I’m a Douglas Hofstadter fan. I read his book I Am a Strange Loop years ago, and it remains one of my three favorite non-fiction books, period. I highly recommend it to anyone who is at all interested in the nature of consciousness. The cognitive scientist’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid…
In a recent Lyft Line, it surfaced that the other rider in the car with me also had a linguistics background. Our driver was a non-native English speaker (from his accent maybe Russian) – although his English was pretty fluent. As he was deciding whether to make a left turn at a chaotic, construction-clogged intersection,…
I love patterns. They’re how we learn and evolve, and they’re everywhere. Here’s a pattern for you. When I tell someone new that I do linguistics, their response often goes like this: Nod and/or smile and/or give small verbal acknowledgment. Slight awkward pause. “And what is linguistics again exactly?”[1] People know that linguistics has to…
