Jan, Feb, & Mar 2024: Crossword puzzles and vowel charts

Hello!

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