amatalefay:

spaceisprettycool:

wildestranger:

sashayed:

lierdumoa:

sashayed:

sashayed:

sashayed:

lierdumoa:

sashayed:

sashayed:

My name is Calfe
& Im too young
to know yet what do 
with my Toung!

So till my Mom say
“Dont Do That!”
Ill stick it out
And lik this cat.

My little Calfe,
Im proud of yu–
yur living like
the Big Cows do.
Yur doing just
what Mom have said–
for yu lik cat,
and cat 

lik bred.

Bad meme execution. 0/5 stars.

These poems are supposed to be imitative of 17th/18th century middle English poetry (pre-dating dictionaries and formalized spelling conventions) not early 2000s chatspeak, not babytalk.

These poems are also supposed to be in iambic diameter, giving them a pleasing songlike rhythm. The above has inconsistent syllabic structure from line to line.

These attributes are clearly illustrated in the prime:

image

So tired of people on this website and their flagrant disregard for syllabic structure.

No respect for the craft.

1. first of all, how dare you. i would never, N E V E R, put forth a cow poem with inconsistent syllabic structure. these may not be my finest work, but the iambic dimeter is IMPECCABLE. check my scansion again and come back to me. I guess “know what do yet” is not ideal, but it falls within the constraints of the form. i’m genuinely appalled by this. i have SEEN inconsistent scansion in this meme, i do NOT approve of it and i have NOT done it. how dare you. HOW DAR EYOU!!!

Secondly: it is not absurd to suppose that the linguistic constraints of a Cow Poem would depend on the figure to whom Cow speaks. In the original (and perfect) “i lik the bred,” the narrative cow, like a Chaucerian non-characterized narrator, directs her speech to an imagined and unspecific listener; not to “the men,” who are characters within the poem, but to some more general audience. (See the Canterbury Tales prologue for an example of this voice in action.) 

Later, poem_for_your_sprog has Cow address contemporaries like “dog.” You will notice that the voice of Cow varies slightly, in speaking to Dog, from her voice in the original “I lik the bred.” WHY, then, can we not extrapolate that Calfe – who is, after all, a narrator of limited capacity, being only a Baby Cow with a Baby Cow’s simplicity – would have its own variant voice? And why, too, would Cow not speak differently to her own Calfe than she does to an animal peer, or to reverent imaginary auditors? These are experiments within an emerging form – flawed experiments, certainly, but not mistakes ipso facto. Again: HOW DARE YOU!!!!!!!!

image

my name is Cow,
and as yu see,
its worth yor tiyme
to studye me.
but if yu dont
like what yu red,

take 2 deep breths

and lik the bred.

I am willing to concede on second reading that the syllabic structure is passable, and in that regard I’ve wrongly impugned the integrity of your work, however I maintain that your Frankenstinian amalgam of fake middle English with fake modern American baby talk is thoroughly unconvincing as either middle English or as modern American baby talk.

It’s an aesthetic failure, IMH(inh)O*

You’ve created the linguistic equivalent of a spork — vitiating two perfectly serviceable tools by attempting to fuse them.

Writing ‘till mothere says / do not do that,’ would have conveyed roughly the same idea without feeling quite so awkwardly anachronistic.

My name is Rave,
and I can see
you’re bent on pa-
tronizing me!
”Anachronistic”
frankly seems 
a misplaced word 
to use of memes.
But since you want
to start that fight,
let’s step outside
and do this right.

Dude: if you want 
to not get wrecked
you’d better get 
your facts correct.

Like, “Mothere,” friend,
is not a word
that Geoffrey Chau-
cer ever heard.*

(*”Mooder” would be period-accurate, and also a good cow word.)

What’s more, the “eight-
teenth century”
has zip to do 
with, um, “M.E.”
And it’s not spelled
“diameter.”
What are you, pal,
an amateur?

I am not Chaucer
or John Donne
but if you try
to spoil my fun
with words you learned
in English class –

don’t come for me. 
I’ll kik yur ass.

I don’t think someone who thinks Middle English happened in the seventeenth century ought to be schooling others.

“17th/18th century middle English”

My name is Geoff,
John Chaucer’s sonne,
and I my lyfe’s
cours have runne.
Engelish tonges
are now divers,
so pedants, kis

my naked ers

sonneillonv:

pyrrhiccomedy:

catwinchester:

evieplease:

iamthebadwolf85:

taste-like:

nem sirok csak 65ezren belementek a szemembe

A crowd of 65,000 sings ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ perfectly while waiting for a Green Day concert

THIS. IS. PERFECTION.

@catwinchester

Amazing! 

1. how the fuck did Green Day follow that

2. you know, we have fun here, with the word “meme,” but according to meme theory, which is an actual thing pioneered by reptilian human impersonator Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, most of what we call memes are very unsuccessful memes. A meme, in the scientific sense – if one is generously disposed to consider memetics a science on any particular day – is an idea that acts like a gene. That is, it seeks to replicate itself, as many times as possible, and as faithfully as possible.

That second part is important. A gene which is not faithful in its replication mutates, sometimes rapidly, sometimes wildly. The result might be cancer or a virus or (very very very rarely) a viable evolutionary step forward, but whatever the case, it is no longer the original gene. That gene no longer exists. It could not successfully reproduce itself.

The memes we pass around on the internet are, in general, very short lived and rapidly mutating. It’s rare for any meme to survive for more than a year: in almost all cases, they appear, spread rapidly, spawn a thousand short-lived variations, and then are swiftly forgotten. They’re not funny anymore, or interesting anymore. They no longer serve any function, and so they’re left behind, a mental evolutionary dead end.

This rendition of Freddie Mercury’s immortal opera Bohemian Rhapsody is about the most goddamned amazing demonstration of a successful meme I’ve ever seen. This song is 42 years old, as of 2017. FORTY TWO YEARS OLD. And it has spread SO far, and replicated itself across the minds of millions of people SO faithfully, that a gathering of 65,000 more or less random people, with nothing in common except that they all really like it when Billie Joe Armstrong does the thing with the guitar, can reproduce it perfectly. IN PERFECT TIME. THEY KNOW THE EXACT LENGTH OF EVERY BRIDGE. THEY EVEN GET THE NONSENSE WORDS RIGHT. THEY DIVIDE THEMSELVES UP IN ORDER TO SING THE COUNTER-CHORUS. 

“Yeah, Pyrrhic, lots of people know this song.”

Listen, you glassy-eyed ninny: our species’ ability to coherently pass along not just genetic information, but memetic information as well, is the reason we’re the dominant species on this planet. Language is a meme. Civilization is a collection of memes. Lots of animals can learn, but we may be the only animal that latches onto ephemera – information that doesn’t reflect any concrete reality, information with little to no immediate practical application – and then joyfully, willfully, unrelentingly repeats it and teaches it to others. Look at how wild this crowd is, because they’re singing the same song! It doesn’t DO anything. It’s not even why they showed up here today! If you sent out a letter to those same 65,000 people that said, “Please show up in this field on this day in order to sing Bohemian Rhapsody,” very few of them would have showed up. But I would be surprised to meet a single person in that crowd who joined in the singing who doesn’t remember this moment as the most amazing part of a concert they paid hundreds of dollars to see.

And they’re just sharing an idea. It’s stunning and ridiculous. Something about how our brains work make us go, “Hey!! Hey everybody!! I found this idea! It’s good! I like it! I’m going to repeat it! Do you know it too?? Repeat it with me! Let’s get EVERYBODY to know it and repeat it and then we can all have it together at the same time! It’s a good idea! I’m so excited to repeat it exactly the way I heard it, as loudly as I can, as often as possible!!”

This is how culture happens! This is how countries happen! Sometimes a persistent, infectious idea – a meme – can be dangerous or dark. But our human delight at clutching up good memes like magpies and flapping back to our flock to yell about them to everyone we know is why we as a species bothered to start doing things like “telling stories” and “writing stuff down.”

“That’s a lot of spilled ink for a Queen song, Pyrrhic.”

Man I just fucking love people.

They harmonize too.  Some people are singing the low parts and some people are singing the falsetto on the chorus.

Plus, when the head-banging starts, watching the whole crowd bounce in perfect unison was fun.