The Dissenter | 21 August 2023 | 1h 43m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Valerie Fridland about her book Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English. Discusses what people call “bad” English, the history of standardization and prescription in English, how grammar rules are mostly arbitrary; how women and low-status people drive linguistics change; what gender has to do with how we speak; the uses of filled pauses like “um” and “uh”, the uses of “like”, “I mean”, “you know”, and “so”; the meaning of “dude”, and “literally”; whether words have any intrinsic meaning; the current proposal of using “they/them” as singular personal pronouns to refer to non-binary people; and removing/banning words from classic books.