I just posted the following on a comment thread about gay marriage, in response to a couple of people who made the usual arguments about gay marriage leading to polygamy and incest and such. My response:

Suppose the slippery slope argument is true? What if gay marriage *does* lead to legalization of polygamy, incestuous marriage, and so forth?

So what?

If you don’t have a good reason to ban polygamy, then polygamy should be allowed. Likewise for incestuous marriage.

My point is that if there *are* good reasons to ban polygamy and incestuous marriage, those reasons will still exist regardless of what happens with gay marriage.

Think about it.

Linguists Gone Wild!, about how the The American Dialect Society chooses its Words of the Year.

It’s always nice to see santorum get greater publicity. (By the way, that site gives new meaning to “splash page.”)

My favorite quotes from the article:

The suffix -based, as in faith-based or reality-based, was widely disliked. “It’s its own opposite,” said Bill Kretzschmar, editor of the Linguistic Atlas of America. “If it’s reality-based, it’s not real.” …

But carb-friendly — when used to mean “not containing carbohydrates” — took the prize. “It’s meaningless,” said phonetician David “Not the Rock Star” Bowie, “unless you’re saying you’re a friend of carbs by not eating them.”

The assignment for Mrs. Stanfill’s eighth-grade social-studies class was to pick a year in U.S. history and live for a week as if it were that year, without any of the conveniences available in today’s modern society. I chose 1992, and for extra credit I persuaded my family to participate in the experiment along with me.

That’s the beginning of a humor piece, 1992 House, that appears in this week’s New Yorker. Though it’s a parody, for some reason it resonated with me. The year 1992 feels like yesterday; it’s shocking to realize how many things I take for granted today didn’t exist a mere 13 years ago.