If Alexander Siddig were your boyfriend, you’d know how to play cricket. You’d own matching sweaters, which you’d wear when his and your families got together for a game.

If Alexander Siddig were your boyfriend, you’d make breakfast together in a well-coordinated dance: he’d set out the eggs and butter up the pan while you put in the toast and set out the plates. Then you’d switch places — you would grab a pan to fry the eggs while he got out jam and grabbed the toast as it came out of the toaster. As he made the coffee, you’d take a second to butter up the toast before you returned to the pan. He’d be smothering the toast with jam while you added the fried eggs to the plates, and you’d be pouring coffee while he got out the orange juice, sriracha sauce, and utensils, before you both sat down. All without saying a word.

If Alexander Siddig were your boyfriend, you would come up with amazing couples’ costumes for Halloween. But they would be ones that also worked independently, so you wouldn’t have to stick to the other person’s side all night.

If Alexander Siddig were your boyfriend, you’d always fill up every page of your sketchbooks and notebooks and journals. You’d stop worrying about the pages of dialogue that doesn’t come out quite like it sounded in your head, or the drawings of feet that look more like hoofs with little corn niblets on them.

If Alexander Siddig were your boyfriend, he wouldn’t mind you going on about the technobabble in Star Trek. “Come on, ionospheric interference again?” you would say. “Positively tricky things, ions,” he’d reply, with a smirk that would make you want to hit him in the face with a pillow. Lovingly.

If Alexander Siddig were your boyfriend, you’d slyly refer to that one thing he does as “the Cardassian neck trick.”

Whether you breastfeed exclusively, prefer to use formula, or have adopted a mix of both methods, we can all agree that nursing is a beautiful, natural moment between a mother and child. It’s a shame we still live in a society that shames and sometimes even criminalizes parents for trying to feed their babies in public. Check out these pictures of parents of all kinds that remind us whether we breastfeed or not, it’s a loving, natural act we can all get behind.

Gretchen McCulloch’s previous works of linguistic genius for The Toast can be found here.

The Wired style guide changed my life. One particular sentence, in fact.

We know from experience that new terms often start as two words, then become hyphenated, and eventually end up as one word. Go there now.

Oh. I thought. Oh.

*

Wired Style was a book by Constance Hale and Jessie Scanlon, but I encountered it on the internet. It would have been sometime in the early 2000s. I was the type of teenager who read help documentation and tech blogs and anything that seemed vaguely linguistics-related, and I was already reading the articles on Wired‘s website, so of course when I stumbled upon its style guide, I read that too.

The thing that stuck in my mind about the Wired style guide was the attitude. I’d read other usage guides — well-meaning gifts from people who thought that having an interest in linguistics was the same as having an interest in the mechanics of writing — but they tended towards the curmudgeonly. But while Strunk & White and their inheritors considered themselves the last thing standing between The English Language and Mortal Peril, Wired Style said, essentially, No. We’re not the guardians of tradition, we’re a forward-facing tech publication, and it’s essential for us to be on the vanguard of linguistic change. Hyphens will drop eventually, so let’s drop them now; capitals will eventually de-capitalize, so let’s lowercase as soon as the opportunity presents itself.

To my teenage self, it was like being handed a crystal ball and a lever with which to move the world at the same time.

If Daniel Radcliffe were your boyfriend, he would be turned on by the fact that you win whenever you arm-wrestle. He’d look for excuses to arm-wrestle.

If Daniel Radcliffe were your boyfriend, you would wake up really early on purpose, just so you would have more time to laze around in bed together, reading. Sometimes he’d nudge you awake before dawn so the two of you could watch the sunrise on the roof with a blanket around your shoulders. You’d be grumpy at first, but he’d already have tea ready for you, and he’d be so scruffy and rumpled and earnest you’d just let yourself relax and sink into the morning with your head on his shoulder.

If Daniel Radcliffe were your boyfriend, he would beg you, from the bottom of his heart, never to make Harry Potter spell jokes in bed.

If Daniel Radcliffe were your boyfriend, he’d be endlessly in awe of how you don’t seem to mind that his life is very peculiar and different from yours, and he’d hate dragging you into it but love being with you whether he’s in “movie star mode” or not. You’d just smile and tell him it’s all an adventure, and it’s a fine trade-off for everything you have together that when you go to Comic-Con he’s always wearing costumes with hoods or helmets.

If Daniel Radcliffe were your boyfriend, whenever you were in a bookstore (which would be very often) he’d nudge the books shelved around where your last name would be, leaving a gap. He would whisper, “That’s where you’re going to be someday,” with such confidence and affection that you’d melt and have to hide your blush behind a stack of Poirot novels.

If Daniel Radcliffe were your boyfriend, there would be a much higher concentration of show tunes in your life. He’d want to sing every duet with you.