The Year of the “Vaxx”

Slate Debates

Slate Podcasts

Society & Culture, News

4.6 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 4 January 2022

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

On today’s episode of Spectacular Vernacular, Nicole and Ben pay tribute to the late pioneer in linguistics and cognitive science, Lila Gleitman. They also interview Peter Sokolowski of Merriam-Webster and Fiona McPherson of the Oxford English Dictionary about the keywords of 2021. And finally, we bring on a listener for some wordplay. We hope you’re familiar with the diversity of English dialects. 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: Lila Gleitman’s obituary in the New York Times Lila Gleitman’s interview at the 2017 Association for Psychological Science conference Oxford Languages Word of the Year Merriam-Webster Word of the Year American Dialect Society Word of the Year American Dialect Society’s 2021 Word of the Year livestream — register to join the virtual voting session! 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

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This episode is brought to you by Slack. With Slack, you can bring all your people and
0:05.8	tools together in one place. It's your digital HQ where you can increase productivity,
0:11.1	enable flexibility and automate workflows. Plus, Slack is full of game-changing features
0:16.7	like huddles for quick check-ins or Slack Connect, which helps you connect with partners
0:20.9	inside and outside of your company. Slack, where the future works. Get started at
0:26.9	Slack.com slash DHQ. The following podcast contains explicit language.
0:33.1	Hello, I'm Nicole Holiday, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
0:40.3	And I'm Ben Zimmer, language columnist for the Wall Street Journal.
0:43.1	And this is spectacular vernacular, a podcast where we not only explore language.
0:47.3	We also play with it. This week we'll be joined by two lexicographers,
0:51.0	Peter Sokolowski of Miriam Webster and Fiona McPherson of the Oxford English Dictionary,
0:56.4	who will tell us about their choices for word of the year. And later on, we'll be joined
1:00.4	by a spectacular vernacular listener from New Zealand for a very international wordplay quiz.
1:05.5	We have guests from the US, the UK, and New Zealand this week. We're really spanning the globe.
1:11.3	Yes, and it's always great to chat with our friends from the dictionary world. Ben, I know
1:15.4	you've been involved in both linguistics and lexicography, but those two fields don't
1:19.6	actually intersect as much as people might think.
1:21.9	Yeah, it's true. I worked for a while as a lexicographer for Oxford University Press.
1:27.3	I was editor for US dictionaries. But most people who work on the major dictionary programs,
1:32.9	they don't necessarily have backgrounds in linguistics.
1:36.5	A lexicographer has often come out of the humanities where they might be studying language
1:40.6	from a more literary or historical angle.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Slate Podcasts, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Slate Podcasts and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.