For our first episode as Because Language, we’re assisted by an all-star cast of our linguistic friends, all here to tell us what they love about language.
They are:
- Nicole Holliday of the University of Pennsylvania
- Ben Zimmer
- John McWhorter of Lexicon Valley
- Carrie Gillon of The Vocal Fries
- Ryan Paulsen of Lexitecture
- Grant Barrett of A Way with Words
- Jane Solomon, author of The Dictionary of Difficult Words
- Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch of Lingthusiasm
- Ellen Jovin, proprietor of the Grammar Table
Many thanks to all our great friends for helping us with our relaunch.
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Become a Patron!Show notes
LSA Issues Statement on Racial Justice
https://www.linguisticsociety.org/news/2020/06/03/lsa-issues-statement-racial-justice
[$$] Ben Zimmer: ‘Looting’: A Term With Roots in Protest and Conflict
https://www.wsj.com/articles/looting-a-term-with-roots-in-protest-and-conflict-11591310530
Nicole Holliday of the University of Pennsylvania
Home page: https://nicolerholliday.wordpress.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mixedlinguist
Ben Zimmer
Home page: https://benzimmer.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bgzimmer
John McWhorter of Lexicon Valley
https://slate.com/podcasts/lexicon-valley
Twitter: https://twitter.com/JohnHMcWhorter
Carrie Gillon of The Vocal Fries
https://vocalfriespod.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/carrie_gee
Ryan Paulsen of Lexitecture
http://www.lexitecture.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/PRyanPaulsen
Grant Barrett of A Way with Words
https://www.waywordradio.org
Twitter: https://twitter.com/wayword
Jane Solomon, author of The Dictionary of Difficult Words
Blog: https://www.lexicalitems.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/janesolomon
Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch of Lingthusiasm
https://lingthusiasm.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/lingthusiasm
Ellen Jovin, proprietor of the Grammar Table
https://www.grammartable.com
https://twitter.com/grammartable
Talk the Talk episode: http://talkthetalkpodcast.com/369-the-grammarian-is-in/
Urban Dictionary: doomscrolling
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=doomscrolling
Urban Dictionary: get memed
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Get%20memed
Transcript
Thanks to Termy, who assisted with transcription.
BEN: Should we… I mean, should we do a show at some point, do we think?
[THEME MUSIC]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to this episode of Because Language, a podcast about linguistics, the science of language. I’m Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. It’s media observer, educator, and smart person Ben Ainslie. Hey, Ben.
BEN: Hello. As an Australian, I feel deeply uncomfortable with any kind of laudatory statements. I’m just going to push through.
DANIEL: Get used to ’em. [LAUGHTER] And we’ve got linguist and newly minted PhD, Hedvig Skirgård.
HEDVIG: Thank you! I don’t know yet if I’m a doctor, so let’s just hold on that.
DANIEL: Well, you certainly smell minty, so…
HEDVIG: What?
DANIEL: That’s why I thought you might be newly minted.
HEDVIG: Oh, okay! [LAUGHS]
BEN: It’s all them lingonberries. You know how it is in “Sveden”.
DANIEL: Is that what it is?
HEDVIG: I’m actually wearing an Ariana Grande perfume. I don’t know if that matters.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Hedvig? Honestly, honestly, every day that we do a show, I learn a new…. You defy stereotyping so comprehensively.
HEDVIG: Yeah! I think I spent a lot of years of my life sort of needlessly rejecting feminine things. Like, I didn’t wear pink, and whatever.
BEN: I want to be abundantly clear: I am 100 percent not hating on Ariana Grande fragrances…
HEDVIG: No, no, no, I know. It surprised you, yeah.
BEN: …for I do not know them.
HEDVIG: It’s lovely!
DANIEL: Is it by any chance called “Smell U, Next”? [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: No. It’s called like RiRi. No, not RiRi; that’s Rhianna. It’s called something — Ari! I think it’s called Ari. Anyway…
DANIEL: I think you’ve got the Rianna smell too, don’t you? You do, don’t you.
HEDVIG: No! I only have one! [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: A big thanks to all of our listeners who have shown such excitement and energy about our return. Hasn’t everyone been great?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: I would like to offer a huge thank you to everyone who did our listener survey. Man, oh man! Did we get some really cool and interesting data from that? Principally: buckle up, fuckwits! There’s some swearing coming your shit-ton way! ‘Cause everyone was like, swearing is fine! So fuckin’ Ben Ainslie is fuckin’ on the fuckin’ swearing wagon. Whoo!
DANIEL: I’m setting the entire podcast to “explicit”. Thank you. Thank you, everyone.
BEN: Good times. No, but seriously, a big thank you ’cause… if for no other reason than: I got a whole bunch of really great podcast recommendations.
HEDVIG: Oh yeah, that too! Yeah. I thought it was really nice reading through. Also, people really liked… Ben, when you go off and talk about non-linguistic stuff, apparently people really like that, so, you know, this is going to be great!
BEN: I also elected to see the three times that was mentioned, and inflate it to “everyone likes this!”
HEDVIG: Yup. Yup. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: So… we are back together after a break, during which a lot of stuff has happened.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Oh, man.
DANIEL: So I think we need to talk about it.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: So we’re living in a moment now where there are two major tragedies combined. There’s the emergence of Covid-19, and the murder of George Floyd and many people of colour by the police. And these two events are not entirely unrelated. Both of these events have been compounded by incompetent leadership, both affect people of color disproportionately. So the first thing I want to say is: we’re really grateful for the uprising that we’re seeing. We want to affirm that Black lives matter. That police have been given control over areas that they have no business being a part of. For example, you know, drug addiction: oh, let’s let the police handle that. Homelessness: let’s give it to the police. And most tragically, enforcing a discriminatory social order based on race.
BEN: I mean, the only thing I’d add to that is just also that we are going to strive to be really aware that we’re a white podcast, and just push forward, knowing that we exist in the position that we’re in because of the lottery of birth, essentially. And we have always, but we will continue to always try and elevate voices of colour, queer voices, intersectional voices of all kinds. And we welcome people having a listen and maybe taking issue, or having something to say about the way we’ve gone about things, and as much as we do love to talk, we also really want to try and listen.
HEDVIG: Yeah. I think that’s really important, listening, because we are a podcast about language by three white people. It’s not our place to lead this struggle, or take up space. I think it’s good that we recognise our role, and listen when people critique what we do, but also to not step outside of that role and take on responsibility, or think that we have a space where we don’t. There are things we can talk about. We can make silly jokes about language and talk about papers, but I can’t certainly speak to the experiences of living in this world as a person of colour and I don’t intend to.
DANIEL: There was a tweet by Anne Charity Hudley and we’ve had her on the show before talking about her book “We Do Language”. And the tweet — I’m paraphrasing it — was something like “White people, what are you going to do? Don’t just like this, tell me what you are going to do.” So I decided to respond on Twitter, I took that as a challenge. I said: I am going to educate myself about my own privilege, about why the demilitarisation, why the defunding, and even the abolition of police is a good idea, and to keep learning and exercising humility about it. So that was one thing. The other thing that I said I was going to do was to feature Black voices and that includes Aboriginal voices. We are going to pass the mic whenever we can on Because Language.
BEN: Mmm. A hundred percent.
DANIEL: So please hold us to that, let us know how we’re doing, and don’t let us forget.
HEDVIG: Thank you.
DANIEL: With that in mind, let’s go on to our news item. There were a lot of papers and a lot of stories and a lot of things going on, and I guess I’ve kind of handled that in other places. But the thing that I wanted to bring up in connection with our first show was the statement by the Linguistic Society of America on Racial Justice. Let me just read a bit: “The Linguistic Society of America asserts its collective support for Black members of our community — students, colleagues, family, friends, and neighbors — who are carrying an extraordinarily painful burden during these already distressing times. The pandemic has highlighted the structural anti-black violence and broader racial disparities endemic to our communities. Black lives are being lost at a disproportional rate, as important life outcomes for Black citizens continue to be diminished. In recent months and days we have seen murders of people of color by vigilante civilians and the police, and we have heard explicit devaluation of Black lives and legitimization of attacks against them from the highest levels. We have also seen, with rising horror, the active suppression of ongoing peaceful protests and threats of military deployment against dissenting citizens. The LSA stands opposed to oppression and injustice in all its forms, and to the weaponization of language and culture.”
BEN: For my money, I think the more interesting place is to actually look at some of that language and how it’s being used, right? So the now-infamous Trump tweet, which got censored by Twitter under their new moderation laws and all that kind of stuff, like the: When the looting starts, the shooting starts. And also just the… for me, I mean, that’s just explicitly violent.
HEDVIG: It’s just… yeah.
DANIEL: Yep.
BEN: There’s absolutely no other possible way to construe that — and I don’t think there’s any intent to construe that in any other way, right?
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: No.
BEN: Like, that’s just actively very dangerous language. But the one that’s just so clearly the synonym — for racists — for Black people is the word “thug”.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: Right? and I just wanted to — I just really wanted to drill down into that, because I think people who use “thug” in that way don’t fully… I think we talk about dog whistling like: everyone who is dog whistling is kind of doing it deliberately. But I think there are people who are probably engaged in this language who are racists and who are using it racistly, who would say to themselves: Oh, I’m talking about anyone who sort of behaves in a certain way.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: But if you really were to just sort of, like, take a snapshot of that person’s brain, that is a Black person in that picture. Right? Like, that’s what’s going on there. So when we see the word “thug” deployed, what it invariably means is: my idea of a dangerous Black person.
DANIEL: Yeah. Ben Zimmer did a really good article in… was it the Wall Street Journal? about the words, specifically the words “looting” and “thug”. So that’s worth checking out. We’ll put a link on our blog, at becauselanguage.com. The statement continues: “As linguists, we need to continue to ask what we can do as individuals, programs, departments, and a discipline to bring about change. There is already important work in these directions and a clear need for more.” And then they mention a couple of articles; one by Rickford and King about the jurors’ reactions to the testimony of Rachel Jeantel, who was a speaker of African-American English in the Treyvon Martin case and how she was misunderstood because of prejudice. There’s some work by Voigt and company: Language from Police Body Camera Footage Shows Racial Disparities in Officer Respect. And there’s a lot of good work, and we need to have more. “The LSA Statement on Race also makes the point that linguists must be active participants in creating an intellectually inclusive community. For linguists seeking to mentor and support students of color, listening to and respecting their experiences is crucial, as is acknowledging and addressing, rather than overlooking or denying, the role of the discipline of linguistics in the reproduction of racism.”
HEDVIG: Yeah. I think this is something that linguists don’t like to think about, which is that prescriptivists often care about what linguists say and people who use words like “thug” — they sometimes ascribe maybe an inordinate amount of authority to academics and to linguists, especially white linguists. So it is actually a position of power that I don’t feel comfortable with and I don’t like. But it is true that when linguists say something like, you know, “Afro-American Vernacular English is a perfectly valid version of English”, people do listen. And it’s silly because as linguists, we just want to say: No, all language is okay, and don’t you already know this? And why do I need to keep telling you this?
BEN: I think the linguists need to pick up the bandanas, tie them around their faces, and start telling those people in employment interviews, it’s not this way.
DANIEL: Knock it off. You know, linguistic discrimination is incredibly pervasive and it often flies under the radar. So I think as linguists, we are really well positioned to fight this kind of discrimination, and I think it is amenable to change. People do sort of change their minds a little bit, or at least they have to concede: Okay, well, language changes and it is normal for people to talk differently. [And sign differently. Sorry for the omission. -D] So, on the show we’re going to keep doing that. We’re going to keep talking about linguistic discrimination, and if you want to have a whole podcast about it, you can listen to The Vocal Fries with Carrie Gillon and Megan Figueroa, who talk explicitly about linguistic discrimination on every episode. Just wanted to give them a mention.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Big ups!
HEDVIG: I feel like we’re all struggling at this moment to know what is the thing to do, and where our energies are best placed. And I personally having been, you know, just writing my thesis, I’m in this bubble and been quite disconnected, and at a loss, honestly, of what I should be doing in this moment.
DANIEL: Mhm.
BEN: I reckon as a podcast, my gambit here or my play is just, like, let’s us do a whole bunch of the reading and the research and the educating that white people should be doing, and then send that to as many white people as possible, basically.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: That’s a good point. We do have a platform and we should use it. But at the same time I just want to say that we also… I’m sure we have listeners in America. We probably have listeners, people of colour in America who are going to protest and who are engaged in this, and I would love to know what you think we should do.
BEN: Yes, please, please get in touch about our show, about what, like… use our platform! Right? It’s here! What do you want us to say to people?
DANIEL: All right. Well, with that in mind, let’s go on to the main part of our show. Ooo — we don’t take a track. No longer do we take tracks!
BEN: Trackless!
DANIEL: Trackless.
HEDVIG: [GASPS] Oh, no — this means I can’t just, you know, shove ’90s pop down your throat.
DANIEL: You still can.
BEN: And I can’t come up with, like, late 2000s psy-trance bangers.
HEDVIG: Yeah!
DANIEL: And then I can’t ignore them all and do something local. [LAUGHTER]
BEN: I mean, I suppose here we should probably come up with a suite of, like, stings and stabs and stuff, really, shouldn’t we? to function as, like, structural conduits.
[STRUCTURAL CONDUIT MUSIC]
DANIEL: So back when we were on a show called Talk the Talk, we used to interview loads of people about their books and their work. So to help us launch this episode, we put out the word to lots of our lingopod friends and linguist friends to tell us what some of their favorite things were about language, and boy, did we get a fantastic response! So many great people sent us so many great things. So let’s get started, shall we?
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Mhm!
DANIEL: First, we’re going to hear from Nicole Holliday of the University of Pennsylvania.
NICOLE HOLLIDAY: This is Nicole Holliday, now an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. My favorite thing about language is that I can’t think of anything that better captures fundamentally what it means to be a human being. Recently, the entrepreneur Elon Musk tweeted that he thought that human language would be obsolete in the next five years, and first it’s laughable, but also I realize that that means that linguists need to do a much better job of explaining how language actually works for human beings. The reason that something like that is kind of a ridiculous statement is that language isn’t just about communicating. You know, if we’re thinking about a world that we’re moving towards in which there is AI and robots who are capable of communicating fairly straightforward messages, I could see how someone would make that claim. But there’s so much information that we provide via human language in the choices that we make and in the really subtle points of variation that we don’t even understand well enough to encode in sort of computational systems. So when you hear me, you’re hearing me talk right now, it’s not just that you’re processing the words that are coming out of my mouth — that’s true; that’s one thing that’s happening — you’re processing them in the context of every time you’ve heard them in the rest of your life. But you’re also processing a lot of social information about me. So you hear my voice, you probably intuitively guess that I’m a woman. You probably make an assumption about my race, about my age, probably you get that I’m American, if you are also American. There’s so much information that we need about each other and about how to be social beings in this world that’s encoded in our language, and I find that sort of miraculous. The fact that, when we talk, we carry the entire stories of our lives with us, and that’s part of what we’re communicating when we’re using language, too. And for that reason, I think natural language will never be obsolete and it’s one of the things that I continuously find so fascinating about language itself, even after all these years of studying and working and doing research on it.
BEN: I’ve got a couple of hot takes.
DANIEL: Go for it.
BEN: Straight out of the gate, I think we just officially now — Elon Musk, we can just refer to as a douche-trepreneur. [LAUGHTER] Second of all, I would really really like to take a class from Professor Holliday because, man oh man, she’s one of those teachers who clearly is just like, “You guys. You GUYS! [LAUGHTER] This is so much cooler than you think it is!”
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, it’s true that language is a lot more than bare communication. We really do carry the entirety…
BEN: Bear? Bear communication?
DANIEL: [LAUGHS and GROWLS]
BEN: Is that what we’re going for here?
DANIEL: No.
BEN: Because if that’s the case — man! I’m going to stop trying.
HEDVIG: I just thought that was really well put, and a really good point as well: I think we tend to think about language as this, like, information game, like just getting ideas from one head to another, and it’s not just that. We are also communicating unconsciously and consciously about who we are, where we come from, and it’s just so fascinating as well, what she says about how we’re running all these processes all the time. You know, we’re both decoding what she’s saying, but then: where is she from? I was trying to pinpoint where in America she was from as well, but I couldn’t.
BEN: Nah, she just has like General Americano accent, I reckon.
HEDVIG: Ah — there are some things in there that I thought were a little bit distinct, but I can’t really — augh! they’re sort of slipping from my… it’s like a dream! They’re slipping from my mind. But for a moment, my brain was like: Oo! the way she did that fricative.
BEN: Oh! It’s like that Antonio Banderas movie, where he’s, like, captured by Vikings, and he can’t understand their language…
HEDVIG: Yeah yeah yeah! What was it… um…
BEN: And then every now and then and then, like, a little word comes through.
HEDVIG: The Thirteenth Warrior, whatever, yeah.
BEN: Yes! That one! Yeah! Exactly!
HEDVIG: Yeah, but it’s slipping from me now, like a dream. But I think that was so well put. We do carry our identities and our experiences with us cumulatively through our lives, through our language. Yeah.
DANIEL: All right. Let’s go on to a chat that I had with Ben Zimmer. Ben Zimmer is a writer for The Wall Street Journal, and he’s all over the language beat. So let’s listen to Ben and me.
BEN ZIMMER: Well, there’s so much that one could say about the joys of language. One thing that I appreciate in studying language, writing about language is not just language itself and how cool it is, but the wonderful community of linguists and language lovers. You know, there are people who study language, people who write about language, people who podcast about language, and these days it’s very easy to communicate and build things together. You know, from when I started contributing to Language Log back in the mid-aughts, you know, this is one thing that I noticed right away — this kind of community aspect of it.
DANIEL: We have an amazing language community. We would be lost without the people who come on the show like yourself and like all our contributors and who help us put the word out there.
BEN ZIMMER: Yeah. You know, I was thinking of a kind of a funny example of just this type of thing that has come up again recently, and that involves the word ‘shitgibbon’, which I know that you talked about on your old show. So this just strikes me as a great example of what I’m talking about. So you know, if you’ll recall back in 2016, a British fellow on Twitter called Donald Trump a shitgibbon — in fact, it was a tiny-fingered Cheeto-faced ferret-wearing shitgibbon.
DANIEL: Wow.
BEN ZIMMER: And then in 2017, an American politician from Pennsylvania used it, and then suddenly shitgibbon was everywhere. And I wrote about it, just sort of reacting to this word that people were using as an insult towards Trump. And so I wrote about it on the Strong Language blog, the sweary blog about swearing, and then I wrote about it for Slate, as well. And you know, I was interested in: where did the word come from, and why is it so appealing to use this kind of insult and similar ones? And the amazing thing is right away, I was able to find out where it came from because a guy got in touch with me named David Quantick, a British humor writer, who actually originated it back when he was writing for the NME, the music magazine from Britain back in the ’80s and ’90s. And then he went on to write for shows like Veep, and used that word shitgibbon. And so right away, just from talking about this online, I was able to find out exactly where it came from. But then even more amazingly, linguists started chiming in about my question about, well, why do we do this and why do we see this so often, where it’s a one-syllable curse word followed by a funny two-syllable word? And you know, there are so many other examples, many that were being used towards Trump at the time, like you know: ‘cockwomble’ and ‘fucktrumpet’ and all of these things. And so then there were linguists like Gretchen McCulloch and Taylor Jones who were writing about this very quickly, and you of course chimed in, as well. I know that you talked about it on your show, and you came up with a lovely table of frequencies for these different “shitgibbon compounds”, as they came to be known. And you made an observation that having two of the same vowels is great, like ‘twatwaffle’ or ‘fucktrumpet’ or ‘cockwomble’.
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: And then you know, that led to actual scholarly research on the topic. You know, there was a paper by phonologists looking at “Vowel Harmony and Shitgibbon Compounds”. And then earlier this year, there was yet another scholarly paper by people who do psycholinguistics in the psychology department at Temple called “Building the Perfect Curse Word”, and it would take this sort of algorithmic approach to understanding shitgibbon compounds. And so before you know it, there’s an entire subfield of linguistics in shitgibbonology, and I just find that wonderful that that just sort of came together, just from people talking about this, and even though it’s something that just seems kind of like a funny insult, it gives you all of these insights actually into how language works.
DANIEL: When it comes to human language productivity and creativity, you just sort of stand in awe, don’t you?
BEN ZIMMER: Yeah, it’s incredible and I think that something like, you know, these shitgibbon compounds are a great example of that. It’s just, you know, people will always find ways to innovate. They’ll take the building blocks of language that they already have and create brand new ways of using them… using those building blocks. So suddenly, you get these bizarre compounds like ‘douchecanoe’, or whatever. And again, it might seem very frivolous, but when you start analyzing and looking at: how do we do this? How do we put these things together for various reasons? And it could be humorous, it could be a political purpose — which you know, we’re still seeing. People still talk about this in terms of criticism of Trump, for instance. And so there are always all of these different aspects at work. And it’s a joy for me just to observe it and bring it to people in the writing that I do.
DANIEL: Ben, do you have a favorite shitgibbon compound?
BEN ZIMMER: One that I remember liking at the time — again, I think it was used towards Trump — was ‘wankpuffin’ and I think that’s a pretty good one. You know, there’s ‘turdweasel’, ‘dickbiscuit’… I mean, there’s so many good ones. It’s really hard to choose.
DANIEL: It is. It’s like choosing your children. [LAUGHTER] Ben Zimmer, thanks so much for jumping on the phone with me. How can people find out what you’re doing?
BEN ZIMMER: Well, you can follow me on Twitter, @bgzimmer. You can also find me at benzimmer.com, and look for my writings in the Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic and other places.
DANIEL: (to BEN and HEDVIG) Does anybody have any favorite shitgibbon compounds?
HEDVIG: I asked Ste, and you know we had to postpone our… we were going to get married this summer, and we had to postpone it because of everything. But I got confirmation today that we are truly meant for each other, because he also has ‘cockwomble’ as his favourite.
BEN: Ah, there you go. See, I immediately looked at all of the low-scoring ones, thinking that there was an underdog who really needed a helping hand, and I’ve got to say ‘jizzpiston’ is really high up for me.
DANIEL: Yeah, yeah. For me, anything with biscuit. Fart biscuit, dick biscuit… anything with biscuit, it’s just great.
BEN: Biscuit is such a wonderful Australian catch-all. I use it all the time.
DANIEL: Let’s move on to John McWhorter. He does the Lexicon Valley podcast, and he teaches linguistics at Columbia University.
JOHN MCWHORTER: My favorite thing about language is its changeability, its inherent changeability. And so, there were people on the steppes of Ukraine about 6 to 8000 years ago who would have said something like: Gʷərēi owis, kʷesjo wl̥hnā ne ēst, eḱwōns espeḱet. And what that meant was: “There was a sheep on a hill that didn’t have any wool and he saw horses.” That’s what it meant. If they wanted to say that, they would have said what I just said. That sentence — Gʷərēi owis, kʷesjo wl̥hnā ne ēst, eḱwōns espeḱet — gradually morphed bit by bit into “On a hill, a sheep which had no wool saw horses.” That’s how it ended up coming out on the windy island that we now know as England, just bit by bit. Cultural exchange with speakers of other languages had maybe a very little to do with the difference between the old sentence and the sentence now. And it wasn’t a matter of slang changing. Almost completely, it was just a matter of the fact that language morphs sound by sound, suffix by suffix. It really is a majestic thing, it’s just like the way cloud formations are always changing. And next thing you know, you go from “Gʷərēi owis, kʷesjo wl̥hnā ne ēst, eḱwōns espeḱet” to “On a hill, a sheep that didn’t have any wool saw horses.” To me, that is the most amazing thing about language: its changeability, and how that explains why we have so many different languages and dialects.
DANIEL: You know, a lot of people just hate language change. So, to say that that’s your favorite thing… that’s so linguist!
HEDVIG: It is.
BEN: #ThatsALinguist. Like, being able to study swear words, and “I love that stuff shifts.”
DANIEL: Yep!
HEDVIG: I also… just maybe just an explainer for people who didn’t catch all the things… what John McWhorter was saying. So, as far as I understand it, he’s pronouncing a sentence in Proto Indo European.
DANIEL: Mmm. About 7,000 years ago, probably?
HEDVIG: Yeah, between 8 and 6000, we don’t really know. He also says specifically steppes of Ukraine, which is, like you know, taking a stance in Proto Indo European homeland, but that’s fine, that’s fine!
DANIEL: That’s the right stance, I think.
BEN: Ohh…!
HEDVIG: Well, even if it wasn’t the homeland, it probably was also spoken there.
BEN: Fight fight fight fight fight!
HEDVIG: Or soon moved there, so you know, whatever.
DANIEL: Okay. It was the mountain horsey peeps.
BEN: Mountain horsey peeps, as Ben Ainslie likes to call them.
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: And what he said was a reconstructed sentence. So the reason why he specifically says “the sheep” and “the wool”and “the horses” are: these are some of the few words that we have been able to reconstruct. This is, like, one of the few sentences we can make! It doesn’t mean that people then only talked about sheeps and horses and wool. It just means that it’s one of the…
BEN: Hey look, if you’re a steppe people, like I’m sure you are talking about them quite a lot!
HEDVIG: Yeah, fair enough, fair enough. And also, like, he’s also taking another stance, which is: It sounded very Latin, the way he was pronouncing it. And I kind of enjoy that.
DANIEL: Yeah. You know, when I do my Middle English voice, I don’t know how it really sounded. I just do my best sort of Olde Accent.
BEN: Yeah, you do OP Shakespeare.
DANIEL: I try. Now I got a bunch of people who are mentioning very specific things. We’ve had the long view; now we’re going to zoom in. Helping us is Carrie Gillon of the podcast The Vocal Fries. She does that along with Dr Megan Figueroa.
CARRIE GILLON: Because Language! Welcome to existence. My name is Carrie Gillon. I’m the co-host of the Vocal Fries podcast, the podcast about linguistic discrimination. And I don’t know how to choose what my favorite thing about language is, but I’m going to say: it’s reduplication. So reduplication is where we copy a whole word or part of a word to create something new. A new meaning. So in English, we do this with like: Do you like him or do you LIKE like him? And in one of the languages that’s nearest and dearest to my heart, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh or Squamish which is a Salish language spoken in southwest British Columbia, you can reduplicate part of the word to create the plural. So s-λan-ai̯ is ‘woman’, and s-λin-s-λan-ai̯ is ‘women’.
DANIEL: (to BEN and HEDVIG) We bonded over Squamish, I have to say.
BEN: Just being from that rainy, dreary part of the world.
DANIEL: There you have it.
BEN: Reduplication is awesome. I adore it.
DANIEL: It’s too bad you weren’t on the Reduplication Reduplication show. That was fun.
BEN: I know.
HEDVIG: I also really like reduplication and the way it’s used for sort of like iconicity in this case so like, if you say a woman more than once you can understand that, like: ooh that’s like similar to like plural. You have more of the material in the word, so you have more of the thing!
BEN: You have more of the women!
HEDVIG: I really like that, and I’m also very impressed by her… laryngeals? No, sorry, laterals, like [λ], [λ] sound. I can’t probably do that. Good job.
DANIEL: I love reduplication, but I love ablaut reduplication, where you repeat a thing, but you modify the vowel. Like the way the bells always go “ding dong”, they never go “dong ding”.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Why don’t they‽
DANIEL: We always say “splish splash, I was taking a bath.” It’s never “splash splish”. It goes I-A-O, like splish splash splosh. But I have a story here. My oldest daughter, who’s now three years old, we have a book — it’s one of these books that they give you at the hospital?
BEN: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah, “Baby Ways”. It has a bit: This is the way the baby washes, splash splosh splish. And it does A-O-I! It doesn’t follow the order. But interestingly, my daughter was trying to read the book. You know how they can’t really read, but they know it?
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: She said: “This is the way the baby has a bath, splish splash splosh.” So she came up with the ablaut reduplication the way we do it, contrary to the input she was getting from the book. Isn’t that cool?
BEN: That is very cool.
HEDVIG: That is cool.
DANIEL: Let’s go on to Ryan. Ryan Paulson from Lexitecture. You know, there’s an interview with Ryan and Amy that we did and it was really fun. So let’s hear from him.
RYAN PAULSON: Hi, everybody. My name’s Ryan and I’m one half of Lexitecture, a podcast about etymology. That’s word origins and histories. My co-host Amy couldn’t be here at the moment, but she sends her most enthusiastically Scottish regards as well. We were thrilled to be asked to participate in the launch of Because Language. Huge congratulations, and welcome back to the word-nerd podcast world to Daniel, Hedvig and Ben. I think one of the biggest things I’ve learned and learned to love about language through doing research for our show and talking with other language podcast geeks is just how fluid language is, and always has been. I was quite the prescriptivist before I started, but the simple fact is that it’s nearly impossible to get hung up on “mistakes” people make with language when you spend any time at all looking at how drastically and constantly English has changed over the centuries. For example, people get all giggly and snide over things like “nucular” or “asterix”. What if people just started swapping other sounds and letters around willy nilly? You’d have people saying ridiculous things like “waps” and “hros”, instead of “wasp” and “horse”. People would count “ten, eleven, twelve, thriteen…”. And it would be absolute chaos! Well the truth is that hross, wæps, and thriteen used to be absolutely correct, until a process called metathesis happened, and the sounds gradually got swapped around. Eventually the swapping stuck, and we’ve got the words we know and love today. So my advice to you is love the words you use, but love the words other people use too. Let go of the rules you love to cling to, and really jump in on the wild and crazy ride that is language evolution. And be sure to listen to all the Because Language you can while you’re at it… maybe a little bit of Lexitecture or two if you’ve got time. Congratulations again, Daniel, Hedvig and Ben — we can’t wait to hear what you’ve got in store for all of us.
DANIEL: Aw, lovely.
BEN: That was very nice of him. He sounds better than we do! That was a very well put together little sting.
HEDVIG: Yeah, that was… both like, what he said content wise, but as a person who’s just now coming back to, like, talking on a show and I’ve sort of forgotten how to do all this, it was very well spoken!
BEN: Like, we just sit around talking shit, and he’s sitting there like, crafting some Jed Bartlet-esque, Toby Ziegler-written little perfect nugget!
HEDVIG: Yeah! It was really good! It was perfect. And it was a very good point, well made, and… yeah. Just great.
DANIEL: Metathesis is really cool. Here’s one of my favorite metathesis bits. The word “curd”, you know, like curds
BEN: Like, when you make cheese.
DANIEL: Yeah, exactly. It is metathesis. Can you guess what word it’s related to?
HEDVIG: Crud?
BEN: Please tell me crud.
DANIEL: It’s crud!
BEN: YES! Yes.
DANIEL: The two words are related!
HEDVIG: Wow.
DANIEL: And the same as task and tax, those are related as well, they’re both a duty that you have.
BEN: Oh, of course, yeah right!
DANIEL: I love metathesis.
HEDVIG: The /r/ thing… I’ve heard a theory that, you know, when you have an /r/ next to a vowel, you often r-colour the vowel. And then that can sort of like…
BEN: Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa… back it up, dummy Ben time. You… hwat now?
HEDVIG: You r-colour the vowel, so…
BEN: You r-colour as in, like, to colour something?
HEDVIG: You, you… while you’re doing the vowel you’re sort of like doing a bit of the /r/ at the same time — one of the /r/’s that you have available in your repertoire.
BEN: Not to be confused with, like, r-COLLARing the vowel? Like in some sort of kinky sex dungeon way?
HEDVIG: Eh, what?
DANIEL: No.
BEN: No, I’m just making sure. Like, as the non-linguist, sometimes I feel like I have to really drill down for some of the other dummies out there like me.
HEDVIG: Yeah yeah yeah no, that’s fair.
DANIEL: You’re maybe working through your own issues there, Ben.
BEN: I’m just…! [LAUGHTER] Okay, fine — someone else might have said “like you put on a dog”, but I don’t like pets, okay?
DANIEL: No kink-shaming, no kink-shaming.
BEN: Like you put on a treasured loved one who just wants to not make decisions for awhile.
DANIEL: You know, that’s a really good point, because we’ve got “curd” and “thirteen” and “bird” and “horse” — those all have /r/’s.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah. So the idea is that you start out by just saying the /r/ at the same time as you’re doing the vowel, and then when you’ve got the /r/ sort of on top of the vowel — because /r/ is one of the few things you can do while you’re doing a vowel — you then sort of forget if it was came before or after.
BEN: Oh, so basically — yeah, okay, okay, I get you.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it sort of hops on to the middle. It’s like a trilobite in Hive. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Oh my gosh, so that’s why people say “modren” and “perscriptive”. You know, instead of “prescriptive”.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah, I think that’s what’s going on.
BEN: So, it’s kind of the difference between like say, “rock” could conceivably turn into “orc”. Kind of thing.
HEDVIG: Mmm ಠ_ಠ
BEN: Right, like if we were to take…
DANIEL: Mmm ಠ_ಠ
HEDVIG: Mmm ಠ~ಠ
BEN: No?
DANIEL: Mmm ಠ~ಠ
HEDVIG: I think it’s… mmm ಠ_ಠ [LAUGHS] Wait, maybe it is!
DANIEL: Maybe!
BEN: Well, isn’t that the same thing?
HEDVIG: Maybe it is! Maybe the idiot’s onto something.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Gee, thanks, Hedvig!
DANIEL: I feel like the beginning of the word is a little different.
HEDVIG: Yeah, that’s what I was thinking, too, yeah.
BEN: Hang on, hang on hang on hang on. Just for the sake of… the reason I gave that nonsense example is not… just because I’m stupid, but because Ellis is five now, which means he’s learning how to read in school, which means one of the things they do now…
HEDVIG: …is talk about orcs?
BEN: …with phonics is they give them nonsense words.
DANIEL: Ah, yeah.
BEN: Right? They deliberately construct non-real words to just, like, see how the kids are going at, like, constructing the rules in their heads, kind of thing, about how different phonemes sound when you put them in different parts of the word and all that kind of stuff.
HEDVIG: Aha.
BEN: And… that’s what I was doing. basically!
DANIEL: There you go. There you go. We are moving along! Thanks, Ryan.
BEN: OKAY, FINE.
DANIEL: Let’s go on to to Grant Barrett, who along with Martha Barnette, hosts the incredibly popular podcast A Way with Words.
GRANT BARRETT: I’m Grant Barrett of A Way with Words, an American radio show and podcast about language. My favorite thing about language is polysemy. That is, that a word can have more than one meaning. For example, the word ‘mango’ can mean a fruit, but ‘mango;, in parts of the United States along the Ohio River Valley, can also mean a green bell pepper. And the story of how it got that way is really interesting. It involves the British in India and hundreds of years of subjugation of those people, and it involves the British encountering strange fruit and the pickling techniques that were required to bring it back to the UK and picking techniques being used for other things like melons and cucumbers and of course peppers. And then those pickling techniques being brought over to the US and in the United States somehow that pickling technique became transferred by name to just one thing: to green bell peppers. And it stayed. And even now in Ohio and Kentucky and Indiana and other places, you will still find people who call green bell peppers mangoes! Congratulations to Because Language! I wish you all the best.
DANIEL: Thanks, Grant.
BEN: Oh, he’s so nice.
DANIEL: He’s lovely.
HEDVIG: This reminded me of, in Samoan — I’ve told you about this before, right? Pisupu?
DANIEL: I don’t remember.
BEN: No.
HEDVIG: Aaaa!!! Okay! It’s my favorite thing! So, when…
BEN: Wait, we’ve got a sting from Hedvig! Hedvig, what’s your favorite language thing?
HEDVIG: No, but it’s like the mango thing.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: So, when canned food arrived in Sāmoa, the first, like, predominant canned food that arrived was pea soup.
BEN: [SHUDDERS] Wow, in the world of cans, that is a real bum steer.
DANIEL: Can be good.
HEDVIG: So the word for canned food became pisupo. The most prominent canned food became corned beef.
DANIEL: Hm.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: So then it shifted. So corned beef in Samoan is pisupo.
DANIEL: WHAT!! That’s bananas!
HEDVIG: Yeah. Isn’t that great?
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: So if you’re having dinner, and you’re going to give me some corned beef, you’ll say, Hey, have some pisupo.
HEDVIG: Yeah yeah yeah! That’s still an entirely, you know, common way to refer to corned beef.
DANIEL: Meaning jumps!
HEDVIG: Yeah
DANIEL: Meaning jumps.
HEDVIG: And the mango — I didn’t know about the mango one, but that was a really fun one, too.
DANIEL: I didn’t either.
BEN: That makes… that would deeply weird me out if I was in that part of America, right? Like if I was just cruising through Ohio, and I went to a shop and I really wanted to make — I don’t know — some gumbo or something else that needs a green bell pepper…
DANIEL: Capsicum.
BEN: And there were and they were like, “Have this mango!” [LAUGHTER] I would be properly weirded out. I would feel like I was being punked.
DANIEL: You know, my English students used to complain about polysemy because every word meant like eight things, and it was hard to remember. But polysemy is great, because do you really want to have to memorise an entirely new word for every concept?
BEN: Now is polysemy the same thing as senses?
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: So is all the different ways we can say “bank” the same thing?
DANIEL: Yes, that is polysemy.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: It just makes sense to pick up and use an existing word for a similar concept.
BEN: 100 percent.
HEDVIG: But you’re right, Ben, that there’s sort of two kinds, right? So, “bank”, the bank of a river, and where you put your money are etymologially unrelated.
BEN: There’s like ten more, right?
DANIEL: Yep.
HEDVIG: Yeah, but then there’s things that are actually related.
BEN: Oh, I see what you mean, so like those two words came from totally different… they’re like squid eyes.
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly.
DANIEL: Actually, no. Bank and bank, the river bank and the money bank come from the same place; that is, a bench.
HEDVIG: No!
DANIEL: Yeah, you conducted your bank business on a bench, and then also a river bank resembles a bench.
BEN: Oh, really?
HEDVIG: Darn it!
DANIEL: They are the same.
BEN: I would have thought that the river bank one would not have been the same.
DANIEL: I’ll tell you one that doesn’t come from… these two words are unrelated: ear and hear. Not related.
BEN: Wait, but they’re different words.
HEDVIG: They’re not integral, though. But that is weird.
DANIEL: They look similar, they kind of relate to the same thing, but they’re not related.
HEDVIG: That’s weird.
BEN: Ear and hear!
HEDVIG: And because of regular sound correspondences, that’s also really… so in Swedish, it’s höra and öra. They’re also similar.
BEN: Ah! I love when that happens, when you’re just like: Clearly, aliens created the universe! Because there are these really weird parallels between different languages that shouldn’t really be there!
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, we’ve heard some super specific things that our friends love about language, but now let’s get back on the wide view. We’re going to talk to Jane Solomon, who wrote The Dictionary of Difficult Words. I loved that chat with her.
BEN: Oh! I read this so… like, this is on high rotation in my house.
DANIEL: Me, too! My daughter, 3 years old, says — this is at the dinner table — “Dad, I’m masticating my food!”
HEDVIG: Oh, god.
BEN: Oh, wow. That is 100 percent the child of a linguist.
DANIEL: Uh, yeah. Here’s a chat I had with Jane. (to JANE SOLOMON) Tell me about what you love about language as a lexicographer, or just as a person who uses language.
JANE SOLOMON: Well, right now I think my appreciation for language is very very based in this new experience I’m going through. I have a very young baby who doesn’t speak yet, and I just am really appreciative of the fact that language helps us communicate, and take all the thoughts in our head and put them out in the world and make connections with other people, because right now I’m sort of interpreting cries and trying to figure out what they mean. So I’m really really excited for my baby to start using actual words. And so that’s where I am with language right now, and this is a completely new experience for me. It’s interesting, because I think that before I had a baby I was like: I’m not going to be able to handle all the crying. I’m going to find it really annoying. I’m going to get really angry when the baby cries, like… I don’t know… I don’t know how I’m going to deal with this, because I’ve never really been around infants before, not for a prolonged period. And it turns out, because I know that’s his only way of communicating, I’m really appreciative when he cries. I’m like: oh, you’re trying to tell me something! You’re reminding me that I should feed you, or change you, or that you’re tired, or all these things. So it’s… yeah, even the language of crying is something that I’m new to, but I’m excited to start decoding.
DANIEL: I think it’s interesting that, as a lexicographer, someone who studies and catalogues words, your response to this question about your favorite thing about language is not really about words at all! Are you exploring some new frontier here, I think?
JANE: Oh, yeah. I mean, I guess I could say my favorite thing about language is that it’s better than crying. Right now, that just happens to be where I am right now. But I mean — yeah, just being able to take abstract thoughts in your head and and express them… that’s huge!
DANIEL: It’s magic!
JANE: Yeah.
DANIEL: It’s sorcery.
JANE: And I can’t wait to, like… right now, sort of trying to get at: what is the personality of this very very young human? I mean, I fully expected to not really fully enjoy having a small child around until we could have a conversation, but luckily it’s been great so far.
DANIEL: (to BEN and HEDVIG) Jane Solomon there.
BEN: Oh, I do feel for her. I mean, I’m really jazzed for her that she has found, like, a way to approach infantdom that isn’t like a drill boring into your head. That’s good for her.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: I will say this though: Man oh man, when they do start speaking — so much better!
DANIEL: I do. I enjoy kids who can talk. You know, somebody tweeted once: animals know how to do animalness, but human babies come out with a spot on their head that isn’t done yet [LAUGHTER] and the communication skills of an alarm clock.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] Yeah, you can say that about language: it is better than crying.
BEN: That is such a great take away!
DANIEL: Better than crying.
HEDVIG: And as we were saying — like Nicole earlier on the show was talking about how language is more than communication. It’s also all this, like, unconscious indexing of your social identity and everything going on, but it is also information transfer, you know? But it is really really useful. I’m desperately trying to get my niece here that one of her first words is my name.
BEN: Oh, yes!
HEDVIG: I’m working very hard on it.
BEN: As in you’re trying to make that happen, not it has happened.
DANIEL: Can’t really force these things.
HEDVIG: You’d be surprised!
BEN: Daniel, that’s fucking quitter talk! [LAUGHTER]
BEN: Don’t you listen to him, Hedvig! You give it a red hot go.
HEDVIG: So it’s going okay. She is more on the [aban] [aman] track…
BEN: Oh, boo.
HEDVIG: …but she’s doing [hed], [hedi], [het̪] things, and…
DANIEL: Oh, yeaaaah!
BEN: Do you know what, I would almost take that as a win!
HEDVIG: I am basically, yes. It’s great.
DANIEL: Supplant those parents!
BEN: But then, abdicate your responsibility completely! [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Our next clip comes from Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch from Lingthusiasm. Great friends of the pod.
GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: Hi, I’m Gretchen McCulloch, author of Because Internet and co-host of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics.
LAUREN GAWNE: And I’m Lauren Gawne, also co-host of Lingthusiasm.
GRETCHEN: I’m really enthusiastic about how people are changing language online to communicate our emotions and intentions better with each other.
LAUREN: And I’m really enthusiastic about all the bits of language we don’t always notice, like how people’s gestures are a really important part of communication.
GRETCHEN: We were actually having a conversation about this a while back, and we realized that emoji and gestures have a lot of similarities.
LAUREN: It’s amazing how technology is making writing better by making it more like speaking to someone face to face by using things like emoji.
GRETCHEN: Philosophers have been proposing ironic punctuation marks for over five centuries, and internet people have finally figured out how to make irony possible in writing.
LAUREN: We got so excited by this idea that we did a whole analysis of how people use emoji, and we ended up writing a whole academic paper about our theory of emoji as digital gestures.
GRETCHEN: And we also did a whole Lingthusiasm episode about it.
LAUREN: Online language is so great, whether that’s using emoji, chatting with long distance friends, or podcasts like this one.
GRETCHEN: We hope you enjoy this brand new episode, and congrats on the shiny new name!
DANIEL: (to HEDVIG and BEN) Lauren and Gretchen from Lingthusiasm.
BEN: I’m sensing a real throughline here and I feel really comfortable saying this as the non-linguist on the show: Clearly, what all you linguists like is dicking around!
DANIEL: Yes? Was that ever in doubt? [LAUGHTER]
BEN: I think some people probably come to this podcast thinking that, like, linguistics is a serious important field. And then, like, even a cursory listen to any of our shows will reveal some linguist being like: I made a graph about shitgibbon! I wrote an academic paper about irony marks! And I want to be clear: I don’t think that’s the bad stuff. I’m not knocking that. I’m just — I’m calling a spade a spade on this one.
[NOTE: We’ve used an expression here that we have learned is offensive. We apologise for this, and we’re retiring it from usage. Instead, we’ll use an expression like “I’m telling it like it is.” If you want to know more about this, you can read here. Thanks to the listeners who do the work of informing us and helping us do better.]
HEDVIG: I think you’re right. I think, however, that some things that look a bit silly can hide something more interesting and serious?
BEN: Okay, fine! Be all serious about it!
DANIEL: Now remind me — what are our ways of communicating sarcasm? Was it the…
BEN: We had the sarc mark. Ugh!
DANIEL: Ugh. The tongue-out emoji? Was that what they’re suggesting?
HEDVIG: I think just any emoji.
BEN: I don’t find the tongue out emoji denotes sarcasm. Do you guys find that? Like when you use it, it’s not saying: I’m being sarcastic.
HEDVIG: No,it’s not sarcasm.
BEN: No, it’s more a gentler fire.
HEDVIG: I think what happened was that for decennia, and maybe hundreds of years, there was no way of really marking irony without, like, really knowing the other reader and being able to hear their voice and figure it out. And then they try to make one marker of irony and of tone in written language and they, you know… what was it… sarcasi-bang?
DANIEL: It was the reverse question mark. That was the one.
HEDVIG: Reverse question mark. Yeah. But now that we have emojis, what’s happened is we have so many more, and we can do more nuances.
BEN: Yeah, yeah.
HEDVIG: So like, the difference between an upside down smiley and the tongue-out emoji. And not only are there more and they have different meaning, they’re also changing around. So like, the tongue-out probably doesn’t mean the same thing now that it did five years ago.
DANIEL: Don’t forget also the slash s (/s) for sarcasm, and also the aLtErNaTiNg UpPeR aNd lOwEr CaSe.
HEDVIG: Oh, like Spongebob. Yeah.
DANIEL: Oh, god. Oh nah, hard pass on that one for me.
DANIEL: Which I don’t do. I don’t do.
BEN: That’s… that’s a no.
HEDVIG: It is a really good point about just mediums, you know? That written and spoken language are very different things. They have different capabilities. Now that I… I’m the kind of person who likes to talk more than I like to write, and I’ve been trying to write my thesis and I’m like, why can’t I just beam my things in my head to my supervisor? Why can’t… why do I have to put it in words?
BEN: When will they invent DownloadShitToYourBrain.com?
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly!
BEN: And UploadShitFromYourBrain.com?
HEDVIG: And my supervisor commented something on my thing, and I’m like, I know that! I just didn’t write it! and like yeah. [LAUGHTER] So how would they know?
BEN: Just get inside my head!!
HEDVIG: Yeah! So now I really appreciate writing as well, because one of the great things about writing is that you can go back and change it afterwards, so I can go… you know, I can’t go back in time and change what I said, but I can change what I put on a piece of paper, which is great textually.
DANIEL: Let’s finish up our discussion with a chat between me and Ellen Jovin of Grammar Table. Remember her?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: She’s the one that carts a table around…
BEN: I think she 100 percent… it’s not even close. She’s my favorite guest of all time. A hundred percent.
DANIEL: We don’t play favorites around here, but she’s…
BEN: I a hundred percent play favorites, and she’s mine.
DANIEL: She’s awesome. Let’s hear what she’s got. (to ELLEN JOVIN) So language does a lot for you, otherwise you wouldn’t be taking a grammar table out there and soliciting questions from people that you meet. What is it about language that makes you do this?
ELLEN JOVIN: Well, I get a kick out of everything relating to words. So we could be talking about spelling, pronunciation, writing effectively, writing creatively, like anything… learning a language — I don’t know, I just get such a kick out of all of that. So the process of concentrating on a question with a stranger that tickled their fancy — you know, because they’re the ones that bring the content to me, I don’t come up with quiz questions. Although I guess if people wanted that in the future, I could try it as a fun alternative. But anyway, they come with their own content, and then we concentrate on this thing that connects us, and it’s just delightful. It warms my heart, it warms my spirit — I really miss it a lot right now!
DANIEL: Hm. Because I noticed on Twitter, you’re always cranking out these grammar surveys. What’s one that tickled your fancy recently, that you noticed?
ELLEN: I just want to point out that they often don’t have much to do with grammar, but they do have to do with words, so I like the one that I put up the other day about sounds people make, such as mmm or hmm, or whatever in conversation, where they think the other person is going to understand that sound the same way they do, and they don’t.
DANIEL: Oh!
ELLEN: Like for instance, I have a sound… yes, so the listener gets totally confused. So I have a sound that I make, and I’m going to try it on you, if you don’t mind.
DANIEL: Sure.
ELLEN: So if you’re talking along, and I say “Hmm.” [FALLING INTONATION]
DANIEL: Oh!
ELLEN: Like that. Hmm!
DANIEL: Oh.
ELLEN: What does that mean to you?
DANIEL: That sounds like you slightly disagree with something that I said, or that it’s new information.
ELLEN: [LAUGHS] Interesting! Because, see, if I disagree, I tend to be very verbal about it! So you’re likely to have a lot more material than that! So usually, I think — I would need to audit myself very carefully with the objective help of a linguist — but I believe that when I say “Hmm”, that normally I’m just kind of encouraging more information. I’m acknowledging… It’s like an email receipt. I’m acknowledging receipt, and I’m waiting for more to happen. And I have found that… yeah, the interpretation doesn’t seem to go my way sometimes. So I’m going to work on this.
DANIEL: That is interesting. Now, I think that if somebody is doing an encouraging thing, that would be “mhm” with intonation that goes up. And if you really disagree, then it would be like “mmm” (SLIGHTLY FALLING INTONATION).
ELLEN: Well, you do have a point, so maybe I do… maybe I do the other thing more.
DANIEL: This is just my feels.
ELLEN: But I have been told — and I won’t name the teller of the information — I’ve been told that I sometimes say “Hmm” in a way that is unclear.
DANIEL: That’s one thing that I love about lang… ’cause we’re talking about the one thing we love about language. One thing that I just love about language is that it’s so subtle. We are so sensitive to differences, or to even just mild differences in prosody or intonational contour, even if we’re saying just something like “mmm”.
ELLEN: Right. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: It’s amazing!
ELLEN: Yeah. Yeah, those are often really difficult too, those murky little things. You know?
DANIEL: Yeah.
ELLEN: Yeah. It’s really… they take some work. Especially if you cross national borders. Then anything could happen!
DANIEL: So it sounds like what you’re saying is that the thing about language you love is — there’s a few things: that it brings people together to enjoy this thing that we do mutually…
ELLEN: Yes.
DANIEL: Would that be it?
ELLEN: I think so, but also there’s something about the concentration on a small detail that is therapeutic, I think. You know, this whole — I think I mentioned to you when I spoke to you before — just that not everyone’s in, you know… feeling very agreeable about other people right now. There’s a lot of conflict, I mean, there’s a lot of conflict here, and there’s something therapeutic about taking something very specific and examining it. I mean, I didn’t get into any fist fights at all on the road.
DANIEL: Amazing.
ELLEN: I know! [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: They’re not violent people, they’re just… you know, the prescriptivists will just look at you snippily.
ELLEN: No arrests at all.
DANIEL: Oh, good.
ELLEN: We did get the police in one… I had nothing to do with this, this was my husband Brant. He got the police in one city to go… to yell out “We love grammar!” And he taped that, which I think is pretty funny.
DANIEL: Oh, very nice.
ELLEN: The grammar police! See? Now they can be the grammar police. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Of course they were! Of course. Ellen, how can people find out what you’re doing?
ELLEN: I’m most active at the moment on @grammartable on Twitter. That’s my handle. But then also increasingly I have things going on grammartable.com, including videos from some of our travels to the corners… all the corners of the US, except for Alaska and Hawaii, because we did not get there before the pandemic.
DANIEL: And it can remind you of the happier times.
ELLEN: I’m actually really enjoying that right now. After we talk, I’m going to go look at some footage.
DANIEL: Awesome. Ellen, thanks so much for talking with me today.
ELLEN: Thank you.
DANIEL: (to BEN and HEDVIG) Lovely. Ellen Jovin.
BEN: [SIGHS] Yeah, she is my fave.
HEDVIG: She did mention something that I think also came up in some of the other ones, which is this sort of like… the pragmatics things. So she talked about intonation in agreement sounds, and I just wanted to mention a study I think we talked about before. The study about HUH?
DANIEL: Oh, yes. With Mark Dingemanse.
HEDVIG: Yeah, Mark Dingemanse, Francisco Torreira, and Nick Enfield studied words that you use in order to get your interlocutor to repeat what they said.
DANIEL: Hm.
HEDVIG: And they looked at a bunch of languages, and in most of them there is a rising intonation, like HUH? But in some languages it actually falls, like Cha’palaa in Ecuador.
DANIEL: Hm.
HEDVIG: Which like Ellen was saying, when you when you switch language or something, something that you think is like entirely iconic — and like, of course it should be rising intonation! — can actually be the dramatic opposite.
DANIEL: Well, now it’s time for our favourite things. I’ll tell you my favourite thing about language. Well, for today, anyway. There are loads of little tiny differences in the way we talk. Differences in sounds, and words, and in the way we put words together. Just a thing like “This house needs to be painted” versus “This house needs painted”, you know. Just a difference like that, or even just the U in a word like “favourite”. But there’s no difference so small that it won’t be picked up and used as, like, some kind of social identifier.
HEDVIG: Mhm.
DANIEL: I mean, maybe that’s the bad side of language, but it’s also really cool that we have so much sensitivity to such tiny details. That’s very special.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: My favorite thing about language is that it’s just hell fun! Like, not necessarily the nerdy stuff that we do. I think that’s slightly more bespoke field of interest, and certainly the more professional and comprehensively you construct your life around linguistics, as you two have, I would say the more bespoke that comes. But for me it’s just like, fat chats are just real good, you know?
DANIEL and HEDVIG: Fat chats?
BEN: I just… yeah! You know, like just having fat chats.
DANIEL: Oh, okay!
HEDVIG: Having good conversations?
BEN: Yeah, basically! Yeah, like you just… you sit down, you talk or you write, or whichever sort of channel or channels, plural, of communication you want to engage in, and it’s just good! Like, I just really like making people laugh, and without language, that would be super hard. Like, we’d be stuck with clowning. Ughh.
HEDVIG: Yeah, slapstick. I bet that you’re decent at slapchick. Slapstick.
BEN: Don’t get me wrong; there is nothing like a good pratfall, right? Like, someone falling on their ass is inherently hilarious to all humans universally, but if that’s all we had… I mean, that’s what French comedy looks like, and it’s not fun.
DANIEL: Okay, Hedvig. Your favorite thing?
HEDVIG: Oh, I thought about this, and I thought listening to all these people would make me realise what is my favorite thing, and I think I’m a little bit on — McWhorter and Ryan and a couple of people said this thing about variation and changeability. I find it fascinating that we are able to deal with so much variation. Like, every human, the way they speak, even when they speak the same language and the same dialect, will have different things in, like, the acoustic vibration that come out of their mouth will be a bit different. And our brains are just like: Fine, whatever! Like, I’ll just entirely shift the way I understand you 200 Hz up or down. And that’s just bonkers. And that’s just the acoustics. Then there’s like the particular words we choose and like, what different speakers will mean with particular words, and we just like accommodate all of that. And that’s why it’s so hard for computers to do this, because — trust me — we’re so varied and we deal with this so well. In fact, we could probably deal with more variation. Like, English could easily be more varied than it is now. People are capable of so much variation, and that’s the key to like why languages how diversified so much, because we’re just so fine and chill with it. Our brains are fine with it, and that’s just fascinating to me.
DANIEL: Well, we are very grateful to our friends Nicole Holliday, Ben Zimmer, John McWhorter, Carrie Gillon, Ryan Paulson, Grant Barrett, Jane Solomon, Lauren Gawne, Gretchen McCulloch, and Ellen Jovin for giving us their wonderful insights on what they love about language, and for welcoming us back to the podcast scene. Thanks, all.
HEDVIG: Thank you.
[TRANSITION MUSIC]
BEN: All righty! Well, I think that means that it’s… it’s time.
DANIEL: It’s time?
BEN: I think it’s time.
HEDVIG: It’s time.
DANIEL: It’s time.
HEDVIG: You thought changing a name and a brand and a logo and an intro would change this, Ben? You really thought so?
BEN: No, I, like… Do you know what? For just a second, yeah, I kind of did. [LAUGHTER] I kind of did. And yet here we are. And do you know the worst part, right? I was like, you know what? This will be a good opportunity to just allow me to drop this sort of, like, somewhat hammed-up hatred of Word of the Week.
HEDVIG: Hammed up‽
BEN: And then we did the questionnaire, and then everyone was just like: Ha ha! Sucked in, Ben! I love Word of the Week, and I love how much you hate it. And I was like: well, looks like that’s here to stay. Yay! So yeah, like a person returning home to find that their house has been burned to the ground, we once again come to the smoking crater that is Word of the Week.
DANIEL: Our first Word of the Week is “non-optical allyship”.
HEDVIG: Ah.
DANIEL: I really like this one.
BEN: I think I can infer what this is, based on what’s been going on.
DANIEL: Go on.
BEN: Basically, how to just be a active ally at the moment in the current context to people of colour specifically, and not just do it so that it looks like you are.
DANIEL: Yeah. Because there’s a very real desire for me as a white person to be a “good white person”.
BEN: There is a fascinating — and we’ll chuck it on the show notes page, I’m sure one of you to have probably come across it — titled “I Don’t Know What to Do with My Good White Friends”.
HEDVIG: Mhm.
DANIEL: No, I haven’t.
BEN: I’ll send that through. So that’s like an interesting one about it.
HEDVIG: What did they say?
BEN: It’s exactly the same thing. It’s basically saying like: Great! You’re not a dick. Now what?
HEDVIG: Yeah. Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, I noticed this on a Twitter thread by Mireille Cassandra Harper. She says “For people who actively want to be support and be an ally right now, I have written a thread: 10 Steps to Non-Optical Allyship. So looking like an ally, but not really being one, just to make yourself look good. Then she gives tips like • check in with people • deal with your privilege • read up on anti-racist works… I’ve put the thread up on our website, becauselanguage.com, and you can check that out.
BEN: I like it.
HEDVIG: And we were talking about this on top of the show as well and yeah, I feel conflicted because I feel like I want to do… I want to do something good and like, everything you do when you do something good, I’m sure there’s always, you know, a little bit that is like: I want to feel like I am a good person. I like to feel like I’m a good person. I don’t want to be a bad person. I also don’t want to burden… I don’t think it’s up to… it’s not other people’s jobs to educate me. I should be educating myself. At the same time, I want to know what is the best thing to do, and I don’t think I’m the best person to know what to do. It’s a conflicting time, but it’s also like, it’s a trivial problem, like my… what are… oh, words in English. My…
BEN: What, you only speak four languages, Hedvig? Come on, get with the program!
HEDVIG: Three, but… I also think that my worries of this kind aren’t particularly important or interesting. Like me being, like: ooh, I don’t know what to do as a white person! It’s like: Okay, who cares.
BEN: I think… look, no; I think that we need to answer that question. Right? Like, that’s what our job is, right? Rather than to… and I’m not digging at all. Like, I agree with you 100 percent. I’m in a similar boat. Like, no one is interested in a white person going: ~uh i dont know what to do~. But I think the “and then”, or the “if this, then that” is basically like: Cool. So I’m gonna do a bunch of reading and come back with something, basically.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Right? Instead of going ~i dont know what to do~, like coming back and going: Based on heaps of reading that I’ve done, this by all accounts seems like a pretty solid thing that you could start doing. Kind of like the article that Daniel’s sharing, or kind of like the one that I mentioned, right?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Like finding a bunch of those and then being like: Hey, I was having this question and then I found these resources, and I found them really helpful.
DANIEL: Yes, so if you follow the thread, you will see some specific things to read. I’m going to give it a try. And not let this disappear. So many issues are like: a bad thing happened and then everything just moved on. I don’t… I don’t want this to move on. It’s easy for me as a white person to treat this issue as remote, because it’s one of many issues: race relations, nuclear war, you know…
HEDVIG: …climate change…
DANIEL: …the Pacific Garbage Patch. But people of colour do not have the luxury of letting this issue disappear. Every time they walk into a shop…
BEN: You can’t take your skin off.
DANIEL: Nope. You know. It’s a thing. So yeah, I don’t want this to move on. I want to sink into it. So I guess the education process must be ongoing.
BEN: And we will do our level best to share all of the really good awesome resources, and also not let it drop off the radar. So if you’re thinking to yourself, ~Oh, I can’t wait until everyone like, muh, just like stops having a big ol’ fuckin’ deal about this~ we’ll be like: Well, you should find a different podcast to listen to!
DANIEL: Sorry!
HEDVIG: A different world to live in. Yeah.
DANIEL: Yes, please. Next one! Doomscrolling.
BEN: Ohh — I want to take a guess. I don’t feel anywhere near as confident, but I hope that I’m right.
BEN: This is a good one.
HEDVIG: Is it something that some of my family members are doing, where it’s just like, you’re just like reading about preppers and dystopian things constantly, and feeling paralysed?
BEN: I think it’s probably a little bit closer to, like, digital self-harm. So basically like: shit’s fucked; I’m going to just scroll and scroll and scroll and get completely overwhelmed and sunken down by how fucked shit be.
DANIEL: You’ve both got it; it’s just reading your social media feed, looking for news about the latest catastrophe, even though you know there’s never going to be anything good in there because of the hellscape we are all living in now! Yay!
BEN: Yay.
DANIEL: The term burst onto the scene in March; that’s when Google Trends caught it, and also there’s the first Urban Dictionary entry but Twitter user Callamitys has the first instance on Twitter from October 2018. October 2018!
BEN: There we go. Back in time.
DANIEL: And I have to say: Kid, you had no idea, past Callamitys.
BEN: Yeah yeah yeah! You thought it was bad before!
DANIEL: Oh, man.
BEN: I like it because it sounds like a black metal album.
DANIEL: DOOOOMSCROLLING
BEN: Yeah. Hundred percent.
DANIEL: Last one! Nigel suggested this one: getting memed.
HEDVIG: Oh! Is that when you get pulled out of your context, and made into a meme?
DANIEL: No, it doesn’t.
HEDVIG: WHAT??
BEN: Oh, really? That was definitely going to be my guess — like, when some person who just got snapped, like, waiting at a bus stop becomes the poster child for, like, white privilege or something?
DANIEL: Ah, no.
HEDVIG: Or like, every performance of Nicolas Cage.
DANIEL: Surprisingly not. So I guess you could say that though the Karen that called the police on the bird watcher in Central Park…
BEN: Oh, so like the opposite of what we said — getting memed for the right reasons.
DANIEL: I guess she kind of did get memed. But in this case, in the usage that Nigel has pointed us to, you can get pwned, you can get rekt. Getting memed is getting rekt so hard that someone could make a meme about you. Ohh — he got memed! Your plight is relatable and yet somehow the best — the platonic ideal of getting rekt in the way that you got rekt. That’s getting memed.
HEDVIG: Wow.
BEN: Okay. That sounds brutal.
DANIEL: It does.
HEDVIG: Ah, that video. Yeah, sorry.
DANIEL: Were you doomscrolling?
BEN: The bit that I shared on our socials about that was really really good, and if you guys didn’t listen to it, you totally should.
DANIEL: It was.
BEN: Cause it was pretty… like it was… like I said, linguistics adjacent.
DANIEL: Yes. So those are our three Words of the Week: non-optical allyship, doomscrolling, and getting memed. Now ordinarily, this will be the place where we read people’s reactions to the show, but we haven’t got any yet, so we would love to hear them. We’re also doing a Mailbag episode next; that’s going to be a bonus episode, so get onto Patreon and get those questions to us. All right. It’s…
BEN: Let’s do the reads.
DANIEL: Let’s do the reads.
BEN: “END BIT: Here’s the bit we read at the end of the show. Feel free to put this in your own words! Ben: Send your reactions and ideas to us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon, and Patreon. Our handle is becauselangpod in all of those places. Or you can email us at hello@becauselanguage.com.” Hello? You went with hello? Anyway, moving on.
DANIEL: What? What should I have gone with?
HEDVIG: No, hello’s good!
BEN: Just… okay!
DANIEL: What about hey?
BEN: No no no, it’s fine! Two v one! That’s fine! If you like Because Language, and you want to help promote good language science podcasting, you can tell some friends about us, you can also leave us a review on your podcast app of choice, on Facebook, or on… wherever else you can leave a review. I don’t know where all those places are. You find some. You leave a review, and then you show us where you left that crazy bespoke review, geocaching style. Under a waterfall in, like, Fiji somewhere for all I care. I love it.
HEDVIG: Give us a treasure map. Yeah.
BEN: [D&D GATEKEEPER VOICE] You will find my review when you answer me these questions three!
DANIEL: Ugh! Why do I have you read these things?
HEDVIG: So we’re back in your podcast feed, but we are also going to be putting out bonus episodes. If you become a patron, you won’t miss a single episode. You can sign up at patreon.com/becauselangpod. We have already got some wonderful patron Patreons. Kinda hard to do patron and Patreon… pei p pa p p p… We’ve got patrons!
BEN: You are kicking the thoroughest goals ever right now. It is exceptional. [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Okay…
DANIEL: Just read the list of people!
HEDVIG:: Yeah, okay! Reading names now! Ah! I actually practice-read this; I don’t think that’s going to help me!
BEN: Really? I couldn’t tell.
HEDVIG: Shut up.
DANIEL: This is fun.
HEDVIG: Okay, so we’ve got some lovely people who have decided to give us money for doing this, which is, you know, unbelievable. Some of them are: Lyssa, Kate, Termy, Chris, Carolin, Anna, Helen, Christelle, Andy, Jack, Kristofer, Kate, Michael, Nasrin, Binh, Elías, Jen, Dustin, Kitty, Lord Mortis?, Larry, Whitney, Matt, Nigel, Damien, and Bob. Thank you, all of you, from my little heart.
DANIEL: Our music is written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, and you can hear him in at least two great Perth bands, Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible, maybe even more. Thanks for listening. We will catch you next time. Because Language.