1. Join us on @drums!

• You heard about that recent study trying to say that Indo-European speakers came from Anatolia? Classic case of people from another subject of study thinking their own experience and conventions transfer across fields. The dataset is supposedly very good but their theoretical framework and conclusions aren’t.

• Your language isn’t the world’s oldest/first language.

• That includes Sanskrit. It isn’t the Ur-language either. Sorry not sorry.

• Neither is Albanian.

• Nor Arabic.

• Or Tamil.

• Turkish neither.

• Not all languages came from Latin—in fact, most didn’t. It’s a quirk of history that Romance (and Indo-European generally) spread so far and wide

• Indo-European language theory is correct regardless of whether you choose to believe it.

• Russia may be Satan’s dacha, but that doesn’t change the fact that Russian is a real language (and a Slavic one, to boot). Also, when I cite George Shevelov, you don’t get to write him off as a propagandist; he is Ukrainian, not Russian (somebody tried to do that to me last weekend, refusing to even consider the idea because his last name looks Russian).

• Black people (or whatever minority of your choice) don’t speak “bad English” or whatever other language. African-American Vernacular English in particular is a well-studied lect—a language variety—with a ton of scholarship behind it; it isn’t arbitrary (“he eating” and “he be eating” have different meanings/connotations; they don’t just drop words for no reason—there’s logic to it).

• “I could care less” is an idiom. The fact that it is so widely used and understood makes it a part of proper English. That’s the yardstick in linguistics: The crowd tends to win. (Or do the complainants never say things like “I read it a million times” or “it was a billion degrees out and humid”?)

• Words like “supposably”, “liberry”, “expresso”, and “conversate” are analogically extended forms. Sound change and grammar change happen all the time. If you have issues with them, you will have issues with “tenth” (the original form of this word, tithe, survived as a specialized form), “snuck” (sneak is originally a weak verb, not a strong one), or “messenger” and “passenger” (analogy with challenger).

• BONUS ROUND: The Armenian genocide DID HAPPEN. I was quite smugly told by a Turkish nationalist to “read the court case” as I was wrong…in which case THE JUDGES AGREED THAT IT HAPPENED and were only concerned with whether the right to deny history exists. I also got libeled as a racist “Cizvit” (“Jesuit”) for some reason. Same guy tried to pull the “Turkish is the mother of all languages” card, even saying that Native American languages came from Turkish. (Which is facially implausible. North American languages are often front-loading whereas Turkic likes to suffix.)

Linguistics.

A stupefying proportion of what mass media and everyday people think they know about linguistics and languages is wrong. Unfortunately, they do not appreciate corrections.

Yes. Got bumped to a quality control position, disliked it and made a lot of errors; I hit the brakes myself.

I’m also never going to become management if I can help it.

Seroquel—and even then I still feel crazy a lot of the time.

“I’m all right.”

Holy fuck dude. Holy FUCK. “Some [B]lack people”?

Change your profile pic to the Stars and Bars. You are minimizing the very real and tragic effects of racism to win social justice points. I have no words.

Everybody bandies around the word “fascism”, but un-personing people is fascism.

Since you brought up the Star Wars comparison…ironic, that they were so quick to see fascism in others but were so blind to it in themselves.

Like I said above: Mobs lynched Black people.

Mobs lynched Black people. You call that a “proven track record”?

That’s mob mentality.