Sublime

educational researcher at the University of Pennsylvania named Erling Boe,

In a modern society, who is allowed to speak with authority is a political act.

hope to persuade you that the decline of a print-based epistemology and the accompanying rise of a television-based epistemology has had grave consequences for public life, that we are getting sillier by the minute.

as the linguist John McWhorter pithily put it, today we ‘talk with our fingers’.

The acrid views expressed about colloquial speech in online comments sections today is a relatively new view of language, fostered by a combination of bourgeois sensibility and the dominance of unchanging documents such as dictionaries, both of which subtly but powerfully distract us from the dynamic reality of language’s essential mechanisms.

On the one hand Marco made some good arguments, but on the other Derek remembers his college years well enough to know that skill at debate isn’t the same as maturity.

Distant abstractions are easier to antagonize than “living, breathing interlocutors.”

the culture wars—as the vociferous debates over race, religion, gender, and school curricula were called during the 1980s and 1990s—have