Fossicking and skerrig are related to mining activities, so may be more localized to areas were the gold rush was big. I confirmed they’re actual words.

My parents emigrated from Aus/NZ just before I was born, so I inherited a bunch of weird down-under, outdated vocabulary.

“What are you fossicking around in the pantry for?” “Did you find a few skerrigs of chocolate?” “I need to use the dunny.” “That guy in car dealership was apoplectic.”

Lots of other turns of phrase, but - with the possible exception of “dunny” are legit words.

EDIT: OK. A few others, I still use ‘blasted’ as an adjective. If my kids do something ridiculous, “Jesus wept, child,” sometimes comes out of my mouth. Then a bunch of, “running around like a sprayed blowfly,” or, “wandering around like a lost soul.”

I’m totally struggling with the mixed units here: potential energy being compared to power. “How much hp does your car have?” “A tank of gas.” Wut?

This line right here: “battery storage equivalent to the output of 20 nuclear reactors.” I suspect the author has considered GW with GW/hr…

It’s other common name is the European Fat Dormouse.

I don’t see why the need to shame. Some of us like our dormice with some fat on them.

“Had a relationship with …”

Sex with a minor. Hmm … sex with a minor. I could swear we had a word for that.

I often cringe a bit at the rhetoric coming out of the men’s rights corner, but the gender bias around sex with minors in so consistent.

Motivation.

Is it? There are plenty of Jews and plenty of Muslims who are not involved in this and see it as wrong. Plus, that’s such a broad statement as to be meaningless. We could equally say government is the problem, but there aren’t many advocating for anarchy. Or people are the problem. I’d be more inclined to say tribalism is the problem, the very foundation of an “us” vs. “them” mentality. Sometimes assholes pick a fight and call it religious. There’s a strong case to be made that war has become much more brutal and far reaching since the Napoleonic wars and the rise of the nation-state. I mean, we can blame religion … that certainly erases the need to look within ourselves and ask why humans do this to each other.

It’s a bit like pretending Nazism was a German problem and pretending like the same dark forces don’t exist now and in many people everywhere.

There are definitely some religious dickheads, but there are dickheads of all stripes.

If religion is so vile, how do we hold in tension the fact that religious people are often behind the most charity towards the marginalised and disempowered? Atheists talk a good game, but rarely leave their armchairs to do anything positive. Religion can become a tribal marker, but it also is one of the main forces working against tribalism.

That’s kind of the point: there isn’t an authority on English. The closest we come is a bunch of English elites making up informal rules on grammar, spelling, and pronunciation and judging everyone else for not using their version. … And a bunch of try-hards who enforce their arbitrary and often nonsensical 'rules '.

If it parses, it rolls.