Structured Visions

To what extent is who(m) you’re allowed to love analogous to syntactic structure?

In this episode I explore the idea that human beings, in initiating themselves into lang…

What’s your favourite way to alleviate anxiety? Mine is tapping, also known as Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). Linguistically, tapping is fascinating, because it reveals an inhere…

Do you believe in fairies? In his 1911 book, American anthropologist Walter Evans Wentz hypothesises ‘tentatively’ that the invisible world of fairies should be e…

The paradox of being human in a Western, settler, colonizing culture is you’re supposed to be special and… you’re not supposed to be special.

It’s a culture that’s cli…

Conversations with final-year university students has brought back all the fears that I had in my mid- to late twenties about having to be a grown up. The secret to soothing …

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 cu…

Have 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 M…

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 S…

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 …

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 imag…

Have 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 belon…

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…

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 whateve…

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 pi…

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 anyth…

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 c…

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 …

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 f…

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 gif…

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 …