April 2018: Tree diagram scarves and Prodigal Tongue livetweet

We launched a new round of linguistics-themed merch on Lingthusiasm: scarves with a subtle tree diagram print, and t-shirts and other items that say Heck Yeah Descriptivism and Heck Yeah Language Change. Plus, the IPA scarves in more colours: teal, grey, black, and pale pink. For more pictures and to order.

This month’s Lingthusiasm main episode was about Sentences with baggage: Presuppositions and the bonus episode was about Roses are red and other connections between poems and memes.

I tweeted my way through The Prodigal Tongue: Lynne Murphy’s new book about British vs American English (twitter thread version, blog post version)

I gave a talk at McGill about careers in linguistics: slides.

I put up again my semi-annual call for papers and student work about internet linguistics!

Selected tweets:

• Your International Phonetic Alphabet vowels bracket that you didn’t know you needed
• It happened: I got recognized by my voice while out in public
• A monoscuit, aka a cookie
• Myths don’t come from ignorance, but from values (a short #lingcomm thread)
• A very cute linguistdog in an IPA scarf, 12/10 would softly howl the vowels to
• The latest in bad emoji research: I’m literally writing a book about why this is complete 🐂💩
• “What if Guess Who, but for the International Phonetic Alphabet?”
• The academic thing where you title your paper “Catchy fun bit: Serious description of topic”

Selected blog posts:

• A Maximal Onset Principle joke
• On learning Aboriginal languages as a non-Aboriginal person
• Structural ambiguity: “Fake degree claims dog prominent Spanish politicians.” and “Nicole, who never saw a dog and didn’t smile” (diagrammed)
• Heaven’s Vault: a videogame that’s “like Guitar Hero for linguistics”
• Learning Javanese is like learning 3 languages
• IPA chart Battleship
• “Utterly linguisted”
• xkcd and the linguist meteorologist
• Latin roots in English words that ultimately go back to the same Proto-Indo-European roots as native Germanic English words
• Why drawings aren’t universal communication
• A masters thesis about tumblr orthography
• A paper about tagging practices on tumblr

Here’s a photo of one of the new tree diagram scarves, in cream, hanging out on a tree.