For our 500th episode, we got together with our great listeners for their words, stories, and inspiration. It’s a look back at the show, a look at language from our friends’ point of view, and a celebration of our great community. Dr Kelly Wright joins us.
Big thanks to everyone who joined us, and to everyone who’s listened over the years.
Timestamps
Cold open: 0:00
Intros: 1:17
News: 9:19
PharaohKatt tells us about Speech Pathology Week 2024: 27:00
Related or Not (with polls!): 40:23
Words of the Week: 56:52
Self-indulgent twaddle about the show and thank yous: 1:23:16
The Reads: 1:30:50
Outtake: 1:35:24
Listen to this episode
Video
Promo
@becauselangpod Coming soon on our next episode: It's time for Related or Not, so turn it way up! With very special co-host Kelly Wright @raciolinguistic ♬ original sound – Because Language
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Among the New Words (free to read)
https://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article/99/3/364/390025/Among-the-New-Words
[PDF] AMONG THE NEW WORDS Lexicographical Treatments with Citations
“The best thing we do (big ups to Charles Carson) is the supplement…”: Very long link from Kelly
Australia’s citizenship test should be offered in other languages, landmark review recommends
https://www.sbs.com.au/language/hindi/en/article/australias-citizenship-test-should-be-provided-in-other-languages-landmark-review-finds/hejyk4pdp
Towards Fairness – a multicultural Australia for all
https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/about-us/our-portfolios/multicultural-framework-review/towards-fairness
White Australia policy | Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Australia_policy
AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39048682/
Common Crawl
https://www.commoncrawl.org
Communicate your way this Speech Pathology Week
https://www.speechpathologyaustralia.org.au/Public/Public/About-Us/News-media-campaigns/Articles/2024/Speech-Pathology_Week.aspx
Upcoming events | Speech Pathology Australia
https://www.speechpathologyaustralia.org.au/Public/Shared_Content/Events/PEL.aspx?hkey=c9db63e4-6b2e-45b6-9eb1-e9a25671b071
vänsterprassla | Interglot
https://m.interglot.com/sv/en/vänsterprassla
@loewhaley Its very mindful #relatable #wfh #meetings #corporate #toodaloo ♬ original sound – Laura
The ‘demure’ trend went so viral, the TikToker behind the audio can now pay for her transition
https://www.out.com/celebs/tiktoker-jools-lebron-demure-trend-funding-transition
Ben Zimmer: “Demurity is my purity”
https://on.wsj.com/4dEr8hF
Cornplate / Corn Plate
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cornplate-corn-plate
@pretendingtobehot #greenscreen ♬ original sound – Milo
FTC orders 8 companies to provide information on ‘surveillance pricing’ practices
https://apnews.com/article/ftc-surveillance-pricing-inquiry-d264f45fa586d9de6e35f932993b577f
https://digiday.com/marketing/wtf-is-surveillance-pricing/
“Most people in the public know nothing about Breaking so it’s easier to moan and have an algorithm orgy about Raygun than to dig deep and understand the gigantic effort that thousands of Bboys & Bgirls put in to get the dance to the Olympic”
https://www.facebook.com/dujoncullingford/posts/pfbid02Gdxgi7GJCrUvn37oMmMTm7DaeiBSx7RJ8qwC31o8KQLs9aBvL8NocgnxuxtZQiYBl
Are J.K. Rowling’s Walls Riddled With Black Mould? Is That Why She Is How She Is? An Investigation
https://www.pedestrian.tv/online/is-j-k-rowling-black-mould/
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
DANIEL: I’d just like to say a huge thank you to everybody for coming and joining us for this momentous episode. Put all your messages in chat, because we turn most of those into speech balloons on the video, and it’s fun to watch them as a kind of running commentary. But if you’ve got a comment and it’s super good, you can just patch in. You can just jump in and we’ll make way for you. I can edit things, and it’ll be just great.
HEDVIG: Daniel?
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: How does one know [DANIEL LAUGHS] if your comment is good?
DANIEL: You have to be rather self-aware, which means that we…
HEDVIG: That’s fair enough.
DANIEL: We will hear a lot from the not very self-aware people, and I love that too. That’s fun in its own way. [STE LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: That’s fine. I had a student in class who was asking a lot of questions, and he raised his hand one time, and I had no filter, and I pointed at him. I was like, “Is it important?” [LAUGHS] And he said, “No,” and took down his hand. I’m like, “Good. Okay. Right. We’ll talk in the break. Lovely.” [LAUGHS]
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]
DANIEL: Hello and welcome to this very special live episode of Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name’s Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. It’s my friend and podcast partner for approximately one half of an Ainslie, which is a unit of time on the show. It’s Hedvig Skirgård.
HEDVIG: Hello. Thank you very much. I’m living proof that you can just randomly write to people and then bully your way onto [LAUGHS] coming onto a podcast, apparently.
DANIEL: Tell us the story, because I tried to find that email, and I have failed. So, I’m going to need you to tell me this one.
HEDVIG: Oh! I should find it, I think I was listening to a lot of linguistics podcasts. And I found Talk to Talk, as it was called in those days, and I thought it was very nice because it wasn’t about teaching me a language or teaching me intro to linguistics. It also had news and stuff and interviews with people, and I thought that was really fun.
DANIEL: And then you…
HEDVIG: And then, I wro… Sometimes, I do this. If there’s an artist you really like or a researcher or a person or something, you can get in touch and just lay love on them in like… I have to preface this, try and make it not creepy, of course, but you can say what actually is good objectively about them and not how cute they look in short pants or whatever. You can just be like, “You make a good podcast. It’s interesting.” And then, Daniel, you needed a Swede for something, I think.
DANIEL: Well, you were doing [HEDVIG LAUGHS] a thing with the language game. [LAUGHS] “I NEED A SWEDE!”
HEDVIG: Yeah. I’d written a paper.
DANIEL: You did a thing. And so, we had you want to talk about it? And that was pretty cool. And then we were talking about Sweden, and you were a Swede, and that was pretty cool. And then we just thought, “Well, she’s awesome. Let’s just put her on. Let’s get that person on.” And you’re still here.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I am.
DANIEL: So, is the partner next to you. Introduce yourself, dear partner.
STE: Hi, I’m Ste. I’m Hedvig’s husband. And I was one time, very long time ago when it was Talk to Talk, right?
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think it was, yeah, yeah.
STE: Was it one time after that, I think?
DANIEL: Twice.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: Daniel’s putting up fingers too. Yeah.
DANIEL: You were on the Dialect playthrough. You were a cast member.
HEDVIG: Yes. We played an RPG.
STE: Oh, yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
STE: Oh, I remember that, yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
STE: Well, that was a game. That didn’t feel like an episode. That was more just like, we played an RPG, and it was really fun.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
STE: We made an island in Antarctica or something.
DANIEL: Yeah, yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I think it was Antarctica.
STE: That was cool.
DANIEL: Took three hours, but it was great. And you were also on a Journal Club episode. So, you’ve been on three times. You’re official.
STE: Wow. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I think that’s true. Yeah. And now, we live together here in Germany, and we are also newly colleagues again.
STE: Oh, yeah. I got a job.
DANIEL: Nice.
STE: That’s my news since last time…
DANIEL: Wow.
STE: [HEDVIG LAUGHS] …several years ago, I was on the podcast. [LAUGHTER] You get very long-range life updates from me. But yeah, I work in the same office now, as Hedvig.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Okay. Okay. We’ll see how long it lasts.
HEDVIG: Wow.
DANIEL: That’s cool. And now it’s one of our favorite cohosts. She confronts institutional racism with the power of her linguistic prowess. It’s Dr Kelly Wright of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Kelly, thanks for joining us.
KELLY: Hi. Hi, friends. Oh, my goodness. So many faces. It’s very exciting. Thank you for having me back.
DANIEL: I know. It’s great. It’s great to have you. We always enjoy having you on. What you been doing? What’s up?
KELLY: Oh, you know, moving, starting a new job. I am actually really excited to be teaching in person for the first time in five years. I have to put on pants and go to work. It’s pretty cool. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: So, what units are you doing this time?
KELLY: I’m teaching the capstone. I’m so excited because I have all the graduating seniors, and we’re going to be talking about metalinguistics for 14 weeks. [LAUGHS] My dream.
DANIEL: Oh, wow. Okay.
KELLY: Yeah. It’s awesome.
DANIEL: Congratulations.
HEDVIG: Wait.
KELLY: Thank you. Yeah. I’m so excited.
DANIEL: Yeah, let’s talk about…
KELLY: The biggest of big questions. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: What is metalinguistics?
KELLY: It is like that superimposed layer. So, it’s talk about talk when people are talking about the language that they use, or signing about the language they use or writing about the language they use. But it’s also our own terms, so, our metalanguage as a discipline. And then, it’s how linguistics points out or intersects with other sciences. So, we talk about our bounds and possibilities through interdisciplinarity and computational linguistics, limited by computation, that kind of thing. So, yeah, it’s going to be fun.
DANIEL: Okay, cool. Well, you’re also on the Among the New Words committee for the journal American Speech. Tell us about how that’s going.
KELLY: Oh, it’s going so well. I am now officially lead editor, which is really exciting. So, we’re branching off Word of the Year from Among the New Words. I’m definitely still doing all the data crunching, for WOTY. But yeah, we’re writing about a lot of really great things right now. Our new one is up. It’s got some BUSSIN’ and the Word of the Year and “ENPOOPIFICATION”, [LAUGHS] which has proved to be a good one. It was rather prescient for us. We don’t usually hit the nail on the [CHUCKLES] head that well.
DANIEL: Same, same.
KELLY: Yeah, it’s free to download. So, check it out. I’ll throw it in the chat.
DANIEL: Okay, cool. This episode is our 105th episode for Because Language. But because we had 395 episodes of our former incarnation, Talk the Talk, that adds up to 500. So, this is a very special episode. We put a lot of work into this podcast, and we’ve gotten a lot… I’ve gotten a lot out of it. We started this in… I think the first episodes go back to 2010/2011, and we’re still here many years later. And we’ve got a lot of friends. So, it’s great to have you. We’ve invited you. You’re going to share stories, words, things like that.
Just quickly, our next episode, just something to look forward to. It’s going to be a bonus episode with Mark Ellison because Mark stayed at my place, we went out on the deck and had one of our wonderful deck chats. I’ve got to edit that video together. This episode was about a question that I posed to Mark as a challenge for us both to answer. And the question was, “What one thing explains the most about language? What one idea?” And we also posed this question to our listeners. They came back with answers and we talked about them and then we gave our answers. So, that’s going to be a really fun chat.
And patrons at the Listener Level will be able to hear that bonus episode the second it comes out. If you’re not one of them, why not try? It’s patreon.com/becauselangpod. I have asked some of our patrons, some of the folks in the audience to say something you remember, something you learned, something that you liked. I’m just going to be reading some of those out.
Dustin says, “I really enjoyed when you had the linguistics games champions who were teens. I seem to remember it was our OzCLO episode”. I love OzCLO episodes.
HEDVIG: Yes, it’s true. We should do a new one soon. It’s really fun. It’s fun to have quiz. It’s fun quiz format as an episode. And it’s fun to hear the teenagers outsmarting Ben Ainslie.
DANIEL: And me. Don’t forget me.
HEDVIG: And you, yes, But he’s a worse loser.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: But that’s fun too.
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly.
DANIEL: All right, should we get to some news to start us off? This first one was suggested by Diego. Diego, you want to blast on in? Let me just pin you here.
DIEGO: Yes. Hello. Hi, everybody.
DANIEL: Hey, Diego. It’s great to see you. We haven’t done a Diego episode for a while and we are going to get to one, [DIEGO LAUGHS] but it’s nice to have you jump on in.
DIEGO: Good to be here.
DANIEL: So, tell us about this story that you found.
DIEGO: Yeah. So full disclosure, I am not Australian. I’ve never been to Australia, but I do listen to a lot of the SBS News podcast to keep up with my language learning. So, this story I actually first heard about on the Portuguese news podcast for SBS. So, Australia has a citizenship test, and part of that test is in English proficiency examination to see what level you’re at. And I guess as part of a pretty big review that took about a year to put together, they came out with a few suggestions, multicultural review for the process of citizenship. And one of the recommendations was that the test be offered in languages other than English because Australia is so multicultural and many people have a home language or a first language that is something other than English.
And from the looks of it, nothing is changing so far. The spokesperson for the Department of Home Affairs has mentioned that they’re going to take everything into consideration. They’re going to include things from these suggestions. Nothing substantial has been stated yet, and they went on to say that the citizenship will continue to be offered only in English because of the role that English plays as the national language for Australia. There is no official language in Australia, but they have called English the national language.
So, beyond that, this was just one of 29 recommendations in the review to have a language other than English offered for the citizenship test. So, they also talk about the need for a creation of a committee or a council on multicultural affairs and assigning a leader to that group. And they have been getting the support of the Refugee Council of Australia. But as I mentioned before, nothing has changed yet.
Obviously, a lot of groups are pushing for the changes recommended in this framework to come to fruition, especially the citizenship test language. And I just found it really interesting because being an American, where we also don’t have an official language, but a lot of people think that English is the official language here, we also have a citizenship test with a proficiency portion for English. And I did just a quick search on other majority English-speaking countries, the UK, Ireland, Canada, and everybody pretty much has something similar for their citizenship test. There is a language portion to, I guess, prove your proficiency in English. In the case of Canada, you can also do it in English or French. And even New Zealand right next to Australia, they also have it embedded into the citizenship test.
So, yeah, I just think it’s a very interesting idea. And again, as a non-Australian, I’m not sure what it’s like on the ground, if people are in support of this, if people are even aware that there’s a citizenship test with an English portion. Yeah. So, I don’t have too many opinions on the matter, but a lot of our listeners are Australian. We have Ben, of course. And yeah, I just thought it was very interesting.
DANIEL: Okay, let me just read this from our friend, Liz, who also emailed me a copy of this same article. Here’s Liz’s comments. “The government commissioned a review of multiculturalism in Australia, and the report was released recently. It has a whole chapter on language, basically saying that English is important, but other languages are an asset and should be supported and promoted. They call for a national language strategy and more support for community languages, as well as interpreting and translation services. The government’s response to the report supports the principles. But unusually, I think,” says Liz, “doesn’t address the individual recommendations or specify what action they will take.” Now, we are going to have a link to the relevant chapter in the show notes for this episode, but let’s just get some takes. English is important, right? But does it follow that should be part of a citizenship test, or are other languages okay?
HEDVIG: Well, the tricky part is the legality of it, but we sometimes also come up against here in Germany, which is that in Germany, German is the only language that is valid for legal contracts. So, it doesn’t matter how much German I understand, that’s the only one that someone can issue a contract in. And any translation into any other language is considered not fully valid. If there’s any meaning difference, the German one is the one that trumps anything. And I suspect that the same is true in Australia with English. So, you can understand the state being like, “Well, we already have this,” and they don’t have a multilingual support there. So, I can understand them wanting to make sure that people can access that information and can work in the society.
But in cases where you have large population speaking one language, like Quebec in Canada, that makes sense as well. It’s tricky. I’d like to say as a linguist who likes diversity, that everything should be translated and multilingual. But I can also understand the practical side from a government. It’s hard to provide multilingual services.
DANIEL: Let’s hear from LordMortis on this one who has relevant experience. Hey, LordMortis.
LORDMORTIS: Hello. So, I actually did this in January because I just became an Australian citizen. And I would put that the citizenship test is essentially an English reading comprehension test. That is what it is. It does not test anything but your ability to read English and memorise facts and spit those facts back out as the test. That’s all it is. The amount of depth it goes into about the governmental systems and things like that, while useful, are very much very surface level stuff. So, I would say that it is essentially functioning as designed, which is it is making sure that people who know English can become citizens and those who do not know English cannot. Because it’s a 20-question multiple choice test, there is one question that if you get wrong, you immediately fail. Otherwise, you can get four questions wrong.
DANIEL: Who’s going to do well in an English test, and what color skin do they usually have? I’m just wondering.
LORDMORTIS: There’s a certain policy that Australians may be familiar with and having just done this citizenship test, I’m of the opinion that it is the extension of that policy by other means.
DANIEL: 100%. Yes. So, we’re talking about the White Australia policy, which existed during my lifetime, only abolished in 1967, although what we’re talking about is something called the dictation test. In the bad old days, you could block unwanted migrants because they had to take a test in… English? No, any European language. And if they passed it, then you could give it to them again in a different language. And in fact, I’m reading this from… I forget the website that I pulled this from, but this was a memo from Atlee Hunt, who was the first administrator of the Immigration Restriction Act, later known as the White Australia Policy, in 1903. Here’s a quote.
“It is not desirable that persons should be allowed to pass the test, and before putting it to anyone, the officer should be satisfied that he will fail. If he is considered likely to pass the test if put in English, it should be applied in some other language of which he is ignorant.” This was the instruction in 1903.
Diego, you mentioned that the recommendations may not be taken up. I see here that a spokesperson from the Department of Home Affairs said that the government will draw from… By the way, I’m reading this from the SBS Hindi article. The government will draw from and embed the key features of the review across all Commonwealth agencies and activities now into the future. The citizenship test plays an integral role in ensuring new citizens have “a basic knowledge of the English language and an understanding of Australia.” Oh, and adding that a basic knowledge of English supports integration and participation in the community. You know what else supports integration and participation in the community? English speakers learning different languages. That works. That’s pretty good. So sorry, I think my dander’s up. [HEDVIG LAUGHS] Oh, and sorry, we’ve got a hand up. Oh, LordMortis again. Go for it.
LORDMORTIS: The other thing that gets my dander up about this whole thing is, what about Indigenous Australian languages?
HEDVIG: I was going to ask you that, yeah.
DANIEL: Yep, yep, yep.
HEDVIG: Are there any questions about Indigenous Australians in the citizenship test?
LORDMORTIS: They exist, and they have their own, like…
HEDVIG: Like: “What is Uluru?” I don’t know.
LORD MORTIS: They exist and that there are different groups in different areas of Australia, but it’s very basic stuff. They don’t even mention six seasons, for example, like the fact that…
HEDVIG: Oh my gosh.
LORDMORTIS: …Indigenous Australians have completely different seasons to what you will read about in English. And those seasons fit better with how the weather works here because it’s almost like they lived here for longer than we have.
DANIEL: Yep. It’s a bit of a myth that everyone will get along if we all just speak English. This is a myth that we use to attract people and punish people. We hold out rewards and we hold out threats. If you learn English, then you can have these rewards. Oh, but if you don’t, then, you know. So, it’s a push-pull thing. We attract, we punish, but it’s a myth that we’ll just get along if we all speak English, because it’s not about language and never was. Even if they spoke English perfectly, we’ll just get them on something else. So, I am for making sure that this is available in different languages. I think it would be a good thing.
HEDVIG: I am for it if there is a support for anything after. I don’t like the idea of doing only that, because that will not be enough. If you can take the citizenship test in Mandarin and then no other services are available in Mandarin…
DANIEL: Okay. That’s a really good point.
HEDVIG: …what is that? That’s weird.
DANIEL: So, I guess what we’re really arguing for is the full slate of suggestions by this council as a part of a complete breakfast.
DIEGO: Sorry, I just wanted to correct myself. The review was a review of multiculturalism in Australia, not specifically just the citizenship test and the citizenship. The citizenship test was just one of the components. And also, UK, you can also take the test in Welsh or Scottish English.
HEDVIG: Sure.
DIEGO: Not that many people are probably going for that. And then actually, Ireland does not have a language proficiency requirement for citizenship. And it’s only one of three countries in the EU, Sweden and Switzerland being the other two, that don’t require language proficiency.
DANIEL: All right, cool. Let’s move it to the next one. Thank you, LordMortis. And thank you, Diego. I’m going to take it to the next one. This one is about large language models and training. Large language models are very cool. They can output plausible-sounding text by collecting stats on massive amounts of data. But what happens when you feed AI-generated text into the training model? This is work from Dr Ilia Shumailov of the University of Oxford and team, published in Nature. Here’s the quote. “We find,” says the team, “that indiscriminate use of model generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models in which tails of the original content distribution disappear.” What are tails?
STE: Tail of a distribution?
HEDVIG: I think it’s tail of a distribu… No, it can’t be tail of a distribution, is it?
STE: Why not?
KELLY: It has to be. Yeah. What’s the… Zipf’s law? [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: That’s it. So, a lot of words happen often, but a very few words happen only once or twice or not at all.
KELLY: Hapax? Hapax.
DANIEL: Hapax legomenomomenon. [KELLY LAUGHS] It’s that one term I can never say. And so, low frequency words, when we hear language and there are words we don’t know, we actually do. Okay, we can actually listen past it or infer from context. But with synthetic text, those infrequent words get winnowed out. The tail disappears. And that means, according to this team and they’ve got the charts to prove it, performance will degrade on certain tasks. They’ll do fine when you’re in the zone of frequent words, but not when you need the tails. And so, like a Xerox copy — does anyone remember Xerox copies? — Like a copy of a copy. When you start making more copies of them, performance deteriorates, and it becomes horrible.
HEDVIG: Oh, I see now.
DANIEL: Yep.
HEDVIG: I see now. What does that give us? That they can only do certain tasks and that…? What are the tasks they can do?
DANIEL: They’ll be fine when you’re in a domain where all you need is the frequent words, but when you start venturing out of that domain, then you’re going to get in trouble and it’s going to get worse.
HEDVIG: But that’s like me! That’s like people, right?
KELLY: It is.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] I’m not saying that makes it bad or good, but I’m like that. Ste teaches me new English words regularly because he’s got a much longer tail than I do.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: He does?
STE: It’s all my training.
HEDVIG: He does.
STE: But I guess you can… I mean, humans sort of learn from context. I don’t know if these models can learn from context. If a word has dropped out due to this tail being chopped off, is it then capable of figuring out, “Well, this word that I haven’t seen before probably means such and such a thing because of the context that it’s in”? I don’t know if they can do that. Maybe they can’t.
DANIEL: Did anyone remember to download a clean copy of the internet before large language models came out? [STE LAUGHS]
LORDMORTIS: Isn’t that what Common Crawl is?
HEDVIG: Is it?
DANIEL: I don’t know about… I don’t think I know about Common Crawl.
LORDMORTIS: There’s a corpus, the corpus that they all use. I think it’s called Common Crawl. Isn’t it?
DANIEL: Cool. This is the first time I’ve ever heard of it.
HEDVIG: That’s why he says like…
LORD MORTIS: There’s, like, a corpus. Yeah, this is one of the basises for a lot of these lawsuits, is there’s this huge corpus, open-source corpus where no one was asked if their websites could go into Common Crawl. I’m going to check the name, like, right now to make sure I’ve got the name. But Common Crawl sticks in my….
DANIEL: Yes. Steele is also saying that as well.
HEDVIG: Like old Tumblr.
DANIEL: Steele says this is what Common Crawl is. Ariaflame points out you can specify before the date when searching. So, that’s good too.
HEDVIG: Yes, I’ve done that. Yeah. But then if you want to know something about something that happened the last two years… Yeah.
KELLY: Yes.
DANIEL: This is one reason why I’ve decided to give some money to the Internet Archive every month. The Wayback Machine prevents link rot, but it also preserves a snapshot of text at any given time although it sounds like people are thinking about this and they’re aware of it.
KELLY: We could not do what we do at Among the New Words without the Wayback Machine.
DANIEL: Really? How so?
KELLY: Oh, because antedating, it’s like being able to say, like, “Okay, this word exists right now, but how are people using it 20 years ago? How are people posting on Reddit about it 15 years ago?” It’s that. It’s like we need the Wayback Machine.
DANIEL: Okay. Okay, cool. It’s Speech Pathology Week and I think that we’ve got our resident speechy, PharaohKatt. PharaohKatt, you ready to jump on?
PHARAOHKATT: Yep, I am here. Hello.
DANIEL: Hey. You’ve been speechifying. That’s not the right word. [HEDVIG LAUGHS] How long have you been working in… We had a chat with you last year when you were a newly minted speechy. So, it’s been a year since then.
PHARAOHKATT: Yep, yep. I’m still considered a new grad until I’ve been in the field for three years, which is… it is what it is. I’m mostly solo now. So, that’s fine. But no, I’ve been independent speechy for 18 months now, since February 2023. And I have got the privilege of working with such a wide variety of people of all different ages and all different backgrounds, which I think is one of the best things about my job. My youngest client is now 3 years old and my oldest is 87. [CHUCKLES] So, I truly do get to work with lifespan, which I love.
DANIEL: That is cool. It’s Speech Pathology Week. What are the festivities? Is there cake? What goes on?
PHARAOHKATT: Sometimes, there’s cake. Speech Pathology Week, it starts on the 25th, which is, I think, tomorrow depending on where you are, and it runs Sunday through to Saturday. And it’s all about celebrating what speech pathologists do and trying to bring more understanding to the field. So, there’s a lot of social media presence. There’s a hashtag that everybody follows, which is really just #SpeechPathologyWeek2024 so it’s nice and easy. And members of Speech Pathology Australia are encouraged to talk about it, use the hashtag and tell some of their stories as speech pathologists and some of what they do.
The theme this year is something that is very true to my heart, which is communication is more than speech. So, I’ve got the website up in front of me, so that I don’t forget anything or miss anything. When we talk about speech pathology, we’re not just talking about learning speech. We’re not talking just about stuttering or articulation therapy, which is helping kids who have different sounds that they’re using. I can speak more on that later, but it’s not the same as accent reduction either. It’s also about teaching people to communicate in a way that works for them. So, that could be with signs or with writing, with communication booklets, which are like pictures that you point to, pictures you hand to people, high-tech communication devices. And more often than not, it is a combination of these. We have something called multimodal communication, which is the best communication for the job. It might be easier one day for you to sign and for another day to write it down. I myself am a parttime user of an AAC device. So, there are times when verbal language doesn’t work for me and I’m nonspeaking, and I instead use my communication device to do all of my talking.
DANIEL: Wow, okay.
HEDVIG: Wow, so cool.
PHARAOHKATT: Yeah. And all of my clients have that. So, yeah.
DANIEL: You mentioned that people are telling their stories, practitioners, people who rely on speech therapists. Do you have a story that you could share?
PHARAOHKATT: Yeah, I’ve got to be real careful obviously for confidentiality reasons. But I did have a client the other day say to me that they’d noticed a huge change in their confidence and their communication and that other people had started to comment on it. So, this wasn’t something he’d brought up, but they started to say to him, “Wow, I can’t believe how much more confident you are. I can’t believe how much more you’re saying and how much easier it is for you.” So, this was unprompted by him, but it was something that he felt he needed to say to me. And then later on, someone else who knew him came and said it to me as well. And those are the moments we live for, to know that you’ve helped in just even a small way.
DANIEL: Wow.
PHARAOHKATT: I do have some statistics, if you’re willing to hear them.
KELLY: Yes, I love numbers.
PHARAOHKATT: [LAUGHS] So, the level of limitation for communication can be mild to profound. It can be temporary, it can be lifetime, it can be congenital or developmental, and it can be something brought on by a stroke. Children and older people make up the highest numbers of people with communication disability. And children are more likely to have a profound or severe communication disability than older people.
All right, here’s where we get into stats, and this is why speech is so important. People with communication disability are less likely to have a non-school qualification, which is 42% compared to people without, 61%. 38% of people with communication disability are participating in the workforce, compared with 80% of people without. One in seven people with communication disability need formal assistance with communication. So, that is either someone doing scanning with them. There’s something called partner-assisted scanning, or it could be using a Podd book, which is a partner-based communication system as well. And three in five people who have unmet need formal assistance with communication are children. Yeah. I missed one, sorry. Half of all people who need formal assistance have an unmet need for this assistance. This is especially true in regional and remote areas.
I service the regional area near me twice a fortnight, and I have started taking 30-minute sessions to try and cram as many people as I can into that day because there’s two days that I’m there in a fortnight. And there’s still more. A colleague of mine has just sent me another list of people who need help. So, this is an area that is just crying out for support. And I think there’s a lot more that we can do in that space to get help for those communities.
Is there anything you’d like to know about speech pathology or about Speech Pathology Week?
DANIEL: Yeah, let’s throw in some questions, either in chat or just unmute.
STE: How come…? So, these people… If I can jump in, sorry.
DANIEL: Go, Ste.
STE: The people are now being introduced to you as being in need. Did they have nobody assigned to them? I don’t know what you would say. Nobody helping them beforehand? Is this the first time that someone, a speech pathologist, has been… They’ve been put on a list for somebody to help them and they just had nobody before this? How many other people then therefore remain uncontacted or how many people are just that we don’t know about?
PHARAOHKATT: Yeah. So, for my regional clients, most of them are through NDIS. So, there’s a local area coordinator who sends us referrals.
DANIEL: Maybe people don’t know what NDIS is. Sorry.
PHARAOHKATT: Oh, sorry, I forget this is international. [LAUGHTER] NDIS is the National Disability Insurance Scheme, which is a program in Australia for people with disabilities to access any supports that they need. So, speechies, OTs, someone who can do the shopping for them or the cleaning for them, literally anything. So, people in the regional areas where I am, the local area coordinator will take in all of these referrals and send them to us, and then we have to try and triage who needs more urgent need and where can I give it.
Other people I’m seeing, I have one client who was bounced between three separate speech pathologists before finding me. And that’s because the level of attrition in the industry is actually quite high. There’s a lot of burnout. There’s a lot of people who leave or go private or just can’t do it anymore. The waitlists in the inner city are 18 months long, and it gets longer and longer the further away from the inner city you get.
DANIEL: Nati has asked, “What’s the tea in terms of structural and systemic issues in the field thinking like intersectionality, race, gender, class, and so on?” What concerns do you face there?
PHARAOHKATT: Yeah, so race is one of the big ones, especially regarding which therapists people accept. I have two clients who are seeing me because, specifically, I am a white woman, and they don’t want to see anybody foreign. And as much as I disagree with their reasoning, the children that are in their care still deserve support. So, I still have to work within that system, and that’s actually a really tough system to work within. There is a lot of class and gender issues. Most speech pathologists are women, but a lot of the higher-level positions are held by men, which seems to happen in these sort of industries.
And class is a big one, because if you’re not on the NDIS, you can’t afford a speech pathologist unless you are upper class. So, yeah, because I work with NDIS clients, I do get to see some of the more vulnerable people and the people who really do need the support the most. But otherwise, you’re on your own. And if you get cut off from that system because the government decides that you aren’t deserving of support anymore for whatever reason, then you’re cut off and you’re on your own.
DANIEL: Let’s take one more question from Diego. Do speech and language pathologists do any diagnosing, or does that take place before you meet the patients?
PHARAOHKATT: Speechies do diagnose. I am qualified to diagnose speech sound disorders and various levels of dysphagia, which is swallowing disorders. You can also do extra training to be able to diagnose autism and developmental language disorder, and that’s something that I’ll probably do in the future.
DANIEL: All right. Well, it’s Speech Pathology Week. I hope that it’s a good one for you. Thank you for taking the work on and doing the work which is really necessary. Could you give us that hashtag again? Did you have that available?
PHARAOHKATT: I’ll put it in the chat.
DANIEL: All right, awesome. Kelly, sorry, did you have a hand up?
KELLY: Yeah. I guess I just wonder if there was one resource that would make your job better or more efficient, what would it be? Is it more awareness? Is it more people in your field? Yeah, you just laid out so many issues. I wonder in your dream scenario, what would be the biggest gift the universe could give you?
PHARAOHKATT: If you could find a way for AI to write my progress notes for me… [LAUGHTER] …that would take away all of my admin and then I would have more time for the stuff that I actually enjoy doing, which is looking after people and helping them find their best way to communicate. I think what the field is crying out for right now is simply more of us. And to do that, we need more awareness, more training. We need paid student placements. I worked unpaid for 20 weeks to get this job. And that’s ridiculous. And it cuts a lot of people off of the industry as well. So, talk about class and race there.
KELLY: And the attrition, if people can’t do that and if they can’t keep up with those lack of resources in the field, I’m not massively surprised that you say that a lot of the top positions are held by men because maybe they don’t have as many challenges that way, so they stay.
PHARAOHKATT: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah. Okay. Well, once again, PharaohKatt, thank you so much for your work and what you’re doing, and I hope you have a good week.
PHARAOHKATT: Thank you very much.
DANIEL: All right. Now, Kelly, we were planning the show right up until the very end. Kelly, did you have a news story or did you want to mostly do words? Are we done?
KELLY: Oh, words, please.
DANIEL: Okay, cool. Yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
Just making sure. Then, you know what time it is. It’s time for Related or Not, the greatest game. I have here… Let’s see. I’m going to share. This is the part where I’m…
HEDVIG: This requires…
DANIEL: This [CHUCKLES] requires Daniel to be able to share things. Here we go. Because it’s our theme song… [CROSSTALK]
HEDVIG: And I’ll teach Ste. This also requires Post-its.
STE: Oh, Post-its, cool.
HEDVIG: So, you get a Post-it. I get a Post-it. And then, you try and write down notes for what Daniel….
KELLY: Yes.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] All right, it’s time for our theme tune. This one was generated by our friend Adam using Suno AI. Here we go.
[LATEST RELATED OR NOT THEME]
DANIEL: Oh, so good. All right.
KELLY: It went so much harder than it should.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: God, this might be one of the best ones yet.
STE: It don’t miss.
DANIEL: Ahh. So good. It stops rather abruptly. And I asked Adam about that, and he said, “Yeah, if I give it a different prompt, I won’t get the same song.” So, that’s all right. [LAUGHTER] Happy for what we get.
HEDVIG: It did, in fact, slap. Yes.
DANIEL: This is the game where we ask, is there an etymological relation between these words, or is the similarity merely coincidental? Ann says, “In honor of International Lefthand Day…“
HEDVIG: Mmm, yes.
DANIEL: …which I didn’t even know it was. Congratulations to everyone. Hey, lefties, unite. SIN and SINISTER. Now, the connection between SINISTER and left-handedness is because that’s the old word for if you were left-handed, la mano sinistra and la mano diestra. So, are they Related or Not? I am going to slap up a poll. Here we go.
HEDVIG: Can I also use this as… Ste’s learning Swedish. And in Swedish, there’s a metaphor with left, which is “vänsterprassla” which means to make noise with your left hand, and it means to have an extramarital affair. [STE LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I am struggling to understand the reference here.
HEDVIG: Um, left is bad.
DANIEL: Okay. The right hand would be the hand you should use…
HEDVIG: And having affairs is bad.
DANIEL: …to make noise.
HEDVIG: I think that’s it.
DANIEL: Mm. Okay. All right. We have already had a lot of votes rolling in here, but I’m just going ask for guesses. Kelly, I’m going to start with you. Do you think they’re related or not?
KELLY: I definitely have the same left-handed idea of SINISTER. So, I do think they’re related. My Catholic upbringing tells me yes.
DANIEL: Yes. Okay, very good. The left-handed path. Matthias says, “Isn’t it still sinister for left in several European languages, like Italian, sinistra and so on?”
HEDVIG: French is not: it’s à gauche.
DANIEL: À gauche.
HEDVIG: German, it’s not, it’s “links”.
DANIEL: Which, again, if something’s gauche…
HEDVIG: and it’s also “links” in Dutch.
DANIEL: …that is not very good, is it? I mean, this runs deep. This runs deep. Hedvig, your answer. Are you in favour like Kelly, or not?
HEDVIG: I don’t think they’re related.
DANIEL: Why not?
HEDVIG: You should always be suspicious if one of the words is really short. SIN is super short. A lot of things can reduce down to something that’s short. And just thinking a bit Swedish. I know the word for SIN and I know that it doesn’t sound like SINEST or SINISTER. So, I’m cheating.
DANIEL: Sounds like…
KELLY: I’m cheating… oh!
HEDVIG: But it sounds like SIN.
DANIEL: Peccata or something like that. All right. I said also… I’m going to read what I wrote here because I guessed first. I said not related. SIN is just two consonants. It’d be so easy for another word to bear a coincidental similarity. Let’s see those results. We see that 61% of us think they’re related and 39% of us, only 11 out of 28 think they’re not related. And the answer, they are not related. It seems that SINISTER comes from just a Latin word, sinister, meaning the left on the left-hand side. And let’s see, Etymonline goes on to say “a word of uncertain origin”. Oh, very mysterious. However, SIN comes from Proto-Indo-European *snt-ya-, a collective form from *es-ont-. It’s a word that meant to be, to becoming. And the sense here is that you are, yes, you are guilty of sin. No, I’m not. You are.
KELLY: That’s fascinating.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] So, that’s where that comes from. That one is not related. So, thanks for that.
HEDVIG: But is that like I am to, am not, like…
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Oh, you did. Oh, you did.
STE: Oh, yes, SEIN, of course. German.
HEDVIG: Oh, SEIN.
STE: Thanks, Diego.
HEDVIG: [GASPS] Oh, I said yeah…
DANIEL: Oh, I missed that one.
HEDVIG: …as if I understood it. And then half a second later, it clocked. Oh, my god. Thank you.
DANIEL: All right.
HEDVIG: Yes, that should be true then.
STE: We’ve lived here all these years.
HEDVIG: That English SIN is related to German SÜNDE, which is another conjugation of “to be.” Yeah, very, very good.
DANIEL: Signs.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: That’s it. That it. Okay, that’s one down. I’m calling on Carla. Carla, are you in attendance? Do you want to come forward and present?
CARLA: Yes.
DANIEL: Okay.
CARLA: Can you hear me?
DANIEL: Yep, I gotcha. What’s yours?
CARLA: Hi. All right, so which two of these are related? FILAMENT, FILIGREE, FILIBUSTER.
DANIEL: Oh, we are also holding out the possibility that they’re all related and that they’re none of them related as well.
CARLA: Oops. I just gave it away, didn’t I?
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: No, that’s fine. That’s fine. Which two? So, when I have this version… These questions on the poll. Don’t pick those. Let’s see. Okay, FILAMENT, FILIGREE, and FILIBUSTER. Don’t choose the first and the last ones. But we’ve got only FILAMENT and FILIGREE are related. Only FILIGREE and FILIBUSTER are related. And only FILAMENT and FILIBUSTER are related.
HEDVIG: I’m with Matthias and Diego in the chat. What is a filigree?
DANIEL: What is a filigree?
KELLY: It’s like jewelry or like glass blowing or something where it’s like filigreed is something that’s really thin and spread out, and it’s all these tiny little connections, like lace made of metal or glass. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Cool.
HEDVIG: Okay. Thank you so much, Kelly. That gave me a lot of information. [KELLY LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Sure. It did for me too. [CHUCKLES] But could it be that the thing that you’re thinking is a red herring because red herrings, abound in this game, or am I merely trying to confuse you? All right, the results are rolling in. I think my guess is that FILAMENT and FILIGREE are related, but the other one, FILIBUSTER, is not. Also, I may have spelled FILIGREE wrong. Thank you, Andy from Logophilius. Heyyy.
HEDVIG: To be fair though, those unstressed English vowels, somewhere in the middle, you can just guess if it’s an I, an E, or an A, and you’ll get it right sometimes.
DANIEL: I’ll fix it in post.
KELLY: And the autocorrect corrects you.
DANIEL: That’s what I do. All right, I am going to end the poll. Let’s see what we’ve got. I am sharing the results here.
HEDVIG: Mmm. Ooh, 3% said they’re all related.
DANIEL: Which I told you not to do.
HEDVIG: 72% said FILAMENT and FILIGREE are related, but the others are not. 17% said only FILIGREE and FILIBUSTER are related, and 7% said only FILAMENT and FILIBUSTER are related, and no one believed that none of them are related.
DANIEL: The odd one out is, Hedvig, what do you think?
HEDVIG: Wait, what do you mean, odd one out?
STE: What did you guess?
HEDVIG: Oh, I guessed FILAMENT and FILIGREE, because Kelly was telling me that something was delicate [DANIEL LAUGHS] and filament [KELLY LAUGHS] are small and delicate.
DANIEL: Was that your answer too, Kelly?
KELLY: It was, but it’s just interes… because FILIBUSTER being speech that obstructs, something that’s supposed to be in the way, I don’t think it would be related to something small and nice. So, that’s why. [LAUGHS] Yeah.
DANIEL: All right. I said the same thing. All right, Carla, it’s time to tell us the answer.
CARLA: Everyone’s pretty much right. It was FILAMENT and FILIGREE that are related. I had this quandary early in the morning one day because exactly what you said, Kelly. The idea of complicated, interconnected, and confusing, whatever. I was like, that’s what a filibuster is. But yeah, I wanted to share. When I looked it up, I was very excited to learn that FILIBUSTER and probably, Daniel, you have more of the deets on this, but comes from French, flibutor, then Dutch, which I’m going to say this wrong, vrijbueter. So, flibutor means pirate. The Dutch means robber or freebooter. And then, that comes from the Proto-Germanic prī-, to love and buit to plunder. So, basically, a filibuster is a booty lover.
KELLY: Yes. [HEDVIG LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Who’s not‽ Who’s not? [KELLY LAUGHS]
KELLY: Indeed.
DANIEL: Pirates were called freebooters because they would rob ships and get the free booty. That’s right.
KELLY: I love that you had this question though. It makes sense why maybe they would be related.
DANIEL: I had this mistaken impression that it was the name of a US senator, and the practice in the US Senate of filibustering, talking a bill to death, I thought that was named after a person, but it’s not. It’s actually plays on this freebooting principle, because when you are engaging in this tactic, you are pirating the time from other people. But yes.
CARLA: And kind of holding them hostage.
DANIEL: Hmm. Yes, piracy, but, yes, FILIGREE and FILAMENT both go back to Latin filum, which means a thread or a wire. Carla, thank you very much for this one. That was fun. All right. And now, we’re to Nati. Let’s see. Let me find you. Are you ready to give us yours? Because yours is just…
NATI: I am ready. I am ready.
DANIEL: Okay. There we go. Hi, Nati. It’s great to see you.
NATI: Hi, great to see you.
DANIEL: Thank you for joining us, by the way. It was nice to meet you.
NATI: Yeah, no, yeah.
DANIEL: What’s yours?
NATI: Okay, so which of the words are not related in this list? So, one of them is not related to the others. We have MERRY — merry as in Merry Christmas — CARNIVAL, BRA and PRETZEL.
DANIEL: And then there’s a fifth option. “This is totally bananas, and I cannot even.” I’m just kidding on that one. [KELLY LAUGHS] Don’t pick that one. Go for it, everyone. Which one is the odd one out? MERRY, CARNIVAL, BRA and PRETZEL. Looks pretty spread. The votes are coming in. Kelly, let’s hear from you first. Wait, I haven’t gone first. Maybe I should go first. I should go first. I thought it was carnival, but I’m not sure why. Yep, that’s my answer. All right. Hedvig and Ste are conversing silently because they’ve muted. [KELLY LAUGHS] Kelly, I guess it’s up to you. Oh, okay, Hedvig, go for it.
STE: We need to choose if they choose?
HEDVIG: We haven’t chosen yet.
[LAUGHTER]
KELLY: I think it’s PRETZEL. I think it’s PRETZEL.
DANIEL: It’s PRETZEL. Do you have a reason or is it just vibes?
KELLY: It feels Germanier than the other ones, which feel more French.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Okay, may be PRETZEL.
DANIEL: All right.
HEDVIG: We are also choosing CARNIVAL because we think that BRA, brassiere, it’s also a place where you cook, a brasserie and you might make pretzels and /b/ and /p/ are basically the same sounds historically. So, you can swap any of them out and then you have an R in there, blah blah. Then I don’t know anything about MERRY, but merry is probably old, so it could mean anything. Old words can mean anything. Whereas CARNIVAL has to do with meat and that’s newer and meat is… Oh, no, I just realised you eat meat in a brasserie.
STE: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Shit.
DANIEL: You can carry meat around in a brassiere as well.
[LAUGHTER]
KELLY: You, in fact, carry meat around in a brassiere.
HEDVIG: Okay, so it’s either MERRY or CARNIVAL.
DANIEL: Sorry, I didn’t mean to be gross.
HEDVIG: I guess CARNIVAL.
KELLY: It’s the truth.
DANIEL: Ah, this is tough. We have 30 people.
HEDVIG: Oh, my god.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s great. I’m just going to read some of these comments. Sarah says, “I started to think pretzel shapes are similar to bra straps.” We found a semantic connection. Dustin, pretzel and bra have that crossed shape. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: And meat used to mean food, which is, we also know because Pontus and I speak Swedish and food is mat.
STE: Okay, so those three mean food, and that one means…
HEDVIG: Yes, for me, merry thing.
KELLY: Nati, thank you for the… This is fun.
DANIEL: Sandman is coming up with an arms connection here. Okay, I’m going to close this off because I think we’re there and now we’re going to share the results. So, the most popular answer is merry. Most people think that MERRY is the odd one out, followed closely by CARNIVAL, then PRETZEL. Many people think that BRA is tied in. Okay, I guess it’s time to, Nati, tell us the results. Which one is the odd one out?
NATI: CARNIVAL is the odd one out. It all goes back to a Proto-Indo-European root. It’s been a while since I’ve had to do Proto-Indo European phonology, but something along the lines of myrge or something like that — with the rolled R — myrge, meaning short. So, going through all the words, MERRY used to just mean short, and MERRY then shifted to short and sweet to just being happy, joyous, things like that. BRA and PRETZEL…
DANIEL: Because pleasure is short.
NATI: …come from the other prefix of bracchia or brakhíōn things like that in other languages, meaning arm. So, the brassiere was a euphemism, just means shoulder strap. And PRETZEL got its name from the arms that you cross. And then, CARNIVAL comes from carne, obviously. But the little sneaky thing there is CARNE comes from *sker in Proto-Indo-European, which SHORT also comes from. So, there is a short connection somewhere in there as well. But, yeah, those three words share a Proto-Indo-European root.
DANIEL: Amazing.
STE: Wow.
DANIEL: So, I knew that brassiere was something like an arm protector, but I looked it up, and it does come from Latin brachium, an arm. And that goes back to Greek, Greek brakhion, meaning arm, possibly upper arm. And the thing about your upper arm is that it’s shorter than your lower arm, at least mine is. So, that got the name SHORT. And that goes back to myrge. And PRETZEL comes from the same place because the shape of the folded arms. And then, MERRY also takes part in that short, because pleasure is short lasting. CARNIVAL is the odd one out.
KELLY: Oohhh.
DANIEL: Far out. Thank you, Nati. This was absolutely bananas. [LAUGHS]
STE: That was one of the best. Well done.
NATI: Thank you, thank you.
HEDVIG: That was very impressive.
DANIEL: All right, well, I am very grateful to all of you for doing the work of bringing us these great Related or Not questions. We’re having a lot of fun with them. Keep them coming, and we’ll keep featuring them as we go. Well, now I think it’s time for Words of the Week, and I think there was one word that really stood out heads and shoulders. I’m going to throw it to Pontus first, who brought this to us. And then, Kelly, I’m going to throw it to you. Let’s see. Let me just find Pontus here and pin ya. There you go. Hey, Pontus, what’s the word?
PONTUS: The word is DEMURE. [CHUCKLES] It’s a word that popped up on my TikTok from a creator called Jools Lebron that popularised it, I guess. It’s been trending, and it’s been used in kind of like a, I don’t know, ironic way, I guess. it’s hard to tell exactly, but it feels like that to me, at least.
DANIEL: I know what it means to be demure. But why has this taken off in such a way? Kelly, what are you noticing with this?
PONTUS: [LAUGHS] Everything. [DANIEL LAUGHS]
KELLY: I love this. What we’re seeing happening with this word is exactly like semantic reanalysis in progress, which is a lot of fun. So, it is tongue in cheek, sort of coyness, but also, it’s being hella obvious. I saw it today used with a burlesque dancer who was humping in the rope of a curtain, pull the curtain. And so, it was very demure. And also like a cat bursting through a door to get treat, very demure. So, I think it is the opposite of that when people are noting it, but then it’s also, like, “Look at me. I did all of this work to be a whole person,” very demure. [LAUGHS] I don’t know. It’s really funny. So, the meaning is being settled right now, as many people are picking it up. So, it’s a good place to watch linguistic reanalysis happening.
HEDVIG: It’s really funny to me because there are a lot of people who aren’t on TikTok and haven’t watched the original videos because the original videos are, like you say, this sort of coy, playful. Jools says like, “Oh, this is how I come to work. I’m very demure. I’m very mindful. I don’t have neon painted nails,” or whatever. But it’s obviously also a joke because she also makes videos previously going to work with neon nails. So, it’s meant to be self-referential, deprecating.
KELLY: Exactly.
HEDVIG: But there was a Swedish newspaper that ran a column last week where they didn’t understand any of that and just thought that it was in to actually be demure and to be, like, unobtrusive and modest. And someone wrote a column being like, “Oh, the young kids are being modest now!” And I’m like, “No, I don’t know if that’s happening.”
KELLY: Yeah. That’s a little bit of how the Wall Street Journal covered it. And it was like, “Demurity is my purity.” [LAUGHS] Yeah, like toning it down. We’re still very turn down for what, turn down for what, [LAUGHS] yeah, generation. It is exciting.
DANIEL: Okay, I guess this is the point at which I go to the etymology of the word. It didn’t used to be DEMURE until the 1500s. It was just MURE. You could be mure. I’m feeling mure. [KELLY LAUGHS] And it meant sober and serious and reserved up. Until the 1700s, at which time it might have changed to mean kind of coy. But ultimately it ties back to Latin maturus meaning mature or ripe. And I am noticing Lynnika telling us DEMURE and BRAT are converging this summer. So, are they polar opposites? Do you have to choose?
HEDVIG: No.
KELLY: No.
HEDVIG: I think they’re the same thing. They’re both irreverent.
KELLY: Yeah, there’s a huge overlap. The brats are being demure. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I love how this is being negotiated.
HEDVIG: I’ve seen a meaning that I quite like, which was… I follow programming TikTok. And someone wrote like, “Oh, I’m being very demure. See how mindful I write my code with lots of comments, and I do simple if statements so that other people can read my code later. And I’m being thoughtful of other people.”
DANIEL: Very demure. Very mindful.
HEDVIG: Exactly. That’s very demure and very mindful, but not very modest necessarily. It’s more kind.
DANIEL: Diego, I’m noticing you in chat. Would you mind just telling us a little bit about how this word is transferring over into the… el mundo hispanohablante?
DIEGO: Yeah. There are several news articles just talking about how the TikTok trend of this word is even making its way over into Spanish. Traditionally, we do have the word because it’s a French loan word. But yeah, the articles are saying this is pretty much an unpopular or just uncommon word in English, and now it’s getting a second life because of the TikTok trend, and that’s carrying over into Spanish as well.
DANIEL: Okay, cool. So demure. Do we have any more on that, or shall we leave it as it is?
SPEAKER: I just want to say, for me, it was also interesting with the almost like poetry. The way she says it, rhythmic. That was something that caught my ear, so to speak.
DANIEL: Not having watched the videos, can anyone do an impersonation of the cadence? [PAUSE] Apparently not.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: “Look how I come into work.”
STE: “Very demure.”
HEDVIG: “Very demure, very mindful. I’m not like you other girls. I don’t boast about what I did last weekend. I’m demure.” Like that, sort of.
DANIEL: Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. Let’s hear… Magistra Annie has a hand up, and I’m going to put you up front. Here we go. Magistra Annie, thank you for coming on. What do you got?
MAGISTRA ANNIE: Hello. Can you hear me on my mic?
DANIEL: Yep.
MAGISTRA ANNIE: No. Yes. Okay. I put this in the chat, but I wanted to shout it out in the audio to Jools Lebron, who I guess coined demure, is a transwoman, and she’s been able to pay for her gender transition with her online success from this online videos and stuff.
DANIEL: Always very pleased when that happens. Credit to Jools. All right, thanks for that one. I need a director. Okay, we’re back to Nati, who’s got our next one.
NATI: Okay.
DANIEL: What’s your word? Don’t tell us what it means because I want to see if people know it, how prevalent this is.
NATTY: My word is cornplating. Cornplating, cornplate.
DANIEL: Who’s heard of this? Anyone?
HEDVIG: The plate for corn?
DANIEL: It is a plate for corn [LAUGHS] in one context. Termy asks, “Is it related to corncobbing?” No. All right, Nati, tell us…
NATI: All right.
DANIEL: …what this is, because I love this because it’s a term that I needed. So, bring it.
NATI: Okay, so I’m sending a link to the original tweet. So, send that to the chat. So, 2021 movie sensation, Encanto, came out and had a lot of online discourse around it. And in that, a lot of people were making various posts. But one Twitter account made a post of the character, Dolores, holding a plate of corn and said, “Wow, I never realised she was holding a plate of corn,” to which a different Twitter account retweeted that and was like, “Wow, y’all are really running out of things to say about this movie.” And eventually, that became a meme to refer to as Wiktionary put it, to discuss or scrutinise insignificant or inconsequential details in media.
Every once in a while, you’ll see people getting into various detailed discussions about things that are not that deep, about various TV shows or movies. And then, someone will comment being like, “Wow, we were really cornplating this one.” But I will say one thing I did this morning when looking up the term and the history, is that story is a little bit of a lie because the original Twitter account that posted it is Dolores Hourly, which is a shitposting account. So, it was like intentionally posting a stupid comment about Dolores. But nonetheless, the term stuck.
HEDVIG: I like that term. I think it’s a very good term. And it’s a thing that has happened since we got these big media projects and a lot of fans. It happens with Star Trek and Star Wars for sure, where it’s like Star Trek’s an old show. Sometimes, they run out of money. And that’s why there’s a funny peck on that wall. And people are like, “No, it’s an interdimensional portal.”
NATI: I’m a middle school English teacher. And so, I think for one of my first lessons I’m going to be doing this year is going to be a discussion on cornplating. And if when we analyse literature, are we cornplating or is there some value in looking into these details and seeing how that creates a certain understanding of the literature that we’re dealing with?
DANIEL: Encanto is an animated film. Somebody had to draw everything. Corn’s not easy to draw. And by the way, there’s a really good TikTok video by pretendingtobehot from June. I’ll stick that up in the show notes. But Dolores’s gift is hearing. She’s got really good ears. Corn’s got ears.
HEDVIG: [GASPS] Oh, my god, Daniel. That’s so bad. I hate it so much. The movie is supposed to take place in Mexico, right?
DANIEL: Colombia.
HEDVIG: Colombia?
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: Thank you for correcting me. I didn’t know.
DANIEL: I’ve watched it 11,000 times because I have young daughters. [STE LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I understand. I’m sure corn is a popular food in Colombia.
DANIEL: It is. [LAUGHS] It is. I also frequent the Bluey subreddit, where people tend to analyse every single detail of every episode of Bluey. And often when someone does so, people will use a Bandit quote to tell them they’re cornplating. It’s the one from the episode, Movies. And the quote is, “It’s just monkeys singing songs, mate. Don’t think too hard about it.”
[LAUGHTER]
But I’m not the only one to have noticed that corn has ears. When I thought of that, I went through the comments on that pretendingtobehot video to see if anybody had, and like 70 people had already made the ears comment.
NATI: [LAUGHS] I guess it’s related to the old Simpsons where the guy is like, “When Itchy plays Scratchy’s ribs as a xylophone, he hits the same rib, but a different note is struck,” or something like that.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Cornplating.
NATI: Guy immediately makes fun of him for living in his parent’s basement or whatever.
DANIEL: Definitely cornplating. Thank you, Nati. That was a good one. Cornplating it is. Aristemo, you want to give me yours?
ARISTEMO: Yeah. So, I had SURVEILLANCE PRICING, which is something that came up recently when the United States Federal Trade Commission decided to ask for information from Chase, Mastercard, Bloomberg, and a couple of other companies for offering a dynamic pricing service, or analysis. Basically, they pull information from all your web activity, what device you might be using, your approximate or even precise location, anything about you, to determine a profile on how much you’re most likely to be able to spend on a given product so that in real time, or at least dynamically, a price can be adjusted to get the absolute most money out of you. So, that’s SURVEILLANCE PRICING, maximize the extortion.
DANIEL: That’s a good name. It’s also known as differential pricing, dynamic pricing, and algorithmic wage discrimination. But—Oh, Ariaflame also points out, one way haggling. But I like SURVEILLANCE PRICING because it does just sound more sinister. And I am using that term in the absence of its left-handed context. Hm, thank you.
HEDVIG: I thought they just took location, but now that it’s device and other stuff. Yeah, this is why you got to have those like… what are they called? Ghostery and other blockers on your browser to try and stop, specifically Facebook from tracking you wherever you go.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. And I used to wear old clothes when I would shop for automobiles, just because the salesman clocks ya or the salesperson clocks ya and thinks, “How much can I get out of this guy?” All right, thank you, Aristemo. Let’s keep going. Hedvig, yours.
HEDVIG: Oh, the Olympics recently wrapped up, and I believe the Paralympics are currently ongoing or did they also wrap up recently?
STE: I’m not sure.
HEDVIG: I’m not sure either. I think they’re still ongoing Paralympics. And there was an event for the first time, breaking, or as many people might know, to dance. And there was someone who participated from Australia and who got a lot of criticism for her style. And I don’t know much about breakdance, but it became extremely popular to spread videos of her performance and talk about her. And there was an interesting post from the team from New Zealand where they wrote about the context of how to qualify for the Olympics, and that there weren’t very many female performers qualifying from Australia and saying, “Yeah, the performance wasn’t great, but Australia is not very big on break dancing among girls.” Apparently, and a lot of people didn’t enter the competition. Anyway, just explaining the context.
But in all of that, they wrote, “Most people in the public know nothing about breaking. So, it’s easier to moan and have an algorithm orgy.” And I thought algorithm orgy was very interesting because it’s true that it’s sort of quite quickly bootstrapped, and it became like a very quick meme that everyone could talk about from so many different angles and have so many opinions about, no matter how much… I looked at the performance, I also thought it looked funny and goofy, but I also don’t have that much interest in breakdancing or talking about breakdancing or this person. So, I thought it was interesting, algorithm orgy, because it happens with other topics as well.
We talk often positively about memes, but this discussion because everyone’s engaged in writing in the comments, like, “Yeah, I don’t like her,” or whatever, it fuels that interaction engine that most of the social media websites use to gauge what draws your attention, because it’s about attention, not about whether you like something or not. And this drew a lot of attention to the degree that most people didn’t watch the winning performances, by the way, which I thought was quite tragic.
DANIEL: Kelly, where are you coming on this?
KELLY: Yeah, no, that’s exactly how I feel, is like, this one video is the thing that got pushed around and pushed into people’s view who were not interested in breaking, had never googled it, wasn’t in their search results. And they didn’t see the good ones or the winners or the people who actually… not actually, I mean, not to say that she isn’t part of this culture. Like you said, there were a handful of people from Australia who qualified, but it’s obviously people who care. And so, yeah, I wish that this huge amount of discourse had generated any interest in folks who were really dedicated to the sport and did super well and medaled. Yeah. I will never not laugh at the name Alaysha Johnson though. I thought that was fantastic. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: All right.
HEDVIG: But a lot of the events from the Olympics were like that. Right? There was the pole jumper with his [KELLY LAUGHS] unfortunate wardrobe accident. There was the Turkish guy who came second place, who shoots with both of his eyes and therefore just wears his prescription glasses. There was… Who else was there that was…? A lot of the things that got talked about weren’t the winners or the things like world records. Right?
STE: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Which makes sense, I guess. It’s what’s fun to talk about. I get it. But also feels a bit sad for all those actors.
STE: Plus, everyone, like, winning is boring in a way. In terms of what generates the memes, you can’t generate a meme from this person won a gold medal because it’s like, “Yeah, okay, they won a gold medal.” The only difference is the Swedish guy who won in just outrageously breaking world record after world record. That’s like the kind of thing that can generate this. But otherwise, it’s the fun things. Yeah. Maybe Simone Biles was like, I don’t know, a meme, but that was more like news. But on the mosaic of memes at the end of the Olympics that I saw, there was 12 or 15 things, and Simone Biles was in there. I mean, yeah, she’s succeeded a lot, but it’s not like1 the thing that generated the most fun for people to laugh at.
HEDVIG: Yes. No. Her performance was…
STE: But then, there’s laughing at and laughing with, sorry. It is laughing…
HEDVIG: yeah. Her performance wasn’t laughable. [LAUGHS] That’s true. Yeah. It wasn’t comedic.
KELLY: And a lot of people are mentioning, Imane Khelif, in the chat here, and it’s that too. It’s like there were a lot of social justice issues to be concerned about at the Olympics, many, many that occurred. Protests that occurred before the thing even started. Protests that occurred before ground was even broken on some of these venues. And not to say that we shouldn’t be talking about her, we should. But again, algorithm orgy, it got in front of everyone’s faces, and it’s where all our energy went, or where a lot of energy went. So, it is that of things to be aware of. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Yeah. This kind of shades into the next one, which I’ve been noticing. The phrase is EXTREMELY ONLINE. I’m noticing lots of references to it. People sometimes fail to notice that there’s a big mismatch in the opinions of people in their online communities, and then there’s the opinions of people in the wider public generally, and they’re sometimes surprised to find that there’s a big difference. I’ve heard… Sandman, terminally online, says Sandman. There’s extremely online. I’ve also seen…
HEDVIG: Chronically.
DANIEL: Very chronically indoors. I’ve seen INDOORS PEOPLE, the most indoors people in the world have such and such an opinion, which I think is a very good way of expressing it. Let’s see. James has HEISENBUG. I like this one. A bug that disappears when someone is trying to diagnose or fix it.
HEDVIG: Ooh.
DANIEL: You got the reference, right?
HEDVIG: Yeah. I think that the IT guy in our department is magic, because I’ll have a problem, he’ll come into the room and he’ll try and replicate it and it’s no longer there.
DANIEL: Suddenly, fails to replicate. Having worked as a tech support guy in a former life for WordPerfect for Macintosh way back in the early ’90s, I found many heisenbugs. And of course, this is a reference to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, where in a puff of quantum magic, the bug disappears. Okay, we are keeping going. Hedvig, I think we’ll give you the just about last one. What was yours?
HEDVIG: What? I have another one?
DANIEL: Yeah. You got another one. COOLCATION.
HEDVIG: Oh, yes. Sorry. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Sorry. It’s very hot where we are. I don’t know if you can hear it on the mic, but we currently have a fan on. I have a cool pack stuck inside my clothing, and we’ve bought new kind of reflective things to put on the windows to try and manage the heat in our apartment. This is the case in a lot of places in Europe, and not just for a few days of summer, but for weeks and months at a time. And a lot of traditional vacation spots for families and people in Europe in general is places like Greece, Spain, Egypt, Tunisia and they are becoming hard to travel to. There are forest fires, there are droughts. It’s just too hot to be outside. So, some people are choosing to go to cooler places instead. So, Germans have been doing this for a long time by hiking up to Sweden with their… what’s it called? House wagons. What do you call them.
STE: Caravans.
HEDVIG: Caravans. Thank you.
DANIEL: I like house wagons.
HEDVIG: But it’s becoming more common. And one word that people have used for it is COOLCATION. And it’s also something that Nordic countries are trying to brand themselves as a destination for, I should also mention. This might be Swedish PR making up this term, but it’s also a really easy term to make up. I think anyone could make that up, coolcation.
DANIEL: It is. It’s another example of the -CATION combining form. I just did a quick search and found, of course, STAYCATION, which we’ve all seen, DAYCATION, a HAYCATION, which is when you stay on a farm, you’re having a haycation, doesn’t go very far. A DRIVECATION where you park an RV in your driveway and mostly stay home. And then if you don’t go very far, you can have a NEARCATION. So, it’s good to see the -CATION combining form.
Just quickly, Kelly, I want to go back to online because you had a comment. Tell me about what you noticed. Because we’ve said TERMINALLY ONLINE, we’ve seen EXTREMELY ONLINE. What have you noticed in your work?
KELLY: Yeah, I just… I think I put the right document [LAUGHS] in there because it’s not free anymore, so.
DANIEL: Oh, thank you.
KELLY: It’s CHRONICALLY ONLINE. We put it in the dictionary. It was nominated for Word of the Year a couple years back, now, I think 2021. And it really is this, like… we noted the echo chamber-y state of being chronically online and also this disconnect between folks who know everything that happened on the internet today and are using usage that is all over the place there and like real-world usage, which is happening… this demure discourse we had today is perfect for that. Our moms probably don’t know what we’re talking about because they’re just going to work or sitting in front of the television, retired all day. And so, yeah, so chronically online really is this antisocial, near continuous discourse community, which is interesting.
DANIEL: Okay, cool, thank you. All right, we’ve had a lot of words here, but does anybody have any other words that aren’t on the run sheet? Time to bring them up and I’ll try to find you and pin you.
HEDVIG: Oh, Ariaflame brought up something that I was thinking in connection to what Kelly said about terminally or chronically online, is people who are very politically aware and are following everything might think something has a bigger effect. And I think the term for those people is wonky.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Or something like that.
DANIEL: Bit of a wonk.
HEDVIG: And going there from FiveThirtyEight. They noticed like a small change in polling in Nebraska and they’re like, “Oh, my god, this is going to change the entire American election.” It’s like, “Well, maybe not.” [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: PharaohKatt, what’s yours?
PHARAOHKATT: The discussion about Imane Khelif in the chat reminded me of something that happened earlier in August where J.K. Rowling was found to have black mold in her house. So, the new nickname for her is MOLDERMORT.
DANIEL: Nice.
HEDVIG: Oh, god.
DANIEL: No notes.
PHARAOHKATT: I just… I really love it Moldermort.
HEDVIG: Are we even sure it was black mold?
PHARAOHKATT: No one’s really sure. There’s intense speculation. Some of the pictures look pretty damning.
HEDVIG: Yeah, this is like… I appreciate this kind of having fun. So, J.K Rowling looked in a picture like there was some black mold on the back side. This whole thing about the republican VP candidate, J.D. Vance, and a sofa. We know that it’s plausible that these things aren’t true. But we’re having fun with it anyway. But at what point are we just slandering people? [SQUIRMS]
DANIEL: Well, it turns out this hasn’t come out yet. Tomorrow, I’m dropping an episode. The episode is Dogwhistling. It’s with Rikker Dockum. And we do have an extended discussion of the couch discourse, which is just bananas and you’re going to love it. So, that one’s coming out tomorrow. Thanks, PharaohKatt.
All right, there’s one more word that I’ve noticed. We’ve seen a lot of political words lately, a few words that have come up in the campaign season. We’ve talked about weird. Talked about vibes. But there’s one that just keeps coming up most recently and it’s joy. I’m seeing the word JOY an awful lot. Kelly, have you noticed this as well? Not quite? Okay. Kamala Harris describes herself as a joyful warrior, which is kind of echoes of Reagan, the happy warrior. But this is the joyful warrior. I’m seeing people talking about with this change over from Biden to Harris in the campaign and Harris’ amazing prowess and ability. The feeling of relief is palpable. The feeling of relaxation is palpable now that we can get complacent. But there is also a sense of joy. And I’m seeing this word come up a lot. So, that is one to watch out for as well.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I think the Democratic Convention, that was a word that was really frequent there. So, I think in American discourse, yeah, joy is coming up a lot more for sure.
DANIEL: Yeah. Hey, I just wanted to read something from Mr Bobby Hunt who sent me a really nice email about the 500 thing. I’ll just read it. It is a little bit long but I enjoyed it. Bob says, “Wow, congratulations on the 500th episode. Can’t believe I’ve been listening for over ten years in real time in addition to the back catalog. I have come to linguistics through my love of songwriting, which may be a different entry point than many of your listeners. Truth is, as curious for knowledge as I’ve always been, school and I didn’t get along too well. So, what have I learned from the show? What Talk the Talk, Because Language has given me as a caring human being is the ability to call out people when it comes to language being used as a proxy for hate and prejudice by explaining the nuances of linguistic discrimination.”
“Personally, after an ADHD diagnosis in 2020 at the age of 46, I was able to take some things I have learned from the podcast to explain how things like back channeling and uptalk and the use of ‘like’ were in fact helpful to me and not a hindrance to proper speech. On a lighter note, some of my favorite moments have to be Angry Ainslie when Ben just goes on a rant about vanilla beans being far superior to the artificial flavoring or the naming conventions of the French counting system.”
“There was one episode of typography where Daniel suckered him into being interested in fonts by telling a tale about a typeface that was thrown into a river, only for Ben to catch himself and be disgusted that he was mildly caught up in the story. And all I can recall about the Hobson-Jobson episode was Ben’s delight in saying it with reckless abandonment, Hobson-Jobson.”
Bob continues, “Favorite guests include Ellen Jovin, Kory Stamper, Lane Greene, and Jesse Sheidlower but there are really far too many to mention. Thanks for creating a podcast where people like me can learn from folks who are genuinely interested in sharing their knowledge with enthusiasm that makes learning fun. Keep talking. PS, my limerick has to be a favorite moment as well.” And I’m going to read this limerick that Bob wrote. Here it is.
“There is a curmudgeon named Ben
who can get quite uptight now and then.
Broadway plays, prose or fonts
will unleash a response
from this youngest of grumpy old men.”
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Aww. That is a very cute limerick.
DANIEL: Thank you, Bob. Yes, it is.
HEDVIG: That’s very nice.
DANIEL: Just on that note, it’s been 500 episodes. Ben was a young man when he started this. I was a lot younger, but still there are a lot of people that I think of when I think of the show. Alan Dench, my old supervisor who originally had Talk the Talk and handed it off to me. There’s Ben, of course, who I said, “Ben, I’d like to have some continuity in the show. Would you be willing to come and prerecord it with me?” And he said yes, and he’s been on the show for the 13 years previous.
Kylie Sturgess, who was such a fun voice, such a good skeptic and so interesting and funny. It was great to have her. Hedvig, it’s been great to have you and I’m really grateful to you for being on the show. Grateful to RTRFM, who in the Talk the Talk days was the radio station, the community radio station where we all cut our teeth, where we got practice for doing radio stuff, and where they gave us an opportunity to talk about good language science for an entire hour a week.
HEDVIG: And also, RTRFM had a radio license. So, whenever I thought of a random Eurodance song, that could actually be played all across Perth, which was quite pleasing to me, I must add.
DANIEL: It is. RTRFM still needs your support. Even though we’re no longer associated with them, they’re still doing the work of making the scene happen in Western Australia. They are coincidentally in the final days of their annual appeal. We will be making a donation to RTRFM. We hope you will too. Thats support.rtrfm.com.au.
So, there have been a lot of good memories, a lot of great things that have gone on in the 500 episodes. I would like to thank everybody who listens for coming along this learning path with us. I have the best job in the world. It’s exactly what I want to do. It doesn’t work well with my Main Character Syndrome, which I am desperately trying to get a hold of. But presenting things about language week after week, month after month has helped me to keep up with the times and to understand language better. And all of you giving story suggestions and ideas and discussion has helped me to understand language better as well. And I hope it does the same to you. So, thanks.
STE: Hey, Daniel, can I just say something very quickly? I heard you a little bit obviously on podcasts and Talk the Talk, especially when Hedvig was guesting and then when she was hosting. But I’d never met you in real life. And then, you came to Canberra, and you gave a talk to those high school students, and I was like, “Wow, this guy is first of all, not just like a radio voice, not just radio personality, but he’s a guy who is dedicated and perfectly suited to this job that he does.” And I personally feel very lucky to be even tangentially associated with you. And I think everybody who listens to the podcast as well is very grateful to you. So, I’ll speak at least partially on behalf of them when I say thank you for everything that you’ve done.
DANIEL: Thanks, mate. It’s a team effort. It’s not just me, it’s everybody who helps with the show. It’s everybody who listens. Because you folks put a little bit of pressure on me so that I can edit this thing and cut this thing together and get it out, because I’ve got a show to do and having a show to do. It’s been said that everybody needs four things. Something to do, something to love or someone to love, something to look forward to, and something to leave behind. And this show is something I love, and it’s something that I’m going to leave behind. And I feel like it’s my contribution. It’s what I’m going to be known for. And so, I’m happy to put a lot of work into it.
People are putting lovely things in chat, and I’ll have those as speech balloons. But I’d like to say big thanks to our cohost, Kelly Wright. Kelly, thank you for being here.
KELLY: Thank you for creating this wonderful community. Ah, what a great place.
DANIEL: How can people find you? How do you want people to find you?
KELLY: Oh, my gosh. On my website, really. I’m very easily googleable. The new professional website is loading.
DANIEL: Okay, cool. Is it the Wix one or the new one?
KELLY: The Wix one is the one where I’m at. But yeah, the wisc one — for Wisconsin — is coming soon.
DANIEL: Very cool. We’ll have a link to that on the show notes for this episode. Thanks also to everyone who gives suggestions for this episode. Thanks to you who appeared and those of you who didn’t. Thanks to SpeechDocs for transcribing this episode. Thanks to you patrons who keep the show going. Thanks to Ben, who’s not here, but we love him. We miss him. We hope he’s cycling well. And, Hedvig, thanks to you for being a good friend and a good podcast mate.
HEDVIG: Okay. Thank you very much. I like you too, Daniel. But I think the sop is getting [LAUGHS]…
DANIEL: It’s getting thick, isn’t it?
HEDVIG: I think that’s… Yeah. Thank you. Same to you.
DANIEL: After 500 episodes, I’ve earned this. All right. If you like the show and you would like to do more, there are some things you could do. You could follow us. We are @becauselangpod in just about every conceivable social platform. You can send us ideas, and that’s via SpeakPipe on our website or just send me an email, hello@becauselanguage.com, or you can tell a friend about us or write us a review in all the review-y places. Take it, Hedvig.
HEDVIG: Oh, shit. I was reading the chat, people pointing out that you only get to do that to us once every 500 episodes, which I thought was very funny. Okay, the chat and the run sheet at the same time. Okay, yes. You should become a Patreon. People who are here right now are supporters on Patreon, but people who are listening might not already be. It’s a great thing. It really helps us and it really makes this show as good as it can be. And we are going to give a special shout out to our top supporters at… our [STUMBLES, BLOWS RASPBERRY] This is where you get to see how the juice is made. I usually fail at about there.
Shoutout to our patrons at the Supporter level. So, every time we record, Daniel has recently started to bamboozle me with a new way of ordering the names. It used to just be one fixed order every time, but now it’s a different one every time and because someone said that they thought it was getting homogenous. So, this time it’s… What is it?
DANIEL: This one is kind of traditional.
HEDVIG: Okay, that’s nice. It’s from longest time to shortest time.
DANIEL: As the ones that we read first are the ones who have been patrons the longest. And we really are going back, like eight years to the beginning. So, let’s hear it.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah. It is Matt, Whitney, Chris L, Termy, Helen, Jack, PharaohKatt, Lyssa, Elías, gramaryen. This is the old order. This is the old order. I know this one.
DANIEL: It is the old order. Say it along with us. Chant along.
HEDVIG: Larry, LordMortis, Rene, Kristofer, Andy B. James, Nigel, Meredith, Kate, Nasrin, Joanna, Nikolai, Keith, Ayesha, Steele, Margaret, Manu, Diego, Ariaflame, Rodger, Rhianne, Colleen, Ignacio, Sonic Snejhog, Kevin, Andy from Logophilius, who is to be blamed for the reordering. Stan, Kathy, Rach, Felicity, Amir, Canny Archer, O Tim, Alyssa, Chris W. aengryballs, Tadhg, Luis, Tony, Wolfdog, Molly Dee. J0HNTR0Y, and sæ̃m. And we have a new supporter at the supporter level, and this is the person who’s chosen to use a lot of extra diacritics so that it looks like an alien is speaking in The Sims.
DANIEL: It’s Zalgo text.
HEDVIG: I think it’s Linguistic C̷̛̤̰̳͉̺͕̋̚̚͠h̸͈̪̤͇̥͛͂a̶̡̢̛͕̰͈͗͋̐̚o̷̟̹͈̞̔̊͆͑͒̃s̵̍̒̊̈́̚̚ͅ, but you’re going to have to show people what this is, because what happens if I copy paste it into chat?
DANIEL: Things might get ugly, but I guess we’ll give it a shot if this brings down the whole system. There you go.
HEDVIG: Who was smart enough to get a yearly membership, which is cheaper than just going month by month. Thank you to all of the people who support us in all the various ways.
DANIEL: Oh, yeah. Don’t forget our free members. There are a lot of free members, even ones who signed up today. Rachel Morgane, Logan from Theory Neutral podcast. Go check that out. Kara and Virginie, very pleased to have you all here. Thanks to everybody. All right, Kelly, this one’s for you.
KELLY: Our theme music, is this where we’re at?
DANIEL: Yeah. That’s you. Okay.
KELLY: Our theme music was written and performed by Drew [LAUGHS] Krapljanov, who also performs with Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
DANIEL: That’s 500. Thanks, everybody.
HEDVIG: Wow.
STE: Woo.
DANIEL: Ho-hoo.
STE: You can do the thingy, right? Is there fireworks on here?
HEDVIG: The fireworks?
STE: I saw something.
DANIEL: Hey, I didn’t know you could do that. How do you do that?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Oh, I think if you do this, then it does something. Nope. [STE LAUGHS]
KELLY: Oh, wow.
DANIEL: I’m throwing hand signs but I don’t…
DIEGO: My reaction is from MacOS. This is a MacOS thing.
STE: [LAUGHS] That’s cool.
HEDVIG: That’s really funny.
DANIEL: That’s cool.
HEDVIG: Love it.
DANIEL: I love it.
KELLY: This is what AI has given us. It’s amazing.
[BOOP]
DANIEL: There are three of these that are related. You have to pick the one that is not related to the other three. And they are MERRY, CARNIVAL, BRA, and PRETZEL.
HEDVIG: Daniel, did you close the poll immediately? Yeah.
DANIEL: Uh-oh, did I? Hang on.
HEDVIG: You brought it up and then you closed it somehow.
DANIEL: Oh, flipping heck. Hang on.
HEDVIG: Don’t worry about it.
DANIEL: Sorry about that.
HEDVIG: There are worse things.
DANIEL: There are worse things, but not many here. I’ll just do it again here, because this is important. Can I do a new one? I’m going to add one.
HEDVIG: It was MERRY as in Merry Christmas.
DANIEL: Yep. Okay.
HEDVIG: And then, the second word was BRA.
KELLY: CARNIVAL.
NATI: Yeah.
HEDVIG: As in…
NATI: MERRY, CARNIVAL, BRA, PRETZEL. And BRA is like a BRASSIERE, like the undergarment.
HEDVIG: Heyy. And then PRETZEL.
DANIEL: I’ll have this up in a second.
KELLY: Over the shoulder boulder holder.
DANIEL: Yeah.
STE: I know that.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]