111: Whoa!! A surprise episode??? For me??!!

Wait, surprise is associated with a particular intonation!? Oh, you can see surprise by measuring electricity from your brain!? Hang on, some languages have grammatical marking for surprise!? In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about surprise. We talk about surprise voice and context, writing surprise with punctuation marks and emoji, anti-surprise and sarcasm, and measuring the special little surprise blip (technically known as the n400) in your brain using an EEG machine. We also talk about grammatically indicating surprise, aka mirativity, and whether that's its own thing or part of a broader system related to doubt and certainty (spoiler: linguists are still debating this). Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice: Read the transcript here: Announcements: New on Patreon: you can now buy a set of bonus episodes as a collection if you're not keen on signing up for a monthly membership. Collections so far include Lingthusiasm book club, Lingthusiasm After Dark, Linguistics Gossip, Linguistic Advice, Word Nerdery, and Interviews: Patreon bonus episodes also make a great last-minute gift for a linguistics enthusiast in your life: In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about the mysterious Voynich Manuscript with Dr. Claire Bowern! We talk about We talk about what we can actually know about the manuscript for certain: no, it wasn't created by aliens; yes, it does carbon-date from the early 1400s; and no, it doesn't look like other early attempts at codes, conlangs, or ciphers. We also talk about what gibberish actually looks like, what deciphering medieval manuscripts has in common with textspeak, why the analytical strategies that we used to figure out Egyptian hieroglyphs from the Rosetta Stone and Linear B from Minoan inscriptions haven't succeeded with the Voynich Manuscript, and finally, how we could know whether we've actually succeeded in cracking it one day. 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: For links to things mentioned in this episode:

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111: Whoa!! A surprise episode??? For me??!! is an episode from Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics by Lingthusiasm.

This episode is 00:50:36 long.

This episode was published on Dec 19, 2025.

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