Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchThe Haphazard History of C
Episode 240
The letters C and K can both represent what we might call a Hard C — as in Cosmo Kramer or Calvin Klein. Not to mention Q, which usually indicates th…
3 years, 10 months ago
JFK's Most Famous Sentence
Episode 239
On Jan. 20, 1961, President John F. Kennedy delivered — to an audience seated both outside at the U.S. Capitol and at home in front of their televisi…
3 years, 10 months ago
The Evolution of Woke
Episode 238
What does it mean to be woke? Has the word problematic become problematic? John McWhorter talks with Banished host Amna Khalid about the fraught voca…
3 years, 10 months ago
Reviving Dead Languages
Episode 237
More than half the world’s approximately 7,000 languages will have no speakers left in the coming decades. Some are working feverishly to preserve or…
3 years, 11 months ago
Let Sleeping Dogs Lay
Episode 236
Did you know that the past participle of the intransitive verb lie is lain and that its past tense is lay, not to be confused with the present tense …
3 years, 11 months ago
How Did Nigeria Get Its Name?
You might guess that Nigeria and Niger derive their names from the Latin word for “black,” especially since both countries were formerly colonized by…
3 years, 11 months ago
Where Is the Name Ketanji From?
Episode 235
President Biden’s Supreme Court nominee has said that her parents picked “Ketanji” from a list of West African names supplied by a relative. But West…
4 years ago
A Linguistic Love Letter to Ukraine
Episode 234
As John likes to say, Proto-Indo-European — the original ancestor of many European and Asian languages — began on the steppes of Ukraine. This is his…
4 years ago
How About This Weather?
Episode 233
To describe inclement weather in English, we might say that “it” is raining, which seems natural to a native speaker. But does “it” refer to the sky,…
4 years, 1 month ago
Joe Rogan and the N-Word, by Way of Kyiv
Episode 232
You may have noticed, among widespread coverage of looming Russian aggression, an unfamiliar pronunciation of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv. What does t…
4 years, 1 month ago