{"id":2603,"date":"2026-10-26T18:37:19","date_gmt":"2026-10-26T22:37:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/?p=2603"},"modified":"2026-10-26T18:37:35","modified_gmt":"2026-10-26T22:37:35","slug":"on-cranks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/on-cranks\/","title":{"rendered":"On cranks"},"content":{"rendered":"

For me, a crank<\/em> is an professor\u2014there are crank independent researchers, and so on, but we need not be concerned with them\u2014who have no followers or school to speak of. I won’t name names, but you know who they are, at least in whatever subareas you work. Linguistics has a lot of cranks, and one place you’re particularly likely to encounter them is at events hosted by the Linguistics Society of America (LSA). The first LSA talk I ever went to (back in 2007, in Anaheim) was by an infamous crank, and I was discouraged to find out that everyone in the audience except for me<\/em> seemed to know this guy was a charlatan who had been spinning this line for years. This is in contrast to, say, equivalent events in Canada (CLA\/ACA) or the UK (LAGB): at such institutions, cranks can be seen but generally not heard. Given the LSA’s current mission to encompass all of linguistics<\/em>, I see why this is, but it seems more should be done to prevent corruption of the youth by the usual suspects.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For me, a crank is an professor\u2014there are crank independent researchers, and so on, but we need not be concerned with them\u2014who have no followers or school to speak of. I won’t name names, but you know who they are, at least in whatever subareas you work. Linguistics has a lot of cranks, and one … Continue reading “On cranks”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-aside","hentry","category-language","category-presentation-of-self","post_format-post-format-aside"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2603"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2603\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2610,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2603\/revisions\/2610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}