This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Irregularity is all over the place. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about irregularity and the consistent inconsistency of language. But first, we have new merch!

Gretchen: Okay, backstory. We’ve used the metaphor of a musical instrument several times when talking about how the human vocal tract is organised and how you can change the shape of your mouth as the air is on the way out, which changes what the air sounds like, which is true for both the mouth and a musical instrument.

Lauren: We’ve used a couple of different musical instruments as metaphors – the “meat clarinet,” the “meat bassoon,” the “meat bagpipe.”

Gretchen: But I just can’t get that original imagery of the meat clarinet out of my head. Maybe it’s because I played clarinet in high school – who knows. Lauren has very generously allowed me to persuade her that what we really need in our lives is some art of the human vocal tract and a clarinet merged together in meat colours.

Lauren: To be clear, YOU need this in YOUR life. This art is deeply cursed, and I will not be buying any.

Gretchen: This art speaks to my soul. Our artist Lucy Maddox did an amazing job, knocked it out of the park (as usual). Lingthusiasm patrons can even see (behind-the-scenes) some stetches of the several horrifying meat textures that she offered us as we were coming up with this design.

Lauren: Truly one of the most terrifying design briefs I have ever had to write.

Gretchen: Go have a look at the meat clarinet – available on all Lingthusiasm social media – and tell us if you love or hate it.

Lauren: As people have pointed out, this is not actually an anatomically accurate drawing because the mouth at the end of the meat clarinet would have to be your mouth. That was even more disturbing if we tried to line all that up.

Gretchen: [Gretchen shushes Lauren] Just me have my body horror in peace, okay? The meat clarinet is available on stickers, mugs, t-shirts, other horrifying objects. You can follow the merch links on our website or social media to see it for yourself and decide if you are #TeamLauren or #TeamGretchen on this front.

Lauren: Something I am really excited about is this is the first time we have launched merch with its very own zine.

Gretchen: A “zine” is a miniature DIY magazine (hence the name) which you can reproduce yourself on a photocopier. We’ve been experimenting with making zines about linguistics over the past couple months so that we have something to give out to people at conferences and other types of events.

Lauren: We’re making all the Lingthusiasm zines available as PDFs on the Lingthusiasm website. You can print them out yourself if you want to spread the joy of linguistics.

Gretchen: We’ve heard from a lot of listeners over the years that Lingthusiasm helped you get into linguistics, and now you’re trying to share that with your friends, family, classmates. Sometimes, it can be a pretty big ask to get someone to listen to a whole half-hour episode, so what if you could just hand them a fun little mini zine with illustrations as an easier starting point?

Lauren: We’ve shared a couple of zines on Patreon already. Gretchen’s been sharing production updates through Patreon’s Quips feature. If you want to be in the loop on this new little project, you can see future zines and you can give feedback before they’re live for everyone.

Gretchen: Our first three zines are one from me about bouba and kiki, a zine from Lauren about gestures (surprise surprise), and an extra teeny-tiny zine about making words for small things from our technical editor Leah Velleman.

Lauren: Thanks to everyone who’s been following along for your enthusiasm about the zines. We love seeing photos of where they show up in your lives.

Gretchen: You can print off a copy or two to put on your bookshelf, your coffee table, your bulletin board – wherever people might see it. A few people have already told us that they are leaving them in little free libraries or putting them on zine swap racks, which I just think is so cute.

Lauren: I’ve been using the photocopier at work to print out copies to share with colleagues and students for educational purposes.

Gretchen: Of course. If you get inspired to make any linguistics zines, or you know of other existing linguistic zine projects, let us know! You can read the new meat clarinet zine and all Lingthusiasm zines so far at lingthusiasm.com/zines.

Lauren: Our most recent bonus episode was all about poetry and how the structure of language shapes the structure of the style of poems.

Gretchen: To listen to this and over 100 bonus episodes, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Lauren: Language loves a pattern. Gretchen, we’re gonna do a pattern recognition pop quiz. Are you ready?

Gretchen: I love a pattern, too.

Lauren: Dog and dogs, cat and cats, chicken and –

Gretchen: Chickens.

Lauren: Great work. Okay, now –

Gretchen: As you might’ve guessed from making a podcast in English, I am, in fact, an English speaker.

Lauren: Okay, now: child and –

Gretchen: Children.

Lauren: Correct.

Gretchen: Not “childs.”

Lauren: Not “childs.” Sheep and –

Gretchen: Sheep.

Lauren: Yes. Unless you’re talking about many breeds of sheeps, and then I guess that’s possibility okay on analogy with “fishes.” Person and –

Gretchen: People.

Lauren: Yes. Although, I do notice when there’s police reports, and they talk about “persons unknown.”

Gretchen: Right. Or sometimes “peoples of the world” to refer to ethnic groups or cultures.

Lauren: Oh, yeah, pluralising the plural is extra nifty.

Keep reading

Lingthusiasm Episode 119: Irregularity is all over the place

Talk, talked. Walk, walked. Go…went?

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about the many ways that languages are irregular in their patterns! We talk about sound and spelling irregularity, word irregularity and euphemisms, grammatical irregularity and fossils of older systems, and how irregularity is perhaps the most regular thing about languages. We also talk about those parts of systems that seem to be magnets for attracting irregularity, like negation in signed languages and common words generally, how kids learn irregular patterns in a U-shaped curve, and perhaps the most fun kind: jocular irregularity like octopodes and more.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

We have new merch! We’ve used the metaphor of a musical instrument several times when talking about how the human vocal tract is organized, and how you can change the shape of your mouth as the air is on the way out, which changes what the air sounds like. We’ve used a couple of different musical instruments as metaphors, the meat clarinet, the meat bassoon, the meat bagpipe… but Gretchen just couldn’t get that original imagery of the meat clarinet out of her head (maybe it’s because she played clarinet in high school band). So Lauren was eventually persuaded that what we really need in our lives is some art of the human vocal tract and a clarinet merged together, in… meat colours (Lauren would like it noted that she thinks this art is deeply cursed and will not be buying any).

(No, it’s not anatomically accurate because the mouth of the clarinet would have to be your mouth and we decided that was even more disturbing.)

If you want to see how our artist Lucy Maddox even went above and beyond and offered us several horrifying meat textures in the concept phase, join us on Patreon. Patrons get to hear about new merch and other exciting announcements early, so sign up so you don’t miss anything! In any case, it was truly one of the most terrifying (and let’s be real here, entertaining) design briefs we’ve ever had to write, so check out the full merch range here and tell us if you love it or hate it! We even made a zine to go along with your new cursed merch - ‘Guide to your meat clarinet’. In this Lingthusiasm zine, Gretchen gets a little bit too enthusiastic about this horrifying metaphor to encourage you to explore the workings of your own meat clarinet. 

In this month’s bonus episode we 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, and how signed languages like ASL use handshape repetition for poetry.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 110+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

• Etymonline entries for:
  Person
  People
  Sneeze
• Lingthusiasm episodes:
  ’Why spelling is hard — but also hard to change’
  ’Knowledge is power, copulas are fun’
• 'Terms for Low Intelligence’ by Sharon Henderson Taylor
• 'Nouns that Change Gender’ by Alesha Allen for Italy Magazine
• Auslan Signbank entry for 'not’
• Auslan Signbank entry for 'can’t’
• WALS entry for 'Chapter Irregular Negatives in Sign Languages’
• Wikipedia entry for 'Suppletion’
• Wikipedia entry for 'U-shaped development’
• 'U-shaped Learning’ post on Learning and Teaching Foreign Languages
• 'How to pluralize loanwords’ post by All Things Linguistic

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @gretchenmcculloch.com, on instagram @gretchen.mcculloch and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

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.

Listen to this episode about how the structure of a language influences what forms of poetry are possible in the language, and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat to other language fans about your favourite popular or obscure form of poetry!

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘A hand-y guide to gesture. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about Lauren’s new book about gesture, including why we gesture and how linguists do research on it. But first, I have a little story to tell.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: A little while ago, I was in a very cool café/restaurant/pub type place, and I went to the bathroom. The bathroom had a bunch of fun stickers and art and graffiti on the walls. There were some stickers for podcasts. I was like, “Oh, that’s so cool! I should add a Lingthusiasm sticker. Maybe people who come to this cool bar would like our cool podcast.” But then I realised, we don’t actually have a sticker or version of our logo that actually says that we’re a podcast.

Lauren: Oh, good point.

Gretchen: Like, our logo just says “Lingthusiasm,” which is great if you are like, “Ooo, ‘linguistics’ plus ‘enthusiasm.’ That sounds like it might be neat,” but not if you wanna stick it somewhere that indicates, “Here’s what you might want to get into this for.”

Lauren: Sure. It would be nice if it did say something like, “We’re a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics.”

Gretchen: We have a great tagline. It should actually go on a sticker. But with the way our logo is currently formatted, there’s not an obvious spot to put that.

Lauren: I also realised we maybe have a bit of a design issue when a family member put one of the show stickers up and very sensibly had the word “Lingthusiasm” along the bottom.

Gretchen: Oh, yeah. I’ve seen this happen to people, too. I give them stickers, and if they haven’t listened to the show before, they will very naturally put the text reading from left to right like text normally reads in English rather than up the side like we did maybe too cleverly.

Lauren: Yeah, I think we were too clever for our own good, especially if people are only passingly familiar with the show and/or the logo.

Gretchen: This inspired us – we’ve given out a lot of logo stickers at conferences; people like them. What if we came up with a slight variation on the existing design that was a little bit more clear about some of these factors?

Lauren: Our artist, Lucy, has been making all of these really nice doodle designs that are on own website and social media, but they aren’t reflected in the logo at all.

Gretchen: We asked Lucy if she could draw us some fun little objects, like we have elsewhere on the website, but in the shape of the classic Lingthusiasm squiggle-slash-glottal-stop-slash-question-mark-slash-ear logo. She could fill them in with some references from the past 100 episodes and other linguistics objects of assorted kinds.

Lauren: I am biased, but I love the little kiki and the little bouba in there.

Gretchen: I thought you were gonna comment on all the hand shapes.

Lauren: I also love those.

Gretchen: I personally love the leaping rabbit because rabbits have come up several times on Lingthusiasm with Gavagai and the Bill Labov rabbit story.

Lauren: I’m upset that you didn’t say you love the teeny tiny silhouettes of us having a little chat together.

Gretchen: Those are also very charming.

Lauren: We’ll have a link in the show notes to where you can see it and see what tiny objects you recognise from past episodes.

Gretchen: Plus, if you want to have the sticker in your own hands to put on your own water bottle or your laptop or maybe inside the bathrooms of your favourite spot that’s cool with having stickers in bathrooms, or assorted other locations, I dunno, telephone poles, we’re also gonna send a copy of the sticker with this new design on it to everyone who’s a patron at the Ling-thusiast level or higher on our Patreon as of July 1, 2025.

Keep reading

103: A hand-y guide to gesture

Gestures: every known language has them, and there’s a growing body of research on how they fit into communication. But academic literature can be hard to dig into on your own. So Lauren has spent the past 5 years diving into the gesture literature and boiling it down into a tight 147 page book.

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about Lauren’s new book, Gesture: A Slim Guide from Oxford University Press. Is it a general audience book? An academic book? A bit of both. (Please enjoy our highlights version in this episode, a slim guide to the Slim Guide, if you will.) We talk about the wacky hijinks gesture researchers have gotten up to with the aim of preventing people from gesturing without tipping them off that the study is about gesture, including a tricked-out “coloured garden relax chair” that makes people “um” more, as well as crosslinguistic gestural connections between signed and spoken languages, and how Gretchen’s gestures in English have been changing after a year of ASL classes. Plus, a few behind-the-scenes moments: Lauren putting a line drawing of her very first gesture study on the cover, and how the emoji connection from Because Internet made its way into Gesture (and also into the emoji on your phone right now).

There were also many other gesture stories that we couldn’t fit in this episode, so keep an eye out for Lauren doing guest interviews on other podcasts! We’ll add them to the crossovers page and the Lingthusiasm hosts elsewhere playlist as they come up. And if there are any other shows you’d like to hear a gesture episode on, feel free to tell them to chat to Lauren!

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

We’ve made a special jazzed-up version of the Lingthusiasm logo to put on stickers, featuring fun little drawings from the past 8.5 years of enthusiasm about linguistics by our artist Lucy Maddox. There’s a leaping Gavagai rabbit, bouba and kiki shapes, and more…see how many items you can recognize!

This sticker (or possibly a subtle variation…stay tuned for an all-patron vote!) will go out to everyone who’s a patron at the Lingthusiast level or higher as of July 1st, 2025.

We’re also hoping that this sticker special offer encourages people to join and stick around as we need to do an inflation-related price increase at the Lingthusiast level. As we mentioned on the last bonus episode, our coffee hasn’t cost us five bucks in a while now, and we need to keep paying the team who enables us to keep making the show amid our other linguistics prof-ing and writing jobs.

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about linguist celebrities! We talk about start with the historically famous Brothers Grimm and quickly move onto modern people of varying levels of fame, including a curiously large number of linguistics figure skaters. We also talk about a few people who are famous within linguistics, including a recent memoir by Noam Chomsky’s assistant Bev Stohl about what it was like keeping him fueled with coffee. And finally, we reflect on running into authors of papers we’ve read at conferences, when people started recognizing us sometimes, and our tips and scripts for navigating celebrity encounters from both sides.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 90+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

• ‘Gesture: A Slim Guide’ by Lauren Gawne
• Lingthusiasm episode ’Emoji are Gesture Because Internet’
• Lingthusiasm episode ’Villages, gifs, and children: Researching signed languages in real-world contexts with Lynn Hou’
• Lingthusiasm episode ’Bringing stories to life in Auslan - Interview with Gabrielle Hodge’
• 'Gesture, Speech, and Lexical Access: The Role of Lexical Movements in Speech Production’ by Rauscher et al.
• 'Effects of Visual Accessibility and Hand Restraint on Fluency of Gesticulator and Effectiveness of Message’ by Karen P. Lickiss and A. Rodney Wellens
• 'Effects of relative immobilization on the speaker’s nonverbal behavior and on the dialogue imagery level’ by Rimé et al.
• 'The effects of elimination of hand gestures and of verbal codability on speech performance’ by J. A. Graham and S. Heywood

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘No such thing as the oldest language. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about old languages. But first, our most recent bonus episode was deleted scenes with three of our interviews from this year.

Gretchen: We had deleted scenes from our liveshow Q&A with Kirby Conrod about language and gender. We talked about reflexive pronouns, multiple pronouns in fiction, and talking about people who use multiple pronoun sets.

Lauren: We also have an excerpt from our interview with Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez about Basque because it’s famous among linguists for having ergativity.

Gretchen: We wanted to know “What do Basque people themselves think about ergativity?” It turns out, there are jokes and cartoons about it, which Itxaso was able to share with us.

Lauren: Amazing and charming.

Gretchen: Finally, we have an excerpt from my conversation with authors Ada Palmer and Jo Walton about swearing in science fiction and fantasy. This excerpt talks about acronyms both of the swear-y and non-swear-y kind.

Lauren: You can get this bonus episode as well as a whole bunch more at patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

Gretchen: Also, yeah, maybe this is a good time to remember that we have over 80 bonus episodes.

Lauren: We have bonus episodes about the time a researcher smuggled a bunny into a classroom to do linguistics on children.

Gretchen: We also have a bonus episode about “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” and more phrases that contain all the letters of the alphabet – plus, what people do with phrases like this in languages that don’t have alphabets.

Lauren: We also have an entire bonus episode that’s just about the linguistics of numbers.

Gretchen: If you wish you had more lingthusiasm episodes to listen to right now, or if you just wanna help us keep making this podcast long into the future, we really appreciate everyone who becomes a patron.

Lauren: You can find all of that at patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Gretchen: Hey, Lauren, I’ve got big news.

Lauren: Yeah?

Gretchen: Did you know I’m from the oldest family lineage in the world?

Lauren: Wow! You sound like you are part of some prestigious, ancient, royal – I can only assume royal with that level of knowledge about your family lineage.

Gretchen: Well, you know, I have some family members who are really into genealogy. I’ve been looking at some family trees. And I have come to the conclusion that my family is the oldest family in the world.

Lauren: You know, I have grandparents, and they have grandparents, and I assume they had grandparents, and I guess my family goes all the way back as well. We didn’t come out of nowhere. I might not know all their names. I don’t think we were ever rulers of any nation state as far as I’m aware. But I dunno if you are from the oldest family lineage because I think everyone is.

Gretchen: Well, this is not a mutually exclusive statement. I can be from the oldest family lineage, and you can be from the oldest family lineage, and everyone listening to this podcast can be all from the oldest family lineage in the world because we’re all descended from the earliest humans.

Lauren: This is a good point.

Gretchen: Psych!

Keep reading

Lingthusiasm Episode 88: No such thing as the oldest language

It’s easy to find claims that certain languages are old or even the oldest, but which one is actually true? Fortunately, there’s an easy (though unsatisfying) answer: none of them! Like how humans are all descended from other humans, even though some of us may have longer or shorter family trees found in written records, all human languages are shaped by contact with other languages. We don’t even know whether the oldest language(s) was/were spoken or signed, or even whether there was a singular common ancestor language or several.

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about what people mean when we talk about a language as being old. We talk about how classifying languages as old or classical is often a political or cultural decision, how the materials that are used to write a language influence whether it gets preserved (from clay to bark), and how people talk about creoles and signed languages in terms of oldness and newness. And finally, how a language doesn’t need to be justified in terms of its age for whether it’s interesting or worthy of respect.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

• Lingthusiasm episode ‘Tracing languages back before recorded history’
• 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding- Give me any word and I show you the Greek root’ on YouTube
• Glottolog entry for 'classical’
• Wikipedia entry for 'Complaint tablet to Ea-nāṣir’
• Wikipedia entry for 'Bath curse tablets’
• Wikipedia entry for 'Cuneiform’
• Wikipedia entry for 'Mesopotamian writing systems’
• Wikipedia entry for 'Home Sign’
• Lingthusiasm episode 'Villages, gifs, and children: Researching signed languages in real-world contexts with Lynn Hou’
• Wikipedia entry for 'Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language’
• Wikipedia entry for 'Kata Kolok’ (also known as Benkala Sign Language)
• True Biz by Sara Nović on Goodreads
• Gretchen’s thread about reading True Biz

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

—

Excerpt from Episode 7 of Lingthusiasm: Kids these days aren’t ruining language. Listen to the full episode, read the transcript, or check out the show notes for links to further reading.

See also the original Space Pidgin quote from Episode 1, or listen to the full episode.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Lingthusiasm Episode 7: Kids these days aren’t ruining language

There are some pretty funny quotes of historical people complaining about kids back then doing linguistic things that now seem totally unremarkable. So let’s cut to the chase and celebrate linguistic innovation while it’s happening. 

In episode 7 of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch explore how far back we can trace complaints about the language of Kids These Days, why linguistic discrimination is harmful, and why “be like”, hyperbolic “literally”, and other modern innovations are actually signs of something awesome. 

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here

Announcements:

We now have a Patreon to keep the podcast sustainable. You can support us there to listen to a bonus episode about swearing and future monthly bonus content, and help decide the topics of future episodes. Even if you’re not sure about pledging, do check out the Patreon goals to see some of our future plans and our video to see a totally realistic and not at all staged cameo from our producer.

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

• Socrates complaining about writing
• Old-timey peeves in a video by Arika Okrent
  
• Old-timey Latin errors
  
• “They barbarize them both and speak neither good french nor good english” (1440) 
• Resistance to language change is part of the social landscape
  
• Alexandra D’Arcy’s ‘Like’ project home page
• Interview with Alexandra D’Arcy on Lexicon Valley
  
• Like on All Things Linguistic
• Linguists are Hardcore (xkcd)
• If we’re going to be pedantic let’s go all the way
  
• Hyperbolic literally
• Student essays are getting longer 
  
• Writing skills and texting (xkcd)
  
• Bad reporting on internet slang (video)
• Grammaticality judgements and emoji
  
• Texts from my sister and grandfather (Superlinguo)
• Informal texting can be an indicator of strong language skills
  
• The Young Peevers (Allie Severin)
• Linguistic knowledge vs pedantry, a graph 
  
• Rob Drummond’s original graph tweet
  
• Literacy privilege
  

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our producer is Claire Gawne, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

Lingthusiasm Episode 4: Inside the Word of the Year vote

Every January, hundreds of linguists gather in a conference room somewhere in the US to discuss and vote for the Word of the Year. It’s the longest-running and most public WotY proceedings, and it’s part of the annual meeting of the American Dialect Society, a sister society of the Linguistic Society of America. Gretchen was there this year and the past few years, while Lauren has never been (but actively reads the #woty16 hashtag on twitter!). 

We discuss what the ADS Word of the Year vote feels like from inside the room where it happens, the categories and politics around selecting a WotY, look at the different offerings from other organizations that also name a WotY (Lauren is pretty pleased that Australian Word of the Year was “democracy sausage”, while Gretchen would like a Canadian Word of the Year for 2017, thank you), and end up wondering what even is a word.

We also respond to finally going live! Thanks for all your comments so far, and if you have a sec to rate us on iTunes or wherever else you’re listening, we’d super appreciate it.

Update: In the show we said that ‘Trump’ was selected as sign for the year for Netherlands Sign Language. It was actually the Swiss Deaf Association, in Switzerland.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

• Jane Solomon’s round-up of different WotYs (WsOTY?)
  
• Collins Dictionary WotY: Brexit
• Oxford Dictionaries WotY: post-truth
• Dictionary.com WotY: xenophobia
• Cambridge Dictionaries WotY: paranoid
• Macmillan Dictionary WotY: elite
• Merriam-Webster WotY: surreal
• Australian National Dictionary Centre WotY: democracy sausage
• The #woty16 hashtag on Twitter
• Lauren’s WOTY16 nominations on Twitter
  
• American Dialect Society WOTY nominees
• American Dialect Society WOTY winners
• Language Log on the ADS winner, dumpster fire
• Wired on “dumpster fire” as word of the year
• Mental Floss on the ADS winner
• Nancy Friedman on the ADS winner
• Swiss Deaf Association name TRUMP as their Sign of the Year
  
• What Counts as a Word?  Tom Scott video written with Gretchen

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

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Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our producer is Claire Gawne, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).