Interesting how many of them start with a , which I'm assuming is a stop, maybe velar? Like, velar stop + mid/low back vowel. I don't do much etymology or cross-language linguistics, but I'm guessing those are . . . probably Slavic, but I see Dutch there too and maybe Spanish. The ones starting with vowels (aside from French) are I guess from Nordic countries? I think I was expecting (to identify) more romance languages. Neat!

Zero copula is a common but not obligatory part of African American English grammar that can occur just about any time you could contract "is" or "are" to " 's" or " 're" in Standardized/General American English:

• "His name's Steve" "His name Steve"
• "We're leaving" "We leaving"
• "I know who that is" "I know who that is" (ungrammatical to contract, ungrammatical to remove copula is)

Regarding "gone": In casual speech, the kind most people use everyday when talking to one another, vowels become more centralized and consonants are removed or articulated as flaps or taps or otherwise assimilated to better accommodate faster speech. This has been studied in English, Dutch, and German at least. Some examples are "going to" -> "gonna" and "I don't know" -> "I dunno", which have transcended phonology into our orthography. I'm not sure what process explains the "gone" variant, which is just "gonna" without the schwa at the end, but yes, many Black Americans say that.

This seems to be an ad. But also notable:

• The term "polygamous working" in the report (meaning "working simultaneously for a competitor").

• This quote, which isn't in the report linked: "According to the report, higher-ups are even more comfortable selling their account credentials than low-level employees. Thirty-two percent of senior managers find it justifiable, along with 36% of directors, 43% of C-suite executives, and, stunningly, four in five business owners." Where is this from? That's so many people.

I hadn't heard that part, I'll look it up. That's amazing lmao

Just a reminder that the founder of the Oath Keepers

wears an eye patch after accidentally shooting himself in the face with his own gun. [Reuters]

They absolutely should, I agree, and I think many folks will email you a copy if you ask. Also, sometimes the journals have clauses when you agree to publish, like you can't upload to your website the same version that they published, at least for 1-5 years. I still think people should do it anyway, anonymously, but I wanted to add that point about the extra legal bullshit.

The country broadly has what's called a monolingual language ideology. English is prioritized above others. Multilingualism just isn't viewed as a skill. And thus there's no large pool of L2 speakers with which to interact regularly enough to learn and maintain an L2. I mean, they certainly exist, but the landscape is quite different from somewhere like Belgium or South Africa or, idk, most countries. Really anywhere where there's like a home/cultural language, a market language (maybe a pidgin), and an official state language.

This article is largely quoting from Tanya Chen's Slate article: https://slate.com/technology/2026/02/ai-psychosis-support-groups-discord.html

The Futurism author credits Slate but adds very little.

I've appreciated endeavourOS's installer and defaults. It's Arch-based and has an option to install KDE/Plasma as the default desktop environment. I only back up my home directory, but I'm sure there's systemwide options, like btrfs snapshots (although that's a whole thing you'd need to test/verify). It's not an immutable distro. And, being Arch-based, it gets frequent updates. I've had a handful of issues from a package being too cutting-edge, but often it gets resolved within a few days at most with an update. Never had something totally break my system that I didn't cause myself (mostly symlink traversal). Just read up on pacman's flags (particularly -R flags, like -dd, -s, -n).