Lingthusiasm
@lingthusiasm.bsky.social
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A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics! By @gretchenmcc.bsky.social and @superlinguo.bsky.social
"Fascinating" -NYT
"Joyously nerdy" -Buzzfeed
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![Gretchen: When you say this in a sentence, people will sometimes give you a double take, but they will understand you. Like, “Oh, yeah, I’m just gonna get the acoustic bicycle because the electric bicycle is on the fritz,” and they’re like, “Acoustic? Oh.”
Lauren: It’s wild that that is actually – is “acoustic” gonna become productive do you think?
Gretchen: Well, this is the thing. I put this on Bluesky because I was so entertained by it, and a number of people got very mad at me because they’re like, “This can’t possibly be the word for it. We should call it an ‘analog bicycle’.” But I was like, the other one isn’t a digital bicycle. An “e-bike” is not the same as a “digital bike.” A digital bike is one you ride in a videogame. Some people were saying a “manual bike,” but technically “manual” means with the hands. And if there’s one thing you don’t use for a bike typically, it is the hands. A hand-operated bike is an entirely different object. These exist. But the typical bike is not that.
Lauren: But also, manual cars only got called “manual cars” because we invented automatic transmission. This is just a series of revelations for me.
Gretchen: Yeah. But my favourite responses are the ones that were like, “All right. If ‘acoustic’ is productive now, I guess that means I have an acoustic toothbrush.”
Lauren: How retro of you.
Gretchen: It’s not an electric toothbrush. I think it’s so silly and so surprising. “Bicycle” has gone through this specifically several times because the current bicycles that we have with two wheels of equal size, when they were introduced, they were called “safety bicycles” because they were easier to handle than the earlier dominant style which had one large wheel and one small wheel.
Lauren: Like a “penny farthing” or something like that.
Gretchen: Well, “penny farthing” is a retronym because –
Lauren: No!
Gretchen: [Laughs] Those first got called an “ordinary bicycle,” much like a “standard transmission,” and then they’re really not the…](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:jh3ldn2xrumqoh6lr3mxdrwb/bafkreibdkggpsm73r4jm4uxig2s4frwhpivkm6cdyeazwbuerukewxxjaq@jpeg)
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![Gretchen: [Laughs] Those first got called an “ordinary bicycle,” much like a “standard transmission,” and then they’re really not the ordinary kind of bicycle that anybody has.
Lauren: So, you had an ordinary bike and a safety bike, but then we just started calling them “bikes” and “penny farthings,” and now you have “e-bikes.” You can imagine a world in which if they became the standard technology, they would just be bikes. You’d have an “acoustic” or a “mechanical” bike or something like that.
Gretchen: This shift has happened over my lifetime with a word like “phone.” If you say, “I’m on my phone” – well, “I’m on my phone,” a bit different from “I’m on the phone” or like, “Where’s the phone?” The older use of landline phone is really much more about THE phone situation, whereas this is much more about MY phone situation. But if you say, “Draw a picture of a phone,” my default in imagery is the handheld touchscreen thing that I didn’t have when I was a child because they didn’t exist. I didn’t even have as a word when I was a child. A “phone” was a landline phone. “Phone” has gone through several stages with respect to this.
Lauren: I’m not gonna lie. When you said you wanted to do an episode so you could talk about retronyms, I thought you were just gonna make your “acoustic bicycle” joke. I did not expect to actually go on a massive lexical change journey with you.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:jh3ldn2xrumqoh6lr3mxdrwb/bafkreieatkhpgxcbxfjvq3vkdt2io2em2drvgqrubwhe6gnfr7imm3ebgu@jpeg)
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