121: Vampires, ghosts, imposters and more linguistic monsters

Vampires, werewolves, witches, ghosts, zombies, imposters, and frankenstein have something in common: they're all possessed by the spirit of linguistics!
In this silly spooky episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about various kinds of linguistic monsters. We talk about how vampires would make the best historical linguists, the ghosts of borrowed words and old grammar haunting our modern vocabulary, why Your Honour can enjoy dressing up as a grammatical imposter, the common origins of witch and wizard, and more hauntings from the thrilling world of monster linguistics.
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice: https://pod.link/1186056137/episode/dGFnOnNvdW5kY2xvdWQsMjAxMDp0cmFja3MvMjQyMDAxMTg4Nw
Read the transcript here: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/830584421665128448/transcript-episode-121-vampires-ghosts
Announcements:
In honour of the 10th anniversary of Lingthusiasm, we're launching the Linguistics Zine Challenge: make or share a linguistics zine and tell us about it by the end of November, and you could win prizes! Full details, including the submission form and details of all the fun prizes up for grabs, can be found here: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/829947863269294080/announcing-the-linguistics-zine-challenge
November is also World Linguistics Day! Join your fellow language nerds around the globe on November 26th as we celebrate linguistics. Last year people from 70 cities in 34 countries participated. Tag us in your celebration posts on social media, or get extra lingthusiastic and share your favourite linguistics zine in honor of the day. More details here: https://lingcomm.org/category/world-linguistics-day/
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about the most deeply irrelevant pitch emails we have somehow ended receiving after almost 10 years of podcasting....and find creative ways to make them all somehow about linguistics anyway! (Don't worry, we've redacted all the names of the actual brands so we can poke fun without feeling like we're actually getting salesy on you. And so no one sues us.)
Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 110+ other bonus episodes, plus access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds: https://www.patreon.com/lingthusiasm/posts/bonus-116-is-our-170970754
For links to things mentioned in this episode: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/830584229365743616/lingthusiasm-episode-121-vampires-ghosts