From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language,
and this time I want to talk about something that I've been reading.
The Ambassadors, which is one of Henry James' late...
You know, James is always interesting for various reasons, and one of them is, at least for me,
and you might predict what it would be, the language,
how he used, how he wrote the English language.
And when reading, especially a book like that, somebody like me... A linguist, and also me,
is always thinking partly of the content,
but then partly not what people are saying, but how they're saying it.
That's the key to what linguistics is.
It's how we're often read wrong by people.
People naturally suppose that to be a linguist is to be thinking about what people are saying.
No, not really.
We're more interested in how people are saying it.
That's what we mean by the science of language.
And so I was picking my way through The Ambassadors,
not an easy book, in the same way and in the same frame.
of mine that during the pandemic,
I picked my way through war and peace and shared some of that here with you then.
Late Henry James, this isn't his easier stuff like Washington Square,