May 6, 2025
It’s episode 212 and time for us to talk about excellently complicate the non-fiction genre of Linguistics & Language! We discuss 🤔, our academic backgrounds, the power of words, accents, and more!
You can download the podcast directly, find it on Libsyn, or get it through Apple Podcasts or your favourite podcast delivery system.
In this episode
Anna Ferri | Meghan Whyte | Matthew Murray 🦇 | Jam Edwards
Things We Read (or tried to…)
- Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch
- Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton
- In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri, translated by Ann Goldstein
- I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See the World by James Geary
- Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages by Gaston Dorren
Other Media We Mentioned
- 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: With More Ways by Eliot Weinberger
- Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages by Guy Deutscher
- Otherwords - Inside the Fiercest Debate in Linguistics
- Your Computer Is on Fire edited by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Marie Hicks, and Kavita Philip
- What the Font?! - A Manga Guide to Western Typeface by Kuniichi Ashiya
- Giga Town: A Guide to Manga Iconography by Fumiyo Kouno, translated by Ko Ransom
-
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying by Marie Kondō, translated
by Cathy Hirano
- Occasional
reminder that whenever you say "sparks joy" you are not quoting
Marie Kondo.
You are quoting her translator, Cathy Hirano. She invented "sparks joy" out of whole cloth.
What Marie Kondo says is "This makes my heart go pitter pat.”
-Zack Davisson
- Occasional
reminder that whenever you say "sparks joy" you are not quoting
Marie Kondo.
- Eine
wie Alaska [Looking for Alaska] by John Green, translated by
Sophie Zeitz
- “I would read it in German, for a few reasons” - John Green
- Die kleine Fledermaus Wegda by Nanna Nesshöver and Wiebke Rauers
- Lingo: A Language Spotter's Guide to Europe by Gaston Dorren, translated by Alison Edwards
Links, Articles, and Things
- Great Vowel Shift (Wikipedia)
- Lolcat (Wikipedia)
- Kinokuniya
- There are four Kinokuniya shops in Texas. Four! Put one in Denver!
- Abugida (Wikipedia)
- Episode 209 - Design
15 Language & Linguistics Books by BIPOC Authors:
Every month Book Club for Masochists: A Readers’ Advisory Podcast chooses a genre at random and we read and discuss books from that genre. We also put together book lists for each episode/genre that feature works by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, & People of Colour) authors. All of the lists can be found here.
- Otter's Journey Through Indigenous Language and Law by Lindsay Keegitah Borrows
- The Skin That We Speak: Thoughts on Language and Culture in the Classroom edited by Joanne Kilgour Dowdy and Lisa Delpit
- Tongues: On Longing and Belonging Through Language edited by Eufemia Fantetti, Leonarda Carranza, and Ayelet Tsabari
- Living Language Rights: Constitutional Pathways to Indigenous Language Education by Lorena Sekwan Fontaine
- Grammar Matters: The Social Significance of How We Use Language by Jila Ghomeshi
- A Tale of Monstrous Extravagance: Imagining Multilingualism by Tomson Highway
- My Broken Language: A Memoir by Quiara Alegría Hudes
- Et Cetera: An Illustrated Guide to Latin Phrases by Maia Lee-Chin with illustrations by Marta Bertello
- Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri
- Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter – Then, Now, and Forever by John McWhorter
- The Ecology of Language Evolution by Salikoko S. Mufwene
- Mâci-Nêhiyawêwin / Beginning Cree by Solomon Ratt with illustrations by Holly Martin
- Living Pidgin: Contemplations on Pidgin Culture by Lee A. Tonouchi
- Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern by Jing Tsu
- Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
Give us feedback!
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Join us again on Tuesday, June 3rd when we’ll be discussing “Found Books,” that is books that we’ve found in public little free libraries, book exchanges, and book swaps.
Then on July 1st we’ll be talking about Non-Traditional Storytelling (e.g. fiction that’s not prose)!