Speechification

Blimey. This is our 300th post. That feels like a little milestone to me. And this is probably an appropriate programme. In many way’s it’s exactly what you’d expect; Stephen Fry is twinkly, arch and clever, various linguistic and maritime experts are interesting and scholarly about the naval and oceanic metaphors that soak the English language. It’s good stuff, but it’s a little predictable. And then, from nowhere, you get Mrs Constantinou, the owner of a Greek removals business, explaining the origins of the word metaphor and it becomes the best radio you’ve listened to for ages. Hurrah. MP3 here.

Here’s a lovely Radio 3 programme by American satirist Joe Queenan that does a simple and special thing: it draws our attention to the strangeness and difficulty of our language and of the concepts we use it to describe. I thought I knew what cunning was but I pretty quickly learnt that it’s a fantastically tricky and contingent word, woven into the history of human misconduct in a really subtle way: Italian journalist Beppe Severgnini says in the programme that “cunning is a pathology of intelligence”. Good stuff (MP3).

A Radio 4 staple, Word of Mouth delves into two of my favourite subjects: taboo words and aphasia (MP3). Both illuminate the inner workings of the mind, the first by overuse, the latter by exclusion. There’s also a stack of malapropisms even I hadn’t heard, and the excruciatingly awful Dr Word. Sorry about that. Words good though, when unbound by snobbery.

I think The Forum is the best programme on the World Service at the moment. A weekly grown-up debate with brainy guests, in this case musicians Amit Chowdhury, social entrepreneur Mdidi Muenelli and psychologist Stephen Pinker (spellings a bit uncertain there, I can’t find anything about the show on the site—the archive is a couple of weeks out of date). It’s like a kind of topical In Our Time. This one (MP3), which went out on 15 June, is presented by scientist (and baroness) Susan Greenfield. While you’re at it, check out the latest edition, which features Mark Mazower, historian of the Nazis, Jan Zalasiewicz, Geologist and Uzbek novelist Hamid Ismailov. The show’s very complete archive is here.

If The Verb went out on Radio 4 there’d be complaints—Feedback would be busy for weeks. It’s one of those programmes that exposes Radio 4 as sort of uptight. Which is funny when you think that it actually goes out on dark brown corduroy Radio 3… Just goes to show (MP3).

Presented by Natasha Mitchell, All In The Mind is ABC Radio National’s weekly psychology programme (or, “the mind, brain and behaviour”), and is always worth a listen. This particular episode featured an interview with Jonah Lehrer, who wrote last year’s popular science bestseller Proust was a Neuroscientist. The book essentially argues that certain artists and writers anticipated some of the great discoveries about the mind and brain that took place in the early 20th century. Lehrer - something of an over-achiever himself, and editor-at-large for SEED magazine - looks at the work of Walt Whitman, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Auguste Escoffier, Gertrude Stein, and Paul Cezanne, and what, with a bit of imagination, they might have foretold about perception, representation, memory and the nature of the psyche. It’s a fascinating discussion.

(And though Proust was in no way a neuroscientist, of course, his implicit understanding of the power of smell and taste recalls the 2007 Boyer Lectures we blogged about here, featuring Prof. Graeme Clark’s work on contemporary understanding of the senses. Oh, and All In The Mind also has its own blog, where Mitchell wrote about this episode.)

All In The Mind: Proust was a Neuroscientist (mp3)

Here’s some proper learning from the grown-ups over at Radio 3. Tom Paulin, a public intellectual on an almost Eighteenth Century model and a William Blake expert, has written a four-part essay about Blake’s language for the Beeb’s aforementioned Blake-a-thon.

I’m going to grab all four of these because Radio 3’s archiving policy is patchy at best. So as not to swamp the podcast with the old fruitcake (sorry), I’ll add parts two, three and four to this entry. So, remember to come back here if you’d like to hear them all (MP3s: part one, part two, part three, part four). From the  British Library’s collection, here’s a really lovely Shockwave facsimile of one of his notebooks and here’s a page about The Tyger.