I'm not sure that I know anyone else who loves the #WorldRallyChampionship, but the fact that Sebastien Ogier is fighting for a title with two (1.5 now) rallies left, having not even taken part in three of them this year, confirms that he's absolutely in a class of his own. #WRC2025

Let's all allow Dick Cheney's peaceful passing at the ripe old age of 84 to remind us of the importance and joy of speaking ill of the dead when the dead were assholes.

Perfect night for an end-of-weekend campfire. Coyotes whooping it up in the fields around us too. Great stuff.

New episode for the first time in forever!

This feels like pretty much the perfect time to start caring about the #BlueJays for the first time since 1994, right? #MLB #baseball

It'd be tricky to make this any closer to a Stalin-era propaganda poster, really...

Did a Liberal MP go rogue and ban the Irish band Kneecap from our country? Um, it sure sounds like it. On The Line Media’s @smohyeddin.bsky.social first exclusively reported this jaw-dropping story:

Motherfucking wind farms…

I'm giving #substack a try, so I wrote a thing there with some of my #CanadaVotes #Election2025 thoughts; particularly about how our system actually works and how it might work even better (hint: @fairvote.ca has the right idea, IMHO): open.substack.com/pub/ryanpaul... #CanadaPolitics #politics

If you like #podcasts, amateur #linguistics, or (even better!) the former hosted by revelers in the latter, good news: we've a new episode out! This time we're digging into the #etymology of #juggernaut and #blackmail, learning about Hindu effigies and unscrupulous landlords! www.lexitecture.com

When Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia, one of their first orders of business was to attempt a total reset of the country back to agrarian roots by forcibly transitioning those academics/experts they didn't kill to farming/labour jobs, with predictable results.

starting to think that centering your campaign around the most viscerally offputting man in history isn’t a reliable winning strategy

Just so everybody understands, Booker has been speaking cogently about the issues the entire time and Strom Thurmond famously spent hours reading from the encyclopedia, because segregationists were and are dumbshits

"I don't want a Disney vacation of our history! I don't a whitewashed history, I don't want a homogenized history. Tell me the wretched truth about America, because that speaks to our greatness" -- 20 hours into his speech, Cory Booker is spitting absolute 🔥

Not-so-gentle reminder to, well, everyone: if "there's no due process if you break the law", all it takes is an *accusation* by the state that you broke the law to rob you of any and all "rights" you thought you had. In other words, when pols are free to say shit like that, you have no rights. #USA

At a 2015 campaign all-candidates meeting, I live-fact-checked our local MP, Cheryl Galllant, on a blatant lie she told about electoral reform. The newsroom I worked for at the time was *INUNDATED* with hat-wringing bitching from her campaign. My genuine sympathies, @rachelgilmore.bsky.social.

This just in - when you're sad, your mirror gets sad too! But your mirror can be made happier if you just smile at it! It's people too!

Imagine having the self-awareness to intentionally add the modifier "physically" to this tweet, but to have the unending and nauseating hubris to tweet it all anyway...

Toddler-wearing-an-ill-fitting-grotesque-approximation-of-a-man-suit fails at extortion attempts and throws public tantrum, now real-world hero and gifted leader is expected to grovel under Donald's high chair to make the toddler feel better. The US is a failed state cesspool run by idiots.

Dear diary, today at work I found an alligator clip that made me briefly question whether I'd been secretly shrunk...

Here's what I don't understand about the panic about #tariffs in the #US: A tariff is a tax imposed by a country on stuff coming into the country, right? So what it actually does is raise the end-price for any consumer/purchaser of that product. ... (1/11)

Aaaaand it's here! (he says, realizing that he forgot to actually link to the episode on the website in the first post...) www.lexitecture.com/2025/01/26/e...

We're back! First #NewEpisode of 2025 - we're looking at the #etymology of #destroy and #present, thinking about tiny prefixes and what it means to give a gift in the here and now. We'd love to connect with fellow #WordNerds around here, so please share this and help us find our people! #linguistics

We have, at long last & LONG overdue, recorded a new episode, and while it's still obviously early days, we may be back on track. We're likely going to aim for a monthly release schedule for now, but if we can get some out earlier, we definitely, absolutely will. Please share with Word Nerd friends!

Guess what (FINALLY) happened today!!! #Lexitecture #linguistics #etymology #podcast #NewEpisode

Do you have a familect — words or phrases that you use with your family that nobody else would understand — like if you say you "Yosimite'd" dinner because of a funny experience you had camping. Family gatherings are a great time to talk about familects! 🧵

Merry Christmas, everyone!!

You know what's weird? J. R. R. Tolkien was still alive when Led Zeppelin released Ramble On, which has a verse that references Mordor and Gollum. I've never before wondered whether Tolkien was a Zeppelin fan, but now I really need to know...

Ryan Starkey makes wonderful, well-researched maps about dialects and accents in Great Britain. But sometimes he gets silly.

I love (LOVE) seeing Marner get chippy in defence of his goalie. #GoLeafsGo

Career news time - in a couple of weeks I'll be leaving the general practice law firm where I currently work and starting as full-time Duty Counsel with Legal Aid Ontario out of the Pembroke Courthouse. My internship there was the best 3 weeks of law school, so I'm excited, but it'll be a busy time!

Pronouncing "spectacles" like "Heracles"

This thread offers a valuable solution to the problem of Christmas song overload/fatigue. We have far more options than we think.

My kingdom for a set of kitchen tongs built well enough that this stupid rivet thing lasts longer than just a month or two...

On being told all mothers should get free Botox: A Poem

Credit where due to to the #NHL on this one. It's an excellent breakdown of this rule, complete with detailed analysis and video examples. Also highlights how everyone in the league is a lawyer - it's basically a criminal law breakdown of a Criminal Code provision, but for an NHL rule. More of this!

Wordle 1,252 1/6 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 I know a lot of people have moved in from #wordle, but this is pretty thrilling!

[To the tune of 'Wouldn't It Be Nice' by The Beach Boys] 🎵Wouldn't it be nice 🎵To eat a Minion 🎵Holding up a towel to hide from god 🎵And wouldn't it be nice 🎵Though quite forbidden 🎵Savouring the yellow flesh of Bob

The Vocal Fries made it into the New York Times as one of the top 5 podcasts for word nerds! #linguistics

T. Eşekkürler 🇹🇷 #langsky

So what's the deal with these Goodpods #podcast charts? Are they legit in any way? Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the little ego boost of seeing #1 All Time beside something I've done, but I can't help but think there *are* better #linguistics pods out there... #langsky #etymology

“Words Christmas Gave Us” festive history “Words the Vikings Gave Us” Norse nouns “Words the Sea Gave Us” nautical words "Modern Words with Old Roots" avatar to zarf “How To Get Your Name In The Dictionary” eponyms #etymology paperback #Kindle wordfoolery.wordpress.com/my-books/

The /f/ sound in the middle of 'nephew' seems like a case of spelling influencing pronunciation The evidence from Middle English and French (today: neveu) points to a voiced /v/ sound, but after English writers added a P to its spelling to resemble Latin nepōs, it started to be pronounced like a PH

I don't watch boxing... ever... Can anyone tell me if it's normal to have the judges be from Texas, Indiana and *Canada*? Can you narrow it down at all for the second-largest country in the world, by any chance?

I would be so happy if this Xodus trend to this place were to continue to grow. I've been signing up to pretty much every new social media site to come along over the last 10 years in the hopes that it would take over from FB/Twitter, so if this was the one, that'd be great!

I miss actual Twitter, which I did really like before Dollar Store Stark took it over and ruined it, so hopefully this (at least perceived by me) trend of more people coming over here continues.

I genuinely can't understand how anyone is shocked at Trump's election. Disappointed/angry? Sure - absolutely. Shocked? Nothing *new* was revealed about Trump in his first term - everyone knew who they were voting for then, and they did it anyway. Why *should* it have been any different this time?

Any #podcast people (hosts, producers, anyone) have advice on how to actually get the 'mojo' back? I'm decidedly not ready to actually no longer have our show be a thing, but life is just really busy, it's just perpetually finding itself on the back burner, and now I'm not sure how to get it back.