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.

Gretchen McCulloch @GretchenAMcC

Currently going through a cultural clash on "do you greet someone you're about to engage in a transaction with" My French-influenced conditioning from Montreal is Absolutely Must Exchange Bonjours First In Singapore a greeting is apparently a kinda baffling waste of time!

Gretchen McCulloch @GretchenAMcC

*clears throat* I'm going to be in Australia for Nov and Dec, primarily Melbourne to see @superlinguo with side excursions to Singapore (late Oct), New Zealand (early Dec), and likely other Australian cities TBD This is a great time to suggest things I might want to do there!

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”.

Gretchen McCulloch @GretchenAMcC

We have a winner! "uzhe" narrowly beats out close contenders "yoozh" and "uzh" for the least confusing possible clipped form for "usual" Now if you need to write it, you can know if you're chosing the marginally least confusing option of an overall very confusing field

Also I wrote a double dactyl about celebrities with great names.

Gretchen McCulloch @GretchenAMcC

Higgledy piggledy Timothée Chalamet Has a name meriting Endless design Much like his forerunner Benedict Cumberbatch: Hexasyllabically, Easy to rhyme https://t.co/4AQ3YZICt3

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:

• Because Internet ….. reference

• Linguistics lab, late one night

• Centre embedding: stickers prohibited

• Linguists don’t know all the IPA symbles, we just look them up as needed

• Because Internet Tumblr vernacular

• Ghoats say “boo”, from the Latin verb boo, bōare “to shout”

• Duolingo and the international date line

• Cursed kiki/bouba

• Check your children’s Halloween candy

• I keep recommending the book Babel by R.F. Kuang to people and that hasn’t stopped

Blog posts:

• Etymology of Lord

• Nicknames

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