November 2022: Melbourne and Mastodon

Hello!

I spent November in Melbourne, Australia, where I gave a talk about linguistics communication at La Trobe University, did lots of hanging out and behind the scenes work with my Lingthusiasm cohost, Lauren Gawne, and met up with various other delightful linguists, including attending the annual meeting of the Australian Linguistic Society at Melbourne University. All of which were extremely good, modulo a tiny bit of accent-based name confusion:

Gretchen McCulloch @GretchenAMcC

number of times I've been utterly foiled recently by people with post-vocalic r in their names introducing themselves non-rhotically and somehow I just?? need to hallucinate in the r for my own accent?? 3 please have pity on your poor rhotic friends, ubiquitous nametags when

Also, this is what happens when you hang out with linguist friends from a variety of places: you can no longer trust that anyone’s linguistic forms are characteristic of where they’ve lived, because you’re probably picking up things from each other.

Gretchen McCulloch @GretchenAMcC

Why I both love and mistrust linguists when it comes to language usage data: Friend: oh and there's a washroom over there if you need it Me: wow, interesting, you have "washroom" here, that's also the term in Canada Friend: no I was just using it for your benefit

Twitter began getting weird and unstable, so if you want to make sure that you have linguistics in your feed wherever else you might end up, I’m also on Mastodon (which I’ve been on for a few years but a bit more active there lately), Instagram, and Tumblr. Plus, of course, this email newsletter, which you can read at gretchenmcculloch.com and/or get in your email if you don’t want to trust the vagarities of algorithms to put it in front of you. (If you’re doing that already, thank you!). Anyway, though expectations of twitter’s demise seem a bit premature, I did a greatest hits thread anyway.

Gretchen McCulloch @GretchenAMcC

alright fuck it here's a greatest hits thread:

Gretchen McCulloch @GretchenAMcC

i feel the need to make you aware of this cursèd and entirely real wikipedia article https://t.co/eMdWDqyaUw https://t.co/5knzppTdgQ

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was Episode 74: Who questions the questions? The bonus episode was Bonus 69: 103 ways for kids to learn languages. Lingthusiasm celebrated our 6th anniversary of podcasting and got a Mastodon account this month, as did my cohost Lauren Gawne, so you can follow the whole trifecta there if you like. The Lingthusiasm listener survey is open until December 15, 2022 (and will run again next year if you didn’t get to it the first time around).

Selected tweets:

• you know you’re a bit too linguist when you spell the ending of “summer” like it’s “grammar”: summar

• intersection of signed languages and synesthesia?

• gradual friendships through DMs

• factification of public communications

Blog posts:

• Title: Ships and Ice Picks: An Ethnographic Excavation of alt.goncharov

This month’s image is from a cafe in Melbourne where I was getting coffee (well, a flat white and an iced tea) with Lauren Gawne, the beginning of a month of hanging out and scheming and considerably better weather than Montreal.

Thanks for coming along,

Gretchen