April 2017: NPR doggos & tweetstorms, teaching yourself linguistics, and a circuit wug

I was quoted in two stories for NPR All Tech Considered: the first was an article about the linguistic style of doggo, pupper, and the rest of the dog rates/dogspotting meme and the second was about twitter threads (tweetstorms).

I was also quoted in a TIME article about Easter and a Fansplaining article about fanfiction versus fan fiction.

The audio from my SXSW Word Curation panel is now online, as is the video from the Five Minute Linguist talks that I judged in January.

This month’s Lingthusiasm episode was about how Kids These Days aren’t ruining language, plus a highly-requested bonus episode on our Patreon about how to teach yourself even more linguistics, with our recs for linguistics books, videos, and other resources. We were also featured on Language Log and Linguist List and got a great endorsement from a listener.

Selected tweets:

• The best emoji April 1st post
• An extensive thread about early twitter hashtags
• “If you demand the Latin plural, I demand the Latin case”
• Your linguist name is your name but in IPA
• “Before running into the sea” – another set of sentences that have definitely never occurred before in human history
• Boutique linguistic social networks
• Espirit d’enter key
• “That’s a mora”
• Upside down smiley emoji versus o.O and its variants (thread)

Selected blog posts:

• Egyptian hieroglyphs in Unicode
• How to revive Massachusetts’s first language
• A sentence containing all the vowels in (some dialects of) English
• Linguist names
• The linguistics of talking backwards
• Two lobsters, a baby octopus, and 21 vodka oyster shots…before running into the sea
• It’s unlikely that you’d get a language that only has three colour terms and those terms are turquoise, orange, and pink.
• A linguistics starbucks that writes your name on the cup in IPA
• when you accidentally type a capital letter at the beginning of a sentence
• Three interesting articles by Julie Sedivy in Nautilus Magazine, about the role of linguistics in literature and more
• Deciphering ancient Incan khipu string code

This month’s featured image comes from my attempt to draw a wug with an eye that would light up out of a pen that had conductive ink and using my fingers as part of the circuit, from a booth at South by Southwest in March. It was, alas, unsuccessful (they don’t teach circuits at linguist school) and I had to do weird things to the contrast in order to make the silver ink show up in the photo, but it still looks pretty cool.