You know what I think is really cool about language (English in this case)? It’s the way you can express “I don’t know” without opening your mouth. All you have to do is hum a low note, a high note, then another lower note. The same goes for yes and no. Does anyone know what this is called?
These are called vocables, a form of non-lexical utterance – that is, wordlike sounds that aren’t strictly words, have flexible meaning depending on context, and reflect the speakers emotional reaction to the context rather than stating something specific. They also include uh-oh! (that’s not good!), uh-huh and mm-hmm (yes), uhn-uhn (no), huh? (what?), huh… (oh, I see…), hmmn… (I wonder… / maybe…), awww! (that’s cute!), aww… (darn it…), um? (excuse me; that doesn’t seem right?), ugh and guh (expressions of alarm, disgust, or sympathy toward somebody else’s displeasure or distress), etc.
Every natural human language has at least a few vocables in it, and filler words like “um” and “erm” are also part of this overall class of utterances. Technically “vocable” itself refers to a wider category of utterances, but these types of sounds are the ones most frequently being referred to, when the word is used.
Reblog if u just hummed all of these out loud as you read them
“Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s six kids have been in the spotlight for their entire lives (and for their three biological children, since they were literally in their mother’s womb). Maddox was born on August 5, 2001 and adopted by Jolie on March 10, 2002. Zahara was born on January 8, 2005 and adopted by Pitt and Jolie on July 6, 2005. Shiloh, the couple’s first biological child, was born on May 27, 2006. Pax was born on November 29, 2003 and adopted in March 2007. Brangelina’s youngest kids, twins Vivienne and Knox, were born on July 12, 2008.“
I was reading through one of those clickbait articles (this one on MSN and I can’t find an author), but I was struck by the use of language. Instead of addressing Shiloh’ s gender identity at all, they simply used language which avoided gender for any of the kids and I thought that was kinda neat. All the other celebrity kids articles used gendered terms like she, he, daughter, son, etc. Right now it is Shiloh’s business who they are and it was nice to see it presented as a non issue and in a way that didn’t even draw attention to it. The only reason I noticed is that I am aware how much of an issue it was a few years back in the media with all kinds of articles speculating.
i read an article about how straight women using the term girlfriend makes it really difficult for the rest of us and all the comments are straight women complaining and telling us to just ask girls straight up if they’re into women, as if that couldn’t get us killed or the shit beaten out of us, but do go on, straight women, about how hard it is for you to choose your language a little more considerately
and it goes the other way too when you’re trying to make reference to your partner and the other person just assumes you’re talking about a platonic friend. why wouldn’t you just say friend
I mean this post was about women but uh ok sure
So it is difficult to figure our if women are straight and just have friends who are ladies when they use the term girlfriend for their bffs, but also a difficulty when a woman is trying to convey that she has a committed wlw relationship because too many people think she’s just talking about one of her friends. I think the op covered both instances, but the second part was trying to emphasize the latter. In writing ‘girl friend’ should be friend who is a girl and ‘girlfriend’ should be a dating relationship, but as language evolves that seems to have fallen out of favor. Besides, it does nothing to help spoken language. So seriously, straight people, stop unnecessarily specifying the gender of your friends! That will probably be clear in the rest of your sentence, anyway. Leave girlfriend for those of us that have them!
TIL that the word “man” was originally gender neutral and “wer” and “wif” were used to describe males and females respectively. This is where the words like “wife” and “werewolf” are derived from.
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