96: Welcome back aboard the metaphor train!

Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne

Science

4.8 • 743 Ratings

🗓️ 20 September 2024

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We're taking you on a journey to new linguistic destinations, so come along for the ride and don't forget to hold on! In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about metaphors! It's easy to think of literary comparisons like "my love is like a red, red rose" but metaphors are also far more common and almost unnoticed in regular conversation as well. For example, English speakers often talk about ideas as a journey (the metaphor train) or as if they're visual - clear or murky or heavy or maybe fuzzy, but not as fluffy or feathery or metallic or polka-dotted, but other languages can use different metaphors. We also talk about the process of metaphor design, and how metaphors can help us understand - or misunderstand - abstract concepts like electricity or language learning. Note that this episode originally aired as Bonus 30: Welcome aboard the metaphor train! We've added a few new things about metaphors and an updated announcements section to the top. We're excited to share one of our favourite bonus episodes from Patreon with a broader audience, while at the same time giving everyone who works on the show a bit of a break. Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice: episodes.fm/1186056137/episode/dGFnOnNvdW5kY2xvdWQsMjAxMDp0cmFja3MvMTkxOTg5MTAzMw Read the transcript here: lingthusiasm.com/post/762097363842220032/transcript-episode-96 Announcements: In this month’s bonus episode we get Tom Scott's Language Files team together on one call for the first and last time! We talk with host/writer Tom Scott, as well as researcher/writer Molly Ruhl and animator Will Marler, about their roles putting the videos togehter, Gretchen's role in the brainstorming and fact-checking process, and what it's like working on a big, multi-faceted project like the Language Files videos. Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 90+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds. Listen now at patreon.com/posts/111056163 For links to things mentioned in this episode: lingthusiasm.com/post/762097255628029952/lingthusiasm-episode-96-welcome-back-aboard-the

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to L'Enthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics.
0:23.1	I'm Lauren Gorn.
0:24.2	And I'm Gretchen McCulloch.
0:25.3	And today, we're getting enthusiastic about metaphors.
0:28.3	But first, this episode was originally posted as a bonus episode in August of 2019.
0:34.4	Ever since March 2017, we've been doing bonus episodes alongside main episodes every month
0:39.5	for people who support us at the Lingthusius level and above on Patreon. They're our way
0:44.6	of thanking people who support us on Patreon as a show that doesn't have sponsors or advertising.
0:49.6	It's your direct support that keeps the show going. The good news is that we're not part of some network that can just decide we're not
0:56.0	allowed to make the show anymore.
0:57.3	When we first started the bonus episodes, they were a bit shorter than the main episodes
1:00.7	because we wanted to make sure that it would be sustainable to keep up a regular production
1:03.8	schedule.
1:04.9	You'd think after doing this show for eight years, we would have made Lingthusiasm a lean
1:09.6	and efficient production. And yet it turns out we still
1:13.0	take a lot of time to put these episodes together because we just keep having higher standards.
1:17.6	Yeah, we definitely do a lot more research now because some of the early topics we covered
1:22.2	were stuff that we already had a whole bunch of background on. And so we didn't need to do
1:26.7	quite as much digging into
1:28.0	other sources and asking other people our many linguist friends and colleagues for their
1:33.3	suggestions and input, which we do a lot more of now.
1:36.3	And this is also true for the bonuses.
	...

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