All it took was a tweet. Last week, linguists refocused their attention on a paper about humidity and tone. Was it bad linguistics? Environmental determinism? The reaction said a lot about linguistics and the nature of linguistic communication in the digital age.
Listen to this episode
Patreon supporters
As always, we’re very grateful to our patrons for supporting the show. Special thanks 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
- Nikoli
- Ayesha
- Moe
- Steele
- Andrew
- Manú
- James
- Rodger
- Rhian
- Jonathan
- Colleen
- glyph
- Ignacio
- Kevin
- Jeff
- Dave H
- Andy from Logophilius
- Samantha
Become a Patreon supporter yourself and get access to bonus episodes and more!
Become a Patron!Show notes
A troll, a pregnant man, and a low battery make the list of proposed new emoji | Ars Technica
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/07/a-troll-a-pregnant-man-and-a-low-battery-make-the-list-of-proposed-new-emoji/
[PDF] Recommendations for Emoji, Unicode 14.0
https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2020/20242r2-emoji-recs-14.pdf
Libre Arts – The audacity of privacy
https://librearts.org/2021/07/audacity-privacy/
NAIDOC week 2021: Channel 10 uses traditional names for Australian cities in weather segment
https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/tv/current-affairs/channel-10-commended-for-naidoc-weather-segment-using-traditional-names-for-australian-cities/news-story/aab88b49c36d6d140210c8d2800c2a1b
Australia Post launches new parcels marking traditional place names
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-05/australia-post-launches-new-parcels-traditional-place-names/100264758
Using Traditional Place names in mailing addresses – Australia Post
https://auspost.com.au/community-stories/supporting-communities/traditional-place-names-in-mailing-addresses-richard-brown-indigenous-communities
Map of Indigenous Australia | AIATSIS
https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/map-indigenous-australia
Perth or Boorloo? – The Dusty Nomad
https://dustynomad.com/2006/09/27/perth-or-boorloo/
His voice silenced for years, a man can now communicate using only the electrical impulses from his brain
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/paralyzed-man-can-communicate/2021/07/14/3a9ce638-e4b5-11eb-8aa5-5662858b696e_story.html
New Brain Implant Transmits Full Words from Neural Signals – Scientific American
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-brain-implant-transmits-full-words-from-neural-signals/
Experimental Brain Implant Lets Man With Paralysis Turn His Thoughts Into Words
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/07/14/1016028911/experimental-brain-implant-lets-man-with-paralysis-turn-his-thoughts-into-words
Device taps brain waves to help paralyzed man communicate | Associated Press
https://apnews.com/article/technology-science-health-2034d0fff5e63a83b7add3e991df79b1
“Neuroprosthesis” Restores Words to Man with Paralysis | UC San Francisco
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2021/07/420946/neuroprosthesis-restores-words-man-paralysis
Round 1
124: Sound Reasoning – Talk the Talk
http://talkthetalkpodcast.com/124-sound-reasoning/
Round 2
198: The Geography of Sound (featuring Caleb Everett) – Talk the Talk
http://talkthetalkpodcast.com/198-the-geography-of-sound/
Round 3
296: Geophonetics, Round 3 (featuring Caleb Everett) – Talk the Talk
http://talkthetalkpodcast.com/296-geophonetics-round-3/
Aftermath
317: With Big Data Comes Big Responsibility (featuring Seán Roberts) – Talk the Talk
http://talkthetalkpodcast.com/317-with-big-data-comes-big-responsibility/
Urban Dictionary: Mockdown
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Mockdown
US cities set up ‘cooling centres’ as historic heatwave bakes Pacific north-west
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-28/us-pacific-north-west-heatwave-temperature-records/100248576
Zaila Avant-garde spelling bee: What is Murraya? – REVOLT
https://www.revolt.tv/news/2021/7/9/22570289/murraya-definition
Zaila Avant-Garde, age 14, is the greatest American since Abraham Lincoln | This is the Loop | GolfDigest.com
https://www.golfdigest.com/story/2021-national-spelling-bee-winner-zaila-avant-garde
Transcript
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]
DANIEL: Hello and welcome to this episode of Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. With me now: he’s a teacher who touches the future. He’s Ben Ainslie.
BEN: I’m always so wary of whenever a sentence put teacher and touch is in the same…
[CHUCKLES]
BEN: It’s just so ripe for awful double entendre.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: That just seemed like a low-hanging fruit to me. So I didn’t go there.
HEDVIG: What about something that’s like viewing? Like, who sees the future every day? Who sees the future every day?
BEN: I feel like you haven’t made it worse, but you’ve made it equally bad.
[CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: You’re precognitive?
BEN: No, no, no. The teacher sees the inner workings of his students. Like it’s just all… nah.
DANIEL: I don’t think I can do this. Yeah.
BEN: Ben Ainslie, teacher. [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: I’m going to pivot away from that.
BEN: Moving on.
HEDVIG: Moving on.
DANIEL: She’s a linguist, a researcher, and recently most beloved radio personality of Melbourne, it’s Hedvig Skirgård.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] You’ve really taking this too far.
BEN: I did hear about this, your little… your debut.
DANIEL: Yeah. Good job on your ABC Melbourne show with David Astle.
HEDVIG: Thank you. They contacted me, I still don’t know how actually. [LAUGHS] They contacted me and asked if I can think of a couple of words that I couldn’t translate from Swedish to English, and if I could come on their show and talk about it.
BEN: And did you start off the segment by being like, “Look, I’m going to be super honest with you. Now that I am living in another country, another language which I don’t necessarily speak super well, I’m kind of forgetting ALL of my vocabulary from ALL of the languages!”
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] Ah, I actually could think of some because I have a non-Swedish-speaking partner, and I sometimes want to express things to him, and so I just pulled from that, from words that I struggle telling him about.
BEN: “Let’s think of the last time I was angry with Ste — ah, that’s right!”
[CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: Not angry, just… I have to, like, use a sentence in English and I could have used a word in Swedish. Yeah.
DANIEL: I like SOMMARSLÖ.
HEDVIG: Actually, I nominated it for Word of the Week because it was in Swedish news. So, I’ve entered it into our run sheet for Word of the Week, so I’ll talk about it then.
BEN: Way to ruin the surprise, Daniel!
DANIEL: Man, spoiler alert. For later in the same episode.
[CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly.
DANIEL: Speaking of episodes, this is a very special patron bonus edition. Thank you for being a patron. We hope that you’re enjoying all the perks that come from being a patron, like bonus episodes. A couple of great ones just gone past, there was all of us with Helen Zaltzman of The Allusionist going through our mailbag. And also, me, talking to Grant Barrett about all the Words of the Week. That’s right. It was an entire episode of Words of the Week. Ben, you missed it.
BEN: Oh, dear.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I know. We’re gutted. I can’t believe you did that.
BEN: Just my soul lost several grams in sheer disappointment.
DANIEL: Don’t worry, we’ve got more.
BEN: On that, I might just throw a blanket apology to listeners, because this is a normal episode, not a bonus episode?
DANIEL: Yep!
HEDVIG: This is a normal episode.
BEN: Because the stuff that’s going on in my life, I was missing for a few episodes and I might be missing from a few more, but I will try my level best to try and show up when I call. But otherwise, I will see you guys when I sees you.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: You got me now.
DANIEL: That’s it. Gotcha now. We love you. It’s great to have you.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I wasn’t sure we were going to get you today, and I was positively surprised when I logged and heard your sweet, sweet voice.
BEN: And the classic Cast sound, like: [blum blum].
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] Anyway, huge thanks for being a patron. You’re giving us the freedom to do what we like to do, which is spread good linguistic science to the public. You’re helping us to make public episodes free and available for everybody, and you’re making it so that we don’t need ads. So, thank you very much for all you do. If you are listening a little bit later and you’re not a patron, and this episode has become public, please consider joining. We are becauselangpod on Patreon.
BEN: Shall we do a show?
DANIEL: Yep.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: But now, what’s going on in the news of linguistics in the week… I screwed that up. I can’t do it.
BEN: But now that we’ve said all of that nonsense, shall we find out what’s been going on in the world of linguistics in the week gone past?
DANIEL: Iiiiiit’s new emoji season! You know how I love the new emoji season.
HEDVIG: Pew pew pew!
BEN: I feel like every time this happens, it always makes me think of Hedvig, in her words, relatively unsubstantiated hypothesis that the people in charge of emoji are over it and they don’t want to do this anymore. And every time now there’s messages of new emoji, I picture a group of the sort of people… you know how like, in the beginning of a disaster movie, there’s that one scientist who’s always like scuffled and papers are falling out of their briefcase and stuff, and they’re trying to warn everyone, but no one’s listening to them? That’s the image I have of emoji people. They, like, run out of the emoji room, a whole bunch of papers flying everywhere. They slap down a couple and they’re like, “Yeah, these are the new emoji. Don’t ask me about it. I’m going away now!” And then, they just run away again.
DANIEL: But if that were the case, would they have left us with such wonderful emoji this time?
HEDVIG: Yeah. I think my theory is starting to get a dent.
DANIEL: Uh-huh.
BEN: Some of the lustre has worn off.
DANIEL: I’m afraid so. So this was suggested by Lord Mortis on our Discord channel, which is a fun place to visit.
BEN: 100%. One of our greatest patreons.
DANIEL: Unicode is scheduled to approve Unicode 14, and they’ll be popping up on your devices beginning next year. I’m just going to run down a short list. You tell me how likely you are to use these and what you think that you’ll use them for. By the way, before we start that, can you just divulge your top emoji right now? If you go to your recents, what do you find?
BEN: I’m gonna have to check.
HEDVIG: Oh, no, I know what it is. It’s a sweat smile.
DANIEL: Which one??
HEDVIG: Sweat smile.
DANIEL: Oh, yes.
HEDVIG: A person smiling and then one sweat drop.
DANIEL: [😅 NERVOUS LAUGHTER 😅]
BEN: That’s not the same as tears in the eyes laughing, is it?
HEDVIG and DANIEL: Nope.
DANIEL: Mine is a smiley guy with crinkly eyes because it’s just so amiable! Although monocle guy is coming up.
HEDVIG: Smiley…? Crinkle…? Oh, I think I know. Without sweat, without drops.
DANIEL: I use monocle guy to say, “What is this nonsense?” 🧐
BEN: I can’t believe I’m going to out myself like this. Full context, all right?
DANIEL: No context!
BEN: Oh, fine, no context. Mine is a love heart.
DANIEL: Aw.
HEDVIG: Awww.
DANIEL: That’s so sweet.
BEN: Now the context. I don’t use emoji ever in text messages, it’s not a thing I do. I’m all about the gifs, this we have stated very clearly on the show. I’m a gif man. Emoji is not my territory. But when I text my partner, I use the love heart a lot.
DANIEL: You’re just a big softy!
BEN: Ah, stop it.
DANIEL: ~That’s what you are. Yeah, look at you.~ I want to give you a big snug– I’m going to give you a hat. That’s what I want to do. I’m going to come over to your place and give you a hat.
BEN: A little hat.
DANIEL: A little hat.
BEN: Put a little hat on him.
DANIEL: With the Because Language logo. Okay, so here they are.
BEN: What can I replace the heart with?
DANIEL: Okay, tell me how likely you are to use these. Troll emoji.
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: Oh my god. No, I’m not replacing the heart with the troll, I’m telling you.
HEDVIG: Child-related, right?
DANIEL: Oh, interesting!
HEDVIG: Charming little mischievous — I get pictures of my nephews and nieces and all my niblings all the time, and I feel like a troll would fit very well into that sphere.
BEN: I like that. I really like the connotation you’ve drawn there. I approve. 100%.
HEDVIG: Children are trolls.
BEN: Agreed. As a father, could have not said something more honest.
DANIEL: I just imagine, you know, some idiot pops off in your mentions and you just BOOP! Just a one–emoji… yep.
BEN: Internet troll, yeah.
HEDVIG: Maybe.
DANIEL: Okay, next one, low battery.
BEN: Oh, that’s gold.
HEDVIG: Oh, but then I would have to find it. It’s going to be far away in the emoji lexicon, isn’t it?
BEN: I reckon though, if you find it and it hits your regular usage, that’s got heaps of, shall we say… what’s the word, heaps of mileage? It can go really far in terms of referring to your own energy levels. Like, “Hey, man, do you want to come out tonight?” “I can’t: low, battery emoji.”
DANIEL: Boop.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah, that could be good.
DANIEL: I think it’ll work. Okay, next oneL melting face.
HEDVIG: Melting face…
BEN: Jesus.
DANIELNot as in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of Lost Ark, but in terms of somebody devolving into a little puddle.
HEDVIG: Because of…
BEN: Does it happen in Raiders of Lost Ark or does it happen in The Last Crusade? Or does it happen in both? It happens in both. It might. Carry on.
DANIEL: No, the face melting was actually Raiders. The Last Crusade was…
BEN: Oh, he ages, and it looks like he melts his face. Sorry, sorry, sorry.
DANIEL: Yeah, yeah, that’s it. This one, world emoji award says is the most anticipated.
BEN: The melting face?
DANIEL: Yes. So, you could use this to show that it’s very hot. You could use it to show that you’re very embarrassed or you wish you could melt away. Or, that you’re experiencing a sense of dread. People love it. People are really into this.
BEN: There we go.
DANIEL: Okay. Man with swollen belly, also known as the pregnant man emoji.
BEN: Okay. Well, look, it’s niche, but I guess that makes sense because there are men in our world who get pregnant.
DANIEL: Mhm.
HEDVIG: I’m going to say that these emojis in general, the little family ones, there’s families with two fathers and a child, two fathers and two children, I don’t use any of these. I don’t use the gendered one that much, even the mermaid and merman.
BEN: It should be noted though, Hedvig, you haven’t procreated yet or anything.
DANIEL: But I have and I don’t use them.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Who uses them?
BEN: Yeah, that’s true. I have as well, and I also don’t use them! I just felt like Hedvig’s saying, “I don’t use these big family emojis.” Well, you… okay!
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] No, but honestly, I don’t really…
BEN: I also don’t use the gun emoji very much. I don’t own guns.
HEDVIG: No, but… I don’t know how to express it, but like, what kind of meaning would… if I am a family or if I’m talking to someone who has it, the only time I would use it is right when they announce that they’re pregnant and then not ever again, almost. Like, the communicative function seems very low.
BEN: I’m not particularly, like, happy families, family-family-family type guy. That’s not my speed or anything. I’m wondering if people who live that life a bit more fully, who really throw themselves into the family world, maybe they’re using these a lot more? And maybe people like gay couples and whatnot who have kids, maybe they feel like they want to use those a lot more, because that sort of stuff has been kept from them for a really long time.
HEDVIG: Maybe. I definitely think that if we’re going to have them, we should have them representing all the things.\
DANIEL: Yep.
BEN: No question.
HEDVIG: I definitely support this. This sounds great. I’m just saying that all of them, I’m questioning how often I’d use, or how often almost anyone would use any of them regardless of genders and constellations.
DANIEL: I just feel they’re not so much communicational as representational, like you have them. And we have everybody, and here we all are.
BEN: But I mean, we have been adding emojis that aren’t purely communicational for… phwoar!!
HEDVIG: But is that a good idea is, I guess, what I’m saying.
DANIEL: Well, we’ve got them now.
HEDVIG: Yeah, we’ve got them and we’ve dug this hole, but was that a great hole to dig?
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I’m just saying that I think they should be communicative. I know some people who like to do, like… have you seen these little visual stories with emojis? Make a little forest with a house in and then send a new message with a forest and a house and two people outside of it, and then a forest — like, little flip books. So, they’ll love this stuff.
DANIEL: Well, I think for the man with swollen belly, it’s going to be used in exactly two contexts. It’s going to be used by all-right jerks to say the world has gone crazy. And then, it’s going to be used by other people to say, “Oh, I ate too much.”
BEN: And I would like to say there will be the third niche of transmen who are pregnant.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: As in, people who are transmen who are pregnant might use it.
DANIEL: I guess I skipped over that one because it was really, really obvious. But yes, I agree. That’s kind of what we’re talking about here.
BEN: The edge scenario is it will be used as intended. And then, there’s a whole bunch of other stuff.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Are people already using the preggy ones as food baby?
[CHUCKLES]
BEN: I hope so.
HEDVIG: Anyway, what’s up next?
DANIEL: Next one, hands in the shape of a heart. Heart hands.
BEN: Oh.
DANIEL: Not an emoji yet, but will be. Okay, next one: lip bite. Will you use lip bite?
BEN: Ooh.
HEDVIG: Ooh, that’s very saucy.
BEN: Hang on. What kind of lip bite?
DANIEL: It’s sexy lips. Arr, arr. Very Rocky Horror in a way.
HEDVIG: Oh.
BEN: Time is fleeting.
DANIEL: It could be a sexy emoji, and thereby take a load off of the smirk emoji, looking to the side and smirking.
HEDVIG: Aubergines and the peaches.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Well, I feel this one is more flirtatious, whereas aubergine and peaches are far more on the explicit end of the flirting… Maybe they’re trying to fill out the roster, like put a few more on the bench for your repertoire when you’re trying to do low-level flirting. Is it clear that I haven’t had to do this for a really long time? It sounds like it’s probably clear.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] I feel…
DANIEL: It could be anxiety. It could be: I’m feeling anxious or apprehensive.
BEN: Well, this is why I ask, because if it’s not overtly flirty in the eyes, then, yeah, I think a lip bite is actually far more anxious and nervous than flirty.
HEDVIG: I’m going to click this link in our run sheet, so I can see the picture and make a call.
BEN: I’m not going to. Hedvig, I trust…
HEDVIG: That’s definitely flirty.
BEN: Okay. There we go.
HEDVIG: That’s definitely flirty.
DANIEL: Well, in that case, it could be used… you know thing people do where they have an eye and then the lips and then an eye (👁 👄 👁) and it’s just this weird fucking string?
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Do that instead of the lips. Eye-lipbite-eye and it’ll just look…
HEDVIG: But people often do the eye-lip-eye for like: “The dog was like 👁 👄 👁” and dogs don’t flirt.
DANIEL: No.
BEN: You just described the thing that actually sounds more like a horror movie to me than anything that’s flirtatious. So, like eye emoji, lip emoji, eye emoji, not an okay string. [HEDVIG LAUGHS] Yes, definitely retire that in favor of the actual lip. Let’s call it the coquettish emoji.
DANIEL: A while ago, Layman’s Linguist told us that you could use the sparkly star emoji to signify ✨sarcasm✨.
BEN: And that has really taken off.
DANIEL: There’s a new one on the block, mirrorball.
HEDVIG: Oh.
BEN: When something’s fabulous?
HEDVIG: Like a disco ball.
DANIEL: I think that would be good for that. Yeah. It’s a disco ball.
BEN: So, you’d be like, “Hey, everybody, I’m having a disco ball great disco ball day.” And that basically means like, not just great, but fabulously great.
DANIEL: Or, it could be like, “My life is a mess. I’m feeling bad about it. But I’m joking about it. I’m telling you.”
BEN: Okay. I see what you mean. Not so much sarcasm as almost irony maybe?
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Now that I’m looking at this image that Daniel has sent us with the new emojis, I’m also noticing that there’s the heart emoji that’s formed with two hearts, that in the negative space between the hand you form the shape of a heart. But there’s another heart hand emoji here, which is when you take…
BEN: We already have two?
DANIEL: I missed that one.
HEDVIG: When you take your thumb and your pointing finger, and you combine them, you press them together in two different… this is really hard to explain.
DANIEL: Show me the money.
HEDVIG: No, it could be that, but as far as I know, in like K-pop, this is also heart.
DANIEL: Is that right?
HEDVIG: Yeah, I’m pretty sure.
DANIEL: Huh.
HEDVIG: Do you want to have clattering of keys when I find out or do you want to leave it at that?
DANIEL: I want to leave it at that. [CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: Okay, great. [CHUCKLES] But I’m pretty sure there’s two hearts in here.
DANIEL: That’s interesting. And I love the idea that we can have all the emblematic gestures that mean different things from culture to culture, like the okay symbol and the fingers indicating a small thing, emoji and so on.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s supercool.
BEN: I’ve also noticed the “America wants you” finger.
DANIEL: Yes, that’s right.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: You.
BEN: That’s a bit… I don’t care for that one.
HEDVIG: And an emoji doing a military salute.
BEN: Even without the propagandistic sort of overtones, I also just feel like the way it will be used, it’s very confronting. I don’t know. I’m looking at these fingers right now, and I’m like, “What have I done?” [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: You. You, Ben.
BEN: ~Oh, no. Oh, no. [CHUCKLES] I’m in trouble.~
DANIEL: When we get some emoji, we also lose some emoji. So, here are the ones that are going to be removed.
HEDVIG: Oh, really?
DANIEL: Vulture, crow, raised little finger like, “I’m having some tea.” What a shame. Orchid, cooking pot, submarine, chainsaw. I don’t think we’ll miss a lot of these.
BEN: The only one I could think of would be vulture and crow. They seem like they could do a fair bit of work.
DANIEL: [CROW NOISE] Blerp. Well, we’re looking forward to all of those.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Let’s move on. This one was suggested by PharaohKatt who says… by the way, just as a context, it was NAIDOC week at the beginning of July, the first week of July.
HEDVIG: Yes. Do you want to explain to non-Australians what NAIDOC is?
BEN: Yes, that makes sense. [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: I have forgotten what it stands for.
HEDVIG: National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee.
BEN: I reckon I can take a stab at this.
HEDVIG: Okay.
BEN: In Australia for the last little while, it’s been NAIDOC Week, which is kind of ballooning out to be like a bit bigger than NAIDOC week. NAIDOC is our Indigenous representation body. So, basically, it’s the time of the year where a lot, a lot, a lot of Indigenous voices get elevated in various media channels and that sort of stuff. And you just generally see, like, a lot more Indigenous-led things doing the rounds, for lack of a better description.
DANIEL: Well, PharaohKatt pointed out, “Channel 10 used Indigenous place names for their weather report. And Australia Post has started to use them for parcels.”
BEN: Oh, my god.
HEDVIG: Interesting.
BEN: Yeah, but did you guys see how many butthurt, fragile, white people started having a whinge about the Australia post thing?
HEDVIG: Can we talk about how cool it was first, and then the shitty people?
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: Yeah. Let’s talk about whinging whiteys second.
DANIEL: So Channel 10 presenter, Amanda Jason, an Aboriginal woman herself, gave us this audio from Sydney, or as she says: Warrang. Here’s how that sounded.
AMANDA JASON: Weather time now, and here on Channel 10, we’re doing weather a bit differently during NAIDOC Week this week. We’re acknowledging traditional place names, and I’ll began in the city that we’re coming to you from. Warrang, Sydney, on Gadigal Country heading for a sunny day of 17 degrees after a chilly morning, zero this morning. And on the other side of the country, my traditional home on Noongar Boodja, Boorloo, Perth, can expect more showers today and a top of 17.
HEDVIG: That is really cool.
BEN: That’s wicked.
HEDVIG: And I see here that for Canberra, they’ve gone Ngamri/Ngunnawal, which is very cool. I believe that Perth is Boorloo, is that correct?
DANIEL: Boorloo. I hadn’t heard that one. That was odd to me. I guess I’m out of touch, but even though I’ve talked about Aboriginal place names a bunch of times, I guess I missed that one.
BEN: I’m wondering if that’s like a neo-Nyungar word that has been constructed to represent Perth, because prior to white invasion, I don’t think there would have been any strong concept of a place called Perth like that. That was several different tribes of the Noongar Nation who were just sort of like…
HEDVIG: Hanging out in different areas.
BEN: …interacting with each other. Yeah, exactly.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Like, the Swan river is really big, and the Swan coastal plain where we live stretches for like 100 and something kilometers up and down the coast. So, there was heaps of different people. I think they might have been maybe better off going with the word for the Swan River, but either way, I think it’s cool that we’ve got a Nyungar word for Perth: Boorloo.
DANIEL: Now, Australia Post, it looks like Gomeroi woman, Rachael McPhail, has been petitioning Australia Post to include Aboriginal place names in addresses. So, I decided to look up how you could do this on a parcel. There’s an example on the ABC News site, link on our blog, becauselanguage.com.
BEN: To just like, real spoiler alert for people, like, you know how on an address label, there’s four or five lines where you can write stuff? They added an extra line.
DANIEL: That’s it!
BEN: It was pretty crazy!
DANIEL: So, it would say something like, Rachael McPhail, Wiradjuri Country, and then street address: 50 Example Street, Coolomon, New South Wales 2701, Australia.”
HEDVIG: Right.
BEN: I feel so sorry for the person who lives at 50 Example Street. They’re going to get so much mail.
DANIEL: They’re going to get hammered. Oh, my god.
HEDVIG: So to be clear, this doesn’t replace what’s known as the city, the thing that accompanies the postcode. So, you’re still writing Melbourne or Canberra or whatever place you’re in. This is just an additional way to specify it.
BEN: Just like we were saying before, it’s essentially representation. Right? It doesn’t make any meaningful structural difference to how anything is being processed. Although I do believe — and I should probably have checked this before I say it out loud — I think you can leave something off now and if you have the Indigenous name in there, it will compensate. Does that make sense?
DANIEL: I would love it if that were true, but that’s not the recommendation from Aus Post. Instead, you are supposed to put the traditional name just under your name and ahead of the entire rest of the address. So, it doesn’t actually replace the suburb name. Maybe that’s to be expected, because we don’t really have suburb-by-suburb replacements. It might not work like that.
BEN: Possibly, but it might replace… actually, what am I talking about? If you’ve got a bloody postcode in there, it doesn’t really make any difference anyway.
DANIEL: No.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Postcodes are pretty darn smart.
BEN: Is the thing that’s what… Anyway.
DANIEL: Yeah. They’re very helpful.
BEN: Moving on.
HEDVIG: Moving on.
DANIEL: Moving on. Do we want to talk about Audacity or is that too insider baseball-y?
HEDVIG: No.
BEN: I think given our listenership, it’s probably not.
HEDVIG: [CHUCKLES] Yeah.
DANIEL: So, the free audio editing program…
BEN: And you should leave all of that in, by the way.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: All right, then, here we go. The free audio editing program, Audacity, is under new management, and because we use it — I use it to edit the show, and lots of podcasters do — maybe this is relevant. I heard references to Audacity now being spyware and sending your data to Russia, personal info because of the new user agreement. Soo what have you heard about this?
BEN: I haven’t heard about this at all.
DANIEL: K.
HEDVIG: I heard about it from a friend and I told you because I knew we were using it. I was unsure of how serious it was, and how much they were sending. So we should also say to listeners, Audacity is really, really popular because it’s quite easy to use, and it’s free and it does a great job. If you find the editing of this show to satisfaction, that’s thanks to Audacity.
DANIEL: It’s open source.
HEDVIG: So, it’s a bit scary, yeah, when I heard this.
BEN: Without any knowledge about it, which is just kind of my default mode.
DANIEL: It’s your brand. [LAUGHS]
BEN: This could go one of two ways. This could be 100% and completely benign, because sending small amounts of user usage data back to some sort of parent company to figure out how to build better products is kind of the default. Like, I promise you, except for the tinfoil hat people listening to the show, nearly every single app on your phone does this, guaranteed. Right? Like, they are sending some data…
HEDVIG: But to the company that you think you’re interacting with.
BEN: Yes. But like, I don’t necessarily know… for instance, let me just open up my phone for a second. Let’s look through some of my apps. I have — oh, okay. My podcast app is Pocket Cast. I don’t know who owns Pocket Cast, necessarily. I don’t know who the ultimate parent company of that is. I’m sure that data is getting sent somewhere, like what I listened to, how long I listened to it for, where I pause, all that kind of stuff. You know, like, Hedvig, I know you watch TikTok. TikTok notoriously is just ferociously attentive.
HEDVIG: [whispering] That’s Daniel. I don’t watch TikTok — that’s Daniel.
BEN: What? I thought you TikTok.
DANIEL: [whispering] I don’t watch TikTok either.
HEDVIG: [whispering] Ah, oh, okay. Neither of us watch TikTok.
BEN: [whispering] I thought you TikToked, Hedvig.
HEDVIG: [whispering] No, I don’t.
DANIEL: [whispering] No. Why are we whispering?
BEN: [whispering] I don’t know.
HEDVIG: [whispering] ‘Cause… I don’t… Sorry.
DANIEL: [whispering] This is gonna go nuts on the compression.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Okay, all right. We’ll start talking normal again. I don’t watch TikTok. I was told by my brother who’s very similar to me that it’s a time hole.
BEN: It is 100% a time hole.
HEDVIG: And I know myself, and I know him. So, I didn’t download it yet.
BEN: Yeah. Let’s strip it back to the simple things. From what I understand of software development, tracking usage information is the standard, not the exception. Every piece of software is now doing this. So, that’s situation number one. Totally benign, you can use that data just like everyone else is using the data to improve the user experience, because that’s just what everyone does now. Situation two, dodgy shit.
DANIEL: Nightmare big brother.
BEN: No good. [CHUCKLES] So, I would be interested to know whether it’s situation one or two, because that difference matters, like a lot.
DANIEL: You can find both views expressed online. Here’s the facts. It’s changed hands. It’s now being developed by Muse, which has its headquarters in Russia. The new terms of service say that they will be using telemetrics, and here’s what they’re collecting. Your OS version and its name, because they want to find out what… if it crashes, they want to find out what OS it was.
BEN: I’m calling that. I’m going to keep a tally here, and I’m going to say normal or not normal.
DANIEL: Yep. The CPU that you’re using, is it a Mac? Is it Windows?
BEN: Yep.
DANIEL: Okay. Data related to error codes and crash reports. What country you’re in based on your IP address.
BEN: Yep.
HEDVIG: Hmm, why would they need that one?
DANIEL: Why do they need your IP?
BEN: I’m still calling that one. Well, hang on, they don’t need your IP. What they’re doing is they’re using the IP to infer… if the data is being sent back, you would have to know the IP address anyway. Right? Like, that is the nature of network protocols. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: That’s how downloads work. [CHUCKLES] They claim to only save that information for 24 hours, do you believe them or not? Finally, data necessary for law enforcement, litigation, and authorities’ requests, if any. Hmm.
BEN: Interesting.
HEDVIG: That’s the scary part, because what the hell is that?
BEN: Given that they’re in Russia, that last one is the only one of those things that you listed that goes on the dodgy list. Everything else for me was entirely normal including the what country you’re in, IP address thing.
DANIEL: It says we are occasionally required to share your personal data with our main office in Russia and our external counsel in the USA. Hm.
HEDVIG: What illegal things can people do with audio editing?
DANIEL: Nothing. It’s not… Oh, well, they could include copyrighted works, but that’s not…
HEDVIG: Oh.
BEN: A. B, I think far be it from me to be this grim, but you could absolutely use Audacity in the service of some unspeakably fucked up and horrible stuff.
HEDVIG: Oh… don’t…
DANIEL: Like, if you had your mic and stuff?
BEN: Well, no, more to the point.
HEDVIG: Hmm. Yeah, I think I know where he’s going.
BEN: Let’s think about this in terms of what it’s being stated as, let’s take it at face value. If I’m a user and I’m using Audacity as part of a workflow to, say, edit child pornography or something equally abhorrent and despicable, that’s the reality where I could see this. I’m not trying to pay like… I’m not under the employ of Muse and I’m not defending it in any way. But I’m just saying, again, at face value, you could make the argument that Audacity as a editing software could be used in the production of bad things. And so, say, the FBI, or whoever could come and be like, “Hey, we found this material. And we can tell from its metadata, that it was edited using Audacity. Do you have any information about this?” Now, having said that, they’ve just said that they only keep information for 24 hours. So… eehhh?
HEDVIG: Also, Audacity isn’t an app that’s under a password. You open it and you open files and you save the files on your computer. So, if you can get into the computer, you can get into the Audacity files.
BEN: True. Yeah.
HEDVIG: I don’t see what the company, Audacity, can really bring to the table that opening the computer… The problem is opening the computer.
BEN: Again, if I’m thinking this through correctly, the one thing that I think that a law enforcement company might be looking to Audacity to supply them with is: in your servers, did it say that this computer at this IP address was editing things at this time, because that law enforcement agency via some other means has been able to go, “Okay, we suspect that this person was in the house. They were the only person in the house. And if we can prove that this was edited at that time, then we might have like a really damning piece of evidence to suggest this was used in…” Like, this is so fringe though, this is so ridiculously fringe.
HEDVIG: Also, it seems like, again, the computer, the OS would keep track of stuff like that better than Audacity. Audacity is not going to remember… Right? Every person who uses Audacity, they’re not going to log everyone all the time every second what file they edited.
BEN: I agree. And not only that, but we all need to remember the context under which this law enforcement agency clause is being… Russia is so fucking dodgy politically. I think we all just as a society seem to be like, “Oh, it’s like a bit bad, but not that bad.” Putin is now essentially, like, a dictator of that country. We needed to state that incredibly clearly. He has eliminated the competition and he has eliminated term limits. Right? Like, there’s really no other way you can encapsulate that reality. So, the idea that the clause is like: Oh, the Russian authorities might need information sometimes. That is a massive red flag to me.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, Muse says that it’s not spyware. They say, “Concerns have been raised largely because of unclear phrasing in the privacy policy,” which they are now fixing.
HEDVIG: Hmm.
BEN: What do you reckon, Daniel? Are you going to stop using Audacity?
DANIEL: Here’s what I’m going to do. I am using an old version 2.4.2. Not 3, the newest. I investigated using a different program. A lot of people out there love Reaper. Audition is very good. I have used that as well.
BEN: Audition’s multiband compressor is par excellence. But can I also throw a third one into the mix for everyone?
DANIEL: Yeah, sure.
BEN: DaVinci Resolve, which is primarily a video editing software, which is free by Blackmagic Design, has an incredibly good and powerful audio editing suite called Fairlight that comes with it. So, you could install basically, like, this video editing app just for its audio editing, and it would be really, really powerful.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Cool.
DANIEL: I might wait until there’s a forked version. A forked version happens when a developing team decides to take an old version and keep developing it. Like, as a fork in the road.
BEN: Ah, which you could still do with Audacity, because it’s open source.
DANIEL: That is correct.
HEDVIG: Right.
DANIEL: For now, I’m still using it. I’m classifying this as not a big deal, but I am going to disable network features. And that will do it.
HEDVIG: Can we also say to our listeners, if you consider sending ideas to Daniel for other software that he could use, and they cost money, and you’re not already a Patreon, [Daniel and Ben laughing] just think hard and think about your life. If you don’t have enough money, that’s fine, but just see if you can just think a couple of thoughts along that line. Yes.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: [CHUCKLES] That was a really good segue, dude, well done.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Thank you. Thank you. Okay, last story. In our last episode…
BEN: God, the news is… there was a lot of news!
HEDVIG: Maybe we need to stop the news now.
DANIEL: This is a quick one, and it builds on something we did last time.
HEDVIG: Okay okay okay.
DANIEL: Last week, we mentioned that there was some work in passing sounds through a guinea pig’s brain and into a cochlear implant.
HEDVIG: Yeeees.
BEN: How quickly your tune changed, Hedvig. “No, we don’t have time, we don’t have– Oh, my god, oh, my god. Guinea pig brains!”
DANIEL: [laughs]
HEDVIG: That’s pretty cool.
DANIEL: Also, we talked about a piece of work, reconstructing birds’ songs from bird brain impulses. And this was also that we could maybe help people with expressive disorders so, they could communicate maybe by thinking words, and then having them play through a speech synthesizer. But it was a long way off, that was the goal. Yeah, well, forget all that, because there’s been some new work by Edward F. Chang and a team from the University of California at San Francisco, in which they have someone thinking words and then having them appear on a screen.
HEDVIG: Whaaaaat?
BEN: That is so good.
DANIEL: It’s done.
HEDVIG: So cool. How many words? What’s the error rate? How do we know if it’s correct?
BEN: Yeah yeah yeah. Let’s get the hard numbers here.
DANIEL: Let’s start from the top. A 38-year-old man, he’s anonymous, but he’s chosen to use the name Bravo One, because Bravo is the name of the system. Fifteen years ago, he had a brainstem stroke so that he couldn’t talk and he was essentially paralyzed. He taps out messages using a pointer on his hat, tap, tap, tap on a screen. So, what they had him do was train by giving him words and having him try to say them and looking at what his brain did.
BEN: Okay, yep.
DANIEL: So eventually, he worked up to a vocabulary of 50 words. Then, they would present him with questions on the screen and have him think the answer, like, “How are you today?” Or, “Would you like some water?” Because they knew his brain signals, it was able to figure out that he was trying to communicate, “I am very good,” or, “No, I am not thirsty.” They were able to get correct words and sentences as much as 93% of the time at 18 words a minute.
BEN and HEDVIG: Wow.
Now, just for comparison, we’re doing 200 to 250ish just talking like this. So, it’s pretty slow, but that’s good accuracy, and because you’ve got 50 words in the bank, and they’re working on more, he can say a lot of stuff very slowly. But this is just miles ahead of other work.
HEDVIG: Is it better than the tapping?
DANIEL: Well, it’s much faster than tapping because if you watch the video — and there is one on our website — it is pretty slow. You can only do like 5 or 10 words a minute. So, this is something.
BEN: Do they hypothesize if there’s some sort of upper limit to how much the machine can learn based on the brain signals? They’ve got 50 now, is there anything stopping them from getting that to, like, 3,000?
DANIEL: They could do. They’ve been going on. I don’t know what the limit is. I wonder if a lot of words look similar once you get the vocabulary to a finer extent.
HEDVIG: I was going to say that.
BEN: Yeah, interesting.
HEDVIG: Plus, you get to, like… DOG or CAT might randomly come out as one or the other or something. I don’t know.
BEN: Would that be a question of — I don’t know if this is the right word, but it’s the word I’m going to use — like, resolution of the measurement instrument. At the moment, I’m assuming they’re doing the classic bunch of electrodes onto the head kind of thing?
DANIEL: It’s pretty invasive. It uses an array of electrodes that are placed onto his speech motor cortex.
BEN: Oh, wow. Okay, so it’s not the external sticky pads. It’s like in there.
DANIEL: That’s right.
BEN: Oof.
HEDVIG: Wow.
BEN: That is interesting. It’s also pretty, like… classically, humans don’t do super well with an invasive item in their body. That has a shelf life. The body does not like having stuff stuck into it. I hope we can figure out better ways to manage that.
DANIEL: But [phew] what an advance. This is really, really something and I’m very impressed.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Me too.
DANIEL: I feel bad about covering those earlier stories, because it just seems like, “Oh, okay, well, that’s all been superseded now.” Which is great! Which is fantastic. But wow.
HEDVIG: Yeah, no, wow. Super cool.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
BEN: We are on to our main story.
HEDVIG: Right.
BEN: We’re back onto our main story.
DANIEL: Yes, we are.
HEDVIG: We are in some drama, aren’t we, Daniel?
DANIEL: Well, I titled this episode, “You’re Wrong About Everett, Roberts, Blasi 2015″. Kind of tongue in cheek here, because there’s been a bit of angst, a bit of drama.
HEDVIG: I was going to say, I saw you propose that title: “Okay.” I’m not sure everyone is wrong. But some people might be a bit wrong about it. Let’s see.
DANIEL: It was more a nod to a podcast that I’ve been listening to of that title “You’re Wrong About.” So, that’s a little hat tip to them.
HEDVIG: Okay, wonderful.
DANIEL: So, what happened was: last week, there was a tweet from the Decolonial Atlas.
BEN: Who, I think, we generally think do really good work, right?
DANIEL: Yeah. They’re great.
HEDVIG: Yeah. They’re super.
BEN: The Decolonial Atlas, we give a massive double thumbs up to.
HEDVIG: Yeah, all of them. They have a great Facebook page as well, and Twitter.
DANIEL: The tweet was this. “The level of moisture in the air affects the elasticity of our vocal cords. Languages with complex tonality have generally not developed in very cold or dry climates, suggesting that human language is ecologically adaptive,” and then they cite a map from Everett, Roberts, Blasi 2015, saying that there’s a link between humidity and tone. Sound familiar?
BEN: Yes, we covered it in 2015.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: I’m pretty sure.
HEDVIG: Some of those names sound very familiar.
DANIEL: Yep, Caleb Everett, Seán Roberts, Damián Blasi, they’re all researchers that we have had on the show, in some cases, multiple times and who we respect very much. However — tell me if you disagree — I have come to feel that this work is not solid, and I don’t encourage people to use it.
HEDVIG: Well, we’re going to get into a more detailed discussion. My general stance pre us having this discussion is that I think the idea makes sense to me that there can be small, small, small effects on things like how likely you are to be able to produce a tone with your vocal folds, and therefore how likely that is to develop in the language. I actually think that isn’t too bad of a theory. I don’t think it’s as crazy as people seem to think. I don’t think it means that all of language is entirely ecologically determined. I think it just means there are tiny effects on some parts of language, and I’m fine with that in my world.
DANIEL: Okay. Well, some of the anger online was, “This is entirely wrong from top to bottom. This is complete ecological determinism. And this should never have been done.”
HEDVIG: See, I don’t think that…
BEN: So, not what Hedvig was saying!
HEDVIG: Yeah. [LAUGHTER] So, not what I was saying. Also not what the original tweet was saying either. The tweet from Decolonial Atlas said… Oh, wait, did it start by saying, “Language is psychologically adaptive”?
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: It did. Ah, yeah. That’s the trick. That’s not really what I think the paper says. It’s certainly not ecological determinism, for sure. It’s saying there might be a small effect on this part of phonology.
BEN: So that was going to be my non-linguist question. We’ve established what Decolonial Atlas said, we’ve established what Hedvig thinks. Can we just quickly outline what Everett, Roberts, and Blasi were really properly actually positing with… What does their conclusion say, basically?
DANIEL: Cast your mind back to the beginning. 2013.
BEN: Fuck, Daniel. [CHUCKLES] So many shows between now and then!
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Well, this is a chance for us… By the way, we will have links to all of the shows because our involvement with this goes pretty deep. So, I think we’re in a pretty good position to talk about what was going on, how we feel about it…
BEN: Just to be clear, we are rolling super deep back into the Talk the Talk days, like the pre-name change podcast that we’re well…
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah. Pre-Hedvig, I think, as well.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] Yeah.
BEN: Yeah, well and truly. Lke, we’re Marty McFly and Doc and we have rocketed back to ’56 or whatever it was.
DANIEL: Okay. So round one, Caleb Everett, an anthropological linguist from the University of Miami, did some work about altitude and ejectives. Now, ejectives are a certain kind of sound where you don’t just puff the air out of your mouth, /k/. Instead, you close off your throat and do it like /k’/ — a bit like a beatbox. So, instead of /p/, /t/ and /k/, it’s /p’/ /t’/ and /k’/.
HEDVIG: Imagine doing a consonant more explosively than you are already doing it.
DANIEL: [series of clicking sounds] Like that.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Now, Everett noticed that ejectives only seem to occur when there’s high altitudes. And he had a reason why he thought that might be. Linguists, including us, including me, we were dismissive. We said, “This is not really how language works” because it reminded us of so many stupid stories. Like where people would look at a society and say, “Well, this society is pretty primitive. And let’s try to look at the morphology that they have. Maybe there’s a correlation.” There’s never been a correlation. Languages don’t work like that. And so a lot of people said, “Language doesn’t work like that.” So, that was the first bit, our original dismissal.
HEDVIG: The important part is the original colonial racist argument is much more general than any of these specific arguments and much more like… I’ve read grammars, where they say things like, “Oh, the natives of this place aren’t capable of complex thought. Therefore, they don’t have complex syntax.” Those are the kinds of statements people are having in the back of their minds. And I think these statements from this paper, although be it, some of them are have been disproven the things, are much more about, for example, the phonology, and the place, which I think are a different kind.
DANIEL: You can see why people would resist this, why linguists are like, “Ugh, this looks sketchy as hell.” And I thought so too at the time. I thought, “Well, this is a good example of bad linguistics and how not to do it.” Caleb Everett, for his part, got in touch, said, “Hey, I’d love to talk about it, and I’m working on round two.”
BEN: And round two turns into the paper that we’re talking about in this episode, right?
DANIEL: That’s it. This is round two, humidity and tone. We talked to Caleb Everett in Episode 198, and it was one of those things where he’d done a lot of background work, and he was also joined by our friend, Seán Roberts, who has this habit of approaching people he disagrees with, and says, “Hey, this could be stronger. Let me work with you. I don’t think it’s right. But let me work with you to see if we can iron out any problems,” which is amazing.
HEDVIG: Yeah. “And if it turns out that you are wrong, we’re going to publish it anyway, aren’t we?” is what he seems to be saying to these people, because he also did it with Keith Chen that we’ve covered earlier with the future tense marker and loan. Yeah, economy, savings.
DANIEL: Savings. Yeah, that’s right. That’s such a cool thing to do. And he’s really good at picking up problems. And he did. He picked out problems. He picked out that when you use database of tone and you try to match it to humidity, it works. But when you use a different database, the PHOIBLE database, it falls apart. It doesn’t work at all.
HEDVIG: Not robust.
DANIEL: Not robust results. And the thing about this was, this was known. People were angry at the team for doing what they thought was bad work. But in fact, it was Roberts that revealed that the results weren’t robust. He had already said this.
BEN: Concerns were being put to the paper that had already been addressed in the paper.
DANIEL: Because Twitter, right?
BEN: Yeah, because we read headlines and not body text.
DANIEL: Then there was round three, and it was consonant vowel proportion… not con… Everett says it’s not proportions. It’s vowel index, which is a measure of how often vowels are used, how strongly a language relies on vowels. And dryness. He noticed that cold places and temperature, cold places don’t rely as much on vowels, which is why you see crunchy consonant clusters in German and cold places like that. Whereas in Hawaiian, they use vowels a lot more. Those are just two examples. But it held up, he claimed, over a bunch of languages.
HEDVIG: We should probably also say that, at least with humidity and heat, these are things that have an equatorial effect. So, it’s more humid at the equator, and it’s hotter at the equator of the Earth.
DANIEL: What else happens at the equator?
HEDVIG: There are lots of things that happen at the equator, which is why in some models…
BEN: You can balance an egg.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Not that!
BEN: On the equinox.
HEDVIG: There are also a lot more languages at the equator. Traditionally, with the way humans have spread out over the world, the equator is a pretty good place to be. So, you find a lot more languages at the equator, which means you’ll find a lot of things sometimes spuriously correlating with things that also are at the equator. There’s also higher biodiversity at the equator. There’s a correlation between…
DANIEL: There’s more contact.
HEDVIG: There’s more contact. There’s a lot of things that happen at the equator, which is why in some models, people are encouraged to take absolute latitude, so distance from the equator, as one of your variables to see if any of your other variables are actually just explained by how close you are to the equator. So, equator is part of what’s the ghost or the behind-the-scenes thing that’s happening in some of these effects probably.
DANIEL: So Caleb Everett kinda toned things down for the third paper. He worked on it by himself. He doesn’t talk too much about it anymore like he used to. It’s kind of gone down to a lull, I haven’t thought about this work for a while until the current blowup, which brought a whole bunch of stuff from six, seven years ago up again. And that’s where we’re at.
HEDVIG: That’s where we’re at.
BEN: So, is now the time that we just like… Well, when I say we, I mean you two, just hitch up your belt loops and just wade in and be like: Here is the definitive answer, everyone.
HEDVIG: Well, I think we should remember how the scientific process works and how we can see some of it working in this case. So we had a bunch of papers that were produced, and then people were debunking them. In that way, the scientific process worked. You could argue that maybe the reviewers of the earlier papers should have pointed these things out earlier, but they did get pointed out later. We should remember that several of these things, not all of them, have been debunked by coauthors of the papers that suggested them, which is quite unusual and pretty extraordinary.
DANIEL: Which is why it was kind of maddening to see the tweet pop up and then everyone piling on as if the scientific process hadn’t happened. It’s like, “Wait, we’re back here?! Guys, wait, hold on, hold on, hold on.”
BEN: I hope you went into every single Twitter fight, and were just like, “Hey, everyone, I’m just saying, we’ve got actually series of episodes about this. If you want to just quickly go back, just review it all, and then speak from a slightly more informed position.”
DANIEL: I kind of did do that in a tweet.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I think it was good, Daniel, that you started from where you did, because part of the reason why this sparked so much drama and anger was because people think of this as a representative of ecological determinism. And maybe in all honesty, Caleb Everett does believe in that. Maybe I’m being charitable in thinking that this is a very… not even ecological determinism, just like ecology has a little bit of an effect on some parts of our sound system. I don’t know.
DANIEL: I think the other thing that got a lot of people angry — and that’s where the anger sort of converged because of these two things — one was, “Whoa, that looks like ecological determinism, which is totally colonialistic,” which I won’t argue with. But the other thing was, “This is a bunch of big-data techbro douches coming in here and stomping all over linguistics,” which is not true.
HEDVIG: Oh, that’s not true.
DANIEL: It’s not true. But I saw a lot of that reaction from people who maybe had just seen the tweet and didn’t know the work, and seen a few reactions from linguists.
HEDVIG: Maybe we should talk about ecological determinism a little bit more, because I’m still not clear about…
BEN: That’s what I was thinking of, even if we record it now, but then put it at the front of this section.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: No, no, I’m happy to talk about it now. What are you thinking?
HEDVIG: What do you think it is? Because, for example, we’ve covered other papers on this show that talk about the linguistic niche hypothesis, where you say that the amount of people you have, the size of your community, or the amount of times you talk to strangers, or the amount of second-language learners you have of a language can have an effect on you. Now, that could be argued to be a social ecology of a language.
DANIEL: Mhm. Well, yes.
HEDVIG: That work doesn’t tend to get critiqued in the same way as this. Right?
DANIEL: And I can see why because there’s a lot of sociolinguists who say language is a social phenomenon. And if you want to hypothesise that language looks the way does not because of linguistic factors but because of some other social factor, then I think a lot of people would say, “Okay.” But if you want to say, “It’s the weather,” that looks a lot different.
HEDVIG: Right.
BEN: Okay, so let’s go back to ecological determinism and just put a nice big, “Hey, everyone. Like, this is what ecological determinism is. And here is why lots and lots and lots of linguists think it is like a bad, old-school, reductive way of thinking.” I don’t know why. Like, I’m not a linguist, but maybe one of you two would like to talk. [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: What do you think, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: Yeah, I think it’s a bit hard to determine. Ecological determinism, broadly, is when you believe that the physical environment of where you speak a language is affecting yourself, and not only your language, but maybe also your community and your personality. I believe there’s some racist theories where people believe that the place people live in affects the… what’s it called, like, the folk personality of a people. Like, this type of argument.
BEN: So, basically, if you, say, are like a hill tribes people, you might be more inclined to warfare? Type thing?
HEDVIG: Yeah, maybe that kind of thing.
BEN: That’s the racist argument?
HEDVIG: Yeah, maybe that kind of thing. Maybe “people who live by the water are calmer, because water is calmer” or things like that.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Well, okay, can we just go back? So, we’ve established, one, that the physical environment where you live might have some sort of impact on language, the language that you speak.
DANIEL: We’ve already seen that in lots of ways.
BEN: That’s what I mean. Like, that doesn’t necessarily seem like a particularly outrageous or provocative statement.
DANIEL: I mean, Alice Gaby showed us work where, if you live on an island, you tend to talk about direction in terms of seaward and landward. You don’t talk about north and south.
BEN: Sure. Okay.
HEDVIG: Right.
BEN: So then, step two of ecological determinism is that it might go beyond linguistics, and it might also impact the broad cultural temperament of a group of people.
HEDVIG: Yeah, and also, that there isn’t such a thing as, like, a temperament of a people in general.
BEN: And ecological determinism categorically says A and B are both simultaneously true.
HEDVIG: I am not entirely sure, because there’s very few people who are around today who believe and publish under these kinds of frameworks. Right? I’m drawing on old racist things I’ve read from the 1920s and ’30s, and they didn’t even necessarily call it ecological determinism. So it’s a bit hard.
BEN: Right, so it’s almost like an anachronistic describer — Did I use ‘anachronistic’ right? I don’t know — an anachronistic describing word that modern or moderner linguists have come up with to describe a certain school of thought that was held by, like, pretty fucked up colonial pith-hat-wearing linguists who would jaunt about in the colonies and just be incredible awful, racist people, and write dictionaries and that sort of shit. And they would come up with these super hokum hypotheses that just absolutely don’t stand up to any kind of rigorous analysis.
HEDVIG: And in general, I should also say, not only saying that the environment affects people, but also saying that there are better and worse people. Like, “Oh, isolating is bad, because people can’t think in complex thoughts because they have this language and they have this language because they maybe live in this place,” or because something-something. It’s not just saying…
BEN: So the undercurrent of ecological determinism or the not-stated thing is basically: We think that the environment is having all of these impacts, and pretty much across the board, those impacts make them less good than white Europeans.
HEDVIG: Yeah. I think that’s at least the worry that that is where that’s leading.
BEN: Okay. That makes more sense. I could…
HEDVIG: An argument you can make potentially for social niche hypothesis as well. You could say, “Oh, it is better for thinking to have this and this proportion of second-language speakers.” I’ve never heard anyone say that and I haven’t heard anyone critique social-niche-hypothesis-type papers on that grounds, but it is a connection that could be made as well. I should also say that while we were discussing, I quickly did a little google. Environmental determinism generally is mainly used for the idea about state formation and warfare and spread of societies, more than this type of thing.
BEN: I could see how that is super racist and colonial. No question.
HEDVIG: That can get really bad and colonial quite quickly of trying to justify, and also positioning societies as on a one-directional scale of progress, and there’s just one direction.
BEN: Yeah. So, basically the argument being, “Oh, most of Sub-Saharan Africa is a melting pot of war-torn nonsense, because it’s equatorial, and not instead because it was systemically raped and pillaged by colonial powers for hundreds of years,” which would be a far more accurate, but also require — you know, oh, I don’t know — accountability as an argument.
HEDVIG: Or, societies in Europe developed in a particular way, and that’s because of the northern hardy climate, and we learned to sail in this in this way, and that’s why we are entitled to colonialise other places because we are higher on this scale. Also, it means that no other empire could exist on any other conditions. So if you, like me, like to follow Civilizations podcast, I highly recommend listening about the Songhai and the Inca Empire, which do not work this way at all. Other empires can exist in other ways, and environmental determinism doesn’t really posit that.
BEN: And not only that, but let’s just quickly recap, who are the groups of people who had two, like, World Wars and used atomic weapons? I can’t remember. Is it the so-called super enlightened advanced ones?
HEDVIG: Oh, no, we’re super rational all the time over here in Europe. Yes.
BEN: Oh, just so rational.
HEDVIG: Only rational all the time.
BEN: Right. Now that we’ve established exactly what ecological determinism is, and hopefully we’ll put that back at the start of the section. Basically, the furor… Oh, no.
DANIEL: Well, there are many furors.
BEN: The current furor that was kicked off by Decolonial Atlas was basically that a element of this paper has stated that that first bit of ecological determinism, whereby the environment and its physical realities — humidity, altitude, that sort of stuff, temperature, whatever — might have an impact, a small impact on specifically speech artifacts, like phonemes and that sort of thing. And because it has one part of a couple of parts of this ecological deterministic school of thought from, like, a billion years ago and is super racist, people are super touchy about it.
DANIEL: I think so. I think linguists have a reaction… I’m going in a slightly different direction here, but it feels like linguists get annoyed when people posit the language is the way it is because of spooky reasons. So, having environment influence language seems spooky, it doesn’t seem like a social thing.
BEN: Why? That doesn’t make any sense to me.
DANIEL: To reach down to the phonology level… I think it’s not a dumb idea in total, but it does seem like something that linguists would say, “Well, that doesn’t work that way.” Just like with Sapir-Whorf, the idea that language influences thought in spooky ways. Like, there are lots of ways in which language does influence thought. Like the wording in a survey, that’s language, and it can influence the way you answer on the survey. But that’s not what linguists object to. They object to language influencing thinking in spooooky ways, like the amount of money in your bank account or whatever.
HEDVIG: Yeah, that one was definitely weird.
BEN: Do you know what this mostly reminds me of? Every time we’ve ever done a story, which I’m going to call is the ‘animal doing the language’ story, of which we’ve done fucking dozens now…
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Never gets old. Never gets old.
BEN: And always, always, always, every single time what we come back to is, like: no. But they’re doing this one…
DANIEL: But still be nice to them.
BEN: …like, no, but they’re doing this one thing that is like language. Even though the bigger picture is: this is absolutely not language, they do this one language-like artifact, and that’s a bit interesting. It seems to me like that’s what this paper basically said, which was that there is a small, but measurable effect on phonology based on relative humidity and temperature. It’s not a broad brush, it doesn’t mean everyone who lives in high altitude places, or only uses like harsh expletives or vice versa or anything like that. But there is a small but measurable effect, and here is all of the work we’ve done to compensate for reasons why this might be spurious data of which it sounded like there was actually a fair bit of work done.
DANIEL: There was a fair bit of work done, but then this takes us to another objection to the work and that was, “You can’t statistics language.”
HEDVIG: Oh, that’s…
DANIEL: You can’t statistics language because… of course, you can statistics language.
BEN: I was about to say like…
HEDVIG: You can.
BEN: “Ah, what?”
HEDVIG: We can argue about like sample sizes and effect sizes and resolution of data, and good and bad statistic thing of language. I think definitely we can have arguments there. For example, one of the reasons that some of these papers were debunked because they didn’t statistics language the right way, but I think you can say something.
BEN: Yeah, that’s the same question you would have with any statistical analysis though, right? Like, you’re never not going to worry about your N size.
DANIEL: Well, there was just a lot of slop. Every database is going to have some slop, and we put up with slop because the world is sloppy, but we want to study it anyway. But you start with a map of languages, which is going to be sloppy because dots aren’t languages, but for the purposes of the study, we’ll accept it. Then, you move on to a list of language families, because you want to control for family resemblance, which has its own kind of slop. Then, you go on to a map of tone, which can be very sloppy again. Then, you go into a map of humidity, which has its own kind of slop. So, now you got three or four different layers of slop, and you’re putting them all on top of each other, and it’s just sloppy, and hardly anything maps onto anything anymore. Then, you bring in the colonial stuff, and then you’re like, “What a mess, and this is misguided top to bottom.” And this is the criticism that I’ve seen. I can’t fault it. They were right.
BEN: You can’t fault the criticism.
HEDVIG: Well, some of that criticism is better than other. For the language as points and language families, the reason why you’re having that data at all in your study is because you want to have a control for those type of effects. So, you want to know if tone is in fact inherited, and if there’s a family that happens to be at the equator where there’s high humidity and the inherited tone has got nothing to do with where they are. And in that case, having a sloppy tree or having a sloppy spatial data is so much better than not having it at all. The alternative is to not have any kind of family tree or geographical control whatsoever, which is always worse in these kinds of studies. So, the slop there is more acceptable, I would say, than the slop in the tone database. Yeah, definitely.
DANIEL: Yeah. Another thing that happened was a lot of linguists were very critical of this work, because that’s not how language “works”, in quotes. And what can I say? In retrospect, it turned out that they were right, language doesn’t work that way. And I certainly don’t want to say, “Oh, come on, you don’t know how language works,” because these are people whose job it is to tell us how language works and I really want to hear from them. I’ve learned a lot from them telling me how language works. But I do get nervous when I see certainty about how language “works”.
HEDVIG: Right.
BEN: Yeah, that was going to be my question. Isn’t how language works simply an idea made up of studies like this one?
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly. And this is furthering our belief, our knowledge about how language works.
DANIEL: Somebody told me once that you can have certainty or you can have wisdom, but you can’t have both.
HEDVIG: Oh. Wow.
DANIEL: That is a good one, isn’t it?
HEDVIG: Yeah. I like it.
DANIEL: You can have certainty or you can have wisdom, but you can’t have both. And when I see a lot of certainty about how language works… well, we still have a lot to learn about how language works. That said, that people who said that’s not how language works, they were right. I would have been right if I listened to them, but would I have known I was right?
HEDVIG: [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: This is tough.
BEN: The problem with that as a theory is that all disruptive work is bankrupt. It is impossible in the system where you say, “That isn’t how language works,” or put whatever word you want instead of language. That isn’t how technology works. That isn’t how society works. That isn’t how justice works, or whatever it is. Nothing can break the dominant ideology in a system like that. Right? You cannot have a seismically disruptive idea in any field where that field is, “Well, that’s not how technology works. That’s not how transport works.”
DANIEL: That’s not how continental drift works.
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: But at the same time, I sympathise with some of the critiques of this body of work. So, by the way, the critique that’s been floating around on Twitter and other places haven’t been only at this paper. It’s been at, I think, very much Caleb Everett as a person and the spawning of these type of theories. And people find them objectionable on these grounds. We’ve talked about ecological determinism, things like that. But we should also say that we don’t want to be hyperrational or free thinking and encourage people to do research on why colonialism is great. There’s some free thinking that we do want to discourage, isn’t there?
BEN: Yes. I hope so.
DANIEL: Then, we’d be the Joe Rogan podcast and be like, “Well, why can’t we just ask any questions? We’re just being rational.”
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly.
BEN: Sam Harris is not someone I want to be.
DANIEL: No.
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly. Then we can talk about whether in this place that was well placed or not, but I do think there is something to be said for not a total open mind or free thinking in asking any type of questions because questions come with potential harm. I think questions like…
BEN: Yeah, can you get… what’s his name, who did the study about different races and their IQs? It’s just gross.
HEDVIG: Right. Yes.
DANIEL: If you’re not informed by humanity, then your science comes to nothing. It really does.
HEDVIG: Yes. Exactly. Exactly.
DANIEL: So people that I love in linguistics had good reasons and some bad reasons for opposing this work. I think the good reasons are that the results were not robust. The effect size was tiny. Even though they tried to be very rigorous about it, it did try to reduce language to some simple variables, and it ignored questions about like, “How do we model who speaks a language? What about learners? What about degrees of fluency?”
BEN: Can I ask Hedvig as the person on the show who, I think, we can call — and, no shade, Daniel —
DANIEL: The real linguist.
BEN: I wasn’t going to say real linguist. I was going to say the boots-on-the-ground working linguist…
HEDVIG: [to self] I don’t like where this goes.
BEN: …what would a paper have to do to kick you off?
HEDVIG: Oh.
BEN: What would a paper have to do for you to dust off and be like, “Straight up? Academically speaking, this is fucked”?
HEDVIG: Some good things to look for, I think, in papers of this kind is, first of all, if they did any control for family tree or space. If they haven’t done that, then their conclusions shouldn’t be really trusted, because there’s something called Galton’s problem, which is that you can get languages that have inherited a trait from a common ancestor, so a parent, and then that parent has had a lot of offspring, and that occurs in a particular place, and you get an overblown effect of being in that place and having that trait. Where in fact, the reason why they have that trait is just because they all inherited it.
DANIEL: In other words, you think you’re looking at 17 different things and they match up, but you’re actually just looking at one thing.
BEN: Right. So, it can inflate data.
HEDVIG: Exactly. So, you get inflated effect sizes. We should also maybe say what an effect size is. Effect size is a term that is used to describe… okay, sure you got found a statistically significant effect for this variable on what you’re trying to predict, but how large of an effect was that? If it’s a tiny effect, then it doesn’t really explain most of the data. So, that’s what effect size is.
BEN: Are we talking R values or P values here?
HEDVIG: We’re talking coefficients here.
DANIEL: This is different from P value. You can reach significance and still have a tiny effect size.
HEDVIG: Exactly. You can have a tiny effect…
BEN: Oh, I see what you mean.
HEDVIG: …but it could be significant. Like studies about men and women and how good they are at various things can’t really work because they’re all socialized into being men and women, so they can’t work for that reason. But very often, the effect size of what they find is also very small. It’s like men could be slightly better at spatial rotation tests in their mind, but they’re not that much better.
BEN: Right. So like, there’s more variability inside each individual gender than there is between the two genders. That sort of thing.
HEDVIG: Yeah, that sort of thing. So I would look for, what’s called phylo controls, control of phylogenetic trees, and I would look for spatial controls who control for having borrowed the trait because you’re next to each other, and then effect size. Yeah, those three things would be things to look at in a paper. Definitely. And if they don’t… yeah.
DANIEL: What about the anti-human angle, like the social justice angle? Can we look at that and say, “This is fucked”?
HEDVIG: Yeah, we definitely can. We definitely should ask if the theory is well formed. And if the steps in between… I think a lot of what you called earlier, spooky connections, has to do with there being a lot of steps in between. So, if we take the example of the having grammatical future tense on your verb, and a certain kind of behavior and economy, modeling and theorising the steps in between that, there’s quite a lot of steps in between that!
DANIEL: Yeah. Not parsimonious.
HEDVIG: Thinking about the future, and then what does it mean to think about the future? And what does it mean to think about it with this verb affix as opposed to something else? And then, what does that mean about thinking about economy and the future? There’s a very long connection in between those points, and I think if you have a theory that has a very long, spooky connection between two things, and it could also be argued that it disadvantages certain people, then I also think that’s probably a bad, bad theory.
DANIEL: So, here are some things that I’ve taken away from this event. Number one, Everett, Roberts, and Blasi were not doing shoddy work, and they have not harmed linguistics. This is a case of science working, not a case of science not working. The problem is a linguistic communication problem. Twitter, in particular, has a terrible dynamic. Short tweets are not great for nuance, and the group effect means that it’s easy to have dogpiles.
The next thing is I think that we should expect stuff to come around again, we need to get used to it. This is the nature of the skepticism game. Things that have been debunked, they just keep popping up. I can remember the last time that astrology was popular in the 70s. And now, ah, 50 years later, here, it comes around again. These things just come back and back. We need to get used to that.
What I wish we would do is refer to work that’s already been done, and be less reactive and more thoughtful. Fight for justice, be strong in your beliefs, but use a little bit of — and nobody needs a lecture from me on this — be a little better at the thinking we call slow thinking, and maybe watch out when you try the fast thinking. Just exercise intellectual humility, and try to be a good listener. That’s the best I got.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And we should say all these theories… the thing that Caleb Everett is being accused of is that these theories are ecological determinism. So we have the altitudes and ejectives, humidity and tone, and consonant and vowel and heat. I don’t know if this is something anyone else cares about, but the sounds of a language and our articulatory organs are physical manifestations of language. And to me, they don’t say a lot about people’s value or thinking or anything like that. I don’t really think of sounds as connected to people’s worth, or cognitive abilities or anything like that, which is also why I’m not as worried about this work. It seems like connecting a physical thing, humidity or altitude, with another physical thing, sounds. And that seems… Even if it turns out that all these papers are disproven, it doesn’t seem that controversial and linked to me. Am I making sense?
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Yeah, definitely.
DANIEL: Hedvig, you felt nervous about attacking this topic. How do you feel now? You feel like we did a good job?
HEDVIG: I still feel nervous. I think that there might have been things we missed in our review that we didn’t think of. And I think that we have thoughtful listeners who will get in touch with us, if that’s the case. Yeah.
DANIEL: I hope so.
BEN: Can I just mention, academia seems really bitchy! Like, I’ve never seen two accountants duke it out about philosophies of accounting. It’s just so strange to me that academia, which again ostensibly — and maybe I’m just engaging in some Eurocentric thinking here, which is supposed to be all about rational thought and evidence and blah, blah, blah, etc. — seems to have a lot of people yelling at each other.
DANIEL: Well, I can see why that would be the case when language is a proxy for so much that’s deep about ourselves.
HEDVIG: I was going to say that. Exactly.
BEN: Okay. Yeah, fair enough.
HEDVIG: We have to remember… Language often gets to be a stand-in for culture and worth in a way that linguists often forget about.
BEN: Okay. Yeah, fair enough.
HEDVIG: But that said, my ex-boyfriend was in physics, and they also shout at each other, and atoms don’t have feelings!
DANIEL: Mathematics! Oh, my god.
BEN: Well, that’s what I was going to wonder! Like, does the maths community like…
HEDVIG: So you have a point, we spend all of our time sitting in front of computers and writing words and manipulating these mental objects in our mind, and we get very invested in them. And then, someone comes around and sort of pokes a hole at it, and it’s hard! It is challenging. It’s hard when your product is all mind. [LAUGHS] I think it gets more connected to you as a personality in that way. And that gets harder than when people critique it because it feels they’re critiquing you. I don’t know.
DANIEL: Well, thanks for listening everybody. Please tell us what we got wrong and…
BEN: Yell at us! [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] As always, be kind.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
BEN: Shall we finish off with the [IN A SINGING TONE] Words of Week?
DANIEL: [IN A SINGING TONE] I want to finish off with Words of the Week.
BEN: doot doot doot doo
DANIEL: [SINGING] The Words of the Week. The Words. The Words The Words of the Week.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS]
BEN: I just laid down the beat and I just trusted that someone would come in there with something, and Daniel: always reliable.
DANIEL: Hedvig, where were you?
BEN: Was it good? Probably not.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: Did it work? Also, probably not. But it happened anyway.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: It all comes together in the edit. First Word of the Week, suggested by PharaohKatt. Man, between the two of them…
BEN: Lord Mortis and PharaohKatt?
DANIEL: And Diego and Aristemo, oh, my god, everyone just keeps us going.
BEN: Just doing the Lord’s work.
DANIEL: MOCKDOWN.
BEN: I don’t know for sure, but I bet I can guess what this is!
DANIEL: This one’s from Urban Dictionary. “A half-hearted attempt to apply restrictions and rules to control the spread of COVID-19, either applied too late, not strictly enough or too confusing, contradictory, or involving some kind of tier system that no one fully understands.” Hello, Scott Morrison.
BEN: I am going to also call a version of this that I’ve been using in my head based purely on this particular nation, when I say this particular nation, not Australia, but the one I’m about to name. So the American lockdown, that’s how I think of it, because America just classically did so poorly in the initial run of coronavirus. Full credit, doing real good on vaccinations, so much better than Australia who really have just fucked the dog on that one in every conceivable way.
DANIEL: One of our words last week was STROLLOUT.
BEN: Oh, I like that.
HEDVIG: I’ve had my both shots now.
BEN: Oh, good for you.
[CLAPS]
DANIEL: You’re maxxinated. Yay.
HEDVIG: I’m maxxinated. In a couple of weeks, I’ll count as maxxinated because I did it just this week, but yeah, pretty excited.
BEN: It’s taking every power inside me not to ask which one you got, because I’m finding that that question now, in Australia in particular, has so much weight attached to it.
HEDVIG: Oh, my god.
DANIEL: Oh, my gosh.
HEDVIG: We’re young and sprightly or at least somewhat, except me who’s like sleepy and have a back problem. But my husband is British and I’m Swedish, so we got the one that’s appropriate for that, which iiiis…
DANIEL: Which iiiis?
HEDVIG: You should… no?
BEN: No. I don’t know.
HEDVIG: AstraZeneca is a British/Swedish company.
BEN: Oh, I didn’t know.
DANIEL: Right. Okay. Yeah, British folks tend to skew Astra. I’m over 50, so it’s Astra all the way for me. Fantastic. Get it in ya.
BEN: Enjoy your one in a million chance of blood clots.
DANIEL: Yeah, I’ll take it. What about you, Ben? You’re really on the line.
BEN: Oh, my friends, I am thoroughly unvaccinated. That’s because every time I’ve gone to the Australian “Would you like to vaccinate yourself?” website, one of the following three things has happened. The website has said, “No. We don’t want to vaccinate you. Go away.” The website has not worked because we are in lockdown, and every motherfucker in Australia is trying to get onto the website. Or, three, it says, “Oh, great. Yes, this dose is available for you. Let me take your information down and we’ll contact you,” at which point, no one contacts me.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay. Frustrating. In other frustrating news, this one’s from Aristemo. You know, it was kind of hot in the Pacific Northwest where I hail from.
BEN: It sounded fucking hot.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: I can’t believe it. Never even seen it here. Oh, my gosh.
BEN: I feel saying to people, this is not… first of all, when we hear about like there’s a 35-degree heatwave in Britain and they can’t handle it, and people from places like here in Australia, we just go: ~oh hoo hoo hoo~ [DERISIVE SNEERING] Like, that’s not fair. And that’s not a thing that we should do, because none of those places are set up for conditions that hot. If you have a 35-degree day in a place where there is no air conditioning, that’s a really fucking shitty place to be. But we’re not even talking about that. In this instance, we are talking about temperatures aligned with what we get in Perth. And just so for everyone who’s like listening, not from Perth, it can get really hot here. It can get like 45 degrees in the summer, which is 110 in the old money, I think, Daniel?
DANIEL: A little higher, 113-ish.
BEN: So, definitely, definitely hot. And that’s happening in places, again, that don’t have widespread air conditioning at a residential level. Right? Like, an air conditioner is not just a default thing in every house in Portland. You wouldn’t need it. That’s awful. That is awful situation.
DANIEL: The word from Aristemo, COOLING CENTER. A cooling center is an air-conditioned public space set up by local authorities to temporarily deal with the health effects of a heatwave. And so they’re having them here.
BEN: It’s great.
HEDVIG: They were also a thing in France. Do you remember a couple years ago when it was really, really hot in Europe as well, and people were dying of heatwave?
DANIEL: Yep.
HEDVIG: Yeah. France did cooling centers as well. So, they’re a public space where there’s also AC. Right?
BEN: Yep. This is a thing that Australians know about as well, because when you are poor and in your 20s, or if you’re just not a wealthy person and you can’t afford air conditioning at your property, or you happen to live in a divey rental property that doesn’t have air conditioning, because landlords don’t care about you, then we would go to the movies or we’d go to a shopping center or something like that, just to get a little bit of respite.
DANIEL: Yeah. Finally, MURRAYA. This was the winning word for 14-year-old Zaila Avant-garde. She was the winner of this year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, DC. First Black American winner.
BEN: Really, really like that. That’s amazing. Can we just for a second talk about this kids last name?
HEDVIG: Oh, Avant-garde.
DANIEL: I wondered that myself, Avant-garde. It turns out that her father drew inspiration from John Coltrane, which is very cool.
HEDVIG: Super badass.
BEN: That’s amazing. That person is 100% either a supervillain in waiting…
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: No, fashion designer! Oh, my god.
BEN: Yeah. No, but this is the thing they only be a fashion designer in a super, super twee anime where every character’s name is what they do or whatever. That’s why I think they’re either a super villain or they’re going to be the person who, like, collates all of the heroes together, like the Nick Fury type, because they just got such a fucking cool name.
HEDVIG: That is a very cool name.
DANIEL: Well, she’s a super villain who can spell, that is for sure. She won by spelling MURRAYA, can you tell me what it means? Is it…?
BEN: Wait. Can I guess before you even tell me?
DANIEL: Go for it, murraya. And you don’t have to spell it.
BEN: Is it like a kerfuffle, is it a fight?
DANIEL: Okay, that’s Ben’s guess. Hedvig, your guess?
HEDVIG: Oh, I’m also guessing out of the blue. Is it a feeling of coming together? I don’t know.
DANIEL: I love it. I love it. No, it’s not. Is it? A, a wind that signals hot conditions? B, a valley prone to flooding? Or, C, a kind of flowering citrus plant?
BEN: C.
HEDVIG: Citrus. Yeah. I don’t know why but it feels right.
DANIEL: You’re both right, murraya.
HEDVIG: Yay. [CLAPPING] How do we know that? I have no idea.
DANIEL: Nice. It was named after a Swedish botanist, Johann Andreas Murray, and that’s why the word is murraya. It’s kind of a Latin derivation of his name. So, congratulations to Zaila Avant-garde. Go watch the video. A copy is on our website, becauselanguage.com. There’s… she… The dance that she does, I want to feel like that someday.
HEDVIG: Oh, really?
BEN: I love when we see things like that.
DANIEL: Yeah. Hedvig, we got one more from you.
HEDVIG: Yeah, we got one more from me. So, I was on the ABC to talk about words you can’t translate, and one of them is my Word of the Week. This is a Swedish word that I struggled translating into English, and it’s SOMMARSLÖ.
DANIEL: I love it.
BEN: And what does it mean?
HEDVIG: It’s an adjective that describes when you are lethargic in summer. It was used to describe journalists having a very lukewarm reaction to a political scandal.
BEN: [CHUCKLES] I like that. Basically, a thing happened that should have got a big response, but then journalists were just feeling a bit lethargic because it was summer and they weren’t really paying very close attention. So, it just kind of… [LAUGHS] I like that.
DANIEL: Summer lethargy.
HEDVIG: Yeah, summer lethargy.
BEN: I like that.
DANIEL: You were talking to David Astle on ABC Radio Melbourne, isn’t he lovely?
HEDVIG: He is very lovely. That was lovely to talk to him.
DANIEL: And you got to talk about the show, as well.
HEDVIG: Yes. I got to talk about the show and…
DANIEL: A lot.
HEDVIG: …how much I love Australia. Yeah, it was great.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] You can listen to that as well. We’ll have a link to that on our blog as well. So MOCKDOWN, COOLING CENTER, MURRAYA, and SOMMARSLÖ. [IN A WHISPER] How did I do?
HEDVIG: [IN A WHISPER] Very good.
DANIEL: [IN A WHISPER] Thank you.
BEN: [IN A WHISPER] But the compression, you guys. The compression!
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] Yeah. [WHISPER] I’m gonna whisper [LOUD] Then, I’m going to talk really loud! It’s going to be great.
DANIEL: Augh!
[LAUGHTER]
[END THEME]
BEN: If you have any questions, comments, or just want to say hi, you can get in touch with us in a buuunch of different ways. Daniel is on all of the things but here are a few of them. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon, Patreon, TikTok, Clubhouse, and Substack. You can also, if you are so inclined, send us a nice old-fashioned cup-of-tea-and-a-biscuit email. hello@becauselanguage.com is how you can craft such an ancient, but lovely, bespoke message.
Hey, if you want to help the show, obviously, there’s a bunch of different ways you can do that. I’ll let Hedvig talk about becoming a patron. But you can also big-up the show, just tell friends about us. If you think this is a cool podcast and you think other people would like it, you should definitely do that. And in relation to that, the way you do that for strangers is by leaving us a review. So, if you want to just review us in Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, that would be awesome, because it just makes us look really good, and it will put us into more ear holes of more people, and that would be great.
HEDVIG: Yes, doing all those things, is a great way to spread the word about this show, and we’d be very grateful if you did them. You can also support us further by becoming a Patreon. One of the wonderful things you get by being a Patreon is you get to be temporadically [temporarily + sporadically? -D] flooded by me throwing lots of science news at you and asking you to pick which ones should go on the show. I think it’s mostly fun for our patrons. What do you think, Daniel?
DANIEL: I think so. They voted on which stories they like best and we’re going to present that in our next bonus episode.
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly. So, if you support the show, you do that by becoming a patron on Patreon and you can find us by searching Because Language there. And that money goes to making these episodes and releasing them for free without us having to do any ads. It also goes to our lovely Maya Klein of Voicing Words who provides transcripts for the show, which means that people can search them and people who want to access our content but aren’t finding it very easy to listen to it, can also read it, which is great.
We want to give a special shoutout to all of our top patrons, so here it goes. We’re going to try and see if I can do it in one breath. Okay? 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, Nikoli, Ayesha, Moe, Steele, Andrew, Manú, James, Rodger, Rhian, Jonathan, Colleen, glyph, Ignacio, Kevin, Jeff, Dave H, and Andy. [EXHALES]
DANIEL: Wow, I’m impressed!
HEDVIG: I did it. I didn’t think I would do it. Actually, I thought at about Jonathan, I was like, “I’m not going to make it.”
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Your lung capacity is impressive.
HEDVIG: Thank you, all of you.
DANIEL: Big thanks also to our newest patron, Samantha. Our theme music has been written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who’s a member of Ryan Beno and of Didion’s Bible. Check out their new EP No Caveat on their Bandcamp page. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Boy Love. No — Because Language.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] God. That’s funny.