#linguistics
85 episodes
#5687: The Speech Scientist Behind Teletubbies
Andrew Davenport studied speech sciences and performance art — then built Teletubbies on developmental theory, not gibberish.
#5466: Hebrew Words Hidden in English Text
Daniel wants a classifier that spots Hebrew written in Latin letters — and it turns out nobody's built one.
#5442: When Do LLMs Suddenly Get Good at Things?
New capabilities seem to appear out of nowhere as models scale. Whether that's real — or just how we measure — is still an open fight.
#5438: Why Linguists Left the AI Room
Large language models grew out of linguistics — so why aren't linguists in the room where they're built?
#5437: Hunting the Tells That Vanish When Named
There's no tool for finding an LLM's verbal tics — you have to build one. Here's how keyness analysis works.
#5342: When "Politically Correct" Flipped Sides
From Marxist party discipline to campus flashpoint to pejorative — how "politically correct" changed hands, and why "woke" repeated the pattern.
#5311: Churchill's McKinsey Interview: When Oratory Meets the Case
Churchill's rhetoric was architectural, every sentence load-bearing. McKinsey wants the answer in sixty seconds. Let's roleplay the collision.
#5306: The Trump Interview Playbook: A Filing Job, Five Rhetorical Patterns
What happens when a rally-style rhetorical machine gets aimed at a beige cubicle and a filing job? A touchpoint-by-touchpoint playbook.
#5228: Why Israeli Road Signs Still Spell It "Tiqwa
Israel's Academy of the Hebrew Language is finally standardizing how place names get written in English — but the Q on the signs has survived every...
#5187: Translation Is Not a Pipe: What Machines Miss
Rubrics rate machine translation above human work — until readers pick side-by-side. What translators know that metrics can't see.
#5172: Who Decides When a Dialect Becomes a Language?
Languages fork like codebases — and the merge button doesn't exist. Who actually decides when a dialect becomes its own language?
#5170: How Many Languages Sit in the Middle?
Roughly 250 of the world's 7,000 languages have 100,000+ speakers. What's it like living in one of them?
#5081: Babies Communicate Before Words — Here's the Science
Why "baba" might mean everything and nothing — and why your baby is already conversing with you.
#4974: When a Culture You've Never Lived In Feels Like Home
Why K-dramas, Japanese aesthetics, or Kazakhstan can feel more like home than your own culture.
#4876: How Hebrew Lived and Irish Died: Language Revival Lessons
Why one national language experiment created native speakers and the other created a school subject.
#4762: Grinders vs Subs: What Actually Makes Them Different
Is a grinder really different from a sub? We dig into the bread, the heat, and what makes Connecticut's signature sandwich unique.
#4677: Beyond the Itinerary: Travel Writing That Actually Works
Bill Bryson made travel writing feel alive. Who's carrying that torch to places he never explored?
#4643: The Baby Cluck: A Tiny Vacuum That Captures Every Infant
Why do people across cultures make that rhythmic tongue-click at babies? It's a lateral click — and it's perfectly designed to grab an infant's brain.
#4473: The Hidden Worlds We Build From Stuffed Animals and Baby Babble
Why do we keep imagining that toys, babies, and pets have rich secret lives when we're not watching?
#4323: Customer Service Speak as Social Trolling
A practical field manual for weaponizing call center scripts at the dinner table — and why it works.
#4241: How "Liberal" Means Opposite Things in Different Countries
The same political word can mean opposite things depending on which country you're in.
#4180: Translation-Safe Writing for Global Supply Chains
How to write English that survives machine translation without losing critical specs.
#4044: How to Sound Like a Bot on Purpose
When AI detectors flag clean human writing as machine-made, sounding like a bot becomes a survival skill.
#3941: Imp, Goblin, Gremlin: What's the Difference?
Three small creatures, three completely different origins, functions, and fears. Untangling the folklore.