All Things Linguistic

So, there’s a post about how Bertie Wooster’s “what ho!” is a corruption of Beowulf’s “Hwaet!” And @fremedon​ and @oldshrewsburyian​ wrote up some things I decided to voice.

Lingthusiasm gets into zines!

We hear from people a lot who are enthusiastic about linguistics, and many of you have been trying to get other people in your life also into linguistics, which is amazing!

Whether it's linguistics fans trying to articulate their (our) excitement to family and friends, linguistics academics trying to spread the word to future students who might want to take a linguistics course, or when we go to in-person conferences and events and we're trying to explain why people might want to listen to a whole half hour of linguistics enthusiasm every month, we've been feeling a need for more ways to bring that linguistics energy from the internet into the physical world.

Also, it turns out coincidentally that Gretchen's and Lauren's and producer Claire's and editor Leah's friends have all separately been getting really into zines lately [although a few of our friends would like it pointed out that they've been into zines since earlier zine waves. you're very cool and we appreciate you.]

So we're hatching a new project: Lingthusiasm Zines!

Basically, we make some zine designs, we release them as pdfs under Creative Commons licenses for anyone to print off from lingthusiasm.com/zines for free, and then people can have them floating around on your coffeetable, bulletinboard, break room table, outreach events, wherever you're looking for eye-catching pick-up-able objects to help get people interested in linguistics. And then we can print them off and bring them to whatever events we happen to be at too!

All the zines are made to be printed off from a single sheet of paper which is cut and folded in minizine style to keep photocopying costs low. We're making all the designs available in both US letter and A4, and with colour/black and white options, so they can work for as many people as possible!

Zines are DIY and participatory, so we're also hoping to encourage other people to make linguistics-related zines and help people find other linguistics zines that exist!

We've already heard from a few people who have made linguistics and language-related zines (check out these mini minorized language books in zine format on the Endangered Language Project site).

We've done one lingcomm through zines workshop at a linguistics conference so far (LabPhon), and have another lined up (NWAV), and we've heard from some linguistics profs who are excited by the idea of using zines in teaching as well! You can see (and repurpose) Linguistics Communication through Zines slides here.

Let us know by tagging @lingthusiasm on social media if you make a linguistics-related zine or use zines for any other fun purpose!

Okay, we've made you wait long enough. Wanna see some zines?

Which shape is bouba and which is kiki?

Here are two shapes. If you had to assign the name “bouba” to one of them and “kiki” to the other, which name would you give to which? If you think about it, you probably have a guess… In this Lingthusiasm zine, Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about these two linguistically famous shapes. Read the whole zine and get printable versions here!

What's this gesture called?

The same gesture can mean different things, or have different names in different languages. In this Lingthusiasm zine, Lauren Gawne gets enthusiastic about these “emblem gestures." Read the whole zine and get printable versions here!

Small dog, long word! A Lingthusiasm tinyzine

Why does “ie” turn “dog” into itty bitty “doggie”? In this Lingthusiasm zine, Leah Velleman gets enthusiastic about diminutives. Yes, this one is extra tiny, it’s a diminutive zine about diminutives! A zinelet? Or zineling? Read the whole zine and get printable versions here!

Stay tuned for more Lingthusiasm zines in the future! And thank you to all our members on Patreon who got to see the zines early and gave us many helpful comments! It's thanks to the support of our community that we're able to make fun free linguistics resources like this.

Small dog, long word! A Lingthusiasm tinyzine

Why does "ie" turn "dog" into itty bitty "doggie"? In this Lingthusiasm zine, Leah Velleman gets enthusiastic about diminutives. Yes, this one is extra tiny, it's a diminutive zine about diminutives! A zinelet? Or zineling?

Print and fold your own copies

8½ x 11 paper

A4 paper 

How to cut and fold a minizine (for this extra special tinyzine, cut the paper into quarters first along the dotted lines, then fold and cut four tinyzines like a usual minizine)

Learn more

Things we wish English had: diminutives

(She's right, we fudged a little! The -ie in "doggie" only works on some words in English. It would be cool to have a version that worked on every noun, like some languages have. Alternatively: be the change you want to see in the English language?) 

Abso-bloody-lutely, on the only infix in English

Lingthusiasm Episode 100: A hundred reasons to be enthusiastic about linguistics 

YouTube channel of Upper St'át'imc nation, one of the groups who speak St'át'imcets, including lots of words and phrases in the language.

More from Lingthusiasm

More zines that are enthusiastic about linguistics!

We also make a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics!

If I understand correctly, medieval French folk tales considered chestnut-colored horses to be deceitful and tricky; the Old French word for a chestnut or dun horse was fauvel, and so the Old French expression correier fauvel, literally "to brush the chestnut horse", meant lying or being hypocritical for personal gain. This turned into "curry favel" in 15th-century English, and then mutated into "curry favor" over the next few centuries as people forgot about the horse.

So "currying favor" is really "brushing the Horse of Lies", and the reason you can't curry goodwill, or love, or hatred, or even disfavor is that we didn't have Horses for those.

I realize, looking back on this post, that regular readers of my blog may have thought I made this up. Making up a ridiculous etymology is certainly the sort of thing I might do; in fact I've been meaning to start a sideblog dedicated solely to sufficiently accurate etymologies, and have a notebook with dozens of them jotted down, I just haven't had the time to do anything with them.

But I want to stress that this is not one of those cases. This is, to the best of my knowledge, the very real etymology of the phrase "curry favor".

The Old French fauve or falve referred to the light-brown color that's sometimes called "fallow" in modern English, but since it also sounded similar to faux, meaning "false", it was also associated with deceit and trickery ; the idiom estriller Fauvel literally meant "to groom the fallow one" but idiomatically meant "to lie or trick people".

Then in the 1300s we get the French poem Roman de Fauvel, a satirical poem about a fauve horse, whose name is derived both from the color and from the fact that FAVVEL is an acronym of Flaterie, Avarice, Vilanie, Varieté, Envie, Lascheté (Flattery, Greed, Vileness, Fickleness, Envy, and Cowardice) - all the different vices that this horse embodies.

Fauvel (purportedly modeled after Enguerrand de Marigny [source], an advisor to King Philip IV) is a sinful, conniving, and very rich horse who has various religious and secular leaders fawning over him and brushing him; it was well-known enough that "grooming Fauvel" came to mean "sucking up to someone powerful" more than just "being evil", and when it was translated into English the grooming was translated as currying, which specifically is grooming a horse with a curry comb [wiktionary]. From this we got the Middle English expression "currying Fauvel", which then mutated via folk etymology (in the "reinterpretation of unfamiliar words as more familiar ones" sense, not the "people are wrong about etymology" sense) into "currying favor".

Curry favor in:

Wiktionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/curry_favor

Merriam-Webster: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/curry%20favor

What's this gesture called? A Lingthusiasm zine 

The same gesture can mean different things, or have different names in different languages. In this Lingthusiasm zine, Lauren Gawne gets enthusiastic about these "emblem gestures." 

Print and fold your own copies

8½ x 11 paper: colour, b&w 

A4 paper: colour, b&w

How to cut and fold a minizine

Learn more

Why do we gesture when we talk? (Lingthusiasm podcast)

Why do we move our hands when we talk? (Tom Scott's Language Files on YouTube)

Gesture: A Slim Guide (book by Lauren Gawne, 2025, on Amazon or Bookshop)

Gestures (book by Morris et al, 1979, borrowable on archive.org)

More from Lingthusiasm

More zines that are enthusiastic about linguistics!

We also make a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics!

Which shape is bouba and which is kiki? A Lingthusiasm zine

Here are two shapes. If you had to assign the name "bouba" to one of them and "kiki" to the other, which name would you give to which? If you think about it, you probably have a guess… In this Lingthusiasm zine, Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about these two linguistically famous shapes.

Print and fold your own copies for free! 

8½ x 11 paper: colour, b&w 

A4 paper: colour, b&w 

Learn more about bouba and kiki! 

What words sound spiky across languages? (Lingthusiasm podcast)

Which is "bouba" and which is "kiki"? (Tom Scott Language Files video)

Bouba/Kiki Effect (Wikipedia)

Research cited

Cwiek et al 2021, Novel vocalizations are understood across cultures

Loconsole et al 2026, Matching sounds to shapes: Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naïve baby chicks

Öztürk et al 2012, Sound symbolism in infancy: Evidence for sound–shape cross-modal correspondences in 4-month-olds

Styles and Gawne 2017, When does maluma/takete fail? Two key failures and a meta-analysis suggest that phonology and phonotactics matter

More from Lingthusiasm

More zines that are enthusiastic about linguistics!

We also make a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics!

118: Using tech to chat with bonobos, dogs, and whales

Can we teach dogs to express their needs better by pressing buttons? What about the studies trying to teach bonobos and other primates to communicate through buttons or signs? What have we learned about whale communication from the first-ever recording of a sperm whale birth?

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about how people use technology to try and enhance our communications with bonobos, dogs, and sperm whales. (Sorry, other animals, you'll need to wait for a future episode.) We talk about the crucial distinction in animal communication studies between "any communication at all" (yes) and "language the way humans do it" (no), how we can actually learn more by appreciating animal communication systems on their own terms, and how some kinds of tech are helping us do that. We also talk about the logistics of studying animal communication, including avoiding the Clever Hans effect, how ubiquitous recording technology has changed the game on whalesong in recent decades (but there's still lots of catching up to do), and an at-home study of over 10,000 dogs using buttons (they're still recruiting if you want to join!). Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

Gretchen was invited to narrate the audiobook for Shakespeare's Sonnets: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness by friend of the podcast Zach Weinersmith, and we have some free copies to give away to patrons! Follow us at any level on Patreon (including free) to read the behind-the-scenes post about reading the sonnets and get the audiobook.

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about some of our favourite deleted bits from recent interviews that we didn't quite have space to share with you! First, an excerpt from our interview with Danny Bate, host of the podcast A Language I Love Is... about a language he loves: Czech! We talk about learning languages through in-laws, stock phrases, and hidden etymological parallels. Second, more from Claire Bowern about the mysterious Voynich Manuscript, including a peek inside her super multidisciplinary class on the topic, and the story of World War II codebreakers who worked on the manuscript in between solving lightning-fast crossword puzzles and the Enigma Machine.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 110+ other bonus episodes, and see new projects before they're public. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

Lingthusiasm bonus episode 'Talking with dogs, horses, ravens, dolphins, bees, and other animals'

'Can we talk to the animals? The ethics of using machine learning to decode animal communication' by Marriah Alcantara and Kristin Andrews

Bonobos:

Wikipedia entry for Kanzi

Wikipedia entry for Yerkish

Examples of Lexigrams

Koko the gorilla Birkin bag post, by Tom Walker on Bluesky

Dogs:

'Can our pets really say ‘I love you’? Science is finding out' by Robyn Schelenz

Sign yourself and your pet up for citizen science with the Comparative Cognition Lab

'Soundboard-using pets? Introducing a new global citizen science approach to interspecies communication' by Amalia P. M. Bastos and Federico Rossano

'Washington Post article on "button dogs": Can dogs talk by pressing buttons? What science says about the debate.' from the r/Dogtraining subreddit

Wikipedia entry for Clever Hans

Whales:

'This video captures a rarely seen sperm whale birth. It’s beautiful.' By Allie Yang

'Underwater Sounds heard from Sperm Whales' by L. V. Worthington and William E . Schevill

Project CETI (named after SETI)

'Cooperation by non-kin during birth underpins sperm whale social complexity' by Alaa Maalouf et al.

'Description of a collaborative sperm whale birth and shifts in coda vocal styles during key events' by Aluma, Y., Baron, Z., Barrett, R. et al.

'WhAM: Towards A Translative Model of Sperm Whale Vocalization' by O. Paradise, P. Muralikrishnan, L. Chen, H. Flores García, B. Pardo, R. Diamant, D. F. Gruber, S. Gero, S. Goldwasser

Lingthusiasm episode 'Making speech visible with spectrograms'

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @gretchenmcculloch.com, on instagram @gretchen.mcculloch and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

Me in 2016: I’m still salty about that

Our latest is live! ✨ Maria Temming reports on the worlds of fictional constructed language (aka conglang) speakers. For fans gathering around Na'vi, Elvish, Klingon, Dothraki, or High Valyrian, it's about more than a connection to canon—it's about community.

Conlang aficionados will also note that the definition of a “useful” language depends on who you want to communicate with. Sometimes, that’s a friend with a different native language, or the people who live in a country you want to visit; other times, it’s the people in your fandom. That doesn’t just make a conlang useful. “Once it starts to have real speakers,” Mikaelon says, “in a way, it becomes a real language too.”

Bonus 113: Czeching out...the Voynich Manuscript? Deleted scenes from Danny Bate & Claire Bowern

Learning languages and solving linguistic puzzles: two great topics that we're always interested in a new angle on!

In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about some of our favourite deleted bits from recent interviews that we didn't quite have space to share with you. First, an excerpt from our interview with Danny Bate, host of the podcast A Language I Love Is... about a language he loves: Czech! We talk about learning languages through in-laws, stock phrases, and hidden etymological parallels, and Danny attempts to teach Gretchen the most uniquely Czech sound (ř, the voiced alveo-palatal fricative trill). Second, more from Claire Bowern about the mysterious Voynich Manuscript, including a peek inside her super multidisciplinary class on the topic (which draws on related fields from medieval studies to information theory) and the story of World War II codebreakers who worked on the manuscript in between solving lightning-fast crossword puzzles and the Enigma Machine.

Lingthusiasm Episode 117: What makes for beautiful writing, scientifically speaking

Sometimes, a phrase seems to leap off the page and lodge into your mind, crisp and shining like a precious jewel. Other times, you're reading something and it just won't stick, your eyes wandering away no matter how hard you try.

In this bonus episode, Gretchen gets enthusiastic about what psycholinguistics can tell us about creative writing, with Julie Sedivy, who's a psycholinguist based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada and the author of two general-audience linguistics books, Memory Speaks and Linguaphile. We talk about moving from the style of scientific writing to literary writing by writing a lot of unpublished poetry to develop her aesthetic sense, how studying linguistics for a writer is like studying anatomy for a sculptor or colour theory for a painter, and how you could set up an eyetracking study to help writers figure out which sentences make their readers slow down. We also do a small linguistic experiment on air using the following words, which you can play along with: luggage, liminal, withstand, tremulous, pulchritude, zoo.

Note that this episode originally aired as Bonus 96: What makes for beautiful writing, scientifically speaking, and we’ve added an updated announcements section to the top. We’re excited to share one of our favourite bonus episodes from Patreon with a broader audience, while at the same time giving everyone who works on the show a bit of a break. Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about linguistics podcasting with Helen Zaltzman, host of The Allusionist podcast! We talk about being nearly teenaged in the world of language podcasting (Lingthusiasm turns 10 later this year, and The Allusionist turned 10 last year!) and alternative careers that we had on the way to becoming podcasters (did you know Helen once worked for a reality TV show?). We also talk about breaking the kiki/bouba test, the importance of publishing "failed" experiments, the Bender Rule and the Holliday Rule (both previous Lingthusiasm guests!).

Note that this particular bonus episode is available to everyone who follows us at any level (including free!) on Patreon, so welcome if you're joining us as an Allusionist fan (or a broke lingthusiasm fan tbh, we're trying to give you some treats while also trying to keep the show running!!).

Speaking of which...a few people found Patreon's new community gifting feature before we even knew what to do with it so we've been able to give out 7 community-supported memberships so far to people who follow us for free on Patreon. If anyone else is feeling comfortably off in this economy and wants to help both us and your fellow lingthusiasts, we'd be happy to do this again! Follow us as a free member to get announcements whenever we might have gifted memberships to distribute!

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 110+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds. Plus: we've been posting more and more fun things for free followers on Patreon, such as helping us decide what bonus episode to unlock next and this exciting new announcement about zines!

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

Original Patreon bonus episode 'What makes for beautiful writing, scientifically speaking'

Julie Sedivy's website

Julie Sedivy on Bluesky

Julie Sedivy on Twitter

'Julie Sedivy on Amplifying the Pleasure of Language' on Lit Hub

Excerpt from 'Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love'

Lingthusiasm episode 'What it means for a language to be official'

'Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love' by Julie Sedivy on Goodreads

'Memory Speaks: On Losing and Reclaiming Language and Self' by Julie Sedivy on Goodreads

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @gretchenmcculloch.com, on instagram @gretchen.mcculloch and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Round 5 match 1: [ɸ] v [β] v [ɬ]

[ɸ]

Voiceless bilabial fricative

[β]

Voiced bilabial fricative

[ɬ]

Voiceless Alveolar Lateral Fricative

Bonus Episode 112: The Lingthusionist - Interview with Helen Zaltzman

The Allusionist is a podcast that tells stories about language and the people who use it, which actually started only a year or so before Lingthusiasm but has always felt a bit like our older cousin.

The 2026 LingComm Grants awarded seven $300 (USD) grants, thanks to Lingthusiasm patrons, as well as Lukas Graf, Sarah Kelen, Daniel Currie Hall, enchantedsleeper, Rob Monarch, and Kirby Conrod and friends. Each grant winner was connected to a relevant lingcomm expert for advice and support. The 2026 LingComm Grants received 111 applications.

Tundealao Toyi Joshua, Tone Deaf AI: Visualizing the “Digital Divide” in African Languages

Garima Sukhwal, Menu Linguistics

Ngoungouo Yiagnigni Abass, The Sound Detectives

Cooper Bedin, Drag video essays on language and pop culture

Sabela Morais Martínez, Hugo Parra, Sabela Treinta Lomba, Marco Bravo Rodríguez, Samuel Fentanes Barrozo, Lucía Vieitez Portas, Dálle á lingua. Conversas sobre lingua na taberna

Nastasja Deretić, Lingvistasja – Linguistic Emancipation

Kirby Conrod LGBTQ+ LingComm Grant

Suvarna P, Gender and Sex In Malayalam Podcast

Commendations

Melissa Schuring, Expedition Youth language

Baqau Hassan Omotayo, CivicLingua Lab

Martina Guzzetti, Mind the Gap: A Zine for Decoding the Language of Your Body

Lacey Wade, Phil Duncan, Jeff Holliday, Utako Minai, Steve Politzer-Ahles, Adam An, Bayleigh Baldwin, Lillianna Lamagna, Language Exploration at the Library