Just two words, but they do so much. But what exactly? Here to answer that question is Dr Isabelle Burke, who has studied yeah-no in depth. She’s also going to help us with these Mailbag questions.
- Why can we say “I very much enjoy…” but not “I much enjoy…” or “I very enjoy…”?
- When is a loanword not a loanword?
- Do word processors have a problem with singular THEY?
- Why doesn’t English have diacritics?
Listen to this episode
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Isabelle Burke | Monash University
https://research.monash.edu/en/persons/isabelle-burke
Izzy’s project: The history and evolution of Australian slang
https://lens.monash.edu/@history-evolution-of-australian-slang
Bella | Bluey Wiki
https://blueypedia.fandom.com/wiki/Bella
Yeah-Nah Condoms
https://www.yeahnahcondoms.com.au
[$$] Burridge and Florey 2002: ‘Yeah-no He’s a Good Kid’: A Discourse Analysis of Yeah-no in Australian English
https://doi.org/10.1080/0726860022000013166
‘Milkshake consent video’ pulled amid mounting political backlash over ‘woeful’ campaign | ABC News
UWA Corpus of English in Australia
https://doi.org/10.26182/b8cf-nb69
Moore, E. (2007). Yeah-No: a discourse marker in Australian English. Honours thesis, Department of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, The University of Melbourne.
https://minerva-access.unimelb.edu.au/items/f28d5f4b-eb4c-5828-8dc7-7dcc4f1dcc46
Carsales 2022 Ad
Grammaticalisation clines: a brief conceptual history
https://hiphilangsci.net/2019/03/06/grammaticalisation-clines/
Contrastive Focus Reduplication in English (The Salad-Salad Paper) [PDF]
https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/jackendoff/papers/salad-salad.pdf
MUCH | Macmillan Dictionary
https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/much_1
Philip Durkin | Borrowed Words: A History of Loanwords in English | 16 Long-term effects of loanwords on the shape of the English Lexicon
https://academic.oup.com/book/25623/chapter-abstract/193021393?redirectedFrom=fulltext
The History of ‘Restaurant’ | Merriam-Webster
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/the-history-of-restaurant
At the sign of the . . . | Restaurant-ing through history
https://restaurant-ingthroughhistory.com
Nouns and pronouns | Microsoft Style Guide
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/style-guide/grammar/nouns-pronouns
Bias-free communication | Microsoft Style Guide
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/style-guide/bias-free-communication
How does Microsoft Word handle non-binary grammar like they?
https://office-watch.com/2022/microsoft-word-non-binary-grammar/
The Curse of the Diaeresis | The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-the-diaeresis
Apostrophes in Native Languages
https://www.languagegeek.com/typography/apostrophes.html
2022 Programme & videos | Forum on Englishes in Australia (Izzy’s video)
https://sites.google.com/view/auseng/2022-programme-videos?authuser=0
What Is FUPA?
https://www.webmd.com/skin-problems-and-treatments/what-is-fupa
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
HEDVIG: [SCREAM] Oops. Oh. Sorry, my…
DANIEL: Did the cat get out?
BEN: Cat malfunction.
HEDVIG: My cats are chasing a bug and they’re trying to knock over something. Hold on. Okay, where is the bug and how can I get…
BEN: Classic.
ISABELLE BURKE (hereafter IZZY): It’s the most beautiful cat too.
BEN: I know. That’s Sandy. We like Sandy very much.
IZZY: Sandy was gorgeous!
HEDVIG: This is Cement. She’s also gorgeous.
BEN: Hello, Cement.
IZZY: Oh, a tortie! I’ve got a tortoiseshell too.
BEN: Aw, I used to have a tortoiseshell and they are sssssso good!
IZZY: They are. They do have tortitude though.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Interesting.
BEN: Tortitude.
DANIEL: And that’s a Word of the Week.
BEN: Yes, tortitude, for sure.
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME PLAYING]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. First up, it’s Hedvig Skirgård. Hedvig?
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: I had a dream…
HEDVIG: oh no
DANIEL: …where you and Ste were at a tennis match and he whistled really, really loudly and everybody noticed, and you both got ejected from the tennis match.
HEDVIG: Wow!
DANIEL: What does this mean?
HEDVIG: Uh, I subscribe that intrusive thoughts and dreams don’t mean much at all.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Interesting.
HEDVIG: It means you thought about us sometime during the day.
BEN: Can I ask, Hedvig… can we reality check this particular dream Daniel had. Of the two of you, were one of you to be ejected from anywhere for being obnoxiously loud, which of the two of you would it be?
HEDVIG: That would be me. That would be me.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Oh, really? Yeah, it would be, wouldn’t it.
HEDVIG: Unless Ste was in a group of British men, then maybe they would confuse him with another British man who was loud.
DANIEL: Good to know. Okay. But it will be a confusion of somebody else, that’s okay.
BEN: Only through doppelgangerness could it ever be him.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Otherwise, it would always be you.
HEDVIG: It would always be me.
DANIEL: Okay. Thank you. Next, it’s Ben Ainslie. Ben…
BEN: Who already spoke before his introduction! That’s just how I roll, folks.
DANIEL: He does this all the time.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: You’ve never been in any of my dreams even though by now, after doing the show for so long, you’d think that you might have.
BEN: Nope.
DANIEL: What does this mean?
BEN: I’m hoping that it means, like a Gray Man from the Wheel of Time series, I just like… I slide out of people’s consciousness the moment I’m not in their direct… like, I am the slipperiest person cognitively on the planet. And as soon as you’re not forced to interact with me, I cease to exist in your understanding of the wider universe.
DANIEL: It’s not working because I’m always saying, “Oh, this one time, Ben said a thing and it was really good.” I seem to be doing that a lot lately.
BEN: I start with the dreams and then I work my way into conscious cognition.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Good to know. Our very special guest for this episode: returning champion, Dr Isabelle Burke. Hello, Izzy.
IZZY: Hi. Yeah, no, very good to be here.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: That’s thematic. [LAUGHS] Izzy is a research fellow at Monash University. She’s presented work recently at the — correct me if I’m wrong — the Forum on Englishes in Australia 2022?
IZZY: Yes, that’s right. It does have very long name, but an excellent forum.
DANIEL: Was it good? I really would have loved to be there.
IZZY: Yeah, it was very fun. There was a lot of phonetics this year, but I got really into it because I don’t know much about phonetics. But at the end of it, I came out with a wonderful clip from Bluey that told me a lot about T-affrication.
HEDVIG: Huh.
BEN: It’s the gift that just keeps on giving, isn’t it? Really.
DANIEL: Gosh. Okay, now that you’ve gone there, I think I’m going to need you to say what the example was because T-affrication, so that’s [ʧ], [ʦ], what is it?
IZZY: Yeah, it’s like “grate-ch” [gɹeɪʧtᶴ], [gɹeɪʧtᶴ]. Like Prue and Trude on Kath & Kim, the very posh, you know: ~oh, that was just grate-ch~.
DANIEL: Wow, and Bluey does it, huh?
IZZY: Yeah, apparently a particular character in Bluey does it, a very posh…
BEN: Oh, it must be Wendy.
DANIEL: Oh, it’s Coco’s Mum.
BEN: It’s got to be Wendy. Nah, it’s gotta be Wendy from next door.
IZZY: No, I think it was a Shar-Pei or maybe it was. I must confess I’m not 100% up on my Bluey because all the kids in my extended family around.
BEN: As a person who rolls very deep on Bluey lore…
DANIEL: We roll very deep on Bluey.
BEN: …I can almost guarantee that would be their right-hand next-door neighbour, Wendy, who is the mother of Juno and they are very much coded as, like, posher types.
DANIEL: Yeah.
IZZY: We’re getting the Bluey deep cuts here. Okay. I didn’t know what I’d stumbled into.
DANIEL: I love how at first, Wendy was, like, the foil because anytime Bandit would do something strange, she would walk past and be horrified. But then after a while, she was like, “No, no, I’m immersing myself in this situation.”
BEN: They saved her. I think at first, they did her a bit dirty and were like, “Oh, she’s just the annoying posh lady from next door.” And then they were like, “No, no, there’s depth there,” which is good.
HEDVIG: What animal is Wendy?
DANIEL: Walk away, Wendy, this doesn’t involve you. According to the Bluey Wiki, Wendy is a Chow Chow. and Chloe’s Mum Bella is a poodle. I think it’s Chloe’s mom.
[BOOP]
Okay, this is Daniel breaking in on the edit. And it turns out I was right. It was Chloe’s mum, Bella. And this happened in episode, Baby Race. And here’s the audio.
BELLA: You’re doing greatsch.
DANIEL: Sorry, Ben, I got this one right. Returning you to the recording.
[BOOP]
So Izzy, you’ve done work on probably my favourite discourse-pragmatic marker, which is…
IZZY: Yeah-no.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: And so, I had to have you on so that you could tell us all about your recent work and maybe answer some mailbag questions. Are you ready?
IZZY: Yeah-no, totally ready.
DANIEL: All right. Uh… let’s not overdo it.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: This is a bonus episode for patrons at the listener level. Thanks to all of you for supporting the show. You’re not only getting to hear the bonus episodes, but you’re also making it possible for everyone to hear the regular episodes as well. So, thank you, thank you, thank you for supporting the show. If you are stumbling across this and you’re not a subscriber, why don’t you go ahead and go to patreon.com/becauselangpod. You’ll be in line for lots of goodies including hanging out with us on Discord, our yearly mailout, which is coming up pretty soon, we’re working busily on that. And also, you’ll get warm and fuzzy feels. So once again, patreon.com/becauselangpod.
BEN: I would just like to spruik, Daniel, just really quickly as an added incentive to join our Patreon community on Discord, as Daniel was saying the long read-y thing that we have to say every week and so I tune out a little bit, I actually genuinely just looked through at one of our sub-Discord channels, the cats and other animals channel, and it’s delightful. There’s so many cute animals there.
DANIEL: You like that one.
BEN: For that reason alone, folks, you should go if you want to go to the Now Playing channel in the Discord where I basically just rant about all of the things that I like in the media. You could also go there, but the animals and cats on it.
DANIEL: I’m big on games. I haven’t been doing lately, but I like the games where we post our -LE game scores.
BEN: Uh-huh.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
BEN: Okay. What is happening? What is in the Mailbag? Open that purse string, tip those letters out, Daniel.
DANIEL: Up-up-up. Before we get to the Mailbag, I’ve got to talk to Dr Burke about her work in YEAH-NO. So, Izzy, tell us about the kind of data you were looking at. Where were you pulling this information from?
IZZY: Yeah, absolutely. The study I did basically for this was corpus-based. So, I looked at the UWA Corpus of English in Australia, which you may or may not be familiar with. It’s quite a large corpus, all spontaneous conversation and fortunately enough, quite large. So, the slice I was looking at was nearly two million words. So, all pretty spontaneous, recent conversational data I was looking at. The funny thing was though that it’s just so salient to the Australian English-speaking community. People are so aware of it. It’s so big in the media. It’s increasingly large everywhere. In fact, a colleague recently told me the other day that there’s a Melbourne-based condom company, company that’s called Yeah-Nah Condoms.
BEN: Wow.
IZZY: I feel like I probably can’t give a shoutout to the colleague because I feel I probably did an ethics module on don’t thank your colleagues for their condom advice.
[LAUGHTER]
IZZY: But I’m pretty sure I ticked a box.
DANIEL: I did not take that unit but…
BEN: That’s a social faux pas.
DANIEL: Is Yeah-Nah Condoms, is that a good idea for because…
IZZY: I mean, that was my view, because it’s… I mean, as I’ll tell you, YEAH-NAH has a number of very different uses. It can be a really enthusiastic agreement of, “Yeah, yeah-no, no.” Or it can be like a really sassy putdown of: “Yeah-nah.”
BEN: I’m wondering if that’s what they’re alluding to.
IZZY: Yes.
BEN: My marketing brain goes, like, “Use this product, or you’ll get a yeah-no.”
IZZY: Their tag line is actually… I actually went to their website, which was perhaps not the wisest idea. But their tag line is, “We’re all about fun, but consent comes first.” So, maybe it’s a way of sort of highlighting how complex consent can be because YEAH-NAH can have so many different meanings. I mean, at least it beats the previous government’s milkshake ad, it comes out ahead on that.
BEN: Woof. Can I ask a question about this corpus? Is that a thing can I do?
IZZY: Absolutely. Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: As the non-linguist, you said that this corpus is based on spontaneous conversation.
IZZY: To an extent. I mean, obviously, there are a number of prompts and they have a number of sort of… they’re prepared with a list of questions that are designed to get conversation and particular narratives flowing.
BEN: So how does this work? ‘Cause obviously, a lot of what we’re seeing now in linguistics, at least based from what we’ve covered in the show is, I go online and grab all of the digital text from some gargantuan written corpus. But this is sounding very different. So, can you just really briefly articulate how this corpus is built?
IZZY: Yes, of course. So, it was linguistics students themselves, that was part of their coursework over at UWA. So, what they would do for a particular class was they’d go out with a recorder or just their phone, and they would have a list of questions. They’d go out and do a little interview or a conversation with one of their friends or their family, someone within a particular age group. And they would then type up the transcription and submit that and the audio for the corpus and for their coursework.
BEN: Okay. That’s really interesting and quite… or at least somewhat unique by the sound of things, at least based on what we’ve been talking about a lot.
IZZY: Yeah. I think it was a lovely idea. So this was all compiled. It was Celeste Rodriguez Louro, it’s her corpus and her idea. So, it’s a lovely one, because you get a lot of data and all much more naturalistic than the other sources than you’d normally be looking at. For instance, with comparable studies on YEAH-NO, there was a senior honors thesis that someone had done on US English, and they’d used COCA. And of course, the thing with COCA is it’s all based on radio shows, television shows, talkback, some of them are scripted, but even if they’re not, they’re in the public domain, or they’re sort of public speech.
BEN: Even if they’re not formal in register, they are for broadcast, which is its own kind of distortion.
IZZY: Exactly. Yeah. And they don’t tend to be the sort of conversations between two people who are pretty close, or they’re on the same wavelength and know each other really well. And that’s when you tend to see more… for one, more discourse-pragmatic markers. And also, more interesting uses… more uses. There was another strange thing I found was the corpus of… the closer the two interlocutors were, the more YEAH-NO would pop up.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Hmm.
DANIEL: Ooh.
IZZY: Yeah. I call them superusers. I thought about calling them whales after gambling, but then it just sounded a bit mean. I thought it was super because most people, or those that did use yeah-no, it’s actually not all that frequent, which is funny, because it’s clearly very salient. And people see it as very characteristically Australian. But actually, not that frequent particular and we looked at it was other discourse-pragmatic markers. But yeah, it’s superusers, most people would use it if they did at all, one or two times in about a 40-minute recording. But the closer people were, and there was one peer, who were very close indeed and having a great chat, they used it nearly 20 times in the space of a 40-minute conversation. So, this is compared to sort of one or two, and I thought, “Wow, they’re really… “
BEN: Smashing it.
IZZY: Yeah, they’re smashing it out of the park.
BEN: Absolutely smashing it.
HEDVIG: Is part of the use of YEAH-NAH to do with indicating shared knowledge? So, like you and I both know blah, blah, blah.
IZZY: Exactly. Yeah, it certainly does it. That’s one of its textual functions, it likes to create a lot of relevance between the previous turn. It sounds like relevance may not be particular for me as an outsider, I’m just reading the transcript. Some of that was not necessarily very clear to me, but they were clearly operating on something that had happened before or something was very much in the shared domain, their shared knowledge.
BEN: [CHUCKLES] You’ve been outgrouped…
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: …at a distance.
IZZY: You know, I felt very much on the outer.
HEDVIG: But yeah, that would explain why there’s less of it in the broadcasting speech and more of it in the people who are already familiar with each other.
DANIEL: Mm.
IZZY: Yes. And different sort of uses too.
DANIEL: Let’s go back a second to what we knew before your work. I’ve read Yeah-no He’s a Good Kid by Dr Kate Burridge and Dr Margaret Florey. And what I took from that — I hope this is right — in some cases, YEAH-NO is acknowledgment-reject. So, the yeah means, “I hear what you’re saying,” and the no is, “No, my answer is no.”
IZZY: Yes.
DANIEL: Okay. That’s one thing. And then, another thing that I got from that paper was that you’re telling a story, you’ve digressed, digressed, digressed. And now, it’s time to come back to the main thread and hand over the turn. So, we say, “We did this, we did that, we did that, we did that. Yeah, no, it was a really fun vacation, and now it’s your turn.” Have I got that right so far?
IZZY: Yes, absolutely. They’re very common uses of YEAH-NO. They call it a presumptive topic marker of, a lot of this has been a long stretch of conversation. We’ve talked about a number of different things. And then for instance here, if I said, “Yeah, no. Tortietude is a really big thing. My cat has it.” So, it’s returning to a topic that… In fact, I found… you could have a huge number of turns that had passed sort of in 10 or 15 minutes and people reintroduce a topic with YEAH-NO, and people would pick it up, people didn’t view it as strange or anything. It was viewed as completely the norm.
BEN: I’ve realised that I need this particular sense of YEAH-NO very badly in my life. [LAUGHS] I am the king of digression and the people who are listening to the show right now…
DANIEL: Oh, boy.
BEN: …you don’t know. You’re sitting there nodding along to me, being like, “Yeah, he really does.” You get only a tiny sliver.
DANIEL: You have no idea. You have no idea.
BEN: Daniel cuts like 80% to 90% of my digression bullshit out. Like my students? Oh, those poor, poor darlings.
DANIEL: Goes on and on, doesn’t it?
BEN: There’s no Daniel to save them, let me give you the big tip!
IZZY: [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: So, resumptive… What was that term?
IZZY: Topic marker.
DANIEL: Resumptive topic marker.
BEN: Resumptive topic marker. That’s great.
IZZY: And I felt that this was a sort of very good meta use of it, because it’s such a great paper, the 2002 paper, and I thought, “Well, it’s been 20 years on. Yeah, no, it’s time to revisit it.”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: Resumptive topic marker: engage.
IZZY: Exactly. Maybe it’d be more of a new topic. It can do that too. Introduce something that’s completely new.
DANIEL: What’s an example of that?
IZZY: Well, when people want to introduce, they want to pretend that there’s some sort of connection with the preceding stretch of talk, but actually there isn’t. It’s a bogus connection if I did something like, “Yeah, no, let’s talk about Taylor Swift’s new album.”
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Wow. Okay. That sounds good to me.
BEN: I have a feeling, I may already use it this way too much.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
IZZY: You can also shut down a topic using YEAH-NO too and you can do that in a sort of very comfortable way. Also, it seems to depend on where it occurs in a turn. For instance, we could say… I saw this all the time. When people have been talking about their holidays, or something nice that had happened, there’d be a big stretch of talking, they do, “Yeah-no, it was a great time. Anyway, let’s talk about something else.”
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay.
IZZY: Or alternatively, it could be that they’re really uncomfortable with the topic, and they don’t want to talk about it anymore. And that tends to be turn-final of, “So, the Taylor Swift album, yeah, no. Let’s talk about something else.”
HEDVIG: Can you do it for saying goodbye?
IZZY: Absolutely. Yes, and that was one of the more interesting… or it’s more of an expressive use, I guess, because it seems to be servicing points that are more interactionally difficult of… I saw one very vivid example of this poor woman was trying to extricate herself from a conversation that had gone on for sort of way too long. “Yeah, no, it’s been really great seeing you, but I better get moving.”
DANIEL: Okay, so it can be a conversation closer.
IZZY: Yes. Sort of extended leave-taking sequence.
DANIEL: I’ve also noticed hard reject. I think you mentioned this in your presentation as well, like my daughter says, “Let’s do some baking, dad.” And I’m like, “Yeah, no, we’re not doing that.” Because we have to do s…. Yeah, no, we’re not.
IZZY: Absolutely.
DANIEL: That’s a bit like the acknowledgement-reject. Is that what you noticed as well?
IZZY: Yes. In fact, the particular context in which you used it is more common, so when you’re using it in reported speech, because it’s quite unusual in Anglo-Australian speech norms to sort of aggressively shut someone down or to have an aggravated sort of a disagreement. That’s why they’re sort of…
BEN: Agreed. I think Australians fancy themselves straight talkers but the reality of how they communicate just absolutely doesn’t bear that out.
HEDVIG: Definitely not.
BEN: We’ve got way too much British influence in us, I think, and we hedge and we um and er and we dance around. Yeah, to be what I conceive of as more Scandi or more Israeli or something is actually really confronting and Australians struggle with it a lot. South Africans are great for it. They’ll just be like, “Nah.” Australians are like, “Oh, okay.” Urghh!
[CHUCKLES]
IZZY: The typical use of the agreement, but then reject is the mitigating use of you’re creating a false impression of agreeing with someone but you’re letting them down gently is the mitigating use of… for instance, if we then said, “Yeah, no, actually, I think some other artist is my favourite.” “Yeah, no, I actually prefer Carly Rae Jepsen to Taylor Swift.”
HEDVIG: That can be really hard for us blunties sometimes to pick up on when it’s…
BEN: [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Blunties.
BEN: [LAUGHS] You have not brought that up before, you just dropped BLUNTIE as a characterisation, and I get it. It works. I love it.
IZZY: It works beautifully.
DANIEL: That’s a Word of the Week.
BEN: Blunties.
HEDVIG: Yeah. I’ve had a lot of conversations lately, where being blunt has been an asset and it’s so nice. We’re doing this paper, and someone’s like, “Oh, I think this sentence should be like this instead.” And I’m like, “No,” or, “Yes, okay, fine. Not a hill I want to die on,” and just like go through it. And I have to say to people before we have the conversation, I’m like, “Okay, we’re going to have a very blunt conversation. And it’s fine, I’m not attacking you. Like, we just need to get through this.”
DANIEL: Nice.
BEN: I would definitely, definitely require that were we to collaborate on anything. Things are way too ingrained. Like, I had a group assignment at uni this morning and, yeah, I honestly feel like 50% to 60% of our communication was just managing other people’s feeling states around that sort of stuff.
HEDVIG: No, that’s totally legit.
DANIEL: What else have we got, Dr Burke?
IZZY: So, on the expressive uses, so these are the sort of sarcastic putdown ones. I mean, the interesting thing was that was not found at all in the Burridge and Florey paper. So, in 2002, that did not appear to be a thing. People did not use YEAH-NO in that way, at least in Australian English in 2002.
DANIEL: In the way of, sorry, the hard reject?
IZZY: The hard reject, sort of aggravated sarcastic disagreement. “Yeah, no, I’d rather not.” It’s funny because I wonder, there is some data on US English on this use and it seems to be documented in US English earlier than it is in Australian English, whether or not that means it did in fact occur earlier. I’m talking about sources such as Language Log. Twitter too. Twitter, unsurprisingly, has a very rich vein of the sort of expressive sarcastic shut down use of: “Not only am I disagreeing with you, but you’re so completely wrong, that we’re not going to be discussing this topic any further. Yeah, no, that’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.”
The interesting thing I thought was, for one, it hadn’t been documented in Australian English before, at least in corpus data, or in earlier works, like the 2002 paper, or even the 2007 honors thesis by Erin Moore. So, I thought, “Well, this is funny. I wonder if this actually does exist in Australian English,” because on the face of it, it seems a very un-Australian use of a discourse-pragmatic marker. We’d like to use them to manage affect, we’d like to use them to mitigate. YEAH-NO, all of its uses are very sort of collaborative and cooperative. It’s all about managing relationships and saving face. So, on the face of it, it just seems like a really weird use for us to suddenly take this and to be using it as this aggravated putdown.
But in fact, we do. When I looked at the corpus data, we are starting to use it, but only recently. In the recent corpus data I have, the first use I saw was in 2019 and only by much younger speakers. So, I’m talking about sort of between 17 and 19. So, it seems to be younger people and a newer use. So, I don’t know whether or not this is sort of a different lineage, whether this has been picked up maybe through the internet more, maybe through Twitter. I do see it often combined, which is sort of suggestive with other kind of internet speak terms of like that classic, “I can’t even,” so they’ll combine it with things like that. “Oh, yeah, no, I can’t even.” Things like that.
That makes me wonder whether or not… and I do want to look at it in more detail, of course. But it makes me think this is perhaps a different kind of use, maybe one that did not originate in the same way as the classic old-school YEAH-NO uses that we saw in the Burridge and Florey paper. But I can’t know for sure until I have a more detailed look at media uses because it certainly appears in the media or the more recent media, Australian media, in this way too. We’ve got a really awful ad for car sales at the moment. We’ve got this dad trying to sell his car the old way. And then, we have the cool new Millennial daughter with her phone looking at her dad doing all this and she says, “Yeah, nah,” and goes back in her phone and uses the Wonderful New Car Sales app or whatever it is.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Hmm.
DANIEL: Let’s leave it all on the field. What other uses have you noticed? I just want to get them all out there. Anything different?
IZZY: Yeah, there is one thing that’s quite different. So you might remember from the old paper… the ancient text from 2002 that it’s used when people receive a compliment because that’s obviously a very difficult juncture in Anglo-Australian culture of, “Oh, god. I have to accept this graciously but I can’t be seen to be the tall poppy. Sirens are blaring. What do I do?” You reach for the wonderful discourse-pragmatic marker YEAH-NO. And you’ll notice it all the time with sportspeople in their interviews. Initially, it might seem as though they’re being immodest, because it appears as though they’re agreeing of, “Oh, well, you played really well.” “Yeah, no, the boys and I, we played really well.” It’s a marker of being quite uncomfortable… there’s two competing pressures here, the pressure to be gracious, and accept the compliment but also, we don’t want to go over the top.
So, I mean, that one was present but what I found really weird was that people react the same way to criticism as they do to a compliment. So when they’re directly criticised — and sometimes this is in a gentle way, like the jocular mockery way, the casual shyacking that close Aussie friends tend to do — people react in the same way of, “I can’t believe you forgot my birthday,” was one, or, “You’re a giant nerd” was another. And they react the same way as, “Yeah, no, I guess you’re right.” “Oh, yeah, no, I got nothin’.”
[CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: Oh.
IZZY: Clearly, it’s between very close friends that you see that happening. But I just found it a very interesting reflection of Australian culture that we’re wrapped in much the same way as whether or not you compliment us or criticises, they’re both apparently equally uncomfortable.
BEN: Just don’t do anything to Australians.
HEDVIG: I was wondering about all of these different yeah-nahs because when you were giving us examples, the vowels and the stress and the tone intonation changes, so they’re not the same. Like [IN A OFFHAND TONE] “Yeah, nah,” and [IN A CURT TONE] “Yeah, nah,” like, they’re not the same. I can hear the difference and I can sort of maybe guess which one maps onto which function. But I was wondering if you had done any analysis on actual intonation curves, for example. That seems to be the most salient thing of how they…
IZZY: Yes, I totally agree that it is. That’s my next plan of action. I think it is, that is going to be the answer to a number of these things. The two, though, seems to correlate just was where it is in the turn. So, if it occurs at the end of the turn, then it’s a quite different intonation, quite a pause there and trail off. And with the agreeing one, particularly very vigorous agreement, you get that stress that you put there, [IN A VIGOROUS TONE] “Yeah, no.” Those sort of ones. But it doesn’t appear to map sort of 100%.
For instance, the very sassy putdown YEAH-NO, you would think they would have quite a distinctive prosody. But in fact, it doesn’t always. I mean, I don’t have a very large set of actually spoken naturalistic sort of shutdown YEAH-NOs I’ve got quite a small amount, but some of them appear to have much the same pattern as the resumptive topic marker one or the textual ones. It clearly doesn’t have the same sort of intonation as the polite, mitigating one. Certainly, people never seem to mistake one for the other. There doesn’t ever appear to be any confusion about what’s intended there. Or at least any ambiguity that’s present is probably useful, rather than confusing. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Can we get a little reel of Izzy doing like a couple in a row?
DANIEL: Oh, yeah. Okay, that’s a good idea. Okay, so let’s hear the resumptive topic marker.
IZZY: “Yeah, no. As we’re talking about, tortoiseshells are awesome.”
[CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: Okay, now, let’s hear a pre-close.
IZZY: Oh, so hang on. Which one is it?
DANIEL: That’s the one where we’re about to end the conversation.
IZZY: Oh. “Yeah, no, so it’s been great talking to you guys but I got to head off now.” [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Hard reject?
IZZY: “Yeah, no.”
[CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Succinct, I like it.
DANIEL: Response to complement or criticism.
IZZY: “Yeah, no, no. We all worked really hard on that. So, thanks.”
[CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: Okay. Fantastic. Now, this is happening not just in Australia, but all over the English-speaking world and it may not be an Australianism.
IZZY: Unfortunately, yes. People seem to be very proud of naming this and claiming this as being distinctly Australian. And everyone seems very crestfallen when I tell them that, “No, it is in other varieties.” But we… even though it does appear in other varieties, we seem to have coopted it in a different way, or at least we seem to cherish it in a way that other varieties of English don’t necessarily do. I can’t speak to whether or not they have exactly the same functions and exactly the same popularity because I haven’t looked at the data yet. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be many in depth studies of YEAH-NO in other varieties of English. People seem to like to do like a fun blog post or, “Here’s a fun language blog,” and then it just disappears.
BEN: Sounds like a hole in the market!
[CHUCKLES]
IZZY: Well, it made me quite worried! I’ve presented this paper. I’m really excited to write it up but no one else has done it. Is someone out to get us? The people writing on YEAH-NO? What’s going to happen?”
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: The absence is conspicuous.
HEDVIG: I think that’s a case for a lot of discourse markers and pragmatic stuff in general, because it’s so hard to get good data on. Pragmatic typology is so like… I know Mark Dingemanse has done some things but it’s so in its infancy. Like you were saying, a lot of the corpora are either newspapers, fictional books, maybe you get some blogs in there, maybe you get some radio broadcasts, but this kind of usage, we don’t have a lot of data on. But they’re really interesting, and they’re interesting to the general public, and they’re interesting to linguists who hear them. So, people are overwhelmed with this enthusiasm for them. So, that’s why it comes out, I think, in like blog posts and podcasts and things like that, because they’re like, “Oh, no. It is a thing!”
IZZY: Yeah.
BEN: Should we just go to various unis that have linguistic departments and be like, “Yo, UWA did this wicked thing where they basically use the free labour of all of their undergrads to just build this wicked casual corpus. Do that.”
HEDVIG: There’s something called the Brown corpora, which is when you make a corpora in the same proportions as the Brown corpora. We can make the Celeste corpora and be like, “Hey.”
IZZY: Yes. It sounds nice.
DANIEL: All right. I had a funny experience though when I was talking to a group of mostly older Australians. They were expressing concern about creeping Americanism. And I said, “Well, lots of Australian expressions are being accepted in the American English.” And they were like, “What?” And I was like, “Well, for example, YEAH-NO,” and they were crestfallen. They were like, “Oh, no, not that!” So I thought that was kind of funny how, yeah, people love it, but, no, it’s stigmatised.
BEN: First of all, Daniel, that was your fault for talking to old people. Second of all, what do they expect to go across? We don’t have high-register Australia… [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Maybe COBBER? I don’t know.
BEN: We wanted them to take the Bentley of our linguistic tradition. It doesn’t exist! There’s nothing like that from the Australia. It’s just casual shit.
HEDVIG: Yeah. The things that are spreading from American English are often things that American English look down upon. Like the valley girl stuff is spreading like wildfire across the Anglo world. And I like it. I like valley girls. I like it. But I bet they think like, “Oh, I wish they adopted… ” I don’t know, something else instead, and it’s like, “No, fuck you. We know what’s good.”
DANIEL: Just to wrap this up, we’ve mentioned a lot of different jobs that YEAH-NO does. How is it that these two words YEAH and NO — seeming opposites — how is it that they were chosen for such a wide variety of pragmatic jobs? Did you get a sense of why specifically YEAH and NO were put together to mean all these things?
IZZY: Well, I mean, it’s interesting. I tend to view it through Traugott’s cline, you know, the lovely cline of grammaticalisation of propositional meanings and developing into textual ones and then into expressive ones. I think maybe one of the reasons why YEAH-NO is so successful is just by virtue of the specific words that have been chosen, the sort that were initially filled with content and then sort of became a bit more bleached, when we think of like presumptive topic marker ones, as opposed to ones that are used for just purely agreement. I think it’s maybe that these particular words…
I think Paul Harper calls it persistence. The original meaning of these words tends to glimmer through even though they’re used in very different ways. And I think because it’s more obvious, perhaps, in YEAH-NO that these words were originally, polarity adjuncts, interjections, whatever you would like to call them, that is still so clear to people that it’s sort of maybe surprising that they can still do all these jobs. And maybe it’s useful in a way. With other discourse-pragmatic markers, it’s not so clear. For instance, I’ve done some work on A BIT with Kate Burridge, and A BIT used for mitigation. And it’s funny, we use it way more than YEAH-NO, but people don’t view it as being characteristically Australian or doing Australian stuff, which it does, but no one wants to talk about that. A bit, that was originally from like a mouthful or bite, and you can still see some of that and have its uses of particularly the mitigating ones. It was a bit stressful. It was a little bite stressful.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] I’ve seen some work that suggests that maybe NO is in there because you’re anticipating perceived disagreement. Like if you’re suggesting to go someplace, you say, “Yeah, no, let’s do it.”
IZZY: I think that’s a lovely take on it, of it’s sort of a preemptive self-protective face-saving mechanism. You deduce it with even the more propositional ones. So, when you’re trying to agree with something that’s negative, so like the French “si” of someone’s… you’re trying to agree with a negative statement and you’re trying to eliminate all ambiguity.
DANIEL: Yeah, okay. Well, this has been great. Thank you so much for taking us through this. Was there anything else we needed to say about YEAH-NO, that we didn’t get out there?
IZZY: We might want to briefly mention the fact that it’s not necessarily used by the people you think it is. We were talking about old dudes previously. A lot of people think of discourse-pragmatic markers as being sort of the sole province of younger speakers. But actually, it tends to be the older speakers who are the vanguard of YEAH-NO, particularly baby boomers. And I found that even though they were much rarer in the UWA corpus, because, of course, undergrad linguistics students tend to be for one, female, and also generally under 21. But it came through even with this large sort of sample of young women with the people they’re interviewing, it tends to be used by older speakers.
It’s interesting, because it’s not at all what we generally think of with discourse-pragmatic markers and grammatical change or language change. But yeah, as Burridge and Florey found in 2002, it still seems to be baby boomers who are the more prolific users. Funnily enough, not so much for the men. I think that was more an artifact of them being maybe uncomfortable because they’re often paired with very young women who they didn’t know very well, but the baby boomer women, they were generally paired with people they did know very well, and oof, there was a lot of YEAH-NO happening. [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: Wow, okay. Well, thanks for taking us through that. And we’ll be looking forward to the writeup, and to see the further results of your analysis.
IZZY: Thank you. Well, I hope I don’t disappear into the YEAH-NO black hole, the discourse-pragmatic…, yeah.
DANIEL: Watch out.
BEN: Some discourse pragmatists doing wet work to make sure everything’s fine.
IZZY: Apparently. Well, I hope not!
[MUSIC]
DANIEL: We need to get to some Mailbag questions. So, let’s get started. Everybody ready?
BEN: Woo!
DANIEL: Woo-hoo!
BEN: Where are we starting? Start me off! Shoot from the hip. Let’s go!
DANIEL: This first one, I’m bringing this one in cold because this one came from our Discord, Ariaflame wants to know. “Why is LIKE, like so persistent?” Aw, I could’ve read that wrong. “Why is like LIKE so persistent?”
BEN: Can I ask a clarifying question of Ariaflame who can’t possibly answer, but you probably can, Daniel?
DANIEL: I can.
BEN: Is she referring to the singular word LIKE, or is she referring specifically to LIKE said twice to mean romantic interest?
IZZY: Ah.
HEDVIG: Hmm.
DANIEL: No, I don’t think it’s that one.
BEN: Okay, because the way you just said it then made it sound like…
IZZY: Yeah, contrastive reduplication, that’s what I thought you meant.
DANIEL: That’s it.
BEN: So we’re not talking about that.
DANIEL: “I like you but I don’t LIKE YOU like you.” No, I don’t think we’re talking about that. I think we’re talking about how LIKE, the discourse-pragmatic marker is so robust.
HEDVIG: “I’m like so hungry right now,” like that kind.
DANIEL: Yeah, like that kind.
IZZY: Yeah, probably because it has so many uses.
HEDVIG: Yeah, because there’s two major uses, and then probably more. Like, one is like: Ben was like: “What meaning does she mean?” That’s one.
IZZY: So, the quotative BE LIKE.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And then the other one is like, “I’m like so hungry,” the hedging, the bringing it down a bit.
DANIEL: The focal marker. Meaning, the next thing is important, those two. Useful.
HEDVIG: “He’s like not that good at football.”
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: It’s a strange one as well, isn’t it? Because a part of me can understand… we should acknowledge that LIKE, for a lot of people, has been the standard that they hold up as the coming apocalypse of language for English.
DANIEL: I know. I know
BEN: It is the thing of like, “Oh, kids these days say LIKE for every third fucking word,” and blah, blah, blah. But the only thing that I can go even a little bit towards people who experience frustration for the word LIKE is, much like the word THAT, you can remove it from nearly every sentence it’s used in, and that sentence still makes perfect sense.
HEDVIG: Mhm.
DANIEL: I mean, it does, but yes, it’s useful in that way though.
HEDVIG: But it…
BEN: I’m not contesting that it’s nice to say and it’s fun, and it’s productive in the sense that it’s allowing for easier speech. All of those things are true. But the fact remains, and certainly in the two instances that Hedvig just used, you could not say it and the meaning would be unchanged.
DANIEL: I think LIKE does contribute meaning.
HEDVIG: I mean, the quotative one you can’t say it. Ben was like: That’s not true.
BEN: I suppose that’s true. Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah.
IZZY: You can have a zero… I think probably the imprecision is desirable too, like it’s very fuzzy of, “Well, he said something like this, but, hey, don’t quote me, it wasn’t verbatim.”
DANIEL: Yeah. And also remember that BE LIKE is different from SAY and GO. You could say, “He said blah.” “He went blah.” “He was like, blah.” But BE LIKE, unlike SAY and GO, can be used to report thought. So, the example I love is, ‘I walked into the room and the windows were all open, but nobody was there. And I was like, “That’s weird.”‘ I didn’t say that’s weird, but I thought it and you can use it to report thought.
BEN: Ah, yeah yeah yeah yeah. Fully.
DANIEL: It fills a slightly different niche. Okay, I didn’t want to go too deep on that one. But I guess our answer is that it’s really useful and it contributes a lot.
BEN: You use everything but the oink when it comes to LIKE.
HEDVIG: I think one the reasons people don’t like it is because it makes you sound less assertive but being less assertive can be a good thing. Being ambiguous can be good.
IZZY: Yeah, exactly.
DANIEL: Also, people say, “Ugh, people use it every other word.” And they don’t, they don’t.
BEN: Some young people do, but then they’re also young. And my brain says, “Well, you’re just figuring it out. So, you’ll get there. It’s all good.” And all of the people who aren’t young who I look at aren’t doing that. So, my brain goes, “If you’re like this and they’re all like that, then somewhere in the middle you’re going to stop saying it so much.”
DANIEL: This one’s from @jello4marcelo on Twitter.
BEN: Tremendous name.
DANIEL: Why can I say, “I very much enjoy,” but not, “I very enjoy,” or “I much enjoy.” Now, is this true? Does this match your feels? Is the premise correct? “I very much enjoy is okay” but “I very enjoy” or “I much enjoy”, not okay?
IZZY: Well, I guess if you’re using doge, that meme speak with the Shiba, you can certainly say, “I very enjoy,” but that’s…
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: I much enjoy as well.
IZZY: Yeah, but “I much enjoy” though actually not with no doge talk, I actually feel is okay. And certainly, you can use MUCH with verbs, it’s just they are pretty restricted. Like you could have say, “I much prefer X to Y.”
DANIEL: I much prefer.
BEN: Yeah, I don’t know if… I’m right there with you on “much prefer.” “I much enjoy,” fires is that little twitchy thing in my head. Not like, “Oh, you can’t say it that way,” but more just like that…
IZZY: Yeah, but a bit weird.
BEN: That thing in your head that goes, “Language no work that way.” [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: You broke my grammar!
IZZY: Well, riddle me this, Ben. So, do you mind it in the passive so much of, if you say, “Well, thank you very much. Much appreciated.” Or, much loved.
BEN: See again, totally it doesn’t.
IZZY: So, you’re okay with that one?
BEN: “Thank you very much. Much enjoyed,” it’s still doesn’t… I don’t know something in it just doesn’t click the same way.
IZZY: I think it’s maybe slightly more formal.
BEN: True.
DANIEL: Do you think?
IZZY: Maybe, or maybe at least written. I think we see it more like instead of little strict collocations of, you know, like “much preferred” or “much enjoyed” or “much appreciated” or those sort of ones.
BEN: I figured from the three of the linguists here that there would actually be like a super straightforward rules of grammar and English answer, like…
IZZY: There is, but let me show you my copy of Pullum and Huddleston.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Oh, god.
DANIEL: Oh, here we go. It just got real.
IZZY: I love bringing this out when people say, Oh, but the grammar of English is so simple. There is no grammar.” I’m like: well!
HEDVIG: Who says that? Who says that?
BEN: Who? WHO? Who says such a thing? Who says that???
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
IZZY: Well-meaning non-linguists.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Yeah, they do.
BEN: [BLOWS RASPBERRY]
IZZY: And I think: well, this is a lot of kilos for, you know, not that complicated. Anyway, the view of Huddleston and Pullum on MUCH is… seems to be rather complicated, but also that… and I agree, I think a lot of this is an artifact of MUCH being used, it’s preferred in negative contexts. So, as an NPI [negative polarity item].
DANIEL: Mhm. And questions.
IZZY: Yeah, exactly. So, when it’s used in affirmative contexts, it’s kind of weird or as I describe it, a huge number of selection restrictions or… it is very restricted.
DANIEL: “She has much money,” is weird. But, “Do you have much money?” is okay.
IZZY: Yeah. And weirdly enough, like it does sound… as @jello4marcelo has correctly pointed out, weirdly enough, you can use MUCH in affirmative context right next to the verb but only if it’s modified by that degree adverb VERY. If you don’t use that, then it starts to get a little bit weird. But the moment you put in a degree adverb in the affirmative, it’s more comfortable.
DANIEL: Do we know why?
IZZY: [LAUGHS] I think it just seems to be an artifact of MUCH being preferred in negative context. So MUCH behaves kind of strangely in a few ways. I mean, VERY is an easier answer, I guess.
BEN: It’s sounding like the answer here — and I like this answer, so I hope that you all agree with me — but it’s sounding like the answer is if we were to personify MUCH as a word, it’s quite a picky little bastard. It has airs and it has very concrete ideas about whom it will and will not sit next to.
IZZY: Absolutely. It’s a real mean girl, “You can’t sit with us.”
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: It seems like VERY MUCH is functioning like an adverb like REALLY, but only for verbs and only when it’s describing some kind of extent, like you can’t say “I very much run,” but you can say, “I very much enjoy.”
HEDVIG: No. You can, but only in contrastive…
DANIEL: I very much run?
HEDVIG: You can say, “You don’t run,” “I very much run!”
IZZY: Yeah.
BEN: Yeah, that’s what I was just about to say as well.
DANIEL: Whaaaaat
BEN: It would have to be a response to someone challenging you.
HEDVIG: Then, you can say that.
DANIEL: Oh, wow. Oh, wow.
HEDVIG: But for the first actually, I think we missed another very simple thing is, you can’t say, “I very enjoy” because VERY can only modify other adjectives like VERY MUCH. But you can say, “She’s very beautiful.” That’s another adjective but you can’t say… so VERY can’t be directly on the verb or on the… yeah.
DANIEL: There’s something else I noticed. So, I was checking this out in Macmillan Dictionary. We don’t go to Macmillan Dictionary a lot, but this time I did. It says when the expression VERY MUCH is used with verbs, such as LIKE, “I very much like this,” I enjoy, “I very much enjoy this,” want, “I very much want,” and hope, “I very much hope,” it is usually at the end of the sentence but it could also be used before these verbs. I noticed about LIKE and ENJOY and WANT and HOPE, some of these at least, they’re weird. And they’re often handled the opposite way in other languages. For example, if I say, “I like chocolate,” that’s kind of weird, because I’m not doing anything to the chocolate. There’s some chocolate on the table, “What are you doing?” “I’m liking it. I like this choc…” What you’re saying with LIKE is — and in fact English used to work this way — is that it’s describing the effect on you. And other languages would say something like, “It pleases me.” It goes the opposite way.
Same with WANT. When you have want something, it’s kind of like lacking something. And other languages would say something like “it lacks itself to me””. And I’m thinking about MISS. I made a prediction because ‘miss’, to miss someone is like that. In other languages, it’s something like, “You are missing to me.” Could you say, “I very much miss this person?”
HEDVIG: Yeah.
IZZY: Yeah.
BEN: Yeah, absolutely.
DANIEL: Okay. So there’s this weird… It seems to attach itself to verbs that in English, work in a certain weird way that doesn’t have… like, you’re not being an agent to the chocolate when you’re liking it. And other languages would flip it, would reverse it the other way. That was an observation that I just wanted to throw in there.
BEN: Yes. Some other languages do that.
IZZY: Yeah. So like experience of…
DANIEL: Experiential verbs.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
IZZY: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Some do like… I think you’re thinking of French, like that pleases me or that is missing to me…
DANIEL: I am. And Spanish.
IZZY: Yeah, Italian, Latin.
HEDVIG: In some other languages, yeah.
DANIEL: And Russian as well.
HEDVIG: Yeah. In Samoan, some of those experience or feeling verbs, you have to add an extra marker, so like, “I like at you.” I is still the subject, but you have to like do more things so…
DANIEL: Dative.
HEDVIG: Yeah, LOVE is like that. You love AT people.
IZZY: I know people like that.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: That’s cool.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Oh, god, I was in this one relationship.
HEDVIG: Ou alofa ia te oe, yeah, I like you.
DANIEL: Okay. So, what’s our answer? Is it just that VERY MUCH has become lexicalised as an adverb of extent?
IZZY: I think that’s the one that makes the most sense.
DANIEL: Okay. Well, there you go, @jello4marcelo. Thanks for that question. Glyph, on our Discord has asked, “Random question, when does a loanword stop being a loanword? Does, for example, an English word need to have been part of the English language all the way back to proto-Indo-European? Is a word loaned into proto-Germanic from Latin still a loanword, or does it become a native word at some point?”
HEDVIG: It becomes a native word at some point. I think one of the ways you know when… The short answer is we don’t know and this is something linguists argue about. Depends on the question you’re asking. If you’re trying to do very deep historical linguistics, you might count more things as loanwords than a native speaker would. If it’s a native speaker, I think you might count it not as a loanword anymore when you apply your regular sound rules to it, so when you start producing different sounds. I think it’s really funny in German that some people still do like a nasal thing for RESTAURANT. So, they’ll be like, [PRONOUNCES IN NASAL TONE] “restaurant.” They don’t have nasalisation almost anywhere else. But they all still do it for that one.
BEN: Interesting.
DANIEL: That’s fun.
HEDVIG: And I’m like, “You guys know that that’s a loan,” but some don’t. [LAUGHTER] And I think a lot of people don’t. And then, if you borrow a lot of those, you can actually import that phonology and then that’s part of your language too.
DANIEL: That happened with English when V, the V sound, became thought of as like… It went from, “Oh, that’s just a version of F that we use in the middle of words. We can’t use it at the beginning of a word.” And then, after tons and tons of French contact, V could come at the beginning of a word.
HEDVIG: Like how?
DANIEL: Like VERY.
HEDVIG: Oh. Okay.
DANIEL: It used to be that if you had that sound at the beginning, it was a /f/, it was always /f/. That’s why we have ROOF, and ROOVES in the middle of a word.
HEDVIG: Right. Fair enough. Yeah, but it’s hard and it’s a gradual process. It’s like the difference between a heap and a… what is it?
DANIEL: Yeah, a heap, like, when do all those grains of sand become a heap? One grain isn’t a heap.
HEDVIG: Yeah. If you’re a researcher and you’re doing a particular study, yeah, it depends on… but usually what you care about is, like, whether native speakers are aware of the origin still, and whether they treat it differently than other words.
DANIEL: Yes. I was going to say etymological opacity.
HEDVIG: Because if they’re aware of it and if they’re actively codeswitching, and they’re doing it with another person who knows those two languages, that’s probably still some sort of loan. But if they’re doing it with anyone, yeah, frequency as well, like how common is it… Yeah, I don’t know. We don’t really know, but we have some diagnostic tools.
DANIEL: We do. And can I just read this? This was from a book chapter by Philip Durkin, in his book Borrowed Words: A History of Loanwords in English. And I presume that if you answer more of these questions a certain way, then we can say, “Oh, yeah, it’s further down the road of not being a loanword anymore.” Here are the questions. Hedvig, you’ve already said most of these. • Is it naturalised in pronunciation and morphology? So, do we pronounce it /karaoke/ or is it /kerioʊki/? • Has it formed new compound or derivative formations? Are we picking it up and making new words out of it? • Has it developed new meanings? • Who is the word used by? • In which context is it found? • Is it the usual word in contemporary English realising a particular meaning? And if so, how has the situation changed over time? • What competition has there been with other words realising the same meaning? • What relationships exist with other words in the same semantic field? So, the more of these boxes you tick, the closer you are to saying, “It’s naturalised. It’s not a loanword anymore.” But it’s not a clear demarcation.
HEDVIG: What do you think is the thing that RESTAURANT competed out in English? Is it INN?
DANIEL: TAVERN?
HEDVIG: Tavern.
BEN: MESS HALL, maybe?
DANIEL: Did it have to replace anything because it used to be that there weren’t restaurants?
BEN: Yeah, that’s where I was coming from as well. The idea of a restaurant is a relatively modern conception.
HEDVIG: But an inn is really similar.
BEN: Is it though? Because an inn is expressly a hotel that would serve food, and so it would serve some of its food to people who just wanted food. Right? Whereas a restaurant is a business. So, first of all, it needs to be like a capitalistic enterprise. And so, that’s at least within the last like 300 or 400 years. And it has to only do that, because that’s what separates a restaurant from a hotel or an inn or any of those.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Hmm. It looks like Merriam-Webster in their article, The History of Restaurant, lists these variants that were active at the time that restaurants were becoming a thing. You could have an eating house, victualling house, cook shop, treating house, and settling house, and chop shop. Chop shop? Chop shop is a bit of a surprise. In addition to inns and taverns. Any other comments, Izzy, did you have any comments on this one?
IZZY: No, I thought you answered it beautifully. The one thing I was thinking of was: you know, like, whenever I teach history of English or Old English, I find it so weird those very Old Norse loanwords of borrowings of, like FATHER, THEY, BIRTH, GIVE. I think it’s so strange to think of those as being loanwords. Like, at what point do we accept them as being our own? Like, what’s a few thousand years between friends?
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Exactly.
BEN: Or forced migration enemies.
HEDVIG: It’s funny because in historical linguistics, there’s this idea that there’s certain parts of the lexicon, right?, that are exceptionally resistant to borrowing.
IZZY: Yeah.
HEDVIG: And that are exceptionally stable and you can use them to diagnose family relationships. But there’s usually some exceptions to that. Sometimes, there’s disagreeing… like, numerals is a good one because numerals like one, two, three, four, people usually say, “Oh, they’re super stable,” but you get lots of languages borrowing entire numeral systems. They’re like, “We used to count like this way with, like, to do with, like, fingers, or like how many things but then like, Indonesian came along, and now we’re a purely decimal”, and the entire system, it’s bonkers.
DANIEL: Yeah. Well, thank you, Glyph, for that question. Let’s go on to one from Holly on Patreon. “I have a mailbag question for you. Are you aware of any work happening so that spellcheckers in MS Word and other programs acknowledge singular THEY as grammatically correct in a sentence with a singular subject? I’ve noticed lately how many uni textbooks insist on referring to HE OR SHE, which is inefficient and less inclusive. Word also does not like it when I use singular THEY in my own notes.” So, let’s just give a quick rundown of the issue. Over the past thousand years, people have used THEY for one person in English, despite the protestations of self-appointed grammar monitors who say it’s not grammatical, and that sometimes includes grammar checkers on Word processors.
BEN: Can someone else back me up on this one? I haven’t encountered the red squiggle on singular THEY.
HEDVIG: Me neither.
IZZY: Yeah, me neither. I was just testing it earlier and it seems fine with it.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. I noticed this one.
BEN: This is a really easy answer. Good news, Holly. It’s fine.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Are they trying to write the sentence, “They is eight years old.”?
IZZY: Oh, okay. Yeah.
BEN: Oh, okay.
HEDVIG: Because…
DANIEL: “They are eight years old.”
IZZY: I was thinking of just the possessive.
BEN: Yeah, I was just about to ask: can we create the most aggressively nongrammatical one?
HEDVIG: Because…
DANIEL: Well, let’s try it. Who’s got Word?
IZZY: I’ve got it open. I’m going to have a look.
DANIEL: Please.
HEDVIG: Because I think that most people who use singular THEY, when we talk about singular THEY, what we mean is that the referent of THEY is a singular person. But grammatically, we usually use the agreement and everything that comes with the plural. So, we usually say, “They are an eight-year-old child.”
DANIEL: Let’s do that.
IZZY: Yeah. Word doesn’t like it. I tried “They is happy”… Hated it.
HEDVIG: But I don’t think most people who talk about singular THEY say THEY IS.
IZZY: Yeah.
DANIEL: Can we say…
BEN: Can I also ask…
DANIEL: Could you try, “They are an eight-year-old child”?
IZZY: Okay.
BEN: And also, Izzy, when you’re done with that, can I ask you: where was the squiggle? Was it under THEY or was it under IS?
IZZY: It’s under IS.
BEN: Yeah, that’s what I was wondering.
IZZY: Oh, no, it likes “They are an eight-year-old child.” Word is happy with it.
DANIEL: Yup.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Well, because that is a phrase that we would say all the time, even outside of some ~political-correctness-gone-mad~ context or whatever.
HEDVIG: I’ve never heard of anyone saying THEY IS, yeah.
IZZY: No.
BEN: Neither have I. But I’m also wondering, though, is that the new frontier? Is that a way for NB people to grammatically emphasise the nonbinaryness of what they conceive of themselves to be?
DANIEL: I’m not seeing it anywhere.
HEDVIG: First of all, the agreement in English with IS and ARE — so that agrees with the number of the subject in this case — is something that native speakers actually already vary on. So, for example, DATA IS or ARE very good, or DATA ARE very good.
DANIEL: Oh, that’s true.
BEN: Yeah, okay. Yep.
HEDVIG: The other one is “Football team, Barcelona, is the champion.” “Barcelona are the champion.” And native speakers are different. And in a sentence, if you make a very long sentence, for example, “There is many blah, blah, blah,” if you put the subject, the thing that is, somewhere, very far away from the verb, then native speakers have a harder time tracking.
BEN: [LAUGHS] We just forget.
HEDVIG: Yeah, short-term memory blacks out and you just don’t remember. So, things that are ungrammatical, native speakers will say are fine if there’s long distance. So, we already know that we’re getting funny things with verb agreement. So, the verb agreement, I don’t think, necessarily exactly means singular and plural. I think we sort of need to get that a bit out of our heads. It doesn’t really work like that. And as a second-language speaker from a language that doesn’t have verb agreement, this is one of my most common comments by my supervisor on my PhD thesis is that I screw this up all the time, because I don’t care, and I would like to welcome English speakers into the world of, “Just pick one of these.” [CHUCKLES] And then, just forget about verb agreement. You don’t need it, it’s fine.
DANIEL: There’s a Danish YouTuber who just cannot seem to get subject-verb agreement for certain kinds of subjects, and I just always enjoy hearing what he comes up with.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s just…
DANIEL: Let me just point out a couple of things. Number one, I went to Microsoft’s own internal style guide. And they say that singular THEY is okay. They also refer you to the webpage on bias-free language. Nice going, Microsoft. Then, there’s an article on a blog called Office Watch, which incredibly covers Microsoft Office, what’s going on in the world of Microsoft Office. And they point out that, number one, NIBLING and PIBLING are already in the Word dictionary. That’s fun.
BEN: Oh, that is fun.
HEDVIG: Pib… Wait, what’s the second one?
DANIEL: PIBLING. So, we know NIBLING, right?
HEDVIG: Yeah, nieces and nephews.
DANIEL: A PIBLING is your uncle or your aunt.
HEDVIG: Why? No, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I don’t know.
BEN: Oh, wow, that was a strong response.
DANIEL: It’s in there.
HEDVIG: It’s your parents’ sibling.
IZZY: Oh.
DANIEL: Is it because of PATER? Parents’ sibling?
HEDVIG: I don’t like it.
IZZY: No, I don’t like it either.
HEDVIG: They are not…
DANIEL: Well.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: [BULLWINKLE THE MOOSE VOICE] ~Well, this isn’t up to you, Hedvig!~
HEDVIG: Nyeah 😛
DANIEL: Do you have anything better than /p/?
HEDVIG: I’m not sure the -ING is… because they’re older than you. Niblings are younger than you.
DANIEL: Oh. Oh! You’re reanalysing it as…
BEN: Niblor!
HEDVIG: Niblings are younger than you. Siblings are the same age as you. These are older than you. Usually.
DANIEL: Is the -LING in SIBLING “young”?
BEN: Grandnib.
DANIEL: Quick! To the Oxford English Dictionary! Hang on, I’ve got to check this out because there’s EARTHLING which means belonging to Earth. SIBLING. So it looks like the -LING in sibling… Oh, what is it?
HEDVIG: It’s probably belonging. Anyway! Whatever the etymology, do you agree with me that -ING is like little and cute?
IZZY: It feels that way, doesn’t it?
DANIEL: Yeah, I do.
BEN: Yeah. Definitely. Yeah. 100%.
DANIEL: It does. It does. It totally does.
BEN: For sure.
HEDVIG: So, you can’t say that about your uncles and aunts.
DANIEL: Okay, well, we’re going to have to conference on this one.
BEN: Make sure to forward your vociferous and emphatic complaints to the Microsoft style guide. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: The other thing on Office Watch says that Word copes nicely with THEY and THEM in their expanded use, no red or blue squiggly lines to mark spelling or grammar problems. But if you’re on Word, and it’s chucking a fit over singular THEY, you can change it. Here’s what you do. File, Options, Proofing, Writing Style. It goes on. Settings, Grammar and Refinements, Inclusiveness. Yes, that’s right. It’s buried seven levels deep. But when you get there, you can click Gender Bias and Gender-Specific Language. And the objections to singular THEY will go away.
BEN: And I have to guess that that maybe is turned on by default, given that nothing squiggled up for us when we just gave it a red hot go before.
DANIEL: So it seems, so it seems.
BEN: Good-o.
HEDVIG: But if you tick that box, can you then write, “They is an eight-year-old child”?
BEN: Ooh, fun.
DANIEL: We’ll get to that…
BEN: Listeners, try it out and report back.
DANIEL: Try it out and report back. Holly, Thanks for that question. This one’s from O Tim…
BEN: O Tim.
DANIEL: …on Discord, but Diego also posted about it on Discord. “Have I — has anyone here — raised the question of why English of all languages uses zero diacritical markers, other than the optional and very rarely used diaeresis over a repeated letter that’s pronounced separately, or is this just a naïve question?”
BEN: Oh, thank you so much, O Tim, for helping this idiot understand what the hell you were talking about.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Is diaeresis the two dots?
BEN: The two dots.
IZZY: Yeah, The New Yorker uses it. I haven’t seen anyone else use it.
HEDVIG: A lot of people use it for NAÏVE.
DANIEL: Ah, The New Yorker with COÖPERATION.
HEDVIG: Is the only one.
DANIEL: Yes, that’s right. Let’s just spend some time on The New Yorker. It uses the two dots, the diaeresis for COÖPERATION and REËLECT and other words as well. It’s called a diaeresis or a trema. It’s a bit of a strange bird when it comes to this problem. Many people just leave it out or do a hyphen.
BEN: Yeah, no, it should definitely… Like, the New Yorker is wrong. [DANIEL LAUGHS] I realised that me, as a rando frickin’ guy on a podcast, whatever, and I know there’s probably some… in fact, not only do I reckon, I know for sure, because I’ve heard Malcolm Gladwell talk about it, there are some extremely proper ladies who are in charge of this who are making those decisions who probably have a lot more to say about this than me, but like… can we all just agree that it is purely affectation, please?
DANIEL: Well, let me read this. This comes from Mary Norris, known as the Comma Queen. I’ll just read this bit. “We” — The New Yorker — “do change our style from time to time. My predecessor and the former keeper of the comma shaker” — I don’t know what a comma shaker is, but okay — “told me that she used to pester the style editor, Hobie Weekes, who had been at the magazine since 1928, to get rid of the diaeresis. She found it fussy. She said that once in the elevator,” she’s bugging him in the elevator. “he told her he was on the verge of changing that style and would be sending out a memo soon. And then, he died. This was in 1978. No one has had the nerve to raise the subject since.”
BEN: And apparently, the style guide at that moment just turned from paper into stone and no further changes could be made.
DANIEL: No, even worse! It morphed into a sentient being that could inflict death upon anyone who tried to tamper with it.
BEN: Maybe that’s just the top of the crypt of this old guy when he died, they just chiselled the style guide into every surface of it or something.
DANIEL: O Tim continues, “Languages with much greater consistency and pronunciation use them” — diacritic marks — “and I would argue English needs them much more, ROW versus ROW, COWER versus GROWER, which is different from GROWLER. Minnesota’s MOWER County which rhymes with POWER, not MOWER and so on.” So, why does English use virtually zero? Or does it?
BEN: Can I just also say, Tim, why are you stopping there with those dinky examples?
DANIEL: What’s on your mind?
BEN: I just don’t think… maybe people who have… like, only speak English, of which I am one, but I have been afforded the understanding of how other languages do this. English is just like a maniac when it comes to vowels! We’re the worst! We’re the absolute worst. We have so many different stupid vowel combinations to make different… So, everyone, like if you’re asking a usual person: how many vowels are there? They’re like, “Five.” Wrong. Wrong. Incorrect.
DANIEL: There’s at least 14, plus combinations.
BEN: There are 14 vowels that we use. Right? So, if that didn’t blow your mind enough, here’s an extra little fun fact. A lot of other languages just have 14 different characters, so that process is really simple. And that’s what those funny little hats and stuff are.
HEDVIG: But wait.
BEN: Right? Each of the vowels will just get a little funny little hat, and then it’ll just be pronounced differently. So, instead of having like E-E and O-I, and all of this dumb combination nonsense, you just handle it. Sorry, I feel very strongly about this. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I think we need to acknowledge something, which is: just like how biological evolution isn’t striving towards some sort of perfect organism goal — it’s just getting by — every generation is just getting by.
DANIEL: It works well enough.
HEDVIG: It works well enough. And English spelling works well enough. People read books and understand them, sometimes, they read a sentence one more time…
BEN: Poppycock!
HEDVIG: …but it works well. E. Nough. I agree with you. And I would encourage English speakers to maybe have more variation. So why don’t the New Yorker have their tremas and whatever, and then someone else has like a slightly different comma rule. It’s good for humans and humans are able to deal with variation.
BEN: Nope. Nope. Nnewp.
HEDVIG: You should see some variation. Why did you got have a standardised, homogenised thing? Why can’t we all just do a bit little what we want?
BEN: Awww, ’cause like…
DANIEL: I’m on your team.
BEN: Look, okay, I get where you’re coming from. Playing is fun. But I would argue that you can play no matter how bolted down and constrained the… So, for instance, Hedvig, your first language, your mother tongue does exactly this. Yeah? They’ve got a different character pretty much for every vowel sound with a few exceptions.
HEDVIG: No.
BEN: Ohhh.
HEDVIG: No, that’s not true.
BEN: Am I thinking of…
HEDVIG: No, we have many more characters…
BEN: Okay, Finnish does then?
HEDVIG: …that represent different vowel sounds than English does. Yes, we have a higher…
DANIEL: You got a few more.
HEDVIG: We have a better connection between sound and letter than you do. But it’s not one to one. We still have different ones.
BEN: No, no, I know it’s not one to one. It’s better.
HEDVIG: It’s better. Yes.
DANIEL: It’s better.
BEN: And then, Finnish is better again, I believe?
HEDVIG: Yes, sort of, but then they also like… I found out late in my life that if you speak very formal and standard Finnish, yes, you pronounce everything on the paper. But if you speak like a normal, casual person, you don’t.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Okay, okay!
IZZY: Well, what I found strange here is that… I mean, we do use diacritics but we only use them with loanwords. You know? Like, we’re quite happy enough to enable user to differentiate between different words like résumé and resume.
DANIEL: Good point.
IZZY: So, I just wanted to say that we’re happy enough to use the diacritics. We seem to know what some of them mean, or at least vaguely, but at no point have we thought of consistently applying them throughout the rest of our vocabulary.
DANIEL: I have a spicy take.
IZZY: Ooh.
BEN: Oo, bring it on.
DANIEL: There is one diacritic that English makes extensive use of: the apostrophe.
HEDVIG: I knew you were going to say that.
IZZY: Ooh.
DANIEL: [DOING AGGRAVATING LITTLE DANCE] Bop pa, bop ba, bop ba, bop ba, bop ba. You’re on board?
HEDVIG: It’s not on top of the character. 😡 It’s between characters!
BEN: Yeah, sorry, I’m calling shenanigans on that as well.
DANIEL: It doesn’t have to be on top of the character.
HEDVIG: Why not?
DANIEL: Here’s the thing, all right? Because it does what diacritics sometimes do, which is omitting a letter, for example, medieval scribes used to write poetā with a macron, a line, over the A. Yes, it was over the A, and that meant that they were omitting a letter “M” like poetām, the accusative form. Omitting a letter is something that diacritics do and that’s what apostrophes do. [CONTINUES DANCE] Bop pa, bop ba, bop ba, bop ba, bop ba.
HEDVIG: But you and I both know that the question asker did not mean that.
BEN: Daniel, I’ve got to be honest, you just pulled… yeah.
IZZY: [LAUGHS]
BEN: Yeah. And, and, and! And if you want to back up your very, very contemporary, spicy take…
DANIEL: …yes?
BEN: …pulling from 600 years ago is not like the most compelling piece of evidence!
DANIEL: I could probably come up with more examples of diacritics allowing some letters to drop.
BEN: Listen, we all know you’ve got your axe to grind when it comes to apostrophes.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: That’s what this one does French as well. But it’s not the job that the question asker had in mind. The circumflex in French does the same thing, it’s a gravestone for old lost characters.
BEN: I want to answer Tim’s question in the spirit with which it’s been asked. I think because making changes around spelling — this is the truth — is incredibly difficult. It’s really, really, really hard. You even need a like… and you guys can probably speak to this better than me. But the only instances I know of it being possible is if you have outright power and control over an entire speaking population.
DANIEL: And even then, they ignore you. [LAUGHS]
BEN: Yeah. Potentially. Or you have a form of that power assembled via other means. So I’m thinking now of whoever the guy in America was, who was like, “We’re getting rid of U from HONOUR and COLOUR and all the rest of it.” Clearly, that dude at that time just had enough power in one special little way that pushed that forward.
DANIEL: Yep, at a special time.
BEN: Other than that though, you really can’t pull it off. It’s so hard. I know. I’ve been trying. I’m like, “Why the fuck do we capitalise weekdays and months?”
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah, fuck that.
IZZY: Yes.
BEN: It’s just stupid! We use them all the time.
IZZY: I think the problem also is that there are so many different varieties of English and so many different pronunciations, it’d be very difficult to land upon a uniform use of the diacritic anyway. I mean, think how badly we argue over how to spell GRAY and COLOUR.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: And those are real letters!
BEN: Yeah, those are in the alphabet!
DANIEL: Let me just run down a couple of things. Some people have suspected that it relates to typography and I think that that might be a little bit convincing because many of the early printing presses around 1440 came from Germany. I know that wasn’t the first printing press but those printing presses came from Germany. German doesn’t use diacritics. So, they would ship over big boxes of type. What do you got? There’s no diacritics in there. And also, Anglo Saxon. In Old English, yes, you can find now some examples of Old English with diacritics over the letters. But really, those are later. And in Old English, you didn’t need them to distinguish different sounds in writing, because at the time, they would just use digraphs. They would just use pairs of letters instead of using diacritics. So, the story is we kind of do use them sometimes, especially if they’re foreign or fancy or [IN A METAL TONE] metal, sorry.
BEN: [CHUCKLES] Yeah, good old metal, just bringing it in.
DANIEL: The metal umlauts. But early English scribes could have used diacritics, but they found ways around them, like digraphs. And then, the limitations of the early printing presses didn’t help things out. So, I think there may be two reasons why we kind of tracked that way instead.
HEDVIG: But I think the call to action I want to make here to all of our listeners is that it’s true, you don’t have the power to change all of English. And it’s true that when you write like an essay for university or something, you need to conform to whatever style guide they have, like how to place commas. If you come from — I have a Ukrainian friend or a German or Swedish — English comma placement is annoying. But there are other venues nowadays where we use written language, like direct messaging our friends or Discord with our favourite Patreon supporters, or Twitter. And you should, I think, subject yourself and your surroundings to exercising some variation there. So, I, for example, try and avoid apostrophes and any capital letters in those places because I think that’s more fun. I came across this very fun presentation on TikTok where someone spelled questions, K-W-E-S-C-H-E-N-S, and it’s my favourite thing. I love it.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: That is aggressive.
HEDVIG: And then, the other one is CONCERNS. K-O-N-S-U-R-N-Z. [TRIUMPHANT NOISE] When I read it, I felt the power and you also can have that power. Think about your audience, you maybe don’t want to piss off your boss or whatever, but where you can, spice it up! Fuck around, find out.
DANIEL: Hedvig, this is something that I have learned from you, and I’m so grateful: that we have an enormous capacity for tolerance and variation. We don’t even push the limits of what we’re capable of, and we could easily take on a lot more variation and ambiguity than we currently deal with.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: All the time. So, thank you for that insight. All right. That’s all the time we have, but a big thank you to our guests for this episode, Dr Isabelle Burke. Izzy, how can people find out what you’re doing?
IZZY: Well, the La Trobe Forum of Englishes have, I think, posted a video of the presentation, so you can have a look at what I’ve been up to.
DANIEL: [GASPS] That’s going on the website.
BEN: Link on our show notes.
DANIEL: Oh, yes.
IZZY: Hopefully. I mean, I’ll send it to you.
DANIEL: Yes, please.
IZZY: I don’t have a Twitter. So, you’re just going to have to keep an eye out for the eventual paper.
DANIEL: You are mysterious.
IZZY: Unless someone puts a hit out on me, which appears to be what happens to those of us who work on discourse-pragmatic markers.
DANIEL: Oh, my god. Well, thank you so much for joining us for this episode. This has been a lot of fun.
IZZY: It’s been a joy, particularly to see Hedvig’s cats.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: Sandy and Cement.
DANIEL: Thanks to everyone who gave us questions and ideas for the show. Thanks to Dustin of Sandman Stories who still recommends us to just about everyone. Thanks to the team at SpeechDocs who transcribe everything that we say, and they’re a lot of fun besides.
BEN: Hey-ho.
DANIEL: Thanks to our sponsors, the Oxford English Dictionary. And most of all, thanks to our patrons, who give us so much support and make it possible to keep the show going. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all.
[END THEME]
BEN: If you liked the show, much like Dustin of Sandman Stories, you can go ahead and leave us a review in the places where you frequent, be that online haunts or, like, the places where reviews for podcasts are supposed to go, such as Apple Podcast or all of the other places. I don’t have an iPhone.
HEDVIG: Podchaser!
DANIEL: Podchaser. That’s the one. Do that.
HEDVIG: You don’t have to be stuck in Apple universe. If you don’t use iTunes or iPods or whatever, Podchaser.
BEN: I was getting there!
DANIEL: ¿Porque no los dos?
BEN: I use Pocket Casts, which I enjoy very much. And if I’m being perfectly honest, they all mostly do it the same thing anyway. So, if you just want to review us in the place that you use the thing, no matter how quirky and bespoke it is, you go right ahead. You can send us an email, hello@becauselanguage.com. You can even leave us a message on SpeakPipe that we can play here in the show. Just remember to listen back to it so that if you’ve got like a horrendous laptop fan going [MIMICKING BUZZ SOUND] in the background, you can pick it up and you can try and problem solve the situation. And you know what? Make it old school. Go completely analogue. Yarn up with a mate and be like: ~Yo, you should listen to Because Language. It’s pretty good, eh.~
DANIEL: Not bad. You can follow us as well where we’re @becauselangpod everywhere except Spotify. You can also become a patron, you’ll get bonus episodes like this one, you can hang out with us on Discord. You’re making it possible for us to make transcripts so our shows are readable and searchable. In what episode did Ben first call Hedvig “Hedders”? You can look that up. [BEN LAUGHS] Oh, and by the way, Lord Mortis is doing the work of making sure that our podcasts are searchable on Discord which is super awesome. We’re really grateful to Lord Mortis for that.
BEN: ~Using his dark powers for good, Lord Mortis.~
DANIEL: Shout out to our top patrons Dustin, Termy, Elías, Matt, Whitney, Chris L, Helen, Udo, Jack, PharaohKatt, Lord Mortis, gramaryen, Larry, Kristofer, Andy B, James, Nigel, Meredith, Kate, Nasrin, Ayesha, Moe, Steele, Manú, Rodger, Rhian, Colleen, Ignacio, Sonic Snejhog, Kevin, Jeff, Andy from Logophilius, doing great work there. Stan, Kathy, Rach, Cheyenne, Felicity S, that S is going to become important later. Amir, The Canny Archer, O Tim, Alyssa, Chris W, and Kate B who smashed the one-time donation button on our website becauselanguage.com. She obliterated it for all time! It no longer exists! It’s been smashed!
BEN: But it does totally exist and you can go there and donate…
DANIEL: It’s been smashed to atoms by her mighty click! No more can you contribute with the one-time donation button on our website becauselanguage.com. Don’t look! You will not find it there! And if you do find it there, do not click or use it to donate anything, however large. Thank you to all our amazing patrons. Oh, and by the way, almost forgot: our newest patron, Felicity… hang on. Whoa. Where’s it? Where’d it go?
BEN: G. G, it’s a letter G.
HEDVIG: G.
DANIEL: Felicity G. We now have a couple of Felicitys supporting the show. If your name is Felicity, be a third. You could do this. Let’s get a full deck.
HEDVIG: [CHUCKLES] Yeah, indeed.
DANIEL: I’m done.
HEDVIG: Thank you to all our amazing patrons. Our theme music has been written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who is a member of Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible. Thank you for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
Pew.
BEN: Pew, pew, pew.
DANIEL: Thank you, Izzy. This was fun.
IZZY: This was great.
DANIEL: Did you have fun?
IZZY: This is wonderful. Thank you for inviting me.
[BOOP]
DANIEL: Well, it’s Hedvigiggers! Hedvitters.
BEN: [SWEDISH CHEF VOICE] Hegurgedurk.
HEDVIG: It is Hedders.
DANIEL: Hello.
HEDVIG: Hello.
DANIEL: I like how Ben gave you that name and now you kind of like it, and you just use it.
HEDVIG: Oh, Hedders…
BEN: No, I don’t think I did.
HEDVIG: No, I don’t think he did.
BEN: I’m not claiming stolen valor on that one, sorry.
HEDVIG: I think the first one to use that name on me it was my supervisor, Simon. Oh, god, I look funny. What is with this camera?
DANIEL: ~naw you dawn’t~
HEDVIG: There’s something wrong with this camera. Hi, Isabelle as well. Sorry.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Starting off strong.
[BOOP]
DANIEL: Well, should we get to some mailbag questions?
BEN: Yes. Can I take a quick like 60-second break and I’ll be right back?
DANIEL: Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.
HEDVIG: Okay. I have as usual, Izzy, Daniel knows this, I don’t like to eat right when I wake up. So, I often have leftover food.
DANIEL: Yes, you do. What is it today? Spaghetti again?
HEDVIG: No, it’s porridge.
DANIEL: Oh. I’ve been huge on porridge, just making porridge for me in the morning, porridge for my kids. I grate up some apple, and put some oats in there and some milk and I microwave it, cinnamon on the top. Oh! delightful.
IZZY: Sounds brilliant.
DANIEL: It is. It’s new for me. It’s a new zone.
HEDVIG: During the last time with my PhD when my partner and I were like, “We need to save time,” we started buying these porridge sachets from, what are they called, Quakers?
BEN: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: Little flavoured…
IZZY: Are they any good though?
HEDVIG: They are. Or I like them. I mean, I think they’re good, that doesn’t, but um…
BEN: I’ve got to be honest, is there much headroom in the, like, quality of porridge?
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
[LAUGHTER]
IZZY: There’s a ceiling!
DANIEL: This porridge is better.
HEDVIG: Yeah, no, there is.
BEN: I’m really not trying to be dismissive of anyone. And I don’t know. Maybe this will add to something you put at the end, Daniel, or whatever but…
HEDVIG: Ben, you’re waffling unnecessarily because you’re being Australian. There is headroom, it’s a fair question.
BEN: Is there?
HEDVIG: Yeah. There’s like rolled oats and…
BEN: Is there though? Because other than making it with water, which is shit, and we all understand that…
IZZY: Who does that?
BEN: Bad people.
DANIEL: My partner.
BEN: Yeah, bad people.
DANIEL: Mhm.
There’s making it with water, which ends up with it not tasting particularly nice. And then, there’s making it with milk, which makes it taste much nicer. But after that, it’s just oat gruel. Like, how much better can it get?
HEDVIG: There’s different types of oats.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: The bespoke cold rolled oats.
HEDVIG: Some of them work better on the stove, some of them work better in the microwave, number one. Number two, you make the porridge with water, and then you have it with milk.
BEN: False, wrong, incorrect. You’re doing it wrong. I’m sorry.
HEDVIG: That’s how everyone… yeah.
BEN: You are doing it wrong.
HEDVIG: And then, you have Fun Jams on and then they come in different flavours. Don’t get the banana. The banana one is horrible.
DANIEL: I’m a fan of cut-up bananas in porridge. It’s not bad. It’s not my favourite, but it’s not bad.
HEDVIG: You know the synthesised banana flavor?
BEN: Yeah, synthetic banana, yeah.
DANIEL: Hmm.
IZZY: But I kind of like that one. Isn’t it based on like the bananas that went extinct?
BEN: Apparently, yeah, it is.
DANIEL: Yes! The Gros Michel.
IZZY: Yeah. god, I wish we still had that.
DANIEL: Yes! Thank you, YouTube.
BEN: But we don’t know how close an approximation it was. Right? Like, so, it still might have them based on this…
IZZY: I want to pretend that this is the authentic real banana, like the OG banana, that’s the one I want.
DANIEL: The Ur-banana. The Ur-Nana.
HEDVIG: I might ruin something for you. But when I was little, we would have baths together, all the kids and sometimes our parents in the bathtub. And as a fun toy for us in the bathtub, I had no idea, my mom would take condoms and fill them with water and then put them… actually, this is great fun for kids. I can recommend it. You fill them with water and you put them in the water and then you have like a 🤪 slimy ball.
BEN: I would like to note to everyone — god forbid that this makes it out — You can achieve the same effect with things that aren’t condoms.
HEDVIG: Yes, but they’re less slippery.
DANIEL: No, but this could lead to discussions.
HEDVIG: And the condoms are very durable.
BEN: Oh, I see.
IZZY: This episode needs a condom sponsorship.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Yeah-No Condoms. Supplying bath fun for children since 2018.
DANIEL: This episode of Because Language is brought to you by Yeah-No Condoms.
IZZY: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: And my mom is a midwife and she used to work at the youth clinics that they had excessive condoms. So, we always had a lot of condoms at home that she would encourage us to hand out to our friends that we would have safe sex as teenagers. But often, we’d get the banana-flavoured ones. And so, that banana flavour for me just means condom, and I don’t want that in my porridge.
DANIEL: The Big Banana.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Why not?
IZZY: Fair enough. Fair enough.
DANIEL: Come on!
BEN: Well… I mean… just not all the time, I would imagine. Surely, there’s a circumstance.
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: I think that if I start throwing wet condoms in the bathtub with my little girls, it could lead to some really actually good discussions about what these things are.
HEDVIG: No. But you don’t even have to… I was never explained what they were. It was just a fun bath thing. And because they’re very durable, so the kids can squeeze them and stuff, it’s fine. And they come with glidey stuff, so they like slop, and that’s fine. You don’t need to explain it; just put it in!
DANIEL: It’s great! It’s great.
BEN: Yeah, no, but can we just get you to use milk when you make porridge from now on though?
DANIEL: Yeah, would you please? Try it? Try it.
BEN: Please, can you just try it? It’s so much nicer. It really is.
DANIEL: In the microwave, two minutes.
[BOOP]
HEDVIG: Can I show you guys a new coffee cup I bought yesterday?
IZZY: Yes.
DANIEL: Please.
BEN: We got so close to starting a show just then, Hedders. I want you to know that.
IZZY: Ooh.
BEN: Is that like a fertility idol mug, is that what I’m seeing there?
HEDVIG: It’s like a little butt.
DANIEL: That’s a bottom.
HEDVIG: That’s the front.
BEN: Is it a butt and, like, a curvaceous belly?
DANIEL: A little belly!
HEDVIG: That’s a little belly.
IZZY: I think the kids would call that thicc.
DANIEL: It’s cute.
HEDVIG: I think this is a FUPA.
IZZY: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I don’t know. I got very excited. They had them at Monkey and I bought four for my female friends in my department. We’ll see how that goes.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Wwwwhat
BEN: I really genuinely think that that is deliberately ideoquoting, like, ancient fertility dolls. You know, like, the really, really voluptuous…
DANIEL: Is that the concept?
BEN: Because I’m pretty sure, like, one of the oldest ones was found in Germany as well.
HEDVIG: Yes, there’s a bunch of statues found all over Europe that people like to call like Venus of blah, blah, blah, because they don’t have a good word for “fertility woman” that’s shorter than Venus.
BEN: [CHUCKLES] Don’t you love it? It’s older than Rome but the best we could do is, like, some classical reference.
DANIEL: ~Oh, that’s Venus!~
HEDVIG: Yeah. I mean, maybe it’s referencing that. They also had cups with boobies. Anyway, I bought one for me and three more for the women who are in my department who are in Leipzig are going to get a little.
BEN: Well, your ceramicware is extremely body positive. Congratulations. Well done.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I just hope they won’t think it’s, like, creepy. We’ll see. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Nah. Not from you, Hedvig.
HEDVIG: No, I know, right? That’s what I’m hoping. We’ll see.
BEN: Hey, look, you can only find that line by crossing it.
DANIEL: Is that your heuristic, Ben?
HEDVIG: Yeah, but what if someone is like, “Oh, my work colleague made me feel bad”?
BEN: Do you know what? Do you know what? I think that’s the second-worst outcome. The first worst is if they respond, thinking it’s creepy, in a similarly creepy way. If they one-up your creepiness.
HEDVIG: Had not considered that.
BEN: Yeah. Yeah.
DANIEL: How would you do that?
BEN: Yeah. See? I think about worst-case scenarios.
DANIEL: You’ve got my imagination going.
HEDVIG: Also, it’s not that creepy, right?
BEN: Are you looking for validation here? [CHUCKLES] Is that what you come here for?
HEDVIG: Okay, never mind. Never mind. I bought it yesterday…
DANIEL: Fishing.
HEDVIG: Ste’s away, I haven’t spoken to anyone.
BEN: [LAUGHS] I didn’t have my veto power of attorney!
DANIEL: Veto partner. [LAUGHS]. I do run things past Merryn. I’m like, “Merryn, is this tweet a bit too saucy?” And she’s like, “If you have to ask.” So, whenever I ask her, it’s: “Merryn, do you think… never mind.”
BEN: Should we do a show? I think we should do a show.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]