so my friend is studying abroad in germany this semester
My mom is German and told me what the fuck these were actually trying to mean.
“You can me once” is supposed to mean “you can kiss my ass ONCE ” As in like,, you can be a suck up once.
“What must, THAT MUST” is supposed to be “it is what it is”
“Now butter by the fishes is a German saying that is more like ” can I have some butter with the fish?“ Which basically means ” get to he point of the story. “
These are somehow just as confusing as the coasters
I don’t wanna shit on someone’s mother, but the actual correct explanations should make more sense.
“You Can Me Once”: “Du kannst mich mal (am Arsch lecken).” This is the equivalent to “kiss my ass”. “Mal” which was googled into ‘once’ here is just a filler word used to complete the half-sentence, it does not actually mean anything. Just like “kiss my ass” is ironically not about asskissing but about telling someone to fuck off, fuck you, so is “Du kannst mich mal.”
“What must that must”: “Was muss das muss”. Not completely wrong up there, but more precisely, it’s “you gotta do what you gotta do”. Often muttered as a politely vague reply to someone you randomly meet asking “how’s life” when life’s shit or you’re running an unpleasant errant/on a doctor’s visit etc.
“Now butter by the fishes”: “Butter bei die Fische” (which btw is not standard German grammar but that’s exactly how we say it, I’m honestly not sure why… may have its root in a dialect or other Germanic language). Correct translation here, it means to get to the point, get real for a second. Explanation? By the time you plop a piece of butter on a grilled or baked fish, it’s ready to eat, aka you ‘got to the point of the meal’.
Hope this makes more sense now!
How fun. Some British Gas guy just came to the door. There’s apparently a leak somewhere, with a smell around the junction box across the corner from us. He asked about our meter, and I said it was under the stairs but hard to get to right now.
Hoping he won’t need to come back and try to look at it, because I am going to be very very sorry if I try to move Mr. C’s clutter out of the way. And of course he’s still not home to do it himself 😈
I’m not at all happy about that situation anyway. Not much I can do about it right now, though. Worrying and guilting myself more over getting too disabled to deal with all of the freaking mess myself sure won’t help anything.
At my last company, one day someone in accounting approached me at lunch and quietly told me I need to ask for a raise because I was way underpaid.
They gave me a number to shoot for. It was about twice than what I had been making at the time.
So I went online, did some research, found some figures backing up my claim, put it all together and went to my boss.
I got what I asked for.
If it hadn’t been for that person in accounting telling me I was way underpaid, I’d have never known. I went from barely scraping by to being able to have a savings account and getting all my debts paid thanks to them.
You should at least check sites like salary.com to start the process of seeing what you should be making.
Because this is crucially important
Except for the fact that 90% of the time you are under contract not to talk about your salary otherwise the company can sue you. Every job I’ve had I’ve had to sign that I won’t discuss my pay with other employees otherwise my employment is terminated and the company will take legal action.
people understand that Spanish speakers speak different dialects of the Spanish language but don’t understand that black people speak a dialect of the English language
saw a variation of this conversation on twitter earlier
I just want to state for the record that this is completely uncontroversial among linguists. It’s the first day of sociolinguistics class.
I majored in Communication Disorders to become an Speech Language Pathologist and am currently and Assisstant. When we were in class we were taught about this as well as other dialect. Under no circumstances do you treat a client for what is considered a dialect. So as a speech therapist when I hear AAVE I move on. It is a real language with real rules.
Thats why it was outrage in the speech community post Katrina when teachers began to recommend students for speech, when it was simply the New Orleans dialect.
I got that as a kid, in the early ‘80s, until my mother found out the school’s speech therapist had taken it on herself to “fix” my dialect. Put more effort into that than the actual reason I was referred.
In that particular case, it was also the equivalent of moving to New Orleans, and trying to justify “fixing” people’s accents because (*gasp*) the child sounds like they’re from New Orleans. 😩
Anyway, that couldn’t be a pleasant experience for anybody. And I really do hope the inappropriate nature of that approach is being stressed more in education for professionals.
friends don’t let friends succumb to peer pressure
Like everyone growing up, I was vaguely warned about peer pressure. But what I expected was a bunch of friends standing around in a circle chanting “do it! do it!”. What I got was just vague looks of disappointment and people assuming I didn’t want an invitation next time, which was far harder to push back against
“resist peer pressure!” sounds so much more compelling than “disappoint your friends”, or “be a lame dork”, or “listen to your parents instead of that hot guy you like”.
People always tell you that standing up for yourself is a good thing, but they never mean that you should stand up to them.
Trump has not just shat on the table after a good Feed at Blenheim Palace…. Polite reminder.
Polite reminder. Trump & Brexit are not 2 different things. They are the same thing. Same companies. Same data. Same Facebook. Same Russians. Same Cambridge Analytica. Same Robert Mercer. Same Steve Bannon. Same Breitbart. Same Alexander Nix. Same Donald Trump. Same Nigel Farage.
“[Benjamin Lay] first began advocating for the abolition of slavery when, in Barbados, he saw an enslaved man commit suicide rather than be hit again by his owner. His passionate enmity of slavery was partially fueled by his Quaker beliefs. Lay made several dramatic demonstrations against the practice. He once stood outside a Quaker meeting in winter with no coat and at least one foot bare and in the snow. When passersby expressed concern for his health, he said that slaves were made to work outdoors in winter dressed as he was. On another occasion, he kidnapped the child of slaveholders temporarily, to show them how Africans felt when their relatives were sold overseas. The most notable act occurred in Burlington, New Jersey, at the 1738 Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Quakers. Dressed as a soldier, he concluded a diatribe against slavery, quoting the Bible saying that all men should be equal under God, by plunging a sword into a Bible containing a bladder of blood-red pokeberry juice, which spattered over those nearby.“
hell yes
“On another occasion, he kidnapped the child of slaveholders temporarily, to show them how Africans felt when their relatives were sold overseas.”
direct action
broke: complain about slavery
woke: kidnap people into slavery as object lesson that slavery is bad
I think it’s important to remember white abolitionists because they serve as proof that slavery was as reprehensible then as it is today. A lot of people excuse slavers as “products of their time” and saying that things were “different back then”. People like Benjamin Lay show that the atrocities of slavery were just as obviously morally repugnant even to white men with no personal stake in enslavement then as they are now. If Mr. Lay can sympathize with the oppressed then Mr. Jefferson has no excuses.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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