The Importance of Emotional Speaking

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Every chapter is read by a different voice actor. When I went to read it, it just was so natural for me to say fuck rather than fork or something minced. And in fact, the audio producer, the audio director told me that every other reader had, she was going to let them sort of do it themselves because we wanted everybody to embody that that chapter. Yes, but I think for me, and I have no problem. I mean, ask my students, I will sayFuck, you know, a million times in class. It's not in spoken language. I don't have any problem with it. But when I was writing a book, it didn't feel organic to

Paranoid about the “ums” and “uhs” that pepper your presentations? Bewildered by “hella” or the meteoric rise of “so”? Can the word “dude” help people bond across social divides? Why are we always trying to make our intensifiers ever more intense? Are these language tics, habits, and developments in our speech a sign of cultural and linguistic degeneration? Fridland weaves together history, psychology, science, and laugh-out-loud anecdotes to explain why we speak the way we do today, and how that impacts what our kids may be saying tomorrow.

Shermer and Fridland discuss: Okay, Boomer language • accents • ChatGPT • gender pronouns • gender differences in language use • forensic language analysis • evolution of language • why children learn language naturally but must be taught to read and write • literature, film, and TV’s influence on language use • cancel culture and taboo language • language and identity politics • y’all, contractions, and other language shortcuts • tracking human migrations by language, and vice versa • Fargo, and more.

Valerie Fridland is a professor of linguistics in the English Department at the University of Nevada, Reno. She writes a popular language blog on Psychology Today called “Language in the Wild,” and is also a professor for The Great Courses series.