September 2021: virtual university talks and a new portrait!

I did some back-to-school virtual university talks this month! I talked about The Internet is Making English Better at Yale with Claire Bowern and about Internet Linguistics and Memes as Internet Folklore with a student at the University of Oklahoma.

In fun internet crossover moments, Cecil Baldwin, host of Welcome to Night Vale (the podcast that got me into podcasts!), discovered the Welcome to Night Vale crossover in Because Internet, which he had evidently been reading!

Gretchen McCulloch @GretchenAMcC

Yes hello it's Cecil Baldwin reading my book (!!)

Cecil Baldwin @CecilBaldwinIII

Oh hey @NightValeRadio shout-out in "Because Internet" by @GretchenAMcC! 🥰💻🎙 https://t.co/GJ2cgPocS9

Peeking face, palm up, and palm down – the emoji I proposed with Lauren Gawne and Jennifer Daniel are now officially in Unicode 14.0 and will be coming to your devices in the next few years!

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was That’s the kind of episode it’s – clitics. The bonus episode was Q&A with Emily Gref from language museum Planet Word. We also debuted a time-limited Lingthusiastic Sticker Pack special offer for people who support the podcast on Patreon. Finally, Lauren and I commissioned a portrait of the two of us hanging out together as cohosts, since international travel restrictions mean we won’t be taking a photo together anytime soon.

Lingthusiasm @lingthusiasm

Since we can't travel to be in a photo together, we decided to commission a portrait of us instead! Thanks to Malyar from @TheCovatar for such a great drawing!

Selected tweets:

• Lack of diversity in childhood language acquisition studies

• Enweirdening words through AI magic

• #MetGala2021 as linguistics books

• haunted trunk implicature

• emoji reaction research idea

• Why kids these days don’t understand file systems

• Mario epenthesis

• Japan’s new prime minister, Britney Spears crash blossom

Selected blog posts:

• Revised and updated for another year: How to teach yourself linguistics online for free

• Linguistics jobs: social media lead (for NASA)

• Dinosaur Comics on the “I dunno” hum

• A list of the languages mentioned on Crash Course Linguistics

Here’s the portrait of me and Lauren again, I’m so pleased with how it turned out! We also got individual versions to use as social media avatars.

Thanks for coming along,

Gretchen