September 2016: Second book draft, #Wulf4Ham, linguistics jobs interviews

I hit a book milestone: I finished the second major draft! Details and sneak peaks into the writing process. I also made a central information page for the book.

I was quoted in two articles, That time when “That time when” took over the Internet (Washington Post) and the evolution of emoji from emoticons (Japan Times). I also storified the Beowulf/Hamilton crossover, #Wulf4Ham.

I restarted the series of interviews for the linguistics jobs series on All Things Linguistic, with the help of Elena Russo, and also created a handy linguistics jobs overview page. New interviews: with a book publicist, science fiction writer, and policy analyst.

I’m currently heading to Dawn or Doom, a conference at Purdue University about technology and culture, where I’ll be giving a talk about the linguistics of emoji, so you can keep an eye on #DawnOrDoom for livetweets! I also announced this month that I’ll be giving a workshop at EmojiCon in November in the Bay Area.

Selected tweets:

• A 20 minute video from 1940 explaining how dial-tone telephones work
• Thread about playing Rewordable (compared to IPA Scrabble)
• A linguistics quiz show called the Grice is Right
• My grammar of ship names article was newly relevant
• Codeswitching hashtags on twitter paper is #tresinteressant
• If you’ve ever wanted to tweet in Cuneiform, you can!
• Goddammit, synesthesia
• Pupil, puppet, and puppy all come from the same word
• Millennials didn’t invent yass or bruh, they’ve been in AAE for over 100 years
• What separated Early Modern English from Late Modern English?
• “Literally” literally means “pertaining to the alphabet”

Selected blog posts:

• New favourite example of structural ambiguity: cat-like reflexes
• If we’re going to be pedantic, let’s go all the way, Latin “errors” that became the Romance languages, and medieval griping about codeswitching
• Blind people gesture (and why that’s kind of a big deal)
• Sound symbolism is more common than we’d assumed
• The important difference between swearing and slurs
• xkcd: Fashion police vs Grammar police
• Cross-Atlantic differences in where a “frown” is
• An early linguist review of the xenolinguistic film Arrival
• Singlish: the language the government tried to suppress
• Vintage sexting acronyms
• English ingressives include “sss” to express empathy

This month’s bookshelfie is a photo I took when I stopped in Reykjavik briefly on my way back from the UK in May. Mál og Menning didn’t have much of a linguistics section, but the balcony and hanging bird cutouts were charming anyway.