If you’d like to bring a future Lingthusiasm liveshow to a venue near you or an online event, please get in touch!

A Q&A liveshow about language and gender with Kirby Conrod, LingFest 2023

We’re doing another Lingthusiasm liveshow for 2023! The liveshow is will be on the Lingthusiasm Patron Discord on the 18th/19th of February (depending on your timezone).

We’ll be returning to one of our fan-favourite topics and answering your questions about language and gender with returning special guest Dr. Kirby Conrod, which you can ask in the AMA-questions channel on discord in advance, or bring along to the liveshow. You may remember Kirby from their very popular episode about the grammar of singular they, so we’re bringing them back for a more informal discussion which you can participate in! You can also share your examples and anecdotes about gender in various languages on the replies to this post or in the AMA-questions channel on discord, and we might mention some of them in the episode! 

The show will last a bit over half an hour, like a normal Lingthusiasm episode, and then we’ll open up the floor in the audio channel for the rest of the hour and we can chat a bit informally with Kirby and anyone who want to hang around, like if we were in the lobby after a physical show! Since Lauren is currently embarking on Longitudinal Language Acquisition Project #2, it’ll most likely be just Gretchen and Kirby. 

The event will be on the 18th of February at 4pm on the US East Coast, which is 1pm on the East Coast, 10pm in Berlin, 9pm in London, and 8am the next day in Melbourne. You can check out the time/date for the event in some major world timezones. (We’re sorry that the world is inconveniently round if this isn’t great for you.) For those who can’t make the live recording or want to listen again, we’ll have the edited audio and transcript as an upcoming bonus episode. (You’ll just obviously miss out on the “talking with other fans in the chat during the show” and “asking us questions for the Q&A section” parts of the experience - but feel free to go to the Lingthusiasm Discord at all hours of the day or night if you want to chat with other people who are enthusiastic about linguistics.)

The Lingthusiasm Discord is available for all patrons at the Ling-thuisiast tier and above — you can join the Lingthusiasm Patreon here. This is also the tier that has access to our monthly bonus episodes. If you haven’t joined the Discord yet, here are instructions for linking your Patreon and Discord accounts.

This Lingthusiasm liveshow is part of LingFest, a fringe-festival-like programme of independently organized online linguistics events running in February 2023.

Previous Liveshows

A Sweary Q&A Liveshow on the Lingthusiasm Discord, April 2022

We returned to one of our fan-favourite topics and answered patron questions about swearing. It was our first liveshow in the Lingthusiasm Patreon Discord, and we enjoyed chatting with patrons and reading the text chat as well.

Swear words often have an emotionally charged meaning, but that can’t be the only factor - after all, there are polite versions of some swear words, such as “excrement” instead of “shit”, and words that are treated as swears in some languages but not others, such as “cholera” in Polish and Dutch but not English. It kind of seems like a swear word is a word you have a memory of getting in trouble for…which both explains why swear words might not feel “real” in a language you learned later in life, and also why you can still feel weird about words kids are sometimes forbidden to say, like “shut up” and “liar”.

You can access the liveshow recording by becoming patron of Lingthusiasm.

The Listener Talks Back, Online Liveshow, LingFest 2021

In April 2021 we did our first virtual live show. We gave listeners the chance to talk back to us, and to each other, while they got enthusiastic about the linguistics of the words and sounds and gestures (and emoji!) that people make to show that they’re listening, such as “uh huh” and 👍 and nodding. The Lingthusiasm liveshow was part of LingFest, a fringe-festival-like programme of independently organized online linguistics events from April 24 to May 2, 2021.

You can access the liveshow recording by becoming patron of Lingthusiasm.

Australian liveshows, Melbourne and Sydney 2018

We recorded two liveshows in November 2018 in Melbourne and Sydney, Australia!

We were in Sydney on Monday, 12th November 2018 at Giant Dwarf theatre, with special guest Tiger Webb, the ABC’s language research specialist. We were also in Melbourne, Friday, 16th November 2018, at the State Library of Victoria with special guest Dr. Alice Gaby, Senior Lecturer in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University. 

2018 liveshow description:

How the internet is making English better

Have you ever wondered who’s responsible for the fact there’s no jellyfish emoji? Why does ending a text with a period make people think you’re mad at them? Why doesn’t “lol” mean “laughing out loud” anymore?  

Lingthusiasm is a podcast that is enthusiastic about linguistics. In this brand new Lingthusiasm liveshow, linguists Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about the ways in which the internet is breathing new life into the English language. Come along to this lively, humorous conversation about how we communicate (and miscommunicate) with each other these days. You’ll never look at your quickly dashed-off text messages the same way again.

Montreal, September 2017

We held our first liveshow on Saturday, September 23, 2017 in Montreal, Canada at Argo Bookshop. It was great to meet so many lingthusiasts at this sold-out show! 

2017 liveshow description: 

So, like, what’s up with, um, discourse particles, y'know? These seemingly meaningless words can tell us a lot about how language works.

Join Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne for a real-life version of the linguistics podcast listeners call “the right balance between rigour and accessibility… It feels like I’m listening in on a conversation between two of my most interesting friends.” Plus a Q&A for all your burning questions on internet linguistics, linguistics in the public sphere, Australian versus Canadian English, and more.