EtymOnline states "used in reference to metaphors, hyperbole, etc., even by writers like Dryden and Pope, to indicate "what follows must be taken in the strongest admissible sense" (1680s)", unfortunately with a bit of uncharacteristic prescriptivism not fitting a linguist, but whatcha gonna do. That's where I got the…

What a terrible person they were. If you can't still enjoy Highlights when you're 28, what joy is there left in this bleak world?

/aɪ pi eɪ ɔɹ gɛt aʊt/

It's been used that way for literally three hundred and fifty years. At this point, if anyone is "forcing" anything, it's the people whining about how it supposedly can't be used as an intensifier (while they go on their merry way using "really" (derived from "real"), "very" (derived from the same roots as "verily",…

I... don't know what I expected.

Jumping on the "there I am!" bandwagon. Kinda hard to see due to the angle, but I'm up there, somewhere, just south of the Saginaw Bay. Hello, self!

4 out of 5 are visible, that's pretty much all of them. (even if Lake Superior is the, ahem, superior one. Of course Michigan and Huron are lovely too, in the right places, but Superior is just so gorgeous...)

Only special magic rays blessed by a rabbi will do, and for maximum effectiveness, the rabbi should be at least 50 years of age, speak Russian, and enjoy mystery novels.

He has a secret twin brother that Clara hooks up with!

Well, Uzzah got struck down for touching the Ark of the Covenant, because he wasn't a Kohathite (one of a particular family of Levites whose responsibility it was to carry the ark), I think.

Some linguists claim that, but it's not a widely accepted theory.

Some linguists claim that, but it's not a widely accepted theory.

I may not have said that very clearly... it's not that it's impossible Frisian is doing this, it's impossible that any language is doing this. I mean, there's stuff like creoles, there's cultures that adopt new languages wholesale, there's massive waves of borrowing (see Japanese and English for that one), but to…

It's a nice idea, but it's not really true. Languages don't stop changing. What people probably mean when they make this claim is that certain American dialects preserved some features of earlier English dialects that most other modern dialects have lost, but they've still kept right on changing. They just didn't…

Huh, that has the population drop happening a fair bit later than I think it's usually stated.

but but if the Dark Ages didn't exist and it turns out that literature was actually preserved in that time period by religious people (Catholic monks and Muslim scholars), how can I justify despising all religious people now????

At least they didn't claim people spoke Old English back then... if I had a penny for every time I've argued with someone who genuinely believed Shakespeare was Old English, I would... probably have about ten cents, but it feels like more.

Yes, the Turkic languages are actually in their own Turkic language family!

Scots is often considered a dialect of English, it's true, but seeing as it's not mutually intelligible with most dialects of English, linguists frequently classify it as a language.

The article states, and I quote, "as part of her Stand Still. Stay Silent webcomic, she's illustrated the family trees of Indo-European and Uralic languages", so I'm not sure how the article could possibly make it more clear that as a part of the webcomic, the artist chose to illustrate only the Indo-European and…