Tag: linguistics

In spring of 2026, I attended conferences, awarded grants, read and discussed some great books, and made zines. And handed out zines. And talked about zines. Have I mentioned zines? Because I’m going to be mentioning zines a lot. But first…

Upcoming events

• August 26, 17:00 Central European Time: presenting “Busting Complex Myths through Sustained Public Engagement: The Case of Emoji” at Societas Linguistica Europaea in Onasbrück, Germany. 
• September 27, 10:30 AM ET: panel “How Language Is Made” at the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario.

Recent activities

Lauren Gawne and I awarded the 2026 LingComm Grants this spring, as well as some commendations to projects we couldn’t afford to fund but couldn’t resist giving props to. Go check out these cool projects! Thank you to everyone who submitted a grant proposal: we had a lot of fun reading through everyone’s ideas. And special thanks to the mentors who volunteered to be matched with a grantee: we heard great things about these meetings! 

I lost my voice for a day and realized that after 2 years of ASL classes at Lethbridge Layton Mackay, I’d learned a lot from the Deaf community about how to navigate it. No new ASL classes this quarter, but I did take a Portuguese class for fun.

I celebrated starting All Things Linguistic 14 years ago! I don’t update as much as I once did, but as I often tell people, never apologize for your update schedule. 

I attended some great local events: 

• Science Writers and Communicators of Canada, where I got to meet lots of interesting science communicators (shout out to the extra-long coffee/networking breaks), attend a Dragons-Den–style live pitch/feedback event, and participate in a zine workshop by Cat Lau (which was great inspiration for the zine workshop I ran a week later!)   
• LabPhon, the meeting of the Association for Laboratory Phonology, where I did a hands-on “linguistics communication through zines” workshop and talked with many linguists about zines and their own research! You can borrow my slides here, should you want to run a similar one yourself. 
• Festival BD de Montréal/Montreal Comic Arts Festival, where I picked up some sample zines for the workshops (including this incredibly cute tinyzine about cats) 
• Scintillation, a small literary speculative fiction convention, where I was on panels about Neologisms and the very meta Books That Are Impossible Recommend 

And everywhere I went, I talked about zines, showed people zines, looked at other people’s zines, and handed out zines and speaking of which, have I mentioned zines? Because: zines!

Zines zines zines zines

The biggest news in the last few months, as you might have inferred, is zines. Lingthusiasm — previously just a podcast — put together our first three linguistics themed zines, which are free to print, copy, and share anywhere in the world. 

We’ve heard a lot from listeners trying to share their love of linguistics with friends, family, or students, or just generally bring that linguistics energy from the internet into the physical world. Also, it turns out coincidentally that Gretchen’s and Lauren’s and producer Claire’s and editor Leah’s friends have all separately been getting really into zines lately. 

So here’s the plan. We make some zine designs, we release them as pdfs under Creative Commons licenses for anyone to print off from lingthusiasm.com/zines. (All of the zines are free for everyone, though patrons get to see them a few weeks early.) And then you can share them wherever you happen to be. And we can print them off and bring them to whatever events we happen to be at too!  

All the zines are made to be printed off from a single sheet of paper which is cut and folded in minizine style to keep photocopying costs low. We’re making all the designs available in both US letter and A4, and with colour/black and white options, so they can work for as many people as possible!

We’ve already heard from a few people who have made linguistics and language-related zines (check out these mini minorized language books in zine format on the Endangered Language Project site). If you make a linguistics-related zine or use zines for any other fun purpose, let us know by tagging @lingthusiasm on social media! 

Lingthusiam

All the zine-ing didn’t distract me from my linguistics podcast with cohost Lauren Gawne. Here are the latest episodes:

• The long shadow of Daisy Bates with This Guy Sucked (a crossover episode with a cool pop history podcast that we like!) 
• The pink-collar labour of colour words: Part II with Kory Stamper (a bonus episode where we talk about the story behind the spoilery part of True Color)
• Cross-cultural communication (in space!) (several of our recent favourite sf books on cross-cultural communication going wrong) 
• The idiom hit the fan (bonus)
• What makes for beautiful writing, scientifically speaking: Interview with Julie Sedivy
• The Lingthusionist: Interview with Helen Zaltzman (bonus)

We’ve learned that some podcast apps are trying to charge you for their own AI transcripts of Lingthusiasm. Don’t be fooled! If you want genuine human-made way-more-likely-to-be-accurate transcripts, lingthusiasm.com/transcripts has them free for every episode.

Also on the website: if you’ve been meaning to catch up on our archives, you should check out our updated topics page! It’s a great resource if you’re not sure what episode to listen to next or what to recommend to someone. 

And speaking of recommending…a few people found Patreon’s new community gifting feature before we even knew what to do with it so we’ve been able to give out 7 community-supported memberships so far to people who follow us for free on Patreon. If anyone else is feeling comfortably off in this economy and wants to help both us and your fellow lingthusiasts, we’d be happy to do this again! Follow us as a free member to get announcements whenever we might have gifted memberships to distribute!

The glamourous life of a podcaster

For anyone who wants a little glimpse into my glamourous life as a podcaster, here’s my new favorite note from Producer Claire.

Here’s the CanCon classic that I stopped a meeting with Cohost Lauren to play. 

And here’s the episode of Lauren’s crossover podcast episode on the mixed legacy of Daisy Bates  — a subject that she’s been resisting the urge to tell me little anecdotes from it so I could enjoy the episode without spoilers (which I did!).

Live from Lingthusiasm HQ, audio editing is undergoing an important quality control audit from the big boss(please say hi to Gremlin the cat!)

— Lingthusiasm (@lingthusiasm.com) 2026-05-08T18:15:24.575Z

Reading

This was a great few months for reading. I got to devour:

• Jo Walton’s Everybody’s Perfect, which I also got to discuss with the author at Argo Bookshop. It’s nothing at all like Piranesi, but somehow also like Piranesi, not that that really helps, and you should definitely give it a look. 
• Jo Walton’s The Just City, which ponders the question, what if Plato’s Republic was run by ten-year-olds? 
• Felicia Davin’s The Gardener’s Hand trilogy, queer fantasy with sea monsters and a well-thought-through depiction of what language learning magical ability could look like.

I read Kory Stamper’s True Color a while ago now, but please enjoy this absolutely heartwarming thread about it.

If you’re interested in literature, translation, and politics (as I am) you may enjoy (as I did) chewing on the ideas in this thread on pronouns in the Portuguese and French translations of the Murderbot books and this article on decolonizing fanfic in the non-English-speaking world. 

New favorite linguistic data

To my great delight, people said, learned, and pondered these sentences, facts, and phenomena:

• Love when I get to blow my linguist friends’ minds by pointing out that it’s [grilled [cheese sandwich]], not [[grilled cheese] sandwich] (rebracketing)
• “Once I’ve finished pondering my orb, I begin orbiting my pond” (chiasmus)
• “my candific opinion is that this would vigify the english language” (making morphemes more productive)
• Some french speakers are also using “begins with a vowel” as one of many gender-neutral strategies (taking advantage of neutralization)
• “Man arrested after driving child-size pink Barbie Jeep through Prince George, B.C.” (novel sentence)
• “‘A combination of amazement and horror’: Hitchhiker fish hide in manta ray buttholes” (novel sentence)
• “Jacob Elordi Cans Cannes Plans, Not in Jury Due to Injury” (novel, and extremely catchy, sentence)
• New favourite example of Grice’s Maxim of Relevance (unsurprisingly, Grice’s Maxim of Relevance)

New favourite example of chiasmus (source: http://www.tumblr.com/scribblinawa… )

— Gretchen McCulloch (@gretchenmcculloch.com) 2026-05-05T04:07:59.967Z

These words and phrases either already existed or do now:

• Vingifortmonthly — “every two years”
• The Woozle effect — when a source is widely cited for a claim it does not actually support
• Solvitur ambulando — “it is solved by walking,” used for things that obviously work in practice even when they don’t in theory
• Mirepoipsicles — frozen batches of onion, celery, and carrot
• Passé Composé — it’s always been a tense in French grammar, but now it’s a restaurant in Montreal
• Kalani Kanaele — a name in Hawaiian, or Finnish for “the chicken-like gesture that my fish makes”

And speaking of new words, here are some especially fun etymological facts:

• Minutes are called that because they’re minute (as in small)
• In Yup’ik, euphemistic terms for “bear” include “very lovable,” “he is good,” and “he doesn’t attack people”
• The s in island is entirely unetymological
• The ’-age’ suffix [in ‘language’] is … a suffix of action (like how a ‘pilgrimage’ is ‘that thing pilgrims do’). So really it’s more like ‘what that tongue do’

Today’s final photo is, unsurprisingly, zines