Listen to Episode No.7 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is This is what language means.
It is text, and it is speech — but ... Show More
Mar 2
Jieun Kiaer, "Emoji Speak: Communication and Behaviours on Social Media" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Emoji Speak: Communication and Behaviours on Social Media (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Jieun Kiaer provides an in-depth discussion of emoji use in a global context, this volume presents the use of emoji as a hugely important facet of computer-mediated communication, leading Dr. Kiae ... Show More
41m 57s
Mar 1
Joanna Bourke, "Five Evil Women: Hindley, West, Wuornos, Homolka, Tucker" (Reaktion, 2026)
Why do certain women become icons of evil? Five Evil Women: Hindley, West, Wuornos, Homolka, Tucker (Reaktion, 2026) by Professor Joanna Bourke offers the first comparative, non-sensationalist account of five of the most reviled women in the modern Anglophone world: Myra Hindley, ... Show More
1h 1m
Feb 28
Barbie Zelizer, "How the Cold War Broke the News: The Surprising Roots of Journalism's Decline" (Polity, 2025)
Most of us would agree that American journalism has problems. Rushed reporting and thin coverage. Timidity in the face of adversity. Polarized perspectives and euphemistic language. Groupthink about complicated events.While much blame has been levelled at big tech, in How the Col ... Show More
40m 29s
Mar 2021
54: How linguists figure out the grammar of a language
If you go to the linguistics section of a big library, you may find some shelves containing thick, dusty grammars of various languages. But grammars, like dictionaries, don’t just appear out of nowhere -- they’re made by people, and those people bring their own interests and prio ... Show More
41m 16s
May 2022
68: Tea and skyscrapers - When words get borrowed across languages
When societies of humans come into contact, they’ll often pick up words from each other. When this is happening actively in the minds of multilingual people, it gets called codeswitching; when it happened long before anyone alive can remember, it’s more likely to get called etymo ... Show More
40m 48s
Mar 2022
N. J. Enfield, "Language Vs. Reality: Why Language Is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists" (MIT Press, 2022)
Nick Enfield’s book, Language vs. Reality: Why Language is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists (MIT Press, 2022), argues that language is primarily for social coordination, not precisely transferring thoughts from one person to another. Drawing on empirical research, Enfield ... Show More
1h 6m
May 2021
Compliments, Lesson 1, Figures Of Speech
You may meet many different kinds of figures of speech in Arabic. We usually think of a figure of speech as being a comparison between two things which are not usually connected with each other, so that the characteristics of the one are carried over to the other. In Levantine Ar ... Show More
5m 4s
Mar 2024
#262 Why You Can't Understand Native Speakers (Elision)
Textbook English is different from spoken English, and a big part of this comes down to pronunciation and how things are said in real conversations. This is Part 2 in my series on pronunciation, where we first looked at Linking in Episode 255, and now we're looking at Elision. Th ... Show More
34m 23s
May 2024
How Can We Be More Effective With Language?
Have you ever wondered what’s up with double negation, the history of gender neutral pronouns, or why swearing is taboo? Then get ready for this week’s guest, linguist Anne Curzan! Anne and Jonathan talk about how the English language has evolved since the 1300s and how our words ... Show More
53m 20s
Oct 2023
Txt
In this episode of High Theory, Matthew Kirschenbaum talks about txt, or text. Not texting, or textbooks, but text as a form of data that is feeding large language models. Will the world end in fire, flood, or text?
In the full interview, Matthew recommended Tim Maughan’s novel I ... Show More
19m 54s