Teri the bnick, a new proposed mascot for linguistics
Since about the 1990s, linguists, especially 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:
- • It is modality-specific, coming from research on a spoken language.
- • It is language-specific, coming from research on English.
- • It is field-limited, coming from research in psycholinguistics, acquisition, and morphophonology.
- • It is copyrighted, and linguists have been repeatedly hit with legal threats to stop using it (which is I why I do not include a picture here, just to be on the safe side!).
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:
- • It is used in historical linguistics to mark reconstructed historical forms, regardless of language or modality.
- • It is used in most subfields to mark ungrammatical or unacceptable linguistic structures (and by extension, constraint violations in Optimality Theory), regardless of language or modality.
- • It is used in phonetics to represent any spoken language phone that does not yet have a dedicated symbol in the IPA.
- • It is used in phonetics and phonology to mark pitch accents in any spoken language in the tones and break indices (ToBI) transcription system.
- It is used in computational linguistics (where it is sometimes called the Kleene star) to represent zero or more repetitions of the previous symbol in formal languages.
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 than the wug. In addition, Teri is not legally problematic. I will not pursue legal action aɡainst underɡraduates tryinɡ to raise funds selling Teri-shaped cookies. Giving me proper credit a decent thing to do, of course, but I'm not going to sue you for using Teri to show your enthusiasm for linguistics.
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.