With age, comes wisdom about things no one wants to know about. I’ve started making a list of the things I have learned in my life that are now irrelevant:

-how barrier inheritance worked in Chomsky’s 1985 theory of Barriers.
-where linguists put complementizers and wh-phrases before there was CP
-how to operate a mimeograph machine
-how to load paper into one of those printers with the little sprockets that feed the paper with holes on the sides
-all the words to the jingle used by Baltimore Federal Savings and Loan in 1965.
-how to make cheese fondue
-how to use Word Perfect for MS DOS
-how to create a website in Dreamweaver in 1996
-what the best cheap restaurants were in Central Square in 1983.
-how to plan a trip by researching hotels in guidebooks and writing to them for reservations.
-how to use a pay phone in Paris in 1981 to make an international call
-why Lasnik and Saito proposed “gamma marking” in their theory of long distance movement
-how to iron
-how to straighten your hair with an iron
-how to keep polyester clothes from melting if you need to iron them
-what the problem was with Kari’s rule of “ni-absorption” for Navajo
-how feature percolation worked in late 1980s HPSG
-how to formalize passives in Relational Grammar
-what the major insight of Connectedness theory was, and how Barriers theory differs from it
-which members of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young Joni Mitchell slept with
-all the words to probably 30 Joni Mitchell songs
-the Bryn Mawr School prayer
-the motivations for and details of Ken Hale’s theory of variation in the Projection Principle.
-what the Projection Principle was, and why Chomsky’s grammar doesn’t include it anymore.
-what Williams said about Small Clauses, and how it isn’t really about what we now generally think of as Small Clauses (if we ever use that term)
-who dressed up as Koko the gorilla for Chomsky’s 50th birthday party
-how the feature [-coronal] differs from the feature [grave].
-what Elizabeth Sagey’s dissertation was about
-what the Symbionese Liberation Army was, what the name was of its leader was, and where that name came from.
-how many chemical elements there were in 1967.
-how the tune goes that was used to communicate with aliens in the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind
-how to formalize a transformation in the Standard Theory
-who founded the National Lampoon
-what Jackie Kennedy was wearing when JFK was shot
-how to make pull taffy
-how to use PSSSST hair powder/spray
-which toothpaste had Bucky Beaver as a mascot
-what C. Wright Mills said about the Power Elite in his 1956 book
-what young women in 1972 thought was going to happen as a result of feminism
-who the first female news (co)anchor was (and that it was in 1974)
-who H.R. “Bob” Haldeman was
-why Oliver North ought to be in jail rather than on TV as an expert military commentator
-the name of Jimmy Carter’s daughter
-how to spread peanut butter on Wonder Bread without making holes in it
-which currently common foods were thought of as only for “health nuts” when I was young.
-what Mau-Mauing the Flack-Catchers is about
-the significance to politics of the phrase “there you go again.”
-who Dan Quayle is
-what novel begins with the words “A screaming comes across the sky”