Culture Gabfest - We Found Our Archives: The Abstract Noun Edition
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3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 24 December 2025
⏱️ 52 minutes
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Summary
After thinking it was lost to the sands of internet time, our team uncovered a 2013 gem from the archives. In the “The Abstract Noun Edition,” your favorite Gabfesters talk about how we talk. Steve, Dana, and Julia discuss the elements of language: vocabulary, conversation, and voice. In paroxysms of polysyllables, they invoke their favorite writers—and their least favorite linguistic tics—to probe the best and worst of the English language. Why should you eschew the word “eschew”? What does “shibboleth” really mean? And where is the line between a strong voice and self-parody?
Speaking of self-parody, check out these very on-brand 2013 Endorsements:
Dana: The Sounding Joy, a CD collection of folk carols, collected by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings and performed by Elizabeth Mitchell. (Now available on streaming.)
Julia: Creating an iTunes playlist of all songs you’ve played more than 10 times and then shuffling them. You’ll rediscover old gems like “The Size of Our Love” by Sleater Kinney.
Steve: The mind-bending “Monty Hall problem,” as originally described by Marilyn vos Savant in Parade Magazine.
If you’re in New York on January 5, don’t miss some real life vocabulary, conversation, and voice when Steve joins Booker Prize-finalist Ben Markcovits for a conversation about The Rest of Our Lives — details here.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the Slate Culture Gamfest. We found our archives edition. |
| 0:17.0 | It's Wednesday, December 24th, Christmas Eve, 2025, hopefully a twinkly holiday |
| 0:25.9 | celebration at the end of a long year. And we are presenting you this week with a rerun. |
| 0:33.7 | We sometimes get questions about a show we did, I think, more than 10 years ago called the Abstract Nouns Edition, where we decided to talk about talking divided into the concepts of vocabulary, conversation, and voice. |
| 0:51.1 | And for a while now, it's been really hard to find any of our old shows online, |
| 0:56.0 | but magical producer Ben Frisch found them somehow with a twinkle of his keyboard. And so we've |
| 1:02.3 | excavated this old show. And it's very fun to hear little old us so innocent discuss where we were then, I don't know, five, six, seven years into |
| 1:14.3 | talking to each other all the time and to hear it now, another 10 years on, ish. |
| 1:19.0 | I don't know why I'm being so fuzzy about the dates. |
| 1:20.6 | Producer Ben, did you get a hard date in that? |
| 1:23.0 | 2013 is the abstract noun's edition. |
| 1:25.7 | Okay, so 12 years ago, five years into us doing the show, and yeah, we sound different and the same. |
| 1:33.4 | Oh, it's that long ago. |
| 1:35.0 | You know, Julia, a quick couple of observations, like you had said before we turned on these mics that we just sound like children on this. |
| 1:43.9 | And it's like, you know, my first thought was, |
| 1:47.2 | you know, it's, well, it's 10 years ago, but it sounds like 100 fucking years ago. And we don't |
| 1:52.1 | have like, I don't know, whatever jaundiced, bourbon-soaked, world weary, velchmerzie voices. |
| 1:59.4 | And now we're just like, you know, whatever. But then of course, it's all pre-Trump. just like you know whatever but then of course it's all |
| 2:02.7 | pre-trump it's like i mean of course that's not the only thing but it's definitely a part of it |
| 2:07.9 | it's got to be a thing it's before the world went to actual shit not the not the notional shit |
| 2:15.1 | we always think it's going to the actual shit shit. Yeah, there's a lot that hasn't |
| 2:19.2 | happened yet in those voices and yet a lot of like it was fun. Anyway, we hope you enjoy. We will |
... |
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