You forgot about the possessive plural y’alls’s
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I love that video. Shame it took a scumbag like Robin Thicke and his rapey Blurred Lines to make it possible.
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I’m disappointed that this entire thread hasn’t yet had a single mention of Amelia Bedelia.
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This one’s good too (although not really relevant to the topic unless you want to criticize Deadpool’s hashtag abuse and attempt to rhyme with orange.)
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No, not really. In practice it doesn’t work that way. Technically, all Spanish speakers can rely on the RAE for disambiguation, but a word can be defined by the “governing body” and only be used in certain regions.
Sure the RAE tries to be prescriptive but if you read publications from different countries you notice differences even in sentence construction.
TL;DR language governing bodies don’t have the power to be prescriptive. Regional differences in how the language is used get accepted by said governing body but do not necessarily get propagated to other Spanish speaking countries/regions.
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I like that your TL is nearly as long as the long form : D
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There really are degrees of uniqueness, defined by just how different or novel the thing, idea or expression of an idea is from others. Every Kellogg’s Frosted Flake is unique, but not “very” unique.
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Irish has been experiencing something similar. The other side of the family being Irish. Basically they enforced re-adoption of the Irish language in hopes of re-igniting it as a language of everyday use. But along side English, because you can’t exist as an Irish only nation. They failed really. The Irish speaking regions (Gaeltacht) shrink every year. Most people taught Irish (IE everyone who attends school there) can’t speak the language conversationally. On the other hand the local dialect of English is rapidly changing. It’s diverging from British English, and incorporating more and more Irish words and structures. I can even notice the difference over the last decade in the way the same family members speak. It’s wild.
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Ha! I didn’t even notice that. 
In my defense. The first paragraph was originally much longer before some judicious editing.
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Fun facts:
I love Marvin Gaye, hate that song (which clearly violated copyright and was rapey as fuck) and I wouldn’t listen to it at all, until Weird Al parodied it in his brilliant video.
I also laughed in schadenfreude when Paula Patton divorced Thicke for his douchery.
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When I was a kid there was a push to avoid discouraging the large Vietnamese population from speaking Vietnamese, and the loss of Cajun French usually came up in those discussions. It’s so easy though for teachers to just ban a language when kids use it to gossip, or cuss, or tease other kids. Which is why class size is so important, trying to control large groups leads to blunt tools.
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I have this thing where when I listen to music, I don’t understand the lyrics at first. So the first few times I heard the song I liked it, then I heard the lyrics and thought "what in the actual fuck am I listening to? "
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The very first time I heard it, my reaction was something like:
http://i57.tinypic.com/i50n84.jpg
Which made me go ‘Genius’ the lyrics:
If you can’t hear, what I’m tryna say
If you can’t read, from the same page
Maybe I’m going deaf
Maybe I’m going blind
Maybe I’m out of my mind
OK, now he was close
Tried to domesticate you
But you’re an animal
Baby, it’s in your nature
Just let me liberate you
You don’t need no papers
That man is not your mate
And that’s why I’m gon’ take you
Good girl!
I know you want it X3
You’re a good girl!
Can’t let it get past me
Me far from plastic
Talk about getting blasted
I hate these blurred lines!
I know you want it X3But you’re a good girl!
The way you grab me
Must wanna get nasty
Go ahead, get at me
What do they make dreams for
When you got them jeans on
And then I was like:
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Oh my God the anarcho-primitivist bullshit…
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We say “you guys” here and cannot locally say “y’all” without sounding like we are just trying to be goofy. “All y’all” is even more foreign. But I spend time in Texas for work where both can be heard. Last year I wanted to see what my 14yo would say if I tossed out an “all y’all”. I was already getting made fun of for saying y’all every so often. I took a screen shot of it for posterity.
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I’m working on this.
The teacher in me always comes forth to teach, even when I should hold my tongue. Apologies.
Agreed, but how often does that happen? My experience is that when it’s impossible to discern the speaker’s meaning, bad grammar is usually only the icing on the cake of communication difficulties.
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My favorite: “I’m mostly vegan.”
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Unfortunately, ctrl F will only search the part if the page that’s currently loaded in your browser, and as you scroll down, previous posts get unloaded as new ones are downloaded. You need to use the bbs search function and select “search in this topic” to search through the whole thread.
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I know “mostly vegan” sounds funny, but what do you call someone who maintains a vegan diet when they can, but is less strict if there are no vegan options available?
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