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: 

• WorldCon in Glasgow, where I was on a panel about linguistic worldbuilding
• Societas Linguistica Europea in Helsinki, where I particularly enjoyed a special session on linguistics outreach 
• A colloquium talk on Applying Linguistic Methods to Linguistic Communication at the University of Tartu and a two-part workshop on lingcomm for participants of Methodological Excellence in Data-Driven Approaches to Linguistics (MEDAL) in Tartu, Estonia (and the excellent linguistics and Finno-Ugric displays at the Estonian National Museum, also in Tartu) 
• Dropping by Mundolingua, a linguistics museum in Paris I’ve been hearing about for years! 
• An event with translator Miguel Sánchez Ibáñez and journalist Elena Álvarez Mellado for the launch of the Spanish translation of Because Internet by Pie de Página in Madrid, Spain, which is now available at Pie de Pagina, Casa del Libro, and elsewhere

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 

• I appeared on an episode of quiz podcast Go Fact Yourself alongside David Wilcox.
• I was interviewed on the Language on the Move podcast by Brynn Quick about social ties, weird old postcards, and more tidbits from Because Internet.
• The podcast Dashboard Diaries interviewed me about the linguistics of Tumblr, and I collected some extra links of interest on the subject.
• 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. 

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

• Babel-17
• A Hoard of Infinite Meanings
• “A Terrible Irony”: How the Media Lost Trust
• I put the glamor back into grammar, a “deadpan German linguistics bop”
• The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera
• A Sweet Sting of Salt by Rose Sutherland
• This browser game about making a cup of tea

Selected social media posts

General linguistics

• Linguists don’t really know what a “word” is and we don’t really mind
• Etymological epiphanies from all over: nookie, cookie, bacon, parasol, parachute…
• At WorldCon I learned about the historical dictionary of science fiction and fannish words in the OED
• Approaching old language change “with gleeful delight rather than a fussbudgety sniff”
• “Woo it’s been a while since I’ve seen such an obvious Google Translate fail”
• “New favorite example of the Stroop test“
• “If I’ve said this once, I’ve said this a million times…”
• Boomer ellipses in hand drawn cartoons
• “My language classes in school gave me a SEVERELY INFLATED idea of how much of my future would involve discoteques”
• French as it’s taught versus French as it’s spoken
• A word for “wet with air”

Fun moments

• Oh hey, my tweet is in this xkcd.com What If video
• Lots of informal polls!
  • Do you visualize words in a specific font? 
  • What’s your favorite secondary cardinal vowel? 
  • What are the hardest and easiest things about learning a language?
• Tumblr gave us boops. We made boopguistics. Are they a pure instantiation of phatic expression? A great way to annoy your mutuals? Boops boops Boops boops boops boops Boops boops?

New favorite linguistic examples

• “Why this poop-propelled ‘headless chicken monster’ is the ninja of the deep sea” (novel sentence)
• “A Medieval French Skeleton Is Rewriting the History of Syphilis” (novel sentence)
• “Fucktangular” (portmanteau word)
• “Mama, my soup is a little too temperature for me” (overextension) and a whole thread of other child language gems 
• “Smallrus” (portmanteau, complete with an n=1 comprehension study)
• “That’s not nice,” cried one, as Juniper slurped down a duckling like a raw oyster. (novel utterance)
• “Catholic Priest AI chatbot is defrocked within a week after taking confession and okaying Gatorade baptisms” (novel utterance)
• “Reblog to fangle this post” (backformation)
• “I don’t get people’s interest in the horse-drawn carriage that has gotta be one of the worst possible animals to be drawing a carriage like how in the heck is a half ton animal with hooves and such terrible limb dexterity going to ever finish an entire drawing of such a mechanically complex thing I—” (structural ambiguity)
• “Jesus Christ, the fireflies in Brooklyn walk?” (structural ambiguity)
• “I didn’t even know they could drive” (structural ambiguity)
• “I wonder what a bobcat orders at Starbucks” (antecedent reference ambiguity)
• “Pass the mayo: Condiment could help improve fusion energy yields” (novel sentence)
• “Local man fond of linguistic garden path sentences friends to hearing his boring puns” (garden path)
• “Shout out to the top 5 skies in the world, pie in the, reach for the, excuse me while I kiss the, Lucy in the, and Blue.” (Island violation)
• “Martyred porn squirrel” (Novel utterance)
• “Stay fresh, cheese bags” (Novel utterance)
• “In loving memory of Nicole Campbell, who never saw a dog and didn’t smile” (Structural ambiguity)
• “To outtasightouttamind” (Verbing)

Helpful threads and posts

• Benefits of using alt text
• Hidden gems in lingcomm
• I made a linguistics starter pack on Bluesky — if you’re thinking about joining, this will populate your feed with a few active linguists, which will in turn help you find others
• The Chicago Manual of Style on punctuating with emojis
• My tips on writing about science
• How to respond to people using AI for a task (“That’s so neat! How are you verifying it?”)

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.