Recent content by Melange_Thief

She did not consider trans men to be men, yet she did consider an individual trans man to be a man. Almost as if, in her mind, being physiologically male isn't necessary for her to apply the term to someone if they fulfill other conditions. Almost as if the meaning of "man" is more complicated...

First, a note on quotes: The new multiquote thing is really nice! Though I'd like an easy way to get rid of quote pyramids somehow. People keep bringing it up for two simple reasons: 1. Trans-skeptics posit that it's so utterly important to link the pronouns and gender terms one uses for a...

We can add a proviso about performance to my definition, it's no big deal. Regardless, if this is a problem for my definition, it's also a problem for what I suggested as the historical usage. But honestly the key thing to take away is that you can't make rigid mathematical definitions of words...

I do agree that I used "old man" figuratively to refer to him, and I definitely am not trying to say that trans folks are the gender they are in a figurative sense, so you have noted that accurately. What I would say is that I actually think trans folks are already covered under the definition...

Tom, I'm afraid you have more to learn about human language. The fact is, words are an arbitrary sequence of sounds that are arbitrarily assigned to arbitrary categories of meaning - and the assignments are not fixed. They can be analogically extended and they change constantly, and we could...

Hi Generation55, as someone with overly extensive experience with linguistics, I categorically recommend against founding your argument on the idea that words mean specific things. Language changes constantly to fit the needs of its speakers, and the only reasonable way of determining the...

From https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/03/26/wrong-ruling-could-let-suspect-george-floyds-killing-go-free/: A fair trial would acknowledge that this is an extremely suspicious thing to happen and wouldn't allow the defense to bring up an unrelated case because of it. So therefore...

Just a quick note regarding the confusion between Siberia 'Сибирь' and the Russian Far East 'Дальный Восток': I'm a non-native Russian speaker who lived over there a couple of times briefly and a native English speaker. Russian speakers talking about the portions of Russia in Asia are, in my...

After living in the Twin Cities for a while, I got the impression that Midwesterners have a very different definition of "short drive" than Pacific Northwesterners do. These seem like drive times the Midwesterners I met would consider pretty short.

Turns out we just had to wait a couple days for the punchline: Clinton campaign 'hacked' along with other Democratic groups

... I just said that I don't know that. I was making an assumption and took their silence on that score as a lack of disagreement. Perhaps they do criticize Russia for these things; I just find it strange that they take such a strident tone about the USA's involvement in the world without...

This is fair. I just find it a bit hypocritical that these students don't also criticize the overreaches other countries make, including their own, but for all I know they criticize that too. Oh, I'm not making that excuse. I'm taking issue with them saying Obama continues Bush's foreign...

First of all, hey, I was not expecting to see a university I've been to on this video. Huh. Apparently AGU is doing a better job of indoctrinating its students these days; when I was there last time, the girl I dated there was not a fan of Putin and ended up emigrating to the evil USA (though...

It could be a matter of dialectal variation. In my dialect (Pacific Northwest English) we wouldn't use the construction "most us [NOUN]", and it sounds ungrammatical to me. In my case, this isn't a matter of the so-called "grammar rules" we were taught in English class, it's the syntax of the...

This is a completely insane proposition. Is it really Ukraine's job to foresee that someone with the training to use the Buk system will fire on a plane without doing basic IFF, but the Buk user's responsibility to fucking do basic IFF in the fucking first place is just icing on the cake to...