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"

it is appalling how much unpaid work the UC Faculty have had to do on behalf of Californians to fight for this ruling, and it's even more shocking to think that the UC will spend even more resources to appeal it dailybruin.com/2025/10/14/j...

I wonder if Dutch philosophy departments in the 1630s were only hiring in the philosophy of tulips.

almost midway through my 40s; as far as I can tell, this decade is distinguished in two respects: 1) I am constantly being offered free sometimes VIP tickets to gigs I would have killed to attend in most prior decades, but 2) I have virtually no interest in attending them

neuroatypical 10yo explained to me that "spicy" referred to heat spice because it describes intrinsic properties where "spiced" refers to cinnamon &c because it describes something added

A lot of tech bros who were upset about pronouns want to confer them on their computers now that they’re dating

surely it's "myuts" (apologies to the poster 🤣)

being a semantics professor means constantly getting to say hilarious things like "that is a 'but'-adjacent phenomenon" but only to people who do not even smirk at it

just sent some corrected proofs back, so I feel it is not too premature to celebrate that I have successfully gotten the word "oomph" into a white paper (use not mention!)

more like weaponized doofiness

Each year, University of California campuses have to get approval from the board of regents for orders of new military-grade weapons. On Thursday, regents approved orders for a total of thousands of pepper-balls, rifle rounds, drones and more. www.latimes.com/california/s...

nothing like returning back to academia after a long summer break to remind me how much I love hanging out with neuroatypical people (just walked away from a conversation that was boring me by saying "I'm walking away, this is boring me" and was sent off with cheerful, understanding goodbyes)

one sign; zero pronouns; two anaphors 🐦🐦🐦

UC faculty, please take note of who is being fearless and decisive in standing up for our rights. It’s not the admin, it’s not the senate. They’re structurally unsuited to the way we need to fight right now. It’s @uc-faculty.bsky.social. It’s time to join, if you haven’t already.

I mean, categories in linguistics are as real as categories in biology, which also aren't

will pop music ever again embrace the synthesizer as it did in the 70s? I hope not

an interesting fight on Reddit about the difference between English treating "visa" as a Latin verb morphologically and German treating it like a Latin noun. obviously everyone is right, but I'm curious if there are other examples of the German case (deverbalized loans) 🐦🐦🐦

there's a 7th-grader in Santa Monica named "Elden"

the kids spent the day at the beach referring to the watermelon as "Water Malone", maybe you need that in your life right now

5yo: "If he did that, I would kick him in the nuts for a living." me: "What?!" 5yo: "That means I would do it until he died."

delighted to report we've leveled out of the phase now where a) time can only be communicated in length of TV shows; b) all salient TV shows bundle 2 or more mini episodes into a 20ish-min package episode; & c) the child cannot understand the difference regardless of how it is presented to him

TIL that in Irish you can use the word 'demon' as a negative quantifier and it's called "demonic negation" (McCloskey 2009), e.g. Dheamhan duine a bhuaileann sé. demon person that hits he 'Not one person does he hit.' 🐦🐦🐦