04: Inside the Word of the Year vote

Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne

Science

4.8 • 791 Ratings

🗓️ 16 January 2017

⏱️ 214 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Every January, hundreds of linguists gather in a conference room somewhere in the US to discuss and vote for the Word of the Year. It’s the longest-running and most public WotY proceedings, and it’s part of the annual meeting of the American Dialect Society, a sister society of the Linguistic Society of America. Gretchen was there this year and the past few years, while Lauren has never been (but actively reads the #woty16 hashtag on twitter!). We discuss what the ADS Word of the Year vote feels like from inside the room where it happens, the categories and politics around selecting a WotY, look at the different offerings from other organizations that also name a WotY (Lauren is pretty pleased that Australian Word of the Year was “democracy sausage”, while Gretchen would like a Canadian Word of the Year for 2017, thank you), and end up wondering what even is a word. We also respond to finally going live! Thanks for all your comments so far, and if you have a sec to rate us on iTunes or wherever else you’re listening, we’d super appreciate it. Update: In the show we said that 'Trump’ was selected as sign for the year for Netherlands Sign Language. It was actually the Swiss Deaf Association, in Switzerland. For more information visit the show page: http://lingthusiasm.com/post/155962380426/lingthusiasm-episode-4-inside-the-word-of-the Listen to bonus episodes, suggest future topics, and help keep the show ad-free by supporting us on Patreon: http://patreon.com/lingthusiasm

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Lenthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics.
0:10.0	I'm Gretchen McCulloch.
0:11.0	And I'm Lauren Gorn. And today we're going to be talking about the word of the year.
0:16.0	But first, since we did our last podcast, we've gone live.
0:22.0	And it's very exciting.
0:25.4	It's more exciting for us, maybe, because we've been, like, keeping it for a long time.
0:27.1	And now we get to see it all.
0:28.6	We're not talking to an imaginary audience.
0:31.1	We're talking to real people, and real people who've been listening.
0:39.3	It's amazing. Thank have been so much more than we've been expecting as well. There have been more of them and they have been nicer than we expected. I don't know. We weren't expecting mean comments.
0:44.3	We weren't expecting this many nice comments either. So thank you for that.
0:47.3	So I feel like we're doing a real podcast now because I get to say to people,
0:51.3	if you like this, then go to iTunes and leave a positive review.
0:55.9	And that just makes me feel like I really am doing a podcast now that I have to beg for likes.
1:01.4	We've leveled up.
1:02.7	And you should also know that we're in transcriptions of the episodes.
1:06.4	So if you are not a person who likes listening to things, I don't know how you got so far.
1:10.8	But if you know people who don't like listening to things, you can send them to our
1:14.8	transcriptions, which are also on our website at linkthusiasm.com.
1:18.7	And we also have a Twitter and a Facebook. We're pretty chatty, really, unsurprisingly.
1:23.8	We're pretty chatty. And we're also on other platforms like Google Play and YouTube if you're really not a podcast person and SoundCloud.
1:30.3	So if you don't do iTunes, don't worry, we're there too.
	...

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