it’s not that unusual, in translation, to come across something that has a dedicated word or expression in the source language but requires a lengthier explication in the target text. sometimes, however, it’s the other way around! not so much found in the process of translation as found waiting for you in translation.
a very satisfying case, in the very first chapter I picked to translate, was
Gideon would have immediately made plans to … do up all the buttons on [Harrow’s] shirts, making sure that each button went into the hole above the one it was meant to go into.
which is a long description for something that Finnish has a word for:
[Gideon] olisi heti ottanut asiakseen … napittaa kaikki [Harrow'n] paidat juoponnappiin.
La Trobe Linguistics Program Zine at University Open Day 2026
I have been enjoying making Lingthusiasm zines, so when we started making plans for our University Open Day this year, I realised that a zine was the perfect format for introducing linguistics, our team, and subjects available. I found they were well suited to this kind of event and wanted to share the experience in case it is useful to others.
Eight-fold zines like these usually work by having a blank inside. I used this to my advantage and printed the very text-dense list of subject overviews on the inside for people to take away and read later.
The fact they’re smaller than the usual A4 (letter) handouts made them feel a lot easier to share with people. They also sat really nicely on the table, thanks to some nice little acrylic boxes I found. I printed the La Trobe zines in black and white and they looked really nice. The team gave out about one hundred of them over the course of the day. The only problem with zines is budgeting the time to fold them, but I started a few weeks out and used seminars and online meetings where my hands could be busy.
Alongside the La Trobe zine I also had the current range of Lingthusiasm zines. These were great for both introducing people to linguistics and sharing some of the research topics we work on. It made me think about some more topics I wanted to share with people in zine format for future events.
I brought along kiki/bouba stickers and scarf so that we could do kiki bouba tests and then leave people with the zine. This was particularly effective as a way of having something fun to bring in family and friends who were along to support a prospective student. At least one parent said “this is so cool, you have to study this when you come to university!!”
In previous years I have suffered from what I refer to as Archeology envy, because they always have great props and artefact replicas. Having the zines at the table went a long way to solving that problem for me this year. I’ll definitely be returning with them next year.
Below is an image of the table set up we had. All the Lingthusiasm zines are available on the Lingthusiasm website. You can see and print a digital copy of the La Trobe zine here.
Bonus 114: How poetry reveals the structure of languages
Roses are red Violets are blue English poems are stress-based This is not a haiku
In this bonus episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about how the structure of a language influences what forms of poetry are possible in the language. We talk about why so much English poetry depends on not putting the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLABle, how languages that don’t have word-level stress like French write poetry based on syllable counts instead, how English speakers write haiku in a way that’s actually subtly shifted for the constraints of the language (because Japanese doesn’t have syllables, they have morae), and how signed languages like ASL use handshape repetition for poetry. (Check out the links to some ASL and BSL poem performances below, they’re well worth watching!) We also talk about how the form of poetry has evolved several times as it moves back and forth between spoken and written formats, from beat and slam poets reclaiming orality to perfectly tweet-length forms like double dactyls and formats that rely on screencaps to preserve formatting, like the double-columned twin cinema.
So, there’s a post about how Bertie Wooster’s “what ho!” is a corruption of Beowulf’s “Hwaet!” And @fremedon and @oldshrewsburyian wrote up some things I decided to voice.
We hear from people a lot who are enthusiastic about linguistics, and many of you have been trying to get other people in your life also into linguistics, which is amazing!
Whether it’s linguistics fans trying to articulate their (our) excitement to family and friends, linguistics academics trying to spread the word to future students who might want to take a linguistics course, or when we go to in-person conferences and events and we’re trying to explain why people might want to listen to a whole half hour of linguistics enthusiasm every month, we’ve been feeling a need for more ways to bring that linguistics energy from the internet into the physical world.
Also, it turns out coincidentally that Gretchen’s and Lauren’s and producer Claire’s and editor Leah’s friends have all separately been getting really into zines lately [although a few of our friends would like it pointed out that they’ve been into zines since earlier zine waves. you’re very cool and we appreciate you.]
Basically, we make some zine designs, we release them as pdfs under Creative Commons licenses for anyone to print off from lingthusiasm.com/zines for free, and then people can have them floating around on your coffeetable, bulletinboard, break room table, outreach events, wherever you’re looking for eye-catching pick-up-able objects to help get people interested in linguistics. And then we can print them off and bring them to whatever events we happen to be at too!
All the zines are made to be printed off from a single sheet of paper which is cut and folded in minizine style to keep photocopying costs low. We’re making all the designs available in both US letter and A4, and with colour/black and white options, so they can work for as many people as possible!
Zines are DIY and participatory, so we’re also hoping to encourage other people to make linguistics-related zines and help people find other linguistics zines that exist!
We’ve done one lingcomm through zines workshop at a linguistics conference so far (LabPhon), and have another lined up (NWAV), and we’ve heard from some linguistics profs who are excited by the idea of using zines in teaching as well! You can see (and repurpose) Linguistics Communication through Zines slides here.
Let us know by tagging @lingthusiasm on social media if you make a linguistics-related zine or use zines for any other fun purpose!
Okay, we’ve made you wait long enough. Wanna see some zines?
Here are two shapes. If you had to assign the name “bouba” to one of them and “kiki” to the other, which name would you give to which? If you think about it, you probably have a guess… In this Lingthusiasm zine, Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about these two linguistically famous shapes. Read the whole zine and get printable versions here!
Why does “ie” turn “dog” into itty bitty “doggie”? In this Lingthusiasm zine, Leah Velleman gets enthusiastic about diminutives. Yes, this one is extra tiny, it’s a diminutive zine about diminutives! A zinelet? Or zineling? Read the whole zine and get printable versions here!
Stay tuned for more Lingthusiasm zines in the future! And thank you to all our members on Patreon who got to see the zines early and gave us many helpful comments! It’s thanks to the support of our community that we’re able to make fun free linguistics resources like this.
Stay Lingthusiastic!
Honestly, people’s incredibly excited responses to the zines so far are exactly why we’ve started making zines that are enthusiastic about linguistics to go with the podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics, so perhaps it needed no explaining, but hey, we had this meta post already half-drafted so perhaps you’d like to see some reasoning about why we’re getting into zines at the moment.
Why does “ie” turn “dog” into itty bitty “doggie”? In this Lingthusiasm zine, Leah Velleman gets enthusiastic about diminutives. Yes, this one is extra tiny, it’s a diminutive zine about diminutives! A zinelet? Or zineling?
How to cut and fold a minizine (for this extra special tinyzine, cut the paper into quarters first along the dotted lines, then fold and cut four tinyzines like a usual minizine)
(She’s right, we fudged a little! The -ie in “doggie” only works on some words in English. It would be cool to have a version that worked on every noun, like some languages have. Alternatively: be the change you want to see in the English language?)
So “currying” a furry animal means grooming or brushing it with a currycomb, which in turn comes from the Old French correier meaning “to prepare [something]”, because you prepare a horse for riding by brushing it; it’s most commonly applied to horses but you can get e.g. currycombs for dogs.
If I understand correctly, medieval French folk tales considered chestnut-colored horses to be deceitful and tricky; the Old French word for a chestnut or dun horse was fauvel, and so the Old French expression correier fauvel, literally “to brush the chestnut horse”, meant lying or being hypocritical for personal gain. This turned into “curry favel” in 15th-century English, and then mutated into “curry favor” over the next few centuries as people forgot about the horse.
So “currying favor” is really “brushing the Horse of Lies”, and the reason you can’t curry goodwill, or love, or hatred, or even disfavor is that we didn’t have Horses for those.
And it follows that we can gain the ability to curry other things by assigning them to Horses.
I realize, looking back on this post, that regular readers of my blog may have thought I made this up. Making up a ridiculous etymology is certainly the sort of thing I might do; in fact I’ve been meaning to start a sideblog dedicated solely to sufficiently accurate etymologies, and have a notebook with dozens of them jotted down, I just haven’t had the time to do anything with them.
But I want to stress that this is not one of those cases. This is, to the best of my knowledge, the very real etymology of the phrase “curry favor”.
The Old French fauve or falve referred to the light-brown color that’s sometimes called “fallow” in modern English, but since it also sounded similar to faux, meaning “false”, it was also associated with deceit and trickery ; the idiom estriller Fauvel literally meant “to groom the fallow one” but idiomatically meant “to lie or trick people”.
Then in the 1300s we get the French poem Roman de Fauvel, a satirical poem about a fauve horse, whose name is derived both from the color and from the fact that FAVVEL is an acronym of Flaterie, Avarice, Vilanie, Varieté, Envie, Lascheté (Flattery, Greed, Vileness, Fickleness, Envy, and Cowardice) - all the different vices that this horse embodies.
Fauvel (purportedly modeled after Enguerrand de Marigny [source], an advisor to King Philip IV) is a sinful, conniving, and very rich horse who has various religious and secular leaders fawning over him and brushing him; it was well-known enough that “grooming Fauvel” came to mean “sucking up to someone powerful” more than just “being evil”, and when it was translated into English the grooming was translated as currying, which specifically is grooming a horse with a curry comb [wiktionary]. From this we got the Middle English expression “currying Fauvel”, which then mutated via folk etymology (in the “reinterpretation of unfamiliar words as more familiar ones” sense, not the “people are wrong about etymology” sense) into “currying favor”.
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