Lately I keep having the thought to myself, “loving your job is a really tragic flaw.” I mean Tragic in the proper sense, the flaw that unmakes you, the heartbreaking ironic thing that both animates your life and ruins it. Odysseus’s pride and my love of teaching and research and…

Disclaimer!!! This is not a literal description of actual psychological phenomena, I don’t know what’s going on inside your brain, and this is just a framework that I use for articulating some thoughts and emotions that may or may not work for other people. I’m not a doctor or therapist…

I wrote up two quick blogposts earlier this month debriefing my time at the Linguistic Society of America’s annual meeting. In part 1, I talked about the Word of the Year, and in part 2, I summed up the research I presented at the conference. This part is a little…

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…