Joey Stanley

This comment brought to you by the Department of Redundancies Department. 🙄

My favorite word, boustrophedonically, isn’t in their dictionary, but I’ll gladly be the first to use boustrophedons for the first time!

Playing Snake while plowing a field? Two boustrophedons at once!

The Ridiculously Interesting World of American Accents Podcast Episode · Culture Study Podcast · 08/06/2025 · 1h 18m

I had such a good time speaking with the incredible @annehelen.bsky.social for the Culture Study pod! Check it out to learn more about regional accents of English (including a detour through Utah, h/t @joeystanley.com) podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/c...

A references section with nothing but works by Labov.

This is Penny Eckert's references section for her tribute to Bill Labov in Language in Society this month. It's not far off from the references sections in some of the stuff I write. 😆

I finally got around to trying this walkthrough of using DCTs to normalize and model vowel formant trajectories. And it's pretty awesome. And you should try it.

I should do this. I occasionally see a blog post of mine get cited and as I prepare for my tenure portfolio, it'd be nice to have something a little more substantial than "well I've got this cool blog."

DARLA is just FAVE and new-fave is just FastTrack. Old FAVE incorporates some priors about where the expected values should be, while FastTrack has priors about formant ceilings and whatnot. I suppose the better question really should be how the measurement processes between the two are the same!

A selfie with a months worth of facial hair.

Yes, this is true. Yes, pun intended. Yes, it’s whiter than I expected. And—for those of you aware of BYU’s dress and grooming standards—yes, I got a beard waiver because I’ve auditioned to be an extra in a small movie.

I haven’t shaved in about a month, and while I didn’t like the beard at first, I’ll admit it’s kinda growing on me.

Kind of shocking to me that you can learn Klingon on Duolingo but not Hausa

Just saw Jaws on the big screen. First time. It was awesome.

Just make sure there's enough space for everyone to spread out in their own rooms. We got lucky and found a spacious basement with a couple tables for a good price.

Incidentally, if you use my research in your classes or if you or your students use my tutorials or R code, I'd appreciate hearing about it. I think it's one of the stronger parts of my portfolio but it's hard to track that kind of stuff.

A laptop, external monitor, and iPad into a three-monitor setup. At a kitchen table at a nice Airbnb.

I got an Airbnb with some colleagues to do a writing retreat and hopefully knock out a big chunk of our tenure portfolios. Here we go!

I would genuinely enjoy reading research on this. It’s at the intersection of my professional and personal interests.

And guess what one of the other singer’s name is! Shirley!

It just seems to arbitrary. What makes Italian vowels pure? What makes English vowels impure? Why are we imitating Italian vowels when singing English?

That may be true. But it sounds like another “don’t end sentences with a preposition because Latin didn’t.” It just seems weird to say that when singing my (and 300 million people’s) native variety, it’s ugly simply because we use a sound that some European languages lack.

Going back to my colleague’s comment about unstressed vowels and rhoticity being Utahn though (taps too), I’m curious if other people hear that or if it’s only Utahns that hear mainstream American English and say “ugh, what an ugly Utah accent.” 6/fin

There might be some acoustic, physiological, or whatever reasons for the extremely prescriptivist comments I’ve heard from singers. Perhaps a vocalist can point me to research. But think a lot of it is just perpetuating language attitudes from one choir director to another. 5/n

What’s wrong with singing a rhotic R? “Oh, it’s hard to sing?” Is it though? I was in a choir and for “iron” the director had us sing “eye-ron” instead of “eye-yearn”. Why are we changing lyrics to something that literally none of us say for the sake of avoiding the NURSE vowel?? 4/n

I’ve only had a little formal singing instruction so I don’t know what they teach in choirs. But singers have the strongest language attitudes out of anyone I know. And when pressed, they can never defend themselves very well and resort to “it’s just British” or “that’s how we sing it in choir.” 3/n

The same thing was said about basically any reduced vowel (e.g. comfort, angel, cedar) or taps. They insisted on hypercorrect forms otherwise it’s “Utahn.” I offhandedly mentioned that that’s just American English but didn’t push it. They laughed dismissively about me being a linguist. 2/n

Last night I was working on a piece with a few other people to sing in church,

Me, aware of the CURE lexical set: Okay so this “surely,” how are we saying it?

Someone: “shore-ly”

Me: even though none of us say it that way?

Them: yeah, because if we say it “shure-ly” we’ll sound Utahn.

1/n 🐦🐦

👀

For anyone who is planning on putting code snippets in books:

The remains of Gazerbeam from the Incredibles

Kronos carved into the cave wall by Gazerbeam

Screenshot of an earlier version of the omnidroid and the super that it terminated.

And Andor and Rogue One–style prequel to the Incredibles. Gazerbeam couldn’t have been the only one involved in getting that computer’s password. He was probably the (second-to-last) in a long line of supers dying to get one step closer.

Old Captain America, saying, "No, I don't think I will."

Box, when I try to open a file I closed five minutes ago:

Dallin D. Oaks Full-time Faculty, Linguistics<br/>4075 JFSB<br/>(801) 422-6369<br/><a href="mailto:dallin_oaks@byu.edu" target="_blank"…

Dallin D. Oaks in my department has done a some onomastics work like this and I think I’ve heard him talk informally about this. Let me see if I can dig something up. Most of his recent work is in books though so a little hard to access. hum.byu.edu/directory/da...

I relate to your husband so much right now.