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Bridget Copley PhD

@moppety.bsky.social
3.3K followers 9.5K following 1.5K posts

Parisienne Buffalonian linguist spoonie mom. bcopley.com "The line separating good and evil passes...right through every human heart." -Solzhenitsyn

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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Focus is funny 🐦🐦 www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=...
black and white comic with four panels. 1. duck wants human to feed it, says speech bubble showing a drawing of human hand dropping food to duck 2. human points to "don't feed ducks" sign showing same drawing of human hand dropping food to duck, in a circle with a slash through it. 3. duck brings stepladder. 4. duck climbs stepladder and says speech bubble that has human hand below duck throwing food up to duck. see human, that's not what is prohibited!
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
"in" temporal adverbials in the news
headline from 9 years ago: "SpaceX founder Elon Musk plans to get humans to Mars in six years"post from Alan Richardson: "It didn't say which six years!"
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 04/07/2026
And just like at that birthday party, the abusive parent is somehow spared the full blame. 🤔
"America's 250th birthday celebration feels like a child's birthday party ruined by fighting between to soon-to-be-divorced parents."
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 26/04/2026
Finally, a dropdown box that accommodates my mother tongue, Old High German
A drop down menu on a site called "Le français des affaires" asking for the langue maternelle where options include "ancien anglais", "ancien français", "ancien haut allemand", and "ancien irlandais"
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
the Irish can, apparently www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-r...
"Having a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories. More specifically, for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown."
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 18/02/2026
The world needed this. marshdeer.github.io/xkcd2501-gen... Thanks, @lensdeer www.tumblr.com/lensdeer!
Two stick figures in a version of xkcd's "Average familiarity" comic: Woman: "Compositionality is second nature to us formal semanticists, so it's easy to forget that the average person probably only knows Functional Application." Man: "And Schoenfinkelization, of course." Woman: "Of course." Caption: "Even when they're trying to compensate for it, experts in anything wildly overestimate the average person's familiarity with their field."
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 17/01/2026
Going homemade this week. Wings noticeably larger. Go Bills! #BillsMafia
12 chicken wings, cooked in BBQ sauce, on a foil-lined tray.
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 11/01/2026
I'm not sure they weren't
Hand holding a very small BBQ chicken wing
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 05/01/2026
A rare case in the wild of "be going to P but I don't suppose I shall P" - note the hedging ("don't suppose...") but unusual enough even so! From Chapter 3 of "The Way We Live Now", Anthony Trollope (1875).
Text including "Going to hunt to-morrow?" "Well, yes; but I don't suppose I shall."
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 23/11/2025
This is poor user interface design, especially when there IS a part of my brain that wants to just delete the whole thing
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 12/09/2025
"Semantically, the two sentences are the same. Yet the shift in syntax subtly, but fundamentally, changes the message being communicated." I know it's not the most important thing here but I'm going to be snarky and wish linguistics were taught in high school.
The first: “Charlie Kirk had terrible politics, but no one should be killed for their beliefs.” The second: “No one should be killed for their beliefs, but Charlie Kirk had truly terrible politics.”

Semantically, the two sentences are the same. Yet the shift in syntax subtly, but fundamentally, changes the message being communicated.
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 05/07/2025
When I grow up I want to be the person who does facts and stats on the Formula 1 site.
Hamilton has two wins here from outside the top three on the grid, and both those races were held on July 6th — in 2008 when he won for McLaren, and in 2014 when he won with Mercedes.
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 22/05/2025
"Your admin requires that you sign in to Zoom every 12 hours." I sure hope this is a "dogs must be carried" case and not a "shirts must be worn" case 🐦🐦
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 09/05/2025
The Empire is building an armory in Palmo
The new Tour Triangle being built at Parc des Expositions de la Porte de Versailles in Paris, France. It’s going to be a huge triangle-shaped slab.
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 17/03/2025
Yikes. Sounds like they’d get along with whatever’s happening at our kid’s school
A map of “the British Isles” showing a large Union Jack and smaller flags of all the nations of the UK and the Republic of Ireland, giving the impression that the Republic of Ireland is part of the UK.
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 10/01/2025
Higher stakes than I expected at the Korean grocery store today
poster with Squid Game red light-green light girl, masked characters, and some Korean foods with the slogan "Joue à fond - Savoure la vie" (Play hard - savor life"
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
Poster in my child’s classroom. My Irish husband rolled his eyes back so far in his head I think he sprained them @drkevguitar.bsky.social
Poster of “The British Isles” with small flags of England, Scotland, Wales, NI, and Ireland and a larger Union Jack, making it look like Ireland is still ruled by Britain
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 18/11/2024
I was actually just asking, but sure, ChatGPT, I can retcon my question as passive-aggressive if that works better for you #pragmatics #Linguistics
In ChatGPT window, user asks: why do you sound so optimistic and corporate? ChatGPT replies: "Got it! Here's a more straightforward and grounded version"
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 16/11/2024
Hilariously, I had just unfollowed him before returning to the thread and seeing this skeet. Dude sure knows his (non-)audience.
Skeet by Benjamin Dreyer: More power to you if you’re one of those people who believe that no native speaker/writer of English can, being a native speaker/writer of English, set a grammatical foot wrong, but if you’re one of those people, you’re probably not following me anyway, so  (shrug emoji)
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 25/10/2024
Ooh! I used to live next to Fresh Pond:
Gas station with cars. Name of gas station: FRESH POND GAS
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 23/09/2024
In other words, no island violations or episodic readings, and the existence of an agent is presupposed
Sign in metro: Signaler à nos agents tout objet abandonné ou situation inhabituelle (Signal to our agents any abandoned object or non-habitual situation)
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 20/09/2024
this is so true that I bought this word to remind me not to sniff too much logic
in front of some plants, a cursive word in silver wire: "évidence"
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 18/09/2024
Are ya all right there St. Nicholas
“The Cathedral of Our Lady Assumed into Heaven and St. Nicholas”
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 16/09/2024
I guess I've noticed a difference, especially lately, but a bit surprised to see that I've been around here for an order of magnitude
#582,263
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 14/09/2024
I really appreciate @juliusgoat.bsky.social's careful parsing of what fascists are saying. (and psst, #Linguistics, binding theory Condition C in the news!) www.the-reframe.com/its-time-to-... For more of this sort of thing, you can buy A.R. Moxon's book Very Fine People: jgoatpress.com
Which is interesting, because in case you didn't click through to read al lthe linked stories, the Haitian immigrants *are* "the people who live there." They're here legally, which I mention only because those who call themselves conservative claim that's what matters to them. [Highlighted text:] They are J.D. Vance's own consituents! They put the spring in Springfield! *They are the people who live there!* They can only be *eating the pets of the people who live there" (they aren't) if they don't live there, or if they aren't people, and that latter formulation is of course what Vance and all these other bigoted thugs are trying to do: dehumanize them, [End of highlighting] in order to further marginalize them, in order to justify violence against them, in order to bolster their case for mass deportations of millions and millions of people—which, again, is the sort of thing that has never failed to lead to mass murder, so the proposal should be taken as the intent.
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 27/08/2024
I guess summer is over, you guys
Hiccup from Race to the Edge. Caption: Now it’s time for the other kind of fun. Working.
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 25/08/2024
Did not expect this lovely bit of morphopragmatics in this article on Sámi parenting! 🐦🐦 getpocket.com/explore/item...
Sámi languages still use the dual form, a form that was also once known in Old English, Ancient Greek and Old Church Slavonic. It refers to two people doing something, as in the Northern Sámi phrase "Moai manne", "we two go". According to Äärelä-Vihriälä, Sámi parents often use the dual form: "If a child pees himself, we might say that: 'Oh, did we (two) pee ourselves, shall we (two) clean this up?' Or we can say: 'Oh we (two) are not used to doing this'. In that way we can turn the child’s attention elsewhere without blaming and criticising."
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 18/08/2024
hope it's ok! avoid the tea tho
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 07/07/2024
Oh sorry I misremembered. Look at me telling lies on bluesky. It's Jacques Chirac. I knew it was someone gross.
Bronze statue of Jacques Chirac in Nice
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 07/07/2024
Good morning France, I’m hopeful that on this day of voting that we can avoid both-sidesing demonization of the left with the far-right and come together in… oh
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 17/06/2024
I don't know anything about ancient Hebrew, but please enjoy a recent paper on basic color terms in languages, explaining and supporting a hypothesis from the 70s of an "implicational hierarchy" of color terms: if a language has a color term in the hierarchy, it has all the terms to the left of it.
{white, black} < red < {green, yellow} < blue < brown < {purple, pink, orange, gray}
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 10/06/2024
Despite the far right's success yesterday across France, it didn't crack Paris. The 16th, along with the suburb of Neuilly, is the last bastion of the Républicains (center-right, blue). Then it gets farther left the more east you go... www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeur...
Electoral map of Paris European elections June 2024: blue (center-right) in the west, and shading from west to east through orange (center/Macronists) to pink (socialist/social democrats) to red (far left) in the northeast
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 19/05/2024
Made a cake! First time using isomalt, and let's just say I didn't burn *all* of my fingertips off
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 13/05/2024
Hmm. What does “successfully urge” mean? For me it’s that the successfully did some urging, not that they got them to do the thing, but does anyone get the intended reading here?
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 01/05/2024
@foxes-in-love.bsky.social My 7yo daughter is a huge fan of Foxes in Love and wanted to send you her fan comic! It’s based on the “orange you glad I didn’t say banana” joke. Thanks for your lovely and kind comics.
Green fox: knock knock! Blue fox: who’s there? Green: orange! Blue: orange who? Green: … Green: wait…can I start over? Blue: yes
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 11/04/2024
I think they made the best choice on the plural here, but sometimes the best choice just isn’t that great.
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 07/03/2024
Semanticists and semantics-adjacent people interested in causation, converge with us tomorrow on causal ontology analyses at 3pm Paris time! Write to me at my email address at bcopley.com for the zoom link. Students especially welcome. We'll be hearing from....
COCOA logo: three pink circles representing marshmallows on a brown oval representing hot cocoa. Text: COCOA: Converging on Causal Ontology Analyses
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 19/02/2024
Semanticists and semantics-adjacent people interested in causation (especially causal models), please join us for Converging On Causal Ontology Analyses (COCOA) this Friday Feb. 23rd, 3pm Paris time. No knowledge of causal models necessary, students are especially welcome.
COCOA logo: three pink circles representing marshmallows on a brown oval representing hot cocoa. Text: COCOA: Converging on Causal Ontology Analyses
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 11/02/2024
Happy superb owl Sunday!
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 07/02/2024
Semanticists and semantics-adjacent people interested in causation: join us for COCOA (Converging On Causal Ontology Analyses) this Friday 3-5pm Paris time!
COCOA logo: three pink circles representing marshmallows on a brown oval representing hot cocoa.
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 05/02/2024
apparently I still do work on the future
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 30/01/2024
lol no #linguistics though I guess the Celts did pass through there at one point
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 14/01/2024
#linguistics Not a bad article on an effort to reclaim a language, but it’s like they just can’t help themselves
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 10/01/2024
#linguistics @nytimes.com is at it again 🤦‍♀️
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 03/01/2024
Ugh, someone please collect the @nytimes.com #linguistics
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 02/01/2024
Semanticists and semantics-adjacent people who study causation in language, join us at COCOA (Converging On Causal Ontology Analyses) for our annual causal models tutorial, Jan 19, 15h Paris time. Students especially welcome, no knowledge of causal models required. Write me (bcopley.com ) for link
COCOA logo: three pink circles representing marshmallows on a brown oval representing hot cocoa.
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 25/12/2023
Merry cookies to all, and to all a good night!
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 07/12/2023
Clever name tag at CSSP
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 21/09/2023
Not to be one of *those* parents, but they did ask if parents could come in and explain about their job, so I might just have to
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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 05/09/2023
Semanticists and those semantics-adjacent who are interested in causation in language, especially but not only with respect to causal models, please join us for Converging On Causal Ontology Analyses next Wednesday on zoom, 5pm -7pm Paris time!
COCOA logo: three pink circles representing marshmallows floating above and in a dark brown oval
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