Tag: podcast

2024 Year in Review

leahvelleman

In 2024, I traveled to Europe to speak at several events, including the launch of the Spanish translation of Because Internet. I started studying American Sign Language through the Lethbridge Layton Mackay Rehabilitation Centre in Montreal — my first time in a language classroom since university and it’s been really fun! The 2024 lingcomm grants were awarded. And I collaborated with the Crash Course Linguistics team on a research article about the series.

This year the podcast and I got some fun tidbits of pop culture recognition. Lingthusiasm was featured in the New York Times’ list of 5 Podcasts for Word Nerds, and Puzzmo’s daily crossword referenced my book Because Internet.

And speaking of which, Lauren Gawne and I kept making the podcast, along with some new merch featuring rabbits and fun personality quiz. I also started working with Leah Velleman on these update posts and assorted other Lingthusiasm and behind-the-scenes projects. 

Conferences

Most of my conference attendance this year was in a big trip through Europe, where I attended: 

I also went to the centennial Linguistic Society of America annual meeting in New York City.

Writing

A Spanish translation of Because Internet was released, bringing the translations list to four, with Chinese (simplified), Japanese, and Korean. If anyone reads it in several versions and wants to tell me about the linguistic choices the translators made (especially as I don’t speak the latter three languages), feel free to nerd out with me about it on bluesky. 

In 2020-21, I was a co-writer and script consultant for a project to make 16 videos for Crash Course Linguistics, the first video of which now has over a million views! The team behind these videos has also written an academic article about our process in making them, which appeared this year (yup, that’s how academic publishing goes). It’s called Creating Inclusive Linguistics Communication: Crash Course Linguistics and appears as a chapter in Inclusion in Linguistics (full text), an open-access academic book edited by Anne H. Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson, and Mary Bucholtz. The other articles in this book and its companion Decolonizing Linguistics are also well worth checking out if you’re on the more academic side of things. 

Interviews 

Lingthusiasm

Lingthusiasm, my podcast with Lauren Gawne, celebrated our seventh anniversary! There were some fun podcast events this year above and beyond the usual episodes. Bethany Gardiner made vowel space plots for me and my cohost Lauren, and you can see more about them and how they were made on github. We created a Highly Scientific™ ‘Which Lingthusiasm episode are you?’ quiz. We put out some new merch, including gavagai shirts, scarves, and stickers to go with our episode on a famous thought experiment about a rabbit. And while we can’t take credit for this one, you can get people gift memberships now, in case there’s a linguistics fan in your life who would like to listen to the bonus episodes.

Lingthusiasm episodes

  1. No such thing as the oldest language
  2. Connecting with oral culture
  3. What visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are
  4. Scoping out the scope of scope
  5. Brunch, gonna, and fozzle — The smooshing episode
  6. How nonbinary and binary people talk — Interview with Jacq Jones
  7. The perfectly imperfect aspect episode
  8. Lo! An undetached collection of meaning-parts!
  9. Welcome back aboard the metaphor train!
  10. OooOooh~~ our possession episode oOooOOoohh 👻
  11. Helping computers decode sentences — Interview with Emily M. Bender
  12. A politeness episode, if you please

Bonus episodes

  1. Themself, Basque ergativity cartoons, and bad swearing ideas — Deleted scenes from Kirby Conrod, Itxaso Rodriguez-Ordoñez, and Jo Walton and Ada Palmer
  2. Are thumbs fingers and which episode of Lingthusiasm are you? — Survey results and a new personality quiz
  3. How we made vowel plots with Bethany Gardner
  4. Inner voice, mental pictures, and other shapes for thoughts
  5. Secret codes and the joy of cryptic word puzzles
  6. Linguistic mixups — spoonerisms, mondegreens, and eggcorns
  7. The best and worst comparatives episode
  8. Don’t you love to do a “do” episode?
  9. Behind the Scenes on the Tom Scott Language Files
  10. Xenolinguistics 👽
  11. Linguistic Travel – Estonia, Mundolingua, and Martha’s Vineyard
  12. Metaphors be with you! Lingthusiasm x Let’s Learn Everything crossover episode

Reading, listening, and other media

Selected social media posts

General linguistics

Fun moments

New favorite linguistic examples

Helpful threads and posts

Missed out on previous years? Here are the summary posts from 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021,2022, and 2023. If you’d like to get a much shorter quarterly highlights newsletter via email, with all sorts of interesting internet linguistics news and links, you can sign up for that at gretchenmcc.substack.com.

October, November, & December 2024: Lingthusiasm Makes the New York Times Word Nerd Top Five

leahvelleman

Lingthusiasm was featured in the New York Times’ list of 5 Podcasts for Word Nerds! And here’s print evidence that it happened. 

The show is often as much about social habits as it is about language — one memorable episode had Gawne and McCulloch discuss “lopsided conversations,” those verbal interactions that can go off the rails if one person is either dominating or not contributing enough. It’s a fascinating listen that will change the way you see everyday communications.

The rest of the list had four other indie linguisticsy/languagey podcasts whose creators we also know and like: The Allusionist, Words Unravelled, The Vocal Fries, and A Way With Words. Check them all out!

New York Times, September 29, 2024, page AR 15, “Now Listen Up, You Word Nerds,” by Emma Dibdin

Besides that, I ran a little accidental A/B test on how to market your pop linguistics book.

And I answered linguistics questions from Ella Hubber, Tom Lum, and Caroline Roper on an episode of their very fun pop science podcast Let’s Learn Everything. 

73: Linguist Gretchen McCulloch, Latin in Science, and Internet Linguistics

I also enrolled in my third American Sign Language class, ASL 103 with Deaf instructor Hariklia (Lia) Mavroudis, again through the Lethbridge Layton Mackay Rehabilitation Centre (LLMRC) in Montreal. Back in person again after 102 on Zoom, which was a huge relief. It’s also been fun this semester to start recognizing some people from previous classes and events! 

Lingthusiasm

Lingthusiasm put out the usual six episodes — including a bonus episode about my last summer’s travel and visits from Emily M. Bender and Let’s Learn Everything.

We also added linguist, technical editor, and generally excellent human Leah Velleman to the Lingthusiasm team! Her first project was sprucing up the Lingthusiasm merch page (check it out, it’s much easier to navigate now!), and you may also notice her around here helping me with these newsletters, for which I’m very grateful.

Remembering Bill Labov

The great sociolinguist Bill Labov passed away. The internet remembered him as it does, with eulogies and also silly jokes about his best-known study:

Or, for a serious (but still entertaining) look at why he was so great, listen to Lingthusiasm’s episode about the bunny paper. 

Favorite data

New weird utterances! Someone said these!

And several someones have already been saying these! To my great delight, they actually are or were common expressions.

A product label saying "Stay Fresh Cheese Bags." Above the text is a picture of sliced cheese.

Reading and listening

Here are some things I enjoyed this season:

Tweets and blog posts

This quarter’s image is a pumpkin I carved for Halloween. Featuring two shapes, a round, blobby one and an angular, spikey one. If you had to assign the names kiki and bouba to these shapes, which one would be which? 

Carved pumpkin with a rounded cloud shape on the left and a sharper star-like shape on the right with the text: One of the shapes on this pumpkin is called kiki and the other one is called boo-ba. Which is which?

2023 Year in Review

gretchenassistant

In 2023, I switched to bluesky from twitter, which is still going strong. I also spent a month at the LSA summer institute, went to assorted other conferences, and kept doing the podcast. In other words, just like, a pretty normal year, which wasn’t nearly as shaped by the pandemic as the previous few years have been.

Conferences

  • I started the year in Denver, Colorado at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, where I co-hosted the Five Minute Linguist competition with Jessi Grieser and saw many excellent linguist friends! 
  • I attended the second International Conference on Linguistics Communication, #LingComm2023, which I was so pleased to see in the hands of a fantastic new organizing committee. They did ask me to give the opening keynote, which I’ve posted the text of as a blog post: What we can accomplish in 30 years of lingcomm.
  • I was on panels at Scintillation, a local literary SFF convention, one about magic words and one about reading Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan books.
  • I went to UMass Amherst for Lingstitute 2023, where I did a talk on linguistics communication, emceed the Three Minute Thesis competition, recorded two interviews for Lingthusiasm, and did a talk at a workshop called Bridging fieldwork, corpus, and experimental methods to study sociolectal variation.
  • I also got a cool tour of the Merriam-Webster headquarters while I was in the area!
  • October: I attended NWAV51 in Queens, New York.
  • November: I attended Patreon CreatorFest in Los Angeles.

Other projects

Lingthusiasm

Lingthusiasm, my podcast with Lauren Gawne, celebrated our seventh anniversary with a second listener survey and some new merch: the slogan Etymology isn’t Destiny and posters and other items with a colourful yet minimal layout of the International Phonetic Alphabet on them.

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).

I did an experimental bluesky thread matching people with the Lingthusiasm episode that matches their personality best based on the vibes of their profile, which people were surprisingly keen on! Since I was eventually getting more replies than I could keep up with, this ended up turning into making a Which Lingthusiasm episode are you? personality quiz.

Lauren and I published a new open-access academic paper: Communicating about linguistics using lingcomm-driven evidence: Lingthusiasm podcast as a case study. It’s in Language and Linguistic Compass, an open access linguistics journal, and you can read it in full here.

Lingthusiasm episodes 

  1. Where language names come from and why they change
  2. How kids learn language in Singapore – Interview with Woon Fei Ting
  3. Bringing stories to life in Auslan – Interview with Gabrielle Hodge (our second bilingual video episode, in Auslan and English with an interpreter and captions)
  4. Tone and Intonation? Tone and Intonation!
  5. Word Magic
  6. The verbs had been being helped by auxiliaries
  7. Frogs, pears, and more staples from linguistics example sentences
  8. How kids learn Q’anjob’al and other Mayan languages – Interview with Pedro Mateo
  9. Look, it’s deixis, an episode about pointing!
  10. Ergativity delights us
  11. Revival, reggaeton, and rejecting unicorns – Basque interview with Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez
  12. If I were an irrealis episode

Bonus episodes

  1. Parrots, art, and what even is a word – Deleted scenes from Kat Gupta, Lucy Maddox, and Randall Munroe interviews
  2. Singapore, New Zealand, and a favourite linguistics paper – 2023 Year Ahead Chat
  3. When books speculate on the future of English
  4. Neopronouns, gender-neutral vocab, and why linguistic gender even exists – Liveshow Q&A with Kirby Conrod
  5. 2022 Survey Results – kiki/bouba, synesthesia fomo, and pluralizing emoji
  6. Linguistic jobs beyond academia
  7. LingthusiASMR – The Harvard Sentences
  8. How we make Lingthusiasm transcripts – Interview with Sarah Dopierala
  9. Field Notes on linguistic fieldwork – Interview with Martha Tsutsui Billins
  10. Postcards from linguistics summer camp
  11. Linguistic Advice – Challenging grammar snobs, finding linguistics community, accents in singing, and more
  12. Frak, smeg, and more swearing in fiction – Ex Urbe Ad Astra interview with Jo Walton and Ada Palmer

Books

Selected posts from tumblr, twitter, and bluesky

General linguistics

General interest

Cool existing and hypothetical studies 

New favourite linguistics example sentences

Helpful threads and posts

Missed out on previous years? Here are the summary posts from 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022. If you’d like to get a much shorter quarterly highlights newsletter via email, with all sorts of interesting internet linguistics news, you can sign up for that at gretchenmcc.substack.com.

August-September 2023: Etymology isn’t Destiny merch and an academic article about lingcomm

gretchenassistant

I joined onto a fun project this month, Zach Weinersmith of the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is running a Kickstarter for his book, The Universe: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness, and one of the bonus rewards is an audiobook of his other book, Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulenss. I’ll be the one reading the highly abridged sonnets, which I’m looking forward to!

I wrote down assorted thoughts about I think about framing a plenary talk, which began as a bluesky thread and I’ve now archived as a blog post.

The main episodes of Lingthusiasm were How kids learn Q’anjob’al and other Mayan languages – Interview with Pedro Mateo Pedro, in which we talk about expanding research on how children learn languages to a broader range of sociocultural settings, and Look, it’s deixis, an episode about pointing!, in which we talk about how pointing varies across societies and species (domestic dogs can understand a point, but wolves cannot), and how linguistic pointing relates to the eternal confusion about which Tuesday is next Tuesday.

The bonus episodes feature two names you might recognize from the end credits of Lingthusiasm episodes: How we make Lingthusiasm transcripts – Interview with Sarah Dopierala, in which we talk about how Sarah’s background in linguistics helps her with the technical words and phonetic transcriptions in Lingthusiasm episodes, her own research into converbs, and the linguistic tendencies that she’s noticed from years of transcribing Lauren and Gretchen (guess which of us uses more quotative speech!) and Field Notes on linguistic fieldwork – Interview with Martha Tsutsui Billins, in which we talk about the process of doing linguistic fieldwork and interviewing dozens of linguists about it for her own podcast, Field Notes.

We also announced new Lingthusiasm merch! We love reading up on an interesting etymology, but the history of a word doesn’t have to define how it’s used now – and to celebrate that we have new merch with the motto ‘Etymology isn’t Destiny’. Our artist, Lucy Maddox has brought these words to life in a beautiful design in black, white, navy blue, Lingthusiasm green, and rainbow gradient. The etymology isn’t destiny design is available on lots of different colours and styles of shirts, hoodies, tank tops, t-shirts: classic fit, relaxed fit, curved fit. Plus mugs, notebooks, stickers, water bottles, zippered pouches, and more!

Finally, Lauren Gawne and I published an academic article about Communicating about linguistics using lingcomm-driven evidence: Lingthusiasm podcast as a case study. It’s in Language and Linguistic Compass, an open access linguistics journal, and you can read it in full here. Here’s the abstract:

Communicating linguistics to broader audiences (lingcomm) can be achieved most effectively by drawing on insights from across the fields of linguistics, science communication (scicomm), pedagogy and psychology. In this article we provide an overview of work that examines lingcomm as a specific practice. We also give an overview of the Lingthusiasm podcast, and discuss four major ways that we incorporate effective communications methodologies from a range of literature in the production of episodes. First, we discuss how we frame topics and take a particular stance towards linguistic attitudes, second, we discuss how we introduce linguistic terminology and manage audience cognitive load, third, we discuss the role of metaphor in effective communication of abstract concepts, and fourth, we discuss the affective tools of humour and awe in connecting audiences with linguistic concepts. We also discuss a 2022 survey of Lingthusiasm listeners, which highlights how the audience responds to our design choices. In providing this summary, we also advocate for lingcomm as a theoretically-driven area of linguistic expertise, and a particularly effective forum for the application of linguistics.

Selected tweets on Twitter:

Selected bluesky tweets:

This month’s image is from the new Etymology isn’t Destiny merch, which I think looks so good in the rainbow gradient on a dark background! I’ve enjoyed seeing some people with it already in real life and here it is on a tote bag:

"Etymology isn't destiny" in swoopy rainbow gradient text on a black tote bag hanging from a wooden hook.

https://allthingslinguistic.com/post/725034554312753152

2021 Year in Review

Gretchen McCulloch

2021 was in many ways a very meta year: most of my writing projects were reflections on the social functions of various other projects I was working on. But those other projects were very interesting both to do and to reflect on, such as coordinating LingComm21: the first International Conference on Linguistics Communication, and redesigning the Lingthusiasm website. (Might they also reflect how under-socialized I got by a certain point in this pandemic? Hmmm.)

I was honoured to be the recipient of the Linguistics, Language, and the Public Award from the Linguistic Society of America in 2021. I put up my acceptance speech as a blog post.

Media and crossovers

Media

Crash Course Linguistics

The final three videos of Crash Course Linguistics came out in 2021, although it was largely a 2020 project. Here’s the full list again so they’re all in once place, or you can watch them all at this playlist.

  1. What is linguistics?
  2. What is a word? Morphology
  3. Syntax 1: Morphosyntax
  4. Syntax 2:
  5. Semantics
  6. Pragmatics
  7. Sociolinguistics
  8. Phonetics 1: Consonants
  9. Phonetics 2: Vowels
  10. Phonology
  11. Psycholinguistics
  12. Language acquisition
  13. Language change and historical linguistics
  14. World Languages
  15. Computational Linguistics
  16. Writing Systems

Each video also comes with a few companion links and exercises from Mutual Intelligibility and a list of all of the languages mentioned in Crash Course Linguistics is here. It was great working with the large teams on that project!

Lingthusiasm

In our fifth year of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics which I make with Lauren Gawne and our production team, we did some general sprucing up, including a new cover photo (now featuring a jacketless Because Internet), a new portrait drawing, and a new website (for which I wrote a long meta process post here). We also did our first virtual liveshow (as part of LingFest), introduced new bouba/kiki and what the fricative merch, and sent patrons a Lingthusiastic Sticker Pack. Here are the main episodes that came out this year:

And here are this year’s bonus episodes:

Conferences and Talks (all virtual unless noted)

Conferences/events attended:

LingComm and LingFest

In April, I co-organized a pair of new events related to linguistics communication: LingComm21, the first International Conference on Linguistics Communication, and LingFest, a fringe-festival-like program of online linguistics events aimed at a general audience, which contained a total of 12 events attended by a total of over 700 participants. One of those events was our first virtual Lingthusiasm liveshow: here’s a fun thread that I did about backchannels while we were getting ready for the show.

LingComm21 had just under 200 registrants, around 100 of which were formally part of the programming in some way. My opening remarks and closing remarks are here as blog posts, and see the #LingComm21 hashtag for highlights of what people noticed about the conference. We then wrote a 6-part blog post series on the conference as a case study in making online conferences more social, in hopes of helping other people who are interested in better virtual events. 

  1. Why virtual conferences are antisocial (but they don’t have to be)
  2. Designing online conferences for building community
  3. Scheduling online conferences for building community
  4. Hosting online conferences for building community
  5. Budgeting online conferences or events
  6. Planning accessible online conferences

Selected tweets

Books and more

Helpful threads

Linguistics fun

General fun

Selected blog posts

I celebrated my ninth blogiversary on All Things Linguistic! Here are some of my favourite posts from this year:

Linguistics jobs

Linguistics fun

Languages

Meta and advice posts

Missed out on previous years? Here are the summary posts from 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020. 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.

November 2021: 5th anniversary of Lingthusiasm and a new website

gretchenassistant

It’s Lingthusiasm’s fifth anniversary! I’ve officially been making a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics with my cohost Lauren Gawne and our linguistically enthusiastic team for five years now!

In celebration, we redid the Lingthusiasm website to make it work better on mobile and so it would be easier for both new and recurring listeners to find things like where to start, transcripts, bonus episodes, and more. It looks so good now thanks to the tremendous behind-the-scenes efforts of Liz McCullough (different spelling, no relation!) and the new icon art by Lucy Maddox!

I also wrote an incredibly long meta post about the website design process for Lingthusiasm, which…you probably already know if you’re the type of person who likes long meta posts about the implicit social functions of things in everyday life.

Podcasts have what’s often called a discoverability problem: it’s hard for prospective listeners who might like a particular podcast to know what’s out there.

I propose, however, that this problem is not unique to podcasts, and that we could understand the nature of this problem better by calling it opacity: the degree to which you’re able to try before you buy without committing a substantial chunk of time, money, or effort.

For example, books have a higher opacity than newspapers, despite both being text, because it’s easier to read through some news articles before buying a physical paper or online subscription. Books, even when you can leaf through the first few pages, are often designed to be a unified rather than a modular experience, so you don’t know before committing to it if the premise that seems intriguing on page 1 is going to pay off well a few chapters later. Even if you’re getting access to the book itself as a gift or a loan, the time that it takes to figure out whether you’re enjoying it is still rather daunting. 

— How we made a better podcast website for Lingthusiasm

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was Cool things about scales and implicature. The bonus episode was Linguistic 〰️✨ i l l u s i o n s ✨〰️ (like optical illusions but for language!). We also sent out the Lingthusiastic sticker packs in the mail!

Also, we put some Lingthusiasm transcripts into a neural net and apparently the robots think I do linguist standup now.

Selected tweets:

Selected blog posts:

This month’s image is from the website redesign: our artist Lucy Maddox did this exceedingly cute sketch of me and Lauren as the icon for our new “about” page!

Colored silhouette line art of Gretchen and Lauren from Lingthusiasm website redesign.

April 2021: #LingComm21, Lingthusiasm liveshow and #lingfest

Gretchen McCulloch

We finally ran LingComm and LingFest, the events we’d been planning for the past few months!

LingComm21, the first International Conference on Linguistics Communication, had just under 200 registrants, around 100 of which were formally part of the programming in some way. It was fantastic to get to see old friends and meet new people and find out more about so many great lingcomm projects. Thank you to everyone involved in the conference, especially the organizing committee and those who participated through panels, posters, volunteering, and organizing meetups. My opening remarks and closing remarks are here as blog posts, and see the #LingComm21 hashtag for highlights of what people noticed about the conference.

We did a liveshow for my podcast, Lingthusiasm! Here’s a fun thread that I did about backchannels while we were getting ready for the show. If you’ve now realized that you want to belatedly watch the liveshow, here’s the archive link (for patrons, as encouraging people to become patrons is what helps us keep the show running).

The Lingthusiasm liveshow was part of LingFest, a fringe-festival-like program of online linguistics events aimed at a general audience, which contained a total of 12 events attended by a total of over 700 participants. Thank you to everyone who both created and attended events!

I also moderated a panel for the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) on NLP Applications for Crisis Management and Emergency Situations.

The main episode of Lingthusiasm this month was about R and R-like sounds (rhoticity), featuring A Thing About Eeyore that keeps blowing listeners’ minds, and the bonus was about talking to babies and small children.

Selected tweets:

Selected blog posts:

This month’s image is a group photo of attendees from the LingComm21 conference! So much fun to get to be in a group photo again for a change!

Tweet from @LingComm reading: Look at how many lingcommers there are! Group photo from #LingComm21, tag yourself! With screencap of about 50 videogame-style avatars from Gather around the word #LingComm21