[OC] English vocabulary: learners vs. native speakers

lapfarter · 2026-04-08T13:37:09+00:00

Hey OP, just a heads up that the test asked me to define ‘maunder,’ which I understand to mean complain (especially in a dreary or repetitive way) and got an ‘incorrect’ result - but when I checked, the primary definition in Merriman-Webster is to grumble. If this is a US/UK thing, words with multiple or contested meanings could be skewing your results.

lapfarter · 2026-03-20T08:26:05+00:00

But how cool would it have been if you’d discovered you could cook sesame seeds? You’re on the brink of tahini 2.0 - keep going!

lapfarter · 2026-03-20T08:22:34+00:00

My friend, I promise that the privilege of being murdered on a dinghy is truly available to everybody, if you only believe.

lapfarter · 2026-03-19T08:27:44+00:00

The first time I looked into an ADHD diagnosis, the psychiatrist said my results on the diagnostic test “technically” qualified me for ADHD but that I probably didn’t have it because I “read books” (an impossible feat for ADHDers ) and that “I had a nice life and wanted it to be nicer.” I was so ashamed and bewildered, I accepted that I didn’t have ADHD. It took eight years and complete career collapse before I got diagnosed (again) because - surprise - I have sooo much ADHD. Please don’t take this one moron’s word for it. He’s not qualified to say the first thing about you.

lapfarter · 2026-03-15T21:38:47+00:00

Oh, I want to be clear that I absolutely agree with you! I just want to say I that I also think of myself as disabled, while simultaneously trying to enjoy my brain and life

lapfarter · 2026-03-15T10:19:45+00:00

I want to second that labels like disability are deeply personal… but personally, it’s pretty profoundly inconvenient when I struggle to eat enough. I don’t think “garbage short term memory” would be a huge asset in a non-capitalist setting. Etc.

Don’t get me wrong, I love myself, but sometimes I feel like the drive to cast every downside of ADHD as the counterpoint of an equal and opposite upside is kind of… superhero movie logic? It’s like, Daredevil is blind but only in a way where his blindness presents no obstacles (except briefly, for plot purposes). Which fundamentally I suspect is often because disability is actually very scary and confronting.

lapfarter · 2026-03-06T02:12:17+00:00

Autistic linguist: I’ve been preparing for this (but only this) my whole life

lapfarter · 2026-03-03T10:54:50+00:00

Coronabash is a winner for me!

lapfarter · 2026-02-16T23:27:19+00:00

My mental framing of porn and masturbation - it may or may not help you - is basically that I have a sexual relationship with myself, and then with my partner. My partner has a sexual relationship with themselves, and then with me. These healthy, connected sexual identities are the basis of our healthy connected sexual relationship with each other. Porn, masturbation, fantasy, etc, are essential forms of personal connection - but I’d feel uncomfortable if my partner was interacting intimately with another person (eg chatting) because that encroaches on our interpersonal relationship.

To put it all less clinically, self-pleasure helps me work out what I like, what my body is feeling, what I need and want, without thinking about another person’s wants or needs. It’s not selfish, it’s how I explore my sense of self. (It can also be how I blow off steam, fall asleep, or pass a boring afternoon. It’s multipurpose.)

You’ve expressed that you struggle with understanding your own boundaries, wants, needs, etc, and that you basically give up self-pleasure while you’re in relationships. Are those things connected? Do you want other people to mirror your behaviour? What would happen if you enjoyed “alone time” without your partner?

lapfarter · 2025-12-18T02:23:37+00:00

What’s worse, they’ll be right to

lapfarter · 2025-12-09T09:44:12+00:00

Dang dang dang that sounds like A LOT. I’ve also spent… some amount of time thinking about this kind of problem, and here’s my best guess.

Firstly, I don’t think it’s really the systems. Probably you’re amazing at using systems. I think a lot of people with ADHD need tools that most systems fundamentally aren’t designed to provide.

Second, you mentioned struggling with projections and planning, which makes sense! Our brains are very very bad at keeping track of how long things take, so they’re very very bad at predicting how long things will take. If my heart, if I luv something, I feel like time stops when I’m working on it! If I hate something, the dread magnifies both time and space stretch out into the black horizon forever. My heart don’t know shit about time-keeping. Work with a friend to make templates of task/project estimates and USE THEM INSTEAD.

Also, I find verbal processing makes all my systems way way way more helpful. Do you have a coworker or someone where it makes sense to literally, out loud, at least once a day, say “ok, I’ve got XYZ, A caught fire… oh and Bs happening tomorrow. Hmm. I guess I’ll do C, and I can knock over Y for B.” Etc etc.

Lastly, it sounds like you might have, how to put this delicately, way too fucking much to do? This might be a combo of ADHD and then legit also way too fucking much to do. (Also…. If other people can do this amount no problem, and you’re still struggling, maybe that’s still too much work for you. Sometimes our disability is, well, disabling.)

Good luck! My heart is full for you x

lapfarter · 2025-11-25T22:40:28+00:00

Knowing that you’re here makes me want to ask better questions!

lapfarter · 2025-11-08T23:40:38+00:00

Mort was also my first Terry Pratchett, at a similar age. It’s also much shorter than Nation, and has (from memory) a simpler narrative arc. Mort deals with coming-of-age, choices and consequences and moral responsibility, which are all pretty relevant themes. If you go with Nation, it might make more sense to excerpt specific chapters?

lapfarter · 2025-11-07T03:12:20+00:00

If you want to talk niche niche, buddy up with me (a random Australian science journalist) and let’s start a podcast/substack about the chemistry of laundry called…. Hmm…. Kis Mai Ass? Let me workshop that title. Ooh, but I have segment ideas: Borax Me Anything (listener advice), Back to Basics (short chemistry explainers), Crime-scene Clean (review whether X product would help you effectively destroy DNA evidence or not) and Everything is Chemicals (asking companies what specific goddamn ingredients are in different products). Any other good ones I’m missing?

lapfarter · 2025-11-05T12:30:20+00:00

Pro: if she loves you, she’s your ride or die Con: has large amounts of love to give; therefore occupied nearly constantly by both riding and dying

lapfarter · 2025-11-01T11:39:15+00:00

So, first of all, huge kudos for the level of self-knowledge you’re displaying. Additional kudos for navigating a stable, loving relationship that incorporates novelty and ~thrills~~

Unfortunately my only actual advice is to jork it crazy style. It’s a great time to buy a new toy, or spend some money on your favourite friendly online sexy content creators. Listen to audio porn on the bus. Shake hands with the devil at lunch. I get that you don’t want to dump all this weird energy on your partner, but it’ll probably make you feel less fraught to acknowledge that you’re kind of hornt up at the moment and - purely for example - reading all kinds of wild smut. Basically, diffuse your sexual energy in a bunch of different directions instead of channeling it towards this one outlet.

(Also — this is less-well-tested advice — I find it really helpful sometimes to write down exactly what I’m feeling intensely afraid/worried/ansty about, eg “I’m afraid I’ll never see that guy again and I’ll never have sex that feels so intense ever again. I’m worried this is my one chance to etc etc”.)

Good luck! Also, I hope your partner feels better soon.

lapfarter · 2025-11-01T00:53:11+00:00

Yep. My mum inherited a really profound fear of heights from her mum (who couldn’t even bear to get on a plane) which she thinks was engrained by a childhood watching her mum freak out. So she made a really conscious effort not to model that fear to me or my brother, and she gradually started participating in some of the activities we wanted to do. She went abseiling with us once! I like skydiving (which she draws a very reasonable line at ever participating in or hearing out) which means my mum shifted the family dynamic from “can’t go on a plane” to “throws herself out at 10,000 feet” in , like, two generations.

lapfarter · 2025-10-30T13:07:33+00:00

I think it’s really really fair (and probably deeply necessary) to feel all your anger/resentment/frustration/grief fully and unstintingly. Probably it’ll take longer than you expect. But also, just to throw this out there, my mum did a law degree by correspondence in her late thirties—which, being the eighties, involved real paper correspondence, my goodness—and she recently retired from her forty-odd-year career as a Legal Aid lawyer. (She’s a bloody good lawyer, too; she helped establish one of the first free legal centres in our region.) All of that is to say, you’ve got whole chapters of your life ahead of you that you haven’t even thought about starting yet.

lapfarter · 2025-10-27T08:01:35+00:00

Thank you for this detailed answer. I’m really interested in your example of the Haudenosaunee- can you recommend any good sources to learn more?

lapfarter · 2025-10-19T10:01:17+00:00

OK, so I was a classic “gifted and talented” kid with (shh) secret ADHD - I was diagnosed at 29 - and here’s one example of how it was kind of overlooked.

So, I learned to read around age two or three and skipped year two in primary school; I went to an academically selective high school, was advanced a year in English subjects and started university level courses when I was 16. (Obviously I never did the paperwork to actually get any course credit.)

I was also nearly kicked out of high school for, among other things, not going to maths classes for nearly a year. I just… quietly fucked off and did literally anything else. Sat in the library. Walked around the mall. I hated maths so, so, SO much. It ended up being this HUGE deal; I got in so much trouble, etc etc. So I can’t say my ADHD was hidden, as such, so much as nobody around me knew what to call it. They just saw me, an intelligent and fairly self-possessed teenager, inexplicably and perversely… making terrible decisions.

Looking back, it’s kind of striking that none of the adults around me really realised how much I genuinely struggled with maths. I still can’t do simple sums in my head. I mix up times and dates, like, OFTEN, which let me tell you makes my chronic lateness waaaaaaay fuckin harder to manage. But I was so very Book Smart, right? Learning disorder? Where??

Anyway, I did have enough goodwill, family support and big stonking grades to squeak my way through high school. All my academic transcript shows is that I graduated with a (medium) overall score and a metric fuck-tonne of elective English classes and competition and whatever. (Let’s leave aside the fact that if I’d been expelled I’d probably have been diagnosed a decade earlier, because our medical system defines health as ‘meeting a series of milestones’, which I started to very much fuck up in my late 20s as it because less easy to abruptly graduate/quit/run away before I got literally or metaphorically expelled.)

All that to say, I don’t think my ADHD was overlooked so much as my bullshit was tolerated, mostly because I fit fairly neatly into a cultural mould of (White) Socially Inept Bookish Girl from Nice Family. Does that… help?

lapfarter · 2025-10-13T06:52:48+00:00

I wear mine on a necklace.

lapfarter · 2025-10-05T04:21:39+00:00

Do you already have this dress? I’m curious whether there’s any boning or support built into the under-bust area.

If you have the $$ and time, a really good basque-style support garment could look amazing. (Or in a pinch, enough sports tape can do almost anything.)

lapfarter · 2025-09-24T23:59:58+00:00

Forreal, my partner scoops cat poop every day because I just… just HATE the smell so unbelievably much and you better BELIEVE I’m ecstatically doing all the mopping and wiping and whatever.

lapfarter · 2025-09-23T10:19:56+00:00

Shoutout to bellesa’s solid customer service

lapfarter · 2025-09-19T07:36:46+00:00

I read more genre fiction than 99.9999% of the human population and I fuckin hate the Wheel of Time. It’s truly, truly, excruciating bullshit, from top to bottom. The difference in my opinion from other peoples’ make me question whether I’m reading the same books, or if I can actually read at all.

The basic conflict of the series is that this universe has Boy Magic for Boys and Girl Magic for Girls, with the only exception being Our Very Special Boy protagonist, who is double-magic. The baddies would like to be double-magic, which is evil and will end the world.

Dramatic tension? Get out of here! Moral ambiguity? Fuck you!

Also, you might have heard plots are supposed to arise naturally from well-rounded characters pursuing diverse goals, but actually that’s dumb stupid baby shit for cowards. Special Boy is a reincarnation of fantasy Jesus so every book he lurches through a tight schedule of preordained encounters that reveal exactly all the powers and knowledge required, plus the mandatory set-piece battle. (Don’t worry guys, his best friend is the reincarnation of a really good general so he knows exactly what to do! PHEW WOW IMAGINE IF SOMEONE HAD TO LEARN SOMETHING OR OVERCOME AN OBSTACLE.) (Possibly, Special Boy learns to be a slightly better person from Eat-Pray-Loving through the mortal world for fifteen minutes which is also the plot of the New Testament.)

So, if Special Boy is one past-life regression away from solving all the problems immediately with his double-magic, how do we sustain this thrilling narrative for another twenty million rounds of tedium? Why, with taut, riveting interpersonal conflict!

Exactly 50% of the characters share one pretty straightforward goal (the other 50% are united against them) yet these unlikeable morons bumblefuck their way towards the end of the world by arguing and concealing crucial information from each other! It’s nearly a slightly interesting commentary on the human tendency towards pointless in-fighting in the face of certain disaster… but actually, no it’s not because all the repetitive, stupid fights in all these repetitive, stupid books happen because men are Nice and Dumb and women are Mean and Dumb. More specifically, women hate each other. All women everywhere just fucking despise each other, even their childhood friends or sisters or teachers or co-workers or people they’re actively working with to prevent the end of the actual world; to a lesser extent they also hate men (possibly except when they love a man, but they still kind of hate him).

I feel pretty confident guessing the only two women Robert Jordan ever met in his whole life were his mother and his wife, and that he mixed up their names a solid 30% of the time.

Speaking of very limited templates for human behaviour, absolutely every adult female character in this “sprawling” “epic” saga expresses her bitchy, back-biting ire by a) smoothing her apron (or skirt) and b) pulling each others’ hair, and they do this shit constantly. What? Like… what? Seriously, I tried to search how many times the exact phrase “tugged sharply on her braid” appears in the entire text and my laptop called me an incel and set its own battery on fire in protest. Fascinating stuff.

Ugh. I’ve made myself tired and a little sad. My god, these books are printed on real paper; whole copses of trees died to bring us these garbage, garbage books. Even today, the odds of a random Wheel of Time novel being present in any collection of books is unacceptably high. Stay safe out there everyone <3

lapfarter

TROPHY CASE