The following podcast contains explicit language.

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

I'm John McWhorter, and this week we're going to talk about what a linguist knows.

I'm always saying, well, we linguists think, well, it's something that a linguist would consider, etc.

What is this stuff that we think?

Is there a linguist frame of mind?

Well, yes, there is.

We see language in a way that's different from how the layman usually sees it,

and that's not only in that we don't think there's such thing as people speaking wrong.

That's only the tip of the iceberg.

We are taught to look at what I'm doing right now as having a certain anatomy,

a certain physiology.

We have our own kind of table of elements.

You might call it our own anatomy chart,

our own fatagorean theorem, etc.

You might like to know what some of that is.

On this show, I've generally avoided giving you too much textbook introduction to linguistics kind of material.

I shouldn't hold it back from you completely because a lot of it is.

Once you wrap your head around it, pretty neat stuff.

I just want to share with you some of the basic tools that we use when I'm not going to put it that way.

That sounds very remote.

Some of the ways that we see language that differ from the way you might see language

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