98: Origin Uncertain (with Anatoly Liberman)

When language was innovated, what happened next? How did it change our abilities — and our responsibilities — to each other? Dr Nick Enfield shares ideas from his new book, Consequences of Language. P...

3 Apr 20232h 12min

Here's an entire show, curated by one of our most prolific contributors — newly minted speechie PharaohKatt! She's got news. She's got words. She tries to stump us on Related or Not. She even teaches ...

25 Mars 20231h 37min

For this special live LingFest23 episode, we'll again be voting on tricky language issues, and our votes will be binding on all English users for all time because that's how language works. If you ha...

2 Mars 20231h 33min

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 Dec 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 Dec 20221h 26min