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[Image ID: Tweet from Shen Comix (@/ shenanigansen) on 18 Jan 23 reading: making the moon fucked up is the first step of any good worldbuilding. the moon is normal in your story? just a normal moon? amateur mistake. /End ID]
[Image ID: Tweet from Shen Comix (@/ shenanigansen) on 18 Jan 23 reading: making the moon fucked up is the first step of any good worldbuilding. the moon is normal in your story? just a normal moon? amateur mistake. /End ID]
A large part of housecat vocalisation toward humans isn’t goal-directed communication, but rather, affiliative signaling: a simple call-and-response protocol which establishes that the participants are part of the same social unit. Amongst themselves, most housecat affiliative signaling is non-vocal, but humans aren’t really physiologically equipped to respond to such signalling in a feline fashion, and cats, well, they’re adaptable.
Which is to say that when your cat yells, and you yell back, so the cat yells again, and so forth, what you’re really saying to each other is “hiiiiii~”.
This is why it is important to meow at loved ones.
A largish percentage of human vocalizations are this, too! When your human co-worker says “Workin’ hard or hardly workin’?” or comments on atmospheric conditions or other readily-observable features of your surroundings, or generally statements that seemingly convey no useful or novel information whatsoever, the true purpose of these vocalizations is to develop and/or maintain the social unit of the workplace! In effect, they are saying, “We are experiencing this situation together. We often experience situations together. Let’s be allies!”
Some humans will even make vocalizations of this kind to complete strangers, such as when waiting in a line or using public transportation. This behavior is especially common in situation that may involve some form of inconvenience or frustration, such as waiting in a long line or experiencing a delay. In these contexts, the vocalizations communicate, “We are both experiencing the same unpleasant situation; let’s not make it worse by being aggressive to one another.”
There is a linguistic word for this and it’s called phatic expressions! Here’s what Wikipedia says about them:
In linguistics, a phatic expression (English: /ˈfætɪk/, FAT-ik) is a communication which primarily serves to establish or maintain social relationships. In other words, phatic expressions have mostly socio-pragmatic rather than denotational functions. They can be observed in everyday conversational exchanges,[1] as in, for instance, exchanges of social pleasantries that do not seek or offer information of intrinsic value but rather signal willingness to observe conventional local expectations for politeness.[2]
Phatic communion at first appears to break Grice’s conversational maxims, because it denotationally appears to give information that is unnecessary, untrue, or irrelevant. However, phatic communion plays an important role in language and has important connotational meanings that do not break these maxims[6] and needs to be understood as an important part of language in its role in establishing, maintaining, and managing bonds of sociality between participants,[7] as well as creating feelings of solidarity and familiarity, and putting participants at ease.[8]
Many expressions generally considered to be phatic (see below) may be a genuine request for information in certain contexts. For example, in British English, “How are you?” is a phatic expression used when greeting someone one knows, especially when a participant wants to initiate conversation. However, it can be asked sincerely, and this must be inferred from context, such as when a friend gives bad news, or tone, such falling intonation to show it as a genuine question (as is with w/h-word questions), or speaking more quietly. Authenticity of the question can also be emphasised by the addition of the word “feeling” (“How are you feeling?”).
Also here is a @lingthusiasm episode about phatic expressions for way more examples and a description of how phrases can go from literal to phatic to (sometimes) literal again (“Dear X” in salutations is a good example of this!).
Rick Astley is a valid homestuck kid name
if you had fun it was not a waste of time, having fun is literally one of the best parts of being alive
"Als je plezier had was het geen verspilde tijd, plezier hebben is letterlijk een van de beste componeten van het bestaan."
r/malelivingspace post from etho about his ex-wife moving in with him in his roofless gravel shack. not a complete thought but do you see my vision