This is true. At best, you can come up with food-names that are too long for casual everyday use (such as “Ris de veau à la financière”), but that just opens up a wealth of potential nicknames (Riri, Fifi, Nancy, Veaubot, etc.), and the full version is ideally suited for admonitory purposes.

This is unfortunate news for anyone who expects to (still) be teaching phonology when the cohort in question reaches university age.

For the most part, I don’t really get Christianity. But there is much worth contemplating in the story of the Nativity, and in the image of a newborn baby representing all the hopes of the world. Merry Christmas.

Any Canadian effort to make American media look silly would be entirely redundant.

I think we are in Slop Forest Where the dead men lost their phones

Oh shit, they’re on to us

On this day in 1989, an armed gunman murdered 14 women at École Polytechnique de Montréal. Another ten women and four men were injured. The anniversary of the massacre is commemorated annually on Dec. 6 as the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women.

I ate a lot of sushi. I ate a lot of fish. I ate it with wasabi and soy sauce in a dish. Oh, sushi, sushi, sushi—they make it out of rice with vinegar and seaweed, and it tastes really nice. 🍣

Introduce yourself with five animals you’ve seen in the wild. ① Red fox, in the dunes south of Katwijk, September 2015 ② Moose, Algonquin Provincial Park, July 2007 ③ Grey seal, off Point Pleasant Park, Halifax, August 2023 ④ A puffin photobombing ⑤ some murres, Newfoundland, July 2017

Cabbage is red,* Violets are blue.* (*Actually purple, But what can you do?)

I put that envelope under that garbage.

Happy World Linguistics Day from the great harbour Kjipuktuk, in the Sɨpekne'katik region of Mi'kma'ki, the territory of the Mi'kmaq (L'nuk), one of the peoples of the Wapna'ki Alliance, where I live under the terms of the Treaties of Peace and Friendship in a settlement called Halifax!

I got to use the phrase “Potemkin links” in an e-mail to the publisher today; how’s *your* Saturday going? #AmEditing

How delightfully quaint some of these old Devon village names are, their etymologies lost in the mists of time.

Top 5 film genres? ❶ Implausibly witty people try to out-manœuvre one another in politics/diplomacy/espionage ❷ Implausibly witty people commit and/or solve an audacious crime ❸ Implausibly witty people fall in love ❹ I don’t know what’s going on, but it’s beautiful ❺ My friends voted to watch this

No, it hasn’t. The second sentence of THIS VERY ARTICLE explains that “Pope Leo XIV gave the artifacts […] to the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, which said it would return the items to individual Indigenous communities ‘as soon as possible.’” The headline and first sentence are just false.

When asked why they chose that name, her parents shrugged and said, “Just for the fun of it, just for the heck of it.”

Just after midnight, I heard what sounded like a leaf blower outside. There were two workers effacing a crosswalk—one on a machine abrading the surface, the other blowing away the debris. Noisy—and, now I see it in the light of day, not very effective. Dunno why they don’t use black paint instead. 🤷🏼

A historic day for Victoria. Australia will see its first ever treaty with Aboriginal people signed and formalised as law today. www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11...

Okay, but why didn’t he put The Blues Brothers in his top four? www.nytimes.com/2025/11/11/m...

The book is in Spanish, but the name of the institution that published it is in Catalan, which means we want “fonética” (con acento agudo) in the Title field but “fonètica” (amb accent greu) in the Publisher field. #AmEditing

Island, shmisland #linguistics

If you think the first word after a colon in a title should be capitalized, then by all means, use a .bst file that does that when it’s up to you. But don’t put braces in your .bib file to override OUR .bst file, because I’m just going to have to take them out. #AmEditing #LaTeX #BibTeX

No, you may not have a §1.1 unless you are also going to have a §1.2. #AmEditing

Bud: Guess who’s back? Lou: Yes. Bud: No, not Yes. Lou: Yes, they are. Bud: No, the Guess Who’s back. Lou: That’s what I said. Bud: No, you said Yes was back. Lou: Who? Bud: No, Yes. Lou: Make up your mind!

The clock just ticked over to Edmund Fitzgerald day. Here are the Rheostatics.

N'oubliez pas: l'hexadécimal B6 se prononce «dizante-seize» sauf chez les Belges où c'est «onzante-six».

Thruppence a pint? Eat your heart out, Doug Ford!

Omg! @ryannorth.ca is on Because News!

Pete Hegseth, Secretary of War Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Secretary of Pestilence Brooke Rollins, Secretary of Famine

The season for fresh local berries isn’t over; it’s just moved on to cran.

So, signing the Dal waiver for I 💡 HFX seems to involve booking a (free) ticket through some company called Bounce. They want a name, e-mail address, and phone number—okay, fine. But they don’t like my phone number. 🙄 www.bouncelife.com/events/68f65...

@pranav-nlp.bsky.social and I are surveying researchers about naming and name changes in academia (especially computer science). If your academic name is / has been / might someday be different from other names you've used, please tell us about it here: forms.cloud.microsoft/e/E0XXBmZdEP

Elvis Costello – Check Out My Camera Alanis Morissette – Oops, Forgot to Advance the Film The Cranberries – This Loveseat Ain’t Big Enough for the Four of Us The Cranberries – Neither Is This One

Leaves grace trees no more. Instead, in wet clumps, they clog The fucking bike lanes. #November #haiku

Y’know, it’s okay to just repeat the noun phrases you used before instead of using “the former” and “the latter” to point back to them—especially if the original noun phrases are actually *shorter* than three syllables each. #AmEditing

I don’t actually believe in an afterlife, but it’s fun to picture Dick Cheney in the pit of Hell, undergoing ‘enhanced interrogation’ by various gleeful demons and looking down in dismay at the Trump administration from the relative moral high ground.

C’est beau!

This is not at all how I pictured Jordan Baker when I read The Great Gatsby.

I understand that diplomacy sometimes requires making nice with people who are not nice. But I’d really rather our PM didn’t apologize to that whiny nazi piece of shit for something someone else did that wasn’t even wrong. www.cbc.ca/player/play/...

Came out of the grocery store to find a cluster of people around the bike racks looking nerdily at their smartphones. Apparently I parked in the middle of a PokéStop.

This is the best thing about November:¹ ¹Please don’t tell my sister I said that, because her birthday is later this month.

Cube, shmube (Jakobson & Lotz 1949).

Its existence has been confirmed by a reliable eye witness. The logo was supposedly added during the 1990s renovation after the Jays 1993 success. Actual creator still a rumour

Note to FedEx: The United States is not a language. (It’s barely even a country anymore.)

Last day of the season at wildwoodwatersports.ca

Heard on my radio just now: PEI is unlikely to ever have a fertility clinic, because it doesn’t have the population to support one. This sounds like a bootstrapping problem to me.

Casu martzu.