thingsthatverbme:

livinginthewing:

iamilex:

when you say “so many feels” outside of tumblr, people look at you like you’re an illiterate fuck

#SO TRUE #OH GOD #i do it anyway #and if people try and call me out on it #i just go #I’M A LINGUIST BITCH BACK THE FUCK RIGHT OFF #FEELS #IS A LEGITIMATE WORD #IF PEOPLE ARE ALLOWED TO USE ‘LEGITLY’ AS AN ADVERB I CAN USE FEELS FUCK OFF

Ashley, I love you.

I said it in front of the head of the English department about a month ago. He gave me this weird look and I basically sat him down and explained fandom to him, and he gave me this sort of ‘you have way more to say, I’m interested, go on’ look, and I told him that I thought that the word feels is both beautiful and ironic.

On Tumblr, we have this wonderful community spread across the globe, based around the collaborative creative efforts (no matter how specialised) of humanity. That in itself is a beautiful thing. We pore over tiny details, split seconds of footage, a one-liner, the direction of a gaze, choice of costuming, and in that we find meaning. We explore their world more closely and more intently than our own, and we pinpoint in precise terms exactly the emotions those supposedly insignificant fragments may or may not elicit, and what they do elicit. Which is a direct and stark contrast to the fallback onto the blanket term feels, or indeed keysmashing when confronted with a particularly evocative scene.

To me, ‘feels’ is an example of the limitations of language when faced with something as complex as human emotion, the inability to cover the kaleidoscope of feelings that one moment can evoke, feeling so much you cannot vocalise the individual emotions as they come.

To me, it is both beautiful and ironic that for all the intelligent, marvelous people in the fandoms, we come back to such a basic word to convey what is arguably the most important part of being a human, our emotions, and it is beautiful and ironic that with such a term, we can be instantly understood.

sorry, ignore me. it’s 3am and i’m not asleep for whatever reason, and none of that made any sense probably, but if by tomorrow it still makes sense then goddamn it, i’m putting it in my reflection statement

#this is beautiful #and accurate #and also explains keysmashing #seriously wonderful person alert! #language