Structured Visions
Linguist Jodie Clark explores creative ways of imagining social transformation.
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112 Love language
08/28/2025
112 Love language
To what extent is who(m) you’re allowed to love analogous to syntactic structure? In this episode I explore the idea that human beings, in initiating themselves into language, surrender the higher consciousness that the rest of the non-human world enjoys. This is a problem when it comes to love. If we see the world in terms of nouns, verbs, adjectives and prepositions, then love becomes part of a transitive syntactical arrangement which requires a subject that is separate from an object. But it’s worth considering the distinct pleasure of separation. It makes it possible to experience the uniqueness of being loved, of being unknown, of being a mystery. As I always say, intimacy is embedded in the structure of language. The research I discuss comes from Chapter 8 of . You can get a copy from . Here are . The story I read is ‘.’ Check out my new free course, . Check out my old free course, . Subscribe on , or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!
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111 The linguistics of tapping
07/31/2025
111 The linguistics of tapping
What’s your favourite way to alleviate anxiety? Mine is tapping, also known as Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). Linguistically, tapping is fascinating, because it reveals an inherent contradiction that your body ends up resolving for you. When we tap into (pardon the pun) the world beyond language—our bodies, the earth—we access the worlds ‘created from silence’, the mystery, and the spaces where something new can emerge. The stories I read in this episode are and . My favourite EFT resource is . Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: Subscribe on , or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!
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110 Clap if you believe in fairies
06/26/2025
110 Clap if you believe in fairies
Do you believe in fairies? In his , American anthropologist Walter Evans Wentz hypothesises ‘tentatively’ that the invisible world of fairies should be examined ‘just as we examine any fact in the visible realm wherein we now live, whether it be a fact of chemistry, of physics, or of biology’ (pp. xvi-xvii). In this episode I put forward my own hypothesis: that human language is what keeps us from seeing fairies… and all the other multidimensional mysteries of the material world. What is it about language that so comprehensively excludes us from a more expansive experience of the world? I draw upon principles to explain what aspects of the ‘architecture of language’ keep us confined within the dark prison of selfhood. Each of Halliday’s metafunctions contribute, I posit, to how selfhood confines us, through the linear experience of time (the textual metafunction), the need to vie for social status (the interpersonal metafunction) and the assumption of separate worldviews (the ideational metafunction). We can learn about the world we can’t access by examining the restrictive shapes of selfhood that human language produces. We can also imagine the possibility that our experience is restrictive by design—that the Earth developed a means to create separate consciousnesses so that it could experience the mystery of intimacy. The story I read in this episode is ‘.’ Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: Subscribe on , or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!
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109 What makes you so special?
05/29/2025
109 What makes you so special?
The paradox of being human in a Western, settler, colonizing culture is you’re supposed to be special and… you’re not supposed to be special. It’s a culture that’s clinging to the idea of human exceptionalism, which is the assumption that humans are better, smarter and more conscious than the rest of the world. Human language is held up as evidence of what makes humans so special. Posthumanism is a movement that challenges this assumption. My position is that language does make humans exceptional, but not exceptional in the sense of ‘better.’ I think language makes us less conscious than the material world. A lot less conscious. Find out what I mean through an exploration of nouns and copular verbs. The stories I read in this episode are ‘’ and ‘.’ If you enjoyed the ‘think of a word’ exercise, you can do it again in Episode 64, ‘The intimacy embedded in language.’ If you’d like to hear more about how language makes humans less conscious than the rest of the world, listen to , ‘Language and the afterlife’ and ‘Consciousness is more than just a little cutie pie.’ If you’d like to hear about the Earth’s language, try . Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: You can see what I did with the words my History of English students wrote on scraps of paper in Grammar for Dreamers, the screenplay, available here: Subscribe on , or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!
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108 Adulting, and stuff like that
04/30/2025
108 Adulting, and stuff like that
Conversations with final-year university students has brought back all the fears that I had in my mid- to late twenties about having to be a grown up. The secret to soothing those fears for me was… studying linguistics. More specifically, it was ‘like’ and stuff like that (discourse markers and general extenders). If you’re curious about what made me want to investigate American speakers’ use of like in conversation, have a listen to . In this episode I discuss general extenders, which take the form CONJUNCTION + PROFORM + (optional) MODIFER: and stuff (like that), and things (like that), and everything (like that), and all (that), or something (like that), or anything (like that). I discuss that examines how general extenders have become grammaticalized over time. They have followed a common pattern in grammaticalization, where linguistic elements go from being mostly propositional or ideational, to mostly interpersonal. In other words, when bits of language become more incorporated into grammatical structure, they become more subjective, more oriented to self. But my obsession with the mysteries of language, which was sparked in my terrifying early adulthood, has led me to wonder if all the grammar of human languages is oriented to self—organised around the principle of selfhood. The assumption that human beings are more conscious because they have language often remains unquestioned. But what if human beings—limited as they are by a self-producing human language—are less conscious than the rest of the material world? In this episode I propose that the more-than-human-world is organised according to principles other than selfhood. There is no division. There may be layers of perspectives, but not the division of selfhood that requires perspectives be separate from each other. Here's the . The story I read in this episode is ‘.’ Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: Subscribe on , or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!
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107 Heaven and Earth
03/27/2025
107 Heaven and Earth
The idea that human language comes from the land is not new. It’s rooted in Indigenous ontologies of language. But for those of us who haven’t grown up in an Indigenous culture and are swimming in the ideas of a Western, colonising culture, it can be very difficult to see language as anything other than a human construct. In this episode we ponder the heaven-Earth binary and wonder about what it may have to do with the differences between saying and doing. We marvel at the verbal processes in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘’ and imagine a world in which the loving Creator of human beings is the Earth itself. If the Earth is speaking, perhaps we are part of its verbiage. The story I read in this episode is ‘.’ Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: Subscribe on , or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!
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106 Prosody and peak experiences
02/27/2025
106 Prosody and peak experiences
Have you ever had a peak experience? Did you ever try to tell someone about it? Also, how good is your singing voice? If you’re a native speaker of a tonal language like Mandarin, you may have an excellent singing voice (or at least, you’re more likely to pass a test for perfect pitch, according to ). But in a language like English requires you only to grasp the difference between rising and falling tones—and these only in relation to each other—and this only for paralinguistic information (like whether someone’s being sarcastic). If human language had evolved differently, we might all be amazing singers. Or so we might glean from Steven Mithen’s book, (which I also discussed ). Mithen proposes that human language evolved from music. All that remains that’s vaguely musical in language now is prosody. But what a diminished form of music it is! In this episode we explore the quality of human language to reduce, constrict and thereby oppress, especially in relation to trying to put peak experiences into words. One of the features of a peak experience, according to Abraham Maslow in , is that ‘the whole universe is perceived as an integrated and unified whole.’ One of the reasons, I suggest, that it’s hard to express these mystical experiences is that language is structured around the principle of the self. Peak experiences refuse to be contained within the membrane of self. And yet, when you look for it, it’s there. Within your self, somehow. That’s the contradiction: the you that dissolves in a peak experience remains present by its inability communicate it. What if we think of human language as developed by the Earth itself, as part of the Earth’s agentive evolution? What if the Earth produced selfhood to experience mystery? Entertaining that possibility offers us the opportunity to explore the mysteries within us, and to keep sacred the mysteries of others. Have you ever had a peak experience? . The story I read in this episode is ‘.’ Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: Subscribe on , or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!
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105 Given, new and the selfless know-it-all
01/30/2025
105 Given, new and the selfless know-it-all
What if you could know everything, but you had to lose your self in the process? We discuss two layered structures in human languages. The first is word order, such as Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) and Subject-Object-Verb (SOV). The second is information structure, which is the system by which people in interaction navigate their interlocutor’s knowledge state, orienting what they say to make a distinction between given and new information. All human languages start from the assumption that human beings in interaction know different things, or are putting their attention to different things. In this episode we play with the idea that individual minds, with different states of knowledge, didn’t precede, but are produced by language. We pose the hypothesis that human language shapes the experience of selfhood—which therefore restricts our capacity to know everything. We also talk about ’s brilliant novella, The story of your life. But if you want to know what will happen in the future, you’re out of luck, because the future is a projection of the self, moving in a linear way through time. What are your thoughts about the ideas discussed in this episode? Because I have a self, . The story I read in this episode is ‘.’ Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: Subscribe on , or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!
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One from the archives: The Gift (Episode 24)
12/27/2024
One from the archives: The Gift (Episode 24)
If you listened to last month’s episode, you’ll know that I’ve taken a short break from podcasting to finish off the book I’m writing. I’m thrilled to tell you that the book is now finished, and I’m very happy with it. I can’t wait to tell you more. (In fact, if you sign up to my newsletter at you’ll hear more sooner!) I’m so excited to get back to podcasting monthly, which I’ll do again at the end of January 2025. In the meantime, please enjoy this episode from the Structured Visions archives. Episode 24, The Gift, originally aired on Christmas Day, 2015. I hope you’re enjoying your holiday season, and I’ll talk to you again in the New Year! .
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One from the archives: How linguistics can save the world (Episode 60)
11/28/2024
One from the archives: How linguistics can save the world (Episode 60)
I’m taking a short break from podcasting as I finish off the book I’m writing, but I’ll be back in the New Year. In the meantime, please enjoy this episode from the Structured Visions archives. Episode 60, How linguistics can save the world, originally aired on June 1, 2018. This podcast has been an amazing way for me to develop some unusual ideas about language. Recently I was wondering when I first came up with the idea that the Earth has its own language of which human language is one small but significant part. Episode 60 is one of the early recordings of me fleshing out that idea. I hope you enjoy it! Learn more about my ideas about the mysteries of language at . Sign up for the .
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104 Consciousness is more than just a little cutie pie
10/31/2024
104 Consciousness is more than just a little cutie pie
Do human beings have more or less consciousness than the rest of the living world? Is language an addiction? We’ll explore both points by examining the relationship between language and time. To participate in the world of human language, we have to reduce ourselves to little cutie pies known as ‘selves,’ who exist at a precise moment of time and who orient to their world in relation to their deictic centre. What might it look like if we could see beyond the linearity of language and thus, the linearity of time? The story I read in this episode is ‘.’ Some time sensitive things to act on now: Refreshing Grammar () will be free until 12 November 2024. You can get the unlimited access version for a very special, limited-time price here: Also check out the amazing offer on my other amazing course, The Grammar of Show Don’t Tell: Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: Subscribe on , or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!
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103 Inhabiting language
09/26/2024
103 Inhabiting language
In this episode I’ll try to convince you that using language to express the self is like a dog chasing its own tail… or a snake eating its tail, if you prefer ouroboros imagery. My perspective is that human language is the one-dimensional structure that shapes the self and thus limits access to the vast multidimensionality of consciousness. Language can’t refer to anything beyond itself (or beyond the self). The good news is, that when human language draws a circle that says ‘this is you,’ it creates a space that you can look inside. What you might find is not the you created by language, but instead the part of all the worlds that is uniquely designated by that self-circle. Transformation comes from truly inhabiting the space that language creates. On the journey of this episode we’ll be rambling through the realms of phrasal verbs, conceptual metaphor theory and the challenges of learning English as a second language. The blog post I mention in the episode is ‘’ by Elaine Hodgson. The story I read is ‘.’ Lots of things going on… Refreshing Grammar is open now (), and will be free until 12 November 2024. You can get the unlimited access version for a very special, limited-time price here: Also check out the amazing offer on my other amazing course, The Grammar of Show Don’t Tell: Come join me on 11 October at Off the Shelf Festival of words for a free, interactive online writing workshop, . Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here:
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Episode 102 How to belong
08/29/2024
Episode 102 How to belong
Have you ever felt like you don’t belong? My own red thread through the labyrinth of linguistics has been the theme of not belonging. We explore the grammatical shape belonging takes in everyday conversations about fitting in. We discuss how selves can grammatically ‘detach’ from bodies, and the transformative possibility of embodied selves. Join me in a hopeful dream where humans belong on planet Earth. We’ll explore how human language, which seems to divide us from wider consciousness, might be re-envisioned as an invitation to co-creation with the Earth itself. The story I read is ‘.’ I also mentioned my story ‘.’ Connect with me on . Refreshing Grammar begins on 16 September 2024. Sign up here: Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: Subscribe on , or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!
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Episode 101 You, me and big egos
07/27/2024
Episode 101 You, me and big egos
What’s the difference between me and you? And what’s so bad about big egos, anyway? In this episode we explore the relationship between ego and language. We move from Freud’s psychoanalytic theory to D.T. Suzuki’s explanation of the Zen Buddhist perspective. We explore Suzuki’s analysis of two poems about encounters with flowers, one by Basho and one by Tennyson. The story I read in this episode is ‘.’ The essay by D.T. Suzuki I discuss is: Suzuki, D. T. (1960). Lectures on Zen Buddhism. In E. Fromm, D. T. Suzuki and R. DeMartino (Eds.) Zen Buddhism and psychoanalysis (pp. 1-76). Grove Press. It’s available on . Connect with me and discover my courses on Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: Subscribe on , or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!
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Episode 100 Selfish wishes for social change
06/29/2024
Episode 100 Selfish wishes for social change
What are your top three wishes? Are they selfish? As it happens, your wishes may be worse than selfish—they may be toxically self-effacing. If you participate, on whatever level, in a society in which people are continually and oppressively bullied into thinking they need to be someone other than who they are, then you may be wishing for things that obliterate your own unique selfhood. In this episode we explore the linguistics of wishing—with a close look at realis and irrealis expressions—and discover what grammatical structures can reveal about a desire for a transformative society. We explore the possibility of a social structure in which individual selfhood is protected and sustained by a mutually supporting community. The book I refer to in this episode is , and you can learn more about the analysis I did there in . The stories I read in this episode are ‘’ and ‘.’ Connect with me and discover my courses on Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: Subscribe on , or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!
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Episode 99 Linguistics and astrology
05/30/2024
Episode 99 Linguistics and astrology
What new language would you most like to know? Is astrology on your list? Does astrology count as a language? Maybe the language of the stars could be classified as a pidgin, a language without native speakers. But if, as discussed in , languages are ways of organising information, then it might be more accurate to describe astrology as one of the Earth’s languages. If the Earth has a language, it’s using it to tell us: You don’t just exist as an ego, as a first-person pronoun, or a proper name You don’t just exist in relation to all the things that people have said about you...or that you say about yourself You also exist as a being who took their first breath at a precise moment in the Earth’s movement through the cosmos. Get your birth chart on . The story I read in this episode is ‘.’ Connect with me and discover my courses on Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: Subscribe on , or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!
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Episode 98 Linguistic singularities
04/25/2024
Episode 98 Linguistic singularities
Counting… that’s maths, right? Actually, it’s language. And as we’ll discover through a series of absurd tasks (like, ‘count everything you can see’), you can’t count anything until you know what ‘counts as’ a thing. Language draws the lines around what counts, and it shifts and changes as it does so. In this episode we celebrate the rich lineage of linguists and language philosophers who offer detailed, rational arguments against an objectivist paradigm of language. Language does not refer to things in the world, they explain. Language is not, as Wallis Reid (1991, p. 54) explains, a ‘mirror of nature.’ My own perspective on the objectivist paradigm resonates with these, but it’s less rational, more mystical and speculative. What if we experience the world in many dimensions, and language is the most restrictive of these dimensions, as I discussed in What if language restricts us from fully accessing the other dimensions? Here are my radical, irrational views in a nutshell: Language is a way of structuring information. Human language structures information according to a particular organising principle—the self. Human language presumes, constructs, projects a self. And we can see the process by which this happens by looking closely at the structures of grammar. The structure of grammar we’re looking at in this episode is grammatical number. We’ll discover that different languages have different grammatical number systems. Many have singular and plural. Some have singular, dual and plural. Some have singular, dual, trial and plural. Some have singular, dual, paucal and plural. One thing all these languages have in common is ‘singular’. Understanding how language structures the ‘singular’ can help us understand the structure of our own selves, and the beauty that might be found there. The story I read in this episode is ‘.’ Connect with me and discover my courses on Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: Subscribe on , or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends! Work cited: Reid, W. (1991). Verb and noun number in English. Longman.
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Episode 97 The intimacy of denial
03/28/2024
Episode 97 The intimacy of denial
What’s the weirdest thing about human language? We explore linguistic polarity and all its bizarre implications. Embedded in every human grammar is a way of turning a positive clause (I’m listening) into a negative clause (I’m not listening). Grammatical negation is one of the ways we can do denial. (‘I’m not scared of that dog,’ said the three-year-old whose body was telling an entirely different story.) What would a language without negation look like? My story ‘’ refers to an (imaginary?) alien language where everything is expressed in the affirmative. Closer to home, we could speculate about . If languages are ways of structuring information, then human languages are uniquely structured around selfhood. Negative polarity works to structure the relationship between self and other, which sometimes means denying the other, sometimes affirming them. Either way it’s a route to intimacy. If human language draws a boundary or a membrane around the distinct self, then the intimacy of negation can be a way of acknowledging and celebrating those boundaries. The other story I mention in this episode is ‘’. Connect with me and discover my courses on Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: Subscribe on , or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!
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Episode 96 The Earth’s language
02/29/2024
Episode 96 The Earth’s language
We start the episode, as always, with a couple of questions: 1. What are the differences between spoken/signed language and written/printed/digital language? 2. Where are you? There’s an answer to Question 2 that will be true for anyone who says it. ‘I am here.’ But if you write it on a piece of paper, and then leave the room, it stops being true. Does that make spoken language more genuine? Or is written language more reliable because it’s more durable, less ephemeral? (‘Put it in writing.’) We explore questions around spoken/written language in relation to what French philosopher Jacques Derrida calls the ‘metaphysics of presence’. And also in relation to . The discussion leads to a conversation about non-human language, specifically, the language of the Earth itself. Both human language and the Earth’s language are systems for structuring information. Human language is structured around the principle of selfhood, which leads us to the whimsical fancy that the separate, distinct self exists prior to the grammar that created it. The story I read in Episode 96 is ‘’. Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: Check out my course: . Subscribe on , or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!
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Episode 95 Your name without language
01/31/2024
Episode 95 Your name without language
What would your name be without language? In this episode we explore the problem of names in truth conditional semantics, with a look at Gottlob Frege’s explanation of sense and reference, Bertrand Russell’s claims about the definite descriptors and Saul Kripke’s term for proper names, which is ‘rigid designators’. What would it be like if you weren’t so rigidly designated? Truth conditional semantics is concerned with making true or false statements about the world. But what if the world and language are on two different planes of existence? What if language is a one-dimensional phenomenon attempting to delineate multidimensional experience? The most fascinating aspects of language (to me) is that it presumes and thereby constructs a self. But a one-dimensional language, it would seem, would produce very limited, superficial selves. Does inhabiting language keep us from experiencing the vastness of other dimensions? (If this question sounds familiar, you might be remembering playing with it in .) It turns out that the linearity of language offers possibilities not available in other dimensions. Language, being one-dimensional, can (and does) shape itself in constantly changing ways to create new selves. The selves form spaces from which new ideas can emerge. The story I read in Episode 95 is ‘’. Sign up for the Grammar for dreamers newsletter here: Check out my course: . Subscribe on , or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!
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Episode 94 Language and the afterlife
12/28/2023
Episode 94 Language and the afterlife
What happens when we die? Ideas about the afterlife (or the lack of an afterlife) requires theory building based on either faith or experience. What if you don’t have faith in stories about the afterlife and you’ve never experienced anything resembling a near-death experience (NDE)? In this episode I’ll guide you through a language-based exercise that might help you with your theory building about worlds beyond everyday experience. The task is to ‘experience your world’, first through the filter of language and then without the filter of language. The intention is to open up the possibility that there are at least two different (simultaneous) worlds, layered on top of each other—at least two different dimensions of experience. If we accept that, why might there not be at least one more? Or even many, many more? The other thing that we might notice is how the filter of language presumes and produces a distinction between self and other, which disappears when we remove this filter. Because the linguistic dimension restricts us to the experience of selfhood, it might be the most constraining of all dimensions. And we can speculate about the existence of a soul that survives death and lives simultaneously in many (or all) dimensions. But before we get swept away in our excitement about this transcendent soul, we might allow ourselves to enjoy a certain fascination with living within a restrictive, linguistic existence and the creativity that might emerge from this level of constraint. The story I read in Episode 94 is ‘’. Sign up for the Grammar for dreamers newsletter here: Check out my new course: . Subscribe on , or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!
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Episode 93 Where do you stop and the rest of the world begin?
11/30/2023
Episode 93 Where do you stop and the rest of the world begin?
Is there a distinction between you and the rest of the world? Where do you stop and the rest of the world begin? What’s the meaning of the word ‘now’? The gift of language is that it shapes and reshapes the experience of separateness. It’s a gift because it’s fluid. It’s more a membrane than a wall—with every utterance, there’s a new configuration of separateness. The gift of separateness is that it invites mystery. The word Carl Jung uses for this is numinous, which comes from the word numen, meaning divinity, god or spirit. Language gives you access to divinity. But it requires first that you disown the divine aspects of the self, so that you can experience the joy of reunion. The story I read in Episode 93 is ‘’. The other story I mention in ‘’. Sign up for the Grammar for dreamers newsletter here: Check out my new course: . Subscribe on , or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!
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Episode 92 The grammatical shape of emotions
10/25/2023
Episode 92 The grammatical shape of emotions
When was the last time you lost language? And… how do you feel? The one time it feels like I’m losing language is when I let myself feel what I really feel. (We’re talking about weeping, wailing, keening—the dripping-nose ugly cry.) I’ve been thinking a lot about emotions and language because I’ve just made a new course available, . It’s a love letter to my young writing self, who had no idea how to put ‘show don’t tell’ into my writing practice. In designing the course, I discovered the ways that writers grammatically shape their characters’ emotions. I look specifically at fear, envy, grief, love at first sight, sensuality and rage. In this episode we explore sorrow as a felt experience with a grammatical shape. (Ugly crying entirely optional.) The story I read in Episode 92 is ‘’. Sign up for the Grammar for dreamers newsletter here: Subscribe on , or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!
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Episode 91 The limits of language and selfhood
09/28/2023
Episode 91 The limits of language and selfhood
Linguistic interaction involves much more than simply sharing information. It requires shaping the information so that it will fit in to a pre-existing structure. This is where we might run into problems if we ever get the chance to chat with intelligent extra-terrestrial beings. To what extent can we communicate if there is no shared common ground? As it happens, we already live on a planet with intelligent non-human life, a world with its own language and even, , its own internet. If we were courageous enough to live at the limits of human selfhood and human language maybe we’d be able to communicate with that world. The story I read in Episode 91 is ‘’. Check out for information about , and . Sign up for the Grammar for dreamers newsletter here: Subscribe on , or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!
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Episode 90 Language, intimacy and narcissism
08/31/2023
Episode 90 Language, intimacy and narcissism
What’s the worst relationship you’ve ever been in? What’s the difference between this and that? There are at least three ways of understanding that second question, each of which reveals a different level of abstraction: metalinguistic, anaphoric and exophoric. Our exploration of this and that (proximal and distal demonstratives, that is) reveals the gift, the risk and the challenge of human language. The gift: Language creates selfhood, and with selfhood comes intimacy. The risk: Language can also create an obsession with the self, disavowal of the other, narcissism. The challenge: To recognise that our selfhood is a gift of our evolving human language, which is a gift of the evolving Earth. With language we’re offered the opportunity to recognise the limitations of the self, and to be open to the mystery of the other. The translation of the quote from Buddhist sutras about the finger pointing at the moon is from: Ho, Chien-Hsing (2008). The finger pointing toward the moon: a philosophical analysis of the Chinese Buddhist thought of reference. Journal of Chinese Philosophy 35 (1):159-177. Check out for information about , and . Sign up for the Grammar for dreamers newsletter here:
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Episode 89 Grammar as a gateway to mystery
07/27/2023
Episode 89 Grammar as a gateway to mystery
‘Dreams, it turns out, are like clauses. They can be configured and reconfigured in an infinite number of ways. They are quanta of information about what could be transformed in the world, whether it’s your own world or a bigger social world, or both.’ —from my new book, , p. 127 Can something be both practical and dreamy? Mysteries involve holding two seemingly incompatible our irreconcilable truths. The thrill of a genuine mystery is when it cracks you open to something new. Can grammar be a gateway to mystery? We explore this question by thinking about out of body experiences. And what we’re having for breakfast tomorrow. The mystery of being human is that we exist grammatically, which means we constantly shift our point of reference outside of our own body. How can the self exist outside the body? How can experience exist outside of the world? This is the mystery: grammar is creative—and what it creates is space from which new ideas can emerge. The story I read in this episode is ‘’, and it’s available at . Check out my new website, , for information about Refreshing Grammar, the book, and Refreshing Grammar, the course. Subscribe on , or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!
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Episode 88 Grammar shame
06/29/2023
Episode 88 Grammar shame
What’s your most mortifying experience of grammar shaming? Mine involved a misplaced apostrophe in an important email, and I still burn with shame to think of it. Grammar for many has a spectrum of negative associations, which ranges from the imposter syndrome you might get when you realise you can’t tell a preposition from a conjunction to more serious and oppressive forms of linguistic prejudice. An example of the latter can be found in Geneva Smitherman’s account of her childhood experiences in her book Talkin That Talk. After her family moved from rural Tennessee to Detroit, Smitherman’s teachers decided that the way she spoke indicated a lack of intelligence and put her back a year in school. Later she was placed in speech therapy because the educators didn’t recognise her linguistic variety, African-American Vernacular English, as a legitimate form of English. Ann Phoenix’s work describes similar racism encountered by Afro-Caribbean children in British schools, who spoke perfectly grammatically in a variety that was not White enough for their teachers and peers. As I’ve written, ‘To be grammar shamed is to be told there’s something fundamentally wrong with the way you’ve expressed yourself. The implication is often that there’s something wrong with you: you’re not smart enough, you’re not well educated enough, you’re not savvy enough, you’re not “in the know,” you don’t have the right kind of cultural capital and/or you shouldn’t be taking up space on whatever platform you’re using.’ (Clark, 2023, pp. 5-6) The story I read in this episode, ‘’, hints at a deeper grammar, a welcoming grammar, one that is not shamed. Clues about such a grammar can be found through an exploration of what babies know about the grammar of the language that surrounds them, before they’ve even begun to speak themselves. In my forthcoming book, , I offer ways to tap into what you’ve known about grammar since you were a little cutie pie. Before you even knew you knew it. Check out my new website, , for information about Refreshing Grammar, the book, and Refreshing Grammar, the course. Prepare to be refreshed! Subscribe on , or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends! Works I discuss in the podcast Clark, J. (2023). Refreshing grammar: an easy-going guide for teachers, writers and other creative people. GFD. Naigles, L. R. (2002). Form is easy, meaning is hard: resolving a paradox in early child language. Cognition, 86(2), 157–199. Phoenix, A. (2009). De-colonising practices: negotiating narratives from racialised and gendered experiences of education. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 12(1), 101–114. Smitherman, G. (2000). Talkin that talk: language, culture, and education in African America. Routledge.
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Episode 87 What if you’re an alien?
05/25/2023
Episode 87 What if you’re an alien?
If you were told, definitively, that you were an alien, would it relieve a burden? Would it explain, or affirm, a few things? Would you look to the sky and long for home? If you’ve ever felt like an alien, then the story I published recently on is dedicated to you. According to ‘’, it’s not you who’s the alien. It’s human language. The story positions human language as distinct from ‘Earth’s own linguistic structures.’ The idea here is that human language is one set of structures, which is separate from the material world. The material world is another set of structures, physical, chemical, biological, etc. All these structures are forms of language. The Earth is excited (or so the story goes) to welcome the new species. It’s curious about the new ideas that might emerge from the hermetically sealed selves that human language shapes. In this episode I discuss these ideas in relation to my book, . We’re looking at Chapter 8, ‘Openings,’ which is about social transformation through language and embodied creativity. It’s also about fursuiting. . Connect with me, sign up to my newsletter and learn some exciting things about the Refreshing Grammar course here: Follow me on Instagram , Facebook or Twitter Subscribe on , or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!
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Episode 86 Feelings are, like, inside things
04/26/2023
Episode 86 Feelings are, like, inside things
When you were a kid, was there something that inspired wonder in you? Is there anything that has inspired wonder for you more recently? For me as a child it was something I read in a picture book: ‘Colours are outside things. Feelings are inside things.’ As an adult it was the idea that language evolves to produce forms that are more subjective, more personal, more enveloping. The word ‘like’ is a great example of that. The evolution of grammar is a move toward more personhood—which is a way of creating the experience of a self, with an inside and an outside. Maybe the self is one expression of the Earth’s evolution, and language—specifically grammar—is the mechanism by which the self comes into being. The story I read in this episode is ‘’, and it’s available on . Connect with me (and sign up to my newsletter) here: Follow me on Instagram , Facebook or Twitter Subscribe on , or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!
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Episode 85 How spooky is language?
03/29/2023
Episode 85 How spooky is language?
What makes Ouija boards spooky? Is it language? After all, it’s the letters of the alphabet that take up the most space on these devices, and they’re just waiting for something to be spelled out. Who’s doing the spelling? And what kind of spells are they, after all? In this episode we’ll be exploring the occult etymologies of words like ‘spell’ and ‘grammar’. We also examine the spookiness of receiving messages that come without the coordinates of selfhood. As Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhou writes, ‘The point of a fish trap is the fish. The point of the word is the idea. Once you’ve got the idea, you can forget the word.’ What if language is a net that shapes itself around an idea to bring it into a different plane of existence? In this episode I share my own spooky idea: that human language is the Earth’s way of creating nets of selfhood from which new ideas emerge. The story I read is ‘’, and it’s available on . Connect with me (and sign up to my newsletter) here: Follow me on Instagram , Facebook or Twitter Subscribe on , or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!
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