Joe Comer

BUT LISTEN: you don't even need to be a sociolinguist or discourse analyst to be worried any time a member of the British public prefaces what they say in a vox pop with "I'm not being funny..."!

In fact, you can be pretty sure what they're about to say is not funny, and depressingly racist!

You don't exactly have to be a sociolinguist (or a historian, or a scholar of migration...) to be pretty disgusted by Kier Starmer's rhetoric around language and immigration in the UK...

You just kind of have to realise that learning languages is not, like, instant ... or easy ... or cheap ...

[the rest of this post has been redacted, on the advice of the most professional and well-disciplined of the several rats in a trenchcoat that manage/comprise my psyche at the end of my first semester teaching in two years ... in the USA of 2025, no less]

Teaching young people about the wonder of language and sociocultural analysis has been, without question, the greatest honour of my professional life, and it's something I value beyond measure ... AND YET

Do I know anyone going to the SLA meeting in Chicago at the end of this month, who is still looking for accommodation?

Reach out if you'd be interested in sharing an AirBnB!

To compare is to despair

“is my calculator horny?“ our tech columnist asks. “i entered 5318008 into it and turned it upside down. what i saw surprised me”

Hehe, let's say mostly it's inspiring for me personally! Teaching it in 2025 (in the US) to a very diverse student cohort who basically aren't trained in linguistics (let alone CA, anthropology, CDA, transcription, or studies of gesture/nonverbal communication) ... it's challenging! But still fun 🥳

Congratulations! Teaching this Language and Body course has gotten me into gesture in a massive way (unsurpirsingly) so I'm excited to dig into this as soon as I can!

Kind of astounding just how 'not smart' a smart person you have to be in order to not realise the fallacy of all this brain-ranking kinda stuff (let alone not cutting it out because of all the bad vibes it gives off, psychologically and historically)

I didn't come up with any answers obviously, but writing this through was fun! With gratitude to the editors of Language in Society, Susan Ehrlich and Tommaso Milani, for the opportunity 🤓

I took the opportunity to reflect on what it means for such a landmark text, unfortunately, to come out just before the drastic global upheaval of a (technically ongoing) devastating pandemic, rising authoritarian populism and far-right resurgence, and the (frankly terrifying) rapid rise of AI!

A while back I was really privileged to review the *excellent* Language and Neoliberal Governmentality by Luisa Martín Rojo and Alfonso Del Percio, for Language in Society:

doi.org/10.1017/s004...

"Executive Order 14188 of January 29, 2025: Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism."

having their executive order to combat antisemitism be order number "14188" is the kind of thing they do to make us look crazy for pointing it out.

👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻!

The Indigenous People of North America have decided to go back to calling the Gulf of Mexico, “Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl”. It is what the Nahuatl People originally called it as it is the domain of the goddess Chalchiuhtlicue, who is assoc w/water bodies, including the Gulf of Mexico.

Remember, especially today, this hand on your shoulder could be your own:

[extremely Rafiki voice] it is time!

The ASL version of “Not Like Us” is magnificent.

Needless to say, even as a quarantine-pilled Australian boy, I thought that was quite weirdly specific

Some extremely niche information about me is that when I was a child and obsessed with the encyclopaedia (and especially geography) I used to think the historic "Orange Free State" in what is now South Africa was ... a place where oranges weren't allowed

The sound of that Sharpie, I swear to god

i'm tired of being told to stop doomscrolling. i'm just scrolling, it's not my fault there's doom on there

Image of t-shirts and other items from The Kash Foundation – they are ridiculous

Why does this all have to be so fucking stupid ... ya know?

Not to make light of anything very troubling about its production, but I feel like all I really need to know about It Ends With Us ... is that its two male leads' characters are named "Atlas" and "Ryle"

I think I might use this in class, if that's okay! Such a good way to illustrate the "problem" 😉

lol u think im being a nazi!!! when in fact i was playing a prank to make u mad! my beliefs are isomorphic with those of the historical nazi party but nevertheless i tricked you in some way i cant quite articulate

I often come back to Jane Hill’s excellent book “The Everyday Language of White Racism” and her point that “folk” ideologies of racism emphasize a nebulous, unknowable, and always somehow not racist underlying essence of actions. Here we are again.

(I don't care if the songs are good or not, tbqfh ... nor do I really care that I am calling it out without seeing it, sue me)

Only in the USA of 2025 would a whimsical musical – written by a man – perpetuating SO many harmful stereotypes – with precisely one trans character – be a frontrunner for the Best Picture Oscar

It reeks of abject, performative tokenism if you ask me – don't think I'll be seeing it any time soon