November 2015: internet hyperbole in NYT, explaining linguistics, and linguistics in fiction

I’m quoted in this New York Times column about internet hyperbole.

I’m also quoted about emoji in articles for Think Progress and for 24 Hour Toronto. I wrote about lowkey for Mental Floss.

My lingwiki activities were mentioned in a blog post announcing the partnership between the Wikipedia Education Foundation and the Linguistic Society of America, which is a new initiative I’m excited to be a part of.

 

I did a talk at the University of Ottawa about explaining linguistics to a general audience, and how that relates to getting a job with linguistics. You can see the slides at bit.ly/explainling-uottawa plus a roundup about how to do linguistics outreach. I also posted an extensive list of pop linguistics books and lingfic.

Several interesting things about analyzing linguistics in stories:

I did a livetweet of Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai, which you can read in full here via Storify.

Last month’s livetweet of Carry On came to the attention of Rainbow Rowell herself, so you can see her response here:

 

And finally, while I can’t claim credit for this directly, when I saw Todd Snider on tweeting about the linguistics of Hamilton, I suggested that he make it into a Storify so that I could post it on All Things Linguistic, and the same Storify eventually came to the attention of Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda himself.

Selected blog posts:

• Teaching phonetics using lollipops
• The problem with “economically useful” as a reason for language learning
• An example of count/mass nouns from the Simpsons
• “p” as an abbreviation for “pretty”
• Your fave is problematic: adjectives
• A thesis about tumblr language
• “Hashtag” in spoken English

Here’s a photo I took of the linguistics section at the pun-tastically named bookstore Mona Lisait in Montreal.