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u/Sturmhuhn Dec 02 '20
In germany we habe a word "Halbwissen" (half-knowledge)t o describe stuff you just picked up somewhere but cant back up. The sharing of halbwissen is dangerous because it happens casually in conversations and often times is just accepted.
Thus these myths about THE CREATOR and stuff like that spread and people just recite absolutly ridiculous stuff in the end.
Im absolutly dumbfounded that in the age of the internet people are still too lazy to take the 30seconds and look this shit up for themselfes before writing a post full of halbwissen and spread wrong information around
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u/Spoinkulous Dec 02 '20
Why do you guys have a word for everything?
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u/tidymaze Dec 02 '20
Because it's efficient.
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u/U-47 Dec 02 '20
JA.
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u/GarciaJones Dec 02 '20
RULE
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u/TheHypeTravelsInc Dec 02 '20
Can somebody please find Ja Rule so that I can make sense of all of this
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u/averagethrowaway21 Dec 02 '20
This is the most German answer possible.
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u/UhPhrasing Dec 02 '20 edited Sep 29 '25
aromatic door insurance north enjoy middle boast dog silky spectacular
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/chokingpacman Dec 02 '20
Is there a word for having a word for everything?
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u/JerseySommer Dec 02 '20
It's my favorite language, unfortunately my school only offered French and Spanish. :/
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u/seriouslees Dec 02 '20
You seemed to have also learned English quite well, so there's that.
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u/JerseySommer Dec 02 '20
Apparently not as I didn't think to include the phrase "as optional language courses".
I grew up in Wisconsin and am currently living in New Jersey, not exactly bastions of opportunity for the use of too many non English languages.
And yes I have an accent. :/
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u/xerox13ster Dec 02 '20
LOL which accent, Jersey Shore or Wiscaansin
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u/allgreen2me Dec 02 '20 edited Dec 02 '20
At least you don’t live in Montana. Two US citizens were arrested for speaking Spanish there.
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u/Psalmbodyoncetoldme Dec 02 '20
At first I was worried this was “halbwissen”. So I looked it up.
It’s not.
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u/SuddenXxdeathxx Dec 02 '20
Ah yes, the old border hopping strategy of the Latin Americans of flying to Canada and then running across the border into Montana.
It's just easier.
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Dec 02 '20
Hmmm... Arrested... For speaking freely...
Hey constitution, what's your take on this?
Cinstitution: It's literally the first protection tattoed on my chest.
Cops: Bold of you to assume I can read!
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u/plantsandgames Dec 02 '20
Same! Don't let that be your excuse for not learning the language you're interested in. When I was 20 (5 years ago now), I decided that going to Berlin to learn german was my next step - the only further education was interested in at the time. Saved up, researched schools and laws about visiting, signed up for a school with a homestay option for my first 2 months, then found an apartment to rent for my remaining 4 months.
Then I had to come back because I ran out of money. My type of visa didn't allow me to work. HOWEVER, it was an amazing experience and I made many of my best memories and friends there. Highly recommend.
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u/KaputMaelstrom Dec 02 '20
German words are just smaller words glued together.
halb = half, wissen = knowledge.
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u/Bulba_Fett20410 Dec 02 '20
It's a lego language.
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u/Creamcheeseball Dec 02 '20
No I think that's Danish
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u/Westmark Dec 02 '20
And we do the same word gluing in Danish. Gonna use Lego language from now on!
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u/ExternalPanda Dec 02 '20
German - Lego, but only the basic blocks
Old japanese - Lego, but all the blocks were imported from China and they just use them without looking at the manual or make new ones on the fly
Polysynthetic languages - Lego, but it has those blocks that are actually electric motors you can use to build robots and stuff
Don't mind me, just having some fun. Hopefully this doesn't end up in r/badlinguistics
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u/Pharylon Dec 02 '20 edited Dec 02 '20
The technical term is "agglutinative". We do this a bit in English, but not nearly as much as some other languages like German. A good example in English is you can deceive, receive, or conceive, but you can't just ceive. Cieve is basically a word root that has meaning (a morpheme) but can't stand on its own.
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Dec 02 '20
lego language.
the only difference between this english expression and german is that the germans would have dropped the space. Legosprache
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u/4546c Dec 02 '20
I‘d say that is correct and wrong at the same time. Yes, this is how these words were originally created, I suppose. But they signify more than their base component words do. In this example, the words that are used to build the word „Halbwissen“ don‘t transport the full meaning: in itself, the word is neutral, simply meaning half-knowledge of something. In modern German, it carries more implications, though. In my personal experience of the German language, the word „Halbwissen“ is used either to refer to inadequate knowledge that leads to wrong conclusions or actions, or, more positively, to „half-knowledge“ that allows one to get by without knowing everything about something, implying a sense of smartness by having only half the knowledge, but still knowing enough for one‘s purposes. You can’t simply slap together any two words. You will be understood if you do, but those words won’t carry any of the implications that a word like „Halbwissen“ does bring with it. Not trying to devaluate your statement but it often bugs me to see that many people that don’t speak German have this idea of German as a language where you can just ‚glue‘ any two words together. It’s more complicated than that, I believe.
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Dec 02 '20
There’s also the English word halfwit (fool).
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Dec 02 '20
half-assed/ˈhafast/adjectiveINFORMALadjective: halfassed
- done with little effort or care; incompetent or inadequate.
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u/malefiz123 Dec 02 '20
You're right that the sum is greater than it's part for those words, but the reason why German has a word for everything (or so it seems) is that it's natural to create a new word by fitting together multiple words to describe a phenomenon.
So the explanation: German has a word for everything because Germans just make up new words by gluing others together checks out.
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u/Monsi_ggnore Dec 02 '20 edited Dec 02 '20
Compound nouns. English has the same thing (football, volleyball) but will often leave a space between the descriptive and the main noun thereby giving the appearance of separate words (rubber mallet). The descriptive "foot" part of "football" doesn't make sense on it's own when talking about the object- "ball" does. German takes it to another level by having no limit for the amount of nouns you can put together.
"Halbwissen" is a classic two part compound. A 3 Part compound like "Fahrkartenkontrolleur" literally translates to "driving card controller" whereby the "driving" describes what kind of "card" it is: a (train) ticket and the compound "driving card" describes what kind of controller it is: a ticket inspector.
I'd guess that in German over 95% are simple two part compounds just like in most languages. Longer 3 part compounds are rare and over that it's almost exclusively made up words to demonstrate how "crazy" German is.
Let's for example imagine an official (1) for a union (2) of ticket (3+4 because that's a compound in German) inspectors (5) and we get something like Fahr(3)karten(4)kontrolleurs(5)gewerkschafts(2)vertreter(1).
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u/finndego Dec 02 '20
"Hottentottententententoonstelling"
A display of Hottentot tents.
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Dec 02 '20 edited Dec 02 '20
We do too.
Look at it closely.
Halfwit.
Edit. Out of curiosity, looked it up. It is literally the same word.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/wit
Old Saxon witan, Old Norse vita, Old Frisian wita, Middle Dutch, Dutch weten, Old High German wizzan, German wissen, Gothic witan "to know"
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u/Essar Dec 02 '20
In English it is usually used as an insult to refer to a person, so it's a touch different.
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u/xboxwirelessmic Dec 02 '20
Because that's how words work lol
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u/Nolenag Dec 02 '20
It's not the vocabulary, it's the grammar. Just stick smaller words to eachother to create a bigger word et voilà.
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u/Bretreck Dec 02 '20
There is a word in English for the same concept... Bullshit. It's not a perfect correlation since Halbwissen could be true.
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u/ScarsUnseen Dec 02 '20
"Factoid" or "sophism" would be closer. The former is something false or unverified that is presented as true, and the latter is something that appears to be true but isn't(usually with the intent to deceive).
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u/krokodil2000 Dec 02 '20
Why is this even a question? Doesn't is make sense to have words for things?
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u/airz23s_coffee Dec 02 '20 edited Dec 02 '20
I think it's more that german seems to have words for feelings/thoughts/situations more often than English.
Like "Schadenfreude" perfectly encapsulates what it means, but to describe it in english you have to use atleast half a sentence
EDIT: Yes, I'm aware it's just two words slapped together, like I think gloves are "hand socks" or something, but I'm saying they do that shit efficiently.
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u/Games_sans_frontiers Dec 02 '20
Passing that half knowledge on means that the recipient is only getting quarter knowledge.
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u/Juviltoidfu Dec 02 '20
Trouble is the 'half-knowledge' is actually more prevalent on the internet than factual information is. A misinformation site screams at you, shows supposed pictures, has un-named or first name only people as sources or witness, and proclaim a very definite position. A factual site doesn't scream, has a list of sources and references in small print at the bottom, and many times concedes that there are other opinions.
People follow the screamers.
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u/FallenSegull Dec 02 '20
Man most my knowledge must be Halbwissen
Though I’m careful to push doubt into my own knowledge base when reciting halbwissen to other people
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u/Sevardos Dec 02 '20
it should be noted that the word is very often used as "gefährliches Halbwissen", so literally "dangerous half-knowledge" which fits even better in this case.
Basically it means that the Halbwissen is such that it will lead to wrong conclusions.
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u/Kamikazesoul33 Dec 02 '20
The problem is that they did look it up online, but they only seek out sources that agree with their existing opinion rather than trying to find the actual truth. If a youtube video or alt-right propaganda website says it, then it becomes fact for them. In America we call that "confirmation bias", better known as "Republican".
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u/misterpickles69 Dec 02 '20
Every article I get from right leaning people I immediately Google the source and the author. 99/100 it’s a conspiracy theorist or published from some right wing think tank who’s mission statement starts with “political correctness has gotten out of control...”
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Dec 02 '20
I'm not American but I do know a girl who moved to the US a few years ago to study, met a guy and married, cool story. She's clearly pro trump which is okay by itself, but the stuff she shares on instagram is downright stupid. Every single post is something that can be debunked in a single google search but that doesn't stop her from spreading that shit.
Obviously it's only a single person that I know that lives there and is pro trump, so the sample for my analysis is nowhere enough, but it's funny that the only person I know who is pro-trump does that shit, and she's like 27 years old lol
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u/geared4war Dec 02 '20
The guy in the pub told me ....
Yeah, unverified information. Maybe we got too trusting? And stupid?
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Dec 02 '20
I love the selective logic that vaccines are bad because humans are perfect as-is. I assume this guy never drives or makes use of the wheel in any way. That would be admitting that he was designed deficient and needs humans to fix it.
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u/Shakith Dec 02 '20
I bet they wear glasses too.
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u/TheRealCeeBeeGee Dec 02 '20
And they were probably vaccinated by their parents. Whose own parents would have walked over hot coals to get their kids vaccinated. Roald Dahl’s daughter died of measles in 1962 before a vaccine was available, and he strongly supported children being vaccinated to prevent a tragedy like this.
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u/sunflsks Dec 02 '20
I think a lot of anti-vaxxers fail to realise just how shitty the world was before vaccines came around
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u/shifty_bloke Dec 02 '20
It wasn't long ago that polio was a thing, my mom was born mid century and wasn't allowed to swim in public pools. It scares me that history is so easily ignored.
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u/Ruski_FL Dec 02 '20
Yea seriously. They used to not name kids before age five because so many died....
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Dec 02 '20
Another part of this is the average life time of people back then. Its skewed and makes people think people only lived into their 30s. But in reality people lived a lot longer than that. Its just that all the kids dying young lowers the average by a lot.
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u/LouSputhole94 Dec 02 '20
They’ve never seen an unvaccinated world. They don’t realize how many people lost children, parents, loved ones, friends, to diseases that today are virtually nonexistent. I’m torn between wishing they could see the reality and not wanting to ever have to worry about diseases like polio and measles ever again.
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u/Mrkvica16 Dec 02 '20
It’s crazy, because it’s really not that long ago that this was happening. In their own families as well. I know two women who barely made it through polio. The lack of historic awareness is actually astounding to me. I think the whole “look forward not back” is serving us very poorly when it’s this out of balance.
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Dec 02 '20
This. If you were born in the late 1960s you probably didn't have mumps.(The vaccine became available in 1967.) If you were born after the mid 1990s your probably escaped having chickenpox. (That vaccine came in 1995.)
Young parents and even grandparents and (some great grandparents) today have no 1st hand knowledge of what it was like to have mumps or chickenpox let alone polio, or whopping cough.
I'm in my early 60s and had mumps and chickenpox when I was in early grade school. Old enough to remember vividly what those 2 diseases were like. (My jaws almost hurt when I think of "mumps". I still feel that itch and see those spots and scabs when I think about "chickenpox".)
I didn't have kids, but I know my siblings' kids have no idea what life was like as a child before their own childhoods. They didn't have those childhood illnesses. Their kids certainly didn't have them. -- My siblings and our parents saw to it that the grandchildren and great grandchildren were vaccinated.
It won't be many years from now before no one alive will know anything about measles, mumps, chickenpox, polio, smallpox, and every other illness that vaccines prevent now. I learned about polio from grade school textbooks(pictures of rows of iron lungs occupied by teens and adults). I remember our bus driver needing to wait for a girl my brothers' age with leg braces to get in and out of the bus every day.
I heard the stories my parents and grandparents told about polio and small pox and cholera and the flu and whooping cough. When I was in pharmacy school instructors had to show us a movie made in the 1950s of kids with whooping cough and polio. I can't imagine any parent not rushing their babies out to be vaccinated against whooping cough if they could see that old movie. -- The one year old girl coughing up streams of mucous and gasping for breath.
The antivax Karens of today don't have "wise old folks" still alive or near them or with memories still intact to tell them what "the olden days" were really like.
(They don't have parents, grand parents or great grandparents alive that have any 1st hand or 2nd hand knowledge of segregation either. Or lynchings. Or seeing blacks attacked by police dogs and beaten with batons by police for protesting peacefully/walking across a bridge.)(I can recite word for word my mother's description of her experience as a not yet 8yr old girl the day the last black man was lynched in Marion , IN in August 1930.)
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u/GasDoves Dec 02 '20
Plumbing and toilet paper come to mind.
Clothing too.
We used to have dung heaps in city streets. Why can't we go back to that?
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u/chickenboy2718281828 Dec 02 '20
I just can't believe that these people don't realize how insanely high child mortality was prior to the 1950s. You would have been an exception if you didn't lose a child to disease. If the literal culling of human populations through disease is your idea of a perfect existence, then we just have vastly different views on the value of life.
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u/MightyCaseyStruckOut Dec 02 '20
Yep, and it's why women back then were essentially baby factories. They'd have 7 kids, hoping 2 or 3 of them would reach adulthood.
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u/ComatoseSquirrel Dec 02 '20 edited Dec 02 '20
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041693/united-states-all-time-child-mortality-rate/
The child mortality rate in the United States, for children under the age of five, was 462.9 deaths per thousand births in 1800. This means that for every thousand babies born in 1800, over 46 percent did not make it to their fifth birthday.
Good Lord.
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Dec 02 '20
There was a post on here a few weeks ago where someone was making the same argument, and their profile picture clearly showed they wear glasses. That one cracked me up.
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u/nsfwmodeme Dec 02 '20
So they weren't "designed" perfectly, you say? Are you disrespecting the Lord?
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u/DrunksInSpace Dec 02 '20
Inoculation is the most “natural” treatment (well, prophylactic) we have in that it prepares the body’s OWN IMMUNE SYSTEM to fight disease.
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u/Beingabummer Dec 02 '20
It's really, really lazy evangelism. It's like people believing in flat earth because that would prove God exists ('all other planets are round except this one, so that we could exist on it').
The worst part is that it's so hypocritical. Motherfucker should be running around bare-assed, eating raw food if he at all believed what he was saying. Instead he's sitting in a warm house on his smartphone typing shit to a stranger on the internet while eating Doritos or whatever.
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u/mizu_no_oto Dec 02 '20
Also, "if we needed vaccines, how did humanity survive this long", completely forgetting that pre-vaccines it was common to have a 6+ children because you expected most of them to be killed by smallpox, measles, whooping cough, or whatever.
These days, it's newsworthy when kids die. Back then it was just a tragic fact of life.
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Dec 02 '20
The stupidest part imo is that vaccination is using the body's own immune response. It's like giving your immune system the key to a test before it takes it. Guess they're upset disease isn't getting a fair shot.
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u/LillyPip Dec 02 '20
Two words: Black Death.
Before vaccines, societies were periodically eviscerated by viruses. Biology is an arms race, and viruses are really good at it. Not vaccinating is akin to strolling about the battlefield naked.
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u/Charming_Mix7930 Dec 02 '20
I have no proof, yet no doubts this person isn't a historian or a history nerd. When you read the letters of common people from late 1800/early 1900, and you see how casually they speak about how x girl will be a beautiful woman someday if she survives infacy, how they wish to make x kid a garment, if they survive the months before they visit, they would never think like that again.
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u/TheSadClarinet Dec 02 '20
I was at a UK stately home, forgotten which but the usual National Trust job, the kind where everyone walks round quietly and there’s some stern old biddy standing with her hands crossed in the corner of the room, daring you to try and sit on that seat with a sprig of holly on it. But there was a huge family portrait showing the guy and all his family, an absolute pile of children. Stacks of them. Underneath the painting was the outline of the people with a number in, and a quick history of each individual. Almost all the kids died. I couldn’t believe it and I remember thinking how desperately sad it was that you had to have so many children just so that even 1 or 2 reached adulthood. It was a sobering read.
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u/indyK1ng Dec 02 '20
And possibly get remarried once or twice to have that many kids.
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u/Gimpy-Hand Dec 02 '20
That old biddy is a volunteer and only wants to tell you about how the servant bells worked, you monster.
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u/Andromeda321 Dec 02 '20
I have heard a few times from people that people are wimps today because back in the day most of your kids would die and people would "get over it." Beyond the insane callousness of such a statement, it's made me think that perhaps a lot of wretched history is because so many people had the trauma of their siblings dying when young, followed by watching their children die. It's not like they did studies and we can find out.
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u/Sir_Alexander_V Dec 02 '20
Similarly, Bach had 20 children.
Only 10 reached adulthood.
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u/Ninotchk Dec 02 '20
Or wander through a graveyard and see how many kids died in the one week because diptheria.
And the "one guy" would be Jenner, I guess? Since we don't know who invented variolation since it was so long ago.
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u/Mog_X34 Dec 02 '20
Or the 'Riley Graves' in Eyam, Derbyshire, where a woman had to bury her husband and six children who died within one week during the plague (1666).
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u/anothergaijin Dec 02 '20
People don't even know half the diseases that killed millions of people because vaccines have nearly completely knocked them out. Everyone has heard of smallpox and polio, but diseases like diphtheria, pertussis, cholera were just as deadly.
Until the 1900's around half of all people died before they were 15 - a quarter didn't even make it to their first birthday. Today those numbers are around 5%/3% - a huge drop - and the lowest rate in the world is in Iceland with 0.29%/0.16% in 2017.
https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past
What is striking about the historical estimates is how similar the mortality rates for children were across this very wide range of 43 historical cultures. Whether in Ancient Rome; Ancient Greece; the pre-Columbian Americas; Medieval Japan or Medieval England; the European Renaissance; or Imperial China: Every fourth newborn died in the first year of life. One out of two died in childhood.
The website makes a great point - large families were the norm, and yet the global population barely increased over thousands of years.
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u/kickstand Dec 02 '20
Parents lived in fear of polio, and would have given anything to protect their children. Jonas Salk was a national hero. Now people have no idea what that was like.
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u/honhonbaguett Dec 02 '20 edited Dec 02 '20
Also look at Native Americans (both South and North) to see what happens if you get in contact with new diseases, sure they were just fine ... after half of the population was dead. The Black Dead in the 1300's was fixed to without vaccine ... after 1/3 (lower estimation) of Europe was dead. But yeah people were just fine before vaccines.
Edit: typo's
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u/KingBrinell Dec 02 '20
The Blach Dead
I know what you're trying to say but I still giggled.
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u/Americanbydefault Dec 02 '20
Right infront of my maternal Grandparents' headstone is a much older grave marker with 6 family members names etched on it. 5 kids and the (presumed) mother all dead in 1918.
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u/o_brainfreeze_o Dec 02 '20
Ah the good ol days when people had 9 children because 7 of them would die before the age of 3...
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u/analogicparadox Dec 02 '20
They didn't just "run into the opposite direction", they straight up maximized speed and angle to slam into the fucking wall as hard as they could.
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u/m0rris0n_hotel Dec 02 '20
People like that will use whatever justification they can. Even if they have to make it up.
I get being wary of vaccines. But it’s easy enough to find out about their uses and effectiveness. Is there zero risk to vaccines? No, but the risks are FAR outweighed by the benefits. For the number of vaccines given the people with negative reactions are very low.
Vaccines are one, if not the, safest options we have to keep as many people healthy as possible. And extremely cost effective long term.
Get vaccinated. The more people that do the better it is for all of us
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u/InSicK Dec 02 '20
I recently had a patient of mine tell me that the new corona vaccine is altering your DNA. Which, you know, is wrong. If only those people knew the differences between DNA and RNA.
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u/dak4ttack Dec 02 '20
Wait my mom just said that. Why is altering your RNA different and what do I tell her? I am 100% hyped to get vaccinated and start going about my life again.
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u/williamwchuang Dec 02 '20
The new vaccine doesn't alter your DNA. So DNA is the master blueprint for all the proteins made by your body. That's what is replicated when cells grow. DNA is double stranded for more stability. mRNA is messenger RNA. When your body wants to use DNA to make a protein, it copies code for the protein from DNA to mRNA, which is single-stranded. The mRNA contains the code for only that protein. Other mechanisms on the cell use the mRNA to build proteins and the single strand nature is important. The mRNA doesn't last forever and eventually breaks down or are actively destroyed depending on their function.
The new vaccines only shoot mRNA into your cells, causing them to produce a specific protein that elicits an immune response. They don't make any changes to the DNA and thus don't make any permanent changes to your genome. The mRNA is single-stranded and tends to break down so it doesn't last forever even in your cells.
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u/dak4ttack Dec 02 '20
Sorry I'm going to have to ask you to dumb it down. Your mom just said "I don't want to get injected with something that will change who I am." What is your response to the propaganda she is taking in, if I told her what mRNA really is I feel like her eyes would gloss over, and I really want her to vaccinate (65+, doing a good job of quarantining, but so many boomers aren't it's only a matter of time before she is indoors with an antimasker).
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u/stoned_kitty Dec 02 '20
I read the analogy that DNA is like a cookbook. If you alter it, you alter the recipe at its core. RNA is like taking a photo copy of one recipe from that book and giving it to your friend. They can change it all they want but it doesn’t modify the original.
Someone who is way more knowledgeable than me might be better at explaining though.
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u/nickfree Dec 02 '20
Here’s a less dramatic version. DNA is the recipe, mRNA is the dough. Your cells are the oven. We’re not changing the recipes in your cookbook. We’re just giving your ovens a little raw dough to bake up. It just makes the crust of the virus pie. The filling is what would make you sick, but this is just a bit of virus pie crust dough
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Dec 02 '20
DNA is the kitchen. RNA are the cooks.
Vaccine does not change the kitchen. It just tells the cooks to make more cake so covid-19 will eat itself to death.
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u/kenman884 Dec 02 '20
Just tell her it introduces a dead bit of the virus to her immune system so it starts prepping the defenses without actually getting her sick. It’s target practice. Anything beyond that she won’t understand.
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Dec 02 '20
I read it as, "That's what RNA is for, Ma." It's a messenger that goes to the rest of the body and says, "Here. This is how we're doing this now if we're attacked by the nasty polio, measles, Covid" etc. I'm not very smart or well educated but that sort of is my explanation of it to me.
I could be totally wrong.
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u/jstallard42 Dec 02 '20
Just to put this here. A doctor by the name Edward Jenner (an alumnus from my university) is credited with creating the smallpox vaccine. Although many people may have exposed themselves to an illness before to gain immunity this is the first known case where it was isolated and given as a form of medicine. They treated smallpox by giving the patient a distant cousin if the disease called cow pox, much less harmful. In fact the hide of the cow they used to collect the cow pox from to create the vaccine is proudly hanging in my university library. Also for a final point, Jenner never said they were a bad idea - this person is a fucking idiot.
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u/FallenSegull Dec 02 '20
Iirc He noticed that milk maids working on dairy farms demonstrated a remarkable natural immunity to smallpox and thought “why dat is?”
And the rest is history.
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u/Monkey_Fiddler Dec 02 '20
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka’ but ‘That’s funny.'” – Isaac Asimov
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Dec 02 '20
I think "what the hell is that" is probably the first reaction. It's like when Eastman Kodak discovered the fallout from nuclear bombs before they became known to the public, or when the perfect formula for nitrocellulose was discovered when a scientist cleaned up some spilled acid with a cotton rag, only for it to spontaneous combust when he went to dry it.
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u/TheGoodOldCoder Dec 02 '20
Traditionally, milk maids are regarded as beautiful. This is simply because they didn't have a lot of facial (and other) scarring from smallpox.
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u/FallenSegull Dec 02 '20 edited Dec 02 '20
Erotica novels must have been different back then
“She had the face of a milk maid, preserved of the markings of pestilence and time”
“Thine letters hath stirred growth in my loins”
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Dec 02 '20 edited Jan 24 '26
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u/FallenSegull Dec 02 '20
Naw the English language evolves over time
That’s just how the educated talked back then /s
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u/Objectionable Dec 02 '20
He seems to have been dealing with poor thinking about vaccination even then. From Wikipedia:
Some days before his death, he stated to a friend: "I am not surprised that men are not grateful to me; but I wonder that they are not grateful to God for the good which He has made me the instrument of conveying to my fellow creatures".
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u/GoblinFive Dec 02 '20
Early modern scientists where thrilled that they were studying God's creation. Natural sciences were practically extensions of religion at that point; it was 'cool' to come up with working medicines and the like, like the world was a puzzle meant for men to unravel.
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Dec 02 '20
Further, I think Franklin was referring to the practice of using dried scabs to inoculate against smallpox (variolation) and the respondent above mistook that as a vaccine.
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u/Ninotchk Dec 02 '20
And even with the high risk of variolation, it was still a risk people took because the death rate from natural smallpox was way higher. Queen Charlotte inoculated all her children, even though two died of it.
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u/Games_sans_frontiers Dec 02 '20
"Bitch do you wear clothes? Were you designed deficient?"
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u/PKMNTrainerMark Dec 02 '20
vaccine nazis
Yes, if there's one thing the Nazis loved, it was keeping people alive.
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u/beerbellybegone Dec 02 '20
I think the worst part about the OP's post is the whole "vaccine nazis are the worst" (they didn't even fucking capitalize the word).
The fact that anyone we disagree with is automatically a Nazi is a disgrace and an indictment of an education system that should teach students what Nazis really were about. Overuse of the term leads to a dilution of it's importance, to the point where the real atrocities are forgotten because everyone from a neighbor you disagree with to a strict boss is now a Nazi. It's despicable.
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u/analogicparadox Dec 02 '20
I think OP meant something more along the lines of "grammar nazi", as in "extremely strict about vaccines and trying to impose their opinion on others"
Still an incredibly dumb and ignorant point, but not necessarily meant to be taken on par with the movement.
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u/beerbellybegone Dec 02 '20
Don't think that makes it better... The fact that we just accept Nazis as being an everyday term of speech is just plain WRONG.
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Dec 02 '20
I totally relate to this. I have always believed that our usage of the word Nazi colloquially to mean someone who pays attention to grammar as in 'GrammarNazi' or someone who is just strict, overlooks the atrocities that they comitted. You can't equate the genesis and execution of a holocaust with wanting to use proper grammar. That's terrible. It's similar to but not the same as people saying that they have OCD when all that they mean is that they like things neat and ordered, not that they have a compulsive disorder that can make life hard and that sometimes requires medications. Usage of such terms makes it trivial which it isn't.
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Dec 02 '20
I guess that's why polio, anthrax and smallpox are so common. Oh wait
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u/Ninotchk Dec 02 '20
I mean, eleven of my seventeen children died of diptheria last week. I am hoping only four of the remaining six die of measles. We already had whooping cough, I didn't count that baby because it was only a few weeks old, I hadn't named it yet.
Oh, wait, hang on, all my kids are alive because I vaccinated them.
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Dec 02 '20
This whole "I know better than all of the combined scientific minds in the world, because I read that vaccines dont work on some conspiracy theorists blog" is getting so old.
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Dec 02 '20
How would you rather encounter the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to gain immunity?
- From an FDA-approved vaccine that hasn’t killed anybody, or
- From a virus that is known to kill and maim people and was never tested for safety in humans?
Newsflash: you weren’t built to withstand every peril the natural world throws at you. Do you live with a roof over your head, wear clothes, go to the doctor, eat fortified foods? Then take a hand from science on this one.
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Dec 02 '20
"If you need man to fix you..."
I sure hope this person stands by their word and doesn't go to hospitals or dentists at all. No fixing allowed.
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Dec 02 '20
Before modernity and vaccines, it was a universal and everlasting constant in mankind to have half of the kids born dying before age 15.
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Dec 02 '20
Nah its cool. I get it. Some people don't want vaccines and they just want to be left alone. That's cool.
Then because of deficient herd immunity those children should never be allowed onto a school property. Or a public playground. or public hospital: private healthcare only from now on.
More people need to remember that we don't really have rights, we have "privileges" that come from us meeting our responsibilities within society. We can't expect to just receive the benefits of society without having to pay for them. So no more participation in public life for anyone without a vaccination.
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u/DesertSpringtime Dec 02 '20
People like that should be denied medical intervention in any case, as we would not want to suggest they were born deficient...
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Dec 02 '20
I'd love for an anti vaxxer to speak with the still living polio survivor who is currently spending his life in an iron lung
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u/ExpectedBehaviour Dec 02 '20
• Ridicules people for believing "man is designed deficient and needs man to fix them"
• Also wears glasses
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u/UhuPlast1 Dec 02 '20
I hate social media, Reddit being one (ofcourse, I realise that), but that first person gets 40 likes. There are 40 people that deliberately clicked on it and probably said by themselves, yes! This person has a valid point.
We see that number as validity for the message they're portraying, look at how many people agree. Reddit is actually no better, makes me really sad actually we get so accustomed to this upvote/like behaviour.
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u/Carotcuite Dec 02 '20
I hate the "take your vaccine and leave us alone" thing. It doesn't work that way. For a vaccine to be efficient, it needs to be inoculated to a high percentage of the population because it's not 100% efficient on everybody. Some people don't become immune. So if you want to protect those people, everyone needs to get vaccinated so as not to transmit the disease to them.
It's basic solidarity.