Thanks, good point. I’ve edited my comment.

I learned women actually don’t have the same access to higher education as men.

You’re right - women have significantly better access to higher education than men, and have demonstrably better education outcomes as a result.

For example, women are significantly more likely to receive scholarships and grants than men in undergrad.

Partially as a result of this lack of access, men have dropped to almost 40% of undergrad students, while women make up nearly 60%. Women also receive more doctorates than men, and almost twice as many Master’s degrees as men.

I’m not trying to minimize the bigotry that you observed (or faced), but it’s objectively false to claim that women have worse access to higher education than men.

I can’t tell if this is cope or Kool-Aid.

In my experience that’s more commonly due to overzealous mods deleting or locking posts than it is to OPs deleting posts.

It does seem like a fundamental problem with Reddit-style comment sections, which is why I usually prefer communities that rely on voting instead of heavy-handed moderation.

Interestingly, Latin ursus and Greek arktos are cognates. Both come from the Proto-Indo-European word for “bear”, h₂ŕ̥tḱos.

This word is interesting in that it contains an example of what’s called (for various reasons) a “thorn cluster”. Certain words in PIE containing the cluster “tk”, for whatever reason, underwent metathesis (switching places) in most of the IE daughter languages. This is why the PIE word has a “tk”, but the Greek word has a “kt”.

This is one of the many reasons for thinking that the Anatolian branch of Indo-European (Hittite, Luvian, etc.) branched off from PIE first - the Hittite word for “bear”, ḫar-tág-ga-aš, still shows the PIE order of “t” and “k” (the Hittite double-g was probably something similar to a “k” in this environment, and what appears to be an intervening “a” is a shortcoming of Hittite’s cuneiform writing system), meaning that this family of languages branched off before the rest of the family underwent this shared change of “tk” to “kt”.

Another fun fact about the “bear” word is that all of Germanic has completely lost it. Instead, in prehistoric times they innovated a formation meaning “the brown one”, which is still reflected in Modern English bear.

This is thought to have been due to taboo avoidance. When you’re hunting the bear (or maybe when the bear is hunting you), you don’t want to actually say the true name of the animal, because that would either scare it away or bring it to you, whichever is worse under the circumstances. So, you instead call it “the brown one” so as not to draw its attention, and so, over time, the true word for “bear” in Germanic was completely lost.

A similar process may have happened with the source of one of the primary Slavic words for “bear”, medved <*medu-ed “honey-eater” (the first part cognate with English “mead”, and the second with “eat”).

Specifically, the process by which cucaracha became cockroach is called folk etymology, whereby words that people have trouble making sense of in their native language can be remade with pieces they are familiar with.

Other examples of folk etymology include Key West from Spanish Cayo Hueso (Bone Key), crayfish from French creviche, Alzheimer’s Disease being called Old Timer’s Disease, and many, many others.

They’re also older than Polaris. Not just older than since Polaris has been our North Star, but older than the star itself.

Google keeps changing my country just as I get ready to move to another country. I haven’t had currency in correct local units in almost a decade.

And, of course, there’s no way to change this - it’s done automatically, and always at the worst possible time.

Turns out we were living on the Bionis after all

I tried out a couple of other Reddit replacements a few years ago before Lemmy took off, and I really enjoyed the few that had separate votes for “funny” and “insightful/contributes to discussion/whatev”.

Yeah it made voting a bit clunkier, but it did a good job of differentiating between two very different ways of positively contributing to a discussion.

And many other measures besides.

Don’t worry, I always leave plenty of room for my animal slurry. ^_^

Blindly promoting the false dichotomy just like I mentioned, ignoring all of the research on the ways that technology and legislation can reduce the vast majority of the effects mentioned in the data you cite, while also clearly revealing your religious, dogmatic reasons for ignoring all of that research in the first sentence of your non sequitur screed.

Just like my crazy aunt in her anti-abortion Facebook rants. But do you have the self-awareness to realize that?

Nope.

Exactly. Vegans promote a false dichotomy due to their religious fanaticism, intentionally ignoring all of the ways we can already mitigate the vast majority of the problems of meat production through legislation and existing technology.

At the end of the day they’re functionally equivalent to anti-abortion activists, pushing an extremist, arbitrary view of which lives humans are or are not allowed to end.

A significant number of linguists believe that words aren’t real, so…

I mean, yeah. Two different things can be true at the same time.

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The difference being that my “pedantry” is informed by history and linguistic theory, and is intended to stop linguistic prejudice, as opposed to the pedantry threads like this are magnets for: perpetuating linguistic prejudice while being completely wrong in the process.

Edit: Typo

The downside is that with appositive phrases present the Oxford comma can introduce ambiguity:

“Thanks to my mother, Mother Teresa, and the pope.”

In the Oxford comma system this is ambiguous between three people (1. my mother 2. Mother Teresa 3. the pope), and two people (1. my mother, who is Mother Teresa 2. the pope). Without the Oxford comma it’s immediately clear that “, Mother Teresa,” is an appositive phrase.

The opposite happens as well, where Oxford commas allow true appositives to be unintentionally read as lists:

“They went to Oregon with Betty, a maid, and a cook”, where Betty is the maid mentioned.

This ambiguity is easily fixed, of course, but then again so is any ambiguity from not using an Oxford comma as well.

Note that I use the Oxford comma myself, but it’s still worth mentioning that both systems are ambiguous, just in different ways.

Here I am, calling out pedants for being literally and demonstrably wrong about language for two (and a half thousand, under the sloppy reading) years and counting!