Valerie

defying description (mostly)

she/her/hers

[Valerie @vjkehr]

@ChefReactions Happy birthday-versary! I hope you have the most wonderful day🎂🥳✨️👏

[Valerie @vjkehr]

@ChefReactions You bring so much joy to so many (including me) ❤️ keep going 🫂❤️

[Valerie @vjkehr]

@ChefReactions Thank you for sharing your grandma with us, Chef - she is a delight, and thank you to Mrs. Chef for the videography ❤️ What a sweet memory you made with Grandma Chef ❤️ it was truly a gift for me today ❤️Merry Christmas to you all 🌟🎄

[Valerie @vjkehr]

@LakotaMan1 Real person, not a bot or a cat

[Valerie @vjkehr]

@shannonstacey True 😂

[Valerie @vjkehr]

@shannonstacey I'm so sorry - a good string cheese is very satisfying

[Valerie @vjkehr]

@shannonstacey Probably not without choking...

[Gabrielle Blair @designmom]

I’m a mother of six, and a Mormon. I have a good understanding of arguments surrounding abortion, religious and otherwise. I've been listening to men grandstand about women's reproductive rights, and I'm convinced men actually have zero interest in stopping abortion. Here's why…

[Valerie @vjkehr]

@shannonstacey 🤞

[Valerie @vjkehr]

@shannonstacey Happy New Year to you and yours ❤️🎉🥂🍾

[Valerie @vjkehr]

@shannonstacey I'm so glad you have the puppy, but sorry that the belly rubs are medicinal instead of joyful 🫂

[Valerie @vjkehr]

@shannonstacey 🫂🫂🫂🫂🫂🫂
October is still a good month. Give yourself time to heal. You will find your peace and joy. ❤️

[Valerie @vjkehr]

@arealmofwonder B please 🌞

[Valerie @vjkehr]

@shannonstacey 🫂🫂🫂🫂🫂

[Valerie @vjkehr]

Love this!

[Pulp Librarian @PulpLibrarian]

Today in pulp: can you judge a book by its cover?

Let's look at some unusual covers for popular novels and see...

[Stuff_By_Mark @The_Ren1981]

Rubber Saul. A series I did last year and still one of my favourite things I've ever done. The idea was to reimagine Beatles songs as film posters in the style of mid century graphic designers like Saul Bass.

[Fascinating @fasc1nate]

This is Unsinkable Sam, aka Oscar, a cat that served with the Kriegsmarine (navy of Nazi Germany) and the Royal Navy (navy of the UK) during World War 2.⁣⁣ He was reported to have belonged to a sailor onboard the German battleship Bismarck.

On May 18, 1941, Bismarck was on its first mission when it was sunk by the Allies. Out of the 2,100 crew members, only 115 men and one cat survived.

⁣ The HMS Cossack scooped up the cat and gave him the name Oscar. For the next few months, Oscar lived on the ship until it was hit by torpedoes from a German U-boat, which killed 159 crew members but not Oscar, who was brought to the shores of Gibraltar by the remaining survivors.⁣

Oscar was soon transferred to the HMS Ark Royal, where he was given the name "Unsinkable Sam". Ironically, the Ark Royal was heavily involved in the sinking of the Bismarck. After a series of near misses, the ship had garnered a reputation for being a "lucky ship", however, its luck would soon run out.

On November 14, 1941, the Ark Royal was torpedoed by a U-boat, causing it to roll over and sink. Sam was found clinging to a piece of wood and was described as "angry, but quite unharmed".⁣ ⁣

The sinking of the Ark Royal ended Sam's career at sea, and he lived out his remaining years in Belfast with a seaman until 1955.⁣ ⁣

[Valerie @vjkehr]

Interesting! I'm glad we didn't stick with zumzy-zan 😆👍

[The Cultural Tutor @culturaltutor]

What the hell is an ampersand and why does it look like that?!

The first thing you need to know is that "&" used to be the 27th letter of the alphabet...

But there are three parts to this story. And the first begins over two thousand years ago in Ancient Rome with a single word: et. It's the Latin for "and". At some point Roman scribes started combining the two letters of et into a single symbol, which was the ancestor of our modern &.

The earliest example of the "et" symbol is actually from graffiti in Pompeii. In any case, it did not disappear with the fall of the Roman Empire.

Latin survived as the language of the Catholic Church and of scholarship in Medieval Europe. Scribes during the Dark Ages continued to use the & symbol. It evolved down the centuries, in places losing any semblance of the letters e and t whatsoever.

The second part of the story is that during the 18th and 19th centuries, as education and the teaching of literacy spread, & was added to the end of the alphabet as a sort of 27th letter.

On a related note, although "et cetera" is now usually just abbreviated as etc., for a long time it was instead abbreviated as "&c". The & was for et and the c for cetera.

The third and final part of the story is about how the alphabet was taught to children — and how it was read out loud.

As this 1822 Glossary of Words and Phrases explains, it had been normal during the Renaissance, when speaking the alphabet, to add "per se" before any letter which could also be a word on its own — "per se" means "by itself" in Latin.

Take the letter A, which can also be a word of its own. When reading out the alphabet people would say "A, per se A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, per se I..." and so on. O was also considered a word of its own.

Which means, when people got to the end of the alphabet, with & being the 27th letter, they would say: "S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z, and per se &."

When this old way of reading the alphabet was taught to children in the 18th century and they were reciting it aloud, they would garble "and per se " into what eventually became... ampersand.

A Dic­tion­ary of Slang and Col­lo­quial Eng­lish from 1905 relates some of the many other pronunciations school children apparently came up with:

"Am­persand. The sign &; am­persand. Vari­ants: Ann Passy Ann; an­pasty; an­dpassy; an­parse; aper­sie; per-se; am­passy; am-passy-ana; am­pene-and; am­pus-and; ampsyand; am­pazad; am­siam; am­pus-end; ap­perse-and; em­per­siand; am­perzed; and zumzy-zan."

Well, of all the many pronunciations that might have stuck, it was "ampersand" which came to be accepted and is now the official name for &... rather than zumzy-zan. So, from hurried Roman scribes to unruly school children, that's where "&" came from.

[Valerie @vjkehr]

This is delightful ❤️

[World Bird Sanctuary @WBSSTL]

#mrcootoons #artsybirdsquad