Tag: replies

 copperfire replied to your post:
I’ve spent the past hour trying to wrap my head…

I say them differently and my roommate used to love asking me to do so at parties to hear everyone else go ‘woah, weird’ and then start repeating the two words over and over. (Not sure if this is a helpful comparison, but I pronounce ‘caught’ like ‘court’ and ‘cot’ to rhyme with ‘got’.) (Language and pronunciation is so fascinating!)

oh my GOD I’ve been trying that and now I sound like I’m doing an absurd over-acted NYC accent lmao 

kylo-zen replied to your post: I’ve spent the past hour trying to wrap my head…

Great, now *I’m* mumbling caught/cot out loud.

join the club, all three of the people in my house are now doing this

omgimsuchadork replied to your post: I’ve spent the past hour trying to wrap my head…

I don’t have the merger! The vowel sounds are different. “Cot” is between “ah” and “eh”; “caught” is “aw.” … And my New York accent shines on “aw” sounds.

haha I figured that was why you disagreed with the other post, you new yorker you. I do love that new york/new jersey vowel inflection

aceoofhearts replied to your post: I’ve spent the past hour trying to wrap my head…

I have a friend whose second language is English and until I was able to tell them in person they couldn’t understand how the name “Alec” and the word “phallic” could rhyme

oh my god I hope this person was not themselves named Alec. 

WOW I WANNA FIGHT YOUR BAD FARM NEIGHBORS

I wanted to fight them for most of my childhood, tbh. I have so many bad animal husbandry stories involving that specific farm. 😦

….BUT ON THE BRIGHT SIDE it may be better now? they had a big barn fire (farm equipment storage barn, not livestock, fortunately) a few years ago, and after some fb stalking it seems like their daughter who was a few years ahead of me in school has taken over the farm. she made it a twee little hipstery facebook page, complete with pics of the sheep actually grazing in the actual field, and the goats having photo ops in nice green grass interacting with adorable children, so I think things may be looking up now that her shitty parents seem to have retired!

phasersonstun replied to your post: ohhhhh god now I am just VIBRATING with…

I love grackles! Such funny faces! Not so fond of bluebirds though, I think they’re kind of jerks

Aren’t they delightful?? And they’re one of those birds who can recognize and differentiate between individual humans, too. 

…I know this from personal experience, because 9-year-old mica thought it would be a GREAT idea to emulate Gerald Durrell’s childhood and steal a hatchling grackle from the nest and lovingly raise it as my own. 

I climbed a tree in the middle of the colony, surrounded on all sides by parents shrieking bloody murder and dive-bombing me, selected a nearly-fledged chick, tucked it into the pocket of my sweatshirt, and climbed down to set him up in his new home on the porch (a big old bird cage found in the attic of the barn). This lasted until my mother got home and discovered my plan, at which point she told me in no uncertain terms that we do NOT kidnap wildlife, that it would NOT be good for him to live in the house, and that I was going straight back up that tree this instant and putting the chick back where I found him or else. I did so reluctantly, my dreams of a pet grackle foiled, and replaced the chick in the nest where I had found him (again, to a chorus of all the adults shrieking at the top of their little birdy lungs about chick thieves). 

But for the entire rest of the summer, every time I stepped out the door, the whole colony would go off again, screaming the alarm. They didn’t do it to my parents, they didn’t do it to other kids who came over, and they knew it was me even when I had my distinctively colored (red) hair covered by a cap. I was a confirmed dirty lowlife kidnapper, and by god they were going to tell the world.