Teacher: William Shakespeare is credited with the invention of over 1,700 words. He was a linguistic genius.

Student: Can I make up words and use them in my papers?

Teacher: Absolutely fucking not.

@lowqualityfacts
#Education doesn't favor the #creative thinker:

The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis,
the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion
-- these are the most valuable coin of the thinker at work.
But in most schools guessing is heavily penalized and is associated somehow with laziness.

"The Process of Education", Jerome S. Bruener

@lowqualityfacts
Become a conlanger
#conlanging

@jackcole @lowqualityfacts

ugh, so true.

I remember my teachers saying "never use the first person in an essay! it's not about you, it's about the facts and research!" but then if I stated a conclusion without saying "this is what I think," they'd scold me for writing as if it was an objective fact when it was really my opinion.

@Earthtoerika @lowqualityfacts

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”

Mark Twain

@jackcole @lowqualityfacts

...but I was still expected to state my conclusion.

So I had to learn vocabulary like "it can be concluded that..." "it is apparent..." and all the other weasel words that let you state an opinion while suggesting (but not outright saying) that it's a proven fact

@Earthtoerika @lowqualityfacts In past I would review 100 papers or so a year for different technical publications (e.g., digital forensics, storage systems), and the handling of conclusions isn't much different or easier than for legal arguments or general writing, which I have reviewed just for my own satisfaction. I was a chemist in the first ten years of my career, and chemists are notorious for hedging statements in conclusions. Writing is hard work.

@lowqualityfacts That's because Shakespeare was a cunning linguist...

@lowqualityfacts here’s a fact: i put the word “medachodical” in a history exam I did at school many years ago and nobody said squat. I’m kind of like Shakespeare in this respect, medachodically speaking.

@oldmanmike @lowqualityfacts 😏

@lowqualityfacts I rebuild words in english all of the time! Exceot when clarity is primary. Then, I be a good laddy. 😊

@lowqualityfacts

That teacher is not cromulent.

@lowqualityfacts fair question though, if shakespeare could do it, why can't we?

@cadence022 @lowqualityfacts You don't know Francis Bacon.

@cadence022 @lowqualityfacts Just go write some stuff that gets super popular. Any words or phrases that you invent that catch on can be credited to you.

@cadence022 @lowqualityfacts The hard part isn't making up the words; it's getting them to catch on.

@lowqualityfacts Germans are objectively better than us anglophones when it comes to rules about making creative, on-the-fly compound words

@lowqualityfacts I picked my college thesis topic in large part so I could use a word I coined during a discussion session. It's been 15 years and I'm still proud of that.

@elmiller0330 @lowqualityfacts 👏🏼 👏🏼 RELATABLE! Still proud!

@elmiller0330 @lowqualityfacts going to need to know the word now. Thanks.

@SarcastiCarrie @lowqualityfacts Paul Muldoon wrote a poem that was heavily influenced by Bob Dylan's music. It's almost a villanelle, but not quite. I called it a "dylanelle."

@lowqualityfacts Shakespeare was the first person to use the word "hobnob" This demonstrates what a genius he was because the biscuit wasn't invented until 1985.

#facts
#biscuits

@lowqualityfacts
Notice: this has about 5k upvotes on r/me_irl, didn't realize it would blow up like that. Will remove if you consider it insufficiently credited

https://www.reddit.com/r/me_irl/comments/12wxen6/me_irl/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

@MahatmaKG Haha that's hilarious, no need to remove!

@lowqualityfacts https://youtu.be/A8M8qTclbho

@lowqualityfacts @TicklishHoneyBee ITYM absofuckinglutely not

@lowqualityfacts I remember telling my grade school spelling teacher in the '70s that one day they're going to condense words when writing & she pretty much gave me the same response. Years later cell phones came out and people started texting using condensed words!

@lowqualityfacts

Absofuckinglutely not; really.

@lowqualityfacts
What kind of a lousy teacher says that!
If a student of mine had come up with a new word and could explain her thinking to get there, I'd give them extra credit.

@Island_Martha @lowqualityfacts

Heck, yeah! And then I’d be dropping that new word all over - at the store, on social media, everywhere.

Source: I am an English teacher. 😊

@athena_rising @lowqualityfacts
Brava! Caring language teachers for the win.

@lowqualityfacts Brilliant - “see the writer with his pen who must be dead to be admired” - with apologies to Gordon Lightfoot (Don Quixote)