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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo

    “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” is a grammatically correct sentence in English that is often presented as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated linguistic constructs through lexical ambiguity. It has been discussed in literature in various forms since 1967, when it appeared in Dmitri Borgmann’s Beyond Language: Adventures in Word and Thought. The sentence employs three distinct meanings of the word buffalo:

    • As an attributive noun (acting as an adjective) to refer to a specific place named Buffalo, such as the city of Buffalo, New York;
    • As the verb to buffalo, meaning (in American English[1][2]) “to bully, harass, or intimidate” or “to baffle”; and
    • As a noun to refer to the animal (either the true buffalo or the bison). The plural is also buffalo.

    A semantically equivalent form preserving the original word order is: “Buffalonian bison that other Buffalonian bison bully also bully Buffalonian bison.”


  • Yeah, that’s completely true. It’s up to each person to decide what their standards are and where they draw the line. Like Roman Polanski anally raping a 13 year old and using his money and fame to leave the country and avoid the prison time may be across one person’s line while another person says, “Eh, what can you do? It was almost 50 years ago.” Also true, but that piece of shit is still alive and making money–from people who like his work at least enough to keep consuming it.















  • If the reason you don’t want to speak to an adult for guidance is because there aren’t any you find trustworthy or who know how to communicate effectively with you, I think the best way to learn from your mistakes is to look for the patterns around them. Then, shift your perspective from being the person who made the mistake to being someone on the receiving end of it–walk a mile in someone else’s shoes to understand them better and all that. For me, I found getting to know myself a really important part of this: I had to know what I was like when I felt my best and worst to recognize the things that went wrong before I made a mistake. It took me until adulthood just to recognize that I have a slow-to-warm personality and tend to be inflexible, which means that any unexpected changes really fuck my shit up and can lead to me making mistakes because I feel like I’m scrambling to adapt. Give me an extra minute or three to live with it and I’m fine; don’t give me the extra time, and I’ll probably be nasty towards you even if you don’t deserve it. Recognizing those patterns in my own behavior lets me say, “Hold on, I need a few before I can do what you want” instead of, “Are you fucking kidding me? You’re doing this again?” (which, it turns out, upsets the people who are so ready to demand I do something flawlessly and on their schedule instead of mine, lol).

    Looking for the underlying causes of mistakes is like tracking down clues to solve a mystery. Maybe you missed a throw because your hands were sweaty and the ball was slippery, or maybe you miss a throw because your mind was busy trying to work on a different problem while you were throwing a ball. Maybe an unexpected gust of wind blew the ball in a different direction than you were expecting it to go; mistakes aren’t always because of things that we can control, so it’s important to be fair and kind to yourself when you’re looking for these patterns behind them and recognizing when something isn’t your mistake.

    It’s way too easy to get wrapped up in the idea that making mistakes makes you a failure or a bad person. Nah, they just mean that you’re doing something you’re not used to doing perfectly. Nobody just hops on a bicycle and rides off into the sunset on their first try. It’s a skill that takes practice. There are tons of skills like that that most people don’t think of as needing practice before you get good at them: making friends, being a good friend, creating emotional boundaries, saying no, saying yes, asking for help, washing dishes, fixing a leaky pipe, emotional regulation, apologizing, forgiving, driving… it’s a long list, but you get the idea. Being bad at a skill is a temporary thing, and making mistakes is how you figure out how to improve.