Grammar Girl here. I'm In Yon Fogarty, and today's show was originally released in June as a bonus segment for the people who support the show, our Grammar Pellusians. If you would like to be a Grammar Pallusian and get in on the fun, including getting ad-free episodes and these bonus episodes when they first

come out, visit quick and dirty tips.com slash bonus to learn more. And now onto the show.

Greetings, grammar pelusians. Thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for your support for the show.

We just finished the main segment with Lauren Gahn about her new book,

Gesture, A Slim Guide, and all sorts of fascinating stuff. If you haven't listened to that yet,

go listen, you'll enjoy it. There was so much more to talk about. We're just going to continue the

discussion here. If you didn't miss that, Lauren Gahn is a senior lecturer in Linguistics at La Trobe University

in Melbourne, Australia, and she's the co-host of the Lingthusiasm podcast. Lauren, thanks again

for being here. Thanks, Minion. Sorry, just making a note about one of the gestures that you did.

We'll come back to that. Oh, no, say it now. So when you were talking about

we've just finished chatting. Yeah. You were pointing out to your left. Yeah. And that is for very

good reasons, which is that as English speakers where we have a left to write writing system,

we think of the left as in the past and we think of the right as in the future. Absolutely. And that was one of the topics I

wanted to talk about is the cultural differences and the in space and the time thing. Yeah. So this is a metaphoric gesture. Time famously is different from

or related to space, but because time is so abstract, we try and make sense of it by trying to pin it down to the physical world.

As I said, one of the metaphors that we have is that the past is in the left and the future

is in the right. If you ask someone to plan out their week, you can usually get a really great

visual gesture timeline if someone has a particular, a busy person I'm sure they'll love

you taking up more of their time and ask them about their busy week and hopefully you'll get a lot

of things moving on a left to right timeline it's also why the FedEx logo points to the right

because they're getting things to you in time so there's lots of this left to right gesturing,

but there's also a different metaphor that we have

...