This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Word Magic’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about word magic. But first, people often ask us to recommend books about linguistics that don’t assume prior knowledge of linguistics, so we’ve come up with a list of 12 books plus a few bonuses, including both nonfiction as well as some fiction books with some linguistically interesting elements.

Gretchen: Social media’s in an interesting state of flux these days, which, as someone who studies online interaction, I find very interesting. However, not unrelated to that, we like to encourage people to sign up for emails from us in case everything else just melts down.

Lauren: You can get this list of 12 of our favourite linguistics books by signing up for our free email list by following the link in the show notes or going to lingthusiasm.com.

Gretchen: Our email subscribers also regularly get an email once a month when there’s a new episode of Lingthusiasm. This month you will see a link to our linguistics books list if you’re an existing subscriber. Otherwise, you will get the books list in the confirmation email after you sign up at any time even if you’re listening to this way in the future. Technology is very useful for things like this.

Lauren: Our most recent bonus episode was the 2022 listener survey results. If you’d like to know whether being aware of the kiki-bouba meme affects how people respond to the blobby shape and the pointy shape, as well as other results from our survey, you can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Gretchen: Speaking of books, I’ve read some linguistically interesting books lately!

Lauren: We realised that a common thread between some of the books we’ve been reading was this link of magic.

Gretchen: Specifically, I love the way that books about magic are also often really linguistically interesting because saying the word and casting the magic spell are so intertwined when it comes to our conception of how magic works. Actually, “magic spell” and “spelling a word” – etymologically, I’ve just look this up, and these have a common root.

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Lingthusiasm Episode 80: Word Magic

The 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 fictional magic spells that set things on fire or make them invisible, and in terms of the real-world linguistic concept of performative utterances, which let us agree to contracts, place bets, establish names, and otherwise alter the fabric of our relationships. 

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about word magic! We talk about how the word magic systems are set up differently in three recent fantasy books we like: Babel by R.F. Kuang, Carry On by Rainbow Rowell, and the Scholomance series by Naomi Novik. We also talk about linguistic performatives: why saying “I do” in a movie doesn’t make you married, aka Felicity Conditions, aka an excellent drag name; performativity as applied to gender (yup, Judith Butler got it from linguistics); the “hereby” test; and how technology changes what counts as a performative.  

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements: 
People often ask us to recommend interesting books about linguistics that don’t assume prior knowledge of linguistics, so we’ve come up with a list of 12 books that we personally recommend, including both nonfiction and fiction books with linguistically interesting elements! Get this list of our top 12 linguistics books by signing up for our free email list. Email subscribers get an email once a month when there’s a new episode of Lingthusiasm, and this month existing subscribers will see a link to our linguistics books list! If you find this any time in the future, you’ll get the books list in the confirmation email after you sign up. 

In this month’s bonus episode, we get excited about the results of the 2022 Lingthusiasm Survey. We talk about synesthesia fomo, whether people respond differently to kiki/bouba depending on whether they’re aware of them as a meme, complicating the “where is a frown?” map, the plural of emoji, and more! Plus, we mentioned swearing in this episode? Yeah, we’ve got bonus episodes about that too. 

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 70+ other bonus episodes, as well as access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds! Our patrons let us keep making the main episodes free for everyone and we really appreciate every level of support.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

• Sign up to our newsletter and get our list of 12 linguistically interesting books!
• Etymonline entry for ‘spell’
• Etymonline entry for ‘glamour’
• ‘Babel’ by R. F. Kuang on Goodreads
• ‘Carry On - The Simon Snow series’ by Rainbow Rowell on Goodreads
• ‘A Deadly Education - The Scholomance Series’ by Naomi Novik on Goodreads
• Lingthusiasm episode ‘Cool things about scales and implicature’
• Wikipedia entry for ‘performative utterances’
• Superlinguo post on ‘I do’ and performatives in weddings
• Government of Canada post on ‘hereby’
• All Things Linguistics post on performatives
• Judith Butler Wikipedia entry
• ‘Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity’ by Judith Butler on Goodreads
• ‘Universality and specificity in infant-directed speech: Pitch modifications as a function of infant age and sex in a tonal and non-tonal language’ by C. Kitamura et al
• Tambiah 1968 on word magic

Lingthusiasm bonus episodes on swearing:

• ‘Real swear words vs pseudo swears’
• ‘The grammar of swearing’
• ‘What makes a swear word feel sweary? A &⩐#⦫& Liveshow’

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

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Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, and our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).