English at Leeds Trinity Podcast

Hannah came up with the concept for this episode, which is all about made-up words in literature. We start by reading Lewis Carroll’s famous poem, ‘Jabberwocky’; then look at a little-known passage from Shakespeare where the characters all deliberately speak meaningless words. We think a bit about how writers such as Frank Herbert, Roald Dahl and J. K. Rowling have invented words to enrich their fictional worlds – and also about names of characters in children’s TV programmes. We end by all having a go at making up new words ourselves and speculating about how they could be used. It’s wobious!   

In this episode Richard is joined by students Hannah, Ben, Humaira, Saarah and Imi, who each choose one word beginning with the letter I for us to talk about. There is plenty of variety – from ‘Istanbul’ to ‘ideology’ via ‘if’ and ‘ick’ - and on the way we think about the difference between ‘incredulous’ and ‘incredible’; and also what ‘identity’ means. We end by listening to a student reading of the famous poem ‘I am’ by John Clare.    

We’re all interested in where English words came from and how the language evolved. But how can we do some research of our own into this?  In this episode Richard, Ben and Hannah are joined by Dr Will Standing, who talks us through some of the digital resources which are freely available for researching the history of a language, including Google Ngrams, British National Corpus, and the EMMA corpus (which Will helped to develop). On the way we learn what the word ‘multiloquent’ means, and what an 'it-cleft' construction is, and Will and Ben share something about their historical-linguistic tattoos.  

An episode focussed on everyone’s favourite accent. Richard and Ben are joined by proud Geordies Lucy and Rod, who share their love of stottie cakes, pease pudding, and the wonders of the word ‘canny’, and give us some insights into the distinctive features of Geordie pronunciation. We also think about Geordie celebrities and the modern phenomenon of ‘Geordie stylisation’, and consider how much this version of English is changing. Howay!

In this episode, recorded in 2024, Richard is joined by Ben, Hannah, Imi and Basil to compare notes on Shakespeare, and how we can access Shakespeare through the 1623 First Folio, the all-important book in which all Shakespeare’s plays were first printed together. We share our experiences of studying Shakespeare, and see how many of Shakespeare’s plays we can list; and we celebrate the new free online resources that give much more access to the pages of the First Folio text than we could ever get by looking at a museum copy behind glass. And on the way we discuss whether Shakespeare scholarship means Imi should now change her name . . . 

This is a special episode recorded with an audience of Leeds Trinity staff and students as part of our English Week in 2023. Martyn Bedford, who is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity, talks about his career as a novelist and answers questions from the audience about two memorable extracts from his novels (read by Lana and Motiba): the 'Birdmen' scene from The Island of Lost Souls (2006) and the tightrope walk scene from Twenty Questions for Gloria (2016).

Continuing our exploration of the languages of Eurovision, Richard Yvonne and Linda celebrate the victory of Switzerland in Eurovision 2024 by hearing more from Linda about the four official languages of Switzerland and how they are used. Richard and Yvonne compare notes on some of the other interesting languages that featured alongside English in the contest; Yvonne and Linda take a quiz on ‘the poetry of Eurovision’; and we swap ideas on what the United Kingdom should do in order to get a better result next time.   

English at Leeds Trinity is who we are, but we are always interested in other languages beside English. In this episode Richard, Yvonne, Eloise and Maia celebrate the multilingualism of the Eurovision song contest, with a particular focus on two other languages beginning with E. We hear from Maia about her first language, Eesti Keel (Estonian); and from Yvonne about hers, Español (Spanish). We also revisit the literary question that got so much attention at Eurovision 2023: ‘Who the hell is Edgar?’ The answer was Edgar Allen Poe, the American author – and we find time to read his poem ‘Eldorado’.  Note: we recorded this episode not long after Eurovision 2023. We will be following it up with another episode as soon as we can after Eurovision 2024.  

Join Richard, Eloise and Ben in this episode for an exploration of the ever-popular topic of dialect. We test Eloise on her knowledge of Salford dialect; revisit the question of whether there is more than one way to pronounce the word ‘apricot’; examine what Yorkshire dialect looked like in 1683; and see if we can guess the meaning of some Leeds dialect words from 1862.  Note: we originally recorded this episode in 2023, so keep listening to the end for an update on what we discovered when we revisited the OED in 2024.