More like choosing names like Fae Wilds.

Even with just two kids and two parents, one parent is paying or presenting a ticket, second parent notices kid 1 is leaking nose horror all over their mouth and reaches to wipe it. Kid two, now knowing they have 4 unsupervised seconds, will teleport to the other side of the room, use their Felix the Cat briefcase to make a stepladder, and is now standing on top of a brontosaurus smoking cigarettes they found.

My one year old yesterday used the time it took me to give my 4 year old a courtesy wipe in the bathroom to push a kitchen chair across the room, climb that chair, start the coffee maker, and grab a handful of candy from the candy drawer. It sounds outrageous, but we’ve been pressing coffee pot buttons in the morning to help make the coffee. He’s seen me get him a piece of candy for desert from the candy drawer. He learned the day before he could climb up on a piano bench by pulling his belly on top. And that morning he pushed in a heavy kitchen chair that was sticking out, and it is the first time he could move it. So, of course, he synthesized those skills at the most opportune time.

He’s one. My four year old gets up to some real oceans 12 shit when left to her own devices. Kids are nuts. It would be equally a normal story for a 4 year old if the kid had been found hiding INSIDE the pot, making documentary accurate dolphin noises.

”Ore-GAH-no. What the hell?” - M. Simpson

So you understood most of what I meant, but we missed slightly. I agree that irregular verbs might be misconjugated or that they may tend back toward regular conjugations (see for example “to plead” in the legal sense, or “to hang” in the execution sense), but I specifically meant mismatched count. As a stickler, I would sometimes put lack of use of subjunctive or adding it unnecessarily (though the second is pretty uncommon) in the realm of a mistake but that could be because I like it and hate to see it fall out of use.

Also yes that’s what I was meaning for indirect and direct object pronouns (to/for whom vs who, or maybe more simply him/her/me vs he/she/I). Here you could also include “myself” or “themselves” or the slightly less natural sounding “themself”. I was trying to craft an example of creating a misunderstanding in English but it didn’t work as well as it does in Spanish for example where you can accidentally create reflexive verbs with a different meaning. I suppose though you are right: these are not mistakes a native speaker can really make because they have the knowledge that the word is changing.

For countability, I assume you mean the question of less vs fewer, and when you might pluralize words like ”water" and when you don’t. That is indeed an interesting topic.

Prestige dialects are not an example of a direction I would like to go, but as a counter I really appreciate that French DOES have the French academy to decide what is proper and what is not.

Im an American, I only speak one language natively because there’s not exactly a variety of spoken languages in the Midwest. Since high school though I’ve been “collecting” languages though and am passably conversant in a few. My wife’s extended family is all in France so French has been an important skill to develop. For me, the fact is that “deviations” from the book usually result in losing track of the meaning or losing track of the conversation. English is already hard enough without adding even more irregularity, so I tend to lean in on being precise and I think it’s a worthwhile effort. It is a real source of stress when the shoe is on the other foot.

You can pick a word besides ”correct" but it means sort of the same thing either way: we are moving individual variations of language toward the collective standard.

Languages all have categories of words, general rules for how those categories are applied, exceptions to the rules, and idiomatic parts to name a few. Misconjugating a word is not evolution of language, it is a mistake. Mismatching count is also a mistake. Mixing direct and indirect object pronouns is a mistake. The risk is not “i don’t understand you”, it is rather that I did understand you, but what I understand is not what you mean. You can call it a “unique linguistic quirk”, but if it leads to people misunderstanding you it’s a mistake. And yeah, pushing mistakes under a rug of " it’s descriptivism" is just as gross as any allegory to runaway cell growth.

If everyone understands you and its not a perfectly grammatically correct construction and lots of people start to use it, sure this is evolution of language. Every deviation is not that.

We don’t have to be silly with descriptivism either. Of course languages evolve over time, but speakers also make mistakes that should still be corrected to keep language cohesive. It’s the difference between change in body shape from evolution, and an isolated growth that probably shouldn’t exist. We use a different word for that second one: cancer.

You gotta have both IMO. Not too rigid, not too flexible.

Why would anyone want rules and consistent applications of those rules? ANYONE could just learn any language that way. How would we keep our ability to communicate for native speakers only? It doesn’t make sense.

Heresy

Yo… You can’t use commas like that.

Fun fact:

Bryony is a poop name.

This is the first one of these I’ve ever identified the meme for. They are usually a little obscure.

This is some real funbreaker bullshit, I tell you what.

I mean sure. I agree with everything you said.

It doesn’t matter if he was hit or not and someone is dead (actually 2 people). However–and I’m not saying I buy into this–if I had to pick a person / campaign who would set up live fire into a crowd and who cares who gets hit if the “target” gets a good photo op, it is trump all day long. And the kicker of THAT is I could imagine someone doing a bane / dark Knight rises “someone has to be in the wreckage” volunteer to get swiss cheesed by secret service.

I don’t think the shooter kid meets that profile, but this is within the realm of possible for a fucker like trump.

Dude don’t be alarmist.

It will be months until it turns into that. Maybe even a year or two.

I think you’ve got to be a little careful how you say what you mean here:

In light’s own reference frame, this is true-ish from a pure special relativity perspective. Velocity is sort of undefined in that case because at c, Lorentz transformations bring all distances to zero, meaning that the photon is everywhere at the SAME time. Or said another way, it’s everywhere on its own simultaneity curve. Maybe this is splitting hairs on the definition of “undefined” because, mathematically yeah you’re right, but a rock also moves zero distance in zero time. Its more like it’s velocity doesnt make sense to compute.

From the outside though (as in a non photon frame) this is not true at all. Using laws of refraction you can compute, and even photograph and verify a real, defined speed for a photon in a medium.

Glad to see you’re feeling better, Teft.

Twice the chance for a cursed horsefish or fishorse though. Or also either of the other, more cursed centaur and mermaid variants as well.

Ah. They were blindsided.

AROOOOOO, BROTHER!

No way man. In rare occasions, like when eating a Jimmy John’s sub, real Hellman’s mayo is the only answer. Sometimes in BBQ dressings / sauces you also can’t substitute. For basically everything else, ESPECIALLY sandwiches, there is no beating the tangy zip of miracle whip, to quote their old commercials.

As an Indiana boy, it’s the only mayo I had until I was a man, and I have no regrets.