Language links 7/1/2019

Once a month, I share some of what I’ve been reading.

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Apologies for last month’s silence: I was mid-move. (I’m still mid-move, but more organized.)

While everyone’s talking about the Democratic candidates’ use of Spanish, Nelson Flores reminds us that there’s more to it. And then there’s the President’s mock Spanish, which fits some … let’s say familiar patterns.

Linguistic anthropologist Ben Blount has defined culture as "an information system that allows members of a society to interpret each other’s behavior…"

People who were raised and/or currently live in the culture of American racism understand how to encode and decode it. https://t.co/cWU9XfLXhG

— Dr. Suzanne Wertheim (@WorthwhileRandC) June 28, 2019

The Society for Linguistic Anthropology blog is up and running, looking at topics from transgression in comedy to racialization in Disney movies to the technology of transcripts.

Applied CA: don’t ask people if they “would like” to do something; ask if they “are willing” to.

“Facebook is what happens when you hand society over to engineers without any humanistic education. The only history it knows is the triumphant history of technological advancement, which made it easier for its products to be used in the incitement of genocide, as happened in Myanmar in 2018. It recognizes no other epistemological value than engagement numbers and therefore sells out its country to Russian agents for tiny sums of money that it doesn’t need. A world of diminished humanities is a technically adept world that is fundamentally stupid.” –Stephen Marche

I’m part of a group that has a new paper out in Journalism Practice. (Non-paywalled pre-print here.) And here’s my co-author Nsikan Akpan on how to spot bad science.