October 2016: Dawn or Doom talk on emoji, SXSW Word Curation accepted, #SpookyTalesForLinguists

In October, I gave a talk about emoji and why they aren’t language at the Dawn or Doom conference at Purdue University. You can see slides here or just look at the fantastic visualization that The Ink Factory made of my talk. I also got to meet Jorge Cham and many other cool people.

I found out that our South by Southwest panel proposal was accepted, so you can look for me in Austin, Texas in 2017 with Ben Zimmer, Jane Solomon, and Erin McKean talking about Word Curation: Dictionaries, Tech, and the Future.

Linguist Twitter had a lot of fun making #SpookyTalesForLinguists happen – see highlights or just go for the whole hashtag.

I’m quoted in several articles:

• What your email tics say about you (New York Times)
• My blog post on why ghosts say “boo” was picked up in an article by NY Mag
• Japan Times kindly sent me a paper copy of their article that I was in
• Translating identity across the language barrier (How We Get To Next)
• How linguists hear the U.S. election (McLeans)

I ran a linguistics jobs interview with a health writer and noted with great excitement that plans are beginning for an AP linguistics course. I’ll be doing a panel about high school linguistics outreach at the LSA annual meeting in January.

I’m currently heading to EmojiCon in San Francisco, where I’ll be giving a workshop, so stay tuned for livetweets!

Selected tweets:

• Concepts first, jargon second
• The English verb “waslike”
• These slides are why we need more linguists designing word games
• College student writing today actually contains the same rate of errors as it did in 1917 (but papers are almost 10x longer)
• A study from 1997 investigating very seriously whether internet friendships are possible
• Developing literature in small languages using twitter
• Discussions of what the upside-down smile emoji and the scared/surprised emoji mean to people

Selected blog posts:

• Gender-neutral language in Hebrew
• “As a linguist, if you ever get bored during a conversation, you can stop listening to what they’re saying and start listening to how they’re saying it“
• Multilingual jokes
• Several linguistics analyses about the US election. Others include: bigly vs bigleague, gendered speech, translation, why “the” sound othering, and how RBG’s accent changed
• This is a noot
• Linguists take on the “me, an intellectual” meme
• Google’s Noto font works in over 800 languages/100 writing systems
• Clippy takes on prescriptivism
• How the movie Arrival made the linguist’s office
• SMBC comic corners the “erotic linguistics” market

This month’s bookshelfie comes from Von’s Book Shop near Purdue University, but really, let’s just look at that visualization again. Amazing.