80: Mailbag of TLAs

Listeners have once again sent us some great questions, and we have answers!

  • Why do we TALK SHIT and not SPEAK SHIT?
  • Do we KEEP OUT, or STAY OUT?
  • Why are so many acronyms three letters long?
  • How do we break young people out of the prescriptivist mindset?
  • Isn't "folk etymology" just… etymology?
  • Can you think of any anagrams that are also synonyms?

Plus our favourite game, Related or Not!

Episoder(100)

94: Mailbag of Sextillion and Three

94: Mailbag of Sextillion and Three

Dr Kelly Wright is helping us understand the link between public health and language maintenance. And she's helping us with our voluminous Mailbag! Why can you have a TRIFECTA, but not any other numb...

18 Mar 20241h 16min

93: Stop! Grammar Time (live with Ellen Jovin and friends)

93: Stop! Grammar Time (live with Ellen Jovin and friends)

In honour of Grammar Day (4 March), we are joined live by special guest Ellen Jovin, who regularly dispenses grammar advice and wisdom from the Grammar Table. Now she's testing our grammatical mettle ...

2 Mar 20241h 28min

92: In the First 600 Milliseconds (with Rachel Nordlinger)

92: In the First 600 Milliseconds (with Rachel Nordlinger)

What are your eyes doing when you describe a scene? It may depend on your language.  New research from Dr Rachel Nordlinger and team shows that we do a lot of planning and scanning very quickly, and i...

22 Feb 20241h 45min

91: Linguistic Time Machine, part 2: Prehistory

91: Linguistic Time Machine, part 2: Prehistory

We're climbing back into the linguistic time machine and taking a look at language in the long view. We'll find out what language was like 100,000 years ago 1 million years ago 10 million years ago ...

31 Jan 20241h 33min

90: Enpoopification (with Grant Barrett and Tim Brookes)

90: Enpoopification (with Grant Barrett and Tim Brookes)

We're talking words, and no one has a way with words like Grant Barrett. He's here to tell us what it's like at Dictionary.com, and what went down at the annual American Dialect Society Words of the Y...

21 Jan 20242h 5min

89: Words of the Week of the Year 2023 (with Cory Doctorow and friends)

89: Words of the Week of the Year 2023 (with Cory Doctorow and friends)

The public has voted, and a winner has been decided! We're looking all the words chosen by the various dictionary bodies, and counting down our Words of the Week of the Year.  And there's a very speci...

24 Des 20231h 53min

88: Linguistic Time Machine, part 1: History

88: Linguistic Time Machine, part 1: History

What was language like a year ago? Ten years ago? A hundred? What about before that? We're climbing into the Linguistic Time Machine and finding out. Along the way, we'll explain the resources that li...

7 Des 20231h 24min

87: Trans-Inclusive (with Andrew Perfors)

87: Trans-Inclusive (with Andrew Perfors)

What is a woman? Or a man? Or a chair, or a sandwich? Or anything, really? "Gender critical" people are making language into a vector to attack the rights of trans people. They treat categories like m...

1 Des 20231h 42min

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