The band Vampire Weekend once asked, who gives a f*** about an Oxford comma? This episode proves the answer is: a lot of people.

A crash course on some of the characters and methodologies behind the Simplified Spelling movement, from Benjamin Franklin to today.

An exploration of Proto-Indo-European — the lost ancestor of hundreds of modern languages — and the surprisingly unknown story of how it shaped much of the modern world.

An exploration of how accents shape identity, perception, and belonging—where they come from, why they change, and what our speech reveals about us.

The English alphabet is a direct descendent of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. By unpacking this lineage, light may be shed on the state of the alphabet as it exists today.

What can we learn about the nature of translation by comparing a mundane warning message in hundreds of different languages?

Rhetoric has a bad reputation, but in reality, it’s much more than political gibberish and snake oil.

“Bad” English might not be as bad as we think. In fact, it’s just language change in action.