like a love letter to language
Joined March 2025
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There is no group chat. Come outside.
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Praise God out of your mouth even if you are finding it hard to do so in your heart. Similarly, all of your relationships and therefore your life as a social animal would improve if you started speaking as if you were composing a work email everywhere except your own property.
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Book Club California retweeted
Jun 12
Magic words are real and obvious.
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People make suggestions for the grammar of foreign languages exactly the same way that they make suggestions for the way politics should be conducted.
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❌: You’re using a part of your mind which can only conceptualize the present as a hypothetical scenario which may occur 50,000 years in the future.
✅:
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We probably can’t reclaim thee, thou, and thy without an executive order but you can refer to people as “Mr./Ms. [name]” to signal that you have been introduced but are not yet closely acquainted and it wouldn’t appear out of place in any context.
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The horse head scene in The Godfather can only take place because Jack Woltz expresses his desire to block Johnny Fontane from getting a movie role and then takes pride in showing his horse to Tom Hagen as an example of his personal importance.
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Praise God out of your mouth even if you are finding it hard to do so in your heart. Similarly, all of your relationships and therefore your life as a social animal would improve if you started speaking as if you were composing a work email everywhere except your own property.
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You can do a lot of facework by describing the effect that facework is supposed to have.
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Imperium is the power to command. An empire is the context in which this language is made intelligible.
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“And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.”
In Spanish, using words to form a “sentence” is the same word as “prayer.” A criminal penalty is also called a “sentence” but it is understood to mean an “authoritative judgment.” You “plead” your case in court. The judge speaks in highly illocutionary imperatives like the Father
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