#linkfest

2022 was a year of opening up again and laying foundations for future projects. I spent the final 3 months of it on an extended trip to Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand, which is a delightful reason to have a delay in writing this year in review post. 

Interesting new projects this year included my first piece in The Atlantic, why we have so much confusion on writing the short form of "usual" and 103 languages reading project: inspired by a paper by Evan Kidd and Rowena Garcia. 

Continuations of existing projects: 

Return of LingComm Grants

A survey for those using Because Internet for teaching

10 year Blogiversary of All Things Linguistic: highlights from the past year and highlights from the past decade

6 years of Lingthusiasm

Conferences/Talks

LSA 2022 and judging Five Minute Linguist

I was on panels about swearing in SFF and the Steerswoman books at a local literary speculative fiction con, Scintillation

I was on panels at WorldCon (ChiCon 8) in Chicago: Ask A Scientist, That's Not How That Works!, and Using SFF for Science Communication

I was a contestant for the second time in Webster's War of the Words, a virtual game show fundraiser for the Noah Webster House.

I attended the Australian Linguistics Society annual meeting in Melbourne and the New Zealand Linguistics Society annual meeting in Dunedin, where I gave a talk co-authored with Lauren Gawne called Using lingcomm to design meaningful stories about linguistics

Lingthusiasm

In our sixth year of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics which I make with Lauren Gawne and our production team, we did a redesign of how the International Phonetic Alphabet symbols are layed out in a chart, in order to correspond more closely with the principle that the location of a symbol is a key to how it's articulated. This involved much digging into the history of IPA layouts and back-and-forths with our artist, Lucy Maddox, and we were very pleased to make our aesthetic IPA design available on a special one-time edition of lens cloths for patrons as well as our general range of posters, tote bags, notebooks, and other all-time merch. 

We also did our first Lingthusiasm audience survey and Spotify for some reason gave us end-of-year stats only in French, which I guess is on brand, but we were pleased to see notebooks, and Lingthusiasm is one of Spotify's top 50 Science podcastsF/href.li/?https:/www.redbubble.com%2Fi%2Fmouse-pad%2FAesthetic-IPA-Chart-Square-by-Lingthusiasm%2F129215087.G1FH6&t=OTkxYjYxYjNmMzA1M2VhNGViOGIxZWIxOGI0NDRjYjE2YTIzYTE2NCw2YTgzNDQyZTM3MzY0YjRkNjc3NGJkNzhhYzJhMzk3ZjA2Y2NkYzIz&ts=1684794278">other all-time merch!

Main episodes from this year

Making speech visible with spectrograms

Knowledge is power, copulas are fun.

Word order, we love 

What it means for a language to be official

Tea and skyscrapers - When words get borrowed across languages

What we can, must, and should say about modals

Language in the brain - Interview with Ev Fedorenko

Various vocal fold vibes

What If Linguistics

The linguistic map is not the linguistic territory

Who questions the questions?

Love and fury at the linguistics of emotions

Bonus Episodes

We interview each other! Seasons, word games, Unicode, and more

Emoji, Mongolian, and Multiocular O ꙮ - Dispatches from the Unicode Conference

Behind the scenes on how linguists come up with research topics

Approaching word games like a linguist - Interview with Nicole Holliday and Ben Zimmer of Spectacular Vernacular

What makes a swear word feel sweary? A &⩐#⦫&

There’s like, so much to like about “like”

Language inside an MRI machine - Interview with Saima Malik-Moraleda

Using a rabbit to get kids chatting for science

Behind the scenes on making an aesthetic IPA chart - Interview with Lucy Maddox

Linguistics and science communication - Interview with Liz McCullough

103 ways for kids to learn languages

Speakest Thou Ye Olde English?

2021 was in many ways a very meta year: most of my writing projects were reflections on the social functions of various other projects I was working on. But those other projects were very interesting both to do and to reflect on, such as coordinating LingComm21: the first International Conference on Linguistics Communication, and redesigning the Lingthusiasm website. (Might they also reflect how under-socialized I got by a certain point in this pandemic? Hmmm.)

I was honoured to be the recipient of the Linguistics, Language, and the Public Award from the Linguistic Society of America in 2021. I put up my acceptance speech as a blog post.

Media and crossovers

How Linguistics Can Help You Learn a Language – I did a talk for Duolingo’s DuoCon

Why do adults…over 40….use ellipses…so much? Crossover with Tim Blais of Acapella Science

xkcd Tower of Babel

Why Shakespeare Could Never Have Been French (video with Tom Scott)

PUZZLE SPOILERS: A quote from Because Internet in the New York Times acrostic

Someone made a crossword puzzle of Because Internet!

Peeking face, palm up, and palm down – the emoji I proposed with Lauren Gawne and Jennifer Daniel are now officially in Unicode 14.0 and will be coming to your devices in the next few years

Media

BBC Word of Mouth – The Shipping Forecast

I’m cited in a Wikipedia article about boomerspeak

I’m quoted in a New York Times Wordplay piece about ending texts with a period.

Lauren Gawne and I did a Lingthusiasm crossover appearance on the NPR show Ask Me Another, featuring two fun quiz segments, one on accepted or rejected emoji and one on famous book titles

Crash Course Linguistics

The final three videos of Crash Course Linguistics came out in 2021, although it was largely a 2020 project. Here’s the full list again so they’re all in once place, or you can watch them all at this playlist.

What is linguistics?

What is a word? Morphology

Syntax 1: Morphosyntax

Syntax 2:

Semantics

Pragmatics

Sociolinguistics

Phonetics 1: Consonants

Phonetics 2: Vowels

Phonology

Psycholinguistics

Language acquisition

Language change and historical linguistics

World Languages

Computational Linguistics

Writing Systems

Each video also comes with a few companion links and exercises from Mutual Intelligibility and a list of all of the languages mentioned in Crash Course Linguistics is here. It was great working with the large teams on that project!

Lingthusiasm

In our fifth year of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics which I make with Lauren Gawne and our production team, we did some general sprucing up, including a new cover photo (now featuring a jacketless Because Internet), a new portrait drawing, and a new website (for which I wrote a long meta process post here). We also did our first virtual liveshow (as part of LingFest), introduced new bouba/kiki and what the fricative merch, and sent patrons a Lingthusiastic Sticker Pack. Here are the main episodes that came out this year:

Where to get your English etymologies (transcript)

Cool things about scales and implicature (transcript)

Corpus linguistics and consent – Interview with Kat Gupta (transcript)

That’s the kind of episode it’s – Clitics (transcript)

Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Theory of Mind (transcript)

A Fun-Filled Fricative Field Trip (transcript)

Making machines learn Fon and other African languages – Interview with Masakhane (transcript)

Not NOT a negation episode (transcript)

R and R-like sounds – Rhoticity (transcript)

How linguists figure out the grammar of a language (transcript)

Listen to the imperatives episode! (transcript)

Writing is a technology (transcript)

And here are this year’s bonus episodes:

Linguistics puzzles for fun and olympiad glory

Linguistic 〰️✨ i l l u s i o n s ✨〰️

Lingwiki and linguistics on Wikipedia

Q&A with Emily Gref from language museum Planet Word

Sentient plants, proto-internet, and more lingfic about quirky communication

Language under the influence

Gotta test ‘em all – The linguistics of Pokémon names

Lingthusiasm liveshow: The listener talks back (on backchannelling)

Talking to babies and small children

The episode-episode (reduplication)

Conferences and Talks (all virtual unless noted)

Planet Word, the new language museum in Washington DC, about internet language and Because Internet

Slate’s Future Tense about the meaning of emoji with Jennifer Daniel.

I moderated a panel for the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) on NLP Applications for Crisis Management and Emergency Situations.

Contestant on Webster’s War of the Words, a virtual quiz show fundraiser for the Noah Webster House, and also attended online conferences,

guest interview about internet language on That Word Chat (summarized in tweet form)

The Internet is Making English Better at Yale with Claire Bowern

Internet Linguistics and Memes as Internet Folklore with a student at the University of Oklahoma

Sotheby’s Level Up in Los Angeles (physical)

Unicode Conference in the San Francisco Bay Area (physical), where I did a keynote called “Taking Playfulness Seriously – When character sets are used in unexpected ways” (slides here!).

The Unicode talk isn’t online but a few days later I did a talk on the same topic for Bay Area NLP, for which the video is here.

Virtual talk for some internal folks at YouTube

Rosemary Mosco Talks to Gretchen McCulloch about Pigeons, a book event at Argo Bookshop

Conferences/events attended:

Linguistic Society of America (LSA) – did a Wikipedia editathon

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

Dictionary Society of North America conference

Annual meeting of the Canadian Linguistics Association

WorldCon (physical)

LingComm and LingFest

In April, I co-organized a pair of new events related to linguistics communication: LingComm21, the first International Conference on Linguistics Communication, and LingFest, a fringe-festival-like program of online linguistics events aimed at a general audience, which contained a total of 12 events attended by a total of over 700 participants. One of those events was our first virtual Lingthusiasm liveshow: here’s a fun thread that I did about backchannels while we were getting ready for the show.

LingComm21 had just under 200 registrants, around 100 of which were formally part of the programming in some way. My opening remarks and closing remarks are here as blog posts, and see the #LingComm21 hashtag for highlights of what people noticed about the conference. We then wrote a 6-part blog post series on the conference as a case study in making online conferences more social, in hopes of helping other people who are interested in better virtual events.

Why virtual conferences are antisocial (but they don’t have to be)

Designing online conferences for building community

Scheduling online conferences for building community

Hosting online conferences for building community

Budgeting online conferences or events

Planning accessible online conferences

Looking to teach yourself linguistics? Mutual Intelligibility was a year-long project to help curate free linguistics resources online for people who are trying to teach or learn linguistics, and now all of its posts are collected here for you. 

Crash Course Linguistics

A structured introduction to linguistics. Each post contains a 10-12 minute video from Crash Course Linguistics, plus supporting resources on the same topic including exercises with answer keys. 

Week 0 - Preview

Week 1 - Introduction

Week 2 - Morphology

Week 3 - Morphosyntax

Week 4 - Syntax

Week 5 - Semantics

Week 6 - Pragmatics

Week 7 - Sociolinguistics

Week 8 - Phonetics, Consonants

Week 9 - Phonetics, Vowels

Week 10 - Phonology

Week 11 - Psycholinguistics

Week 12 - Language acquisition

Week 13 - Historical linguistics and language change

Week 14 - Languages around the world

Week 15 - Computational linguistics

Week 16 - Writing systems

Resource Guides

Longer, more comprehensive guides to a few common intro linguistics topics. 

Introduction to IPA Consonants - Resource Guide 1

Introduction to IPA Vowels - Resource Guide 2

Introduction to Morphology - Resource Guide 3

Introduction to Constituency - Resource Guide 4

Introduction to World Englishes - Resource Guide 5

Introduction to Languages around the World - Resource Guide 6

3 Links Posts

Quick highlights of three relevant links about a specific topic, with a short description for each. 

3 Links about Linguistics Teaching

3 Links for Second Year Syntax Videos

3 Links for Second Year Phonology

3 Links for Natural Language Processing

3 Links for Semantics and Pragmatics

3 Links for Sociolinguistics

3 Links for Second Year Psycholinguistics

3 Links for Field Methods

3 Links for Articulatory Phonetics

3 Links for Writing Systems

3 Links for Gesture Studies

3 Links for Linguistics Communication (lingcomm)

3 Links for Evidentiality

3 Links for Linguistic Discrimination

3 Links for Linguistics Careers Outside Academia

3 Links for Schwa

3 Links for the Linguistics of Emoji

3 Links for Proto-Indo-European

3 Links for Second Language Acquisition

3 Links for Zero Morphemes

3 Links for Internet Linguistics

3 Links for Language Revitalization

2020 wasn't the year anyone was expecting, and I did much less travel than in previous years. But, while I was social distancing at home like everyone else, I did at least keep doing enjoyable linguistics things: Crash Course Linguistics videos went from early planning stages to nearly complete, Because Internet came out in paperback, and my podcast Lingthusiasm launched two other projects to contribute to the pop linguistics ecosystem: LingComm Grants and Mutual Intelligibility.

Because Internet

Because Internet, my book about internet language which hit the NYT bestseller list last year, came out in paperback this year! 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.

Crash Course Linguistics

I worked on these 16 fun intro linguistics videos, 10-12 minutes long each, along with a large team, including linguists Lauren Gawne and Jessi Grieser, host Taylor Behnke, the animation team at Thought Cafe, and of course the production team at Crash Course itself. Writing the scripts ended up being our first lockdown project in the spring, and then reviewing the filmed and animated episodes for accuracy a second lockdown project in the fall. The final few videos will be appearing in early 2021 -- you can watch them all at this playlist.

Preview trailer for Crash Course Linguistics

What is linguistics? Crash Course Linguistics #1

What is a word? Morphology, Crash Course Linguistics #2

Morphosyntax, Crash Course Linguistics #3

Syntax 2: Trees - Crash Course Linguistics #4

Semantics - Crash Course Linguistics #5

Pragmatics - Crash Course Linguistics #6

Sociolinguistics - Crash Course Linguistics #7

Phonetics 1: Consonants - Crash Course Linguistics #8

Phonetics 2: Vowels - Crash Course Linguistics #9

Phonology - Crash Course Linguistics #10

Psycholinguistics - Crash Course Linguistics #11

Language acquisition - Crash Course Linguistics #12

Language change and historical linguistics - Crash Course Linguistics #13

Other Writing

Wired Resident Linguist column:

Covid-19 Is History’s Biggest Translation Challenge

A Mission to Make Virtual Parties Actually Fun

Language Files videos, with Tom Scott and Molly Ruhl:

The sentences humans can understand but computers can't

Abso-b████y-lutely - Expletive Infixation

the Hidden Rules of Conversation (about Grice's Maxims)

schwa

the Bouba/Kiki experiment

the corpus statistics behind the pronunciation of "gif"

the complicated question of how many languages there are

Lingthusiasm

My fourth year of producing a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics with Lauren Gawne! Regular episodes:

Making machines learn language - Interview with Janelle Shane

This time it gets tense - the grammar of time

What makes a language easy? It's a hard question

The grammar of singular they - Interview with Kirby Conrod

Schwa, the most versatile English vowel

Tracing languages back before recorded history

Hey, no problem, bye! The social dance of phatics

The happy fun big adjective episode

Who you are in high school, linguistically speaking - Interview with Shivonne Gates

How translators approach a text

Climbing the sonority mountain from A to P

Small talk, big deal

And 12 bonus episodes, with thanks to our patrons for keeping the show sustainable:

What might English be like in a couple hundred years?

Generating a Lingthusiasm episode using a neural net

Teaching linguistics to yourself and other people

When letters have colours and time is a braid - The linguistics of synesthesia

A myriad of numbers - Counting systems across languages

Doing linguistics with kids

Tones, drums, and whistles - linguistics and music

LingComm on a budget (plus the Lingthusiasm origin story)

The quick brown pangram jumps over the lazy dog

The most esteemed honorifics episode

Crash Course Linguistics behind the scenes with Jessi Grieser

Q&A with lexicographer Emily Brewster of Merriam-Webster

We started a Lingthusiasm Discord server, a place for people who are enthusiastic about linguistics to find each other and talk! And we released new schwa-themed merch with the (admittedly aspirational these days) slogan Never Stressed.

Lingthusiasm also sponsored two other projects this year: LingComm Grants and Mutual Intelligibility.

LingComm Grants - We gave out four $500 grants to up-and-coming linguistics communications projects. Thank you again to everyone who applied, and do check out the projects of the winners of the 2020 LingComm Grants.

Mutual Intelligibility - A newsletter to connect linguistics instructors with existing linguistics resources suitable for teaching online in a bite-sized, easy-to-digest fashion, with considerable help from the editing and organizational skills of Liz McCullough.

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 around 200 media hits for Because Internet (I'm sure I'm missing a few). Here are a few highlights:

Two (!!) reviews in the New York Times, by Jennifer Szalai (NYT Daily) and Clay Shirky (NYT Book Review)

Two reviews in the New Yorker, by Katy Waldman and Mary Norris

Reviews in: The Economist, Time Magazine, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Science Magazine, The Times (of London), the Observer/Guardian, BBC Science Focus.

NPR: All Things Considered and Science Friday 

BBC World News  

Trade reviews: Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly (starred), Booklist, and Library Journal

Podcasts: The Cracked Podcast, The Allusionist, Grammar Girl, Slate’s “Lexicon Valley”, New York Times Book Review podcast, The Ezra Klein Show

Lists: TIME’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2019, Goodreads Choice Award Semifinalist, an Amazon Best Nonfiction Book of 2019

My publisher made me a special leather-bound version of Because Internet in celebration of it becoming a New York Times bestseller. It's beautiful.

I have a Wikipedia page now and someone dressed up as my book for Halloween!

Short-form Writing

We Learned to Write the Way We Talk (New York Times Op Ed)

How Can You Appreciate 23rd-Century English? Look Back 200 Years (New York Times Op-Eds From the Future)

We Will Have Meme Folklorists (New York Magazine)

How to use irony on the internet (Wall Street Journal)

The Big Idea: Writing towards the future  (John Scalzi’s Whatever)

Wired Resident Linguist column:

Children are using emoji for digital-age language learning

Predictive text presents the best version of you

Coding is for everyone — as long as you speak English

Fans are better than tech at organizing information online (about the Archive of Our Own)

The meaning of all caps — in texting and in life (excerpt from Because Internet)

New emoji are so boring — but they don’t have to be

Boomerspeak is now available for your parodying pleasure

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:

why typing like this is sometimes okay.

Why “No Problem” can seem rude: Phatic expressions

The language sounds that could exist, but don't

Can the words you read change your behaviour?

Why do we move our hands when we talk?

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:

How languages influence each other - Interview with Hannah Gibson on Swahili, Rangi, and Bantu languages

The verb is the coat rack that the rest of the sentence hangs on

Why do we gesture when we talk? (also a video episode!)

Pop culture in Cook Islands Māori - Interview with Ake Nicholas

You heard about it but I was there - Evidentials

Why spelling is hard - but also hard to change

Emoji are Gesture Because Internet

Putting sounds into syllables is like putting toppings on a burger

Villages, gifs, and children - Interview with Lynn Hou on signed languages in real-world contexts (also a video episode!)

Smell words, both real and invented

Many ways to talk about many things - Plurals, duals, and more

How to rebalance a lopsided conversation

Bonus episodes on Patreon:

Naming people (and especially babies)

How the internet is making English better (liveshow from Melbourne)

Adapting your language to other people

How do radio announcers know how to pronounce all the names? With guest Tiger Webb

Talking with dogs, horses, ravens, dolphins, bees, and other animals

North, left, or towards the sea? With guest Alice Gaby

Words from your family - Familects!

Welcome aboard the metaphor train!

Behind the scenes on Because Internet (Q&A)

Jobs, locations, family, and invention - Surnames

Reading fiction like a linguist

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

In 2018, I finished writing my book about internet language, which now has an official title (BECAUSE INTERNET) and publication date (July 23, 2019). You can preorder it here now and it will arrive as a delightful present from yourself halfway through the year! 

I also started writing a column for Wired about internet language and went to Australia to do two Lingthusiasm liveshows. 

Writing 

My book about internet language officially has a title and publication date! Look for BECAUSE INTERNET: UNDERSTANDING THE NEW RULES OF LANGUAGE in July 2019, and you can also put your email address here to make sure you don’t miss when it’s out on social media. 

I also began a column about internet language for Wired. My first two articles: 

Voldemorting, birdsite, The Cheeto, and other ways of hiding words in plain sight online.

Why do some mid-sized languages, like Swedish, have extensive internet resources, while others with the same or larger speaker populations do not?

Lingthusiasm Podcast 

For Lingthusiasm, my podcast with Lauren Gawne, we did our long-anticipated liveshows in Sydney and Melbourne! We also released new Lingthusiasm merch, including tree diagram scarves, rainbow IPA scarves, Space Baby art, and IPA ties. 

We released 12 main episodes and 12 bonus episodes: 

16. Learning parts of words -  Morphemes and the wug test 17. Vowel Gymnastics 18. Translating the untranslatable 19. Sentences with baggage - Presuppositions 20. Speaking Canadian and Australian English in a British-American binary 21. What words sound spiky across languages? Interview with Suzy Styles 22. This, that and the other thing - determiners 23. When Nothing Means Something 24. Making books and tools speak Chatino - Interview with Hilaria Cruz 25. Every word is a real word 26.  Why C and G come in hard and soft versions, and more about palatal sounds 27. Words for family relationships: kinship terms

Bonus episodes: 

11. We are all linguistic geniuses - Interview with Daniel Midgley 12. Creating languages for fun and learning 13. The grammar of swearing 14. The poetry of memes 15. Linguistics grad school advice 16. Forensic Linguistics 17. Homophones, homonyms, and homographs 18. Emoji, Gesture and The International Congress of Linguists 19. Hyperforeignisms 20. Bringing up bilingual babies 21. What’s it really like at academic conferences? 22. Q&A (with bonus video!) about the shape of your ears, very old words, and more

Media 

A few select media articles: 

Multiple exclamation marks in internet speak!!! (Atlantic) Video on NBC about teen slang (NBC)

Dictionary.com’s decision to add entries for emoji (TIME)

Emoji in the courtroom (CBC The Current)

On the origins of “doggo” (Wired)

An interview about Lingthusiasm with Lauren Gawne (Babel Magazine Meet the Professionals series)

Lingthusiasm was featured on Dictionary.com’s list of best podcasts about language.

I also started a personal/professional instagram account, and started updating the accounts for All Things Linguistic and Lingthusiasm more frequently: go check those out if your instagram feed needs more linguistics in it. 

You can also follow All Things Linguistic on Mastodon for a daily linguistics post there.

Talks and conferences 

I gave a talk about emoji as gesture at EmojiCon in Brooklyn and about emoji sequences as beat gestures at Emoji2018 at Stanford. 

I went to a broad range of interesting conferences this year: XOXO, PatreCon, LangFest, Scintillation, Automatic Speech Recognition for Endangered Languages (ASREL retreat), McGill Symposium on Indigenous Languages, and the annual meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR). 

While in Australia, I gave workshops on LingComm at the annual meeting of the Australian Linguistic Society and at the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language summer school, in addition to a sold-out public lecture on internet linguistics at the summer school. I also gave talks about emoji as gesture at four universities: Sydney, Melbourne, Monash, and La Trobe. 

At the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, I organized a panel called Language in the Public Ear: Linguistics Outreach via Podcasts and Radio, for which my cohost Lauren Gawne represented Lingthusiasm. I also organized the linguistics Wikipedia editathon with Lauren Collister, and stepped in at the last minute to co-host the Five Minute Linguist competition with Lane Greene of the Economist, in addition to our previously scheduled judging, due to weather issues. 

Selected blog posts

I hit my 6-year blogiversary! Here are a few of my favourite posts from 2018: 

Links that may or may not be related to gardens, food, travel, nature, or heterotopias and liminal spaces but probably are. Sources in parentheses. long article: GHOSTS ON THE GLACIER (John Branch and Emily Rhyne/NYT gifted link).  Janet Johnson and John Cooper became part of the folklore of South America’s Aconcagua mountain when they died there, and now, almost 50 years later, an old camera…

LINK FEST: 25 OCTOBER 2022

Links that may or may not be related to gardens, food, travel, nature, or heterotopias and liminal spaces but probably are. Sources in parentheses.