July 2020: Because Internet in paperback!

August 15, 2020May 22, 2021 Gretchen McCulloch

Because Internet, my book about internet language, is now available in paperback! Links to get it in all of the formats, including how to get signed copies.

Here are some photos of the new paperback edition, same bright yellow cover, now with 10x more nice quotes from people. I also wrote an old-school reflexive blog post about what it’s like to hit the final milestone in a book journey that began in 2014. Because Internet was also featured in Paperback Row, the New York Times’s list of paperback books that came out this week, among other media (below). (There was also, briefly, one of those ebook sales.)

My Wired article about preliterate children texting in emoji from a while back was translated for Wired Japan. Here it is in Japanese and here it is in English again.

Lauren Gawne and I gave a talk for Abralin, the Brazilian Linguistics Association, about emoji and gesture. You can watch it online here on the Abralin youtube channel. (Auto-captions only; for similar content already in text form see our slides, this livetweet thread, our paper about emoji as gesture or the transcript of our Lingthusiasm episode about emoji and gesture in Because Internet.)

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was about phatic expressions like “hey”, “no problem” and “bye” and the bonus was about linguistics and music, including tones, drums, and whistled languages.

If you’re a Lingthusiasm fan, and you’re considering reading the Because Internet audiobook but you wish Lauren was there too, not just my voice all by itself, we now have a solution to that problem! That’s right, we’ve made a clip of Lauren-backchannelling audio that you can now play on loop in the other ear while you listen to the Because Internet audiobook.

Lauren and I also finally finished the bulk of the writing on the scripts for Crash Course Linguistics this month! We’ve been working on this intensively since March, not to mention the planning side in previous months. The Crash Course and Thought Cafe teams are now moving into exciting things that we’re less involved in, like filming and animating, although we’ll still be keeping an eye on technical accuracy as it goes along. I’m excited to share that the 16 ten-minute intro linguistics videos will be going up on the Crash Course youtube channel starting in September! If you want to get emails with each of the Crash Course Linguistics videos and suggested further reading/activities as they go up, you can sign up for the Mutual Intelligibility newsletter.

I did an edition of Mutual Intelligibility about teaching internet linguistics in honour of Because Internet coming out in paperback, along with several other great resources in the internet linguistics domain.

Media list:

Rotten Tomatoes – mention “WHY AIRPLANE!’S TITLE IS ONE OF THE CLASSIC COMEDY’S BEST JOKES” – 7/2
The New York Times – interview “A Short History of ‘Simp’” – 7/7
Grist – mention “Is nature all healed now? A look at the pandemic’s best meme” – 7/9
Daily Beast – mention – 7/17
Inverse – mention “Comic-con@Home” – 7/29
Against The Grain – Book of the Week – 7/31
New York Times – paperback row – 8/2

Radio/Podcast:

Lifehacker’s The Upgrade podcast – interview – 7/23
Something You Should Know Podcast – interview – 7/23
The Pulse/ WHHY – interview – 7/24

Selected tweets:

Structural ambiguity: Never gonna give you UP
it has come to my attention that the Chinese translation of Häagen-Dazs ALSO has a spurious umlaut on it
scanning your phone, I don’t even
Thinking about how we can establish better virtual “hallways” as conferences and so on move online (thread)
the word “cakeroll”
why the international phonetic alphabet is useful: “genre” in various languages
apparently we’re dreaming in videochat now
New favourite example of scalar implicature: many whales were never taught how to drive stick shift
Roaring twenties / tossing pennies – a short thread about post-nasal stop deletion
Asterisk correction in chat (thread starting with an xkcd comic)
I began an experiment trying to replicate the “hallway circuit” online
The emotional valence of periods in text messages

Selected blog posts:

This month’s image is, of course, that snazzy paperback edition of Because Internet! The inside is pretty much the same, except that there are now two entire pages of fancy people saying nice things at the front, which you can see here, should you desire. But it’s also just been really gratifying over the past year to hear from so many regular internet people on social media finding yourselves in its pages. Thank you.

October 2019: UK edition of Because Internet comes out, Sound Education & Scintillation conferences

November 6, 2019 Gretchen McCulloch

The UK edition of Because Internet came out this month! It will also be replacing the US edition in Australia, New Zealand, and other places that typically get UK versions of books. In celebration, I re-recorded a tiny portion of the Because Internet audiobook in a very posh, very fake British accent. You can get the real audiobook, featuring my normal voice, as well as all other versions of Because Internet here (or scroll to the bottom for a comparative photo of the US and UK editions!).

There was also some UK media around the UK publication! I did interviews in The Times (yes, that Times, the Times of London), the Observer/Guardian, BBC Science Focus, the Financial Times. Here’s a quote from my interview in the Guardian:

Like many linguists, I have a difficult time turning the linguistics part of my brain off. If you get me at the pub, I may be trying to listen to what you’re saying and then get distracted by your vowels. So to be interested in the way people talk on the internet is just a natural extension of being interested in how people talk around me on an everyday basis. […]

I think it’s easy to see people doing something different from you, and assume it must be haphazard, random, or they must not know “the right way” to do it. In reality, people are acting for deliberate reasons, and I’m figuring out what those reasons are.

I was on panels at two conferences this month! I did threads about adding linguistics programming to not-explicitly-linguistic conferences and about how making public-facing work leads to interesting opportunities.

Sound Education is a conference about educational podcasts in Boston, and I was on a panel about busting language myths through podcasting.

Scintillation is a small speculative fiction convention in Montreal, which I participated in for the second year now, and I was on panels about Using Language for Worldbuilding (moderator) and “What did we say before we said Cool?”

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was about smell words, both real and invented, and the bonus episode was about surnames. We were also recommended by Buzzfeed (!!), which called Lingthusiasm “joyously nerdy”.

Lingthusiasm also released new merch, including socks with our International Phonetic Alphabet, tree diagram, and esoteric symbols prints; greeting cards that say “thanks” or “congrats” on them in IPA; the pun-tastic “glottal bottle” and liquids for your liquids bottle/mug; and shirts/mugs/bags that say Linguistic “Correctness” is just a lie from Big Grammar to Sell More Grammars. (See photos of the all the Lingthusiasm merch here.)

I got inspired by the “ok boomer” shirts that have been going around to make “ok pedant” shirts (and people have actually bought them!)

Finally, but perhaps most excitingly, someone dressed up as my book for Halloween! I am ded.

Long list of all media from this month:

National Radio/TV:

BBC Science Focus – interview –10/17
Radio New Zealand – interview –10/23

National Print/Top Online:

The Times – interview – 10/1
The Observer/Guardian – interview – 10/5
The Financial Times – review – 10/7
Real Simple– roundup “Best Books of 2019” –10/1
Capstone Communications – mention – 10/9
Lifehacker– mention – 10/10
The Week– roundup “Randall Monroe’s Book List” –10/18
Without Bullshit– mention – 10/17
GeekDad– mention – 10/21
Mashable– roundup “10 books about tech for every kind of person in your life” –10/21
Considerable– review – 10/23
BuzzFeed News– mention – 10/24
The Daily Kos– review – 10/26
Philosophy Tube– mention – 10/28
Vogue – mention – 10/30
Ars Techninca – review –11/4

Newsletters:

Crooked Reads Newsletter – mention – 10/1

Podcasts:

Nerdette podcast– interview – 10/18

Local Print/Online:

Seattle Review of Books – Q&A from event – 10/9
Colorado Public Radio– mention – 10/30

Local Radio/TV:

KJZZ “The Show” – interview – 10/25

Selected tweets:

Selected blog posts:

This month’s photo is of the new UK edition of Because Internet (left) hanging out with the US edition (right) and a small stuffed wug.

September 2019: Book events in Toronto and Seattle, XOXO in Portland, and New York Times Op-Ed From the Future

October 3, 2019November 5, 2019 Gretchen McCulloch

I wrote an op-ed for the New York Times (my first time writing there instead of being quoted!), from the perspective of 200 years in the future when people have nostalgia for the good old days of quaint emoji. Here’s one part that I liked (longer excerpt here).

The early 21st century was also a golden era for linguistic innovation related to using indirect constructed dialogue to convey actions and mental states. In speech, this era saw the rise of “be like” and in writing, the “me:” and *does something* conventions. (And I’m like, how did people even communicate their internal monologues without these?? also me: *shakes head* yeah I have no idea.)

We now take these linguistic resources for granted, but at the time they represented a significant advancement in modeling complex emotions and other internal conditions on behalf of oneself and other people. Imagine being limited to the previous generation of dialogue tags, which attempted to slice everything into sharp distinctions between “said,” “felt” and “thought.”

I was very proud that this op-ed got me no fewer than five (5!) entries in New New York Times, a twitter account that tracks words that appear in the New York Times for the first time. (Also, which unhyphenated compound word from the early 23rd century are you?)

I also did quite a lot of travel!

Toronto – book event in conversation with Ryan North (of Dinosaur Comics fame), featuring a packed house with many old friends at The Ossington with Flying Booksn.

Portland – XOXO fest where I held a language meetup for the second time, introducing people to the excellent word game called Contact, left some signed copies at Powells, and gave many Because Internet stickers to people!

Seattle – two talks about the book, one internally for Textio in the afternoon, and one in the evening for the public with the Seattle Review of Books and Elliott Bay Books.

The third Language Files video in my recent collaboration with Tom Scott and Molly Ruhl went up, this time about the language sounds that could exist, but don’t (the forbidden grey boxes of the International Phonetic Alphabet).

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was a bilingual video episode interviewing linguist Dr Lynn Hou about her research on signed languages in natural contexts, including ASL on youtube and Chatino Sign Language, in ASL and English. The bonus episode was a behind-the-scenes look at the writing process for Because Internet. Watch the video episode here:

My keynote talk about internet linguistics at the CoEDL Summer School in Canberra, Australia last year went online. I also switched this monthly newsletter from Mailchimp to Substack (existing subscribers were already migrated, and you can still view it online at gretchenmcculloch.com/news, but if you’d like to get an email when I write a new post like this, you can sign up here).

I spent a week at a friend’s cottage by a lake for a much-needed respite, where I wasn’t on the internet much but did enjoy JY Yang’s Tensorate series :)

Long list of media from this month:

Radio/TV:

CBC The Current – interview – 9/4
“The List” – interview– 9/10
KPR “Conversations” – interview – 9/9

National Print/Top Online:

Wall Street Journal – mention “Tales of ‘Woah’” – 9/13
The Washington Post – Review– 9/12
New York Times – Op-Eds from the Future – 9/23
Wattpad– feature– 8/27
WeWork– feature– 9/3
The Walrus – excerpt – 9/9
GeekWire.com – review – 9/11
Wired – mention – 9/11
Lifehacker – mention – 9/23
Mother Jones – review – 9/24
Good Beer Hunting—mention – 9/25
Esquire– roundup “The Best Nonfiction Books of 2019” –9/26
Reader’s Digest– mention – 9/30
Real Simple– roundup “Best Books of 2019” –10/1

Newsletters & Blogs:

Crooked Reads Newsletter – mention – 10/1
Language Hat – excerpt – 9/18

Podcasts:

New York Times Book Review podcast – interview – 8/30
Slate’s “The Gist with Mike Pesca” – interview – 9/5
Six Pixels of Separation – interview – 9/22
The Ezra Klein Show – recommended by Randall Munroe – 9/15
A Way With Words Radio – mention – 9/23

Local Print/Online:

Seattle Review of Books – “Whatcha Reading” series – 9/7
SF Gate – review – 9/13
Columbia Journalism Review – mention – 9/16
Washington Independent Review of Books– review – 9/25

Selected tweets:

Selected blog posts:

Here’s a photo of me and Ryan North just before our event in Toronto, featuring the really excellent sign based on Because Internet that The Ossington made for us!

August 2019: UK edition of BECAUSE INTERNET coming in October and So. Much. Media.

September 26, 2019September 28, 2019 Gretchen McCulloch

There’s going to be an official UK edition of BECAUSE INTERNET! It’ll have a slightly different cover and subtitle, and will be coming out on October 3 in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and everywhere else that typically gets UK editions of books. You can preorder it here in hardback, ebook, and audiobook formats. (As tempting as it sounds, I will NOT be re-recording the entire audiobook in a fake British accent for the UK edition — you’ll have to settle for my actual Canadian one.)

BECAUSE INTERNET hit the New York Times bestseller list for a second week, and through mysterious alchemical forces I acquired a Wikipedia bio page and this nifty Google search box beside my name.

There are, as I learned this month, two different ways that a book can be reviewed by the New York Times. One is through the Daily reviews, which is what happened last month. The other is through the weekend Books section, which is what happened this month with a review by Clay Shirky, who said:

If you are concerned about digital tools dumbing down written English, or leaving young people with lazier syntactic habits, this is definitely not the book for you. If, on the other hand, you are interested in how language actually works (the rules are just collective agreements, constantly renegotiated), and how the internet is changing those rules, it definitely is.

I also wrote an adapted excerpt from BECAUSE INTERNET which appeared in the Wall Street Journal. Here’s a bit of it:

Irony is a linguistic trust fall. When I write or speak with a double meaning, I’m hoping that you’ll be there to catch me by understanding my tone. The risks are high—misdirected irony can gravely injure the conversation—but the rewards are high, too: the sublime joy of feeling purely understood, the comfort of knowing someone’s on your side. No wonder people through the ages kept trying so hard to write it.

Other media highlights: reviews in the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, and NPR Fresh Air, being quoted in a New York Times article about the em dash, and interviews on the BBC World News and NPR It’s Been a Minute. (This month’s full, ridiculous, media list below.) Here’s a quote from the Atlantic:

McCulloch shows how creative respellings, expressive punctuation, emoji, memes, and other hallmarks of informal communication online demonstrate a sophistication that can rival even the most elegant writing.

I did a Reddit AMA on the r/Books subreddit and wrote a Big Idea post on Whatever, John Scalzi’s blog, about the quixotic attempt to write a book about the internet. I’ve been reading both things for years so it was exciting to finally be on them!

I collaborated on a second Language Files video with Tom Scott and Molly Ruhl, this time about “no problem” “you’re welcome” and other phatic expressions.

I tweeted my reading of two other new books, This Is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, and How To by Randall Munroe.

The main Lingthusiasm episode was about how putting sounds into syllables is like putting a burger together (a thread about how we designed this metaphor). The bonus was about metaphors themselves, including metaphors we take for granted and the career of metaphor design. We also ran a Patreon Special Offer to get signed bookplates of BECAUSE INTERNET (which is closed now, but you can still get your name and favourite IPA character on our Lingthusiasm Supporter Wall of Fame).

Here’s the ridiculously long list of all the media I did this month, another 34 items to add to July’s 68. (For those keeping score at home, that makes for 102 media things in July and August alone, which is a bit more than the amount of total media that I’d ever done in the five or so years before that. In other words, that’s a LOT.)

National Radio/TV:

BBC World News – interview –8/1
NPR/“It’s Been a Minute” with Sam Sanders– interview –8/10
NPR/ “Fresh Air” – review– 8/20

National Print/Top Online:

New York Times– roundup “Editor’s Choice”– 8/4
Wall Street Journal – review– 8/2
Wall Street Journal – first serial “How The Internet Is Making English Better” – 8/10
New York Times Book Review– review – 8/16
People Magazine – review–8/12
The Washington Post – Op-Ed mention– 8/8
The Atlantic – review– 8/10
New York Times Style – mention– 8/14

BookPage– starred review – August issue
The Ringer – feature – 8/1
The Big Idea – author essay – 8/1
Vox– review– 8/2
The Week– review– 8/7
New Yorker/Mary Norris’s Comma Queen column–review– 8/15
Refinery29 – feature – 8/19
Wattpad– feature – 8/27
Globe and Mail – feature – 8/31

Newsletters/Blogs:

New York Times “Daily Briefing” Newsletter – mention – 8/1
Six Pixels of Separation “Six Links” Newsletter – mention – 8/3
Recs Weekly from Rex Sorgatz Newsletter– mention – 8/4
Class Participation Newsletter– mention – 8/6
Superlinguo blog – snippets – 7/29
Sentence first (Stan Carey’s blog) – review – 8/20
Northern Plunder blog – review – 8/22

Podcasts:

Fansplaining – interview – 8/6
This Is The Author (Penguin Random House’s Audiobooks podcast) – interview – 8/7
The Curiosity Daily podcast – interview –8/20
New York Times Book Review podcast – interview – 8/30

Local Radio/TV:

KQED “Forum” – interview– 8/09
NBC Bay Area/Press: Here – interview– 8/12
WNYC “All of It” – interview– 8/20

Selected tweets:

Selected blog posts:

This month’s photo is a composite of various people’s photos of Because Internet hanging out with other books, thanks to people tagging me in their photos on instagram! It’s been really fun seeing this book I’ve been working on for so long out there in people’s lives! (Remember to tag @gretchen.mcculloch directly in the photo rather than just in the comment if you want to show up in this view!)

Want to follow what’s going on in the world of internet linguistics? You can now sign up for these posts as a monthly newsletter at gretchenmcc.substack.com!

November 2018: Book title (BECAUSE INTERNET), Lingthusiasm liveshows, PatreCon, CoEDL, and more Australia talks

December 16, 2018 Gretchen McCulloch

My book about internet language officially has a title and publication date! Look for BECAUSE INTERNET: UNDERSTANDING THE NEW RULES OF LANGUAGE in July 2019, and you can put your email address here if you want to get a link when it’s available.

My second Wired column went up: Why do some mid-sized languages, like Swedish, have extensive internet resources, while others with the same or larger speaker populations do not?

I’ve spent most of this month in Australia! (I did stop by PatreCon, a conference for Patreon creators, on my way.) Here’s a thread of linguistic reflections on being a Canadian in Australia.

We did our long-anticipated Lingthusiasm liveshows in Sydney and Melbourne! It was amazing to meet so many old and new fans of the show and compare notes on Australianisms, Canadianisms, and how people talk on the internet. The liveshow recording will be up in a few months for the rest of the world.

The main Lingthusiasm episode was about why C and G come in hard and soft versions, and more about palatal sounds, and the bonus episode was an inside view into academic conferences and how to have a good time at them. The Lingthusiasm merch is now finalized for the season, so you can order it for the holidays with confidence!

I also went to Canberra for the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (CoEDL) Summer School, where I gave a public lecture on internet linguistics and taught a class on linguistics communication (see course notes and readings on the @LingComm twitter account). A few tweets from talks, plus threads about the Linguistics Roadshow and linguistics escape rooms.

I also did talks at University of Sydney, University of Melbourne, La Trobe University, and Monash University, and radio interviews on ABC Melbourne and ABC Canberra.

I also did a short thread about An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green

Selected tweets:

Selected blog posts:

This month’s photo is a shot of the table where Lauren Gawne and I were preparing for the Lingthusiasm liveshow, complete with Real Australian Flat Whites!

August 2018: #LangFest18, Instagram, and Mastodon

September 24, 2018 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.

June 2017: Internet tilde, meme formatting, and doggo syntax

July 8, 2017August 5, 2017 Gretchen McCulloch

I was quoted in this article in NY Magazine: The Internet Tilde Perfectly Conveys Something We Don’t Have the Words to Explain. I was also in an episode of CBC Spark about digital tools revitalizing minority languages.

I spent a bunch of time behind the scenes working on the book: here’s an #amwriting tweet about meme formatting.

Lingthusiasm posted its ninth regular episode: The bridge between words and sentences – Constituency and a bonus episode about the linguistics of the doggo meme. I made a page about the podcast for this website and we put the Space Pidgin quote on Medium for easier reading. Lingthusiasm hit our equipment goal and bought a new recorder: here’s a picture of it!

I also announced a class twitter account @LingComm and class hashtag #lingcomm for the course on linguistics outreach/communicating linguistics that I’m teaching at the Linguistic Summer Institute (Lingstitute) in the month of July. Feel free to follow along!

Selected tweets:

Selected blog posts:

This month’s featured image is a photo of the new linguistics section at Argo Bookshop in Montreal, which was just reopened by linguists Moti Lieberman and Adele-Elise Prevost, from when I went to their opening party this month.

April 2017: NPR doggos & tweetstorms, teaching yourself linguistics, and a circuit wug

May 10, 2017May 10, 2017 Gretchen McCulloch

I was quoted in two stories for NPR All Tech Considered: the first was an article about the linguistic style of doggo, pupper, and the rest of the dog rates/dogspotting meme and the second was about twitter threads (tweetstorms).

I was also quoted in a TIME article about Easter and a Fansplaining article about fanfiction versus fan fiction.

The audio from my SXSW Word Curation panel is now online, as is the video from the Five Minute Linguist talks that I judged in January.

This month’s Lingthusiasm episode was about how Kids These Days aren’t ruining language, plus a highly-requested bonus episode on our Patreon about how to teach yourself even more linguistics, with our recs for linguistics books, videos, and other resources. We were also featured on Language Log and Linguist List and got a great endorsement from a listener.

Selected tweets:

Selected blog posts:

This month’s featured image comes from my attempt to draw a wug with an eye that would light up out of a pen that had conductive ink and using my fingers as part of the circuit, from a booth at South by Southwest in March. It was, alas, unsuccessful (they don’t teach circuits at linguist school) and I had to do weird things to the contrast in order to make the silver ink show up in the photo, but it still looks pretty cool.

2016 Year in Review

January 16, 2017January 16, 2017 Gretchen McCulloch

Cross-posted from All Things Linguistic.

In 2016, I met Lauren Gawne of Superlinguo in person for the first time and by the end of the year, we’d created a podcast called Lingthusiasm. It’s a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics and you can listen to it on iTunes, Soundcloud, Google Play Music, YouTube or most other podcast apps via rss, and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr. We launched it with the first three episodes – stay tuned for more in 2017!

I also collaborated on two episodes of PBS Idea Channel with Mike Rugnetta:

All Things Linguistic turned four! I also got verified on twitter, which has not really changed anything, but here’s a reminder that you can follow me there as a person @GretchenAMcC or this blog at @AllThingsLing.

Articles

Two Linguists Explain Pseudo-Old English in The Wake (co-written with Kate Wiles on The Toast)
A Linguist Explains Emoji and What Language Death Actually Looks Like (The Toast)

My article on teen girls as language disruptors, which I wrote for Quartz last year, was republished in a print textbook from Oxford University Press called Making Sense of Language.

Book

I did a lot of behind the scenes writing on my upcoming book about internet language for Riverhead at Penguin. Here are the update posts so far:

I also made an email list for book updates, if you’d like to make sure you don’t miss it on social media.

Talks

I gave a talk at South by Southwest on emoji, in collaboration with SwiftKey
Workshop at the first Emojicon on the mistake people make in assuming that emoji are a language, and three paralinguistic things that emoji do instead
Forensic linguistics panel at the sister society of the LSA
Talks about linguistics outreach and careers in linguistics at Georgetown, University of California Fullerton, University of Glasgow, University of Edinburgh, SOAS, University of Kent, and Swarthmore. Here’s a summary blog post about getting linguistics out of the ivory tower
Talk in conversation with Jane Solomon at Dictionary.com. Audio excerpt, where I talk about the idea of an “internet era” of English.
Talk about emoji at Dawn or Doom, a conference at Purdue University about technology and culture.

Outreach

I consulted on the public outreach component of the Scots Syntax Atlas (SCOSYA)
I did public relations for the Linguistic Society of America annual meeting
#lingwiki Wikipedia editathons: LSA, Queen Mary London, CoLang
Taught a course on Wikis and Wikipedia for under-represented languages at CoLang with Lauren Gawne: see our slides and other resources here.

Media

I did a lot of interviews, but here are some of my favourites:

Two live radio interviews on Science Friday: one about emoji (listen on souncloud) and one about expressive punctuation and internet tone of voice.
The linguistic appeal of “garbage person” (Atlas Obscura)
Emoji: Think of them as an upgrade (WIRED) print version, online version
“Snek” is the slithering, scaly, surprisingly adorable heir to the doge meme (The Daily Dot)
On Fandom “trash” (Fusion)
On the podcast Fansplaining talking about ~fanspeak – listen to on soundcloud or read the transcript on tumblr. Key quote: “Your language is not my language but your language is okay.”
On the Lexicon Valley podcast with new host John McWhorter, talking about emoji, internet language, and being a public linguist.

Tag: radio

July 2020: Because Internet in paperback!

October 2019: UK edition of Because Internet comes out, Sound Education & Scintillation conferences

September 2019: Book events in Toronto and Seattle, XOXO in Portland, and New York Times Op-Ed From the Future

August 2019: UK edition of BECAUSE INTERNET coming in October and So. Much. Media.

National Radio/TV:

National Print/Top Online:

Newsletters/Blogs:

Podcasts:

Local Radio/TV:

November 2018: Book title (BECAUSE INTERNET), Lingthusiasm liveshows, PatreCon, CoEDL, and more Australia talks

August 2018: #LangFest18, Instagram, and Mastodon

June 2017: Internet tilde, meme formatting, and doggo syntax

April 2017: NPR doggos & tweetstorms, teaching yourself linguistics, and a circuit wug

2016 Year in Review

Articles

Book

Talks

Outreach

Media

Top blog posts of 2016

Explanations

Language learning

Prescriptivism

Internet linguistics

Humour

Novel sentences & ambiguity

Languages

Arrival

Linguistics jobs

Advice

August 2016: SXSW words proposal, Twitter verified, Wikipedia & jobs advice