Did you know that investigators can use spectrograms (visual displays of speech) to help identify speakers or verify audio recordings in legal cases? This is thanks to acoustic phonetics: https://aboutlinguistics.com/explore/what-is-acoustic-phonetics #Phonetics #Linguistics #Languages #Forensics

The Trump administration is being forced to clean up some of the expensive mess left behind by the DOGE job massacres. Those returning will have had a long paid vacation at taxpayer expense. www.cnn.com/2025/09/24/p...

The MAGA regime is arguably the most corrupt administration in US history. When it comes to criticizing other countries for corruption, we now hold the moral underground.

Confusion and chaos are normal for an administration that issues decrees without any apparent foresight, planning, or feedback. The inexperienced lackeys running government departments don't know what it will take to implement the decrees, but they know the consequences of disobeying orders.

Linguistic usage has always been political. Here is an excellent example of politicians fighting over the usage of linguistic gender. In an attempt to legislate preferred gender pronoun and title usage, Republicans accidentally tried to ban their own preferred pronouns and titles. Er...what? 🤔

The US is run by an increasingly unpopular tyrant who has seriously weakened the Western alliance of countries. Now is a time to expect both Russia and China to increase tests of their military defenses with incidents like this.

Voodoo medicine replaces science. These people clearly don't know what they are doing, and they are a danger to the health of Americans.

ABC's cowardice or complicity is undermining the principle of free speech. This is exactly the kind of thing that happened in Russia when Putin consolidated his dictatorship and in Hungary when Orban did the same. bbc.com/news/article...

It is a hallmark of censorship in authoritarian regimes that media outlets censor themselves. The Trump regime is moving quickly now to shut down freedom of expression in the US. First Colbert, now Kimmel. www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio...

This is all well and good, but every member of the board now knows that Donald Trump will try to fire members he disagrees with and replace them with political loyalists. That is bound to be on their minds when they make decisions. www.cnbc.com/2025/09/15/t...

The Trump administration appears to see the Charlie Kirk assassination as a pretext for taking action against opposition groups. Kirk is to be treated as a political martyr that was the victim of an organized conspiracy rather than a loner. nymag.com/intelligence...

But is this OK with the MAGA majority on the Supreme Court? It seems like such an obvious ruling, but...

A couple of million more Americans voted for Trump and got the president they deserved. Unfortunately, the rest of us got the president they deserved.

Trump pulls out the stops for one-party rule. Republicans are all in. Can he be stopped? Blue states have systems in place to block unfair election gerrymandering. It may take years to mount an effective counteroffensive.

It looks like Boss Trump is now getting ready to replace other members of the Federal Reserve with his stooges. We are now on a very slippery slope.

Another friend has passed away.

They can plan all they want, but Putin has to agree to pause his bombardment of Ukraine first. He is very good at stringing Trump along and anyone else who is willing to believe he will "make a deal".

Comcast owns both NBC and Versant. It has sidelined MSNBC to Versant and will change its name to MS NOW. It isn't known how this will impact content in the future, but they claim there won't be significant change for the viewership.

Trump will attempt to order states to violate their own laws on the use of mail-in ballots. Washington state elections are conducted almost entirely through mail-in ballots. There is no chance that all of that could change by 2026, even if Trump's order were legal.

A delusional Trump admits that he thinks of diplomacy as similar to making a real estate deal. Who needs the professional diplomats when you have salesmen like Trump and Witkoff to broker a peace treaty? How hard could it be?

So, Trump finally made some progress. By dropping his demand for a ceasefire, he removed an obstacle to a peace deal. Now he is just demanding a peace deal with no strings attached. I wonder what he'll think of next. 🤔

The federal courts have another shot at curbing the rise of Trump's police state. Do they want to curb it? And, if they do, will it matter?

It turns out that the greater risk to the health of others is not vaccines. It is the spread of misinformation about vaccines in a gun-saturated society.

King Donald can no longer ignore the problem of homelessness in Washington DC. His solution will be to round them up and send them elsewhere. Where? Concentration camps for the homeless?

Putin agrees to pause the fighting for now so that he can consolidate his gains and prepare for future operations. Trump will likely see himself as entitled to a Nobel Peace Prize. Hope I'm wrong, but I suspect that's the plan. Ukraine needs security guarantees and won't get them.

The headline neglects to mention that two Trump-appointed judges trump one Obama-appointed judge. The ruling was tossed, and the contempt remains in place.

Breton is one of my favorite languages. Did research on it in the 1970s. AFAIK, the only language other than English that uses 'do' as a purely tense-bearing auxiliary verb.

Sorry for the repost, but I forgot to add some tags for interested readers. I tried to keep the content simple, but it may still be too technical for those without some linguistic training. #linguistics #phonology #phoneme #psycholinguistics #language

Blatant misuse of federal power, but no longer surprising in Trumpland. King Donald wants it, and so it shall be. The FBI will help the state of Texas go after legislators who have committed no state or federal crime. www.politico.com/news/2025/08...

I have posted a new substack about how linguists came to lose the original distinction between phonology and morphophonology. richardwojcik.substack.com/p/how-lingui...

This latest AP-NORC poll is a snapshot of public opinion about American attitudes towards their parties. It comes as no surprise that Democrats are disappointed in their party, and Republicans are happy with theirs.

Ironically, Trump is using the OSC to try to build a case for prosecuting a Special Counsel for doing his job. If any public official has ever violated the Hatch Act repeatedly and enthusiastically, it is Donald Trump.

The good news is that kings no longer kill messengers, if they don't like the message.

The Fed will soon face two choices: preserve economic activity by lowering interest rates or curb inflation by raising them. This wouldn't be a problem, but for a president who has assumed the power to levy import taxes to serve his whims.

Would a Republican-dominated Supreme Court dare take away Trump's tariff toy? They can just blame Congress and look the other way. The Republican Congress won't dare take it away either. Inflation winter is coming.

All the hype surrounding LLM chatbots makes people ignore the thin line between artificial intelligence and artificial stupidity. They aren't about to replace humans, and they could get humans who trust them in a lot of trouble.

Nature's wake-up call to a slumbering humanity is a dash of cold water.

This is so obvious, yet so many people are in denial. Nobody wants to admit that such a fool could end up running the most powerful and dangerous country in the world.

That ought to wipe the smirk off of Russian faces. Or will it? Putin has set this sucker up for years. Now Trump thinks that he can use tariffs to bully India and China into stop buying Russian oil and gas? Not likely.

It is not about selling these deals to foreign countries. Those are basically street muggings. It is about selling them to the American public. Half the public was sold on him in 2024. Now we are all forced to pay for these expensive deals in import taxes.

Import taxes on American consumers have barely begun to sting so far. When Democrats called Trump's plan a "national sales tax", few people paid attention. Now they are starting to learn what that meant.

Democrats tried the same redistricting tactic in New York state and ended up losing House seats in a swing election. Republicans are usually successful at gerrymandering tactics, but the next election may teach them the same harsh lesson that Democrats learned.

For those interested in what makes phonemes more memorable than other speech sounds. #linguistics #phoneme #phonology richardwojcik.substack.com/p/the-psycho...

Nobody expects Belgium's Permanent Committee on Language Monitoring! Where will they strike next?

What is up with the NY Times headline? This is anything but a "new strategy". Blaming Democrats is just a tired old tactic.

With so much serious corruption, crime, and incompetence in his daily behavior, it is always his sex scandals that get all the traction and grab all the headlines.

TACO Donald Trump postponed the previous tariff deadline from today (July 9) to August 1. He now says that August had always been his deadline. 🙄 He wants the trial of his friend, Jair Bolsonaro, to be ended as part of a deal. Because it's part of the "emergency" that justifies his tariff power?

The incompetent former Fox News Host really needs to be fired, but so does the person who hired him.

The federal government already controls Washington DC and not in a good way. Trump has no authority to assume control of other cities, but he is accustomed to exceeding his authority.