Fig. 1. Still from The History of English Podcast Website.     This podcast episode from The History of English, hosted by Kevin Stroud, deals with looking at the core group of letters which have stayed constant since the Phoenician alphabet. Stroud explains that their shapes might have changed, but the sounds they make and their position in the alphabet shows the consistency of these letters for over 3000 years.      Stroud also points out that the original alphabet only had consonants, so all of these letters were also consonants – which he calls Constant Consonants. He reminds us that the vowels present in our modern English language were added later by the Greeks. The Constant Consonants are:  B, D, L, M, N, P, R,  and T.      Stroud further states these letters are still found in the same order as the original Phoenician alphabet, and besides  their individual shapes and their modern English names...

Fig. 1. Still from A Way with Words website.   This podcast episode of A Way With Words begins with a discussion about a fascinating group of compound words. Normally, compound words consist of two words that make up one idea or thing, such as houseboat and steamboat which are both a type of boat. However, there are some compound words whose definition comes from describing what they do, not by what the two words mean together.  For example, scarecrow is not a type of crow, nor is pickpocket a type of pocket.   enturies ago, it was in fashion to create a word by combining two words and making up a whole new word, and around 1200 new words were created. They are called Cutthroat Compounds, but some of the created words have fallen out of common use. These compound words are aptly named for the word cutthroat as it is not a type of throat. Some examples of Cutthroat Compounds are: saddle-goose – silly person scrapegut – violinist tanglelegs – a ...

Fig. 1. Still from The World in Words.   Where does language come from? How did humans learn to speak?   To find the answers, the hosts of The World in Words podcast looked into the structure of our throats. They discovered with the help of Philip Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist at Brown University, that we are the only animals on Earth who, “have a common pathway for food, liquid, and air, which allows us basically to choke to death.” In essence, the composition of our throats don’t allow us to breathe and swallow at the same time.      It is because of the setup in our throat, consisting of the larynx and esophagus, that gives us the ability to make sounds and utter words. Because we developed a throat that can lead to our demise though, scientists believed there had to be something beneficial about the configuration of the throat that outweighed the dangers choking held. That something had to be speech. ...

                                                                     Fig. 1. Still from Lingthusiasm.                     Lingthusiasm is a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics and is hosted by Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch.   According to Lingthusiasm, “Emotions are a universal part of the human experience, but the specific ways we express them are mediated through language.”          Gawne and McCulloch then share how different languages express emotions, although the expression of l...

Fig. 1. Still from Lexicon Valley.       I am a new listener of Lexicon Valley Podcast, and I ran across an episode with a subject that seemed very interesting and answered a question I hadn’t previously thought to ask. Why do languages have gender, and more importantly, why doesn’t the English language have that?                  Having an advantage of being bilingual in Spanish, I was instantly struck with this question and realized it had never occurred to me that English doesn’t follow the same pattern of adding gender to nouns. First, Some Rules:   Lexicon Valley Podcast’s host, John McWhorter, tackles this question expertly. In some languages, gender is divided between masculine and feminine, and some gender rules in some languages makes sense.           McWhorter continues and states that the gendered feminine and mascul...

Fig. 1. Still from A Way With Words. I am new to A Way With Words’ YouTube channel, and while I often go to the beginning of a channel to get a better idea of its content, this time I watched/listened to the most recent uploaded entry titled, “Care Package.” Narrated in podcast style, its creators, author/journalist Martha Barnette and linguist/lexicographer Grant Barrett, talk about everything language, including questions and sharing stories.     CARE PACKAGE: In this particular episode, they explore the origins of the several words and phrases, one of them being Care Package. The hosts explain that it was actually an acronym for an organization formed in 1946 called Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe. This organization formed to fight poverty and hunger during WWII. In essence, they sent food and items overseas to people who were in need, but within time, the organization sent food and items all over the world. ...