@mixedlinguist.bsky.social
Assoc. Prof of Linguistics at Berkeley. Language, identity & prosody, esp. in politics & human-computer interaction. Trivia person, marathoner, coach. LA & the Bay! No one is illegal on stolen land. Views are my own. https://nicolerholliday.wordpress.com
I'll be talking slang on WBGH's Curiosity Desk today at 1:30pm EDT/10:30am PDT this morning! Listen (and call in) here! www.wgbh.org/shows/the-cu...
She's right, and has thought way, way more about LLMs, language, and society than almost every reply guy on here, but they simply can't resist fighting with a world-class expert.
I also get a lot of DMs “is it offensive for me, a white person, to say X word”. I can’t tell you, but obsession with policing individual boundaries of particular words with changing meanings, devoid of context, does nothing for anyone’s liberation. It does make people look righteous online though.
No disagreement about proper attribution in writing about slang sources. My issue is that I see white teens commenting on each other’s videos saying “you’re not allowed to say naur, that’s AAVE”. Which, it’s not, and also, that’s not how language works. The goal is to score points by shaming.
We can’t expect users to know the etymology of every word, but at the same time, the erasure of black contributions is infuriating. But so is the virtue signaling that comes from policing who’s allowed to say what on any given day, especially since the indexicality of a given word is a moving target
Congrats on the paper! When I heard you talk at NWAV, the overdetermination was most interesting to me. Black & white users will label every single thing as appropriation and try to gatekeep terms that never were AAVE. It makes sense because there is so much appropriation, but it’s counterproductive
We knew they were doing this at the time, which is why you saw grants elsewhere that mentioned things like “biological diversity” get cancelled.
I’m horrified at how bad these people are, but I’m astonished at how lazy and incompetent they are at everything.
This is the same depraved shit they did during slavery, I say for the 8 millionth time.
I see some on this site have decided to blame Harris for everything Trump has done. Remember how people did that in Trump 1, and how it was an effective strategy then, too?
These takes are gonna get more and more people killed if the left doesn’t start getting its shit together to defeat fascism.
Hahaha excellent LARP-ing, and your human is funny!
I am obsessed with whatever is going on here.
I tried really hard to get to Scandinavia for a while before deciding that maybe I should keep my black ass in California because of stuff like that. I have one of the safest jobs you could have in the U.S. academic system, and at least I (currently) have citizenship rights here.
She spent a lot of time talking to black people in major cities, because yeah, that’s a big part of the base people constantly forget about.
I trust your on the ground experience, and I know she was running a “turnout” campaign in a place with voter suppression, while Talerico was targeting moderates. But the Bradley effect is specifically about polling, and there’s no doubt that people said they’d vote for her but ultimately didn’t.
I think Crockett got the Bradley Effect, and I think every black candidate that the Dems run for a long time will have the same experience. The lesson they took away from 2024 was that people want to believe they’ll vote for black candidates (and women) but can’t be trusted to pull the lever.
Someday I will post a good take without any typos the first time. This is not that day 😆
My works are publicly available because I believe in science and research for the public good. And because I am required to publish them in order to keep my job. In no way does that mean I consented to the building of a machine that impersonates me. More anti-human trash every single day.
Or just a woman. Or just black. Many such cases.
Someone is going to murder a “trusted contact” who is just trying to get them out of an AI delusion. OpenAI doesn’t care about the physical or psychological risks it poses not only to users, but also to everyone around them.
Not just the phones, also wishful thinking. Conservatives want cities to be hellscapes because it justifies their racism, punitive policies, NIMBYism, etc. My grandma in Ohio lives down the street from a meth lab that exploded, but she’s convinced I’ll be stabbed on the street in Pasadena.
Lol our current government is actually hell for my “personality type” (ENTJ).
“Somebody is wrong, and they’re directing a large group of people! You can’t do anything about it and will have to obey whatever inefficient policies they decide to implement”
thoughtcatalog.com/heidi-priebe...
Iran’s regime was atrocious, but even if you believed it was the U.S. president’s role to replace their government, you’d imagine that he would have an actual plan for doing so.
Trump has never given a damn about a single Iranian or a single American. This is all just a game to him.
The SAG awards are the best commercial for organized labor I’ve ever seen. More important now than ever, and it’s so nice to see this kind of messaging, even if it’s weirdly on Netflix.
This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.
Operation Epic Fury
Every time this administration names an action, they choose something a 14-year old boy would call a video game. Cutesy names don’t cover up warmongering and terrorism, they just reveal a profound disrespect for human life.
things every single republican president of your lifetime has done
- started a war in the middle east
- completely destroyed the economy
Unfortunately, Trump doesn’t care about Americans or Iranians and we’ve seen this script before. Venezuela didn’t get regime change; he didn’t care about them either, he just wanted a photo-op. And Iraq & Afghanistan certainly have some things to say about whether American “intervention” ever helped
I won’t tell anyone how to feel about developments in their country, and I certainly won’t stand up for Iran’s current regime. But as an American, I am against our president committing war crimes and taking actions that will get more Iranians and Americans killed.
the congressional authorization thing is bad but honestly for me the whole "the crime of aggression is the supreme international crime" thing is what keeps me up at night
Not a coincidence that the administration threw a fit about not having an AI-powered murder apparatus hours before they started killing civilians in Tehran.
If there is a hell, the people in this administration are campaigning hard to get into it.