Good Xkcd Today

hello! do u have any linguistic podcasts/lectures/articles to recommend ? if yes will send a mental daisy bouquet as a thank u 👩‍🚀👩‍🚀

yes i do<3!! here are some articles/books/short stories ive enjoyed in recent memory :’)

Fruits We'll Never Taste, Languages We'll Never Hear: The Need for Needless Complexity -- a favorite essay of mine <3

Pink Trombone -- this is an interactive mouth sounds simulator; you can click and drag to adjust different parts of the supralaryngeal vocal tract as well as pitch and hear how it affects the sound :+) 

The Imitation of Consciousness: On the Present and Future of Natural Language Processing -- REALLY good 

Alberto Bruzos (2021): ‘Language hackers’: YouTube polyglots as representative figures of language learning in late capitalism, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, DOI: 10.1080/13670050.2021.1955498 

To Speak of the Sea in Irish

The Library of Babel -- short story by borges, really fucking good 

Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red & Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée -- these last two books are maybe the least directly related to linguistics but they engage with language in ways that. Are . <33333 

Open Access Resources on Language and Linguistics

Poems by Richard Kenney (if you are interested in “language origins, the cognitive basis of poetic forms, magical reasoning, and the Darwinian lives of subliterary species such as jokes, riddles, proverbs, charms, spells, nursery rhymes and weather-saws”)

&& @ everyone do add on if you have any u want to share !!  

Back when I used to walk around my college in a corduroy blazer and slacks I didn't call it "dark academia" I called it "professor drag" and the purpose was to smoothly walk into parts of campus I wasn't supposed to access

🎀🌸🗒💻💕📖

person w adhd experiencing symptoms of adhd: why the fuck can’t I do this thing . I wish there was some explanation for this

i finished reading your story and i must say that, while it's alright, there's so many plot holes because the characters made irrational decisions and didn't think logically 100% of the time. consider fixing this next time please

*copying the thai alphabet* ooh loopies hell yeah this is so cool

*reading typed thai* where are all the loopies

i know it's been literal years but the surreality of seeing rachel from suits on the news all the time hits me anew every time i see her

it’s always amazing to watch adults discover how much changes when they don’t treat their perspective as the default human experience.

example: it’s been well-documented for a long time that urban spaces are more dangerous for kids than they are for adults. but common wisdom has generally held that that’s just the way things are because kids are inherently vulnerable. and because policymakers keep operating under the assumption that there’s nothing that can be done about kids being less safe in cities because that’s just how kids are, the danger they face in public spaces like streets and parks has been used as an excuse for marginalizing and regulating them out of those spaces.

(by the same people who then complain about kids being inside playing video games, I’d imagine.)

thing is, there’s no real evidence to suggest that kids are inescapably less safe in urban spaces. the causality goes the other way: urban spaces are safer for adults because they are designed for adults, by adults, with an adult perspective and experience in mind.

the city of Oslo, Norway recently started a campaign to take a new perspective on urban planning. quite literally a new perspective: they started looking at the city from 95 centimeters off the ground - the height of the average three-year-old. one of the first things they found was that, from that height, there were a lot of hedges blocking the view of roads from sidewalks. in other words, adults could see traffic, but kids couldn’t.

pop quiz: what does not being able to see a car coming do to the safety of pedestrians? the city of Oslo was literally designed to make it more dangerous for kids to cross the street. and no one realized it until they took the laughably small but simultaneously really significant step of…lowering their eye level by a couple of feet.

so Oslo started trimming all its decorative roadside vegetation down. and what was the first result they saw? kids in Oslo are walking to school more, because it’s safer to do it now. and that, as it turns out, reduces traffic around schools, making it even safer to walk to school.

so yeah. this is the kind of important real-life impact all that silly social justice nonsense of recognizing adultism as a massive structural problem can have. stop ignoring 1/3 of the population when you’re deciding what the world should look like and the world gets better a little bit at a time.