August 2017: #SpaceWitchCon, Planet Word beginnings, Al Jazeera TV & your ability to even

I went from Lingstitute to Washington DC, where I did some internet linguistic consulting work, and met up with some DC linguists, including Ann Friedman and several members of the Planet Word Advisory Board, which I am now on as well! I’m excited to be getting involved with this project to create a linguistics museum.

I then went to SpaceWitchCon, in the woods of North Carolina, where I ran a very fun session about internet linguistics (and also did a lot of singalongs and crafting and other excellent nerdery).

Later in the month, I was on live TV with Al Jazeera’s The Stream, talking about emoji (watch here), and a post of mine, about how to talk with your academic heroes and other people you admire, was featured on Thesis Whisperer.

This month’s Lingthusiasm episode was about Layers of meaning: Cooperation, humour, and Gricean Maxims, and the bonus episode was about language play. We also reached our Patreon interview goal, so you can look forward to hearing guest linguists on Lingthusiasm shortly!

Selected tweets:

• “What is the kind that your book is the first of its?”
• One of the many ways in which my name is NOT spelled
• Coming up with a clever/nerdy wifi network name
• Novel sentences: bats in a fiberglass triceratops
• Partial eclipse of the heart
• A timely case for not calling yourself a “grammar nazi”
• Linguistics versions of the distracted boyfriend meme: “I’d tap that” and “Arrival“
• Anyone know of work on autocorrect affecting regionalisms?
• I have a new favourite French idiom
• The history of dictionary lookup trends

Selected blog posts:

• A very long list of linguistics movies, documentaries, and TV show episodes
• Linguistics jobs: interview with a text analyst and quote from Bringing Linguistics to Work
• Blissymbolics
• Linguist parents and prototype theory
• Structural ambiguity: the sad and lonely man science has left you
• How many times people repeat the “u” when saying “fuck” on twitter
• Playing wax cylinder recordings of Indigenous languages with lasers
• Is your child texting about phonetics?? meme
• How to create nice-looking syntax trees using phpsyntaxtree
• “The idea that intelligence is linked to pronunciation is a legacy of colonial thinking”
• What a border collie taught a linguist about language
• Deaf babies, when exposed to ASL, start to babble with their hands
• Question mark in parentheses (?)
• A jumping wug with confetti
• Kilroy Was Here: a proto-meme

This month’s photo is a sign from SpaceWitch: the rooms were divided into even and odd sections, so I took this picture for those times when you can’t even anymore: here’s some even!