…what slight?

I had a “gf” in grade 6 break up with me because she claimed to have seen me in a porno. I didn’t even know how to respond

I got accused of rape my junior year of high school by a girl I had never met. She picked me out of the yearbook and made up a crazy story. This dragged on for months, countless meetings with police/principals with no evidence other than her word. Her mother even came into my work yelling and screaming at me, her brother was trying to find me to kick my ass. Turns out the whole time her boyfriend was sexually abusing her. She admits to randomly picking me and making up the whole thing. Pretty fucked up situation to put a random kid in high school through.

Back in the day, I was stationed in South Korea when I was 18/19 years old. While it was legal for Koreans to drink by 18, US soldiers were expected to wait until they were 21. Soldiers 21 and over got ration cards in order to buy alcohol from the post’s shoppettes. I was never 21 in Korea, so I never got one.

One day the Criminal Investigation Division shows up and starts asking around about me. Sure I guess I was technically drinking underage on base, but I was legal once I left. And I hadn’t done anything else shady or dodgy, so I was getting a little concerned.

Turned out, I was being accused of buying liquor on base for cheap and then selling it to Koreans for profit because a bottle of real Jack Daniels was like $200 whereas I could have bought it for $20.

I told them that I couldn’t have bought it because I don’t have a ration card for alcohol. They didn’t believe me, but somehow it got cleared up down the road because I never heard another word about it. And I doubt it was mistaken identity because my height kinda precludes me from being misidentified, and the only other guy on the base that looked even remotely like me never got in trouble either and he was never questioned in the first place.

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I’m 8 years old. For some reason I’m out the front of the house with a friend and his mum on my bike. Again, for some reason that makes sense to children, I insist on showing them how ‘far’ I can cycle, and go off around a corner a little way from our houses to find some kind of loop back. Not important.

I find myself going down this fairly tight alleyway when a girl, maybe around 11/12, starts coming down the other way. There’s just about enough space for us both to fit, but I’m not a very experienced cyclist and lose my balance, instinctively grabbing her handle bar to avoid falling into her bike. We’re going slowly enough that we’re both absolutely fine. I apologise profusely and remove my hand from her bike and back to mine, when she grabs my hand and forces it back into her handlebar. She loudly shouts ‘DAD!!’ and my heart absolutely sinks.

This big guy comes round the corner. He was fairly tall and muscular, with short hair and a tank top. The main thing I remember is that he had terrible teeth, something I’m about to get a good look at. The girl informs him that I am ‘bullying’ her. He is immediately aggressive, detaining me in this narrow alley and interrogating me about what I’m doing. He shouted directly at my face, letting me feel his spittle and see his black teeth clearly. Her mum comes round to see what’s going on. She asks how old I am, and I say that I’m 8 and just trying to ride my bike. She says “8’s very young to be bullying” as if there’s a more acceptable time. I insist I’m not trying to bully anyone but they have none of it. After 5 minutes or so the dad asks me where I live and as some sort of self-preservation I say through tears that i “don’t know”. They let me go and I cycle off wiping away my tears.

I get back to my friend and essentially just say ‘haha! I went a really long way’, and that’s the end of it. I never tell anyone for fear that they won’t believe me, and I feel terrified that that girl or man will find me for the next year or two. Arseholes.

Last year my (then) gf got it into her head that I’d been unfaithful to her with my neighbour, and on one occasion snapped and physically assaulted me in my own home. She then claimed to friends and family that I assaulted her, presenting photos of bruises on her arms and face as “proof”.

My bf is convinced I have/had feelings for some other guys. Keeps pressing the issue and “Why can’t you just admit it?”. I can’t admit something that isn’t true…

I get accused of not knowing about linguistics or history a lot.

I am a degreed linguist, and the people who accuse me of it tend to be ethnic nationalists or right-wingers. You can’t reason with them. People don’t like being told that their language isn’t the end-all be-all or that minorities (gasp) have their own speech patterns.

There was a notable incident on Reddit where someone complained that African-American Vernacular English wasn’t legitimate. I responded to the guy, who, in response, kept moving the goalposts. He asked if AAVE let Blacks “flourish”, I directly addressed it, then he took me to task because that was supposedly something he didn’t ask about. Then he spouted off about how Indigenous American languages were inferior because you couldn’t talk about quantum physics with them (which is false, but the hard Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a tough bug to kill). The kicker is my interlocutor was from Texas. He shut up when I pointed out that “y’all” is, by his own metric, “incorrect English”.

Watch their brains implode when they talk about how French is “legitimate”, and Latin is even more “legitimate”, and then you point out that French developed out of Latin via the same means and processes they demonize in minority speech.

Or when people bitch that “I could care less” is incorrect English. It’s not; it’s an idiom. “Brazen” as a descriptor of methods or attitudes is descended from an idiom (nobody says “bold as brass” anymore though, so its origin is obscured).

I even run into this on the fediverse (search my comment history).

It gets worse when people write sources and facts off because it’s inconvenient. I was into it today with a Turkish nationalist who claimed that Turkish was the mother of all languages (it’s not even the mother of Turkic generally) and then went on to deny the Armenian genocide. I also ran into someone who tried to deny that Russian was a legitimate Slavic language because I cited George Shevelov’s work and obviously his last name was Russian, so he was a propagandist…when Shevelov is Ukrainian-American and spent a long time teaching at Columbia.

Being a linguist on the Internet is an utterly Sisyphean task.

I was walking home from work late one evening 20+ years ago when someone in a big pick-up truck pulled up next to me, rolled down their window, and started berating me for “doing drugs and chasing girls”.

I was not, at the time, doing drugs or chasing girls. I was working an IT job in a tiny New England town, had recently been dumped, and was convinced that I would never date again, oh woe is me. Some server had blown up and I’d been at the office late.

And for this I get hollered at by some stranger?

Best I can figure is they mistook me for someone they knew — who, for all I know, was doing drugs and chasing girls.

Quite a few times. Not much you can do about it except avoid the person forever. Spent 3-8 grade refusing to talk to a fellow student over them doing this to me.

Had a few in mind, but I got to thinking and remembered I actually did do it lol