sauce makers and sea salt collectors. She goes through the differences between different types of salt and salty products, and how they flavor the dish differently while all adding a salty element.
Samin takes great lengths to describe, and teach, how these elements and flavor profiles work in concert to create amazing dishes that are packed with flavor. Really can’t reccomend the Netflix series and the cookbook enough.
teaching children that they are allowed to walk away and cool off if they are feeling overwhelmed might literally save their life as teens/adults
I am a preschool teacher.
This is my “alone zone.”
At any time of the day, if my kids are feeling stressed, they can go here to cool down. There’s stress toys, silly putty, bubbles, sensory bottles…there’s books and headphones to block out the loud noises.
The only thing they have to do is “check in” by putting their picture on which emotion they’re feeling so I know how I can help them when they’re ready.
Kids. Need. Space.
Kids. Need. Coping. Mechanisms.
Not. Time-outs.
And the sooner we as adults teach them that, the better off they’ll be as they grow.
@ all my shittily developed adult pals, if someone is walking away to cool off, kindly dont follow them and continue to harass them
One of the biggest “I love you”s in Fullmetal Alchemist are all the ways people respect each other’s bodily autonomy. There are two scenes that carry this theme to its fullest potential, and I love them so, so much.
The first one is quite iconic: Riza’s throat was slit and Roy has a chance to save her - by dooming their country and committing human transmutation. And Roy would do it. He would throw it all away just to save her, even though he knows that human transmutation is an unforgivable sin. But she looks at him and signals him to Not Do It. And he doesn’t. He wants to, but he doesn’t do it. Because only minutes earlier, he hurt her again by dooming himself (and potentially the country) with his fury. And if there is one thing Roy Mustang doesn’t want to do, it’s hurt Riza Hawkeye any more than he already has. Even if that means watching her die. Even if that means letting her go.
He respects her and their goals enough to say no.
He loves her enough to let her die.
The second one is just as heart-wrenching: after Al sacrificed himself, basically dying in the process, Ed tries to think of a way to save him. Both Hohenheim and Ling offer him a Philosopher’s Stone to bring Al back - and Ed says No. Even though he wants nothing more in life than to save his little brother. Even though there is nothing he wants more desperately than the safety of Al. He says no for many reasons - Hohenheim is his father after all, Ling needs the stone to become Emperor - but mostly he says no because he and Al promised to never use a Stone for themselves. And he respects that. He puts Al’s wish above his own desire to see his little brother again. He respects Al’s decision (his own conviction) enough to break the rules of the world to find another way.
Because he loves Al - he loves him enough not to break the fundamentals of their principles. He loves him enough to respect the integrity of their believes.
And the narrative rewards both Roy and Edward for their choice to respect the agency and bodily autonomy of their loved ones - they survive, are saved, are brought back… and neither Ed nor Roy had to force their own desire for them to live on clearly stated last wishes.
So often we see media portray the disregard for bodily autonomy (especially in medical contexts) as a sign of love, the breaking of patient-doctor confidentiality as a sign of care, the violation of a living will as a sign of family - I like to think that Fullmetal Alchemist shows us that there’s strength in respecting it instead.