Can you hear them? Only if you’re meant to. Political dogwhistles exploit lack of knowledge in one group to send a coded message to another group. But that’s just the beginning. How are dogwhistles different from slurs? How do they licence behaviour? Do progressives dogwhistle? Dr Elin McCready is the author of Signaling Without Saying: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Dogwhistles.
We’re also joined by Lizzy Hanks and Dr Jesse Egbert, who are working on the LANA-CASE corpus, a huge corpus of conversational English. It aims to bring representation to a diverse group of English speakers, and they’re looking for contributors.
Dr Rikker Dockum is our special guest host.
Timestamps
Intros: 0:00
News: 3:01
Interview with Lizzy Hanks and Jesse Egbert: 16:47
Related or Not: 35:45
Interview with Elin McCready: 45:57
Words of the Week: 1:17:47
The Reads: 1:39:43
Listen to this episode
Patreon supporters
Thanks to all our patrons! Here are our patrons at the Supporter level.
This time, they are ordered alphabetically, but letter by letter. Basically A=1, B=2… Z=26, and then divided by letters in the name.
- Jack
- Ariaflame
- Rach
- Diego
- Tadhg
- Ignacio
- Raina
- Helen
- Joanna
- Elías
- Kate
- Nigel
- Colleen
- James
- Ayesha
- Cheyenne
- Canny Archer
- Rhian
- Margareth
- Amir
- Meredith
- Rene
- aengryballs
- Keith
- PharaohKatt
- Andy
- sæ̃m
- Steele
- Felicity
- Rodger
- gramaryen
- Molly Dee
- Chris L
- Sonic Snejhog
- Nikoli
- WolfDog
- J0HNTR0Y
- Kevin
- Manú
- Tony
- Nasrin
- Andy from Logophilius
- Alyssa
- Kathy
- Chris W
- Kristofer
- Matt
- Stan
- O Tim
- LordMortis
- Larry
- Lyssa
- Luis
- Termy
- Whitney
And our newest patrons:
- At the Listener level: Sarah
- And our newest free members: Xina, Caroline, Danielle, and Katherine
Become a Patreon supporter yourself and get access to bonus episodes and more!
Become a Patron!Show notes
Rikker Dockum
https://rikkerdockum.com/projects/
A centuries-old secret script called nüshu is empowering young Chinese women
https://apnews.com/article/china-nushu-women-exclusive-script-jiangyong-b6a206b87c9682f743bf73d9a51a5d85
[PDF] Decolonizing Historical Linguistics in the Classroom and Beyond: Claire Bowern and Rikker Dockum | Oxford Academic
https://watermark.silverchair.com/oso-9780197755259-chapter-11.pdf
[PDF] Toward a Big Tent Linguistics Inclusion and the Myth of the Lone Genius: Rikker Dockum and Caitlin Green | Oxford Academic
https://watermark.silverchair.com/oso-9780197755303-chapter-6.pdf
Women in the History of Linguistics, Wendy Ayres-Bennett (ed.), Helena Sanson (ed.)
https://academic.oup.com/book/39657
Nüshu (女书) | Omniglot
https://omniglot.com/writing/nushu.htm
Multiple evolutionary pressures shape identical consonant avoidance in the world’s languages
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2316677121
LANA-CASE Corpus: Share Your Voice
https://sites.google.com/view/share-your-voice/home?authuser=0
Buy the book
Signaling without Saying: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Dogwhistles | Robert Henderson and Elin McCready
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/signaling-without-saying-9780198886341?cc=au&lang=en&
Read the book (open source)
Signaling without Saying: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Dogwhistles | Robert Henderson, Elin McCready
https://academic.oup.com/book/57329
Dog Whistle or Just Racist?
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/08/dog-whistle-racism-gop-trump-election-atwater/
Exclusive: Lee Atwater’s Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/
Offensive political dog whistles: you know them when you hear them. Or do you?
https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/11/7/13549154/dog-whistles-campaign-racism
Republican dogwhistle politics explained
https://thedemlabs.org/2022/02/28/dogwhistle-politics-culture-wars-republicans-use-to-get-elected/
Elizabeth (given name) | Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_(given_name)
Mignon Fogarty (@grammargirl.bsky.social): “Vibes” is making a strong play for word of the year.
https://bsky.app/profile/grammargirl.bsky.social/post/3kye5ibnb5p2a
Online Anti-LGBTQ Hate Terms Defined: “Transvestigation”
https://glaad.org/transvestigation-definition-meaning-anti-lgbt-online-hate/
Rebecca Watson: “This is all complete bullshit. [Imane Khelif] is a cis woman who is being attacked for being too good. JK Rowling and her minions… have weaponized their transphobia against ALL women. This is the final and inevitable result of transphobia: the policing of all women’s appearance, of all women’s behavior, of all women’s success.”
https://www.patreon.com/posts/transphobes-are-109661706
Psychiatrist: Bed rotting days are ‘very tempting,’ but don’t really help you feel rested—here’s how to recharge instead
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/07/07/psychiatrist-bed-rotting-days-are-tempting-but-not-very-restful.html
lying late in bed | The Historical Thesaurus of English
https://historicalthesaurus.arts.gla.ac.uk/category/?type=search&qsearch=slugabed&word=slugabed&label=&category=&oef=&oel=&startf=&startl=&endf=&endl=¤tf=¤tl=&year=&twoEdNew=&twoEdUpdated=&page=1#id=79566
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]
DANIEL: Hello and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name’s Daniel Midgley. And with me now, our special guest, cohost, it’s Dr Rikker Dockum of Swarthmore College, USA. Rikker, how’s it going?
RIKKER: It’s going great. Thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here.
DANIEL: Thanks for coming on. My question for you, are you any kind of -pilled? Is there any kind of pill that you have been taking?
[LAUGHTER]
RIKKER: A great question. Well, I guess a year ago or so, I would say I was Taylor-Swift-pilled.
DANIEL: Oh.
RIKKER: Taylor-pilled by my daughter.
DANIEL: That’s a good kind of pill.
RIKKER: Yeah, we… I’ve never not enjoyed some of the music, but really having a kid who’s very into that got me… It just became our driving music anywhere we would go, so.
DANIEL: That’s actually funny because listeners will know that I am somewhat Charlie-XCX-pilled in a similar way with a similar daughter in a similar car. So, I’m Brat-pilled.
RIKKER: Well, there you go.
DANIEL: Thanks for coming on the episode. Ben is still cycling through the wild and windy landscape that is the American West. Hedvig is away for this episode, but it’s great to have you for this one. Last time we saw you, it was on our Big Tent episode with Dr Aris Clemons and Dr Caitlin Green. What’s been going on in your work since we saw you last time?
RIKKER: Well, been keeping busy in a lot of ways. We had those volumes, those chapters we were talking about in that episode were published finally. So, those are out and in open access, worldwide. So, you can get them in PDF or various other forms, I think even just straight up websites. So, yeah, happy to see those out finally.
DANIEL: That is cool. And as someone who does podcasts where you do a show every two weeks, I kind of forget about academic timescale.
RIKKER: Yeah, it’s its own thing, isn’t it?
DANIEL: It is. That’s great. So, on today’s show, we are going to be talking about dogwhistles, those sneaky political things people say so that the ingroup will know what you mean, but all of the people on the outside will not know. We’re talking to Dr Elin McCready of Aoyama Gakuin University. Along with Dr Robert Henderson, she’s the author of a new book, Signaling without Saying: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Dogwhistles. So, we’re getting into that.
Also, our next episode is going to be our live episode. It’s been recorded; we had a great time doing it. It was our 500th episode or our 105th episode, so be sure that you are subscribed to us in all places so you can see that on YouTube or hear that as soon as it comes out.
All right. Ready to get to some news?
RIKKER: Sounds good.
DANIEL: Okay. This one was suggested by Diego on our Discord. This is a story that’s been on my radar off and on for a while. It was Diego that encouraged me to find out about it. And it’s about a centuries-old secret script called Nüshu in China. Had you heard of this one before it came through?
RIKKER: It’s come across my radar a time or two, but I don’t know the details, just what I’ve read in recent publications or recent news coverage about it.
DANIEL: It comes around every once in a while. So, this is a story in the Associated Press by Huizhong Wu about a writing system called Nüshu. It was begun by women in a small village in China. The village is called Jiangyang. There are examples of it from the 1600s. It existed because reading and writing were only available to men. So, women created their own script. The script is called Nüshu. It’s sometimes called “the script of tears” because women were sometimes pushed into a life that they didn’t get to choose, and this was a way for them to share their stories.
RIKKER: Yeah, now that you mention it, I think this was covered in a recent book that came out. Have you heard… I think, maybe two years ago, Women in the History of Linguistics, you know that book? Edited by Wendy Ayres-Bennett and Helena Sanson?
DANIEL: Ooh.
RIKKER: They have a bunch of case studies. I think this might have been in one of the chapters. I have not read the book cover to cover, but I’ve read many of the chapters in it, so.
DANIEL: That looks cool.
RIKKER: Yeah, that’s something else to look into in terms of sort of elevating the experiences of women and sort of language creativity, yeah, often under very repressive circumstances.
DANIEL: Well, I will find out about that one. We’ll slap a link up on the show notes for this episode. So, I took a look at the script. It looks a lot like Chinese writing to me, but it’s almost like you take the square shapes and you turn them into a rhombus. It looks like curvy X’s and V’s with some dots. And they’ve been derived from Chinese characters but made kind of diagonal. And one idea is that it made the characters easier to embroider. And the last proficient user, Yang Huanyi, died in 2004 at the age of 98.
RIKKER: Wow.
DANIEL: But now it’s seeing a new life, as young women in China are learning the script and using the script as a source of cultural pride. It’s even seen a measure official support, and it has its own Unicode block, although on my Mac, unfortunately, it just looks like squares of tofu.
RIKKER: I love to see some Unicode support, that’s great. I didn’t realize… I had heard of the script, but had not heard that it had Unicode support. Very cool.
DANIEL: It’s so good. What if it takes off? What if people start using it? That would be really cool.
RIKKER: Well, I love the tidbit about it being easier to embroider, because writing systems are… There are a handful of unique origin points around the world for writing systems, so much fewer than you might think. But oftentimes, the reasons they look so different is because they’ve evolved under different materials that were used to write them. A lot of the Brahmic scripts of Southeast Asia, whether they’re curvier like loops or whether they’re more angular, was whether they were being inscribed in stone or written with ink or being carved into mulberry paper and leaves and things like that. So, they have a similar origin. All the scripts derive from the Brahmic scripts of South Asia, spread into Southeast Asia, but they could still look quite different. So, the idea that you would have embroidery as a sort of evolutionary pressure on the shapes of the symbols is super cool.
DANIEL: I think the idea of evolutionary pressure on language is super interesting. I really like thinking about that. I know that your work is in Thai, the Thai languages, which has its own writing system. And I know this because I’ve been playing games where you have to identify languages by the writing system.
RIKKER: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Was Thai difficult for you to get used to? How is it different from other scripts that descend from the Brahmic scripts?
RIKKER: Well, they all kind of have their own flavor, but one of the main features of the scripts in that part of the world are called abugidas. Abugida being the first four letters, like a lot of categories of scripts are named based on alphabet comes from alpha beta.
DANIEL: True.
RIKKER: Abugida, it just becomes collapsed into one word. Abjad, similar story. But in abugidas, the consonant is kind of the primary thing, and vowels are sort of seen as diacritics on the consonants. And so, for Thai and other languages like that, the vowels have evolved a little bit, so they’re not quite diacritics, they’re not connected directly to consonants, but they still don’t have full status like a consonant would. So, it does take some getting used to. But yeah, I don’t know. It’s just… I guess I’ve been using them so long, I don’t think about it much anymore. I guess 20 plus years.
DANIEL: So, some writing systems are abjads, once again, aa-ba-ja- and da.
RIKKER: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: They represent consonants, although you can have breath marks which show the vowels that you would have to use. But that’s not quite as far along that path as an abugida. Is that right? My understanding is that abugidas are kind of syllabic.
RIKKER: Yeah. Abugida is a somewhat recent term coined in the 1990s, I think. Before that, the term, and still some people would use the term, alphasyllabary. So, they’re sort of in the middle between an alphabet and a syllabary. So, they think the consonants have an implicit vowel, but they don’t have to have an implicit vowel. You can write… And in fact, perhaps the majority of syllables do have an explicitly written vowel, so yeah.
DANIEL: Okay, cool. Well, if you want to see some Nüshu text, we’ll have a link to the relevant Omniglot page on the show notes for this episode. That’s becauselanguage.com. And thanks, Diego.
All right, now I’ve got a question Rikker. Are there any words in English that you find it especially hard to say? Many people stumble over statistics.
RIKKER: I feel like it depends whether I’m in front of a classroom or not. Because if I’m in the front of a classroom, the odds of me stumbling over a word suddenly skyrockets.
DANIEL: Good point.
RIKKER: I don’t have any single-word tongue twisters that come to mind. Do you have some?
DANIEL: So, phenomenon doesn’t seem to pose you any trouble?
RIKKER: Phenomenon.
DANIEL: Do-do-do-do.
RIKKER: No, I’m good with that.
DANIEL: Okay.
RIKKER: That’s where I was going to go with that, too.
DANIEL: Mimetic?
RIKKER: I’m good with mimetic.
DANIEL: Okay. Have you ever met a rural juror?
RIKKER: Now, that’s a great example, in part because I tried to use that as an example in my phonetics class in this past semester and in semesters past, and people don’t get that reference anymore, so.
DANIEL: Oh, man.
RIKKER: I may be able to say rural juror fine, but I’m not able to come up with timely pop culture references.
DANIEL: Not anymore, hey, we’ve reached that time. It seems that languages tend to avoid having sequences of identical consonants like mimetic or statistics. Which is weird, because when you have words that children use, nursery words like mama and papa, they actually do repeat sounds in the very same word. Mama has a couple of M’s, papa has a couple of P’s. But there’s just something about words that use repeated sounds that make language not really work. And the question is, is it because they’re hard to say or because they’re hard to understand? Do you have a take on this? What’s your guess?
RIKKER: I know the paper you’re referring to, and I have not fully digested it, but…
DANIEL: Me neither.
RIKKER: …my sense is that it’s probably articulatory in nature. That we just… There is a bit of a tongue twister effect where it’s not that any single word might trip you up. But if you have a bunch of words with a lot of repetitions in a row, you have to balance between… When you’re talking with someone, you’re trying to balance between your desire to get what you’re saying into the head of the person that you’re communicating with versus your need to say it in a limited amount of time to keep their attention. There’s all kinds of competing pressures. And so, one of those is you’re going to trip up if you start trying to speak too quickly. It makes some sense.
DANIEL: That’s right. And then, I noticed also, we tend to go to the work of Stephen Levinson a lot lately around here. Putting things into words is slow, but comprehension is fast. So, you’ve got to take little hacks to be able to get things out faster. And anything that can help you not trip over stuff. I tend to weigh things like you do toward the articulatory, like if it’s easier to say, then we’ll do it. If it’s harder to understand, that might be an acceptable cost tradeoff. If I can offload the job onto you, then I’m cool with that. Okay.
Well, this is some research that takes a look at why we just don’t seem to see words with similar sounds in them. This is work from Dr Chundra Cathcart, published in PNAS. There are a few ideas. One idea is when we engage in the process of word creation in languages, not just English, but other languages too, it’s possible that we just don’t create those kinds of words, we just stay away from that kind of pattern.
Another idea is that we make them, we do create such words. But then, over time and under pressure, we filter those sounds out of the same word. We keep the word, we just make it easier to say over time.
But a third possibility is we do create such words, but then we don’t like them, we avoid them and choose other words to say the stuff that we want to say.
So, in this paper… Hang on, I’m going to get the name of the paper.
RIKKER: Multiple evolutionary pressures shape identical consonant avoidance in the world’s languages.
DANIEL: Thank you very much. This work looks at data from five different language families. They took a look at how words arose and how they got dropped, and that’s both relative to other words that they were etymologically related to. So, even if they mean something different, whether they sound the same, which is what you would want to know if you wanted to know if it was the sounds themselves that were difficult. They also looked at whether those words got dropped relative to other words for the same concepts so that you can see what gets semantically preferred. They took a look at Austronesian languages, Semitic languages, Uralic languages, and some others.
And here’s what they found. Across these families, it does seem that when people create words, they do create them less often with similar consonants in there. So, we just try to avoid them when we’re creating words. But they also point out that words mutate to get rid of identical consonants, and that happens much more often than when words change to acquire identical consonants. So, it looks like not only do we avoid making such words, when we do end up making such words, we tend to get rid of them and make them a little bit easier to say.
RIKKER: Yeah. What I like about this is the idea that there are multiple selectional pressures, I think, sort of conclusively proving any single thing is going on is almost certainly going to be overly simplistic. So, even though we were saying it makes sense to us articulatorily, there can easily be other reasons to do that, right? So…
DANIEL: Hmm. That’s right.
RIKKER: It seems to be supported by the research.
DANIEL: Well, what I like about this is it does show that languages and the words in languages are subject to evolutionary pressure. They can get selected for or selected against, and the whole process kind of follows what works for us cognitively. And I’m a big fan of that approach.
RIKKER: Yeah, same.
DANIEL: All right. Finally, we’ve got some work from a team from the University of Arizona. They’re putting together one of the largest and most ambitious corpora of unscripted English conversation. This is called the LANA-CASE corpus. It’s the Lancaster-Northern Arizona Corpus of Spoken American English. It’s a corpus of conversational American English. It includes a lot of recordings from a diverse group of people telling their stories. It’s unscripted. It’s going to have about 10 million transcribed words. And interestingly, sounds like they’re trying to make this corpus a positive force. To what extent does your work involve corpus linguistics, Rikker?
RIKKER: So, I don’t work directly with contemporary corpora, but I do work with some historical corpora. So, mainly in sort of the epigraphy, the inscriptions of Southeast Asia. So, I’ve done some work there. A little bit with old Khmer. So, for instance, trying to figure out where the origins of certain Thai words come from, we can use old Khmer corpora to say, well, if it was written in old Khmer and that predates the arrival of Thai people in the region, it was almost certainly not a native Thai word. It would have been borrowed from either, if not Khmer, then Mon or some other language, yeah.
DANIEL: Okay. Well, one thing that’s interesting about this corpus is that it looks like they’re trying to make it a positive force socially, and it’s something that people can contribute to themselves if they’re speakers of American English. I got the chance to talk to two of the researchers, Lizzy Hanks, a PhD student at Northern Arizona University, and Dr Jesse Egbert, a Professor at Northern Arizona University. I started by asking them how this corpus was different.
LIZZY HANKS: Yeah, there are tons of corpora out there. LANA-CASE is different and new, I guess, because it’s of American English conversations. So, these are naturally or as natural as possible occurring conversations spoken between two or three people in the United States using American English, and it’s pretty large. Right now, the corpus is 8.5 million words that we’ve collected. We’re hoping to get up to 10 million. So, it’s larger than many corpora out there, especially spoken conversational corpora. And we have real recordings of authentic conversations, which is different from some of the other conversational corpora that we might see.
DANIEL: Okay. There’s a lot of information that can go in a corpus speaker information, dialect information, labeling the turns with different speech acts. What kind of information is going to be in this?
JESSE EGBERT: Yeah, that’s a great question. So, we have carefully designed the corpus before we started collecting anything to try to represent the full spectrum of geographic dialects in the US across different regions, different age ranges, different socioeconomic groups and educational backgrounds and professions and things with the hope of being able to get a cross-section of the entire United States, people 18 and over. And so, we’re collecting all this information, when people agree to participate, they report their age and gender and educational background, where they live and where they have lived recently. So, all of this is recorded and can be used to help us to stratify the corpus.
And when people are researching the corpus in the future, they’re going to be able to look at these different groups and compare, how do people 18 to 25 speak differently from people who are 50 plus? Or, how is English in the deep south different from New England? And we’re adapting the corpus as we collect it along the way to try to make sure that things are balanced and representative of at least the most recent census in the US. And hopefully, these variables make it possible for linguists and others to look at language, especially conversational language in the US, in ways that we’ve never really been able to before.
DANIEL: I like how you’re trying to grab a representative sample of everyone. Are there some groups that are harder to track down? Are you missing anybody?
LIZZY: Yeah, absolutely. There are definitely groups that are harder to track down. The good news is, I wouldn’t say we’re missing anybody. Actually, as far as what we’ve found from the census data, we are collecting participants from each demographic group that we’re aiming for, but definitely we have less representation from certain groups. Surprisingly, one of the challenging demographic groups has been gender. So, we found that many female participants are really eager to participate. About 60% to 70% of our data right now is from female speakers. We have about 10% from nonbinary genders and other genders, and then the rest is male participants. So, we’re definitely looking to hopefully boost male participation. That’s been tricky.
Another sort of tricky aspect has been race and ethnicity, in particular, people who identify as Indigenous. And so, we have about maybe 1% of our data from Indigenous populations. And according to the census, actually there’s greater population in the US who are Indigenous. So, we’re hoping to boost that as well.
And I should say this is just going to become, I’m talking about all of the different challenges, but one more challenge is age, as you might imagine. So, younger participants, participants under around 30, 40 are really eager to participate. Participants above 40 are a little harder to track down.
DANIEL: Okay. And what do you do when you have a group that isn’t well represented? How do you fix that?
JESSE: Yeah, everything is self-selected. Everyone in the corpus has opted in. Obviously, we can’t record people without their knowledge, and so this is why there’s some bias in the sample. But we do different things to try to adapt and to try to recruit people from different demographic groups that are lacking. We’ve tried dozens of different ways of recruiting participants to join in the effort to get as much language as possible in the corpus. We’ve done everything from flyers to visiting senior citizen centers to recruiting participants at restaurants in town.
And the most successful approach so far has been social media. A lot of our recruitment has happened over TikTok. Lizzy’s active on TikTok and posting content that people enjoy, but then occasionally asking people, “Hey, do you want to participate and share your voice? Give us an insight into how you use conversational language,” and that’s worked really well. But obviously, that itself introduces a bias because certain age groups and things are on TikTok whereas others aren’t.
DANIEL: Okay, we’re going to have some information. I’m going to ask you toward the end about how people can contribute, but I’m really curious. Are there things that you’re noticing even just now? I mean, you mentioned that younger people speak differently than older people do, or maybe women talk differently from men versus nonbinary folks. What are you noticing so far? Anything interesting going down?
LIZZY: Yeah, at this point, we have about 4 million words transcribed. So, we’re still actively collecting the corpus and transcribing the data. So, we haven’t been able to run any systematic investigations of this type of stuff. But I have been taking a look at the notes that transcribers have been making as they’ve been going through this process, and we found some really interesting things happening in the data. So, I wrote a couple examples down that you might be interested in.
Actually, from two weeks ago, we had an instance of the word UNBADONKIFY, which…
DANIEL: What is that, like removing somebody’s ass? What is that?
LIZZY: That’s exactly what it is. Yes.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: I guessed it.
LIZZY: You guessed it.
DANIEL: The process of unbadonkification. Why not DE-badonkification? Where did that come up? What context was that?
LIZZY: It was actually in an online game, I think The Sims or something. Yeah, the creativity in this language is so cool. There was an instance of someone saying TOOKEN as in the past participle of TAKE. So, they’re sort of purposely using an ungrammatical form, which is really interesting.
DANIEL: My young daughters are very much into BRANG right now, as past tense for BRING.
LIZZY: BRANG.
DANIEL: Which gets you into very young speakers, like under seven. I don’t suppose there’s a lot of subjects like that.
LIZZY: Yeah, unfortunately, I was about to say, I don’t know if I’ve heard an instance of this because we’re looking at data from people who are 18 and over.
DANIEL: Yeah, correct.
LIZZY: But actually, I would love to look into the corpus and see if that does show up.
DANIEL: TOOKEN is cool. I like TOOKEN.
LIZZY: [LAUGHS] One more example the transcribers heard, HIGH-DEA. I don’t know if you can guess this one, HIGH-DEA.
DANIEL: First, I had an idea, but it was aspirated. An aspirated idea.
LIZZY: It’s a good guess.
DANIEL: Okay.
LIZZY: It’s an idea that you had while you’re high. A high-dea.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] High-dea.
LIZZY: Mm-hmm. So, we see some really interesting things coming in. Unfortunately, right now, yeah, we haven’t done any analyses on who’s saying these things or in what context, but definitely things to explore once the corpus is done, I think.
DANIEL: Awesome. Now, you mentioned in the supporting material that the LANA-CASE corpus — and I’m quoting here — “will be instrumental in creating more equitable classrooms, identifying language change, and developing materials for language teachers.” Those are some really good aims and really ambitious aims. How will this work out, do you think? How do you see the corpus being used to do those things?
JESSE: Yeah, every year, I teach a sociolinguistics course to our master’s students and teaching English as a second language. And many of them say, it’s one of the most eye-opening courses that they’ve taken so far because it’s one of the only places where they get exposure to language variation. In so many of the other classes, they’re learning about the structure of language and how to teach the standardized variety. In sociolinguistics, they get to learn about how language doesn’t always look like the standard, that these prescriptive norms that often we need to abide by if we’re writing a college essay, doesn’t look like the language we’re going to experience if you go out and have a conversation at the gas station.
And helping them to understand that just because a variety is standardized, because of whatever the dominant group in society is at the time, doesn’t make that variety of language any more grammatical or correct in terms of its pronunciation. So, even within the United States, there’s rich diversity in the language that you’ll be exposed to if you live here and I and encounter people from different groups, regions and things. And so, this corpus will allow us to be able to study that directly.
There’s been a lot of sociolinguistic research on language variation in the US, but for the most part, it’s been through surveys, small datasets, ethnographic kind of anthropology type of studies. But this will allow us to have, again, this kind of large cross-section that we can look into and compare these varieties side by side in the same dataset and help us to appreciate and embrace all of this rich variation.
So, in the classroom, it has a lot of applications, and this is one of the things we’re trying to do to encourage people to participate is to help them to see that their variety of language, the language that they use most often with friends and family is distinctive in many ways from other speakers in the US. And that without them sharing their voice, we will be missing an important piece of kind of the fabric of language in the United States.
DANIEL: I’ve had that reaction a lot from people who have been sort of beaten down by the standardised language ideology, both L1 speakers and English learners. And they felt very encouraged when they hear the message that, “Well, we’re linguists. We’re interested in the way you talk, and the way you talk, it’s worthwhile, were interested in it.” It’s kind of sad when language teachers become people who know a lot about teaching language, but they sometimes get locked into the standardised language ideology and they don’t seem to see that their responsibility is to teach across the varieties. And when you find a way to do that, like this corpus, I think that’s a wonderful thing.
LIZZY: Thank you. Yeah, totally.
JESSE: Yeah, it’s really exciting to be able to understand what language looks like in different contexts. We’ll have a lot of examples in the corpus of what looks like standard American English, and we can compare directly and help people to see that maybe it’s context specific, maybe having control over your own dialect and the one you use with friends and family and helping you feel empowered, that’s a valid way of communicating, especially in those contexts. But then also, what does the standard look like? And if you wanted to interact with people in a university setting, how would you make that adjustment?
And when I teach this class, every semester, I have students who say, “I speak differently here in this college classroom when I’m home for Thanksgiving.” And we talk about that shift that they make, that kind of code switching within your own language. And I think having mastery over language in different contexts is empowering, and it helps people have a healthier sense of their own identity while still being able to have confidence that they can use language effectively in different contexts.
LIZZY: I’ve noticed this as well. When we invite people to participate, and many people immediately say, “Well, you don’t want my language because I have ADHD or I’m autistic or I talk about crazy things. You don’t really want my language. My language isn’t a good representation of how people speak in the United States.” But actually, I mean, we want all language. We’re just interested in how people normally talk, regardless of who they are or how they identify.
DANIEL: So, we’ve mentioned some use cases for this corpus. Is there anything else that you expect linguists to do with this data?
LIZZY: Yeah, honestly, for me, I’m most excited to see how people use this data in ways that I, and maybe we, wouldn’t have imagined. I hope that this corpus will be used for a lot of different applications, and many of them I hope that I can’t foresee, really. I hope that there are lots of linguistic studies and research questions that are interesting and new and really exciting, and that’s truly what I’m hoping for.
DANIEL: Okay. So now, you’ve got a mountain of words, you’ve got a lot of different conversations but you still need more, and people can contribute, including the folks that listen to our podcast if they are speakers of some kind of American English. How would they go about doing that? What do you do?
LIZZY: Yeah, so you can check out our website, you can just search “share your voice” on Google and it’ll pop up and there are links there for how to participate. Basically, the speakers will have to take a survey. It’s just a two-minute survey, super quick. And then, they’ll record just everyday conversations. Conversations that ideally, you’d be having regardless of whether you are participating or not. So hopefully, this doesn’t take any extra time, like while you’re getting ready in the morning, talking to a partner, while you’re eating lunch with friends, chatting with coworkers in the hallway, things like this. And once those are submitted on the website, we will send you a $25 Amazon gift card on the 16th of the month. And it’s $25 for each hour of conversation that’s submitted. So, participants can submit up to 6 hours of data, and we’ll send you a $25 gift card for each hour that’s submitted.
Briefly, the eligibility criteria here would be the conversations should have just two to three speakers and each speaker should be eligible to participate, meaning that they’re at least 18 years old, they speak English as a primary language, and that they’ve lived in the United States for most of their lives, so since before elementary school.
DANIEL: Okay. And do they have to have fancy audio equipment or anything like that?
LIZZY: No, not at all. Just a phone. Just a phone works great.
DANIEL: This is a great project. I guess I just have one more question. Putting together a big corpus like this is a lot of work. What’s been one of the more challenging areas to tackle that maybe you didn’t think was going to be difficult? What has come up as a big uh-oh in the process of collecting this data?
JESSE: I mean, a big one has been recruitment. We already talked about that. Just trying to convince people to participate and in specific groups as well. Some people are… I think younger people are much more familiar with technology and going through the steps to submit recordings. It seems like they’re more comfortable sharing their private conversations than older people are. But then, some of the surprises have just been, why are we having a harder time getting men to participate? Why are we seeing so much more participation from females? And so, we knew recruitment would be hard, but sometimes we’ve been surprised by what those challenges have looked like.
And then, some of the recruitment ideas that we originally had, we thought, were just brilliant and would result in all of these submissions, and it didn’t result in anything at all. One example is we ran a Hulu ad and invested some resources in that. We thought for sure it would be a great way to get participants to submit. And I think, as far as we know, got one participant from our whole Hulu ad run.
LIZZY: Mm-hmm.
JESSE: So, yeah, we’re getting closer to the finish line. We’re aiming for 10 million words, and we got maybe 1 to 2 million left. But it’s been a lot of work to be able to get to this point and kind of coming up with some creative ideas to help people to see the value of the project, but also to reduce some of their concerns about sharing their conversations.
LIZZY: I would second that and say yeah, it’s been a lot of work and none of this would be possible without such a great team too, which has been something that surprised me about this process. I guess surprised me in a good way about how many people are willing to step in and help. So, we’ve got a team of, I think, 11 linguists from Northern Arizona University and Lancaster University. And on top of that, last time I counted, we have 55 contributors and collaborators, many of whom are volunteers from all over the world, many in the UK, in the US, and other countries as well. And so, it’s been really pleasantly surprising to see how many people are passionate and excited about this project enough to volunteer their time and resources to help get it completed.
DANIEL: Well, it’s great to be able to see a project where we can not only collect data, but also address issues of representation in diverse speakers around the country. That is really fantastic. If people want to get in touch, if they want to contribute, they can do a search for “share your voice.” The corpus is the LANA-CASE corpus, and we are going to be having some links on the show notes for this episode. But for now, we’re talking to Lizzy Hanks and Dr Jesse Egbert of Northern Arizona University. Thanks to both of you for hanging out with me and telling me about your work.
LIZZY: Thank you so much.
JESSE: Thanks, Daniel.
DANIEL: And now, it’s time for Related or Not. Let’s hear our theme. This one’s from Jo.
[LATEST RELATED OR NOT THEME]
DANIEL: Lovely. Thanks, Jo. What’d you think? Have you heard that one before?
RIKKER: Which TV show is that a parody of? I’m trying to think of it.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Oh, this is a quiz night question, isn’t it?
RIKKER: [SINGS] Believe it or not, I’m walking on air. I can’t… Yeah, I know the tv show theme, but I don’t know what show it’s from.
DANIEL: Okay. This was the Greatest American Hero.
RIKKER: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: Joey Scarbury did the theme song and if you haven’t listened to it, well, it’s quite a good piece of work. Yeah, it really stands up, I find. By the way, we’re still taking jingles if anyone would like. We’re cycling through them. It’s just a lot of fun to hear you. So, thanks, Jo, for that one.
In this game, we look at words, we see if there’s a connection between them etymologically, or if the similarity between them is merely coincidental. You ready to play?
RIKKER: Sure am.
DANIEL: All right. I’m going to give you three pairs of names. One of these pairs is a name and then a simple shortening of the name. Just a simple clipping. The other two pairs are names that aren’t the same name, but they do resemble each other. and you have to find which one is the simple clipping. Here we go.
First, Madeleine and Madge. Madeline and Madge. Second pair, Jonathan and John. And the third one, Elizabeth and Eliza. You’ve got to figure out which of these is just clipped version of the name. The other two, they’re not the same name. Not at all.
RIKKER: Well, I know Jonathan and John have different origins. I think.
DANIEL: Oh, you do? Okay, tell me more. Tell me more.
RIKKER: This is just a thing that I think I’ve absorbed is that that’s true. Madeline and Madge, I feel like Madge might be a shortening of a different name, Maybe I’m imagining that. I-MADGE-ining. I apologize.
DANIEL: No, no. It’s late. You can…
RIKKER: Pun brain.
DANIEL: Go nuts.
RIKKER: I mean, the obvious red herring feels like it should be Elizabeth and Eliza, but it feels like it should be a red herring. But then again, John/Jonathan is a good red herring.
DANIEL: So, you can really drive yourself in circles that way. It sounds like you’re leaning toward Elizabeth and Eliza.
RIKKER: Yeah, let’s go with that. I’m prepared to be wrong.
DANIEL: You are correct, sir.
RIKKER: Okay. Okay.
DANIEL: Elizabeth and Eliza. Eliza is just a simple clipping of Elizabeth. By the way, how many variations on Elizabeth can you think of?
RIKKER: Oh, let’s see. We’ve got Lisa, Liza, Eliza, Beth.
DANIEL: Yep.
RIKKER: Lisbeth.
DANIEL: Yep.
RIKKER: Betty.
DANIEL: Yep.
RIKKER: I might have run out, at least six. There’s got to be more though.
DANIEL: And Liz.
RIKKER: Liz, of course.
DANIEL: There are loads. Check out the Wikipedia page for Elizabeth. Jonathan and John are slightly different names. John is Johannes. The “Jo” is Ya, it’s God.
RIKKER: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: It comes from Yehochanan, God is gracious. But Jonathan is something like Yehonatan, which means Jehovah has given. So, the Ya part is related, but one name is not a simple clipping of the other.
And then, Madeline and Madge, you were right there, too. Madeleine is from Magdalena, somebody from Magdala with reference to Mary Magdalene, whereas Madge is a form of a different name, Margaret.
RIKKER: That’s what… I was going to say it sounds more like a Margaret because you’ve got Meg and Peggy and all those. So, yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah. Isn’t it funny how Meg and Peg are variations of the same name? That was how they rolled in the 1800s, 1900s.
RIKKER: Yeah. That’s true.
DANIEL: Okay, well, you’re one up. Let’s go to our next one. I have noticed this word popping up, and by the way, it’s James that gave us this one. The word “coach” is seeing an interesting uptick because the vice president pick for the democratic party is Tim Walz, who has been a teacher and a coach, and people are referring to him as Coach Walz. Are you Walz pilled, by the way?
RIKKER: I guess I am. I’ve been enjoying the coverage. It’s been entertaining. I have not heard people say Coach Walz yet though, so.
DANIEL: Oh, okay. Well, James has asked us: related or not? COACH, the vehicle, and COACH the sports team leader. Hmm, and because I didn’t know, I guessed before I looked it up. I said related, but I was not sure how. Maybe some element of being a driver, like you drive a coach and a coach sort of drives you. That was what I…
RIKKER: I could see that.
DANIEL: So, I said related.
RIKKER: I could see that. You know, just the fact that it’s asked always makes you wonder.
DANIEL: Yes, it does.
RIKKER: I guess I would… I mean, I would just assume related but the fact that we’re discussing it makes me wonder. But yeah, I think the logic around, a coach, sort of being at the head of a team. But then again, a coach like the vehicle means such different things, like a stagecoach and like a coach as a term for a large bus kind of thing. So, I don’t know.
DANIEL: And you can ride in coach. But I’m sure those are…
RIKKER: Coach, a class, right?
DANIEL: Coach class.
RIKKER: Right, right. Hmm.
DANIEL: All right, do you think related or you think…?
RIKKER: I’ll go with related even though my intuition is saying, “Pick the other one. Pick the other one.” I’ll go with related.
DANIEL: All right. You know what? You’re two for two.
RIKKER: Yeah. Really?
DANIEL: Really. James says related, the vehicle is the original sense. At some point, a private tutor was called a coach because they “conveyed” the student. So, I was right about the driver thing.
RIKKER: There you go.
DANIEL: And from there, it was adopted by the similar position in athletics. Very nice. And thanks, James. Let’s go for the last one. This one’s from Lynnika on our Discord: HAND and HANDSOME.
RIKKER: Hmmm.
DANIEL: If someone’s handsome, could that have anything to do with your actual hand?
RIKKER: I got to say it’s giving me big false friend vibes. Like, you know HANDSOME, like endowed with hands. Like, it doesn’t seem like… Handsome doesn’t… I’m not able to parse it as separate morphemes in any way that makes sense to me etymologically. But then again, I don’t know much about European languages. So, who knows?
DANIEL: Yeah. Okay. Well, I’m going to give you a little tip into how I approach problems like these.
RIKKER: Go for it.
DANIEL: The way I solve this is I free associate with senses of the word until I find a connection between them. And then, I decide if it’s too farfetched or not. Mm.
RIKKER: Hmm, tried and true.
DANIEL: It seems to work well enough. Except it didn’t work this time because in this one, I couldn’t even find a connection between your hand and good looking. Although, I do know that we’ve seen some unlikely items in this domain. For example, HOMELY, which used to mean homelike, but which now means unattractive, and it’s difficult to see why. Turns out for that one, if something is like a home, then it’s nice. It’s plain and simple, which then moved to plain in looks.
RIKKER: Gotcha.
DANIEL: Okay, so what do you think, related or not?
RIKKER: Well, the other place I would go with it is what other things or do I know that end in -SOME, and I can think of LOATHSOME and WINSOME and HANDSOME, but I’m just not able to find any kind of pattern where I think hand lines up. So, I’m going to go with not related.
DANIEL: Okay. I said related because I thought, oh, because of the time, this word probably ente… Like, I got a feeling that it entered the language in like the 1700s-ish. And I thought, that’s kind of early to allow an entirely different word to assume that unless I’m wrong on the timing. Okay, so I said related, and the answer is: related!
RIKKER: Okay, tell me how.
DANIEL: I was wrong about the time. It actually dates from the 1400s, 1440s, where we see HANDSOME, but it didn’t mean good looking. It meant easy to handle or control because you have that thing to hand and it’s handsome. Okay. By the 1500s, this changed meaning to mean suitable or convenient or handy. I guess we started using HANDY for that. Also in the 1500s, it meant the right thing or seemly or morally admirable. And then, because we always seem to think that attractive people are morally admirable, also by the late 1500s, it meant attractive and pleasing in appearance. So, it was a winding road, but HAND eventually did work its way to HANDSOME. Appropriate, convenient, nice, good looking.
RIKKER: Interesting that it went the opposite way from HOMELY, where I’m sure there’s something gendered in that also. I will drop that there and not dig into it further.
DANIEL: Oh, oh, there’s these paths, aren’t there?
RIKKER: Certainly.
RIKKER: The path isn’t very nice for women. Sometimes it’s very nice for men. Thanks, Lynnika, for that puzzle. We’ve had a lot of fun playing these. You can send those to me by dropping an email, hello@becauselanguage.com or by getting onto our Discord.
[MUSIC]
[INTERVIEW BEGINS]
DANIEL: I’m here talking with Dr Elin McCready of Ayoma Gakuin University. Along with Dr Robert Henderson, she’s the author Signaling without Saying: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Dogwhistles. Elin, thanks so much for coming and chatting with me today.
ELIN MCCREADY: Thanks so much for the invite. It’s great to be here.
DANIEL: Well, it’s a fascinating book. Tell me about yourself first. How long have you been studying dogwhistles?
ELIN: So, the dogwhistles thing, we started in, I guess in 2014, we invited Robert to Japan to speak at a conference, and we were riding the Shinkansen together to Kyoto from Tokyo and complaining about the analysis of dogwhistles in Jason Stanley’s 2015 book on propaganda, which struck us as the wrong approach. And then we said, “Okay, well, let’s see what we can do.” And ten years later, finally we have a book.
DANIEL: That’s great, I guess, first, let me ask, why were you interested in this? I’m interested because I think it’s genuinely fascinating, but I didn’t make it the focus of my research. Why did you?
ELIN: I mean, I’m interested in social meaning and political aspects of language use. I’ve been working on things like slurs and discourse particles and various kinds of expressions with social import for a long time. And so, dogwhistles falling very much into this kind of thing. Also, dogwhistles are fascinating because they have a funny meaning profile. So, dogwhistle meanings are not conventional in the same way that a slur, for example, is but they are conventional in the sense that some things are dogwhistles and some things just aren’t, even though they’re sort of propositional meaning as a word is more or less exactly the same.
DANIEL: Okay. Yeah. I mean, every word has more than one sort of meaning, but it’s not often that you exploit the polysemy in a word, the multiple meanings, and aim one sense at one group and a different sense at a different group. That’s so weird.
ELIN: Or do you? Maybe you would do it all the time, actually. So, dogwhistles are defined in this rather specific way when you look at the way people use the term on the internet, for example. So, that’s a dogwhistle, basically means you’re trying to say something that I won’t catch and trick me or somebody else. And why would you do that? Because essentially, you’re like a discursive bad citizen, right? You’re trying to pull something over on me.
But we express coded speech all the time. We often try to give side messages. An in-joke is like this, for example. You get it as my old friend, but the person we’re speaking with doesn’t know that I’m making fun of them. This kind of thing happens in so many contexts. Yeah.
DANIEL: I do this. As the parent of young children, I say things to my partner that my children just will not get because I don’t want them to understand what plans we have or something like that. So, yeah, I guess I am kind of mindful of my different audiences.
ELIN: What a kinder and gentler example than the one that I just used. Now, I feel like a bad person.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Well, if we want to be bad people, let’s talk about some of these dogwhistles. Do you have a favourite? You used one, you used INNER-CITY, as spoken by former Republican guy, Paul Ryan, as a code for BLACK. You don’t want to say, “Oh, yeah, Black people have these attributes. So instead, I’m going to say inner-city people.”
ELIN: Right.
DANIEL: That’s a good example. What else you got? Give me another one.
ELIN: I mean, because my own background being what it is, I’m a fan of the phrase TRANS RIGHTS ACTIVIST. Often abbreviated TRA in this discourse, when dogwhistling. It sounds so innocuous, but in fact, it’s very not innocuous when used in certain circles.
DANIEL: I need to know more about this, because would it be bad if I said that you were a trans rights activist? That sounds like a good thing to be.
ELIN: Yeah, right? You think so. And, in fact, it is a good thing to be. But when it’s used by a particular group, it means something like transperson who complains a lot and tries to take away the rights of women type content. It’s always… As usual, it’s not so easy to paraphrase exactly what it does mean. So, if you said, it would sound very neutral, even positive. If certain people… if, for example, JK Rowling said it would sound extremely bad. And of course, this is just because of the things that we expect JK Rowling to say and the kinds of language that we expect her to deploy in her crusade.
DANIEL: Okay, let’s have what I like to call lightning round, where I’m just going to fire a bunch of them out here that I’ve noticed, because in the lead-up to our interview, I’ve been noticing these things everywhere. I just would like to have your takes. First up, LOW IQ. Low IQ is the first one.
ELIN: Low IQ.
DANIEL: This is one that Trump… Trump uses this one about Kamala Harris, Maxine Waters, couple of Black women. Have you noticed this one before?
ELIN: Do you think it’s anti-Black dogwhistle?
DANIEL: Oh, I think it’s anti-Black dogwhistle.
ELIN: Okay. I never noticed this. I always thought that just Trump was saying that people are dumb in what seemed to him to be a high IQ kind of way. So, I missed it.
DANIEL: He might refer to white people like this, but in the instances I’ve noticed, it seems to tie into, I think what’s going on is tapping into discredited race science, like Charles Murray Bell Curve nonsense, which holds that people of colour are less intelligent. And that therefore, oppression and even slavery are part of this natural and desirable social order.
ELIN: Ay, ay, ay, ay. Wow. I mean, nothing… Not nothing, not nothing. Little would surprise me coming from Trump, but this one I did not pick up on.
DANIEL: Okay, next one. DEI CANDIDATE. That’s another one that’s come up. What do you think is going on there? Diversity, equity, and inclusion. Those are good things, right?
ELIN: I suppose. Once again, it’s anti-minority slur of a relatively multipurpose kind, but it also carries the implication the person is not qualified. Yeah. Is it a dogwhistle? I mean, does DEI CANDIDATE actually have a positive use? That’s another question that I have now thinking about this.
DANIEL: “She’s only getting hired because she’s Black.” I think this is the implication. Anyway.
ELIN: Mm-hmm. I’m just wondering if it’s a dogwhistle-dogwhistle as such.
DANIEL: Ah, maybe not. Well, okay, so maybe there are cases where I can use dogwhistles and I’m aiming it at different audiences, and then there’s just ordinary persuasion where I’m trying to use words that I think will catch on, that’s not really a dogwhistle, is it?
ELIN: Probably not. Probably not. Yeah, dogwhistles have this relatively specific kind of meaning profile where they have an innocuous meaning and then they have a specific, usually negative coded meaning that comes along with them. And so, purely persuasive language where all the meanings are accessible to everybody, roughly speaking in the discourse, probably are not dogwhistles.
DANIEL: Okay. Okay. Doing good. How about this one? You use in the book, the example of Greens candidate, Jill Stein, that’s the USA Greens, using the term BIG PHARMA, and I’ve heard that one a lot. And it’s supposed to raise this scary specter of corporate genetic mucking around or something like that. It was used by Kamala Harris in a recent rally. She says, “And we will take on Big Pharma to cap prescription drug costs for all Americans.” I could understand why RFK Jr would use the term big pharma, but what do you think it brings to Kamala Harris?
ELIN: Well, people are trying to get elected by means hopefully fair, but possibly a little bit foul. So, if she drops a dogwhistle here and there, maybe it does her good with some voters. That would be my diagnosis.
DANIEL: Yeah, okay, sounds good. So, that’s an example of a progressive, of a liberal dogwhistling, and we focus on the dogwhistles that conservative folks use. Are there progressive dogwhistles?
ELIN: There must be. Big Pharma is one, I suppose. Or, I guess it depends how you divide conservatives from liberals. Yeah, hmm.
DANIEL: I can think of one.
ELIN: Tell me.
DANIEL: It was the couch gag in Tim Walz’s stump speech. He said, “I would love to debate JD Vance if he could be bothered to get off the couch and show up.” Throwing that word COUCH in there is… I don’t know if that’s a dogwhistle… Well, that is kind of a dogwhistle, isn’t it?
ELIN: I mean, this is a funny case, right? Actually, because it’s… I don’t think COUCH in and of itself is a dogwhistle outside of context, outside of context. So, here…
DANIEL: Do you want to talk about the context? Should we just lay this out for anybody who’s somehow under a rock and not aware of…?
ELIN: You’re maybe more up on the example than I, but…
DANIEL: Okay. Somebody did a tweet, which was entirely untrue, that JD Vance, the current candidate… I say current. The running mate on the Republican ticket with Donald Trump, fucked a couch. And it was untrue, and nobody cared. Because the idea that you can say, it’s not true that JD Vance fucked a couch. But when you say “he did not fuck a couch”, it doesn’t help. It doesn’t… Actually, you’re still… It’s George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant, right?
ELIN: Yeah.
DANIEL: So, what Walz is doing here is he’s allude… He’s not spreading misinformation. He’s alluding to a joke that everyone knew was a joke. And if you weren’t aware of the couch joke, it would go right over your head. It would be invisible.
ELIN: I mean, when I watched this clip, I was like, “Wow. So, this man has some comic timing, actually.”
DANIEL: We’re doing this?
ELIN: Yeah, pretty well done. And then, he paused for a second to let everybody explode. And then he said, “See what I did there?” So, he like flagged it a little for us.
DANIEL: Yeah, he did. He did. He did flag it. I’m becoming aware now though that like I thought, okay, we’re going to try to call out dogwhistles because maybe calling out the dogwhistle robs it of its power if everyone suddenly becomes aware of it. Because as you say in the book, dogwhistles exploit some people’s lack of knowledge. So, if I explain the dogwhistle, then I’m giving that knowledge and robbing the dogwhistle of its power. But I’m still kind of reaffirming the wrong information. And also, if you’re the one who’s trying to debunk the bad info, sometimes it can make you look a little bit unhinged. Like, if you’re trying to explain a dogwhistle that’s nine levels deep and it involves like all this conservative QAnon lore and stuff, you sound a little bit paranoid.
ELIN: I think it’s very easy in these kind of contexts to start to start to tell stories where people at a point are like, “Babe, just get off Twitter for a minute. Let’s head to the pool. What do you say?” Yeah, it’s…
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Okay.
ELIN: But also, people have found that explicit recognition of the dogwhistle doesn’t necessarily defuse it. And not recognizing a dogwhistle as a dogwhistle still doesn’t rob it of its power, either. So, people hear dogwhistles, and they can be influenced subtly to have to, for example, accede more to certain kinds of statements. Yeah, so they’re pretty dangerous, actually, but I think they’re quite pervasive, and this kind of influence is quite hard to eradicate, ultimately.
DANIEL: Damn. No wonder people use them. They’re incredibly useful. They’re deniable.
ELIN: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
DANIEL: Walz could say, “I just said get off the couch. What? What, am I not supposed to say?”
ELIN: I mean, also the phrase “get off the couch,” I’m sorry, there’s so many things going on there already, it’s very well done, this phrase, I thought, “Wow. Wow. Okay, so.”
DANIEL: So, I guess having run through some dogwhistles and maybe not dogwhistles, let me ask, why don’t I hear some dogwhistles? Some of them just go right past me, and they are inaudible to me. Why don’t I understand them? And why can other people hear them? What’s going on?
ELIN: Yeah, I think it depends entirely on background. One of the dogwhistles Robert and I talk about in the book is the phrase WONDER WORKING POWER, which George Bush used in this old state of the union address. And I had no idea about this in the world until Robert told me. But this phrase apparently exists in an evangelical hymn that many people sing in church. And so, when somebody who’s been to a church of that kind and perhaps sung that hymn, hears that phrase, they’re like, “Oh, George, you’re one of us, or at least you know about us.” But I hear it and I’m like, “George, you’re being very boring. This is just some political crap.” It’s completely uninteresting. So, I think it’s very much about what your background is and the kind of knowledge you bring to the table.
DANIEL: Okay. So really, what’s happening is we’re talking about not just intention, we’re also constantly making guesses about other people’s knowledge. So really, we’re talking about the common ground, aren’t we? They all have this common ground, mutually accepted knowledge between them. I don’t share that common ground. I don’t have that knowledge. They know that I don’t have that knowledge, and so they can sort of talk around me.
ELIN: Mm-hmm. Yeah. It’s this complicated set of computations between… the run between speaker and hearer, in this case, hearer, because dogwhistles aren’t so meaningful if it’s just a single-person audience where the speaker is making guesses about what the people in the audience might know, and the audience is also making guesses about what the speaker might know. So, when I hear something that I think might be a dogwhistle, what should I do? Should I think, “Oh, this person is trying to dogwhistle at me. So, this person thinks we’re in an adversarial context. So, this person must be a disaster person, and now I will act as such.” I mean, this is a dangerous thing. We talk about this in the book. We call it hypervigilance, this kind of state that one can enter into very easily where you start to see dogwhistles everywhere, enemies all around.
And, I mean, this is the kind of thing that people whose brains are… Twitterfied? Twitterized…
DANIEL: Twitterpated.
ELIN: …easily enter into. So, like, this hypersensitivity to covert content, possible covert content. Yeah.
But all this stuff is really just extensions of the kinds of computations we make every day when we hear any kind of ambiguous statement or underspecified statement.
I wrote, for example, a paper some years ago where I tried to describe or model the process by which we decide what somebody means when they use certain kinds of adjectives. So, if I say something like, I don’t know, “Fucking Kamala,” am I praising or am I damning Kamala Harris? And so, to answer that question as a hearer, you have to think about who I am, what the context is, what’s happened, how you think I feel about her in the first place, what’s happened recently that might have prompted this statement, blah, blah, blah. And dogwhistles, in that sense, are not so different.
DANIEL: Okay, well, now I think I’m ready for this quote from the book, and maybe you could just talk me through this, because I think this pertains to what we’re talking about. “It emerges” — I guess the dogwhistle emerges — “due to the variation in what knowledge members of a speech community have about how other members of the speech community use language to situate themselves in social space, and in particular about the frequency in use of particular expressions. This is entirely expected from a sociolinguistic standpoint. Members that belong to a community will have more knowledge about the style or ways of speaking of members of that community than outsiders will.”
What I liked about that quote was you mentioned frequency. You get an expression that seems unusual, like you say, the wonder-working power, and I would say, “That’s an unusual phrase.” Meanwhile, members of the community are saying, “Well, that’s not an unusual phrase at all. That’s a phrase that pertains to us. We got that one.” And now, I understand the intent. It’s partly frequency based, but also, tell me more about situating yourself in social space.
ELIN: I mean, we all have linguistic resources and other resources. For example, we can dress in particular ways or use even body language in particular ways, things like this, which let us communicate the kind of social impression that we want to give. So, I can choose my words and even the way I speak my words and pronounce my words so as to give a certain kind of impression of the person who I am in the social groups that I belong to. This is classic variation in social linguistics.
So, for instance, I mean, one of the examples that Robert and I talk about is Barack Obama, who was recorded and whose speech was examined in some detail on a particular occasion 2hen he did two things. He gave a briefing at the White House and when he sort of supervised a barbecue on the lawn. And in particular, how did he pronounce his gerunds? Did he say, “I’m working on a thing,” or, “I’m workin’ on a thing.” And it turned out that in the briefing, he wanted to present very professionally, and so working. But at the barbecue, he wanted to look like an informal, nice, chill guy, and so he dropped all his G’s. Or not all, maybe, but…
Yeah, and so like these kind of resources we can use to present ourselves as certain kinds of people, and we can also speak with particular accents or particular kinds of lexical choices to present ourselves as members of social groups. So, this is the kind of resources that we have to place ourselves in some kind of social space given the resources that the language and that our communities make available to us. And the argument we make in the book is that dogwhistles are very much manipulating this kind of thing or maybe just living in this space as well.
DANIEL: And that’s risky, isn’t it? Because on the one hand, using workin’ and goin’ makes Obama seem like a chill, normal dude. But sometimes when people use workin’ and goin’, they seem less competent. You do mention that he’s walking this tightrope. You want to rely on that device enough so that you sound kind of cool, but not so much that you seem incompetent.
ELIN: Yeah. I think probably there is not a… I’m also walkin’ a tightrope and this thing I’m about to say, which I think is probably false in some sense or maybe it is, I don’t know, but I think it’s true. Okay, I say it anyway. I have the sense that all these kind of social presentations are ultimately double-edged swords. So, no matter how I present myself, there’s somebody out there who’s not going to like that. Or, there’s a context in which it’s not appropriate. Or, because I present myself as professional, I also present myself as uptight, etc., etc., etc. So, there’s no, as it were, safety in social life. I guess that’s the upshot.
DANIEL: Yeah. Let’s talk about the function of dogwhistles. We’ve kind of been talking around it, and the main thing that we’ve been talking about is that dogwhistles are a kind of implication. A quote from the book, “Utterances containing dogwhistles send a primary message to the audience and a second message to a sub audience.” Very cool, we know that already. But I was surprised to find in the book that you view this as the naive view and that it’s actually just the beginning, but there’s more stuff that they do. And I want to focus on this aspect that you mentioned, that dogwhistles could be analysed as conversational, norm-shifting devices. It’s like, if I use a dogwhistle, it could mean, okay, I’m aligned with you guys. And I don’t want others to know. But it could also mean some behaviors are on the table now. And I’m thinking of the couch gag from Walz. Could you tell me more about this aspect of it?
ELIN: I guess this bit of the dogwhistle meaning is probably closely related to other expressions that have social import. And so, to take a more inflammatory kind of example, when I use a slur that enables certain kinds of behaviors toward the slurred group, for instance. Yeah. And so, dogwhistles may do that in a more subtle way. And they certainly make this kind of tricky linguistic behavior go on the table as well.
DANIEL: Okay. But slurs aren’t dogwhistles because with a dogwhistle, the meaning is available to one group but deniable to the other group. Whereas if you use a slur, that’s not deniable, and the meaning is available to pretty much everyone.
ELIN: Exactly.
DANIEL: So, yeah, I can see how they’re different things. Now, let’s see. I’ve been thinking about what dogwhistles are like, and there’s another quote from the book. “Dogwhistles have three key features,” and here are the three. “It bears social meaning, that is to say, signals a persona.” I think I get that part because we’ve been talking about, like how you position yourself socially with doin’ and workin’ versus doing and working. Do we need to say any more about that?
ELIN: I think it’s more or less clear, I hope, no? Yeah?
DANIEL: Okay. “The second aspect is some members of the audience would disapprove of the speaker bearing the social persona that the expression signals.” Is that where deniability comes in, the coded message is so toxic that it has to be hidden?
ELIN: We think that when one presents with a social meaning or really whether one wants to present with a social meaning depends on how one thinks one audience is going to react. So, if I’m in the room at the Antifa convention… Sorry, I’m just speaking fictionally now.
DANIEL: Sure.
ELIN: I don’t want to present my racist persona directly because I know I’m going to get myself in trouble. And so, at best, I’m going to start dogwhistling and try to hope that somebody catches it and is going to join me on my little team. Yeah, something like this. But for us… I mean, also, we kind of picked this definition or this way of thinking about dogwhistles up from popular discussion, and the way people talk about it in the media, the covertly signaled content tends to be something that one would want to hide. Yeah, positive covert signals aren’t really dogwhistles for us, although the theory that we give, it applies quite generally to all kinds of coded communications.
DANIEL: Okay. And then, the third aspect that you mentioned is, “There is some uncertainty in the disapproving audience up to complete obliviousness as to whether the expression bears the social meaning in question.” So, that’s where your deniability comes in. “I was just talking about a couch.”
ELIN: Yeah. I would say, “What do you mean, inner city? Yeah, what do you mean Black people?”, like this.
DANIEL: “I wasn’t talking about Black people.” In fact, I think there’s a pretty famous quote, a discussion with Newt Gingrich where he did the dogwhistle and then was called on it and said, “What are you talking about?”
ELIN: Yeah. Yep.
DANIEL: There it is. So now, I’ve been thinking about how we can predict these, and we mentioned that frequency effects can be part of it. If you have an unusual expression, that can be a tip-off. But in order to be a really good dogwhistle, it has to be a combination of words that a normie could say so that you can hide it. So, it has to be obvious enough to the target audience, but normal enough to a normie audience, like inner city, which is a real expression that people could use.
ELIN: Absolutely. And so, this is one reason to think that couch by itself is not a dogwhistle because every time I say couch, it’s not that I’m name-checking Vance, probably.
DANIEL: Yeah, probably. Although if my ingroup thinks I am, then whatever.
ELIN: I can certainly imagine constructing a dogwhistle temporarily. This is not something we talk about in the book or anything I’ve ever thought about before. But if you think about constructing terms on the fly, if we’re in a conversation and if we keep… If you and I went for a beer right now and we keep talking and keep talking, then every time the word COUCH is used, we’re going to be like…
DANIEL: Eyyyyyyyy…
ELIN: 👍😎👉
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: So once again, this is about context, but also mutual shared knowledge, common ground.
ELIN: Exactly.
DANIEL: Okay.
ELIN: Exactly. So, in the book, we treat this as the probability with which one associates the persona, the social persona with the word or the term. And so, these probabilities can be shifted temporarily, I guess, in conversation for some period of time as we just have done with couch.
DANIEL: How relevant are dogwhistles now? Because it seems to me like one thing that Donald Trump contributed to the national discourse, and I’m sorry about… I should give some Australian examples because I’m in Australia. But one of the things that Donald Trump signaled to his fellow MAGA conservatives was that it was okay to take off the mask now. Can I just read that Lee Atwater quote? You know the one, I won’t say anything bad. Lee Atwater was a Reagan era apparatchik, if I may, he once said on audio, and we’ll have a link to this on the show notes for this episode, he said, “You start out in 1954 by saying,” and then there’s a very unpleasant racial slur. Then he says, “By 1968, you can’t say that. That hurts you, backfires. So, you say stuff like forced busing, states rights and all that stuff. And you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things. And a byproduct of them is Blacks get hurt worse than whites. ‘We want to cut this’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than the actual slur.”
So, it seems like for a long, long time, conservatives were doing a thing where they had to couch it in these very vague terms. And Trump’s contribution was, “We can take the mask off. We can go full mask off now.” And it worked. So, are dogwhistles still relevant?
ELIN: I hope so. I hope so, and not just because I wrote a book on the topic.
[LAUGHTER]
No, but actually one of the conclusions we come to in the book is that with increases in political polarization, and especially with perceived increases in polarization, masks come off. So, if I don’t think you’re listening to me, I take my mask off, as you being my opponent or somebody who has differing beliefs. Or, if I don’t think that you’re ever going to give me credibility, why should I wear a mask?, etc., etc. And so, dogwhistles in this sense signal a little bit of discursive health in a political discourse. People still think others are listening and they have to be at least not horrible. So, once the mask comes off, that’s when we start to have real problems. So, I hope to see more dogwhistles in the future, honestly.
DANIEL: Because then, that means that at least some people feel like they have to hide their true intentions and their true persona.
ELIN: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Yeah. Okay, okay. Are dogwhistles such a vague category that they’re not really useful?
ELIN: Useful for what? Do you mean useful as analytic concept or useful as something to use?
DANIEL: Well, if I’m hypervigilant and I start seeing dogwhistles everywhere, then I’ll lose the sympathy of the people that I’m trying to convince. I’m still not sure whether the okay gesture is actually racist or not. And if I try to convince someone that it is, it just looks like an okay gesture, and then they won’t be convinced at all.
ELIN: Are dogwhistles useful things to look for? Yes, because it’s a part of our epistemic hygiene. You would like to know if somebody’s trying to put one over on you and you would like to be able to evaluate the character of your information sources. And this is one way to do that. That said, as you say, if you slide over the line into hypervigilance and everything starts to look like a dogwhistle, and you’re snapping back at every single thing that anybody ever says, then… I mean, obviously, this is not a way to conduct a political conversation that’s going to change anybody’s mind in your favor. I mean, it’s like other things. Moderation is the key. What a boring thing to say, but it’s just a fact.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] In that case, do you have any tips for how to be appropriately vigilant and not hypervigilant?
ELIN: This is outside the realm of the book, but yes, maybe one possibility is to give people the benefit of the doubt two times only. Two being one arbitrarily chosen number, but if I hear something that I think might be a dogwhistle, I hold that in my head and wait for the next one.
DANIEL: That’s one.
ELIN: Yeah. If I hear another one, then I’m like, okay, and here’s a third strike. Now, we start the war. But until then, maybe you don’t start the war.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Okay, that sounds good. What would you like people to do or understand because of the book?
ELIN: Okay, the book is addressed at an academic audience. And within academia or within linguistics, I think Robert and I would both hope that this kind of work demonstrates that it’s possible to approach these kind of political issues with the tools that we have in linguistics and semantics and pragmatics in particular, in a way that’s productive and that gives us some cool results and some results that speak to things that we need to know about as social beings and as political beings.
So, I really hope that more work will be sparked by this kind of stuff and that if this book turns out to be influential in that sense, whatever the merits of the particular analysis might be, outside of this sort of linguistics academic context, yeah, I hope it turns out to be something of a useful toolkit for people, conceivably. And I also think that, beyond the specific analysis of dogwhistles, the lessons that we can draw from that about credibility, about vigilance, about what it means to take off a mask, and how to think about political discourse in general. These things, I think, have a bit more of a broad application.
DANIEL: I think so too. And your work on dogwhistles exists at the convergence of so many interesting things about language, so many things that I’ve been thinking about so much lately, like, of course, intention, which I’m always into, common ground and mutual knowledge, construction of identity, social positioning, stance. I guess stance is kind of like social positioning, but that’s part of it. And political language. It’s just at the convergence of so many interesting things.
The book is Signaling Without Saying: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Dogwhistles. It’s available now from Oxford University Press. I’ve been talking with Dr Elin McCready of Aoyama Gakuin University. Elin, thanks so much for coming on the show and telling me about your work.
ELIN: Thanks for having me. It’s been a super fun conversation. So appreciative.
[MUSIC]
DANIEL: Let’s move on to Words of the Week. We’ve been getting lots and lots of great ideas and suggestions from everyone, and I just want to raise a couple that people have emailed. Cameron sent me an email saying, “I propose WEIRD.” Okay, we’ve handled WEIRD. Do you have any feelings on WEIRD? Have you noticed WEIRD lately?
RIKKER: Certainly, noticed it. I’m not yet sure whether it will continue to have any currency more than a few weeks or a month out. It’s hard to know what these things… or if there’ll be some backlash and it will stop being on the tip of everyone’s tongue, but it certainly could have some staying power.
DANIEL: I think so. I think it’s a contender for Word of the Year, just because, as we mentioned last time in our episode with Nicole Holliday, it is a devastating political strategy. The time was when right-wing politicians or figures would say just outrageous things, and then people on the left would have to explain why that was so outrageous and take an order of magnitude more time explaining this and why it was wrong than it took to say the original thing. And that’s not even counting if the people on the right countered with nuh-uh, and then you’ve got to go another round.
RIKKER: Right.
DANIEL: And by the way, who said… Who was it that said, I think it was Ronald Reagan, “When you’re explaining, you’re not winning.” So, instead of having to explain why it’s wrong, simply dismissing.
RIKKER: Yeah.
DANIEL: Dismiss, and then you’re done. Weird. Oh, Cameron continues, “word salad.” Word salad is a tasty expression used to describe somebody who is not making a lot of sense. So, that’s interesting. You don’t want to spend too much time on it, but I liked it thanks, Cameron. Here’s one from Wolfe: ANTI-EUPHEMISM. Wolfe says, “My very gen Z brother” — not just Gen Z, very Gen Z — “My very Gen Z brother and I were talking about new usages of raw dogging.” Are you aware of this term RAW DOGGING in any sense?
RIKKER: Sometimes, I wish I weren’t. Well, the one that’s most recently. I mean, I just took a long haul, international flight, and so the idea of raw dogging comes up in multiple contexts. Am I going to raw dog the air on the flight? Which I did mask for the majority, except when eating.
DANIEL: Oh, wow. Okay.
RIKKER: But then, the weird trend of I guess young men wanting to raw dog flights by engaging in no entertainment or stimulation or even walking of any kind of, which just seems like you’re going to get deep vein thrombosis, that’s where I’ve been hearing raw dog lately.
DANIEL: I approve, I guess, except for the DVT, but I approve of sort of living in your own head for a while and cultivating a Zen flight aesthetic, I guess. It’s not something I want to do, but Wolfe says, “He called it — RAW DOGGING — an anti-euphemism. A regular euphemism refers to something lewd using non-lewd words, but an anti-euphemism refers to something non-lewd using lewd words. Don’t know if it’s in general usage or not, but still found it interesting and thought you might too. Thanks for all the podding, Wolfe.” Anti-euphemism.
RIKKER: Well, I love it, and it’s certainly true enough in this case that the term RAW DOGGING is being used on my family text chain with my siblings and my mother. And so, I would not be talking about raw dogging in that context normally.
DANIEL: Oh, my goodness.
RIKKER: It seems to have worked its job.
DANIEL: They’re happy to use it, and they don’t seem to mind?
RIKKER: Well, I would have avoided it. But the fact that my siblings… It’s interesting to me that it seems to be, I guess, bleached enough of its sexual connotations to be appropriate for cases where… Yeah.
DANIEL: Your mom will find out the sexual meaning, and then she will…
RIKKER: That’s what I was thinking. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Just drop it in, see how long it takes. Dude, it’s been two years, and she still hasn’t said anything. You know, we do have dysphemism. Yeah, anti-euphemism is great, but we do have dysphemism. So, maybe that? May be? But, hey, why not have two expressions for something that’s totally okay?
RIKKER: And very linguistics.
DANIEL: Yeah, very much. Thanks, Wolfe. All right, let’s get to our words. The first word I want to tackle, because I wanted to kind of tackle it last time, I kind of left it for this one just to see if it would stay, VIBES. The word is VIBES. I heard this a lot in connection with the US election, that there’s been a VIBE SHIFT where everything seems to have happened, everything seems to feel differently. Mignon Fogarty, also known as Grammar Girl on BlueSky has said vibes is making a strong play for Word of the Year. Thanks, Mignon.
And I’ve seen a bunch of tweets talking about how this is a VIBES ELECTION, and I’ve tried to think what that means. I think it refers to when Kamala Harris was running the first time for president, I was kind of like, [IN AN INDIFFERENT TONE] “Mm,” And then she became the vice president, and I was like, “What does she do?” And then, she became the presidential nominee, and suddenly I was like, “This is good. I am 100% behind her. I feel totally different about this person based on no new information!” [JAZZ HANDS] Vibes!
RIKKER: Well, I think it goes hand in hand with the WEIRD thing, right?
DANIEL: Yeah.
RIKKER: It’s sort of, who do you just feel icky about? And who do you feel good about? And political details will always follow behind a bit. It’s like they used to say about Bush, the guy who you’d want to sit down and have a beer with. Like that, I guess we would say vibe of being like a guy you would want to hang out with certainly helped then.
DANIEL: Yeah. And I know that some people are lamenting like, “I haven’t heard one policy discussion from Harris. I haven’t heard one policy discussion from Trump.” Yeah, okay, maybe not, but maybe that’s not where we’re at. Maybe after the Trump years, what we’re talking about is not policy, but just the very nature of what a democracy is and how we keep it. And I don’t want to sound alarmist, but I kind of am. I think the ball has been placed back at that part of the field.
RIKKER: Yeah.
DANIEL: We’re not to the point where we can start talking about tax law. Oh, my gosh.
RIKKER: Yeah. I 100% agree with you on that. There’s such a drastic contrast between the directions they would take, you’re really just… Yeah, very little overlap between the sides at this point.
DANIEL: And that means that what you got to go on is vibes. What do you feel about the character of this person? How do you? … Not who do you want to have a beer with, but who do you think is the responsible adult or who aligns with you. So, yeah, vibes election.
RIKKER: You want one more vibes fact?
DANIEL: Yeah, give me a vibes fact.
RIKKER: There’s also a 1988 movie I just learned about called Vibes, starring Cyndi Lauper and… Oh, god, who’s the other guy?
DANIEL: Not Andy Kaufman. That was Heartbeeps.
RIKKER: Jeff Goldblum. It was Jeff Goldblum and Cyndi Lauper. And so, I have never seen this movie, but just based on the fact that it’s called Vibes and has that cast. I know what I’m watching tonight.
DANIEL: I can see the poster. It had squiggly letters because it was very 1980s.
RIKKER: That’s right.
DANIEL: Oh, man. You unearthed the memory for me. Oh, my gosh.
RIKKER: Well, it’s free on Tubi in the US. So, I’m going to go watch it tonight.
DANIEL: I’m not watching that. Although Jeff Goldblum, oh, that could be fun.
RIKKER: It’s a Vibes movie night.
DANIEL: It’s a Vibes movie night. Let’s go to our next one, suggested by James on our Discord. This one’s kind of… This one makes me sad: TRANSVESTIGATION. It’s not an investigation, it’s a transvestigation.
RIKKER: Yeah, I’ve heard this as transvestigators. So, people who are sort of obsessed about weird clues that they read into that they think someone is secretly transgender or trying to trick the public. Is that the idea?
DANIEL: That is the idea. And this one got in the news lately because Olympic gold medal boxer, Imane Khelif from Algeria, not only won gold, but had to endure weeks of slander and misgendering as JK Rowling and the usual horrible people decided to question her gender.
RIKKER: The usual weirdos.
DANIEL: Pretty gross.
RIKKER: Yep.
DANIEL: There are lots of good takes. One is from Rebecca Watson, a skeptic and a very good YouTuber, who pointed out that TERFs claim to be feminists and claim that they’re protecting women and then they engage in a kind of gender policing, like, you must not be a real woman because you’re not high femme enough or something.
And Watson says, “This is all complete bullshit. She is a cis woman who is being attacked for being too good. JK Rowling and her minions have weaponized their transphobia against all women. This is the final and inevitable result of transphobia: the policing of all women’s appearance, of all women’s behavior, of all women’s success.”
RIKKER: That’s a great take.
DANIEL: It is. I will defer to anyone who has more skin in the game than I do because I’ve got none, but that is a good take. So, thanks, James, for that one. All right, you can see the run sheet just as well as I can. Do you have any favourites? Because we’re not going to get to them all. I want you to pick one of yours, Rikker.
RIKKER: Well, one of my favourites has been BED ROTTING for months now.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] Okay. Yep. This one also suggested by James, who’s been an absolute ferret when it comes to words. What is bed rotting?
RIKKER: I must have heard about it towards the start of this year, but maybe it was even last year. There was a flurry of articles and discussion around the idea that bed rotting as a form of self-care. So, bed rotting is the idea that you sit in bed with no goals except to just rest and I guess relax. You’re just enjoying your time. And it’s a sort of intentionally… I guess, I look at it as maybe it’s even a dysphemism or an anti euphemism, where you’re not literally rotting, but you’re picking something negative to describe something positive, which is a thing that would typically be disparaged, is actually being reframed as a kind of self-care. So, that’s what I like about it.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s pretty cool. And it reminds me a lot of being in GOBLIN MODE when you decide to just let it all hang out and not stress too much about the daily grind. I feel like the rotting is the… That’s the one little nasty piece of this that makes me go, “Oh, there’s a value judgment there.” But I guess you’re right. Maybe reclamation is what’s happening.
RIKKER: Yeah, I think there’s something there.
DANIEL: I was curious, so I decided to take a look at other terms that have been around in history for sitting or laying around. And to do this, I took a look at the Historical Thesaurus of English, link in the show notes for this episode. Here are some terms for lying late in bed and what you would call somebody who does this. From the 1500s, a slugabed. I don’t know if you’ve heard that one.
RIKKER: I never have.
DANIEL: I think I have been. I think my mother used to call me a slugabed, somehow it worked its way into her language 400 years later. You could be a lie-abed, that one’s from the 1700s. Or you could be a morning killer, that one’s from 1753.
RIKKER: Now, is lie-abed different from layabout in a more general sense? I’ve certainly heard lay about, but I’ve never heard lie-abed.
DANIEL: Oh, that’s a good point.
RIKKER: A layabout being someone who lays around and doesn’t do anything.
DANIEL: That’s a really good point. You could be a lie-abed, but you can’t be a… But you could be a lie-abed, couldn’t you? But have you ever been a lay-abed? Lay and lie, hmm, there’s a pair for you. All right, well, in that case, I’m going to go with another one. And that’s BROLIGARCH, suggested by AriaFlame on our Discord. She points to a tweet by Jennifer Mercieca, @jenmercieca, “Broligarchy. Lol. Cry.” This one is a tweet by Carol Cadwalladr on Twitter, writing just after JD Vance became Trump’s pick for VP. JD, of course, stands for…?
RIKKER: …?
DANIEL: Jorkin Depeanus.
RIKKER: 😒
DANIEL: That was like second place after the couch gags. The tweet says, “I hope I’m wrong, but this week feels like a dark inflection point for America. The Tech Bros have got their man on the presidential ticket. My piece for the Observer UK on the tech billionaires backing Trump, welcome to the broligarchy.”
RIKKER: Well, I feel like this is one where the timing of the announcement of JD Vance, the sudden decision to take off the mask for a lot of the tech billionaires saying, “Okay, we’re just going to full out endorse…” You really see this emergent broligarchy. And then, Kamala Harris becoming the nominee really took the wind out of the sails of a lot of that and actually makes a lot of the tech bros billionaires look like real a-holes.
DANIEL: It really made them look like they were partaking in this big loser energy.
RIKKER: Yeah, and the sort of disastrous effect of JD Vance on the Trump polls seems to be playing a big part of that.
RIKKER: Well, it is good to see another BRO- compound. We’ve had bromance, brogrammer. There’s been a lot of portmanteaus. Sorry, a lot of portmanbros. But this one attached to oligarch. I just took a look at the origin of oligarch because I’m not very au courant with all my -garchs. Comes from Greek oligos, few or small or little. So, it’s an oligarchy is the rule of the few. So, what do we got? We’ve got throwback to WEIRD, WORD SALAD, ANTI-EUPHEMISM, but also VIBES, TRANSVESTIGATION or TRANSVESTIGATOR, BED ROTTING, and BROLIGARCH. Our Words of the Week.
Let’s take some comments. This one’s from Corvin. As you might remember, Ben had a very bad reaction to the cronigiri, which is… Even if you haven’t heard this one, are you able to put this one together?
RIKKER: Well, I’m thinking something with either croissants or David Cronenberg. So, tell me where I’m wrong. I’m thinking like cronut.
DANIEL: You’re right on the first one. Yep. It’s an onigiri, one of those cool Japanese tasty things surrounded with pastry. Ben had an intensely negative reaction to the cronigiri. Didn’t like it at all. Thought it was a bit appropriate-y. So, Corvin says, “I think Ben’s reflex on cronigiri is wrong. For one thing, it apparently started in Singapore. For another thing, Japan is famous for having excellent French patisserie. Here in Toronto, there are many really good Japanese-French and Korean-French patisseries that also have an Asian take on some of the pastries, such as cake and tart flavors using Asian ingredients. In my experience, the plain croissants themselves tend to be a bit sweeter and often bigger than traditional French croissants but are otherwise as good as the best French croissants. While a bit more outre, the cronigiri did not seem like anything that Japanese pâtissier themselves couldn’t have innovated.” So, I thought that was an illuminating take.
RIKKER: I like that. I was just passing through the Singapore airport and had a treat at Paris Baguette, which, despite the name, is a 40-year-old Asian patisserie chain. All throughout Asia. And in fact, in Philadelphia, we have a branch as well.
DANIEL: Wow. Yeah. By the way, I haven’t thanked you for coming on the show so soon after international travel, which is, I’ve got to say, grueling.
RIKKER: Quite soon after.
DANIEL: We have some Japanese pastry places in Perth, and I’ve often felt like the treats are tasty, but they’re a bit like somebody described pastry to an AI and then tried to replicate it. It’s just a different thing.
RIKKER: That’ll happen with different ingredients. I think that’s par for the course. Actually, I just remembered, I had my first cronut at a Paris Baguette chain.
DANIEL: How was it? How was it?
RIKKER: Oh, it’s excellent. I think the second one I had was from a random grocery store. So, the Paris Baguette one was better, which I think they might be a Korean chain originally, but certainly not. Yeah, it’s fitting in exactly with Corvin’s comment.
DANIEL: Now, there’s one more comment from Pontus, affectionately known as Moon-Moon around these parts. He sent us a message via SpeakPipe, because we often talk about minority languages and threatened languages, and we’ve talked about this on episodes like Language City with Ross Perlin. So, our pal, Pontus, has given us his perspective. Let’s listen.
PONTUS: Hi, guys. This is Pontus or Wolf-Wolf. I just had like an epiphany, and I wanted to share that because for a long time, I’ve been listening and enjoying your content, and I have considered, like, why do we care so much about making sure languages aren’t dying or maybe even revivifying, so to speak. And I just, like, had an epiphany. Because at the same time, I also always realised that language is culture. Like, the languages we speak are a part of the culture we come from. And, of course, we don’t want the cultures to be disappearing, because if we have one language in the world, which some people probably want, like English for example, then that means we have one culture, and that means that the culture won’t evolve.
The culture needs to evolve. We need to borrow from other cultures and implement it into our own culture, so to speak. That’s what culture is. So, that made me realise that is why preserving languages is so important. Just wanted to share that. Thanks for a great show.
DANIEL: I like where he’s coming from.
RIKKER: Yeah. This is an issue which I think linguists are kind of all over the board about. Because it’s certainly true that… I guess with the sort of the sciencification of linguistics or thinking about linguistics as a science, which is only one perspective on what it is, that certainly contributed to sort of the extractive taking… Treating language as a thing which you can separate from the humans who use it. So, I really like the focusing of it as it’s culture. It’s used by humans. It’s, in fact, inseparable from humans because you can’t record it without humans. You can’t look at it under a microscope.
DANIEL: It’s not culturally neutral.
RIKKER: Yeah. At the same time, there can be sort of harm in the impulse to feel like entitled to anyone’s language. That by coming in and saying, I’m going to come save it, that you’re doing an inherently good thing, which I think is certainly not always the case either.
DANIEL: Now, just to be clear, that’s not what Pontus is advocating, of course.
RIKKER: Not at all.
DANIEL: But it is the way that it plays out often in linguistics.
RIKKER: Yeah, well, I’m just talking about this as someone who does fieldwork in linguistics. I think language documentation has made great strides in moving away from a sort of Anglo or Western or white savioury approach towards endangered languages, although there is still some of that perspective that is deeply, deeply embedded in linguistics and the subfield. So, it’s certainly the case that language preservation is valuable. But what I liked about the direction these things have taken in recent years is the community and the users, the language knowers are centered much more than in the past, rather than just, “I’m going to parachute in and save your language,” kind of deal.
DANIEL: Yeah, I like that too. One thing that I might take issue with is that you can have a… Well, maybe I’m wrong here. If we only had one language in the world, we would only have one culture. Well, maybe not, because English isn’t just one thing. There are many people who speak English, and yet they’ll have a quite different culture with the same language. Now, I guess you could argue, “Oh, no, because if there’s a different culture, then they will have different language.” And I guess that’s kind of true, maybe depending on if you’re a lumper or a splitter. Tying culture to language too closely might not be quite right, but I like the ways in which thinking this way is right. And I think it might be a useful argument for language preservation.
Sometimes, people say, “Well, you know, it’d be actually pretty good if everyone just spoke one language.” And I’ll be like, “Great, let’s dump English. I want you to start speaking Mandarin.” They never think that it’s going to be their culture that’s on the chopping block. It’s never their language that’s on the chopping block. If it was, they would feel a bit different.
RIKKER: Yeah, I think that’s really true. Really, the advocates for this kind of thing are almost invariably coming from a position where they’re already speaking politically and culturally dominant variety or language. And so, yeah, may not even realize exactly the kind of like monoculture loss of diversity that’s already taking place, I don’t know.
DANIEL: I think that culture is a very good vector. I think it’s a winning sort of argument. Thanks, Pontus, for that one. And thanks also to Dr Elin McCready, to Lizzy Hanks, and Dr Jesse Egbert. Thanks to everybody who gave suggestions for this episode. Thanks to SpeechDocs for transcribing all the words. Thanks to patrons who keep the show going. And, Rikker Dockum, thanks so much for hanging out with me and bookending the show together. This was fun.
RIKKER: It’s been a pleasure.
[MUSIC]
So, if you like the show, here’s some stuff you can do. You can follow us @becauselangpod just about on every platform. Send ideas, SpeakPipe on the website, or email hello@becauselanguage.com. Or of course, tell your friends, tell everyone, and write reviews of the podcast.
DANIEL: Yep, those are all good things. Another thing you can do is become a patron. Patrons help us by making sure that we can keep the lights on and keep the show going. It helps us to pay the bills. And depending on your level, you get certain perks. You get mailouts, shoutouts, invitations to live episodes like the one that’s coming up next.
I just like to give a big shoutout to our patrons at the supporter level. Now, we had been ordering things the same way, ordering these names. This time, we’re just going to order the names alphabetically, but it’s going to be the entire name. So, I converted each letter in the name to a number where A is 1 and B is 2, and Z is 26. Then, I added them up to get a score, and then I divided by the number of letters in the name. So, what you’re going to hear is a score. This is a score that shows, on average, how close to the front of the alphabet each name is.
Now, Rikker, we’ve talked about alphabetic bias on the show before. People whose names are closer to A get cited more, they get slightly better grades. We’ve got 55 supporters whose names I’m going to read. How many do you think will be weighted more toward the front of the alphabet? Take a guess, out of 55.
RIKKER: I’m going to say 36.
DANIEL: Okay, 36. Very good. Well, here they are. Jack is the one whose name is weighted closest to the beginning of the alphabet.
RIKKER: Really?
DANIEL: Yes, it was. For reference, Ben’s name is just after Jack with a score of exactly seven. Next, we’ve got Ariaflame, Rach. For reference, my name, Daniel, is here, score of 7.5. Diego, Tadhg, Ignacio, Raina, Helen, Joanna. Hedvig, for reference, your name is here, scored 9.167. Elías, Kate, Nigel, Colleen, James. Ayesha. Almost everything in her name is toward the front except for that Y. Cheyenne, Canny Archer, Rhian, Margareth, Amir, Meredith, Rene, aengryballs. Man, it’s so interesting how that Y adds so much to the total. Keith, PharaohKatt, Andy, sæ̃m, Steele, Felicity, Rodger, gramaryen, Molly Dee, Chris L, Sonic Snejhog, Nikoli, WolfDog. [HOWLS] J0HNTR0Y. I thought J0HNTR0Y would come higher because the O’s are zeros and they didn’t count against the score. But the T, R, and Y added a lot of numbers. Rikker, for reference, you are here, score of exactly 12.
RIKKER: Wow.
DANIEL: Yep. Yes, so basically, on average, your name is an L.
RIKKER: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Kevin, Manú, Tony, Nasrin. Andy from Logophilius. Alyssa, Cathy. Cathy has a score of exactly 13. She is the midpoint, which means that everyone after this has a name weighted toward the back half of the alphabet. Chris W, Kristofer, Matt, Stan. O Tim. LordMortis, Larry, Lyssa, Luis, Termy, and finally Whitney, who had no chance with a W and a Y. And that means, what did you guess? 36 would be in front…
RIKKER: That’s what I guessed.
DANIEL: 19 would be in back, I guess. Well, there were 43 people with names weighted toward the front of the alphabet and only 11 waited toward the back with Kathy forming the midpoint. Shoutout also to our newest patrons at the Listener level, Sarah. And at the free level, Xina, Caroline, Danielle and Katherine. It’s great to have you. We’re gathering up a lot of free patrons. Do you think, Rikker, that we should invite free patrons to the live episode number 500?
RIKKER: I say let them have cake. I mean live.
DANIEL: Yay. Rikker says. Thanks to all our patrons.
RIKKER: Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Krapljanov who also performs with Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
DANIEL: Wow. Pew, pew, pew. Thank you very much. This was a lot of fun.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]