May 2018: Babel interview, meme culture, and a teal tree scarf

I did an interview with Babel Magazine about Lingthusiasm with Lauren Gawne for their Meet the Professionals series.

I was also interviewed for an article about How Star Trek: The Next Generation predicted meme culture in Twin Cities Geek.

The main Lingthusiasm episode this month was about speaking Canadian and Australian English and the book the Prodigal Tongue about British and American national varieties of English, and the bonus episode about what you should know if you’re thinking about applying to linguistics grad school. We also announced the artist for art goal, new video episode goals, and posted a quote about the connection between first, second and minute, second.

I did social media for the McGill Symposium on Indigenous Languages: see the Twitter Moment summarizing the livetweeting here.

It was my 6-year blogiversary on All Things Linguistic! Here’s a link roundup of my favourite posts from the past year.

I archived my livetweets of several linguistically interesting books from Storify, since it was shutting down, into Twitter Moments:

• The Art of Language Invention by David J. Peterson
• Carry On by Rainbow Rowell
• The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt
• The Fifth Season by NK Jemison
• The Obelisk Gate by NK Jemison
• Too Like The Lightning by Ada Palmer
• Word by Word by Kory Stamper

Selected tweets:

• Just another day in the life of an Internet Linguist, asking Professional Internet People if they want to be cited by their online pseudonym or their linked offline identity #amwriting
• Poet Voice: “pauses / within sentences / where pauses / need not go.”
• Emoji deixis problems
• Tree diagram scarf in a tree
• As a linguist I definitely do spend my days standing in front of a chalkboard with “English Alphabet” on it #BadStockPhotosOfMyJob
• A thread about Hamilton and the subjunctive: me, listening to First Burn for the umpteenth time: ooooh, look at that subjunctive! happy little subjunctive!
• “Is this…public linguistics education?“
• Henceforth I will refer to it exclusively as a teleops or a pervision, one cannot truly enjoy the sight of octopodes on a mere television.
• By age 35 you should be able to pronounce all the sounds depicted in the International Phonetic Alphabet (except, of course, for the shaded areas, which denote articulations deemed impossible)
• You’ve Got Mail is now PRIME nostalgia fare
• Pokemonastics: a livetweets from conference about the linguistics of Pokemon names
• People in the 2010s: Conversation is dying because everyone’s on their phones!
  People in the 1910s, intellectuals: Conversation is bad and everyone who does it should feel bad

Selected blog posts:

• So, your linguistics department has a recruitment challenge
• Communicating colours using black and white (a language evolution game)
• Yanny or Laurel (two threads, origins)
• A colour-coded diagram of the English IPA with the part of the mouth you use to make each sound
• Look, Simba. Everything the light touches on that chart is pronounceable.
• Linguistics takes on the “Is this a pigeon?” meme
• May the 4th Be With You: Syntax Wars
• A study of tagging on tumblr
• A free online course about the linguistics of signed languages
• Linguistics jobs interview with two communications professionals

 

• The logic behind childhood spelling “errors” 
• A lexicographer’s guide to real words
• Linguistics jobs interview with an accent coach
• A thread on meme semiotics
• The injustice of the baby sign trend

This month’s featured image is the teal tree diagram scarf (prototype version: see the cream scarf for the updated size of the diagrams) hanging out in a yellow forsythia bush.