"More than five million children under age 13 signed up for Facebook this year, according to Consumer Reports estimates"? Sigh. No. FB has that many children using it this year. Not that signed up this year. (NYT: "This year, Consumer Reports estimated that Facebook had more than five million children under age 13.")

I think there is a legal issue here because exposing yourself in a sexual manner to a child is child abuse. He is a little monster too, of course...his youth doesn't exempt him from responsibility even though it mitigates it.

Your "this is obviously the guy they're fucking" (or whatever) comment *was* pretty awesome.

I kind of buy Singapore at the top of the list, given that the govt had this video produced in an attempt to encourage the population to fuck.

I work in philosophy of language... so on the internetz I just get drunk.

Hahaha. That's the only decent thing I've read all day.

That's a pet peeve of mine as well. I can survive (or fail to survive) any attempt to kill me, but most rapes don't involve attempted murder. (That said, rape, depending on the age of the victim and whether or not foreign objects were used, can be deadly regardless of the perpetrator's intentions, and in those sorts…

Looking back at this, I agree with you that the etymological fallacy is probably at play — it seems the most likely reason why they don't want to accept two distinct senses of "phobia" as a suffix — the medicalized one and the colloquial one where we attach it to all sorts of things we don't like. I was thinking too…

That was added after I wrote my comment, and I appreciate it!

I think it's a broader notion than you think it is. You think of it as a loser in some battle between establishment and progress; in fact, language progresses through leaps and jumps. Did AP actually say "rather preserve them under their etymological meanings"? If so, that is rather silly and awful. But no more awful…

"Prescriptivism," as an activity which seems to be how you see it, can be an attempt to stabilize a language...in that case I think it will take a generation to tell if the attempt was or was not "out of touch" — whatever that means. Out of touch with whom? Can it be racist and classist? Sure. So? Who cares? If you…

Actually, "prescriptivists" are as organic a part of the evolution of language as common language-users. Why should they "stop" instead of being themselves part of the development of English? In any case, "ethnic cleansing" is a term of art, and one can fight for or against the medicalized sense of "phobia."

"Genocide" is, among other things, a legal term defined in the UN Genocide Convention — if something is labeled genocide it creates obligations in UN member states. So of course the word "genocide" must have a definition — how else does one know if something is or isn't genocide except by seeing if events meets…

I thought the term "ethnic cleansing" originated during the wars in the former Yugoslavia. It was coined by the Nazis?!

What? Do you know others who share your view?

I LOVE YOU.

Ethnic cleansing is not the same thing as genocide.

Ugh. Ok. "Minthorn continued"? Who is Minthorn? Someone writing in the Style Book? Generally when one says "continued" the person has been mentioned before, explicitly. I get the sense that because of the paywall, the Style Book hasn't been looked at by the author of this piece. Or were we supposed to read the…

Your response confuses me. Rape fantasies are common, of course. And also of course women who have them tend to know that the reality of rape is different. That's precisely why I thought this statement must be a joke: "I'm almost positive I wouldn't want to be raped IRL." The key word here is ALMOST. Almost positive?…

Exactly. I have rape fantasies too. My problem is with "almost" in "I'm almost positive I wouldn't want to be raped IRL." I thought it would be obvious that that was the objectionable part.