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I’ve been delinquent in blogging since becoming more serious about consistently posting on YouTube, but this is a post that I think is very important, and I’ll be building on in future posts. I have been waiting until I’m sufficiently “in-between” cases to be able to talk about this, but I’ve basically been retained for at least one, if not two or three, cases at any given time. The video I’m…
Yesterday, discussing Haitian migrants in Springfield Ohio, and whether or to what extent they may or may not be abducting and eating (presumably white) Ohioans’ pets — because this is what the political discourse in the US is, and if we’re honest, has always been —Rich Lowry seems to have inadvertently used the n-word. Yes, that one. The one that rhymes with trigger , as in obvious trigger…
A little while ago, a linguist friend of mine sent me a video of Mayim Bialik talking about Yiddish. The video has since gone viral. In it, she explains “why Yiddish has two words for penis.” Aside from the laughably low-ball (pun not intended) number of penis words in Yiddish, there were a few factual errors. But, more than the factual errors, the assumptions that underpinned the whole endeavor…
I couldn’t resist saying more about aspect in another YouTube video. This time, I’m tackling lexical aspect, starting with why in linguistics drowning is considered an “accomplishment.”
I get asked about tenses in various languages A LOT. Often, the person asking is actually asking about aspect , but that’s a concept that nobody learns about in school (unless it’s an undergrad class in linguistics). I don’t get this. Knowing about aspect and how it differs from tense would make life easier for anyone even remotely interested in language. So I made a quick video explaining why…
Almost a decade ago, I wrote about pronouns and got hate mail from Jordan Peterson fans for years. I decided to wade back into that morass to point out that while everybody is arguing about pronouns now, most people have no idea what they’re talking about. In this video, I explain how the current public conversation gets facts wrong about what pronouns even are, what gender is, how hard new…
Happy new year everyone! In the last year, I launched a Youtube channel, Patreon, and merchandise through Spring (all @languagejones), and the response was incredible. I was blindsided by two of my videos surpassing a few hundred thousand views, and I am so encouraged by the response. In 2023 I will be building both the channel and this website — that is, “building my brand” — and I have a lot in…
I took a few minutes today to wade into, and definitively settle, how to spell the current holiday. Enjoy!
Like many of you, last night I watched the first evening of congressional hearings on the events of January 6, 2020. At one point in the video they played, there was a bone chilling sequence of shots as a crowd of armed men wandered the halls of congress chanting “Nancy, Nancy…” as they tried to find Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Their chant was exactly what it was intended to be: menacing.…
One of the main reasons I started a YouTube channel is that, while I’m very comfortable in a text-based medium, there are just certain things about spoken language that it will always be easier to discuss with recourse to sounds. The more I want to talk about specific sounds and sound changes, the more I force my readers to engage with specialized technical tools for linguistics. Especially the…
There is so much about language that’s just better if you can include either sound (for spoken languages) or movement (for signed languages) and there are so many fantastic youtube channels out there, that I was inspired to start my own! My goal is not to teach a class on linguistics (for that, I would recommend The Ling Space , or Crash Course Linguistics ). Instead, I wanted to share some of the…
18 days ago, Duolingo released their newest language course: Yiddish. There has been an unsurprising amount of controversy around the course, which I will briefly explain, but there has also been a lot of confusion about the language itself, especially the relationship between spelling and pronunciation. I wil l start with the caveat that while I am a trained linguist and I already spoke some…
On Thursday, the defense in the Derek Chauvin trial played a body cam video clip of the arrest of George Floyd, that subsequently led to his death. As part of their broader strategy of casting aspersions on Mr. Floyd’s character to sow doubt among the members of the jury, they played an audio clip with multiple speakers and significant background noise, and claimed that Mr. Floyd said “I ate too…
Last April, at the height of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, I defended my dissertation. It will come as no surprise to anyone that I’m only now getting around to writing about it — everyone I know who has a PhD needed some distance from their dissertation before they could really condense it and get out of the weeds enough to talk to regular people about it. My 2020 dissertation was the…
A few weeks ago, I was invited to testify about linguistic discrimination before a joint session of the Pennsylvania House and Senate democrats, organized in part by the Legislative Black Caucus. I submitted written testimony, explicitly drawing the link between linguistic discrimination and racial, gender, and other kinds of discrimination against protected classes, arguing that linguistic…
In recent years, if you’ve been online (or listened to NPR, or watched the news on TV), you’ve no doubt come across the term latinx . It’s intended to replace latino in Spanish (and English), and is ostensibly a remedy for the gendered — and presumably therefore non-inclusive — nature of latino . Proponents argue that it is inclusive of people other than men and the x is more inclusive than @,…
Today’s post will be a short one, but it’s something I should have written a long time ago. Thanks to social media, there is a rising awareness among the general public of the validity of the language variety most associated with Black Americans who are the descendants of enslaved people. However, just as people on Twitter are taking the term AAVE mainstream, linguists are moving away from it.…
Today I was tagged into a conversation on Twitter by New York Times best-selling author Morgan Jerkins, who had been watching an episode of The Cleveland Show and happened to have the closed captions on. She wrote: So last night I was watching "The Cleveland Show" and I want someone to explain the last few captions to me. pic.twitter.com/j5r84Xn5zG — Morgan Jerkins (@MorganJerkins) December 13,…
There is an advertisement I consistently see on TV, especially on New York 1, that never fails to annoy me. It’s a car service ad that tries to tell the viewer what “ real New Yorkers” do, and does so by repeating a “New York” catchphrase over and over: “what are you, mashugana ? Real New Yorkers take Carmel!” This is their spelling, by the way. What they’re trying to do, as far as I can tell, is…
CONTENT WARNING : lots of uncensored slurs and offensive language, in a variety of languages. .In part starting with my research with Christopher Hall on uses of the “n-word” (available here , and in (free) final draft form here ), and in part because of the consulting work I do, I am an expert on slurs, epithets, and offensive language — the main language-y thing that companies, government…
