December 2014: Swearing, explaining linguistics, and more Cabin Pressure

I wrote an article on the syntax of fuck for The Toast, reviving the classic paper, “English Sentences Without Overt Grammatical Subject”. I also joined Strong Language, a new blog about the language of swearing, and wrote a post about this delightful bilingual sticker that I snapped a photo of in Montreal. The comments on both the original wordpress post and my subsequent cross-post to tumblr are very much worth it for further commentary.

I made a link round-up with resources for how to explain linguistics to your friends and family this holiday season, which was resoundingly popular on facebook (perhaps from linguists hinting to their friends and family!)

I continued my blog series on the linguistic aspects of Cabin Pressure, which ultimately came to the attention of John Finnemore, who writes and acts in the show.

• Formal vocabulary, Spanish, and onomatopoeia in Johannesburg
• Ambiguous compounds in Kuala Lumpur
• Limericks, perfect rhymes, and evil-sounding names in Limerick
• Christmas mondegreens in Molokai
• Ellipsis ambiguity in Newcastle
• Snowclones, irregular plurals, and adjectives in Ottery St Mary
• Diagnostic questions and rhyming phrases in Paris
• Uvular stops, Q, French adverbs in Qikiqtarjuaq
• Dactyls and “DER der der” in Rotterdam
• At-issue content in St Petersburg
• Contrastive focus reduplication in Timbuktu
• Modality in Uskerty
• The NPI “give a hoot” in Vaduz
• Gricean relevance in Wokingham
• Reduplication, truth conditions, and accidental doge speak in Xinzhou
• Swollen speech in Yverdon-les-Bains

For Lexicon Valley highlights, see this list of the top posts of 2014.

Selected blog posts:

• Finding “lost” languages in the brain
• Spread the sign: Multilingual sign language dictionary
• Some speculation about signed magic in Harry Potter
• Linguistics for high schools: What would a syllabus look like?
• Rudolph the Green Idea’d Linguist

Upcoming: Wikipedia editathon and panel about popularizing linguistics online (I’m representing tumblr) at the Linguistic Society of America annual meeting in Portland, Oregon next week.