🌵 Elise Stickles 🍁

The verb "table" having opposite meanings in #Canadian and #American #English is just another example why speaking the same #language doesn't mean we speak the same

#linguistics #antonyms #dialect #meaning

You should do “table” (verb) next - that one really threw me at my first faculty meeting

Basically for the non-student segment of the UBC population, they have cars and would rather drive than deal with the unpleasantness that is the current transit situation. Students largely don’t have that luxury, hence the high rate of student transit ridership in comparison.

It’s true ridership drops substantially in the summer months, but I know a lot of UBC employees drive to work, many of whom would take skytrain if it existed. Similarly a lot of folks who live here drive to work, errands, etc but would take skytrain downtown if they could.

Treating UBC as only students ignores a good chunk of its population and fuels the narrative that the ubc skytrain extension would only benefit a small (privileged) temporary population who disappears 4 months out of the year.

Wesbrook alone is projected to have a population of over 16,000 by the time it’s built out - it’s the size of a small city in its own right. And that’s not including other UBC neighborhoods and UEL.

A bit disappointing this continues the framing that UBC skytrain is only for students - a lot of folks live out here who aren’t students, and a lot of folks work at UBC who would also benefit from having the skytrain to their place of work

University of Alberta law professor put on leave amid review of online comments made after Charlie Kirk's death “You do not ... ever have to hand it to the Nazis. I utterly do not care for any ‘virtues’ that someone may perceive in them,” they wrote.

the layers of chronically online context playing out here are fascinating - now we have a UAlberta prof put on leave for a bluesky post referencing a @dril.bsky.social tweet

nationalpost.com/news/canada/...

My mom sometimes texts me book recommendations, and it’s so sweet of her to think I have time to read for fun 🥲

Anyone else remember this? Turns out it was all of 5 years ago.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Lette... (aka “the Harper’s letter”)

The Onion headlines are writing themselves again

@toddthelinguist.bsky.social the way this exchange lives permanently rent-free in my brain

Screenshot of twitter exchange: Todd Snider: “Okay, Michael. So you got that fact wrong some other way. I'm not really interested in how or why that came to be. I would simply like for the record to be corrected, now that you can see that you were mistaken.” Michael Powell: “No. Sorry Todd. I was not mistaken, the reporting stands. Best, Michael” Todd: “The people you were reporting about say otherwise.” Michael: “Cool”

For reference, here’s how he handles being told his reporting on academic freedom of speech scandals is inaccurate

Michael “Cool” Powell also posting lots on twitter, remarkably silent on this.

Twitter post by FIRE: “Yesterday, after a video of a student complaining about discussions of gender identity in a Texas A&M “Literature for Children” class went viral, Governor Greg Abbott demanded on X that Texas A&M President Mark Welsh fire Professor Melissa McCoul for the content of her course. Welsh promptly announced that McCoul had been terminated.” (Post cuts off) User reply: “Fire should be considered trans movement and intifada movement aligned.”

FIRE actually did post about it! And their message is being *very* well-received

(He’s probably still workshopping how to make this the left’s fault.) @caitlinmoriah.bsky.social

I ventured over to twitter to see what Conor Friedersdorf has to say about this. In the last day he’s had time to post about Burger King and a 1907 car race, but has remained mysteriously silent on his favorite topic, suppression of academic freedom of speech.

Why Cancel Culture is Fading "Even when you take out the canines of a tiger, his heart remains that of a carnivore." ROB HENDERSON SEP 07, 2025

The strategy relied on punishing the powerful to terrify the rest. In 2020, hundreds of scholars urged the Linguistic Society of America to strip Harvard professor Steven Pinker of honours. But Pinker understood the real target--it was a warning shot aimed at every graduate student, junior academic, and untenured professor watching from the sidelines, telling them to keep their mouths shut. As Pinker memorably put it, the atmosphere resembled The Sopranos: "Nice career you've got there. It would be a real shame if something happened to it." Often the problem wasn't that people were being cancelled for expressing outrageous views, but that they were cancelled for expressing views that might very well be correct.

it has been 4 years and these guys simply cannot stop acting like the LSA letter was the same thing as a McCarthy era black list or a maoist denunciation rally or some shit

New Zealand marked safe

Merriam-Webster Merriam-Webster @merriam-webster.c... • 17h enshittification noun | when a digital platform is made worse for users, in order to increase profits ... Gold Yoshi @goldyoshi.bsky.social [Screenshot of the enshittification page on Merriam Websters website. It says where does enshittification come from and the entire page is covered in ads]

Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI Millions of books and scientific papers are captured in the collection’s current iteration.

There are tons of graphic novels, academic papers, film and TV scripts, & prose novels/nonfiction on the LibGen list Anthropic used.

As settlement approaches, make it easy for the class action lawyers to contact you! Here’s how

Part 1: is your work in Libgen?

www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

I am pleased to report I successfully flew into and back out of the coal mine

What is the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything?

Holy false equivalences, Batman!

I’m descended from those who were fortunate enough to escape the pogroms and come to America in the early 1900s.

My Bubbe (z’’l) would be roiling, roiling, roiling today.

A twitter post explaining how you can “save PNGs to birds” by converting a drawing of a bird into a spectrogram then playing it to a starling who sung it back, reproducing the PNG.

Can’t wait to introduce bird-based storage into my backup system

One of the first CDs I bought as a kid (and anyone who remembers how expensive they were, knows that was no easy decision) - and now we can all enjoy his work for free in the public domain.

That CD was later possibly the only reason I passed 10th grade chemistry…

Tom Lehrer outlived Kissinger, and I think that is evidence that there are at least some good forces in the universe.

“I do have a cause, though. It is obscenity. I’m for it.”
-from the intro to “Smut”

I posted a picture on the internet and it made you have some big feelings. But language changes, dude. Sorry not sorry.

You've written so many responses to this from every angle (legal, historical, strawman arguments like "perrx" and "Anglx", criticizing fields of study that you don't even understand just from...vibes...alone?, citing irrelevant studies) in attempt to make something stick.