littorally

Invertebrates can end up like a girl
Luckless in amber, wounded round a pearl
Neither at home in water nor awing
Some fly into a swatter, some a ring

LAEL Department 40th Birthday Rap

Before one department all others pale
It's 40 years old, and its name is LAEL
In the old school days you had to walk from town
You got hit with a cane if you forgot your gown

Since then we've grown, now we have all flavors
So we don't understand each others' papers
We got CDA and we got pragmatics
And clever students who don't know mathematics
We got literacy and SLA
And a little bit of corpus somewhere far away

But we don't care about subfield labels
We know what matters and it's called league tables
We're gonna catch up, we're gonna grab the gold
Although linguistics at Cambridge is 900 years old

We love Vic, Vicky, Becky, Elaine and Marjorie
But the Phonetics Lab looks like a doctor's surgery
They have a torture cage with which they'll surround you
Then they'll mold your palate and they'll ultrasound you

Speaking of ultrasound, everybody's having babies
Rescuing kittens, and Winston's got rabies
Still there's only one thing that we really fear
But Alison comes only twice a year

Now if this rap isn't quite what you expected
Don't forget when I applied I was initially rejected
But I'm so glad that they changed their mind
Even though I left America far behind

Of course I miss my right to bear arms
But an English life has different charms
We got the Lake District, the Trough of Bowland
The Duchess of Cambridge, and Ronnie Rowlands

So the question is, or maybe I already know
Como dicen Los Clash, should I stay or should I go?

video of rap during break in song

To tweet, or not to tweet?

People have had to choose between different forms of communication ever since the first cavewoman asked herself, will he know what I mean if I paint two horses on the living room wall, or should I just tell him how I feel? Later times brought new dilemmas: hieroglyphs or demotic? Latin or the vernacular? Telegram or phone call? Email or text? And recently, Facebook or Twitter?

As a devoted Facebook user since February 13, 2005 (according to Timeline), and a newcomer to Twitter - not counting a period in 2009 when I had a locked profile and mainly exchanged messages with two friends who no longer talk to me in any medium - I began with a strong bias. And while I started to learn a lot from celebrities, stripper intellectuals, and brilliantly offensive amateur comedians, in terms of my own self-expression it seemed that Facebook still offered everything Twitter did, and more. Fine, no one appreciated the poke as much as I did, but I still wondered why anyone would want to restrict themselves to 140 characters (and less privacy) when they didn't have to?

I'm still not completely sure (and I still prefer Facebook), but I've come to understand that Facebook and Twitter are like men and women, or meth and coke: some people do one, some people do both, and some people do neither - and these are all legitimate choices. Some find Facebook to be "a shitty boring claustrophobic dollhouse", while others consider Tweets no more than "bursts of mental flatus". I can understand both comments, but I continue to enjoy both platforms.

But what to post on Twitter and what to post on Facebook? That is the question - even if no one answered it when I posted it on-line. The easy cop-out is to have your Twitter posts (or some of them) copied automatically to Facebook. This can be obnoxious because people who read you in both places will have to read it twice, and it's inefficient because any comments or discussion will end up split in half. But if your friends and followers don't overlap that much, it can be OK.

If your friends and followers don't overlap much, though, it's probably less likely that you want to say the exact same thing to both groups. So you can make a choice and tell either your friends or your followers what you want to tell them, or what they want to hear, or post wherever you think you'll get more comments, or likes/faves/retweets, or followers, or pokes, or piss the most people off, or whatever you feel compelled to do.

Having spent a lot of time in a small, friendly academic subfield, my circles overlap a lot. So I asked a colleague (and friend and Facebook friend and Twitter follower) how he resolves this dilemma himself. He said that on Twitter, he's more careful about what he says - it's public, after all - and for posts that might cause mild offense, he considers Facebook. I thought that was a brilliant solution.

Then I realized I had been pursuing the opposite strategy. Or my version of the opposite: if I was quite sure that something would be widely (or deeply) offensive, I'd deliberately choose Twitter. For the rest of my opinions, most of which are somewhat offensive too? Facebook. This way, I thought that two sides of my personality could find separate outlets. I was creating separate personas out of my language use, just like I had been taught. But on second thought, wouldn't my friends who also follow me think I was even more of an asshole than they already probably did?

Maybe I should just post to Google Plus. Or go paint some horses.

remainder

'twould be a hyperbolic crime
to say i miss you all the time
since quitting so quickly, if not too soon
i've only pined on one full moon
and i don't need you anymore
between, say, half past three and four
a.m. at least - tuesday's aren't bad
if mercury's in retrograde
nor will you find me sitting home
whene'er the date's a palindrome
how can i claim i often grieve
when every leap year brings reprieve?
but pity me the moments, if any be left over
for the redundant love left in a quondam lover

occultation

The dimmest constellation in the sky
Looked brighter for two nights, no one knew why
She makes the Penn astronomers look silly
Who could see stars, with Venus in West Philly?

up to eleven

If I were old and heavy-hearted,
this young romance could not have started,
making October into spring,
and me able to anything.
I don't know, an adult might say,
you well enough to feel this way,
nor does mere pilot data prove
a trend, long looked for, up to love.
But if it's immaturity
to want what I can barely see -
your heat, your hipbones, your shy smiles,
set off by clothes, a hundred miles,
a baker's decade flecked with rage -
then I don't plan to act my age.

trying to listen to fleetwood mac on the 7 train

sometimes the sun shines anyway
i thought i wanted rain
suddenly mariachis play
la bamba, break the chain