Vincent, Elio, and Michael discuss the finding of Sutterella species in the gut of autistic children, and methods for cultivating oral bacteria.

Vincent, Michael, and Stanley recorded TWiM #8 live at the 2011 ASM General Meeting in New Orleans, with guests Andreas Baümler, Nicole Dubilier, and Paul Rainey. They spoke about how pathogens benefit from disease, symbioses between chemosynthetic bacteria and marine invertebrates, and repetitive sequences in bacteria.

Vincent, Elio and Michael discuss the finding that copper surfaces reduce microbial burden and hospital-acquired infections in the intensive care unit.

Vincent, Michael, Elio and Michele review a new fluorogenic diagnostic test for tuberculosis bacteria, and the role of a metalloprotease in helping a fungus invade the central nervous system.

CONTENT WARNING: lots of uncensored slurs and offensive language, in a variety of languages..In part starting with my research with Christopher Hall on uses of the “n-word” (available here, and in (free) final draft form here), and in part because of the consulting work I do, I am an expert on slurs, epithets, and offensive language — the main language-y thing that companies, government organizations, journalists, lawmakers, lawyers, and judges are interested in is offensive language. Everyone wants to understand what they can and can’t, or should and shouldn’t say, and where the line is drawn, and for many people it has stark, real-world consequences. One of the things lots of people ask about is some variation of how do you know or how can I prove that something is offensive?Ever since working on totes constructions with Lauren Spradlin, years ago, I’ve been thinking about hypochoristics (fancy linguist speak for ‘baby talk’ or ‘pet names’) and truncations, and how they relate to offensive language. A huge number of slurs are truncations of other words, and this isn’t really a coincidence.Working with Lauren Spradlin on totes truncations we were focused on phonological and morphological rules of truncation: how does everyone know how to make new truncations, and what intuitive rules to people follow? Does anyone ever break those rules? What do these truncation patterns tell us about language more generally? There’s a lot to say there (and we’ve only, honestly, written about some of it — there’s another paper on the way, but here’s the conference talk), but one of the things that stood out to me immediately was that when we were talking about how you don’t yuzh (usually) eat blewbs (blueberries) with guac beeteedubs (BTW, by the way), is that certain words were shortenable but just sounded…offensive.Truncating blueberry? Great. Truncating adjectives like ridiculous, or obnoxious? Totally fine. Truncating adjectives that relate to ethnic groups or places of origin? Really offensive. This is interesting: a morphological transformation that’s completely unremarkable in most contexts is deeply offensive in a small set of specific contexts.The crazy thing is, this holds for novel truncations, meaning I can refer to someone with a truncation you’ve never heard before, and you’ll have an intuitive sense of whether it’s offensive. For instance, if someone said the chefs at the French restaurant I like are all mexies it reads, at least to me and everyone I’ve asked, as very offensive… even though I don’t know anyone who has ever heard that word before. (I wouldn’t be surprised if it exists, though). It’s clear I mean Mexican, which is in-and-of-itself fine, but it’s also clear that this particular phrasing is NOT OK. And when you look at a list of offensive words (like, say, on Wikipedia), it really jumps out how many offensive terms follow this. An by no means exhaustive sample in no particular order:Heeb and Heeby from HebrewJap from Japan(ese)Jerry from GermanHunky (and honkey(!)) from HungarianPaki from Pakistan(i)Another way people intentionally offend is to take names stereotypically associated with a people, and call someone by that name, knowing it’s not their real name (for instance, Ike is an old fashioned epithet for Jewish men, Shaniqua is a name used to insult Black American women, Ahmed is used for Arab and muslim men, and the fact that this phenomenon exists goes a long way toward explaining the sentiment that being called “Karen” is a slur, even when the target is a person whose actual name is Karen but that’s unknown to the speaker). This truncation is also applied to names, making their use, in some cases, more offensive:Ikey-mo from Ike and Moses (or Moishe) Ack (or Akh) from AhmedHymie from Hyman (itself an anglicization of Chayyim)Abi from AbrahamMo from MohammedShaneeq(s) from ShaniquaInterestingly, it’s not just totes style truncations, and shortening applied to offensive terms doesn’t make them less offensive, but rather more:coon from barracoonnig from…you know what it’s fromspic from either “hispanic” or “no spik ingles” (!)I mentioned hypochoristics above, and I really think that’s the common factor. Baby-talk and “childish” language games can be fun and solidarity-building when they’re in-group behavior, but when baby talk is directed to someone who you don’t have the appropriate level of social closeness with, it’s insulting. It tells the speaker you respect them as much as you do a child. And to use baby talk for the name of the listener’s ethnic group, religion, or geographic origin, indicates belittling their background. This seems to hold cross-linguistically as well, so in French, verlan (a game where you move syllables around similar to pig latin) is used to make offensive terms, like rebeu from beurre, itself a melioration of beurre from arabe (Arab), or feuj from juif (Jew(ish)). In Hebrew you get aravush, which has a “cutesy” diminutive marker -ush on the word arab. And the baby-talk element can be used to generate new offensive terms, so the more hateful parts of the internet use the term nig-nog to double down on offensiveness. While that particular term is attested as early as 1959, it and words like it were a starting point for the (thankfully now-defunct) subreddit /r/coontown.Perhaps the wildest part about this, to me anyway, is that these truncations are used in fiction, sometimes even for groups of people that don’t exist. There’s an episode of Star Trek Voyager where a character claims that The Doctor was being totally Vulky and my first reaction was “the censors let that slide?!” Cardi is a slur for the fictional “race” of Cardassians in Star Trek (and it has its own entry in memory alpha). And in the gritty post-apocalyptic Canadian graphic novel “We Stand on Guard” the American aggressors routinely call the Canadians Nucks (from Canuck, a sometimes offensive, sometimes not slang term for Canadians). I remember reading it at a friend’s house and being genuinely shocked at a character referring to one of the protagonists as a "nuck bitch”. (He’s a mountie — itself a word probably originally intended disparagingly, from mounted police — and he left it as bedside reading as a sly provocation). I've been watching so much DS9 lately that "Cardi B" sounds like a Cardassian rapper reclaiming the slur— Cohen is a ghost (@skullmandible) February 4, 2019 There’s a LOT left to be said about slurs, epithets, and offensive language — after all, we haven’t even touched on using religious headgear or ethnic foods as terms of address, let alone sweary words combined with prosody (as in “shit gibbon”) — but it seems there’s something profoundly offensive about truncation and the diminutives it commonly is accompanied by. So a good rule of thumb is to avoid any truncations unless you either (1) are really sure your interlocutors won’t take it the wrong way, or (2) you’re actively trying to offend. -----©Taylor Jones 2020 Have a question or comment? Share your thoughts below!

18 days ago, Duolingo released their newest language course: Yiddish. There has been an unsurprising amount of controversy around the course, which I will briefly explain, but there has also been a lot of confusion about the language itself, especially the relationship between spelling and pronunciation. I wil l start with the caveat that while I am a trained linguist and I already spoke some Yiddish, I am an enthusiast and neither a native speaker nor a Yiddishist™️. That said, I am friends with people who are both, and I have been asking them my own questions, and keeping an eye on the questions (and conflicts!) that have filled my social media feeds in the last two weeks. This is not intended to be an academic work so much as a toolkit for people who are struggling. Note: I am going to be saying “Hasidic” and not “Hungarian/Poylishe/etc.” in the rest of this post, but I recognize that it’s a simplification and so should you. So let’s get down to tachles:What kind of Yiddish are they teaching and why is there conflict?Yiddish is complicated. Until very recently, it was incorrectly considered by many to be merely “bad German,” and it wasn’t until the 20th century that there was a concerted effort from a handful of linguists to study and describe Yiddish as its own language. Yiddish: A Linguistic Introduction by Jacobs has an excellent summary of the arguments that demonstrate conclusively that Yiddish is not merely a form of corrupted German, but is instead a fusion language descended in part from Middle High German, but also drawing on elements from Judeo-Romance languages, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Slavic elements. There are various other arguments about population movements and origins that are complicated, contentious, and not super relevant here.Yiddish historically had dialects. Before the Holocaust, Yiddish was spoken across a large geographic area (Ashkenaz, or the heym). Historically, it could be divided into Western, Central, and Eastern, with further subdivisions: Northeastern, Central Eastern, South Eastern, and so on. These each had slightly different grammatical patterns, sometimes very different accents, and, of course, different words for the same thing. If you want to see maps of word and accent differences, @seydproject on Twitter are working hard on digitizing historical atlases of Yiddish.Yiddish has new dialects too. Even before the holocaust, there was a push toward creating a standardized literary form of Yiddish. Its pronunciation was mostly Northeastern, but its grammar was drawn from other regional varieties and emerging norms in Yiddish literature. In many ways, what people refer to as YIVO Yiddish (for the YIVO Institute) is an imagined standard that wasn’t ever spoken natively by anyone, but that was a reasonable compromise for a cross-dialect, cross-regional “standard.” Separate from that, there are new dialects of Yiddish that are different from what people spoke 100 years ago, and that are spoken by millions of native speakers around the world — mostly in very “religious” communities (not that they’re actually more religious or more traditional than everyone, but they’re usually discussed in those terms). There was a melting pot of Yiddish in the Lower East Side roughly 100 years ago that may have been its own distinct thing, as well. The new dialects have different grammar. Hasidic Yiddish in Brooklyn has a different grammar than YIVO standard Yiddish, than the dialects spoken in Europe a hundred years ago, and than the secular books people may be interested in reading in Yiddish. Case marking has all but disappeared in Hasidic Yiddish, so the definite articles der, di, dos are present in some formal publications, but in casual speech are almost always all de. This, in part, explains some of the pronunciations of di and der that slip in to Duolingo. Agreement on adjectives has likewise all but disappeared. In fact, case marking on pronouns even seems to be on its way out, with the dative fossilized in some forms, but accusative case encroaching on it. The Duolingo team came to an ingenious compromise. The team was largely (all?) native speakers, but they wanted the course to potentially serve as a bridge between secular Yiddishists, who may be learning out of nostalgia or to read Sholem Aleykhem in the original, and Hasidim and other non-secular communities where Yiddish is the lived language of every day life. If you learn YIVO, you can’t speak to native speakers. If you learn Hasidishe Yiddish, you won’t grok the grammar in an Isaac Balshevis Singer novel. So what did they do? They chose to teach the spelling and grammar of YIVO standard Yiddish with the pronunciation of contemporary Hasidic Yiddish. This means if you want to speak with people, you’ll learn the vocabulary and pronunciation to be able to, and the grammatical changes you’d have to make are to have to do less conjugating and declining. If you want to read old books, or take a college class, you will know the academic grammar, and can figure out pronunciation from the standardized spelling. It’s literally a win-win. So of course everyone is mad about it.Why is the spelling WEird?There are two reasons the spelling doesn’t seem to line up with the pronunciation:YIVO Yiddish has artificial mergers that contemporary native speakers keep distinct. It’s just like how New Yorkers keep the sounds in cot/caught or Don/dawn distinct but Californians cannot hear or reliably pronounce the difference. In this example, the Duo speakers are the New Yorkers.Hasidic Yiddish has natural vowel shifts that led to mergers that YIVO Yiddish keeps distinct.I will explain both in turn.Orthographic ‘Mergers’YIVO has collapsed two different historical vowel classes into “oy.” This is the main point of confusion from YIVO standardization: words like אזוי azoy ‘so’ and רויט royt ‘red’ are pronounced like they’re spelled, with an “oy” sound. [This is actually just a fact about written Yiddish, and not necessarily a decision made by YIVO, per se, as Isaac Bleaman helpfully pointed out]But words like פרוי froy ‘woman’, הויז hoyz ‘house’, ברוין broyn '‘brown’ were not historically pronounced that way. They were historically, and are currently, pronounced like fro:, ho:z, and bro:n, where the colon indicates vowel length (if you listen closely, there’s what sounds like an off-glide as well). YIVO has — I cannot emphasize this enough — artificially collapsed two pronunciations that were historically distinct for many, many Yiddish speakers. So it’s not that the speakers on Duolingo are inconsistent in how they pronounce oy, rather they are very consistently pronouncing two different vowel classes differently. Hasidic Vowel ShiftsThere are certain patterns of change that languages follow so often that linguists are really not surprised by them. In fact, if you read Bill Labov’s magnum opus, Principles of Linguistic Change, there is an entire volume dedicated to predictable patterns of vowel change over time (with pages on pages discussing Yiddish vowel shifts!). This is not the place for it, but pretty much all of the vowels in English moved in what’s called the Great English Vowel Shift, and our spelling is weird because we have the old spelling with the new vowels. (Why is “Tim” not pronounced the same as “team” and “time” not “teamy”???). It has been helpful for me to think of the Hasidic pronunciations in Duolingo as what’s called a chain shift. That is, one vowel moves to a new place and another follows and takes its place.If you are starting from YIVO Yiddish as an imaginary starting point, then here are all the changes you need to keep in mind to be able to navigate between YIVO and what you learn in Duolingo:ey becomes ay. For most varieties of English, this means the vowel in English “say” is pronounced like “sigh”. You’ll see this in words like the ones for tea, one, egg, etc.ay becomes long a. This is exactly the same as a Southern American accent pronunciation of words like “night” and “time”, and is what linguists call ay-monophthongization. So mayn ‘my’ becomes ma:n and man ‘man, husband’ stays man. “My husband” is two almost identical words but one is longer than the other: מײַן מאן ma:n man. aw (as in coffee, hawk, caught) becomes o or u: That is, ָא is pronounced like it should be spelled with a vav. That’s how you go from YIVO vos iz dos to Hasidic vus iz dus. YIVO ָא also represents more distinct sounds in Hasidic Yiddish (for instance, the oo of English “book”), so pay attention!u becomes i. i stays i. This kind of merger happens all the time, and you should see the history of Greek if you think it’s bad in Yiddish. So YIVO vu ‘where’ and vi ‘how’ are both pronounced vi. Blumen ‘flowers’ (cognate with English “blooms”) becomes blimes. The word for “you” which is cognate with German du and English thou, becomes di. The word kumn ‘to come’ becomes kimn. [Bonus: in some cases i becomes e in Hungarian/Hasidic sound shifts. Thanks to Isaac Bleaman for pointing this out]This is not a historically accurate chain of events, but if you want to be able to navigate between, say, Duolingo and a college Yiddish course, here’s the pattern:YIVO to Duo: ey > ay > aa and (some) a > u > i. You’ll have to just memorize oy for each word as they come.Duo to YIVO: aa > ay > ey and (some) i > u > a. Spelling will tell you how it’s pronounced in YIVO if you just read a vav as u, a yud as i, and so on. Vocabulary differencesAcademic Yiddish has many of words that were simply made up by Uriel Weinreich when he wrote a dictionary of Yiddish. I love all of them (like der parol for '‘password’), even though some may never have been in widespread use. Many are borrowed from German or French.Living Yiddish has many loanwords from the languages contemporary Yiddish speakers are in contact with. So YIVO fenster ‘window’ is more often than not now vinde. And the formal, academic geyn shpatzirn ‘going for a walk’ is vakn. Duo seems to be teaching the fun new stuff. If you want the old stuff, moving on to Weinreich’s College Yiddish after Duolingo would be a good next step [EDIT: an earlier version characterized the material in College Yiddish as “possibly made up” — The textbook is all legit, the dictionary may have some more fun neologisms. Thanks to Isaac Bleaman for pointing this out.]. If you really want to be good at Yiddish, congratulations, you’re learning two registers that way and you can vak with your friends but gey shaptzirn in formal writing.[edit: there was a some discussion on Twitter of when to use vakn and when to use shpatzirn and it seems as though for some speakers who use both, vakn is goal oriented and shpatzirn is like a ‘stroll’.]What’s the deal with R?The variety of Yiddish spoken by the voice actors for Duolingo has what is called an “apical” r — meaning it’s tip of the tongue on the roof of the mouth, or as one person on Twitter put it, “Scottish R.” "YIVO Yiddish has a “uvular” r, pronounced at the back of the throat, which most people might know as the “French R.” The history of uvular r is a rabbit hole. Actually, just the study of r in general is a bewildering mess (trust me, I’m an expert), and which one a language uses has all sorts of downstream effects for coarticulation and language change over time. All a learner needs to know is that it’s Hasidishe = Scottish, YIVO = French. And the Hasidishe r is effectively the same sound that most Americans make when saying ts and ds in the middle of words, like ladder and latter. That’s why it sounds like the character’s name in Duolingo is “tseedl”.More vocabulary differencesYiddish English is not Yiddish. What this means is that words you may know in English, everything from schmuck to schvits to kvetch, may have a different meaning than you anticipated in Yiddish Yiddish. Babka, however, transcends language.Good luck!The above was definitely not an exhaustive, or even strictly correct description, but hopefully I showed enough of the correspondences that any of you out there learning Yiddish understand a little better how to navigate between YIVO and Duolingo pronunciations, and appreciate the compromise they made. I’m very happy with their course, even if they say ni and not nu, because it’s a fun, easy entree into spoken Yiddish, and I hope what I’ve written here helps others navigate the differences and get the most out of the course.Here are some other resources:For learning Standard Yiddish: College Yiddish by WeinreichColloquial Yiddish by Kahn (there’s some fuzziness around “standard” pronunciation in this one)Yiddish in 10 Lessons by Werdyger (also some fuzziness around “standard” pronunciation)Basic Yiddish (grammar) by MargoliesFor learning about Yiddish:Yiddish: A Linguistic Introduction by Jacobs (warning: it’s very much a linguist’s book)Grammar of the Yiddish Language by KatzSome academics to follow:I don’t know everyone working on Yiddish and I am bound to leave people out. People working today who have helped shape my (still rudimentary) understanding include Chaya Nove, Isaac Bleaman, Rachel Steindel Burdin, Zoë Belk, Lily Kahn, and others. There’s also the wonderfully named @jewyid on Twitter.Good luck and happy learning!-----©Taylor Jones 2021 Have a question or comment? Share your thoughts below!

World Boxing News continues its 60 Tragedies Boxing Can Never Forget series with ten more stories, including two Japanese fighters who died after competing on the same card and world champions who suffered fatal injuries in the ring. Part 3 also remembers an Irish Olympic medalist whose professional career was cut short, a former British… Read More »60 Boxing Tragedies That Can Never Be Forgotten – Part 3

Vincent, Michael, Elio, and Joe review highlights of the 15th International Symposium on Staphylococci and Staphylococcal Infections (ISSSI) in Lyon, France.

Today I was tagged into a conversation on Twitter by New York Times best-selling author Morgan Jerkins, who had been watching an episode of The Cleveland Show and happened to have the closed captions on. She wrote: So last night I was watching "The Cleveland Show" and I want someone to explain the last few captions to me. pic.twitter.com/j5r84Xn5zG— Morgan Jerkins (@MorganJerkins) December 13, 2020 I was expecting closed captions that were, at least, an attempt at accurately captioning what was said. Perhaps the transcriptionist misheard or misunderstood, but transcribing in good faith.Instead, there was this: The caption reads “dam-fa-foo-dun-may-hebeyad-shoot.” That was followed by: The caption reads “Naw-a-gah-may-mah-beyad, dayum.”This raises an important question: what is the function of closed captions? Ostensibly, it’s so the viewers know what was said. In this case, what was said was: The sentence In IPA (this will be relevant later) that’s:[dæ̃ fæ fuw dʌ̃ me͡ɪ hɪ beːʲɪʔ ʃːuʔ næ͡w ɑ͡ɪ gɑː me͡ɪk̚ mɑː beːʲɪd̥ deʲɪ̃ʰ]The transcript should read “damn fat fool done made his bed? Shoot. Now I gotta make my bed. Damn.”There are a couple of things happening here. First, the character is a black character being voiced by a white voice actor, who does not, evidently, have early life contact with AAE speech communities necessary to speak it natively. He’s very good, but he also is not perfect, and it’s clear that while he’s nailed some of the harder parts of some black accents, he’s also missed some important nuance, overgeneralized some parts of the accent, and applied the wrong accent to the wrong place. He’s noticed that word final consonants are often deleted, unreleased, realized as glottal stops, or deleted altogether, but he has overgeneralized, and left no word final consonants in places where they should appear. In fact, it was his second word — [fæ] instead of [fæʔ] — that made me look up who was voicing the character — I’ve never heard an AAE speaker who would say fah for fat. He noticed that word final nasals (n, m, ng) are often pronounced as nasalization on the vowel, like in French, and not as a following segment. He also noticed that the vowel in bed is often split, so it sounds like the vowels in “play hid”. However, the show takes place in Stoolbend, Virginia, and this accent feature is not as common in Virginia AAE. It’s common in parts of the Carolinas, and from the Gulf to the Great Lakes, along the Mississippi, but not most of the mid-Atlantic or Northeast. He also overdoes the consonant deletion — this level of syllable coda deletion is only really plausible in Georgia. He also over does it with “gotta.” That kind of reduction does happen, but not exactly in that context: the word is too slow and too carefully pronounced, so it comes across as caricature. Caricature brings me to the second: This is a white actor voicing a black character on a comedy show, where part of the humor is evidently making fun of how he speaks. It should not be controversial for me to plainly state that it looks a lot like minstrelsy. I’m not entirely clear on how Rallo Tubbs is significantly different from Amos ‘n Andy, or from Thomas D. Rice. Evidently, after the killing of George Floyd, even the voice actor realized it was probably a bad look, and he publicly announced he would not be voicing black characters anymore. Why George Floyd, but not Mike Brown or Emmett Till, changed his mind remains a mystery. He made it clear he doesn’t want to take work from Black voice actors, but I’m not sure if the broader context is clear to him, given that statement and, you know, the decade or so of him doing this work. As I mentioned in my replies on Twitter, it’s uncomfortably evocative, to me anyway, of Jim Crow in Dumbo. The crows are clearly a vaudeville/minstrel act, and clearly intended to be speaking AAE (“I-uh be done seen most ev’rything/when I seen an elephant fly!”). They’re also voiced by white actors in the 1950s, and the line between imitation as flattery and caricature as mockery is razor thin there (and they’re on the wrong side of that line anyway). We can say that they clearly have contact with AAE speakers, and that there’s clearly a certain level of respect, but at the end of the day they’re taking a job that a Black man simply could not have at that time, to play at the culture, music, and language for laughs. It’s no longer the case that a Black voice actor could never get the job (just look at the cast of the Cleveland Show), but there’s still a direct line from Al Jolson, through Amos ‘n’ Andy, through the crows in Dumbo, right up to the Cleveland Show. Third, and most importantly for this discussion, there’s the captions on top of all of that. If you’re reading the captions to know what was said, you still don’t know what was said! What you get is that the character said something unintelligible. The way I look at it, there’s two plausible possibilities, neither of which is good: first, the transcriptionist couldn’t make sense of the utterance and did the best they could, assuming it was some kind of gibberish. Or Jive (note to self: write post about Airplane). Second, the transcriptionist thought it was more important to show that the character wasn’t speaking “right” than to actually, you know, transcribe what was said. That would explain why “done” was written as “dun”. They’re pronounced the same, but any time a writer chooses to write something like “eye dun tole yew” instead of “I done told you”, they’re not telling us much about how a character sounds, but they’re telling us a great deal about how we’re supposed to perceive that character. Is it really possible that the transcriptionist who had flawlessly transcribed up to that point could no longer tell from context that the character was talking about making his bed? That he said “now” — a recognizable word of English — and not “naw”?This is a really interesting case to me, because it is in some ways very subtle. What has to be behind this choice, any way you slice it, is a certain often unstated linguistic ideology. Most of us were taught explicitly in school that writing takes precedence over speech, and that for both writing and speech, there is one correct way to do things, which coincidentally overlaps with how well educated, wealthy White people (but not White Ethnics!) speak. This manifests itself in all aspects of our society, from arguments about pronunciation, to whether something “is (really) a word.” Built into that ideology is that there is some reason why one way of doing things is better — clarity, logic, authority — and it’s never the truth: that the prestige variety exists based on social norms, not linguistic facts. Lastly, this ideology positions ways of speaking that are not “classroom” English as inferior (and lacking in clarity, logic, and authority). This captioning only makes sense if we recognize that the transcriptionist, the service running these captions unquestioningly (in this case, Hulu), and likely most of people involved in the show’s production either view AAE as unintelligible, as something that can function as the butt of a joke, or both. It’s a subtle form of anti-blackness that’s not necessarily predicated on overt or deep hostility. It’s casual.That’s not to say that all nonstandard spellings are inherently racist, or offensive, or what have you. I’ve even written chapters on how people intentionally represent how they speak with novel spellings (as in “dis tew much”). But in this particular case, there’s no valid reason I can think of why turning on the captions on Hulu should result in “dam-fa-foo-dun”. And this is, weirdly, something you only really see with AAE, and some socially stigmatized varieties of English spoken by (generally poor) white people, like Appalachian English. As a thought experiment, can you imagine what would happen if Downton Abbey were captioned this way?“noaw mayde? noaw nah-nee? noaw valette eevun?”“ihts nayntiyn twuntee sevun, wi-uh mahdun foake”(If that wasn’t transparent to you, It was the first lines in the Downton Abbey movie trailer).This was a very interesting counterpoint for me this week, as I’ve been reviewing transcripts of a deposition and I was blown away by the accuracy and professionalism of the court reporter. While mistranscription of AAE (and mock AAE!) is a systemic problem, it’s not a universal one. I don’t know where people stand on this issue, but I know where I do. While I see mistranscriptions of AAE everywhere, from Netflix to Turner Classic Movies, this is different, in that it’s apparently intentional. We can do better than this.-----©Taylor Jones 2020 Have a question or comment? Share your thoughts below!

Hello Friends, On a family visit to the east coast of the US. South Carolina is one of those places where the coast isn’t very well aligned to the prevailing swell so it’s usually small to flat. The picture above was taken at Isle of Palms which is more or less due east of Charleston and it’s what a good wave an above average day looks like. The coast is shallow a long way out, so by the time the waves get to the surf zone, they’re pretty gutless and slow. But, hey, you can catch ‘ em and go a ways, so that’s something. Americans gave us Halloween and we gave them Bluey. South Carolina forest, Old Dorchester

Vincent and Michael meet up with Ellen Jo Baron to talk about working in a clinical microbiology laboratory.

Former Australian boxing champion Josh Frederiksen has died aged 36 after a skydiving accident in Queensland despite his parachute reportedly opening correctly. Frederiksen, who held the Australian light heavyweight title during a 20-fight professional career, suffered fatal injuries during a jump at Toogoolawah, northwest of Brisbane, on Wednesday. The experienced skydiver had completed more than… Read More »Boxing Champion Dies at 36 Despite Parachute Opening

Anthropic IPO investors are discussing a valuation as low as $1.2 trillion following Thursday’s sharp selloff in AI stocks. The figure is below the $1.5 trillion previously considered, while the company’s November listing schedule faces growing pressure. Ad Ad Anthropic IPO investors push for lower valuation According to a Bloomberg report on Friday, prospective investors The post Anthropic IPO Valuation Talks Fall to $1.2T After AI Stock Selloff appeared first on CoinGape.

Vincent, Margaret, Michael and Elio review the presence of extended spectrum beta-lactamase genes in chicken meat and in humans, and a beneficial effect of Helicobacter pylori colonization on the development of allergen-induced asthma.

Vincent and Michael travel to San Francisco for the 52nd Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC), where they meet with Bill, John, and Victor to discuss tuberculosis, monitoring infectious disease outbreaks with online data, and outside-the-box approaches to antibacterial therapy.

Susan Saint James (Toby Canham / Getty Images)Actress Susan Saint James died on October 26, 2026, at the age of 80. Per People, her cause of death was metastatic pancreatic cancer, as noted on her death certificate. It was recently obtained by the outlet. She was a popular and likable star who enhanced her professional reputation on now-classic shows such as McMillan & Wife, opposite icon Rock Hudson, and Kate & Allie, with legendary SNL alum Jane Curtin. Saint James was charming, gracious, agreeably sincere, and very easy to watch. The longevity of her career can be ascribed, at least in part, to those outstanding characteristics. Frederick Koehler Remembered Saint James Warmly Jane Curtin and Susan Saint James starred on the sitcom Kate & Allie from 1984 to 1989. Actor Frederick Koehler, now 51, played Curtin's young son on the show. He had words of great praise for Saint James upon news of her death. According to People, he said in a statement, "Susan brought a warmth, generosity, and joy to the set of Kate & Allie that filled every single room she walked into. Growing up on that show, having her as a constant, supportive presence during some of the most defining years of my life was an absolute gift." Koehler added, "She was an amazing example of how to find the fun in the work, but more importantly, she showed everyone on that set what it truly meant to be kind, and to look out for one another." She Was a Beacon of Strength and Wisdom for Her Family After Son Teddy Died Saint James' son, Teddy, perished in a plane crash in Colorado 22 years ago this month. He was 14 years old at the time. Her husband, Dick Ebersol, and Teddy's brother, Charlie, survived but were injured. Charlie Ebersol talked openly about the pain of losing his brother in 2013 during an appearance on Katie Couric's TV show. He discussed this memory of his mother's indelible courage and compassion at the worst time in her and her family's life. "My resilience, I think, came from the fact that my mom, the day it happened, said to us, 'You can be sad. But you can't be mad-sad. You can't blame anybody. You have to just see the sadness for what it is, and kind of move through it.' And that was a huge thing for us. It allowed us to kind of own it, and then move through it, and celebrate my little brother." The post Beloved 'Kate & Allie' Star's Cause of Death Confirmed appeared first on Wide Open Country.

On episode #20 of the podcast This Week in Microbiology, Vincent, Michael, and Elio follow up on the outbreaks of E. coli in Germany and cholera in Haiti, then discuss genes that confer self-identity to Proteus mirabilis.

Is it possible to have a company where politics are minimized, clarity is king, and team members are passionate about what they do? Absolutely. And this episode’s guest, best-selling business author Patrick Lencioni, tells us how. http://www.entreleadership.com/podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices