Transcript Episode 106: Is a hotdog a sandwich? The problem with definitions

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Is a hotdog a sandwich? The problem with definitions’. 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 “What even is a sandwich, and how does meaning even work anyway?”

Gretchen: This episode totally blew our minds when we were researching the classic internet debate.

Lauren: But first, this episode was originally posted as our 9th bonus episode in November 2017.

Gretchen: Oh my gosh, it was from our first year. We have been doing monthly bonus episodes since 2017 for people who support us at the Ling-thusiast level or above. The support of patrons is literally the way the show keeps running and helps us not have to think about running ads or exposing you to other things you don’t wanna listen to.

Lauren: We now have over 100 bonus episodes in the Patreon bonus feed for you to listen to right now and new ones that come out every month.

Gretchen: Our bonus episodes are often a little bit more playful and less likely to be used in a linguistics classroom, like our several swearing bonus episodes.

Lauren: Or the whole bonus episode on the linguistics of kissing.

Gretchen: But overall, we have as much fun with bonus episodes as our mains. We love them so much, we wanted to share one from the archive on the main feed.

Lauren: It also gives us a chance to catch a bit of a break between preparing new episodes.

Gretchen: This was something we did last year as well, and it really helps us during a busy period.

Lauren: Indeed, there’re multiple reasons to love this tradition that we’ve started. We’re gonna play the original episode. We are gonna skip the intro with updates from 2017.

Gretchen: Ooo, what was the hot news in 2017?

Lauren: We were heading towards full-length bonus episodes – a thing we have been doing for almost eight years now.

Gretchen: I had almost forgotten that these bonus episodes weren’t full length to start.

Lauren: We literally didn’t have the money to pay Claire to edit full-length bonuses for us a year into making the show.

Gretchen: That explains why this was only about 20 minutes of tape. We were also celebrating our first official anniversary month.

Lauren: Of course, because it was and is November, our anniversary. That’s so lovely.

Gretchen: We’re gonna revisit an episode from when we were a year into the show. We’ll listen along with you. And then I look forward to chatting with you at the end about other things that we’ve observed about this topic.

Lauren: Our most recent bonus episode was all about linguistics landscapes and the way language is visible or not in the spaces around us.

Gretchen: Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to access this and many other bonus episodes including the original version of this episode with the announcements still intact.

[Music]

Lauren: We ran a poll with a very simple question: “Which of the following 20 items is a sandwich?”

Gretchen: If any!

Lauren: And people had opinions, I think it’s fair to say.

Gretchen: Yeah. This was, I think, maybe one of our more participated polls.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Definitely got the most comments because we didn’t manage to include a “none of the above” option because we ran up the max on the Patreon polls. We’re not gonna list all 20, because I assume you can see those, but I think of the most “sandwich” things, people were kind of most content to consider a hamburger a sandwich, maybe; bagel and cream cheese a sandwich; and an ice cream sandwich a sandwich. I mean. it’s got “sandwich” in the name! Like, it has to be a sandwich, right?

Lauren: Yeah. Things like burritos, pop-tarts, ravioli, apple pie didn’t really rate very highly.

Gretchen: Macarons, I don’t know – they seem very sandwich-y to me. They’ve got like, things on either side, and like a filling, and same with Oreos, like, they’re sandwich cookies. That’s their genre of cookie.

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Lingthusiasm Episode 106: Is a hotdog a sandwich? The problem with definitions

We asked you if a burrito was a sandwich, and you said ‘no’. We asked you if ravioli was a sandwich and you said 'heck no’. We asked you if an ice cream sandwich was a sandwich and things…started to get a little murky. This isn’t just a sandwich problem: you can also have similar arguments about what counts as a cup, a bird, a fish, furniture, art, and more!

So wait…does any word mean anything anymore? Have we just broken language?? It’s okay, linguistics has a solution!

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about why deciding what’s in and what’s out of the definition of a word is so dang tricky, why people love to argue about it, and how prototype theory solves all the “is X a Y” arguments once and for all.

Note that this episode originally aired as Bonus 9: Is X a sandwich? Solving the word-meaning argument once and for all. We’ve added an updated announcements section to the top and a few new things about prototypes and meaning to the end. 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 enthusiastic about fictional gestures with Eric Molinsky, host of Imaginary Worlds, a podcast about sci-fi, fantasy and other genres of speculative fiction! We talk about the Vulcan salute from Star Trek, the Wakanda Forever salute from Black Panther, and the three-finger Hunger Games salute, and how all three have crossed over with additional symbolism into the real world. We also talk about gestures that have crossed over in the other direction, from the real-world origins of the Vulcan salute in a Jewish blessing, the two-finger blessing in the Foundation tv series from classical Latin and Greek oratory via Christian traditions, as well as religious gesture in the Penric and Desdemona series, smiles and shrugs in A Memory Called Empire, and more.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 100+ 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 episode on Patreon: ’Is X a sandwich? Solving the word-meaning argument once and for all’
Lingthusiasm bonus episode ’Liveshow Q and eh’
Wikipedia entry for 'Prototype Theory’
'Memes in Digital Culture’ by Limor Shifman
Ann Leckie on Fangirl Happy Hour
Jaffa cake: cake or biscuit? (UK)
Crostini: bread or biscuit? (Aus)
Tomato: fruit or vegetable?
cup vs. bowl vs. vase
cup vs. mug
No Such Thing as a Fish (podcast)
Wikipedia entry for 'Harlem Shake’
Wikipedia entry for 'Numa Numa’
Wikipedia entry for ’Gangnam Style’
Lingthusiasm episode ’Translating the untranslatable’

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, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. 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).

Transcript Episode 95: Lo! An undetached collection of meaning-parts!

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Lo! An undetached collection of meaning-parts!’. 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 our default assumptions for learning new words – whether as kids, in a classroom, or while travelling. But first, we have new merch.

Gretchen: We have three new designs for merch. First off, we have some t-shirts, stickers, and badges, buttons, pins, whatever you call them, that say, “Ask me about linguistics.” They look like one of those classic, red “Hello, my name is” stickers only with “linguistics” instead of you name for those times when you’re maybe at a conference or an event or going about your life, and you want people to know that they can skip the small talk with you and talk directly about linguistics with you.

Lauren: We also have t-shirts that say, “More people have read the text on this shirt than I have,” which is not untrue.

Gretchen: This is a classic kind of sentence in linguistics more commonly found as “More people have been to Russia than I have,” but that was less funny and self-referential on a t-shirt. These are called the “comparative illusion,” which is when the first time you read that sentence with the comparative in it – “More people have been to Russia than I have” – you’re like, “Yeah, that makes sense. Wait. Hang on. What does that even mean?” That’s the illusion part. The illusion is that it makes sense. If you think about it longer, then it doesn’t make sense.

Lauren: It doesn’t make sense.

Gretchen: If you wear a shirt that says this – or a hat, or you carry around a mug or a sticker or a tote bag – that says these things with, of course, the word “shirt” swapped out for the relevant object – because we know how to do that – then people might do a double-take when they see it. You can confuse people, which sounds fun.

Lauren: This t-shirt is available in an old school typewriter-looking font. All of our shirt options are there on Redbubble with a range of different cuts and colours. We have relaxed-fitted classic t-shirts as well as hoodies, zip hoodies, and tank tops.

Gretchen: We have a secret third design, which we will be talking about later this episode – dun dun dun.

Lauren: Mm, suspense and mysteries.

Gretchen: Our most recent bonus episode is about the word “do” in English, and why it’s weird compared to basically every other language, and how this only started happening in the past few hundred years.

Lauren: To listen to this and many other bonus episodes, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

Gretchen: Plus, patrons got to find out about this new merch a few weeks ago. If you become a patron now, you’ll be the first to find out about future new merch and other behind-the-scenes updates. And you get to hang out on the Lingthusiasm Discord server to chat with other linguistics fans. Plus, of course, getting a whole bunch of bonus episodes and just helping us continue making the show for you.

[Music]

Lauren: I want you to imagine you’re visiting a place where you don’t speak the language. You’re standing in a field with one of your new friends. It’s a lovely day. You’re enjoying the scenery. And a rabbit scurries by. That person you’re standing with says, “Gavagai.” What do you think they are referring to?

Gretchen: I wanna say that they’re talking about the rabbit. This is a word that means “rabbit,” probably, in whatever that language is.

Lauren: Possibly.

Gretchen: But, in principle, it could mean a lot of other things as well. It could mean “scurrying” or “creature,” “animal,” or, as the philosopher V. W. O. Quine said, “Lo, un-detached rabbit parts,” which is just a very bizarre mental image.

Lauren: This is indeed a classic linguistic thought experiment from the philosopher V. W. O. Quine.

Gretchen: It’s also found in philosophy of language as well as linguistics. The philosophers sometimes also talk about this anecdote from a more philosophical perspective. The thing that’s exciting to me about it as a linguist is that it’s this pretty good approximation and distillation of the kind of challenge that you have when you’re trying to figure out some words in another language, and you don’t have someone or a book that can do some translation for you. You’re just like, “Well, here’s this word that’s been said in this context. What do I think it refers to?”

Lauren: I also appreciate how this one little thought experiment, interactional moment, set Quine on a philosophical train of thought that took up an entire book. Quine’s 1960 book Word and Object takes this thought experiment as its starting point to tease apart a lot of the issues around how we make and share meaning, especially across languages.

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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 probably assumed they meant “rabbit” but they could have meant something else, like “scurrying” or even “lo! an undetatched rabbit-part!”

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about how we manage to understand each other when we’re learning new words, inspired by the famous “Gavagai” thought experiment from the philosopher of language WVO Quine. We talk about how children have a whole object assumption when learning language, and how linguists go about learning languages that are new to them through either translating standardized cross-linguistic wordlists known as Swadesh lists or staying monolingual and acting out concepts. We also talk about when our baseline assumptions are challenged, such as in categorizing kangaroos and wallabies by their hopping rather than their shape, and when useful folk categories, like “trees” and “fish” don’t line up with evolutionary taxonomies.

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

Announcements:
We have new Lingthusiasm merch!

Imagine you’re in a field with someone whose language you don’t speak. A rabbit scurries by. The other person says “Gavagai!” You probably assumed they meant “rabbit” but they could have meant something else, like “scurrying” or even “lo! an undetached rabbit-part!” Inspired by the famous Gavagai thought experiment, these items feature a running rabbit and the caption “lo, an undetached rabbit-part!” in a woodblock engraving crossed with vaporwave style in magenta, indigo, teal, cream, and black/white on shirts, scarves, and more!

“More people have been to Russia than I have” is a sentence that at first seems fine, but then gets weirder and weirder the more you read it. Inspired by these Escher sentences, we’ve made self-referential shirts saying “More people have read the text on this shirt than I have” (also available on tote bags, mugs, and hats), so you can wear them in old-time typewriter font and see who does a double take.

Finally, we’ve made a design that simply says “Ask me about linguistics” in a style that looks like a classic “Hello, my name is…” sticker, and you can put it on stickers and buttons and shirts and assorted other portable items for when you want to skip the small talk and go right to a topic you’re excited about.

Also, there are lots of other designs of Lingthusiasm merch, and we love to see your photos of it! Feel free to tag us @lingthusiasm on social media so we can see it out in the world.

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about the word “do”! We talk about the various functions of “do” as illustrated by lyrics from ABBA and other pop songs, what makes the word “do” so unique in English compared to other languages, and the drama of how “do” caught on and then almost got driven out again

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 80+ 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:

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).

Lingthusiasm Episode 68: Tea and skyscrapers - When words get borrowed across languages

When societies of humans come into contact, they’ll often pick up words from each other. When this is happening actively in the minds of multilingual people, it gets called codeswitching; when it happened long before anyone alive can remember, it’s more likely to get called etymology. But either way, this whole spectrum is a kind of borrowing.

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about borrowing and loanwords. There are lots of different trajectories that words take when we move them around from language to language, including words that are associated with particular domains, like tea and books, words that shift meaning when they language hop, like “gymnasium” and “babyfoot”, words that get translated piece by piece, like “gratte-ciel” (skyscraper) and “fernseher” (television), and words that end up duplicating the same meaning (or is it…?) in multiple languages, like “naan bread” and “Pendle hill”. We also talk about the tricky question of how closely to adapt or preserve a borrowed word, depending on your goals and the circumstances.

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

Announcements:

The LingComm grants have been announced! Thank you so much to everyone who made this possible, and congratulations to all our grantees. Go check out their projects as they keep rolling out over the rest of this year for a little more fun linguistics content in your life.

In this month’s bonus episode, originally recorded live through the Lingthusiasm Discord, we get enthusiastic about your sweary questions! We talk about why it’s so hard to translate swears in a way that feels satisfying, how swears and other taboo words participate in the Euphemism Cycle, a very ambitious idea for cataloging swear words in various languages, and more.

Join us on Patreon to listen to this and 60+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can play and discuss word games and puzzles with other language nerds!

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

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 advertising-free by supporting our Patreon. Being a patron gives you access to bonus content, our Discord server, and other perks.

Lingthusiasm is on Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter.

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, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our production manager is Liz McCullough. 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).

Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 25: Every word is a real word

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 25: Every word is a real word. 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 25 show notes page.

[Music]

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

Gretchen: And I’m Gretchen McCulloch, and today we’re getting enthusiastic about how every word is a real word. But first, it’s almost our second anniversary! Whoa!

Lauren: Yay! Next month is our anniversary month. We like celebrating in November. It will be episode number 26. We can do maths, don’t worry. It’s not episode 24 because we launched with several episodes at once, but we are very excited about our anniversary month.

Gretchen: Yes! And on our first anniversary, we celebrated by asking you to help more people find the show, and you definitely came through. We ended up thanking almost 100 people in our anniversary post for all your recommendations on social media. And we saw a big bump in listeners, which kept going afterwards and even until now. And so, this year we want to see if we can thank 200 of you for recommending Lingthusiasm to people in your lives.

Lauren: That means we need your help. So if you know anyone who could use a little bit more language nerdery in their lives, this is the month to share the show on social media. Email people, text them, send it to your group chat, or just leave a well-placed sticky note for the person in the office. Writing a review or even just leaving a rating on whatever podcast app you use really helps us so much. It helps other people find the show, and it helps encourage other people to click Play if they happen to come across us.

Gretchen: And it helps your friends who need more interesting things to listen to, who want more fun linguistics in their lives. It helps them find something that they’re going to enjoy. If you send us your reviews or tag us in your post on social media, we would love to see them, and we’ll be thanking everybody that we know about in our anniversary blog post on lingthusiasm.com. We’ll pick a couple reviews to feature there.

Lauren: If you would prefer to recommend us privately, please send us an email with the story of how you recommended us so that we can add you to the thank you post.

Gretchen: Or feel free to just recommend us and not tell us about it. You can still get the warm, fuzzy feeling. Plus you’ll get to feel a warm, fuzzy glow of satisfaction both when you recommend us and when we thank you all together at the end. Even if you don’t tell us about it, you can still feel that warm fuzzy feeling.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is an independent show, but we are lucky to have a massive marketing department, which is all of you.

Gretchen: Aww!

Lauren: And we really appreciate when you take the opportunity to share Lingthusiasm with other people.

Gretchen: If everybody introduced the show to just one new listener, our audience would double.

Lauren: So this month, take the chance to recommend us or review us.

Gretchen: We really appreciate it, and so do the people who are about to discover the show because of you.

We also have another way to discover the show, which is two live shows! In addition to the Melbourne live show, which is going to be on the 16th of November, we also added a show in Sydney on the 12th of November, so you can go to either of those shows. Just go to Lingthusiasm.com, look for the link that says Live Show to get tickets.

Lauren: We’re really excited to be joined by Tiger Webb in Sydney, who is the ABC’s language researcher. Super excited to also be joined by Alice Gaby for our Melbourne show, who’s a researcher at Monash. And we’re also thrilled that we will have both shows fully Auslan-interpreted as well.

Gretchen: Yeah, so the topic of those shows is how the internet is making English better. We’re going to be talking about a few bits that are coming out from my book and from other things on the internet, and through texting, and emoji, and everything. There’s no knowledge of linguistics or of previous Lingthusiasm episodes assumed, so feel free to bring your friends even if they have never listened to an episode, because then they’ll have this whole back catalogue to discover. We’re really looking forward to seeing you there and meeting people in real life after the show!

Lauren: Other quick exciting news, we have new merchandise, including adorable space babies, t-shirts that say, “I want to be the English schwa. It’s never stressed.” We also have baby clothes that say, “Not judging your grammar, just acquiring it,” as well as new IPA scarf colours and now, IPA ties.

Gretchen: So you can get the International Phonetic Alphabet on various items as well as the clever baby riff on “not judging a grammar, just analysing it.” The baby is just acquiring it; I love this one so much. The space babies are so cute. Everything’s coming up babies in the merch these days –

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: – including this month’s bonus topic, which is about multilingual babies and raising kids speaking multiple languages. For this and 19 other bonus episodes – there are so many bonus episodes now! It’s like twice as much Lingthusiasm. You can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm and support the show and listen to all the bonus episodes.

Lauren: And while everything’s coming up babies, probably about time I let everyone know I’m going to be having a baby in January.

Gretchen: What? What a coincidence! It actually really is a coincidence.

Lauren: That’s actually quite the coincidence that – it’s just baby month here at Lingthusiasm. We are definitely going to keep running all the way through December, January, February, and beyond, so no worries about that. We’ll still have our main episode every month as well as your Patreon bonus episode.

Gretchen: Yeah, so we’ll be recording episodes, and events, and interviews, and so on in advance to make sure that we give Lauren some mat leave from the show and make sure that everyone here still gets to listen to it. And I’m very excited to hear the results of your new, long-term longitudinal language acquisition project!

[Music]

Gretchen: Have you ever heard, Lauren, someone say, “That’s not a real word”?

Lauren: Oh my gosh, like, so often.

Gretchen: All the time.

Lauren: It’s just a go-to phrase that people throw around a lot. But when we started talking about this idea of what is a real word and what is not, it seems like such a simple throwaway line. But there’s so many things that are happening when people say this.

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Lingthusiasm Episode 25: Every word is a real word

squishable, blobfish, aaarggghh, gubernatorial, apple lovers, ain’t, tronc, wug, toast, toast, toast, toast, toast.

All of these are words that someone, somewhere has asserted aren’t real words – or maybe aren’t even words at all. But we don’t point at a chair or a tree and assert that it’s not a word. Of course it’s not! That would be absurd. So why, then, do people feel called to question the wordhood of actual words?

In this episode of the funnest* podcast about linguistics, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch take you on a tour through what’s really going on when people say that a word isn’t a word. (*Funnest is definitely a real word, and so are all the others.)

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

Announcements:

We’re heading into our second anniversary! That’s two whole years of linguistics enthusiasm delivered right to your ears every month (twice a month for patrons). To celebrate, we want to share the show with more people! Most people find podcasts through word of mouth, and there are people out there who would be totally into a lively deep-dive into how language works, they just don’t know it exists yet. They need you to save them from their dreary, un-lingthusiastic lives!

At our anniversary last year, we thanked over 100 people for their recs, and this year we want to thank even more! Here’s what to do: post about why you like Lingthusiasm on social media (or link to your rec elsewhere, such as a blog or podcast), make sure to tag us in your rec so we can find it, and your name will live on in perpetuity on our special second anniversary thank you post!

This month’s bonus episode was about bringing up bilingual babies! We get enthusiastic about various ways to raise children who speak more than one language when you’re stuck in a mostly-monolingual society: the one-parent, one language method, immersion schools, and speaking different languages at home and in the public sphere. Support Lingthusiasm on Patreon to gain access to this and 19 previous bonus episodes.

In November, we’re doing two liveshows! We’ll be in Sydney at GiantDwarf on Monday the 12th of November, and State Library of Victoria in Melbourne on Friday the 16th of November. Both events will be Auslan interpreted. For more details and how to book tickets check out our liveshow page.

We also have new merch! Alongside the Space Babies, new children’s clothing and new colours for the IPA scarves, we also have IPA ties! Check out our Merch page for more details.

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

blobfish (Wikipedia)
impact (noun) (Etymonline)
Erin McKean on dictionaries and maps
whelm (Etymonline)
Lingthusiasm Episode 8: People who make dictionaries (review of WORD BY WORD by Kory Stamper)
Tronc (Wikipedia)
Gubernatorial
Lingthusiasm Episode 16: Learning parts of words - Morphemes and the wug test

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 Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, 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 editorial producers are Emily Gref and A.E. Prévost, our production assistants are Celine Yoon & Fabianne Anderberg, and 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).

Lingthusiasm Episode 18: Translating the untranslatable

Lists of ‘untranslatable’ words always come with… translations. So what do people really mean when they say a word is untranslatable?

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch explore how we translate different kinds of meaning. What makes words like schadenfreude, tsundoku, and hygge so compelling? Which parts of language are actually the most difficult to translate? What does it say about English speakers that we have a word for “tricking someone into watching a video of Rick Astley singing Never Gonna Give You Up?”

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

Announcements:

This month’s Patreon bonus episode is about the grammar of swearing. When we launched our Patreon this time last year (wow!) with a bonus episode about the sounds of swearing, we promised that we’d come back with even more about swearing that we didn’t have space to talk about. Now you can listen to a sweary double feature: put on bonus #1 and bonus #13 back to back! As always, episodes that aren’t specifically about swearing are swear-free.

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

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

Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, 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 editorial producer is Emily Gref, our production assistant is Celine Yoon, and 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).

Bonus #9 - Is X a sandwich? Solving the word-meaning argument once and for all | Lingthusiasm on Patreon

We asked our patrons if a burrito was a sandwich, and they said ‘no’. We asked if ravioli was a sandwich and they said 'heck no’. We asked if an ice cream sandwich was a sandwich and things…started to get a little murky. This isn’t just a sandwich problem: you can also have similar arguments about what counts as a cup, a bird, a fish, furniture, art, and more!

So wait…does any word mean anything anymore? Have we just broken language?? It’s okay, linguistics has a solution!

To listen to this bonus episode, gain access to all eight previous bonuses, and generally support the show, become a patron on Patreon! We’re getting close to unlocking full-length bonus episodes every month, so now is a great time to join!

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Lingthusiasm Episode 18: Translating the untranslatable

Bonus #9 - Is X a sandwich? Solving the word-meaning argument once and for all | Lingthusiasm on Patreon

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