No worries, I’ll try to succinctly explain (it’s 5:08 AM here and I need sleep).
It’s not so much about efficiency. Calling me “a man with mental illness” trivializes the experience and makes it sound like you can separate the malady from my person. You can’t. Being, as in my case, bipolar and obsessive-compulsive is part and parcel of my life.
“I could care less” is an idiom, a set of words that is somehow beyond the sum of its constituents. It’s apples and oranges with the preceding.
Person-first language. IT SUCKS. Don’t use it. I am not “a man with mental illness”, I am “a mentally ill man”.
“X language has no word for Y, so they can’t think about it!” Wrong. Language has ways of adapting to gaps. Sometimes they make up phrases or circumlocute; other times, they straight-up borrow the word. You could perfectly well take some language with 300 speakers in the rainforest in Brazil and talk about quantum physics, though they’d need to invent or borrow quite a bit of vocabulary to do it (but the point is, it can be done in the first place). The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is basically false in its strong form. (There is evidence for a weak form holding, with particular reference to color terminology and Guguu Yimidhirr’s famed real-space orientation).
Despite what Twitter and Tumblr tell you, nobody who’s in the demographic actually likes “Latinx” or similar “-x” forms in practice. The people who shout about this ignore that Indo-European languages have had strategies for mixed or indeterminate gender for thousands of years—they would simply use the masculine as a default. The masculine/feminine dichotomy isn’t even thought to have been the original situation in Indo-European: The Anatolian languages evince an older system that was more strictly animate/inanimate, with feminines deriving from some sort of collectivizing suffix (I’m somewhat hazy on the details of this).
“Can I do X?” “I don’t know, can you?” Piss off! “Can” has acquired a secondary definition relating to permission; this is, cross-linguistically, unsurprising and it’s not clever asking them to rephrase. It’s obnoxious.
English isn’t the only Anglic language! Off the top of my head I can think of Scots (not Scottish Gaelic, something entirely different) and Yola. Fingallian also appears to be Anglic.
Arabic and Chinese are often considered single languages, but the situation is akin to Latin and Romance. Modern Standard Arabic and Mandarin are artificial standards, the dialects being highly divergent, so the standards are used to facilitate things generally. (When I was in college I took a few semesters of Arabic and ustaaz, my professor, was from Cairo. He told us once that he was in a room with a Jordanian and a Moroccan and the Moroccan spoke his dialectal Arabic. The Jordanian had to ask ustaaz to translate.)
Yes, it is the Christian ideal of donating 10% of your earnings. In the history of English, “m” or “n” sounds were deleted before fricative consonants (like “s”, “z”, or “th” for example), which is why we say us rather than uns. It’s also why we would normally have said tithe as opposed to tenth. However, on the basis of other numbers (fourth, fifth, sixth), the word for “tenth” was re-formed. Tithe survives in specialized form because that was how it was often used.
Trying to go back to an Ur-language is a fool’s errand. I personally consider it a moot question, though I admit my religious views impact this; even with that said, it’s not really a serious topic of scholarship for many reasons. It’s not even clear that the main major language families share a common origin—a few proposals have attracted serious scholarship (Indo-Uralic, Dené-Yeniseian), but there’s not much in terms of respected research or consensus.
Pretty much any of mine, including but not limited to:
You heard about that recent study trying to say that Indo-European speakers came from Anatolia? Classic case of people from another subject of study thinking their own experience and conventions transfer across fields. The dataset is supposedly very good but their theoretical framework and conclusions aren’t.
Your language isn’t the world’s oldest/first language.
That includes Sanskrit. It isn’t the Ur-language either. Sorry not sorry.
Neither is Albanian.
Nor Arabic.
Or Tamil.
Turkish neither.
Not all languages came from Latin—in fact, most didn’t. It’s a quirk of history that Romance (and Indo-European generally) spread so far and wide
Indo-European language theory is correct regardless of whether you choose to believe it.
Russia may be Satan’s dacha, but that doesn’t change the fact that Russian is a real language (and a Slavic one, to boot). Also, when I cite George Shevelov, you don’t get to write him off as a propagandist; he is Ukrainian, not Russian (somebody tried to do that to me last weekend, refusing to even consider the idea because his last name looks Russian).
Black people (or whatever minority of your choice) don’t speak “bad English” or whatever other language. African-American Vernacular English in particular is a well-studied lect—a language variety—with a ton of scholarship behind it; it isn’t arbitrary (“he eating” and “he be eating” have different meanings/connotations; they don’t just drop words for no reason—there’s logic to it).
“I could care less” is an idiom. The fact that it is so widely used and understood makes it a part of proper English. That’s the yardstick in linguistics: The crowd tends to win. (Or do the complainants never say things like “I read it a million times” or “it was a billion degrees out and humid”?)
Words like “supposably”, “liberry”, “expresso”, and “conversate” are analogically extended forms. Sound change and grammar change happen all the time. If you have issues with them, you will have issues with “tenth” (the original form of this word, tithe, survived as a specialized form), “snuck” (sneak is originally a weak verb, not a strong one), or “messenger” and “passenger” (analogy with challenger).
BONUS ROUND: The Armenian genocide DID HAPPEN. I was quite smugly told by a Turkish nationalist to “read the court case” as I was wrong…in which case THE JUDGES AGREED THAT IT HAPPENED and were only concerned with whether the right to deny history exists. I also got libeled as a racist “Cizvit” (“Jesuit”) for some reason. Same guy tried to pull the “Turkish is the mother of all languages” card, even saying that Native American languages came from Turkish. (Which is facially implausible. North American languages are often front-loading whereas Turkic likes to suffix.)
Linguistics.
A stupefying proportion of what mass media and everyday people think they know about linguistics and languages is wrong. Unfortunately, they do not appreciate corrections.
Yes. Got bumped to a quality control position, disliked it and made a lot of errors; I hit the brakes myself.
I’m also never going to become management if I can help it.
> mental illness has entered the chat
Seroquel—and even then I still feel crazy a lot of the time.
“I’m all right.”
Holy fuck dude. Holy FUCK. “Some [B]lack people”?
Change your profile pic to the Stars and Bars. You are minimizing the very real and tragic effects of racism to win social justice points. I have no words.
Everybody bandies around the word “fascism”, but un-personing people is fascism.
Since you brought up the Star Wars comparison…ironic, that they were so quick to see fascism in others but were so blind to it in themselves.
Like I said above: Mobs lynched Black people.
Mobs lynched Black people. You call that a “proven track record”?
That’s mob mentality.
Cancel culture.
It exists. Ask any man falsely accused of rape, sexual assault, or generally being a creep.
News flash: Turnabout is fair play. Don’t come crying to me when you offend the Groupmind and get persona non grata’d.
You can do the right thing for the wrong reasons.
Happiness/wanting to continue living. I’m bipolar. I don’t get to feel that way often.
Meshuggah – “Clockworks”