colorless green ideas sleep furiously?

Today our totally qualified native speaker!!! Finnish teacher "explained" that what differentiates casual speech from written language is that there "kind of aren't any rules".

SOOOOO, not a linguist then!

She did say she "didn't really like grammar" to me in passing once, which I found difficult to understand. How can you like teaching language, let alone teaching lower-level language to non-native speakers, if you don't like grammar?

But I've noticed sometimes that the syntactical underpinnings of explanations aren't really there. Like, it's completely plausible that they would just confuse many of my classmates, but the difference, for example, between a gerund and a participle is pretty hard to explain without using some version of the concept of "modify", and without comparing the words in question to nouns and adjectives. Not that she doesn't fully undersatnd the nuances of the different forms and modes she teaches, but the way she explains them is almost always a combination of semantics and examples.

She's pretty good at explaining things generally, but it's not in a way that's extremely suited to the way I organize grammar in my brain. Her counterpart who loves grammar, like me, is easier to understand.

a very specific ubuntu-based linux music player rant

Every now and then I think, "Surely all the major Ubuntu-based distributions will have a default music player stable enough to not constantly crash by now, right? I mean, the overall user experience in all the main flavors is so smooth and mostly crash-free in other areas, so maybe I can switch away from Quod Libet now, since everyone is always so slow to include widget and menu integration for it and it lacks a good compact display mode. Some of the other ones have really sweet-looking widgets and stuff."

So then I try one.

And okay, to be fair, Amarok under the newest KDE is no longer crashing constantly on my system, but the browser's complete lack of multi-pane sorting and the inconvenient playlist management was enough to drive me away anyway.

But Rhythmbox! STILL crashing more than once per day... on the system it came pre-installed in!

I've been using Quod Libet for at least 4 years under Unity, Gnome Shell, KDE, Xfce, and LXDE, and it's never crashed or sucked up all the memory.

Ugh.