Rhythmic? No, not really. More exciting if the musician could somehow anticipate this fundamentally unpredictable event? Absolutely.

It’s a reference.

In Aristotelian geography, the coastline is infinitely divisible.

They wrote that whole ass article and never stopped to consider that time may be both an illusion (in the sense that it is an emergent rather than a fundamental property of existence) AND necessary for the evolution of life (in the sense that other hypothetical configurations of physical laws which do not feature an emergent arrow of time may not produce life).

In regions of the set of all possible universes where the physical prerequisites of evolution were not present, nobody would be there wondering about why that is. In this region, conditions are right for life to evolve, so somebody is here to ask the question. It’s just the anthropic principle.

And even then, if you look at quantum mechanics through the right lens, its apparent randomness is only an illusion of perspective. If you flip the quantum coin, then with 100% certainty, perfectly deterministically, it will come up heads in one timeline and tails in the other. It’s only because your two future selves can’t interact with each other that they can’t have an argument about what the result “really” was, so one says, “it actually came up heads, and the result was completely random,” and the other says, “it actually came up tails, and the result was completely random.”

Quantum cryptographically signed memory certificates from my designated reality broker or it didn’t happen.

But you have to understand, to 74 million people, the Fox News Cinematic Universe is reality. There’s regular bullshit, and then there’s bullshit so widely believed that you actually have to study the bullshit, just to be able to predict what its subscribers will do next. Like religion.

He’s always got le mot juste.

Speaking as a Marxist, we did in fact need to chuck Newtonianism out the window early last century since it turned out not to work at high speeds, in strong gravitational fields, or at very small scales…

What game is this?

This reminds me of last year’s Christmas present from my husband - a homebrew powerpoint Only Connect game based on our favorite media. Instead of “twisted flax” or “two reeds” my categories were things like “lightsaber” or “Starfleet insignia.” Love the format (and that sweet man).

On the starship Enterprise, under Captain Kirk!

Counterpoint: he’s controversial because of what he says and does, not because of lies people tell about him.

I tried to explain this near the time of the event, back when I was on reddit. For this I received mass downvoting, and a universal consensus that misgendering is perfectly appropriate as long as the target has done something evil. Even from trans people. “We don’t claim her!”

It would be one thing if these same people also misgendered any given cis person who did wrong. But they don’t, and that double standard is transphobia. “Of course I would never misgender Hitler. He was AMAB. He earned it. You’re not AMAB? Then your right to be a man is contingent on your behavior. I’ll decide if you’ve been good enough to deserve it.”

We’ve got a long way to go culturally before people recognize that there is literally one and only one valid criterion for entitlement to a certain gender identity: claiming it.

“Should of” instead of “should have.”

“Me and her went” instead of “she and I went.”

“Flustrated” instead of “frustrated.”

“To who” instead of “to whom.”

“For all intensive purposes” instead of “for all intents and purposes.”

“Aks” instead of “ask.”

“Literally” to mean “figuratively.”

“Shoe-in” instead of “shoo-in.”

A semicolon instead of a colon.

Using a preposition at the end of a sentence.

Splitting infinitives.

Starting a sentence with a conjunction.

Each a simple “error” to remember. But there are thousands of them. None make an appreciable difference in understanding. None would ruin a business deal or a meeting except in terms of lost social standing for getting it “wrong.” This category of errors is what I believe to be meant by “improper English.” This is in contrast to “incomprehensible English.”

As I said, successful transmission of the message is the only true test of linguistic legitimacy. You’re absolutely right. People are instinctively aware of when their dialectical quirks are going to cause a problem communicating with outsiders, and they code switch. They simplify. Ironically, the less familiar the interlocutor is with English, the more “improper” a native speaker’s English might become. “My name? John. Your name?” Yet in so doing, they become more compensable because they’ve dropped the complex cultural dance which they are so often required by the powerful to perform.

I have a degree in linguistics. The most important thing it taught me is that there is a widely believed fiction, almost like a religion, underlying prescriptivist grammar. For the sake of social advancement, if you have both the means and the talent, it’s generally necessary to learn a list of arbitrary but extremely complicated prestige markers for your language, to earn the approval of the self-appointed priestly caste of grammarians, in order to rub shoulders with the rich and powerful. An overly complex shibboleth.

It’s a mechanism to oppress the lower classes while maintaining the pretense of pure meritocracy, by declaring arbitrarily that the dialect which is already spoken and written in the homes of the upper class children is proper, and all other dialects are improper, then implying that the “failure” of lower class children to acquire the prestige markers is an intellectual shortcoming, rather than the absence of privilege.

Can you buy books and hire tutors to learn these prestige markers? Of course. Is there general agreement among members of this cult about what their own rules are? Sure. If you choose not to use them, is your English “improper”? Absolutely not. It’s different but equal, as long as your meaning is clear. I would wager that more than 90% of people do not go even one day without saying or writing some example of “improper” English, which is nevertheless understood perfectly well by the recipient. Successful transmission of the message is the only true test of linguistic legitimacy. Everything else is performative.

By the way, while it doesn’t change much about this more fundamental basis for my opinion that “standard English” is an offensive fiction, neither British nor American English actually have the backing of a nation state. This is in contrast to, for example, French, which does. According to this article on language regulators, “The English language has never had a formal regulator anywhere, outside of private productions such as the Oxford English Dictionary.” Prompting my rhetorical question to you earlier: Who is the governing body? There is none.

It also doesn’t help that the third person feminine is ambiguous. There’s often no distinction between the accusative “her” and the possessive “her” (except when the pronoun appears in a different part of the sentence and becomes “hers” - fuck I hate English), so it could be interpreted as fitting either rule.

I don’t care if it’s not correct - I use “theirself” and “theirselves.” It jibes with “yourself,” “myself,” and “herself.”

“Himself” is a frustrating outlier, but I do know at least one person who says “hisself,” and that’s enough precedent for me.

For airborne contagions. Next question.

What is the governing body of your alleged “proper English”?