Okay, now that I’ve gotten the important job of telling you about spongebobussy out of the way, I’ll continue this week with some very short posts rounding up how my first Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting (LSA for short) since 2020 has been! What’s this sleepover you mentioned? A very brief bit of background…

Word of the Year, sometimes abbreviated WOTY, is a thing that some scholarly societies and dictionaries do every year as a kind of fun little event, playfully comparable to things like the Oscars or Grammies. Personally I really like treating “woty” as a word, which pluralizes to “woties,” and I…

Stop trying to have arguments about grammar when fascists are trying to have arguments about trans people. I am getting frustrated with a certain flavor of “quote tweet to dunk on the square” that keeps cropping up on Linguist Twitter (tm). The quoted tweets are of the following type: “You’ll never catch me using pronouns” “Only groomers use pronouns” “Pronouns in bio, sjw detected” “someone would have…

(or: how to rotate your crops) — I’m overdue for one of these ADHD posts. I know I’m overdue because I have the urge to write one, I guess — these things sort of bubble up seasonally, sometimes in clusters of several in a row, and then months of none. This might itself be an ADHD thing. …

(This is not my usual fare for this particular outlet; I’m assuming some familiarity with the mechanics of generative syntax, and use a lot of jargon that’s particular to minimalist syntax notation. Please feel free to skip it, and check out my more accessible posts elsewhere on the blog!) Let’s…

why i sometimes let people (especially bosses and doctors) misgender me so I can gain valuable intel I moved across the country this year, after living in Seattle for 7 years, which is the longest I lived anywhere as an adult. As such, I’ve been slowly rebuilding my life, including…

Pronouns aren’t gender. If you’ve been around the pronoun conversations for a bit, you’ve likely seen this line, but I find it’s either intuitive to you (like lightbulb-moment “oh, that explains a lot”) or you’re stuck on like, “….sure, but what does that mean?” I will run you through a…

Hey cis people! You should change your gender marker to X on your legal ID documents. Uhh why do you say that, Kirby? Well, the current thing that scares a lot of trans and non-binary people off of getting our ID genders changed to X is that, as it stands…

Q: Should I say ‘themself’ or ‘themselves’ with singular they? A: This is a question I have gotten a few times, and when I’ve answered it in live Q&A sessions, my answer has been that infuriating Linguistᵗᵐ Answer: I dunno, which one do you say? What feels more right? I…