Podcasts I’ve been enjoying

I love these podcasts. Excellent.

• Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing 4-5 min
• NPR: Sunday Puzzle 7-9 min
• NPR: Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! 47-49 min
• The Word Nerds 35-40 min
• Project Runway: Tim Gunn 19-35 min

I’m still trying these out.

• Biology 2110: Lectures on Anatomy and Physiology 50 min
• FOXCAST: House 10-15 min
• FOXCAST: Prison Break 25-38 min
• LSAT Logic in Everyday Life 6-10 min
• Story Talk 4-9 min

I suspect these will be useful at some point.

• 50 Walks of a Lifetime 15-25 min
• Rick Steves’ Audio Tours 45-50 min

Do you have any podcasts that you’d recommend? My one-way commute lasts about 50 minutes to 1 hr 20 minutes in general. Many days, I’ll listen to a Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me or a Word Nerds podcast, with a couple of the shorter ones thrown in. Since I’ve only recently started doing this, I’ve had a huge backlog to listen to, but frankly, I am going to need about 2-3 more weekly updating podcasts to round out my listening or I’ll run out. I’m still looking into books, but audiobooks are so damn expensive that it may not be worth it.

The ones I can download from the library only play on MS devices, so I tried to put one on one of my work devices, only to find that there isn’t enough on-board memory, so I’d have to buy an SD card (or use the one for my camera), which could be ok, if it weren’t for the fact that the particular device I have does not have a standard headphone jack, which means I’d have to buy some sort of an adapter (ETA: other than the headphone jack-to-tape deck adapter I already have for the iPod Nano) to listen to it in the car. Which all translates to more trouble than it is worth.

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This morning, on the Word Nerds podcast, they discussed the various ways people equivocate: lingually (with words), paralingually (with non-word vocalizations), and non-verbally (without words, duh). I realized as they were covering both what equivocating (or prevaricating) is meant to do and how people do them, that I’d been conditioned by my mother to dislike paralingual (e.g. sighing) & non-verbal (e.g. shrugging) forms of equivocation but to engage ridiculously in the lingual forms, always diluting my statements with phrases like, “sort of”, “somewhat”, “maybe”, “perhaps”.

They also discussed the use of the active versus passive voice as applied to equivocation. I found it interesting that when I speak to people about things that could potentially be perceived as negative, I use a passive voice, (e.g. “There is a mistake in the code,” rather than “You’ve made a mistake in the code.”) fairly consistently, where as when I want to say something positive, I make it a habit to use the active voice (e.g. “You have great taste in clothes,” rather than, “That is a great shirt.”)

I don’t have a concluding thesis or anything. I’m still working out how this plays into my communication with others.