I'm a young fugitive and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language.

We talk about writing, history, roles, and other cool stuff.

And we are going to talk about other cool stuff today because I have with me Lynn Murphy,

Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sussex in England, author of one of my favorite

books of all time, The Protegal Tongue, which is about the differences between American and

British English.

And today we're going to talk about that, but also about Wordal.

Welcome Lynn.

Thanks.

I'm glad to be here.

Yes, I am glad to have you here.

So to give listeners a little bit of background, you and I were both guests on Editor Mark

Allen's annual Word of the Year, like a Zoom chat thing.

And Wordal came up.

Do you remember why we were talking about Wordal in the first place?

Well, we must have been talking about it because it was the topic of many word of the year

conversation.

So it was Cambridge Dictionaries.

Word of the Year was Homer because it was a Wordal word that had been looked up a lot

by people who were frustrated by being a Wordal word.

But all of the editors of all of the dictionaries were there.

We're talking about the Wordal effect in their dictionary lookups.

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