How does conversation work? Why are videoconference calls so awkward and terrible? Why can we say goodbye multiple times, but good morning only once in a conversation? And how do we get good at being a conversationalist?
Linguistic lion David Crystal tells us about his book Let’s Talk on this episode of Because Language.
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Red Skins and Chicos sweets to be renamed, with Nestlé calling brands ‘out of step’ | Nestlé | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jun/23/red-skins-and-chicos-sweets-to-be-renamed-with-nestle-calling-brands-out-of-step
Nestle to change names of Allen’s Lollies products Red Skins and Chicos
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-23/nestle-red-skins-chicos-allens-lollies-rebrand-overtones/12384986
Why Nestle is one of the most hated companies in the world
https://www.zmescience.com/science/nestle-company-pollution-children/
The Chevy Nova That Wouldn’t Go
https://www.thoughtco.com/chevy-nova-that-wouldnt-go-3078090
240: Bite the Wax Tadpole | Talk the Talk
http://talkthetalkpodcast.com/240-bite-the-wax-tadpole/
Washington Redskins To Review Team Name After Sponsor Pressure – Ministry of Sport
https://ministryofsport.com.au/washington-redskins-to-review-team-name-after-sponsor-pressure/
The Dixie Chicks Change Their Name, Dropping the ‘Dixie’
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/25/arts/music/dixie-chicks-change-name.html
languagehat.com : Dixie.
http://languagehat.com/dixie/
Why Is the South Known as “Dixie”? – HISTORY
https://www.history.com/news/why-is-the-south-known-as-dixie
Coon Cheese: Origin of Australian brand name raises doubt about name change
https://www.news.com.au/finance/business/retail/renewed-push-to-rename-coon-cheese-hits-stumbling-block-due-to-historic-detail/news-story/2ae1fc28984ec37093d70959837562e0
Developers Debate Deleting ‘Master’ and ‘Slave’ Code Terminology
https://insights.dice.com/2020/06/16/developers-debate-deleting-master-slave-code-terminology/
Replace use of whitelist with allowlist and blacklist with denylist | Github
https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/33677
The Racist Origins of ‘Tipping Point’ | Merriam-Webster
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/origin-of-the-phrase-tipping-point
Is It Racist To ‘Call A Spade A Spade’? : Code Switch : NPR
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/09/19/224183763/is-it-racist-to-call-a-spade-a-spade
‘Call a spade a spade’ – meaning and origin.
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/call-a-spade-a-spade.html
The Politics of Writing: Should You Use Skunked Terms? : Word Count : Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus
https://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wc/the-politics-of-writing-should-you-use-skunked-terms/
Types of Semantic Change
https://homepage.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/silke.hoeche/Aspects%20of%20Language%20Change/types_of_semantic_change.htm
Let’s Talk: How English Conversation Works | Oxford University Press
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/lets-talk-9780198850694?cc=au&lang=en&
7 Common Phrases You Didn’t Know Were Rooted in Racism | Best Life
https://bestlifeonline.com/common-phrases-racist-origins/
Urban Dictionary: Blursday
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Blursday
What Day is it? 4 Ways to Cope with Blursday – Mindful
https://www.mindful.org/what-day-is-it-4-ways-to-cope-with-blursday/
Support bubbles to shagbubbles: ‘bubble’ is the go-to word of 2020 | Coronavirus outbreak | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/18/support-bubbles-to-shagbubbles-bubble-is-the-go-to-word-of-2020
WA’s hard border should be lifted to create a travel bubble with SA and NT: Harvey
https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/wa-s-hard-border-should-be-lifted-to-create-a-travel-bubble-with-sa-and-nt-harvey-20200603-p54z7k.html
Coronavirus lockdown: ‘Support bubbles’ begin in England and NI – BBC News
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-53031844
Coronavirus: Single person seeks best bubble options – BBC News
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-53007814
https://twitter.com/dinasimp/status/1272853576717647872
Did the robber emoji really exist? I try to find out | SoyaCincau.com
https://www.soyacincau.com/2020/06/21/did-the-robber-emoji-really-exist-i-try-to-find-out/
The ‘Mandela Effect’ and how your mind is playing tricks on you
https://theconversation.com/the-mandela-effect-and-how-your-mind-is-playing-tricks-on-you-89544
10 Examples of the Mandela Effect | Mental Floss
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/585887/mandela-effect-examples
Transcript
DANIEL: David, have you got a beverage?
DAVID CRYSTAL: No, it’s raining here in Wales, so the last thing I want is any water around at the moment. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: It just gets in.
[THEME MUSIC]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to this episode of Because Language, a podcast about linguistics, the science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team! The wise, witty, and wonderful Ben Ainslie.
BEN: We really need to stop using positive things, ’cause then I have to always come back at them. You can just say “the sublimely adequate Ben Ainslie”.
DANIEL: Okay, I’ll try for that next time. And the sublimely adequate Hedvig Skirgård.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] Yes!
BEN: No no no no!!! Don’t! What?? That’s not what I meant at all! That was so far from the thing that I intended!
HEDVIG: I love it!
DANIEL: She got your intro.
HEDVIG: I feel adequate today. Thank you.
BEN: Oh, dear. I just… 😫 I know how butterflies feel when they see hurricanes. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Well, we are joined today by a very special guest. It’s the author of 120 or more books about language, including “How Language Works”, “The Stories of English”, “Begat”, “By Hook or by Crook”, “Making a Point”, “Spell It Out”, “Making Sense”, “The Story of English in 100 Words”, “As They Say in Zanzibar”, and “Shakespeare’s Words” — which involves your son, Ben. We’re talking to David Crystal. Hello, David.
DAVID: Well, hello, everybody. I feel totally inadequate now, after all those introductions! [LAUGHTER]
BEN: Oh, oh, I was just sitting here thinking: I can’t tell if you’re the Terry Pratchett of linguistics or if Terry Pratchett is the David Crystal of fantasy.
HEDVIG: Mmm! Good question!
DAVID: [LAUGHS] Yeah, Well, Terry Pratchett — that’s quite a nice analogy, actually. When I go into schools, because of the length of my beard, people usually call me Gandalf.
HEDVIG: Oh! Right!
BEN: So what I think we’ve immediately established is that a author’s prolificness is a linear relationship to the length of their beard.
DAVID: That’s absolutely right. Indeed it is. Cut their beard, and down goes the productivity. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: It’s like Samson.
HEDVIG: I have just one hair that grows out, that I pinch before it gets to one full centimetre. What is that?
BEN: Well, I think we’re seeing the roadblock to greatness here. You’ve gotta let that bad boy just… out she comes! [LAUGHTER]
DAVID: At the moment… therefore, on that principle, I have to be extremely productive because of course in lockdown, I haven’t been able to have a haircut for months and months and months!
BEN: Of course. Yes, indeed.
DANIEL: We are talking to David Crystal about his new book, “Let’s Talk: How English Conversation Works”, which is a great look at how we do the nuts and bolts of conversation, what it all entails, and it manages to uncover things that maybe you haven’t noticed yet about what you do conversationally.
BEN: But before we get to that, we should probably check in with what’s going on in linguistic news around the world.
DANIEL: Okay. We’re going to be discussing some racial slurs in this segment. So if this is a difficult area for you, I might need you to summon your resources. Do what you need to do. So, I think we’re all aware of trademark names that are pretty racist.
BEN: Sure.
DANIEL: And a couple of those have gone by the by, at least in Australia, where…. This might be news to our non-Australian listeners, but we had a couple of candies here from the Allen’s brand, which is owned by Nestlé. Incredibly, there’s still a candy, raspberry-flavoured, called Redskins.
BEN: Yup.
HEDVIG: Right.
BEN: And did it still, until recently, have the iconography of a Native American chief? Or am I thinking back to my youth?
DANIEL: It just had the wordmark.
BEN: Right. Okay.
DANIEL: They got rid of any Native American iconography back in the 1990s. They also had Chicos, which are — I don’t even… do you know, I never had them. Are they these weird chocolate jelly baby things?
BEN: Yeah, it’s… they’re a terrible idea, as far as candy is concerned, in my opinion, in that they take a sort of — what’s that word? — like a lolly-snake-type consistency of confectionery, you know? So like, a gelatine sort of sweet. But then they try and give it chocolate flavour, which is just not a thing that anyone should do.
DANIEL: And then they put it in the form of a baby. This is…
BEN: Yes. So it’s a dark brown baby shape.
DANIEL: It’s all bad!
HEDVIG: Okay.
BEN: Yep.
HEDVIG: And what is it called, sorry?
DANIEL: They’re called Chicos [t͡ʃikos].
HEDVIG: Okay.
BEN: As Australians call them, as in Australian English would call it a Chicko [t͡ʃɪkoʊ].
DANIEL: A Chicko! [t͡ʃɪkoʊ]
HEDVIG: Okay…
DANIEL: Now, in the wake of everyone’s sudden consciousness of racial issues, which we’ve been talking about in previous shows, these two candies are going to be renamed. We don’t know what the name is going to be, but because they are potentially offensive, either to Native Americans or to Latinx people, Nestlé has announced they’re changing the names.
HEDVIG: Huh.
DANIEL: The statement says: “This decision acknowledges the need to ensure that nothing we do marginalizes our friends, neighbors, and colleagues. These names have overtones which are out of step with Nestlé’s values, which are rooted in respect.” In case you forgot, we are still talking about Nestlé.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Yeah.
DANIEL: Possibly the most ethically challenged corporation on earth? I’m just thinking?
BEN: Well, yeah. Like, there’s… I mean…
DANIEL: What have we got?
BEN: There’s Enron, I guess.
DANIEL: So they say: “While new names have not yet been finalized, we will move quickly to change these names.” Got a take? What’s your hot take on this?
DAVID: Yeah, well, it’s going to be difficult. Brand names have always been a problem, haven’t they? Partly because they’re international. And as soon as you get international, you have to start thinking about different languages. I mean, you know, the famous case years ago was the car, the Nova. Which… the name was chosen because it meant something “new”. But of course in Spanish, it meant “no va”. It doesn’t go. [See, however, these articles on why — although the name could mean that — it wasn’t an impediment to sales in Spanish-speaking countries. —D] You know, they suddenly realised that the resonances in one language are going to be very different from the resonances in others. And that’s the problem, you know, with any name change of this kind. It might lose its racial connotations in English, but you’ve got to be careful to make sure that it doesn’t acquire — the new name doesn’t acquire some in other language.
DANIEL: You don’t want to “bite the wax tadpole”, as Coca-Cola found in Chinese.
DAVID: Nice example.
HEDVIG: But in this case, these sweets are mainly manufactured and purchased in Australia, correct?
BEN: I’d say outside of Australia and maybe, maybe New Zealand, you’re not going to see this anywhere else.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Which we should make the job, you would imagine, relatively easy, which then takes begs the question, it’s been easy for a while.
DANIEL: Oh god, yes, it’s been decades! They were happy… this says “this is out of step with our values”. They were happy to keep the names when it was in step with their values.
BEN: Yep, exactly. Basically, “Oh, it turns out, like, a whole bunch of people are making a lot of noise, so I guess we should change it?”
DANIEL: We’ve seen a lot of names falling. Are there any that need to happen? I know the Washington Redskins, which we’ve talked about many many times.
BEN: Yep. That’s… I mean, that’s just, surely that’s just a question of time, right? Like, eventually that has to crumble.
HEDVIG: I don’t know. This is a very American thing, so I don’t know all the ins and outs of it, but I thought they were just like… they’ve now forged their identity as not switching. And, like, people are, like, actively, like, supporting them because they’re, like [GRUFF VOICE] “Arr, they’re sticking by it, rah rah rah.”
BEN: Yeah, maybe. Hey, look, Trump’s going to win a second term, so, like, all bets are off.
DANIEL: Stoppit. Stoppit!
BEN: You know it’s true!
DANIEL: In other news, the Dixie Chicks — the band — they’ve renamed themselves to the Chicks!
HEDVIG: Right, so here again, as a non-American, what’s the story here? ‘Cause I don’t feel like I understand.
DANIEL: Okay, well, as the former American, Dixie…
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: …is a word …is a word that evokes… I’m still American, but I’m also Australian.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: But I feel former. I feel former. [LAUGHTER] “Dixie” is a word that evokes a romantic notion of the history of the US South, including slavery and racism and….
BEN: Is Dixie a sort of… I don’t know the linguistics term, but like a morph of the Mason-Dixon line?
DANIEL: Yes, that is the most likely origin.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: And what’s the Dixon line?
BEN: Which is… The Mason Dixon line … ooh, let’s see how well I can remember my elementary school American history. This is going to be embarrassing.
DANIEL: Oh, nice.
BEN: The Mason-Dixon line was the collective state borders that separated slave states from non-slave states.
DANIEL: Right.
BEN: Is that correct?
DANIEL: As far as my elementary school American education reminds me, yes.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Right.
DANIEL: Any other trademark names you’d love to see?
HEDVIG: Hmm.
BEN: Trademark names.
DANIEL: I got one.
HEDVIG: Yeah? What?
DANIEL: In Australia, there’s a brand of cheese.
BEN: Oh, god. Oh, geez. I can’t believe I… this escaped my attention, yeah, okay. Go on, Daniel.
HEDVIG: What? Okay, okay, What’s it called?
DANIEL: Do I say it? Okay, I’m going to say it. It’s… it’s Coon cheese. Coon cheese. An actual brand of cheese in Australia. And the company has defended the name for a long time, saying, “The Coon cheese brand name recognises the work of Edward William Coon, who patented — or patented [peitəntəd] — a unique ripening process that was used to manufacture the original Coon cheese.”
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: You know what — bad luck for him. I don’t really care if he made a magical kind of cheese that could grant wishes! All right? Change the goddamn name.
BEN: Yeah, that one. And sort of… to what Hedvig was saying before, it seems like they’ve forged their identity a little bit around, like: We won’t kowtow to these social justice warrior types. Which is really unfortunate. Although, having said all of that, I wonder if they were able to say that at a time when there was just, sort of like, some pretty fringe elements saying some stuff every now and then.
HEDVIG: Mhm.
But now they are going to be confronted with one heck of a less fringe approach to this. So maybe that will change it. I don’t know.
DANIEL: Let me just run through some other terms that maybe people should be aware of, and that are coming under scrutiny. Erica, our listener, suggested that in the computer science business, WHITELIST and BLACKLIST. The whitelist is the sites that you’re allowed to go on, blacklist, the sites you’re not. And master/slave terminology.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah. So, do people still use that so much? I know about as in, like, a machine that’s, like, a slave to another machine, like a hierarchy.
BEN: Yep.
HEDVIG: I don’t think I’ve used that in ages.
BEN: And you often hear about it in hard drives, as well.
DANIEL: Mhm.
HEDVIG: Right.
BEN: I’d completely forgotten about this, but then I thought back to my, sort of like, very post-high-school days when I ran a little bit of IT support and I was like: Oh, yeah. That is used all the time. Absolutely.
DANIEL: So it’s possible to substitute. For WHITELIST and BLACKLIST, you could have a BLOCKLIST and an ALLOWLIST.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I see that actually a lot.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Because, like, AdBlocker and all these apps — not everyone knows which one is white and black. It’s not really obvious from the start. So I’ve seen ‘allowed’ and ‘block’.
DANIEL: And then, instead of MASTER/SLAVE, you could do a PRIMARY and a REPLICA. Or a MINION. So that’s a possibility.
BEN: Ooo, minion’s a fun one.
DANIEL: Bob and Termy suggested: TIPPING POINT needs some scrutiny.
HEDVIG: Tipping point? As in, like, that was the tipping point for me?
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: What’s up with that?
DANIEL: Okay, so — and I know that we’re getting, like, I had no idea about this one until it was raised for me. So, “tipping point” is a very useful phrase when, you know, you get to a certain point and then a big change.
HEDVIG: Something tips over. Yeah.
BEN: Mhm.
DANIEL: Right.
HEDVIG: I can see the wheelbarrow in my mind.
DANIEL: Yeah. But the popularity of TIPPING POINT sort of came back into vogue in the 1950s when people started discussing it in terms of what’s known as “white flight”: black families start moving into a neighbourhood, and white people would move out. And so it was discussed in terms of this phrase, TIPPING POINT, and it’s been suggested that using this phrase is an unpleasant… I mean, it seems like a totally normal phrase without any racist connotations, but it owes its popularity to discussion when it was brought up in a time when this practice was happening.
HEDVIG: But it doesn’t owe its origins, right? I’m not misunderstanding what “tipping” is?
BEN: No. That’s, like, another one that we’re going to speak of in a second, though. It was, like… the reason it sort of came into our lexicon in a wide sense was because of this particular thing.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: And then Ayesha mentioned a phrase that we used in our last episode: CALLING A SPADE A SPADE.
BEN: Yeah, this one’s my fault.
HEDVIG: What’s…?
DANIEL: Okay, you want to talk about it?
BEN: Yup, I sure do, because one of our regular listeners, who also happens to be my partner, called me out for CALLING A SPADE A SPADE because — yeah, it is a very very very old phrase. Actually, like, far older than I ever would have imagined. It’s older than kind of English, a little bit. It goes back to, like… many many centuries. Anyway, it originally meant a shovel. Right? It had nothing to do with a deck of cards, which is always how I had imagined it in my head.
HEDVIG: Oh, wait, what? Wait, I always imagined a shovel. You still call, like, what you dig in when you’re in the kindergarten, what do you call that?
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yep, that’s what it originally meant, and it basically meant: “tell it like it is”, right? You see a shovel, you call it a shovel, basically.
HEDVIG: Uh-huh.
BEN: Then, around the same time that SPADE was starting to be used as a name for a suit in playing cards, which by the way was way later than I thought — apparently that only happened in the ’20s…
HEDVIG: Oh, wait. No, I think I know where this is going.
BEN: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It also came to mean a… a Black person, essentially.
HEDVIG: My god.
BEN: And it also was a unkind way to refer to a Black person. And so, for a lot of its history — sort of in the 20th century — it’s had that sort of hanging over its head, to the point where many African-American activists, Black activists, in the civil rights era tried to sort of, like, reappropriate the phrase. You know, calling certain members of their community, like: That’s my ace of spades, and that sort of thing, to try and recapture some of the power from that. But yeah, so CALLING A SPADE A SPADE also has like a bit of a icky sort of back history.
HEDVIG: I had never thought about that expression and the deck of cards symbol at all. It does beg the question, same with TIPPING POINT: what are we to do? There’s one thing if there’s, like, the origin is explicitly problematic, but if it rose to… Because we imagine that, like, when the phrase occurred in, like, Middle English or something, it had to do with shovels, right?
DANIEL: Let me just take it to David.
HEDVIG: Oh! Yeah.
BEN: Oo, good point, yeah! We have a guest. Hi, David! Sorry.
DANIEL: David, I would like to know…
DAVID: I’m fascinated! This is really interesting! Yeah, you carry on. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: I would like to have an indication… what’s your idea about how we can tell when a term has been skunked? When it might not — this is Brian Garner’s expression — you know, it might not have had its beginnings in anything hateful, but at some point enough people start to say “Whoa whoa whoa — you know what, it’s so close. I would rather say something else.” Do you have an idea as to when it reaches that… that point?
DAVID: No. there isn’t any magic idea. The two concepts face each other. One is… you know, in semantics, we talk about deterioration of sense, and the opposite, the amelioration of sense. So there are other terms as well, but the basic idea is that some terms indeed start off neutral, and deteriorate, with negative senses coming along. And the opposite happens too, you know, where you get a term that was originally demeaning in some way, and it achieves positive senses. And there’s no way, no way of predicting language change, semantic change in this way. You’ve just got to keep your ears open and your eyes open, and monitor what’s going on, and there will come a — to go back to your other example — a tipping point, you know, where you think: Hey, now things have gone so far that the majority of people, in our opinion, are finding this a negative term or a positive term. And the point then gets a label in the dictionaries, doesn’t it, so that people are kind of alerted to it. And once it gets to that stage, then you could almost say it’s been institutionalised in that sort of way. But it’s absolutely impossible to predict the point in time at which that’s going to happen. You know, that’s the thing about language change. You know, language change very rarely happens through its own account. It’s always a reflection of social change. So anybody who’s asking about predicting the future of language is really asking a question about predicting the future of society.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, I can imagine that some of our listeners — maybe our white listeners — might be throwing up their hands in exasperation.
BEN: Yep.
DANIEL: Maybe they’d be feeling like keeping up with language in this way just seems like a constant battle. It’s so exhausting. I hope not. I hope we’re all open to input, and trying to challenge our biases, and trying to do better. And at the same time, it does leave us with questions. What do we say, what don’t we say, and how careful do we need to be? What do we do?
BEN: Well, in this particular instance, right, I think that my brain goes: A brown person came and said: Hey, these two things landed pretty clunkily, and didn’t sound that great, and here’s the reasons why. And I’m… obviously, I’m incredibly biased in this situation because that person happened to be the person I’m in a relationship with. But my brain kind of goes: Okay, someone has taken the time out of their day to kind of, like, educate me on this thing and, to Ayesha’s credit, she does a lot of emotional labour educating lots and lots of people online. So, I mean — yeah, my instinct is to just kind of be like: Okay, so TIPPING POINT can obviously be CRITICAL MASS, which is way cooler because it’s sciency and sci-fi, and it just sounds heaps doper.
DANIEL: Oh, that is good!
BEN: And CALLING A SPADE A SPADE, I can easily turn that into TELLING IT LIKE IT IS.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: And you know, by doing so, what you’re doing is: you’re making it so that your audience won’t be distracted. So that your message will come through to the most people, and you know, you’ll be doing what we’re supposed to do with language and that is: be clear.
DAVID: Yeah, that’s a very important point, actually. It’s when the medium gets in the way of the message that you have to start worrying about things. This is true for all kinds of language shibboleths of any kind, you know, all the prescriptivists use. You know, why should you never split an infinitive, or something like that? Well, heck, we all know that people do that all the time, but if it gets in the way, if people are distracted by the shibboleth, then one needs to do something about it. Otherwise, the message simply won’t get across.
HEDVIG: And in the instance of these two phrases, we are lucky that there exists a sort of alternative that is fairly frequent as well, like CRITICAL MASS. I don’t know — I use CRITICAL MASS quite a lot; I like it.
BEN: Yep.
HEDVIG: And TELLING IT LIKE IT IS…
BEN: You and I are nerd-aligned? How unusual! [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: And TELLING IT LIKE IT IS is also really common. The tricky point is — which we don’t have any examples of today — when there isn’t another alternative that is as neutral.
BEN: Well, I would love to put that out to our listeners. If anyone can think of one of these shibboleths that — for whatever reason, but in particular, to what’s going on in the world at the moment — that we don’t have a ready stand-in for, and maybe we can look into that in the next show.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I was just going to say: it’s… probably a lot of people are going to send in various gender paradigms in different languages for pronouns.
BEN: Funsies!
HEDVIG: And that is one that is really hard. We’ve talked about the Swedish case before on the show, and we’re fairly lucky in Swedish that the neutral alternative people are popularising actually sounds fairly natural. But in a lot of languages, that isn’t the case. Like, the use of the X in English is really… I find it quite difficult to get used to and learn.
DANIEL: Mm.
HEDVIG: That’s why the THEY option is, like…
BEN: Oh, the English alphabet has a bunch of letters that we just need to get rid of. C, what are you even doing? Mate, pick a side. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: There was one other aspect of our last show that I wanted to talk about. There was one of our guests who told a story of an encounter with the police. You know, playing like the grammar police. And it was a fun story. It was lighthearted and fun. And, in including that anecdote, I didn’t fully realise… you know, a lot of encounters that people of colour have with police are not fun, and not lighthearted. It ends their lives. And it was kind of insensitive of me to include that, and I’d like to apologise for that. For many of our listeners, it didn’t… it was off.
BEN: And like Daniel said, we’ve put the call out to our listeners to sort of feedback to us ways in which, as three white people on the show, we can do better, and I think that was probably one that we erred on. And yeah — we are sorry, and we want more people to communicate with us when we maybe get it wrong or do something that’s just… just makes you feel a bit uncomfortable, or something like that. We are open to all feedback.
HEDVIG: Speaking of feedback, we should actually have a more fun term for grammar police. I guess prescriptivist? But one that’s more like…
BEN: That’s not fun. You’re right. That’s deeply unfun. [LAUGHTER] That’s very linguisticky.
DANIEL: What about ‘grammar monitor’? Somebody who’s monitoring everybody’s grammar. But it also contains, etymologically, ‘monere’: to admonish. The two are related.
HEDVIG: What’s ‘admonish’?
BEN: Ooo, grammar monitor. I like that.
HEDVIG: I love not knowing anything! This is the episode where I don’t know anything. What’s ‘admonish’? [LAUGHTER] I’m fine with this.
DANIEL: To scold, to reprove…
HEDVIG: What’s ‘reprove’? [LAUGHS]
BEN: Admonish… admonish… here, I’m going to… Daniel, stop being a linguist, okay?
HEDVIG: No, David! David’s going to help me. David is the…
BEN: Yeah, okay! David David David!
HEDVIG: David, help me!
DAVID: In what way can I help you, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: Can you tell me what ADMONISH is?
DAVID: To ADMONISH, well…
HEDVIG: Yes, thank you.
DAVID: …is to tell off, to… yeah.
DANIEL: There you go.
HEDVIG: And what’s DIS… what’s the other word? DISPROVE?
DANIEL: REPROVE.
HEDVIG: REPROVE! What’s REPROVE?
DANIEL: Same deal.
DAVID: Yes.
BEN: It’s a synonym.
DANIEL: I thought that was good.
BEN: Yeah, we really did a lot of doubling up in English, now that I think about it!
HEDVIG: Okay, thank you very much.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: We are speaking with David Crystal about his book “Let’s Talk: How English Conversation Works”. It’s a ripping read, I’ve got to say. One of the things that we’ve been talking about on the show lately is that language isn’t just for information exchange. We convey a lot of other information in conversation, like the social information about us, who we are, what our history is. But I’m also noticing that traffic direction also takes up a lot of our effort — who should speak, who should stay quiet. How do we do all of this? How do we make it… how do we smooth it out?
[AWFULLY LONG SILENCE WHICH GROWS EXTREMELY AWKWARD, FOLLOWED BY CROSSTALK]
BEN: Wow. That was so smooth.
DAVID: Yeah, so you want to know you… oh, you’re asking me? Or is that a rhetorical question? [LAUGHS] But hang on a minute, though, Ben. What’s just happened is a very good example…
HEDVIG: Yeah, I was gonna say…!
BEN: Oh, yes yes yes yes yes! Let’s all tease Daniel for how badly he did! This sounds great! [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: No! It was all of us! We were just not sure, you know…
DAVID: Yeah! And now if we were face to face, that wouldn’t have happened.
HEDVIG: No.
DAVID: Because there would have been facial expressions and gestures…
HEDVIG: Yes.
DAVID: …and eye contact and all that sort of thing, which would enable us to see who the question was directed to. I wasn’t sure whether it was directed to me or not.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DAVID: But in a face-to-face situation, it would have been absolutely clear. So these are the cues that are so important. It isn’t just language, it’s all the whole body activity that goes with it.
HEDVIG: Yeah yeah yeah. Sure.
BEN: And can I just say for me personally, this has been so relevant over the last, like, three months of my life. I don’t know about you all, but man, I have been doing a lot of stuff on video conferencing.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Like, a lot a lot of stuff as a teacher and [GROAN], it suuuucks.
DANIEL: Is that because you’re denied a lot of cues that we normally use?
BEN: I think it’s that, but also I think that the idea of large conversations in an online space — we still haven’t figured it out.
HEDVIG: Mm. No.
BEN: I have not come across one example where it works well.
DAVID: No, it doesn’t. And even if it’s one-to-one, it doesn’t work well, and the reason’s very interesting. In the book, I spend a lot of time talking about the fundamental feature of conversation that makes it work, and that is the existence of simultaneous feedback.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Oh…
DAVID: In other words, while one person is speaking, the other person is giving a commentary of the kind of, you know: Uh-huh. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Mhm. No. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. Sure. Ah. And all of that, along with the facial expressions and everything. And that is immensely reassuring and stimulating and it’s a check on what’s going on. That does not happen in an online situation, even in the best and the least lagging of contacts where you see the person that you’re talking to. There is always a lag and in any case people are not used to giving that kind of interaction while you’re talking. So you’re on your own, in other words. Which is why it’s so tiring, Ben. Yes, absolutely!
BEN: Yeah, well, I was going to say that… Hedvig, you might have experienced this, and Daniel, you might have experienced this, and David — outside of writing a truly breathtaking amount of books, I’m not sure if you have occasion to, like, talk to people, but when I was having to teach to a room… like, a “room”… a screen full of black squares, right, ’cause everyone would turn their camera off…
DAVID: Mm.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: It’s the most exhausting thing I’ve ever done, just about!
HEDVIG: Yeah. Scary!
BEN: It was just so tiring!
HEDVIG: Yeah, you don’t know… yeah, you don’t know if they’re understanding what you’re saying, if they’re following along, if they like it, if they don’t like it. That’s why, like, I think lectures can work better than big group conversation if, beforehand you say: Okay, no one’s turning their video off! You can mute your mike…
BEN: Yeah, this is a norm that I had to establish. It took me way too long to figure out, I’m embarrassed to say.
HEDVIG: Yeah. I like the little…. So, on Zoom, you can do a little clap, and a little thumbs up.
BEN: Yes.
HEDVIG: The symbol. Have you seen those? That can actually kind of work. It’s still not at all, of course, as good as in person, but it did something.
BEN: Yeah.
DAVID: Well, it all depends on what the lag is. You know, that’s the big problem. I do a lot of online lecturing, and I’ve learned that, you know, the one thing you must not do really is tell a joke. [LAUGHTER] Because if you do, the people who are watching you in India are not getting the point until about, you know, a split second or so, and you’ve moved on from there. And then the laugh comes back at you, at the point when you’re not making the joke anymore, you know.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Oh god.
DAVID: I’ve had this with an international audience where the lag differs enormously from one part of the world to the other. I mean…
BEN: Oh, of course.
DAVID: It really does differ! In one talk I was giving, there was a lag of up to ten seconds before the person actually heard what I was saying.
BEN: Oh, wow.
HEDVIG: That’s rough.
DAVID: And, you know, you’re talking to a multi-national audience, but the reactions are coming in at different times and different speeds and so on. So it’s an impossible situation, really.
BEN: Can I ask, David, because you are, I can tell, quite a funny man — did that create, sort of like, a ten-second long cascade of laughter?
DAVID: Yes, it did rather! [LAUGHTER]
BEN: I love it!
DAVID: But the point is: I’d left that point behind, you see! I mean, ten seconds on, I was now on a very serious point and suddenly somebody is laughing at it! So I mean, come on.
BEN: That would have sounded truly bizarre. I… I kind of want to hear it! [LAUGHTER]
DAVID: But the more people that you’re watching, as in a Zoom room gallery view situation, the worse it gets because even if you can see… even if it’s not black screen — I mean, I was on a call the other day to a class in the States and all the class were there. and I saw all ten, fifteen of the kids that were in the class. But you know, who does one look at? You can’t look at all of them, so you don’t look at any of them.
BEN: Yeah, it’s true, isn’t it?
DAVID: And then somebody gives a reaction to you and that immediately gets your attention. And so you suddenly start talking to that person, until you realise: No, no, I’m not talking to that person; I’m talking to everybody! It’s a very difficult situation! We’re amateurs at it. We haven’t been doing it for so long.
BEN: Well, I think if we needed definitive proof that we’re not there yet — David, I don’t know what an expert at conversation looks like, but you have to imagine that you’re one! And if you can’t do it… if you can’t make it work… I feel a lot less bad about also not being able to make it work. [LAUGHTER]
DAVID: Well, I suppose there’s a difference here between doing it, and analysing the doing of it. Just like, you know, some music critics are very bad players or singers.
BEN: True.
DAVID: Or indeed, to go back to grammar police, you know, some people are very good at analysing grammar but they they still use all sorts of things themselves. I find the same here. I spend a lot of time analysing conversation, or have done. And I think I know a lot about it, but whether I’m a good conversationalist or not, that’s a different ball game, it seems to me. Some people are, some people aren’t, you know?
HEDVIG: And it’s really difficult as well what bar we’re going to measure it against, because people have different criteria and different sort of metrics. Like you were saying before about the feedback, the sort of, like, humming and things like that, and some people do it a lot, and some people do it very little. And sometimes you’re in a conversation with someone who’s not of the same type as you, and it sometimes can take you a while to understand what’s going on. You just feel like there’s a bad vibe.
DAVID: And there are cultural differences here, as well.
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly.
DAVID: And I don’t just mean international… interlinguistic ones, I mean, even within a particular language. There can be cultural differences. But you notice it especially — I mean, I have a chapter in the book on this, you know. Take silence, for instance. We had a silence a little while ago, and we all felt a bit awkward about it. [LAUGHTER] But in some parts of the world — in Japan, for instance — to have a silence in a conversation is just fine, you know. No problem about that.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Right.
DAVID: The next person will talk when the next person is ready to talk.
HEDVIG: I had a phone conversation one time with a man from… just from northern Sweden, and I’m from Southern Sweden. And he was doing long pauses, and I thought he was mad at me! And we got to the whole end of the conversation, and I expected to be told off! And then it didn’t! He said: Ah, that was very good, and thank you, and you know, I’ll get back in touch.
DAVID: [LAUGHS] Yeah.
HEDVIG: And goodbye, and I thought: Oh, wait!
BEN: You expected to be… admonished.
HEDVIG: Yes, and I wasn’t! And that’s… we were speaking the same language!
DAVID: And that’s the point, you know. That’s one of the reasons why I wrote this book. Because I think the more you know about these different expectations and conventions and cultural differences and all the rest of it, the less you’re likely to be taken aback in that way. You become more tolerant, more flexible, more understanding about what happens in this apparently very natural thing called conversation.
DANIEL: The book is called “Let’s Talk: How English Conversation Works”. But of course, English conversation isn’t just one thing. I wonder if you could tell me what you’ve noticed about the challenge of talking to Americans or Australians.
DAVID: Well, you know, I don’t talk to them very much, really. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Yeah, no point, really. Why would you? I mean…
BEN: That’s fair; we are garbage people.
DAVID: Yeah, well, any two dialects are going to differ in all sorts of ways. There’s going to be differences of prosody… you know, differences of intonation and rhythm and tone of voice and all that sort of thing. Differences in vocabulary, differences in things like addressing strategies and things like that, you know, with some people more ready to use first names and other people not. So there are lots of differences of this kind, and the thing is that very few of them have actually been studied in the right amount of detail.
HEDVIG: Mm.
DAVID: One of the limitations of my book is that it’s based on a corpus of data that I gathered some years ago and it’s not representative of the entire English-speaking world, you know. It takes us so far along a road to understand conversation amongst the group of people I was studying, but when you think of all the diversity that’s very much part of the news at the moment, you can see that there are lots of other books that could be written, or analogies to mind that would take that kind of thing into account. So I just don’t know what some of the crucial differences are. You only notice it when you engage in a conversation and you feel something’s not going quite right. Something has broken down, or there’s a slightly awkward pause, or something of that sort. And these are the things that really need to be captured, remembered. How do you get at them, you know? You’ve got to rely on your memory. You can’t sort of take out your phone and say: Can I just record that piece of conversation we’ve just had? [LAUGHTER] You know, because I need to analyse it later? It’s very difficult to get the data on things like this.
BEN: It’s also very difficult to exist outside yourself during a conversation, I find. I don’t know, I’m speaking to three linguists. You guys have probably spent years figuring out how to do that, but I… when you sort of try and break apart or reflect on, you know… if you’re trying to adopt that sort of, like: standing on the balcony of your own psyche, looking down at yourself doing a thing, conversation is just so rapid and it’s so… it feels so subliminal to me, which doesn’t make sense because obviously I’m thinking about the things before I actually say them out loud, but the mechanics of conversation feel like trying to freeze a photon. Do you know what I mean?
HEDVIG: Yeah. It’s actually… this kind of thinking and what you write about in this book is actually made me want to study linguistics in the first place… is that thing of, like, you’re talking to someone, and suddenly you’re sharing information, and you’re getting on the same page. And when you look at the transcript, you can’t really tell, like, where that happened. And also words and little pauses, and I think we’ve talked about before, there’s some work saying… from Steve Levinson and the gang in Nijmegen saying that when it comes the turn taking, the next turn starts so quickly after the previous turn very often, that the person — we know from neurolinguistics — has to have started planning their turn before the other person has stopped talking.
DAVID: Yeah. that’s right.
HEDVIG: Which means it’s so fast! And we’re doing so much predicting and so much… so much is going on. And when I started linguistics, I found that — like you say — there’s surprisingly little study of conversation, actually!
DAVID: Yeah. There’s more of it now, I mean, the conversation analysis as it’s called, or discourse analysis has really come on in the last, you know, twenty years, twenty years or so. But still, relatively little… there are still plenty of discoveries to be made. I mean, I was discovering stuff as I was writing this. A lot of the stereotyped or mythical views about conversation, and you start to explore a view in relation to a corpus of data, and you suddenly realise that things are not as they seem. Give you an example.
BEN: Oh, you’ve got to give us an example.
HEDVIG: Yes, please!
BEN: Like, what’s the juicy example there?
DAVID: Yeah — well, people interrupt each other. Okay? This is a commonplace. There’s interruptions taking place all the time. And if you go online, and just type “interruption”, the message you get is enormous: interruption is bad! You must never interrupt. Style guides tell you: do not interrupt! Well, when you actually analyse a corpus of data, of conversation, what you find is that interruptions take place a lot, and people welcome them! [GENERAL AGREEMENT] Because interruptions are usually in support of what somebody’s just been saying. To amplify, to help, rather than to confront and negate. Of course, that can sometimes happen, but the vast majority of interruptions in any conversation I’ve ever analysed have been very helpful ones. That’s the sort of thing I mean.
BEN: I like to think of them as “yes and” moments.
DAVID: Yeah, “yes and”. That’s a very good way of putting it, rather than “yes but”. Or to take another example: why do people laugh? And people say you laugh because something is funny. No, you don’t!
HEDVIG: You laugh to ease tension and to show agreement.
DAVID: Yeah, exactly! Or to express embarrassment, or… all sorts of reasons why people laugh.
BEN: No, no, see, okay, we’ve got to take a quick pause here — I’m sorry — because now we’re getting back into territory that is breaking me a little bit! When David first came on the show, and I said I was coming back here, I had to… I had to admonish him just a little bit, because I had never understood that you can only say “good morning” but you can say “goodbye” or “good night” many times! The “good morning” can only happen once, and then if you repeat it, you’re a weirdo — I knew that! But you say “goodbye” a whole bunch of times! WHY IS THAT A THING
HEDVIG: What?
DAVID: Yeah, I mean, this is a good example of conversation analysis at its best, it seems to me. Because most people simply do not know they say… I mean, they know it in one sense.
BEN: I did not know that I’d been living under the crushing weight of this rule my entire life!
HEDVIG: Wait, I don’t understand — wait, sorry. Back up.
BEN: Okay.
DAVID: Okay, so if I come into the office and I see you, Hedvig, I say, “Good morning, Hedvig!”
HEDVIG: Good morning.
DAVID: And you say “good morning”. And then I go on somewhere else, and then I come back five minutes later and say, “Good morning, Hedvig!” — then it’s weird.
HEDVIG: And I say: I already saw you.
DAVID: Yeah. And it’s weird. I’m not so important? You didn’t see me the first time? I mean, what’s going on here? But in the evening time now, I’m leaving you. I say, “Okay, bye, Hedvig! Bye! See you!” And off I go — and I forget something. I go back into the office and pick it up, see you again and say, “Bye, Hedvig! Bye!”
HEDVIG: Ah… yes!
DAVID: And as I leave, I say, “Bye, Hedvig! Bye! Bye!”
HEDVIG: Bye! Bye bye! [LAUGHTER]
DAVID: I can say it as many times as I like.
HEDVIG: That’s true!
BEN: Yeah — [DISTRESSED NOISES]
DAVID: You know, the difference between good morning and good night and hello and goodbye — they’re exactly the same in that respect.
HEDVIG: Hm. That’s funny.
BEN: That broke me.
DAVID: But you know, I’ve just been given a review of this book in The Spectator — came out just yesterday. And the critic there says — wrongly in my view — but still, he says: People don’t say “good morning” to each other anymore! [GENERAL SCOFFING AND MOCKERY] They say things like, you know, “Hi, dude!” and things like this!
DANIEL: Oh, dear.
BEN: Oh, my.
HEDVIG: Oh, people still say “good morning”.
DAVID: Well, I’m sure some people do [say “Hi, dude” — D] , but in my experience, “good morning” is still pretty popular.
BEN: I feel like I — in this show, anyway — get to be the person who is the, like, the authority on what “the yoof” are doing these days, and I… like, 13 year olds say good morning to me all the time. All the time. Right? “Morning!”
DANIEL: Let’s talk about hellos for a second, because I feel like the traditional hello on the telephone is changing.
DAVID: Yeah.
BEN: Ooo, true!
DANIEL: Back when you had to pick up the phone, and you didn’t know who it was, you know, “hello” was what you say. Nowadays, I feel like you see who it is, it comes up on your screen, and I say, “Oh, hi, Drew.” Or whatever. Am I right that this hello is changing?
DAVID: Yeah. I think that’s absolutely right. HELLO has a very short history, you know. In 500 years time…,
HEDVIG: Oo! I know this! [LAUGHTER]
DAVID: …people will look back and say it lasted for about a 100 years or something like that. I mean, it only came in with telephones, you know. People didn’t say hello before that.
HEDVIG: Wasn’t there also a newspaper contest? Am I getting it wrong?
BEN: Hang on, hang on, hang on. I’m…. No. Okay. Everyone needs to back up.
HEDVIG: Sorry.
BEN: I’ve just been told that HELLO is a century old and it has broken me again. Can we just… can we revisit that for a second?
DAVID: When telephones came in the middle of the 19th century, the girls — the telephone operators — were called “hello girls” because that was the convention that they were supposed to use. And before that, HELLO simply did not have an existence in English. There were various similar words, you know, like HAIL, and all the rest of it. But HELLO as a greeting became popular only as a result of the telephone.
BEN: Wow!
DAVID: A hundred years on, and it’s being replaced by HI — isn’t it? — in everyday parlance because you can actually see the name of the caller now, as you were mentioning. It may actually have a very short future left to it.
HEDVIG: So I thought that — there was a further piece of trivia that I’m not sure if it’s true or not, because again, I got it from QI — that when the Bell Industries were launching the hello, they had a contest in a newspaper, where they said, “What should we say when we pick up the phone?” And HELLO won, and before that, HELLO in English mainly meant, “Hello! What’s this?” And it still has that use today. Even I, as a second language speaker, use that…
BEN: Sorry, it took me a second, but I get what you mean.
HEDVIG: You find something in your bag, and go “Hello! Oh, what’s this? Oh, it’s that cable that I was looking for earlier.”
BEN: Yep.
HEDVIG: And I think the runner-up — Stephen Fry told me — was AHOY! Is this a myth?
DAVID: Now what’s being referred to here is not a competition, as such. It was different individuals suggesting different items. AHOY was one. HELLO was another. There were a couple more. But it was the individual inventors who were making these suggestions in the first place.
BEN: Oh, wow!
HEDVIG: About the Hello Girls — so in Sweden, we called the… There used to be on TV… Ten plus years ago, there used to be people talking to you, telling you what was going to come on later, and you could see their faces, as opposed to just their voice over the end credits. Do you remember this?
BEN: Wow, that’s a very interesting convention.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And we called them…
BEN: That didn’t happen in the English speaking world, I can tell you that.
HEDVIG: What? It didn’t?
BEN: No. No.
HEDVIG: We had… like, a woman would say, like: oh, and in 5 minutes, you know, there’s going to be the news.
BEN: Yeah, no, we would never ever ever see those people. I have no memory of a forward announce for a TV show ever looking like a news reader, ever.
HEDVIG: So we had that, and we could see these people and they were only women. There was a few men. And we called them hello… helloers.
DAVID: Oh, right. Yeah.
DANIEL: Really?
HEDVIG: Halloer. Yeah. And there’s a… [LAUGHS] There’s a song. [LAUGHS] There’s a pop song about a male person professing his sexual attraction to these ladies. Makes it very silly.
BEN: Wow, we really got a hell of an insight just then, into a bunch of different things.
DANIEL: Well, you did manage to work in a ’90s pop song, so that, you know.
HEDVIG: Yes! Always!
DANIEL: David, what advice would you have for someone who wants to be good at conversation?
HEDVIG: Ooo, good question.
DAVID: Well…
BEN: Don’t come on a podcast with Daniel, Hedvig, and Ben!
DAVID: Yeah, well, I suppose there are all sorts of things you could suggest. I mean, one is: you know, do it! That’s the thing. You know, how am I going to be good at tennis? You could analyse it and do all sorts of… No! Get out there! Get hold of the racket and belt the ball. See what happens. Well, start off with… but start off with people who are sympathetic. Don’t get yourself into a very difficult situation to begin with. Try conversation with, you know, the people you know, the people you love, the people who are not going to be threatening. And then take it gently, and go into a more… an environment where you’re talking to somebody that you don’t know so well, and so on and so forth. But you’ve just got to do it. You can only become a good conversationalist by doing it.
DANIEL: We have some questions from listeners on our our Discord channel, if you don’t mind just quickly running through some of these. There’s two good ones from PharaohKatt.
BEN: These are… just to be clear, David: this will almost certainly be better than any question we’ve asked so far. Whenever we get our listeners to ask questions, they are a billion percent smarter than we are.
DAVID: Oh, right. Okay. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: That is true. So the first one: has the interconnectedness of the internet led to more or less regional variation? Or maybe no change?
DAVID: Ah! With many questions about the internet, the answer is: we have no idea. Because it’s all been so recent. And you know, it’s just difficult to be sure just what’s going on. But having said that, at an impressionist — I don’t know of any, you know, really detailed survey on this — but at an impressionistic level, one sees two competing trends. There are always two competing trends on the internet! One is a greater homogeneity, because as people from different parts of the world interact in chat rooms and things like that, they accommodate to each other and the regional differences start to disappear. So, you know, if I’m talking to an American, I might not use analogies with cricket because I know that the guy I’m talking to won’t understand cricket, and visa versa. He might keep off baseball for the same reason. But at the same time as that homogeneity is happening, we’re seeing a great deal of identity being expressed. And you notice this when people code-switch, for instance, and they start introduce… If they’re bilingual, and they introduce a second language into what’s going on. Or they form a group, and the identity is important to that group, and so they start using particular idioms or particular phrases. Or even — because it’s often typing online — particular spellings. I remember a few years ago when chat rooms were first being explored in this… analysed in this way, there was one group I was studying, and one of the members of the group mistyped the word COMPUTER and it came out as “comptuer”. Right? And everybody thought this was really cool. And so everybody suddenly started typing COMPUTER as “comptuer”. And that became the norm for that particular chat room. A newbie comes along to that chat room, types COMPUTER in the normal way, and he gets howled down because he was mistyping the word COMPUTER!
BEN: Yeah, he’s outed him or herself.
DAVID: And that kind of new dialect, if you like, is increasing diversity, it seems to me. So we’ve got these two competing trends. And which one is going to emerge triumphant in the end? Well, it’s too soon to say.
BEN: David, can I ask on that — just a “yes, and” question: Do you think there’s the possibility that there’s agency involved in that, as well? And by that, I mean … I referenced before, teenagers say hello or good morning to me like a normal human does, because they are normal humans. But they also have the capacity — depending on what sort of online communities and subcultures they’re part of — to speak a properly foreign language, as far as I can tell. Is there sort of agency involved in that sort of… that coalescing and that diversification?
DAVID: Yeah, I think the big fallacy is when people think that we all have just one dialect, one accent, one variety that we use. In fact, we’re all multi-lingual in our own language — multi-dialectal, I suppose we would would call it. And we change our language, depending upon the circumstances in which we find ourselves. You know, whether we use first names or not, whether we speak at a certain speed or not. Hundreds of different variables, which we acquire partly by instinct, partly by teaching. This is one of the things that goes on in schools these days. English language teachers spend a lot of time trying to instill into young minds this sense of linguistic appropriateness and inappropriateness. And it covers everything, including the stuff we were talking about at the beginning of the program, you know, on race and things like that. And developing that sense of appropriateness, and of accommodation, and when to join in with the others, and when to distance yourself from the others. This is all part of linguistic growing up. It sometimes has to be taught sometimes it just comes naturally. But certainly the basic thing is that we are all of us… the most fluent of us in a language are the ones that can handle the most conversational circumstances with equal facility and equal sensitivity.
HEDVIG: And this is — I know we’ve talked about this on the show before — this is the mark of, like, someone who’s actually interested in language and someone who’s a language teacher who understands languages. To phrase it like you did — to say, it’s about appropriateness, it’s about knowing what variety to use when. It’s not saying, there’s only one variety you should use.
DAVID: Absolutely.
BEN: There’s a good kind, and there’s all the other kinds.
HEDVIG: Yeah. I’ve spoken to language teachers in Sweden as well, and you build up this idea that all, like, Swedish and English teachers (in respect to Sweden and England) are these prescriptivist people, and and I found that, for most part, when I talk to them, they’re not. They say: Oh, you know, my students, they’re great! They know all these things and I’m trying to teach them another variety, and to teach them how to use it.
BEN: That’s in keeping with my experience, as well.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Let’s go on to the second question, which is kind of related. PharaohKatt asks: It seems like there’s a lot of new slang terms that come in, then leave super fast. Is this a new phenomenon, or am I only just noticing it?
DAVID: No, it’s not new at all. I mean, slang is evanescent by its very nature. New terms come along, everybody uses them, thinks they’re cool, and then they go out of use because they’ve been overused. Or usually because they’ve been appropriated by some other sector of society that makes the young people — or whoever it is, because it could be anybody, I mean, we’ve all got slang in all our walks of life — feel that the slang just simply isn’t part of our identity anymore. I mean, you see this especially online at the moment. You know, when texting arrived, the big feature of text messaging was all the new abbreviations that were coming in. You know, LOL, and all that sort of thing. And all the kids were thinking: this is absolutely cool. And it had been like that for quite a while. Now, I went to a school not so long ago. One of things I do when I go into schools is: I get the kids to collect some of their text messages and went to have a look at them, do a bit of analysis together.
BEN: Oho, that’s playing with fire! Oh, my!
DAVID: And I went in. This group showed me their texts, and there were no abbreviations there at all. And I said, “Where have they all gone?” And they looked at me as if I was from a different planet! And they said — these sixteen-year-olds, you know — “We did those when we were young,” they said.
BEN: Yeah.
DAVID: And I said, “Well, really?” And one lad said to me — and this is the point I’m making — he said, “I’ll tell you when I stopped abbreviating C for SEE and U for YOU and all the rest of it. I stopped doing this when my dad started,” he said.
HEDVIG: Yeah!
DAVID: But that makes my point, you know, that when older people take over young person slang, it’s not cool anymore! And they go on and find something else.
DANIEL: Yep.
HEDVIG: And also nowadays you don’t have to… like, I remember when texting came in, you actually had to pay… like, there was a cost involved in the number of characters!
DAVID: Yeah, there was. At the beginning, there was indeed.
BEN: $2.25, is that right?
DAVID: Yeah, there was. Pay per letter.
HEDVIG: Yeah, so.
DANIEL: So let me ask then, David: are you staying on top of language, do you think? Or do you feel like some of it’s passing you by?
DAVID: Oh, passing by, definitely. Heck, at my age! The thing is that I do have children — good, yes, they help, but they’re in their forties now. And they have children. Ah, that’s good news! So I have a couple of fifteen-year-old grandkids and also some five-year-old grandkids. So talking to them, I’m getting a sense of what’s going on. But this is hugely selective, as you can imagine! And I’ll tell you what: the area that I’m finding greatest difficulty in keeping an eye on is the diversity that’s coming from the areas like what we were talking about the beginning of the program. I mean, how can any one person keep up with all the diversity that’s taking place out there amongst Black Americans, and all the rest of it? So I am finding myself under considerable difficulty these days to keep pace. It was easier once upon a time, you know. Once upon a time, it was so straightforward, as any English language teacher will tell you. There was British English and American English, and we all knew where we were. And now there’s Australian English and New Zealand English and Singaporean English and Indian English and Nigerian English — and it is becoming much more difficult keeping pace with the variety that’s taking place in just English. Indeed!
HEDVIG: And we should also say, I mean, when you were little and growing up, Australians did speak Australian English as well. It’s also that these things are coming in to the mainstream. They’re becoming more visible through the internet, so we see them.
DAVID: Yes. So many of them are. And the point is that, you know, we’re talking about large numbers of people here. Take Indian English, for instance.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DAVID: You know, we’re talking about a third of the Indian population now being able to carry on a conversation in English. Well, that’s four hundred million or more people. That’s more people speaking English in India than in the entire native speaking population of English in the countries of the world, you know.
HEDVIG: Yep.
DAVID: So we’re talking about big bucks here, as far as English usage is concerned. They can’t just be ignored as a kind of minority dialect anymore.
HEDVIG: No. And, you know, English has changed a lot because of contact with other languages. But now, like you say, we second-language speakers do outnumber you. Quite dramatically!
DAVID: Well, absolutely! For every one native speaker, there are now five non-native speakers! The center of gravity has shifted to the non-native speaker. And what’s happening is that, as these large groups of non-native speakers develop an increased confidence in the language, start to become professional in the language, start to write novels and poems and plays in the language, we get a completely different concept of — for example, Hedvig — what Swedish English means. Swedish English to me doesn’t mean the English of people from Sweden, non-native speakers who are making mistakes. Oh, no! It means all the cultural background that you have as a Swedish person, that you build into your English conversation. Which means that when I’m speaking to you, and you introduce those local observations, I don’t know what you mean because I don’t share your cultural background. And that cultural set of differences is what’s happening increasingly the world over at the moment.
HEDVIG: And it’s… like we were saying before about internet usage, and how people might code-switch or do things, that’s my current pet peeve. I don’t know if this is just quarantine getting to me, but Americans on the internet thinking that everyone understands American culture perfectly? I’m really sorry, Daniel! and I know you’re not one of them, but it drives me bonkers.
DAVID: Yeah, well, you know, actually this is a bigger issue than just Americans, Hedvig. Everybody assumes that the person that they’re talking to will understand the cultural allusions because most of them are unconscious, you see. Because you’ve grown up with them, you drop them into the conversation without a second thought. And it’s only when somebody from a different cultural background says, “Hang on a minute! I didn’t understand that point. Could you explain it?” You suddenly realise that you’ve said something that is part of your instinct because of the way you grew up, and actually it’s restricted to your part of the world and not anybody else’s.
HEDVIG: So I really liked a quote you had in the beginning of the book and you referenced earlier. I’m paraphrasing. It’s something by someone named Holmes, saying “The whole force of conversation depends on how much information you can take for granted as being shared.”
DAVID: Ah, yeah. Yeah.
HEDVIG: And I think that was a really good quote and it really spoke to me because conversation and language is so much about theory of mind, and trying to imagine what the other person might know, and how you can — if you want to transfer knowledge — how you can, you know, link it to what they already know. There are so many ways we do that in conversation, with cues and with facial gestures, and I was wondering if you could speak a bit more about how that is done in English.
DAVID: Yeah, well, it covers everything. Not just, you know, gestures and things like that, though that’s part of it. It covers grammar, it covers pronunciation, covers vocabulary. Covers idiom, perhaps more than anything else. You know what, I might say to you — I just leave a room, and I say without thinking twice about it: “Oh, gah! Oof! It’s like Clapham Junction in there today!” And people say either: “Yes it was, wasn’t it?” Or they don’t say anything because they don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. What is Clapham Junction, anyway? And it’s a cultural point. You have to know that Clapham Junction is a railway station to the south of London, that it’s the most complicated railway station in the country, it has more platforms than anywhere else, you always get lost there, it’s totally chaotic. And what the person means is: it was chaos in there. “It was like Clapham Junction in there today.” It was chaos in there. Now, the exercise is: what is the equivalent in, say, Australian English? Is there an equivalent? What’s the equivalent in American English? What’s the equivalent in Swedish English? Is there an equivalent? There will be something. You know, some sort of local idiom, or what have you, that people use in order to express total chaos. And if this isn’t an example, there will be other similar ones. My watch, for instance, here that I’m wearing now: It’s not Bond Street, my watch. It’s not Bond Street.
HEDVIG: Oh, it’s not fancy.
DAVID: Now, if you know that Bond Street is an expensive street in London, you know what I’m saying. If you don’t know, you don’t know what I’m talking about. Now, what is the equivalent of Bond Street in Perth, you see, Daniel? What is the equivalent of Bond Street in Stockholm, Hedvig? And so on. There will be some sort of analogous idiom, which if you used it… will I understand it? Only if I know your culture well.
HEDVIG: But what about using… you know, a lot of the governments nowadays try to use simple, clear language. They have different words for this thing, you know. “It’s not an expensive watch.” “That was a chaotic room, wasn’t it?” [LAUGHTER]
DAVID: Yeah, that’s right. And the people who notice this first and foremost are the translators and interpreters of the world. I was at a meeting not so long ago where I was talking to the translators and interpreters in the European Union. And this issue came up, because the problem was: what do they do? Do they go for the more neutral expression, which is their word, or do they respect the actual words that the Minister has used in his speech? And it’s a sensitive issue because some ministers say, “You must translate exactly what I say. If I say it was like Clapham Junction, then you must say, in the other language, ‘Clapham Junction,’ you see. If you change it to something that you think is more understandable, you are missing my meaning.” And then there are other ministers who go the opposite way. So it really is quite a contentious issue, this one.
DANIEL: The book is “Let’s Talk: How English Conversation Works” by David Crystal. David, thanks so much for talking to us about your work.
DAVID: Well, it’s been an absolute delight. And thanks for the conversation, as it were! It’s been very enjoyable, all of you.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: We’re barreling towards Word of the Week and David, I believe you’ve got a word for us.
DAVID: Oh, yes, well, I’ve been spending my time over the last three months collecting all the new vocabulary that’s coming in as a result of the virus. And I’ve got a collection now of over a hundred. Linguists have been doing this all over the place, not just me. And one of my favourites is this word for the… you know… what day of the week is it? I don’t know. Gah, what day of the week is it? Oh, folks, it’s Blursday. [LAUGHTER] Blursday.
BEN: I like that very much.
DAVID: That’s my favorite at the moment.
HEDVIG: That’s good.
DANIEL: You know, like I say, there’s been a lot of pain associated with this time and a lot of expense, and a lot of upheaval, but I’ve really enjoyed the easy passage of time that is Blursday.
HEDVIG: I enjoyed… I don’t… “enjoy” is maybe the wrong word, but I experienced something new in this time, and that is: everyone is in the same situation. So, when I was living in Australia, and there’s a big forest fire in Australia, and I talk to my friends in Sweden, they have no idea. “Oh, is it burning everywhere? Is no one dead?” Like, they have no conception. They don’t hear about it in the news as much. and everything. But now it’s like everyone is paying attention to the same news feed a bit more. That, to me, is actually quite interesting.
BEN: This relates to our next word of the week. It’s forced people out of their little silos, their echo chambers, or if you like, their bubbles.
DANIEL: Bubbles. The word BUBBLE has been coming up a lot in the last couple of weeks. I’ve seen things like a “travel bubble”. WA knocked back the formation of a “travel bubble” between Western Australia and South Australia.
BEN: And New Zealand as well.
DANIEL: And New Zealand. There’s the “social bubble”, there are “support bubbles”. I’ve even seen “shagbubble”.
BEN: Gross. Is that what I think it is?
DANIEL: Sorry. Probably?
BEN: Okay. Isn’t that what we used to call orgies? [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: No, no… I don’t know what we used to call them, but when you’ve got somebody that you’re maybe not living with but you’re kind of exclusively shagging, then that’s your shagbubble.
BEN: Oh, I see what you mean. Gotcha.
HEDVIG: Right.
DANIEL: So BUBBLE is definitely on the list. You know, BUBBLE’s kind of interesting because we used to decry information bubbles, but now we sort of are required to be in a bubble, in a way. And we define ourselves in relation to the bubbles that we’re in.
BEN: Let’s be clear: bubbles are sick. Right? The actual thing? Literally no one hates bubbles. Surely.
DANIEL: Bubbles are great!
HEDVIG: Oh, you mean soap bubbles!
BEN: Yeah, yeah, the actual actual progenitor of BUBBLE — the bubble — is uniformly adored by all humans, I would say. Like, you have to be such a broken person not to see a bubble, and be like: Heh. Cool.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I guess.
DANIEL: Finally, our last word of the week. Does anybody remember the robber emoji?
HEDVIG: I saw you’d written this here and I was trying to not, like, Google — I was trying to just search my mind — and I vaguely… what was it supposed to look like? Is it just a face or the full person?
BEN: It’s a full person…
DANIEL: There are two versions roaming around. So this comes from a tweet from @dynasimp. The tweet was: “I swear this emoji existed.” And there’s a photo of the emoji face, on which someone has drawn a mask and a black little woollen cap.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah! And there’s also a version where there’s the person running, carrying a money bag over their shoulder. Surely! Surely, you remember this emoji.
HEDVIG: A bit.
BEN: I am going to be honest. This will surprise no one. Having never really gotten on the emoji train at any point in my texting life, I don’t remember this. But that’s like saying I don’t remember 800 other emojis, which is also true.
DANIEL: Okay. David, any remembrance? Any experience with this one?
DAVID: Yeah, it’s beginning to ring a bell, I must say.
DANIEL: Okay, so if you feel like you remember the robber emoji, or you have a vague memory of the robber emoji, it never existed. It is a false memory.
HEDVIG: Huh!
DANIEL: Many people have tried to find it, or remember where they’d seen it, but it never was a thing, and people are incredulous.
BEN: This is a Mandela thing, isn’t it?
DANIEL: Tell me about the Mandela effect.
BEN: Oh, man. The Mandela effect, if you, dear listener, have not come across it before… like, remember how early in the show I was like: ~Oh, David, you broke my brain about the whole goodbye thing.~ Like, I was hamming that up for humour’s sake. Some of these Mandela effect things that I’m about to list may legitimately break you, so like, just sit down. It is named after Nelson Mandela. Basically, heaps and heaps of people thought Nelson Mandela was dead when he wasn’t.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: To put it simply, but there are so so so many of these. The one that rocks me the hardest is the Queen song one — do you guys know this one?
DANIEL: No.
HEDVIG: Which song?
BEN: Okay. “We Are the Champions”.
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: Sing me the final chorus — the fade out chorus — of that song.
DANIEL: I do know this.
HEDVIG: [SINGING] We’ll keep on fighting til the end…
DANIEL and HEDVIG: [SINGING] We are the champions, we are the champions…
HEDVIG: [SINGING] No time for losers — is it this bit?
BEN: Yeah, yeah.
HEDVIG: [SINGING] No time for losers.
BEN and HEDVIG: ‘Cause we are the champions…
BEN: And how does it end?
HEDVIG: In the world.
BEN: Aha!
DANIEL: It ends just like that.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: They never come back to the [SINGING] “of the world”.
BEN: That doesn’t… that’s not a thing. It is not a thing.
HEDVIG: This is really embarrassing. My fiancé’s a huge Queen fan! He’s going to listen to this later.
BEN: No, it’s not embarrassing because you are like thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of other people. And these things happen with a fair bit of regularity, where like people just, I think, collectively kind of badly remember. And then because enough people do it, our brain — being the dumb monkeys in shoes that we are — are just like: Oh, the tribe says it is, so it definitely is.
DANIEL: Well, Ben, you reminded me of the one about the Berenstain Bears. How do you spell “Berenstain”?
BEN: Oh, yes! So this is going to be… this is going to really piss off Hedvig, because this is a, like, a deeply American cultural thing.
DANIEL: I guess it is.
HEDVIG: What is this?
BEN: The Berenstain Bears…
HEDVIG: I don’t hate American things! I speak what sounds like American English! I like some Americans.
BEN: No, no, no — this is us assuming, like, a shared knowledge of Americana which… blah.
HEDVIG: Oh. Mhm.
BEN: So basically, there is a very old, sort of well loved family animation and book series, like a picture book series called The Berenstain Bears.
HEDVIG: Okay.
And if you were to ask basically anyone who grew up in the States to spell that, they would spell it B E R E N S T E I N: Berenstein.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: But it’s actually spelt Berenstain.
HEDVIG: Oh.
BEN: And if you grew up in the States, you just look at that and you’re like: someone has gone and Photoshopped literally all of the books in circulation. That’s the only explanation.
HEDVIG: Wow, that’s weird.
DANIEL: It’s pretty easy to give people false memories. and we can do it with language. I’m thinking of the experiments with Elizabeth Loftus, who did this with videos of car crashes where you say: how fast were the cars moving when they “smashed” into each other, or when they “bumped” into each other, and people consistently give higher speeds. Also if you say when they “smashed” into each other, people are more likely to remember glass. There is no glass in the video, but people will swear up and down that there was glass.
DAVID: Yeah. Gosh, this is a huge big area of research in psycholinguistics, isn’t it? When you’re talking about misremembering, I mean, from from a language point of view, the biggest area of misremembered history is the field of quotation. Misquotation. People will remember and say: you know, so and so said this, and of course they didn’t. But what you’re remembering is some kind of a group collective misremember… memory of it. I mean, “Play it again, Sam”, you know. No, it didn’t occur in the movie. You know, the lady says, “Play it, Sam. Play it.” and she does not say “Play it again.” But everybody thinks she said “Play it again, Sam”. That’s the sort of thing where the remembered quotation replaces the actual original one. And there are thousands of examples of this.
HEDVIG: I have a t-shirt like this. This is my most niche t-shirt. It’s for another podcast, called “Old Time Radio Detective Shows.” I have a t-shirt that says “Joe Friday never said ‘That’s the facts, ma’am.” [The alleged quote is “Just the facts, ma’am.” — D] Because he never did.
BEN: And Darth Vader never said, “Luke, I am your father.”
HEDVIG: There we go, yeah.
DAVID: Well, there we are. We’re finished now, aren’t we? [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: I suppose we are. David Crystal, once again, thank you so much for being on Because Language. It’s been so fantastic to talk to you. Thank you so much.
DAVID: Well, thank you, guys. Good luck for the next shows!
HEDVIG: Thank you.
BEN: Well, well done enduring us for an hour and twenty-six minutes! [LAUGHTER]
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: You know what that music means. It’s time for us to read the end bit. Ben?
BEN: Okie-dokey! As always, if you are digging what’s going on you should send your reactions and your ideas and all the really fun stuff that you want to share with us on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram, on Mastodon, and Patreon. We are becauselangpod in all of those places. Or if you want to, you can send a cheeky old email message to hello@becauselanguage.com
DANIEL: Hello.
BEN: If you like Because Language, and you want to help promote good language science podcasting, then you can tell some friends about us. Spread the word! We are seeing ourselves growing, and we want to see it growing more. Please!
HEDVIG: And as some attentive people might have noticed, this is episode three. And the last public show we had was episode one, so what happened? We had an episode two, and it didn’t go in our public feed — it went in our Patreon-only feed. If you want to hear that as well, and other shenanigans we get up to there, then sign up as a Patreon. You can go to patreon.com/becauselangpod and sign up. We have a lot of great patreons and we’re very grateful to them. and they do good things for us besides giving us money, They also come up with good questions for our guests, like today.
BEN: Better questions than us. Always.
HEDVIG: And we’d like to think some of them. So we’d like to thank Lyssa, Kate, Termy, Chris, Carolin, Anna, Helen, Christelle, Andy, Jack, Kristofer, Kate, Michael, Nasrin, Binh, Elías, Jen, Dustin, Kitty, Lord Mortis, Larry, Whitney, Matt, Nigel, Damien, and Bob. And new this time around, Ayesha. Thanks to all of our patreons.
DANIEL: The music you hear in our show was written and performed by Drew Krapljanov of Ryan Beno and of Didion’s Bible. Find them on Bandcamp and wherever you get your music. Thanks for listening! Catch you next time. Because Language.