Slate Debates

By Slate PodcastsSociety & Culture News

Slate Debates episodes

May 11, 2021 Irregardless Make You Cringe? Relax.
English is full of redundancies—so why are we bothered by only a select few?
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42 min
April 27, 2021 Nine Nasty Words
John McWhorter teases his new book about off-color English expressions, starting with c!#k.
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41 min
April 13, 2021 The Invisible Complexities of Translation
A single word—take "self," for example—reveals the thorny nature of literary translation.
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47 min
March 30, 2021 English Is Plain Weird
Don't be fooled into thinking that English is a typical language. It's not.
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45 min
March 16, 2021 Subject-Verb-Object. Right?
For many languages, the idea that the subject belongs up front is plain backwards.
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44 min
March 02, 2021 Parting Company
How did a word meaning "with bread" come to sprout its corporate connotation?
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45 min
February 16, 2021 Wallowing in Negativity
From the evolution of ain't to double negatives, simply saying no is wonderfully complex.
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47 min
February 02, 2021 Fossil Hunting in English
Our language contains a trove of buried clues, petrified remnants of its past. But you have to know where to dig.
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47 min
January 19, 2021 Why Do Languages Have Gender?
Lots of languages divide words into categories, like male and female. How does that happen?
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57 min
January 05, 2021 Forgetting Your Roots
Words have a way of rebelling against their etymological parents, acquiring meanings of their own.
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1 hr

About Slate Debates

From the publisher's feed

A feed from the Slate podcast network featuring episodes with enlightening conversations, opposing views, and plenty of healthy disputes. You'll get a curated selection of episodes from programs like…