Heartbreak here too. He inspired so many students, including me, to pursue sociolinguistics by his brilliance and just by being a joy to hang with. I'll raise a glass and a diphthong to Jack!
fyi, i have a podcast and it's really great and fun. and there are a lot of super-smart people who've been on to talk about not just the Middle Ages but how and why it's studied here in the USA. please give it a listen.
AmericanMedieval.com
Thanks for this reminder to check the forecast so I'll know whether to leave the kitchen faucet dripping to avoid frozen pipes and subsequent burst
If they're going to refer to the area as "Dallas-Fort Worth", I really must insist that the one on the left/west be Dallas (see, e.g., Minneapolis-St. Paul). Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Tonight it might be “portrait” > “paroletrait”
If it makes you feel better, Burke didn't actually say this. quoteinvestigator.com/2010/12/04/g...
Stay unaslept!
The accessibility tracker in Canvas won't accept alt text descriptions of images that are longer than 120 characters. I've never encountered this limit in other contexts. How is it useful if it leads to very short descriptions?
The accessibility tracker in Canvas won't accept alt text descriptions of images that are longer than 120 characters. I've never encountered this limit in other contexts. How is it useful if it leads to very short descriptions?
All righty y'all! The Journal of Black Language and Culture @jblacjournal.bsky.social is now open for submissions! See our website for information on how to submit and reach out if you have questions or ideas as we learn and grow!
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
"enamored with" instead of "of" - if you're going to use a fancy word, use its obscure prepositional complement and don't analogize to "in love with".
You can tell he's crazy by his misuse of Cyrillic
Book cover for "Banning Books in America"
📕 Banning Books in America: Not a How-to edited by Samuel Cohen
Out February 2026: A vital exploration of how and why books are banned in the U.S.—and what that means for democracy, education, and free expression.
🔗 www.bloomsbury.com/banning-book...
#BannedBooksWeek #FreedomToRead
a grave mistake
Yes, great points! When I asked students about this a few weeks ago, they noted those phono features and one mentioned the word "gagging" which made me hopeful that "gag me with a spoon" might still be alive in the stereotype but probably not
This is interesting since it seems to ignore the class associations of "Valley Girl", right? Californians don't think of Bakersfield, Fresno, etc. as bastions of upper middle-class entitlement, do they?
I've recently heard 2 folk interpretations of the "valley" in "valley girl" as it relates to a speaking style/persona. A (northern) Californian said it referred to the Central Valley (e.g. Fresno). A St. Louisan believed it was about some valley in west county STL. Anyone have other examples?
"Since the bandages used in this trial contain silver threads, shouldn't lycanthropy be an exclusion criterion?" My latest attempt to get invited to step down from the IRB.
For non-dialectologists, "sick at the stomach" in the US was the usual form in the South and much of the Midland regions while the preposition used most commonly today, "sick to the stomach," was a Northern form (per Kurath 1949).
I've had the luxury of mostly avoiding listening to Jimmy Johnson (football coach of teams I hated), but it warmed my dialectologist's heart to hear him, in a recent documentary, say "sick at my stomach".
well actually, one is grammy-nominated this year. (for audio book) www.npr.org/2025/11/18/n...
just wait till they fire him and we still have to pay him as well as his replacement
I'm reminded of the time our campus rec center held a Mardi Gras party on the first friday of Lent.
I believe there's lots of evidence that Chaucer was an h-dropper, e.g., "myn homcomynge" and h-dropping was found across most of England by 20th century dialectologists, but I've always thought the "an historic" business was a pedant's trick like the "rules" for broad-a in RP.
therapy or linguistics courses?
Which department is hosting your Mizzou talk?
Screen shot of a Bing search for "when did moses live" and the Copilot answer: "13th century BCE" with the explanation "Moses is believed to have lived during the 13th century BCE, with his birth estimated around 1525 BCE and his death around 1406 BCE..."
Copilot introduces the long (& displaced) 13th cen. BCE.
List of teams in the Big 10 with short labels for each including, "founding football institution" for Illinois, "basketball powerhouse" for Indiana, "competitive program" for Iowa, and "colorful uniforms" for Maryland.
These epithets for the teams are mostly innocuous & vacuous in a very genAI way but Maryland's stands out.
TIL the NFL team called the Arizona Cardinals used to be the Racine Normals, which would seem to raise some questions of the that-team-doth-protest-too-much variety
"Is your velum raised or are you just happy to see me?"
