Hello!

Flights of Foundry went well. I think the workshop worked, so I’m going to add to my 2027 to-do list “figure out how to run the workshop outside of a convention.” (I have no mental capacity the rest of this year.) Roller derby world championships are in two weeks, and I’m going to go watch four days of some amazing teams. I’m rooting for any of the European teams (especially Nothing Toulouse, because they have the best pun of all the team names) to take the Hydra home.

Unrelated self-promotion

I’m taking on copyediting clients next year! I’ve got two years’ experience at a half-time job and several novels (other people’s) under my belt. Contact me if you’re interested. (c.covington on the g-mail)

Let’s get retrospective

It’s been three years since I started this newsletter. I originally thought I would use it to go more in depth into some topics from my book or talk about things that didn’t quite fit in. The first few did end up being that way, but since then, it’s been more about things I was thinking about when I needed to come up with a newsletter topic.

Most-viewed newsletters

I was curious about which newsletter entries were popular (to see what topics people are interested in reading about so I can find good topics for the future), and Shakespeare with a Southern Accent is the most-read entry of all time, followed by Uncleftish Beholding and language purity. (I have most tracking turned off, so I only know what pages were viewed, from where (country & referrer), and device. I’m not sure it’s possible to get only view count without the rest.)

That’s a little unfair, because those are also the first two entries, so I checked the stats for the last month. That gets Language contact (the previous issue), Southern Shakespeare, and language purity. So it’s not just because they’re the two oldest entries; they’re both apparently interesting to people.

My favorites

The type of newsletter I like writing the most is the one where I can use my degree and analytical skills. Academic/pop-linguistics reviews or interesting articles, but they aren’t nearly as popular as anything else. This one on “your ass” as a pronoun is the only one that appeared on the most-viewed list.

A couple book recommendations (Language of Liars) have done well, so maybe I’ll do more of those.

What do you want, readers?

Leave a comment online or talk to me on bsky (@exaggerated).

Next month

I have a half-started post about prefixed verbs that I may or may not choose to continue (it really is pretty specific). I’ll be spending 16+ hours on trains next month, but I’ve already got paid work I need to work on, so we’ll see what I have time for. There are a lot of books I’d like to read, including some that have really cool language things going on, so I hope I can spend half the time reading.