This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Welcome back aboard the metaphor train!’. 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]

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

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about metaphors. But first, this episode was originally posted as a bonus episode in August of 2019.

Lauren: Ever since March 2017, we’ve been doing bonus episodes alongside main episodes every month for people who support us at the Lingthusiast level and above on Patreon. They’re our way of thanking people who support us on Patreon. As a show that doesn’t have sponsors or advertising, it’s your direct support that keeps the show going.

Gretchen: The good news is that we’re not part of some network that can just decide we’re not allowed to make the show anymore. When we first started the bonus episodes, they were a bit shorter than the main episodes because we wanted to make sure that it’d be sustainable to keep up a regular production schedule.

Lauren: You’d think after doing this show for eight years we would’ve made Lingthusiasm a lean and efficient production. And yet, it turns out, we still take a lot of time to put these episodes together because we just keep having higher standards.

Gretchen: Yeah. We definitely do a lot more research now because some of the early topics we covered were stuff that we already had a whole bunch of background on, and so we didn’t need to do quite as much digging into other sources and asking other people – our many linguist friends and colleagues – for their suggestions and input, which we do a lot more of now.

Lauren: This is also true for the bonuses. They went from being these 10-to-20 minutes on things like the linguistics of swearing or what we mean by the word “sandwich,” and then they very quickly – like, within about 12 months – became very similar to main episodes both in length and in structure and the amount of research that we do.

Gretchen: We do sometimes do a bonus episode that is a deep dive into a single research article, like the time we discussed Bill Labov sneaking a rabbit into a primary school.

Lauren: Hm, yes, classic.

Gretchen: Or the time we talked about the very classic salad-salad paper, which is about, you know when you have egg salad and potato salad and then “salad-salad.”

Lauren: We also have bonuses where we’ve done things like attempt to create a computer-generated transcript of Lingthusiasm with Janelle Shane, or we’ve done Q&A episodes. We have at least 90 bonus episodes available to you right now, which make a really fun catalogue of listening alongside the main episodes.

Gretchen: They can be a bit of a blast from the past if you go back to some of the very early ones. If you’re someone who’s always got a lot of podcast episodes on the back burner, and you don’t really need more listening material, but you’d just like to help us keep existing long into the future, we also really appreciate your support for whatever reason you wanna give it to us.

Lauren: We’re really proud of our bonus episodes, and we wanted to give them a bit more attention. We’ve taken this older bonus to share with you today.

Keep reading

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 this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about metaphors! It’s easy to think of literary comparisons like “my love is like a red, red rose” but metaphors are also far more common and almost unnoticed in regular conversation as well. For example, English speakers often talk about ideas as a journey (the metaphor train) or as if they’re visual - clear or murky or heavy or maybe fuzzy, but not as fluffy or feathery or metallic or polka-dotted, but other languages can use different metaphors. We also talk about the process of metaphor design, and how metaphors can help us understand - or misunderstand - abstract concepts like electricity or language learning.

Note that this episode originally aired as Bonus 30: Welcome aboard the metaphor train! We’ve added a few new things about metaphors and an updated announcements section to the top. We’re excited to share one of our favourite bonus episodes from Patreon with a broader audience, while at the same time giving everyone who works on the show a bit of a break.

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

Announcements:

In this month’s bonus episode we get Tom Scott’s Language Files team together on one call for the first and last time! We talk with host/writer Tom Scott, as well as researcher/writer Molly Ruhl and animator Will Marler, about their roles putting the videos togehter, Gretchen’s role in the brainstorming and fact-checking process, and what it’s like working on a big, multi-faceted project like the Language Files videos.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 90+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

• Original ‘Welcome aboard the metaphor train!’ episode on Patreon
• Because Internet
• Metaphor - etymology (Wikipedia)
• Conceptual metaphors 
• Gentner, D. (1983). Flowing waters or teeming crowds: Mental models of electricity. In D. Gentner, & A. L. Stevens (Eds.), Mental Models (pp. 99-129). Hillsdale, New Jersey: Erlbaum. (Gentner and Gentner 1983, 2014 reprint)
• German 'wichtig’  
• Michael Erard’s metaphor for language learning 
• FrameWorks Institute 
• Malaphors 
• Cakewalk 
• After recording this episode we researched more about cakewalks, which turned out to have their origin in 19th Century dance events held by African Americans. This article by Nicole Emmanuel goes into more on the history of cakewalk. 

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.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

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

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky 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, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. 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).