Steven Pinker lol

deep vowel shifts in the boy child population over here in LA: [bro] --> [brɑ] --> [bɹ̩]

frustrated with the ambiguity rifle in English response particles? the colloquial "I'm good" unambiguously tracks the speaker highlight ([AGREE] in the Farkas/Roelofsen typology) 🐦🐦🐦

rhetorically peaking with the sentence "It is important not to throw the conditional out with the biconditional bath water"

people whose email signature patronizingly assures me I can respond in my own time

Hiring in syntax/semantics. 1 year position at @ox.ac.uk. my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

All the philosophy students who pursued their passion made a wise decision. Learning how to think is a always a good investment. Psychology grads are not doing too badly on the job market either.

Happy Mother's Day

I am someone who can find an associate in context for any anaphor or ellipsis site and I am absolutely stumped by this headline, I feel like congrats are in order 🐦🐦🐦

a horrific failure of administration that has traumatized a whole generation of students at UCLA

famous UK headline "My Dodgy Kebab Was a Baby"... evidence that de dicto / de re has nothing to do with (modal) quantifiers? 🐦🐦🐦

a non-trivial amount of my students report being able to get a consistent reading of the sentence "2 players are male and non-binary", i.e. they can interpret it as a claim about 4 individual players how widespread is this?! seems like endtimes to me

it may interest you to know that a sick burn amongst the local 5th graders is to accuse you of doing a Trump Dump in your Vance Pants

I don't usually repost memes, but this one keeps being relevant.

can we please all stop deliberately consuming propaganda from any government

an alternative perspective on the Artemis 2 stuff www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2...

I have consistently made $200-400 each year on average in class action settlements for at least the last 8 years or so. is this a common experience? it just takes a few minutes of filling out forms online per settlement... it's wild

death by a thousand small apocalypses

pretty hard to feel good about your LA public school kid having Cesar Chavez Day off on a NORMAL new cycle...

what's more neuroatypical: * watching ASMR videos, or * watching ASMR videos with the sound off because it's too much

Every time

Jesus Christ, this is terrifying

finally got so exhausted I accidentally said "meat flaps" instead of "vocal chords" in office hours today. gonna just fire myself I guess

losing an hour on International Women’s Day feels right

When someone says „Scientists do not want you to know“ you can dismiss everything from there on. Scientists want you to know. They are desperate that you know. They can’t shut up about what they found out and want you to know.

women FTW "Instead of Googling Epstein, Aaronson, then 29, turned to what he considered an even more reliable source: his mother. She did some checking. “Be careful not to get sucked up in the slime-machine going on here,” she wrote back"

OCD 6yo organizing the liquor cabinet at 7am, referring to the Bacardi as "bat juice"

my kids say "yeet" instead of "throw" almost exclusively now and it brings such unexpected joy into my life

How to delete your cɦɑtgpt account. If you try via settings on the website (and you have a free account), it won’t let you (keeps it locked). privacy.openai.com/policies/en/

gonna be a reckoning soon between semanticists who care most about language and those who care most about logic I am sick of trying to convince people in my own profession that a semantic theory is responsible for empirical predictions about adjacent phenomena or languages

just teetered over the apex in my career where more meetings are organized for me than not; as privileged as that position is, my calendar is now full of meetings named "Meeting with Prof Fars" and I have lost all bearings

Wow: AI as faculty union bargaining issue

couldn't be more impressed with UC faculty for implementing this project to help employees move their retirement investments out from not just weapons manufacturers but inequity-promoting tech companies like Palantir. if you're a UC employee, take advantage ASAP! ucmoveyourmoney.org

dedicating this paper to all the students who stayed away from office hours this quarter

Wesleyan University President Michael Roth, a leader in organizing college presidents, has proposed Democracy Summer 2026, evoking the heroic Freedom Summer of 1964 that aimed to advance voting rights in Mississippi, now employed to safeguard the midterm elections. From Bob Kuttner:

search all of Epstein's emails here: jmail.world Chomsky and his wife exchanged 4,431 emails with Epstein, one of the highest rates of his celebrity acquaintances (more than Bannon!)

suck it haters (this includes UCLA admin and regents)

it seems impossible to defend the claim that, if you're a bastard in your personal life, you're necessarily a bastard in your professional life, and vice versa. but surely we can agree there's a correlation, and that learning about one should prompt us to critically evaluate the other

“That’s particularly true now with the hysteria that has developed about abuse of women, which has reached the point that even questioning a charge is a crime worse than murder." -- Noam Chomsky www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

linguists it's true, I hate fucking wugs, can this be our mascot instead?

just woke up from a stress dream where I was lecturing with a microphone and then a student gave me a popsicle so I had to try to do both

my students and I are trying to figure out the meaning of "slash," as in "I'm an actor slash writer", contrast "and" "or" and "and-or" we've worked that, in a context in which A & B are holding their office hours together: I'm going to A { and / *or / slash / *and-or } B's office hours 🐦🐦🐦

speech acts are paralinguistic, by definition! I am now assigning semantics papers within this broken genre (including one of my own) by asking students, "If you were to receive an electric shock every time you said the phrase 'speech act,' how would you describe this phenomenon instead?"

I had a colleague whose grant was cancelled because it had the phrase "linguistic diversity" in the title, so Palantir is dumb as a rock in addition to being evil

my students tell me that, sometime between my generation and theirs, the marked context has changed from "/s" to "/gen" (its opposite, /genuine) and I think that means we are in the Nihilism Era

absolutely uncanny we decided to pivot from email to text just as we pivoted from hyperlinks to QR codes so now every fucking kids party invite comes to me via text as a flyer with an embedded QR for the gift list that I have to screen shot and email to myself so I can use my phone to get the link

oh my fucking God I need this so bad

Harper's Letter folks are being kind of shy lately about free speech issues. Maybe they are writing an extra long letter this time.