A hundred episodes already? To celebrate, we’re doing our favourite kind of episode: a Mailbag.
- Why is it a BLOW JOB when there’s no blowing? Why JOB? And why is OFF often used in sexual expressions?
- Why do we say NO SIRREE? Is there an equivalent expression for women?
- Why does English have rare TH sounds like /θ/ and /ð/? Why doesn’t everyone?
- HIS’N — is it related to IF’N?
Timestamps
Intros: 1:00
Questions (sexual): 8:46
Questions (non-sexual): 26:24
Related or Not: 42:12
More questions: 36:36
The Reads: 1:15:48
Outtakes: 1:20:11
Listen to this episode
Video
@becauselangpod Are you a linguistic chaos goblin? Or would you like to be? You get to say things like "expresso", "irregardless", and yes, "expensiver". Just because. The power is in your hands. This is from Episode 100: Spicy Mailbag https://becauselanguage.com/100-spicy-mailbag/
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Thanks to all our patrons! Here are our patrons at the Supporter level.
This time, we are reading the names in alphabetical order by first letter.
But the way that the letter would be alphabetised if you go by the way the name of the letter sounds. So any name that starts with a W would come just after D because “double-u”.
And then by last letter, backwards.
- Ignacio
- Rodger
- Rhian
- Rach
- Rene
- Raina
- Diego
- Whitney
- WolfDog
- J0HNTR0Y
- James
- Jack
- Joanna
- gramaryen
- Andy
- aengryballs
- Andy from Logophilius
- Amir
- Ariaflame
- Alyssa
- Ayesha
- Helen
- Felicity
- Larry
- LordMortis
- Luis
- Lyssa
- Manú
- Matt
- Margareth
- Meredith
- Molly Dee
- Nasrin
- Nigel
- Nikoli
- Stan
- sæ̃m
- Sonic Snejhog
- Steele
- Elías
- Kathy
- Kristofer
- Kevin
- Keith
- Kate
- O Tim
- PharaohKatt
- Chris W
- Canny Archer
- Colleen
- Chris L
- Cheyenne
- Termy
- Tony
- Tadhg
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Become a Patron!Show notes
blow v.2 | Green’s Dictionary of Slang
https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/qrmyczy#sn1c
job v.1 | Green’s Dictionary of Slang
https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/fgj34zi
More + one-syllable adjectives in comparatives | WordReference forums
https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/more-one-syllable-adjectives-in-comparatives.1402569/
Pitch Drop experiment | University of Queensland
https://smp.uq.edu.au/pitch-drop-experiment
Presence of Uncommon Consonants | WALS
https://wals.info/chapter/19
Inventories | PHOIBLE
https://phoible.org/inventories
Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51051997_Phonemic_Diversity_Supports_a_Serial_Founder_Effect_Model_of_Language_Expansion_from_Africa
Can a linguistic serial founder effect originating in Africa explain the worldwide phonemic cline?
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2016.0185
Phonemic diversity decays “out of Africa”?
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3090
[PDF] Lend Me Your Ears: Otitis Media and Aboriginal Australian languages
https://ling.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Anelisa%20Fergus.pdf
Th-fronting
https://notoneoffbritishisms.com/2012/12/27/th-fronting/
Iffen ya brung a gun | Grammarphobia
https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2015/04/iffen.html
SCTV: Grapes of Mud
https://youtu.be/MqBvwHqr7fk?si=xUYKnYcBmkRy9REq
When Is Mother’s Day Around The World?
https://blog.officeholidays.com/general/when-is-mothers-day-around-the-world/
International Womens Day
https://www.internationalwomensday.com
International Mens Day
https://internationalmensday.com
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
HEDVIG: Now, that we’re not on a radio station, is there any amount of music we can play?
DANIEL: Not really, no. We’d have to get the rights for it.
HEDVIG: Not even like 10 seconds?
DANIEL: Why? What would you play?
HEDVIG: Intergalactic by the Beastie Boys, [BEN LAUGHS] of course.
BEN: Or a short stab of Mother’s Milk [LAUGHS] from Red Hot Chili Peppers.
HEDVIG: No, no, no. Intergalactic by the Beastie Boys is the best.
DANIEL: You know what that means? We have to do an acapella version of Intergalactic. I’ll start.
[ALL SINGING INTERGALACTIC IN THE MOST CHAOTIC ACAPELLA VERSION]
BEN: Stop stop stop stop stop.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] This is worse. This is worse.
DANIEL: I feel like we let the beat… DROP.
BEN: Oh, I see what you did there, Daniel. Very good.
HEDVIG: Oh, god. Oh, god. Oh, god. Oh god. What have I started?
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to this bonus episode of Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name’s Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. He’s been my podcast husband for 15 years. It’s Ben Ainslie. Hi, Ben.
BEN: Parasocial relationship. Parasexual relationship. Who can really say?
DANIEL: We never know. We never know.
HEDVIG: Neither. Also, that’s not how parasocial works.
BEN: Just to be clear to all of the listeners, much to my ongoing chagrin, it is not a parasexual relationship.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Despite my very best efforts.
HEDVIG: I think it could be because parasexual relationships are one sided. So, Ben, that’s up to you.
BEN: Oh.
DANIEL: Oh. So, which side?
HEDVIG: That’s the thing.
BEN: Okay, so I’m bringing that big stalker energy. Okay, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool.
DANIEL: So, it can’t be because it’s clearly mutual, but it would never work because we don’t even live in the same town. [GASPS] Wait a minute!
BEN: Oh, did the classic stalker thing of being in all the places that Daniel’s going to end up and be like…
DANIEL: Hi, Ben.
BEN: …Hi, Daniel. How did you get here? What? That’s crazy.
DANIEL: I thought I was stalking you. This is awkward. Ben, I have some bad news.
BEN: What’s that?
DANIEL: You didn’t coin the word UNIQUITY in episode 97.
BEN: Oh, that’s unfortunate, but unsurprising.
DANIEL: It’s been in print since 1789. Wow.
HEDVIG: Uniquity.
DANIEL: Uniquity? Yep. Something that Ben said off the cuff. And there it was.
HEDVIG: Is it uniqueness?
BEN: Unique-titude.
DANIEL: Yes. Unique-titude.
HEDVIG: Unique-titude.
DANIEL: By the way, Ben and I are having fun with the sexual chemistry, but we don’t mean any offense to people who are queer, as I am not. I’m not a part of that community. We just do [HEDVIG LAUGHS] it to make homophobes mad. That’s why we do it. Just like Nirvana.
HEDVIG: They’re not queerbaiting. They’re just being silly.
BEN: …yes. Yes! It’s… purely to make… the homophobes… mad.
HEDVIG: Okay. You’ve got to stop this one.
BEN: Certainly isn’t a kernel of truth in my end of things!
HEDVIG: I’m just glad I’m not involved.
BEN: Because that would be inappropriate. Hedvig, come on.
DANIEL: We don’t want that.
BEN: Be responsible.
DANIEL: She’s been… not my podcast wife, because saying that would be weird. But definitely my podcast mate. It’s Hedvig Skirgård.
HEDVIG: Hello.
BEN: In the Australian sense, just to be clear.
DANIEL: Yes [LAUGHS].
HEDVIG: I think in most senses of MATE, right? I can be your sailor buddy if you want.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Oh, I didn’t even think of that sense. I’d forgotten that sense of MATE.
DANIEL: The sailor buddy! Heyyyy.
HEDVIG: All right. Okay. I can’t believe this is happening, but I think we should do a show, and you guys should stop waffling around and we should…
BEN: Okay. Yeah. Yeah, you’re right.
DANIEL: You put me through that intro last time that didn’t work. And so, now I’m getting you back.
HEDVIG: No, I know. I’m just enjoying the fact that I just woke up and I’m tired and I’m the one who is…
BEN: You get to be the grumpy director. Ooh, let’s just flip the script. Let’s just make Hedvig the whip cracker.
DANIEL: The grumpy Gus. Oh, you get to drive. No, that’s not… Next time. Next time. Hedvig, [HEDVIG LAUGHS] you didn’t invent the word CHARADING in episode 38. I’m just telling you. It’s a noun most places. I wasn’t able to find any actual dictionaries that have it as a verb, but Wiktionary does. So, that’s real, right?
HEDVIG: What word? I was laughing.
DANIEL: CHARADING. CHARADE, the verb.
HEDVIG: Charading? Charading, yeah. You’re charading as something.
DANIEL: Masquerading, charading. Well, I thought that you invented it because nobody has it, but I did find the Wiktionary has CHARADE, the verb. So, there you go. I’m trying to find a word that you didn’t invent, which is, most of them, but still.
BEN: [LAUGHS] 99.99999999% of all of the words we’ve said, probably.
HEDVIG: All right.
DANIEL: Hey, it’s our first bonus episode for a while. Good to be doing these.
BEN: We’re back.
HEDVIG: Yeah. They’re fun. They’re fun. Can we be more loose? Yes is the answer, right?
DANIEL: Yes. Yes, that is the answer.
HEDVIG: Okay, cool.
BEN: As in, in this episode or just generally?
HEDVIG: In bonus episodes.
BEN: Oh, okay. Fair enough. Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah. By the way, it’s episode 100. Isn’t that great?
BEN: A century.
DANIEL: We did it.
HEDVIG: We count bonus and regulars at the same, right?
DANIEL: Yes, because they eventually become regulars.
HEDVIG: So…
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. I was thinking we would have a big bash for our 100th episode, and we thought, and Hedvig, you said, let’s do it this way. Let’s just have a cozy chat, just the three of us.
HEDVIG: Yeah. We could stay on it.
BEN: The funnest.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Kind of the equivalent of, when you get older, having a quiet night in for your birthday.
HEDVIG: Uh-huh.
BEN: What it really is it’s collectively our favourite things, which is a Mailbag episode.
DANIEL: Yep, it is.
BEN: Whenever we do a Mailbag episode, we always finish it being like, “Goddamn, I love Mailbag episodes.”
DANIEL: That was so good!
BEN: So, this is our special treat to us. This has got a very Emperor’s New Groove vibe, where we’ve just gifted ourselves the thing that we like the most. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Ooh, for me? Oh, thank you.
BEN: [LAUGHS] A Mailbag episode. How did you know, me?
DANIEL: Well, we are going to be doing something big for number 105, and it’ll be 105 because… that’s a big deal. Because?
HEDVIG: There are about…
DANIEL: Ben knows.
HEDVIG: …105 characters in the IPA.
DANIEL: No.
BEN: I came into the previous show at episode 105? I don’t know, what is it? [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: In our earlier incarnation, Talk the Talk, there were 395 episodes.
BEN: I see.
DANIEL: So, add another 105.
BEN: 5 hunjy!
DANIEL: That takes us to 500. It’s going to be huge. So, if you’re one of our patrons, watch out on Discord, because we’re going to tell you about the live episode coming up. I’m really proud of our hundred episodes.
BEN: A hundred shows.
DANIEL: Even though I can never remember any of them that we’ve done but…
BEN: That’s untrue. Whenever I say, what about this thing that we did one time, like a savant, you can be like, “It’s this.”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] That’s the benefit of having transcripts.
BEN: Hey, if you were listening to this bonus episode, but you’re like, what the frick is bonus about it? This just seems like a normal episode. That probably means that you are not one of our patrons. Because our patrons get the bonus episodes first, and then whenever Daniel remembers, he puts it out there for the general population. If you would like to become a patron, there are all sorts of wicked things that benefit you. Because, of course, that’s the primary reason why anyone does anything in this hellscape capitalism nightmare in which we all coexist.
DANIEL: Mm, yum.
BEN: You can most importantly join our Discord, where a whole bunch of really, really, really nice word nerds hang out. We’ve got a whole bunch of different channels to do with pets and games and puzzles and all sorts of things. And the general chat is just good old crack. It’s the best.
DANIEL: Good vibes.
BEN: So, if you would like to be part of the word nerd collective, you become a patron, and then we give you a little invite into our little members only Discord server. You also get things like this, the bonus episode. The money that we make, we do a couple of things with. We pay ourselves a little bit, not very much. We mostly spend money getting our show transcribed so that people who cannot hear can access our podcast. And so, you can search our podcast if you ever are like, “Oh, what the fuck was that thing that Ben said that one time on that one thing?” You can just be like [WARBLES] and find it really easily through a good old-fashioned word search. And it allows us to offer a little… What’s the word I’d use? Not payment, like a…
DANIEL: Honorarium.
HEDVIG: Compensation.
BEN: An honorarium to all of the guests that we have on our show so that they don’t feel like we are taking their labour and knowledge and just making a good old show without giving anything back. Now, some people accept that honorarium. Some people donate it to a charity of their choice. But it is important for us to be able to offer that nonetheless and that’s what being a patron helps us to do. So, you should check it out.
DANIEL: patreon.com/becauselangpod. Okay, let’s get to the questions. This first one comes from Will via email. He emailed us at hello@becauselanguage.com. This one’s going to be a little bit spicy. It involves sexual vocabulary of a rather frank nature. So, if you want to skip it, go to exactly 26 minutes, 24 seconds.
Will says, “Hello, friends. Why do we use the phrase SUCKING OFF and BLOWJOB? SUCK and BLOW to denote the same action when those are opposite motions? Furthermore, where does the suffix JOB, such as handjob, blowjob, etc., come from? Thank you for your consideration.” Thanks, Will.
BEN: I would also like to throw into this mix, I would like to further Will’s question. When the individual in question who is having oral sex performed on them is not in possession of a penis and is instead in possession of a vulva, why do we call that GOING DOWN rather than any of the names that we have for the other penis-oriented activities?
DANIEL: And can you give a blowjob to a vulva owner? Let’s talk about that.
BEN: Mm.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Okay, good. I was going to also extend the question.
BEN: Oh, so many extensions.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] It’s extending, it’s getting longer. What about OFF as in JERK OFF or JACK OFF? Or JILL OFF, a novel term?
BEN: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: Hedvig, what was your question?
HEDVIG: Well, I was going to say you can also FUCK OFF.
DANIEL: Aah.
HEDVIG: And you can also, what does that person GET OFF…? Why didn’t… There’s lots of OFFs.
BEN: Yeah…
DANIEL: Getting off.
BEN: What offboarding is taking place in all of these situations? [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Yeah. Okay. We’ve got a lot to go on here. Where do you want to take this first? You want to go for the SUCK versus BLOW? Do you feel like going to OFF or do you want to take a JOB?
BEN: I feel like I have an idea about SUCK versus BLOW. I’m just putting my little hand up for that one.
DANIEL: Okay. Take it away.
BEN: Well, I think that it has to do with the fact that independent of a sexual context, when human beings put a straw like thing in their mouth, they can either suck through it or they can blow through it.
DANIEL: Interesting.
BEN: And that’s what that is. So, the motion of performing oral sex on a penis is one of simulacrum to some kind of straw-like thing. And so, we’ve basically just taken that idea of you can either suck or blow, and we’ve taken it over into that realm. When in fact, if we’re being honest, not really a whole lot of definitive sucking or blowing tends to take place during oral sex.
DANIEL: True.
BEN: Right. Like, it’s just a, like a…
HEDVIG: What do you do?
BEN: Well, in my experience of…
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: No, no, no, no. Let’s stop that there.
HEDVIG: One of those happens more than the other.
BEN: Okay, sure. I will give you that. But I will also put it out there that the idea that sucking someone off [HEDVIG CHUCKLES] involves heaps and heaps of sucking is not hugely accurate either.
HEDVIG: Okay. Well, yeah, I’m just. I’m just remembering that my mom is…
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I just can’t get away from it.
BEN: Do you know what’s really, really good, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: Language, okay.
BEN: Just today, I called my grandmother, my dearest, sweetest grandmother, and she said, “Oh, are you doing that podcast still? Would you mind sending me a link so I can listen?”
HEDVIG: There you go. Now, you’re in my situation. You are welcome.
BEN: [LAUGHS] And of course, this is question number one.
DANIEL: And that’s why you can use the transcripts to find out which episode Ben doesn’t swear on.
BEN: [CHUCKLES] Yeah. None. Zero.
DANIEL: One thing, Ben is reminding me of contronyms, where SANCTION and SANCTION…
BEN: Oh, yes, auto-antonyms.
DANIEL: …both mean to allow or to disallow, because it just involves something in that area and it just bifurcates to mean both things.
HEDVIG: There’s a couple of options, why there’s SUCK and BLOW for fellatio. It could be that there’s an old practice that we don’t know about where people are actually blowing air on each other.
BEN: Oh, okay. Yep.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Something to do with similarity to instruments like a trumpet that you blow into. So, it looks a bit like that. So, maybe that’s why it’s blow. I don’t know. I don’t know any other languages where… In France, I think it’s faire de pipi or something like that. And that’s why it can’t be Pippi Longstocking. And that just sounds like either of those in Swedish is only the suck. There’s no blowing happening.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: So, the blow is a bit English specific, maybe.
DANIEL: Okay, well, I did a bit of research on this one. This, of course, took me to the wonderful Green’s Dictionary of Slang, greensdictofslang.com. A blowjob is not a blowjob because you do any actual blowing. Instead, what happens is you make them blow… their load.
BEN: Ohhh.
DANIEL: Yep.
BEN: Is that really where it comes from? Like, we’ve got a definitive… So, we’ve just had it wrong this entire time and all the comedians who do the really cheesy bit about, like, “Why do we call it a blow job?”, it’s all just been us getting the root, the blowing was happening on the wrong side.
DANIEL: Well, that’s one potential answer.
BEN: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: It’s that, yeah, to blow means to have an orgasm, and that’s been around for a very long time.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Huh-huh.
DANIEL: But there’s another possibility. It could be that BLOW is a synonym for sex, like hitting. There’s this sex-as-violence metaphor that happens. And so, people have been talking about having a blow, which means having traditional sex, penis and vagina, from about 1654. So, there are two things going on, and maybe they both contribute.
BEN: Interesting.
HEDVIG: Ah, blow as in, like, taking a blow. Like a hit.
DANIEL: Like getting hit. Yes.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: We’d say, I’d hit that. I’d blow that.
BEN: I’d tap that. Yeah. Okay.
HEDVIG: That’s a really as the second language speaker of English, I rarely remember that blow also means that.
BEN: Yeah, it’s a quite…
DANIEL: It was a heavy blow.
BEN: Archaic.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Maybe not archaic, but certainly…
HEDVIG: He can take a couple of blows.
BEN: You’re not going to hear a lot of young people walking around being like, “Wah, he dealt him a mighty blow.” [LAUGHS] Its pretty unusual.
DANIEL: No. Yeah, exactly, exactly.
HEDVIG: Right. Okay.
DANIEL: Now, let’s go to job. JOB is just a procedure. So, it makes sense that we would stick that onto a blowjob or a handjob or something like that. But the word JOB has also, by itself, meant sex since the 1500s, jobbing. In fact, there’s a quote in Green’s Dictionary of Slang from 1538: “Jynkyn Jacon that jobbed iolye Jone”, a funny sentence that appeared. And if he jobbed her meant he had sex with her.
BEN: Does this have any association with sex work, or are we just talking completely divorced from that as an idea?
DANIEL: The quotes in Green do not involve sex work at all. It was just having sex, perhaps for that reason, perhaps not.
BEN: Is this also to do with the fact that a lot of our linguistic history in European linguistic tradition has been super informed by sexual taboos and stuff needing to be not spoken about openly and all that sort of thing? So, in the same way that we have 100 different words for penis, do we have lots and lots of these words because we just needed to never, ever actually be like, “We were having sex,” and everyone grasps their pearls and faints or swoons onto a diwan?
DANIEL: We were doing a job. Yeah, taboo language does that, doesn’t it? It needs to keep morphing because people can’t catch on.
HEDVIG: Is the older meaning procedure? Is that what is common to both sex and work?
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Any sort of procedure…
HEDVIG: Because I do have a job, I have a job as a linguist.
DANIEL: You have a job.
HEDVIG: Yeah. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I’m just looking that up. In the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest sense is a piece of work. So, that is the oldest that we have from the 1500s.
BEN: That makes sense.
DANIEL: However, it didn’t take long for criminal slang to catch up. We start seeing a job, a crime…
BEN: A crime, yeah.
DANIEL: …especially something arranged beforehand, from 1679.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: And then, we see a BOOB JOB and FACE JOB as a kind of operation by the 1900s. So, lots going on there.
HEDVIG: And when did we have the “he jobbed her” thing you said earlier?
DANIEL: That one was from about the 1500s, about the same time as the work meaning. So, it didn’t really take very long for that one to become sexual at all.
BEN: Hang on, can we just… I feel like we blew, no pun intended, past BOOB JOB, as a phrase, existed in the early 1900s?
DANIEL: Nah, 1970-ish.
BEN: Oh, okay. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Which is about right.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.
DANIEL: Sorry. I tend to just go century by century.
HEDVIG: Plastic surgery is older than you think.
DANIEL: Yeah, that is.
BEN: Yeah, that I knew. But just the idea that, that was going to be the wildest anachronism for me. [LAUGHS] Like, “Cheers, we’re going down to the speakeasy. She’s just had a boob job.” Like, it didn’t jibe in my head at all.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: It would have meant something else, I’m almost certain. By the way, Green does have references to a blowjob also being cunnilingus.
BEN: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: A blowjob. Or even normal intercourse. Can I say that better than normal intercourse? Or penis in…
HEDVIG: You said traditional, you said normal, and then you caught yourself and then you said penis in vagina. Yeah.
BEN: The Mormon heritage is making itself known.
DANIEL: This stuff is pervasive! Or just penis-in-vagina intercourse.
HEDVIG: You can say vagino-penetrative sex or something like that, or missionary position something.
DANIEL: Yes. Thank you. We are always looking for better ways to be more accurate in what we’re describing. Now, let’s keep going with OFF. Why off? [BEN LAUGHS] Hedvig, I’m going to get you to do the heavy lifting on this one. Why would OFF be really good for things like JACK OFF and JERK OFF and things like that?
HEDVIG: Well, okay, so my theory is that it is what I like to call like an aspect, Aktionsart, particle. It happens a lot of times with prepositions. It happens more in Swedish than in English, which is why Daniel gave this to me, I think.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: So, like…
DANIEL: What’s Aktionsart? Sorry, can we go back? What is Aktionsart?
HEDVIG: Okay. It’s like aspect, but a bit different. [LAUGHS] We’re talking here about time, but not time as in how far away something is. But time as in, like, is something happening? Is it taking a short amount of time for it to happen? Is it ongoing still while I’m talking? Has it happened repeatedly every Thursday? Those type of time thinkings are we doing now.
DANIEL: That’s aspect.
BEN: So, this idea in linguistics of like the thing that is being referenced has its own time frame of some kind.
HEDVIG: Yeah. So, in English, for example, you can say, I drink and I am drinking.
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: And those mean different things.
BEN: Right. I drink means there are innumerable times in my life where consumption of alcohol takes place. I’m drinking means right now, drinking is happening. I am consuming alcohol.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: Right. So, that’s the thing that English learners have to learn, that distinction and when to use which one, because it’s not obvious.
BEN: So, how does that relate to OFF then?
HEDVIG: Right. Sometimes, you have an event that has the sort of medium time and you want to make it short and more punctual and more explosive. And that’s when I think you add the OFF. So, KICK and KICKOFF.
BEN: Right. I see.
HEDVIG: TAKE, TAKEOFF. Do you have some more other prepositions when you do this in English? You don’t have that many.
DANIEL: I mean we do. I think OFF as being kind of telic, that is to say the action is complete. So, we have UP. He ate the spaghetti. He ate UP the spaghetti. If I interrupt you in the middle of it, you could have eaten it for a bit, but you didn’t eat it up.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Gotcha.
DANIEL: So, there’s that.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: There’s SHUT UP, I guess.
DANIEL: Yeah. Yeah. That’s an intensifier, that one I think of off as like being kind of completeness. So, for example, the bomb goes. There it is, ten, nine, eight. The bomb is going, but then the bomb goes off. And that’s at the end.
HEDVIG: Yeah, the whole event… It’s the whole event that has to happen, right?
DANIEL: Yep. Telicity.
HEDVIG: So, it becomes completed. It comes, yeah.
DANIEL: Oh, also separation. Part of off is separation. So, “Ben knocked my socks”, which means that there’s some sock knocking that Ben is doing. [BEN LAUGHS] But if I say “Ben knocked my socks off”, that’s separation. That’s like something happened. Or also, “He limped”, which describes the way he was walking. “He limped off”, which means now he’s gone away.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
BEN: But now, aren’t we changing…? We’re changing the usage now, aren’t we though?
HEDVIG: Yeah, those are all quite different. The last one is almost like a regular preposition.
BEN: Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Like, “Step off, George, step off.”
HEDVIG: Off to the pub.
DANIEL: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
BEN: Like, he literally needs him to go away.
DANIEL: So, something is attached and then it gets separated from something else, which means you’re in a new state. And I think that’s what’s happening with jerk off or jack off or blow off, whatever.
BEN: So, we think it is directly relating to the ejaculation of seminal fluid.
DANIEL: I think that’s one aspect.
HEDVIG: Just that the event happens in its entirely.
BEN: Right, okay.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Whatever that means.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Then, I wonder why I… [LAUGHS] Oh, god, we’re staying on this too long, aren’t we? So, the discrete end for oral sex, independent of the equipment…
HEDVIG: Discrete end.
BEN: …being used or availed of, is an orgasm, right? Now, we can have conversations about whether all sex necessarily needs to focus on orgasm and all that kind of stuff. But let’s just put that conversation to the side for one second and just work from the presumption that a lot of people who engage in oral sex are doing so with the idea of an orgasm being the final state of that engagement.
DANIEL: It would normally be considered to bring about an orgasm under most normal circumstances.
BEN: So, with that being said, why does then off not get readily applied to cunnilingus when both use cases ideally end in an orgasm? There is a definitive moment, that is coming, ugh, no pun intended. So, if we think about something like kickoff, which is the start of some sort of ball match, whatever.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: That thing happens, and it really doesn’t matter what the sport is. If there is a kick that starts the match, then you can have a kickoff. And so similarly, if an orgasm concludes the activity, you could have something off to talk about cunnilingus. But we don’t tend to.
HEDVIG: No, but you can get someone off, right?
BEN: Oh, good point. It is a good point. But we don’t have the words like… We don’t have jerk off.
HEDVIG: You don’t say lick off…
BEN: Yeah, true.
HEDVIG: …as much. But you do say get off. That one is fairly neutral.
BEN: I suppose. Yeah. Okay. Yep.
DANIEL: No, but I see what you’re saying though, Ben. The ejaculation of semen is a pretty prototypical OFF sort of event. Whereas…
HEDVIG: I think it’s just that we talk about fellatio more.
BEN: Yeah, true, because of sexism.
HEDVIG: Number one, we have more words for it. And some of them fit nicely with OFF, like blow and jerk and suck. And for cunnilingus, we use things like go down, lick, etc., that we just don’t use as much in that way. But get off, I think, works well.
BEN: Well, look, I will put it out there to our listeners. Those of you who provide cunnilingus to other people in the world, start coming up with some off-ending phrases for that activity.
HEDVIG: I don’t think people talk… I don’t think people perform fellatio and are like…
BEN: And talk about it very regularly?
HEDVIG: I’m going to… Oh, god. [LAUGHS] We should move to the next item.
BEN: Clearly, someone has to be talking about these things because we have these words, like someone’s coming up with them. [DANIEL LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I’m just saying you talk about them in general with your friends later. You don’t talk about it with the person you’re doing it on, I think, is what I’m saying.
BEN: Oh, I see. Well, your mouth’s quite busy. It’s quite hard.
DANIEL: What a shame.
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly.
DANIEL: By the way, do we have any ideas just before we leave this topic? Ben was asking why do we say GO DOWN ON someone, which you can go down on a guy as well.
BEN: Yes. Absolutely.
DANIEL: So, that’s not gender specific, but I guess it’s because you’re talking to somebody and then you actually do go down, right? I mean that’s…
BEN: The one… the curveball I want to throw to both of you is GIVING HEAD.
DANIEL: Mm.
HEDVIG: Mm. Yeah.
BEN: What’s that about?
HEDVIG: Yeah, I’ve never had an answer to that one.
DANIEL: Oh, what’s the problem? It’s the head of a penis, naturally but are we saying…
BEN: It’s definitely not locked to fellatio.
HEDVIG: No, it’s definitely not that one.
DANIEL: I have wondered about this. So, cunnilingus. You can give head to someone and give them cunnilingus?
BEN: Definitely. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Okay. I bet that there’s an entry for Green’s in that.
BEN: Well, we will put a pin on that one…
DANIEL: Thank you.
BEN: And we’ll bring it back for the next mailbag episode. So just in case Hedvig feels like her mum is done listening to conversations about oral sex, there’ll be another one in the next Mailbag episode.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: We are definitely not bringing this back. And we’re never talking about sex ever again. We’ve gotten it out of our system for at least another… three days or so.
BEN: I thought you were about to be like: For at least another three questions!
DANIEL: Thanks to Will for that question. And thank you to both of you. All right, this one’s from Unleashy on Discord. You’ve heard the expression, “No siree.”
BEN: Sure have.
DANIEL: Unleashy says, “As no sirree was or is used as an informal of sir, has anyone ever come across ‘no mammy’ or something of the sort in writing? I’d love to see that. Sounds delectable. Hehe. My brisk search yielded nothing, but maybe I looked in the wrong places.” What do you reckon about this?
HEDVIG: So, first of all, we got to figure out if it is actually SIR.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Ben.
BEN: That’s a good point. That’s not the thing that I was going to say, but I think that’s a really important first step. Like, is this a… what do you call it when it sounds like a thing, but it had no. Like a co…
DANIEL: Convergence.
BEN: Convergent. Is this a convergent thing? So, Daniel, do you have that answer? Is this based on SIR?
DANIEL: I do have that answer. I got a bit of a shock from the Oxford English Dictionary.
BEN: Before you tell me, because I have a suspicion about what’s going on here, I want to guess it before. So, confirm or deny, SIR is the thing that SIREE is based on, confirm.
DANIEL: SIR is at the heart of YES SIREE.
HEDVIG: Okay, got it.
BEN: I am going to guess that this is in some way tied to minstrelry.
DANIEL: Oh, interesting.
BEN: Well, so first of all, because certainly all of the interactions with siree that I’ve encountered always seem to have like a Southern American lilt to it. Like, “No, siree. I don’t think that at all.” Like, that sort of vibe.
DANIEL: It does sound pretty Appalachian. Does seem to occur in that region of the USA as well, but parts of England too.
BEN: So then, I would posit the idea that is this an aspect of essentially sort of AAVE or old AAVE, African American Vernacular English, which due to minstrelry, which was the horrifically racist sort of blackface tradition sometimes referred to as America’s first pop culture, which I think is probably pretty apt…
DANIEL: Wow, okay.
BEN: Was that something that then the blackface minstrel performers who were mimicking and aping African Americans in the late 1800s, early 1900s, brought into their act, and then it hopped from there into the vernacular of everyday sort of speech?
DANIEL: Okay. The vaudeville Amos and Andy minstrel stuff did employ that kind of speech pattern, but did not originate it. It far precedes that entertainment style.
BEN: Okay. All right. I have it wrong. Good to know.
DANIEL: Hedvig, your thoughts? Anything?
HEDVIG: I don’t know. I think people… I think men have been in positions of power for longer. So, you say yes, sir and no, sir more than yes, sir, no, ma’am.
DANIEL: Oh, interesting.
HEDVIG: I also think the idea of ma’am as the thing instead of sir, I don’t know, because I was watching Deadloch, the Australian detective comedy drama, and there the police detectives in charge get called ma’am all the time. And it’s extra funny when there’s two of them, you get no ma’ams, which is very funny.
DANIEL: Oh, that’s cute.
HEDVIG: It’s just people have said it more people have said, so if you say something more, there’s more variations of it. People have said NO SIR more.
BEN: So, I’m wondering if the point you’re making is whenever we started saying NO SIREE, which, by the sound of Daniel’s thing is quite a while ago, there was just not socially positions of powerful women. So, we didn’t at that time port it over to no mammy or madamy or whatever.
HEDVIG: At least not as much.
DANIEL: Not as much.
HEDVIG: And also, you say… I think that it could be, no, sir. No, my lady. No, lady. It doesn’t have to be ma’am.
BEN: No, ladyee.
DANIEL: Okay. Well, I had always imagined that the compounding went something like people said, “No, sir.” And then, sir got expanded to no, siree. What surprised me was that the SIREE part is very old.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Started from the 1500s, lasted all by itself for a good long time. And it took various forms. It took siree, it took surrah, surree. Even sorry. There’s an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary for S-O-R-R-Y, which looks like, “I’m sorry,” but it was actually sir.
BEN: Wow.
DANIEL: But the OED says that this is contemptuous.
BEN: So, it sounds like we don’t have a particularly good answer to this. It’s just we know that it’s very old, but we don’t really know where these various different forms have come from. And are you saying that siree, in its current usage, is just like the one that survived?
DANIEL: That’s the one that made it. And so, we have NO SIREE and YES SIREE. It just got attached to YES and NO, which makes sense because SIR is a good thing to stick at the end of NO, because refusals can seem abrupt. So, if you include that honorific sir, then that makes it seem less abrupt, but then adding -EE makes it informal again.
BEN: Making it playful almost.
DANIEL: Yeah. Like, you would probably do it in reported speech more. You wouldn’t say, “No siree, boss.” You might, but you might say…
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: …“I told the boss no siree.” That’s more likely.
BEN: “Can I get another cup of coffee?” “No, siree. We’re fresh out.”
DANIEL: Now, there is a word MAMMY, but that’s mammy. That was being used as someone’s mother.
HEDVIG: Huh.
BEN: Yeah, my mammy.
DANIEL: Possibly, semantically, that territory was occupied. That’s not really how it works. Words can occupy the same semantic territory. But maybe it was just enough. Maybe English speakers thought it was strange enough that didn’t survive, but siree did. There’s a lot going on. Here’s my next question, who’s BOB? No siree, Bob.
BEN: Oh, okay.
HEDVIG: Policeman.
BEN: Is this related to BOB’S YOUR UNCLE? Is Uncle Bob the same Bob?
DANIEL: Bob’s your uncle. That’s going to need some explanation for people who aren’t Australian.
BEN: I did not realise that was an Australianism. I thought that might have been in the entire anglosphere.
HEDVIG: Even if it is, it’s not that common.
DANIEL: Go ahead. When do we use Bob’s your uncle?
BEN: You basically mean: and you’re set, that thing is sorted. Like, if you’ve said a series of instructions…
HEDVIG: Yeah, in the car, put on the seatbelt. Bob’s your uncle.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. A series of instructions and then Bob’s your uncle. It means things have completed, and we’re sorted and let’s progress. Let’s move on to the next thing.
HEDVIG: It’s very strange. Yes.
DANIEL: Well, let’s start with Bob’s your uncle. So, this one dates from about 1929. There was a play, Bob’s Your Uncle, with a character named Bob, but that probably wasn’t the origin. They were probably just trading on an existing phrase that was already popular. We have to go back quite a ways. For example, there’s a book called the New Dictionary of the Canting Crew. It’s one of those slang dictionaries. It’s from 1699. And it has an entry, “It’s all bob,” which means everything is good. It’s all bob.
So, it wouldn’t be very far from IT’S ALL BOB to BOB’S YOUR UNCLE. We don’t know where the uncle comes from, but that’s one idea about where Bob came from. This one. No siree, Bob. Bob is probably BUB.
BEN: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: And BUB is BUD or BUDDY. Hey, buddy. No, siree, buddy, to Bob.
BEN: That’s interesting.
DANIEL: Which BUDDY as friend is surprisingly, probably a child’s attempt to say BROTHER.
BEN: Oh, really?
DANIEL: Yeah. So, we can add that to the list of words coined by children, including TUMMY for stomach and TWEE when something is sweet.
BEN: There we go. I did not know.
DANIEL: This one’s an English learner question. This one’s from Magistra Annie on our Discord, “Why do some adjectives become redder?” — that is to say, with an -ER ending — “and some more red or more something? And some can use both. I’m learning Dutch right now and I am delighted to see lots of words like EXPENSIVER. That would be awkward in English.” That’s expensiver.
HEDVIG: So, I would like to answer this question, please. [BEN LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Please.
BEN: I hope what begins is just a rant on how stupid English is.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] We had that one last time with Dr Liberman.
HEDVIG: No, it’s just that… You’re right, Annie. A lot of people who speak English think that when the adjective usually is because it’s too long or it’s too fancy, and then they don’t want to put the -ER or -IER ending on it. Like prettier, redder, etc. This is what we do to adjectives to say that they are more of something than something else. The comparative and the boring answer is usually that is when things are long or fancy, but the power is in your hands. [LAUGHTER] You can say expensiver. I like to do this all the time. It’s fun. They’ll understand. They might wrinkle their nose, but I understand if not everyone wants to be like a chaos goblin and just have fun. [LAUGHTER] Usually, it’s the longer, the more likely it is to get the more, more expensive. If it’s a compound… If it’s like, yeah, various ways of making it longer, it’ll get it. That’s the boring answer.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
BEN: And it’s just… I suspect, he says as a monolingual [HAUK-TOO], that it’s also one of those annoying things where you just have to build the vibe of it as you go, and you’ll just get a sort of intuitive sense of like, “Oh, this is one of the more ones instead of the -ER ones and all that sort of thing”
HEDVIG: Isn’t it also that more of the ones that are loan… like, obvious Greek or Latin loans, I think are more likely to be more. Is that true?
DANIEL: I am willing to accept that. That sounds good. Here’s what I used to teach my students back in my English teaching days. If it’s a one-syllable word, usually -ER, like, bigger, three-syllable words gets more, like more convenient or more expensive. Now, we approach the two-syllable words with fear and trembling.
BEN: And it’s just the fucking wild west.
DANIEL: Some get, -ER, like, CLEVER. Cleverer. More clever. Both okay. Don’t know.
HEDVIG: Both. Okay.
DANIEL: This is where I point them to the Ngram Viewer and get them to look for it by themselves. If it ends in an [i] sound, it’s probably, -ER, like, SCARIER or HORNIER. STUPID is funny because it’s changed.
HEDVIG: Stupider.
DANIEL: Stupider. Used to be that MORE STUPID was common, and now STUPIDER is more common. But STUPIDEST, that’s the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard. That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.
HEDVIG: That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.
DANIEL: Yeah. STUPIDEST has… I think it was in the vanguard, and it allowed STUPIDER to take the fore. But then, we have to go back to one syllable words because some of them don’t sound good with -ER, like wrong.
BEN: Yes, wronger.
HEDVIG: Wronger. Wronger?
DANIEL: Wronger.
HEDVIG: That sounds fine.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Is there anything that we can say that you won’t say it sounds fine, though?
DANIEL: How about huge?
HEDVIG: Huger.
DANIEL: Huger. What do you think, Ben?
BEN: I think. I think what’s going on here is we have reached the state of life. Hedvig has essentially become radicalised onto the [DANIEL LAUGHS] -ER suffix, and she’s just like, all of the things. It goes on everything.
DANIEL: We have killed God. Everything is permitted.
HEDVIG: I don’t know what I do in natural speech, but yeah, there are some… Yeah, I don’t know. Yeah, because you have… Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know. I struggle. [BEN LAUGHS]
DANIEL: This is how Hedwig looks when she is struggling for intuition.
BEN: I do think WRONGER just doesn’t like… if you were to ask me, is that appropriate in a formal writing context, if a student was to ask me that, I would feel obliged to say, “No. If you write it that way, the people who read it will perceive that you have a lower level of education.”
DANIEL: They’ll give you the face.
BEN: And that would be bad if that’s not what you want, and it’s often not what people want. So, I always feel so slimy, essentially, when I am essentially being, like, a jackboot mouthpiece for “proper” English.
HEDVIG: But it’d be way worse, Ben, if you, in that position, didn’t tell them that.
BEN: Yeah, look, I get it. I feel I have an obligation to go, “This is how a lot of the world is going to operate with this. And so, here is the information. Do what you will.”
DANIEL: Ben, don’t forget what you told me!
BEN: What did I tell you?
DANIEL: Teach the game, but call out the game.
BEN: Yeah, I know, and I get that. I do. I mean, that’s what I do. But I also feel a little bit slimy, just even with that level of cognition, because it’s a lot similar to: don’t hate the player, hate the game. And I’m like, wait, I [CHUCKLES] don’t want to be a pick-up artist of linguistics.
DANIEL: Don’t want to hate anything. [BEN LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: I know what you mean.
HEDVIG: Do you have a rule, Daniel, for wrong and right?
DANIEL: This is the paradox of the ESL teacher. When you know nothing, you tell students, “Uh, just memorise.” But then, when you know more, then you say, “Oh, okay. This number of syllables, and it ends in a G during a full moon, then you do this.” And then you learn even more. And then you say, “Uh, just memorise.”
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: It’s the horseshoe.
DANIEL: No, sometimes, it is a stylistic choice, like, MORE RED. “It was more red than pink”, that kind of thing. So, it’s tough.
BEN: And I would go back to the person who was asking me about whether they can write WRONGER, and I would say absolutely. I myself will write WRONGER in text messages and all sorts of other things, because it’s playful. It is a deliberately, almost informal way to communicate. So, if my partner says, “Oh, we should have this, this, and this for tonight,” I might text, “You couldn’t be more wronger. We should, in fact, have this and this.”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Yeah, yeah. Good, good.
HEDVIG: And can I draw on a recent book that I’m reading?
BEN: Yay, books.
HEDVIG: I’m reading the The Dark Matter of Pragmatics by Steve Levinson, and he talks about inferences.
DANIEL: Oh, good.
HEDVIG: And he says that when someone does something in an unusual way, if I said, “She caused the door to close,” then you assume she didn’t put her hand on the handle and close the door.
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: Ooh, interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: Because in Levinson’s words: what isn’t said, isn’t. Think about that.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: I didn’t say I closed the door. That means I didn’t close the door. That means I did something else.
BEN: That’s cool.
DANIEL: Because if I had closed the door, I would have just said I closed the door, but I didn’t say that.
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly. So, what isn’t said isn’t meant. Simple form suggests normal extensions. So, she closed the door, things happened. Abnormal form suggests abnormal extension. So, if you choose to use wronger, which is not the common thing to do, you will be understood but people will infer you’re being playful. You’re doing something.
BEN: Something other than the standard thing is taking place.
DANIEL: Yeah, well, I’m reading Communicative Efficiency: Language Structure and Use by Natalia Levshina.
HEDVIG: I am also.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Yes, because it’s so good.
BEN: Fucking nerds.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: I’m reading The Clan of the Cave Bear because it’s got really hot prehistoric sex scenes in it.
DANIEL: Awesome. Well, hey, thanks for that Magistra Annie, and we haven’t solved anything, but we have had a lot of fun. So that’s what the show’s about. So, thanks for helping us do that. It’s time for Related or Not. Oh.
BEN: Not another one, surely.
DANIEL: Yeah, a new one.
BEN: What?
DANIEL: Yep. This one is from Aristemo, who gave us a haunting theme. Here we go.
[NEW RELATED OR NOT THEME]
HEDVIG: Oh.
BEN: Oh, is this supposed to have a little bit afterwards?
DANIEL: No, it cuts there.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: I just…
BEN: Stretch it out. It needs to be like, [SINGS] you tell meeeeee
DANIEL: [SINGS] You tell me. But something, something happened. Something happened to cut that.
BEN: No. Okay.
DANIEL: To cut it short, in fact, you know what? I’m going to improvise a piano theme. Here I go.
[RELATED OR NOT THEME WITH PIANO MUSIC]
BEN: Okay. Wow.
DANIEL: Thank you to everybody who’s been sending us these Related or not jingles.
BEN: More. I want more.
DANIEL: Yeah. Thank you, Aristemo.
HEDVIG: Great.
DANIEL: I have got, once again, three pairs for Related or Not. Three pairs of words. Only one of them is related. The other two are not related to each other.
BEN: Two no’s and a one. Got it.
DANIEL: And these are in alphabetical order. Number one.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: BEDROOM and BOUDOIR.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Okay. All right. Okay. Sorry. Pen, pens, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen?
DANIEL: Yep. I’ll wait for you.
HEDVIG: Found pen. Okay.
DANIEL: Found a pen.
DANIEL: Did you find a pin?
BEN: Oh, god.
DANIEL: Is it a pin or a pun? [BEN LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: bo-ud-oir Okay.
BEN: [LAUGHS] God.
DANIEL: Number two, by the way, when Aristemo sent me that one, it was 03:00 AM. And I was up, so I listened, and it [SHIVERS] gave me chills.
BEN: Hot chills. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: Gave me chills.
HEDVIG: All right, go, go, go.
DANIEL: Number two, DREAM and TRAUMA. DREAM and TRAUMA.
HEDVIG: Mmmmm-hmmm.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Number three, WINE and VINE. This was yours, Ben.
BEN: I forgot [DANIEL LAUGHS] that I dropped this one last week.
DANIEL: So, only one pair is related. BEDROOM and BOUDOIR, DREAM and TRAUMA, WINE and VINE.
HEDVIG: Okay.
BEN: I’ve got a strong feeling on this one.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Yeah, me too.
BEN: Okay Hedvig, you first.
HEDVIG: My strong feeling is that number two is related. DREAM and TRAUMA.
BEN: I was going to say the same thing. Give me your reason.
HEDVIG: They bear the hallmarks of… T and D are just, like, the same.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Right. In terms of linguistic shifty.
HEDVIG: Whenever you see a T, imagine that you could have been seeing a D. It’s like the other day, I saw on some podcast, someone thought that it’s not called Tupperware but Tubberware.
BEN: Tubberware. Yeah, yeah, yeah. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Somebody had this Mandela effect thing where they thought it was Tubberware?
BEN: Yes.
DANIEL: All right.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Say that word again. Say the first syllable. Tub. Wrong!
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly. So, they also thought it was Tub-O-Ware. Right?
DANIEL: It’s a Tub-O-Ware.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: And the reason why they went through their life getting to age 25, 30, whatever, thinking this is because if you put an unvoiced thing [p] between some vowels, the things around Tubberware there, then it’s going to sound very voiced. And that happens to T’s and D’s as well. So, P’s and B’s, almost interchangeable, T’s and D’s, almost interchangeable. F and V is the same. So, I’m not going to be fooled by that.
And then, I get the rest of it is just so similar. And then dreams and trauma, they’re both about memories and experiences and things happening in the mind. Yeah.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Ben, do you agree or…?
BEN: Yeah, I was going to say that it sounded like one of those things that could have morphed into another thing, the way, like pader and father and all that sort of stuff. Basically, I’m just feeling real dark and cynical. And I’m like, for most of human histories, maybe dreams were pretty traumatic. [LAUGHTER] Maybe trauma and injury and stuff and dreams is just a very strong linkage for a lot of people or at least for a lot of human history and so that’s where I was going with that one. WINE and VINE seem too easy, too obvious.
DANIEL: So, you’re settling on DREAM and TRAUMA?
BEN: I think so, yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah, I did too. And I remembered that German TRAUM is dream, right?
HEDVIG: That’s it.
BEN: Oh, there we go. Okay. Well, that seems…
DANIEL: We’re all wrong.
BEN: Case closed. Oh, really?
HEDVIG: We’re all wrong. Amazing.
DANIEL: Not related at all.
BEN: Let me guess. It’s WINE and VINE.
DANIEL: Well, hang on.
BEN: Okay, sorry.
DANIEL: So, DREAM comes from some Proto-Germanic word like dʰrowgʰ-mos, which means deception or illusion.
BEN: Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah.
DANIEL: And the OED says further etymology uncertain and disputed.
BEN: Oh, well, okay.
DANIEL: Whereas TRAUMA comes from Greek, it just means a wound, a hurt, a defeat. And it comes from Proto-Indo-European trau, which is an extended root of tera, which means to rub or to turn, to twist. Something different, not deception.
HEDVIG: Mm.
BEN: Wow.
DANIEL: Well, maybe it goes back there in the midst of time, as we’ve seen from our chat with Anatoly Liberman. Sometimes, if something turns, then it could be something that turns from truth to falsehood, but we just don’t know about that one, and we’re leaning kind of away from it.
BEN: Unclear.
DANIEL: Your next guess. BEDROOM and BOUDOIR or WINE and VINE.
BEN: I’m going WINE and VINE.
DANIEL: Okay. Just sounds similar. People have a V to W thing.
BEN: And I know, like, vin and von and stuff in a lot of the European languages and all that kind of stuff and vineyard, right?
DANIEL: Lots of…
BEN: All that kind of a thing.
DANIEL: It’s a whole neighborhood of words which locks it in.
BEN: Yeah. And this is so closely related. I’m also wondering, I don’t know what the French word for BED is. I don’t think it’s BOUD.
DANIEL: No, it’s LIT. You sleep on a lit.
BEN: [LAUGHS] So, lit-room. What’s French…? [DANIEL LAUGHS] It just doesn’t seem like it works. So, that’s why I’m going for VINE and WINE.
DANIEL: Hedvig is considering carefully.
HEDVIG: Well.
BEN: Mm, there’s a very pensive face on Hedvig.
HEDVIG: It’s tricky because bedroom is a compound. So, the track record on getting points for compounds have been not great here. I wonder if the “oir” bit in boudoir is the aria, terrarium place thing.
DANIEL: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: And if you’re going to give me that as room, but you probably aren’t. It’s going to be WINE and VINE. And I don’t really know why because in the only other language where I know the word for vine… This is another hard one for second learners, is you have to do wine and vine, and there’s awful… that baby is whining.
[LAUGHTER]
It’s a struggle.
DANIEL: Okay, so you’re thinking WINE and VINE.
HEDVIG: I think so.
DANIEL: You are both correct on your second try. They both come from Latin vinum, which means wine. BEDROOM and BOUDOIR is fun. BOUDOIR comes from the French verb, bouder, which means to pout. So, the boudoir is the pouting room.
BEN: Pouting room.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: To sulk. I’m going to go to my room. Goodbye.
BEN: That’s fun. That’s really fun.
DANIEL: That’s good. Big thanks to Cara for giving us DREAM and TRAUMA. Our next one comes from Elliot, who decided to give us a message on SpeakPipe.
BEN: Oh, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun.
HEDVIG: Lovely.
DANIEL: Here’s Elliot with a question now.
ELLIOT: Hello from the West Coast, USA. This is Elliot. I’m a new listener and I had a suggestion for the Related or Not. I was wondering if the word, GALACTIC, as in related to a GALAXY, is in any way related or not to the word, LACTIC, from lactose, lactic acid. Or, is that just a coincidence?
HEDVIG: That is so smart, Elliot. I love it. I think you’re right. I think you’re right because Milky Way.
BEN: Ooh. Ooh.
DANIEL: Oh. You got the link.
HEDVIG: Because the white stuff in the sky that I never saw before I went to Australia.
BEN: That is fascinating. I would have said no…
HEDVIG: Yes, yes, yes.
BEN: …because lactose being one of the sugars in milk. Have I got that correct?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Correct.
BEN: It’s one of the complex sugar chains in milk. I would have imagined we get that word from LACTATE, meaning to express milk.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: But I don’t know if ga-lactic or ga-laxy is related to milk and Milky Way. That is a link that I am finding a little bit harder to make. So, I’m going to go no, but I really hope I’m wrong, because I would love [LAUGHS] for the word, GALAXY, to essentially be related to tits. That’s fantastic.
DANIEL: Okay, good news, Ben. You’re incorrect. Hedvig, you got it. They are related.
BEN: So, lay this chain down. Build this picture for us.
DANIEL: Why is the Milky Way called the Milky Way?
BEN: Because it looks like a bunch of milk that’s spilt in the sky.
DANIEL: Correct. It comes from Greek, galaxias kyklos, which means a milky circle. The American Museum of Natural History says “The Milky Way gets its name from a Greek myth about the Goddess Hera, who sprayed milk across the sky,” from her own teats, by the way.
BEN: Oh, that is punk as fuck.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. Thank you, Elliot.
DANIEL: They are related.
BEN: Wow.
DANIEL: And now, let’s go to Philip, who says, “Hi, team. I’d like to offer some words for Related or Not.” There are five.
BEN: Oh, five. Good lord.
DANIEL: The words are PITCH, PITCH, PITCH, PITCH and PITCH.
BEN: Okay, [LAUGHS] I see what you’ve done here. Okay. Let’s see how many senses of this I can tick off. Okay, so we’ve got five here, right?
DANIEL: Yep.
BEN: Pitch, like the highness or not of a person’s voice or a sound in general.
DANIEL: Yep.
HEDVIG: Oh, the frequency.
BEN: Pitch, the thing that you throw at a baseball game.
DANIEL: To throw something.
BEN: Yep.
HEDVIG: Oh, my god.
BEN: Pitch is a field. The rugby pitch or the football pitch or whatever.
HEDVIG: How’s that different from the second one?
BEN: Pitching is the actual act of throwing a ball.
HEDVIG: Oh, the act of pitching. Oh, my god. Yes.
BEN: Yeah. Okay.
HEDVIG: Oh, this is cricket-wicket all over again.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pitch is the stuff that you use in building roads and surfacing roofs and that sort of thing.
HEDVIG: Yeah, that was going to be my first one for the record.
BEN: I’ve got one left.
DANIEL: Think elevator.
BEN: Oh, sorry. Yeah, you’re right. [LAUGHS] I just went completely the wrong direction on Semantle just then. So, pitch is when you try and get something approved by money-holding people. Right? Like, you make a pitch to get your project off the ground or to get your new team happening…
HEDVIG: Elevator pitch.
BEN: …at work or something like that. Yeah. Okay.
DANIEL: Okay. So, here were his five. And I’m going to modify one of yours, Ben, because it was his 6th. Number one: black tarry stuff on the side of ships.
BEN: Cool.
DANIEL: To throw.
BEN: Yep.
DANIEL: To try to sell someone something.
BEN: Yep.
DANIEL: The frequency of a note, and an area to erect a tent or the act of such an erection.
HEDVIG: Mm, pitch a tent.
BEN: Oh, to pitch a tent, yeah, yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: I will give you more help than Philip did, because I will tell you that these senses divide neatly into two groups.
BEN: Okay, so two sets of related things.
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: I think that, for example, two and three, to throw and to try and sell something, I think, are in the same of these two groups.
BEN: Yeah, that strikes me as the same as well.
HEDVIG: And I think that… I wonder if the one and five, black tarry stuff on the side of ships and an area where you put a tent, are maybe the other group.
BEN: See, I would have thought that… No, I would have thought pitching a tent and…
DANIEL: Do you feel like that’s throwing?
BEN: Yeah. So, pitching up a tent is erecting something, is throwing something up, is doing a thing.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: And then, I’m wondering if the area where that tends to happen just got that name because that was the act of doing that thing in that area.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Meaning jumps.
HEDVIG: Something like that.
BEN: Right. So, it’s called a baseball pitch because you pitch there. And it’s called a football pitch because reasons.
DANIEL: God, baseball pitch. What is wrong with you, Ben? You’ve been away from America for a while. Good thing you’re going back.
BEN: Oh, is. It’s a diamond, a field.
DANIEL: It’s a field or a diamond. Yes.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: I’ve only heard of a cricket pitch. Rugby pitch?
BEN: Football pitch, rugby pitch. Yep.
DANIEL: Okay, okay.
BEN: So, maybe English sports and maybe that’s related to, because I think a pitch can also be an area where soldiers march and that sort of thing.
DANIEL: Okay, so, Ben, let me focus on you for a bit. You think that the throwing, the selling and the pitching a tent are part of the same sense. Now, that leaves black tarry stuff and the frequency of a note. Do you want to put them in any groups or put them in the same group or…?
BEN: I reckon the frequency of the note thing might have to do with the fact that in the early days of measuring notes, they somehow used tarry, sticky things. I don’t know.
DANIEL: Interesting. Okay. So, you thought that maybe the black tarry stuff and the note, those are in one group.
BEN: Yep.
DANIEL: And then, throwing, selling, and pitching a tent might be in a second group.
BEN: Correct. That’s my thought, yes.
DANIEL: Okay, okay. Hedvig.
HEDVIG: I find the black tarry stuff and the frequency of a note very hard to link to the others.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
BEN: Oh, so they’re in a group by exclusion.
HEDVIG: Well, they’re in two separate groups. They’re not even… I don’t know how the pitch… By the way, if you enjoy pitch, you can look at the Pitch Drop Experiment in Brisbane Online.
BEN: Yes. [DANIEL LAUGHS] That’s very fun.
DANIEL: That’s a good one.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Pitch is a very, very slow moving…
DANIEL: So, what did you think, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: I don’t know what I think. I don’t feel like I’m being pushed.
BEN: You are being pushed. [LAUGHS] Make a choice.
HEDVIG: Yeah. To throw and to try to sell something is definitely related.
DANIEL: Okay, good.
HEDVIG: What do I know about…?
DANIEL: You still have black tarry stuff, the frequency of a note, and a tent.
HEDVIG: So, tents can be connected to the black tarry stuff because you can impregnate tents with pitch.
BEN: Okay, okay.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: So, if it’s the tent material that’s the link and not the place or the act of doing it, then that’s linked.
DANIEL: And do you feel like the note partakes in throwing as well?
HEDVIG: The throwing and the note. You can pitch something at different levels.
DANIEL: That’s true. That sounds like throwing.
HEDVIG: I’m going to pitch this project for a five-year-old. I’m going to pitch it for an adult. You can pitch things at different levels. That’s similar to the note stuff.
DANIEL: Sounds like you’re putting that in the throw category.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Okay. One and five are in the same category. And then, two, three, four are the same.
DANIEL: Hedvig thinks that the black tarry stuff and the tent are the same sense. Ben thinks that the black tarry stuff and the note is the same sense, and the other one’s a throw. I thought that black tarry stuff was all on its own and the other ones were all in the throwing sense.
HEDVIG: You’re just not galaxy brain enough.
DANIEL: And I was right.
BEN: No! I hate it the most when Daniel’s right.
DANIEL: It does seem to be where you aim the note, try to hit it. All of the other ones involve throwing something towards someone. Those go back to old English, piċċan, and then the sticky stuff goes back to just… This is weird. It’s just the name of the stuff. Even back in Proto-Indo-European 7,000 years ago, it was just called pic or pitch or something like that.
So, thanks, Philip, for that one. We’ve got tons more and we’re getting through them, but we’re having a great time. Thank you for sending those. You can send those to us, hello@becauselanguage.com or all the usual ways.
BEN: And definitely send us a SpeakPipe. That was sick. More SpeakPipes, please.
DANIEL: Yes, yes, yes, yes.
BEN: Want to hear your voice from wherever you are in the world.
DANIEL: Okay, let’s get back to more Mailbag questions. This one comes from PharaohKatt on our Discord. “Why does English have [θ] as in THINK and [ð] as in THIS, when it’s such a rare sound in languages?”
BEN: Oh, okay. So, we need to do a little bit of unpacking here because I don’t know if a lot of English speakers are aware of the fact that lots of other languages find the [ð]-ness of our language fucked up and weird because it’s a very boring, normal part of our language to us, which is in some of our most boring and fundamental words. So, let’s just establish that first of all.
DANIEL: Well, I will defer to Hedvig whenever possible, but I am noticing that in WALS, the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures, they’ve got 567 languages listed out of the world’s 7000ish. And out of those 567 languages, less than 10%, only 43 of them have any kind of dental sounds at all. And they’re called dentals because when you say [θ] or [ð], you put your tongue out a little bit on your teeth. I looked in Grambank but it didn’t have that feature. So, if you’ve got a better source Hedvig, go for it.
HEDVIG: There is PHOIBLE, and I’m looking at it right now.
DANIEL: Cool.
HEDVIG: So, if we go for the [θ] so, we’ve got 123 inventories that have it. I have to do some mangling to get languages because some of these are duplicates. The same language several times. Icelandic for sure has it. The question we got is why…?
DANIEL: The question is, “Why do we have them at all?”
HEDVIG: Yeah, why do we have them at all? Wait, they are just voiced and unvoiced versions of the same thing, right?
DANIEL: That’s correct. When you say THIS, you’re vibrating your voice. And when you say THOUSAND, you’re not. Other than that…
BEN: So, it’s the same motion, but one involves vocal cord work and one doesn’t.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Correct.
HEDVIG: Okay, so the question could be more broad here, PharaohKatt. Why do some languages have rare sounds? There are other sounds that are rare in other languages.
BEN: Oh, this is coming back to my very favorite thing that apparently got disproved, even though it seems really intuitive and awesome.
HEDVIG: Yeah?
BEN: The breadth of phonemic inventory, roughly mapping to the stage of the out-of-Africa migration of human beings.
DANIEL: Yeah, that was pretty cool.
HEDVIG: I think it roughly maps. It just doesn’t need to be that explanation, necessarily. But I don’t remember all the details, so.
BEN: Basically, yeah. So, the idea goes that different languages have different sizes of phonemic inventory.
HEDVIG: Inventory.
BEN: Am I correct so far?
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Good.
HEDVIG: Some languages have a lot of different sounds.
BEN: So, some languages have heaps and heaps and heaps of phonemes. Phonemes are the sounds that we can make. So, like a [p] sound is a phoneme and a [kl] sound is a phoneme (NOTE TO BEN: [kl] would normally be considered two phonemes) and all sorts of other things. So, don’t confuse phonemes for letters in our alphabet because English has fuckloads more phonemes than it has letters in the alphabet.
DANIEL: Look at him go, this is amazing.
BEN: But there’s languages out there that put English to shame [CHUCKLES] in terms of how many different phonemes… and people often go to, really supposedly exotic things like, clicks in Xhosa and that sort of thing. It doesn’t have to be that “different” from what we do. It’s just there’s heaps of sounds out there that English doesn’t have, as anyone who has ever tried to learn another language has found out, when they’re like, “No, no, no, like this,” and your brain does a backflip and then explodes because you’ve never had to put your tongue and your teeth and your vocal cords in that configuration before.
HEDVIG: But also, there are plenty of languages that have fewer sounds than English as well.
BEN: That’s what I was just about to say. So, there’s heaps of languages. So, mein Mutter lives in Hawaii and has done for three decades now. Hawaiian, lots fewer phonemes. Like, lots and lots fewer phonemes than English. So, I can’t remember off the top of my head, but there’s certain letters of the English alphabet that just don’t exist in Hawaiian. Not there.
HEDVIG: Yeah, for sure. And if you have few, you tend to have certain ones. So, if you have few vowels, you tend to have [i], [a], [o], roughly. Somewhere there. So, it’s not like if you have three vowels, you have [i], [e], [æ].
BEN: Right, right, right, right.
HEDVIG: The theory that linguists have is that those sounds are too close to each other and you want to maximise the differences if you have few. And when you get more, you fill in the spaces in between.
BEN: So, the difference between [a] and [u] kind of thing.
HEDVIG: Yeah. In English, English has a lot of fricatives in general. Not only is it…
BEN: What is a fricative, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: When you make a consonant… So, you make some stopping type sound and you close your mouth a bit and you create a little whirlpool of sound, of air. So, these are sounds like [s].
DANIEL: They’re the hissers.
HEDVIG: They’re the hissers. You can extend them for your breath. So, you can go, sssss.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: But you can’t do that for [k], [p].
BEN: Right, right, right, right.
HEDVIG: There’s some other features with it. People are going to write in and tell us that’s not.
BEN: Does that mean that the dentals are a fricative as well? Because you can be like [θ].
DANIEL: They are fricatives.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Dentals is a place in the mouth, and fricatives is a way of doing the sound. So, you can have fricatives far back in your mouth. So, the sound in my last name, Skirgård, that’s kind of a fricative, but it’s further back in your mouth, etc. So, English happens to have a lot of fricatives. It’s exceptionally filled in. You also have [s] and [z], etc. Why does English have another zone? I don’t know. Sometimes, languages just have funny ones.
DANIEL: My question is, why doesn’t every language have them? I mean, they’re right there. They’re readily available. They couldn’t…
BEN: Hang on. But, but, but basically, that is the same question as why hasn’t every language filled in every possible spot in the phonemic inventory that exists? Because if you look at the… This is a fun thing that other people have done, like YouTube videos and stuff about. There is empty spots in the IPA sound table, and that’s because of limitations of our actual bodies. There are certain things that we are incapable of doing, but if we were capable of doing it, that’s where it would exist on the IPA table.
So then, Daniel, why would you be asking the question, why haven’t all languages filled in every available spot of sound?
DANIEL: I know what you mean.
BEN: Because why is [θ] any more readily available than [ǂ CLICK]? [DANIEL LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Well, some of them are harder and easier to produce in terms of energy, mass things. Some sounds are rarer because they look like they take more effort to produce. Another theory that people have proposed is that there are both anatomical restrictions that make things more or less easy, but also that there is auditory things that make it… So, there’s, for example, a theory that in populations where certain kinds of ear infections are more common, you get less fricatives because they are a very high, frequent sound. So, people can’t really hear the difference between those things. That’s a theory that’s been suggested to explain some of the variation. Other ones could be things to do with the environment. So, people have talked about tones and humidity in the air and these things.
BEN: Yeah, we’ve talked about that a lot.
HEDVIG: Yes. The [θ] in English, I think, must come from Norse influence, probably because it’s not that common in the rest of Germanic, but it does happen in old Norse and Icelandic. So, I suspect it’s a Viking reason.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s not a bad theory. Proto-Indo European didn’t have any dentals like [θ] or [ð] but Proto-Germanic about 500 BCE did have them. And there’s something else going on, and that is that maybe dentals are just really unstable.
BEN: They drift into other things, like [f] and…
DANIEL: They do and we see this in English, for example, th- fronting is a thing that happens. It’s very common even in English. Like, when a British guy says, “I fink” instead of, “I think,” all right.
BEN: Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes.
DANIEL: Or in the middle of a word, “eeva” instead of “either.”
BEN: So, V’s and F’s are just coming for [θ] hard.
DANIEL: It’s not just those. There’s also th- stopping. Imagine a typical New York gangster talking about deez things and doze things.
BEN: Okay, so, D’s, V’s had… Well, [θ] is in a precarious position [LAUGHS].
DANIEL: Well, look, this isn’t just the typical New York gangster. Even standard English over the years has converted some [θ] words into a [d]. For example, MURDER used to be MURTHER. They’ve committed a murther. Yep, [θ]. Burden… if you are a singer and you do Handel’s Messiah, you will be singing [SINGS] His burthen is easy… his burthen. Not burden. It’s burthen. Ruther for rudder and even the eight-legged things that crawl around. Guess what they used to be called?
BEN: Spithers.
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: No.
DANIEL: That lasted until about the 1500s. And by the way, spiders are called spiders because they…
HEDVIG: Spy on you.
BEN: Spy on us.
DANIEL: No, [BEN LAUGHS] they spin webs.
BEN: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: Okay. So, I just feel like these dentals are some sort of invader. Like, in Inception, when you’re wandering into someone’s dream and then everything notices you and tries to stop you. It’s like all the…
BEN: I feel like it’s the other way round. They’re beautiful unicorns and everyone’s hunting them.
DANIEL: Oh, that’s what it is. Now, I think that even though they’re under pressure, they’ve been eliminated from most of the world’s languages if they were even there at all, why did English keep them? And I think the answer would be they had one thing going for them. They managed to ensconce themselves into some of the most common words. What’s the most common word in English?
BEN: THE.
HEDVIG: THIS. THE.
DANIEL: And then, you got THIS and THAT.
BEN: The definite article.
DANIEL: The most common words. And so, they formed a phonological habit. Also, when a Greek word would come in with a theta, they had thetas, we would keep them. It’s such an interesting area. It could be an accident of history that made it stick, but there’s just a lot of churn going on with thetas and eths.
BEN: That’s so interesting.
DANIEL: It is. Thank you, PharaohKatt, for that question. Next one. This one comes from Scarequotes on our Discord, Scarequotes says, “I was reading some Faulkner this weekend, specifically Light in August, and one page was reminded of the words HIS’N and YOUR’N — dialectical takes on HIS and YOUR — “which got me curious about that N ending, what it means and where it comes from. Particularly because it seems like maybe they’re not related to IF’N, one of those words I think I picked up from the Coen brothers in Raising Arizona, and it always assumed that they were of a piece. So, would love to hear more about that N which may be two N’s because the bare outlines of Merriam Webster don’t really explain where it comes from or what it’s doing. Do you have any sense of what’s going on with HIS’N and HER’N and THEIR’N, versus IF’N? Are they the same -N?” What do you think?
HEDVIG: I have a theory.
BEN: Don’t recall. Good. I’m like, “I don’t know any of these words.” [DANIEL LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Whenever I see an N in Indo-European, my mind immediately goes to accusative case or some sort of nominalisation.
DANIEL: Yes, okay.
HEDVIG: So, is that what this is?
DANIEL: Well, let’s find out. What are we talking about here? What’s accusative case?
HEDVIG: Right. If I say, “He loves me,” then he is the person acting as the subject. If I say, “I love him,” then HIM is the direct object, and we say that the change between HE and HIM is that HIM is an accusative case. It just means… In Indo-European languages, it just means, roughly that it’s the direct object. Things happening to it.
DANIEL: Gotcha.
HEDVIG: And very often in European languages, things that are accusative case end in a nasal. So, an [m] or [n] sound usually. So, it happens in German as well. When you see something like that on an ending, my mind, immediately… It’s almost like, you know how you’re taught to be green light means go, red means stop. In my mind, N ending on a thing that can also not have N ending means accusative case, if I see it in European language. It’s so strong to me.
Or, it could be some sort of nominaliser. So, something was a verb or an adjective thing, and you make it into a noun. I think those sometimes get nasals as well. So, is it the case that HIS’N is a nominaliser thing?
DANIEL: Yep, exactly. So, for example, I might say… well, actually, there’s one that we still use. MY versus MINE. If I say, “That’s my book,” then I’m using that as a determiner describing the book that it is, my book. But if I want to take that and turn it into a noun, I would say, “That book is mine.”
HEDVIG: Mine. That’s mine.
DANIEL: So, there’s your nominaliser ending. You’re turning that into kind of a noun.
HEDVIG: Because otherwise, MY has to occur with the word, BOOK. It has to before the word, BOOK. My book. You can’t say, that’s my. You have to say, that’s mine.
DANIEL: Okay, so that’s one possibility. We see that this is built on analogy from MINE. Now, mine goes back to Old English. But I’ve got to say the other ones, like YOUR’N, that goes back to the 1300s. Here’s a weird one: HER’N, which you’d think would be, “It’s hers.” But no, it’s actually from a time when THEY wasn’t THEY. It was, HEI, it hadn’t acquired a T yet. That’s way back in Old English. And then, if it belonged to THEM, if it belonged to HEI, then it was HER’N, meaning it was theirs. So, we see these things going around in the 1200s, 1300s. They’re super-duper old. We see HIS’N from Middle English times, the 1400s. We see YOUR’N about the same time. Like I say, 1300s. So, that’s one thing that was happening, is that it was a nominalisation ending. We kept the one for MINE. We ditched them on all the others, but they’re still a bit regional. Now, the other possibility is that it’s a contraction. His one or your one.
HEDVIG: This is what I think happens with… You know Irish WEE’UN, for child.
DANIEL: Oh, no, I don’t.
BEN: I have not heard of that.
HEDVIG: I think that’s wee one.
DANIEL: Oh, wee’un, oh, the wee one. Yeah. Okay. The wee one.
HEDVIG: Exactly.
DANIEL: That makes sense.
HEDVIG: This is so fun because I don’t know anything really about Indo-European or Germanic linguistics. I just know some European languages and doesn’t know some linguistics, and then I just freebase the rest.
DANIEL: Just go. The other one that takes part in that is not YOUS or not YOU GUYS, but YINS or YUNZ. It’s kind of Pittsburgh slang. Pittsburgh, PA, in the USA. And it comes from YOU ONES, yuns or yins. So, there’s a couple of things that are going on. Now, we need to turn our attention to IF’N, the Oxford English Dictionary says rather unhelpfully, “It’s a variant or alternation of another lexical item.” Thank you, OED.
But it does say AND, it could be IF AND. And we see Henry Fielding’s 1749 novel, Tom Jones, “If an she be a rebel.” So, we sometimes see IF AND we see IF AN. But we also see IF’N. And the Dictionary of American Regional English speculates that the IF’N spelling is a contraction of IF AND. “If’n you brought a gun, you could have shot him.” Could be both of those things helping it a lot. There’s a lot going on here.
Well, those are our questions for this time. So, I just like to give a big thanks to all of our listeners who gave us questions and ideas for the show. Thanks to SpeechDocs for transcribing all the words. Thanks to patrons for supporting the show, making it possible. And, Ben and Hedvig, thank you for 100 amazing episodes of Because Language. I just appreciate all you’ve brought. Thank you.
BEN: Well, seeing as you did all…
HEDVIG: Thank you.
BEN: …of the work for all of those 100 episodes, Daniel, I would also say thank you to you for shouldering all of the labour.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s how I like it.
HEDVIG: That’s very, very true.
BEN: Now, if you out there in the world of listening through the time machine that is podcasting, want to support Because Language, here are some ways to do it. You can tell a friend about us. Always a great way, always a good rekky, is friends tell friends about good podcasts. You can follow us. We are @becauselangpod in all of the places. And you can send us ideas and comments by email at hello@becauselanguage.com. And please keep using SpeechPipe. SpeakPipe. SpeakPipe? SpeakPipe. Please keep using SpeakPipe because having your voice in our show tickles me pink. I love it. It’s the best.
DANIEL: Yep.
HEDVIG: My husband recently did an embarrassing thing to me, which was, we were at a work gathering, and there were some very young interns there, and they were like, “I love podcasts. Does anyone have any podcast recommendations?” [BEN LAUGHS] which is a terrifying thing to say to me and Ste. And Ste was like, “Oh, you should listen to Because Language. It’s a really good show.” And he didn’t say. And I was just there, and I was just like, “I’m not going to tell this person that I’m on that show.”
BEN: That’s so fun. And that’s so fun.
HEDVIG: And Ste just looked at me, like “[ONOMATOPOEIA],” and I just… I was like… [LAUGHTER] You can also listen to Well There’s Your Problem and other things.
DANIEL: So, they’ve never heard of it. [BEN LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: The 21-year-old who wanted to know podcast recommendation hadn’t heard of it but is now going to subscribe and might recognise my voice or not. We’ll see.
DANIEL: Awesome. This is like that time when somebody, like a TikToker, was doing some vox pops and found Baz Luhrmann but didn’t know it was Baz Luhrmann. [LAUGHS]
BEN: Yes, I saw that. That’s very fun. And he rearranged himself to get better lighting. And the TikToker was clearly like, “Ugh, look at this prima donna.” To which everyone was like, “You don’t know how accurate you are.”
DANIEL: Is it my turn?
BEN: Yes.
DANIEL: We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode if you’re a patron. Your support means the show can go on. Regular episodes are free for everybody, and we can get transcripts from SpeechDocs so that our shows are readable and searchable. Don’t forget, also, you get bonuses, which is things that you get that are extra, like Discord access, mailouts, live episodes, bonus episodes, and you get shoutouts like this one.
This time, we are reading the names in order by first letter, but not alphabetical order in the traditional way, but rather in alphabetical order by the way the name of the letter sounds. So, if a name starts with W, it comes just after D, because “double-u” sounds like [BEN LAUGHS] D. Okay, so, for example, Ignacio is the first one in our list because the letter I starts with [a] sound, and that’s alphabetically first. Oh, and if two sounds start with the same letter, then we go by last letter backwards. So, Ignacio, Rodger, Rhian, Rach, Rene, Raina, Diego, Whitney, WolfDog. [HOWLS]
BEN: Sorry, I missed that one.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: J0HNTR0Y, James, Jack, Joanna, gramaryen, Andy. Andy’s after grammarian because Andy starts with a, and that has ae sound. Not like g, which has a da sound. Andy, aengryballs, Andy from Logophilius, Amir, Ariaflame, Ayesha, Helen, Felicity, Larry, LordMortis, Luis, Lyssa, Manú, Matt, Margareth, Meredith, Molly Dee, Nasrin, Nigel, Nikoli, Stan, sæ̃m, Sonic Snejhog, Steele, Elías, Kathy, Kristofer, Kevin, Keith, Kate, [IN UNISON WITH BEN] O Tim, PharaohKatt, Chris W, Canny Archer, Colleen, Chris L, Cheyenne, Termy, Tony, Tadhg, and our newest patron at the listener level, Rye. Thanks to all of our patrons.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] That is one of the silliest way you’ve done ordering that so far.
DANIEL: List provided on request.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Okay. Anyway, our theme music was written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who’s also a member and performs with Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
IN UNISON: Pew, pew, pew.
DANIEL: Thank you all.
HEDVIG: You know what? I’m going to make a map. I’m going to look up a map.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Hedvig’s answer to all situations where there’s ambiguity. I will make a map.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Make a tree.
HEDVIG: So, Australia and US is the same for Mother’s Day, second Sunday in May.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Germany is also the same as that. Sweden is the same as France, and large parts of Algeria, Morocco, places France has colonised.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Places that France got to make do things.
DANIEL: Thank you, France.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s kind of it.
DANIEL: All right, we should stick that map up on Reddit.
BEN: Hedvig, can I ask, do you ever feel like whilst being a linguist is dope and awesome and living your best life and all that jazz, do you ever sit there and think to yourself, “I should have been a cartographer”?
HEDVIG: No, not cartography.
BEN: Okay. Because you have a love for maps that transcends nearly all human beings I’ve met have love for maps…
HEDVIG: Really.
BEN: …save for actual cartographers, like, actual map nerds.
DANIEL: And even they don’t like it because they’re like, “Ugh, I don’t enjoy this anymore. I should have been a linguist.”
HEDVIG: Ah, I know other people who are quite nerdy about maps too. You were talking about different countries doing different things. I’m going to look at a map.
BEN: Fair enough.
HEDVIG: Someone’s made a map.
BEN: I want to be very clear here. What is not happening is me critiquing your love of map. I want to state that very clearly.
HEDVIG: I just don’t think that’s that extraordinary. I don’t even think it’s like a love for maps. I just think it’s like normal behaviour.
BEN: But I feel, Hedvig, that is the hallmark of a person who has a much higher than normal affection for things, is when you look at that affection for things and you’re like, “What? There’s nothing unusual about this.”
HEDVIG: Yeah, maybe.
BEN: That’s one of the… if there was a DSM-5 for being into trademark stuff, that would be one of the things of a genuine naivete towards the fact that everyone else isn’t as into this thing as I am.
HEDVIG: All right, well, I’ve sent you the map now.
BEN: Okay. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Thank you.
HEDVIG: While you’re talking.
DANIEL: Thank you very much.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Is that all through this, you were literally building a map.
HEDVIG: No, I found it. [DANIEL LAUGHS]
BEN: So, I feel like you have answered my question with your actions. Yes, I would have rather been a cartographer, because while I was saying no, I built you a map.
HEDVIG: I didn’t build it. I didn’t build it.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Didn’t build it.
HEDVIG: Officialholidays.com, Your Home for the Holidays as a map.
BEN: You’re a map finder, a map librarian, a cartolibrariaso.
DANIEL: And then, you forged the watermark for Office Holidays. You deceptive mapmaker, you.
BEN: I love it. I love how into maps you are. It’s one of the…
DANIEL: It’s endearing.
HEDVIG: I discovered something interesting.
BEN: Many endearing things about you.
DANIEL: What did you discover that was interesting?
HEDVIG: I discovered something interesting. Do you know what day March 8th is?
DANIEL: Well, I just noticed on that map that it’s something.
HEDVIG: Yes, but do you know what it is otherwise?
DANIEL: I would not have known, except that I just read that map that you made, and it said that it was the UK Mother’s Day.
HEDVIG: No.
BEN: Okay. What is it?
HEDVIG: My god.
HEDVIG: I did not think this was going to be like this.
DANIEL: Oops. Russian, Russian.
HEDVIG: I think you know what March 8th is.
[LONG PAUSE]
DANIEL: The day after March 7th.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] It is International…
BEN: Linguistics Day?
DANIEL: Workers Day?
BEN: Day of Indigenous Languages. What? put us out of our misery!
HEDVIG: International Women’s Day.
BEN: Oh, whoops. Oh, I’m sorry.
DANIEL: Oh. Is it March 8th every year, or is it just the last Friday?
HEDVIG: Its March 8th every year.
DANIEL: The second Friday. That’s cool.
HEDVIG: And in a lot of places in former Soviet Union, that is also Mother’s Day.
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: Oh, there we go.
DANIEL: I should be more on top of that. I only notice it every year when I see guys saying, “When is International Men’s Day, huh?” And then, people patiently respond…
HEDVIG: It’s in November.
DANIEL: It’s in November.
HEDVIG: I think it is in November.
DANIEL: Here is the answer to your question.
BEN: That’s a good shutdown: November.
DANIEL: It is November, whatever it is, November 8th.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah. It’s November.
BEN: There you go.
HEDVIG: Yeah. There you go.
BEN: And hopefully, I trust that we will definitely see all of the people who dog whistle that talking point, making time and space to talk about men’s mental health issues and…
DANIEL: Ben.
BEN: …the rapacious impacts of toxic masculinity.
HEDVIG: Ben?
DANIEL: Ben! They don’t care about that. They just want to invalidate Women’s Day.
BEN: Yeah, absolutely.
[BOOP]
DANIEL: I have a boomer story.
BEN: Yay.
DANIEL: One of my boomers, as you know, I do a lot of talks in Perth, and the talk audience tends to be a bit older, and I present lectures about language and have a lot of fun. Yeah, they’re a little bit older. But one woman came up to me afterwards, and she’d been to a few of my sessions. I recognised her from a few different places, by the way, tracked her down. She said that it was okay for me to tell this story. And she said to me, “I think I’ve caught tolerance.”
BEN: I have caught tolerance.
DANIEL: And I said, “That is terrible.”
BEN: I like that.
DANIEL: And she said, “I used to be such a language snob and worrying about, ‘Oh, my grandchildren are using language badly.’” But she said, “After listening to you, I’ve begun to realise that I don’t have to worry about language. And it’s taken such a weight off my mind. [BEN LAUGHS] I feel so free.” Isn’t that wonderful?
BEN: It’s so weird when you’re not being a grumpy bastard all the time, [LAUGHS] life is quite a lot nicer.
HEDVIG: Well, also, when you don’t feel like… You feel like the responsibility, like that this is an important job that someone needs to do, and no one else is stepping up, and you have to step up.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Oh, the last vanguard.
DANIEL: Sometimes, I feel like I’m the only person doing any language monitoring around here.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah. So, she just stopped worrying, and now as I come to the linguistic side, we have fun with language instead of being upset about it. And I just thought, as somebody who does language as a public linguist, I just feel like that’s goals.
BEN: That’s neat. Good job, Daniel.
DANIEL: Thank you.
BEN: Look at you, changing one Boomer’s mind at a time, Daniel. Good job.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s my job.
[BOOP]
DANIEL: I loved finding out that spiders were spithers.
HEDVIG: I heard that you loved finding out that spiders were spithers, but I barely hear the difference.
DANIEL: Spither, spider. Oh, really? Hard to perceive, huh?
HEDVIG: Honestly, very [BLOWS RASPBERRY]. Can barely hear it.
DANIEL: Well, then that may be another thing, right? I mean, maybe if two sounds are perceptually similar, there’s no reason for one to exist. And maybe because languages tend to have D’s, maybe there’s no reason for them to have some thetas, Ts and Ds, just chasing them out.
[BOOP]
HEDVIG: [SINGING OOPS, I DID IT AGAIN]
DANIEL: There we go. Okay, now, I need to share this.
HEDVIG: Which do you think is the best Britney Spears song, Ben?
BEN: In terms of remix-ability and longevity, it’s got to be Toxic.
DANIEL: Toxic is great.
HEDVIG: Toxic is very, very, very, very good.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]