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Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

The King’s English

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?

Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, slough and through.

Beware of heard, a dreadful word, That looks like beard but sounds like bird.
And dead: It’s said like bed, not bead -- For goodness’ sake, don’t call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat… They rhyme with suite and straight and debt.

A moth is not the moth in mother, Nor both in bother, nor broth in brother.
And here is not a match for there, Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there’s dose and rose and lose -- Just look them up -- and goose and choose.

And cork and work and card and ward, And font and front and word and sword.
And do and go, then thwart and cart, Come, come, I’ve hardly made a start!
A dreadful language? Why, sakes alive! I’d learned to speak it when I was five.
And yet, to write it, the more I tried, I hadn’t learned it at fifty-five

shit - adjective, bad

the shit - noun, good

.

you are shit - shit is an adjective, you are bad

you ain't shit - shit still functions as an adjective, in some contexts this might be a good thing, but the phrase "you ain't ____" most often is used to say the person doesn't reach the level of the blank. For example "you ain't all that" means you think/act like you are "all that" but you're not at the level of "all that" you're less than all that. If you "ain't shit" it means you're so bad that you're less than shit, you dont even reach the level of shit with how bad you are. This is a devestating insult.

you are not the shit - the shit is a noun, its good, so not being the shit is insulting

you are the shit - the shit is a noun meaning good so this is a complement

"I'm down for anything" and "I'm up for anything" mean the same thing.

Clearly by getting their shit together

Reminds me of a funny performance about the topic by a commedian named ISMO. He does a lot of things with the English language.

is this really about learning the English language, or is this about learning insular colloquialisms and slang? you never stop learning slang, even natives....

I've learned a little bit of two other languages (Spanish and Japanese) and I'm pretty confident that most languages have a ton of nuance like this that you will never understand until you are actually totally immersed in that language and culture.

I mean, everything I learned in Spanish and Japanese is all super formal. Nobody actually talks that way IRL. There's words that from a translator or dictionary mean one thing, but are colloquially used totally differently. Like calling testicles eggs or nuts. "Chupa mi heuvos." They're not saying to suck their literal eggs.

I know less Japanese than Spanish but I already notice that, like, "no" isn't ever annunciated the way I'm being taught. Instead of "iie" I'll often hear just "ya." It teaches to end every statement with "desu," but I have never heard a sentence end with a desu or desu ka in any Japanese media (which is more than just anime). It's all way more casual. Questions are still understood to be questions if you use the right inflection; no need for extra syllables.

Spanish:

"Me cago en la leche" I shit on the milk -> something bad happened, and I'm angry.

"Eres la leche" You are the milk -> you are great.

By being shit
Then doing shit
Then becoming the shit.

I mean German isn't any easier: Umfahren means to run over someone And Umfahren means to drive around something

Learning slang, in which words aren't meant literally, is pure memorization and no more difficult in one language than another.

Easy, don't learn no shit vocab.

I feel like "Tonality" is a big part of it.

Learn? They're all shit at it.

~~English~~ American Culture.

The structure of those sentences are very straightforward. The cultural zeitgeist that caused that one iteration to become positive in meaning is just random chance.

Like nested replies on Reddit that all say the same thing. All of them are being upvoted, except one of them is randomly being downvoted into oblivion.

Simple - one must strive not simply to be A shit but to be THE shit - The plutonic ideal of shit, the perfect shit from which all other shits are derivitive. Anything less is a failure. So following this logic.

"You ain't shit" = You are invalid from the rubric, so below par as not to be mentionable.

"You are shit" = Acknowledgement that you are shit of average or middling status but with the implications that vast improvement is nessisary because you are still a failure.

"You are not the shit" = More directed pointed reminder that you are far below the goal of being THE shit and maybe are overestimating yourself.

Itt: monolinguist native english speakers who thinks a completely common concept is exclusive to english.

Thanks, Ismo

i'd still take this over the ett/en thing in swedish. basically, "ett" and "en" both mean "a" if they come before the word, and "the" if they get smashed onto the end of a word. (e.g., "ett apotek" means "a pharmacy", but "apoteket" means "the pharmacy"; "en hund" means "a dog", but "hunden" means "the dog".)

but despite "ett" and "en" meaning the same thing, they aren't interchangeable. some words are "ett" words, while others are "en" words, and you just have to remember which ones are which.

to further complicate things, there are some words that can end with "et" or "en", but each ending means something different. this typically happens with "ett" words using "en" for the plural forms of the word. for example, "barn" means "child", "ett barn" means "a child", "barnet" means "the child", but "barnen" means "the children". (it's worth also mentioning that "barn" means either "child" or "children", depending on the context.)

Very, very slowly.

shit and fuck are the most versatile words

Police police police police police police.

By going back to the late 90s and watching Cartoon Network, duuh.

Raises hand. "Son of beetch."

They generally leave the shitty bits to more advanced learners.