The questions keep coming! Let’s answer them.
- Why is “Live Laugh Love” in that order?
- Why do we talk about “getting out the vote”?
- Why is the L sound creeping into some words?
- What can computer languages tell us about human languages?
- Is there a word for turning a label into an insult, like Dumbocrats or Repuglicans?
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Language use is connected to indicators of wellbeing: evidence from the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Survey 2014–15 | APO
https://apo.org.au/node/308595
[PDF] Dinku et al. (2020). Language Use Is Connected to Indicators Of Wellbeing
https://caepr.cass.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/docs/2020/8/CAEPR_WP_no_137_2020_Dinku_et_al.pdf
Cultural continuity, traditional Indigenous language, and diabetes in Alberta First Nations: a mixed methods study | International Journal for Equity in Health | Full Text
https://equityhealthj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12939-014-0092-4
Recognising the communication gap in Indigenous health care | The Medical Journal of Australia
https://www.mja.com.au/journal/2017/207/1/recognising-communication-gap-indigenous-health-care
[PDF] Slide presentation by Michael Walsh: Indigenous Languages are good for your health: Health and wellbeing implications of regaining or retaining Australian Languages
https://www.cdu.edu.au/sites/default/files/the-northern-institute/ils_are_good_for_your_health.pdf
Promoting Health and Wellness through Language: International Day of the World’s Indigenous People
https://www.fnha.ca/about/news-and-events/news/promoting-health-and-wellness-through-language-international-day-of-the-worlds-indigenous-people
This Is the Origin of “Live, Laugh, Love”
https://www.housebeautiful.com/lifestyle/a7206/where-did-live-love-laugh-come-from/
“Get out the vote” Origin? – etymology voting politics | Ask MetaFilter
https://ask.metafilter.com/50297/Get-out-the-vote-Origin
Project MUSE – The American Intrusive L
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/2848
[PDF] Gick 2002: The American Intrusive L
http://idiom.ucsd.edu/~ebakovic/phonoloblog/gick-intrusive-l-amsp02.pdf
View of Endonymic Place-Name Alternants and Their Cultural Significances
https://journals.uio.no/osla/article/view/310/453
shitshow | Dictionary.com
https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/shitshow/
What a shitshow! – Strong Language
https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2017/05/15/what-a-shitshow/
cavalier | Online Etymology Dictionary
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=cavalier
The Rise of “Conspirituality” | On the Media | WNYC Studios
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/rise-conspirituality-on-the-media
Transcript
BL Transcript 12
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to this episode of Because Language, a show about linguistics for the linguistically minded about linguistics, the science of language. I’m Daniel Midgley, and with me is the warm and bubbly Ben Ainslie. Hi, Ben.
BEN: I’m going to give that a four and a half out of 11 on the accurate descriptors scale.
DANIEL: Wow, that requires some interesting semantic calculation. Which did you object to; the warm or the bubbly?
BEN: Both in varying amounts. I feel like approximately 38% of the time, those things can apply to me.
DANIEL: Okay, well, they also apply to Jacuzzis. Do you grow a lot of fungus?
BEN: I prefer not to answer in regards to my personal fungal load in public forums.
DANIEL: Just checking.
BEN: And I also want a huge amount of credit for not making the one fun-guy-related pun joke.
DANIEL: Cheerfully granted. We have no Hedvig this week, because…
BEN: Boo! Ugh, I bet it’s some incredibly vapid excuse. It always is!
DANIEL: She’s done eloped. She’s done runned off with her man Ste, off to Denmark to get herself married.
BEN: Married? Married‽ Better than Because Language? More important than Because Language? I don’t think so.
DANIEL: I knew it’d be something trifling like that.
BEN: Absolutely. Like, is there a better word than trite? I don’t know.
DANIEL: I think they’re being a bit rash.
BEN: Ugh. Well, I suppose we’ll have to just muddle through without her, because there’s ~more important things to do~.
DANIEL: Yeah, a couple of Ben and Daniel shows until she comes back in November. Speaking of November, just a big thanks to Patrons. This is a Patron show, which means that the regular folks won’t hear it for another three months-ish, but you get it now. So that’s great.
BEN: But you know what, regular folk? Three months isn’t that long. I’m sure you don’t mind. You’re just like: Cool; Ben and Daniel, no Hedvig, bit of a disappointment. You know what, you should send her a retroactive dig, three months from now when we’re recording it when, like, this whole thing is just completely left in memory. And then a whole bunch of angry people will be like: What the hell, Hedvig? Why weren’t you there?
DANIEL: And if you’re a regular patron listening to it now, you can send a reminder to yourself, or you can schedule a message to Hedvig in three months.
BEN: Yeah, absolutely. Three Month Delay Hedvig Heckel. The TMDHH.
DANIEL: But what I really want to say is that we are getting our reward ready. You know, every year we do a Patron reward, where we send you, you know, a postcard of us and some stickers and just maybe some stuff that you would like, and that’s…
BEN: What reward have you been working on this year, fair Daniel? Is it one of your children? Because you have four, which seems excessive.
DANIEL: Yeah, but there’s a lot more Patrons than that.
BEN: I suppose.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Okay. But what is… some sort of timeshare arrangement on one of your four kids?
DANIEL: It’s stickers again, Ben. It’s just stickers.
BEN: Well, but I mean, you know, that’s good, too.
DANIEL: Yeah. That’s for all Patrons, regardless of level or duration. If you’re an active Patron when we get all this stuff together, then it goes to you.
BEN: Just for you, special few.
DANIEL: Mwah!
BEN: Shall we do… shall we check in on what’s happening in the news?
DANIEL: Well, Ben, do you want the silly story or the serious story first?
BEN: Hmmm. I do like to eat my vegetables first. Let’s go serious.
DANIEL: Okay. This one was suggested to us by Liz on Facebook. She says “You-all” — you hyphen all, which is a thing I have never heard before, so that’s very innovative — “You-all might be interested in this study. It examines the link between speaking and Aboriginal or an Indigenous language and health outcomes.”
BEN: Okay, yep, I’m gonna jump straight to the end here and assume that they are drastically higher for people who have good working ability to speak Indigenous languages?
DANIEL: You are quite correct. And I will refer you to the title: Language Use Is Connected to Indicators of Well-Being. What do you know about the connection between health outcomes and well-being outcomes, and speaking an Aboriginal or Indigenous language? Have you heard anything about this?
BEN: I have not heard anything about this, but just intuitively, based on all of the stuff that we’ve looked at over the years here at Because Language and its progenitor show Talk the Talk, I mean, there’s just never evidence that good knowledge of your heritage language ever results in any kind of negative outcome. It’s always good.
DANIEL: It’s never a bad thing. There’s nothing but good. Okay. There have been a few studies around the world that show a connection between Aboriginal or Indigenous people speaking their traditional languages, and health and well-being. We’ve seen things like better outcomes for diabetes, cardiovascular disease, suicide, drug and alcohol use. The thing that I always think when I see these studies is okay, is it particular to language? Or is it just the kind of thing where language is standing in for something else?
BEN: So correlation/causation kind of thing? Like, are we identifying the correct driver of this dependent variable? Or have we just sort of hit upon it and gone: Okay, that’ll do.
DANIEL: Okay, but what could language be standing in for, potentially?
BEN: Okay, language would probably be standing in for a vibrant and healthy sort of community.
DANIEL: Yep, good, good, good, good, good. On the community level, if the language of the people is recognised and encouraged, then those people are probably getting a lot of encouragement in other ways. Like, there’s a lot of government support, a lot of cultural support, a healthy vibrant community. And that shows up in language, but also in lots of other stuff.
BEN: Or to put it another way, individuals who find themselves being able to learn and grow in their heritage language almost certainly are part of a community that is putting a lot of time, effort, and resources into that, and therefore probably a bunch of other stuff as well.
DANIEL: Yeah, imagine a whole community taking language lessons, like is happening with Wiradjuri in Parks, New South Wales. There’s going to be a lot of community cohesion, people are looking after each other. That’s good. But it’s not about language, it’s about a lot of other stuff. And it shows up in language. We’ve talked about on the community level, but also on an individual level. If an Aboriginal person has the time and the resources to take time from whatever they’re doing and learn their traditional language, then that probably means they’re already doing a little better than some other folks. And that’s going to show up in the language, but it’s also going to show up health wise too.
BEN: Absolutely.
DANIEL: Okay, so, earlier studies found that connectedness to culture, family, country, and opportunities for self-determination was very good for health outcomes. And then there was a 2014 study by Richard Oster, and a team from the University of Alberta, that found that First Nations people, who have more cultural continuity — but that’s measured by languages — had lower diabetes prevalence, after adjustment for socio-economic factors. So that’s interesting.
BEN: So being better off being taken away from the equation.
DANIEL: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there have been some other studies that say that when people are learning language, that’s good for their health in ways that aren’t explained by other factors they looked at.
BEN: Okay, okay.
DANIEL: Which is interesting. So let’s get to this study. This study is from Yonatan Dinku, and a team from the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research and the Australian National University. What they say is that speaking Indigenous language is significantly associated with greater cultural attachment. There you go.
BEN: Makes sense.
DANIEL: Can’t be bad. And positive emotional well-being. Not bad. Also, they point out that if you’re an Indigenous language speaker, you’re probably more likely to earn a little bit of income from art, or craft, or music or whatever it is you’re doing.
BEN: Oh, okay. So they’re, they’re acknowledging that there is a sort of mercantile benefit to being bilingual in an Indigenous language.
DANIEL: Yeah, a little bit.
BEN: Whether that’s through tourism, or whatever it happens to be.
DANIEL: You know, I think about Indigenous musicians who make… who do songs in their language, and they incorporate that into their career. They also mentioned that if you speak an Indigenous language, there may be a hit as far as health, as far as being understood by health workers, if you don’t also speak a lot of English.
BEN: Okay. That makes sense as well.
DANIEL: However, what they also say is there is only very limited evidence of any significant relationship between Indigenous language use and physical health. Indigenous language speakers are less likely to drink at risky levels, but that may be because they’re more likely to live in dry communities.
BEN: Mhm.
DANIEL: And then the social cohesion might be the thing that is accounting for the increased health outcomes, not just the language itself.
BEN: Which is what we said straight out of the gate, wasn’t it?
DANIEL: I think… I think this does come down on the side of language is acting as a proxy, as language so often does.
BEN: Which isn’t bad!
DANIEL: It’s not bad.
BEN: Right? Like, there’s nothing… like, if this study goes: Turns out it’s not language at all, then that is a fine thing. Right? Like, it means that those communities that are seeing a greater sort of social investment from members of the community, like, language then is not a driver, but instead a result of this really great stuff that is happening in those communities. So it’s just… if I’m understanding what you’re sharing with us right, basically, the study says kind of, like, language is a little bit more of a positive outcome than a positive driver, in regards to health and well-being factors.
DanieI: I think of it as like a complicated web that involves language and community and social group and career and, you know, land and lots of things, lots of strands of a web that work together.
BEN: Mmm. It’s, it’s… I mean, it’s just so fascinating. And it’s just so wonderful that there are communities that people are able to look at, and to measure these outcomes from, and see some of these like sort of upward trends. It’s just so buoying.
DANIEL: And yet, one of the interesting things about our last episode, Yarning with Glenys Collard and Celeste Rodriguez Louro. They study Aboriginal English and a lot of Aboriginal folks — go back and listen to this episode, but I’m just gonna summarise — a lot of Aboriginal folks are like: Well, learning a traditional language would be good, but I already have a language that means a lot to me, and that I express my Aboriginal identity through, and that’s Aboriginal English.
BEN: Aboriginal English. Yes, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: Which also contains a lot of words from Aboriginal languages.
BEN: Phwoar. There we go.
DANIEL: Okay, so that’s that study. And big thanks to Liz for sharing that one with us. Ready for the silly story?
BEN: I am ready for the silly story. I’m glad we started – and I’m not going to call them the vegetables – I’m going to call it the most delicious and most nutritious part of the meal.
DANIEL: Think of it as like a really good croissant, with vegetables in it. Like, a really tasty pastry thing.
BEN: Yep! Excellent. All right. Now time for the fatty, sugary chaser.
DANIEL: Ooo. Have you ever heard of a program called PRAAT?
BEN: No.
DANIEL: P-R-A-A-T.
BEN: I would pronounce that as PRATT [pɹæt], which is a colloquialism for “idiot” in my part of the world.
DANIEL: Mine, too!
BEN: Mmm.
DANIEL: Mmm. Well, PRAAT is also a program that linguists use. You can feed some audio into it, and then you can see your audio up on the screen, kind of like I do with our show every week. But then you can also use that to annotate, like: what are the words that people are saying, underneath the waveform, what are the sounds they’re doing?
BEN: So like, a relatively sort of comprehensive, like, annotation and dictation software. But while looking at the visual waveform of sound.
DANIEL: That is it.
BEN: Right.
DANIEL: Lots of linguists use it. I never have, so I was kind of weirded out by this story. Okay, now, I’m going to try to describe this visually — this is going to be really terrible audio — but Ben I’m gonna, we’re gonna throw up a link to an image on our blog, becauselanguage.com.
BEN: So this is the bit where I open “PRAAT1” and “PRAAT2”?
DANIEL: Yeah, let me have you open the first PRAAT drawing.
BEN: Okay, PRAAT1 one opening now.
DANIEL: Because this is the logo. This is the icon that you click on. It’s got two shapes. One pink and one beige.
BEN: Okay, okay. Do you know what this most reminds me of?
DANIEL: Uh, you tell me.
BEN: We’ve all read The Little Prince. I’m assuming it’s like one of those books that everyone’s, like, come across once upon a time. This most reminds me of that author’s account of how he drew a boa constrictor that had eaten an elephant, which is to say, like, a weird lumpy shape that tails off towards either end.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: That’s what I’m looking at here. But it happens to be pink. The only other way I could describe it would be a sort of pink set of lips, like the kind you would find on a face, with maybe a, like, a turkey drumstick heading towards them? And both are so heavily pixelated that they could only have come from, like, a text-based dungeon crawler, circa 1984.
DANIEL: Yeah, this is giving me wumpus flashbacks.
BEN: Yeah, looks like, this is Adventures-of-Zork-level pixelation.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] We’re trying to remember that somebody made this once. Okay, fine. Yeah, I think it’s supposed to be a mouth and an ear.
BEN: Oh, totally see the ear now, but would not have, if you hadn’t said that. And like I said, levels of color and pixelation that like, computers without graphical user interfaces would have been able to handle.
DANIEL: I think your drumstick interpretation is totally valid for the brown shape. Well, it turns out that the PRAAT logo has gotten an update.
BEN: Oh, yeah. I mean, makes sense.
DANIEL: Yeah, let’s take a look at it. It’s PRAAT2.
BEN: Okay… the mouth now looks decidedly more UFO shaped. And the ear… I think…
DANIEL: I’m not done with the mouth.
BEN: Oh, okay!
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Don’t you think it looks…
BEN: Let me… let me start off by saying, it’s a far more modern logo, in that there is no pixelation. Everything is very smooth and vector like.
DANIEL: Yeah, it’s got a lot of shading. You know, it’s very nice.
BEN: And it has a badge, right? Like, it’s a far more application-style application sort of look, with like a little sort of a dollopy badge with the lip in the ear still on top of that badge, but they are… different.
DANIEL: What is going on with the… with the bumps?
BEN: Okay. So…
DANIEL: I like the UFO interpretation. I also…
BEN: UFO, also a cartoon frog that is yelling?
DANIEL: It’s very Pepe.
BEN: Yes! Yes, it’s got a real Pepe sort of vibe.
DANIEL: Which is unfortunate. I’m trying hard to swerve that interpretation to… to Michigan, the cartoon frog from the Warner Brothers short, “One Froggy Evening”. You know the frog that sings?
BEN: You know what, it looks more like the WB frog, which I guess is the same frog.
DANIEL: Yes! [SINGS] Everybody do the Michigan Rag!
BEN: Yeah, that thing.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Okay. It’s not great. You can do lips better than this.
DANIEL: The ear’s an ear. I got the ear.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: So linguists have woken up last week to this, this new logo. And…
BEN: I’m guessing they’re not fans.
DANIEL: There’s a level of freaking out that’s happening. Although, in an effort, presumably to make us appreciate this new logo, some of them have done some truly ungodly shapes, like a mouth with eyes.
BEN: No, no. Don’t… that’s not what the world needs right now.
DANIEL: And some… so reaction is mixed. Some people are saying: Well, 2020. And others are saying: At least it’s not wugs.
BEN: Look, all I will say is I’m really glad you construed this as the silly thing, because as a person who has nothing to do with this world, this seems like the most navel-gazey of things to have an issue about, right? Like, the world is falling quite literally apart around us, and some people are like [FUNNY VOICE] ~but the mouth looks funny~.
DANIEL: We’ve got to find refuge somewhere.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Okay, look, I don’t want to take away anyone’s sort of delighted guilty pleasure pettiness.
DANIEL: This is our job, right? We bring you the stories that linguists are obsessed with. And this is one.
BEN: That’s totally fine. I reserve my right to make sure that everyone understands that they are being silly.
DANIEL: Yes, we are. We are… we are a silly lot. And if the logo is a bit silly, well, that’s all right.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
BEN: Shall we… Shall we move on to the most difficult part of our entire show in any of its possible permutations, which is answering the super difficult questions of our very smart listeners?
DANIEL: Yes, it’s a Mailbag episode and we are answering your questions.
BEN: P.S.: if you listen, and you are thinking to yourself, you know, I’ve always had that bloody one question. Right? Feel free to drop us your question: hello@becauselanguage.com
DANIEL: Hello. But for this one, Ben, this is a show where your guess is as good as mine.
BEN: What? How’s…? What?
DANIEL: So I’m going to handball it to you first.
BEN: That is a terrible idea! Don’t do that!
DANIEL: But Ben, one thing that I’ve noticed in the 17 years that we’ve been doing this show…
BEN: …the 50,000 years, the epoch…
DANIEL: …the 40,000 years we’ve been doing this show…
BEN: The geological datedness, yes.
DANIEL: Is that you have an unswerving instinct for linguistics. You know, you’re… you seem to come up with the right answers. Except when you do not.
BEN: That’s the biggest get-out ever: You do really good at this… until you fuck it!
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: So we’re gonna find out what you think, and see if you can come up with the answer for some of these.
BEN: Yeah, right, fair enough. So basically, this show is will he get there? Or will he fuck it? The Ben Ainslie edition.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: I’m not putting that in the title.
BEN: Okay, just as long as it stays in the show somewhere.
DANIEL: It’s gonna, it’s gonna stay in.
BEN: Okay, well, let’s get started. Let’s… let’s try and avoid as much fucking of the questions on my part as possible.
DANIEL: This one comes from Lindal via email, hello@becauselanguage.com. “My name is Lindal and I am a HUGEEEEE”, e-e-e-e-e, five Es on huge, “huge…
BEN: A hugey fan!
DANIEL: “…fan of you guys. I am in my master’s for teaching English to speakers of other languages.” Oh, good on you.
BEN: Yep, doing the lord’s work.
DANIEL: “And I adore anything language nerdy-y. I was listening to Episode One of Because Language (congrats!) and your conversation surrounding SPLISH SPLASH SPLOSH was very interesting to me.” Now let’s just recall. Splish splash splosh. Why is it SPLISH SPLASH SPLOSH and it’s never SPLOSH SPLISH SPLASH?
BEN: Ohh! Oh, okay, you’ve given me an opportunity to fuck it straight out of the gate! Thank you, Daniel.
DANIEL: Why do bells go DING DONG and never DONG DING? Why do we ZIGZAG and never ZAGZIG?
BEN: Oh, ah, I do remember this show but I don’t remember why! Is it because that’s just the pattern, and we like it that way and so that’s what we do?
DANIEL: Dammit, he got it right, first time.
BEN: Yes! Scratch one to the not-fucking-it side of the tally.
DANIEL: This is ablaut reduplication, and for some reason in English we always seem to go I A O, or [i], [a], [o]. So things go DING DONG, never DONG DING. The verbal pattern is SPRING SPRANG SPRUNG.
BEN: SPLISH SPLASH SPLOSH, so on and so forth
DANIEL: SPLISH, SPLASH, SPLOSH. Okay. Lindal continues, “I wondered if this kind of sound progression has anything to do with the LIVE LAUGH LOVE effect?”
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Hmm.
DANIEL: “I feel like I see a lot of roasting this online as it seems to be a kind of symbol of Karen-esque white suburban soccer mom vibes. Anyway, Splish splash splosh, anything connected to live laugh love?”
BEN: Well, I mean first of all, we just need to acknowledge that it obeys the rule, right? Like it’s, it’s got the I, it’s got the A sound, even though there’s a cheeky U tucked in there, and there’s an O at the end.
DANIEL: Yeah, yeah.
BEN: Now… so Lindal. Are you just asking if this like also obeys the rule? I feel like you probably aren’t asking that, because you can already tell that it does. So what is Lindal asking us?
DANIEL: What I decided to do was check and see if this appeared in that form for the first time, or if it sort of started out as LOVE LIVE LAUGH, and then sort of got changed.
BEN: Ohh. Right, right, right. So there is a… Yeah, we are doing a little bit of etymology forensics, here.
DANIEL: Now I don’t like the roasting of Karens. In fact…
BEN: You don’t like the roasting of Karens‽ Daniel, what‽ That is one of life’s truly wonderful pleasures. I saw a Karen starting up in her Karen-ness on the weekend, and I was like: oh, I got the popcorn out! I was like, Oh, here we go.
DANIEL: What did she…? Was she calling the cops on a black person?
BEN: No, no, no, no, no, nothing. Nothing that severe. Thankfully, no. We just, we… my partner and I were at that most white of activities, the weekend farmers market.
DANIEL: Oh, yeah.
BEN: And we saw a older white lady come up to one of the sort of people whose job it is to, like, wear a high-vis vest and walk around sort of answering peoples’ questions. Definitely a volunteer position. And we just sort of stood in awe as we watched this woman sort of start out with the most Karen of all openings, which is: Hi. Look, I come here, I’ve been coming here for years, right? And I was like, aww, I literally I just started like hitting her on the arm basically just being like: Look, look what’s starting!
DANIEL: Uh oh.
BEN: And yeah, and exactly what you imagine, which was just like, you know, petty complaints about small things and how this woman clearly needs to alter the world around her in ways to make it perfect for her.
DANIEL: I don’t… Yeah, I, mmmm….
BEN: So tell me… tell me why you don’t like the roasting of Karens. This is… this is so provocative, Daniel!
DANIEL: I think it’s fine if your partner – a woman of color – does it, or if it’s somebody who calls the cops on a person of colour.
BEN: Oh, sexist angle. Like, let’s not be men making fun of women, sort of thing?
DANIEL: Okay, so, for example, Amy What’s-her-name? Who called the cops on the birdwatcher in Central Park?
BEN: Yes, yes.
DANIEL: I am willing to let the Black community call that person a Karen. But if I call that person a Karen, then a white guy calling a white woman a Karen deemphasises the race aspect and emphasises the misogyny aspect. And I just try to stay away from all that junk.
BEN: I think that is actually a very good point. And I will sit with that and take that under advisement. I think you’ve made a good point there.
DANIEL: There’s no male equivalent of Karen, although there is a candidate, and it’s Chad.
BEN: Yeah. Chad, Chad’s rising. I’m seeing Chad coming in.
DANIEL: Which is interesting, because…
BEN: It’s got different connotations, though.It’s a different thing.
DANIEL: Chad is the incel meme, right? He’s making a guest appearance with the Karen meme. I dunno. Although, I will say that when I go to somebody’s house, and they’ve decorated their house with words, eg, LIVE LAUGH LOVE. I do find that a little unsettling.
BEN: I cringe. I do. I definitely… when I walk into a house that has the big like, block cut “Live, Laugh, Love”, usually with some LED lights stuck behind it or something like that, I do kind of go… Okay. Like, you know how when you walk into a home for the first time of someone, either you know well, or perhaps you don’t know well, but either way, if it’s the first time into that space, you are definitely doing, like, a Sherlock Holmes job on that place, aren’t you? You’re walking through and you’ve got like the Terminator T800 sort of like overlay going over your vision. And you’re just like [BLOOP BLOOP BLOOP], you’re just clocking everything as you go through, and it’s just sort of making like a little intuitive mental tally. And yes, absolutely. That T800 mental overlay as you’re like blooping your way through the various significant things in the house. You hit one of those things, one of those block-cut letters that says LIVE LAUGH LOVE or something like that…
DANIEL: What about FAITH?
BEN: FAITH, or like just a self affirmation. But like, any words painted onto a wall is immediately like your blop blop blop does a different sound, it’s like [BLOP] to [ALARMING BEEP SOUNDS]. It’s significant, is what I would say, as you’re… as you were profiling this poor stranger’s house.
DANIEL: Very much. So I traced the LIVE LAUGH LOVE thing to its origins.
BEN: Oh, lay it on me. Is it like…? I’m going to take a guess.
DANIEL: Okay, okay.
BEN: Is it… I’ve always for some reason in my head had it associated with The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.
DANIEL: Interesting.
BEN: The book.
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: Does it have anything to do with that?
DANIEL: From the 90s.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, you know there was Eat Pray Love.
BEN: Yes, Okay.
DANIEL: Was it Eat Pray Love? Am I getting the title right?
BEN: Yes, Eat Pray Love is also a thing I’ve heard of many times. Hold on. Let me do the…
DANIEL: That’s the pattern as well, because that’s the [i] sound, the A sound or the [eɪ] sound, and then O.
BEN: Okay. Okay. Yep. So “Eat, Pray, Love: one woman’s search for everything across Italy, India and Indonesia.” Wow.
DANIEL: Wow.
BEN: What a terrible title. In the modern conception, that… woof.
DANIEL: Yeah. Well, I think Lindal really buried the lede here, because Eat Pray Love is the same kind of thing. Okay, so the origin of LIVE LAUGH LOVE is from 1904.
BEN: Mkay.
DANIEL: There was a poetry contest: you have to define what success is.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: And the winner was Bessie Anderson Stanley, who wrote a poem, “What Constitutes Success?”, and the first line goes like this: “He achieves success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much. So it’s the I A O, in that order!
BEN: But when do we condense it down? Does… Bessie? Was that the author’s name?
DANIEL: She herself didn’t, but in subsequent decades, it did get shrunk down to LIVE LAUGH LOVE. But I’m just amazed that that sprang forth in this order, like, from the forehead of Zeus, in a manner that conforms to a pattern that this author had no doubt internalised, even back in 1904.
BEN: But I mean, is it that surprising? In the same way… Like, what’s that, that hilarious meme that does the round every couple of years, and everyone just gets completely like bedazzled by it afresh, which is, you know, like, you have like a cold dark green knife, but you never have, like, a green dark cold knife or whatever. You know that order?
DANIEL: Yeah, I have thought about that a lot.
BEN: Like, is it that amazing? Or is it like, do we just need to stop being amazed by the fact that our brains just have a whole bunch of rules that we’re not aware of? Like, isn’t that all grammar? Shouldn’t we just be constantly baffled as only language knowers, like single-language knowers, that we just walk around obeying these rules all the time?
DANIEL: We’re just not that creative.
BEN: We’re just monkeys in shoes. We’re just tiny little squishy robots.
DANIEL: That’s it. And that’s all I have to say about LIVE LAUGH LOVE, except for the fact that it found its way into the Sondheim lyric. When I went to see Follies, the revival in 2011 in New York City…
BEN: How dare you, Daniel, in an otherwise wonderful question, bersmich this area with your musical affections.
DANIEL: Bernadette Peters is, like, super nice.
BEN: [ANGRY GROAN]
DANIEL: Anyway, let’s go on to the next one.
BEN: Thank you so much. Lindal. That was a lovely question.
DANIEL: Beej-meister on Twitter asks, “GET OUT THE VOTE. What is going on here grammatically?”
BEN: Do you know what Beej? Excellent question! I’ve always wondered that.
DANIEL: GET OUT THE VOTE. You know, we are in a country of my acquaintance having an election pretty soon.
BEN: Yes. By all accounts, what is shaping up to be a pretty one-sided one?
DANIEL: Ohh, the models… the poll models don’t factor in suppression and tampering. [POSTSCRIPT: Or the president inciting a gang of rioters to storm the Capitol in an effort to murder legislators and derail the electoral vote count, FFS. — D]
BEN: Okay, okay.
DANIEL: Let’s, let’s get into that later. You were pretty certain that Trump was going to pull this one off.
BEN: I was, and I will not be surprised if that is what happens.
DANIEL: I will not be surprised if there are monkeyshines. And there have been monkeyshines.
BEN: What are monkeyshines??
DANIEL: Impish tomfoolery. There may be legal challenges to throw ballots out.
BEN: Oh, right. Right. Right. Right. Right.
DANIEL: California Republicans have already been pulled up for having these big boxes that look just like the official boxes where you drop off your vote. They’ve been putting those things out.
BEN: All right. Gotcha. Gotcha. Gotcha. So just nefarious, bad-actor style behaviour.
DANIEL: That.
BEN: Okay. So GET OUT THE VOTE doesn’t make any sense grammatically.
DANIEL: GET OUT THE VOTE. Why would the vote be something that you get out? What’s going on, do you think?
BEN: Yeah, the vote. So in this sentence, right, using my insanely good powers of grammar, which is to say: just the same rules that all the other squishy, like, human robots have to use. The way GET OUT THE VOTE is phrased, it makes the vote — ie., everyone going and exercising their democratic right to choose who, like, runs a thing — it makes that process, all of the people going and doing that thing, one concrete definitive action, right? That’s everyone going and voting, which is to say millions and millions of people going and doing a whole bunch of different activities — because the way you vote in, like, different states can be super varied — that is all one thing. And that entire process is called THE VOTE.
DANIEL: I am intrigued that, of these four words, the word you focused on was THE. I had not done that.
BEN: Well, but like it is, though, right? Get out THE vote.
DANIEL: THE is super interesting.
BEN: How else could you conceive of that sentence in those four words?
DANIEL: So let’s talk about THE for a second. THE is cool, because THE refers to information that is… that I think is hearer-old. So if I say, “I bought the car”, I assume that you know which car I’m talking about. I think this is old information for you.
BEN: Yes.
DANIEL: But if I say “I bought A car”, then this is hearer-new.
BEN: Yes. Okay. Yeah, that’s interesting. Sure.
DANIEL: And, you know, I remember that Trump was criticised for talking about “THE Blacks”, which sounds gross.
BEN: It absolutely does.
DANIEL: But why does it sound gross?
BEN: For exactly the same reason that THE VOTE doesn’t make much sense to me, which is that it condenses down and homogenises this like, hugely multi-, sort of like, tendriled undefinable sort of entity, into a, like, a McNugget.
DANIEL: Yeah, it’s like “the Blacks”. ~Oh, and I know that you know which ones I mean.~ It’s like, what?
BEN: And also just like, the idea that “the Blacks” is this insanely, like, coherent tribe that does all of the things in all of the identical ways.
DANIEL: It’s also kind of othering. For example — and I thought of a really good example sentence for this — “I can see why humans like drugs”. Okay, that’s a sentence.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: “I can see why THE humans like drugs.” What does that second sentence do for you?
BEN: Uh, clearly, it’s an alien appraising our affections for recreational drugs.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Exactly! Right? It makes it like this other thing. Like, if I say: I know why humans like drugs, I could be talking about myself too. But if I say, I know why THE humans like drugs, it’s not me.
BEN: Can I also throw a permutation in there? I see why humans like THE drugs. Now what you’ve othered is the person’s, like, coolness who is saying this sentence, right? Because clearly, fun sort of recreational drug taking activity is so far from this person’s understanding of reality that it has to be othered to that extent: the drugs.
DANIEL: Yeah. And I don’t know why it’s othering. But it just feels that way to me.
BEN: It’s true. Well, yeah. I think anytime you try and condense a complex thing down to a very simple thing, it could… it connotes a lack of understanding about that thing. When you say, “I understand why THE humans like drugs”, what you’re saying is: humans are pretty much the same in my brain, which only a person who doesn’t understand the thing could possibly think.
DANIEL: It’s homogenising, but it also makes it hearer-old. It’s like: Black people, and you know which ones I’m… you know the group! You know the ones I’m talking about, right?
BEN: So let’s bring it back to GET OUT THE VOTE. Like, how did it arrive there?
DANIEL: This phrase actually dates from 1878. It’s a super old expression.
BEN: Oh! So are we looking at a fossil?
DANIEL: Kinda? But I think there’s…
BEN: Okay. Like, like AKIMBO, right? Like, it only exists in one or two key phrases, and doesn’t exist anywhere else?
DANIEL: Well, I think the expression GET OUT THE VOTE isn’t coincidental, I mean, OUT is interesting, because you’re getting out the vote, it’s like you’re getting people out of their houses turning, you know, there’s TURNOUT — we talk about TURNOUT — get out of your house and get to the voting station and do your vote. So I guess that’s the reason for OUT. But that is interesting about “the”, which I hadn’t thought of before.
BEN: And you see it on like t-shirts. And that’s what like the West Wing cast were doing for, like, their thing. All that kind of stuff.
DANIEL: Hey, by the time the show comes out, the election still hasn’t been, so if you haven’t voted and you are eligible to vote in the USA, please make a plan.
BEN: Could you please just do your bit to make the world less insane than it needs to be?
DANIEL: Thank you. Thanks for that question, Beej-meister. Next one! This one’s from Chris L on our Discord channel, “Is there a name for the phenomenon where people add an L sound to the ends of words? So DRAW sounds like DRAWL?”
BEN: What? What? What?? What is this? What is going on here? I don’t know what he’s talking about.
DANIEL: “It seems more common in the American South based on my very, very small experience with it.” And then Chris has given us an example, and I’m not sure where this is from, sorry, but let’s listen to it.
BEN: Okay.
[CHANGE IN RECORDING, SOUNDS LIKE A PODCAST]
MALE VOICE: She receded in her influence on the lawL [ɫaɫ], like her most significant impact on the lawL [ɫaɫ] was the feminist jurisprudence that she convinced the Supreme Court to implement.
BEN: Okay, so it sounds like he’s saying LAWL.
DANIEL: So the first time it says LAW, there’s a LIKE after it, so I could see why there’s an L there, but then the next one: “impact on the LAWL”…
BEN: Yeah, that’s… that’s there. That’s definitely not there.
DANIEL: Sure is. What’s going on?
BEN: Hmm. The first thing that comes to mind for me is the unpronounced B at the end of some words in English, such as LAMB, and COMB, and that sort of thing. And I remember a long, long, long, long time ago, like way back in the possibly even double-digits days of Talk The Talk, we spoke about this. And basically, it used to be pronounced, right? It would be a lamB, and you would brush your hair with a comB. And apparently, if you go to some really regional parts of the UK and find some really old dudes, you can actually hear a little bit of this left behind, still to this day. I’m wondering if there is a similar — I’m not saying that law used to have an L at the end, or in any of these instances that the intrusive L used to be there — but more just that in English, sometimes we do have a propensity to stick, like, a funny little consonant after another consonant. So like, is that just, like, a little habit that some people have, that maybe just is being reintroduced here a little bit?
DANIEL: It kind of is. And when you said that, it reminded me of how BOMB has a B at the end, but it’s silent. But then when you combine that with another syllable or two, like BOMBASTIC, suddenly the B comes back.
BEN: Mhm. And even… even something like BOMBING — I don’t know if it’s just in my head — but I feel a little B there.
DANIEL: Mm. Mm. Underlying. Well, here’s what I think might be going on. Let’s take an expression like, “Let’s go have pizza and beer”
BEN: Mhm. Great. Great. Great. Great example phrase. Love it.
DANIEL: Now I said pizza | and beer. And I separate it with a little, a little pop, a little glottal stop. Because if I say pizzaand beer…
BEN: Which is 100% how I would have pronounced it.
DANIEL: Okay. Would you ever say pizzer and beer?
BEN: Yeah, I think so. Let’s grab a pizzerand beer. Just BLUFDHFHDKF, it’s just one word: pizzandbeer.
DANIEL: Last year, we saw Italy. We sawR Italy.
BEN: Yeah. So the funny one there is in that little example sentence, it feels like Italy, the country has the most significant breaking up of the entire little set of words.
DANIEL: Sawr Italy. Yeah. So why do we do the R?
BEN: Ah, interesting.
DANIEL: What’s going… what’s going on, Ben?
BEN: So is this our brain’s attempt to introduce little markers that help us understand the spaces?
DANIEL: Yep!
[TRIUMPHANT LAUGHTER]
BEN: Another one on the not-fuck-it side of the board!
DANIEL: Yeah, you know, it’s hard to comprehend… I mean, we could argue that it’s hard to produce, but I think I lean a little more on the side of, it’s a little harder to comprehend, you know, “raw eggs” or “saw Italy”. Instead, we say “rawR eggs” or “pizzaR and beer” because it’s easier to comprehend, you know, if there’s a little bit of a split between the word. Now if it can be an R, it can also be an L.
BEN: Well, I mean, I guess it can be anything that works with the preceding and subsequent sounds, right?
DANIEL: Well, it can, but R and L have a special kind of relationship. Phonetically, they’re both liquids. They both are kind of like, [ɹ] [l], they come from the same place in our mouth, and we say them both by not touching our tongue to a part of our mouth, but just hovering our tongue. This is known as an approximant.
BEN: Oh. Are they the only two approximants?
DANIEL: No, there are other approximants, like, W [w] and Y [j]. They’re a strange set of sounds, but R and L are kind of kind of similar on the chart. And you know, we know that L is kind of weird as well. It can drop out. So for example, do you… what about the fish that starts with an S?
BEN: The fish that starts…?
DANIEL: It jumps upstream?
BEN: Salmon [sæmən]. Yes, of course. Not saLmon [saɫmon].
DANIEL: There are some people who say saLmon.
BEN: Oh, interesting.
DANIEL: Yeah. Or almonds [amondz], or aLmonds [almondz]?
BEN: Almonds [æmondz].
DANIEL: Almonds [æmondz]. Fair. I come from ALmonds Country.
BEN: I am very Australian in how I speak though, to be fair, so I’m a bad yardstick for this.
DANIEL: Yeah, I’m a pretty good American speaker still, but I still say salmon [sæmən] and aLmond. So the L in almond is there for me. But now it seems that the L can drop in, just like R does, and I’m looking at an article from Bryan Gick from 2002, in American Speech: “This intrusive L is happening especially in two regions, Southern Pennsylvania, and also a bit of Oklahoma.”
BEN: Wow! So it’s sort of, like, right in the middle there?
DANIEL: Yeah, it’s got two epicenters.
BEN: That’s not really — if I might be so ignorant non-linguist to say — those areas are not the areas that you find your sort of attention drawn to when you think about, like, linguistic weirdness of American dialects.
DANIEL: No, no, you always think of Boston, or…
BEN: Yeah, you think of Boston, or you think of the South, or you think of like some of, like, the funky ways that people down sort of towards the border with Mexico, like some of the shifts that happened down there.
DANIEL: Louisiana or something. Gick mentions — he said, I’ll just quote this — “According to one speaker from York, Pennsylvania, who left town to attend University, she and her friends are all very aware of their L intrusion. And she produces this phenomenon only in comfortable conversation with other intrusive L speakers of her age when she goes to visit.”
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Good Yorkists like her.
DANIEL: Exactly! Yorkers. “She claims that they not only avoid using intrusive L outside their group, but often make fun of themselves doing it.” Isn’t that fascinating?
BEN: That is quite cute. I have to say. Isn’t that an adorable little like: Oh, we do this thing and we know like it’s a bit silly, and it makes us sound a bit weird, but we like it. And so we just do it with each other!
DANIEL: We just do it! And… but you know, maybe this is spreading a little bit. It, that was… that was, back in 2002. But now it’s popping up here and there. So we will certainly keep track of this intrusive L phenomenon. And a big thank you to Chris [CHUCKLES] L, for bringing this to our attention.
BEN: Thank you so much, Chris L. All right. Next!
DANIEL: Anthony, @anthonyteacher on Twitter: “I’m thinking about what (Applied) Linguistics can tell us about (learning) computer programming languages.”
BEN: Okay, I need to ask why he has put “applied” and “learning” both in parentheses in this question, because I have a feeling it changes both of those things.
DANIEL: Well, when you talk about applied linguistics, oftentimes you’re talking about learning a language. Language school.
BEN: Oh, so like, like, practical use of linguistics, ie. learning languages.
DANIEL: But let’s take that completely out of the equation. Is it possible that linguistics can tell us something about computer languages?
BEN: Now, when he said learning computer languages, sorry, learning computer programming languages, I have to assume Anthony means learning how to write code in various different computer languages, programming languages that are available?
DANIEL: Yeah, sure. Have you done this?
BEN: Okay. This might be where we put my first tally on the fucking it side of the board, let’s see. The first thing that jumps out at me here is that programming languages are not languages. And that there is a huge disservice being done to people by using that word, languages, at the end of programming languages.
DANIEL: [CRINGE SOUNDS] Well, depends on your definition of language.
BEN: Okay. To put it another way, when you sit down to learn a applied linguistics-style language structure, say — I’m going to pull one out of thin air here, Hungarian —
DANIEL: Like, we’re talking natural languages, aren’t we?
BEN: Yep. Okay, so let’s say you want to learn Hungarian. No, you know what? I’m going to choose a non-Western one. What’s a cool, like… okay, the one I wouldn’t mind learning? Noongar, the Indigenous language of the part of the world where I live. That is a very, very different thing from me wanting to sit down and learn C++, one of the most widely used programming languages out there in software development. One of those things is not a constructed or designed system. It is an organic system or a grown system. I’m speaking of course, about Noongar.
And it isn’t concerned with anything, necessarily? Right? That’s part of the aspect of it being a organically sort of evolved and developed system is that it doesn’t have goals, it doesn’t have focuses, or like even really concerns. Whereas C++ as a designed system, does. It has goals, it’s an object-oriented language, for example, right? Like it, it has a very clear set of things that it is designed — because it was made by people over time — to do. And my brain says because of those differences, there’s probably not going to be a huge amount of, like, Noongar-intersecting-C++ bit of the Venn diagram, in terms of one being able to help the other. Yeah, that would be my thought.
DANIEL: That would be, that’s really good. And a similar point is, I guess, if I were being a linguist, I would say that natural languages like Noongar are extensive. You can use them to talk about literally anything you want to, even if some concepts you need to talk your way around with longer vocabulary. Whereas using C++, you can’t use that to express the fragrance of a rose, or talk about a summer’s day.
BEN: Right. And, and beyond that simply, like, they’re even more specific and sort of honed than that. There is a reason there are dozens and dozens of different computing languages — computer programming languages, sorry — because, you know, C++ and Python do different things. And, you know, XML does a really different thing from — I was going to say Java, but I actually think they do fairly similar things — XML does a really different thing from Ruby on Rails, or, you know, whatever. And so I think that specificity, by nature, means that they would end up being really different. Or to think about it another way, perhaps — and maybe this is the far more sort of, like poetic, and I was about to say elegant, but now I’m just way too big for my britches — the simpler way to phrase this is, even the most devoutly talented computer programmer doesn’t waft through existence, perceiving the world in code, right? Like, no one, no one is a exceptionally good Java coder, and wanders through sort of thinking about how all of their experiences would be expressed in Java. They just use their language inside their own head. Because that’s what language is for. And computer code is about, like, executing, like, goals and parameters. And that sort of thing.
DANIEL: What about similarities?
BEN: Okay, so what have we got there that’s similar? So both have grammar.
DANIEL: They’re syntactic. Yes, you have to get the symbols in the right order. And if you don’t, then it chucks an error.
BEN: Or if not chucks an error, does something else. Right? Like, like, order matters, it’s meaningful. There are rules, right? Which, I guess in tactical-ness is a kind of rule. But there’s rules beyond simply syntax. There’s vocabulary, right? You can’t, even coding languages like XML, which allow you to define your own tags, which is to say you can make as big a vocabulary as you like, still are based on a core vocabulary of symbols and words.
DANIEL: Yep, that’s right.
BEN: Another similarity is that users of those particular languages wrap that into their identity and become incredibly defensive about people who want to take swipes at that language. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Oh, that is interesting. Yes, yes, marker of identity, that is something we do. I was thinking also that when I’m learning a computer language, when I’m trying to use a computer language, I often do not remember how to do the simplest things. And so I have to use exemplars, lots of examples that I’ve done already, or that somebody else has made, and then I look at how they did it, and I go: oh okay, that’s how that function works. And that is not unhelpful when it comes to natural languages, you know, having a base of exchanges to look at and to copy. That’s not how all language works. But, you know, at the beginning levels, it can be helpful.
BEN: Okay. I think that’s… you’re answering Anthony’s sort of like the core of his question here, which is like: what aspects of natural — or, he sort of went the other direction, right? — like, what Applied Linguistics could tell us about picking up computer programming languages? And you’re kind of going the other way: What aspects of learning computer programming languages could you bring across to natural language learning?
DANIEL: Well, I think so. And I think there’s a reason for that. I mean, I think there’s another similarity: Computer languages are not really interactive. I mean, you’re interacting with a computer. But we use language to interact with humans. And I know we did that with computers. But the other thing is that we learn languages interactively. Well, I guess you know what, I guess that’s more of a similarity than anything else, because we learn through interacting with the computer.
BEN: Yep, well, I mean, learning a language and learning a computer programming language both feature tremendously high levels of trial and error.
DANIEL: True.
BEN: Yep. Okay, so yeah, actually there is a fair bit of overlap. But I guess that would just be overlap with learning any difficult thing, really?
DANIEL: Yeah, I do see a difference in the kind of interaction with a computer and the kind of interaction with a human.
BEN: Look, I do wonder, and like [CHUCKLES] I don’t know if this goes on the fuck-it or not-fuck-it side of the board. But this is definitely on the “Ben Ainslie talks about, like, super weird bespoke sci-fi post-human shit” board. If, as we progress sort of technologically into the future, and we give computer programming language development over to neural networks, and neural networks are the things that start and like deep learning other things that start creating the languages that we will then be able to use and employ to design things digitally, in computer, like in sort of like electronic environments. If then we would start to see significantly more of the sort of organic aspects of spoken human languages or, like, natural human languages start to appear in programming languages, because the thing that is giving rise to those programming languages will be more organic and more evolutionary in its sort of creation cycle.
DANIEL: Wow, that was… that was deep.
BEN: Yep, goes right up there on the weird “I read way too much sci-fi shit” bit. Just, just drawing a little notch on that one.
DANIEL: All right. Hey, thanks for that one, Anthony.
BEN: That was really cool. Hey, Anthony, any time you give me an opportunity to just like wax lyrical about some bizarre sci-fi crap, I’m so grateful. Thank you, mate.
DANIEL: Erica asks us, “Is there a word for when you change a morpheme to make an identifier an insult? For example: dumb-ocrats or conserv-a-thieves.” By the way, have you heard any interesting ones? My… I’ve heard Re-thug-licans a lot.
BEN: I… look, I’ll be honest, I have heard heaps and I don’t remember them because inherently I just — not because it’s objectively bad — but like my own purely subjective things, I hate these things. I hate them so much and when people use them, whether they agree with me or disagree with me, I always go: Oh, no, a dumb person!
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Right. Because partisan to you equals dumbness. I won’t disagree.
BEN: A bit of that, but mostly I think maybe… no, do you know what? It’s not that. It’s even more crass and base than that. It’s me going: there are much funnier ways to take digs. Like, this is “pun — right? Like — is the lowest form of humour” kind of thing. I’m like: ugh, gross, no, we can do better than this! Come on!
DANIEL: Okay. Well, can you think of a term for when people do that?
BEN: Umm. Okay, okay, let me… Okay, I’m looking at these boards, these bigger boards of, like, fucking it or getting it right. I’m going to call this… and I’m thinking an anti-prefix with a, some sort of -nym, like, it’s not an antonym? Because that’s just like an opposite of a thing. Like an ant… oh, an antmanteau.
DANIEL: Antmanteau?
BEN: Antmanteau. So an anti-portmanteau.
DANIEL: That’s pretty good. I, you know what, that made me think of maybe an ANTAGONYM.
BEN: Ooo, I like that! ANTAGONYM is better. No, we’re doing an ANTAGONYM for sure.
DANIEL: Well, I took a look in the research. I couldn’t seem to find anything that anybody had mentioned specifically on this, although Richard Coates of the University of the West of England, Bristol did an article on when people take a town name and change it. Like you call Boston Bean Town or calling Perth The Big Smoke, calling Melbourne The Big Smoke.
BEN: Mkay.
DANIEL: And sometimes you could… these could be called pejorated — okay, so the pejorated part means you’re making the name worse. A pejorated endonym.
BEN: Ooo, nuh. I’m still going with ANTAGONYM.
DANIEL: Let’s go with ANTAGONYM. That’s… I like it.
BEN: I like that a lot.
DANIEL: Okay. Well, thanks, Erica. There’s your answer.
BEN: ANTAGONYM. Straight from the, straight, hot off the press.
DANIEL: Now I gotta publish something where I study this, and then that’ll be a thing. Yeah. Hey, we’re really grateful to all of you for giving us your questions. We love answering them. Did you have fun, Ben?
BEN: I always love a Mailbag episode. They’re just my favorite. It’s so good.
DANIEL: Me too. So please get those to us any way you want. Facebook, Mastodon, Instagram. Oh, did I mention we’re on TikTok now?
BEN: Oh, dear.
DANIEL: I did a video. I did.
BEN: Oh, okay, and how has that been going for you, Daniel?
DANIEL: It’s got literally hundreds of views.
BEN: Oh, good.
DANIEL: So we’re becauselangpod everywhere. You can get questions to us those ways. And you can also send us an email hello@becauselanguage.com.
BEN: Thanks, everyone.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
BEN: [SINGS] It’s time for Word of the Week!
DANIEL: Word of the Week.
BEN: Yep. It’s a thing.
DANIEL: Do you recall the word of the year for 2016 when Trump got elected?
BEN: Uh, dumpster fire?
DANIEL: That’s… you remembered!
BEN: Holy fuck, does that go on the not-fuck-it side of the board?
DANIEL: You definitely did not fuck that one.
BEN: Oh, YES!!! Woahhhh… I’m feeling, I’m feeling gooood on that one! Yes!
DANIEL: You remembered something from a show. That’s impressive!
BEN: That is the most rare and precious of all of the jewels here on Because Language, when I can… holy shit, that was… Yup. That… Today’s a special day.
DANIEL: And yet 2020 seems…
BEN: So much worse. How did we not see how much worse it could get?
DANIEL: So much worse. Why is it worse than a dumpster fire? I’m thinking when you see a dumpster fire, it’s kind of contained. You can watch it safely.
BEN: Yes, yes.
DANIEL: But this? This? Nobody’s watching this year safely.
BEN: What about, what about a… well, no, that’s too Australian. I was about to say tip fire. So dump fire.
DANIEL: Oof, yeah, okay.
BEN: So the entire dump is now just burning.
DANIEL: Oh, man. And you know, we’ve been watching — to take it to the US — I think we try to take it easy on the US focus. But I think with the election coming up, I think… and with just the sheer events of the last few weeks — we’ve been watching the collapse of the Trump show. Collapse in the polls, the White House hosted a superspreader event for COVID-19.
BEN: It’s just, it honestly… The best op-ed I read on any of this stuff was one that was in the New York Times — I’ll send a link so we can chuck it up on the show notes. Which basically – this came by way of my wonderful partner, who is so much smarter than me in so many ways and gives me such great stuff to read – basically saying, much like gun violence, this whole Coronavirus thing, this like hundreds of thousands of people who have died in a country — it’s just gonna be the new normal, right? Like, everyone in America is just gonna be like: ~this is how being in a country works~. And just like gun violence, everywhere else in the world – bar a few examples – kind of goes: Well, I mean, you could also just not. That is an option that literally everyone else is taking, if you wanted to.
DANIEL: It doesn’t happen anywhere else. That is a really interesting analogy there. And I think it’s…
BEN: It hit me like a ton of bricks, right? Like, I just… it just hit me. It hit me in the same way Trump being elected hit me, in that it didn’t seem insane or far fetched to me at all, right? It hit me because it was so incredibly truthful in its potentiality.
DANIEL: Well, it comes from the same place. I was listening to Jon Lovett’s podcast, Lovett or Leave It, and he mentioned how, you know, Americans don’t try to avoid preventable death. In fact, they celebrate preventable death. They swim in preventable death. It’s something… they run to preventable death.
BEN: It’s… yeah, it’s deeply weird. So yeah, how do we possibly wrap that up into a word?
DANIEL: So our first Word of the Week is what I think might be a Word of the Year and it’s not just me. Monica Lewinsky on Twitter thinks that this might be the Word of the Year. By the way, Monica Lewinsky has turned out to be a really cool and prescient person coming out with good takes. So she’s worth following. SHITSHOW.
BEN: Yup. That, yeah, that fits. That is a boot that has been worn in. There are various sort of like dips and troughs for the bits of the foot that sit in there. I think SHITSHOW really fits quite comfortably.
DANIEL: It does. Nancy Friedman on the Strong Language blog points out that the very first instance comes from 1973.
BEN: Really, that young?
DANIEL: Yes, it’s very recent. SHIT goes way back…
BEN: I mean that’s a baby of a word. Just a [SCOTTISH ACCENT] wee bairn.
DANIEL: Well, and the thing is, it didn’t occur the first time in English. It occurred in German.
BEN: Oh, in the original German, sschiessen what?
DANIEL: I don’t know. Nobody I can… nobody that I know has found what the original German word is.
BEN: We’ve got a proper, like, Loch Ness Monster thing going on here.
DANIEL: We have. We know when it was. It was during the trial of a member of the Red Army Faction, also known as the Baader Meinhof gang.
BEN: Okay, okay.
DANIEL: Okay. After which the Baader Meinhof effect is named. Who said in German – this is an English translation – “there is that swine again, we don’t want this shitshow any longer.” But that’s as far as we go.
BEN: But we only have the translation. We don’t have the original German.
DANIEL: Yep, that’s right.
BEN: Fascinating, huh?
DANIEL: So if any of our listeners know, can figure out, maybe have access to the trial notes or something which I can’t find, let us know what the German is. A grateful world would thank you.
BEN: Very much so.
DANIEL: Next one.
BEN: Yerp.
DANIEL: In the discussion of Trump’s handling of getting his own COVID diagnosis, and then not taking steps to protect…
BEN: Are you just gonna say SHITSHOW again? It feels like it would fit really well.
DANIEL: Well, it was part of the shitshow. And… but first of all, I wondered what people call the superspreader event — that was a big term — superspreader event in the Rose Garden at the White House, when the Republicans were celebrating Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the US Supreme Court, and so many people ended up getting COVID from that thing. Some people were calling it The Red Wedding.
BEN: Oh nice, like that, yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah, some people are calling it The Rose Garden Massacre. Love it.
BEN: Oof.
DANIEL: Anyway, CAVALIER is a word that came up over and over again in a discussion of Trump’s lack of care on COVID.
It is a good good word. It’s a nice word. It makes you feel real, real clever, real literary, when you bust it out.
DANIEL: Comes from… does it remind you of any words that you know?
BEN: Well, I mean, it’s part of the name of a dog.
DANIEL: CAVALIER?
BEN: Yeah, King Charles Cavalier Spaniel.
DANIEL: Oh, did those dogs work with horses? Because that’s what the CAVAL- is.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So cavalier I believe is a role in the military, I thought and it was like, light infantry, I think. No, sorry. Light. Sorry. Light cavalry.
DANIEL: Yeah, the cavalry. That’s right. Comes from Italian cavalliere, the mounted soldier.
BEN: Okay. Hmm, let me just, because I would hate… Here’s an interesting thing about me, Daniel. I really, really like war-related stuff.
DANIEL: Uh-huh!
BEN: I know, I know. It surprises even me.
DANIEL: I think you might have said that before. You like Quora descriptions of war stuff.
BEN: Yeah, all that kind of thing. So I just want to really make sure…. I think it’s really telling by the way that when you Google CAVALIER, most of the things are puppies.
DANIEL: Oh, interesting. While you’re looking that up, let me just point out that this word starts out in the 1580s, a horseman. By the 1640s, we had it meaning gallant or knightly if you were being cavalier. But then by the 1650s, it meant easy or off hand, you just do it in an offhanded fashion. And by about 1817, we start seeing it mean the current meaning, which is sort of disdainful or careless.
BEN: There we go. I wonder if it’s because the knights themselves were haughty douches. I imagine it was.
DANIEL: It took a couple hundred years, but they got that way.
BEN: Okay, CAVALIER. I do, I have always loved the word CAVALIER when used to mean sort of like wanton disregard. Do we have any others?
DANIEL: One from Alexander at @Eliderad.
BEN: Great name. What a twitter handle, love it.
DANIEL: We know about QAnon.
BEN: Oh, god. Oh. Speaking of shitshows, if ever there was, like, a standard bearer for how fucked and insane 2020 has been, it has to be QAnon.
DANIEL: Yup. That there is a satanic cult of Democrats who are trying to drink the blood of babies. QAnon folks are responsible for trying to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. I mean…
BEN: If you ever think to yourself as a person, if you’re listening to me, going like: Oh, man, like, — if you are like that meme from Parks and Rec right now, and you’re going: I don’t know what QAnon is, and at this point I’m too afraid to ask. And, and, you feel like right now you feel too good about the state of the world — like, I wish I felt much shitter about humans and human civilisation than I do right now — please go and do a deep dive on QAnon. There’s some great roundup podcasts out there. Reply All did a couple of really awesome ones about QAnon. It explains all of it. And all I can say is the the sort of the blurb that would go on the back of the QAnon book is just like, just the shittest bits of humanity, basically just lying all the time about everything.
DANIEL: Alexander pointed us to a way in which QAnon is spreading, it’s spreading strongly on Instagram. There’s an episode of On The Media, the podcast…
BEN: Fantastic podcast, listen to it religiously.
DANIEL: It is really good. It’s known as Pastel QAnon because it’s spreading on Instagram from women who are sort of yoga instructors kind of New Age spiritual-but-not-religious types.
BEN: Oh, okay, like instant, instafamous influencer sort of like, okay, right.
DANIEL: Yeah. So how do we describe when conspiracy meets spirituality? And the word is CONSPIRITUALITY,
BEN: Isn’t it great? Even in the midst of just how fucked existence is, when a portmanteau just sort of presents itself perfectly formed like that?
DANIEL: That’s the name of a podcast too, so that might be worth checking out as well. Conspirituality. I guess the way I would explain this is that if you believe one kind of conspiracy nonsense, then you are very likely to believe other conspiracy nonsense. You know, your defenses are down and conspiracies say: Gates are open, come on in!
BEN: Well, I mean, I guess… that holds with how, sort of like, certain communities that you would expect to be the least likely to subscribe to certain conspiracies, such as, like, lefties being anti-vaxx, or whatever, which seems very normal now because we’ve been dealing with it for like two decades. But when that first started to happen, I was like, wait, what? Like, what? That’s not — that’s what crazy like dungeon-dwelling, like, secessionists who want to, like, get rid of money and think that we should just trade gold for everything — that’s their shit! Like, what are you doing with this ideology? And I think what you’ve just said is, like, is the mechanism by which that happens, right? Like, if you believe in crystals, you’ve probably ready to believe that, like, autism is caused by vaccines, or just other dumb shit like that.
DANIEL: Yeah. And the interesting thing about conspiracy theories is that people who believe them also believe in other multiply contradicting conspiracy theories. For example, people who are willing to say that they think that the Queen had Princess Diana killed… if they’re more likely to believe that, then they’re also more likely to believe that Princess Diana is alive somewhere.
BEN: Ah, right, gotcha, gotcha. Yep.
DANIEL: But I guess we all, I’m gonna be very generous. I’m gonna channel my inner skeptic and say, you know, we all want certain things, especially at this time.We all want control, we want a community, the feeling that we know what’s going on. Spiritual movements do this, and QAnon does this. So it’s no surprise that they’re merging.
BEN: Um. Yeah, it’s… you’re being much more generous than I feel. But I am going to try and ride your generosity.
DANIEL: Oh, look, don’t think of it as generous. I hate spirituality. I mean, I don’t care… I mean, one of the best things about leaving my religion of origin was that I got to quit pretending like spirituality was important. I know that some people dig it. And there’s a sense of awe and wonder at the universe. You know, I feel it when I look at language, but I don’t…. I think it’s spirituality is such a… it’s so amorphous and gross, and it means nothing. And, and I would just rather call it something else. So no, I don’t want to be generous towards spirituality at all.
BEN: Let’s apply a means test to spirituality.
DANIEL: A means test?
BEN: A means test, right?
DANIEL: How so?
BEN: So like, if you are overcome… so there’s a bunch of really wonderful people in the world that I know who are just genuinely overcome by the magnificence of existence. Right?
DANIEL: It’s great.
BEN: And so that, often for a lot of people, ends up manifesting as a form of spirituality. And that can be as benign as just thinking that human connection is the single and most important sort of like aspect of all existence, right? I know people for whom human connection is essentially their god.
DANIEL: Yep, that’s great. Cool.
BEN: And I would say that that passes the spirituality means test, right? Like, the kind of like: does your spirituality make any other human being’s existence any more fucked up than it currently is? If the answer is no, go for broke, right? Like, your spirituality is awesome. I fully endorse you being spiritual as all get out about that thing.
DANIEL: Yep. That’s the good kind.
BEN: Yep. And if you don’t pass the means test — ie, I don’t think my kids should be vaccinated because I’m scared what it’ll do to him — what is the outcome of that sort of spirituality? Lots of people getting sick. Well, sorry, you don’t pass the means test.
DANIEL: Yeah, that sounds good. I mean, I’ve come around to the idea that religious practice, it’s… You said it once on the show: Well, I don’t think it’s worthwhile, but you do, and, you know, I got a lot of hobbies that people think are worthless. So I’m going to exercise a bit of forbearance. You know, as long as harm isn’t being done.
BEN: Yes. Do no harm and we good.
DANIEL: We good.
BEN: Yep. And by the way, harm is like: I think the things that I believe should be laws, that’s still totally harm. Super harm.
DANIEL: There’s a lot of ways to define harm. Well, SHITSHOW, CAVALIER, and CONSPIRITUALITY: our Words of the Week.
BEN: Love it.
DANIEL: There’s a comment from Javier. This is about our OzCLO episode. And I said it. “In your latest episode, one of you said that Catalan isn’t official anywhere.” I did say that. Javier says, “it’s co-official in three Spanish regions, and official in the independent tiny state of Andorra.” Yep, fair cop. And I realise that comments like that can start wars.
BEN: Oh, Daniel! Yes! Yeah, I don’t remember thinking at the time. But I think we all should have known, when you say anything about a minority language like Catalan, which is associated with any kind of independence movement, you better be like: Ooh pump the brakes, son.
DANIEL: Yeah. Okay. Well, you know what? I’ll defend it by saying: I said a lot of wrong stuff over that quiz night table, okay? [LAUGHTER] During a real show, I check things for accuracy. But if you get me on a quiz night table, all bets are off. Sorry about that to any Catalan speakers. Catalan’s awesome and official in certain places.
BEN: Excellent.
[OUTRO MUSIC]
DANIEL: Big thanks to everyone for listening to this episode. You Patrons are helping us by supporting the show and helping us pay for transcripts and putting a little bit of petrol money in the pockets of our interviewees. So, thanks very much. You can get in touch with us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon, and Patreon. We are becauselangpod in all of those places and you can send us a cheerful email: hello@becauselanguage.com.
BEN: And a special thanks this week — and this is going directly into the ears of all of the people I’m about to read — so thanks you guys goes to Termy, Chris B, Lyssa, The Major, Chris L, Matt, Whitney, Damien, Helen, Bob, Jack, Christelle, Elías, Michael, Larry, Kitty, Lord Mortis, Binh, Kristofer, Dustin, Andy, Maj, Nigel, Kate, Jen, Nasrin, Ayesha, Emma, Andrew and Nikoli.
DANIEL: Our music comes from Drew Krapljanov and he’s in a couple of really great bands, Ryan Beno and Dideon’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
[MUSIC ENDS]
BEN: Boom! Mic drop. Okay, cool. Let’s go cook some dinner.