Are fish wet? What is bi-weekly? And which Monday is next Monday? We’re solving some of the thorniest problems in semantics by voting, because that’s how language works! 👍
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Become a Patron!Show notes
LingFest – LingComm
https://lingcomm.org/lingfest/
Christy Filipich
https://www.christyfilipich.services/
We May Finally Be Getting an Official Sex Emoji – InsideHook
https://www.insidehook.com/daily_brief/sex-and-dating/we-may-finally-getting-official-sex-emoji
Speaking Emoji: Stop Hiding Behind the Eggplant and Peach Emoji – We Need a Sex Emoji
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/speaking-emoji-stop-hiding-behind-the-eggplant-and-peach-emoji—we-need-a-sex-emoji-301273671.html
Support our application for an official #sexemoji
https://www.change.org/p/unicode-support-our-application-for-an-official-sexemoji
Please Don’t Misuse the Italian-Gesture Emoji
https://www.thecut.com/2020/09/please-dont-misuse-the-italian-gesture-emoji.html
Monkeys and eggplants: how do men and women use emojis differently? | Life and style | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/mar/17/emoji-use-men-women-gender-texting
DC Circuit Shuns ‘Garamond,’ Setting Lawyers Abuzz Over Favorite Fonts | National Law Journal
https://www.law.com/nationallawjournal/2021/03/17/dc-circuit-shuns-garamond-setting-lawyers-abuzz-over-favorite-fonts/
In Blatant Power Grab, D.C. Circuit Tells Lawyers to Stop Using Garamond – Lowering the Bar
https://loweringthebar.net/2021/03/power-grab-d-c-circuit-no-garamond.html
What did Garamond do to deserve a D.C. court’s wrath?
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/03/garamond-font-ban-dc-circuit-court-why.html
Fuck these fish | Fuck This Area In Particular | Know Your Meme
https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/633289-fuck-this-area-in-particular
Too cool for schl? Linguists pour scorn on Abrdn rebranding | Marketing & PR | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/apr/27/too-cool-for-schl-linguists-pour-scorn-on-abrdn-rebranding
Vector Beer With Wheat, Hops, Beer Mug And Barrel. Hipster, Label.. Royalty Free Cliparts, Vectors, And Stock Illustration. Image 59073413.
https://www.123rf.com/photo_59073413_stock-vector-vector-beer-with-wheat-hops-beer-mug-and-barrel-hipster-label-or-banner-for-craft-beer-bar-and-pub-.html
Language of romantic partners becomes more similar as relationship forms — even in text messages – The Academic Times
https://academictimes.com/language-of-romantic-partners-becomes-more-similar-as-relationship-forms-even-in-text-messages/
Do New Romantic Couples Use More Similar Language Over Time? Evidence from Intensive Longitudinal Text Messages | Journal of Communication | Oxford Academic
https://academic.oup.com/joc/advance-article/doi/10.1093/joc/jqab012/6199159?login=true
New Siri Voices Resonate With Some Black iPhone Users – Consumer Reports
https://www.consumerreports.org/digital-assistants/apples-new-siri-voices-resonate-with-some-black-iphone-users/
2 Black American Siri voices included in new Apple iPhone update
https://thegrio.com/2021/04/27/2-black-american-siri-voices-included-in-new-apple-iphone-update/
iOS 14.5 offers Unlock iPhone with Apple Watch, diverse Siri voices, and more – Apple
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/04/ios-14-5-offers-unlock-iphone-with-apple-watch-diverse-siri-voices-and-more/
Arguments matter, even if they come down to “semantics”
https://theconversation.com/arguments-matter-even-if-they-come-down-to-semantics-43188
James: The squirrel story and “around”
https://members.tripod.com/~Glove_r/James.html
Language Log » Deceptively valuable
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3500
Deceptively deceptive
https://www.superlinguo.com/post/8102577419/deceptively-deceptive
What Is ‘Cheugy’? You Know It When You See It.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/style/cheugy.html
Cheugy: the word you need when passé or basic just won’t do | Social media | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/media/shortcuts/2021/may/03/cheugy-the-word-you-need-when-passe-or-basic-just-wont-do
Turns Out I’m Pretty Cheugy | The Cut
https://www.thecut.com/2021/05/cheugy-is-hard-to-define-but-easy-to-identify.html
Crunchy childhood TikTok: What is a crunchy granola childhood?
https://thetab.com/uk/2021/04/09/okay-but-what-does-a-crunchy-childhood-actually-mean-heres-how-to-know-if-you-had-one-201541
Study Girl | Know Your Meme
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/study-girl
Eagles players had ‘no idea’ they were using a white supremacist gesture
https://www.theage.com.au/sport/afl/eagles-players-had-no-idea-they-were-using-a-white-supremacist-gesture-20210503-p57okc.html
AFL 2021: West Coast Eagles, Derby win over Fremantle, juvenile act, circle game, right-wing symbol, post-game photo | The Weekly Times
https://www.weeklytimesnow.com.au/affiliates/kayo/juvenile-west-coast-eagles-stars-slammed-for-postgame-photo-act/news-story/9ad0e07447718406ed01fcd811289451
Transcript
Daniel: Hi, everybody, this is Daniel here. Welcome to Episode 27 “It’s All Semantics” live at LingFest. You’re listening to the audio version, but there’s also a video version. And if you watch it, you’ll get the following advantages. Number one, you’ll get to see us and our reactions (eh not great). Number two, you’ll get to see Auslan interpretation by Christy Filipich, which is actually super good. And then number three, you’ll get to see the chat messages (selected ones) that come up from our Patreon listeners throughout the show. They provide an interesting commentary, error correction and fun subtext during the show. So, if you want to check out the video version, go ahead, the link is in comments. But if you are a firm listener, then you’re in the right place. Thanks to our Patrons. Thank you for listening and enjoy.
[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. She’s a linguist and she knows stuff. Not everything. Just the right amount: It’s Hedvig Skirgård.
Hedvig: Thank you very much. I love that one.
Ben: You know the Goldilocks amount of stuff. [LAUGHS]
Hedvig: Yeah. [LAUGHS] I don’t know what that means.
Ben: You know, like the goldilocks… Not not too little, not too much. Just the right amount
Daniel: Not too hot, not too cold.
Hedvig: Okay.
Daniel: That was what I said. That’s the mantra. If you’re suffering from imposter syndrome, just think I know about the right amount for where I’m at. And then you’ll feel better.
Hedvig: Yeah. And also, if we’re talking about helping with imposter syndrome, also, the person who hired me is pretty smart, and probably did a good decision. And if there’s something I don’t know, it’s probably fine.
Daniel: Yeah.
Ben: That’s, that’s great. Because it also confers respect to your immediate, like collegiate mass. Wow. Go you for being just good at things!
Hedvig: [LAUGHS]
Daniel: I’ll go on. He’s the one whose personal ads say “good sense of humor”, but in his case, it’s actually true: It’s the fabulous king of the fairies, it’s Ben Ainslie!
Ben: I feel like I got so shortchanged this time around!
Daniel: You never like my intros!
Ben: A super nice one, and you were just like: yeah, this guy’s bit of a dick. But like, not too much of a dick.
Hedvig: But you you are good at being funny.
Ben: Don’t try. Don’t try and save it. It’s-
Hedvig: No, but you are! You’re naturally that.
Daniel: This is what I tell people: you should listen to us… because sometimes Ben’s funny. We’re Because Language-
Ben: “Sometimes” really is the key modifier there, for the people who are seeing the sausage being made this time around. Which I suppose it’s about time we actually talk about the bizarreness of this particular permute of the show, should-?
[LAUGHTER]
Daniel: I guess so! This live episode is part of LingFest and we’re very glad to have supporting us, Christy Filipich, our wonderful and indefatigable Auslan interpreter.
Ben: I really enjoyed watching Christy pause for a second when you said “indefatigable”, and just kind of look at you with the look that just kind of… I’ve never seen a loving “fuck you” expression before and that is exactly what I just saw.
[LAUGHTER]
Daniel: We’re also very glad to have in attendance, a number of our dear patrons who support the show who give us great questions and ideas make it possible for us to keep the show going and are just heaps of fun to chat with. And you form a great part of our community and we’re so grateful to have you here.
Hedvig: Yeah. It’s very interesting. So during this show, everyone’s live on the same call and there’s a chat so we can see people like react to things we say while we’re talking? So I don’t know, we haven’t done that before. So it might make for an interesting show.
Ben: For instance, one of the most recent comments I’ve just seen, because I’m wearing a crown of fairy lights, because people could actually see me this time around is that I can now go by “Titania”, which was a great Shakespeare reference and I heartily endorse you guys using that as my nickname from now on. Wicked!
Daniel: [LAUGHS] Okay, great. Titania and I are coming at you from Whadjuk Noongar country and we want to take a moment and acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land pay tribute to Aboriginal leaders past, present and emerging. Hedvig, do you have any information on your – There’s nothing really equivalent where you are, you’re in Leipzig –
Hedvig: There is nothing equivalent, really. All I can say is that, because I went on a city tour of Leipzig, that Leipzig and many other German cities that end in “-ig” used to be dominated by Slavic people hundreds and hundreds of years ago. So same with the neighborhood I’m in, Plagwitz. So I’m in the east of Germany. So we have the Leah says the indigenous population Leipzig, Leipzig. Leipzig is called ???. It just sounds like people living in cities? But anyway, but Europeans don’t really tend to do that. I think it would be more important on like, minority indigenous land like Sámi Land in Sweden, but this custom of paying tribute to the land you’re on I have mainly encountered in Australia. I’ve seen people talk about it in North America, but it’s very Australian, I like it a lot.
Daniel: Cool. Later on, we are going to be taking your questions and maybe even your Words of the Week, so get those ready. And also we’ll have a big announcement at the end. Don’t get too excited, it’s a very silly announcement and it’s about something silly, so don’t worry. Okay, are we ready –
Ben: What a showman, ladies and gentlemen: “I’ve got a big deal! But don’t worry, actually don’t get excited at all. In fact, pretend I didn’t say anything.”
Daniel: It’s kind of dumb. Okay. Are you ready for our news?
Ben: Bring it on! Yeah.
Hedvig: Yes!
Ben: I’m at this point – I’m not even doing the shepherding stuff because I’m just so bedazzled by Auslan obviously, as I always am because I find it so amazing, and visually compelling, but also all of our people talking so if I’m not doing my normal job of being like “What’s happening next?” just remind me because I’m just like, like, I’m mesmerized.
Daniel: I’m just following the chat!
Hedvig: Yeah, speaking of the chat, they’re all saying where they are right now. So we have people in Canberra in Ngunnawal country, we have Skåne which is Sweden/Belgium. We have some people in Germany, various places. We have Denmark, South Korea, Los Angeles, Tokyo. I don’t think I missed anyone. But yeah, oh, New Zealand, Washington-
Ben: Crack ahead as well.
Hedvig: …Oh, my God!
Ben: Sorry to jump in. We should also acknowledge that there is a fifth person involved in this, which is a wonderful technical support operator, Drew. And I mentioned that (or at least I was reminded of that), because I saw a comment that said that patrons can’t necessarily see Christie, our Auslan interpreter. So I was just wondering if Drew could sort that out? Maybe? I don’t know.
Daniel: Yeah, Drew, can you see are you in gallery view? Can you see everything okay?
Ben: Drew is on it! Because of course he is because he is a top flight assassin-type Jason Bourne character when it comes to technology. Love you, Drew!
Daniel: We are there.
Ben: Hey, Daniel, what’s going on in the world of linguistics this week?
Daniel: We are going to do the news, but this time in the form of a game and this game is called “Real News or Fake News?”.
Ben: Oh, I love this game.
Daniel: I thought of getting our patrons, our audience, to vote, but we’re doing that a little bit later, so just feel free to keep track of your score in the chat. And this is going to be between Ben and Hedvig. Here we go.
Ben: Yes! Come on, come on!
Hedvig: Yes!
Daniel: Number one. Okay, real news or fake news: The latest Unicode character set includes an official sex emoji. Real news or fake news?
Ben: Fake!
Daniel: Okay, Ben says “fake news”.
Hedvig: What do you mean “sex emoji”? Like, like an image of like two little people?
Daniel: [LAUGHS] What would that look like –
Hedvig: or like, like, [FRUSTRATED NOISE].
Daniel: Sex looks a lot of different ways, doesn’t it?
Hedvig: Or like sex at birth? Like that kind of thing?
Daniel: There’s a lot more than just p-in-v, right?
Ben: Listen, Hedvig, you’re clearly stalling.
Hedvig: Fake!
[LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: I don’t understand what it is. Wait, no, no, no! True! True!
Daniel: Oh, going against! Okay. Well, the answer is: no, it’s fake. I just made it up. But! A sex toy company is proposing one. Sex toy company LELO is proposing an official sex emoji. They’ve also launched a petition on change.org. No longer would we have to rely on peaches and eggplants, it could be something a little more direct.
Ben: I mean, what what lies behind Unicode’s somewhat puritanical stance around this stuff, right? Like the Unicode is a very sanitary space, for lack of a better phrase, by like, Eurocentric Western standards.
Hedvig: It is quite American. Yeah. I think is the short answer.
[LAUGHTER]
Ben: Just throw all of USA under the bus
Hedvig: Well, Western, and, well, they tend to be a bit more puritanical.
Ben: Well, they went over there for that reason.
Hedvig: A while ago, I was trying to understand why the often called “Australian Indigenous Flag” wasn’t among the flags, and the answer to that has to do with the rights of the person who made the flag and not to do with Unicode. But it made me dig through like why Unicode decides on certain emojis or not. And the feeling I got from reading lots of documents was that they were exhausted and overwhelmed and didn’t want to be in charge of everyone’s pictures anymore?
Ben: I was telling this to my students the other day, because we were studying emojis as a form of like visual communication. I was like, “Yeah, one of my friends who is like hell smart about linguistics and stuff basically is like ‘They’re tired and they don’t want to do this too'”.
Daniel: Yeah, they don’t want to do this anymore [LAUGHS].
Hedvig: Yeah, yeah! And they want people to switch to gifs or these like stickers – sticker sets that you can get into, yeah, instead of their emojis because they’ve now found themselves in charge of like… For example, there’s, there’s only three sides of the globe that are shown you can’t get one with like mainly the Pacific Ocean. And they haven’t probably put in like a lot of thought into that that’s just happened to be a thing they decided. And now they have to, like, argue on all these distinctions. And they’re not… they don’t want to, and they have to get flack from people like me, who hasn’t looked up why the Australian Indigenous Flag isn’t on there. And yeah, it’s just, they don’t want to do it anymore, I think.
[LAUGHTER]
Ben: [As UNICODE DEVELOPERS] “We’re tired!”
Hedvig: [LAUGHS] Yeah.
Daniel: The problem here is that LELO has not specified what the sex emoji should look like, and this is not how it works! You can’t just shout at Unicode to make one you have to do drawings, you have to submit them. So, I think this is pretty clearly a ploy for attention.
Hedvig: Yeah, which we ignore.
Ben: I would like to just just to be clear, I think in that sort of graphical representation of the things that we want to express, sex is obviously like… We’re all sex-positive people, we would like a way to do that. Having said that, though, part of me kind of feels like like that classic “When you have restrictions you are more creative”, kind of, whatever, the Brian Eno, school of thought of creativity?
Daniel: Yeah.
Ben: Like there is a fun-ness around the three water droplets and the eggplant and the peach and you know, all that kind of stuff.
Hedvig: The train.
Daniel: The taco.
Ben: The one I found out about recently was the Italian ges– Sorry, I’ll do it sideways — the Italian gesture emoji? And I was just like “Oh!” . No, the the like “eyyy” [MAKES HAND GESTURE SIDEWAYS], that one.
Daniel: The hand?
Ben: Yeah.
Daniel: By the way, “eggplanting” is a term that’s arisen in the last month. Eggplanting is a common mistake: it’s sending someone an eggplant before the relationship is ready for the eggplant and –
Ben: Ooh I like that, I really like that!
Daniel: Common mistake.
Ben: To be clear: I don’t like doing – I don’t like the act of doing that. I like the fact that it has a name for when you’ve misread the situation and you just like cool all the temperature down.
[LAUGHTER]
Daniel: You just show bad judgment. Okay, so one for Ben. Keep track of your own darn scores. Number two, real news or fake news? A US Court has told attorneys to stop using the Garamond font. If you’re not aware, it’s a serif font. And you’re not supposed to use it if you’re a lawyer. True or false?
Ben: I am going to let Hedvig answer first because I jumped in last time,
Hedvig: But the Garamond isn’t particularly offensive. Right? I’ve seen it.
Daniel: I think it’s very stylish.
Hedvig: I’m also surprised that they are forbidding. Why aren’t they saying you can only use Arial and Times New Roman? Why are they saying you can’t use this one? That’s odd. But, this was in some sort of like local American place was it?
Daniel: Well, if it were a real story, it might be. [LAUGHS]
Ben: [LAUGHS] Geez, what a poker face. You want you want to guess “fake”, Hedvig, and I’ll go “true”?
Hedvig: I can’t, I don’t… I’m confused about what’s going on.
Ben: I was gonna guess true simply because there is no one in this world more more… proclived?
Daniel: Inclined?
Ben: More predisposed, predisposed to pedant-type behavior than font nerds. So I absolutely believe that somewhere someone with some decision making power was just like, “Not on my watch!” to this one particular font. So I’m going true.
Hedvig: [WHISPERING] That’s very strange. Yeah, okay, I’m gonna go false.
Daniel: Okay. One for Ben again. It is true. [LAUGHS] Ben is two to zero.
Ben: Awesome!
Hedvig: So we’re currently at… yeah.
Daniel: The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has added a note to their style guide: briefs will only be accepted if they’re written in 14 point serifed fonts, like Century or Times New Roman. The courts strictly discourage the use of Garamond. Explicitly
Ben: I love — do you know what that reminds me of? That, that meme of like, a lake and lightning and it just says, like,” God says fuck this one fish in particular”.
Daniel: “Fuck you in particular!”
Ben: It feels like that’s what they’ve done. “We want you to use this and this and also fuck you, Garamond and the horse you rode in on!”
Hedvig: Some people in the chat are pointing out, I think that’s what they’re pointing out which might be true, that Garamond might have particular issues with what’s called “kerning”, which is like how letters when they are next to each other, how they sort of line up and invade each other’s spaces. And maybe the Garamond makes confusion, or something? I don’t know.
Daniel: Garamond does appear smaller than other typefaces and you can use that to shave a few pages off of a legal brief if there’s a page limit.
Ben: Ah, so there we go. There’s an attempt to stop people gaming the system.
Daniel: Okay, real news or fake news number three: a company in Scotland is getting roasted online for dropping all the vowels out of its business name. True or false?
Ben: I would assume false. I’m gonna go with false on this one simply because I have seen like infinity, like alt-rock band slash pop artists drop all the vowels from their name and, like not only does no one get up in arms, but people like “Oh my God, have you heard Chvrchs? Oh my God.”
Daniel: [LAUGHS]
Hedvig: Yeah, but we’re talking about Scottish people and they have tall poppy syndrome just like you do.
Ben: Hey, Adebisi Shank comes from Scotland and they’re awesome. Okay, so Scottish people make good alternative music as well.
Hedvig: No, no, they I’m sure they do. I’m just saying I can see them thinking that something like that is phony.
Ben: Um, I’m still gonna go with fake.
Hedvig: Okay, I’m gonna go with true. I’m hoping for my first point.
Daniel: By the way, every band with no vowels in its name sucks except HTRK. I want, I want in chat I want to hear one band that doesn’t suck besides H-T-R-K (“Hate Rock”). Okay,
Hedvig: I think if you count “y” as a consonant?
Ben: Oh, I love that. The first suggestion that came into our chat was Grindr. I’m like, mmm, represent! I love that.
[LAUGHTER]
Daniel: It’s true!
Ben: No! No!
Hedvig: YES! [SINGS] I got a point!
Daniel: Standard Life Aberdeen has shrunk to five letters: A, B, R, D, N. [TRIES TO READ ALOUD] “aybridon?” or perhaps “a burden”? It doesn’t seem to be like that Grindr/ Tumblr thing that’s kind of played out, don’t you think?
Hedvig: Yeah, I think you get past –
Ben: That’s exactly what I thought it was. I’m surprised they’re getting roasted though. I’ve got to be honest, not because I’ve started a business that has dropped the vowels and I’m like lowkey hoping I don’t come next or whatever. But more just… Do you remember – do you guys remember how like for a long time there um (and I’m just doing like a little picture on my screen) people change like basically all of their logos to that like hipster X with like for little symbols in the X and it was like craft brewing companies and all that kind of stuff?
Daniel: oh, yes.
Ben: You know, like it had like two iconographic arrows and then like a mountain and a tree and like a beard and hops or something. And like, EVERY logo did that and it was just kind of accepted.
Daniel: I don’t even know what hops looks like.
Ben: They kind of look like a little strawberry but with wavy lines like an umbral.
Hedvig: They look like a strawberry with scales.
Ben: Yes! That is a great way to describe it actually, “a strawberry with scales” as my partner and I would know from farming lots of them in Stardew Valley.
Daniel: Strawberry armor. Cool. All right, the who got that one? Was that was that you, Hedvig?
Hedvig: Yes, I did! Got my first point. And also, people have suggested lots of bands without vowels in the name that are good like MGMT (management), so…
Daniel: okay, cool. This was my secret ploy, I just wanted to get more good bands.
Ben: Ludvig van Beethoven without any vowels, and it’s still incredibly legible.
Daniel: Yeah, it is isn’t it? English isn’t supposed to work like that. Okay, number four real news or fake news? A study of text messages between people in relationships find that couples use language most similarly at the start of a relationship, but then their language use begins to diverge. Real news or fake news?
Hedvig: is that because in the beginning of a relationship, you’re just being what you think is normal and that happens to be the same?
Daniel: [THOUGHTFULLY] Okay.
Ben: I’ve got… my immediate response based purely on my own experience was “fake news”, because in every relationship I’ve been in our communication has converged. You know, like, you pick up the habits of like, your partner’s little quirks, right? But, but my little brain is like: ooh, are we hyper accommodating when we’re still trying to lock a romantic partner in and then once they are locked in (and we’ve made sure they can’t escape!) then we’re just like,” Haha, sucked in! Here’s my real language doofus.”
Daniel: You know, they say relationships are the ultimate long con.
Ben: I’m going to go with fake news. I reckon you get more similar as time goes on.
Daniel: Uh-huh.
Hedvig: I’m gonna go with true news.
Daniel: Okay.
Hedvig: Yeah, I’m just thinking about my text messages and my husband, Steven’s, and they’re different.
[LAUGHTER]
Daniel: Okay, this one was fake news! What happened is –
Ben: [SINGS IN TRIUMPH]
Daniel: [LAUGHS] This is work from Miriam Brinburg from Pennsylvania State University and Nilam Ram from Stanford published in the Journal of Communication. They looked at about a million texts from 41 couples over 200 days. That’s a lot of messages! And they found that couples texts grew more similar as the relationship developed in terms of words, abbreviations and function words like verbs, auxiliaries, things like that. They were already pretty close to each other. But then, when they started to become a couple, they ramped up their accommodation. They started doing it more similar, and then just kept on getting more similar, but it did plateau. Sso they did not diverge.
Ben: I said, they didn’t go like a full Vulcan mind meld.
Hedvig: Yeah, and fully merge. That’s funny!
Daniel: That’s right. Okay, last one. What’s the score? 3-to-1? It’s still anybody’s game (no, it’s not).
[LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: What’s that thing about “I know relevant things”?
Daniel: “Enough things”, “enough things”!
Ben: This last one is worth two points, right?
Daniel: Um, yeah. Okay, so real news or fake news? In the new Apple iOS, you can choose new voices for Siri that are African American.
Hedvig: Yes I know this, I’ve seen this. It’s true.
Ben: [FRUSTRATED NOISE] I was gonna guess true, because I’m pretty sure I heard Drew trial one as he was testing this show.
Hedvig: Yeah…
Ben: I head Siri just speaking in a bit of an AAVE sort of accent. I was so jazzed by it.
Daniel: But you’re supposed to forget that though.
Ben: Yeah.
Daniel: Well, let’s hear it, Drew. Can we have the file?
Siri: [IN THE AFRICAN AMERICAN MAN VOICE OPTION] Hi, I’m Siri! Choose the voice you’d like me to use. [IN THE AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMAN VOICE OPTION] Hi, I’m Siri! Choose the voice you’d like me to use.
Ben: Ah! It’s so good.
Daniel: Ah! Okay. So that was Voice Three and Voice Two. So, the funny thing about this is that all the media that I’ve seen has been very coy about saying that this is African American. Like nobody is saying, “oh, Black Siri”. Nobody is saying this.
Hedvig: I see users on Twitter saying it.
Daniel: Yeah?
Hedvig: I saw like, a Black man on Twitter saying, “Is everyone hearing what I’m hearing? I think I’m hearing this”.
Ben: But yeah, I think Daniel’s point is that like official outlets are being very sort of circumspect.
Daniel: Extremely. Even Apple’s being a bit coy. Like I found a page for Apple and it says, “In English, users can now select more diverse voice options”, which kind of gives the game away.
Ben: Why do you think they’re… Do you think they’re sort of like afraid of the optics of just coming out and saying there’s a Siri with a Black voice?
Daniel: “This is what Black people sound like.” Well, Black people sound a lot of different ways.
Ben: Oh, okay. So they’re just almost being sort of like cautious around that.
Daniel: Which is good.
Ben: I guess so, yeah. It’s up to Black people to call it Black Siri I guess.
Daniel: So you can make your own call, you can decide whether to award yourself points or not for that last one.
Ben: Oh, Kitty also mentioned that there is an Indian accent as well for Siri just now.
Hedvig: Ooh!
Daniel: Cool! Yeah, so there are options if you want your phone to be, you know, sound a little different why not give it a shot? One thing I like about this is that it’s very good for I think Black voices – African American voices – to be relied on as a trusted source of information. I think that’s really positive.
Ben: Heck, yeah! Absolutely. I want everything in my life read to me by either Morgan Freeman or Octavia Spencer, 100%. All things. All the time.
Daniel: And that’s real news and fake news. Well done to both of you!
Ben: Yay! We tied, we tied
Daniel: Yay!
Hedvig: Well, no, we didn’t tie it’s fine.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
Daniel: Now it’s time for the semantics part of our show. There are some thorny usage issues that we have been wanting to find out about and get your input on. So, it’s- [LAUGHS] No, Leah, not like “Is cereal a soup?”. Don’t even start me! I’ll go there.
Ben: ~Is a hot dog a sandwich?~ Triggered!
Daniel: We did a whole episode on that! Anyway, we’re gonna let you, our dear listeners, vote. Now, this first one is a bit of a throwback, but we’re going to stick it up there anyway. Here we go.
Hedvig: I’ve set it so I can actually see their faces as well so I can actually see your faces on my second screen.
Ben: Oh, Daniel, why, why?
Daniel: It’s time for you to vote. It’s a hot day, so thank goodness for air con. But, now it’s a bit chilly in here so to make the room warmer, I’m going to turn the air con _? What are you gonna do, Ben? Let’s see if you still agree with your old self.
Hedvig: Should I vote as well or should I stay out of it?
Daniel: You’re welcome to
Ben: Obviously, obviously, -and I really hope I am as fervently arguing the same one that I did before-
[LAUGHTER]
Ben: You obviously turn the intensity of the device which is making things cold down in order to make things not as cold as they currently are.
Daniel: Okay, so, so wait, you’re saying –
Ben: Please put me out of my misery, did I say that before?
Daniel: Before you were arguing that if you want that, if you want it to get warmer, you turn the air conditioning up. That’s what you argued a long time ago.
Ben: [FRUSTRATED NOISES]
Daniel: But clearly, you’ve moderated on your very strong views.
Ben: No, I haven’t moderated at all, I’ve just swung wildly over compensatory to the other extreme.
Hedvig: We got a question if non native speakers allowed… Of course they are.
Ben: Of course they are!
Hedvig: Well, there’s, there’s more than us than them. So, yeah.
Daniel: Yes, please!
Ben: Like one member of our show is a non native speaker of English, I think we can probably say yes.
Hedvig: Yeah, and also the the often it calques the same way into other languages.
Daniel: Okay, I’m gonna end this poll [BEEPS]. Everyone’s voted and now I’m gonna display the results. It looks like if you want the room to get a little less cold, you’re gonna turn the air conditioning …
Hedvig: Down!
Daniel: Down! Most people said down, although it was close. Things, as I remember, got a little bit weird if you go the other way and say you want to, you want it to be colder. So you know, people were a lot more clear on this one. So this was the extra weird case and I think the voting reflects that.
Ben: And a lot of people are jumping in to the comment section with the really good design fix, which is like, ~ do you want to turn the temperature up or down?~ right? Which is just for a split cycle system where it can be both a heater and an air conditioner? It’s just a very good way to do it really.
Daniel: Sure. Okay, let’s go on to our next one, [BEEPS]. Okay. This one is a couple of them. First of all, it’s Saturday. If Daniel says, “Let’s get together next Monday” [LAUGHS] when is that? In two days, or in nine days, or not sure? Okay, so if I say, “Let’s get together next Monday”. But now, I could also in part two say, if I said, “Let’s get together next Friday”, when is that in six days? Or in 13 days? Okay, so we’ll give you a minute. And, by the way, it’s okay to raise your hand and maybe we can patch you in if you think you have a really good argument for one or the other.
Ben: [SIGHS] I feel so strongly, strongly strongly about this.
Daniel: Do you feel differently between the two?
Ben: No, I don’t.
Daniel: Okay.
Hedvig: You just feel strongly.
Ben: I have a very consistent system. And it is this, right? The first day that you could be referring to in the cycle is this Monday, and then one after that is next Monday, and that can be for whatever day you want. Right? In the possible sort of like whatever it is the absolute maximum like 13 day cycle that this question could hold. Right? You are “this” for the closest one. So in the first example — right? — the Monday in two days is this Monday and the Monday nine days is next Monday.
Daniel: Hmm. I almost feel like people should stop saying next Monday.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Okay, I’m gonna end this one. [BEEPS]
Hedvig: I think we should stop talking about weekdays to each other and just send each other Google Calendar invites, cause that’s how my life runs anyway.
[LAUGHTER]
Daniel: Let’s see those results, here we go! Oh, split decision.
Hedvig: Oh! That’s really interesting.
Ben: Wow!
Daniel: Which you’d kind of expect, wouldn’t you? I mean, really? I mean, if I say “next Monday”, that’s kind of weird. I would have just said Monday if I had meant the one coming up, right? Whereas, “Let’s get, yeah, let’s get together Monday”. But if I say “next Monday”, that kind of leapfrogs into nine days, I think. Whereas if I say “Let’s get together next Friday –” [GROANS] “next” is so horrible! “Next” is so ambiguous. We should just say oxt. “Oxt” is a word that I keep plugging ( O-X-T ) and it just means “not this one but the one after that”.
Ben: No, no! You know better than this, Daniel. This is the Randall Munroe “There are 13 competing standards” problem.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: This is a terrible idea. And you are basically a terrorist for —
[LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: Basically a terrorist? God!
Ben: You know better!
Daniel: I’m trying to make this happen. Okay, let’s go on to the next one. There we go.
Hedvig: Oh no, there’s another person who says “Sunday’s the start of the week”?
Daniel: Hang on, no. Okay, that’s our next show.
[LAUGHTER]
Daniel: “Are fish wet?” Your choices are: “Yes”, “No”, — this is multiple choice by the way you can choose any number of these — “depends on what wet means.”, “Depends on water means”, “Depends on what fish means”, “Not sure”. Are fish wet?
Hedvig: My partner annoyingly had another alternative that I wasn’t sure if you were going to add here when we were test running this which is: a fish is wet when you take it out of the water. Which I kind of like. [LAUGHS]
Daniel: That was what Ben said! For the promo!
Ben: I said that! I said that! I totally said that!
Daniel: Which makes no sense at all. Because —
Hedvig: no, no, no, no, no, because I am also, when I’m under when I’m snorkeling when I’m underwater, I don’t think I’m wet. But when I stick my head up my head’s wet
Ben: [POINTS TO HEDVIG] This person, correct. [POINTS TO DANIEL] This person, incorrect.
Daniel: Why would it become wetter when you remove it from the source of the water?
Ben: I can answer this, I’m gonna answer this.
Daniel: Yes, please.
Ben: Okay, what if, right? And just like prepare yourself your mind to just explode right now? What if wet — right? — is not an objective state but a ratio, right? Right, a ratio of moisture to ambient moisture. Right, so when a fish is in water its nof wet because it’s just surrounded by the element that it like lives and breathes in, and then you pluck it out of the water and it’s dripping with wetness in an otherwise ~dry~ environment. Right?
Daniel: In other words, wetness is an emergent property of contact with water.
Ben: Correct. Kind of.
Daniel: Yeah. Okay.
Hedvig: Hmm, yeah and then you have to be un-in-contact with water, but a little bit in contact with water.
Daniel: Okay, everybody vote. It’s time.
Hedvig: Oh, shit. And then I’ll pick…
Hedvig: I don’t even know, basically. I went with depends what wet means?
Ben: Yes.
Hedvig: Because that’s what we were talking about.
[LAUGHTER]
Daniel: I guess that’s semantics, all right. Okay, I’m going to end it in three…two… one… [BEEPS]. And let’s share those results. [BEEPS]. All right. Most people said: Yeah, fish are wet.
Ben: I’m really disappointed with this because it means I’m wrong, because our listeners are substantially smarter than I am. So…
Hedvig: And I was just gonna say we haven’t touched on this yet, but our purpose of making this show is to settle these things. So everyone who’s here now knows the truth, which is that fish are wet.
[LAUGHTER]
Ben: The absolute truth.
Hedvig: We’ve decided it. And now me and Ben need to succumb to that and I’ll inform my poor husband later that that’s his reality as well. Because this applies not only to us.
Ben: As Ste and I just bite through our tongues, we will just have to deal with it.
Daniel: There will be holdouts-
Hedvig: And it just applies to everyone around the world. So, so far, we have decided that… what have we decided? That “next Friday” is in six days if you’re on Saturday?
Ben: Yep, yep.
Hedvig: And “next Monday” is in –
Ben: Eight days.
Hedvig: Eight days?
Ben: Yeah.
Hedvig: That’s it, we’ve decided. Anyone who voted differently has to just –
Ben: I’m wrong.
Hedvig: [LAUGHS] You’re wrong?
Ben: It turns out I’m wrong. I’m wrong about a lot of these!
Daniel: Let’s do this one, it’s similar: “Is water wet?”. It’s also multiple choice: “Yes”, “No”, “Depends on what water means”, “Depends on what wet means”, “Depends on, inexplicably, what fish means”, “Not sure”. No, I didn’t copy and paste that. I really meant to include that option.
Ben: “Water is wet”, I’m going with yes.
Daniel: So, if you had a floating cube of water, that would be wet?
Ben: If I had a floating cube of water…
Hedvig: But we don’t have a floating cube of water.
Ben: Daniel, are you doing some like crazy stoner nonsense right now? Are you doing the whole like ~ is my blue and your blue the same blue~?
Daniel: No, I’m saying… Didn’t you just argue that water is — that wetness is an emergent property of contact with water? It’s not in the thing itself.
Ben: Yeah. But like, you’re talking about like, “is water wet?” from some sort of like, objective perceiver’s neutral reality where there is no anything, right? In which case it would have to be wet.
Daniel: I’m going to argue that water is wet because we look at a boggy place and we say “Careful, it’s wet there” and then if we go to a lake, we say, “Well, this area is much wetter than the last one”.
Hedvig: Yeah, but that’s because the land around the swamp and around the water is wet, which is correct. But the water itself, the big body, mass of water isn’t wet in itself.
Daniel: That’s why I was mentioning the floating sphere of water not in contact with anything: is that wet?
Hedvig: Which I also wouldn’t say is wet and also this is like when you’re extracting examples during fieldwork that like don’t exist. We were talking the other day on one of my research assistant meetings about like how you say, present tense, but perfective. So like finished events, but that are on that are happening at this moment. Like no one talks about them! Like they don’t occur in corpora. They don’t happen in the world. People don’t talk about that.
Ben: I feel like there is a whole bunch of talking to try and justify when you know you’re going to be proven wrong in this poll in a second.
Hedvig: [LAUGHS]
Daniel: There’s an interesting discussion in chat about whether ice is wet. Does anybody want to raise their hand and jump in? Maybe we can try to include you and maybe our tech guy can help.
Hedvig: So if you use the raising hand emoji, or if you wave your hand around, I might see it.But they’re not doing it because maybe they don’t want to do it. That’s fair.
Ben: Yeah, they’re probably sitting there being like: “Hell no, you’re the idiots who have a podcast. We just listen.”
Hedvig: [LAUGHS] Yeah, that’s fair. That’s fair.
Daniel: Okay, time to vote. I’m going to end the poll in five…four…three…two…one. [BEEPS] Let’s take a look at those results. Predictably, yeah, it looks kind of the same as before. We’ve decided that water is intrinsic — that wetness is intrinsic to water and it’s not a result of contact. “Breaking News: Water is wet” says Kitty[LAUGHS]. Okay.
Ben: You heard it here first folks.
Hedvig: I’ll submit.
Daniel: In a related note, can the sky be deep? “Yes”, “No” or “Not sure”. Think about it. Does it have depth? Is it deep? Water can be deep, but what about the sky?
Ben: I am going to go with no, because it can’t be deep. It can only be high because of our stupid monkey-centric perception of the universe.
Daniel: Okay, from our own perspective,
Hedvig: But, Ben, do you think a room can be deep?
Ben: Uhh, I mean, I guess like a Scrooge McDuck vault full of money that you swim in can be deep? And that’s a room, I guess.
Hedvig: Okay. And when you say depth perception, do you mean this direction [POINTS STRAIGHT DOWN]? Or that direction [POINTS OUT FROM SELF]?
Ben: Yeah, no. I see what you’re doing here and I don’t buy it. Like, yes, depth can have multiple contextual inferences but I think the way English speakers use the word deep, they generally mean down. For instance, I presume Lord Mortis, who is listening right now, is located somewhere very, very deep.
Hedvig: [LAUGHS] Like underground? What? Interesting.
Daniel: What? Why?
Ben: because a person who has the moniker [DEEP VOICE] “Lord Mortis” is not someone who’s just like floating on the Jovian moons, right? Like it’s, it’s a deep name. [DEEP VOICE] “Invisible Oranges” [HOLDS OUT SLIGHTLY OPEN HAND IN METAL GESTURE].
Daniel: [DEEP VOICE] “Invisible Oranges” [MIMICS BEN’S GESTURE]!
Ben: I love it. I just love when someone pointed that out to me. And I was like, Oh, my God metal fans totally are holding invisible oranges! Its so good.
Daniel: Okay, I’m gonna end this soon, but it’s a squeaker so get your votes in now. Okay, in three…two…one. [BEEPS] Let’s see the results. By a whisker, the sky CAN be deep but, boy, are we split.
Ben: That’s close. That’s close. That’s real close.
Hedvig: [SINGS] Yeah!
Daniel: You know, it seems like deep is only used for things that we’re on top of and can go down through.
Ben: But apparently not.
Hedvig: When you make a cabinet and you –
Ben: [LAUGHS] We get it! We get it! Depth can be lateral. You don’t need to give more examples!
Hedvig: Yeah, exactly! And mostly it is in those situations. This is the depth of this thing.
Ben: But you’re using “depth” and “deep” like they’re synonyms and as we know, there is no such thing as a synonym.
Daniel: That’s true.
Hedvig: [JOKING MOCKING NOISES] Sounds like sour grapes to me!
Ben: I just linguistics-ed you like a motherfucker and I feel so good about it.
Hedvig: No, no, no, you’re just, you’re just a bad loser.
Ben: I also just really quickly want to acknowledge that there is an awesome person in our chat who is also called Ben, but they had the courtesy to put in brackets, “(not the host one)”. God bless you, Ben, thank you.
Hedvig: That was nice.
Daniel: We’re gonna go to the next one. And this one’s about the word “around”. If you’re going around a tree in pursuit of a squirrel, and the squirrel also goes around the tree on the opposite side from you, did you go around the squirrel?
Ben: If you’re going around the tree in pursuit of a squirrel and the squirrel also goes around the tree…
Hedvig: Okay. Here’s a tree … [HOLDS UP BOTTLE IN ONE HAND]
Ben: Yep.
Daniel: Yep.
Hedvig: Here’s a cockatoo [HOLDS UP COASTER WITH COCKATOO PICTURE], here’s me.
Daniel: Hello, cockatoo.
Hedvig: Wait, I have too many hats. Okay, so I go like this. I go. Oh, 360 divided by 280 degrees. Yep. All right. Thank you. And the squirrel does the same as that we are saying, huh?
Daniel: That’s right.
Ben: You do not go around the squirrel.
Daniel: And the tree is always between me and the squirrel because we’re always on opposite sides.
Hedvig: Yeah, you’re like that.
Daniel: I’m just I’m just gonna read this. This is from Lila by Robert Pirsig. Because this conundrum comes from William James, considered the father of pragmatism. “James had a group of friends who were on an outing somewhere, and one of them chased a squirrel around a tree. The squirrel instinctively clung to the opposite side of the tree, and moved so that as the man circled the tree, the squirrel also circled it on the opposite side. After observing this, James and his friends engaged in a philosophic discussion of the question, did the man go around the squirrel? Or didn’t he? He was north, south, east, and west of the squirrel, so he must have gone around it. Yet, at no time had he ever gone to the back or to the side of the squirrel. The squirrel could say ‘that man never got around me'”.
Hedvig: Yeah, exactly, he didn’t go around the squirrel.
Ben: Yeah, exactly. I’m saying he’s not going around and as many people have pointed out in our chat, when you’re talking about words like this, your point of reference is, like, the super important thing and it seems like the tree is the point of reference. They both go around the tree. They do not go around each other. That’s what I think.
Hedvig: Yes!
Daniel: Okay, let’s see. Okay, I’m gonna close off the poll in three…two…one… [BEEPS]. Let’s see those results
Hedvig: Oh! Someone said “if I rotate 360 degrees as the person next to me go around me?”.
[LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Let’s see, by a pretty clear margin: no, you do not go around the squirrel. Okay, we’ve solved it. We’ve solved James’s philosophical problem with empiricism!
Hedvig: Makes sense to me.
Ben: I actually like — who asked that? Matthias? And I’m so sorry, Matthias, if I’m pronouncing that incorrectly. I think that’s the more interesting question. If I rotate on the spot, and someone stands still have they gone around me? Or have I spun like a weirdo near them?
Hedvig: [SPINS] You all went around me now, I spun.
Daniel: Yeah, exactly. If you want to say that, that he went around the squirrel, then you’d also have to say that I go around the island of Manhattan every day, because I’m opposite sides of the Earth from it. But that doesn’t seem right.
Ben: Yeah. Also, I think the far more interesting thing in that little, what shall we call — anecdote — is both of those people keyed into the really boring part of that activity, which was discussing the semantics of it, when you could just be playing squirrel tag, which is heaps of fun.
Hedvig: Poor squirrel, sounds scary.
Ben: I’ve got to be honest, when I’ve done that with a squirrel, they seem to be having a great time.
Hedvig: Okay, yeah. Fair enough.
Daniel: Where did you find a squirrel?
Ben: Not in Australia, obviously, in America.
Daniel: Okay, here we go. Number seven. We’re getting through it. This is great. I’m so glad we’re settling these things. If a test was deceptively easy, was it easy or hard?
Ben: This one really fried my circuits. I really, like I experienced a halting error on this one. Like I was like [GLITCHING NOISES].
Hedvig: Okay, so our problem is that when, you know, have you ever watched the show QI? And sometimes Stephen Fry asks, or Sandy Toksvig asks a question to lure our beloved… A-A-A… what’s-his-name who was always on the show.
Hedvig: Oh I’ve forgotten his name. Fuzzy hair guy.
Daniel: dude.
Hedvig: Yeah. Fuzzy hair guy plays Jonathan Creek. Jonothan Creek!
Daniel: Almay… Alan.
Hedvig: Oh, Alan! Thank you, Alan Davies.
Daniel: [LAUGHS] Thank you, everyone.
Hedvig: And sometimes, sometimes it’s a question like, it’s not ice water, or something that’s like, “It’s the capital of Australia, Canberra”. And it looks deceptively easy, which makes Alan Davis think ~ oh, no, it can’t possibly be that. So it must be Sydney. I’m double thinking myself!~. And then he says “Sydney” and then the things go off. But sometimes it is… It’s confusing when people ask things that seem easy and it usually means it’s hard, but the actual question is easy. Am I making sense?
Ben: You are…
Daniel: It looks easy, and it is.
Ben: Yeah, I went in a similar direction to this like any situation where there is an easy answer, right? But the easy answer isn’t necessarily immediately obvious, right? So the solution to the problem is straightforward, but getting to or realizing that solution may be not so straightforward. Does that make sense?
Hedvig: That’s the other one, yeah. I was thinking more of the double bluffing thing where the actual answer is easy to find and straightforward, but you start doubting yourself because you think they can’t possibly be asking me this. Like when Stephen Fry finally asked the question to which the answer is “a blue whale” and Ella Davis is like, [ENGLISH ACCENT] “It can’t be that. It’s never that”.
Ben: Yeah. On either of those, though, we’re saying the same thing, which is fundamentally it is easy.
Hedvig: Easy, yes.
Ben: Okay.
Daniel: Okay. I’m gonna close off the poll, make your votes … three and two and one [BEEPS]. Let’s see those results. Looks like if the thing is deceptively easy than it actually is easy. Maybe it looked hard, but it turned out to be easy.
Hedvig: Yay!
Ben: I agree with our very, very smart listeners. This is good.
Daniel: This was the same as the result from a Language Log survey from 2011. When asked: “The exam was deceptively easy”, about a little more than half of everyone said it was easy. But when you say it was deceptively hard, everybody says, “Oh, yeah, that was totally hard” and I think we’d get the same result here.
Hedvig: How can something be deceptively hard?
Ben: Just really quickly, this reminds me of – Has anyone here ever been doing like an MCQ (Multiple Choice Quiz), where you’ve had like, five of the same answers in a row, like you’ve gone “D,D,D,D,D” and then the next one is also D and it just like [STRESSED NOISES] activates my cortisol levels, like so few things can.
Hedvig: Can’t be, Yeah, yeah.
Daniel: So the thing about a question like this is when you have terms with a positive or neutral valence like “easy”, or “simple”, or “kind”, its a little ambiguous, but it leans toward being simple or kind or easy. But when it’s negative, it tends to be negative. So “deceptively hard”, “deceptively ugly”, those things tend to be hard and ugly and so on. Much more straightforwardly. Okay, let’s [BEEPS], thank you. We’re getting through these very well. And now….
Hedvig: Solving all the problems.
Daniel: Here we go, oh, there’s two. This is a twofer. Number one: if somebody gets electrocuted, did they die? “Yes”, “No”, “Not sure”. And then, did the teenager in this headline die: “Teenager shot in home invasion”? Okay. Now I know that in our promo, you both said, No, electrocution is not dead.
Ben: And I checked with my partner-doctor, Ayesha, who is currently in this show. And she said “no”, so I, as with all things in my life, I just defer to her judgment, basically,
Daniel: Very smart.
Hedvig: But do you want to expand why she might have said that?
Ben: I mean, she can, if she would like to she can give her answer. I don’t want to necessarily answer for her. Do we have an Ayesha actively listening? She might actually be in the toilet. I’m not sure.
Hedvig: I think it’s turned off her video for a second. No, there she is!
Ayesha: I did turn it off because I was stuffing my face with tofu and I thought that might not be the best look. But I was listening, I was listening. So, what was the question?
Ben: It’s the electrocuted one.
Hedvig: If someone is electrocuted did they die?
Ayesha: Well, no, because not all electrocutions are fatal electrocutions. You can be electrocuted and you can survive that with horrific burns and/or cardiac arrhythmia that needs to be reversed with further medically-controlled DC shock. So, I’m taking it that way. But hey, it’s a linguistic podcast so it could be completely misinterpreted it!
[LAUGHTER]
Ben: Can I ask a follow up question, which I didn’t actually, this is not me doing like a little bit that I rehearsed or anything, this is just a thought this occurred to me. So clearly, there’s a threshold for being electrocuted, right? Like I’ve touched an electric fence, and it hurt, but I didn’t get horrific burns or cardiac arrhythmia or anything like that. So, is there a certain sort of gradiation of like, electric shock, electric something like…
Hedvig: How far has to go through?
Ayesha: Exactly, so we have a lot more in it, we have heaps of terms, and they all tend to be graded. And it’s true of many different types of syndromes and types of illnesses. And we love grades, either between one to five or one to three. And my understanding of shocks is that it’s sort of mild, moderate, severe. It’s just you know, the way that we graded it. So for you to be considered electrocuted would need to be moderate or severe. Which would mean that you would need to not just have had, you know, any experience, an interaction with the electricity that left you just with a bit of a fried but actually have either caused burns and/or cardiac issues — cardiac arrhythmia.
Ben: So we can say with certainty that if you’ve been electrocuted, it’s a really bad fucking day.
Hedvig: My sister got electrocuted when we were little. She touched a globe that had a light in it and a radiator and they weren’t properly earthed and she got an electric shock through here [GESTURES THROUGH SHOULDERS], which is terrifying. She was like, six or something at the time? Yeah, they rushed to hospital. She was fine. It was terrifying.
Daniel: But still electrocuted?
Hedvig: I would argue, yes.
Daniel: Okay.
Hedvig: Now I don’t think we in Swedish don’t have the word we just said “electric current went through her”.
Ben: In classic Swedish style, just like “I’m going to combine all of the relevant words into one single word”.
Daniel: Three, two, one [BEEPS]. Does it change your answer if I say that the etymology of electrocution is “electric execution”? Like you actually got executed? Does that matter? Or not?
Hedvig: I mean, yes, but why can’t you guys all just say “electric shock went through her”?
[LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: Solved!
Daniel: Let’s see the results. No, everyone says – most people say – no, you didn’t die in either case. Oh, I noticed, however, that “not dead” on the number two – the teenager shot in home invasion – I feel like that one is a little more ambiguous, because…
Ben: Really, it is by our survey.
Daniel: They are more towards the death… I was thinking more toward the dead side and the reason I thought that is because, think about your Gricean maxims by Paul Grice (G-R-I-C-E). We’re always guessing about what people mean, but also why they’re saying it. And if it’s in a headline, then it tends to be serious so our brain takes the more serious interpretation: Oh, he was shot and killed.
Hedvig: Yes, but if same thing if he was killed why isn’t the headline “Teenager Killed in Home Invasion”?
Daniel: Hmmm.
Ben: I’m also going to just to really make this tiny micro bit super medical, bring up another thing that Ayesha’s told me in many of our conversations, which is that, unfortunately, based on the just horrific prevalence of gun trauma in the United States, doctors are getting really effective at getting people to not die who have been shot because they’ve had just a truly heartbreaking amount of practice at it.
Hedvig: [GROANS] That’s good…
Daniel: Okay, let’s go on… It is, it is good. Okay, another annoying one. And this one is biweekly: “We’re thinking of having biweekly episodes”. How often is that? Is it every two weeks? Or is it twice a week?
Ben: This always does my head in, I never know this.
Daniel: Or “Every two weeks for podcast episodes, but my answer might change for something else”, or “Twice a week for podcast episodes, but my answer might change for something else”, or “Not sure”.
Ben: I think twice a week. That’s just that’s where I go with it. Twice a week.
Hedvig: What? I just voted every two weeks, because that was the obvious answer to me.
[LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: This is not good. And we are biweekly! Or, sort of. I don’t like this. I don’t like this one bit, Ben.
Daniel: “Fortnightly” is one of the choices.
Ben: We wouldn’t be Because Language if we agreed.
[LAUGHTER]
Daniel: Okay. Of course, dear listeners, feel free to weigh in if you –
Ben: Like, what is… What’s biannual? Is that twice a year?
Hedvig: Yes, this is the problem, there’s biannual and then there’s Bi-bi-biannal?
Ben: Biennale.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Biennium. This is another –
Hedvig: There’s three of them! There’s three.
Daniel: What are the three?
Hedvig: No, because — I have to Google… there’s biannual. But then there’s the like the art exhibit.
Ben: Yeah, there’s the Venice Biennale.
Hedvig: Yeah, which I think is a different thing. But it happens every two years.
Ben: The Venice Biennale is is like a, for lack of a better phrase, the Olympics of like, displaying art, and it happens every two years in Venice. And like representatives from each country drop their work blah blah blah – Actually, you know, it’s not like the Olympics. It’s like Eurovision because it’s a lot more hokey.
Hedvig: [LAUGHS] But anyway, the problem is that we don’t have the same split for biweekly as we do for the year. But there are two different words. We might disagree. We might be confused about them. But there are two different words. But the biweekly… yeah.
Ben: I like that this of all of the things, Hedvig, is the one where you’ve just been like, “this is the correct answer. Suck a fuck, everyone else.”
Daniel: James has a good point “semi” is an available, a perfectly good prefix, you know, we can certainly use it. “Semi”, doesn’t have the same ambiguity
Hedvig: “Semi” means both “half” and “sometimes”, sort of.
Ben: That’s the kind of ambiguity I love to work with. If I could put that into a work contract, like “How often does Ben work?” “Semi-regularly.”
[LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: I like Kitty’s suggestion of “fortnightly” and “twice weekly”.
Daniel: We gotta get Americans to say “fortnightly”.
Ben: Yeah, “fortnight” is like a wonderful, wonderful usage term, 100%.
Daniel: Okay, we’re gonna end this one, [BEEPS]. And this one turned out pretty ambiguous.
Ben: Oh, damn!
Hedvig: Oh no, oh no.
Daniel: “Twice a week” has the edge. I think that one’s still 50-50 for me.
Ben: Now, no, excuse me, no! Nuh-uh! Nuh-uh! No, no, you did not sell us on this narrative that we were gonna like,” or if it’s close, it doesn’t matter”. There was some close ones before and you were like, “Suck it, everyone. This is what the answer is.” So this time, right? I was right. And you guys wrong. And you just have to deal with it.
Daniel: But see, I have to sell this to the larger linguistic community now and if I have that kind of, you know… is it significant?
Ben: To use a phrase that I know is hated by so many people Daniel, that sounds like a ~you~ problem.
Hedvig: I’m willing to give it up. Well I’m going to go with Kitty and supporting “fortnightly” and “twice weekly” cuz I think that’s better.
Daniel: Just nobody say “biweekly”. Stop saying “biweekly” just say “semi-weekly”, “fortnightly”, just say something else! It’s like with “next weekend”. Stop it.
Ben: I love, I love that you are wrong and you’re just trying so desperately to keep your head above water on this one.
Daniel: I don’t have- I do not have a dog in this fight.
Ben: [LAUGHS] But you clearly do! It’s “any dog but this dog that won!”
Daniel: I just [LAUGHS] I just want to end!
[LAUGHTER]
Daniel: I just want the pain to end!
Ben: Just because you weren’t barracking for one particular thing doesn’t mean, as we said earlier that you can’t do that , like, “fuck this one fish in particular” meme!
Daniel: I have no feels, I have no feels. [LAUGHS] Let’s go on to our last one. Oh my gosh.
Ben: Ooh!
Hedvig: Our last one?,
Daniel: Here it is. Oh, this one’s tough. This one’s coming to us from Layne Green on Twitter. Here we go. If a square object is 10 meters square, how long is each side? Try to go with your feels? Is each side 10 meters, or is each side 3.16 meters (which is the square root of 10)? Or “not sure”.
Ben: In Australian usage, I think I’m very comfortably in saying if the square object is 10 meters square, each side is 10 meters. And if you were to say an area was 10 square meters, every side — actually it doesn’t actually matter what the sides are as long as one by the other equals 10 square meters.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Mmhmm, let’s see if that changes the votes.
Hedvig: I didn’t vote that way, I voted square meters 3.6. Because that makes sense to me.
Ben: And I did add the just the justification at the start there that that is 100% Australian usage. I don’t know how other English users might roll with that. But that’s definitely how we use it in Australia.
Hedvig: Yes, I am with Lord Mortis, I voted too early and Ben convinced me of the other the thing, and I can’t undo it. So add two votes for me, and Lord Mortis on, well, I know that I should have voted for the number one option. And I don’t know.
Daniel: One for Kitty too.
Hedvig: Oh, and Kitty as well! [LAUGHS] We really shouldn’t have voted, we shouldn’t have been so sure of ourselves.
Ben: Apparently, apparently, I have a great career ahead of me as like a political leader for deeply petty and completely irrelevant issues and topics, because I am…
Hedvig: [LAUGHS] I think we always knew that.
Daniel: That’s politics! Let’s end this poll in 3..2…1… [BEEPS]. And the results? Okay. 10 meters is 10 meters.
Hedvig: I think you won anyway, Ben.
Daniel: Mm hmm. So what have we learned about this? What have we learned from these….
Ben: Enough with your tacit disapproval, Daniel! You are walking back all your…
Daniel: No, I’m happy. I’m happy with this one. This one won. Is there anything we can learn from all of this, to wrap this up?
Hedvig: I mean, learn? What do you mean learn? We’ve decided things, and that’s great. And we all agreed.
Ben: Ok, obviously, Daniel, the things you can learn is the like 10 hardline answers that we’ve established that are now carved in granite, right? Like Moses on the Mount? And yes, that’s what you can learn.
Hedvig: Yeah! Okay, and you can go and look at the transcript of this episode, or watch the video or listen to it, and you can learn the truth.
Ben: Yeah, we’ve in contrast to literally everything we’ve said on the show up until this point, this is true, and it will never change.
Daniel: Yeah, is there anything that we can take away for other problems besides just these 10?
Hedvig: That they should all come to us, and we’ll do a poll.
Daniel: [SIGHS]
Hedvig: [LAUGHS]
Ben: I think our listeners are actually much smarter than us and they are saying all of the right things that Daniel wants us to say, which is like, “English is very ambiguous” and “every language is very ambiguous” and this all… When I first started my Master’s study, I had one lecturer in one of my first units basically go, “Hey, do you guys want to know a great cheat code for any question you ever get asked? Just start it with ‘It depends’.”
Hedvig: “It’s complicated.”
Daniel: “It’s complicated.” Well, one thing I want to get out there is that semantics is under-specified. We often say words that mean less than a precise meaning because language is imprecise. And we often rely on context to figure out which interpretation is most valid.
Hedvig: And it’s not necessarily a problem. There are people who like to make it a problem, or who like to, like, make conlangs in their spare time where everything is superduper defined. It’s often not a problem you should get by well enough as it is. There’s some research about whether it matters where like the social demographics of the language community, maybe if you’re very few people and you know each other super well, you can be even less precise because you can all understand what you refer to anyway. And written languages, some people pointed out here, there’s a problem when you say something is spoken, and you see the other person, I can see Ben and Daniel now I can see if they’re nodding or understanding. But when I write something, you often have to spell things out more. That’s a good point as well, because you don’t know the person who’s going to read it sometimes.
Ben: Kevin made a really good point that this points out that it’s important to clarify in spoken language and sometimes an email doesn’t clarify the way we need it to. I think that’s such a useful life lesson.
Hedvig: Yeah, it’s it’s good to be shorter sentences and clearer sentences is often good.
Ben: And also apparently, we’ve just rocked a bunch of American’s worlds to find out that like, squirrels are mostly American and there’s like some European squirrels but for the most part like that, purely relegated to the Americas, and I’m seeing a few Americans being like, “What? This is not a universally understood tiny creature?”
Daniel: “Squirrels aren’t everywhere?”
Hedvig: The European squirrel – the gray one – is… So UK has this problem with the gray and the red ones right?
Ben: Correct.
Hedvig: And the red ones are the nice ones and the gray…
Ben: I think the red ones are the native to Europe and the gray ones….
Hedvig: Yeah, yeah ’cause the there’s only read one since Sweden and when Ste sees one he’s like “Oh! A precious red one! Oh I see a red squirrel, how exciting!”
[LAUGHTER]
Ben: It’s like real life Pokemon Go [GASPS] “A rare red Squirrelax!”
[TRANSITION MUSIC]
Daniel: Okay we are gonna go on to our Words of the Week, ready?
Hedvig: [GASPS]
Ben: [MIMICS FANFARE]
Daniel: Our first word “cheugy”… “cheugy”.
Hedvig: Right.
Ben: In the words of the spelling bee, can I spell it? Can you have…
Daniel: C-H-E-U-G-Y.
Ben: And can I have it in a sentence, please?
Daniel: “My family is really great, but they’re just a bit cheugy”. C-H-E-U-G-Y. This is the latest word on TikTok. What is it? Take a guess.
Ben: Ooh, I’ve been smashing TikTok and I don’t know! My finger’s not on the pulse, you guys!
Hedvig: I’ve seen people talk about this on Twitter. And I think the Australian translation is “daggy”, partially?
Ben: Ooh! I do like…
Daniel: “Daggy”‘s good! I do like
Hedvig: Maybe we should tell the non-Aussie listeners what that is.
Ben: Yeah, I’ve always, I’ve always found, as an Australian, to other English language variant users that like “daggy” is a thing that has so much, like, linguistic merit, and it just isn’t used and there often isn’t… It’s like a lost in translation thing and I’m like, look at them! Look at them! They’re so clearly daggy!
Hedvig: Yeah, explain! Don’t do the epistemology do the meaning first.
Ben: “Daggy” is … I’m going to try and give you a, like, a real world example from ~the wild~. Let’s say your mom has just gone out into the front yard early in the morning wearing just her dressing gown and slippers to grab the paper and maybe she’s got like, like her hair in a bit of a thing and like the neighbor who she knows really well sees her and they’ll be like, [SOMEHOW MORE AUSTRALIAN SOUNDING] “Oh, g’day, love! Looking a bit daggy this morning.” Right? So it’s like an endearing way of saying “not necessarily looking that great”, but it’s often said with like a kindness. It’s like a … it’s a positive statement about an negative look.
Hedvig: Isn’t it also similar to Americans’ uses of “basic” so if someone comes into the office and has all their clothes on and everything, but it’s not looking super interesting, are they daggy?
Ben: I would disagree. Personally, I’ve seen “basic” used far, far more derogative way. I’ve seen people wield basic like a, like a proper knife, whereas I’ve never seen anyone do that with daggy. And I’m saying people in the comment section saying “tacky” and I would argue that it’s not the same as tacky, because again, tacky tends to be quite down looking. Right? When someone looks tacky it’s usually a person of a higher sort of fashion status saying ~Hmmm, they look a bit tacky”, whereas daggy like I said, is a real… it has a vein of kindness in it for the most part.
Hedvig: Maybe a little bit like scraggly?
Daniel: Drew says. “it’s a little uncool”, and I think that’s about right.
Ben: Scraggly?
Daniel: But, let’s get back to “cheugy” because…
Ben: Yeah, what a digression. Poor Christy, I’m so sorry
Daniel: “cheugy” is kind of like “off trend”. Like you like things that were popular about a decade ago. Here’s a list of things that are kind of cheugy. Things that I have seen described as cheugy: minions.
Ben: Oh, yeah.
Hedvig: Uh huh.
Daniel: Dancing with the Stars.
Ben: Mm hmm.
Daniel: The whole “girlboss” aesthetic.
Hedvig: Feels like “basic” territory, yeah.
Daniel: Yeah, still basic. Grownups who are just a bit too into Disney. The entirety of BYU. “Talk Like a Pirate Day” is kind of cheugy. Saying things like “said no one ever”. It’s like, It’s like daggy but cringe.
Ben: I know exactly what cheugy is now and I feel like I’ve got a really, really quick and easy way to categorize it for everyone. Cheugy is stuff millennials do that they think is still cool but Gen Z absolutely does not think is cool anymore.
Hedvig: No! I am the youngest generation. We are the youngest generation that ever existed and no one will ever be younger or cooler than us. That’s a true fact, you can’t do this to me!
Ben: No, just accept it, mate! Our time in the sun has well and truly set. There is a younger, cooler a group of people than us. You… The things you like – just to be clear- the things that you like are mum things. The Gen Z and we’ll put like “mum” in front of it, right? You you like “mum rock” and like “mum pop” and all that kind of stuff.
Hedvig: Yeah…
Daniel:Hedvig’s not happy about this. I’m sorry, Hedvig. This is hard.
Hedvig: Is a yoga mat cheugy?
Ben: I’d say so.
Daniel: Um, Lululemon is cheugy.
Ben: Yes, for sure
Hedvig: I have Lululemon pants and a top. Yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
Ben: So basically “cheugy” is just millennial shit if we’re being honest.
Hedvig: I think Boomer, cause I don’t think millennials went for the minion memes as much as Boomers did.
Ben: Okay maybe… Yeah, you scrabble for that life raft however you want.
Hedvig: I started missing…
Daniel: The way this word came to be (I forge ahead), a teenager named Gaby Rasson or Rasso (accounts vary) coined it in 2013 when she was in high school. “There was a missing word that was on the edge of my tongue and nothing to describe it and ‘cheugy’ came to me. How it sounded fit the meaning.” Then her friend, Hallie Cain, made a TikTok video explaining it. And now here we are talking about it, which makes me wonder: is this one of those things that only is not a thing and that only linguists are picking up and showing to everyone way out of proportion to the terms popularity?
Hedvig: Didn’t a former guest of the show point that out on Twitter? That she had asked one of her young people in her presence and they were like, “Never heard of it. What?”
Ben: It should be noted, just to get a little bit media teacher-y here, is that part of TikTok’s just like raging success is their capacity to quickly and powerfully make and support microcultures. So it’s entirely possible that a huge subset of Gen Z is saying this and another whole huge subset of Gen Z has never even seen it or encountered it before. And when they encounter it they’d be like: ~ ugh gross, that’s what those other losers do~ or whatever.
Daniel: Let’s go on to our next one. This one was suggested by Ziprealty on our Discord channel [NAME] If you’re here, do you want to do this one? Raise a hand if you — if you want, oherwise, I’ll read it. Okay, here I go ahead. “Have you guys spoken at all yet about the TikTok trend of using the word ‘crunchy’ as in ‘crunchy childhood’? I don’t know how niche this must be just on my For You Page, but I found it an interesting use of that adjective.”
Ben: Ayesha and I are looking at each other through the screen right now because we 100% use this all the time.
Daniel: Really? What does it mean?
Hedvig: Oh, I know “crunchy”.
Ben: In fact, I’m gonna confer to my partner ’cause it doesn’t mean “something that crunches when you bite into it”. We’re not describing what some — We’re not toddlers who are just like [CHEWING NOISES] on random stuff, obviously. Ayesha, do you want to explain how we use crunchy?
Ayesha: It basically means it’s, it’s something uncomfortable, but it’s uncomfortable in multiple ways. And so you can’t say this particular thing about it is uncomfortable, but it’s multifactorial, but the overall feeling that you’re left with is “so uncomfortable, I sort of don’t really want to talk about it”
Daniel: Interesting.
Ben: To add to that, it’s like it’s kind of for me related to the idea of Bouba and Kiki, right? That linguistic term? Right?
Hedvig: Okay.
Ben: Like there is an inherent understanding — right?– across cultures that Bouba is like blobbily and Kiki is like spiky, right? And so too, when something is “crunchy”, right, like we just kind of inherently understand between each other and also for other people as well if other people use it this way. It’s like, “I’m, I’m just feeling a bit crunchy”. And it’s kind of a way of saying “I’m like in a bit of a bad mood”. But it also just kind of suggests that like, I’m aware that I’m in a bit of bad mood. I’m processing it. It’s like I find it. It’s really useful.
Hedvig: Like a funk?
Ben: It’s kind of all of those things, but it’s clearly not one of those things because if it was we would just use that thing.
Daniel: Well let me just explain this as far as I’ve gotten it, and I’m gonna pull a comment from Nikolai out of the chat who mentioned granola, it’s kind of granola. So this is a very, very specific experience of growing up in the UK countryside in the early 2000s. So let me just read some of the things according to thetab.com some things that are crunchy:” You were forced to go on roughly 7 million family walks and bike rides. Your mum would never buy the good snacks just raisins, rice cakes, and those gross strawberry bear fruit yo-yo things, your parents cupboards are full of roughly 37 different kinds of tea. Your school shoes were always from Clarks”… This is, like, I’m having a bit of a relatability gap here.
Ben: I’m sorry. So this is interesting because this is not how Ayesha and I use it at all. This is a whole different thing.
Hedvig: This is different. This is different. This is like in Sweden, if you didn’t have the commercial TV channels, you only have the ones that come free-to-air? Sounds like in that category.
Ben: Right, right, yeah. So it’s like a little bit hippy crossed with like, a little bit anticapitalist crossed with like a little bit left wing kind of thing?
Daniel: Crossed with “you didn’t get to do stuff”.
Hedvig: If that’s what crunchy is, then I can tell you Germany’s very crunchy. [BEN LAUGHS] But that doesn’t sound like what… for example, Angela Merkel goes on a hike every year, and she wears the same shirt every year and has done it for 10 years. And all the Germans are like, “It’s great. She uses the same shirt. It’s a great sign that she’s like, a reliable politician because she goes hiking every year in the mountains and she uses the same shirt.” Yeah.
Ben: Thanks, thanks for your stunning German impression.
Hedvig: [LAUGHS]
Daniel: I’m glad to hear about other people’s childhoods even if I, I can only relate to it slightly being a Gen X kid whose mother gave him Brewer’s Yeast every once in a while, but that’s about as granola as it got.
Ben: Man.
Hedvig: What, to eat it? What?
Daniel: Oh, yeah, it was a thing. Adelle Davis…
Hedvig: What do you mean?
Ben: Is that like an American Pacific Northwest cod liver oil type thing?
Daniel: Yeah, yeah! Yeah. But it was in my orange juice. Oh, my God. Okay. Sorry, Mom. Next one: “juvenile”. I noticed this one and I tweeted a it’s a story in the West Australian. Three members of the West Coast Eagles were taking their official Derby photo and they flashed a white power hand signal, you know, the one, looks like [MAKES OK SIGN]
Ben: Okay, this is a thing, but it’s also not a thing. Right?
Daniel: It is a thing.
Ben: No, no, it 100% is the thing and it is a white power symbol. One of those kids is of Aboriginal descent. They’re not using it as a white power symbol, I promise you. Because I see kids doing this in the school. And it’s part of a game where if you like make a person look at this hand gesture, then you get to punch them, basically.
Daniel: I know the Circle Game.
Daniel: Yeah. So it’s the Circle Game, but it’s also a white supremacy symbol. And I felt really bad for this Eagles player who’s Aboriginal who did it thinking it was the Circle Game because he… Aww, I would just hate to be him a lot.
Hedvig: Ugh.
Daniel: Mmhmm, this is part of the thing about the white power symbol is that it hides behind a lot of other symbols. And you know, there’s a really good thread by Lauren Gawne, which will link to in our blog, but the way that the PR folks described it was “juvenile”, which I had never heard that as a euphemism for “racist” before.
Ben: Oh, okay. I see what you mean.
Daniel: Yeah.
Hedvig: Well, that happens when like 18 year-olds do like blackface for Halloween people would… I can see people describing them as juvenile in a similar vein, where, like, other words would probably be better. Like, “stupid and racist”. [LAUGHS]
Ben: [LAUGHS]
Daniel: Well, it’s an interesting asymmetry. Because when white adults do something — and this isn’t just this incident, it’s lots of other incidents — when white adults do something unacceptable they’re they’re described in terms that we use for children. And then black children when they are you know, murdered by cops or by white people, they’re described in terms of adult things.
Ben: Yeah.
Hedvig: “They were mature-looking. They look mature.” Yeah. Same with underage girls who get accosted sometimes and raped, etc. “They look mature”.
Daniel: Okay, so there was that one. Well, I, I feel I feel less certain about that one now because of your input, Ben.
Ben: Well, like I said, I just really feel for this one kid in particular, who you have to imagine, is not doing a white power symbol on any possible conceivable level as like a like a notable, member of his, like, indigenous community, all that kind of stuff. So I just wanted to like, throw defense in that kid’s general direction.
Daniel: Yep. Cool. Cool. Hedvig, I need your help on this one because we’ve been talking about “lo fi ” for a good, long time, but I wanted to make this official.
Hedvig: Okay. Lo fi… It’s been defined… So like, in the early 2000s to me “lo fi indiepop” would mean that there’s a lot of mumbling and a lot of white noise in the background.
Ben: Like it had been recorded on cassettes and that sort of thing?
Hedvig: Yeah, yeah. And it was maybe Death Cab for Cutie is a bit? But like there was a Scottish label called Rough Tray that did a lot of this kind of lo fi. But then there is lo fi now which are these like YouTube streams and things and the most famous one is “Lofi Beats to Study and Relax To”, which has the lo fi girl. The channel used to be called ChilledXow but now they’ve just renamed themselves to Lofi Girl.
Ben: I think that was smart. Like they just, they responded like a dictionary.They just went “okay, so this is how everyone us”.
Hedvig: “This what we’re called, okay, fine.” And you can also listen to them on Spotify and things and they have this kind of music style that is a bit more not… less noisy, more clear, very few words, but sometimes there’ll be samples or like, there could be like quotes from like Star Trek or whatever in there, or like old recordings.
Ben: I find that there is like a disproportionate amount of melodies from Miyazaki films, for example.
Hedvig: Yes. Sometimes you’ll listen to it and you go, “Oh, that’s, that’s, that’s a thing elsewhere. That’s like a remix thing”. And there’s also popular to do like “this artist, but lo fi.” So I can recommend “Drake, but lo fi,” which is like applying these filters and genre on them. It’s a little bit hard to explain exactly what it sounds like. But it’s no longer low fidelity. I would say.
Ben: No.
Hedvig: It’s chill. Chill is the other possible word for it.
Daniel: Is chill cheugy?
Hedvig: I think its still not.
Ben: I don’t know, I would say probably not…
Daniel: Not yet!
Ben: And the reason I say that is because I regularly chuck Lofi Girl up in front of like my students, and they’re just like: cool, I’m down.
Hedvig: I can really recommend the very popular, Australian-Taiwanese YouTube duo TwoSet Violin. They did a video where they tried to create lo fi tracks. So they fool around in like GarageBand and stuff.
Hedvig: It’s very funny.
Daniel: Awesome. Okay, thank you. So “cheugy”, “crunchy”, “juvenile”, and “lo fi” are Words of the Week. I’d like to throw it open to our listeners if they want to give words or if they want to ask us questions just for a few minutes, because we still have a little bit of time. questions.
Ben: Questions? Questions?
Hedvig: They were writing a lot just a minute ago. But now they stopped
Daniel: They’re quiet. They’re having their own discussion. This is great. I love it. By the way, lots of love for Nujabes in the chat and I share that love.
Ben: And what I loved is when we started talking about squirrels, a bunch of Europeans did a Ste and we’re just like, “Let me tell you about reds and grays”.
Hedvig: Oh, someone asked what I was knitting.
Daniel: Mariana asks “Hedvig, what were you knitting?”.
Hedvig: So it’s a pandemic, right? We’ve gotten hellofresh, we’ve gotten cats. We’re doing the whole pandemic activities, and I’ve reached knitting. And I’m trying to knit a scarf for Ste. It’s just a big ol’ rectangle. I fucked up a bit. I started with 40 stitches and then I somehow got to 65 stitches? [LAUGHS] Which shouldn’t really be a thing. And now I’m I’m trying to down it again. So it helps to have some holes. But it is my first knitting project since primary school so
Ben: Made with love.
Hedvig: Yeah, no, Ste’s like, ~Oh, that’d be lovely, honey, I like it.~ You know?
Ben: Why is Ste, who is a manc all of a sudden have like this weird old lady accent?
Hedvig: He’s not a manc, for starters!
Ben: Isn’t he? Isn’t he from Manchester?
Hedvig: No. He’s Boltonian. He’s from Bolton. But he says to people, he’s from Manchester, because they don’t know where Bolton is.
Ben: Oh, okay.
Daniel: Holly asks, “I find referring to family members confusing. Like grandmother maternal versus paternal? Sister-in-law. If you could create English terms for ambiguous family members, what would they be?
Hedvig: Yes, yes!
Daniel: Just compound, right?
Hedvig: Oh, new ambiguous terms or unambiguous?
Ben: Unambiguous
Daniel: For ambiguous family members. So what do you call the brother of…
Hedvig: Unambiguous, they corrected themselves? Yes.
Ben: So so I’m gonna I’m gonna go with like “fathermother” for like your dad’s mother and that sort of thing. Right?
Daniel: Compound!
Hedvig: Yes, that’s what we’re calling the IKEA system of kinship
[LAUGHTER]
Daniel: Dustin says you don’t want that system, Dustin says no.
Hedvig; No, you want that system! It’s great, you can just pile on. If it’s your father’s mother’s mother’s mother’s you just say “fathermothermothermothermother”. Fine. And you guys shouldn’t be talking because you have this shit with “cousins removed” and stuff. It’s not only that you have cousins leveling out like that, you also have cousins down!
Ben: Yeah.
Daniel: I like removed. Once you understand that, removed is great.
Hedvig: No, no!
Ben: It’s only great if you have a just a breathtakingly large family. Right? Like how many kids does every single couple producing kids need to have for like once, twice, three times removed to have any kind of relevance?
Hedvig: And also why can’t you just say “my cousin’s son”.
Daniel: There’s a lot of love for “niblings” in the chat. I also love “niblings”.
Hedvig: Niblings? I use “niblings”.
Daniel: Niblings is great.
Ben: What is “niblings”?
Hedvig: I have nieces and nephews, they’re my niblings.
Ben: I never heard that before! That’s so good, I love that.
Hedvig: You haven’t? I have used it on the show. Yeah, its great also if you have a singular one and you don’t want to say what gender.
Ben: This is a really good design solution for my partner’s nieces and nephews, because at first they were just nieces and that was super easy. And then a dumb boy came along and its just like ~uhh nieces and nephews.~ Now we’ve got nibblings This is great. I’m so glad I love when problems get solved like this.
Hedvig: It sounds cuter.
Daniel: Let’s, if you… We’re going to take any more questions that we get and wrap them over to comments for next time, but quick announcement. This is the silly part, we are going to find a way to release NFT’s of our episodes. That’s right.
Hedvig: [LAUGHS]
Ben: Oh no, oh god, Daniel.
Daniel: If you want to own the definitive copy of Episode One.
Ben: Wow, I should have the saddest thing I should have seen this coming because you… Whenever a new platform, no matter how barren and like unpopulated it is, Daniel jumps on it. And so like as soon as NFT’s came along, I should have just been like,” oh fucking Of course, Daniels gonna make NFT’s of everything”.
Daniel: Maybe, unless it’s too silly.
Hedvig: I proved it as a joke. And then it’s fine.
Daniel: We’ll release them as a joke. Like, doves. And look at `what’s happened now? Huh?
Ben: Oh my god.
Hedvig: We’ve got 1,2,3,4,5 patrons saying “what?”.
Daniel: “Please don’t do this”
[LAUGHTER]
Ben: All I can say Daniel, is that like, you have made us incrementally more adacent to like trader bro douches, and I’m not super comfortable with that. Right? Like we are one step closer to the Reddit subreddits that say “STONKS” and… awesome.
Daniel: Okay, so five of our chat friends have said “don’t do this”, but I only need one to say yes. Okay,
Hedvig: Someone said “lol, what?” which ~could~ be an encouragement.
Daniel: Let’s say thanks to a bunch of people. First of all, Auslan interpreter Christy Filipich, oh my gosh, what a marathon.
Ben: Christy was supposed to have another interpreter come and relieve her. And I feel bad that I’m explaining this and she has to do more work in the explanation, but I feel like the people who have been using those services need to know this, which is that she shouldn’t have done this whole show. Her hands are tired. The poor thing.
Hedvig: Are they tired?
Daniel: Are you tired?
[LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: Yep.
Daniel: Thanks also to Drew Alexander for tech support. Also to Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCullough of Lingthusiasm, and all the organizers of LingFest, because this was part of the LingFest festival. We’ll be doing it again. Finally, to you, our dear patrons and friends for supporting the show and helping us do this. And this is where we need to do the thing.
[TRANSITION MUSIC]
Daniel: Have you got the new one?
Ben: I do. Okay, Hedvig you’re up first.
Hedvig: Yeah, up first I was thinking of getting a cat.
Ben: You have nice friendly cats so if you call one, it’ll come right?
Hedvig: I’ll just go get one. Do you want to – can you do your first, Ben?
Ben: Sure. I’m going to go a little bit slowly in this part, because I have a lot of names to read out and names are harder to sign than sort of conventional non-pronoun words. So, Christy, who has been doing amazing work all through our show today is part of an effort that we do to make our shows available people who can’t hear, which obviously excludes podcasts to that community. So we really want non-hearing people to be able to take part and contribute and so we make transcripts of all of our episodes. And those transcripts have a sideline benefit, which is that you can search them. So if you have a vague memory of that thing. That one time in a show like a billion episodes ago, you can search it up through our transcripts. And the reason we can do transcripts is because of the amazing people who have joined us in our show today, our patrons and here is a list of some of our wonderful, wonderful patrons. Okay, and this is a bit where I’m going to go slow. We have Dustin, Chris B., Chris L., Matt, Whitney, Damien, JoAnna. Christie, I hope I’m not going too fast because I can’t read the thing and see you at the same time. So I just have to kind of guess.
Hedvig: She’s saying you’re going okay, I think.
Ben: Okay. Helen. Bob. Jack. Kitty. I want to see big sign emphasis on this one please, Christy, [METAL VOICE] Lord Mortis. Lyssa. Elías. Erica. Michael. Larry. Binh. Kristofer. Andy. Maj. James. Nigel. Kate. Jen. Nasrin. River. Nikoli. Ayesha. Moe. Steele. Andrew. Manú. James. Shane. Eloise. Rodger. I think this is Rhian? I know Rhian is actually in the chat — Rhian so did I pronounce that correctly? Yay! I can actually see Rhian and I can check. This is good. Jonathan. Colleen. glyph. Ignacio, and Kevin. Thank you to all of our patrons because without you, we couldn’t do what we do and and especially this show where you all joined us. It’s been so lovely. My heart is has been warmed. Now over to Hedvig with a cat!
Hedvig: Yeah, I have the lovely Sunday?? here who’s going to help me to say some things maybe? Or not? [TO CAT] Hello, having a good time? Oh, yeah, thank you to all of our lovely patrons. It wouldn’t be a show without you. We couldn’t do polls like this and have a majority and just decide things which is lovely. If you have any questions or comments, or just want to say hi, you can always get in touch with us on all the places. [TO CAT WHO IS MOVING] Now we urgently have to go somewhere else apparently. No, you just have to sit in that direction instead. Very urgent. We are BecauseLangPod on all the things and all the things are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Mastadon, Patreon, TikTok and Clubhouse. You can also — [TO CAT] No, that is my porridge — you can also send an old fashioned email at hello@becauselanguage.com And I really recommend telling a friend about us because that’s how I get most of my podcast recommendations. So I assume that may be true for you as well. So tell a friend about us. And please leave a review on iTunes store that’s great or anywhere else you can leave a review, especially one giving us more than one star that be very appreciated. Doing all those things will help people find us and spread the good word of linguistics around the world.
Daniel: A special shout out to Dustin of Sandman Stories for tirelessly recommending us to everyone. Our theme music has been written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who’s a member of Ryan Beno, and of Dideon’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We will catch you the next time there’s a LingFest for our next LingFest live show. Thanks for listening. I’ll see you next time. Because Language.
Ben: Yay. We did a live show guys and it wasn’t in a rancid pub in Perth.
Daniel: Yeah, that was good.
Hedvig: Oh, yeah. Speaking of lofi girl, someone just noticed… Yes, I’ve put googly eyes on my headphones.
Ben: Ah, ha! Just like lofi girl. That’s really cool. I like that.
[BEEP]
Ben: I feel like you could… if Oscar Wilde could write like a really interesting screwball comedy about the way social mores [PRONOUNCED LIKE “MORE”] have changed in the last 18 months? Like The Importance of Being Earnest but via Zoom.
Daniel: I can tell that “more” [PRONOUNCED LIKE MORAY] is one of those words that you’ve only read and so…
Ben: Oh, is that what it is? Social “moray”, like an eel?
Daniel: That’s right. Exactly.
Ben: Right.
Daniel: Yeah.
Hedvig: Is it “more” as in the phonetic stuff? Like a mora?
Daniel: No, that’s a mora, but it’s like…
Hedvig: But aren’t several mora a morae?
Ben: Wait are you guys talking about the green superhero from Guardians of the Galaxy?
Hedvig: No, but…
Ben: That’s, that’s Gamora. Yeah, right?
Daniel: No, no, no. You’re thinking about when there are two screens and they make a pattern like this [HOLDS HANDS UP SO ONE OVERLAPS THE OTHER]. That’s that’s what you’re thinking.
Ben: I can’t…. I actually don’t know what the name is. I would like to continue the joke.
Hedvig: What is that?
Daniel: It’s a moire.
Ben: Ahh!
Daniel: “No, that’s a moire, you’re clearly thinking of…”
Ben: Oh, no, sorry. No, I get it. I see where the confusion is. You’re thinking of like a very important person who writes down the account of their life towards the end of their life.