I agree with this blogger, this kind of sweeping judgments isn’t doing anybody any good:

“There is no greater threat to a child’s emotional well-being than being separated from a primary caregiver. Even if it was for a short period, for a child, that’s an eternity,” said Johanna Bick, a psychology professor at the University of Houston who studies adverse experiences in childhood.

It’s possible that the professor was misquoted or edited in some way. If that’s the case, she should make a big stink because she’s being portrayed as a quack. I mean, children of what age can’t be away from mommy even for a short time? Two days, two months, two years, seven years? Fifteen? And what’s a short time? Two minutes or two months?

No self-respecting scholar would make such grandiose pronouncements in a professional context.

What triggers me are toddlers in TV shows. Hate those little buggers. They never pay any attention to their parents. Because obviously the actors are not their real parents. And it would do nothing for the plot to show endless scenes with a toddler fighting the battle of Somme for mommy’s attention.

I get all that but it’s still very annoying to watch the scenes where mommy comes into the room, and her two-year-old continues to play placidly and silently in the corner without even noticing her. I keep yelling at the TV, “Lady, wake up! Aren’t you supposed to be a doctor? (I’m watching Grey’s Anatomy.) Your kid is seriously unwell. Do something about it!”

You, folks, told me to take it easy after the surgery, so I’m back to my TV-watching marathon.

Are there any Grey’s Anatomy fans here? Because I’ve got things to say and nobody to discuss it with.

After a colleague posted the article on trigger warnings I linked earlier on academic discussion boards, it took under 3 hours for other colleagues to start screaming like banshees that he’s “belittling sufferers” and offering a string of truly strange accusations. And that’s in summer, when most people are away and not checking the work email all the time.

This is the real issue with trigger warnings and this is why I keep posting about it. Look at the normal, civilized discussion we’ve had on the blog in these 3 hours of this very link. But it doesn’t work this way in professional settings. People are using these discussions, probably without realizing what they are doing, to prep their arsenal for the job wars where getting and staying employed in prestigious professions will hinge on the capacity loudly to proclaim one’s unwavering support for the most recent dogma.

Russian is impossible to teach because all the words are extremely long and most have the ы sound. To understand what it sounds like, take the vowel in “big” and just your lower jaw out while making the sound as strong as possible. Horrible, eh?

Klara now asks, “how do you say that in Russian?”, but loses interest when she hears that the simplest English words sound like an endless jumble of a million ы-containing syllables. Take, for instance, the word toes. Do you know what it is in Russian? Пальцы ног. How crazy is it? And this is without commonly used diminutive suffixes.

What a stupid language.