It’s Eurovision season! We love to talk about what we can learn about language from this international song contest, but even we didn’t realise that there was so much to learn. Language choice, language policy, language and gender and metaphor — and all of this has been packed into a unit at Umeå University: Linguistics and the Eurovision Song Contest. Paulette van der Voet and Solveig Bollig are heading up the course, and they’re here to tell us all about it… and nerd out with Hedvig besides.
Timestamps
Cold open: 0:00
Intros: 0:39
News: 7:39
Related or Not: 26:41
Interview with Paulette and Solveig: 38:53
Words of the Week: 1:30:08
Comment from John: 1:49:18
The Reads: 1:53:53
Outtakes: 2:02:25
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This time we alphabetised them based on what their name would autocorrect to, if they could only autocorrect to the names of animals for some reason. Which animal name is closest to yours? We used the standard Wagner-Fischer algorithm for Levenshtein distance.
- Alyssa & Ariaflame: alpaca
- Aldo, Amy, Manu, Andy B: ant
- Canny Archer: anteater
- Nasrin: baboon
- Rodger: badger
- Kathy: bat
- Rene: bee
- Nikoli: bison
- Rachel & James: camel
- Colleen & Whitney: chicken
- O Tim & Elias: clam
- LordMortis: cormorant
- Chris W: crow
- Diego: deer
- Tadhg: dog
- Andy from Logophilius: dolphin
- Sydney: donkey
- Jack: duck
- Steele: eel
- Termy: emu
- Margareth: ferret
- Faux Frenchie: finch
- Keith: fish
- Laura: gaur
- Ignacio: gnat
- Kristofer: hamster
- Sonic Snejhog: hedgehog
- Kevin & Helen: heron
- Lyssa & Ayesha: hyena
- Luis: ibis
- Linguistic C̷̛̤̰̳͉̺͕̋̚̚͠h̸͈̪̤͇̥͛͂a̶̡̢̛͕̰͈͗͋̐̚o̷̟̹͈̞̔̊͆͑͒̃s̵̍̒̊̈́̚̚ͅ: kingfisher
- Joanna: koala
- Larry: lark
- Fiona: lion
- Chris L: loris
- gramaryen: marten
- Molly Dee: mole
- PharaohKatt: parrot
- Felicity: pelican
- Mignon: pigeon
- Tony: pony
- Rach: rail
- sam: ram
- J0HNTR0Y: stingray
- Stan: swan
- Amir: tapir
- Meredith: termite
- Nigel: tiger
- Wolfdog: wolf
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Democracy Sausage
https://democracysausage.org/federal_election_2025/
Trump signs executive order enforcing truck drivers must be proficient in English
https://abc7.com/post/trump-truck-drivers-president-signs-new-executive-order-enforcing-motor-proficient-english/16276745/
Most Common Jobs in America (November 2023)
https://standout-cv.com/usa/stats-usa/most-common-jobs-in-america
Children’s reading and writing develop better when they are trained in handwriting
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/04/250430142559.htm
The impact of handwriting and typing practice in children’s letter and word learning: Implications for literacy development
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2025.106195
The kerning on the pope’s tomb is a travesty
https://www.fastcompany.com/91324550/kerning-on-pope-francis-tomb-is-a-travesty
[$$] leprosy | The Oxford Companion to the Bible
https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780195046458.001.0001/acref-9780195046458-e-0428?rskey=iEeb5y&result=428
10 Top Slang NYC Words from Yerrr to Brick (from 2 years ago)
https://nyartlife.com/the-10-top-slang-words-in-new-york-city/
Scientists Say They’ve Discovered a New Color—an ‘Unprecedented’ Hue Only Ever Seen by Five People
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-say-theyve-discovered-a-new-color-an-unprecedented-hue-only-ever-seen-by-five-people-180986473/
The Perils of Audience Capture
https://www.gurwinder.blog/p/the-perils-of-audience-capture
🎁 You’re Being Alienated From Your Own Attention by Chris Hayes | The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/attention-valuable-resource/681221/
God Spared Him Because Flock Raised $8 Million, Roberts Says
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-04-02-mn-1975-story.html
An Animated Demo of the Wagner-Fischer Algorithm for Sequence Alignment
https://calc.hypotheses.org/3265
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
DANIEL: Sorry, I’ve got to do pronunciation. Umeå is the name of the university.
HEDVIG: Umeå.
DANIEL: Umeå.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Umeå.
HEDVIG: If you want to sound a bit more local, you could even say Ume University. Daniel, if you want to come across as a bit like…
DANIEL: I would never presume.
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]
Hello and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. It’s Ben Ainslie. Ben, we’re recording this on the election day for Australia. And Laura on our Discord has mentioned democracy sausage. Ben, did you have a democracy sausage today and maybe explain?
BEN: My local polling place, which is to say primary school, because that’s overwhelmingly where it happens in Australia, had run out of democracy sizzle sausages by the time that I got there. But I, as a clutch backup play, I swung past a Bunnings to feel like I got my sausage. Yeah. Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah, okay.
HEDVIG: Nice.
DANIEL: So, do we know…? Hedvig, should we explain what democracy sausage is?
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: Basically, it’s just sausage. It’s a hot dog. There’s really no sort of grander explanation than that. It is a sausage in a very cheap bun, usually with some fried onions and then your choice of condiments that you have applied to it. And it is available to you after you vote. And it’s usually run by the school parents and carers association. So, the money goes to the school, and they buy new gym equipment or something like that.
DANIEL: But it does contribute to a festive atmosphere. Voting in Australia, it happens on a Saturday. It’s compulsory, so everybody has to do it. So, you see everybody.
BEN: There are very few things that I’m proud of as an Australian, but the way we do elections is a thing that I am incredibly proud of.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yep.
BEN: We fucking rule at voting. [LAUGHS] It’s so good, we’ve got preferential voting. It’s always on a Saturday. It’s all like… Yeah, no, we smash voting in Australia.
HEDVIG: Yeah. You’re pretty good at it.
BEN: We were lucky, I think. We did it last. That’s the reality. It’s like after everyone had fucked up and we had realized globally that, like, “Wow, first [UNINTELLIGIBLE 00:02:32] voting, fucking terrible.” And so, when Australia started doing it, we were like, “Well, what if we fixed all those mistakes?”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] We did. We did.
HEDVIG: No, it is very good.
BEN: Yeah. We’re very lucky in Australia. So, yeah, it was election day, which is always, I don’t know, call me a little bit twee, but there’s always a little bit of a vague civic like pride that comes on voting day. Having said that, I am on record as being like voting is not the best form of democracy and we should definitely move to democratic lotteries. But failing that, Australia does this pretty well.
HEDVIG: Democratic lottery?
BEN: No, we won’t, we won’t, we won’t. You’ll get me going for ages. At the end, remind me and I’ll explain.
DANIEL: And Hedvig Skirgård. Hedvig, I’ve got a question for you. What kind of democracy food would you like to see?
HEDVIG: Oh, so it has to be…
DANIEL: Democracy ravioli.
HEDVIG: It has to be cheap to produce, and it has to be easy to distribute, and it can’t be like a full meal. It has to be like a hot dog, a taco, like a…
BEN: It has to be on the go, like it can’t be a sit-down thing.
DANIEL: These are self-imposed constraints. [LAUGHS]
BEN: No, they’re not. They are constraints of the reality of the situation.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And they technically don’t need to be savory. They could actually be sweet.
DANIEL: Yep.
HEDVIG: So, like a donut could be something. I do like…
DANIEL: Democracy donuts.
BEN: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: I’m a big fan of cinnamon rolls. I have one every weekend at a cafe I go to.
DANIEL: Oh.
HEDVIG: I think they’re quite easy to make. They can even be a little bit warm, but they don’t have to be. Easy.
BEN: Hedvig Skirgård, when you next find yourself in the same geographical location as me, let me make for you my cinnamon rolls, because I am.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah?
BEN: I’m going to say…
DANIEL: Ah, I’ve had these.
BEN: They’re better than nearly every bakery I’ve ever been to, including the ones that are “famous” for their cinnamon scrolls. Whenever I try them, I’m like, “mine’s better than this.”
DANIEL: Yep. Well, I would like to see some democracy fries with a side of liberty ketchup.
BEN: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: That’s what I want. But I like Hedvig’s idea a lot better. A fixture of our show has been Hedvig’s annual update of the Eurovision Song Contest, which we always love because there’s a surprising amount that you can learn about language from Eurovision. But even we were surprised at how much about language you could learn from Eurovision. We were surprised that you could get an entire university unit out of it. And we’re saying that because someone has. Right, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: Yes. So, we talked to two of the three course conveners at Umeå University who run the… I think the title of the course is Eurovision and Linguistics, or Eurovision and Languages. I forget the exact title.
DANIEL: It’s called Linguistics and the Eurovision Song Contest.
HEDVIG: Linguistics and Eurovision Song Contest. And we talked to Solveig and Paulette and they were so nice and it was so fun also for me to just… I would throw out a little trivia fact and I was like, “Was that Georgia?” And they’d be like, “Yes, it was.” And I was like, [LAUGHER] “Someone else knows what I’m talking about, and I am correct?”
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: There is a uniquely fun feeling to find people as tragically into, or even more tragically into the thing you’re tragically into than you. There is a deep validation that happens when you’re just like, aah.
DANIEL: It’s true.
HEDVIG: I should say also that I like Eurovision and I like the way that they’ve done it. I like it as a lens to understand other things. So, when you watch Eurovision, you get a sense of how the different countries are portraying themselves. That’s very interesting to me. I kind of care less about the stage performance and… I don’t know, I care about it as a cultural spectacle and a way to understand politics and identity in Europe.
BEN: You approach Eurovision how I approach pro wrestling, which is to say, I don’t actually like it very much, but it’s fascinating.
HEDVIG: Yes, exactly. Which is why I also like… I mean, there are some years where I’ve been like, “I’m not sure I want to watch it. There’s a bad vibe this year,” as some previous years have been, for example. So, yeah, Eurovision nerds come in different flavors, but it was really fun to talk to them. And I don’t know what exact parts Daniel has cut because Solveig and Paulette and I sometimes [BEN LAUGHS] weird off a little bit, so we’ll see what he’s cut up.
DANIEL: Kept it all. Kept it all. Yep. So, we’ll be airing that chat with Paulette van der Voet and Solveig Bollig from Umeå University. Our latest episode was with Dr Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna about their book, The AI Con, where they document the current AI hype cycle that we’re living in. But our episode before that was a live episode for LingFest 25. We piled everybody in a room, voted on tough English usage questions. You can watch that and/or listen to that. If you wanted to be invited to bonus episodes and live episodes or just support the show, you can do that by becoming a patron. You can help us share the message of linguistic science and become part of a community of nerdy people who like language. Just head on over to patreon.com/becauselangpod.
BEN: Hey, Daniel, before we get into Eurovision, should we not check in with what’s going on in the world of linguistics?
DANIEL: Yes. This one was suggested by the Deliquescent Future on BluSky, also by Diego and Aristemo on our Discord. We’ve got a lot of people suggesting the story, which is kind of a shame because it’s about Trump and we do have a Trump band in effect, because it’s exhausting.
BEN: A Trumbargo.
DANIEL: A [LAUGHS] Trumbargo. We don’t want to talk about it all the time, but when it’s about language and when it’s kind of important, we sometimes will jump in. Like when the president made English the official language of the USA, we thought, “This is notable. We should talk about it.” So, the Deliquescent Future says, “Did you catch the executive order requiring truck drivers in the US to be fluent in English ‘sufficiently to converse with the general public’…
HEDVIG: Interesting
DANIEL: …to be enforced against currently licensed commercial drivers by unspecified measures.” Did we? Well, no, we did not. And so, that’s the story.
HEDVIG: Thank you, guys, for bringing it to us. I think it’s really interesting because… So, truck drivers is actually quite a common job in the US. I saw this map of the US states and what the most common job is. We can get into all the details of what counts as the same and different job. But truck driver is… a lot of people are truck drivers.
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: And a lot of people are foreign immigrants who work as truck drivers because they can drive a car and they can do the thing, but they might not necessarily speak English or for that matter, Spanish. I actually had a supervisor, a linguistics professor, who was interested in this because there’s been like a bit of rumors that there’s like a trucker pidgin.
DANIEL: Oh, right.
HEDVIG: That because there are so many different people speaking different languages and they sometimes need to get on those little sets and be like, “Hey, there’s a big boulder on this road,” and you go on the radio and you tell all the other ones so that they can safely navigate the roads and whatever. So, truck drivers often talk to each other on this radio. Maybe now, it’s all Bluetooth, Wi-fi, satellite, I don’t know.
DANIEL: Is that a CB radio? Is that what it is?
BEN: Yeah. Breaker, breaker.
DANIEL: 1/9.
HEDVIG: Something like that. But it makes a lot of sense that even if you work for different companies and stuff, you might want to be collegial and be like, “Hey, this is happening,” or like, “I’m behind you, but don’t worry,” or whatever.
BEN: I think even on a much simpler level, truck drivers just talk to each other as well, because it’s a boring job where you spend a lot of time just with not a lot to do.
HEDVIG: Right. This is why my mom, she went hitchhiking around the US in the 1970s, said that truck drivers are really good because they’re bored out of their minds and they’re going really far, and they’re like, “Sure, I’ll take you to Nevada.” And you can do that safely or unsafely, I don’t know if it’s possible to do. But anyway, there’s this idea that because a lot of them don’t speak the same languages, that they would have developed certain shorthand communication for common things to say.
BEN: Yeah, like Creole or something.
HEDVIG: Exactly. And that this could be understood as a pidgin in the same way that we talk about trade pidgins or war pidgins or colonization pidgins…
DANIEL: Or even space pidgins.
HEDVIG: But it’s sort of hard to get data on this. So, there were some people saying maybe this is happening. And there were some people in trucker forums online talking a little bit about the shorthand. But to my knowledge, no one’s done a research project on this. But if they’re all forced to have a high level of English, then yeah, they wouldn’t need this.
DANIEL: Well, here’s the background. This is kind of a revival of an old rule from 90 years ago. That’s right, July 1937. The rule was that truckers had to, A, be able to read road signs, B, communicate with law enforcement, and C, interact with employers and customers in English.
HEDVIG: I can see that.
DANIEL: Some reasonable things.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Up until the Obama years, there were loads and loads of infractions drawn up. A lot of people were also placed under a situation called out of service, which means you’re done. You’re not able to work in this business. In the Obama years, enforcement became deprioritized, and so those infractions stopped. But now, this is a revival of that. And it’s an executive order, which is not the same as a law. But executive orders do send signals, and people who are in positions of power will take that as a signal that if they wish to abuse the law or use the law very zealously, there will be no consequences for that.
And I was thinking, why trucking? But I think you’ve answered that question for me. This is a place where maybe a lot of people who don’t speak English work, and it’s a lot of people, is a sizable work group. And this is a chance to enable people in positions of power to fire people who are either English learners or not great at English or just simply not hire them.
HEDVIG: I think the question that’s important here is if there is an actual danger to road safety. Because if there is, I can understand wanting a solution, right?
DANIEL: Right. Well, I did do some looking up on that, and it seems that even in cases where there have been big accidents or bad accidents, the problem hasn’t been language. Language didn’t cause the problem, usually. It was lack of training or other things that can get you in trouble if you’re in the trucking industry, just from my lookups. Now, it’s not clear how this is going to be enforced. And my fear is because, of course, the Trump administration has a thirst for the worst, it’s probably going to take the form of arbitrary hassling of people who aren’t in the in group. But for people who are in the in group, they’ll be fine and won’t be affected by it at all. And the reason this is happening, I think, is because Trump is just that guy who hates having to press 1 for English on phones if he ever did have to. Once again, it’s rules for thee and not for me, rules that protect the in group, but punish the out group. That’s what I think is going on here.
HEDVIG: So, if immigrant truckers might not have jobs, they would need to be replaced by American-born English-speaking truckers who want those jobs. And what sometimes happens when immigrants are kicked out of certain fields is that some developed nations find that their own don’t want to do it. [CHUCKLES] So, this happens with like fruit picking, for example, where it’s like, “Okay, then we have no one to pick our avocados,” so it’ll be interesting to see how many… And I mean, it’s also possible that a lot of the immigrant truck drivers actually might meet this requirement. Even if they don’t speak English fluently, they could maybe meet these requirements. We’ll see. We’ll see what happens.
DANIEL: It’s anybody’s guess how much trucking will even happen once the coming economic slowdown happens. The tariff-induced slowdown.
BEN: Yeah, maybe all of the jobs that are lost are sort of like pretty much exactly how many fewer will be needed because the economy has shrunk.
HEDVIG: And also, when we talked to Carmen Fought, she also brought up that a lot of people who move to the US and who don’t speak English very well want to learn English. So, she talked about them doing these volunteer training sessions with people. So, people would travel far, but often they have a 9-to-5 job and a family. And they don’t have the resources, they can’t pay for the courses. They don’t have enough time. So, if this means that trucking companies are going to give classes in English to these truckers, that… I mean, I don’t know if that’s going to happen.
DANIEL: Oh, that’s a nice idea. Let’s find out if that’s what happens.
HEDVIG: We’ll see what happens.
DANIEL: Well, thanks to the Deliquescent Future and to Diego and Aristemo for bringing that story up to us. Here’s a question. When it comes to learning, what’s better, typing or actual writing?
BEN: Well, we have three educators on this show. So, I would imagine that we are all familiar with the evidence for this.
DANIEL: Well, spell it out because I’m a little fuzzy.
HEDVIG: I’m not.
DANIEL: Go for it.
HEDVIG: No, I don’t know the… I’m the one… I’m saying I don’t know a lot about… I’m bad at handwriting.
BEN: So, look, I might be about to eat a whole bunch of crow, but let’s see.
HEDVIG: Yup, let’s go.
DANIEL: Just tell me what you know.
BEN: My understanding is that there is substantial evidence to suggest that things like retention are significantly improved if you incorporate a substantial handwriting component to your learning process…
DANIEL: Really?
BEN: …or to put in a much simpler way, when you write stuff by hand, you do a better job at retaining it and remembering it.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Why is that, do you think?
BEN: I suspect it’s because it’s slower and it operates at a speed that… This is not evidence based at all. This is just my supposition. I’ve always guessed or presupposed that it’s to do with the fact that you have to go quite slow when you write. Even people who write quickly, the fastest typers are much, much faster than the fastest writers unless you’re doing some weird journalism shorthand or something like that.
HEDVIG: Shorthand, yeah.
BEN: And I think for that reason, and because you are engaging not only the psychological process of like, “I want to spell words on a page,” you’re also doing like the mechanical and dexterous manipulation. Now, I understand that with a keyboard you’re doing that too, but I think… I don’t know, there’s just something about writing that hits different. For me, typing on a keyboard can exist sort of a little bit faster than conscious thought, whereas writing absolutely can’t, right? Like, writing happens slower than conscious thought.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. I mean, when you’re typing stuff on a keyboard, it’s the same motion, just in a different place, doot, doot, doot. But when you’re writing different letters. That’s a suite…
BEN: Yeah, exactly.
DANIEL: …of different movements. Mm. Well, this is some work from Dr Gorka Ibaibarriaga of Universidad del País Vasco in San Sebastián, Spain, and a team. This was published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. They were working with 5- and 6-year-olds because they felt like that was kind of a critical time for writing. And they got the young ones to use the Georgian and Armenian alphabets, which they hadn’t seen before. And they would have to remember letters, sounds, pairings, and made-up words. And to practice, some of the kids used a keyboard and others had to actually write. And it turns out that, Ben, as you say, the kids that did better in the tests were the kids who had to physically write to practice. The team says, “Our work confirms that the graphomotor function is essential in memorizing letters and word structures.” So, it seems that doing the task with your body helps a lot.
HEDVIG: Do you think it also has to do with the breaking down of the character? So, for example, I’ve been doing like Duolingo Japanese and Mandarin lately, and it makes you practice the signs. And I also did Mandarin in high school, so I remember a bit of that. And it’s like, “Oh, well, it’s first this little dot and then there’s this line and then this one.” And you become intimately familiar with the internal structure in a way that when you type it, you do it all at once. Am I making sense?
DANIEL: It totally makes sense to me because I had the same experience. I had to learn Cyrillic handwriting, and I just did it for a long time and I can still remember it even though there’s so much Russian that I’ve forgotten, I spent so much time on Cyrillic handwriting, but I kind of surprised myself by still remembering automatically how it goes.
HEDVIG: Why did you learn Cyrillic?
DANIEL: I minored in Russian…
HEDVIG: You did?
DANIEL: …for my undergraduate.
HEDVIG: Oh, cool.
DANIEL: I did. Yeah.
BEN: I remember this. Yeah, I knew this…
DANIEL: Didn’t you know that about me?
BEN: …interesting little factoid and fact about Daniel.
HEDVIG: That’s cool.
DANIEL: Yeah. So, if you want to learn, if you want to be able to memorize, try getting in there and writing the characters instead… Well, now this is with different writing systeMs If you’re learning a language and you have to do a different writing system, try grabbing a pencil, not just typing.
BEN: I know I’m ever more drifting into this space of being like a… Not only a crotchety person but like a person who is like eschewing a lot of modern things.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: But there is, I think… going slow and finding ways to go slow is a thing that I think will be increasingly important for us as a society as our world gets ever faster and more sort of complicated and AI and blah, blah, blah, blah. And writing by hand is just a really effective break on stuff. You can’t go fast if you’re doing some sort of task where you have to write stuff out by hand. I don’t know. I’m looking for ways to slow down. And that seems like one of the good ones.
DANIEL: That is. Thanks. Let’s go on to our last news story. Pope Francis died recently, and people have noticed something about his tomb. It’s covered by a slab of marble on which is simply inscribed the name, Franciscvs. The U on the end of -us is a V, which is very cool, very classical.
BEN: Well, that’s just like all European architecture.
HEDVIG: [CROSSTALK]
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s like Roman.
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: But how to put this? It’s the kerning.
BEN: Oh, Daniel, are we doing font nerd stories? That what’s happening here? [LAUGHTER] I just need to share with everyone listening. We do this remotely, but we can see each other. And Daniel just had the cheekiest fucking grin when I asked that question. [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Another fun tidbit about Daniel, besides the fact that he apparently knows a bit of Russian and Cyrillic, is that he’s designed fonts, which I knew about in theory, and then a year ago, I was using an app to do a thing, and one of Daniel’s fonts came up as an option, and I was like, “Ooh.”
DANIEL: Was it the Daniel font?
BEN: Was it the Daniel font?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: That was me.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: But, Ben, you might notice when kerning is really bad, and by kerning, I’m referring to…
BEN: [CROSSTALK] for being a font dork, but there is, unfortunately… what is actually happening here is I am not at peace with a side of myself which is also a closeted font dork.
DANIEL: You are trying to destroy that side of yourself.
BEN: Yes. Exactly.
DANIEL: Yes, I know.
BEN: So, please tell me about what font crimes have been writ large upon the marble slab atop Pope Francis’s corpse?
DANIEL: So, kerning refers to the space between letters in a word. If you put the same exact amount of space between all the letters in a line, it will sometimes look wrong.
BEN: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: For example, the word, wave. If you have an equal amount of space between all the letters, it will look wrong because the W and the A need to be a little closer together to look right, and the A and the V need to be a little closer together so there’s not this massive hallway of space between them, this diagonal. You need to look at, not actual space, but visual space.
BEN: I hate to say it, but it’s about the vibes, man. It’s one of those things of if you do it…
DANIEL: It’s bad.
BEN: …exactly right, the vibes are all off. And then, if you just gussy it up and you get the vibes right, it feels like everything’s equal and it’s not…
DANIEL: Yep, that’s true.
HEDVIG: Or if you have what’s called a monospace font, where each character has the same exact space, people will think it’s programming because it’s popular…
BEN: Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
HEDVIG: …in a lot of programming UIs. So sometimes, when you see someone who just wants to say, “This is code,” they’ll use a monospace font.
DANIEL: I do that in my notes for my lectures. It’s true.
BEN: So, Daniel, what has happened to the tomb?
DANIEL: Oh, it’s not good. The word, Franciscvs, the F and the R just look like they are more widely spaced than the other letters and that poor A is absolutely stranded out there on its own.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: It’s done in Times New Roman, which is an unusual choice, but it’s very nice. It’s very understated, but somebody has clear… There’s an illustration in the story for this in Fast Company link in the show notes for this episode. But if you look at the illustration that somebody has made, you can see they’ve just placed equal space between every letter and it looks very, very wrong, which is unfortunate. I mean, if it were my slab, I would frigging get up…
BEN: Literally turning in the ground.
DANIEL: …unleash holy hell.
BECCA: Yeah. Yeah.
DANIEL: I would.
BEN: No, look, it does look, looking at the… I’m looking at the image now. It does look for listeners essentially, like there was a person called Anciscvs and they had some sort of job that was like a doctor, but like a fraktur. Because it just looks like F-R-anciscvs.
DANIEL: It’s Brother Anciscvs. Fr Anciscvs.
HEDVIG: In the interest of having not everyone agree, but also in my true opinion, I am looking at the thing and I’m going to tell you, dear listeners, it’s fine.
BEN: It’s not. She’s wrong.
DANIEL: Okay, tell them…
HEDVIG: It’s not that bad.
BEN: She’s dead wrong.
HEDVIG: It’s not that bad.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] This tells us about Hedvig and not about so much about the [CROSSTALK]
BEN: You can look at that F-R and you can say, “That looks like it’s part of the rest of the word,” really? I don’t believe you, madam.
HEDVIG: I just… Yeah, it’s fine.
DANIEL: Aengryballs on our Discord said, “I hope they redo it. At least turn the stone over and do it properly on the other side.” [LAUGHTER]
BEN: That’s fun, though. I kind of almost do wish they’d do that because that’s the sort of stuff that like a thousand years from now when they excavate something, because we find that, right? We find evidence of like, “Oh, I fucked that up. Here, I’ll flip it over and I’ll do it better on the top side.”
DANIEL: Yeah, just flip it over.
BEN: That’s great. That’s like a really fun humanistic thing for the aliens to find when they’re uncovering the evidence of our civilization.
DANIEL: That’s it. The aliens will say, “Oh, there must have been someone named Franciscvs.” And then, they’ll turn it over and see the fucked-up version. And they’ll be like, “Oh, yeah, fair. That’s shit.”
BEN: Or we can see that they had the capacity for rational thought at least.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Excuse me.
DANIEL: And some design sense.
HEDVIG: Or there’ll be Hedvig aliens who will be like, “Oh, they wrote the same thing on both sides. Slight differences. I wonder why they did that. Do they want the Pope to see his own name?” [LAUGHTER]
BEN: You’re right. You’re right. A space faring interstellar civilization is not going to have any attention to detail. They’re just going to be like, “Oh, these are basically the same.”
HEDVIG: Fucking fonts. Okay, sorry. [LAUGHTER]
BEN: This is so good. At the beginning of this story, I ceded my ground as like the hater of font dorkery. And Hedvig clearly was just like, “Hold my fucking beer. This is going to be amazing.”
HEDVIG: You must find.
BEN: “I’m coming in hard.”
DANIEL: And now, it’s time for Related or Not.
[LATEST RELATED OR NOT THEME]
DANIEL: Thanks very much to Hugh for our Related or Not jingle. All right, this one comes from Tigertronia on our Discord, who says, “Here’s a silly one. Rug and rugged.”
BEN: Ooh.
DANIEL: “I said, ‘Some of those rugs are pretty robust, I’ve got to say.’ But then, Aristemo added, “Wait, what about rag and ragged? All four related?” So, there’s your four, rug, rugged, rag and ragged. Some related, some not. What do you reckon?
HEDVIG: Rugged is more positive than ragged, right?
BEN: Yes.
HEDVIG: Rugged is like Aragorn, Strider in Lord of the Rings is rugged. Ragged is, you are also unwell and dirty and smelly and you’re not doing great.
BEN: I’m going to go… I’m putting my flag in the sand straight away and saying, rag and ragged are dead related. Ragged is just like, you are so shit. You are like made of rags kind of thing.
DANIEL: Made of rags. Yep. I could see that. That’s my guess too. But what about rug and rugged?
BEN: Rug and rugged. I’m thinking the age of those two words is going to be wildly different. I think rug potentially will be very, very old. And I think rugged is going to be a much more contemporary word, and therefore they will be unrelated.
DANIEL: Mkay. My flag in the sand is I can see rug and rugged, and I can see rag and ragged, but I’m not seeing a crossover.
BEN: Okay, okay.
HEDVIG: Okay. So, this is hard one. Who was it that sent this in?
DANIEL: It was Tigertronia.
HEDVIG: Okay. Very good job.
DANIEL: On our Related or Not channel. Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: I’m trying to do my usual sneaky move, thinking about other languages. [BEN LAUGHS]
DANIEL: That’s a good idea.
BEN: Way to be a polyglot.
DANIEL: Go Norse. Always good… You’re the only one who can help us.
HEDVIG: Right. Well, the back, like back of your body part, the back, where the pain lives. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: The nape.
BEN: [SINGING] Someone’s in their 30s.
HEDVIG: Yay.
DANIEL: The hackles. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I may or may not have gotten a sort of massage thing for Christmas by my husband.
BEN: Oh, you got one of the guns? One of the [ONOMATOPOEIA]
HEDVIG: No, I got one that you put like here and you pull it and it does, like… Anyway.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Anyway. Okay. So, a lot of Germanic languages. Norwegian, Swedish, German at least back is [UNINTELLIGIBLE 00:29:29] or rygg.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: And you wear rags on your back.
BEN: You’re going all fours.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I’m thinking… I’m going to go all four. And that there’s some sort of thing like a transitivity or perfectiveness or something that does the vowel shift, because that sometimes happens with fall and fell. Like, I fall, I felled you. They’re very similar, and the difference is like whether you do it to someone else as a transitive or a causative or perfective or something like that. So…
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: …I don’t know. I’m just going to say all related. Rag, ragged, rug, rugged, all the same origin.
BEN: If she takes this out, I think she’s earned the W on this one. This is a pretty good play.
DANIEL: Then, I found out that rugged used to mean back in the 1300s, having a rough, hairy, or shaggy surface originally of animals.
BEN: Oh, shit. Oh, dear.
HEDVIG: [GASPS]
DANIEL: They’re all four related.
BEN: Oh, well done.
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: Well done.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] They’re all probably related. All from Proto-Germanic, rawwa, meaning something like a shaggy tuft or a coarse coverlet or something like that. Also rough, likely related.
HEDVIG: Right.
BEN: Really? That’s interesting.
DANIEL: Thanks to Tigertronia and to Aristemo for that one. That was great. Next one’s from Michael, who wrote in and said, “Hello, my dear podcasters, big fan of your show, though just a lurker, till now. I have a suggestion for related or not. This might be an obvious one you’ve already covered,” we haven’t. “Here it is. Attic, the part of a building below the roof versus Attic related to Athens.”
HEDVIG: Oh, Attic Greek. Yes.
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: Right. I have to say I struggle with the word “attic” because I need to remember which one is which, because you have these attic and cellar and…
DANIEL: Oh, that’s interesting.
HEDVIG: I have to remember [CROSSTALK].
DANIEL: I never had that trouble.
BEN: I never heard the second sense before right now. So, yeah, to be of or related to Athens.
HEDVIG: I think they’re spelled exactly the same, A-T-T-I-C.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: So, what do you reckon? I thought I will recuse myself because I know this one.
BEN: Which would suggest that it is related if Daniel knows it. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Maybe.
HEDVIG: Or that it’s a common thing people think, and he knows that it’s not.
BEN: Yeah, true, true, true.
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: I’m going to go with not related because they seem just, like very… oh, unless, unless…
DANIEL: Unless they had them. Unless they had a lot of them back there.
BEN: No, no, no. What I’m thinking is Greek architecture, classical architecture has that real squat triangle at the top of all of the pantheons and that sort of thing. And attics…
DANIEL: The frieze.
BEN: The frieze. And the attic kind of has that shape, like it’s under the roof of the. Ooh. It’s a stretch though. I’m going to go not related.
DANIEL: It does.
BEN: Not related.
DANIEL: It does. Okay, Hedvig, are you going to pull out the second one?
HEDVIG: Attic and attic. The Greek thing and the thing… I live in an attic flat. That’s why I have a diagonal roof behind me.
DANIEL: Yes, you do.
HEDVIG: I think they’re going to be related. They’re spelled too similarly.
BEN: Meaning the same? Like, they have [CROSSTALK] [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: The same. Which isn’t always a clue, but the longer they are, the more it’s a clue, usually.
DANIEL: Yeah. You can get away with rug and rag being different.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I think it’s one of those Corinthian, Dorian architecture terms that we get from Ancient Greek, and therefore, they are related somehow.
BEN: Ah.
DANIEL: Mm. Okay, well, Hedvig is on the right track once again because there are attic columns all over the place. The meaning jumped from the column to a triangular facade that the column supported, and then it jumped to the space up there.
HEDVIG: Ooh.
BEN: So, I actually had… I had the exact right answer. I just didn’t back myself.
DANIEL: It was in your hands. But they are totally related. And Hedvig wins the second one.
HEDVIG: Wow.
DANIEL: Michael continues “Your collective combo of erudition and seemingly effortless banter.” Oh, effortless, he says.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Until that is after Daniel has had his editing ways with the show.
HEDVIG: Also, I’ll have you know, I love recording process with you, and I love all of you, but sometimes when you make me get up very early in the morning. I’ll record podcasts and I’ll be very effortlessly bantery, and then I go lie down for two hours, actually. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Same. Michael says, “Your seemingly effortless banter, no doubt the result of tremendous effort and experience and editing is beyond compare. Thank you so much for your tireless advancement of language nerdom.” Michael, you say tireless, I’m kind of tired.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: There’s tire. Tire exists.
DANIEL: Okay, I’m giving you this next one. This next one comes from me because I wondered. The word is so. So means a lot of things. So means to such an extent. It was so big. It’s a conjunction. I was finished, so I left. And it means in addition, as in also. Are they the same so?
BEN: Oh, okay. So, we’re not even talking about putting plants in the ground or putting fabric together. We’re just talking about the same spelling.
DANIEL: S-O, that’s all.
HEDVIG: And then you have the even so and just so, which are arguably variants of the three categories you described earlier, maybe?
DANIEL: Something like that.
HEDVIG: This is where it gets hard, because it’s a short one, isn’t it? It’s just two sounds.
DANIEL: So, the first one is. The first one is to such an extent, so big. The conjunction, “I was finished, so I left,” shows a result. And then also, in addition.
BEN: I going to go with all related. Because it feels like one of those times where we’ve just kind of lazily used one word just to do a lot of heavy lifting.
DANIEL: That’s what we do with efficient units, but Hedvig is not sure.
BEN: Yeah, she seems pensive.
HEDVIG: No, I’m doing the. I’m doing my…
BEN: I’ve got to check on a cat, one sec.
HEDVIG: I’m doing my checking other languages. So, both German and Swedish have very similar extents, of something that looks very similar. But that could just mean that those things existed in like Proto-Germanic or they borrowed from each other or something. It’s not necessarily… So, [UNINTELLIGIBLE 00:36:19] I drank a lot of water, so I have to go to the toilet. Yeah, it’s some sort of prepositional, locational thing that means like “to the extent of” or something like that is my theory.
DANIEL: Yep. Okay. So, what do you reckon?
HEDVIG: Yeah, all related.
DANIEL: Do you think they’re the same?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay. You’re both correct. They are all related. Now, here’s the unifying sense. When you say that something is so big, you’re saying it’s big in such a way. That’s how it is. The so as in the result, “I was finished, so I left,” it’s sort of like you’re saying I was finished and things being in such a way as that, I left. Now, Etymonline also points out that these come from an Old English word, swa. In fact, sometimes we even see swa-swa, [UNINTELLIGIBLE 00:37:12], like as. So, this was a word that grew into so, but it was frequently strengthened by eall, all
BEN: Eall?
HEDVIG: Yeah, also.
DANIEL: Which is all. And so, also is sort of like “all being in that way” and it is contained in compounds.
BEN: I never realized how hard it would be to explain a word to my mind, as simple as so to a non-English speaker.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm. It’s hard.
BEN: Like I’m hearing Daniel try and do it and I love you, Daniel. You do a great job. But even you were kind of floundering a little bit.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s hard.
BEN: it’s not an easy word to explain at all.
DANIEL: I worked on that explanation all afternoon. [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Really? Yeah. No, that’s a good… I can tell. The smaller they are, the more frequent they are, the more vague, abstract their meaning, the harder it gets. Ask anyone to explain… There’s a bunch of German terms like mal and doch and a bunch of other ones that like…
DANIEL: Doch is great.
HEDVIG: You just have to be exposed to it a lot, [UNINTELLIGIBLE 00:38:10] very vaguely, right?
BEN: It’s another vibe check situation.
DANIEL: Yeah, it’s a vibe check. You mentioned this, Hedvig. If we made a big list of all the words in English from most common to least common, at the bottom, we would have a bunch of really long words with specific meanings like microphone and antipathy. Whereas at the top of the list we have all these tiny words that just don’t mean anything until you start putting them next to other words. Amazing. Well, that’s it. So, this was one of those where they were all related, every single thing. Congratulations to Hedvig, but you both did a great job. Thanks to everybody who’s giving us these ideas. If you’d like to donate a jingle to us, you can go ahead and send that, hello@becauselanguage.com. We’re loving the ones we’ve gotten. And thank you to Hugh for yours.
[MUSIC]
[INTERVIEW BEGINS]
DANIEL: We’re talking to Paulette van der Voet and Solveig Bollig of the Umeå Universitet in Umeå, Sweden. They are heading up a university class about language called in English, Linguistics and the Eurovision Song Contest. Hello, Paulette and Solveig. Great to see you.
SOLVEIG: Great to be here. Thank you for the invite.
HEDVIG: Yes. So, how happy are you that you… This is the first semester you’re offering this course, is that right?
Solveig and Paulette: No, it’s the second one.
HEDVIG: Oh, second.
DANIEL: Oh, that’s the time when you go through and fix all the problems.
HEDVIG: Are you…? The intake for the students was before Kaj 1, right? So, okay, okay.
DANIEL: Sorry, the Kaj?
HEDVIG: Are you feeling the Kaj…?
DANIEL: Sorry. So, you’ve got to… I’m the noob here. You’ve got to help me.
HEDVIG: All right. What usually happens on this show is that Daniel says a bunch of stuff about like Americans. He’s like attorney general and 401k and like tri-state area or something. And I have to be the European to be like, “I don’t know what those things are.” So now, I get to do the other thing.
DANIEL: I’m the audience surrogate now.
HEDVIG: So, the Eurovision Song Contest is an annual contest in which different countries compete in who has the best song.
DANIEL: I knew that.
HEDVIG: And you vote and there are juries and it’s all very complex. And it’s run by the European Broadcasting Association. I think I’ve got that right. And in every country, the broadcaster who is a member of that association gets to pick how they select their representative. And in some countries, it’s all done in like backrooMs Like, the BBC selects for UK. And it’s just a bunch of people, they go into a room and they pick someone, more or less. Whereas in Sweden we like to do it as big as we can. So, we have…
PAULETTE: Yes.
HEDVIG: …first a preselection filter by some jury specialist. And then, we have four contests and then everyone who gets first on that one goes to the final. And everyone who goes second goes to another contest called Second Chance before the final.
DANIEL: Cool.
HEDVIG: All in all, you have six weekends of the spring, late winter, spring, who are just like Eurovision mania.
DANIEL: That sounds amazing.
HEDVIG: Some people think it’s amazing. Some people think it’s over the top. There are different opinions.
PAULETTE: But it can be both.
HEDVIG: It didn’t used to be this big, but this year the contest was won by a group from Finland. So, in Finland, the east parts of Finland and also south and the island between Finland and Sweden, there are people who speak Swedish natively in their communities. They speak what we sometimes call Eastern Swedish dialects. And I would call them a music comedy group from Eastern Swedish speaking dialect, entered into the Swedish contest and ended up winning.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: So, I think they’re Finnish citizens. I don’t know if they’re also Swedish citizens. I’m not actually sure.
SOLVEIG: No, they’re just Finnish citizens.
HEDVIG: Yeah, but they do speak Swedish natively and I think they speak Finnish with like a Swedish version of Finnish as well. Anyway, it’s very exciting because we’re coming up on the next Eurovision contest. If Sweden wins this one, then we have the most wins ever.
DANIEL: Oh, exciting.
HEDVIG: And it’d be really exciting. I personally think it would be really fun if that was with the group, Kaj, because they feel humorous and lighthearted and not this kind of like serious pop, whatever Måns Zelmerlöw was doing this year. You guys are nodding. Okay, so we’re on board. Anyway, the thing, Daniel, that you have to understand is that Kaj is like… So other European countries are understanding this as well, it’s very exciting. And they’re going to compete in Swedish. They’re not going to make an English version of their song for the big contest. And that’s unusual.
DANIEL: For some reason, that sounds like it means something, but I guess it’s time to bring in Paulette and Solveig. So, what’s your… [HEDVIG LAUGHS] Where are you? Are you both just like massive Eurovision nerds like Hedvig is?
SOLVEIG: We all were separately big Eurovision fans and then we all started our PhDs together and started to watch Eurovision Song Contest together. And obviously, if you put a bunch of linguists in one room watching Eurovision together, it’s all we talk about, the language choices, multilingualism. So, we always thought that we should do something with that. And we kind of ended up designing an entire course around that.
PAULETTE: And we thought that the department would never accept it as a course. [DANIEL LAUGHS] We thought we would get a no somewhere in the system, but we didn’t get a no anywhere. And we went ahead and we taught it for the first time last summer.
HEDVIG: I think it’s a brilliant idea. And also, I know that a lot of university departments… How to say this. So, like at the Stockholm University, there’s a summer course on dinosaurs that looks like it’s very airy and fun and it gets a lot of students, but it’s actually a serious paleontology course, but it gets a very high student involvement. And I think using something that looks very poppy and trendy, you can actually use it as a great focal lens to actually talk about things.
I understand one segment of the course is, for example, about language policy, which is really interesting to explore through Eurovision. So, I think it’s very smart. And I’m not surprised that Umeå University approved of this because I think it’s like a smash hit.
PAULETTE: I mean, we have also great national examples. Linnaeus University had a couple of courses, for example, with vampire focus, and it was basically just Gothic literature, but it was sold as something different. I mean, it’s so great to catch students with something so special and so popular and then just kind of get in some actual content.
DANIEL: The problem is evaluation.
HEDVIG: But it’s a serious course. It’s this credits and exams and evaluation and everything like that, right? They have to read papers. They have to pay attention during class. You’re not just showing up to a room and playing YouTube clips of your favorite Eurovision winners.
PAULETTE: No. We were a bit concerned. We thought that some students would think that’s exactly what we’re doing, but everybody was on board with our vision, and we got a lot of really, really interesting final exaMs So, we are very happy with how it turned out.
DANIEL: Wow. But you don’t want to flunk Eurovision. That would be too terrible. [LAUGHTER] Let’s take a look at the linguistic areas that your unit touches on, because there’s a lot going on here. Where do you want to start? What area stands out to both of you?
PAULETTE: Maybe the first module. Your module, Solveig?
SOLVEIG: Yeah. So, my module is mostly on basic linguistic concepts. So, we have a big part on language versus dialect, prestige and so forth just to make sure that everybody who may not be all too familiar with linguistic concepts is on board.
DANIEL: Let’s go right there. Tell me about prestige in language as it shows up in Eurovision. What goes on? What’s an example you might use?
SOLVEIG: I mean, then we’re already in language choices. What languages are presented as Eurovision and which are maybe not so common? Then, we can go back to Kaj. Swedish hasn’t really been all that popular, especially among Swedish-speaking public. So now, we have Swedish back on the menu. But Swedish hasn’t really been all that big of a prestige language in the Eurovision contest at all. And I also think it hasn’t really been a prestigious language among Swedish speakers.
DANIEL: Why not?
SOLVEIG: I think the associations for Swedish is it’s a bit too cute. It’s a bit too funny for a serious competition. It doesn’t sound all that serious. And I know that non-Swedish speakers might disagree with that, [DANIEL LAUGHS] but I think the associations from Swedish speakers are a lot in that line. Like, if you want to compete seriously, it can’t be in Swedish.
PAULETTE: And when you want to win.
HEDVIG: Exactly. That’s the problem. I don’t know, Daniel, if you understand this, but, like the Swedish contest is so much geared towards winning Eurovision to the degree that people will vote tactically, so they’ll like put their vote on not who they think is the best in the final, but who they think that the rest of Europe will vote for.
DANIEL: Oh.
HEDVIG: And this means that very often the person who comes like second is actually the one that people actually enjoy and they’ll get the most streams on Spotify or whatever, but the person who wins is like the bland thing that we think most Europeans will accept.
DANIEL: Disappointing.
HEDVIG: It is. I find it very disappointing. I think that’s also why people have not been wanting to put forward entries in Swedish, because they think, “Well, Serbians and Spanish people are not going to vote for a Swedish act,” which is a bad way of thinking about it, because some of the things that do the well is like the campy, funny, local, regional stuff, right?
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Like, what’s the Ukrainian woman called? [SINGING] Ein, zwei, drei, dancing doo, doo, doo.
PAULETTE: Verka Serduchka.
HEDVIG: Thank you. That’s like some of the best Eurovision you’ll ever see. And that’s like, how many languages in that song? At least two, if not three?
PAULETTE: Yeah, I think it also has to do… I mean, Sweden is the third largest exporter for popular music. So, I also think Sweden views the Eurovision Song Contest as some kind of card for the rest of the world to see what we can do. So, I don’t necessarily think that Sweden wants to be present in the Eurovision Song Contest as representing the country but rather representing the music industry in Sweden.
HEDVIG: Oh, okay, so it’s like Max Martin industry we’re representing, rather than… Mm.
SOLVEIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: In that case, which languages are considered the high prestige languages? Paulette, what’s your assessment?
PAULETTE: For a long time, it has been English, and especially if we look here in Sweden, as soon as they were allowed to participate in English, they did participate in English. They were one of the… I think they were the first country that participated in another language than one of the national languages. Because when Eurovision started, they were like no language rules. And it took some time before the countries figured out that there were no language rules. And when Sweden did, they did it very successful. And since then, as long as they have been able to participate in English, they have more or less been participating in English. It’s even so that songs that have been like winning the national selection in Sweden in Swedish have been translated into English for the Eurovision stage. So, this is very new.
But on the same time, there is like kind of a border in Europe between Northern and Southern Europe, where Northern Europe, English has a lot of prestige to participate with a song in English at the Eurovision Song Contest while in Southern Europe we see that the national languages have a lot of prestige.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Okay.
SOLVEIG: The Romance languages, for example, speakers of those languages are more likely to compete in their national languages. Same goes for Southern Balkan region. So, there are specific regions that are more likely to compete in their own languages. But then obviously, we also see a bit more general trends apart from English. French is a relatively high prestige language, as well as Italian. For a while, a couple of countries were also participating with partly in Russian or partly in German, but that hasn’t been really all that visible in the last couple of years for understandable reasons. So, we also see a bit of a shift of what is considered prestigious or not.
DANIEL: Spanish is the party language.
HEDVIG: Can I ask? Should we discuss…
HEDVIG: Daniel, you’ve got me. That was exactly what I was going to say. We’ve advanced before in this podcast the theory that sometimes countries where Spanish is not an official language will sing a song in Spanish, because Spanish is the party language. And if you’re doing like a party song with like a rapid beat and you have a lot of dancers on stage, you sing in Spanish even if you are like… who was it that did it? It was one of the Balkan nations that did it recently.
SOLVEIG: It was Romania a couple years ago that…
HEDVIG: Yes, it was Romania.
DANIEL: Great to have these two. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: So, do you agree with our Spanish as the party language theory?
SOLVEIG: I think it’s a party language, but it’s also very much tied to specific music genres. If you’re competing with an Americanized country song, you’re not going to sing in your national language. And I think the same also goes for party songs or Latinized songs. Then, you’re more likely to compete in Spanish or a Romance language.
DANIEL: It reminds me a bit of what happens in… Someone described the situation India when it comes to official languages or the languages that get used. If we make it Hindi, then Telugu speakers get mad and other speakers. If we make it this language, others speak… So, English might not be most people’s favorite or the language that most people feel comfortable in, but it’s considered to be an acceptable middle of the road choice. Is that kind of a situation in Eurovision if you’re going for broad appeal?
PAULETTE: We can also see that English songs have been doing very well among the juries for a long time. And the jury vote has been very important in the beginning of Eurovision, and it has been changing. The public vote has become more and more important and more and more present at the contest. And we see also that there is a difference between… The jury vote is often going to songs in English, while the public vote is often going to songs in other languages than English. So, we also see that happening.
HEDVIG: Mmm. And can I ask, since you’re two Eurovision experts, like, what is the reason for the jury vote? Is it just because we think the masses have poor taste and they need to be reined in?
SOLVEIG: I mean, in the beginning it was simply a practical choice. Like, in the 1950s and 1960s, you can’t just ask the public what they think and conduct that in a timely manner. That’s just not possible. But in most juries, it’s music industry professionals, it’s people from the individual broadcasting services. So, they obviously also have a kind of vested interest in what becomes popular.
HEDVIG: Sure.
SOLVEIG: Personally, I don’t really think that the jury does all too much. I think that has also been a contentious point the last couple of years, that there is a really big difference between what the jury wants and what the public wants. And I think the public doesn’t view the jury votes too favorably right now.
HEDVIG: No, yeah, it does feel… I understand what you said, like the Eurovision Song Contest has been going on since 1965?
SOLVEIG: 1956, Yeah.
HEDVIG: Oh, swap around the numbers, 1956. And of course, you couldn’t call in or click on an app and have everyone do it within certain amount of hours, but you can do it now.
SOLVEIG: Yes, we already see a change there. Like, the semifinals rely on purely the public votes right now. That’s a change that has been made in 2023, I believe. So, we do see a change in the voting system, and I think it’s probably only going to be a matter of time that we are just not having these jury votes. But at the same time, it’s a great show to have the national spokesperson announcing the jury votes. It’s a part of the thing that makes Eurovision, Eurovision. I think in that case, we would have to find another solution for that, because I do think that most people still want to have that kind of suspense of having a spokesperson announcing the points.
DANIEL: You mentioned that Russian has been a language that has been selected by many singers, but for understandable reasons, as you say, this is no longer so. And it sounds like geopolitical tensions have an impact on the languages that people use for their songs. Are there any other examples that you can think of or that people have brought up?
SOLVEIG: One big example is, of course, Ukraine. Ukraine had a streak where they basically just sent English-speaking… English songs. And since the Krim invasion in 2014, there haven’t been any songs purely in English. There have been a couple of songs with English and Ukrainian lyrics. But, I mean, that’s also a big, big, big thing to publicly show your national identity, especially if that national identity is being questioned.
The same goes for the Balkan regions. The ex-Yugoslavian states have been more likely statistically to participate in their own language, simply because you kind of have to show that you have a language, that you have a singular national identity. So, there definitely are geopolitical trends and there are geopolitical forces that kind of play into the language choices.
HEDVIG: Yeah, for sure. So, when you talk about the language policy part of your course, do you also discuss language policies outside of Eurovision in the countries in general? So, for a while, for example, it was only the case that you could participate in Eurovision with a language that was an official language in your country. And not all countries have official languages or have something… Different kinds like minority, minority or sign languages are in a weird category sometimes. So, in your course, do you talk about that as well?
SOLVEIG: We do. Obviously, we do have a focus on Sweden. So, we’re talking a bit about the Swedish minority languages. But we also have a second module which is purely multilingualism and minority languages that Paulette has been teaching.
PAULETTE: Yes.
DANIEL: Oh, well, then let’s talk about that for a second. What’s going on with minority languages? They’ve been on the rise, haven’t they?
PAULETTE: They have always been present at the Eurovision Song Contest. Like, there is often one song with like either parts in a minoritized language or completely in a minoritized language. And we have seen that for many years. Sometimes, it’s just like a couple of words. We have had Norway in the 1980s participating with a song with the title in North Sami, but the rest of the song was in Norwegian or English… In Norwegian, I think, yes. And so, we always have had a presence of minoritized languages, and I would really like to see them more at the Eurovision stage than what we see them now. But it’s not that it’s getting more, it’s not increasing. That’s not something that we see.
DANIEL: Do they win though?
PAULETTE: I can’t… Jamala had parts in Crimea.
SOLVEIG: In Krimtataren, yeah. And I mean, Norway a couple of years ago, with parts in North Sami, they did pretty well. They didn’t win, but I think they ended up second place. So, they come up close but winning? Yeah.
HEDVIG: So, on the international stage, singing or having a reference to a minority language or culture, is that another way of representing your country, if you understand what I mean? So, like, there are not Sami speakers in so many different European countries. So, Norway, by having some Sami in their entry, are sort of saying, “Oh, this is a part of being Norway as we have this as well.” Is that sort of how it works on that stage? Because people in, like, I don’t know, Montenegro won’t know Norwegian or Sami, [LAUGHS] so it’ll be equally foreign to them.
PAULETTE: So I think that when it comes to the song that I mentioned from the 1980s that Norway sent, Sámiid ædnan, that was a bit more special because the 1980s has been a very important period in Norwegian and Sami history when it comes to the Sami getting a voice and a place in the nation state of Norway with huge protests amongst others. So, it had a certain political load that time. Well, nowadays, when we look at like more recent contributions, the one that Solveig mentioned, I think that it has almost like a feel of a kind of exotification to show like, “This is also us and we’re also fronting this.”
SOLVEIG: We’re more different. Yeah.
DANIEL: The question I wanted to ask was, are the majority languages steamrollering the minority languages? Are they crowding them out or do you feel like they’re giving them a chance to shine? What’s your view?
SOLVEIG: Probably a bit of both. We do see different attitudes in different countries. We also see differing attitudes depending on what year we’re looking at. Italy, for example, they always send or try to send the winner of Sanremo Song Festival. And they recently had a change in the guidelines and the rules. So, the song has to be in Italian with a cover song in either Italian or English also performed at the festival. And previously, they allowed for dialects as well. And now, they have a guideline that says it’s not supposed to change the general Italian character of the song, which I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean in the context. I’m going to assume that they try to further a unified Italian national identity…
DANIEL: Mm, okay.
SOLVEIG: …but I find this change really weird, and I don’t really know what to make of it. So, I do think that it really depends on which year, which country, there’s differing opinions basically in every year and in every country.
PAULETTE: And we should also maybe say that the EBU, they have at this moment, no language rule. You can participate in whatever language you will. We have even seen constructed languages at the Eurovision stage. But yes.
HEDVIG: Netherlands, Iceland, who else?
PAULETTE: Belgium.
HEDVIG: Belgium, right.
PAULETTE: Two times.
HEDVIG: This is so fun. I’m usually the only one who knows. [LAUGHTER] I’m enjoying this.
DANIEL: Which conlangs were used? I don’t even know.
PAULETTE: Belgium had, for example, completely made-up language and I think the Netherlands as well. And the idea when Belgium for the first time participated with constructed language, the idea was normally that it’s either the Flemish broadcaster, so from the Dutch-speaking part or from the French-speaking part, sending it alternating years. And the idea was then, like, we sent this year a song in neither of our national languages. So, there are a lot of different motivations behind it.
DANIEL: Okay.
PAULETTE: And the EBU doesn’t have a language rule right now, but the broadcasters in the different countries selecting the songs, they might have language rules. For example, Italy, what Solveig mentioned. But for example, there are also countries, for example, Netherlands, they don’t have a language rule. It’s completely free choice of language. So, it depends a lot on countries, or not even on countries, but on the broadcasting unions participating what they are sending.
SOLVEIG: As with here, the Swedish broadcaster, for example, they say that they aim to have 30% Swedish-speaking entries in the national selection process. I mean, 30% is not a lot if you compare it to, for example, Italy where it is mandatory in Italian, or Iceland where all but the final have to be in Icelandic. So, it’s a big difference depending on the country and the broadcasting service.
HEDVIG: I think what’s really interesting talking about the Eurovision language policies of things is that Eurovision I think becomes a very nice mirror or like way of viewing how nation states are building their national ideology and identity. So, by allowing more different languages or something, you’re saying something like, “Oh, we’re…” I don’t know, “Either we’re so secure that we’re so monocultural that we don’t mind if someone does something different,” or, “We’re trying to build a multinational multiethnic state. So, we would love to have different representatives.”
And it’s hard to remember, I think this is going back very far, but Germany and Italy… so, the big five are Spain, France, UK, Germany, and Italy. And they get to participate regardless of how good their contributions do in the first filter, which is sort of why they tend to send maybe not the best entries [LAUGHTER] because they don’t have much selection process. But Germany and Italy I think stands out a little bit among them as… how to say, they’re kind of the youngest countries in that group. Do you know what I mean? Like, Italy only unified in like, what is it, 1850? And Germany is barely a coherent country now. It’s just a bunch of prince city states that sort of stuck together. And then, some of them became like Switzerland and oh, god, all my German friends are going to listen to this, but I think they know what I mean. [LAUGHTER]
And also, Italy also speaks a language that has a high prestige, but it’s not spoken very much outside of Italy. Like, French is spoken in West Africa and Quebec. And Spanish is spoken all over the world, but Italian isn’t. So, maybe they feel, I don’t know, a bit more fragile about their cultural identity outwards and that’s why they’re enforcing these rules that has to be Italian. Does that make any sense?
SOLVEIG: Yeah. I mean, our Italian colleague also suggests that it might also be just a recent change due to the political climate in Italy right now, that it is very nationalized right now, that it is supposed to be a unified Italian strong state, and that can be true as well.
If we look at German, for example, I think it’s really telling that Austria has participated with several different dialects and Germany has not. Germany has only participated with standard German songs. So, I also think that might be an indicator that, “No, we don’t really need the diversity within Germany right now. We are barely unified as it is.” So, I do think that there are certain identity-building characteristics to be found, yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I’m not a specialist on German language by any means, but just living here, I think that Germans are quite sensitive about… They seem to be quite keen on removing some dialects. I live in Saxony and the Saxon variety of German is famous for being the worst one. Actually, I learned an interesting thing. An Austrian friend of mine, apparently in children’s cartoons the villains are often speaking Saxon German.
DANIEL: Oh, there’s a choice.
HEDVIG: And he grew up with this… Yeah. And he grew up with these cartoons and he said that he didn’t know until he moved to Saxony that it was a real dialect that people spoke. He thought it was just what villains spoke on TV, which says something about how they’re treating… I don’t even know what that would be in Swedish. I think it would probably be Stockholm dialect for villains, just picking on the capital is a popular thing to do. But yeah, I’m not surprised to hear that the German entries, if they are even in German, are in like standard High German or whatever. Okay, bit shame.
DANIEL: Let’s move on to gender and how that’s performed because language is a proxy for a lot of things about ourselves, national identity, but also gender. What have you noticed in how this is showing up?
SOLVEIG: What we can see is that songs about either sexual identity or gender identity tend to be in English simply because they appeal to a different subset of the public. I don’t think songs like that would be all too popular within a language just because it is just a subset of the entire European public that is supposed to be talked to.
HEDVIG: Mm. So, like the Austrian entry, Phoenix, was in English.
SOLVEIG: Yeah. Or like Switzerland’s winning contribution last year, Nemo, The Code, with nonbinary identity is also in English. And that’s something we do see that they tend to be in English or songs about questioning one’s identity or very universal topics, grief, identity finding, they do tend to be in English because they are so universal and they are meant to appeal, yeah, to a broader public.
HEDVIG: Right. So, you sing in your not English language, [CHUCKLES] lack of a better word. When you want to say something about your country, your culture, or a part of your country or part of your culture.
PAULETTE: Or more about traditional love.
HEDVIG: Yes. And even if you want to say something like, what’s that with the Polish entry with the butter?
SOLVEIG: Oh, yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Butter?
HEDVIG: Yeah. Or the Grammys, they…
DANIEL: Butter, you said?
PAULETTE: They were churning butter on stage. And it was fun. Everyone enjoyed that.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Oh, yeah, okay. I understand that gesture. Yes.
PAULETTE: Right. Or like if you have a bunch of babushkas on stage, if you want to appeal to like an older version, like something like pre-, I don’t know, 1950s of your countries using in your national language. But if you want to talk about gender or war, well, the Crimean Tatar one was partially.
SOLVEIG: Yeah, but I mean, the setting, the context, the setting, the stage was in English. So, I do think if you want to talk about difficult topics such as war, for example, English is a good medium. It’s just more understandable for a broader public.
HEDVIG: Do you think that sort of steamrolls the… I don’t know. So, from a broader perspective, for example, I’ve been thinking about this, and again, I’m not a specialist on this, but, for example, in lots of different countries, there are like different kinds of gender identities or sexualities that don’t map one-to-one onto like a sort of actual Anglo-American understandings. Like the term, queer or trans or bi or something, there might be like another sort of kind of identity that’s a bit similar but doesn’t map one to one. But then, as a lot of English cultures spread around the world and talking about these topics, sometimes maybe that eradicates that kind of divers… Do you guys know what I mean?
SOLVEIG: Yeah, I understand. I mean, obviously it’s also hard to map if you don’t really understand the language or the specific cultural context. So, I wouldn’t want to really say one way or the other, but I do think… I mean, people do have the choice to sing in another language if they really want to or if the broadcasting member allows for it. So, I think it’s probably more of a question of how the broadcasting union sees it, if that is something that is supposed to be expressed in English or in a national language, for example.
HEDVIG: So, if you sing in your national language about something that concerns your country, if someone doesn’t understand you, they minimally understand that you’re representing your country by the choice of language. So, in a sense, they kind of get a little bit of the meaning of the song just from the choice of language. But whereas if you want to talk about grief or love or sexuality or identity, you don’t think you can communicate that well enough if you don’t speak English.
PAULETTE: Or you want to approach like a larger public with it, and you want to appeal to a larger public with it, and you think that public that you can appeal with it is outside of your country.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Yeah, there’s a minority of people who are not straight in all countries, and there are few people maybe in your country, but if you add them all up across the countries, there’s more of them, but they’re all from different countries. So, what do you choose? English. Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah. Okay. I’m sort of seeing how this works. The choice of language is a tricky topic. What are you signaling? Who are you trying to appeal to? What’s the topic? What’s the audience? Mm, you also have a section in your unit about metaphors. And, of course, metaphors tell us a lot about what we’re trying to communicate. Of course, metaphors of love, very common. What do we notice from the lyrics? What have your students pointed out?
SOLVEIG: Our colleague is not too impressed with Conchita Wurst, Rise Like a Phoenix anymore. I think she has read 15 essays with the same topic.
DANIEL: Oh, no.
PAULETTE: And students were completely free to choose any song they wanted to write about.
HEDVIG: Maybe next time they’ll not allow that song.
SOLVEIG: That was her thinking as well. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Fair enough. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Well, then give me an original one, one that was off the beaten track.
SOLVEIG: Off the beaten track.
DANIEL: What do you teach when it’s metaphor time?
PAULETTE: I think we can think a lot about Israel in the past years with a lot of metaphors about the war going on. Then, we can also see that metaphors are often used to convey a political message. Well, Eurovision, one of the rules that the EBU has is that it has to be an apolitical contest. So, to hide the political messages, we can often see that metaphors are used.
DANIEL: Okay, that makes sense. What’s an example?
SOLVEIG: Last year, for example, there was a huge controversy about Israel’s entry because it was originally called October Rain, clearly referencing the Hamas attacks in October. And they had to rename the song and called it Hurricane but basically left the entire meaning as it was. So, it was still understandable, if you looked at the lyrics, that it clearly was associated to the political situation in Israel and Palestine.
HEDVIG: But you can do something… So, there was one of the Balkan countries that tried to participate with a song called We Don’t Want to Put In or something, which is a pun on Putin.
DANIEL: Putin, yes.
HEDVIG: Who was it? Was it Georgia?
SOLVEIG: It was Georgia in 2009. Yeah. [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: [UNINTELLIGIBLE 01:17:20] And that one, I think, was disqualified because they were like, “This is too obviously political.”
SOLVEIG: That was also on the cusp of the South Ossetian War. So, they did have a reason to kind of, well, show their disappointment with Russia, so to speak, but they were not allowed to participate with that song. So, we do see that the EBU tries to moderate which songs and which lyrics are allowed, but obviously they don’t really… There’s no specific system to it. Like, whenever there’s a song that might be too political, it’s a lot of discussions, it’s a lot of uproar from the member broadcasting services, and maybe they change it, maybe they don’t. So, it also has a lot to do with what the EBU is feeling and thinking and what kind of pressure they are facing.
PAULETTE: And sometimes, the metaphors can also be visual… Well, I don’t know if you’ll agree with me, but Russia had an entry just before the war that was those two twins with staffs or whatever. And I saw some popular reviews that was supposed to be a metaphor for Ukraine and Russia.
SOLVEIG: Yeah.
PAULETTE: I don’t know if most viewers got that though, so I [CHUCKLES] don’t know if it qualifies.
SOLVEIG: No, no. I mean, that’s the thing. You can always feign ignorance, both when it comes to metaphors, to language choices, to visual aids. You can always say, “Well, it doesn’t really mean what it means, right?” [DANIEL CHUCKLES] So obviously, there is a huge gap between what might be conveyable and what the public actually understands.
DANIEL: Okay, so what am I missing? What else has come up in the course content that we haven’t talked about already that you feel is really significant?
SOLVEIG: I mean, we talk so much about… Aside from the course, we do talk a lot about language choices. People want to know, why do certain countries choose certain languages? Why is English so, so dominant still? And now, we’ve gotten a couple of questions about the fact that English for the first time is not the most dominant language or, well, not the majority language anymore. So, that’s something that everybody always wants to talk about, what kind of reasons are there?
DANIEL: And that’s Brexit or is it America? What is it?
SOLVEIG: I don’t think it’s Brexit.
PAULETTE: No.
DANIEL: Okay.
SOLVEIG: We do see that Britain hasn’t been doing all that well [LAUGHTER] after Brexit, apart from one year where it was very much TikTok oriented.
HEDVIG: Oh, Sam, what’s his name?
SOLVEIG: Yes, Sam Ryder. Yeah.
HEDVIG: I have to say it does feel like we as Europeans tend to vote UK low. Not necessarily because their entries are terrible, but also because we listen to their music so much otherwise and we kind of don’t want them to win here as well. We already grew up with Beatles and this is ours. And I feel like that’s the sentiment. I don’t know about you. Do you think that’s true?
SOLVEIG: I think to a certain degree, it absolutely is. I think everybody, we do see that… I mean, in the 2010-2015 years, there were so many Spice Girl inspired entries in general. I think people got sick of that. I also think English, well, it’s a great conveyor, but we don’t really like English all that much as a means of national expression. And we do see that people appreciate national expressions, may it be in music choices that it is folk inspired or language or national costumes. We do want to see all the differences that make Europe special. And then of course, I do think that people don’t really like the big five. If you have to pay to get into the big final, I don’t think people like that.
DANIEL: Let me just take a moment and say thank you for doing this interview in English. You could do this in Swedish, and you would all be okay. But here I am, the one that walks up into a crowd and everybody feels like they just have to switch for me. So, I’m aware of that and I thank you for that. And our audience, our English-speaking audience, thanks to you as well. I will point out that the language of the unit is English as well. You’ve decided to… What was the rationale behind that? Or, is that just a normal thing at Umeå?
PAULETTE: No, it isn’t. We wanted to get like a very diverse student population with students from all over Europe. Because it’s an online course, they can participate online from all over Europe or all over the world even, but for students from Europe it’s easier to study here or cheaper mostly.
DANIEL: Once again, there’s that choice. There’s that language choice thing going on. Wow.
PAULETTE: So, we wanted to have students representing the different countries participating at Eurovision Song Contest and bringing their different perspectives with them. And that’s something that we have really seen last year when we taught the course for the first time.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: Do you also… Like something that I like to say on this show because I’m the only non-native speaker out of the three of us, is like, there are more non-native speakers of English than native speakers. Like, the gravity of the population is with us and we don’t maybe have the prestige and we maybe make lots of “mistakes.” But there is more of us and if we choose to speak English to each other, it’s because we think we want to convey something and that’s the most efficient way, not because we like… Well, I happen to be married to an Englishman, so I have some love for England in particular. And it’s just like a pragmatic choice of just… similar to the Eurovision contestants, if you want to reach many people about a complicated issue, I guess Daniel’s not going to like this, but I guess that if there was like decent automated translation, you could actually do this. Like, if there was a Star Trek universal translator, but there isn’t, or not a reliable one at least, so.
DANIEL: Mm. All right, so Eurovision is coming up this year starting May 14th. That’s the semifinal one. Of course, there’s been a lot going on already. But what should I, as a Eurovision noob, be watching out for? What are you thinking is going to happen linguistically? What do you know and what should I be looking for?
PAULETTE: Look at the multilingual songs. This year, we have traditionally seen multilingual songs used in different ways to appeal to different parts of the public, to show national identity and so forth. But this year, we see that they use multilingualism in a humorous way, to make fun. And that is something new and really exciting that we can see at several participating countries. Amongst others, Sweden.
DANIEL: How are they making fun using multilingual songs?
SOLVEIG: I mean, with Kaj, with the Swedish entry, it’s so, so clear that it was specifically written for a Swedish audience first. All the references are very much tailored towards the Swedish audience. We have, for example, a couple of Finnish words that are typically known by Swedish speakers. We have, for example, ei saa peittää, which… [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: We have to explain this.
SOLVEIG: We have to explain this.
HEDVIG: Oh, Daniel.
DANIEL: Yes, [LAUGHTER] I’m ready.
SOLVEIG: So, it means do not cover. And it was pushed as a warning signal on all the elements.
HEDVIG: Radiators.
DANIEL: Oh, radiators, okay.
SOLVEIG: Okay, so yeah, everybody who has looked at a radiator has probably seen the “ei saa peittää” warning sticker at some point in their life. But since that’s usually just in the Nordic countries, it’s very much tailored towards the Swedish speaking audience. So, we do see that. We also have a reference to Arja Saijonmaa.
PAULETTE: Yes.
SOLVEIG: Who was very popular in Sweden. Huge icon in the Melodifestivalen in the Swedish national selection. So, we have a couple of references…
HEDVIG: And she’s Finnish-Finnish, right?
SOLVEIG: Yes. She’s Finnish Finnish.
HEDVIG: Not even a Sweden Finn, so to speak.
SOLVEIG: No, but it’s so, so clear that Kaj simply wanted to find new Swedish audiences and kind of ended up in the middle of Eurovision.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And it’s especially ironic because they wrote a musical a few years ago called Botnia Paradise in which the main character wants to participate in the Swedish Eurovision Melodifestivalen. That’s like the goal of his life. I haven’t watched this musical, but I understand. But they sort of make fun of the idea that you live in Finland, but you watch Swedish media all the time and you want to go to Melodifestivalen. And isn’t that sort of funny and maybe a little bit pathetic? And then they went and won it and it’s… Yeah, it’s just very funny to us. But I don’t know actually how it’s going to play to international audiences. And what are they up against? What’s the competition?
SOLVEIG: I mean, on all the betting sides, Austria is pretty high up and Israel is pretty high up. But as of now, Sweden is on number one. So, we’ll see how that goes. I do think it’s so fun. It’s in dialect. It’s not even in standard Swedish, it’s in Vörå dialect. And that’s just great to see to have something so specific and so tailored to the Swedish audience. And people just find it fun and exciting and are looking forward to seeing Sweden compete with something in Swedish for the first time in forever. So, yeah, I think that’s just so fun.
But what I’m also looking forward to see is I would recommend watching both the semifinals and the finals, just to see which songs and which languages fall out of the final. I’m looking forward to seeing that. I don’t really want to bet on anything there. [LAUGHTER] I don’t know if the English-speaking countries or English songs are going to do better or worse there, but I think it’s going to be interesting to see what’s disappearing before the finals.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: It looks like there’s a lot of non-English-speaking entries. I’m scrolling through it. So, Latvia is competing in Latvia and Lithuania is competing in Lithuanian. Montenegro is competing in Montenegrin. Netherlands is competing in French and English. So, it looks like a quite, like, multilingual set.
PAULETTE: 18 out of the 37 I think are partly or completely in a language other than English.
HEDVIG: That’s fun. That sounds high to me. That’s really fun.
SOLVEIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, this is terrific. So, I enjoyed hearing about this and I think I might check it out and see what kind of language things we notice. We’re talking to Paulette van der Voet and Solveig Bollig of Umeå University in Umeå, Sweden. Thank you both for coming here and I hope all the best for your class and the marking. Oh, dear.
SOLVEIG: Thank you very much. We’re looking forward to all the student essays. They were brilliant last year.
PAULETTE: Yes, thank you for having us.
[MUSIC]
[INTERVIEW ENDS]
DANIEL: It’s time for Words of the Week and the first one is suggested by James and it’s yerr.
BEN: Yerr.
DANIEL: I am really late to this one. Have you heard this on TikTok? Yerr.
BEN: Is this like a new version of yas?
DANIEL: Yas, it is. Yerr, that’s true. Especially in New York City, apparently. It’s a shortened version of “what’s up” or “how are you”? If you see a friend on the street, you might say, “Yerr, what’s good?” That’s from an article from New York Art Life from a couple of years ago now, Top 10 slang New York City words from Yerr to Brick.
BEN: Surely, it’s out of vogue in New York by now if [BEN LAUGHS] it’s from two years ago.
DANIEL: Find out yes, definitely.
BEN: Think about how quickly and quickly yas rose and fell from common usage.
DANIEL: Yep, definitely.
HEDVIG: Mm. But it’s got to be from “how are you,” right?
DANIEL: Yerr.
HEDVIG: That’s the only ones that have any sounds that are vaguely like that.
DANIEL: Like, “How are yerr?”
HEDVIG: Because it’s a bit similar to, “Are you alright?” “You all right?” is a thing in British English, at least.
DANIEL: Yerr.
HEDVIG: So, I think it’s “How are you?”, or, “Are you alright?” that gets it at. It’s not “what’s up?” Because…
BEN: No, that makes no sense.
HEDVIG: …those sounds don’t match. It can’t be. Yeah.
DANIEL: I think I need to do some more research on this because I wasn’t able to find… I found conflicting reports, including the pirate thing, which is almost certainly wrong.
BEN: Yeah, I’m not seeing that.
DANIEL: Definitely not.
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: Let’s go to a different one that James also suggested. And this is olo, O-L-O. Have you heard this one, Ben?
HEDVIG: Okay.
BEN: I had this brought to my attention by my partner, and I think I ended up frustrating her somewhat because I was the annoying person who, when told the cool, interesting science story, ended up going, “Yeah, but it’s just green, right?”
DANIEL: No, it’s not green.
BEN: Exactly. You are doing a one-for-one verbatim theatrical recount of exactly what went down, yes.
DANIEL: Okay, so here’s the deal. Olo is a color that only five or so people have ever actually seen.
HEDVIG: So, the way color works in your eyes is that you have… What do you call them in English? You have the little things.
BEN: Rods and cones.
HEDVIG: Rods and cones.
DANIEL: The cones.
HEDVIG: And depending on how many you have and maybe some of the configuration, you can see different colors. And if you’re colorblind, then you don’t have certain ones. And therefore, you perceive the color spectrum of light that’s coming into your eye differently.
DANIEL: That’s right.
HEDVIG: So, some animals, like birds and butterflies, I think, supposedly have way more. So, they have actually patterns on themselves that we can’t see, but they can. And some people have this genetic mutation where they have some more so they can see something, that’s it.
DANIEL: Most of us have three kinds of cones, L, M, and S. And they’re called L, M and S because they’re sensitive to long, medium, and short waves of light.
HEDVIG: Got it.
DANIEL: But researchers at the University of Washington wondered what would happen if you stimulated the M ones with lasers. Yeah, not with regular light, but laser light. And what happened was that people started seeing a color that nobody had ever seen before because you can’t see this color unless you have freaking lasers fired right into your retinas, stimulating your cones.
BEN: The logic here is that although we can see pure, say, green, green and all of the other colors that exist in nature will, in some way or another be firing off the different types of cones in our eyes in different sort of amounts. And even with things that are like heavily favor one over the others, there’s nothing that will only ever exclusively target just one type of cone in our eyes. Until people fired lasers into their face and then they were like, “Did it.”
DANIEL: I can see colors that nobody’s ever seen before.
BEN: And that color apparently looks like cyan.
DANIEL: You’re pretty dumb. Weren’t you listening? You can’t see it without the lasers.
BEN: Okay. Okay.
DANIEL: The reason it’s called olo is because you’re hitting none of the short ones, all of the medium ones, and none of the long ones, O-1-O.
HEDVIG: I don’t know if anyone’s told you before, but like, an L is not a one.
BEN: Well, to be fair, this is a major failing of the Roman alphabet.
DANIEL: It’s the one thing I would change. It’s the one thing, capital I, L.
BEN: Capital I, L and numeral number one is just an astounding design flaw.
DANIEL: I learned to type on an old Royal typewriter that did not have a number one because you were just supposed to type a lowercase l.
BECCA: Wow.
DANIEL: Because they looked the same. How bad is that?
HEDVIG: Bad.
DANIEL: We’ll take a moment in silence.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: It’s bad. Yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: Sometimes, there’s a Word of the Week that we just want to get on the record because it hasn’t been done yet, but it seems so important. And this one comes to us from Brendan. “I have a Word of the Week suggestion. Audience capture.”
HEDVIG: Oh, yes.
DANIEL: Now, if you’re listening and thinking, “Oh, we’ve done that, haven’t we?” Yes. In our episode with Caitlin Green, a couple of Caitlin episodes ago, we talked about Russell Brand and grift drift.
HEDVIG: We did.
DANIEL: And she said, “Is that like audience capture?” And it was.
BEN: I’m going to put my hand up and be really ignorant here. I have no idea what we’re talking about.
HEDVIG: Ooh.
DANIEL: Hedvig, would you please?
BEN: Yeah, please.
HEDVIG: Do you know, Ben?
BEN: Educate me.
HEDVIG: So, if you want to make money online and you want people to click and watch your content…
BEN: Sure.
HEDVIG: …you might start with some sort of pure artistic thing and then be like, “I’m going to make videos about rocks. It’s what I like the most.”
BEN: Gotcha, yeah.
HEDVIG: Make some videos about rocks. And then one time, a goat walks into frame and they get a lot of attention and you’re like, “Mm-hmm. Maybe I should make videos about goats instead.” And slowly but surely, you get this dynamic between the audience and the performer where the audience will actually shape you and you can actually get into a sort of dead end or a situation where you can’t make anything else the thing that they…
BEN: Cul-de-sac. Okay…
HEDVIG: [CROSSTALK] cul-de-sac.
BEN: So, this is what I’ve kind of thought of as like the Joe Rogan effect, where you start off in one place and then you end up in a very different place because of what the audience kind of rewards you for.
HEDVIG: Yes. And it’s happened to Russell Brand. It’s happened to a lot of different people. And there are some creators that I like out there who explicitly don’t do this. And it also depends on how much you want how much money, because you can probably continue making your rock videos and get some money. But if you want a lot of money, and also if you already have a mortgage to pay off, because everyone loved your goat videos and you want to continue paying off your mortgage, you might be like, “Well, this is what…” Giving people what people want, in a way.
BEN: If we have talked about it before, why are we circling back now?
DANIEL: Well, Brendan suggested it. I liked it. Brendan says, “It refers to a dynamic between an audience and a performer in which the performer feels compelled to act in an otherwise undesirable way to appease audience demands.” “Oh, I was just doing rock videos. Suddenly, I’m a COVID denialist and flat earther. What happened?” Does anyone remember that cartoon Sinfest? That one webcomic, really well done, but now they’re horrifically anti-Semitic and awful. Never mind.
Now, Brendan continues. “It seems like a play on regulatory capture. It’s not an exact parallel, except insofar as both point to power dynamics that have been flipped. Oldest usage I could find was this 2022 essay.” We’ll put it on the website. “It’s called The Perils of Audience Capture. I wanted to throw this in, just we could get on the record because we haven’t ever done it. But I also wanted to throw in attention economy, because that has been… It’s not a new phrase by any means, but it’s been on my mind an awful lot.”
BEN: It’s certainly the driving force of our contemporary media environment.
DANIEL: “You know, it’s that song, Hey, Look Me Over. There’s a lyric, how can you win the world if nobody knows you’re there? Attention is valuable. The Trump surrogates went on every interview they could and dominated the airwaves and dominated the attention, and that was like money for them. They didn’t have to spend. Whereas Harris and Walz did some stuff, but they seemed terrified to do a bad interview.” No, attention is like gold.”
HEDVIG: You just normalize stuff. Yeah.
DANIEL: Chris Hayes is doing a great job of talking about this. He’s on MSNBC. He did an article in the Atlantic called You’re Being Alienated from Your Attention. He points out that Elon Musk, he had all the money in the world, but he would have traded it all for Twitter. That attention that he got from that was worth it to him, but it’s a dynamic that some people get.
HEDVIG: I have to say that’s one of his few redeeming qualities, is that he wants people to think he’s good at video games in his tweets, which I don’t think Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg or Trump actually care.
BEN: Yeah, his ridiculously transparent need for general approval rounds off a couple of the sharp edges.
HEDVIG: Apparently not enough somehow.
DANIEL: Would you say it’s endearing?
BEN: No, no.
HEDVIG: But he wants to be liked by cool, edgy gamers…
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: …which creates some probleMs But going back to the term audience capture, it’s a little bit… a proto version of this could be fan service. So, a lot of popular fandoMs like anime’s and stuff will sometimes be like, “Well, we have to put in like a bit of boob because that’s what people like.” It’s not the same, but it’s that it’s you’re being your… Yeah, your audience is actually having an effect on your production.
BEN: I think you’re right in identifying that it’s like a nascent expression of the same idea. Because it’s funny, we’re talking, Daniel’s like, “Oh, attention economy’s been on my mind recently.” Fan service has actually been on my mind recently because…
DANIEL: Oh, really?
BEN: …I’ve been revisiting some of the animes that I adored when I was a teenager and they’re a tough watch. They are a really, really tough watch. It is sort of like… I don’t want to say heartbreaking because I think that’s overstating it a little bit, but there is a thing of like in the same way that going back and watching like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, which as a 10-year-old , I genuinely thought was the funniest piece of movie that had ever been made and that stayed the funniest piece of movie that had ever been made. And then, you go back and you watch it with like an adult brain and you’re like, “Fuck, he hated gay and transpeople so much.” He might not have as an interpersonal person, but he was just so willing to throw that group of people under the bus for a laugh in a way that was just so horrendous. And anime is the same thing where you’re just like, “Wow, you guys fucking hate women. Like, you really, really hate women.”
DANIEL: Clockwork Orange.
HEDVIG: Or just don’t view them as…
BEN: Human beings…
HEDVIG: People.
BEN: …worthy of… Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah. There are several anime’s where it’s just a lot of gratuitous people boob stuff and it’s awkward especially when it’s like, which it often is, a lot of younger characters on screen and you’re like, “I know this character is supposed to be 13-year-olds. I don’t need to see their cleavage. We’re fine. I can skip past that.” But yeah, but it’s something they felt that they needed to do in order to get people’s audience. Or honestly, like… And sometimes, people get it wrong. People thought with Game of Thrones that people wanted more dragon fights. I think they found out that wasn’t what people wanted, but they thought so. They seem to think so. You can get it wrong as well.
DANIEL: So, it’s a concern for creators like us, and I think about it a lot. And we said once, Ben, I remember us talking about this and saying, “I’m kind of glad that we’re medium popular and not massively popular-”
BEN: Yeah, big time. Yup.
DANIEL: …because if I ever got paid for what I thought, oh, my god, people could pull me around like anything.
BEN: I suspect people, not our listeners, because they’re also delightful, tragic nerds like us but I think if the general population were to hear us say that, they would do some version of like, “Oh, these fucking guys just have sour grapes, basically. [LAUGHTER] That’s just what they have to tell themselves to make peace with the fact that they’re not like huge.” But as I’m getting older…
DANIEL: I guess it is. [LAUGHS]
BEN: But as I’m getting older, I genuinely… Because I teach young people and especially younger young people, so people who are like 12, 13, you hear like, “I would love to be a YouTuber. I would love to be an influencer,” like a lot. There are worse jobs that I can imagine, but not a huge number of them. Being a person who was living the grind of being a content creator sounds fucking horrendous to me.
DANIEL: It’s exhausting.
BEN: That sounds like a genuine punishment for badness. Like god punishes you by fulfilling your wishes kind of monkey paw shit to me. It sounds awful.
HEDVIG: And yet, there are some people who manage it somewhat well.
DANIEL: Well, it takes a very special kind of person.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it does. So, what’s her name? Is it Jenny Nicholson? The YouTuber who does the long essays? Or, like BreadTube or to a certain extent, Jenna Marbles. There are people, but they are medium successful.
BEN: Yeah, exactly, right? Anytime you hit like MrBeast level notoriety, it just seems like an absolute clusterfuck of terribleness.
DANIEL: Yeah. Well, on that note, let’s go on to our last Word of the Week. [LAUGHTER]
BEN: Clusterfuck.
DANIEL: I picked up on this one from Data Bear on, it’s @dataandpolitics.net on BlueSky, who showed a giant photo of an iceberg that looked like… Well, it looked like a dong. It looked like a dong. It had cleaved away and it went up in the sky and then it crashed down to earth and the skeet was, “Happy giant phallus shaped iceberg floating in,” get this, “Conception Bay…
BEN: Oh, there we go.
DANIEL: …of Dildo Canada.”
BEN: No.
HEDVIG: Wow.
DANIEL: Yes, “to all who celebrate.”
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: “Happy all of that day to all who celebrate.” So, to all who celebrate, I’m noticing this a lot. People are using it as a joke saying, “Happy Easter for all those who celebrate.” But then you can also say happy whatever day to all who celebrate. It’s kind of a way, a joke way to do this.
BEN: I’ve got to be honest, Daniel, with Dildo, Canada, as the final little piece of information there, you really pulled this story out of the judgmental hole that I had immediately chucked it in, which was this is like “Yet again, ex-Mo Daniel, not being… not able to help but be titillated by the vaguely sexual thing.”
DANIEL: What?
HEDVIG: Ben, did you click on it?
DANIEL: Oh, it is kind of sexual, isn’t it? I hadn’t even noticed. I was just focusing on the last part.
BEN: Oh, pish posh. You absolute… [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Did you look at it, Ben?
BEN: Yeah, it looks like a dick, for sure.
DANIEL: It’s a dong.
HEDVIG: Especially from the particular angle that they’ve… I suspect if you went around a bit less, but yeah, no, that’s fun.
BEN: But like I said, when it got to Conception Bay and Dildo Canada, I’m like, “Okay, this is in fact newsworthy. That’s a run of related items that is too juicy to like not talk about.”
DANIEL: Is that something? So, I got curious and found that the name… This is from Wikipedia. The name, Conception Bay, comes from the Portuguese Baía da Conceição. Baia, the conception. And was presumably given in honor of the feast of the Immaculate Conception, December 8th. Like, you know how someone will discover an island on Christmas Day and suddenly that’s Christmas Island? That kind of thing.
HEDVIG: Like Easter Island?
BEN: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Exactly, common. So, this is the Immaculate Conception Island. Immaculate Conception Bay.
BEN: There you go.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Now, do we have…
DANIEL: Why Dildo?
BEN: That was going to be my follow-up question. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: No one knows.
BEN: Oh, good.
DANIEL: We don’t know where the word “dildo” comes from. People have offered many unconvincing etymologies. It could have been that Dildo, Canada, was named for the sex toy. It would have been possible. It was James Cook and his associates who named it, and they sometimes gave things playful and naughty meanings. But then, I went back to our files, our transcripts, and I found Mother Tongue with the late Dr Jenny Nuttall. So, that was nice to listen back to that. And she points out that sometimes, dildo… You know how in some songs they would say, “Hey nonny, nonny, hey nonny,” and it doesn’t mean anything?
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm. Rama lama ding dong.
DANIEL: Exactly. Well, they would do the same with dildo. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just like, “Fa la la la la. Fa la la la la.” And dildo was one of those. Let’s listen now, shall we, to…
BEN: What have you got for us?
DANIEL: This is from the BBC. I hope they don’t mind us playing it. It’s countertenor Alfred Deller singing a song by Thomas Morley, Will you buy a fine dog? Let’s listen now.
[SONG PLAYING] Will you buy a fine dog with a hole in his head? With a dildo. With a dildo, dildo. With a dildo, dildo, dildo.
DANIEL: There we have it.
BEN: That was weird as fuck.
DANIEL: With a dildo.
HEDVIG: It clearly underlines the thing that it… And that Etymonoline also suggests as one possible thing, which is diddle…
BEN: Diddle, right.
HEDVIG: So, diddle, diddle. Twiddle, dwiddle, dee.
DANIEL: Possibly.
HEDVIG: That usage of dildo in that song sounds like that.
DANIEL: You could also imagine, and this is one thing that I think Oxford English Dictionary points out, it was a well-known sort of doo-doo-doo, doo-doo-doo sort of chorus that if you wanted to say something unmentionable, you could use that and say, “I was going over to buy a doop-do-doo. I was going to buy a hey nonny nonny, if you know what I mean.” It could be that dildo got its name from that use of a refrain.
BEN: Like, bear. Like what do you call it? A taboo word.
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Can we go back? The song says, would you like to buy a dog with a hole in its head?
BEN: With a hole in its head. Yeah.
HEDVIG: It’s all typical nursery rhyme nonsense.
BEN: I thought that the use of the word “dildo” in that song was the least noteworthy aspect of that song. [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: There was some fucking weird shit going down in that song.
DANIEL: I think it’s just meant to be a silly song.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s like a pocket full of rye, blah, blah. Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah. [LAUGHS] So, happy dildo for everyone who celebrates, do-do-do. Yerr, olo, audience capture, attention economy, and fan service, possibly to all who celebrate our words of the week. Let’s take a comment from John via email, hello@becauselanguage.com. John says, “Hello. I just wanted to offer a wee bit of my own specialization, Scots dialectology and revitalization.” Scots is cool. “Not Scottish English, but the separate language which is known as Scots. Sorry if this feels like a bit of a row, but I feel the minority language speaker POV could definitely be a useful one here. Firstly, use disgust, wilch.” Remember how we said that which? The man which I saw was once pronounced wilch, with an L?
BEN: Vaguely.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: This is a while ago. Couple of episodes. It happened when we were doing Related or Not with vault.
HEDVIG: Uh-huh.
DANIEL: John says, “It is still actually used in Scots as whilk, W-H-I-L-K. Here’s it in context. Ah, the ken [UNINTELLIGIBLE 01:50:09], which means, I don’t know which I will go for. Those sort of things are normally the same as any other.” Anyway, John says, “I’d also add that C-H instead of G-H, such as in loch, meaning lake is now basically the only way ch is rendered. We say richt, right, nicht, night, thocht, thought, etc., with a uvular fricative. Not cough though. That’s just cough. Ooh. Also, T and it for past tense -ed forMs Ben, I remember that you liked past. I past the house, P-A-S-T instead of P-A-S-S-E-D. You liked that.
Well, that’s the norm. Scots beat the simplified spelling folks to that one. The other thing I wanted to mention was that Scots has no standardized spelling. And while there’s plenty of conventions that have been mostly agreed upon, this lack of standardization means that I can get a good idea as to what variety someone speaks from their writing. Dine or da versus diné for don’t is especially Shibbolethic of Northeastern versus Central Belt Scots, respectively. In a sense, it’s led to regional quasi standards, but what I propose is that the existence of standards is a generally good thing. The enforcement of them is not.”
BEN: Okay, that’s a good take.
DANIEL: “There’s almost a direct line between the adoption of English language Bibles, including the reasons for that adoption in Scotland in the 16th century and the broader stigmatization of Scots as a mere dialect and Scots suppression over the last two to 300 years. Point being, as a revitalizer of this language, the continued lack of a standard Scots orthography is part of this revitalization project. I just felt it important to highlight as I thought it might have been missed in your discussion. Spelling standardization and reform should support communication, not suppress it, in whilk case, I’m 100% behind it. Cheers, John.”
BEN: That was a very thorough and very welcome rejoinder.
DANIEL: I’d say.
HEDVIG: I was sitting through the whole thing. I was even reading ahead a bit, and I was wondering where the friction was, because John wrote that “this might be a bit of a row.”
BEN: I think maybe we had come down a little bit more sort of somewhat dogmatically on like, “Let’s standardize things,” and he’s basically been like, “Or not.”
HEDVIG: Oh, so I did. I agree with him though that it is good to be able to efficiently communicate with people. And unfortunately, it seems like when it comes to spelling and reading and writing, we are less good at variation than when it comes to listening, probably because we’ve done it for much less longer time, etc. It uses entirely different parts of our brain. So, it does make sense that people do want to communicate. That is after all what we use language for. It also connects to what we talked to Solveig and Paulette about the Eurovision where they said people want to sing in English because they want all of the people watching the show to understand what the song is about and then that’s what you do.”
DANIEL: But we did also make the point that if there’s variation in sound, that’s not that hard to deal with, but variation in spelling is, argh, sometimes very difficult.
HEDVIG: It does seem harder. I don’t know if any research on it, but it does seem harder.
DANIEL: But John is saying, “Hey, you know what? That’s good too. Can help. Can send a message.” Thanks, John, for that. And thanks also to our guests Paulette van der Voet and Solveig Bollig. Thanks to everybody who gave stories, words and comments. Thanks to SpeechDocs for transcribing all the words. And thanks to you, great patrons for keeping the show going.
BEN: Hedvig’s turn.
HEDVIG: If you like our show and you want to support us in doing the show, if you want to have the show go on and not stop, then there are some things you can do.
DANIEL: We won’t stop. I’m not stopping. You’re going to have to drag… Oh, are we doing the thing? god’s going to kill me unless I get a jet.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: god’s going to kill me unless I get a jet? Oh, my god. This is a Mormon thing I don’t understand?
DANIEL: Oral Roberts, if I remember correctly.
HEDVIG: Anyway, if you like the show, you want to support us, there are a bunch of things you can do. We have the username, becauselangpod, on most platforms like TikTok, Twitter, BlueSky, etc. BlueSky, we are actually becauselanguage.com which is also our website. You can go to our website and submit a SpeakPipe. That’s when you record your voice saying something and then we might play your voice in an episode, which is always fun. It’s always fun to… Daniel does a great job of reading out your guys’ comments, but sometimes it’s nice to hear.
DANIEL: Yeah, but that would be so much better in John’s voice.
HEDVIG: Exactly. If John wanted to actually do Scots, that could be really fun. You can also send us like a voice memo or something. Our email is hello@becauselanguage.com. And another great way of supporting us, like how most podcast recommendations work, is talk to people you like. Maybe you’re taking a linguistics class, and you can tell some of your fellow students about it or just your mom. You can also write a review of us in any of the places that you can do reviews. I think I personally like Podchaser is one of the better ones to leave reviews at. Yeah, those are some things you can do.
BEN: You can also become a patron. You get stuff depending on your level, like being able to sit in on live shows or bonus episodes or mailouts or shoutouts. And you can even come and hang out on our Discord server, which is awesome. It’s where all the really nice people hang out. Also Daniel. You help us pay the bills. You help us make the show good. You help us transcribe the show. We send it to a company called SpeechDocs and they have to listen to all of the just terrible shit that dribbles out of my mouth and then turn it into the written word, which I never, ever stop being impressed by.
We like to thank our patrons at the Supporter level. And we have been engaged in a very curious system of reorganizing it because it got really boring to say all the same names in the same order every single time. So, Daniel, what fucked-up, mind-melding, dreamscape hallucinogenic trip have you built for us today?
DANIEL: On the Discord, we’ve been talking about autocorrect and whether it’s gotten kind of bad lately and why. Usually, if a word is not in the vocabulary, it will autocorrect to the closest word. The way it does this is it uses something called the Wagner-Fischer distance, also called the Levenshtein distance, which is just how many steps it takes to get from one string to another. So, Matt and bat would have a distance of two because you’ve got to change the M to a B and then you’ve got to drop one of T’s the matt. That’s two changes. So that’s got a distance of two. Good so far?
Ben and Hedvig: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Well, I decided to order the names based on what word their name would autocorrect to if you only allowed animal names for some reason. So, this is which animal your name is closest to and then alphabetized.
BEN: Wow.
DANIEL: Ready?
HEDVIG: All right.
DANIEL: Okay. Here’s the animal you got. This is like your animal. Alyssa and Ariaflame, you’ve both got alpaca because that’s that animal that your name is the closest to. Especially Alyssa, which you’ve got an A-L. And then you got an A at the end. Aldo, Amy, Manu, Andy B all got ant which is funny because Canny Archer got anteater. That’s interesting. Nasrin, you got baboon. Rodger, badger. Kathy, bat. Rene, bee. Nikoli, bison. Rachel and James, both got camel. Colleen and Whitney, you both got chicken. O Tim and Elias, clam. This one’s interesting, LordMortis, cormorant.
BEN: Ooh, good one. That’s a good one again.
HEDVIG: Ooh, it’s a bird?
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yes, it’s a bird. I remember James Sumner who tweeted, “Yes, it was me who smuggled a large seabird into the plenary and launched into the speaker’s head with the words, ‘Actually, this is more of a cormorant than a question.’”
BEN: Oh, god.
HEDVIG: Oh, god. Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Chris W, you got crow. Diego, deer. Tadhg, dog. Andy from Logophilius, dolphin, that’s interesting. It took a lot of doing, but we got there. Sydney, donkey. Jack, duck. Steele, eel. Termy, emu. Margareth, ferret. Faux Frenchie, you got finch. Keith is a fish. Laura, gaur. I don’t even know what kind of animal a gaur is. Does anyone know?
BEN: Gaur, spell it.
DANIEL: G-A-U-R.
BEN: Gaur. Yeah, let’s have a look.
DANIEL: What does it look like, Ben?
BEN: Oh, it’s a water buffalo.
DANIEL: Cool. All right, good job, Laura. Ignacio, gnat. Kristofer, hamster. Sonic Snejhog, no points for guessing what Sonic Snejhog got.
Hedvig and Ben: Hedgehog.
DANIEL: Correct. Kevin and Helen, both a heron. Lyssa and Ayesha, hyena.
Ben and Hedvig: Ooh.
DANIEL: Yeah. Luis, ibis. Linguistic C̷̛̤̰̳͉̺͕̋̚̚͠h̸͈̪̤͇̥͛͂a̶̡̢̛͕̰͈͗͋̐̚o̷̟̹͈̞̔̊͆͑͒̃s̵̍̒̊̈́̚̚ͅ is kingfisher, interesting. Joanna, koala. Larry got lark, and Fiona got lion. Chris L, loris. Gramaryen, marten, which is a kind of small weasel.
BEN: A small weasel, yeah. I came across them on my ride across America. They’re very cute and they’re also psychotic.
DANIEL: Yeah. Yeah. They’re wild critters. Molly Dee, mole. PharaohKatt, parrot. Felicity was pelican. I guess that’s because of the E-L-I-C join up there. Didn’t take much. Mignon was pigeon. Tony was pony. Rach was rail, which is animal. Sam was ram. J0HNTR0Y, stingray.
BEN: Cool.
DANIEL: Stan, swan. Amir the tapir.
BEN: Oh, yes.
DANIEL: I should just read these like they’re animal. Meredith the termite. Nigel, the tiger. And Wolfdog, the wolf.
BEN: Wait, hang on.
DANIEL: What?
BEN: What are Hedvig and I?
DANIEL: Oh, shoot. Hang on.
HEDVIG: I might be pig because that’s what one relative… There’s a small person in my extended family who does call me Headpig. [BEN LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Oh, dear.
BEN: I like that a lot.
DANIEL: Ben, you were bee.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Daniel was donkey. I got the same one as Sydney with the same animal. That’s lovely. And Hedvig the herring.
BEN: The herring.
HEDVIG: Herring.
BEN: That’s fun.
DANIEL: Isn’t that something?
HEDVIG: I like herring.
BEN: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
HEDVIG: Nice. Tasty.
DANIEL: Back to you, Ben.
BEN: Okay, now I’m doing the Hedvig thing. I’m not caught up. There we go. And our latest patrons at the Listener nevel. [LAUGHTER] What’s happening? What’s happening? I can’t…
DANIEL: Listener nevel. [LAUGHS]
BEN: I can’t read and see you guys at the same time. Hold on, I’m doing that. Doing that. Okay. And at the Listener level, Narushi and Marty. And at the Friend level, Varena. Our newest free patrons, Sasha. TwiksLinguistiks, Melissa, Laura, Sabrina, Matthew, and Vee. Thank you to all of our patrons.
DANIEL: Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who also performs with Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible. They just released their first full album this month…
HEDVIG: Nice.
BEN: Pew, pew, pew.
DANIEL: …which is very good. Thanks for listening, but you catch you next time, Because Language.
BEN: Yay.
HEDVIG: Pew, pew.
DANIEL: You’re welcome too, Ben, but do you want to do more interview stuff?
BEN: No, [BEN LAUGHS] sorry.
DANIEL: No. Not really. No, I don’t.
BEN: I like chatting with you guys. I don’t have linguistic things to ask linguists.
DANIEL: Yeah, but you’re good during an interview, I will say.
HEDVIG: It’s probably good because I already derail it.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, you and I are a terrible force. The fact that Daniel put us on a show together was seriously strategically stupid of him.
DANIEL: I didn’t know at the time.
BEN: How could I know? How could I have known?
DANIEL: Tell me more about Agatha Christie.
BEN: Sorry. Yes, please go ahead.
HEDVIG: In her story, sometimes people take eyedrops for various conditions. And some of the eyedrops, if you eat them, they will kill you.
BEN: Oh. So, she’s used it as like a classic…
HEDVIG: Right. So, they’re not toxic to put in the eyes, but they’re toxic if you put a lot of them in someone’s tea and they don’t taste that much. So, it’s like a super good poison thing.
BEN: Well, because…
DANIEL: Nice.
BEN: …apparently that would… I would guess that is a thing that could be true because the eye is an extraordinarily bad way at imbibing things into the body. And so, every time, for some bizarre reason, so much sci-fi… Aisha, and I watch a lot of sci-fi. So much sci fi does future drugs through the eyeball and every time it happens, Aisha’s just like, [ONOMATOPOEIA]. The reason our eyes are white is and other parts of them are clear is because there’s so little blood flow in them and so little blood vessels. That as like a mechanism to get things into the body, they are uniquely shit, especially that.
DANIEL: Wow.
HEDVIG: They should be because they are essentially an extension of the brain, in a way.
BEN: Yep, yep. Direct path.
HEDVIG: So, you’d want them to be bad at taking stuff up because otherwise you have a direct access to the brain, which feels…
BEN: Definitely.
HEDVIG: …very bad.
DANIEL: You need an air gap. It’s an air gap.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Now, I’m waiting.
HEDVIG: What happened to Ben?
DANIEL: For Ben to zip back into that chair and say, “Daniel,” spinning around a couple of times, “What’s going on in the world of linguistics?”
HEDVIG: But of course, something happened. I heard a noise and then he went.
DANIEL: I’m sure everything’s fine.
BEN: Sorry, sorry. Just getting water. I made the keep going machine.
HEDVIG: We thought there was an accident.
DANIEL: Getting water through the Patreon spruikery bit?
BEN: Well, I figured you had a bit to do, so, you know, here we go.
DANIEL: Yeah, you did. You know what?
BEN: Is it time for my segue?
DANIEL: You’re right. Yes, please. You’re drinking out of a mason jar. That is so 2000s.
BEN: I know.
DANIEL: You’re hipster.
HEDVIG: My first year of linguistics, I took a lot of notes by hand, but I also did a lot of drawing.
BEN: Mm. Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: So, it wasn’t all writing. There was a lot of drawing the vowels in the IPA chart, but with like [UNINTELLIGIBLE 02:05:16]. I don’t know.
BEN: There’s a lot of evidence for that as well. Diagrammatics and stuff is really, really helpful.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And that helped me because. Yeah, just writing, actually, I’m not sure would actually cut it for me.
BEN: So, interestingly, this is just like me being a high school teacher for a second. I don’t want people listening to this to walk away from it going, “Oh, cool. All I have to do is write stuff out by hand and then my retention goes up,” because paired with the fact of doing handwriting stuff is really good for retention is the complementary or the sort of the… What’s the opposite of complementary?
HEDVIG: Contrastive?
DANIEL: Corollary.
BEN: The contrastive fact that rewriting notes is pointless. It is a deeply useless…
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Oh, really?
HEDVIG: Oh, what?
DANIEL: I didn’t know that.
BEN: There is basically no evidence for rewriting notes being an effective revision and study mechanic, like, any more than just reading your notes would be.
HEDVIG: That’s fascinating.
BEN: I know, I know. And you’re looking at a person who spent most of his university undergrad doing that as a primary revision technique. And unfortunately, it’s just one of those really, really bedded-in things for some people. Like, when you say that there’s no evidence for women’s menstrual cycles syncing up, some people get very, very angry.
DANIEL: Oh, I know.
BEN: That’s so incred…
DANIEL: For some reason.
HEDVIG: Or speaking of educational trends, I was listening to a podcast recently about the fact that the learning style stuff, kinetic, visual learner, apparently that’s all poppy pock.
DANIEL: Nothing. And it’s the one thing everybody knows and there’s…
HEDVIG: And it’s not true. And actually, textbooks sometimes will say you might want to be familiar with the idea of learning styles because it might come up on your teacher’s certification exam…
BEN: Yeah. [CROSSTALK]
HEDVIG: …but sort of between the lines.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HEDVIG: But we’re going to include it in a textbook because we know they’re going to ask you about it.
BEN: I’m going to go you one better than that. And there are a huge number of like educators and teachers who are still thoroughly singing from that hymn book big time.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. That doesn’t mean it’s not okay to give students things in a style that they like, their preferred style.
BEN: No, no, no. So, it’s one of those like non- It’s not a particularly destructive idea to hold. Like, you’re not going to do a terrible job by attempting to approach learning with kids who aren’t flying with a particular way, in different ways. So, the outcome of approaching education in that way is still usually a kind of pro social one because you’re going to go, “Well, this kid isn’t really doing well with chalk and talk. So, I’m going to try physicalizing things and blah, blah.” But yeah, it is unfortunate that it’s also just like, “Learning types is not a thing.”
HEDVIG: I did hear a study where they actually show that it can actually pull down the grades a little bit in some cases, which is fascinating because if the preferred learning style of a student doesn’t match well with the content or the teacher, it can actually make it a little bit worse. But if anything, it might open the educators up to the idea for maybe I can switch things up and just like that basic idea maybe can be helpful sometimes. I don’t know. I am not an educator.
Can I pull you one?
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: Yesterday at my Friday beers, we talked about one and I want to see what you guys think.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Okay, I’m ready.
HEDVIG: Leper, the disease.
BEN: Oh, no, as in a person…
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: And leprechaun.
DANIEL: Oh, dang, I thought you were going to say leopard, the animal.
HEDVIG: No, no, leper, a disease that causes limbs to fall off. And leprechaun, a sort of magical being from Ireland who may or may not give you money.
BEN: I should quickly note that just because I’m not sure if this is Hedvig not fully understanding the Englishness of it, but a leper is a person who has leprosy.
HEDVIG: Oh, right, sorry. Yes, yes, yes. A leper is the person who has leprosy. So, you could also say leprosy.
BEN: Leprosy and leprechaun.
HEDVIG: Leprosy and leprechaun. Yeah, yeah, fine.
DANIEL: Also, I learned back in my Bible-knowing days that leprosy that’s described in the Bible is not a disease, especially in the Old Testament, it’s not a disease that makes skin fall off. It was a disease that put spots on you and you would suddenly come up with white spots. And then, you had to go away from the community and do purification rituals. However, it wasn’t that they didn’t like the disease, it was that they hated mixing things that were different, like fabrics. If you had such a bad case of this leprosy that you turned entirely white, then you were fine. You could come back. Until you started getting better, then the normal color would return, then you had to go away again…
BEN: Was it just the thing that…
DANIEL: …until you were fine.
BEN: What’s it called? The thing that Michael Jackson had?
DANIEL: Vitiligo.
BEN: Yeah. Is leprosy just vitiligo?
DANIEL: It’s something like, but now I’ve forgotten my Bible.
HEDVIG: But it’s not the same thing, that’s interesting,
BEN: Okay, leprechaun and leprosy.
HEDVIG: Yeah, leprechaun and leprosy.
DANIEL: I don’t think they’re related. I’m going to say no, I don’t think that leper, leprosy, are related to leprechaun.
BEN: I’m going to say they are related and my guess at the pathway is that it’s leprosy and lepers and all that sort of stuff. Argh, no, this sounds stupider the more I think about it, but I’m going to go with it anyway. I’m forging ahead. I reckon we’ve actually taken leprechaun and used that as the genesis point for leprosy in some way, shape or form.
DANIEL: Oh, that’s interesting.
BEN: I’m wondering if perhaps our, “Tittlee-tee, oh, look at me, pot of gold at the end of the rainbow,” version of leprechaun as like a tiny, cute Irishman is actually a very sort of pleasantly whitewashed thing of today. And as so often is the case, the original sort of myth was actually a far more creepy, scary, decrepit, like bog-dwelling creature that would have been described as very what we would think of as like a leper or a leprosy having person. So, I’m thinking that. That’s what I’m going to go with.
HEDVIG: Okay, so one vote for related and one vote for not related. So, for the record, yesterday, after two beers, I thought related, and I was wrong.
BEN: Ahh.
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: Boo.
HEDVIG: Because… So, let’s do leper first. So, leper and leprosy goes back all the way via Greek and a bunch of other stuff to Proto-Indo-European root lep, which has to do with to peel. And it can also relate to something that’s delicate and weak. So, something that has peeled off, something like that.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: It also has cognates that don’t make sense. So, lepidus means pleasant, charm, fine, elegant, effeminate. So, again, this like small meaning. So, that’s leper. And leprechaun is a funny thing because we actually get one of our favorite things, which is metathesis. I hope I’m saying that right in English.
BEN: [ONOMATOPOEIA]
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: So, sometimes over time, sounds and words can swap places with each other. So, for example, this has happened with English bird, which at one point was something like brid. It has happened with ask where some English speakers today say axe.
DANIEL: Happened with iron, which still is spelled like i-ron and we’ve transposed it. And is this then a case of not just metathesis, but R metathesis, because R loves to twiddle.
HEDVIG: So, lupracon is a metathesis of old Irish luchorpán and chorp is?
DANIEL: Body.
HEDVIG: Body.
DANIEL: What’s lup?
HEDVIG: And lup, luc, lu, small…
BEN: Small body.
HEDVIG: …so, it’s having little weight, [UNINTELLIGIBLE 02:13:56].
BEN: Yeah, okay.
DANIEL: Oh, okay.
HEDVIG: Yeah. So, they are not related, but they do look a bit alike. And I thought actually Ben was going to go down that path of like, “Oh, those people that we have put far away and are strange, maybe they have magical abilities.”
BEN: Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is that where you went?
HEDVIG: That’s where I went when it started but it’s not…
DANIEL: I was thinking maybe it’s a curse that somebody like that could give you.
BEN: True.
DANIEL: Right?
BECCA: Also, very good.
HEDVIG: Yes. Yes.
DANIEL: Mm. All right. Thanks for that. Okay. Give me a second. I just got to…
HEDVIG: I love. Pigs are great. Yeah…
BEN: Oh, absolutely. I think in this regard, your TikTok feed, my TikTok feed is somewhat similar in that we get quite a lot of animal content. And I am always here for when it is like pig- and boar-related things.
HEDVIG: I shook my head and then I remembered that I do actually get a lot of cows.
BEN: But you don’t get, like, cats and dogs and pets and stuff?
HEDVIG: Ooh, yeah, yeah. Okay, that’s just base level internet fare. You get cats and dogs, and then I get goat.
BEN: See, I used to think that. But I’m wondering, Hedvig, if you and I, as deep cat lovers are like… We’re doing that thing where we’re like, “Everyone smooches their pet on the face, right?”, like, if that thing is going on. Which, by the way, I don’t smooch my cat on the face because [ONOMATOPOEIA]
HEDVIG: I don’t either.
BEN: I don’t want that hair in my mouth.
DANIEL: Okay, I’m running out of battery.
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