Slate Debates

By Slate PodcastsSociety & Culture News

Slate Debates episodes

October 04, 2016 Billy and Me Went to the Store. Deal With It.
John McWhorter on what the intricacies of the future tense tell us about the unwritten rules of pronouns.
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30 min
September 20, 2016 What Is a Dictionary, Really?
John Simpson, former editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, talks about life as a lexicographer.

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27 min
September 06, 2016 The Invisible Language of Nursery Rhymes
What does "Hickory Dickory Dock" really mean? John McWhorter makes linguistic sense of seemingly arbitrary children's verse.

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28 min
August 23, 2016 Word Sex
How Words Hook Up and Make New Ones

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40 min
August 08, 2016 Should Shakespeare Get a Modern English Update?
John McWhorter talks with author Jack Lynch about the sacrilege of modified Shakespeare.

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49 min
July 26, 2016 Are Emoji a Language?
Gretchen McCulloch talks to John McWhorter about the big meaning behind our favorite little pictograms.

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43 min
July 12, 2016 Finding Life in a Dead Language
Ann Patty, author of "Living With a Dead Language: My Romance With Latin," talks about her transformative experience of learning Latin.

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30 min
June 29, 2016 Rules Are Made to Be Spoken
Sali Tagliamonte, author of Making Waves: The Story of Variationist Sociolinguistics, talks about the underlying disorder of the English Language.

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34 min
June 14, 2016 The Tragedy of English Spelling
Etymologist and poet Anatoly Liberman says that English is one of the most difficult languages to spell. But we can change that.
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30 min
May 31, 2016 Your Brain on Profanity
Benjamin K. Bergen, author of the upcoming What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and
Ourselves, discusses the science of cursing.
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35 min

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…