Heidi Bond gets pushed a long way out along that gra­di­ent I was just talk­ing about.

It makes me melan­choly, you know. I’d best have a box of kleenices nearby, in case it over­whelms me.

No seri­ously, if you think about it, this abbre­vi­ated slangy crap peo­ple use online (espe­cially ESL writ­ers) might be taken as evi­dence for the fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ence between read­ing and writ­ing — these are folks read­ing Rowl­ing (and lots and lots and lots of words she wrote), but who on the face of it haven’t inte­grated her lan­guage very well, though they can clearly parse it. Imi­ta­tion does not fol­low from exposure.

Either that, or you’ve gotta buy into that whole Eng­lish is a Liv­ing Tongue bull­dada. And you know, we need to decide. It’s gotta be one or the other.…

It also makes me think about the dynam­ics of cul­tural mix­ing brought about by large wide-​​ranging shocks to the sys­tem. Now where’d that meme come from?