51: Small talk, big deal

Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne

Science

4.8 • 743 Ratings

🗓️ 17 December 2020

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“Cold enough for ya?” “Nice weather for ducks.” Small talk is a valuable piece of our social interactions -- it can be a way of having a momentary exchange with someone you don’t know very well or a bridge into getting to know someone better by figuring out which deeper conversational topics might be of mutual interest. In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about the science behind small talk: how we pick topics for small talk conversation, the fine art of media references from memes to movies, and our own tested strategies for dodging awkward small talk questions while keeping the conversation flowing, such as when you’re having a not-great time but don’t want to talk about it, and that ubiquitous linguist question “so, how many languages do you know?” This month’s bonus episode is a Q&A with lexicographer Emily Brewster of Merriam-Webster! Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about the process of making dictionaries, posing your patron questions to lexicographer Emily Brewster of Merriam-Webster. We also talk about how lexicography has changed since dictionaries went online and in the era of social media, and the extremely esoteric process of getting lexicography jobs. Get all your lexicography questions answers, as well as access to 45 other bonus episodes by becoming a Patron! https://www.patreon.com/lingthusiasm Announcements Crash Course Linguistics videos are available now and coming out weekly! https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8dPuuaLjXtP5mp25nStsuDzk2blncJDW Keep an eye out for them around 2pm North American Eastern Time on Fridays for the rest of 2020 (except a few holiday Fridays) and into early 2021. If you want to get an email each week with some further reading and practice exercises on each topic, you can also check out the companion issues of Mutual Intelligibility. https://mutualintelligibility.substack.com/ Become a Patron and get access to the Crash Course channel in the Lingthusiasm Discord to chat about each episode! https://lingthusiasm.com/discord For links to all the things mentioned in this episode: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/637790657255227392/lingthusiasm-episode-51-small-talk-big-deal

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics.
0:22.0	I'm Lauren Gorn.
0:23.5	And I'm Gretchen McCulloch.
0:26.0	And today we're getting enthusiastic about small talk.
0:30.8	But at first, thank you so much to everybody who helped us celebrate our anniversary month in November.
0:35.8	We really enjoyed hearing and seeing all of your shares to help other people find the show and be able to listen to a podcast that's enthusiastic about
0:38.1	linguistics. Most podcasts still find new ears or new eyes, if they have transcripts like ours,
0:45.3	by word of mouth. So whether you shared in the anniversary month in November or you
0:51.2	want to share enthusiasm at any other time of the year, we're always
0:54.8	incredibly grateful. This month's bonus episode is a Q&A with lexicographer Emily Brewster,
1:02.5	who works for Merriam-Webster, answering patron questions about dictionaries and how they're made
1:07.2	and how words get into them and out of them and all sorts of things in that direction.
1:10.5	So you can listen to that and a whole bunch of other bonus episodes, almost twice as
1:14.8	much Lengthusiasm by going to patreon.com slash Lengthusiasm.
1:32.3	Hey, Gretchen, how's your book going?
1:44.9	Oh, well, you know, so it's been out for a bit over a year now, came out in paperback earlier this year, so the media I've been doing for it has been dying down, which is nice to take a bit of a break, but people are still tagging me about them reading it on social media, and that's really nice.
1:48.9	What I've actually been working on this year has been this series of intralinguistics videos with this big educational YouTube channel, Crash Course. As you know, Lauren, because you've been working on it with me.
1:54.8	I say that it's a very well-practiced answer to that question.
2:00.8	I mean, it's a question that people have been asking me
2:03.3	for five years now. So the answer does keep changing, but I have had a lot of practice.
2:09.6	I imagine it's definitely in high rotation for people making small talk with you.
2:15.4	Yeah, it's a good way of getting into this idea of small talk,
	...

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