I’ve taken a lot of foreign language classes in my life. At different times, I’ve studied German, French, Russian, Spanish, and Japanese. The teachers that I encountered in these classes, not to mention many of my colleagues now, frequently talk about the value of language learning and multilingualism. Among the many reasons we provide for why people should study languages is an economic advantage. Specifically, additional languages are supposed to serve as assets on the job market. Read more ›
So I guess it’s basketball season. For me, basketball is tied up with gender equity debates. I remember that what little discussion over gender equity took place at my high school largely centered around the boys’ and girls’ basketball teams. Read more ›
In two previous posts, I examined the New York Times’ (NYT) use of racial labels for African Americans and Latin@s (Latinos or Latinas) using NYT Labs’ tool, Chronicle. I found that the NYT has changed the labels they’ve used for these groups over time and also gone through periods of more or less intense discussion of African Americans and Latin@s. One lingering question that I have is how the NYT’s discussion of these groups compares to their discussion of the dominant racial group in the US: White/European Americans.
In a previous post, I examined the New York Times’ (NYT) use of racial labels for African Americans using NYT Labs’ tool Chronicle. In this post, I expand on that work and look at another racial minority in the US: Latin@s. Latin@s is my preferred label for the group, although I have rarely seen it used outside of certain academic circles. The @ symbol here attempts to represent both men (Latinos) and women (Latinas). Read more ›
Perhaps my least favorite thing about internet journalism is its ability to endlessly generate non-news by summarizing and linking to what people write on social media sites like reddit and Twitter.
This past week, a friend pointed me toward one of these non-news pieces. Apparently, a reddit user who allegedly works at a Chick-fil-a posted a picture of a sign his manager made banning a number of terms that the internet has dubbed ‘slang’. The over one hundred articles that have been written about this non-news have added a couple of important pieces of information to our understanding of the situation. First, none of the information in the reddit user’s post can actually be verified (and y’know why should journalists be bothered to verify the information they report on?). Second, people on the internet apparently have opinions about the sign, which appears below.
linguistic pulse 