September 2018: #XOXOfest, copyedits, Space Babies, and a stuffed wuglet

I started the month at XOXO, an experimental festival for independent artists and creators who work on the internet. I’ve been hearing about XOXO for years now, and it was amazing to finally get to go! I ran a language meetup there, which filled the whole empty midafternoon restaurant we had it in (massive thanks to everyone who came!), and got to hang out with old friends, internet friends who felt like old friends but I’d actually never met before irl, and new friends! Here are a couple tweet-shaped highlights: on getting more poets into AI, on making an impact, on interwoven narrative structure, on an emoji-fueled Barrett’s Privateers singalong, and art of both the human and the generated kind.)

I then spent most of the rest of the month working on copyedits for my book on internet language! Still not much to say officially, but here’s…a…tantalizing…hint… and here’s a thread about my favourite copyediting word, stet.

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was an interview with Dr Hilaria Cruz about Making books and tools speak Chatino (transcript) and the bonus episode was about words that are kinda-sorta English and kinda-sorta belonging to other languages, aka hyperforeignisms.

We also released the official Space Babies art which we commissioned based on a popular moment in a couple early episodes of Lingthusiasm, about the languages of space. Honestly just go look it it, it’s so cute! (It’s available in physical form as an art board, stickers, shirts, phone cases, and scarves.) Plus a few more new merch items, like baby onesies that say NOT JUDGING YOUR GRAMMAR, JUST ACQUIRING IT (to go with the existing merch for grownups that says NOT JUDGING YOUR GRAMMAR, JUST ANALYSING IT), more colours of IPA scarves, and by popular demand, IPA ties!

Tickets are now on sale for the Lingthusiasm liveshow in Melbourne on Friday, 16th November 2018 at 6:30pm plus a second liveshow in Sydney on Monday, 12th November 2018 at 8pm. Both shows are going to be about how the internet is making English better, and include a patron meetup before each show and general meetup/hanging out time afterwards. I’m so excited to meet everyone!

Selected tweets:

• French grammar news
• Jortmanteau
• Ouija Board in the International Phonetic Alphabet
• Why “Mexico” is spelled that way in Spanish, when in Classical Nahuatl it was pronounced more like me-shi-co
• this is a wug / wug papa
• The “No, You’re Thinking Of” game
• New favourite retronym: call-phone

Selected blog posts:

• Folks, there’s nothing left from the linguistics division. (On the Brazil National Museum fire)
• grendel grendel / yes mama
• Why teaching phonics is an important part of learning to read
• xkcd: houseboat/boathouse
• New Zealand government pushes for Maori in all primary schools by 2025
• Singular ‘They’ is 700 Years Old
• Indigenous sign languages
• Crows with a human accent
• Linguistics jobs: interview with a language creator
• Debunking the idea that apes might have learned a sign language
• Linguistic approaches to language learning (revised and updated)

This month’s image is my new art from XOXO! Two bot-generated scarves in the background by Kate Compton, sunset postcards by Lucy Bellwood, and a stuffed wuglet I commissioned from Becky Margraf.