There are! Many of them are here, too!

Oh, its heft, its physicality, makes it all the better!

This is the only sensible way forward. If people don't want to do the work, they should do something else. Thank you for holding the line against the slop.

This is so relevant to my day-to-day thinking at @hubcitypress.bsky.social. instead of being demoralized and saying, let AI do all the publishing work and pump out more slop to boost sales, our new focus is carefully curated + clearly human created. Hence the focus on short stories, novellas, etc.

I said this when the fake books supplement came out this summer but, if the internet is mostly bots now then that's who's reading and engaging with these fake AI articles. I think that's what's making me feel so untethered--how little humans matter to any of these systems now. Bots talking to bots.

Thanks for the shout-out!

👏👏

Ooh, lot hinges on “Ninja Rap”

Also: TMWKTM. New Turtles? lol

Same. But I think you’re right about its prominence. Que Sera hit #2 on Billboard. (Doris Day—Cincinnatian!)

Those are good calls. The song is super forward in TBG, but these are good examples.

Yes! Surely Lynch was familiar with “The Blue Gardenia,” too. There are echoes.

/7 The OED first records the derived form (definitely including a bunch of Latinate suffixes) ‘affordability’ in 1910.

Its first two citations really hit close to home. Affordability—long an issue, it bears repeating.

6/ Around this time and before, the sense of ‘afford’ was evolving from “produce, yield” to “manage to give, to have the means (to).”

By the 1680s, the OED records it in the current sense of “to have enough money for (something).”

5/ ‘Geforðian’ became ‘aford,’ among other forms and due to regular sound changes, in Middle English.

In the 1500s or so, know-it-alls like myself shaped ‘aford’ into ‘afford’ to fit it with a lot of Latin derived words beginning with the prefix ‘af-,’ an assimilated form of ‘ad-’ (to, towards).

4/ The ‘ge-’ (or ‘y-’) was once a productive, versatile prefix.

Here, it conveyed completing a process. The obsolete verb ‘forðian’ meant “to carry out” and the like.

Its root, the adverb ‘forth,’ survives today.

3/ ‘Afford’ is English. Good ole English.

It’s recorded in Old English as ‘geforðian,’ meaning “to accomplish, provide, further.”

‘Further’ is key, because it’s actually related. As is its variant ‘farther.’

2/ I always sort of assumed ‘afford’ was from Latin.

Welp, apparently I wasn’t alone in that arrogant, foolish assumption.

It’s not Latin, but its spelling was modeled after Latin under similarly mistaken notions.