Tag: translation

October, November, & December 2025: Plays, poems, and preserves

Gretchen McCulloch

This fall was a good season for literature. I took a trip to the Stratford Festival in Ontario to see live productions of Goblins Oedipus, Dangerous Liaisons, and Sense and Sensibility. 

I enjoyed reading Margalit Fox’s Talking Hands, Margaret Killjoy’s The Sapling Cage, Janet Kagan’s Hellspark, and Kory Stamper’s new book True Color that I’ll soon be able to talk to the rest of you about. 

And I… okay, this one takes some explanation, but Bonne Maman puts out a yearly advent calendar of tiny specialty jams (aka jamvent), and I liveblogged my way through it with favourite linguistically-relevant books from my shelves that made for thematically appropriate pairings. Apparently it was big news in the jam calendar chat. 

At any rate, if you missed it at the time or would just like to browse a list of linguistics books that I like (admittedly biased towards books that I happen to own in hardcopy), you can read the thread on bluesky, the highlight on my instagram, or the blog post version on my blog. 

And then, because why waste a good idea and because it was Lingthusiasm producer Claire’s fault that I got into the jamvent calendar thing in the first place, we also paired each flavour of tiny jam with a relevant Lingthusiasm episode from the archive. You can browse that on bluesky or instagram. 

By the way, the last time I did a linguistics advent shenanigan was in 2014, when I liveblogged my way through all 26 episodes of the linguistically witty BBC radio comedy Cabin Pressure in time for the final episode coming out, which you can still read on my blog should you so desire. It’s a great show! I still relisten to an episode or two every time I’m on an airplane. 

I also spent a lot of my time working on a project I’m not allowed to talk about publicly yet (dunh dunh dunn). Many thanks to the patrons of Lingthusiasm: their support of the podcast also keeps the lights on while I do a lot of research that will eventually be fun linguistics for all to enjoy! If you want to help me in the research phase and be the first to find out when I have updates that I can share, you can become a member on Patreon. 

Events and media

Arroba lengua, the Spanish translation of Because Internet, is now out as an ebook. 

The LingComm IRL blog series interviewed Marisa Cook and Daniel Currie Hall on teaching linguistics at a high school STE(A)M summer program in Halifax, with thoughts on getting involved with this same program at universities elsewhere in Canada.

I wrote a double dactyl about Timothée Chalamet and someone, for possibly the second time ever, wrote me my own double dactyl in reply.

A copy of Arroba Lengua, with the text "ya en formato e-book"
"Arroba lengua es el libro perfecto para entender el modo en que internet está cambiando nuestra lengua, por qué es bueno que eso suceda y hasta qué punto nuestras interacciones digitales hablan de nosotros."

Lingthusiasm

Lingthusiasm turned 9 this season! That’s nine years of podcasting enthusiastically about linguistics! Our episodes were:

Over 120 people wished each other a Happy World Linguistics Day from 70 cities in 34 countries! See more stats from World Linguistics Day. Plus: some high-quality Voynich Manuscript page scans for fans of the incredibly popular Voynich Manuscript bonus episode.

We also released some linguistics-themed holiday greeting cards, mostly because I personally wanted to send out cards that say {Merry, marry, Mary} Holidays: whether you say them the same or differently, hope you have a joyful festive season! And then I figured that perhaps I should let other people do so too. Shout out to the person who immediately purchased 50 of them: Redbubble doesn’t show us what your name is, but we hope that all 50 of your nearest and dearest appreciate you as much as we do. 

A greeting card says "{Merry, marry, Mary} Holidays. Whether you say them the same or differently, hope you have a joyful festive season!"

New favorite linguistic data

Linguists are NOT KIDDING…

Today in linguists are NOT KIDDING when we say that your knowledge of language enables you to understand sentences that have never been said before.

— Gretchen McCulloch (@gretchenmcculloch.com) 2025-11-26T21:18:23.439Z

…when we say that this section is full of sentences you can understand that have never before been uttered.

The end of the year means Word Of The Year season! The Canadian one took place in 2025 (I was betting on “elbows up,” but “maplewashing” won). The US one isn’t until 2026, but I had my eye on “lobster’s too buttery.” 

And nobody I know of has studied these, but maybe someone should:

Miscellaneous posts

And if you’re still looking for a new year’s resolution, have you considered trying to bring back overmorrrow, a highly useful word that English used to have and which many languages still do? 

The featured image is the first of my many books paired with jams! 

A copy of Julie Sedivy's book Linguaphile in front of an advent calendar.

July, August, & September 2025: ASL Camp and Arroba Lengua

Gretchen McCulloch

This summer, I went to ASL camp! I spent a week at Bob Rumball Camp of the Deaf, in Parry Sound, Ontario, at their ASL Adult Immersion Summer Camp, voices off for 6 nights and 7 days! This was my first time doing any sort of language immersion camp in my various experiences learning languages, and I definitely see why people like them, I really felt liked I levelled up significantly in my signing with that much concentrated practice (and I slept very soundly in the dorm beds since my brain felt so full from learning). And I made friends and got to learn from a left-handed ASL teacher for the first time, which was helpful for me as a lefty!

Also, the Spanish-language translation of Because Internet was released. You can get Arroba Lengua — not a literal translation of the title, but Spanish Internet slangification with a similar vibe — from Piodepagina, Casadellibro, and other places Spanish-language books are sold (note that the ebook edition may be more readily available if you’re outside Europe). And for lots of juicy details about the translation process, see our Lingthusiasm bonus episode where Lauren Gawne and I interview Miguel Sánchez Ibáñez, the translator. 

More media milestones

Let’s start with the big news: The first Crash Course Linguistics video has hit a million views! If you want some fun 10 min linguistics videos to watch, here’s a great place to start.

In way smaller news, Because Internet is on one of Penguin Random House’s “credibility bookshelf” zoom backgrounds. 

And somewhere in between: Because Internet made an appearance in an episode of Words Unraveled. @efrex.bsky.social made a nice callout to my interview on Let’s Learn Everything. And Linguistic Discovery would like to remind you that the internet is encouraging, not ruining, writing. 

Lingthusiasm

We launched two new Lingthusiasm merch designs:

{Merry, marry, Mary} Holidays Whether you say them the same or differently, hope you have a joyful festive season!
The Lingthusiasm podcast logo

Lingthusiam put out six episodes, including three interviews. 

Speaking of interviews, we have more than twenty interview episodes now, and you can find them all together on our topics page, where they have their own category. We also have over 100 bonus episodes for patrons, with a few interviews there as well.

Lingcomm

It was a big few months for communicating about lingcomm. Maybe we can call that lingcommcomm? Or maybe not… 

I presented at Lingstitute 2025, the LSA summer institute, about 101 ways to communicate linguistics with a broader audience — some of which we brainstormed together in this bluesky thread.

I started a new series of interviews on the lingcomm.org blog about community collaboration linguistics projects that don’t have much of a web presence. First interview: Lingcomm IRL with Girl Scouts, an interview with Nikole Patson.

The lingcomm mailing list now has over 100 members! If you’re a lingcomm practitioner who wants to hear about lingcomm conferences, events, journal special issues, and so on, please feel free to subscribe!

Lingthusiasm cohost creator Lauren Gawne put out her yearly list of linguistics and language podcasts. Know of a good one she missed? Please let her know!  

New favorite linguistic data

Linguistics

— Gretchen McCulloch (@gretchenmcc.bsky.social) 2025-09-11T21:54:45.712Z

Miscellaneous posts

The lingthusiasm podcast logo, zoomed in to reveal many smaller pictures

This quarter’s image is a schwa and a kiki and a nondetatched rabbit part and a vowel space and a microphone and…

July, Aug, Sept 2024: Lo! An un-detached Eurotrip!

gretchenassistant

This summer I spent time with Finnish, Spanish, Estonian, Dutch, Italian, Latin (unexpectedly!), and… well, okay, kind of all of them, at least in museum exhibit form.

So I did what any linguist would do and made myself into a guinea pig, comparing four different language learning strategies on four languages to see what happened. I’ve written up an Introduction/overview and some highlights and troubleshooting. 

On the same trip, I made appearances at some events:

The Spanish translation isn’t the first one for Because Internet — it’s already available in Japanese (Filmart, Amazon.co.jp), Chinese (Taobao), and Korean (Aladin.co.kr, Kyobo) — but it was the first one into a language I understand and where I happened to be in the right location to meet the translator, so that was really cool! The publisher also localized the title (arroba is the Spanish word for the @ sign, so it literally means @language) and the social-media-post-inspired cover art is a fun new direction compared with the classic blue and yellow of several other editions! 

Cover art for a book titled "Arroba Lengua, Cómo Internet Ha Cambiado Nuestro Idioma." The art depicts a futuristic-looking social media post by author gretchen.mcculloch.

In non-travel news, the podcast Dashboard Diaries interviewed me about the linguistics of Tumblr, and I collected some extra links of interest on the subject.

Lingthusiasm

This season’s episodes included some great grammatical phenomena, a look behind the scenes at one of my collaborations, and the classic philosophy of language thought experiment with merch to match.

The experiment? Suppose you’re in a field with someone you don’t share any languages with. A rabbit scurries by and the person says “Gavagai!” You probably interpret that as referring to the rabbit, rather than just to the rabbit’s ears, or the act of scurrying, or, as memorably put by WVO Quine, “un-detached rabbit parts” — but why? Listen to this episode to find out…

…or enjoy the merch, available in magenta, indigo, teal, cream, and black. 

New favorite data

People continued to produce wonderfully unique utterances:

They also continued not producing “abso-jesus-lutely!” — but why?

A road sign saying "ELEPHANTS PLEASE STAY IN YOUR CAR"

Bluesky and blogs

I visited the linguistics museum Mundolingua in Paris and took this photo of a literal Indo-European family tree: 

A large potted plant, with metal rods coming out that are labeled with the names of Indo-European languages.

October 2020: More Crash Course, SBTB, #SciWri20

Gretchen McCulloch

I had a very fun time doing this interview on Smart Podcast, Trashy Books this month, talking about the cheese plate as social technology, various language aspects of books I’ve read recently, and of course your ever-present Internet Linguistics Content. Here’s a quote:

Gretchen: So the interesting linguistic fact about Tooth and Claw is, I happen to know Jo Walton and she was telling me the story about the Japanese translation for Tooth and Claw. There’s a linguistic feature in Japanese where you have, like, categories for different types of entities in the world, and there’s one for humans and there’s one for monsters, and what the Japanese translator approached her for permission to do was, can I use the human category, this linguistic thing, for the dragons in this book, and for these other people, who are implicitly humans, but they’re external to the society – can I use the monster descriptor for them?

Sarah: [Gasps] Ohhh! Oh my.

Gretchen: [Laughs] And, and Jo was obviously like, oh my God, of course you can! I would have done this in English if I’d had the ability!

—428. The Cheese Plate is a Technology: Because Internet with Gretchen McCulloch

The Crash Course Linguistics videos (10-12 minute videos about intro linguistics!) and their accompanying Mutual Intelligibility newsletters continued coming out this month, as the prophecy (er, scheduling calendar) foretold.

This month’s main episode of Lingthusiasm was about how translators approach a text, featuring that new translation of Beowulf that I’m super keen on, the Tale of Genji, and more. The bonus episode was about honorifics, that most esteemed and venerable of topics.

I’m pleased to report that the latest set of draft emoji from Unicode include three emoji that I co-wrote the proposals for, along with Lauren Gawne and Jennifer Daniel.

I virtually attended the online National Association of Science Writers (NASW) conference, where I got to try out the Remo table-based proximity chat platform and also ran a “night owls hang out at the hotel bar” meetup in Gather. I also really liked this quote on how writing for the public is difficult and sublime.

Planet Word, the language museum in Washington DC that I’m on the Advisory Board for and have been watching the progress of with interest for several years, finally opened its doors! I watched the virtual ribbon cutting here (still online, if you’re curious) and I’m looking forward to eventually getting to see it in person one day.

A further video in my ongoing collaboration with Tom Scott, about the corpus statistics behind the pronunciation of “gif”.

Media:

Selected tweets:

Selected blog posts:

I didn’t really go anywhere this month, so here’s a small easter egg from inside a Crash Course Linguistics video.