Fark has been doing that for almost 25 years (e.g. every instance of the N-word becomes "attractive and successful African-American") and I'd be lying if I said nobody had a problem with it, but people who see fit to challenge it tend to give up very quickly.

The obvious joke here is "If that substance is being marketed as 'beer', and if we've all agreed to tolerate this, then we're already on level 2."

Have you ever looked at a tree and thought, 'Can I drink this?'

1. If your bit depends on the audience being too stupid to remember that fruit juice exists, it's a bad bit.
2. American dairy products often contain trace chemical contaminants from sources much scarier than trees. Link
3. Interestingly, wood pulp does have a history as a food additive, but it's less of a "millennial nonsense" thing and more of a "ripoff scheme sometimes attempted by the agro-food establishment during periods of lax government oversight" thing. Link

Meh. The universal grammar concept has the potential to yield interesting insights, even if Chomsky's version of it (or at least, Chomsky's version of it which was current when I was in undergrad) resembles English too much in the particulars. Also, the "linguistic differences between ethnic groups" can of worms rarely contains anything useful, at least not when Westerners open it.

I will reserve judgment until I read more. Got any more?

Someone who lives outside of Canada might be tempted to dismiss this as 'treat discourse', and that's fine, but I would politely urge them to read the article first.

What next? Requiring translations of Chinese-named dishes, so 'chow mein' becomes 'Chow Blvd. Saint-Laurent'?

AFAIK the usual move here is to do a morpheme-by-morpheme translation with the ethnic origin tacked on at the end, so 'chow mein' would probably become something like 'nouilles sautées à la cantonaise', which is both more verbose and less fun than what Freed is suggesting.

People make fun of a video of someone’s toddler only eating the very tippy-tops of strawberries. They recommend a healthy dose of beatings.

The internet really is exactly the same in every language, isn't it.

If the USSR wanted to keep workers in, that means it understood that it couldn't function without them. Does your current country act like it understands this?

[Quietly whistles Electric Six guitar riff]

In standard written English I think "they were hurt" is the clear winner.

Closest point of comparison I can think of is "you were hurt", which uses the same verb form regardless of whether "you" is singular or plural.

And maybe a Roma state somewhere east-southeast of there.

imagine in like 2110 someone makes a rap musical about Alan Greenspan

Thanks to ChatGPT, we don't have to wait until 2110. Hell, we don't even have to wait until the end of the day.

The truth is that life on farms from the Atlantic Seaboard to California bore little resemblance to the nostalgic ideal suggested by contemporary imaginings of the family farm. [...] Camps, bunkhouses, lodges, taverns, and saloons were spaces rife with intimate and sexual relations that directly contravened dominant middle-class notions of sexual propriety: homosexuality, sexual barter and commerce, public and semi-public sex, and cross-dressing and gender fluidity.

If HBO made a show about this I would probably watch it.