In spring of 2026, I attended conferences, awarded grants, read and discussed some great books, and made zines. And handed out zines. And talked about zines. Have I mentioned zines? Because I’m going to be mentioning zines a lot. But first…

Upcoming events

• August 26, 17:00 Central European Time: presenting “Busting Complex Myths through Sustained Public Engagement: The Case of Emoji” at Societas Linguistica Europaea in Onasbrück, Germany.

• September 27, 10:30 AM ET: panel “How Language Is Made“ at the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario.

Recent activities

Lauren Gawne and I awarded the 2026 LingComm Grants this spring, as well as some commendations to projects we couldn’t afford to fund but couldn’t resist giving props to. Go check out these cool projects! Thank you to everyone who submitted a grant proposal, we had a lot of fun reading through everyone’s ideas, and special thanks to the mentors who volunteered to be matched with a grantee, we heard great things about these meetings!

I lost my voice for a day and realized that after 2 years of ASL classes at Lethbridge Layton Mackay, I’d learned a lot from the Deaf community about how to navigate it. No new ASL classes this quarter, but I did take a Portuguese class for fun.

I celebrated starting All Things Linguistic 14 years ago! I don’t update as much as I once did, but as I often tell people, never apologize for your update schedule.

I attended some great local events:

• Science Writers and Communicators of Canada, where I got to meet lots of interesting science communicators (shoutout to the extra-long coffee/networking breaks), attend a Dragons-Den-style live pitch/feedback event, and participate in a zine workshop by Cat Lau (which was great timing to be inspirational for the zine workshop I ran a week later!)

• LabPhon, the meeting of the Association for Laboratory Phonology, where I did a hands-on linguistics communication through zines workshop and talked with many linguists about zines and their own research! You can borrow my slides here, should you want to run a similar one yourself.

• Festival BD de Montréal/Montreal Comic Arts Festival, where I picked up some sample zines for the workshops (including this incredibly cute tinyzine about cats)

• Scintillation, a small literary speculative fiction convention, where I was on panels about Neologisms and the very meta Books That Are Impossible Recommend

And everywhere I went, I talked about zines, showed people zines and handed out zines and speaking of which, have I mentioned zines? Because: zines!

Zines zines zines zines

The biggest news in the last few months, as you might have inferred, is zines. Lingthusiasm — previously just a podcast — put together our first three linguistics themed zines, which are free to print, copy, and share anywhere in the world.

We’ve heard a lot from listeners trying to share their love of linguistics with friends, family, or students, or just generally bring that linguistics energy from the internet into the physical world. Also, it turns out coincidentally that Gretchen’s and Lauren’s and producer Claire’s and editor Leah’s friends have all separately been getting really into zines lately.

So here’s the plan. We make some zine designs, we release them as pdfs under Creative Commons licenses for anyone to print off from lingthusiasm.com/zines. (All of the zines are free for everyone, though patrons get to see them a few weeks early.) And then you can share them wherever you happen to be. And we can print them off and bring them to whatever events we happen to be at too!

All the zines are made to be printed off from a single sheet of paper which is cut and folded in minizine style to keep photocopying costs low. We’re making all the designs available in both US letter and A4, and with colour/black and white options, so they can work for as many people as possible!

We’ve already heard from a few people who have made linguistics and language-related zines (check out these mini minorized language books in zine format on the Endangered Language Project site). If you make a linguistics-related zine or use zines for any other fun purpose, let us know by tagging @lingthusiasm on social media!

Lingthusiam

All the zine-ing didn’t distract me from my linguistics podcast with cohost Lauren Gawne. Here are the latest episodes:

• The long shadow of Daisy Bates with This Guy Sucked (a crossover episode with a cool pop history podcast that we like!)

• The pink-collar labour of colour words: Part II with Kory Stamper (a bonus episode where we talk about the story behind the spoilery part of True Color)

• Cross-cultural communication (in space!) (several of our recent favourite sf books on cross-cultural communication going wrong)

• The idiom hit the fan (bonus)

• What makes for beautiful writing, scientifically speaking: Interview with Julie Sedivy

• The Lingthusionist: Interview with Helen Zaltzman (bonus)

We’ve learned that some podcast apps are trying to charge you for their own AI transcripts of Lingthusiasm. Don’t be fooled! If you want genuine human-made way-more-likely-to-be-accurate transcripts, lingthusiasm.com/transcripts has them free for every episode.

Also on the website: if you’ve been meaning to catch up on our archives, you should check out our updated topics page! It’s a great resource if you’re not sure what episode to listen to next or what to recommend to someone.

And speaking of recommending…a few people found Patreon’s new community gifting feature before we even knew what to do with it so we’ve been able to give out 7 community-supported memberships so far to people who follow us for free on Patreon. If anyone else is feeling comfortably off in this economy and wants to help both us and your fellow lingthusiasts, we’d be happy to do this again! Follow us as a free member to get announcements whenever we might have gifted memberships to distribute!

The glamourous life of a podcaster

For anyone who wants a little glimpse into my glamourous life as a podcaster, here’s my new favorite note from Producer Claire.

Here’s the CanCon classic that I stopped a meeting with Cohost Lauren to play.

And here’s the episode of Lauren’s crossover podcast episode on the mixed legacy of Daisy Bates — a subject she knows I love so much that she’s been resisting the urge to tell me little anecdotes from it so I could enjoy the episode without spoilers.

Reading

This was a great few months for reading. I got to devour:

• Jo Walton’s Everybody’s Perfect, which I also got to discuss with the author at Argo Bookshop. It’s nothing at all like Piranesi, but somehow also like Piranesi, not that that really helps, and you should definitely give it a look.

• Jo Walton’s The Just City, which ponders the question, what if Plato’s Republic was run by ten-year-olds?

• Felicia Davin’s The Gardener’s Hand trilogy, queer fantasy with sea monsters and a well-thought-through depiction of what language learning magical ability could look like.

I read Kory Stamper’s True Color a while ago now, but please enjoy this absolutely heartwarming thread about it.

If you’re interested in literature, translation, and politics (as I am) you may enjoy (as I did) chewing on the ideas in this thread on pronouns in the Portuguese and French translations of the Murderbot books and this article on decolonizing fanfic in the non-English-speaking world.

New favorite linguistic data

To my great delight, people said, learned, and pondered these sentences, facts, and phenomena:

• Love when I get to blow my linguist friends’ minds by pointing out that it’s [grilled [cheese sandwich]], not [[grilled cheese] sandwich] (rebracketing)

• “Once I’ve finished pondering my orb, I begin orbiting my pond” (chiasmus)

• “my candific opinion is that this would vigify the english language“ (making morphemes more productive)

• Some french speakers are also using “begins with a vowel” as one of many gender-neutral strategies (taking advantage of neutralization)

• “Man arrested after driving child-size pink Barbie Jeep through Prince George, B.C.“ (novel sentence)

• “’A combination of amazement and horror’: Hitchhiker fish hide in manta ray buttholes“ (novel sentence)

• “Jacob Elordi Cans Cannes Plans, Not in Jury Due to Injury“ (novel, and extremely catchy, sentence)

• New favourite example of Grice’s Maxim of Relevance (unsurprisingly, Grice’s Maxim of Relevance)

These words and phrases either already existed or do now:

• Vingifortmonthly — “every two years”

• The Woozle effect — when a source is widely cited for a claim it does not actually support

• Solvitur ambulando — “it is solved by walking,” used for things that obviously work in practice even when they don’t in theory

• Mirepoipsicles — frozen batches of onion, celery, and carrot

• Passé Composé — it’s always been a tense in French grammar, but now it’s a restaurant in Montreal

• Kalani Kanaele — a name in Hawaiian, or Finnish for “the chicken-like gesture that my fish makes”

And speaking of new words, here are some especially fun etymological facts:

• Minutes are called that because they’re minute (as in small)

• In Yup’ik, euphemistic terms for “bear” include “very lovable,” “he is good,” and “he doesn’t attack people”

• The s in island is entirely unetymological

• The ’-age’ suffix [in ‘language’] is … a suffix of action (like how a ‘pilgrimage’ is ‘that thing pilgrims do’). So really it’s more like ‘what that tongue do’

Today’s final photo is, unsurprisingly, zines

Thanks for coming along,

Gretchen

In the first quarter of the year, I attended the Linguistic Society of America 2026 annual meeting online and admired how linguists are really great at pronouncing people’s names (phonetic transcription is a practical skill!).

I narrated the audiobook for Shakespeare’s Sonnets Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness by Zach Weinersmith, featuring sonnets turned into couplets like “When in disgrace and feeling crappy / I think ‘you love me.’ Then I’m happy.” Zach has very kindly given me some free copies of the audiobook to share with people who follow Lingthusiasm on Patreon (at any level, free or paid), so if you want to hear me try to restrain my giggles at a few points, there are still some left! It was neat to read all 154 sonnets and see how my high school sonnet-reading excised some of the spicier ones and how reading them in order created a narrative arc of Shakespeare’s disaster bisexual love life.

I also posted about life as a writer and celebrated some extremely silly holidays. Read on for more!

Lingthusiasm

In case you needed another reason to listen to Lingthusiasm, my friend’s kid complains when someone puts on a podcaster that isn’t me. In that spirit, here are the episodes that my cohost Lauren Gawne and I put out:

• When language become-s(3SG) linguistic example-s(PL)

• Swifties, amorch, Melbin, and bloopers: Deleted Scenes from Adam Aleksic, Miguel Sánchez Ibáñez, and the advice episode (bonus)

• Why “it’s a diglossia!” explains so many social dynamics.

• Collaborations, your latest pop ling reading list, and assigning ourselves IPA symbols: 2026 updates! (bonus)

• Begonia, average coral, and sea pink: Defining colour terms with Kory Stamper

• Skipping rhymes, counting chants, and fortune-telling games: Children’s oral culture (bonus)

Upcoming events

I’m attending three local conferences in Montreal in June:

• Scintillation, a small literary speculative fiction convention, where I’ll be on some panels to be determined, likely about some aspect of language in science fiction and fantasy (previous years have included linguistic worldbuilding and swearing in SFF)

• Science Writers and Communicators of Canada Conference, where I’m doing a talk about mythbusting and emoji

• LabPhon, the conference of the Association for Laboratory Phonology, where I’m doing a workshop for linguists on communicating with broader audiences through zines (you may need to register for it separately on the Thursday workshop day)

If you know of other events happening in Montreal or nearby that I might be interested in, especially linguistics conferences that might be interested in a lingcomm workshop, you can tell me about them via bluesky or via my contact form!

LingComm and popular science

Applications are closed on the LingComm grants, and the winners will be announced shortly. This is our fourth year running them: we started in 2020 in what accidentally became supporting some projects in lockdown, and since then have been runing them bi-yearly (or is that biennially? vingifortmonthly?). Thanks to several generous donations, we have more to give this year than usual, and we’re excited to start choosing recipients!

Looking for science-y details to use as an SFF writer? You don’t need to use the same old 1940s theories: look to modern LingComm and other pop sci writing!

What linguistics fact is still a hot take with the general public? All varieties are valid, systematic, worthy of study and respect. Go forth, LingCommers, and spread the word.

Aspiring LingCommers might also be interested in

• This thread I wrote on the economics of being a LingComm podcast host as well as a writer.

• This post by Elise Cutts on the limited audience of pop sci: mostly educated, left-leaning, and wealthy.

• This thread of thoughts on writers’ relationships with social media; here’s mine.

Minor celebrations

We celebrated pi day, which could also be pie day — and perhaps PIE day. Fun fact: it turns out the guy who started using π the letter to mean π the number was the father of the guy who first hypothesized PIE the language.

On the subject of silly holidays, we also celebrated Rectangular February. And of course, Valentine’s Day, observed (as is traditional) with linguistics-themed poetry.

And in the smallest and cutest of honours, someone may or may not have named a lamb after me. You know, I’ve always aspired to be, erm, outstanding in my field.

New favorite linguistic data

Psst, wanna see a weird sentence? Step right up, folks. We got yer weird sentences, clauses, words, and phrases right here.

• The truth is, I have a genetic disorder where my body doesn’t produce enough books of its own, so I have to supplement. (Novel sentence)

• There’s a German insult that translates to hobbyless behavior. (Novel phrase)

• Who the hell called them “podcast hosts with whom I’ve developed an unhealthy parasocial relationship” and not … earbuds. (Novel word)

• More than 3 years ago, the famous Roman emperor Julius Caesar passed away. (Misleading scalar implicature)

• All the Belgian whistles (Eggcorn)

• Langauge (Persistent typo)

• I HAVE SOMETHING TO COMMUNICATE (Non-linguistic code)

• Linguists stumped by decline in Winnipeg residents calling themselves ‘Peggers. (Euphemism)

• The plural of book could have been beek. (Regularization is unpredictable)

• …and in fact, the singular of week could have been wook. Our library sends out an annual book wook groot, but it used to send monthly beek week greet. (More regularization)

Or maybe you want a non-weird word with a secret weird past. We’ve got you too — try this history of minute. For those who prefer animals to people, here’s Kiki and Bouba, but chickens. If you like data bigger than a sentence, here’s a linguistic analysis of Heated Rivalry and a detailed explanation of NPIs and downward entailment using Mean Girls references. Truly something for everyone!

Beek week greet

Hello, books! Howdy! Bonjour-hi! Okay, these greetings to books don’t belong to any particular weeks, but here’s what I’ve been excited about as a reader in early 2026.

• David M. Perry’s The Public Scholar might be useful for linguists doing lingcomm.

• The upcoming Mother Tongue by Sara Nović is a memoir about both being and parenting a Deaf child

• Ada Palmer’s essay “Writing/Realizing Disability + Power“

• Here’s what I like to call the “ontogeny recaputulates phylogeny” fallacy of book recommending. (hint: people don’t need to start with the entire history of a genre to appreciate it, especially when reccing books to young people!)

• Why should you request books you love from public libraries?

• There’s a new Canadian indie bookseller site and it looks cool.

• In this thread we discuss how we found out linguistics existed. So many great books on the list!

• I often try to read more books I already own, but now I’m contemplating owning more books I’ve already read.

• I wanted to send a sick friend a Legible Arrangement of books instead of an Edible one, and then cool artist Erica Moen got inspired to draw it!

*writing on my phone case* if you have time to doom scroll, you have time to read books.

Department of Meme Studies

• An especially good “Seniors talk like Gen Z” video.

• Apparently kids in school are being given the assignment “go home and ask your parents what their favourite meme is and write a report about it.” (I love this)

• For the deep lore on Proto-Blueskexian, also known as Twitteric, may I suggest Because Internet?

Miscellaneous posts

Here I am on the map of Bluesky, hanging out in linguistics near the Canadians and sociologists:

• I want to print YOU DON’T GET GOOD AT A THING BY NOT DOING IT onto little cards and just hand them out in conversation sometimes

• This is a fun reading exercise! I managed to get pretty far with knowing some German and some obsolete letters and saying things out loud!

• Eastern time next please?

• if anyone manages to score a jinx with a friend by sending them this tweet you BOTH owe me a pepsi

• Also sometimes people come up to me at conferences and tell me that I got them interested in linguistics...when they were in high school...and they’re now a grad student

• Not gonna lie, sometimes the world is on fire and I wonder why we’re doing this…

• one of my favourite small pleasures is renaming a groupchat after a random funny ephemeral thing that someone in the chat has said

• Just over here hanging out in linguistics near the Canadians and sociologists, I’m pleased with that!

In the featured image today I’m writing from a particularly aesthetic cafe situation

Thanks for coming along,

Gretchen

This fall was a good season for literature. I took a trip to the Stratford Festival in Ontario to see live productions of Goblins Oedipus, Dangerous Liaisons, and Sense and Sensibility.

I enjoyed reading Margalit Fox’s Talking Hands, Margaret Killjoy’s The Sapling Cage, Janet Kagan’s Hellspark, and Kory Stamper’s new book True Color that I’ll soon be able to talk to the rest of you about.

And I… okay, this one takes some explanation, but Bonne Maman puts out a yearly advent calendar of tiny specialty jams (aka jamvent), and I liveblogged my way through it with favourite linguistically-relevant books from my shelves that made for thematically appropriate pairings. Apparently it was big news in the jam calendar chat.

At any rate, if you missed it at the time or would just like to browse a list of linguistics books that I like (admittedly biased towards books that I happen to own in hardcopy), you can read the thread on bluesky, the highlight on my instagram, or the blog post version on my blog.

And then, because why waste a good idea and because it was Lingthusiasm producer Claire’s fault that I got into the jamvent calendar thing in the first place, we also paired each flavour of tiny jam with a relevant Lingthusiasm episode from the archive. You can browse that on bluesky or instagram.

By the way, the last time I did a linguistics advent shenanigan was in 2014, when I liveblogged my way through all 26 episodes of the linguistically witty BBC radio comedy Cabin Pressure in time for the final episode coming out, which you can still read on my blog should you so desire. It’s a great show! I still relisten to an episode or two every time I’m on an airplane.

I also spent a lot of my time working on a project I’m not allowed to talk about publicly yet (dunh dunh dunn). Many thanks to the patrons of Lingthusiasm: their support of the podcast also keeps the lights on while I do a lot of research that will eventually be fun linguistics for all to enjoy! If you want to help me in the research phase and be the first to find out when I have updates that I can share, you can become a member on Patreon.

Events and media

Arroba lengua, the Spanish translation of Because Internet, is now out as an ebook.

The LingComm IRL blog series interviewed Marisa Cook and Daniel Currie Hall on teaching linguistics at a high school STE(A)M summer program in Halifax, with thoughts on getting involved with this same program at universities elsewhere in Canada.

I wrote a double dactyl about Timothée Chalamet and someone, for possibly the second time ever, wrote me my own double dactyl in reply.

Lingthusiasm

Lingthusiasm turned 9 this season! That’s nine years of podcasting enthusiastically about linguistics! Our episodes were:

• On the nose: How the nose shapes language

• What’s in a nym? Synonyms, antonyms, and so many more (bonus)

• The history of the history of Indo-European: Interview with Danny Bate

• World Linguistics Day (bonus)

• Whoa!! A surprise episode??? For me??!!

• The Mysterious Voynich Manuscript: Interview with Claire Bowern (bonus)

Over 120 people wished each other a Happy World Linguistics Day from 70 cities in 34 countries! See more stats from World Linguistics Day. Plus: some high-quality Voynich Manuscript page scans for fans of the incredibly popular Voynich Manuscript bonus episode.

We also released some linguistics-themed holiday greeting cards, mostly because I personally wanted to send out cards that say {Merry, marry, Mary} Holidays: whether you say them the same or differently, hope you have a joyful festive season! And then I figured that perhaps I should let other people do so too. Shout out to the person who immediately purchased 50 of them: Redbubble doesn’t show us what your name is, but we hope that all 50 of your nearest and dearest appreciate you as much as we do.

New favorite linguistic data

Linguists are NOT KIDDING…

…when we say that this section is full of sentences you can understand that have never before been uttered.

• This week’s news update includes a disastrous font Stroop task.

• Cook 5 hours at 300° or until popcorn blows the ass off the turkey.

• Jennifer L. Armentrout’s just-published THE PRIMAL OF BLOOD AND BONE is available in a special, limited-edition “garlic-scented copy, infused with Hellmann’s Garlic Aioli to create a one-of-a-kind Craven-proof book.”

The end of the year means Word Of The Year season! The Canadian one took place in 2025 (I was betting on “elbows up,” but “maplewashing” won). The US one isn’t until 2026, but I had my eye on “lobster’s too buttery.”

And nobody I know of has studied these, but maybe someone should:

• How our use of language has changed when we talk to customer service now because we know we are talking to a machine

• How we creatively misuse the surname field in phone contacts

• Which snowball is more Bouba and which is more Kiki

Miscellaneous posts

• brb asking my publisher for an edition of Because Internet that makes the dialup screech as you open it, like a novelty birthday card

• me 20 years ago: dangit people keep misspelling my name, if only there was some sort of handy reference item that I could convince people to place in easy view

• Don’t fear the repetition, embrace it!

• A really interesting article about a horrifying distortion of sign language happening in the UK, and which its creators are now trying to export to other countries and their sign languages.

• Absolutely riveted by this video of women filmed in the 1970s reminiscing about their young adult life in the 1890s

• Sometimes I need to explain to non-Canadians what a square is in the dessert sense (a thread with lots of fun replies about people’s names for squares/bars/traybakes/slices in various places)

• This is one of the reasons we always ask guests on @lingthusiasm.bsky.social how they got interested in their research topic

• Writers now: what a rich period of borrowing from Norman French into English! 1440, Bokenham hating on the youth: “They barbarize them both and speak neither good French nor good English”

• “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” in Anglo-Saxon meter, by Philip Craig Chapman-Bell.

And if you’re still looking for a new year’s resolution, have you considered trying to bring back overmorrrow, a highly useful word that English used to have and which many languages still do?

The featured image is the first of my many books paired with jams!

Thanks for coming along,

Gretchen

This summer, I went to ASL camp! I spent a week at Bob Rumball Camp of the Deaf, in Parry Sound, Ontario, at their ASL Adult Immersion Summer Camp, voices off for 6 nights and 7 days! This was my first time doing any sort of language immersion camp in my various experiences learning languages, and I definitely see why people like them, I really felt liked I levelled up significantly in my signing with that much concentrated practice (and I slept very soundly in the dorm beds since my brain felt so full from learning). And I made friends and got to learn from a left-handed ASL teacher for the first time, which was helpful for me as a lefty!

Also, the Spanish-language translation of Because Internet was released. You can get Arroba Lengua — not a literal translation of the title, but Spanish Internet slangification with a similar vibe — from Piodepagina, Casadellibro, and other places Spanish-language books are sold (note that the ebook edition may be more readily available if you’re outside Europe). And for lots of juicy details about the translation process, see our Lingthusiasm bonus episode where Lauren Gawne and I interview Miguel Sánchez Ibáñez, the translator.

More media milestones

Let’s start with the big news: The first Crash Course Linguistics video has hit a million views! If you want some fun 10 min linguistics videos to watch, here’s a great place to start.

In way smaller news, Because Internet is on one of Penguin Random House’s “credibility bookshelf” zoom backgrounds.

And somewhere in between: Because Internet made an appearance in an episode of Words Unraveled. @efrex.bsky.social made a nice callout to my interview on Let’s Learn Everything. And Linguistic Discovery would like to remind you that the internet is encouraging, not ruining, writing.

Lingthusiasm

We launched two new Lingthusiasm merch designs:

• We’ve made a special jazzed-up version of the Lingthusiasm logo to put on stickers, tshirts, and more, featuring fun little drawings from the past 8.5 years of enthusiasm about linguistics by our artist Lucy Maddox. There’s a leaping Gavagai rabbit, bouba and kiki shapes, and more…see how many items you can recognize!

• And with various and sundry gift-giving holidays on the horizon, we’ve also got a Merry/marry/Mary Holidays greeting card and sticker.

Lingthusiam put out six episodes, including three interviews.

• Is a hotdog a sandwich? The problem with definitions (this was a highly popular bonus episode from a few years ago that we’ve now released with expansions for the main free podcast feed, go see what the fuss was about!)

• Why sci-fi gestures live long and prosper: Crossover with Imaginary Worlds (bonus)

• Urban Multilingualism

• Reading linguistic landscapes on street signs (bonus)

• Highs and lows of tone in Babanki: Interview with Pius Akumbu

• ¡Pos ya está! Translating Because Internet into Spanish with Miguel Sánchez Ibáñez (bonus)

Speaking of interviews, we have more than twenty interview episodes now, and you can find them all together on our topics page, where they have their own category. We also have over 100 bonus episodes for patrons, with a few interviews there as well.

Lingcomm

It was a big few months for communicating about lingcomm. Maybe we can call that lingcommcomm? Or maybe not…

I presented at Lingstitute 2025, the LSA summer institute, about 101 ways to communicate linguistics with a broader audience — some of which we brainstormed together in this bluesky thread.

I started a new series of interviews on the lingcomm.org blog about community collaboration linguistics projects that don’t have much of a web presence. First interview: Lingcomm IRL with Girl Scouts, an interview with Nikole Patson.

The lingcomm mailing list now has over 100 members! If you’re a lingcomm practitioner who wants to hear about lingcomm conferences, events, journal special issues, and so on, please feel free to subscribe!

Lingthusiasm cohost creator Lauren Gawne put out her yearly list of linguistics and language podcasts. Know of a good one she missed? Please let her know!

New favorite linguistic data

• “brb making “hich” happen“ (analogical creation)

• And speaking of which, when will somewhy happen? Somewhen (analogical creation)

• “I just want to be a cheese wizard, or fromage.” (portmanteau)

• “yaybe — It’s when you’re not sure if the yay is gonna happen“ (portmanteau)

• “KPop demon hunters. KSoda demon hunters. KCoke demon hunters“ (a famous case of regional variation)

• “My 9 year old and his classmates have started using “that’s AI” to mean “I don’t believe you.” Me: we’re having dinosaur meat for dinner. Kiddo: that’s AI.“ (semantic change)

• “OPEN HOLE DO NOT REMOVE“ (zero anaphora)

• konbarning (Ok, this one’s a doozy… inclusive language, a multilingual portmanteau, then some clipping, and finally a rebus with emoji)

Miscellaneous posts

• well you see when words are polyamorous they can date BOTH a Greek prefix and a Latin suffix

• Larry Tesler, inventor of the cut, copy, and paste commands, dies at 74

• Talking to the youths in 2025: did you know that “podcast” comes from a pun on “broadcast” plus the Apple iPod, a precursor to the iPhone that only played music
  Talking to the youths in 2045: did you know that “tweet” comes from a pun on Twitter, a precursor to various shortform social media

• Now I’m thinking about what sorts of linguistics topics might be a good fit for a neighbourhood association meeting, has anyone tried this?

• James Murray, aka the original guy behind the oxford english dictionary, being pretty damn tolerant for 1895

This quarter’s image is a schwa and a kiki and a nondetatched rabbit part and a vowel space and a microphone and...

Thanks for coming along,

Gretchen

Back in 2017, when I was deep in the writing process for Because Internet, I was feeling stuck on the emoji chapter and Lauren Gawne, my cohost on the then-baby Lingthusiasm podcast (we were less than a year old!) offered to read the current draft. I'll never forget her comment that led to me rewriting the whole chapter: "You realize this is all related to gesture, right?"

Immediately, I wanted to dive into the gesture literature, which hadn't been a part of either of my linguistics degrees. I asked Lauren where I should start. Was there some sort of short book or long survey article that put the rest of the literature into context so I could figure out which papers I needed to read more deeply and how they fit into relationship with each other? Lauren was like, "Read these parts of McNeill 1992, and then McNeill 2005, and then these three chapters of Kendon 2004…" — which was when I realised maybe I was going to have to solve this problem for myself. She ended up sending me her classroom slides and answering my questions herself, which led to a much-revised chapter in Because Internet and an academic paper together on emoji as gesture.

Since then, we've done several Lingthusiasm episodes about various aspects of gesture, but that gap we noticed in 2017 has still been there: if someone wants a more in-depth entry point into the gesture literature, one that doesn't assume they have any background in gesture specifically but does assume they want more details than we can fit into a podcast episode, where do they go? Especially since many people's degrees, like mine, still don't contain much about gesture, so a prof in linguistics, cognitive science, anthropology, and related fields might not know where to advise a student with a gesture-related project to start reading.

That's why Lauren has written a book! It's called Gesture: A Slim Guide and it's available now from Oxford University Press. The Slim Guides are part of an Oxford series in the genre known as academic crossover books: they're much less technical than a typical academic monograph, but more in-depth than a trade book from a commercial publisher like Penguin. Here are some ways you can learn more about it:

• Lauren's post about it on her blog Superlinguo

• Lauren's and my Lingthusiasm episode about it

• Lauren's guest episodes on the podcasts Let's Learn Everything, Because Language, Language on the Move, and Grammar Girl

Events and Media

I also did other things this quarter than just take credit for Lauren's hard work! Quite a few things, in fact: three conferences…

• The LingComm25 conference, where I presented a lightning talk on collaborations between academics and non-academics and learned that November 26th will be National Linguistics Day in the UK. Stay tuned for some National Linguistics Day celebration on the podcast!

• The Canadian Linguistic Association, where I learned about this "living dictionary" tool for documenting endangered languages and the Canadian Language Museum.

• Scintillation, a science fiction con, where I participated in panels on worldbuilding and stakes in fantasy.

…two guest appearances…

• I presented with Amal El-Mohtar — coauthor of This Is How You Lose the Time War, a book I greatly enjoyed — in a conversation about her new book, The River Has Roots at the Argo Bookshop in Montreal, a great place where I've done events before.

• I appeared on the podcast A Language I Love Is, talking about Montreal French and bilingualism in Canada.

…and a few anniversaries:

• I celebrated my 13th blogiversary! I started All Things Linguistic in the spring of 2012, and while it isn't my most active lingcomm project at the moment, it's still important to me as my very first public-facing one.

• It was the 10th anniversary of LingWiki, another lingcomm project which I started in 2015 and which many linguists have picked up since, where we host Wikipedia editathons to improve linguistics-related articles on Wikipedia. I didn't feel like writing an anniversary post so Lauren did — and not just a quick celebration, but a whole informal history of LingWiki.

Lingthusiasm

We had a few special lingnouncements this quarter. (Is that a word? It is now.)

You can now gift a Lingthusiasm membership to someone else. Depending on the tier you buy, this could get them access to bonus episodes and our Discord server, or even a spot with their favorite IPA character on the Lingthusiasm Supporter Wall of Fame.

We also celebrated our 100th bonus episode on Patreon. In celebration, we went back into the vault and revisited our very first bonus episode — with updated sweary commentary on Important Swearing Developments that have happened since 2017. We’ve made this extra bonus bonus version available to all patrons, free and paid, so feel free to send it to your friends!

Plus, we had a full quarter of three regular and three bonus episodes:

• A hand-y guide to gesture

• Linguist Celebrities (bonus)

• Reading and language play in Sámi: Interview with Hanna-Máret Outakosk

• The linguistics of kissing 😘 (bonus)

• Linguistics of TikTok: Interview with Adam Aleksic aka EtymologyNerd

• Fun linguistic experiments, linguistic etiquette, and language learning scenarios (bonus)

Posts

• A while ago I asked, "does anyone on Linguist Twitter know of research on the intersection of signed languages and synesthesia?" Nobody knew then, but now we do: Elizabeth Droubi wrote an honors thesis at Gallaudet University about it.

• We had a great discussion thread on dreaming in a language you're learning.

• "this is a version of monopoly where you're trying to recreate proto-indo-european and I don't know how to feel about it"

• Another great Bill Labov story that a lot of students need to hear

• The perennial problem of writers worrying about how kids talk: this time, brainrot!

• "How are we feeling about the consensus-seeking 'we'? 🐦🐦"

• Sharps and flats as kiki and bouba

• Birdsong as kiki and bouba

• 'Just realized that the hole emoji 🕳️ could be used to stand for "portal"…'

New favorite linguistic data

• Fort-yearly (Analogical creation)

• Woodsqueer: one who squees in the woods (Word segmentation is hard)

• This article says younger Californians say pony differently than older ones. But what's the pronunciation and how should we write it? POH-nee? pau-nee? poh-nay? per-nih? Sounds like we're all looking for ways to convey GOAT fronting. (Writing about English vowels is hard too, but lexical sets make it easier…)

This quarter's image is me, holding onto Lauren's Gesture book with my own two hands (well, one hand had to hold the camera), since it exists in the real world! I hope it brings joy to students, researchers, and autodidacts!

Thanks for coming along,

Gretchen

In the first few months of 2025, we celebrated a podcast milestone: 100 episodes of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics!

To celebrate, my cohost Lauren Gawne and I did a special double-feature: our 100th episode had 100 "fun fact" reasons to be enthusiastic about linguistics (including a few from former guests) and our 101st episode finally tackles that classic "Linguistics 101" format of the micro-to-macro perspective on language.

Plus, we made a special roundup post of 101 places to get enthusiastic about linguistics. This is your one-stop-shop if you want suggestions for other podcasts, books, videos, blogs, and other places online and offline to feed your interest in linguistics, based on whittling down over 1000 listener suggestions from the Lingthusiasm listener survey with editing assistance from Leah Velleman. Even with a hundred and one options, we’re sure there’s still a few that we’ve missed, so also feel free to tag us @lingthusiasm on social media about your favourites!

Also, and we feel extremely enthusiastic about this, after a bonus episode mentioned crocheting a model of the vocal tract, very talented listener Melody sent us a genuine crocheted model of the vocal tract!

And as always we put out three regular and three bonus episodes.

• Lingthusiasm Episode 100: A hundred reasons to be enthusiastic about linguistics

• Micro to macro: The levels of language

• The science and fiction of Sapir-Whorf

• Crochet vocal tract, grammar is a team sport, gifs, and soy sauce: Deleted scenes from Jacq Jones, Emily M. Bender, and Tom Scott team interviews (bonus)

• What makes for beautiful writing, scientifically speaking (bonus)

• Rock, paper, scissors, Gesture book, and a secret project: Survey results and general updates (bonus)

Publishing news from all over

Because Internet is now translated into four languages — three that I don't speak (which is very surreal) and one that I sorta do. My author copies of all four have now finally arrived, so here's a photo of them all hanging out together!

And the famous Bunny Paper — a.k.a. Labov 1971, on evaluating kids' language skills (using empathy and bunnies) — is back in print in open access form! When Labov passed away, someone mentioned the existence of this once-obscure paper, and Linguistics Twitter went on a hunt for a copy. We eventually did an episode about it on Lingthusiasm. Now it's back in print so anyone who wants can read it.

Events

I went to the Linguistic Society of America's annual meeting, this year in Philadelphia, where I played Spot the Canadian, felt a little bit old when I met a longtime fan, and saw "rawdog" elected Word of the Year.

To rawdog: taking on life without the usual protection, preparation, or comfort. Whether it’s diving into a challenge unprepared or skipping the safety net, rawdogging is about embracing risk, stone-cold sobriety, and rolling with it.

I also appeared on a few other podcasts:

• BBC Science Focus Instant Genius Podcast: How the internet shaped how we speak

• Language on the Move: Because Internet, An interview with Gretchen McCulloch

• A Language I Love Is…: Montreal French and Gretchen McCulloch

New favorite data…

• "She put the card back into her small, for a handbag, handbag" (Center embedding)

• "In a sentence never before uttered by humans, I am delighted to share that an alligator stole my conservation instructor’s hat by jauntily walking into the water while wearing it 🐊" (Novel sentence)

• "unless☝️you eat a lemon" (Emoji are really gestures!)

• "Croissan 'wich you a happy new year" (Double portmanteau with bonus pun)

…and a few excellently coined new words

• "Acoustic bike" (rather than electric)

• "The Strunk cost fallacy" (treating the time wasted on learning silly rules as a sunk cost)

• "Fauxmage" (vegan cheese)

Social media

• I am a creature of the night (or at least, that's the best translation I can manage)

• Linguistics-themed Valentine's day poetry

• "…our new 3rd person dual pronoun, thembo"

• "Bluesky sells books"

• Canada gets a fully bilingual TV show

• "Just got served this ad for an app called 'Kiki'" — "Brb launching a competing app called Bouba"

This quarter's image is a bag of popcorn proving that people in Montreal really are using "fauxmage."

Thanks for coming along,

Gretchen

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.

Thanks for coming along,

Gretchen

Lingthusiasm was featured in the New York Times' list of 5 Podcasts for Word Nerds! And here's print evidence that it happened.

The rest of the list had four other indie linguisticsy/languagey podcasts whose creators we also know and like: The Allusionist, Words Unravelled, The Vocal Fries, and A Way With Words. Check them all out!

Besides that, I ran a little accidental A/B test on how to market your pop linguistics book.

And 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.

I also enrolled in my third American Sign Language class, ASL 103 with Deaf instructor Hariklia (Lia) Mavroudis, again through the Lethbridge Layton Mackay Rehabilitation Centre (LLMRC) in Montreal. Back in person again after 102 on Zoom, which was a huge relief. It's also been fun this semester to start recognizing some people from previous classes and events!

Lingthusiasm

Lingthusiasm put out the usual six episodes — including a bonus episode about my last summer's travel and visits from Emily M. Bender and Let's Learn Everything.

• OooOooh~~ our possession episode oOooOOoohh 👻

• Xenolinguistics 👽 (bonus)

• Helping computers decode sentences — Interview with Emily M. Bender

• Linguistic Travel — Estonia, Mundolingua, and Martha's Vineyard (bonus)

• A politeness episode, if you please

• Metaphors be with you! Lingthusiasm x Let's Learn Everything crossover episode (bonus)

We also added linguist, technical editor, and generally excellent human Leah Velleman to the Lingthusiasm team! Her first project was sprucing up the Lingthusiasm merch page (check it out, it's much easier to navigate now!), and you may also notice her around here helping me with these newsletters, for which I'm very grateful.

Remembering Bill Labov

The great sociolinguist Bill Labov passed away. The internet remembered him as it does, with eulogies and also silly jokes about his best-known study:

• Imagine him "in heaven, doing research on the pronunciation of 'pearly.'"

• Treatment is simple. Great sociolinguist Bill Labov is in town.

Or, for a serious (but still entertaining) look at why he was so great, listen to Lingthusiasm's episode about the bunny paper.

Favorite data

New weird utterances! Someone said these!

• "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)

And several someones have already been saying these! To my great delight, they actually are or were common expressions.

• "We will certainly get that piglet washed" (Dutch)

• "Repussying" (Brazilian Portuguese)

• "How is thy life-condition?" (Old English)

• "Boop" (Modern English — now in the Cambridge Dictionary!)

Reading and listening

Here are some things I enjoyed this season:

• 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"

Tweets and blog posts

• Oh hey, my tweet is in this xkcd.com What If video

• The only version of the ghoti meme I'll accept from now on

• Linguists don't really know what a "word" is and we don't really mind

• Mark Hamill signing his name Mar🐫 because in English /p, t, k/ sounds at the beginning of a stressed syllable are pronounced aspirated

• The many benefits of alt text

• Ooh, there's a word for absence of inner speech/voice now!

• A thread of "Hidden gems" in lingcomm

This quarter's image is a pumpkin I carved for Halloween. Featuring two shapes, a round, blobby one and an angular, spikey one. If you had to assign the names kiki and bouba to these shapes, which one would be which?

Thanks for coming along,

Gretchen

This summer I spent time with Finnish, Spanish, Estonian, Dutch, Italian, Latin (unexpectedly!), and… well, okay, kind of all of them, at least in museum exhibit form.

So I did what any linguist would do and made myself into a guinea pig, comparing four different language learning strategies on four languages to see what happened. I've written up an Introduction/overview and some highlights and troubleshooting.

On the same trip, I made appearances at some events:

• The World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon) in Glasgow, Scotland, on a panel about languages as world-building

• The Societas Linguistica Europea annual meeting in Helsinki, Finland, where I didn't present but I especially enjoyed the special outreach session, Communicating linguistics research: results and prospects.

• 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

• 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

The Spanish translation isn't the first one for Because Internet — it's already available in Japanese (Filmart, Amazon.co.jp), Chinese (Taobao), and Korean (Aladin.co.kr, Kyobo) — but it was the first one into a language I understand and where I happened to be in the right location to meet the translator, so that was really cool! The publisher also localized the title (arroba is the Spanish word for the @ sign, so it literally means @language) and the social-media-post-inspired cover art is a fun new direction compared with the classic blue and yellow of several other editions!

In non-travel news, the podcast Dashboard Diaries interviewed me about the linguistics of Tumblr, and I collected some extra links of interest on the subject.

Lingthusiasm

This season's episodes included some great grammatical phenomena, a look behind the scenes at one of my collaborations, and the classic philosophy of language thought experiment with merch to match.

• The perfectly imperfect aspect episode

• The best and worst comparatives episode (bonus)

• Lo! An undetached collection of meaning-parts!

• Don’t you love to do a “do” episode? (bonus)

• Welcome back aboard the metaphor train!

• Behind the Scenes on the Tom Scott Language Files (bonus)

The experiment? Suppose you're in a field with someone you don't share any languages with. A rabbit scurries by and the person says "Gavagai!" You probably interpret that as referring to the rabbit, rather than just to the rabbit's ears, or the act of scurrying, or, as memorably put by WVO Quine, "un-detached rabbit parts" — but why? Listen to this episode to find out…

EMBED THE LO! EPISODE

…or enjoy the merch, available in magenta, indigo, teal, cream, and black.

New favorite data

People continued to produce wonderfully unique utterances:

• 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)

They also continued not producing "abso-jesus-lutely!" — but why?

Bluesky and blogs

• 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

• Etymological epiphanies from all over: nookie, cookie, bacon, parasol, parachute…

• A little shoutout on XKCD's What If? video

• The historical dictionary of science fiction and fannish words in the OED

• A Chicago Manual of Style section on punctuating with emojis. "Usage varies widely, however, so editors should query before making wholesale changes"

• French as it's taught versus French as it's spoken

• A word for "wet with air"

I visited the linguistics museum Mundolingua in Paris and took this photo of a literal Indo-European family tree:

Thanks for coming along,

Gretchen

In official research news, during the second quarter of 2024, the Crash Course Linguistics team published a case study on how the series came together, called Creating Inclusive Linguistics Communication: Crash Course Linguistics. It was a big collaboration, including co-writers me and Lauren Gawne, fact-checker Jessi Grieser, and several members of the production team at Complexly. You can read it for free along with the rest of the open-access handbook it’s in if you’re into meta on doing lingcomm. (Or you could just watch the Crash Course Linguistics videos again.)

In less-official research news, we declared it Vowel Month on Lingthusiasm and learned that people’s favorite secondary cardinal vowel is /y/ as in über.

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.

I also enrolled in my second American Sign Language class, ASL 102 with Deaf instructor Krishna Madaparthi, again through the Lethbridge Layton Mackay Rehabilitation Centre but this time on Zoom instead of in person. I have to say, I much preferred the in person classes (the Zoom images were so tiny!) but it was worth trying Zoom in order to continue learning. And at least there were still local Deaf events to attend irl!

The 2024 LingComm grants were awarded, funding:

• Emily Remirez’s Linguistics Coloring Book

• Adam Aleksic’s Etymology Nerd videos

• Sarah Wood, Pina Hare, and Marcus Wilker’s Get the Reference Podcast

• Onyedikachi Augustine Okodo’s English Parliament radio show

• Irene Lami’s Saussure e Grida podcast.

• Montreal Benesch’s trans*languaging art show

And I greatly enjoyed the following books and other activities:

• 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

• 𓆜 The 𓆝 Unicode 𓆟 hieroglyphic 𓆞 fish 𓆛

Lingthusiasm

This quarter’s Lingthusiasm episodes included a fanciful foray into a shop that sells everything, no really, everything. Plus, some of our favourite and most cursed portmanteau words, and an interview with a linguist who I met back in 2022 on my trip to New Zealand:

• Scoping out the scope of scope

• Inner voice, mental pictures, and other shapes for thoughts (bonus)

• Brunch, gonna, and fozzle — The smooshing episode

• Secret codes and the joy of cryptic word puzzles (bonus)

• How nonbinary and binary people talk — Interview with Jacq Jones

• Linguistic mixups — spoonerisms, mondegreens, and eggcorns (bonus)

New favorite data

People produced these utterances!

• Today I learned that there were smaller walrus ancestors and I am extremely happy to report that the researcher speaking about this did indeed refer to them as the “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)

Tweets and blog posts

• Approaching old language change “with gleeful delight rather than a fussbudgety sniff”

• An informal poll on the hardest and easiest things about learning a language

• Tips on how to write about science

• “Woo it’s been a while since I’ve seen such an obvious Google Translate fail”

• “My language classes in school gave me a SEVERELY INFLATED idea of how much of my future would involve discoteques”

• From acute to ’cute to just cute

• 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?

This quarter’s image is the classic Boops boops fish species, which was not technically part of the tumblr boops game but let’s face it, it’s still very charming.

Thanks for coming along,

Gretchen

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In the first three months of 2024, I attended the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in New York City — home, as always, of the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year vote. (The winner? Enshittification!)

I also started taking classes in American Sign Language through a local community ASL 101 class offered at the Lethbridge Layton Mackay Rehabilitation Centre, with Deaf instructor Marc Gervais. It’s my first time back in a language class since my university days and it’s great to be flexing that muscle again and learning more about Deaf culture.

I appeared on an episode of quiz podcast Go Fact Yourself alongside David Wilcox.

I learned whether people visualize words in a specific font (I do!).

And in a personal first, I appeared in a crossword puzzle — Puzzmo’s daily crossword referenced my book Because Internet.

Podcast news

Lingthusiasm created a new and Highly Scientific™ ‘Which Lingthusiasm episode are you?’ quiz based on a game I played last year on bluesky recommending episodes to people by ~vibe, and also three regular episodes and three bonus ones:

• No such thing as the oldest language

• Connecting with oral culture

• What visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are

• Themself, Basque ergativity cartoons, and bad swearing ideas (bonus)

• Are thumbs fingers and Which Lingthusiasm episode are you? (bonus)

• How we made vowel plots with Bethany Gardner (bonus)

For the vowels episode in March, my cohost and I fulfilled a long-time personal dream and commissioned a linguist to map out our respective vowel spaces (based on data from previous Lingthusiasm episodes) so we can see a visual representation of how my Canadian and Lauren’s Australian vowels differ from each other!

You can see further vowel plots and more about how they were made on this github page that Bethany Gardiner set up for us!

Favorite words and sentences

• “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

Tweets and blog posts

• “New favorite example of the Stroop test“

• “AI? … That’s so neat! H…how are you verifying it?”

• “If I’ve said this once, I’ve said this a million times…”

• “Today I learned that ‘cone of silence’ isn’t just an idiom”

• Boomer ellipses in hand drawn cartoons

This month’s image is another of the super cool vowel charts that Bethany Gardiner made for Lingthusiasm! Look how different Lauren and I are!

Thanks for coming along,

Gretchen

In 2023, I switched to bluesky from twitter, which is still going strong. I also spent a month at the LSA summer institute, went to assorted other conferences, and kept doing the podcast. In other words, just like, a pretty normal year, which wasn’t nearly as shaped by the pandemic as the previous few years have been. (This is a super long linkpost that is probably going to get cut off in your email, by the way, so you can also see the full thing as a webpage here.)

Conferences

• I started the year in Denver, Colorado at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, where I co-hosted the Five Minute Linguist competition with Jessi Grieser and saw many excellent linguist friends!

• I attended the second International Conference on Linguistics Communication, #LingComm2023, which I was so pleased to see in the hands of a fantastic new organizing committee. They did ask me to give the opening keynote, which I’ve posted the text of as a blog post: What we can accomplish in 30 years of lingcomm.

• I was on panels at Scintillation, a local literary SFF convention, one about magic words and one about reading Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan books.

• I went to UMass Amherst for Lingstitute 2023, where I did a talk on linguistics communication, emceed the Three Minute Thesis competition, recorded two interviews for Lingthusiasm, and did a talk at a workshop called Bridging fieldwork, corpus, and experimental methods to study sociolectal variation.

• I also got a cool tour of the Merriam-Webster headquarters while I was in the area!

• October: I attended NWAV51 in Queens, New York.

• November: I attended Patreon CreatorFest in Los Angeles.

Other projects

• Spanish Translation of Because Internet was announced, coming out in 2024!

• A review of Because Internet showed up in the UK A Level exams. Which is very neat and also I would like to convey my apologies to any students out there who got stressed by it.

• In April, I made an account on bluesky and enjoyed some wordplay there, which is still going strong as a twitter replacement.

• I recorded a very silly audiobook of Shakespeare’s sonnets abridged beyond the point of usefulness by Zach Weinersmith, which will be available eventually

• I cowrote three scripts for Tom Scott Language Files videos: How languages steal words from each other, there’dn’t’ve and Does the language you speak change how you think? (No. Mostly.)

Lingthusiasm

Lingthusiasm, my podcast with Lauren Gawne, celebrated our seventh anniversary with a second listener survey and some new merch: the slogan Etymology isn’t Destiny and posters and other items with a colourful yet minimal layout of the International Phonetic Alphabet on them.

People often ask Lingthusiasm to recommend interesting books about linguistics that don’t assume prior knowledge of linguistics, so we’ve come up with a list of 12 books that we personally recommend, including both nonfiction and fiction books with linguistically interesting elements! Get this list of our top 12 linguistics books by signing up for Lingthusiasm’s free email list (which will otherwise send you an email once a month when there’s a new episode — this is something we’re doing to help continue to reach people amid the rising fragmentation of the social media ecosystem).

I did an experimental bluesky thread matching people with the Lingthusiasm episode that matches their personality best based on the vibes of their profile, which people were surprisingly keen on! Since I was eventually getting more replies than I could keep up with, this ended up turning into making a Which Lingthusiasm episode are you? personality quiz.

Lauren and I published a new open-access academic paper: Communicating about linguistics using lingcomm-driven evidence: Lingthusiasm podcast as a case study. It’s in Language and Linguistic Compass, an open access linguistics journal, and you can read it in full here.

Lingthusiasm episodes

1. Where language names come from and why they change

2. How kids learn language in Singapore – Interview with Woon Fei Ting

3. Bringing stories to life in Auslan – Interview with Gabrielle Hodge (our second bilingual video episode, in Auslan and English with an interpreter and captions)

4. Tone and Intonation? Tone and Intonation!

5. Word Magic

6. The verbs had been being helped by auxiliaries

7. Frogs, pears, and more staples from linguistics example sentences

8. How kids learn Q’anjob’al and other Mayan languages – Interview with Pedro Mateo

9. Look, it’s deixis, an episode about pointing!

10. Ergativity delights us

11. Revival, reggaeton, and rejecting unicorns – Basque interview with Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez

12. If I were an irrealis episode

Bonus episodes

1. Parrots, art, and what even is a word – Deleted scenes from Kat Gupta, Lucy Maddox, and Randall Munroe interviews

2. Singapore, New Zealand, and a favourite linguistics paper – 2023 Year Ahead Chat

3. When books speculate on the future of English

4. Neopronouns, gender-neutral vocab, and why linguistic gender even exists – Liveshow Q&A with Kirby Conrod

5. 2022 Survey Results – kiki/bouba, synesthesia fomo, and pluralizing emoji

6. Linguistic jobs beyond academia

7. LingthusiASMR – The Harvard Sentences

8. How we make Lingthusiasm transcripts – Interview with Sarah Dopierala

9. Field Notes on linguistic fieldwork – Interview with Martha Tsutsui Billins

10. Postcards from linguistics summer camp

11. Linguistic Advice – Challenging grammar snobs, finding linguistics community, accents in singing, and more

12. Frak, smeg, and more swearing in fiction – Ex Urbe Ad Astra interview with Jo Walton and Ada Palmer

Books

• A thread on Bea Wolf, a graphic novel children’s adaptation of Beowulf

• An academic book I wish had existed in time for me to cite it in Because Internet

• A thread on True Biz and depicting ASL in text

• Part of the Narrative for This Is How You Lose the Time War

• In Mrs Dalloway, (published 1925) Virginia Woolf refers casually to the eighties and nineties much like we do but a century earlier

• Author’s note pronouns part 1 and part 2 from Before We Were Trans by Kit Heyam

• Phatic communication in Murderbot

• The Unraveling (bouba and kiki genders)

• A thread about obscure vocabulary and intonation in Middlemarch by George Eliot

Selected posts from tumblr, twitter, and bluesky

General linguistics

• Extremely good IPA chart earrings

• Happy PIE Day! And more on Proto-Indo-European day

• Linguistically relevant xkcd comics: stares in œ, the g as in “gif”, twelve word vocabulary, After bird strikes judge who ordered Olive Garden path sentence in case of green walkways vacated overturned but rights and lands safely

• Voiced and Voiceless, the two bathroom door signs

• Meat Clarinet

• New genders: soupative and oosative

• Them/Their Hills

• Britney Spears interdentalization

• hey, I just met you / and this is freaky / but which one is bouba / and which is kiki?

• harvesting words, France, 15th century

• Phatic Expressions (Meow at your loved ones)

• Letter rations

• Against copyediting

• I recently came across a current linguistics grad student saying they found out that linguistics existed from the movie Arrival, and I am just so excited because Linguistics Twitter totally predicted this was gonna happen when it came out in 2016 and now IT’S HERE

• Because Internet showed up on a slide at Vocabaret, a language comedy club in NYC that I apparently now have to visit

• Students don’t get your pop culture references anymore? Give ’em a bonus assignment to come up with cultural references that relate to linguistics, put them in the materials for next year, repeat

• Hello Grambank! A new typological database of 2,467 language varieties

• Polari

• Haiku

General interest

• At the top of the hour

• Random language learning phrases

• if and only if

• English loan words in German

• Writing/Reading direction

• Corn boustrophedon

• “In short, participants believed that moral decline began at about roughly the same time they appeared on Earth”

• I want to be a cheese wizard, or fromage

• I dreamed a dream

• Podcast Broadcast

• Is this SALAMI intelligent?

• Walking Thesaurus

• Mille neuf cent

• Vorb

• Ceiling Wax

• It’s so hard to remember how hard is used to be to “just look stuff up”

• Much as I’m a fan of David Crystal (who obviously bears no responsibility for this), I have to say, having my words misattributed to him by an AI is…not great

Cool existing and hypothetical studies

• Unexpected calls?

• Social media voice?

• Barbie Sociolinguistics

• Behavior change through language

• Ron, Jon, Lon, Don

• Yoga & Bodybuilding Youtube Prosody

New favourite linguistics example sentences

• In loving memory of Nicole Campbell, who never saw a dog and didn’t smile (structural ambiguity)

• Cocaine in the River Thames is ‘another problem eels don’t need’ says expert (novel sentences)

• Hidden beneath Antarctic ice for eons, scientists have made a chilling discovery (structural ambiguity)

• I keep seeing ads for Neutrogena products with the tagline “for people with skin” and it raises a truly horrifying alternative (Grice’s maxim of quantity)

• A Medieval French Skeleton is rewriting the rules of syphilis (ambiguity)

• A snapping-turtle-snapping heron. And you: a snapping-turtle-snapping-heron-snapping human. (recursion)

• Their dog was barking in a way that is entirely normal for a regular, full-blooded dog, and could not be mistaken for the vocalisations of a half-wolf, a jackal, or perhaps a hyena. (Gricean maxims)

• Blind bisexual goose named Thomas who spend six years in a love triangle with two swans and helped raise 68 babies dies at the ripe old age of 40 (novel sentences)

• “How many Octobers is it today?” I told him it was the 21st. (child language acquistion)

• Jesus flipping over tables in the temple (structural ambiguity)

Helpful threads and posts

• Ways of talking about vocal tract height that aren’t gender essentialist

• Telling people what they may or may not already know is tempting but less effective for communicating complex topics: A lingcomm thread

• I wrote down assorted thoughts about I think about framing a plenary talk, which began as a bluesky thread and I’ve now archived as a blog post

• Student email to professors is an occluded genre

• I added a few updates to my post So you wanna go to linguistics grad school? Part II: Picking a school and how to apply

Missed out on previous years? Here are the summary posts from 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022. If you’d like to get a much shorter quarterly highlights newsletter via email, with all sorts of interesting internet linguistics news, you can sign up for that at gretchenmcc.substack.com.

Thanks for coming along,

Gretchen

In the final quarter of 2023, I went to NWAV51 in Queen’s, New York in October and to Patreon’s CreatorFest in Los Angeles in November. No talks from me at either, just attending interesting sessions!

I recorded a dramatic reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness (i.e. made into couplets) for the audiobook of Zach Weinersmith’s very hilarious book of the same name. This will be released publically…eventually. Stay tuned.

Two Tom Scott Language Files videos that I was involved in came out: there’dn’t’ve and Does the language you speak change how you think? (No. Mostly.)

I posted assorted linguistic tidbits about a few novels I read: The Unraveling by Benjamin Rosenbaum (bouba and kiki genders), phatic communication in the latest Murderbot book, and a thread about obscure vocabulary and intonation in Middlemarch by George Eliot.

We celebrated Lingthusiasm’s 7th anniversary in November with another listener survey! The three Lingthusiasm episodes and bonus episodes were:

• Ergativity delights us

• Postcards from linguistics summer camp (bonus)

• Revival, reggaeton, and rejecting unicorns – Basque interview with Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez

• Linguistic Advice – Challenging grammar snobs, finding linguistics community, accents in singing, and more (bonus)

• If I were an irrealis episode

• Frak, smeg, and more swearing in fiction – Ex Urbe Ad Astra interview with Jo Walton and Ada Palmer (bonus)

New favourite linguistics example sentences:

• Hidden beneath Antarctic ice for eons, scientists have made a chilling discovery (structural ambiguity)

• A Medieval French Skeleton is rewriting the rules of syphilis (ambiguity)

• Blind bisexual goose named Thomas who spend six years in a love triangle with two swans and helped raise 68 babies dies at the ripe old age of 40 (novel sentences)

Selected tweets from Bluesky:

• Current linguistics grad students who found out about linguistics via the movie Arrival

• the forgotten origin of podcast/the forgotten origin of tweet

• Britney Spears interdentalization in kpop

• Vorb

• ceiling wax???

• adrenaline is called that because the adrenal glands are next to the kidneys

• Mille neuf cent quatre vingt dix huit

• plaTYPodees

• Slippery linguistic terms: syllables

• hey, I just met you / and this is freaky / but which one is bouba / and which is kiki?

Selected blog posts:

I added some updates to my advice post: So you wanna go to linguistics grad school? Part II: Picking a school and how to apply

• Phatic Expressions (Meow at your loved ones)

• Haiku

• Kids saying weird and funny things as they’re learning language

• “when i was a child i asked my grandad (who has a thick yorkshire accent) why he sometimes misses letters out of words and words out of sentences and he told me its because they had to ration letters during the war“

This quarter’s image (also yes, these newsletters are quarterly now since monthly evidently wasn’t working) is from Patreon CreatorFest where I brought Lingthusiasm cards and bouba/kiki stickers to give out to people I met!

Thanks for coming along,

Gretchen

I joined onto a fun project this month, Zach Weinersmith of the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is running a Kickstarter for his book, The Universe: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness, and one of the bonus rewards is an audiobook of his other book, Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulenss. I’ll be the one reading the highly abridged sonnets, which I’m looking forward to!

I wrote down assorted thoughts about I think about framing a plenary talk, which began as a bluesky thread and I’ve now archived as a blog post.

The main episodes of Lingthusiasm were How kids learn Q’anjob’al and other Mayan languages – Interview with Pedro Mateo Pedro, in which we talk about expanding research on how children learn languages to a broader range of sociocultural settings, and Look, it’s deixis, an episode about pointing!, in which we talk about how pointing varies across societies and species (domestic dogs can understand a point, but wolves cannot), and how linguistic pointing relates to the eternal confusion about which Tuesday is next Tuesday.

The bonus episodes feature two names you might recognize from the end credits of Lingthusiasm episodes: How we make Lingthusiasm transcripts – Interview with Sarah Dopierala, in which we talk about how Sarah’s background in linguistics helps her with the technical words and phonetic transcriptions in Lingthusiasm episodes, her own research into converbs, and the linguistic tendencies that she’s noticed from years of transcribing Lauren and Gretchen (guess which of us uses more quotative speech!) and Field Notes on linguistic fieldwork – Interview with Martha Tsutsui Billins, in which we talk about the process of doing linguistic fieldwork and interviewing dozens of linguists about it for her own podcast, Field Notes.

We also announced new Lingthusiasm merch! We love reading up on an interesting etymology, but the history of a word doesn’t have to define how it’s used now – and to celebrate that we have new merch with the motto ‘Etymology isn’t Destiny’. Our artist, Lucy Maddox has brought these words to life in a beautiful design in black, white, navy blue, Lingthusiasm green, and rainbow gradient. The etymology isn’t destiny design is available on lots of different colours and styles of shirts, hoodies, tank tops, t-shirts: classic fit, relaxed fit, curved fit. Plus mugs, notebooks, stickers, water bottles, zippered pouches, and more!

Finally, Lauren Gawne and I published an academic article about Communicating about linguistics using lingcomm-driven evidence: Lingthusiasm podcast as a case study. It’s in Language and Linguistic Compass, an open access linguistics journal, and you can read it in full here. Here’s the abstract:

Communicating linguistics to broader audiences (lingcomm) can be achieved most effectively by drawing on insights from across the fields of linguistics, science communication (scicomm), pedagogy and psychology. In this article we provide an overview of work that examines lingcomm as a specific practice. We also give an overview of the Lingthusiasm podcast, and discuss four major ways that we incorporate effective communications methodologies from a range of literature in the production of episodes. First, we discuss how we frame topics and take a particular stance towards linguistic attitudes, second, we discuss how we introduce linguistic terminology and manage audience cognitive load, third, we discuss the role of metaphor in effective communication of abstract concepts, and fourth, we discuss the affective tools of humour and awe in connecting audiences with linguistic concepts. We also discuss a 2022 survey of Lingthusiasm listeners, which highlights how the audience responds to our design choices. In providing this summary, we also advocate for lingcomm as a theoretically-driven area of linguistic expertise, and a particularly effective forum for the application of linguistics.

Selected tweets on Twitter:

• Mostly on bsky

• Sonnets

• Occluded genre

• What is language?

Selected bluesky tweets:

• Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf

• New genders: soupative and oosative

• Cheese wizard

• Plenary/Keynote advice

• Pronunciation guide

• List of unsolved problems in linguistics

• Them/Their Hills

This month’s image is from the new Etymology isn’t Destiny merch, which I think looks so good in the rainbow gradient on a dark background! I’ve enjoyed seeing some people with it already in real life and here it is on a tote bag:

Also, unfortunately substack looks like it’s becoming unusable these days, so I’m in the process of figuring out how to transfer your email subscriptions to the wordpress version of this newsletter. Hopefully this will be seamless on your end and you may just see slightly different formatting in your inbox next time, but if you’re feeling impatient about getting off substack, you can also scroll to the bottom of gretchenmcculloch.com and put your email address in the newsletter box to subscribe that way.

Thanks for coming along,

Gretchen

In June and July, I headed to Lingstitute 2023, the LSA summer institute, at UMass Amherst. It was great to get to hang out with old friends and meet lots of new people

While I was in Massachusetts, I dropped by the headquarters of Merriam Webster to say hi to the dictionaries and lexicographers! (In that order.) Thanks especially to Peter Sokolowski for the guided tour and to Stacy Dickerman for the ride. Here are some photos I took on the tour, including many different eras of dictionary and the “linguistics” entry in the card catalogue:

https://www.instagram.com/gretchen.mcculloch/p/CvK5w7MOd6X/

The main episodes of Lingthusiasm were The verbs had been being helped by auxiliaries and Frogs, pears, and more staples from linguistics example sentences. The bonus episodes were Linguistic jobs beyond academia and a very silly special episode we called LingthusiASMR, in which we read a classic set of linguistics examples known as the Harvard Sentences in our most soothing, meditative voices (people have reported that it may not exactly induce the ASMR effect but it does indeed work to fall asleep to, and we’re still fans of the pun).

Selected tweets:

• Writing/Reading direction

• Yoga & Bodybuilding Youtube Prosody

• NYT Bouba or Kiki

• Grice’s Maxim

• Moral Decline

• Corn boustrophedon

• Voice and Voiceless

• Meat Clarinet

• Barbie Sociolinguistics

• Behavior change through language

Blog posts:

• Because Internet passage

• Grambank

• Garden path sentence

• Polari

This month’s photo is of the Lingthusiasm postcards featuring the circle IPA design that we printed out to give out at Lingstitute. People seemed to like the challenge of figuring out what features all of the circles stood for, and I gave away lots but still have some left, so if you see me at a future conference do feel free to ask for one so you can have a fun thing to stick up by your desk or on your fridge!

Thanks for coming along,

Gretchen

This month, I announced that there’s going to be a Spanish-language edition of Because Internet coming at some point in 2024! Spanish has been the translation that people have requested from me the most and I’m delighted that Álex Herrero and the other folks at Pie de Página are making it happen.

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was Word Magic, in which we discuss the linguistics of the magical systems in several recent fantasy novels we like, including Babel by R.F. Kuang, Carry On by Rainbow Rowell, and the Scholomance series by Naomi Novik, as well as the ways that you can change the state of the real world with words using the linguistic concept of performatives, such as agreeing to contracts, placing bets, and naming. The bonus episode was about reviewing the results of our 2022 listener survey, including answers to questions on whether knowing about the kiki/bouba effect as a meme influences your results on the kiki/bouba test, synesthesia, and whether people pluralize “emoji” as “emoji” or “emojis”.

People often ask Lingthusiasm to recommend interesting books about linguistics that don’t assume prior knowledge of linguistics, so we’ve come up with a list of 12 books that we personally recommend, including both nonfiction and fiction books with linguistically interesting elements! Get this list of our top 12 linguistics books by signing up for Lingthusiasm’s free email list (which will otherwise send you an email once a month when there’s a new episode — this is something we’re doing to help continue to reach people amid the rising fragmentation of the social media ecosystem).

The most recent of those books, which I read this month, was True Biz by Sara Novic and made a thread with some linguistically interesting snippets from it. Definitely recommend!

Selected Tweets:

• Cultural phenomena

• Social media voice?

• Unexpected calls?

• This Is How You Tweet The Timewar

• Part of the Narrative

• Ron, Jon, Lon, Don

Thanks for coming along,

Gretchen

In April, I made an account on bluesky and enjoyed some wordplay there, which is still (so far) going strong as a twitter replacement.

The main episodes of Lingthusiasm these two months were Bringing stories to life in Auslan – Interview with Gabrielle Hodge, which was our second bimodal bilingual episode, this time in Auslan and English, as well as Tone and Intonation? Tone and Intonation!

The bonus episodes were When books speculate on the future of English and Neopronouns, gender-neutral vocab, and why linguistic gender even exists – Liveshow Q&A with Kirby Conrod.

I did a fun thread on Bea Wolf, Zach Weinersmith’s retelling of Beowulf as a kid’s graphic novel, analyzing how the alliterative metre works:

https://twitter.com/GretchenAMcC/status/1638276237784240136

Selected tweets, while we’re still doing this thing, I guess:

• Is this SALAMI intelligent?

• Author’s note pronouns part 1 and part 2 from Before We Were Trans by Kit Heyam

• Happy PIE Day! And more on Proto-Indo-European day

• Random language learning phrases

• Madame

• stares in œ

• if and only if

• Snake fight portion of your thesis defense

• English loan words in German

Blog posts:

• Copy editing

• Gricean Maxims, the book

• Field Linguistics

This month’s image is from the Barbie movie meme generator, but make it bouba/kiki.

Thanks for coming along,

Gretchen

This month was the second International Conference on Linguistics Communication, #LingComm2023. I was extremely delighted to not be on the organizing committee this time and to get to participate in the excellent panels and posters and meetups organized by Laura Wagner and the rest of this year’s organizing committee. They did ask me to give the opening keynote, which I’ve posted the text of as a blog post. Here’s a little bit from it:

People who are readers read more than one book a year — and they read way more than one article. People who like podcasts listen to more than one podcast. People who like video subscribe to more than one account. People who like museums go to more than one museum. When I look at topics like pop history and pop science, god, they have SO MANY books and podcasts and scicomm accounts and museums and documentaries. This is my 30 year goal, that linguistics has a thriving ecosystem of so many ways that people can engage with it. 

Our competition isn’t each other, it’s all the other things people could be doing with their time and not even necessarily enjoying them. It’s doomscrolling, it’s aimlessly opening Netflix, it’s playing silly little games on your phone. 

The goal of doing lingcomm isn’t about ego, in trying to make one person into a celebrity. Frankly, I just think there are far more efficient ways of trying to become rich and famous. You know, have you considered making some weird food videos? Maybe having a weird looking pet and posting photos of it? I think those do pretty well. And like, I know we could all be getting more attention right now if we were willing to spout hot takes about how Insert Group Here are ruining language. We’re here because we’ve chosen not to do that. We’re here because we’ve chosen service to the harder path, the ethical path, the more rewarding path, of feeding people with language information that liberates them, that challenges them, rather than the easy path of stoking their insecurities and validating their prejudices. 

I hope that one of the things that the lingcomm conference becomes known for over the next 30 years is as a place to find collaborators to join you in this ethos of serving the public with lingcomm, whether that’s students excitedly hatching ideas with each other like I did in my friend’s car, or journalists and linguists connecting with each other to publish really great news stories, or more established projects finally meeting other people in their niche and thinking about how they could collaborate. 

What we can accomplish in 30 years of lingcomm: Opening keynote of #LingComm23

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was about How kids learn language in Singapore – Interview with Woon Fei Ting. The bonus episode was Singapore, New Zealand, and a favourite linguistics paper – 2023 Year Ahead Chat. We also did a liveshow through the Lingthusiasm patron Discord server about language and gender with special guest Dr. Kirby Conrod.

Selected tweets:

• Misattribution by AI

• Structural ambiguity

• Telling people what they may or may not already know is tempting but less effective for communicating complex topics: A lingcomm thread

• Linguistic Valentines

• NYT letter signed as contributor

• SALAMI AI

• At the top of the hour

• Vocabaret

Blog posts:

• Gen Z and intergenerational research barriers

• What we can accomplish in 30 years of lingcomm: Opening keynote of #LingComm23

Here’s my little Gather avatar standing at a booth containing a miniature Because Internet at #LingComm23!

Thanks for coming along,

Gretchen

I started the year in Denver, Colorado at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, where I co-hosted the Five Minute Linguist competition with Jessi Grieser and saw many excellent linguist friends! It was so great to see people in person after several years of virtual events. I was also on a linguistics jobs panel organized by the student committee.

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was Where language names come from and why they change. The bonus episode was Parrots, art, and what even is a word – Deleted scenes from Kat Gupta, Lucy Maddox, and Randall Munroe interviews.

We announced another Lingthusiasm liveshow! February 18th (Canada) slash 19th (Australia)! (What time is that for me?) We return to one of our fan-favourite topics and answer your questions about language and gender with returning special guest Dr. Kirby Conrod! (See Kirby’s previous interview with us about the grammar of singular they.)

Also, my 2022 year in review post is too long for email, but you can read it here on my website.

Selected tweets:

• Ways of talking about vocal tract height that aren’t gender essentialist

• Rizz (from the stressed syllable of “charisma” was a popular word of the year candidate

• Extremely good IPA chart earrings

This month’s image is from while I was in Colorado: I dropped by Boulder Books with Janelle Shane and we found both of our books there and left them with signed copies!

Thanks for coming along!

Gretchen

This month, I wrote a piece for The Atlantic for the first time! It’s about when the connection between spelling and pronunciation breaks down.

You walk into your favorite coffee shop. You greet the familiar barista, who knows your daily order. You say “Hi, I’ll have the”—wait, I can’t figure out how to write the next word. You know, “the usual,” but shorter. Hip! Casual! I’ll have the … uzhe. I mean, the yoozh. The youj?!

Why does this shortened form of usual, which rolls off the tongue when it’s spoken, cause so much confusion when we try to write it down? When I offered my Twitter followers 32 different options for spelling the word, nobody was fully satisfied with any of them. Youge to rhyme with rouge? Yusz as if it’s Polish? Usjhe in a desperate hope that some letter, somewhere, would cue the appropriate sound? The only thing everyone could agree on was that all of them felt weird.

How Do You Spell the Short Version of “Usual”? (Gretchen McCulloch in The Atlantic)

I spent much of the month in New Zealand, also for the first time! I gave a talk about Using lingcomm to design meaningful stories about linguistics, co-authored with Lauren Gawne, at the New Zealand Linguistics Society annual meeting in Dunedin, then went to Christchurch to give a department talk (Data-driven approaches to lingcomm: A case study of internet linguistics) at the University of Canterbury, and then went to Wellington to visit a non-linguist friend and see some birds! It was really fun to get to meet lots of linguists and hear what people are working on!

Some of my ideas from Because Internet were featured in a Vox meme explainer, which was fun to see!

When people refer to “Gen Z humor” or “TikTok humor,” what they’re really talking about is the chaotic, meaningless-seeming mishmashes of various references that are impenetrable to anyone not chronically online. But that’s just an extension of what the Washington Post once dubbed “millennial humor,” which should actually be called “Gen X humor,” considering the ages of the first internet forum posters who realized that weird, meaningless references made for good comedy. Instead, in her book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, the internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch has what I think is a far better way of categorizing internet users: She divides people according to when they truly “got online.”

Toward a unified theory of “millennial cringe” (Rebecca Jennings in Vox)

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was Love and fury at the linguistics of emotions. The bonus episode was Speakest Thou Ye Olde English? We also got some, ahem, entertaining end-of-year stats from Spotify.

Finally, look, I can’t take a whole lot of credit for these two excellent things existing, but I am very pleased to have played a role in connecting the two.

Selected tweets:

• Glottal on a Bottle

• apocolocyntosis, the action of turning someone into a pumpkin, pumpkinification

• Because Internet: a great passive-aggressive gift for your relative or child’s English teacher who spends their time vociferously complaining about Kids These Days And Their Texting And The Decline Of Everything and you would like them to Stop Please

• Antipodean linguistic milestone

• Kanga Bangers

Blog

• How many babies does it take to adda uuu?

This month’s image is one of the many examples of Māori language I saw on public signage, beginning with a user interface option on Air New Zealand in-flight displays.

Thanks for coming along,

Gretchen