Two reports on abilities and disabilities in reading. One from my own experience in reading Finnish (a language I don’t speak, though I have a fair amount of linguist’s knowledge about the language, its structure, and its writing system). The other from our overlord Grabpussy’s approach to reading English (his native language, indeed the only language he can speak). I’ll suggest that the two of us are more alike in our abilities and disabilities than you might have thought.
Archive for the ‘Morality’ Category
Adventures in reading
March 24, 2026Masculine flamboyance
March 12, 2026adj. flamboyant: (of a person or their behavior) tending to attract attention because of their exuberance, confidence, and stylishness … [from NOAD]
Last Saturday I made the acquaintance (in the first Crooked Media show on MS NOW) of this exemplar of masculine flamboyance, presenting himself in this IMDb photo as an impish hunk:
Jon Favreau (advertising Crooked Media’s Pod Save America show)
Inexplicably, I seem not to have noticed JF before, though he’s someone of great substance. Meanwhile, his performance on the show was hugely entertaining — cutting criticism of our overlord Grabpussy and his administration, flamboyantly delivered. The deep moral commitment of Stephen Colbert performed in a wildly expressive style.
Living out loud
October 22, 2025The beginning of an e-mail exchange with a graduate student in linguistics, call him GS, who wrote to tell me that he’d found my blog a few years before he went to grad school in linguistics:
and I thought it was excellent and exactly the thing I needed at the time
I replied with delighted thanks, and asked if he would be willing to say, more specifically what is was that I provided for him.
GS then elaborated on his thoughts at the time in a particularly thoughtful flight of introspection (and, yes, said more nice things about me).
Now: details.