May 2017: covfefe, Lingthusiasm buttons, blogiversary, Canadian Linguistics Association, and dictionary makers

I wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post: Herefefe is why it’s toughfefe to say “covfefe”, which was inspired by a twitter thread of mine that became massively popular and was picked up by the Guardian, Longreads, and El Pais (Spanish).

I moderated a panel about careers in linguistics at the annual meeting of the Canadian Linguistics Association, part of the Canadian Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Toronto.

It was my 5-year blogiversary! Here’s a list of some of my favourite posts on All Things Linguistic from the past year.

Episode 8 of Lingthusiasm was about People who make dictionaries, and contained our thoughts about Kory Stamper’s new book, Word by Word. We also posted a new Patreon bonus about selling your linguistics skills to employers, a follow-up Space Pidgin quote, and officially reached our sustainability goal on Patreon, so now we can start expanding!

Selected tweets:

• Schmeckbund: a culinary sprachbund (dialect continuum)
• What Klingon speakers can tell us about learning unnatural stress patterns
• The syntax of “because x” constructions
• Posting song lyrics as coded messages
• We have shruggie scansion now
• Papers about being a woman in linguistics in 1990
• The open-mouth smile emoji would have been interpreted very differently in 18th century France
• “As you’ll see elsefork in this thread…”
• The etymology of “illocutionary”

Selected blog posts:

• Auli’i Cravalho’s name
• Linguistics wordplay about Emmanuel Macron
• “Lexicography moves so slowly that scientists classify it as a solid”
• The Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights
• The relationship between gesture and thinking/speaking
• New paint colours invented by neural network
• Linguistics takes on the Student Athlete meme
• A great visualization of Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics
• A graph of a kid’s first words
• Clip of someone whistling a sentence in Spanish

This month’s featured image is from making a couple Lingthusiasm buttons at the Scholar’s Portal booth in the Congress Expo! Now I just need to get one of them to Lauren and find us an occasion to wear them…