Let’s compare what the UCLA student has lost and what he has gained. Here’s Oberon addressing Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

Once I sat upon a promontory
And heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath
That the rude sea grew civil at her song
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres
To hear the seamaid’s music

To which UCLA’s junior English faculty respond: Ho-hum. Here’s the description of a University of California postcolonial studies research grant: The “theoretical, temporal, and spatial intersections of postcoloniality and postsocialism will arrive at a novel approach to race, gender, and sexuality in present-day geopolitics.” To which UCLA’s junior English faculty respond: That’s more like it!

I wish I could say this was a parody of conservative culture war writing, but no

Youth goes fast, and yet you are still alive. There will be no coming back.

Although stated as such in TNG: “Night Terrors”, REM sleep is not the exclusive purview of dreams - it is simply the most common time to dream. 5-10% of people who are woken during non-REM sleep also report dreaming. We can perhaps forgive Crusher being inexact as she was impaired by the effects of the Tyken’s Rift.

It’s very soothing… and then suddenly you realize that he’s just lulling you so he can smack you over the head with a patented word-couple like “hemorrhoidal isometrics” or “vampiric homonculus.”

But most remarkable of all was the effect of this anogenital licking on the young rats’ brains.

Likewise, the very point of the slur “birdbrain” is to indicate that the thinking skills of the person in receipt of the insult are, in some important way worth commenting on, inadequate.

This society is no feminist fantasy of the future.  It is the Republic of Armenia.

Notice that one cannot use planks and a pair of dividers to construct physical scaffolding in hyperspace!

All the latest signed comments are Odd Tablet ones.  The full signature is “Old Man Odd Tablet” or “Old Odd Tablet.”  Sometimes he refers to himself as “The Old Crock” or “Old Useless.”