December 2016: Lingthusiasm podcast launched, Idea Channel video, and yearly summary

I launched a podcast called Lingthusiasm with the fantastic Lauren Gawne of the linguistics blog Superlinguo. It’s a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics and you can listen to it on iTunes, Soundcloud, Google Play Music, YouTube or most other podcast apps via rss, and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr for updates. We launched it with the first three episodes:

1. Speaking a common language won’t lead to world peace
2. Pronouns: singular “they”, other languages, and solving the gay fanfiction pronoun problem
3. A lingthusiastic review of the alien linguistics movie Arrival

I consulted on this video for the PBS Idea Channel about the “words for snow” myth and I was quoted in this article for the New York Times: On the internet, to be “Mom” is to be Queen.

I also wrote book things! Nothing to announce yet, but here’s a few #amwriting protips.

I posted my yearly summary for 2016 on All Things Linguistic.

In January, I’m heading to the annual conference of the Linguistic Society of America, where I’ll be doing a panel and a talk and an editathon and lots of other things!

Selected tweets:

• “Emoticons” from 1881
• The true relaxation of the holiday season
• An acoustic analysis of how many guests to invite to a party
• “Super”
• Undoing auto-capitalization for the sake of aesthetic
• The day I actually wanted to type the word “duck”
• The worst coffeeshop eavesdropping

Selected blog posts:

• Linguistics merch 2016
• Rudolph, the red-nosed tundra-wanderer in Anglo-Saxon meter
• What it means to speak a language (and practice understanding less fluent speakers)
• How Dr Louise Banks solved Heptapod B
• Emoji syntax
• The most “me” xkcd ever
• A Gricean analysis of that photo with the bagpiper and the penguin
• What monkeys (and Neanderthals) might sound like
• Ambiguity humour

This month’s bookshelfie is the linguistics section of Foyles in London, a photo I took when I was in the UK in May.