Is Linguistics a Gift or a Curse?

After describing how Black communities have been exploited by several linguistics studies with no compensation, Rickford goes onto outline some ways to pay the communities back. These include a lot of logical steps forward; one example, letting more qualifed Black people teach, is a cry which is still echoed today with the Who's Teaching Us movement. But one proposed plan stood out for me. He wanted to bring more Black students to the study of linguistics. I think it's just plain arrogant to assume that the only reason Black students weren't getting into linguistics was because they weren't inviting enough. Linguistics has never been super popular, and furthermore, studying it is not a gift, in fact it might be a bit of a curse. If one stumbles upon linguistics, and truly falls in love with it, they can never be sated. It starts out with you studying grammar and syntax of your language. Then, you move onto how these can be applied to other languages. You start studying large datasets, to see minute differences in language and how language evolves. You find yourself in a cafe for four hours, guiltlessly eavesdropping and furiously making note of what the people around you are talking about. And eventually you find yourself writing about triangles, consumed by a need to clearly define every word you encounter to the point where you are actively trying to make a distinction between the word triangle and the words "three sided polygon", two things that should be exactly the same. Even more maddening is when you find out that they aren't the same, that nothing is the same, that there are differences in meaning that come from even the slightest variations. Linguistics is the cruelest of mistresses. It never cuts you off, it never even deigns to tease you. It just gives you what you want, when you want, and lets you destroy yourself. It never ends. If you study physics or computer science or chemistry, you think about these things a lot, but it doesn't permeate everything you do. You're not constantly faced with thinking about electron spin, recursion, or balancing chemical equations. But no matter what you're doing, you will be using language. And any funny pronunciation, regional vocabulary or strange syntax will set you on a warpath to probe for more, more, more. I learned far more about triangles reading Lupyan's paper than I ever needed in geometry. Linguistics is the study of excess knowledge that can never be sated. It is a curse, and if Rickford wants to spread it to new communities, he should know the consequences of his actions.