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

We all have freedom of expression, but what are its limits — social and legal? And how have governments tried to curtail it? We're talking through the implications of free speech with Dennis Baron. He...

16 Feb 20231h 42min

The American Dialect Society Word of the Year has been chosen — and it's a wonderful and terrible pick! Depending on who you're talking to. In this episode, we're talking about -USSY and all the words...

27 Jan 20231h 36min

In what was meant to be a casual chat, cognitive scientist Dr Mark Ellison answers galaxy-brain-level questions about how language works. Why aren't we more efficient with language? How do we know wh...

3 Jan 20231h 22min

We're counting down our Words of the Year, as voted by you! We're joined by our friends and patrons, and they've brought us some words we missed. And we'll go through all the Words of the Year from di...

20 Des 20221h 44min

ChatGPT has just landed. It can generate text that seems fluid, plausible, and (surprisingly) not total nonsense. It's got a lot of people wondering what's left for humans — and for the field of Natur...

13 Des 20221h 26min

Many expressions we use come from the nautical domain. But are they nautical? Are they really? We've got Chase Dalton from the US Naval History Podcast to shine a light on some of these expressions, a...

7 Des 20221h 27min

A chat with Dr Kelly Wright, who's been working on… well, really a lot. Kelly is at the juncture of a lot of areas we're keen on. Oxford's effort to document African-American English? She's been there...

20 Nov 20221h 56min

Just two words, but they do so much. But what exactly? Here to answer that question is Dr Isabelle Burke, who has studied yeah-no in depth. She's also going to help us with these Mailbag questions. W...

3 Nov 20221h 27min