I hope albe shows up in this thread! I like hearing the math ed stuff. Consider yourself bat-signalled.
2 reminds me of the concept of "lies to children", popularized but not invented by Terry Pratchett.
Like when you teach your kids to say "He can't come to the phone now" instead of "He's pooping."
2 is a more sympathetic explanation of the thing we see constantly with the kids in school, where they're taught the 1960-80's version of politics/nutrition/science, so that they can presumably end before the controversy took hold and became politicized, and also implicitly side with the conservatives/baby boomers memory of how it's appropriate to teach something. Basically the public school version of the canon of Christmas Songs.
A lot of times it probably comes from teachers free-versing on topics outside of their specialty, and so just spouting whatever they learned in the 80s-90s without reflecting on it. But sometimes it seems more intentionally ostrich-like.
Sometimes I think the reasoning goes: "If you have to piss off the liberals or conservatives, pick the liberals, because they're less Pillars of Society and Guardians of Rightness. Although they'll annoy you to death until you do things their way."
4: Or about less controversial topics. It is a lie that an atom looks like the solar system, with electrons orbiting the protons and neutrons in the center like planets orbit the sun. (Due to quantum stuff, electrons don't have positions in any meaningful sense, they're more like a cloud of potential positions at any time. I think. I'm not a physicist.) It is a lie that the Earth is round or planets orbit the sun in circles. (They're actually both more ovoid.) It is a lie that until Columbus sailed, people thought the Earth was flat. (The shape of the Earth wasn't in doubt, just the size, and Columbus was wrong about it so he was lucky he ran into a big landmass.) (There's lots of controversial stuff about Columbus, but I think why he sailed is relatively uncontroversial, right?)
Prompt dependence is a great term, it describes a lot of what I saw in introductory grad level statistics courses -- a lot of students could do the mechanics of each step just fine but really did not understand how/why the series of steps led to a particular type of result or conclusion.
Regarding butler lies and the phrase "at home," my understanding has always been that it is a euphemism that refers to whether the person in question is or is not receiving visitors, it's not at all about whether the person is physically present or not. So saying someone is "not at home" would not be a butler lie or indeed any type of lie.
Or about less controversial topics.
I can't remember the one that Hawaii brought home last week, but the way we explained it was, "The teachers are teaching you the background knowledge that adults learned as kids, and then as you get older, they teach how it evolved/changed/improved, which is the thing you're (correctly) taking issue with right now. So you're sort of learning the history of how people thought about this thing, only they're not saying that it's history yet."
I really wish I could remember what she was complaining about.
Prompt dependence is huge. I know that for my wife, history is the minefield of isolated facts -- she got the memorize names and dates version of history in classes, so isn't good at extrapolating from a general sense of the world in various centuries/decades and figuring out how [this thing] is a reaction to [that 20 year older thing]. I know that's the thing that I want to solve for just about everything... like, electricity is a scattered field of dozens of rules, to me -- but if I could assemble a good framework for house/building scale electricity, I could probably better find what's missing by moving along systematically.
Butler lies, or "little white lies"... they're so pernicious. It's way too tempting to give a short declarative answer, like "she's not here" or "the check's in the mail", than to engage in a lengthier conversation that winds up with the same result, but wastes five minutes getting there. Though my wife is currently enjoying the inverse -- wasting the time of telemarketers and "your vehicle warranty has expired" callers, with a sense that she's sacrificing her time to save some little old grandma a call from that scammer.
* There's no deception in "not at home." The speaker does not intend to deceive and the listener does not receive false information. If you were to translate the phrase to another language (say Spanish) you would not write "no esta en casa" but instead something like "no esta recibiendo visitas"
A butler lie would be more than the following. A Japanese friend of my sister brought a very expensive bottle of saki to one of her parties. He said it needed to be chilled before serving so he put it in the refrigerator. Meanwhile the party had descended into everyone taking too many shots of vodka and tequilla and getting really drunk. And of course wanting to start in on the saki. But the Japanese guy kept saying that it was not yet sufficiently chilled, which on reflection the next day after my horrible hangover had moderated I understood to have actually been him not wanting to waste very expensive saki on a bunch of drunks. "Not yet cold enough" was a socially facilitating diplomatic [butler] lie, not a generally accepted euphemism for "I'm not going to waste this booze on a bunch of drunks.:
7, 12: Is this a Britishism, a "divided by a common language" thing? If I was told that someone "couldn't come to the phone right now", or simply that it's "not a good time" for whatever I was looking for, I would assume they were in the shower, on the toilet, drenched with sweat due to something strenuous, or otherwise at home but not wanting to be seen. If I was told that someone was "not at home". I'd assume they weren't physically present.
13 Yeah probably. I was being pedantic. Also the "at" is important: "she's not home" does not mean the same thing as "she is not at home right now." I think you are correct that I picked up the idea of someone being "at home between 2 and 4" meaning that's when they are receiving visitors" (and likewise for "not at home") via British/English film or literature. So this would be among social classes that had formal visiting routines, i.e., not me or anyone I know.
I would never say "off to swim," if I were not, in fact, off to swim.
That's just what a butler would demur if protecting his employer's dignity.
We joined a gym, so I may start going to swim again. I'm still not eager to go inside yet though.
My mom made us ride our bikes to swim lessons so she didn't have to say, "I have to drop the kids off at the pool."
"My butt-ler is dropping the kids off at the pool."
Whatever happened to "indisposed?"*
*Definitely means "is pooping"
I think the Queen might do the "at home between...." thing but not really anyone else. It persists in the language, though - if you're not at home to someone/something, you are determined to exclude them/it from your life, rather in the way that if you say someone is not a happy bunny, you mean they're in the grip of utter fury and you should do almost anything to avoid seeing them.
On the topic of new vocabulary, I just learned the useful phrase Gish Gallop.
On prompt dependence: this comes from applied behavioral analysis (ABA), which is mostly but not exclusively for autistic folks. ABA is actually a hugely controversial thing, with many adult autistic folks arguing that it is inherently traumatizing. Prompt dependence is part of this argument--that ABA just teaches people to follow a cue, which is not a useful skill. There are a whole set of techniques for fading prompts to help a skill "generalize," but the debate is in part over how well that works. ABA research is a hot, hot mess--I know different fields all develop different standards of evidence, but really, the ABA stuff is just terrible.
Not unrelatedly, my son is autistic, diagnosed about a year ago, and I now know way more about this stuff than I had ever hoped to.
21. I don't think the Queen sees anybody without a formal appointment, except family at Balmoral and Sandringham. T!his isn't due to archaic formalities, her calendar is that full.
23: Oh interesting. How old is your son? What is he like? (That's a broad question but I'm just generally fishing for whatever you find interesting to share with strangers on the internet.)
7,8, 14:
I take "not at home" in the butlerish sense to be short for "not at home to visitors", which has little to do with whether you're physically there, conscious, dressed, etc.
P.p.c.