"The recent change to our course-management system has meant that I need to re-upload every document and assignment and reassign every homework. I will be attending three two-hour training sessions to help me do this." buff.ly/lv7w8kf

Happy May Day. They can’t kill us all.

i once saw a book review that described skimming the references of a book as seeing “who is cited and who is slighted”. anyway, today i observed that a new book “in my area” has zero bybee citations, and i think that explains a lot

Just released & free to download for two weeks: "Constructions, Networks and Linguistic Change" by Graeme Trousdale and Elizabeth Closs Traugott in the Cambridge Elements Construction Grammar Series #language #linguistics doi.org/10.1017/9781...

Version 1.0 of the Grammaticon is now online! This has been in the making for over eight years. Quite a few of the entries are still preliminary, but I hope to expand and improve it over the coming months and years. Comments are welcome! An intro text is here: dlc.hypotheses.org/4316

file this under “getting old”: can we all agree not to use emoji to react to emails? who thought that was a good idea?

I don't need a summary of what's available online, in biographies, or even in my own notes. I need to comb through and find the great details, decide what interests ME. No, it's not efficient. It's slow and painstaking. But I don't believe in efficiency as an ultimate good, especially in writing. /

Meanwhile, the people I see complaining about this usually use the term "AI" without saying what they mean by it. In other words, they're starting the conversation form a non-nuanced position. >>

Computational Papers (CPs) are always Annoying To Read (ATR) because of their Extensive Use of Abbreviations (EUA). After Some Time (AST) reading a CP, there are No Words (NW) left TR due to the EUA, and I Almost Give Up On Even Trying (IAGUOET) TR the CP because it is so ATR any text with EUA.

If I had a nickel for every time I decided to stop using a “cognitive linguistics of ASL” paper because my students get too distracted by problematic examples, I would have two nickels. …Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it’s happened twice.

here’s the thing, I’m not going to make an account just so i can decline your review request 👻

the absolute nerve of my electric company to jack up prices to subsidize energy-hungry data centers AND THEN SEND ME automated messages about how much more i am spending on electricity year-over-year as though i had just left the lights on 🪫🤬💸

I’m behind the trend on this one but I’m about halfway through Enshittification and enjoying it. Aside from the inherent dissatisfaction and frustration of the phenomenon, that is. Going to continue to be mindful about where I spend my money and attention in 2026 us.macmillan.com/books/978037...

thank you to my non-linguist friends who texted me this photo because they remembered that i do not like him

Now available! THE CRIP LINGUISTICS READER is a wide-ranging and groundbreaking collection that challenges normative ideas about what is considered “good language.” Visit our website for more information on this latest release from GU Press! gupress.gallaudet.edu/Books/T/The-...

I don't know how many times this needs to be said, but apparently a lot: If you are not in a position to verify the accuracy of some synthetic text, the synthetic text is not useful/has a high potential to be misleading. This is one of those cases.

“it’s *giv*ing season 🍁 😊” “it’s giving *sea*son 💅 💃“ #linguistics

🤦‍♂️

Breaking news: Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani is elected as the next mayor of New York City, defeating former New York governor Andrew Cuomo and becoming the first Muslim and first of Indian descent to hold the office. https://wapo.st/47rlrDf

‘Study after study shows that students want to develop these critical thinking skills, are not lazy, and large numbers of them would be in favor of banning ChatGPT and similar tools in universities’, says @olivia.science www.ru.nl/en/research/...

even with the -ai trick and scrolling down past the first several results, google still hides automatically generated misinformation on every page. it’s unusable. can’t wait for this bubble to burst

Every time I sit down to write a piece I feel certain that I would rather die than actually write it and yet somehow I would rather die ten times harder before I ever let the word machine write for me.

Important reading as you prepare for your semester

“I watched Snow White when I was a kid but I ain’t give a bitch a poison apple yet” is just an objectively great line. 😂

UPDATE: Abstract deadline: Nov 1, 25! Invited speakers: Corrine Occhino, Dagmar Divjak, Idan Blank, Randy Allen Harris, Gary Lupyan, Laura Michaelis, Kanishka Misra ! @dagmardivjak.bsky.social @randyallenharris.bsky.social @congramqueen.bsky.social @glupyan.bsky.social @kanishka.bsky.social

10 years ago this month, i defended my dissertation. i scrounged up two pictures from the day. linguistics is an odd, sometimes challenging field, but i’ve been incredibly privileged to learn and travel with great advisors, colleagues, and friends along the way 😌😌

OK so I LOLed at the dinosaurs in Central Park www.aiweirdness.com/chatgpt-will...

“A legitimate PhD-level expert in anything,” they said. “Show me a diagram of the US presidents since FDR, with their names and years in office under their photos,” I said.

Sunk-cost fallacy and cheating students are the only things keeping AI in business at this point. Just look at how usage of ChatGPT plummets as soon as the semester ends.

So glad this is out! Still wish we had the data processed in time for @jmhenner.bsky.social to use but pleased to have his contribution in more ways than 1. See below for a brief commentary re Jon, deaf linguists & participating in SiL research and doing it in a way that disrupts or crips it all

i love reading old ASL syntax papers. everything is so straightforward. a star for this, a checkmark for that, no need to know what the signs even are or what the context was… 🫠🫠🫠

Ten Percent Of U.S. High School Students Graduating Without Basic Object Permanence Skills

finally en route to what might just be the best Ling Institute ever, in Eugene OR! Can't wait to see old friends and meet new ones! ‪@lsa2025uo.bsky.social‬ center.uoregon.edu/LSA/2025/

Really infuriating stuff. There's no place for AI in the classroom. AFT needs to follow the lead of @aaup.org and understand that these technologies are part of the increasing move to corporatize the classroom.

Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old state assemblyman, declared victory in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary after Andrew Cuomo conceded the race. “Tonight we made history,” Mamdani said, addressing his supporters. wapo.st/44yMVoI

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

if i can be y’all’s dad for a second: one of the most important things I’ve learned is that acquiring a skill is literally uncomfortable that awful moment where you feel confused and stupid and embarrassed? it means you’re about to learn something. and it’s *mandatory* if you want to get better

At our faculty we have guidelines on Generative AI and research integrity: osf.io/preprints/os... . Another example: ERA Living Guidelines european-research-area.ec.europa.eu/news/living-... I'm looking for other examples of guidelines like that, aimed at researchers. Hit me!

I appreciated Julie Ann Dawson, former publisher of Bards and Sages, on this point. www.404media.co/bards-and-sa...

"We’re a tech-forward, future-oriented company that doesn’t shy away from the promise of new innovation—even if that innovation is a Giant Plagiarism Machine™ that copy-pastes existing innovation into fake sentient sentences."

looking forward to catching parts of the 2nd ROLE collective symposium today! the short (captioned) presentations are already online, and Dr. Anna Lim is delivering the invited keynote at noon (EDT)! www.rolecollective.org #linguistics

time for my annual frantic google: “how to wear academic regalia -ai”

Love my department 😍 From our last faculty meeting of the academic year. My fourteenth year as full-time faculty at Gallaudet 😮 #GallaudetLinguistics #SignedLanguageLinguistics

What started as a half-baked lecture in 2023 is now an actual article in 2025. I try to define "idiom", look for them in ASL, and identify other ASL constructions, to boot. (We all complain about "reviewer 2", but I got good and helpful revisions on this one!) doi.org/10.1515/cog-... #linguistics

You can also find our syllabus at:

this is a moral panic hyped by tech bro nihilists bsky.app/profile/aedw...

For @jmhenner.bsky.social. We — @savithry.bsky.social and I — wrote “How to crip your sign language linguistic theory”. Open access. academic.oup.com/jdsde/advanc...

Say it after me: Chat GPT is not a search engine. It does not scan the web for information, it just generates statistically likely sentences. You cannot use it a search engine, or as a substitute for searching. Now. Please never use an LLM for information searches ever again.

LLMs are nothing more than models of the distribution of the word forms in their training data, with weights modified by post-training to produce somewhat different distributions. Unless your use case requires a model of a distribution of word forms in text, indeed, they suck and aren't useful.