Keyword censor fail: My husband posted his late mother’s doll house on a resale website. It got flagged as potential porn because the description contained the words mother, adult, child, doll, toy. Gotta do some creative rewording to both describe the 🏠 and evade the lame keyword flagging!

PSA: Put the laundry away after you fold it.

Your cat is obeying the prime directive: sit on a cat-ish sized surface on top of another surface. Extra points for rectangular surfaces, bags, and being half-on, half-off. Wyatt aims for a trifecta.

Aislinn Keogh @mandolinguist.bsky.social gave my new book to her mother to help her understand some of Aislinn's research area. Her mother is in a book-crochet group; she loved the book so much that she made a blanket (aka granny) square inspired by the book cover! This is so fantastic and touching!

Same, but with yawning.

Example of how comprehenders have time and capacity to predict producers' ends of utterances imgs.xkcd.com/comics/predi...
imgs.xkcd.com/comics/predi...

And you don’t need a spoon

Actually two cats, Akira! Here is Anna, Wyatt's frenemy.

Here is Wyatt, who got his name via a phonological reduction of "white cat"

This email from Google Calendar includes an AI summary that gets the temporal phrase attachments exactly backwards! Medication for Wyatt (the cat) is an all-day event in the calendar, and gym is at 3pm. Don't wanna go to the gym all day.

Day 3 recording the audiobook for my book. Thoughts: 1. No mind-wandering allowed! It's absolutely exhausting. 2. My speech errors are way more anticipatory than perseveratory, as in spontaneous speech. Yes, reading isn't "real" lang production, but it seems super useful for studying phon encoding.

John McWhorter discusses a creole named Kriol today, and also gives a shout out to my book! www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/o...

Took a picture of one of the beautiful mosaics at the WI capitol yesterday during the #StandUpForScience rally

One mission I have in retirement is making the reading education field more aware of adult sentence comprehension research, which is largely absent at the kid level. One small data point from this recent talk at Planet Word Museum maybe suggests some first steps of progress?

My new book, MORE THAN WORDS (Avery/PenguinRandomHouse) arrives 6/3! It tells the story of how we produce language & how talking shapes our lives in surprising ways. It's psyling for gen'l audiences! Info & preorders www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/724046/more-than-words-by-maryellen-macdonald-phd/

Maybe someone needs this for their stats/logic fallacy of the day collection? Could it be on the opening slide for undergraduate lecture? Cheers!

Is this the snarkiest acknowledgements ever? Saw this in an article the other day.

Yeah, you can see image of Karl Marx in the hummus swirl, so must be lefty.

Hi, all, I'm technically retired now, still working but w more of an emphasis on broadening the audience for psycholing. I'm giving a webinar this week for educators about the lexical/syntactic differences between speech & text & implications for kids' reading. Please pass on to educators, thanks!