2020 Year in Review

Crossposted from my blog, All Things Linguistic.

2020 wasn’t the year anyone was expecting, and I did much less travel than in previous years. But, while I was social distancing at home like everyone else, I did at least keep doing enjoyable linguistics things: Crash Course Linguistics videos went from early planning stages to nearly complete, Because Internet came out in paperback, and my podcast Lingthusiasm launched two other projects to contribute to the pop linguistics ecosystem: LingComm Grants and Mutual Intelligibility.

Because Internet

Because Internet, my book about internet language which hit the NYT bestseller list last year, came out in paperback this year! Links to get it in all of the formats, including how to get signed copies.

Here are some photos of the new paperback edition, same bright yellow cover, now with 10x more nice quotes from people. I also wrote an old-school reflexive blog post about what it’s like to hit the final milestone in a book journey that began in 2014.

Crash Course Linguistics

I worked on these 16 fun intro linguistics videos, 10-12 minutes long each, along with a large team, including linguists Lauren Gawne and Jessi Grieser, host Taylor Behnke, the animation team at Thought Cafe, and of course the production team at Crash Course itself. Writing the scripts ended up being our first lockdown project in the spring, and then reviewing the filmed and animated episodes for accuracy a second lockdown project in the fall. The final few videos will be appearing in early 2021 — you can watch them all at this playlist.

• Preview trailer for Crash Course Linguistics
• What is linguistics? Crash Course Linguistics #1
• What is a word? Morphology, Crash Course Linguistics #2
• Morphosyntax, Crash Course Linguistics #3
• Syntax 2: Trees – Crash Course Linguistics #4
• Semantics – Crash Course Linguistics #5
• Pragmatics – Crash Course Linguistics #6
• Sociolinguistics – Crash Course Linguistics #7
• Phonetics 1: Consonants – Crash Course Linguistics #8
• Phonetics 2: Vowels – Crash Course Linguistics #9
• Phonology – Crash Course Linguistics #10
• Psycholinguistics – Crash Course Linguistics #11
• Language acquisition – Crash Course Linguistics #12
• Language change and historical linguistics – Crash Course Linguistics #13

Other Writing

Wired Resident Linguist column:

• Covid-19 Is History’s Biggest Translation Challenge
• A Mission to Make Virtual Parties Actually Fun

Language Files videos, with Tom Scott and Molly Ruhl:

• The sentences humans can understand but computers can’t
• Abso-b████y-lutely – Expletive Infixation
• the Hidden Rules of Conversation (about Grice’s Maxims)
• schwa
• the Bouba/Kiki experiment
• the corpus statistics behind the pronunciation of “gif”
• the complicated question of how many languages there are

Lingthusiasm

My fourth year of producing a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics with Lauren Gawne! Regular episodes:

1. Making machines learn language – Interview with Janelle Shane
2. This time it gets tense – the grammar of time
3. What makes a language easy? It’s a hard question
4. The grammar of singular they – Interview with Kirby Conrod
5. Schwa, the most versatile English vowel
6. Tracing languages back before recorded history
7. Hey, no problem, bye! The social dance of phatics
8. The happy fun big adjective episode
9. Who you are in high school, linguistically speaking – Interview with Shivonne Gates
10. How translators approach a text
11. Climbing the sonority mountain from A to P
12. Small talk, big deal

And 12 bonus episodes, with thanks to our patrons for keeping the show sustainable:

1. What might English be like in a couple hundred years?
2. Generating a Lingthusiasm episode using a neural net
3. Teaching linguistics to yourself and other people
4. When letters have colours and time is a braid – The linguistics of synesthesia
5. A myriad of numbers – Counting systems across languages
6. Doing linguistics with kids
7. Tones, drums, and whistles – linguistics and music
8. LingComm on a budget (plus the Lingthusiasm origin story)
9. The quick brown pangram jumps over the lazy dog
10. The most esteemed honorifics episode
11. Crash Course Linguistics behind the scenes with Jessi Grieser
12. Q&A with lexicographer Emily Brewster of Merriam-Webster

We started a Lingthusiasm Discord server, a place for people who are enthusiastic about linguistics to find each other and talk! And we released new schwa-themed merch with the (admittedly aspirational these days) slogan Never Stressed.

Lingthusiasm also sponsored two other projects this year: LingComm Grants and Mutual Intelligibility.

LingComm Grants – We gave out four $500 grants to up-and-coming linguistics communications projects. Thank you again to everyone who applied, and do check out the projects of the winners of the 2020 LingComm Grants.

Mutual Intelligibility – A newsletter to connect linguistics instructors with existing linguistics resources suitable for teaching online in a bite-sized, easy-to-digest fashion, with considerable help from the editing and organizational skills of Liz McCullough.

Conferences

I did do a tiny bit of travel this year, my usual January trip to the Linguistics Society of America annual meeting (this year in New Orleans) and February trips to Comma Con (I gave a keynote about the future of language online), Social Science FooCamp, PanLex at Long Now, the Internet Archive offices (all San Fransisco Bay Area) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting (Seattle).

Virtual conferences and talks:

• An impromptu panel about linguistics in science fiction/fantasy at the online version of WisCon (#WisConline) with a fun group of linguists
• A talk with Lauren Gawne about emoji as gesture for Abralin ao Vivo (the Brazilian Linguistics Association’s online lecture series)
• A panel about linguistics podcasting for Linguistics in the Pub,
• A panel about translation and the juxtaposition of historical texts with modern language styles with Maria Dahvana Headley (translator of the new “bro” Beowulf edition) and Alena Smith (creator of the show Dickinson) for Slate’s Future Tense.
• A keynote at the Australian Educational Podcasting Conference: From mythbusting to metaphors – Learning from cross-disciplinary research to communicate complex topics better
• A virtual “night owls at the hotel bar” meetup at the National Association of Science Writers conference

Media and internet crossovers

• xkcd: hovertext on ok vs okay, cameo pursued by a bear, (possibly a subtweet?)
• The latest set of draft emoji from Unicode include three emoji that I co-wrote the proposals for
• Because Internet cameos on the official tumblr, Steak Umm, and QI twitter accounts
• I late-night-wrote a parody version of “Jolene” but about vaccines (“Vaccine, Vaccine, Vaccine, Vaciiiiine / I’m begging you please go in my arm”) which someone made an excellent video recording of and then it got picked up by quite a lot of media outlets

Selected media

• New York Times about retronyms and the vocabulary of covid times
• Wall Street Journal about how covid is changing the language of emails
• The Cheese Plate Is A Technology – Interview with the Smart Bitches, Trashy Books podcast
• Words of 2020! (and Metaphors, and Interfaces of the Year) on the a16z podcast
• Spanish-language interview about Because Internet in Archiletras
• kottke.org on Weird Internet Careers

Selected twitter threads

Books I enjoyed:

• The Language Lover’s Puzzle Book
• A Memory Called Empire
• Murderbot novel
• The Tale of Genji
• Romeo and/or Juliet (choose-your-own R&J)
• The Victorian Internet
• Love’s Labours Lost
• brb translating “hwaet” as “bro”
• Grammar West to East

Helpful threads:

• An advice thread on effective recs – how to get other people into something you love
• Tips for communicating remotely during a stressful time: be gentle with yourself and each other
• A thread about how our communication habits are changing
• A thread about why waving is such a clever solution for bridging the awkwardness at the end of a video call
• Why you don’t need to do an unpaid internship (and especially you do not need to become my intern) in order to get started in lingcomm (and what you should do instead)

General fun:

• A thread about why many European languages have a verb “to hamster” but English instead has “to squirrel”
• Recipe of Theseus
• Quarantimes days: robot vacuum cleaner, learning old english
• kids setting timers and doing pretend video calls
• Over-the-top adjective names for birds: the birding/linguistics crossover I’ve been waiting for
• Long Hundred: a cursèd and entirely real Wikipedia article (thread about numbers)
• it has come to my attention that the Chinese translation of Häagen-Dazs ALSO has a spurious umlaut on it
• the months of the year (metric system) (an ever-increasingly bizarre thread)
• How recycled woodcuts resemble modern memes
• How it started / How it’s going (Because Internet edition)
• Welsh takes on LL Bean
• things that feel bouba but are actually kiki
• a cursed wordgame and the results

Selected blog posts

I celebrated my eighth blogiversary on All Things Linguistic! Here are some of my favourite posts from this year:

Linguistics jobs and other advice:

• community radio outreach coordinator
• wug farmer (parody)
• Grad school advice post: do I need to have done a linguistics major to apply for linguistics grad school?
• exhibition content manager at Planet Word
• transcriptionist
• dance instructor and stay-at-home mom
• freelance writer (and creator of Dinosaur Comics)
• speech pathologist
• Practical advice for if you want to start a podcast – An advice post on Superlinguo which I co-sign (unsurprisingly, as we have a podcast together)
• law student
• at the American Anthropological Association
• ESL teacher
• developer advocate

Languages:

• These students speak perfect Spanglish — and now they’re learning to own it
• Comparative evolution of Cuneiform, Egyptian, and Chinese characters
• Grammatical gender in Greek and Latin is more complex than most people think
• Indigenous languages of Taiwan are regaining prominence
• Indigenous activists are reimagining language preservation under quarantine
• New kanji for social distancing
• “Language features are not neutral in the way that the calculator feature is neutral.”
• Pompeiian graffiti
• A video singing the names of the Indigenous languages of Australia
• The poetic process powering real-time language translation in Namibia
• The Scots Wikipedia saga
• How do you sign “Black Lives Matter” in ASL?
• How to tell apart various languages that use the Arabic script
• A linguistic perspective: The harmful effects of responding ‘All lives matter’ to ‘Black lives matter’
• 68:Hazard:Cold, a short story by Janelle Shane which does interesting things with language
• Gestural theories about the origin of language
• Cuneiform and not quite having enough space at the end of a line
• Towards a new language of the global language crisis

Linguist fun:

• Cookies decorated with IPA symbols
• académie française: you can’t just make up new words willy-nilly like that!!! linguists: haha language machine go brrrr
• This is not a joke: a baby was named Diot Coke in 1379
• Which Indo-European Subfamily are you? (Buzzfeed quiz)
• the best animal species name, featuring very small frogs
• Neolatinist TikTok
• xkcd does dialect quizzes (a parody)
• Ancient Sumerian meme dogs
• A neural net writes variations on Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
• The language after “Modern” English: English_final_FINAL?
• English’s avoidance register in front of certain animals: W-A-L-K

Missed out on previous years? Here are the summary posts from 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019. If you’d like to get a much shorter monthly highlights newsletter via email, with all sorts of interesting internet linguistics news, you can sign up for that at gretchenmcc.substack.com.