Plenty of politicians on both sides of the aisle feel threatened by rising class consciousness.

meanwhile, Elissa Slotkin is whining to reporters about how people expect her to stand up and fight.

"Only that comparative linguist who for once emerges from the hypotheses-beclouded atmosphere of the workshop (...) and steps into the clear air of tangible reality & of the present (...) can arrive at a correct idea of the way in which linguistic forms live & change." (Osthoff & Brugmann, 1878)

In remembrance of Bill Labov

It is an absolute understatement to say that every single sociolinguist has been that person in the library, opening one of his books and finding a useful insight. Thank you for everything you have given us. One of the greatest scientific minds of the last one hundred years.

Bill Labov died this morning. I'm not coherent enough to talk about how important and influential and brilliant he was. I am very sad.

I was so lucky to know him, and I am grateful every day that he (and Gillian, and Walt, etc) built an academic field where kindness is expected.

Is there even a SINGLE good LMS used by any university in the world?

So… what’s up with the [æ]~[ɑ] variation in “Halloween?” (I have [æ] but feel like this is a minority position)

Tales from NCS-Land: Today I witnessed in realtime someone realizing that the state of being exhausted after a cross-timezone flight was called “jetlag” and not “jetleg.”

Run, don't walk to catch Monica Nesbitt's article "Phonological emergence and social reorganization: Developing a nasal /æ/ system in Lansing, Michigan" in Language Variation and Change on FirstView! doi.org/10.1017/S095....

Teaching Monday morning after a conference that ended on Sunday should be illegal

Look out for MSU people at #NWAV51 this week! We've got 3 talks and 1 poster on our MI Diaries project, mi-diaries.org. Find (1) @betsysneller.bsky.social et al on MI English vowels; (2) Ye on MI English nasalization; (3) @adam-barnhardt.bsky.social on early adolescent stance-taking...and... 1/3

Yesterday I asked my Language and Gender class in a discussion post if they could think of any other current social media trends deconstructing/experimenting with gender and femininity à la girl dinner/girlboss/hot girl ___. And I hope to god someone brings this up.

Several students today: I wouldn’t say “y’all” to a group of students who are younger than me, bc I’d be afraid they’d think I was from the south and make fun of me. But I would say it to a group of peers. (The majority of them are from MI and report using “y’all” regularly.) This is fascinating.

In 26 hours UAW could be on strike.

And every single one of us should support them, because if 150,000 autoworkers win these demands, it’ll change things for all of us.

Solidarity!

Does everyone else also always think they have a Bluesky notification whenever they get a push alert from their weather app? Or has this already been discussed and I’m just making a noob observation?

Rewatching the OG Bladerunner & the giant in-film billboard for Coke really amuses me. So much cyberpunk is anticapitalist, & BR is no exception, but since it was a forerunner I suppose not many people expected those themes? Then again, there’s that old metaphor about capitalists selling rope.