Speculative Grammarian Podcast Speculative Grammarian

I love this podcast. Equal parts hilarious and clever, every time I play it around people they “don’t get it.” Oh well. The small sound bites are perfect to add to my queue during my morning commute, or when I just want to be cheered up when I’m having a bad day.

Ever found yourself slogging through yet another McCarthy & Prince treatise with no end in sight? Or perhaps you've stayed up into the wee hours of the morning digging through a grammar written in a no-longer-current framework by a long-dead missionary in search of a single piece of data you're not sure exists, but whose existence, you hope, will save the cagey thesis your advisor agreed to let you explore (you know, the one that bears little if any resemblance to your original thesis, the one you actually care about)? If this sounds like you, put down the reading material, and pick up your headphones: SpecGram has a podcast! Now you can spend time not being productive while still engaging with language in some way without having to resort to conlanging!

Speculative Grammarian is to linguistics what The Onion is to news and The Journal of Irreproducible Results is to science. While the written articles can be rather technical and jargon-laden in their hilarity, the articles chosen for the podcast so far have been less technical—porbably because those translate better to the audio format. The podcasts also feature a variety of speakers. The episodes are short—just a few minutes—which is good news for the busy linguist or language lover on the go. These podcasts also feature entire transcripts as "lyrics", meaning you can read along on your iPhone or iPod Touch. As they say on their website: "Satirical Linguistics, the specialty of SpecGram, is a meta-field that covers everything from Abkhasian to Heinrich Zimmer. Everything linguistic is fair game—uh, that is—acceptable subject matter." Indeed!