Pretty much any of mine, including but not limited to:

• @amenbreak
• @deepspacenine
• @djent
• @drums
• @fakealbumcovers
• @imaginarytechnology
• @neography
• @scenesfromahat
• @steamedhams
• @vaporwave

• 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.

I’m bipolar. Something like this happens practically every time I find myself in an episode.

More recently it was when I realized my band wasn’t going to make it.

If /kbin had a BestOf, this would go there.

I thought Eleanor Roosevelt was Black. I have no idea how I got that idea and it stuck with me until partway through college.

Electronics stores sometimes sell static discharge bracelets. You put it on your wrist and then there’s a cord that goes to an alligator clip or something and you can touch it to metal to discharge the pent-up electricity. I had to do that at mine old workplace—the air there was so dry, and my legs so hairy, that static charge would build up from my pants. I had a static discharge once that was so loud someone came over to ask if I was all right; it stopped when I started wearing the bracelet.

Well…I've only had one girlfriend but the breakup wasn't really bad (she was psycho and basically gave me an ultimatum; I called her on it). I did, however, get bailed on on a date once. That stung.

I have a few.

• Linguistics/languages. It's what I majored in. Unfortunately, being a linguist on the Internet is a Sisyphean task—when you point out that language changes and doesn't always mean what you think it should mean, people get upset.

• Related to the above, conlangs (constructed languages—e.g. Klingon, anything Tolkien, Sangheili (sp?) from Halo, Na'vi). It's a very niche hobby.

• My Little Pony. I am a dude. I like the wholesomeness; it's a break from everything else being gritty and dark.

• Music theory. Like, deep music theory. Meshuggah counting? Microtones? Obscure composers and releases? I love that shit.

• Star Trek. nuq vIjatlh DaneH'a'?

Night of the Living Dead has always been in the public domain because someone in the distribution chain neglected to include a copyright notice. (This has since been addressed, e.g. by the Berne Convention.)

Fun fact: One (I forget which specifically) of the old Rankin-Bass specials is also in the public domain because when they included the copyright notice, they rendered the date in Roman numerals but screwed it up—they omitted one of the “M”s, so as far as the USCO was concerned, it dates to the Tenth Century.

The bronies are still alive and well, it seems.

“Were” is cognate to Latin vir ‘man’—cf. “werewolf” (‘man-wolf’).

“Woman” comes from a compound meaning “woman-person” (wif-mæn, cf. “wife”); a man was a wæpned-mæn (“weapon-person” or “penis-person”). The lexical narrowing of “man” to mean ‘male’ happened later, and it was indeed originally a gender-neutral term.