linguistics – Mashed Radish

language (for your ears)

Language and linguistics used up some great bandwidth this past week. Check out these podcasts for some excellent listens for your weekend:

What do Huckleberry Hound, decals, and Yiddish have in common? Ben Zimmer makes the cockamamie connection on the latest episode of Slate’s Lexicon Valley:

Linguist Arika Okrent, whose work you may have read in Mental Floss, answers questions about questions on the newest Freakonomics podcast

Author and journalist Stefan Fatsis discusses his fascinating piece on the future of dictionaries with the Slate Culture Gabfest panel:

Be sure to keep up with Strong Language, the sweary blog about swearing. There have some incredible new posts lately on all things profane, vulgar–and linguistic. In “So many mother _uckers,” Nancy Friedman looked into sweary soundalikes in name branding while Steve Chrisomalis investigated the rise of the phrase four-letter word, to name a few.

In need of a tonic after Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, I recently wrote on Robert Creeley’s artful swearing in his iconic poem, “I Know a Man.” This post, I’m excited and humbled to announce, is the inaugural cross-post of Strong Language at Slate’s excellent language blog, Lexicon Valley. Read it here at Slate.

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