Throwback to the time my poor German teacher had to explain the concept of formal and informal pronouns to a class full of Australians and everyone was scandalised and loudly complained “why can’t I treat everyone the same?” “I don’t want to be a Sie!” “but being friendly is respectful!” “wouldn’t using ‘du’ just show I like them?” until one guy conceded “I suppose maybe I’d use Sie with someone like the prime minister, if he weren’t such a cunt” and my teacher ended up with her head in her hands saying “you are all banned from using du until I can trust you”
God help Japanese teachers in Australia.
if this isnt an accurate representation of australia idk what is
Australia’s reverse-formality respect culture is fascinating. We don’t even really think about it until we try to communicate or learn about another culture and the rules that are pretty standard for most of the world just feel so wrong. I went to America this one time and I kept automatically thinking that strangers using ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am’ were sassing me.
Australians could not be trusted with a language with ingrained tiers of formal address. The most formal forms would immediately become synonyms for ‘go fuck yourself’ and if you weren’t using the most informal version possible within three sentences of meeting someone they’d take it to mean you hated them.
100% true.
the difference between “‘scuse me” and “excuse me” is a fistfight
See also: the Australian habit of insulting people by way of showing affection, which other English-speakers also do, but not in a context where deescalating the spoken invective actively increases the degree of offence intended, particularly if you’ve just been affectionately-insulting with someone else.
By which I mean: if you’ve just called your best mate an absolute dickhead, you can’t then call a hated politician something that’s (technically) worse, like a total fuckwit, because that would imply either that you were really insulting your mate or that you like the politician. Instead, you have to use a milder epithet, like bastard, to convey your seething hatred for the second person. But if your opening conversational gambit is slagging someone off, then it’s acceptable to go big (”The PM’s a total cockstain!”) at the outset.
Also note that different modifiers radically change the meaning of particular insults. Case in point: calling someone a fuckin’ cunt is a deadly insult, calling someone a mad cunt is a compliment, and calling someone a fuckin’ mad cunt means you’re literally in awe of them. Because STRAYA.
case in point: the ‘Howard DJs like a mad cunt’ meme.
ALSO I’M SORRY IF I KEEP TAGGING YOU IN AUSTRAILIAN RELATED SHIT
BUT YOU”RE THE ONLY AUSTRAILIAN I KNOW
AND I MUST VERIFY
It’s all true, believe me. I reckon it has something to do with being geographically isolated and having a massive convict background during colonisation. Then you have huge immigration influxes from all over the world, and the fact that we like to shorten names into things like “Dazza”, “Maccas”, and “Shaz.”
Also, when they shout “Fang It!” in Mad Max Fury Road, that is a thing that is regularly shouted in the suburbs.
I don’t know why we evolved our language like this.
I’d wager a portion of it comes from the social structure originally applied to the country. Because so much of the population were convicts, the society built up around the notion of fighting authority or at least resisting it in some fashion. A lot of people came from poverty, obviously (because why the hell else would you be in prison for stealing bread?), lacked formal education and were illiterate. There was a tie-in with the influx of rural people in Britain looking for work if I remember correctly, which fed this problem of overcrowding in prisons in the first place. The point is that a large chunk of the prison population were poor, disenfranchised, from a certain geographical area or social group disproportionately affected by law enforcement.
For awhile (in the 1800′s there around) people from other countries joked you could tell if a person was Australian because of how they walked (the iron ball and chain).
And most of Australia’s current terminologies for homesteads and things were built around military or police terminology (that’s why we have stations, homesteads etc. instead of farms or ranches, whatever). Slang that was common to local dialects or communities (cockney for example) stuck around, presumably because a fair few of these people were poor and ran afoul of the law. So already just at Australia’s founding you have a culture that hates people in power. And my guess is that fed an attitude of disdain for authority in any form and a camaraderie towards those in the same boat as you. Social structures (and later political structures) reformed to favour or support the people fucked over by the system.
Which leads to the idea if you’re one of us, you’re a mate and we can slag you but we’ll act very nice to you if you’re in power but we all know how we really think of you.
I never knew any of this?
If I had ever gone to Australia before reading this I would have probably ended up insulting everyone I met … might still, because ‘excuse me, ma’am’ or ‘excuse me, sir’ is just ingrained in how I learned to speak english.
And I thought english people were crazy for having you in the singular person and you in the plural person…
(You in the plural person is Voi in Italian, which is a deferential way of referring to someone, possibly stronger than the ‘Lei’ [which no, has no relation to the female she (though that is *also* called lei), but is a specific form of respectful address] and definitely league above (as far as formality goes) about the ‘tu’ which is the singolar person you equivalent and is considered informal and colloquial.
This is 100% accurate for Aussie. New Zealand is slightly less so, but it does still sorta apply.
“If autism isn’t caused by environmental factors and is natural why didn’t we ever see it in the past?”
We did, except it wasn’t called autism it was called “Little Jonathan is a r*tarded halfwit who bangs his head on things and can’t speak so we’re taking him into the middle of the cold dark forest and leaving him there to die.”
Or “little Jonathan doesn’t talk but does a good job herding the sheep, contributes to the community in his own way, and is, all around, a decent guy.” That happened a lot, too, especially before the 19th century.
Or, backing up FURTHER
and lots of people think this very likely,
“Oh little Sionnat has obviously been taken by the fairies and they’ve left us a Changeling Child who knows too much, and asks strange questions, and uses words she shouldn’t know, and watches everything with her big dark eyes, clearly a Fairy Child and not a Human Like Us.”
The Myth of the Changeling child, a human baby apparently replaced at a young age by a toddler who “suddenly” acts “strange and fey” is an almost textbook depiction of autistic children.
To this day, “autism warrior mommies” talk about autism “stealing” their “sweet normal child” and have this idea of “getting their real baby back” which (in the face of modern science) indicates how the human psyche actually does deal with finding out their kid acts unlike what they expected.
Given this evidence, and how common we now know autism actually is, the Changeling myth is almost definitely the result of people’s confusion at the development of autistic children.
Weirdly enough, that legend is now comforting to me.
I think it’s worth noting that many like me, who are diagnosed with ASD now, would probably have been seen as just a bit odd in centuries past. I’m only a little bit autistic; I can pass for neurotypical for short periods if I work really hard at it. I have a lack of talent in social situations, and I’m prone to sensory overload or you might notice me stimming.
But here’s the thing: life is louder, brighter and more intense and confusing than it has ever been. I live on the edge of London and I rarely go into the centre of town because it’s too overwhelming. If I went back in time and lived on a farm somewhere, would anyone even notice there was anything odd about me? No police sirens, no crowded streets that go on for miles and miles, no flickery electric lights. Working on a farm has a clear routine. I’d be a badass at spinning cloth or churning butter because I find endless repetition soothing rather than boring.
I’m not trying to romanticise the past because I know it was hard, dirty work with a constant risk of premature death. I don’t actually want to be a 16th century farmer! What I’m saying is that disability exists in the context of the environment. Our environment isn’t making people autistic in the sense of some chemical causing brain damage. But we have created a modern environment which is hostile to autistic people in many ways, which effectively makes us more disabled. When you make people more disabled, you start to see more people struggling, failing at school because they’re overwhelmed, freaking out at the sound of electric hand dryers and so on. And suddenly it looks like there’s millions more autistic people than existed before.
Armistice Day is commemorated every year on November 11 to mark the armistice signed between the Allies of World War I and Germany at Compiègne, France, for the cessation of hostilities on the Western Front of World War I, which took effect at eleven o’clock in the morning — the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” of 1918. The date was declared a national holiday in many allied nations, and coincides with Remembrance Day and Veterans Day.
Imagine how much historical knowledge wasn’t written down because our ancestors thought: “What idiot isn’t going to know this?”
So ancient Egypt’s best friend basically was called Punt. They traded all kinds of fun stuff with them; ebony, incense, gold, silver, myrrh, leopard skins, baboons for pets… and the Egyptians wrote a lot about the land, the people living there, what their houses looked like, records of trading expeditions to there (like, robust, oceangoing ships with thousands of men); they wrote down everything imaginable about this place… except for where it actually was.
We still to this day have no geographic fix on this ancient empire’s whereabouts, because what idiot wouldn’t know, right?
Until the 1850s British condiment sets came with bottles for oil and vinegar, and three spice containers for salt, pepper and…nobody knows. Potentially mustard, but it’s just a guess because no one ever wrote it down.
And this is why historians love, really love, those incredibly dull people who write in their diary every day about what they wore and what they had for dinner and how many miles away their friend Mr So-And-So’s house is in that one village. Because they are the only ones who *do* write down what was in the third spice jar, how many miles away this now-nonexistent village was and so on. Seriously, the diaries of really dull people are HISTORICAL TREASURES OF OTHERWISE LOST MINUTIAE.
Somewhere out there there is almost certainly a diary that would expose the true contents of that third spice jar because of the one time it was low and this person had to have a quiet word with the butler or something and it was the most interesting thing that happened all week so they wrote it down. And I hope that diary is found someday because now I really want to know.
The third spice jar thing has massively bothered me since reading Bill Bryson’s At Home.
A local one that gets me is why the nickname of Charlton FC is the Addicks and no one knows why. The club was only founded in 1905! How can knowledge get lost so quickly??
Bertha Boronda (from the first San Quentin photo set I posted) was sentenced to five years in prison for “Mayhem” in 1908.
What’s “Mayhem” you ask? Apparently in Bertha’s case, it’s cutting off your cheating husband’s penis with a straight razor, disguising yourself as a man and fleeing by bicycle.
Old English just has some wonderful words and kennings. I mean, really:
Their word for sea? It was often swan-rad or “road of the swan.” Spider was gangelwaefre, literally “the walking weaver.” They had the simple and now-obsolete word uht, which describes that time just before sunrise when mist still hangs heavy over all the fields and lakes and the last few stars are still out.
…Also, they didn’t say body. They said ban-cofan, which means “bone-cave,” and if you don’t think that’s some hardcore shit right there then you need to get out of my face before I turn your skull into a mead-cup.
In the commentary on his translation of Beowulf, Tolkien argues that translating ‘rád’ as ‘road’ in the context of kennings for the sea is incorrect. On the subject of ‘hronrád’, which is often translated as ‘whale-road’, he says: “rád is the ancestor of our modern word ‘road’, but it does not mean ‘road’. Etymology is not a safe guide to sense. rád is the noun of action to rídan ‘ride’ and means riding – i.e. ‘riding on horseback; moving as a horse does (or a chariot), or as a ship does at anchor’; and hence ‘a journey in horseback’ (or more seldom by ship), ‘a course (however vagrant)’. It does not mean the actual ‘track’ – still less the hard paved permanent and more or less straight tracks that we associate with the ‘road’…The word as ‘kenning’ therefore means dolphin’s riding, i.e. in full, the watery fields where you can see dolphins and lesser members of the whale-tribe playing, or seeming to gallop like a line of riders on the plains. That is the picture and comparison the kenning was meant to evoke. It is not evoked by ‘whale road’ – which suggests a sort of semi-submarine steam-engine running along submerged metal rails over the Atlantic.”
Steel Phoenix Studios 