I’m watching Dexter. In a flashback, teen Dexter says, “Jesus, Dad, it’s called being on time, did you ever hear of it?”

The actors playing Dexter in the present and in the past were born in 1971 and 1987, so let’s assume the flashback is about 1990, 16 years before the episode was made. Was the sarcastic “it’s called” construction already current then?

Charity finds that U.S. food aid for Africa hurts instead of helps. Oh dear, CARE has been taken over by evil selfish libertarians. What else could explain such a conclusion?

What American accent do you have? I got Philadelphia on the first try, and I’ve never even visited Philadelphia. I went back and changed Mary/merry/marry from “marry is different” (a conscious affectation on my part; I value distinctions) to “all alike”, and got Midland, no surprise.

The Serious Organised Crime & Police Act 2005 forbids protesting in the vicinity of Westminster Palace without a permit. What is a concerned comedian to do? (three parts, about 29 minutes total)

Strange but true — People study for years to talk like this:

Infant is status post initial ampicillin and gentamycin for rule out sepsis workup.

What, if anything, does this mean?

The racial, ethnic, and gender diversity of the United States has increased exponentially over the past two decades . . . .

Besides wondering whether the writer knows what exponential means, I’m curious about how much range there is for gender diversity to increase.

I had the idea to design a fantasy script from combinations of a small repertoire of features: namely, subsets of this set of twelve segments. Using a fixed number of segments gives some built-in error-detection. There are 924 subsets of six segments; discarding those that form disconnected graphs leaves 306, more than enough for a syllabary. (Syllabaries have been invented more often than other types of scripts, but they’re underrepresented in fantasy.) ( . . more . . )

I hear some strange things in this medical transcription gig:

Due to her birth weight less than 1500 grams, she will require a rule out retinopathy of prematurity eye exam . . . .

Let’s take an against un-Englishly compound adjectives stand!

Most of us English-speakers were told as children that it’s wrong to say me and him went to the park, and we should instead say he and I. And many of us grow up extending the lesson to where it does not belong: the letter was addressed to she and I. Purists like me expostulate in vain: one wouldn’t say or to she or to I, or indeed to we, so why to she and I?

It now hits me that, in all these years of wincing at between he and I, I’ve never asked why children make the opposite error. Children rarely if ever say me went or him went, so why was it so much more natural to say me and him went?

Perhaps in all of these phenomena the partnership is considered a new entity, distinct from its components. So now I’m inspired to ask: In languages that still have a strong case system, e.g. Russian, what is the genitive of a company name like Sears & Roebuck? Do both elements become genitive, or only the last, or is the whole thing indeclinable, or what?