So besides "What is a wug?" probably one of the most commonly asked questions that I get is "What is linguistics?"
I get this all the time at parties, where people are like "Oh, what're you majoring in?" 
Or, you know, when you're at a job interview and they're like, "Oh I see you majored in linguistics, what is that?"
One job interview, the interviewer actually asked me,
Oh, I see that you majored in logistics. He probably misread it as logistics because linguistics is such an infrequent word
He's probably used to seeing the word "logistics" more often than seeing the word "linguistics."
And that's a great example of how linguistics works
is that we think about how language works in the brain. 
So what is linguistics? Linguistics is the science of language.
And what do I mean by that? How can you have the science of language?
So I think a lot of people, they think of language, they think of it as sort of the opposite of science.
So you have, in high school you have your language arts class. And 
art is sort of seen as the opposite of science, for a lot of people.
And so it's like, how can you have the science of language? So the way I like to explain this
is that it's a little bit like psychology, anthropology, sociology
computer science, artificial intelligence, philosophy. All of these scientific fields
have some aspect of them that has to do with language. So,
you take your anthropology class, and you learn about
you learn about culture, you learn about religion, you learn about tools and artifacts and archeology
and all these other things, but you also learn about the languages of these different cultures
Or you take a psychology class and you learn about visual processing 
and you learn about motor skills and you learn about how the brain controls this and controls that.
But then you also talk about how language and cognition works. And so,  
linguistics is all of these different fields combined and just focused on language.
So that's what linguistics is. It's the science of language. A little bit of psych, a little bit of anthro, a little bit of computer science.
But there's also some other subfields of linguistics that are kind of the major key points
So from smallest to biggest: we like to talk about phonetics. 
So that's the sounds of languages. So you have your consonants, you have your vowels.
And how you form them with your mouth and listen to them with your ears and process them with your brain.
And then you have phonology, and so that's how these sounds interact with each other.
Um, phonology. And so,
you have one sound and you stick it next to another sound and it kind of makes another, kind of slightly different sound.
Alright so next up we have morphology. So morphology is how words are built up
from their parts. So you have a -- morphology --
Um, so you have, for example, you have "cat"
and you have "cats." And so "cats" is built up out of two parts, the "cat" and the "s" part.
And so that would be an example of two morphemes in the word "cats."
And then you have syntax. And so that's how words get put together into sentences.
So, "the cat" you have your nice little determiner "the" and your noun "cat".
And you might want to put a verb in there, "eat", so "the cat eats."
And that kind of thing. And then we have semantics. So what do words mean?
So, how do we get meaning out of meaning out of words?
So yeah, these are the -- the basic subfields of linguistics.
We have phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics.
