Why doesn’t English have genders? Well… it did!
Pretty much every other language seems to have grammatical genders… so why doesn't English? Well, it used to. Old English had three genders, meaning there were at least three different…
British country names explained
Why is 🏴England named after the Angles and not the Saxons? Does 🏴"Welsh" really mean slave? And where was the original 🏴Scotland? These questions answered and many more on this…
Where did our numbers come from?
Why do our numbers look the way they look? Why do we count the way we count? These questions answered and many more in this video looking at where English…
A seal pushed me into the shower
en français
How far back in time
can you understand English?
French negation history
sorry to old English speakers
Following the Sounds of Poetry
There are multiple pathways from Anne Carson’s poetry to Ross Gay’s prose. One need only listen, the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona in Tucson reminds us, and follow…
AI Threatens Literary Translation
The etymology of the word translation—“to carry across”—conjures an image of physical labor. It is deeply relational, requiring at least two bodies, those of an author and of the person…
Artificial Intelligence, Automation, Work, and Algorithms | Matteo Pasquinelli and Richard Hames
What is AI? A dominant view describes it as the quest "to solve intelligence"—a solution supposedly to be found in the secret logic of the mind, such as in its…
Where does punctuation come from?!
In this episode I trace the punctuation we use every day as far back as I can. ❓Is the question mark actually a word? ❗️Where did the exclamation mark come…