Tag: bouba

In the summer of 2026, I was a Meighen Forum panelist at the Stratford Festival on “How language is made” in fictional worlds, to compliment their plays about The Hobbit and the King James Bible.

Closer to home, I led a conversation at Argo Bookshop for the book launch for Jo Walton’s Everybody’s Perfect (where I was grateful for my public speaking and improv background). And I returned to the Societas Linguistica Europea — virtually, this time — to talk about busting linguistic myths.

Lingthusiasm

We’re the podcast that is so enthusiastic about linguistics that it’s just too much for some people! Here are this season’s episodes from me and my cohost Lauren Gawne:

• Using tech to chat with bonobos, dogs, and whales
• Czeching out…the Voynich Manuscript? Deleted scenes from Danny Bate & Claire Bowern (bonus)
• Irregularity is all over the place
• How poetry reveals the structure of languages (bonus)
• How (not) to kill a language: Interview with Sophia Smith Galer
• Behind the Zines: Interview with Leah Velleman (bonus)

We also published zines with a few collaborators:

• How to fold a mini-zine (words by Leah Velleman, art by Lucy Maddox) — not just for linguistics! feel free to share this one with anyone who’s looking for a self-referential foldable zine-folding guide!
• Guide to your meat clarinet (words by Gretchen McCulloch, art by Lucy Maddox)

In honor of that second zine, I was proud (and my cohost Lauren Gawne was reluctantly convinced) to present MEAT CLARINET MERCH. Patreon patrons, both free and awe-inspiringly generous, can get some extra details on how this design came about, including seeing several horrifying meat textures that Lucy offered us in the concept art phase (sorry).

Even more ominously, “meat clarinet” can be sung to the tune of Pink Pony Club. Consider this foreshadowing…

The Glamourous Life of a Podcaster

Late last year I both (a) jocularly declared July 2nd to be World Schwa Day

please remember to adopt a medium posture today in the middle of the day and go uhhh for World Schwa Day from our episode about real and silly linguistics holidays http://www.patreon.com/posts/142860…

— Lingthusiasm (@lingthusiasm.com) 2026-07-02T17:36:26.149Z

and (b) completely forgot about it in time to be surprised by a keen listener wishing me a happy World Schwa Day.

a few minutes earlier…

— Gretchen McCulloch (@gretchenmcculloch.com) 2026-07-02T17:46:15.347Z

The whole experience was, as advertised, extremely mid.

Reading

Here are some books I’ve been enjoying:

• The Dragon Has Some Complaints — “A page-turning read that kept me up too late last night and also whew, a chronic health mood“
• Bowling Alone — “I love when one of those classic pop sociology books that everyone cites turns out to have even more in it when you actually read it!“
• Anne McCaffrey’s Pern novels — I don’t know why I hadn’t read them before, but boy do I have some linguistic thoughts now.
• The Mars House — “Unfair of this book to target me so personally” with this delightful sentence.

New favorite linguistic examples

I found new favorites (real and fake potentially-someday-real) among morphemes

• Smite, smote, smitten (semantic change making related words seem unrelated)
• Yup, nope, welp, lolp (that –p is starting to look like a productive suffix…)
• Uebinar, uebinaris, uebinari (what if borrowing worked backwards in time?)
• Gird, girdle; spin, spindle; tread, treadle (an Old English instrument nominalization)

and words

• Komorebi (highly specific but not untranslatable)
• Cockamamie (extreme semantic change)
• Podfic (the ultimate portmanteau)
• What-ho! (allegedly derived from Hwæt!, and did you want a Jeeves and Wooster–style Beowulf adaptation?)

and phrases and clauses.

• Currying favor Fauvel (folk etymology)
• I’m bitter salty umami about this (semantic field)
• He’s not here to fuck spiders (a glorious idiom)
• Drunkard’s buttons (and another)
• Smoking Bare Foot Pets Prohibited in Building (structural ambiguity)

Komorebi is a single-word lexicalization for "sunlight filtering through leaves" and that's a lovely concept I'm enjoying having learned about today despite (and indeed because of) how extremely translatable it iswww.morethantokyo.com/komorebi-jap…

— Gretchen McCulloch (@gretchenmcculloch.com) 2026-08-16T18:10:18.372Z

Miscellany

And finally, all sorts of things that I posted or that caught my eye on social media:

• It was a great season for boubas and kikis. They showed up in character design, canid species, t-shirts, poetry, and chocolate. The last one is an actual experiment! Can you guess which one tastes sweeter?
• As well as the bouba/kiki t-shirt, here’s a historical writing system skirt!
• A helpful resource for doing linguistics activities with libraries
• Advice from a real linguist on including people in conversations
• Songs by Weird Al!  The Brain Song and an incredible song that’s entirely in palindromes
• It’s gotten so much easier to learn a little bit of something new, and if you’re wishing you could do that for linguistics, you can, with the Crash Course Linguistics video series and a whole bunch more resources the Lingthusiasm team collected.

• What your favorite obsolete English letter says about you
• A fun little multilingual vocab quiz
• Lunar eclipses don’t happen more often than when I was a kid, I just know nerds who tell me about them and have a later bedtime.
• In other astronomy news, it’s sun lamp and vitamin D time for Northern Hemisphere dwellers far from the equator.
• The mystery language that influenced Ancient Greek
• Is there a wrong way to chase your dreams?
• Pluto losing planethood is a chance to get excited about other dwarf planets. I did not get dwarf planet fanfic, but I did get a song, some chickens, and a whole thread of you guys’ favorite dwarf planet facts.

Today’s image is a new cafe called Broken Man located, naturally, on a Halifax pier. (Okay, fine, I’ll explain the joke.)