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 it follows the requirements of our language. She's studied Murrinhpatha, an Australian Aboriginal language, to see what its speakers do.
22 Feb 20241h 45min
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 and then jump into the future 100 years 1,000 years, and 10,000 years from now. What will we find?
31 Jan 20241h 33min
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 Year 2023 vote. And perhaps he can help forestall Hedvig’s planned mass human extinction. Also: World Endangered Writing Day is upon us! It’s a fantastic initiative, and author Tim Brookes of Endangered Alphabets is here to lay out the case for preserving writing systems.
21 Jan 20242h 5min
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 special interview with author, blogger, activist, and inventor of words Cory Doctorow.
24 Des 20231h 53min
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 linguists use. And we’ll try to get away from English once in a while.
7 Des 20231h 24min
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 man and woman as binary and obvious. But cognitive linguistics has a response, in the form of a new paper in Nature Human Behaviour. Are categories concrete, or are they mental, social, or something else? How do we categorise objects at all? Author Dr Andrew Perfors brings the science on this episode.
1 Des 20231h 42min
86: Mailbag of Dog Sushi (with Nicole Holliday)
We've got mail, and linguistic MVP Dr Nicole Holliday is here to help us sort some things out around here. And we chat about the state of lingcomm today. Why is dog sushi made FOR dogs, but duck sushi is made FROM ducks? What do we call it generally when companies try to improve their image by -washing? Is the term "MVP" becoming uncoupled from sports? Will vaping kill your vocal fry? Are shibboleths made on purpose, as a way of creating an in-group and an out-group? Plus our favourite game: Related or Not!
14 Nov 20231h 18min
85: The Dictionary People (with Sarah Ogilvie)
Who wrote the Oxford English Dictionary? Sure, James Murray had a very important role as editor, but a small army of volunteers submitted hundreds of thousands of words on slips of paper to get the project off the ground. What were their stories, and why did they have such a relentless sense of mission for the OED? Dr Sarah Ogilvie is sharing her research into their lives and times, and it's startling and wondrous. She's a lexicographer and author of The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary.
4 Nov 20231h 43min
