Samantics

I used to spend a lot of time on r/linguisticshumor, doing what every grown-up on Reddit inevitably does. (That is, disagreeing with everything, but smugly.) Recently I got it into my head that shouting at the never-ebbing tide of first-year linguistics students was a waste of my life, so rather than continue piling bricks in an ever-eroding wall, I'll just post them here, and you can throw them through your own window (or your enemies' windows) at your leisure. […]

Lately I've been on a retro-computing binge, revisiting some past nostalgias (and borrowed nostalgias) with fresh eyes. I don't usually think highly of nostalgics in the purest sense—I've always thought of rose-tinted glasses as an obstacle to true appreciation of history rather than a justification for it—but this time I took a long, hard look at the technology of my own childhood for once, particularly the quirks of 90s Windows, from 3.0 through 2000, and in the midst of this I've come to realise that the standard terminology we use to describe the experience of using old computers is missing an axis, one that's worth defining. […]

Chlorine, Chlorine, Chlorine, Chlorine
Please purify every single last dram
Fluorine, Fluorine, Fluorine, Fluorine
I'm begging of you, bind to all that you can […]