November 2017: IPA scarves and more Lingthusiasm merch

The main Lingthusiasm episode was a deep dive into, around, and through the fascinating world of prepositions, and the bonus was about the tricky question of whether a burrito or an oreo is a sandwich. We also hit 100k listens in time for our first anniversary, and launched a line of lingthusiastic merch: scarves with the International Phonetic Alphabet on them, and mugs, shirts, totes and more that say NOT JUDGING YOUR GRAMMAR, JUST ANALYSING IT. Here’s why we made IPA scarves and why we made pro-descriptivist merch.

I didn’t get to NWAV46 in Madison, Wisconsin myself, but Jeff Lamontagne presented our coauthored poster about letter repetition on French twitter. I was quoted in this Business Insider article about new words in Words With Friends. I was also in this Planet Word Advisory Board crossword puzzle!

Had some fun on twitter with Christmas-themed rewrites of the William Carlos Williams plum meme poem: see hashtag #WilliamCarolsWilliams or follow the thread here. (A few ended up in Buzzfeed.)

Selected tweets:

• I hope someone is doing a longitudinal study of twitter language as the character limit increases
• New Twitter is great for interlinear glosses
• A linguist watches the Great Canadian Baking Show: proofing vs prooving drawer
• My favourite thing about colour typology is how you recreate it every time you sort your laundry
• Testing out the meme feature in Google Assistant (hint: it doesn’t understand remix culture)
• “Cornucopia” and “horn” have the same Proto-Indo-European root
• A survey about lol and LOL

Selected blog posts:

• Linguistics merch gift guide
• How to explain linguistics to your friends and family this holiday season (revised and updated)
• An emoji version of the classic Pear Story
• Why sign language gloves don’t help Deaf people
• Which beer would you like? IPA, please
• R meets the “lik the bred” meme
• Linguistics jobs interview with a communications consultant
• Structural ambiguity: who calls their cat toxoplasma gondii?
• Google Translate adds gender stereotypes when translating from Turkish

This month’s image is my red IPA scarf which I took out for a cup of coffee with me!