God I Hate Living In A Fascist State. I Wish I Felt Like I Had Literally Any Power But That's Kind Of

Fuck This Headache and Fuck elon musk Even More

reblog to give your headache to elon musk instead

I got an A- on my test, and I am thrilled

hank green's 2025 bingo card is gonna make me pass out

Total Eclipse of The Sun (Wilhelm Kranz, 1897)

Rebog

Whose idea was finals week? Their name needs to go on my gravestone. Why is this all happening in the same week??

This is a fantastic linguistics paper – the researcher observed the artificiality and social pressure imposed on kids when they're asked to produce language on the spot, so instead had them talk to a rabbit in a room with a tape recorder. He found that when talking organically, without an adult authority figure around, their speech was exponentially more sophisticated, socially fluid, and creative.

As someone in the twitter thread points out, this has obvious implications for situations in which cued language production is used in diagnosis e.g. for autism. I'd add that (while this particular paper's remit is limited to children) it should also make us think about situations where adults are pressured to speak by authority figures: court hearings, police encounters, benefit assessments, asylum interviews, etc. If the presence of power hampers your ability to advocate for yourself, these are all rigged propositions.

Anyway, you can read the whole piece here (taken from a talk on his research, so it's very readable):

https://betsysneller.github.io/pdfs/Labov1966-Rabbit.pdf

e: sorry, I should add the context that this is a language study situated in Hawaii in 1970 so there are also some very significant racial socio-linguistic politics discussed here that might be distressing to read about. I don't want to discount that aspect of the power dynamic studied here either.