This month was largely occupied in continued preparations for a pair of events in April:
- LingComm21, the first International Conference on Linguistics Communication, including calls for participation and creating the program schedule.
- LingFest, a fringe-festival-style coordination of independently organized public linguistics events, announcing the first list of events including a Lingthusiasm liveshow (our first online liveshow!) about backchannelling.
The main episode of Lingthusiasm was about how linguists figure out the grammar of a language (transcript) and the bonus was about reduplication and a classic linguistics paper affectionately known as the salad-salad paper.
I did two video talks: at Planet Word, the new language museum in Washington DC, about internet language and Because Internet, and for Slate’s Future Tense about the meaning of emoji with Jennifer Daniel.
I collaborated on another video with Tom Scott, this one about the rhythms of poetry in different languages or Why Shakespeare Could Never Have Been French:
Selected tweets:
- PUZZLE SPOILERS: A quote from Because Internet in the New York Times acrostic
- Suez meme: ordinary conversation topics vs noticing something about the language
- Not Haunted: new favourite example of implicature
- Vaccinated every 8 seconds: new favourite example of quantifier scope ambiguity
- A bagel with cream cheese: new favourite example of structural ambiguity
- Convaxulations
Selected blog posts:
- Linguistics Games online
- “Indeed, old man” in Middle Egyptian
- LingComm and LingFest announcement posts
This month’s photo, since I yet again didn’t go anywhere, is a throwback photo from ReadeBook, a bookshop in Adelaide, from when I was in Australia in 2018.
