Michael Erard

@michaelerard

Writer, linguist. Pop books about speech errors & disfluencies (amzn.to/40GCOM3); hyperpolyglots (bit.ly/3AXLtAe); first & last words (bit.ly/4kN0PKa). NEW: A collection, THE LANGUAGE BEAT (Apple: Google:

1.798 Folgt3.124 Follower5.994 Posts

Bluesky

Ist das dein Profil?Übernimm es — dann gehört dir michaelerard.dirty.social.Profil übernehmen

Michael Erard@michaelerard· 7d

At the local supermarket here in Austin

A gray windowless door is closed. On it hangs a sign that reads “warning: office armed”

Michael Erard@michaelerard· 9d

A reminder that THE LANGUAGE BEAT (a curated collection of my language journalism 2000-2024) is available as an e-book on THREE platforms: On Amazon: amzn.to/4aokz3c On Google Play: bit.ly/4wARdY2 On Apple: apple.co/4fK71SA

Michael Erard@michaelerard· 10d

For your semantics class next semester. You’re welcome.

Michael Erard@michaelerard· 13d

this is a A) social experiment B) grift C) seed of a conspiracy theory

Michael Erard@michaelerard· 13d

To the contrary, um marks the battle against entropy

Michael Erard@michaelerard· 14d

And another

Michael Erard@michaelerard· 14d

Another language bit

Michael Erard@michaelerard· 14d

One of the mentions in the Federal Writers' Project interviews

excerpt from a typescript interview. "there's a many different people, talkin' different speech, can't understand English ver well, we have to have us union interpreters for lots of our members, but that don't make us no mind, they all friends in the union, even if they can't say nothin' except 'Brother', an' shake hands."

Michael Erard@michaelerard· 16d

@beltpublishing.bsky.social @atrubek.bsky.social

A book on a counter. The book is American Made: Stories of Work from the WPA

Michael Erard@michaelerard· 18d

@fliglman.bsky.social i think we briefly discussed a take like this on language

Michael Erard@michaelerard· 20d

Why is this guy smiling? Because it’s 1995, smartphones don’t exist, he has to ride his bike up to the normal college to check his email, and he writes all day.

Photo of a young white man with dark hair, tanned, wearing sunglasses, leaning on a barbecue grill, with a stone cottage on the background.

Michael Erard@michaelerard· 20d

In the wild! South Portland, Maine library cc @novicsara.bsky.social

A book cover, yellow. Mother Tongue by Sara Nović

Michael Erard@michaelerard· Jul 12

Myriad forces are at play here, and the changing linguistic and cognitive functioning of an ill and dying person is only the beginning. Layered atop them and transforming that functioning are also ideas, beliefs, and practices in any given community about the nature of the dying person and prevailing ideas about mortality, death, and dying; how family members, medical staff, other caregivers, religious guides, and others perform their social roles and meet social expectations; how people will have been socialized to be linguistically agentful aging and dying people through cultural attitudes, religious beliefs, popular media, and perhaps even personal experiences at deathbeds and how they navigate the inability to enact those cultural models; and the affordances of the physical and social environments in which people die (environments which are themselves embedded in, and shaped by, ideologies of life, death, and medical care). The approach begins with the language that dying people produce but is also attentive to how those productions are interpreted and why as well as the purposes to which participants put this language. Understanding this territory would be the project of language de-socialization.

Michael Erard@michaelerard· Jul 12

There's a lot of discourse on here (both serious and jokey) around who talked to an incapacitated, maybe dying person, so I re-introduce my 2025 paper on "language de-socialization."

My candidate for such a lens is a concept called “language de-socialization.” This term refers to any process through which the declining social and interactive capacities of a person at the end of life, as well as the loss of personhood as it is defined in a particular cultural setting, are dealt with, guided, interpreted, responded, and adapted to through linguistic processes by varied social actors. This concept is the end-of-the-lifespan corollary to “language socialization,” which has been an enormously influential theory of language development in social and cultural context developed over the last 35 years by linguistic anthropologists, applied linguists, sociolinguists, and others (for overviews, see Garrett and Baquedano-López Reference Garrett and Baquedano-López2002; Berman and

Michael Erard@michaelerard· Jul 10

Three weeks later, my Scrivener file looks like this, and that's on top of 8 interviews. For this piece I'll post a bibliography, h/t @jetjocko.bsky.social for the idea.

Michael Erard@michaelerard· Jul 1

Here’s the table of contents. Piece are arranged by theme, not chronologically, and themes are introduced briefly in each section.

Praise
Introduction
Table of Linguistic Contents

Part I. Beginnings
1. Writing and opacity (Texas Observer, 1995)
2. If you asked about my students (North American Review, 1996)
3. Winged words (Lingua Franca, 2000)

Part II. Belonging
4. Welcome to the y'all house (Lingua Franca, 2001)
5. What it means to talk like a Mainer (Down East, 2015)
6. 'So': The anatomy of a scientific staple (Seed, 2008)
7. What's in a name? (Science, 2015)
8. Does this look like a man who would name his boat Princess? (Down East, 2014)
9. Swizzle me this (The Morning News, 2013)
10. Like a lead balloon (The Morning News, 2013)

Part III. Learning and Community
11. Street talk (Aeon, 2016)
12. The small island where 500 people speak nine different languages (The Atlantic, 2018)
13. So you want to learn an endangered language (Psychology Today, 2012)
14. Fragments of English (Texas Observer, 2006)
15. ISIL is using the language barriers within its ranks to evolve jihad beyond Arabic (Quartz, 2016)
16. ISIL isn’t merely tolerant of people who speak languages besides Arabic; it needs them (Quartz, 2016)
17. ISIL demands many things of its top commanders, but good Arabic isn’t always one[…]”

20. A national language czar (The New Republic, 2005)
21. Language matters (Legal Affairs, 2002)
22. Immigration by shibboleth (Legal Affairs, 2003)
23. Frame wars (Texas Observer, 2004)
24. Pete Buttigieg's language magic is textbook polyglot mythmaking (The Atlantic, 2019)
25. Speaking in tongues (Unpublished, 2006)
26. The king of closed captions (The Atlantic Monthly, 2001)
27. W: A Usage Guide (Texas Observer, 2001)

Part V. Doing Linguistics

28. Sillyspeak: The art of making a fake language (Vice, 2015)
29. The linguist's tents will be forgotten (Unpublished, 2019, 2025)
30. Discovering China's linguistic riches (Science, 2009)
31. Holy grammar, Inc. (Search, 2009)
32. Studying an emerging sign language won't kill it (Mosaic Science, 2019)
33. The life and times of "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" (Southwest Review, 2010)
34. Metaphor and myth (Texas Observer, 2001)

Part VI. Controversies and Advances

35. Secret military test, coming soon to your Spanish class (Nautilus, 2014)
36. Slips of the tongue serve as windows into the mind (Science, 2007)
37. Language puzzle (Science, 2016)
38. Words from far-flung tribes (Globe and Mail, 2008)
39. Stutter, memory (Lingua Franca, 2001)
40. The deep roots of writing (Aeon, 2018)
41. Why sign-language gloves don’t help deaf people (The Atlantic, 2017)

Part VII Doing Journalism
43. The medium (The Morning News, 2014)
44. Pitch: A language czar for America
45. Pitch: An innovative Chinese school
46. Pitch: Post 9/11 responses to building US language capacity

47 Pitch: The story of Ethnologue and the discovery of languages
48 Pitch: China's newest export, Chinese
49 Pitch: Sign language Bible translations
50 The last word (Undark, 2016)
51 What happened to Schwa Fire? and the state of the language beat
Part VIII. The New and The Old
52 A cultural history of first words (Paris Review, 2019)
53 A sign language is born (Al-Jazeera America, 2014)
54 What people actually say before they die (The Atlantic, 2019)
About the author
Acknowledgements
Other language journalism work

Michael Erard@michaelerard· Jun 26

my article on gen AI and language change will be nothing like this crap

Michael Erard@michaelerard· Jun 24

I‘m happy to say: I hired a guy for the cover of my next book, and his work was incredible.

Michael Erard@michaelerard· Jun 24

Michael Erard@michaelerard· Jun 19

So much for applied ethics shrug emoji

Text of a notification that I had unsubscribed from the ethics Substack

Michael Erard@michaelerard· Jun 16

@ykomska.bsky.social

Three colanders in a sink filled with dark red cherries

Michael Erard@michaelerard· Jun 2

Readers of Bluesky, the cover of my next book. #langsky #booksky #language #journalism

at the top, in a serif font, The Language Beat, Michael Erard, and at the bottom the subtitle, Essays and Reporting on Language and Life, with a blurb from Onze Taal. In between is a sea of blue quotation marks atop which rides a small black and white boat

Michael Erard@michaelerard· Jun 1

The US is increasingly weird to me…example: this autonomous robot roaming the Stop & Shop aisles “looking for spills” and presumably doing other AI enabled surveillance. That simping smile tells you just how dangerous it is

A tall gray column with large googly eyes at the top stands in a supermarket aisle

Michael Erard@michaelerard· May 23

Michael Erard@michaelerard· May 18

I think of this line by Lorraine Daston in the LRB all the time

We badly need a grown-up way of talking about scientific uncertainty, uncontaminated by a long philosophical and theological tradition in which truths worthy of the name must be certain and eternal.

Michael Erard@michaelerard· May 16

Always be becoming ungovernable

In the foreground of a green lawn, two dandelion blossoms. The background, rows of white crosses of a cemetery

Michael Erard@michaelerard· May 4

This is the alcohol free beer section at my unremarkable local Dutch supermarket. Every major brand and brewery (and a lot of minor ones) has an option, and I know there’s even more out there.

Michael Erard@michaelerard· Apr 28

Maybe when Sora folded, Duolingo decided they should go with real people instead of AI actors? Anyway, I got this last week from an ad agency casting for a video series on slang. (They weren't recruiting me but asking me to pass it on.) Or maybe it was a scam. (I did receive it twice.)

Seeking English Language Experts for Duolingo Video: Slang Decoded

We’re casting a language expert for an upcoming episode of Slang Decoded, a Duolingo video series exploring how slang varies across the world—we recently completed an episode on Spanish slang.

In each episode, participants from different English-speaking regions—such as the UK, Australia, and the US—come together in a studio to compare the slang they grew up with. As various objects and scenarios appear on screen, each person shares the terms they use back home, often revealing funny, surprising, and unexpected differences. Our expert plays a key role throughout, reacting to the responses, breaking down meanings, and explaining where these expressions come from, how they’ve evolved, and what they reveal about culture and geography.

Upcoming episode topics include:

Gen Z slang

Food slang

Going-out slang

Michael Erard@michaelerard· Apr 24

discuss

a bag of chips on a metal shelf. the background of the bag is blue. on it next to a picture of a chip are the words, in white font, "cool American flavour," where "flavour" has a British spelling

Michael Erard@michaelerard· Mar 31

i mean sure, why not