October 2022: Visiting Singapore and Linguist Halloween
Hello!
This month, I went to Singapore! It’s the beginning of my multi-month trip that’ll also take me to Australia in November and New Zealand in December. I stayed with Suzy J Styles, gave a talk about linguistics communication at Nanyang Technical University, and met up with lots of lovely linguists who made sure that I tried many delicious Singaporean foods (thank you!). Also I got to hear people speaking Singlish, which is indeed as neat as everyone says it is.
![Twitter avatar for @GretchenAMcC](https://substackcdn.com/image/twitter_name/w_96/GretchenAMcC.jpg)
![Twitter avatar for @GretchenAMcC](https://substackcdn.com/image/twitter_name/w_40/GretchenAMcC.jpg)
This month’s shenanigans involved finishing my series of twitter polls in order to determine the least confusing way (okay they’re all confusing, but) to spell the clipped form of “usual”.
![Twitter avatar for @GretchenAMcC](https://substackcdn.com/image/twitter_name/w_96/GretchenAMcC.jpg)
![A 32-member bracket titled "Not your USUAL bracket" and with "uzhe" circled in bright red in the final mashup.
The full set of option pairs was:
uzh, ujhe
yuuj, youzh
yooj, uge
yuje, usjh
yoozh, yujhe
youj, eujh
yuzh, yoojhe
us', uuje
uzhe, uje
youje, yushe
yooje, usjhe
yooge, usj
yoozhe, uszh
usu., usj
ushe, uze
uj, euge
In tiny text at the bottom: "usual" abbreviation bracket by @GretchenAMcC](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_600,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fpbs.substack.com%2Fmedia%2FFebS-DwXkAI2-Cj.jpg)
Also I wrote a double dactyl about celebrities with great names.
![Twitter avatar for @GretchenAMcC](https://substackcdn.com/image/twitter_name/w_96/GretchenAMcC.jpg)
The main episode of Lingthusiasm was Episode 73: The linguistic map is not the linguistic territory. The bonus episode was Bonus 68: Linguistics and science communication – Interview with Liz McCullough. We also launched a Lingthusiasm listener survey to celebrate our 6th anniversary of making a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics, which is coming up in November.
Selected tweets:
Linguists don’t know all the IPA symbles, we just look them up as needed
I keep recommending the book Babel by R.F. Kuang to people and that hasn’t stopped
Blog posts:
This month’s image is a joke Halloween costume design that I made as part of a Halloween costume meme going around. But seriously if anyone does this for real please tell me, I want to know:
Thanks for coming along,
Gretchen