“Gretchen: I mean, I will say that we have a pretty phonotactically weird cluster in the name of our podcast.
Lauren: This is true.
Gretchen: We’re finally admitting it four years in – like, /lɪŋ/ /θʊziæzm̩/. They belong to different syllables, but they’re just done with such distinct places in the mouth that people have a really hard time saying our name. We didn’t think that through.
Lauren: Different places and different manners. There’s a little bit of stuff that I’ve read about the influence of sonority preferences across syllables. We meet the requirement. Normally you have something that’s more sonorous at the end of the first syllable than at the beginning of the second syllable. We got that bit good.
Gretchen: Okay. So, we’ve got /ŋ/ at the first syllable and then /θ/ at the next one, but they’re just one away from each other kind of. They’re not that far.”

“Lauren: It can feel a bit anxiety-provoking about committing an analysis to paper because you are pinning a butterfly for a moment in time. People are still speaking the language, and it moves on. As long as you don’t think of the descriptive grammar as anything more canonical and authoritative than people’s actual intuitions, that’s an important thing to remember. Especially if you’re working with a grammar that’s more than a few generations old, it may be that the person didn’t quite capture what people were doing. It may be that the language has changed again.”

“Gretchen: I think the best-known example of do you do the source language versus the target language in terms of plural in English is a certain little creature with eight legs.
Lauren: The octopus.
Gretchen: The octopus.
Lauren: Which I just avoid talking about in the plural at all to save myself a grammatical crisis.
Gretchen: I admit that I have also done this. If you were gonna pluralise “octopus” as if it’s English, it would just be “octopuses.” It’s very easy. But there’s a fairly long-standing tradition in English of when a word is borrowed from Latin to make the plural the actual Latin thing. Because, historically, many English speakers did learn Latin, and so you want to show off your education by using the Latin form even though it’s in English. So, if you’re going to pretend that “octopus” is Latin, then you wanna say, “octopi.” However, there is yet a third complication, which is that “octopus,” in fact, is actually Greek – “octo” meaning “eight” and “pus” meaning “feet. So, Greek does not make these plural by adding I to it. In that case, there has recently become popular a yet even more obscure and yet even more pretentious, to be honest, plural.
Lauren: Is there where you say, “octopodes”?
Gretchen: Well, this is where I used to say, “octopodes.” But I have recently learned that, apparently, it is, for maximum pretentiousness, /aktaˈpodiz/.
Lauren: You’ve out-pretentioused my out-pretentiousness.”

“Gretchen: I did a study with a smartphone keyboard app looking at millions of anonymised examples of how real people use emoji in aggregate. One of the things that we came across really early on in this data – so I got them to extract examples of the most common sequences of two, three, and four emoji, because this is a common thing that people do for a large data set of words is they’ll say one of the most common sequences of two, three, and four words. So, let’s try to do the same thing with emoji and see what happens because, obviously, we couldn’t read individual people’s messages. This is a way of kind of extracting from that and figuring out what the common sequences are. The most common sequence of emoji overall is [tears of joy] [tears of joy].
Lauren: Right. Okay.
Gretchen: The second most common sequence is [tears of joy] [tears of joy] [tears of joy].
Lauren: Okay. Hmm…
Gretchen: Do you wanna guess what the third most common sequence is?
Lauren: I’m going for, hmm, [tears of joy] [tears of joy] [tears of joy] [tears of joy]?
Gretchen: Yeah. Four of them.
Lauren: Amazing.
Gretchen: Once you get to number four, I think it was two kiss faces. So, it did change eventually. We did eventually run out of [tears of joy].
Lauren: Just moved on to more repeating sequences.
Gretchen: Turned out, we looked at the Top 200 sequences of two, and then Top 200 of three, and Top 200 of four, and about half of all of these lists was just straight up repetition of the exact same emoji. This was really interesting to us because a lot of the emoji narratives and media at that point were really excited about the idea of telling stories with emoji of like, “Okay, if you have a [person] and then a [tongue sticking out] and then a [hamburger], maybe that means a person is eating a hamburger,” or something like that. But that’s not what people were doing. People were doing the exact same emoji a whole bunch of times in a row.”

“Gretchen: I think it’s one of the things that distinguishes a linguistic approach to grammar from a “I’m taking this high school English class” approach to grammar because I definitely remember being taught, okay, if you wanna know if something’s an adjective, you can look it up in the dictionary, and the dictionary will tell you. This, of course, raises the very obvious question of, “Well, how did the dictionary makers know that this was an adjective? Who decided that?” Dictionaries are great. I’m not anti-dictionary. But if you’re always looking for external authorities for something that you can actually logic out for its principles, it’s unsatisfying. Whereas, being able to actually deduce, “Oh, I know this is an adjective because I’ve run it through these tests,” let’s you feel like you’re figuring something out about that world. It’s the appeal of doing a logic puzzle as opposed to being told like, “Here’s what the sudoku looks like. If you wanna know what the correct answer is to the Sudoku, you just look it up.” It’s like, well, you could actually just do the sudoku and then you could figure it out. That’s more fun than looking up the answer to the sudoku.
Lauren: Yeah. I enjoy being a part of speech detective and figuring out what a word is doing in a sentence using the linguistic evidence that I have.”

“Gretchen: I mean, you could say “uncles-in-law” or “aunts-in-law.” I don’t know why we don’t.
Lauren: I find the whole “in-law” terminology in English very confusing. If I were gonna fix English –
Gretchen: You would fix the in-laws?
Lauren: The kinship system does need a bit of a makeover, and the in-lawing is very confusing because – I mean, to me, it’s confusing because so many people in my family have long-term partners who aren’t married. I like to refer to them as “out-laws.”
Gretchen: I think a lot of people use the out-law terminology as a jocular version of in-laws.
Lauren: But it does kind of upset my grandparents.”