herstarlight:

cutlerish:

The word “laser” is actually an acronym: Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.

By the logic of always using the pronunciation of the member letters as they are in the root words, then “laser” should be pronounced lah-seer.

We don’t pronounce it that way. For two reasons. First, the people who invented the term pronounced it lay-zer, and, second, it sounds dumb.

we don’t pronounce it that way for the same reason that we can tell a difference btwn “raped” and “rapped”

which, again, is why I choose to pronounce “gif” like “gift” but without the T

Those aren’t acronyms though! But that’s a great example for why you shouldn’t remove letters from words to explain other words’ pronunciation. I mean, explaining to someone how you’re pronouncing it in this easy way is alright, but if you say that “gif” is pronounced like “gift” without the last letter, then you could justify mispronouncing “rap” basing on “rape” the same way (although there’s an E involved and that is kind of a different case, but, still. that’s dangerous)

But I don’t think people who invented the name LASER chose this pronunciation. This is the natural pronunciation you want to go for when you see that word, especially when it’s lower case. It’s so popular and widely used that people have forgotten that it’s actually an acronym and not just a word. Which btw is kind of amazing ‘cause wow lasers!

And pronouncing “gif” with a hard G (BTW the name of the letter is pronounced with a soft G NOW HOW CRAZY IS THAT RIGHT? HAHA OH NO THE LETTER ITSELF IS PRONOUNCED INCORRECTLY) is intuitive, definitely. I used to pronounce it like that. Just like I used to pronounce JPG as…uhh if you’re curious, go to google translate, choose Polish, write jpg and listen to that. That’s how. If I’d needed it in English, I would have gone for “jay pee gee”. Also “pee en gee”. Until I discovered that, holy shit, they’re universally, casually, like it’s no big deal, pronounced “jay peg” and “ping”. Fucking. How. Now THAT doesn’t make any sense.

And when I learnt about this weird pronunciation of GIF that its inventors wanted, I was like “lol no way am I doing that haha” and then without realising it, against myself, started using it, because hard G started feeling wrong. God, I’m weird when it comes to grammar and stuff.

But uhh I wandered off when what I wanted to say is all that, HOWEVER
I totally agree with the argument that laser would be pronounced something like lahsser and just…like

There are arguments in favour of pronouncing GIF with a hard G. But don’t bring the word “graphics” into this. It’s an acronym, and heeyyyy it’s not THAT rare that when you say an acronym, some letters are different sounds than the original word.

But I don’t agree with the reasons, 1. I don’t know how they pronounced it, it’s the first thing that pops into your mind and that is a pro-hard-G argument so why are you using it, and 2. no it doesn’t sound dumb that’s how I pronounce it when I’m speaking my language because that’s how we normally pronounce those letters and I can assure you it sounds fine

we pronounce it as layzer because 1. we’re speaking English 2. it’s an acronym and it’s supposed to be pronounced like a word 3. that’s how it would be pronounced if it were a word, which it’s become anyway
(and for the same reasons, apart from the first one, it might be pronounced differently in different languages, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that some people weren’t even considering hard/soft G for GIF but something completely different)completely different)

sursonica:

inflammatorystatements:

Woman Time Lords can control the way they will look when they regenerate, while male Time Lords cannot. This was established in Classic Who, when Romana regenerated.

Also, the Doctor wanting to be Ginger is not about the hair color. In Gallifrey, the only ones to have red hair were the people called Heroes which were beings who were time-sentient (meaning they could see all of the time at the same time). So I doubt they will ever make him ginger.

Wait so how was the Corsair both a man and a woman in his/her timeline
plus why then does the Doctor keep complaining he’s not ginger if he knows that

god damnit too much canon to stay consistent or?

(via that-is-illogical)

literaryreference:

You know how it is, right, ladies? You know a guy for a while. You hang out with him. You do fun things with him—play video games, watch movies, go hiking, go to concerts. You invite him to your parties. You listen to his problems. You do all this because you think he wants to be your friend.

But then, then comes the fateful moment where you find out that all this time, he’s only seen you as a potential girlfriend. And then if you turn him down, he may never speak to you again. This has happened to me time after time: I hit it off with a guy, and, for all that I’ve been burned in the past, I start to think that this one might actually care about me as a person. And then he asks me on a date.

I tell him how much I enjoy his company, how much I value his friendship. I tell him that I really want to be his friend and to continue hanging out with him and talking about our favorite books or exploring new restaurants or making fun of avant-garde theatre productions. But he rejects me. He doesn’t answer my calls or e-mails; if we’d been making plans to do something before this fateful incident, these plans mysteriously fail to materialize. (This is why I never did get around to seeing the Hunger Games movie. Not to name any names, but thanks a lot, Tom.) Later, when I run into him at social events, our conversations are awkward and lukewarm. This is because the moment we met, he put me in the girlfriend-zone, and now he can’t see me as friend material.

I must say that I find this really unfair. I mean, I’m a nice girl. I have a lot to offer as a friend, like not being a douchebag and stuff. But males just don’t want to be friends with nice girls like me. They can’t help it, I guess; it’s just how they’re wired, biologically. Evolution conditioned our male hominid ancestors to seek nice girls as mates and form friendship bonds only with the other dudes that they hunted mammoths with. It’s true—I know this because I studied hominids in my fifth-grade science class.

So what’s the answer? Should I take up mammoth-hunting in an attempt to appeal to the friendship centers of men’s primal lizardbrains? Should I keep making guy “friends” and then prevent them from making a move on me by subtly undermining their self-confidence? Should I just give up on those manipulative, game-playing, two-faced bastards once and for all? I don’t know. I mean, I’d really like to have a true friendship with a guy someday, but it’s so hard to trust and respect them when they never say what they mean—and you never know when you might be relegated to the girlfriend-zone.

owlmylove:

When I was 10, I saw

my first episode of Law & Order, SVU

a woman screamed

and her pretty pink dress ripped

the scene cut to black but then

she sat in a station

hair mussed and mascara running

and she seemed broken

and empty

and that’s when I began to prepare

for the inevitable.

Read More

(via herstarlight)

I’m trying to draw a heart

but I got annoyed and thought it looked like a stomach, so I went with

angry stomach

I’m pretty sure it’s because he had already taken her to Darillium, so he knew that she had already gone to the library in her timeline? Irdk, but yeah, the Doctor/River part was the only part that I enjoyed at all

Wait but did he? I mean in one of those mini-episodes he was in the TARDIS and a future version of him was taking River to see the Singing Towers, but has he, you know, become that future version of himself already? Theoretically, he could be visiting her every day anyway. And last time they were together was I think in The Angels Take Manhattan and everything seemed okay.

Oh my god yeah I don’t know about Classic!Who, but in RTD’s era there was definitely more “Doctor showing his companions wonders of the universe” than now, and certainly there was also OH ROES IT’S THE CURSE OF THE TIMELORDS but now it’s like…DOCTOOOOR SO GREAT I CAN’T EVEN OH MY GOD HE’S THE DOCTOR HOW AMAZING
all the time

There was this video
and for a second I thought that this could be it, but then the Doctor said something stupid about a promise and John Hurt turned around and I lost all hope