Not All Wugs

everyone over the age of 40: oh good u can sort out all those uneducated people who don’t speak properly!

me:

Japanese: hai, aisenai - yes, not love

Japanese: daisuki - I really like you

Japanese: kissa – drinking tea

Japanese: hana - a flower

What are the ghosts of dead phoneticians called? Spectral-grams

What does a linguist dressed up as a pirate wear on their face? An I-PAtch 

What do linguist children say when asking for candy? Affix-or-treat! 

What does a linguist-ghost say? /bu::::/ 

What does a linguist become if bitten at the full moon? A wordwolf 

What do you call several jack-o-lanterns with the designs that change depending on their environment? Allo-phompkins 

What’s the most pragmatic way to disguise yourself? Wear a Gricean Mask-im 

Why can bags of bones travel through time? Because they’re skele-tense

What would you call a famous linguist with an appetite for brains? Noamnomnom Zombsky 

What is the appropriate month for making linguistics halloween jokes? Wugtober 

Three things that I like about this tweet, linguistically: 

1. It syntactically integrates the emoji into the sentence into what is, indeed, an adjectival position. This is (currently) a rarer way of using emoji – we more commonly put them at the end of an utterance to indicate how we feel about what comes before, or as an entire utterance to respond to what a previous person said – but if emoji do get linguistically integrated in a systematic fashion, this is what it could look like. 

2. The emoji that it uses is already a symbolic (linguistic) representation, since it consists of numbers, albeit in a specific format that has a different meaning from just “100″. If an emoji contains a word, is it language, a picture, or both?