50: Employing Linguistics (with Anna Marie Trester and Ellen)

How do you define what blue is? What even IS colour? Turns out, the quest to define colours was happening along with a standardisation crisis and a dictionary crisis at the venerable Merriam-Webster. ...

13 Maalis 2h 21min

We all have an accent — or several! And we use them to communicate things about us, and highlight aspects of our identity. So what's going on with the accents we hear? Are we losing some accents, or a...

26 Helmi 2h 27min

We're talking to Dr Kelly Wright, friend of the show and data czar for the American Dialect Society. They run the biggest and most prestigious Word of the Year event, and she was there when the 2025 W...

17 Helmi 1h 29min

Video for this episode: https://youtu.be/Mqf05kN-TaI It's Word of the Year season, and we're counting down our Words of the Week of the Year! In the time-honoured tradition, we gathered them all up fr...

20 Joulu 20251h 31min

You know the story. The language you speak doesn't determine your savings. If your language has a future tense, there's no impact on the way you see or describe the future. Language and perception are...

6 Joulu 20252h 53min

We've asked linguists about how language began, but what would an evolutionary biologist tell you? Prof Madeleine Beekman says it's part of a complex web of body, brain, and community, and at the hear...

19 Marras 20252h 25min

Among so many great word games, crosswords still reign supreme. How have they survived — and even expanded — in our digital age? What goes into a good puzzle, and will computer techniques take over? D...

22 Loka 20252h 7min

The "Oh" show was an experimental linguistics performance lecture. It happened in June 2025 at Creative Time HQ in New York City. Actors, musicians, and audience came together (with at least one lingu...

10 Loka 20252h 15min