I just think they're neat!!! (I'm saving a bonus imposter fun fact or two for people who listen to the whole episode, or read it, we've got transcripts and they're made and edited by humans)

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Imposters are when you have something that functions GRAMMATICALLY like a third person (like "your Majesty is" "your correspondent finds") but actually has the MEANING of a first/second person It's hiding under a little costume!! (you don't say "this reporter am" even when it means "I am")

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Then, actually digging into the research for this episode a few months ago when we were recording, we went back to the primary sources (which is common for us) but also discovered in our hunt for useful secondary sources to link to for listeners that there just weren't any for the imposters section!

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When we were roughing out the plan for this year's worth of episodes, @superlinguo.bsky.social had the idea for an October monsters theme with the usual vampires and werewolves, and I was like oh do you think we could fit imposters into that? Which is pretty fast as far as our process goes!

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In this case, I think it was both background and network About a year ago, I saw someone (pretty sure it was @kirbyconrod.bsky.social ) talking about linguistic imposters, vaguely rang a bell from grad school, added them to the running file of possible episode topics (it's LONG)

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