Best of both worlds.

What book?

Man idk

I got a date secured and it dawned on me that I am NOT ready to have a date over. Like you ever realize how many things you gotta take care of that you stopped paying attention to?

Like fine, clear your counters, sweep the floor, clean the bathroom, replace the burnt out light bulb, clean sheets on bed, on box spring, on bedframe, shampoo carpets, dust shelves, put away clean clothes, wash dirty clothes, check your fingernails, check your ear and nose hair, your regular hair, make sure they don't have allergies, etc, etc.

Im ok with not getting laid I don't have the energy to go to work, do all that shit, panic for a week about the date, have fun at the date, play the social awkward dance of "more, not more" and potentially end up having her see that I'm an absolute disaster?

Nah I'm good.

Show me the progress of your most recently opened audiobook.

This is why I just burp into the phone until I know I'm talking to a real person.

I made the mistake of pronouncing the "s" in "debris" once, and a pedantic acquaintance pretended to not know the word over and over as I repeated it, until I finally realized the mistake. If he'd simply corrected me, I would have laughed at myself and appreciated him. But he had to be a smug prick about it, and now I permanently resent him.

Sorry for the mini trauma dump. Just agreeing with your sentiment.

Never make fun of someone if they mispronounce a word. It means they learned it by reading.

I learned English reading so many books that I just pronounced how it's spelled in my head. Combine that with general non-social tendencies I didn't really heard or had to say a lot of those words.

I had to spell out words to people because of that. Then I came to US, and now I can't even spell the words because the alphabets are pronounced differently lol.

Because I'm a fairly basic Chinese (Mandarin) learner, this gave me a moment of feeling dumb before realising it's Cantonese.

One thing I love doing is to learn to say "I don't speak " as well as possible in a language I don't speak. If you're good enough at it, people will assume it's a joke and try to speak to you in that language you don't actually know. Apparently I'm pretty good at saying it in Portuguese, but I wouldn't know.

Good. There's too many of us.

without making mistakes

This part is not true at all. I know a guy who edits these, and from what I hear, re-reads are very much a thing.

Ain't has been around since 1749, with an't and in't preceding it. It seems to have always been associated with the common people, and familiar/colloquial talk. Dickens used it a lot for that reason.

Aren't to an't makes perfect sense among people who don't pronounce their rs like certain Brits (non-rhotic).

And isn't to in't, and haven't/hasn't to hasn't are certainly no more difficult elisions to understand than Worcestershire or Cholmondly, although those have kept their spelling because they're names.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ain%27t

AI not. Ain't.

In fairness they never said they ain't stupid, they want to know if who they're messaging isn't stupid.

Ain't is just a shifted dialectal pronunciation of aren't

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ain%27t

Also relevant to the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webster%27s_Third_New_International_Dictionary#Treatment_of_the_contraction_'Ain't'

pastime

keep reading those books

My wife got cataract surgery years ago and they kind of botched it, so she could see for some time. She couldn't watch videos/TV, browse the web, or anything like that, and it was pretty terrible for her. She asked me to read to her, so it became a daily thing. It was pretty neat, I have to admit, though it sure did make me hyper aware of my pronunciation and stuff.