10yo starts giggling because to him it's obvious if you want to spell the tongue depresser sound it's "AA" or perhaps "AAH" but "AHH" is clearly the being chased by zombies noise 🐦🐦🐦

UPDATE: the fun people are three hours late

for NYE plans we had to choose between fun, flaky people and less fun people who can be trusted to show up relatively on time and prepare appropriately for the event and I'm begging us as a society to push back harder against the apparent fun / responsible dichotomy

6yo asked me why churches all have big lowercase ts on them when 'church' doesn't start with T and my answer has rattled him to his core. weird how much crazy-ass shit religion has us normalize

niche linguistic content but after over 20 years I have the trickiest time in Australia with their French loan words (e.g. fête --> [fait]), especially with the word-initial stress, e.g. in croissant 🐦🐦🐦

This quote is from a piece that’s 8 years old now.

Because it'll probably get cut, I wanted to post this footnote here for posterity

Things are going great over at X, The Everything App

just so. fucking. validating. for this woman's kid, good for her

my French is chugging along nicely because I refuse to think about the numbers

I've realized, after talking to a bunch of philosophers, that I have a strong but suss take on AI: * philosophers who conclude AI is sentient are using a niche, technical definition of sentience * laypeople who think AI is sentient are confused about what AI is

everyone is outraged about this except the UC administration ("That's fine! We get it!")

Kudos to the Brown University students who are posting continuous live updates, spaced just minutes apart, on the campus shooting. A lot of grace and professionalism under immense pressure. www.browndailyherald.com/article/2025...

Shrooms 2 just dropped

Well, there's a photo I never expected to see in my life. Noam Chomsky palling around with Steve Bannon.

packing for Australia, bracing ourselves as always for an abrupt and painful bagel detox

They should do MyChart Wrapped

what's going on with the use of the possessive "your guy's" instead of "you guys'"? 🐦🐦🐦

HAVING A REALLY HARD TIME WITH THE LIZZA/LIZZO DISTINCTION GUYS

rhetoric goals

I'm glad we're shedding light on the terrible behavior of intellectual elites but it's incredibly irresponsible that deep-dives like these fail to mention even in passing that Epstein's ridiculous schtick only worked on men www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/o...

JetBlue asking for 15 volunteers in the lesser boarding classes to check their carryons "otherwise we'll check everyone's" triggering everyone who grew up with abusive evangelical parents

Banksy social commentary brought to you by conditional (counterfactual!) strengthening

Where are the island constraints when you really need them?

ride-or-dies gonna ride-or-die amp.miamiherald.com/news/local/c...

might cause me to get disbarred as a linguist but I just wrapped individual pieces of lasagne up in tin foil and wrote "lasagnum" on them in a Sharpie, cracking up internally

"AFK" is an old chatroom acronym for "away from keyboard", describing stepping away from the virtual to attend to the real but 10yo tells me kids these days use it to describe people who have spaced out of real conversation to type in their phones, which makes it a brand-spanking new contronym! 🐦🐦🐦

that's a really pretty face, it'd be a shame if someone smashed it = compliment you guys

UCLA is *us*: Faculty, students, and staff. Not administrators.

WE WON. I am *begging* you to take note of who did this. *Not* UCLA admin—they’re still scuttling around behind closed doors, attempting to appease—but FACULTY AND STAFF, led by AAUP.

wondering if there's a general term for words designed to replace taboo words, and in particular if there's a name for the phonological+ process that has given us shit --> sugar 🐦🐦🐦

we are somehow too neuroatypical to go to the Magic Castle; they have a strict dress code of hard pants and dress shoes ☹️

well, it finally happened, as I always knew it would. I am so exhausted I looked at the cover of Roald Dahl's "BFG" and ask 5yo if he wanted to listen to the "Big Fucking Giant" audiobook

linguists are used to seeing predicate-marker deletion, but are there languages that delete aux verbs with no semantic consequence? (no, right? as in, this is a universally unavailable reading?) 🐦🐦🐦

🎵These streets will make you feel brand new Big lights will inspire you LET’S HEAR IT FOR NEW YORK 🎶

if your student tells you they want to be an experimentalist when they grow up and you don't immediately follow up by grilling them about how much they enjoy paperwork and following minute often arbitrary instructions, some of which are unknowable, you are doing them a great disservice

If you see someone stealing food - no you didn't.

have achieved a Buddha-level zen* *merging from one freeway to another in downtown LA while my kids loudly argue about whether the baby on the Nirvana cover is now 70 or 80 years old

Hell yeah it is

SHAME ON YOU, UC

THIS IS WHY I USE HANDOUTS trying to prep a talk on high negation, wasted 30 minutes trying and failing to get AI to draw a personified stoned negation symbol

stumbled upon my absolute entire-ass mood on a school wall today

The UC Regents have so far refused to release the demand letter UCLA received from the Trump admin. @uclafa.bsky.social sued for its release last week and won. Glad to see that yesterday a judge rejected UC’s appeal of the decision. www.latimes.com/california/s...

ok, here's what I've got so far: * question-based exclamatives (Bardenstein 2022) * exclamative rhetorical questions (Rubenstein et al. 2015) * counterexpectational questions (Bhadra to appear) * positive-rejecting declarative questions (Repp & Geist 2025) * emphatic questions (Yoon 2022)

I need help coming up with every term in the semantics literature used to refer to utterances transcribed with interrobangs (?!), ideally with a citation, e.g. "question construction exclamatives," Bardenstein 2022 @denizrudin.bsky.social ? @haikugoat.bsky.social ? 🐦🐦🐦

Imagine considering doing something USC wouldn't.

celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month the only way my white ass knows how, i.e. walking 10yo line-by-line through Rage's "People of the Sun"