This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘A politeness episode, if you please’. 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 what politeness and rudeness are made up of at a linguistic level. But first, people have been asking us for years, “You guys have bonus episodes on Patreon, but I wanna get a gift for someone,” or “I’m broke/I don’t have a credit card. Is there a way that I can buy a gift subscription for someone else to the bonus episodes or ask someone else to get them as a gift for me?”

Lauren: We’re pleased to say that the answer is now, “Yes!” Patreon have newly added a gift membership feature. If you’d be excited to receive a Patreon membership to Lingthusiasm as a gift, we’ll have the link in the show notes for you to forward to your friends and/or family with a little wink-wink, nudge-nudge.

Gretchen: Also, if you’re intrigued by the bonus episodes but a monthly subscription isn’t quite your thing, we also now have a way for you to buy a themed bundle of linguistic bonus episodes on a particular topic. If you’re looking for more linguistics-related books to read – both fiction and non-fiction – you can pick up the Lingthusiasm Book Club collection or check out the Lingthusiasm After Dark collection for our episodes about swearing, language under the influence of…various substances, and our special ASMR episode where we read the Harvard Sentences in a [ASMR voice] soothing, calming voice.

Lauren: For both of these collections or membership that gives you access to over 90 bonus episodes, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

Gretchen: Our most recent bonus episode, for example, was a crossover chat with the team from Let’s Learn Everything. Let’s Learn Everything is a delightfully silly science podcast. They had me on their main show to ask me questions about linguistics. But they had so many fun questions that we recorded a second bonus part for patrons about science, metaphors, and more. You don’t need to already have any familiarity with their show to listen to the bonus episode, but we will link to the first part anyway since it was also really fun.

[Music]

Lauren: “Okay, Gretchen, let’s start the episode.”

Gretchen: “Lauren, would you like to start the episode?”

Lauren: “If you would please introduce the topic of the episode, Gretchen, I would be ever so grateful.”

Gretchen: “Oh, no, I couldn’t possibly. No, you go first. I really must insist that YOU introduce the topic of the episode. Ah, that is, if you wouldn’t mind. I hope I’m not imposing.”

Lauren: “Well, thank you. I appreciate that. It’s incredibly kind of you to concede to my feelings about whose turn it is to start the episode. Maybe we can start it by being incredibly impolite to each other.” [Both hosts hesitate]

Gretchen: It’s so – it was a lot easier to act at being very polite. This being rude to each other on purpose thing feels really hard to me, actually.

Lauren: If we were to try, though, I imagine that the sentences would be a lot shorter and involve a lot less deferring to each other. Maybe something very abrupt like, “Start the show now, lady!”

Gretchen: “Get on with the effin’ podcast, all right?”

Lauren: “Podcast, now!”

Keep reading

Lingthusiasm Episode 99: A politeness episode, if you please

If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, if you have a spare half hour, could we possibly suggest that you might enjoy listening to this episode on politeness? Or, if you’d prefer a less polite version, “Listen! Now!”

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about what politeness and rudeness are made up of at a linguistic level. We talk about existing cultural notions of “saving face” and “losing face”, aka the push and pull between our desire for help vs our desire for independence, and how they’ve been formalized in a classic linguistics paper. We also talk about being less polite to show intimacy, addressing God in English and French, which forms of politeness are and aren’t overtly taught, different uses of “please” in UK vs US English, levels of indirectness, email etiquette across generations and subcultures, rudeness and pointing, nodding norms in Japanese and English, smiling at strangers in the US vs Europe, and how a small number of politeness ingredients can combine in so many different ways that are culturally different.

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 science metaphors and learning everything with Tom Lum and Caroline Roper, cohosts of Let’s Learn Everything! We talk about whether programming languages should count as a language credit, numbers and ritual stock phrases like seventeen and “once upon a time”, as well as etymology and metaphor in ecology, chemistry, and linguistics. We also talk about turning the “constantly trying to figure things out” part of your brain off, attending the word of the year vote, and how linguists have a tendency to be curious about language all the time, which… sometimes gets us into trouble.

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.

Looking for a last minute gift for the language nerd in your life? Or are you trying to get someone in your life to love linguistics as much as you do? Patreon have newly added a gift memberships feature! So if you’d be excited to receive a patreon membership to Lingthusiasm, forward this link to your friends and/or family with a little wink wink nudge nudge.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

• ’Politeness: Some universals in language use’ by Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson
• Wikipedia entry for ‘Politeness’
• Lingthusiasm bonus episode ’The Most Esteemed Honorifics Episode’
• ’Routine politeness in American and British English requests: use and non-use of please’ by M. Lynne Murphy and Rachele De Felice
• @killersundy video about the Irish offering cake to the Irish on TikTok
• Lingthusiasm episode ’If I were an irrealis’
• Lingthusiasm episode ’Look, it’s deixis, an episode about pointing!’
• ’Nodding, aizuchi, and final particles in Japanese conversation: How conversation reflects the ideology of communication and social relationships’ by Sotaro Kita and Sachiko Ide
• ’Why Americans Smile So Much’ by Olga Khazan for The Atlantic
• ’Three-year-olds infer polite stance from intonation and facial cues’ by Iris Hübscher, Laura Wagner, and Pilar Prieto

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 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).