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Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 22, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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When I say "as a child", I mean in the critical period. I don't mean as a twelve year old.

I started picking it up when I was 5, or something. Then, when I was 7, Cartoon Network made a sudden appearance on the TV, and the people who were rebroadcasting it didn't have the resources to translate it, so my English really picked up at the time. All the vidya I was playing since I was old enough to hold a controller was also untranslated. It helped a bit with reading.

It's simply a fact that language rules are an emergent phenomenon determined by the, let's say, ummah made up of speakers of each language or dialect

Yeah, every category is. Transcription errors exist even on a biomolecular level, and we can tell they're errors because we can trace what they're meant to be transcribing.

Sometimes, it's harmless enough. Sometimes it's even adaptive, and you get evolution, but the descriptivist approach is akin to saying "cancer is, like, just another way of being, man".