Capital Language From Kyiv to Washington, D.C.

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News, Society & Culture

4.6 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 1 February 2022

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On today’s episode of Spectacular Vernacular, Nicole and Ben talk about how the capital of Ukraine has become a linguistic hot take. They also interview Jessi Grieser, a professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville about her new book, The Black Side of the River: Race, Language, and Belonging in Washington D.C. And finally, we bring on a listener for some wordplay. We hope you’re good at figuring out analogies. You could win a year’s membership to Slate Plus. Do you have any language questions or fun facts to share? Email us at spectacular@slate.com. Produced by Jasmine Ellis and Asha Saluja Here are some notes and references from this week’s show: New York Times: “How Do You Say Kyiv? It Can Be Hard for English Speakers” NPR “Kyiv or Kiev? Why people disagree about how to pronounce the Ukrainian capital’s name” Jessi Grieser: The Black Side of the River: Race, Language, and Belonging in Washington, D.C. “Bad Analogies” on Twitter Subscribe to Slate Plus. It’s only $1 for the first month. To learn more, go to slate.com/spectacularplus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode is brought to you by Slack. With Slack, you can bring all your people and
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0:20.9	inside and outside of your company. Slack, where the future works. Get started at Slack.com
0:27.8	and slash DHQ.
0:32.4	Hello, I'm Nicole Holiday, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
0:36.1	And I'm Ben Zimmer, language columnist for the Wall Street Journal.
0:39.2	And this is Spectacular vernacular, a podcast where we not only explore language.
0:43.7	We also play with it. This week, our guest is Dr. Jesse Gracer of the University of Tennessee
0:48.1	Knoxville, who has a new book out called The Black Side of the River, Grace, Language and
0:52.9	Belonging in Washington, D.C. And later, we'll try to stump a listener with a brand-new
0:57.1	wordplay puzzle.
0:58.4	And Nicole, one thing we have in common is we both love keeping up with current events.
1:03.6	I know we're both kind of news junkies. But as language people, we're always noticing
1:07.8	little things, you know, when there's a linguistic hot take that's related to the news in some way.
1:13.2	Yeah, that's kind of our jam and it turns out to be pretty helpful since we're hosting
1:16.7	a language podcast.
1:18.6	Well, this week, with all the concerns about a possible Russian invasion in Ukraine,
1:24.0	a certain city name has been popping up in the news quite a lot.
1:27.6	Kiev. Kiev. Kiev. Kiev. Kiev. Kiev. Kiev.
1:32.9	Oof.
	...

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