Our friends and listeners bring us lots of great stories, questions, and words. So for this episode, we’ve invited them to present them themselves! All patrons have been invited to join us for this live episode, and many have brought pets.
Also, Dr Hadas Kotek has examined the sentences used in linguistic textbooks and examples. How are people represented in our discipline?
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Billie Eilish, Omicron and Stefanos Tsitsipas lead list of names mispronounced by US broadcasters
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-12-08/names-and-words-which-us-broadcasters-mispronounce/100682616
New Zealand PM confirms name to stunned Aussie journo over a seemingly ‘routine’ call
https://indianexpress.com/article/trending/trending-globally/australian-journo-baffled-after-new-zealand-pm-jacinda-ardern-confirms-her-last-name-over-phone-call-4904208/
Dialect Dissection: Britney Spears | Ace Linguist
https://www.acelinguist.com/2019/10/dialect-dissection-britney-spears.html
Britney’s Tongue is out of control? | Oh No They Didn’t!
https://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/51355724.html
The Peaky Blinders, a Lego Disney Castle, losing a game of Streetfighter to the Prime Minister, there’s so much more to Karsten Warholm than hurdling
https://olympics.com/en/news/karsten-warholm-400m-hurdles-funny
Persistent gender bias found in scientific research and related course materials: A long-term linguistic analysis | EurekAlert
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/937011
[PDF] Kotek et al. (2021). Gender bias and stereotypes in linguistic example sentences
https://www.linguisticsociety.org/sites/default/files/02_97.4Kotek.pdf
[Presentation] Gender representation in linguistic example sentences
https://www.academia.edu/41820068/Gender_representation_in_linguistic_example_sentences
“Meet the Authors” LSA webinar mentioned by Dr Kotek
https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/4566117178484822030
Dr Hadas Kotek
https://hkotek.com/
on Twitter
http://twitter.com/@HadasKotek
Dr Kotek is the incoming senior chair of COGEL, the Linguistic Society of America’s Committee for Gender Equity in Linguistics. They have various initiatives related to gender issues, which you can read about here:
https://genderinlinguistics.org/
What are pronouns, and how do different languages use them? | Duolingo
https://blog.duolingo.com/what-are-pronouns/
Gender neutral language in Spanish | Nonbinary Wiki
https://nonbinary.wiki/wiki/Gender_neutral_language_in_Spanish
A French dictionary added a gender-neutral pronoun. Opponents say it’s too ‘woke.’
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/11/18/iel-petit-robert-gender-neutral-woke/
French dictionary sparks anger by adding non-binary ‘iel’ pronoun
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-11-18/french-dictionary-sparks-debate-with-non-binary-iel-pronoun/100629432
touch grass from PharaohKatt
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=touch%20some%20grass
Touch Grass | Know Your Meme
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/touch-grass
polywork from Aristemo
https://twitter.com/AlanRMacLeod/status/1466844690347614217
horny jail / bonk from AJ
Go To Horny Jail | Know Your Meme
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/go-to-horny-jail
vaxxxed from Diego
https://twitter.com/hashtag/vaxXxed
COVID-19: Stephen Colbert pokes fun at Jacinda Ardern’s relaxed ‘orgy rule’
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/entertainment/2021/12/covid-19-stephen-colbert-pokes-fun-at-jacinda-ardern-s-relaxed-orgy-rule.html
Ampelkoalition (German) from ladidalisa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_light_coalition
do a capitalism from Daniel
Reddit: “Need to do a capitalism” is the only way I’ll be referring to ATMs now
https://www.reddit.com/r/AnimalCrossing/comments/qscug4/need_to_do_a_capitalis m_is_the_only_way_ill_be/
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
Daniel: Hey, Ben.
Ben: Hello. Unfortunately, I don’t have a camera.
Daniel: Oh, that’s all right.
Ben: Sorry, everyone.
Daniel: Got to retain that air of mystery.
Ben: Yep, that’s the air: mystery.
Daniel: The mystery air.
PharaohKatt: Oh, want to meet my kitten?
Ben: 100% yes.
PharaohKatt: This is Pixel.
Daniel: Pixel.
PharaohKatt: She’s just eaten, so she’s full of zoomies.
Ben: I have remarked before on the show. I don’t know if it’s made it through the edit, how one of the most vibrant sections of the Discord is just pictures of people’s cats.
[Because Language theme]
Daniel: Hello, and welcome to a very special episode of Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. I’m Daniel Midgley. Let’s make the team. He’s sometimes wrong, but still very cool, it’s Ben Ainslie.
Ben: I thought of a really good introduction for you for me. Ash and I have figured out that she is what people call an old soul, and I am what people call young at heart. What we figured out is those are actually both insults. Old soul just means boring, but in a noble way. And young at heart just means annoying, but makes people laugh occasionally.
Daniel: Correct me if I’m wrong anybody, but I’ve heard old soul referred to as children who are just really chill, like they put the CHILL in CHILDREN?
Ben: I have never heard that, and that’s weird, and it makes me uncomfortable. Please stop.
Daniel: I will stop.
PharaohKatt: I’ve heard it for children who are super serious.
Daniel: Yes. Really intense children.
Ben: [chuckles] That’s the opposite of chill!
[chuckles]
Daniel: No, but you know what I mean, like a kid who’s like super quiet and focuses.
Ben: I don’t know, when a person says a child is intense, I immediately hear the Children of the Corn theme song.
Daniel: Me too. This is getting worse. Okay, I’m going to stop then.
Ben: So, why is this a special show, Daniel?
Daniel: This is a very special show because we are joined by some of our great friends, listeners, and patrons who help the show to be what it is. They do a fantastic job of supplying us with stories and giving input. For this very special live episode, we are handing the mic over to some of them so that they can tell us about these stories in their own words. Sound good?
Ben: Sounds fantastic. I’m staring at many faces in a grid display. It’s like a really, really kooky diverse Brady Bunch intro panel.
Daniel: I’m here for that. We also have a very special guest joining us. It’s Dr. Hadas Kotek, linguist in tech and research affiliate at MIT. Hello, Hadas.
Hadas: Hello. Thank you for having me.
Daniel: It’s great to have you. Thanks for being on our show. Even though it’s very early where you are.
Hadas: Quite. [laughs] But the sun is rising. So, you know, it is worth it getting up this early.
Daniel: Yay. The things we do for science.
Hadas: Things we do for science.
Daniel: Our West Coast US guests always have it rough, just like our Melbourne guests.
Hadas: Well, I’m on the East Coast, so it could be worse.
Daniel: Oh, yeah, that could be a lot worse. Never mind! You’re fine! Okay, good.
[laughter]
Ben: He giveth and he taketh away.
Daniel: Hedvig is joining us soon. I guess I’ll just read her introduction when she gets here because she’s doing the best she can, and I’ve got a great intro for her.
Ben: That should just be her introduction. Hedvig Skirgård, doing the best she can.
Daniel: [chuckles] Great. By the way, Ben, did you notice that my intro for you came from our Caitlin Green episode?
Ben: I did not.
Daniel: Yeah. We suggested it for you, and then I thought, “Okay, I’m just using that next time.”
Ben: Oh, there we go. You presume that I remember anything about anything that has happened more than a day ago, and my experience would say, “That’s unlikely.”
Daniel: After 300 shows, you know what? I’m glad that you forget everything because we call it keeping it fresh. We give it the Illusion of the First Time.
Ben: Strategic amnesia.
Daniel: Wow. Okay. That’s a Word of the Week, folks. And speaking of Words of the Week, our next episode is going to be our Words of the Week of the Year episode. If you follow us on Twitter or Facebook, you’ve probably already noticed the mega thread with every Word of the Week we’ve done this year. All of the words are there as tweets or as comments and you can vote for a word by liking it. People are piling in with their favorites and soon, I’ll be compiling all the votes and we’ll be giving you, the Because Language Word of the Week of the Year next time, but which one will it be? Keep listening to find out, and of course, go and vote for your favorites if you haven’t yet. All right. Do the thing.
Ben: I’m sorry. I had my microphone on silent because and here’s a little bit of behind the magic. I had to do a fart, and so I turned my microphone off so that none of you could know. Ha-ha. Super effective. Hey, Daniel, enough spruiking, I think it is very much time for some of our wonderful patrons to be able to bring the juicy goods, the tidbits to our table.
Daniel: By the way, I can edit out farts. Okay.
Ben: Are you saying that’s what you want to hear? I do not believe that. Your Mormon upbringing is still in there deep down. I do not think that that level of body autonomy you’re down with.
Daniel: Speaking of Ben, Mormons do fart. Okay.
Ben: [laughs] See how quickly you move on? Even the idea of admitting that was on some level to you, you’re just like, “No, no, we must move on.”
Daniel: Farting, it’s the devil’s gas.
Ben: [laughs] Sorry, sorry. No more [unintelligible [00:05:43], I promise.
Daniel: Thank you. Ben blames that on everything, I do. Our first one is about names, and this one comes from PharaohKatt, one of our most prolific contributors. Hey, PharaohKatt.
PharaohKatt: Hello, thank you for taking my story and all my other things.
Daniel: And all the other things. [chuckles] That’s great.
Ben: What else have you taken off PharaohKatt, Daniel?
[laughter]
Daniel: Words of the Week and stories and that’s about it.
PharaohKatt: Questions.
Daniel: Questions. Oh my gosh, some of the best questions. Remember that one about why do we say “You’re welcome”? My head is still spinning from that. So, PharaohKatt, tell us about your story what’s going on with names and the mispronunciation thereof? Mishpronounctiation.
PharaohKatt: This is a story I found on the Australian ABC site because I know there’s an American one as well. And it’s apparently the most mispronounced names from US TV presenters. So, this is something that the US captioning company has created a list of. Most of the names or words that they have listed as commonly mispronounced are either new words like cheugy or Dogecoin. And other ones are names that are not common in English or with sounds that aren’t common in English. Stefanos Tsitsipas is one of them and Billie Eilish is another.
Daniel: Yeah. Okay.
Ben: How else would you pronounce Billie Eilish?
Hadas: I don’t know. A-lish?
Ben: That one doesn’t seem particularly– when you stack Billie Eilish up against, in my opinion, some of the most notoriously hard names, such as Polish names and Irish names, that it seems pretty bush league.
Hadas: The only way I can think is A-lish maybe or something like that.
Daniel: You know English in those vowels. One that we did last week, I believe, and I thought it was either omi-kron, omee-kron, omy-cron. Boy, did I not realize how wrong I was?
Ben: Did you just not watch Futurama? Or am I the idiot for thinking that Futurama got it right?
Daniel: What did they say on Futurama?
Ben: “We come to you from Omicron Persei 8.”
Daniel: No, I never did watch that episode of, or maybe very many others of Futurama.
Ben: Fair enough.
Daniel: You know that my gaps are huge, Ben, my gaps in my knowledge.
Ben: Please, please, please don’t ever say the phrase, “My gaps are huge” ever again. Can we just put that one on the dump? Let’s just leave.
Daniel: As soon as I said it. As soon as I said it.
Ben: Gaps are hu– No, don’t need that in my life.
Daniel: Now, how much of this would you say is actual mispronunciation and how much of it is just normal variation? I’m thinking of Dogecoin. I know that there’s a thing where some people say Doge with ja, but I’ve also heard Doge-coin. How many of us say it one way? How many of us say it other?
Ben: I say Doje. [doʊʒ] I’m a Doje. [doʊʒ]
Lord Mortis: Doje. [doʊʒ]
PharaohKatt: Doje. [doʊʒ]
Daniel: Lots of Dojers?
AJ: I’ve actually always thought and I don’t know that I’ve ever heard anyone pronounces out loud. In my head, I’ve always thought that it would be Doag [doʊg] -coin, with a hard G.
Daniel: Wow. Okay.
Ben: Kind of like a frat boy twist on the name Doug. Doug! And Nigel, Doge. Yep. Fair enough. We’ve got Nigel backing a ja on that one.
Daniel: I guess the possibility is that if you got someone’s name, someone’s name is sacrosanct. So, you just try to do it the best you can according to how they would probably do it. But there’s a lot of scope for some of these. Like yass-ify or yess-ify. A popular trend in which multiple beauty filters are applied to well-known pictures or portraits for comic effect. I’ve never seen anything yassified myself.
Ben: You just got to hang out on the right parts of TikTok, my friend. It gets a little bit complex in the sense that there are individuals who tolerate different pronunciations of their name depending on the language of the speaker as well.
Daniel: Yeah, we’ve talked about coffee names.
Ben: Oh, Nigel is raising his hand. What’s the alternative, Nigel? What’s the alternative?
Nigel: Because I live in an area that’s primarily of Spanish or Hispanic descent, despite having a very Anglo name, Nigel, it’s super common for me to hear variations like Ni-el or Ni-all. So, I’ve just gotten used to that at this point. I take those readily as my name.
Ben: There we go.
Daniel: How do you feel about that? Do you feel like it’s giving up or accommodating?
Ben: Giving [chuckles] up. No, the Spanish have won!
Daniel: [chuckles]
Nigel: These are my people. If this is what they call me, that’s my name.
Daniel: Good point. All right. Well, I think that there are some interesting assumptions going on behind the idea of mispronunciation, and I have seen lots and lots of annoying articles saying, “Here are the words you’re pronouncing wrong,” and it might not be wrong. But in some of these, it’s good to have a source and Tiger Webb of the ABC does a great job of helping– he actually phones up politicians and says, “How do you say your name?” He actually did that with just Jacinda Ardern, and actually got her on the line, the New Zealand Prime Minister, to tell him how she says her name. So, it’s good to have people who act as a guide.
PharaohKatt: Next.
Daniel: I’m going to move on. This one comes from Vocabulous.
Ben: Vocabulous. Someone in this chat called vocabulous? Ah, Margarethe.
Daniel: I’m using your Discord name, but you can use whatever name you want.
Margarethe: Hi. [chuckles]
Daniel: Hey, great to see you. What’s your story?
Margarethe: Yeah. I’m from Norway. I’m not a native speaker, I’m not a linguist. I just want to make that clear. But I listen to a lot of linguistics podcasts, Norwegian English, Spanish, whatever. I was listening to this Norwegian podcast the other day about this odd phenomenon that a Norwegian linguist called Olaf Husby has observed in the past two decades or so. People have started to– well, mostly young women in television, like TV show hosts, journalists, they’ve started to pronounce T-D-N-L, not like postdental or interdental, but more like interliable. So, they stick their tongue out when they say el and dh [chuckles] to look more sexy, I guess.
Ben: [chuckles] That was not the reason I was expecting.
Daniel: What were you expecting?
Ben: I didn’t have an idea, but it was not that one.
Hedvig: Surely, it’s not that one.
Margarethe: That’s Husby’s assumption anyway, that they’re doing it as a sort of strong visual signal as a sign of attraction maybe, making themselves attractive maybe. Husby blames Britney Spears for this phenomenon.
[laughter]
Ben: Oh, man, poor Britney. [laughs]
Daniel: Hasn’t she been through enough?
Ben: Seriously? The sexification.
AJ: They just got her out.
Daniel: Everyone’s texting in the chat, “Leave Britney alone.”
Ben: I just love the idea that she’s got out from this conservatorship and then somewhere in the distant reaches of a Norwegian fjord, a linguist is like, “Now’s my chance.” [chuckles]
Daniel: Hedvig, jump in for a sec.
Hedvig: Sorry, everyone, that I’m late. I’m babysitting my nephew whom I haven’t seen him for a very, very long time.
Daniel: It’s lovely to have you.
Hedvig: Yeah. Also, I’m traveling, and the only headphones I brought are my SleepPhones, it’s like a headband. That’s why I look a bit funny.
Ben: [laughs] [crosstalk] You’re rocking it like a hell 80s hairband vibe.
Hedvig: I can’t really recommend having these. But yeah, they’re the only bluetooth headphones I brought apparently. I was just going to say I know what you mean though, because she does that. I don’t know if that is a general trend among young women in America, and it’s spread to Norway or if it’s like a Britney invention, but I have noticed it too.
Ben: So just to clarify, what are the sounds in the mouth that we’re talking about here? I heard T and D, what were the other two?
Daniel: N and L. She does it in her songs when she sings “My l-loneliness.”
Ben: Oh, okay.
Hedvig: [singing] My loneliness.
Daniel: My l-loneliness and you can actually see it in the video, but–
Hedvig: Not as much as Daniel just did it.
Ben: Okay, because he looked like a creepy, creepy sexpest.
[mimicking Britney]
Hedvig: Not like that, it’s much more light.
Daniel: I think I was underplaying it, if anything.
[laughter]
Ben: I hope not.
Daniel: Apparently, Kesha does it as well.
Ben: I’m trying to do it now. I’m imagining that what we’re talking about here is a fairly subtle, like a hint rather than like a weird proboscis from an insect.
Margarethe: Well, he’s seen as much as 1.5 centimeters of tongue.
Ben: [laughs] No!
Daniel: See, I told you! I told you I was underplaying it!
Ben: Hang on, hang on. First of all, he’s seen as much as, so what he’s taken is the full range and he’s gone to the highest number and that’s the thing that we’re locking onto here. So, there’s like some weird anchoring bias that’s going on, first of all. Second of all, let’s talk for a second about the person who’s [laughs] especially– [laughs]
Daniel: A little too focused on Britney’s tongue, is that what you’re saying?
Ben: Well, a little too focused on all of the tongues of the female newsreaders of Norway. That is a concerning hobby.
Daniel: Hmm. Perhaps, perhaps. Because she doesn’t do it when she talks and interviews. She only doesn’t when she sings, and there’s a lot of it. So, what’s going on here?
Ben: First of all, we’re making it all about Britney, but the story supposedly is about the Norwegian news readers who have adopted this. This habit, this tactic. Let’s get away from poor Britney. Poor Britney. I’m just trying to do it a little bit with my tongue right now. And the T and the D are the ones that are really stuffing me up. Tha, tha. It makes me personally feel like I’m a tiny child, rather than sexy. “And this week on–” [laughs] It’s just very odd.
Daniel: Tha, tha. What are you doing with your tongue?
AJ: I just can’t figure out how to make myself say anything while doing that. It’s not adding up.
Ben: Yeah, it’s like brushing your teeth with your left hand or your right hand. It’s very odd.
Daniel: Okay, so apparently this is spreading to conversation according to this Norwegian linguist. I’m just wondering if this is– because we’re always looking for stuff that women are doing, because we know that women, especially young women.
Ben: I’m just going to get you to revise, we’re always looking for stuff women are doing, as just a phrase that we’re using.
Daniel: I’m innocent. So, let me say that again. Linguists are always looking for trends. And the trendsetters are young women. I think I said that pretty well.
Ben: Yes, we’ve discussed this before. You go to old rural men, if you want to find out what the most ancient forms of speech are, and you go to teenage girls, if you want to find the bleeding edge of change.
Daniel: That’s it. So, is this a new trend like similar to indie girl voice? Or is this just a new way of criticizing women? Margarethe, what do you think?
Margarethe: I don’t know. And according to Husby, he says, at least in Norwegian, there is no acoustic difference in the pronunciation. The reason has to be something else. It may not be a conscious thing. But he has noticed more and more people doing it, and mostly young women, but not only because– you probably know the Olympic champion and the world record holder, Karsten Warholm, he won the 400-meter hurdle. He tends to do it when he speaks in interviews. He also has a mantra saying, “I’ve yet to see a mirror I don’t like.”
Ben: Well, he’s really leaning into that narcissist vibe, isn’t he? This is just bold narcissism.
Margarethe: This linguist, Husby, was joined by another Norwegian linguist, a woman, her specialty is gender and language. She’s also noticed this in more and more young women and a few men on television.
Daniel: Okay, wow.
Ben: I would really like to fact check the whole, there is no acoustic difference claim. I’m sorry, but sticking my tongue out when I say a T and a D produces a very noticeable acoustic difference to those sounds. [chuckles]
Daniel: That is a good point.
Margarethe: Do it with S, because if you do it with S, which is a similar– you place your S in the same area of your mouth. But if you do it with S, it comes up like a lisp, which is not very sexy at all.
Daniel: Or it could be.
Ben: To all the people out there who have lisps, I just want you to know, I think you plenty sexy, it’s fine.
Daniel: It depends on what you’re into.
Ben: [chuckles] Okay, we definitely need to move it on.
Daniel: Okay, great. Our next story comes to us from Dr. Hadas Kotek, notably of tech and a research affiliate with MIT. Dr. Kotek, thank you so much for joining us.
Hadas: Thank you for having me.
Daniel: A long time ago, we did an episode of Talk the Talk about dictionaries, and how their example sentences were sometimes not great. For example, in the Oxford English Dictionary, in the entry for rabid, one of the example sentences used ‘rabid feminist’.
Ben: Oh, wow.
Daniel: Yeah. Michael Oman-Reagan tweeted the Oxford folks and said, “Hey, @OxfordWords, why is rabid feminist, the usage example of rabid in your dictionary, maybe change that?” And Oxford responded, “Rabid isn’t necessarily a negative adjective. And that example sentence needn’t be negative either.” And then, Justin Ryan on Twitter said, “Bit of kind advice. Once you’ve said rabies can be a good thing with the company account, it’s time to check in with management.”
[chuckles]
Ben: I would push back on the whole like, “Do we believe that rabid is wholly negative?” Yes, yes, we do.
Daniel: It’s kind of bad.
Hedvig: Isn’t that derived from rabies? Yeah.
Daniel: Yes, it is.
Ben: Yeah. 100% what it is, and it’s terrible.
Hedvig: And it’s a sickness that kills.
Daniel: It’s really, really bad. It’s a scary illness.
Hedvig: No, sometimes death is good.
Ben: Beyond that though, as well, it’s not just that it’s negative because it kills people as well. Rabies, for the longest time, I don’t know about anyone else, I legitimately thought rabies was the zombie disease when I was a kid. That’s kind of how it’s built in pop culture, like rabies is the thing where you go crazy and you bite people and then they get rabies.
Daniel: Oh, man.
Ben: It’s like extra bad.
Daniel: When you get it really bad, it’s like you get super thirsty, but you won’t drink water and then you start shaking. And that’s when you’re–[crosstalk]
Ben: And then, you die 100% of the time.
Daniel: Anyway, let’s bring back Dr. Kotek. Hadas, you’ve done some work with one of our pals, Rikker Dockum, Sarah Babinski, Christopher Geissler, and also Paola Cépeda, Katharina Pabst, Kristen Syrett about examples, not in dictionaries this time, but in linguistic papers and in textbooks. Could you tell us a little bit about why this was interesting to you?
Hadas: Yeah, that’s great. The starting point for both of those studies is a paper that was published in 1997 by acquaintances of ours, Monica Macaulay and Colleen Brice. At the time, they were interested in looking at textbooks that were published in the 60s through the 90s and looking at example sentences, where they had suspected and indeed found that there were biases in the examples that were being used. We were interested in knowing whether since that paper was published, there had been progress, whether the fact that it had been published and discussed at the time, almost 25 years ago, if that had led to an improvement in how authors, linguists were constructing their example sentences.
Daniel: Could you tell us a little bit about what the example sentences 20 years ago were like? Were they really all that problematic?
Hadas: Gosh.
Daniel: [laughs]
Hadas: The example sentences from 25 years ago were in a sense as bad as they are now and in a sense, they were– I can’t tell you, if I think they’re better or they’re worse. They are more blatant which made life easier to in terms of showing that there is an issue, but also, they’re blatant right there. Actually, I think, really awful. I’m trying to quickly look up a few so that I can read a few of these terrible examples, because it’s actually-
Daniel: Yeah, no worries.
Hadas: -fun to do it.
Ben: Just the cat in– Hadas’ background is awesome, by the way, just running across the screen. Wicked.
Daniel: [laughs]
Hadas: Okay, so here’s one of my favorite examples. It is an example of a structural ambiguity. So, an ambiguity that is attributable to the syntax where you could have more than one syntactic structure to your sentence, it is, “Max doesn’t beat his wife because he loves her.”
Ben: Oh, wow.
Daniel: That could have been a lot better.
Hadas: But, of course, you have to read in two different ways. He doesn’t beat her because he loves her or he doesn’t…
Daniel: So, the ambiguity there is, the first reading is, he doesn’t beat her, and the reason is that he loves her. But the other reading is, it isn’t because he loves her that he beats her.
Hadas: Yes, correct.
Ben: Wow. Is the word BEAT in that one, by the way, is that what that’s being used as an example to define?
Hadas: I believe it is being used to illustrate an ambiguity, I think that is what is. I don’t remember what it was being used for. Here’s another one. “She’s fond of John naked.”
Daniel: Okay.
Hadas: “What a nice pear Mary has.” Or, “Mary’s got–”
Ben: [laughs]
Daniel: Oh, lovely.
Hadas: Which is a word play. It’s spelled P-E-A-R, but, of course, a word play on P-A-I-R.
Daniel: I didn’t know Benny Hill was a linguist. I’m noticing lots of others, like, “John told Bill that Mary began to cry without any reason.” It’s like there’s one woman in this sentence.
Hadas: Yes, but this from our paper, so I was trying to read you these examples from the 90s that you were asking about.
Daniel: Okay.
Hadas: Yeah, we had a few others that were also nice. But also, I’m now realizing that we actually didn’t include the worst types of examples in the paper because I suppose we decided that was not the point.
Daniel: Yeah, okay.
Hadas: Here are a couple of my other favorites. “After Rambo as her lover, she was exhausted.”
[controlled laughs]
Hadas: “She’ll soon tire of her sexploits.” I can’t believe I’m reading this for the radio.
Ben: Well, it’s not real. It’s podcast, so it’s fine.
Hadas: Podcast, yes. No one listens to it anyway.
Daniel: Exactly.
Ben: What is bizarre though, I did not expect it to be so sexual. I figured there’d be like other stuff in there. But there’s really a picture building here that dictionary writers are sad, sexless jerks.
Daniel: But these are not dictionary writers.
Hadas: These are textbooks that were published in mostly the 70s and 80s. Actually, one of the main findings from the pair of papers that we’re discussing today is that that in particular went away. So, the actual explicit content is no longer there. But really everything else that McCauley and Brice found in ’97 is still apparent in current textbooks and current papers. So, I guess we should say what those things are.
One finding is just a general skew and how often we refer to men as opposed to women. We refer to men twice as often generally as we refer to women. We also tend to refer to men more often as subjects than as non-subjects. There are lots of stereotypes. So, men will have occupations much more often than women will be described as having occupations. We refer to women more often using kinship terms, so they’re someone’s wife or someone’s mother, much more often. When we talk about violence, then men are more often perpetrators of violence and women are the recipients. And when I say more often, even given the general skew have a two to one, beyond that, we find an additional skew.
I guess maybe we can stop there. There are a few others. The main finding is, “This is consistent. We looked at three journals, and we looked at seven textbooks. When I say we looked at three journals, I mean we extracted every example from each of these journals that was published over the course of 20 years, so quite a lot of data, and we find that it’s consistent over time, it doesn’t really change, and it’s consistent, regardless of who the author is,” so regardless of whether the other is a man or a woman.
Then, last thing I want to say is, just to acknowledge that we’re very limited in what we can do. I’m talking about men and women. That’s obviously a simplification. For one, these people and these example sentences are not actual real individuals. So really, what we’re doing is we are assuming something about a person’s gender from their name and from the pronoun that’s being used for them. We’re doing it in stereotypical ways, and precisely the way that we say that people should not be doing it. But we think that this is how these sentences are being interpreted. So, we’re forced into doing that.
Second of all, anything that is really nonbinary in any way, it’s just not represented in journals and in textbooks. We just don’t see singular ‘they’ for example. So, I just want to acknowledge that. Talking about men and women is a simplification, we’re very aware of.
Daniel: So, nonbinary people are not represented at all, and where men and women are represented, they’re represented in stereotypical ways with men being aggressors and women being referred to with positive emotions, mostly.
I got a question. The language of the study was English, we have to obey the Bender rule. But there has been some attention focused on languages other than English and how example sentences in linguistic papers are casting people in a negative light. Did you get a sense of what kind of things were going on in languages other than English, or was that outside the scope of this study?
Hadas: I have a two-part answer. Part one of the answer is, the study is written in English, but we look at example sentences, not only English. Specifically, in journals, in journal articles, people will study which they study, that’s not just English. Also, in textbooks, we do see depending on the textbook, some amount of non-English data. Both papers will have a part of them that discuss the non-English data separately from the English data, and the trends are exactly the same. So, we don’t see a difference. We have done the work of splitting out what we call non-English into categories. We may have enough data to do that for some languages, but the general trend is the same regardless.
The second part of the answer is, there has been a bit of work looking at textbooks in other languages. So, Spanish introductory textbooks and then French journals, and both of those find, again, the same kinds of findings as we find here.
Daniel: Well, I really appreciate you bringing this topic to light, but I guess I’m wondering what kind of impact you’re seeing so far. Have you gotten any good feedback? Are linguists on board with this? What’s going on? How do we fix this?
Hadas: Well, okay, that is a big question. The first thing to say is, we have seen some improvements since we started presenting this work. In particular, we’ve had several authors of textbooks write us and say, “Hey, we’re either publishing a new textbook or we’re republishing a new version of an existing textbook. Can you talk us through how to do this kind of work of doing the counts and improving the examples in our textbook?” So, that has happened. I think that’s really great.
How do we fix it is a big issue. There isn’t just one answer to how do we fix it. But the main thing is you start by being aware of what’s going on, you can’t fix a problem that you’re not aware of. Doing the work of listening to yourself and trying to identify issues in your own thinking in your own way of speaking is hard, and is hard for me as well. As someone who’s been presenting this work for several years, I find myself falling into this trap again. From where I’m from, my education and my teaching, it’s engraved in me that the order of names that you use is John, Mary, Bill, and Sue–[crosstalk]
Daniel: That’s it.
Ben: [laughs]
Daniel: It was almost John in my master’s coursework.
Hadas: My dissertation is very skewed in exactly the same way. By the time I published my book, based on my dissertation, I did the work of going in and trying to do better, but being very self-conscious and thinking and saying– at some point, when I was teaching, I would say to my students, I would put John on the board that start a sentence and say, “You know what? No, I don’t want to hear about John. We’ve heard about Johnny. We’re going to talk about someone else.” And just being very explicit about it to yourself, and taking that extra step of being mindful, and even explaining why. At some point, I just explained to my students why I was doing that, while I was actually changing the way that I was talking. I’m sorry. There are cats here, and they’re making quite a noise.
[laughter]
Daniel: They’re great. We love them.
Ben: It’s not a distraction. It is an augmentation of an already fantastic response.
Hadas: I forgot what I was saying. But in any event–
Ben: One thing I was wondering, Hadas, is publishing didn’t die, first of all. There was the big fear that books will were basically going to go the way of newspapers and all that kind of stuff. But it actually has proved to be one of the more, shall we say, robust, old-world medias. Beyond that, textbooks make good money. It is a realm of publishing that is still pretty profitable. So, I’m wondering if publishers, as the gatekeepers of textbooks, of which there aren’t that many, I would imagine, I can think of a few pretty big names off the top of my head. If we get them on board with this, and it’s just a bolted in part of their copyediting process. Maybe that’s something that could see some substantial improvement.
Hadas: You would think that something like this should already be a part of the process. If someone’s reading someone reads a textbook and says, “These are blatantly sexual examples. We should not have them because they are really not necessary in order to illustrate.” [crosstalk]
Ben: By edition 17, you’ve had 16 chances to unfuck this, basically.
Daniel: [laughs]
Hadas: And that apparently didn’t happen. Yes, I think it’s a good point that if we could get publishers on board, that would be a start. Maybe the thing that we can control more is journal articles, because the editors tend to be scientists who in the field, who are linguists. We have a much more direct line of communication with them just to say, “Hey, your papers contain biases of these kinds that we can illustrate. Maybe you want to have some kind of policy about this and try to enforce it?” And some of them do have policies, but the enforcement part might be the thing that needs to improve.
Daniel: I know that some people might say that this seems like a small thing. Why are you going through these old examples? But I don’t think it is. I think it’s super important because representation matters and the way that we refer to each other sends a message about what we think, that’s what language does. So, I’m really grateful that you’re doing this. I’m glad that you seem to be bringing out the kinds of changes that need to happen. So, thanks for this work.
Hadas: Yeah. In a sense, it’s not that if we fix example sentences, we both solve sexism and all problems that relate to gender equity. But first of all, you have to start somewhere. Second of all, for those who don’t believe, you have to do the work of showing the data. And third of all, “Just saying it’s too big, we can’t fix it just by doing this one thing,” that’s also not helping. You’ve got to start somewhere, and this is a thing that you can control. And, hopefully, you can do better.
Can I make sure before I end the segment that I remind or tell everyone that the author of both papers, so Rikker Dockum, Sarah Babinski, Chris Geisslerm. This one paper, Chris and Sarah, Paola Cépeda and Katharina Pabst for this other paper, we are doing a ‘Meet the Authors’ webinar in January. So, it will happen on January 28th at 12 noon Eastern US time, so possibly somewhat late for some of the people who are attending this particular meeting here. But if you’re a very ambitious, you might attend and regardless, I would hope that at least some of the listeners of this show might be interested in meeting us and talking to us. We’ll spend an hour and a half going through findings and a lot of time trying to talk through consequences and what we can do and why it matters and all that good stuff.
Daniel: That is great. Thanks so much, Hadas. Thanks for coming on the show. We’ll have a link to that on our blog, becauselanguage.com. Thanks, Hadas, for talking to us about your work.
Hadas: Yeah. Thank you.
Daniel: Awesome. We’re on to a story by Diego, who noticed something about neopronouns. Diego, we got you?
Diego: Yes. Hello. Thanks for having me.
Daniel: Hey, great to meet you. Diego is another very prolific contributor who has given us so many great Words of the Week, and so many great stories. Thanks for doing that for us.
Diego: Sure. My pleasure.
Daniel: Tell us about what you notice about neopronouns.
Diego: Yeah, so I actually found a little post or article on the Duolingo blog. Every once in a while, they have some actually pretty interesting things on there. Most of the articles are by doctors and linguists. But yeah, this one caught my attention. It’s talking about neopronouns or new pronouns. The main gist of the article talks about just pronouns in general, how they work in English, how they work in other languages, and how that can change from one language to the other. But yeah, the whole concept of neopronouns was new to me, it’s something I hadn’t seen before. The article talks about how in English, we’ve developed Z, spelled Z-E or X-E, instead of using he or she, as a gender-neutral pronoun or a neopronoun. The article goes on to say that it’s happening in other languages, like in Spanish. So, that just kind of took me down a rabbit hole.
As a native Spanish speaker, I’ve been trying to pay attention to what’s happening with inclusive language and gender-neutral language. The issue that’s happening with Spanish, different from English, is that Spanish is a very grammatically gendered language. We have words ending in O-R masculine, usually an ending in A-R feminine. So, Spanish has come up with a few different ways to try to combat that, the binary nature of how the language works. Some of the things that have been attempted, I think one of the earliest things that was going on, was using the @ sign because it looks like an A inside of an O, and that didn’t last.
Ben: [laughs] That’s really fun.
Daniel: We have noticed that one before going back about 2015, but it feels like that one’s not as popular anymore. That’s just my sense.
Diego: Yeah, it seems to have already kind of fallen out of use for the most part because it really only counts men or people who identify as male or female, and it doesn’t account for all the other identity options that we have, as well as it not necessarily being pronounceable in Spanish. Which is an issue with the other option that’s come up with, which is using an X instead of an A or an O, most famously in Latinx. So, people argue that neither of those, using the @ sign or the X are pronounceable in Spanish, and that’s why they don’t work.
What I’ve been seeing most recently, and more commonly, is using an E instead of an X or an @ sign. For example, the neopronoun that’s coming out in Spanish now is instead of el for he or ella for she, they’re doing elle, so E-L-L-E, like a combination of el and ella. But it’s an uphill battle for sure, different country-specific governments are trying to push it forward. In Argentina, for example, there are some universities that are allowing in papers and whatnot, any sort of inclusive language, gender-neutral language in whatever form you want to use. But then on the other hand, we have the Royal Spanish Academy that says that inclusive language is really just a strategy for avoiding the use of the generic masculine, which is really at the root of the problem with Spanish, and I suppose with other romance languages in that people consider them to be inherently sexist. Because the rules that we have in the romance languages is that, if you’re talking about a group of male identifying people, you use the masculine plural pronoun, and if it’s a group of female identifying people, the feminine pronoun. But no matter how many women you have in the group, as soon as you add one male identifying person, we default to this generic masculine. That’s why people think Spanish is a sexist language, and we have to reform it.
But I always go back to the Romans and as Latin was developing, nobody was thinking, “Oh, a flower is feminine. So, we’re going to give it a feminine article,” as Latin transformed into the romance languages, it’s arbitrary, but it would seem that as society, over the centuries, we kind of reimposed these ideas of masculine and feminine on to inanimate objects, and then we multiplied the issue on all layers of the language.
There’s obviously no simple solution. I really think it comes down to just being aware of the fact that people change, languages change, and everything’s always evolving. It’s not really a matter of just having to change the way you talk or having to change the way you write or the way you read. I really feel it’s just a matter of being aware of the fact that this is happening, and being aware of the fact that you might meet somebody one day who has a different pronoun, or maybe you already have somebody in your life that wants you to use a different pronoun with them.
It’s really interesting to see how it’s playing out across different languages, the whole concept of inclusive language or gender-neutral language. I don’t know if they’re mutually exclusive. I don’t know if we can lump them all together. There are obviously some overlapping areas of concern for sure. But yeah, I thought it was really interesting, the way that this is continuing to take hold in different parts of the world in different languages. Yeah, I think that’s about it. Sorry, if I’m rambling now.
[chuckles]
Daniel: This is a great discussion. I’m glad to hear about how a Spanish speaker, who’s not me, who’s just basically a learner, how that comes across to you. I’m curious about Latines or instead of compañeros or compañeras or compañeres, I wonder if you have a sense of how accepted that is, or if anybody else besides Diego has encountered Latines or the E instead of the O and the A in the Spanish-speaking world.
Ben: If I can jump in, I saw Brendon left a comment saying that it’s infiltrated telenovelas, which I have to assume is a strong indication that it is hitting at least some level of mainstreamness because if it has hit the telenovelas, I mean come on.
Daniel: Yeah. What do you got, Lord Mortis?
PharaohKatt: This is actually, PharaohKatt again. I’m chatting with Lord Mortis. I watch a telenovela called La Casa de las Flores, and they play a lot with gender and sexuality in that telenovela. One of the things that I saw was someone was addressing a crowd, and she said, todas, todes, tores. She used masculine, feminine, neutral, like all three.
Daniel: And this was to refer to a crowd of people like, “Everybody, everybody, everybody, I have an announcement,” that kind of thing.
PharaohKatt: Yeah. The subtitles said it was gentlemen, ladies, everyone, but you know how subtitles can be.
Ben: Yeah, a little bit of subtlety missing there.
Daniel: That’s interesting.
Diego: That’s been another option or people have considered that as another option of instead of saying los chicos or las chicas, you always say los chicos e las chicas, the boys and the girls, but again, that only accounts for me. identifying people and female identifying people, not any of the other options or people who are gender fluid. So, that along with @ kind of is lacking, because it really just reinforces the binary. It’s a way of avoiding the use of the generic masculine, but still doesn’t really, really solve the problem.
The other issue that happens now is that people take it a step too far and they think they’re being cute or funny. They’ll take an inanimate object, like la mesa, the table, and they’ll refer to it as le mese or something like that. So, kind of missing the whole point pretty much and just laughing at, in their opinion, how ridiculous it is that we’re even considering this. The language is what it is, it’s not sexist, and we should just leave it alone or whatever.
Ben: The Spanish speaking version of like, “I identify as an Apache attack helicopter,” look how stupid this nonsense is.
Diego: Exactly.
AJ: I know that right now French is having a lot of controversy over like very similar thing because they have the neopronoun ‘el’, which is created in between the il and el. It was added recently to a prominent dictionary. And there’s a lot of conservatives in France that are decrying the wokeism and writing letters to the Académie Française. There’s a lot of similarity there, I think.
Diego: Yeah, no, definitely. There’s a politician– I can’t remember what his title was, but there’s a politician with the quote out there saying, “Inclusive language is not the future of French.” So, that’s kind of disappointing to hear.
Daniel: Now, I’m curious about the other romance languages. Any Italian speakers notice anything? Maybe not?
Diego: I dabble in Italian, but I haven’t looked into it. As I was doing the research for Spanish, I came across the one for French, and that’s all I’ve been able to find.
Ben: We could also check in on Portuguese as well, see what they’re doing.
Daniel: Yeah, that’s right.
Diego: I think they’re doing something similar. If anybody’s familiar with the FX show, Pose, I personally never saw it, but when I was working as a translator, my company had to work on it. And if I’m not mistaken, the creator of the show, I can’t remember his name, he made a point of telling the translation companies, “You’re going to use gender-neutral language,” because that’s kind of a big theme of the show. It’s definitely out there, it seems to be hit or miss. It’s really production specific or show specific platform, specific country, like I was mentioning it’s different in Argentina compared to Mexico or compared to Spain.
Obviously, we have a very long way to go in all the languages. But going back to the research that Hadas is doing, I think it’s very, very timely, and obviously, people have been noticing the inequities for a long time now. Now that other gender options have really come into the fold, I think it adds to the complexity, but also adds to the urgency of trying to figure it out and have everybody do a better job.
Daniel: It’s fun to watch. It’s fun to see this happening in real time. Thanks, Diego. Really appreciate you bringing all the things you bring. That was a great item. Thanks so much.
Diego: My pleasure. Thank you.
[music]
Daniel: We’re done with our news items, but now we’re on to Words of the Week. Whoo. Okay, our first one from PharaohKatt. What you got?
PharaohKatt: Okay. The word I have this week is touch grass, which is one that I have encountered a lot on Tumblr.
Ben: Touch grass. Oh, I feel so old. I love it when this happens because I have no fucking idea what this means.
Daniel: Oh, we’ll take a guess, Ben.
Ben: Touch grass, touch grass, touch grass.
Daniel: Touch grass, not as one word, but as an instruction.
Ben: I’m wondering if it has anything to do with kneeling during the national anthem.
Daniel: Oh, interesting.
Ben: That would have been my guess, is like an instruction from one freedom fighter to another, like, “Touch grass.”
AJ: I love that. It’s really not a bad guess. That’s kind of impressive as I guess. It’s not even close but the logic is great.
Ben: Impressive as a guess, but you’re really held wrong.
PharaohKatt: That’s a good guess.
Ben: [chuckles] That was much less genuine and authentic than AJ. AJ was giving me a genuine compliment. PharaohKatt is like, “Shut up, idiot.”
[chuckles]
PharaohKatt: I’m sorry. I don’t know how to regulate my tone of voice.
[chuckles]
Ben: It’s okay, don’t worry me. Trust me, you deserve to say shut up with your tone of voice to me. That is the thing that needs to happen.
PharaohKatt: [laughs] All right. Touch grass tends to be used when somebody has said something a little bit ridiculous or pointless, and the response is, “Go and touch grass,” or, “You need to touch grass.” It basically means you need to get out more. So, go outside and–
Daniel: Get off the computer.
PharaohKatt: Yeah, get off the computer and go back to the real world.
Ben: Oh my God. Does this have something to do with the film, Holy Man, with Eddie Murphy? Do you remember that? Where he instructs everyone watching to go outside and touch the grass, to physically interact with the grass?
Daniel: Oh, wow.
PharaohKatt: I have not seen that movie.
Ben: Anyone? Anyone? Anyone saying Holy Man ? Come on, work with me here.
Daniel: That is worth checking up on though.
Ben: Damn it.
Daniel: Nobody seen it, which means you can claim anything you want. Yay.
AJ: It sounds very plausible, certainly.
Ben: Clearly, I’m just desperately trying to get back from my crushing failure of this having nothing to do with the national anthem. Where are we seeing this being used? What subculture of humans tends to be saying this?
PharaohKatt: Lots of people on Tumblr.
Ben: Teenage girls, is that what we’re thinking?
PharaohKatt: [crosstalk] -a bit older.
Daniel: Rebecca Watson used on The Skeptics, used it on a few recent episodes. She’s not as old as I am, but not teenaged either.
PharaohKatt: It’s Millennials.
Ben: You just gave the widest fucking age range, Daniel.
Daniel: I certainly did not!
Ben: You just gave [laughs] like a 35-year gap.
Daniel: Okay, I did do that. [laughs]
PharaohKatt: It’s mostly millennials who I see using it.
Ben: Well, that’s me, technically, as an elder millennial. So, I guess I’ll just have to start doing that.
Daniel: Okay, awesome. Okay, touch grass. Our next one is from Aristemo.
Aristemo: Alrighty, then. It’s fairly new to me, but polywork. Are you guys hearing me clearly?
Ben: Yes, we are. Polywork.
Aristemo: I think this might have branched off of kind of the side hustle culture where people don’t really feel that a single job title really sums up who they are or what their interests are. So, they’re branching out and listing themselves in different ways and don’t really see themselves as having a fulfilled life if they’re tied to a single role or profession. They want to be doing different things every day, they want to engage with their different interests. So, you know, “Hey, yes, I prepare taxes, but I also write songs,” or, “I can be a web developer,” or whatever. There’s even a site now by the same name, Polywork, where people can list these things, list kind of the different facets of who they are and what they do. But I see it as a rejection of this idea that you have to do one task forever for the rest of your life.
Ben: Capitalist wage slave model.
Aristemo: Yeah.
Daniel: Well, you also dropped a tweet from Alan MacLeod on Twitter, who says, “Heads up, they’ve come up with a new buzzword to describe desperately working multiple jobs just to survive.” So, there’s the upside of not just being one thing, “Hey, I contain multitudes,” but also, “Oh, I’m kind of having to do billions of gigs.”
Aristemo: Yeah. That’s the flip side of it where I think this mentality might have partially come and again, sort of branching off of the side hustle where this came out of a place of need. People realizing that they can do these things after having had to do more than one thing to survive. But I think among the younger generation, it’s more of a preference and an optimistic outlook, whereas perhaps among older millennials, it’s more of that negative view of like, “We can’t just survive doing one thing.”
Daniel: If this catches on, then we’re going to need a retronym for the kind of job where you just get it and stay in that job until you retire.
Ben: Oh, yeah.
Aristemo: Monowork?
Daniel: Monowork. [laughs]
Ben: Monorail, monorail, monorail. Are we thinking that this is a play or an evolution of polymath to describe a person who is pursuing many notable intellectual pursuits?
Aristemo: I mean that’s an interesting overlap.
Daniel: Not sure. Poly seems like a natural way to attach to work, don’t you think?
Ben: Maybe, I don’t know. I’ve always found polymath as a phrase to be a weird and unwieldy one. I only really tend to hear it from Americans. Whereas other places tend to use phrases like “renaissance man” or something like that to reference a far more classically trained and impressive version. I also never really understood polymath, just as a really brief aside, because it’s like poly meaning lots and then math, just one discipline. That didn’t make heaps of sense to me inherently.
Aristemo: I would think there would be math says different disciplines and not a limited usage as we perhaps see it now.
Ben: Maybe. Maybe all interesting things were just called math back in the day. I don’t know.
Aristemo: Well, think of how we use sciences.
Ben: Yeah. Okay.
Daniel: Hang on. I could be completely wrong on this, but the math from polymath might be unrelated to mathematics. No, that can’t be right.
Ben: You get right out of town, Daniel. You get right out.
Daniel: It looks like both math and the math from polymath, both come from a Greek word meaning ‘all learning’. Okay. False alarm, everybody. False alarm.
Aristemo: There you go.
Ben: Okay. You can come back into town now, Daniel.
Daniel: Okay. I’ll come back. I always get excited when I think, “Oh, no, I found an unrelated pair of words that I always thought were related.” No, I think they’re totally related actually.
Hedvig: You pass that inclination on to me because when we were talking about rabid and rabies, I was like, “Maybe they’re not related.” Like, I’ve lost track.
Ben: [chuckles] [crosstalk] It definitely does happen [crosstalk] was convergent evolution in linguistics where you’re just like, “Oh, they’re totally different route pathways.”
Hedvig: Yeah. It seems possible to me. Anything’s possible now.
Daniel: The surprising one was that rabies and rabid are related, but another related word to those two is rage.
Hedvig: That makes sense.
Daniel: But the one that’s not related is outrage. Outrage is completely unrelated to rage.
Hedvig: That’s not fine.
Ben: Yeah, that is a shining example of fuckin’ English, you’ve had too many, go home, mate.
Daniel: No, you know what it is. [crosstalk] It’s because of the -AGE ending from French.
Ben: Look, Daniel, we don’t need to get this started. There are probably some French language speakers here on the show, and I don’t want to make any enemies. We’ve already touched on the Académie Française, and I bit my tongue. I did. I kept it all on the inside when we– [crosstalk]
Daniel: Suddenly, we’re trying not to insult French speakers? When did this start?
Ben: When I could see everyone’s faces and how mad at me they would be.
[laughter]
Hedvig: I like not insulting French speakers. I like French.
Daniel: I like French too.
AJ: I can at least tell you from this side that as a mostly Canadian-dialect French speaker, I absolutely relish in insulting the Académie Française. Every time.
[laughter]
Ben: Because in their eyes, you’re a dirty farmer. Because, AJ, and I’m not insulting you, I’m using their insult because they’re horrid snobs. That’s what I was trying to say, just in case, because I could see AJ’s face and he judged me a little bit and I didn’t like it.
Daniel: If you’re going to judge Ben, then please turn off your camera. Just for his sake.
Ben: The tone of voice is fine as PharaohKatt discovered.
Daniel: Okay, AJ, we’re over to you for yours. Go ahead, hit us with it.
AJ: All right, hold on one second. Let me figure out how to unmute myself permanently and not have to hold my spacebar.
[laughter]
Ben: Push to talk. I’m pushing, I’m pushing.
AJ: I’ve got it. I am one of those weird people that doesn’t have an office job. So, I’ve never worked from home or use Zoom, even though that’s the whole pandemic thing to do. I come to this week with ‘bonk’ is a word that I have noticed on my Twitter feed a lot more from the image macro meme that you may have seen of the distorted-looking dogs coming from the doge meme, where you have one smacking the other over the head with a little baseball bat, and it says “Bonk, go to horny jail.” At this point, if you haven’t figured out, if you wanted a PG podcast, turn back now.
Ben: [laughs]
Daniel: Too late!
AJ: I think it’s really interesting, the bonk part of that meme and its implications specifically have started to be used on its own in reference to that meaning. In particular, I spend a lot of time in Twitter circles with ice hockey fans, specifically in my case, like–
Ben: [laughs] This gets better and better. [laughs]
AJ: No, it’s very niche, I can admit that, but specifically queer ice hockey fans. It gets more niche, I promise.
[laughter]
AJ: I can search on my feed, I can search the word ‘bonk’ and set it to the latest results filtered just to the people I follow and there’s result after result after result. So, people will basically just reply, it can literally just be the word ‘bonk’ in the reply, and that’s the whole tweet. It basically is like a playful slap on the wrist, like, “You’re being horny on your main account, stop.”
Ben: Is this a thing that you might put to someone who’s put up a thing that is perilously close to a thirst trap, but is trying to parade is not a thirst trap, and so you might be like, “Ah, okay, bonk.”
AJ: I think, sort of. The only difference really, it’s when somebody is being thirsty about someone else. In the case of like my Twitter circles, if somebody is posting really thirstily about their favorite player, you might playfully say bonk. It comes in a couple different flavors. I saw somebody a week ago, one of my friends replied to another friend, “Bonk, but true.”
[laughter]
AJ: They were agreeing with the thirst, but just had to point out that the person was being horny on main.
Ben: It’s like a tech foul. The play was inherently fair, but I’m sorry, we still have to foul you for it.
AJ: It is. I think it’s funny, because it’s not like anybody actually doesn’t want this content to be in their feed. Nobody is saying it because it’s a negative thing. Most of the time, it’s like, “We’re actually enjoying what you’re putting out. We just have to point out the fact that it is thirsty.”
Ben: Well, it’s play, right? It’s playful.
AJ: Exactly.
Ben: It’s allowing for a little bit more interaction in a space where everyone’s sort of consenting to that play.
Hedvig: There’s a bit of a value I feel, if you in a social setting, whether it be in physical flesh world or online, if you make a little bit of a faux pas or make a few people something that’s a little bit out of– if you’re like a bit thirsty about a hockey player, then someone will maybe react to it and say bonk, or you’re getting horny on main. But if you actually did something that was a proper misstep that people were actually upset about, a lot of people wouldn’t comment at all. Do you know what I mean?
AJ: True.
Hedvig: I feel the same thing is true in real life. If you feel you’re a bit rude to someone and you– if you actually screw up, then you probably won’t be told about it.
AJ: Yeah.
Ben: I like the idea that there’s a value though, because if you fuck up bad enough, [chuckles] those responses come back.
Hedvig: Yeah, that might happen. But maybe not your friends.
AJ: True. If you play into systemic societal problems and really lean into something horrible, you’re probably going to get the backlash from that.
Ben: Right. Yeah, and that’s the value that I thought Hedvig was talking about, like playful stuff, good.
AJ: Come back up.
Ben: Yeah, it’s like a bathtub. A whole bunch of kind of bad embarrassing stuff, no one’s going to come in. Horrendous, evil internet supervillain stuff, everyone’s going to come in.
Hedvig: Yeah. But again, when you get to that end of the spectrum, the people who engage might actually more be strangers. Your family and friends might just be like, “I’m just going to ignore Marius on Christmas. I’m just not going to talk to them. I’m going to ghost them. I’m going to unfollow them.”
Ben: The crazy internet mob is doing my work for me.
Hedvig: Yeah, I’m going to just hide because I just don’t want to engage with this person. Whereas people who are strangers might not feel as bad engaging with that person. You just ghost them, you just unfollow them and just be like, “Okay, fine, whatever.”
Daniel: I think it’s worth pointing out that bonk is polysemous. It could be referring to sex like, “Did you bonk?” And then, it could be also like, “Knock it off, bonk.”
Ben: I just wanted to bring that up, because I wasn’t sure if any listeners outside of Australia would have been aware of that connotation because it’s pretty old as well. Like my grandparents’ generation referred to sex as bonking. But not anyone even remotely close to our–
Daniel: Four Weddings and a Funeral.
AJ: I’m definitely aware of it, but it sounds just not– I’m having one of those times, sorry, where there’s a word that’s perfect for what I want to say in French and not in English and I can’t get there. It sounds not [crosstalk] courant, is what I was coming to which translates sort of to fluent, but in a colloquial sense, but it wouldn’t colloquially fit to me.
Ben: Yeah, it doesn’t have the capital it used to. It just stands out like a fossil.
Hedvig: It doesn’t seem spontaneous and natural.
Ben: But that all sounds way cooler when you use the French word that means all of those things.
Daniel: Well, I just love how bonk is escaping its horny jail [crosstalk] and becoming its own thing.
AJ: Yeah, it’s fun. I actually discovered, and I wouldn’t have realized this and even though I think it’s something I knew, but when I was going through the Know Your Meme site that you so helpfully put in the run sheet, that pre-dating the ‘go to horny jail’ image that was actually only from last year, believe it or not. Previously to that in 2019, there was a short video format meme with the sound effect of the bonk prior to it having the horny jail context where it’s just a picture of the distorted-looking dog with the bonk appears in one of the little jagged word clouds like you would see in a comic book. And you don’t see a bat, but you see the head of the dog deform, just get a little slash right through it.
Ben: And now, it’s on TikTok as well. It’s a filter that you can use to be like, “That’s what I want–”
[crosstalk]
AJ: Yes, it is.
Daniel: Ooh. Send me a link of that, and I will put that up on our blog. That will be really good.
Ben: That was a fun one. I really liked that.
Daniel: I liked that one. Thank you.
Ben: I was also thinking about Queer Eye talkie fandoms as a part of the internet that I’ve just never thought about before.
AJ: It’s tremendous. You would be surprised how many Australians are actually on it.
Ben: Look, as a culture, we love punching shit in the face. It is just one of our favorite pastimes.
Daniel: Speak for yourself.
Ben: Bump into a person at the bar, punch that person in the face. Bump into a person outside, punch that person in the face. It’s a very unfortunate aspect of toxic masculinity in Australia.
Daniel: Okay. Let’s go on to our next one from Diego. Diego, we got you back. What do you got for us?
Diego: As somebody who recently got their third booster shot, I was curious to see if people had started writing ‘vaxxxed’ with three X’s instead of one or two. [Ben laughing] I just did a quick Google search. I didn’t really find anything. There’s a BBC article from May about people using the triple-X-ed vaxxxed after getting the two shots to say that they’re fully immunized and ready to get down pretty much. And they were predicting spikes in STIs possibly in the UK, because people were coming out of their homes for the first time in a year or whatever. But yeah, that’s pretty much all I was able to find. I’m sure it’s going to catch on or maybe I didn’t look in the right places. But, yeah, three X’s means you got your three shots.
Daniel: Also, it’s got that triple X sexy thing going on. I think I need to expand on that a little bit. I’ve seen people write, “I’m vaxxed, waxed, and ready to chillax,” or, “ready to climax.” I’ve seen a bunch of things in that vein.
Ben: Hmm. Yummy. I know on internet dating, if someone says that to me, I’m going to be like, “Yes, please.”
Hedvig: Did you all see that thing from Jacinda Ardern, the New Zealand Prime Minister, where she was on a new show and said something about they were now going to be possible to meet Tinder dates. And then, she commented and said, “In fact, you can meet up to 25 people.” This sort of implied that she suggested the people should have 25-people orgies, and it’s quite funny, and she realized. She thought it was very funny started giggling.
AJ: It’s very in character for her.
Ben: I have to watch that interview because I just don’t know how conversationally you are talking about like, “Yeah. Everyone, it’s going to be really exciting. It’s really fun. You go out there. You can Tinder date again. You can Tinder date 25 people.” How do you get to 25 straight out of the gate?
Hedvig: Because that’s the max of people that you can meet.
Ben: On Tinder, is that an app limit?
Hedvig: No. The New Zealand regulations, that’s how many people you can get together in a place.
Ben: Okay, that makes a lot more sense.
Hedvig: She just mentioned that right after the Tinder, so it sounded like she was just testing. Yeah, it was quite funny. Also, 25 people sounds like so much logistics.
Daniel: Yeah. Get snacks.
Ben: I don’t know about anyone else, but I desperately want the amateur section of Kiwi Pornhub to feature a couple of these parties. Surely it has to happen, surely.
Daniel: She’s an ex-Mormon as well, so she shares my awkwardness.
Ben: [chuckles] I didn’t know that.
Hedvig: This might be a bonk moment. Yeah.
[laughter]
Hedvig: I don’t want to–[crosstalk]
Daniel: That’s a great one. Let’s go to our next one. Ladidalisa, with one in German.
Ladidalisa: Yes. This week, Germany got a new government for the first time in 16 years. Our chancellor is not Angela Merkel, but Olaf Scholz. For the first time ever, our government is made up of three parties. Traditionally, the German government is made up of two parties. This time, no two parties get enough votes. So, this time, we’ve got the SPD, the Social Democrats, the Environmental Green Party and the FDP, the Liberal Party of Germany. Since those parties are associated with the colors, red, green, and yellow respectively, we like to call it the ampelkoalition, the traffic light coalition.
Ben: [chuckles] That’s fun.
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: Yes, that’s very good.
Daniel: But this is part of a long tradition of color names in German politics, is it not?
Ladidalisa: Yes.
Hedvig: This is Jamaica one, right?
Ladidalisa: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Apparently, ampelkoalition was first used in 1980 but it hasn’t been traction since the early 2000s, I guess. That’s when for the first time we had to actually talk about three-way coalitions on the national level. The other coalitions they get the nicknames from flags, like the Jamaica coalition Hedvig just mentioned, that’s made up of the Green Party, the liberals, and Angela Merkel’s CDU, which is associated with the color black. In the early days of talking about the Jamaica coalition, it was actually talked about as the schwarzampel, the black traffic light, because it’s a traffic light, but you swap the red for black, and it quickly got to the nickname schwar zampel, which I love, because it sounds so ridiculous. As it sounds ridiculous, it was abandoned pretty quickly. For the Jamaica coalition, apparently, the politicians actually leafed through a bunch of flags and sat and looked for one’s that had three-color combination, and they decided that Jamaican flag looked pretty cool and fit with those colors.
Some people try to used that for the ampelkoalition. The flags of Lithuania and Cameroon actually work, I guess. That’s not the right color scheme, but we have gotten used to the ampelkoalition so much that it just didn’t work out. We just landed on the traffic light.
Ben: It’s very fun. I like that tradition of just naming it after stuff, because we just give all of our leaders in Australia horrendously casual nicknames, and I don’t like that system very much at all. And it’s not because I believe that we deserve–
Hedvig: Wait. Besides ScoMo, which are the ones do we know of?
Ben: K-Rudd. We had– what was Gilla? Julia Gillard had one that wasn’t just her last name. I can’t remember.
Daniel: No, that’s not.
Hedvig: Really?
Daniel: It was about her hair. Yeah.
Ben: And then there was–
Hedvig: Oh, passed me by. Probably for best.
Ben: ScoMo. Scott Morrison as well.
Hedvig: That’s the one I said. I said besides ScoMo, what do you got?
[chuckles]
Ben: Sorry, the one before ScoMo. What’s his name?
Daniel: Tony Abbott.
Ben: No. Fuck, we’ve had so many leaders, Australians leaders–[crosstalk]
Daniel: Oh. Who was the one between Tony Abbott and Scott– I should know this.
Ben: The one who wore the leather jackets and was really cool, but also fabulously wealthy and kind of a douche.
Daniel: Malcolm Turnbull.
Ben: There we go. Did we call him something, Malcolm–?
Daniel: I just think we called him Malcolm Turnbull.
Hedvig: Oh, yeah, budgie smuggler, [unintelligible [01:13:43] Tony Abbott. That is true.
Ben: Yes, that is true.
Daniel: Or perhaps PharaohKatt.
Ben: No, I really appreciate German doing it after flags and colors and stuff, way better. Really good.
Ladidalisa: I mean, we had a nickname for Angela Merkel, that was “mutti,” which is mommy, basically.
Ben: [chuckles] I think after that many years, that was just inevitable. I heard a joke, the punchline was Angela Merkel. I think the leading was something like what is the most dependable machine in Germany?
[chuckles]
Ladidalisa: [crosstalk]
Ben: I love that we’re talking about some of the most complex social and governmental entities like that have ever been devised by human minds, and fundamentally, it’s just like, “I voted yellow.”
[chuckles]
Hedvig: Yeah, but it’s really good in news coverage, when you see the polling, you can make the column in that color, and it’s really handy.
Daniel: Let’s go on to the last one. I had to get this one in, because I love it. It’s “do a capitalism.”
Ben: Who’s this from or is this you?
Daniel: This is from me. I’m doing this one.
Ben: Oh, boo, Daniel. This show isn’t about you. Gross.
Daniel: Well, this part can be.
Ben: [laughs]
Daniel: This little bit. I just had to get this in because it went into the poll and it’s doing really well. So, I’ve got to say it on our show. I was on a group chat with Dr. Gerald Roche, who said that I could share this, and something about, “How I can’t do a thing because I need to do a capitalism.” Doing a capitalism means like going to work.
Ben: Do a capitalism.
Daniel: I have to go do a capitalism.
Ben: Interesting.
AJ: That’s really interesting, because I feel that’s not how I would have expected that context to be. I would have thought like, “Oh, that would refer to the wealthy classes doing oppressive things under capitalism.”
Ben: I like that.
Daniel: [laughs]
Nigel: Commit a capitalism.
Daniel: Committing a capitalism!
[LAUGHTER]
Nigel: Like Amazon getting 100 people killed for tornadoes. Yeah, commit a capitalism.
AJ: That feels more correct.
Hedvig: Or going to work.
Daniel: Actually, I did a little digging and found that there was a character Harvey in Animal Crossing.
Ben: Wait, is there a Harvey in Animal Crossing, as well as Stardew Valley? I’m not okay with this.
Daniel: And is this a dog? He’s a hippie-looking dog wearing a vest, and he’s got round glasses. I think he installs the equivalent of an ATM in the game, and he says, “I’m hoping to get a bunch more shops around. So, I installed it in case you need to do a capitalism.” But now I’m seeing some people referring to going to work as doing a capitalism.
Ben: I like it. Doing a capitalism. Part of me also wonders, are we kowtowing the overlords if we use that language?
Daniel: No, I think it’s a little different. I think it’s like thumbing your nose at it by explicitly saying, “I’m doing this because of capitalism, not because I love it.”
Hedvig: But how is it going to an ATM and why isn’t it wage labor? That’s what I don’t understand.
Daniel: [crosstalk]
Hedvig: I’ve just been reading a lot of Marx lately, and currency and value in itself is not necessary. You can still have currency in a communist system.
Ben: Hedvig, we’re making a funny tweet about a video game. I think you might be rolling a bit deep here.
Daniel: The ATM was not my reading. I had the other reading.
Hedvig: Okay, yeah, because going to work seems more like doing a capitalism.
Daniel: And gig labor as well. Going to work every day doesn’t– I mean it is doing a capitalism. But if you say I have to do a capitalism, it seems like I have to do a gig. And I think I feel it’s a reference to the gig economy, but I’m not sure.
Ben: Nigel, I like yours. “May your capitalism go well, fellow consumer.” That’s great.
AJ: Yeah, I had put it in the chat, because I didn’t want to interrupt and say, “Oh, I have to leave,” because you’re in the middle of recording,” and then I realized, “Actually, this is a perfect example of when I can jump in. I have to leave because I have to go do a capitalism.”
Ben: [laughs]
Daniel: Whoa. Spotted in the wild. This is great. Thanks, AJ.
AJ: Thank you all for doing this. It’s been so much fun.
Daniel: Cool. Let’s just rewind. Touch grass, polywork, horny jail/bonk, vaxxxed, ampelkoalition, and do a capitalism are our Words of the Week. I would just like to say a huge thank you to everybody who gave us stuff, who continue to give us words, who continue to give us news, and who make the show so much darn fun to do. So, a huge thank you to all of you.
Ben: Thanks, everyone. You’re all so lovely.
[music]
Hedvig: [chuckles] If you have a question or comment, or just want to say hi, you can get in touch with us, we are BecauseLangPod on all the things. You can also send us an email. And our email address is hello@becauselanguage.com. You can also help out the show and one of the best ways of doing this is telling a friend about us. And Dustin of Sandman Stories is a lot on Twitter. I’m still very amazed that he continues to do it. It’s great.
Daniel: He’s here.
Hedvig: Oh, yeah. And he’s here as well. Sorry, I switched screens. Yes, Dustin is here as well. Dustin, you want to say anything?
Dustin: Just thank you guys for making this wonderful podcast.
Daniel, Ben, and Hedvig: Aw.
Ben: He speaks.
Hedvig: Thank you so much, he speaks.
[laughter]
Daniel: By the way, if you’re not listening to his show, Sandman Stories, it is a very relaxing voice to have read to you, maybe when you’re falling asleep, or just when you want to hear a story. [crosstalk]
Ben: Hey, Hedvig, you are all over. You’re like a sleep podcast queen.
Hedvig: I love sleepcasts. I love it all. I think it’s a great genre, and I love you during that Dustin, it’s just so great.
Dustin: I’m just bright red now!
Hedvig: Yeah, [chuckles] fair enough. Another thing you can do if you want to help out the show is leave us a review in all the places you can leave a review. Apple Podcast is a great place to do it out, but other places are also good.
Ben: This show has featured the voices of a whole fat stack of patrons, who give us money to keep making this show, and it’s amazing, and now I can look each and every one of them in the eyeballs as I read the thank yous. This is so cool. This is genuinely, I am absolutely chuffed about this. Before I get to the names and creepily staring at everyone’s eyes, I should mention that all of these wonderful, wonderful people that you’ve heard tonight, their money goes a long way to doing some really cool stuff here on the show. We transcribe all of our episodes, which makes them available to people who can’t hear, but also makes them searchable. So, if you’ve ever found yourself in that situation, where you’re trying to prove someone wrong at a pub, and you can remember the show where you heard the thing, but you can’t quite remember the name of the show or anything like that, you can be like, “What episode was it?” You can search it up, and that’s what transcribing allows. So, thanks for the money to settle pub arguments, everyone, that’s really, really cool. So, here we go. Here is our shoutout to our very lovely patrons.
Dustin, Termy, Chris, Matt, Whitney, Helen, Udo, Lord Mortis, Jack, Kitty, Elías, Larry, Kristofer, Andy, James, Nigel, Kate, Nasrin, Ayesha, sneakylemur, [chuckles] oh, I love that. Moe, Steele, Andrew, Manú, James, Rodger, Rhian, Colleen, glyph, Ignacio, Sonic Snejhog — another amazing name — Kevin, Jeff, Dave H, Andy from Logophilius, Samantha, zo, Kathy, Rach, Taylor, Cheyenne, Felicity, Amir, and Kate B. Thank you, you guys, from the bottom of our little, little hearts.
Daniel: We’d like to give a big shoutout to SpeechDocs, the whole team for taking our transcripts and turning our words into words.
Ben: I’m so sorry, guys.
Daniel: Our theme music has been written and performed by Drew Krapljanov. He’s a member of Ryan Beno and of Didion’s Bible. Thank you for listening, we’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
[cheering]
Daniel: I hope that was fun. I had fun.
Ben: That was heaps of fun. Thank you, everyone. You are tremendous human beings, and I enjoyed that heaps, lots. We should do this more often. This is really fun, I like it.
Hedvig: It is fun.
[BOOP]
Hadas: Is this your pantry? What’s going on?
Daniel: [laughs] Well, yes, it is. This is where the magic happens. Yeah, because the sound is so good.
Hadas: Sure.
Daniel: I’ve got a good really nice mic. Oh, you can see. You can see my setup. I’ve got a nice microphone and a baffle behind me.
Hadas: [crosstalk] it became clear that this was also used for some other things sometimes.
[chuckles]
Daniel: There’s food.
Hadas: Sure.
[BOOP]
Daniel: If we do talk over each other, then I’ll try to traffic direct, but other than that, just have a great time.
Ben: That sounded so somewhere between forceful and incredibly self-conscious. Just have a great time.
Daniel: We’re going to have a great time. I’m glad that both of those came through because that’s what I was really shooting for.
Ben: Yeah, pick a story, Daniel. Pick a story.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]