the archetypical examples: "toeing out of his shoes" and "carding through his hair"

"he/it was all ___ and ___" (optional: "and a little bit of ___")

if this describes a smell then the list will end with "and something uniquely him"

"oh. oh."

"pupils blown wide"

people are always "fucking into" each other (and later are "fucked out")

they also "obscene noises" while doing it

"his breath hitched," never "caught"

everyone always "hums appreciatively"

and does things "a little helplessly"

???

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

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

What I did in August 2016: SXSW words proposal, Twitter verified, Wikipedia & jobs advice

I proposed a South by Southwest panel for 2017 about Word Curation: Dictionaries, Tech, and the Future with Erin McKean, Ben Zimmer, and Jane Solomon. There’s still a few days left to vote for it (you do need an account, but you can vote even if you’re not necessarily planning on attending SXSW – we’ll be putting whatever we can online afterwards).

I did interviews on #TheFeed on Sirius XM about…

What I did in February 2016: Fansplaining podcast interview, #lingchat, TV in Singapore

I did a nice long interview on internet language and fandom language on the podcast Fansplaining, episode 15 ~fanspeak, which you can listen to on soundcloud or read the transcript of on tumblr. Key quote: “Your language is not my language but your language is okay.”

I was also the featured guest for a twitter #lingchat on internet language, which you can read on storify. I also storified my…

metaphortunate​ said in response to this post:

Could we come up with a name for our excellent fanfic authors other than the slightly sneering “BNF”?

Is BNF sneering?  Have the connotations changed over time?  I don’t usually perceive a negative connotation when I see it used, but I may just be oblivious.

Thanks to fiora-miriel for writing in response to my fanfic languages stats, and allowing me to respond publicly. I finished that post by inviting fan authors with native languages other than English to share their experiences -- and info about where non-English fanworks are found.  I’ve gotten some great responses about foreign language archives that I’ll be assembling and publishing soon. But I found this response particularly interesting in terms of thinking about writing experience.  

First we LOLed. Now we’re changing the way a sentence works

I talked to Clive Thompson for The Message about (nominalized) subordinate clauses and the rise of internet syntax. It was hard to pick just one part to excerpt though -- you should probably just go read the whole thing here, which has lots more examples and also features commentary from Ben Zimmer. 

Grammatically speaking, what’s going on here is the rise of the “subordinate clause.” A subordinate clause isn’t a sentence on its own. As the name implies, it requires another sentence fragment to complete it, as with this example that McCulloch and I looked at on Yik Yak:

Usually you can quickly deduce what the missing part would be. Maybe it’s something like You, sadly, always know what to do when she’s holding a dog on her Tinder and you’re like, “cute dog.” Or maybe the full sentence that emerges in your head is more convoluted, like Nothing is more bittersweet than reflecting on the challenges of dating someone who is superficially attractive but owns a pomeranian and thus, you worry, has all sorts of dog/partner priority issues, which you can instantly intuit when you’re using a dating app and see someone when she’s holding a dog on her Tinder and you’re like, “cute dog.” The point is, it’s up to you imagine the rest of the utterance. It’s like the author is handing you a little puzzle. Subordinate-clause tweets and Yik-Yak postings seduce us into filling out that missing info, McCulloch says. “Our brain has to work a little bit harder to figure out what it’s referring to, and so making that connection is very satisfying. It’s like getting a joke. You have to draw that connection for yourself a little bit — but because you can do it, it works really well.” A historic parallel? The crazy, long chapter headings in 19th-century novels, which often were also dependent clauses, inviting the reader to imagine the rest of the baroque narrative. “In Which Our Protagonist Meets A Dashing Stranger,” McCulloch jokes. “The ‘in which’ is doing a very similar thing.” (Read the rest.)

Something that's also occurred to me since the interview is the relationship between (nominalized) subordinate clauses and the gif-captioning tumblrs that were popular around 2012, like whatshouldwecallme and its themed variations. A classic early post, for example, has the subordinate clause caption "When my best friend and I decide we're not going out" and the reaction gif of a really pleased-looking kid saying "I've got on my eating pants". But at some point between then and now, the subordinate-clause-style caption and the reaction gif or image split ways.