first year seminar group has decided on the group project topic: we'll be looking at Louis Tomlinson, comparing his sung and interview speech during his One Direction era and his solo career to see if/how his Yorkshire features have waxxed or waned over time. STAY TUNED #linguistics

Louis Tomlinson Flirty Smile

Alt: gif of singer Louis Tomlinson grinning and raising his eyebrows

static.klipy.com

Among the degrees that have been cut at Edinburgh are Persian Studies (and Persian and Middle Eastern Studies), and Africa and International Development. If only there was any need for specialists in any of these areas in the current state of affairs.

Josh Pizzuto-Pomaco@joshpizpom.bsky.social · 2w ago

EXC: 90 programmes in Edinburgh University's College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences are to be closed. The casualties, which include 48 language and literature programmes, will be 'taught out', w/ no admissions after 2027. @heraldscotland.bsky.social www.heraldscotland.com/news/2655839...

The international chess Federation banned trans women from playing women's chess. CHESS. It's not about fairness. The fairness argument is intended to radicalize people into more violent forms of transphobia.

Chef Kennedy🐸🏳️‍🌈@kennedy.northsky.social · 3w ago

That rock skipping, yes tossing stones across a pond or river, is a gender segregated sport, should tell you something about how gendered sports are not about fairness of physical ability, and is instead about the male ego

i love that this has had literally no impact on my day lol

MacRumors.com@macrumors.bsky.social · last mo.

ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok Are Down

I'll again note that the folks willing to sign a letter supporting a raging eugenicist (purportedly in defense of his academic freedom to be racist) aren't nearly as motivated when it comes to *actual* threats to academic freedom, like this.

Cas Mudde@casmudde.bsky.social · last mo.

If you are wondering how bar-shit crazy Texas is these days: the University of Houston removed almost half of its courses to comply with state censorship laws.

Make a band bigger: Indigo Women

Joey Stanley@joeystanley.com · last mo.

Make a band bigger: Greater London Symphony Orchestra

Fifteen years and i have never seen good evidence of this.

Brendan Cantwell@cantb.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I keep seeing higher ed commentators saying that students and employers are demanding short-term certificates and other credentials but where's the evidence?

I love it and will absolutely be buying a Meat Clarinet boxy tee to wear on the day I talk about the vocal tract in my Fall sociophonetics classes (maybe some stickers too, for office hour attendance incentives)

Gretchen McCulloch@gretchenmcculloch.com · 2mo ago

Please help me win a debate with @superlinguo.bsky.social which is that people will love our new body horror linguistics merch

This is the part that breaks my heart. "Generative AI has broken the sacred contract between professors & students: that the professors are there to teach and the students are there to learn. The understanding has been broken...That’s a very deep part of the grief” www.chronicle.com/article/thes...

These Professors Are Retiring Early. AI Was the Last Straw.

What is the point of teaching, they ask, if students are just pretending to learn?

chronicle.com

This is the tragic yet logical result of a decades-long project—undertaken by rightwing politicians and “business-minded” administrators alike—to distort the meaning of higher education, to deny the intrinsic value of the pursuit of knowledge, to deprive us all of richer, more purposeful lives.

The New Republic@newrepublic.com · 2mo ago

President Trump is banning students majoring in degrees that don’t make enough money from taking out college loans. Degrees for social work, art, religious studies, teaching aides, and music will be hit the hardest. trib.al/aaAEu6v

Surely the solution here is just *don't use AI tools* for your writing and research and continue to do your writing and research in ALL the ways you were doing it before you started using AI instead of doing the work??

This morning in Biddeford, Maine, a 26-year-old man said goodbye to his wife and daughter and left for work. Moments later he was dead, shot in the head by ICE agents, the second man ICE has killed in six days. ICE is killing our neighbors. ICE cannot be reformed. Abolish ICE.

Is Harry Kane standard cockney slang for complain?

The point of having students do peer review is not to fix the essay, it’s to give the students a concrete experience of delivering their ideas to an audience and being in community caring about their compositional choices.

This whole thread up & down is important and insightful. I want to add one linguistic point here:

Sonja Drimmer@sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 4mo ago

So it's normalizing AI as a legit educational aid. That's the point, and that's my main point too. But I do have one more thing to add, and it's this. The president of the Museum of African American History said the following to allay some concerns. This is a common defense. 6/n

Dramatic, tsunami-esque storm cloud above the Newark St Community Garden in McLean Gardens! @capitalweather.bsky.social

The LSA First Gen Access & Equity (FGAE) Committee is awarding $500 for travel assistance to a first-generation student in #linguistics to attend the 2027 LSA Annual Meeting in San Francisco. Learn more and apply at this link by July 31st! docs.google.com/forms/d/1Qza...

Three of my doctoral students have new papers in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America (PLSA)! 🧵 #linguistics 1) "Sounding Black, looking White: Perceptions of racial identity in pop music" by Abby Killam

Submitted my book manuscript to the publisher last night!! "Second Dialect Acquisition: Theory, Findings, and Methods", coming soon (well, "soon" in academic terms; maybe in a year 🙃) #linguistics

"What a time to be alive! We are finally freeing you from the rat race and placing you on the rat unemployment line. Is your dream to be an artist? Well, it is the dream of your employers to push a button that extrudes art. And guess who has more funding for their dream?"

My Mention of AI in This Commencement Speech Is Bound to Be a Hit

Why are you booing?

theatlantic.com

I feel that one way of expressing the combined effect of growing up, becoming socialized, getting an education, and having a personality is: not needing “all-day help… spoken into your ear privately” by Google

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 5mo ago

The glasses “are designed to give you all-day help with Gemini that's spoken into your ear privately”

If ours was a world where AI (the ideology, politic, and tech) were, uh, asking these graduates to shape AI this might resonate. But it’s not. Look, you cannot go out and market your new corporate monopoly widget as the death kneel to American workers and then ask new workers to be excited.

James Fallows@jfallows.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Have seen lots of coverage of Eric Schmidt getting booed at U Arizona commencement. I looked at what he actually said, which seems important and right, to me. (For the record: he's a friend from the pre-Google era.) See sample below.

Child language development expert here. No. The answer is absolutely not. So-called baby talk is culturally specific. Developing language is not. #linguistics

Linguistic Discovery@linguisticdiscovery.com · 5mo ago

Did language evolve because of baby talk? The way that human adults talk to young children is unique among primates, a recent study found. That might be one secret to our species’ grasp of language. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/25/s...

I'm sorry, what? In writing my first monograph, I spent six weeks trying to track down a citation in TWO languages I didn't know. And good thing too, because the citation was wrong. That's scholarship. That's research. You know, the thing we're trained to do?!?

writing some text that involves the phrase "rec room" and remembering how when I was a child (and for perhaps even longer than that...) I thought it was "wreck room" because of course the room where you played/had fun was always in massive disarray 😆 #linguistics

gotta love when a whole education system makes itself vulnerable by making a large number of institutions dependent on a proprietary lms whose continuity or reliability they have no control over *chef's kiss* now let's do it again, but bigger, with ai

Tell Congress: Protect NSF’s Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Directorate, which is quietly being eliminated while attention is focused elsewhere. Now is the time to act—contact your representatives today. #WhySocialScience #SaveSBE cossa.org/action-cente...

new blog post about, like. why i teach syntax, i guess. may be a little bit inside baseball, curious about your thoughts kconrod.medium.com/build-me-a-b...

build me a bird

or, an apologia for (still) teaching syntax

kconrod.medium.com

enraging; they scraped videos from prof's Canvas sites. I don't post video lectures to Canvas but I guess I should think harder about uploading handouts & other content, in case my own uni decides to go this route? Feeling like it's time to go back to course readers & everything on paper, 90s style!

404 Media@404media.co · 5mo ago

ASU Atomic, a new tool in beta at Arizona State University, takes faculty lectures and chops them into extremely short clips, that AI then attempts to turn into learning materials.

👀

Michael Friendly@datavisfriendly.bsky.social · 5mo ago

There's still much more that can be done to use #datavis / graphic design ideas from Cheysson style. I've started on a ggCheysson #rstats pkg: friendly.github.io/ggCheysson/ Still a WIP, but includes @kennethfield.bsky.social fonts, ideas/patterns from @infowetrust.com