We’re opening up the Mailbag for another episode.
- Are sneezes written the same way everywhere?
- Do all languages have rhyming name games?
- Can all languages do all the things?
- Why does “this and that” sound normal, but “that and this”
Author: Daniel Midgley (page 3 of 41)
The rules are changing. Here’s the manual.
Gretchen McCulloch’s book Because Internet is a look at how people use language on the net to communicate and to show identity. How do people laugh online? How is emoji like gesture?
It’s …
Take a tornado. Add some sharks. You’ve got a sharknado.
But it’s not just sharks that can leap out of their normal context. It looks like –nado is jumping free and becoming a combining form — a part …
Names are what they are, and as long as they work, they work.
But sometimes in the history of naming, people name things in a manner inapt to their nature or origin. So what’s the story behind words like atom…
If you’re at a park in New York City, you may see someone at a table offering free grammar advice.
That person is writer Ellen Jovin, and she dispenses wisdom from her Grammar Table. What motivates her to do …
Poetry isn’t (just) enjoyable, it can be useful.
It can help us with language learning and memorisation, and help us in historical linguistics. And even computers are getting into poetry generation, probably because they want to learn the secret of …
Audio
We got together with Ryan Paulsen and Amy Hanlon from etymology podcast Lexitecture, and asked them about their love of language, their techniques for doing etymology, and …
Even if we’re trying not to be the grammar police, we all have that internal voice that notices linguistic difference, and categorises people thereby.
How do we deal with that inner prescriptivist? How can we have linguistic discussions with grammar …
Akimbo. Throes. Tizzy.
Some words only appear in limited contexts. But what do they mean? The fascinating histories of these words can tell us more about how English works — and language in general.
We’re in tatters — or …
Juxtapose. Obfuscate. And of course, absquatulate.
All these words appear in a new dictionary for young people. It’s The Dictionary of Difficult Words, and we’re talking to the author, lexicographer Jane Solomon.
Activate your sesquipedalian …
Connect to us online
Awards
-
- CBAA Awards 2018: Best Radio Program — Talk
-
- Talkley Award 2018
© 2024 Talk the Talk
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑