Teri the bnick, a new proposed mascot for linguisticsSince about the 1990s, some linguists, especially many undergraduate students in North America, have latched on to the wug as an unofficial mascot for the field. It is used in various ways, such as student group logos, tattoos, crochet projects, and baked goods. The wug is a cute bird-like creature famously used in Jean Berko Gleason's groundbreaking (1958) research into child language acquisition. However, the wug has been a problematic mascot for many reasons:
For more on this issue, see this article. To solve these problems, I created a new mascot called Teri (pictured below) in September 2020. ![]() Teri's name is short for asterisk, which is the name of the * symbol that has many uses in linɡuistics:
So, the asterisk is used by linguists across modalities, across languages, and across subfields, making Teri a more inclusive and representative mascot for the field. In addition, Teri is not legally problematic. Teri is available for use under a Creative Commons Attribuition 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) licence, with the modification that attribution is not required. I will definitely not pursue legal action aɡainst underɡraduates who are selling Teri-shaped cookies or making Teri-imprinted T-shirts to raise funds and celebrate their enthusiasm for linguistics. Giving me proper credit in the form of “©2020 Nathan Sanders” or similar is a decent thing to do, but not obligatory. Teri is non-binary, and their species is called bnick, which happens to be an ungrammatical word in English, highlighting one of the uses of the asterisk. Teri's name is also a very unusual type of truncation, if not outright ungrammatical, because it takes from the middle of the word asterisk. It would be like truncating the names Madeline and Theodore to Deli and Odo, instead of the more usual Maddy and Theo. It's just weird! (Like many linguists…) If you would like access to the original vector files or some other version of Teri, please contact me. If you still love the wug, you can purchase officially-licenced wug merchandise at the Wug Store. |