Cross posted from All Things Linguistic.
It’s my six year blogiversary! Wow! Let’s celebrate by looking back at some of my favourite posts from the past year:
Articles and talks
- I wrote for the Washington Post: Herefefe is why it’s toughfefe to say “covfefe”
- I archived my Toast articles here as a folder of pdfs
- I organized a Linguistics in the Public Ear podcast panel at the Linguistics Society of America
- I ran an informal session about internet linguistics at SpaceWitchCon
- I livetweeted the book The Prodigal Tongue
- I’m quoted on the origins of “doggo” for Wired
- I’m quoted in NY Magazine: The Internet Tilde Perfectly Conveys Something We Don’t Have the Words to Explain
- I’m quoted in an episode of the World in Words about “aliebn-speak” or the linguistic style of jomny sun
I taught a session on communicating linguistics (LingComm) at Lingstitute, the linguistic summer institute of the LSA. Here’s my course summaries:
- Day 1: Goals
- Day 2: Terminology and the explainer structure
- Day 3: The Curse of Knowledge and short talks
- Day 4: Myth debunking and in-person events
- Day 5 & 6: Events, self-promotion, and charades
- Day 7 & 8: Pitching and final projects
Advice and lists
- How to teach yourself linguistics online for free
- A very long list of linguistics movies, documentaries, and TV show episodes
- Linguistics merch gift guide
- So, your linguistics department has a recruitment challenge
- An extensive playlist of songs about linguistics
- How to explain linguistics to your friends and family this holiday season (revised and updated)
- My two linguistics grad school advice posts, revised and updated: Part I and Part II,
- How to type IPA on your computer or phone
Linguistics jobs
- Communications professional
- University course coordinator
- Data scientist
- Think tank researcher
- Museum curator
- Communications consultant
- Project manager a language tech company.
- Librarian and digital humanities librarian
- Text analyst
- Speech pathology
- User experience research
- Quote from Bringing Linguistics to Work
Games
- Communicating colours using black and white (a language evolution game)
- Heaven’s Vault: a videogame that’s “like Guitar Hero for linguistics”
- IPA chart Battleship
- Robot mind meld, a word net game
- Take the Dialects of American English survey
Ambiguity
- Yanny or Laurel
- Local man fond of linguistic garden path sentences friends to hearing his boring puns
- Structural ambiguity: Lindsay Lohan and the snake and who calls their cat toxoplasma gondii?
- Ambiguity: true self control is waiting until the movie starts to eat your popcorn and “You can’t eat a dumpling wearing a tuxedo!”
- Structural ambiguity: the sad and lonely man science has left you
- “Amelia Earhart flies, like, a plane.”
Things about languages
- A colour-coded diagram of the English IPA with the part of the mouth you use to make each sound
- A free online course about the linguistics of signed languages
- Learning Javanese is like learning 3 languages
- “Utterly linguisted”
- 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
- Deflecting “how are you” and “how many languages do you know” with Gricean Maxims
- Proto-Algonquian Dictionary online
- Babies notice the difference between signed languages and gestures
- Pointing with the index finger isn’t as universal as you might think
- How to visualize consonants by painting charcoal on various parts of your mouth
- The story of “sic”
- When most people tell you they think words are so fascinating, they have in mind items like “canoodle” and “serendipity.” When linguists say it, they have in mind, like, “the.”
- The 300-year history of using “literally” figuratively
- Phonemes as Pokémon cards and the first conference on Pokémonastics
- Google Translate adds gender stereotypes when translating from Turkish
- Wells Lexical Sets as emoji
- Pokemon take on the question of whether language and the universe is pre-programmed
- “Somebody trying to switch into English on you is like them trying to pick up the cheque”
- An exercise for teaching about iconicity in ASL for intro linguistics classes
- Heritage Speaker Problems and the word for “remote control”
- When does maluma/takete fail? The language’s sound system matters
- Sign languages have accents
- How many times people repeat the “u” when saying “fuck” on twitter
- Playing wax cylinder recordings of Indigenous languages with lasers
- What a border collie taught a linguist about language
- Deaf babies, when exposed to ASL, start to babble with their hands
- The relationship between gesture and thinking/speaking
- A graph of a kid’s first words
- Clip of someone whistling a sentence in Spanish
- How to tell apart the two “th” sounds in English
- Talking about The Doctor across regenerations using singular “they”
- Inclusive and exclusive “we”
- Kids aren’t using the thumb-and-pinky-out gesture for “phone” anymore
- Conlang summer camp for high school students
- The most common speech sounds in languages around the world
- An intro to the field of computational sociolinguistics
- Latin, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit triplets
Language activism
- On learning Aboriginal languages as a non-Aboriginal person
- Icelandic language battles threat of “digital extinction”
- An anti-linguistic discrimination limerick for Grammar Day
- “We see value in speaking two languages, but we don’t see value in speaking two dialects. Maybe it’s time we did.”
- Ursula K LeGuin on singular “they”
- Why do cartoon villains speak in foreign accents?
- Native American Hand Talkers fight to keep sign language alive
- Why sign language gloves don’t help Deaf people
- The Vocal Fries does an interview about Rez English(es) and indigenous language revitalization
- Phonaesthetics is propaganda
- The strange reason deaf children aren’t taught sign language
- Spenser vs Shakespeare: a response to grammar policing
- “The idea that intelligence is linked to pronunciation is a legacy of colonial thinking”
- The problems with talking about “oldest languages”
Linguistics baked goods and other handmade items
- How to crochet your own wug
- An embroidered IPA vowel trapezoid with animals
- Gingerbread wugs and IPA
- Knitted IPA door handles and a stuffed wug
- Linguistics Halloween costume roundup
- A Halloween Costume Neural Network halloween costume
- A wug-tastic addition to the linguistics baked goods files
Memes
- 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
- Linguistics takes on the “Hallelujah” meme
- This is the best meme poem and I will brook no arguments
- The English “th” sound takes on the Distracted Boyfriend meme
- Is your child texting about linguistics?
- Which beer would you like? IPA, please
- R meets the “lik the bred” meme
- Prescriptivism takes on the expanding brain meme
- OK is a fossilized meme
- Is your child texting about minimalist syntax? (meme)
- You’ve heard of Elf on the Shelf, now get ready for…phonemes on the memes
- Is your child texting about phonetics?? meme
- Kilroy Was Here: a proto-meme
- you: *cough* me, a linguist: aspirated glottal stop
Linguist humour
- A Maximal Onset Principle joke
- Structural ambiguity: “Fake degree claims dog prominent Spanish politicians.” and “Nicole, who never saw a dog and didn’t smile” (diagrammed)
- xkcd and the linguist meteorologist
- This Egyptian bird has declared himself “your evil son”
- Yahoo Answers takes on the type-token distinction
- The new Buffalo buffalo… sentence is about a fish called Boops boops
- A dialect map parody
Internet linguistics
- A study of tagging on tumblr
- A masters thesis about tumblr orthography
- A paper about tagging practices on tumblr
- why would you do this / it just seems right?
- Keysmashing “wrong”
- Winnie-the-Pooh used Ironic Capitals
- Question mark in parentheses (?)
Podcast
Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics, entered its second year! Myself and Lauren Gawne of @superlinguo released the following main episodes this past year:
9. The bridge between words and sentences: Constituency
10. Learning languages linguistically
11. Layers of meaning: Cooperation, humour, and Gricean Maxims
12. Sounds you can’t hear: Babies, accents, and phonemes
13. What Does it Mean to Sound Black? Intonation and Identity Interview with Nicole Holliday
14. Getting into, up for, and down with prepositions
15. Talking and thinking about time
16. Learning parts of words: Morphemes and the wug test
17. Vowel gymnastics
18. Translating the untranslatable
19. Sentences with baggage: Presuppositions
20. Speaking Australian and Canadian English in an American/British binary
We also had a full year of bonus episodes:
4. Doggo linguistics behind the scenes
5, Hypercorrection
6. Language play
7. DIY linguistic research
8. Hark, a liveshow! So, like, what’s up with discourse markers?
9. Is X a sandwich? Solving the word-meaning argument
10. Liveshow Q and eh
11. We are all linguistic geniuses: Interview with Daniel Midgley of Talk the Talk
12. Creating languages for fun and learning
13. The grammar of swearing
14. The Poetry of Memes: Roses are red in the icebox
15. What you should know if you’re considering applying to linguistics grad school
We also released Lingthusiasm merch: scarves with a subtle International Phonetic Alphabet or tree diagram print on them, plus various items that say NOT JUDGING YOUR GRAMMAR, JUST ANALYSING IT, Heck Yeah Descriptivism, or Heck Yeah Language Change.
Book
I did a lot of behind the scenes writing on my upcoming book in defense of internet language for Riverhead at Penguin. I wrote an update post about the revision process here.
We’re getting close to the “exciting updates” stage for the book, so if you want to make sure you don’t miss things like the official title and publication date, preorder links, and what the cover looks like, you can sign up to receive very occasional book update emails here.
Haven’t been with me this whole time? You can see my favourite posts of year one, year two, year three, year four, and year five. For shorter updates, follow me on twitter as a person or as All Things Linguistic, or for a monthly newsletter with highlights, subscribe at my website.
Gretchen McCulloch 