October 2015: SXSW accepted, Polyglot Conference, NELS & NWAV editathons, and storifies

My SXSW panel with SwiftKey about the linguistics of emoji was accepted!

I did three Wikipedia editathons, at NELS in Montreal, NWAV in Toronto, and at Queen’s in Kingston. Here’s a summary of all three editathons. The NELS editathon was my last under my Inspire grant from Wikimedia, and it also got picked up in Concordia’s news service which led to me doing an interview about it with CBC Homerun.

I attended Polyglot Conference in New York City, which I’ve storified the livetweets from. I also storified my livetweeting of Rainbow Rowell’s new book, Carry On, as well as a linguistic parody of Taylor Swift’s Blank Space that I wrote a while back.

Articles for Mental Floss:

• What’s up with Exclamation!!! Marks!!! Between!!! Words!!!? 
• Why the pronunciation of GIF really can go either way
• Why are your fav abbrevs totes legit hard to spell?
• Smol: the new social media word that’s like “small” but cuter
• What 4 new snowclones like “X-ers gonna X” have in common

I did interviews for a number of articles:

• What is indie pop voice? (Buzzfeed)
• How sexting changes our sex lives irl (VICE)
• Calling Women “Girls” (Refinery29)

And several of my previous articles got picked up elsewhere:

• A quote from my Lexicon Valley post about haplology made it into an example citation for Merriam-Webster and the M-W word of the day
• My ship names article for The Toast was featured in a post by the AV Club
• My language disruptors article for Quartz was cited in a post on Listverse

Selected blog posts:

• What was it like before emojis? Analysis of a 💯 tweet
• A lazy dog was involved in a jumping-related incident with a quick brown fox
• Rising Voices / Hótȟaŋiŋpi, a documentary about revitalizing the Lakota language
• A forensic linguist who used to be a member of the Sha Na Na
• /ju doʊnt tʃuz lɪŋˈɡwɪstɪks lɪŋˈɡwɪstɪks tʃuzəz ju/
• How people use tags on tumblr
• Writing about linguistics & fandom (roundup)
• Sexy linguistics costumes (comic)
• Someone dressed up as the Linguistics Gothic meme for Halloween

I took so many cute wugshots this month I couldn’t pick just one. Here’s a series of crocheted wugs which Concordia linguistics student Caitlin Stahl made and brought to NELS, a wug I drew on a children’s magnetic toy in a store in NYC, and a line of marching wugs from a blackboard in the University of Toronto linguistics department.