There’s a relevant bit in The Player of Games from The Culture series. It purports that the book you’re reading is actually translated from the original Marain (in-universe language), and has been adapted suitably:

Still with me?

Little textual note for you here (bear with me).

Those of you unfortunate enough not to be reading or hearing this in Marain may well be using a language without the requisite number or type of personal pronouns, so I’d better explain that bit of the translation.

Marain, the Culture’s quintessentially wonderful language (so the Culture will tell you), has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, drones, Minds, other sentient machines, and every life-form capable of scraping together anything remotely resembling a nervous system and the rudiments of language (or a good excuse for not having either). Naturally, there are ways of specifying a person’s sex in Marain, but they’re not used in everyday conversation; in the archetypal language-as-moral-weapon-and-proud-of-it, the message is that it’s brains that matter, kids; gonads are hardly worth making a distinction over.

So, in what follows, Gurgeh is quite happily thinking about the Azadians just as he’d think about any other (see list above)… But what of you, O unlucky, possibly brutish, probably ephemeral and undoubtedly disadvantaged citizen of some unCultured society, especially those unfairly (and the Azadians would say under-) endowed with only the mean number of genders?!

How shall we refer to the triumvirate of Azadian sexes without resorting to funny-looking alien terms or gratingly awkward phrases not-words?

…. Rest at ease; I have chosen to use the natural and obvious pronouns for male and female, and to represent the intermediates - or apices - with whatever pronominal term best indicates their place in their society, relative to the existing sexual power-balance of yours. In other words, the precise translation depends on whether your own civilisation (for let us err on the side of terminological generosity) is male or female dominated.

(Those which can fairly claim to be neither will of course have their own suitable term.)

Anyway, enough of that.

Kind of a combination of skull and open mouth emojis

Some background on this comic:

Transcript:

Another example of when a cartoon’s intent was lost on a lot of people. Very simply, I just meant that we all look a little longer and harder at things that fall upon our particular interests.

Interestingly, different in The Complete Far Side:

I think the joke is that the vibrator is being recommended for use by not the person with hysteria. Something like:

Person: Vet, my pet bird won’t stop screeching!

Vet: Here’s some tylenol

Person: But birds can’t have tylenol

Vet: It’s not for the bird

Note, I have no idea if birds can have tylenol or not, just an example. The humor comes from subverted expectations around who the doctor is recommending remedies for. It’s not a great joke, but I don’t think it was meant to be specifically gendered.

You might be interested in browsing through this site:

https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/

It talks about a lot of sci fi tropes from a hard science perspective, and goes over FTL specifically:

https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/fasterlight.php

It’s kind of a downer site in some respects because it does a lot of “here’s why your favorite sci fi series is unrealistic”, but in that discussion there’s a lot of looking at interesting tropes and concepts. There’s also a good explainer for FTL specifically here:

https://www.physicsmatt.com/blog/2016/8/25/why-ftl-implies-time-travel

Not really sure. “This is X, where the magic happens” is a phrase you hear during a tour, but it’s not really clear why he’s doing a tour of his house like that.

You think the doctor’s being old-fashioned and diagnosing hysteria, but he’s actually recommending the vibrator as stress relief to the husband instead of the wife.

Are you thinking it’s a normal-sized shoe, shown from the perspective of near the viewer? I interpreted it as a giant shoe, aimed at the wolf.

I posted some related commentary of his recently in another thread. The relevant bit:

Mr. Pembrose (I have no idea where this name came from. In general, I just try to match characters with names that “feel right.”)

Whoops, thanks. Reposted at https://discuss.online/post/42169450

Some background on this comic:

Transcript (sketch):

"Egad… My Kerchief, My monogrammed hand handkerchief! I’ve left it behind… They’ll know it was me!

Transcript (comment):

I changed my mind about the approach to this cartoon and drew it instead from the perspective of the police. And the only name I could think of for the handkerchief was King Kong. There just aren’t too many famous monsters running around with first and last names.

It’s making fun of what boomers would find funny, so it’s kind of an intentionally shitty joke, and the meta humor is what they’re really trying for. The shitty non-meta joke is about boomers making a big meme out of millenials loving avocados too much. See here for some background on that:

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/avocado-toast

Avocado Toast is a food featuring avocado fruit spread over bread. The term became a popular reference and in-joke for millennials after an article about millionaire Tim Gurner featured a quote from him saying he got rich by saving and not spending money on frivolous things such as avocado toast. Since the article, millennials joke about their poverty by referencing all the avocado toast they have supposedly purchased.

Sorry, not a good fit for the community. Politics is generally off-topic here

Some context on this comic:

Transcript:

This cartoon about Mr. Pembrose evidently left a fair number of people wondering what in God’s name was going on here.

Mr. Pembrose (I have no idea where this name came from. In general, I just try to match characters with names that “feel right.”), from whatever circumstances in his life have rendered him such, is only an eye. (Yes, that’s supposed to be an eyeball resting on the couch―the image all but vanished after size reduction.) And who wouldn’t have more than a little anger toward the world if ending up as an eye was the card life dealt them?

OK, maybe it doesn’t work.

I think it’s slightly more specific, “What if a neurosurgeon operated like a barbershop?”, but yeah that’s the gist of it.

Here’s a comparison between French and Swedish on a random news story of the day:

https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2026/06/22/le-premier-ministre-britannique-keir-starmer-annonce-sa-demission_6706580_3210.html

Keir Starmer annonce sa démission de son poste de premier ministre du Royaume-Uni

https://www.svt.se/nyheter/utrikes/keir-starmer-avgar-som-storbritanniens-premiarminister

Keir Starmer avgår som Storbritanniens premiärminister

I can tell it’s about Keir Starmer and being a prime minister, but nothing beyond that (annonce = announce, but that doesn’t help). The French one is a bit worse IMO because of false cognates. He decommissions his son from the post of prime minister of the royal university? I translated it and I was way off. Looked at a few others, and I can see cognates after I translate them to English, but it’s not something I would be able to figure out just by reading it.

Some context on this comic:

Transcription:

I’ve discovered an interesting phenomenon. Once you’ve drawn Rocky the Flying Squirrel, you can never draw him again. In the final version, I must have drawn and erased that miserable little rodent fifty times, and he ultimately ended up looking like Rocky the Flying Hamster.

I tried translating the sentence to French with a machine translator and it came up with this:

L’hiver rigoureux approche, une tempête de neige va s’abattre. Viens te réfugier dans ma maison bien chauffée, mon ami. Bienvenue ! Viens ici, chante et danse, mange et bois. Voilà ce que j’ai prévu. Nous avons de l’eau, de la bière et du lait tout frais de la vache. Oh, et de la soupe bien chaude !

I would understand “bière” and “soupe” out of all that, I think. There’s cognates in there like mansion/maison, but they’re spelled/pronounced differently enough that I don’t think they’d help.

Generally not, but it’d be interesting to explore how long of an intentionally-constructed text could be considered mutually intelligible. Here’s an example for Germanic languages:

https://linguifex.com/wiki/Literature%3AThe_cold_winter_is_near

The cold winter is near is an example text for Germanic languages written by YouTuber King Ming Lam. It aims to use as much partially or completely mutually intelligible vocabulary between North and West Germanic languages to construct a text that can be understood, if vaguely, by any speaker of a mainstream Germanic language, such as English or German.

Here’s the English text:

The cold winter is near, a snowstorm will come. Come in my warm house, my friend. Welcome! Come here, sing and dance, eat and drink. That is my plan. We have water, beer, and milk fresh from the cow. Oh, and warm soup!

To me, Norwegian is the closest to intelligible as a native English speaker:

Den kalde vinteren er nær, en snøstorm vil komme. Kom inn i mitt varme hus, min venn. Velkommen! Kom her, syng og dans, et og drikk. Dette er min plan. Vi har vann, øl og melk fersk fra kua. Åh, og varm suppe!

I’ve also seen that Frisian is supposed to be most understandable to an English speaker, or at least most historically related. Here’s some samples of that:

• English: The boy stroked the girl about the chin and kissed her on the cheeks.
• Saterland Frisian: Die Wänt strookede dät Wucht uum ju Keeuwe un oapede hier ap do Sooken.
• North Frisian (Mooring dialect): Di dreng aide dåt foomen am dåt kan än mäket har aw da siike.
• North Frisian (Söl’ring dialect): Di Dreeng strekt dit faamen om’t Ken en taatjet höör üp di Sjaken
• West Frisian: De jonge streake it famke om it kin en tute har op 'e wangen.
• Gronings: t Jong fleerde t wicht om kinne tou en smokte heur op wange.
• East Frisian Low Saxon: De Fent straktde dat Wicht um’t Kinn to un tuutjede hör up de Wangen.
• German: Der Junge streichelte das Mädchen ums Kinn und küsste sie auf die Wangen.
• Dutch: De jongen streelde het meisje langs haar kin en kuste haar op de wangen.
• Afrikaans: Die seun streel die meisie oor haar ken en soen haar op die wange.
• Danish: Drengen strøg pigen på hagen og kyssede hende på kinderne.
• Icelandic: Drengurinn strauk stúlkunni um hökuna og kyssti hana á kinnarnar.
• Norwegian (Bokmål): Gutten strøk jenta på haken og kysset henne på kinnene.
• Norwegian (Nynorsk): Guten strauk jenta på haka og kyssa henne på kinna.
• Swedish: Pojken strök flickan över hakan och kysste henne på kinderna.