Using “uncomfy” instead of uncomfortable. I recognize this one is fully style, but it’s like nails on a chalkboard. Break the entirely fake rules of grammar and spelling all you want, but have some decency when it comes to connotation.

Comfy is an informal and almost diminutive form (not technically, but it follows the structure so it kinda feels like it) of comfortable. You have to have a degree of comfort to use the less formal “comfy,” so uncomfy is just…paradoxical? Oxymoronic? Ironic? I’d be ok with it used for humor, but not in earnest.

Relatedly, for me “comfy” is necessarily referring to physical comfort, not emotional. I can be either comfy or comfortable in a soft fuzzy chair. I can be comfortable in a new social situation. I can be uncomfortable in either. I can be uncomfy in neither, because that would be ridiculous.

FWIW I would never actually correct someone on this. I would immediately have my linguist card revoked, and I can’t point to a real fake grammatical rule that would make it “incorrect” even if I wanted to. But this is the one and only English usage thing I hate, and I hate it very, very much.

Both excellent, but I have to put The Body at the top. I think that’s where I realized how excellent some of the actors in this show were, SMG in particular. Anya’s monologue has stayed with me in a way nothing else from tv or movies ever has. Would I rather enjoy a OMWF singalong? Yes, any day. But The Body felt like a one of a kind thing.

Yeah in most North American dialects it’s produced with a tap/flap, not a glottal stop. Unfortunate, because it would be very fun if it were true for us.

When I loved this song as a teenager I did understand that it was about the girlfriend’s suicide, but I missed the abortion piece. I assumed the “baby’s breath” referenced wedding flowers and “shoe full of rice” was like the rice you throw on newlyweds.

Turns out the only true part of the story is the abortion, which is a rough topic but not inherently tragic. TBH these days a song about abortion could be considered wishful thinking. (Or even celebratory? Cue the Sextina Aquafina abortion song from Bojack.) The suicide is poetic license, but does make for a beautiful narrative of guilt and naïveté.

I absolutely consider Phantom Tollbooth a masterpiece. There’s nothing else like it, and it has extraordinary persistence.