Book #124 of 2025: Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language by Adam Aleksic I’ve been out of academia for almost a decade now, but back when I was working as a sociolinguist, I studied how people use language on the internet and how traditional emblems of group identity in speech can …
Tag Archives: linguistics
Book Review: Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language by Amanda Montell
Book #76 of 2025: Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language by Amanda Montell As a reader with a master’s degree in linguistics who used to research and lecture within its sociolinguistics branch, there are three main things I’m looking for in a popular science title like this: 1) Does it seem …
Book Review: Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English by Valerie Fridland
Book #113 of 2023: Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English by Valerie Fridland I taught a few undergraduate sociolinguistics courses when I was in grad school, and if this book had been available back then, I could see myself including a few of its chapters as assigned reading. It’s an engaging …
Book Review: Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch
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 …
Book Review: The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland
Book #220 of 2017: The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland This book is a wild blend of Arrival, Timeline, and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, in which a linguistics professor is recruited by a shadowy government agency to translate documents suggesting that magic actually existed in the world before …
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Movie Review: Arrival (2016)
Movie #4 of 2017: Arrival (2016) Honestly just a terrific movie all around. I had some minor gripes about the way linguists and linguistics are presented in the film, but it’s still probably the closest Hollywood’s ever gotten or that we could have reasonably hoped for. The script stuck pretty close to the beats of …
Book Review: The Pun Also Rises: How the Humble Pun Revolutionized Language, Changed History, and Made Wordplay More Than Some Antics by John Pollack
Book #56 of 2016: The Pun Also Rises: How the Humble Pun Revolutionized Language, Changed History, and Made Wordplay More Than Some Antics by John Pollack The Pun Also Rises is a fun little book that argues from research for the prominence of puns in the history of our species. Writer John Pollack presents a …
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