Laurel MacKenzie

I understand this frustration. That said, it's exciting that more work is now starting to examine the potential for children to play a role in change *while also* paying full attention to the sociolinguistic work on adolescents, like this recent paper by Erin Hall www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

¡VAMOS! LET'S GO TO THE MARKET | Kirkus Reviews Little Lobo and his dog, Bernabé, journey through a Mexican mercado delivering diverse goods to a variety of booths.

www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews...
There is a whole ¡Vamos! empire now, but this one started it all (and is my favorite)

"I did it!"
'I did it'

"I did it Mama!"
'Mama did it'

1;10 #linguistbabyphotos

YouTube video by Etymology Nerd This post is based #linguistics #language #etymology #grammar

I never thought it would happen to me! The Etymology Nerd did a video on my work with Laurel MacKenzie on how more and more people are saying "based off" instead of "based on"! Watch the video for a great summary, or look out for our forthcoming paper in English Language and Linguistics!

Assignments in his classes tended to look like this.

YouTube video by Josef Fruehwald laugh demon

Who else has both pioneered a novel approach to the study of language and developed software with animated demons in it? youtu.be/2cLoEPeq5Fk?...

Into his 80s, Bill Labov was still coding his own software. But it didn’t just do what it needed to do; it had goofy graphics and sound effects and hidden animations that appeared when you clicked things.

The Plotnik lion, or maybe it’s supposed to be William Labov.

HOW could I forget all the little Plotnik bells and whistles?! “This is the Plotnik lion, or maybe it’s supposed to be me.”

Thanks to @edballister.bsky.social for this recollection: an anonymous grad student (we genuinely forget who) was looking through a book of Chinese sayings and observed "a lot of these seem to involve the head of the turtle." Bill: "the turtle head is a metaphor for the penis." Turns and walks away.

I first met Bill when I sat in on his Dialect Geography class as a prospective student. He was teaching his forthcoming (2007) Lanugage paper. He had a hilarious self deprecating aside about using the library for the first time when researching this paper. "It's incredible what they have in there!"

Bill cycled the mile or so from his house to campus every day. One day he had a minor accident (someone opened a car door into him). He was fine, but got an MRI just in case. He came into class late and reported, with a huge grin, "they said I have the brain of a 25 year old!"

One day he called me into his office. He had a PDF file that had an E where it needed to have a B. He couldn't edit the text of the PDF, he could only use drawing tools on it. He had drawn two tiny vertical lines to connect the empty spaces of the E and approximate a B. He was so proud to show me.

When teaching us how to use Plotnik, he showed us how to save an Excel file as text. But to open the text file, don't double click it on a Mac, or it will open up in a "fiendish little program called TextEdit." (Fiendish because, despite its name, it only saved .rtf files, not Plotnik-friendly .txt)

During an NWAV talk, he showed a vowel plot and identified a couple of outlying tokens as "these little rascals over here." Instant addition to all of our lexicons.

During a meeting, his phone would ring, and he'd say "Oh, it must be President Obama!" He'd look at the caller ID, and it would be Gillian. "Oh, it's the boss."

I have to focus on the lighthearted moments in my six years studying with Bill to keep from feeling too sad. Here we are in 2009 at a ceremony at the Penn Museum where I received a teaching award. When I invited him: "I wouldn't miss it! I've already got it on my calendar." Classic Bill.

Citation of D'Onofrio, Praat, & Van Hofwegen 2019

Maybe I was primed to see it, but this typo jumped out at me in a paper I was reading just now :)

This has annoyed me for years. I don't think it ever was an acronym, was it? Isn't it Dutch for "speak"? I think people see the double A and assume it has to be an acronym because it can't be English. But like... that's a licit sequence in other languages! Come on, linguists!

Last time I did Google Drive comments (spring '23), they were very clunky (as you scrolled down through the PDF, they would pop up one at a time, sometimes glitchily). In spring '24 I shared PDFs via Acrobat instead, found the commenting much smoother.

"With the offer you are saving $39,918.24"

Found a good deal on an #nwav52 hotel!

...ok, not exactly a "permanent" place after being "extinct," but a more tempered version of what you ask :)

"gotten" did this in UK English separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2020/01/2019...

Tweet from 2014 by @laurel_mack: "@JoFrhwld I feel like I get a Bingo when I find a noun pileup with 'scheme'. Spotted recently: Cycle Theft Victim Bike Loan Scheme Launch"

#tbt, from when Twitter was fun

Email subject line "FY26 Research Technology Needs Request Process Information Session"

Sometimes I miss British English noun pileups and then I get an email with a subject line like this

Thanks for the boost!! 🏴‍☠️

Aargh, It’s Talk Like a Pirate Day

The NYT has an article on pirate speech, featuring actual linguist @laurelmack.bsky.social, the star of a fun NYU-produced video discussing a bunch of terms

Unclear why they use the spelling "aargh" to represent the _arr_ interjection, though.

www.nytimes.com/2024/09/19/n...

The alienability constraint on this is really cool

I'm with you!

These followup tweets answered exactly the 2 questions I had

drive.google.com/file/d/1FrGl... p. 4!