Goldieslearning - Big Plans, Baby!

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

anti-intellectualism is a deflection of personal responsibility to learn onto subject matter that isnt immediately understandable. it's a coping mechanism for people who want to feel like they're still living up to their full potential (they're not) by blaming the learning itself, instead of the effort they put into their learning

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):

there is no one coming to save you. there is no future version of yourself that will save you. there is no predestined course correction. all there is are the choices you make right now, and your best guess of how things will go. there is no narrative. no winning. only movement. and your convictions. you have no choice but to act on your convictions, your principles. or else the movement will sweep you up. dont be inert.

Get Dunked On

I love you phonetics I love you descriptivism I love you minority languages I love you dialects I love you accents I love you suffixes and prefixes I love you fossil words I love you outdated letters and pronouns I love you etymology I love you preservation of endangered languages I love you visible remnants of the way a language used to be I love you linguistics

Pink certainly gets my attention

I love how my notes look like a ladurée dessert!

This is my last exam and I have to give it my all. This course has been challenging to say the least but I learnt a lot and I took a liking to a subject I thought I would hate.

My study tips:

Set a timer of 1 hour tops for maximum productivity.

Make a small summary on each paragraph or chapter that you read on the margins of the book (make it look very cute as an extra)

Make sure your space is well illuminated and appealing to your eye (doesn’t have to be expensive, a little can go a long way!)

Talk to other people! Make sure you communicate with colleagues and professors, getting someone else’s perspective can be very valuable.

Try and explain the subject to someone with absolutely no idea of it! If they understood it then so do you

Happy beginning of the week!

fascinating that as soon as i start really digging into the whole law school thing all my targeted ads start being for whiskey

[Image ID: A picture of a bee and a wasp, both labeled. Both are colored yellow and black. Facts are listed about each one in their respective columns.

Bee:

Cute and fuzzy, like a friend

Make honey

Come in pretty colors with different occupations (blue orchard bee, carpenter bee)

Pollinators!

Freeloaders who will come build hives in the walls of your house

Communicate with dancing

According to all known laws of aviatin, honey bees can fly up to 15 mph

Like sweet things

Over 20,000 species--not just honeybees!

Wasp:

Cool and sleek, like a motorcycle

Prey on pests

Come in pretty, iridescent colors (ruby tailed wasp)

Will try to mooch off your drinks (so check your cans!)

Pollinators!

Leave you paper nests that you can sell to collectors

Communicate with smells

Like sweet things

Over 30,000 species--not just [kind I hate]

At the very bottom, in smaller text, is the URL bug-maniac.tumblr.com. /End ID]

NO ANTI-WASP SENTIMENTS ON THIS POST

Rings of Gas Giants

l Uranus (Chandra) l Neptune, Jupiter (Webb) l Saturn (Cassini)