Alan Jackson’s cover of Merle Haggard’s “The Way I Am” is really excellent. That’s a mood that only country can evoke, and when it does, hot damn, it really does.

Country at its best is not an exercise in nostalgia but rather about yearning for something that you cannot have, or once had and irrevocably lost — that is not only lost but still is so close that it caresses your face with a breath of wind in the middle of the darkest nights. It’s the only musical genre that deals in tragedy and regret and loss credibly and with depth.

In that song you can hear the person that Jackson’s character almost was, wishes he were but is not, feels that he could’ve been if he’d just had a little more of…something. But he didn’t and that’s his fate.

And that mandolin playing is really great. My favorite of any song with mandolin.

Knowledge and privilege have different spellings mostly by just serendipity and the vagaries of language drift and variation. Sometimes in language, that’s just way things are. An obsolete valid spelling of “privilege” is in fact “priviledge.”

These two words come from much different places, though. “Privilege” is from Latin by way of Old French while “knowledge” is from Old/Middle English by way of Old High German. This divergent linguistic path might have some influence because “privilege” means basically “private law” and we spell anything to do with that cognate “leg-” as found in “legal” and “legislate.” This probably helped to fix that stem it in the word “privilege.”

The above is just my speculation. Unlike most etymologists on the internet, I will admit it is such because I don’t have the time nor inclination to do all the research that’d be necessary to attempt to determine that with any degree of certainty.

My partner was telling me about progressive web apps the other day and I thought they were applications that monitored what words you used and then got triggered and melted down or closed or something if you used an officially unapproved word.

No, that’s not what they are. But I am sure we’ll get there soon enough.