As Josef Fruehwald pointed out, attitudes towards language often are proxy for the attitudes towards the people who speak those languages. This is a case of what John Earl Joseph termed “prestige transfer,” and it makes sense.

Science is objective, but scientists tend to like things they study; in a notable scene from the 2008 adaptation of Journey to the Center of the Earth, the characters emerge into a cave. One exclaims, “Diamonds!” another “Emeralds!” And then Trevor the geologist (played by Brendan Fraser) remarks, “Feldspar!” It’s natural for geologists to delight in rocks, and it’s natural for linguists to delight in languages.

I think it was an important move for linguists to divorce our field from aesthetics. There can be a science of taste, but science itself is not the arbiter of taste. It is not the place of linguists to judge accents or languages. Just as biologists study animals and plants that many people consider repugnant, linguists may study words and phrases that alarm or disgust people. That said, objectivity doesn’t mean you have to like everything.

One thing I have to mention at this point: It’s okay to not like an accent. This is a matter of taste. You like what you like, and you dislike what you dislike. If you think an accent is ugly, or lovely, that’s completely your prerogative. On the other hand, patterns of likes and dislikes can be telling. If all the accents you dislike are from cities, maybe you’ve got something against cities or the people who live in them.

In his post about Gawker’s “America’s Ugliest Accent” series, Joseph Fruehwald notes, “Predictably, the kinds of accents and languages which get dumped on the most, and get branded the ‘ugliest,’ always wind up being spoken by socially disadvantaged people.” And that’s really the ugliest thing about this Gawker gimmick: it’s pretty much the epitome of punching down.

Josef Fruehwald has some well-thought-out criticism of Gawker’s latest hate-fest, “America’s Ugliest Accent.” He concludes: “At the risk of coming off as a slacktivist, I’d encourage you all to be the change you want to see in the world, and say something nice about an accent today, even if it’s just your own.” I was actually thinking, as I looked at the Gawker bracket, how much I like some of these accents.

There were a couple of years when I was tremendously confused about pragmatics and information structure. I learned a lot from reading Knud Lambrecht’s 1994 book Information Structure and Sentence Form . And one of the most useful things I learned was that people use the word “topic” to mean several different things, some of which are mutually exclusive.

I’ve told you about one kind of category fight, accusing someone of a bait-and-switch and this week I came across an excellent example of another one. A blogger who goes by the alias of Doctor Nerdlove wants to protect the category of Socially Awkward Men from incursions by people who are just assholes. In this case, the Socially Awkward Men have established themselves as a disabled class and asked for accommodation.

Charles Fillmore died in February. I only met the man once, briefly, but his work has been a great inspiration to me over the years, particularly frame semantics. Last week I came across this sign above, advertising a bar. The word “screwdriver” is ambiguous, because it can mean a hand tool to turn screws, or a drink made with vodka and orange juice. Fillmore’s frames help us to explore and understand that ambiguity.

Slides from my contribution to the roundtable “Culture, Identity, Diversity: The Challenge of Multicultural Classes” at the Northeast Modern Languages Association, April 5, 2014.

Slides from my talk today at the Georgetown University Roundtable on Linguistics.