Tag: because internet

July, Aug, Sept 2024: Lo! An un-detached Eurotrip!

gretchenassistant

This summer I spent time with Finnish, Spanish, Estonian, Dutch, Italian, Latin (unexpectedly!), and… well, okay, kind of all of them, at least in museum exhibit form.

So I did what any linguist would do and made myself into a guinea pig, comparing four different language learning strategies on four languages to see what happened. I’ve written up an Introduction/overview and some highlights and troubleshooting. 

On the same trip, I made appearances at some events:

The Spanish translation isn’t the first one for Because Internet — it’s already available in Japanese (Filmart, Amazon.co.jp), Chinese (Taobao), and Korean (Aladin.co.kr, Kyobo) — but it was the first one into a language I understand and where I happened to be in the right location to meet the translator, so that was really cool! The publisher also localized the title (arroba is the Spanish word for the @ sign, so it literally means @language) and the social-media-post-inspired cover art is a fun new direction compared with the classic blue and yellow of several other editions! 

Cover art for a book titled "Arroba Lengua, Cómo Internet Ha Cambiado Nuestro Idioma." The art depicts a futuristic-looking social media post by author gretchen.mcculloch.

In non-travel news, the podcast Dashboard Diaries interviewed me about the linguistics of Tumblr, and I collected some extra links of interest on the subject.

Lingthusiasm

This season’s episodes included some great grammatical phenomena, a look behind the scenes at one of my collaborations, and the classic philosophy of language thought experiment with merch to match.

The experiment? Suppose you’re in a field with someone you don’t share any languages with. A rabbit scurries by and the person says “Gavagai!” You probably interpret that as referring to the rabbit, rather than just to the rabbit’s ears, or the act of scurrying, or, as memorably put by WVO Quine, “un-detached rabbit parts” — but why? Listen to this episode to find out…

…or enjoy the merch, available in magenta, indigo, teal, cream, and black. 

New favorite data

People continued to produce wonderfully unique utterances:

They also continued not producing “abso-jesus-lutely!” — but why?

A road sign saying "ELEPHANTS PLEASE STAY IN YOUR CAR"

Bluesky and blogs

I visited the linguistics museum Mundolingua in Paris and took this photo of a literal Indo-European family tree: 

A large potted plant, with metal rods coming out that are labeled with the names of Indo-European languages.

May 2023: Spanish Because Internet, True Biz, and Word Magic

gretchenassistant

This month, I announced that there’s going to be a Spanish-language edition of Because Internet coming at some point in 2024! Spanish has been the translation that people have requested from me the most and I’m delighted that Álex Herrero and the other folks at Pie de Página are making it happen.

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was Word Magic, in which we discuss the linguistics of the magical systems in several recent fantasy novels we like, including Babel by R.F. Kuang, Carry On by Rainbow Rowell, and the Scholomance series by Naomi Novik, as well as the ways that you can change the state of the real world with words using the linguistic concept of performatives, such as agreeing to contracts, placing bets, and naming. The bonus episode was about reviewing the results of our 2022 listener survey, including answers to questions on whether knowing about the kiki/bouba effect as a meme influences your results on the kiki/bouba test, synesthesia, and whether people pluralize “emoji” as “emoji” or “emojis”.

People often ask Lingthusiasm to recommend interesting books about linguistics that don’t assume prior knowledge of linguistics, so we’ve come up with a list of 12 books that we personally recommend, including both nonfiction and fiction books with linguistically interesting elements! Get this list of our top 12 linguistics books by signing up for Lingthusiasm’s free email list (which will otherwise send you an email once a month when there’s a new episode — this is something we’re doing to help continue to reach people amid the rising fragmentation of the social media ecosystem).

The most recent of those books, which I read this month, was True Biz by Sara Novic and made a thread with some linguistically interesting snippets from it. Definitely recommend!

Finally reading @NovicSara's True Biz and greatly enjoying how it innovates with form to show ASL within the constraints of a print page mostly in English. You. Name, one set of pointer and middle fingers tapped twice on top of the other set. What, almost like the gesture, hands up and out like a shrug. Eyebrows again, down this time. You + name + what—eyebrows. (line drawing of person doing said signs on the page of a book) Here the alphabet did come in handy, and Charlie was grateful that she could at least spell her own name. Me name C-h-a-x-l-i-e, she said. The teacher shook his head, pointed to his own hand. C. He pointed to Charlie. C. H. A. R. Dammit. R, she copied. He gave her a thumbs up. Again, he said. Everyone waited, watching her. Me name C-h-a-r-l-i-e The teacher nodded and continued around the circle. Once everyone had a turn, he returned to the board and wrote, Deaf, Hearing, Son, Daughter, Brother, Sister, then pointed to each and signed its equivalent. (line drawings of signs) Her fellow students introduced themselves. Most of them were parents or relatives of younger River Valley kids. Me hearing. My son deaf.

Selected Tweets:

October 2022: Visiting Singapore and Linguist Halloween

gretchenassistant

This month, I went to Singapore! It’s the beginning of my multi-month trip that’ll also take me to Australia in November and New Zealand in December. I stayed with Suzy J Styles, gave a talk about linguistics communication at Nanyang Technical University, and met up with lots of lovely linguists who made sure that I tried many delicious Singaporean foods (thank you!). Also I got to hear people speaking Singlish, which is indeed as neat as everyone says it is.

This month’s shenanigans involved finishing my series of twitter polls in order to determine the least confusing way (okay they’re all confusing, but) to spell the clipped form of “usual”.

Also I wrote a double dactyl about celebrities with great names.

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was Episode 73: The linguistic map is not the linguistic territory. The bonus episode was Bonus 68: Linguistics and science communication – Interview with Liz McCullough. We also launched a Lingthusiasm listener survey to celebrate our 6th anniversary of making a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics, which is coming up in November.

Selected tweets:

Blog posts:

This month’s image is a joke Halloween costume design that I made as part of a Halloween costume meme going around. But seriously if anyone does this for real please tell me, I want to know:

Halloween costume package with a photo of Amy Adams from Arrival in an orange spacesuit holding up a whiteboard reading "human" Captioned: Linguist "Human" Costume Included: Orange jumpsuit, helmet, whiteboard, marker Not included: Alien grammar, causality violation

May 2022: 10th blogiversary and Japanese translation of Because Internet

gretchenassistant

In May, I hit my 10-year blogiversary on All Things Linguistic. I celebrated with two linkposts, one of the usual highlights from the past year and another, shorter post of more zoomed-out highlights from the past decade.

I participated for the second year running as a contestent in Webster’s War of the Words, a virtual game show fundraiser for the Noah Webster House.

Promotional graphic of Gretchen as a contestant for Webster's War of the Words virtual game show, including logo, headshot, and bio.

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was Tea and skyscrapers – When words get borrowed across languages. The bonus episode was What makes a swear word feel sweary? A &⩐#⦫& Liveshow, an edited recording of our online liveshow from April.

It’s delightfully surreal when an author whose books you’re enjoying also likes your book!

The #103papers project continued, in which I read one paper per language for the 103 languages identified as having papers published about them in the four major child language acquisition journals, based on a survey paper by Kidd&Garcia. Here’s a bit from a paper about Greenlandic showing that kids love morphology!

Selected tweets

Selected blog posts

This month I received my author copies of Because Internet in Japanese, translated by Toshio Chiba, which kept the bright yellow/blue cover. You can get it at Filmart or Amazon.co.jp.

Image of Japanese editions of BECAUSE INTERNET on top of blue fabroc covered in symbols. One copy is in its yellow dust jacket; one shows the blue cover inside the jacket.

January 2021: Linguistics, Language and the Public Award, end of Crash Course Linguistics, and a cappella song about Because Internet

Gretchen McCulloch

I started off the year as usual at the Linguistic Society of America annual meeting, at which I was honoured to be the recipient of the Linguistics, Language, and the Public Award. I put up my acceptance speech as a blog post (and also a reminder that I wrote a series on how to have a career sorta like mine). Although this year was virtual and Word of the Year had been in December, it was still great to see everyone in the unofficial Gather space that I made for the conference (thanks to everyone who helped brainstorm ideas for what to call a fantasy linguistics coffeeshop). Also thanks to Christian Brickhouse and Lauren Collister for running the annual Wikipedia editathon with me, which we also did in Gather and it worked well there.

The final Crash Course Linguistics videos and accompanying resource posts on Mutual Intelligibility came out!

There’s also now a directory of all of the Mutual Intelligibility posts, a whole year’s worth of compiled resources, which we put up to conclude the project. Many thanks to everyone who read and contributed to the project, especially our editor Liz McCullough.

The main Lingthusiasm episode this month was about how writing is a technology (a companion to the final Crash Course episode), and the bonus was our 100th episode total, a “director’s cut” of excellent deleted scenes from previous episodes that we’d had to cut for time. It’s also the one-year anniversary of launching the Lingthusiasm patron Discord, which has since become a place that’s lively and active but not too much to keep up with, in my opinion an ideal state for an online community.

Someone made a musical tiktok video asking why adults over 40 use ellipsis so much, a lot of people tagged me in it so I tweeted about it, and then the delightful A Capella Science made an extremely catchy response video, also in music, with the answer:

Media:

Selected tweets:

Selected blog posts:

This month’s image is a screencap from the A Cappella Science video about Because Internet, which I still utterly cannot get over. Amazing.

July 2020: Because Internet in paperback!

Gretchen McCulloch

Because Internet, my book about internet language, is now available in paperback! 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. Because Internet was also featured in Paperback Row, the New York Times’s list of paperback books that came out this week, among other media (below). (There was also, briefly, one of those ebook sales.)

My Wired article about preliterate children texting in emoji from a while back was translated for Wired Japan. Here it is in Japanese and here it is in English again.

Lauren Gawne and I gave a talk for Abralin, the Brazilian Linguistics Association, about emoji and gesture. You can watch it online here on the Abralin youtube channel. (Auto-captions only; for similar content already in text form see our slides, this livetweet thread, our paper about emoji as gesture or the transcript of our Lingthusiasm episode about emoji and gesture in Because Internet.)

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was about phatic expressions like “hey”, “no problem” and “bye” and the bonus was about linguistics and music, including tones, drums, and whistled languages.

If you’re a Lingthusiasm fan, and you’re considering reading the Because Internet audiobook but you wish Lauren was there too, not just my voice all by itself, we now have a solution to that problem! That’s right, we’ve made a clip of Lauren-backchannelling audio that you can now play on loop in the other ear while you listen to the Because Internet audiobook.

Lauren and I also finally finished the bulk of the writing on the scripts for Crash Course Linguistics this month! We’ve been working on this intensively since March, not to mention the planning side in previous months. The Crash Course and Thought Cafe teams are now moving into exciting things that we’re less involved in, like filming and animating, although we’ll still be keeping an eye on technical accuracy as it goes along. I’m excited to share that the 16 ten-minute intro linguistics videos will be going up on the Crash Course youtube channel starting in September! If you want to get emails with each of the Crash Course Linguistics videos and suggested further reading/activities as they go up, you can sign up for the Mutual Intelligibility newsletter.

I did an edition of Mutual Intelligibility about teaching internet linguistics in honour of Because Internet coming out in paperback, along with several other great resources in the internet linguistics domain.

Media list:

  • Rotten Tomatoes – mention “WHY AIRPLANE!’S TITLE IS ONE OF THE CLASSIC COMEDY’S BEST JOKES” – 7/2
  • The New York Times – interview “A Short History of ‘Simp’” – 7/7
  • Grist – mention “Is nature all healed now? A look at the pandemic’s best meme” – 7/9
  • Daily Beast – mention – 7/17
  • Inverse – mention “Comic-con@Home” – 7/29
  • Against The Grain – Book of the Week  – 7/31
  • New York Times – paperback row – 8/2

Radio/Podcast:

Selected tweets:

Selected blog posts:

This month’s image is, of course, that snazzy paperback edition of Because Internet! The inside is pretty much the same, except that there are now two entire pages of fancy people saying nice things at the front, which you can see here, should you desire. But it’s also just been really gratifying over the past year to hear from so many regular internet people on social media finding yourselves in its pages. Thank you.

Because Internet paperback on esoteric symbols scarf

Top posts of 8 years of All Things Linguistic

Gretchen McCulloch

Cross-posted from All Things Linguistic. 

It’s my eight year blogiversary! Wow! Let’s celebrate by looking back at some of my favourite posts from the past year:

Because Internet

My book about internet language came out in July 2019. Here are a few of my favourite blog posts about it:

I also did over 200 media interviews for the book, but I’ve already summarized those on my 2019 year in review post.

Wired Resident Linguist column

I kept writing my Ideas column for Wired, which included these articles:

Other writing

Surprising internet crossovers

After 7 years of blogging, I thought I had pretty much figured out which sections go in this yearly summary post. But for year 8, I’ve found myself needing to add a delightful new one.

Lingthusiasm

We celebrated our third year of making Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! This year we were recommended by Buzzfeed (!!), which called Lingthusiasm “joyously nerdy”.

The most exciting Lingthusiasm episodes this year were the ones where our guests helped me and Lauren Gawne push the boundaries of what a podcast typically is: this video episode in ASL and English interviewing Lynn Hou about her research on signed languages in real-world contexts and the one where Janelle Shane used a neural net to generate fake Lingthusiasm quotes based on our existing transcripts, and then we performed the best ones out loud (see also Janelle’s blog post about making this).

Here’s all twelve regular monthly Lingthusiasm episodes:

  1. Why spelling is hard – but also hard to change
  2. Emoji are Gesture Because Internet
  3. Putting sounds into syllables is like putting toppings on a burger
  4. Villages, gifs, and children – Interview with Lynn Hou on signed languages in real-world contexts (also a video episode!)
  5. Smell words, both real and invented
  6. Many ways to talk about many things – Plurals, duals, and more
  7. How to rebalance a lopsided conversation
  8. Making machines learn language – Interview with Janelle Shane
  9. This time it gets tense – the grammar of time
  10. What makes a language easy? It’s a hard question
  11. The grammar of singular they – Interview with Kirby Conrod
  12. Schwa, the most versatile English vowel

And the twelve monthly bonus episodes:

  1. North, left, or towards the sea? With guest Alice Gaby
  2. Words from your family – Familects!
  3. Welcome aboard the metaphor train!
  4. Behind the scenes on Because Internet (Q&A)
  5. Jobs, locations, family, and invention – Surnames
  6. Reading fiction like a linguist
  7. The sounds of sheep, earthquakes, and ice cream – Onomatopoeia
  8. What might English be like in a couple hundred years?
  9. Generating a Lingthusiasm episode using a neural net
  10. Teaching linguistics to yourself and other people
  11. When letters have colours and time is a braid – The linguistics of synesthesia
  12. A myriad of numbers – Counting systems across languages

We also started a Discord community that’s enthusiastic about linguistics, to solve the problem of “Your podcast got me (back) into linguistics, but now I don’t have people to fan out about language with! Where do I make lingthusiastic friends?”

Finally, we released more Lingthusiasm merch: schwa pins and more that say Never Stressed, greeting cards that say “thanks” or “congrats” on them in IPA; the pun-tastic “glottal bottle” and liquids for your liquids bottle/mug; and shirts/mugs/bags that say Linguistic “Correctness” is just a lie from Big Grammar to Sell More Grammars. (See photos of all the Lingthusiasm merch here.)

Other projects

Lauren Gawne and I also started working on several other projects in the pop linguistics ecosystem online:

  • LingComm Grants – grants to help the next generation of linguistics communication projects get started, which we were able to expand from one grant to four thanks to the support of our patrons. Grantees to be announced in upcoming months!
  • Mutual Intelligibility – a newsletter summarizing existing linguistics resources on specific topics to help instructors moving their courses online, including shorter 3 Links posts and longer Resource Guides
  • Linguistics Crash Course – a series of intro linguistics videos in collaboration with the educational youtube channel Crash Course and linguist Jessi Grieser, to appear later in 2020

Blog posts, generally

Internet linguistics

Linguistics memes and humour

General linguistics

Linguistics jobs (mostly by Lauren Gawne)

Creative linguistics creations

Language Files videos 

I collaborated with Tom Scott and Molly Ruhl on a series of short youtube videos about linguistics.

A series on Weird Internet Careers

A reflection on how starting All Things Linguistic back in 2012 was the seed that led to all of the interesting and exciting things I’m doing now, including writing articles, writing a book, and doing the podcast — and how to approach trying to do something similar.

Haven’t been with me this whole time? You can see my favourite posts of year one, year two, year three, year four, year five, year six and year seven.

For shorter updates, follow me on twitter as a person, as my blog, or as the podcast, or for a monthly newsletter with highlights, subscribe on substack.

April 2020: expletive infixation and singular they

Gretchen McCulloch

We put up many posts on Mutual Intelligibility, the new newsletter that I’m producing with Lauren Gawne with resources for people who are teaching (or self-teaching) linguistics online (thanks to our contributors Liz McCullough and Katy Whitcomb!). Here are a few of them:

I made lists on Bookshop.org about Linguistically Interesting Fiction and Pop linguistics books, if you’re looking for distractions that also support independent bookstores.

The Lingthusiasm main episode was an interview with Kirby Conrod about the grammar of singular they (see also the show notes and transcript). This month’s Lingthusiasm bonus episode was about synesthesia – when letters have colours and time is a braid.

We’re officially giving out four LingComm Grants! If you have an idea for a linguistics communication project, make sure to apply by June 1st!

Lauren Gawne gave a video talk about our joint work on emoji and gesture. We also continued to work on scripts for Crash Course Linguistics.

A new Language Files video came out: Abso-b████y-lutely – Expletive Infixation, product of the ongoing collaboration between me, Tom Scott, and Molly Ruhl.

National Print/Top Online:

Podcasts

Local Print/Online:

Selected tweets:

Selected blog posts:

This month’s photo is of Because Internet in the Technology section of Elliott Bay Books, from back when I was there in February.

elliott bay books because internet technology section

March 2020: Mutual Intelligibility project for online linguistics teaching resources

Gretchen McCulloch

The large print edition of Because Internet is now a thing that exists, in case you need to explain how we talk online these days to a person in your life who likes large print and hasn’t already gone for the resizable-text ebook.

If you’re in the Montreal area, I’d appreciate people’s support these days for my local indie bookstore, Argo Bookshop, which did the book launch party and signed copies of Because Internet, and are now facing the loss of foot traffic like all small, “non-essential” business. Argo takes orders online (now including gift certificates and local delivery!) and everyone who goes to their events would really like to see them still be there after this!

A lot of linguistics professors started scrambling to move their courses online this month, so I revised and updated my post with a very long list of linguistics youtube channels and other free online videos about linguistics, and did a couple threads answering questions about further resources that people were looking for.

The popularity of our existing linguistics resource roundups led Lauren Gawne and I to launch Mutual Intelligibility, a project to connect linguistics instructors with existing linguistics resources suitable for teaching online in a bite-sized, easy-to-digest fashion. (Also potentially of interest to linguistics fans who want a distraction from the news cycle.)

We’re putting up thrice-weekly Mutual Intelligibility newsletters for the next while: on Mondays and Wednesdays short “3 Links” posts on a particular topic, and also on Fridays six longer Resource Guides diving deep into topics with a whole bunch of resources. We’re fortunate to have Kate Whitcomb and Liz McCullough (different spelling, no relation) along to help us make them. Thanks to everyone who has sent in queries and suggestions!

Read our first Mutual Intelligibility newsletter here, check out the archive so far, and put your email here to get future themed linguistics resource updates.

Because Lauren Gawne is essentially my partner in all forms of business, we also spent a substantial amount of time this month working on scripts for Crash Course Linguistics, along with Jessi Grieser and the Crash Course team. (Nothing official to report yet but stay tuned!)

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was about the tricky question of what makes a language “easy” (Spoiler: it’s not that straightforward).

The Lingthusiasm bonus episode was about teaching linguistics to yourself and other people — how to articulate what you find so cool about linguistics (and other complex topics you may find yourself needing to explain). We also experimented with doing live listen-alongs of new Lingthusiasm episodes on Discord, and made a Lingthusiasm Turing Test, where you can see how well you can identify which Lingthusiasm quotes are real and which robo-generated.

Lauren and I also announced that we’re giving out a second LingComm Grant, thanks to the support of Claire Bowern’s NSF grant. If you’re a linguist with a linguistics communication idea that could use a $500 boost to make it, you can apply at lingcomm.org by June 1. (Also a reminder that there are no conditions on how the grant money is used, so if you need it to take care of some living costs so that you can allocate your time to a project, that is totally fine with us!)

This month’s media hits:

National Print/Top Online: 

  • Kottke.org – feature “Weird Internet Careers”– 3/9
  • Financial Times – mention – 3/15
  • CNBC’s Make It – feature “How not to sound like a jerk (and communicate effectively) over Slack and email, according to a linguistics expert”– 3/18
  • Mel Magazine – feature “WILL CORONAVIRUS FINALLY END THE SCOURGE OF ‘I HOPE THIS EMAIL FINDS YOU WELL’? ”– 3/26
  • The Guardian – Solitary refinement: a lockdown survival guide – mention – 3/27
  • HerCampus.com – roundup “3 Books To Read While Stuck At Home” – 3/30

Newsletters:

Podcasts:

Local Print/Online:

Selected tweets:

Selected blog posts:

Obviously I didn’t go anywhere this month, so this picture is of an emoji-Escher-esque exhibit in the Burke Museum of Natural History from last month in Seattle, which I went to for a science journalist “Night Out at the Museum” event at the AAAS.

emoji ish symbols escher burke museum seattle aaas

2019 Year in Review

Gretchen McCulloch

Cross-posted from my blog, All Things Linguistic. 

2019 was a very big year for me.

My book about internet language, which I’d been working on since 2014, finally came out into the world! Because Internet hit the New York Times bestseller list and was one of TIME’s 100 books of 2019, plus tons of other media.

I wrote two op-eds for the New York Times and continued writing my Resident Linguist column at Wired, and we made two special video episodes of my podcast, Lingthusiasm.

Book: Because Internet

There were over 200 media hits for Because Internet in 2019, at final count. Here are a few highlights:

Short-form Writing

Wired Resident Linguist column:

I also co-wrote an academic article with Lauren Gawne, Emoji as Digital Gestures in the journal Language@Internet [Open Access].

Events, Talks, and Videos

In January, I did a lingwiki Wikipedia editathon and judged the 5 Minute Linguist competition, both at the LSA annual meeting.

In March, I gave a comic talk at the festival of Bad Ad-hoc Hypotheses (BAHfest) about why we should make English spelling more weird and confusing, which you can watch online. Recommended if you like Unicode jokes.

In May, I recorded the Because Internet audiobook! Here’s a thread with my linguistic thoughts about the process and an audio sample of me reading the audiobook. 

In July, I went to the LSA Summer Institute in UC Davis, to do a lingwiki Wikipedia editathon focussing on articles about underrepresented languages, a talk about effective communication of linguistics to a general audience, and MC’d the 3 Minute Thesis event. Plus, I had book launch party in Montreal with Argo Bookshop!

In September, I did a book event in Toronto in conversation with Ryan North (of Dinosaur Comics fame), featuring a packed house with many old friends at The Ossington with Flying Booksn. I also went to XOXO fest in Portland, and did two talks about the book in Seattle, with Textio and the Seattle Review of Books and Elliott Bay Books.

In October, I was on a panel about busting language myths through podcasting at Sound Education in Boston. I was also on panels about Using Language for Worldbuilding (moderator) and “What did we say before we said Cool?” at Scintillation, a small speculative fiction convention in Montreal.

I now have a speaking reel! So if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like when I’m giving a talk about internet linguistics, you can now watch a five minute highlights video here!

I collaborated on several Language Files videos with youtuber Tom Scott:

Lingthusiasm Podcast

We celebrated our third year of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics which I make with Lauren Gawne. New this year were two video episodes, about gesture and signed languages, so that you can actually see them!

Here are all 24 episodes from 2019, 12 main episodes and 12 bonus episodes:

  1. How languages influence each other – Interview with Hannah Gibson on Swahili, Rangi, and Bantu languages
  2. The verb is the coat rack that the rest of the sentence hangs on
  3. Why do we gesture when we talk? (also a video episode!)
  4. Pop culture in Cook Islands Māori – Interview with Ake Nicholas
  5. You heard about it but I was there – Evidentials
  6. Why spelling is hard – but also hard to change
  7. Emoji are Gesture Because Internet
  8. Putting sounds into syllables is like putting toppings on a burger
  9. Villages, gifs, and children – Interview with Lynn Hou on signed languages in real-world contexts (also a video episode!)
  10. Smell words, both real and invented
  11. Many ways to talk about many things – Plurals, duals, and more
  12. How to rebalance a lopsided conversation

Bonus episodes on Patreon:

  1. Naming people (and especially babies)
  2. How the internet is making English better (liveshow from Melbourne)
  3. Adapting your language to other people
  4. How do radio announcers know how to pronounce all the names? With guest Tiger Webb
  5. Talking with dogs, horses, ravens, dolphins, bees, and other animals
  6. North, left, or towards the sea? With guest Alice Gaby
  7. Words from your family – Familects!
  8. Welcome aboard the metaphor train!
  9. Behind the scenes on Because Internet (Q&A)
  10. Jobs, locations, family, and invention – Surnames
  11. Reading fiction like a linguist
  12. The sounds of sheep, earthquakes, and ice cream – Onomatopoeia

We also made new Lingthusiasm merch, including  items with the best esoteric Unicode symbols on them, adding socks, mugs, and notebooks in all our prints (IPA, tree diagrams, and esoteric symbols), onesies saying Little Longitudinal Language Acquisition Project, greeting cards that say “thanks” or “congrats” on them in IPA; the pun-tastic “glottal bottle” and liquids for your liquids bottle/mug; and shirts/mugs/bags that say Linguistic “Correctness” is just a lie from Big Grammar to Sell More Grammars. (See photos of all the Lingthusiasm merch here.)

Selected twitter threads

Book-writing meta threads

Other threads 

Some books I enjoyed! 

Selected blog posts

I celebrated my seventh year blogging at All Things Linguistic! Here are some of my favourite posts from this year:

A series on Weird Internet Careers

Memes and linguist humour 

Other Linguistics 

Things about languages 

Linguistics jobs interviews

Lists and how to

Missed out on previous years? Here are the summary posts from 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. 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.