The Dictionary Wars! with Gabe Henry
Host Sarah talks with writer and lexicography enthusiast Gabe Henry about the "dictionary wars" between Samuel Johnson, Noah Webster, and rival lexicographer Joseph Worcester, and how these battles shaped modern English spelling and national identity. They trace the messy history of English, the rise of Americanisms that offended British elites, Johnson's and Webster's massive dictionary projects, and the petty, decades-long feud between Webster/Webster's heirs and Worcester. The conversation also explores why radical spelling reform failed, how small spelling changes were quietly smuggled into American English, and what these stories reveal about obsession, failure, and the politics embedded in language.
The Wubi Effect
The episode traces how China grappled with the challenge of fitting its logographic writing system into Western-designed computers and keyboards, focusing on Professor Wang Yongmin's Wubi input method that decomposed characters into components for fast typing. It connects earlier debates over abandoning Chinese characters, the proliferation of competing input methods, and the later shift to pinyin-based phonetic typing with broader political and cultural consequences. The story then explores how predictive and cloud-based input, as well as the QWERTY effect, show that our writing tools now subtly shape our language, behavior, and even thought.
#611 - Louis C.K.
Theo Von talks with Louis C.K. about performing edgy stand-up in different kinds of venues, parenting, childhood neglect, race and taboo language, and the creative process behind Louis's novel "Ingram". They explore the American literary voice, the evolution of language, and broader cultural issues like polarization, social media addiction, and technology's physical footprint. A large part of the conversation centers on Louis's public downfall, his struggles with sex and pornography addiction, 12‑step recovery, and how confronting his own failures has reshaped his life, work, and friendship with Theo.
The link between evolution and language | Richard Dawkins
Host Elise Hugh introduces a conversation between evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and linguist John McWhorter exploring parallels between biological evolution and the evolution of language. They compare extravagance in language to sexual selection in animals, discuss linguistic "junk" and genetic pseudogenes, examine dialects versus languages through a frog speciation analogy, contrast selection with drift in both domains, and debate how mixed and hybridized any "proto" ancestral language must have been.