Thread by @TheChillum

.@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.🇺🇸

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.“

“It's not a part-time gig. It has to be taken as a full-time, serious profession.”

#InItToWinIt

"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.”