I didn't think I had a pin/pen merger but I guess I do. I caught myself saying, instead of centimeters, I said cinnameters, which I guess are cinnamon-flavored meters.

Hey. The fragmentation of the social media landscape has been hard on indie #scicomm 🧪 projects So if you'd like to follow a podcast that's enthusiastic about #linguistics, could you check out @lingthusiasm.bsky.social? And if you think your followers might like to, could you give this a repost?

Very Serious Linguistics going on today in phonetics/phonology. Congratulations to the tass for winning wug test creature of the semester, spring 2025. #linguistics

Oh hey, I get to do one of those posts! Stoked, thrilled, hyped, psyched, jazzed, amped, and chuffed to bits to share that I've accepted a tenure-track position in historical linguistics at Binghamton University (SUNY system). I'll also establish and direct the first linguistics lab there. Yay!

An important post from a friend of mine currently on a Fulbright in Estonia. Consider: the human impact on the individual grantees, the impact on the people they serve, and the hit that the image of the US takes when these folks leave. Fulbright has always been bipartisan. This is a disgrace.

Gonna start calling it trumpscrolling to try to trick myself into not doomscrolling

It is Black History Month. I am Black. Ain't enough euphemisms in the world to hide them facts! Here's some reading for y'all as we celebrate & remember! Solidarity & Collectivity in Decolonizing Linguistics: A Black Diasporic Perspective in Decolonizing Linguistics doi.org/10.1093/oso/...

I'm not sure if people realize how quickly the Trumpzis can do enormous damage to US science, from basic research to translation. Really fast. REALLY fast. Labs with decades of irreplaceable domain and technique knowledge can break apart with a surprisingly short funding gap. When they're gone...1/

I understand that ChatGPT is down and fortunately this is not a problem for me as I have spent considerable time developing a local language model that I am able to run autonomously, fueled by Coke Zero and snacks

How do Philadelphians pronounce 'Passyunk'? It's complicated. Really appreciate how their first reference is to the original Lenape version(s) h/t @kendraserra.bsky.social 🧪 🐦🐦

after days of grifters and con men at CES we stumbled upon the booth for VLC. they were all dressed as wizards and told us, "we have nothing to sell, we just decided to show up". i told them I'd been using their software to pirate media for 15 years and they said "keep doing that"

"To invoke #language when talking about #LLMs is to misunderstand the nature of language and miss its fundamentally lived and embodied character ... Where #AI promises magic, the most pressing need is for basic research driven by communities" A must-read:
www.thedial.world/articles/new... #langsky

LLMs love racist stereotypes, which is why Meta’s Liv talks in mock AAE…all they’ve got is “yaaasss” and “tea” because they mimic what the internet thinks black people are www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8FYxhdy/

I can tell I’m an elder millennial who thinks about the 90s too much because my phone just autocorrected “aim” to “AIM”

On the infinitude of language 🐦🐦 (h/t @rikker.bsky.social and @roryturnbull.bsky.social) Roses are red, Trump is a cretin...

Important analysis showing that people share outrage producing misinformation, even if they know it to be untrue. IMO, this is why one campaign relied so heavily on anger about things that did not happen, and why they were electorally successful.

“Top cover, your best years are behind you and your dreams will probably stay dreams”

The barcode lookup feature on my dead media cataloging app is so helpful lol. But I think we can all agree that Trolli Sour Brite Octopus Gummy Candy 4 was where the franchise really went off the rails, it just couldn’t recapture the magic of the first three films

I just saw my work out in the wild!

Noah Webster's failed spelling reforms never fail to amuse me, even if we probably should have gone with more of them lol Why shouldn't I enjoy this nice SOOP on my TUNG, when it can GIV some CUMFORT for the AKE of my GREEF?

I need an app notification setting "You're on real thin ice here, buster" for when I still might want an occasional ping, but when they also need to know that they're like one Jake Paul news headline away from a total ban

those findings helped inform @rikker.bsky.social and my argument that the myth of the lone genius is a significant barrier to an academic landscape that promotes full participation and a healthy environment for all members academic.oup.com/book/56194/c...

couple years ago i did a study of the strategies people used to defend professors who had been accused of sexual impropriety in their labs/departments. overwhelmingly the most common one was that he’s a special genius and mediocre minds want to deprive us of his brilliance. this thinking is RAMPANT

Pleased to announce I’ve been nominated for Secretary of the Interior, and I am highly qualified because I do not want go outside for the next 4 years

Obsessed with this nightmare fuel gumball machine man on fb market

I really needed the laugh I got from this note that a student included with their thesis draft: "this is RIDDLED with typos. I’m sorry. It's a part of my long standing commitment to not being able to type better than I can set up a tent"

Each class I ask my Intro Ling students to share tasty linguistic morsels they notice around them. One from today was a student observing that W and L usage moving from nominal ("take the L") to more adjectival ("that's a W car")

Uh oh it’s apple discourse somebody stop me. Jazz is the actual correct answer, but Envy gets points for similar parentage to Jazz — both are Gala and Braeburn crossbreeds

My earliest game memory is of Mystery House on Apple II (first of many, many Sierra games I played as a kid)

Your move, Chicken in a Biskit. I can’t wait to buy Cornish Game Hen in a Pastry

Talking morphology in intro linguistics today and the Heinz portmanteau sauces came up, so now I feel the need to remind you all about delightfully unhinged product names like TARCHUP and HANCH

This was quite good fun to do youtu.be/mey9EsOwhDo?...

Should linguistic descriptions include basic statistical modeling? If you look at phonetic descriptions in the Illustrations of the IPA, most do not. Though, grammars and articles with descriptive phonetic data seem to do so (Tabain, Hargus, etc). What about for corpora in grammars? #linguistics

In a move surprising Probably No One, I have written about syntax pedagogy! This time for COZIL's blog: here's my five quick tips on how to make your syntax #linguistics classroom more LGBTQ+ friendly! lgbtqlinguistics.wordpress.com/2024/10/18/m...

My son asked why is there a movie called “NOOOOO” 💀💀💀

Taskmaster makes me wish I could respond “All the information is on the task” to many people in daily life lol

A Brief History of Students Today Aren’t Prepared for College 🧵

So you know how for anonymous abstracts you have to clear the PDF properties and not just rename the file? Same is true for submitting thesis drafts to your advisor 🫣😭

The Black Academic Development Lab at Stanford University, Anne H. Charity Hudley, Ph.D., PI, seeks to hire a postdoctoral fellow in the language, literacy, and culture of African Americans. The appointment is scheduled to begin on September 15, 2025; a later start date may also be possible.

TIL that the zoo where Moo Deng lives is the one we used to take our kids to a lot on the weekends. Fun fact: the zoo is in Sriracha district, the namesake of the hot sauce

Congratulations @savithry.bsky.social and coauthors!

I swear Tim Walz is so good at this.

Today after Intro Ling a student came up to me beaming and said she was so happy when I pronounced her name right. I always try, but she'd written in a reflection that introductions in the U.S. are stressful because people struggle to pronounce her name, so I made the extra effort. It matters!

Never caught that Hobbes (i.e. Bill Watterson) uses sentence-initial positive "anymore."

New use for my hard copy of the OED: blocking off the vent on the HVAC because it’s gone haywire and cooling our building to 66F/19C

My commentary on the excellent research published yesterday in Nature, showing that AI LLMs discriminate against AAE speakers www.tiktok.com/t/ZP81EXBx8/

Thai news broadcaster-ese does a thing with some lexical items, apparently in trisyllabic loans from Sanskrit, where the stress pattern ◡ – – with the vowels /a/ /aa/ in the first two syllables, becomes – ◡ ◡ or – ◡ – with the vowels reversed to /aa/ /a/ 1/

My latest article with Dr. Christine L. Mallinson and Aris Moreno Clemons is now out! It's an expanded version of our LingComm23 plenary address. DOI:10.1515/lingvan-2023-0154

Um, actually it’s

It’s that time again: back in Thailand with the family and up to my usual needless foodposting thread. You have been warned!!1! First up: som tam and pork larb from the other day