—

Excerpt from Episode 25 of Lingthusiasm: Every word is a real word

Listen to the episode, read the full transcript, or check out more links about words and how cool they are! (Here’s isthmus on Wikipedia btw)

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.

Keep reading

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:

• No word for dead umbrellas?
• Dr. Jen Gunter’s “no word for…”
• Concept first, jargon second
• A meta-analysis of all ‘untranslatable emotions’ lists
• ‘Yes’ and ‘no’ in Mandarin
• Translating poetry
• The art of Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey
  
• Rickrolling (Know Your Meme)
• A better definition of Rickrolling
• Mate(ship)
  
• Early mark
• Denotation
• Connotation
• Life is HARD (Dinosaur Comics)
  

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 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).

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 8: People who make dictionaries: Review of WORD BY WORD by Kory Stamper. 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 8 shownotes page.

[Theme music]

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

Lauren: and I’m Lauren Gawne. And today we’re going to be talking about how dictionaries get made. But first, bonus episodes! We have them. We now have bonus episodes about how to teach yourself even more linguistics with our top recommendations for books, videos, and further resources for self-study, as well as our first bonus episode about swearing.

Gretchen: and this month’s bonus on Patreon is about how to sell your awesome linguistic skills to employers. Or you can check out the Patreon at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or just follow the link on lingthusiasm.com to see those bonus episodes, support the show, and help Lingthusiasm keep growing.

[Music]

Lauren: Today we are talking dictionaries, which is a super exciting genre of book for linguists! This topic choice is for a number of reasons. The first of which is that Kory Stamper’s new book ‘Word By Word’ came out a couple of months ago and we both read it and we had the best fun reading it and we wanted to talk about it so much that we ended up just talking about it for this whole episode. The whole episode will kind of be framed around Kory’s book and some of the things that we really enjoyed about reading it, but that is not the only reason, is it Gretchen?

Gretchen: Yeah, and we’re also going to be talking about other stuff to do with dictionaries because I was recently on a panel about dictionaries at South by Southwest, and I also got to meet Kory and hang out with some other dictionary people – when she gave a talk in New York City I happen to be going down on that specific day.

Lauren: And so this episode will be another episode in the genre of ‘Gretchen makes Lauren really jealous by telling her about all the cool linguist and lexicography peeps that she got to hang out with’.

Gretchen: You just need to come here and come to a conference and then I can introduce you to everybody and it’ll be great!

Lauren: Yeah, but for now we’re all going to live vicariously through Gretchen’s excellent adventures.

Keep reading

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 5: Colour words around the world and inside your brain. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 5 shownotes page.

[Theme 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 going to be talking about colour. But first! I want to point out that all the transcripts for previous episodes are now online so you can check those out. 

Also: Lauren, what have you been up to lately?

Lauren: I have been in the world of gesture and the world of language data archiving. I’ve been at iGesto conference in Porto in Portugal, which was a delightful place for a delightful conference. And I’ve been archiving language data with a couple of projects, one of which is super exciting and I don’t want to be one of those people that holds exciting projects over people’s heads, but I’ve been doing some work with 1970s data recordings that’s pretty cool and coming along nicely. And of course getting my own data into an archive that will be accessible for other people to look at whether they’re speakers of the language or interested in the language or want to do linguistics on it. So that’s been my month, how are you?

Gretchen: I had a pretty quiet month but at the end of February I’m heading to ICLDC which is the international conference on language documentation and conservation in Hawaii.

Lauren: I’m so jealous! I say, having just come back from Porto.

Gretchen: I am really excited because I’ve been hearing about the conference for years and I have not made it yet. So this is an international conference about language revitalization and I’m going to be running some workshops on getting your language information on Wikipedia and I’m also really excited to learn more about what other people’s projects are that they’re working on.

Lauren: Awesome. I’m so excited that LingWiki, the linguistics Wikipedia editing thing is having a season in Hawaii The ICLDC conference is so great it has such a good community and I’m sure ICLDC7 will be a hashtag with lots of action on it in late January early March. [Update: the hashtag is actually ICLDC5.]

Gretchen: Yeah, so check out the hashtag, we’ll try to tweet something about that, I’m sure I’ll be tweeting from my own twitter account on that hashtag. I don’t know how much people use hashtags at gesture conferences so maybe check out Lauren’s.

Lauren: Lots.

Gretchen: Oh good! OK good, you just have to take photos of the gestures.

Lauren: Yeah, I’ll add a link in the show notes as well to the iGesto hashtags. That’s what Twitter photos are for.

Gretchen: Ahhh photos, I forgot about photos.

[Theme music]

Lauren: I am so excited that today’s topic is colour and language! You may be wondering why we would be interested in talking about colour and language at the same time and that is for a number of reasons.

If you take a cross-linguistic perspective you find that there are a variety of ways in which different languages cut up the colour space in order to talk about them, that has some really interesting implications.

Gretchen: Yeah, so I guess the simple reason is colours are things that we have words for! But not all languages have the same words for the same colours, so you have a potential visual spectrum of possible colours that exists and languages that carve up that visual spectrum in some ways that are similar in some ways that are different. Lauren, you have a story for us.

Keep reading

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 4: Inside the Word of the Year vote. 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 4 show notes page.

[Theme music]

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

Lauren: and I’m Lauren Gawne. And today we’re going to be talking about the Word of the Year. But first, since we did our last podcast, we’ve gone live, and it’s very exciting!

Gretchen: It’s more exciting for us maybe, because we’ve been keeping it a secret for a long time and now we get to see it all. We’re not talking to an imaginary audience.

Lauren: We’re talking to real people and real people who have been listening! It’s amazing. Thank you all so much.

Gretchen: And there are so many more of you than we expected and your comments have been so much more than we’ve been expecting as well – there have been more of them and they have been nicer than we expected. I don’t know, we weren’t expecting mean comments but we weren’t expecting this many nice comments either so thank you for that.

Lauren: So I feel like we’re doing a real podcast now because I get to say to people “if you like this then go to iTunes and leave a positive review” and that just makes me feel like I really am doing a podcast now that I have to beg for likes.

Gretchen: We’ve levelled up. And you should also know that we’re doing transcripts of the episodes. So if you are not a person who likes listening to things, um, I don’t know how you got this far, but if you know people who don’t like listening to things, you can send them to our transcripts which are also on our website at lingthusiasm dot com.

Lauren: And we also have a Twitter and Facebook. We’re pretty chatty really, unsurprisingly.

Gretchen: We’re pretty chatty and also on other platforms like Google Play Music and youtube, if you’re really not a podcast person and SoundCloud. So if you don’t do iTunes don’t worry we’re there too.

[Theme music]

Lauren: So, Gretchen, you were at the Linguistics Society of America annual conference and as part of that the American Dialect Society run their annual Word of the Year vote. They have it at the start of January so it definitely encompasses all of the possible 2016 word-time and it’s a big vote. You have been to the last few and you were there for this one this year, right?

Gretchen: That is correct!

So, we were in a big ballroom in the Marriott in Austin, Texas where the whole conference is being held. If you can picture it, I’m trying to describe this for you, you can picture a big conference ballroom with a couple hundred people in it. I didn’t do a count, there were a lot of them, it was standing room only. Big, packed conference room, probably like for 400, 500 people in this ballroom. And what we do is on Thursday we nominate words for a bunch of different categories for Words of the Year. And then on the Friday night we vote for those categories. There are short, 30 second speeches from the floor in support or against particular words in those categories or to nominate a new thing. And then Friday we also take nominations and vote for the actual final overall word of the year. Sometimes that percolates up from the other categories, sometimes it’s a new candidate, depends on the year.

Lauren: So it’s all kind of a combination of like structure and tradition and kind of free-form chaotic fun.

Keep reading

Lingthusiasm Episode 4: Inside the Word of the Year vote

Every January, hundreds of linguists gather in a conference room somewhere in the US to discuss and vote for the Word of the Year. It’s the longest-running and most public WotY proceedings, and it’s part of the annual meeting of the American Dialect Society, a sister society of the Linguistic Society of America. Gretchen was there this year and the past few years, while Lauren has never been (but actively reads the #woty16 hashtag on twitter!). 

We discuss what the ADS Word of the Year vote feels like from inside the room where it happens, the categories and politics around selecting a WotY, look at the different offerings from other organizations that also name a WotY (Lauren is pretty pleased that Australian Word of the Year was “democracy sausage”, while Gretchen would like a Canadian Word of the Year for 2017, thank you), and end up wondering what even is a word.

We also respond to finally going live! Thanks for all your comments so far, and if you have a sec to rate us on iTunes or wherever else you’re listening, we’d super appreciate it.

Update: In the show we said that ‘Trump’ was selected as sign for the year for Netherlands Sign Language. It was actually the Swiss Deaf Association, in Switzerland.

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

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

• Jane Solomon’s round-up of different WotYs (WsOTY?)
  
• Collins Dictionary WotY: Brexit
• Oxford Dictionaries WotY: post-truth
• Dictionary.com WotY: xenophobia
• Cambridge Dictionaries WotY: paranoid
• Macmillan Dictionary WotY: elite
• Merriam-Webster WotY: surreal
• Australian National Dictionary Centre WotY: democracy sausage
• The #woty16 hashtag on Twitter
• Lauren’s WOTY16 nominations on Twitter
  
• American Dialect Society WOTY nominees
• American Dialect Society WOTY winners
• Language Log on the ADS winner, dumpster fire
• Wired on “dumpster fire” as word of the year
• Mental Floss on the ADS winner
• Nancy Friedman on the ADS winner
• Swiss Deaf Association name TRUMP as their Sign of the Year
  
• What Counts as a Word?  Tom Scott video written with Gretchen

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 producer is Claire Gawne, 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).