You're listening to Away with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I'm Grant Barrett.

And I'm Martha Barnett. I always appreciate it when an expert in a specialized field can talk

to non-experts in a way that's clear and concise and understandable. And that's why I was interested

in a book called The Five Minute Linguist. It's a collection of dozens of very short essays

by linguists from across the country. And each of them addresses some question involving

language. The kind of thing that they might be asked at a dinner party or just sitting around,

drinking a beer, things like what causes somebody to have a foreign accent or what's the difference

between a language and a dialect. And the essays in this book are really bite-sized. They're just

three to five pages with references at the end, which makes it a really intriguing way to sort of

wander through the topic of language and just follow whatever aspect and treat you.

I had the good fortune to see the live version of The Five Minute Linguist at the annual convention

of the Linguistics Society of America conference in New Orleans. Oh, I bet that was fun.

It was very fun. They presented it kind of like the moth. So all of these prepared speakers who

clearly had rehearsed and had fantastic slideshows got up exactly five minutes, presented very exciting

material in a very familiar fun way. And there was voting, the audience voted and there were judges

in the front. The MC was John McWorter, whom you may know from the Luxicon Valley podcast and the

judges were other podcasters, Gretchen McCulloch from the Linguism podcast. There was Patrick Cox from

the subtitle podcast, formerly of the world in words, Ben Zimmer, who writes about language for

the Wall Street Journal, and Ann Kursan, who does a language podcast for Michigan Radio was there.

Lane Green, who writes the language column for the economist, was also one of the judges.

And it was just the best. They really know how to take complicated subjects and explain it so that

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