Words of the Week are coming out of the woodwork, and who better to work through them with us than Grant Barrett of A Way with Words? Wow.
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Become a Patron!Show notes
A Way with Words | Radio show and podcast about language and linguistics, with callers from all over
https://www.waywordradio.org/
Mark Twain Never Said He Read Obituaries With Pleasure – The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/05/mark-twain-didnt-say-thing-about-obituaries/350238/
What is Pinkster? – Historic Hudson Valley
https://hudsonvalley.org/article/what-is-pinkster/
Pinkster – Wiktionary
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Pinkster
Covid: Biden orders investigation into virus origin as lab leak theory debated
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57260009
How science demolishes the right-wing fiction of a Wuhan “lab leak” as the source of coronavirus – World Socialist Web Site
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/06/21/sci1-j21.html
Sway: Dr. Fauci Claps Back on Apple Podcasts
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/dr-fauci-claps-back/id1528594034?i=1000526249260
Why Is ‘Worcester’ Pronounced ‘Wooster’? | Grammar Girl
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/why-is-worcester-pronounced-wooster
Vaccine Emoji Comes to Life
https://blog.emojipedia.org/vaccine-emoji-comes-to-life/
Apple revamps syringe emoji for Covid vaccines
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56099162
Shirley Manson Takes BuzzFeed’s Alt Grrrl Quiz, Doesn’t Get Herself
https://gawker.com/shirley-manson-takes-buzzfeeds-alt-grrrl-quiz-doesnt-1515001875
Transcript
Grant: Is Ben joining us today?
Daniel: He’s not sadly. And Hedvig won’t be either.
Grant: That’s too bad, aw.
Daniel: I know. But that’s gonna add to the cozy intimacy which you and I…
Grant: We need a new theme song. [SINGS] “Two white guys from America! Bah bah bah. Yeah! Cause you don’t have enough of two white guys on a podcast! Dun dun dunn. White guys have opinions! Yeah!”
Daniel: [SINGS] They’re sexy, complexy! They’re Generation X-y!
[LAUGHTER]
Grant: Ah, you know, if I hear one more podcast that’s just a bunch of white guys being like “You know what? I like the sound of my voice! Hey, I like the sound of my voice too! We should do a podcast.”
[INTRO MUSIC]
Daniel: Hello, and welcome to this episode of Because Language: a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley and I am joined by our special guest co-host. He’s also the co-host (along with Martha Barnette) of the spectacularly popular podcast and radio show A Way with Words: It’s Grant Barrett.
Grant: Hiya, Daniel. Nice to talk to you from Anaheim. I’m just like practically across the street from Disneyland.
Daniel: Oh my gosh! What are you doing talking to me?
Grant: I can smell the big mice from here.
Daniel: Ew.
Grant: They’re like six feet tall running around in public. It’s weird.
Daniel: Oh, okay. Do they smell? Because…
Grant: No, no, the whole place has≤ like, piped in smells. They, like, pipe in the fake smell of baked cookies.
Daniel: Wow. Oh, that’s fresh. Yeah,
Grant: Yeah, and if you’re around the Winnie the Pooh stuff, they pipe it out in the smell of honey.
Daniel: Oh my gosh, they think of everything. All right, well, last time I saw you we were in Times Square. And…
Grant: Yeah. What were we doing?
Daniel: We were having cheesecake at Junior’s.
Grant: Oh, yeah, that’s right.
Daniel: It was awesome! But if you see the Elmos and the Cookie Monsters there, they do smell and it is not… It is not cookies.
Grant: The question is… I want to see like the Elmos in Times Square versus the Elmos in Las Vegas. Like, I want to just see, like, verbal sparring, like a round of The Dozens or something or maybe fist fights. I don’t know. I don’t want to become the new bumfights guy? But I’m just saying I want to see the… they’re like two different breeds of Elmo. Like subspecies of Elmo.
Daniel: I just feel that the East Coast Elmos are gonna be scrappy. That’s…
Grant: Right? Because they got to fight off pigeons and, like, the Naked Cowboy, and he’s all buff and stuff.
Daniel: He’s terrifying.
Grant: Right? I wish I had that.
Daniel: But then I think the Las Vegas Elmos could bring it. But I’m not sure.
Grant: All right. So here we are. It’s nice to talk to you, Daniel. Thank you for inviting me on the show. I don’t know if I can meet up to Ben plus Hedvig, but I’ll do my best.
Daniel: Well, you know, you do have something special on your side and that is that you are a member of the Third Timers Club.
Grant: Oh, really?
Daniel: Yeah!
Grant: Wait, let’s see. I did one of the American Dialect Society Word of the Year talks, I talked about that. What else did I do?
Daniel: You gave us your favorite thing about language for episode one.
Grant: Oh, yeah. But that was like a 15 second clip, so…
Daniel: Still counts!
Grant: Okay.
Daniel: And now you’re here. So we have this unofficial tradition where if you’re on three times you might be invited to be an honorary co-host. So, you get a t-shirt.
Grant: Wow, is this like when you cross the equator you have to put on the grass skirt and sing bawdy tunes like sea shanties, yeah?
Daniel: Exactly like that. “Bawdy” or “body”? You have the cot-caught merger, oh my gosh!
Grant: No, I don’t usually actually. I don’t usually have cot-caught. Yeah, “Don” and “Dawn” are different names for me.
Daniel: Okay. Okay. That’s cool. And I just want to say also that in the early days of Because Language when we were transitioning from Talk the Talk to Because Language, folks, Grant was especially encouraging with helpful advice. And that was really great to have at that time. So thanks very much.
Grant: Yeah, I was like, screw it. Do it!
Daniel: Change the damn name!
Grant: I was like, jump! Jump! They’ll catch you, they’ll catch you.
Daniel: And they did. It worked. Hedvig Skirgård is off in Sweden celebrating Midsommar. I don’t know what that is, but I did notice a movie with that title. I’m pretty sure it’s like an explainer or a documentary. So I’m looking forward to watching that.
Grant: I thought it was a horror flick. Doesn’t involve like a Wicker Man of some kind?
Daniel: What? Oh.
Grant: No, oh, I don’t know. [LAUGHS]
Daniel: Well, I’ll find out.
Grant: Hej… hej, Hedvig. I just want to say hej, that’s all.
Daniel: “Hej”, with a “j”. And not sure what Ben is doing. You can say hello to Ben with a “j” as well.
Grant: Hej, [AUSTRALIAN ACCENT] hello, hello.
Daniel: Hello. Oh, nice, nice, you’ve got the accent. This is a very special patron bonus episode, our second in a row. If you are listening to this when this first drops, I’d like to thank you — yes, you — for being a patron. You’re helping us get out the word for solid linguistics and helping us examine news and research, which is what we love to do. So thank you. But if you’re listening to this a good while later than June 2021, then thank you, as well for being a great listener. You contribute to the show too. Please consider helping us by telling your friends about us and possibly becoming a Patreon patron. And we are “becauselangpod” there. Okay, now that that’s done: Grant?
Grant: Yes?
Daniel: Our listeners have sent us ideas for Words of the Week and they have sent so many that we have a backlog. So, of course, I thought of you.
Grant: And that’s why Ben’s not here, because he doesn’t like Words of the Week.
Daniel: [LAUGHS] He noped out, he seriously did.
Grant: [AS BEN] “More than one?”
Daniel: He just couldn’t do it. Ugh! You are of course the word guy, or A word guy. You do a lot of work with the American Dialect Society’s annual Word of the Year vote.
Grant: Yeah, for better or worse I’m lexically oriented. Yeah, it’s what Geoff Pullum derides as the “big bag of words” people.
Daniel: Oh, man, but that’s great! Words, words are important. It’s pretty much July. Do you have any ideas as to front runners for this year? You’ve got your eye on it, surely.
Grant: Oh, god, front runners…
Daniel: Come on!
Grant: Hold on. Let me go to my master list of stuff that I’ve saved. You know, I’ve got a list, right?
Daniel: I know you’ve got a list. You whip it out.
Grant: I’ve got a list out. Yeah, it’s it’s long and in my pocket.
Daniel: Obviously, we’re all just waiting for the next CHEUGY.
Grant: So what I do: I have something called my “word tips” file. I used to do a Words of the Year list for the New York Times every year, but then they stopped wanting it. So I said all right, fine. But for 10 years, I did it and so I had this habit, so … Okay, here’s one: NORMAL COUNTRY.
Daniel: Oh, shoot.
Grant: Do you know NORMAL COUNTRY?
Daniel: No, I’ve never heard that expression.
Grant: Yeah, NORMAL COUNTRY… It’s about like, you have these crazy things happening to you, terrible stuff happening. Just the worst stuff and you just like tag it or put in the tweet or the message “normal country” meaning “Yeah, that’s every day. That’s just how it is.”
Daniel: Oh, man. Okay. Wow. Sardonic observation. Okay.
Grant: Yeah. That’s one of my front runners right there.
Daniel: And I’ve never heard of it. You know, I tend to be pretty on top of these things but, no that one got past me. I’ve been nutmegged by that one. Nutmegged.
Grant: Yeah, nutmegged. I know “nutmegged”.
Daniel: Okay, just checking.
Grant: I’ve been watching the UEFA Cup and the Cup of America. So yeah, I know “nutmeg”.
Daniel: Tell us a bit about A Way with Words, tell us what you do.
Grant: A Way with Words is an American public radio show, which means non-commercial, that broadcasts from coast to coast in the US. And you can hear it in little bits of Canada and Mexico as well. Also has a popular podcast and we answer questions about language. We tend towards the kind of folklore slash word origins slash expressions that your family uses kind of side of things. So we do stray into regular old linguistics. We do do, you know, grammar disputes, and speaking and writing well, and slang into words and stuff. But what we try to do… we talk about it as language seen through the lenses of family, history, and culture. So what that does is, you come to us with something your kid brought home from school, and we try to find out more about it. Or you come to us with something you remember your grandmother used to say, and we tried to find out more about it. Or you come to us and say, “My boss, and I had a dispute at work, but he’s my boss. So he won. But I still think he’s, I still think he’s wrong. So what do I do? You know, do I continue to argue with my boss?” So sometimes the show was about manners. You know, that’s a manners question more than it’s a language question.
And so it’s fun. And because we have such a large audience, we have an exploding inbox, we get tons of email and instant messages on social media messages and voicemail and we save all the voicemail that we get. It presents as live, it’s what’s called “callout radio”, we do it like Car Talk used to do it. So if you call us you leave a message with your thought or your idea and then a producer gets back to you try to book you for a future show. In that way, we can make sure that we’re properly sampling all across the spectrum of questions, all across the spectrum of geographies. and all across the spectrum of identities. We try to make sure we get people who – it’s more than just white folks, you know? It’s it’s everybody from everywhere, including people who speak English not as a first language and as a second, third, fifth language, what have you. And when you do that, it’s funny the doors open up. When you put one or two people, say, who are from India and don’t speak English as a first language or as a primary language on the show, you’ll be surprised. You’ll get more calls from people who are from India and don’t speak English as a first or second language. That’s really interesting. So that representation ctually encourages others to call so it works really well for us.
Daniel: What I love about that is that it’s so personal. I mean, language is personal, obviously. But you found a way to make it tie in to family, and current needs, and identity. And I’m sure that keeps your show on people’s minds.
Grant: Yeah, one of the things that we found during the pandemic was we started getting a lot of emails from people who noticed that we’re a nice intellectual refuge. That is, you can come to us and the regular troubles of the world kind of aren’t present, you know, we’re not constantly… we don’t have COVID on a, you know, a three hour repeating cycle and we don’t have presidential politics on a repeating cycle. And yet, you can still come away educated, you still feel like you’re testing your brain, you feel you’re stretching your intellect. And that’s kind of what we offer, in general have always offered. A place where you can still feel like you’re learning and growing and acquiring knowledge and yet, you don’t have to go through the typical stresses of the news cycle in order to do that.
Daniel: Yeah. I’d like to try something. I get questions a lot, both on Because Language and also on the two ABC shows that I do both in Perth and Adelaide. Some questions just have a way of popping up again and again. I’d like you to hit me with a question that you’ve had many more times than once, see if I can handle it.
Grant: Man, I have got a whole bunch of these. Alright. A lot of people call and say, you know,I moved to a new part of the country (and I’ll have you guess where when I say the phrase) and everyone says something like, “Oh, I’m glad you called before you came because I was able to redd up the house before you showed up.”
Daniel: Oh my gosh.
Grant: REDD UP.
Daniel: REDD UP… Where are we? Are we in the… Okay, we’re in the northern cities, we’re like up north and middle.
Grant: Yeah, we’re in Ohio and Pennsylvania, probably.
Daniel: Okay, that was a little further east than I thought.
Grant: And we’re in a Scots-Irish area. Because its a word, it’s an expression that means “to clean up” or “organize”,” to make ready a house”. You might say “I redd up the table” means you get ready for dinner or you “redd up a room” it means you “straighten it, organize it or declutter it”, and this tends to be used by people in that part of the country who in this area settled by people originally from from Scotland.
Daniel: Wow, so it’s “ready”. I was thinking like “to heat up the place” because heat is red and things like that. I was obviously off base.
Grant: It’s REDD with two d’s usually.
Daniel: R-E-D-D, like Redd Cross, the band. Okay.
Grant: Redd up, yeah.
Daniel: Okay, I have one and I’m gonna throw these at you.
Grant: [LAUGHTER]
Daniel: “Why do people say OFF OF? This annoys me.” This is what people say, that it annoys them a lot. “What’s the deal with OFF OF? Why the OF? Why can’t you just say OFF?”
Grant: It’s an idiom. It’s an idiom. Don’t parse it for logic or it’ll just break down in front of you, you know?
Daniel: You do not question the idiom!
Grant: Don’t take the toy apart, or it’ll stop working.
[LAUGHTER]
Daniel: Okay.
Grant: It’s been around since… it’s been around for hundreds of years, about 400 years. It’s mostly verbal, we mostly say it and not write it. You know, people say, “Oh, it’s repetitive. We don’t need the OF”, but you know, most spoken language is redundant and repetitive. We just don’t notice. But there are a few of these pet phrases that we catch on to. And once one person complains about it, then the complaint gets passed around like the common cold and that OFF OF is one of those complaints that is contagious. Whereas if you really listened to the way people talk, it is astonishingly repetitive. It is amazingly redundant. There’s constant restatement and constant rephrasing. That’s just the way we are when we speak.
Daniel: It’s true. People just hand complaints around like, I don’t know, the Papyrus font or MOIST. And it’s not that they’re terrible things. It’s just like, “Oh, I notice now”. It’s like telling somebody about bad kerning and then they see bad kerning everywhere they go. And, you know, it makes you feel special.
Grant: [LAUGHS] Yeah. Things that come with emotional energy, whether it’s negative or positive, tend to be emotionally contagious. And so disliking Nickelback is one of those, or sometimes appreciating an artist you’re like, “Oh, yeah, she’s amazing.” And then if you press somebody, they don’t know that movie star very well. They maybe haven’t even seen more than one of their films, but they just have read or heard a lot of other people say that this particular actor’s really amazing. And maybe they are, but their opinion is still only informed through the emotion of other people and not through their own experience. And that’s fair, because this is… we’re humans and this is how we operate, we just have to recognize what we’re doing when we do it.
Daniel: You know what everyone hates this week?
Grant: What?
Daniel: Ketchup. Everybody hates ketchup this week. They’re like, “Oh, that’s a child’s condiment,” or I heard someone say “barbecue sauce is like ketchup, but good.” And so, you know, you just sort of watched these complaints get hand around about ketchup, but unlike “Well, I guess we hate ketchup now.”
Grant: Yeah, it’s true. The ketchup one is really interesting because well, disliking something in the public sphere (such as social media, or talk radio, or the kind of commentary TV) is a real good way to develop a following. People like to hear passion and the passion that comes with negativity is really easy to generate. And we might not realize why all these chemicals are firing off in our brains and why we’re getting a kick out of this stuff. And sometimes it’s the negativity. This is not something I invented or discovered. I’m just explaining what other people have reported. There’s a real reason that we’re attracted to a whole host of people having a real strong argument against ketchup. It’s because it makes us feel the emotion.
Daniel: And then we come along the language folks, and we say, “Hey, everybody, language variation is normal. Everybody speaks with a range of styles, the thing that you’re getting worked up about is actually not worth getting worked up about and you already do a lot of these things in other ways.” And that’s a hard sell.
Grant: We sound like mealy-mouthed spoilers. We’re like, ~Hey, you guys. Don’t do that. You could, you can like each other be friends.~
Daniel: ~Don’t hate. Give me my hat back!~ Yeah. So I guess I would just say, if you can say “I jumped on the train”, or” I jumped on TO the train”, then you can say “I jumped off the train”, or “I jumped off OF the train”, it’s really not a big deal. And redundancy is built into language, so that’s a good answer. I like your answer. All right. Last question about your show. Would you say that that A Way with Words is kind of non-political?
[PAUSE]
Grant: Yeah, but why are you asking?
Daniel: Because our show is like really political. Like, there’s a spectrum, right? It’s like, on the one side, it goes from not so political, very political, it’s like, Way with Words, Lingthusiasm, us, you know, Vocal Fries…
Grant: I think Vocal Fries is all the way out there in the most political spectrum. And God bless them too.
Daniel: You also got Unstandardized English, which is like, you know, even possibly even farther, which is great. And I love it for all that.
Grant: Yeah.
Daniel: Do you find it confining?
Grant: Do I find it confining?
Daniel: Yeah, there are certain things you just don’t… don’t do.
- – * – * – * – * – * GOT HERE * – * – * – * – * – *
Grant: No. And I’ll tell you why we operate this way. It really was not by design. But it’s been a nice spot for us. When I when I first started making dictionaries with Oxford University Press, this is back in the early 2000s. My first dictionary was a book of political slang. And it wasn’t a very good book, so don’t go looking it up. But I did enjoy it and got involved in, you know, got more interested in politics and started paying more attention to the language. But, you know, I also started finding my work there, and from my old dictionary website, Double-Tongued Dictionary, being used in ways that I didn’t like by people that I didn’t agree with. So for example, I had an entry for ANCHOR BABY on my old Double-Tongued website, and I thought my definition was pretty balanced. You know, but before you know it, fans of Rush Limbaugh’s radio show (and he’s a conservative, or was he’s dead now) God bless. [LAUGHS] Sorry, he died, nobody should die. But if anybody deserved it more, it’s Rush Limbaugh.
Daniel: Yeah, Clarence Darrow once said, “I have never killed anyone but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.”
Grant: Yes. So he was a conservative American radio show host. And he and his people (or at least his people) were quoting my definition and they would sometimes mentioned me and my credentials to give the definition authority. And they seem to be using it to prove that women from other countries were lining up at the border right before their due dates so that they could go into labor as soon as they were on the other side. And you know, immigrate as if immigration is a bad thing. And it really left a bad taste in my mouth and it wasn’t the only time; it happens all the time. Every dictionary maker goes through this. And you know, and there’s another part of this: Public Radio carries our show and many of the stations would not carry us if we had the slightest political whiff whatsoever. We are not a politics show. We’re an entertainment show when we go on the… we tend to be aired in slots where people are not expecting politics. And, you know, Public Radio and the pod universe are just awash in political content. I mean, I think Public Radio overdoes it to the point where I’ve gone a whole years without turning on the radio, just to avoid another political story that I’m already getting from social media, my email and the internet at large, you know? I mean, I’m not avoiding politics, I just don’t want to have it beaten in my head by the cycle, you know, the news cycle. So Public Radio too often forgets about the entertainment part. And that’s what we’re doing here. And so, as I mentioned earlier, my radio partners and I kind of all realized that we’d come into the same direction, particularly when we started getting those emails and phone calls from our listeners saying, “Look, you’ve been a place that’s a refuge for me.” You know, sure, we might discuss things like, you know, the origin of a word like Senate, which actually comes from a word meaning ‘old men’, or the pronunciation of “gerrymander” (the guy’s name was originally pronounced “Gary”), but we weren’t going to be talking about new partisan insults, you know?
Daniel: Yeah.
Grant: The slang insults from the left and the right, that just appeared, and we weren’t going to help mock a politician’s pronunciation or verbal gaffes. And we weren’t going to assist anyone in using a question on our show as a proxy for painting any part of the political spectrum a certain color. And that’s kind of what you get, you get these questions that really aren’t questions. They’re just somebody trying to make a political dig. And they’re really easy to suss out. And, you know, sometimes the question, you think, “Oh, well, I’m clever enough that I can guide this listener to a space where their intent won’t matter and we can get something good out of this.” But really, it’s never worth the effort. So anyway, it’s been a great decision. We get zillions of different messages and contacts and people saying they see us as an educated, intelligent, respectful refuge, away from the kind of discord and disgruntlement that has been such a part of the election cycles since basically 9/11.
Daniel: It seems really hard to talk about language and not talk about politics, because a lot of things are political that didn’t used to be. Like, you know, if we mentioned pronouns, or you talk about naming of products, which takes you to giving products and sports teams racist names, it’s really hard for us not to address that through our political lens. Do you know what I mean?
Grant: Yeah, I do. And you’ll see a little note in our mission statement where we talk about defusing the places where people’s complaints about language and their peeves about language are almost always a proxy for something else. People… You’ve mentioned this. I know we’ve talked about this face-to-face too. And most of our colleagues understand this, but the world at large outside of the language biz doesn’t: When you complain about language, typically it’s about you and not about the person you’re complaining about, or about the mistake that you’re complaining about. I mean, okay, sometimes our complaints are good natured and we don’t really mean it. But typically, they’re often, they’re a dodge for, s proxy: for racism, elitism, classism, sexism, gender ism, ageism, I mean, and many more of those sorts, isms and those sorts of terms. And so on our show, when those do come up, for example, when we talk about the new pronouns, when we do talk about them, we talk about them in an apolitical context and we normalize them, we make it clear that this is an ongoing trend, you’ve simply noticed it late. And isn’t this interesting? Isn’t this amazing? And how great it is that we can accommodate our fellow humans in the ways that they want to be accommodated. And so in that way, we’re doing politics by giving you an answer that you didn’t know you needed when you feel uncomfortable about these changes to language that may have a political focus.
Daniel: Yeah.
Grant: We’re helping you so the next time you’re awkward having to use “they” as a pronoun, you might remember our show go, “Oh, yeah, Martin and Grant said, all I have to do is…”
Daniel: And what is considered political has changed. I mean…
Grant: That’s true.
Daniel: A lot of things didn’t used to be political, and then politics moved. So, it seems like you can’t avoid it, but but you’re doing it in a really good way, in a really positive way.
Grant: It’s hard, it can be hard. Sometimes we fail and you know, the email boxes show it. Email boxes show “I can’t believe you did this. I can’t believe you did that.” Or, you know, the funny thing is we’ll do a segment sometimes, and it happens everywhere, but you’ll get batches of emails from all ends of the political spectrum, claiming that we were biased against them. Left and right and in the middle. And how is one segment all of those things? but basically what they’re saying is we didn’t handle it with a delicacy that they’re used to, and that we would do better next time. Not that they’re correct about the bias being there, but really what they’re saying is, we weren’t clear. And so we have to take that lesson away and do better next time.
Daniel: “We felt uncomfortable with that.”
Grant: Yeah, yeah, basically, that’s what they’re saying. So their conclusion is incorrect, but the emotions are probably correct.
Daniel: You’ve got a big heart, Grant.
Grant: I try. It’s a hard one.
Daniel: Yeah. Hey, you ready to get some words?
Grant: Oh, more? [LAUGHS] Yes!
Daniel: Let’s do ’em. Okay, this one comes from Jenna on FaceboOkay. It’s “Juneteenth” (we’re reaching back a little ways). Jenna says “Juneteenth was recently made a national holiday in the USA. Do we know the linguistic origin of the word Juneteenth? It sounds like it means ‘an indeterminate day between the 13th and the 19th of June.'” Let’s start with my partner. My partner had never heard about Juneteenth until this year, because she’s Australian. Whereas I, as a white American kid… had never heard about Juneteenth either. Well, no, that’s not, that’s not quite true, but it never came up in my protracted education. I just never heard of it in high school and never — was that your experience? Or were you more on the ball than I was?
Grant: No, no, that’s true for me. I’d never heard it until I became you know, a lexicographer and a word guy and it passed by before my eyes among my travels. That’s only when I found it.
Daniel: Yep. I knew it was the 19th, I did know that. Which is funny, because my partner asked, “Well, what date is it?” And I thought, “isn’t it obvious? It’s the 19th.” But then I realized, “Oh, no, there are like six other things that could be.”
Daniel: Juneteenth. Do we know much about the origin?
Grant: We do. We do know some, you know, it might surprise people to know that it was a holiday in Texas before it was a holiday anywhere else, because that’s where it started. It celebrates the emancipation of slaves. In 1865, there was a General Gordon Granger, who landed at Galveston, which is a port city. And he landed there with a regiment of Union soldiers and read General Order Number Three, which included sentences along the lines of “all slaves are free.” And so that became a celebration among people in East Texas to start and then it spread throughout the state. And, you know, spread to Louisiana and Arkansas and then by 1979, it became an official holiday in Texas itself, and then continued to spread from there.
Daniel: And when they read that announcement, I always think of the people saying back, “But since when?”…. “Two years ago.” [CLEARS THROAT] Took us a while…took us a while to get here.”
Grant: Yeah, yeah. It’s funny how recent that actually is. 1865 is actually… In the history of humanity, 1865 is yesterday.
Daniel: That’s like two or three human lifetimes.
Grant: Yes, that’s right.
Daniel: Yeah. Do we know how I got blended as a portmanteau? Because I know Ben Zimmer did an excellent article in the Wall Street Journal about how it was “June the teenth” for a while it was “June-teenth”, and then it became “Juneteenth.” Do we know much about this? I was unable to get too much more about that.
Grant: No, I don’t know any more about it, than you’ve uncovered or Ben, whose research is always exquisite, was able to uncover. What I do know is that it is interesting in how early a blend it is. Blends at the time were not that common. And so blends before 1900 tended to be mostly company names and not anything else.
Daniel: Okay. We’ll have a link to Ben’s article on our blog, becauselanguage.com. I just want to say Juneteenth is my favorite portmanteau holiday.
Grant: Yeah. By the way, there’s another Black holiday which might come around the pike soon. Keep your eyes on it’s pinkster (P-I-N-K-S-T-E-R) that African Americans in New York picked up from the Dutch there. So I don’t know if there are legs behind its movement, but it’s still celebrated in some places in New York State and perhaps we’ll see that the holiday as well.
Daniel: Then that was intended to commemorate anything in particular?
Grant: It’s just being themselves. So the African Americans kind of basically borrowed it from the Dutch and it became an African American holiday, something that they didn’t have. They had no holidays for themselves.
Daniel: Wow.
Grant: Until they took it from the Dutch. The Dutch stopped celebrating it.
Daniel: I am just eaten alive with curiosity about the name Pinkster.
Grant: Isn’t it lovely? Yeah. Google is your friend.
Daniel: Okay, okay. Okay, I can do that. Okay, another one. And this one I noticed in a tweet from Marie Beecham on Twitter which I retweeted. Marie says “I started saying ‘enslaved people’ instead of ‘slaves’, and you should consider making this change too. ‘Slave’ is an identity, it says this is who they are. ‘Enslaved’ is a circumstance it says this is what was done to them. The language we use matters.” And I have noticed a lot of people writing ‘enslaved people’ instead of ‘slaves’ because ‘slaves’ sounds gross and ‘enslaved people’ seems like a more natural choice.
Grant: Agreed.
Daniel: So I commend that to our listeners.
Grant: Yeah, Martha and I talked about this on the show in 2015 and one of the other phrases that was put it was you could also talk about them historically, as ‘enslaved Africans’ or just ‘captives’, depending on what part of the process you’re talking about, just to make it clear that this wasn’t willing. If you look at some of the heavily modified textbooks and the way that slavery is discussed, particularly in the American South, it makes it sounds like they were just mistreated plantation workers rather than people who were stolen from Africa, whipped, beaten, deprived, families intentionally broken, so forth and so on. And it was, you know…
Daniel: Yeah, that’s it. Okay, let’s go on. This one was suggested by Wolf of the Wisp: “lab-leak”. This one’s been in the news a lot.
Grant: Yeah, “lab-leak”.
Daniel: The idea that SARS-CoV-2 was somehow engineered in the lab in China, and then either wittingly or unwittingly leaked to the world. How did this gain traction in the mainstream? It’s just weird to me, because it’s been in the news because President Joe Biden of the USA has said, “We need to get to the bottom of this, we need to have an investigation.” And I think this has implications for how we talk about things that Dr. Anthony Fauci of the NIH, has said in an episode of Sway with Kara Swisher, a New York Times joint, that there isn’t anything more to this than there ever was. And yet, this is being investigated. And yet, in our current environment, simply investigating something is taken as evidence for the thing you’re investigating, in the eyes of conspiracy theorists.
Grant: I agree. You can’t investigate enough for conspiracy theorists to be satisfied. You can never have enough investigations, you can never have enough committees, you can never have enough eyes on it. They’ll never trust you have to have done sufficient enough a job. So if he’s just trying to appease those people, it’s going to fail. Unless he gives them the answer that they want.
Daniel: Because confirmation bias is how you stay in a cultish situation, which is a callback to our episode with Amanda Montel. Okay, good for that one. Let’s go on to Margareth on Twitter: “reboarding”. This is one that I had not heard before, “Is reboarding another example of new words inspired by COVID? Or was it already in use, for example, returning to work after maybe parental leave? And does it specifically imply returning to the office or returning to the workplace in general?” “Reboarding”: have you encountered this one, Grant?
Grant: I have, but, you know, I’m more interested in thinking about “board” and “boarding” as combining forms, because it’s really been very productive. We’re looking at “offboarding”, “reboarding”, “inboarding”, “onboarding”, and all those different terms, all referring to what you do with employees. Do you bring them inside the company, outside the company? Do you fire them and hire them back as contractors? There’s a variety of different terms for each of those situations and some more all involving forms of “boarding”.
Daniel: And is the “board” a ship like “Welcome aboard”?
Grant: Yeah, I think both derive from the HR term “onboarding”. This is the induction process that you do when you bring somebody onto staff.
Daniel: Yep, I was looking in all the corpus tools that I could find for “reboarding”. If you look prior to 2020, it’s pretty much all about boats and buses, “reboarding the ship”, “reboarding the yacht”. Even the Google Ngram corpus, which goes to 2019 now, comes up empty for “employee reboarding” or “reboarding employees”. Google Trends just blinked at me and said, “There isn’t enough data”, which I thought was interesting.
Grant: I heard it in an interview and I wish I had noted where, but it was somebody talking about exactly the circumstance that you said: bringing employees back into the office after they’ve been working from home for so long.
Daniel: So Margareth asks, “Does it imply returning to the office or returning to the workplace in general?” I’m not sure how to take that because they sound like kind of the same thing to me. Do you have to go to the same office again? Or can you just be re-entering the workforce? I think probably the former in my reading.
Grant: That’s how I heard it in the one time I heard it.
Daniel: So going back to the same office?
Grant: But, it’s early days for the term it obviously, you know, hasn’t settled yet, so something new could happen to it.
Daniel: Okay, well, here’s another one with a slightly longer history and that’s “staycation”.
Grant: Oh, yeah.
Daniel: Fiona Jordan on Twitter — I was unaware of this difference by the way — she tweets: “I am chill about language change, but to all you plonkers” — love that word– “plonkers who have appropriated ‘staycation’ to mean ‘holiday that doesn’t involve my passport’, the onus is on you for ‘holiday where I sleep in my own bed each night but do fun stuff instead of work’. Come on, what’s the word?”
Grant: [LAUGHTER]
Daniel: Now, what is your familiarity with this term? In your experience does a staycation have to be at home? Or can it just be in your same town or county or state?
Grant: All right, when you sent me the list of things you want to talk about today, I did look this one up. And we just have to acknowledge that we both know that it’s as early as 1944 in the Oxford English Dictionary, right?
Daniel: Yep, yep.
Grant: But! In my files, I have a press release that I saved from 2009 that a company called SpinVox put out and they defined it as, quote, “a holiday in the country in which you lived”
Daniel: In the country in which you live?
Grant: Yeah. So it’s basically that’s what she’s, that’s the definition she’s complaining about. So we’re looking at this definition, basically, being around for 12 years.
Daniel: Yeah, okay. I found also a 2009 quote from our show called Army Wives: “This my darlings is what the trendsetters refer to as a ‘staycation'” “A staycation?” “Precisely, all the pleasures of a trip in the confines of one’s own home.”
Grant: Ohhh.
Daniel: But, from 2010 in the Christian Science Monitor… “Staycation”, they defined it as “taking a vacation from work but staying close to home to save money.” So it seems like there’s always been this flip-floppy a variation in “staycation”.
Grant: Yeah, I think people have in their mind the perfect vacation where you completely shut down the house and rehome the pets and turn off the utilities and you’re gone for three weeks and it involves passports and airplanes and tropical isles and you come back refreshed and tanned and… No one takes vacations like that anymore, at least nobody in my life.
Daniel: On Because Language we have the power and the authority to declare language to be a certain way by fiat. So now’s our chance. What is the word for when you take a staycation but you do stay at home? We can let them have “staycation” for like staying in the same city or the same state or no passport, but…
Grant: Okay, so let them have “staycation” because they’ve already ruined it.
Daniel: [LAUGHS] That’s what happens with words when they change them. They are ruined.
Grant: [AS CHARLTON HESTON] Damn them! Damn them! You damn dirty apes, you blew it up!
Daniel: How about “homecation”? Ah, I don’t like it.
Grant: You know, I really dislike… I’m one of those people who really dislikes blend. Just like I really dislike blends.
Daniel: [LAUGHS] Oh really?
Grant: Because they’re usually terrible! They’re, you know, they’re just kind of predictable and not that clever. And I want… good blends should pass by you on first hearing without realizing they’re a blend. And they almost never do.
Daniel: Yep, and then I have a hard time finding them for Word of the Week because they’re just so natural.
Grant: [LAUGHS] Yeah. Well, by the way, here’s another one that came up “daycation” — that’s a one day vacation.
Daniel: A daycation.
Grant: Yeah.
Daniel: See, that preserves the “ay” syllable.
Grant: Yeah, it sure does. And then the other one that came up during the pandemic was “Coronacation”, but that has like three different definitions. One, one you had to take where you know you’re at home all the time because the pandemic. Two, you did a really cheap vacation because Corona ruined all your plans and airlines are shut down and car rentals are hard to get, and then another one is “Coronacation is working from home”.
Daniel: Yeah, okay. “Coronacation” also sounds a bit like a “coronation”, which is where you declare yourself a king of the house and you refuse to leave.
Grant: [LAUGHS] Pile up the couch cushions, sit on top.
Daniel: “I am the lord of all I survey!”
Grant: “Bring me ice cream! I demand ice cream!”
Daniel: [LAUGHS] Okay, this one was suggested by Drew, my darling adult son who is a great guy. He said, “Dad, I’ve got this word that I think you might want to know about it’s ‘mutuals’. ‘Mutuals’: people who you follow online and who also follow you but you also kind of know them in real life or you have a you have a closer relationship than just the typical fan/important-person dynamic.” Have you heard this one?
Grant: Yeah, yeah, that’s a real common… that’s really common in social media.
Daniel: Okay, cool. Well, you’re you’re cooler than I am. Have you ever seen um, I saw this phrase “Mutual’s keep scrolling”, which means “if we follow each other and we know each other, you might want to just not read this because I’m only releasing this information to people who I don’t know, because it’s too personal”, which seemed like a weird inversion to me.
Grant: Yeah, that is a weird inversion. Like, why don’t you want your mutuals to know?
Daniel: Maybe it’s like a shameful secret that you can only confess to someone anonymous?
Grant: But don’t post it to the internet then, dingdong!
Daniel: [LAUGHS] You don’t know how this works, Grant! You have to!
Grant: I know you gotta feed the giant maw of social media, it must be fed or it comes after you.
Daniel: Arbitrary approval clicks must be garnered.
Grant: Yeah.
Daniel: Let’s see. So thank you, Drew, for that one. I’ve been noticing a couple of words that relate to the impact that something has on someone. And they are “land” and “hit”. So I’ll just read some examples here: “How is this idea going to land with voters?” And thats gow that’s how is it going to impact them. “Our latest episode lands on Tuesday”, episodes don’t drop anymore, they land. I’ve seen a lot of people, write, you know, “This thing has an impact on me, it just hits different”. And then this one: “Any podcast recommendations for whilst I work on art? I have a few I listen to but they don’t hit as much as they did before.” So I’m just noticing these, these words “landing” and “hitting” as they pertain to the way that something affects us or the way that it bumps against us when we encounter it.
Grant: Those are good examples of continuance, I think, really good examples of old language being, you know, thoroughly woven into everyday language. And I want to talk about “hits different”, that sounds slangy, it has a slang mouthfeel, I think, because of “different” being used as an adverb, rather than an adjective. So it kind of jumps out at you, right? That’s slang.
Daniel: Yes, flat adverbs, I love those.
Grant: Yeah, “hit’s different”. But both “land” and “hit” have figurative uses dating back hundreds of years that are very much the same as the ones that you’re talking about. And that’s not to take anything away. What I’m talking about is this further continuance of these words further away from their literal sources down the figurative path. So we might get a couple 100 more years to being so different that they’re not even recognized as being the same words anymore. That’d be amazing.
Daniel: Yeah, I love it when words generate new senses. Like that’s, you know, you talk about portmanteaus… Portmanteaus are fun, but they don’t stick around very long. But when a word subtly shifts senses and gathers a new sense, it’s very likely to stick around I think, and it’s sometimes just fails to register. It just it doesn’t hit, you just don’t notice it you just use it so naturally.
Grant: Yeah, there’s a weird paradox that the people who want language to say the same because they feel overwhelmed by change, at the same time, really find it frustrating that the words that die are the ones that don’t undergo these transitions. In order for a word to be lively and alive, it has to be constantly used and when it’s constantly used, it’s changed. So, unused words die. That’s just how it goes. And if it’s not if it is used, it changes. That’s it.
Daniel: Yeah, gosh. We’re really speaking to the inevitability of language change, the futility of trying to stop it in its tracks.
Grant: Well just know that humans don’t live long enough for it to really matter to an individual.
Daniel: Yeah, true.
Grant: That’s a real sad thought. Let’s end on that happy note.
[LAUGHTER]
Daniel: Well, we got one more. It was Andy Hollenbeck, I don’t know if you’re acquainted with Andy.
Grant: Andy was on our radio show recently!
Daniel: Yeah, I thought he was! Yes, he doesn’t mind us every once in a while. So he sent an email (hello@becauselanguage.com). He says, “I don’t know how old the phrase “errand hang” is, but I just saw it for the first, second, and third time in the last week.” All right. So you know, I think we’ve all had that experience with some word or other. Doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s breaking, but we do become aware of these things. So I’m going to read a bit from the Substack of Annika Hansteen-Izora: “Can we take a moment to talk about the sweetness of the errand friend hang? The errand hang, where you hit your homie up to accompany you while you tend to the tasks that come with adulting?” That’s another great word. “The grocery run, getting a pair of pants tailored, helping you pick a new bed frame, and so on the errand hang dismisses the usual setting of a bar or a lunch. It waves off the expected script of ‘Give me the summarized updates on your life and then I’ll give you the sum on mine.’ Instead the errand hang dances in the sweet vulnerability that comes from the everyday. The errand hang sings ‘Okay, I’m a human and you’re a human and we’re going to take an intimate walk through this seemingly ordinary part of my life, but if you look closely, this moment will reveal something delightfully specific and illuminating to what makes me – me, and I want to share that with you because quite frankly – I just like your company, and even in the silence ( sometimes especially in the silence) it makes me feel somewhere between warm and content to have you here beside me.”
Grant: “The sweet vulnerability of everyday life”, what a gorgeous piece of writing. That’s so lovely.
Daniel: Isn’t it just?
Grant: Yeah, what’s her name again? Please give her full credit again.
Daniel: That was Annika Hansteen-Izora, we’ll have a link to that up on our blog. You know,it is vulnerable isn’t it? It’s like… I’m picking out sheets, but I use those sheets with the little flowers. First of all, you know something about me because of the design I chose. But also, I’m gonna think about that time when we had a hang, and we got that stuff. I really, I really like this idea a lot.
Grant: What I flashed to was running errands with my father and my brother when I was a kid. My dad would just get us out from under my mom’s feet and he’d always use the back of envelopes, scrap envelopes, for his notes in his particular handwriting. And we’d go to the post office, and we go to the bank, and we go to the feed store, maybe we go to the hardware store, and it was just the three of us hanging out running, you know, errands. And it was that it was and also he, whether he knew it or not, he was teaching my brother and I how to be adults. “This is how a bank works”, “this is how a post office works”, “this is how men behave in a hardware store”. [LAUGHS] You know, it was good. It was three dudes out there just hanging out, you know, and he wasn’t expecting anything from us except to be with him. And it was really nice.
Daniel: I used to do errand hangs a lot more than I do now. Like when I was in high school or even early uni, we used to just go and like get things that we needed and look for stuff that we wanted. And I miss it, you know? I miss it.
Grant: Yeah.
Daniel: Andy continues “According to a tweet from Cyndi Wang Brandt,” – we’ll have that up on the blog too – “it seems the errand hang is considered un-American because, I don’t know, rugged individualism or self-sufficiency or it’s somehow socialist? But it’s the perfect phrase for something I know could be good for many of us, not only for our relationships, but for our mental health (or at least for mine).” Alright, so I like that. Thank you, Andy, for bringing that to my attention. I’m going to use it more and I I think I might do it some more.
Grant: Yeah!
Daniel: Okay, well, Grant, those are all the words. You’ve taken me through, you’ve enlightened my understanding.
Grant: Wow! All the words, there’s no more left. Let’s shut down the dictionary companies.
Daniel: There’s no more left! But there are some comments. So, here we go. First of all, Grant, what is the spicy sauce beginning with a “W” and ending in “shire”?
Grant: Worcestershire sauce.
Daniel: Were- stir-sure? Okay.
Grant: Yeah, you don’t pronounce it like Massachusetts, the city in Massachusetts. The place name in England is a little different. [PRONOUNCING ‘WORCESTERSHIRE’] “Worster” “worster”… “Wooster”! I’m sorry, “Wooster”, no “r”. No first “r”.
Daniel: “Wooster” in Massachusetts?
Grant: Yeah. Worcester, Massachusetts, right.
Daniel: Okay, so here’s the thing. So we started the episode. It was our cold open, I think for Episode 29 or 30. And I said to Ben and Hedvig, about, I was talking about worcestershire sauce (and that’s how I said it). But then Hedvig kind of corrected me and she was just funning a little bit, I thought and I said, I said “Wooster sauce”, because —
Grant: [LAUGHS] I’m laughing at your misfortune. ~Haha, he hurt, that guy hurt himself.~
Daniel: Ahh, no, but I like calling it “wooster sauce”. And I didn’t even know about Wooster, Massachusetts, because it sounded like the most reduced name for the sauce that it could be and I just thought that reducing it was funny. But there are actually “woostershires” here and there.
Grant: You can just reduce it further and call “woo sauce”.
Daniel: “woo sauce”…. We can make it a portmanteau and call it…. “woss”.
Grant: “woss”
Daniel: Yeah. “The woss”.
Grant: I just call it “waa”.
Daniel: I don’t like that anymore. No.
Grant: I don’t, me neither. “Waa” sounds gross. I would not put… that sounds like something needs a bandaid.
Daniel: Too much lenition, too much lenition. We gotta bulk it up. So Steven via email says, “You were not wrong in your pronunciation of ‘Worcestershire’. Hedvig was not wrong to correct you if you were pronouncing ‘Worcester’, but the sauce is named after the county, not the city. So it’s ‘Worcestershire’, but if you ever visit Worcester (wooster), Mass or Worcester (wooster), UK it would be exactly as Hedvig recommends you pronounce it.” But, I should say we were just being silly so… it was a cold open.
Grant: Yeah, yeah, yeah, sometimes it’s hard to pick up on it but that’s fun. I love the cold opens by the way. That’s great way to start the show.
Daniel: [LAUGHS] We try to find something fun. This one’s from Cameron, finally, (hello@becauselanguage.com): “Hello friends. My wife, an epidemiologist, pointed out to me recently that the emoji for the syringe has recently changed from a scary blood dripping one to a friendlier, cleaner design. I found this blog post about it” – link on our blog – “in emojipedia.” Great source. “As we’ve started speaking about shots differently, like the rise of the word “jab” here in the US, and come to associate syringes more with vaccines than blood donations, it makes sense that the visual representations would change to. “Keep talking!” Thanks, Cameron, that’s a little Talk the Talk throwback. Um, I don’t associate syringes with blood donations. Do you?
Grant: No, no I just associate…
Daniel: It goes into a bag.
Grant: Yeah, tubes and bags and things. But when you do blood draws with… yeah, syringes you don’t really use at any point.
Daniel: What are they doing? They take some and then squirt into a bucket? Is that how it’s supposed to work?
Grant: Even when you go to a lab to get blood drawn for tests they just tap the vein, but with a needle, not a syringe, and they just attach it to several vials.
Daniel: Which is why the blood-filled syringe never made any sense to me, because if somebody came in with a blood-filled syringe, I would assume I was being robbed and I would get out of there.
Grant: Yeah, yeah and they were trying to infect you with the disease. Yeah.
Daniel: Yeah, yeah. So I think the current one is much bette. If we can get, like, wings in a halo in the next iteration maybe that would do some good as well.
Grant: Agreed.
Daniel: Grant Barrett of A Way with Words, thank you for hanging with me today. How can people find your show?
Grant: Go to waywardradio.org – any way you want to spell “wayward” will get you there. You can also find us on Twitter @wayword. And you can send us email to words@waywardradio.org. Daniel, it’s been a great pleasure! I’m sorry, I didn’t get to talk to Ben and Hedvig, but maybe another time.
Daniel: Well, now that you’re an honorary cohost you can bust on in anytime you want to.
Grant: [AUSTRALIAN ACCENT] Nice.
Daniel: [AUSTRALIAN ACCENT] Nice. We have to do the thing where we say “Welcome to this episode. Grant is out today, but we hope to have him back later.”
Grant: [LAUGHS] Do you do that for all your special hosts, your guest hosts? Now you’re up to like 15 where you’re like “Alright, so Helen Zaltzman’s not here, Grant Barrett’s not here, and…”
Daniel: [LAUGHS] “Nicole Holliday’s not–” So, you know there are only a few people in the Three Timers Club, I’ve gotta say.
Grant: Wow! Bonus. Nice.
Daniel: You’re, you’re elect.
[TRANSITION MUSIC]
Daniel: If you have a comment or a question or you just want to say hi please, please, please get in touch with us. We are becauselangpod on every conceivable social media platform including (in no particular order) Patreon, Substack, Clubhouse, Mastodon, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and even FaceboOkay. Now if you would like to help the show, you can do a certain number of things: you can tell friends about us. You know someone who’s really good at doing that? Not only, Grant, for Because Language but also for A Way with Words is Dustin of the Sandman Stories podcast.
Grant: Absolutely. He recommends… anytime that somebody’s on the internet asking for a new podcast to listen to (especially if you’re listening, asking for podcasts that are easy to listen to), he recommends our shows and it’s lovely and wonderful and he brings a great audience too. It’s like he brings good and kind people to our shows.
Daniel: Yeah, what’s up with that?
Grant: Yeah, where are the meanies? I need more meanies in my life. No, I don’t stay away.
Daniel: Oh, no. As they said on bumper stickers in the 90s, “Mean people suck”. So, that’s one thing you can do. You can also leave us a review in all the places that reviews can be left. If you do those things, it’ll help people to find us. Now we have a lot of patrons, including you. So we’re really grateful to you for supporting the show. Because you help us in this work we can make episodes, release them for free. We don’t have to worry about algorithms or advertisers or anything like that. Also, we can make transcripts thanks to the work of Maya Klein of Voicing Words, and that means that people who don’t like to listen or who can’t listen can still enjoy our show. Hey, inclusivity! It’s what it’s all about. So big shout out to our top patrons Dustin, Termy, Chris B., Chris L, Matt, Whitney, Damien, JoAnna, Helen, Bob, Jack, Kitty, Lord Mortis, Elías, Erica, Michael, Larry, Binh, Kristofer, Andy, Maj, James, Nigel, Kate Jen, Nasrin, River, Nikolai, Ayesha, Moe, Steele, Andrew, Manú, James, Shane, Roger, Rhian, Jonathan, Colleen, glyph, Ignacio, Kevin, and most recently, Jeff and 9001. Big thanks to all of our patrons for your support.
Grant: Nice going, Jeff. I’m a little disappointed not to get a [SPOOKY METAL VOICE] ~Lord Mortis!~
Daniel: Okay, I’ll try: [SPOOKY METAL VOICE] ~Lord Mortis!~
Grant: [LAUGHTER]
Daniel: Our theme music (which is not in that style) has been written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who’s a member of Ryan Beno, and of Dideon’s Bible. Thanks for so much for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
Daniel: So long.Thanks, everyone.
[TRANSITION BEEP]
Grant: Yes, yeah, yeah. Hedvig’s a real delight. I think I’ve said this before in person that Hedwig is a real treat and she tempers the, you know, Ben’s exuberance. [LAUGHS]
Daniel: [LAUGHS] Exuberance? That’s one I haven’t heard.
Grant: Well, I don’t know about “exuberance”, but he’s… You know, on the chart of evil and, you know, everything, he’s somewhere on the right hand column of the “lawful evil”, I think. [LAUGHS]
Daniel: He is. I’ve been trying to think, I mean, is there a good… is there a better axis like, you know Winnie the Pooh personalities? Or like, you know, Harry Potter? No, we’ve already done that one.
Grant: Yeah, so I don’t know. Bond villains, maybe.
Daniel: Ooh, Ben would be a good Bond villain.
Grant: Bond has got its own issues. I mean, we’re kind of all past, you know, that. [LAUGHS] But, there’s no new you know, the media landscape is so fractured right now. You know, that’s old news. But that it’s hard to come up with something that’s universal, where we can all, you know, pick ourselves, choose ourselves.
Daniel: I’m just confused though is our…Is the personality test that you have to choose which villain you are? Because that’s…
Grant: I think, yeah, or is it BuzzFeed style where you take like “Which cat do you like best?” and you have to pick the furless one?
Daniel: Yeah, okay. I don’t have any trust in those ever since there was one, “Which 90s Rock Chick Are You?”, and Shirley Manson took the quiz and did not come up as Shirley Manson.
Grant: Who’d she get?
Daniel: Ah, who did she get? I gotta look it up. I can’t think of any other 90 rock… uh, Kim Deal! Kim Deal, that’s what
Grant: Kim’s good. You know, it could be, like, could be worse. Could be Liz Phair.
[LAUGHTER]
Daniel: God this thing… Oh my gosh, this is taking me back. Does Fiona Apple count? Because she’s still good. She’s timeless.
Grant: Yeah, yeah. I think Liz Phair is still good. You know, I would want, I would want to be Exene Cervenka, I think. I think that’s who I would want to be. So…
Daniel: No shade on Liz Phair. I’ll be Phranc. I’ll be Phranc.
Grant: I never I never. I never, she never did it for me. Sorry. Sorry! Sorry, Liz. I know you have your fans.
Daniel: Aww, sorry.
Grant: Yeah. And she’s trying to come back, and good for her. She’s talented. It’s just not the kind of talent I appreciate, so…
Daniel: Oh, well, when I said, “I’ll be Phranc”, I meant P-H-R-A-N-C.
Grant: [LAUGHS] Oh, I see! Nice.
Daniel: And I was Phranc.
Grant: I heard her perform a couple of times. She was very good, actually. She could really rile a crowd up. She had delightfully sarcastic politics that I really appreciated in between songs. Her in-between-song patter was just delicious.
Daniel: Peerless. She opened for Morrissey in Salt Lake once.
Grant: Oh, I bet that went over well.
Daniel: It was no we… people dug Phranc. It was fine. See, I had myself fooled into thinking that Morrissey was maybe kind of a lefty sort of guy cuz he was vegetarian. I don’t know…
Grant: See, he got you! He got you good, like the rest of us. But also he got old. I think he even surprised himself and just… because at some point when you get old you’re like, “Hey, being right wing is alternative!” And you realise that it isn’t. You’re your dad… you’re your grandpa!
Daniel: Yeah, your grandpa. Yeah, leapfrogged a generation. Hmm, yeah, that was a big disapointment. All right. I think we’ve got this I think we’ve got enough for the outtake reel.
Grant: We’re warmed up.
Daniel: We’re warmed up.
Grant: We’re gonna have the largest outtake reel you’ve ever had. [LAUGHS]
Daniel: No, oh, shoot, no, I could go for… oh, man.
Grant: I know. I know. All right, here we go.