How They Do It In Linguistics

by James Crippen

Sociolinguists do it with variety.
Phonologists do it with deviation.
Professors do it for tenure.
Psycholinguists do it with reliable effects.
Theorists do it in armchairs.
Field linguists do it with the whole village.
Cognitivists do it with mental imagery.
Acquisitionists do it with families.
L2 acquisitionists do it in classrooms.
Computationalists do it with corpora.
Generativists do it with bindings. (Recursively!)
Typologists do it with everyone.
Comparativists do it the longest.
Creolists do it in colonies.
Grad students do it for the experience.
Phoneticians do it in booths.
Comparativists do it over millennia.
Syntacticians do it with trees.
Semanticians do it with meaning.
Morphologists do it in pieces.
Neurolinguists do it with magnets.
Documentationists do it for the record.
OTists do it with strict domination.
Evolutionists do it with primates.
Archivists make it last forever.
Experimentalists do it repeatedly.
Speech pathologists do it oddly.
Revitalizationists do it with elders.
Linguistic anthropologists do it in context.
Austronesianists do it over half the world.
Polynesianists do it in outriggers.
Grant reviewers only read about it.

masq

[] cannot put this together
the pieces have become entangled
and impossible to be delivered whole

lesser ones than [] must continue
make the journey and find their
own path

gratitude would be incomplete
if expressed without regret
so let it not go unsaid
that this should not have been

plain and plaintive
this voice rests on a melody
moving pensively
across the dissonance
that distances us

sentimentally,
this is not just a haiku
- a revelation!

Zinedine Zidane

Zinedine Zidane, the great french algerian soccer star.  perhaps the greatest soccer player of all time.

even if you don't care to watch this whole video, watch the first 34 seconds.  

the move he executes between 0:24 and 0:33 is literally awe-inspiring.  it's like ballet.

Experiment

The Walk

From the Daily Alta California, Thursday November 20, 1890

This is my great great grandmother and her fine husband, the diplomat

Suncage: Plein Aire

Suncage (aka Jon Hall) is a Plein Aire God.
~m

time for electoral reform??? sheesh

Joe Pesci IS a pluralist?

Visibility

The visibility of the visible cannot by definition be seen “called the unbeseen, as one speaks of the unbeknownst. Memory or not and forgetting as memory and without memory.

Derrida

La Haine

So, this is a few clips from the 1995 French film La Haine, about a day in the life of three young men--one Algerian, one Jewish, and one Cameroonian(?)--in a poor neighbourhood in Paris, the day after a series of violent anti-police riots have taken place.

WARNING: Don't watch if you plan to ever see the movie.

The narration at the beginning and end is this: "There's a story about a guy who fell from the 50th floor of a building, and on the way down, he re-assured himself at each floor by saying, over and over: So far, everything's fine. So far, everything's fine. So far, everything's fine. But it's not that fall that matters--it's how you land."

At the end, he repeats the same narration, except he says: "There was a society that was falling..."

White Board Adventures, ongoing...

in this episode, sinister things are happening:

what does k-man mean in striking these various poses--first as a nerd in glasses, fused with a bicycle; then as a voyeur or victim, shower style, a la "Psycho"; and thirdly (not pictured) as a curious and good-natured cat, trapped in her room by terrorists?

we see madame sanchez wearing a moustache and appearing in the character of emilio esteban-- why does he/she stand in the shower, hiding behind the curtain?

loco, you will note, appears here as a shag-haired hippie.

and where is L-Blizzard, our man in Montreal?

only a series of cryptic messages give hints that he may have even been here at all.

odd poems, configurations, statements.

(and all of this, of course, was before the famous incident in which Loco rescued him from the laundry room floor, paralyzed and sweating with back spasms, and poured him a hot bath.)

but what about the rest of this, all these other things?

robinets? faucets? extermination? gilles? vendredi?

a sculpture is a sculpture? marmalade is marmalade? but a sculpture of marmalade is a sculpture but it is not marmalade?

what does any of this mean? all of it seems so random, so savage and unconnected. what's holding this together?

further study is needed. please stand by.

And he was alone in the wilderness

Trees and JQ Bridge, almost done...

So, I've now amassed about 1800 pics for this series, which will soon become a video, and will of course be posted here to reward you for your patience.

I'm just waiting for it to snow, and then I will have completed a full year-long, day-by-day cycle of snow, melt, spring, summer, fall, and snow again.

Seekling

a perch atop a leafless pinnacle
pale blue air wind
blowing cool in hazy sunlight

who has left, who remains
to stay or go, we wonder
but the question remains
because there is always an elsewhere

and yet you wonder why
this hasn't turned out like you wanted
and you wonder where
you will find the way out
and you didn't realize
that the answer is Nowhere

portrait

Survival

Aggressive I must have you
Solidarity I must have you

Survival I must have you
Enjoyment I must have you

I must have you

Frankfurt on the Rhine

Teaching Religion in the Schools