103: A hand-y guide to gesture

Gestures: every known language has them, and there’s a growing body of research on how they fit into communication. But academic literature can be hard to dig into on your own. So Lauren has spent the past 5 years diving into the gesture literature and boiling it down into a tight 147 page book.

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about Lauren’s new book, Gesture: A Slim Guide from Oxford University Press. Is it a general audience book? An academic book? A bit of both. (Please enjoy our highlights version in this episode, a slim guide to the Slim Guide, if you will.) We talk about the wacky hijinks gesture researchers have gotten up to with the aim of preventing people from gesturing without tipping them off that the study is about gesture, including a tricked-out “coloured garden relax chair” that makes people “um” more, as well as crosslinguistic gestural connections between signed and spoken languages, and how Gretchen’s gestures in English have been changing after a year of ASL classes. Plus, a few behind-the-scenes moments: Lauren putting a line drawing of her very first gesture study on the cover, and how the emoji connection from Because Internet made its way into Gesture (and also into the emoji on your phone right now).

There were also many other gesture stories that we couldn’t fit in this episode, so keep an eye out for Lauren doing guest interviews on other podcasts! We’ll add them to the crossovers page and the Lingthusiasm hosts elsewhere playlist as they come up. And if there are any other shows you’d like to hear a gesture episode on, feel free to tell them to chat to Lauren!

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

We’ve made a special jazzed-up version of the Lingthusiasm logo to put on stickers, featuring fun little drawings from the past 8.5 years of enthusiasm about linguistics by our artist Lucy Maddox. There’s a leaping Gavagai rabbit, bouba and kiki shapes, and more…see how many items you can recognize!

This sticker (or possibly a subtle variation…stay tuned for an all-patron vote!) will go out to everyone who’s a patron at the Lingthusiast level or higher as of July 1st, 2025.

We’re also hoping that this sticker special offer encourages people to join and stick around as we need to do an inflation-related price increase at the Lingthusiast level. As we mentioned on the last bonus episode, our coffee hasn’t cost us five bucks in a while now, and we need to keep paying the team who enables us to keep making the show amid our other linguistics prof-ing and writing jobs. In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about linguist celebrities! We talk about start with the historically famous Brothers Grimm and quickly move onto modern people of varying levels of fame, including a curiously large number of linguistics figure skaters. We also talk about a few people who are famous within linguistics, including a recent memoir by Noam Chomsky’s assistant Bev Stohl about what it was like keeping him fueled with coffee. And finally, we reflect on running into authors of papers we’ve read at conferences, when people started recognizing us sometimes, and our tips and scripts for navigating celebrity encounters from both sides.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 90+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

• ‘Gesture: A Slim Guide’ by Lauren Gawne
• Lingthusiasm episode ’Emoji are Gesture Because Internet’
• Lingthusiasm episode ’Villages, gifs, and children: Researching signed languages in real-world contexts with Lynn Hou’
• Lingthusiasm episode ’Bringing stories to life in Auslan - Interview with Gabrielle Hodge’
• 'Gesture, Speech, and Lexical Access: The Role of Lexical Movements in Speech Production’ by Rauscher et al.
• 'Effects of Visual Accessibility and Hand Restraint on Fluency of Gesticulator and Effectiveness of Message’ by Karen P. Lickiss and A. Rodney Wellens
• 'Effects of relative immobilization on the speaker’s nonverbal behavior and on the dialogue imagery level’ by Rimé et al.
• 'The effects of elimination of hand gestures and of verbal codability on speech performance’ by J. A. Graham and S. Heywood

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

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 ‘A hand-y guide to gesture. 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 Lauren’s new book about gesture, including why we gesture and how linguists do research on it. But first, I have a little story to tell.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: A little while ago, I was in a very cool café/restaurant/pub type place, and I went to the bathroom. The bathroom had a bunch of fun stickers and art and graffiti on the walls. There were some stickers for podcasts. I was like, “Oh, that’s so cool! I should add a Lingthusiasm sticker. Maybe people who come to this cool bar would like our cool podcast.” But then I realised, we don’t actually have a sticker or version of our logo that actually says that we’re a podcast.

Lauren: Oh, good point.

Gretchen: Like, our logo just says “Lingthusiasm,” which is great if you are like, “Ooo, ‘linguistics’ plus ‘enthusiasm.’ That sounds like it might be neat,” but not if you wanna stick it somewhere that indicates, “Here’s what you might want to get into this for.”

Lauren: Sure. It would be nice if it did say something like, “We’re a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics.”

Gretchen: We have a great tagline. It should actually go on a sticker. But with the way our logo is currently formatted, there’s not an obvious spot to put that.

Lauren: I also realised we maybe have a bit of a design issue when a family member put one of the show stickers up and very sensibly had the word “Lingthusiasm” along the bottom.

Gretchen: Oh, yeah. I’ve seen this happen to people, too. I give them stickers, and if they haven’t listened to the show before, they will very naturally put the text reading from left to right like text normally reads in English rather than up the side like we did maybe too cleverly.

Lauren: Yeah, I think we were too clever for our own good, especially if people are only passingly familiar with the show and/or the logo.

Gretchen: This inspired us – we’ve given out a lot of logo stickers at conferences; people like them. What if we came up with a slight variation on the existing design that was a little bit more clear about some of these factors?

Lauren: Our artist, Lucy, has been making all of these really nice doodle designs that are on own website and social media, but they aren’t reflected in the logo at all.

Gretchen: We asked Lucy if she could draw us some fun little objects, like we have elsewhere on the website, but in the shape of the classic Lingthusiasm squiggle-slash-glottal-stop-slash-question-mark-slash-ear logo. She could fill them in with some references from the past 100 episodes and other linguistics objects of assorted kinds.

Lauren: I am biased, but I love the little kiki and the little bouba in there.

Gretchen: I thought you were gonna comment on all the hand shapes.

Lauren: I also love those.

Gretchen: I personally love the leaping rabbit because rabbits have come up several times on Lingthusiasm with Gavagai and the Bill Labov rabbit story.

Lauren: I’m upset that you didn’t say you love the teeny tiny silhouettes of us having a little chat together.

Gretchen: Those are also very charming.

Lauren: We’ll have a link in the show notes to where you can see it and see what tiny objects you recognise from past episodes.

Gretchen: Plus, if you want to have the sticker in your own hands to put on your own water bottle or your laptop or maybe inside the bathrooms of your favourite spot that’s cool with having stickers in bathrooms, or assorted other locations, I dunno, telephone poles, we’re also gonna send a copy of the sticker with this new design on it to everyone who’s a patron at the Ling-thusiast level or higher on our Patreon as of July 1, 2025.

Keep reading

synticity:

if you feel like you’re always getting talked over, or if you feel like you’re always accidentally interrupting people, you should consider looking into some of the linguistics research about conversation style and turn-taking. lingthusiasm podcast has a great episode called “how to rebalance a lopsided conversation” that goes over some of this research in a really accessible way; Deborah Tannen’s book You just don’t understand is an early book¹ that’s aimed at general audiences on the same topic.

the thing is, when there’s conflict in how a conversation flows, often what’s going on is a mismatch in norms or expectations – not that one person is necessarily acting “wrong” and the other person is “right.” the mismatches in norms/expectations can and do align with existing power structures in society, but being more aware of them can really help you as an individual trying to navigate them.

you can train your brain for more linguistic awareness! start listening for pauses, intakes of breath, or back-channeling that’s meant to support, not interrupt. try it out!

¹ I am linking to the wikipedia page for the book rather than a link to buy the book because it’s kind of outdated and the criticism section on the wiki page is pretty reasonable. If you do read this book, be prepared for uhhhh period-typical gender essentialism that, to my knowledge, Tannen has not particularly updated her views on in the intervening time. But it is an influential and important book, just read it skeptically imo

If you enjoyed this post, may we also suggest our episode ’Small talk, big deal’ for more behind the science chat on conversation styles, the fine art of media references from memes to movies, and our own tested strategies for dodging awkward small talk questions while keeping the conversation flowing.

Bonus 98: Linguist Celebrities

Have you ever wondered if there are famous people who lead a hidden double life as a linguist? If you hang around linguists long enough, you’ll start hearing stories of them: musicians, athletes, politicians, and other people better known for their non-linguistic accomplishments who nonetheless have studied anywhere from one linguistics class once to a whole PhD – we’ll claim ‘em all!

In this bonus episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about linguist celebrities! We start with the historically famous Brothers Grimm and quickly move onto modern people of varying levels of fame, including a fantasy author Gretchen read in high school, the former Prime Minister of Latvia and former Premier of Ontario, a curiously large number of linguistics figure skaters plus a few other athletes, several linguistics musicians, a celebrity chef, and several nerd celebrities. We also talk about a few people who are famous within linguistics, including a recent memoir by Noam Chomsky’s assistant Bev Stohl about what it was like keeping him fueled with coffee. And finally, we reflect on running into authors of papers we’ve read at conferences, when people started recognizing us sometimes, and our tips and scripts for navigating celebrity encounters from both sides.

Know of any other celebrities with a linguistics background? Let us know, and maybe we’ll find enough of them to do a second celebrities episode someday!

Listen to this episode about linguist celebrities, and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘The science and fiction of Sapir-Whorf’. 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]

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 complexity of the relationship between the language you speak, and the way that you perceive reality. But first, our most recent bonus episode was the results of our 2024 listener survey.

Gretchen: We learned which one of us was more “kiki” and which one of us was more “bouba.”

Lauren: Mm-hm. And we discussed the highly competitive hand gesture game of “Paper, Scissors, Rock.”

Gretchen: “You mean ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors’?” – and more things that people call it cross-linguistically.

Lauren: Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm for this and almost 100 other bonus episodes.

Gretchen: Ooo, 97! We’re almost at 100.

Lauren: Should we do something special for our hundredth?

Gretchen: Stay tuned to see if we do.

[Music]

Gretchen: So, I recently read the classic science fiction book Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany, which people have been asking me to read for a long time.

Lauren: It’s from, like, the mid-’60s, so, for basically much longer than you’ve been a linguist (or alive) it’s been a staple of linguistic sci-fi reading.

Gretchen: Yes, this book is older than I am. You have to come to classics when you come to them. There’s no wrong time to do something like that. It sure does have a lot of linguistic elements. There’s this very cute bit where – so the characters have a lot of these interesting body modifications. This character has fangs and so can’t make a P sound.

Lauren: Oh, yeah, because I guess if you have teeth sticking out over your lips, you can’t close your lips to make a P.

Gretchen: The thing that gets me is it is explicitly said that he can’t make the P but he can make a B – and those are done with the same movement of the lips. It’s just the vocals cords which are different, which has nothing to do with where your fangs are.

Lauren: I absolutely love the linguist brain with which you read these books.

Gretchen: This was my experience of reading a lot of Babel-17 is that there’s a lot of linguistic elements that are almost doing it for me. The biggest of those is “Babel-17” itself, which in the book refers to this mysterious alien language that our poet linguist character (like, more poet linguists, that’s great) is assigned to interpret/decipher/translate/figure out from recordings. Classic linguist sci-fi story line, but Samuel Delany is one of the first people doing it.

Lauren: I was very invested in this character when I read this book ages ago.

Keep reading

Lingthusiasm Episode 102: The science and fiction of Sapir-Whorf

It’s a fun science fiction trope: learn a mysterious alien language and acquire superpowers, just like if you’d been zapped by a cosmic ray or bitten by a radioactive spider. But what’s the linguistics behind this idea found in books like Babel-17, Embassytown, or the movie Arrival?

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about the science and fiction of linguistic relativity, popularly known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. We talk about a range of different things that people mean when they refer to this hypothesis: a sciencey-sounding way to introduce obviously fictional concepts like time travel or mind control, a reflection that we add new words all the time as convenient handles to talk about new concepts, a note that grammatical categories can encourage us to pay attention to specific areas in the world (but aren’t the only way of doing so), a social reflection that we feel like different people in different environments (which can sometimes align with different languages, though not always). We also talk about several genuine areas of human difference that linguistic relativity misses: different perceptive experiences like synesthesia and aphantasia, as well as how we lump sounds into categories based on what’s relevant to a given language.

Finally, we talk about the history of where the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis comes from, why Benjamin Lee Whorf would have been great on TikTok, and why versions of this idea keep bouncing back in different guises as a form of curiosity about the human condition no matter how many specific instances get disproven.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about two sets of updates! We talk about the results from the 2024 listener survey (we learned which one of us you think is more kiki and more bouba!), and our years in review (book related news for both Lauren and Gretchen), plus exciting news for the coming year.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 90+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

• Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany on Goodreads
• Lingthusiasm episode on the linguistics of the movie Arrival
• History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast episode 31: The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
• Lingthusiasm episode ’Colour words around the world and inside your brain’
• Wikipedia entry for ‘Edward Sapir’
• ‘The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’ by Harry Hoijer (1954) (archive.org)
• Wikipedia entry for 'Ekkehart Malotki’
• Wikipedia entry for 'Hopi time controversy’
• 'Key is a llave is a Schlüssel: A failure to replicate an experiment from Boroditsky et al. 2003’ by Anne Mickan, Maren Schiefke, and Anatol Stefanowitsch
• 'Do Chinese and English speakers think about time differently? Failure of replicating Boroditsky (2001)’ by Jenn-Yeu Chen
• 'Does grammatical gender affect object concepts? Registered replication of Phillips and Boroditsky (2003)’ by Nan Elpers, Greg Jensen, and Kevin J. Holmes
• 'Future tense and saving money: no correlation when controlling for cultural evolution’ by Seán G. Roberts, James Winters, and Keith Chen
• Lingthusiasm bonus episode ‘North, left, or towards the sea? Interview with Alice Gaby’
• 'Samuel R. Delany, The Art of Fiction No. 210’ Interview by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah for The Paris Review (unpaywalled photos here)

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

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).

Bonus 97: Rock, paper, scissors, Gesture book, and a secret project - Survey results and general updates

In this bonus episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about two sets of updates!

First, results from the 2024 listener survey. We learned which one of us you think is more kiki and more bouba, an utterly nonsensical question that you nonetheless had 80/20 agreement on! We also learned about heart gestures and variants on rock, paper, scissors (or paper, scissors, rock) in many different languages.

Plus, we used results from all three years of listener surveys to create a massive blog post of 101 places to get enthusiastic about linguistics, if you’re looking for more linguistics options!

Second, our years in review and some upcoming things:

Lauren has finally finished writing her academic book about gesture and you can get Gesture: A Slim Guide from Oxford University Press later this month (that’s late March 2025 for people reading from the future). If academic books aren’t quite your jam (extremely reasonably), stay tuned for the fun highlights version on an upcoming Lingthusiasm episode!

Gretchen had a big trip in Europe last year including the launch of the Spanish edition of Because Internet, started learning American Sign Language (ASL), and has also been working a lot on a mysterious secret project which can’t be announced in public yet (ooooooh~~). It’s thanks to the support of patrons that we can do projects like this before they’re bringing in revenue on their own so stay tuned for further announcements once we’re allowed to talk about it :)

Together, we also co-authored two academic articles in 2024 about the meta aspects of doing linguistics communication with broader audiences (an important part of convincing Lauren’s job that it’s worth her spending time still making the podcast). They’re called: ‘Towards a theory of linguistic curiosity: applying linguistic frameworks to lingcomm and scicomm’  and 'Creating Inclusive Linguistics Communication: Crash Course Linguistics’ (with a big team from Crash Course Linguistics).

Listen to this episode about our 2024 survey results and general updates, and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Micro to macro - The levels of language’. 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 all the different layers of language structure. But first, thank you to everyone who shared so many excellent linguistics facts to celebrate our 100th episode anniversary!

Lauren: To celebrate Lingthusiasm now having more than 100 episodes, we’ve compiled a list of 101 places where you can get even more linguistics enthusiasm.

Gretchen: If you want some suggestions for other podcasts, books, videos, blogs, other places online and offline to feed your interest in linguistics, you can check out that link from our website.

Lauren: Even with 101 options, I’m sure there’re still a few we’ve missed. Feel free to tag us @Lingthusiasm on social media about your favourites.

Gretchen: Or if there’re any that you’re particularly excited to see on the list, we would love this to help be a bit of a hub for people to find other cool linguistics communication projects.

Lauren: Our most recent bonus episode was an interview with Julie Sedivy about our relationship with language and how it changes throughout our lives and the linguistics of what makes writing feel beautiful.

Gretchen: You can also read Julie’s new book called Linguaphile, which is, indeed, very beautifully written. It is about that relationship that we have with language throughout our lives.

Lauren: For this and over 90 other bonus episodes, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to the 101st episode of Lingthusiasm.

Gretchen: It’s LING 101!

Lauren: Oh my gosh, that is a classic first year subject course code.

Gretchen: I feel like there’s this canonical introduction to linguistics course that almost every linguistics programme has in some form. It’s a classic textbook format. It’s a classic course style. It goes from this very micro-level of language to this macro-level of language where you’re starting with very small list units and zooming out into the whole area of discourse.

Lauren: Weirdly enough, I absolutely did this subject, but we didn’t have course codes like “LING 101,” but I did do an introduction to linguistics that was exactly like this.

Gretchen: Ours also was not called “LING 101.” It was called “LING 100.”

Lauren: Oh, no. That was the last episode. We missed it.

Gretchen: We missed it. Now we can’t do it ever. Then I was at another university where it was called “201.” I don’t really wanna wait for another 100 episodes for us to be able to do this. I think “101” is still classically in the culture – the idea of an intro linguistics course – even if there’re many course codes that are different from that.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is intentionally not in this structure.

Gretchen: It seems like it would be a bit of a shame if we had to start like, okay, our first year is like, only phonetics, and then we’re gonna do only phonology, and then when we get all the way to pragmatics, we’ve got to stop doing the podcast or something. We made a very conscious decision early on to mix it up a bit.

Lauren: I mean, especially with the level of detail wherein – imagine if we’re like, “We’re 100 episodes in. We’re now moving from individual phones up to phonology.” We could’ve been here for quite a while.

Gretchen: Yeah, I think it’s more fun to mix it up. It also means that if we encounter a really good example or anecdote or paper – a new paper comes out – that we wanna talk about about a particular topic, there’s always more stuff that we can say about sounds. It’s not like, “Oh, well, we did sounds for the first three years, and then we never get to do sounds again.”

Lauren: Episode 101 is a great time to actually take ourselves through – 101 course-style – all these different layers of linguistic structure so you can see how a finite number of building blocks had this capacity to combine in so many novel ways.

Gretchen: I think of it as those – have you ever seen those videos where they start really, really zoomed in on a quark or an electron or a nucleus, and then they zoom out to the atom, and then to the cell, and then to the plant, and then to the backyard, and then to the map-view, and the Earth-view, and the Solar System, and the galaxy, and then you feel like, “Wow! We’re so far out!” and then you can zoom back in and back out. It’s very trippy and fun. We can do that with language.

Lauren: One of the great things about this is that those building blocks being able to combine in really versatile ways allows us to create sentences that have never been uttered before. Collecting these is something of a linguist’s hobby.

Gretchen: We have a few fun sentences that we can keep returning to and talk about them and all these different layers. But let’s debut our candidate sentences here.

Lauren: One: “Today, I learnt that there were smaller walrus ancestors, and I am extremely happy to report that the researcher writing about this did, indeed, refer to them as ‘smallrus’.”

Gretchen: Number Two: “Moons can have moons, and they are called ‘moonmoons’.”

Lauren: Three: “As the current record holder for the highest score in Donkey Kong, Hank Chien is legally fourth in line to be President of Taiwan.”

Keep reading

Lingthusiasm Episode 101: Micro to macro - The levels of language

When we first learn about nature, we generally start with the solid mid-sized animals: cats, dogs, elephants, tigers, horses, birds, turtles, and so on. Only later on do we zoom in and out from these charismatic megafauna to the tinier levels, like cells and bacteria, or the larger levels, like ecosystems and the water cycle. With language, words are the easily graspable charismatic megafauna (charismatic megaverba?), from which there are both micro levels (like sounds, handshapes, and morphemes) and macro levels (like sentences, conversations, and narratives).

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch take advantage of the aptly numbered 101th episode to get enthusiastic about linguistics from the micro to macro perspective often found in Linguistics 101 classes. We start with sounds and handshapes, moving onto accents and sound changes, fitting affixes into words, words into sentences, and sentences into discourse. We also talk about areas of linguistics that involve language at all these levels at once, including historical linguistics, child language acquisition, linguistic fieldwork, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics. Plus: why we don’t follow this order for Lingthusiasm episodes or Crash Course Linguistics and how you can give yourself a DIY intro linguistics course.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

To celebrate Lingthusiasm now having more than 100 episodes, we have compiled a list of 101 places where you can get even more linguistics enthusiasm! This is your one-stop-shop if you want suggestions for other podcasts, books, videos, blogs, and other places online and offline to feed your interest in linguistics. Even with a hundred and one options, we’re sure there’s still a few that we’ve missed, so also feel free to tag us @ lingthusiasm on social media about your favourites! 

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about what psycholinguistics can tell us about creative writing, with Julie Sedivy, psycholinguist and the author of 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.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 90+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

• Lingthusiasm episodes by topic
• Corinna Bechko ‘smallrus’ post on Bluesky
• Donkey Kong structural ambiguity and novel sentence example post on All Things Linguistic
• Auslan Signbank entry for 'my, mine’
• Taiwanese Sign Language Online Dictionary handshape list
• Our aesthetic IPA chart merch!
• ASL sign for 'student’ by @aslu on YouTube - formal version and informal version
• Crash Course Linguistics
• 'Quantifier Scope Jokes’ post on All Things Linguistics
• ’Billy Mitchell’s Donkey Kong Historical Records Reinstated After Multi-Year Dispute With Twin Galaxies’ article by Kat Bailey on IGN
• Wikipedia entry for 'President of the Republic of China’
• Wikipedia entry for Hank Chien
• Smallrus artwork by ursulav on Deviant Art
• Nix Illustration post on smallrus in the historical record

Lingthusiasm episodes mentioned:

• 'Schwa, the most versatile English vowel’
• 'All the sounds in all the languages - the International Phonetic Alphabet’
• 'Sounds you can’t hear - Babies, accents, and phonemes’
• 'Why do C and G come in hard and soft versions? Palatalization’
• 'Climbing the sonority mountain from A to P’
• Who questions the questions?
• Brunch, gonna, and fozzle - The smooshing episode
• That’s the kind of episode it’s - clitics
• Word order, we love
• The bridge between words and sentences - Constituency
• Cool things about scales and implicature
• Scoping out the scope of scope
• Layers of meaning - Cooperation, humour, and Gricean Maxims
• How to rebalance a lopsided conversation
• Corpus linguistics and consent - Interview with Kat Gupta
• Making speech visible with spectrograms

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

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Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

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).

Bonus 96: What makes for beautiful writing, scientifically speaking

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 bonus episode, Gretchen 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.

Listen to this episode about what psycholinguistics can tell us about creative writing, with Julie Sedivy, and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.