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Will Bennett

@wmgbennett.bsky.social
179 followers 199 following 402 posts

Linguist, professor, Africanist, aspiring mad scientist/inventor/youtuber/occasional shitposter. Interested in meaning, sounds, the navigation therebetween, and how that all plays out for humans across history and geography.

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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Little known Snapple fact: Cajuns are not originally from Louisiana, and the clue is in the name. Cajun is a shortening of ‘Akkadian’, which reflects the group’s history of being forcibly resettled from Mesopotamia by the French after the fall of Sumeria. #cuneiformdelafayette
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
When a university says “we are committed to constructive engagement”, that usually means “you can email us and we will ignore it”
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
My health insurance sent a text message to remind me about ADHD awareness month. They categorically refuse to cover ADHD medication for adults.
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
What a profoundly terrible excuse for a “grant”
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Reposted by Will Bennett
Hadas Weiss @hadas.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
did they say grad school was a good investment
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
“I don’t know if dogs can be on the spectrum, but your dog is” -a literal biologist
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
What kind of monster puts condensed milk into a cheese sauce meant for fried chicken? Just gross.
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Even NEW ZEALAND has better trains than America. Think about that for a second.
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Our new paper we’ve been trying to finish since 2015 is finally out: www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.2... 🗣️💬
tandfonline.com
On the productivity of length-based alternations in Xhosa noun class prefixes
Noun classes in isiXhosa are each associated with specific prefixes on the noun stem. Some of these noun class prefixes exhibit length-based allomorphy: they take one form before multisyllabic stem...
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
The existence of Bouillabaisse implies that one can be Bouillacringé
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Reposted by Will Bennett
Kate Elliott @kateelliottsff.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
I recommend this entire thread, and you'll understand why when you get all the way through it. A lovely analysis of human communication.
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
I just got an email from an “AI writer”, which profiles itself as “Victoria Chase, a writer tracking the last two speakers of a dying language”. 🗣️💬 What in the #freshaihell is ilands.ai? They are asking for whether the people we recorded during fieldwork have died yet. Unconscionable lack of tact.
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
Please everyone join me in welcoming “grok” to the list of words that are their own antonyms
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
I’m actually more of a secular mantis myself
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
I thought I had a joke about Mbabaram canines being good dogs, but it didn’t stand the test of time
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
I guess the thing to learn from RFKj is that Kennedys either die young or live long enough to become the villain
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
The new Infowars has delivered the most brutal satire I think I’ve ever seen.
youtu.be
CONSERVATIVE HERO: Lucas Reilly Is FIGHTING For The 2nd Amendment
YouTube video by InfoWars
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
The Bennett (No relation) et al 2009 salmon poster remains one of my all time favorite academic pubs. prefrontal.org/files/poster... Q: how much of the hype around AI is basically this kind of error writ large?
prefrontal.org
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-m... Note to self: share this link with the next person who tells you prompt engineering matters for anything
aclanthology.org
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
Apparently my lecture yesterday got tiktok’d by one of the students. Let’s see if I get fired for *checks notes * “playing the pink trombone “
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
The South African Library for the Blind thanks you for watching
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
Anyway the France-Spain referee used to be a professor of organic chemistry, so…..
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 10/07/2026
Hypothesis: real parrots are actually way more deterministic than stochastic ones (ie LLMs)
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
once I bought an electric toothbrush advertised on some podcasts. Shipping was delayed so long I assumed it wasn’t coming and did a chargeback. And then one day it arrived! Free toothbrush! Two root canals and thousands later, I found out quip was a scam. This is a tweet about LLMs.
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
Cooked: “Good luck” Overlooked: “May all of your errors be grammatical”
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
Hey Claude, give me a function that explains the relation between tokens and wickelphones
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
Fkn bullshit
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
Me, watching soccer: oop, sorry, I guess I conceded that goal because I looked away at the wrong moment
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
Yellow cards for both coaches. You love to see it. Go Paraguay! #theotherguaysturntowin
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 27/06/2026
Go Black Stars 🇬🇭
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 27/06/2026
This many choices is way above the threshold of usefulness, Google
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 27/06/2026
It is always amazing to me how much lint can get stuck inside a phone
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 20/06/2026
Thread of how the non-SA comment team pronounces “Gqeberha” 1. Kwabeixa
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
arxiv.org/pdf/2605.31514 “IF LLMS HAVE HUMAN-LIKE ATTRIBUTES, THEN SO DOES Age of Empires II”
arxiv.org
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
Does anyone know what’s up with the journal Anthropological Linguistics? No new issues since they switched editors in 2022, but I can’t find any announcement about closure or hiatus.
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
Boo for the World Cup but still go Bafanabafana
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 06/06/2026
What’s up with this ad I keep getting? #tentaclenostalgia #deepflavorbass
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
Lions in the rain
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 27/05/2026
Minimal pair: ocelot ~ axolotl
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 24/05/2026
RIP Richard Dawkins
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 20/05/2026
New spelling unlocked: “Mackhonda” [ma|.kho.nda] I live in the city of #Makhanda, in the local municipality of #Makana, both named for the same person. But spelled and pronounced differently. For reasons.
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 09/05/2026
Look at our pitch detector finding two pitches at the same time. Throat singing is crazy, man!
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
Anyone else routinely have autocorrect change their name to a different name? Thanks, Erin
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 07/05/2026
Sure you’ve heard of BIPOC, but what about AI POC? (I have no guess what UAT means or what a CMO does, and I’m categorically unwilling to google it because I don’t care)
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 07/05/2026
It’s raining out there, folks
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 07/05/2026
There is a water outage on campus due to *checks notes* heavy rainfall
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 04/05/2026
How many of the actual use cases for LLMs are things that weren’t really worth doing in the first place? I reckon it’s more than half, but maybe less than 90%.
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 04/05/2026
This is a crass but clear example of a thing I’m looking for a suitable label for. Ideas? Each shirt has an innocent message, but they juxtapose to make a different interpretation as a crude joke. The joke interpretation is available ifF the other part of the pair is in the available context.
A young man and young woman are wearing shirts. His says “I love to finger paint”, and hers says “I’m paint”
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 03/05/2026
Just like how we don’t have a word for “cryptocurrency bro who pivoted hard to AI”, even though every person here knows at least one of those Guys
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