So I have a question... 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 followers *especially* welcome to respond, but not exclusively! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿, 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿, and 🇺🇸 views very relevant too (and other nationalities can absolutely chime in)! 1/

Actually I think part of the issue is people countenancing only two possibilities for the fate of a language. Either it stays "the same language" or it dies. So either Latin died or Italians are still speaking Latin. They don't consider option 3: Continuing in a different form (or different forms)

Tonight's #BoardGames: 1. Puerto Rico 2. Tag Team

"As they rushed into his apartment...he felt the jaws of a large dog biting into his ankle, knocking him to the floor. He screamed as the dog tore the flesh from his thighs, hip and wrist. Down the hall, agents took a mother and her 16-yr-old son at gunpoint..." www.propublica.org/article/chic...

Also this from @azforeman.bsky.social in the days of Twitter: "The right question is not 'when did people stop speaking Latin. It's 'when did they start believing that the language they spoke wasn't Latin?' And the answer to that is: not until pretty damn late."

Note to self: Check if sparrows and T Rexes can mate...

Coda: There's actually a subtler, more insidious version of the misapprehension that languages (or species) are static and monolithic. Many people who don't exactly think that are nonetheless beguiled by a different idea... bsky.app/profile/gari...

I keep forgetting to tag my #linguistics posts!

Here's an example of a linguistic fact that I think should be straightforward and obvious when pointed out, but which a lot of people seem surprisingly resistant to: Colloquial Latin never died. In fact it's spoken extremely widely across the world. 🧵

A surprising number of people seem to consider both the following to be true: 1. "Average" doesn't mean "central tendency"; it refers specifically to the mean. 2. "Average income" should be based on the median.

Tonight's #BoardGame: 1. Scotland Yard 2. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring – Trick-Taking Game 3. Tag Team

Today’s jobs: - Writing my department’s counter-proposal to the plan to sack over half of us - counselling students - dealing with Canvas hack fallout - trying to imagine what might be taught next semester and by whom (this bit failed).

Are we sure Keir Starmer isn't a Patrick Barlow character who escaped containment?

Tonight's #BoardGames (with a bit of a hidden movement theme): 1. The Hunt 2. Black Sonata

#linguistics If someone tells you they've won the Gold medal of Philology be suspicious ... www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

Occasional cat picture

Yesterday's #BoardGames: 1. Outfoxed 2. Root 3. So Clover

I’ve talked about this before, but when I was assaulted in the philosophy department hallway, I was repeatedly kicked in the head. It caused me permanent brain damage and took years of recovery. I think it’s unacceptable for a cop to continue to kick someone in the head after they’ve been disarmed

It’s also important to hold police accountable when engaged in brutality and misconduct precisely when the person they’ve brutalised is least sympathetic. Saying it’s acceptable in this instance breaks down the important social norm

For clarity’s sake, I’m referring to the last kick, which occurs after appears the attacker is disarmed. It’s that kick that, I believe, undermines any defence of the police’s fear for safety bsky.app/profile/poli...

Tonight's #BoardGames: 1. Maglev Metro 2. Codenames

Anyone willing to try an online experiment for one of my students? She’s investigating listeners’ ability to discern a real human voice from a deep fake synthetic voice: 🧠💬 uky.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

The one pet peeve I need to give up, as someone who is neither a monarchist or a unionist, is getting irked when Americans say 'King of England' when they mean 'King of Britain'. It would be like saying 'President of Texas' technically true, but weirdly phrased.

paper out, hope it's useful doi.org/10.1017/S009... #linguistics

A #BoardGame before bed: Magic Mountain

Tonight's #BoardGames: 1. Prodigals' Club 2. Hot Streak

An afternoon #BoardGame: Zombie Kidz Evolution

This meme makes a lot of intuitive sense. Except that, interestingly, the term "First World War" was actually coined in 1920 as the title of book by a WWI veteran called Repington, nearly two decades before the second one started. Which seems a curious fact. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles...

Significantly better than I expected. Obviously it was good enough to spawn a pretty popular franchise, but I wondered if it might be that the idea of the Predator was good but the original movie itself just kind of dumb and boring. It's not.

Tonight's #FirstTimeFilm: Predator. I'm as surprised as you are that I've never seen it before

I wrote here about how Americans stopped the last bigoted scheme, by J Edgar Hoover and his cronies, to strip citizenship from immigrants. We must stop the current scheme.

With alt text. Utterly unsurprising that the BBC would twist its story this way to serve a far right agenda

Tonight's #BoardGame: Mansions of Madness. Again—this time we won!

Feeling this one very very personally.

Congratulations to my English friends and followers on their special day.

MAGA fans, this is for you. Don't comment. I'm not sharing it for you to start trying to argue. Just read.

Hunter Biden says wtf

The world needs more benches (and toilets, and bins! And general provision of visible public amenity as a principle.)

It’s St George’s Day, which means there are groups of bald white men gathered in Nottingham's city centre looking vaguely threatening.

With rare and specific exceptions, it is not actually a problem that any individual politician is Old, it is a general problem for a society that so many politicians are Old, the fact that the problematic nature is mostly an emergent property at scale makes it very hard to address.

Seen a leaked copy of the Reform national curriculum.

A #BoardGame before bed: Sleeping Queens

Pennsylvania's auditor general, a Republican, audited 210,000+ new voter registrations under Gov. Shapiro's new motor voter system to see if noncitizens were registering to vote. They found one. One. And that was because a PennDOT staffer erred. It was fixed before the driver left the office.

Some confusion here, I think

Tonight's #BoardGame: Mansions of Madness

Spanish PM Pedro Sánchez: “Here in Spain, we are approving and advancing a process to regularise half a million immigrants. “And I want to say to the Right and the Far Right who oppose this: Spain is the daughter of migration and will not become the mother of xenophobia.”

The NFL barely cares about violence against women. They definitely don’t care about extramarital activity.

OOP New York Times got receipts on John Roberts being like, 'I know this isn't how anything works, but a Democratic president is about to implement a policy!!' www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/u...