It’s called a dummy pronoun.
Showerthoughts
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
wow, rude.
Funny. In French, we call it a “pronom impersonnel”, meaning non-personal pronoun.
It's the sky that's snowing, skys snow, sometimes they rain.
Is this just my left brain?
It's raining. It's cold outside. It is the case.
'It's raining' must refer to the same it as the one in 'it rains'. From that we can gather that the entity referred by 'it' must be quite capable as it can do the raining as well as be raining. However 'It's cold outside' could refer to the air as in the air is cold outside. Similarly the 'it' in 'it is the case' needs some context in a prior sentence or something else in the real world otherwise the sentence doesn't make sense.
The sentence does make sense, because all the speakers understand what it means. The context is implied, as another commenter linked to.
Which sentence do you mean?
the one you were talking about not making sense: "it is the case"
you're both kinda agreeing on the same thing, whatever the "it" is, is understood through context. which when you lack said context, the sentence becomes nonsensical
"It raining" only makes sense if it's Bubba saying it. In which case he means "It is raining." He just doesn't speak English well.
"It raining, y'all!" - Bubba
The reality of outside is snowing
“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
I kinda of disagree with this as I always felt it refers to Time or the event frame of time
That somehow feels right. I still kind of want some phrase that you could substitute for it though. The most correct feeling thing I could think of are seasons as in 'the summer rains'. But from a logical standpoint a concept that is defined by humans producing something material doesn't really make sense since a concept isn't material.
It really becomes time that it's been made clear about that! It's unbelievable that it took so long for someone to call out that it's the time the It is referring to!
(Now I wait for some nerd to clear up each reference point because I only wrote that because I had the first two parte in my head when I reset your reply!)
Whether it's cold or whether it's hot, there will be weather, weather or not.
Snow is god scratching his dandruff onto us and rain is him pissing 😌🙏 hope this helps
True but why is this flagged nsfw
Sry. Activated by accident
Downvoted for stupid NSFW tag
They are from the Lemmynsfw instance. Probably automatically applied to any post coming from that instance.
I think I just fat fingered it
It puts the lotion on its skin.