About me and about this blog
I’m a Professor of Linguistics at UC San Diego, where I’ve been since I began as an Assistant Professor in 2000. My professional web page is here.
I started blogging in 2004, first writing occasionally for Language Log (still going strong) and then for my own open group blog, phonoloblog (now defunct). I also had a personal blog going for a little while, with the same title as this one, where I mostly cross-posted my Language Log posts to allow for comments (there weren’t any comments allowed on Language Log at the time). When the server hosting my two blogs was retired, I somehow managed to save phonoloblog but lose the other one. This is my effort to start over from scratch.
Inspired by Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s book Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, I’ve decided to use the CommentPress plugin for this blog, which allows paragraph-by-paragraph commenting on the side of the blog; I hope that anyone who bothers to comment on anything I post here will find this more useful than the threads-at-the-bottom-of-the-post kind of commenting that typifies most blogs.
The title of this blog is a line from Stewart Copeland’s “Serengeti Long Walk” from the movie soundtrack The Rhythmatist. I’ve always liked how it brings together how I feel as both a linguist and a drummer (sometimes, it seems, perpetually).