Dillon D. W. J. Hartwig

i have become the de facto owner of my local coffee shop by spitting in every cup of coffee

Two line graphs side-by-side illustrate linguistic sentiment shifts from 1860 to 1980. Graph (a) "Lean becomes more positive": Shows the word "lean" undergoing amelioration. Its sentiment score rises over time as it becomes more semantically similar to "muscular" and less similar to "weak." Graph (b) "Pathetic becomes more negative": Shows the word "pathetic" undergoing pejoration. Its sentiment score declines as it becomes more semantically similar to "weak" and less similar to "passionate." Both graphs use red lines for sentiment and blue lines (solid and dashed) to represent semantic similarity to related words.

This article finds that 5% of sentiment-bearing words switched polarity between 1850 and 2000. Examples include "lean" (weak > masculine) and "pathetic" (passionate > weak).

Incredibly surreal to watch Iran's Foreign Minister attempting to explain to concerned US TV personalities that one of the risks of going to war is that the other side might shoot back...

This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.

it took an expensive, coordinated effort & a lot of people saying “this doesn’t matter” to get from a bathroom ban costing one state $400 million & a gubernatorial race to “trans people must turn in their documents which become invalid in a few hours or face fines & potential jail time” in 10 years.

The complete refusal to apologize for the Nazi tattoo is almost more damning than getting it in the first place. But for a certain kind of populist politician, originally more on the right but now seemingly migrating to the left, refusing to apologize for anything is now a sign of authenticity.

Bringing back the classics!

Store refrigerator with a sign advertising IMPOSSIBLE SAUSAGE CHUB and behind it is dozens of sausage chubs

the proper noun for a grouping of sausages is a chub

Tweet from Alexander Clark: I was explaining at dinner that linguists disagree radically about almost everything and one person said so what do they actually agree about? Just that languages exist? And I was like: well you might want to sit down for this

When my adult trans kid was planning a move, several family members suggested cities closer to home with the argument that although X state is red, X city is blue. And kiddo was like, "Nope, I need the full power of the state behind me." And this is why.

Bots have made their way to Prolific experiments. Our lab has stopped online testing of adults entirely now for this reason - we want to know if what we study is real. Probably data collected 2-3 years ago are ok, but moving forward we just can't know. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Nurul Amin Shah Alam, Blind Rohingya refugee dumped by CBP, dies in cold "They just left him."

Profoundly evil and sad story of a blind Rohingya refugee who survived the killing fields of Myanmar only to die alone in the cold in Buffalo, NY after Border Patrol dumped him 5 miles from home without notifying his family.
www.motherjones.com/mojo-wire/20...

Want.

Defund the police is very specific. The issue is the Black youth that articulated the position were met with eye rolls, even as they laid out their plan for an abolitionist movement. I've spoken to many of them, specificity isn't a problem, will is. Much like abolish ICE.

Drintera Worldbuilding 2026: Native American Fantasy Help our Indigenous-led team build a fantasy version of North America in zine form!

We are LIVE and 163% FUNDED!

Our Native American-led team of worldbuilders are bringing inspiration from their heritage to a 5e/Pathfinder setting as a zine. The more backers support us, the more we can write and illustrate! Help this project go viral!

www.kickstarter.com/projects/she...

I regret to inform you that he took the bait.

RSF siege of El Fasher in Sudan has ‘hallmarks of genocide’, UN mission finds Report details harrowing 18-month occupation of North Darfur capital, showing destruction aimed at ethnic communities

Pretty overwhelming evidence that the UAE-backed RSF committed genocide in El Fasher

www.theguardian.com/world/2026/f...

“The purpose behind the release of herbicide on the villages remains unclear.”

Israel has been dumping herbicides throughout southern Lebanon as part of a concerted ecocide campaign to render the region uninhabitable. This has been going on for months with Lebanese journalists & environmentalists regularly reporting on it.

The BBC: we don’t know why the Israelis are doing it

Depends how this would work with reconstructed languages; like would I know it as one of the ways it's currently reconstructed, or as it was actually spoken in a given time/place? If the latter Proto-Afroasiatic is tempting

Journal of African Languages and Linguistics Starting 2025, Journal of African Languages and Linguistics will be transferred to Gold Open Access on a year-by-year basis. All articles will thus immediately appear under the Creative Commons licens...

Also, did you know that our wonderful Journal of African Languages and Linguistics is open access?
Via subscribe to open (S2O) anyone has access this year! @degruyterbrill.bsky.social

IT HASN'T EVEN BEEN A WEEK!

I need help getting the next chemo dosis asap. Images on the right are from may last year, on the left it's normal CT images for reference. I took ss of the wider parts 'cause there's even smaller bits throughout the pipe. It probably got worse since I cannot breathe right now. #HelpSky #SignalBoost

oats "thirty" & alty "six" (quantifying an American noun; British would be *canoke oh no)

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bud (oh) dundee dea "on (this/that) knife"

< dundee "knife" + circumposition bud dea "on" (named for my dog Buddy who usually doesn't have the brain cell long enough to understand personal space)

poachyfarleyyester "fell"

< poachyfarley "to fall" (< poachy "to drop or fall after running on air and looking down" + -farley (serious suffix)) + recent past -yester

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no "of", also the main adjectivizer~adverbializer

slappen "they (US government employee)"

Grammatically plural, but all plural pronouns also serve as formal singular pronouns

schmoeforeereyester "said"

< schmoe "to say" + legendary past -foreereyester (in this case used less loterally to imply the saying ought not be questioned)

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oh (general demonstrative, in the first bit used as a relativizer)

Nvm fuck it:

kniffyupharttress ey "coroner"

< kniffyup ey "to bring out one's dead" (-up ey CAUS=NEG, kniffy "to be improving in condition despite being declared dead") + -hart-tress PASS-AG

Lit. "one who dead are brought out to"

Was also gonna write up a more literal translation~gloss~explanation for this, but just the word for "coroner" here is more than the character limit can handle so I give up, but I promise each bit of nonsense in there has relevent sense

Been a bit since my last #conlang shenanigans here, so a Jokelang 2 sentence:

Kniffyupharttress ey schmoeforeereyester oh slappen poachyfarleyyester no oats alty bud oh dundee dea.

"According to the coroner's report, he (an US government employee) fell on this knife thirty-six times."

I’m just a Minneapolitan, standing in front of a country, asking them to stop platforming our mayor for swearing on tv about ICE and then doing nothing substantive while antagonizing city council members that are