I'm sure verbing nouns is what all the cool kids do these days, but that doesn't make it acceptable English, living language or no. An expression is a noun, expressing something is an action.

I have never in my life heard pejorative used that way, and this word is no stranger to me. A pejorative is a word or expression, specifically one that worsens the noun it acts on - hence the Latin root: peiorare ("make worse") I'll totally cop to looking that up.

You meant to say "You can hate it all you want, that's your derogatory expression"? I'll be honest, I don't follow. Apparently I am not alone.

A helium balloon does not float because it has negative weight. It floats in air because of the buoyancy force acting on it is stronger than the force of gravity. In a vacuum a helium balloon would drop like an anvil (much like the Apollo video of dropping a feather and an hammer on the moon and their hitting the…

Whether they rape other inmates remains to be seen.

I should also add, if milk is a serious problem letting your tea cool also reduces the absorption of tannins. That said, a drop of milk is all you really need.

It's the lactose in the milk that binds to the tannins, so I don't think the soy milk would do it.

A drop of milk in hot black tea with neutralize the tannins in your black tea, so they can't be absorbed by the tissue in your throat and increase your likelihood of throat cancer. England is the only tea drinking population that doesn't have an increased incidence of throat cancer - because they traditionally (read…

Fair enough. This was as it was told me me when I was a scout pre-1999 and I saw no reason to doubt it.

Donatello was undoubtedly the best turtle to play in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project.

Yes, UK scouts can be gay. The World Scouting Organization has had a policy of inclusiveness for decades now. You'll also note there are girl scouts there too. That the BSA has not adopted such a policy is why the USA hasn't hosted a World Scouting Jamboree and won't until the BSA becomes inclusive.

I see a few disconnects between our thinking on this - the first of which is whether or not the guys were doing something wrong. Adria may not have liked it, but we've seen a lot of people say they have cracked immature jokes in a professional setting. That doesn't make is right, but I haven't been convinced that it…

I think it's a mistake to think anyone is trying to be unreasonable, but obviously mileage varies as there is no universal rubric for what is reasonable. Also, having read the apology from one of the guys, he certainly doesn't come across as a douche bag in the apology or the following conversation. I've got pretty…

It doesn't seem fair to me to compare this to a rape case; even sexual harassment seems like a stretch.

This really supports my on going contention that women (i.e. nurses) already in the room made medicine and therefore chemistry more welcoming to women, whereas physics and engineering hasn't had that benefit and therefore much lower parity. I'm not sure why math has such good parity though.

No, that was last Christmas, as my Latvian in-laws watched the Russian news. My Russian is really bad so I couldn't follow much, but the themes were pretty apparent (except for those couple of days when they were covering an airplane crash).

From what I gather, when you live in Russia mostly you hear about how much it sucks elsewhere.

Sure, I mean, what do you do with stale bread? You feed it to birds. The birds fly away, so they have an accelerated frame of reference compared to the woman who can't move quickly because she's old. It's science!

+1 for general relativity usage.

Hmm, not sure I'm with Tracy on this one. We acknowledge that society conditions women to be self-conscious about their appearance and place far too much emphasis on it. So, it's not surprising that some women react badly when a loved says something that feeds those anxieties. A husband likely has some idea how his…