A 5,000 Year History of Punctuation: Interview with Florence Hazrat
Today, we live in a world where text is, by default, punctuated. But the ubiquity of punctuation is a surprisingly recent development. Flore...
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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...
Episodes
20 of 132 episodesThe Oxford Comma Debate: Interview with Jay Stookesbery
In this episode, Ray and Jay discuss the question first raised by the 2000s indie rock band, Vampire Weekend: Who gives a f*** about an Oxfo...
The Simplified Spelling Movement: Interview with Gabe Henry
We all know English spelling is inconsistent, but some people have actually tried to change it. In this episode, Gabe Henry, author of Enoug...
The Proto-Indo-European Puzzle: Interview with Laura Spinney
In this episode, Ray chats with author Laura Spinney about Proto-Indo-European, the ancestral language of hundreds of modern languages spoke...
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...
The 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...