These cute critters, once part of a pioneering study in child language acquisition, have become an unofficial mascot of linguistics. But now they’re part of a tussle over intellectual property. We do our best to talk through the Wug test and the surrounding struggle.
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Become a Patron!Show notes
The Australian citizenship practice test – effective from 15 November 2020
https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/citizenship/test-and-interview/prepare-for-test/practice-test-new
(PDF) Australian Citizenship: Our Common Bond
https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/citizenship-subsite/files/our-common-bond.pdf
FactCheck: do ‘over a million’ people in Australia not speak English ‘well or at all’?
https://theconversation.com/factcheck-do-over-a-million-people-in-australia-not-speak-english-well-or-at-all-101461
The new Australian citizenship test: can you really test ‘values’ via multiple choice?
https://theconversation.com/the-new-australian-citizenship-test-can-you-really-test-values-via-multiple-choice-146574
REVEALED: Australian values questions that MUST be answered correctly to gain citizenship
https://7news.com.au/news/immigration/revealed-australian-values-questions-that-must-be-answered-correctly-to-gain-citizenship-c-1325406
Why are there differing preferences for suffixes and prefixes across languages? — ScienceDaily
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/08/200828115340.htm
Greenberg’s linguistic universals | Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenberg%27s_linguistic_universals
Lingthusiasm • Correspondence about the legal status of wugs
https://lingthusiasm.com/wugupdate
Letter 3 – Berko-Gleason Wug-Response to Lingthusiam’s 4.10.20 Letter– 7-24-20 SHS_REDACT | Fair Use | Trademark Distinctiveness
https://www.scribd.com/document/476584299/Letter-3-Berko-Gleason-Wug-Response-to-Lingthusiam-s-4-10-20-Letter-7-24-20-SHS-REDACT
THIS IS A WUG – Gleason, Jean Berko Trademark Registration
https://uspto.report/TM/90078560
THIS IS A WUG Trademark of Gleason, Jean Berko – Registration Number 4251794 – Serial Number 85506537 :: Justia Trademarks
https://trademarks.justia.com/855/06/this-is-a-85506537.html
Harrower-Erickson Multiple Choice Rorschach Test
https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/HEMCR/
The Wug Store (Jean Berko Gleason)
https://www.cafepress.com/wugstore
Lingthusiasm • Merch with wugs
https://lingthusiasm.com/wugs
Caitlin Green: This is a linguistics controversy. Now there are two of them. There are two __.
https://medium.com/@c.moriah.green/this-is-a-linguistics-controversy-now-there-are-two-of-them-there-are-two-935bee536f78
Greendale Human Being | Community Wiki | Fandom
https://community-sitcom.fandom.com/wiki/Greendale_Human_Being
Because Language shop | Redbubble
https://www.redbubble.com/people/talkthetalk/shop
How Ruth Bader Ginsburg Lives on In Pop Culture
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/26/at-home/ruth-bader-ginsburg-pop-culture-rbg.html
Is a ‘Twindemic’ of COVID-19 and Flu Coming This Fall?
https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2020-08-21/is-a-twindemic-of-covid-19-and-flu-coming-this-fall
TikTok video reveals bizarre Aussie shower habit expats find weird
https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/true-stories/woman-uncovers-weird-aussie-shower-habit-in-new-boyfriends-bathroom/news-story/6f5511814ea1dd73bb935db61f0427b8
I found something in my boyfriends bathroom 😂😅 #aussiesdoingthings #heapsgood #tiktokaustralia
https://www.tiktok.com/@eefexplores/video/6860272703211834629
(PDF) Aleksandra Misior-Mroczkowska — The Fuss about the Pooh: On Two Polish Translations of a Story about a Little Bear
https://journals.indexcopernicus.com/api/file/viewByFileId/96831.pdf
Transcript
DANIEL: It says Australia’s national language is English…
[BEN LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Sorry, I’m getting more coffee.
[MORE LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: You’re getting coffee handed to you through the coffee flap! Dang.
BEN: Sorry, carry on.
DANIEL: I just have a door. I want a flap!
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, seriously.
DANIEL: I’m going to cut a cat flap.
BEN: Like, Hedvig’s radio cubby looks like tons of fun.
HEDVIG: My toes are really cold! Actually I need to do something about that; they’re sticking out.
DANIEL: I did do an improvement to my pantry, by the way. I got the electrician in to install a new power port, so no more snaking an extension cord under the door.
BEN: Oh, you’ve got a cheeky GPO in your pantry, you fancy bish!
DANIEL: I do!
[THEME MUSIC]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to this bonus episode of Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. I’m Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team! It’s linguist and inventor of the coffee flap, Hedvig Skirgård.
HEDVIG: [LAUGH] Thank you. Yes, I’m here. With coffee.
BEN: Through the flap!
DANIEL: Through the flap.
HEDVIG: Through the flap.
DANIEL: And not linguist, but probably an inventor of something, Ben Ainslie.
BEN: Okay, let’s see what I invented. Off the top of my head. Oh, I did something recently that I was really proud of, where I was just like, man, I’m glad that I’m practical! I’ll think of it later and we can drop it in. Let’s keep going!
DANIEL: Okay, this is a special bonus episode. So if you are listening to this soon after the publication date, it’s because you’re a Patron. We’d just like to say thank you, and you. Yes, and you over there for being Patrons.
BEN: But not you! You know who you are.
HEDVIG: Person doing dishes!
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: How did you know?!
BEN: I really love the idea that like several people are just like [SCARED NOISE]
HEDVIG: So many people doing dishes.
DANIEL: You know what you did.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Chopping onions.
DANIEL: Let’s start out with some news. This one was suggested by PharaohKatt who brings us, you know, like a real cat who brings you mice and sometimes dead things…
BEN: Pump the brakes. This is… you’re taking this in the wrong direction. I feel like you find that cute and the rest of the world doesn’t find that cute.
DANIEL: Okay, but, you know, PharaohKatt brings us so many good items and PharaohKatt brings them up on our Discord channel and we’ve been discussing it. We would love to have, by the way, more of you on our Discord channel. Check patreon.com/becauselangpod to see how you can do this.
BEN: Come and be cordant or discordant. It’s entirely up to you.
DANIEL: Why didn’t they call it Accord?
HEDVIG: Because it sounds like a music thing?
BEN: Ooo, probably because it was for gamers, I have to be honest. And like, they are a cranky bunch.
HEDVIG: Discordant bunch.
BEN: I say, as a devout gamer.
DANIEL: Well, then why don’t they call the musical instrument a discordion? Because as far as I’m concerned…
BEN: Ooo hoo hoo. Wow. The hottest of takes.
HEDVIG: I love accordions, they’re so beautiful.
BEN: The accordion is a bad instrument. Stop being so… stop being so, like, provocative!
DANIEL: Hot takes coming in!
HEDVIG: Yeah, this is a spicy episode.
DANIEL: [SIGHS LOUDLY] This is about the Australian citizenship test.
BEN: Oh, what have they done to it now?
DANIEL: Well, we’re on a language podcast, take a friggin’ guess.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: You have to define ‘mateship’.
BEN: Oh, god.
DANIEL: No.
BEN: Everyone all automatically, retroactively doesn’t become an Australian citizen because no one can do it.
DANIEL: I would have included that as a Word of the Week, not as a news item.
HEDVIG: Ah.
BEN: English, you’ve got to pass a… Someone has proposed, this is my guess, that you have to pass some sort of minimal ETSL standard in order to be an Australian citizen.
DANIEL: It’s always some kind of English-only horseshit, but this time it’s not that in particular. Well, although that has been floated every once in a while and always batted down. The practice Australian citizenship test, which you can take right now and see if you would make it 15 minutes as an Australian citizen…
BEN: Oh, Jesus.
DANIEL: We’ll put it on our on our blog, becauselanguage.com
HEDVIG: I want to be Australian. I’ll try it!
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: I’ll give it a red hot crack. 15 minutes, and you’re an Australian!
DANIEL: Well, Hedvig, here’s a question for you off of the practice citizenship test, which everyone can take. Number 17, tell me what you think about what the correct answer is: “Should people in Australia make an effort to learn English?”
BEN: Wow.
DANIEL: Okay, “make an effort”. I think that “make an effort” is doing a lot of work. So this is a multiple choice.
BEN: [SCOFFS] How is there more than two choices?
DANIEL: Yes, no, maybe! No. “A) people in Australia should speak whichever language is most commonly spoken in their local neighborhood. B) There is no expectation to learn any particular language in Australia. C) Yes, English is the national language of Australia and it helps to get an education, a job and to integrate into the community.” Okay, which option do you think in your professional opinion would be the best?
HEDVIG: I mean, I kind of, I want to say B), but I kind of want to say A), because I think it sounds more pragmatic that it’s good if you can go to your pharmacy and be understood. But that A) is essentially C).
DANIEL: I would love it if people in Greek neighborhoods thought they had to learn Greek if they lived there.
[BEN AND DANIEL LAUGH]
HEDVIG: Yeah, like that is what I want A) to mean. But it’s not what it means.
DANIEL: Never works that way, does it?
BEN: I’m going to Morley, and I’ve got to say the tonal distinctions between the various Chinese phonemes are going to be a challenge!
DANIEL: But I’m up for it!
BEN: Yeah, let’s do it!
DANIEL: Here we go.
BEN: I like that… the little L libertarian part of me likes B) as a concept, right? Just like…
DANIEL: No expectation.
BEN: Let’s just keep things really just quite chill, and not be dicks, basically.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: It’s obviously C) though, right? It’s obviously C).
HEDVIG: If you have B), it is essentially going to result in A), which is just going to result in C), right?
DANIEL: Whaaa…
BEN: [LAUGHS] You’ve just created an ouroboros, it’s like the snake’s just gnawing on its own tail.
DANIEL: I don’t know how you got from A) to C) though.
HEDVIG: Oh, because most local communities are going to be majority English speaking.
DANIEL: True. Oh okay, A) is a is essentially a C) default position.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And the difference between A) and B) is just like, if it’s a law or not, people are going to do it.
DANIEL: Well, I answered all the questions and I did shithouse as an Australian citizen. It says “Your mark was 85 percent.”
HEDVIG: Oh that’s… good.
BEN: Just to clarify as well to the to the listeners who might not necessarily be able to tell from Daniel’s accent, he is actually an Australian citizen.
DANIEL: I am. You know, Australians sound a lot of different ways.
BEN: It’s true. But I know a lot of people will be like: What? An Australian-American? What is, what is that?
DANIEL: Oh, look. I mean, every week on the Speakeasy on ABC Radio Perth, I get people saying: What does that Yank think he has any right to tell us about language.
BEN: Bloody seppo, dribbling shit.
DANIEL: Yep, comes through. Mmm. So it told me “your mark was eighty five percent”, so I must have missed three out of twenty. “You did not answer all of the Australian values questions correctly. This means you have failed the Australian citizenship practice test. Please try again. The pass mark is 75 percent and you must answer all of the Australian values questions…
HEDVIG: Ooh!
BEN: Ooh! This is non-negotiable.
DANIEL: “…correctly.”
BEN: Dang! Some go/no-gos. So what are the go/no-gos? I got to know.
DANIEL: Okay, the values questions concern freedom of speech, freedom of religion, whether violence is okay — spoiler alert, it’s not — and then learning English. That was one of the values questions, the language one, that we all got wrong.
BEN: Jesus.
DANIEL: So I’m just reading from Australian Citizenship: Our Common Bond. It says, “Australia’s national language is English. It is part of our national identity. Everyone in Australia is encouraged to learn and use English to help them participate in Australian society.” Okay, what do you notice about that?
BEN: Isn’t that inaccurate?
HEDVIG: I mean, it is true that the national language of Australia is English, right?
DANIEL: Is it…???
BEN: No, no, no. I don’t actually think we have a national language.
HEDVIG: Oh, it’s like the UK. Yeah, it’s like the UK, that it is English, but you didn’t announce it.
BEN: Yeah, yeah. I think… I think we have a like a weird don’t ask, don’t tell policy basically where it’s just kind of like we’re super monolingual, but whatev.
DANIEL: Well, I think this is where our government is muddying the water. You see, when I posed this question to a few people this weekend, the response that I got was, “Oh, I didn’t realise that English was Australia’s official language.” And I had to say, no, no, no, no, no, not official. They didn’t say that.
HEDVIG: They said national.
BEN: National.
DANIEL: Yeah, yeah. Now, here’s a guide saying that English is a national language. You call something a national language when you want to call something an official language, but, you know that’s a lie. And that’s intended to fool people into thinking that that language has some kind of official status when it doesn’t. Seriously, the people that I talked to this weekend and posed that, they were very much in the dark between an official language and a national language…
BEN: Which, by the way, English is neither in Australia, correct?
DANIEL: It’s like being a dietician versus a nutritionist. One of those is official, but I always forget which one it is.
BEN: Dietician, I believe.
DANIEL: Oh, thank you. Well, I think that B) is the correct answer. There’s no official expectation to learn English, just like there’s no expectation to learn Noongar, Greek, or any other language. Other problems that I have… it talks about English as being vital to help you, you know, get a job. I guess that’s true. I guess Greek and Spanish and other languages will help you get a job, too, depending on the job. But I think that if English is the only language around that will help you get a job in Australia, or to fully participate in Australian society, then I think we have a problem.
BEN: I mean, I think the reality is that’s categorically untrue. We have huge numbers of people who have recently migrated to Australia who don’t have particularly great English language skills, who still find gainful employment in all sorts of different places, right? Like I don’t want to be, like, reductive, but like I just went and did my weekly grocery shop out of a place called Coventry Markets, which is like the international, like, food grocery emporium thingy in Perth, right? Like it’s got like a little Latin supermarket and a little Vietnamese market, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you just look around, you can see there’s heaps of people with, like, not great English and they’re doing just fine. Like, they’re livin’… livin’ big ol’ lives and conducting business, and clearly earning money somehow, because they’re buying their shopping.
DANIEL: English is awesome. But we really need to break this idea that English is the only language you can get a job in. I mean, we speak 300 languages in Australia. One in four of us speaks another language at home. And when it comes to school kids, it’s one in three. And let me just also say that Australian immigrants are doing a great job of learning English! In the last census in 2016, guess the percentage of people who said that they speak English not very well or not at all? What percent?
BEN: It’d have to be super low.
HEDVIG: Six percent.
BEN: Single digits for sure.
DANIEL: Lower.
BEN: Three?
DANIEL: Three and a half. Three and a half percent said that they could speak English not well or not at all. That is self-reported, but when you go back and test people, they actually have a good idea of how well they do in English.
BEN: The thing with the census is that on the whole it’s actually super accurate, right?
DANIEL: Yeah, it is.
BEN: Like, it’s astoundingly accurate.
DANIEL: But I mean, 95 percent of people in Australia report speaking English well or very well. Here’s another thing that’s bugging me. Let me just read this from Australian Citizenship: Our Common Bond, “Australia’s national language is English. It is part of our national identity.”??
HEDVIG: I mean, it is, right? It is.
BEN: It’s part of our coloniser identity. I’d agree with that.
HEDVIG: Yeah!
DANIEL: Yeah, well, it’s part of my identity because I speak English. It might not be part of somebody else’s identity. We can’t enforce that by fiat. And the other thing is that it’s one of those value questions. So speaking English is a value now?
BEN: A non-negotiable value, by the way. Like, we really need to make sure that’s… Yeah
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Here’s my point. There is this overwhelming tendency to subvert community languages other than English, and to paint the people who speak them as untrustworthy, or suspect or, you know, insular, there’s a word for ya.
BEN: Or like just even beyond that, like un-Australian is the clear implication…
DANIEL: Right!
BEN: …that’s happening in this survey.
DANIEL: And this turns up the pressure on other languages when what we should be doing is encouraging them. But this approach, which is promoted by the Australian government, is really bad for minority languages and the people who speak them. Because this says if somebody doesn’t speak English well, it’s not just that they’re bad at English, that they somehow don’t share our values. This is incredibly divisive and dangerous.
BEN: I am at a point now, where I kind of regard any nation state that is a colony or a former colony, like: you don’t any longer get to have any claim on the coloniser identity as some kind of like, because we stole something first, we get to say that that stuff is the good stuff, right? Like that… that just seems like a deeply morally bankrupt argument to me. So any former colony place, whether that’s America, Canada, Australia, South Africa, wherever you like, basically just needs to go, you know, like, for my money, values wise, we are obliged to be open to all different kinds of cultures because we stole the land anyway, right? Like, you know, it’s like someone stealing a bike and then being like: [EDGELORD VOICE] I am the king of the bike. And I get to choose all of the rules that happened to the bike. And someone’s like: You nicked that bike, dude.
DANIEL: Well, I think that promoting minority languages is one of my values.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: But yeah, forcing Australia into a monolingual English cookie cutter is not.
HEDVIG: Are there any questions in this test that have anything to do with Indigenous people?
DANIEL: Yeah, there was one. What are the colors of the Aboriginal flag?
BEN: Uhhhh! [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Okay yeah
DANIEL: Yeah, goes deep, doesn’t it?
BEN: Oh geez, that’s rough.
DANIEL: Well, let’s go on to a piece of research that I thought was kind of interesting, but Hedvig, you might not. You might think this is boringly obvious, but let’s get into it. This one’s about prefixes and suffixes. You know, in the languages that I have learned and studied, the really important stuff is happening at the ends of words. When you’re conjugating verbs or declining nouns, you have to remember the suffixes, the little pieces of words at the end. The prefixes, the ones at the beginning, are kind of cool for making up new words like adding un- or dis-, but, you know, you’ve got work, worked, works, working,
HEDVIG: Worker.
DANIEL: All those things at the end are the ones that help make things agree.
HEDVIG: Mhmmm…
DANIEL: So this is some research by Alexander Martin and Jennifer Culbertson from the University of Edinburgh, published in Psychological Science. I’m going to give both of you a made-up word. It’s three syllables.
BEN: Woo hoo! Yay.
DANIEL: Here we go. Bo-re-ni. Can you remember that? Boreni.
BEN: Bo-re-ni.
DANIEL: Boreni.
HEDVIG: [TO THE TUNE OF “THE SOUND Of MUSIC” DO-RE-MI] Bo-re-mi na-na-na-na
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] Almost. Now I’m going to give you two more made-up words, and I want you to tell me which one you think is the most similar to boreni. Here we go. Number one, boremo and number two, mireni. Which one is closest to boreni? Do you feel like boremo or mireni?
HEDVIG: Yeah, boremo.
BEN: I’m gong to go mireni.
DANIEL: Ben, you think that mireni sounds more similar to boreni?
BEN: I do.
DANIEL: What’s your reasoning?
BEN: Because I like it?
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: [LAUGHS] I don’t really have a better reason. It, it, it… Because I’m not a linguist, all I hear is like the melodic contour of the sound and the melodic contour sounds more similar in the second one.
DANIEL: Boreni, mireni. Yeah. Okay Hedvig, you thought that boreni, boremo sounded more similar?
HEDVIG: Yeah, I agree with Ben on the melodic contour, but I speak mostly suffixing languages, so I’m likely to think the first two syllables are the root. And the other thing is a little thingamajig.
BEN: Technically, I speak one of those languages as well, but whatever.
HEDVIG: Yeah, but you’re overthinking it or something, I don’t know what you’re doing.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Well, all I did was change one syllable at the end to get boremo. Then I changed one of the front: mireni. So it’s been noticed that English speakers think that it’s more similar if the end is changed. After all, you know, work, works, worked, working. We’re used to words being kind of the same thing, even if they had a little bit different at the end, like Hedvig thought. But what about if somebody speaks a language that doesn’t do its work by suffixing, it does it by prefixing? Would they agree with Ben?
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: Hopefully.
DANIEL: Yes, they do.
BEN: Good. Because all good people should agree with Ben.
DANIEL: What they studied was Kîîtharaka, which is a Bantu language in Kenya that does a lot of prefixing, and they found that speakers of English thought that it was more similar if you changed, I guess what we could call the suffix, whereas the speakers of this language thought it was more similar if you change the beginning. So the intuition follows what your home language does.
BEN: Unless you’re me, in which case you’re just whack.
DANIEL: Well, you’re a… you’re a bit of stray data. You’re noise.
BEN: I’m an outlier. I love being more than three standard deviations from the mean!
DANIEL: You are Ben, you are.
HEDVIG: There’s the other thing, which I don’t know if our listeners are interested in this, but like: there have been proposed several times, that there’s a tendency for, depending on your word order in your clause, you’re more likely to be suffixing or prefixing. So if you put your objects before your verbs more often, you’re more likely to be prefixing. And if you put your objects after. I think I’m right.
BEN: Remind me object, subject. Is that like “eyes blue”?
HEDVIG: I like coffee. Subject-Verb-Object.
BEN: Yep.
HEDVIG: I coffee like, Subject-Object-Verb. And the idea is if I’m a person speaking a language where I often say “I coffee like” then at least I would have my adpositions — so my prepositions — would be the other way around. So I would say “I coffee like den in” — my den.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Yeah. I sent a letter John to.
BEN: Yeah. Language is so weird.
HEDVIG: And I think it also goes with prefixes and suffixes.
DANIEL: No, I a letter John to sent. Okay, so!
BEN: This is fun! Maybe we should just make a game where we just give Daniel ever-increasingly complex prefix, suffix, word order, difficulty like gambits, and he just has to try and do them.
HEDVIG: Yeh, yeah, yeah!
BEN: This is great. I like this.
DANIEL: So the implications of this is that languages can vary lots of ways and some things might be the same across languages because that’s the way that humans perceive things, and we all have human brains and human cognition makes language look certain ways. But this experiment shows that not everything’s like that. Sometimes it’s just the way things turn out. Instead of following general cognition, the way you perceive language depends on historical factors, how your language shakes out.
BEN: There you go.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: Welcome back to Because Language. This is going to be the episode that doesn’t make anyone happy.
BEN: I’ve got to know, like, I don’t actually know why this episode is going to be super spicy. So let’s, let’s do it.
HEDVIG: Is that good, should he now? First?
DANIEL: Well, let’s talk about… let’s talk about wugs. Ben, if I talk about wugs to you, does that mean anything?
BEN: Hmmmmm. No.
HEDVIG: Ben isn’t on Twitter much, is he?
BEN: No, I’m not on Twitter much, for I am old before my time, but not in, like, a cool, wise way, just in like a grumpy, curmudgeonly way. Um, I’m going to assume it’s, it’s a, like, a social justice acronym, similar to but not the same as like a TERF or a SWERF.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Interesting.
DANIEL: It is not that.
HEDVIG: Do you know what a WAG is?
BEN: Uh, wives and girlfriends, like the… soccers and that sort of thing. Okay, wives un-girlfriended?
HEDVIG: No, no, I’m just throwing you a red herring. It’s got nothing to do with that.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Oh, thanks man! Really helpful!
DANIEL: You know, in all the years that we’ve done this show, we have never done a show on wugs. We have mentioned them briefly in one episode. And Ben, you weren’t even there for that episode.
BEN: Not only that, but even if I had been, at like three hundred and something and counting, like one episode is not enough. We’ve got to have done at least like four or five episodes about it for it to stick in my brain.
DANIEL: Well, wugs are cuddly and lovable, but they are unfortunately at the heart of a legal and moral controversy.
BEN: What is a wug??
DANIEL: All right, Ben, how do you make English words plural?
BEN: Uh, by sticking S at the end of them?
DANIEL: Typically, yes, although there are other ways. So…
BEN: There’s some other ways. They’re pretty minimal if you go by like the numbers, though, right? Like, the overwhelming majority of things just get an S at the end.
HEDVIG: One ox
BEN: Oxen, yes, I get it.
DANIEL: They might be underwhelming in number, but in frequency they’re huge.
BEN: Okay, okay.
DANIEL: Man and men. Woman, women.
BEN: All right.
HEDVIG: Mouse, mice.
BEN: Fair enough.
DANIEL: But there is a way to test children on whether they have internalised the patterns of English suffixes. You can’t just ask them about English words that exist already, because they could have heard them before and memorised.
BEN: Right, so you’ve got to give them nonsense words.
DANIEL: Exactly.
BEN: I love a good nonsense word. They’re heaps of fun.
DANIEL: Well, let’s listen to one now. I gave my dear daughter, the four year old, she’s three, Three years and ten months. I gave her something called the Wug Test. I showed her a picture with cuddly blue things on them. They are, they are blue, they are sort of… they look kind of like the the little critter on The Partridge Family opening titles. I guess those were supposed to be partridges.
BEN: Oh, do they look like tribbles from Star Trek?
DANIEL: Not exactly.
HEDVIG: No…
DANIEL: How would you describe them?
HEDVIG: What are those Easter things called? Fluffy marshmallow…?
BEN: The Moai??
DANIEL: Peeps!
HEDVIG: Peeps. They look a lot like peeps.
BEN: [LAUGHS] I thought you meant the heads!
HEDVIG: Yeah, they look like peeps, they make you think of…
DANIEL: Eggs, Hedvig, they’re called eggs.
[BEN AND DANIEL LAUGH]
HEDVIG: I was talking about peeps!
DANIEL: I’m just kidding.
BEN: I thought you were talking about the Easter Island heads, and I was just like Moai? Furry Moai? Why? That’s a nightmare fuel.
HEDVIG: They’re not furry.
DANIEL: Those are terrifying!
HEDVIG: I think most people agree that wugs are a type of bird, right?
DANIEL: I have always perceived them that way.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Actually, now that I think about it, I don’t think anyone’s ever said that. I think we… this is interesting!
BEN: It’s just a tacit understanding through everyone.
HEDVIG: Because they look so much like peeps, they look like little sparrows or something.
DANIEL: Let’s just listen to a real live Wug Test.
HEDVIG: Ooo.
[RECORDING QUALITY CHANGES]
DANIEL: Okay, this is a wug. Now there’s another one. There are two of them. There are two.
DANIEL’S DAUGHTER: Uggs.
DANIEL: Uggs? Not wugs? Two uggs. Thank you.
DANIEL’S DAUGHTER: There are three uggs!
DANIEL: Yes, I guess there are three uggs. Thank you very much.
BEN: [SNICKERS] There’s two uggs, you guys!
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Uggs, obviously!
HEDVIG: That’s very cute.
BEN: Oh my god. Oh god. Kids are idiots, aren’t they?
DANIEL: I don’t know what was happening there between the uggs and the wugs, but…
BEN: Apparently when you pluralise things, the beginning of words? Get out of here, we don’t need them.
DANIEL: Wow, yeah, I think I think we need to contact the researchers for that other experiment because I think we might have found something!
BEN: So if you… maybe that’s the true plural of sheep, right? It’s just eep.
DANIEL: It’s heep! [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Did you ask her again to say what one was, because I think she just can’t say [w].
DANIEL: No, she can say [w]. She just, she just borked it somehow.
BEN: Ugh, kids. So dumb.
DANIEL: Kids. Well, so that is the Wug Test. This Wug Test was created by a brilliant researcher named Jean Berko Gleason. She did the first Wug Test in 1958.
BEN: I’m really worried about how this is going to get spicy because this seems so wholesome and nice. And you started off with some cute little kid audio and I’m like: oh no, where’s the turn?
HEDVIG: Well, it’s very cute. And there are also… so I should also mention that the Wug Test also had other pictures in it. There are other animals and there’s some things for past tense as well like “this person is” and it’s like “spelorking” or something. And you have to be like: oh, he “spelorked”.
BEN: Oh, right.
HEDVIG: Yeah, so there’s a whole series of these.
BEN: Are there animals that are going to have different pluralisations in this test. Is that the point? Because…
HEDVIG: No, I think it’s all regular stuff.
BEN: Oh, so it’s not like there’s going to be, like oooven.
DANIEL: Well, it is… it is subtly different. Think about the way that we pluralise things in English. We have, you know, dog. What’s the sound at the end of dog?
BEN: Zzzz, yeah, true.
DANIEL: Zzz, right. With cat?
BEN: Catssss.
DANIEL: And then horse?
BEN: Horsezz.
DANIEL: So there’s three different ways to do it. Cats [s], dogs [z], and horses [əz]. Now, children about the age that my dear charming daughter is do a pretty good job on the Wug Test. But when she was small…
BEN: Most of the time.
DANIEL: Most of the time, except for the prefixes. But I slipped her this test when she was much smaller and she just simply said wug. She wasn’t able to do it because she didn’t understand the underlying representation. And in Berko Gleason’s work, it was found that kids are really good at nailing those [s[ and [z] endings like “wugs” and “heafs”. But the [əz] endings — like “tasses” — take a bit longer. And that was true for past tense as well, which has three different ways it could be. It could be [t] as in “worked”, it could be [d] as in “played”, or it could be [əd] as in “sounded”.
BEN: Oh, okay
DANIEL: And that’s the Wug Test with all the words. But you know, even though there were “tasses” and “guches” and “nizzes”, the wug, being adorable and blue was really the one that gained fame. And it has, it has really become kind of an unofficial mascot of linguistics.
BEN: Right. Like it’s one of those sort of scions of, like, linguistics study that has been around for decades and decades.
DANIEL: Yeah, it’s a beloved study.
HEDVIG: Yeah. I was going to say that Berko Gleason published these results quite a long time ago, right? These are before the internet, essentially.
DANIEL: Oh, yeah. 1958 was the earliest. But it’s… of course, it’s been replicated many times since then.
HEDVIG: So it’s like it’s all old stuff.
BEN: Old, old, but seminal? Like is it one of those seminal works that just like…
DANIEL: Extremely.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah! it’s like I’ve taken language acquisition classes and you have to like read Berko Gleason, that’s what you do.
DANIEL: Foundational work. Brilliant stuff. Okay, fast forward to the present day and the current controversy, where Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne of Lingthusiasm have gotten involved. Now some disclosure: We know Lauren and Gretchen. They’re our friends, we hang out. We help each other with shows at times, and we work together to spread good linguistic knowledge and to encourage other linguists and podcasters.
BEN: And they’re also the ones behind Crash Course now as well, aren’t they?
DANIEL: Yes, they are. And, you know, we’ve been… we’ve been their Patron since the very beginning. You know, when Lauren and Gretchen first announced they were starting Lingthusiasm, I thought: Oh, I’m aware of these people and this is going to be really good. Oh, no. Is this the one that’s going to sink us? Never mind! Let’s get behind them and promote them. And we’re all in this together.
HEDVIG: Well, yeah. And also they do something enough different from us that we can be like, yes.
BEN: Got to love our niche!
DANIEL: Now at the same time, I have, I have huge respect for Jean Berko Gleason, even though I haven’t met her. Her work is legendary in the linguistic community.
BEN: Oh, no. I feel like Maui in Moana. [SINGS]: I can see what’s happening here.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: I see what’s coming, people are going to have a fight!
DANIEL: It’s going to be bad. This is not the wug discussion I wanted to have, but it’s the one discussion that I think we need to have. I haven’t spoken with anybody involved in the making of this episode, so I’m just going by the facts that are out there. I’m trying to be impartial, but I’m putting my biases up front. Also we are absolutely not lawyers.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah. As will be in evidence in a later question.
BEN: Yeah, in case aaanyone was in any doubt!
DANIEL: So back in March 2020, it looks like Lingthusiasm and Jean Berko Gleason were in talks to team up to do some merch, some wug merch, and to use some of that money to give out grants for worthwhile linguistic projects.
BEN: Great.
DANIEL: And to split the takings.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Okay, now these talks broke down, and in putting together the picture from the different people, the different participants in the story, Jean Berko Gleason says that it’s because Lingthusiasm ghosted her, stopped talking. Lingthusiasm says it’s because Berko Gleason’s lawyers told them not to contact her directly.
BEN: Okay, it’s not super uncommon.
DANIEL: Right. But even now, we’re getting multiple views of events that are contradictory and a little bit unclear. As things progressed, in the opinion of the legal team used by Lingthusiasm, it seems that the trademark claim over the original wug drawing from 1958 was not as strong as had been represented. In particular, the Lingthusiasm team says that this drawing is in the public domain. But this is not the view held by Berko Gleason.
HEDVIG: It should also be said maybe that I believe there have been other instances… So Speculative Grammarian, which is another fun internet jokey jokey linguistic satire site. It’s really fun. Ben, you should try it sometime. They write, like…
DANIEL: It’s hilarious.
HEDVIG: They write satirical linguistics about linguistics. It’s so meta, so good. They have a podcast sometimes, it’s great. I believe they have also had wug merch. They’ve had kitchen magnetic things. Maybe I shouldn’t say that! Maybe that’ll get them into trouble.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Somewhere these podcasters are being like shut up, shut up!
DANIEL: How did this? I did not hear about this, and I know about SpecGram.
HEDVIG: I’m pretty sure that I’ve seen a magnetic thing on it. I might be wrong, but I’m I just checked their website and they don’t have it now, which might be…
DANIEL: Interesting.
HEDVIG: Might be… they maybe took it down maybe years ago. They took it down. But I’m pretty sure they did have…
BEN: Just have this picture of someone reading this story on the internet, and then leaning back and being like “Uh, Steve? Yeah man nah, we’re going to have to, yup no, pull them, pull them”
DANIEL: Well, so here’s the case that Gleason has put up, and I’m getting this from legal documents that the Gleason sent to Lingthusiasm. Jean Berko Gleason has some trademarks. One is for the phrase, “This is a wug”, which is the phrase I used. Also curiously “Wug Life.”
BEN: Oh, yeah, that makes sense.
HEDVIG: Yeah, because I became a total viral thing. People were like #wuglife, yeah
DANIEL: I don’t know how I feel about that, because it’s a take off on a Black phrase, and Jean Berko Gleason is a white professor. Now what the lawyers are arguing is that because Gleason has trademarked those phrases, and — I hope I’m understanding this correctly, please contact me if not, attorneys — Because those phrases are so tied in with the little, often blue wug critter that it has something called secondary meaning, which means that the trademarks over those phrases also covers the associative little critter as well and that’s secondary meaning. So that’s sort of where the legal side is. It doesn’t look like the lawyers have provided evidence of the original 1958 wug drawing being trademarked, but it’s a bit of a contest over whether it’s in the public domain or not.
BEN: I mean, that sort of seems like a relatively straightforward question, doesn’t it? Like you can either produce the ownership documentation for a thing where you… or you can’t like natural copyright exists at the moment of creation. And if Berko Gleason did, was the person who created this thing, is that true? or did she just…
HEDVIG: Yeah, she created it.
DANIEL: Yeah, let’s say that’s true.
HEDVIG: I don’t think that’s being contested.
BEN: Yeah, yeah. So natural copyright exists at the moment of creation. And again, my super limited understanding is that it probably wouldn’t be in the public domain yet because Disney has made sure that the public domain statute gets ballooned out by like 10 or 15 years every time Mickey Mouse nearly enters the public domain. So 1958 is definitely not old enough for just like blank check public domain argument to be made.
DANIEL: Well, a couple of things. First of all, copyright is not the same thing as trademarks. So she had to apply for trademark separately. And it doesn’t appear that she did until much later and only then on those two phrases. Second, and I’m getting this from a really good explainer by Dr Caitlin Green, and there’s going to be a link on our blog becauselanguage.com, “Jean Berko Gleason would have had copyright over the original wug drawing that she made. Fair enough. But according to U.S. law, it would have expired by now unless it was renewed, which it wasn’t.” So now I want to take a couple of minutes and talk about Jean Berko Gleason’s approach to protecting her IP.
Jean Berko Gleason has sent letters to people who post images of wugs online. And I’m looking at a tweet here. There’s going to be a link on our blog. This is from Jean Berko Gleason to someone with a wug tattoo. I’ll just read this out.
BEN: Ooh.
DANIEL: And by the way, it seems that the person who this was sent to has given permission for this to be public. It says, “I saw your amazing wug tattoo on Twitter. Congratulations, it looks great. I also wanted to contact you before my attorneys notice the copyrighted Wug Test pictures you posted because they send out takedown notices and I wouldn’t want that to happen to the bearer of a chest wug. The good news is that a new edition of the Wug Test with all the pictures is coming out very soon. And if you will, please take down the pictures you posted ASAP, I would like to send you a copy of the Wug Test book as a present from me.”
BEN: Hmm. That is a very active attempt to protect a copyright, I’ve got to say. Like, that is definitely meeting the threshold of like: this is mine.
HEDVIG: That is weird.
DANIEL: I mean, sending takedown notices, I guess, is something that you have to do sometimes to protect your trademark, if you have one.
HEDVIG: But she makes it sound like she’s like held hostage by her attorneys and that the attorneys don’t work for her. Because she can make the choice to email this person and be like, technically, this is a violation, but I’m going to give you permission.
DANIEL: Well, that’s the good-cop-bad-cop thing, right?
BEN: Yeah, that’s… that is I’m glad you put those words to it because I was trying to find the words for it. That’s exactly the vibe that I was getting from that message.
DANIEL: It’s like, you know, hey, I’m nice. But, you know, my lawyers, they’re pretty aggressive! I would hate to see anything happen.
BEN: Look, I mean…
HEDVIG: But you can say, like, I would hate to see anything happen. That’s why I’m putting in writing that this is okay.
DANIEL: Yep.
HEDVIG: And I’m going to tell my lawyers that this is okay. Like, that’s the… that’s a choice you have as a copyright holder, right?
BEN: Absolutely. It strikes me that this person isn’t particularly interested in this thing belonging to everyone.
HEDVIG: No.
BEN: Does that make sense?
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: Like, the impression that I get is that this person very much conceives of this icon as hers. And she sort of almost maybe… the sense I’m getting is kind of begrudgingly acknowledges that there’s a certain amount of its proliferation that she’s not going to be able to stop, but she wants to stop as much of that proliferation as she can. Because it’s hers and she wants to keep it that way. That’s the feeling that I’m getting, which I mean, is her, like, purview, I guess. I will also put it out there that I really feel for, like, um, Lingthusiasm, because like we just… we live in a remix culture. We absolutely do, right? Like, we… if they’re even remotely my age, which I believe they both are, right?
DANIEL: Mhm.
BEN: Like, they’re in their 30s. We grew up with all of this stuff just being, like, churned up and regurgitated and mixed about and turned into another thing. And now that process is only accelerating through, like, meme culture and all that kind of stuff. But the reality is that content legislation just absolutely does not live in that world. Right? And so if you try and do some of this stuff, I think like anyone who’s ever tried to upload, like, a really cool video that they’ve made to YouTube that has some copyrighted music and that will know the pain of just that algorithm going: bow bow, sorry friend-o, not today! And it sucks, right? Like, it absolutely sucks, but that’s like… I kind of want to say to the wider world, like, I feel you, I feel how much that sucks. But like dem’s the laws now. It would be great if they changed.
HEDVIG: What makes my feelings extra complicated about this is that they had entered into legal discussions.
BEN: Yeah. They tried to do the righty.
HEDVIG: They tried to do the righty, but then some lawyer told them that Jean Berko Gleason didn’t have the correct copyright claim, so that they didn’t have to do the legal right thing, and then they did something else, and this all muddies the water because that seems like weird like, ugh!
BEN: Yeah, I agree.
DANIEL: Let me just have a couple of more data points. Number one, Jean Berko Gleason has given authorisation for maybe student linguistic clubs to use the wug image.
HEDVIG: Okay.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: And also, Jean Berko Gleason sent Lingthusiasm a letter demanding that Lingthusiasm take down any posts on their blog about anything about wugs, including their entire Episode 16, which was about the Wug Test before any of this got started.
BEN: Now, that doesn’t seem like a thing that you’re able to do.
DANIEL: I mean, we right now could be placing ourselves in legal jeopardy because I have described the Wug Test.
BEN: But the Wug Test…
HEDVIG: That… But we’re…
BEN: Can science be copyrighted like that? Isn’t it published in, like, a peer reviewed journal?
DANIEL: Yes, it is.
HEDVIG: Like, we’re not saying… okay we are giving this to our Patrons and they are paying us money.
DANIEL: Exactly.
HEDVIG: So are we selling? Because if this was in are you saying to me, Daniel, that if this is what’s in a general feed, we’d be fine?
DANIEL: We are doing the same exact thing that Lingthusiasm did in their episode.
HEDVIG: Yeah, but also we’re putting in our Patreon feed, which I think is worse!
BEN: Yeah, we’re monetising it. Absolutely. But you can’t…
DANIEL: But is it suddenly…
BEN: The Wug Test isn’t copyrighted. The image is copyrighted and we haven’t used the copyright.
HEDVIG: No It’s the opposite. It’s the opposite. What Daniel recounted was that “This is a wug” and “Wug life” is copyrighted and the image is copyrighted by proxy.
DANIEL: Trademarked
HEDVIG: Trademark, right
DANIEL: But is it not okay suddenly to discuss the Wug Test on a podcast? It is academic research.
BEN: That’s the bit. Like if the copyright claim came down of the audio of Daniel reading the test — right? — I could understand that an argument could be made there. But the conc… like, for instance, I know the Rorschach test — I only learned this recently, right? — is the same images as it has always been. And there’s not many of them. There’s like 16 of them. Right, the ink blots? They’re the same 16 ink blots from, like, 100 years ago. Right? They’re copyrighted, and they’re heavily protected so that they don’t, like, circulate and the test lose its — I don’t know — fidelity, or whatever.
HEDVIG: Oh, so whenever we see it in like, like in Watchmen and stuff, it’s just other ink blots?
BEN: Yeah, it’s just pretendsies. Like, they work very hard. I think maybe one or two of the 16 they’ve kind of let go of, for lack of a better phrase. But anyway, point being, I am aware of the fact that certain sort of things can be copyrighted for the use of a test. But I don’t believe that you can put that information into a peer reviewed study and still have it be a monetisable, protectable… How do you…? It would be like Elon Musk going after people for talking about his product. It doesn’t make sense. That’s not a protection that exists in law.
HEDVIG: In the sense of the test, it might make sense that, for example, people that have the Rorschach test might say: we want to be able to do longitudinal comparisons between now and one hundred years ago, and for that to work, no one of our test subjects can have seen the thing before the test.
BEN: But the test can be bought by anyone, right?
DANIEL: The original images are just out there.
BEN: But didn’t Berko Gleason say there’s a new Wug Test that you can buy? Wasn’t that in the message that she sent to the tattoo person?
HEDVIG: There’s like a book or something.
DANIEL: Yes. Those were updated images, yes.
BEN: Yeah. So like, if you are selling a product into the world that I can freely buy
HEDVIG: Yeah, you’re already screwing up your test.
BEN: I can talk about that thing.
DANIEL: You know, science works because experiments are replicable and anybody should be able to replicate that experiment. I can replicate the Wug Test with my four year old daughter.
HEDVIG: And also the amazing thing about the Wug Test is actually not the picture of the bird peep, right? It’s the concept of the test. You should be able to do it with another shape. You should be able to do it with a square that’s called lerk.
BEN: And another sound, right? Another word
DANIEL: You can make up your own.
Hedivg: Yeah, yeah. That is still a valid test. So unlike the Rorschach test, where you could maybe argue that there’s something about the inkblots, I don’t know. You could actually do this with anything.
DANIEL: So, let’s bring this to a close.
BEN: Look, I’m going to say that that image probably can be protected and this happens all the time. And I will even go further than that and say that it’s kind of important. Right? Like, everyone knows a photographer who has had their work ganked online and then used for stuff when they should have been paid for their work, because they’re a photographer and that’s what they do for a job. Like, it’s a dick move and it shouldn’t happen. It doesn’t seem to me like a wholesale co-opting of this image took place. Conversations were had, legal advice was sought… it seems like a storm in a teacup to me.
HEDVIG: I’m surprised that she created this thing, not intending for it to be spread this much. Like, she couldn’t even have known when she made the test that it was the wug that was going to be… you know?
BEN: Yep, absolutely. Like, you were doing science, you weren’t making merch.
HEDVIG: You were doing science. And everyone was like, oh, this one is super cute. And it became… it’s become the unofficial mascot for linguistics. Like, the reason why she gave linguistics student clubs the permission to do this is because it’s, like, extremely popular. People are tattooing it on themselves, and not necessarily just because of her Wug Test, but just that because what it has come to represent in terms of… it just has come to represent linguistics. And I’m just really surprised. I think that she’s probably within her some sort of legal right to do this. I’m not a lawyer. I’m not going to get into it. But at a human level, I’m a little bit surprised that she doesn’t just embrace this and use it all… Embracing it is, like… what would be the bad thing about it? I don’t know, like: oh, losing money, but I don’t think she was making money on this thing anyway.
DANIEL: Oh no, she is. She does have her own wug shop.
HEDVIG: Oh, okay. All right. Okay
DANIEL: Which I would encourage everyone to frequent.
HEDVIG: Right.
DANIEL: And if you decide to buy stuff from the Lingthusiasm wug merch store, then the money will not go to Lingthusiasm, it will go to their annual LingComm grants to help other projects.
BEN: It feels like any time you protect copyright, you come off looking like a bit of a wanker, even if you’re not a bit of a wanker. Right? Like, it just seems like a real protective. The optics on it always seem to look really bad. And I feel for people whose business is copyright protection.
HEDVIG: Fuck, yeah.
BEN: Like, if you if your main income stream is a store with a particular little image and you’ve got to go after people, otherwise that image will leave copyright, will leave your sort of patent protection and your source of income will evaporate, you’ve got to go after your copyright and you just kind of… Yeah, like, you don’t look great doing it, unfortunately. And I kind of feel for everyone in this situation, it feels like…
HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s really fucked, isn’t it?
BEN: Everyone comes off looking like a bit of an asshole. I’m not calling them an asshole, like just the optics on the situation make everyone look like not great. And it’s just… it feels yucky in my tum-tum.
DANIEL: Yeah, it makes me sad.
HEDVIG: And it is weird because all of these people, like Lauren…
BEN: Are great people!
HEDVIG: Are great people and they’re all academics. Right?
DANIEL: And they all do tremendous work to help promote and encourage linguistics.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, we don’t know what’s going to happen in future. There is still some hope that the parties will come to an amicable arrangement.
HEDVIG: The fate of the little blue creature is uncertain. But there’s also been calls on Twitter for a new mascot of linguistics. So we want to hear from you what you think is a good idea. There’s a thread by Mark Dingemanse that we can link to where there are different suggestions. Maybe you’ve seen these like kiki and blobblobs have been up, for example.
DANIEL: Kiki and bouba.
HEDVIG: Kiki and booba and others, sort of like famous graphs like that.
BEN: Somewhere in the world, someone’s like kiki and bouba shop who owns the copyright to that, is just like NOOO.
DANIEL: Well, we are going to make up our own weird mascot and it will fail utterly. But…
BEN: We’ve got to make the Greendale human.
HEDVIG: Yeah. The human being.
DANIEL: The…?
BEN: The Greendale human being.
HEDVIG: Oh, god, so gross.
DANIEL: Okay, well, that’ll be up in our shop. That’s on Redbubble, link on our blog, talk…
HEDVIG: Blfgjlfjr?
DANIEL: I have to give a dollar to the Talk Jar. On our blog, becauselanguage.com
BEN: I do it all the time. I still like: oh, baby I got to go record Talk the Talk, see you later!
DANIEL: Well, it was ten years.
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah, fuck.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: Let’s go on to Worrrrds of the Week
BEN: Meehhh, Words of the Week.
DANIEL: Number one, RBG.
BEN: Oh, Ruth. Ruthy, Ruth, Ruth.
HEDVIG: Notorious.
DANIEL: Notorious RBG.
BEN: This is one of the few times in Word of the Week that I’m just going to be like, I know it.
DANIEL: Yup. US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died and everything is worse now.
BEN: Oh, so much worse now, like much worse than the worse that you were expecting it to worsen by.
DANIEL: Mhm. Of course she died, because 2020. I just want to read a bit from Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, because I have been reading lots of women’s empowerment books to my kids, and guess who has turned up all three times?
BEN: RBG.
DANIEL: RBG. The book says, “Ruth was passionate about women’s rights and argued six landmark cases on gender equality before the United States Supreme Court. Then she became the second female Supreme Court justice in the country’s history. There are nine justices on the Supreme Court, quote, ‘If I’m asked when will there be enough women on the Supreme Court, I say when there are nine. People are shocked, but there have been nine men like forever and nobody’s ever raised their eyebrows at that.'” By the way, bonus points to RBG for LIKE in the middle.
HEDVIG: Yeah, LIKE, and also just for being fucking brazen about it, like just being like: No. Nine. That’s when I think is enough.
BEN: Baller. Being a fucking baller about it.
HEDVIG: What you gonna do? Come at me!
DANIEL: Fuck you!
BEN: My darling partner shared that exact quote on Facebook like an hour after the news broke that she’d died. And I’d never actually heard that quote before. And I was just like, fuck yeah! It’s just, it is! It’s just so… it’s just like it really reminds me of like a Western when, like the hero has like, sauntered into the saloon and someone challenges them and they just like unclip their holster and then don’t say anything and sit down. It’s like, it’s that level of baller move. It’s just like: fuckin’ what are you going to do about it? Yeah. Yeah. That’s what I thought.
HEDVIG: This is where I want to say something about like because I feel like the normal English expression here is “that she has balls”, but that doesn’t feel right.
BEN: Ah, true
HEDVIG: What’s the other… chutzpah (shutzpah [ʃət.spa]) is that also a thing?
DANIEL: Chutzpah! [xʌt.spa:]
BEN: Chutzpah [xʌt.spa:]
DANIEL: She’s got ovaries. We need to ovary up and be like RBG.
HEDVIG: Yeah, fair enough.
DANIEL: So not only have we lost an inspiring person, but we are also now confronted with political Calvinball.
BEN: Oh, jeez. Hhaahhh. Good use of Calvinball by the way. I just want to zero in on that for just a moment.
DANIEL: No one’s talking about Calvinball, you know? This hasn’t come up once.
BEN: That is an excellent way to characterise what is about to happen. Hedvig is looking confused, shall we?
DANIEL: Would you please?
BEN: Okay, so Bill Watterson, author of Calvin and Hobbes…
HEDVIG: Can I just say, I knew that it was going to be Calvin and Hobbes. I immediately understood that.
BEN: In Calvin and Hobbes comics, there is a recurring motif, which is a sport that Calvin likes to play with Hobbes called Calvinball, the only rule of which is the rules can change at any time, according to any player who is playing the game.
DANIEL: Mitch McConnell is playing Calvinball, because he’s the same Senate majority leader who refused to let President Obama appoint a Supreme Court justice because it was in an election year.
BEN: [MOCK SHOCK] That’s not ethical!
DANIEL: That’s unheard of, yeah. And that’s a lie. Now, even though it is an election year, he can’t move fast enough to rush through a Trump appointee, because the entire Trump presidency is a right wing, authoritarian, kleptocratic coup. So Mitch McConnell and the Republicans in the Senate are treating Democrats as though they have no legitimate right to govern. And when the minority of Republicans try to lock down minority rule using power games, then the majority feels like they don’t have the ability to change the system using normal means. And that is a very dangerous situation.
BEN: It’s just… When is that place going to implode? It has to be soon and, like, for life? That’s… that hurts. That hurts right down in the downstairs.
HEDVIG: I think something that’s important to think about when it comes to this Mitch McConnell thing about, like: you could call him a hypocrite and like rightly so, right? But these people are not afraid of being called hypocrites. They’re afraid of being called weak. This is a strong move. I saw one of my friends comment on this and I was like, yeah, that’s true. Like, they don’t… like hypocrisy is not something that… that’s not what’s like the worst insult. Being weak is.
DANIEL: It’s one of their values.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HEDVIG: And this is a strong move.
BEN: Yeah, absolutely. Like if in the other, if on the flip side, Obama sort of hadn’t pushed through the appointment of that justice, that would have been construed as weak on the part of the Democrats by Republicans, right? Like, oh, look at them not taking advantage of that situation. Those like limp-spined, yellow-bellied, like this is why we need to rule, because they don’t have the they don’t have the balls for it.
DANIEL: The ovaries.
BEN: Exactly, right? So, yeah, playing dirty is, it’s… the philosophy seems to be: I didn’t write the rules — which actually isn’t true because these are the people who write the rules, but — I didn’t write the rules. I’m just playing the game that is put in front of me and I play to win, basically.
DANIEL: Well, we need to do that as well. What would you… what are the conditions for giving somebody a three-letter acronym name?
BEN: Oh, interesting. Do you have to be dead?
DANIEL: No.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: One of my favorite podcasters is John Patrick Coen, and everyone calls him JPC.
DANIEL: Yeah, okay.
HEDVIG: And I’m trying to think how I can draw on that. Okay, so you have to have a double barred last name or a fun middle name.
DANIEL: I think that having to be very famous is a necessary condition.
BEN: Okay, I felt like that goes without saying! Like, you know about no one just rocks up to, like, work on Monday being like: Hey, everyone, by the way, my new name BBDA.
DANIEL: You can call me TDM, no wait, Tedium? No, hang on.
HEDVIG: I’m not sure I agree with that!
BEN: Hedvig, what do you call yourself at work?
HEDVIG: I call myself Hedvig, but like…
BEN: [LAUGHS] Okay, I feel like we were about to learn that Hedvig is just like: Oh, were we not supposed to acronym our name to everyone?
HEDVIG: But like I have several friends in Sweden who I know primarily by their initials, like CF and AK.
BEN: How unusual.
HEDVIG: No, it’s really common. And like, I introduced… when I introduced them in English people, English people are like: That’s weird. They have an acronym for a name? And I’m like, yeah, they do.
BEN: I suppose that does happen from time to time in English. Like there’s TJs out there, that sort of thing.
HEDVIG: Yeah, TJ, exactly.
DANIEL: It has to be the kind of name that you can’t reasonably shortened to just one name. So Elon is just Elon, right? For example.
HEDVIG: He’s EM.
DANIEL: I can’t think of another Supreme Court justice with a three letter name. I can only think of presidents, JFK, LBJ, blah, blah, blah.
BEN: I will be honest, I don’t know a lot of Supreme Court justices names off the top of my head.
DANIEL: But we know her. So what would RBG want us to do? I think she would want us to fight. And to dissent. May we all so do.
Let’s go onto our next one. This was suggested by Erica on Facebook. She showed us an article: “Is a TWINDEMIC of covid-19 and flu coming this fall?” Of course it is, because 2020.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: But Erica says, “first evidence of -DEMIC becoming productive or has this happened before?”
BEN: Ooo, no, this must have happened before, surely.
HEDVIG: I think it has happened before, but I can’t think of a good example.
BEN: No, neither can I.
HEDVIG: I can think of the Brovid we had the other week. And like Sharknado and -nado has been a thing for a long time, but
DANIEL: Well, of course we’ve been sticking things on to -demic for a long time. “Demic” is just Greek demos, the people. And so an epi-demic is a disease that’s among the people, — among is epi-. And of course then there was pan-, pan-demic, which means all the people. And yet TWINDEMIC seems a little bit different. Maybe it’s because we’re not sticking a Latin or Greek prefix on it, we’re just sticking an English word on there. I could only find TWINDEMIC and then I found one more, and that is we are all suffering from an INFODEMIC.
BEN: Oh yeah, okay.
HEDVIG: Too much information? Or bad information?
BEN: I don’t think it even needs to be bad information; just too much.
DANIEL: Yeah. We’re surrounded by an avalanche, which is why one of the biggest companies in the world is about information retrieval.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay, so my answer: is -demic combining form? I think it’s in this weird gray area between being a neoclassical compound, as in epi- and pan- and then becoming, kind of reaching out and becoming its own combining form a little bit, as with twin- and info-. We’ll be looking for more -demics in future.
Finally, this is from a TikTok video, a Dutch woman has started dating an Aussie guy and in her video, she points the camera to an empty Corona bottle, a beer in his bathroom, she says. And she asked him, why is there an empty beer bottle in the bathroom? And he says, oh, it’s a SHOWER BEER.
BEN: Shower beer, surely. Obviously it’s a shower beer!
DANIEL: You know about this?
BEN: [INCREDULOUS NOISES] You don’t know about this?
DANIEL: Well, I don’t drink, but is this a thing?
BEN: Yeah, absolutely.
HEDVIG: I have beers in the bath, yeah.
BEN: Yeah! Shower beer, for sure.
DANIEL: Now I can understand bath beer because it’s… you know, I have… I have beveraged myself in baths. But a shower beer?
BEN: I, I’m going to go out in here and say it. And look, I am not looking to take a dig at anyone’s life choices, but a shower beer is categorically superior to a bath beer.
HEDVIG: Wait, how?
BEN: Oh, absolutely.
HEDVIG: Wait, how are showers superior to baths?
BEN: Ah… oh, pfff… I don’t… like, that’s not a question that even needs to be answered, surely, because the obviousness of the truth is just so… like the gravity which makes the water fall in the shower. Like it’s just, it is.
HEDVIG: Hey, do you… is it still a shower if you sit down?
BEN: People who sit in the shower are super weird and I don’t agree with it.
DANIEL: Or else they’re children.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: If you had a shower beer, wouldn’t it take slightly longer to drink?
BEN: Yeah. But like, is that always a bad thing? Is the point of drinking beer to, like, mainline it as fast as humanly possible or is it to savour it, to enjoy it?
HEDVIG: Yeah, I agree with this.
DANIEL: The alcohol content of my beer is three point five… whoops, no, two point five. Whoops, no.
HEDVIG: Exactly. That’s… that was going to be my question. Shower beer, surely this is a problem.
BEN: What! What!! How…
HEDVIG: Also, Corona’s already pretty watered down.
BEN: Okay, yeah, like the real talk we need to have here is about the fact that this guy was having bad shower beers.
DANIEL: Yeah. Okay. So this is an Australian thing apparently.
BEN: I don’t know if it’s purely Australian, but I would say that it is definitely… it is definitely a thing. I have both had shower beers and I have talked with my mates about the phenomenon that is the shower beer.
DANIEL: Oh! It’s a known thing.
BEN: And this is not at all unique.
DANIEL: Okay, then I think we need to know, do you have a shower beer, and are you Australian? Hit us up on the Twitter, we’ll have a thread.
HEDVIG: I had a grandma who was a chain smoker and she would smoke cigarettes in the shower, but not while drinking.
BEN: It’s doable. Hey, look, I figured go big or go home.
DANIEL: SHOWER BEER, -DEMIC and RBG. They’re our Words of the Week. Let’s get to some comments. Hayden says, “Thanks for finally going over SIMP Daniel. It’s not a word I use, but I like to hear you guys break down some new crude internet words..”
BEN: Oh, Did that happen on the one that I missed out on?
DANIEL: Oh yeah, I think you didn’t, you weren’t here for SIMP.
BEN: That’s really interesting because I had to quiz some of my kids about SIMP this week. I’m like: What is SIMP? What is this new word? Teach me!
DANIEL: What did they say?
BEN: They were just basically like: like, it’s like a alt-right insult for like a cuckolded, like… basically it’s their word for when a guy is a decent person to a woman.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] You kind of got what we got. Although Pontus, affectionately known as Moon Moon, hit us up and said, “Hey, just listen to episode eight and heard you talk about simp. The origin for its resurgence is, as far as I know, online culture. And the first meaning was more specific than what you talked about. A simp is a person, only men, according to many, that gives lots of affection and/or stuff or money to a woman with the expectation of getting love in return. For example, man that follows a female streamer and donates big sums of money to her and because of this, gets to chat with her. And sooner or later he will demand her love and affection, becoming angry when he doesn’t get it.” Thanks, Pontus. I did say there was a toxic masculinity going on here, hey?
BEN: Interesting.
HEDVIG: I really hope we don’t have simps.
BEN: Well, we would need people to be giving us lots and lots of stuff. We would need one of those streams where, like, the dollar signs are raining down the screen and stuff and be like: Oh hey boo, thanks!
DANIEL: I just want to say that our listeners are awesome people and I never have any trouble even on Facebook. I don’t seem to have any trouble with toxic fandom, which is such a blessing. Thank you, everybody.
BEN: Clearly, that the message here is we need to get much bigger, so we get toxic fans so we can make fun of them
HEDVIG: Oh god no no no no. Only tell your nice friends about us.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Yeah. If you’ve got if you’ve got that one friend who just like kind of always kind of goes like: uhh, just to play the devil’s advocate, just don’t tell them. All right. Just leave them. They’re fine. Just, they can go listen to Joe Rogan and they’ll have a great old time.
DANIEL: Finally from Adam via Facebook. “Hello, team. Great that you’re back. I finally got back to listening and subscribed as a listener. In episode five, Hedvig is talking about how she made available multilingual versions of Alice in Wonderland to the students. Then Ben said, Oh, that must be in the public domain, surely. And everybody laughed it off. Now, coming from a team of linguists, that’s disappointing. You, above all people should know that multilingual versions are actually translations made by real people. Lewis Carroll’s original text is, of course, in the public domain. But translations, though being derivative works, as in based on other work, also have their own copyright.
BEN: That is true.
DANIEL: I thought that was a really good point
HEDVIG: It is a really good point.
BEN: I don’t… I don’t remember making the joke about the translations being in the public domain, though I’m sure I did, because someone, like, mailed in angry about it. So I’m really sorry. And that absolutely is true. I didn’t… I must have meant it at the time, but I can absolutely see how that is 100 percent not the case.
DANIEL: We take responsibility for our content, but sometimes something goes by and you don’t really like I was you know what I was thinking? I was thinking about a copy of Alice in Wonderland written by Vladimir Nabokov. Like the translation was, it’s so old that it uses the pre-Soviet characters that got dropped in 1918, I think. Yeah, I haven’t… I can’t read it, but I was thinking, yeah, that’s in the public domain, but I didn’t think any more about it. Sorry about that.
HEDVIG: I should probably clarify, I didn’t actually make these available, I’m sorry if I made it seem like I did. What happened was the linguistics department I was at had a visit from a lawyer where… ’cause we were talking about sharing research material. And the lawyer was, when we said, like some of the computational language department, we’re like: oh, so we’re doing this course and we’re searching through Alice in Wonderland. And we had intentionally scrambled the order of sentences, would actually probably maybe makes a little bit better copyright-wise, because it means you can’t just print the novel.
BEN: Yes, actually do remember this now. I think my comment was about the fact that if all you’re using is the English language text, then that’s definitely in the public domain.
HEDVIG: I think we were using the translations as well. But the funny part is more that like… it was really funny to see the face of the lawyer who was like: I don’t think you should do that. And the linguists were like: obviously we want to do that! And it was just this standoff of like: We don’t understand each other at all.
DANIEL: Let me just continue with Adam’s text here, because he gave us a really good example that I wanted to bring up. Here it is. “The translation of Winnie the Pooh into Polish was done some 70 years ago by Irena Tuwim,” — I hope I’m getting the name right — “the wife of a very famous Polish poet, Julian Tuwim. For decades, Irena Tuwim was often presented as ~the housewife~, while her husband deservedly got the fame, but possibly undeservedly, did he get all the fame. As modern research suggests, she was much more than that. She was his assistant, archivist, secretary, but also consultant. Irena Tuwim’s contribution to Polish literature went largely unnoticed. Except that her only credited work is the translation of Winnie the Pooh, and it is a genius translation. Funnily, the wider public only realised how good it was only when a second new translation was published, which people strongly disliked. Only then, after a brief discussion or update about how good Irena Tuwim actually was as a translator and writer. I’m citing this story with the request that if you can, please notice the translators work a bit more rather than brushing it all off with ‘surely this must all be in the public domain.'”
BEN: That is super fair enough. And I’m just imagining the process of A, learning a second language…
[HEDVIG CHUCKLES]
BEN: And then B, sitting down to like translate an entire cherished text. And that must be like doing one humongous golden shit. Like, it must be so difficult and so rewarding. And it just… yes, you’re absolutely right. That is someone’s like laborious, laborious work and fair cop.
DANIEL: Thanks, Adam. Appreciate you.
HEDVIG: I actually have worked as a translator for part from English and Swedish, which is not that much called for because all Swedes read English.
BEN: Where can we…! Yeah, that’s what I was going to say, so you were making it feel like the seven over-seventy-five year olds left to who are English only in Sweden.
[OUTRO MUSIC]
HEDVIG: If you liked our spicy episode… this is what we think is spicy. Maybe you think it’s very bland, but to our tummies, at least two of us…
BEN: [LAUGHS] This is the northern European version of spicy.
DANIEL: We’ve talked about this.
HEDVIG: Yeah! I mean, we have two issues now about copyright and copyright always makes me feel very queasy. And if you also feel queasy, or if you want to tell us this wasn’t spicy at all, why don’t you get in touch with us? You can send all your reactions and ideas for other things we should cover to us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon, and Patreon. We are becauselangpod everywhere, which is great, the same username. And you can also send us old-fashioned emails: hello@becauselanguage.com. And also you can tell a friend about us. I remember only nice… I think we’ve now narrowed it down to nice and dumb friends are our preferences?
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: Yes, yes. Dumb. Nice, because we don’t want awful toxic culture on our Facebook and other pages. And dumb so that we start getting some easier questions for mail-in episodes.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: No smart people!
HEDVIG: No smart people! Yeah, thank you.
[JUST MUSIC FOR A MOMENT]
BEN: Oh, that means it’s my turn?
DANIEL: That’s you.
BEN: Yeah, I know what I’m doing. I know what’s going on. Hold on. Wait, what? Ah. You’re hearing this episode right now because you’re a Patron and that’s great. And so I’m going to take a second to offer some extra special individualised thank you to a couple of our most special friends: Termy, Chris B, Lyssa, The Major, Chris L, Matt, Whitney, Damien, Helen, Bob, Jack, Christelle, Elías, Michael, Larry, Kitty, Lord Mortis, Binh, Kristofer, Dustin, Andy, Maj, Nigel, Kate, Jen, Nasrin, Ayesha, Emma and this week, Andrew. Thank you to all of our patrons. Especially you, Andrew.
DANIEL: Our music is written and performed by Drew Krapljanov. You can hear him in a couple of great bands, Ryan Beno and Dideon’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
[BEN AND HEDVIG MAKE PEW PEW PEW NOISES]
DANIEL: [SINGING] Transitional music! Transitional music!
[ALL MAKE MUSIC SOUNDS]
DANIEL: We’re back. Hope we didn’t offend too many people.
HEDVIG: God, yeah.
BEN: That was not spicy. I want to put that out there. That was a lot less spicy than I was expecting. Given how many, like, messy racial and, like, sexual identity and identity politics and all this kind of stuff we’ve been wrestling with. That was just, like, a fight between linguists.
DANIEL: I know, but they’re my friennnnnnnds.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Yeah.
DANIEL: Sorry, Ben, I couldn’t hear you there. I was getting a phone call from somebody… Attorney Somebody?
[LAUGHTERS]
[BLOOPER BEEP]
HEDVIG: And we took our topper mattress that we bought from IKEA. This is the sofa, [TAPPING SOUND ON MIC] and this is…
BEN: Yeah yeah yeah, explain to us every structural element of the…
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Of the room.
HEDVIG: I invented it walking home last night, and I was like: I have an idea I know what I’m gonna do.
BEN: You had a proper eureka moment. Eureka!
HEDVIG: And then I woke up and I built it! And Ste helped, and he’s bringing me coffee. I have a little flap that I can, ooh there’s coffee! [LAUGHTER] I have a little flap that I can…
DANIEL: Coffee flap.
HEDVIG: And coffee just arrived in my flap! Yep!
DANIEL: Wow.
BEN: Daniel, can you please make sure that you take that out of context for the end of the show?
DANIEL: Yes, I will.
[BLOOPER BEEP]
HEDVIG: It’s like my, one of my grandpa’s used to be like, not spread out butter on a piece of crispbread, but would just put it on one end and be like: it’s all getting mixed in the stomach.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Like, that’s not why you spread out butter on bread though, but fine?
BEN: Isn’t that so good? It’s just like I care only about the caloric qualities, and no other qualities of the food.
DANIEL: Excuse me. Now I’m going to go eat some cookies now. Right, flour, om nom nom nom nom
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Oil. [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: It’s bizarre, yeah.
DANIEL: Eggs. Now I put myself in the oven at three fifty.
BEN: How delightfully easy would life be though, right? if literally all you had to do was just identify the constituent components of food. The bare sort of elements of the food periodic table. And then the tummy was where it all happened.
DANIEL: It’s the combustion chamber!