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 number -FECTA?
  • Why does a SEXTILLION (with a prefix meaning six) have seven chunks of zeros?
  • What do CHOPSTICKS have to do with chopping?
  • And what's the -ER in words like RUBBER, AFTER, and TEMPER?

Episoder(100)

125: Friends With Words (live with Martha Barnette and friends)

125: Friends With Words (live with Martha Barnette and friends)

Martha Barnette is one half of the linguistics podcast A Way With Words, and author of the new book Friends With Words: Adventures in Languageland. Her lifelong love of language has led her through so...

12 Sep 20251h 31min

124: Algospeak (with Adam Aleksic)

124: Algospeak (with Adam Aleksic)

Creators have to be mindful of what to say and what not to say in their content. This affects the language we're exposed to — and what we say IRL. But it's part of an old process. Popular LingToker Ad...

23 Aug 20251h 49min

123: Conscious Language (with Karen Yin)

123: Conscious Language (with Karen Yin)

We've all seen style guides that tell us what to say and what not to say. Has a style guide ever asked you what you wanted to say? Or challenged you to examine your thinking? This one does. It's the C...

3 Aug 20251h 54min

122: The Interaction Engine (with Stephen Levinson)

122: The Interaction Engine (with Stephen Levinson)

How did language start? What do all languages have in common? How does language really work? Many answers have been posed to these questions, but one thing is for sure: interaction is the combustion c...

12 Jul 202555min

121: Learning from LLMs (with Adele Goldberg)

121: Learning from LLMs (with Adele Goldberg)

How do large language models (LLMs) do their thing, and it is anything like how we do our thing? What can we learn about human language from this software? The answer might involve constructions — pai...

29 Jun 20252h 22min

120: Gesture! ✨👐✨ (with Lauren Gawne)

120: Gesture! ✨👐✨ (with Lauren Gawne)

Gesture is everywhere. We wave our hands when we talk, even if we're alone. Signed languages are, of course, full languages that use gesture. And it could even be argued that emoji are the online equi...

10 Jun 20251h 54min

119: Eurovision Goes to Uni (with Paulette van der Voet and Solveig Bollig)

119: Eurovision Goes to Uni (with Paulette van der Voet and Solveig Bollig)

It's Eurovision season! We love to talk about what we can learn about language from this international song contest, but even we didn't realise that there was so much to learn. Language choice, langua...

18 Mai 20252h 15min

118: The A.I. Con (with Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna)

118: The A.I. Con (with Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna)

Artificial intelligence (so-called) is typified by its boom and bust cycles, and we're in a boom now. But as more and more money pours in with decreasing returns, we're going to see a shakeout, and hy...

12 Mai 202551min

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