Linguists Are Nihilists | Interview: Colin Gorrie

There’s a certain ache in the bones—no, more like pain behind the eyes brought on by fatigue with the world—that overtakes a man when he’s gone too long without talking about etymology. We here at The Remnant have been feeling that deeply, and we know you have too. That’s why Jonah Goldberg is sitting down with fellow word nerd Colin Gorrie to talk about everything he’s ever wanted to know about language. Jonah and Colin cover Old English dialects, prescriptive vs. descriptive, the world’s biggest language, Latinization, early dictionaries, class, accents, linguistic hygiene, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, metaphors, the euphemism treadmill, borrowed words, Shakespearean coinages, Australian English, gender in language, Basque, and the hardest European language to learn. Show Notes: The Remnant is a production of ⁠The Dispatch⁠, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a nonpartisan perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including the Saturday Ruminant, audio versions of all our articles and newsletters, and Jonah’s twice-weekly G-File—⁠click here⁠. Instructions on how to set up your members-only feed can be found here, and if you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member ⁠by clicking here⁠. Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief and co-founder of The Dispatch, based in Washington, D.C. Prior to that, enormous lizards roamed the Earth. More immediately prior to that, Jonah spent two decades at National Review, where he was a senior editor, among other things. He is also a bestselling author, longtime columnist for the Los Angeles Times, commentator for CNN, and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. When he is not writing the G-File or hosting The Remnant podcast, he finds real joy in family time, attending to his dogs and cat, and blaming Steve Hayes for various things. The podcast transcription below was generated using artificial intelligence and may include occasional errors or misspellings. Music 0:13 [groaning] Ladies and gentlemen, Music 0:16 could I please have your attention? Can you dig it? Jonah Goldberg 0:24 [cheering] Greetings, dear listeners. This is Jonah Goldberg, host of the Remnant Podcast, brought to you by the Dispatch and Dispatch Media. Extremely excited about today's guest, although it's funny, um, we got this sort of on the calendar a long time ago, and I've been crazy working on my own book and all this other stuff going on in my life with the house and whatever. And Alex, my RA, texts saying, "Hey, any specific you wanna talk about with the etymology guy?" And I read it as entomologist, Jonah Goldberg 0:59 and I was, like, thinking, okay, well, I would love to have a bug guy. So, and I started thinking about it, and then it turned out I just, uh, my dyslexia or something kicked in, and 'cause I had forgotten that, that we had gotten Colin Gory on the calendar, and I'm very excited about that. Colin Gory is a-- joins a long list of linguist-- uh, linguists on here. We've had John McWhorter on a couple times. We've had Steven Pinker, Joshua Katz, and then some other psycholo-- some other folks who are more on the psychology side than the linguistic side, but there's a lot of overlap there, which I'm kinda fascinated by. Uh, Colin has a fantastic Substack that I've been going through called the Dead Language Society Substack. He's working on a book, book-length history of the English language. He's a linguist who claims to be on a mission to bring linguistics out of the ivory tower. He's a serial language learner. We're gonna ask him how many languages he's, he actually knows or claims to know. Colin received his PhD in linguistics from the University of Arizona in 2014, where his studies focused on linguistic typology, methodological foundations of linguistic theory, and Celtic languages. Colin, welcome to The Remnant. Interactive transcripts are available to Premium members. Join to follow along with the audio. Join Now More We Think You’d Like