"What a time to be alive! We are finally freeing you from the rat race and placing you on the rat unemployment line. Is your dream to be an artist? Well, it is the dream of your employers to push a button that extrudes art. And guess who has more funding for their dream?"

I feel that one way of expressing the combined effect of growing up, becoming socialized, getting an education, and having a personality is: not needing “all-day help… spoken into your ear privately” by Google

If ours was a world where AI (the ideology, politic, and tech) were, uh, asking these graduates to shape AI this might resonate. But it’s not. Look, you cannot go out and market your new corporate monopoly widget as the death kneel to American workers and then ask new workers to be excited.

Child language development expert here. No. The answer is absolutely not. So-called baby talk is culturally specific. Developing language is not. #linguistics

I'm sorry, what? In writing my first monograph, I spent six weeks trying to track down a citation in TWO languages I didn't know. And good thing too, because the citation was wrong. That's scholarship. That's research. You know, the thing we're trained to do?!?

writing some text that involves the phrase "rec room" and remembering how when I was a child (and for perhaps even longer than that...) I thought it was "wreck room" because of course the room where you played/had fun was always in massive disarray 😆 #linguistics

gotta love when a whole education system makes itself vulnerable by making a large number of institutions dependent on a proprietary lms whose continuity or reliability they have no control over *chef's kiss* now let's do it again, but bigger, with ai

Tell Congress: Protect NSF’s Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Directorate, which is quietly being eliminated while attention is focused elsewhere. Now is the time to act—contact your representatives today. #WhySocialScience #SaveSBE cossa.org/action-cente...

new blog post about, like. why i teach syntax, i guess. may be a little bit inside baseball, curious about your thoughts kconrod.medium.com/build-me-a-b...

enraging; they scraped videos from prof's Canvas sites. I don't post video lectures to Canvas but I guess I should think harder about uploading handouts & other content, in case my own uni decides to go this route? Feeling like it's time to go back to course readers & everything on paper, 90s style!

👀

Researchers writing about their work frequently rely on clichés. Yet, little is known about how such clichés affect

Have you been asked by a medical provider recently for consent to have an "AI" scribe record your visit? Us, too. And we have **thoughts** buttondown.com/maiht3k/arch...

Burchett is right: the most DC thing ever *is* a member of Congress blaming the city for something he and his colleagues did themselves.

Just got my exam copy from CUP in the mail, excited to read this and figure out how I might use it in my undergrad classes!

What these admins will never tell you is that the *courses* in these majors are often full. Students don't *major* in these fields, but they really want to take the classes. They use number of majors as a metric on purpose so they can achieve their cuts.

filling out check-in forms online before an appointment and impressed by the inclusivity of this urgent care's "preferred language" options #linguistics

We do now know the NSF is proceeding with dissolving the Social and Behavioral Sciences Division. Congress might reverse it, but it is now already underway. YOU CAN NO LONGER SUBMIT FUNDING PROPOSALS TO SBE. Program officers are being moved to different parts of the agency. Call your Congress member

This. AI claims to do my job. I don’t want that. I love the work of writing, research & teaching. I want someone to take all the additional work that has been added over the years in the name of austerity off my plate. Dismantle the harmful structures that make it hard to do my job, please.

Looking forward to the next time the associate dean tells our department to "get grants"

I am shocked to see this language from the NSF. “The U.S. National Science Foundation's Fiscal Year 2027 Budget Request reflects a strategic alignment of resources in a constrained fiscal environment while eliminating woke and weaponized grant programs that previously funded radical DEI projects.”

Somewhere up in heaven, Richard Scarry is like “fuck yeah, told you so”: www.bbc.com/news/world-u...

📗More book promotion: for the next month, you can download and read Chapter 1 of my & @lhlew.bsky.social 's new book, Sociophonetics: Implications for Phonological and Phonetic Theory, for free! #linguistics academic.oup.com/book/61815/c...

I’ve been thinking about the construal of LLMs as tools for research automation, and as someone who’s put a lot of effort into research facilitation tools, I don’t agree

Again and again, executives don’t want AI to enhance work, only to replace workers, while telling us it will enhance work, while the AI vendors say “this is your problem if it screws up.” They seem to think we don’t notice this. www.microsoft.com/en-us/micros...

NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Directorate has awarded only 16 grants since October. No big budget cuts went through. No freeze. The courts have acted to keep funds flowing at every turn. The money just isn't going out. Why...? 1/x source: grant-witness.us/funding_curv... 🟦🧠 #academicsky

Linguistics on The News: A lot of "Gen Z slang" comes from African American Language - w/comments from Minnie Quartey Annan, Sonja Lanehart, and Jamaal Muwwakkil youtu.be/6GtW_PHNjo4?... #linguistics

We are fast moving from cold spots to blackout. This is not trivial and the impact in terms of access to languages education will be inter generational. How do you “level up” or promote “growth” without a multilingual workforce and the know-how to deploy? www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

There's a learned helplessness here that feels a lot like obeying in advance. Use your brain, don't let anyone tell you you can't, and definitely don't tell others they can't.

Mulling whether to buy my book w/@lhlew.bsky.social, Sociophonetics: Implications for Phonological & Phonetic Theory? With code AUFLY30 you can get it for 30% off via OUP at global.oup.com/academic ! Spend down those research funds (if you have them) before the end of the fiscal year! #linguistics

She's right, and has thought way, way more about LLMs, language, and society than almost every reply guy on here, but they simply can't resist fighting with a world-class expert.

Last call! The LSA Nominating Committee & COSIAC are seeking nominations for VP/President-Elect, EC Members-at-Large, and Student Rep to the EC. We especially encourage nominations from those historically underrepresented in LSA governance. Deadline: 3/13. buff.ly/EkqLh7j

Thanks so much to everyone who came to my Georgetown University Linguistics GURT talk today! I really appreciate that you took the time to stay til Sunday afternoon. The talk was recorded, so I'll post the video as soon as I get it!

imagine being such an incompetent researcher that you think an llm can write your literature review

Hello, Washington, D.C.! So excited for the Georgetown University Linguistics GURT conference and so honored to be the closing plenary speaker on Sunday at 11:30 in the Bunn Intercultural Center! Come on through! gurt.georgetown.edu/gurt-2026/

Conversation Analysis for Social Justice. Nadja Tadic 👏 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Now it's March I can say "applications close next month!" Still lots of time to finesse your idea for a cool linguistics communication project!

cot-caught-court on a British high street ;-) #linguistics

So cool how my university isn't hiring new faculty but they HAVE recently announced they'll be "deploying Google’s generative AI solution, Gemini, to students, faculty and staff in the coming weeks"

Operation Epic Fury Every time this administration names an action, they choose something a 14-year old boy would call a video game. Cutesy names don’t cover up warmongering and terrorism, they just reveal a profound disrespect for human life.

“I care about this and want to know more about it” is a great reason to study something in college. So is “Huh, that sounds interesting.” Like I said, it’s not everybody’s thing, but being able to pursue your curiosity without a tangible other goal in mind is a good thing, I think.

When academia's stars mistreat people, they're "punished" with relief from teaching, mentoring, and service responsibilities. This frees them to spend more time on the more valued work of research. And dumps less valued responsibilities onto colleagues, making it harder for them to become stars.

Is the president mocking the U.S. women’s hockey team on a celebratory call with the men’s team going to attract even an iota of the sustained handwringing that the idea of trans athletes disadvantaging women’s sports has gotten

maybe this is because i'm the kind of goody-goody who gets a PhD but I find it shocking that they don't even try to lie that there's some justifiable use case for this. it's just a tacit "we all know you don't want to learn anything, and now you don't need to"

i know i'm preaching to the choir here but what the fuck is the point of undertaking education if you don't want to *learn* it is the end result just getting a paper saying you're One Smart Cookie? validation? for growth you didn't undertake? i know this is self-evident but it's still crazy to me!

Wow.

Flights for summer trip to Poland are booked, so time to start learning some Polish! Happy to take recs for helpful books, podcasts, & other media from those who've already been on this journey (Dziękuję!) 🇵🇱

ICE told nurses this Minneapolis man “purposefully ran headfirst into a brick wall.” What actually happened is that they pulled him from a car, beat him so viciously with a steel baton that he had 8 skull fractures, 5 life-threatening brain hemorrhages, and couldn’t remember he had a daughter.

My course syllabi now contain a link to this document, "why Professor Holliday Doesn't Use Generative AI". Feel free to share/repurpose or just check out the links for your own reference. It won't stop some of them, but I want students to know why. docs.google.com/document/d/1...