On the other hand, I only learned (my native) English grammar by studying another language. I mean, I used standard English intuitively, but couldn't have told you any of the technical terms. I agree with modern educators that explicit grammar instruction beyond a very, very basic level should not be a high priority. Exposure to and guided close reading of complex texts sharpens grammatical intuition, right alongside all of the other benefits of an advanced reading level. Knowing deep grammar does not so automatically improve textual interpretation.
This is speculation, but I wonder if the period of emphasizing explicit grammatical instruction wasn't an accidental interregnum. That is to say, back in the days when Latin and/or Greek were part of the ordinary curriculum students learned grammar much as I did, as a "natural" excelerant to interpreting a foreign tongue. Once those languages were dropped educators noticed students couldn't do grammar analysis anymore, and so tried teaching it directly, without fully considering when and why it might be useful. I don't know how well the dates line up, but it would be interesting to look into.
> On the other hand, I only learned (my native) English grammar by studying another language.
This is one of the reasons why Latin is tought. You learn transferring a gramatically hard language into your own, having to learn the ins and out of your own language's grammar. No grammatically complex situation in your own language can fluster you afterwards.
I learned (an academic expression of) German grammar at university, in computational linguistics. There was a class „Syntax I“, and it had us break down phrases and sentences in a graphs, a (constituent) C structure and a (functional) F structure.
Everything in this article rings true to my limited and glancing observations of the phenomenon.
In a previous life I worked in an industry (entertainment) where becoming a celebrity is an occupational hazard. A few times I was treated as if I were famous in very, very, extremely minor ways - met at the stage door, followed down the street, stared at or photographed in a restaurant or public transportation - and it's super destabilizing and just... Weird. I was pleased to be able to turn the corner and "disappear", as it were.
I also had conversations about this with colleagues who were, let's say, well-known (but not even close to globally famous), and the shit they had to put up with was, if anything worse than described in the article - particularly when (this is theatre and independent film we're talking about) their profile didn't come with the income that could support, say, private security, or a secluded property. They were doing what they were doing in order to work on interesting projects with interesting people - and the ability to assure that was their favorite "perk" of their profile - and the "occupational hazard" framing comes from them.
Another (very not-famous, though you're almost guaranteed to have seen them in a supporting role in something they've done) person I worked with a couple of times has a globally "you know their face, at least" famous spouse, who got that way because they're an immensely talented and committed artist; someone I've admired for years. I never met that person, because a) they'd have had to deal with a lot of hassle getting into the theatre, and b) their presence would have been an overwhelming distraction from the (interesting, but low-profile) piece we were doing.
Fame is not something any well-adjusted person should wish for, and I have a good deal of sympathy for the people who seem to be destabilized by that level of attention.
My impression was the same as the poster: it still over-indexes on a couple of recent posts.
Of course, it's possible that we've both been repeating ourselves all year long! I mean, I know I do that, I just think I've ridden more hobby horses than it picked up. :-)
It's fun, though. Thanks for sharing - a couple of my "roasts" gave me a genuine chuckle.
Excel is not "complete" until they stop forcibly converting long strings of numbers into scientific notation - or at least give me a sheet-specific way to turn it off. I know how to stop it on my machine, but I have shared documents where if any one of the 16+ other users forgets, then it's messed up for everyone.
Let alone the date issues.
At one point I did a deep dive on one or the other of these "quirks", and the earliest request for exactly the fix I want is from nineteen-eighty-fricking-five. Unbelievable.
Yes, there will be edge cases. They need to balance historic compat vs one more fricking setting checkbox. I am thinking that you will never see this solved.
Thanks. Copied the journal's generated link, and should have inspected it more closely. On the other hand, why do they do that? Genuine question, are they imbedding tracking or something? I note that yours goes to a pdf, is there a way to get a transparent link to an html page?
> The livestream sharing commentary on investing appeared for at least eight minutes late Thursday on whitehouse.gov/live, where the White House usually streams live video of the president speaking.
So /live is some kind of a redirect to whatever other stream source. My guess is that whoever was meant to post the latest stream had this guy's URL in his clipboard history. Oops! Hard to see it being hacking - there are way more "interesting" things to do if you have the keys to whitehouse.gov - and it's not really a big deal, except for the poor schmuck who was watching personal finance videos at work, and maybe to the guy who just found out he has a fan in the Whitehouse. Hope neither of them gets too much federal law enforcement attention.
<Maximum pedantry mode engaged> Either could be correct, because whisky casks begin as whiskey casks. It's wise to be aware of all the links in your supply chain!
Huh. I may be younger than you are. By the time I got online in the early to mid-nineties the very strong zeitgeist was never to use your real name, nor to post identifying details into (the resultingly anonymized) fora. This was the "on the internet no one knows you're a dog" era, which cartoon (I just looked it up) was from 1993 - way earlier than I'd have guessed!
Social media - starting with the very early ones: Six Degrees, Friendster, maybe MySpace? - weakened that expectation, but (someone tell me if this is accurate) my recollection is that Facebook was the first platform to require realname accounts. I agree with you about the current danger, and though I've never posted anything anywhere that I wouldn't stand behind - trolling just isn't my style - I have, reflecting the pov of my "internet generation", always felt super weird publicly posting anything under my real name.
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