I get accused of not knowing about linguistics or history a lot.

I am a degreed linguist, and the people who accuse me of it tend to be ethnic nationalists or right-wingers. You can’t reason with them. People don’t like being told that their language isn’t the end-all be-all or that minorities (gasp) have their own speech patterns.

There was a notable incident on Reddit where someone complained that African-American Vernacular English wasn’t legitimate. I responded to the guy, who, in response, kept moving the goalposts. He asked if AAVE let Blacks “flourish”, I directly addressed it, then he took me to task because that was supposedly something he didn’t ask about. Then he spouted off about how Indigenous American languages were inferior because you couldn’t talk about quantum physics with them (which is false, but the hard Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a tough bug to kill). The kicker is my interlocutor was from Texas. He shut up when I pointed out that “y’all” is, by his own metric, “incorrect English”.

Watch their brains implode when they talk about how French is “legitimate”, and Latin is even more “legitimate”, and then you point out that French developed out of Latin via the same means and processes they demonize in minority speech.

Or when people bitch that “I could care less” is incorrect English. It’s not; it’s an idiom. “Brazen” as a descriptor of methods or attitudes is descended from an idiom (nobody says “bold as brass” anymore though, so its origin is obscured).

I even run into this on the fediverse (search my comment history).

It gets worse when people write sources and facts off because it’s inconvenient. I was into it today with a Turkish nationalist who claimed that Turkish was the mother of all languages (it’s not even the mother of Turkic generally) and then went on to deny the Armenian genocide. I also ran into someone who tried to deny that Russian was a legitimate Slavic language because I cited George Shevelov’s work and obviously his last name was Russian, so he was a propagandist…when Shevelov is Ukrainian-American and spent a long time teaching at Columbia.

Being a linguist on the Internet is an utterly Sisyphean task.