.@JFitzJourney is a forensic linguist and 20-year veteran of the FBI who proves not all linguistics work is sleepy or for nerds; he helped break open the case of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski in 1996.
Check him out.🇺🇸
Check him out.🇺🇸
https://twitter.com/JFitzJourney/status/1041356656213413888
“A lot of people can be amateur linguists. But it really takes someone studying the field, knowing the field, having a true appreciation of language usage, that I believe makes the best forensic linguist.“
"You can learn a lot from looking at 1 doc — what's called linguistic demographic profiling,"—Robert Leonard, Dir. of the graduate prog in forensic linguistics @HofstraU, w/Fitzgerald, co-director of their Institute for Forensic Linguistics, Threat Assessment/Strategic Analysis.
“You can learn an awful lot about people, without comparing it to anything, because actually you're comparing it to all the other documents you and all other linguists have studied since the beginning of time.” hofstra.edu/academics/coll…
“When I actually sit down with these documents, what I look for are indicators of lexical features; what are the words individually being used, are they unusual, are they distinctive, are they rare? Are they unique?”—Fitzgerald jamesrfitzgerald.com
Listen up. “In trying to identify the author of an anonymous writing, MISDIRECTION IS a COMMON tactic. In the New York Times op-ed, the word ‘lodestar’ was seized upon by several armchair forensic linguists. It's a word used often by @VP Mike Pence.”
”The general consensus, though, is that the word was placed in the opinion piece to throw linguists off the trail of the real author.”
Becoming a Word Sleuth: Anonymity works sometimes, but forensic linguists are a pesky lot. An English professor @Vassar (linguistics sleuth) correctly exposed @Newsweek’s Joe Klein as the anonymous author of a novel on Bill Clinton's first run. npr.org/2018/09/09/646…
ID’ing Kaczynski as the author of an anonymous manifesto helped lead to his conviction.
Fitzgerald and Leonard worked on the JonBenét Ramsey case, too, helping in 2006 to rule out someone who falsely confessed to killing her in 1996.
washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nationa…
Fitzgerald and Leonard worked on the JonBenét Ramsey case, too, helping in 2006 to rule out someone who falsely confessed to killing her in 1996.
washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nationa…
Most of forensic linguistics isn't that high profile, though. It's painstaking work, done outside the limelight in front of a computer.
Amen.
Amen.
“I guess all forensic sciences suffer from what's called, 'The CSI Syndrome,' where everything is tied up neatly in a bow in an hour.”—Leonard
“What I look for in students is [that they are], of course, highly intelligent and able to go through language data in infinitesimal detail. To not only know about how language works in terms of languages and dialects and interaction among people in different social groups..”
“... in different languages, ... but also to be able to focus on the most minute of data points, and understand the context in which it occurs.”
Now I know what I (and so many others) should’ve went to school for. Heh.
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