Who wrote the Oxford English Dictionary? Sure, James Murray had a very important role as editor, but a small army of volunteers submitted hundreds of thousands of words on slips of paper to get the project off the ground. What were their stories, and why did they have such a relentless sense of mission for the OED?
Dr Sarah Ogilvie is sharing her research into their lives and times, and it’s startling and wondrous. She’s a lexicographer and author of The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary.
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AI created image from the phrase, “Jesus flipping over the tables in the temple.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/technicallythetruth/comments/16kk3p0/ai_created_image_from_the_phrase_jesus_flipping/
How to pronounce cetacean in English | Youglish.com
https://youglish.com/pronounce/cetacean/english?
AI revealed the colorful first word of an ancient scroll torched by Mount Vesuvius
https://www.popsci.com/technology/ai-scroll-scan-vesuvius/
First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by 21yo computer science student | Vesuvius Challenge
https://scrollprize.org/firstletters
AI reveals the word “purple” in ancient scroll from Herculaneum
https://medium.com/trendy-digests/ai-reveals-the-word-purple-in-ancient-scroll-from-herculaneum-d2d90e0e9d2b
Did vampires suffer from the disease porphyria — or not?
https://www.straightdope.com/21342467/did-vampires-suffer-from-the-disease-porphyria-or-not
Reading ancient scrolls | Casey Handmer’s Blog
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/08/05/reading-ancient-scrolls/
10-second voice test shown to detect type 2 diabetes
https://newatlas.com/medical/10-second-voice-test-type-2-diabetes/
Acoustic Analysis and Prediction of Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus Using Smartphone-Recorded Voice Segments
https://www.mcpdigitalhealth.org/article/S2949-7612(23)00073-1/fulltext
Combining voice technology with AI can be a major step forward in diabetes detection
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20231018/Combining-voice-technology-with-AI-can-be-a-major-step-forward-in-diabetes-detection.aspx
Jitter and shimmer
https://wiki.aalto.fi/display/ITSP/Jitter+and+shimmer
Diabetes care and AI: a looming threat or a necessary advancement? | The Lancet
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8587(23)00174-2/fulltext
AI Predicts Schizophrenia Via Hidden Linguistic Patterns
https://neurosciencenews.com/ai-schizophrenia-language-24929/
AI language models could help diagnose schizophrenia
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2023/oct/ai-language-models-could-help-diagnose-schizophrenia
Her Incredible Sense Of Smell Is Helping Scientists Find New Ways To Diagnose Disease
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/03/23/820274501/her-incredible-sense-of-smell-is-helping-scientists-find-new-ways-to-diagnose-di
Instagram sorry for adding ‘terrorist’ to some Palestinian user bios
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67169228
The Dictionary People: The unsung heroes who created the Oxford English Dictionary by Sarah Ogilvie | Penguin Books
https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-dictionary-people-9781784744946
Contributing to the OED
https://www.oed.com/information/using-the-oed/contributing-to-the-oed/
Inktober Alternatives – Art Challenges for October
https://brushwarriors.com/inktober-alternatives/#noinktober
Bedbug crisis sparks political row in Paris as insect ‘scourge’ continues
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/29/bedbug-crisis-political-row-paris-insect-scourge-continues
The Tism: Promoting a Positive Perspective of Autism
https://www.thetism.org
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
Ben: Potentially. Did you just have food delivered? Is that what that is?
Hedvig: Yes.
[laughter]
Ben: That’s lovely.
Hedvig: There is a cup of tea. A cup of coffee, like I asked for, and a banana.
Daniel: I’m guessing it was not delivered by the cats.
Ben: Wait, you have a cup of tea and a cup of coffee simultaneously?
Hedvig: Yes.
Daniel: Coftea.
Ben: Swedes are very interesting people.
Hedvig: I don’t think it’s a Swede thing. I know it’s me and my grandma. I think it skips a generation.
[Because Language intro]
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 off, it’s Hedvig Skirgård. Hedvig, there’s a phrase that’s come up on the socials. Here’s the phrase, “Jesus flipping over tables in the temple.” That’s the phrase. Jesus flipping over tables in the temple.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: If it were a photo, what would you imagine you would see?
Hedvig: Well, uh, okay, I did not know that our introduction segments were interrogations. In the Bible, Jesus goes to the temple, and there are people selling stuff or doing financial stuff in the temple, and he’s unhappy with it. So, he goes and he flips them by taking his hand underneath and then lifts them off so that everything goes everywhere.
Ben: Rage flipping a table.
Daniel: Classic table flip. Don’t forget, also improvising a flail and driving them out. That’s pretty cool. Okay, thank you.
Hedvig: I don’t know what a flail is, but that is…
Ben: Like a morning star stick chain, heavy ball at the end.
Hedvig: Overreaction.
Ben: Hey, man, when you want to take down capitalism, you got to go hard.
Daniel: When you’re the Son of Man, you get to do what you want.
Ben: [laughs]
Daniel: We also have Ben Ainslie. Ben, same question. Jesus flipping over tables in the temple. What do you see?
Ben: This is an incredibly niche reference, but for the six people listening who watched Take Shelter starring Michael Shannon…
Hedvig: [laughs] Oh, my god.
Ben: …there is, in my opinion, the quintessential rageful table flip at the end of that film, and he flips a table and just screams at the room, “I said not here.” And it’s beautiful. And I imagine Jesus, in his moment of vengeance and wrath, was channeling full-tilt angry Michael Shannon.
Daniel: Very good. It seems that this came to light because Midjourney, or perhaps DALL-E, not even sure, when it was given that as a prompt, it had a man in a robe literally flipping over a table.
Ben: Oh, doing, like, a sick kick flip.
Daniel: That’s the one.
[laughter]
Ben: That’s funny.
Hedvig: Ooooh.
Daniel: Which just shows the role of ambiguity. I like to imagine that Jesus can’t stop going on about how cool the tables are. Oh, man. Jesus is flipping over those tables.
Ben: Or, and final semantic interpretation. Jesus is coming in, and he’s putting the hard word on some people who don’t have very much money. He’s like, “How much for that table, man? How much for that table?” Gets it, goes down the line. He’s like, “Yo, I got this sick table. It’s worth like 80 drachmas,” and they pay 24. He’s flipping tables.
Daniel: He would, wouldn’t he? Well, for this episode, it’s the regular stuff, news, words on our favorite game, Related or Not. But we’re also talking to Dr Sarah Ogilvie. She’s a linguist, lexicographer, author, technologist, former editor on the OED. And lately, the author of The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary.
Hedvig: Nice.
Ben: I’m imagining a magical realism retelling interpretation of the mystical origins of the OED. Is that the flavor I’m detecting here?
Daniel: Well, what do we know about the crowdsourcing involved in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary? Do we know?
Hedvig: That it involved criminals.
Ben: Well, I’m going to answer first because I will definitely be the dumbest and least accurate because I have a feeling Hedvig has encountered this idea before. In the earliest days, did they not do the thing of literally sending out letters or missives, and were just like, “Hey, what words do you know?
[laughter]
Ben: Just like, “”Send me your words.”
Daniel: Have you seen a word?
Hedvig: Like, “What do you know about words?”
Ben: But is that not kind of what they did?
Daniel: Found any good ones lately?
Ben: Hundreds and hundreds of years ago?
Daniel: Yeah, it was, actually. They had these slips of paper that you could mail in and anybody could and lots of people did.
Ben: So bold. It’s like going on Twitter, like we say about Dustin from Sandman Stories, the cojones on the person who goes onto Twitter and just says, “Give me recommendations.” This is like the Middle English version of that. It’s just like, “Tell me words.” Imagine how much vulgarity they got because humans never change, right?
Daniel: Yeah. Dick. Huh.
Ben: Yeah, seriously.
Daniel: The entry for deez nuts was left out of the first edition. But you might be familiar with a book called The Surgeon of Crowthorne by Simon Winchester.
Ben: I am not, for I am an uncultured swine.
Daniel: It’s about one of the most prolific contributors to the OED, William Chester Minor, and it’s all about him. It’s a ride. But there were a lot more contributors and their stories are here in this new book by Sarah Ogilvie. And I’ve got to say, having read it, what a time. The late 1800s, early 1900s, there was a lot going on.
Ben: I didn’t realise it was that recent that they did this like, “Tell me your words.” That’s really interesting.
Hedvig: I mean, if you think about dictionaries as a thing, as a kind of product that society makes, it’s only in the last like 300 years.
Daniel: They’re kind of new…
Hedvig: They’re kind of new.
Daniel: …and other languages were way ahead of English. English came kind of late to this game.
Ben: Well, we’re scummy, really, aren’t we?
Hedvig: But why would you need a dictionary? You would need a dictionary if you have a growing literate population that’s going to school and you need to standardise things, and you’re a nation state, you’re like… [crosstalk]
Ben: Yeah. We haven’t had those for very long to be fair.
Hedvig: We haven’t had them for very long. Exactly.
Ben: [laughs]
Hedvig: As long as you got a bunch of monks and scribes scattered all around who are devoting their lives to painstakingly learning very idiosyncratic systems, you don’t kind of need… They messed up sometimes, but they probably didn’t need dictionaries or need them enough.
Ben: Well, I can’t wait to hear from this lady. She sounds like an absolute hoot.
Daniel: She is. Our latest bonus episode was with listener and prolific contributor, Diego. We had a lot of fun talking about news, words playing Related or Not. Hedvig won that one. Got to say, nice going.
Hedvig: Yay.
Ben: Woo. Well, when I’m away, the field gets a lot easier.
Hedvig: Oh, yeah.
Daniel: But that bonus episode with Diego is now available to our patrons at their listener level. So go sign up and check it out. Can I just say, it’s reaching the end of the year. You know what that means for patrons?
Ben: Ooh. Is it time to take sexy beach shots of Ben and send it out to everyone?
Daniel: Yep. We’re approaching our mailout. We send our yearly postcard.
Ben: [laughs] mailout.
Daniel: It’s a doozie. [laughs]
Hedvig: Oh, no, no, no.
Daniel: Put your mail back in. Thank you. Thank you.
Hedvig: Thank you.
Daniel: Although I am interested in the sexy beach shot. That’s going to be interesting.
Ben: Perhaps, that will be a private communique between you and I, Daniel.
Daniel: [chuckles] Along with all the others.
Hedvig: I don’t understand Anglo people sometimes. Sometimes, they say stuff and then you’re supposed to understand that it’s a lie. You told me earlier, before we started recording the show, Ben, that you were going to take a beach shot for this mailout. I thought you meant that.
Ben: I do.
Daniel: He does.
Hedvig: Okay, good.
Ben: I will. Yeah.
Hedvig: Okay.
Daniel: Yeah.
Hedvig: Okay.
Ben: Just then, for the sake of the show, I was saying, “Well, perhaps I’ll just send it to you privately, Daniel,” to suggest to the listeners that Daniel and I are in the preliminary phases of a torrid physical relationship.
Daniel: So, we send out our yearly postcard. We send out stickers and merch from the Because Language Shop. Yes, there is a Because Language Shop that nobody knows about. We’re sending out our new etymology design, the idea for which Ignacio gave to us. That’s going to be fun.
Ben: He’s very clever. So, I like the idea by default.
Daniel: Don’t forget, we’re working on the Linguistics at the Disco series, so that’s going to be interesting. And every patron gets the mailout, regardless of level. And if you’re a patron, you get invited to all the live episodes. You get to hang out with our great Discord community. There’s a lot going on.
Ben: There is. Sexy Ben Beach Shots are just the very beginning, everyone.
Daniel: That was just the beginning. Where do we go from there? Holy crap. So, to find out what we’re all getting up to, sign up, patreon.com/becauselangpod. Thank you.
Ben: Righto. I think now that the plug is thoroughly finished, it is time for us to open our mighty cetacean jaws and filter linguistic news like krill through our baleen. I went with a whale thing.
Daniel: I like it. And then we excrete everything else.
Ben: Are they ceta-cean? Did I get that right?
Daniel: Yes.
Ben: Okay.
Daniel: I’ve always said cet-acean, but it’s one of those…
Ben: Oh, you’re probably correct by virtue of being older and a linguist.
Daniel: No, no, no.
Hedvig: What are the words you’re saying?
Daniel: Cetacean, relating to whales?
Ben: Yeah, like the family of…
Hedvig: Oh, okay.
Daniel: It’s probably one of those skele-tal/ske-letal things. It’s just American versus not. And anyway, I’ve only ever read it in the first place.
Ben: Yeah, until right now. Me too.
Daniel: Yep. But here’s the news. This one was suggested by Diego.
Ben: Oh, he’s such a good boy.
Daniel: Love him. There’s this project called the Vesuvius Project, and the tagline is, “Resurrect an ancient library from the ashes of a volcano. Win $1,000,000.” Sound good?
Ben: Okay.
Daniel: We all know about Vesuvius, right?
Ben: I have an inkling. I have a suspicion about what this is, but please continue.
Daniel: No, you go ahead. What is Vesuvius? What do we know?
Ben: So, that is like a legitimate offer. There is a thing out there being like, “We want you to do a thing, and if you are lucky, you’ll get a million bucks.”
Daniel: The Vesuvius Project is a real thing.
Ben: So I reckon if you guys recall, back in the late 90s, early 2000s, there was like distributed computational projects. There was the one for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, the SETI one. And there was also one about protein folding to do with cancer, I think.
Hedvig: Steve is running that currently.
Ben: Like the protein folding thing? He’s running it?
Hedvig: Oh, yeah.
Ben: He’s in charge of it?
Hedvig: No.
[laughter]
Daniel: He’s doing the program.
Ben: He’s [crosstalk] running the software.
Hedvig: His computer, when it goes sleep, it does it.
Ben: My bad. Well, I guess he’s an academic guy, and you never know. He might have just ended up being in charge of that. Anyway, I’m wondering if this Vesuvius Project is a new version of that where people’s sort of excess processing power can be put to good use, trying to brute force or number crunch something.
Daniel: This one isn’t about borrowing other people’s computer processing power. It’s about trying to figure out the contents of scrolls.
Ben: Okay.
Daniel: So, Mount Vesuvius exploded in 79 CE. It buried Pompeii, and it also buried a certain library under mud and ash, preserving the scrolls inside.
Ben: Oh, wow. I figured that stuff would be like toast, literally.
Daniel: Well, [chuckles] here’s the thing. It actually is. I mean, the scrolls were preserved, but they were also, unfortunately, carbonised.
Ben: Okay.
Daniel: Which meant that you…
Ben: Wait, we can undo that?
Daniel: Yes, you can.
Ben: What?
Daniel: Well, when they first discovered them in, I think, the 1800s, people tried unrolling some of them and inflicting various degrees of damage on them.
Ben: Yeah, I imagine that did not go great.
Daniel: It didn’t go very well. And there were some that were just completely charred. Well, you can use CAT scan technology. You can use x-ray topography to scan it.
Ben: Oh, that is wild.
Daniel: And just unpiece the rolls and see what’s next to what and get a picture.
Ben: So, you get essentially like a Tootsie Roll scan, right?
Daniel: It’s a cinnamon bun.
Ben: Yeah. You scan a thing that is in like this helix. But then, you use software, I’m imagining, to lay that data out into a flat plane.
Daniel: That’s it.
Hedvig: Maybe you scan it at different angles. So, you do one slice one way, and then you turn a little bit, and you do another slice.
Daniel: Yeah, that’s what a CAT scan is. It’s 3D x-rays.
Ben: That sounds like the sort of thing that you can say very quickly, but someone must have put a lot of time and effort and thought into how to actually make that work.
Hedvig: Yeah, that’s the kind of thing that someone that’s high up in sort of executive hierarchy is like, “We should do this,” and then some low person is like, “Okay, all right.”
[laughter]
Hedvig: “So, what they want us to do is invent an entirely new…”
Daniel: Oh, god.
Ben: I’m going to take each slice, and then I’m going to use AI to like, oh, man, that’s…
Daniel: Figure out exactly which layers go with which layers.
Ben: So, where does winning a million bucks come in, then?
Daniel: Well, they’ve made the files available online, and they are appealing to citizen scientists to make out the ink traces. But this isn’t easy. You see, when they applied these techniques, they could actually read the scrolls as long as the ink was made of a different stuff than the papyrus was made of.
Ben: Okay.
Daniel: For this small subset of the papyri called the Herculaneum papyri, the ink and the paper are all made of carbon. There’s no contrast.
Ben: Oh, I see. Yes.
Hedvig: Oh.
Daniel: This team used a particle accelerator to scan two full scrolls and several fragments.
Ben: Because who doesn’t have one of them lying around?
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: And sorry, what does the particle accelerator have to do with anything?
Daniel: It allows you to take really, really high-resolution photographs of the scrolls and see what’s inside.
Hedvig: [laughs] Okay.
Daniel: And because I don’t understand particle acceleration, I can’t go any farther than that.
Hedvig: [crosstalk]
Ben: Because I think we’re now getting to the realm of, like, quantum mechanics.
Hedvig: Yeah. This is wild.
Ben: This is nice.
Daniel: Well, this month, one of the competitors got a word out of it.
Ben: Oh, wow. What’s the word?
Daniel: The word is purple. In Greek, it’s porphyras.
Ben: Wow.
Daniel: Or purple.
Hedvig: It’s very important color.
Ben: Yeah. Well, that was the royal color, wasn’t it?
Daniel: Yeah. And it’s a rare word too.
Hedvig: And it’s made from a certain kind of sea snails. And for a while, it was known as Cartagen color, I think, because it was very popular in Cartago.
Daniel: And I only know the word because of porphyria, a weird disease that turns you purple and does weird stuff to your body. But here’s what happened. Luke Farritor, who is a college student, summer intern at SpaceX, worked on finding crackles.
Ben: Crackles.
Daniel: This crackle technique was developed by blogger and tech person Casey Handmer. And you can find the blog post on the show notes for this page, becauselanguage.com. So, you look at the paper and there’s no color anywhere. It just looks like a flat piece of parchment. But wherever the ink was, it affected the parchment so that it’s like… [crosstalk]
Ben: Yeah, so like water damage from like a book or whatever. Like, where the water has been, you can see the… okay. Yep.
Daniel: Yeah. So, Luke Farritor used this technique to find the word “purple.” The contest is ongoing. Anybody can participate. You can check it out at scrollprize.org. And again, we’re going to have a link in the show notes for this episode. But it’s very exciting, using AI to read ancient documents.
Ben: Do you know what this sounds like? This sounds like one of those things that you see in like movies and TV shows where some weird IT contest is out there and some 15-year-old kid in their bedroom is just like chewing on like a Pocky Stick. And they’re like, “Ah, I’ll give that a shot.” And then they just revolutionise things with this one idea they come up with. I love stuff like that.
Hedvig: It’s brute forcing. You know those stories, there’s one 15-year-old with a Pocky Stick, but the truth is that there’s thousand 15-year-olds with a Pocky Stick. And what makes 15-year-olds special is that they have a lot of free time.
Daniel: And they’re all communicating with each other.
Hedvig: So actually, we’re just brute forcing it and we find some supposedly genius teenagers. But sometimes I’m like, there were just a lot of you to pick from.
Ben: I think the genius of teenagers, I say from my personal experience, is that we have lost largely… Certainly I have, and I think this is true for a lot of people. I have never been able to hyperfixate on a thing like I was able to as a 15-year-old. I have lost that capacity to a really substantial degree. Which doesn’t mean I can’t fall down a rabbit hole and play games for a bunch of hours and all that kind of stuff. But as a 15-year-old, man, 17 hours on a task was doable if I was intrinsically motivated to do that thing. And I think that’s largely true for a lot of teenagers. They could just really fixate on a thing in a way boring adult humans who have like lives and responsibilities and bills and crap can’t.
Daniel: I think I had that in my 20s. It’s like, “Oh, the day’s gone by. Oh, it’s dark.”
Ben: Yeah.
Hedvig: I was going to say one of the advantages of being a researcher is that sometimes you get to do that, and it is really nice when you get to do that.
Daniel: And you still got it, Hedvig?
Hedvig: Well, sometimes it happens to me, but very often there are other things prop up, so I can’t do that. But sometimes, it happens and it is really nice.
Ben: Is it also not the case, Hedvig, that maybe there’s like a little bit of neurospicy stuff going on for you as well?
Hedvig: I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.
Ben: Like a little bit of ADHD, little bit of that going on?
Hedvig: See, even listeners of this show tell me this, and I just want to say [Ben laughs] that I do think and I’m on TikTok, I do think that superficially diagnosing people with ADHD or autism or Asperger’s…
Ben: I’m not offering a diagnosis. [crosstalk]
Hedvig: No, no.
Daniel: It’s very popular. It’s very commonly done.
Hedvig: It’s very popular. And there’s a lot of content that’s like, “You know how you like to like you don’t like the texture of microfiber towels?” I hate the texture of microfiber towels. I don’t think that means I have autism. That’s not how any of that works. And I think we also need to recognise that the neurotypical spectrum is also a spectrum.
Ben: True.
Hedvig: And there are spicier ends of it.
Ben: Fair enough.
Daniel: Hmm, okay.
Ben: So, just to be clear, that is a no from you?
Hedvig: It is a no. Yeah.
Ben: Fair enough.
Hedvig: I just happen to be blessed with a work where I can sometimes get into a flow state and hyperfixate on some things, and it’s really nice.
Ben: That’s awesome. I am extremely jealous of that. Flow state is delightful, and it’s so elusive.
Daniel: I get that with editing.
Hedvig: And it’s the best at like 02:00 AM. 02:00 AM is like sweet spot.
Daniel: Oh, shoot. Okay. Go to bed.
Ben: [laughs]
Hedvig: No.
Daniel: Let’s do another one. Illness detection with AI.
Ben: Okay.
Daniel: We have always been interested in projects where they diagnose medical conditions from language because it’s not very invasive. Even back in the Talk the Talk days, we were looking at dementia, psychosis, Parkinson’s, ALS. Well, now we have an update. Diabetes. Or Diabeetus.
Hedvig: So, all those other things you mentioned earlier, dementia, Parkinson’s, they have a cognitive component.
Daniel: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Hedvig: Like, people who have dementia might have say things several times, repeating patterns. You could transcribe what they’re saying and then find that they’re repeating themselves a lot and say, “Hmm, something seems to me maybe up.”
Daniel: So, with psychosis, you could say, “Oh, they don’t have very many relative clauses,” or, “They never use pronouns,” or something like that. But diabetes?
Hedvig: Yeah. I feel like one of these things is not like the other.
Ben: Look, I think we’re saying slightly or I’m about to say something slightly different, but related. As soon as you said that, Daniel, my brain was immediately very skeptical. [laughs] I was just like, “Uh-huh.”
Daniel: “Huh. Well, let’s talk about it.”
Ben: Much like animals do in language, I’m immediately, like, “Prove it.”
Daniel: How could that possibly show up in language? Well, this is work from Jaycee Kaufman from Klick Applied Sciences in Toronto, Canada. They got participants, some of whom they knew had diabetes and some of whom they knew did not. They got these folks to record their voice about six times a day for two weeks. There was just a special app that they could do on their very own smartphone, and all they would do is say these words, “Hello. How are you? What is my glucose level right now?” That’s it.
Ben: Okay.
Daniel: That’s all you had to say, a bunch of times during the day. And somewhere between 6 seconds and 10 seconds long.
Hedvig: Okay.
Ben: I have some thoughts. I think Hedvig has some thoughts.
Hedvig: Me too.
Daniel: What are your thoughts? I’m curious.
Ben: Hedvig, please.
Hedvig: When I have low blood sugar, there are things about my mood and energy levels that are affected by blood sugar.
Daniel: Okay.
Hedvig: Maybe it can detect something like that.
Daniel: Okay, okay.
Hedvig: Yeah, that’s my only… [crosstalk]
Ben: I actually had a different thought based on how you’ve just described this thing being set up. So basically, a bunch of people record the thing and then they get AI to analyse it and be like, “Hey, AI, what do you notice?”
Daniel: What’s the difference?
Ben: I would put it forward that the participants, knowing that they have diabetes is dirtying this data.
Daniel: Oh, interesting. Okay.
Ben: If you have type 2 diabetes and your life has been governed by your blood sugar levels, and you are recording into a phone constantly, “My blood sugar level is this,” or like, “What is my blood sugar level?” or whatever, people who have diabetes, I think… it would not surprise me to know or to find out that people who have diabetes who know they have diabetes, sorry, to be clear, would imbue that question with measurably different inflections and tension. If you ask me what my blood sugar is, I’m like, “What’s my blood sugar?” “I don’t fucking know or care,” because I’ve never had to think about it before in my life, ever once.” Whereas a person with diabetes, that’s an important and a significant and at times a scary and a challenging question. So, maybe the AI is detecting that.
Hedvig: And something you say a lot. Maybe you say the words blood sugar a lot often.
Ben: So, that’s my thought is that could be a potential thing that’s getting picked up rather than it’s detecting diabetes.
Daniel: Well, the difference was not intonation. That’s not what they were looking for. What they were looking for was two things called shimmer and jitter.
Ben: Fun words, I have to say.
Daniel: For example, I edit you guys a lot. I can see what your waves look like when you make voice. When you say an ‘ah’ sound, for example, it looks like a wave. And if I were saying ‘ah’, ‘aaaah,’ and my voice were a wonderful perfect instrument with no irregularities, you would see my ‘ah’ as a wave going up and down and the wave would be hitting the top at the same exact point every time. Pappapapap, but it doesn’t.
Ben: So essentially, there’s like an amplitude consistency to the noise that’s being made by the voice.
Daniel: That’s right. Now, because my voice isn’t a perfect instrument, sometimes the top of these different waves will be higher and lower and that’s called shimmer, the degree to which the tops of the waves differ. And then, jitter is when the middles of the waves look different.
Ben: The period changes.
Daniel: Yes. Or there’s weird stuff. There’s like weird little crinkles going on in the middle of the wave. That happens too.
Hedvig: Okay.
Daniel: When someone has a lot of shimmer and jitter, the way that sounds is it sounds like breathiness or hoarseness or a kind of roughness in the voice and that can be linked to certain pathologies. It may also be how we recognise voices as well. And so, what they found was that people who had diabetes had more shimmer and jitter in their voice compared to people who didn’t.
Ben: Okay. That’s pretty interesting sounding. The very first thing I want to do is turn to my partner who is a doctor and be like, “What’s the low blood sugar effects on the voice? Is that a thing?” But if it is, then yeah, absolutely, I think you could… It’s a noninvasive way rather than just randomly having a person have to do a skin prick test six times a day for several weeks.
Daniel: And it may be highly predictive as well, though I would actually love to see how this predicts people who don’t seem to have it at the time but then later are diagnosed. Like, remember that lady who could smell Parkinson’s? There was a lady who allegedly could smell Parkinson’s and so they let her smell a bunch of people, volunteers who had Parkinson’s and those who didn’t, and she was able to smell them, except she got one wrong. She said this person has Parkinson’s and they didn’t, until six months later when it turned out they did. But anyway, I would love to see how that functions… [crosstalk]
Ben: That is pretty interesting.
Hedvig: That also means that we could diagnose people who are no longer with us if we had an audio sample.
Ben: Oh, wow.
Daniel: Interesting. Ooh.
Ben: I wonder if you need consistency though, right?
Daniel: Do they need the same thing?
Ben: Yeah. Would you need like a voiceprint over and over again?
Daniel: Yeah. And then there’s another one. Diego pointed us to this one schizophrenia, which we have kind of seen before. This was work from Dr Matthew Nour and a team from UCL Queen Square Institute for Neurology, published in PNAS. They got 26 participants with schizophrenia and 26 without to do some verbal fluency tasks where they got them to name as many animals as they could name in five minutes or as many words beginning with P in five minutes. And they were able to spot patterns, either difficulty or just things going a certain way. They think it has to do with cognitive maps, the way that information is put together in people with different kinds of brains.
Ben: So, would this be… in its ideal form, would this be like we can figure out if people have schizophrenia using AI, as in like a diagnostic tool that could eventually be available to doctors is, “Hey friend, please. I’m going to sit here at this table with you and here is a script and I just need you to read this nice old script into the microphone.” And then, the machine can be like, “There’s cause for concern on a schizophrenic spectrum here,” or something like that.
Daniel: This is kind of where I worry about this stuff.
Hedvig: [onomatopoeia] I feel like we have ways, for example, diabetes. I appreciate that it’s a noninvasive way of doing it, but we have ways of testing for diabetes. Like, I’ve been tested for diabetes. You starve someone, then you give them some sugar, and then you test their blood sugar, and you see how it works, and you see if they have diabetes or not.
Ben: I imagine this potentially has the promise. I’m thinking about it in terms of not in a western setting. So, when we say things are less invasive, it often means they’re less expensive as well.
Hedvig: That’s true.
Ben: So, that means that you could take a microphone to impoverished parts of the world and be able to do a kind of medicine that you just cannot find funding for in another way potentially.
Hedvig: Maybe.
Daniel: Yeah. Dr Nour says, “By combining state of the art AI language models and brain scanning technology, we’re beginning to uncover how meaning is constructed in the brain and how this might go awry in psychiatric disorders.” So, there’s… [crosstalk]
Ben: It doesn’t really sound like it’s working towards a diagnostic tool, but that doesn’t mean it’s not interesting and that it’s not really fascinating research from like a linguistic and a neuro whatever perspective.
Daniel: Ben ran out of road.
Ben: Neuropsychology?
Daniel: There you go. Like I say, I kind of worry about this stuff because we mentioned this in our episode with Dr Emily Bender, AI Hype Hose Down. Somebody at work, finds a way to analyse all your emails, and suddenly you come back with schizophrenia or something, and they fire you.
Ben: Yeah, I mean, look, that sounds very American, I have to say. [laughs] That doesn’t sound like the sort of…
Hedvig: Like, we live in an American… what’s it called? How do you say in English? Hejemony. Hegemony.
Ben: Hegemonic system. I don’t know. I would push back on that a little bit simply because I’ve walked through Europe, and it’s a very different place, and you guys do things very differently.
Hedvig: Yeah, but we’re super influenced by American stuff all the time, and some things that are true in America are true in other places too. Germans are also afraid of being sued all the time. It’s very stressful.
Ben: Okay. But they don’t have like crazy privatised health care or anything like that, do they?
Hedvig: [onomatopoeia]
Ben: A little bit, hybrid system like Australia?
Hedvig: Yeah, it’s weird.
Ben: Yeah. Okay.
Hedvig: But I think those fears are founded. I also am a little bit thinking like, “Why are we solving problems that we kind of already have some sort of solution for?”
Ben: That’s what I mean. I don’t think we are solving problems. By the end of that sort of recount, it didn’t sound like they were working towards a diagnostic tool. I think they’re doing interesting research, and that’s research. Like, you go where interesting things are, and you find out about them. And then, maybe that goes somewhere and maybe it doesn’t.
Daniel: And AI is very shiny this year.
Ben: Then, you hold hands and you skip around the maypole and it’s great. And all academia is perfect and has no problems.
Daniel: Well, let’s talk about one of the problems. So, this is an editorial from The Lancet back in July. The article is called Diabetes Care and AI: A Looming Threat or a Necessary Advancement. Link in our show notes. They point to unequal access to quality care and diabetes technology due to socioeconomical or racial background.
Hedvig: Right, yeah.
Ben: Yep.
Daniel: So, if you don’t have the technology, you might not get the care. The other thing is the data problem. Ethnic minorities and people in remote areas sometimes aren’t in the data set, and that means that they might get missed in diagnosis. So, they say, “If we do not consider all people in AI development from its inception to its distribution, we will inevitably maintain the deep rooted systemic and societal biases we have today.” So, there’s that.
Hedvig: And even if we develop tools and say to people like, “This is an early screening thing, it’s just an advice, it’s just a cause for concern,” thing, doctors are super stressed and are maybe going to be like computer says, “No.” You know.
Daniel: Mm-hmm.
Ben: Yeah, look, I really hope that we are not quite so dystopian as that in a lot of places. And I say that simply, and, Daniel, you might encounter this as well, as a person whose partner is a doctor, at the end of the day, a lot of those human beings are just like, “How do I provide care for the human being in front of me?” And they look at all of the sweets… and I know you weren’t taking a swipe at doctors there, but more just I have a little bit of trust that the humanity and the system when told, “Oh, you could do this.” Like, I’ve met doctors who are like, “No, I’m supposed to do this thing, but I’m not going to because I don’t agree with it.”
Daniel: Yeah, there’s that. Look, professionalisation and deprofessionalisation are the words to watch out for. Let medical people do their medical thing. Let’s finish the news up with… this one’s a bit of a downer. It looks like Instagram has been accidentally adding the term “terrorist” to people who are supporting Palestine or the Palestinian people.
Hedvig: Not even supporting Palestine or Palestinian people, if I’m not mistaken. So, what has happened is that Meta, the company that runs and owns Facebook and Instagram and other platforms such as Threads…
Ben: And WhatsApp.
Hedvig: -offer the in-platform translation tools that they have developed themselves for translating between different major languages and among other things, they translate between Arabic and English. What has been happening is that someone wrote in their Instagram bio that they were Palestinian, followed by a Palestinian flag and then Alhamdulillah, which means “Praise be to god,” and that is what that means. But if you go see translation in the Meta app, it says, “Praise be to god, Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom.”
Daniel: Yikes.
Ben: Also, just putting aside the really problematic nature of AI doing this work and it being bad, it doesn’t pass the sniff test either. People who are advocating for what, say, Hamas or Al-Qaeda or the Taliban or whatever organisation you want to pick are doing, they don’t refer to it as terrorism. They’re freedom fighters, they’re soldiers, they’re liberators, they’re like holy warriors.
Daniel: That’s not how people do language.
Ben: Yeah, it’s not, at all.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: And this follows reports that people posting on Instagram who are showing support for Palestinians during the conflict are getting shadow banned, which is when a platform downweights your post so that other people can’t see. It looks like Meta’s communications director, Andy Stone, made a statement. He said, “This bug affected accounts equally around the globe and had nothing to do with the subject matter of the content, and we fixed it as quickly as possible.” Hmm.
Ben: I don’t know. I mean, I was about to say, do you buy it? And then, I realised it doesn’t actually matter if any of us buy it because we just don’t have any mechanism by which to hold these people to account. Whether I buy it or not is completely immaterial. That guy might absolutely be downweighting Palestinian perspectives. He might also just be like a raging antisemite, and he might be doing something there. But the really salient point is, like, we don’t know because it’s a private company, but it also has this massive, massive fucking influence and force on how discourse plays out. And it’s… Argh, whenever anyone looks at me and be like, “Man, you’re such a bladadah.” But it’s objectively bad.
Hedvig: It is.
Daniel: This stuff matters. It’s like Jack Hessel said on our episode, again with Emily Bender, automation poses risks. Whenever you automate a thing and you deploy it at scale, there are going to be weird little edge cases, and those weird little edge cases are actually going to be pretty huge with the scope that we’re talking about of humans in the world.
Hedvig: I’m not always the optimist on this show, but the one thing that consistently stands up against Meta and other big companies like that is actually the EU Parliament, living in the European Union has certain benefits among them that European Parliament has, and very strongly, I think, championed by Germany we are living currently has actually put Meta to the test. Not when it comes to translation, I think, but when it comes to a lot of other shenanigans that they’re up to, especially data protection.
Ben: I’ll give them points for that as well.
Hedvig: And sometimes, Meta rolls out those rules also in the rest of the world, but sometimes they just make special rules for EU IP addresses.
Ben: [laughs]
Daniel: Yeah.
Ben: I mean, look, they got Apple to ditch the lightning cable. So, they will always, always have my love.
Daniel: Weren’t we having the Apple discussion? Yes, we were. It’s time for our favorite game, Related or Not.
Ben: [singing] Related or Not, it is the game. Please tell us what you think of the difference.
Daniel: I feel like this game is bringing out some good things about language, which… that song was not one of the things but…
Ben: [laughs] Oh, that was… oof.
Hedvig: Spicy.
Ben: Ouch.
Daniel: No. But the longer we go with this game, the more I listen out for words and notice them, and I feel like our listeners are doing that as well. They’re writing in and, “I noticed these words.” And then, you can have a discussion of historical linguistics and language change and everything.
Ben: What do you got for us this week, Daniel?
Daniel: All right, first one, PUPIL. “I noticed the word PUPIL because I have a couple of young pupils and I have a couple of pupils in my eye. So, PUPIL the student, PUPIL in your eye, related or not?
Hedvig: Okay. So, I think that PUPIL student has to do with furniture, and I think there is something about the desk that’s sitting at and the podium that is technically the pupil.
Daniel: Fascinating.
Ben: Okay, Interesting. Sounds like you’re going for a not then. So, I’m going to go for a yes.
Hedvig: No. I’m going for yes.
Daniel: No, I [crosstalk] yes.
Ben: Okay. So, how does the eye relate to a podium?
Hedvig: Exactly. And I know a word that you don’t know that is related to the word PODIUM.
Ben and Daniel: Oooh.
Daniel: Okay, so, Ben, do you think yes?
Ben: Okay, well, I’m going to say related. Not for any of that fancy pants, wishy-washy nonsense, but because both things are to do with seeing, and we associate seeing with understanding, to see is to be understood, all that kind of stuff.
Daniel: Ooh, we say, “I see.” Okay. I also thought related, and I thought of the Latin word PUPA.
Ben: Oh, like the little larvae.
Daniel: Yeah, but I couldn’t go back farther than that.
Ben: Okay.
Daniel: Answer, they are related. We’re all three correct. So now, we have to take it to the next level.
Ben: Yeah, but who gets the bonus point for being the right kind of right?
Daniel: Okay, well, hang on, that’s in our next question. So, for this bit, PUPIL the eye and PUPIL the student are related, but what is the unifying sense? How is a student like an eye? Are you ready?
Ben: Okay.
Daniel: First one, a PUPIL, the student is someone who you protect, and nurture and you also want to protect your eyes.
Ben: No.
Daniel: Wait till you hear them all.
Ben: I’m wiping that one off the board.
Daniel: Two, it goes back to pupa. A PUPIL is someone young. And at the time of the words coinage, there was a belief that embryonically, the eye develops first.
Ben: Also no.
Hedvig: I thought you were going to say there are larvae in our eyes and I got a lot of intrusive thoughts.
Ben: Good old body horror.
Daniel: Three, many people at this time were interested in studying the eye and pupils were named after this. Pupils studied eyes.
Ben: Still feeling no. Was that the last option?
Daniel: And number four.
Ben: Okay.
Daniel: When you look right into somebody’s eye, you can see a small copy of yourself, like a small person, and a PUPIL is a small person.
Ben: Oh, my god. It’s one of these. Are you for real? This is horrendous. I don’t care for this at all because I hate every one of these answers.
Daniel: So, • you protect and nurture pupils, students and eyes. • It goes back to pupa. There was a belief that it developed first. • Pupils studied eyes or • when you look at someone’s pupils, you can see a tiny person and a pupil is a tiny person.
Ben: I’m going number four. Not because I like it, but because I hate it the least.
Daniel: Okay, very good. Hedvig?
Hedvig: I also like number four. Wait, can you give me number two again?
Daniel: It goes back to PUPA. A PUPIL is someone young. There was a belief that embryonically the eye develops first.
Hedvig: I’m going to go number two just for fun. Yeah. I think it’s number four.
Daniel: Okay.
Ben: Daniel, what did you guess before you looked? Or can you not answer this one because you had to find out?
Daniel: This one I can’t play because I had to look them up. From Etymonline, “The eye region was so called from the tiny image one sees of oneself reflected in the eye of another,” Ben wins.
Ben: No. You know what? I don’t like it. I don’t care for it. I don’t want this win, because I didn’t like the answer.
Daniel: Take the W, Ben.
Hedvig: I like the answer. I like it. I think it’s really cute.
Daniel: That is cute.
Ben: I cannot believe that… that is one of the most whackadoodle etymology connections we’ve had so far.
Daniel: Welcome to the wonderful world of etymology.
Ben: You see a little picture of yourself in their eye, and students are little. [laughs]
Hedvig: What? Students are little copies of you. You’re trying to make them little copies of you.
Ben: Okay. [groans] Doesn’t make it better.
Daniel: And they have gigantic eyes. This one’s from Lynnika. Related or not, “Does the name SCOTT come from the SCOTS of Scotland?” Lynnika continues. “I know last names often come from locations which I feel like you even talked about in a recent episode, like Da Vinci, DiCaprio, Dubois. And sometimes last names can migrate to being first names Jackson, Hunter, Lincoln and so on. But is this the case with Scott? I’m not sure.” I would always have thought so. I was going, yeah, sure, it’s related.
Ben: Nah.
Daniel: Somewhere else, huh? Do you want to take a guess as to where it came from?
Ben: I think Scott, the first name, I go, no, I think Scott is not Scott in its current form, but like some form of Scott is a really, really old name, like some mid Germanic, like [unintelligible 00:41:53] or something like that. I just don’t… Something about it migrating to a first name doesn’t seem right to me.
Hedvig: That is the weird part, yeah.
Ben: And also, first names are like, in my experience, from what I’ve read about them, are almost never collective catchalls like that. First names are unique identifiers. That’s their whole point. So, having one that was just…
Hedvig: You mean like Mohammed and Jose?
Daniel: Yeah, like that.
Ben: Okay.
Daniel: Why would you name your son “citizen” or something like that?
Ben: But is it not also the case that in cultures that engage in that, then another part of the name becomes the unique identifier?
Hedvig: No. [laughs] That’s just literally… [crosstalk]
Ben: I’m still going with no and those are my reasons.
Daniel: Okay. Hedvig?
Hedvig: I think that they’re both related to the name of a people called the Scots.
Ben: Okay.
Daniel: They are related to a people named the Scots. You are correct. Interestingly, the OED says that Scott doesn’t appear to be the native name of the Scottish people.
Ben: Oh, that doesn’t surprise me.
Daniel: Instead, there was a medieval Irish origin story told in the 11th century about a mythical princess, Scota, who originated in Scythia and migrated via Spain to Ireland. Tell you if this makes you think what I thought. The first appearance of the surname “Scott” is to someone in 1120: Uchtredus filius Scoti.
Hedvig: Son of Scot.
Daniel: In other words, Utrecht, son of Scott.
Ben: Oh, okay.
Daniel: Wait, does that mean that the given name came first?
Ben: I guess it must have.
Daniel: I guess so.
Ben: And that’s in keeping with what I said. Which that Scot might just be a really old name. It’s not a particularly complicated name either.
Daniel: No.
Ben: Like Sc-ot. It’s not inconceivable that several different…
Hedvig: Sco…
Ben: Sco is no?
Hedvig: Sco is weird.
Daniel: Hedvig, I forgot to ask about pupil. What was the secret word that you knew that made you think of desks?
Ben: Oh, yeah.
Hedvig: Pulpit. It’s another word for podium. [crosstalk]
Ben: Of course.
Daniel: We have [crosstalk] pulpits. Okay, so let’s go on. Last one from Sam.
Hedvig: Can I tell a funny story about patronyms first?
Daniel: Please, please.
Hedvig: My mother has bought a farm on the countryside in Sweden and there has been a house there for a long time. And someone wrote a book about houses in that region and about her house. And the first guy who had the house was called, I think, Lars Jensen. And he had a son who he named Jens, who then is Jens Larson. And then he had a son he named Lars and he’s Lars Jensen again. And they did this one more time.
Daniel: Oh, that’s funny.
Hedvig: And they did this one more time.
Ben: And they just kept… oh, yeah, I can see that coming.
Hedvig: That’s my only patronym. So stupid.
Ben: When did Sweden stop using patronyms?
Hedvig: I think it’s like 1700s probably properly.
Daniel: That was late.
Ben: Yeah.
Daniel: Wow.
Hedvig: I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong.
Ben: Some people are still flying the flag, man.
Daniel: Yeah, true.
Ben: Good old Iceland.
Daniel: Last one. This is from Sam via email. Sam says, “I just thought of a Related or Not question. My partner was saying his friends got married at his house while he was marinating chicken. I was wondering if MARRIAGE and MARINATE were related.” Guesses?
Ben: MARRIAGE, MARINATE. Well, it comes down to MARRY. And we actually use MARRY as in to mean “to join””.
Daniel: We do.
Ben: Like, you can marry two joints and things like that.
Daniel: Yes.
Ben: I don’t know if that comes from marriage though or the other way around. Like, if we had to combine in the form of the word MARRY or something like it. And then were like, “Oh, yeah, marri-age when you…”
Hedvig: But then the question is if they’re related, not direction.
Ben: No, I know that, but what I’m saying is, do I think that the MARRY in MARINATE is the same route pathway, and I’m going to go with no.
Daniel: You bring two people together? You bring the meat and the sauce together? [laughs]
Ben: No, I reckon no, I’m going no.
Daniel: No, I reckon no, I reckon Sam is trolling us.
[laughter]
Hedvig: I reckon yes.
[laughter]
Ben and Daniel: Ooh.
Daniel: Okay. In that case, Ben, where does marinate come from? Do you have any guesses?
Ben: Some Romantic thing like marianatus or something like that. I don’t know.
Daniel: I made an outrageous guess. Something about a MARINA.
Ben: Oh, that’s not actually that dumb.
Daniel: I’ll bet sailors prepared food this way and then the name carried over.
Ben: Oh. Yes, because you make a little marina…
[laughter]
Ben: Okay. Okay.
Daniel: All right. Well, here’s the answer. They’re not related. Sorry, Hedvig.
Hedvig: Oh, shit.
Daniel: So, MARRIAGE is just a borrowing from French MARIAGE, from classical Latin MARITARE, and people used it of people, but also of animals and also in viticulture.
Ben: Oh, okay. Like the marriage of two root stock to stem and things like that.
Daniel: That’s it. “We’re marrying them.” Let me… just like grafting, let me just marry these two. Now, MARINATE comes from Italian MARINARE, which comes from classical Latin AQUA MARINA, “seawater””. [laughs]
Ben: There you go.
Daniel: I got it.
Ben: Nicely done.
Daniel: And it’s not that sailors prepared food this way, but people used to boil meat in seawater with herbs until it was tender, which is really gross.
Ben: Ooh, that is… We had some interesting choices to make as people who prepared food in our history because seawater is so too salty to use.
Daniel: Yeah. Also, it’s full of mercury and weird chemicals, but maybe back then it wasn’t, so not related. So, thanks to everybody who keeps sending us ideas for Related or Not, we’ve got a lot of them and we’re getting through them, but we’re taking on more. So, send them to us on our Discord or our email, hello@becauselanguage.com. Thanks, y’all.
[Interview begins]
Daniel: I’m here with Dr Sarah Ogilvie, linguist, lexicographer, author, technologist, a former editor of the Oxford English Dictionary and lately the author of The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary. Sarah, thanks for coming and hanging out with me today.
Sarah: It’s a pleasure. Thank you, Daniel, for asking me.
Daniel: Great to finally meet you. Congratulations on the book.
Sarah: Thank you.
Daniel: Okay, first question. Tell me something about language that you think is really, really cool.
Sarah: Hmm. The coolest thing for me is the fact that language is the key to culture and that it’s through language that we can learn someone else’s view of the world. That’s what’s always excited me about linguistics right from the very beginning, and it still does today.
Daniel: There’s a lot about culture in The Dictionary People, which we’re going to get into. But aside from writing books, your work involves blending technology and the humanities. What does that look like for you?
Sarah: Well, at the moment, so basically, my first degree was in pure maths and computer science, because basically, when I left school down in Australia, I had no idea of what I wanted to do. And that was the subject that I found relatively easy back then. And so, it wasn’t until, actually, while I was doing my final exams for maths and computer science that I discovered linguistics, and I’d never looked back. But what I have done is I’ve kept a foot in the tech world and I’ve always brought that into my research and into my work. And at the moment, what that looks like is here at Oxford. I’ve just started up with colleagues, a new master’s degree in digital scholarship that I direct here. And so that’s a one-year master’s degree, basically, for humanists to learn digital tools and methods. It’s just started. We’re in our second year and it’s going well.
Daniel: Ah, cool. Now, if I were in your program, what kind of stuff would I be doing?
Sarah: Basically, you would get training in coding, Python and R, and you’d also get to choose other methods of digital scholarship, such as text analysis, AI, machine learning, TI, IIIF, data visualisation, as well as just the basics of digital humanities. And also the students here get to join one of the digital projects at Oxford, and there are over 60 of them for them to choose from, and they get to be part of those digital tools working on some particular problem or research question.
Daniel: Okay, well, that sounds pretty amazing, but for this book, you are using your talents not for the future so much, but to take a look back into the past. You’ve been documenting the lives of the contributors to the original Oxford English Dictionary, which is just such an interesting and unusual thing to do. What gave you the idea for this book?
Sarah: Well, when I was an editor on the OED, I had responsibility for words coming into English from languages outside of Europe, so anything from Australian Aboriginal languages to North American Indian languages to Hebrew to Arabic. And what I noticed when I was editing those words is something which really surprised me. So when I came from Australia to Oxford 25 years ago to work on the dictionary, I came with this preconceived idea that the first edition of the OED, which was begun in 1858 and finished in 1928, I thought that was quite Anglocentric text and had deliberately kept out words from outside of Britain. But when I was editing those actual words, I was realising, my goodness, there were thousands of those words there. I don’t know why we have this preconceived idea of the first editors being Anglocentric.
They were actually nothing at all like that, and they put in thousands of words. Not only that, when I went down into the archives, I discovered all of these memos internally from James Murray, who was the longest serving editor, from his boss, who was the secretary to the delegates of Oxford University Press, urging him to keep out words from outside Britain, saying, “These outlandish words have no place in an English dictionary. They’re decaying our language. Why do you keep putting them in?” And basically, he ignored all of that and he kept on putting those words in.
And so, a part of me knew that the OED in the 19th century was this global crowdsourced project where they realised when they first started the dictionary in 1858, that to create a dictionary of every word in the English language and a dictionary which, for the first time was going to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. They knew that a small group of men living in London or Oxford couldn’t do that alone. So they put out this global appeal for people to read their local books, write up quotations from those books, and send in those local words on little slips of four by six inch paper and send them into Oxford. And they had no idea whether that would be a success or not, but we now know that it was a huge success.
And so, I realised, working on the Dictionary, that all of these thousands of words from Australia, from New Zealand, from South Africa, from North America, that they must have been sent in from people living in those locations. We knew who some of them were, because sometimes, basically, the Dictionary wasn’t published in one lot in 1928, but rather from 1884. It was published gradually in little chunks of the alphabet. And James Murray would write a preface to each of those fascicles where he sometimes thanked people. So we knew that there were several hundred people, but we didn’t know how many or who they really were until… so I’ve always had that in the back of my mind. And so, eight years ago, I was down in the basement of Oxford University Press, which is where the Dictionary Archive is stored.
Daniel: The basement.
Sarah: Yeah, I was down in the basement, which is a wonderful place. It’s kind of dark and cold, and there are hundreds of boxes, all dusty, and all of those original slips that people sent in were kept. So, they’re all stored down in that basement.
Daniel: Amazing.
Sarah: Yeah. And so, I found this dusty box. I took the lid off, and inside was this little black book tied with cream ribbon, which I’d never noticed before. And when I untied the ribbon and opened it up, I immediately recognised the immaculate handwriting of James Murray, that longest serving editor. And I realised that this was his address book with the names, the addresses of all of those people around the world. Not only their names and addresses, but also every book that each person read. The number of slips per book, like the number of words that they sent in per book. The date that he received it here in Oxford. And so as soon as I saw that, my moment went in slow motion, and I thought, “This is amazing, because no one’s ever mentioned these address books.”
So basically, I ended up finding six address books. There were three belonging to James Murray. And then the following summer, I was looking in the Bodleian Library where the Murray papers are kept, and I found another three address books belonging to Murray’s predecessor called Frederick Furnivall. So, with these six address books, I then was taking up a new job in linguistics at Stanford. And I worked with a wonderful group of students who loved this project. And together we researched all of those people. So it turns out that there were 3000 people.
Daniel: Oh, my goodness.
Sarah: Yeah. And we basically just did as much research on every person as we could by going through censuses and marriage and death certificates and 19th century newspapers, whatever we could find to try and shed a light on these people finally and find out about them and their lives and what they did with their days. What was remarkable about them is that some of them were really devoted to this task. So, they volunteered their time. They were doing this for free. The top contributor sent in 165,000 slips in a 10-year period. The next top contributor sent in 151,000. So, these are people who were really devoted, and I must say quite obsessed and did a really superb job. And without them, the dictionary could never have been written. So, we really owe them a lot. Yeah.
Daniel: Wow. Okay, I’ve got a lot of questions. I was trying to imagine just what size these things were because you’re describing them as pretty small books, but it sounds like they must have been these enormous telephone books.
Sarah: No, they were sort of the size of an exercise book. So, sort of 37cm.
Daniel: Okay. A5.
Sarah: Yes, exactly.
Daniel: Okay. If you know what A5 is, but if you’re Americans, sorry, I can’t help you because you use weird paper, but okay. I guess I want to ask about James Murray, but I guess I’m really gravitating toward the dictionary people themselves. I’ve read their stories that you’ve written, and I think if I had to distill it, I think I would go to your chapter because all of your chapters start with a letter. Of course, I would go to O. And O was for Outsiders. These people were outsiders, weren’t they?
Sarah: Most of them were. That’s what really surprised me. They weren’t the scholarly elites. They were definitely people on the margins. And they were the amateurs and the autodidacts. Many of them were like James Murray himself, they left school at 14 or 15. And I was asking myself throughout all of the research what was motivating these people because of their devotion and just how much they contributed. I was really wanting to know what motivated them. And I think by the end of the project, the best answer to that I could come up with was that this was because most of them were outsiders. This was a chance for them to be associated with an academic project. So there were a lot more women than we thought. And this, of course, was at a time when women weren’t given the same opportunities for education as men. So I think that this was an opportunity for most of these people to be part of a project that was attached to a prestigious university and that attached to a whole world that they were otherwise excluded from.
Daniel: And this was their chance to contribute to something really big, be part of it.
Sarah: Definitely, yes.
Daniel: When they were excluded from being a part of so many other things.
Sarah: That’s right, yeah.
Daniel: Wow. And they were odd. Some of them were quite odd. And I can’t tell if it was them that were odd or if it was the time that was odd. You know how they say, “Oh, the place is a character in a story.” I feel like the time in your book, The Dictionary People, I feel like the time was a character in the story.
Sarah: So true. Yes, the Victorian era. And this time was a time of invention. It was a time of innovation. Strangely, of freedom to try new things and experiment. So, I mean, there is one person in there who got addicted to cocaine and heroin. Cocaine, of course, was legal at the time. I’ve got a whole chapter on inventors because the man who invented the sewerage pipe was a contributor, as was the man who invented, lest we forget, the tennis net adjuster.
[chuckles]
Daniel: Very important.
Sarah: Exactly.
Daniel: There’s a rain know that she was working on… what was her name? I’ve forgotten her name.
Sarah: Mrs Pringle from Kent.
Daniel: Yes.
Sarah: And that’s another thing. So, the Oxford English Dictionary was not the only crowdsource project of the 19th century, and you find that there were serial crowdsourcees, many of these people. So. Mrs. Pringle, for example, she was a rain collector. I think I had about a dozen people who collected rain for the British Rainfall Organisation, but also words for the OED. And then there was a Parson from Norfolk who also collected wildflowers for the Royal Botanical Society, who had this crowdsourced project where they asked people to collect their local flowers and send them in.
Daniel: It just feels like people were doing science. People were just like, “We’re going to sit down and we’re going to sort this universe out. We are going to figure out what’s going on here.”
Sarah: That’s right. “We are going to classify, we’re going to categorise, we’re going to collect. “Yeah, they were terrific collectors. I mean, you say that they were odd. I see them more as devoted and obsessed, very joyful. I mean, this is what happened. The more I got to learn about them, and they are very joyful characters and people, and so that really added to my research life. It was actually a great pleasure to research them and to write about them, and I just hope that it’s also a pleasure for people to read about them, because there’s definitely a joy there.
Daniel: It was.
Sarah: Yeah. Oh, good.
Daniel: There is. The enthusiasm for the world was palpable. I mean, everybody was doing weird stuff like, “I’m going to invent a new kind of bicycle,” or, “I’m going to invent a new writing system.” “Oh, what are you doing?” “I’m going to start an opera society in my neighborhood.” [laughs] Fantastic. You go, you humans. What are you doing? And then we got to talk about Eadweard Muybridge.
Sarah: Yes. He’s one of the three murderers.
Daniel: Yes. Well, I didn’t even know that he had killed someone. I knew about the movie, how he kind of invented the idea for a movie, because the story is that there was a debate about whether all four legs of a horse are off the ground at the same time when it’s running. And Muybridge just lined up a bracket of cameras with, I guess, strings that the horse would break and trip the shutter. And so you get 20 different pictures of the horse at every stage, and then you can run that into a movie. And I mentioned this to you in the run up to chatting today. As a child, I grew up in this college town in Eastern Washington State, and I would go to the John F. Kennedy Library, and this is the kind of kid I was, I would go around the stacks, and I felt very reverential about it. I would go to maybe a book that nobody had opened in 20 years, and I would open that book and look at it and then put it back. And it was very magical. But one of the things I found was Muybridge’s books. They were all there. And there was, like, strings of photos of men wrestling or women kicking a hat. Everybody was naked because this was science. And there were, like, dogs running and horses running, and I remember just looking at those. But he was doing lots of other stuff, like he was an OED contributor. I did not know that.
Sarah: Yes, exactly. As well as being one of the founding fathers, I guess, of photography and of moving pictures, he also was helping the OED on all of its terms to do with photography and to do with his world. Also, his wife was having an affair. And as I tell in the book, I mean, I don’t want to spoil it for the reader, although lots of people know this story. So he hunted down his wife’s lover and shot him dead at point blank range. But because he was in favor with Leland Stanford, the founder of Stanford University. And it was Stanford who was funding him to investigate whether horses do lift all of their feet when they canter and gallop.
Daniel: Spoiler, they do.
[chuckles]
Sarah: And Stanford therefore gave him the best lawyer, and he managed to get off the murder charge, yeah.
Daniel: Okay, cool. But don’t try this at home, kids. This is not recommended. But the other thing that you found out, I love this. What was he working on at the time of his death, Sarah?
Sarah: Yes, he was living back in England, which is where he had been born, and he was living with his brother in a tiny town south of Oxford called Kingston upon Thames. And in his back garden, he was building a miniature reconstruction of the Great Lakes. And it was that he was working on when he died.
Daniel: Of course he was!
Sarah: Eccentric to the end.
Daniel: [laughs] Who wasn’t?
Sarah: Yeah.
Daniel: Maybe people were so passionate about this project because love is a kind of madness. And when you love something, maybe that hits something inside of you. And taking it easy on that thing just doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t make any sense to ramp it back.
Sarah: Absolutely.
Daniel: They were just full on.
Sarah: Yeah. And I definitely think that a common thread throughout them was that many of the dictionary people, just like myself, were neurodiverse and probably on the spectrum. And I think that’s why I think four of the main contributors, so the highest contributors, the top four contributors all had connections with what were called lunatic asylums at the time.
Daniel: Yes. That comes up.
Sarah: And I don’t necessarily believe that they were lunatics. I just believe that they were judged as that because in 1871, a new column was added to the census. And that’s when several of my contributors have lunatic written beside their name there. And they were living in psychiatric hospitals or at least having spells in them quite often.
Daniel: And you mention in the book that this was a time when there were different opinions on how to work with people who had mental illness. Some people were quite cruel and punitive, and some were starting to look into it and say, “Oh, maybe there’s better ways.”
Sarah: That’s right. And in the L for Lunatics chapter, there’s a classic example of two of the contributors, two of the professors and doctors who contributed to the dictionary actually exemplified both of the extreme theories. One, he worked very hard, Dr Brushfield, to create very humane care for the mentally ill, and the other, Blandford took the other more strict approach. So, yeah, this was an all-encompassing project which brought in that cast a wide net and brought in many diverse people.
Daniel: James Murray, for his part, not the first editor of the OED, but probably the one that made the biggest contribution to getting it there. He, in many ways seems like a normal chap, churchgoing, abstemious, liked books, worked with the people, even the ones you call the “hopeless contributors”. Wait, are those his words?
Sarah: They are, yes. He wrote little notes beside the names of many people, and some of them were hopeless, no good, threw up, gave up, stole the book. It’s really, really cute.
Daniel: Okay. They’re the long tail. But in many ways, he seems like a pretty progressive guy. Like, you mentioned how Oxford was like, “Okay, James, do you think you can keep the American words out?” And he’s like, “Nah, this is going to be a big, all-inclusive project.” So was he kind of ahead of his time?
Sarah: I think he was, definitely yes. What was most admirable about him was that he was very strict in keeping to the scientific method and the historical method of lexicography, where he really believed in telling the biography of a word. So finding the very first instance of that word, gathering as many instances of the use of that word. And as you know, in The OED after the definition, there is a quotation paragraph where the very first instance is written there, and you more or less tell the biography of a word by choosing suitable quotations to show its life from that very first instance until the current day.
And so, over and over again, I find in the archives examples where Murray is being pressured to leave out a word, and he puts it in. The only time that I did find that he did on two occasions, well, three occasions with the C word and with the F word, he gathered all of the evidence for those words. But at the time, there was a big court case going on with Stephen Farmer, who had created a wonderful slang dictionary, which did include the C word and the F word. And because of the obscenities act which had come in around this time, he was being sued for publishing those obscene words, and he was in communication with James Murray. And James Murray eventually decides not to put in those words because he didn’t want to be sued and draw negative attention to the dictionary. So those words didn’t get in until the 1970s.
Another instance of when he was pressured by one of the specialists. So, what would happen is Murray and the editors and his coeditors would do as much as they could, which is the case now. An editor does as much research as they can. They come up with what they think is the best definition and a correct etymology, and then they’ll send that word and that entry to a specialist in whatever that field is that word belongs to. And so, he used to send the medical words to a medical doctor called James Dixon, and one of those words was appendicitis. And James Dixon writes back to Murray saying, this was in the letter A. “If you start to put in all of these itis words, you’ll never stop. So, I recommend that you don’t put in appendicitis.”
So, Murray doesn’t, and he lives to regret that because in 1902, at the coronation of Edward VI, the coronation was actually delayed because the king got appendicitis. So suddenly everyone’s talking about this appendicitis, but they couldn’t find it in the dictionary. And so Murray was embarrassed about that and wished that he had actually put it in.
Daniel: Oh, man. Okay, you can still submit slips today, can’t you? I hadn’t realised that.
Sarah: People do send in slips. And actually, The OED just launched a new website a couple of months ago. And when you look at an entry on the new website, there’s a button there called “Contribute.” So, you can actually give feedback to the editors and notify them if there’s something about the entry which you want to add. So they still are valuing this contact with the public and they’re valuing the crowd still, which I think is great.
Daniel: So, you don’t send in slips, but you just click a button?
Sarah: Yes. Although some people do send in slips. And when I used to work on the dictionary, when I first started about 30 years ago, I used to open the post and there was a bundle of slips that came in every month from a man living in Brisbane, Australia, which is actually my hometown, and his name was Mr Collier. And these slips would arrive, these bundles, eccentrically, wrapped in, like, cornflake packets with bits of dog hair stuck on them. And I’d open them up, and the amazing thing about these slips is that they all came from a single source. They came from the local Brisbane newspaper called The Courier Mail, which I grew up with.
Daniel: Oh, god.
Sarah: And so, this man over a 35-year period, Mr Collier contributed over 100,000 slips. And the words were all from The Courier Mail. And so, I did analysis of the quotations throughout the dictionary and discovered that it’s something like the 384th most cited source now, which means that there are more quotations in The OED from The Courier Mail than there are from T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and The Book of Common Prayer or something else. Yeah, there’s a bit of a bias now. And so, I actually got to meet him. So about 15 years ago, I was in Brissy, and I went to meet him in what he called… He said, “Meet me in my office,” which was the park behind the Paddo Tavern. So, I went to this park and there was Mr Collier sitting on a park bench reading, of all things, in the sunshine, he was reading The Courier Mail.
Daniel: Can I get? [laughs]
Sarah: Yeah. So, we sat down and talked for a couple of hours, and it turned out, actually, he fitted the profile of most of the dictionary people from the past in the sense that he left school at 15 and he eventually worked in the Queensland government. But this was his life, and his devotion was sending in slips to the OED. And he also collected movie posters. So, he was definitely a collector. And as I tell in the book, there’s a little surprise which I might leave for people, which you discover when you read about him. But I did say to him, “Mr Collier, we would love to fly you to Oxford to show you the workings of the dictionary and you could meet all the editors and we would love to thank you for your contribution.” And he thought for a moment and then said, “Oh, but I couldn’t possibly. Just imagine all The Courier Mails waiting for me when I got home.”
Daniel: Wow, all right, so there’s a type, is what we’re saying.
Sarah: Definitely devoted. Yeah.
Daniel: A devotional personality. Now, I put this out to our listeners. I mentioned that I was going to be talking to you. So, PharaohKatt had a question. “Are there any words that didn’t get included in the OED because they were over too quickly? I know that the process of word inclusion has sped up in our modern age. You no longer need to have a century of track record. Well, maybe I’m wrong, I don’t know. But is there like a word that you go, “Nah, it’s done, it’s passed.?”
Sarah: So actually, even if a word is past or it’s obsolete, then it still goes into the dictionary. So, Murray, just as now, they still put in words that are obsolete because it’s seen, and it’s always been seen as a scholarly text for other scholars. So, there are people, of course, working on other centuries who, if they come across a word, they want to be able to look it up in the OED. So even if a word was only used in, say, the 16th and 17th century, it’ll still get an entry in the dictionary. When a word is obsolete, then we put a little dagger beside the headword to show that it’s dead. So that has always been policy and it is really remarkable just how inclusive and comprehensive that first edition was. But you are so right.
Thanks to social media, we can track a word in real time, so it’s much easier for us to track. And, of course, semantics, like words, are changing much faster than they have ever before, thanks to social media. So that’s very exciting. And the dictionary now does quote from social media, so as long as a citation is dated, and therefore as long as it can be verified, it is a sound quote to be used in the dictionary. So they do now quote from Twitter, for example.
Daniel: So, you’re not working as an editor on the Oxford English Dictionary anymore, but when you were, were there words that you would fight over or were there words that you would kind of be on the edge about? It’s like, “Include? Not include?” Do you remember any stories like that?
Sarah: So I did work for a period. There is a whole group called The New Words Group, and I spent a period working in part of that group where there’s about a dozen people who are tracking new words and researching them and putting them into the dictionary. And you certainly want to make sure that a word isn’t just a fad word. So, you want to make sure that it’s got, say, at least five citations over a five year period, and preferably in a variety of sources. So not just in newspapers, but also in books and journals and social media. So, you want a variety there. And, I mean, they’re very inclusive as long as it’s an example of a word being used in an English context and it’s in a verifiable source, then there’s no reason for that not to go in.
Daniel: I would love to contribute, but I don’t want to waste anybody’s time. How do I be a good contributor? What information would you need? Like, if I wanted to do yeet, I want to find sources for yeet.
Sarah: Yes. So, what you would do is you would go to the OED website where there is a submissions section, and you fill out the form. And the most important thing is to submit a sound reference and a citation that is accurate. And just as those slips originally people were asked to write the author of the book that they were getting the quotation from, the title, the page number, the date, and exactly the same. Now you would just share all of that information and send it in.
Daniel: What was it like being an editor on the OED?
Sarah: There’s nothing romantic about it. It’s just a very routine, repetitive task that you’ve got to concentrate and focus on. I love just personally, and I think most linguists do love looking for patterns and solving problems, and just as you would if you were documenting a language, you try to get yourself out of the picture, and you try and be as objective as possible. We know that’s an impossible task, so there’s always that tension there, but you have to learn and learn to live with that tension and just try your best to be as objective as possible.
Daniel: But you must have had these moments where you were like, “Time tunnel, wow. I’m here. I’m doing this.”
Sarah: I think the most important thing when you’re editing is to know when to stop. So I think good editors know when to stop. And I would often have to catch myself going down a rabbit hole, and, “No, I just got to stop the madness, write this definition, and move on,” basically.
Daniel: When I was teaching at the university, it was busy, and I hardly had time to think, and there was always things to do, but every once in a while, I’d walk out actually, very distinct memory. I would walk out of my office and look over a cricket field, and it was night, and the lights were on because people were doing stuff, and there was this cricket house, this 100-year-old cricket house. I don’t even know what it’s called. It’s not cricket house, something else. But I would just think, wow, I’m in this place, and I’m a part of it, and this is where it’s happening, and I’m a little bit of history. I don’t know. Did you ever feel that way?
Sarah: I didn’t, no.
Daniel: Wow. Okay, cool. [laughs] It’s a different experience for everybody, I guess.
Sarah: Yeah. I mean, look, when I first went there, I was aware I mean, there were just normal cultural differences. I was aware that I was Australian and I was in this British context, but I think that’s what every Aussie feels when they come to Britain, and then you get used to it. And it’s fine.
Daniel: Yeah, the book is kind of amazing. I mean, it’s about the people who contributed, but it’s actually kind of about James Murray, but it’s actually about the OED, but it’s actually about the culture of dictionaries and language, but it’s actually the people that make up that culture, but it’s actually about the time. And it all winds together into this wonderful story that I really enjoyed reading.
Sarah: Well, I’m so pleased to hear that. And, yeah, it’s great. I certainly went on a huge journey in writing it, and I just wanted to finally give these people credit and shine a light on them. And so, I’m really thrilled that it’s out there now and that I hope that’s the case and that people appreciate all the time and effort that these people put in to the wonderful dictionary, which now we all enjoy.
Daniel: The book is The Dictionary People: The unsung heroes who created the Oxford English Dictionary. It’s out now from Knopf. Sarah, how can people find you?
Sarah: I’m not on social media, I’m afraid, but they’re so welcome to email me. My address is on my website at Oxford, and I welcome any contact. I’d love to be in touch with anyone who wants to contact me.
Daniel: Talking to Dr Sarah Ogilvie. Sarah, thanks so much for coming on the show and having a chat. The book is really good and we’d love to have you back again sometime.
Sarah: Thank you so much. Bye-bye, Daniel.
[interview concludes]
Daniel: And now, it’s time for Words of the Week. Hedvig, you want to start us off? I have no idea what this one even is.
Hedvig: Well, as the token… well, I’m not going to say what kind of correspondent I am. I’m going to say the word and then you’re going to guess.
Daniel: Okay, I’m ready.
Hedvig: Bugageddon,
Daniel: Bugageddon.
Ben: Bugageddon.
Daniel: Okay, I thought three things.
Hedvig: Oh, wow.
Daniel: Is this meant to be a time when bugs take over? Or is it that bugs are disappearing and we no longer see, for example, the kind of windscreen splatters that we used to? Or I thought maybe it’s like germs taking over, like superbugs that we don’t have antibiotics for. Those are my three guesses, and I just do not know.
Ben: I am going to go with a plague of something, flies, locusts, something, like moths.
Hedvig: Okay.
Daniel: We are going biblical this episode.
Hedvig: I know that I have a reputation for bringing Words of the Week that are things that had to be thought about in the last week and not like that are of great current relevance.
[laughter]
Daniel: Don’t worry.
Ben: I’m not touching on the zeitgeist, we’re touching on the Hedvig-geist.
Hedvig: However, this is a very current event word.
Ben: Okay.
Hedvig: It’s related to a current event.
Daniel: Okay.
Hedvig: I’m very surprised you haven’t caught onto it yet.
Daniel: I’ve been busy. I’ve had a lot on.
Ben: Bugageddon. So, I don’t think it’s Palestine-Israel, because I’m really struggling to see how… because, like hold on, don’t look at me like I’m crazy. You said it’s super recent current event. So, I’m going down the list. To be honest, I watch Al Jazeera news, so I’m not aware of very much else that’s going on in the world at the moment.
Daniel: Are we saying my three guesses are all wrong?
Hedvig: Your three guesses are all wrong.
Daniel: Oh, man.
Ben: I could have told you that without even her saying it. They were bad guesses.
Daniel: They were perfect guesses.
Hedvig: Well, the first one maybe is true in a sense.
Daniel: Is it about bugs? The listening device?
Hedvig: No.
Ben: Okay. It’s about insects.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: So, is it about a plague of insects of some kind? Like, some part of the world is getting just utterly horrendously inundated?
Hedvig: Yes.
Ben: Okay. Is it Australia and flies?
Hedvig: It’s not Australia.
Ben: Okay. Is it locusts in Madagascar and Africa?
Hedvig: No. This is fun.
Ben: Is it mosquitoes in some sort of like malarial part of the world?
Hedvig: It doesn’t fly.
Ben: Okay.
Hedvig: I’ll help you.
Ben: Cockroaches. [gasps] It’s fucking bedbugs.
Hedvig: It is bedbugs.
Ben: Yes, of course.
Daniel: Dang it.
Hedvig: Epicenter France, it seems like, here in Europe.
Ben: Sorry. I feel like, Hedvig, on this front, you have encountered the fact that Daniel and I are quite far away from Euro/Amerocentric news. So, if you were in New York or Paris right now…[crosstalk]
Daniel: I knew about New York. Everyone knows.
Hedvig: Yeah. That was fun. I’m glad that you’re not only concentrating on European stuff.
Ben: I want to be really clear. From what I’ve seen, that shit sounds awful.
Daniel: Just burn the place, get a new house.
Ben: Really, really awful.
Hedvig: Yeah, I think it’s really, really awful. It’s spreading on trains, which is terrifying. I’m really hoping it doesn’t get to where I am. They’ve also become resistant to a lot of the commercially available pesticides that you specifically put on them.
Daniel: Well, at least it’s good to see combining form -geddon, which…
Hedvig: I suspected Daniel would enjoy that.
Daniel: Yup, I did.
Ben: Geddon has been not an evergreen favorite, but we’ve featured a few of them over the years, haven’t we?
Daniel: Yeah. Once again, the etymology, Har Megiddo, the Hill of Megiddo, which, according to some Bible fans, is going to be the site of the great and final conflict between the forces of good and evil. And since the Bible’s always been right so far, we have no reason to doubt it.
Ben: Where is it? Out of interest, just so I can secure like a really good spot for my picnic rug and stuff.
Daniel: Somewhere in the Middle East, but not sure it can’t go anymore than that. But it’s got its own Wikipedia page, so look there.
Hedvig: [crosstalk]
Daniel: It goes along with the other Bible-based combining form that means total destruction and that’s -pocalypse.
Ben: Oh, yes, very good.
Daniel: Oh, Apostle John, you’re such a cutup. Next one from Kate on our Discord, Tober. Kate says, “Has -TOBER been covered as INKTOBER and FICTOBER, etc.? I just saw this TikTok that actually refers to this sort of thing as TOBERS.” What’s up, Hedvig, you’re grumbling?
Hedvig: No, just thinking about the different TOBERS I know.
Daniel: Well, the video that is on TikTok, I think, is from artyphex, that’s Maddie’s Minis on TikTok who mentions INKTOBER and also WHUMPTOBER, FLUFFTOBER for pets, and naturally KINKTOBER.
Ben: Because why not?
Hedvig: Kinktober? Okay.
Daniel: And the idea is that you get a series of prompts which can give you inspiration to try drawing something or writing fiction or experimenting with your kinks or whatever.
Ben: There we go.
Daniel: What about -VEMBER? Why is it not Octember?
Ben: Wait, why is it…? Don’t you mean why is it not KINKVEMBER?
Daniel: Well, it’s not kinkvember because it happens in October, and October has become…
Ben: I know but like [crosstalk] what are you asking?
Hedvig: Why does it happen in October?
Ben: Yeah. Are you asking why it happens in October?
Daniel: Well, hang on. No, but why is it that it’s September? It’s a -tember, it’s a November, it’s a December. Why isn’t it Octember? Why don’t we do that?
Hedvig: Oh, you’re asking about the actual formation of the words.
Daniel: I was.
Ben: Oh, I don’t know.
Hedvig: Okay, it is actually SEPTEM, 7th, and it’s NOVEM, and it’s DECEM and it’s OCTUM, I guess. So, why isn’t it October? I don’t know. But my mnemonic for remembering this shit is that it used to be that October was the 8th month of the year and November was the 9th, etc., and December. But then, Julius and Augustus had to get their own months and they squeezed in. And the way to remember that is that there’s two dicks that wanted to get squeezed in. So, you add number two. So, October is the eighth plus two.
Daniel: Yup, that’s it.
Ben: [laughs] Thank god. Thank god for my life up until this point. For 37 years, I have labored without knowing a good way to square that circle. And now, I have one.
Daniel: Believe it or not, secretly, some people did call it Octember. You can find it in written documents from the 500s, but it was never very popular. What’s happening is that the -ber is the month part. So, OCTO plus BER is October, but NOVEM and then BER, it’s not an ember or October. It’s a BER. It’s just a ber, and that’s “month”. Let’s see.
Ben: What about all the other ones?
Daniel: Well, you’ve got DECEM-.
Ben: Why do we not have Marchber?
[laughter]
Hedvig: Because they’re not the ninth month, they’re the month of [unintelligible [01:30:08].
Ben: Fine, fine, fine.
Daniel: We named them after goddesses and then we ran out of steam. Just call it whatever. PharaohKatt on our Discord says, “The TISM. Have you done TISM as Word of the Week yet? I made a room for the tism. Or: Maybe it’s the tism.” Time was I would have said rheumatism. But then…
Hedvig: “I made a room for the tism.” Oh, is it like rheumatism, autism, astigmatism? Like, I made a room for something that’s happening to me?
Daniel: Some kind of…
Ben: I think it’s talking specifically about autism.
Daniel: It is.
Ben: That would be my guess, yeah.
Daniel: People are indeed talking about having the tism or having a touch of the tism as a way of explaining the things they do, but also promoting a positive view of autism.
Ben: And I share my favorite TISM that I’ve heard?
Daniel: Please. Not the band?
Ben: No. [chuckles]
Daniel: It’s close.
Ben: No, Daniel. That’s for After Dark Because Language.
Daniel: Certainly is.
Ben: No. TISM RIZZ is my favorite. “He is bringing that mad tism rizz to this situation,” rizz as in charisma.
Daniel: I love it.
Ben: Rizz being the word that like, “Ooh, look at his rizz,” or, “Look at her rizz,” being [crosstalk] confidence, their ability to talk to people, that sort of thing.
Daniel: Is this the first time you’ve encountered the rizz? You look genuinely shocked and confused.
Hedvig: The combination of the words that he said, tism…
Ben: Autism. You might say, “Oh, my friend came over to visit the other day and she just brought that mad board game tism rizz.” She arrived with just like six board games and was like, “I’m about to explain all the coolest games that I know to you guys. It’s going to be sick.”
Daniel: The autism charisma.
Hedvig: The autism charisma.
Daniel: So, implying that it’s charming or endearing, is that what we’re saying?
Ben: Yeah. 100%. Sure. I’ve seen it used in a very positive, affirmatory way.
Daniel: Yay.
Hedvig: That sounds nice. And I hope that people like to be described like that. I can’t help but think that…[crosstalk]
Ben: I’ve seen it self-applied. I’ve seen it predominantly, it’s like people within the community are the ones who get to say that sort of stuff.
Daniel: In the community, yeah.
Ben: It is not something that I would like… I would feel very not good about casually just being like, “Oh, looks like someone’s got a touch of the tism.” That would be really gross and not…[crosstalk]
Hedvig: Yeah, that feels… [crosstalk]
Daniel: That’s not where we go.
Ben: Bad, all bad.
Hedvig: I know that we’re in a world of labels and brands and stuff, but I would like to be Hedvig and not a collection of things. Does that make sense?
Daniel: You are. Yes.
Ben: You are Hedvig. And I apologise for talking about possible spiciness earlier.
Hedvig: No, no. I’m fine with being on the spicy end of neurotypical, but lately by being a lot on TikTok, I’ve become a bit anti being groups. [laughs]
Ben: Yeah, fair enough.
Hedvig: I just want to be me.
Ben: I don’t begrudge anyone…
Hedvig: [crosstalk] …again at all.
Ben: I would never begrudge anyone who is experiencing a… I do not begrudge anyone who has the lived experience of other people’s judgment being put onto them due to something that they can’t control, their skin color, their sexual orientation, their neurotypicality. And in that reality, in the reality that we live in where being autistic is not awesome because of how society is, not because of how autism is, generally, I don’t begrudge anyone going, these labels, these judgments that you’re using, I’m going to play with them, I’m going to mess with them, I’m going to take them for myself. I’m going to do what I want with them. That stuff, I am always going to be like, “You go, girl, boy, whoever.”
Hedvig: That’s fair.
Ben: But I also completely understand where you’re coming from, which is like, I could also just not be defined by any of these things, which I also would be like, “Yeah, for sure. That’s a really cool way to exist in the world.”
Hedvig: I just hope that this tism thing doesn’t get used casually in an unkind… or not unkind, but just like weird ways. But it sounds like it’s being used in a cool way. So, that’s cool.
Ben: I think we can absolutely say with… or at least I can with absolute confidence, it will definitely be appropriated by regular people and used badly because that’s what’s happened to all of this language. Whether it’s AAVE, which it is 95% of the time, or stuff from the queer community or whatever, it’s definitely going to be appropriated by Martha in accounting or whatever, eventually, like it’ll make its way there. But by then, these people… these people, that doesn’t sound good.
[laughter]
By then, the sorts of people who are reappropriating words and coming up with new words and doing that sort of stuff, they’ll have moved on to like seven new things anyway, so their Martha will just look really out of touch.
Daniel: Reminds me of OCD and how that kind of has gotten sort of trivialised. It has that effect. But I think it is definitely being used within the community and we’re just kind of watching it. So, that’s a fun one to watch.
So, bugageddon, combining form tober and the tism, our Words of the Week. Let’s get to some comments. Catherine on Patreon says, “I love you folks and all, but three hours? Hmm, is too long, doesn’t fit anywhere in my day and my eyes start to glaze over at about two hours anyway. Could you break these monsters up for us mere mortals?”
Ben: Do we make three-hour shows, Daniel?
Daniel: We have done.
Hedvig: Yeah, we do.
Ben: Ah, but not regularly.
Hedvig: The last few.
Ben: Like, we record three-hour shows, I’ve been presuming this whole time, you cut us down to some normal runtime.
Daniel: Well, it used to be back in the Talk to Talk days, we would go for 45 minutes and that was news, main, and words. Then, we started adding the game. Then, I started letting the interviews run. Then, we started bringing in like a second interview. Yeah, it’s tended to go.
Ben: I think one interview hard limit. I think we need to bring this… we have bloated, Daniel. We’re like Western Steel or something. [chuckles] Like we’re too big.
Daniel: We’re always thinking about the format of the show. It’s a living thing.
Hedvig: Well, maybe we can have an upper cap on… First of all, thank you, Catherine, for your support on Patreon. I assume that she can write this because she’s a Patreon supporter?
Daniel: Mm. This came from Patreon. Yes.
Hedvig: Yeah. So, thank you, Catherine, and I appreciate sticking with us. And personally, I am a big podcast listener, and what I do is I don’t listen in one go and I did the dishes and then I go to bed and I listen to another one and I go back and it’s all a big, tangled mess. But I understand that other people do not do that, and I appreciate that three hours might be pushing it a little bit. We do do the surveys, and in the last survey, I think people said that the length was sort of like okay with them. But maybe we can just put a cap on, like three news items, three Words of the Week? Three is the magic number?
Daniel: Well, let’s hear from you. How do you consume the show? Are you daunted when you see anything longer than an hour and a half? It’s a balance for us because I want to include enough stuff and I want to feel like we’ve given lots of things a good treatment, and we only have, what, 26 shows a year. I want to cram them all full. But let’s hear from you. That’s hello@becauselanguage.com. I want to open up the discussion.
Big thanks to Sarah Ogilvie, author of The Dictionary People. Thanks to everybody who gave us ideas for this episode, the team from SpeechDocs for transcribing our words. And most of all, you patrons who keep the show going. And Ben and Hedvig, thanks for being here with me. I always enjoy doing shows with you guys.
Ben: Hate it. I can’t believe I come back every week. This is the worst.
Hedvig: Yeah. This is the only way we’re going to treat you if you say stuff like that. Ben and I are not going to be [unintelligible 01:38:24].
Daniel: Contemptuous mockery.
Ben: Unmitigated resentment.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: If you like the show, you can support us by doing a number of things. One is giving us ideas and feedback. How do you do it? Well, I’ll tell you, on the socials. We are BecauseLangPod on just about every platform, but mostly I stick to Twitter, Facebook, Bluesky, and Mastodon, leaning toward Bluesky. To be honest, enjoying it. Mm. You can send us a voice message on SpeakPipe or send us an email, hello@becauselanguage.com. Another thing you can do is tell a friend about us or leave us a review. Hey, we have a new review. Who wants to read it out loud?
Hedvig: Ben?
Ben: Oh. What? Sorry.
Daniel: You want to take this one?
Ben: Where am I? I’m reading the review? Gotcha.
Daniel: Yeah.
Ben: Love your work. Star. Star. Star. Star. Star.
Ben and Daniel: That’s five stars.
Ben: “I’m merely an enthusiast and far from an expert, but I thoroughly enjoy the show and look forward to every ‘poducational,’ (my Word of the Week episode).”
Hedvig: Nice.
Ben: “Keep doing what you do, guys. Love your work. Clappy hands emoji. JoJoBoyd1976,” via Apple Podcasts.
Daniel: Thanks. JoJoBoyd1976. If you write us a review somewhere, we’ll probably find it and we’ll read it, especially if it’s good.
Hedvig: I really like poducational.
Ben: Yeah, it’s fun. I like it.
Hedvig: It’s very cute. It’s very good. If you like our show or if you just have money left over, maybe our show is like medium on your priority list but you just have money left over, you could consider giving that money to us. We do good things with your money. Do you do good things with your money? I don’t know if you have money left over, if it’s just squalling around, maybe you don’t.
Daniel: It’s probably not as good as what we would do with your money.
[laughter]
Hedvig: Yeah, that is the argument I’m trying to make.
Ben: Thinktober.
[laughter]
Daniel: Postcards on the beach.
Hedvig: Either you really like us and you just want to give us money or you have too much money, either you’re like Elon or someone else, either way, if you give us money, we will do what we think are good things with those money, and that is support and make this show great. We use your money for a number of things. We use it to pay people at SpeechDocs to transcribe our shows so they are readable and searchable. We use it to give a little bit of money to compensate our guests when they come onto the show. We compensate ourselves for costs and effort and time that we spend on the show so that we can make this show as good as we want it to be.
You also get fun things besides the warm, fuzzy feeling of someone doing good things with your money. You also get to hang out with us on Discord and you get mailouts and other nice things. You get bonus episodes. And I’m going to read out a list now of our top patrons who have been giving us money. And if you can tell that my sickness is coming in, this is my shimmer and jitter is going to go up. I’m going to see how far I can make it. Okay.
Thank you very much to all these people. Every time I read your names, I think of you as people, and I think of you gratefully. Your names are Iztin, Termy, Elías, Matt, Whitney, Helen, Jack, PharaohKatt, LordMortis, gramaryen, Larry, Kristofer, Andy, James, Nigel, Meredith, Kate, Nasrin, Joanna, Nikoli, Keith, Ayesha, Steele, Margareth, Manú, Rodger, Rhian, Colleen, Ignacio, Kevin, Jeff, Andy from Logophilius, Stan, Kathy, ɹaʃ, Cheyenne, Felicity, Amir, Canny Archer, O Tim, Alyssa, Chris, Laurie, aengryballs, Tadhg, Luis. And we have also two new patrons at the Listener Level, Khoi and Shaya. Thank you to all of you.
Ben: Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who I will once again mention has a new album out under his band, Didion’s Bible, but he also plays with another band, Ryan Beno. So, check them both out. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
Daniel: Hm-hmm.
Daniel, Hedvig, Ben: Pew, pew, pew.
Daniel: Can I tell you another Jesus joke while we’re here?
Ben: Why not?
Hedvig: What? Okay?
Daniel: Everyone loved my last one.
Hedvig: What is this?
Daniel: Jesus goes to a restaurant with his disciples, and he says, “Can I get a table for 26 because it’s the Last Supper and we’ve got to…” And the server says, “26? What are you talking about? There’s only 13 of you here.” And he’s like, “Yeah, I know, but we’re only going to use one side…
Ben: Arghh.
Daniel: [laughs] -of the table.”
Ben: I felt it coming, and I resented the punchline on its approach. I was just like, “Don’t be that.”
Daniel: Coming a mile away. Don’t let that be what the joke is about.
Hedvig: It’s like a wedding table.
Ben: [laughs] Yeah. Like a bridal table, yeah.
Daniel: Like a trestle table is set up and it’s covered, yeah.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]