July 2017: teaching #LingComm class, attending #lingstitute, and a crochet wug

This month, I was quoted in this New York Times article about how we type laughter online.

The tenth Lingthusiasm episode went up, about learning languages linguistically, and the Patreon bonus was about hypercorrection.

I taught a four-week class on communicating linguistics or LingComm at the LSA institute in Lexington, Kentucky.  The day-to-day class notes can be found on the @LingComm twitter account and tweets from students on #lingcomm. Here’s a summary of the class notes as blog posts:

1. Day 1: Goals
2. Day 2: Terminology and the explainer structure
3. Day 3: The Curse of Knowledge and short talks
4. Day 4: Myth debunking and in-person events
5. Day 5 & 6: Events, self-promotion, and charades
6. Day 7 & 8: Pitching and final projects

Also at the institute, I was on panels about careers in linguistics and implicit bias in linguistics and did a Wikipedia editathon. See the whole #lingstitute hashtag for livetweets from many people, but here’s a few threads of plenary talks I attended:

• Using games to measure how people match the conversational styles of their interlocutor
• Children should be educated in a language they actually speak: Haitian Creole and linguistic colonialism
• Come for the sociolinguistics; stay for the lumbersexuals
• Combatting stereotypes about Appalachian English
• Expanding historical linguistics beyond standardized print texts and into non-standard varieties
• The linguistics of talking to sheepdogs
• “Verbal Gestures” often include sounds that aren’t in a language’s words but which are very important for communication

In August, I’m heading to SpaceWitchCon and giving an informal session about internet linguistics. Here’s the description.

Selected blog posts on All Things Linguistic:

• Phoenician letters as emoji
• How to tell apart the two “th” sounds in English
• A wug-tastic addition to the linguistics baked goods files
• A neural network writes Harry Potter fanfic
• “I am learning ingles” A dual-language comic
• A dialect map parody
• Talking about The Doctor across regenerations using singular “they”
• Inclusive and exclusive “we”
• Kids aren’t using the thumb-and-pinky-out gesture for “phone” anymore
• Why Deaf actors should play Deaf characters
• you: *cough* me, a linguist: aspirated glottal stop

Selected tweets:

• “thigh” and “thy” are a minimal pair for /θ/ and /ð/, as are “thistle” and “this’ll”
• Writing looks different now and kids are okay
• Fuck Every Word does linguistics
• Peak linguistics professor
• Kids begin to learn which letters often appear together & which don’t before they learn how letters represent sounds
• For all your multilingual swearing needs

This month’s image is a crochet wug that one of my lingcomm students made me. It is even cuter in person and lives with me now (d’aww). Stay tuned for further wugventures!