January 2011
4 posts
App Is 2010's Word of the Year →
Closely beat out “nom” (not as worthy in my eyes). Last year’s WOTY was tweet.
Words of the Year 2010 coming up →
Love this “So even if when it’s not all correct, it can still be OK.”
How I long to fall just a little bit, to dance out of the lines and stray from the light. - Dar
NYT on Cuomo; Kara gets political →
The most frustrating thing about this is the realization that journalists will absolutely make their article about what they want to make it about. So Michael gives the writer evidence that there is a Queens accent, which goes on, but my comments on the lack of a borough difference stays out. Then he ends with a quote from me that implies I think Cuomo is putting on his accent? What I said was...
December 2010
5 posts
Disregard this joke but for the reference to the...
Today is my 30th Birthday! Also - how often do I get all agro about the letter c in the English language? Well, this joke is silly, but please note that it is one of the first “improvments” suggested.
Subject: FW: The Building of a European Union Language! Read all the way through….it is indeed very clever. The building of a European Union language! The European...
R
My friend Dan said something funny on Facebook yesterday, prompted by Facebook’s additions to its spoken language selection, which does not include African American English (or any derivative) or Latino/Chicano English, or New York (City) English, but does include Pirate. He noted that “a language is a dialect with an army and either a navy or a pirate ship.” I mean, that’s...
Penultimate →
Byron congratulated me today on teaching my penultimate class of my first semester at Reed. It reminded me of stress assignment in English - one of my colleagues in French was asking me about stress assignment and I was trying to explain some of the basic rules without making it too complicated, the most basic of which is that disyllabic nouns take stress on the penultimate syllable, as well...
November 2010
9 posts
“Look after the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves.” - Lewis Carroll
Eyewitness Account, Memory, and the Kennedy... →
On the anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination, I’m always reminded of the fascinating research that basically debunks the validity of eyewitness testimony, and the longevity of memory more generally. Research on the actual eyewitnesses in Dallas proved incredibly unreliable as witnesses changed their stories over time, particularly with reference to additional shooters and other...
Unlearning to Talk like a New Yorker →
GAH. we have so much work to do as linguists to educate the public and media. Labov misquoted with “linguistic self-hatred??” Drives me up a wall.
Caught between a rock and a hard place (grammar...
I had a student (a college sophomore) make another joke in my class that our course material (on dialects of English) was not “linguistics.” I took him to mean that he does not consider the subfield of sociolinguistics to be “linguistics.”
So what is linguistics then? Purely a cognitive science? An abstraction where the ideal speaker/hearer provides data from white...
