Grammar for Dreamers

Do you, like me, find words impossible? Have you ever had writer’s block? And are you free this Friday evening? You are very welcome to join me for my free online workshop The impossibility of words: a linguist’s cure for writer’s block with Off the Shelf Festival Of Words
https://offtheshelf.org.uk/event/the-impossibility-of-words-a-linguists-cure-for-writers-block/

A child trades his family’s only food source for a handful of seeds. The seeds grow into a language that reaches a world in the sky.

New flash fiction on my blog!

Beanstalk It was a drunken conversation with my science fiction reading group that got me wondering about what the A in AI really stood for. When I got home I typed a tipsy question into my app. We are alien…

Episode 103 of Structured Visions, ‘Inhabiting language’ is out now! Join me on a ramble through phrasal verbs, conceptual metaphor theory, ESL and the idea that human language is a one-dimensional structure that shapes the self and limits consciousness.

Episode 103 Inhabiting language Photo by Erlend Ekseth In this episode I’ll try to convince you that using language to express the self is like a dog chasing its own tail… or a snake eating its tail, if you prefer ouroboros image…

If you're a , or other who would like to feel confident about the nuts and bolts of language, Refreshing Grammar is for you.

I've created this six-week course to help you access your 'linguistic intuition', which is what you already know about grammar without knowing how you know it.

Come join us!

https://jodieclark.com/refreshingcourse

New on my blog!

https://grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com/2024/09/21/the-museum-of-language/

Have you ever felt like you don’t belong? My own red thread through the labyrinth of linguistics has been the theme of not belonging. Episode 102 of Structured Visions, How to belong, is now available!

Episode 102 How to belong Photo by Tim Mossholder Have you ever felt like you don’t belong? My own red thread through the labyrinth of linguistics has been the theme of not belonging. We explore the grammatical shape belong…

New on my blog!

https://grammarfordreamers.com/2024/08/24/summers-with-mad-gran/

New on my Grammar for Dreamers blog!



https://grammarfordreamers.com/2024/08/20/the-last-stage-of-the-earths-evolution/

New on my Grammar for Dreamers blog!

https://grammarfordreamers.com/2024/07/30/coming-of-age/

Episode 101 of Structured Visions, ‘Me, you and big egos,’ is now available!

https://structuredvisions.wordpress.com/2024/07/27/episode-101-you-me-and-big-egos/

New inspired on my blog!

https://grammarfordreamers.com/2024/07/20/ego-angels/

I’ve just published the 100th episode of Structured Visions! Listen to ‘Selfish wishes for social change’ wherever you get podcasts.

Episode 100 Selfish wishes for social change Photo by Saad Chaudhry What are your top three wishes? Are they selfish? As it happens, your wishes may be worse than selfish—they may be toxically self-effacing. If you participate, on whatever le…

Inside they believe can be found one last mystery, the wish before the wishing utterance, the desire of language itself.

New inspired on my blog!

Ala’s lamp Image in the public domain, accessed from The Met The first human language was found in a cave in sub-Saharan Africa. Ala, having stubbed her toe on something hard, reached down to find a vessel hi…

‘As you know, the linguistic field is more localised and thus more subtle than other fields—electromagnetic, gravitational, quantum, etc.—and much time was wasted in convincing the scientific community that it even existed.’

I’ve just published a new piece on my Grammar for Dreamers blog!

It explores the of and the possibilities of moving ‘Beyond desire.’

Beyond desire Photo by Markus Spiske ‘Welcome to the History of Scientific Progress. It is my hope that as we explore the foundations of our everyday technologies, they will become a little less commonplace, a l…

What if the linguistic systems on PA-99-N2 were somehow connected to ours on Earth? An entanglement, of sorts.

New on my blog!

Entanglement Image by Dario Brönnimann It came to me in the shower. What if the linguistic systems on PA-99-N2 were somehow connected to ours on Earth? An entanglement, of sorts. The models were showing an exci…

‘If astrology’s a language,’ she would later demand, ‘who are its native speakers? It’s a pidgin, at best.’

(A linguist finds answers in the stars in my brand new piece, ‘Pidgin.’)

Pidgin Image by Nastya Dulhiier ‘The Language of the Stars?’ Mary had scoffed. She was convinced Carl scanned bookshops expressly to find the most infuriating titles. Stella Johnson translates the languag…

Understanding how language structures the ‘singular’ can help us understand the structure of our own selves, and the beauty that might be found there.

Episode 98 of StructuredVisions, ‘Linguistic singularities,’ is now available!

Episode 98 Linguistic singularities Photo by Chrissy Jarvis Counting… that’s maths, right? Actually, it’s language. And as we’ll discover through a series of absurd tasks (like, ‘count everything you can see’), you can’t count anythi…

What is it about superlatives? It’s never enough to be better than two. When there’s three, there’s a multitude. Where there’s a multitude, there’s the one. (The best, the most, the greatest.)

(New -inspired on my Grammar for Dreamers blog! Curious about what mirrors, magic or otherwise, can teach us about language? Tune in to Episode 98 of Structured Visions, which will be out this week.)

Fairest Photo by Sarah Penney Mirror, mirror on the wall… Not this again. Who’s the fairest… Let me interrupt. Fair is not a gradable adjective. Something’s either fair or not fair. It’s not a sliding sca…