All Things Linguistic: Recent Episodes
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A blog about all things linguistic by Gretchen McCulloch.
I cohost Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics.
I'm the author of Because Internet, a book about internet language!
lingthusiasm:Lingthusiasm Episode 97: OooOooh~~ our possession episode oOooOOoohh 👻Eye of newt and toe of frog,Wool of bat and tongue of dog…In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren...
lingthusiasm:Lingthusiasm Episode 96: Welcome back aboard the metaphor train!We’re taking you on a journey to new linguistic destinations, so come along for the ride and don’t forget to hold on! In...
lingthusiasm:95: Lo! An undetached collection of meaning-parts!Imagine you’re in a field with someone whose language you don’t speak. A rabbit scurries by. The other person says “Gavagai!” You...
dashboarddiaries:Every Tumblr user knows that we Tumblrinas use language a little differently. We’re not like other social media users. We’re weird. We’re weirdos. And this month, we have actual...
lingthusiasm:Lingthusiasm Episode 94: The perfectly imperfect aspect episodeWhen we’re talking about an activity – say, throwing teacups in a lake – we often want to know not just when the action...
lingthusiasm:Episode 93: How nonbinary and binary people talk - Interview with Jacq JonesThere are many ways that people perform gender, from clothing and hairstyle to how we talk or carry ourselves....
lingthusiasm:Lingthusiasm Episode 92: Brunch, gonna, and fozzle - The smooshing episodeSometimes two words are smooshed together in a single act of creativity to fill a lexical gap, like making...
lingthusiasm:Lingthusiasm Episode 89: Connecting with oral cultureFor tens of thousands of years, humans have transmitted long and intricate stories to each other, which we learned directly from...
lingthusiasm:Lingthusiasm Episode 88: No such thing as the oldest languageIt’s easy to find claims that certain languages are old or even the oldest, but which one is actually true? Fortunately,...
lingthusiasm:Lingthusiasm Episode 87: If I were an irrealis episodeLanguage lets us talk about things that aren’t, strictly speaking, entirely real. Sometimes that’s an imaginative object (is a toy...
lingthusiasm:Episode 86: Revival, reggaeton, and rejecting unicorns - Basque interview with Itxaso RodrĂguez-OrdóñezBasque is a language of Europe which is unrelated to the Indo-European languages...
lingthusiasm:Episode 85: Ergativity delights us When you have a sentence like “I visit them”, the word order and the shape of the words tell you that it means something different from “they visit me”....
lingthusiasm:Episode 84: Look, it’s deixis, an episode about pointing!Pointing creates an invisible line between a part of your body and the thing you’re pointing at. Humans are really good at...
lingthusiasm:Young kids growing up in Guatemala often learn Q’anjob’al, Kaq’chikel, or another Mayan language from their families and communities. But they don’t live next to the kinds of major...
lingthusiasm:Episode 82: Frogs, pears, and more staples from linguistics example sentencesLinguists are often interested in comparing several languages or dialects. To make this easier, it’s useful to...
lingthusiasm:Episode 81: The verbs had been being helped by auxiliariesIn the sentence “the horse has eaten an apple”, what is the word “has” doing? It’s not expressing ownership of something, like...
lingthusiasm:Episode 80: Word MagicThe magical kind of spell and the written kind of spell are historically linked. This reflects how saying a word can change the state of the world, both in terms of...
lingthusiasm:Episode 79: Tone and Intonation? Tone and Intonation!Spoken languages can change the pitch or melody of words to convey several different kinds of information. When the pitch affects...
lingthusiasm:Episode 76: Where language names come from and why they changeLanguage names come from many sources. Sometimes they’re related to a geographical feature or name of a group of people....
lingthusiasm:Singapore is a small city-state nation with four official languages: English, Mandarin, Tamil, and Malay. Most Singaporeans can also speak a local hybrid variety known as Singlish,...
lingthusiasm:Episode 75: Love and fury at the linguistics of emotionsEmotions are a universal part of the human experience, but the specific ways we express them are mediated through language. For...
lingthusiasm:Episode 74: Who questions the questions?We use questions to ask people for information (who’s there?), but we can also use them to make a polite request (could you pass me that?), to...
lingthusiasm:Episode 73: The linguistic map is not the linguistic territoryMaps of languages of the world are fun to look at, but they’re also often suspiciously precise: a suspiciously round number...
lingthusiasm:Episode 72: What If Linguistics - Absurd hypothetical questions with Randall Munroe of xkcdWhat’s the “it’s” in “it’s three pm and hot”? How do you write a cough in the International...
lingthusiasm:Episode 71: Various vocal fold vibesPartway down your throat are two flaps of muscle. When you breathe normally, you pull the flaps away to the sides, and air comes out silently. But if...
lingthusiasm:Episode 70: Language in the brain - Interview with Ev FedorenkoYour brain is where language - and all of your other thinking - happens. In order to figure out how language fits in among...
lingthusiasm:Episode 69: What we can, must, and should say about modalsSometimes, we use language to make definite statements about how the world is. Other times, we get more hypothetical, and talk...
lingthusiasm:Episode 68: Tea and skyscrapers - When words get borrowed across languagesWhen societies of humans come into contact, they’ll often pick up words from each other. When this is happening...
lingthusiasm:Episode 67: What it means for a language to be officialThe Rosetta Stone is famous as an inscription that let us read Egyptian hieroglyphs again, but it was created in the first place as...
lingthusiasm:Episode 66: Word order, we loveLet’s say we have the set of words “Lauren”, “Gretchen”, and “visits” and we want to make them into a sentence. The way that we combine these words is...
lingthusiasm:Episode 65: Knowledge is power, copulas are funIt was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The pen is mightier than the sword. Knowledge is power, France is bacon. These, ahem,...
lingthusiasm:Episode 64: Making speech visible with spectrogramsIf you hear someone saying /sss/ and /fff/, it’s hard to hear those as anything other than, well, S and F. This is very convenient for...
lingthusiasm:Episode 63: Where to get your English etymologiesWhen you look at a series of words that sorta sound like each other, such as pesto, paste, and pasta, it’s easy to start wondering if...
lingthusiasm:Episode 62: Cool things about scales and implicatureWe can plot the words we use to describe temperature on a scale: cold, cool, warm, hot. It’s not as precise as a temperature scale ...
lingthusiasm:Episode 61: Corpus linguistics and consent - Interview with Kat GuptaIf you want to know what a particular person, era, or society thinks about a given topic, you might want to read what...
lingthusiasm:Lingthusiasm Episode 60: That’s the kind of episode it’s – cliticsHere’s a completely normal and unremarkable sentence. Let’s imagine we have two different coloured pens, and we’re going...
lingthusiasm:Lingthusiasm Episode 59: Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Theory of MindLet’s say I show you and our friend Gavagai a box of chocolates, and then Gav leaves the room, and I show you...
lingthusiasm:Lingthusiasm Episode 58: A Fun-Filled Fricative Field Trip What do the sounds fffff, vvvv, ssss, and zzzz all have in common? They’re all produced by creating a sort of friction in your...
lingthusiasm:Lingthusiasm Episode 57: Making machines learn Fon and other African languages - Interview with MasakhaneWhen you see something on social media in a language you don’t read, it’s really...
lingthusiasm:Lingthusiasm Episode 56: Not NOT a negation episode“I don’t have a pet dinosaur.” This sentence is, we assume, true for everyone listening to this episode (if it isn’t, uh, tell us your...
lingthusiasm:Lingthusiasm Episode 55: R and R-like sounds - RhoticityThe letter R is just one symbol, but it can represent a whole family of sounds. In various languages, R can be made in various...
lingthusiasm:Lingthusiasm Episode 54: How linguists figure out the grammar of a languageIf you go to the linguistics section of a big library, you may find some shelves containing thick, dusty...
lingthusiasm:Lingthusiasm Episode 53: Listen to the imperatives episode!When we tell you, “stay lingthusiastic!” at the end of every episode, we’re using a grammatical feature known as the imperative....
lingthusiasm:Lingthusiasm Episode 52: Writing is a technologyThere’s no known human society without language, whether spoken or signed or both, but writing is a different story. Writing is a...
lingthusiasm:Lingthusiasm Episode 51: Small talk, big deal “Cold enough for ya?” “Nice weather for ducks.” Small talk is a valuable piece of our social interactions – it can be a way of having a...
lingthusiasm:Lingthusiasm Episode 50: Climbing the sonority mountain from A to P“Blick” is not a word of English. But it sounds like it could be, if someone told you a meaning for it. “Bnick” contains...
lingthusiasm: Lingthusiasm Episode 49: How translators approach a text Before even starting to translate a work, a translator needs to make several important macro-level decisions, such as whether to...
lingthusiasm: Lingthusiasm Episode 48: Who you are in high school, linguistically speaking - Interview with Shivonne Gates High school is a time when people really notice small social details, such as...
lingthusiasm: Lingthusiasm Episode 47: The happy fun big adjective episode Adjectives: they’re big, they’re fun, they’re…maybe non-existent? In English, we have a fairly straightforward category of...
lingthusiasm: Lingthusiasm Episode 46: Hey, no problem, bye! The social dance of phatics How are you? Thanks, no problem. Stock, ritualistic social phrases like these, which are used more to indicate...
lingthusiasm: Lingthusiasm Episode 45: Tracing languages back before recorded history Language is much older than writing. But audio and visual cues from sounds and signs don’t leave physical traces...
lingthusiasm: Lingthusiasm Episode 44: Schwa, the most versatile English vowel The words about, broken, council, potato, and support have something in common – they all contain the same sound, even...
lingthusiasm: Lingthusiasm Episode 43: The grammar of singular they - Interview with Kirby Conrod  Using “they” to refer to a single person is about as old as using “you” to refer to a single...
lingthusiasm: Lingthusiasm Episode 42: What makes a language “easy”? It’s a hard question Asking which language is the hardest to learn is like asking where the furthest place is – it all depends on...
lingthusiasm: Lingthusiasm Episode 41: This time it gets tense - The grammar of time How do languages talk about the time when something happens? Of course, we can use words like “yesterday”, “on...
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Lingthusiasm Episode 40: Making machines learn language - Interview with Janelle Shane If you feed a computer enough ice cream flavours or pictures annotated with whether...