Arthur D. Hlavaty

Here are some Dirty Words that must be taken out of scientific papers lest they hurt the sensitive feelings of the government:

Gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, biologically female

Twitter bans Memphis [Gizmodo]

At least as much as you wanted to know about the Scunthorpe problem

Thanx to Slate Star Codex

Backwards & forwards [The Believer]

Thanx to File 770

Crucial distinction explained by Emma Darwin

Just picked up Lydia Davis’s Essays One. I enjoyed many of her Collected Stories (a number of which are more accurately described as nonstory constructs), and I recommend the book highly. In the Essays book she discusses the funny-sounding word gubernatorial, how it comes from the Latin word for steering, and how variants of it appear in other languages. She does not trace it back one step further to the Greek original, from which we get cybernetic.

The president of the United States is acting in the interests of a foreign power because they own his ass after bailing him out of his many business failures, but saying that sumbnall* Jews are loyal to Israel as well as to the United States is an unprecedentedly evil slur.
*Some but not all (Robert Anton Wilson coinage). I, for instance, am not one.

Goy is not a hate word [Twitter]

Thanx to andrewducker

It used to be that an elitist was a person with ability who tells the masses not to obey the people with money. But now there’s a stupider definition: author who thinks she should be paid for her work [Guardian]