iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Michael Erard @michaelerard.bsky.social · 15/10/2026

Waiting at home. My day just got better

A white package with the words “boekhandel dominicanen”

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Michael Erard @michaelerard.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

From the LRB review of Irina Paperno's book about Olga Freidenberg

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Michael Erard @michaelerard.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

When BBILY came out, anthro Peter Spear interviewed me for his podcast; it was one of the few times I got to talk about the "as is" and "as if" framework that lifted the book to another plane. Spear is now clipping the interviews for Insta www.instagram.com/reel/DePuy5C...

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Michael Erard @michaelerard.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Chasing down the earliest use of "surprisal" and here the trail goes a bit cold. But at least there's the gift of some surprisal in the process!

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Michael Erard @michaelerard.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Somewhere in the world there's a newspaper columnist exhorting that "if you're uttering last words, make them good ones." You don't need BYE BYE I LOVE YOU to know why this isn't realistic. It will explain the columnist's exhortation and give you a sense of what people do have control over.

a cover of Bye Bye I Love You by Michael Erard as designed by the crack graphic design team at MIT Press

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Michael Erard @michaelerard.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

You can scope out a bit of what's in the book from Google's kinda weird core sample books.google.com/books?id=Q7P...

al-Qaeda American American Sign Language anthropologist Arabic argued asked babies band names Bible bidialectals bilingual boat bonobos brain called captioning Chatino Chinese Chinese language Chomsky cocktail cognitive colorless green cultural deaf dialects emoji endangered languages English Ethnologue experiments foreign language French German going grammar hearing Hilaria Hispanic human hyperpolyglot ideas immigrants interaction ISIL journalism journalists Kanzi Kata Kolok Kate Lakoff language beat language czar language learning learners lexigrams Lingua Franca linguistic profiling look Lynn Maya metaphor Michael Miyakubo multilingual NVTC person piece pitch political polyglot published reported says Schwa Schwa Fire scientific scientists sentence signers slips social someone sound Spanish speak speakers speech spoken story stuttering talk tell Texas Observer there's things told tongue translation University Vajda verbs village sign languages Warruwi words writing wrote y'all

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Michael Erard @michaelerard.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Why "some"? Because my work for the NYT, Wired, & New Scientist is too expensive to re-license. But my work for The Atlantic, Science, Aeon, Nautilus, New Republic, Lingua Franca and others is included, along with a few unpubbed pieces and some pitches, too. It has the best cover of all my books!

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Michael Erard @michaelerard.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

In my sleepy Dutch neighborhood this morning. How’s your Monday going?

A full size tank, green, suspended by cables from a large yellow crane

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Michael Erard @michaelerard.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Check out my Q&A with @scholarsandwriters.com scholarsandwriters.com/what-works-p...

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Michael Erard @michaelerard.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Post a photo of yourself wearing a cowboy hat standing under a tree with a kid and his red wagon

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Michael Erard @michaelerard.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Perhaps AI will be the grit that makes the pearl: making institutions articulate, for the first time in decades if not ever, what the hell they’re about and what an education is supposed to be for. (This from the MIT committee‘s report on AI)

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Michael Erard @michaelerard.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

AI summary getting it wrong. if you relied on this, your hair would now be on fire

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Michael Erard @michaelerard.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

For no concrete reason, I re-up my 2025 Mortality article on ritual last words. Here's the abstract: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

This article analyses some traditions in which dying people are expected to produce prescribed sounds, words, or phrases as their very final utterances, which I call ‘ritual last words’. I describe the traditions in the Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu and Buddhist faiths as well as the affordances that descriptions of the rituals make for the physiological realities of dying. Throughout, I situate these adaptations within broader cultural conceptions of a multifaceted linguistic agency of the dying person, who will perceive language as well as produce it. It is also necessary to situate ritual last words alongside anti-ritual traditions of the ‘sincere’, found in the secular, Western tradition of an individual’s ‘famous’ last words, where an individual’s personality, relationships and reputation are privileged over the collectivising function of ritual last words.

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Michael Erard @michaelerard.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Post your dumb uses of IPA. I’ll go first. This is the sign for the new coffee provider in my building.

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Michael Erard @michaelerard.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

At the local supermarket here in Austin

A gray windowless door is closed. On it hangs a sign that reads “warning: office armed”

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Michael Erard @michaelerard.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

A reminder that THE LANGUAGE BEAT (a curated collection of my language journalism 2000-2024) is available as an e-book on THREE platforms: On Amazon: amzn.to/4aokz3c On Google Play: bit.ly/4wARdY2 On Apple: apple.co/4fK71SA

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Michael Erard @michaelerard.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

For your semantics class next semester. You’re welcome.

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Michael Erard @michaelerard.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

this is a A) social experiment B) grift C) seed of a conspiracy theory

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Michael Erard @michaelerard.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

To the contrary, um marks the battle against entropy

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Michael Erard @michaelerard.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

One of the mentions in the Federal Writers' Project interviews

excerpt from a typescript interview. "there's a many different people, talkin' different speech, can't understand English ver well, we have to have us union interpreters for lots of our members, but that don't make us no mind, they all friends in the union, even if they can't say nothin' except 'Brother', an' shake hands."

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Michael Erard @michaelerard.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

@fliglman.bsky.social i think we briefly discussed a take like this on language

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Michael Erard @michaelerard.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Why is this guy smiling? Because it’s 1995, smartphones don’t exist, he has to ride his bike up to the normal college to check his email, and he writes all day.

Photo of a young white man with dark hair, tanned, wearing sunglasses, leaning on a barbecue grill, with a stone cottage on the background.

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Michael Erard @michaelerard.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

There's a lot of discourse on here (both serious and jokey) around who talked to an incapacitated, maybe dying person, so I re-introduce my 2025 paper on "language de-socialization."

My candidate for such a lens is a concept called “language de-socialization.” This term refers to any process through which the declining social and interactive capacities of a person at the end of life, as well as the loss of personhood as it is defined in a particular cultural setting, are dealt with, guided, interpreted, responded, and adapted to through linguistic processes by varied social actors. This concept is the end-of-the-lifespan corollary to “language socialization,” which has been an enormously influential theory of language development in social and cultural context developed over the last 35 years by linguistic anthropologists, applied linguists, sociolinguists, and others (for overviews, see Garrett and Baquedano-López Reference Garrett and Baquedano-López2002; Berman and

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Michael Erard @michaelerard.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

Three weeks later, my Scrivener file looks like this, and that's on top of 8 interviews. For this piece I'll post a bibliography, h/t @jetjocko.bsky.social for the idea.

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Michael Erard @michaelerard.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Here’s the table of contents. Piece are arranged by theme, not chronologically, and themes are introduced briefly in each section.

Praise
Introduction
Table of Linguistic Contents

Part I. Beginnings
1. Writing and opacity (Texas Observer, 1995)
2. If you asked about my students (North American Review, 1996)
3. Winged words (Lingua Franca, 2000)

Part II. Belonging
4. Welcome to the y'all house (Lingua Franca, 2001)
5. What it means to talk like a Mainer (Down East, 2015)
6. 'So': The anatomy of a scientific staple (Seed, 2008)
7. What's in a name? (Science, 2015)
8. Does this look like a man who would name his boat Princess? (Down East, 2014)
9. Swizzle me this (The Morning News, 2013)
10. Like a lead balloon (The Morning News, 2013)

Part III. Learning and Community
11. Street talk (Aeon, 2016)
12. The small island where 500 people speak nine different languages (The Atlantic, 2018)
13. So you want to learn an endangered language (Psychology Today, 2012)
14. Fragments of English (Texas Observer, 2006)
15. ISIL is using the language barriers within its ranks to evolve jihad beyond Arabic (Quartz, 2016)
16. ISIL isn’t merely tolerant of people who speak languages besides Arabic; it needs them (Quartz, 2016)
17. ISIL demands many things of its top commanders, but good Arabic isn’t always one[…]”

20. A national language czar (The New Republic, 2005)
21. Language matters (Legal Affairs, 2002)
22. Immigration by shibboleth (Legal Affairs, 2003)
23. Frame wars (Texas Observer, 2004)
24. Pete Buttigieg's language magic is textbook polyglot mythmaking (The Atlantic, 2019)
25. Speaking in tongues (Unpublished, 2006)
26. The king of closed captions (The Atlantic Monthly, 2001)
27. W: A Usage Guide (Texas Observer, 2001)

Part V. Doing Linguistics

28. Sillyspeak: The art of making a fake language (Vice, 2015)
29. The linguist's tents will be forgotten (Unpublished, 2019, 2025)
30. Discovering China's linguistic riches (Science, 2009)
31. Holy grammar, Inc. (Search, 2009)
32. Studying an emerging sign language won't kill it (Mosaic Science, 2019)
33. The life and times of "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" (Southwest Review, 2010)
34. Metaphor and myth (Texas Observer, 2001)

Part VI. Controversies and Advances

35. Secret military test, coming soon to your Spanish class (Nautilus, 2014)
36. Slips of the tongue serve as windows into the mind (Science, 2007)
37. Language puzzle (Science, 2016)
38. Words from far-flung tribes (Globe and Mail, 2008)
39. Stutter, memory (Lingua Franca, 2001)
40. The deep roots of writing (Aeon, 2018)
41. Why sign-language gloves don’t help deaf people (The Atlantic, 2017)

Part VII Doing Journalism
43. The medium (The Morning News, 2014)
44. Pitch: A language czar for America
45. Pitch: An innovative Chinese school
46. Pitch: Post 9/11 responses to building US language capacity

47 Pitch: The story of Ethnologue and the discovery of languages
48 Pitch: China's newest export, Chinese
49 Pitch: Sign language Bible translations
50 The last word (Undark, 2016)
51 What happened to Schwa Fire? and the state of the language beat
Part VIII. The New and The Old
52 A cultural history of first words (Paris Review, 2019)
53 A sign language is born (Al-Jazeera America, 2014)
54 What people actually say before they die (The Atlantic, 2019)
About the author
Acknowledgements
Other language journalism work

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Michael Erard @michaelerard.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

THE LANGUAGE BEAT is here. For more than two decades, I wrote reportage, profiles, essays, and reviews about language. This book, which collects some of those pieces, is on sale now: amzn.to/4aokz3c (I'll announce when it goes onto other platforms.)

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Michael Erard @michaelerard.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

my article on gen AI and language change will be nothing like this crap

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Michael Erard @michaelerard.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

I‘m happy to say: I hired a guy for the cover of my next book, and his work was incredible.

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Michael Erard @michaelerard.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

So much for applied ethics shrug emoji

Text of a notification that I had unsubscribed from the ethics Substack

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Michael Erard @michaelerard.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

The US is increasingly weird to me…example: this autonomous robot roaming the Stop & Shop aisles “looking for spills” and presumably doing other AI enabled surveillance. That simping smile tells you just how dangerous it is

A tall gray column with large googly eyes at the top stands in a supermarket aisle

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Michael Erard @michaelerard.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

I think of this line by Lorraine Daston in the LRB all the time

We badly need a grown-up way of talking about scientific uncertainty, uncontaminated by a long philosophical and theological tradition in which truths worthy of the name must be certain and eternal.

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Michael Erard @michaelerard.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

This is the alcohol free beer section at my unremarkable local Dutch supermarket. Every major brand and brewery (and a lot of minor ones) has an option, and I know there’s even more out there.

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Michael Erard @michaelerard.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

Maybe when Sora folded, Duolingo decided they should go with real people instead of AI actors? Anyway, I got this last week from an ad agency casting for a video series on slang. (They weren't recruiting me but asking me to pass it on.) Or maybe it was a scam. (I did receive it twice.)

Seeking English Language Experts for Duolingo Video: Slang Decoded

We’re casting a language expert for an upcoming episode of Slang Decoded, a Duolingo video series exploring how slang varies across the world—we recently completed an episode on Spanish slang.

In each episode, participants from different English-speaking regions—such as the UK, Australia, and the US—come together in a studio to compare the slang they grew up with. As various objects and scenarios appear on screen, each person shares the terms they use back home, often revealing funny, surprising, and unexpected differences. Our expert plays a key role throughout, reacting to the responses, breaking down meanings, and explaining where these expressions come from, how they’ve evolved, and what they reveal about culture and geography.

Upcoming episode topics include:

Gen Z slang

Food slang

Going-out slang

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Michael Erard @michaelerard.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

A periodic reminder that the index to Bye Bye I Love You rocks, one of its many charms. Amazon now sells the book for under 20 bucks. bit.ly/4s21RW3

floating on a psychedelic turquoise background, a white 3d book, titled Bye Bye I Love You: The Story of Our First and Last Words, by Michael Erard

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