Tag: lingthusiasm

October 2018: Wired Resident Linguist, Scintillation, #AoIR2018, and Lingthusiasm’s second anniversary

Gretchen McCulloch

I’ve started writing a Resident Linguist column for Wired! My first article is about Voldemorting, birdsite, The Cheeto, and other ways of hiding words in plain sight online.

I was in this video on NBC about teen slang and this article about “ish” in work emails.

I attended Scintillation, where I was on panels about linguistic worldbuilding and the future of English in science fiction, and the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conferences, both in Montreal.

The Lingthusiasm main episode was about how Every word is a real word and the bonus episode was about bringing up bilingual babies. (Lingthusiasm is now also officially on Spotify.)

It’s our second anniversary of Lingthusiasm! To celebrate, we’re trying to help the show reach more people by encouraging current listeners to give us a shoutout on social media. Here’s a helpful roundup post with links to all the current episodes that you can share, and we’ll thank everyone who recommends us in a special anniversary post!

I livetweeted the linguistics bits from the new book HOW TO INVENT EVERYTHING as well as a short thread about linguistics aspects of Salt Fat Acid Heat.

Many great linguistics Halloween costumes.

At the end of the month, I head to PatreCon and Australia! Here’s my Australia conferences and talks schedule.

Selected tweets:

Selected blog posts:

This month’s image is the new Space Baby art from Lingthusiasm, which is available as a poster, art print, scarf, stickers and more!

space babies bookshelfie

September 2018: #XOXOfest, copyedits, Space Babies, and a stuffed wuglet

Gretchen McCulloch

I started the month at XOXO, an experimental festival for independent artists and creators who work on the internet. I’ve been hearing about XOXO for years now, and it was amazing to finally get to go! I ran a language meetup there, which filled the whole empty midafternoon restaurant we had it in (massive thanks to everyone who came!), and got to hang out with old friends, internet friends who felt like old friends but I’d actually never met before irl, and new friends! Here are a couple tweet-shaped highlights: on getting more poets into AI, on making an impact, on interwoven narrative structure, on an emoji-fueled Barrett’s Privateers singalong, and art of both the human and the generated kind.)

I then spent most of the rest of the month working on copyedits for my book on internet language! Still not much to say officially, but here’s…a…tantalizing…hint… and here’s a thread about my favourite copyediting word, stet.

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was an interview with Dr Hilaria Cruz about Making books and tools speak Chatino (transcript) and the bonus episode was about words that are kinda-sorta English and kinda-sorta belonging to other languages, aka hyperforeignisms.

We also released the official Space Babies art which we commissioned based on a popular moment in a couple early episodes of Lingthusiasm, about the languages of space. Honestly just go look it it, it’s so cute! (It’s available in physical form as an art board, stickers, shirts, phone cases, and scarves.) Plus a few more new merch items, like baby onesies that say NOT JUDGING YOUR GRAMMAR, JUST ACQUIRING IT (to go with the existing merch for grownups that says NOT JUDGING YOUR GRAMMAR, JUST ANALYSING IT), more colours of IPA scarves, and by popular demand, IPA ties!

Tickets are now on sale for the Lingthusiasm liveshow in Melbourne on Friday, 16th November 2018 at 6:30pm plus a second liveshow in Sydney on Monday, 12th November 2018 at 8pm. Both shows are going to be about how the internet is making English better, and include a patron meetup before each show and general meetup/hanging out time afterwards. I’m so excited to meet everyone!

Selected tweets:

Selected blog posts:

This month’s image is my new art from XOXO! Two bot-generated scarves in the background by Kate Compton, sunset postcards by Lucy Bellwood, and a stuffed wuglet I commissioned from Becky Margraf.

stuffed wuglet and art

August 2018: #LangFest18, Instagram, and Mastodon

Gretchen McCulloch

I attended LangFest in Montreal, a conference for polyglots and language fans. See my livetweets from #LangFest18 here.

I was on KPCC AirTalk (LA’s NPR affiliate) talking about the exclamation point in text messaging.

The Lingthusiasm main episode was about When nothing means something (transcript) and the bonus episode was a behind the scenes look at several recent conferences: emoji, gesture, and the International Congress of Linguists.

I started fact-checking a book about emoji and the book was so hilaribad it turned into a thread-review (blog post summary).

I’ve started updating the instagram for All Things Linguistic more regularly! Go check it out if your instagram feed needs more interesting linguistics posts in it.

I’m also experimenting with Mastodon. You can follow me here as a person, or here for a daily linguistics post from All Things Linguistic.

Selected tweets:

Selected blog posts:

This month’s photo is from July, when I was in Boston and paid a trip to the linguistics section of the MIT libraries. linguistics section MIT libraries bookshelfie.jpg

July 2018: Book heading into copyedits and EmojiCon in NYC

Gretchen McCulloch

My book on internet language is now heading into copyedits and will be out sometime in mid-2019! I wrote a blog post about the latest stage of the writing process and I’ve been tweeting periodically about it as well. If you want to be the first to find out when there’s more news available, you can put your email address here and I’ll make sure you don’t miss anything.

I gave a talk about Emoji as Gesture at the second EmojiCon, in Brooklyn (see livetweets at #emojicon18), and went to Dartmouth for a workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition for Endangered Languages. I also met up with a bunch of interesting people while I was in the NYC and Boston areas and went to EmojiLand, a surprisingly deep musical about emoji!

This month’s Lingthusiasm main episode was about This, That, and The Other Thing – Determiners and the bonus episode was about words that look or sound the same and the cool sentences we can make from them, featuring The Buffalo Buffalo sentence and more.

Selected tweets:

Selected blog posts:

This month’s photo is the sign of the excellently-named restaurant j’eat jet? (Did you eat yet?) in Brooklyn, near the venue for EmojiCon.

j'eat jet restaurant sign.jpg

Top posts from 6 years of All Things Linguistic

Gretchen McCulloch

Cross posted from All Things Linguistic. 

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

Articles and talks

I taught a session on communicating linguistics (LingComm) at Lingstitute, the linguistic summer institute of the LSA. Here’s my course summaries:

Advice and lists

Linguistics jobs

Games

Ambiguity

Things about languages

Language activism

Linguistics baked goods and other handmade items

Memes

Linguist humour

Internet linguistics

Podcast

Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics, entered its second year! Myself and Lauren Gawne of @superlinguo released the following main episodes this past year:

9. The bridge between words and sentences: Constituency
10. Learning languages linguistically
11. Layers of meaning: Cooperation, humour, and Gricean Maxims
12. Sounds you can’t hear: Babies, accents, and phonemes
13. What Does it Mean to Sound Black? Intonation and Identity Interview with Nicole Holliday
14. Getting into, up for, and down with prepositions
15. Talking and thinking about time
16. Learning parts of words: Morphemes and the wug test
17. Vowel gymnastics
18. Translating the untranslatable
19. Sentences with baggage: Presuppositions
20. Speaking Australian and Canadian English in an American/British binary

We also had a full year of bonus episodes:

4. Doggo linguistics behind the scenes
5, Hypercorrection
6. Language play
7. DIY linguistic research
8. Hark, a liveshow! So, like, what’s up with discourse markers?
9. Is X a sandwich? Solving the word-meaning argument
10. Liveshow Q and eh
11. We are all linguistic geniuses: Interview with Daniel Midgley of Talk the Talk
12. Creating languages for fun and learning
13. The grammar of swearing
14. The Poetry of Memes: Roses are red in the icebox
15. What you should know if you’re considering applying to linguistics grad school

We also released Lingthusiasm merch: scarves with a subtle International Phonetic Alphabet or tree diagram print on them, plus various items that say NOT JUDGING YOUR GRAMMAR, JUST ANALYSING IT, Heck Yeah Descriptivism, or Heck Yeah Language Change.

Book

I did a lot of behind the scenes writing on my upcoming book in defense of internet language for Riverhead at Penguin. I wrote an update post about the revision process here.

We’re getting close to the “exciting updates” stage for the book, so if you want to make sure you don’t miss things like the official title and publication date, preorder links, and what the cover looks like, you can sign up to receive very occasional book update emails here.

Haven’t been with me this whole time? You can see my favourite posts of year one, year two, year three, year four, and year five. For shorter updates, follow me on twitter as a person or as All Things Linguistic, or for a monthly newsletter with highlights, subscribe at my website.

April 2018: Tree diagram scarves and Prodigal Tongue livetweet

Gretchen McCulloch

We launched a new round of linguistics-themed merch on Lingthusiasm: scarves with a subtle tree diagram print, and t-shirts and other items that say Heck Yeah Descriptivism and Heck Yeah Language Change. Plus, the IPA scarves in more colours: teal, grey, black, and pale pink. For more pictures and to order.

This month’s Lingthusiasm main episode was about Sentences with baggage: Presuppositions and the bonus episode was about Roses are red and other connections between poems and memes.

I tweeted my way through The Prodigal Tongue: Lynne Murphy’s new book about British vs American English (twitter thread version, blog post version)

I gave a talk at McGill about careers in linguistics: slides.

I put up again my semi-annual call for papers and student work about internet linguistics!

Selected tweets:

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Here’s a photo of one of the new tree diagram scarves, in cream, hanging out on a tree. CreamTreeTree10 cropped filtered

February 2018: Archive of A Linguist Explains from The Toast

Gretchen McCulloch

While The Toast is sorting out their website situation, I’ve archived my Toast articles here as a folder of pdfs. I’ve gotten a couple requests for A Linguist Explains The Rules for Summoning Benedict Cumberbatch and A Linguist Explains The Grammar of Doge especially, so now they’re all available! (Also, apparently The Toast is going to be archived in the Library of Congress now, so that’s cool.)

I was referenced in this post on Boing Boing by Clive Thompson.

Our Lingthusiasm main episode was about vowel gymnastics and the bonus episode was about constructed languages (conlangs). Here’s a thread about people ordering custom coloured scarves, and we also made a teaching page with the episodes sorted by topic. We’ve been hearing from several people using Lingthusiasm in their classes, which is exciting!

Selected tweets:

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This month’s image is a photo of a restaurant sign that I took in Halifax when I was there in December. Someone involved in this restaurant knows their IPA!

mung restaurant IPA sign

January 2018: Language in the public ear: linguistics podcasts and radio panel at LSA

Gretchen McCulloch

I organized a panel called Language in the Public Ear: Linguistics Outreach via Podcasts and Radio at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. Here’s a description of the panel from the LSA program:

The number of Americans who listen to podcasts has doubled since 2013, and a growing number of these podcasts are about linguistics. Being able to download an episode to your phone or computer, listen to it anywhere (often while doing something else with your hands), and even pause and come back to it, has created a surge in the popularity of audio. While language is often a popular topic on general interest shows, there are now enough dedicated linguistics podcasts that we’ve put together a whole panel of them for the first time in LSA history. This panel brings together the hosts of both well-established and up-and-coming linguistics podcasts, which combined reach hundreds of thousands of listeners around the world.

Although a few speakers ran into weather issues and had to send in their contributions remotely, it all came together in the end! Here’s a link to all the podcasts, in order of appearance, with cohosts who weren’t present in parentheses:

We were also excited to have at the panel The Vocal Fries (Megan Figueroa and Carrie Gillon) which didn’t even exist when we were putting the panel together. It’s great to see the linguistics podcast sphere continue to grow! If you’re looking for more language podcast recommendations, do check out the other podcasts on this list!

Many thanks to everyone who attended the panel and especially to those who livetweeted #LinguisticEar, asked questions, and came up to chat with us! Here’s some more panel recap.

Also at the LSA, I organized a linguistics Wikipedia editathon with Lauren Collister, who’s an excellent new addition to the lingwiki team, in a rather epic room, and stepped in at the last minute to co-host the Five Minute Linguist competition with Lane Greene of the Economist, in addition to our previously scheduled judging, due to weather issues again. You can watch a video of all the Five Minute Linguist talks here.

Still at the LSA, we took a group photo of lingthusiasts wearing IPA scarves and reached $1000/month on Patreon while Lauren Gawne and I were in the same place, so we got celebratory ice cream!

The Lingthusiasm main episode was about learning parts of words: morphemes and the wug test. Here’s a thread about wugs and linguistic in-jokes. The bonus was an interview with Daniel Midgley of Talk the Talk about how “We are all linguistic geniuses”. We also did an interview with The Vocal Fries about Canadian and Australian Englishes.

I posted my 2017 Year in Review post, with links to the highlights of what I’ve been doing and reading about linguistics. I was also in Superlinguo’s 2017 year in review.

Planning for creating an AP Linguistics course continues: Here’s a thread on how you can help and a blog post version. The LSA is now also offering free membership to K-12 students and teachers.

I did an interview on the origins of “doggo” for Wired.

Selected tweets:

Selected blog posts:

I went into two bookstores while I was in Salt Lake City to check out their linguistics sections. One was shelved next to “etiquette” and the other next to “witchcraft.” There are two kinds of linguists…

linguistics bookshelfie salt lake city etiquette witchcraft

2017 Year in Review

Gretchen McCulloch

Cross-posted from All Things Linguistic.

In 2017, podcasting turned from a fun new experiment into a real, self-sustaining project, I checked off half of the American states on my have-visited list thanks to conference rotation (lifetime, not just in this year), and I got my book way closer to being a real thing you’ll get to see soon.

Lingthusiasm podcast

My podcast with Lauren Gawne, which launched towards the end of 2016, had a full year of episodes, a sold-out liveshow at Argo Bookshop in Montreal and reached over 100k listens!

4. Inside the Word of the Year vote
5. Colour words around the world and inside your brain
6. All the sounds in all the languages – the International Phonetic Alphabet
7. Kids these days aren’t ruining language
8. People who make dictionaries: Review of Kory Stamper’s book Word by Word
9. The bridge between words and sentences — Constituency
10. Learning languages linguistically
11. Layers of meaning — Cooperation, humour, and Gricean Maxims
12. Sounds you can’t hear – Babies, accents, and phonemes
13. What Does it Mean to Sound Black? Intonation and Identity Interview with Nicole Holliday
14. Getting into, up for, and down with prepositions
15. Talking and thinking about time

We also launched a Patreon for the podcast, and released 10 bonus episodes there:

  1. Swearing and pseudo-swears
  2. How to teach yourself linguistics
  3. How to explain linguistics to employers (text chat)
  4. Doggo linguistics behind the scenes
  5. Hypercorrection
  6. Language play
  7. DIY linguistic research
  8. Hark, a liveshow! So, like, what’s up with discourse markers?
  9. Is X a sandwich? Solving the word-meaning argument
  10. Liveshow Q and eh

In addition, we launched some lingthusiastic merch: scarves with a subtly nerdy IPA print on them, stickers with our logo, and various items that say NOT JUDGING YOUR GRAMMAR, JUST ANALYSING IT.

Book

I did a lot of behind the scenes writing on my book about internet language, which will be published by Riverhead at Penguin. All you got to see about it for 2017 was this update about line edits and a few cryptic tweets, but stay very much tuned for more updates about it in 2018!

You can sign up for very occasional email updates about the book here, if you want to make sure you don’t miss it on social media.

Talks, workshops, and teaching

A linguistics museum called Planet Word was announced for Washington DC. I’m on the Advisory Board, and I went to New York City in October for a planning meeting

  • Internet linguistics at SpaceWitchCon, in the woods of North Carolina
  • How I Became An Internet Linguist: Princeton linguistics colloquium talk

At the Linguistic Society of America annual meeting in Austin, Texas:

  • Stumbling into linguistics via blogs and Wikipedia at a panel on Getting High School Students into Linguistics which I co-organized with Moti Lieberman. Panel slides and abstracts.
  • How people lengthen words on Twitter, co-authored with Jeffrey Lamontagne – slides at bit.ly/longggg.
  • Judge for the Five Minute Linguist talks

At South by Southwest in March:

At the LSA institute in Lexington, Kentucky in July, I taught a four-week class on communicating linguistics or LingComm  Here’s the class notes as blog posts:

  1. Day 1: Goals
  2. Day 2: Terminology and the explainer structure
  3. Day 3: The Curse of Knowledge and short talks
  4. Day 4: Myth debunking and in-person events
  5. Day 5 & 6: Events, self-promotion, and charades
  6. Day 7 & 8: Pitching and final projects

I also livetweeted the Lingstitute plenary talks:

I did lingwiki Wikipedia editathons at the LSA annual meeting, Lingstitute, and the International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation (ICLDC) in Honolulu, Hawaii in March.

Media

The first episode of Lingthusiasm was also featured in NY Mag’s Science of Us and on #SciFriLive (Science Friday on NPR).

A few articles I was quoted in:

Linguistics jobs

I moderated a panel about careers in linguistics at the annual meeting of the Canadian Linguistics Association in Toronto. Linguistics jobs interviews that aired on the blog:

Selected blog posts

I hit my 5-year blogiversary on All Things Linguistic! Here are a few of my favourite posts from 2017:

Continue reading “2017 Year in Review” →

December 2017: Full-length bonus episodes and 100k listens on Lingthusiasm

Gretchen McCulloch

This month’s Lingthusiasm episode was #15: Talking and thinking about time and the bonus was the Q&A from our liveshow in Montreal. We have dubbed it the liveshow Q and eh because the first question is about Canadian “eh” but we also answer other questions!

Thanks to everyone who supported Lingthusiasm’s anniversary by recommending the show: full length bonus episodes started this month! We also announced that we’re adding a new goal to the Patreon: to commission art of a memorable part of Lingthusiasm and make it available for listeners!

We’ve been enjoying seeing pictures of everyone’s IPA scarves and NOT JUDGING YOUR GRAMMAR, JUST ANALYSING IT items on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr! We’re planning a group photo with everyone wearing linguistics merch at the LSA conference in Salt Lake City, just before the Word of the Year vote. We’re also going to compile a collage of everyone’s photos that get sent in!

I was also quoted in this Vox explainer of the Mr. Brightside meme.

I posted my 2017 highlights post on All Things Linguistic if you want a glimpse back on the year.

Selected tweets:

Selected blog posts:

This month’s featured image is all three colours of IPA scarf, red, navy, and olive, together at last!

Maker:S,Date:2017-8-23,Ver:6,Lens:Kan03,Act:Lar02,E-ve
Three scarves with International Phonetic Alphabet pattern in white letters on red, navy, olive