Il Signorino Giuseppe (age 3) was wandering around singing the elephant march song afterward.

Dawes was excited to get to write the songs for this too!

A New Zealander or a hairy fruit?

It will include a patter-song Works Cited and it will be amazing.

Weren’t “Friend Like Me” and “Bare Necessities” in the film? I’ven’t seen it, but they’re both on the soundtrack.

*defeat
*Hun

I cannot recommend highly enough The Stories of English by David Crystal.

But it really messed up in “The Devils Hands are Idle Playthings” in its analysis of irony!

They’re free to say “PBS’ funding threatened by Executive Order” but I’m still gonna hurt a little every time I see it.

I first read this as a “pop-UP sciënce book” and was loving the idea of someöne post-High-School reading a pop-up book.

Interesting. I diäerese (nice verb!) when the two vowels are pronounced separately, which is easy to see in, e.g., “theory” vs. “theöretical.” But in “opinion” the two vowels could be said to be separate, i.e. the “i” is pronounced as palatalization on the “n” and the “o” is pronounced as a schwa. Sort of the way I…

Are you saying that of
1) Me like to swim
2) Me and Henry like to swim
These sentences are equally ungrammatical? That you can imagine no native speaker producing either one?

Oh yes. I was tryïng to not even get into those points, but I’m with you there too.

I do think language gets worse, but that’s my personal opinion, not sciëntific one. I hate every time I hear “I wish I would’ve/would have known” in place of my “I wish I’d/I had known,” but I know that there’s no sciëtific basis, and would never try to correct someöne, except perhaps a non-native speaker, depending…

You’re saying that English teachers who teach the standard diäect are imaginary? I would say that even those who teach it as a black+white right vs. wrong issue exist, and I’ve known some of them and been taught be others, but those who teach it in any way are, like, all English teachers, right?

Even as someöne with a doctorate in theöretical linguistics, I think those people shouldn’t go away. There is a social (and thus, economic) advantage to beïng able to speak and write in the Standard diälect. But it’s important to approach it that some of those who cannot speak the Standard variëty are native speakers…

You’ve heard about religious “passion of a convert” right? ESL speakers are the same way! Since ESL (and other XSL) teachers are the most justified prescriptivists in the world, ESL (and XSL) learners are in a prescriptivist environment for a long time. Just think about how well covered the French language changes…

My English class experiënce (I haven’t taken a single English class since High School) is entirely reading books and analyzing them, along with the vocabulary from those books. i’d’ve loved more linguistic history, and taught a lot of it as soon as I had free rein to teach a course I wanted.

Oh certainly not. Point against me for poor argumentation, then. The case is that the majority of speakers produce sentences like (3) and (4), and a good model for language should account for that those are allowed and (1) is totally ungrammatical.

I like this metaphor. But the airplane/airline/pilot/passengers… everybody believes in and accounts for gravity in their model. This is the equivalent of a good ESL teacher who says “‘Double negatives’ are frowned up by many commentarors, but used by the majority of speakers to express intense negativity. You will…