Category: Blog Posts

This time: two stories about the future, and how we might adapt.

The Boston Globe did a great big feature on alpha-gal syndrome, which is a tick-borne illness that causes an allergy to some meat and dairy. I initially read this story just as someone who lives in tick central, and who knows at least three people with alpha-gal. The language angle comes late in the story, with a photo of bakery labels on Martha’s Vineyard. There are handwritten signs that say “alpha-gal friendly.”

As someone who has been vegetarian since I was 15, it’s a weird feeling seeing these signs. Being vegetarian is fun when it’s a choice. Having to eat that way out of necessity, and having to be on the lookout for those labels, is…grim.

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Jay Caspian Kang has the best series of columns on generative AI and higher ed that I’ve read from any journalist. I say that despite (or perhaps because) I don’t totally agree with him. He’s much more curious about AI than I am. (If I were to write about AI, the piece would just be the word “No” and nothing else.)

His guiding question over the course of the series has been whether his 9-year old daughter will, or should, go to college after she graduates from high school. Should he keep contributing to her college fund? The highlights are his critical appraisal of AI-generated writing style and his collection of testimonies from professors at Cal State Chico, UNC, USF, UMass Amherst, UCLA, Cambellsville University, East Los Angeles College, Belmont University, University of Mount Saint Vincent, and Houston City College.

Yes, he also interviewed the shameless Hollis Robbins, but in my reading he gave her enough rope to hang herself with.

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Both of these stories also put me in mind of the “Word of the Year” contest that I do with my Language in Everyday Life class (modeled after the American Dialect Society’s annual WOTY event). Three years ago, my class voted “AI” as the word of the year. This year, is alpha-gal a contender?

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What else I’m reading: Samir Nadra’s and Jim Purdy’s article “Is genAI a good editor of academic writing?” (answer: not usually, especially when it comes to questions of capitalization). Also, some recent gems in Research in the Teaching of English: Anne Haas Dyson’s article on returning to teaching K-2 students, Robert Petrone, Adrianna González Ybarra’s article on youth re-learning their Native language, and an interview with Jonathan Rosa and Shirin Vossoughi.

This time: two stories that touch on multilingualism, one more melancholy and one more forward-thinking.

Junot Díaz writes about being a No Sabo kid in “When your mother tongue is your worst tongue.” Lots of memorable details around learning, and failing to learn, different language varieties.

“No sabo kids” is a common trope around heritage Spanish users who are not as fluent as they or their friends and family might like. “No sabo” is the way someone might try to say “I don’t know” in Spanish if they understood the regular pattern for Spanish verb conjugation but they didn’t know that the verb saber is irregular. Most Spanish users would say “No sé” instead. It’s like if someone said “I goed” in English, but 10x more jarring. Saying “no sabo kid” is a way to make fun of someone who knows some Spanish but not enough.

It’s notable to me that this essay appears on his Substack. I approach Díaz as someone who loved Drown, didn’t like Oscar Wao, didn’t finish This is How You Lose Her, wasn’t sure what to think of “The Silence,” and was ultimately persuaded by my former colleague Maia Gil’Adi that his work is worth critically engaging, even if just to examine why he has such a central place in American letters. I’m glad this new essay exists. I’m also kind of happy it’s not in the New Yorker.

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Last month, the Māori Queen visited the British royal family in London.

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When I first saw this post of Prince William with Queen Te Arikinui Kuini Nga wai hono i te po, I was a bit surprised to see the two monarchs being so friendly, and to see the British Royal Family spelling her name with such care. There’s a long history of British disrespect toward Māori land, language, and people. Even if the Queen hadn’t majored in Māori in college, she would be well aware.

At the same time, she was there to highlight economic futures more than sad histories. As her team posted in advance, the aim was to “celebrate rangatahi [young] entrepreneurs supported by the King’s Trust Aotearoa New Zealand.” Paging Monica Heller, Alexandre Duchêne, Susan Gal, and others on “pride and profit.”

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Yes, monarchs are going to monarch, but I think there’s more going on. It’s interesting that her content emphasizes the young entrepreneurs who won grants (pride + profit), whereas his focuses on culture and history alone (pride). She’s focusing on the future, on technology, on small businesses; he’s focused the past. Her approach also reminds me of Cindy Tekobbe’s great book Indigenous Voices in Digital Spaces.

Needless to say, the comment section on Prince William’s post is a dumpster fire. An Indigenous person can be as capitalist and royalist as possible, and it’s still never enough.

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What I’m reading: Amity Gaige’s Heartwood for fun. A lot of James Tollefson for an article I’m working on. Today, his 1986 article “Language policy and the radical left in the Philippines: The New People’s Army and its antecedents.”

I wanted to start this blog as a way to round up all the interesting articles, interviews, and media about language that I come across. These are the links I save for my research, teaching, and just everyday conversations with my family and friends.

I lean toward stories that a) show that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to language and b) attend to questions of who benefits and who gets to decide. I mostly read and listen to US media.

This time: exclamation points and shibboleths.

A federal judge uses a lot of exclamation points in his opinions, much to Trump’s chagrin. Jim Puzzanghera reports in the Boston Globe: “US District Judge Richard J. Leon is a plainspoken South Natick native known in legal circles for sprinkling his rulings with exclamation points — an idiosyncrasy now getting national attention.” The article cites several instances where Leon uses 10+, 20+ exclamation points in a single document. Interestingly, Leon is politically conservative.

Exclamation points are something that writers are often advised against for being unprofessional and/or feminine, but Puzzanghera shows another way. He is at the top of his field.

The Boston Globe’s headline writer even adopts Puzzanghera’s style in the print edition: “Meet the judicial thorn in president’s side!!!”

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In a podcast interview, comedian Wil Sylvince discussed his family’s history of leaving Haiti as refugees. When considering where to flee, Sylvince explains to host Trevor Noah that the Dominican Republic was “out of the question for my dad,” because Dominicans were so “anti-Haitian.” Sylvince goes on to describe the shibboleth that gave name to the 1937 Parsley Massacre, in which the Dominican military killed Haitian civilians: “There was a word that if you couldn’t say…they would come up to dark-skinned people in the Dominican Republic and say, ‘perelil, pereril’ [parsley] something where the tongue rolls. Haitians can’t roll their tongues.” This NPR piece from a few years ago has context on this shibboleth.

I also couldn’t help but appreciate the moment when Sylvince starts to say that his dad considered moving to Boston in the 1960s, but decided against it because Boston was racist, and host Noah says, “You don’t have to explain.”

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What I’m reading: I just finished my friend Kristen Stern’s new book Performative Authorship: Contemporary Francophone African Novelists Creating Meaning Inside and Outside the Book. I’m about to order Corinne Mitsuye Sugino’s Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans, after seeing her book panel at the Rhetoric Society of America. Douglas Stuart’s John of John for fun.