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

And you know what we're going to do today?

We're going to start from where you guys keep writing to me because it really is something

interesting.

And then we're going to take it even further.

This is going to be one of our where-do-words come from shows.

Let's start with something that's called sound symbolism.

This is a subfield of linguistics that has a name.

It's kind of intuitive.

It goes a little further than you might think, but not as far as you might prefer.

And part of my job here, as always, is to take us a little further from where we might

think things stop.

For example, we have these labels for various things, for nouns and verbs and adverbs and

everything else.

And you kind of wonder where did the words come from?

Who started this?

And if you've been listening to this show for a while, you know that our words today started

out as other words and that there's this constant morphing, but that only leads to the

question where did the first words come from?

And even nowadays, as the only place words come from, people deliberately making things

up or words coming together, well, no.

There is something that I think many of us feel might be the source of all words in

...