34 min
English the vampire language, sucking life from other tongues Bad English
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- Comedy
We investigate “word aversion” and our host Ivan ends up with a bad case of hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, a 35-letter word meaning fear of long words. Our guest Deng Adut was a child soldier in Sudan. After arriving in Australia as a teenage refugee, he learned English by singing along with The Wiggles, reading the bible and working at a petrol station. He sees English as a 'vampire language', sucking words from other languages like Latin, Italian, Spanish and German. It’s holy mayhem as language teacher Ai-Lin Bhugun encourages them to unpack the bonkers world of idioms and Australian slang. There are over 25,000 English idioms!
We investigate “word aversion” and our host Ivan ends up with a bad case of hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, a 35-letter word meaning fear of long words. Our guest Deng Adut was a child soldier in Sudan. After arriving in Australia as a teenage refugee, he learned English by singing along with The Wiggles, reading the bible and working at a petrol station. He sees English as a 'vampire language', sucking words from other languages like Latin, Italian, Spanish and German. It’s holy mayhem as language teacher Ai-Lin Bhugun encourages them to unpack the bonkers world of idioms and Australian slang. There are over 25,000 English idioms!
34 min