#episode 103

[dailyimodna]

[lingthusiasm]

103: A hand-y guide to gesture

Gestures: every known language has them, and there's a growing body of research on how they fit into communication. But academic literature can be hard to dig into on your own. So Lauren has spent the past 5 years diving into the gesture literature and boiling it down into a tight 147 page book.

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about Lauren's new book, Gesture: A Slim Guide from Oxford University Press. Is it a general audience book? An academic book? A bit of both. (Please enjoy our highlights version in this episode, a slim guide to the Slim Guide, if you will.) We talk about the wacky hijinks gesture researchers have gotten up to with the aim of preventing people from gesturing without tipping them off that the study is about gesture, including a tricked-out "coloured garden relax chair" that makes people "um" more, as well as crosslinguistic gestural connections between signed and spoken languages, and how Gretchen's gestures in English have been changing after a year of ASL classes. Plus, a few behind-the-scenes moments: Lauren putting a line drawing of her very first gesture study on the cover, and how the emoji connection from Because Internet made its way into Gesture (and also into the emoji on your phone right now).

There were also many other gesture stories that we couldn't fit in this episode, so keep an eye out for Lauren doing guest interviews on other podcasts! We'll add them to the crossovers page and the Lingthusiasm hosts elsewhere playlist as they come up. And if there are any other shows you'd like to hear a gesture episode on, feel free to tell them to chat to Lauren!

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

We've made a special jazzed-up version of the Lingthusiasm logo to put on stickers, featuring fun little drawings from the past 8.5 years of enthusiasm about linguistics by our artist Lucy Maddox. There's a leaping Gavagai rabbit, bouba and kiki shapes, and more...see how many items you can recognize!

This sticker (or possibly a subtle variation...stay tuned for an all-patron vote!) will go out to everyone who's a patron at the Lingthusiast level or higher as of July 1st, 2025.

We're also hoping that this sticker special offer encourages people to join and stick around as we need to do an inflation-related price increase at the Lingthusiast level. As we mentioned on the last bonus episode, our coffee hasn't cost us five bucks in a while now, and we need to keep paying the team who enables us to keep making the show amid our other linguistics prof-ing and writing jobs. In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about linguist celebrities! We talk about start with the historically famous Brothers Grimm and quickly move onto modern people of varying levels of fame, including a curiously large number of linguistics figure skaters. We also talk about a few people who are famous within linguistics, including a recent memoir by Noam Chomsky's assistant Bev Stohl about what it was like keeping him fueled with coffee. And finally, we reflect on running into authors of papers we've read at conferences, when people started recognizing us sometimes, and our tips and scripts for navigating celebrity encounters from both sides.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 90+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

'Gesture: A Slim Guide' by Lauren Gawne

Lingthusiasm episode 'Emoji are Gesture Because Internet'

Lingthusiasm episode 'Villages, gifs, and children: Researching signed languages in real-world contexts with Lynn Hou'

Lingthusiasm episode 'Bringing stories to life in Auslan - Interview with Gabrielle Hodge'

'Gesture, Speech, and Lexical Access: The Role of Lexical Movements in Speech Production' by Rauscher et al.

'Effects of Visual Accessibility and Hand Restraint on Fluency of Gesticulator and Effectiveness of Message' by Karen P. Lickiss and A. Rodney Wellens

'Effects of relative immobilization on the speaker's nonverbal behavior and on the dialogue imagery level' by Rimé et al.

'The effects of elimination of hand gestures and of verbal codability on speech performance' by J. A. Graham and S. Heywood

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles. This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

[tsukikonikushimi]

Page 88 - Viktor & Jayce (Boys of Progress)

MASTERLIST

VIKTOR AND JAYCE ARE AMONG THE characters who changed the most, both physically and psychologically, over the span of Arcane. They start off as close colleagues and friends, working together in a Piltover lab. They end up making radically different choices and eventually drift into radically different directions with radically different end games. Jayce and Viktor represent two sides of the same coin, with shifting views on power and the use of hextech. "When Christian told us about Viktor and Jayce, he used Apple as a comparison," Fortiche's Pascal Charrue said. "You had Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Wozniak would be Viktor: He's the true genius who creates Apple, whereas Steve Jobs is its public face, like Jayce is the public face of hextech."

The writing team greatly benefited from the input of Amanda Overton, who not only is an avid gamer (though not so much League of Legends as Teamfight Tactics, "just to kind of familiarize myself more with the characters and the fans," she said) but had studied molecular biology and been a geneticist in a previous life. "I was able to draw on my science background to inform Viktor and Jayce, and their relationship and understanding," Overton said. "One of the lines Jayce says to Ambessa is that failure is ninety-seven percent of science or something, I was like, 'Yeah, I wrote that because thate what science is: No one understands that science is ninety-seven percent failure.'"

Title courtesy of Jinx:

Boys of Progress VIKTOR & JAYCE

THIS PAGE Concept art for Jayce and Viktor

ABOVE AND BELOW Viktor and Jayce activate the Hexite Crystal in Episode 103

THIS PAGE, BACKGROUND Notes investigating the runes from Jayce and Viktor's notebooks

With a "few" of Jinx doodles: "Math-y" "Magic-y" "it's all about these runes"

Pattern behind them:

The plants (with a little drawing from Jinx)

This is all for today! I'm gonna be absent for at least (maybe) 2 days so no new posts tomorrow, probably during the weekend I'm gonna post one of the many ask in my inbox while avoiding the death threats. Have a nice end of the week and see you in a couple of days!

Thank you anon for the ask! If you wanna be added to the anon emoji list on the timeline feel free to add one next time you send a request!

[zonaenthusiast]

You know what? I'm about to say it: I don't care that you broke your elbow we have two of the hottest One Piece characters in episode 103, argue with the wall.

[danielr4]

WHEN DID THIS WOMAN UNBOTTON HER JACKET???

ALSO THIS SCENE SCARES THE DAYLIGHTS OUT OF ME

[nevermorewebtoonnews]

Academy Students Show Blatant Disregard for Fire Safety

Reporters were shocked and dismayed today as they discovered an assembly of Academy students congregating in the abandoned observatory of the Forbidden Wing - particularly due to the makeshift fort they had assembled, and the profound fire hazard it represented.

The gathered students had created an admittedly impressive tent, supported by a lamppost and crafted from blankets, sheets, and curtains made primarily from cotton and linen. Inside, reporters found such objects as an oil lamp, a loose cigarette, an assortment of cushions and pillows, and several bottles of alcohol.

While the remarkably flammable construction had yet to catch alight, the threat alone was more than enough to cause alarm, as firefighters would not be able to get into that wing of the school, given that it was, of course, forbidden.

When reporters questioned if she was concerned about the risk of a blaze, student participant Eulalie tilted her head and replied, "Huh! Should I be?"

“Why d’you think I’m smoking over here on the balcony?” contributed another participating student, Pluto. “We’re not stupid, y’know.”

"I wish I could burn this place to the ground," said ringleader Lenore. “I’ve had success with that before, actually.” When asked to elaborate, she smiled sheepishly and waved at our reporters before finding a bird to shout at out the window.

When asked to comment about the situation, school deans Merry and Mourn flipped through a large book. “Well, there’s no rules against it,” Mourn admitted, his tone observed to be somewhat sour.

The reporters asked the deans to clarify that there were in fact no rules about fire in the school, to which they briefly glanced at each other and shrugged. The deans then asked what the reporters were doing in the Forbidden Wing of the school in the first place; our reporters declined to comment.

[syvellsworld]

[wbg-quotes]

And now there's a cowboy in the time stream somewhere doing whatever he wants, and he wants to radically alter our lives to save another cowboy.