This month, I announced that I’m working on a book about internet language! I’ve signed a publishing deal with Riverhead, a division of Penguin – stay tuned for more information on title, publication date, book cover, and so on once I have it.
I wrote an article for Quartz, nominating singular “they” for Word of the Year 2015 – we’ll see how it goes when I’m at the official American Dialect Society vote in January!
I also wrote two posts about expletive infixation for Strong Language, on why you can’t say “abso-jesus-lutely” or “abso-hallelujah-lutely“.
I was quoted in Wired talking about the tears of joy emoji which was Oxford’s Word of the Year, as well as in Slate by Ben Zimmer talking about Bob Dylan’s use of “can’t even”, which was picked up in The Atlantic as Did Bob Dylan Invent Millennial Catchphrase “I Can’t Even”? I also did interviews with Digiday and the LA Times. I did an interview about emoticons, emoji, and other linguistic trends on the live podcast The Geekly Chronicles.
My articles appeared on several roundup lists of best posts, including my grammar of shipping piece on The Toast’s 2015 list, and my grammar of doge and syntax of fuck pieces on The Electric Typewriter’s 2014+2015 list.
I published my grant report for the Inspire grant I got from Wikimedia to run six linguistics Wikipedia editathons at conferences in 2015. Including both Wikimedia-sponsored and non-sponsored grants, I ran 10 #lingwiki editathons in 2015, in which over 200 articles were created or edited by over 200 linguists.
As usual, at the beginning of January, I’m headed to the LSA annual meeting in Washington DC, where I’ll be livetweeting, attending the Word of the Year vote, and running an editathon. New this year, I’ll also be doing PR for the LSA at the meeting, so you can catch me on the LSA’s official Twitter account in addition to my own (and, of course, in person). I’ll also be sticking around afterwards to give a talk about explaining linguistics at Georgetown.
On All Things Linguistic, I posted a 2015 year in review post. Here are a few other highlights from this month:
- Hwaet, Hrodulf the red-nosed reindeer in Anglo-Saxon
- Yaasss, yusss, yisss and vowel chain shifts
- Deck the Vowels: A collaborative tumblinguistmas carol
- The new shortest science paper is in linguistics
- Phoreus: a new font for the Cherokee syllabary
- “You” is plural, unless thou dost speak to an unfamiliar person.
- People who swear more have a bigger vocabulary
- The long, incredibly torturous, and fascinating process of creating a Chinese font
The photo is some delicious-looking wug cookies which Laura Beaudin made for a bake sale at the McMaster Linguistics Society and later tweeted at me for the linguistics baked goods file.
Gretchen McCulloch 
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