The name of the blog

To start off, I'll explain a bit about the name Gwistix. It would be cool if there were some sort of mystical, historical, or scientific meaning to Gwistix, but there's not. When I was an undergrad studying linguistics, I noticed that whenever people abbreviate the word linguistics, they use the first syllable of the word, ling. The classes I took were all listed in the catalog at LING classes, and even the department website used ling rather than the full word. I thought it would be fun to use the other half of the word instead, so I started labeling all of my linguistics-related web-apps with the IPA pronunciation [ˈɡwɪs.tɪks]. I set up a blog on blogger (this one, which I've had on the books for a few years but have never posted on), a Google Sites page (which I've never done anything with) and even ended up buying the domain name gwistix.com, which, for complicated reasons, I still own but no longer have control of. (Maybe I'll explain why some other time in another post.) Since then, I've started using @gwistix as my seldom-used Twitter handle, as well as for StackExchange, Steam, and who knows how many other places, and I've set up a Neocities page at gwistix.neocities.org (which I've put a little bit of time into, but not much).

So there you have it. Gwistix started off as shorthand for linguistics, and started off being about just linguistics. My interests have broadened since those days. After a BA and an MA in linguistics, I certainly have things to say about the scientific study of Language, but that's not all I have to say. I'll probably also frequently post about space, science, technology, and any number of other nerdy things. I also really like data, demographics, and comparing things, which I'll probably do a lot of. I guess we'll see.