What is worse for you when reviewing/marking academic work: a) having to spot and take action on AI-generated writing or b) reading human writing that is almost incomprehensible due to grammar issues?

If I had a £ for every time I have said or written the sentence "CDA is not a method", I could retire tomorrow <sigh>

How people can send me an email cobbled together by AI, with irrelevant, incoherent and incorrect references to my work and then expect me to accept them as PhD students, I just can't make out. Please stop wasting my time.

Reading grant applications can make your head hurt. I mean, can you really have "cascading impact pathways"? 😵‍💫

It's official: after 22 (!) years at @lancslinguistics.bsky.social, I will start as Professor of Organisational Communication at @sdu.dk's Department of Language and Culture on 1 September this year. 1/2 www.sdu.dk/en/om-sdu/in...

When visual and linguistic meaning collide - and yes, the whole 29-page document is in Comic Sans 🤦‍♀️

I have just learned about CoARA and its qualitative principles for assessing research, instead of relying on rankings and metrics. 20+ years in a British university and I had no idea this approach even existed 🥲 www.coara.org

Whether you cannot wait to read this ⬇️ new book on the discursive construction of veganism or your guilty pleasure is watching meat carving videos, our episode on the language of #food is for you. Free extra materials at wordsandactionspodcast.wordpress.com www.bloomsbury.com/uk/discursiv...

Today, we have a #metaphor half-day at @lancslinguistics.bsky.social, where PhD students present their work. Nice to have a visitor from Birmingham, too @jeannettel.bsky.social

Right now, I am on a train driving across a small Danish island called Sprogø. I don't know if that really translates as "language island", but I like it.

Who - who?! - designs editorial management software? Why is it so uniformly user-unfriendly, time-wasting and unattractive? Why?? The programmers need to talk to UX people and they in turn need to talk to the users.

Your podcast hosts have four teenage sons between them, and one of them has promised (threatened?) to cook tonight. He could do worse than listen to our latest episode on language and #food while preparing dinner. wordsandactionspodcast.wordpress.com/2026/03/26/e...

And finally, preliminary findings on the use of up/down metaphors in the annual reports of UK companies. Industry also plays a role ('low carbon' in reports by energy companies)

I have just presented the latest @mantrap.bsky.social research at the @lgas-baal.bsky.social meeting, on #emotion and humour in an anti-feminist YouTube video (and comments)

The unparalleled Alon Lischinsky is talking about media representations of polyamory at the @lgas-baal.bsky.social meeting: who would have guessed that British tabloids are obsessed with it? I'm also learning about a (functional) grammar of jealousy

Another thing I just learned at the @lgas-baal.bsky.social event (talk by Ningxin Yin) that in Chinese, 'pink gay' refers negatively to nationalist gay men (originally blending femininity and Communist red) or positively to fun (a curious parallel to the old sense of 'gay') 💗

Interesting to hear Soyoon Park talk about "affective code-switching" at today's @lgas-baal.bsky.social event. And thanks to the organisers for making it easy to find 🏳️‍🌈

One of our hosts, @veronikakoller.bsky.social, switched sides and was interviewed on all things #metaphor for the @discourseacademy.org podcast "Doing Critical Discourse Analysis". Listen and find out more about the Discourse Academy here: www.discourseacademy.org

New episode of Doing CDA with @veronikakoller.bsky.social on metaphor! podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/d...

There, it has happened: I have just used the word 'classroom' in an abstract. Come to think of it, I may even have used it in a recent publication. What has become of me?! 😉

**CALL FOR PAPERS: Online Discourse of Gender-Based Violence** Dates: Jan 13-15, 2027 Location: University of Picardy Jules Verne, Amiens The conference will bring together linguists working on the interplay between online discourse & gender-based violence odgbv27.sciencesconf.org/resource/pag...

New @wordsandactions.bsky.social episode on the language of food out today! Featuring interview guest Marcelyn Oostendorp, sound clips from five researchers and quite a few metaphors. Free extra materials at wordsandactionspodcast.wordpress.com/2026/03/26/e... #DigitalPalates

The past year has not been the easiest at Lancaster, but we made it through and things are looking up. And today, @lancslinguistics.bsky.social has been ranked second in the world (!) for Linguistics. I won't lie: it feels really, really good 🙂 www.lancaster.ac.uk/news/lancast...

I will present the latest @mantrap.bsky.social research at the event, on #emotion in anti-feminist YouTube videos

Due date for abstracts: 30 April If it's an incentive (and not a deterrent), I'm one of the keynote speakers

In the physics building at my university - linguistics was definitely the safe choice!

I like a bit of dry humour in a review: "In fact, one might expect that the audience for a paper on a specific construction in [small European language] is extremely small."

For all #metaphor researchers and #discourse analysts out there: Elsevier has published my chapter on metaphor and discourse analysis, part of the Int'l Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. DM me for a copy

Ep. 32 on the language of #food is now in post-production. It features not only one longer interview with Marcelyn Oostendorp (Stellenbosch U, South Africa) but also five sound clips from @instantlinguist.bsky.social, @marbagli.bsky.social, @michaelchesnut.bsky.social, Alla Tovares & Keri Metwick

An obituary of Deborah Cameron in the J of Sociolinguistics: doi.org/10.1111/josl... I never met her, but Don Kulick's writing brings her alive.

My chapter "Language in #Brexit Discourses" has been published as part of Elsevier's Reference Collection in Social Sciences (and will be part of their International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, due out in June). Happy to privately share a copy if you don't have access, just DM me.

This has been a day for podcasting so far: recording the next episode for @wordsactions.bsky.social, on language and food, in the morning, then being interviewed on metaphor and critical discourse analysis for @discourseacademy.org

Next Monday (9 March) at 3pm GMT, my student Tianxin Li will give a talk at @lancslinguistics.bsky.social, on #multimodal discourses of voluntary #childlessness on Chinese social media. The talk is in person and on Teams: shorturl.at/2Wgi8

It's the little things that get us through the everyday: one of my academic visitors saw that I had sent comments on her paper at 11pm last night. When we met in the morning, she brought coffee for both of us, assuming - rightly! - that I needed it ☕😊

Where can you - in one and the same day - give a plenary talk and be part of a working group with MA students? At the CLADES conference on critical language awareness: clades.prd.ugent.be/en

I am very proud of my Phd student Melody Yunzhu Chen, who gave a really good presentation on the metaphors used by sexual violence survivors on Reddit #clades

@jokedae.bsky.social is showing shocking data about gender bias in machine translation and #LLMs. This stuff is taking gender equality back by decades - and that's before we even talk about non-binary people. www.biasshield.org #clades

This is brilliant! I made it back to 1100, but Old English was a struggle, despite knowing German and Danish (and a degree in English).

If you teach social actor representation, today is a good day to collect examples: "Thames Valley police said: 'We have today arrested a man in his sixties from Norfolk'" #AndrewMountbattenWindsor #PrinceAndrew

Next Monday (23 Feb), I am one of the speakers at this @engmediacentre.bsky.social sixth form conference: www.englishandmedia.co.uk/conferences/... I'm looking forward to bringing #criticaldiscourseanalysis to schools!

A shout-out to @multi-ling-mat.bsky.social (and all small, independent publishers) for their openness, integrity and genuine appreciation of academic reviewers - thank you!

One of my PhD students told me today that they had attended three talks by me over the last month. That not only shows great loyalty, but also reminds me of Stefan Zweig, who, in The World of Yesterday, notes that his passion has become an enterprise.

Did one! Not listed and should be? Let me know 🙂 go.bsky.app/AT6KX6X

Includes a chapter by the @mantrap.bsky.social team on using #corpus linguistics to address the effects of manosphere language

This is happening tomorrow (10 Feb) at @liprg.bsky.social #metaphor #discourseanalysis

There, it has happened: I came across a reference to Koller (2008), for a book I did not write🤦‍♀️#hallucination

I am halfway through the #AI slop of an automatically generated grant application and I am using the will to live. Call me cranky and out of touch, but this is *not* what I signed up for when I became an academic.

Today I learned that there "humaniser" programs that reduce "AI smell" in automatically generated texts. Strange cross-modal metaphor I think, wouldn't AI "sound" be more obvious? @bnerlich.bsky.social

Will it ever end? Then again, no shortage of data, in this case for a handbook chapter on critical #metaphor analysis. @samtbennett.bsky.social Also, a reminder of this bibliography-in progress on #Brexit and language: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

In 2026, our CASS Summer Schools offer two free-to-attend courses in corpus linguistics, focused on Language, Discourse and Society, and Language Teaching, Testing and Assessment. Applications are now open! wp.lancs.ac.uk/corpussummer... #LancsSS26