Linguist in Chief: Backstory, dogs, foreshadowing

This edition of Rose-coloured is our first-ever guest post from recently named Linguist-in-Chief Anne-Michelle Tessier. I met Anne-Michelle when we were both frosh and living in the same university residence, but our friendship really took off that December when I fell in slush puddle and tore all the ligaments in my left ankle. When she saw me on crutches, AMT demanded the story, and was a rapt and sympathetic audience, laughing in all the right places (it’s a pretty funny story if you disregard the pain—foreshadowing for a future post). It quickly turned out, she is as good a storyteller as she is a listener, and we have been telling each other stories ever since. Now she can tell you all some as well. I hope you enjoy as much as I have these many years. Over to AMT:

Many mornings, because I have a privileged job and certain priorities and a lot of luck, I take our two dogs to the woods. In our canonical configuration we hike double-file: Howard and Bagel out front, collaborating to set a vigorous pace and pulling roughly in the same direction, and me keeping the rear balanced and the leashes untangled, calling out aspirational commands like,  “Wow don’t eat that” and photographing the back of their heads for instagram. I admire their agility and dorkiness simultaneously, watching their ears and tails flop and trot along — Howard a sleek middle-aged hound, and Bagel a floof-pile of youthful golden retriever. 

I love them fully and fiercely. This is surprising, because I grew up quite afraid of dogs (for reasons you’ll just have to ask about another time.) But in this decade I am 100% a dog person — and increasingly, I am thinking about what’s going on in my dogs’ fluffy, fuzzy minds. 

To pay the bills, I am a linguistics professor at a public university, and my areas of expertise are “phonological acquisition” and “constraint-based learning algorithms.” This means that I spend your taxpayer dollars on basic science questions like (1) why do many three year olds say “pas-getti” for spaghetti? and (2) why did your Spanish teacher always call your classmate “Eh-Scott” and (3) to what extent are the answers to (1) and (2) the same? Some of my research involves experiments with actual children learning to talk, but mostly I work with computer simulations and spreadsheets and abstractions. I’m an only child, I have never wanted children of my own — unlike almost everybody in my research subfield, I don’t especially need to cuddle your baby although I agree they are really cute? — and the youngest people around me are usually undergrads. 

So, you see where I have landed. At work, I’m hyper focused on the insides of a child’s mind; at play, I am mostly focused on the outsides of a dog’s. (You probably know the old Groucho Marx joke that I truly wanted to shoehorn in here but couldn’t manage it. If you don’t, google “it’s too dark to read.”) … And I’m starting to really want to climb (intellectually!) inside a dog. 

The world of science is supposedly rigour and replicability, where observations from two datapoints are merely anecdotal evidence. But a lot of very good science happens because of the anecdote, because of course it does: “I was trying to understand this data mess and I remembered that one outlier who we figured had heard too much Mandarin or Cantonese in childhood but then I thought what if…” 

My one datapoint is a neurotic mind-reading mutt, a protective older brother who loves three-pillow naps and vinaigrettes, and who appears to understand 95% of our speech regardless of how hard we try to disguise our intentions. The other is a pure-heart purebred who loves everyone and thing especially blueberries, has never known a bad day or a scary thought, seems pretty low on thoughts overall, but also tracks the movement of any animal on TV much better than her brother. 

Between them, an absolute font of anecdotal evidence. And I do have a sabbatical coming up. 

… More research, coming here soon.

RR again: some meta-newsletter stuff: when I previewed the photos of the main characters in this post in the previous one, some folks said they couldn’t see them, so here they are again, slightly compressed—can you see them this time? Below they are: AMT, Bagel, Howard.

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Still RR, still meta: I was trying to set AMT up as an official guest poster, failed, somehow enabled comments, which I was meaning to do anyway. At least, I think I did? Did it work? I would love comments—DIALOGUE, BABY!!

And finally: in the taxi late on the way home from a party on Saturday night, stopped a red light I hear people yelling on the other side of the street and think at first I’m witnessing an argument but then woman standing in silhouetted in the doorway shrieks, “Bye-bye, I love you!” and I realize it is just drunk people being nice.

Bye-bye, I love you!!
RR