125: Friends With Words (live with Martha Barnette and friends)

Martha Barnette is one half of the linguistics podcast A Way With Words, and author of the new book Friends With Words: Adventures in Languageland.

Her lifelong love of language has led her through some of the toughest questions lexicography has to offer, and she’s answering questions from our live listening audience.

Why do we FALL pregnant? How can we use PRETTY to say something is “pretty ugly”? And once and for all, why do we really say “the whole nine yards”?

Timestamps

Cold open: 0:00
Intros: 2:02
Chat with Martha about Friends With Words: 5:42
On Martha’s life and language: 11:10
Related or Not: 36:27
Questions for Martha: 56:25
The Reads: 1:25:40

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Video

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Patreon supporters

Thanks to all our patrons! Here are our patrons at the Supporter level.

This time we are ordering our Supporters according to the wonderful pangram written for Martha by our listener Mr Bobby Hunt:

She learned Greek and Latin through study, but she acquired language from her father Henlee Hulix, Aunt Mazo, and other Southerners whose Appalachian voices live on within her joyful examples.

Mr Bobby Hunt

Taking unique letters as they come gives us this order:

S H E L A R N D G K T I O U Y B C Q F M X Z W P V J

Here are our Supporters, according to this new alphabetical order.

• sæ̃m
• Steele
• Stan
• Sonic Snejhog
• Sydney
• Helen
• Elías
• Larry
• Laura
• Linguistic C̷̛̤̰̳͉̺͕̋̚̚͠h̸͈̪̤͇̥͛͂a̶̡̢̛͕̰͈͗͋̐̚o̷̟̹͈̞̔̊͆͑͒̃s̵̍̒̊̈́̚̚ͅ
• LordMortis
• Luis
• Lyssa
• Aldo
• Alyssa
• Ariaflame
• Andy B
• Andy from Logophilius
• Ayesha
• Amir
• Amy
• Rene
• Rach
• Rachel
• Rodger
• Nasrin
• Nigel
• Nikoli
• Diego
• gramaryen
• Keith
• Kevin
• Kathy
• Kristofer
• Termy
• Tadhg
• Tony
• Ignacio
• Iztin
• O Tim
• Chris L
• Chris W
• Canny Archer
• Colleen
• Felicity
• Faux Frenchie
• Fiona
• Meredith
• Margareth
• Manú
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• Molly Dee
• Wolfdog
• PharaohKatt
• J0HNTR0Y
• Jack
• James
• John
• Joanna

And our newest patrons:

• At the Friend level: Rachael and Lasse
• And our newest free members: Tiago, Susie, Kay, and Sabrina

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Show notes

About A Way With Words
https://waywordradio.org/about/

Friends with Words: Adventures in Languageland by Martha Barnette
https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781419778841

The Story of Piggly Wiggly: The First Supermarket
https://tnmuseum.org/junior-curators/posts/the-story-of-piggly-wiggly-the-first-supermarket

Word of the week: Pulchritude | Australian Writers’ Centre
https://www.writerscentre.com.au/blog/word-of-the-week-pulchritude/

What’s the meaning of the phrase ‘The whole nine yards’?
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/the-whole-nine-yards.html

Stretching Out “The Whole Nine Yards”
https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/wordroutes/the-whole-nine-yards-hits-the-big-time/

whole nine yards | Word Origins
https://www.wordorigins.org/big-list-entries/whole-nine-yards

Indian English and “kindly”
https://boards.straightdope.com/t/indian-english-and-kindly/358193

Accent imitation positively affects language attitudes
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3659325/

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Transcript

[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]

DANIEL: Hey, you audio listeners, it’s Daniel from Because Language, obviously. You’re listening on the audio version, but did you know there’s also a video version on YouTube? If you go there, you’ll be able to see us, which is good, I think.

HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] Which is good.

DANIEL: Except Ben.

HEDVIG: I think it’s nice.

DANIEL: It’s nice. But you’ll also see the messages that our listeners are putting in chat and that’s a lot of fun. Audio or video, we hope you enjoy the show.

[BOOP]

HEDVIG: It is so embarrassing, isn’t it, when you have some sort of technical problem and someone asks you, like, “Have you restarted the software or device?” And you’re like, “That can’t possibly fix it though. The problem is not…” And then you do it and it fixes it and it’s so like humiliating.

BEN: It’s a spiritual wound. It hurts the soul.

HEDVIG: Yeah. It’s like, that shouldn’t do anything, and yet it does, and I hate it.

DANIEL: Here’s what happened to me in the grocery store. I was looking for the haloumi. I said to the cheese person — because there’s a cheese person — “They’ve moved the haloumi again. Can you tell me where it is?” She didn’t know, and then I disengaged, “Thank you,” I said. And then I looked around, and it was just in the cheese. And I thought, it’s a good thing that she didn’t say: “It’s just in the cheese””, because I would have said, “I have been in the cheese, and it’s not in the cheese, and you’ve hidden it in some specialty…” and then it would just be in the fucking cheese.

BEN: “You know nothing of the cheese! I’ve waded hip-deep through the swamp of cheese.”

DANIEL: [SHOUTING] “What type of cheese merchant are you, knowing nothing about the cheese?” And then I would have been that guy.

BEN: Oh, you would have had cheese on your face, Daniel.

DANIEL: My face would have been cheese. Mm-hmm. All right, is everyone ready?

BEN and HEDVIG: Yes.

[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]

DANIEL: Hello and welcome to this live episode of Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. I’m Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. First, it’s Ben Ainslie. Ben, favourite kind of cheese? What’s the best?

BEN: I favour hard cheese. I really enjoy snacking on a parmesan, just slicing off big chunks of it and just nibbling on it. It’s really nice. I enjoy it very much.

DANIEL: I think you’re supposed to grate that stuff up.

BEN: No, no. Well, yes one can.

HEDVIG: You can eat it straight.

BEN: But, Daniel, I am not bound by convention.

DANIEL: [LAUGHS] That’s it. That’s it. I’ve always admired that about you, Ben. Yeah. And we’ve got Hedvig Skirgård. Hedvig, same question.

HEDVIG: Oh, my god.

DANIEL: If you like cheese. It’s okay to say, “You know, I don’t really like cheese.”

HEDVIG: I like cheese. I eat cheese basically every day. I like to fry a nice haloumi. I like to mush… There’s a Bulgarian variant of feta that is better than Greek feta, but it’s like with buffalo milk. It’s really good. And I like a mature cheddar. And I also really like parmesan. And I’m not comfortable with having to choose because they all do different things. It’s like saying, like, “What is your favourite type of…” you know…

DANIEL: What’s the best letter?

BEN: I will say: you asked a mainland European about cheese [DANIEL LAUGHING] and you expected anything less than a five-minute thesis.

DANIEL: That’s all right. That’s all right. That’s what we’re here for. No, it’s not. No, it’s not what we’re here for, is it? No.

HEDVIG: Pro tip. If you haven’t, take a feta, a nice, salty, crumbly one, mush it with a fork, put in crème fraîche and a little bit of garlic, and then put it on anything. You can put on bread, you can put on pasta, you can put it on potato, you can put on anything.

DANIEL: Thank you.

HEDVIG: It will revolutionise your life.

DANIEL: I can’t imagine molesting a bison. I just can’t see milking a buffalo, I just… That can’t be easy.

BEN: Oh, Daniel. Daniel, Daniel, Daniel. You and your localisations. Get out of here.

DANIEL: Not with that attitude, young man.

BEN: Jeez.

HEDVIG: [TYPING] How hard is buffalo…

DANIEL: We have a very special guest joining us for this episode. It’s Martha Barnette. She’s one half of the podcast, A Way with Words, which is one of the longest running and most successful linguistic podcasts out there. So, she is LingComm royalty. Martha, it is great to have you for a live show.

MARTHA: Well, thank you so much for having me. Do you want to know my favorite cheese?

DANIEL: You know? That was going to be my next question.

MARTHA: Oh, great, great. My favorite cheese is the one cheese that’s made backwards.

[PAUSE]

BEN: E…seech?

HEDVIG: Backwards.

DANIEL: Palindrome cheese.

HEDVIG: Do you like push it into the teat?

DANIEL: Back in the cow you go! [LAUGHS]

HEDVIG: Or you put the skin in the middle.

MARTHA: Come on. You’re word people!

BEN: Made, edam. Ah, Jane from Texas, well done. Brouhaha.

DANIEL: Ah! MADE backwards. Thank you. EDAM. Good job, Ditte, and Jane in Texas.

BEN: I feel like we need to now do the Wayne and Garth like, we are not worthy. We are not worthy.

DANIEL: I am not worthy. She came up with that!

MARTHA: I was going to say: Do you need me anymore? [LAUGHS]

DANIEL: This was unplanned.

HEDVIG: Do you like edam? because I don’t.

MARTHA: Actually no. No, but I like cheddar.

HEDVIG: Yeah, okay, all right! I just want to check because I don’t think it’s that nice.

BEN: We will not be accused of not sacrificing for the sake of a joke.

MARTHA: Thank you. Well, I knew this already. I knew this already. And you know, I know my cohost has had a blast with you guys, Grant Barrett. And so yes, I figure that we could be…

HEDVIG: That’s a very good joke.

DANIEL: Now, Martha, for those who don’t know, tell us a little bit about A Way with Words, which by the way, is one of the few linguistics podcasts I like.

MARTHA: Oh, yay. Thank you so much.

HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] Daniel!

DANIEL: True. I stand by it.

MARTHA: [LAUGHS] Well, thank you, Daniel. We have been around… I was kind of shocked when I was writing my book to realize that I’ve been doing this for 20 years now. And the show started in 1998 at KPBS here in San Diego. Sunny, San Diego, where it’s like 6am, or something. But yeah, it’s a show that is a call-in show where people call in with their questions about language, whether it’s regional dialects or word origins or grammar or linguistic diversity or that weird thing your grandma used to say and you don’t know if it’s her word or not.

So, we’ve been going for 20 years and we still haven’t run out of things to talk about. I mean, you guys know how this is. I mean, there’s so much to talk about when it comes to language. And so, Grant, who is a professional lexicographer, and I, as a journalist and author, talk to listeners every week from all over the US, and all over the world.

DANIEL: A call-in show is tricky because, I mean, individual words are kind of easy. There’s a limited number of places you can go to find out what people think about how words got to be that way. But man, phrases, you got to look at like five different places and they all say something different and it’s really hard.

MARTHA: Well, you’re right about that. And we make no secret of the fact that although the show appears as if it’s a live call-in show, the term of art in radio is that it’s a call-out show, which means that we get hundreds of phone calls and emails every single week and we screen those calls for diversity of ages and ethnicities and locations and different questions because Grant and I have done live radio on the BBC and you get a lot of the same questions, or a kid wants to know some naughty word or something. But we put together the show the way that the old Car Talk guys used to put together the show on NPR Car Talk. So, our producer lines up the callers, like planes circling an airport. [LAUGHS] And so Grant and I, although, we do live shows all the time around the country, but, yeah, we know some stuff before we start talking.

DANIEL: Yeah. Okay. We’re going to be talking about your new book, Friends with Words, for this episode. But first, hello to everybody who’s joining us here in the Because Language room. Would you mind, just as an experiment, putting in chat where you are in the world generally and what you call one of those conveyances at the grocery store that you wheel around and put your groceries in, so that’s what I want to know. I want to know sort of where you are, or where you’re from or… maybe those are different things. Where you are, let’s go with where you are and what you call them.

So, Andy from Logophilius. Hey, matey. Shopping cart, Indiana. Colleen in Western Washington, cart. Kay, Manhattan Beach, California, shopping cart. All right. Ariaflame, Coming from Boorloo, Perth, the shopping trolley, that’s us. Ben, do you feel pretty comfortable with trolley?

BEN: I will. But as a person infected in his youth by Americanisms, I do interchangeably use cart regularly. I have just now realised about myself in this moment.

DANIEL: Oh, wow. Okay, cool.

HEDVIG: Ditte from Denmark has indkøbsvogn, and Rene from Germany has Einkaufswagen, which are exactly the same things for funsies.

DANIEL: Cool.

HEDVIG: They’re in-buying wagon.

DANIEL: I love it.

BEN: Wagon is so much cuter. I want to start calling them shopping wagons. That’s fun.

HEDVIG: Well, wagon is basically cart here, so…

BEN: Okay.

DANIEL: Mm-hmm.

HEDVIG: Don’t worry about that.

DANIEL: I’m sad about the time we don’t have anybody from New Zealand because it’s far too early, but they might have it.

HEDVIG: I was going to say New Zealand’s my favourite one.

DANIEL: What is it?

HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

DANIEL: Have I got it right? Is it a…

HEDVIG: Isn’t it…

DANIEL and HEDVIG: …trundler? Yeah.

BEN: Oh, that’s wonderful.

HEDVIG: It’s so cute.

DANIEL: I want to trundle.

HEDVIG: Like trolley, but better.

DANIEL: Yeah, like a little wombat, that’s what I want to do. I want to trundle. Magistra Annie says Winkelwagen. Winkelwagen in Dutch.

HEDVIG: That’s shop cart as well.

DANIEL: Winkle. Fantastic. This is great. You know what? Forget the English answers. I just want the other ones! 

[LAUGHTER]



DANIEL: Well, everybody, we’ll have those going on the video, but thanks to all of you for being patrons in whatever capacity you’re in. If you’re not a patron and you’re just listening to this later, why not join up? You get to hang out with us on live episodes. You get to hang out in the Discord Room. There’s lots of fun, lots of benefits. So that’s patreon.com/becauselangpod.

Mr. Bobby Hunt, who’s been with us contributing for a long long time, wrote in. “I once wrote a pangram for Martha.” And as we know, a pangram is a sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet that’s used in that language. Here’s the pangram, “She learned Greek and Latin through study, but she acquired language from her father, Henlee Hulix, Aunt Mazo. Mazo. And other Southerners whose Appalachian voices live on within her joyful examples.” That’s a lovely pangram, also a very long one, could have tightened it up, but I’m not going to complain. [LAUGHTER] That’s kind of a bio for you, Martha, what do you reckon? Tell me about it.

MARTHA: Yeah, I was going to say that’s a lovely bio and it’s all true, because I grew up in Kentucky and my roots are in Appalachia. My father, Henlee Hulix Barnette, and he had no idea why they named him that. He said maybe they saw it in the newspaper or something. He never knew why he was named Henlee Hulix. And my Aunt Mazo and their siblings grew up in a log cabin in Appalachia, which reminds me that I used to go visit Appalachia every summer, and we would go to the Piggly Wiggly and get a buggy.

BEN: The Piggly Wiggly is the first ever modern grocery store.

HEDVIG: Is that right?

BEN: Yeah. So, the Piggly Wiggly was the first ever entity that was like, “Hang on, why don’t instead of my worker going back and fetching everything for you, as all shops used to be,” they were like, “We’re just going to give them a…” What did you call it?

DANIEL and MARTHA: A buggy.

BEN: A buggy. “We’re going to give them a buggy, and they’re just going to cruise around and they’re going to bring all this stuff to me, and then we’ll just tally it up.” And that was like they invented the modern grocery store.

MARTHA: Oh, wow. I did not know that.

BEN: The Piggly Wiggly. [LAUGHS]

MARTHA: Piggly Wiggly. You still find them in the South, I think.

BEN: That’s really cool.

DANIEL: Yeah. So, you have a great affection for Appalachian English, but also for all varieties. And in the book, you mentioned, there’s just… you take linguistic tours around different areas. Which ones were your favourite to trundle through?

MARTHA: Trundle through. Well, of course, the south. The American south is an endless font of all kinds of different expressions. For example, I grew up… I mean, Kentucky’s kind of on the border. It was a border state during the Civil War. But I grew up saying the word TUMP, do you all use this? Tump?

BEN: Tump.

MARTHA: It’s a verb. Don’t tump over that glass of water.

BEN: Oh.

MARTHA: Oh, yeah, yeah. And it may come from an English dialectal term we don’t know. But I used TUMP my entire life, and I moved to upstate New York to go to school, and people looked at me like I had two heads when I used the term TUMP. So that’s one of my favorites. In South Carolina, somebody might sidle up to you and say, “I got a sirsee for you.” Do you know what a SIRSEE is?

DANIEL: What might that be?

HEDVIG: A story?

MARTHA: That’s a good guess, but, no, it’s not.

DANIEL: A secret.

HEDVIG: A secret.

MARTHA: It’s a secret.

HEDVIG: Gossiping.

MARTHA: It’s a secret. It sounds like the word surp…

DANIEL: A surprise.

MARTHA: Uh-huh. Yeah. A little sirsee for you.

HEDVIG: What?

MARTHA: “It’s a small gift. I got a sirsee for you.”

DANIEL: Oh, that’s very sweet.

HEDVIG: A small gift?

MARTHA: Yeah, a small gift. Yeah, “I got a sirsee for you.”

HEDVIG: Okay, right.

MARTHA: And it’s spelled a lot of different ways because it’s one of those expressions that’s shared, you know, mouth to ear, rather than written. Yeah, I love it.

HEDVIG: I like to, when I go to the store sometimes like buy a treat that I know someone likes and then try and get it to them. Because I’m very bad at remembering birthdays, but I can remember, like when I’m in the store, I’m like, “Oh, this person likes this chocolate.” And then I hope that by random acts of stochastic kindness will make people forget that I don’t remember their birthdays.

MARTHA: [LAUGHS] That’s smart. Yeah, or cheese, right? Pick up some cheese for ’em.

DANIEL: Depends on what kind though, you know?

MARTHA: Right, right.

DANIEL: In the book, you say… and this comes pretty early, it was the first thing I noticed you write, “When it comes to language, grammatical pet peeves are the least interesting thing of all. In fact, think of our show as a spay and neuter program for pet peeves. You’ll be much happier, trust me. There’s so much more to explore when it comes to language.” I really like that quote. A spay and neuter program for pet peeves. Do you get a lot of them on A Way with Words?

MARTHA: You know, it’s so interesting that you ask that, Daniel, because early on, when I joined the show, and I was a stickler too, my mother was a sort of a knuckle-wrapping English teacher in the public schools, and I was a stickler as well and a prescriptivist as well. And early on, we got a lot of those. People would say, “Don’t you hate it when people say this and that?” But over time, and especially after Grant joined the show, we all learned that, as he says, “We should unclench.” There are so many more interesting things to talk about when it comes to language. And actually, if somebody is using a word that you’re not used to or a usage that you’re not used to, whether it’s NEEDS WASHED or maybe they say AXE rather than ASK, there are good historical reasons for that. And it’s actually an occasion to be curious, not furious. So, we get very few peeving calls now.

DANIEL: So, the audience has learned.

MARTHA: Yeah, yeah, we all have learned over the years.

DANIEL: That’s so good that you’re getting the message out. Ben, I remember when you first joined me, well, you had the touch of the grump.

BEN: I think we’ve essentially sort of uncovered the genesis story, or at least a very oft walked path for most people who end up like word nerds. Because we start with a deep affection for words that manifests often as rules, or perhaps lore would better, right? Like L-O-R-E. And we get very upset when people don’t understand the lore, like there’s all this meaning behind it all. And it’s like we do it this way for a reason and all this kind of stuff. And we kind of, I will admit, also in my case, there’s a little buzz that comes from knowing more than other people and our worst selves sometimes indulge that buzz and all that kind of stuff. But then, you know, like, through knowing you and much… Like it was just said, if we’re lucky, we get past that and we unlock even more interest and love for words. We get past our own barriers for that sort of thing, which is all a really wordy way of saying, “Nuh-uh, not anymore.” [LAUGHTER]

HEDVIG: I feel like I’ve been in this tolerance soup for long enough that my contrarian little bugbear inside of me wants to switch camps again somehow. And I’ve been thinking about this because first of all, I think that if you frame these kinds of instincts as like, aesthetic choices rather than like objective truths, they make more sense. So, I like this word more, but someone can be like, “Well, I like begonias more than peonies, but it’s your wedding, so whatever.”

BEN: [LAUGHS] I’m just loving this metaphor, you’re at someone’s wedding, policing their language, it’s great. [LAUGHTER]

HEDVIG: That’s the thing you should have in your head. Like people can do whatever you want. But it does like… I think you can get stuck on the wrong thing, which is like little word choices or stuff. What’s actually annoying is when people aren’t saying things clearly and understandably. Like when people write text when it’s hard to understand what they mean because if it’s a communication game of information exchange then…

BEN: [CHUCKLES] Hedvig’s getting older. She’s getting grumpier.

HEDVIG: I’m thinking more about…

BEN: “What is this message? What is this supposed to me? I don’t have the time for this.”

DANIEL: Young people are grumpy too, okay?

HEDVIG: Because I have to switch right, Ben? It’s boring to stay… No, but I was thinking more of like a clear communication movements that people have in different countries about like for example, governmental bureaucracy or…

DANIEL: Oh, Plain Language, right?

HEDVIG: newspapers or stuff, where it’s like Plain Language movements, yeah.

DANIEL: That’s good.

HEDVIG: So, that’s like a policing of language that I actually can get a little bit behind when it’s like, don’t use super low frequency words and complex syntax that people… You’re actually obscuring your message. I feel like if we can move the people who get upset about like ASK and AXE to like the Plain Language movement, maybe they can like have an outlet for that emotion, no?

BEN: We will turn their fury to the purpose of good.

HEDVIG: Yeah, no?

BEN: I think that’s very ambitious.

DANIEL: I find that when you’re talking about efficiency, and I keep coming back to this. I’m giving a talk on it on Monday. People want language to be efficient, but they don’t really know what efficiency is and they think that it means something like using the least words possible…

HEDVIG: Oh, that’s dumb.

DANIEL: …like not using redundancy and not using tautologies. And I have to say, “No, redundancy is a desirable feature of human language. Getting words to jump in and help is efficient. It’s not inefficient.” So that’s what I’ve been on for a while now. It’s fun.

HEDVIG: I don’t think anyone who has that has ever studied like communication or information networks, like redundancy is great. I mean, there’s excessive ones, but a little bit of it is pretty good.

DANIEL: Redundancy, ambiguity, vagueness, they’re helpful. They really help.

HEDVIG: Yes.

DANIEL: One thing that I noticed was that you with A Way with Words, Martha, you had to make a big move. You had to do something that we kind of had to do because at one point we decided to leave the organisation that birthed us and kind of go indie. And Grant was instrumental because Grant and I had a big talk about this, and he said, “No, go for it. The audience will catch you,” and they did. And so, you had this exact same struggle, and do you feel like it’s gone well? And are you where you want to be with the show?

MARTHA: Yeah. Well, the choice was kind of forced upon us because I joined the show in 2004, and I was commuting back and forth from Kentucky, doing a few shows, and then I would go back home to Kentucky, and I finally moved out here in 2006. And the next year was 2007, which was the Great Recession here. And KPBS ran out of funds to produce the show, and they canceled our show very abruptly and canceled another show as well.

And Grant and our intrepid producer, Stephanie Levine, and I just kind of looked at each other and said, “No, we’re going to keep doing this. Our ratings had never been higher. We get so much support from listeners.” As I said, this linguistic curiosity that’s out there was just coming at us all the time, and we thought, “We’ve got to find a way to do this.” So, it was sort of… It was partly pigheaded, partly naive, and partly passionate. We just thought, “Okay, let’s put on a show. Let’s do it ourselves.” I’m not a parent, but maybe it’s like parenthood. If you knew how hard it was going to be, you might think twice.

It was really tough. I have to admit, the first three years, we did not take a salary at all. And we were having to continue to produce show and distribute it to public radio stations because the worst thing you can do is be inconsistent in providing content as you know. And so, we made a lot of sacrifices, worked really hard, worked other jobs, and we got great support from listeners. I mean, listeners make such a difference and somehow we’ve managed to maintain.

And of course, you always want more. You always want to be on more stations and have more listeners and donations to your nonprofit. But, writing the book has been a moment to reflect on all of that and think, “Gosh, I’m really glad we did what we did, even though it was really tough at the time.” And every time I talk to a listener, I just… I mean, you probably have the same experience. You just think, “Yeah, this is where I need to be. I’m so glad to be a conduit for this kind of information,” and you get so much back from your audience. People who listen to these kinds of podcasts are wonderfully curious and generous, and so I could go on and on, but I won’t.

DANIEL: Okay. Tell us what social media looks like for your show, because the social media landscape, the internet landscape has changed. What are you doing now to promote? Where do you hang out? What’s your feeling about where we’re at in our moment?

MARTHA: Oh, boy. Well, I’m kind of getting exposed to that a little bit because I’m busy promoting the book and I still don’t understand Instagram. I’m sorry, I just don’t. I don’t know… Way Word has a presence there, Way Word Radio, but I feel like most of our energy goes into our website, waywordradio.org where you can get hundreds of past episodes there.

In terms of just the daily grind of putting out stuff in social media that’s Grant’s responsibility for the most part. And we do BlueSky and Threads and Facebook. We have a thriving Facebook group I think, there, I don’t know, something like 50,000 members there. And that’s where a lot of our contact with listeners goes. We barely post to X. And, yeah, that’s… I would say that probably Facebook is… And we have a newsletter that goes out to about 55,000 folks once a month or so. But I don’t know, what are you guys doing? I mean, I see you on BlueSky and X.

DANIEL: Yeah, we’re out there.

HEDVIG: I’ll be honest. I mean, I was continually on Facebook personally, because a lot of people I know are only there, and a lot of people I want to connect with are only there. And I agree with all the critique that Facebook has gotten over the years, but I can’t just move large swaths of my people. And I’m finding that with certain extensions and with some thoughtful use of the platform, it’s still pretty important in my life in a way. I kind of made me wish it wasn’t, but it is. I feel conflicted about it, but I can’t deny that it’s actually where… yeah.

MARTHA: Yeah, yeah, I’m the same way. Even though I have such mixed feelings about Facebook, I still depend on it. Having moved all the way across the United States, I have a lot of friends back home. I have a lot of friends all around the country. And it is a really good way to keep in touch with people. I mean, I feel like I’ve watched people’s kids grow up just on Facebook, and so I really depend on it. But I’ve been trying to get into Instagram and the other short form social media and especially of late, and I keep saying I feel like my eyes were dipped in acid or something, I just… I really am… Yeah, I have such mixed feelings about it. I feel like there should be a word for that mixed feeling of… I mean, you do depend on something like Facebook, but you also resent the heck out of it.

DANIEL: Mm-hmm. I feel like I’m aging out of social media, maybe.

HEDVIG: Like all of them.

BEN: I don’t know if I’m aging out so much as I have stopped contributing in any way. So, I’m pure usage. I’m no output whatsoever. Not through any standard or like moral position, but just literally, like, “I have nothing to offer. [LAUGHS] I got nothing for you people. I got nothing. I’m sorry.” And, yeah, it’s weird. My consumption of Facebook has nearly completely disappeared. The only thing I use it for, and this is maybe this is Facebook’s way of just trying to become the everything thing, because we’ve all said, “I have this one bespoke use that I can no longer do without.”

The secondhand goods market in Australia now is nearly entirely dominated by Facebook. Facebook marketplace. I went on Gumtree recently, which was our previous king of the secondhand thing, and it’s basically dead. It’s been thoroughly, thoroughly killed by Facebook. So, if you want to not pay full price for things which this cheap ass doesn’t, then there’s no other place to be.

DANIEL: I see two things happening, for us anyway. Discord, it’s like a social network, but it’s quieter, it’s smaller and it’s better than the other ones, to my way of feeling. And also, I feel like newsletters are coming up. You’ve got that newsletter that goes to a lot of people. I feel like that’s a major area for a lot of us LingCommers.

HEDVIG: It’s almost like messaging boards and forums are just like perennial because these are like ancient technology. Discord is nothing but like it’s the same kind of thing as a forum used to be in the early days of the internet and email lists. I mean, we’re talking like ancient technologies here in the web space, right? But they stand the test of time, people can subscribe to them the way they want and like… Yeah, I agree with you.

DANIEL: Mm-hmm.

MARTHA: That’s so interesting because I got on the web in 1991, and it was ancient then. It was the Wild West, and people just were falling all over themselves to help you. If you just put out a question there on CompuServe. And I made lifelong friends that way. And I kind of like your idea of just sort of embracing the retro there. The newsletters, for sure. I find myself subscribing to so many newsletters now, and that just feels, I don’t know, calmer. It makes me feel less compelled to go out and touch grass, which I need to do when I look at this short form social media, this is a…

BEN: A slow-content movement, perhaps, is what we’re like articulating.

DANIEL: Yeah, that’s a good name for that.

MARTHA: Yeah. I like that.

DANIEL: In Friends with Words, you have a lot of good information. You have a good section on debunking, which is a lot of fun to read. What’s a word history that you’ve had to debunk over and over again or one that you would most like to. Can you think of one? It’s okay to take your time on this one. We’re all chill.

MARTHA: [LAUGHS] Well, of course, there are all the acronymic etymologies. GOLF being “gentlemen only, ladies forbidden” or POSH. [LAUGHS] I think probably anybody who’s here knows what we’re talking about. Let’s see…

DANIEL: It’s never an acronym. It’s never an acronym.

MARTHA: It’s almost never. I mean, every once in a while, radar and lasers. But, gosh, well, SAVED BY THE BELL, we often… And it’s so cute. I mean, people just sidle up to with a sirsee about language, they say, “Did you know that SAVED BY THE BELL has to do with these weird Victorian burial practices of putting people into the ground, but leaving a little string that they can pull if they turn out to be alive rather than dead? if they turn out to be buried alive?” And I mean, there’s some overlap there because there were designs for coffins like that in the Victorian age.

DANIEL: Oh, okay.

MARTHA: Yeah, you can go online and see drawings of these, because at the time, there were some cholera epidemics and you could look like you were dead, and people really feared being buried alive. But of course, SAVED BY THE BELL is one of those sports idioms. It comes from boxing, obviously.

DANIEL: Bob Hunt is asking, “I know they had to debunk RULE OF THUMB on A Way With Words.” I did RULE OF THUMB last week on my other gig, which was The Speakeasy on ABC Radio. Do you remember that one?

MARTHA: RULE OF THUMB?

DANIEL: Yeah, the RULE OF THUMB.

MARTHA: Yeah, right. That there was some English law that said that a man could beat his wife as long as the stick wasn’t wider than a thumb or something.

DANIEL: That was the story and it turned out not to be. It turns out we just use our thumbs a lot to estimate things, distances or granularity or… The truth… Would it be true to say that the truth is always more boring than the stories?

MARTHA: Often, often, quite often. I thought of another one that somebody came up to me with just the other day, which was, “Did you know that SINCERE comes from the Latin phrase that means without wax?” Because cēra in Latin is wax. And there are different versions of this. Some people say that in ancient Rome, people, beekeepers would sell honey and be in the streets of Rome saying, sine cēra. This honey doesn’t have any wax in it. Or there are stories about people who made statues in ancient Rome and if there were cracks in them, they would fill them in with wax and… No, no, it has nothing to do with wax.

DANIEL: Everybody’s heading over to Etymonline right now. But do you remember the real story offhand? [LAUGHS]

MARTHA: Not offhand. I think maybe somebody knows.

DANIEL: All right, chat.

MARTHA: I think it may be sort of a squishy etymology. I can’t remember, but it’s definitely not the wax.

BEN: Oh, there you go, Daniel. Yeah, go for it, Daniel.

DANIEL: Dan has it from Latin sincerus, whole, pure, genuine, probably from sin meaning one, and cerus meaning to grow. That isn’t very transparent to me, but I’m going to believe it.

MARTHA: Yeah, that’s why I was saying I feel like it was sort of squishy, but it doesn’t have to do with the…

DANIEL: It’s not the wax.

MARTHA: Yeah, that’s one of those things where it’s really picturesque, really colorful and it’s got a bit of a storyline to it, but… Yeah, I hate to be a party pooper. So often I am.

DANIEL: Are you?

MARTHA: Well, linguistically speaking, yes.

DANIEL: [LAUGHTER] Sorry, folks, but it’s not that. I’m glad that there wasn’t a law about rule of thumb. That would have been kind of terrible.

MARTHA: Yeah.

DANIEL: Listeners, you might have questions for Martha. Sorry, what?

HEDVIG: You wish that there wasn’t a law saying that you can’t hit your wife with…? I think that would have been great if you were hitting your wife, anyway, I’m glad there would have been a law.

DANIEL: I’m glad that somebody didn’t make a rule saying it was okay as long as it wasn’t any thicker than your thumb. Content warning, domestic abuse.

HEDVIG: Okay, all right, never mind.

DANIEL: We’re going to get to those questions in the next section, but now I think it’s time to play everyone’s favourite game. Yes, indeed. Our theme this time comes from Hugh.

[RELATED OR NOT THEME PLAYING]

DANIEL: Thanks, Hugh, for that theme. This one’s from Alison via email, who says, and Alison, if you’re here, jump in. “Dear Daniel, Hedvig and Ben, I was out canoeing and came across some rocks just below the surface. I thought of it as a shoal.

BEN: Oh, yep.

DANIEL: Then it occurred to me that SHOAL and SHALLOW are very similar. Could they be related?”

BEN: I want to give our listeners a little the-sausage-getting-made insight here. We have a show notes page, and up until this very week, Daniel, in the show notes page would just bung these words straight in there. And this week, he has hidden them all behind hyperlinks that he has labeled “Daniel-only hyperlinks.”

DANIEL: Yep.

BEN: So, Hedvig and I now have to click shamefully on the link if we want to cheat before the show.

DANIEL: Yeah, but you won’t see anything, will you? No, you won’t.

BEN: [LAUGHS]

HEDVIG: I haven’t tried. Okay, so SHALLOW and SHOAL.

DANIEL: You got five options here. There’s SHALLOW and SHOAL. But remember, SHOAL has two different meanings. There’s a SHOAL, a submerged ridge. A SHOAL, a group of fish. So, as you can see on the screen, listeners, there’s five different choices. These three words, all related. Or you can say SHOAL number one is unrelated. That’s the submerged ridge, that’s the odd one out. You could say that SHALLOW is unrelated. You could say that SHOAL number three, that is to say the group of fish is unrelated. Or: ain’t none of them related. Now, I can see the scores rolling in here, and people are clicking around.

HEDVIG: I thought it was a SCHOOL of fish.

DANIEL: Ah. We do say a SCHOOL of fish. Wait a minute. Could that be a variant of SHOAL of fish?

HEDVIG: No, no, no, no, no. Let’s not complicate this more. You’ve already set up the poll.

DANIEL: Let’s not muddy the waters. [LAUGHS] Okay, it’s time to… Martha, why don’t you go first? What’s your pick here?

MARTHA: [LAUGHS] I don’t think that SHALLOW is related to SHOALS.

DANIEL: Okay, so it seems like you either feel that SHALLOW is the odd one out or maybe none of them are related? Do you think the two SHOALs are related?

MARTHA: [LAUGHS] Oh, I was afraid you would go further with that.

DANIEL: I got a follow-up question.

BEN: I was really hoping there would be no further investigation.

[LAUGHTER]

DANIEL: You said you weren’t going to fact check.

MARTHA: Gosh, all I can think of is Muscle Shoals, Alabama in that song… Okay, I have to commit, don’t I? I have to commit. I will say that none of them is related.

DANIEL: Okay, very good.

BEN: I stuck my flag squarely in SHALLOW being on one out, and that the two SHOALs were in fact related.

DANIEL: Okay. I will say I think they’re all related. I think it’s not such a big stretch.

BEN: Okay. Okay.

DANIEL: Sound alike, semantically related. And you know what that means? That means totally related all the time.

BEN: Yeh… mmm… Does it? Is that what we found out? [LAUGHS]

DANIEL: Unless I’ve been greatly deceived!

BEN: I think you have been. I think we have got many examples where that does not hold true. This is like you have just said I before E except after C, basically. 

[LAUGHTER]

DANIEL: Did I miss the point of this game? Hedvig has her skeptical face on.

BEN: She’s squinting. She’s got such a squint on.

HEDVIG: I’ll be honest, this SHOAL one is actually one of those that I encounter so rarely that it took me a really long time to learn what it was. It’s not a high frequency word.

BEN: No, it’s not. It is bespoke.

HEDVIG: So, I encounter it so rarely, I kind of have to look at it every time and like remind myself what it is.

BEN: I also wonder if it’s slightly regional as well. I grew up spending a lot of time on the water. My dad is a commercial fisherman and we never used this word even in a maritime context. We called them reefs or rocks or whatever. So, I’m wondering if like maybe British people say SHOAL all the time or maybe it’s in American English, but it’s certainly not something that we said much, even when were like semantically in the zone.

DANIEL: Okay, so what’ll it be?

HEDVIG: No, but I guess that SHALLOW was the odd one out and the…

DANIEL: SHALLOW is the odd one out.

HEDVIG: …two SHOALs are related. Just vibes, I have nothing.

BEN: Yes.

DANIEL: It’s time to get those votes in, everybody, five, four, three, two, and one. I’m ending the poll now. And now let’s see what everybody said. Everybody said that… there’s a real tight thing. There’s SHALLOW, six people said SHALLOW is unrelated. 29% said SHOAL number three, the group of fish is unrelated. And a bunch of people said none are related. I was not very popular, I thought they were all related, but only 10% said so. The real answer is, I was wrong. They’re not all related. There is an odd one out. SHALLOW comes from Old English sceald, which is a shallow. And that is also where we get SHOAL, the shallow place. Those two are related. So, if you said SHOAL number three is unrelated, you were correct.

BEN: So, where does that come from then, Daniel?

DANIEL: Well, I’ll tell you. A SHOAL of fish comes from a different word, old English scolu, a troop, a throng, a crowd, which is also where we get a SCHOOL of fish.

BEN: That is so annoying that it came to be the exact same bespoke, weird, not often used word, that’s a shallow place.

HEDVIG: I don’t like this.

BEN: [LAUGHS] Yeah, this one’s right in the tummy.

DANIEL: Now, remember, when you see a school of fish, it’s related to a shoal of fish etymologically. But I’m seeing some sources say that those two words are actually kind of different. Like, a SCHOOL of fish is a bunch of fish traveling in a coordinated manner, swimming together in the same direction. A SHOAL of fish is when they’re different fish not being coordinated, they’re just hanging out, they’re just chilling.

BEN: That seems an incredibly fine distinction. [LAUGHS]

DANIEL: I think so, too.

HEDVIG: Well, I guess it’s also like different species could maybe be a shoal, but a school has to all be the same species. If they’re all hanging around in the reef, for example, it could be different species.

DANIEL: That’s it.

BEN: Opening it up to the room. Marine biologists anyone want to chime in? Any…

DANIEL: Yeah, unmute. All right, well, I’ll tell you what, our next one comes from Oshin, but I think, Oshin, you’re here. Do you want to give us yours, if you remember?

OSHIN: Yes. Yeah.

DANIEL: What do you got for us?

OSHIN: So, BANDIT and BANDICOOT. And this came to me because a friend of mine would get confused between the two. And bandicoots are kind of raccoony and such. So, yeah, BANDIT and BANDICOOT.

DANIEL: It’s those thieving bandicoots. All right.

BEN: We should probably… For those outside of Australia, be like, a bandicoot is a small marsupial.

DANIEL: Are they one of the cute ones?

BEN: Yes. Well, I mean.

HEDVIG: Wait, are there any of them that aren’t cute?

DANIEL: No.

BEN: No. I think as an Australian, I definitely have a hierarchy of cuteness. And if you look me in the eye and say that a bandicoot is cuter than a numbat, I’m going to call you a dirty fucking liar, because that’s clearly objectively wrong. But bandicoots are still pretty great little creatures. They basically just look like a large shrew. They’ve got like a quite elongated…

HEDVIG: I was going to say if you’re just audio listening to this and you know what a shrew looks like? It’s a marsupial shrew.

BEN: Just pinch, zoom a shrew up and you got yourself a bandicoot.

DANIEL: More like bandi-cute, amirite?

BEN: Oh, stop.

DANIEL: Anyway, it’s up on the screen.

HEDVIG: Can I…?

DANIEL: Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead.

HEDVIG: I was going to ask because, Daniel, previously you have ruled in a way that Ben and I have disagreed with when it comes to partial relatedness. [BEN LAUGHS]

DANIEL: Okay. Do you think the BAND- might be related, but nothing else? Okay.

HEDVIG: Yes.

DANIEL: Okay. Okay.

BEN: So, I’m saying that’s a second-tier relatedness, which is tricky.

DANIEL: You know what? I think that if you say the BAND- parts are related, that’s good enough to call it related for me.

BEN: Okay.

HEDVIG: That’s what I think.

BEN: Well, Dad is clearly softening in his age, Hedvig. And there is a favourite and it’s you.

HEDVIG: I think he’s making a distinction between because previously we’ve had little Greek or Latin prefixes, and he’s been like, that’s not good enough, but BAND- is like a chunky thing.

DANIEL: Yep.

BEN: Okay.

DANIEL: Well, I’m going to plant my flag in the aluminium and say no. I think BANDICOOT is probably from an Australian Aboriginal language. And I’m not sure which one, but I’m going to guess Dyirbal.

HEDVIG: That is exactly what…

BEN: That’s not the reason, I guess.

HEDVIG: …Kay has said in the chat and I think that might be a good point.

DANIEL: Hot dog. What a smart listener.

BEN: I guessed no as well. Not necessarily on Aboriginal bastardisation, but more on the thing of my experience of bandicoots is they’re not very thievy. They’re not like raccoons. A raccoon will get in your shit. They are annoying creatures, whereas a bandicoot is just pretty chill. They’re just cruising around doing their own thing.

HEDVIG: Okay, so what about a BAND? As in a stripe?

BEN: Oh, I mean, I guess, yes, okay, they are a little bit stripy. Again, not as much as the numbat. But that…

DANIEL: Sounds like a folk etymology to me. If you said no… Okay, so do we all think no? I’m thinking this is a slam dunk for no.

MARTHA: I agree.

DANIEL: That’s what I thought before I looked it up. Martha, you’re a no?

MARTHA: I am definitely a no. I think bandicoot is an Indigenous term. Not sure which language, but for sure.

DANIEL: Okay, hmm. Now let’s see. I think if you say no, you have to guess the language. Does anybody have any guesses besides an Australian language? Slap it in chat.

BEN: I do think Hedvig might be onto something in the fact that the bandicoot does have bands running across its, like, rear half. So, there could be definitely something there.

DANIEL: Okay, I’m going to end this poll now. I’m going to share the results.

BEN: Overwhelming. I tell you what, the 10% of people who said it’s related, if you are right, you get to ride victorious and shiny into Valhalla. That is going to be amazing.

DANIEL: Well, it turns out that the two words are not related at all. But nobody said the language that BANDICOOT comes from, and it’s not Australian.

BEN: Okay. 



HEDVIG: Oh. Hmm.

DANIEL: BANDIT comes from Italian, bandito, an outlaw, which comes from a word… not BAND. I thought it was like a band, like a bunch of bandits are, like, banding together. But no, they’re doing things that are forbidden. Things that are banned. It comes from vulgar Latin, bannīre, to proscribe.

BEN: There we go. That’s fun.

DANIEL: Okay, so who’s got it? Go ahead and pop that language in chat if you think you know it. I’ll give a prize to somebody who… You know what? Because Language merch for the first person. Oh, we’ve got it.

HEDVIG: Telugu.

DANIEL: Telugu.

HEDVIG: Faux Frenchie. He said Telugu. Is it Telugu?

BEN: Really?

DANIEL: It is Telugu. And the word is pandikokku, which means… The pandi is pig. Kokku is rat. It’s a pig rat. Now, the cute little guys that we have are not the original bandicoots.

BEN: Oh, this is a magpie situation.

DANIEL: Yes, it is. It was a kind of rat that existed India, or probably exists. But then people came to Australia, saw these cute little guys and said, “Time to rehabilitate that name.”

BEN: Okay.

DANIEL: So, thank you, Oshin, for that one. This is great. And our last one comes from Iztin. This one was from the Discord. You know, we’ve got a Related or Not channel and it’s full of really fun examples which I think we should use a lot.

BEN: Be conversant.

DANIEL: Yeah, it’s great. Right, Hedvig?

HEDVIG: They’re also full of like a bunch that me and Ste suggest from when we’re out walking and then I post one and Daniel never picks them.

DANIEL: Those are pretty good too.

HEDVIG: Apparently not good enough.

BEN: The pity give, oh, that was brutal.

DANIEL: Iztin suggests HURTLE, as in when you’re flinging yourself towards something with reckless abandon.

HEDVIG: Oh, I see. Hurtling towards the sun.

DANIEL: Hurtling towards doom. And HURDLING to jump over obstacles. But then there’s also to HURL, to throw something. Okay, you got five choices once again. Either they’re all related, you’ve got an odd one out, or you’ve got none of them related. Let’s hear some answers. I’ll go first, I said all unrelated. I think that you could get there without having them be etymologically related at all.

BEN: Excuse me. Hang on. No, no, no, no. What happened to Mr “They’re all spelled the same, and they’re all semantically basically identical. Therefore, they’re all related”? That was your words about 45 seconds ago.

DANIEL: Oh, Ben, that’s so childish. Please, we’re past that.

BEN: Okay. 

[LAUGHTER]

DANIEL: Help me out.

BEN: I’m saying HURDLE is unrelated. I think that there is a… My brain, my little, like I’ve osmosised a whole bunch of linguistic stuff, but I don’t know that I know it, and then every now I kind of black out, and then I say a linguistically appropriate thing. I feel like there is a process whereby HURL to throw and HURTLE, which is basically a thing that gets thrown. You can put the T in as like it can jump further into… because it should be hurled, but then there’s something in English where the D turns into a T and then it jumps a few letters forward or whatever, I think that’s possible.

DANIEL: Okay. Okay.

HEDVIG: You think it’s like a bit of a FALL-FELL situation or something like that where it’s like: either you do…

DANIEL: Oh, you better describe that because that was a good one.

HEDVIG: Well, I FALL and I FELLED you, so then you FELL.

BEN: Just chop that -ED off.

DANIEL: Yes. Causative.

HEDVIG: You change something in the middle of the thing, like a little vowel or a little consonant gets added, and suddenly it’s like perspective changing or something little happens or something applicative.

DANIEL: Okay.

HEDVIG: I say they’re all related. I don’t know.

DANIEL: Wow.

BEN: The Daniel answer, if he was being honest with himself.

DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] Okay, Martha, what you got?

MARTHA: I agree with Ben. I think that HURDLE in the middle is actually a hurdle between [LAUGHS] HURTLE and HURL. I’m getting this visually, I think that HURDLE with the D is unrelated. I can see how HURTLE and HURL could definitely be connected.

DANIEL: Okay, great. We’ve got our answers.

HEDVIG: Have you ever seen people run hurdles, [BEN LAUGHS] like the Olympic sport?

BEN: Yes.

HEDVIG: Okay.

DANIEL: Yes.

HEDVIG: You don’t think they’re hurling themselves through the air?

DANIEL: I think they might be hurtling and if they trip over one of those things, then they’re hurting. Ooh!

HEDVIG: Hurtling. Just saying.

MARTHA: [LAUGHS]

BEN: I reckon HURDLE. I’m going to just guess really quickly before we finish just on HURDLE’s etymology. I think the fact that we make people jump over those things is much younger and secondary to making horses jump over them. So, I reckon that’s where that comes from.

DANIEL: Hmm. Okay.

HEDVIG: Yeah, but what are athletes except small horses?

DANIEL: Agreed. Okay, let’s share those results. Well, looks like the most popular answer was that HURDLE is unrelated, overwhelmingly 62%, The next most popular, they’re all related at 29%. Oh, the one that I said — none are related — wasn’t popular at all, only 5%, which is ironic…

BEN: Oh, no.

DANIEL: …because they’re all unrelated!

HEDVIG: No, no, no. No, no, no. This is double-checking time. Can we get like one veto double check [BEN LAUGHING] I am… Fuckin’ hell, what is this? I’m going to be… [TYPES] HURTLE…

BEN: She is livid, people, she is livid.

DANIEL: Ropeable.

HEDVIG: Okay.

DANIEL: I’m going to read my information here. So, HURTLE, who said that it was…? Was it you, Ben, who said that the -LE was probably doing something? Who said that?

BEN: I said the T jumped forward in HURTLE.

DANIEL: Okay, well, it does have a frequentative. You know how we’ve talked about frequentatives before? We add an -LE on the end when something is like really frequent or really intense, like CRACK versus CRACKLE. Okay, I’ve used that example a lot. Well, it seems that HURTLE is probably frequentative of hurtin, which is a word that kind of means HURT and you’re hurtling. In some sense hurting.

BEN: You’re going so fast. It’s like painful.

DANIEL: You’re rushing painfully towards your demise, or something. Or something.

BEN: Or perhaps in a carriage and is so fast that it’s uncomfortable or something like that.

DANIEL: There’s some discomfort. The word HURL… OED suggests from an imitative Germanic bass, hurr meaning rapid motion, which is also where we get the word HURRY. HURL and HURRY are related, it would appear.

BEN: I just love that while Daniel is saying all of this, I have just like a profile view of Hedvig, just like enhance, enhance, enhance. 

[LAUGHTER]

HEDVIG: Shut up. I also keep googling the same thing because I keep forgetting which ones which I think speaks to like… because I think I looked at the page for HURTLE now three times thinking it’s a different one. [LAUGHS] I think it says a lot.

DANIEL: And then the HURDLES that you jump over is a totally different word. Old English, hyrdel, which is described as “frame of intertwined twigs used as a temporary barrier”, which is something that you would jump over. Yeah, different word entirely. So, they do look like completely different words. Thanks, Iztin for that one. Thanks to you for playing.

BEN: Not thanks to Iztin. Unhappy with Iztin. That was really unsatisfying. Didn’t like that at all. [MARTHA LAUGHING]

DANIEL: Well, that’s too bad. But I had a good time because…

BEN: Yeah, I bet you did. [MARTHA LAUGHING]

DANIEL: …I got it right. And if you’d like to contribute Related or Not or a jingle, we would love to have that. Just send it by email hello@becauselanguage.com or over our Discord, like a lot of people do because that’s where I’m going to get them when they’re good.

All right, Martha, it’s time for some questions that our listeners have asked. Our first question comes from listener Sydney. Hi, Sydney.

SYDNEY: Hi, Daniel.

DANIEL: Nice to have you. What’s your first question?

SYDNEY: So, I wanted to ask Martha about a word that I consider rather clumsy and yet it means beautiful. I’m thinking of PULCHRITUDE, and how did such a clunky word come to mean something beautiful?

DANIEL: PULCHRITUDE.

BEN: I think it’s fair to say, and I’m not here to, like, body shame words, but that is a fugly word. [LAUGHTER] That is not a pretty word. That is a bad word. And I’m seeing so many people nodding. Like, clearly this is not just a me thing. It’s just like achey.

DANIEL: I feel like Sydney has touched a nerve here. Okay, Martha, what’s your take on this? Just to start.

MARTHA: You know what? The word PULCHRITUDE has a special place in my heart. [LAUGHTER] It does because in ninth grade Latin class we learned that PULCHER means beautiful. And so, I was so excited as a 13-year-old to learn that there was this word in English, PULCHRITUDE. And so, I always loved this word. And then the more that I talk to people about it, the more I realize that people had this thing about this…

And PULCHRITUDINOUS, I mean that’s what we would call a heterological adjective. That it’s a word that doesn’t look like or sound like what it is. Like the word BIG is a little word and LITTLE is a bigger word or MICROSCOPIC is a big word. But I will join with you in not liking the obsolete word, I believe it’s from the 15th century. It’s a variation of that which is PULCHROUS, you know which…

BEN: You somehow made it worse.

MARTHA: I know, I know it sounds like some kind of bodily effusion.

BEN: Yeah, like a wound that’s leaking or something.

MARTHA: [LAUGHS] Separating. it’s just like pulchrous. So, I’ll grant you that one, but I really like PULCHRITUDE.

DANIEL: I think maybe clunkiness is in the eye of the beholder. Because I think when you say pulchritudinous, it sounds like one of those fanciful words from the 1800s. “Roll up, come and see Martha Barnette, a paragon of pulchritudinous perfection!”

BEN: I’ve got to be honest, it sounds… when you add the -INOUS to the end, it sounds more like CROMULENT to me. It’s a perfectly cromulent word.

[LAUGHTER]

DANIEL: Right, like DISCOMBOBULATE or that whole bracket of words from that time.

MARTHA: Suffonsified. I’m sufficiently suffonsified.

DANIEL: So pulcher up, buttercup. All right, let’s get to Sydney’s next question. What else you got for us?

SYDNEY: So, the other question I have for Martha is the word PRETTY starts out as meaning attractive, physically attractive, and then it goes into a gradation of PRETTY LARGE or PRETTY SMALL. How does that happen?

DANIEL: There you go. Yeah, I’m PRETTY TIRED.

MARTHA: Yeah. That’s gone through quite a process, hasn’t it? Because back in the… A long time ago, Old English, even, it comes from prættig, I believe, in Old English, which means cunning or skillful. And then in Middle English, it sort of came to mean pleasing or attractive. And then Early Modern English, the meaning changed a little bit more so that it meant considerable or notably good, a PRETTY PENNY, something like that. And today you can use PRETTY to mean rather or moderately, so it’s really gone through some, what do you call it? Semantic drift, right?

DANIEL: Mm-hmm. I noticed that the same thing happened to FAIR. You could have a FAIR maiden, but then you could say, “Oh, it’s FAIRLY early right now.” So maybe this is a path that words go on. You start out being like a word for something good or pleasant, and then after a while, it means a lot of something.

MARTHA: Right.

BEN: I don’t think we’ve gotten to the bottom of why though. Like, it’s not an intuitive jump, at least not to my brain.

MARTHA: No.

BEN: Something being good and something being to some extent are not necessarily semantic neighbours to me.

HEDVIG: But if you think about it’s… Hmm. So, first of all, we have two words in English, so I don’t know if we can claim that there’s a general semantic pathway.

DANIEL: Well, I got more. Let me give you another one. Oh, no, somebody has it already in chat. What was it? It was… Who said awful…?

BEN: Awfully. Yeah, yeah.

DANIEL: Oh, it was Faux Frenchie, who also got Telugu right. “I’ve long enjoyed the irony of PRETTY UGLY and AWFULLY PRETTY.” Awful has gone through a path, but now we say, “Oh, it’s awfully nice of you to be here.” That is to say to some extent it’s nice. Terrific, right? It’s a terrific word, but then we also say there was a terrific bang outside when the lightning hit. So, it was to a certain extent. So, there is this history of words meaning really bad or kind of nice or really good. Meaning, it’s just getting picked up and used as adverbs, meaning, to a certain extent.

HEDVIG: But a terrific bang is not the full extent of a bang. It’s like 90% of a bang, is what you’re telling me.

BEN: One is a version of very in this case.

DANIEL: You know what? Maybe TERRIFIC isn’t a great example, but I think the other ones are better.

HEDVIG: Pretty good is like 90% of good. Terrific bang, I don’t think it’s 90% of a bang.

DANIEL: Maybe not.

MARTHA: And what about TERRIBLY?

DANIEL: Terribly. Oh, yes, Andy from Logophilius has pointed out “terribly happy.” Yes, that’s another good example.

BEN: So, I think what we’re identifying is that we will have these words for good or bad. And if we think about it, I don’t know, I’ve been doing numbers lines with my son for his homework, and if we think about it as just like a values line of pretty or awful or whatever, and then further on we’ve got terrific, and then further on we’ve got terrible. They’re just intensifiers that come to mean… So, we take them from the objective description of how good or bad something is, and we just say this is how far along the values line. I think the thing after this word is, so like a pretty big bang is 90% of the way there. A terrific bang is like 120% of the way.

DANIEL: We just make it slide. We just ease off on it. We start off saying this is the thing, but then we ease it back just to…

HEDVIG: Oh, it just bleaches, it gets overused, it becomes hyperbole and then people scale it down. Is that what you mean?

DANIEL: Yeah, I think that is what I mean.

HEDVIG: It’s like how AMAZING doesn’t mean that much anymore in American English.

BEN: Not a superlative anymore, Yeah, yeah.

MARTHA: AWESOME.

DANIEL: Yeah.

BEN: Or GREAT.

HEDVIG: Awesome.

DANIEL: Awesome. Yeah.

HEDVIG: Yeah. I’ve been thinking about writing a paper by intensifiers for a bit.

DANIEL: Thank you, Sydney, for those questions. Diego asks about… Oh, no, I was dreading this one: THE WHOLE NINE YARDS. Now I picked this one out of a pile that he suggested because I know that this is just the one that you dread. There’s no good answer, at least not one that I know. But maybe you’ve got information that I don’t. So, Martha, help me out. The whole nine yards, meaning giving it everything you got.

MARTHA: Yeah, yeah. And the reason that this one sort of makes us squirm is because it’s sort of the… What would you say? The Sasquatch of etymology, the Loch Ness Monster of etymology, the Great White Whale [LAUGHS] and the Holy Grail all rolled into one because, boy, if you find the actual etymology of… If you find the very first usage of THE WHOLE NINE YARDS, it will likely be on the front page of newspapers all over the world.

People have tried at length to find something definitive on this, and there have been some linguists who have done some great work on this. In particular, Bonnie Taylor-Blake has done a lot of research on this. And if you want a really good summary of the work that’s easy to read, I would go to Dave Wilton’s wordorigins.org, which has a wonderful page on THE WHOLE NINE YARDS. But basically, I think the idea is that yard in the past has been used as sort of a term for a vague measure of something, like it’s not necessarily 36 inches or a meter.

And I think we’ve only taken it back to what, 1907 or so. And I think that that was THE FULL NINE YARDS rather than THE WHOLE NINE YARDS. And for a while there in the early 1900s, people would talk about THE FULL NINE YARDS or THE FULL SIX YARDS, which sort of debunks the whole idea number one of the whole nine yards coming from the machine gun strips of ammo in World War I, because it antedates World War I.

And there is a very, very early use of, I think it’s THE WHOLE NINE YARDS. I think that’s the phrase back in 1855, but it seems like it’s sort of a one off, because there’s a long period of time before you see it again in 1907, which makes it very, very suspicious. So, people have suggested it has to do with the length of material used in a kilt.

BEN: I see none of these folk etymologies are hitting on what I had always guessed this was because I’d never thought about this before, but whenever I’ve heard the phrase, I always thought I was like, well, that has to be from the Age of Sail.

DANIEL: That is one theory. Another one is that a cement truck holds 9 cubic yards of cement… Well, okay, so what does this tell us about your work as word finders? I mean, this is tough. It’s not always easy to get back to the base. Are there any others that are similarly lost to history? What would you love to know?

MARTHA: Oh, let’s see. Well, you know, I was going to say that I think an uglier term than PULCHRITUDE is “Orig. unc.” [LAUGHS] You know, when we run across an etymology that we just can’t find. Yeah, and one that we get asked about a lot and that was in the news lately was 86.

DANIEL: Oh, yeah. Let’s go on. Thank you, Diego, for that one. James has one. We’re going to try to run through these pretty quickly because I’m seeing some good questions coming up in chat. James says, “I’ve noticed that people speaking Indian or South Asian English dialects often use KINDLY, where I would say PLEASE. For example, kindly fill out this form, or kindly submit your time card before the end of the day. How did KINDLY become a hallmark of these dialects? Or looked at another way? Why didn’t PLEASE catch on?” Kindly do the thing.

MARTHA: Yeah. Or kindly refrain from smoking or whatever. Yeah, I believe that’s a vestige of British colonial rule in that part of the world. You know, that was the language that was used in formal and bureaucratic writing and that’s what was taught there. You wouldn’t necessarily learn it at home, so of kindly stuck around.

BEN: It certainly, I don’t know. I avail myself of the linguists to find out the proper name for this, but the phenomenon I have heard of exactly the same thing happening here in Australia in Italian migrant populations. So, we’re now three or four generations deep of people who originally moved to Australia that long ago. And when the fourth-generation kids could go back home to Italy or go to the mother country or whatever, all of their distant cousins are like, “Dude, you speak like ancient… like a desiccated fossil.” Because the language that came across with those original migrant populations kind of froze in place a little bit or at least to a much greater extent than back home and it seems like maybe that similar process is at work here. Like a version of English was kind of taken over to India at a certain time, or inflicted on India, I should say. And so, there’s going to be a whole bunch of fossils from then because it wasn’t privy to that language evolution that was still happening on the British Isles.

MARTHA: Yeah. Sort of preserved in linguistic amber, right?

BEN: Yeah, exactly. The mosquito.

DANIEL: A lot of American expressions are kind of like that. Like the Americans still do a lot of things that British people stop doing because it fossilised in America. Like saying that someone who’s angry is MAD or saying FALL instead of AUTUMN. I did take a look at the Google Ngram viewer and it looks like KINDLY plus verb peaks about 1880 to 1900, which is right in the middle of the British Raj there. It was popular, British English people took it with them, and then it became a pattern.

James also asks, “I’ve noticed people using the phrase FELL PREGNANT where I would expect to say GOT PREGNANT. Is this a regionalism? Is it newish? Does it mean something different from GETTING PREGNANT?”

MARTHA: That’s a really good one. Yeah, so, it’s sort of like entering into the condition of being pregnant. Like, I mean I’m thinking of how FALL is used.

BEN: FALLING ILL. I mean that’s…

MARTHA: Right, falling ill.

DANIEL: FALL IN LOVE.

BEN: …I think British kind of thing.

DANIEL: FALLING PREY to or FALLING VICTIM TO.

MARTHA: Yeah, yeah.

DANIEL: It sounds like these are things that entail a lack of volition or a lack of intention. And I know pregnancy isn’t always like that, but maybe it’s just…

HEDVIG: Just like control.

MARTHA: Is there an element of unexpectedness then?

DANIEL: I think so.

MARTHA: Not unexpectINGness, but…

BEN: I was wondering if it might have been… it might have fallen into fashion by way of a kind of a weird puritanical overarching thing. So, like when you GET PREGNANT there is quite a clear indication that somebody fuuucked. Whereas if you fall pregnant, it’s a thing that’s just happened. 



DANIEL: Oops!



BEN: Like it’s a much more like chill, neutral kind of. It doesn’t evoke the idea of like getting it on.

DANIEL: Like falling asleep, right?

BEN: Exactly.

DANIEL: And at a time when contraception wasn’t available for women, then it kind of was in a more involuntary sort of way. I thought that this was an old usage that got replaced by get, but in Google Ngram Viewer it looks like GET was always popular. Get pregnant. And FALL PREGNANT seems to be a kind of newcomer.

HEDVIG: What else do you get like that?

BEN: GET SICK.

HEDVIG: GET FAMOUS? You can get sick?

DANIEL: Get banned. There’s lots of GETs. [LAUGHS]

HEDVIG: You can’t.

DANIEL: Can’t always get what you want.

BEN: You GET diseases, right? Like you get syphilis or you get specific named things.

HEDVIG: Yeah, but you fall in love, you fall pregnant, but you don’t get in love, I think.

BEN: Yeah, true.

DANIEL: Yeah. Yeah.

HEDVIG: Right?

BEN: But you do catch feelings, just saying.

DANIEL: Oh, that’s contagion. That’s a contagion metaphor. The Fishmonger asks, “I love hearing Hedvig’s accent shift as she talks to different people.” 

[LAUGHTER]

HEDVIG: Sorry about that. You’re welcome. You’re welcome. I’m glad you enjoy that.

BEN: [LAUGHS] That was a masterful pivot. She went from apologising to be like, “I got you.”

DANIEL: Is there a name for this effect? Has it been studied?

HEDVIG: It’s just not something I have any… Yeah, I don’t know what it’s about either. Generally, it’s called accommodation, which is when you adapt to the person you’re speaking to. You can do this in lots of ways. If you’re a native speaker of English, you might be doing it in very subtle ways that are not so obvious. If you’re a second language speaker of a language, I think that you don’t have as much of a home base anyway, so it’s not as big of a deal to shift around. You can accommodate also with like gestures and other kinds of behaviors where you sort of mirror the person you’re talking to. You might choose certain words, certain ways of expressing yourself to align with that other person and thereby facilitate collaboration.

There are some linguistic studies that suggest that maybe it’s a thing that women overall maybe do a little bit more than men. I can’t remember any names of those papers, but it’s something I remember in social linguistics class, people talking about. And the more sort of like important your particular identity is to you, reasonably, the less you’re willing to accommodate consciously or unconsciously.

So, the simple word is that it’s called accommodation. And I think I’ve told this story before, but, like, I remember I had an American and a British friend talking once to each other, and neither of them were accommodating at all and they were both doing their thing. And I had this underlying feeling of like tension. I was like, “Why don’t they like each other?” Like, there’s a bad vibe, and there wasn’t. It was just me thinking that they should accommodate, but they didn’t, and they didn’t feel antagonistic towards each other or felt that the other one was, so. But, yeah, accommodation is a simple word.

DANIEL: Do you feel then that you’re more sensitive to this as a person? Do you know this about yourself or is it like, “Nah.”?

HEDVIG: I mean, I know that I do it more especially because I spend a lot of time with linguists, and they point it out to me [BEN LAUGHS] and I listen to a lot of podcasts.

BEN: [LAUGHS]

HEDVIG: If I like listen to… They love… the minute I arrived in Australia, all of the Australian linguists I met were like, “Do you know you do this thing?” And I was like, “I mean, I do, but I also…”

BEN: [CHUCKLES] I just love. That was a really fun mental image of you just walking through your working life and have people basically coming up to you, be like, “You’re weird. Did you know that?”

HEDVIG: Oh, no. This happens, like, at workshops, conferences. People who know me, like Americans who know me, and then they see me talk to someone else and they happen to walk by and they stop, they’re like, “Oh, my god, I heard you speak.” And like, “Oh.” I’m shocked.

BEN: Clutch the pedals.

DANIEL: Yeah. Yeah.

HEDVIG: No, I mean, they’re linguists. So, they have that little surveillance radar going at all times, and they want to talk about it. And basically, I listen to podcasts, I really like the Boonta Vista, Australian podcast. So, if I am at home office all day and I listen to that podcast at some point, and then… So, it’s not just people I talk to.

DANIEL: No, there’s been a lot of work on this. Some work has shown that if you find someone to be more socially attractive, then you’ll imitate them more. If you find them cheerful, friendly, warm, etc. But there’s some work from 2013, I just found that shows that it works the other way, this is work from Dr Patti Adank of the University of Manchester and a team published in Frontiers in Psychology. Link in the show notes to this episode. They found that if they ask people to listen to a recording of someone talking, for example, they got British speakers to listen to people using a Glaswegian accent and then ask them to imitate a few sentences in that accent and tested them, those people were more pro social toward the speakers and that accent, which I love. So…

HEDVIG: Wait, what…? Oh, so if he got them to walk in their shoes by imitating them, they then felt more positive towards them than if they weren’t asked to do that, is that what you mean?

DANIEL: Then the people who weren’t asked to do that. Yep, that’s what that study found.

HEDVIG: Okay. But the previous study. So, there’s one problem here, which is… My husband is British and he’s the person I spend the most time with, and he doesn’t seem to affect me, which is…

BEN: That’s necessary. No, no, no, that’s not problematic, that is absolutely necessary. Because if you afforded your romantic partner the same level of, like, significance and influence as the rest of the world, shit will fall apart straight away. Right? Like, you can’t hold on to the level of tension — I don’t know about you, Hedvig — that I hold on to around like colleagues. You can’t be your true and authentic self around colleagues, not truly, but one would hope you do feel free to do that around your romantic partner, but I think the price you pay…

HEDVIG: But then my true and authentic self is some sort of weird American thing and I’m not sure I love that.

DANIEL: He’s your baseline.

BEN: [LAUGHS] Look, I can’t speak to that.

DANIEL: He’s your baseline. Strike him from the sample.

HEDVIG: And Daniel said that like you’re more attracted to people you accommodate to. Sorry, am I…? It’s just upsetting.

BEN: You’re married, bro. Like, this is how it goes. The attraction phase is gone. You’re in the slob.

DANIEL: You’re in something deeper. You’re in something deeper and more normal.

HEDVIG: He’s so cute.

BEN: Yes. Exactly.

HEDVIG: I don’t know if you know. I don’t know if you’ve met him, but he’s the prettiest man I know.

MARTHA: Well, I have a question for you, Hedvig. How aware are you when you’re accommodating? How aware are you of your accommodation?

HEDVIG: Well, because it’s pointed out to me a lot, I become more aware of it.

MARTHA: But when it’s not… Oh. Huh.

HEDVIG: A little bit, maybe. I don’t know. Maybe a little bit.

BEN: I’ve got to say, Hedvig, from my read of you having spent this time that we have together, I think if it’s not pointed out to you, not hugely, to be honest, you’re in it. It’s like jazz, man. You’re just freestyling. You’re like [ONOMATOPOEIA]

HEDVIG: The worst thing is… The embarrassing thing is when it’s me and a bunch of other second language speakers, and in particular, if it’s like, for example, Indian English or like various kinds of European English, I will fall into that. And then some people will be like, “Oh, you shouldn’t do that.” And I’m like…

BEN: We don’t do that. 

[LAUGHTER]

HEDVIG: And I’m like, no, but like that’s what I do. And then it gets… Usually, the people I’m talking to don’t seem to mind, but other people who hear me mind.

DANIEL: I want to ask a question that I found in chat. It’s from Kay. Kay, you asked a question in chat to Martha. Do you want to unmute and ask it yourself, even though you’ve already asked it in chat? Is Kay still here in our link?

KAY: Oh, no, there, I’m unmuted.

DANIEL: Hey, there you go. Go ahead.

KAY: I’m fascinated by words that are self-contradictory. Like I said sanction, which means two opposite things. Frenchie also threw in cleave, which is another good one. Linguistically, how does that happen? Is there a negative meaning that starts out as the traditional one and then it shifts to a positive meaning? Or what do we know?

MARTHA: Well, cleave is a great example because cleave is actually two words that look identical. One of the cleaves, yeah, Clēofan, I think, in Old English, means to… One of them is Clēofan, which means either to cling or to cleave. I forget which one. Now, Clifian is maybe cleave.

DANIEL: I forget myself, actually.

MARTHA: I think is to be sticky like clay. It’s related to clay. So, when you see cleave, meaning either like a meat cleaver, or the husband should cleave to his wife, which is stick to her, that is actually two different words that have gone along different etymological paths. So that’s quite often what happens.

I think sometimes it’s a little bit different. I’m thinking about dust, like you can dust your furniture to get the dust off, but you can also take powdered sugar and dust a cake and it’s sort of the same idea there with both dusts, but I mean, powdery stuff, but it’s used in a different way, but those are wonderful, yeah…

DANIEL: Those are two really good examples. And you’ve got a bit of contronyms in the book as well. Sanction is interesting because it’s one of those things where when people were talking about sanctions, they were talking about stuff that was okay or not okay. Is this okay or is this not okay? And so over time, one meaning of sanction was the okay meaning, and the other one was the not okay. So, with sanction, two words split apart. With cleave, two totally different words fused together and there’s your two sides of contronyms.

MARTHA: Yes. Or think about the word table, for example. We’re going to table that issue. Are you going to take it up or are you going to put it aside? And apparently the UK version of table, meaning to take it up, had to do with the fact that in parliament there was a speakers table where you put an issue on the table, literally. And in the US, table means exactly the opposite. “We’re not going to do that we’re going to table it for now.”

DANIEL: We could go on and on, but I feel like we have come to the end of our questions and I would just like to thank you, Martha Barnette, for coming on and helping us sort through some of the most difficult questions that lexicography has to answer.

MARTHA: Oh, what a pleasure.

BEN: Huzzah.

MARTHA: [LAUGHS] Well, I’m a big fan of. And I love playing the game, so it’s great.

DANIEL: There we go. And the book is Friends with Words, because you are a great friend of words.

MARTHA: Friends With Words: Adventures in Languageland.

DANIEL: On sale now from all good places?

MARTHA: It is. And on Tuesday, the audiobook drops. Boy…

DANIEL: What was it like recording that?

MARTHA: Oh, my gosh.

HEDVIG: Did you record it?

MARTHA: I did. I did record it. I had to try out for the audiobook company to see if they wanted to use me, but they budgeted literally 24 hours for me to go to the studio and spend not all at once, but that number of hours. And I thought, “Come on, it’s an eight-hour book, how long does it take to read [BEN LAUGHS] a book that’s going to last eight hours?” Oh, my gosh. I was stopping every other sentence. It was just… You think you know what you’ve written and then you read. And also, you think you know what you’ve written and then you read it aloud and you’re like, “Oh, I want to edit that. I want to move that word over there.” [DANIEL LAUGHS]

Honestly, I have so much more respect for audiobook narrators now. It is grueling and it takes a lot of stamina and I’m someone who gestures a lot. And that was a big no-no because I was off-mic when I was…

BEN: Drifting and out, yeah. Wow.

MARTHA: So, in one session, I stood there for eight hours with my hands behind my back, [CHUCKLES] but I’m hoping that if you listen to the book, it sounds mellifluous and relaxing.

BEN: There’s a pretty word.

DANIEL: That’s a lovely word, isn’t it?

MARTHA: Oh, yeah. Don’t get me started on the etymology of MELLIFLUOUS, it’s beautiful.

DANIEL: But it is in the book, I remember.

MARTHA: It’s in the book.

DANIEL: Check that out. Friends with Words by Martha Barnette. Thanks to you, Martha. Thanks to everybody who gave us words, questions, comments. Thanks to SpeechDocs for transcribing all the words. And thank you for all you great patrons for just showing up in all kinds of ways.

BEN: If you would like to help us here on the podcast, there’s so many different things you can do. You can follow us, we are @becauselanguage.com on BlueSky and @becauselangpod, all of the other multitude of places. You can send us ideas, news and words. And you should definitely do it by leaving us a SpeakPipe, which is just you going to a website and putting your question into like spoken words so that we can play it on the show. It’s so nice and fun and wicked.

We love hearing all of your voices, especially all of the different wonderful versions of English, it’s just so fun. And of course, the very funnest of all things to do is just tell a mate. Just be like, “Hey, I heard you were like, ‘oh, I was really bored on my run and I need something to listen to.’” Well, we got a trio of absolute units to talk about linguistics and that will help you run.

HEDVIG: Units. I love being called a unit. I like a good unit. Anyway, now it’s my unit of what we call the reads, which is a sprug to say that it’s a lovely thing to do to become a Patreon. You get invited to live shows like this. You hang out on Discord. You can see all the submissions that me and my beautiful pretty husband make that Daniel does not declare are good enough for the show. So, if you want to see that, you can join our Discord.

DANIEL: Lift your game.

HEDVIG: It’s nice to be there. You also get mailouts and shoutouts and just the good feeling in your heart that you helped pay for my new mic stand that I really needed because it was driving Daniel nuts with my old mic stand. As usual, Daniel has done something crazy about the reading out of the Patreon supporter names, what is it this time?

DANIEL: Well, let’s see. This time I thought, what can I do to arrange the letters in some kind of different alphabetical order? And then I looked at Mr Bobby Hunt’s wonderful pangram that we talked about at the top of the show about Martha Barnette and her life and words. And I thought, well, that contains every letter of the alphabet because it’s a pangram. So, I just removed all the duplicates and I came up with something like S-H-E-L-A-R. And I said, well, that’s alphabetical order now. So, if your name starts with S, you come first. Do you know what I mean? Hedvig, you’re looking confused.

HEDVIG: No, I actually… Did you see that I messaged you privately earlier on the top of the show and was like, “I don’t want to pangrams. I’m sorry, I’m dumb.”

DANIEL: No, no. Pangram is just one of those sentences that contains every letter of the alphabet. And because Mr Bobby Hunt’s sentence contained every letter, I just took them in the order that he put them.

HEDVIG: Oh, but you can duplicate and do any order?

DANIEL: I’m taking far too long to explain this. Basically, what it means is that S-H-E-L, etc. That’s the letters that are kind of come in the order that they come in. So, Hedvig, I seem to remember that you had a difficult time reading alternate alphabetical orders last time. Should we give this one to Ben, see how he does?

BEN: Yeah, yeah. She’s not good enough everyone. Watch her handball it to me.

DANIEL: I just want to give Ben a hard time as well.

HEDVIG: I really got messed up last time and I don’t think this is going to be any better.

BEN: Alrighty. This time we are ordering the names, by the way of that crazy that Daniel just said. So, in that order we have sæ̃m, Steele, Stan, Sonic Snejhog, Sydney, Helen, Elías, Larry, Laura, Linguistic C̷̛̤̰̳͉̺͕̋̚̚͠h̸͈̪̤͇̥͛͂a̶̡̢̛͕̰͈͗͋̐̚o̷̟̹͈̞̔̊͆͑͒̃s̵̍̒̊̈́̚̚ͅ, LordMortis, Luis, Lyssa, Aldo, Alyssa, Ariaflame, Andy B, Andy from Logophilius, Ayesha, she’s really great. Amir, Amy, Rene, Rach, Rachel, Rodger, Nasrin, Nigel, Nikoli, Diego, gramaryen, Keith, Kevin, Kathy, Kristofer, Termy, Tadhg, Tony, Ignacio, Iztin, O Tim, Chris L, Chris W, Canny Archer, Colleen, Felicity, Faux Frenchie, Fiona, Meredith, Margareth, Manú, Mignon, Molly Dee, Wolfdog, PharaohKatt, that’s a great little duo. J0HNTR0Y, Jack, James, John, and Joanna. And for our newest at the friend level, I don’t want to say Lasse because that seems degrading. Lasse. Lasse.

DANIEL: Help me out, Hedvig. This is a Swedish first name. When someone’s name is L-A-S-S-E.

HEDVIG: Lasse.

DANIEL: Lasse

BEN: Okay. Hello to our newest free patrons. Tiago, No, no association. Susie, Kay, and Sabrina.

DANIEL: Martha, do you want to take the last bit or is this for me? I’m going to put it… Shall I put it in chat and you can have a go?

MARTHA: Yeah, I’d be honored. Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Krapljanov — is that right? — Who also performs with Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We will catch you next time. Because Language.

IN UNISON: Pew, pew, pew.

DANIEL: I see why they gave you the audiobook gig because you have a really nice voice. It’s almost like you’re good at radio or something.

BEN: Also, you just smashed Krapljanov like nobody’s business. [MARTHA LAUGHING]

HEDVIG: That was good.

MARTHA: I’m looking at IPA before the sun comes up. 

[LAUGHTER]

[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]