Words for Granted - An etymology and linguistics podcast

In this episode, Ray chats with author Laura Spinney about Proto-Indo-European, the ancestral language of hundreds of modern languages spoken by billions today ranging from Western Europe to India. They explore how...

In this episode, Ray talks with linguist Valerie Friedland about accents—what they are, where they come from, and why everyone has one. They explore how accents begin in early childhood, how regional speech patterns...

In this episode, author Danny Bate walks through the alphabet's evolution from its origins in Egyptian hieroglyphs to the letters of the English alphabet familiar to us today. He explains why English spelling became so...

In this episode, Ray chats with Mignon Fogerty, aka the Grammar Girl. "Good grammar" may seem like the epitome of prescriptivism, but when it comes to her "Quick and Dirty Tips", Mignon leans on a more ideologically...

What can we learn about the nature of translation by reading a warning message in hundreds of different languages? In this episode, Keith Kahn-Harris discusses his latest book, The Babel Message , in which the mundane...

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. While this stereotype is true, rhetoric is more than just snake oil––we use it...

Instead of criticizing deviations from Standard English as "wrong," what if we celebrated them as expressive lingusitic innovations? In this conversation with Valerie, we take a look at some of the quirky features of...

What goes into building a language learning curriculum? How do designers choose features within a language learing app? Are some approaches to language learning better than others, or is it up to the indiviudal? In this...

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 fantastical and mundane, author Duncan Madden takes us on a journey across the...

In this interview with linguist Danny Bate, we go deep on all things gender––grammatical gender, that is. Why do some languages have gender while others don't? Where does gender come from? What is the function of...

Trivia refers to obscure or useless information, but this definition is a far cry from the word's etymology. Trivia, or tri-via , literally means "three roads," and in Ancient Roman times, it referred to three-way...

In this episode, I speak with Tracey Weldon, linguist and board advisor on the Oxford Dictionary of African American English project. We discuss the origins of AAE, the role of code switching within its speech...

What does "standing under" have to do with "understanding?" Nothing at all, which is why most of us probably overlook the obvious fact that "understand" is actually a compound word comprising "under" and "stand." In our...

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 , meaning "age". "World" literally meant "the age of man", and in many of its...

Have you ever wondered how writing was invented - or, how many times it was invented? How many undeciphered scripts has the ancient world left us, and is there any hope in eventually deciphering them? In this interview...