On this momentous episode, we look back on all the words that made our year. Like, all of them. Including some from other languages.
Many words were discussed in the context of the annual vote of the American Dialect Society, but the greatest were voted on by you, the listeners. Ready? Let’s talk words!
Big thanks to Hilary Krieger for having a chat.
Listen to this episode
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Cleveland’s Baseball Team Will Drop Its Indians Team Name
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/13/sports/baseball/cleveland-indians-baseball-name-change.html
Cleveland Indians to change team name; here are some of the best options, including Spiders and Crows
https://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/cleveland-indians-to-change-team-name-here-are-some-of-the-best-options-including-spiders-and-crows/
What you need to know about the Cleveland Indians’ name change
https://www.espn.com.au/mlb/story/_/id/30516138/what-need-know-cleveland-indians-name-change
Blaseball, an absurd and terrifying baseball simulation, is 2020’s best sport
https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/blaseball-video-game-baseball-fan-art-simulation
Non-Māori-speaking New Zealanders have a Māori proto-lexicon | Scientific Reports
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-78810-4
The Casketeers: how two Māori funeral directors became beloved Netflix stars | Television | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/jan/26/the-casketeers-how-two-maori-funeral-directors-became-beloved-netflix-stars
To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology
https://news.mit.edu/2020/brain-reading-computer-code-1215
Scratch – Imagine, Program, Share
https://scratch.mit.edu/
Google widely criticized after parting ways with Timnit Gebru, a leading voice in AI ethics – CNN
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/12/04/tech/google-timnit-gebru-ai-ethics-leaves/index.html
We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google. Here’s what it says.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-ai-ethics-research-paper-forced-out-timnit-gebru/
Ousted Black Google Researcher: ‘They Wanted To Have My Presence, But Not Me Exactly’
https://www.npr.org/2020/12/17/947719354/ousted-black-google-researcher-they-wanted-to-have-my-presence-but-not-me-exactl
Is There a Doctor in the White House? Not if You Need an M.D. | Internet Archive, not WSJ
https://web.archive.org/web/20201213050954/https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-there-a-doctor-in-the-white-house-not-if-you-need-an-m-d-11607727380
As critics blast a ‘misogynistic’ op-ed on Jill Biden, a Wall Street Journal editor blames ‘cancel culture’
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/12/14/dr-jill-biden-wsj-oped/
Zodiac killer code cracked by Australian mathematician Sam Blake more than 50 years after first murder
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-12/zodiac-killer-code-cracked-by-australian-mathematician/12977342
The Zodiac Ciphers: Messages from a Murderer – Wonders & Marvels
https://www.wondersandmarvels.com/2013/02/the-zodiac-killer-ciphers.html
ELI5: Why are the Zodiac Killer’s notes so hard to decipher? : explainlikeimfive
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/61gvsw/eli5_why_are_the_zodiac_killers_notes_so_hard_to/
Memories of Murder (2003) – IMDb
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0353969/
BLABRECS
https://mkremins.github.io/blabrecs/
Collins’
‘Lockdown’ is named Collins’ word of the year for 2020 (obviously) – CNN
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/10/uk/collins-word-of-the-year-2020-lockdown-scli-intl/index.html
Australian National Dictionary Centre
‘Iso’ named Australia’s 2020 word of the year, beating coronavirus-related terms ‘bubble’ and ‘COVID normal’
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-11-17/iso-is-the-australian-word-of-the-year-dictionary/12890260
Cambridge
‘Quarantine’ is Cambridge Dictionary’s Word of the Year 2020 – Language Magazine
https://www.languagemagazine.com/2020/11/24/quarantine-is-cambridge-dictionarys-word-of-the-year-2020/
Macquarie
COVIDIOT and Karen among Macquarie Dictionary’s Words of the Year | The Feed
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/the-feed/covidiot-and-karen-among-macquarie-dictionary-s-words-of-the-year
Merriam-Webster
Word of the Year 2020 | Pandemic | Merriam-Webster
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/word-of-the-year
Oxford
Oxford Word of the Year 2020 | Oxford Languages
https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/2020/
Column: Don’t be a ‘pandejo.’ Take the pandemic seriously
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-12-03/coronavirus-covid-latinos-pandejo
Why ‘sanmitsu’ is Japan’s word of the year | The Independent
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/japan-buzzword-sanmitsu-coronavirus-b1764982.html
Viral hit: ‘Sanmitsu’ — the ‘Three Cs’ — declared Japan’s buzzword of 2020 | The Japan Times
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/12/01/national/sanmitsu-japan-buzzword/
The “San Mitsu” Three Cs Take the New Phrase of the Year Throne | Nippon.com
https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/c03824/
‘Mitsu’: Kanji of the year sums up pandemic in Japan 2020 | The Japan Times
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/12/14/national/mitsu-kanji-of-year-coronavirus/
‘Corona pandemic’ named Germany’s word of the year
https://www.dw.com/en/corona-pandemic-named-germanys-word-of-the-year/a-55769588
‘Lost’ is Germany’s 2020 youth word of the year
https://www.dw.com/en/lost-is-germanys-2020-youth-word-of-the-year/a-55283354
F2020 by Avenue Beat
(PDF) In First-Ever Virtual Vote, American Dialect Society Selects “Covid” as 2020 Word of the Year
https://www.americandialect.org/wp-content/uploads/2020-Word-of-the-Year-PRESS-RELEASE.pdf
‘Defund the police’: What it means and how it would work
https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/what-it-means-to-defund-the-police-and-how-it-would-work/12336014
How Americans Feel About ‘Defunding The Police’
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americans-like-the-ideas-behind-defunding-the-police-more-than-the-slogan-itself/
Poggers Meaning: What Is Poggers And When Should You Use It? – 7 E S L
https://7esl.com/poggers/
POGGERS | Know Your Meme
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/poggers
The NRA got all excited about ‘freedom seeds’ and this takedown hit the bullseye – The Poke
https://www.thepoke.co.uk/2020/09/26/nra-takedown-hit-bullseye/
NRA Happy So Many Americans Buying ‘Freedom Seeds.’ Bullets. They Mean Bullets. – Wonkette
https://www.wonkette.com/nra-happy-so-many-americans-buying-freedom-seeds-bullets-they-mean-bullets
FANTI: “BIPOC” Kinda Sucks
https://maximumfun.org/episodes/fanti/bipoc-kinda-sucks/
Orbisculate
https://www.orbisculate.com
Is ‘orbisculate’ a word? The late Neil Krieger’s children want it to be.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/12/02/lifestyle/is-orbisculate-word-late-neil-kriegers-children-want-it-be/
Orbisculate on Twitter
https://twitter.com/orbisculate?lang=en
Our Facebook WotWotY thread
https://www.facebook.com/becauselangpod/posts/4235566849803408
Our Twitter WotWotY thread
https://twitter.com/becauselangpod/status/1336176114465587201
EP2 by Didion’s Bible
https://didionsbible.bandcamp.com/album/ep2
Transcript
HEDVIG: I was like: Oh, I’m going to be recording pod in the morning. And my brother was like: Oh, I listened to it. That guy is very funny. He speaks very well. And I was like: Which one?
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: That guy.
HEDVIG: And he was like: Not sure. And then he said, “the English one”. So I think he’s thinking… he’s doing the thing that I did, which is correctly adjusting that Australia is just part of England.
[BEN LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Linguistically speaking, it’s not untrue.
BEN: I’m sorry. I’m like, I’m flattered. And at the same time, my Australian, like, chip on my shoulder is like: We’re not bloody part of England! What’s going on here?
[INTRO MUSIC]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to this episode of Because Language, a podcast about linguistics, the science of language. My name’s Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team! The one who helps to make the season bright, it’s Hedvig Skirgård.
HEDVIG: Oh, is that what I do? Lovely. Thank you!
DANIEL: Yup!
BEN: And?
DANIEL: And Santa’s little helper, Ben Ainslie.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: I 100 percent identify with that character of The Simpsons, above any other character in The Simpsons. So I think I will take that, a hundred percent.
HEDVIG: Oh, the dog!
DANIEL: That is particularly what I was thinking of, the dog.
BEN: The dog. Santa’s Little Helper is the insanely poorly behaved dog that everyone just loves anyway. And if ever there was a standard bearer for my persona, that is it.
DANIEL: That became the dominant meaning in my mind, as soon as I thought of it for you. Our previous episode was a patron-only Mailbag episode. We answered lots and lots of questions, and it was really fun.
HEDVIG: It was!
DANIEL: So if you want to listen to that the moment it comes out, just head over to patreon.com/becauselangpod and you can support the show and get some bonus goodies besides. Ooh! The postcards are almost here, and I’ll be mailing those out just as soon as they come, along with lots of stickers. So that’ll be fun for folks.
HEDVIG: Yay!
BEN: The last postcard that I got from the podcast was an invitation to Hedvig’s wedding, so it should be at least as good as that.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] Which got cancelled!
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Which got cancelled. That’s so sad.
BEN: Cancel culture rears its ugly head again. Man, we’ve got a huge show!
HEDVIG: It is big, it’s the end of the year.
DANIEL: Yeah. The thing about this, this episode is that it’s like, it’s like Words of the Week just like the whole time, this whole episode.
BEN: It is my living hell.
HEDVIG: Is it though? Maybe there’s something strange that you actually like it when it’s, like, scaled up?
BEN: Yeah. Maybe it’s… maybe… well, maybe it’s become like a kink. Right? It’s so bad that I just want more.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: It’s like tit clamps for your ears.
BEN: Exactly. Or, more for my brain. Tit clamps for my brain. Tit clamps sounds bad, by the way. Nipple clamps. Nipple clamps for my brain. Tit clamps just… I don’t know what’s going on there. That sounds like you’re clamping small varieties of birds. I’m not on board.
DANIEL: Okay, I won’t. I won’t do that.
HEDVIG: I had to think about what you guys are talking about. I’m not sure I prefer either. But what… is that a common expression for something being bad?
BEN: No, it’s something that is kinky.
HEDVIG: Oh yes. So it is. Yes. Sorry. Yes indeed.
BEN: [LAUGHS] It’s just… the amount of PhD-ness with which you just, like, resolved that situation. [PRETENTIOUS VOICE] “Oh yes. So it is. So it is.” [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I should say, we should let all of our listeners know, like I mean… so Ben and Daniel are in Perth. They’re in Australia. We’re about eight hours apart, roughly? And I mean, some people might say, especially my co-hosts would say that 8am is not early. In fact, when I woke up and went down to the living room, my niece was like: I’ve slept so long. I just woke up! And I’m… my brain, it takes a while. I’m going to have some coffee and be quiet now.
BEN: All right. Well, Daniel and I will do the heavy lifting during the news, and perhaps by the words stage, Hedvig will have spun up to speed.
HEDVIG: Thank you.
DANIEL: There we go. Well, let’s get into it, Ben. Wow. There’s a lot of news. We’re going to pour it all.
BEN: Lay it on me. I’m ready. Let’s go. Speed round, bam.
DANIEL: Yes, speed round, indeed. So, first of all, in racist brand names no longer being racist…
BEN: Oh man, we need, we need a jingle for this, by the way. We absolutely need to come up with it. We’ve done THAT many stories on it. Okay, who have we dropped this week? We’ve done the bad candy about the colour of a person’s skin. We’ve done the bad candy about little Black children. We’ve done the cheese. What are we up to now?
DANIEL: We talked about the Washington football team.
BEN: Yes, absolutely.
HEDVIG: Mhm mhm.
DANIEL: Now we’re going to talk about the Cleveland baseball team.
BEN: Ahh, formerly known as the Indians.
DANIEL: The Indians. And they had that really gross logo as well of the chief guy, the grinning chief.
BEN: Didn’t the — and I apologise for using the word, they’ve dropped it now – formerly known as the Redskins, they also had a chief, like a brave iconography?
DANIEL: Yeah, you can see the feather, the headdress.
BEN: Yeah, both have like a war-bonneted, sort of brave warrior.
DANIEL: Got to say, though, the old chief from the Cleveland team was particularly ridiculous and offensive. This grinning cartoon, it was really… yeah.
BEN: Yeah, I remember. Yeah, it is. It’s gross.
DANIEL: They dropped that about five years ago, I think. I think. But they won’t be that team name anymore. According to a few people familiar with the matter, The New York Times reports that they plan to keep the Indians name and uniforms for the 2021 season. Is there a… is there a baseball season now? Is baseball doing its thing?
HEDVIG: Surely not.
BEN: Put your hand up if you know anything about sport. [HANDS DROP TO THE TABLE] [LAUGHS] We are the worst trio!
HEDVIG: I listen to a football podcast because I married a Brit and I felt like I had to read up.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Let’s just make up facts about sport, and just pretend that they’re real.
BEN: Well, from what I understand, the Cleveland formerly known as Indians, have scrimmaged the most touchdown points on the trapezoid of baseball of all of the many teams in the playoffs.
DANIEL: Well, the good thing about baseball is that on the trapezoid, you can actually position each of the twenty one players on the team pretty far apart, because the field is about the size of a cricket… diamond.
BEN: Ah, mhm. That makes a lot of sense. So they, we presume there will be some sort of altered baseball season next year because there’s too much money being lost not to be. And they intend to keep the name and the uniforms for the next season?
DANIEL: And then drop it in 2022.
HEDVIG: Have you guys heard of blaseball?
BEN: Blaseball?
HEDVIG: Mmm.
BEN: With a B? Blaseball?
HEDVIG: Blaseball.
DANIEL: Blaze-ball…
BEN: I have not heard of blaseball. Wait, do you just get super high and play baseball?
DANIEL: Or do they set you on fire?
HEDVIG: No, no, well potentially… it’s a fantasy. It’s a game where you bet with your friends on various fantasy-themed teams, but it’s all like ridiculous. And it’s like baseball, but like bizarre rules.
DANIEL: Where’s the L coming from? I’m not getting the etymology here.
HEDVIG: I think it is! I think Ben was on the right track.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Okay, okay.
BEN: Yes!
DANIEL: Blaze it up!
BEN: 420-ball, dudes!
HEDVIG: And anyway, it’s very silly. Their Twitter account is very, very referenced, humour-heavy and very silly. And you vote for things like, at the end of each season, you vote if you’re going to open the forbidden tomb. And when you do… it’s bizarre.
BEN: This is… this is the kind of sport I can get on board with.
HEDVIG: Apparently you’re supposed to follow the New York Millennials, is what I heard.
DANIEL: Okay, very good. All right, let’s go on to our next news item.
BEN: Yes.
DANIEL: Hedvig, you brought this one about Māori and non-Māori speakers.
HEDVIG: Yes. So did you know that not speaking a language is not an excuse for not knowing something about said language?
DANIEL: I would heartily agree!
BEN: I mean, I would, I would say that we all know some stuff about languages that we don’t speak. Right?
DANIEL: I know more about Noongar now that I did that transcript for Episode 11. Phwoar! I’m quite well versed now.
BEN: Okay, so what brought this to our table, though? Because I assume you don’t mean three nerds on a linguistics podcast, but just like non-people like that?
HEDVIG: No, I don’t mean that. So this is a new paper in Nature. They’re mostly from New Zealand Institute of Language and Brain. And there’s one, two, three, four, five, six of them. So there’s a lot of them.
BEN: Six authors?
HEDVIG: Six authors who wrote a Nature paper, where they found that non-Māori speakers in New Zealand have knowledge of Māori phonotactics.
DANIEL: Phonotactics.
BEN: Yeah, catch me up on that one, as the dummy lay-person.
HEDVIG: So they have sort of subconsciously acquired knowledge about what kind of sounds you can combine to make a Māori word and what sound combinations don’t occur in Māori.
BEN: Oh, okay. So if you were to go to non-Māori speakers in New Zealand, presumably in the North Island in particular, where Māori is far more widely, sort of like spoken and on display…
HEDVIG: Mostly, yeah.
BEN: …if you were to ask one of them, is this a Māori word and it wasn’t, they’d be like, nah, that doesn’t seem right.
HEDVIG: Exactly. So they are able to distinguish, and they sort of, through just bathing around in some Māori words here and there, they’re picking up on some subtle cues about what is reasonable and what isn’t. And that’s quite interesting.
BEN: I love that metaphor, by the way. Like, if you are a non-Māori speaker in New Zealand, you’re just constantly being bathed in Māori.
DANIEL: Swimming in it.
BEN: That’s wonderful.
DANIEL: You’re soaking in it.
HEDVIG: If you also want to be bathed in Māori, I can really recommend the show on Netflix called The Casketeers.
BEN: The Casketeers? All right, I’m on board.
HEDVIG: It is about a Māori funeral service home.
BEN: Oh, that sounds fun, I like that.
HEDVIG: And they mainly have Māori and Pacifica clients, I believe is the term? I’m not sure.
BEN: Okay, so what’s happening right now Hedvig, is you need to make a recommendation for pop culture artefact for every single thing that we talk about on the show, because you’re like three for three so far.
DANIEL: Oh, no.
HEDVIG: Oh no, sorry everyone.
BEN: No, but that is really interesting, though.
HEDVIG: But it is also, the subtitles on Netflix, when they speak Māori, they just, they don’t translate it. They just say the Māori words. And sometimes it’s like quite a lot, and it’s just like codeswitched into the sentences, and Ste looks at me and I’m like: Well, based on Samoan I think it’s this, I don’t really know. Anyway! And it doesn’t stop the flow of the show, which I think is what all these non-Māori speakers in Aotearoa are experiencing. They are, like, just getting bathed in Māori words, and they get to figure out through context and they probably do. And they… yeah, they acquire some skills in it. It’s pretty cool.
BEN: That’s really wonderful.
DANIEL: Yeah, it’s really cool work because I’ve often wondered, you know, how much are we absorbing really? And the answer here is: yeah, we seem to be absorbing a lot of things about Māori, especially the phonotactics, like what kind of sounds make a legal word in Māori and which ones don’t.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: And I think this is a nice piece of evidence in the dossier of — not that there needs to be evidence like this, in my opinion, but it’s nice to have it there so that when someone goes: [MOCKING VOICE] Oh, I don’t understand why we keep changing all these street names and place names and like, why is there just like all of this ~Indigenous language~ all over the place? But it’s like: well, actually it has a really significant impact in not only speakers of the language, but non-speakers of the language as well. Sucked in. We mind-virused you. We got an idea and we put it in your head against your will. Sucked in!
HEDVIG: I wonder if it’s possible to do something similar… I wonder if the same is true for… so most people in Australia live in places where Pama–Nyungan Australian Indigenous languages are spoken, and I don’t know a lot about Pama–Nyungan languages, but I’ve seen a few examples of synthesis here and there. And they seem to share some phonotactic, so some sound combination features. So I wonder if… it’s obviously not true that non-speakers of Indigenous Australian languages would, like… there’s not one language they can relate to, as it is in Aotearoa, but there are some commonalities. I wonder if it could be a little bit true.
BEN: I’d say so. Maybe not to the level of being able to sort of clearly identify what is and is not a word in the sort of the local Indigenous language of whatever area you happen to be in. But certainly, I think most Australians, even if they don’t have the language for it, would probably be able to broadly identify what sorts of things make words or sounds sound a bit Indigenous? Right? So like, we’ve spoken about it on the show before, right? Like, if you move the tip of the tongue back towards the little curvy bit of the mouth on your Ns and on your Ds, that significantly sort of like drags those phonemes into a more sort of Australian Indigenous language sort of place, right? Like [ɳ] and [ɖ].
DANIEL: Now, while it seems true from this work that exposure to a natural language makes our brain do some preparation — do some background work, putting things together — is that also true for programming languages? Do our brains handle them like natural languages?
BEN: I’m going to guess no. I’m putting my thing right out on the table, straight out and saying no.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: I wonder, though, because… so in some programming languages they like to talk about, like, predicates and arguments and stuff.
DANIEL: True, true.
HEDVIG: And conceptually I like it, but I don’t think it makes sense. But maybe not programming languages. But I wonder if there’s something about programming styles. I like programming in R and there are people who have different styles. And usually, it was called the tidyverse style, but every now and then I get to read a script by someone who’s written in the base style, and that is, like, different. Those two things are like different languages, like not the programming language itself, just people’s school of writing.
BEN: Yeah. I would have gone with: programming languages just like, they aren’t languages. Like, it’s just one of those unfortunate things that people have called them languages. And that’s not at all what they are from a linguistic standpoint, right? They are tools. They are tool kits, and they are at best — and I’m not taking a dig against programmers because they do crazy good work and it’s so hard and so impressive — but they’re sets of instructions. Right? Like, at the very most base level, you’re not speaking a language. You are writing out an instruction set in the jargon of that particular tool. Correct?
HEDVIG: But isn’t human language an instruction set for the kinds of thoughts that I want to appear in your head?
BEN: Ohhhh, I guess so? But I don’t know if you are employing coded instructions in the way that computer coded instructions function, i.e., unfortunately, humans are just just such disgusting, messy, unpredictable creatures that like… I mean, it would be great. I would love it if we could all just speak Python to each other and have like no, like, loss of meaning whatsoever. Wow! Wouldn’t that be great?
HEDVIG: I think what I’m saying is, is it a question of difference in kind? Or a difference in scale?
BEN: Okay, okay. Well, let’s hear what Daniel has to say.
DANIEL: Well, that’s what this work was intended to do. This story was recommended to us by Jonathan on Twitter. It comes from Evelina Fedorenko of MIT, and a team. It appears in the journal e-Life. They took a look at Python and Scratch Junior, which is a programming language for kids.
HEDVIG: Oh, yay! Scratch is really cute.
DANIEL: Is it? Should I get my kids onto it when they get older?
HEDVIG: Yes, yes, yes, yes. If nothing else, they can, like, push a button and hear themselves say “poop” and they can push it again.
DANIEL: Ohhhh!
BEN: Brilliant.
HEDVIG: If they’re not interested in programming, it’ll still entertain them for a while.
DANIEL: Well, they got programmers to sit very still in a whirling tube of death, also known as the fMRI machine. They showed them snippets of code and asked them to figure out what the code would do. And it turns out that the parts of the brain that are commonly associated with language processing just didn’t light up at all. Instead, it seems that the parts that lit up were the parts that…
BEN: Oooh!!! Let me guess. Let me guess. Let me guess!
HEDVIG: Ben has turned into a monkey.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: The bits that lit up are the bits that are involved with planning and executing somewhat complicated plans.
HEDVIG: I was going to guess something with space, spatial awareness.
DANIEL: Spatial awareness. Okay, the part that lit up was the multiple demand network. It’s responsible for our ability to perform mental tasks, things that are challenging…
HEDVIG: Sounds like Ben’s.
DANIEL: …almost like sets of instructions!
BEN: Mmm. Mmm, Mmm.
HEDVIG: I have to say…
BEN: [SINGING] I love being right.
HEDVIG: There are some kinds of writing and programming that I can do like casually with some music or something in the background. But then there comes a point when my brain just like goes no, and I have to pause the music and everything and just be like, no, I can’t… it’s thinking time!
DANIEL: Yeah. Same.
BEN: Same. I’m exactly the same way.
HEDVIG: You just got to do the thing. Yeah. Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay. So maybe this is one reason why when people try to say: oh, instead of doing foreign languages, let’s get code to count as a foreign language — yeah, it’s not really the same.
BEN: No, no, no. Which doesn’t mean it’s bad. It just means it’s different.
HEDVIG: It’s like when people say that maths is a language.
DANIEL: It’s a different task.
HEDVIG: Yeah. It’s fine.
DANIEL: Okay, keeping going with our computational theme. The Zodiac Killer.
BEN: [GASP] I read about this!
DANIEL: The cipher that the Zodiac Killer used fifty years ago, taunting newspaper folks. One of the major messages has been cracked. What did you read, Ben?
BEN: I’m so excited about this, but Hedvig, you go.
HEDVIG: Wait, okay, I feel like… so my introduction to the Zodiac Killer… first of all, I have opinions about being fascinated by serial killers.
DANIEL: I don’t like it. I don’t like true crime.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I find true crime a bit…
BEN: The only, the only thing I find fascinating about this is, much like when we eventually find MH370, the aspect of this that was fascinating was the fact that this thing had remained un-deciphered — this particular coda. That’s the bit that are really, really interesting.
HEDVIG: That’s fair.
BEN: And I agree with you. I don’t… I don’t think that sort of glorifying serial killers necessarily… Having said that, I did really like Mindhunter the series and I really like David Fincher’s work. So maybe I’m just dumb and wrong.
HEDVIG: It is fascinating, and I prefer it being fascinating in fiction than in true crime, certainly. Like I like… But I’m into like Poirot more than…
BEN: Yeah, Agatha Christie.
HEDVIG: What I was going to say was, can I act the dumb audience surrogate and say: who’s the serial killer? And why did he write in cyphers?
BEN: So…
DANIEL: It’s Ted Cruz.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: That’s one of the few things I know about him, is that it’s a meme that it’s Ted Cruz, which. Hmm. Yeah.
BEN: So there was a string of murders in the Bay Area of the West Coast of America in the ’70s, sorry, ’60s and ’70s. And during this spate, a series of coded pictographic messages have… were sent into the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper. And they have kind of sat in like the…
HEDVIG: Were they published at the time?
BEN: Yes. Yeah. So they have been openly known to the world for 50 years now. And they have sat in this big bin of, like, unsolved mysteries, Right? Like a completely uncracked code. And just recently, it was actually finally cracked by a team here in Australia, at a mathematician at the University of Melbourne whose name is… Daniel?
DANIEL: Sam Blake.
BEN: And I think he was just a dude, as in like as in… he’s obviously more than just a dude. He’s clearly a very intelligent man, but he’s a person for whom this was just one of those things that was like a bit of a mind splinter that he just wanted to keep chipping away at.
DANIEL: Yeah, it was a tough message to decipher because the person who called himself Zodiac used 59 symbols instead of 26. And it appears that he used… one of the messages has already been deciphered. And that message, that earlier message, he used seven different symbols for the letter E, and he used four different symbols for I. There was triangle, P, U, backward K, in that order and then just keep… and then keep cycling through.
BEN: And so I think one of the things that made this really difficult to crack wasn’t so much that whoever this awful, awful person was, was like a genius, but like: it’s a lot easier to fuck something up than to fix it. Right? Like, it’s a lot easier to tear a house down than to build a house. So if you want to just garble up something as much as possible, it’s actually not that challenging to do that, but to ungarble that is incredibly challenging. Right? And so I think what a lot of cryptographers were looking at with this work was: how do you rebuild the house that has had a wrecking ball taken to it, using only the rubble that’s left behind? That’s sort of the task that they were facing. And this guy managed to do it somehow.
DANIEL: There was some really complicated software using about 650,000 different directions, because it was in a grid, so, you know, do you go up? do you go down, you go around — all kinds of different reading orders. Finally, the term GAS CHAMBER came up in the software, and so they followed that lead, twiddled some things, and got the whole message. And it’s pretty creepy.
HEDVIG: Wow. So they were sure from the start that it was some sort of replacement script?
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: You know, it’s one of those things, it could be gibberish, but it turned out not to be.
HEDVIG: I had to search… last night just before I pressed send, I had to look up a page number and search a PDF that had been OCRed, but the OCR was all, like, gobbledygook. So it was, like, at-symbol and whatever. So I was like: okay, well, I see the text, and I see what my OCR thinks it is. I’m going… I’m going to try and cipher it!
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: So I was like: I need a B, and I found a B, and I was like: Okay, B is apparently capital C, okay. I need a U — oh, apparently all vowels are colon. Okay, And I, like, built the word that I was looking for, and I searched and I found it!
DANIEL: Wow.
BEN: Wow.
DANIEL: Why weren’t you on this?!
BEN: Yeah, seriously! Clearly, the Zodiac cryptographers needed Hedvig Skirgård to just come in and just like sort their shit out!
DANIEL: Do you know the funniest thing about this, though? This is awful. And I hate that this is funny. But when this came out, when the story came out that the Zodiac killer’s cypher had been decrypted, Ted Cruz – and this is real – tweeted: “Uh oh.”
HEDVIG: No, no. He didn’t! Oh, god.
DANIEL: He did. Genuine. I hate it when horrible people have a sense of humor, but I did get a chuckle out of that.
BEN: Just to further the pop culture recommendations, for lack of a better phrase, along with each story, obviously, there is a biopic that has been made about the Zodiac Killer called Zodiac, directed by David Fincher, who is a very good director.
DANIEL: 2007, wasn’t it?
BEN: Yup, and I have not a bad word to say against his work. He does excellent work. However, there is a better serial killer true crime biopic out there. It’s a Korean film. It’s called Memories of a Murder, and it is one of the best movies ever made. And Hedvig, I think you would be interested in checking it out because it doesn’t… It in no way sort of glorifies or titillates or anything like that. It really genuinely conveys how awful the sort of like the pervasive fear that such a sort of creature generates in a community. It’s really, really powerful movie making. So if anyone wants to: Memories of a Murder. Also, just spectacular filmmaking. It was Bong Joon-Ho’s breakout film. It wasn’t his first film, but it was his breakout film.
HEDVIG: Interesting.
DANIEL: Okay. I’ll check that out.
BEN: So, way before Snowpiercer and all that kind of stuff, and way more restrained, just really, really impressively… Like, it’s amazing how — and I’ll wank on about movies like all day — but it was incredible when you just see a director who’s just, like, got their voice, their visual voice, it’s just like there and like no further development required. Anyway!
DANIEL: Wow. Well, let’s go on. This one is about Timnit Gebru. We already know that there is bias in AI. We’ve seen loads of examples because, of course, it’s just pulling data from us, and the data contains all of our biases and unfairnesses. And so our algorithms replicate that. And so this is the topic for AI ethicists, including prominent AI ethicist Timnit Gebru, who was a part of Google, co-founder of the group Black in AI. Gebru had written a paper about the problems involved in Google software and in the industry more generally. Here are the details as I have them: Google asked Gebru to retract a paper that had been submitted to a conference. It was the conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. And then… so accounts differ after this. Gebru says that she was informed that she no longer worked at the company, that she’d been fired.
BEN: As in, before she said yes or no to retracting the thing? Like they said, you need to retract this publication. And then also you’re fired?
DANIEL: And you’re done. There was a public outcry about this and then came the notice. But then a Google spokesperson said that Gebru had responded with demands that Google had to meet if she were to remain, that she would leave if those demands weren’t met. And then Google just sort of failed to do anything about it. And the end date came and went.
HEDVIG: It sounds fair, though, that if your job, if you get hired by Google to take a job that requires them listening to you and changing, I don’t think making demands is that weird. Am I making sense? Yeah, if you’re brought on as a consultant.
BEN: Yeah, if you’re brought on as a consultant.
HEDVIG: Yes. Oh god, we said almost the same sentence. Creepy!
BEN: But it’s true! Like, you… But I mean, the difficult thing here is if you are brought on as a consultant — and I think nearly any consultant in business will tell you this — a whole bunch of the time, you will make a bunch of recommendations that they don’t listen to, right? Like, in the course that I study at uni, a lot of the people who deliver the lectures to me are themselves consultants. And they go, like: if you go out into the consulting world, have fun learning all this stuff, figuring out the right things to do, telling a company and then having them go mmm, nah, nah. Which unfortunately, like for Timnit, like, this person’s identity is part of this work, right? Like, this isn’t… this isn’t like a person going in and going: hey, by the way, if you move to a sort of like interest reduction scheme, you’ll save, like, a thousand dollars a year on all of your depreciation metrics. This is, this is real meaningful identity pillar stuff. Right? So it’s not just consulting for this person, I’m sure. It’s like, it’s life or death in a lot of ways.
DANIEL: And it’s just one more sign that we have a long way to go, that Silicon Valley is not liberal.
BEN: No. Silicon Valley’s libertarian, if anything. That is the L word that I would use to describe that part of the world.
DANIEL: Yeah. Yeah. And that we have a lot of work to do as far as making AI more ethical.
BEN: Seems like a really — and I know it’s really easy, we say this all the time — but it seems like such a fucking bonehead move on Google’s part. Like, how do the optics not look shit as fuck?
HEDVIG: Yeah, if nothing else, just the optics.
BEN: Yeah! Like, I get that, like a lot of corporations want to talk the talk but don’t want to walk the walk. But on this one it seems like the smart play doesn’t seem like it required a huge IQ. And you’ve got all of the people at Google! Right?
HEDVIG: They are smart.
BEN: Like, NASA doesn’t have the geniuses anymore. Google does. Use them! Surely some of them would have been like: This could go real bad for us.
HEDVIG: But someone is also a bureaucrat, an admin HR manager, and just says: oh, employees don’t make demands. Goodbye.
BEN: I think what probably has also happened here, I think, is that in an industry where consultants are so prevalent and dismissing their suggestions is so prevalent, I think somewhere in the line a dumb probably white guy was just like: I don’t care for this consultant suggestions. Goodbye! Your contract will not be renewed. And — ugh — what a dumb, dumb thing to do.
DANIEL: In other enraging news, a condescending Wall Street Journal article is taking us back to a debate, back and forth and back and forth. One Joseph Epstein wrote in The Wall Street Journal. God, I hate The Wall Street Journal.
BEN: Why? Hang on, pause. Why do I know Joseph Epstein’s name? What has he done? Why is he notable?
DANIEL: I hadn’t heard of this guy before.
HEDVIG: [TYPING] Joseph Epstein. There are Swedish famous people called Epstein.
BEN: I feel like this guy might be a little wannabe Ben Shapiro. That’s my little spidey sense.
HEDVIG: [READING OFF SOMETHING] American writer. Wait, Joseph Epstein?
DANIEL and BEN: Yes.
HEDVIG: Born 1937.
DANIEL: Uh, really?
HEDVIG: That is a while ago.
BEN: That’s very old.
HEDVIG: Age 83, editor of the magazine, The American Scholar. I think this might be him.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Yes! The Wiki article specifically mentions his article on Jill Biden in 2020.
BEN: Oh there we go, wow.
HEDVIG: I don’t know if we need to care about what he thinks. I’m very glad, I can recommend… by the way, there was, don’t… try… They want clicks for this.
BEN: Yeah, don’t click on their article.
HEDVIG: If you can, if you can, don’t click on the article, find someone who talks about it, or listen to us talking about it or something. Avoid clicking on the article, if you can.
DANIEL: I’ll read the first paragraph, which is all that I got through.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Let’s, let… Daniel has clicked it once for you.
DANIEL: Here it is. Here’s the first paragraph, “Madame First Lady, Mrs Biden. Jill. Kiddo.
[ALL GROAN]
DANIEL: “A bit of advice on what may seem like a small but I think is not unimportant matter. Any chance you might drop the doctor before your name? Dr Jill Biden sounds and feels fraudulent. Not to say a touch comic.” And he goes on to say: You’re only a doctor of education. I mean, come on.
BEN: Look, all I have… all I’ve ever had to say about this is whatever bloody civic society you live in, whatever they call doctors is what are called doctors. Like, that’s it. Right? If there is a part of the world that awards doctorates for education, then those people are doctors in that place in the world. That’s just… like, how is that complicated?
DANIEL: And this has all reminded me of that debate, you know, lots of women on Twitter put Dr on their handle because we have this habit of not, of minimising women’s achievements. And you can feel however you want about: maybe this is lording it over people who don’t have doctorates, or maybe it’s pretentious to insist that other people call you doctor. But we really do have this pattern of not rewarding women or not recognising the accomplishments of women. And so everyone who had taken out their doctor in their Twitter bio put it right back in the last week! Or at least a lot of people.
BEN: I would have to imagine, given my cultural heritage, you would not find a person less interested in the airs of status. Right? Like, Australians are world renowned for not giving a fuck about this shit. Right? Like, I have never once, ever in my entire university life, in all of the four degrees I have either achieved or am currently working on, ever called any of my lecturers or professors anything other than their first name. Ever. Right? They’re always Sandra, Paul, Steve, Janice, whatever. Like, that is how Australians do it. And if any one of them have ever been like, actually it’s Dr so-and-so, I immediately just go, okay. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: There you go.
BEN: Like, it’s just so, why don’t people just call people what they want to be called?
HEDVIG: I wonder how. — because we are all like academics are in the academic world and we know that Dr means a PhD degree, a doctor degree. I wonder though — how confusing it is for the general public and… hmm… I wonder if is confusing for them.
BEN: I have to imagine in a developed nation, not very. Like, if you’re in your 40s and you were for the first time discovering that there’s doctors other than the medical kind, like, that has to be a rare occurrence. Surely, in a developed nation.
DANIEL: Perhaps it’s worth pointing out at this stage that the medical sense of DOCTOR is, in fact, a newcomer.
BEN: Yeah! Right. Doctors of the MD variety have taken it from PhDs.
DANIEL: Yes, indeed. And it just means a leader, somebody who guides.
HEDVIG: I’m about to very soon hopefully get my doctorate degree from ANU, who prides themself on being thought leaders. So I’ll be like a leader thought leader leader.
BEN: We will have to salute.
DANIEL: I will. What did the Wall Street Journal do in response to getting slammed?
BEN: Double down. I’m going to with double down. Did they double down?
DANIEL: They doubled down!
BEN: Oh! [HYPERVENTILATES]
HEDVIG: And said thank you for all the clicks!
BEN: Yeah, yeah. “I really enjoy how much you have generated a shitload of traffic for our site. Thank you, everyone. And let me do another one to generate a little bit more.”
DANIEL: Well, don’t go there. Go to The Washington Post, who did an article entitled “As critics blast a misogynistic op-ed on Jill Biden, a Wall Street Journal editor blames… cancel culture”
BEN: Yep.
DANIEL: Yep.
HEDVIG: Wait, how is this… this is not… oh god, this can’t be cancel culture.
BEN: They can make anything into cancel culture. Have you not learnt this yet?
DANIEL: Academics are very good at nursing imaginary grievances. So here’s the editorial page editor, Paul Gigot (gi-go). Or is it Gigot (gi-got) to rhyme with bigot? I’m not sure. Here it is: “Why go to such lengths to highlight a single op-ed on a relatively minor issue? My guess is that the Biden team concluded it was a chance to use the big gun of identity politics to send a message to critics as he prepares to take power. There’s nothing like playing the race or gender card to stifle criticism.”
HEDVIG: You started!
BEN: This is what… this is what I find so endlessly juvenile about this stuff, right? Like, anyone with more than four neurons to rub together can just so clearly see that response for what it is, which is, like, the classic schoolyard bully thing of being like: [BULLY VOICE] ~Why did they hit me? I’m a victim here!~ after they have just, like, deliberately gone after someone, in potentially not as inflammatory a way, but like still with every intent to get a total predictable rise out of that person and then go: [BULLY VOICE] ~Uh, guys, like, why is this person all bent out of shape? I don’t underst…~ It’s just so, so young. Like, I don’t know if, just because I’m a teacher, I’m just much more fed up with it than the average person because it’s, like, my every working day of my life I see shit like that. But arggghhh.
DANIEL: It’s a good illustration of the DARVO technique, which is Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. You’ve got to say you’re the victim here.
BEN: Yeah. Jesus.
HEDVIG: Oh, god.
HEDVIG: The Wall Street Journal classically just so like: Yeah, man. Everyone was really punching down on you just then.
HEDVIG: This really made me think of, one of the things I really didn’t like about what he said to her was the sort of patronising, grandfatherly tone of, like: I’ve been around for a while, kiddo.
BEN: Yes, kiddo. As soon as he said kiddo I was just like that’s… fuck off.
HEDVIG: Fuck right off. And it sort of made me realise that I… So this man is 83 years old. And you know, a lot of people who are older have outdated opinions about things. I’d like some role m… I’d like some examples, I want people to tweet at us with examples – besides Dolly Parton – of people who are in the older generation in the public face who aren’t dicks, because I think there are. I don’t think all eighty year olds are dicks.
BEN: Where are the lovely, gentle, open-minded octogenarians? Help us out.
HEDVIG: Yeah, or the ones who are just like: I’m sorry, I used the wrong pronoun, this is hard for me, but I love you and I’m giving it a try. Like, I understand. They’ve got to be out there.
DANIEL: There’s heaps of awesome boomers, awesome people who are still progressive. Let’s hear from you. Finally in the news…
BEN: Oh my god, we’re still not done with the news!
HEDVIG: Yeah. This is going to be a rough one to edit.
DANIEL: No, it’s fine. Blabrecs is a new game, or a new twist on an old sport. It’s evil Scrabble. Yay!
BEN: People in podcast land can’t see this, but all of you two on the Zoom can. I just narrowed my eyes very, very much. [LAUGHTER] My hatred of Scrabble is well known on this show.
HEDVIG: You love Scrabble.
DANIEL: Yes, it … We’ve made videos about this. If you want to play Blabrecs, you could do that. Just head to our blog becauselanguage.com and there will be a link on the show notes for this episode.
HEDVIG: Yeahhh…
DANIEL: So Blabrecs is kind of like Scrabble, but actual words aren’t allowed. You can only play plausible looking words that get past the AI word model.
HEDVIG: I like this!
BEN: Oh, okay, so it’s a little bit like Balderdash with a computer?
HEDVIG: This connects to our earlier news point about the Māori phonotactics.
DANIEL: Yes, it does!
BEN: Okay, yeah, I get you. You’ve got a… you’ve got to make… yeah! Fun! This… okay… I could do this. I could do this. Balderdash is fun.
DANIEL: Well, then, you’re going to do this with me right now. So I’m going to give you a normal word which now you can’t play in Blabrecs. And you have to rearrange those into a plausible word that fools the AI. The word is NORMAL. Normal. You have to come up with a word that looks plausible.
HEDVIG: mor-an-ul MORANL
BEN: Uh, wait, so I’ve got to use the letters from NORMAL to do this.
DANIEL: You’ve got to use the word, letters from… that’s on your rack. NORMAL. I know you get one extra letter.
HEDVIG: MORNAL.
DANIEL: MORNAL. That’s Hedvig’s word and… mornal? Yes. [DING] It says: Looks good to me. So you win. Ben, yours?
BEN: ROMNAL.
DANIEL: ROMNAL. It says… Looks good to me [DING].
BEN: Yessss.
DANIEL: Very good. Nice. You both win.
BEN: Like, you just sprung a competition on me! I’m not ready for this! I’m going to get more feisty! [HYPERVENTILATES AGAIN]
DANIEL: I wonder if we can do… okay, okay, okay, round two. Same word: NORMAL, but it has to start with a vowel.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Oh, why don’t I have pen and paper? Why am I doing this in my head? My head’s shit.
[INTENSITY INTENSIFIES]
BEN: ALMORN.
HEDVIG: Fuck! I wrote that! I WROTE THAT!
BEN: I got there first!
DANIEL: You both lose. [BUZZER SOUND]
BEN: Oh, damn!
HEDVIG: What?
DANIEL: It says: ALMORN. No way that’s a word.” I thought ORNMAL, which is very close to NORMAL and hey — Looks good to me! it says. [DING]
BEN: Hey, you don’t get to compete. You’re the arbiter. That’s not fair.
DANIEL: I am… I am making this up as I go, just like you are.
BEN: All right. Fair enough. All right. Another one. Another one.
DANIEL: Anyway… Really?
BEN: Yeah, tiebreaker. Because we’re all on one.
DANIEL: Okay, the word is… should we do an easy one, or a hard one?
BEN: Hard one.
DANIEL: The word is NAPKIN, because I’ve got a lot of napkins here in my pantry where I’m recording this.
HEDVIG: Ki… kinap. No, that’s not English. That’s Swedish. Kinap?
BEN: Kipnam.
DANIEL: Kipnam?
BEN: Yup, kipnam.
HEDVIG: K-napin. Knapin!
BEN: Ohh, going the K-N, risky!
DANIEL: Kipnam. It says: no way that’s a word! [BUZZER]
BEN: Damn.
DANIEL: Okay, what’s yours, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: Knapin.
DANIEL: With a K N?
HEDVIG: K-N-A-P-I-N
DANIEL: I don’t think it’s going to like it… Oh! Looks good to me, it says! [DING]
BEN: Ohh! Daniel, what was yours?
DANIEL: I said PANKIN. Pankin.
HEDVIG: It’s not going to like it.
DANIEL: And hey, it likes it! [TA-DA SOUND]
BEN: Okay, you guys, I lose. For the first time ever in the history of the show, I have lost, it’s fine.
DANIEL: We beat Ben? This calls for celebration!
HEDVIG: [THUD] Whoops, my mic dropped.
DANIEL: Mic drop!
BEN: See, your mic understands the travesty that is me losing.
DANIEL: The fabric of the universe has been disturbed. Let’s go to our next section.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
BEN: [UNDER MUSIC] The collective will of a thousand listeners working on your microphone at once.
DANIEL: It’s been Word of the Year season all over the place! Various dictionary bodies have announced their Words of the Year, the American Dialect Society has announced its Word of the Year. And we’ve got our Word of the Week of the Year. There’s a lot to get to here. That’s a lot of words.
BEN: Okay, well, we need to… we need to pick up the pace here, people. We have been… like, we have been languishing in the news and we need into, like, race mode!
DANIEL: Okay, race mode it is.
HEDVIG: I must say, there was discussion on Twitter earlier about if Word of the Year is a good idea. I like that we’re actually picking from our Word of the Week. I think that makes sense. And it brings some consistency, continuity to our Word of the Year.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Okay. Right.
DANIEL: You know what, though? The only bad thing is that I’m really… when I have Words of the Week, my focus is on the weekly and I frequently miss the big, sort of… I don’t have the long focus.
HEDVIG: Yeah. I like that, though!
DANIEL: Yeah?
BEN: So our Word of the Week is, like, underdogs. What’s the underdog word of the year? The one that’s, like, slipped under the radar.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I like it.
DANIEL: Okay! I might have some underdogs coming up here. Let’s go to the various dictionary bodies first. Just very quickly: Collins! Where’s Collins from?
BEN: Let’s just all Google it together!
HEDVIG: Is this… Hedvig googles, google dictionary, Collins Dictionary. Usually Daniel knows everything when we record, and me and Ben can just languish.
BEN: Collins dictionary, printed online Dictionary of English is published by HarperCollins in Glasgow, Scotland.
HEDVIG: Glasgow.
BEN: So I am going to say it is English.
HEDVIG: British.
BEN: Sorry, you’re right.
DANIEL: Their word was LOCKDOWN.
BEN: Checks out, yep.
HEDVIG: Fair enough.
DANIEL: One thing I’ve noticed here is that nobody wanted to go with the big one.
BEN: QUARANTINE?
HEDVIG: CORONA.
DANIEL: The word of the year is doubtless COVID.
HEDVIG: COVID. Or CORONA.
DANIEL: It’s gotta be COVID. Could be CORONAVIRUS.
BEN: See, this is the thing though, this is the funny thing. I don’t think there is agreement between COVID and CORONAVIRUS, right? You see there, that… that fight has not been resolved.
HEDVIG: Or, CORONAVIRUS.
DANIEL: You mean, like, which one is the one?
BEN: Yeah, exactly. CORONA, CORONAVIRUS, COVID, COVID-19. All four of those, I think, are all punching each other out for, like, top spot on that one. And I don’t think the fight is concluded.
HEDVIG: But I think SARS-COV-2 lost.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Yeah, definitely. That one didn’t last long. The other one that didn’t last is NOVEL CORONAVIRUS. That one didn’t last very long either.
HEDVIG: That was, that’s still I think the standard on Swedish radio. They say that a lot.
BEN: Oh, there we go. Swedish, the Swedes! Underdogs.
DANIEL: Seems to me that that COVID is the one, and not only COVID not in all caps, but covid all lowercase. We’re converging on that one.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Seems like.
DANIEL: But nobody wanted to go with that one because it’s boring.
BEN: Yeah. It’s the low hanging fruit.
DANIEL: And so they’re all going to these side things.
DANIEL: Yeah. Yeah. So Collins was LOCKDOWN. The Australian National Dictionary Centre was ISO.
HEDVIG: Oh, good Aussies.
BEN: That’s so Australian, I love it.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Well done.
DANIEL: Iso-baking, iso-kilos.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Perfect.
DANIEL: So I like that. Cambridge was QUARANTINE — again, hitting all around it. Macquarie Dictionary. They had two. The one that they picked was COVIDIOT. A little negative.
BEN: Yeah. Also just like…
HEDVIG: I don’t think it’s that common.
BEN: It’s not, it’s not that good a franken-word either. Like it’s, like, this better franken-words out there. There’s better portmanteaus. Like, it’s just a bit meh on a bunch of fronts.
DANIEL: Yeah. The People’s Choice Award from Macquarie. People picked this one. They picked KAREN, which…
BEN: Yes! Now there is a non-covid-related one that I think absolutely could be the Word of the Year.
HEDVIG: Was this year the year of Karen? I thought it was last year.
BEN: No, this year was the year that Karen, like, fully exploded into the pop culture zeitgeist.
HEDVIG: Right.
BEN: Like, obviously Karen as a thing has been around, I think since like 2014, maybe? That was the original Karen. But this year was the year where, like, white middle-aged women really just… people got stuck into them. And rightly so.
[HEDVIG LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Rightly so? I mentioned on the Speakeasy why I don’t, why I don’t do the Karen thing. And we’ve talked about this before as well, Ben. That if it’s racial commentary, then go ahead and do it if you’re a person of colour. But when I, as a white guy, criticise Karens, the racial element’s kind of absent because she’s a white Gen-X woman and it starts to look a little bit more like misogyny. So, you know… I’ll leave it for other people.
BEN: I would agree with that right up until I see someone engaging in behaviour that needs correcting.
DANIEL: Well, we do correct women a lot, don’t we? I mean, it’s easy to correct women.
BEN: Hey, look, everyone’s… everyone’s looking at me right now, like we all haven’t run into THAT person, right? That white, middle aged woman who is just having a full blown tantrum over something inconsequential and, like, that is Karen. I’m sorry.
HEDVIG: I also am looking at you, like you just said that it was a good idea to get stuck in white middle class women.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: None of you reacted.
BEN: My best puns are always unintentional. Like, I…
DANIEL: I made a note of it and then I moved on.
BEN: Okay, okay, fair enough.
HEDVIG: I didn’t!
BEN: We can cut all of that out where Ben just looks like a horrid misogynist who makes sexual puns.
HEDVIG: It’s quite funny.
BEN: So! I think that Karen, independent of our usage, Daniel… I think Karen deserves to be a very notable word this year.
DANIEL: It is notable.
HEDVIG: I think that’s true.
BEN: Big time. Big time.
DANIEL: That’s true. Okay. Merriam-Webster, their word was PANDEMIC. Again, hitting around it.
BEN: Nibbling at the edges.
HEDVIG: Well, quite at it.
DANIEL: They were going off of lookups. And another word that got a big look up was UNPRECEDENTED.
BEN: Oh, really?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Do you remember how you kept hearing this unprecedented year, this unprecedented presidency?
HEDVIG: There’s unprecedented levels of unemployment, there’s blah blah blah.
BEN: The only problem is, though, it super is though, that’s the problem. It’s very precedented. There have been many precedents for this.
HEDVIG: Yeah, but it hasn’t been precedented in maybe… I don’t think America has had a big pandemic like this for a long time, and their Social Security system is fucked up.
BEN: It should be remembered that Spanish flu started in America. And that’s where the biggest death toll was.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah, yeah. For quite a while. Like, a lot of people don’t remember that.
BEN: Okay fair, fine, fine.
HEDVIG: And also, we haven’t had a big pandemic like this as a world since after we all, like, became slaves to the algorithm, and we had the precariat of like Uber drivers and Deliveroo, things like that. That is a special combination.
BEN: True, fair, that is true.
DANIEL: And what Ben has said here is exactly what Nicole Holliday said. You know, she said like: “‘~Oh, this horrible racism. Oh, this horrible, you know, economic system where we’re wage slaves. This is unprecedented!~’ No it’s very precedented.” And she didn’t say this, but this was the under text, the subtext: it would take a person of enormous privilege to think that it wasn’t, you know. It’s like that sketch when Donald Trump won the presidency, that Saturday Night Live sketch where all these white people are going: I can’t believe that America is this racist! And Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle are like: oh, you can’t believe that America is that racist! How about that? You know.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: And then Oxford didn’t have a word of the year. They had, like, tons of words of the year. So you’ll have to download their PDF if you want to find that. There was so much because, you know, 2020 is, like, nine years long, so.
BEN: But hang on.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Wait, why? I also… can I ask…
[BEN and HEDVIG BABBLE INCOHERENTLY AS THEY COMPETE FOR THE FLOOR]
HEDVIG: Why has it been so far… Black Lives Matter…
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: …didn’t get into any of these lists?
DANIEL: Not Black Lives Matter itself, but in fact the hashtag Black Lives Matter was the American Dialect Society’s word of the year, like the big one, for 2014.
HEDVIG: Oh, I would have thought some of that stuff would have gotten into some of these lists.
BEN: Can you not have repeats? Is that, is that not the case? Is it, like… is it literally like, if it’s been up once, you’re done?
DANIEL: No, it’s not, it’s not one and done. I think we’ll see some Black Lives Matter words coming up.
HEDVIG: Okay.
BEN: Well, let’s just break out of this dirty, disgusting, Anglo-centric nonsense. Daniel, what about the what about the other, you know, seven thousand three hundred and fifty nine languages in the world? What are they up to?
DANIEL: Well, Spanish has a word of the year. Now, you have to understand the word PENDEJO. If somebody is a PENDEJO, that means they’re a jerk or an asshole.
BEN: Yeah, I’m hearing it a lot in the video game that I’m playing at the moment, because apparently I don’t do things very well.
DANIEL: Oh, are you? [LAUGHS] Are you playing with lots of Spanish speakers? ¡Que pendejo!
BEN: My primary offsider in the game is Spanish, is a Spanish speaker. And so quite often it’s like: Pendejo, ¿what are you doing? And I’m like, sorry, I’m not very good yet!
DANIEL: Well, they’ve changed it slightly from PENDEJO to PANDEJO, as in a PENdejo in a PANdemic.
HEDVIG: Ohh!
BEN: Gotcha.
HEDVIG: So this is like COVIDIOT. Yeah.
BEN: Their COVIDIOT.
DANIEL: It’s their COVIDIOT.
BEN: Oh, okay. That’s fun.
DANIEL: The Japanese word of the year — this is from Japanese publisher Kiyoko Kunimatsu — their word is SANMITSU and it takes some explanation.
HEDVIG: SANMITSU?
DANIEL: SANMITSU.
HEDVIG: SANMITSU.
DANIEL: SAN is three, and MITSU means close, or dense. So the national health body defined three close, dense places to avoid. One is confined and enclosed spaces. Another one is crowded places, and then a third one is close contact settings. We could call them the three C’s. Confined spaces, crowded places, close contact settings. But they decided to call them SANMITSU, the three close situations to avoid.
BEN: Yeah, the three densities, the three clusters, the three, something like that.
DANIEL: Yeah. Good. Yeah. So that’s Japanese and it’s been used as kind of a mnemonic. Hey folks, PSA, these are three situations to avoid.
HEDVIG: Don’t Japan, a lot of governmental agencies love having like catchy, like they have mascots and slogans and like catchy mimetic like sticky things, that stick in people’s brain for how to behave.
BEN: Oh, yeah. They love a good jingle in Japan. Love a good jingle.
HEDVIG: Yeah, interesting.
DANIEL: Let’s move over to German, where the word of the year, according to the Society for German Language, was CORONA-PANDEMIE, which is corona pandemic.
HEDVIG: Oh. They just hit the bull’s eye.
BEN: That sounded very French. Did you mean to sound French?
DANIEL: It looks like a French word to me, which is why I pronounced it very Frenchly. But let’s try it in German. Who’s better at German?
BEN: Surely Hedvig now.
DANIEL: Hey! Hedvig! How would you say it?
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] Corona Pandemie. No, it’s not good, something like that.
DANIEL: Just sounds French.
BEN: Don’t forget, Germans adopt a lot of words just like everyone else, right?
HEDVIG: Yeah, they call teacups tasse!
BEN: So: Corona pandemie.
HEDVIG: I think you guys think that words that end with -IE sound French.
BEN: You said it French. Don’t deny it.
HEDVIG: I didn’t! Daniel did.
BEN: No, he did. I’m not saying you did. I’m pointing at Daniel. Didn’t you see it while I was off-screen?
DANIEL: I certainly did. I did think it was interesting. The German youth word of the year was LOST, which is very plaintive, isn’t it?
BEN: Wow. As in, like, the year has been lost?
DANIEL: It’s got a different meaning in German. You could say it in class if you’re trying to say: I don’t get it.
BEN: Yeah, but I mean we say that in English. I’m a bit lost.
HEDVIG: I’m at a loss.
DANIEL: But I think everybody’s lost.
BEN: Ooo, we’re getting…
HEDVIG: Yeah, I think we’re all agreed that if we’re ever on a hiring board and someone has low activity for the year or the year after 2020, we just give them a pass. Correct? Like, fuck. There’s a really good song called F2020 by Avenue Beat, which is just like: Fuck 2020. I can really recommend it.
BEN: Fair.
DANIEL: I think it’s a funny thing to see all these F2020 people. You think this is going to get better next year? Magically we turn the calendar and suddenly everything’s gone. Oh, thank goodness for that!
HEDVIG: I think it is going to get a little better maybe.
BEN: Hey Daniel, don’t stomp on everyone’s dreams, all right? Your boy in the White House got ousted against my guess, might I add. Oh, I fully saw that going against you. So, you know, I would expect a little bit more chipper attitude out of you, young man. There’s a vaccine. Trump is, like, on the outs.
DANIEL: Okay. There’s a lot of reasons to hope. That is true. Also, but the word that lost in the youth vote was CRINGE, which I have just found such a useful word. Like, it’s almost like I got a diagnosis and suddenly everything makes sense. Like, my entire youth, my entire life before age 35. CRINGE sums it up.
HEDVIG: I’m turning thirty two in two weeks.
BEN: Oh, wow.
DANIEL: Good for you.
BEN: Yeah, but Hedvig you got your shit together. You’re a doctor at thirty two, so you’re fine.
DANIEL: You didn’t grow up in a, in a… ugh. Anyway, let’s move on now to the American Dialect Society Words of the year.
BEN: Hello!
DANIEL: Usually I’ve gone to this as part of the LSA, the Linguistics Society of America, but this time it was all online. People were watching. I was live tweeting, I was there, I was voting! It was so much fun.
HEDVIG: It’s very fun.
BEN: Nerds!
DANIEL: So let’s get started.
BEN: Let’s go.
DANIEL: The Political Word of the Year. There was FREEDUMB, with d-u-m-b.
BEN: Yep.
HEDVIG: This is the third one we have now with a word for stupid or idiot or something.
DANIEL: Yes, we should be criticising not people’s intelligence, but people’s recklessness. I agree.
HEDVIG: That’s fair, that’s fair. No, that wasn’t what I was going for. I just thought it seems like shoehorning. Like, were these actual popular words? Because I’m skeptical.
DANIEL: I never heard it.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: I think it’s… I think it’s worth remembering for both of us, all three of us, I should say, we’re not in America. And I imagine in America right now, there would be really strong emotions attached to people who are continuing to engage in behaviors that have just very clearly resulted in the deaths of, like, a quarter of a million people.
HEDVIG: I thought RATLICKER was better than these portmanteau words.
DANIEL: God.
HEDVIG: Sorry.
BEN: [LAUGHS] No, I agree with you. It’s so good! Every time I hear it, I just like it. It washes through my psyche anew and it’s wonderful. I love it.
DANIEL: RATLICKER’s good because it doesn’t impugn anyone’s intelligence. It focuses on their behaviour.
HEDVIG: Yeah, that as well.
BEN: Uh, I think it implies it!
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Let’s see, RED MIRAGE/BLUE SHIFT was one of ours, but that one didn’t win. It was ABOLISH/DEFUND.
BEN: Ah, there we go. Done. Good, good, good, good.
DANIEL: How do we feel about, how do we feel about defund? Like, I’m going to be unpopular for this one. I totally agree with the goals of Defund the Police. The police are handling lots of stuff that they shouldn’t be handling and we should be sort of taking some of that and diverting it to appropriate agencies…
HEDVIG: Americans should.
DANIEL: Americans should. But I think Defund the Police is a terrible slogan, because if you ask a lot of people: do you think we should defund the police, they’ll say no. But if you ask them: do you think we should take a bunch of the money that the police get and put it instead into homelessness or drug addiction or helping different agencies, then they will say yes. So I think it’s a great idea, but a very muddled slogan.
BEN: See, I’m going to contend on this one. I don’t think we need to keep engaging in the same business-as-usual practice of, like: we need to try and appeal to like a big chunk of conservative fuckheads.
HEDVIG: ~Be civil!~
BEN: So we need to water down our message in such a way that it’s palatable to them, which is why I don’t actually agree with DEFUND. I go with ABOLISH. I’m like, let’s get it, let’s go, let’s go harder, let’s go bigger.
HEDVIG: Fuck ‘em.
DANIEL: In the two schools of thought of, like: you need to like… you win more friends… What is it? You catch more flies with honey, kind of thing, than vinegar. I’m like: Yeah, but you kill a lot more flies with a flamethrower, so maybe we should try that? Like, I reckon, go much, much bigger and if you fall short, at least you will have shot a lot further and the shortness you fall will still be better than whatever, like, watered-down bullshit you need to get the Karens on board.
DANIEL: Okay, yeah.
HEDVIG: And then the middle people can… they can do the work to convince the middle class suburbia people, and then we can just stand there and throw flamethrowers. Yeah.
BEN: I just remember, I just remember that like that classic — I think it’s a webcomic, maybe it’s a Tumblr post? — that’s basically like leftists: We think that like genocide is really bad! Conservatives: We think that genocide is pretty good! And Centrists: maybe a little bit of genocide?
DANIEL: I’m not trying to be a centrist. I just don’t want to hand people a way to, to short circuit the message.
BEN: The win. I get that. It’s going to put a lot of people offside. But I’m done caring about that.
HEDVIG: And maybe that’s not your job. There are a lot of other people who care about that. Someone needs to care about pushing as well.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Pushing the window. Yep. Totally agree. Okay, let’s go on to Digital Word of the Year. We have SUS. We’ve been saying SUS in Australia for a super long, long time.
BEN: Such a long time. And you know what’s brought it in, don’t you?
DANIEL: I do.
BEN: Among Us.
DANIEL: Among Us.
BEN: The world’s least fun video game.
DANIEL: I’ve had fun playing Werewolves with you, Ben.
HEDVIG: What? Least fun? What?
BEN: Yeah. I don’t… I’m, I’m just like… I don’t know if, like, this is a controversial opinion or not, but Among Us 90 percent of the time is a really shit boring dumb game to play. It’s no fun. You just do pointless, busy work. It’s only fun if you’re an impostor.
HEDVIG: Yeah. My nephew who is Swedish, five years old and doesn’t understand English, has noticed that Among Us is, like, appearing in, like, his feed or whatever. So he’s like downloaded it and played it, but he doesn’t understand what it’s about. He doesn’t know what sort of deception games are.
BEN: Oh my god. He would make an amazing imposter! Like, he would never get caught.
HEDVIG: He’s like: I don’t, this is not a fun game. So he’s just been running around in people’s games, just doing random shit.
BEN: Love it.
DANIEL: Somebody at the ADS, in the meeting said: maybe we shouldn’t do SUS because it’s been, it’s being used to describe people’s sexuality. “I think that person’s a bit sus.”
HEDVIG: Really?
BEN: Who’s using it that way?
DANIEL: Some people, apparently.
BEN: But what, what cluster of humans are using it that way? I’m certainly not seeing it in schools or anything.
DANIEL: Okay, good, good.
HEDVIG: I like it was the wordification of the Nicki Minaj meme. You know which one I mean?
DANIEL and BEN: Mm-mm.
BEN: SUS is a shortening of suspicious, right?
DANIEL: Yeah, suspect.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah. There’s a Nicki Minaj meme that’s very common as a reaction meme, where she stares at the camera and says: That’s weird. That’s suspicious.
BEN: Oh, I know. Oh, okay, I get you.
HEDVIG: I thought SUS was that meme, but in a word.
BEN: Possibly. Yeah. I mean, like Daniel has said, like for like those sort of born and bred, or having lived here for a long time, SUS is just absolutely part of the lexicon. Like, it’s not a new word at all.
DANIEL: Bit sus. But the winner for Digital Word of the Year was DOOMSCROLLING, which we defined as: obsessively plowing through all the bad news in your feed, even though it makes you feel terrible.
BEN: Oh, yes.
DANIEL: A fantastic word. Fantastic word.
HEDVIG: Fair enough, fair enough.
BEN: Appropriate. And oh man, people got to stop. People got to stop! I’m just like: my mom’s in quarantine at the moment, and I’m like: pleeeeease get off social media. I can see it is destroying your mental health.
DANIEL: Mmm. Let’s go to Zoom Related Word of the Year, a special 2020 category.
BEN: Zoom related? [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Oh, my God.
BEN: By the way, can we just like… do you reckon the people at Zoom created coronavirus? Like, has this not been the single greatest thing for that company? There is now, in the American Dialect Society, an entire category about a piece of software.
DANIEL: Mmm. And it’s become genericised as well. You can Zoom on Skype. You can Zoom on Facebook.
BEN: Yeah. Like, it’s the FaceTime of now.
HEDVIG: I remember when people started using it, and my boss was like: Oh, we should talk. Oh, can you, can you, Zoom is much better. And I was like: Oh no, I have to download another thing and get an account, I hate this, I hate the world. ANU was like: you should really get Zoom. And I was like [FRUSTRATED CRYING NOISES]. And then suddenly…
BEN: We’re sitting on your Zoom right now.
HEDVIG: We’re sitting on my Zoom. Everyone’s on Zoom. Everyone just installed it. Like, that happened quickly! It’s like, to me it’s like the entire, like, academic online world became… Like, Swedes do this all the time, someone invents something like now everyone is using… technology spreads very, very quickly through the Swedish population. And now I feel like that’s happening at a global scale. Like, everyone is just like: Oh okay, we’re all doing this now. It’s normal.
BEN: Can you imagine? And we will move back onto the topic in just a second. But can you imagine the scaling efforts that must have been in place in Zoom over the course of, like, a couple of months? Like…
HEDVIG: Fuck.
BEN: Fuck! Like, I can’t… it boggles my mind!
HEDVIG: Hiring so many new people.
BEN: Just take this thing that must have been built for, like, point zero one percent of what it was going to be needed for, in just a couple of months, and scaling it up to that degree. And having it not completely fall apart!
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s insane.
BEN: That’s bonkers. That is just crazy. I don’t know what deal they did… They were at the crossroads, and they were like: they had their banjo case by their side! Far out. Okay, sorry. Daniel.
DANIEL: The nominees were ZOOM BOMBING.
BEN: Oh yeah. Yeah.
DANIEL: Somebody’s busting into your meeting. ZOOM FATIGUE, or it’s Yiddish inspired counterpart OYSGEZOOMT, which is fatigued or bored by Zoom.
BEN: OYSGEZOOMT. That’s… okay.
DANIEL: ZUMPING. Getting dumped by Zoom. I was expecting the Z to be more productive, but okay. But the winner: YOU’RE MUTED, which is what you say to someone when you tell them to unmute. You’re muted.
BEN: But interestingly enough, I think that works in both directions. So what I’m seeing now, so Ayesha, my partner…
HEDVIG: Ben is about to make a pivot, to promote… to being one of those cultural warriors who thinks everything is cancel culture?
BEN: No, no, no, no, no, no. More like, so what I’m seeing… I’m not on Facebook very much and I don’t participate in, like, a lot of ardent discussions. I feel like this is the discussion that I like to contribute in.
DANIEL: Mmm. Me too.
BEN: But Ayesha’s a moderator on a couple of different sort of, like, feminist groups and non-white groups and that sort of thing. And what I’m seeing a lot, is when a person, often like a privileged person, is just like not letting something go and is just banging on, a reply now is: Okay, blah, I’m muting you now. Or: you’re muted.
DANIEL: You’re muted. That’s what I thought when I first heard it.
BEN: So I think it’s interesting that it can go in both directions. Like, in the Zoom context, it’s like: Uh, grandma, you’re muted, press the button. And then in the Facebook setting, it’s actually like a protective mechanism.
DANIEL: Mmm.
HEDVIG: Mmm. Yeah, I had… I put someone… I’m a group moderator as well im our maps group. And someone commented, there was, we had a map about massacres of Indigenous people in Australia. And someone commented: It wasn’t us, it was the British.
BEN: Oh ho ho. Ba-bow.
HEDVIG: And several members reported that comment and I was like: Yeah, fair, I’m putting this person on post approval and mute for a while, because no.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Because no.
DANIEL: Next category, Pandemic Related Word of the Year, special category. CONTACT TRACING. COVID. CORONIALS: the coronavirus generation for the predicted baby boom in the wake of the pandemic.
BEN: I’m not feeling it.
DANIEL: I don’t expect there to be a baby boom, I expect there to be a divorce boom.
BEN: Hmm! Dark, very dark.
HEDVIG: I don’t know if I…
DANIEL: Well, you know, people are having to stay together because lockdown, and once it’s over, yeah, I expect to see that instead of babies.
BEN: I’m not sure that I agree with the divorce boom necessarily, but I definitely agree that it’s not super likely that we’ll see a baby boom, simply because I think it’s a pretty well measured thing, like in times of resource insecurity, like, people don’t have a lot of babies.
HEDVIG: People have a lot of babies in wartime, though, which is weird.
DANIEL: Unless it’s… yeah, if it’s a country that doesn’t have much resources, then you do have a lot of babies in the hopes that one will survive.
BEN: Sure. But if you’re in a place of, like, resource insecurity… So like, I think the example here would be something like, from a developing nation without a lot of resources, when those families have to sort of like become refugees, birth rates still come down like a lot. Right? Like, if you are in a process of severe insecurity — which I think a lot of people in America are probably experiencing right now, I think — you’re not going to see heaps and heaps, like, no one is sitting in America going like: you know what, this situation needs? A newborn.
HEDVIG: I also think, and I don’t… I’m not sure about this, but I’ve heard this said before that in scarce places people have a lot of babies in the hopes that one will survive. I’m not sure that’s true, because…
BEN: I don’t think it’s in the hopes that one will survive. I think it’s the hopes that there will be a lot to look after you because there’s no social welfare for you.
HEDVIG: I’m not even sure it’s that. I think it’s: you don’t really have contraception. And girls who are less educated tend to also use less contraception. And when girls aren’t educated and men have more power and there’s little resources, women tend to get pregnant more often. I’m not sure. I’m not sure. You two have, you’re parents, you have kids. I’m not sure people, like, make a choice to have a child that way.
BEN: That is a good point. That is a very good point.
DANIEL: Well, that sounds incredibly plausible and I think maybe that deserves some research.
BEN: Yeah, we need to check.
HEDVIG: I think there is some… Yeah.
BEN: Sounds like Hedvig’s got a job. Got some homework!
DANIEL: Very good. The winner: SOCIAL DISTANCING.
BEN: There we go.
HEDVIG: Fair enough.
DANIEL: That is our pandemic related… Even though some people favour PHYSICAL DISTANCING. I think SOCIAL DISTANCING is the phrase that really caught on and hasn’t let up.
BEN: Yup, I think so as well.
DANIEL: Next one, Slang or Informal Word of the Year. I need your help with this one: POGGERS?
BEN: Ooh.
DANIEL: POGGERS.
BEN: Poggers, poggers…
HEDVIG: Wait, we’ve talked about this, no? Yes? No?
DANIEL: I never heard this before. I had never heard in my life.
HEDVIG: Poggers…
BEN: This is, this is pulling a tiny little memory bell. And I think some of my kids have at school – when I say my kids, I mean my students – have keyed me into this one, because I remember making the joke that the only thing I knew a pog to be was those stupid collectible toys from the ‘80s.
DANIEL: Yup, those discs.
HEDVIG: ‘90s as well.
BEN: So I’ve heard of this. And when you tell me, I think I’m going to go: That’s right! So lay it on me.
HEDVIG: So Urban Dictionary… Know Your Meme, which is sort of like Urban Dictionary, says that poggers is a Twitch emote.
BEN: [GASP] That’s exactly what it is! I remember now! I remember now. I remember now. I remember now.
HEDVIG: Okay, cool.
DANIEL: What is a Twitch emote?
HEDVIG: Have you ever been on Twitch, Daniel?
DANIEL: …yes.
BEN: You can send a react, right? You can send a little emoticon or like a whatever. Right? And the pog is this one: [BLOWING RASPBERRIES NOISE]
DANIEL: The surprised expression.
BEN: But like, like really exaggerated. Like, like the lips are like [PUFFED UP CHEEKS NOISE]
HEDVIG: And it is originally Pepe the Frog.
BEN: Oh! I did not know that.
HEDVIG: Who is a little non-racist frog who has been co-opted by the American alt-right.
DANIEL: Yeah, yeah.
BEN: Right.
DANIEL: Well, I have to say that this is one where there was a split between the Zoomers and the Boomers in the room.
BEN: What?
DANIEL: In the American Dialect Society.
BEN: What are the Z… Oh, I get you, like the Zoomers, the people who were Zooming in, and the Boomers were… yep, I gotcha.
HEDVIG: No, no, no, Zoom as in Millennials and Gen-Z.
BEN: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: There was a real age split for this one.
HEDVIG: It’s a new fun word for us.
DANIEL: The other terms were WAP [wæp] or WAP [wap], which is Wet-Ass Pussy. COVIDIOT. GIRLS, GAYS AND THEYS.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah, I’ve heard that. It’s good.
BEN: I’ve not heard that.
DANIEL: It’s an inclusive form of address encompassing female-identifying LGBTQ and non-binary identities.
BEN: Fun.
HEDVIG: THEYS is a… yeah.
DANIEL: But the winner for Slang or Informal Word of the Year… THE ‘RONA.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Okay, we’re up to Most Creative Combining form. I love combining forms.
BEN: This is obvious, though, right? Like, surely this is a, this is the obvious one.
HEDVIG: COVIDIOT.
BEN: This is -DEMIC, right?
DANIEL: Oh, that… wasn’t one of the choices.
BEN: Yeah, right? I’m so surprised! Surely this suffix -DEMIC was like way on the list!
DANIEL: Yeah, like TWINDEMIC or INFODEMIC. Nope! Here they were: There was ZOOM-. There was MASK-, as in MASKNE and MASKHOLE.
BEN: Yep.
DANIEL: There was -FATIGUE, as in COVID FATIGUE, LOCKDOWN FATIGUE. CORONA in its many forms: CORONA CUT, CORONA HAIR, CORONA BABIES. But the winner: QUARAN- as in QUARANTINE.
BEN: Oh, like QUARANSHOP, QUARANBATHE, QUARAN-whatever.
DANIEL: QUARANSTREAMING. You can even take the drinks that you have around the place and make a QUARANTINI. [LAUGHTER] Euphemism of the Year: There was an OFFICER-INVOLVED SHOOTING.
BEN: Ooh.
HEDVIG: [CRINGES]
DANIEL: Uh huh. FREEDOM SEEDS, which the National Rifle Association used for bullets. FREEDOM SEEDS.
HEDVIG: No, they didn’t. They said they did. They made a funny public announcement that they did. They never do.
DANIEL: Well, the tweet was, “Ammo Sales SURGE 139%. That’s a lot of freedom seeds.” And then a little American flag, which was a nice touch. EVERYTHING IS CAKE.
HEDVIG: Everything is cake?
DANIEL: Everything is cake.
HEDVIG: Oh, everything is cake!
BEN: As in the song? From the end of Portal?
HEDVIG: No, no, no. You know, in all those videos were like cakes that looked like realistic things and then someone cut into them and they were cake.
DANIEL: That’s it.
HEDVIG: Ben looks confused.
BEN: I am so confused. What is that a euphemism for though?
HEDVIG: It was primarily on Twitter. It was just like people made amazing artwork cakes.
BEN: Out of cakes, right.
HEDVIG: And they looked like, you know, an old shoe, a pencil case.
BEN: But again, what I really need to zero in on here is: what is this a euphemism for? It seems like everything is exactly what it says it is, which is cake.
DANIEL: It means that you need to be suspicious, or you need to be distrustful.
HEDVIG: Everything is suss, ’cause everything is cake.
BEN: Okay, so like this bottle of Tabasco could be cake?
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: This microphone could be, okay.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: And I think it’s interesting that that fits in with the Portal definition that the cake is a lie. It goes very neatly in there. But the winner for Euphemism of the Year: ESSENTIAL, which is a way of saying: you have to put yourself at risk at work, because you’re actually expendable!
BEN: Ah yes, yup, yup.
HEDVIG: Yeaaah…
DANIEL: Any feels?
HEDVIG: If there is another good discussion we’re having this year, besides the ones we’ve already highlighted — and again, I’m surprised there weren’t more George Floyd / Black Lives Matter things so far here either, but — is that I feel like people are having a serious discussion about employment conditions.
BEN: Yes. Yes.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: And what it is like to be a young person working…
BEN: In a place like America, when you…. Oh, man.
HEDVIG: But also Australia and also in Europe, like, with so many people who are on these zero hours contract. Yeah, we’re, we’re having those discussions again. And personally, as a socialist, I’m glad.
BEN: Seize those means!
DANIEL: Let’s move on to Emoji of the Year. Two fingers touching 👉👈, which means I’m shy or I like you.
BEN: Oh, this one, this one. Of course. Yeah.
HEDVIG: This one. We’re all on a Zoom call doing the thing. You take your pointy finger, you think what do you call these in English?
BEN: Finger guns!
DANIEL: Index fingers.
HEDVIG: Index finger, and you put up your thumb and you fold in the other ones and then you touch them to each other.
BEN: You make two finger guns and you touch them together, barrel to barrel.
DANIEL: Yeah, it means I’m pleading. Let’s see. There was also, this one freaked me out. Eye mouth eye 👁👄👁, the eye emoji, the mouth emoji, the eye emoji. It looks freakin weird.
BEN: I kiss you? I…
HEDVIG: It looks really weird. I know it.
DANIEL: It’s supposed to, isn’t it?
BEN: What is, what is that supposed to be?
HEDVIG: Well, it’s like, it’s sort of actually similar to the poggers I think. In like…
BEN: So just to be clear, it’s just the eye emoji, the mouth emoji, the eye emoji in a string of three?
HEDVIG: But it’s like, it’s like the ones that look, I don’t wanna say makeuped, but like…
BEN: Yeah, I get you. I get you.
HEDVIG: But, like, there’s lipstick on the lips.
DANIEL: The lips.
HEDVIG: It’s a lot in Jenna Marble’s videos to illustrate that the dog misses the marbles, but that… you guys aren’t going to get. Yeah.
DANIEL: The description, the official description is amazement, shock, disgust, or confusion.
HEDVIG: Yeah, confusion I think is the most common one. Like, huh!
BEN: Interesting.
DANIEL: Huh!
BEN: I love this sort of like Zodiac cryptographic-ing some of these like, like strings because it’s deeply baffling to me a lot of the time.
HEDVIG: It’s like surprised Pikachu a bit.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: But it’s not for me, and I’m okay with that. Like, I’m okay with there being a string of emojis that I don’t understand, and that’s fine.
DANIEL: Next one, emoji hugging a heart, it’s the Cares reaction.
BEN: Oh, yep.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: Gretchen McCulloch made an interesting case. There’s a time allotted where everyone can plead their case for or against one of the nominees. She said, you know, with emojis, you never know if people are going to use them once they’re approved. But we actually have a good body of evidence that if the Cares emoji were part of the Unicode set, it would get used, because people are using it.
BEN: 100 percent. I feel like there’s a couple of, like, ones that I could have told the Unicode people — who we have talked about before, who are over it, right? Like I don’t fucking like this anymore. I want to do something else.
HEDVIG: Well, I think that’s Hedvig’s theory. We have yet to get someone we know in Unicode to confirm this. But yes, read your documentation. It seems that the Unicode people don’t want to maintain emojis anymore. They want to get on with their life and they want everyone to move on to stickers and GIFs.
BEN: Like my… if you’d asked me before this one, like the one eyebrow raised suspiciously ten years ago, I could have told you, that’s an essential emoji that needs to be there. And took ages, it just took a really long time. I don’t know why. Anyway.
DANIEL: Winner of Emoji of the Year: face with medical mask. Another covid one.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Yeah, yeah. There’s a theme!
DANIEL: Now we’re getting to the big ones: Most Likely to Succeed.
BEN: Ooh!
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Wait, this is a category?
DANIEL: This is a category. Every year it’s a category. Most Likely to Succeed.
HEDVIG: I forget every year in that case, because this is an American yearbook high school book thing, right?
BEN: Exactly. It’s a piss take, it’s a satire of a thing that America does that isn’t really anywhere else.
HEDVIG: But what does that mean in terms of Word of the Year?
DANIEL: It’s going to stick around.
BEN: Yeah, so Most Likely to Succeed in the yearbook is like, who do you think is like rock solid? Right? Like, which member of your cohort can you point at and go like: they’re probably going to be mayor or like whatever.
HEDVIG: Like suss or something.
BEN: Yeah, exactly.
HEDVIG: Two years ago suss.
DANIEL: So here we go: ZOOMER. Any feels?
BEN: So just to be clear, you are using ZOOMER as anyone from Gen-Z or a Millennial, is that correct?
HEDVIG: Yes. And Gen X is sort of excluded.
DANIEL: I think even Millennial is excluded. I think Zoomer is specifically the generation after Millennials.
BEN: Yeah, right. Gen-Z. Sorry mate; you’re a, you’re a dirty Millennial just like us. Well, when I say us, I mean me… old guy!
DANIEL: I’m three years away from being a boomer. If I’d been born three years earlier. GIGAFIRE, a wildfire that burns at least a million acres of land.
BEN: A gigafire? Mmm, yeah, no sorry, that’s not going to win.
DANIEL: CURBSIDE.
BEN: CURBSIDE?
DANIEL: So you can get things delivered curbside.
BEN: Woah, this is an Australian one! Not even an Australian one. This is a Perth-specific one. This is one of the very few Perth, like, specific… This is like one of those four hundred or so words that we have here in WA that, like, other people don’t use. Curbside: one of them.
DANIEL: Yeah, okay!
HEDVIG: I thought it was going to be… I’m on NUMTOT: New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens, and there’s a lot of pictures lately of people sitting curbside by train sunbathing, and it’s called a NUMTOT beach. And they’re sitting like on the sidewalk, like by the train, like sunbathing. It’s very cute.
BEN: I love this collective. And I love that there’s a reason to talk about them in every show! It’s so good.
HEDVIG: Yeah. It’s a very, very good group!
DANIEL: On a similar theme: CONTACTLESS.
HEDVIG: Ehh.
BEN: Ehh.
DANIEL: BIPOC, for Black and Indigenous People of Color.
BEN: BIPOC, yes. I want that to win. I really want that to win. But you’re not doing that, are you? You’re telling me all the ones that got close and then you’re going to tell me what won.
DANIEL: And the winner is… not that one.
BEN: Yeah, damn.
DANIEL: The winner is ANTI-RACISM. I was really glad about this one, because I find the concept of anti-racism super useful. Like, there are three kinds of people: racists, not racists, and anti racists. And I tell my not… my sister’s a not-racist. She’s awesome. We don’t need people to be not racist. Like, as in “I’m not racist.” We need people to be anti-racist.
HEDVIG: There’s a really good podcast which is run by, I believe, two black gay men: Fanti.
DANIEL: Oh, yes. We’ve talked about Fanti before.
HEDVIG: Yeah, they have an episode called “‘BIPOC’ Kind of Sucks”, I’m not sure I agree with what they talk about. But if you’re curious about some advantages and disadvantages of the term BIPOC, I recommend listening to Fanti. F-A-N-T-I.
DANIEL: A few people chimed in and said, a few people of color: Hey, we’re not sold on BIPOC. Anne Charity Hudley said, “If you want to be IPOC, that’s totally cool, but I don’t know no grown Black people trying to be BIPOCs.”
HEDVIG: I think one of the critiques of BIPOC is that it is grouping people together who should be described separately, and that it’s attributing common aims and identities where we should recognise differences.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Yeah. But some people are also saying it is also a useful category for this. So there is back and forth, and they really discuss it well in that episode.
DANIEL: That’s cool. Okay, we’ll put a link to that. Next category, we’re almost done. Most Useful: SUPERSPREADER. PPE. BUBBLE. BLURSDAY — we had that one from David Crystal.
HEDVIG: Yay! I love BLURSDAY. It’s good.
BEN: That’s right.
DANIEL: The Most Useful: BEFORE TIMES.
BEN: Ah, BEFORE TIMES is good.
DANIEL: That was one of ours; the dystopian before times. Ah, remember back in the day? And the Word of the Year, we’re up to the big one. The nominees were: UNPRECEDENTED.
BEN: Okay, we’ve spoken about that one.
DANIEL: SOCIAL DISTANCING.
BEN and HEDVIG: Mhm.
DANIEL: DOOMSCROLLING. Still love it.
BEN: Classic.
DANIEL: BIPOC. BEFORE TIMES.
BEN: BEFORE TIMES.
DANIEL: ANTI RACISM.
BEN: Woah, man, we’ve got a real horse race on our hands!
DANIEL: Yeah. Those ones didn’t win. There was a run off between these two: COVID and 2020.
HEDVIG: 2020.
BEN: COVID.
DANIEL: 2020’s interesting, because you know it could be used as: This was a real 2020.
BEN: 2020 hindsight, blah blah blah.
DANIEL: And also like an infix, like abso-2020-lutely
BEN: Yeah, right.
HEDVIG: Oh, people did that? That’s crazy. What does that mean?
DANIEL: Yeah, it broke my grammar, I gotta say.
HEDVIG: As in, “I lost my job, oh abso-2020-lutely.”
DANIEL: Yes, exactly. But the winner was, for Word of the Year of the American Dialect Society: COVID. Because of course COVID won! It was all about COVID! Nothing but covid! Covid, covid, covid!
BEN: I don’t think we should be surprised.
DANIEL: No, I don’t think so either. It was the word. And it was a boring choice, but it was also the only choice.
BEN: Yeah, agreed.
DANIEL: Okay, but but now [CLAP] we’re going to bring this home, because it’s time for our Word of the Year of the Week.
BEN: The real contest, if we’re being honest.
HEDVIG: Yeah, the real contest. It’s been fun, guys, listeners. I understand you’ve kept with us and been patient as we go through this middle school league of Word of the Year.
BEN: This boring, like, amateur hour of, like, the ~American Dialect Society~. Now we get to the real stuff, the good stuff.
HEDVIG: Yeah, who cares. Exactly.
DANIEL: And this was voted on on Twitter and on Facebook by our listeners: You! And just people who managed to bump into our poll. So number ten: -DEMIC, which got overlooked by everyone. But I think it’s awesome.
BEN: There we go, there we go. Yep, there’s my suffix.
HEDVIG: Yeah, we’re on to the good stuff, yep, yep, yep.
DANIEL: Adam on Facebook commented, “It’s elegant. The -DEMIC portion simply refers to the people, as in affecting the people on a large scale, same root as in DEMOCRACY. The notion of sickness is not required, just the mass scale affecting people. So something like INFODEMIC is understandable.” Yep. Number nine: 2020.
BEN: Oh, okay. Wow, we placed the word, the second word of the year, the second most popular at number nine. Shade thoroughly thrown.
DANIEL: Number eight: SHITSHOW, which I thought would do better.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: I think, I think a lot of years have been shitshows. This one more than ever. But yeah.
DANIEL: Number seven, REVENGE BEDTIME PROCRASTINATION.
HEDVIG: Yes. Yes.
BEN: I was talking about this just the other week, in fact.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Which I defined as: staying up late and engaging in retaliatory timewasting as a reaction to overwork, because no one tells you what to do.
HEDVIG: Yes, I did this last night. That’s why I’m not so lucid right now.
BEN: Bit foggy.
DANIEL: Jeff on Facebook says, “I have actually used this word in real life more than once since listening to this episode, and of course, done the thing many times.”
HEDVIG: I think this is a good Word of the Year because it is about a concept that is new and needs a name.
BEN: Yeah, right? Like, this is a hole that needed spackling over. And now we have spackled.
DANIEL: Sure did.
HEDVIG: Yeah, good job.
DANIEL: Number six, HETROSPECT: realising things you did in your youth were not in fact straight. This was one of ours with Cedar Brown back in the Talk the Talk days. Here’s what we said at the time:
[FROM AN OLDER RECORDING]
DANIEL: This one comes from Felicia Ray Devon on Twitter. The word is HETROSPECT and it means: realising things you did in your youth were not, in fact, straight. “In hetrospect, I realise that that one experience at summer camp might have been a bit of a clue.”
BEN: Gosh, there is some funny Around the table stories that like belong in the hetrospect subcategory, aren’t there?
DANIEL: I’ll say. I don’t have a lot of queer experiences myself, so I’m going to leave that to other people.
BEN: I’m thinking more about times that I’ve heard where, like, you know, a partner of a person sort of… comes out, for lack of a better phrase. And then that person who was with that person who came out, starts sort of like looking back in hetrospect at a few things and kind of goes: oh, right.
[LONG THOUGHTFUL PAUSE]
DANIEL: Okay!
BEN: Well, I guess we’re done then!
[BACK TO THE EPISODE]
DANIEL: One Ben on Facebook says, “I know this is the word I’ll be using most from now on out of this list.”
HEDVIG: Just to be clear, it is about things that were actually not hetero. We’re not allowed to use it for when J.K. Rowling ever wants to announce that someone was gay, when there was no evidence of it.
DANIEL: No, no, no, no, no, no. Number five, RATLICKER.
HEDVIG: Good job! Yes, I’m into it. The better version of COVIDIOT.
DANIEL: Someone who scorns health advice. If they’d been around during the Black Plague, they’d be licking rats. I found that this one was weirdly popular on Twitter, disproportionately.
HEDVIG: It’s a good word.
BEN: Maybe. Maybe it just got, like, a real… Yeah. There’s something very twittery about it in that it’s mean.
HEDVIG: Yeah, also it sounds a bit like bootlicker, which is good.
BEN: Yeah, fun.
DANIEL: Number four, one given to us by David Crystal: It’s BLURSDAY.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s good.
DANIEL: The day it is when you’re not sure what day it is. And here’s what David Crystal told us at the time.
[CUT TO OTHER RECORDING]
DAVID: I’ve been spending my time over the last three months collecting all the new vocabulary that’s coming in as a result of the virus. And I’ve got a collection now of over a hundred. Linguists have been doing this all over the place, not just me. And one of my favorites is this word for the, you know, what day of the week is it? I don’t know. Gah. What day of the week is it? Oh, folks it’s Blursday, Blursday.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: I like that very much.
DAVID: That’s my favorite at the moment.
[BACK TO THE EPISODE]
Danie: Number three, DOOMSCROLL.
BEN: There we go. There it is.
DANIEL: Yep. To obsessively plow through all the bad news in your feed, even though it makes you feel terrible. Number two, BEFORE TIMES, the time before the pandemic.
BEN: I like BEFORE TIMES.
DANIEL: I love BEFORE TIMES. Dan on Facebook says, “I used to say this somewhat ironically to my young nieces a few months back. Now it’s getting less ironic.”
BEN: Yeah, it’s not ironic at all. It’s a very real thing. But what have our listeners and other random punters decided? What is number one?
DANIEL: What was number one? Number one is a surprise. Number one happened because a very energetic word promoter found our poll and encouraged friends to vote for it.
BEN: Oh, dear. Oh, we’ve had a…
HEDVIG: I like this!
BEN: We’ve been electorally, like, scooped, is what’s happened.
DANIEL: The Because Language Word of the Year is… ORBISCULATE!
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: No!
HEDVIG: Yes! Yes! We all need a break. We need to do something silly.
BEN: To scoop one’s eyeball out of their skull, to be clear?
DANIEL: No, no!
HEDVIG: No, we had this. It’s just the citrus squeeze, squeeze when you get.
BEN: Oh that’s right, when you get the… oh, right.
DANIEL: To squirt in the eye of the potential eater, said of a citrus fruit. It was Hilary Krieger of orbisculate.com who found it, displayed it to her friends, and now we have a lot more friends! It jumped from six to seventy on Twitter.
HEDVIG: Love it.
BEN: Wow, okay.
HEDVIG: I’m for this.
DANIEL: I’m okay with this! So I got in touch with Hilary Krieger. She’s an opinion editor at NBC. And we had a chat about the word. And here’s how that went down:
[AUDIO WITH HILARY KRIEGER]
DANIEL: Tell me about the word. So it’s not a word that most people have heard of, although you are changing it. And it means?
Hilary KRIEGER: It means when you go to eat a grapefruit and you dig your spoon in and the juice and the grapefruit squirts out and hits you in the eye. That’s the purest definition of the word. But there’s also secondary definitions, like when you’re peeling oranges and it squirts onto your clothing, or to the clothing of somebody near to you. And since the word’s been picking up, people have been expanding beyond the citrus fruit definition that was originally part of the word’s sort of core, to include if you’re eating a pizza and the pepperoni oil sprays up onto you. Somebody was chopping peppermint and decided that the peppermint flakes were orbisculating. So it’s really gotten quite a wide food-related definition at this point.
DANIEL: Okay, that’s interesting that the food is one of the important factors. And I think also squirting under pressure, like as from a jet.
HILARY: Yes!
DANIEL: Like, if the pepperoni just dropped on to your shirt and left an oily stain, that would not be orbisculation.
HILARY: Right. Absolutely not. No. There has to be some level of which the food is attacking you, and definitely that they’re playing an active role in the entire action.
DANIEL: Okay, well, the word certainly has a lot of fans and we’ll see if it takes off and hits the wider public. Tell me about the origins of this word, because I believe this is one of those words that comes from your, as we say on the show, your familiolect, is that right?
HILARY: Yes, absolutely. And that would be the reason why so few people had heard of it until we… My brother and I started a campaign just very recently to try and get the word into widespread use with the ultimate goal of hoping that it will be welcomed by the dictionary gods into their nice new editions. My dad actually invented the word ORBISCULATE because of a college assignment that was to come up with a word. But when he used it in our house growing up, he didn’t tell us that he had made up this word. So actually, we grew up just thinking it was a word, because when your family uses words and that’s how you learn how to speak the English language and you don’t question them every time something new is mentioned, you just ask them: oh, what does that mean or how do I use that? So I grew up thinking that ORBISCULATE was an official word in the English language.
And at the ripe old age of twenty four, I was hanging out with a friend of mine who had just received an MFA from a creative writing program. So I guess he felt that he was quite fluent with the words of the English language. And we were eating oranges and one squirted and I said: Wow, that orbisculated on you! And he said what? It did what? And I said, it orbisculated. And he said, what is that? That’s not a word. And I said, of course it’s a word. And we actually ended up placing a bet, a five dollar bet on whether it would be in the dictionary. And to my shock and embarrassment, we opened a dictionary. It was not there! Anyway, my dad happened to be, we were at my parents house, so I ran over to my dad’s office and I said, what’s wrong with his dictionary? Why isn’t ORBISCULATE here? And he very, very sheepishly admitted after all these years that perhaps it wasn’t an official part of the English language.
And our dad passed away from covid earlier this year. And, you know, we couldn’t do a lot of the standard things that you do when somebody passes away, given all the restrictions. So we spent a lot of time talking to people about him, trying to explain, you know, things like, for… Even for his obituary or for a eulogy, you’re just trying to capture a person in a few words, which is an impossible task. And the word ORBISCULATE kept coming up because it just so succinctly captured so much about him — his humor, his creativity, his quirkiness, his love for taking something that should be negative and turning it into a positive or something at least to laugh about. And we saw how much it resonated. And people loved the word. And we thought, you know, this is really something that should be part of the broader English language and really should be in the dictionary. And so in his honor, and because everybody is sitting on their couch bored out of their mind, we thought we should take advantage of the moment and try and use social media and raise awareness about this wonderful word and hope that it does indeed get to enter the dictionary. And then I’m going to call up my friend and say, hey, you owe me five dollars!
DANIEL: Plus interest!
HILARY: Yeah, right! I won’t tell you how many years ago I was twenty four! [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: It would give it away a bit. Now, well, that is a lovely tribute to your father and to his creativity and sense of humour. Now, to get a word into a dictionary, we know a little bit about how dictionary makers do their thing. You’ve gotten some advice from people who know a lot about dictionaries, who have worked on dictionaries. What advice have they given you?
HILARY: It’s actually been really wonderful talking to people involved, language experts, dictionary experts, and it’s been for me as a journalist and writer — my brother is a writer also — it’s just been a really fun part of the project. The main thing that they’ve stressed is that people need to be using the word. And they need to be in… and the thing that’s actually really important is they need to be using the word for what the word means. So saying: “ORBISCULATE is the most wonderful word ever, which is something that we love to hear” isn’t something that dictionary editors are going to pay much attention to, because you’re not using it for the meaning of the word, which is to squirt something somewhere.
So when people start just using it “in context” — is the phrase they told us — and it starts being evident in lots of places. So obviously not just with our Facebook friends, but across different groups. I mean, different continents. That’s huge. Having it be used in different mediums. So whether it’s a sort of official newspaper of record versus in a comic book blurb of a character, versus a song that somebody puts together. Those are all things that the dictionary editors are looking for as signs that something’s being widely used. And so basically, the more the word is out there and people know it and then start incorporating into their vocabulary, that’s how it begins to actually infiltrate the language and take hold.
DANIEL: So how is it going? Is it working?
HILARY: First, we are thrilled, you know, we have seen such amazing responses from people. I mean, a lot of people have just left us the most wonderful notes about our situation. And actually one of the wonderful things about the project is how other people have been sharing their own losses. And we are actually partnering with a charity called Carson Village that helps families in the aftermath of a loss, dealing with a lot of the really difficult logistical things that need to be done that nobody thinks about until you’re in your worst moment of life and then have to deal with everything all at once.
So there are a lot of people that connect and it’s been resonating that way. And that’s been wonderful. But in terms of the word itself, the creativity of people, in terms of using it and sharing it and thinking of different ways to incorporate it, just in terms of what the uses that we’ve seen on social media has been fantastic. And then we wanted… we wanted really to have fun with the project. But also just to reinforce that you need to use the word lots of different ways. So on our website, we have 50 goals of different places that would use the word to show that it really has a lot of different currency. And they range from appearing on a podcast…
DANIEL: Tick!
HILARY: …to being in the name of a cocktail, to being used by a celebrity chef, et cetera. And a bunch of people now have gotten in touch about different challenges. So the other day, somebody wrote a crossword puzzle that includes ORBISCULATE as the answer to a clue, which was fantastic! So we’ve really seen people… a bunch of people who are in the process of writing books have said that they’re going to be incorporating the word, which is wonderful. And people have been really creative. Somebody from… who runs a smoothie, a smoothie store, got in touch to say that he wants to name one of the smoothie fruit beverages with ORBISCULATE. And so actually with our 50 goals, we left a couple blank so people could come up with their own ideas. So I think we’ll add “smoothie name” to the list as well.
DANIEL: Very good. Did you ever get a sense from your dad, from Neil Krieger, about the etymology of the word? I’m looking at ORBISCULATE, I’m trying to break it down. I’m looking at “orb”. Your orbs is your eyes, I guess? Am I getting there? Did you ever get a sense of how this broke down?
HILARY: We never… we never talked about that, which obviously is something to regret. But there’s like really two camps of people. And my brother and I fall into the opposite sides. There are the people who see ORBIS and think “eye” and “round”. And there are people like me who thought ORBIS is round like a grapefruit or citrus fruit. We did just talk to his college roommate who was there at the moment of creation, and he said that he thought ORBIS was because of “eye” and “round” and connected to that. But he had to admit that was sort of his assumption. So we’re not sure that he had a really conclusive conversation to establish that.
One of the language experts that I talked to said that there’s actually two different possibilities in terms of combining ORBIS with different Latin root words. One of which is THROW and one of which is more like THRUST. And so those two combined, ORBISCULATE would be sort of a natural derivative. So we’re going to go with that. We don’t really know if that’s what he had in mind, or where it came from. My dad was definitely an original, unique thinker, so I don’t know that he himself personally felt bound by the confines of Latin etymology or what. But we think that that’s a good way to approach the word. Though, in fact, our official dictionary entry description of the etymology is: arbitrary coinage.
DANIEL: Yes, yes. I mean, it would be. But that’s okay, because there are lots of those. Well, Hilary Krieger, thank you so much for sharing a bit of the history of this novel coinage with us. And congratulations on the progress of ORBISCULATE, and congratulations for ORBISCULATE being the Because Language Word of the Year for 2020!
HILARY: It’s such a thrill. Thank you. Really appreciate your having me on. Love to talk to you, and love to talk about language and being Word of the Year. Wow. That’s, like, amazing.
DANIEL: Well, it’s not much. I mean, we’re a very small podcast, so…
HILARY: No, no, no, no! Don’t diminish it. It’s a wonderful victory. It shows that we’re all doing something great and we want to celebrate it to the fullest extent possible.
[BACK TO THE EPISODE]
DANIEL: So that was Hilary Krieger, editor. She’s worked for 538. She’s worked for CNN and she’s worked for NBC. And she is the purveyor — she along with her brother Jonathan — purveyors of orbisculate.com.
BEN: Well, look, what a genuinely, genuinely unique way to try and keep the memory of someone alive after such an awful tragedy. That has to be a first, that I’ve ever heard.
DANIEL: It’s lovely. I mean, if you read Douglas Hofstadter’s book, “I am a Strange Loop”, he talks about people being patterns and when they’re gone, who keeps the pattern? Well, the people that knew them. And now this pattern is sort of like keeping his playful language spirit going.
BEN: And who better to keep a pattern alive than someone who’s worked for 538 and understands the intricacies of, like stats numbers and all of that stuff shakes out?
HEDVIG: I think it’s beautiful. I think… I feel honoured to have this as our Word of the Year. It’s beautiful and it gives us a little bit of a break and allows us to keep a memory alive of someone who obviously meant a lot and who, as I understand it, passed away for very 2020-related reasons.
DANIEL: This is like our poke in the eye for 2020. It’s like, no, we’re not doing any of your words. We’re doing the grapefruit one!
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: I like that we’re claiming this, like it wasn’t entirely just like mobilised a massive squad of like-minded nerds to just come in and just, like, bum rush the the poll. Which I fully support, by the way.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Good job. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you for doing that.
DANIEL: That’s the Word of the Year. Thank you. So other suggestions from our listeners. Erica says, “The word of the year should be silent screaming. Not silent screaming, but an actual silent scream.”
BEN: Right. I get ya. I get… Into a pillow or something. Yeah.
HEDVIG: [SCREAMS]
DANIEL: Scream in your heart.
HEDVIG: That’s become a reaction thing, YouTubers do that. They go [SCREAM].
DANIEL: [SCREAMS]. Erin on Facebook, “Four Seasons, as a way of making fun of the whole Rudy Giuliani thing.”
BEN: That was very fun.
HEDVIG: That was funny.
DANIEL: And Elsa on Twitter says, “Just wanted to say how much I appreciate A Way With Words…” — That’s the podcast with Grant Barrett and Martha Barnett — “…bringing up the word RESPAIR, which means to have hope again, especially after a period of despair.”
BEN: Okay. To RESPAIR. I like that. That’s fun.
DANIEL: Ben, at the beginning of the year, we had our personal words of the year, and yours was STAMINA and mine was INTEGRITY.
HEDVIG: INTEGRITY?
DANIEL: Yeah, it’s something I wanted to work on.
BEN: STAMINA. Yeah, I think I’ve done all right this year. I’ve stayed the course.
DANIEL: We had no idea how much stamina this year was going to take.
BEN: Mhm. True that.
HEDVIG: You wanted to work… how do you work on integrity?
DANIEL: You just try to make sure that your inside is the same as your outside.
BEN: Yeah. And that what people perceive of you is like a as accurate a reflection of who you behave to be.
HEDVIG: Both ways, right?
DANIEL: Yeah. Well, hopefully good ways.
HEDVIG: No, but I mean, like, try to make also, your inside — if you’re pretending to be a good person, try to become a good person inside one.
BEN: Yeah, a hundred percent, yeah.
HEDVIG: I support this.
DANIEL: Let’s hear some comments before go. Miranda on Twitter says, “I was just listening to the most recent Mailbag episode, and I’m sure I’ve used SCREENSHAT before, but I’ve also used TROUBLESHAT and I have a picture to prove it.”
HEDVIG: Very good.
BEN: [LAUGHS] TROUBLESHAT, that’s fun.
DANIEL: Diego on Facebook has also suggested more words for GRAMMANDO, which is somebody who corrects other people’s grammar. GRAMMAR-SUPPORT, like tech support; a GRAMMARIST; a GRAMMARIAN; a GRAMTHUSIAST, inspired by Lingthusiasm. The one I like best is GRAMMAR PATROL. I’m on grammar patrol today.
BEN: Oh. No, I don’t like that because it makes it too nice.
DANIEL: Okay. In that case, we’ll just have…
BEN: I like GRAMMONITOR. So like, your grammar monitor — which was boring and dumb and hard. GRAMMONITOR though, that’s good.
DANIEL: GRAMMONITOR. I like it. Hey, I just want to say thank you both for being here. This has been such an amazing year of us becoming Because Language, and I’ve enjoyed our chats so much, and so thanks.
BEN: Awww, stop it you! All I do is show up. You do all the work.
DANIEL: [KISSY NOISES]
HEDVIG: Awww.
DANIEL: Well, I think the show works and I love it. And I just, when I get off of a call with you guys, I’m like: why do I want to do anything else? I’m so glad this is my only job now.
HEDVIG: It is very fun. I am very happy to be on here and I’m very pleased to be able to combine… that you allow me to combine my other interests besides linguistics, which is politics, apparently, and pop culture!
BEN: Yeah, absolutely.
[OUTRO MUSIC]
BEN: If you have any reactions, ideas, or anything else that this show has generated for you this time around, you can hit us up in a bunch of different places.
HEDVIG: Citrus squirt in the eye. Oh, can we ask people to send in themselves getting orbisculated?
BEN: I think I will leave that for you, Hedvig.
HEDVIG: Yes!
BEN: You can get hold of us in a bunch of different places: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon, and Patreon. We are becauselangpod in all of those spots. If you want to tippy tappy type out your heartfelt missive, you can do so via email to hello@becauselanguage.com. And of course, the very very best thing you can do is tell your friends and associates about us, and be like: Hey, there’s this really good podcast. I really like it. You should like it too. And that’s how we grow and it’s fun.
DANIEL: Can I just say that Dustin from Sandman Stories @storiessandman has for the last entire month been relentless and unstinting in recommending our podcast and many other linguistic podcasts to basically everybody. So thanks, Dustin. You are the king.
BEN: What a lord.
HEDVIG: Amazing. We love all of our patrons and we would love more of you to become patrons if you are able to. And we’re very grateful for the support that we have gotten from our patrons during this quite rough year, I think we can all agree. One of the wonderful things we can do with that support is transcribe our episodes, which means that people can read us. And it also makes our show searchable, which is great if you are a co-host of this show and want to find out something you said at some point, which episode. Thank you.
DANIEL: Receipts.
HEDVIG: We also make bonus episodes, like our recent Mailbag episode. This is not a bonus episode though because this is Word of the Year, which goes out to everyone. If you are a patron, make sure that your details are up to date because we like to send you things and it’s good to know that those things can arrive to you. So among our wonderful patrons are: Termy, Chris B, Lyssa, The Major, Chris L, Matt, Damien, Helen, Bob, Jack, Kitty, Lord Mortis, Christelle, Elías, Michael, Larry, Binh, Kristofer, Dustin, Andy, Maj, Nigel, Kate, Jen, Nasrin, Nikoli, Ayesha, Emma, Moe, Andrew, James, and for the first time this episode: Shane! Thank you to all of you.
DANIEL: Our music is written and performed by Drew Krapljanov. He’s in the band Dideon’s Bible. Their second EP, cleverly entitled EP2, is available on their Bandcamp page. Link on our blog becauselanguage.com. Drew is also a member of Ryan Beno, which is a band that I quite enjoy. Thank you for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
[THE KIND OF PAUSE THAT COMES BEFORE AN OUTTAKE]
HEDVIG: It can be searchable and also because people can read us and blblblblblblblb I made a very long sentence that doesn’t make sense!
BEN: You can do it. Wait, wasn’t your brain supposed to be in gear at the end of the two hours of the podcast? [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: It’s not happening. It’s not. Shut up! I’m going on a Christmas break!
BEN: I’m going off the instructions you gave me.
HEDVIG: Yeah, no, that’s fair.