[Image of text saying,

Some AAVE speakers pluralize 'child' as 'childrens'. People get racist about this ("It's already plural!"), but 'children' actually comes from Middle English speakers doing the same thing: slapping their plural marker on word already pluralized by an extinct plural marker.

To oversimplify: in Old English, 'childer' ('ċildra') was the plural of 'child' ('ċild'). Middle English developed an '-en' plural marker, which we see in 'oxen'. Instead of updating to 'childen', people slapped their preferred '-en' onto the end of 'childer' - so now we have 'child-er-en'. AAVE carries on this tradition with 'child-er-en-s'.

"Pure" language is just impurity obscured by the passage of time.

End ID.]

"Pure" language is just impurity obscured by the passage of time.

Some alternative statements you could consider when your initial reaction is just ‘!’:

• I’m glad we took that X-ray
• Well this is almost certainly diagnostic

When one of my classmates broke my leg in 2nd Grade, there was an entire fiasco and I nearly died but I do remember the guy from radiology storming out to the little curtain area I was in and SLAPPING the X-ray up on the back light and the doctor actually shouting "JE-YAY-SUS! No wonder the kid doesn't have any damn blood!"

i have corneal dystrophy so my corneas will just kind of. tear. for no reason. quite frequently. cause of death: blinked too hard.

so one time i was in the eye hospital (id been there the day before and a junior doc dismissed me entirely as nothing being wrong, sent me off with no treatment, and my optician was Not Having It)

selfsame junior doc eye rolled and, when it was clear i wouldn't be leaving again, begrudgingly called in the consultant who took one glance at one eye, said "oh my god" and sent for a second consultant

who took one look and said "'ive never seen anything like it" and sent for a third

who took a quick look and said "wow. jesus. what a mess" and sent for the fourth etc

(junior doc getting progressively more embarrassed the whole time)

anyway both of my corneas have torn so many times it's apparently just a mess of scar tissue. but if you were wondering what's worse than one doctor exclaiming in surprise with 0 info, its having the entire department do it in succession

One time an old, very experienced doctor took a tissue sample of an allergic reaction to look at under a microscope. A couple minutes later the doctor came back in and said, "Hey you should come see this" and took me back to microscope to look at it.

While I'm looking through the microscope the doctor, in awe, says "I've never seen one so bad before!"

(To be fair, every single cell on the sample had exploded. Every last one.)

I started writing my book in 2005, finished the first full draft in 2015, finally published in 2018.

No, I wasn’t writing constantly during that time. For about 7-8 year the file was just gathering dust but I was THINKING about it. And sometimes that’s writing too, just letting an idea or a character percolate while you gain the live experience and the technical experience you need to make it RIGHT.

Loooook