any minor world that breaks apart
falls together again
any minor world that breaks apart
falls together again
Power is out
Trying to make coffee by candlelight
the DELIVERY
People who are blind from birth will gesture when they speak. I always like pointing out this fact when I teach classes on gesture, because it gives us an an interesting perspective on how we learn and use gestures. Until now I’ve mostly cited a 1998 paper from Jana Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow that analysed the gestures and speech of young blind people. Not only do blind people gesture, but the frequency and types of gestures they use does not appear to differ greatly from how sighted people gesture. If people learn gesture without ever seeing a gesture (and, most likely, never being shown), then there must be something about learning a language that means you get gestures as a bonus.
Blind people will even gesture when talking to other blind people, and sighted people will gesture when speaking on the phone - so we know that people don’t only gesture when they speak to someone who can see their gestures.
Earlier this year a new paper came out that adds to this story. Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow looked at the gestures of blind speakers of Turkish and English, to see if the *way* they gestured was different to sighted speakers of those languages. Some of the sighted speakers were blindfolded and others left able to see their conversation partner.
Turkish and English were chosen, because it has already been established that speakers of those languages consistently gesture differently when talking about videos of items moving. English speakers will be more likely to show the manner (e.g. ‘rolling’ or bouncing’) and trajectory (e.g. ‘left to right’, ‘downwards’) together in one gesture, and Turkish speakers will show these features as two separate gestures. This reflects the fact that English ‘roll down’ is one verbal clause, while in Turkish the equivalent would be yuvarlanarak iniyor, which translates as two verbs ‘rolling descending’.
Since we know that blind people do gesture, Özçalışkan’s team wanted to figure out if they gestured like other speakers of their language. Did the blind Turkish speakers separate the manner and trajectory of their gestures like their verbs? Did English speakers combine them? Of course, the standard methodology of showing videos wouldn’t work with blind participants, so the researchers built three dimensional models of events for people to feel before they discussed them.
The results showed that blind Turkish speakers gesture like their sighted counterparts, and the same for English speakers. All Turkish speakers gestured significantly differently from all English speakers, regardless of sightedness. This means that these particular gestural patterns are something that’s deeply linked to the grammatical properties of a language, and not something that we learn from looking at other speakers.
References
Jana M. Iverson & Susan Goldin-Meadow. 1998. Why people gesture when they speak. Nature, 396(6708), 228-228.
Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow. 2016. Is Seeing Gesture Necessary to Gesture Like a Native Speaker? Psychological Science 27(5) 737–747.
Asli Ozyurek & Sotaro Kita. 1999. Expressing manner and path in English and Turkish: Differences in speech, gesture, and conceptualization. In Twenty-first Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 507-512). Erlbaum.
the x files biggest missed opportunity was a body swap between mulder and scully because there is so much comedy gold there that was just missed
like. imagine scully trying desperately to adjust to suddenly being a foot taller i.e. she keeps banging her head on things and mulder’s like “bE CAREFUL”. she also keeps forgetting she doesn’t have to do a manly voice and so mulder just occasionally sound like he’s really sick. she finally gets to sit at the desk and she point blank REFUSES to let mulder sit there and is a smug little shit the entire time
and MULDER is just trying to ruin scully’s credibility to entire time. he forgets that he has to brush his hair everyday. he also tries to bullshit his way around a lab and almost throws up before an autopsy. he’s only saved by a call from “agent mulder” in the station and he’s like “OH MYGOD HOW DO YOU DO THIS ALL THE TIME IT’s SO GROSS AND YUCKY”
scully’s like “mulder why is your back always fucking sore??” and he just. “scully i don’t have a bed”
basically i just really wanna see gillian and david trying to act like each other and im sad it never happened
good things
- singing to a song on the radio with a friend
- genuinely enjoying the material you’re studying
- successfully making a yummy meal or cake
- cute nicknames and inside jokes
- sitting on the window seat on a plane and seeing the sunset outside
- listening to a great song for the first time
- living in the moment
- someone noticing you’re sad and asking if you’re ok
- being excited for future plans
- having a deep conversation with someone & feeling understood
- the start of getting to know a future best friend
- long hugs after a long day
- french toast & nutella waffles for brunch
- crying and having someone make you laugh
I am trying to fix my sleep schedule I am really really trying t is 11am and I have had six cups of coffee and that was a MISTAKE my tummy is SO mad at me :(((((((
ASCENDANT signs indicate SOCIAL compatibility (the impression you give others/ the “face” you put on when confronting the world)
SUN signs indicate TEMPERAMENT compatibility (how your personality interacts with others under stimuli/changing environments).
MOON signs indicate EMOTIONAL compatibility (how you relate/ connect/ empathize. This is internal and may not be necessarily obvious).
MERCURY signs indicate INTELLECTUAL compatibility (how you communicate and share thoughts).
VENUS signs indicate ROMANTIC compatibility (how you love/ receive love. What you idealize and fantasize for in relationships).
MARS signs indicate PHYSICAL compatibility (the personality of your aggression. how you interact physically or sexually).
JUPITER signs indicate IDEOLOGICAL compatibility (how you react to each other’s beliefs, values and opinions).
SATURN signs indicate LONG-TERM compatibility (how your relationship may develop and be sustained over time).
“My friend Dennis had a copy of A Clockwork Orange and he’d already seen it once, and he was like ‘we need to watch this.’ I was sleeping over his house — and I think we were literally 15 — and we watched it. I remember my first reaction to that film was very similar to my reaction to Taxi Driver or my first reaction to Watchmen, where you just immediately gravitate toward Rorschach in Watchmen or Alex from Clockwork. And then you start to get older and realize that character wasn’t a hero at all; they’re really bad people who didn’t do anything heroic. When you’re exposed to that as a youth, you misconstrue stuff. Sometimes you literally only take it on the surface, and you see any strong action that’s done with conviction as the right action, and you start to realize later on in life that just because you felt strongly about it, it doesn’t mean it was the right thing to do. And that’s one of my feelings that I tried to inject into The Killjoys, especially with the characters of The Ultra-Vs. (Shaun and I said) ‘let’s literally make these characters 15-year-olds watching A Clockwork Orange, just pulling all the wrong shit from it.’”
