66: ChatGPT Wrote This Episode (with Daan van Esch)

Noam Chomsky is one of the world's foremost thinkers, and his impact on linguistics is incalculable. Yet many people are only familiar with his political activism. What are his linguistic ideas, and w...

8 Jul 20242h 27min

A hundred episodes already? To celebrate, we're doing our favourite kind of episode: a Mailbag. Why is it a BLOW JOB when there's no blowing? Why JOB? And why is OFF often used in sexual expressions?...

19 Jun 20241h 27min

What's going on in Germany? How are people talking about gender in the German language, and how is freedom of expression being handled? We have a couple of German experts — linguist Rob Tegethoff and ...

11 Jun 20242h 8min

How much can we really know about the words we use? What are the facts behind some of the most tangled etymologies in English? And is our "Related or Not" game a good way of approaching word history? ...

20 Mai 20241h 43min

What's the difference between a KINK and a FETISH? Does it matter if you ASSUME or PRESUME? English is full of these close groups of words, and author Eli Burnstein has untangled many of them in his d...

28 Apr 20241h 38min

New York City is home to a lot of languages! Sometimes a sizeable language community can live on just a couple of floors of an apartment building. Dr Ross Perlin is working to find and promote minorit...

19 Apr 20241h 45min

Language authorities. Right-wing politicians. White supremacists and feminists. What do they have in common? They're all working together to fight gender-inclusive language. But why bring language int...

1 Apr 20241h 44min

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