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July 2020: Because Internet in paperback!

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:

Selected tweets:

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.

Because Internet paperback on esoteric symbols scarf

June 2020: translation & public health, LingComm Grantees, and IPA masks

Gretchen McCulloch

I wrote an article for Wired in which I got to talk with a lot of really interesting people about the importance of language to public health: Covid-19 Is History’s Biggest Translation Challenge.

You, a person who’s currently on the English-speaking internet in The Year of The Pandemic, have definitely seen public service information about Covid-19. You’ve probably been unable to escape seeing quite a lot of it, both online and offline, from handwashing posters to social distancing tape to instructional videos for face covering.

But if we want to avoid a pandemic spreading to all the humans in the world, this information also has to reach all the humans of the world—and that means translating Covid PSAs into as many languages as possible, in ways that are accurate and culturally appropriate.

It’s easy to overlook how important language is for health if you’re on the English-speaking internet, where “is this headache actually something to worry about?” is only a quick Wikipedia article or WebMD search away. For over half of the world’s population, people can’t expect to Google their symptoms, nor even necessarily get a pamphlet from their doctor explaining their diagnosis, because it’s not available in a language they can understand. […]

According to a regularly updated list maintained by the Endangered Languages Project, Covid information from reputable sources (such as governments, nonprofits, and volunteer groups that clearly cite the sources of their health advice) has been created in over 500 languages and counting, including over 400 videos in more than 150 languages. A few of these projects are shorter, more standardized information in a larger variety of global languages, such as translating the five WHO guidelines into posters in more than 220 languages or translating the WHO’s mythbuster fact sheets into over 60 languages. But many of them, especially the ones in languages that aren’t as well represented on the global stage, are created by individual, local groups who feel a responsibility to a particular area, including governments, nonprofits, and volunteer translators with a little more education or internet access.

Read the whole thing.

The Lingthusiasm main episode was about tracing languages back before recorded history (transcript) and the bonus episode was about doing linguistics with kids. We also released new nonmedical face masks, by popular request, in our IPA, tree diagram, and esoteric symbol prints. It’s a weird world where suddenly face masks are our most popular merch item, but we’re heartened to hear from people that it makes them feel a bit more cheerful about wearing a mask.

We also announced the winners of the 2020 LingComm Grants! We had over 75 applications from around the world and we’d like to thank all applicants for making the job of deciding extremely difficult! Stay tuned for further updates from these great projects:

Media list:

Selected tweets:

Selected blog posts:

This month’s image is one of the new IPA masks, which I now also own! They’re made out of a soft, jersey-like material and are pretty comfortable for short wear.

IPA mask navy

Top posts of 8 years of All Things Linguistic

Gretchen McCulloch

Cross-posted from All Things Linguistic. 

It’s my eight year blogiversary! Wow! Let’s celebrate by looking back at some of my favourite posts from the past year:

Because Internet

My book about internet language came out in July 2019. Here are a few of my favourite blog posts about it:

I also did over 200 media interviews for the book, but I’ve already summarized those on my 2019 year in review post.

Wired Resident Linguist column

I kept writing my Ideas column for Wired, which included these articles:

Other writing

Surprising internet crossovers

After 7 years of blogging, I thought I had pretty much figured out which sections go in this yearly summary post. But for year 8, I’ve found myself needing to add a delightful new one.

Lingthusiasm

We celebrated our third year of making Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! This year we were recommended by Buzzfeed (!!), which called Lingthusiasm “joyously nerdy”.

The most exciting Lingthusiasm episodes this year were the ones where our guests helped me and Lauren Gawne push the boundaries of what a podcast typically is: this video episode in ASL and English interviewing Lynn Hou about her research on signed languages in real-world contexts and the one where Janelle Shane used a neural net to generate fake Lingthusiasm quotes based on our existing transcripts, and then we performed the best ones out loud (see also Janelle’s blog post about making this).

Here’s all twelve regular monthly Lingthusiasm episodes:

  1. Why spelling is hard – but also hard to change
  2. Emoji are Gesture Because Internet
  3. Putting sounds into syllables is like putting toppings on a burger
  4. Villages, gifs, and children – Interview with Lynn Hou on signed languages in real-world contexts (also a video episode!)
  5. Smell words, both real and invented
  6. Many ways to talk about many things – Plurals, duals, and more
  7. How to rebalance a lopsided conversation
  8. Making machines learn language – Interview with Janelle Shane
  9. This time it gets tense – the grammar of time
  10. What makes a language easy? It’s a hard question
  11. The grammar of singular they – Interview with Kirby Conrod
  12. Schwa, the most versatile English vowel

And the twelve monthly bonus episodes:

  1. North, left, or towards the sea? With guest Alice Gaby
  2. Words from your family – Familects!
  3. Welcome aboard the metaphor train!
  4. Behind the scenes on Because Internet (Q&A)
  5. Jobs, locations, family, and invention – Surnames
  6. Reading fiction like a linguist
  7. The sounds of sheep, earthquakes, and ice cream – Onomatopoeia
  8. What might English be like in a couple hundred years?
  9. Generating a Lingthusiasm episode using a neural net
  10. Teaching linguistics to yourself and other people
  11. When letters have colours and time is a braid – The linguistics of synesthesia
  12. A myriad of numbers – Counting systems across languages

We also started a Discord community that’s enthusiastic about linguistics, to solve the problem of “Your podcast got me (back) into linguistics, but now I don’t have people to fan out about language with! Where do I make lingthusiastic friends?”

Finally, we released more Lingthusiasm merch: schwa pins and more that say Never Stressed, 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 all the Lingthusiasm merch here.)

Other projects

Lauren Gawne and I also started working on several other projects in the pop linguistics ecosystem online:

  • LingComm Grants – grants to help the next generation of linguistics communication projects get started, which we were able to expand from one grant to four thanks to the support of our patrons. Grantees to be announced in upcoming months!
  • Mutual Intelligibility – a newsletter summarizing existing linguistics resources on specific topics to help instructors moving their courses online, including shorter 3 Links posts and longer Resource Guides
  • Linguistics Crash Course – a series of intro linguistics videos in collaboration with the educational youtube channel Crash Course and linguist Jessi Grieser, to appear later in 2020

Blog posts, generally

Internet linguistics

Linguistics memes and humour

General linguistics

Linguistics jobs (mostly by Lauren Gawne)

Creative linguistics creations

Language Files videos 

I collaborated with Tom Scott and Molly Ruhl on a series of short youtube videos about linguistics.

A series on Weird Internet Careers

A reflection on how starting All Things Linguistic back in 2012 was the seed that led to all of the interesting and exciting things I’m doing now, including writing articles, writing a book, and doing the podcast — and how to approach trying to do something similar.

Haven’t been with me this whole time? You can see my favourite posts of year one, year two, year three, year four, year five, year six and year seven.

For shorter updates, follow me on twitter as a person, as my blog, or as the podcast, or for a monthly newsletter with highlights, subscribe on substack.

February 2020: Comma-Con keynote, SocSci FooCamp, #AAASmtg, and visiting PanLex and the Internet Archive

Gretchen McCulloch

In February, I did a bunch of travel. First, I went to the Bay Area for Social Science FooCamp, where I gave a lightning talk about how the internet is changing language, and for Comma-Con, Facebook’s internal conference for their writing team, where I gave a keynote about the future of language online.

While in SF, I also paid visits to the Wired mothership office, to PanLex at Long Now (where I got to see one of the original Rosetta Project disks), and to the Internet Archive’s headquarters (where I took a short video of this art installation of the first full crawl of the web, 1997).

I then went to Seattle for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting. Highlights: a short talk about emoji, gesture, and internet linguistics, a thread from a SciComm workshop, the Language Science for Everyone booth, and meeting a bunch of people who have a similar sort of weird internet/scicomm job as I do but in different fields.

Looks like there won’t be much travel in anyone’s cards for the upcoming months, so I’m glad I got to see so many friends and meet new interesting people while it was still a thing.

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was about time and tense in languages. I also did a lingcomm thread about how we approached the topic.

The bonus episode is a robo-generated version of Lingthusiasm, where we asked last month’s guest Janelle Shane to help us use a neural net to generate a new Lingthusiasm episodes based on the transcripts of our ~70 existing episodes, and then we performed the best snippets. Accuracy: low. Hilarity: high.

The Lingthusiasm Patron Discord server is also still going strong, and people have requested a linguistics basics book club channel, to read through an open access linguistics textbook supportively together. I did a thread about how this solves a big lingcomm problem I’ve been working on for years.

A new collab video with Tom Scott and Molly Ruhl went up, this time about the sentences humans can understand but computers can’t.

This month’s media list:

  • Tor.com– roundup “Jo Walton’s Reading List: January 2020”– 2/5
  • Medium – CommunicationHealth Bookclub –2/13
  • The Atlantic —feature “Corporate Buzzwords Are How Workers Pretend to Be Adults”– 2/19
  • Thrive Global—mention—2/21
  • Beachcomber– roundup “recommended reading”– 2/6

Selected tweets:

Selected blog posts:

This month’s image is the Rosetta Disk from when I visited PanLex, with a bonus sunset in the background.

rosetta disk panlex sunset

2019 Year in Review

Gretchen McCulloch

Cross-posted from my blog, All Things Linguistic. 

2019 was a very big year for me.

My book about internet language, which I’d been working on since 2014, finally came out into the world! Because Internet hit the New York Times bestseller list and was one of TIME’s 100 books of 2019, plus tons of other media.

I wrote two op-eds for the New York Times and continued writing my Resident Linguist column at Wired, and we made two special video episodes of my podcast, Lingthusiasm.

Book: Because Internet

There were over 200 media hits for Because Internet in 2019, at final count. Here are a few highlights:

Short-form Writing

Wired Resident Linguist column:

I also co-wrote an academic article with Lauren Gawne, Emoji as Digital Gestures in the journal Language@Internet [Open Access].

Events, Talks, and Videos

In January, I did a lingwiki Wikipedia editathon and judged the 5 Minute Linguist competition, both at the LSA annual meeting.

In March, I gave a comic talk at the festival of Bad Ad-hoc Hypotheses (BAHfest) about why we should make English spelling more weird and confusing, which you can watch online. Recommended if you like Unicode jokes.

In May, I recorded the Because Internet audiobook! Here’s a thread with my linguistic thoughts about the process and an audio sample of me reading the audiobook. 

In July, I went to the LSA Summer Institute in UC Davis, to do a lingwiki Wikipedia editathon focussing on articles about underrepresented languages, a talk about effective communication of linguistics to a general audience, and MC’d the 3 Minute Thesis event. Plus, I had book launch party in Montreal with Argo Bookshop!

In September, I did a book event in Toronto in conversation with Ryan North (of Dinosaur Comics fame), featuring a packed house with many old friends at The Ossington with Flying Booksn. I also went to XOXO fest in Portland, and did two talks about the book in Seattle, with Textio and the Seattle Review of Books and Elliott Bay Books.

In October, I was on a panel about busting language myths through podcasting at Sound Education in Boston. I was also on panels about Using Language for Worldbuilding (moderator) and “What did we say before we said Cool?” at Scintillation, a small speculative fiction convention in Montreal.

I now have a speaking reel! So if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like when I’m giving a talk about internet linguistics, you can now watch a five minute highlights video here!

I collaborated on several Language Files videos with youtuber Tom Scott:

Lingthusiasm Podcast

We celebrated our third year of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics which I make with Lauren Gawne. New this year were two video episodes, about gesture and signed languages, so that you can actually see them!

Here are all 24 episodes from 2019, 12 main episodes and 12 bonus episodes:

  1. How languages influence each other – Interview with Hannah Gibson on Swahili, Rangi, and Bantu languages
  2. The verb is the coat rack that the rest of the sentence hangs on
  3. Why do we gesture when we talk? (also a video episode!)
  4. Pop culture in Cook Islands Māori – Interview with Ake Nicholas
  5. You heard about it but I was there – Evidentials
  6. Why spelling is hard – but also hard to change
  7. Emoji are Gesture Because Internet
  8. Putting sounds into syllables is like putting toppings on a burger
  9. Villages, gifs, and children – Interview with Lynn Hou on signed languages in real-world contexts (also a video episode!)
  10. Smell words, both real and invented
  11. Many ways to talk about many things – Plurals, duals, and more
  12. How to rebalance a lopsided conversation

Bonus episodes on Patreon:

  1. Naming people (and especially babies)
  2. How the internet is making English better (liveshow from Melbourne)
  3. Adapting your language to other people
  4. How do radio announcers know how to pronounce all the names? With guest Tiger Webb
  5. Talking with dogs, horses, ravens, dolphins, bees, and other animals
  6. North, left, or towards the sea? With guest Alice Gaby
  7. Words from your family – Familects!
  8. Welcome aboard the metaphor train!
  9. Behind the scenes on Because Internet (Q&A)
  10. Jobs, locations, family, and invention – Surnames
  11. Reading fiction like a linguist
  12. The sounds of sheep, earthquakes, and ice cream – Onomatopoeia

We also made new Lingthusiasm merch, including  items with the best esoteric Unicode symbols on them, adding socks, mugs, and notebooks in all our prints (IPA, tree diagrams, and esoteric symbols), onesies saying Little Longitudinal Language Acquisition Project, 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 all the Lingthusiasm merch here.)

Selected twitter threads

Book-writing meta threads

Other threads 

Some books I enjoyed! 

Selected blog posts

I celebrated my seventh year blogging at All Things Linguistic! Here are some of my favourite posts from this year:

A series on Weird Internet Careers

Memes and linguist humour 

Other Linguistics 

Things about languages 

Linguistics jobs interviews

Lists and how to

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

 

July 2019: Because Internet is published and makes the NYT Bestseller list!

Gretchen McCulloch

There was a New York Times Daily review of Because Internet (paper version!). Here’s one of the very nice things that reviewer Jennifer Szalai had to say about it:

McCulloch is such a disarming writer — lucid, friendly, unequivocally excited about her subject — that I began to marvel at the flexibility of the online language she describes, with its numerous shades of subtlety.

There was also SO MUCH other media about the book, including reviews in Time, the Economist, The New Yorker, and more; excerpts or interviews in Wired, Slate, Vox, Salon, Vice, and more; and interviews on NPR All Things Considered and Science Friday, Slate’s Lexicon Valley, Grammar Girl, The Allusionist and the Cracked Podcast, just to pick a few. (Full list with hyperlinks below.) A great little ad also ran next to the NYT crossword puzzle in the print edition (photo).

As if that weren’t enough, Because Internet also hit the New York Times bestseller list at #9 in its first week! Huge, huge thanks to everyone who preordered it and bought it during the first week which made this happen.

I did a book launch party in Montreal with Argo Bookshop at the Atwater Library! I was especially excited about the cake with the cover of my book on it which allowed me to literally eat my words and the internet-themed youtube playlist that twitter helped us put together to project on a screen during the party. Many thanks to all the people who attended!

I did a collaboration with youtuber Tom Scott! The first video in this new round of Language Files videos is “why typing like this is sometimes okay.” and is directly based on Chapter 4 of Because Internet! Stay tuned for more Language Files videos with Tom and our new collaborator Molly Ruhl in future months.

Everything is also coming up Because Internet on Lingthusiasm! Our main episode was about the connections between gesture and emoji, aka the behind the scenes story of the part of the book where my podcast cohost Lauren Gawne makes a cameo! The bonus episode was about familects, not the book, but we also released a Special Offer on Patreon to get signed bookplate stickers. Our academic paper about emoji as digital gesture in the journal Language@Internet also came out this month, and Lauren wrote an accessible summary version of it for The Conversation which got picked up by Quartz. (We were very pleased to have to disclose that our Lingthusiasm patrons helped fund this research.) Also, I now have an Erdős number.

When people ask what it’s like to have this book I’ve been working on for five years finally come out, the best analogy that I can think of is that it’s like having it constantly be my birthday for the past several weeks: I’ve been hearing from so many people from all corners of my life who are excited to have spotted BECAUSE INTERNET in their local bookstore or library, or to have heard me on the radio or their favourite podcast. I haven’t always been able to reply to everyone individually, but I truly appreciate how many communities have claimed this book’s success as their own.

In non-book-related news, I also went to California to do a linguistics outreach event at the LSA Summer Institute in UC Davis, consisting of a lingwiki Wikipedia editathon focussing on articles about underrepresented languages in the afternoon, and in the evening doing a talk about effective communication of linguistics to a general audience and MCing the 3 Minute Thesis event. (A thread from an interesting talk I attended on language tech.)

Here is the truly staggering media list just for July alone for Because Internet, all 65 (!) items:

National Radio

National Print/Top Online

Newsletters:

Podcasts:

Local Print/Online/Radio:

Selected tweets:

Selected blog posts:

This month’s photo is real paper proof that Because Internet made the New York Times Bestseller list! because internet nyt bestseller list with emoji.jpg