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Spectacular Vernacular: Capital Language From Kyiv to Washington, D.C.

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Slate Podcasts

News, Business, Society & Culture

41.1K Ratings

🗓️ 1 February 2022

⏱️ 32 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

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 [email protected]. 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 Noor.

0:04.0

If you're loving this podcast, it's probably because of the things that went into it,

0:08.1

the ingredients, which is something Noor knows all about.

0:12.1

Their stocks put the earth into your birthbog in Yon, the souper into your soup, and the

0:17.0

oo-wee into your chili.

0:20.0

Discover the recipe for family meal time happiness and give it more with Noor.

0:24.8

Visit Noor.com forward slash UK.

0:30.0

Hello, I'm Nicole Holiday, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

0:36.8

And I'm Ben Zimmer, language columnist for the Wall Street Journal.

0:39.8

And this is Spectacular vernacular, a podcast where we not only explore language.

0:44.3

We also play with it.

0:45.6

This week our guest is Dr. Jesse Gracer of the University of Tennessee Knoxville, who

0:49.8

has a new book out called The Black Sight of the River, Grace, Language and Belonging

0:53.8

in Washington, D.C.

0:55.6

And later we'll try to stump a listener with a brand new wordplay puzzle.

0:59.1

And Nicole, one thing we have in common is we both love keeping up with current events.

1:04.3

I know we're both kind of news junkies, but as language people, we're always noticing

1:08.3

little things when there's a linguistic hot take that's related to the news in some

1:13.1

way.

1:14.1

Yeah, that's kind of our jam, and it turns out to be pretty helpful since we're hosting

1:17.2

a language podcast.

1:18.4

Well, this week with all the concerns about a possible Russian invasion in Ukraine, a

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