Archive for the ‘Academic life’ Category
September 7, 2026
You say it’s your birthday / We’re gonna have a good time
— the Beatles, Birthday (1968, from The White Album)
[evoked for me in e-mail by Brian Joseph]
šŖš»šŖš»šŖš» for (US) Labor Day, the flexed biceps of a manual worker (like my two grandfathers: Bethlehem Steel (maternal), Textile Machine Works (paternal); Melchior Zwicky doubled as a small-farmer as well). I’m two generations down and have ascended, as a professor and writer, to Ā the status of scholar and artist rather than worker and peasant — socioculturally if not financially in the upper middle class. With a thick veneer of high culture, but also fiercely egalitarian. It’s a balancing act.
Birthday greetings. I now veer onto something completely different (but hang on; things will come together): amidst the great avalanche of well-wishing for my birthday, #86, yesterday, an especially charming pair that came as a package. (more…)
Posted in Academic life, Bilingualism, Events and occasions, Language and culture, Languages, Linguists, Music, My life, Names, Ohio State, Social class, Social life, Teaching and learning | Leave a Comment »
September 1, 2026
On Facebook (substantially edited down): Horton Copperpot on 8/26, with this lead-in to a longer piece:
— HC: We all know AI slop. TikTok is branching out into a bunch of areas, including shopping and “short dramas”, which is a bit different from the original medium. It’s AI-generated soap operas that seem to follow between 3 and 5 script matrices, with some variation in focus, setting and language. The main feature is the ability to monetize them with high efficiency, much like most “free” video games on your phone. Several of them pop up in Facebook Reelz as ads for several “short drama” platforms, with some of the feature “dramas” shared between them. I found several that cross these platforms, mostly Horatio-Alger-type fantasy plots, plus a few cheap romance novelettes.
I got interested in them a while ago, not for the “drama” or visual appeal but more for the recurring plot lines that indicate laziness and greed. The other aspect that intrigued me was just how bad the AI was in keeping track of the details.
(more…)
Posted in Academic life, AI, Categorization and Labeling, Compliments, Plays, Pragmatics, Social interactions, Social life, Stories | Leave a Comment »
August 1, 2026
ššš rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate August, with a leporine shout-out to remember 1291, the traditional date of the formation of the Swiss federation: Hail, Helvetia!
Now to dive into today’s topic in medias res, with this 7/30 Facebook greeting from Pietro Giovanni to Aaron Broadwell on the occasion of AB’s 64th birthday, somewhere around that time:
Many returns of the day to my favorite linguist
AB is George Aaron Broadwell (known as Aaron Broadwell), Elling Eide Professor of Anthropology at the Univ. of Florida (Gainesville). PG is AB’s husband Peter Marino under the pseudonym Pietro Giovanni. For further complexity, since there are a regrettably large number of men named Peter Marino, some of them famous in their fields, Peter Marino uses the nickname Piet as his professional name; Piet Marino is the author of young adult novels (Dough Boy and Magic and Misery):
(#1) The Piet Marino logo
(more…)
Posted in Academic life, Conversation, Events and occasions, Friendship, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Indigenous peoples, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguists, Logos, Marriage, My life, Phallicity, Professional names, Pseudonyms, Speech acts, Switzerland and Swiss things, Teaching | 3 Comments »
May 27, 2026
The Stanford linguistics AZ community — adjunct faculty Annie Zaenen and Arnold M. Zwicky, graduate student Anissa Zaitsu — is pleased to announce the PhD dissertation oral presentation of one of its little band:
The Landscape of Polarity-Sensitivity in African American English: Meaning and Structure by Anissa Rei Zaitsu: PhD dissertation oral presentation (Monday, June 8, 2026, 1:00-2:15pm).Ā Committee: Vera Gribanova (co-chair), Cleo Condoravdi (co-chair), Boris Harizanov, Nandi Sims, and Gabriella Safran (Slavic Languages and Literatures, university chair).Ā Ā
(more…)
Posted in AAVE / Black English, Abbreviation, Academic life, Events and occasions, Linguists, Names, Negation, Semantics, Syntax | Leave a Comment »
May 21, 2026
The crucial moment of today’s (5/21) Zippy strip, in which Griffy addresses a Muffler Man, offering the fiberglass giant a phallic offering to his superior masculinity. It’s hard to know where to start with this — and then it turns out that this strip is a reworking of the text from an earlier strip on a similar theme.
(#1) Today’s strip “Tired Out”, with, oh dear, the alpha male theme made explicit; it is, in any case, all about (hyper)masculinity vs. inferior masculinity
(#2) The 6/2/17 strip “Rubber Fire”, showing (hyper)masculine contempt for analytic academics (I am, of course, the very model of the modern analytic academic, so eat my shorts, brute boy)
Just to get the two strips on display, for discussion to come. My l life has been overfull, but almost entirely in wonderful ways, and that’s something else for me to talk about.
Posted in Academic life, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity, My life, Phallicity, Pop culture, Signs and symbols, Vaginality | Leave a Comment »
April 22, 2026
Two things: in my e-mail, the list of the members elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in the 2026 class, including two linguists and two scholars of LGBTQ+ matters (I might have missed others); then through the USPS, the information booklet for this June’s California direct primary elections, with its massive list of candidates for governor (61 of them).
(more…)
Posted in Academic life, Awards, Gender and sexuality, Language and politics, Linguists | Leave a Comment »
March 12, 2026
The philosopher Bill Lycan (an old friend, once my colleague at Ohio State, a prolific writer, and an enormously entertaining person) came to my mind when a friend was amazed that I managed to write at least one essay a day — every day of the year — as a posting on this blog (this posting is the second for today, and it’s not yet 9 am; I’m on a roll). At least once at Ohio State, a student asked Bill how he managed to publish so much (perhaps, like Vishnu, he could write with four arms at once). Bill’s wonderful reply:
I have a very high tolerance for error.
This was, in fact, a deeply serious reply, worth some reflection.
(more…)
Posted in Academic life, Errors, People, Philosophy | Leave a Comment »
March 6, 2026
From NOAD:
noun sinecure: a position requiring little or no work but giving the holder status or financial benefit:Ā political sinecures for the supporters of ministers.Ā ORIGINĀ mid 17th century: from LatinĀ sine curaĀ āwithout careā.
And now a juicy bit of political news as it appeared on Facebook today (4/6):
(more…)
Posted in Academic life, Administration, Language and politics, Naming | 5 Comments »
March 3, 2026
The phenomenon, from Wikipedia:
The DunningāKruger effect is a cognitive bias that describes the systematic tendency of people with low ability in a specific area to give overly positive assessments of this ability. The term may also describe the tendency of high performers to underestimate their skills. It was first described by the psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger in 1999. In popular culture, the DunningāKruger effect is sometimes misunderstood as claiming that people with low intelligence are generally overconfident, instead of describing the specific overconfidence of people unskilled at particular areas.
As then in my mail recently, as a benefit of my being a member of the American Academy: “Why Do Fools Think They Are Wise? Should the Wise Believe Themselves to Be the Fool?” (a conversation between new American Academy member David Dunning and Academy President Laurie L. Patton about the Dunning-Kruger effect), Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Winter 2026, pp. 44-57.
(more…)
Posted in Academic life, Cognitive Science, Psychology | 3 Comments »
