Mine is probably at least PG-13.

"These have millions of views so you click on them."

The recommendations are so weird that way. One Bill Burr video and YouTube gives you tons of videos from people who treat stand-ups like preachers. One video about atheism and you get uncountable videos of guys talking directly into cameras for 30 minutes to make a 30-second point. Watch some folk music videos and…

If it provides any hope: I just finished working respite with an autistic teenager in February because he finally got a placement in a group home with another fellow around his age. He's got round-the-clock support and he's a five-minute drive away from his father's home. Things are definitely getting better when it…

Fucking Autism Speaks. I never thought I'd end up trying to boycott a charity, but here we are. They're the goddamned worst.

Mate is a grand drink. I got a gourd and bombilla as a present and haven't had the chance to use it, but it can be made as one would make loose leaf tea if one is just having a cup to oneself. The taste is strongly vegetal (like drinking a tree) and you feel like a million bucks afterwards. I intend to learn to do…

It sort of brings an episode of Oz to mind wherein a murder is performed on an inmate by sneaking powdered eggs (his allergy) into his food. That's basically poisoning if performed with guilty intent. This seems like an analogue to me.

I figure that the law has to keep up on new methods of harming people as technology advances. It's not the medium of harm that matters so much, it's the act of causing it. Ruling that this is in the same category of offense as a fist in the face makes sense to me, but I'm not a lawyer.

Heh. I also had a 10 year old in mind (the brother of my previous client). It seems like the age to start trying out that sort of language. This kid would use it more like an all-purpose intensifier, rather than your kid's arguably more logical usage, so it was hard to correct.

That's a conflict with a long history. Save the enslaved now at the expense of propping up the industry that enslaved them, or refuse to feed it and leave them in slavery until such time as that industry can be eradicated? When you don't have the option of going in all scorched earth against such brothels, you're…

The classic No True Dickbag fallacy?

This is assault in essence, right? It's an action taken with the intent of causing physical harm. If you stood in front of somebody and flashed a light in their eyes in order to trigger a seizure, I think that would be counted as assault. Doing it over Twitter should essentially be the same crime, no?

I think you're right, but I'm trying to look at it the way that someone would parse it if they knew the rules of English and encountered the word for the first time. How would they parse it? Might they go step by step through the word and work it out to a double-negative? Just because it's an idiom that's common to…

Yep. Now I'm old enough to have joined a proud tradition of finding young people totally unclear. Circle of life and all that.

That makes sense. It seems like there isn't really an effective way to be a radical descriptivist and a paid educator of English. I'm interested in how people who learn English as an additional language perceive idiomatic constructions. If someone comes in, having already learned the basic rules of English grammar…

I was thinking of a friend of mine who teaches ESL to international students at the local college. If I asked him, I suspect he'd say that they teach them "the right words" or something like that, as he's something of a prescriptivist himself. It's a position that makes teaching easier (as you can just point at a…

I definitely agree about "literally". If we're going to be fighting over words at all, that one's worth a fight. I have heard children using that one in so many senses that I genuinely wasn't sure what they meant by it after a bit.

"Irregardless" is indeed an interesting case. Objections to it aren't generally due to its meaning being unclear (who uses it to actually mean "not not regarding" something?); instead, one generally objects to it on formal grounds, in that it's either a mistake or a useless word. In other words, it's more of an…

The exposure.

Nice! We can make hyper-local jokes about metal trees and leave everybody wondering what the hell we're talking about.