19: Mailbag, Schmailbag

Listen to this episode

Download this episode

Become a Patron!

Patreon supporters

Huge thanks to all our great patrons! Your support means a lot to us. Special thanks to:

Termy
Chris B
Lyssa
The Major
Chris L

Matt
Damien
Helen
Bob
Jack
Kitty
Lord Mortis
Elías
Michael
Larry
Binh
Kristofer
Dustin
Andy
Maj
Nigel
Kate
Jen
Nasrin
Nikoli
Ayesha
Emma
Moe
Andrew
James
Shane
Eloise
Rodger

and new this time:

River
Rhian
Jonathan
and Steele

Become a Patreon supporter yourself and get access to bonus episodes and more!

Become a Patron!

Show notes

New Spotify Patent Involves Monitoring Users’ Speech to Recommend Music | Pitchfork
https://pitchfork.com/news/new-spotify-patent-involves-monitoring-users-speech-to-recommend-music/

Singular they in context
https://www.glossa-journal.org/articles/10.5334/gjgl.1012/

Linguist twitter, quick question. Do you pronounce the name Grice [ɡɹis] or [ɡɹa͡is]? I had learned the 1st one was correct but have recently heard the 2nd in a ling setting. And I need to talk about implicature in class this week.
— Judy in this for the long haul Pine (@judythelinguist) January 24, 2021

February 12 “Meet the Authors” Webinar: Toward Racial Justice in Linguistics: Interdisciplinary Insights into Theorizing Race in the Discipline and Diversifying the Profession | Linguistic Society of America
https://www.linguisticsociety.org/event/february-12-meet-authors-webinar-toward-racial-justice-linguistics-interdisciplinary-insights

The Grammarphobia Blog: Suspect etymology
https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2007/12/suspect-etymology.html

Letuchiy: Typology of systems of labile verbs [PDF]
http://aletuchiy.narod.ru/handouts_articles/Transitivity/handout_Lancaster_new.pdf

Ergative verb
https://teflpedia.com/Ergative_verb

The skinny on Jorts, Jor-jeggings and Jweats. | Scoop
https://www.scoopcharlotte.com/2011/06/19/happy-fathers-day-the-skinny-on-jorts-jor-jeggings-and-jweats/

Jeggings, jorts and junderpants: A glossary
https://www.today.com/news/jeggings-jorts-junderpants-glossary-wbna43237896

List of portmanteaus – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_portmanteaus

World Wide Words: Port Out Starboard Home
http://www.worldwidewords.org/posh.htm

posh (adj.) | Etymonline
https://www.etymonline.com/word/posh

On Language: Acronym | Ben Zimmer in the NYT
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/magazine/19FOB-onlanguage-t.html

Dosh – phrase meaning and origin
https://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/13/messages/874.html

Acronym – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym

Rules Shmules: 5 Phonetic Pitfalls of Shm- Reduplication | Mental Floss
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/51600/rules-shmules-5-phonetic-pitfalls-shm-reduplication

How well do missionaries learn a foreign language? A brief summery of the latest research. : exmormon
https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/2s3no2/how_well_do_missionaries_learn_a_foreign_language/

Speaking in Tongues – Mormonism, The Mormon Church, Beliefs, & Religion – MormonWiki
https://www.mormonwiki.com/Speaking_in_Tongues

ILR scale – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILR_scale

How Long Does it Take to Become Proficient?
https://www.languagetesting.com/how-long-does-it-take

Penny Arcade | News | Sorcelations
https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2021/01/29/stonk

GameStop and AMC stocks soar on another day of wild trading in heavily shorted companies – MarketWatch
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/gamestop-and-amc-stocks-soar-on-another-day-of-wild-trading-in-heavily-shorted-companies-11611775450

GameStop’s surge continues, as small traders band together to push up stocks.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/01/27/business/us-economy-coronavirus#gamestop-stock

How much short sellers lost in the GameStop stock rally – Vox
https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/2/2/22261097/gamestop-wallstreetbets-short-seller-hedge-funds-losses-robinhood

Joe Biden, in his first speech as president-elect, urges unity: ‘Time to heal in America’
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/07/joe-biden-in-his-first-speech-as-president-elect-urges-unity-time-to-heal-in-america.html

What Unity? | Charles Blow in the New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/opinion/trump-impeachment-unity.html

The Quiet Part Loud | Know Your Meme
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-quiet-part-loud

Language Log » Saying the quiet part loud
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=43732

A New ‘Simpson-ism’ for the Trump Era
https://medium.com/fan-fare/a-new-simpson-ism-for-the-trump-era-c0dbf929223b

I may be late to this, but someone in my feed just referred to rep. Greene as Qaren. And that’s perfect and about all that ever need be said about her until she can get the help she needs.
— Christian Turner (@christor) January 30, 2021

Cori Bush Moving Office Away from Marjorie Taylor Greene
https://www.thecut.com/2021/01/cori-bush-moving-office-away-from-marjorie-taylor-greene.html

QAnon Anonymous
Google Podcasts | Apple Podcasts

Transcript

DANIEL: All right.

HEDVIG: Go, go, go!

DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to this episode…

HEDVIG: [INTERRUPTS WITH SINGING] ♫ Go, go, Power Ra…! ♫

DANIEL: … [LAUGHS]

BEN: Ruined it already. On sentence one.

DANIEL: First take! I could edit you out, but I’m gonna start again.

[INTRO MUSIC]

DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to this episode of Because Language, a podcast about linguistics, the science of language. I’m Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team! The one with all the answers… it’s Ben Ainslie.

BEN: Hello, everyone.

HEDVIG: Yesss!

DANIEL: And the one with all the answers… Hedvig Skirgård.

HEDVIG: Different answers, but also all of them.

BEN: I would like to think that there’s a… there’s a… like, a B-intersect-H Venn-diagram with, like, considerable overlap in terms of our answers.

HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’re Marxists in a similar way! [LAUGHTER]

BEN: I would… I would like to throw an apology out to all of our listeners. If you are listening to my voice and thinking: he sounds a little bit more Tom Waits-y than normal, that is because I had my Year 12 Ball last night. And so I was deep on the D floor throwin’ out a lot of “wooo! woo!”s and my voice has suffered.

HEDVIG: Hasn’t suffered that much.

BEN: So if you like this voice, bad news: you will not get it again.

DANIEL: You don’t sound like I do after a cold. I always get very ~smoky~.

BEN: Yeah.

HEDVIG: You sound all right.

BEN: It might — maybe it’s mostly in my head — but I sound substantially different than normal to me. Anyway!

HEDVIG: It’s mostly in your head. You don’t sound that different.

BEN: Excellente. Edit that out. Carry on.

DANIEL: This is a Mailbag for our patrons. Hello, patrons. Thank you for being patrons.

HEDVIG: [HIGH, AIRY VOICE] Hello, hello.

BEN: And for people listening to this months down the line: hello, general population.

DANIEL: Yes. What this means is you give us the questions, you get to listen to our answers. So thank you for making the show possible. But before that, let’s get to the news. We’re going to start with a story on Spotify.

BEN: Excellent.

HEDVIG: Yep.

DANIEL: You know how Spotify tries to figure out what you like?

HEDVIG: Yeah.

BEN: I have found it’s very bad at it, but yes, I do know how they do that.

HEDVIG: Ohh, I found it really good at it.

DANIEL: Are you able to get a sense of how they’re grouping things? Are you able to figure out, sort of reverse engineer, how they do it?

HEDVIG: So you know how if you use Spotify a lot, and you build up a sort of catalog, it makes these daily mixes, but it makes more than one. And the daily mixes are actually for me sorted by genre, which is good because I listen to so much lo-fi when I’m working that, if it didn’t differentiate, I would have like six playlists of only lo-fi. But thankfully, it understands that that’s a genre. And it puts that in Daily Mix One, and then in Daily Mix Two, it puts other stuff. So it’s sort of grouping things by genre, which I like.

BEN: Maybe… maybe I have to dive a little deeper because I’ve honestly found that it’s recommendation algorithm is as mediocre as YouTube’s, which for me is the notoriously most mediocre of things, which is basically like: I saw that you liked this thing, so I’m going to give you a thing that I have just, like, heat-mapped to be approximately the most similar thing.

HEDVIG: Really?

BEN: Like, very rarely has YouTube ever given me a thing, which is what I would describe as a delightful surprise. Right?

HEDVIG: Really? That’s interesting.

BEN: I’m like: Oh, look at this thing that is functionally indistinguishable, say, for like one speaking voice from the thing that I have consumed recently.

HEDVIG: Right. No, YouTube is really good for me. Recently, it was like: You would like to watch two hours of this professional groomer grooming a dog who has a very bad coat. And I was like: Yep, this is me.

BEN and DANIEL: Wow.

HEDVIG: Never watched grooming videos before.

BEN: That was an insight I was not expecting to get.

DANIEL: Who wouldn’t like that? Come on!

BEN: I would absolutely not like that! I don’t want to watch two hours of a dog being groomed.

HEDVIG: It’s really fun. This type of video… the comments section is very, very often filled with people saying, you know, a little dialog template saying: YouTube: Would you like to watch a grooming video for two hours? A million people: Yes. And I’m like, Yes, that is me.

BEN: Wow.

DANIEL: Well, Spotify has a patent [peɪ-tənt] — or a patent [pæ-tənt] — to do it slightly differently. To do this job of figuring out what it is that you want.

HEDVIG: [pæ-TENT].

BEN: How it do. How it do dis.

DANIEL: Here it is. It will use recordings of users’ speech.

HEDVIG: AHHHH.

BEN: Isn’t that…

HEDVIG: …like, illegal?

BEN: When I… when I speak into my phone and say: YouTube, play me some banging EDM dance music, isn’t that…

HEDVIG: THAT is what you listen to? I doubt that.

BEN: I absolutely listen to… excuuuuuuu – hah hah hoh hoh hohhhhhh?!

DANIEL: Oh, absolutely. Do we not know Ben? Have we met? Hedvig, I’d like to introduce you to Ben.

HEDVIG: Have we talked about EDM before?

BEN: Hedvig, Hedvig. Me and… oh… you should have seen me last night. Like, in the ballroom, there was… because you know how balls work? You got a bunch of tables, but then you got a D floor in the middle, right? And so there would be just like shitty Bon Jovi song, shitty pop song, and then like either a thumping EDM banger…

HEDVIG: Did they play Should I Stay or Should I Go?

BEN: Yes.

HEDVIG: Why is that a staple on all, like, school functions in all countries?

DANIEL: Has been ever sonce.

BEN: Don’t even… don’t even get me started. Anyway, right? So all that trash is playing. And I’m just like chin-stroking up the back. And then like…

HEDVIG: [WHISPERS] Chin-stroking… oh…

BEN: And then like an absolute banger hip-hop or EDM track comes on. And I am just like, pushing well-dressed teenagers out of the way! Because I am just like, I’m in the middle. I’m jumping up and down. I’m whipping my head around to the point where it is very sore today!

DANIEL: There goes Mr Ainslie.

BEN: Me and EDM very much… to my question, though: When I bust open my phone, I’m like: Hey, YouTube, play me like something by Boys Noise or whatever. Isn’t that what… Isn’t that what’s happening? Isn’t that it using my voice to like, give music?

DANIEL: What if it took a look at this: What if it took a gander at gender?

BEN: [GASP]

DANIEL: Age?

BEN: Oh, meta analysis?

DANIEL: Emotional state.

HEDVIG: Yeah, it does a lot of, like, morning mood for me and stuff and I’m like, yeah.

DANIEL: And accent?

BEN: That’s… okay… that’s…

HEDVIG: Wait, what? Wait, how does it know what an accent is?

BEN: That’s creepy.

DANIEL: Well, that’s a good question.

BEN: I mean, to be fair, they’ve had a lot of time to figure it out now!

DANIEL: Yeah, that’s a task, accent detection. I mean, yeah. Yeah, totally.

HEDVIG: I didn’t know they were good at that yet.

DANIEL: Well, maybe they’re not. Here’s another thing that Spotify has a patent to look at.

HEDVIG: Yeah, what are they doing?

DANIEL: By the way, I’m not saying that they’re including this in the software now.

BEN: But they’ve patented it, so they have a protective space for it.

HEDVIG: Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah.

DANIEL: Background noise. Whether somebody is on their own, or there are people around. “Ooh, you have other people? It might be a party playlist time.”

HEDVIG: That’s… that’s not bad.

BEN: Does anyone else find the accent thing to be a little bit creepy?

DANIEL: Mhm, intrusive and weird.

HEDVIG: Yeah, because I want to know what they’re doing with it, because…

BEN: Because basically my brain basically goes: Ah, that sounds like a trashy… like, that sounds like a white trash person, so I’m gonna give them lots of… I don’t know what’s that… who’s that? A kid? Kid Rock. I’m gonna suggest a bunch of Kid Rock.

DANIEL: Hey, you sound Latinx, would you like to listen to what you’re already listening to?

BEN: Yeah.

HEDVIG: But the scary thing about all of this is how often… Okay, this isn’t your experience, but it is mine. I mean, I… it does something good for me, right? Like, I actually… when I click a playlist and I go, like: playlist radio or daily mixes, it’s not doing too bad a job.

DANIEL: I think the accent one is the one that gave me the tremors, you know?

BEN: Can I ask why, Daniel? From like a linguistics perspective, what’s the sort of ethical implications in the background there?

DANIEL: For some reason, I’m thinking of that project where they try to figure out where refugees are from, as a way of… what’s that called? It’s a four letter acronym? Starts with an L. Language of origin? No, what is it called? [It’s LADO. — D]

HEDVIG: I know that, I know that various countries have wanted to do that. And the US wanted to do that. They wanted to, like… they have companies, and Australia has done that as well. Trying to just see if refugee stories match up. So like: Oh, you say you speak this language, but we’ve got this linguist here says that that language isn’t spoken in that country, you must be lying. Is it that you’re talking about?

DANIEL: Or: You say that you’re from Iran, but you sound like you’re from somewhere else, and that’s because you were in a camp, talking to people for like, a year?. And so I’m just suspicious of anything having to do with accent, and it’s probably not related to anything that I should be worried about. But I am, I’m concerned about it.

HEDVIG: I’m also surprised that that accent is included, because like, how much better is that going to do my prediction on Spotify, for example, than just looking at what kind of things other users who listen to my kind of music listen to? Like, surely that has to be, like, the best thing.

BEN: I predict, Hedvig, if I may, that it won’t be a… my suspicion would be it is not designed to improve the results of the algorithm. It is designed to reduce the load on the algorithm. Right? So at the moment, they’ve got this like super complex network of things, figuring stuff out, and if they can listen to your accent and be like: Ah, this like, basic white boy just wants like a bunch of like EDM trash – and I’m speaking about myself right now – instead of having to like, cross reference a bunch of nonsense, it can just literally be like: eh, I know what these clowns like, and then just give it to me.

DANIEL: Wait, it’s not so that they can give songs to you, it’s that they can give ads to you.

BEN: Oh!

HEDVIG: Oh!

DANIEL: Come on, what do you think this is for?

HEDVIG: Song recommendations, obviously. We both thought so.

BEN: Yeah, Hedvig, correct me if I’m wrong. That was not made clear to me!

HEDVIG: No!

DANIEL: Don’t you think? Don’t you think?

HEDVIG: Also, I pay for Spotify, so I don’t see them ads stuff.

DANIEL: Okay. There’s something. They want to know more about you, and I don’t think it’s so that they can give you what you want.

BEN: Oh, that is… now that you’ve said it out loud, that is abundantly obvious.

HEDVIG: That makes more sense.

BEN: Question though. And this is as a non Spotify user… I use YouTube for my music.

HEDVIG: So weird, so weird!

[LAUGHTER]

BEN: How much are people speaking to Spotify? Like, what data corpus?

HEDVIG: I’m not speaking to it at all.

BEN: Yeah, what data corpus is Spotify getting here?

DANIEL: Well, it does show what’s possible, anyway. And there are more things that are possible and the more possible things get, the more things we’ll find that are maybe a little creepy and intrusive.

BEN: I have a feeling we have all three of us just displayed our age, and there’s a bunch of teenagers listening being like: You put your air buds in and you say: Spotify, skip to the next track, and that’s how we bloody interact with our Spotify all the time.

DANIEL: Okay, well, let us know. You can get in touch with us at hello@becauselanguage.com. Should we move on to the next item?

HEDVIG: Yeah.

BEN: Otherwise we will be here until… yes.

HEDVIG: Yeah, sorry. You should pick less interesting news, Daniel.

DANIEL: Sorry, sorry. And less of it.

BEN: Yeah, we haven’t even gotten to the fucking questions, good god.

HEDVIG: No no no no no.

DANIEL: This one’s about singular THEY. This one is Keir Moulton and a team from the University of Toronto. And this work was published in Glossa. We’ve talked a lot about singular THEY. We’re big fans.

BEN: We have. I was a big fan… This is one of the very rare instances where I was ahead of the curve even before I joined the show.

HEDVIG: [MOCKING] ~Oh, so cool.~

BEN: Singular THEY; easy, makes sense. Just everyone needs to, like, just fuck off, basically, who doesn’t like it.

DANIEL: So you might use singular THEY in a sentence like, “The reporter said that their cell phone was recording the whole interview.” Sounds good?

BEN: Yep. Sure.

DANIEL: Sounds good. Yep, sounds fine to me. Some people think it sounds funny, either for prescriptive reasons, or because they just think it sounds kind of odd. But what happens if I just got rid of the reporter altogether? What if I said, instead of “The reporter said that their cell phone was recording the whole interview?” — what if I just said, “They said that their cell phone was recording the whole interview”? What do you think?

BEN: Just makes perfect sense to me. The only thing that I can think about in that sentence is a… is a sort of a person going: But I must know more biographical details about the subject of the sentence! Right? And I think that is a real thing for some people, right? They’re like: But is… [DRAMATIC VOICE] ~is the person a man or a woman?~

HEDVIG: To be fair, I do think it’s strange in general to have a sentence with a pronoun. Like, pronouns usually are introduced after you say a full noun-phrase, where you say “the reporter” or “Andrea” or whatever.

BEN: Can you give the non-linguist…? Yeah. So give us a sentence with one, and both?

HEDVIG: Yeah, so pronouns are HE, SHE, IT, YOU, ME, THEY, US. All of them.

BEN: Right.

HEDVIG: And usually, a pronoun is replacing a noun or a full… even a noun phrase. So like: The ugly duckling was tired. Um… is ducklings IT?

BEN: Yes, duckling would be IT.

HEDVIG: It was tired. But if you just strike up a conversation with someone, or if you read something, and they immediately just say, like: “It was tired,” you’d be like: Wait, what? Like, not even… not even about the gender. You’re just like: What was tired? Something. Just… I need to know what it’s referring to.

BEN: I guess in this particular example, though, we’ve got enough contextual information that we can assume that it’s probably not, sort of like, bobcat, for example, right? Because it’s recording an interview.

HEDVIG: So in the recording an interview, yes. But in general pronouns, usually you introduce the thing before.

BEN: You need to anchor them to a proper noun.

HEDVIG: Yeah, It’s a sign of someone not being used to writing, I think, if they do that.

DANIEL: Well, some people find singular THEY perfectly fine and some people don’t. But we’re still kind of working to understand the conditions under which people do find or don’t find singular THEY acceptable. Let’s dig into the literature. So in earlier work, Kirby Conrod and the team found that people find singular THEY more acceptable when the THEY is somebody socially distant, like “The dentist washed their hands” instead of “My friend washed their hands”. They find the friend one not as palatable as the dentist one. But what we’re finding with this work is that if you’ve got nobody in the antecedent role, the sentence with the reporter people thought was fine, but the people with no reporter thought it was weird. Their comment is, “we find that the presence of a linguistic antecedent, like ‘the reporter’, has an ameliorating role for a singular THEY, because it serves to reinforce the irrelevance of the gender of the referent,” which is why the reporter… we don’t know if that’s what gender that person is. But as long as you stick somebody in there, singular THEY sounds okay. Without it, odd.

BEN: Yeah, right. Oh, also, just apropos to nothing at all. I just figured, can we just all start calling female reporters reportresses?

DANIEL: Hmmm…

HEDVIG: Oh, god, gross.

DANIEL: Let’s not!

BEN: I just like: ~REPORTRESS!~

HEDVIG: German… German does this kind of stuff and I have to remember. But it is… And there isn’t… there is a potential feminist argument for it, which is gender is relevant. And you shouldn’t… like, being gender blind is not always helpful, either.

BEN: Yeah. It’s the… it’s what we’re seeing in sort of racial discourse right now. Like, yes, push towards colorblindness is actually just deeply antithetical to any sort of forward progress on anti-racism and all that kind of stuff.

HEDVIG: Yeah.

BEN: Which is a thing that I have been speaking with my wonderful partner about, and who, which I was not aware of completely until she was just like: You white people have some interesting ideas about how this works. [LAUGHTER]

DANIEL: And then you say: You’re right.

BEN: And I cleaned that up a little bit. [LAUGHTER] White people are fucking idiots sometimes!

DANIEL: We’re a lot of work.

HEDVIG: I thought about it, and it’s led me to sort of more often say that I’m white, when I started thinking about this more. And sometimes I say that in instances where I realise that like, the other people might not be clued into why I’m saying it. And it makes things weird, but I’m working on it.

BEN: You’re just in a room of white people, and you’re like, “Hi, I’m Hedvig. I’m white!” and they’re all like… …okaay….

DANIEL: Also I’m descended from Vikings!

HEDVIG: No, I think I said at one point, I was like — oh god, how was it? Oh, we were — it was about the train and like about the… It was actually kind of tricky. So, it was that the police were inspecting people’s passport for entering into Germany. And they didn’t check me and Ste. And I casually said to someone, like: Oh, I must be because they have like, racist bias and we’re white people and they didn’t check us. Which might be true. But it could have…

BEN: But that is that is definitely the sort of offhand comment that I would say, all the time. Like that is a very normal statement for me.

HEDVIG: But I said it to someone I don’t know. And I think they might have thought that I agreed with that?

DANIEL: Oh, I see.

BEN: Oh, right.

HEDVIG: Like: They didn’t check us because we’re white and we’re better!

BEN: Yeah. Yeah. Kind of… kind of like: I found that with French people, like, especially older French people…

HEDVIG: [LAUGHS UNDER HER BREATH] French people, okay.

BEN: …sometimes would be like: I do not want my culture diluted. I am not… I am not, like… I’m not being shy about this. So they will say things that can kind of sometimes sound to me like they would be progressive, but what they’re actually saying — like you’ve just said — it’s just like: Hm, yes, they must have put me to the forward of the queue because I’m French. And their implication is like… which is the right way to go!

[LAUGHTER]

HEDVIG: And I said this, and I realised the person I was speaking to, I couldn’t tell which interpretation they had made, and I was like, I’m not going to draw attention to it. I’m just going to go on with the rest of the conversation because I don’t know what to do about this.

BEN: Yeah, just move on!

HEDVIG: Ugh. Bleh.

Danel: Well, let’s leave singular THEY for a while. I’m sure that we’ll find out more interesting stuff about how that works. I noticed this tweet: “How do you say the name of the influential pragmatics theorist who invented all of the Maxims of behaviour?” Sorry, non-linguists. Hedvig? How would you say Herbert Paul…

HEDVIG: Do you know who this is, Ben?

BEN: Hold on. Let me look at the…

HEDVIG: I want to give you a guess. Don’t look at the run sheet, because it says the word.

BEN: I didn’t look at the, like, content, but I could see the name. I am going to guess that it’s the French pronunciation.

DANIEL: And that is…?

HEDVIG: Please produce it.

BEN: Hubert? [ubeʁ]

HEDVIG: The last name is what we’re after.

BEN: Oh, uh…

DANIEL: Herbert Paul, HP…

BEN: Oh, oh! If it’s French it’s going to be like: Paul [pwal]?

DANIEL: It’s not French. What? No.

HEDVIG: Here, his last name starts with G.

DANIEL: Here, I’m going to spell it: G-R-I-C-E.

BEN: Oh! I saw Herbert Paul, I didn’t see… okay. Look, in that case, I’m gonna go with Grice [gɹaɪs].

DANIEL: Grice [gɹaɪs].

HEDVIG: Yeah, that’s how everyone says it, Grice [gɹaɪs].

BEN: Rice with a G.

HEDVIG: Grice [gɹaɪs] and Gricean [gɹaɪsiən] Maxims, yup.

DANIEL: The Gricean Maxims. Well, I’m looking at this tweet by Judy, the linguist on Twitter, “Linguist Twitter, quick question, do you pronounce the name g-r-i c-e, Grice [gɹis], or Grice [gɹaɪs]? I had learned the first one was correct — Grice [gɹis] — but I have recently heard the second in a linguistic setting. And I need to talk about implicature in class this week.” And then a whole bunch of people in the comments were like: Yeah, no, I only ever heard Grice [gɹis], and I only ever heard Grice [gɹaɪs]. And it was kind of split. I was like, Wait, what? ‘Cause I’ve only ever heard Grice [gɹaɪs].

HEDVIG: Has anyone ever done Grice [gɹɪs]? Grice [gɹis] or Grice [gɹɪs] or whatever it is.

DANIEL: All right, so how do we settle this?

BEN: Grice [gʁɪs] would be the French pronunciation right? I know this person isn’t French, but that’s how you would…

HEDVIG: Yeah, it would.

DANIEL: Let’s make him French. Herbert [uʁbeʁ]

ALL [IN FRENCH ACCENT]: Herbert Paul Grice

HEDVIG: Yeah, that’s fine. But he’s not French, is he?

DANIEL: No, he’s British.

BEN: But he might have a French heritage, right? Or he might have a French parent or something like that, which is why he’s got a French name, potentially.

HEDVIG: Yeah. But that doesn’t always mean you inherit pronunciation, right?

DANIEL: Well, I decided to take this to youglish.com, which is a website you can go to, to type in a word and find that word in YouTube annotations.

BEN: Oh, what a cool… I’ve never heard of this!

HEDVIG: WHAT

DANIEL: It’ll take you right to that spot in the video. And so you can hear like 44 different people saying Grice [gɹaɪs] or Grice [gɹis], and you can count them up.

BEN: Ohhh!

DANIEL: Yeah!

BEN: Cool.

HEDVIG: It’s like your Spotify!

[LAUGHTER]

BEN: It’s Ngram Viewer meets Spotify!

DANIEL: You can hear people saying stuff. So do you want to know how people pronounce a certain word like divisive [də vaɪ sɪv] or divisive [də vɪ sɪv]? Is it this or that? Well, now you can look it up in a bajillion YouTube videos that have annotation.

HEDVIG: Divisive [də vɪ sɪv]?

DANIEL: It’s so brilliant.

BEN: And so I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess the answer is: a bunch of people say it both ways.

DANIEL: No, everyone says Grice [gɹaɪs].

BEN: Okay. [LAUGHS]

DANIEL: Every single person said Grice [gɹaɪs].

HEDVIG: So who are these Grice [gɹis] people? I’m confused.

DANIEL: Oh, the other cool thing about Youglish is you can break it down by country, Australian videos, American videos, Great Britain videos. So Australians say kudos [kju-dɒs] to you. Whereas American say kudos [ku-doʊz] to you.

BEN: And that’s why I say kudos [ku-doʊz]. There you go. I’ve always had Australians look at me askance, and be like: The fuck you doing, dickhead?

DANIEL: [AUSSIE ACCENT] It’s kudos [kju-dɒs].

BEN: It’s kudos [kju-dɒs], you bloody idiot.

HEDVIG: Ya think you’re better than us?!

[LAUGHTER]

BEN: I bet you think it’s Jello as well? Don’t you, mate? And I’m like: [CRINGINGLY] ~I actually do think it’s Jello.~

DANIEL: Well, if you say Grice differently, we want to hear about it. So get in touch. This is of course the second in a list of linguists whose names I’m not sure how to pronounce them. The first one is, of course, William, the sociolinguist William L-A-B-O-V.

HEDVIG: Labov [la bɒv].

BEN: Wouldn’t that be Lebeau [lə boʊ]?

HEDVIG: [la bʌv]. [la bɒv].

DANIEL: Okay, well, remember, he’s the pioneering social linguist that investigated how people say items if they’re on the fourth floor?

HEDVIG: Yeah, he’s fucking pleased with this. He’s happy about this.

[LAUGHTER]

DANIEL: Yeah, that’s the thing. I started hearing Labov [ˈleɪ bɒv] when I first started my master’s program, and then I heard that was wrong, and it was Labov [lə ˈboʊv]. And then I found out that he doesn’t actually want to resolve this conflict because he likes…

HEDVIG: Yeah. I know.

BEN: Of course he doesn’t! Hedvig hit the nail on the head, he’s pleased. He likes it.

DANIEL: It’s so appropriate that his name is a sociolinguistic variable. So good.

HEDVIG: It’s like our research center that we had in Canberra, which is Center of… ARC Center of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language. And some people said, CO-EDL, and some people said, like CODEL [kʌdəl], like curdle [kɜdəl] almost. And I say coidal [koɪdəl]!

[LAUGHTER]

BEN: No… coydel, really?

HEDVIG: And our director Nick was so pleased. Because it’s so fun. And I told it to our director. And he was like, yeah, that’s funny. That sounds like coitus! And I was like: Yeah, it does!

DANIEL: So some people said that there was a Coital Party. And some said that there was a Cuddle Party. I guess… you know… whatever you’re into.

HEDVIG: Yeah, and our director was just like, I approve of this! This is fun!

DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Was that Nick Evans?

HEDVIG: Yes. He was like: No, I’m not gonna correct anyone, you can all say whatever you want.

DANIEL: Finally… something that’s coming up. Hedvig, tell us about what’s coming up soon.

HEDVIG: So, as we may be aware of, if we are listeners of the show — but otherwise, I’ll give you a bit of recap — The Linguistic Society of America in 2018 did a statement on race and racial justice in the association and in linguistics in general. And that later sparked a lot of controversy because certain members…

DANIEL: There’s been no end of trouble since!

BEN: Was this the infamous, like, walkback and then the half apology and the whole, like, rigmarole?

HEDVIG: Yeah, this is that whole thing. And a lot of various things happen after that, where some members said that certain other members were not living up to the statement, etc, etc. And the LSA also published a journal called Language, which was one of the most high esteem linguistics journals.

BEN: Seminal. Seminal linguistic journal.

HEDVIG: Seminal. And I don’t think we’re going to cover the whole, like, letter and statement back and forth right now, but basically, they decided to to discuss this in their scholarly production as well. And in the latest issue of Language, there is a target article by Dr Charity Hudley, Dr Mallinson and Dr Bucholtz, where they discuss the conceptualisation of race in linguistics, and what linguistics as a discipline should do to increase social justice, both within the discipline and also what impact that has on our actual research — how people construct race in their research.

BEN: We had Hudley on the show, didn’t we?

DANIEL: We did. This was way back in I think 2014, 2015.

BEN: Yeah, I remember that.

HEDVIG: Yeah. Um, so some listeners might be familiar with her work. And this… so there was a target article. And then there were a number of responses, and then a sort of commentary on that. And it’s a lot of content to go through. And they’re also going to have a webinar where you can, like, meet the authors next Friday. So that’s 12th of February. We’re going to put the link in the show notes, and it’s free to attend. We’re going to be attending, I’m going to be attending because it’s a decent time – so for me, I don’t know about you guys, if it’s as good – but we’re gonna report back and cover more after that discussion, I think. And hopefully, we might be able to have some of the people who wrote some papers in there on the show.

BEN: Awesome. Fingers crossed for lots of good progress.

DANIEL: Yeah, that’s coming up.

HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s really cool. What I really liked about their paper is they sort of go through what other disciplines like anthropology and psychology and education studies have done that is sort of akin to what they argue linguistics should be doing. And they’re basically illustrating how these disciplines are usually decades ahead of linguistics in many of these regards. It made me feel, you know, sad that we’re not as advanced as I’d like us to be. But I was very grateful and very happy to read the papers, and see all the attention devoted to it.

DANIEL: Okay, we’ll keep an eye on that and have that coming up in a future episode.

HEDVIG: Yesss! [CLAPS]

[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]

BEN: And now, it is time for Hedvig and Daniel to do heaps of really hard work while I sit here and coast on their coattails, because they’re gonna have to answer a whole bunch of difficult linguistic questions!

DANIEL: Ah, not so fast — you’re gonna have to answer them first, knowing nothing!

[LAUGHTER]

BEN: Okay, okay.

DANIEL: That’s what we do.

BEN: All right.

DANIEL: So the first one comes from Marty via email, hello@becauselanguage.com.

BEN: Martin? Lovely, lovely.

DANIEL and HEDVIG: Marty.

BEN: No, I’m gonna call you Martin, just for this time, because I feel like it’s an honorific. I’m affording you even more respect. Because you’re just a deadset legend, and you’re starting off the show. I’m going to call you Marty from now on, though. Thank you.

DANIEL: Now, on our Word of the Week of the Year episode, we talked about SUSS.

BEN: Ah, yes, SUSS, great word!

DANIEL: Yeah. So Marty says, “Regarding the word SUSS. I’ve used that word — maybe spelled S U double S, but pronounced the same as you did on your Words of the Week of the Year 2020 podcast — for decades.”

BEN: You and me both Marty, you and me both.

DANIEL: “To mean, not to suspect, but to know or to figure out.”

BEN: Yep, to suss something out.

DANIEL: Suss something out.

BEN: For sure.

HEDVIG: Hmm.

DANIEL: “I’m curious how this other meaning came about.”

BEN: As in how to suss something out.

DANIEL: Yeah. So SUSS in our earlier episode was, like, suspicious.

BEN: [DRAMATICALLY] Suspicious. Yep.

DANIEL: Suspect.

BEN: Well, that’s a bit suss.

DANIEL: But to SUSS OUT means to discover.

BEN: Investigate or to uncover. Yeah.

DANIEL: Okay. So any ideas on how suspicious led to, to find out about something or to investigate something?

BEN: Well, I mean, for me, I’ve… do you know what, Marty, thank you so much for bringing it to the table because I’d never actually made the connection that it’s been used outside of its, like, yard. Do you know what I mean? Like, it’s, I’ve never really thought about how like to suss something out is actually based on suspicious necessarily, if it even is. But if it is, I would imagine because when you’re suspicious about something you investigate, so when you suss something out, you investigate it.

HEDVIG: There’s also just the verb “I suspect that you’re lying”.

BEN: Okay, yeah, true.

HEDVIG: And you are suspicious.

DANIEL: Creating some curiosity. That’s the path that I found as well. But I tried to find some sort of quote to link them together. And here’s one from the OED. It’s from 1970 from a book. Somebody says, “You’ll get sussed right off. The club boys will mark you down for a copper the minute you walk through the door.” You’ll get sussed.

BEN: Sussed right off. So that almost like you will be tagged as suspicious, in that usage.

DANIEL: Yeah, you’ll be suspected, but you’ll also be… you’ll be sussed, they’ll evaluate you, they’ll figure you out.

BEN: Yeah, okay. Okay.

HEDVIG: It’s a good threat.

DANIEL: So that there is a neat little link between suspecting and finding out. I think that kind of encapsulates them both.

BEN: Fascinating. There we go.

HEDVIG: Is this a case of a patient labile verb? So there are some verbs that are, like…

BEN: [SNORTS IN LAUGHTER] That definitely needs some explanation on that one.

HEDVIG: Yeah. no, I know, I know. I’m not stupid.

DANIEL: She’s a pro.

HEDVIG: I have a cup here. I can say “I will break the cup.” The cup will be broken, right?

BEN: Cool.

HEDVIG: Which is fun, because in the first sentence, it is I who’s the subject and the second one, the state of it… or I can also say “The cup broke.” The cup will break. So “I will break the cup” and “The cup will break.” We actually have “will break” in both scenarios, but the subject is different. It’s actually a bit weird in a way because…

BEN: Yeah, because you flip the subject and the object a little bit, don’t you?

HEDVIG: You flip the object and the subject, and usually when you do that, you should have a sort of a passive voice thing. Like, something like: the cup… the cup…

DANIEL: Will be broken by me.

BEN: What I love is – just for all of our listeners, because we do this on Zoom so we can see each other — Hedvig just went, “the cup” and then she stared at her cup for an uncomfortably long period of time and just stopped.

HEDVIG: I just had to be like: Wait, how does passive voice work in English?

[LAUGHTER]

BEN: It just felt like you were learning a deep universal truth from your cup in a film. Like: the cup [MIND BLOWN SOUND EFFECT]. So to finish that thought….

HEDVIG: So to finish that thought, Daniel very kindly told me that “The cup will be broken” and then potentially you can add if you want “by me”. But that’s weird, right? That I don’t have to say that. That I can say “The cup will break.” That’s mad!

BEN: So you’re thinking SUSS has done a similar thing?

HEDVIG: Well, I suspect you, and you are suspicious. It’s not the same thing exactly. Because it’s not… well, you can say you are a suspect. So it’s not… it’s not the same because it’s not like: I suspect you, you are suspect. [SUDDEN REALISATION] No, that works!

DANIEL: Yes, it is. Yes. You can say that. Yeah. Yeah, it’s the same exact thing.

HEDVIG: I don’t know if you saw that. But that was like: a light went up in my head when I said the words. I was like: wait, that’s a grammatical sentence!

BEN: That was, that was a real aha moment. I saw it. All across your features.

HEDVIG: So SUSPECT is a patient labile verb! There’s your jargon for the week.

BEN: Right.

DANIEL: Wow.

BEN: Yeah, there you go.

HEDVIG: Labile as in, instable.

BEN: It has evolved along those different paths, because it has the core capacity to have been used in both ways.

HEDVIG: Yeah. Yeah. And, um, patient labile verbs are really fun. And if you can think of some more, then let us know.

BEN: That’s a fun party game, like in Star Trek Discovery where they play the auto antonym game.

HEDVIG: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, things that are its own antonym. Yeah, I learned a fun one. I don’t usually like these memes on YouTube and Facebook, where it’s like: ~hehehe other languages are so funny. They sound funny. SCHMETTERLING sounds so stupid in German, etc.~ But someone pointed out that PLUS DE ÇA and PLUS DE ÇA in French both means “more of this” and “no more of this.”[LAUGHTER]

BEN: That seems… that seems confusing and like it could lead to some serious difficulties.

HEDVIG: Yeah, I saw some French people commenting and saying: It’s true, but we actually don’t… Like, one of those is less common, and we use something else. But that’s stupid!

DANIEL: Well, one of the things about BREAK is that when you find a verb that does it… when you find one patient labile verb, you’ll usually find others in the same semantic frame. So for example, “I shattered the glass”, “The glass shattered”. “I cracked the glass”, “The glass cracked.” So anything in that vein.

BEN: Okay, so what we want to find is multiple veins, listeners. So if you’ve got a bunch of different, like, little geographical regions where there these patient labile verbs…?

HEDVIG: There you go. Good. Good job.

BEN: …live, then you should definitely hit them up to us. Because you could then be the same kind of unpopular person we are at parties and you will be like [MOCKING VOICE] ~oh did you know what patient labile verbs are? Isn’t this interesting~

HEDVIG: Yeah, you can also win a some sort of symbolic prize if you can think of a better jargon term than “patient labile”, because it’s not…

BEN: I will send you all of the trash 4-H pencils that Hedvig uses, as a reward.

DANIEL: It’s not the same as anti-passivisation, is it?

HEDVIG: No, anti-passive’s different.

DANIEL: Oh, dang. Okay, next time, next time. Thank you, Marty, for that question. You are a legend. And so is Dual Power Ranger Rick — @aquaticonions on Twitter.

BEN: What a cluster of great handles!

DANIEL: Yes, indeed. “Is the segment J [d͡ʒ] as in JORTS, JOOTS or JAPRON…” Let’s just pause for a second and talk about some of these J words. I knew about JORTS, jean shorts.

HEDVIG: And you didn’t have trouble figuring out JAPRON?

BEN: JAPRON is a denim apron, I’d presume. Yeah.

DANIEL: A denim apron. I’d never heard of JOOTS.

HEDVIG: What is that?

DANIEL: They’re boots, I guess. Right?

HEDVIG: Why would you have boots in denim? Googling [KEYBOARD TAPPING SOUNDS] JOOTS.

DANIEL: Yeah, you do that.

HEDVIG: Oh, no, it’s totally a thing. It’s like, you know, you know, those Australian… uggs! They look like uggs, but they’re denim.

DANIEL: Oh! Of course. Yeah.

BEN: Yeah. Okay.

HEDVIG: I hate it.

DANIEL: “Is the segment J best analyzed as a reduced form of JEAN within a portmanteau? Or has it become lexicalised enough to be considered its own distinct affix?”

BEN: Well, when you said JAPRON before, I was like: I’ve never in my life encountered anyone who refers to something made of denim that is not in jeans as jeans, right? Like, I’ve never heard someone call, like, a denim jacket a jean jacket, for example.

HEDVIG: A jean jacket. You’ve never heard that? A jean jacket?

DANIEL: Oh, I’ve heard… Yeah, that’s what we used to call it.

BEN: Oh, so is this an American thing where JEAN is actually a synonym for DENIM?

DANIEL: Yes, it is. Yes, it is.

BEN: Oh, I wasn’t aware of this!

DANIEL: [SINGING] I got my blue jeans… [TALKING] Well, blue jeans we know already.

BEN: This is what… this is what I mean. I’ve always had JEANS just referred to as pants. As in, I’ve heard the word JEAN solely reference pants and anything else is denim, which is the material.

HEDVIG: [KEYBOARD SOUNDS] Jean jacket, denim jacket.

DANIEL: Yeah, I had a jean jacket. Hey, can we think of any other J words? Of course, there are JEGGINGS.

BEN: Are they jean leggings?

DANIEL: Yeah, jean leggings.

HEDVIG: JEGGINGS. Yeah. Well, jeggings are leggings that give the appearance of being made from denim but they’re usually not.

BEN: But are in fact not. Okay.

HEDVIG: Yeah. Yeah.

DANIEL: In my quick searching I came out with JWEATS, which…

BEN: Oof.

DANIEL: …doesn’t work at all. I thought maybe there might be JWOVERALLS, which is sort of like a throwback to our SWOVERALLS from last episode, but made of jeans. I even came across – don’t google this – JUNDERPANTS. [FALLS ABOUT LAUGHING]

BEN: I don’t know how you possibly expect me not to google that. How could you… Why would you even say the sentence “Don’t google this”? That is 100% a thing that will be googled.

HEDVIG: Yeah, that’s rude.

DANIEL: JUNDERPANTS. It just sounds terrible. What a terrible name.

HEDVIG: I found something curious, which is… we just talked about JOOTS, which we all had to be told were jeans boots. But I also found upon googling something very curious, which is JANDALS.

DANIEL: Jandals, of course!

BEN: Jandals are different. Different.

HEDVIG: Yeah, I know. No, no, but the stupid teens on the internet have reinvented the term to be a jeans flip flop.

BEN: Oh, no! No! That’s just what lovely Kiwis call their thongs.

HEDVIG: Because they’re Japanese sandals, right?

DANIEL: Japanese sandals. Yes.

HEDVIG: Yeah, but they’ve redefined the J to be jeans. So they’ve made jeans thongs.

BEN: I don’t care for that at all. I want all these kids to get off my yard.

HEDVIG: Also, I’m guessing that jeans thongs is a different thing as well. [LAUGHTER]

DANIEL: That’d be JONG. Anyway, let’s take it back to the regular question. How do we know the difference between J as part of a portmanteau and J as a legitimate prefix? What do you think it is? Do you think it’s one or the other? Or is it fuzzy?

HEDVIG: Why can’t it be b… Wait, why can’t it… What’s the prefix in this scenario?

DANIEL: Well, the J.

HEDVIG: Wait, why aren’t… Why aren’t portmanteau things prefixes?

BEN: Because portmanteaus are explicitly the combinations of two words, whereas prefixes are more abstract, aren’t they? Like PRE- for instance, doesn’t have… I don’t just say PRE- by itself.

HEDVIG: Actually you don’t say J by itself either.

BEN: Actually, to be fair, though. No, no, you’re right. We don’t say J by itself. But we do say JEANS by itself. And it’s… so a portmanteau is a combination of two words that get shortened. But those original words have definitive meanings. Whereas a prefix has a far more abstract, sort of non-anchored reality. Is that?

DANIEL: Portmanteaus are hard because you put them together, and they could still refer back to their original thing, but sometimes it’s much more opaque. Like with CHORTLE, which is like CHUCKLE and SNORT, where you’ve gotten that -ORT, and you’ve stuck it right in the middle. So the method of attachment is not clean.

BEN: It feels like portmanteaus are only portmanteaus in the early phases of that word’s lifetime gestation phase. Like, that’s the pupa phase of the word. And then after that, they just become a word in their own right.

DANIEL: Like a combining form.

BEN: Yeah, a little bit.

DANIEL: Like -POCALYPSE.

HEDVIG: I’m thinking that part of the issue here is that portmanteaus, we generally tend to think of them as a sort of kind of compound. So when linguists say compound, they typically mean two words that are put together and they form a sort of new word in some sort of meaningful way. So what’s a good compound? Sunbathing. Meh, not great.

DANIEL: No, that’s great. Babysitting.

HEDVIG: And usually when we say the word prefix, we mean things that can’t occur on their own and that are productive. So they should be able to go on lots of things. They shouldn’t be fossilised, usually when we say prefix, and I think what their question… Yeah, they’re getting to exactly that the J is, like, quite productive.

DANIEL: Productive.

HEDVIG: Well, it… what have we got? Like, 20 examples or something?

DANIEL: Got a lot. I mean, we could go on.

BEN: I mean, conceivably anything that could have, like, denim used in its manufacturing process could have this applied to it, right?

HEDVIG: Yeah. But that’s… that’s just the subclass of nouns that are clothes.

BEN: Not necessarily. Like, denim can be used in accessories.

HEDVIG: I can put anti- on anything.

BEN: Yeah. Okay. I get what you mean. True.

DANIEL: Yeah, it’s not as productive as all that. And it feels to me like word creation is kind of more complex than the narrow categories of just: this is a portmanteau or this is a prefix. It feels… it feels different. For what it’s worth, all of the J words we mentioned are listed on Wikipedia’s list of portmanteaus.

BEN: Oh, there we go.

DANIEL: But then, so is BICURIOUS, and that feels like it’s got a prefix to me. Doesn’t feel like a portmanteau at all.

HEDVIG: Yeah.

BEN: Oh, I guess. But that feels like a bit of an accidental double up, though, doesn’t it? Because what it’s really saying is bisexual curiosity, right? As opposed to simply just using the BI- prefix in its “two, like, productive format, right?

HEDVIG: It’s not like I’m curious about two things.

BEN: Like, a bicycle has BI-, not because it’s got anything to do with bisexuality.

DANIEL: [LAUGHTS] Bicycle! This stuff’s complicated!

BEN and HEDVIG: Yeah.

DANIEL: I don’t know if there’s a good answer to this. So what’s our answer? Do we feel like this J is a portmanteau?

BEN: I’m leaning to portmanteau. I lean to portmanteau on this one.

HEDVIG: Yeah, me too.

BEN: I think it’s… we’re a ways away from it being a productive prefix.

HEDVIG: When I can start putting it on verbs, then I’m totally down for being a prefix.

BEN: But also, I think the the sort of like the asterix like it’s a portmanteau, asterix, the barrier between portmanteau and prefix is a lot more fuzzy than we’d probably like it to be.

DANIEL: Good, good, good, good. I’m happy about that. Hey, big thanks to Dual Power Ranger Rick for that question. And we’ll go on. This one’s from Nikoli on our Discord channel. “Why do PEEP, PEER and PEEK all mean the same thing and have such similar spellings?” PEEP, PEER, and PEEK.

BEN: PEEP, PEER, and PEEK.

HEDVIG: This is like GLITTER, GLISTENING, GLIMMER, isn’t it?

DANIEL: Sound symbolism, hmm?

HEDVIG: Hmm.

BEN: I am going to put it out there that I find slight semantic difference between these things.

DANIEL: Like what?

BEN: I find that peeping and peering in my brain have a different connotation. Yes, they both mean looking. Absolutely. But to PEER for me seems like a long, somewhat more restive process of looking at something, whereas a PEEP has connotations that are far more furtive.

DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] Yes. And PEEKING as well.

HEDVIG: Furtive. Furtive means…?

BEN: Like, like, to PEEP is like…

DANIEL: Sneaky.

BEN: Yeah, exactly. Like if I peep at you, I kind of do this. [UNSEEN GESTURE]

HEDVIG: Short amount of time.

BEN: Yeah, whereas if I peer at someone, I go… [ANOTHER UNSEEN GESTURE].

HEDVIG: Yeah, great radio, Ben Ainslie. Ben Ainslie’s performing great radio content here.

BEN: What I want everyone to imagine is in the first instance for PEEP, just any game of hide and… peekaboo you’ve ever played with an infant. And then the second instance, anytime you smell something and you don’t know what it is, and your eyes narrow for the amount of time that it takes you to figure out what that smell was. That’s a PEER for me.

HEDVIG: I think this is a great illustration of… a question asker probably doesn’t mean that they all mean exactly the same thing. I think they’re realising that these aren’t perfect synonyms. By the way, if anyone ever finds a perfect synonym, tell us, because they’re usually not perfect synonyms, but that they mean enough of the same thing. And I think we can all agree at that. They all have to do with looking, seeing. They’re all a little bit negative-connotated a bit, right?

DANIEL: Interesting, interesting.

BEN: PEER and PEEK. I reckon PEEK is the only one that I would not describe as not negatively connotated for my own suite of connotations in my head.

DANIEL: They’re all ways of looking that you don’t… you’re not really supposed to do. Like: Don’t peek!

BEN: AH, I guess that… Yeah, true. Okay, fair. Yep.

DANIEL: Okay. Well, I did a little bit of digging in Etymonline.

BEN: Good ol’ Etymonline.

DANIEL: And I found that two of them are related, and one isn’t. Which two?

HEDVIG: Ooh, fun Hedvig/Ben game.

DANIEL: Yeah!

BEN: I’m gonna go with PEEK and PEEP are the related ones and PEER is different.

DANIEL: Okay. Hedvig, do you agree?

HEDVIG: That was gonna be my guess too. But that’s boring, so I’m going to say…

BEN: Then… no no no! Let’s both guess the same thing, and then we can both be wrong and salty together in our loss.

HEDVIG: Okay, okay. Yeah, I agree. PEER is the odd one out.

DANIEL: Turns out you’re both correct. [DING!]

HEDVIG: [CLAPS] Yess!

BEN: See? Did you see how I just encouraged you to, like, trust yourself there? You’re welcome.

DANIEL: So PEEK and PEEP were once the same word, but now: what was the word? Did PEEK come from PEEP or the other way around? Which came first?

BEN: I’m gonna guess PEEK is the originator.

DANIEL: Okay.

HEDVIG: I’m gonna guess PEEP, because sound changes tend to go front to back.

BEN: Ah, see, you got me… you got me pipped on this one.

DANIEL: Yeah, I thought so too. It turns out that PEEK came first. PEEK with a K.

BEN: Ha hah!!

HEDVIG: Darnit! Darnit!

BEN: The layperson rides triumphant into the field once again.

DANIEL: Now you might ask yourself: if PEEK can turn into PEEP — if there’s a K to a P — what about the first P in PEEK? Is it possible that if we went back further…

BEN: KEEP!

HEDVIG: Has that ever been KEEK?

DANIEL: …is it possible that there was a word KEEK? And the answer is yes!

HEDVIG: ! Oh! There is in Swedish! Ha ha ha!

DANIEL: What, no?! I need to know more!

BEN: KEEK means what?

HEDVIG: So we affricated the first one. Sorry, but we spell it!

DANIEL: So it’s CHEEK?

HEDVIG: No, KIKA [ʃi-ka].

DANIEL: [ʃi-ka]?

HEDVIG: [ʃi-ka]. It’s to PEEK!

[LAUGHTER]

DANIEL: Okay, there you go. There you have it.

BEN: What possible word could we use?!

DANIEL: So the words PEEK and KEEK and PEEP are all used for about the same meaning through the 1400s, 1500s.

BEN: Oh, well, hang on a second. Then, like, it’s pretty clear why Hedvig’s language has it and we were using it in the 1400s. ‘Cause a bunch of them came to, like, Britain!

DANIEL: Well, it all came probably from Middle Dutch KIJKEN. Middle Dutch. Okay, so that that one was an interesting look at some words, and it kind of blew my mind. So Nikoli, thanks to you for that one.

BEN: Good one, Nikoli! Very good.

HEDVIG: That’s so funny that both Dutch and Swedish. I think they also have softened the first K so it’s CH-ish? No, or so they maybe they still say Kijken, so Swedish… so you guys went: Oh, K. I’m going to make it into a P. And we went K? I’m going to just affricate that and make it CH. That’s weird.

DANIEL: That is weird. The whole thing’s weird.

HEDVI: That’s just so much fun!

BEN: Here’s the takeaway from 10 years of this show: Language is weird.

HEDVIG: Yeah. Thank you so much! That was a great question.

DANIEL: Yeah! One from Margaret on Facebook. “Hey, I’ve got a question for the Mailbag show. What is the origin of the word POSH?” Ben, have you heard anything about this? Have you heard any funny stories?

BEN: Uh, no. I have never investigated the etymology of POSH, as we say here in Australia.

DANIEL: “I have heard a few reasonably reliable sources say it is an acronym from taking a ship journey: Port Out Starboard Home” — because that’s the nice seats right? It’s very, very posh.

BEN: Oh, I’ve always thought acronyms are very folk etymologist, personally. I am deeply suspicious.

HEDVIG: Suss.

BEN: But having said that, it has happened once or twice. So, you know.

DANIEL: “From the show,” says Margaret, “I thought the general rule was that acronym stories were generally false.” That is correct. They are usually false. “Is it true in this case? What other ones are true?”

BEN: I want it to be now, for Margaret’s sake. I want Margaret to have brought, like, a rare gem. You know, like a lovely little linguistic fossil that contravenes the rules and we get to go: bloody hell, Margaret, great job!

HEDVIG: Yeah. Yeah.

BEN: So, do I get to say that, Daniel?

DANIEL: No, you do not get to say that, I’m afraid.

BEN: [LAUGHS] I’m sorry, Margaret. I built you up so high. You’re probably listening to this going: Ooh! No.

DANIEL: “The etymology of POSH is probably from POSH: a dandy, from 1890″ — I’m reading this straight off of Etymonline — there was a word, thieves cant meaning money, which is POSH, 1830. And it’s thought that this was a coin.

BEN: DOSH!

DANIEL: Hm?

BEN: We say DOSH.

DANIEL: DOSH. Oh, what is the etymology of DOSH?

BEN: Well, surely it’s the same thing.

HEDVIG: It’s money.

DANIEL: Mmmm… what don’t we just…?

BEN: Money. Dosh is money.

DANIEL: Yeah, I got a bit of dosh.

BEN: Yeah, I got a bit of dosh in my back pocket.

HEDVIG: Is it related to DOUGH?

DANIEL: Don’t think so. Don’t think so.

BEN: Yeah, that’s a bit more American, I think, DOUGH as a word for money.

DANIEL: And also bread, you know, things you eat, that’s very likely to have… become a word for money. DOSH is unknown, possibly a combination of DOLLARS and CASH. Oh, so there is a possibility.

BEN: There we go.

DANIEL: Anyway, what about acronyms? How far back do acronyms go? Or initialisms. I’m going to treat them both the same.

BEN: Oh Latin, surely. Like, didn’t the Romans do a bunch of acronyminising?

DANIEL: They did. SPQR. S-P-Q-R. That appears in inscriptions, so Senātus Populusque Rōmānus, which means the Roman senate and people.

BEN: And what was the…? Wasn’t SPQR also the acronym for the entire Roman Empire?

HEDVIG: Yeah, you just put it on everything you own.

DANIEL: Yeah, that’s right. But from then, it was a bit of a lull. We don’t see it in English until… I’m just gonna give you some here: GIF [gɪf] or GIF [ʤɪf] 1987, RAM 1957, Scuba 1952, MIDI from 1983… you get the idea.

HEDVIG: Wait wait wait.

BEN: Hang on, hang on. Oh, sorry, sorry. I’m getting what you mean. It wasn’t until the sort of the ’70s and the ’80s where acronyms started turning back into words. We were using acronyms far earlier than that, but we weren’t word-ifying them.

DANIEL: That’s right. They existed here and there, but they weren’t wordy. So according to an article by Ben Zimmer, the earliest one we can find is from 1879, where they abbreviated Supreme Court of the United States as SCOTUS and President of the United States as POTUS. That’s like literally the first one. And I thought it was kind of new, but it’s not. It’s, like, the oldest acronym in English.

HEDVIG: What?

BEN: The oldest acronym being used as a word.

DANIEL: Yes.

BEN: Right. We had acronyms. Like, they exist.

HEDVIG: That’s what I think too. They… surely.

BEN: Surely the Dutch East India Company was referred to by its capital letters in forms and stuff, surely.

DANIEL: Yeah. It’s like you say, Ben, they were around, but we didn’t just go around saying them as one word.

BEN: Interesting. I want to dig further into this. Because if, literally, the earliest modern acronym we have was POTUS from the late 19th century, that’s gonna blow my freaking mind.

HEDVIG: Yeah, me too.

DANIEL: Here’s the other thing. I mean, in World War One, we had A-W-O-L, Absent WithOut Leave, we had AWOL. But in World War One times, they weren’t saying it as a word. They would spell it out. He’s A-W-O-L.

BEN: Sure. But that’s still an acronym!

DANIEL: Yeah, it is. But then by the time we get to World War Two, then people started saying AWOL. And if you hear a story, like FUCK, or SHIT or whatever, that… that this was before the 20th century, mmm, they’re few and far between. There really are not a bunch. So yeah, that rule happens. And don’t believe POSH, because it probably comes from somewhere else.

BEN: But the good answer, Margaret, is that thieves cant is super fun. And that is, like… when you go to like various origin stories, anytime you run into like Polari, or thieves cant or any of those, you always know you’re in for a good time, right? Because anything that was even remotely around any of those words, is just a hoot. It’s such a good time.

DANIEL: And whenever you see an etymology — that’s the origin of a phrase — that says: Oh, this comes from the Navy, then be suspicious. [LAUGHTER]

HEDVIG: Hey, here on the on the Wikipedia page for Acronym, it says that Edgar Allan Poe made an acronym that spells out PRETTY BLUE BATCH.

DANIEL: You mean a poem where the first letter of every line spells that?

HEDVIG: It’s the initials of a name. Isn’t it?

BEN: That would have to be the world’s longest name.

HEDVIG: “We always add our names’ initials PRETTY BLUE BATCH, that is to say, Philadelphia, Regular, Exchange Tea, Total, Young, Belles Lettres, Universale, Experimentale, Bibliographical Association to Civilise Humanity.”

BEN: Holy Jesus, what a mouthful.

HEDVIG: I mean, know what? That’s a funny joke. Right? No one said that.

BEN: Yeah, that’s a party trick essentially, isn’t it?

HEDVIG: That’s… he’s being silly and funny, Mr Poe. But it is for SCOTUS.

BEN: It is an acronym, it is.

DANIEL: Yeah, and then AM and PM also existed before English did. And then of course, there’s OK. Which is an acronym for OLL KORRECT. They were being silly. But that goes back to…

BEN: Is that? Is that the settled answer? I thought that was like one of a few contentious possibilities.

DANIEL: It’s not contentious. It’s pretty solid. That’s the first… because the first references we have to it are from that. It was then picked up by Old Kinderhook, which was, I think, President Martin Van Buren in the US. But it looks like we started using RSVP around 1850. So that would actually be a very early one. Again, we didn’t say it like a word, but it was definitely used as a unit. The main thing is when you hear that a word was created by acronymy or initialism and it was before the 20th century, you… no, probably wasn’t.

BEN: Fail.

HEDVIG: Yeah. Usually.

BEN: That was a doozy, Margaret. Well done.

DANIEL: Let’s go to Cass. Cass on Facebook says, “Why do we add a “sh” sound to things to diminish them? Like when you’re saying something’s not a big deal? It’s coming to say: oh, justice, schmustic, or hill schmill? I don’t mind this stinking hill

BEN: I guess — gonna go out on a limb and guess — there was a funny man or woman at some stage in the last 100 years who did that as a thing, and people thought: That’s a hoot, I’m gonna do that. And it’s just carried on ever since.

DANIEL: What language background might this person have had?

HEDVIG: Isn’t this a Yiddish thing?

BEN: Yeah, Yiddish, for sure.

DANIEL: Yup, it is. Came into English from Yiddish speakers in the late 19th century. By the time the ’30s come around, everyone was saying “fancy schmancy” and things like that. It’s my favorite example of reduplication: shm- reduplication.

HEDVIG: Fancy schmancy. Yes, good.

DANIEL: Or reduplication schmeduplication.

BEN: [LAUGHS] That’s fun.

DANIEL: But then I found a fun article by Arika Okrent – who’s been on the show – on Mental Floss, where she points out that there are difficult words to schmeduplicate.

BEN: Yes! Absolutely.

DANIEL: I’m gonna see how you do, okay? Breakfast. How would you schmeduplicate BREAKFAST?

HEDVIG: Schmekfast.

BEN: Breakfast schmekfast!

HEDVIG: Schmekfast.

DANIEL: Okay! Schmekast. Not schme-r-ek-fast?

BEN: No!

DANIEL: Okay, good. It’s hard to do when there’s a consonant cluster like BR.

HEDVIG: Yeah, just replace the whole thing. Yeah.

DANIEL: Just rip it out.

HEDVIG: Yeah.

DANIEL: How about UNITY?

BEN: Unity sch-myoonity.

DANIEL: Sch-myoonity?

BEN: Yep.

HEDVIG: Sch-moonity.

DANIEL: Do you like sch-myoonity or sch-moonity?

BEN: Sch-moonity. Sch-myoonity. Sch-myoonity.

HEDVIG: Sch-moonity, yeah.

BEN: Unity sch-moonity! That’s all I have to say. And considering that it was just Australia Day, that’s pretty much what white people of my culture think, so yeah.

HEDVIG: [CRINGES] Yeah.

DANIEL: Reduplication is hard when there’s a glide like [w] and [j]. How about WITCHES?

HEDVIG: You say hard, but I think Ben and I are crushing this!

BEN: Yeah, witches schmitches, honestly.

HEDVIG: Schm-, schmitches!

DANIEL: Did you say schmitches? Or…

BEN: Schmitches! Yeah, schmitches.

DANIEL: Schmitches.

BEN: Schmitches. Sch-mi-tch-es. Schmitches.

DANIEL: Schmitches. You’re working that pretty hard. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather say smitches instead?

BEN: Nah.

HEDVIG: Nah.

BEN: Witches, schmitches.

DANIEL: Oh go on, witches schmitches.

BEN: See, for me that SCH-, that real protruding the jaw forward is the fun of doing it. Right? I really want to get my SCHmitches in there.

HEDVIG: What about when you have another SH-, CH- sound? So, like, CHAIR?

DANIEL: Chair schmair. Yeah, it’s hard when there’s a CH- in there. Like with WITCHES. Either a sh- or a ch-, it’s hard to do.

HEDVIG: Or SHEEP? Like the animal.

DANIEL: Sheep, schmeep.

BEN: No, no, no, that’s easy, because you just replace it with the other thing.

DANIEL: Yeah. How about IMMUNITY? When there’s a soft unstressed syllable in front?

HEDVIG: Schmemoomoo, schmemoo…

BEN: Schemoonity. Schemoonity. Immunity, schemoonity

DANIEL: Wouldn’t you rather say immunity isch-moonity? Im-schmoonity?

BEN: No. No, I do not want to say that.

HEDVIG: Oh god, no. No, no, no. I don’t want to say that at all.

BEN: That is awful, and you should feel bad for suggesting it.

HEDVIG: Yeah. Agreed.

DANIEL: I do feel bad. I also feel bad for suggesting SCHMOOZE where there’s already a SCHM- at the beginning.

HEDVIG: Schmooze, schmooze.

BEN: Yeah. There’s this famous comedian who has this as a bit and their name escapes me right now. But they do a bit where yeah, this is like: this is all really good, right up until you get SCHMOOZE. And then you’re just like: ah, schmooze… schmooze.

HEDVIG: So, hey, so, do we agree that the meaning of this kind of reduplication is like: [SIGH] ugh well, money schmoney. Like, I don’t care about it.

BEN: It’s a diminishment, right?

HEDVIG: Diminishment, right?

BEN: You say this thing is of less importance than most sort of… than the baseline assumption that I presume is at work right now. In this conversation.

HEDVIG: Right. So the other kind of reduplication you have in English is the like: money money.

DANIEL: Oh, right. Salad salad.

HEDVIG: Like, I paid in, I paid in cash. I paid in money, money. Not bitcoin. [LAUGHS]

BEN: I have not encountered that very much, I have to say.

DANIEL: Contrastive reduplication.

HEDVIG: So I have a theory that, in general, grammar sort of flies under the radar. People don’t… They’re not as aware of it, they’re not as aware of the boundaries, they’re not as aware of the variation. So I think that maybe this kind of money money is a book book. An oak is a tree tree. It’s not like, what’s a not-tree tree?

DANIEL: A weird tree, like a palm.

BEN: Like a shrub tree, or whatever.

HEDVIG: A palm. Yeah, exactly. It’s like it’s in this of the prototype of the category that is these things, this is at the very center of it.

BEN: Like this Socratic form of the thing in question, kind of thing.

HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly. And it’s one of those things where… so you said interestingly, Ben, that you don’t think it’s as common in Australian English, maybe?

BEN: Well, as you were speaking, I came up with the one example that I know that English speakers do use pretty regularly, which is like-like. Do you like them? Or do you like-like them?

HEDVIG: Like-like, yes. Natalie Tran has a very good sketch on like like, and fancy fancy. Okay, so like schmike is diminishing, like like is prototyping. But I wanted to bring up before we… because I think… haven’t we talked about this on the show before, because I…

DANIEL: We had a whole episode about reduplication.

HEDVIG: Yeah, and I remember bringing up the Swedish nickname thing, which is replacing the first thing with a P. So Ben Pen.

BEN: Like the song!

DANIEL: Daniel Paniel.

HEDVIG: Daniel Paniel, yeah.

BEN: One of my very best friends in the world, whenever I pick up the phone, it’s just like: Andy Pandy!

HEDVIG: Exactly. Yeah, so we’ve got the same one. My, my mother likes to call my brother Hannus Pannus. Just for fun.

BEN: It’s cute.

DANIEL: And it’s cute.

HEDVIG: And it’s cute! And why does this abstract pattern have… what have we got? We got diminishing, we got prototyping, and we’ve got… cute.

BEN: Adorable. Kawaii!

DANIEL: Yeah, reduplication’s so dope.

HEDVIG: Yeah.

DANIEL: So the short answer is: this is schm-reduplication and it signifies derision, dismissal and disparagement, the three Ds.

HEDVIG: And if you found us rambling about reduplication interesting, we have a got a whole episode with only reduplication.

BEN: Which is apropos to what I was gonna say, which was like, I love that knowing our listeners, Margaret is not the kind of person who would have asked that question, got her answer in the first, like, minute of us speaking, and then gone: Ughhh, they’re talking about this a lot, this is not what I wanted. What I love is that our listeners are just kind of like: Ooh, 15 minutes of reduplication chat! Because we could have wrapped it up with, like: It’s Yiddish. Bye.

DANIEL: Bye. Let’s go on. Thanks, Cass. This one’s from Diego on Patreon. This is our last one, “I’ve seen and heard…” I think I feel like this one is addressed to me!

HEDVIG: Yeah, I think it is.

DANIEL: “I’ve seen and heard on more than one occasion that Mormon missionaries…”

BEN: Why would this be about you? I don’t understand.

DANIEL: We’ve got the ex-Mormon linguistic thing locked down tight. That’s our niche, right? “Mormon missionaries seem to have a real knack for learning languages and learning them fast. With your background and experience, can you speak to this at all? Thanks.”

BEN: Well, you can’t Daniel, you came to Perth. [LAUGHTER]

DANIEL: I did.

BEN: You didn’t have to learn another language. I know we speak badly, but not like that badly!

HEDVIG: You could have learned Noongar!

DANIEL: I did actually speak a bit of French and Spanish.

BEN: Okay, sure. I’m really glad Daniel didn’t learn Noongar at that stage and proselytise to the Indigenous people here. I’m fine with that.

HEDVIG: Ooh, yes. We are grateful for that, yes. That’s true.

DANIEL: Okay, so here’s the background. Many members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — commonly known as Mormons, which annoys them if you call them that — so Mormons…

BEN: Really??

HEDVIG: Yeah.

DANIEL: Yes.

BEN: I have known you this entire time, and you have never told me that I annoy Mormons when I call them Mormons.

DANIEL: It’s kind of a new thing. It’s a whole story. It’s a whole thing. Many members go on a two-year mission, many times to places where they have to learn the language. And to do that, they go to a place called the Mission Training Center for about eight weeks for intensive language training. And it’s been claimed that missionaries are super good at learning languages. I used to hear that people at the CIA or the FBI or the KGB would come to the MTC to try to learn their methods, but they never did quite as well.

BEN: This sounds like the kind of, like, internal big-upping that so many institutions — not just religious ones, I’m not throwing a bone here at, like, true believers, but like — like, down the road from us we’ve got the West Australian Center for Performing Arts, right? And they love sort of, sort of like just kind of being like [PRETENTIOUS VOICE] ~did you know we’re the most prestigious Performing Arts Academy in Australia?~ Like, it’s just like, really? That’s what it sounds like to me. Like that kind of, like, completely baseless ~did you know were actually lowkey super good at this?~

DANIEL: It is. It’s exactly that thing. Mormons have an interest in promoting themselves as, like, supernaturally good at learning languages.

HEDVIG: But also if we revisit the Ben Ainslie theory of language acquisition, which is that it’s all about motivation.

[LAUGHTER]

HEDVIG: Religious people; pretty motivated!

DANIEL: Good point. Good point, okay.

HEDVIG: Like, I’m not religious, but like, if I believed that there was a creator, and that if you didn’t please him, you would go to hell and that I would go somewhere and save people, I’d be… That’s the motivation to learning a language that I’ve never felt in my life, and I’m a linguist! Like, that’s got to put a fire under your butt!

DANIEL: Yep.

BEN: And even if you don’t necessarily believe to that degree, the fire and brimstone aspect of it, I would have to imagine, Daniel — and please correct me if I’m wrong — a lot of Mormon missionaries, at the very most baseline are at the, like, vocation level of engagement, right? Like, I am called to this. Right?

DANIEL: There is definitely that sense. Yes.

BEN: And being called to something is a higher threshold of, like, motivation than just like: I’m bored! I might sit on Duolingo for a while.

DANIEL: Yeah, I mean, if they give you a badge and tell you YOU can be the instrument by which people of Earth can attain salvation through the Gospel, and people’s eternities will look completely different if you do a good job, then yeah, it has a way of making you do some pretty strange things.

Now, as far as the scripture goes, Mormons think of this as a manifestation of the Gift of Tongues. Which a lot of churches think is, you know, glossolalia [SPEAKS GIBBERISH]. But which, if you look at the New Testament, on the day of Pentecost, it describes all the Christians getting together and speaking. And everyone runs in and listens to them and thinks that they’re just babbling away, but they’re actually speaking languages. And in the book of Acts, it says: How are we hearing everybody teaching us the Gospel in our own language? So Mormons think of this as more translation.

BEN: Right. Gotcha. Like a Babelfish.

DANIEL: Yeah, that’s it. And I’m reading this from Mormonwiki: “In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the gift of tongues is manifested every day among the thousands of missionaries serving around the world. Missionaries learn foreign languages and the interpretation thereof with astonishing ease, and words come to them that they have not mastered.”

BEN: Aha. Yep. Okay, sure.

DANIEL: There is a body of work on this, to see if it’s actually true.

BEN: Ah!

DANIEL: Yes.

BEN: I’m, I’m just… I’m champing at the bit for it to turn out that when you plonk a person in a fucking foreign country, and that’s all they speak, you learn real fast!

DANIEL: Yeah, but do they learn well? That’s the question.

BEN: Okay. Let’s find out.

DANIEL: The answer is no. They don’t actually learn all that well. So here are some conclusions from the literature. Number one: on average, returned missionaries are not very proficient in their foreign… in their mission language.

BEN: Really?

DANIEL: No. Using the FSI test —hat’s what the US government uses — they score about 2+, which is described as “limited working proficiency”. They can do work stuff, they can do social routine stuff, most situations, but they don’t have very good control of the grammar.

BEN: What is baseline? If you took Ben Ainslie, and you stuck him — as a profoundly mediocre human being — and you stuck me somewhere in the world that is a non-English place for two years, because that’s how long a mission goes for. Correct?

DANIEL: Yes, that’s right.

BEN: What is accepted baseline for a mediocre douche like me?

DANIEL: Well, it depends on the language. But I mean, even if you’re talking about the ones that English speakers find really difficult, like Korean or Arabic, for two years of immersion, you’d expect to get to, like, intermediate, high intermediate, maybe even advanced.

BEN: Okay, so the Mormons are not doing any better or worse than any other numpty. So they’re definitely not amazing at it, they’re just exactly what you would expect from human beings being pluoked in some sort of immersion situation for two years.

DANIEL: Yeah, that’s about right. They’re great when it comes to churchy stuff.

BEN: Right.

DANIEL: When it comes to talking about that whole domain, they’re great. Because they’ve done it.

BEN: Because that’s… because that’s what they’re practicing day in and day out, right? They’re knocking on doors and they’re going: Hey, Jesus Christ and the Latter-day Saints, but they’re saying that in Swahili or whatever.

DANIEL: But they have trouble supporting opinions, speculating, and producing speech without errors that disturb or distract. They do not seem to experience this Pentecost-like outpouring of linguistic skill. They seem to be okay at language in a manner consistent with the stuff that they talk about all day. No better than most people, no worse. Not supernatural.

HEDVIG: Okay, fair enough.

BEN: Yeah. Yeah, that’s exactly what I expected.

HEDVIG: Fair enough, fair enough.

DANIEL: And that’s the answer, Diego.

BEN: There you go. So Mormons are not super gifted at learning languages. They just seem to have this interesting system built into their faith, which just takes a bunch of young people and puts them all over the world.

DANIEL: Yep. Great question, Diego. Thanks for that. Appreciate that. And thanks to everyone for all of their questions. We have another bracket of questions to go next time we do a Mailbag. So we’ll get to those then. Don’t worry.

[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]

BEN: Yeehaw! And now we come to the crunching halt of the show. [LAUGHS]

DANIEL: Oh, I love this part: It’s Words of the Week!

BEN: Huzzah.

DANIEL: Okay, the first Word of the Week: STONKS!

BEN: I’ve heard of this before.

HEDVIG: [CHUCKLE]

DANIEL: They’re stocks, as in Wall Street.

BEN: Yeah, no no no. but I’ve heard of it in a different context.

DANIEL: Oh, what are STONKS?

BEN: Like, like, a stonking good time.

DANIEL: Okay. Yeah, that is an earlier meaning. But now, this STONKS, as in the stock market, is taking over. Lord Mortis suggested this one.

BEN: Oh, thank you, Lord Mortis.

DANIEL: Who has heard about GameStop?

BEN: I have.

HEDVIG: [NERVOUS LAUGH] I have.

DANIEL: And the wild shenanigans.

HEDVIG: I think we’re all on the internet enough that we’ve heard about this.

DANIEL: Yeah, okay. So to understand what’s going on, we need to start with short selling.

BEN: I’ve got the best example of this!

DANIEL: Okay, go ahead.

HEDVIG: Does it involve Skrills?

BEN: Let me quickly, really, really quickly Google it. I found the best summation I’ve ever seen. Like, I understand what shorting a stock is, and I have done for quite a while.

HEDVIG: Look at you go!

BEN: But I’ve never heard it more succinctly sort of expressed than this. Here goes, okay? And this comes from a wonderful gaming website called Penny Arcade,

DANIEL: Ah yes. Yes, of course.

BEN: Which you should check out if you ever want to get, like, the hot take on games. So, “You just got a new Xbox. Before you open it, I ask you to borrow it. I then sell that borrowed Xbox for 500 bucks.”

HEDVIG: Rude!

BEN: “I go to Best Buy and I get a new Xbox for 450, and I pocket the 50 bucks that I’ve made and I give you the Xbox unopened. That’s short selling.”

HEDVIG: Why is the game store selling you an Xbox for less money than…?

BEN: So, in this particular instance, the example of the Xbox is really pertinent because of the shortages of supply for all gaming hardware at the moment. There is a far more sort of stock-price kind of pricing scheme, in that it’s very difficult to get hold of a retail-priced new Xbox or new PlayStation or new graphics card for for a gaming PC. So mostly what people are getting are resale cards which have been jacked up prices substantially. Does that make sense?

HEDVIG: No.

BEN: Okay. [LAUGHS]

HEDVIG: Why is JB Hifi selling you something for less than I bought it for?

BEN: No, no, you bought it second… you bought it from a scalper, essentially, because you had to.

DANIEL: Right. So like, as with stocks, Ben thinks that the original Xbox is overvalued now. And he’s planning on the price dropping later.

HEDVIG: I understand that. Okay, let’s, let’s just make another example. Let’s make concert tickets. Ariana Grande.

BEN: Yeah, it’s exactly the same thing, right? You got an Ariana Grande concert ticket for $500. I ask to borrow that concert ticket. Then I go and sell that concert ticket for even more money.

HEDVIG: $600.

BEN: And then I go… because I’ve got, like, the inside line, I go and buy a concert ticket for less money, right? Say $450. Because I know where the good tickets are.

HEDVIG: That’s the bizarre thing. I don’t know how you got that.

BEN: Because I’m better at it than you. Because I’m better at this than you.

DANIEL: But in the case of stocks, you’re betting that the price will go down later. So I borrow Ben’s shares in Orange Corp. And I can sell them to Hedvig. I can pocket Hedvig’s money. And then later on, when the stock goes down like I expect, I could just buy cheaper shares, give them back to Ben, pay him a little extra, and then I pocket the difference. So that’s short selling.

HEDVIG: Okay.

BEN: Short selling is like the ultimate sort of, like, I-know-how-to-do-this-better-than-you move in stock trading.

DANIEL: But what happens if the shares don’t go down in price? What happens if they go up?

HEDVIG: Then you’re fucked, right?

BEN: Yeah. So this is the ultimate, ultimate Faustian bargain, because there is no safe limit to shorting. If the stock price goes up, you get fucked proportionally to whatever that increase is, and you’re on the hook for it, and it’s bad news. Shorting is a very dangerous game.

HEDVIG: Right. Because prices don’t go below zero, but they go above one.

DANIEL: Right, right. If you… if you just buy and hold shares, you could lose your whole investment. But you can only lose your investment. If you’re shorting and it goes up 5X? 10X? You could lose multiples of what you invested. That’s the danger in short selling.

HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

DANIEL: And then what you have to do is you have to buy shares to give back maybe to Ben, right? I’ve got to buy shares at a higher price, I’ve got to bite the bullet and buy those shares, give them back. And then what happens when I buy the shares, then that makes the price go up even more, and that’s what we call a short squeeze.

HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah, squeeze. That’s what I’ve heard. Okay. I want to hear from any of our listeners, if they, after listening to this, understood it better or worse when they listen to. Because I think other people listen to other like economy podcasts. And I listened to the Indicator from Planet Money, and they had a whole squirrel example, and that didn’t make any sense to me. But what you just told me about concert tickets and Ariana Grande vaguely made some sense. It got somewhere into my brain.

DANIEL: All right. Good job, Ben. So here’s what went down. Some folks on the Wall Street Bets subreddit, including the main instigator, someone named DeepFuckingValue, decided to embark on a massive buying spree for GameStop stock, as a way of screwing over the short sellers. And they had a number of reasons for this. Some people it was the money, for some people it was the lulz, of course. And then for a lot of people, it was deeply personal. Like, I read stories about how Wall Street messed with the global economy during the crash in 2008. And there were entire families sleeping on people’s floors. There were people making tomato soup out of ketchup packets. So for a lot of people, it was like super, super personal.

BEN: So a bunch of… a bunch of different people, for different motivations, have come in and they have bought a bunch of stock, which is not what short sellers want to have happen.

DANIEL: [LAUGHS] No, because what happened was, the stock went way up. Like in early January 2021, GME (GameStop) was trading at about 17 bucks. That was the start. On the Monday night it closed about 77 bucks. Unheard of.

BEN: Oh, SNAP!!! I knew the broad outline strokes of this story. I did not realise that they had nearly order-of-magnituded this stock.

DANIEL: 5X in one day. On the Tuesday night it closed at about $150. On Wednesday night it closed about $350.

BEN: WHAAAAA…??? [LAUGHTER]

HEDVIG: Exactly. It was at, like, $400 for a while.

DANIEL: Yeah, it was! And I’m watching this and I’m saying this is up two and a half times in one day, I waited for years for Tesla to do this.

BEN: That is just…

DANIEL: So far, the short sellers have lost about $13 billion.

HEDVIG: Yay!

DANIEL: On GameStop.

BEN: I mean, I say yay. The niggling part of me worries that to a lot of these hedge funds, they’re like: No, no, we’re down like 4% this quarter. That’s a shame.

HEDVIG: The other thing is – and if you smart economy heads can help me – some people are saying like: Oh no, but this is going to be bad for the people who are buying the stocks, because the stock is going to plummet at some point.

BEN: Yeah. It will.

HEDVIG: Which is technically what you want in a shorting situation. So some people are saying it’s making the matters worse. But correct me if I’m wrong, if you have stock in a company and things go shit, you just lose your investment, right?

BEN: Yes, correct.

HEDVIG: You don’t do like the shorting people, and potentially lose more than that.

BEN: What this is creating right now is: a bunch of hedge funds are probably looking at the stock right now and they’re going: Let’s short the fuck out of this.

DANIEL: They’re piling in. Yup.

HEDVIG: But it means that the people who are investing their $1,400 stimulus check from the US government are only losing $1,400. They’re not losing $400,000.

DANIEL: Multiples, correct.

BEN: That is correct.

HEDVIG: Okay, good. That makes me feel, like, a bit better.

DANIEL: I think shorting is kind of a shitty thing to do. Because… it’s great if you’re shorting a corrupt company or a bad company, but it can cause a struggling but otherwise solid company to go under.

BEN: Yeah, because it just communicates a huge amount of lack of confidence on the part of investors, which can be the deathstroke to a lot of otherwise fine companies. And I do feel a little bit bad for GameStop, like Incorporated, and I’m not going to get into all of the like various ethical issues around how GameStop operates as a business or anything like that. But just like, as a company, you were just like, you were struggling, you were ticking along and then through no actual action on your part, you find yourself at the middle of this maelstrom of, like, plucky revolutionaries fucking over capitalist dogs. And you’re just sitting there being like: I just wouldn’t mind having a retail business that sells games. Could I do that please? I don’t want to be the standard bearer for, like, eating the one percent all of a sudden, or whatever it is.

HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah.

DANIEL: It’s not just GameStop. It’s also Blackberry. It’s also AMC, the movie chain. It’s Dogecoin. All right? Everybody’s looking for this. Now that we know that we can bid up a business…

HEDVIG: Dogecoin.

DANIEL: …market manipulation is no longer in the hands of the institutional funds. It’s in the hands of retail schlubs like me.

BEN: As long as, as long as you can touch a nerve with enough people, right? Like, that’s the classic, you have to be able to mobilise a bunch of the schlubs like you! [LAUGHTER] That isn’t always an easy thing to do, by any stretch of the imagination.

DANIEL: And the first one is going to be the one that makes it big, just like Bitcoin was, right?

BEN: Yes, exactly.

DANIEL: So GameStop is gonna be the big one.

HEDVIG: And to make it more confusing, right, there was an app people were using for doing this, which allowed you to, like, easily invest things that was called Robinhood. Which is very confusing to me, because when I started seeing these news about Robinhood, getting shitted on for restricting people to buy GameStop shares, I was just, like: why do they call it that? What are they doing?

BEN: It’s like, it’s like Lisa Simpson in the Australia episode where she sees the Yahoo Serious movie festival. And she’s like: I know what those words mean individually. I don’t know what it means when you put it together like that!

HEDVIG: Yeah. I was very confused with them being called Robinhood. It’s very odd.

DANIEL: Well AOC — Alexandria Ocasio Cortez — and several other people in the US government have favoured a look at this. Like, why is Robinhood allowed to stop trading for retail investors while the institutional investors are still allowed to trade and making the price go down? What’s going on there? So it’s such a fascinating story. It’s kind of a David-and-Goliath story, or it’s kind of like a monkeys-flinging-feces-in-the-same-direction story.

BEN: [LAUGHS] Yeah, it’s not a David-and-Goliath story. It’s that bit in, like, Jurassic Park II when a little girl gets attacked by, like, a bunch of tiny dinosaurs.

DANIEL: I didn’t see that.

HEDVIG: Are we getting to our Word of the Week, STONK, because I don’t know what that is and is it related in the end?

BEN: It’s the… Okay, to surmise, STONK is the word for stocks that all of these monkeys throwing the feces were using? Correct?

DANIEL: Yes, it’s just STOCK but nasalised a little bit. STONKS!

BEN: I’m buying stonk!

HEDVIG: Wait, what? Why? What?

DANIEL: Because it’s funny!

HEDVIG: I thought it was gonna be like…

BEN: Yeah, just because like, for shiggles, like the way you do sometimes in the internet.

DANIEL: Yep.

HEDVIG: So what is it with internet slang and nasals? Because you know about lomg, lomg?

DANIEL: The Forbiddem Masal.

BEN: Is that “lol oh my god”? Is that what you mean?

DANIEL: No, you’re not allowed to use the letter M.

BEN: Oh, right.

HEDVIG: It’s this silly internet culture thing where you need to replace every instance of N with M. So you say lomg words, etc. This is like… you know, we can’t spend money on fun things like — I don’t know — amusement parks and concert tickets and cruises and exciting things. So like, if you got to have some entertainment and spend a big chunk of money, like, this is pretty entertaining!

BEN: You get to say… you got to spend $1400 dollars and be like: I was part of the group that did that hilarious thing that you will remember for the next ten years.

DANIEL: Yep, that’s right.

HEDVIG: Yes. I have a lot of friends who are like: Ooh, I should have done that, not because, like, they’re interested in but they’re like: that would have been so much fun! That would have been like going to like Coachella or like Woodstock! I could have been like: I was a game stock…stop… I can’t speak any more.

DANIEL: A game stonk!

HEDVIG: I was a game stonker. Like, I literally think that’s it. That’s like, I went to Woodstock. I bought GameStop stock.

DANIEL: Stock is the new game. Let’s go onto our next word.

BEN: All righty. Next Word of the Week. This might be our record, I reckon. This might be our record for longest recording.

DANIEL: UNITY. This one was suggested by Nigel. The word UNITY has been coming up a lot in the context of US politics. Joe Biden mentioned unity in his very first speech as president elect. He said “I will work to be a president that seeks not to divide, but unify.”

BEN: Meh.

DANIEL: So now Republicans are using this as a rhetorical tactic. They’re saying that having consequences for insurrection is divisive [dəvaɪsɪv]. Or divisive [dəvɪsɪv]?

BEN: Oh, yeah.

DANIEL: So here’s the problem.

HEDVIG: DIVISIVE [dəvaɪsɪv]!

DANIEL: I say DIVISIVE [dəvaɪsɪv].

HEDVIG: I’m just going to shout my preference.

BEN: Every time Daniel says DEH or DUEH, Hedvig’s going to be like: DUEH!

HEDVIG: DUEH!

DANIEL: The problem is you want to have unity and you want to have bipartisanship, but you also want to… You won the election, and you now have to get stuff done. And you’ll be punished if you don’t get stuff done. But Republicans are still obstructive.

BEN: I don’t… I find the call for unity to be not a good one. I don’t like it.

DANIEL: Yep.

BEN: I don’t think, I don’t think this is a time to be unified. Because to be unified on a bunch of these issues, — whether it’s race or climate or whatever — usually means being dragged to a fucking dumb-as-shit point by a bunch of fucking idiots. I don’t want to unify with that group of people. I will happily just… like, conservative people have won for a really fucking long time on a bunch of issues. Like, just fucking lose for a while. I’m fine with that. I’m fine with you losing. Just fucking lose.

HEDVIG: They could have chosen… what are other like that kind of… like DIGNITY is a word you could have chosen.

BEN: Ooh. JUSTICE. I would have gone with JUSTICE.

HEDVIG: JUSTICE. Just a very bland thing like FUTURE. You know what I mean? It’s these kinds of words. I don’t know how to say this in a way that makes sense. But it annoys me sometimes in political discussions when people use positive words… I don’t know, what’s a good example? Right, so the reigning political party is…

DANIEL: CIVILITY.

HEDVIG: CIVILITY. The reigning political party in Samoa is called the Human Rights Party.

BEN: Right…

DANIEL: Hmm.

BEN: No, not a thing.

HEDVIG: Not a thing, or what, or not, or like.

BEN: Or, like Australia, The Liberals. In Australia, our conservative… arch-Conservative Party is called The Liberals, which everyone else in the world thinks means, like, permissive and free.

HEDVIG: Well, that’s because they’re wrong and Europeans are right, and LIBERAL means NEO-LIBERAL, but never mind.

DANIEL: Well, we need to talk about what UNITY can mean. The best example was the Drake meme. But with Geordi from Star Trek. On the first panel it says, “Uniting America with alt-right, and fascists?” Blegh. “Uniting America AGAINST alt-right, and fascists?” Mmm! [LAUGHTER] That’s a positive vision of unity. I mean, the latest message out of the Biden camp is: Unity and bipartisanship is good, but we’re not going to let that get in the way of getting things done. And so I think they’re playing it exactly right. They’re saying unity unity unity, and then they’re saying: well, we couldn’t work with them, so we’re going to do stuff our way. And that’s positive.

BEN: Yeah. Which is good.

HEDVIG: Okay.

DANIEL: And finally: this one was suggested by PharaohKatt on our Discord channel: The QUIET PART OUT LOUD.

BEN: What the what the wha?

DANIEL: Saying the quiet part out loud, Ben, you haven’t heard this one.

BEN: This is new. Saying the quiet part out loud.

DANIEL: She says: I’ve been hearing it more and more recently.

HEDVIG: Is it like vocalising dog-whistling?

DANIEL: That’s actually a pretty good description. Let’s say that you have bad intentions, but you want to make it look like you have good intentions. And this comes from the Simpsons. Okay, Krusty the Clown is on the judging panel for the Springfield Film Festival, where Mr Burns has a film in contention. Someone says “How can you vote for Burns’s movie?” and Krusty says “Let’s just say it moved me… to a bigger house! Whoops. I said the quiet part loud and the loud part quiet.” He accidentally said what he meant to say, which was obvious, but which he didn’t want it to be explicit.

BEN: You accidentally communicate your true intentions, when you meant to be deceitful about them.

DANIEL: This was very big in the Trump era, with its utter shamelessness. When Trump says, you know: go back to your countries, he was saying the quiet part out loud. So, the Simpsons: it’s one of those phrases that comes to us once again, along with CROMULENT and EMBIGGEN.

BEN: The Shakespeare of our generation.

DANIEL: Yes, exactly, exactly!

HEDVIG: …

BEN: I stand by it. Hedvig, don’t you squint at me! Hedvig just squinted like a motherfucker at me, and I stand by that statement firmer than any statement. That show…

HEDVIG: It’s great. Yeah!

BEN: Shakespeare. Shakespeare.

DANIEL: Lots of phrases, lots of words. So: STONKS, UNITY and QUIET PART OUT LOUD, our Words of the Week. Let’s get to some comments. This one’s from Lauren on Twitter. Lauren says, “GLEEFRESHING is my vote for Word of the Week.” There’s been a lot of gleefreshing.

HEDVIG: It’s good, yeah. It’s the opposite of DOOMSCROLLING. I like it, I agree with Lauren.

DANIEL: Yes, it is.

BEN: I like that.

HEDVIG: Good, very good.

DANIEL: And from Maya, our wonderful transcriptionist — ah, what a job! — for Word of the Week: Karen, but with a Q

BEN: Like Qaren [kweɹən]. Oh, for QAnon?

DANIEL: For QAnon.

BEN: QAnon Karen is a Qaren. Yeah, okay.

DANIEL: Yes. And this is because of that one hateful representative, the QAnon Congresswoman who…

BEN: I can’t remember her name. She’s the worst.

DANIEL: I can’t either. Double-barreled last name. Worst person. And in fact, a Black representative has moved office because the staff was so hateful. Christian Turner @chistor says, “I may be late to this, but somebody in my feed just referred to that representative as Qaren. And that’s perfect and about all that ever need be said about her until she can get the help she needs.”

HEDVIG: Yeah, I think that’s really good. I think if you’re looking for insightful… insightful insights into QAnon stuff, I can really recommend the podcast QAnon Anonymous. I think we might have talked about this one before, I’m not sure. They do a great job of covering the conspiracy theories and the mythology in a very meme- and internet-savvy way, but also with a lot of depth and seriousness. And after the sixth of January, what are we calling them now?

DANIEL: Insurrectionists.

HEDVIG: We want to call it domestic terrorism… Insurrectionists, okay. Domestic terrorist, whatever we think is a good term. They did a good job of sort of talking about the… the tragedy of some of the people who are a part of this movement, and their sort of life choices and things. They’re not saying that it’s excusable, but they give some nuances and depth to like how… how crazy and how far people get pushed in this movement. In it, they managed to be empathetic and not patronising at the same time. I don’t know how they do it.

BEN: It’s what you need. If you want deep analysis on anything, there has to be empathy there, otherwise it just doesn’t work. Something I’m classically terrible at, by the way. Like, really, really shit at it.

HEDVIG: And I struggle with empathy to QAnon people in a very serious way.

BEN: Conspiracy theorists broadly, I’ve just looked at askance and I’m just like: Ugh, just put it down.

DANIEL: Well, hey, thanks, everybody for those comments.

[OUTRO MUSIC]

BEN: Hey! You have been listening to a special patron, Pat-…. Hey, you’ve been listening to a special patron-only episode of Because Language, our Mailbag episode. But you might be listening to this aways down the line, when we open it up for gen-pop. If you have any questions, thoughts, queries, insights, anything at all like that, you can get ahold of us in all of the conventional social media channels. We’ve got a Facebook presence, we’ve got an Instagram presence. We’ve got a very small YouTube presence. Don’t visit us there. We haven’t really done that in a while. We have a Mastodon presence, we have a Discord channel. And of course, as always, if you just really want to spend some time crafting a meaningful missive, you can send us an email to hello@becauselanguage.com. Is that correct?

DANIEL: Yep, that is.

BEN: Also, please, please go and give us a review. But if you’re one of my high school students, and you want to leave a review about this podcast, please don’t leave a one star review as a joke, because most of you said very nice things, but then you left a one star review. And it really kind of fucked with our rankings a little bit. So, leave us high reviews! That would be great. I’m looking at you, Daniel.

HEDVIG: If you like the show, leave us high reviews. And if you feel like other people besides Mr Ainslie are good on this show, feel free to mention that too. [LAUGHTER] But if you do like the show just because of Ben, do that, but just don’t leave a one star review as a joke please, if you can.

BEN: thank youuu…

DANIEL: One of the hazards.

HEDVIG: They’re very funny. We get the whole internet edgy meme thing. Just…

BEN: [BEGGING] Stop fucking with our rankings.

HEDVIG: Yes. That’d be great. Thanks! And also, this is a Patreon special episode, like Ben said. So we’d like to thank you all for being our patrons on Patreon, which is always a mouthful for everyone who uses the service. You keep the show ad-free and you help us employ people to transcribe our shows, to make them more accessible and searchable. So we’d like to give a special shout out to all of our patrons, and especially people who participate on our Discord channel and send us in ideas and questions and comments for the show. We love hearing from you. So those people are: Termy, Chris B, Lyssa, The Major, Chris L, Matt, Damien, Helen, Bob, Jack, Kitty, Lord Mortis, Elías, Michael, Larry, Binh, Kristofer, Dustin, Andy, Maj, Nigel, Kate, Jen, Nasrin, Nikoli, Ayesha, Emma, Moe, Andrew, James, Shane, Eloise, Rodger, and new for this time: River and Rhian!

BEN: Wicked!

DANIEL: And getting in just under the wire for this episode: Jonathan and Steele. Thanks to all of you. And a huge thanks also to Dustin from Sandman Stories @storiesSandman who’s doing a great podcast of his own, and who has been repping us to everyone on Twitter who’s been ever asking for podcast recommendations. So thanks for that, Dustin, you once again are a ledge. Our music has been written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who’s a member of Ryan Beno and of Dideon’s Bible. Their new EP, EP2, is available on Bandcamp. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Because Language.

[PAUSE]

BEN: [MIC CHECK] Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

HEDVIG: [AIR HORN NOISES] Pew pew pew pew!

[PAUSE]

If I don’t sleep well, or if I wake up at the wrong period, then essentially my mood and my, like, capabilities cognitively for the entire day are sort of fucked.

BEN: I would agree with that. But I’ve just recognised that me at 75% capacity is fine.

HEDVIG: Okay.

DANIEL: Because you’re so wonderful.

BEN: No, I wouldn’t say that, but more just like I can…. The Ben Ainslie that the world requires is about a 75% Ben Ainslie. 100% Ben Ainslie is just too much.

DANIEL: How about the amount of Ben Ainslie you’re willing to give the world?

BEN: Yeah, no, there’s a great, there’s a great synergy there: What they actually need of me and what I’m willing to give… like, I’m not a doctor or a lawyer, so thankfully, I don’t work in an industry where they’re like, you must like always be fucking closing!

DANIEL: But is it the same 75%? That’s the question.

BEN: Yeah, that’s a good point.

[BOOP]

DANIEL: We hope that you’re enjoying the mailout of stickers slash postcards. People are starting to get those. They’re coming through.

HEDVIG: Yeah. Yeah, let us know if there’s anything else you want. So my merch-life is basically the usual, right? Like, stickers, tea cups, tote bags. But if you have any funky ideas for content that is, like, really interesting to you, but not normal, let us know, because I’d be interested. Not condoms.

BEN: That’s a good point.

DANIEL: No condoms?

HEDVIG: But… ehhh… I don’t…

BEN: We can’t, we can’t do custom condoms?

DANIEL: Well, not on Redbubble, no.

HEDVIG: Why are you both so positive towards that idea?

DANIEL: Because we’re latching on to any idea here. Just anything.

BEN: Sex positivity matters, right? I… had you said sanitary pads or tampons, I would have been like: That’s a great idea. Let’s do that. Why not?

HEDVIG: I think sex positivity is fine. I’m just not sure that I want to be in every situation. Does that make sense?

BEN: Oh, that’s fair enough. I tell you what: why don’t we do, like, Ben Ainslie double thumbs up on the condoms, because I’m sure that’s what every safe-sex practicing boy girl and otherwise loves to see when they are applying their prophylactic. And Hedvig, we can put you on, like, pencils.

HEDVIG: Yeah. Oh, pencil! I want a pencil. Yes, that’s good.

DANIEL: Because Language pencil.

What do I get?

Listen to this episode

Patreon supporters

Show notes

Transcript

Pages

Contact us

19: Mailbag, Schmailbag

Listen to this episode

Patreon supporters

Show notes

Transcript

Related Posts

97: The Dictionary of Fine Distinctions (with Eli Burnstein)

96: Language City (with Ross Perlin)

95: Why the Far-Right Demagogues Language (with Caitlin Green and Maureen Kosse)

Pages

Contact us