Ben Zimmer, a language columnist for the Wall Street Journal, is a self-described "linguist, lexicographer, and all-around word nut," but I think this episode proves him to be a paragon of linguistic curiosity. He's committed to bringing the nuances and complexities of language to a general audience, and all through his work on words—which, as we know, are often persona non grata in the linguistics community. But nevertheless, this episode focuses on words, specifically, their political impact.

Words—signifiers—have power; they can index history (re: slay), political allegiance (🍉), in groups and out groups, overt and covert prestige, age, gender, and a whole lot more. Whether it's cunty, -ussy, rizz, nasty woman, enshittification, or ucalagon, we will discuss words' potential to be used and abused for political power. What happens when language becomes a conscious phenomena wherein the symbols we invoke index a political teleology?

This episode stretches across time and space to get at the importance of language when it’s invoked in a word-like form. From Bakhtin to Saussure to discussions of Trump and Biden, this conversation is alive with the awesomeness of language.

On a personal note I would like to thank Ben for being such an inspiring figure for young language scholars like myself. Thank you for the work you do, and thank you for doing it so thoughtfully.

Full interview on YouTube

Ben Zimmer - WSJ

Ben Zimmer - Twitter

Traveling Among the New Words: Lexical Adventures in the Digital Age

Ben Zimmer on CNN

Slang Trends Through History

Artwork by: Maja Mishevska, Brown '27 (https://mishevska.myportfolio.com/)

People often talk about language as "a window" into many things. Language can teach us about the mind, the brain, history, etc. But language is also a medium for discrimination, ridicule, oppression, unequal labor, and various other insidious practices. Linguistic oppression, as Kelly Elizabeth Wright tells us, isn't really about language, it's about how practices of oppression exploit language in their conquests.

Kelly E. Wright uses language to study and address forms of oppression, labor, racism, sexism, ableism, and the ideologies of what makes something "standard." This episode will address the question of sociolinguistic labor: why it exists, why it persists, and how to address it. We discuss how language is used as a barrier, a tool for discrimination and inclusion, a proxy for race and gender and class, among other things. If nothing else, this episode will show how studying language empowers you to make a difference in the world and highlight systemic issues.

For the full, unedited version of this episode, head to youtube.

Kelly E. Wright Website

Dr. Wright's Public Scholarship

Housing Policy and Linguistic Profiling

Hearing Rachel Jeantel

You Met My Ambassador

Shifting: The Double Lives of Black Women in America

Sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology of US Latinos

There’s a lot that I can say about Emily M. Bender, but I think that a philosophy professor of mine said it best when he described her as the “cutting edge of technology and AI and linguistics and ethics.” Obviously some of her cutting-edge-ness concomitantly stems from the cutting-edge-ness of large language models, deep fakes, and 'artificial intelligence' inventions. But out of all the computational linguists, Emily M. Bender stands out to me because she's made the problem of unregulated AI pertinent and understandable to everyone—linguists, computer scientists, climate activists, lawyers, everyone. Her message about LLMs and other AI inventions is clear: we have to do something, and soon, preferably yesterday. Because there is great incentive for AI to remain unregulated at the cost of our democracy, our right to privacy and ownership over our data, our planet, and (as she calls it) our "information ecosystem."

This episode answers all the questions you've had about 'AI' technology: how is the language of an LLM intrinsically different from the language of a human? What are the legal implications of un-watermarked synthetic media? What's going on with deep fakes? How can linguists use their knowledge to effect change? And throughout it all, you'll hear Emily's wisdom and empathy radiating through her wealth of knowledge.

Emily's Website

Collection of links about the 'Stochastic Parrots' paper and the subsequent firing of multiple coauthors

On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜

Baldwin: Understanding the link between joint attention and language

George Carlin

NBC News: Deepfake porn

Patricia Kuhl TedTalk: The Linguistic Genius of Babies

Language and Linguistics on Trial: Hearing Rachel Jeantel

Abeba Birhane

⁠Wesley Leonard ⁠