2008 New Year’s special edition: Dave Shepherd sends New Year’s greetings from the Word Nerds team, and responds to listener feedback.
Dave reads and responds to emails from Hillary, Idiosyncratic Idiot, Chris, Rob, and Donna. (3:10)
A bald-faced solicitation of your donations through our PayPal button. (See the right-hand navigation column on our website.) (15:47)
Shows we hope to do soon: rhetorical devices, many peoples divided by a common language, and the languages we teach. (16:59)
Theme music by Kick the Cat
time: 20:55
size: 19.2 Mb
rating: G. This week’s show is just a response to our listeners’ very courteous and decorous emails.
I was actually going to suggest that you touched the subject of rhetorics in the e-mail, but I completely forgot!
Eagerly looking forward to these upcoming shows. Please consider doing one on neologisms too.
i.i.
Are you doing a research about non-English heritage speakers?
Please let me know what you mean by non-English heritage speakers. Do you mean speakers of English or of other languages? What do you think of as a heritage speaker in this context?
native speaker of English
I mean that’s someone who’s parents didn’t speak English at home.
is that right?
Dave – two Ls, just like Mrs. Clinton, ok??
. 
Thanks for starting the year off right!
Oopsie! Fixed now!
Say, is she just about to win the New Hampshire primary election?
Hey Dave, thanks for fixing that. I guess she did win, didn’t she? If she wins the whole thing that’s going to be weird on a personal level.
Anyway regarding this business of “heritage speaker” of English, I have to say I’m still a little unclear on what that means…
My father-in-law’s parents spoke Hungarian at home, and he spoke Hungarian as a child in a disputed area controlled by Romanians, learning English and Romanian at school, until moving to Israel when he was 13 when he stopped learning Romanian at school and started speaking Hebrew and English in school. He became an adult fluent in Hungarian, Romanian, English, and Hebrew, and he married my mother-in-law.
My mother-in-law’s parents spoke Hungarian at home in the Philadelphia suburbs; my mother-in-law grew up bilingual in Hungarian and English, picking up Hebrew and Swedish along the way due to extended visits with extended family in Israel and Sweden.
So, my parents-in-law married after meeting in Israel while my mother-in-law was studying there; they spoke Hebrew in their home when my first sister-in-law was born, and continued to do so until my husband, their third child, was two years old, at which point they switched to speaking English at home. My husband and his three siblings are all monolingual English speakers, to the great shame of their extended family who are all at least trilingual (my husband’s grandma speaks English, Hebrew, Hungarian, Romanian, Swedish, French, and at least some Russian! She speaks English at home with family unless she wants “the kids” to be left out in which case it’s a toss up if she’ll choose Hebrew, Hungarian, or Swedish to chat with whomever she’s speaking to…)
So, who in this story is a “heritage speaker” of English, if anyone?
Good morning!
I was listening to 96A Thursday morning and I sympathize w/ the immense task of creating transcripts of your shows. Not something I’d want to have to do on a regular basis.
Have you considered creating a wiki and letting the transcipts appear, as though by magic?
Keep up the wonderful work.
JB
JB, I just recorded a show with Howard Chang, and we were planning to take a moment to invite listeners to submit transcripts. However, we forgot it completely.
I’m not sure I have the time right now to set up a wiki, but I do like the idea. We could even have a thread on the Word Nerds forum site just for transcripts. In any event, I’d like to invite any listeners who would like to transcribe our shows to do so.
Knowing how many false starts and “ums” and “uhs” we utter, I’m not sure I want to read the show transcribed, though!