Language Log partners with Lexicon Valley on Slate

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For the past year and a half, Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield have been co-hosting the excellent Slate podcast Lexicon Valley, covering many Language Log-friendly topics (and interviewing a few Language Loggers in the process). Now Lexicon Valley has spawned its own blog on Slate, and Language Log has joined up as a partner to supply cross-published posts.

From Mike Vuolo's announcement:

Why do English speakers often begin sentences with a dangling, superfluous so? What makes the "historical present" such an effective storytelling tense? Is Bob Garfield a stone-cold misogynist because he finds "vocal fry" insufferable?

These are just a few of the questions we’ve tackled on the podcast Lexicon Valley over the past year and a half, and we’re deeply grateful to the many listeners who have tuned in. But many of you have written to request language-related content that can be consumed without headphones, which, alas, remain taboo in many workplaces (where shirking with the eyes is easier to do on the DL).

And so, until surgically implanted "in-ear" speakers (Exhibit A) are standard-issue, we bring you Lexicon Valley: The Blog. We’ve teamed up with the brilliant linguists at Language Log—including the University of Pennsylvania’s Mark Liberman, the University of Edinburgh’s Geoffrey Pullum, and Vocabulary.com’s Ben Zimmer—whose new and archival posts will be featured here along with content from other contributors.

The first Language Log post to be featured on the new blog is my piece on last week's hubbub over "twerk." We here at Language Log Plaza are looking forward to a fruitful partnership and are happy to have some of our posts reach a much wider audience.



5 Comments

  1. Victor Mair said,

    September 4, 2013 @ 11:33 pm

    Mike just interviewed me this afternoon about "Secret love that sticks like glue", so it will probably be up next.

    http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=6402

  2. David Donnell said,

    September 5, 2013 @ 3:15 am

    Oh WHY do I feel melancholy about this development?

  3. Adam Funk said,

    September 5, 2013 @ 4:18 am

    Is it possible to subscribe to the Lexicon Valley podcast without iTunes? I was looking for a normal RSS URL but couldn't find one.

  4. Adam Funk said,

    September 5, 2013 @ 4:21 am

    Sorry, I found it:

    http://feeds.feedburner.com/SlateLexiconValley

  5. Cherie Belkin said,

    September 5, 2013 @ 3:31 pm

    To vent or not to vent, that is the question. I'm looking forward to insightful discussion laced with humor. Personal axes to grind, not so much.

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