Spectacular Vernacular: Interrupting to Show We Care
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On today’s episode of Spectacular Vernacular, hosts Nicole Holliday and Ben Zimmer recap the recent New Ways of Analyzing Variation conference) for sociolinguistics. They also interview Deborah Tannen, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University and best-selling author) about conversational style. And finally, Barry Lam, host of Slate’s philosophy podcast Hi-Phi Nation) stops by for some wordplay. We hope you paid attention in your philosophy classes for this next quiz! You could win a year’s membership to Slate Plus.

Do you have any language questions or fun facts to share? Email us at [email protected]).  

Produced by Jasmine Ellis. 

Subscribe to Slate Plus. It’s only $1 for the first month. To learn more, go to slate.com/spectacularplus).

Here are some notes and references from this week’s show:

NWAV 49 (the 49th annual meeting of New Ways of Analyzing Variation)) 

Tweet by Cindy Noir (@Ebonie_QT) that inspired people to record Memojis code-switching between “home voices” and “work voices” )

Ben’s 2011 New York Times essay, “Twitterology: A New Science?”) 

Twitter’s new Academic Research track )

Deborah Tannen’s recent New York Times essay on cooperative overlapping, “In Real Life, Not All Interruptions Are Rude” )

Sari Rachel discussing cooperative overlapping on TikTok )

Deborah Tannen’s 2005 book, Conversational Style )

Barry Lam’s philosophy podcast, Hi-Phi Nation )

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