Ellen Jovin discusses her travels around the nation answering grammar questions, why people are so keen to reveal what they don’t know and don’t understand, and how written language connects us all.
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How alphabetical order made the modern world
We take alphabetization for granted, but it’s a relatively new way to classify the things we hold dear.
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Owning your identity starts with your name
Marian Chia-Ming Liu talks about she reclaimed her Chinese middle name after waves of Asian-American violence and the journey that brought her to a new understanding of who she is.
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What’s lost when English dominates the world
Linguist and lawyer Rosemary Salomone talks about the implications for a world dominated by English – from legal issues to class divisions.
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How language keeps cults together
Amanda Montell is a language scholar and host/creator of the “Sounds Like a Cult” podcast, and she joins us to talk about how language is used to develop the us vs. them mentality that solidifies people’s membership in cults – and cultish organizations.
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The words we need that don’t exist
John Koenig joins us to discuss his work coining new words and phrases that he hopes will perfectly capture the nuance and beauty of specific moments in our lives when the words we have at our disposal fail.
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Use Your Words
This hour we’ll talk with linguist John McWhorter about how we use profanity, Anna Sale of the “Death, Sex and Money” podcast about strategies for having difficult conversations and psychologist Katherine Kinzler about how the actual sound of our voices affects how people hear what we’ve got to say.
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An Immigrant Parent’s American Dream Meets A Child’s Reality
Sabreet Kang Rajeev joins us to talk about understanding her parents’ journey, their hopes for their new life, and connecting those to her own story as a first-generation American.
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What Your Voice Says About You
New Yorker staff writer John Colapinto joins us to talk about the experience of losing his voice and how it led him to look into how the sounds we create are so integral to our identity.
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A Conversation About … Conversations
Elizabeth Stokoe, professor of social interaction at Loughborough University, joins us to talk about how personal interactions and niceties reveal our motives – and we’ll get tips for having more meaningful conversations.
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Why We’re Not All Speaking Esperanto
Stephanie Tam joins us to tell the story of one man’s quest for a lingua franca that would bridge communication and why it was blocked by colonial ideas of English superiority.
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How We Got To BIPOC
Christopher MacDonald-Dennis is chief diversity officer at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, and he joins us to talk about the evolution of BIPOC and similar terms – and why some people embrace them while others don’t.
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