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I need an academic meme of the year competition to teach me all the memes the way the American Dialect Society's word of the year competition teaches me all the youth slang
“Incantations” for #WOTY2026?
We’ve taken Kevin’s lead.
We’ve gotten so good at trimming words for abstracts that it has spilled into our spoken language.
The kids are all right: a short story.
My kids are in a Chinese DLI program. Last month, their teacher complimented a student’s Jordan 1s. He explained that when he migrated from China, he chose “Michael” as his English name because he loved Michael Jordan. 1/
📦 My first #RStats package on CRAN:
{readelan}
A package dedicated to reading all files associated with ELAN: eaf, etf, ecv. Reads annotations, metadata, controlled vocabularies. Relevant for many in #linguistics perhaps?
More info here:
borstell.github.io/misc/readelan/
Ooh!
I know there's a lot going on, but I had the pleasure of introducing an Arabic speaker to small capitals. They didn't realize that those were different from regular caps. What was admittedly confusing was explaining that you have to type things in lowercase and the shift to small caps.
Ooh! Mine did the same thing. Also “see this” for “watch this”.
Pass the word ... The American Dialect Society is participating in a social media campaign with ACLS the week of April 13-17, and we invite you to join in! We need more humanities and social sciences scholars and research.
A toolkit can be found here:
www.acls.org/TalkAboutHumanities
Ohh! I've never heard it outside of Utah I don't think, so this is exciting!
I’ve heard older Utahns say “measure” with the first syllable as “may”. But I’ve heard two Gen Xers just this evening say it that way.
I will miss the flexibility of the EQ trainings. I’ve put a lot of thought into timely, informational, and relevant topics. They have been the highlight of the meetings.
But also this is brilliant.
Stroppleganger. A clean shaven version of someone who normally has facial hair. Esp if they use a straight razor.
I’m in favor of this. What are some new ones we can start to circulate? Shoppleganger (someone with your same shopping habits), hoppleganger (a bunny that looks like you), coppleganger (cop that looks like you), popplegager (some who looks like the grandpa version of you)?
I’ve heard this before and /d/ glottalization is well attested in AAE, but I think too that words like didn’t, couldn’t, and wouldn’t are especially more susceptible to that.
Just watched it. The hard attacks were interesting.
I've been wanting to make a video like this for a while. It shows that [ʔn̩] in /tən/ is all over the place in mainstream media.
I'll use this in a presentation to nonlinguists tomorrow about my recent paper on how Utahns say "mountain" and similar words.
Solidarity.
It’s patten 128 from Hitomi Shida’s “250 Japanese Knitting Stitches” with pattern 239 as the hem. The yarn is hand-dyed cotton from Manos del Uruguay that I bought in New Orleans while at LSA.
An knit scarf in progress, a little less than a foot long, with a rather complex cable and lace pattern.
My latest knit scarf is turning out nicely. First fancy pants design for my first fancy pants yarn. 🧶
When I returned to BYU, I was notified that the registration from my old car from freshman year had expired.
I was also reminded to finish up my MA application 😆
So I guess in my mind, Milton Keynes is like the most textbook case of a koiné, but it sounds like there are other senses. Well that's good I guess. More to draw from on this new lecture for next week!
So some authors (Petyt 1980 for one) use the term "koiné" to refer to what is basically a lingua franca or even a standardized variety. But many other authors use it to refer to new dialect formation as a result of contact, often in a settlement. I had never seen the Petyt use before today.
I was the opposite. I didn’t realize that Mark Twain was so famous and thought we only studied him because he grew up near St. Louis.
This is very cool research! Glottal stops in Utah English have become so stigmatized that speakers have swung the other direction and now use a hypercorrect pronunciation more often than any other.
An excellent summary!
