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digivolvin:

so earlier i remembered how during one philosophy class, my professor asked us all to consider what we would do if we could be invisible for a day, because (as she would reveal to us later) she wanted to prove a point about observed accountability and situational morality. we all wrote down our answers, submitted them anonymously, and the prof read them back to us. about 95% of them were like “prank people”, “rob a bank”, “get in places for free”, “scare my best friend”, “spy on someone”, “sneak into closed off areas”, etc.

prof. read them all aloud so she could demonstrate how virtually everybody chose something they couldn’t morally or socially get away with if they were witnessed, and she was looking awfully entertained about how quickly the class proved her point until she got to one that just said “go swimming in the ocean.” 

she stopped, read it again, and after a short period of confused silence a girl piped up very earnestly from the class “because the sharks wouldn’t be able to see me.” 

sparxflame:

hugealienpie:

thechubbynerd:

just-shower-thoughts:

Contractions function almost identically to the full two-word phrase, but are only appropriate in some places in a sentence. It’s one of the weird quirks of this language we’ve.

This post needs some kind of warning sign.

I did not see that coming.

linguist here!! it’s less that contractions are only appropriate in some places in a sentence, and more that they’re only appropriate with some types of verb – mainly auxiliary verbs.

for example: “i have seen the dog” -> “i’ve seen the dog” is perfectly acceptable, because in this instance, the “have” is acting as an auxiliary verb. what it’s doing is taking the main verb, “see(n)”, and putting it in the past tense (along with some other tense stuff). it doesn’t mean “have” in the traditional sense of something like “to own”. you don’t own or have the dog, and you certainly don’t own the seeing of the dog, whatever that might mean – but you did see the dog, in the past. the “have” basically just modifies the meaning of “see(n)”. so, auxiliary “have” is contractible.

however, “there’s a dog i have sometimes” -> “there’s a dog i’ve sometimes” is unacceptable, because in this sentence the “have” is not functioning as an auxiliary verb that’s modifying another verb. there’s no other verb for it to modify! (yes, the “is” in “there’s” is something commonly considered a verb, but it’s not, especially in this particular cirumstance. just trust me on this one.) in this instance, the “have” is the main verb – and therefore actually an entirely different verb altogether. in the same way “flour” and “flower” sound the same, these two “have”s sound the same and are spelled the same, but mean different things and come from entirely different classes of word. you might not know this consciously, but as a native / fluent speaker, you still know it.

can you hear how, when you say “there’s a dog i’ve sometimes”, you’re waiting for something at the end? your brain expects there to be something else – another verb. “the dog i’ve sometimes what? sometimes hugged? sometimes played with?” you instinctively know that, for “have” to be used in the “-‘ve” contraction, it has to be an auxiliary verb – and therefore there should be a main verb following it, because auxiliaries need a main verb to modify.

this is why the contraction in just-shower-thoughts’ example sounds wrong – in their example, the have is the main verb, because there’s no other verb for it to modify. so, again, you get this strange feeling of the sentence being incomplete. your brain is waiting for a main verb to appear for the auxiliary to modify.

tl;dr: it’s not where in the sentence a “have” occurs that defines whether you can contract it, but what kind of a “have” it is. only auxiliary “have”s can be contracted.

(in some circumstances, you can seem to use main verb “have” in a contraction – “i have a dog and three horses” -> “i’ve a dog and three horses” is acceptable to some people, though it does have a definite non-standard, almost archaic feel to it. i suspect what’s happening here is that when you say this, you’re actually saying “i have got a dog and three horses” -> “i’ve got a dog and three horses”, in which case the “have” is still an auxiliary modifying a silent “got”, instead of being the main verb, so it still works!)

flowerprincessburd:

So I live right outside a PokeStop.

‘Ha, that’s pretty cool!’ I thought when I first installed Pokémon Go. I walked out my door and got myself 15 poke balls. Nice. Right?

The game hadn’t quite taken off just yet. I didn’t yet understand what this would mean. I didn’t realise what this would cause.

For three years I have lived here now. In this beautiful blissful city suburb … And for three years, no one would randomly try talking to me (except for that one guy. Ning. Who always seems to forget I’ve rejected him several times now). No small talk, no comments about the weather. This isn’t a rural town. Nobody knows anybody. No one talks to anyone.

But now I live outside a PokeStop.

Now people keep trying to talk to me.

‘You playing Pokémon?’ they smile.

They hang out in groups; they cruise past in their cars. They linger.

I live outside a PokeStop and it is an introvert’s hell.

It’s midnight. It’s bin night.

It’s safe now to go out, I thought. There wont be any Pokémon trainers around now, I thought.

In and out. Just take out the bin. It’ll be fine. It’ll be fine.

They were there, waiting, playing!

‘There is a Meowth in this area somewhere, you know!’

I skitter back inside. No. No, I don’t know.

But I live outside a PokeStop. Now everyone will make sure I know.

Pokémon, please go!