Oct, Nov & Dec 2023: there’dn’t’ve and ceiling wax

2 conferences, 2 Language Files videos, 3 novels, 7 years of Lingthusiasm, and a silly Shakespeare audiobook reading

Hello!

In the final quarter of 2023, I went to NWAV51 in Queen’s, New York in October and to Patreon’s CreatorFest in Los Angeles in November. No talks from me at either, just attending interesting sessions!

I recorded a dramatic reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness (i.e. made into couplets) for the audiobook of Zach Weinersmith’s very hilarious book of the same name. This will be released publically…eventually. Stay tuned.

Two Tom Scott Language Files videos that I was involved in came out: there’dn’t’ve and Does the language you speak change how you think? (No. Mostly.)

I posted assorted linguistic tidbits about a few novels I read: The Unraveling by Benjamin Rosenbaum (bouba and kiki genders), phatic communication in the latest Murderbot book, and a thread about obscure vocabulary and intonation in Middlemarch by George Eliot.

We celebrated Lingthusiasm’s 7th anniversary in November with another listener survey! The three Lingthusiasm episodes and bonus episodes were:

• Ergativity delights us

• Postcards from linguistics summer camp (bonus)

• Revival, reggaeton, and rejecting unicorns – Basque interview with Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez

• Linguistic Advice – Challenging grammar snobs, finding linguistics community, accents in singing, and more (bonus)

• If I were an irrealis episode

• Frak, smeg, and more swearing in fiction – Ex Urbe Ad Astra interview with Jo Walton and Ada Palmer (bonus)

New favourite linguistics example sentences:

• Hidden beneath Antarctic ice for eons, scientists have made a chilling discovery (structural ambiguity)

• A Medieval French Skeleton is rewriting the rules of syphilis (ambiguity)

• 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)

gretchen.mcculloch

A post shared by @gretchen.mcculloch

Selected tweets from Bluesky:

• Current linguistics grad students who found out about linguistics via the movie Arrival

• the forgotten origin of podcast/the forgotten origin of tweet

• Britney Spears interdentalization in kpop

• Vorb

• ceiling wax???

• adrenaline is called that because the adrenal glands are next to the kidneys

• Mille neuf cent quatre vingt dix huit

• plaTYPodees

• Slippery linguistic terms: syllables

• hey, I just met you / and this is freaky / but which one is bouba / and which is kiki?

Selected blog posts:

I added some updates to my advice post: So you wanna go to linguistics grad school? Part II: Picking a school and how to apply

• Phatic Expressions (Meow at your loved ones)

• Haiku

• Kids saying weird and funny things as they’re learning language

• “when i was a child i asked my grandad (who has a thick yorkshire accent) why he sometimes misses letters out of words and words out of sentences and he told me its because they had to ration letters during the war“

This quarter’s image (also yes, these newsletters are quarterly now since monthly evidently wasn’t working) is from Patreon CreatorFest where I brought Lingthusiasm cards and bouba/kiki stickers to give out to people I met!

Thanks for coming along,

Gretchen