2023 Year in Review

A pretty typical year with podcasting, conferences, book recs, silly example sentences, and a move to bluesky

Hello!

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