BUT LISTEN: you don't even need to be a sociolinguist or discourse analyst to be worried any time a member of the British public prefaces what they say in a vox pop with "I'm not being funny..."!

In fact, you can be pretty sure what they're about to say is not funny, and depressingly racist!

[the rest of this post has been redacted, on the advice of the most professional and well-disciplined of the several rats in a trenchcoat that manage/comprise my psyche at the end of my first semester teaching in two years ... in the USA of 2025, no less]

To compare is to despair

Hehe, let's say mostly it's inspiring for me personally! Teaching it in 2025 (in the US) to a very diverse student cohort who basically aren't trained in linguistics (let alone CA, anthropology, CDA, transcription, or studies of gesture/nonverbal communication) ... it's challenging! But still fun 🥳

Congratulations! Teaching this Language and Body course has gotten me into gesture in a massive way (unsurpirsingly) so I'm excited to dig into this as soon as I can!

Kind of astounding just how 'not smart' a smart person you have to be in order to not realise the fallacy of all this brain-ranking kinda stuff (let alone not cutting it out because of all the bad vibes it gives off, psychologically and historically)

I didn't come up with any answers obviously, but writing this through was fun! With gratitude to the editors of Language in Society, Susan Ehrlich and Tommaso Milani, for the opportunity 🤓

I took the opportunity to reflect on what it means for such a landmark text, unfortunately, to come out just before the drastic global upheaval of a (technically ongoing) devastating pandemic, rising authoritarian populism and far-right resurgence, and the (frankly terrifying) rapid rise of AI!

👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻!

Needless to say, even as a quarantine-pilled Australian boy, I thought that was quite weirdly specific