I know it's a matter of personal preference, but I just don't get that same feeling. It looks chintzy in a way that modern cars just don't.

I agree that there's less experimentation nowadays, but I feel like an alien when people praise the aesthetics of the 70s as self-evidently good.

Sorry if I'm explaining a hypothesis you already considered. I definitely sympathize with you on being an ignored expert!

I ran into this a lot in trying to figure out why prescriptivist grammar books were so popular when they were written by non-experts, and no one wanted to listen to linguists.

Then when it comes time to find an expert for someone's show, they look at you and them. They realize you might have nuance or views that clash with the non-experts, whereas this other guy will say the same thing as always and our non-expert audience will nod along.

My pet hypothesis: it's mostly that actual experts don't say what people want to hear, and expertise is getting harder to assess. There's too much unvetted and PR media out there that any sufficiently brazen person can reach the critical mass of appearances to be considered an expert.

At least Glenn Beck pretended to be contrite on his fake apology tour. Carlson just keeps on doing this "they changed, I didn't" schtick and a certain set of people let him use them for free.

Headline: "The power of verbs (and why you should never use an adverb)", but I've crossed out the adverb "never"

Well OK, if you insist

Same here. I swear more now, but with teaching I try not to say obscene things even in my personal life so I don't accidentally say bad things around students. Geography matters for swearing for sure, but religion/class/culture matter more, and geographic effects will be washed out by those big ones

Couldn't agree more. I want to look at their data so I can say "this is methodologically bad", but by me looking they already got their engagement. Damned if you do, but maybe only darned if you don't.

He's not even a Democrat! He's an adult convert whose strongest principle is not paying his child support!

I misunderstood Tobias Funke as a gullible rube when he said "No, it never works. I mean, these people somehow delude themselves into thinking it might, but ... But it might work for us."

Now I see he was a hard-nosed realist and I was the fool.

It's interesting how people pushing for an end to a genocide and a fair distribution of wealth are gullible rubes tricked into supporting policies that can't work. As opposed to Reform voters, whose "kick out all the immigrants to save the country" policy is currently failing spectacularly in the US

Thanks for reading this and sharing it. It was a very welcome blood boil for my afternoon.

I can't believe they used hundreds of words to express what old men have been saying for generations, using only 12 words: "If you don't smile more, how will you ever get a husband?"

This is one of the most disrespectful passages I've ever seen written about a normal person. The authors can't mention a single thing about this woman without a "look how fucking stupid she is" sneer about it. And then they imply *she* is the sociopath by comparing her to manosphere creeps. Christ!

In fact, wasn't that what tax rates were like during (the early years of) the Cold War? If the whole goal is to get back to the Cold War, shouldn't we be historically accurate on the whole thing?

What’s the point of being right? Published writing is generally supposed to follow rules of ‘correct’ grammar and usage. These rules appear in style guides and other manuals, in the stern rebukes of English teachers, in the media diatribes of grammar pundits, and in the blood-red mark-ups of copy editors. But these sources never entirely agree on what all the rules are, and (as every pedant glumly knows) huge numbers of people ignore them. So how do readers really react to ‘common mistakes’? Are all those rules truly helpful if they don’t match the audience’s expectations – or can they waste our time and even lead us astray? And how can writers, editors and others do the right thing when it’s not so clear-cut what rightness is?

My #EnglishGrammarDay talk is "What's the point of being right?" Others are on: dictionaries & offensive language; HG Wells & the evolution of grammar; a curious case of adverb formation; the language of K-Pop fan communities; grammar in the school curriculum. Just £15!
www.ucl.ac.uk/arts-humanit...

Unfortunately, that paper framed the analysis really badly (trying to explain the results in terms of formal syntax instead of pragmatics) and it never went anywhere. I keep thinking I ought to try to get some students interested in a follow-up study. I wish I weren't an ocean away from your talk!

Ooh, that looks interesting! I didn't know you were working on a book on this topic. I've been thinking about the psycholinguistics of nonstandard forms for forever now, but especially since I read a draft paper on people's processing of unexpected gender-neutral "they".

There is a lot of good to be found in religion, contra the New Atheists. The vindictive premillennial dispensationalism that has taken over as the semi-official religion of the US, with the support of sedevacantist adult Catholic converts, is as soulless and empty as an AI Jesus.

My mom, who is an older white lady with blond hair, gets mistaken for a Trump supporter sometimes, and when someone looks for her support for anti-immigrant policies or the like, she just says "Oh, I'm a Christian, so I can't support that", and it's both effective and true.

Apparently I, an atheist, find these Mess-AI-hs far more blasphemous than (some) believers apparently do. If I believed in the vengeful God that many American evangelicals profess to believe in, I'd be preparing myself for a smiting for claiming to get my computer to speak for Him.

"It was a great idea, someone other than me screwed it up, I'll leave it to the people we killed to fix it, and they'll probably screw it up. Basically, I'm the only person coming out of this looking good."

The purpose of a country is what it does. We have seen that the US can elect a Trump and can do Trump things and therefore world stability needs our power to be curbed in some way to avoid that. It doesn't matter that you or I wouldn't do bad things because we can't stop the US from doing bad things

🇰🇭 Cambodia unveils statue for mine-sniffing hero rat

Cambodia unveils a statue of the landmine-hunting rat, Magawa, the only rat ever awarded the PDSA Gold Medal for animal bravery.

People forget that laws are assessed by weight. That's why Justice is depicted holding scales.

Worse, we've seen what happened to Mahmoud Khalil and others. As an international student, the second you protest wrong, or for the wrong thing, you're food for ICE.

So if you're complaining about the lack of students protesting, I ask: would you risk that? And if you would, why aren't you?

College is so expensive that our students NEED to leave with a degree to feel like they have any chance of getting out of debt. Threatening them with expulsion for protesting is terrifying. This isn't the 60s; you can't afford to get kicked out.

It turns out that if you massively suppress protests you don't agree with, you're not going to get protests anymore, even for the things you want students to protest. That's the whole lesson here. You don't need to read this hand-wringing "no, no, it's the children's fault".

I think a lot comes down to identity. The Sensible Centrists know that the lefty side of a political argument is usually the morally correct one, so they need to identify as the furthest left a reasonable person can go - i.e., the maximally moral position. Anyone to their left is an affront to that.

Essentialism is arguably behind otherwise liberal people's embrace of The Bell Curve, of transphobia, of all kinds of stereotyping and biases. "Race science" and scientific racism thrive on it. And not only is it demonstrably untrue, this researcher found that you can teach people why it's wrong!