polyglot conspiracy

Here in Charlottesville, there’s a restaurant called Jabberwocky/Jaberwoke (though more accurately written in syllabic transcription [is that a term?]). A quasi-linguist’s delight (the theme doesn’t quite satisfy), its main bag is pizza, but it has a huge menu of sandwiches and so on. The awning outside the restaurant reads:

“jaberwoke - pizza et al.”

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My sister, quite the colorful wordsmith, posts:

…the other day, I said “…I am not going to not..” and my friend went nuts over it. Is it really that atrocious? And if so, why? And then, two days ago, I heard mom say it…Do you say it, too?

Why yes, sister, I do. And so do a lot of other people. Google turns up quite a few hits. I use it mostly because it’s fun, but I also find it semantically helpful. Atrocious? Nah. (Though it does sound a bit Rumsfeldian.) (more…)

The other night a few friends and I were out, and one of them insisted on using airquotes* during speech. You know the kind: two fingers each hand, moving from peace signs to floppy-bunny-ears then back to peace signs. When we noticed the excess, she claimed that it was an “unconscious” “habit” that she “just couldn’t stop.”

It was then that we realized some peculiar things about airquotes. (more…)

There’s nothing like teaching an ESL Conversation class to heighten one’s self-awareness of her personal language tics. Sometimes I genuinely want to apologize to people (in particular, the students in my class) for my speech patterns. And I know this carries over into my writing, because that’s the other forum in which I’m ultra-aware of my style–the same things I overuse in speech, I overuse in writing, particularly email (see any future posts in the CMC category for exposition of this point). So because you will inevitably be subject to at least one of my irritating verbal habits, in this post I am preemptively acknowledging and apologizing for them. (more…)

I finally did it. I finally got sucked into the Blogosphere. It feels weirdish, but I’m not going to fight it.

I intend mostly to talk about things that are interesting to me, which means things that I think ought to be interesting to everyone, though of course they rarely are. I will attempt to be witty, and probably fail a good part of the time. I will use words I make up, and words made up by others, and I will not always use parallel constructions when putting phrases in a series (though attempts will be made to do so). (more…)

The Conspiracy shall soon be theorized. Be patient, public (all four of you).

I’ve already been asked about the name. I knew this would happen. I’m just going to give you the two definitions and let you put them together however you want in that independently brilliant brain of yours. (more…)

I’m L.M. Squires, currently a graduate (MA) student in Linguistics at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. In 2003, I received my BA in Philosophy and Communication from American University in Washington, DC. After that I spent a year in Boston, MA as an AmeriCorps VISTA, working with Boston’s literacy campaign, ReadBoston.

Right now, my research interests mostly involve computer mediated communication(CMC) and information and communication technologies (ICTs), but I’m not a computer geek (thus, this blog will be lo-fi to da max, as they say in Hawaii). Rather, I’m a lay technology user interested in the language people use in various media venues, and the interplays between mediated and non-mediated forms of language. I also like to talk about The Media a lot, from the standpoints of rhetoric as well as cultural production/consumption, and the burgeoning field of media literacy. I guess I’m one of those “social ramifications” people, as a friend of mine calls them.

I’m also really, really fascinated by the word “like.”

Contact: squires at polyglotconspiracy dot net