Accompanying this hazy snapshot posted on Facebook on 12/22 by John Wells —
Juicy scavenging on the green slopes of (I assume) Montserrat, in the Leeward Islands; the fully ripe fruits fall to the ground and ferment there, where the local iguanas can feed on them
— was his caption, the donée for a poem in trochaic tetrameter (with a couple leading unaccented syllables), the most common meter for folk poetry of all kinds in English:
An iguana feasts on fallen mangoes
On Facebook today, a report on a Google AI search on “Lynneguist hospital” that inspired the bot to satisfy the search term by giving Lynne Murphy a medical degree:
[LM:] Adding medical qualifications to my cv.
I mean, here’s the evidence.
Yesterday on this blog, the posting “LSA news bulletin: awards” on (among other things)
Kira Hall — of the University of Colorado, Boulder — as the 5th recipient of the … Arnold Zwicky Award, intended to recognize LGBTQ+ scholars and those whose work in linguistics benefits the LGBTQ+ community.
Now, some basic information about KH, from Wikipedia and from the University of Colorado website; I might add some further information about her in a while.
Today turned out to be the annual awards announcement day for the Linguistic Society of America. Two awards of special interest to readers of this blog, in e-mail from the LSA (both announcements edited, rearranged, and expanded here):
The Bloomfield Book Award Committee, recognizing a volume that makes an outstanding contribution of enduring value to our understanding of language and linguistics, congratulates George Aaron Broadwell — Aaron Broadwell, of the University of Florida, Gainesville — as an award finalist (there are two finalists) on his book The Timucua Language: A Text-Based Reference Grammar, published by University of Nebraska Press in 2024. The award is named after Leonard Bloomfield, author of the influential textbook Language (1933), one of the founding members of the LSA in 1924, and its president in 1935.
Join the Committee on LGBTQ+ [Z] Issues in Linguistics (COZIL) in congratulating Kira Hall — of the University of Colorado, Boulder — as the 5th recipient of the prestigious Arnold Zwicky Award, intended to recognize LGBTQ+ scholars and those whose work in linguistics benefits the LGBTQ+ community. The award is named for Arnold Zwicky, the first openly LGBTQ+ president of the LSA.
So it’s LSA President’s Day (Bloomfield and me), and also LSA Pride Day (Aaron, Kira, and me).
The beginning of an e-mail exchange with a graduate student in linguistics, call him GS, who wrote to tell me that he’d found my blog a few years before he went to grad school in linguistics:
and I thought it was excellent and exactly the thing I needed at the time
I replied with delighted thanks, and asked if he would be willing to say, more specifically what is was that I provided for him.
GS then elaborated on his thoughts at the time in a particularly thoughtful flight of introspection (and, yes, said more nice things about me).
Now: details.
Once again, three linguists on Facebook. beginning with Lauren Hall-Lew on Facebook on 10/4:
— LHL (Univ.of Edinburgh): I’ve been binging Desert Islands Discs, because most of my podcasts are political, and my heart can only take so much.
— AZ (Stanford) > LHL: (Side comment: for me, the spelling really has to be bingeing; otherwise it’s just bing-bing-bing like bullets, or Bing like Bing Crosby.)
— LHL > AZ: excellent point! I am a terrible speller!
To the author of “Read at your own risk: Syntactic and semantic horrors you can find in your medicine chest” (1974), a speech act for 8/22. Jerry, if you’re now 83, that means that in two weeks I’ll be 85, and how did this happen to us, but, hey, we’re still standing. I am happy you keep having birthdays.
To other readers: Jerry is Jerrold M. Sadock, Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor in Linguistics and the Humanities Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago. A friend for 60 years now and one of three sustained collaborators of mine. Also a really good guy.
From Amy Dahlstrom on Facebook yesterday, an obituary for Ives Goddard (who was, oh dear, a year younger than I am) from the Smithsonian Institution:
Ives Goddard III [Robert Hale Ives Goddard III] (1941-2025) passed away peacefully in his sleep on the evening of August 6. Ives earned his A.B. (1963) and Ph.D. (1969) from Harvard University. Following a stint as a junior professor at Harvard after his Ph.D., in 1975 he came to the Smithsonian to work as a linguist and as the technical editor of the Handbook of North American Indians. After he retired in 2007, he continued his research as a curator emeritus.
Ives was a renowned linguist known as a leading expert on Algonquian languages.
… He will be fondly remembered for his dry wit, encyclopedic knowledge of Indigenous languages, generosity to language learners and to other scholars, and passionate support for linguistics and language revitalization.
From 6/19 on Facebook, an exchange between Aaron Broadwell and me (somewhat expanded in this version):
— AB > AZ: Arnold, I wonder if you knew Miriam Petruck, who died about two months ago. [with the link below:]
Linguist List 36.1873, 6/17/25, “In Memoriam Miriam R.L. Petruck (1952-2025)”: by Hans C. Boas, dated 6/14/25
[beginning:] Dr. Petruck was born April 11, 1952. She received her B.A. in Linguistics from Stony Brook University in New York in 1972 and her M.A. in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1976. In 1986, she received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, with Prof. Charles J. Fillmore as the head of her dissertation committee. Her dissertation on Hebrew body-part metaphors combined two of her lifelong interests, the scientific study of the Hebrew language and Cognitive Linguistics. Her dissertation was the first one to apply Frame Semantics to linguistic analysis. She became involved in the major research projects which Prof. Fillmore and his colleague Prof. Paul Kay undertook in the 1990s, developing the twin theories of Frame Semantics and Construction Grammar. She participated in the discussions leading to the creation of the FrameNet project (the practical implementation of Frame Semantics) in 1997, helping to define frames and to annotate some of the data in the FrameNet database.
For the rest of her life, she continued to publish and speak about both theories (particularly about Frame Semantics and its application to NLP), at conferences and seminars around the world.
— AZ > AB: I did indeed. Through my regular association with the Berkeley Linguistics Society in the old days. The death notice by Hans Boas on Linguist List focused on her position as a kind of international ambassador for FrameNet.
The linguist Bert Vaux (information below) has been playing with AI resources for some time; most recently he’s been using head shots of various people — the hot young Brad Pitt and the famously scowling Vladimir Lenin, for example — as elements in AI compositions, today producing this entertaining ad, in which VL goes places VL has never gone before:
(#1) The major contribution to this work is a genuine Bon Ami cleanser print ad from 1949 (which BV posted on Facebook along with #1; I’ll reproduce it below)
For this image I provided a musical text, a burlesque of a wonderful comic song:
You can do such a lot with V. Lenin,
You can use every part of him too.
For work or for pleasure, he’s a triumph he’s a treasure
Oh there’s nothing that V. Lenin cannot do
Yes, I will also reproduce the original of this text.
