After I had blogged about Barbie, I suddenly wanted to get several things off my chest.  (I'm glad I managed to be critical of the movie without completely dumping on it.  I think it will be an influential movie for years.  Greta Gerwig seems to be trying to nudge the degree to which a film makes demands of a movie audience in the direction of more.  But remember that we have to absorb the sense of the movie in real time!  The ability to do that depends on a number of things; if a moviegoer loves the movie enough to watch it a second time, it could make a huge difference in their understanding of the movie.)

I was looking for information about something on Google, when I came to the bulleted list of previous queries.  OMG.  Let me just say that the typical user of Google is quite unable to formulate a grammatical question.  Let's see whether I can get you a screenshot ...

Nuff said.

It's an interesting puzzle.  An ultra- conservative, or  Tea Partier would probably assume it is an immigrant; at any rate, it is certainly a question from someone whose native language is not English.  But this person is interested in a hymn—a Christmas hymn, in fact—and in locating it in "Methodist", the Methodist Hymnal, I would guess.  All he (or she) had to do is to look it up in the alphabetical index at the back! It's this person new to hymn-books?  It is a whole pile of interesting questions. 

To be fair, there's no basis to assume this person is a typical user of Google; in fact this was the second of several items of this sort, and the other items were phrased reasonably intelligibly.  (I don't want to sound ignorant, but as a teacher I know that confusion between 'intelligible' and 'intelligent' just has to be expected.  Intelligible means easy to read (if it is text, or easy to understand, if it is spoken).  Intelligent is probably what you think it means; I can't do a better job of defining that word. 

But wait, there's more!

Now, my Facebook feed has started showing me trivia about figure-skating as well!  This is how I discovered about a Russian skater called Yulia "Sunny" Lipnitskaya.  This is a pint-sized beauty whom I'm half in love with!  My enthusiasm was greatly dampened when I saw a photo of her receiving a certificate from our good friend Putin, and when I read that she had given her blessing to her husband to go fight the Ukrainians.  I would have put up a photo of her (and her adorable little baby girl) if not for struggling so much with the blogger software.  OK; let me try ...