Wonderful example of the Boomer Ellipsis as a feature of casual handwritten style from the pre-internet era (probably pre-boomer as itâs OPâs grandpa, but currently primarily associated with boomers since the earlier generations were less likely to be online).
I bet this person is of an era with the man named Don who unlocked the stylistic use of ellipsis for me in Because Internet and I wish Iâd known about this other example to cite it as well! But hereâs the section where I talk about other examples I found, for the sake of having them in the same place:
Lingthusiasm Episode 89: Connecting with oral culture
For tens of thousands of years, humans have transmitted long and intricate stories to each other, which we learned directly from witnessing other people telling them. Many of these collaboratively composed stories were among the earliest things written down when a culture encountered writing, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Mwindo Epic, and Beowulf.
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about how writing things down changes how we feel about them. We talk about a Ted Chiang short story comparing the spread of literacy to the spread of video recording, how oral cultures around the world have preserved astronomical information about the Seven Sisters constellation for over 10,000 years, and how the field of nuclear semiotics looks to the past to try and communicate with the far future. We also talk about how “oral” vs “ written” culture should perhaps be referred to as “embodied” vs “recorded” culture because signed languages are very much part of this conversation, where areas of residual orality have remained in our own lives, from proverbs to gossip to guided tours, and why memes are an extreme example of literate culture rather than extreme oral culture.
We’ve created a new and Highly Scientific™ ’Which Lingthusiasm episode are you?’ quiz! Answer some very fun and fanciful questions and find out which Lingthusiasm episode most closely corresponds with your personality. If you’re not sure where to start with our back catalogue, or you want to get a friend started on Lingthusiasm, this is the perfect place to start. Take the quiz here!
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
Today is a big day on the Spanish internet. Valentineâs day in Spanish is âdĂa de San ValentĂnâ, which sounds almost the same as âSam va lentĂnâ, which is how, in some parts of Spain , you would say âSam goes slowlyâ.
Hence, since a few years ago, every February 14th, the Spanish internet is full of âwait for me mr. Frodoâ style memes. One of our holiest days of the year.
oh and the post would probably make more sense if I actually shared any meme right?
You canât even picture how many variations of the meme people post today. Itâs all very silly and I love it.
TL;DR: We’re looking for English-speaking neopronoun users (aged 18+) to participate in a paid linguistics study.
Hello!
Professor Kirby Conrod from Swarthmore College is recruiting participants for a paid interview study (in-person in Philly or on zoom). Anyone who uses neopronouns for themself, is 18 or older, and is fluent in English is welcome to participate. The study will consist of a casual interview between you and a researcher, a similar interview with a friend of yours, and an exit survey for each of you. Each will receive $15 as compensation for their time.
If you’re interested in participating, please fill out this form: (https://forms.gle/YajpkjxGYiwL7RLF6). Filling out this form does not require you to participate; it’s just an expression of interest.
Even on Tumblr, neopronoun use is relatively uncommon, so it would be very helpful if folks could reblog this post to help it reach as many neopronoun users as possible.
Bonus 84: Are thumbs fingers and which episode of Lingthusiasm are you? Survey results and a new personality quiz
In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about two kinds of fun linguistic questionnaires!Â
First: if you were a Lingthusiasm episode, which one would be? Weâve made a tongue-in-cheek quiz that transforms your answers to questions like âYouâre about to start a massive Lingthusiasm listening marathon. You need to stay fortified and hydrated. Pick a beverage to sustain youâ into a Highly Accurate Window Into Your Personality. Â Gretchen and Lauren take the quiz on air and share our own results â please let us know what you get and if this quiz helps you remember an older episode or figure out how to get a friend started on Lingthusiasm!
Second: we have results from the Lingthusiasm survey that many of you took last year! Find out whether Lingthusiasm listeners consider the show more kiki or more bouba, and highlights from your very extensive comments on whether your sisterâs husbandâs sister is still your sister-in-law, whether the thumb is a finger, and more gestures that are rude in some places. A few survey results also appear in an academic paper that we wrote: âCommunicating about linguistics using lingcomm-driven evidence: Lingthusiasm podcast as a case studyâ which was published in Language and Linguistics Compass (open access).
Finally, a few updates: For 2024, Gretchen is heading to the Societas Linguistica Europea conference in Helsinki in August and Lauren is heading back to full-time prof work, teaching syntax and turning gestures and Lingthusiasm research into papers. Plus: the LingComm Grants are running again for 2024.
Lingthusiasm Episode 88: No such thing as the oldest language
It’s easy to find claims that certain languages are old or even the oldest, but which one is actually true? Fortunately, there’s an easy (though unsatisfying) answer: none of them! Like how humans are all descended from other humans, even though some of us may have longer or shorter family trees found in written records, all human languages are shaped by contact with other languages. We don’t even know whether the oldest language(s) was/were spoken or signed, or even whether there was a singular common ancestor language or several.
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about what people mean when we talk about a language as being old. We talk about how classifying languages as old or classical is often a political or cultural decision, how the materials that are used to write a language influence whether it gets preserved (from clay to bark), and how people talk about creoles and signed languages in terms of oldness and newness. And finally, how a language doesn’t need to be justified in terms of its age for whether it’s interesting or worthy of respect.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).
i spent far too long making this incredibly silly quiz, please take it so I can convince @superlinguo that this is definitely a useful thing we should do more of
I have to laugh at the folks in the notes claiming this is fake because “no 2-yr old is that advanced”. My guys, I work at a daycare almost exclusively with 2-3 year olds and let me tell you some of the wild shit I heard this last week alone,
“Uhhh, i ASSUME we’re going to the playground soon??” -2.5 year old girl
“[3 year old boy] pushed me because he doesn’t have a manners.” -2 yr old girl
“Did you spill your water?” “No no no no it’s not a concern” -2 yr old boy (while running away, dripping wet)
The two year-old is now a solid two and a half. Just now, he was sitting on the couch playing with his pretend flip phone and he frowned and said “for gods sake. My battery is empty.”
The other day at breakfast I asked him if he was going to eat any more of his oatmeal and he said “no, I think I’m just gonna move on with my life.”
If you don’t have a lot of interactions with young children:
Kids are smarter than you think
Six months makes a really big difference when that is 1/5 of the total time you’ve been alive
All this, and also, they can tell you lots about their favorite things. My 2 year old nephew can tell you all about Star Wars (the 8 movies he’s seen at least) and loves going out of his way to bring up how Anakin was good and bad and good again when he died. Trust me, little kids learn and mimic and reenact all the things they get attached to. Also, he named his first fish Jengo Fett, and all following fish Boba Fett, so juries still out on how much he understands clones.
Kids pick up the language that’s used around and to them. Mannerisms too. They are tiny, efficient mimics and it will come out at the WEIRDEST times. Young kids will ABSOLUTELY say all the stuff listed here.
My cousin was somewhere between two and three, and I’d just arrived at her house, and she’s animatedly telling me a story of some kind, and I listen as I make my way through the house, get to the couch, and kick my shoes off. She stops dead in the middle of her sentence, puts her hands on her hips, levels me with a glare the likes of which I haven’t seen since, and goes, “WHAT are they doing there? Do you think the box at the front door is for DECORATION?”
Her mum, standing in the kitchen and watching all this, was GOBSMACKED. Apparently she said that exact phrase more often than she realised, and her kid had picked it up verbatim and started using it on unsuspecting guests (me).
(I got up and put my shoes in the box at the front door immediately)
My family’s lore includes the time my mother offhandedly said to Cousin’s son–who was maybe five–that Cousin’s wife certainly did have strong opinions about some minor thing, and the kid let out a sigh and said, in the driest and flattest and most world-weary tone you’ve ever heard, “Tell me about it.”
once i was helping with a class of 3 year olds and during drawing time one girl asked for a lion, specifically a lioness. i drew it and she just looked in silence so thinking she wanted a more liony lion i was like “do you want me to draw a boy lion next?” and she gives me this 🤨ass affronted look and says “umm she doesn’t NEED a man.”
Kids will do three things reliably:
Repeat what they’ve heard, incorrectly and/or in the wrong context, to comic effect
Repeat what they’ve heard in exactly the correct context, which is somehow even funnier
Casually knock you on your ass with some offhand, but utterly profound, original statement
My five years old Niece has started going “Too bad, so sad.” And when called on it not being very nice goes “That’s what Mama always says.”
Weâve interviewed lots of great people on Lingthusiasm, and sometimes thereâs a story or two that we just donât have space for in the main episode, so hereâs a bonus episode with our favourite recent outtakes! Think of it as a special bonus edition DVD from the past year of Lingthusiasm with directorâs commentary and deleted scenes.
In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about some of our favourite deleted bits from recent interviews that we didnât quite have space to share with you. First, we go back to our online liveshow with fan-favourite guest Kirby Conrod, previously seen talking about singular they and other language and gender topics, about reflexive pronouns (themself vs themselves) and people who use multiple pronouns in fiction and real life. Then we go back to Itxaso Rodriguez-Ordoñez, previously talking about Basque language revival, about how Basque people feel about the famed ergativity (hint: there are cartoons!). Finally, we go back to authors Jo Walton and Ada Palmer, previously talking about swearing in science fiction, fantasy, and history, about bad swearing ideas in fiction and why acronymic etymologies should be viewed with deep suspicion.
when i was a child i asked my grandad (who has a thick yorkshire accent) why he sometimes misses letters out of words and words out of sentences and he told me its because they had to ration letters during the war
ALT
