Kokopelli River by gerace, “Kokopelli, the Flute Player, is a Native American symbol of fertility, dance, and mischief. Legends say his spirit protects this meadow stream.
finding it necessary to remind everyone that it’s seasonal. i promise you it’s seasonal. everyone i know is out of their minds right now in some way or another. it’s seasonal.
I am a 27 year old electrical engineer who works in a little secret lab in the middle of buttfuck Egypt. For one two month period, the office supply order changed from normal erasers to these, and I will not lie - every time I thought I was alone, I would sneak one out of my desk and eat it. They looked delicious. Tasted mid, but the appearance was so stunning that my brain just kept thinking, surely, the rest were a fluke, but THIS TIME it will taste like fruit and sugar.
Anyway, eventually the order stopped, and I was very worried that somehow, they’d found out that I was eating their erasers. So I kind of casually brought it up to my manager that I was sad that they swapped the erasers out, and he was like “yeah, but I kept eating them so they couldn’t stay.”
is “chai” a TYPE of tea??! bc in Hindi/Urdu, the word chai just means tea
its like spicy cinnamon tea instead of bland gross black tea
I think the chai that me and all other Muslims that I know drink is just black tea
i mean i always thought chai was just another word for tea?? in russian chai is tea
why don’t white people just say tea
do they mean it’s that spicy cinnamon tea
why don’t they just call it “spicy cinnamon tea”
the spicy cinnamon one is actually masala chai specifically so like
there’s literally no reason to just say chai or chai
They don’t know better. To them “chai tea” IS that specific kind of like, creamy cinnamony tea. They think “chai” is an adjective describing “tea”.
What English sometimes does when it encounters words in other languages that it already has a word for is to use that word to refer to a specific type of that thing. It’s like distinguishing between what English speakers consider the prototype of the word in English from what we consider non-prototypical.
(Sidenote: prototype theory means that people think of the most prototypical instances of a thing before they think of weirder types. For example: list four kinds of birds to yourself right now. You probably started with local songbirds, which for me is robins, blue birds, cardinals, starlings. If I had you list three more, you might say pigeons or eagles or falcons. It would probably take you a while to get to penguins and emus and ducks, even though those are all birds too. A duck or a penguin, however, is not a prototypical bird.)
“Chai” means tea in Hindi-Urdu, but “chai tea” in English means “tea prepared like masala chai” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish “the kind of tea we make here” from “the kind of tea they make somewhere else”.
“Naan” may mean bread, but “naan bread” means specifically “bread prepared like this” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish between “bread made how we make it” and “bread how other people make it”.
We also sometimes say “liege lord” when talking about feudal homage, even though “liege” is just “lord” in French, or “flower blossom” to describe the part of the flower that opens, even though when “flower” was borrowed from French it meant the same thing as blossom.
We also do this with place names: “brea” means tar in Spanish, but when we came across a place where Spanish-speakers were like “there’s tar here”, we took that and said “Okay, here’s the La Brea tar pits”.
Or “Sahara”. Sahara already meant “giant desert,” but we call it the Sahara desert to distinguish it from other giant deserts, like the Gobi desert (Gobi also means desert btw).
Languages tend to use a lot of repetition to make sure that things are clear. English says “John walks”, and the -s on walks means “one person is doing this” even though we know “John” is one person. Spanish puts tense markers on every instance of a verb in a sentence, even when it’s abundantly clear that they all have the same tense (”ayer [yo] caminé por el parque y jugué tenis” even though “ayer” means yesterday and “yo” means I and the -é means “I in the past”). English apparently also likes to use semantic repetition, so that people know that “chai” is a type of tea and “naan” is a type of bread and “Sahara” is a desert. (I could also totally see someone labeling something, for instance, pan dulce sweetbread, even though “pan dulce” means “sweet bread”.)
Also, specifically with the chai/tea thing, many languages either use the Malay root and end up with a word that sounds like “tea” (like té in Spanish), or they use the Mandarin root and end up with a word that sounds like “chai” (like cha in Portuguese).
Thank you @startedwellthatsentence. And English is NOT the only language to do this, either. Spanish words like Alhambra, alcalde, albóndiga, alcohol, etc. all take el or la in the definite, but you know what? All these words come from Arabic where the al means “the”. So if you say el alcalde, you’re saying “the the mayor”—etymologically, anyway. But it doesn’t matter, because alcalde is the Spanish word now that has a specific meaning used in Spanish. Same thing with “chai” in English—or “sushi” or “burrito” or “salsa”. Seriously, in Spanish, salsa means “sauce”, so saying “salsa sauce” in English is redundant. But listen. That’s what happens when languages borrow words. A language doesn’t get to decide to take a word back if a language has borrowed it incorrectly. It just happens. And after a while, the “borrowing” isn’t a borrowing anymore: It’s now a word. And the language of origin can’t change the meaning any more than we can change the modern meaning of Japanese サラリーマン (from English “salary man”). It’s their word now.
With tea specifically, there is some fun historical linguistics going on: Almost every language that has a word for this beverage, that word is borrowed ultimately from Chinese 茶, which makes sense, right? The tea plant was first cultivated in China and the drink spread along trade routes, and the name went along with it. But how do you say 茶? If you speak Mandarin, Cantonese, or several other Chineses, you say something like chá, but if you speak Min Nan (or, again, several others) you say something like te.
So, if the traders that brought tea to your part of the world got it ultimately from speakers of Mandarin or Cantonese, you call it something like chá, but if they got it from speakers of Min Nan you call it something like te. And, because Min Nan is mostly spoken in Fujian province, right on the coast, to first order this corresponds to whether your traders left China by land (along the Silk Road) or by sea.
The only exceptions to “almost every language” are places outside China but within the natural range of the tea plant: for example, in the Myanmar language (aka Burmese) tea leaves are lakphak (my source for this is unclear whether that word or a related word is used for the beverage).
growing up as a boy is like: you are not allowed to be effeminate. you are not allowed to be a faggot. if you are effeminate you will get called a homo or a sissy boy and your peers will reject you. they may not know why they are rejecting you but they will keep you at arms length.
you will try to be a man, try to cut your hair short and grow out your beard, but you cannot hide it. you are a faggot with a beard.
you will be aware of your hands, of how you hold them, how you are holding them wrong, and how you need a manlier posture. you will paint your nails and be told you’re vain. you will remove the nail polish and cover your fingers in clear varnish, so that you can have a secret. so no one will know what you want.
you will wear a skirt or a wig as a joke, to make fun of those men who have truly failed, who are trying to pass themselves off as women, and thank god you are not like those wastrels, and as you laugh you will feel hollow inside.
you will wonder how other men do it.
is it as hard for them as it is for you? can they drive to work without feeling in the marrow of their bones that they are not meant to be in this body? do they look up the wikipedia page for estradiol late at night, while their wives are asleep, and wonder what life could be like? what rewriting your skin would feel like?
you do not know how much hurt you can bear before you will be willing to renegotiate every single relationship you have ever made in your life.
you will renegotiate every single relationship you have ever made in your life.
you will wonder how you ever believed you were a boy. you know the answer–that you were never taught that you could be anything else, that realizing you could be anything else was like crawling up through six feet of dirt with bloody nails and lungs full of earth–but you will never know the answer.
the worst thing a man can be is a woman. you are the worst thing you can be and it is the best thing you have ever done.
another volunteer at the cat shelter was telling me that the trick to socializing feral kittens is not to look at them because “if you don’t show them your eyes they don’t feel threatened” and i couldn’t help but think of angels interacting with humans in the same way
angel, holding a squirming human in one bleeding, ichor soaked hand: your divine creation fucking bit me
