iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Matt Gordon (not that one though) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Also Brer Rabbit (etc) in rhotic American English

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Matt Gordon (not that one though) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

And if you get caught napping, it's also useful for talking about the low back vowel merger

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Matt Gordon (not that one though) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

This construction was the norm in English until recent centuries when passive and progressive came to both be marked. So "the house is building" > "the house is being built." An innovation resisted by pedants & sometimes claimed to be an Americanism.

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Matt Gordon (not that one though) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

"Radio was putting into people's homes by the early 1930s" - nice example of active progressive verb with passive voice meaning (cf. 'was being put'), heard just now on a podcast from Irish historian P. Rouse

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Matt Gordon (not that one though) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Many Americans have different vowels in FATHER and AWE. One test pair is DON vs DAWN which are the same in many areas but not all. People who have a difference here might pronounce PASTA with something like the Italian /a/ (or it might be slightly backer).

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Matt Gordon (not that one though) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

Do American sports broadcasters now go back to using singular agreement with country-team names for 4 years?

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Matt Gordon (not that one though) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

The OED's first citation for SHAG "copulate (with)" is from Jefferson.

A screenshot from OED for the verb SHAG. The first citation is from T. Jefferson in 1770 and reads "He had shagged his mother and begotten himself on her body."

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Matt Gordon (not that one though) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

Source: "Mountain goats are not in the same genus as goats. In the bovidae family, mountain goats are associated with antelopes, gazelles and cattle" CoPilot summary: "Mountain goats are not true goats; they belong to the goat-antelope tribe and are more closely related to antelopes and sheep"

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Matt Gordon (not that one though) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

I noticed a dialect-related misreading in the 2010 remake of True Grit. Original (novel & 1969 film) has "most girls like play pretties, but you like guns" with the noun 'play-pretty', a southern term for "toy", but in 2010 film it's misread as "most girls like to play pretties".

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Matt Gordon (not that one though) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

FWIW my go-to example for this kinda discussion is “funnest”

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Matt Gordon (not that one though) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

This is discussed in Wolfram & Schilling's textbook but I don't know the original studies. In any case, appropriation of AAE by non-AfricanAmericans has complicated things more recently.

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Matt Gordon (not that one though) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

Early sociolinguistic work noted that copula absence with "are" is found in both Southern black and white speech, while absence of "is" is almost never heard in traditional Southern white speech, and nobody (except Michael Scott) does it in the first person singular.

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Matt Gordon (not that one though) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

I've always done consonants first but I don't think I ever thought about why. Maybe because there's more to describe (place, manner, voicing) and so it's more complicated. They're also more concrete, thus mostly easy for students to feel.

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Matt Gordon (not that one though) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

Happy "Logging out of Canvas for 3 Months" Day to me!

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Fred Vultee @fredvultee.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

Today in language change: Passive “weaponize”! (Trump, in a clip on NPR, explaining why members of his cult should be compensated by the government: ”They’ve been weaponized.”) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social

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Matt Gordon (not that one though) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

Maybe it's there to mark a half-long geminate t???

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Matt Gordon (not that one though) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

We got a message from the Dean of our grad school b/c final versions of theses and dissertations are supposed to be uploaded to Canvas tomorrow for spring degrees.

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Matt Gordon (not that one though) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

So, I guess I won't grade the papers my students uploaded to Canvas.

Ransom note displayed when trying to access Canvas. The note is from ShinyHunters claiming to have breached Instructure.

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Matt Gordon (not that one though) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

It's fun to imagine an alternative history for sociolinguistics where Labov stays at Columbia & the MERRY/MURRAY Merger and tense MAD, BAD, GLAD are things known only to linguists who gather around a wooder cooler

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Matt Gordon (not that one though) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

Not to give other scammers ideas, but if you're phishing humanities/social sci faculty at public university in a red state, an email with an attachment purporting to be a letter from a parent of a student received by the dean's office can be pretty effective. Don't ask how I know.

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Matt Gordon (not that one though) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

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Matt Gordon (not that one though) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

Ad from Microsoft encourages me to celebrate Earth Day with "art" created using their image generator. cool cool cool

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Matt Gordon (not that one though) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

This is certainly true, but I think many are attracted to the idea of having "secret" knowledge that challenges straightforward explanations (as with conspiracy theories). E.g. those people who love to share how "Black Friday" comes from an accounting usage ("in the black").

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Matt Gordon (not that one though) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

New excuse for being late to meetings: Sorry but I just saw a looksmaxxing influencer get brutally frame-mogged & I had to give a witness statement to Chad Protective Services

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Matt Gordon (not that one though) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

the discussion did make me wonder if Tolkien's use was another example of his incorporating archaisms (like aux. BE for the perfect aspect constructions with motion verbs) rather than some comment on the sociolinguistics of LESS + pl. noun in the 20th cen.

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Matt Gordon (not that one though) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

I guess my point is that LESS has always been used with plural nouns in English and the proscription against it (like so many of these "rules") are modern attempts to impose distinctions that don't have any solid basis in history. The classic case is WILL vs SHALL.

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Matt Gordon (not that one though) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

You might say the same about King Alfred the Great.

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Matt Gordon (not that one though) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

Heartbreak here too. He inspired so many students, including me, to pursue sociolinguistics by his brilliance and just by being a joy to hang with. I'll raise a glass and a diphthong to Jack!

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Matt Gabriele @profgabriele.com · 02/03/2026

fyi, i have a podcast and it's really great and fun. and there are a lot of super-smart people who've been on to talk about not just the Middle Ages but how and why it's studied here in the USA. please give it a listen. AmericanMedieval.com

americanmedieval.com

American Medieval Podcast

A podcast about the Middle Ages (with an American twist), hosted by Professor Matthew Gabriele.

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Matt Gordon (not that one though) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

Thanks for this reminder to check the forecast so I'll know whether to leave the kitchen faucet dripping to avoid frozen pipes and subsequent burst

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Matt Gordon (not that one though) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social · 01/02/2026

If they're going to refer to the area as "Dallas-Fort Worth", I really must insist that the one on the left/west be Dallas (see, e.g., Minneapolis-St. Paul). Thank you for your attention to this matter.

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Matt Gordon (not that one though) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social · 27/01/2026

Tonight it might be “portrait” > “paroletrait”

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Matt Gordon (not that one though) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social · 11/01/2026

The accessibility tracker in Canvas won't accept alt text descriptions of images that are longer than 120 characters. I've never encountered this limit in other contexts. How is it useful if it leads to very short descriptions?

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Matt Gordon (not that one though) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social · 11/01/2026

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Anne H. Charity Hudley @acharityhudley.bsky.social · 06/01/2026

All righty y'all! The Journal of Black Language and Culture @jblacjournal.bsky.social is now open for submissions! See our website for information on how to submit and reach out if you have questions or ideas as we learn and grow! www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

cambridge.org

Journal of Black Language and Culture | Cambridge Core

Journal of Black Language and Culture - Anne H. Charity Hudley

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Matt Gordon (not that one though) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social · 05/01/2026

"enamored with" instead of "of" - if you're going to use a fancy word, use its obscure prepositional complement and don't analogize to "in love with".

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Matt Gordon (not that one though) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social · 27/12/2025

You can tell he's crazy by his misuse of Cyrillic

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Bloomsbury Literary Studies & Creative Writing @bloomsburylit.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

📕 Banning Books in America: Not a How-to edited by Samuel Cohen Out February 2026: A vital exploration of how and why books are banned in the U.S.—and what that means for democracy, education, and free expression. 🔗 www.bloomsbury.com/banning-book... #BannedBooksWeek #FreedomToRead

Book cover for "Banning Books in America"

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Matt Gordon (not that one though) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

Yes, great points! When I asked students about this a few weeks ago, they noted those phono features and one mentioned the word "gagging" which made me hopeful that "gag me with a spoon" might still be alive in the stereotype but probably not

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Matt Gordon (not that one though) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

This is interesting since it seems to ignore the class associations of "Valley Girl", right? Californians don't think of Bakersfield, Fresno, etc. as bastions of upper middle-class entitlement, do they?

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Matt Gordon (not that one though) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

I've recently heard 2 folk interpretations of the "valley" in "valley girl" as it relates to a speaking style/persona. A (northern) Californian said it referred to the Central Valley (e.g. Fresno). A St. Louisan believed it was about some valley in west county STL. Anyone have other examples?

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Matt Gordon (not that one though) @anotherlinguist.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

"Since the bandages used in this trial contain silver threads, shouldn't lycanthropy be an exclusion criterion?" My latest attempt to get invited to step down from the IRB.

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