Over the past few weeks, the George Zimmerman trial has been in the news. If you’re unfamiliar with it, I recommend checking out the extensive Wikipedia page on the case. To provide a brief summary, George Zimmerman is accused of…
After I wrote in my last post that “no homo” propagates a homophobic ideology, I encountered a number of people claiming that resistance to “no homo” stemmed from racism masquerading as a concern for gay rights. In particular Hakeem Muhammed writes, “While…
Recently, I’ve been engaged with a research project looking at the discourse of RateMyProfessors.com, a website where students rate and comment on their university or college instructors. I’ve been paying special attention to how students talk about instructors who are…
Last week, a man who most people have probably never heard of died: John Gumperz. He was, however, a very important discourse analyst and sociolinguist. His work has had an impact on my own thinking particularly about my approach to…
linguistic pulse 