A preprint of mine and Matt's paper theorising critical OCD studies (accepted for publication Jan 2026) www.researchgate.net/publication/...

@gavinbrookes.bsky.social utterly satisfying and scarily good keynote #CL2025 so much food for thought it will keep me energized for the whole conference and beyond

Another week, another research ethics controversy. TL;DR Researchers released a public dataset of 2B+ messages from 4M+ users on 3k+ "public" Discord servers. Usernames/IDs are anonymized. But let's unpack this one... 🧵 www.404media.co/researchers-...

Hi, so I've spent the past almost-decade studying research uses of public social media data, like e.g. ML researchers using content from Twitter, Reddit, and Mastodon. Anyway, buckle up this is about to be a VERY long thread with lots of thoughts and links to papers. 🧵

📣 Applications closing on 25 April! Could you be one of our Bridging Fellows? If you are a recent PhD graduate interested in researching the medical humanities, apply for the chance to develop your research and grow your connections with us! Find out more 👇 medhumsplatform.org/2025-26-brid...

Trivialising uses of OCD as an adjective are all too known and a great source of frustration for people like me who have the illness. I’m pleased to see this article offering empirical evidence for the linguistic forms these uses can take

I, alongside Dr Mike Ryder at Lancaster University, have just published an article in BMJ Medical Humanities titled 'Role of science fiction in conceptualising the reproductive future: a linguistic and literary perspective'! It is open access and you can read it here - mh.bmj.com/content/earl... 1/3

Sunshine on campus as two buzzards (too quick to photograph) pass over my old County College before I go to teach. Bliss.

I'm concerned about several ideas promoted in this article on overdiagnosis, which argues that people are now excessively and unnecessarily seeking medical diagnoses for a range of difficulties. I describe my concerns below www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

Today’s writing struggle: trying to discuss the analytical framework I’m applying to my sample, but this framework has developed based on how well existing frameworks reflect the data in my sample. It’s all feeling a bit chicken-and-egg

This certainly does not reflect linguistics-based research on mental health/illness. This campaign seems to conflate the verbs ‘have’ and ‘be’, whereas ‘having’ a mental illness is usually reported as preferable to ‘being’ a mental illness

At my institution, official student guidance states that it’s acceptable to use Gen AI to ‘generate ideas’ and that makes me feel a bit sick

Whether this was intentional or a timetabling quirk, I must say having a weekend to break up workshop days is a massive accessibility win for us fibro/chronic fatigue sufferers. Looking forward to this (with sufficient energy for both days 👏🏻👏🏻)

A reminder that we are hosting the BAAL Health and Science Communication SIG event on the topic of Inequalities, inclusion and innovation Day 1: Friday 21 March, Lancaster University (hybrid) Day 2: Tuesday 25 March (online only) Registration is open and FREE: forms.office.com/Pages/Respon...

Save the date! On 11-12 September 2025, we are hosting the 5th Symposium of the International Consortium for Communication in Health Care (IC4CH) at Lancaster University. We hope you will join us! For more information, see ic4ch.wordpress.com/activities/

The paper we have all been waiting for and missing greatly whenever the issue of “why NOT liwc” needed to be backed up by linguistic references!

Well, this is horrendous.

I’m thinking a lot* about the semantics and pragmatics of ‘just’ for my thesis. Obviously here, the intended meaning relies on the temporal sense of ‘just’ (recently baked), but the italics, implying stress, suggests the reader has affected or negatively modified the goods in some way.

One day I will stop being surprised to find men’s clothing is better quality and more supportive. Today is not that day (new slippers are my favourite pre-Christmas treat)

Vale William Labov. Inspired by a colleague on X, I think my favourite Bill Labov quote is: “I have resisted the term *sociolinguistics* for many years, since it implies that there can be a successful linguistic theory or practice which is not social.” Thank you for everything, Bill.

Scott Parrott, Laura Cariola and I are editing a book series for the University of Exeter Press called "Language, Discourse, and Mental Health". We hope to further our understanding of mental health from a pluralistically informed linguistic perspective. Do you want to publish with us? Get in touch!

Have any sociolinguists looked at dialect variation for these? Because I’ve just learned they’re not universally ‘party poopers’ in English and I’m disappointed

A great thread that I’ve been thinking about a lot today 👇

This is a fun research survey! Highly recommended if you’ve got a spare 15-20 minutes

Student exclamation in today's #CorpusLinguistics workshop: "I've just created a corpus and now my laptop has died!"

Please can we have a sunflower lanyard equivalent for ‘Awaiting B12 injection and I am Very Tired’. I’m thankful that my seminar teaching this week is group discussion-based and on a topic I enjoy talking about (Qualitative Research)

Heather McCalden’s book is INCREDIBLE and beautiful for so many reasons, one of them being how she weaves metaphors of virality across COVID, AIDS, other illnesses, the internet, and culture more widely.

Festive IPA spotted in the wild (7/10 for effort)

Check out the latest post on our RC21 blog, where @gavinbrookes.bsky.social argues that "[c]oncordance analysis is still something that humans do best"! www.dhss.phil.fau.eu/2024/11/28/c...

Enjoyed attending @janadeclercq.bsky.social’s talk on her research into doctor patient consultations in a chronic pain clinic. Among other important findings, I appreciated the discussion on discursive levels of (in)visibitity and how this relates to stigma towards invisible pain.

On a pub visit in between covid lockdowns, I saw a line of (what I now know are) wine bucket stands, but I couldn’t work out what they are. My brain came up with ‘tall dog bowl’, as in, a bowl specifically designed for tall dogs

I greatly appreciate the granularity of recommendations in this report. Not just a list of recommended terms, but evidence-based suggested terms on a scale of acceptability, foregrounding that linguistic recommendations are rarely one-size-fits-all. A must-read for health communication scholars!

Thought provoking blog on clinical language choice by Beth Malory. Important work on a sensitive topic, pregnancy loss: medicalxpress.com/news/2024-11...

As I’m nearing thesis submission, I’m looking for postdoc research and/or teaching positions for the new year. My research interests are metaphor, corpus discourse analysis, health communication, and pregnancy discourse. I’m also interested in disability and neurodivergence due to lived experience.

New work suggests that 'cold spots' are developing in the study of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences in the UK: wonkhe.com/blogs/there-...

Call for papers: “Health and science communication: Inequalities, Inclusion & Innovation”, hosted by the BAAL Health and Science Communication SIG. To be held at Lancaster University on 22nd March 2025 (in person) and 25th March (online). Deadline: 11th December baalhealthsci.wordpress.com/events/

Combining two of my favourite things, we have an entry for The Linguistics of Taskmaster: Alex distinguishes the pronominal use of ‘one’ from the numerical use, courtesy of @susiedent.bsky.social

Out today with @jaimackenzie.bsky.social & Sarah Atkins! We considered the ethical challenges of doing participant-centred research in linguistics, thinking beyond the formal ethics review process by drawing on our own - quite different - experiences in the field. www.degruyter.com/document/doi...

I’ve been referring to this extensively in my PhD work of late. Great, practical guidance #linguistics #corpuslinguistics

There didn't seem to be one yet, so I created one. Please share! Reply or DM me if you'd like to be added. go.bsky.app/QJPicoq