To me — maybe not to anyone else, but to me — there are two distinct kinds of memories, only one of which I really think of as a memory. When someone asks me if I remember something I generally reply in the negative unless I remember it in that one particular way. These two ways are: Plain Old Memories and Remembered Facts.

Plain Old Memories are things you can re-experience in your mind, maybe even evoke the scents and sensations of the moment. The tentative hold before you approach for your first kiss, the first time a girl you like smiles back at you, that night you started at a basement party and wound up dancing naked in the fountain. These memories are much less reliable than Remembered Facts, they’re so rooted in emotion and passion that over time they become little more than the emotions of the moment with a few sprinkled images and a healthy imagination to fill in the rest, but they’re so much more human than that second form of memory.

Remembered Facts are things you know happened to you, but they feel distant, like facts from a table you had to memorize at some point. As an example, at my fourth birthday party I had pizza. Something didn’t sit well and I got sick from it. I didn’t eat pizza again until I was in grade 6. I’m sure there was a point when that event felt real to me, but at this point I simply know that it happened. I know that it happened in exactly the same way that I know that World War 2 happened. I can attach emotion to it, but the emotion will never come from it. There’s an immutable distance to it. Do you remember it? No. You know it happened, but you don’t really remember it.

I always tell people I have a terrible memory and this is what I mean. So much of my youth is obscured by veil of abstraction, a dehumanizing wall that lets me know things happened but never re-experience the urgency of them. I know that many things have happened to me. But I don’t remember them in the way I think most people remember their personal histories.

As a devout fan of Babylon 5, I’ve had more than my share of discussions about it. I’ve told endless people to watch the show, to not give up on the show before they get to the second season — when the show really begins to take shape — and, like any B5 acolyte, I’ve defended the controversial fifth season. Obviously, don’t read any further if you don’t want to be spoiled about Babylon 5.

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I’m not a fan of prescriptive linguistics. English is defined descriptively, not prescriptively. That is, English does not have a formal definition from which the language is constructed; the language is described by its usage. I’m misusing the terms prescriptive and descriptive linguistics a little here, but the essence is the same. Languages like French and Latin are predefined so they can be better studied using prescriptive linguistics. English changes all the time so the arguments for prescriptive linguistics don’t hold water.

Of course, prescriptive linguists don’t want English to change at all. They want it to be a dead language. Case in point: what’s the French word for internet? Internet. It’s not even a French word; it must be awkwardly placed into otherwise francophonic speech. And why? Because there is an organization that dictates what goes into the language. The language’s rules are prescribed like the speakers of the language are obviously too idiotic to speak the language.

This kind of stance will inevitably bite me in the ass because descriptive linguistics, where common usage is described and codified as the proper usage, means languages can change. And there are certain things I like about English. I like not ending sentences with prepositions; I might do it from time to time, but I get a perverse little kick out of reordering the words of a subordinate clause such that the preposition leads rather than lingers. Of course, it’s not like the language will ever outlaw that type of speech – English is described not prescribed, after all – it will merely be deemed archaic. I don’t appreciate being referred to as archaic but it wouldn’t be the end of the world. Similarly, I tend not to brazenly split infinitives but I absolutely disagree that they shouldn’t be allowed. As others have said, the idea that we shouldn’t split infinitives comes from other parent languages which don’t allow it; of course, they don’t allow it because it can’t be done in those languages, but that point is typically ignored. That said, I would never want to live in a country where “irregardless” is seen as a real word; not only is there already a perfectly good word with the same meaning (regardless) but “irregardless” implies negation of regardless by its prefix. On the other hand, while normalcy is a neologism for normality, I accept normalcy because it has a poetic feel to it that normality cannot evoke.

But I don’t care if my stance on English is slightly hypocritical because, quite frankly, so is English itself. And I Love English. There’s no language I’d rather have gown up speaking. It’s weird, it has no strong rules of grammar, and it’s essentially learned through trial and error but it’s ultimately the result of five hundred years of brilliant minds borrowing from other languages to better evoke the feelings and descriptions they had. English is not a romance language. It has borrowed most of its vocabulary from romance languages but it is very different and should not be bogged down in the bureaucratic quagmire that is prescriptive linguistics. Languages are not created by the elite few, they are shaped by society. On occasion, it seems like society shouldn’t really be in charge of those things – especially given the preponderance of internet speak leaking into the vernacular – but most of the time I’m damn proud that our language isn’t locked away. Because if it were, a new Shakespeare could be born and we’d never appreciate the beauty of the words they bring.

Everyone knows that September is the month in which most babies are born. Nine months after the Christmas/New Years holidays naturally, when everyone gets drunk and sleeps with people inappropriately. Of course, there is a moment in between the two which every person loathes: breaking the news. Now women back in the day were probably delighted they were pregnant as it meant they had a strong connection to that man who could then become her husband. I’m talking way back in the day, when all women had was their husband. Because she is so happy that she’s dug her way into a man, she wants to let him know as soon as possible, but it takes a while to figure out you’re pregnant. Considering these olden days had no period regulation via hormone pills their period could vary a fair bit and so it would take about six weeks before they were certain they were pregnant. What’s about six weeks after the year-end holidays? The mid-February’s loom, they do. So off she goes to tell her man and what does he do? He reluctantly celebrates the event and steps into “matrimonial bliss” via a romantic night of love and adoration. And thus Valentine’s Day was born.