Living together in a group is a strategy many animals use to survive and thrive. And a big part of what makes that living situation successful is listening. In this episode, we explore the collaborative world of the naked mole rat. Threshold is nonprofit, listener-supported, and independently produced. You can support Threshold by donating today . To stay connected, sign up for our newsletter . Operation frog sound! Send us your frog sounds for an upcoming episode. We want you to go out, listen for frogs and toads, and record them. Just find someone croaking, and hit record on your phone. It doesn’t matter if there’s background noise. It doesn’t even matter if you’re not sure whether or not you’re hearing an amphibian—if you think you are, we would love to get a recording from you. Please also say your name and where you are in the world, and then email the recording to us at outreach@thresholdpodcast.org…
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محتوای ارائه شده توسط Jodie Clark. تمام محتوای پادکست شامل قسمت‌ها، گرافیک‌ها و توضیحات پادکست مستقیماً توسط Jodie Clark یا شریک پلتفرم پادکست آن‌ها آپلود و ارائه می‌شوند. اگر فکر می‌کنید شخصی بدون اجازه شما از اثر دارای حق نسخه‌برداری شما استفاده می‌کند، می‌توانید روندی که در اینجا شرح داده شده است را دنبال کنید.https://fa.player.fm/legal
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103 Inhabiting language
Manage episode 441986918 series 2964320
محتوای ارائه شده توسط Jodie Clark. تمام محتوای پادکست شامل قسمت‌ها، گرافیک‌ها و توضیحات پادکست مستقیماً توسط Jodie Clark یا شریک پلتفرم پادکست آن‌ها آپلود و ارائه می‌شوند. اگر فکر می‌کنید شخصی بدون اجازه شما از اثر دارای حق نسخه‌برداری شما استفاده می‌کند، می‌توانید روندی که در اینجا شرح داده شده است را دنبال کنید.https://fa.player.fm/legal
In this episode I’ll try to convince you that using language to express the self is like a dog chasing its own tail… or a snake eating its tail, if you prefer ouroboros imagery. My perspective is that human language is the one-dimensional structure that shapes the self and thus limits access to the vast multidimensionality of consciousness. Language can’t refer to anything beyond itself (or beyond the self).
The good news is, that when human language draws a circle that says ‘this is you,’ it creates a space that you can look inside. What you might find is not the you created by language, but instead the part of all the worlds that is uniquely designated by that self-circle. Transformation comes from truly inhabiting the space that language creates.
On the journey of this episode we’ll be rambling through the realms of phrasal verbs, conceptual metaphor theory and the challenges of learning English as a second language. The blog post I mention in the episode is ‘What’s up?’ by Elaine Hodgson.
The story I read is ‘The Museum of Language.’
Lots of things going on…
Refreshing Grammar is open now (jodieclark.com/refreshingcourse), and will be free until 12 November 2024. You can get the unlimited access version for a very special, limited-time price here: jodieclark.com/rg-unlimited-access
Also check out the amazing offer on my other amazing course, The Grammar of Show Don’t Tell: jodieclark.com/SDT
Come join me on 11 October at Off the Shelf Festival of words for a free, interactive online writing workshop, The Impossibility of Words: A Linguist’s Cure for Writer’s Block.
Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter
110 قسمت
اشتراک گذاریManage episode 441986918 series 2964320
محتوای ارائه شده توسط Jodie Clark. تمام محتوای پادکست شامل قسمت‌ها، گرافیک‌ها و توضیحات پادکست مستقیماً توسط Jodie Clark یا شریک پلتفرم پادکست آن‌ها آپلود و ارائه می‌شوند. اگر فکر می‌کنید شخصی بدون اجازه شما از اثر دارای حق نسخه‌برداری شما استفاده می‌کند، می‌توانید روندی که در اینجا شرح داده شده است را دنبال کنید.https://fa.player.fm/legal
In this episode I’ll try to convince you that using language to express the self is like a dog chasing its own tail… or a snake eating its tail, if you prefer ouroboros imagery. My perspective is that human language is the one-dimensional structure that shapes the self and thus limits access to the vast multidimensionality of consciousness. Language can’t refer to anything beyond itself (or beyond the self).
The good news is, that when human language draws a circle that says ‘this is you,’ it creates a space that you can look inside. What you might find is not the you created by language, but instead the part of all the worlds that is uniquely designated by that self-circle. Transformation comes from truly inhabiting the space that language creates.
On the journey of this episode we’ll be rambling through the realms of phrasal verbs, conceptual metaphor theory and the challenges of learning English as a second language. The blog post I mention in the episode is ‘What’s up?’ by Elaine Hodgson.
The story I read is ‘The Museum of Language.’
Lots of things going on…
Refreshing Grammar is open now (jodieclark.com/refreshingcourse), and will be free until 12 November 2024. You can get the unlimited access version for a very special, limited-time price here: jodieclark.com/rg-unlimited-access
Also check out the amazing offer on my other amazing course, The Grammar of Show Don’t Tell: jodieclark.com/SDT
Come join me on 11 October at Off the Shelf Festival of words for a free, interactive online writing workshop, The Impossibility of Words: A Linguist’s Cure for Writer’s Block.
Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter
110 قسمت
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Structured Visions
The idea that human language comes from the land is not new. It’s rooted in Indigenous ontologies of language. But for those of us who haven’t grown up in an Indigenous culture and are swimming in the ideas of a Western, colonising culture, it can be very difficult to see language as anything other than a human construct. In this episode we ponder the heaven-Earth binary and wonder about what it may have to do with the differences between saying and doing. We marvel at the verbal processes in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘ As kingfishers catch fire ’ and imagine a world in which the loving Creator of human beings is the Earth itself. If the Earth is speaking, perhaps we are part of its verbiage. The story I read in this episode is ‘ Logogenesis .’ Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!…
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Structured Visions
1 106 Prosody and peak experiences 1:00:35
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پخش در آینده پخش در آینده لیست ها پسندیدن دوست داشته شدHave you ever had a peak experience? Did you ever try to tell someone about it? Also, how good is your singing voice? If you’re a native speaker of a tonal language like Mandarin, you may have an excellent singing voice (or at least, you’re more likely to pass a test for perfect pitch, according to a study reported in Scientific American ). But in a language like English requires you only to grasp the difference between rising and falling tones—and these only in relation to each other—and this only for paralinguistic information (like whether someone’s being sarcastic). If human language had evolved differently, we might all be amazing singers. Or so we might glean from Steven Mithen’s book, The singing Neanderthals (which I also discussed in Episode 78 of Structured Visions ). Mithen proposes that human language evolved from music. All that remains that’s vaguely musical in language now is prosody. But what a diminished form of music it is! In this episode we explore the quality of human language to reduce, constrict and thereby oppress, especially in relation to trying to put peak experiences into words. One of the features of a peak experience, according to Abraham Maslow in Religions, values and peak-experiences , is that ‘the whole universe is perceived as an integrated and unified whole.’ One of the reasons, I suggest, that it’s hard to express these mystical experiences is that language is structured around the principle of the self. Peak experiences refuse to be contained within the membrane of self. And yet, when you look for it, it’s there. Within your self, somehow. That’s the contradiction: the you that dissolves in a peak experience remains present by its inability communicate it. What if we think of human language as developed by the Earth itself, as part of the Earth’s agentive evolution? What if the Earth produced selfhood to experience mystery? Entertaining that possibility offers us the opportunity to explore the mysteries within us, and to keep sacred the mysteries of others. Have you ever had a peak experience? Tell me all about it . The story I read in this episode is ‘ The luthier .’ Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!…
What if you could know everything, but you had to lose your self in the process? We discuss two layered structures in human languages. The first is word order, such as Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) and Subject-Object-Verb (SOV). The second is information structure, which is the system by which people in interaction navigate their interlocutor’s knowledge state, orienting what they say to make a distinction between given and new information. All human languages start from the assumption that human beings in interaction know different things, or are putting their attention to different things. In this episode we play with the idea that individual minds, with different states of knowledge, didn’t precede, but are produced by language. We pose the hypothesis that human language shapes the experience of selfhood—which therefore restricts our capacity to know everything. We also talk about Ted Chiang ’s brilliant novella, The story of your life . But if you want to know what will happen in the future, you’re out of luck, because the future is a projection of the self, moving in a linear way through time. What are your thoughts about the ideas discussed in this episode? Because I have a self, I can’t know until you tell me . The story I read in this episode is ‘ The dark art of world-building .’ Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!…
If you listened to last month’s episode, you’ll know that I’ve taken a short break from podcasting to finish off the book I’m writing. I’m thrilled to tell you that the book is now finished, and I’m very happy with it. I can’t wait to tell you more. (In fact, if you sign up to my newsletter at jodieclark.com/newsletter you’ll hear more sooner!) I’m so excited to get back to podcasting monthly, which I’ll do again at the end of January 2025. In the meantime, please enjoy this episode from the Structured Visions archives. Episode 24, The Gift, originally aired on Christmas Day, 2015. I hope you’re enjoying your holiday season, and I’ll talk to you again in the New Year! Shownotes for the original episode can be found here .…
I’m taking a short break from podcasting as I finish off the book I’m writing, but I’ll be back in the New Year. In the meantime, please enjoy this episode from the Structured Visions archives. Episode 60, How linguistics can save the world, originally aired on June 1, 2018. This podcast has been an amazing way for me to develop some unusual ideas about language. Recently I was wondering when I first came up with the idea that the Earth has its own language of which human language is one small but significant part. Episode 60 is one of the early recordings of me fleshing out that idea. I hope you enjoy it! Learn more about my ideas about the mysteries of language at jodieclark.com . Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here .…
Do human beings have more or less consciousness than the rest of the living world? Is language an addiction? We’ll explore both points by examining the relationship between language and time. To participate in the world of human language, we have to reduce ourselves to little cutie pies known as ‘selves,’ who exist at a precise moment of time and who orient to their world in relation to their deictic centre. What might it look like if we could see beyond the linearity of language and thus, the linearity of time? The story I read in this episode is ‘ The end .’ Some time sensitive things to act on now: Refreshing Grammar ( jodieclark.com/refreshingcourse ) will be free until 12 November 2024. You can get the unlimited access version for a very special, limited-time price here: jodieclark.com/rg-unlimited-access Also check out the amazing offer on my other amazing course, The Grammar of Show Don’t Tell: jodieclark.com/SDT Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!…
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Structured Visions
In this episode I’ll try to convince you that using language to express the self is like a dog chasing its own tail… or a snake eating its tail, if you prefer ouroboros imagery. My perspective is that human language is the one-dimensional structure that shapes the self and thus limits access to the vast multidimensionality of consciousness. Language can’t refer to anything beyond itself (or beyond the self). The good news is, that when human language draws a circle that says ‘this is you,’ it creates a space that you can look inside. What you might find is not the you created by language, but instead the part of all the worlds that is uniquely designated by that self-circle. Transformation comes from truly inhabiting the space that language creates. On the journey of this episode we’ll be rambling through the realms of phrasal verbs, conceptual metaphor theory and the challenges of learning English as a second language. The blog post I mention in the episode is ‘ What’s up? ’ by Elaine Hodgson. The story I read is ‘ The Museum of Language .’ Lots of things going on… Refreshing Grammar is open now ( jodieclark.com/refreshingcourse ), and will be free until 12 November 2024. You can get the unlimited access version for a very special, limited-time price here: jodieclark.com/rg-unlimited-access Also check out the amazing offer on my other amazing course, The Grammar of Show Don’t Tell: jodieclark.com/SDT Come join me on 11 October at Off the Shelf Festival of words for a free, interactive online writing workshop, The Impossibility of Words: A Linguist’s Cure for Writer’s Block . Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter…
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1 Episode 102 How to belong 1:09:41
1:09:41 پخش در آینده پخش در آینده لیست ها پسندیدن دوست داشته شد1:09:41
پخش در آینده پخش در آینده لیست ها پسندیدن دوست داشته شدHave you ever felt like you don’t belong? My own red thread through the labyrinth of linguistics has been the theme of not belonging. We explore the grammatical shape belonging takes in everyday conversations about fitting in. We discuss how selves can grammatically ‘detach’ from bodies, and the transformative possibility of embodied selves. Join me in a hopeful dream where humans belong on planet Earth. We’ll explore how human language, which seems to divide us from wider consciousness, might be re-envisioned as an invitation to co-creation with the Earth itself. The story I read is ‘ The last stage of the Earth’s evolution .’ I also mentioned my story ‘ Summers with Mad Gran .’ Connect with me on jodieclark.com . Refreshing Grammar begins on 16 September 2024. Sign up here: jodieclark.com/refreshingcourse Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!…
What’s the difference between me and you? And what’s so bad about big egos, anyway? In this episode we explore the relationship between ego and language. We move from Freud’s psychoanalytic theory to D.T. Suzuki’s explanation of the Zen Buddhist perspective. We explore Suzuki’s analysis of two poems about encounters with flowers, one by Basho and one by Tennyson. The story I read in this episode is ‘ Ego angels .’ The essay by D.T. Suzuki I discuss is: Suzuki, D. T. (1960). Lectures on Zen Buddhism. In E. Fromm, D. T. Suzuki and R. DeMartino (Eds .) Zen Buddhism and psychoanalysis (pp. 1-76). Grove Press. It’s available on Internet Archive . Connect with me and discover my courses on jodieclark.com Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!…
What are your top three wishes? Are they selfish? As it happens, your wishes may be worse than selfish—they may be toxically self- effacing . If you participate, on whatever level, in a society in which people are continually and oppressively bullied into thinking they need to be someone other than who they are, then you may be wishing for things that obliterate your own unique selfhood. In this episode we explore the linguistics of wishing—with a close look at realis and irrealis expressions—and discover what grammatical structures can reveal about a desire for a transformative society. We explore the possibility of a social structure in which individual selfhood is protected and sustained by a mutually supporting community. The book I refer to in this episode is Selves, bodies and the grammar of social worlds , and you can learn more about the analysis I did there in Episode 58, ‘Communities of Sara Mills’ . The stories I read in this episode are ‘ Beyond desire ’ and ‘ Ala’s lamp .’ Connect with me and discover my courses on jodieclark.com Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!…
What new language would you most like to know? Is astrology on your list? Does astrology count as a language? Maybe the language of the stars could be classified as a pidgin, a language without native speakers. But if, as discussed in Episode 96, ‘The Earth’s language’ , languages are ways of organising information, then it might be more accurate to describe astrology as one of the Earth’s languages. If the Earth has a language, it’s using it to tell us: You don’t just exist as an ego, as a first-person pronoun, or a proper name You don’t just exist in relation to all the things that people have said about you...or that you say about yourself You also exist as a being who took their first breath at a precise moment in the Earth’s movement through the cosmos. Get your birth chart on astro.com . The story I read in this episode is ‘ Pidgin .’ Connect with me and discover my courses on jodieclark.com Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!…
Counting… that’s maths, right? Actually, it’s language. And as we’ll discover through a series of absurd tasks (like, ‘count everything you can see’), you can’t count anything until you know what ‘counts as’ a thing. Language draws the lines around what counts, and it shifts and changes as it does so. In this episode we celebrate the rich lineage of linguists and language philosophers who offer detailed, rational arguments against an objectivist paradigm of language. Language does not refer to things in the world, they explain. Language is not, as Wallis Reid (1991, p. 54) explains, a ‘mirror of nature.’ My own perspective on the objectivist paradigm resonates with these, but it’s less rational, more mystical and speculative. What if we experience the world in many dimensions, and language is the most restrictive of these dimensions, as I discussed in Episode 95, ‘Your name without language?’ What if language restricts us from fully accessing the other dimensions? Here are my radical, irrational views in a nutshell: Language is a way of structuring information. Human language structures information according to a particular organising principle—the self. Human language presumes, constructs, projects a self. And we can see the process by which this happens by looking closely at the structures of grammar. The structure of grammar we’re looking at in this episode is grammatical number. We’ll discover that different languages have different grammatical number systems. Many have singular and plural. Some have singular, dual and plural. Some have singular, dual, trial and plural. Some have singular, dual, paucal and plural. One thing all these languages have in common is ‘singular’. Understanding how language structures the ‘singular’ can help us understand the structure of our own selves, and the beauty that might be found there. The story I read in this episode is ‘ Fairest .’ Connect with me and discover my courses on jodieclark.com Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends! Work cited: Reid, W. (1991). Verb and noun number in English . Longman.…
What’s the weirdest thing about human language? We explore linguistic polarity and all its bizarre implications. Embedded in every human grammar is a way of turning a positive clause ( I’m listening ) into a negative clause ( I’m not listening ). Grammatical negation is one of the ways we can do denial. (‘I’m not scared of that dog,’ said the three-year-old whose body was telling an entirely different story.) What would a language without negation look like? My story ‘ Negative space ’ refers to an (imaginary?) alien language where everything is expressed in the affirmative. Closer to home, we could speculate about the Earth’s own language . If languages are ways of structuring information, then human languages are uniquely structured around selfhood. Negative polarity works to structure the relationship between self and other, which sometimes means denying the other, sometimes affirming them. Either way it’s a route to intimacy. If human language draws a boundary or a membrane around the distinct self, then the intimacy of negation can be a way of acknowledging and celebrating those boundaries. The other story I mention in this episode is ‘ Lessons in Latin ’. Connect with me and discover my courses on jodieclark.com Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!…
We start the episode, as always, with a couple of questions: 1. What are the differences between spoken/signed language and written/printed/digital language? 2. Where are you? There’s an answer to Question 2 that will be true for anyone who says it. ‘I am here.’ But if you write it on a piece of paper, and then leave the room, it stops being true. Does that make spoken language more genuine? Or is written language more reliable because it’s more durable, less ephemeral? (‘Put it in writing.’) We explore questions around spoken/written language in relation to what French philosopher Jacques Derrida calls the ‘metaphysics of presence’. And also in relation to a quite touching France Télécom advert from the ’90s . The discussion leads to a conversation about non-human language, specifically, the language of the Earth itself. Both human language and the Earth’s language are systems for structuring information. Human language is structured around the principle of selfhood, which leads us to the whimsical fancy that the separate, distinct self exists prior to the grammar that created it. The story I read in Episode 96 is ‘ The loneliness of the literate species ’. Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter Check out my course: The Grammar of Show Don’t Tell: Exploring the Emotional Depths . Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!…
What would your name be without language? In this episode we explore the problem of names in truth conditional semantics, with a look at Gottlob Frege’s explanation of sense and reference, Bertrand Russell’s claims about the definite descriptors and Saul Kripke’s term for proper names, which is ‘rigid designators’. What would it be like if you weren’t so rigidly designated? Truth conditional semantics is concerned with making true or false statements about the world. But what if the world and language are on two different planes of existence? What if language is a one-dimensional phenomenon attempting to delineate multidimensional experience? The most fascinating aspects of language (to me) is that it presumes and thereby constructs a self. But a one-dimensional language, it would seem, would produce very limited, superficial selves. Does inhabiting language keep us from experiencing the vastness of other dimensions? (If this question sounds familiar, you might be remembering playing with it in Episode 94, Language and the Afterlife .) It turns out that the linearity of language offers possibilities not available in other dimensions. Language, being one-dimensional, can (and does) shape itself in constantly changing ways to create new selves. The selves form spaces from which new ideas can emerge. The story I read in Episode 95 is ‘ The brutal linearity of language ’. Sign up for the Grammar for dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter Check out my course: The Grammar of Show Don’t Tell: Exploring the Emotional Depths . Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!…
What happens when we die? Ideas about the afterlife (or the lack of an afterlife) requires theory building based on either faith or experience. What if you don’t have faith in stories about the afterlife and you’ve never experienced anything resembling a near-death experience (NDE)? In this episode I’ll guide you through a language-based exercise that might help you with your theory building about worlds beyond everyday experience. The task is to ‘experience your world’, first through the filter of language and then without the filter of language. The intention is to open up the possibility that there are at least two different (simultaneous) worlds, layered on top of each other—at least two different dimensions of experience. If we accept that, why might there not be at least one more? Or even many, many more? The other thing that we might notice is how the filter of language presumes and produces a distinction between self and other, which disappears when we remove this filter. Because the linguistic dimension restricts us to the experience of selfhood, it might be the most constraining of all dimensions. And we can speculate about the existence of a soul that survives death and lives simultaneously in many (or all) dimensions. But before we get swept away in our excitement about this transcendent soul, we might allow ourselves to enjoy a certain fascination with living within a restrictive, linguistic existence and the creativity that might emerge from this level of constraint. The story I read in Episode 94 is ‘ Moving language ’. Sign up for the Grammar for dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter Check out my new course: The Grammar of Show Don’t Tell: Exploring the Emotional Depths . Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!…
Is there a distinction between you and the rest of the world? Where do you stop and the rest of the world begin? What’s the meaning of the word ‘now’? The gift of language is that it shapes and reshapes the experience of separateness. It’s a gift because it’s fluid. It’s more a membrane than a wall—with every utterance, there’s a new configuration of separateness. The gift of separateness is that it invites mystery. The word Carl Jung uses for this is numinous , which comes from the word numen , meaning divinity, god or spirit. Language gives you access to divinity. But it requires first that you disown the divine aspects of the self, so that you can experience the joy of reunion. The story I read in Episode 93 is ‘ Salesman to the gods ’. The other story I mention in ‘ Ghosts ’. Sign up for the Grammar for dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter Check out my new course: The Grammar of Show Don’t Tell: Exploring the Emotional Depths . Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!…
When was the last time you lost language? And… how do you feel? The one time it feels like I’m losing language is when I let myself feel what I really feel. (We’re talking about weeping, wailing, keening—the dripping-nose ugly cry.) I’ve been thinking a lot about emotions and language because I’ve just made a new course available, The Grammar of Show Don’t Tell: Exploring the Emotional Depths . It’s a love letter to my young writing self, who had no idea how to put ‘show don’t tell’ into my writing practice. In designing the course, I discovered the ways that writers grammatically shape their characters’ emotions. I look specifically at fear, envy, grief, love at first sight, sensuality and rage. In this episode we explore sorrow as a felt experience with a grammatical shape. (Ugly crying entirely optional.) The story I read in Episode 92 is ‘ Death of a grammarian ’. Sign up for the Grammar for dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!…
Linguistic interaction involves much more than simply sharing information. It requires shaping the information so that it will fit in to a pre-existing structure. This is where we might run into problems if we ever get the chance to chat with intelligent extra-terrestrial beings. To what extent can we communicate if there is no shared common ground? As it happens, we already live on a planet with intelligent non-human life, a world with its own language and even, as Paul Stamets points out , its own internet. If we were courageous enough to live at the limits of human selfhood and human language maybe we’d be able to communicate with that world. The story I read in Episode 91 is ‘ Nonna’s prophecy ’. Check out jodieclark.com for information about Refreshing Grammar , the book , and Refreshing Grammar, the course . Sign up for the Grammar for dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!…
What’s the worst relationship you’ve ever been in? What’s the difference between this and that? There are at least three ways of understanding that second question, each of which reveals a different level of abstraction: metalinguistic, anaphoric and exophoric. Our exploration of this and that (proximal and distal demonstratives, that is) reveals the gift, the risk and the challenge of human language. The gift: Language creates selfhood, and with selfhood comes intimacy. The risk: Language can also create an obsession with the self, disavowal of the other, narcissism. The challenge: To recognise that our selfhood is a gift of our evolving human language, which is a gift of the evolving Earth. With language we’re offered the opportunity to recognise the limitations of the self, and to be open to the mystery of the other. The translation of the quote from Buddhist sutras about the finger pointing at the moon is from: Ho, Chien-Hsing (2008). The finger pointing toward the moon: a philosophical analysis of the Chinese Buddhist thought of reference. Journal of Chinese Philosophy 35 (1):159-177. https://philpapers.org/rec/CHITFP-2 Check out jodieclark.com for information about Refreshing Grammar, the book , and Refreshing Grammar, the course . Sign up for the Grammar for dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter…
‘Dreams, it turns out, are like clauses. They can be configured and reconfigured in an infinite number of ways. They are quanta of information about what could be transformed in the world, whether it’s your own world or a bigger social world, or both.’ —from my new book, Refreshing Grammar , p. 127 Can something be both practical and dreamy? Mysteries involve holding two seemingly incompatible our irreconcilable truths. The thrill of a genuine mystery is when it cracks you open to something new. Can grammar be a gateway to mystery? We explore this question by thinking about out of body experiences. And what we’re having for breakfast tomorrow. The mystery of being human is that we exist grammatically, which means we constantly shift our point of reference outside of our own body. How can the self exist outside the body? How can experience exist outside of the world? This is the mystery: grammar is creative—and what it creates is space from which new ideas can emerge. The story I read in this episode is ‘ In plain sight ’, and it’s available at grammarfordreamers.com . Check out my new website, jodieclark.com , for information about Refreshing Grammar , the book, and Refreshing Grammar, the course. Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!…
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Structured Visions
What’s your most mortifying experience of grammar shaming? Mine involved a misplaced apostrophe in an important email, and I still burn with shame to think of it. Grammar for many has a spectrum of negative associations, which ranges from the imposter syndrome you might get when you realise you can’t tell a preposition from a conjunction to more serious and oppressive forms of linguistic prejudice. An example of the latter can be found in Geneva Smitherman’s account of her childhood experiences in her book Talkin That Talk . After her family moved from rural Tennessee to Detroit, Smitherman’s teachers decided that the way she spoke indicated a lack of intelligence and put her back a year in school. Later she was placed in speech therapy because the educators didn’t recognise her linguistic variety, African-American Vernacular English, as a legitimate form of English. Ann Phoenix’s work describes similar racism encountered by Afro-Caribbean children in British schools, who spoke perfectly grammatically in a variety that was not White enough for their teachers and peers. As I’ve written, ‘To be grammar shamed is to be told there’s something fundamentally wrong with the way you’ve expressed yourself. The implication is often that there’s something wrong with you: you’re not smart enough, you’re not well educated enough, you’re not savvy enough, you’re not “in the know,” you don’t have the right kind of cultural capital and/or you shouldn’t be taking up space on whatever platform you’re using.’ (Clark, 2023, pp. 5-6) The story I read in this episode, ‘ Little red grammar hood ’, hints at a deeper grammar, a welcoming grammar, one that is not shamed. Clues about such a grammar can be found through an exploration of what babies know about the grammar of the language that surrounds them, before they’ve even begun to speak themselves. In my forthcoming book, Refreshing Grammar: an easy-going guide for teachers, writers and other creative people , I offer ways to tap into what you’ve known about grammar since you were a little cutie pie. Before you even knew you knew it. Check out my new website, jodieclark.com , for information about Refreshing Grammar , the book, and Refreshing Grammar, the course. Prepare to be refreshed! Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends! Works I discuss in the podcast Clark, J. (2023). Refreshing grammar: an easy-going guide for teachers, writers and other creative people. GFD. Naigles, L. R. (2002). Form is easy, meaning is hard: resolving a paradox in early child language. Cognition, 86 (2), 157–199. Phoenix, A. (2009). De-colonising practices: negotiating narratives from racialised and gendered experiences of education. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 12 (1), 101–114. Smitherman, G. (2000). Talkin that talk: language, culture, and education in African America . Routledge.…
If you were told, definitively, that you were an alien, would it relieve a burden? Would it explain, or affirm, a few things? Would you look to the sky and long for home? If you’ve ever felt like an alien, then the story I published recently on grammarfordreamers.com is dedicated to you. According to ‘ Exiles ’, it’s not you who’s the alien. It’s human language. The story positions human language as distinct from ‘Earth’s own linguistic structures.’ The idea here is that human language is one set of structures, which is separate from the material world. The material world is another set of structures, physical, chemical, biological, etc. All these structures are forms of language. The Earth is excited (or so the story goes) to welcome the new species. It’s curious about the new ideas that might emerge from the hermetically sealed selves that human language shapes. In this episode I discuss these ideas in relation to my book, Selves, bodies and the grammar of social worlds: reimagining social change . We’re looking at Chapter 8, ‘Openings,’ which is about social transformation through language and embodied creativity. It’s also about fursuiting. The transcript and table I refer to can be found here . Connect with me, sign up to my newsletter and learn some exciting things about the Refreshing Grammar course here: grammarfordreamers.com/connect Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers , Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!…
When you were a kid, was there something that inspired wonder in you? Is there anything that has inspired wonder for you more recently? For me as a child it was something I read in a picture book: ‘Colours are outside things. Feelings are inside things.’ As an adult it was the idea that language evolves to produce forms that are more subjective, more personal, more enveloping. The word ‘like’ is a great example of that. The evolution of grammar is a move toward more personhood—which is a way of creating the experience of a self, with an inside and an outside. Maybe the self is one expression of the Earth’s evolution, and language—specifically grammar—is the mechanism by which the self comes into being. The story I read in this episode is ‘ The multidimensional language learners ’, and it’s available on grammarfordreamers.com . Connect with me (and sign up to my newsletter) here: grammarfordreamers.com/connect Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers , Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!…
What makes Ouija boards spooky? Is it language? After all, it’s the letters of the alphabet that take up the most space on these devices, and they’re just waiting for something to be spelled out. Who’s doing the spelling? And what kind of spells are they, after all? In this episode we’ll be exploring the occult etymologies of words like ‘spell’ and ‘grammar’. We also examine the spookiness of receiving messages that come without the coordinates of selfhood. As Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhou writes, ‘The point of a fish trap is the fish. The point of the word is the idea. Once you’ve got the idea, you can forget the word.’ What if language is a net that shapes itself around an idea to bring it into a different plane of existence? In this episode I share my own spooky idea: that human language is the Earth’s way of creating nets of selfhood from which new ideas emerge. The story I read is ‘ My late grandmother ’, and it’s available on grammarfordreamers.com . Connect with me (and sign up to my newsletter) here: grammarfordreamers.com/connect Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers , Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!…
Where’s home? What’s your first language? What was your language before your first language? Join me to explore linguistic frames of reference in Guugu Yimithirr, polyglot newborns and the beauty and tyranny of language, self and home. The story I read in this episode is ‘ Poor Magellan ’, and it’s available on grammarfordreamers.com . Connect with me (and sign up to my newsletter) here: grammarfordreamers.com/connect Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers , Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!…
How often have you prepared for a job interview by articulating your weaknesses? Apparently describing yourself as an empathic sponge who absorbs all the moods and emotions of the classroom is not the best self-promotional strategy when applying for an academic job. In this episode we explore interviews as discursive practices that require us, as Michel Foucault might say, to become subjects. I prefer the word ‘self’ to ‘subject’, and I like to think of language as forming the membrane that constitutes the self. An oppressive society requires a rigid membrane. A welcoming society respects the membrane, and honours the opportunities for intimacy inherent in the language-created notions of ‘self’ and ‘other’. The natural world provides illustrative examples of the types of symbiotic relationships that membranes offer. We even have, I was surprised to discover, a symbiotic relationship with viruses. Eight percent of the human genome has its origin in DNA from viruses. Our relationship and understanding of viruses can give us ideas about how to integrate those aspects of self and world that we’d prefer to keep distant. The book I mention in this episode is Frank Ryan’s Virolution . The story I read in this episode is ‘ To meet you ’, and it’s available on grammarfordreamers.com . Connect with me (and sign up to my newsletter) here: grammarfordreamers.com/connect Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers , Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!…
A question for the writers among us (writers of anything—novels, memoirs, short stories, theses, academic articles, monographs): What’s your relationship with words? Are you ringing in the New Year with a commitment to a daily, achievable word count target to ensure you achieve your writing goals by the end of 2023? If so (and I hate to break this to you), you may be treating language like currency. And language will always resist that type of treatment. Despite your best intentions, one day soon the words may simply dry up, leaving you to face the blinking cursor of doom. Rather than understanding language as divisible into quantifiable chunks (words), I think of language as fluid, a membrane in constant flux, forming and reforming around different imaginings of the self, the other, the world. When writers are in a flow state, I believe it’s because they’re allowing language to work its magic of shaping and reshaping selves. Join me to discuss writer’s block, life purpose and (why not?) The Sound of Music . I mention two of my stories in this episode, ‘ The words of your language ,’ and ‘ Coming true ’, available on grammarfordreamers.com . Connect with me (and sign up to my newsletter) here: grammarfordreamers.com/connect Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers , Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!…
‘What are your pronouns?’ How often do you get asked that question? How does it make you feel to be asked? When did the question first start making sense to you? This episode explores the ways that pronoun usage has shifted over time to reflect new ways of thinking about the relationship between self and society. We’ll draw upon Brown and Gilman’s seminal essay, ‘The pronouns of power and solidarity’. And we’ll go back to Girl Scout camp in the early eighties, which is where my real education in pronouns began. The story I read in this episode is ‘ Of prophets and pronouns ’, available on grammarfordreamers.com . Take my free course, sign up for my newsletter, get my screenplay—do all the things, here: grammarfordreamers.com/connect Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers , Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!…
Is nothing sacred? What images or memories does this question conjure for you? Also, what are your aims? (Don’t answer that. This is not a self-help podcast.) When I ask my undergraduate students to articulate the aims for their entrepreneurial projects, I hope and pray they won’t ask me mine. Not because I don’t have one. Here it is (don’t tell anyone): To honour the sacred spaces where new ideas emerge. The word ‘sacred’ sounds a little hokey or New Agey to my ears, but I can’t think of a better word. Episode 80 explores the sociological phenomenon of sacredness. We discuss the importance of the sacred and profane dichotomy in Durkheim’s theory of religion. We draw upon Goffman to posit that uttering profanities might be part of a sacred ritual of drawing boundaries around self and other. And we explore the mysterious ways that language creates sacred spaces where new ideas emerge. The story I read in this episode is ‘ The Determiners ’, available on grammarfordreamers.com . Take my free course, sign up for my newsletter, get my screenplay—do all the things, here: grammarfordreamers.com/connect Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers , Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!…
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Structured Visions
1 Episode 79 Possession, duality and other grammatical mysteries 1:01:54
1:01:54 پخش در آینده پخش در آینده لیست ها پسندیدن دوست داشته شد1:01:54
پخش در آینده پخش در آینده لیست ها پسندیدن دوست داشته شدIn this episode I share what I believe are my most radical ideas, which normally I try to hide so that people don’t think I’m crazy: Human beings are the only living things that experience separation from the rest of the world. What separates us is human language. The experience of separation created by human language is a stage in the Earth’s evolution, the Earth’s next great experiment. And there are mysteries in the structure of language that can help us understand how the separation is shaped. We’ll talk about some of those mysteries, specifically the grammatical principle of possession. To get a flavour of what’s in store, hold up one of your hands in front of you so that you can see it. Ask yourself the question: ‘Is this my hand?’ Did you entertain the possibility that your hand might be possessed? As we’ll discover, it is possessed. The possessive determiner my tells us so. Possession gives us a mechanism for creating two things where before there was only unity or wholeness. It allows us to divide absolutely anything up. And it allows us to redraw the boundaries around our experience. With language—not just possessive forms in language, but with language in general—you have the capacity to shape a self... and to make decisions about what belongs to that self. Language constructs selfhood, which gives us the experience of separation from the world. But what we learn by studying the intricacies of language is how malleable this selfhood is. The dynamic of selfhood can change literally with every utterance. And I believe that close attention to language can show us new ways of shaping the self, and thus, of shaping our communities and our world. The story I read in this episode is ‘ Possessed ’, available on grammarfordreamers.com . Take my free course, ‘Writing through the Lens of Language’, to explore the experiential aspects of ‘inhabiting language’ in more detail: bit.ly/lensoflanguage Come to my free live online workshop on October 21st! It’s called ‘ The creative logic of language ’, and it’s offered by Off the Shelf Festival of Words and Sheffield Hallam University. Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers , Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!…
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Structured Visions
1 Episode 78 Love, language, music and aliens 1:00:42
1:00:42 پخش در آینده پخش در آینده لیست ها پسندیدن دوست داشته شد1:00:42
پخش در آینده پخش در آینده لیست ها پسندیدن دوست داشته شدHave you ever been in love? And if you could send a message to outer space, what message would it be? We’ll use these questions to guide us through an exploration of the evolution of language, music, intimacy and transformation. The book I discuss in this episode is Steven Mithen’s The singing Neanderthals: The origins of music, language, mind and body . The story I read in this episode is ‘ Messages ’, available on grammarfordreamers.com . Take my free course, ‘Writing through the Lens of Language’, to explore the experiential aspects of ‘inhabiting language’ in more detail: bit.ly/lensoflanguage Join my Patreon community for more linguistic inspiration: https://www.patreon.com/jodieclark Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers , Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!…
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Structured Visions
1 Episode 77 The erotic power of syllables 1:08:12
1:08:12 پخش در آینده پخش در آینده لیست ها پسندیدن دوست داشته شد1:08:12
پخش در آینده پخش در آینده لیست ها پسندیدن دوست داشته شدWhat propels you, what drives you, what directs you in your life? Is it inner guidance? Or is it some external power or sense of exterior obligation? And, on a more light-hearted note, what’s your favourite syllable? In this episode we’re exploring selves, bodies, phonology and phonetics, and Audre Lorde’s essay, ‘The erotic as power’. We’re playing with these ideas: Human language gives the human body the experience of existing separately from the rest of the natural world. Human language allows the human body to have a unique and specific experience of pleasure, joy, grief, loneliness—the whole range of human emotions. To inhabit language allows the body the pleasure of being embraced by a self. The story I mention, ‘ Syllables ’, is available on grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com . Take my free course, ‘Writing through the Lens of Language’, to explore the experiential aspects of ‘inhabiting language’ in more detail: bit.ly/lensoflanguage Join my Patreon community for more linguistic inspiration: https://www.patreon.com/jodieclark Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers , Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!…
Where do you get your ideas? The question presumes instrumentality and exchange, as if you could take a trip to your favourite high street shop and come home with the best ideas you can afford. That same sort of instrumentality comes into play when we think of language as a tool, a means by which we communicate information or express our needs and desires. In this episode we explore a new way of thinking about language and ideas: Ideas emerge from empty space. Language organises that space to form selves. Selves are the spaces from which new ideas emerge. Are these selves conscious? Better to say that the whole space is conscious, the space is consciousness itself. When language shapes space to create selves, it bequeaths them with a strange gift: the capacity not to know. The capacity to be unconscious . The capacity to be separated from the vast space of consciousness we’re swimming in. Complex stuff! We may need some help from quantum physics (and a bit of liminal space) to open ourselves to these ideas. The books I mention in this episode are Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe and Amit Goswami’s The Self-Aware Universe . The stories I mention, ‘ YES/YES ’ and ‘ The woodcarver ’, are available on grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com . Take my free course, ‘Writing through the Lens of Language’, to explore the experiential aspects of ‘inhabiting language’ in more detail: bit.ly/lensoflanguage Join my Patreon community for more linguistic inspiration: https://www.patreon.com/jodieclark Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers , Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!…
What’s your relationship to religion? This could be a tricky question, for lots of reasons. People may not understand your faith. People may not understand how your faith is connected to your culture. People may not understand why you aren’t part of a religion. Maybe your experiences of religion have been traumatic in some way. To make this topic a little more light-hearted, it might be best to start with a different question. What’s your most embarrassing religious moment? Here’s mine: I accidentally became a born-again Christian at the age of 12. In this episode we explore my hapless conversion in more detail. We gain some perspective from a book called The elementary forms of religious life, written by French sociologist Emile Durkheim. In Durkheim’s analysis of what’s at the root of all religions, he draws these conclusions: When people worship, they’re connecting with something bigger than themselves This ‘bigger thing’ is society Without society people would not experience themselves as people; they’d have no sense of who they were in the world These conclusions are a little hard to swallow, particularly because we live in a moment where we’re right to be critical of society and the roles it establishes for us. Especially as these roles are carved out of endemic structural injustices. But why do human beings need to actively connect with something bigger than themselves? It seems to me we’re already connected to something bigger than us—the natural world. When I imagine the natural world as a conscious entity—and it’s one of the themes I love to explore in my fiction—it makes me feel like I am already part of a bigger picture. This is true for me even though I feel separate from the natural world, even though I feel my experience is limited by the constraints of my language and my society. The idea I most like to play with in my fiction is that the human experience of separation from the natural world is not a flaw, but a design principle. I explore this notion in most recent story, ‘ First words ’, which is available on my Grammar for Dreamers blog grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com . I intended the ‘Seer’ character to be an agent of the natural world, creating language to produce the experience of separation, the concept of the self. The idea is that those of us who believe we inhabit selves (e.g. human beings!) are the routes by which the Earth itself experiences new ideas. Intrigued? Would you like some more ideas about on how to tap into these insights on language and the self? Check out my free course, ‘Writing through the Lens of Language’: bit.ly/lensoflanguage Join my Patreon community for more linguistic inspiration: https://www.patreon.com/jodieclark Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers , Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!…
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Structured Visions
Is there anyone in your life who truly ‘gets’ you? What’s your favourite fairy tale? Have you ever received guidance from a wiser, more loving version of yourself? Believe it or not, there is a connection between all these questions. The first question came into the foreground for me when I first moved to Britain to do my PhD and was regularly doling out guidance to my student housemates. One of them was convinced that I ‘got’ her in a way her boyfriend didn’t. I didn’t have the heart to tell her I don’t think anyone ever truly ‘gets’ anyone else. Clearly ‘getting’ someone means to ‘understand’ them, but in the same way that you ‘get’ the punchline of a joke. To get a joke means that you have access to all the assumptions on which the joke is based. (In linguistics these are called implicatures.) But jokes are simple, and people are vast and complex. And you are not a joke. You are nothing less than a wild, mad-cap, unsolvable mystery. By definition, ungettable. But that doesn’t stop us from longing to be seen, understood, to feel held, to resonate with someone. To experience that beautiful sense of freedom that comes from not having to explain yourself. I believe that this longing, this loneliness, is part of the human condition, and I believe that what causes it is language. To illustrate this point, I’ve rewritten my favourite fairy tale, Rapunzel, in a story called ‘ Longing ’ (which is available on my Grammar for Dreamers blog grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com ). According to my version of the story, the Earth once had a longing that only the Sorceress, Language, could fulfil. What could the Earth possibly long for? The natural world is governed by interconnection and symbiosis. How could it possibly be lonely? What if the Earth longs for longing itself? What if the Earth longs to experience the separateness that can only be experienced by a distinct, isolated self? In my version of the Rapunzel story, I have the Earth abandon one of its beloved creatures (human beings) to the one magical being that could provide that (language). Language creates the self. What the self creates is, precisely, nothing. If we see the self as a membrane (another of my favourite images), and when we look courageously at what’s inside that membrane, we see... nothing Nothing we can grasp, nothing we can ‘get’, nothing fathomable. Just a miraculously fertile void from which new ideas can emerge. And when those new ideas emerge, we are in the privileged position of seeing them as other . Like a magical doll in a fairy tale, or a wiser, more compassionate version of ourselves. The Self and the Other allow us to experience mystery. And through us, the Earth can experience mystery as well. Check out my free course, ‘Writing through the Lens of Language’: bit.ly/lensoflanguage Join my Patreon community for more linguistic inspiration: https://www.patreon.com/jodieclark Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers , Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!…
How is language like water? Both are all around us. Both are within us. Both have fascinating structuring mechanisms that we may not know much about. Think about the structure of a water molecule. Its single oxygen atom has a slightly negative charge, and the two hydrogen atoms have a slightly positive charge. The opposite charges attract water molecules to each other (the positive side of one molecule is drawn to the negative side of another). These weak attractive forces are called ‘hydrogen bonds’, and they make it possible for water to remain a liquid at room temperature, which in turn allows life to exist on Earth. In this episode we explore the possibility that human language has a structuring quality, like the structuring mechanisms in the natural world. If the qualities of water are shaped by hydrogen bonds, what shapes the structure of human language? I believe that the structuring principle of human language is selfhood. We’re getting better at recognising the oppressive structures of our society, like structural racism, patriarchal systems, colonialism, cisheteronormativity, neurotypicality and ableism (to name a few). But we might also take some time to acknowledge a more dynamic structuring principle: the self. Formed and re-formed by language, it dissolves and is produced anew in each moment. The self shapes itself like a membrane around spaces from which new experiences can emerge. The challenge is to recognise the power of the dynamic structure of the self formed by language. The mission is to honour it, in ourselves and each other. Curious about how linguists can find out what pre-verbal babies know about linguistic structure? Watch this great video on The Ling Space . The story I discuss in this episode, ‘ No and the ark ’ is available on my Grammar for Dreamers blog: grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com Check out my free course, ‘Writing through the Lens of Language’: bit.ly/lensoflanguage Join my Patreon community for more linguistic inspiration: https://www.patreon.com/jodieclark Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers , Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!…
Have you ever entertained an apocalypse fantasy? The one I invented relieves humanity of its language. Language produces selves, which is not a bad thing. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s the window to intimacy. But what happens when the amount of language we use increases to the extent that we’ve seen in recent years? The production of selves increases to potentially catastrophic proportions. Here’s the link to Dr Debbie Reese’s excellent critique of Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins: https://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com/2016/06/a-critical-look-at-odells-island-of.html The book that inspired my fascination with mycelium is Paul Stamets’s Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Save the World . The stories I discuss in this episode, ‘ Finite ’ and ‘ A remarkable outcome ’ are both available on my Grammar for Dreamers blog: grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com Check out my free course, ‘Writing through the Lens of Language’: bit.ly/lensoflanguage Join my freshly minted Patreon community for more linguistic inspiration: https://www.patreon.com/jodieclark Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers , Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!…
Ferdinand de Saussure likened language to a collective treasure that every member of the linguistic community can draw from without its stores diminishing. This idea is quite heartening – almost magical – but it’s also ruthlessly oppressive. What do you want first: the good news or the bad news? The story I discuss in this episode is ‘ A day at the lake ’. Check out my free course, Writing through the Lens of Language , designed especially for you: http://bit.ly/lensoflanguage Join my freshly minted Patreon community for more linguistic inspiration: https://www.patreon.com/jodieclark Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers , Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!…
Happy New Year! The end of the year is a great time for reflection. Why not reflect upon the meaning of life? Or, even better, why not reflect on why we would think there is a meaning to life, and what type of meaning we expect to find ( meaning itself has lots of meanings, as linguist John Lyons points out), and what we’re assuming about life when we ask what it means. Are we asking about the meaning of human life only? If so, are we thinking of human life in terms of a narrative, so the ‘meaning of life’ becomes something like the ‘moral of the story’? What if we thought about meaning of life from a biological perspective? David Deamer, a biologist who explores the origin of life, gives this definition: ‘Life is an evolving system of polymers synthesized by chemical reactions (metabolism) that take place in membrane-bounded compartments called cells’ (2011, p. 3). The image we have here is not one life, with one story and one meaning. Instead it’s a proliferation of discrete compartments – cells, surrounded by membranes, each containing its own unique strand of genetic information – in other words, strands of communicable meanings. If you’ve been listening to this podcast, you know I’m fascinated by the idea that the information contained in these membrane-bound compartments... indeed, that the membranes themselves, are a form of language. This perspective would present human language as nothing more or less than a means for the Earth to produce new forms of membrane-bound compartments, with new forms of information within. Human language creates the self, which serves as a membrane, that requires us to feel separate, divided, broken. But it also offers us the experience uniqueness, individuality and the rare pleasure of co-creating something new, something meaningful, something that reconnects us to everything we once felt separate from. Here’s a New Year’s resolution: rather than spending time trying to find out the meaning of life, let’s celebrate how we each individually contribute to life’s multitude of meanings. The story I discuss in this episode is ‘ The Mosaic Makers ’. Works cited: Deamer, D. (2011) First life: discovering the connections between stars, cells, and how life began . Berkeley: University of California Press. Lessing, D. (1979). Shikasta . New York: Knopf. Lyons, J. (1977). Semantics , vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thanks to the curious, intelligent, creative community who listen to this podcast. I have exciting new things in store for you. Stay tuned to future episodes to find out more. Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends! Or connect with me in one or more of the following ways: Subscribe to the monthly Grammar for Dreamers newsletter (and get a copy of the Grammar for Dreamers screenplay). Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers , Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling…
‘It’s easy to forget,’ said Sir David Attenborough in his address to COP26 , ‘that ultimately the emergency climate comes down to a single number — the concentration of carbon in our atmosphere.’ That one number, he goes on to say, ‘defines our relationship with our world.’ According to Attenborough’s framing, the story is a mathematical problem, with a mathematical solution. But how often, in your experience, are relationship problems genuinely reducible to mathematical equations? How often are they genuinely ‘solved’ by a number? I’ve often said that my creative and academic work are inspired by ‘the intimacy embedded in the structure of language.’ Intimacy requires selves, and selves are generated by language, by the stories we tell. Stories about the environmental crisis usually construct two distinct selves: us and the Earth. In this episode we recognise that the relationship between us and the Earth would benefit from some couples therapy. In therapy it might be revealed that the thing that separates us from the Earth is language – the capacity to create and inhabit other worlds – fantasy, parallel existences – that keep us from putting any attention to our partner, the Earth. Language is a boundary that keeps the human species detached from the Earth. But the thing that separates us does not have to be a boundary. It could be a membrane. Language may be unique to humans, but membranes are universal to all forms of life. Let’s explore the possibility that language is Earth’s newest form of membrane, one that creates spaces from which new ideas can emerge. The story I discuss in this episode is ‘ The Great Reversal .’ Many thanks to Dr Samantha Kies-Ryan for her work on storytelling and water management in the Solomon Islands . For additional content: Subscribe to the monthly Grammar for Dreamers newsletter (and get a copy of the Grammar for Dreamers screenplay). To watch my regularly posted videos of linguistic geekery, follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers or on Facebook: www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ Are you enjoying these episodes? Would you like to hear more? Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify or wherever you like to listen.…
In this episode we’re going to address three questions. What’s a word? What was did it feel like when life first emerged on the Earth? When’s the first (or the last) time you made a real decision? And I’m going to try to convince you that these questions all have something to do with each other. I believe that thinking about words will give us a bit of insight about what it was like when life first emerged on the Earth. These two things – life and language – for me share two qualities: that they’re both incredibly commonplace, and they’re both overwhelmingly mysterious. Also, both require boundary making, whether that takes the form of a cell membrane (life) or a self membrane (language). These boundaries cultivate a space in which new ideas can land. For more about membranes and the origins of life, read Pier Luigi Luisi’s The emergence of life or David Deamer’s First life . Read my story ‘Wordfall’ on my Grammar for Dreamers blog . For additional content: Subscribe to the monthly Grammar for Dreamers newsletter (and get a copy of the Grammar for Dreamers screenplay). To watch my regularly posted videos of linguistic geekery, follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers or on Facebook: www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ Are you enjoying these episodes? Would you like to hear more? Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify , Google podcasts , or wherever you like to listen.…
When did you learn that the earth travels round the sun and not the other way round? And when you talk to yourself, which one of the dialoguing characters is you? Language generates multiple selves, and each self comes with its own built in worldview. Is it superstitious to think of selves that are wiser than us, that are protective, that wish to bless us? Perhaps it’s reckless not to. The story I discuss in this episode is called ‘Go’ . It’s just been published in the Running Wild Anthology of Stories, vol 5 . I learned about imperatives in Omotic languages from reading work by Alexandra Aikhenvald . (See reference list below.) And the discussion of postmodernism is based on the following quote from Madan Sarup’s book, Identity, culture and the postmodern world: ‘Copernicus, Darwin, Marx and Freud have all, in their different ways, decentred the human subject. By “decentering”, I mean that individual consciousness can no longer be seen as the origin of meaning, knowledge and action.’ (Sarup, 1996, p. 46) References Aikhenvald, A. (2010). Imperatives and commands . Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sarup, M. (1996). Identity, culture and the postmodern world. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. For additional content: Subscribe to the monthly Grammar for Dreamers newsletter (and get a copy of the Grammar for Dreamers screenplay). To watch my regularly posted videos of linguistic geekery, follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers or on Facebook: www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ Are you enjoying these episodes? Would you like to hear more? Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify , Google podcasts , or wherever you like to listen.…
Is an enlightened society a society without language? This episode explores what starlings can teach us about selves, the space that surrounds the experience of being, and how to create a more welcoming world. The story I discuss in this episode is called ‘The end of language’ . The hack I mention for finding the subject and verb of a clause is called the question-tag probe. Here’s a video on how to use it to find the subject , and here’s one on how to find the verb . Have you ever seen a starling murmuration? Watch this video from the RSPB , and be prepared to be amazed (or even, enlightened). For additional content: Subscribe to the monthly Grammar for Dreamers newsletter (and get a copy of the Grammar for Dreamers screenplay). To watch my regularly posted videos of linguistic geekery, follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers or on Facebook: www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/…
Have you ever repeated a word over and over again to yourself to experience the dissolution of its meaning? What if you were to do that with the word ‘me’? When I was a little kid, repeating the word ‘me’ became a doorway to a world where I was freed from the self that language had created. It was trippy. In this episode we’ll discuss the role of language in creating, dissolving and protecting selves. In my academic research I analyse transcripts of conversations to identify the shape of the social structure that emerges from people talking about everyday experiences. I look for grammatical patterns in the transcripts, asking these questions: What ‘selves’ are constructed here? What is the shape of the social structure here? What are the possibilities for transformation here? * One transformative possibility that has emerged from this type of analysis is that selves need to be protected. Can language protect them? Think about the work you own name does in constructing your social self. But an anthropological look at naming systems makes it clear that names are less about protecting selfhood, and more about establishing someone’s place in a social structure. Even the seemingly ordinary principle that there are girls’ names for girls and boys’ names for boys, for instance, lets us know that we live in a culture that positions us in a binary gender structure. Having an established place in a social structure is not the same as knowing that your self is protected, revered, cherished. In my short story, ‘ The Greenhouse ’, I explore the idea that everything in the natural world has its own blueprint. – its chemical makeup, its DNA signature, etc. Everything in the natural world has something you could call a ‘name’. Or even a ‘self’. The ‘selves’ are in relationship with each other – molecules combine to form new molecules, membranes form that allow life to emerge What if the earth were to grant to one of its species the ability to play with these relationship-forming tools? What if human beings were offered a device to do creativity in exactly the same way the earth does creativity? Well so far, such a device has created social structures that produce division, hierarchy and exclusion. But there’s hope to be found in the etymology of the word ‘culture’. Culture is what we cultivate. Language is what we use to cultivate. To make a more welcoming social structure, let’s cultivate selves that felt safe and protected, that are crucibles for creation. Let’s use language to form linguistic membranes around selves, create spaces for new experiences, feelings, thoughts and ideas to emerge. *You can listen to me talk about this in more detail in Episode 58 , which is a recording of the talk I gave at Sheffield Hallam University in 2017 in honour of Professor Sara Mills’s retirement. For an even more detailed version, have a look at my book, Selves, bodies and the grammar of social worlds . Are you enjoying these episodes? Would you like to hear more? Subscribe on Apple podcasts , Spotify , Google podcasts , or wherever you like to listen. For additional content: Subscribe to the monthly Grammar for Dreamers newsletter (and get a copy of the Grammar for Dreamers screenplay). Follow me on Instagram, where I regularly post videos sharing bits of linguistic geekery that delight me: @grammarfordreamers…
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