#allthingslinguistic

[sweetthingshavesharpteeth]

[...] cis straight men tend to have vowels that are all more towards the centre of the vowel space. Everybody else – so cis, straight women, gay men, lesbians, trans people of all genders, nonbinary people – use way more of the vowel space.

Lingthusiasm Episode 90: What visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are (by @allthingslinguistic and @superlinguo)

[countingblackbirds]

Hi hello~ I dont know if you'd be comfortable answering this but I saw your post on Ogham and since I'm thinking of studying linguistics I'd wanna ask you what kind of career paths a ling graduate could follow? If it's alright, I'd be interested in your own opinion and experience in the field ^^ Thank you either way, whether you decide to answer or not~

Oh hey!! I’ll be super up front and say I majored in English and Linguistics, and ended up becoming a teacher, so I can’t say linguistics is the *focus* of my career. But I don’t regret studying it for a second!

Linguistics can go a bunch of directions, depending on which aspect you’re most interested in (sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, historical linguistics, computational linguistics—the list truly goes on and on). It’s a super flexible field; I went on to teach English, but another Linguistics grad I know teaches Math! Linguistics could lead you to a career in research, computer programming, speech therapy, language teaching, or truly just any field involving language and communication.

If you’re interested in it, I say go for it. My linguistics classes were truly some of my favorites, because they made me see the world and *people* in a completely new light.

For more information, I’d really recommend Gretchen McCulloch’s blog @allthingslinguistic and specifically her podcast Lingthusiasm, if you aren’t listening already!

[books]

If you love languages and the Internet, Gretchen McCulloch (@allthingslinguistic) has a brand new book for you! Because Internet is now out!

[allthingslinguistic]

Part II - How I built a Weird Internet Career as an Internet Linguist

Previously: What is a Weird Internet Career? 

Like a lot of Weird Internet Careers, I didn’t start out thinking of what I was doing as a career at all. I started my blog, All Things Linguistic, in May 2012 when I was in linguistics grad school, and for the first year or so, it didn’t make a cent, directly or indirectly. 

I was blogging because I was coming across all of these interesting links about linguistics and wanted to share them beyond just my facebook friends, because I’d recently moved to a new city and enjoyed the community that I found online, because I realized that I liked having somewhere to write out the linguistics thoughts and advice that I wished I’d had years earlier. The blog was also initially pseudonymous in the "open secret" style (people who knew me knew that it was my blog, but people who encountered the blog first had no obvious way of tracing it back to me), because I wasn't sure how blogging fit into my future career plans and didn't want it coming up in my google results. 

Because quite a few people know me now, I want to emphasize how few people had ever heard of me when I started the blog. Literally just like, the people I had gone to school with and a few people I'd met at a couple tiny regional conferences. At the university where I did my undergrad, linguistics wasn't even its own full department. The first few readers of my blog came from when I cross-posted it to facebook (which I did sometimes but not all the time) and once I figured out that if I used the #linguistics tag on tumblr some people were actually checking it and would interact with me. I started checking the #linguistics tag and engaging with people there as well, but it still took months to get to 100 followers, and I was very excited when this happened. It was also thrilling to meet other tumblinguists (and later, twitter linguists) at linguistics conferences — academic conferences started becoming way more fun because I got to meet up with internet friends.  

The point at which blogging started taking a turn towards Weird Internet Career was in summer and fall 2013, in the second year of the blog. Over the summer, two groundwork things happened: one, tumblr got me into the podcast Welcome to Night Vale, so I wrote this post about how even “not” doesn’t mean what it seems “not” in Night Vale, and two, I took a course at Lingstitute on Social Media as Linguistic Data, which led to me complaining to some new friends from the course (fellow linguists interested in internet culture) that there were totally patterns in the variants of names for Benedict Cumberbatch and why didn’t somelinguist analyze them. 

In September 2013, someone sent me an ask on the blog asking if I knew of any linguistics podcasts, so I linked to a few, along with my recent post about linguistics in Welcome to Night Vale since it was at least about a podcast. One of the podcasts that I linked to was Grammar Girl, and Mignon Fogarty must have seen that I linked to her and followed the other link to my Night Vale post, because next thing I knew she’d messaged me asking if she could pay me to re-run it on her podcast. I’d already done the work and I was a cash-strapped grad student, so obviously I said yes. 

This was the first time someone had offered to pay me to write about linguistics for a general audience, and it immediately opened up vistas. The weekend I heard from Grammar Girl happened to be the same weekend that I had to decide whether I wanted to be doing a Master’s or a PhD at McGill (there are points at which one can switch from one to the other), and I decided to take it as a sign. Maybe I could just finish the masters now and then spend a year trying out this sort of writing as a break from academia before applying to PhD programs. After all, no one really cares what you do before a PhD program, but afterwards you kind of need to go on the academic job market immediately if that's something you aim to do at all, so if I wanted to take a break or play around with other options, the best time to do it was now. 

So I sent several other posts I’d already written to Grammar Girl and asked if she’d like to run them as well, or perhaps have me write something specifically for her. Yes, it turned out, and she paid more for original pieces. Not a ton, but I was used to living like a grad student and Montreal isn’t a terribly expensive city. So I calculated that if I could do a dozen or so pieces per month at a similar rate, then I would be getting by financially, and even if I couldn't quite hit that pace (spoiler: I have never hit that pace), it would be an interesting supplemental source of income that would prevent me from drawing down the portion of my grad school stipend that I'd managed to save quite as quickly while I looked for further work. (See: Montreal rent prices are very reasonable for how I'd saved money while in grad school. Also, I had the Canadian health care system and Canadian universities like my undergrad are still fairly doable in cost, especially if you both work and get scholarships. Investment in public infrastructure is super important.) 

Shortly thereafter, still in fall 2013, this eclectic feminist humour website that I’d been reading put out a call for people who wanted to writing interesting things about science. Well, I said to myself, linguistics is the science of language, even if they don’t know that, and I happened to know that Nicole Cliffe was an enormous fan of Benedict Cumberbatch, so I pitched The Toast the Benedict Cumberbatch names idea that I’d had rattling around in my head for a couple months, on the strength of my first Grammar Girl piece and one of my longer, fun-explainer-style blog posts as writing samples. They went for it. (Nicole sent me quite a lot of exclamation marks, if I recall correctly.) 

So my first couple Grammar Girl pieces and my first Toast piece appeared in that last semester of my master’s, in the latter part of 2013. Another thing that happened that semester was that another Grammar Girl piece by Neil Whitman about the “Because X” construction went up, which was followed by a piece in The Atlantic. Both of them cited a blog post I’d made a year or so earlier, when I was chatting with Laura Bailey and a few other tumblinguists about it, and this led to my first proper media interview, which was with Norah Young on CBC Spark about internet language. 

This meant that when “because x” won the Word of the Year at the American Dialect Society / Linguistics Society of America in early January 2014, I felt okay about going up to Ben Zimmer and introducing myself, because we’d both been involved in the leadup to this happening and had interacted about it on twitter. Ben recognized me and was very nice and included me in his group to go get food later, where I was able to say that I’d written a few freelance pop linguistics pieces, had just finished a master’s, and was looking for more suggestions on where to pitch. He suggested pitching to Slate’s Lexicon Valley blog, which had been a long-running podcast by the same name and was at the time experimenting with also running written pieces, and gave me the email address of the editor there.  

When I got back to Montreal after the LSA, I had an email from The Week, asking me if I wanted to write short pop linguistics pieces for them. I still don’t know how they found me, but it must have been through my blog or the couple pieces I’d written so far, because that was all there was. I knew that Slate’s Lexicon Valley blog sometimes cross-posted pieces from The Week, so I figured I’d start writing for the Week first (might as well go with a sure thing) and then once I had a couple bylines there I’d have writing samples from multiple places to pitch to Slate. As it happened, a month later one of my Week pieces got picked up by Slate, so I figured this was the best time to go for it and sent that email.  

In the meantime, my second piece for The Toast went up in February 2014, this time about the doge meme which I'd also been seeing on tumblr. It went somewhat viral and led to me doing an interview for the BBC about internet language and getting contacted by my first (of what would become quite a few) literary agents, asking if I'd ever considered writing a book about internet linguistics. From then on, pretty much every time I'd write a new article for The Toast, I'd get a new literary agent in my inbox. I didn't go for it right away, but I did at least take a phone call with each of the agents who contacted me, until I was fairly comfortable with the idea of what a book proposal would look like and the general outlines of the nonfiction book business. (There are lots of author and agent blogs about the publishing industry and therefore tons of advice available for the googling. Two I've found helpful are Jane Friedman and Kate McKean. The role of the Weird Internet Career was in providing what publishers call platform.)  

As it happened, however, when I emailed Mike Vuolo at Slate's Lexicon Valley (also in February 2014), they were looking for someone to take on a more ongoing job writing and editing for the blog side of Lexicon Valley, which had been spun off from the podcast of the same name even though Mike already had a full time doing the Lexicon Valley podcast and other podcast things at Slate. So he replied to ask if I wanted to interview for this job, which I had not known existed or that I was applying for it. I'm not sure what made him offer me the job, but I definitely felt like having maintained a daily blog for two years at that point made it less daunting than it could have been. I ended up writing and editing for the Lexicon Valley blog for a bit under a year, which taught me two very useful things: one, a lot about writing articles in the "explainer" style (which I've already written a post about), and two, that writers get paid differently for the same genre of work depending on what sort of reputation/experience they're bringing to the table. (There are also other jobs like this, such as public speaking.)

By the time I finished working for Lexicon Valley, in February 2015, I knew that writing a dozen or two articles a month wasn't feasible for me, especially not with the kind of fun-but-researched deep dives I was discovering I was best suited to writing, but a different path became clear: if I levelled up as a writer sufficiently, I could potentially get paid enough per piece that I could just write one per week or even one per month. So that was a longer-term strategic reason to write a book, in addition to the fact that I'd figured out that I had something to say about internet language and that people were interested in hearing about it from me. 

In the meantime, I'd started working on a book proposal in serious in November 2014 (using NaNoWriMo as structure to work on it every day), kept working on it intermittently around paying work for about a year, and eventually signed with Howard Yoon of RossYoon Agency in September 2015. We sold Because Internet on proposal in October 2015 to Courtney Young at Riverhead Books (at Penguin), whereafter it basically took over all other writing projects for me until it went into copyedits in 2018, though I still did some speaking/consulting/podcasting. (More posts about the book-writing process at the bottom of the book page on my blog.) 

But first, for the six months or so in mid-2015 between finishing at Lexicon Valley and selling the book proposal, I wrote quite a few articles for Mental Floss, because Arika Okrent, a linguist who edited there had reached out to me when she found out I had time again. I knew Arika from twitter and because we were on a panel together at the LSA in January 2015 about linguistics outreach via online media, where I was representing tumblr because of my blog. At the time, I'd mentioned that I was working on a book proposal about internet linguistics, so Arika suggested that I theme the Mental Floss articles around that too, which was super helpful. Mental Floss also paid more per piece than anywhere else had so far, which helped validate my theory about levelling up. (Also bear in mind that all my writing has paid in American dollars while I'm living in Canadian dollars, which gives me this nice bonus every time I deposit a cheque.) 

Also also in the meantime, somewhere amid all of this, I had been befriending various people in the linguistics blogosphere and on linguist twitter. One of them was Lauren Gawne of the blog Superlinguo. I can't remember how we started talking, but I know we were definitely interacting by mid-2014, because that's when I started doing lingwiki things to encourage linguists to improve Wikipedia articles about languages and linguistics, and Lauren did some of that Wikipedia editing from the very beginning. 

When I did my first virtual lingwiki editathon (also via my blog and twitter), the Linguistics Society of America reached out and asked if they could help, so I asked them if the LSA could host an in-person editathon at the next annual meeting, also January 2015, which I would facilitate. But I also wanted to run a virtual parallel editathon for anyone who wasn't there, so I reached out to Lauren knowing that she wasn't in North America and wouldn't be at the conference, so could she help me out and check in on the hashtag in case anyone was having difficulties while I was busy during the conference? Which she agreed to do, and that's how we got started talking on a more regular basis, eventually leading to us founding a podcast together in 2016. At this point, we each had about 5 years of building up a readership the boring, slow way through our blogs, so the podcast was able to launch with a fair bit of initial attention from people who already knew us by reputation. (I wrote up more of this story for a post on Superlinguo a while back.)  

When I started writing Because Internet in November 2015, again using NaNoWriMo for structure, I took a break from doing much active freelance writing, since one can only do so much writing at once. But I was still getting approached periodically by journalists wanting quotes about internet language (since I'd built up a fair number of articles about internet linguistics beforehand) and editors asking me to write for them. I generally took the media interviews, but for editors I mostly told them that I was too busy with the book for the time being but would get back to them once I had the manuscript in, and then I kept a list of editors to get back to. I still stayed active on the blog and on twitter and at conferences, and I break down those additional activities by month in the archive of my newsletter.

By the time I was free to write shortform again, in mid-2018, Wired was at the top of that list, and I'm very pleased that this worked out to become the Resident Linguist column there (borrowing a title that The Toast had given me) when the book was in copyedits and indexing and so on, and my work on it got more intermittent. (Now that the book is out, I've been getting approached by even more editors, which I'm sometimes but not always able to take on, so if you're an editor reading this you're welcome to try your luck!) 

So that's how my particular Weird Internet Career started. But some of these sites don't even exist anymore (RIP The Toast). What about a person who wants to start a Weird Internet Career now, or who suspects they might already be a couple steps into a Weird Internet Career but isn't sure where to go next? That's the topic of the next post. 

I’m posting this series about Weird Internet Careers and how to build them to my blog over the next few weeks. However, if you want to get the whole series now as a single doc, with bonus Weird Internet Career-building questions to think about, you can sign up for my newsletter on Substack here, which will also get you monthly updates about my future Weird Internet Career activities as an Internet Linguist.

Part I - What is a Weird Internet Career? Part II - How I Built a Weird Internet Career as an Internet Linguist Part III - How to start a Weird Internet Career Part IV - How to make money doing a Weird Internet Career Part V - What can a Weird Internet Career look like? Part VI - Is it too late for me to start my Weird Internet Career? Part VII - How to level up your Weird Internet Career

[lesserjoke]

Book #147 of 2019:

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch

I’ve known and followed Gretchen McCulloch since 2012, when we connected as fellow grad students drawn to the messy question of how to apply the systematic approaches from our linguistics classes to the strange new frontier of informal writing that we saw developing in digital spaces everyday. I mention that as both a disclaimer — Gretchen’s a friend! We’ve even met in person! — and an endorsement — Gretchen’s an expert! You can trust her on this stuff!

For this book exploring some of the distinctive elements of online language use, the author adopts the same informative yet casual tone that has made her such an engaging science communicator in her @allthingslinguistic blog, Lingthusiasm podcast, and The Toast and Wired columns. There’s so much neat creativity going on in electronically-mediated communication, from expressive lengthening (“sooooooo coooooooool!”) to sarcastic encoding (“~so cool”), and McCulloch captures and explains it all with a deft touch. It’s great nonfiction, in that the topics she covers are recognizable to an insider, interesting to a novice, and entertaining no matter what.

It’s also a strong showing for creative writing, peppered with clever turns of phrase like calling irony “a linguistic trust fall” or Morse code “dashingly dotty.” Although the cited examples of tweets and whatnot are probably easier to grasp in print, it’s fun to listen to the audiobook as I did for Gretchen laughing at her own jokes and somehow managing to pronounce an aksjdfhlaksjg-style keysmash.

Internet culture changes quickly, and today’s dank meme can soon become tomorrow’s dated lolcat. McCulloch’s strength as an ethnographer of cyberspace is that she doesn’t attempt to present this inevitably static snapshot as some definitive report, but rather walks her audience through the social and historical forces that have allowed variation from the formal rules to flourish online in the first place. Drawing upon her personal observations as a curious digital native as well as decades of studies from before and after such a status was even possible, the writer connects research on network ties, dialect maps, emerging technologies, and more into a fairly cohesive and persuasive account of how the language we see and use on our devices has acquired its particular characteristics.

Throughout it all, Gretchen conveys what a sheer joy it is to dig into this weirdness, both to uncover the underlying patterns of this ubiquitous new medium and to lovingly participate in and remix them oneself. Whether you’re plugged into that same ecosystem or not, this is an outstanding guide to its many linguistic wonders.

★★★★★

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter

[feeling-diskinserted]

is “-ass” an adverb or what

like in “this is a good-ass cake” or “they live in a big-ass house”

what’s going on there morphosyntactically?

it occurs to me that “good-ass” (or [adj]-ass) can only be used as a modular adjective and not as a predicate -- you wouldn’t say “damn this cake is good-ass”

conversely, “as fuck”/”af” is used more in predicates (“this cake is tasty af”), but it seems okay if a lot less common in the other position (”this is a tasty-as-fuck cake”).... I guess? I’m not sure if I’ve heard that construction much or not but it’s definitely more legit-sounding than “this cake is good-ass” 

I mean it probably has to do with the meaning of ass lol. you can find good ass but not typically in cake form

anyway. I should go to bed but I can’t stop thinking about this because I made some good-ass soup and I might just start saying “that soup was good-ass” even though that sounds weird for aforementioned reasons

[dialmformara]

So the internet-speak trend of swapping "a" and "an" really bugs me

Like it's a kind of deliberate ungrammaticality that is just so obvious to me that I cringe

But I understand why people do it. It's emphatic. If you tell me something is a big deal, I'm like "sure, whatever." But if you say it's An Big Deal™️, I can hear the title case and the trademark symbol. An big deal is a bigger deal than a big deal, and the sudden ungrammaticality calls attention to the bigness if the deal.

[verycoolest]

i got really inspired by an allthingslinguistic post but, cause i’m greedy and it was in turkish, i made an own one