It’s crude. It’s rude. And it’s a lot of fun. Slang has been with us for as long as people didn’t want others to understand what they were about. But what exactly is it? And has the nature of slang changed in our internet age?
Daniel is talking to eminent slang lexicographer Jonathon Green on this episode of Because Language.
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Green’s Dictionary of Slang
https://greensdictofslang.com
The Timelines of Slang
https://thetimelinesofslang.tumblr.com
Ryanair Afrikaans test: South African fury over language quiz
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-61703174
Ryanair Afrikaans test: Airline stands by South African language quiz
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-61743846
Chimpanzees have their own language — and scientists just learned how they put “words” together
https://www.salon.com/2022/05/22/chimpanzees-have-their-own-language–and-scientists-just-learned-how-they-put-words-together/
Chimpanzees produce diverse vocal sequences with ordered and recombinatorial properties | Communications Biology
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-022-03350-8
Unanimous Three-Judge Panel Rules Bees Are ‘Fish’: ‘We Are Tasked with Liberally Construing’ the California Endangered Species Act
https://lawandcrime.com/animals/unanimous-three-judge-panel-rules-bees-are-fish-we-are-tasked-with-liberally-construing-the-california-endangered-species-act/
Car insurer Geico may have to pay $5m after woman contracts STI in a vehicle
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-61763333
Morb | Know Your Meme
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/morb
Sweden Gate trends on internet. What is the debate and why has social media turned on Swedish people
https://www.indiatoday.in/world/story/sweden-gate-trends-on-internet-what-is-the-debate-and-why-has-social-media-turned-on-swedish-people-1956959-2022-06-01
The Reddit thread
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/uxz68j/comment/ia1ji6z/
What Is #Swedengate? How The Internet Turned on Sweden for Not Feeding House Guests
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/sweden-gate-feeding-guests-debate-b2091397.html
The Truth About “Swedengate”
https://slate.com/human-interest/2022/06/swedengate-reddit-sweden-scandal-food-explained.html
A Social Media Takedown Is a Blessing in Disguise for Sweden | New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/11/opinion/swedengate-sweden-twitter.html
The Local | Sweden
https://www.thelocal.se
Platty Jubes Is the Uk’s Latest Meme as Slang Sparks Fierce Debate on Twitter
https://www.hitc.com/en-gb/2022/06/02/platty-jubes-meme/
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
HEDVIG: …and the UK might not be in the EU, but it’s a European country…
DANIEL: Mhm.
HEDVIG: …no matter what anyone says, including my husband.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Oh, dear. There have been chats, have there?
HEDVIG: No, it’s just that British people like to say they’re going to Europe on a holiday when they’re going to France. And I’m like…
DANIEL: Oh, I see.
DANIEL and HEDVIG: You’re in Europe.
HEDVIG: Shut up.
[LAUGHTER]
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]
DANIEL: Hello and welcome to Because Language, a podcast about linguistics, the science of language. My name’s Daniel Midgley and with me now: she’s the cheese, she’s the clam’s cuticle, and in matters linguistic, she ain’t no persimmons. It’s Hedvig Skirgård.
HEDVIG: Uh.
[CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: Thank you! Great to be here. What’s the cuticle on a clam? What?
DANIEL: Yeah, I took a risk on that one because I didn’t know if it was going to be offensive. I could have used the crocodile’s adenoids.
HEDVIG: I don’t know what it is.
DANIEL: Well, a cuticle on your fingernail is that little filmy bit that rides up.
HEDVIG: I know what THAT is.
DANIEL: Oh, okay. Yeah. Well, you know, that’s on a clam.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: It’s similar to “You’re the cat’s pajamas.”
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Or, “You’re the frog’s eyebrows.” It means really, really great! That’s you, my dear friend.
HEDVIG: I’m really great! Yay.
DANIEL: Yay. The reason I used that for today’s intro was that it comes from TimelinesofSlang.com, which uses data from the Green’s Dictionary of Slang, and a bit later in this episode, I’m going to be having a chat with Mr Slang himself, Jonathon Green. That’s going to be really fun.
HEDVIG: Does he like being called Mr Slang?
DANIEL: I hope he does, because it’s his handle on Twitter.
HEDVIG: Oh, okay, okay.
DANIEL: I guess he doesn’t object to it. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: No, that’s fair. That’s fair. No, that’s good. I just thought it was cute. That’s great.
DANIEL: There’s a lot of information in Green’s Dictionary of Slang or greensdictofslang.com, the website. Did you know… take a guess. The word SPLENDIFEROUS — saying something is splendiferous — take a guess as to when that first appeared in English, according to Green’s Dictionary of Slang.
HEDVIG: Splendiferous.
DANIEL: Mmm.
HEDVIG: Um… 1880?
DANIEL: It does sound like one of those fanciful late 1800s coinages, right?
HEDVIG: Yeah. But it’s not.
DANIEL: 1538!
HEDVIG: Oh, goodness me! That’s very old.
DANIEL: I can’t believe it, but there it is. I mean, it hardly looks the same, but it’s there, which really is boggling my mind. And there’s a lot of facts like that in Green’s Dictionary of Slang.
HEDVIG: That’s so old that we don’t know if it is that old or if it’s older.
DANIEL: Exactly.
HEDVIG: As a rule of thumb, if your first occurrence is sometime in the 1500s, that’s right about when we get proper written records.
DANIEL: Exactly! Not much goes on before then.
HEDVIG: It’s… not much goes on before then. So, it might be even older, yeah. That’s super cool.
DANIEL: Might be from the Stone Age. It’s like: Zog, I’ve invented a new hammer that I can lash a wooden stick to. Why, that’s splendiferous, Thag.
HEDVIG: Sounds like something — what do they call — Bill and Ted would use.
DANIEL: Yes, it does. So, that’s going to be a fun discussion although that it tells me that there’s a bit of a content warning for this episode, because slang is sometimes not very nice and sometimes not very fair. And sometimes it involves slurs and even terms about sexual assault. So, there’s a bit of a content warning for the rest of this, but we’re going to try to handle it as maturely and surgically as we can.
HEDVIG: Yeah, because slang is… I don’t know exactly how people usually define it, but it’s not formal language. And when people are racist and horrible in formal language, it sounds different than when they’re racist and horrible in slang. Maybe.
DANIEL: True.
HEDVIG: I would argue that they’re probably equally bigoted but, yeah, content warning might be a good idea.
DANIEL: Okay. You know, our most recent bonus episode was a mailbag with our pal and ABC language guy, Tiger Webb. It was fun, wasn’t it?
HEDVIG: Yes. It was really fun. I really enjoyed that. I like hearing about the way that, like, linguists work in practice, and he has a very practical down-to-earth job that I like hearing about.
DANIEL: I did too. We also tackled the question of what does it take to say you’re a linguist and loads of our Discord friends had great input in response to that. We’ve been talking about that episode in our Discord server.
HEDVIG: Did you reach a consensus? Did you finally figure it out?
DANIEL: Um…
HEDVIG: No?
DANIEL: I mean, kind of. I hope Adam won’t mind me sharing this, but one of his comments was: sometimes we get into trouble when we say, “I’m a blah.” And instead what we might want to say instead is, “I do blah,” So not: I’m a linguist, but: I linguistics, that’s what I do.
HEDVIG: I do linguistics. I work on linguistics. Yeah, I think that’s a good comment actually. I like that.
DANIEL: I like that too. Well, keep in mind, we’re going to be having… Hedvig, is there a term that you use for when there’s a dinner and everybody brings something, and everybody tries some of everybody’s stuff?
HEDVIG: In English, I would call it a potluck.
DANIEL: Yeah, me too. That’s what I grew up with as well. Okay, we’re having a potluck live episode with our patrons, going to be around Sunday, the 17th of July, time to be announced. So, watch our Discord or your patron feed for an announcement. Basically, it’s just everybody brings a Word of the Week or a news story or something cool for us to talk about. And then you can join us, we’ll all get together, you can tell us about it in your own words. If you’re going to be busy, record something for us on SpeakPipe and we’ll play it instead. It’s going to be available for all patrons. So, please come and join us. If you’re not a patron, become one. That’s patreon.com/becauselangpod.
HEDVIG: That’s really nice. We often get a lot of good word suggestions and news from our listeners as it is.
DANIEL: Oh my gosh.
HEDVIG: So, now other people will hear it in their own words, which I look forward to.
DANIEL: Well, we did one of these back in, I think, it was December last year. And we had so much fun that we just decided, “Let’s do it a couple of times a year.” So, this is the July special episode.
HEDVIG: Sweet, I like it.
DANIEL: All right. Well, should we get to the news?
HEDVIG: Yeah, what are the news?
DANIEL: Well, I’ve got a couple.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] Ben isn’t here. So, there’s no one to say things in a good way. I am not an educated broadcaster. And I try my best, but segueing is an art form.
DANIEL: Mm. Segues are tough, but you know what’s really hard? Callbacks.
HEDVIG: Right. But I find that little bit easier, but it’s also hard. I mean, SEGUE is just hard to spell. Whenever I read it in text. I’m like, “That’s how you write it? That can’t be right.”
DANIEL: [TRYING HARD] [segju:] [sjug]
HEDVIG: I think the way you spell those little vehicles that people do on tourist guides, S-E-G-W-A-Y, that’s how you should all spell it. That’s better.
DANIEL: I feel bad about that because I don’t like those devices.
HEDVIG: Suck it up, buttercup!
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Okay.
HEDVIG: It’s a better spelling.
DANIEL: I will do my utmost. Can we just modify it? Can we just make it, like, S-E-G–? No, you’re right. There isn’t any other way to do it. Is it?
HEDVIG: No. It’s SEGWAY, it’s how everyone pronounces it. Whenever I read the S-E-G-U-E-whatever spelling: bullshit. Anyway…
DANIEL: No, I think we should… [CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: I suck at segues and we are going to start the news.
DANIEL: I think we should permaban the word SEGUE because it once belonged to that device. And we should instead start saying it [sei:gw]. That’s a nice SAYGW, Hedvig. Okay, so now that I’ve saygw-ed to this, here’s one story that was suggested by Diego and Samuel on our Discord. It’s about Ryanair, the airline. I have never flown on Ryanair.
HEDVIG: You have never flown Ryanair?
DANIEL: Have you?
HEDVIG: Yeah, of course! I think most Europeans have at some point.
DANIEL: I did not know that this was so ubiquitous.
HEDVIG: Oh, Ryanair is very famous. What have they done now?
DANIEL: They’ve done something. Well, they’ve got a bit of a problem because they take people from South Africa to the UK, and they feel like there are a lot of fake South African passports.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: And that’s a bit of a problem for them, because if they bring somebody into the UK with a fake South African passport, then Ryanair gets charged about 2000 pounds. So, that’s a problem.
HEDVIG: Yeah, and they have to fly them back. This is the reason there’s a really good talk by the Mindgap people about it. This is the reason why refugees coming from places like Syria or Afghanistan… often there are flights, but there’s something called the Airport Carrier Responsibility, something like that, which means that the airline has to confirm not only that they have a valid passport, but also that they have a valid visa to go where they’re going, and that they meet all the requirements for entering. And if the airlines don’t think that they can do that they will just refuse people entry because otherwise they’re on the hook for fees and flying people back. So, there are flights going from Syria to Europe, but people can’t get on them because airlines can’t confirm that they would get refugee asylum in Europe. So, that’s why people get on dingy boats. That’s why people walk places. It’s a really big problem.
DANIEL: Okay, well, I’ll tell you what, we’re going to post some links to Gapminder so that people can follow that through if they’re interested. That’ll be on our website becauselanguage.com. Okay, but back to Ryanair, what Ryanair has done is they’ve decided that the way to discover if somebody’s really South African is to give them a “simple questionnaire”…
HEDVIG: Mhm.
DANIEL: …in Afrikaans.
HEDVIG: Okay, so.
DANIEL: Yeah, bit of a problem.
HEDVIG: Interesting. So, for those who might need a refresher, so Afrikaans is the language that is very closely related to Dutch. In fact, some Dutch people say they can just understand Afrikaans, straight up. And Afrikaans was spoken by the Dutch white colonisers, who colonised South Africa. And it has also spread to be a language that other people use as well. And it has a lot of speakers in South Africa. I believe a lot of, like, government policies and stuff are in Afrikaans, probably. But being a country in Africa, you can imagine that not everyone speaks Afrikaans.
DANIEL: No, only about 13% of South Africans speak Afrikaans as a first language.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And I suspect also that those 13% are white.
DANIEL: A good many of them, I’d expect.
HEDVIG: I have a strong suspicion.
DANIEL: And Afrikaans, of course, had such a role as the language of the oppressor in Apartheid times.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: So, that’s caused a bit of a firestorm.
HEDVIG: That’s a terrible idea!
DANIEL: It’s only the third most common language in South Africa. They could do Zulu or isiXhosa.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: So, that’s a problem. And round two: Ryanair listened to the blowback and then doubled down, defending the test in Afrikaans.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: So, I guess the solution is: Ryanair, if you’ve got to do the test — and it sounds like you’ve got to — make it available in a number of languages so that people can take it. There’s more languages than just Afrikaans. And frankly, you’ve made kind of a controversial choice there.
HEDVIG: Ryanair is an Irish company.
DANIEL: You would think they would have some kind of…
HEDVIG: They’d have some sort of knowledge about linguistic diversity and minority languages. I don’t know. But that isn’t even relevant — that’s why I stopped myself — because isiXhosa and Zulu aren’t minority languages.
DANIEL: No, they’re not!
HEDVIG: They’re really big. And even if they say: ~Oh, everyone has to take Afrikaans at school~ which maybe they do, I still don’t think that’s a good enough reason. But the fundamental problem — and I’m going to let Ryanair a bit off the hook — is the attitude that European countries have towards immigration and asylum seekers, and that airline carriers are being asked to do this at all. That is the fundamental problem. Ryanair is acting shittily and trying to find a solution to this, but the problem is fundamentally that they are putting the responsibility of confirming people’s identity, and visa and everything on these companies. And companies are going to make shitty decisions, right?
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: They don’t do this for other modes of transport. They don’t do this for trains.
DANIEL: That’s a good point.
HEDVIG: Generally. They do it for the channel train, I think. But if you cross over from… I know. Okay, I’m going to calm down, but it’s exceptionally shitty.
DANIEL: It is shitty, and the UK needs to take some… I mean, they’re caught between the UK’s problems with fake passport holders and also South Africa’s inability to control the veracity of its own passports, if indeed that is… I’m going to assume that that’s a problem that’s kind of landing on Ryanair. But if you’ve got a problem, you could solve it in a stupid way, or you could solve it in a good way, and I think offering more languages would be a good way.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I don’t think they should be solving the problem. Yeah. Anyway.
DANIEL: Yeah, I agree. Let’s go to our next one. This was suggested by Diego. By the way, we’re curating an entire Diego Show, because Diego comes up with so many stories.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] Good!
DANIEL: It’s going to be the Diego Show, in addition to our regular Patreon.
HEDVIG: Yeah. I’m looking forward to it.
DANIEL: This one is about chimpanzee vocalisation, something that we’ve been very skeptical about.
HEDVIG: [AMUSED] Yeah…?
DANIEL: Why do we come down so hard on ape vocalisation and ape language? Is it because journalists run away with it so much? They love to think, “Oh, there’s an ape, and they’re speaking, and they’re using sentences,” and people just sort of recycle these reports uncritically? Is that what’s going on?
HEDVIG: Um, hmm.
DANIEL: Are we being too reactive?
HEDVIG: I have a long answer and I couldn’t in my brain make a short answer. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: That’s all right, you go for it!
HEDVIG: I’m sorry, Daniel! [LAUGHTER] I was just going to say that I think that some linguists and a lot of people in the public are thinking that having language or not is this almost binary choice. It’s black and white, either you have it or you don’t, humans have it, other animals don’t. We’re created, like, as superior beings and we have this thing that other animals don’t. Whereas probably it’s a gliding scale.
DANIEL: Yep.
HEDVIG: There’s probably not… The boundaries are probably fuzzy. And I don’t actually have that big of a problem calling something a language pretty far out into that fuzziness, I’m like, “Yeah, you can call it a language if you want.”
DANIEL: You’re absolutely right. I’ve talked to many linguists of the Chomskyan persuasion. And I’ve asked, “Is language something very different from communication? Or is it a sliding scale?” And they’d be all like, “Language is qualitatively different. It’s a different thing from what animals are doing when they are communicating.” And I don’t agree with that actually, I don’t…
HEDVIG: Yeah, I think a lot of pop science journalists also think that way. So, they make a news item saying, like, “We figured out that chimpanzees have language!” And it’s like: Maybe you did, maybe you didn’t, maybe they have some of it. But the way they need to package it sometimes becomes a bit weird. So that’s the reason why sometimes animal language news get a bit weird, because they just say ‘language’, and then people assume that it is the same as human language, which it probably isn’t. But that doesn’t mean it’s worthless or uninteresting.
DANIEL: Right, right.
HEDVIG: So what have the chimps done now?
DANIEL: Well, okay, one thing about human language anyway is that it’s composed of elements that we can break down and reuse in new combinations. Like, we can have a sentence: “Everybody loves Daniel,” and then we can turn it around, “Daniel loves everybody.” Or, we can add new elements, like “Daniel loves chocolate.”
HEDVIG: Mhmmm.
DANIEL: And we can do this on the phonology level as well. We can take a word like DEN, and we can break the sounds apart and turn it into END, and NED and so on. And I know that this is going to sound really Chomskyan: ~It’s only language if it’s syntactic.~ I don’t want to say that that’s the be-all end-all of whether we call something a language or not, whether you can break it down, and then build it back up again, because that’s kind of a Chomsky thing.
At the same time, I don’t know if we can really replace that entirely with some kind of: “Oh, well, if you communicate, then it’s language.” I don’t think that’s true. I think language…
HEDVIG: The breaking-down you did there is two different kinds. So, turning ‘den’ into ‘end’ is taking meaningless sounds and shuffling them around and making new meanings. Whereas turning, “Daniel loves everyone” to “Everyone loves Daniel” is taking words and shuffling around semantics, which is a different act. So, what are the chimps doing?
DANIEL: The chimps are making vocalisations. And this is some work from Cédric Girard-Buttoz and Emiliano Zaccarella from Institut des Sciences Cognitives, and the Taï Chimpanzee Project. The paper’s called “Chimpanzees produce diverse vocal sequences with ordered and recombinatorial properties.” They think that the chimps are recombining the elements of their vocalisations. That’s what they think is going on.
HEDVIG: Are they recombining meaningless sounds into new words? Or, are they recombining words into new sentences?
DANIEL: Let’s see if we can figure that out. Let me ask a few questions though.
HEDVIG: Mhm.
DANIEL: Let’s say we had some animals like chimps or something, and we get to listen to them, and we get to hear their vocalisations, and they make strings of these vocalisations.
HEDVIG: Mhm.
DANIEL: How would we know if they were breaking them down and recombining them? What would you expect to see?
HEDVIG: I would expect to see parts of the sound… like you said, recombined into new things! [LAUGHS] I don’t know how to say it. I would expect what it sounds like! [LAUGHS] I’m sorry!
DANIEL: Yeah, but how would you know? I mean, how would you be able to tell that from just random meaningless sounds one after the other?
HEDVIG: Maybe it’s just my Sunday morning brain, but I don’t know. I don’t know, man.
DANIEL: Here’s what I would expect. Like if it were random, I would just expect just randomness. But if it weren’t random, then I would expect some strings, some combinations, ABC. I’d expect some of them to be more common and some less. Like, if we see hoot and then pant — because they go hoot and then they go pant — if we heard hoot-pant as often as pant-hoot, then that will be disappointing.
HEDVIG: Wait, you’re expecting what we like to call in fancy term, like something like a Zipfian distribution.
DANIEL: That’s exactly what I was thinking. I was thinking about Zipfian distribution. Something like that.
HEDVIG: But both of them are equally recombining.
DANIEL: Mhm.
HEDVIG: Right? It’s just that some sounds are preferred over others.
DANIEL: Yeah. But if I heard pant-hoot as much as I heard hoot-pant, then I would think, “Well, that’s not special. That doesn’t seem like recombining. That seems to just like throwing it together randomly.” Do you know what I mean? Am I wrong here or…?
HEDVIG: I don’t know. If the test is: are they recombining sounds, I want to know if they’re recombining sounds.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] Yeah.
HEDVIG: [CHUCKLES] I don’t know. Maybe I’m a simple girl like that.
DANIEL: Maybe.
HEDVIG: Yeah, but there might be good reasons to think that if they had something like an unequal distribution of the combinations, that says something interesting. Yeah, okay, anyway, I’m going to stop being contrarian in going with what you’re saying.
DANIEL: Let me tell you what the second thing I’d like to see is. If it was nonrandom, if they were building up patterns, I might expect to see some vocalisations only to come in certain places. Like if we see… uh, what were our possibilities? There’s… if I see hoot-grunt and hoot-bark and hoot-pant, and I see that the hoot always occurs at the beginning, that would be really interesting. But if hoot also comes at the end, that would be a little disappointing as well.
HEDVIG: Sure. I would want to know what they’re denoting.
DANIEL: You mean what the bits are?
HEDVIG: When you want someone to pick nits out of your head, do you always say hoot-pant?
DANIEL: Yeah, okay. So, that’s one problem with this study, they don’t make an attempt to tie combinations of sounds to what’s going on with what they could possibly be communicating. That’s going to fall outside the scope of this experiment. But what they are doing is they’re looking at the sequences of vocalisations, like there’s grunt, and panted grunt, and hoot, and panted hoot, and bark, and panted bark, where they pant at the same time as barking. And the rest of the set that they’ve got, there are 12. And they’re just looking at it from an information-theoretic standpoint, does it appear to stack up a certain way, or does it just appear to be a big mess?
HEDVIG: Okay, sure.
DANIEL: So, there were a few things that they found. They took 900 hours of calls from chimps who were used to having humans around. They broke all of the utterances into 390 unique sequences, and what you’ll find in the articles is that they’re saying that these 390 sequences are words, but actually, they’re really bigrams and trigrams. Things like hoot-pant-grunt or grunt-hoot-pant, or three in a row or two in a row.
HEDVIG: Okay, okay, okay.
DANIEL: One interesting thing is that the only ones who made sequences with eight things in a row were the females. 8 to 10 single units, it was females that did that. Males never did that. Anyway, it looks like out of the… there were 58 bigrams, that is two vocalisations in a row, like bark-pant, 14 of them were produced above chance. They weren’t all equally likely, 14 of them were more common, which is interesting.
HEDVIG: Right.
DANIEL: And out of the trigrams, 104 three-vocalisation sequences, 49 of them happened more often than chance. So, that was interesting. It’s not all just smushed together equally likely random. It really does seem like, as we see in human language, “of the” happens a lot more than other stuff in English, and some of the bigrams and trigrams happen more often than others.
HEDVIG: Okay. And is that maybe cost by their physiognomy? Another thing that happens in human language is that certain combinations of sounds are more likely because they’re easier to produce in sequence. So, if you pronounce a sound very far back in your mouth, and the next sound is supposed to be really front in your mouth, that’s actually a bit hard anatomically to do. It’s not impossible. Nothing’s impossible. But it’s difficult, so we do it less often. Or, if we have a combination of sounds like that, historically we tend to change it into something that’s easier. So, the physiognomy of our vocal tract affects the kind of sound products we’re doing. And I think I am going to be a little bit neggo and still insist that we can’t talk about this as words.
DANIEL: No.
HEDVIG: We can talk about this as sound combinations.
DANIEL: Yep. I agree.
HEDVIG: But if they’re not tracking that it means anything, like they’re not tracking that it means “Come pick my nits,” or “Get off me, I don’t want you to be here,” or any sort of meaning, then I don’t think we get to call it words. So, I’m going to ban words.
DANIEL: Okay, we’re banning words from this discussion. But I agree with you, this is in my notes as well. It might be normal for them to use some sounds or some combinations more than others because they’re less effortful. Okay, so that’s one. And then also, my second question is, do we find certain units in certain places? And they did find that 9 out of the 10 single units, they found that hoots and grunts and pants happened most reliably in the first position in bigrams — if you had two in a row, the first one was going to be hoot, grunt and pant. Oop, sorry, I got it wrong. Hoot, grunt and panted hoo, which I guess the hoo would be [HOOT NOISE]. But the panted hoo would be [BREATHY HOOT NOISE].
And then, the other ones tended to be second position. But again, that could be because It’s easier and not because they’re like… Imagine what they’re thinking. They’re imagining that the scream — the vocalisation — that they’re using it in the same kind of way that we use the sound /d/, like it doesn’t have a meaning. I don’t think scream is meaningless. And it doesn’t sound like grunt is meaningless. But the sounds that we use like /b/ and /d/ and /k/, they really are meaningless. So, I kind of don’t know what to do with this work, because I’m almost positive that scream is not meaningless, that they’re using like a /f/ phoneme or something. That would be weird.
HEDVIG: Also, the things you said there were occurring a lot in the beginning of sequences, also sounded like things that required a lot of air from your lungs. So, at the end of the sequence, you’ve been producing sound, so you don’t have as much air in your lungs, you’re less likely to do a pant because you have less air in your lungs. Do you see what I mean?
DANIEL: Yeah, I do see what you mean. Scream and panted scream were in position two, usually, which seems to me like a high-air sort of thing.
HEDVIG: I’m looking at this article, it was published by several authors, some of which Daniel mentioned in Nature really recently. It’s open access, so anyone can read it. Maybe we’re missing the point or something, maybe the ways we filter through some of the popular science articles, we’ve sort of misunderstood… Like, I don’t know, because I’m a little bit confused. I know some primatology people. Maybe we should get a second opinion to understand what the big deal is. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Okay, cool.
HEDVIG: Maybe I’m rude!
DANIEL: No, that’s great. I would love to ask them. But it does sound like they’re looking at the sequences and saying: “Is this random, or is there a pattern?” Because if there’s a pattern, then there must be a…
HEDVIG: Maybe something’s going on.
DANIEL: Maybe something’s going on. And it maybe it’s just that, “Oh, well, it’s natural for a chimpanzee vocal tract to make that pattern.” Or, it could be — you know — they’re doing something on this sliding scale of language that’s kind of like what we do. If it’s non-random, then that begs for an explanation. They’re not offering an explanation, but they are saying, “This might be nonrandom,” which is interesting.
HEDVIG: And to give the researchers credit, that’s actually what they’re saying. It might be nonrandom. If you read the abstract, it just says, “We’re looking at these vocal sequences and looking if there’s any pattern to them.” Maybe the problem is that this then merged into an article on salon.com saying, “Chimpanzees have their own language, and scientists just learned how they put words together.”
DANIEL: This is why we… [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: That’s not what that paper is claiming.
DANIEL: No!
HEDVIG: That they figured out how they put words together.
DANIEL: This is why we push back on this.
HEDVIG: And the size of the chimp “dictionary”, almost 400 words. I don’t think that’s what the scientist in the Nature paper is actually saying.
DANIEL: They would not claim that. They would not say that they’re words.
HEDVIG: I don’t think so.
DANIEL: They would say that they are sound combinations.
HEDVIG: Yeah, which is fine.
DANIEL: The word ‘den’ is a sound combination as well, but I don’t… And this is the problem with these kinds of studies, is that the journalistic treatment goes far beyond the intentions of the authors. And it’s hard, you know? It’s hard to get the message out there. And I guess there’s a lesson here for all of us who do language science. Your work might get taken and used in a way that maybe confuses people a little bit. So that’s why I’m glad that Diego brought this to us so that we could maybe… if people were feeling a bit confused, that we could maybe get unconfusing for a while. Have we unconfused?
HEDVIG: Uh.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Um, I don’t know. I think it’s interesting if chimpanzees have patterns to the vocalisations they do. I’m going to give them that credit. That is actually interesting. I’m glad they published that paper. That is interesting. Now, I would like to know if those sounds have any meaning, please.
DANIEL: Yes. That would be cool. I would like to know that.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Let’s wrap it up with a story. Oh, did you have anything more you wanted to say on that one?
HEDVIG: No, but I’m seeing that in our run sheet, it says Bees are Fish?
DANIEL: Yep. So, this last story is suggested to us by PharaohKatt. This one’s out of California. It’s a classification story. We know that bees are in danger because of the pesticides known as neonicotinoids or neonics are killing loads of bee colonies and we want to be able to protect them because if there’s no bees, then that’s really bad! Then there’s no coffee and popcorn and nice things that we like to eat and drink.
HEDVIG: Chocolate probably. Yeah.
DANIEL: Yes. And even worse, in California, a judge in 2020 ruled that the California Fish and Game Commission couldn’t use the California Endangered Species Act to protect bees. They’re like, “You guys are all about fish and game, you’re not about insects.” But this week, it was ruled that bees can come under the California Endangered Species Act because the California Fish and Game Code defines a fish as: “A wild fish, mollusk, crustacean, invertebrate, amphibian, or part spawn or ovum of any of those animals.” Well, bees are…?
HEDVIG: Invertebrates.
DANIEL: Invertebrates!
HEDVIG: Wait, so they didn’t include in the definition something like that, at least a majority of the time occurs in water?
DANIEL: No, no. It doesn’t.
HEDVIG: They made the definition of fish that didn’t include living in an aquatic environment.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: They did that.
DANIEL: What about flying fish, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: No, but something like ‘mostly’ or ‘can live underwater’. Like, dolphins go up for air — fine, like whatever — but something like propels themselves through water, something with water.
DANIEL: Yep. Nope, not there.
HEDVIG: Wow!
DANIEL: Yeah. But if they did include living in water in their definition, then that would leave out the Trinity bristle snail, which needs protection, but doesn’t live in water.
HEDVIG: Because they have to include invertebrates because they want to include shrimp, and shrimp are just water insects, right?
DANIEL: Oh, okay. I didn’t know that. That’s weird. I didn’t know about bees either.
HEDVIG: Or crustaceans. Yeah, I’m really confused. Famously, it’s really hard to define a fish, because life has occurred a lot longer in the water than anywhere else on the planet. There’s a lot of diversity. There are a lot of things that have fins and scales, and propel themselves through water that have very different evolutionary histories.
DANIEL: But isn’t there a podcast, No Such Thing as a Fish?
HEDVIG: Yes. I think that’s the QI podcast, right?
DANIEL: Yes, it is.
HEDVIG: They did a whole episode about it. But I think that very few people have proposed a definition that doesn’t somehow include living in water.
DANIEL: Well, we can be glad that Section 45 of the California Endangered Species Act doesn’t, because it turns out that bees are invertebrates. Ta-da! Bees are fish. But they’re not; they’re obviously bees. But laws designed to protect fish can now be used in California to also protect bees. Isn’t that lovely? Yay, reclassification.
HEDVIG: They didn’t have a law for protecting non-fish endangered species?
DANIEL: Not as part of the California Fish and Game Commission’s purview. You sound upset! Why do you hate bees, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: I’m just saying that there are lot of things that are… I don’t hate bees. I’m just surprised that the state of California doesn’t have a way of protecting other animals. Or plants.
DANIEL: Or was it that nobody else was willing to go to bat for the bees? Who’s willing to go to bat for the bees? That’s what I want to know. I’ll tell you who. The California Fish and Game Commission. They are making sure that bees get…
HEDVIG: Interesting.
DANIEL: They’ll keep those nasty substances away from our lovely, lovely bees.
HEDVIG: I love it when lawyers define words. It’s really funny. Did you hear about that recent court case of a woman who contracted an STI in a car?
DANIEL: I did not.
HEDVIG: And sued the carmakers for an injury sustained inside the car?
DANIEL: Why did she… Hmm, okay.
HEDVIG: And she won?
DANIEL: How did that work?
HEDVIG: Apparently, the way it’s defined is just ‘injury in car’.
DANIEL: Oh, okay, and…
HEDVIG: She was in the car where she contracted the STI, so…
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: …the precedent apparently applies!
DANIEL: My goodness.
HEDVIG: I love it.
DANIEL: Wow.
HEDVIG: Lawyers should get to define everything. It’s so much fun.
DANIEL: This sounds chaotic.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: I’m beginning to think that maybe we should be keeping dictionaries out of the hands of lawyers because they’re starting to discover corpus linguistics. And it’s getting really messy. Maybe we should do a show on that.
HEDVIG: It’s entertaining.
DANIEL: It is.
HEDVIG: It’s more chaotic and fun and random than like Academie Française. Like it’s more unpredictable. It’s more entertaining for me. Academie Française…
DANIEL: And that’s what it’s about.
HEDVIG: …no language academy, no dictionary, no lawyer can actually define language. Language is something we build as a community when we socially cooperate and organise our thoughts maybe.
DANIEL: Yep.
HEDVIG: But if someone’s going to do it, if someone’s going to pretend to be doing it, then the lawyers have a higher entertainment value.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I’m just saying.
DANIEL: That might not be a good thing!
HEDVIG: It’s not real anyway, what they’re doing. So, why don’t we just choose the one that’s most funny?
DANIEL: Tell that to the bees, Hedvig. My goodness.
HEDVIG: They’re fish now! That sounds great. They move in swarms. We can now call them schools of bees instead of swarms of bees.
DANIEL: A school of bees.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I love it!
DANIEL: I wonder if the bees are going to like being fish.
HEDVIG: It sounds great.
DANIEL: When we’re in the water, will we have to watch out for schools of bee-fish trying to sting us under the water? What would ocean honey taste like?
HEDVIG: So many great questions. Exactly. It’ll be like sea salt in your honey. That sounds great. I love sweet and salty.
DANIEL: Wow, that would be a really good kick, wouldn’t it?
HEDVIG: Yeah. I’m going to go put salt on my honey. Have you ever put salt in your coffee?
DANIEL: No. Why? Should I?
HEDVIG: Yeah. Do it.
DANIEL: I think I get enough salt anyway.
HEDVIG: Just a little bit.
DANIEL: I think the crema… I have really good coffee and there’s a bit of a salty crema on top.
HEDVIG: That shouldn’t be salty.
DANIEL: It is though.
HEDVIG: Crema is the thing to do with the proteins and stuff. It shouldn’t be salty.
DANIEL: And yet, when I get some of it on my lips, I perceive a distinct salt taste that is quite good.
HEDVIG: Anyway, putting cheese and salt in your coffee is interesting. Try it.
DANIEL: Uh-huh. Cheese.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Cheese is like a Sami Northern Scandinavia thing, to put, like, a slice of cheese in your coffee. It melts and then you eat the cheese.
DANIEL: That’s like one step beyond butter. Wow, okay.
HEDVIG: Yeah, go for it. It’s chaos! The world is ending! You know that song, like, the world is ending. It’s fine. Just do whatever. Bees are fish, injuries in cars are including STIs.
DANIEL: Cheese is now cream.
HEDVIG: You can do whatever. It’s fine, as long as it’s not really hurting anyone. And in this case, bees-are-fish means that the bees are going to be more protected. I love it. It’s my favourite news story.
DANIEL: I’m beginning to enjoy the implications of what you’re telling me. This new knowledge interests me.
HEDVIG: Chaos is fun. Yeah.
DANIEL: Let’s go on.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: I am here with one of the preeminent lexicographers of our generation, author of the mammoth three-volume Dictionary of Slang and other works, like Sounds & Furies, The Stories of Slang and The Big Book of Being Rude. It’s Mr Slang, Jonathon Green. Thank you, Jonathon, for being on the show.
JONATHON GREEN: Thank you, as they say, for having me.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] Yes, indeed. What keeps you going? How did you manage to accomplish all of this?
JONATHON: I imagine I’m otherwise unemployable. I’ve been doing it for 40 odd years. I started off because quite honestly, I saw a gap. The man before me was called Eric Partridge, and he was the standout 20th century Anglophone English language slang lexicographer. But Eric Partridge was born in 1894. And I was born — of course, today, it’s kind of the same for the young — but I was born in 1948. So, I had sort of grown up through the ’60s. I understood all that stuff, rock and roll, sex and drugs and all the rest of it. And Partridge really did not. I started looking at his work in the ’60s, or later maybe and thinking, “Really, you’ve read one article for your drug slang, and it wasn’t the right one.”
[LAUGHTER]
Anyway, I decided… I went to university, I came out of university, I joined what was called the underground press, the counterculture, wrote for them a bit. Then I got into various other things, and I ended up finding myself dig up small dictionaries of quotations, sports, politics, famous last words, stuff like that. And then after I did one called the Dictionary of Contemporary Quotations, I thought: I know! — we’re now 1980 — I’ll do one called the Dictionary of Contemporary Slang. And so, I started off — same publisher, Pan Books they were then called, I think they’re Pan Macmillan now in the UK — And I did this book, which was from 1945 through to what would then have been 1984 when it came out.
And all I can say is that the entire book, in all its every page, and its headwords and so on, could have fitted very easily into the letter S in Green’s Dictionary of Slang. I mean, you could swing many cats. It is a very small book, although it’s about 10,000 or 11,000 entries. I didn’t do citations, the usage examples, which are the sort of hallmark, the great badge of GDoS but if there was a source, I would put it in. So it would say — for the sake of argument — it would be such and such and then it would say, “Wodehouse: Carry On, Jeeves” in very small letters or whatever it might be. Well, it was learning the trade, really.
And what happened after that was a few years later, I did something called The Thesaurus of Slang. That was quite fun. But, again, it was very much limited to what I knew, which in, I think, it was 1986, was still very limited. But it was a slang thesaurus. But then in 1993, I was doing such and such, and I was with some editor. And they said, “Have you ever thought of doing a slang dictionary?” And for once in my life, I had the good sense to shut up and say, “Oh, that’s a really good idea!” Rather than say, “Why don’t you know who I am?!”
[LAUGHTER]
Which shows no reason why he should. And then I started off on this… basically, what became the… The Cassell Dictionary of Slang, it was a one volume. They wouldn’t let me do citations. Partridge’s mob had but actually asked me to take over his work. Another friend of mine in the business said, “Well, why be sub-Partridge, when you can be Green?” And I thought, “Why not?” So, I did this thing and it came out in 1998. And it was… actually, if I’m honest now, because I can be, it wasn’t terribly good. It was too derivative, it had too much. It was looking backwards to Partridge too much. It had an awful lot. And it was very well reviewed, and it’s sold 60,000 copies or something, blah blah blah. And I did two more of that. But on the back of that book, I got to do what I wanted to do, which is the book that became Green’s Dictionary of Slang, which finally after 18 years of labor, 1993 through 2010 — is that 18? no, it’s 17, came out in these three volumes. I would have liked another one, but I got three. And quite honestly, I was fortunate to get three because by then, the commissioning editor and the commissioning publisher had been long since eaten up like a game of Pac-Man.
The first meeting, one of the only two meetings I had with the actual people who published it, their first line was, “Well, Jonathon, we don’t want to publish this book but the uber publisher have told us we have to.” So, they did.
DANIEL: Great.
JONATHON: What they also did was say, “Right, if we’re going to publish this, we’re not going to… you have a clause in your contract, which says you want an eBook.” Now, that was put in in 1998. What an eBook was in 1998 was not what an eBook is today. But what I meant was an electronic version. Basically, what I meant was a website. But anyway, they said, “We’re not going to do it. We don’t know how to, blah, blah, blah.” So, it then took from 2010 when Green’s Dictionary of Slang came out in three volumes print, six years to find somebody who would help me make it into a digital website, and that’s what it has been since. It’s like every three months I put up an update and I just keep going. I’m not sure whether any of that answers your question, which is what keeps me going. Keeps me going because I’m hardwired, I don’t know how to stop. I don’t want to stop! Life will stop me. Death will stop me, whatever. But I’d like to crash forward onto the keyboard, typing out the word “slang” with my last sort of gestures. I don’t know.
DANIEL: We’ve often tried to figure out the question of what is slang, and Jesse Sheidlower, the lexicographer, once gave me a key. He said that slang is what we call language when it’s used by disesteemed people, as opposed to jargon, which is used by esteemed people. And it kind of gets me into Pontus’ question. I’d like to play this for you.
PONTUS: I’ve been thinking about slang. Is slang really a thing? Isn’t it just language? What is the purpose of talking about slang? Isn’t it just used mostly to demean people who use different language? I don’t know. I was thinking about that. And also, I’m watching a video about AAVE or AAE, whatever you want to call it, and it’s often pejoratively called slang. It got me thinking, that’s the word I’m looking for. And I don’t know… do we need the word? Isn’t that only problematic? Or am I missing something?
DANIEL: How would you respond to Pontus’ question?
JONATHON: I think it’s a very interesting question. For many years, for centuries as well, SLANG is first used in the context of language in approximately 1756. Having said that, about half an hour ago, I was doing some research and I came across a play by Henry Fielding, who’s much better known for Tom Jones, the novel. And he wrote… it’s called Don Juan — no, not Don Juan, not at all Don Juan — Don Quixote in England. And he wrote it in 1733, and it was published in 1734. Point being, there is a character in it, and even though he’s like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Hamlet, he never appears, he’s this guy called Lord Slang, capital S. And the line before when he’s introduced — he never comes on — is either “I’ve just been having dinner with Lord Slang. He is the merriest and funniest and wittiest men in the world,” or words to that effect, or, “I must go and see Lord Slang, he’s invited me to dinner.” He never appears, but he’s there. And I’m just thinking, “Is this really happening? Am I seeing this word?” Because SLANG does not exist in records that I was aware of, not till 1756 as a criminal language, and not till substantially later, maybe another 50 years, as just a sort of a casual, colloquial, whatever you want to call it. And that’s what it seems to me that this Lord Slang is. And so, that was my afternoon’s discovery. I sent it off to my friend Peter Gilliver, who’s the senior editor at the Oxford English Dictionary. And said: I’m waiting to see what you think, as I always do in these circumstances. So, maybe SLANG is a bit older.
But the point is that slang, people assumed they knew what slang was. And if you look at the Oxford English Dictionary, the first definition, it’s basically saying a language of a low type, spoken effectively by low people. If we were writing the OED, we knew what low people were. And we had known what low people were for a long time and would continue to do so for a long time. But what has happened is that one of the things that the very same reason that we’re able to talk in this way — in other words, the internet — is that all those boundaries have become so much fissiparous, and to be able to say, “Well, this is slang. This is not slang” has become a lot harder.”
The Australian National Dictionary doesn’t use slang as a label. And yet, despite this, Australia probably does the best slang on offer, and has a wonderful slang. I’ve got 10,000 different slang Australianisms in my book, in my website. I would love to do an Oz-only dictionary, but the truth is that Bruce Moore, who was the first editor of The Australian National Dictionary, made the decision not to use it, because his attitude… I think the parallel would possibly be Ebonics. African American English, where, again, you’ve got a situation where people just say, “Oh, it’s weird! Let’s call it slang.” But it isn’t always slang. It often isn’t slang. The same with the Australianisms. They’re just a national style. So, it’s much harder to make that label and make it stick. But nonetheless, my book is still called Green’s Dictionary of Slang. And certainly, in my lifetime will continue to be so.
DANIEL: But were there any items in your dictionary of slang where you said, “Oh, well, I’m not including that because it isn’t slang”?
JONATHON: Oh, yes. I mean, I can’t for the life of me… I’ve got too many in there to worry about to remember what I didn’t put in. But, yes, of course, I knock stuff out. But again, it’s arguable, because… okay, let’s take… you mentioned jargon. I don’t agree with Jesse, who’s an old friend of mine, but that it’s disesteemable people, because it doesn’t quite work that way. What I call the jargon that he means, not the obfuscatory stuff that the government gives us, but this is what I call occupational slang. There’s no reason why a coalminer is particularly esteemed, but the slang that he uses in the pit, which he and his mates understand, which is part of the oil that makes the whole job work smoothly, it’s jargon to me. Now that I would not put in.
But then, you’ll get something like drug slang. Now, you could say quite accurately: But these are drug people. They are not mainstream people. But I would argue back that if you do slang without drugs, you’re leaving a big gap. But more than that, it’s just that, in a way it’s just the numbers of people. I mean, we’re talking, I guess, worldwide, millions upon millions upon millions. Many more than when I went through my dope stage. And so, it would be mad for me not to put that stuff in. Jonathan Leiter, who is another great slang lexicographer who unfortunately got messed over by us publishers – it’s his job to talk about that, not mine — but he put in stuff that I wouldn’t, for instance. He puts in a lot more military stuff than I would, and he puts in more sporting stuff than I would. But I think sports and military in both cases, by their very nature, they are both a form of team games. By their very nature, this is an in-crowd vocabulary. Sometimes it does bubble over, when again, it’s down to people.
If you go back to the First World War, you’ve got this trench vocabulary that’s been used by all participants. I can only speak for the English language ones, but Australia, the States, UK, South Africa, Canada, all these people using this very dense vocabulary. And although it is technically jargon, it spills over into the world. It didn’t spill over for that long, strangely enough. I think it was one of the things… in the way people didn’t want to talk about the war, they didn’t want to talk as they had done in the war. But nonetheless, it did spill over.
I remember in World War II, I mean, I was born, as I say, ’48, so my father had been in Dunkirk and whatever. There were words that he would never not use. He’d never talk about PORRIDGE; he talked about BURGOO. Burgoo was a Navy word, I think, back in the 19th century, if not the 18th. But it had come through the forces, but somehow, because enough people had used it, my father met it in the army, and he brought it back out. And there were words like this that came out undoubtedly. I mean, SNAFU is probably one of them, you don’t have to be wearing a uniform to use that. All sorts of stuff like that.
But again, I don’t have the excuses, of course, anymore. When I did the print book, there was a great excuse: “Oh, I can’t do that. There’s no space.”
DANIEL: Can’t do that anymore.
JONATHON: There is as much space as I want. The box sitting on my desk never ever gets any bigger but what’s in the box gets bigger and bigger and bigger. So, there isn’t the excuse. But I made this decision that, for me, slang is not the occupational stuff. Unless, of course, with drugs it is. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Unless it is. I’ve got a quote from you that slang is the language that says no. What do you mean by that?
JONATHON: I think slang is, and this is where I probably disagree with Jesse’s concept. Although Jesse’s concept is good, and it certainly IS the language of the disesteemed, but I think that slang is the language that indeed says no, it’s subversive, that’s what it’s all about. It’s subversive. It’s about taking the mickey, taking the piss — the one being a rhyming slang for the second — and it’s basically that, and you could say, “Come on, come on, some guy standing there. Some woman standing there swearing, that’s not tak…” but it is. It is. It’s going against. We are hard wired. I’ve written about this too many times. If there’s an establishment, if there’s a standard, then I think an awful lot of us are hardwired to find the counter, the alternative, the other, the opposition. And in language terms, I would suggest that’s slang. Of course, some of it’s silly. Of course, some of it you could say is dirty words for their own sake. Well, I don’t accept a word can be dirty as such. But I still think that slang provides us with this outlet, I don’t know what one would call it, but this way of creating and using a vocabulary that is consciously subversive, that as I say, is taking the mickey.
DANIEL: You mentioned that you like Australian slang and I think that’s something that Australians really like about themselves. The larrikin, the subversive mentality that seems a part of our national character. I mean, I sound American, I am Australian in my second act.
JONATHON: In your heart, you’re Australian.
DANIEL: Yes. It’s something culturally that I’ve noticed.
JONATHON: I’m sure you’re right, but I think like all those kinds of things, we all have these fantasies about ourselves. I’m sitting in Paris where I’m sure every man thinks he’s God’s gift to women. That’s the cliché, and it’s one people are very happy to embrace and so on, and so forth. Yeah, the larrikin thing, Some of my best friends are Australian — as they say! — and in all seriousness, and a lot of them said, “You want to go there, you can’t imagine how straight it was when I was growing up. If they were larrikins, they would keep their heads down,” thinking of the ’50s, the ’60s. A lot of Australians came to the UK. People like Richard Neville, if that means anything, Germaine Greer who I’m sure means something, and Clive James and people like that, but there was a hardcore who joined the counterculture. Their take was that we are escaping Australia because it’s so standardised. But nonetheless, I know about larrikins and so on, but it doesn’t take away from the fact that for me, if I were to choose my favourite slang, it would undoubtedly be Australian.
DANIEL: How come?
JONATHON: I’ve read so much. I’ve read half of Trove, I think. Well, not half of Trove, but an awful lot of Trove. You know Trove? Yes.
DANIEL: Yes, the database.
JONATHON: It’s just gorgeous. You can just fall into it. It’s terr… The level of racism, I’m talking 1900, literally, not the 99, something like that, The Perth, Sunday Times. This is what amazes me is you’re talking about a newspaper that’s doing tens, maybe hundreds of thousands every Sunday to the Perth population of 1900-1910. And what’s amazing about it is that it is a pre-woke existence — whatever one thinks about woke, positive or negative — slang is not very good with woke. Can’t be. But it’s just amazing to see this kind of writing. And I don’t think… well, maybe you did get it in the UK. Maybe you did. But not in a major national Sunday paper. That’s what shocked me a little bit. I mean, not much shocks me anymore.
DANIEL: Yeah. That’s definitely been one of the big changes.
JONATHON: Oh, huge, huge.
DANIEL: Racial terms, my parents and grandparents used to use those terms and think nothing of it and now we think a lot about it. We really do change that. That’s one big change in slang. What else are you noticing as far as the way that slang is changing?
JONATHON: Well, one thing I would say about that, just to expand on that, is that if you look at what’s the most taboo at any one time? Till about 1700, even 1800, the big taboo is blasphemy, proper blasphemy. All that GADZOOKS and ZOUNDS and ODDS LITTLE BODIKINS, they were actually ways of not of blaspheming in a euphemistic manner. I mean SLIDS is for some reason God’s eyelids, and God is always Jesus. An ODDSBODIKINS is God’s little body, and so on. And ZOUNDS is God’s wounds, it’s obviously Jesus at Calvary and so on. But what happens is that this inevitably starts to thin down a bit, maybe a little bit of as a reaction to the puritanism of the 17th century, I don’t know. But by the time you’re getting to 1780s, Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, the big slang dictionary of the time, you can see that what’s become taboo now are parts of the body and what we do with them, in excrement, whatever, semen, stuff like that, but basically sex and the rest. And that’s taken over, very much so. And that’s really still in place for a lot of people. But as generation follows generation, it changes.
I think in the ’60s — when I started off at 12 and left it at 18, something like that. Anyway, my maths are lousy — But point being that, by then, what would become political correctness, what would become woke was definitely up and running. And maybe I was extra conscious being Jewish myself, but I didn’t particularly… not particularly, if at all, experience that kind of name calling. But nonetheless, you could tell that there, it was different. Certainly, people like me, people like my friends, we were not worried by the odd SHIT, PISS, FUCK, whatever it might be. But there was no way we were going to use all those things, all that racial stuff, all that nationalist stuff. I think it was still there then, but it’s vastly diminished now, and all the better for that.
Nonetheless… nonetheless — and in fairness, nobody has told me I shouldn’t — I’m not going to exclude them from my dictionaries, because what slang is about is, as my friend Jonathan Meades, who’s a TV guy here, does wonderful documentaries. And he says, “What slang is about is what we do think, not what we’re told we should think.” If you follow me on Twitter, which I don’t think you do, but it’s…
DANIEL: Oh, I do.
JONATHON: it’s the promoted tweet at the top, I think, and a Lenny Bruce one. Don’t worry, it’s not important. It really isn’t!
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
JONATHON: My yammering on Twitter is not important. It’s so much of it’s about: I hate Johnson!
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Okay, I’m sure if Johnson followed you, he would reciprocate.
JONATHON: I would hope so. I would hope so. There’s a great Brecht poem about books being burnt by the Nazis, and he writes in 1933 or something, he writes in the voice of this artist saying, “What did I do wrong? Why aren’t you burning my books? What’s wrong with them?”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] One of our listeners, Aristemo has asked a question. He asked the first question, which was, how has slang changed, is contemporary slang different? And I think we’ve kind of covered that unless you’ve got anything else you want to mention about that. But Aristemo also asks, “Has the regionality of slang changed in the internet age? I imagine it might be more homogeneous between areas now.” Is Australian slang a lot like British slang, which is a lot like Canadian slang, which is like American slang? Or…
JONATHON: I don’t think it is. I don’t think it is as homogenous myself. I mean, my — a little anecdote — my oldest son, now in his 40s, a few years ago, I don’t know why, but I think he used it for exercise and we were up at the top of his tower block. And he said, “Look at all those tower blocks out there.” And I said, “Yeah,” and said, “They’ve all got their own slang, and you’re not going to get it!”
[LAUGHTER]
JONATHON: Well, I’m now older than Eric Partridge was when I thought he was too old. I’m much older. I’m 74. Partridge was dead, I think.
DANIEL: When he was 74!
JONATHON: Point of the story, again, is that, because we know it’s exactly the same, in the days when one had to get it in the covers of one or even three volumes, or four volumes, or whatever, that constraint is gone. So, you see it in the Urban Dictionary, I mean, the Urban Dictionary, in my opinion, is not a good thing.
DANIEL: No.
JONATHON: It doesn’t offer you authority, and I think a dictionary has got to offer the reader authority. Otherwise, what’s the use of it? But forget the Urban Dictionary. The fact is that the niche end of things has become very obvious. And my son’s comment, while half a joke, was not, because he’s right. And if you start looking at, for instance, drill music. Drill music came out of Chicago, but in the UK, it is very much south. It’s London suburbs, mainly third, second generation, young Black people, but with now a lot of more recent immigrants like Somalis, and so on and so forth. And drill is incredibly small in its vocabulary. It’s probably no more than 2000 words, but I need to put it in. And it’s certainly not the same as hip hop vocabulary in Australia, in Melbourne, say. I don’t know, I don’t know where your hip hop centre is, but let’s say that.
The thing about slang, in my opinion, is that it’s the thing that has become homogenous and has established itself over the centuries, is the imagery that slang uses. So sexual intercourse starts off: man hits woman. If you look at most of the words for sexual intercourse and slang, I’m afraid it’s man hits woman. It may be physical violence, it may be affectionate, whatever — but the fact is all these words starting with FUCK are man hits woman. The penis is always a boy’s toy. It’s always a gun, a club, a knife, a dagger, all that stuff. The vagina is this frightening, narrow, twisty passage sort of thing that some Indiana Jones goes down and a huge stone descends on them or whatever it might be. I’ve not seen those movies. But in other words, again, slang is male-orientated in many ways. And so, the vagina is, while deeply appealing, also quite terrifying. And it comes out in the words that slang uses. And these images which you can see in the 16th century and the 1500s are still there now. In fact, there’s one word, W-A-P, W-O-P, spelling’s a bit weird in 1530, but WAP starts off… Yeah, not that one.
DANIEL: Not that one.
JONATHON: WAP starts off meaning to have sex in 1530. And in my same drill music, it’s still there. Meaning, the same beyond that in hip hop, generally, it still means the same thing, because what it’s about is that slap of flesh on flesh, and it serves its purpose. Slang, it works. That’s one of the things that is so important, is the imagery works. It’s also stereotype but it’s not telling lies. That’s what I mean. If we’re talking about the penis as this thing that boys play with literally and metaphorically, so be it. And slang picks up on that a long time ago, and you’ve got this kind of daggers and guns and so on way back, 16th, 17th century. It’s in place, so that doesn’t change. The words themselves may change, some of them for etymological reasons, some of them for the reasons of the people who was out saying, but you’ll find that the Somali using this, again, is coming up with a word for penis that still is to do with weaponry. Don’t ask me to prove that.
DANIEL: So, it sounds like what you’re telling me is that, though slang has changed and though the velocity of slang may be different, there’s a remarkable consistency across centuries.
JONATHON: I think there is. Absolutely. The big change, of course, is I suppose the gradual erosion of the primacy of white English working class criminals. That was Eric Partridge’s big thing. He loved all that, all power to him. And it sort of stopped… Well, it stops when black America starts taking over slang, which is through popular entertainment, end of World War I, jazz and so on, swing later and so on, certain music and just booms out further and further. Youth culture slang is so dependent on Black slang, and American Black slang as well. All right, it’s got changed and the drill stuff also incorporates, for instance, Jamaica, Caribbean, stuff that they use their parents’ slang or their grandparents’ slang, so on and so forth. But that’s what’s happened.
DANIEL: But I can still see a parallel in the way that many parents read Facebook posts that are like, “These slang terms may mean that your child is using drugs.” So, it’s the crime slang all over again.
JONATHON: I love all that. No, crime in no way has gone away. But one of the things that looking at it, from my point of view, just purely as a lexicographer who wants to go researching, is it’s so much easier to find it. But, of course, there’s a tipping point when it’s… the net is wonderful. The net makes it so much easier to find it. But the net offers so much of it, and you’re never going to find it all! [LAUGHTER] That’s what the nightmare is. That’s what the nightmare is.
DANIEL: And are you keeping up?
JONATHON: No, I’m sure I’m not. I mean, the reality is that I am 74, slang is 17. If I survive, I’ll be 75 in a year, slang will still be 17. Slang is always 17, but I am not. And I hope — and this is really genuine, but not quite yet — I hope somebody’s thinking, “Oh, geez.” Like I did with Eric Partridge. “That Jonathon Green, boy, he knows nothing. I’m going to take over this. I’m going to do this.” But at the moment, the only person who has, I’m afraid, is the Urban Dictionary, and they haven’t got it right. But maybe that’s the reality. Maybe it is so nichey that everybody deserves the opportunity to put their word up there, but… we need a picture. I mean, I’m putting my thumb up and my thumb down, because that is not a way to define a word. Not to me anyway. But you know, a lot of people say, “Oh, nonsense, this is the way I use it. Who are you to tell me I shouldn’t?” And I don’t know, it’s my profession. It’s not an answer I like to ponder too heavily. Someone’s got to do it.
DANIEL: I always ask lexicographers this two-parter. How irritating is it when people ask what your favourite slang term is? And: what is your favourite slang term?
[LAUGHTER]
JONATHON: You should see me, I’m laughing.
[LAUGHTER]
JONATHON: It’s a killer! Yes, it is! It is, because… No, but it isn’t, you see. Because for God’s sake after 40 years, if I hadn’t got faked up something, it’s about time I do. So, I do have something faked up, which is a wonderful word, which I’m very fond of, which is the word CLATTERDEVENGEANCE, which is spelt just how you’d think that the word “clatter” “de” and the word “vengeance.” CLATTERDEVENGEANCE. And it only existed for about 10 years, if that, in the 17th century during the English Civil War between the Roundheads and the Cavaliers, two words that as we know went on to have important meeting in slang, which I remember encountering on my first night at prep school. “Are you Roundhead or a Cavalier Green?” I don’t know what… [LAUGHS] etc, etc.
Anyway, so this this Roundhead goes into a bar and basically tries to rape the girl behind the bar. But she comes out with an enormous knife and threatens… He’s waving his willy and she threatens him, and he freaks out and beshits himself, I believe. But they talk in the anecdote about she assails his clatterdevengeance with her knife. And that’s what happens. Although he runs out the dirty legs out of the bar, but I love clatterdevengeance because… I love it. it’s anecdote. I also love that it is exactly what one is talking about when you’re talking about stereotypes, and this is a perfect… It’s macho noisiness, it’s misogyny with the word VENGEANCE. It’s all there to me, those are two things, but it’s the right word in the right place. So that’s my favourite word. The truth is they’re all my babies. But if you need a favourite one, that will do very well.
DANIEL: Been talking to slang lexicographer Jonathon Green, author of the mammoth Green’s Dictionary of Slang, purveyor of the website, greensdictofslang.com. Jonathon, thank you so much for hanging out with me today. How can people find out what you’re doing?
JONATHON: I do tweet a lot. And I do an update on greensdictofslang.com every three months, and I try and put a few lists up and say, “Look what I found. This is interesting. These are new words. These are earlier examples of established words.” That’s probably the best way.
DANIEL: Fantastic. Thank you once again for joining us, for being on the show today.
JONATHON: Thank you.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: We’re going on to Words of the Week. And this one was suggested by PharaohKatt: MORB.
HEDVIG: Morb?
DANIEL: Morb.
HEDVIG: I don’t know. I have no idea.
DANIEL: I don’t either. This is one of those where I’ve said to myself, if I need to know about this, I think I’m going to absorb it eventually. So, I’m not going to think about this too hard. A few weeks ago, the word MORB was coming up. And in fact, I’m looking at a page. I did a search for ‘morb memes’, and I kind of wish I hadn’t. It’s got Jared Leto. It looks like /litoʊ/, but it’s /letoʊ/. Have I gotten that right or did I confuse it?
HEDVIG: He’s an actor?
DANIEL: Yes, he is. He’s in a movie called Morbius. And it’s a shot of him saying, “Stand back, I am beginning to morb.” There’s all these kinds of memes with the word MORB in them. And here’s another one. “We still don’t know the effects of Long Morbius.” Oh, “It’s morbin’ time.”
HEDVIG: Is the film Morbius derived from the Matrix?
DANIEL: I think it’s part of the Marvel universe but like the D-tier Marvel Universe.
HEDVIG: Okay, Marvel. Can we all just by the way… 15 years ago, I was vaguely excited when a Marvel movie came out, and I went to watch in the cinema. And I like Marvel Comics and I like a lot of MCU. But we need to stop feeding them money because they’re doing bullshit, and they’re just doing tired stuff a lot of the time. And they’re not leaving room for other interesting, not-just-recycling entertainment movies that are coming out.
DANIEL: Yeah. Well, okay, what we have to tell the Marvel folks is: It’s not morbin’ time, the time for morbin’ has passed. And in fact, I never see those memes anymore. I guess nobody liked the movie, and so MORB has been a bubble. A little slang bubble. It didn’t mean anything. People enjoyed it. It was fun. People kicked it around. But then the joke got old and it outlived the movie. So, there you go: MORB.
Oh, Lena on Discord tells us: “That reminds me of that post that went around Tumblr a couple of years ago about GOT THE MORBS being old timey slang for being depressed. But it’s making the rounds again because of Morbius. And I do remember that GOT THE MORBS was indeed Victorian slang for feeling a bit blue. Got the morbs.
HEDVIG: So, I see here that you’ve wrote the part of the definition is to joke about the movie without actually having seen it.
DANIEL: Oh, yes, PharaohKatt cat said “Morb and variations as Word of the Week, tried to meme about the movie Morbius without actually watching it has led to some lines, like, “It’s morbin’ time,” and, “The morbium, I need it.”
HEDVIG: Because this is a trend that I really enjoy, and they do a lot on a very popular podcast called My Brother, My Brother and Me, where they’ll talk about a recent thing. And then tell you… like, just lie about it.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: And they do it, and you have to be in tune with people because to know that now they are saying only lies, like the next five minutes was going to be only lies, and that’s the joke.
DANIEL: They’re just riffing on it, not knowing anything.
HEDVIG: They’re just riffing on it. They’re like, “Oh, and then it was so funny because Morbius’ aunt came into the room, and she said that he had to peel all the carrots.” They just make up, like, whatever. And if you’re not in on the comedy style, it’s just nonsense.
DANIEL: You’ll be confused.
HEDVIG: There’s no marker that it’s lies. They just say stuff. I love it.
DANIEL: That’s the fun.
HEDVIG: Yeah, that is the fun.
DANIEL: Well, that’s not going to last very long. So, let’s move on to the next one that also won’t last very long. Swedengate suggested by Rhian.
HEDVIG: Yeah. [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] There was a Reddit thread from sebastian25525, “What is the weirdest thing you had to do at someone else’s house because of their culture/religion?” And a Redditor responded with, “I remember going to my Swedish friend’s house. And while we were playing in his room, his mom yelled that dinner was ready. And check this he told me to wait in this room while they ate. That shit was fucking wild.” Um.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: We have a Swedish person here.
HEDVIG: Hello!
DANIEL: Hedvig, what’s been going on for you and this Sweden analysis?
HEDVIG: Well, this has been popping up a lot in my various feeds.
DANIEL: I bet.
HEDVIG: I see it on Facebook and Twitter and TikTok and everywhere. It is a thing that happens sometimes in, I would say, across Northern European countries. It’s not unique to Sweden. Ste was telling me that he might be familiar with it from the UK as well. It’s not something that all families do. I don’t remember it that much when I was growing up, actually. But it is a cultural practice where there are different reasons for it. One major reason that people will say is that it has to do with the respect for the other family’s dinnertime.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: So the idea is that the other family has made a plan to cook dinner for that child, and you don’t want to interfere with that. There can be different reasons for that. You think that the family… eating together is a special communal activity that you do as a family, you don’t want to interfere with that. It can be dietary things as well.
DANIEL: Yep.
HEDVIG: Some people are controlling about what their kids eat, and you don’t want to interfere with feeding them something that they shouldn’t be eating, or that the family doesn’t like them eating. So, those are some of the different reasons. People eat at different times, you don’t want to screw with people’s eating times.
Another reason that people have said is that a lot of the times in Scandinavian and Northern European cooking, the way you plan meals can be very precise. You don’t make like a big stew and some sort of carbohydrates. You make one piece of fish or one piece of meat per person, and you can’t scale it easily. So, you actually can’t really easily add another kid. That said, a lot of families do just let you eat, that happens a lot too. Often when that does happen, actually the parents communicate beforehand. So, you say, “Hedvig is coming over to your house. Can she eat dinner with you? Or should she go home?” Sometimes, what will also happen is all the kids at dinnertime will go home to their respective houses and then come back and play, that can also happen. Anyway, it’s being jerked around about a lot, and I’m fine with it but there can be good reasons for doing it.
DANIEL: Okay. I also noticed Imogen West-Knights in Slate has a bit of an article about not wanting to incur some kind of debt. She says, “When I lived in Sweden, I spent a lot of time trying to buy people rounds of drinks and being confused by their distress. People would try to pay me back immediately by bank transfer.” So, that’s a thing.
HEDVIG: Yeah. No, exactly. That’s definitely a thing. And especially drinks in Scandinavia, in general, drinking out at a bar can be really expensive. Unless you get the standard, bog-standard lager, which is probably the cheapest thing you can get, if you get anything other than that, it’ll cost a fair amount of money, and it’ll cost more money than buying it in the store. So, if someone buys you around, everyone will keep track of that in their heads, and will try and even that out. And this is a thing in general with money transactions, I think, in Scandinavia is that you don’t want to mix friendship and financial debt.
DANIEL: Yeah, okay.
HEDVIG: Because that can lead to awkward things. What if you don’t go out for beers for a couple of weeks? People feel anxious about the idea of owing other people money. And you might say, “Oh, whatever. But where you live, maybe alcohol is really cheap.” It’s not cheap in Scandinavia. It is actually a bigger financial transaction than it is in other places. So if you buy someone a round, you are putting them a bit on the spot, honestly, and you just have to be aware of that.
DANIEL: That is a valid way to look at it. As a kid, if you were at someone’s house, and they said, “Oh, hang on, we’re just going to have dinner,” would that have been weird? Or, would you be like, “Oh, I guess that’s just how it is?”
HEDVIG: No, I was aware of that thing when I was little. I think that happened to me. And I was aware of it. You sit in your friend’s room… kids eat fast as well, it’s like 15 minutes, 20 minutes! And then you sit around… actually, sometimes it can be nice. Like, you sit in their room, you can look at their toys and look at their things without being… you can spy on them. It wasn’t that upsetting to me.
DANIEL: Well, it was viewed as very strange by people from cultures where violently overfeeding guests is part of the cultural script that happens.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Of course, it would be extremely weird and impolite and rude in such a culture.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: That makes sense.
DANIEL: Well, this Reddit post has kind of ripped the lid off of Sweden,
HEDVIG: Yeah, I know.
DANIEL: Because stage one was the food thing. And people were like, “Wait, are you really that weird?” And then stage two, Black people in Sweden started coming up with their stories about kind of what they face in Sweden. And then, phase three was racist backlash against Black Swedish people. For example, let me just read a couple of tweets from…
HEDVIG: Oh, I haven’t followed this.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s where it’s kind of sitting now.
HEDVIG: This sounds really bad.
DANIEL: Yeah, it’s bad. One Twitter user said, “Listen, assholes, sometimes our parents did not want us to eat at other places than home. It would look externally as if they couldn’t provide for their children. Swedes are the most generous, non-racist country in the world.”
HEDVIG: Oh, my god. Why do people… okay. All right. So, the whole world…
DANIEL: And then: “We have more migrants than we can handle and they still hate us, although all the benefits they have here.” [HORRIFIED LAUGHTER] ‘They should be more grateful’ thing.
HEDVIG: I’m actually a little bit happy about this in a way because…
DANIEL: How so?
HEDVIG: Hear me out. There’s this weird idea in a lot of Western European countries, and especially where I’m now in Germany, that Scandinavia is this like fairytale country where there is no sexism, there is no racism, there’s no classism, and everyone just, like, gets on. And it’s this idea, it plays into the politics. Here in Germany, people will use Sweden… I don’t know why Sweden, because honestly, guys, this is very similar in Norway and Finland and Denmark, too. So, I don’t know why Sweden is being singled out, but whatever. Okay, we’re the biggest one, fine.
DANIEL: Russian trolls, that’s what.
HEDVIG: But it is not a fairytale perfect place. There is a lot of problems with racism in Sweden. It is a big issue. Like, if you’re a Swedish person, and you listen to Swedish and Scandinavian news, you are well aware that people have tried to burn down or have burned down refugee centers, like arson. There are big problems with racism in Scandinavia, for sure. Racial discrimination in the workplace, for sure. This idea that we are this perfect, morally superior country is not only something that occurs outside of Scandinavia, it also occurs in Scandinavia, people internalise it. So, people say things like, “Oh, well, Sweden is a perfectly gender-neutral country. So, the fact that there are fewer women in math must mean that women are neurologically not as good at math.” People make those conclusions. And it’s like: no, we are not a gender equal country! The reason why there are fewer women in math is because a lot of the math men are dicks to them. But people internalise it to such a degree that they think that we’re now this perfect, experimental grounds to make basic claims about human nature… Anyway, don’t get me… So in a way, I’m glad this came out because, of course racism exists.
DANIEL: A chance for Swedish people to have some self-reflection and knock down some myths.
HEDVIG: Yeah. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t good things as well. I do think when it comes to certain issues, I prefer the Swedish way of doing things in general. Here in Germany, it’s very hard to live here if you don’t speak German. And in Sweden, when you go to healthcare, you can usually get a translator for a lot of the large immigrant languages. I think that’s good. So, there are things that are good. I’m not saying that it’s all shit, but some of it is really shit.
DANIEL: Yeah. And it’s good to have a bit of a vibe check as far as the myth of a country… Sweden has a lot of really positive stereotypes about it, like prosperous, socialist democracy, and blah, blah, blah. It just took a lot of people by surprise, I think, just the weirdy bits, and there are some definite weirdy bits. And I think you’re right. I think this is positive for anyone to be able to just have a bit of a reality check there.
HEDVIG: And also, if you’re actually interested in Swedish politics, this is an election year and the extreme right-wing nationalist party, Sweden Democrats, got a lot of vote in last election, probably will get a lot of vote in this election as well. If you want to follow what actually happens in Sweden politics and not just weird filter through American news or whatever, I can recommend The Local. The Local is a Pan-European news organisation that provides news about different countries in English. So, they provide news about Sweden in English. They provide news about Germany in English. There’s also the Swedish Radio has broadcast in other languages. Not just English, but also like Farsi and Kurdish and lots of other languages. So, if you honestly care, you can actually get nonfiltered news right from Sweden about shit.
DANIEL: All right, thank you. I really appreciate hearing your perspective on that. It’s super interesting. I was wondering what you were going to tell us. So, thank you. Thank you for your perspective there.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Let’s finish up.
HEDVIG: I feel like this is Hedvig’s Rant Show.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: It’s okay.
DANIEL: That is all right. It’s good to have a rant every once in a while.
HEDVIG: I have a Word of the Week that’s a little bit positive if you want. Eh?
DANIEL: Okay, go for it. I do not know what this one is. Hedvig has not told me this one in advance.
HEDVIG: So, as listeners of this show know, I now get all of my news about what young people do from the Clock App, the TikToky place. And I heard about this word, LINGUISTIC SHIFT.
DANIEL: Linguistic shift.
HEDVIG: Some neurodivergent people talk about linguistic shifts as ways of reframing something. So, this person, reallifewholelife on TikTok said that, instead of saying, “I need to do the dishes,” they say, “It matters for my mental and physical wellbeing that I do the dishes.”
DANIEL: Interesting.
HEDVIG: And they call this thing LINGUISTIC SHIFT. Actually putting different words on something, so not like, “I need to get dressed,” or, “I need to take my medications,” or anything like that, but “It matters for my mental health that I take my medication.” And then they find it easier to do the thing.
DANIEL: When I was a child, I was encouraged not to say, “I can’t do the thing. I can’t do maths well.” Instead, I was encouraged to say, “I choose not to do maths well.” As a way of saying, you could put in the work if you wanted to.
HEDVIG: 😧
DANIEL: Don’t know if that’s the same thing, that sounds much more negative.
HEDVIG: It’s the same thing but that one sounds bad. You could say, “Doing math is hard for me. I am not yet good at math.” But yeah, people are sharing these reframing using the term LINGUISTIC SHIFT. And I kind of liked it. I thought it was a nice way thinking about it, because how you frame things in your mind and to other people matters sometimes for your ability to do things and you can do linguistic shifts, like the one Daniel said, like, “I choose to be bad at math,” which sounds…
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] What were they trying to do by saying that?
HEDVIG: Not a productive way of going about life.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: But saying, “Putting on a clean pair of clothes will make me feel better,” might be better than say, “I need to. I need to. I need to. I have to. I have to.”
DANIEL: I like it too. I think it seems pretty positive. I mean, language isn’t magic, but it kind of is. I think maybe a bit of critical reflection on the way that we use language could have perhaps some good effects, could be positive.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: All right. Thanks for that. Let’s wrap it up with the last one. It was, of course, Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee. Been on the throne for 70 years. It’s a long time.
HEDVIG: That’s a long time.
DANIEL: There were lots of celebrations. And seejanecricket on our Discord says, “Got an English word of the week for you. Genuinely torn on whether it’s great or awful or both, but apparently some people are calling the Platinum Jubilee four-day weekend: PLATTY JUBES.” Not Platinum Jubilee, but Platty Jubes. “I think on balance,” says seejanecricket, “If it annoys monarchists and peevers, I’m here for it.” Nice. What do you think? Platty Jubes.
HEDVIG: Is it British people doing this or Australians? Because it sounds like something Australians would do.
DANIEL: It is British people doing this. Okay, I’ve got to ask, and I put the question out…
HEDVIG: That’s funny, yeah.
DANIEL: …to our Discordians. This method of making slang, it sounds like a template that I know and I’m trying desperately to think of other examples of doing slang this way, abbreviation this way, and I just can’t think of it. It feels like it’s on the tip of my tongue and I don’t know what it is. Can you think of it? Does it remind you of anything at all?
HEDVIG: Platty Jubes.
DANIEL: Platty Jubes. Calling something jubes, I thought of AMAZEBALLS, but that isn’t right. I couldn’t come up with it. No idea.
HEDVIG: So what… The pattern is you take platinum and shorten it and you take jubilee, and you shorten and you put it together. That’s what we want.
DANIEL: It feels like with an S on the end. Some listener is going to come up with this, I know it. Mr Slang would know. Jonathon Green would know what this is.
HEDVIG: Oh, we should have asked him. Yeah.
DANIEL: Damn!
HEDVIG: I don’t know. When I saw it in our run sheet, I have to say that I thought first that it was something related to my mammalian glands.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] It’s kind of jumbly, isn’t it?
HEDVIG: Yeah, that it was some sort of word that was related to boobs, and them being flat or something? I don’t know. I was confused. But Platty Jubes, yeah.
DANIEL: That’s something that was not nearly as naughty as you thought it was going to be.
HEDVIG: Yeah. You know what’s funny about the jubileum?
DANIEL: What?
HEDVIG: I was listening to an Australian news podcast the other day, the one that’s taken over the Signal, I think, is ABC News Daily. And they were talking about the Republican movement in Australia and other places. And they were saying that unfortunately, for a couple of years now, it’s probably going to be like: You can’t really become a Republic now. She’s really old. We shouldn’t taint her last years with deposing her as queen. And then…
DANIEL: But as soon as Charles is in, flatten that shit out.
HEDVIG: No — because then, it’ll be like, “He just got the job. And he’s been waiting so long to be king.”
DANIEL: “Look at the disappointment in his little eyes.”
HEDVIG: “He’s been waiting for so long. We can’t rob him of that. Let’s give him a fair shot.”
DANIEL: He’s been waiting for…
HEDVIG: “He’s been waiting for so long.” And I think they’re right. Like, I think that is going to be the sentiment, honestly.
DANIEL: I think it could be right. As long as long as Elizabeth II is alive, the Republican thing is going to be a little bit sotto voce. I personally think — this is just my feeling — that nobody likes Charles, and as soon as he’s king, we’re out.
HEDVIG: I think that people aren’t going to feel strongly enough about it.
DANIEL: Maybe not, maybe inertia…
HEDVIG: And I think the ones who do are going to– I think a lot of people are going to think, “Oh, he just got the job. Give him a shot.”
DANIEL: We’ll probably get a chance to find out. Oh, that’s terrible to say, isn’t it? Oh, dear.
HEDVIG: Within yours and my lifetime, I think that a woman who is very old might pass away. I don’t think that’s a controversial statement.
DANIEL: I don’t know, Hedvig. I’m not…
HEDVIG: You can say that it’s good or bad or neutral, or whatever. But she’s a human, and human have finite lifespans. I think that’s okay.
DANIEL: I think she might be partly cyborg. I am beginning to think that she will outlive me.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I don’t think she’ll outlive me.
DANIEL: Okay. All right. Well, then you find out. We’ll keep an eye on this linguistic story. Where did we… How did we get here?
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] Because we’re a little bit Australian still.
DANIEL: Platty joobs. We are still a little bit Australian. And thank goodness, we still call Australia home. Well, let me just wrap it up here. So, MORB, SWEDENGATE, LINGUISTIC SHIFT, and PLATTY JUBES: lur Words of the Week. Hedvig, thank you so much for being on the show with me today.
HEDVIG: You’re welcome.
DANIEL: And remember, if you want to check out Green’s Dictionary of Slang, but you don’t want to pay for the massive three-volume work, you can just head to greensdictofslang.com or Timelines of Slang, or check out any of the numerous books that Mr Green has written. Thanks to Jonathon Green for being on the show today.
[END THEME]
DANIEL: Your turn!
HEDVIG: If you like our show… I mean, if you’re still listening here, at the end of the show, I assume you either like the show or you’re some sort of masochist, or you’ve fallen asleep. One of those. Either way, if you like it, and you know all podcasters say this, and it does matter. It actually does help us if you go on to the iTunes Music library whatever app, and rate us. I think you can even do it through the web browser. And it sounds really stupid, and why is iTunes the place that matters for podcasters, but it kind of does. And a lot of other podcaster apps take their scoring somehow from iTunes. So, if you give us a rating, I would say at this point, I accept anything above three stars. And if you give a five-star review, I’ll read out what you say.
DANIEL: But you have to write something.
HEDVIG: Yeah, you have to write something, and I’ll read it out. This is your opportunity to make Hedvig say silly things. As long as they’re not wildly offensive, I’m not–
DANIEL: Or deeply revealing.
HEDVIG: No, deeply revealing is fine. I just don’t want to offend other people. But if you want to make me say something, you can give us a five-star review and I’ll read it out. Other things you can do is, you can follow us on all the places; we are BecauseLangPod. But you can’t follow us on Spotify because we’re boycotting Spotify. You can also leave us a message on SpeakPipe. If you go to our website, becauselanguage.com, one word, you can click on there and you can record a little audio message for us and that’d be fun. You can also send us a good old-fashioned email at hello@becauselanguage.com.
Other things you can do as well that don’t even require the internet at all is tell a friend about us. Most of my recommendations for new podcasts I listen to come from people I trust and love and I think the same might be true for a lot of our audience.
You can also become a Patreon. If you do so, you’ll get bonus episodes and you get to hang out with us in Discord and you get to participate in our potluck episode, which I’m really looking forward to.
DANIEL: Me too.
HEDVIG: You can do all those things, and we appreciate any and all of those things. Thank you very much for listening.
DANIEL: Our patrons make it possible for us to make transcripts, and that means that you can read the show as well as listen. You could even read the show and listen at the same time. How closely do the folks at SpeechDocs transcribe this show? I think you’ll find pretty tightly, because they’re doing a great job on our transcripts. We’d like to give a thank to our top patrons, Dustin, Termy, Chris B, Elías, Matt, Whitney. Matt and Whitney have been patrons since 2016. They joined as patrons in the same week.
HEDVIG: Wow.
DANIEL: And they have been hanging out with us all the way. They are stalwarts. Thank you, you two. I’ll feature somebody else next time. Chris L, Helen, Udo, Jack, PharaohKatt, Lord Mortis, Larry, Kristofer, Andy, James, Nigel, Meredith, Kate, Nasrin, Ayesha, Moe, Steele, Manú, James, Rodger, Rhian, Colleen, Ignacio, Sonic Snejhog, Kevin, Jeff, Andy from Logophilius, Samantha, Stan, Kathy, Rach, Cheyenne, Felicity, Amir, Canny Archer, O Tim, Alyssa, Chris W, and Kate B who smashed the one-time donation button on our website, becauselanguage.com. Also, our newest patron at the Listener Level, John L. Big thank you to our amazing patrons.
Our theme music has been written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who’s a member of Ryan Beno and of Didion’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
[MUSIC ENDS]
DANIEL: Pew.
HEDVIG: Pew, pew.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]