Possibly the most horrifying thing that has ever happened to me occurred today. So I’m in a creative writing class at university right now and we had to print out twenty-five copies of our first, one page assignment to distribute to the class. I had to print mine at the computer lab as I don’t have a printer, but here are the three crucial facts that made this the worst mistake of my life.
1. Sometimes, when you log into Google on Chrome, it activates all of your extensions, even ones you’ve deactivated.
2. In high school, my friends and I got really into Ponify (a words replacing chrome extension) and switched the preferences so we could read political articles and have congress get into a “rousing snow ball fight” and the like.
3. Ponify reverted to its original My Little Pony lingo when opened on a new computer’s chrome.
So when I distributed my twenty-five copies of this I noticed the word “everypony”, my heart seized up and dropped into my stomach, and with my imminent death approaching, I began furiously correcting all twenty-five of them. My teacher, confusedly, agreed to let me correct them as I was too infuriated and ashamed to say my mistake aloud.
I just realized, however, that the line “as she watched the binding fall away in her hand” was changed to “as she watched the binding fall away in her hoof”.
And I just had to send this email:
And basically I’m ready for death how was your day
everyone always says that the best profession you can have if you love hearing tea is working in HR but I disagree. as a lawyer you literally get the tea from all angles and from everyone involved and get to ask questions about it and make people swear that it’s true under the penalties of perjury. you also get to gather receipts and be like, but your honor, the receipts
It took me embarrassingly long to figure this out, but it turns out trying to blow off all your hobbies to study more does not in fact result in studying more. It results in pretending to study more. Now instead of drawing or writing when I get tired I get on my phone instead, because I can’t stop studying, but I can “take a quick break” in the middle of studying. Trying to fix that now.
The Needle Galaxy, NGC 4565 // galactic_surfer
For my linguistsics degree, I did a project on why I'm seeing more people saying "on accident" instead of "by accident." I looked at almost a million pieces of writing pulled from news sites, blogs, academic articles and television transcripts. I found almost three hundred cases of "on accident" being used. It was a surprisingly even spread across sources. Even more interesting, I organized the hits by date and tracked an upward swing in use as time goes on. This means that the use of "on accident" is increasing over time, and may eventually supplant and drive out the classic usage of "by accident." I like to call this prepositional shift.
Now, looking at my data and looking at the age ranges of the writers or speakers, the majority of them were under the age of thirty. So I interviewed a panel of people, choosing twenty with a spread of about half above thirty, and half below. Those older than thirty years of age felt "strongly" or "very strongly" that "on accident" was wrong in all cases, and that "by accident" was the only correct phrase. However, those younger than thirty were much less rigorous, with more than half feeling "ambivalent" or "less strongly" about which was correct. This demonstrates a generational link in preposition usage.
When presented with options for the definitions of "by" and "on," we also get some interesting data. For by, there are two main definitions according to the Oxford English Dictionary: 1. Identifying the agent performing an action. Or 2. Indicating the means of achieving something. Whereas "on" has many more definitions, the pertinent ones being 1. To indicate the manner of doing something or 2. To indicate active involvement in a condition or status. By the above definitions, either "by accident" or "on accident" is a correct usage of the term. However, native speakers of English could not successfully define either preposition, instead just choosing one, the other, or both as "sounding correct."
The only evidence for a rule-based shift that I could find was a correlation with the paired phrase for the opposite condition "on purpose." While the younger interviewees were ambivalent about the correctness of "on accident," they uniformly rejected the correctness of the suggested phrase "by purpose." So the shift can only be in one direction according the the native ear, towards the preposition "on."
Whether this means that the particular usage of "by" is becoming archaic or the definition of "on" is expanding is a possible subject of further study using a wider range of phrases. But I found the wider acceptance of "on accident" versus "by accident" to be a fascinating look at how prepositions can shift meaning and usage over time.
So now I'm curious, five years from my initial study (and itching to try the Tumblr poll feature):
NASA’s Webb Space Telescope Reveals Astounding, Unprecedented Views of the Universe
Absolute beginner adult ballet series (fabulous beginning teacher)
40 piano lessons for beginners (some of the best explanations for piano I’ve ever seen)
Excellent basic crochet video series
Basic knitting (probably the best how to knit video out there)
Pre-Free Figure Skate Levels A-D guides and practice activities (each video builds up with exercises to the actual moves!)
How to draw character faces video (very funny, surprisingly instructive?)
Another drawing character faces video
Literally my favorite art pose hack
Tutorial of how to make a whole ass Stardew Valley esque farming game in Gamemaker Studios 2??
Introduction to flying small aircrafts
French/Dutch/Fishtail braiding
Playing the guitar for beginners (well paced and excellent instructor)
Playing the violin for beginners (really good practical tips mixed in)
Color theory in digital art (not of the children’s hospital variety)
Retake classes you hated but now there’s zero stakes:
Calculus 1 (full semester class)
Learn basic statistics (free textbook)
Introduction to college physics (free textbook)
Introduction to accounting (free textbook)
Learn a language:
Ancient Greek
Latin
Spanish
German
Japanese (grammar guide) (for dummies)
French
Russian (pretty good cyrillic guide!)
Mom sent me a facebook link to a PBS news hour post about how the anti-lawn movement is growing. The vast majority of the comments on it were stuff like this:
Most people are on our side here, even the so-called "boomers." We just have to be spreading ecological knowledge and practical means of creating useful habitat in back yards! Educate! Protect! Resist!
i love you space i love you moons i love you solar/lunar eclipses i love you gas giants i love you pluto i love you asteroid belts i love you planet that rains molten glass i love you supernovas i love you comets and meteor showers i love you nebulas i love you constellations i love you infinity
christ