Cross-posted from All Things Linguistic.
In 2016, I met Lauren Gawne of Superlinguo in person for the first time and by the end of the year, we’d created a podcast called Lingthusiasm. 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. We launched it with the first three episodes – stay tuned for more in 2017!
- Speaking a common language won’t lead to world peace
- Pronouns: singular “they”, other languages, and solving the gay fanfiction pronoun problem
- A lingthusiastic review of the alien linguistics movie Arrival
I also collaborated on two episodes of PBS Idea Channel with Mike Rugnetta:
All Things Linguistic turned four! I also got verified on twitter, which has not really changed anything, but here’s a reminder that you can follow me there as a person @GretchenAMcC or this blog at @AllThingsLing.
Articles
- Two Linguists Explain Pseudo-Old English in The Wake (co-written with Kate Wiles on The Toast)
- A Linguist Explains Emoji and What Language Death Actually Looks Like (The Toast)
My article on teen girls as language disruptors, which I wrote for Quartz last year, was republished in a print textbook from Oxford University Press called Making Sense of Language.
Book
I did a lot of behind the scenes writing on my upcoming book about internet language for Riverhead at Penguin. Here are the update posts so far:
- I’m writing a book about internet language!
- I have a (very rough) draft
- I talked with The Ringer about why I’m lowercasing “internet” in the book
- I have a full draft, with chapters and paragraphs
I also made an email list for book updates, if you’d like to make sure you don’t miss it on social media.
Talks
- I gave a talk at South by Southwest on emoji, in collaboration with SwiftKey
- Workshop at the first Emojicon on the mistake people make in assuming that emoji are a language, and three paralinguistic things that emoji do instead
- Forensic linguistics panel at the sister society of the LSA
- Talks about linguistics outreach and careers in linguistics at Georgetown, University of California Fullerton, University of Glasgow, University of Edinburgh, SOAS, University of Kent, and Swarthmore. Here’s a summary blog post about getting linguistics out of the ivory tower
- Talk in conversation with Jane Solomon at Dictionary.com. Audio excerpt, where I talk about the idea of an “internet era” of English.
- Talk about emoji at Dawn or Doom, a conference at Purdue University about technology and culture.
Outreach
- I consulted on the public outreach component of the Scots Syntax Atlas (SCOSYA)
- I did public relations for the Linguistic Society of America annual meeting
- #lingwiki Wikipedia editathons: LSA, Queen Mary London, CoLang
- Taught a course on Wikis and Wikipedia for under-represented languages at CoLang with Lauren Gawne: see our slides and other resources here.
Media
I did a lot of interviews, but here are some of my favourites:
- Two live radio interviews on Science Friday: one about emoji (listen on souncloud) and one about expressive punctuation and internet tone of voice.
- The linguistic appeal of “garbage person” (Atlas Obscura)
- Emoji: Think of them as an upgrade (WIRED) print version, online version
- “Snek” is the slithering, scaly, surprisingly adorable heir to the doge meme (The Daily Dot)
- On Fandom “trash” (Fusion)
- On the podcast Fansplaining talking about ~fanspeak – listen to on soundcloud or read the transcript on tumblr. Key quote: “Your language is not my language but your language is okay.”
- On the Lexicon Valley podcast with new host John McWhorter, talking about emoji, internet language, and being a public linguist.
Top blog posts of 2016
Explanations
- A gif of the tongue moving through the vowel space
- A diagram explaining modality (with reference to Hogwarts houses)
- Linguistic knowledge vs pedantry, a graph
- Pronoun typology and “the gay fanfiction problem”
- Tests for constituency, giffed
- The inner ear bones, illustrated
- Parsey McParseface
- Parseltongue from a linguistic perspective
- A phonetic guide to animating talking lips
- A 3-minute grammar of knitting
- John McWhorter on what it means for him to “sound black”
- Words that sound like their meanings are easier to learn
- Debunking oversimplified myths around which gender talks more
- Time-dating fairy tales with linguistics
- A bad conlanging idea based on internet acronyms
- Scalar implicature and #BlackLivesMatter
- A clever demonstration of the difference between semantics and pragmatics
- “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“
- A classic table of accidental gaps in English
- On the discursive function of “waslike”
- Why Justin Timberlake sings “May” instead of “Me”
- Linguistics merch 2016
Language learning
- What it means to speak a language (and practice understanding less fluent speakers)
- What monkeys (and Neanderthals) might sound like
- Taming the steamroller: on communicating with Non-Native English Speakers
- Learning classical versus modern languages
- On language-learning and decolonization of the mind
Prescriptivism
- Being a linguist is kind of like being a bird-watcher
- Education: I have made a standard.
Linguistics: You have fucked up a perfectly good vernacular, is what you did. - Merriam-Webster adds “genderqueer” to its dictionary, pushes back against critics
- All the words are made up words
- Hedging is inserting extra words to be polite. It’s not “bad” language
- A 17th century rant against singular “thou”
- There’s no such thing as apostrophe logic
- If we’re going to be pedantic, let’s go all the way
- Latin “errors” that became the Romance languages
- Medieval griping about codeswitching
- “As social beings who are linguists, we have a responsibility to address language-related inequalities.”
- Linguists take on the “me, an intellectual” meme
- Clippy takes on prescriptivism
- The important difference between swearing and slurs
- xkcd: Fashion police vs Grammar police
Internet linguistics
- Overlooked subtleties of reaction gifs
- Old-school telegraph speak looks a lot like text speak
- Obi-wan and Skywalker at Tatooine: Memes as intertextuality
- Emoji miscommunication study
- Typographical nuance
- C#nsoring word$ in the era of search
- 10 years of standard English vs internet abbreviations
- Someone wrote an academic paper on why Impact is the meme font
- What if we used mouth shapes of face emoji to represent vowels?
- What Blissymbolics can teach us about emoji
- English has developed a specific verb for tricking people into listening to Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”
- A smol dog will always be a small dog, but not all small dogs are smol
- As people use more emoji, they use fewer emoticons and nonstandard spellings
- Fanfic-specific vocabulary
- Emoji syntax
- Vintage sexting acronyms
Humour
- Strunk and White, hilariously rewritten using a predictive text generator
- My old intro phonetics textbook, recommending quadrilabial clicks
- Roses are red / Violets are blue / Ideas are green / And colourless, too
- xkcd: podium vs lectern and sneaky elicitation techniques and xkcd discovers biscuit conditionals
- How do you spell descriptivism? A linguistics joke
- “Linguists are no different from other people who spend 19 hours a day pondering grammar…“
- The pronunciation of gif, based on Old English
- several linguistics ~aesthetic posts
- Schwa isn’t stressed. Be like schwa.
- Human-sized wug costumes at the University of Edinburgh
- How to pluralize loanwords: memorandibles
- SMBC comic corners the “erotic linguistics” market
- This is a noot
- The most “me” xkcd ever
- A Gricean analysis of that photo with the bagpiper and the penguin
- The linguists strike back, from SpecGram
Novel sentences & ambiguity
- “Drive-by yogurt attack on crochet teacher’s haberdashery leaves her shaken”
- Another addition to the novel sentence archives
- Novel sentences: CafePress takes down t-shirt…
- A #novelsentence involving ferrets, M&Ms, and drones
Languages
- On the development of the Adlam alphabet
- The Standing Rock Sioux are also fighting for their language
- Two articles about colour terms in various languages
- Google’s Noto font works in over 800 languages/100 writing systems
- Cross-Atlantic differences in where a “frown” is
- Singlish: the language the government tried to suppress
- Blind people gesture (and why that’s kind of a big deal)
- Sound symbolism is more common than we’d assumed
- Multilingual jokes
- Cuneiform cookies
- Marvel, Wakanda and the problem with “an African dialect”
- Dialect coach from the show Outlander
- English ingressives include “sss” to express empathy
- Gender-neutral language in Hebrew
- Why technology that supposedly turns sign languages into speech misses the point
Arrival
It’s not often that linguist is the main character in a movie. Highlights:
- How Dr Louise Banks solved Heptapod B
- How the movie Arrival made the linguist’s office
- An early linguist review of the xenolinguistic film Arrival
- An Arrival recruitment poster and meme
- A full list of linguistics media coverage of Arrival
- A guide to more linguistics for people who liked Arrival, which I cross-posted to Medium.
Other books and movies:
- A linguist livetweets N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season and The Obelisk Gate
- A linguist nitpicks droid language in The Force Awakens
- A linguist tweets about Ghostbusters
- A linguist tweets Too Like The Lightning by Ada Palmer
- #Wulf4Ham: A Beowulf/Hamilton crossover
Linguistics jobs
I restarted the linguistics jobs series, with the assistance of Elena Russo, and created a handy linguistics jobs overview page. New interviews:
- Interview with a copywriter and fiction author
- Interview with a speech pathologist
- Interview with a scholarly communications librarian
- Interview with a book publicist
- Interview with a science fiction writer
- Interview with a policy analyst
- Interview with a health writer
Advice
- Should you go to grad school in linguistics? Maybe
- How to engage with someone who’s just given a talk
- Back to school linguistics resources, revised and updated (plus video resources)
- How to remember the IPA consonant chart, with keywords
- I updated my list of linguistics podcasts
Missed out on previous years? Here are the summary posts from 2013, 2014, and 2015. If you’d like to get a much shorter monthly highlights newsletter via email, you can sign up for that on my website.
Gretchen McCulloch 