October 2017: NYC trip, first Lingthusiasm interview, and Linguist Halloween

I went to New York City for a planning meeting of the Planet Word Advisory Board and to meet with my publisher. The details of both are top secret for now but will be really exciting once I can talk about them!

Lingthusiasm aired our very first interview episode: What Does it Mean to Sound Black? Intonation and Identity Interview with Nicole Holliday (transcript). The bonus episode was a recording of our Montreal impromptu liveshow about like, um, hark, and other discourse markers, so you can check that out on Patreon if you want to feel like you’re right there in a room of friendly Lingthusiasts!

We also ran a review and recommend campaign in order to reach 100k listens by our anniversary episode in November, so if you needed an excuse to start listening, get caught up, or recommend the podcast to anyone who needs some fun linguistics in their life, now would be a great time! (Since this post is going up a bit later than usual, I can say that we did in fact meet that goal and that you may also want to know about these IPA scarves now, rather than waiting until their official appearance in November’s news post!)

I did an interview with the Macquarie Dictionary podcast on doggo, and I was quoted in several blog posts on the Oxford Dictionaries blog, about doggo speak, birbspeak, and the history of animal meme lects.

I also updated my two linguistics grad school advice posts: Part I and Part II, and there was a Linguistics Jobs interview about a project manager a language tech company.

Selected tweets:

• Why schwa is the spookiest English vowel
• The obsolete English -k suffix
• We may have taken this “actually, tomatoes are a fruit” thing a bit far…
• “Well” can be a discourse marker or an adjective, but “welp” is only a discourse marker
• What food trends and language trends have in common

Selected blog posts:

• Linguistics Halloween costume roundup
• A Halloween Costume Neural Network halloween costume
• Wells Lexical Sets as emoji
• Try to trick a computer with ambiguity
• Pokemon take on the question of whether language and the universe is pre-programmed
• The Vocal Fries does an interview about Rez English(es) and indigenous language revitalization
• “Somebody trying to switch into English on you is like them trying to pick up the cheque”
• “Amelia Earhart flies, like, a plane.”
• An exercise for teaching about iconicity in ASL for intro linguistics classes
• Heritage Speaker Problems and the word for “remote control”
• Phonaesthetics is propaganda
• The strange reason deaf children aren’t taught sign language

This month’s featured images are some fun sketches I drew of schwa dressing up for Halloween (schwa-lloween), because, after all, it’s the spookiest vowel.