116: Cross-cultural communication (in space!)

Sometimes, you're talking with someone and you just seem to click. Other times, you just can't seem to get comfortable: they're standing too close or too far away for comfort, making too much or too little eye contact, touching or not touching you in a way that just doesn't quite feel right. But where do our senses of what feels comfortable in a conversation come from, and how can they be so different from each other? In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about understanding aliens, fantastical creatures, and perhaps the trickiest group of all, other human cultures. We talk about a science fiction book called Hellspark by Janet Kagan (which was recommended by a listener!) which is a murder mystery set on a planet of cross-cultural communication gone wrong, and which sent us on a whole deep dive into the world of proxemics, aka the linguistics of personal space. We also talk about how these early roots of cross-cultural communication studies have shifted in modern-day linguistic anthropology, and compare several newer speculative fiction books about alternative structures for human societies (plus aliens and/or dragons), including What We Are Seeking by Cameron Reed and To Shape A Dragon's Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose. Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice: Read the transcript here: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/817301296196501504/transcript-episode-116-cross-cultural Announcements: Check our our updated topics page! It's a great resource if you're not sure what episode to listen to next or what to recommend to someone. We've added some new topics that let you browse, for example, which episodes analyze the linguistic elements of all the science fiction and fantasy that we've been reading! And we've kept the ability to browse episodes by linguistic structural features, which is perfect for when you're looking for an episode to pair with a topic you're teaching or studying. Go to https://lingthusiasm.com/topics In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about idioms! We talk about some of our favourite idioms, the interplay between idioms and metaphors, why linguists are so excited about breaking idioms by changing one word slightly, and in particular why "the shit hit the fan" was responsible for multi-hour-long discussions that Gretchen participated in during grad school. (Swear warning, because there's really not another idiom that uh, hits the fan in the same way.) Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 110+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds: https://www.patreon.com/posts/156961605 For links to things mentioned in this episode: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/817300905885089792/lingthusiasm-episode-116-cross-cultural