Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 10/09/2025I understand this frustration. That said, it's exciting that more work is now starting to examine the potential for children to play a role in change *while also* paying full attention to the sociolinguistic work on adolescents, like this recent paper by Erin Hall www.cambridge.org/core/journal...cambridge.orgChildren’s participation in /u/-fronting in Ontario English | Language Variation and Change | Cambridge CoreChildren’s participation in /u/-fronting in Ontario English 140
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 30/04/2025www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews... There is a whole ¡Vamos! empire now, but this one started it all (and is my favorite)kirkusreviews.com¡VAMOS! LET'S GO TO THE MARKET | Kirkus ReviewsLittle Lobo and his dog, Bernabé, journey through a Mexican mercado delivering diverse goods to a variety of booths. 100
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 12/03/2025"I did it!" 'I did it' "I did it Mama!" 'Mama did it' 1;10 #linguistbabyphotos 051
Reposted by Laurel MacKenzieGuy @guyt.bsky.social · 01/02/2025I never thought it would happen to me! The Etymology Nerd did a video on my work with Laurel MacKenzie on how more and more people are saying "based off" instead of "based on"! Watch the video for a great summary, or look out for our forthcoming paper in English Language and Linguistics!youtu.beThis post is based #linguistics #language #etymology #grammarYouTube video by Etymology Nerd 121
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 18/12/2024Assignments in his classes tended to look like this. 140
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 18/12/2024Who else has both pioneered a novel approach to the study of language and developed software with animated demons in it? youtu.be/2cLoEPeq5Fk?...youtu.belaugh demonYouTube video by Josef Fruehwald 260
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 18/12/2024Into his 80s, Bill Labov was still coding his own software. But it didn’t just do what it needed to do; it had goofy graphics and sound effects and hidden animations that appeared when you clicked things. 150
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 18/12/2024HOW could I forget all the little Plotnik bells and whistles?! “This is the Plotnik lion, or maybe it’s supposed to be me.” 220
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 18/12/2024Thanks to @edballister.bsky.social for this recollection: an anonymous grad student (we genuinely forget who) was looking through a book of Chinese sayings and observed "a lot of these seem to involve the head of the turtle." Bill: "the turtle head is a metaphor for the penis." Turns and walks away. 130
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 18/12/2024I first met Bill when I sat in on his Dialect Geography class as a prospective student. He was teaching his forthcoming (2007) Lanugage paper. He had a hilarious self deprecating aside about using the library for the first time when researching this paper. "It's incredible what they have in there!" 160
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 18/12/2024Bill cycled the mile or so from his house to campus every day. One day he had a minor accident (someone opened a car door into him). He was fine, but got an MRI just in case. He came into class late and reported, with a huge grin, "they said I have the brain of a 25 year old!" 160
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 18/12/2024One day he called me into his office. He had a PDF file that had an E where it needed to have a B. He couldn't edit the text of the PDF, he could only use drawing tools on it. He had drawn two tiny vertical lines to connect the empty spaces of the E and approximate a B. He was so proud to show me. 151
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 18/12/2024When teaching us how to use Plotnik, he showed us how to save an Excel file as text. But to open the text file, don't double click it on a Mac, or it will open up in a "fiendish little program called TextEdit." (Fiendish because, despite its name, it only saved .rtf files, not Plotnik-friendly .txt) 141
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 18/12/2024During an NWAV talk, he showed a vowel plot and identified a couple of outlying tokens as "these little rascals over here." Instant addition to all of our lexicons. 151
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 18/12/2024During a meeting, his phone would ring, and he'd say "Oh, it must be President Obama!" He'd look at the caller ID, and it would be Gillian. "Oh, it's the boss." 250
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 18/12/2024I have to focus on the lighthearted moments in my six years studying with Bill to keep from feeling too sad. Here we are in 2009 at a ceremony at the Penn Museum where I received a teaching award. When I invited him: "I wouldn't miss it! I've already got it on my calendar." Classic Bill. 2241
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 17/12/2024Maybe I was primed to see it, but this typo jumped out at me in a paper I was reading just now :) 130
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 17/12/2024This has annoyed me for years. I don't think it ever was an acronym, was it? Isn't it Dutch for "speak"? I think people see the double A and assume it has to be an acronym because it can't be English. But like... that's a licit sequence in other languages! Come on, linguists! 110
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 16/12/2024Last time I did Google Drive comments (spring '23), they were very clunky (as you scrolled down through the PDF, they would pop up one at a time, sometimes glitchily). In spring '24 I shared PDFs via Acrobat instead, found the commenting much smoother. 000
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 21/10/2024...ok, not exactly a "permanent" place after being "extinct," but a more tempered version of what you ask :) 010
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 21/10/2024"gotten" did this in UK English separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2020/01/2019... 120
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 09/10/2024Sometimes I miss British English noun pileups and then I get an email with a subject line like this 230
Reposted by Laurel MacKenzieJesse Sheidlower @jessesword.com · 19/09/2024The NYT has an article on pirate speech, featuring actual linguist @laurelmack.bsky.social, the star of a fun NYU-produced video discussing a bunch of terms Unclear why they use the spelling "aargh" to represent the _arr_ interjection, though. www.nytimes.com/2024/09/19/n...nytimes.comAargh, It’s Talk Like a Pirate Day 441
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 12/09/2024The alienability constraint on this is really cool 020
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 11/09/2024These followup tweets answered exactly the 2 questions I had 020
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 11/09/2024drive.google.com/file/d/1FrGl... p. 4!drive.google.comCGSW_2022_one-anaphora.pdf 230
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 25/06/2024Love seeing a counterexample to Labov 2012 (image 1) in today’s NYT (image 2)! 0548
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 20/06/2024It is this, though :) www.reddit.com/r/funny/comm...reddit.comReddit - Dive into anythingReddit's largest humor depository 110
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 27/03/2024The fact that a graph can still have a y-axis when what’s on the horizontal axis is categorical (e.g. a bar graph) and hence HAS no 0 point is making me think I’m not in the wrong here, but I’m surprised I’ve gone this long not realizing how imprecise and confusing this can be 000
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 27/03/2024Me too! And yet this “y axis is where x=0” definition actually seems to be pretty common 100
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 27/03/2024Right! I think it was not a good choice pedagogically! But I also feel like it’s a pretty common graphical choice to put the vertical axis at the minimum point on the x-axis, even when that’s <0, and this has never bothered me until seeing it adjacent to “y-axis is where x=0” 300
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 27/03/2024yeah, you're right! neither is at {x, y} = 0 in this figure 000
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 27/03/2024This post brought to you by me trying to predict where students will get confused when I teach this stuff, and summarily confusing myself 😐 000
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 27/03/2024I'd never reflected on this before, but I guess there's a convention to put the vertical edge of a graph -- which I'd call "the y-axis" but I guess technically isn't always, under the definition where "the y-axis is where x=0" -- at the minimum x value of the plotted data. 200
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 27/03/2024Very basic math q! See screenshot: we teach that the y-axis is at x=0, but in Fig. 4.2b, what I'd call "the y-axis" (the vertical line labeled "Response") is at x = -2. So like... what do we call that line at x = -2? Is the line at x=0 the true y-axis, and the one at x = -2 just a cosmetic one? 200
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 15/02/2024This is so great! Perfect timing for Language & Society this semester. I wonder how many people heard “saccadic” leaders as “psychotic” leaders? 😂 Such an unexpected word, I can’t remember why he chose it. To me I only know “saccade” in connection w eye movements 110
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 11/02/2024Yep, absolutely. Even Walter has that worrying little resurgence bump in the 2010s. I think our kids’ names do too. 100
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 11/02/2024Walter was on our shortlist for baby #2! We definitely prefer names with this diachronic profile 110
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 31/01/2024Today he referred to the [tr] pronunciation as “the weird way” 💀 040
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 31/01/2024The [ɑ] pronunciation feels very “oh lah-dee-dah, NeVAHda, aren’t you fancy” to me. So funny how my social association with this vowel, probably influenced by RP, carries over into this context. I don’t get that same judgment for e.g. Ir[ɑ]q. 010
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 31/01/2024Great article! Is there a source for the assertion that “the majority of the American English–speaking population” uses [ɑ]? Seems wild to me, as an [æ]-sayer myself. Maybe got it from my parents (NorCal-ians). 400
Laurel MacKenzie @laurelmack.bsky.social · 26/01/2024Yeah, this is pretty much my policy. Teach for America: sorry, I can’t spare class time, but I can forward an email. NYU language classes on Haitian Creole: yes, please take my students! 120
