To me academics are celebrities. The different disciplines correspond to the different genres of celebrity. Psychologists are movie stars, Philosophers are indie movie directors and producers, Biologists are . Anthropologists are Robert Downy Jr. Linguists are the types of stars that cross all genres, the movie star that releases a kick ass album, à la Zooey Deschanel. I feel like being tenured is the academic equivalent of having a star on Hollywood Boulevard. Completing your dissertation is like quitting your job at the twenty-four hour diner to move to Los Angeles.

People should treat them as such. If there were a supermarket tabloid that followed the lives of top academics, I would read it. If there were a trashy gossip show about them after the local news, I would watch it.

Would you?

A slightly less hilarious Chomsky video. Doesn’t the young Chomsky look rather like Stephen Colbert?

Ali G interviews Noam Chomsky!!!11!

Do you like Linguistics? Really? You like Linguistics, in and around your mouth? Oh really?

You must be a gay fish.

I have Course in General Linguistics. It’s old. What does Tumblr think?

I’m a Linguistics major at Pitt. I just started this blog like… yesterday or some shit so gimme some time to get used to it. It’s gonna be sweet though, and I know that all linguistics nerds will be mad into this shit.

BTW I’m not sure how I feel about Chomsky. I like the man but I feel like UG has yet to provide anything useful to the study of linguistics. And I think the proposed underlying structure (as I learned it as an undergrad anyways) has more to do with mathematical probability than the deeper psycholinguistics of speech production.

Also it’s totally not cool that any failure of the UG is explained away by a “trace” placeholder in the specifier position. That’s just messed up. That’s like saying that any time the stock market fails when economics predicts it shouldn’t there were goblins that no one can see who caused it to fail. Long story short I don’t like syntax. I am big on Morphology and Anthropological Linguistics, as well as Linguistic Anthropology. Lulz.

Which brings me to my final point, has there been any concrete scholarly work on internet slang or text messages? If not there should be. Maybe that will be my dissertation one day. Don’t steal it!

New subdiscipline of Linguistics: Animorphology. <The study of thought speak.>

“Noam Chomsky is to Linguistics what Einstein is to Physics: An old jew.”

-Mordeaux