I feel slightly offended. Because it’s true.
(Alt text: “Do you feel like the answer depends on whether you’re currently in the hole, versus when you refer to the events later after you get out? Assuming you get out.”)
I feel slightly offended. Because it’s true.
(Alt text: “Do you feel like the answer depends on whether you’re currently in the hole, versus when you refer to the events later after you get out? Assuming you get out.”)
I think people who think that know more pedants than linguistics and either confuse the former for the latter, or when they meet a real linguist, the linguist’s questions sound on first glance like the pedant’s ones they are uses to. But I have no empirical data to prove my point
I feel like the pedant would be instead bossing the other around, with an “you mean that you «fell into» a hole”. Or perhaps voicing useless trivia, like “fun fact: some people say «fell in a hole»! The more you know~”.
In the meantime, the linguist doing this (from anecdotal evidence, I’d say that plenty do it) is motivated by curiosity, not trying to show off; in spirit he’s the same as “that kid” who disassembles objects to understand how they work, it’s just that the curiosity comes off in the wrong situation.