As shown at left, a reader wants my input on the word “cringy.”
Elements of language like these are constantly changing. I’ve never hear of “cringy,” but it wouldn’t upset me to hear my young daughter use it. Even “cringworthy” itself is only a decade or so old.
I just hope she doesn’t say, “I should have went….”
Question: Primatologist Jane Goodall asserts three reasons for her optimism about the ultimate disposition of our planet’s health. One is shown at left, i.e., all we need to do is stop poisoning and otherwise harming our Earth, and it will repair itself.
What are the other two?
Answer: Can be found at Clean Energy Answers.
From the Story of Stuff:
Unfortunately, the fact that Trump is insane is not costing him the support of his base.
The chart here predicts continued use of fossil fuels in our transportation sector for the foreseeable future.
Personally, I doubt, it. And that’s not because humankind is likely to have some sort of epiphany, a kumbaya moment, re: ceasing to bake the planet. Rather, it’s that the extraction, refinement, distribution and sale of decreasing volumes of petroleum will not be economically feasible.
Here’s a guy who appears to have no trace of uncertainty in his life, no doubts to plague him. But do most people envy him for the simplicity of his thoughts–especially these thoughts?
Before the Trump era, I would have said that ignorance on this level was confined to a small fraction, perhaps 10% of the voter base. The last decade has shown me how pathetically wrong I was.
This from the oft-quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson.
I suppose the issue is: How bad are these so-called “bad times?”
I’m as interested in learning as the next guy, but I don’t really want to find out what world fascism or global environmental collapse looks like.
Older readers will recall that libertarian author Ayn Rand had a significant following in the 1970s, as many people perceived, often correctly, that the public sector was defined by bloat, corruption, and, at best, far greater inefficiencies than could be found anywhere in the private sector.
Yet many serious problems with that idea were about to come forward, all centered around greed and private companies’ unwillingness to police themselves. Whether the issue was deregulated banking, auto safety, environmental ruination, drug ineffectiveness and undisclosed side-effects, or, in this case, food safety, the answer was becoming clear: industry players would do anything in order to profit at consumers’ expense.
Project 2025 will eviscerate government regulation across dozens of business sectors and expand Big Money’s ability to capitalize on the misery of the common person.
Since Trump came onto the U.S. political scene in 2015, a huge swath of the American populous has revealed that it has an unlimited appetite for his cruelty and hatred.
The former president has given the worst people in our country permission to show us how truly reprehensible they are.
A reader asks; Why do some people use the word “comfortability” when they can just use “comfort?” Do they mean different things?
This is an example of something we encounter frequently: how we make nouns from adjectives and vice versa. The rule seems to be: make the word as short as possible. If the adjective came from a noun, and you want a noun, just go back to the noun from which the adjective came in the first place.
Some of these are obvious, like comfortability, which, while it is a word in the dictionary, shouldn’t be used, IMO. Other obvious examples are beauty rather than beautifulness, courtesy rather than courteousness, and candor rather than candidness.
Some are more subtle, e.g., grace rather than graciousness.
