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 i...
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 ...
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 Y...
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 speci...
24 Dec 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 li...
7 Dec 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 m...
1 Dec 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 sush...
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 pr...
4 Nov 20231h 43min
