27 January 2009

"Would You Like Fries with That?"

A couple of Language Log posts on the current job market for linguists sent me running for my direction of my all-time favourite SpecGram post, Choose Your Own Career in Linguistics, which indulges both my linguistic geekery and my nostalgia for choose your own adventure books, and which is funny 'cause it's true--whenever someone asks me where I work, I do always have to suffix "I work in scientific publishing" with "but linguistics is a social science" or (in encounters with arts students who don't know better) "but some disciplines of linguistics are, like, totally scientific" (this always makes me think of this LL post on a favourite xkcd).

I always forget about SpecGram because until this evening, I was only subscribed to their mailing list via my aged and decrepit Hotmail account, although now I have rectified the situation by RSSing myself up. The current issue is a bit hardcore in its pseudo-geekery and meta-meta-humour, even for me, but while I was there, I checked out the December issue and had a good chortle at How They Do It in Linguistics ("Syntacticians do it with trees," "Neurolinguists do it with magnets," "Phonologists do it with deviation," ad infinitum, ad nauseam)--ah, the oldies but goodies--and a poetic dual between a "practical speller" and a "skeptical speller," of which I am sure that George Bernard ghoti Shaw would approve [edit: annoyingly, that reference was included at the end of the poem so I can't claim to be clever here, although I did think of it by myself]. 

Linguistics is so fun anecdotally, or in blog format...

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