August 2020: Virtual hallway experiments and bouba/kiki video

Hello!

Because Internet was featured in the New York Times Paperback Row, a list of books that came out in paperback recently!

I did two experiments around creating a sort of virtual conference hallway/coffeebreak experience, since running into people in hallways is the biggest thing I miss about conferences having moved online!

I was on a Linguistics in the Pub panel about linguistics podcasting, along with my cohost Lauren Gawne (moderator) as well as Megan Figureoa and Carrie Gillon from The Vocal Fries and Daniel Midgley and Hedvig Skirgard from Because Language. You can rewatch it online here.

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was about the happy fun big story of adjectives and the bonus was about doing linguistics communication on a shoestring budget (and the Lingthusiasm origin story).

We started reviewing screener videos for the upcoming Crash Course Linguistics video series, coming out on Fridays starting September 4 for the rest of 2020! Subscribe to Mutual Intelligibility to get an email whenever a new episode comes out.

The latest video in my ongoing collaboration with Tom Scott and Molly Ruhl came out, and it's about the Bouba/Kiki experiment! Follow it with this Lingthusiasm episode about replicating (and failing to replicate) the bouba/kiki experiment across languages.

Media list:

Print/Major online:

• New York Times – paperback row – 8/2

• BookRiot – feature on the evolution of slang – 8/5

• MIT Technology Review – feature—8/17

• AAAS – feature – 8/26

• Jumpstart Magazine (Hong Kong) – review – 8/26

Blogs:

• Blogendorff – review – 8/4

• Whatever/Scalzi – mention – 8/12

• Smart Bitches, Trashy Books – blog mention – 8/22

Local Print/Online:

• The Daily (University of Washington) – staff pick – 8/3

Podcasts/YouTube:

• Factually! with Adam Conover – podcast interview – 8/12

• Is That Normal? –mention – 8/11

• VanFunFun – youtube review (in Spanish) –8/24

Selected tweets:

• Etymological paths: "men are 'cute rogues"

• I'm calling them "masques" now

• Why you don't need to do an unpaid internship (and especially you do not need to become my intern) in order to get started in lingcomm (and what you should do instead)

• Assorted snippets about the telegraph from The Victorian Internet

• how people are finding my website these days

• Socially distanced book signing

• Love's Labours Lost is an apt Shakespeare play for our times

• brb translating "hwaet" as "bro"

• An unfortunate saga (with heartwarming updates) of the Scots Wikipedia

Selected blog posts:

• Linguistics Jobs: interview with a speech pathologist

• Fun with esoteric pangrams: By Jove, my quick study of lexicography won a prize!

• Indigenous activists are reimagining language preservation under quarantine

• What is a heritage language? Infographic

• The difference between language processing and natural language processing

• The Scots Wikipedia saga

• Neolatinist TikTok

This month's image is from last year, the linguistics section at Powell's in Portland.

Thanks for coming along,

Gretchen