Lots of stuff. Nutrition, supplements, accents, beauty standards, parts of speech

 

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/06/260605023408.htm

 

The above link is an example of the drumbeat of not taking supplements unless we have a demonstrated deficiency. I wonder about that logic, as in insurance one does not buy the fire insurance when the house is ablaze, one buys insurance. Of course overdose and side effects may enter the picture, and one must be aware.

I think your insurance analogy gets at a real tension in nutrition science.

The article's main claim is not really "wait until the house is on fire." Rather, it is that many people are taking out insurance policies against fires that are already extremely unlikely, while every insurance policy carries a premium and sometimes a risk of its own.

The question becomes: what kind of insurance are we talking about?

For some nutrients, preventive supplementation is clearly sensible. Folic acid for women who might become pregnant is the classic example. Vitamin B12 for strict vegans is another. Vitamin D for people with very little sun exposure may also fit that category. In those cases, we know the risk of deficiency is substantial and the cost and risk of supplementation are low.

But suppose a healthy person with a varied diet takes large amounts of vitamin A, vitamin E, beta-carotene, iron, or high-dose B12 year after year. The evidence becomes much murkier. Some supplements have shown no clear benefit in people who are not deficient, and a few have raised concerns about toxicity or even increased mortality in certain groups.

What I find interesting is that medicine often treats deficiency differently from insurance. An insurer asks, "What is the probability of loss?" A physician asks, "What is the probability of deficiency and what are the costs of prevention?" If the deficiency risk is 1% and the supplement risk is essentially 0%, supplementation may be reasonable. If the deficiency risk is 1% and the supplement itself has measurable risks, the calculation changes.

Vitamin D is a good example. Many physicians are perfectly willing to recommend modest supplementation to prevent deficiency in older adults, even before deficiency is documented, because the downside is small at ordinary doses. What the recent studies question is whether pushing levels higher and higher produces additional health benefits.

There is also a statistical issue. Deficiency diseases are often uncommon in affluent societies. If you give 10,000 well-nourished people a supplement, perhaps 100 would have benefited because they were borderline deficient, while 9,900 get no benefit at all. The average result in a clinical trial then looks unimpressive, even though a small subgroup genuinely benefited.

Your own situation illustrates why blanket statements can be misleading. You are an older adult. Age itself increases the risk of B12 deficiency because absorption becomes less efficient, and certain medications can worsen that. The article specifically mentions B12 and vitamin D as nutrients where targeted supplementation is often appropriate in older people.

So I would slightly modify the slogan. Instead of "never supplement unless deficiency is proven," I would say:

"Supplement when there is a reasonable risk of deficiency, a plausible benefit, and little risk from the supplement itself."

That is closer to how insurance is actually priced as well. You insure against losses that are sufficiently likely and sufficiently costly, while the premium remains acceptable. The disagreement is usually not about the logic but about estimating those probabilities and costs. Many supplement enthusiasts think the probability of hidden deficiency is high; many researchers think it is much lower than people assume.

And, as an old insurance man might appreciate, bad estimates of risk are where most arguments begin.

I take a daily vitamin/mineral supplement that provides about half RDA in a form that dissolves in water to enhance absorption, making sure it contains no iron or potassium. The cost is minimal and the drink is pleasant.

Those two sentences are actually a nice little demonstration of exactly what you’ve been circling around.

“He dogged me.”
Here, dog is being used as a verb meaning something like to pursue persistently. That’s a pretty normal process in English: nouns becoming verbs without changing form. English does this very freely—to email, to Google, to chair a meeting, to impact (controversial, but real).

“You are a bother.”
Here, bother is a noun, even though its most common life is as a verb (“don’t bother me”). Again, same lexical item shifting category purely through sentence position.

So what you’re seeing is:

• Same word-form

• Different grammatical role

• Role determined by syntax (position in the sentence), not morphology (word shape)

That’s exactly the analytic tendency you were describing earlier.

But there’s an important refinement to your underlying idea:

English is not eliminating parts of speech. It is making them less visible in the word itself and more dependent on structure.

The categories are still doing real work:

• “dogged” (verb) implies an action with subject/object structure

• “a bother” (noun) implies an entity or label being assigned to a person

What’s changed is where the grammar lives. In Latin or Russian it’s often inside the word. In English it’s mostly in the sentence architecture.

And your intuition about Vietnamese goes even further in the same direction: it pushes even more of that burden onto position, particles, and context. But even there, speakers still implicitly know whether something is acting like an action, a thing, or a descriptor—they just don’t rely on word shape to tell them.

So your broader insight is solid, with one tweak:

It’s not that languages are losing parts of speech—it’s that they differ in how loudly they announce them.

I think one can express it the way I expressed it, of having concept words that can serve as different parts of speech, or you can express it your way, as having parts of speech that can be the same word. Amounts to the same thing.

Yes—that’s a fair equivalence, and you’ve basically identified the same phenomenon from two different directions of description.

Your framing treats the word as primary: a concept-word that can take on different roles depending on context.
The more traditional linguistic framing treats the role as primary: noun/verb/adjective slots that can be filled by the same word-form.

Mathematically speaking (and this is the cleanest way to see it), they are dual descriptions of the same mapping:

• In your view:
  word → function depends on context

• In the standard view:
  function → word depends on usage

Same structure, different direction of emphasis.

Where linguists tend to get slightly picky is that the “parts of speech” categories are not arbitrary labels—they correspond to real differences in how words behave in syntax (what they can combine with, what they can modify, what roles they can take). So even when English allows heavy “role switching,” the underlying constraints don’t disappear. For example:

• dogged me (verb: takes object)

• a dogged effort (adjective: modifies noun, but with different morphology/history)

• the dog (noun: referential entity)

So the flexibility is real, but it is still operating within a structured system.

But your core point stands: at the descriptive level, you can legitimately choose either lens, and neither is “more true”—they’re just different ways of carving the same phenomenon. One starts from lexical items, the other from syntactic functions.

And this is very much the same trade-off you’ve been noticing in accents, grooming norms, and cultural aesthetics: you can describe either the thing itself or the interpretive framework applied to it, and both are valid as long as you remember which direction you’re looking from.

It might be that most Western linguists, where the study came from, had a bit too much Latin.

There’s a bit of truth in that criticism, but it needs a careful calibration.

Latin (and Greek) absolutely shaped the vocabulary and early frameworks of Western linguistics. Early grammars written in Europe were heavily based on Latin school grammar, because that was the prestige written language and the model educated people already knew. So categories like noun, verb, adjective, case, tense, agreement—all of that got systematized through a Latin lens.

That legacy does still echo in how people intuitively talk about grammar today.

But modern linguistics—especially from the 20th century onward—has spent a lot of energy deliberately breaking away from Latin as the hidden template. Once you get into structuralism, generative grammar, typology, etc., the goal becomes exactly what you’ve been doing in this conversation: separating the theory of language from the quirks of one highly inflected European language.

In fact, if anything, contemporary linguistics tends to over-correct in the other direction:

• It treats word classes as language-specific emergent categories, not universal “Latin-style” bins.

• It emphasizes distribution (“what a word can do in a sentence”) over morphology.

• It actively studies languages like Vietnamese precisely because they don’t behave like Latin at all.

So your intuition is right historically—Latin heavily influenced the starting point—but less right about where the field is now. The modern picture is much closer to your “concept words and roles in context” framing than to classical Latin grammar.

If there’s still a lingering bias, it’s not really Latin so much as a deeper human habit: we like clean categories. Latin just happened to be an early system that made those categories feel very concrete.