Spelling reform in English: a constant failure? Or a secret success? Waves upon waves of optimists have tried to make English spelling reflect its sound and escape its etymological origins, but have never seen their vision fully realised. Author Gabe Henry has chronicled the attempts, and he joins us on this episode.
Gabe is the author of Enough Is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell, available from Dey Street Books.
Timestamps
Cold open: 0:00
Intros: 1:44
News: 9:50
Related or Not: 32:21
Interview with Gabe Henry: 49:23
Words of the Week: 1:33:41
Comment: 1:50:50
The Reads: 1:53:57
Outtakes: 2:03:28
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Do Inuit languages really have many words for snow? The most interesting finds from our study of 616 languages
https://theconversation.com/do-inuit-languages-really-have-many-words-for-snow-the-most-interesting-finds-from-our-study-of-616-languages-252522
A computational analysis of lexical elaboration across languages
https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/qmgn8_v2
[PDF] Geoff Pullum, 1991: The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language
https://cslc.nd.edu/assets/141348/pullum_eskimo_vocabhoax.pdf
The complicated question of how we determine who has an accent
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/02/250213143925.htm
Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, 2025: Place-Based Accentedness Ratings Do Not Predict Sensitivity to Regional Features
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/josl.12691
A human gene makes mice squeak differently — did it contribute to language?
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00518-0
A humanized NOVA1 splicing factor alters mouse vocal communications
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-56579-2
Scientists identify gene that helped humans develop complex speech
https://theworld.org/segments/2025/02/18/scientists-identify-gene-that-helped-humans-develop-complex-speech
Skeat’s commentary on adding the L in vault
Enough Is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell, by Gabe Henry
https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9780063360235/enough-is-enuf/
English Eggs?
https://ferrebeekeeper.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/english-eggs/
Your ‘Innie’ Will Want to Read This (🎁)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/15/style/severance-innie-outie-work-life-balance.html?unlocked_article_code=1.A08.4abi.e17RgqOe7po9&smid=url-share
#TemuTrump on Twitter
https://twitter.com/hashtag/TemuTrump?src=hashtag_click
Trump calls Zelensky a ‘dictator’ as he hits back at ‘disinformation’ criticism
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c62e2158mkpt
Move Over, Americano: The ’Canadiano’ Has Arrived
https://www.baristamagazine.com/move-over-americano-the-canadiano-has-arrived/
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
DANIEL: Or something like that. Hedvig, you want to say something?
HEDVIG: Well, it’s just I went out drinking with some linguists the other day, and…
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Great. Great start.
HEDVIG: A couple of drinks in, I was like, “I know we’re not supposed to say it, but humans are fucking weird. Like, we’re so different from everyone else. We are suspiciously different.” I was trying to launch a conspiracy theory about us being like aliens and stuff, because I was just like, “I know that the other species have things that look a bit like language, but they’re not writing newspapers. [BEN LAUGHS] There is something very different.” And I feel like I’ve been in the camp, we’re kind of like all of the other animals for a bit, and I had an epiphany, a couple of beers in. I don’t know if that was like going to stick or anything, but I just feel like we need to acknowledge, we are very different.
BEN: I love that you were doing this in a bar while people were a few drinks in and you did not appreciate the danger inherent in starting one conspiracy thing and then firing off the one, right?
HEDVIG: Everyone agreed.
BEN: No, but you ran the risk of being like, “You know, guys, like we’re just so different. We’re suspiciously different. There’s something so different.” And then, someone just leans in and they’re like, “I too, sister, believe in the hand of god reaching in.” And you’re like, “No, no, no. Wrong one, wrong one!”
HEDVIG: I was going more for the aliens.
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]
DANIEL: Hello and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. We’ve got Linguist of the Year and of every year, Hedvig Skirgård. Hello, Hedvig.
HEDVIG: Hi.
BEN: What competition was this?
HEDVIG: I don’t think I have that title. I don’t think I’ve entered into this.
DANIEL: You’ll always be Linguist of the Year to me.
HEDVIG: Aww. That’s very sweet.
BEN: Worthless. Nothing award.
DANIEL: Hedvig, tell me a word you have trouble spelling.
HEDVIG: There’s a bunch.
DANIEL: In any language.
HEDVIG: English is worst in the languages I know.
DANIEL: Okay. All right.
HEDVIG: I think my main problem is the I’s and the E’s, because when they’re unstressed, it seems like it’s a free for all. So, things like ASSOCIATE or IMMEDIATE, I’m just like…
DANIEL: Or the -ABLES and -IBLES. Yep.
HEDVIG: I just…
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: I struggle.
DANIEL: Make them all the same. That’s what we’ve got to do. Okay, sounds good.
HEDVIG: I don’t know what to do about it. Maybe we’ll find out.
DANIEL: Maybe we’ll find out. And we’ve got Teacher of the Week, but it feels like a year, Ben Ainslie. Hi, Ben.
BEN: Hello. RHYTHM, RHYTHM.
DANIEL: [clapping] R-H-Y! T-H-M! R-H-Y! T-H-M!
BEN: I never can spell that.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Where the H is. Why is the Y in there more than once? What is the other vowel sounds doing? How are we constructing this word?
DANIEL: Stupid Greek.
BEN: Oh, man.
DANIEL: Why is Greek that way?
BEN: Just every single time. It’s a bit like trying to remember your own credit card number, right? Like, every now and then when I have to fish out my credit card number, I think to myself, “Oh, it’s so annoying. Like, my order fill didn’t work. I’m going to try and remember it this time.” And every time, I do not succeed. And rhythm is the credit card number of my personal vocabulary. Every time, I’m like, “This is it, Ben. You’re going to get rhythm this time.” And then, the red squiggly line. Always the red squiggly line.
DANIEL: Yeah. Ben’s not got rhythm.
BEN: I do not. I do not. [HEDVIG LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I’m sorry, Ben.
BEN: It’s my genetic curse as a white man.
DANIEL: Oh, dear. Well, on this episode, we’re going to be talking to Gabe Henry. Gabe is the author of a new book, Enough Is Enuf, except that last enough is E-N-U-F.
HEDVIG: Like god intended.
DANIEL: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell. What do you think about that, Ben? I know you like a bit of spelling reform.
BEN: These people, and by these people, I mean people who have tried to reform the English language to take the insanity and render it partially sane, are doing like I…
HEDVIG: …god’s work.
BEN: Well, they’re not, right? Because they always fail. They almost consistently fail.
HEDVIG: So, just because they don’t completely succeed, they should give up?
BEN: No.
DANIEL: Yeah. That’s quitter talk, Ben.
BEN: What I’m saying is I’ve got a soft spot in my heart… Do you know what? They remind me of adult goths. I’ve got a lot of love in my heart for goths. And when you see a goth in their 40s or their 50s and they’re still trying to make fetch happen, I’ve got a soft spot in my heart.
DANIEL: Commitment to the bit.
HEDVIG: No. That is cruel to the adult goths.
BEN: Wait, are you saying that the language reformers are terrible, therefore I am insulting adult goths?
HEDVIG: No, I think the language reformers are trying to do something nice for the wider society and thinking… They’re making like a five-year plan.
BEN: Even if it’s a doomed attempt. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Well, they might succeed partially and that’s pretty good. You do get THROUGH and DRIVE-THROUGH sometimes, spelled T-H-R-U, and that’s pretty good. But I think what you said about the 40-year-old goths was unfair.
BEN: [CHUCKLES] Why? I like 40-year-old goths. I just…
HEDVIG: You implied that there was something pathetic about them.
BEN: No, I think perhaps what it is…
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: …much like language reformers and thought 40-year-old goths, I admire that they have that kind of stick-to-it-iveness in a world that does not care and does not reward and will largely grind them into dust.
HEDVIG: But I think the 40-year-old goths are succeeding.
DANIEL: I’m going to give my perspective on this, just pivoting away from the goths for a moment. As somebody who grew up in a tiny minority religion that thought that it was going to take over the world one day, I just feel like I have been set up in my life to champion lost causes.
BEN: The little guy.
DANIEL: If I just believe hard enough one day, everyone’s going to see the truth of it all, whether it’s the Macintosh or electric cars or anything else.
HEDVIG: Oh, I see.
DANIEL: I know that I can make the world get there. Yeah, it’s doomed…
HEDVIG: Yes, trying to pick another cult.
DANIEL: …Vegetarianism, stuff. Did you know that like maybe 4% of people are vegetarian and it hasn’t moved in decades? And I’m here thinking: I can fix this.
HEDVIG: 4% of like Americans or some shit, right?
DANIEL: Yeah. Well, Gabe isn’t going to be coming to us in the capacity of a spelling reform advocate; he has made a record of the many attempts that people have made in the English-speaking world to make spelling reform happen. But I think that if we were to come to him and say that we think it’s a waste of time, I think he might push back a little bit. I think he might challenge us. So, we’ll see what happens.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
BEN: I would just like to finish this extended breakdown by saying I don’t think it’s wasted effort. Its success rate makes me sad is, I think, what I was driving at because I would love, I would love for the reform to take place. I dream of a world where English, like Spanish and Finnish, has no spelling bees for there is no…
DANIEL: Where the letter C doesn’t exist.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Just look at all that stuff, man. Like, we could do such wonderful things. And it makes me sad that there is a history littered with the fallen heroes of these attempts.
DANIEL: So troo, T-R-O-O. Our last episode was a bonus mailbag episode with Caitlin Green. And our patrons at the Listener level are enjoying that, we asked, how do you deal with the prescriptivists that you know? We had some good questions there and we played Related or Not.
Now, we also have coming up a live episode for LingFest 25. We are going to pile everybody into a zoom room and we are going to ask some tough usage questions and we’re going to fix them by voting on them, as is our custom. All patrons get to come, even the free ones. Check Patreon to see when that will be. And if you’re not a free patron or an expensive patron, then sign up patreon.com/becauselangpod. You looking forward to the old… the voting?
BEN: It’s a fun hang.
DANIEL: It’s a fun hang.
HEDVIG: Every year, it’s funny how you find these examples, Daniel, of things that are usually sort of in the at least 60:40 range of votes.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Right. Because it’s not questions that everyone’s like, “Oh, obviously this.” 98% of people vote the same way, which brings out these… There are so many things that you have different intuitions of, different understandings of. But somehow, we still make this big old society work. We still have like, I don’t know, international travel and nuclear power plants and stuff.
BEN: I don’t know. Watch this space.
DANIEL: Yeah. I’m not sure that’s going to…
BEN: Those are some mighty big words for this current moment in history.
HEDVIG: I don’t know. We have like organ donations.
DANIEL: Oh, we stopped that.
HEDVIG: Whenever your faith in humanity goes down, I recommend looking into like open-source software, like the people who run VLC or like…
BEN: I agree.
HEDVIG: You know? Just like…
HEDVIG: I agree. There are these wonderful vestigial systems that haven’t yet died. I agree. [LAUGHS] Sorry, sorry. Too cynical. Cynical Ben is getting put away in his little shirt front pocket and Happy Ben will come out.
HEDVIG: All right, thank you.
DANIEL: I have news.
BEN: Okay, let’s do the news. I’m sure this will be replete with wonderful, uplifting things.
DANIEL: It will. This one was suggested by James. Have you heard the one about Inuit words for snow? Or maybe Yupik words for snow?
BEN: We’ve…
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: I’ve actually… I think longtime listeners of this show have already mentally rolled their eyes because I’ve spoken about this a couple of times, but…
DANIEL: Have you?
BEN: Yeah. For new members of the audience or people who just love listening to me bang on about things that I’ve done, for six months of my life, I, on exchange, lived with the Sami people of far northern Norway. And what was explained to me there was the sort of the genesis or the origin of the idea that Arctic peoples have many words for snow. And what sort of came to light is there is lots of different kind of snow. And you, if your livelihood and your well-being depends on understanding the difference between those types of snow…
So, the example is if you have a reindeer herd and there is a very hard, quite unbreakable layer of snow sitting on top of the snowpack, underneath which is some really lovely soft snow, underneath which is some food, some grazing material for your flock or your mob or whatever you want to call it, you need different words for these different things because they are intrinsic to your continued success and survival as a group of humans.
So, like, there is lots of words for snow when your life depends on it, but that’s no different from anything else that we do with specificity right. If you go and get into computer engineering, you’re going to learn all sorts of specific words about computer circuitry and all that kind of stuff. So, it’s just that really.
DANIEL: If you take my linguistics class, you’re going to start learning heaps of words relating to language because we need those things. Yep.
BEN: So, it’s just that. It’s just snow. Lots of snow for people whose life depends on it.
HEDVIG: Yeah. So, what else did people think it was?
BEN: I got the impression that in pop culture, it had morphed into a kind of noble savage style… like, there was a faux spiritual sort of thing.
HEDVIG: But having a lot of words for snow is not very spiritual.
BEN: No. It’s not.
HEDVIG: Having like a twin animal or a spirit guide or something like that, I can be like, “Okay, that’s about spirit.” But having a lot of words for something that…
BEN: Yeah, yeah, but that tied…
HEDVIG: …that doesn’t sound spiritual.
BEN: It got rolled into this conception of this noble savage people who lived in the snow and had like 30 words for snow and had spirit animals and all that kind of stuff, all of which was based in a deeply ignorant outsider perspective and a stereotyping of a multitudinous group of people, many of whom are like… The Sami have nothing to do with the Inuk, for instance, right?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: They’re on different sides of the hemisphere. And yet, this pop cultural aspect of their culture is broadly applicable because of their lifestyle requiring this. So, it’s this thing that like outsiders just sort of like blanketly applied to Indigenous peoples from this part of the world.
HEDVIG: Okay. I didn’t realise that it was so fantastically magical, spiritual to have a lot of words for something. I thought that when people said it, they meant, “Oh, if you live in a snowy place and snow matters to you, you might have a lot of words for it.”
DANIEL: Well, there’s a couple of things going on. So, linguists don’t like it because it’s kind of exoticising and weird and kind of lazy because, “Oh, they have a lot of words for snow.” Wait, well, what is a word actually? Don’t these languages operate in a certain way that makes words act like sentences? And don’t we have lots of words for snow in English?
HEDVIG: And what are compounds?
DANIEL: Right, what are compounds? I mean, aren’t we really just talking about the way that languages put words together? And then, the second thing that linguists don’t like is that they think it sounds really Whorfian, by which I mean taking part in the idea that the kind of language you speak has a spoooooky influence on your thinking. And if you have lots of snow around, you’re going to see more words about snow.
HEDVIG: Shouldn’t that be that the language they have changes the way they perceive the world?
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: So, they… And this is pretty hard because like Ben was saying, if you live in a place with a lot of snow, you probably notice a lot of differences about snow that, like, someone living in Perth wouldn’t really pick up on, right?
BEN: It’s cold.
DANIEL: You have hit on the reason why. I don’t think that this is a Whorfian thing at all, because remember…
HEDVIG: It’s just picking up a thing about the world.
DANIEL: Exactly. Okay, so see the Whorfian claim, you’ve got mind, you’ve got world, and you’ve got language. And the Whorfian claim is that language affects the mind, constrains the kind of thoughts we can have. But this would be a case of world influencing language, which is fine. That’s not part of the Whorfian claim. We know that language is optimised to reuse efficient units. And this is just normal.
BEN: This is just jargon.
DANIEL: Let’s get to the story.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: This is a piece of work from Temuulen Khishigsuren of the University of Melbourne and a team. This is a preprint. They have taken a look at words for snow and words for a lot of other things in a lot of different languages. And they’ve seen if people who speak those languages like to do something called lexical elaboration, which means you take the vocabulary that you have for a certain semantic domain and you flesh it out, you make it very complete.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: They make this statement, and I liked this. “Claims about lexical elaboration are sometimes dismissed as” — get this — “either obvious or fanciful.” That’s how linguists take this, by the way. If you make this claim that, “Oh, people have a lot of words for thing in this culture, they either say, “Well, that’s not true. That’s fanciful. That’s just junk.” But then, if you explain it, then they say, “Well, that’s obvious.” [LAUGHTER] There are two ways to dismiss it.
HEDVIG: Well, what’s annoying is that the thing with Inuit words for snow is that they tend to get 99 words but, like, maybe it’s 30, and that’s still a lot more than a lot of other languages, it’s still pretty cool. But for some reason, whenever it gets pop circulated, it gets larger and larger. And also, these funny moments where it has to be 43 or 99. It can’t be 100 or 40 because that sounds like you’ve rounded it. And that’s like not scientific.
BEN: I’ve got to lie convincingly.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, this team made a data set called BILA, the Bilingual Lexicon Assembly. They grabbed something like 1500 bilingual dictionaries. They tested 72 proposed examples of lexical elaboration over 616 languages like, yes, Aleuts/Yupik/Inuit words for snow. Or, speakers of Polynesian languages typically have a number of different names for different kinds of bananas, sweet potatoes, and taro. Or, English has a large number of words referring to kinds of motor vehicles.
BEN: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: Take that!
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: So, what they were doing was they were looking for different concepts related to climate, to sensory perception, stuff like smell, and then concepts, like maybe dance. And they looked for how well those concepts were represented in dictionaries in different languages. And then, they took a look to see if that could be predicted by the natural environment like, what’s the temperature like? What’s the wind speed like? What’s the culture like? What kind of things do come up?
HEDVIG: Nice.
DANIEL: Now, what they found was… Well, they found a number of things. Number one, people frequently dismiss the whole Inuit words for snow thing, but in fact, they found that people who live in snowy climates, yeah, just got a lot of words for snow. Another thing they found was there were a lot of words for reindeer in Sami, naturally; cattle in Zulu, insects and frogs in Kalam. They found lots of words relating to obligation in Mandarin and Japanese. [BEN LAUGHS] Take that as you will. And then, WARRIOR and BATTLE in Old English. Just, that was an area. These are all areas where the vocabulary is very fleshed out.
HEDVIG: And this is another one where it depends on what kind of material you have left and who made the dictionary because I would suspect that the Old English dictionaries reflect the sagas and eddas and whatever.
BEN: Yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. That’s a good point.
HEDVIG: Right. So, they’re like Beowulf. So, they’re like warrior battle.
BEN: Kings writing about how they were really good at winning that battle.
HEDVIG: Right. Whereas I would take more contemporary dictionaries that are more exhaustive and based on the actual language in a fuller sense to be a bit more representative. So, yeah, but that’s really cool.
DANIEL: That is cool. This work is still in preprint, so it needs to go through the process. But it looks like, yep, people in cold climates have a lot of words for snow. People who live in hot, humid places have a lot of words for smells. And that’s just how languages go.
HEDVIG: That’s super cool.
DANIEL: Our next story is about accent. We know that everybody has an accent. I’ve got one.
BEN: Except for me, of course.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Well, it depends, Ben. I mean, you don’t have one when you’re in Perth, but then when you go somewhere else, it’s like you pick up an accent and now you have it. Oh, Ben suddenly got an accent. How about that? This is some work from Dr Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, of The Ohio State University, published in the Journal of Sociolinguistics. They wanted to study whether people’s attitudes about accent matched their perceptions of accent. So, they were at a language museum in the area that the university runs, and it’s got visitors. Whenever anybody wanted to, they would grab volunteers and have them listen to recordings of people saying words like PASS. How do you say PASS? Do you say PASS [pɒs]?
BEN: PASS [pɒs]. Yeah. Like, pass me the spoon or whatever.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: PASS [pæs].
DANIEL: Some people might say [paɪ əs], [pæ:s]. Or FOOD or PEN. Oh, that’s a good one, because PEN [pɛn], and PEN [pɪn], and PEN [peɪ ən].
HEDVIG: Are they all these vowel things that English speakers are obsessed with the vowel words?
DANIEL: Yeah, they are. And this was taking place in Ohio, which is undergoing some of the Northern City Shift, and in some places, but not in others. And they asked the volunteers to listen to those words and judge whether that person who said them had an accent. Had “an accent”.
HEDVIG: Oh, just had an accent.
DANIEL: Did he have a strong accent? Had some kind of accent? Did it seem… Would you say, on a scale of 0 to 100, would you say that this person’s accent was more like a 78? And so, we’re really…
BEN: Remind me what city this museum is in again?
HEDVIG: Columbus.
BEN: Columbus. Okay. Daniel.
DANIEL: What?
BEN: What regional accents would residents of Columbus, Ohio, most likely have?
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Columbus must be Mid, surely.
DANIEL: That’s right. It’s called the Midland accent, which is considered to be pretty standard. There’s also Southern Ohio, which sounds kind of like Southern US English. And then there’s also a northern Ohio accent. I mean, there could be subgroups, but that’s the main grouping, those three.
Now, let’s just say that a person thought that Northern Ohio was really different. “Oh yeah, that’s a really different accent.” You’d think that when they listened to speakers from Northern Ohio, they would say, “Oh yeah, that person’s got a really…” You’d think that they would match up. And according to this work, they just didn’t.
HEDVIG: I’m not surprised.
DANIEL: When people said that northern Ohio accents were, “Oh, yeah. That’s really accented,” they didn’t actually rate real Northern Ohio speakers as being that different. So, something else is going on. How do you know who’s got an accent and who doesn’t?
HEDVIG: I think also it might be that the stereotype of how people speak in a place is the people who speak the most unusual in that place and maybe also it’s like two, three generations gap. So, like I suspect that Northern Ohio… Ohians? Ohi… Northern Ohioans…
BEN and DANIEL: Ohioans.
HEDVIG: Ohioans. Thank you. Northern Ohioans maybe used to speak less normative couple generations back, but now they all watch like CNN and whatever and they all started to gel with the rest of the American… They’re evening out their differences. But people are still like, “Oh, yeah. Those guys.”
DANIEL: Now I will just say that accent leveling is totally a thing, although most social linguists have told me that media has a limited effect. People don’t want to talk like the TV, they want to talk like their neighbors. So, I’m going to say maybe a little bit, but not that much.
BEN: So, for our international listeners, I just had a quick look at a map, and I reckon the reason why they’ve chosen this particular place other than the fact that it’s theirs and they could. So, Ohio sits betwixt Michigan in the north, which has a pretty, like, Michigan accent, and Kentucky in the south.
DANIEL: In Michigan. Really?
HEDVIG: Well, like Michigan…
BEN: Detroit, right? Detroiters have like a really distinct accent.
DANIEL: Yes. Yes.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: I just love how you identified Michigan as having a Michigan accent. That was helpful, thank you.
HEDVIG: Ben, I think you need to go one step back for the poor Europeans. Ohio is in the east of the country and it’s just below the Great Lakes.
BEN: Yes.
HEDVIG: More or less.
BEN: But the point is Kentucky is a member of the Southern states, so you would expect it to have like a pretty pronounced Southern American accent.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: And Michigan has its own very not-Southern accent. So, Ohio is really like a boundary spanning thing from a lexical point of view. If you’re talking about accents in America, you probably couldn’t find a more effective spread…
DANIEL: That’s good.
BEN: …between three states. Like, you go…
DANIEL: Nice work.
BEN: …from Southern to Mid to Northern. And I suspect what these people in this survey were saying, like, “Oh, people from Northern Ohio, they’ve got the crazy strong northern Ohio accent,” possibly just kind of presuming that because as they get closer to, like, Michigan, they’re just going to sound more Michigan-y. And what you’re saying, Daniel, is the data’s like, “Nope. Not really.”
DANIEL: Not so much. Or, I mean, there is, but there’s also a mismatch between attitude and perception. Another interesting little tidbit that they’ve picked up on was that young people, like age 9, 10, 11, 12, they didn’t really see that much difference in accents at all. It was the older folks that saw the big differences.
BEN: Oh, yeah. That’s hugely surprising, is it?
DANIEL: Maybe not. So, what determines who we think has an accent? It seems to be more about attitude than it does about acoustics.
BEN: [LAUGHS] If we think they’re funny looking. Oh, those Northern Ohioans, I don’t trust them at all. They sound really different. What about this person? Oh, no, that sounds like my neighbour. Well, that’s a Northern Ohio. Oh, I don’t care for that information at all.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Let’s go on to our last news story. This one was suggested by Diego. Is anybody keeping track of genes and language and mice? Did anyone notice this one in passing?
BEN: Has anyone been keeping track of… And their names, really unconnected concepts, genes, mice, language.
DANIEL: Yep. You must have seen this one, Hedvig.
BEN: Yeah, Daniel, that one’s… My search alerts just went bananas.
HEDVIG: Wait, Ben. Ben, we can guess this.
DANIEL: You want to guess it? Okay, go ahead.
HEDVIG: It’s about countable things.
DANIEL: Okay. Jeans.
HEDVIG: A pair of jeans. You have to say them in the plural even if you just own a pair. It’s like scissors.
BEN: Oh, nah, nah, nah. He was talking about the things in our body.
DANIEL: I’m not going to tell you.
HEDVIG: Oh, fuck.
DANIEL: I’m not going to disambiguate that for you.
HEDVIG: In that case, it is something about a gene that we’re experimenting on that has some impact on language, and we’re experimenting on poor mice, turning it off and on or making them listen to things and bop a thing and get a treat. And…
BEN: I love that summation of science. Bop a thing, get a treat. I love it.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Where’s the lie though?
BEN: No.
HEDVIG: Where’s the lie?
BEN: I am not calling that wrong. I am calling that delightfully honest.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Ben, did you have a guess?
BEN: Well, I was hoping…
DANIEL: I think you’re purring.
BEN: Yeah, I know. It’s a very nice sound. I was hoping that it was to do with, we have found a gene in mice that allows us humans to process language way better, and we’re splicing it into us or something cool and batman-y like that.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] All right. Okay. On the cusp of gene editing to make language super beings.
BEN: Much like self-driving cars, this was shit were promised like a decade ago with CRISPR-Cas9, right? And I am yet to see my fricking Great Dane sized Chihuahua, which I was told was not far away.
DANIEL: I know. Okay, so here’s the story. Every once in a while, we hear reports of a language gene. A gene in humans that somehow in the mists of time, flipped on and allowed us to do language or made it possible for us to move linguistic symbols around in our brains. Back in the past, if you talked about language genes, it was probably a gene called FOXP2.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: We’ve talked about this on the show a bunch of times. Zebra finches that don’t have a working copy of FOXP2 don’t sing very well. If you knock out the FOXP2 gene in a mouse, they don’t squeak as much. And in humans, if you don’t have a working FOXP2 gene, then you get language issues. There was a whole family that had a faulty FOXP2 gene, and the ones that had that mutation didn’t have good language skills. But now, there’s a new gene in town. Scientists have identified another gene that seems to be doing language-y things. It’s called NOVA1. They gave mice a human like NOVA1 gene, guess what happened?
HEDVIG: We’re talking to the mice.
BEN: This is great. So, we flipped the thing. Instead of taking the mice gene and putting it in us, we took our gene and put it in the mice.
DANIEL: Kinda, yeah. And the weird thing about this is that when you listen to interviews with the scientists, they refer to the mice as “humanised mice”.
BEN: Sorry, I just fully thought you were about to say, “And the strange thing was when you listened to the interviews with the mice afterwards.” [LAUGHTER] I was fully ready for you to say that.
DANIEL: There were no interviews with the mice.
BEN: Sorry. Yeah, they humanised the mice.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: But they did listen to the mice, and they found that when the baby mice were squeaking to try to get mom to pay attention to them, their removed mom mouse, they would do different distress calls than the non-altered mice.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: And when males were in the presence of a female mouse in heat, they made more complex courtship calls, as measured by tagging different bits of the mouse call with different letters, you start seeing different patterns of letters in the mice with the humanised NOVA1 gene.
HEDVIG: Did the mouse ladies go for that to a greater extent? Like, was it an evolutionary better option?
DANIEL: We don’t know. They were only looking at signals from the males, not responses from the females. But we do know that in general, female mice do like more complex calls from males.
HEDVIG: Oh, okay.
BEN: Look, Hedvig, if humans are anything to go by, probably not. The last thing a lady wants is some guy just rambling on about all sorts of weird conspiracy theories.
HEDVIG: Have you seen birds? Bird ladies love that shit.
DANIEL: Yeah, you’ve got to make good calls, right? And you know what? Neanderthals didn’t have the same NOVA1 gene that we do.
BEN: Ah, okay.
DANIEL: It only seems to have popped up about half a million years ago. Now, I’ve been trying to figure out, when did language start? And I’ve had to say something like 100,000, maybe 200,000 years ago?
HEDVIG: 200,000 probably because this has got to before we leave Africa.
DANIEL: Yes, but this mutation happened more than 500,000 years ago, so the stage was getting set.
BEN: So, we’re talking precursor, preconditions, foundation stones.
DANIEL: Yeah, but you know what? I’m still kind of… I don’t know, like… Is genes where we want to look for language? Because yes, fine. A lot of linguists are happy to say language is part of our genetic inheritance, which is why, as you say, Hedvig, we’re weird. There’s something really different about us, and a lot of it has to do with language. So, there is definitely a genetic reality.
HEDVIG: But also, when we take a human child, which no one does intentionally, but when they have been deprived of learning language socially, they also don’t really learn it and they don’t develop it. So, it can’t all be genes. But it’s also possible that it is kind of genes, but that it’s like a house of cards, that it’s like you got to have a FOXP2 and whatever this one’s called…
BEN: NOVA.
HEDVIG: …and a bunch of them and they’re all like, making it happen. And yes, when you remove one of them, things happen that are different, but maybe it’s not one of them doing all the work. You see what I mean? Maybe it’s a non-compositional thing.
DANIEL: Language arose out of a complex web of factors. There was biological stuff, social stuff, cultural stuff, genetic stuff. Genes are only one part of this picture. Maybe you need to have it. But if we’re looking at language and we’ve decided to look at genes, I think we’re missing a big part of the picture.
BEN: I kind of like the idea that since we’ve sequenced the human genome, there have just been these labs all over the world just combing through it, just being like, “What does this do? What does this do? [LAUGHS] What does this do?”
HEDVIG: And sometimes finding really cool stuff.
BEN: Yeah, totally.
HEDVIG: The gene that is… How do you say? sort of like seems to correlate a lot with breast cancer, for example, seems to be a pretty good find, right?
BEN: Yeah, sure. Oh, yeah. I wasn’t making fun of these people. I just genuinely like that we sequenced this tremendously complex thing and then we’ve all just… Various teams all around the world have been going through it little bits at a time and be like, “Eh, what about this bit?”
DANIEL: And then, we say, “Hey, here’s a language-looking one. Let’s stick that in a mouse.”
BEN: Yeah, I know, yeah. Poor mice, right? Because I’m sitting here being like, “What does this do? What does this do?” And the mice like, “No more genes, please. I’ve had my fill.”
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: But this one seems like a good one, right?
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: It does.
BEN: Maybe.
DANIEL: I mean, certainly seems to affect vocal behaviour, for what that’s worth.
BEN: Depends if the mice ladies like getting conspiracy theoried by the mice boys.
DANIEL: Thanks, Diego, for that story. And now, it’s time for Related or Not. Here’s our theme. It’s from Jo.
HEDVIG: Oh.
[LATEST RELATED OR NOT THEME]
HEDVIG: That’s very cute.
DANIEL: I don’t think we appreciate how lyrically tight that is.
HEDVIG: I also like the “it matters to word nerds and me” as in…
DANIEL: And she managed to work in “yeah, no, no, yeah”.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Very well done.
BEN: As an inveterate fan of the television show, Seinfeld, I will never not love that theme song. But I would just like to throw the tidbit in for our listeners that whilst we may be most familiar with that song as the [SINGING] “Believe it or Not, George isn’t at home” song, it is itself based on a song from American pop culture in the 1980s, the greatest American Hero series. And it is its title song. So, yeah, there you go.
DANIEL: Still slaps.
HEDVIG: Still slaps.
DANIEL: This first one is from me.
BEN: Oh, this is a classic Hedvig, Ben, gunslinger at high noon situation. I love it. I love it.
DANIEL: Yeah. But I’m in this too, because I had no idea.
HEDVIG: Oh, boo.
DANIEL: Sorry. The words are VAULT and VAULT. To vault means to jump.
BEN: Okay, to jump over something.
DANIEL: But it also means?
BEN: Like a secure place to lock things.
HEDVIG: This is so funny, Daniel. We were talking about this week, and I was thinking of nominating it.
DANIEL: Really?
BEN: No.
DANIEL: Okay, the time has come.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Because it came up in conversation, there was another second language speaker, we were talking about, “Oh, you know, like, pole vaulting, like what you do in the Olympics.” And then, we were like, “Oh, and a vault.” And then, we were like, “What?”
DANIEL: Vault and vault.
HEDVIG: And as I recall my conversation with my good friends, we thought that these two words were indeed related.
DANIEL: Okay. Did you have a reason for thinking so?
HEDVIG: Arches, I think.
DANIEL: Arches.
BEN: Oh, okay. Vaulted ceiling.
DANIEL: The vaulted ceiling is an arched ceiling…
BEN: Okay, interesting.
DANIEL: …and that’s related to jumping because…
BEN: Yeah. You’ve convinced me. You’ve convinced me.
DANIEL: Wait, but what’s the link here between jumping and a vaulted ceiling?
BEN: Because you jump in an arc.
HEDVIG: You jump like [ONOMATOPOEIA]
DANIEL: You jump in an arch. Oh, I see arc and arch. Okay, very good. What do you think, Ben? Do you agree?
BEN: My gut feeling was that they are related based on nothing other than the fact that they’re spelled exactly the same. And that, for me, considering that it is a word that applies to a fairly modern concept in relation to a secure storage place, right? Like, I don’t think were referring to the dungeon of a castle as a vault, right? To my understanding, it really has mechanical connotations, the big, spoked wheel and all that kind of thing, which is something that can really only exist since sort of the Industrial Revolution, I think.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
BEN: So, with that in mind, I reckon with a word being that recent and then spelled identical to another word, I thought they were related for that reason or that’s a…
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: …that’s a signifier of their relatedness.
DANIEL: I chose not related because I was aware that words can be spelled differently at first, but then they grow together.
BEN: I’m worried about that. It’s true. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm. That can happen.
DANIEL: Like LIE and LIE. Tell a lie or lie down, those come from completely different words, but they grew together. I thought, well, if they are related, the unifying sense would be that of safety. You jump to get out of trouble. A vault will keep your things out of trouble. But I still said not related. Okay, so you both said related. I said not.
The answer is yeah, they’re totally related. Now, VAULT comes from French volte or voute, to gamble or to leap. They got it from Italian voltare, to turn. And they got it from Latin volvere, to turn or to turn around and to roll. So, when you’re vaulting, you’re jumping, you’re turning, you’re twisting, you’re gamboling.
BEN: Is it because you turn the wheel on a vault? Is that what it’s from?
DANIEL: Okay, let’s turn our attention to VAULT, the place where you keep things safe. This also came from French, voûte. A vaulted roof or a chamber. As you know, a vault in this sense is a structure of bricks or something designed to support itself and form an arch, like a vaulted ceiling. This came straight from Latin. The exact same word, volvere, to turn, to turn around. And I suppose this might be because when you’re making an arch, the arches are turned into a round shape.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: The word has been used for lots of things, like a vaulted ceiling, but an underground vault could be used for a prison or a dungeon. Sorry, Ben.
BEN: Oh, damn. So, it does go back that far? It goes back to like, what, 1300s, 1400s?
DANIEL: About 1500s.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: You could use it for keeping wine, anything. But by 1725, people were using it for a bank vault. So, they are related. Interesting note: lots of words that had an L in Latin lost that L in French because L’s just kind of step out.
BEN: And got it back.
DANIEL: And then, people said, “Oh, no, we got to put this back.”
BEN: Ah, English, what are you doing, man? Leave it alone.
HEDVIG: That’s interesting because it means also that it didn’t, like, naturally pop back, but it was because people were, like, reading the Bible and stuff in Latin.
DANIEL: Or just aware of Latin.
HEDVIG: And they were like, “Oh, I see this. It should be like that. The French fucked it up.”
BEN: Yeah. I… That smacks of enlightenment, classical love kind of like. “Oh, we must do it like the Greeks.” [LAUGHS MOCKINGLY]
HEDVIG: Yeah. That’s fun.
DANIEL: I had a read of Skeat’s etymology, and Skeat was fairly unsparing about those people. So, VAULT did that. It got back its L. The word, FAULT, got back its L.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: FALCON. Nobody said FALCON until the L was put back. People used to say fawcon, like a hawk and a fawcon and the birds like that.
BEN: Wow.
DANIEL: Also, I didn’t know this, but one that lost its L was the word, WHICH. We don’t say which with an L, like, which one?
BEN: Hwilch. Hwilch?
HEDVIG: Excuse me, where would the L be?
DANIEL: You can find lots of people spelling it wilch, L-C-H, in documents…
HEDVIG: What? Lots of people? Daniel, lots of people?
DANIEL: …back in the old days. Lots of examples.
BEN: He doesn’t mean now. He means back then.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Yeah, a long time ago.
HEDVIG: I’ve been alive for, like, over 35 years.
DANIEL: Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.
BEN: No, we’re measuring in centuries, not decades.
HEDVIG: Okay, okay. Lots of people.
DANIEL: But if you think about it, L does love to step out. There’s TALK and CALM and ALMOND and SALMON.
HEDVIG: ALMOND.
DANIEL: And so, what happened was L stepped out in French, but then English etymologists were like, “Hey, what are you doing?” And the L was like, “French said it didn’t need me.” “Yeah, get back in that word. Get back in there.”
HEDVIG: Yeah. You’re not fired. Your previous firing was unauthorised. You need to get back to work next week.
BEN: Who is that guy? That Frenchman? He doesn’t even work here.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: I still like that bit from The Goon Show. The bit in the bank where they say, “Now in this bank, you get your own vault. Then if anything happens, it’s your own vault.”
BEN and HEDVIG: Ah.
DANIEL: This one comes from Liz, who emailed us, hello@becauselanguage.com. Liz says, “Here’s an idea for Related or Not. Are any of these words related? PASS, as in, they gave me a free pass to the movie.”
BEN and HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: “PASS, could you pass me that beer? PASS, they offered me the job, but I decided to pass.” Then, PAST, the adverb. There were so many moving boxes, there was no room to get past. And the last one, PAST as in, “In the past, everything was easier.” So, let’s just summarise.
BEN: Ooh, there’s a lot there. Okay.
DANIEL: A free PASS. That’s one.
BEN: Meaning almost like a document or a certificate to do a thing.
DANIEL: A free ticket or something.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: PASS me a beer.
BEN: Okay. To hand someone something.
DANIEL: I’ll PASS.
BEN: I do not want this thing.
HEDVIG: Skip it.
DANIEL: To get PAST or to move PAST.
BEN: Okay. To move past something.
DANIEL: And then, in the PAST. All right. Do you reckon they’re all related? Do you reckon there’s two different or three different camps? What do you think’s going on here?
BEN: Before we answer this question, can I admit to the fact that this is another one of those things, like the word, rhythm, where I’m always frustrated by which one of these I’m supposed to be using? Like P-A-S-S-E-D versus P-A-S-T.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Oh, interesting.
BEN: It really frustrates me. And it shouldn’t be hard because it’s actually like, they’re relatively distinct words, and yet every time I’m writing an email to someone and I’m like, [MAKES FLUSTERED SOUNDS] Quickly go to Google, which one should I be using?
DANIEL: Interesting.
BEN: Hmm. Okay.
DANIEL: Maybe I should start, because I haven’t started yet. I thought that they were all related, and I think they share…
BEN: Wow. Every single one.
DANIEL: I think they share a unifying sense to move through. You pass somebody a beer, the beer passes through space. You get a pass, you can go through. You decide to pass on something, that thing goes through. Something went past, it goes through space. And in the past, time passes by metaphorically. I think that they all share.
BEN: Okay. But I think PAST meaning things that have happened with a T is the odd one out.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: I’m leaning that way too. If I’m going to pick out anyone, it is that one.
BEN: Yep. That’s what I was thinking.
DANIEL: In the past?
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: But is that just because there’s a couple of things…
BEN: It’s got a T. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: It’s got a T. Yeah. Is that all we’re picking up on? Because…
BEN: That a little bit. But I also wonder if the idea of things that have happened previously is such an old idea. Like, we’re talking like some full tilt Proto-Indo-European, very genesis of our language roots. Whereas the other stuff might have come to us by way of like French or…
HEDVIG: I disagree.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: I don’t think that just because something has existed in our conceptual world for a long time, it needs to have an old word for it.
DANIEL: Hmm.
BEN: Okay. Okay.
HEDVIG: I think you can internally innovate things.
BEN: Does that mean you’re going for all related then?
HEDVIG: They all share the moving forward.
BEN: She’s sounding all related to me folks.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
BEN: You’ve got to make a choice here, Hedders. What’s it going to be?
HEDVIG: Yeah, I think I’m going to go all related.
DANIEL and BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Now, Hedvig, since we’re going all related and, Ben, you can do this little add-on as well, because Liz has suggested this. Can you guess maybe which one came last?
HEDVIG: Which one was most recently innovated?
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Okay. Okay.
HEDVIG: I pass on it.
DANIEL: I thought that the time one.
BEN: Oh, really?
DANIEL: I’m putting my hand up for in the past. Yep, I think that time metaphors take a while to work through.
BEN: Wow. I’m going to go for a you get a free pass to enter the festival or whatever.
DANIEL: All right. Hedvig, nearest one.
HEDVIG: I’m for the skip it.
DANIEL: Okay. Okay. Here’s the answer. They are all related. Hedvig and me get a point for that one. Very surprising. This is borrowed from French, passé. It never appeared in Old English. Now…
BEN: There you go.
DANIEL: …here’s the order they came in according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: The expression “the past” I thought this was the latest one. It’s actually the earliest. Dang it. Later came “moving past” but things get murkier if we count spelling. We can find “the past” in the early 1500s. But moving passed, P-A-S-S-E-D, 1300s. We don’t see past, moving past me, P-A-S-T, until the 1500s. Now, to pass someone a beer, we see this from the 1520s. To get a pass, 1590s. But the very last one, I’ll pass.
BEN: Oh, Hedvig.
DANIEL: Hedvig got it.
BEN: Nice one.
DANIEL: We don’t see that until card playing 1869, although, there was something like it used in the 1300s, but that’s the latest one.
HEDVIG: It’s a very board games around beer thing.
BEN: Yep, yep, yep.
DANIEL: That’s what it was.
HEDVIG: I feel like that’s the most abstract…
DANIEL: That’s it.
HEDVIG: Yeah. When in doubt, go for the thing you think is most abstract. Two points.
DANIEL: Thanks, Liz. And good job, Hedvig. Last one item from… This one’s from Corinne, who just gives us three words. ARCANE, ARCHAIC, ANARCHY.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: When something’s ARCANE, it’s kind of weird and old and occult maybe, arcane. ARCHAIC, just old and out of date. And ANARCHY, the rule of no one. Are any of these related?
BEN: I’m going all related. I’m coming in hot and high.
DANIEL: All related. Okay.
BEN: Yep.
DANIEL: Is there a…
BEN: And I think that is because. Actually, I’ll let other people put their flags in the sand, and then I’ll explain my thinking. I don’t want to muddy the waters.
HEDVIG: I think they’re all related to hierarchy.
DANIEL: Oh, that ARC. We’re seeing ARC again.
HEDVIG: Wait, ARCANE.
BEN: ARCHIVE.
DANIEL: Hmm.
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: Old stuff.
HEDVIG: Well, the anarchist is the same one as. So, it’s the same one as an oligarchy, democracy, all of those crazy…
DANIEL: I knew that ANARCHY is without rule. An arch. Yep, that’s right.
HEDVIG: And the thing that it means in ancient Greek, I think, is power.
DANIEL: It’s actually arkhon. Greek arkhon, which is a word that means leader.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And I think ARCANE — maybe I play too much D&D, but it sounds like it could be related to power, right?
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: And then, we had ARCHAIC.
DANIEL: Do you reckon that’s the odd one out, or is it part of the whole thing?
HEDVIG: Because ARCHAIC, I would want it to be related to Kronos, like time…
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: …but it’s not though.
DANIEL: How’d that get in there. Mm.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it doesn’t.
BEN: Come on. You’re going to have to make a choice here.
HEDVIG: Okay. All related. Yeah.
DANIEL: Is that what you said, Ben? You said all related too?
BEN: I said all related.
DANIEL: The one that’s giving me pause is ARCHAIC. What is that ARC? Something about time or being out of time. And I thought that maybe ARCANE took part in that because maybe people thought that somebody who was outside of time, outside of the modern era was a bit weird. So, I think that ARCANE and ARCHAIC are related, but ANARCHY is the odd one out. All right, here’s the answer.
BEN: Mm-hmm. Okay.
DANIEL: None of us got it right. They’re not all related.
BEN: Oh, snap.
DANIEL: Okay, so we got ANARCHY. We figured that one out, the rule of nobody. I didn’t realise that you could describe somebody as an ANARCH if they were the personification of chaos or revolt, but you can.
BEN: There you go.
DANIEL: That was formed before ANARCHY, 1500s.
HEDVIG: Huh.
DANIEL: ARCANE, if you had an old treasure chest to keep stuff in an old chest in Latin, that wouldn’t be called a chest. It would be an ARCA.
BEN: Oh, like the Raiders of the Lost Ark.
HEDVIG: Like Ark of the Covenant.
BEN: Yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: And if things were hidden away in that chest, they were ARCANE, they were occult, they were the secret things.
BEN: Interesting.
DANIEL: Now, I thought ANARCHY was the odd one out, but the two that are related are ARCHAIC and ANARCHY. So, here’s how. As we said, anarchy breaks down to A, without and Greek arkon, a leader. So that’s ANARCHY, no leader.
Now, the reason that something is ARCHAIC is that it is primitive. It goes back to an earlier time. It came first. So, this notion of firstness relates to Greek arkhon, the leader who was first in command, and then something ARCHAIC, something that came first, but that isn’t used anymore. So, ARCHAIC and ANARCHY are related. Ironically, those two words go back to Greek ARCANE to be the first. Greek ARCANE sounds like the word, ARCANE, but that’s the one that’s not related. ARCANE is the odd one out. Thanks, Corinne.
HEDVIG: Amazing.
BEN: That was some of the juiciest red herrings we’ve had served up in a while. That was because that was just like oof.
HEDVIG: Very well done. Very well done.
BEN: So obviously related. What could possibly… Nope, nope.
HEDVIG: That’s so funny.
BEN: Corinne…
HEDVIG: Well done.
BEN: …well played madam. You sunk us. You sunk our battleships, respectively.
DANIEL: And thanks to Jo, who played theme song very well also. And if you have a theme song, a Related or Not jingle you’d like to grant us, then we would love to hear it, hello@becauselanguage.com.
[MUSIC]
[INTERVIEW BEGINS]
DANIEL: We are here with Gabe Henry, author, humorist, softball player, and author of the book Enough Is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Eezier to Spell. Gabe, thanks so much for hanging out with me and Hedvig today.
GABE: Thanks so much for having me. It’s a pleasure.
DANIEL: We haven’t ever done a show on simplified spelling, but I’ve been aware of it for a really long time. How did you get into this area? What’s fascinating to you about it?
GABE: I mean, I heard about it back in college, and it was a very brief sliver of one class where it was mentioned, and then never spoken about again, but it always stayed in my head is this fascinating, bizarre aspect of history that they don’t really teach. And my reaction to it, which I think is the same as many people’s reaction, is that it looks totally silly. It is kind of ridiculous. Well, without context, it really does look like this ridiculous attempt to sound like a modern teenager, and the way they text, spelling though T-H-O and laugh L-A-F and love L-U-V. And just the idea that people were walking around in revolutionary times in their powdered wigs spelling these words, it was just a very kind of absurd notion for me.
But it wasn’t till many years later that I began looking into the simplified spelling movement and reading through the archives and the newspapers and the letters that I realized how rich and complex this movement actually was. It drew in so many eccentric people from all walks of life and some of whom were brilliant, people like Noah Webster, the creator of Webster’s Dictionary, and Benjamin Franklin.
DANIEL: Mark Twain, of course.
GABE: Yeah. And then, there were others who were just clearly out of their minds. If you read the book, you’ll be able to figure out who I’m talking about. But they all shared this belief that you could improve society in some small way by changing the way we spell. So, I wanted to bring these characters to life and bring this movement to life and to show also how sometimes these tiny efforts to change our world, they might not seem like successes in the moment, but they have these repercussions down the line that can be very surprising.
DANIEL: It’s often been said that utopian movements can be judged by what’s left after they inevitably fail.
GABE: Yeah. There are plenty of indirect ways that movements affect the future. If you look at a long enough timeline, if you’re looking at 50 to 100 years, you see that these countercultural movements like simplified spelling, which can seem like a pure ridiculous thing in the moment, a target for mockery and just really like a scandal hungry press just latching onto this and making it into an absurdism. But given enough time, the way these things insinuate into pop culture and then come out the other end, it almost becomes second nature to us at a certain point that something like simplified spelling and abbreviated spelling and shorthand is what we often use on a day-to-day basis with one-to-one communication with our friends.
HEDVIG: How much of this movement do you think originally was utopian? Like, “Oh, this would better. This would be easier for kids to learn. This would be easier for people with maybe eyesight problems or learning difficulties.” And how much of it is, “We don’t want to be like the English. We don’t want to be like Europeans. We’re Americans”?
GABE: It’s a little bit of everything. The interesting thing about this movement is that whatever biases or beliefs you have going into it, you tend to see those beliefs reflected back to you. So, someone like Noah Webster, who was an American patriot, and he was there at the start of the nation and through the American Revolution, and his priority at the time was, “How are we going to distinguish America from England? We just won our independence. We need to create our own culture now. We don’t want to have England’s culture.” And one of the questions is, “What do we do about our language? Do we go on speaking and writing the language of our former oppressor, or do we create what would be an American language?”
And there were a lot of talks among the founders at this time about what to do about language. Some people proposed replacing English entirely with French or Greek as a way to make it seem more of a classical antiquity language. There was someone who posed Hebrew as a language, as a way to identify Americans as this chosen people.
HEDVIG: Alright.
GABE: None of these worked for many reasons, one being that everyone already spoke English. So, in a practical sense, how are you going to make this change? So, Noah Webster’s vision was an American English spelling. And this is how you would take English. You would take out all the silent letters. You would take out all the superfluous letter combinations that come to us from Latin and French and Norse and Celtic, and you would just turn it into the most phonetic… scientifically pure phonetic version of these words. And this was also the start of the Enlightenment, Scientific Revolution. And it just really meshed with all these, this thinking. So, yeah, he wanted to spell tongue T-U-N-G. Ache would be A-K-E.
HEDVIG: Music to my ears. I am not a native English… I am actually not great at Swedish spelling either, which is my mother tongue. [LAUGHTER] But I just… For me, spelling is a way to accomplish a goal and I have very little patience for inefficiencies. But I, today, have the beautiful… Well, depending on how you see it, I have all these technology to help me, so I sort of spell, immediate, like I put vaguely the right letters in vaguely the right order, and then it is fixed for me, so…
GABE: Technology helps you out.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: Yes, but sometimes I insist. Sometimes I’m like, this is, this is… I don’t. This drives me nuts.
[LAUGHTER]
GABE: You would make a good early American, I think.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I don’t have patience for It… And I also think… I admire and I think there was a spirit there of like, “Let’s reimagine all of society. Let’s think about everything. Fashion and politics and navigation and like everything and just redo it.” A lot of those ideas were maybe not great and not meant to be efficient for everyone in the population, perhaps, but we were happy to shake things up.
GABE: Yeah. So, someone like Noah Webster would come at it from that mindset. But like you said, there’s also that utopian vision of phonetic spelling would save us time, it would save us money, it would increase literacy, it would create a future that people aren’t struggling to piece together. These puzzle pieces that look like they were chewed up by a dog and you’re just trying to squeeze them together and make it make sense. So, there was a big utopian thing.
A lot of these simplified spellers really did see this as a future universal language. They believed that ultimately, if there was one future human language, one language that by evolution just naturally it’s selected for, it would have to be the most phonetic language. It would have to be the most widely spoken, widely written, widely read. And the way you would get something to be widely read and widely written is you make it easier for immigrants to learn it, you make it easier for children to learn it. And fast forward a couple centuries and maybe English becomes the universal global language. So, there was a little supremacy going on, a little bit of English language supremacy.
And then, there were other reformers who approached it just from like a profit-driven, selfish point of view. If you were, say, like a money-minded businessman or businesswoman in like early 1900s who ran a newspaper or factory, you would look at simplified spelling and see that it saves time, it saves money. It also saves ink, it saves paper. And these are the kind of marginal profits that add up, and you start to think of it as in terms of efficiency and productivity in the workforce. How can I make a little bit more money? How can I save a little bit more?
So, Noah Webster did a calculation back in 1789 that his version of simplified spelling would save printers 1 page out of every 18, which doesn’t seem like a lot, but for 180-page book, that becomes 10 pages, 360-page book, that’s 20 pages. And that adds up, and that seemed to be the driving force for a lot of people, especially in the late 1800s, industrialization, progressive movement, a lot of reforms and a lot of new technology.
One of the big simplified spelling proponents in the early 1900s was Andrew Carnegie. And he was this big steel tycoon, one of the top five, maybe top three richest men in the world. And he saw it, not necessarily as a charitable reform or a progressive push to make society more equal, but he saw it also for its abilities to increase workflow, increase the workforce, and thus increase industry.
DANIEL: Okay, so we’ve made the case for why spelling reform is a good idea. Makes it possible or easier, I guess, for people to learn it, it saves time, saves money, possibly. There’s a lot of downsides. So, let’s go through some of those. Number one, you’ve mentioned it, [SCOFFS] everybody has to do it, and nobody just does anything, so that’s one.
HEDVIG: Mm.
GABE: Mm-hmm. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Number two, it erases etymologies. We have an etymological-based writing system where the little… Okay, some idiots took it too far but some words do contain the seeds of their etymology, and we would just get rid of those, so that’s one downside.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I don’t think that’s a downside. That’s fine. We don’t have to have it encoded in the spelling of the words.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] Okay.
GABE: I agree with you. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I don’t care.
GABE: I love the English language. Big lover of English words. I like that they have encoded within them the whole progress of their geographical transformation, political transformation. You can look at a word and see where the Vikings invaded it and where the French invaded it, and you can kind of see these sedimentary layers. I think it’s beautiful, but I don’t think it is practical. I think the ideal function of language is to communicate as quickly and as efficiently as possible. I think anything beyond that kind of goes more into the realm of poetry, art, things that you can admire from afar. But I don’t think the words of our language ultimately are meant to be admired or studied for their origins, like you’re studying a geological rock and trying to figure out where it came from. I think simplicity, efficiency, and it’s the most direct way that humans should interact. I think anything else is a little bit more intangible.
DANIEL: Okay. And we don’t even know the etymologies for some words. So, trying to preserve etymology, we might not even be doing that.
HEDVIG: A more important downside which…
DANIEL: Yes, please.
HEDVIG: …am I going to say the same one as you?
DANIEL: We might.
HEDVIG: You’ll freeze a particular pronunciation, which might not even be the pronunciation everyone is using.
DANIEL: Yeah. What about the word ass-ociate or ash-ociate? Right?
HEDVIG: Yeah. You have to pick whichever one you like if there’s variation at the time, and also if people start pronouncing that word differently 20 years from now, do you update again? What do you do?
DANIEL: Whose English gets represented by the new spelling?
GABE: There’s no right answer for that. And that’s one of the reasons, one of the many reasons, simplified spelling didn’t catch on. There were societies for spelling reform in America. There were societies in England. There were societies in Scotland. And even within regions of all those countries, they were disagreeing on pronunciation. So, how do you make a standard phonetic spelling for a nonstandard pronunciation? How does someone in New York spell car if someone in Boston spells it C-A-H? There are just too many regionalisms to iron it out.
DANIEL: May just be easier to spell it one way and then let everybody sort of believe what they want. Okay, well, Hedvig, that was a good one. I’ll do the next one. [GABE AND HEDVIG LAUGH] Standardising spelling makes homophones look the same. I don’t want bread and bred to look the same like bread that you eat. And then, being well bred, I don’t want to, too and two to look the same. I don’t want that. I don’t think anybody should want that.
HEDVIG: But how often are they in the same context?
DANIEL: We might sort them out.
GABE: Yeah, we have homonyms that spelled exactly the same, but we’re able to understand which word we’re talking about by the context. I don’t know what it’s like in Swedish. Are there a lot of homonyms and homophones?
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah, loads. And there are things that are spelled the same that are pronounced differently.
DANIEL: Homographs. Yeah.
HEDVIG: So, you get all the combos. But this is where we’re talking about spelling and it’s clear, we know from study of human language that humans are really good at dealing with diversity. We hear different spoken languages all the time. We’re very good at dealing with change. We hear different things throughout our lifetime. We’re also pretty good at dealing with ambiguity. So, if we do hear a word that sounds like another word, we’ll look at the context. And worst case, maybe we’ll ask, “Oh, what did you mean?” Or we’ll do a retake, but we’ll figure it out. But there seems to be something that is harder about all of these things when it comes to writing.
I have tried this myself. Like, I’ve tried to read dialectal Swedish. So, there’s places where people intentionally write in different dialects to try and represent phonetically those dialects. And that is way harder for me than listening. So, if I hear those dialects, I’m like, “Eh, okay, yeah, this is this.” When I read it, I’m like, “Oh, my god, they put a J instead of a G? I don’t know what to do with myself.” It seems like it’s harder in writing than in listening.
GABE: Yeah, I think you’re right. And, Daniel, I mean, I agree with you also. I’m always of two minds with this, that the purest lover of language mind versus the utopian. What’s the most practical, scientific, all encompassing, ultimately, what’s the idea that’s going to encompass the most people? And I think that you have to weigh our homonyms and homophones and how important it is to have different spellings for different words that are pronounced the same, because it tells you different contexts, it has different meanings. And then, you weigh that on the other side against the difficulty of traditional English spelling for children. There have been studies that it takes several times longer to learn English spelling than Spanish or German or some of these other more phonetic spellings.
And then, for immigrants and for anyone that you want to absorb into your culture, do you want to leave that barrier really tall and really strong where it is, or do you want to open some doorways or take down the barrier entirely? I am a purist in many ways about English. I do love language, but I don’t think I need to impose my love of traditional spelling upon everyone that’s using it. I think it probably should be the easiest, simplest, most efficient way for everyone.
DANIEL: What about the last objection which you brought up? It just looks kind of doofy. [GABE AND HEDVIG LAUGH] You know it does. You know it does.
GABE: It does.
HEDVIG: I don’t care.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: You know what?
HEDVIG: But I don’t.
DANIEL: I would get used to it in a few years. We would all totally get used to it.
HEDVIG: You’ll get used to it.
DANIEL: You’ll get used to it.
HEDVIG: You’re getting fucking used to it. Have you seen like 1700, 1800 English spelling? That looks doofy.
DANIEL: That looks… [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Everything that you’re not used to looks weird.
DANIEL: Middle English looks doofy. It really does.
HEDVIG: Yes.
GABE: A big pushback against simplified spelling is that it does look doofy. It always looks like a child wrote it. So, it’s always making itself a target for ridicule. And it explains why a lot of the pushback to each one of these spelling reforms at the time was mockery, was jibes, was political cartoons. But the idea that spelling though T-H-O is, let’s say, dumbing down English, which a lot of people believe. It’s like, I think, as absurd as saying that spelling magic or music without that final K at the end is absurd or is dumbing down. It’s just something that we get used to. And Samuel Johnson was spelling words in a way that look pretty ridiculous to us now. And I’m sure we’re spelling words that will look pretty ridiculous to people 200 years from now.
DANIEL: Yeah. I just found out about scribal O. Do we know about this? We haven’t ever talked about it.
GABE: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: What is it?
DANIEL: LOVE used to be spelled with a U, something like L-U-F or L-U-V or something like that. And a few other words that we now spell with an O used to be spelled with a U, like month and tongue. And one explanation is that the scribes of the time were trying to avoid confusion because in the old black letter script, an M looks a lot like an N, looks a lot like a U, looks a lot like an I.
And so, scribes, the story goes, in an effort to avoid confusion, started writing some words with O instead of U so that it could be more clear. There could be other explanations like sound change and things, but one explanation that seems pretty credible, Oxford lists it, is this scribal O. They wrote O for some words instead of U so that it would look less confusing. And so, we have a chance. We can put it back.
HEDVIG: I’m thinking about it now.
GABE: If only we taught penmanship to those scribes.
DANIEL: I know, right? What a missed opportunity. Get the time machine.
GABE: It’s interesting to look back at the evolution of our spelling and see how much of it is really owed to some mistakes in certain monasteries by certain scribes who were the only literate people at the time. And therefore, their writing made up a huge percentage of the existing English writing at the time and was passed down. And their ink and their quill, they made mistakes, the ink spread. And people also just spelled in this way that they sometimes they thought was more aesthetic. So, their ideas for a good spelling before the dictionary came along, it was not what’s the correct spelling, it’s what’s the best spelling for this context, this line, this paragraph, this page. Sometimes, letters were added to a word to make the line reach the margin in an even, justified way. Sometimes, a letter was removed so the word wouldn’t have to be cut down and brought down to the next line.
So, within these communities of literate people in the Middle Ages, there’s a lot of happenstance and coincidence and bad luck and mistakes that just got passed down through the ages. So, you get like words you said, like tongue. There’s also the word sneeze, which was… It can be pinpointed to an early printer named Wynkyn de Worde, who worked in William Caxton’s Abbey in his printing studio. William Caxton was the first English printer, first printing press in England. And his assistant, Wynken de Worde, saw a word that in Dutch is, or maybe it’s Finnish, fnese, F-N-E-S-E, and it means to snort. And he transcribed it as S-N-E-S-E, and it becomes snese. There are countless things like this, that many we can’t pinpoint the origins of, but so much has to do with human error that it seems quite funny.
DANIEL: Wynken de Worde is my new hero.
GABE: And what a great name for a printer.
HEDVIG: So, it is Norton Swedish, snese.
DANIEL: By the way, since we’re talking about William Caxton, I just heard the egg story. Does anybody know the egg story?
HEDVIG: The egg story.
GABE: Is this about sailors that are traveling through England and…
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s the one. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: They what? What happens? They travel through England.
DANIEL: Do you want to do it, or should I?
GABE: I’ll do my best at telling it.
DANIEL: Okay.
GABE: So, we’re talking about 1500s. And at this point, spoken English had fragmented so much within England that often a speaker from Eastern England couldn’t understand a speaker from Western or Southern. So, there’s the story of some sailors that are traveling down the Thames and they come to another town in which a different regional dialect is spoken. And they come to a local house, and they ask for eggs. And the local cook doesn’t understand what they’re saying. She says, “We have no eggs.”
DANIEL: She says, “I don’t speak French.” And the guy says, “I’m not speaking French.” [LAUGHTER] He gets all mad.
GABE: It’s a Monty Python skit, unintentionally.
HEDVIG: So, what did she expect the person to be saying?
DANIEL: Well, then, somebody else comes in and asks for eyren, E-Y-R-E-N. And she understood him, gave him some eggs.
GABE: So, yeah, so that’s how wildly different these regional pronunciations could be. It’s maybe wrong to call it a pronunciation, they were dialects. They were all English, but they were all dialects of English, and they had entirely different words for the same thing.
HEDVIG: But that’s quite… Like, that’s all over… So, my husband is British. He’s from the Northwest, and he doesn’t have a very strong dialect anymore, but some of his relatives do. And I’ve heard them speak, and it persists to this day. And all over Europe and all over the entire world, you get a lot of diversity because people just didn’t travel that far. So, these sailors were exceptional in that they would have gone so far as to perceive these differences. Most people who lived at that time probably knew the neighboring village or town did like this, but they might not know five towns over. That’s quite a far distance to go, right?
GABE: That’s a problem you only have in a time when people didn’t travel much and in a time before dictionaries.
DANIEL: Yeah. And that was Caxton’s problem, because what he’s saying and here he is with a printing press and he’s like, “Well, what do I do?” And in fact, he even writes, “Loo, what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte, egges, or eyren? Certaynly it is hard to playse every man, by-cause of dyversite and chaunge of langage.” Langage with no U.
HEDVIG: You just pick the king, right? That’s what you do.
DANIEL: Yeah, pretty much.
HEDVIG: You pick the person who can inflict most pain upon you or pay you most money, and you take whatever they do and you avoid getting beat up.
GABE: That’s what Caxton became. Not a king, but the person that chooses the language that everyone will use. Because he knew that as the printer, his books would be printed far and wide, they would be read by all regions, by all dialects, by all people, and that whatever dialect he picked would become the standard. And there was a lot of pressure on him, therefore, and he chose something called Chancery Standard, which was the language of Oxford University, and it was the language of learned people. And it was considered an elite language, in part because it had the most French words in it. French was considered at the time to be a more elite language. This is also because the French ruled the English aristocracy for 300 years. So, anything that had a French pronunciation or French spelling was seen as higher than English.
So, Caxton picks Chancery Standard, and therefore he puts all these other dialects into the outskirts and they start to go extinct. So, Chancery becomes the main one. And the language we speak today, this sentence right now, is descended from Chancery. And it would be interesting, really, to see if he had just decided in a different momentary decision, if he had just gone another way, we’d all really be speaking a language that maybe resembled more German than French, for instance.
DANIEL: Mm.
HEDVIG: True. But I think that if he didn’t pick Oxford, he would pick Cambridge. [LAUGHTER] I think his target area was probably… Like, there wasn’t that many different possibilities for him to go in order to come across as prestigious. He wasn’t going to pick Birmingham or Newcastle, as much as I would have loved that.
GABE: That would have been… I wonder if there were people, like lobbyists from each of those regions coming up to him and saying, “Hey, you want a trip to Cambridge? All expenses included.”
HEDVIG: Yeah.
GABE: He himself came from a region of England that was very poor. And the real question for him was, should England adopt the language of his hometown or the language of his adopted status? And he went for the adopted status.
DANIEL: Yeah, of course you do.
HEDVIG: Because also there might have been another person similar to him who did go for a regional variety that was not as prestigious and who wasn’t as successful. We hear about this guy. I don’t know, maybe he was the only printer, but he was successful also in part because he decided to flatter everyone by picking the prestigious variety that people already thought highly of probably.
GABE: True.
DANIEL: I was surprised in the book to find that people were adding letters. Like, I always thought, “Oh, we’ve got to remove letters. We’ve got to get rid of C. We got to get rid of these weird combinations.” And here are a ton of people trying to add new letters in, which makes sense because, I mean, you’ve got to do it. There are more sounds than there are letters, so adding letters seems like an easy fix.
GABE: There was a paradoxical thing about these thinkers. We think of something being simpler as something being shorter and easier. For them, simpler sometimes meant the most easily remembered phonetic version. So, if you have to string three E’s together to get that ‘e’ sound just to be more consistent with other words that have that sound, then you’re going to do it. So, some of these words if you take a word like association, which is already running on with a lot of silent letters, some of these simplified spellers, in the name of simplicity, man, they stretched that word. [LAUGHS] They gave it five more letters, six more letters. Some of them gave it numbers. As you mentioned, there were a few pushes in the 1840s, 1850s to add numbers in place of letters. This was their version of simplification.
HEDVIG: That happens in some languages, not English languages. Sometimes, people use numbers for things, not only like, there’s numbers for tone, but also for letters, because we’re all now restricted by the QWERTY keyboard. So, it’s very hard if you’re trying to make a new alphabet to have entirely new things, but there is a three there already on your keyboard. Might as well go for it.
DANIEL: Yeah. The Squamish language uses a 7 for a glottal stop, you know?
HEDVIG: Yeah, there you go.
GABE: Really?
DANIEL: Because it kind of looks like one, sort of.
GABE: And is that… When did that come into their language, do you know?
DANIEL: Looks like about the 1960s.
GABE: That’s fascinating.
DANIEL: Because a lot of these languages didn’t have a writing system. So, linguists would come in or missionaries would come in and do whatever they could. You know what? I actually do wish we had an engma, the N with the tail for the N in sing.
HEDVIG: Why?
DANIEL: Why not? Because it’s cool.
HEDVIG: Every time you have an N before a G, it is that sound.
DANIEL: Yes, it is.
HEDVIG: Essentially except for some compounds maybe.
DANIEL: And a K. Mm.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Let’s do it. No.
GABE: I never will do that. I’m on board with that. Let’s get…
HEDVIG: I’m not.
GABE: How about 27? I’ll stop at 27 letters in the alphabet.
DANIEL: All right, all right. Serious time then. Let’s do English improvement. We have a magic wand. It’s time to decide. It’s time to pick the low hanging fruit. Like, if we change some things, it’s going to bring down everything on our heads. I do not want that. But I would love to take P-H and make it F. It used to be the word “fantasy” was P-H and now it’s an F and nobody blinks an I. I know that filosophy would look a little doofy, but we would all get used to it. I say that’s a quick fix. That’s an easy one. Am I wrong? Change my view.
GABE: You are right.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: You’re right.
GABE: I think that’s an easy first step.
DANIEL: Okay.
GABE: I think a good second step, let’s attack the O-U-G-H letter combination.
DANIEL: Yes.
GABE: We have about eight different ways to pronounce O-U-G-H. You have though, thought, cough, bough. How many are we at?
DANIEL: Through.
GABE: Tough, through.
DANIEL: You mentioned a few things. Dough and hiccough. Don’t forget hiccough.
GABE: Yeah. So, the six main ones we mentioned, then there’s hiccough, which is a little bit more of an English artifact, although some areas still use it. And then, you have the old Scottish loch for lake, which is L-O-U-G-H or L-O-C-H in some. But altogether it’s about eight different ways you pronounce O-U-G-H. And there’s no sane way a child can learn it without just developing a photographic memory for it.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
GABE: And I think what a lot of these reformers agree on is that you shouldn’t have a language based on photographic memory. It should be based on logic. It should be based on just pure scientific sensibility.
HEDVIG: That said, have you met Mandarin Chinese? You can have a writing system that is entirely devoid from phonetic representation. To be fair, it’s not entirely. There are some clues some places, sometimes.
DANIEL: That’s true.
HEDVIG: But maybe that’s how you get there, maybe once you stew in this through tough for long enough time, maybe that’s how… Well, I don’t know.
GABE: No, you’re definitely onto something. Benjamin Franklin made that point in 1768.
HEDVIG: Ah.
GABE: So, I was actually… I misspoke, I didn’t mean to say that you can’t have language based on…
HEDVIG: I’m going to say that to everyone today. [LAUGHTER] I’m going to tell everyone I said something and someone said …. Should I be proud? Wait, is that a thing?
GABE: You should. Yeah, Franklin is a good man to associate with.
DANIEL: He was wild.
HEDVIG: Is he?
GABE: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: He was always jetting off to France to get money for the American Revolution. And he was getting up to some pretty interesting stuff when he was there, can I just say?
HEDVIG: Okay, all right. For the time being at least, I’ll take it as a huge compliment. Anyway, sorry I interrupted you. [CROSSTALK]
GABE: You said that one of the reasons English is becoming so hard is because it is becoming a more photographic, more pictorial spelling system, and it is becoming more like Chinese, he said. And for someone who’s raised in a society that uses a pictographic writing system, great. But for someone who’s raised in a phonetic writing system, an alphabetic writing system, and to then see that system evolve or devolve into something that’s more pictographic, it’s not intuitive to us to just commit to memory six or seven or eight different pronunciations of O-U-G-H. It’s not intuitive to a child. But it’s what we force people to do, and it’s what we have, the three of us have all been forced to do, probably subconsciously, but that is ultimately what it is. And Franklin doesn’t want the language to go in that pictographic direction. He wants to save it and bring it back to the alphabetic, phonetic version of English.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: Also, you can argue that if you’re going to go that way, this is like the undesirable middle point where you’re not doing either one fully. You’re sort of just middling in the middle, which is pretty bad. And let’s not forget also that the Chinese writing system did go through a massive simplification in the 1950s, it’s got to be, right? So, they also have simplification concerns over there, and they did go through with it.
DANIEL: Well, that’s another thing that I was thinking about. I was thinking about how France, the Académie Française, every once in a while, they’re like, “All right, here’s the new spellings. We’re going to simplify these 20 words in five years. And we’re going to do it and everybody’s going to get on board.” And they kind of do. We can’t do that because we don’t have an Académie Anglaise. But surely the Associated Press Style Guide or somebody, LA Times style guide, could make suggestions. Surely, the American Copy Editor Society, they’re in this.
GABE: So, in 1906, when the Simplified Spelling Board was founded in New York City, this was kind of the peak of the Simplified Spelling movement. And this was funded and founded by Andrew Carnegie, big steel tycoon. And one of the members of the Simplified Spelling Board was Mark Twain. And he had the same idea as you. He went directly to the Associated Press, and he said, “Here are 300 words. A lot of them are already in use.” Words like COLOR without a U, HONOR without a U.
HEDVIG: Grey.
GABE: Grey. And then we’ll also add to that words like past tense of KISS. Kissed would be K-I-S-T. MISSED, I MISSED you would be M-I-S-T. And he went to them and he pled with them. He said, “The only institution that can spread these simplifications to the entire world is the Associated Press. And you might get some pushback at first, but over time, people would accept it, then they’d start to utilize it, and then it would become part of our natural way of writing.”
And the founding membership of the Simplified Spelling Board were a lot of people that had a lot of pull in journalism, in newspapers and publishing. People like Henry Holt, who was a publisher. Melvil Dewey, who was a writer and he was the creator of the Dewey Decimal System. William James, the philosopher, writer, psychologist. So, it was deliberate that Carnegie amassed these members in particular because he knew that to make these words catch on, you really have to enter newspapers and publishing.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
GABE: And there were also a lot of instances in the early 1900s, late 1800s, of newspapers adopting some of these spellings and the publisher of the newspaper taking this moderate step-by-step approach where we’ll introduce 18 new words this month and then 18 new words next month and then so on. And the more we use it, the more people don’t see it as something that’s foreign.
HEDVIG: I really like the mist and kist ones. I think that’s brilliant.
DANIEL: Foreign would be F-O-R-U-N, right? That’s… Yeah.
GABE: Foren, depends on your accent.
DANIEL: What’s the case for free spelling? Because that’s something you mention in the book as well. Let’s just move that H around in SPAGHETTI.
GABE: [LAUGHS] So, this is… Yeah, this is this idea that…
HEDVIG: Argh, I really struggle with the H’s, the JOHNNY and SPAGHETTI and RHYTHM.
DANIEL: And WHOA?
HEDVIG: RHYTHM is the worst.
DANIEL: [CLAPS] R-H-Y-T-H-M, everybody’s got their mnemonics, right?
HEDVIG: Okay.
GABE: Yeah. Mm-hmm. The creative spelling free spelling movement. This was this idea that instead of standardizing traditional spelling or standardizing simplified spelling, de-standardize the entire thing and let people spell how they want. And the idea is that among children, this boosts creativity, it boosts play, it opens up the page to more creative expression. And maybe just as a poet or a rapper will write school S-K-O-O-L, it gets your point across and it also kind of makes you smile at the same time.
And it comes from this idea that language maybe is as much art as it is communication. And it also reduces the gatekeeping. It reduces the stigma of being a poor speller. Rigid spelling rules, even if they’re the simplified spelling rules, anything that’s rigid like that does create this barrier to adoption. And people with dyslexia, non-native speakers get judged as uneducated or unintelligent even when their meaning is perfectly clear. So, if the function of language is to clearly convey a thought, as long as you spell it in a way that’s understood by the other party, is there anything wrong with that?
DANIEL: Hedvig’s making a face.
HEDVIG: But that’s the problem.
DANIEL: I thought you’d be fully on board, Hedvig.
HEDVIG: I am on a personal level. You know me.
DANIEL: I do.
HEDVIG: I love to poke at senior people who are snobby. I write quite spokenly a lot of the time, but one of the reasons that I let the autocorrect correct my IMMEDIATE and all the -ABLE things like -ABLE and EDIBLE and when the ELs are just sort of like…
DANIEL: -ABLE and -IBLE. Yep.
HEDVIG: But I do think that it is harder to cope with the variation as a reader in writing than in hearing. And I think about dyslexic people, I don’t have dyslexia, but I would imagine that it might free you up as a writer, as the sender of the information. But the receiver, the reader, I think it increases the cost a lot for them in a way that I don’t think pronunciation variation does. I think we’re better at coping with that. Let’s all remember, writing is a fairly recent thing that humans invented. Literacy, mass literacy is quite recent. And we’re actually probably co-opting our face recognition or pattern recognition, visual part of our brains to do reading and writing. It’s not… It’s a separate thing.
DANIEL: That’s a good point. We’re always making predictions. And if you don’t make it predictable, then it becomes really, really hard. Like putting words in a sentence in any order you want, you can’t do it, doesn’t work.
GABE: Right, it creates more chaos than clarity, I think. Mark Twain, at a certain point in his life, he had a strange relationship with simplified spelling. There were years where he was all for it and then years where he was against it. And then, he had these years where he believed in creative or free spelling. And he always pointed to his daughter and his wife, both of whom he admitted were poor spellers, but he loved and treasured their poor spelling in a way that it was almost their fingerprint. It made them them. It was like a little facial characteristic that some people might look at and see as a blemish, but he looks at and sees as, “This is my wife, this is my daughter, this is who they are.” And a poor spelling or a creative misspelling often says a lot about the speller. And you can kind of get this little insight into their brain. So, Mark Twain, I don’t think he ever saw it as something that could function in society on a large scale, but he really treasured the idea in theory of free or creative spelling.
HEDVIG: I think that’s a very beautiful idea. I do think it works quite interestingly for intimates like your spouse, your children, your parents. But today, we read things like written by JD Vance on Twitter. I read from a lot of different people, not all of whom I want to know intimately and learn their quirks. I would rather not have to learn everyone’s quirks.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s true.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Gabe, I want to ask you one question before we wrap it up. So, you’ve spent a long time looking at English, how it’s spelled in the past, how it’s spelled now. Do you think that simplified spelling or spelling change is going to happen organically? When you think about English 200 years, 300 years from now, what do you see happening?
HEDVIG: Mm.
GABE: I do think it will happen organically. And I don’t think that will come from some top-down approach by a board or a society or an academy trying to impose these spellings.
DANIEL: We’ve tried that. [LAUGHS]
GABE: We’ve tried that for hundreds of years and it didn’t work. But what’s working now is this bottom-up approach. And a lot has to do with the digital communication we use, the shorthand’s we use in texting and social media. These are, I think, indicative of where the language will naturally go. And I don’t think we have any conscious say in the matter. I think we have all voted with our texts, with our phones over the past 20 years. And generally, I think things will get simpler.
I think the way evolution works in language, just as in biology, is that there are these little coincidences or happenstances or mistakes that over time accumulate into large change. I would be surprised if in 300 years we’re not spelling though T-H-O, for instance, or some other smaller versions of that. Shakespeare was spelling in a way that’s incorrect for us now. And I think we’re spelling in a way that will be considered incorrect in a few hundred years.
Noah Webster has this great quote that I like to think about a lot. He says something like, and this is paraphrasing, he said, “The progress of language is like the course of the Mississippi,” in that essentially you can’t change that course. That water is going to flow in a certain direction. It’s going to erode certain areas just by its natural tendencies. No human hand or bulldozer can really change the course of that massive river. The best we can do is observe it from the bank. Maybe we could paddle through it or swim through it. But you really can’t change the direction of that water flow. And I think the direction that water is flowing right now is towards simplicity.
HEDVIG: That’s a beautiful image.
DANIEL: That is a beautiful image. The book is Enough Is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell. It’s available now from Dey Street Books and we’re talking to the author, Gabe Henry. Gabe, how can people find out what you’re doing?
GABE: It’s gabehenry.com and on Instagram, I’m @gabe.henry.
HEDVIG: Nice.
DANIEL: All right, well, hey, Gabe, thanks so much for hanging out with us today. This has been a lot of fun.
GABE: Thank you so much. It was a great time.
[MUSIC]
[INTERVIEW ENDS]
DANIEL: And now, it’s time for Words of the Week. And there are a bunch of them.
BEN: Ooh, fun.
DANIEL: First one, INNIE. Your innie is your at-work persona. There was an article in the New York Times about this. It’s called “Your ‘Innie’ Will Want to Read This.” We’ll throw up a copy, a gifted copy on the show notes for this episode. So, the concept is that in the show severance, some employees at fictional company, Lumon, have undergone the severance procedure. When they’re at work, they have no memory of their outside life. And when they’re outside, they can’t remember anything they do at work. So, your sense of self is partitioned.
BEN: I find it to be like a soft, transhuman, philosophical kind of speculative fiction thing. Like, when do you stop being you? That sort of a kind of a vibe.
HEDVIG: Severance is a little bit like a Black Mirror episode, but two seasons. And also, the innies all can have distinct personalities and everything, so they don’t know anything about the outside world because they behave very differently. There’re some people in the show that argue that they each have a soul, so they can go to heaven separately.
BEN: In relation to this being a Word of the Week, I really enjoyed Severance, both seasons. I’ve had a great time with the show. The one and only discordant note basically in the entire show is the nomenclature they came up with of INNIE and OUTIE. I hate it. I hate it so much.
DANIEL: Oh, really?
BEN: I really do.
HEDVIG: Really?
BEN: I really do.
DANIEL: Does it make you think of belly buttons? Is that what it is?
BEN: Well, it seems so bizarrely childlike and so little of anything else in the show has been coded that way. It’s not like a manifestation. It’s not like the family who created it all speak in this bizarre, childlike way or anything like that. It’s just this weird fossil-y thing that just stands out in the show like a really like you’re eating a meal and then there’s just a really discordant flavor, like you’re having some ice cream and someone puts some tomato sauce on it or something like that, and it’s just like, blah. I don’t like it.
HEDVIG: So, you would want like INSIDERS and OUTSIDERS or something like that.
BEN: It’s not that. Look, I don’t for a second claim to have the kind of writing chops to come up with a better option. I just know I don’t like this one.
DANIEL: Well, it is certainly getting taken up by many of us, even who aren’t big Severance watchers. People are saying things like, “Yeah, I do this innie work so that my outie can have a nice vacation.”
BEN: What I think is so funny about that is that, like, this is very explicitly why Dan Erickson created this show. Like, if you read interviews about how he came up with the idea, he’s like, “Well, after I graduated college and before I became a TV writer, I was doing temp work in an office. And I hated it, and it was eating my soul.” And so, people are like, “Oh, my god, this is just like my life.” I’m like, “Yeah, because a dude based it on your life.” This is not out there thinking, this is just literally a guy just staring at a clock for nine hours and having a basic fugue state. I just think that’s really cute.
HEDVIG: It’s in the same genre as like Office Space and other fiction in this space where there are so many people who have jobs that are not meaningful, let alone like low paid or monotonous or something, but just not rewarding to them. And I think since the pandemic and also with generational shift, people are just not that happy to be grinding away. Like, work, if you work eight hours a day, that’s like a large part of your day. You would want it to be meaningful in some sort of way.
DANIEL: You people have jobs?
BEN: Douglas Adams famously described this as like telephone handle sanitisers in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: Like when a society gets a sufficient block of truly useless workers and it’s not their fault, right? Like, they exist in a society where they’re like, “We need telephone handle sanitisers, please.” Now, I must concede that we’ve just lived through covid. So, it turns out telephone handle sanitisers, an important job that does need to exist, but the point is valid.
HEDVIG: I think something that I realised. I have a couple of friends who have various kinds of jobs that include explaining to senior executives what large language models actually can do. And what has happened it seems to me I might be wrong. If I’m wrong, tell me I’m wrong. But it seems to me that for a long time there were various tools that were developed, like regular expressions, optical character recognition that for some reason these executives never heard about. And then, they hired a bunch of people to do it, to do data entry and stuff. And that went on for a couple of decades. And now, they’ve heard that large language models can solve all these problems. So, they’re replacing those humans with large language models instead of replacing them with a Python script with regular expressions.
BEN: Yeah. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: But it seems like no one ever told them about regular expressions in this gap time, which is the weird part to me, because they could have actually effectivised this workforce a lot sooner, but for some reason it didn’t penetrate. But large language models have, and now they think they can do everything, so they’re using them for tasks that… you don’t need to be doing, that you can do something much simpler for what you want. You don’t need to be burning the rainforest for this. And I think those jobs are the innie jobs.
BEN: So, INNIE has become a thing.
DANIEL: Innies and outies are an interesting way of talking about work-life balance. Are we partitioning off our lives? What do we owe the companies that we work for? And I just find that amnesia is such a compelling concept in fiction, like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
BEN: Yeah. And especially rare, right? It’s like one of those things that we love to use in fiction despite its incredible uncommonness within medical literature. It’s borderline not a thing, basically. It’s so rare that it might as well be fake. But how could we not, right? It’s such a compelling concept. And in some ways, I think amnesia is like sort of… At least the way it’s used in fiction is like soft sci-fi a lot of the time, right? It allows you to speculate on things in ways that you might not be able to in more sort of conventional, dramatic sort of realities and that sort of thing. Maybe that’s just me being an absolute sci-fi fantasy nerd and being like, “Oh, that’s basically like sci-fi.”
HEDVIG: No, I think it is. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind should be classified as sci-fi if Black Mirror is sci-fi.
BEN: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. No, no one’s arguing that Eternal Sunshine… but perhaps just the classic, like the Jason Bourne man, falls off a boat and loses his memory kind of thing. I would still classify that as sort of almost like speculative fiction because it allows for you to explore human beings and their psychology in a way that you really can’t and kind of can’t in reality, because amnesia is basically not a thing.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Anyway, let’s go on to our next one. TEMU. Am I saying that right? Temu. How do you say the name of the Chinese shopping thing?
HEDVIG: Temu.
BEN: I have heard Australians exclusively call it Temu [timu].
DANIEL: Temu. Very good.
BEN: Temu.
DANIEL: Well, I only see it in writing, so I never hear anybody say it, but Temu is taking on a derogatory meaning, as in calling Peter Dutton Temu Trump. Like Trump, but just…
HEDVIG: Budget.
DANIEL: Not as good.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Homebrew.
DANIEL: I remember on election day in the US When Donald Trump was doing his voting and he had a woman with him who was ostensibly his wife, Melania. But she was wearing sunglasses and smiling, and people said, “Who’s this?” And people started referring to her as “Temu Melania.” I never found out if it was really her or not, but let’s watch out for Temu. Derogatory.
HEDVIG: Her smiling was worse?
DANIEL: It was just that she never… When does she ever smile in public? Never seems to happen.
BEN: Daniel, I think you believe that Hedvig and I are exposed to a lot more imagery of Melania Trump than we actually are.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah. I barely know what she looks like.
DANIEL: Well, I’ve got just about zero and you’ve got less.
BEN: If you showed me an image of like ten vaguely similar rich plastic surgery white women, I would not be able to pick her out of that lineup.
DANIEL: Well, me neither. And that’s why I had trouble saying, “Wait, is this the real person or not?”
BEN: Fair enough.
HEDVIG: Is it a version of like, “I want to get Melania Trump in the store. We have Melania Trump at home. Melania Trump at home.” [LAUGHTER] Is it that?
DANIEL: Well, you could meme…
BEN: Sort of.
DANIEL: …it that way. You could.
BEN: Except I think this one has a specifically… We can have the thing at home is more like, “No, but I want the fancy store bought thing.” It doesn’t mean the thing at home is inherently really crappy and shit and going to fail and break. Whereas the Temu has that connotation, like the extraordinarily… You know what? I can actually… Yes, and this particular Word of the Week, because I’ve heard temu used as a verb.
DANIEL: To Temu something. Huh?
BEN: Yeah. So, to get temu’d, it has become the retail version of getting catfished.
DANIEL: You didn’t quite get what you wanted.
HEDVIG: Oh.
BEN: Yep. I bought a pillow on Temu and it was like this big and that sort of thing. I got Temu’d.
HEDVIG: I bought a sundress on AliExpress.
DANIEL: You got Temu’d.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I got Temu’d. I also got refunded.
BEN: Oh, oh, there we go.
HEDVIG: Very easily, but…
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: This one comes to us from Aristemo: DISINFORMATION SPACE. This is when Trump called Ukrainian President Zelenskyy a dictator. This is from the BBC. His comments followed a statement from Zelenskyy, who said, “Trump is living in a disinformation space fueled by Russia.” And boy, I just thought that was a really good way of putting it, thinking of someone in a conceptual disinformation space.
BEN: Is that a play on anything? Do we have an information space? Is that a phrase that we say or something like that?
DANIEL: It’s not connected to anything for me.
HEDVIG: We have ECHO BUBBLE.
BEN: No, I know. But no, I meant specifically about this, like, is this a play on words in some way? It doesn’t seem like it is though.
DANIEL: I don’t think so. It just seems like a good way to conceptualise the state of somebody who has accepted a complex, interlocking meme web of nonsense.
BEN: See, when we talk about the administration and Donald Trump and all that kind of stuff, I don’t know about you guys, but I have zero confidence in saying whether I believe Donald Trump is a true believer in a bunch of disinformation, or if he is a smart man who is just very deliberately being as difficult…
HEDVIG: Oh, I don’t think it matters.
BEN: …and obfuscating as possible.
DANIEL: No, no, no.
BEN: No, but what I mean is, like, I don’t at all feel any sense of clarity about what kind of insanity is at work there. So, to say that Donald Trump lives in a disinformation space, I mean, like, that might be true, that could be true, but he is also at the sort of… He has access to what has to be the most sophisticated intelligence operation the world has ever seen.
DANIEL: And he does not listen to it.
BEN: Well, sure, but that doesn’t mean that information isn’t there and in his space. I’m not saying that Zelenskyy is wrong at all, he might be absolutely on the money, but what is so bizarre to me is how opaque it is as to what is actually going on there, right? It’s a…
HEDVIG: Is it? It seems just like as soon as something is mentioned on Fox News, he wants to make a policy about it. We can kind of track what he follows quite easily.
BEN: No, yes.
HEDVIG: I think we underestimate how much he believes in fascism and strong men. He kind of thinks that Putin has a right to parts of Ukraine just because Putin is larger.
BEN: See, again, I don’t feel like I do have confidence that he believes that. I just know that he is behaving in bizarre ways.
DANIEL: I have arrived at a view on this, and I’d like to place my vote now.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: There is no nine-dimensional chess happening here. He really is…
BEN: No, I don’t think that. No, no, no, no.
DANIEL: Okay. Well, the debate is he crazy like a fox, and he knows what he’s doing not because of intelligence, but because of raw cunning and self-interest. My vote is, there’s no intelligence happening here. He is as dumb as a box of rocks.
BEN: Okay, fair enough.
HEDVIG: But he is like a real estate slumlord, exploitative person who kind of believes that if there is a loophole and he exploits it, regardless if it’s ethical or not, he’s like, “Oh, it’s your fault for having that loophole.” That’s kind of how he would act.
BEN: That aspect of his personality, I find is abundantly clear, right?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: That he is a person for whom, if you can get away with it, then it is okay.
HEDVIG: We kind of need to maybe put a Trump ban on some episodes.
DANIEL: Yeah, I think you’re right. So, let’s wallow in it for now. Now, this one is by James because our listeners keep suggesting these things, and they’re in the water. CANADIANO or Canad-iano.
BEN: I like it. It’s fine.
DANIEL: What is it?
HEDVIG: Oh, I know this.
DANIEL: Go ahead, Hedvig.
HEDVIG: It is a type of coffee drink.
DANIEL: It is a type of coffee drink.
HEDVIG: It is what my husband likes to order at the coffee shop.
BEN: Oh, I didn’t realise this. I thought it was just a fun new word for Canadians.
HEDVIG: No, it’s like freedom fries for French fries.
DANIEL: Yes, it is.
HEDVIG: So, Canada is boycotting American products. And also, they’re no longer ordering americanos, which is, I think, a term invented because American soldiers liked it like that when they were in Europe.
BEN: Yeah. So, we better do a quick recap on the coffee culture. So, in America, unlike many other parts of the world, drip coffee or filtered coffee, just like big sort of flasks of coffee is available at every diner you could possibly go to. And Americans drink their coffee predominantly this way. Yes, there is Starbucks and there is, like, Barista coffee and that sort of thing. It is predominantly a more sort of rudimentary coffee experience.
DANIEL: Yeah. Weird to me.
BEN: So, elsewhere in the world, when Americans travel, because they do from time to time, the nomenclature, and it probably did come from the war, developed of like a sort of weak, watery black coffee, at least compared to espresso coffee.
HEDVIG: No, it is espresso, and americano is espresso with hot water in it.
BEN: That’s what I mean. That is a weak, watery coffee.
HEDVIG: Okay.
BEN: Because you take a normal espresso and then you water it down. So, that’s the phrasing of that style of coffee elsewhere in the world, because other places don’t have the little filter carafe machine, so they have to make it another way. And that’s called an americano.
DANIEL: Well, so I tried to get to the bottom of the story. It could be that American soldiers would take espresso and dilute it so they could have the experience of drinking the piss-weak coffee that they had at home.
BEN: The cup of joe.
DANIEL: On the other hand, it could be the Italians simply thought that diluted espresso resembled American drip coffee, and they decided to call that an americano. But one way or the other, the name got stuck. And now in a freedom-fries move, Canadians are calling americanos canadianos. So that’s a delightful…
BEN: I like it. That’s a lot less gross than the freedom fries were.
DANIEL: Well, it goes on the list, the Wikipedia list of things renamed in protest.
BEN: Wait, what else is on the list?
DANIEL: There’s a lot, actually. There’s SAUERKRAUT, got renamed to LIBERTY CABBAGE during World War I.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Can we just… What are the ones that don’t involve the word “liberty” or “freedom”?
DANIEL: Hang on, I’ll pull it up.
BEN: Yeah, scroll, scroll. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Scroll. Should we do episodes that it’s just like us googling stuff? Because I kind of like it. [BEN LAUGHS]
DANIEL: List of politically motivated renamings, and I’m dropping it in chat.
BEN: Okay, here we go, here we go.
HEDVIG: Okay, so we’ve got one in Israel. In 1975, Israel renamed avenues that were called the UN Avenue in Jerusalem Tel Aviv to Zionism Avenue. That’s a bold move.
DANIEL: Entire cities, like the Ontario city of Berlin was renamed Kitchener. So, renaming cities. Oh, and the reason in South Australia why Pallone that processed pink meat is called Devon instead of Fritz was because that was a politically motivated renaming. It’s called Fritz in other places. It’s called Devon in South Australia. That’s another one on the list.
BEN: There you go. Interesting.
DANIEL: So, innie, Temu, disinformation space, and canadiano are words of the week. Should we go on to a comment?
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: This comment is from Mathieu who emailed us, hello@becauselanguage.com. You might remember that in our recent episode with Dr Carmen Fought, we talked about Trump’s executive order making English the official language of the USA, and we noticed that national unity was supposedly a selling point, which is absurd. I mean, a country can be unified even when everyone is speaking the same language. US Civil War, for instance. Convincing evidence. And Carmen mentioned The Troubles in Ireland as an example of people speaking the same language and not being unified. And I thought that was an okay example. Wouldn’t you have thought?
BEN: Ooh, hang on, I sense… [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I suspect so that when the troubles were happening, they were more Irish speakers than there… There are still a fair amount, of Irish speakers, so [UNINTELLIGIBLE 01:51:41]
DANIEL: There are a lot of Irish.
HEDVIG: …speaking the Celtic language, Irish, as opposed to the Germanic language, English.
BEN: I would imagine Northern Ireland has much lower levels of Irish speakers than elsewhere in Ireland.
HEDVIG: I think the West is the stronghold. Yeah.
DANIEL: Mathieu has added some context. Mathieu says, “While it is true that in the later Troubles, which were mostly concentrated in the northeast of Ireland, combatants on both sides spoke English, this was a direct result of the British colonisation against which the Republicans were rebelling. The earlier Troubles of the 1910s and 1920s, now referred to by different names but contemporarily called The Troubles too, featured far greater numbers of Irish speakers and the language. And the language movement was a large part of the background of the conflict. I live in one of the surviving Irish speaking districts on the West Coast. My own granduncle took part in the War of Independence here with an Irish speaking flying column of the IRA.”
HEDVIG: Wow.
BEN: Cool.
DANIEL: “Conradh na Gaeilge, the Gaelic Language League was a key organisation in the revolutionary period and indeed at least four of the seven signatories of the Proclamation of Independence were senior figures in the organisation. The founding president of the league wrote the necessity of de-anglicising Ireland and went on to become the first president of Ireland. To this very day, the Irish language remains at the heart of the political scene in the north, with the Northern Assembly being suspended for three years over British refusal to implement an Irish Language act.
The same week this episode aired, that same Conradh na Gaeilge 130 years later and the language rights group, An Dream Dearg, celebrated the announcement of an Irish Language Commissioner for the North.”
BEN: Huzzah.
DANIEL: Yeah. “I enjoyed your podcast a lot and you’ve gained a new follower. I apologise if this email comes across as rude or preachy, but it irked me as an Irishman and as an Irish speaker.”
BEN: Not at all.
DANIEL: Kind regards, Mathieu.
BEN: Give me that sweet, sweet context, Mathieu.
DANIEL: Yeah, loved hearing about it. There was a lot going on. But this is all taking place against a background of language diversity fights over what language is going to do. So, I’m really glad to hear about that. Thanks to you Mathieu, and thank you to Gabe Henry. Thanks to everybody who gave us newest words and comments. Thanks to SpeechDocs for transcribing all the words. And thanks to you, great patrons.
BEN: Hedvig’s turn.
HEDVIG: I’m next. [HUFFING PREPARATION NOISES] Okay, I don’t care what you do during our show. You can do workouts, you can bike, you can take care of your children, you can ignore your grandparents or talk to your grandparents. I use podcast, as people who listen to this show, to calm my anxiety and all kinds of things I do every day. But if you do like the show… No, that doesn’t make any sense. I don’t care what you do, if you do like it… doesn’t make any sense. I should not go down that path. I don’t know why I did.
DANIEL: Okay. I appreciate what you’re doing here.
HEDVIG: No, no, no, don’t. [LAUGHTER] Scrap. Oh, now I know. Famously, I don’t care if you like the show or not. A listen is a listen. If you hate this show and you just listen all the way through to just like fuel some kind of rage energy within you, that’s actually chill with me. If you think you know someone else who is the same way, they can listen to it too. If you like the show… qui… if you subscribe to the show because you listen to it and that fulfills something inside of you, regardless if it’s like or not, then you can… If you to make… want us to be able to make more of this rage content for you, here are a few ways you can support us. Ben hates this.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: But I’ve got to do something different.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] There were flames…
HEDVIG: You can’t do the same thing every time.
DANIEL: flames… on the side of my face.
HEDVIG: Downloads are downloads. Anyway, we’ve got to do something different. I can’t say the same thing every time. It’s no fun.
BEN: Oh, man. No, it’s just… I wasn’t hating it. I was just really enjoying watching you.
DANIEL: I’m Tim Curry, watching… where is this going?
HEDVIG: [LAUGHTER] You saw the previous one just went nowhere, so I got a new one that went…
BEN: Look at this drowning woman just like doing the ladder in the water.
HEDVIG: I think this leads to nowhere. Yeah, yeah. Whoof! I have a colleague who tells me she’s very impressed at how much I can generate while I’m still speaking.
DANIEL: Editing.
HEDVIG: Anyway, follow us on all the things, we are becauselangpod we are mainly on Bluesky now, becauselanguage.com there. becauselangpod also exists in other places. For example, I get embarrassing little videos on my TikTok feed because Daniel takes out little videos and he makes little fun little clips and then they appear. And because I subscribe to the show on TikTok, I get them, but then I see myself talking. And also, he takes a video from like the entire episode and maybe some part of the episode, I’m like I’m not picking my nose, but like I might be just looking like not the most flatteringest, but that’s okay.
DANIEL: We get the real Hedvig.
HEDVIG: …as I signed up for that.
DANIEL: It’s the real Hedvig.
HEDVIG: I signed up for that. I signed up for that. Anyway, so on TikTok you can get us as well, becauselangpod. You can also send us your ideas. And if you want to send us your sweet, sweet, sweet voice, you can use SpeakPipe, which is a little widget sort of on our website. So, go to becauselanguage.com for that. Or you can also email us, you can send us a voice note or just a text message. Things like content for, for example, Related or Not or Words of the Week are really interesting to hear from our listeners because you consume other media than we do. So, if you have like a fun Word of the Week from like, I don’t know, like the Philippines or Bolivia…
DANIEL: It’s still going. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: …that could be really fun. You can tell a friend about us and you can also write a review.
DANIEL: Thank you, Hedvig.
BEN: Let’s all take a deep breath, everyone.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Fuck you.
BEN: That was wild!
DANIEL: You know what’s happening?
HEDVIG: And I don’t actually use that.
DANIEL: That was Hedvig… That was Hedvig doing something different. Breaking out of the mould. Not just…
[TOY NOISE IN BACKGROUND]
HEDVIG: Exactly.
BEN: Sorry about that noise, everyone. I smacked the desk in mirth so hard that a Christmas toy that sits behind my screen activated. [LAUGHTER] Let’s do my bit. Becoming a patron is another thing you can do to help support the show. You get stuff depending on your level. Live shows, bonus episodes, mailout, shoutouts and access to the Discord, which is a really, really cool, fun place to hang out with. Well, cool is not actually how I would describe it. Fun…
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] No, it’s not cool.
BEN: …is how I would describe it. Because cool. It’s not cool. It’s deliciously nerdy. It is made up entirely of patrons who are A grade, triple A, A1, all of the different…
HEDVIG: They’re good people.
BEN: …A names you can come up with for why they are great human beings. We are going to shout out some of our patrons right now. But to do that, I need to hand the microphone over to Daniel, because he is a strange man who arranges words in strange ways.
DANIEL: This time, we’re ordering the names of our supporters by elements. That’s right. If your name contains any atomic symbol, your score goes up by that element’s atomic number.
HEDVIG: Daniel? Daniel, are you secretly listening…? Are you…? Because I was talking about the periodic table yesterday.
DANIEL: Wow, okay. And I read your brain and then I decided to do this.
BEN: Folks, if, god forbid, you’re still listening to this part of the show and it is included in this part of the episode, can we just say that this is the most conclusive proof you need for how your phone isn’t listening to you? Because Hedvig has done this three times in this show towards Daniel, who is not a phone and does not have microphones that he can listen with.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] I don’t know that.
DANIEL: I’m not a phone.
BEN: If that can happen with a human meatbag, then you best believe it can happen with your phone. Anyway, Daniel, please.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah, I did order that microphone stand for you and have it sent to your house. Maybe, maybe…
BEN: [LAUGHS] Oh.
HEDVIG: You did do that.
DANIEL: …maybe I’m bugging you. Hope I’m not bugging you. Anyway, here are the names and I want you to notice that you could actually get a big score with a tiny name. Having a long name didn’t necessarily equate to big atomic numbers.
BEN: No, of course not.
DANIEL: But the first one, it’s Andy from Logophilius with the score of 574. You will notice the following elements, oganesson, uranium and francium. Next, Sonic Snejhog at 419. Faux Frenchie. Ariaflame, who got that because of flerovium at 114. Linguistic Chaos. A short name, Laura, punching above her weight with gold, radium and uranium. Meredith. Andy B with ytterbium.
BEN: Whoa.
DANIEL: gramaryen, Kristofer. Kathy, boy, a lot of potassium going on here. PharaohKatt. Luis at 232. Luis had had iodine, lutetium, and uranium on his side.
HEDVIG: Fun.
BEN: Interesting.
DANIEL: Amir at 225 with americium and iridium. Margareth, James, Wolfdog [HOWLS]. No that’s not silver, that’s just [HOWLS].
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Nasrin, Rachel, Rach, Whitney, Ignacio, Mignon, Keith, Canny Archer.
HEDVIG: Gold.
DANIEL: Stop me if you want. Termy, Ayesha. Au is gold.
HEDVIG: Au is gold.
DANIEL: Ag is silver, thank you. Ayesha, Tadhg, Kevin, Chris W. Tungsten does a lot. LordMortis, Felicity, Amy, Nigel, Nikoli. Jack at 114. Larry also at 114. Rodger, Manú, Stan, Rene, Molly Dee, Fiona. I’m here at 88 for reference. O Tim. Hedvig, you’re here at 79 for reference. Chris L, Sydney, Alyssa, Steele, Diego, Lyssa, Tony, Elías, Colleen, J0HNTR0Y, Joanna, Aldo. Now, we’re getting to the low ones. sæ̃m at 16. Ben, you’re here, second to the last.
BEN: Come on, come on, come on.
DANIEL: All you had was beryllium, boron and nitrogen.
BEN: Argh!
HEDVIG: Oh! Second to last.
DANIEL: And Helen in last place at 10.
BEN: Wait, what was my score?
DANIEL: 16.
BEN: Argh, Helen, I’m so jealous. I was so ready to be last in this list. I was like, “Ben, come on, we’ve got it. This is going to be great.” Helen, I doff my hat to you, madam, for being elementarily one step lower on the ladder than me.
DANIEL: Yup, all you had was hydrogen, helium, and a bit of nitrogen.
BEN: Aww.
DANIEL: And then, our newest patrons. You want to take them, Ben?
BEN: At the Listener level, we have Joey and Etymonline. Oh. [MAKES FLUSTERED NOISES]
DANIEL: Yeah, I know, right? I’m a little bit flustered.
BEN: I’m a bit flustered. I mean, Etymonline there too, but Joey, what a get.
DANIEL: Oh, okay. Yeah. So, the funny thing is that we’re patrons of Etymonline, and now Etymonline is patrons of us. So, the only one making bank off of this is Patreon. So, okay.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS]
BEN: At the Friend level, we have Brendan. And our latest free patrons are Andreas, Colin, Asher, 桓棟 邱 (Wong Dong Tu), Bart, and Amber. Thank you to all of our patrons.
DANIEL: Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who’s a member of Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
In Unison: Pew, pew, pew.
BEN: I like what you did there with the old timey jazz late night radio. [IN A SULTRY VOICE] Because Language.
DANIEL: [IN A SULTRY VOICE] Because language. I’m going to stop…
[BOOP]
HEDVIG: Like, they’re not… They have succeeded. Like, I think that they are… They don’t give a shit you think anything about them. And they are dressing the way they want and they’re not trying to make everyone else dress that way.
DANIEL: Is this show about goths now?
BEN: Are we…?
HEDVIG: Maybe it’s because I live in a city that every year have a huge goth festival…
BEN: Yeah. [LAUGHS] I feel like…
HEDVIG: …and I have a lot of goth friends.
BEN: …I’ve accidentally insulted Hedvig and missed it by like seven years maybe. Is that what’s happening, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: No, I’ve never been a goth.
BEN: Okay, okay.
HEDVIG: I just have a lot of love for them. I think that they are…
BEN: I do too.
HEDVIG: Right. So, what are they failing that?
DANIEL: Probably be talking about this two hours from now.
BEN: They’re not failing…
DANIEL: Okay, You know what?
BEN: You know what? Let’s leave it.
DANIEL: I’m going to… I’m going to wrap this up.
[BOOP]
HEDVIG: Hey, one more thing about L though.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: A fun, practical thing. Did you know that when you say an L, you’re letting air pass on the side of your tongue?
BEN: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: It’s a lateral.
HEDVIG: And different people have it more on left or right. And you don’t learn it from your parents because you can’t see into your parents’ mouths.
DANIEL: It’s true.
BEN: Yeah, yeah. So, it’s just a figured-out thing.
HEDVIG: You produce the sound to sound like other people, but you don’t actually know how they produce it. So, why don’t we all take a moment, make an L and then freeze your tongue position and then breathe in quickly and then tell me…?
[EVERYBODY BREATHES IN]
BEN: I think I’m a lefty as in the air is moving more on my left side.
DANIEL: I dress to the left. Yes.
BEN: Which I guess means my tongue is sitting to the right though, so.
DANIEL: Oh, I dress to the right. Yes.
HEDVIG: I think I’m a righty.
BEN: Can I really quickly, and this is going to sound so gross on microphones, but can I share my version of that? Okay. Many languages call this a different thing but blowing a raspberry or making like a fart sound with your tongue and your lips, right? [BLOWS A RASPBERRY] Now, some people, but you’ve got to do it with your tongue between your lips. Not just the lips, but like…
HEDVIG: Tongue between your…
DANIEL: So, stick out my tongue.
[RASPBERRIES ALL AROUND]
BEN: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, like that. Now, some people do it and their bottom lip vibrates. I am a bottom lipper. Some people do it and their top lip vibrates.
DANIEL: Bottom.
BEN: And this is very fun. If you do it right, you can do it with both lips.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: I’m so glad we did this.
BEN: You’re welcome. I have just sprayed my beautiful, large curved screen.
DANIEL: Oh, this is really, really bad.
BEN: Just a fair warning to everyone when you practice that, do it alone.
[BOOP]
HEDVIG: One time I was interviewed at a radio station that I listened to a lot, and I had been listening to their voices a lot. And when I was interviewed, I ended up emulating how everyone else talked. And I had friends who happened to hear it and later said that they didn’t recognise my voice. But at the end, it said, like, “Oh, and this was Hedvig.” And they were like, “What?”
GABE: Were you copying their rhythm and their cadence and their tone?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
GABE: Yeah, it’s funny how that happens. You hang out with certain people, and you develop their… It’s like you all get on the same voice average.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And also, I was thinking to myself that this is how you speak on radio.
GABE: Yeah, there’s a radio voice that we all have in our head, like an NPR voice.
HEDVIG: Yes.
GABE: Kind of low and a little slow.
HEDVIG: I was doing mine of that.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s right.
HEDVIG: And I think if you want to do that, you should do that. If you want to do some other thing, you can do whatever you want.
GABE: Oh, I won’t put on any fake voice.
DANIEL: Oh, come on, let’s do it.
HEDVIG: Why not?
GABE: I’ll just introduce myself as Ira Glass, and… [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: And welcome to the nightline.
HEDVIG: This week: Why do people…?
[LAUGHTER]
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]