This month, I did a virtual event with Argo Bookshop where I talked with Rosemary Mosco about her book, A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching (I am especially pleased with the “linguistic tie-in” portion of the event where I got Rosemary to teach me how to make various pigeon calls and the audience played along, very much vibes of intro phonetics class).
I did an interview on the Notion podcast with Devon Zuegel. Here’s a quote from that:
“If you see it as, okay, language is always a moving target, it’s a living thing that exists in the minds of living beings, and nothing about human life or human society, or human culture is exactly the same from one generation to the next, and language just comes along as part of that.”
Notion: Gretchen McCulloch talks about why we talk the way we do online
The main episode of Lingthusiasm was Where to get your English etymologies. The bonus episode was Linguistics puzzles for fun and olympiad glory.
I also went to WorldCon in Washington DC this December, which I didn’t join in time to be on any panels but I did meet several people who liked Because Internet and signed books for them!
Selected tweets:
- phonetify wrapped
- glottal on a bottle
- xkcd on relevance implicature: debunking
- the linguist urge
- I nerd-sniped someone into recording the Grinch song in Latin and I couldn’t be more pleased
- Finnish pronouns and sarcasm
- teach a person how to look up the etymology of “fish” and they learn for a lifetime
- the Double Empathy problem
- conjugating Christmas
- Christmas plural you form
- Pinguinuca and Antipinguinuca
- verbing tetris
- grice’s maxim of relevance in photo caption directionality: male bison edition
Selected blog posts:
- A McGill student and professor realized they both speak Mi’kmaq; it changed everything
- ancient translation to badger
- Pronouncing words in English (by Chinese speakers)
- “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” in Anglo-Saxon meter
- Linguistics jobs: Interview with an academic linguist
- 2021 Highlights on All Things Linguistic
This month’s image is a charming bookmas tree from Etat de Style, a bookstore in Montreal.
Gretchen McCulloch 
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