The Science and History of English Accents: Interview with Valerie Fridland
In this episode, Ray talks with linguist Valerie Friedland about accents—what they are, where they come from, and why everyone has one. They...
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Words for Granted
Words for Granted is a podcast that looks at how words change over time. Host Ray Belli uses language--more specifically, individual words--as a way of making connections among history, cult...
Words for Granted Podcast Guide
Listen to Words for Granted, a Society & Culture podcast by Raymond Belli. Stream 128 episodes in English, follow new audio stories, and play episodes online on Radio and Podcast.
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Episodes
20 of 128 episodesThe History of the Alphabet: Interview with Danny Bate
In this episode, author Danny Bate walks through the alphabet's evolution from its origins in Egyptian hieroglyphs to the letters of the Eng...
Lessons on Language with the Grammar Girl (Mignon Fogerty)
In this episode, Ray chats with Mignon Fogerty, aka the Grammar Girl. "Good grammar" may seem like the epitome of prescriptivism, but when i...
The Marvels of Translation: Interview with Keith Khan-Harris
What can we learn about the nature of translation by reading a warning message in hundreds of different languages? In this episode, Keith Ka...
The Power (and Omnipresence) of Rhetoric: Interview with Guy Doza
Rhetoric has a bad reputation. We tend to think of it as a linguistic tool used by polticians and marketing execs to maipulate the masses. W...
A Defense of "Bad" English: Interview with Valerie Fridland
Instead of criticizing deviations from Standard English as "wrong," what if we celebrated them as expressive lingusitic innovations? In this...
Learning New Languages: Interview with Rob Paterson
What goes into building a language learning curriculum? How do designers choose features within a language learing app? Are some approaches...
Combatting Bias in Linguistic AI: Interview with Courtney Napoles
As Lead of Language Research at Grammarly, Courtney Napoles is building systems to better help people from around the world communicate. In...
Origins of Place Names: Interview with Duncan Madden
Place names are not random––behind the name of every country is a story of how it came to be. From stories of invasion and rebellion to the...
Grammatical Gender: Interview with Danny Bate
In this interview with linguist Danny Bate, we go deep on all things gender––grammatical gender, that is. Why do some languages have gender...
Episode 109: Trivia
Trivia refers to obscure or useless information, but this definition is a far cry from the word's etymology. Trivia, or tri-via , literally...
African American English: Interview w/ Tracey Weldon
In this episode, I speak with Tracey Weldon, linguist and board advisor on the Oxford Dictionary of African American English project. We dis...
Episode 108: Understand
What does "standing under" have to do with "understanding?" Nothing at all, which is why most of us probably overlook the obvious fact that...
Episode 107: World
In Old English, the word "world", or weorold , did not refer to a place. It was a compound word comprising wer , meaing "man", and ald , mea...
Deciphering Ancient Scripts: Interview with Silvia Ferrara
Have you ever wondered how writing was invented - or, how many times it was invented? How many undeciphered scripts has the ancient world le...
Episode 106: Grotesque
The etymology of "grotesque" is hiding in plain sight: "grotto-esque". Originally, the word was used to describe a style of ancient art that...
Episode 105: Idiot
In Ancient Greece, an "idiot", or idiotes , was a "private person", which meant someone who did not hold a political office. In this episode...
Episode 104: Genius
Though people of extraordinary talents and intellect have always existed, the modern sense of "genius" didn't emerge until the relatively re...
Episode 103: Run Amok
Most Malay loanwords in English describe the local flora, fauna, and food of Southeast Asia. "Amok", however, is different. Amok, which desc...
Episode 102: Hyperbola/Hyperbole & Ellipse/Ellipsis
"Hyperbola" and "ellipse" are geometrical curves, while "hyperbole" and "ellipsis" are rhetorical terms. At face value, it's not clear how t...