January 2017: LSA panel, talk, #lingwiki and livetweets

I gave a talk about Stumbling into linguistics via blogs and Wikipedia at a panel on Getting High School Students into Linguistics which I co-organized with Moti Lieberman at the Linguistic Society of America annual meeting in Austin, Texas. My slides are at bit.ly/lingwiki-lsa2017 and our whole panel’s slides and abstracts are available here.

I also gave a talk about how people lengthen words on Twitter at the LSA, co-authored with Jeffrey Lamontagne – you can check out our slides at bit.ly/longggg. (Here’s a fun example that came up later.)

I ran a Wikipedia editathon for the third year in a row at the LSA – here’s a report on the articles edited (and a bonus post on Wikipedia rabbit holes).

I also did PR for the LSA again this year and was on the judging panel for the 5 Minute Linguist competition. If you missed the livetweets, you can relive the LSA using the hashtag #lsa2017.

The fourth episode of Lingthusiasm came to you from inside the Word of the Year vote and we got fanmail!

A linguistics jobs interview with Jane Solomon, a lexicographer at Dictionary.com.

I’ve added a helpful acrostic of how to spell my last name to my website and email signature.

Selected tweets:

• We need date-sensitive predictive keyboards
• Emoji in speaker notes
• Advertising ambiguity worked on this linguist
• “I watched The Wire, without subtitles”
• Role of the linguist in language documentation/revitalization (and poems/songs)
• “If you give a person a new word, they word for a day…”
• Accent discrimination in academia (and #ISoundLikeAScholar)
• a [sic] Google Docs spellcheck feature
• Someone has mapped out which regions of Canada and France prefer “chocolatine” versus “pain au chocolat”
• Thread on linguistics, politics, and how to do things with words
• On curly-haired emoji
• Grammaticality and happy emoji

Selected posts:

• Then they arrival for the nouns, and I speech nothing, because no verbs
• Schwa cookies!
• Structural ambiguity and ultraviolet wine
• A longread on whistled languages around the world
• sʌmtaɪmz aɪ wʌndɚ…
• RIP the inventor of pinyin
• The linguistics of writing protest signs
• “i lik the bred”, a meme of rhyme and Middle English
• There’s a linguistics museum in the works for Washington DC

This month’s image is “lingthusiasm” sketched out in the sand, with the logo added by a helpful wave.