Podcast Appearance: "In a Manner of Speaking"

Hello, happy to report that I have made another appearance on Paul Meier's fantastic podcast, "In a Manner Of Speaking"! Paul, Cameron and I discussed British and American accents in popular music, which is a topic that I've been interested in discussing for a long time. I hope you'll listen and enjoy the podcast; we had a tremendous time making it.

Blog Update Schedule

Since September 2017, I've been updating posts to the site monthly. This was a way for me to both continue making content for the site to keep it on people's minds, and a deadline that would force me to work on content so things didn't slip out of my own mind. I used to be able to do these updates monthly with the occasional "no update this month" post.

My life has changed substantially in 7 years. I don't have the same free time that I used to. I've also felt that I've exhausted a lot of the "easy" material to write about in the past, and what I do still want to write about is very challenging. I have a Dialect Dissection I've been working on for years that involves analyzing hundreds of hours of audio. I want to complete these projects! However, I don't have the same amount of light material that I used to have that I could publish monthly. It would distract me from these projects to have to come up with something random to publish monthly. And this has led to the endless stream of "no update this month" posts, which I feel bad about posting and must be uninteresting to readers, who have no reason to care about how busy my personal life is or isn't.

Moreover, while I take a lot of pride in this site, it does not make me any money. This sounds silly, but it's a serious consideration on what I spend my time on. Time spent on this is time that could be spent on other things that do reward me monetarily. I've considered starting a Patreon or something like that for two reasons - one being financial (more money = more incentive to work, more books and articles I can buy, maybe even people I could hire to assist with some of the most tedious work), and the other being that having patreon exclusive material could give new material and leads to investigate from people who are also interested in linguistic analysis and who like what I've done on the site. I don't know if there's enough interest for a Patreon at the moment, and I would need to think seriously about how to make it worth patrons' while. I don't want to make a commitment I cannot meet.

As such, for the time being, I've decided to lift the restriction on this blog that I will be publishing monthly. I'm happy to have been able to do it for 7 years, but things have changed, and I feel this restriction is more a source of stress in my life than it is something that inspires me to focus on the site. I will update when I have a new article, or when I have observations, or some major progress on a big project. I hope to break the mold in my head that tells me that I should only post "serious" observations, as that has been something that slows me down tremendously when writing. I still think a lot about linguistics, but I feel that some of the articles on here have set a big standard for me that is difficult to continually meet. I would like to throw that off somehow and write even observations that are very small, as that is how you build up to big articles.

Thank you to everyone who has visited the site so far. I plan to continue writing for Ace Linguist until I just have no ideas anymore, and thankfully I still have many ideas. :)

What I'm Reading Now

I'd been hoping to launch a better tool for lexical set analysis this month, but it didn't work out. Hopefully for September.

I finished reading "Language vs Reality" by Nick Enfield, and I'd recommend it for anyone interested in the topic of limitations of language. I was especially interested by the idea that the purpose of language is to create different Schelling points (ways to coordinate without agreeing beforehand). By this point of view, the lack of a pre-determined word means there is no pre-existing Schelling point.

This may explain certain things - why do people coin words and borrow words when we could just use phrases to describe them? Because it's much easier if we already know the word - it's an agreed upon coordination point.

I'm also reading "The Language of Food" by Dan Jurafsky and will let you know how that one is too.