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English at Leeds Trinity Podcast

English at Leeds Trinity Podcast

Written by: Richard Storer
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About this listen

The aim of this podcast is to capture as many different ways of doing English as possible. We talk about things that we're doing, things that we find interesting, things that we've read, things that we’ve written, things that we like, things that we've learned, things that we've researched. English is our starting point, but we bring in other languages we know about, as many as we can, as often as possible. And we never go too long without dipping into the OED to find out more about our words and their origins.

English at Leeds Trinity is made by staff and students studying English in the School of Digital and Screen Media at Leeds Trinity University.

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Episodes
  • J is for . . . Jabberwocky

    J is for . . . Jabberwocky
    Oct 10 2025
    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!

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    44 mins
  • My Little I

    My Little I
    Sep 1 2025
    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.

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    40 mins
  • H is for . . . Historical Linguistics

    H is for . . . Historical Linguistics
    Aug 15 2025
    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.

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    52 mins
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