Linguistics PhD oral exam?
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Mouseover title: "In the final round, they pelt you with eggcorns."
The Aftercomic:
Mouseover title: "The worst thing is how every time you yell at it, it acknowledges your suffering and tries to hug you."
The Aftercomic:
There may be a connection, in that quite a few recent Linguistics PhDs are taking jobs focused on AI alignment…
Laura Morland said,
July 24, 2026 @ 6:49 pm
"Nothing is alien to my affection"? I think we are already there. The sycophantic praise the AI bots heap on us will soon make us incapable of interacting with real humans who won't claim to find our ideas so "original" or "appealing."
The following sentence (from a NYTimes article earlier this week) struck me:
"Chatbots can execute tasks without using the word “I,” sending emojis or claiming to have feelings."
After zeroing out their ambition, programmers should work on this objective next.
(However, they won't be motivated to do so, because after we flesh-and-blood folk all become addicted to our chatbots, their human overlords will monetize those "feelings.")
mozzerb said,
July 25, 2026 @ 1:41 pm
Erm, something could be literally figurative, surely? "This isn't just something that can be roughly described as figurative, that's exactly what it's intended to be!" :)
Christian Weisgerber said,
July 25, 2026 @ 4:54 pm
The real test of your dedication to descriptivism comes when linguistic terms are used with different meanings. Like "passive".
Jonathan Smith said,
July 25, 2026 @ 7:38 pm
To be prescriptive, I don't think "descriptivism" is / should be a thing as there isn't really such a dogma(s) opposite prescriptivism. An approach/study is just "descriptive".
Michael Watts said,
July 27, 2026 @ 3:19 pm
There seems to be an implication in the comic that "February" might have some pronunciation that differs from /febjuɛɹi/.
Michael Watts said,
July 27, 2026 @ 3:20 pm
/fɛbjuɛɹi/, that is.
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
July 28, 2026 @ 6:58 am
M.W.,
Don't most people make the ol' college try at getting out the first "r" in February? It's not exactly a tongue twister: /feb-bru-ær-i/.
David Marjanović said,
July 28, 2026 @ 8:22 am
/ˈfɛbɹəɹi/ does seem to be pretty widespread, at least outside the US. Likewise /ˈlɑɪ̯bɹəɹi/.
While I'm at it: sometimes you'll find the claim, in pretty authoritative-sounding sources, that the Austrian forms of Januar and Februar are Jänner and Feber. Jänner is indeed practically universal in Austria, but Feber is very rare.
J.W. Brewer said,
July 28, 2026 @ 10:21 am
@Benjamin E.O.: Perhaps someone has good data on the percentage shares of various options in the February-pronunciation market, but that the "spelling pronunciation" is not actually a tongue-twister doesn't seem particularly relevant. There's no reason in English phonotactics or human physiology why Anglophones couldn't fluently produce a "spelling pronunciation" for "Wednesday" if they wanted to, but generally they don't – they use the pronunciation they were exposed to in childhood and its mismatch with the orthography is just one of multiple such mismatches they encountered when learning to read/write.
It may be relevant, though, that the other English lexemes beginning febr- are all pretty low-frequency in actual use. It's not that people wouldn't be able to pronounce "febrifacient" or "Febronianism" if the occasion arose, but for most speakers the occasion never arises so there's not an actually-in-use model to try to match up their "February" with.
Philip Taylor said,
July 28, 2026 @ 10:59 am
"There seems to be an implication in the comic that "February" might have some pronunciation that differs from /febjuɛɹi/" — yes, of course it has, MIchael: /ˈfeb ru‿ər i/.
Michael Watts said,
July 28, 2026 @ 1:34 pm
These are hardly related sentences. Yes, /fɛbɹuɛɹi/ would be easy to say, but no, it is certainly not the case that "most people" make any effort to pronounce "February" that way. Doing so would make as much sense as trying to produce /kʌmfɚtəbl̩/; that isn't how the word is pronounced.
Going over the first 20 "US" results for "February" on Youglish, I count 4 where an effort to produce an R is clearly present, 3 where the sound is indistinct enough that I find it hard to classify, and 13 where the standard pronunciation is clearly used. Assigning all the "indistincts" to the R category, you're still nowhere close to "most people".
Steve said,
July 28, 2026 @ 1:40 pm
i would think it is very common for something to literally be figurative. What is unusual is a context where "[x] is literally figurative" is a natural thing to say.
i am not sure, but i suspect the strip writer might have meant to have the candidate semi-rhetorically ask, "can something be figuratively literal" since that would more closely target the thing that people sometimes get prescriptively upset about.
Steve said,
July 28, 2026 @ 1:42 pm
whoops, i mistook who was the prof and who was the candidate.
Thomas Hutcheson said,
August 4, 2026 @ 4:42 pm
??? Why not "Margret's and my cat?" or (Margert and I)'s to make the posessive non-distributive