tingilinde

why it's called a pitch

Why soccer fields are called pitches

Not authoritative, but it seems to make sense.

 

 

a right way to do things

An Andy Slavitt sermon

 

john v fleming on pronouns

Reacting to Jha McWhorter's op-ed on changing language and pronouns.

(Fleming is always fun to read.  A must-follow blog)

snip

...

But some who revel in breaking free of the restraints of grammatical correctness want us to succumb to the shackles of political correctness. Language must serve many functions, but one of the most vital is to talk about the empirical world as we actually experience it. There are limits to the extent that the social experience of the centuries can be coerced or abolished. Hence I speak of and enjoy a beautiful sunrise or sunset. Even I have enough elementary astronomy to know that the description of observed reality is not the same as a scientific one. But linguistic innovation leading to manifest absurdity is of limited utility.

Imagine that you are the sole witness to a crime. You saw a violent incident on the street. Two people seemed to be arguing. One of them pulled out a gun and shot the other one to death. You are absolutely confident in what you saw, and that you would be able to help the police identify the killer. In the police investigation, the following dialogue ensues.

Police Investigator: Can you describe the perpetrator?
Witness: Yes, about six four, two hundred and twenty-five pounds, three-piece suit, receding hairline and thin, graying hair, probably about fifty years old. Caucasian.
Police Investigator: Man or woman?
Witness: Certainly.
Police Investigator: No, I mean was it a man or a woman?
Witness: Dunno. It all happened so fast I didn’t have time to ask for their pronouns.

It is an old legal adage, or at least used to be, that hard cases make bad law. That is perhaps why linguistic change has, on the whole, been slow and consensual, rarely abandoning common sense.

...

 

 

the anti-business party

The Republicans - and it's not just public health.

 

but marketers love the concept

The flawed concept of defining generations.

snip

...

And who creates “youth culture,” anyway? Older people. Youth has agency in the sense that it can choose to listen to the music or wear the clothing or march in the demonstrations or not. And there are certainly ground-up products (bell-bottoms, actually). Generally, though, youth has the same degree of agency that I have when buying a car. I can choose the model I want, but I do not make the cars.

...

 

 

 

 

fearful, untrusting and loving authoritarians

An essay on Trump true believers.

 

 

from the lincoln project

reframing the problem

Sometimes the thing holding you up is your attachment to a previous conceptual framework.

 

 

summing up right-wing elites in a single image

 

 

moderna and profits

Profits first