PLAY PODCASTS
And May He Be a Masculine Bridge
Episode 9

And May He Be a Masculine Bridge

How English lost its genders: A simple quirk of grammar may affect the way we think.

Lexicon Valley

May 7, 201228m 12s

Audio is streamed directly from the publisher (traffic.megaphone.fm) as published in their RSS feed. Play Podcasts does not host this file. Rights-holders can request removal through the copyright & takedown page.

Show Notes

Does talking about an object as masculine or feminine somehow cause us to think of it that way? In the second part of a Lexicon Valley series about language and gender, Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield discuss the fascinating research by Stanford psychologist Lera Boroditsky involving grammar and perception. They also wonder what may have happened to grammatical gender in English — that’s right, once upon a time we had grammatical gender, too. But then we lost it.

Twitter: @lexiconvalley
Facebook: facebook.com/LexiconValley
Website: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices