This month I attended a local literary speculative fiction con, Scintillation, where I was on panels about swearing in science fiction and fantasy and the delightful Steerswoman books, as well as doing a dramatic reading from Ryan North’s Romeo and/or Juliet book.
Some linguists got very excited about a very cool linguistics paper by the late Anne Cutler, which I won’t spoil (because it really does have spoilers, but trust me you don’t need any particular linguistics background to get why it’s cool) and as a result we also managed to track down Anne Cutler’s Christmas Letter, which is mentioned in the paper. (The full twitter thread, linked to from below, is also worth reading afterwards.)
The main episode of Lingthusiasm this month was What we can, must, and should say about modals. The bonus episode was There’s like, so much to like about “like”.
I did a thread about how we approach a topic like modals which traditionally has a lot of associated terminology for a Lingthusiasm episode:
I also spent the entire month in the Indo-European section of the #103papers reading project. (And then some – 39 Indo-European languages in this sample.) Here’s a paper about Italian with very charming examples:
Selected tweets:
- So You Learned French
- Cackling Like
- Big & small
- Free Open Access Linguistic Textbook
- Subgetwoten
- Because Internet and Boomer Ellipses
- Cognate Objects
- Study Descriptions
Selected blog posts:
- Linguistics Jobs: Interview with a Hawaiian and Tahitian language Instructor, Translator & Radio Host
- Twitter Account of Awkward, Amusing Writing
- Scripting a Language that can’t be written
- Lingthusiasm HQ: Frown Thing!
This month’s picture is Because Internet hanging out at the staff picks section with some book friends at my local independent bookstore, Argo Bookshop! Argo’s owners were linguists in a previous life and it’s well worth a visit if you’re in Montreal.
Gretchen McCulloch 
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