From New York City, this is Luxicon Valley, a podcast about language.

I'm John McWater, and this week I'd like to share with you for our end of the year show.

Some things about languages and what happens when they come together.

What it means when a language is mixed, how mixed languages get.

What that says about some languages that are near and dear to us.

And I'm doing that partly as an excuse to dip a bit into Yiddish,

because a lot of you ask me to talk about Yiddish, the whole idea being what is Yiddish.

What is this peculiar language that seems so mixed up?

What happened to it? How do linguists classify it?

And it is a good question, and it leads us to other things that we need to look at.

You think about the fact that no language is unmixed, language is mixed in different ways.

I couldn't tell you all of them within one or even two of these shows,

but we need to broach the subject.

Have you ever thought, ugh, this water is too wet?

Or this beach is too sandy. My name's Christine.

And my name is Sandy.

And where the host of Beach to Sandy water to wet.

A podcast where we do dramatic readings of the most wild and off-the-wall reviews on the internet.

We find the funniest, real reviews about everything from Vegas weddings,

matchmaking services, and trader joes, to caves, toddler beds, and spirit Halloween.

You won't believe the things that people think absolutely must be set on the internet.

How else would everyone know that some caves don't have Wi-Fi?

...