My 52 Hz Communication

one day when you find out what I wrote about you, I hope it will bring tears to your eyes

[a-52hertz-whale]

Recently I've very often had that feeling of living my dream life.

A ten year old me who did her homework on a foldable table in a shared bedroom with her parents would never, even in her wildest dream, imagine a life I'm leading.

A peaceful Saturday afternoon, I just got home after a nice brunch and food shopping, sitting on the sofa listening to music, reading a book, watching the seasons change outside the bay window in the house that the love of my life bought for us both, smelling the bread baking in the oven, and smiling looking at our silly billy of a cat. I'm married to a man who's the most loving, kind and supportive man I've known. In two weeks' time, I'll start my PhD journey without financial worries. I've achieved everything I dreamed of as a child, 6000 miles away from where I started.

I'm genuinely grateful for this life every single day. I'm grateful for all my effort whilst growing up not having much, feeling like a weirdo all the time.

Here's to those who dream, work hard and never give up.

[wedarkacademia]

You’re important to me. I think if there’s anything that will last forever, it’s that. Whether we separate, stay in touch or rarely speak again, you will always be that little someone I really do care for, that I would sacrifice everything for to protect and keep safe.

— Beau Taplin, The Promise

[a-52hertz-whale]

four years later, sitting in the same room, breathing the same air with that one person, planning your wedding, it feels almost ethereal

four years ago, when I reblogged this, I would never think there would be one day we'd meet in person, let alone get married

but life has been so gracious for me, and him, that today I'm living the life I had always dream of, with the man of my dream

we've saved each other, now we're going strong into our happily ever after holding hands

[a-52hertz-whale]

[a-52hertz-whale]

my whole life has led me to you

now you are my life

will you be my wife so we can make a new life together?

[a-52hertz-whale]

Today when we were cuddling in bed:

Me: do you love me?

Him: don’t I already show you with all my being?

He does. He makes me breakfast and dinner. He fulfills my dream and answers my call. If there are five love languages, he’s a polyglot in all of them.

[apas-95]

“Thus, it is not an exaggeration to say that so long as the French and British Communist Parties have not brought out a really progressive policy with regard to the colonies, have not come into contact with the colonial peoples, their programme as a whole is and will be ineffective because it goes counter to Leninism. I will explain myself more clearly. In his speech on Lenin and the national question Comrade Stalin said that the reformists and leaders of the Second International dared not align the white people of the colonies with their coloured counterparts. Lenin also refused to recognize this division and pushed aside the obstacle separating the civilized (archaic language) slaves of imperialism from the uncivilized slaves. According to Lenin, the victory of the revolution in Western Europe depended on its close contact with the liberation movement against imperialism in enslaved colonies and with the national question, both of which form a part of the common problem of the proletarian revolution and dictatorship. Later, Comrade Stalin spoke of the viewpoint which held that the European proletarians can achieve success without a direct alliance with the liberation movement in the colonies. And he considered this a counter-revolutionary viewpoint. But if we judge from practice to make our theoretical examination, we are entitled to say that our big Parties, excepting the Soviet Communist Party, still hold the above-mentioned viewpoint because they are inactive in this matter.”

— Ho Chi Minh, Report On The National And Colonial Questions At The Fifth Congress Of The Communist International (via peaceandsocialism)

[allthingslinguistic]

All Things Linguistic - 2021 Highlights

2021 was in many ways a very meta year: most of my writing projects were reflections on the social functions of various other projects I was working on. But those other projects were very interesting both to do and to reflect on, such as coordinating LingComm21: the first International Conference on Linguistics Communication, and redesigning the Lingthusiasm website. (Might they also reflect how under-socialized I got by a certain point in this pandemic? Hmmm.)

I was honoured to be the recipient of the Linguistics, Language, and the Public Award from the Linguistic Society of America in 2021. I put up my acceptance speech as a blog post.

Media and crossovers

How Linguistics Can Help You Learn a Language – I did a talk for Duolingo’s DuoCon

Why do adults…over 40….use ellipses…so much? Crossover with Tim Blais of Acapella Science

xkcd Tower of Babel

Why Shakespeare Could Never Have Been French (video with Tom Scott)

PUZZLE SPOILERS: A quote from Because Internet in the New York Times acrostic

Someone made a crossword puzzle of Because Internet!

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

Media

BBC Word of Mouth – The Shipping Forecast

I’m cited in a Wikipedia article about boomerspeak

I’m quoted in a New York Times Wordplay piece about ending texts with a period.

Lauren Gawne and I did a Lingthusiasm crossover appearance on the NPR show Ask Me Another, featuring two fun quiz segments, one on accepted or rejected emoji and one on famous book titles

Crash Course Linguistics

The final three videos of Crash Course Linguistics came out in 2021, although it was largely a 2020 project. Here’s the full list again so they’re all in once place, or you can watch them all at this playlist.

What is linguistics?

What is a word? Morphology

Syntax 1: Morphosyntax

Syntax 2:

Semantics

Pragmatics

Sociolinguistics

Phonetics 1: Consonants

Phonetics 2: Vowels

Phonology

Psycholinguistics

Language acquisition

Language change and historical linguistics

World Languages

Computational Linguistics

Writing Systems

Each video also comes with a few companion links and exercises from Mutual Intelligibility and a list of all of the languages mentioned in Crash Course Linguistics is here. It was great working with the large teams on that project!

Lingthusiasm

In our fifth year of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics which I make with Lauren Gawne and our production team, we did some general sprucing up, including a new cover photo (now featuring a jacketless Because Internet), a new portrait drawing, and a new website (for which I wrote a long meta process post here). We also did our first virtual liveshow (as part of LingFest), introduced new bouba/kiki and what the fricative merch, and sent patrons a Lingthusiastic Sticker Pack. Here are the main episodes that came out this year:

Where to get your English etymologies (transcript)

Cool things about scales and implicature (transcript)

Corpus linguistics and consent – Interview with Kat Gupta (transcript)

That’s the kind of episode it’s – Clitics (transcript)

Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Theory of Mind (transcript)

A Fun-Filled Fricative Field Trip (transcript)

Making machines learn Fon and other African languages – Interview with Masakhane (transcript)

Not NOT a negation episode (transcript)

R and R-like sounds – Rhoticity (transcript)

How linguists figure out the grammar of a language (transcript)

Listen to the imperatives episode! (transcript)

Writing is a technology (transcript)

And here are this year’s bonus episodes:

Linguistics puzzles for fun and olympiad glory

Linguistic 〰️✨ i l l u s i o n s ✨〰️

Lingwiki and linguistics on Wikipedia

Q&A with Emily Gref from language museum Planet Word

Sentient plants, proto-internet, and more lingfic about quirky communication

Language under the influence

Gotta test ‘em all – The linguistics of Pokémon names

Lingthusiasm liveshow: The listener talks back (on backchannelling)

Talking to babies and small children

The episode-episode (reduplication)

Conferences and Talks (all virtual unless noted)

Planet Word, the new language museum in Washington DC, about internet language and Because Internet

Slate’s Future Tense about the meaning of emoji with Jennifer Daniel.

I moderated a panel for the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) on NLP Applications for Crisis Management and Emergency Situations.

Contestant on Webster’s War of the Words, a virtual quiz show fundraiser for the Noah Webster House, and also attended online conferences,

guest interview about internet language on That Word Chat (summarized in tweet form)

The Internet is Making English Better at Yale with Claire Bowern

Internet Linguistics and Memes as Internet Folklore with a student at the University of Oklahoma

Sotheby’s Level Up in Los Angeles (physical)

Unicode Conference in the San Francisco Bay Area (physical), where I did a keynote called “Taking Playfulness Seriously – When character sets are used in unexpected ways” (slides here!).

The Unicode talk isn’t online but a few days later I did a talk on the same topic for Bay Area NLP, for which the video is here.

Virtual talk for some internal folks at YouTube

Rosemary Mosco Talks to Gretchen McCulloch about Pigeons, a book event at Argo Bookshop

Conferences/events attended:

Linguistic Society of America (LSA) – did a Wikipedia editathon

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

Dictionary Society of North America conference

Annual meeting of the Canadian Linguistics Association

WorldCon (physical)

LingComm and LingFest

In April, I co-organized a pair of new events related to linguistics communication: LingComm21, the first International Conference on Linguistics Communication, and LingFest, a fringe-festival-like program of online linguistics events aimed at a general audience, which contained a total of 12 events attended by a total of over 700 participants. One of those events was our first virtual Lingthusiasm liveshow: here’s a fun thread that I did about backchannels while we were getting ready for the show.

LingComm21 had just under 200 registrants, around 100 of which were formally part of the programming in some way. My opening remarks and closing remarks are here as blog posts, and see the #LingComm21 hashtag for highlights of what people noticed about the conference. We then wrote a 6-part blog post series on the conference as a case study in making online conferences more social, in hopes of helping other people who are interested in better virtual events.

Why virtual conferences are antisocial (but they don’t have to be)

Designing online conferences for building community

Scheduling online conferences for building community

Hosting online conferences for building community

Budgeting online conferences or events

Planning accessible online conferences

Keep reading

[acknowledgetheabsurd]

“I dream, often. Mostly I dream of you near me, and of a time when we will no longer have to speak of this love. Yes, I would like to stop talking about it and let it become so much a part of our lives, so much a part of our breaths… to love as we breathe, that’s it.”

— Albert Camus to Maria Casarès, Correspondance, December 31, 1948 [#49] (via acknowledgetheabsurd)

[acknowledgetheabsurd]

“Don’t think too much about our separation, but rather about our meeting in this world, about our waiting, our trust, our love, the sunny days that await us in all those minutes of eternity that we still have to live. Think that everything I do, I do with you, for you, in view of your coming presence.”

— Maria Casarès to Albert Camus, Correspondance, January 5, 1950 [#114]

[dopedreamlandbouquet]

"I've always liked quiet people: You never know if they're dancing in a daydream or if they're carrying the weight of the world."

- John Green

[amaraqwolf]

Good news: if you’re currently laying around and not producing anything, you are a credit to your species.

[curlicuecal]

I’m an ant biologist and I’d like to point out that ants also spend a significant percentage of the time doing nothing.

Turns out sometimes the most evolutionary useful thing you can do is chill and not wear yourself to shreds, whether mammal or insect. It helps you deal with emergencies and adapt to change. Plus, you can act as living food storage!

That last part is probably more an ant thing than a human thing, but hey, live your dreams.

[jumpingjacktrash]

it’s also a bear thing, which absolutely explains me

[gallusrostromegalus]

Doing absolutely fuck-all is how antarctic sea sponges live to be over 10,000 years old, so live your best, longest, laziest life.

[fuckingconversations]

Remember lions? Fellow apex predators?

Yeah, they spend 16-20 hours of the day laying around, socializing, raising Cubs and napping.

The last 4-8 hours are spent hunting.

Wait wait, they’re not a primate so they don’t count.

How about Orangutans?

Well, they spend 90% of their time awake just hanging out in food-rich areas, eating fruit and leaves, socializing, raising children, and chilling.

Well, they’re not people so it doesn’t-

How about Stone Age people in Europe?

They probably worked 3-5 hours per day, every day. (Though seasonal changes in food scarcity could change that)

Laborers in ancient Egypt worked 8 hours, with an hour break at lunch. They did this for 8 days, then rested 2 days. That sounds familiar. Except… they also had regular time off for festivals and holidays, and only worked for about 18 out of every 50 days.

Artisans in imperial Rome generally worked from 6am to Noon, and then had the rest of the day off… and only worked for half the year, due to all the holidays and festivals they got off.

But that’s too easy, what about a Peasant in medieval England?

6-8 hours per day, with Sundays off, Farm workers put in longer hours at harvest time but worked shorter days in winter when there are fewer hours of daylight. Economist Juliet Schor estimates that in the period following the Plague they worked no more than 150 days a year, due to the long holidays and many festivals.

Ugh, let’s go poorer. 17th century France. Starvation was afoot for the working poor!

During the reign of King Louis XIV, the workers of France had it tough, and hunger for the poorest was a fact of life. The typical working day was as much as 12 hours long, but two hours were set aside midday for lunch and perhaps an afternoon nap. Nevertheless, the Ancient Régime is said to have also guaranteed peasants, labourers and other workers a total of 52 Sundays, 90 rest days and 38 religious holidays off per year, meaning they worked just 185 out of 365 days.

So what changed?

The industrial revolution, baybe~~

New factory owners could work their employees to the bone due to a lack of regulation and abundance of cheap labour.

The typical factory worker in mid 19th-century England toiled away for a soul-destroying 16 hours a day, six days a week, 311 days per year!

THAT nightmare became the standard by which western society began to judge “work-life balance” and anything gentler than the industrial factory’s unfettered brutality is considered “softness”

(So many people died being mangled in those machines. Hair handkerchiefs went into style during American industrialization because working women would otherwise get their hair caught in the machines, and be either scalped or be bodily pulled inside to die…. But that’s a horror for another time)

Americans in 2020 worked an average of 8.5 hours per day on weekdays, plus another 5 hours on weekends.

Taking out federal holidays and weekends, we work 262 days per year. Most of us get 5-9 sick days to take per year. (Yes, a fixed number, no matter how sick you really are), and usually either no paid vacation, or 7-15 days paid vacation, depending on seniority and the company. Unpaid vacation doesn’t have a max, but taking it often risks you getting fired.

Even comparing against the poorest laborers in ancient history the current working structure for humans is, frankly, inhumane.

We are mammals. Let us rest. Let us celebrate holidays and attend festivals. Let us attend to our homes and families.

Even the ultra wealthy folks who got their heads chopped off gave us more time off than this!!!

Someone in the comments said something like “humans are instinctively industrious and productive, as social creatures!”

Buddy, that’s a lie fed to you by capitalism.

In our default state, we attend to our families yes, but we also party like hell, lounge around, and make fantastic works of art just to be proud of ourselves. We made beautiful things for the joy of creating them.

Stone Age humans may have spent a couple hours hunting and gathering, but DEFINITELY spent loads of time painting every available surface. Time and weather washed most of it away, but some places like Arizona and Colorado still preserve a few of the endless murals made by ancient hands.

Evidence shows that the ancient world was COVERED in paintings and etchings - just saturated with images of birds and beasts and humans, sunsets and cool weather. We invented mythologies and painted about them. We did something impressive, and painted about it. We taught our children how to paint and lifted them into our shoulders so they could mark the ceiling.

In our most base state, humans will work enough to survive, but our instincts demand we use all other time to create art. We want to communicate. To make connections.

“Working” or “being productive” is not on that list.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

[sociolinguo]

We Need To Stop Blaming Parents for the 'Word Gap'—Here's Why

A new study shows that the 'word gap' has more to do with financial strain than it does with parenting style. Here's what the researchers ha

"The term "word gap" comes from a study done in the 1990s called "Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children," which found that kids in low-income households heard 30 million fewer words by the time they were three years old than kids from high socioeconomic backgrounds. The study heavily influenced how children were taught (especially those from low socioeconomic backgrounds) and suggests that vocabulary level is a predictor of high academic achievement.

The accuracy of this heavily-cited study that coined the phrase "word gap" has been debated a lot in recent years, one of the main arguments being that the study contained inherent racial bias, and did not account for different languages and parenting styles.

A recent study from the University of California, Berkeley provides some much-needed context and nuance to this issue. The study found that parents experiencing financial distress or scarcity talked less to their children—and the research shows that the "word gap" actually has more to do with a lack of resources rather than quality of parenting. Here's what the study and its researchers have to say about how financial status affects how parents engage with children—and ideas on how parents can be better supported."

[probablyasocialecologist]

With the IPCC report and climate change in the news, a couple of reminders are due:

"The wealthiest 5% alone – the so-called “polluter elite” - contributed 37% of emissions growth between 1990 and 2015."

World's wealthiest 'at heart of climate problem'

The so-called “polluter elite” must change their lifestyles to tackle climate change, a report says.

"Luxury consumption by the rich concentrates economic activity and delivers negligible extra wellbeing, yet sucks up vast amounts of resources."

Why a more equal world would be easier to decarbonise

Demand would shift from luxuries to necessities.

"Affluent individuals can emit several ten thousand times the amount of greenhouse gases attributed to the global poor."

Bill Gates, Climate Warrior. And Super Emitter.

The billionaire’s new book, a bid to be taken seriously as a climate campaigner, has attracted the usual worshipful coverage. When will the

"Half of all our economic activity – all the mines, all the factories, all the power stations, all the shipping, and all of the ecological impact that’s associated with these things – is done to make rich people richer."

We can’t have billionaires and stop climate change

Ecological breakdown isn’t being caused by everyone equally. If we are going to survive the 21st century, we need to distribute income and w

"The wealthiest 0.54%, about 40 million people, are responsible for 14% of lifestyle-related greenhouse gas emissions."

Affluence is killing the planet, warn scientists

We need to move towards ‘sufficiency-oriented’ lifestyles.

The rich are primarily to blame for the global climate crisis!

Climate change: The rich are to blame, international study finds

The Leeds University study looked at 86 countries and came to broadly the same conclusions about the rich.

"The world’s superyacht fleet uses over thirty-two million gallons of oil and produces 627 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions a year . The world’s superyachts consume and pollute more than entire nations."

The Rich Are Committing Crimes Against Nature

Mansions, superyachts, luxury cars, and private jets produce more carbon emissions than whole countries. Researchers are calling it “green c

"The grim truth is that the rich are able to live as they do only because others are poor: there is neither the physical nor ecological space for everyone to pursue private luxury."

For the sake of life on Earth, we must put a limit on wealth | George Monbiot

Increased spending power leads to environmental damage. It’s time for a radical plan, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

The wealthy pose our single biggest obstacle to environmental progress.

The World Would Be a Better Place Without the Rich

They coarsen our culture, erode our economic future, and diminish our democracy. The ultra-rich have no redeeming social value.

"The people who are actively cranking up the global thermostat and threatening to drown 20 percent of the global population are the billionaires in the boardrooms."

Billionaires Are the Leading Cause of Climate Change

As the world faces environmental disaster on a biblical scale, it's important to remember exactly who brought us here.

There no undivided, undifferentiated "humanity" that caused climate change. It is the fault of the ultra-rich, of capitalism, and of an economic system that prioritises growth over all else.

A better world is possible. It doesn't include rich people.

[infectedwithnyanites]

[thescottishcomrade]

“If my mother tongue is shaking the foundations of your state, it probably means that you built your state on my land.”

- Musa Anter, Kurdish writer, assassinated by the Turkish secret services in 1992.

[nevver]

Into the woods, Doug Eng

[eatingpoetry]

On the Necessity of Sadness

Let me tell you about longing. Let me presume that I have something new to say about it, that this room, naked, its walls pining for clocks, has something new to say about absence. Somewhere the crunch of an apple, fading sunflowers on a quilt, a window looking out to a landscape with a single tree. And you sitting under it. Let go, said you to me in a dream, but by the time the wind carried your voice to me, I was already walking through the yawning door, towards the small, necessary sadnesses of waking. I wish I could hold you now, but that is a line that has no place in a poem, like the swollen sheen of the moon tonight, or the word absence, or you, or longing. Let me tell you about longing. In a distant country two lovers are on a bench, and pigeons, unafraid, are perching beside them. She places a hand on his knee and says, say to me the truest thing you can. I am closing my eyes now. You are far away.

By Mikael de Lara Co.

[serenata-your-neighborhood-lefty]

Honest question, where can i start to educate myself in economics and such?

I've been very anticapitalist for many years but where i live the educational system took out Ethics, Philosophy and social studies from the Schools programs so you can only access to them through private universities (oh the irony)

I know there is no shortcut but im willing to take the whole trip but have no idea where to start, also, english is not my first language but i think im good enough and im pretty fluent in spanish so can read in both.

Sorry to bother, im just very lost and there's so much information i don't know where to start

Hey! I'm on the exact same journey and it warms my heart to hear from other people that are too, so thank you for reaching out. There’s such a massive corpus of anti-capitalist literature that it really is difficult to know where to begin. I got over that hurdle by doing exactly what you just did: simply asking other comrades for their advice and suggestions. It really is the best way to learn and I’m so grateful to all the people that have helped me this far.

I’m also glad you narrowed it down to economics for me! This list is an intro to socialist economics rather than to socialism in general (although I’ll do a more general list in the future). I’ve uploaded the ebooks where I can find them.

Intro-level theory:

Wage Labour and Capital by Karl Marx. Just 39 pages long. Links to webpage, pdf and audiobook.

Value, Price, and Profit by Karl Marx. 107 pages. Webpage, pdf.

Other intro-level books:

The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx by Alex Callinicos. pdf (*the author is still alive, so you might prefer to pay for his book if you can afford it)

Economics for Beginners by John Keracher. Webpage. 

An Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory by Ernest Mandel. The ‘heaviest’ of these books. Webpage. 

Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton. Pretty light. HIGHLY recommend. This is broader / less economics-focused than the other books but a really enjoyable entry-level book with some quick wit. pdf  (*the author is still alive, so you might prefer to pay for his book if you can afford it)

Youtube series:

Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey. HIGHLY recommended. Link.

Introduction to Marxian Economics by economist Dr Stephen Resnick. This is an online university course by the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Link.

Youtube shorts: 

Any vids by Prof Richard Wolff. Here’s one on surplus value to get you started: link 

“Wage Labour and Capital” Explained, Part 1: What Are Wages?. Link.

Podcasts:

Although I’ve only listened to a few episodes thus far, Revolutionary Left Radio make chores much more enjoyable. 

Economics-focused episodes include: “The Fundamentals of Marxism: Historical Materialism, Dialectics, & Political Economy” (link), “Challenging Capitalism: Envisioning a Socialist Workplace (link) and “Estranged Labor: Karl Marx on Alienation” (link).

(Caveat: while they present things from a broadly leftist perspective, I’m pretty sure the hosts are ML or MLM, so be aware that this might influence their views sometimes)

Other resources:

r/socialism_101 is a great place to ask your own questions and see the answers to questions you never knew you had. It helped me get into socialism in the first place. 

Acknowledgments: This was a collective effort

Some of these recommendations are from @creeping-socialism​, who is more well-read than me and posts some great snippets of theory.

@everyone else, please feel free to add any suggestions, I’d love to have them!

One last note

I’ve found reading literature / learning theory to be really rewarding and I hope you find that same satisfaction. I still remember how mind-blown I was at Marx’s explanation of globalisation in The Manifesto, and how relevant it felt despite having been written in 1848. While the human experience is what made us anti-capitalist, theory directs that energy into something coherent. Makes it all make sense. 

Enjoy!

[serenata-your-neighborhood-lefty]

While I’m a lot less well-versed in anarchist theory, I’ve heard good things about:

Fields, Factories and Workshop by Kropotkin. Link

Modern Science and Anarchism by Kropotkin. Link

The Accumulation of Freedom: Writings on Anarchist Economics. A more recent / modern book. Link

Section 1.4 in this Anarchist FAQ: “How could an anarchist economy function?”. Link.