Listen to this episode via theallusionist.org/lingthusionist
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, am currently in vacation mode, even though I’m not on vacation at all. But for the sake of the mode, today’s episode is a chat with a podfriend, Lauren Gawne of the linguistics podcast Lingthusiasm – her cohost is Gretchen McCulloch who is an alumsionist, from the New Rules episode about how the internet changes language. I know that Lingthusiasm is already a fave podcast for a lot of you; if you’re new to it, scoot over to lingthusiasm.com to get stuck in! Also there’s a longer version of my conversation with Lauren over on the Lingthusiasm Patreon, which they’ve made available for free because they’re generous like that, but if you do have spare cash, support your linguistic entertainment podcasts, including this one.
The Allusionist will be taking a short break until early August 2026, but in the meantime, my other podcast Answer Me This is out of retirement with hundreds of episodes, start anywhere. I’m also on a recent episode of the comedy podcast The Town Show, talking about my home town Tunbridge Wells then we improvise a few scenes about it; and I’ll be on stage reading at the comedy night Say Wha?! in Vancouver on 28 July. Links to all these things at theallusionist.org.
And the Allusioverse will continue to be lively during the brief podbreak; we’ll be watching the new season of Great British Sewing Bee together every Tuesday from 14 July, and we’ll also be watching the rest of the current season of Bake Off: The Professionals, which is great if your particular flavour of schadenfreude is the spectacle of a 5ft tall sugarwork interpretation of Breughel’s Tower of Babel crashing to the floor. Go to theallusionist.org/donate to join us for that, plus bonus written content, membership of the Allusioverse Discord community, livestreams where I read relaxingly from my ever-increasing collection of vintage reference books. Just yesterday I acquired dictionaries of cliches and communism, and manuals on ventriloquism and how to grade grains. Can’t wait to get stuck into those with you! theallusionist.org/donate.
On with the Lingthusiallusionist? Allusiasm? Lingthusionist?
LAUREN GAWNE: My name is Dr. Lauren Gawne, and I am an associate professor of linguistics at Latrobe University. And I am the author of Gesture: a Slim Guide.
HZ: And I'm Helen Zaltzman, not a doctor or professor of anything. How embarrassing. Although I will accept honorary doctorates, if any, are being offered – which so far they have not been.
LAUREN GAWNE: Look, you can only put it out there in the world.
HZ: Sure. Yeah. That and a voiceover agent, that's what I'm looking for.
LAUREN GAWNE: I don't have a plan for this, by the way. It was mostly just to catch up with you… like I haven't even set up a document or anything.
HZ: Oh my God, how liberating.
LAUREN GAWNE: I just thought, let's just chat.
HZ: Just a couple of language podcasters shooting the breeze. How are things in language podcasting for you, Lauren?
LAUREN GAWNE: Well, now the microphone is on, very different to what I would say with the microphone off.
HZ: Isn't that the way? Generally podcasting is very different when you have your microphone switched off. It's a lot quieter for a start. The delivery mechanisms are less extensive, but perhaps the material is all the more salacious.
LAUREN GAWNE: Our producer is like, "It's very easy to edit you, Lauren, because I know the moment that you are off mic because your voice just like drops 50% energy levels."
HZ: Wow. Has that producer ever run any extortion on you for things you've said in your off-mic mode, but on mic?
LAUREN GAWNE: That producer is my sister, so she has an infinity of things she could blackmail me about from an entire lifetime of knowing me.
HZ: That's an exciting edge to live on.
LAUREN GAWNE: Well also, she's just the most savage editor you could possibly get.
HZ: Oh, cool.
LAUREN GAWNE: She's just like, “No, I got bored and cut that bit.”
HZ: Maybe that is a younger sibling thing, because I'm also a merciless editor, and I think it was because I grew up with two significantly older brothers. I thought, “You can't be bringing your C grade material here.”
LAUREN GAWNE: Yeah, it keeps you on your toes.
So the Allusionist is now over 10 years old.
HZ: Yes. The Allusionist started in January 2015. When did Lingthusiasm come into this world?
LAUREN GAWNE: End of 2016. Ten years in, we've talked about a lot of linguistics. You've talked about a lot of language.
HZ: Yeah. And then they just keep inventing more.
LAUREN GAWNE: It just doesn't stop. It's one of the best things about studying linguistics is there's always more linguistics for people to study.
HZ: Yeah. Best and worst, because there's no rest. It's never done. If you're a completist, you're fucked.
LAUREN GAWNE: You look at the people who make dictionaries and you just watch them become distressed by permanently chasing – is it Zeno's paradox? Like you get a bit closer and it moves further. Zeno's Paradox doesn't work for actual physics. Achilles was always gonna catch the turtle. Or tortoise? Sorry, I've just upset a lot of people who remember them.
HZ: One of them's wet?
LAUREN GAWNE: But I feel like with language, it really is one of those things that as soon as you have got to the point of describing where things are at in the year 2026, you won't get around to that for ages, and then things will have moved on.
HZ: Yeah. It’s slippery like that.
HZ: Aside from having language podcasting in common, Lauren and I both have had jobs that involved substantial amounts of typing things up. Mine, as mentioned in the WPM episode way down your podfeed:
HZ: I used to be an audio typist, and I did really enjoy that job. This is 2004, I was working in reality television and it was great because most TV jobs are having to call people, which of course I dread. And if you are typing up all the footage that has been shot, you don't call people. It's great.
LAUREN GAWNE: I feel like this is one of those jobs from the archives.
HZ: Yes.
LAUREN GAWNE: What was an audio typist? What was that job?
HZ: It's called a logger, and you're typing up all the footage that is shot for a TV show, and then you tell the producers where they can find what they need, or what a contestant has done that they might find interesting.
LAUREN GAWNE: Right. From reality television?
HZ: Yes. Reality television.
LAUREN GAWNE: So they were generating a lot of video.
HZ: Oh my God, so much. I did a day or two on a show called The Salon, which was a fake TV salon that they'd set up inside a sort of disused urban theme park in Central London, and I just had to watch the live feed of the back, sack and crack waxing room – that wasn't so good. But the main show I worked on was a show called Spy, and they trained contestants in spycraft. And so you had hours and hours of them just sitting in a shed surveilling, very unglamorous, quite tedious; or hours and hours of them being put in stress positions and interrogated – which felt off. I don’t if morally they would do that now... probably, because TV has still got some reckoning to do.
LAUREN GAWNE: And so you would sit there and watch three hours of silence, and then one of them would have a sip of coffee and you'd log that.
HZ: Yep.
LAUREN GAWNE: Or – it was in the UK so they'd have a cup of tea.
HZ: One of them chewed gum for hours and that was just a terrible sound [makes mouth-smacking sounds].
LAUREN GAWNE: Right into the –
HZ: Diabolical. But, I really liked that [job]. I dunno if I would like it now, but I liked it then.
LAUREN GAWNE: Yeah. I can see once you really get into it – I mean, that's a lot of what my field work data is, is sitting there listening to stories I listened to when they were recorded and just kind of catching all the lines of speech and then typing them out.
HZ: That sounds more edifying.
LAUREN GAWNE: Yeah, maybe. Maybe.
HZ: How long would usually elapse between you recording the stuff and then returning to it?
LAUREN GAWNE: So when I have collected data in Nepal, we've usually recorded – it depends if I'm in a city or a village. If I'm in the city, I can go home and kind of work on it that evening. In villages, I tend to – well, I used to just not take a computer at all and just have the recording gear, so I'd manually write down all the metadata and information about a recording and then come back to it a few weeks later when I was back in town. And even now, when I go back and watch footage I collected 10, 15 years ago, I can remember exactly where I was sitting, and what the weather was like. Those stories and recordings and songs that we collected still feel very like I'm there when I watch them, which is really nice.
HZ: Very evocative. Are there things where you are like, "Oh my God, I forgot about that, and that was really good"?
LAUREN GAWNE: Yes. Usually the things that were proximal to me having food poisoning.
HZ: Oh, cool.
LAUREN GAWNE: Yeah. It's just like, oh, we did collect a lot of data that day, and then I don't remember what happened for the next two days after that.
HZ: Oof.
LAUREN GAWNE: Yeah. The glamorous bits.
HZ: Like the inverse of Proust's madeleine, like the food poisoning has actually destroyed your ability to –
LAUREN GAWNE: – my desire to remember that moment.
HZ: Yeah, it'll do that.
LAUREN GAWNE: There's a lot of there's definitely a genre of linguistic field worker memoir that is framed around dangerous or unglamorous or food poisoning-adjacent working in different parts of the world, which is extremely just like usually white Western outsider comes in and shows how good they are at collecting. There's always an uncomfortable undertone to that,
HZ: And then they receive their colonial punishment of food poisoning.
LAUREN GAWNE: Or it's like a trial by fire of some kind.
HZ: Digestive fire.
LAUREN GAWNE: I think the field is getting better slowly, and it is nice to have more people working with their own communities and their own languages to do their own documentation work. But yeah, that's definitely the genre of like, “How hard is it for you to get to your field site? How remote are the people you are working with?” And it can be uncomfortable.
HZ: So that's changed a bit during your academic career?
LAUREN GAWNE: It has definitely changed a lot, for a few reasons, one of which is you can just stay in contact with people even in quite remote places through mobile technology, which removes some of the kind of one-upmanship of isolation. But I think there's a little bit more awareness among linguists of the kind of position that outside of linguists have when they come into a community.
HZ: This is something I've never contended with because I'm not a linguist, as I think you would be all too aware of, having listened to my work.
LAUREN GAWNE: You don't have to be a – like you, not you specifically, but you generic – you don't have to be a linguist to be interested in language, and that's the genius of the Allusionist. You get to do a lot more of that bridging expertise with people's interests than academics who fall immediately into the trap of, “I will explain my very technical thing in immense detail.”
HZ: Well, you've spent that long on it; I understand why you would feel an urgency to be understood in your lifetime.
LAUREN GAWNE: Yeah. I think that one of the best things about doing language content and linguistics communication is that it's a very broad group of people who span academia and media. We ran a listener survey for like three years, and one of my favourite demographic facts we took away from that is that there are listeners to Lingthusiasm who identify as linguists, and we also have this massive cohort of people who identify as being just generally curious. And I feel like that's the strong overlap in our listeners: just people who are generally curious about the world and languages and language. And linguistics and language is such a good mechanism for being curious.
HZ: And also some people just want infotainment. They want audio where they have received some something useful that is also fairly digestible.
LAUREN GAWNE: Yes. Otherwise, there's The Salon to watch.
HZ: I assume that The Salon is no longer available on the entertainment platforms…
HZ: How do you find it with making content – I know people are upset by that word – for an audience of specialists and infotainment fans without specialist knowledge, and you have to kind of satisfy both, and also, we don't know most of these people personally?
LAUREN GAWNE: The fun challenge is to do that and also just keep it in a format where it sounds like we're just having a chat over a cuppa. We have exceedingly long preparation sessions where we just – I wouldn't say fight, because we're on the same side, but we like thrash it out over like, what is the one piece of terminology that we think is worth people – not even remembering, just encountering; like there's no test at the end.
HZ: No? You should set one.
LAUREN GAWNE: I do know a podcast that has a quiz at the end, Doug Metzger's Literature and History. He has a multiple choice quiz at the end, which I think is just very wholesome. He's like, “Just see if you've been paying attention.” So, we're interested in sharing something, but that something doesn't have to be terminology-dense. And then the fun challenge is: how do you talk about this whole thing without too much terminology? And sometimes we just know there's a whole rabbit hole we're not going down. Sometimes we allude to it enough that the people with linguistics training are like, “Ah, yes, of course, that is this whole technical phenomenon that they are gesturing towards.” Sometimes we will just use – I love it when a word has like a colloquial sense and a technical sense, and we are strictly using the word in the technical sense, but people don't know that they're actually getting a piece of terminology.
HZ: What example would you give of that?
LAUREN GAWNE: Like when I talk about gesture, which is one of my areas of interest, I always make sure to use it in the technical linguistic sense that I have in mind. But I don't tell people that actually this is a very technical definition, that's usually not what I'm focusing on. I'm focusing on some specific phenomenon within gesture. We call this jargon for free, when we get to slip in something that isn't like the correct technical word, it's just conveniently one of the correct technical words that's not a fancy Latin or Greek word, and it doesn't sound intimidating.
HZ: Stealth technical.
LAUREN GAWNE: Yeah.
HZ: As someone who works as an academic linguist as your profession, and you also make a podcast about linguistics, do you ever think, “Maybe I should have made the podcast about something further from my job, like talking about Star Wars films or something, just as relief?”
LAUREN GAWNE: I wouldn't have stayed podcasting if it wasn't something I felt was useful, like hopefully useful and interesting to an audience. And it's nice to kind of know that I can dig really deep into the morass of academic literature and pull out the shiny, fun bits for people, or figure out ways to make those bits shiny and fun. But also, selfishly, I enjoy taking what I've learned from doing the show and using it in my teaching, or taking what I've done in teaching and using it in the show. And, like, if I have to think about this all day, I'm already thinking about it anyway; using it to hone first year lectures or third year anecdotes is really useful. Actually, one of the most touching bits of feedback we get is when other academics listen to the show and they're like, “I borrowed this for my classroom.” And I'm like, “Yes!”
HZ: Oh yes, I love that! It's very flattering.
LAUREN GAWNE: Yeah. And they're like, “That was such a cool story, or a cool way of explaining something, I've used it in my classroom.” I'm like, “I'm so here to make other colleagues sound cool to their students.”
HZ: It's also such a treat when you have something that looks like a really unpromising topic and you can persuade people to be interested in it. But I don't think you can approach that thinking automatically, "Everyone's going to be into this." I think you have to take quite a lot of care with other people's years of work to make it into this easily digestible infotainment that a show like mine is peddling.
LAUREN GAWNE: The really technical topics, like finding a way to sell to people that the way you structure sounds within a syllable is actually really fascinating and has all these implications for the way languages are put together, or the way that different languages structure – like verbs are so important.
HZ: Oh yeah. What are we going to do without verbs? Just noun around?
LAUREN GAWNE: The verbs are just doing all the heavy lifting for the shape of a sentence. And finding a way to really sell people on that idea, it's just like you don't have to remember much; you can kind of reason out the rest once you have this core idea that it's the verb that's telling everyone else where they need to be, what they're doing.
HZ: You've really rattled me to my foundations by telling me that people think that verbs are some shit.
LAUREN GAWNE: Verbs are intimidating.
HZ: Really? Why??
LAUREN GAWNE: Well, there's just a lot going on. When you write a descriptive grammar of a language, nouns are cute, tame pets; usually nouns are relatively under control. Verbs just have so much going on, because they are usually where a language is doing all of its like tense and aspect, and even English native speakers panic at a system that they have internalised. As soon as you start labelling it, they're just like, “Oh, oh – progressive aspect. Oh gosh past, past tense, past perfect… What is… too much happen?” So even in languages we feel comfortable with, starting to describe it, there's just a lot happening in terms of tense. There's a lot happening in terms of why can I use this verb? And it has a whole bunch of other stuff that comes along with it, whereas this one doesn't. Weird verb fossils like “beware the dog”: what is happening with ‘beware’?
HZ: What is happening with “beware the dog”, Lauren?
LAUREN GAWNE: I don't know.
HZ: What's the problem?
LAUREN GAWNE: Like who is beware the dog? You don't say like, “I beware the dog. You beware the dog”.
HZ: Isn’t that just commands? It's like, okay, for whoever is beholding this command, assume you are the addressee.
LAUREN GAWNE: Yeah, but you don't say, like, “Bestop throwing that.”
HZ: I might get into it.
LAUREN GAWNE: Try it.
HZ: Alright.
LAUREN GAWNE: Be the change you want to see in the world.
HZ: Yeah, about time I stepped up.
LAUREN GAWNE: Once you start looking and you're seeing all these things and you're just like, “What's the deal with this?” it's usually verbs that are throwing you the most curveballs.
HZ: I studied Russian, and the verbs in that are horrific.
LAUREN GAWNE: There you go; my theory holds.
HZ: Unless you are already a Russian speaker, in which case you are used to them. But as an English speaker, I'm like, “We had it so easy and I didn't even realise.”
LAUREN GAWNE: Hmm. Yeah. Verbs: cause of panic.
HZ: I will remember that. If I ever wanna give someone a good scare, I'll just wave a list of verbs.
HZ: That was Lauren Gawne, linguistics prof, author of the book Gesture, and cohost of the podcast Lingthusiasm. As I mentioned earlier, there’s a longer version of this conversation available for free over on Lingthusiasm’s Patreon, patreon.com/lingthusiasm, including Lauren explaining how she broke a famous linguistic theory, and listen to Lingthusiasm in the pod places and at lingthusiasm.com.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
chalicothere, noun: a horse-like fossil mammal of the late Tertiary period, with stout claws instead of hooves.
Try using ‘chalicothere’ in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, on the unceded ancestral and traditional territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
The music is by Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com and the experimental podcast Neutrino Watch.
Our ad partner is Multitude. To sponsor this show, whereby I will talk affectionately and persuasively about your product or thing, get in touch with them at multitudeshows.com/ads.
The show will be back with new episodes in early August, and in the meantime if you could recommend it to someone who might enjoy it, that would be delightful! And you can listen to or read every episode and get more information about the topics and people therein, see photos of the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words, follow me on social media platforms are still undead, check out listings for events coming up, and become a member of the Allusioverse to help keep an independent podcast going, all at the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
