April, May, & June 2024: LingComm Grants, a paper about Crash Course Linguistics, and boopguistics

Hello!

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