On today’s episode of Spectacular Vernacular, hosts Nicole Holliday and Ben Zimmer recap the recent New Ways of Analyzing Variation conference for sociolinguistics. They also interview Deborah Tannen, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University and best-selling author about conversational style. And finally, Barry Lam, host of Slate’s philosophy podcast Hi-Phi Nation stops by for some wordplay. We hope you paid attention in your philosophy classes for this next quiz! You could win a year’s membership to Slate Plus.
Do you have any language questions or fun facts to share? Email us at spectacular@slate.com.
Produced by Jasmine Ellis.
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Here are some notes and references from this week’s show:
NWAV 49 (the 49th annual meeting of New Ways of Analyzing Variation)
Ben’s 2011 New York Times essay, “Twitterology: A New Science?”
Twitter’s new Academic Research track
Sari Rachel discussing cooperative overlapping on TikTok
Deborah Tannen’s 2005 book, Conversational Style
Barry Lam’s philosophy podcast, Hi-Phi Nation
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