"A fascinating listen that will change the way you see everyday communications."
New York Times
“Joyously nerdy.”
BuzzFeed
"funny and fascinating and educational!"
Ryan North
Ever find yourself distracted from what someone is saying by wondering about how they say it?
Lingthusiasm is a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics as a way of understanding the world around us. From languages around the world to our favourite linguistics memes, Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne bring you into a lively half hour conversation on the third Thursday of every month about the hidden linguistic patterns that you didn't realize you were already making. One of Spotify's top 50 Science podcasts 2022.
Get an email each month when a new episode of Lingthusiasm comes out and our list of 12 pop linguistics books we recommend:
Follow on
Latest Episodes and News
Lingthusiasm Episode 117: What makes for beautiful writing, scientifically speaking - Interview with Julie Sedivy
Sometimes, a phrase seems to leap off the page and lodge into your mind, crisp and shining like a precious jewel. Other times, you’re reading something and it just won’t stick, your eyes wandering away no matter how hard you try.
In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about what psycholinguistics can tell us about creative writing, with Julie Sedivy, who’s a psycholinguist based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada and the author of two general-audience linguistics books, Memory Speaks and Linguaphile. We talk about moving from the style of scientific writing to literary writing by writing a lot of unpublished poetry to develop her aesthetic sense, how studying linguistics for a writer is like studying anatomy for a sculptor or colour theory for a painter, and how you could set up an eyetracking study to help writers figure out which sentences make their readers slow down. We also do a small linguistic experiment on air using the following words, which you can play along with: luggage, liminal, withstand, tremulous, pulchritude, zoo.
Note that this episode originally aired as Bonus 96: What makes for beautiful writing, scientifically speaking, and we’ve added 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.
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about linguistics podcasting with Helen Zaltzman, host of The Allusionist podcast! We talk about being nearly teenaged in the world of language podcasting (Lingthusiasm turns 10 later this year, and The Allusionist turned 10 last year!) and alternative careers that we had on the way to becoming podcasters (did you know Helen once worked for a reality TV show?). We also talk about breaking the kiki/bouba test, the importance of publishing “failed” experiments, the Bender Rule and the Holliday Rule (both previous Lingthusiasm guests!).
Note that this particular bonus episode is available to everyone who follows us at any level (including free!) on Patreon, so welcome if you’re joining us as an Allusionist fan (or a broke lingthusiasm fan tbh, we’re trying to give you some treats while also trying to keep the show running!!).
Speaking of which…a few people found Patreon’s new community gifting feature before we even knew what to do with it so we’ve been able to give out 7 community-supported memberships so far to people who follow us for free on Patreon. If anyone else is feeling comfortably off in this economy and wants to help both us and your fellow lingthusiasts, we’d be happy to do this again! Follow us as a free member to get announcements whenever we might have gifted memberships to distribute!
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).
This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘What makes for beautiful writing, scientifically speaking - Interview with Julie Sedivy’. 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 the science of beautiful writing with Dr. Julie Sedivy, who’s a psycholinguist based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and the author of Memory Speaks and Linguaphile.
Lauren: But first, this episode originally aired on Patreon a year and a half ago. We heard from so many listeners who wanted to share it with their writing groups or with academics trying to make the transition from scientific writing to literary writing. We thought we’d make it available to everyone as part of our annual unlocking of a bonus episode in the main feed.
Gretchen: Which also gives us and everyone on the production team a mini break that keeps making the show sustainable for us.
Lauren: If you’d like to listen to over 100 other more Lingthusiasm episodes that are bonuses like this one, and maybe you’d like to suggest which one we should unlock next year, join us on Patreon.
Gretchen: We’ve also been posting more and more titbits for everyone who follows us on Patreon – both free and paid – including unlocking our very first bonus episode about swearing with added swear-y commentary.
Lauren: We’ve recently unlocked a bonus chat with Helen Zaltzman of The Allusionist about linguistics podcasting.
Gretchen: Or if you’re someone who’s always got a lot of podcasts on the back burner and doesn’t really need more listening material, but you’d just like to help us keep existing long into the future, there’s a new option on Patreon where you can purchase a community gift membership for us to give out to one of your fellow lingthusiasts who’d like to listen to the bonus episodes and can’t afford it right now.
Lauren: We’ve already given out seven of these community-gifted memberships thanks to the generosity of few people who found this feature before we had even figured out what we were doing with it.
Gretchen: If anyone else is inclined to join them, I think that was really a post that resonated in this economy. It helps us keep going at the same time.
Lauren: Stay subscribed to emails from Lingthusiasm on Patreon to hear about any future community gift memberships that become available.
Gretchen: Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm for memberships for yourself, for a specific person you know, or for these new community gift memberships.
[Music]
Gretchen: Hello, Julie.
Julie: Hi, Gretchen. I am fulfilling a longtime fantasy of appearing on Lingthusiasm.
Gretchen: It’s so fun to have you since you’re already a listener.
Julie: Indeed.
Gretchen: Before we get into stuff about your book, Linguaphile, and your other book, Memory Speaks, let’s start with a question that we ask all of our guests, which is, “How did you get into linguistics?”
Julie: I stumbled into it. I had started university as an English major. I had always thought that I would be a writer from the time I was very small. I was reading through course descriptions, came across this thing called “linguistics,” and it made reference to “grammar” and other stuff that didn’t sound overly interesting to me, but I thought, “If I’m gonna be a writer, I probably need to know some of this stuff.” I took the class, and from the get-go, I was utterly mesmerised. I think my experience was a little bit like – imagine you’re a kid, and you love bugs. You’ve spent your life watching bugs and being fascinated by them, but you don’t realise you can be a scientist of bugs and that there is a science of bugs. Then suddenly you encounter this, you know, at the age of 18. That’s a little bit what it was like for me just to realise that you can study this scientifically, systematically. Of course, one of the things that comes out when you start looking at linguistics is the realisation that there’s so much about language that’s going on below the surface of conscious awareness that is not really easy to just introspect about unless you have the right tools.
Gretchen: You’d had a lot of language experiences before discovering linguistics as a named phenomenon.
Julie: I did. And I think that’s what gave me an orientation and an attunement to language and a desire to use it as a medium as a writer. I was lucky enough to have been dragged from one linguistic environment to another. I think my parents would probably not frame it that way. It was quite a difficult time for them to be bouncing around from one country to another. I was born in what was then Czechoslovakia, and then we lived in Austria for a while, and Italy, and back and forth a bit, and then finally landed in Montreal where I learned French as my fourth language. Finally, English as a fifth language in kindergarten for the first time.
Gretchen: Wow. I really enjoyed the Montreal aspects of your writing because I also live in Montreal. Hearing some of the things that were, like, before I lived here, before I was around in here, and the way that English and French interplay in that – and in your childhood brain.
Julie: Yeah, no, it was a real lesson to me in observing some of the sociolinguistic aspects of language because it was very clear at the time – so this would’ve been the early-to-mid ’70s when we first arrived – that French – I mean, it was the language spoken by the majority, but it was not the language of official business, and it was not the respected language.
Bonus Episode 112: The Lingthusionist - Interview with Helen Zaltzman
The Allusionist is a podcast that tells stories about language and the people who use it, which actually started only a year or so before Lingthusiasm but has always felt a bit like our older cousin.
In this long-awaited crossover bonus episode, your host Lauren Gawne gets enthusiastic about linguistics podcasting with Helen Zaltzman, host of The Allusionist podcast. We talk about being nearly teenaged in the world of language podcasting (Lingthusiasm turns 10 later this year, and The Allusionist turned 10 last year!) and alternative careers that we had on the way to becoming podcasters (did you know Helen once worked for a reality TV show?). We also talk about breaking the kiki/bouba test, the importance of publishing “failed” experiments, the Bender Rule and the Holliday Rule (both previous Lingthusiasm guests!), and answer a listener question, which we’ll now pose to you in the comments. Heather asks, “If you had the power to change one thing about the English language, exclusively for low-stakes reasons, such as pettiness, vibes, or aesthetics, what would you change?”
Listen to this episode about linguistics podcasting with Helen Zaltzman, host of The Allusionist podcast, for free on our Patreon! Get access to many more bonus episodes, plus our Discord server where you can chat to other language nerds, by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.
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 understanding aliens, fantastical creatures, and perhaps the trickiest group of all, other human cultures. But first, we’ve been doing a bit of spring cleaning on our website.
Gretchen: There are kind of a lot of Lingthusiasm episodes by now. We have deliberately made them so they can be listened to in any order that strikes your fancy. That means that if you’re trying to do something a little bit more systematic, it can be hard to figure out what to listen to next or what to recommend to someone. We’ve added some new topic categories that you can browse, for example, which episodes analyse the linguistics elements of all the science fiction and fantasy that we’ve been reading.
Lauren: We’ve kept my favourite part of the Topics page, which is the ability to browse episodes by a linguistic structural feature, which is perfect for when I’m looking for an episode to pair with the subject I’m teaching this term.
Gretchen: You can also see a starter pack of episodes we think are especially good to try to get your friends into Lingthusiasm with, all our interviews and book-related episodes grouped together, and more categories.
Lauren: Go to lingthusiasm.com/topics or find this under the Episodes section of our website.
Gretchen: Our most recent bonus episode was all about idioms and how they work linguistically. It’s a real barrel of laughs.
Lauren: It’ll pass muster. It’ll bring the house down. Heads will roll.
Gretchen: Wait, that sounds bad.
Lauren: Okay, maybe we’ll put that cat back in the bag.
Gretchen: This episode also has a swear warning because we finally explored why linguists are so keen on the idiom “The, uh, stuff hit the fan.”
Lauren: To get access to the idioms episode and over nine years of Lingthusiasm bonus episodes, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.
[Music]
Gretchen: Lauren, some days, do you ever just wanna can it all and become a linguist on a spaceship?
Lauren: Oh, yeah. I mean, sometimes the space linguist is more like an interpreter, or they’re very good at wrangling the translation machines, but what I love are those episodes of Star Trek where Uhura or Hoshi have a gap in the system, and they need to figure out what’s happening in order to communicate.
Gretchen: We recently got a great book recommendation from a listener – shoutout to Trish B. – who asked us on Bluesky whether we’d read Hellspark by Janet Kagan and said it was a science fiction murder mystery and one of your top four books ever.
Lauren: Also, shoutout to the four other people who immediately replied and said they also loved this book – a book we’d never heard of.
Gretchen: With endorsements like that, I had to read it. I can tell you it was great. We are gonna structure a whole episode around it.
Lauren: If those initial endorsements weren’t enough, you told me there was a bunch of gesture stuff in it, and so I had to read it.
Gretchen: Let’s start with the basic premise of Hellspark. We’re not assuming anyone else has read it.
Lauren: Yeah, I guess it’s a murder mystery.
Gretchen: [Laughs] I honestly forgot about the murder mystery part. To me, this book was really about cross-cultural communication. We’re on a planet. There’s a survey crew of humans trying to figure out whether this alien species – which I pictured as sort of looking like an emu – is capable of intelligent communication.
Lingthusiasm Episode 116: Cross-cultural communication (in space!)
Sometimes, you’re talking with someone and you just seem to click. Other times, you just can’t seem to get comfortable: they’re standing too close or too far away for comfort, making too much or too little eye contact, touching or not touching you in a way that just doesn’t quite feel right. But where do our senses of what feels comfortable in a conversation come from, and how can they be so different from each other?
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about understanding aliens, fantastical creatures, and perhaps the trickiest group of all, other human cultures. We talk about a science fiction book called Hellspark by Janet Kagan (which was recommended by a listener!) which is a murder mystery set on a planet of cross-cultural communication gone wrong, and which sent us on a whole deep dive into the world of proxemics, aka the linguistics of personal space. We also talk about how these early roots of cross-cultural communication studies have shifted in modern-day linguistic anthropology, and compare several newer speculative fiction books about alternative structures for human societies (plus aliens and/or dragons), including What We Are Seeking by Cameron Reed and To Shape A Dragon’s Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose.
Check our our updated topics page! It’s a great resource if you’re not sure what episode to listen to next or what to recommend to someone. We’ve added some new topics that let you browse, for example, which episodes analyze the linguistic elements of all the science fiction and fantasy that we’ve been reading! And we’ve kept the ability to browse episodes by linguistic structural features, which is perfect for when you’re looking for an episode to pair with a topic you’re teaching or studying.
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about idioms! We talk about some of our favourite idioms, the interplay between idioms and metaphors, why linguists are so excited about breaking idioms by changing one word slightly, and in particular why “the shit hit the fan” was responsible for multi-hour-long discussions that Gretchen participated in during grad school. (Swear warning, because there’s really not another idiom that uh, hits the fan in the same way.)
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).
Gesture: every language has them, but what do they have to do with the emoji on your phone?
Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about Lauren’s new book ‘Gesture: A Slim Guide’ from Oxford University Press in our episode 'A hand-y guide to gesture’
Don’t miss the boat! The cat is out of the bag: keep your ears peeled for this idioms episode before you kick the bucket…or else heads will roll.
In this bonus episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about idioms! We talk about some of our favourite idioms, the interplay between idioms and metaphors, why linguists are so excited about breaking idioms by changing one word slightly, and in particular why “the shit hit the fan” was responsible for multi-hour-long discussions that Gretchen participated in during grad school.
Warning: this episode does contain mild swearing because there’s really no non-sweary substitute for “the shit hit the fan” so we kind of had to say it a lot.
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 the complicated legacy of linguistic data collected by problematic people with This Guy Sucked. But first, This Guy Sucked is a history podcast who reached out to us about doing a shared episode.
Gretchen: We had a look, and we were like, well, we clearly share an approach to accessible podcasting that nonetheless has scholarly rigour in it. We were like, “Wait, This Guy Sucked is for professional haters, and we are just really enthusiastic about things.”
Lauren: Claire Aubin, who hosts the show, was like, “Look, I am also very enthusiastic about hating things.”
Gretchen: This is how we learned that there are sort of two meanings for “enthusiastic.” One is high energy, and another is high positivity. Normally on Lingthusiasm, we’re both.
Lauren: This was a chance for me to revisit a topic where maybe I don’t feel both.
Gretchen: How was life as a temporary hater?
Lauren: It was very cathartic, actually. This episode is a bit more fast-and-loose than I usually am. I discovered that I used the extended form of “BS” more when I’m really fired up. This Guy Sucked is a fun and unique way to approach history.
Gretchen: What did this person do that you hated so much?
Lauren: Daisy Bates left one of the most important and extensive archives we now have of Australian Indigenous languages from the early 20th Century. But it only exists because of her particularly bad attitudes towards Indigenous people even by the standards of that colonial era, which were also pretty bad, so just a heads up going into this one.
Gretchen: There’s your content advisory. Or most recent bonus episode was about a less problematic woman from the 20th Century, Margaret Godlove (who secretly wrote a whole bunch of definitions for colour words), with our very un-problematic guest, lexicographer Kory Stamper. It’s the second half of the interview that we did with Kory Stamper as a main episode last month. If you listened to that first half, and you want to know the answer to the spoiler, this is your chance.
Lauren: For access to this and over 100 other bonus episodes, head to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.
[Music]
Claire: Welcome to This Guy Sucked, the show where we prove that it’s never too late to have haters, and you can’t label the dead. I’m your host, Dr. Claire Aubin. I’m a historian, writer and, most importantly, certified hater. On this show, we talk about people from throughout history with legacies that need a little updating. Whether it’s because of their politics, their behaviour, or their impact on society and culture, these guys actually kind of sucked. We bring in a new scholar every week to tell us why. Today, we are here to do a super special mash up, collaborative episode thing, with who?
Lauren: Yay.
Claire: Who are you? What are we doing?
Lauren: Hi Claire, my name is Lauren. I am co-host of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that is enthusiastic about linguistics. This is really fun for me because normally we just do “Yay, enthusiasm!” and hating is a new vibe for me. Let’s see how it goes.
Claire: I mean, I think we try to be enthusiastic about the hating a little bit in the sense that we’re doing it for justice. The goal is we’re not just being mean; we’re doing it to try to rewrite someone’s history back into the historical narrative or to try to be clear about harms that are caused by people that we in some way or another hold up as “good” or “useful” or “important.” We just like to make sure that the record is balanced.
Lauren: As long as it’s pedagogically informed and academically rigorous hating – sounds great.
Lingthusiasm Episode 115: The long shadow of Daisy Bates with This Guy Sucked
What do you do when the only records that remain of a language were made by someone who had absolutely horrendous views of the people who spoke it?
In this episode, your host Lauren Gawne gets enthusiastic about a crossover episode with Claire Aubin of This Guy Sucked! Lauren’s Guy who Sucked is Daisy Bates, who did a lot of early 20th century work documenting over 100 Indigenous languages in western and southern Australia, while also directly adding to policies and narratives that continue to harm Aboriginal Australians to this day. We talk about Lauren’s history with the original archive, how much has changed since Daisy Bates’s day, and where linguistics (and society) still has room to improve.
Please note that this episode includes reference to deceased Aboriginal Australians, as well as reference to attitudes and actions that are harmful to the self-determination of Aboriginal Australians.
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about the second half of our interview with Kory Stamper about her book on defining colour words, and this half contains spoilers!! We talk with Kory about how she learned about Margaret Godlove and many other women whose labour has been forgotten in early colour science and dictionary making.
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).
About Lingthusiasm
A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne.
Weird and deep conversations about the hidden language patterns that you didn't realize you were already making.
New episodes (free!) the third Thursday of the month.
ALT
ALT
