Article reads: Woman named as Archbishop of Canterbury in historic first The 63-year-old archbishop-designate is married to Eamonn Mullally, with whom she has two children. Originally from Woking in Surrey, she was the UK's chief nursing officer from 1999 to 2004.

This article manages to name her husband before it names… her.

Only 5% of UK medical school entrants are working class, data shows Sutton Trust says underrepresentation of poorer students is ‘outrageous’ but number has doubled in 10 years to 2022 Students from working class backgrounds still only make up 5% of entrants to medical schools across the UK, a proportion that has doubled…

Only 5% of UK medical school entrants are working class, data shows

Planes, ships and metaphors - Making Science Public We all know that meaning in language only happens in context. Words don’t mean in isolation; they acquire meaning in context. Metaphors even more so. The word ‘pig’ means different things in a farmyard, during a policy encounter or when a mother visits a teenager’s room. Mostly, meanings emerge in context because a speaker has ...

For weekend readers, a post on how critical #metaphors emerge in critical situations blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/makingscienc...

“If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”

A classic quote from Malcolm X, who was assassinated 60 years ago today.

It's not feasible for the average American to boycott everything. But if you're interested, I made a list.

This #NationalApprenticeshipWeek, Transport for London is launching a range of exciting apprenticeship opportunities for 2025.

Since 2009, 9,700 apprenticeships have been created through TfL—driving major projects like the Silvertown Tunnel. Find out more about what roles will be available here:

Spot on

Federal employee unions are suing the Treasury and alleging Elon Musk's DOGE gained illegal and 'unprecedented' access to data The lawsuit accused Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent of giving Musk's Department of Government Efficiency access to sensitive information.

Federal employee unions are suing the Treasury and alleging Elon Musk's DOGE gained illegal and 'unprecedented' access to data

www.businessinsider.com/union-groups...

Proud Boys Lose Control of Their Name to a Black Church They Vandalized (Gift Article) A judge awarded the trademarked name and symbols to a Washington church to help satisfy a $2.8 million judgment against the far-right group.

Judge rules that Black church in DC, which won a $2.8 million default judgment against the Proud Boys, now gains control over the trademark “Proud Boys.” The far-right group is barred from selling any related merchandise or symbols without the consent of the church. Gift link:

Microsoft Virtual Events Powered by Teams Microsoft Virtual Events Powered by Teams

Registration now open for Aston Stylistics next 2024-25 ASRG seminar series talk by @AliceHaines on the narratorial representation of sleep in 'The Pickwick Papers'. Online, Wednesday 5th February, 4-5pm, all welcome!

events.teams.microsoft.com/event/56085a...

Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood reminds Robert Jenrick it was his government that ran our justice system into the ground

Research Fellow (110119-0125) at University of Warwick An academic position as a Research Fellow (110119-0125) is being advertised on jobs.ac.uk. Click now to find more details and explore additional academic job opportunities.

Two year research fellowship available at Warwick looking at GenAI and academic writing: www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DLQ037/r...

BAAL Language, Gender and Sexuality SIG The British Association of Applied Linguistics’ Special Interest Group for Language, Gender and Sexuality

Delighted to share that the programme for the BAAL Language Gender & Sexuality group annual event is now live: baalgensex.wordpress.com
Register here: mmu.estore.flywire.com/.../baal-sig....
looking forward to welcoming everyone on May 2nd!

A small girl is smiling and laughing, while a rainbow patterned sheet is waved around her.

🌈Rainbow Stripes is back for Spring 25! Come along on a Friday morning with little ones aged 6 months + for a great family singalong 🎶. Our next session is this Fri 31 Jan at 11am.

🎟️bit.ly/RainbowStripes25

Writing residency for older writers!

Please share!

UK FOLKS! I know of two full-time salaried roles in tabletop that will soon be open for:

- Editor
- Games Developer

Ideally based in/willing to move to Nottingham, UK. And I've been asked for recommendations!

I'll be prioritising marginalised folks, so please: DM me for details, comment and tag!

Revealed: Conservatives spent £134m on never-used IT systems for failed Rwanda scheme

Not had a chance to see my live show looking at folklore in Scooby-Doo yet? Going to be in the area of the UK Ghost Story Festival? Well ... now's your chance :)

Details on the link below

🔥 On Wednesday, a YOUTH MOBILITY SCHEME with the EU will be debated in Parliament! Write to your MP to demand they attend.

Both training course & symposium are *free* to attend!

Help us spread the word!

#digitalhumanities #corpuslinguistics #concordancetools

@lanthony.bsky.social @schtepf.bsky.social
@anteangaeile.bsky.social @proftaylor.bsky.social
@violawiegand.bsky.social

Find a union for you More than 6 million people are in a union, isn't it time you joined a union?

www.tuc.org.uk/joinunion

A large Sainsbury’s Store Front with the signs for the other shops laid out underneath. They are Argos Habitat Tu. sounds a bit Latin dunnit. lol eh The fact they left out Specsavers leads me to think they knew what they were doing, and I’m probably just explaining their own joke to them

Oooh, look at Sainsbury’s, with their fancy new Latin motto like they’re bleedin hogwarts

Grow up

YouTube video by Peter Stefanovic Let’s make Jacob’s day and join a union today

Without trade unions we wouldn’t have

• a minimum wage
• maternity & paternity rights
• pension provision
• holiday & sickness entitlements

victories which have benefited every single person in this country

Join a union. Thank me later👇
youtu.be/jg0D2yNiqHM?...

Career advice: Linguistics + X Sometimes people ask me for advice on finding a non-academic/alt-academic career in linguistics. Normally, that’s when I send them to the linguistics jobs series, but sometimes they want more personal advice from me as a person who makes a living writing about linguistics for a general audience.  My theory is, it comes down to linguistics + X. Linguistics is the background that you already have at some level if you’re asking me for advice, and X is whatever else you like doing or have experience in or can develop skills with.  For me, X is explaining things, for a non-technical audience, mostly in writing. Where did it come from? Well, I started this blog in grad school and I discovered that it was very satisfying and I was pretty good at it and I worked to become better and eventually that people would pay me for doing it. In retrospect, it seems fairly obvious – I’d entered linguistics myself through pop ling, so I was always aware of that particular side, and I was good at explaining linguistics at parties even before I got a blog.  But when I started, it seemed like this was going to be a terrible idea. I remember thinking to myself, “Okay, so I’m going from academia, which is a terrible job market, to freelance writing, which is also known for being a terrible job market. Why is this a good idea again?” So I decided to give myself a year to see if it could work – and it turned out that I didn’t even need the full year.  Thing is, there aren’t a whole lot of writers who are also actual linguists, or linguists who are also very good at talking to a general audience. So rather than competing with anyone who can draw a syntax tree or anyone who can come up with a well-turned sentence, I’m now part of a very tiny field – I can count on my hands the number of people who are doing something similar to what I’m doing, and still have a few fingers left over. And there are actually zero other people with my exact skill set. (Like, I’m the world’s foremost expert on the grammar of doge. It cracks me up every time I think of it, but it’s also true.) Sure, there aren’t a ton of linguistics writing jobs, but there are also way fewer people applying for them than for either general linguistics or general writing. I started out pitching and with some writing samples from my blog, but I barely ever do that anymore – these days I get enough work, sometimes more than enough, from ongoing relationships plus the new editors, companies, and other people actively seeking me out because they liked something else of mine.  That’s how I got here and how it’s going for me, but my ultimate career advice is not “you should do exactly the thing I did.” Partly, I didn’t start this blog thinking it was a pathway to a career, so there were things I could have done differently if I’d known, and partly you’re not me and you have different skills and interests and opportunities. What I’m doing is working for me, but it might not work for everyone – and even if it did work out for you make-a-living-wise, it might not actually be what you’d enjoy. So my advice is instead to find your X – that thing that you can combine with linguistics that makes you stand out as a person to employ.  Some common examples of X are computational skills, speech pathology, or teaching a second language. They’re well known for a reason – they represent straightforward paths and there are lots of jobs in these areas. And if you’re an already enrolled in linguistics and not sure what you want to do with it, I’d certainly recommend trying a course or two in Python and/or (developmental) psycholinguistics just to see how you like it. (Teaching certificates are a bit more complicated but tutoring is one low-risk way to try out teaching a language.)  Academic skills can also be seen as a kind of X: the skills to write an article and get it through the peer review process, to do an academic conference talk, to write grants that stand a decent chance of being funded, to be a peer reviewer, to supervise your own students and run your own lab, to manage departmental and university politics, to be an effective member of committees. These are all academia skills that are not particularly subject-specific, and many of them are taught covertly or not at all in grad school. But it’s worth separating them from linguistics as a topic just like any other X, because if you don’t like academia as an X then you’ll probably want to find a different thing to combine with your linguistics.     If you don’t particularly like any of these things, you can also find a less conventional X. Maybe it’s related to an incidental skill you acquired as part of your particular branch of linguistics: People who like sociolinguistics and discourse analysis and framing might end up with something to do with naming or communication or marketing. People who learned technical skills in R or Praat or LaTeX might find a related technical job. People who did semantics might head towards taxonomies or sentiment analysis or knowledge management (I know a linguist in library school, for example). People who did linguistic fieldwork might get a job with a non-profit or community organization working on language revitalization.  Or maybe X seems completely orthogonal to linguistics, but suddenly when you’re doing them both they complement each other. There are various kinds of writing, from pop linguistics to technical writing to writing fiction (I know linguists doing all of these), but there’s also several types of editing, or law (forensic linguistics), or graphic design (perhaps you can both write the words and design the graphics). I know someone with a linguistics BA who got a job in university administration because of summer job experience working in an office. I interviewed a literary agent with a linguistics background. There’s a linguist who works for NASA. There’s a linguist who started out teaching high school English but then developed a linguistics course at the high school level. I know another linguist who’s planning on working for the government, and I think it’s a brilliant idea – I definitely want people with a legit linguistics background working on language policy. Heck, thelingspace is linguistics + YouTube.  So if you’re trying to figure out what to do with a linguistics degree (or with a lot of other degrees that are academic rather than specifically tied to a vocation, like anthropology or biology or mathematics), the question is what’s your X? What else do you like or could you develop expertise in that’s not linguistics, that when combined with linguistics would make you a really interesting person to employ? This might involve more school, but there are many jobs that don’t have a specific credential that leads to them, so not necessarily. Have you done/could you do an internship, co-op, or summer job that could be relevant? Could you just start doing – developing a portfolio of work that demonstrates your ability at something? The point is to convince someone that you’d be good at it.  Hearing about how other linguists got different kinds of jobs is a good start, and that’s one of the reasons I keep adding to the linguistics jobs series, but it’s not just about aiming for those particular jobs. It’s also about opening your mind to how to connect a linguistics degree to whatever else you’re interested in – and explaining that connection in a way that makes sense to people who could give you money.

My blog post "Linguistics + X" about thinking more broadly about linguistics jobs, which @nemaveze.bsky.social brought up at the LEXING fishbowl at #lsa2025, if anyone wants to refer to it:

allthingslinguistic.com/post/1271084...

One Too Many?

Chelsea Blaggers doesn’t mean anything to me. I think it’s ok though.

Daniel and the Lions?