October 2018: Wired Resident Linguist, Scintillation, #AoIR2018, and Lingthusiasm’s second anniversary

I’ve started writing a Resident Linguist column for Wired! My first article is about Voldemorting, birdsite, The Cheeto, and other ways of hiding words in plain sight online.

I was in this video on NBC about teen slang and this article about “ish” in work emails.

I attended Scintillation, where I was on panels about linguistic worldbuilding and the future of English in science fiction, and the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conferences, both in Montreal.

The Lingthusiasm main episode was about how Every word is a real word and the bonus episode was about bringing up bilingual babies. (Lingthusiasm is now also officially on Spotify.)

It’s our second anniversary of Lingthusiasm! To celebrate, we’re trying to help the show reach more people by encouraging current listeners to give us a shoutout on social media. Here’s a helpful roundup post with links to all the current episodes that you can share, and we’ll thank everyone who recommends us in a special anniversary post!

I livetweeted the linguistics bits from the new book HOW TO INVENT EVERYTHING as well as a short thread about linguistics aspects of Salt Fat Acid Heat.

Many great linguistics Halloween costumes.

At the end of the month, I head to PatreCon and Australia! Here’s my Australia conferences and talks schedule.

Selected tweets:

• Singalong Bot, a post-XOXO project with Janelle Shane and Kate Compton
• Replying to tweets with the same numbers of exclamation marks or emoji
• There are downloadable Meme Generator and Giphy datasets on the Library of Congress website
• A talk about deep-fried memes
• Sharenting: parents oversharing about their kids on social media
• Advice for academics thinking about getting an industry career or advising their students on doing so
• Eeyore, when pronounced in a non-rhotic accent, is literally the sound a donkey makes
• A twitter fav is like a nod
• “People seem to feel the need to apologize for experimenting with their vocabulary. Don’t apologize! This is great!”
• A child emoji and electronic communication survey
• Writing for the reader of the future rather than the reader of the past

Selected blog posts:

• New favourite retronym: call-phone
• Linguistics jobs: a webinar on working in tech from the LSA and a second webinar on how to get into linguistics grad school
• Pro-Tactile American Sign Language
• New favourite example of reduplication: moonmoon
• New favourite example of semantic ambiguity: let this be the hour that we draw swords together

This month’s image is the new Space Baby art from Lingthusiasm, which is available as a poster, art print, scarf, stickers and more!