February 2017: Colour words on Lingthusiasm & a wug on the beach

I was quoted in this article on Broadly at Vice: The History of Petty Memes.

Episode 5 of Lingthusiasm went up! It’s about Colour words around the world and inside your brain. We also posted a quote about Space Pidgin from episode 1 that became very popular.

I also did a short survey about what the winky face emojicon and/or emoji means to you (see also the twitter thread about it for comments).

Selected tweets:

• Linguists in the #ActualLivingScientist hashtag
• Linguistics in the #AcademicValentines hashtag
• Joking typographical usage of “long s”
• Urban language revitalization of Squamish dialect in Vancouver
• Misrepresentations of youth language online and why that’s a problem (plus a recent example with emoji)
• On the lack of “thread” and “knitting” craftmoji
• Wikipedia editing on Mother Tongue Day
• Youtubers and politeness theory
• The verbing of “<140”
• How emoji have affected Unicode support
• “Is this a sandwich?”
• The six (or thirteen) English grammatical genders
• A #relatable comma tweet
• We have a corpus of drunk speech but not a corpus of sexting
• Useful Hawaiian vocab: mauka (inland, mountainwards) and makai (seawards, to the coast)
• Academic articles that were blogged and tweeted got more citations
• Hypercorrection

Selected blog posts:

• Grammaticality judgements and emoji
• A schematic of why the Korean alphabet is so cool
• Irish spelling has its own historical logic
• Further linguistic commentary on the “i lik the bred” meme
• The different versions of “I” in Japanese
• Commentary about Shitgibbon Compounds (and follow-up)
• Karuk in the Mother Language Meme Challenge
• The middle finger in American Sign Language
• “lol” as “this is to indicate that this brief text isn’t hostile”
• Gifs and videos about aphasia
• A moderation note on All Things Linguistic
• Hidden sounds in English that you don’t realize you’re saying

This month’s featured image is a wug that I drew on a volcanic beach near Hilo, Hawai’i, as part of my trip to the International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation (ICLDC5) at the very end of February. Most of the conference activities happened in March though, so they’ll be in next month’s very travelly update.