Bad English

The birth rate for new words in English is extraordinary. There are over 170,000 words in the English dictionary but some estimates put the vocab tally at over one million words... Ivan asks if we really need more? Tamil refugee Niro Vithyasekar learnt English and cooking in a detention centre. He now runs the successful pop-up food truck Tuka Tuka Kotthu Roti Man in Melbourne. English language teacher Ai-Lin gives Niro the lowdown on nouns, and what happens when they become uncountable.

We investigate “word aversion” and our host Ivan ends up with a bad case of hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, a 35-letter word meaning fear of long words. Our guest Deng Adut was a child soldier in Sudan. After arriving in Australia as a teenage refugee, he learned English by singing along with The Wiggles, reading the bible and working at a petrol station. He sees English as a 'vampire language', sucking words from other languages like Latin, Italian, Spanish and German. It’s holy mayhem as language teacher Ai-Lin Bhugun encourages them to unpack the bonkers world of idioms and Australian slang. There are over 25,000 English idioms!

English is an ode to uncertainty, as host Ivan explains with his ALDI theory (A Ludicrous Display of Inconsistency). Ethiopian-born comedian Joe White (real name Tilahun) loves his mum and is constantly bailing her out of awkward situations resulting from her loose grasp of English. Language teacher Ai-Lin Bhugun takes 'doing words' to the next level, unpacking what happens when verbs band together like the Sharks and the Jets in West Side Story and become phrasal verbs.

Ivan is gutted when he finds out that one of the greatest ever Latino poets Jorge Luis Borges preferred English to Spanish, their shared mother tongue. Award-winning Afro-Brazilian Latinx writer and poet Guido Melo weighs in, trash-talking the English obsession with rhyme in poetry. In-house ESOL teacher Ai-Lin puts our sanity to the test by running through the crazy number of words that sound the same and are spelled the same but have different meanings. Hate, not love, is in the air.

Shortcuts cause Ivan a special level of dread... contractions, acronyms and abbreviations drive him mad. Fellow comedian He Huang is from Chongqing, an area of China known for its spicy food, and has a sense of humour to match. She trained as a linguist but ditched that path to relocate to Australia and pursue stand-up, winning viral success via a clip of her appearance on Australia’s Got Talent. English teacher Ai-Lin puts He through an exercise in decoding how stresses on different words can change the meaning of everything.