Cambrian Chronicles. Obscure Welsh history documentaries with occasional whiplashes of dry humour. Not a super old channel but a marked increase in quality over time. Medieval Laws for Your Medieval Cat is a personal favourite.

Fun fact: linguists don’t actually know what defines a “word”

sh.itjust.works cos I was hoping it would just work

Your assumption that all women are looking for a relationship that aligns with traditional gender roles is antithetical to your view of women as equals. I’m not trying to be inflammatory, I’m just nudging you towards the conclusion that people that talk about traditional expectations in a relationship don’t really speak for everyone. It also seems like a lot of your evidence comes from male voices, which I don’t think is an accurate reflection of what women want in a relationship. It sounds to me like these are the conclusions of the circles that you hang around in (or the culture that you live in/grew up in) rather than a fact of life. Most of the women I know are either in the types of relationships you are describing or vocally advocate for finding that type of relationship. There are both women and men that haven’t evaluated the impact of patriarchal male expectations, and so there are both men and women out there that knowingly and unknowingly perpetuate the stereotype of men as unfeeling and uncaring. But to say that all men and all women think this way is probably inaccurate.

It sounds like you know what you want in a relationship and what activities make you happy regardless of whether they traditionally fit with a certain traditional gender expression, so do those things. I know it’s demoralising to feel like the odd one out, but even if you live in a particularly conservative country there will always be like-minded people /somewhere/ out there.

Big gripe of mine is the distinction of “soft” and “hard” science. I’m a linguist and it surprises people that I had to take advanced statistics, set theory, know the basics of acoustics, and have an understanding of calculus. But just because a field requires nuance and observational data doesn’t mean it’s automatically less rigorous than a field that deals exclusively with numbers. Can’t exclusively rely on statistical models to draw conclusions about economic trends or linguistic phenomena because the economy and language don’t exist outside of human society

Edit: TL;DR: O’Neill is passing a value judgement on language change, something the field of linguistics considers poor practice.

Linguist specialising in swearing and offensive language here. Furthermore, I am actually a corpus/computational linguist who has done statistical and computational research on the subject (O’Neill is a statistics and mathematics professor). The gist of O’Neill’s argument is that words are made insulting by virtue of having euphemistic counterparts. To simplify, euphemism here is a technical term for any word that takes the place of a word considered more offensive. So “mentally handicapped” by this definition would be a euphemism for “retarded”. In reality, euphemisms develop as a reaction to a term that has become offensive. “Retarded” did used to be a medical term that referred to someone who is developmentally disabled, but it began to be used as an insulting term in non technical speech, and so the technical term changed to reflect this semantic change and distance itself from the offensive term. (This is wildly simplified. I wouldn’t even consider “developmentally disabled” to be a euphemism at all but this is just to make it easier to explain the point without giving a whole intro to linguistics lecture)

He also argues that a lot of terms now considered offensive are changing primarily for performative reasons. This is also not really the case, and we can demonstrate that with “retarded” versus “developmentally disabled”. In general, people have started preferring terms that are more specific and descriptive. When we rephrase the term “mentally retarded”, we see that it essentially means someone has a “slow brain”. This, however, is no longer considered to be accurate for many people that used to be diagnosed with conditions under that umbrella and so the label has changed to reflect that.

Language is always in flux and will never stop changing, just like species will never stop evolving. O’Neill is taking what is considered a prescriptive approach to language, which means deciding how language should be used. Virtually all linguists now agree that linguistics is a descriptive science and prescriptive approaches to defining language are often futile at best and counterintuitive at worst. Basically what I’m saying is if people want to use these terms, even if it’s for the reasons that O’Neill is describing, it is not inherently a “bad thing”. It’s just a “thing”.

Rude language, swearing, and insults are also constantly changing as society changes. It’s an established fact that the semantics and pragmatics of a term will change over time. Some terms will become more offensive and some will become less offensive. It’s just a thing that will inevitably happen as society shifts and changes.

Edit 2: O’Neill also does not provide any linguistic evidence for his claims, he’s mostly going off of his own perception of them. Basically, his argument doesn’t really hold any weight because he hasn’t actually proved that these terms are actually used in the way he describes or for those reasons.

Hey I’m a linguist and I’d like to chime in! Great article!

There’s this misconception that language is exclusively a communication tool. In reality it’s a cognitive tool that helps us process the world around us. This is why writing something down helps you figure it out or why we sometimes talk to ourselves. So, very broadly, the more ‘linguistic effort’ you put into a task, the better you’re going to remember it. This is also another reason why writing notes in lecture by hand helps you remember better than if you type on a laptop. Pressing a button or tapping on a screen is a lot less ‘linguistic effort’ than writing a letter by hand.

Another consequence of language being a cognitive tool is that it’s intertwined with a lot of the ways we use physical tools. In fact, some historical linguists use the emergence of complex hand tools as evidence of when language emerged in our pre-history. But that’s a very complicated subject for another time. There is some evidence that cognitively, proficiency with fine motor skills are correlated with language processing functions (big caveat that I’m not a cognitive linguist). So writing might not only help you slow down and be deliberate about what you’re putting on a page, but the act of writing itself might also be intrinsically linked with language processing.

This is all not to say that typing is a somehow bastardized version of language production. It’s just that we’ve decided that easier is better, which in the sense of language learning and maintenance, isn’t really the case.

You’re very right. Dick move of them to hear about Skyblivion and instead of thanking the heavens for plopping a marketing opportunity for minimum effort, went “crush them out of principle”.

I trust the Skyblivion team more than I trust Bethesda

Yes, thank you. I feel like since the AI boom people have forgotten that the purpose of school isn’t just to teach kids to regurgitate facts

Honestly the thing I’d be most worried about is that kids at that age are learning important social and language skills. Without an adult in the room to interact with, who are they going to learn that from?

Return of the Obra Dinn. Indie darling puzzle game where you are an insurance adjuster working on a recovered ghost ship. Very thematic and satisfying to take notes by hand

Edit: whoops someone already mentioned it

Yeah if I ever give it another go I’ll definitely check it out even if it’s a little janky. I liked the intro but after the first few missions I gave up. The POV thing was such an unreasonable thing to be a deal breaker, but I really just couldn’t get immersed after spending so much time making my character and then not seeing them as part of the world

Honestly the fact that the game puts such an emphasis on customizing your character and then is 1st person all the way through annoyed me to no end. Thanks for the recommend, didn’t know there was a mod that changed it

I try to make everything from scratch, but sometimes I make pre made when I know I’m avoiding eating because I don’t feel like cooking. If I make pre made though, I’ll always add something to it to bulk it out. Ramen? Handfuls of frozen veg. Frozen pizza? Slap mushrooms, peppers, onions on top. Pasta sauce? Spinach, homemade stock, and carrots.

To me, its about health. I know processed food isn’t healthy, so I want to mitigate the damage.

Hahaha I did the same thing

I just thought it was a more lighthearted deep dive than the ones I usually post. It’s pretty cool to see the different techniques this guy went through to identify alt accounts and how seriously discord nation state LARPers take their community

It gets worse. There’s a population of natives trapped on the island in legal limbo, living in awful conditions in the name of “national security”.

I generally agree with the article, but think you have a point when you say that it’s hard to argue for self defense for a premeditated action. However, I don’t think that the author was trying to make the point that self defense law was failing women, but more trying to illustrate that “self defense” as a legal concept is a bit flawed.

Unfortunately, DV laws in the US kind of suck and that doesn’t seem to be changing anytime soon. I read an article not too long ago about how even when women try to use DV resources and go to the police, they can often face legal repercussions for failing to protect their children from the abuse. All around horrific situation that I wouldn’t wish on anyone

The “gay panic” defense is still valid in most states. Truly tragic