User Comments - Right-Wingnut

Posted on: Boxing Match

Transcript of podcast here

Posted on: Give Up Your Seat, Young Man!

Transcript here.

Posted on: Plane Ticket Prices

Huh? What do you base that question on?

Posted on: Upgrading Software

Actually, I've never heard of "Chazzwazzers", and the only time I've heard "Knifey-Spooney" was on The Simpsons.

Another than that, yes we do have plenty of non-standard vocabulary, but I think you are missing the point. I would not expect any of this vocabulary to appear on a podcast which is directed at the entire English-speaking world (and beyond).

The issue is NOT that Americans HAVE this vocabulary, but that it is used on this site as though only Americans are listening in.

Posted on: Upgrading Software

And when it came Einstein's turn to hide, he constructed a light cone around him, and Newton and Pascal who were still outside the cone never saw Einstein again.

Posted on: The Wives of Gay Men

'All you need is love'?

You're male right?

I'm just going to slowly back away from you.

Posted on: Talking about Mistakes (Part 1)

That damn le. So were you told what you should have said? Perhaps Tā shàngge xīngqi bú zài. I still really feel like adding the le to that though.

Posted on: The Wives of Gay Men

Of course there is no problem taking the information from this book on board - it certainly does cause one to think, it likely is at least partially correct, and it there is a possibility that it is mostly correct. I for one would like it to be proved correct.

But I have been drawn into these kind of theories before (I don't mean on this topic), and thought 'the whole world needs to know about this'. I've been so drawn in that I close my eyes to alternate theories. But in the end, plausibility and believability is not proof.

In retrospect, you can see an agenda which you couldn't see on first reading. These people state their grand theory very early in the piece, then all the evidence magically fits their theory.

Contrast this with a lecture series I've watched by John McWhorter on Linguistics, in particular his analysis of attempts to come up with a Proto-World language. He did state in the beginning that he is against the concept of a discoverable Proto-World language, and spent a whole lecture debunking it and its adherents. But then he spent the entire next lecture outlining the case FOR Proto-World, and outlined the valuable work that Joseph Greenberg (one of its principal adherents) had done even if the core of the theory is rejected.

This kind of even-handed approach to analysing the evidence (or even acknowledging all the evidence) seems to be lacking from "Sex at Dawn".

But as I said, that doesn't mean the theory is wrong, it just means that the book needs to be read in the right light with a liberal dose of critical thinking on the part of the reader.

Posted on: Upgrading Software

Then we agree on both definitions of blinkers. Except that over here, blinkers is the standard word. I think only the road rules and driving instructors would talk about indicators.

Posted on: Upgrading Software

I believe you are correct with your assessment of Standard English. And it seems to me that most people outside the US, despite speaking lots of dialectal words at home, have a sense of what words are standard and what are not and limit their use of dialectal words when speaking away from home. But it frustrates me that Americans seem to have no gut instinct for what is standard and what they have made up themselves. It seems they wear blinkers which don't allow them to see that they wear blinkers.

**Damn, I hope after all that that 'wear blinkers' is not just an Australian term**