Turkey tacos are the most American Thanksgiving meal.

And also has an enormous ego and that’s what Epstein played to. It was Epstein’s role, the social glue who could bring together academics and politicians to play global policy games and also suss out which ones were amenable to participating in and supporting his primary pastime (raping girls).

Also, Millionaires Tax is very good. We had a vote on it at our town meeting the spring before it was on the ballot, and the millionaires there were Outraged that it applied to ALL income, not just wages. They did pipe down pretty quickly when they sensed the mood in the room.

I pay considerably less in property tax in Massachusetts than a colleague in Texas paid, and there are actually decent services. (There are towns in my county with much higher property taxes, but we are more Olde New England Frugal and also have to drop off our trash at the transfer station.)

And then kept moving the goalposts when it became evident that the previous version was untenable. So we went from the og “universal grammar” where there’s a discoverable in-born grammar that languages engage to “the minimalist program” where maybe it’s just hierarchical phrase structure.

I’m sure you did your best to disseminate the practice amongst your peers and didn’t just let it peter out.

The anthro program was supposedly 4 fields, but they were busily marginalizing the linguists once there was a linguistics independent department. But I got to take Anthro Ling Field Methods, which has been incredibly useful in life and work, which is data management, not anthro or linguistics.

just ignore most of the time so you can continue functioning.

Anyway, sports competitions are war, so is sex, war is a sport, etc.

It’s embedded in the language itself! One of the most effective observational exercises I did in a linguistics course was on generative metaphor, the root metaphors that each language has that are highly productive. English has three big ones: war, sports, and sex. Once you see, you can’t unsee,

And thinking about it, part of the problem was I double majored in anthropology, and cultural was *heavily* dominated by cultural materialism, so I had both Chomsky-stans and Marvin Harris-stans as profs.

This is good to know since I had to suffer through a lot of Chomsky in the 90s. I wonder how life might’ve been different without that. And it was only two classes out of whole-ass linguistics major, but it seemed like more.

(Also, the prof didn’t even read our final exams, everybody got the same score as their mid-term. Instead of writing a response to one of the exam questions, I went OFF on Chomsky, so maybe that was for the best.)

I have loathed him since having to take a Syntax course that was just generative grammar (or maybe it was “government & binding” at that point) so I never even attempted to engage any of his political stuff.