The definition of white supremacy: is it expanding, or are we just getting better at recognising it and its reach? How does white supremacy show itself in language and in linguistics? Kelly Wright talks about her work in sociolinguistics, and how we all can do better.
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Kelly E. Wright | U-M LSA Linguistics
https://lsa.umich.edu/linguistics/people/graduate-students/kelly-wright.html
AI Generated Voices ~ Resemble AI
https://www.resemble.ai/
Adobe Voco ‘Photoshop-for-voice’ causes concern
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37899902
There Is a Racial Divide in Speech-Recognition Systems, Researchers Say
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/23/technology/speech-recognition-bias-apple-amazon-google.html
Racial disparities in automated speech recognition | PNAS
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/14/7684
There Is a Racial Divide In Speech-Recognition Systems, Researchers Say – Slashdot
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/20/03/23/2126236/there-is-a-racial-divide-in-speech-recognition-systems-researchers-say
Humans are born with brains ‘prewired’ to see words
https://news.osu.edu/humans-are-born-with-brains-prewired-to-see-words/
Innate connectivity patterns drive the development of the visual word form area | Scientific Reports
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-75015-7
The visual word form area (VWFA) is part of both language and attention circuitry | Nature Communications
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13634-z
Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene – Penguin Books Australia
https://www.penguin.com.au/books/reading-in-the-brain-9780143118053
Ed Benguiat, a Master of Typography, Is Dead at 92
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/16/business/media/ed-benguiat-dead.html
‘White Supremacy’ Once Meant David Duke and the Klan. Now It Refers to Much More.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/17/us/white-supremacy.html
Webinar: Being a Linguist on Social Media | Linguistic Society of America
https://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/webinar-being-linguist-social-media
Language and Discrimination: Generating Meaning, Perceiving Identities, and Discriminating Outcomes | Annual Review of Linguistics
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011718-011659
The sound of racial profiling: When language leads to discrimination | University of Nevada, Reno
https://www.unr.edu/nevada-today/blogs/2020/the-sound-of-racial-profiling
The fight to ‘EndSars’ in Nigeria | News | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2020/oct/28/the-fight-to-endsars-in-nigeria
Kamala versus Daenerys
https://the.ink/p/kamala-versus-daenerys
How to respect my ethnic name | Anpu London
https://www.anpu.london/name
What Will Become of the Dirtbag Left?
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/what-will-become-of-the-dirtbag-left
What Is ‘Failson’ Culture? Look No Further Than the Family Trump for the Answer
https://www.thedailybeast.com/what-is-failson-culture-look-no-further-than-the-family-trump-for-the-answer
Transcript
DANIEL: We have been talking about doing a show together for a super long time, and now we’re finally here!
BEN: [OMINOUS SPACE VOICE] The planets have aligned.
KELLY: Thanks, white supremacy! [LAUGHTER]
[INTRO MUSIC]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to this episode of Because Language, a podcast about linguistics, the science of language. My name’s Daniel Midgley and with me now, Benjamin Ainsley.
BEN: Good… well, good appropriate time characteristic for whenever it is that you’re listening to this, person who is listening to this.
DANIEL: Thank you. [LAUGHTER] Also with us is doctoral student Kelly Wright of the University of Michigan. Hi, Kelly.
KELLY: Hello!
DANIEL: Now, tell us a little bit about your work, because you’ve been doing a lot of stuff lately. You’ve been doing a swag of media things about the intersection of language, racism, profiling, the racialisation of language. Tell me about your work and how those things combine?
KELLY: Okay, so, yeah, I’m a… I’m a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan in experimental sociolinguistics. So what that means is, I’m critically interested in questions about how our think-meat… right? [LAUGHTER] Like, the language system in the brain…
DANIEL: Think-meat, yes.
KELLY: Think-meat. That’s the German word. [LAUGHTER]
BEN: If I learn nothing else from this show — and I really hope that I still do — that is still… I’m sorted. Think-meat. That goes… that goes in the vault.
DANIEL: I am feeling really insecure about German, because we’ve got some German stuff coming up, and if you say that, I will just believe you, okay?
KELLY: Good, good, good. [LAUGHTER] Yes, I’m interested in how our brain interfaces with social structure — so the things in the society that are outside the brain — and how that affects language change over time. And the way that I test those theories is with various experimental methods. So I have done some machine learning on a large corpus that I built of sports journalism, looking at how Black athletes are described differently than white athletes, and using lots of fancy math to show that that is true. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Awesome.
KELLY: And so, yeah, yeah, I’ve worked on discrimination in the housing market. So voice-based discrimination in the United States. Legally, discrimination has to occur with physical proximity. I have to stand in front of you for you to hear that I’m a woman or a Black person or to know that. So my research shows that this happens with the voice alone. And yeah… and I also work on slurs. So how bad words become bad over time.
DANIEL: Yeah, okay.
BEN: I’ve so many questions, but I am going to hold on to all of them for now.
DANIEL: I just want to ask, you’ve been bouncing around the podcast circuit, you’ve done Vocal Fries, you’ve done Lexis, Unstandardized English. I forget who else. And now you’re doing us, you’re on Because Language. Are you enjoying all of this? Is it fun? Or have you got the bug?
KELLY: I love it. [LAUGHTER] Yes, I think it’s great. I’m really committed to making science consumable for various publics. And so I think the spoken medium is the way to do that.
BEN: Can I set you a really quick challenge, Kelly?
KELLY: Mhm.
BEN: So, like, you just gave us the very sort of polished “I’ve been on some podcasts. This is what I’m about.” Can I challenge you to, like… I’m at a party with you? You’re like three drinks in, so you’re feeling a little bit feisty. And I’m like [MOCK DRUNK], ~bleh, so what do you do?~ And can you give me your, like, 30-second: all right, fucken, here it is, buddy.
KELLY: Yeah, I research why you’re racist! [LAUGHTER AND CLAPPING]
BEN: I was so hoping it would be that. Yes, I love it.
DANIEL: That wasn’t thirty seconds.
KELLY: I know.
BEN: You know, and she’s like: And I got twenty-seven seconds spare to prove that you are.
KELLY: Pulls out graph. Don’t think I don’t take graphs to parties, ’cause I do.
DANIEL: Yeah okay, okay.
BEN: I’ve got visual aids.
DANIEL: Our last episode was a bonus mailbag, in which Ben and I talked about questions from our listeners, our dear listeners, and I’m kind of proud of a term that I invented.
BEN: Oh, um…
DANIEL: Remember the one?
BEN: Oh, sorry, I have to cast my mind way back.
DANIEL: What do you call it when somebody changes a word to make it kind of, to make it an insult like Dumbocrats or conservathieves?
BEN: Oh! That waa the… Antagonism? No. What was it? Help me.
DANIEL: An antagonym.
BEN: An antagonym, that’s right. Very good.
DANIEL: I’m proud of that.
BEN: Very good, sir. Bravo. Brava, brava!
DANIEL: Well, if you’d like to hear some other questions, some answers to other questions, that’s in our episode, and we’ve got a lot of these bonus episodes. If you want to hear them right as they come out, why don’t you head over to patreon.com/becauselangpod. And you’ll be supporting the show, getting some bonus extras, helping us pay for all of this stuff, and we really, really, really appreciate the support from all of you. Thanks all, mwah!
BEN: Before we get completely stuck into Kelly’s work, which I am chomping at the bit to do, can we quickly do, like, a whirlwind tour of what’s in the news this week?
DANIEL: Okay, very quick. Adam sent me this one on Facebook. This is a website or a tool or software that allows you to clone your voice so that you can type stuff and then hear yourself reading it, which seems like a lot more work than just saying it, but… [LAUGHTER]
BEN: Yeah, it’s like adding a few steps here, but okay.
DANIEL: But it’s also kind of fun. So this is resemble.ai and I tried it. I read out fifty different pass… No, actually I read out a hundred. They say you can stop at fifty, but I doubled that, doubled down, did a hundred. And then you can type in stuff, and I’ve sent you a clip. So let’s listen. You could tell me if this sounds like me.
BEN: All right. Here we go. Computer Daniel.
DANIEL: [DEFINITELY SOUNDS LIKE A COMPUTER, BUT ALSO KIND OF LIKE DANIEL] Dhurga is a language of coastal New South Wales. And of course, because it’s been the International Year of Indigenous Languages, a lot of funding from the government of Australia and other countries has become available for it. So this is one of the fruits of it.
BEN: Um, I would 100 percent believe that this is you, if you had just come back from dental surgery. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Like, it clearly does have aspects of you. Like, there’s no mistaking that. Like if you, if a random person played that audio for me, I would legitimately immediately say to them: that sounds like my friend Daniel Midgley, but that he, like he’s been to the dentist and a part of his mouth has been numbed.
DANIEL: Yeah. The first time I listened, it sounded like: oh, that’s a computer voice. And then the second time I listened, I thought: there are some identifiably interesting bits that sound like me. Like it’s got moments. You know what I mean?
BEN: Yeah. Yeah.
KELLY: Your brain will do that. It’ll make… it’ll make a computer-generated voice sound more natural over time. I think that…
BEN: Oh, true.
KELLY: …the “so” in the middle is really kind of telling that it’s not a human, because the pauses are all wrong.
DANIEL: It’s very slurry. That’s right.
KELLY: But it’s so good for a cloned voice. I mean, wow, that technology has come a long way.
DANIEL: It really has.
BEN: Well, quick pause. Like, this is way less good than Adobe Voco was when they showed that back in 2016, right? Which ostensibly is the same thing, correct?
KELLY: Mhm.
DANIEL: Good question.
BEN: Like Adobe Voco is basically, give it a whole bunch of your target’s sort of speech. So like if you were to give it a whole bunch of Barack Obama’s videos or whatever from YouTube, and then you can just basically type some words, and it will, having sort of like deep learning, neural-net, all the buzzwords, what I assume is just, like, coding black magic would just make it sound perfect. And the examples that they showed at that 2016 thing were perfect. But within the context of, this is Adobe selling their brand new product, so, of course, the thing that they’re going to show everyone looks really, really perfect. Having said that, they talked about Adobe Voco like four years ago and it still hasn’t materialised. So I don’t know what is actually going on in that space. But they did way better than the one…. Mind you, having said that, you had to give it twenty minutes of audio and you just typed like, you gave it fifty words.
DANIEL: Mmm. I just really want to hear a synthesised voice trained on someone who speaks a lot of African-American English.
KELLY: Wouldn’t that be fun?
BEN: Heck, yeah. Can we… can we just all agree now, as like us three — because we will of course be the tastemakers and decision makers in this process — that when we inevitably get to the future of like Star Trek and the Star Trek computer, we just, we will make sure that it’s AAVE.
DANIEL and KELLY: Yeah.
BEN: Like, that would just be so good.
DANIEL: Kelly, are you aware of any issues with speech synthesis? I know I read one thing, but I wonder if this hits anything that you’re aware of.
KELLY: Sure. Yeah, there’s plenty… there are plenty of issues. I’m not as deeply engaged in, like the NLP conversations, but I know a number of people… like, graduate students are trying to tackle this as part of their project. It’s very much an issue for all dialect speakers. They just don’t have enough, I think, well transcribed speech samples that are accurately transcribed.
DANIEL: Yeah, I remember reading back in March that speech recognisers, if the speaker is Black, they misidentified thirty five percent of the words on average, compared to white people’s nineteen percent.
BEN: Yikes.
DANIEL: So there’s definitely a gap there. Definitely a divide.
BEN: And both of those numbers are bad as well. That’s the other thing that I want to… like, as in…
DANIEL: One in five words at best?
BEN: [LAUGHTER] That is not… that is not good. We need to… Again, if we want the Star Trek computer, we have work to do.
DANIEL: Well, I’ll move on. Let’s see. This one is from Jin Li and the team at the Ohio State University published in the journal Scientific Reports. And I’m just going to read the top line here: Human Brains Are Prewired To Read Words.
BEN: Um, what does “prewired” mean?
KELLY: Yeah.
DANIEL: Uh, good question.
KELLY: There’s some interesting work on this, I guess it’s about like shape, like shape recognition. So the idea that there are these primary shapes in nature, like a T, or like a thing like occlusion, so you can see that, like, something is behind something else. So like that mechanism, that we already had evolved, got co-opted into reading. And so now we are born knowing how to read. I mean, like, having the mechanism ready to learn to do that task.
DANIEL: I’m glad to hear you say that, because that’s what I kind of arrived at as well. I thought, now writing has only been around for like 5000 years at most, but a lot of languages are not written. They’re signed or they’re oral only. And so how would this have taken root? But then I kind of arrived at the same place you did. That part of our brain got good at shapes a long time ago for some reason, and that’s kind of why writing often takes the form it does instead of being like something else.
BEN: Isn’t that sort of true for everything we do that’s new and difficult? Like, the example that I always say to my students when I’m explaining to them that we’re essentially just monkeys who wear shoes, is like: we’re one of those old, like, 1980s brick cell phones, that’s our hardware. That’s our brain. And we have just kept installing ever more advanced software onto it. But the fundamental hardware is still pretty much the same.
DANIEL: And then there’s this one part of the phone that doesn’t do anything anymore, like we’ve moved on from there. And so the phone figures out how to make that archaic piece turn into doing something else.
BEN: Yeah, totally! Like when you are coding for, like, laptops or whatever, and you’ve got limited resources, or like, the people at NASA who had to try and make bloody computers run on like a couple of bytes up in like the ’60s. Like, you just you have to be lean, right? So whatever’s in there, whatever you can use, like it’s like one of those, like, everything-but-the-oink situations, right? Where the brain is like: Well, we’re good at shapes, letters look kind of look shapey. So that’s what we’re going with.
DANIEL: Instead of smells.
BEN: Yeah. Yeah. Right. Like, what’s the closest? Okay, the shape thing, we’ll use the shape bit.
DANIEL: So they looked at babies who haven’t learned to read yet obviously, and put them through an fMRI machine — yum yum — and they were looking at a part of the brain known as the Visual Word Form Area. Boy, this is an interesting area and there’s been a lot of stuff about it. It’s a part of our brains that’s good at identifying writing, although some work has it down for more general vision processing. And they found that those bits tie in really strongly to language bits, Broca’s area, Wernicke’s area and some other stuff.
KELLY: There’s a really good book on this. It’s by Stanislas Dehaene, which I just really enjoy saying. It’s called “Reading in the Brain”, and it’s very approachable. It’s like, it’s smack dab in between a textbook and pop linguistics.
DANIEL: Oh, awesome. Thank you for that. Let’s talk theoretical. So when I read that that headline that the brain is prewired, in fact I’ll even read their comment: “Humans are born with a part of the brain that is prewired to be receptive to seeing words and letters, setting the stage at birth for people to learn how to read, a new study suggests.” That’s from the Ohio State University press release. And there are two schools of thought in linguistics that sometimes come up against each other. The idea that at least some aspects of language are innate, and there’s something about the human brain that latches on to language, specifically learning languages, not just like learning anything else.
BEN: What do we call that school again?
DANIEL: Nativism. And then another idea, that language is instead learned pretty much just like other things. You learn language because you learn skills and concepts that build up to language. And we’ve kind of taken the second view on this show. But this study, this work hits up against it by saying, well, not only are speaking and signing special, but reading is too.
BEN: Is it saying that though? Like this is kind of…
DANIEL: Yes, it kind of is.
BEN: This is what I have with the issue of like prewired, though. Like it’s saying that our brain is good at some things and that reading… it seems like there’s a Venn diagram, like this study is presenting a Venn diagram. One circle is like “shit our brain is good at” and the other circle is like “shit you need to be able to read”. And there is an intersection where like those two things… it doesn’t mean that your brain has been set up to read, it means there’s stuff in your brain that gets co-opted for reading readily, right?
DANIEL: Okay, but either way, it still means brains are kind of language ready in in ways that aren’t predictable by sort of a generalised undifferentiated language-is-just–other–stuff-too model
BEN: Okay, sure. I would buy that insofar as like our brains are language ready and most other animals’ aren’t, because we’ve tried really hard to give them language and it doesn’t seem to take.
KELLY: I… So I’m of course, like I always find myself in the like, why-not-both? school. So I guess I maybe lean more nativist, in that I often think about how we did so much to our bodies so that we could become speakers, right? I mean, it’s part of being like upright, forward facing, bipedal like mammals. We don’t have to relearn how to stand up and walk upright every generation, right?. Like, there are parts of our biology that make us bipedal, you know, that make us forward facing, to have like this whole sensory array in the front of our bodies to experience the world. So I feel the same way about our language faculty in that over time in our biology, it has become wired to expect us to interface with the built environment in the ways that we do. And so I take a lot of my thought on that from epigenetics, right? That, like, our genes carry some of our experiences. That there’s part of our memory that goes into the next batch, as it were.
BEN: I guess also, like — you’ve just completely convinced me to your school, and I now think exactly the way you do — If enough… like, if enough generations have passed for our bodies to change substantially, like, surely enough has for our brains as well. Right?
KELLY: I say yes, but lots of people say no.
BEN: Well they’re wrong, including me. Including 30-seconds-ago, me. What an idiot that guy was. Pfft!
DANIEL: But I think it’s interesting that when we’re talking about the language faculty, you mentioned a lot of the same things that I would, you know: bipedalism, large brain size, human vocal tract. But when people talk about nativism often, like, let’s take Chomsky for a minute in his book, “Why Only Us?”, he argues that language was possible because of a mutation that allowed us to do syntax, which is not quite the same thing as: well, we’re bipedal and we live in social groups and those things changed our bodies and made language possible. I mean, would we take it that far?
KELLY: I don’t know. I’ve actually… I’ve given a lot of thought to this. I’m really interested… And I wrote a paper on the first merger, which would be like Chomsky’s you know, thing of like Merge, we evolved Merge. I think there are definitely some other things, like the complex eye that kind of started as a random mutation but then became useful. And so our biology kept a hold of it and continued to refine it. Yeah, I’m very much of the why not both. Like we have, we have this really interesting mutation that happens to be useful and it happens to be useful for like the construction of human society. But now Chomsky’s, like, bored. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Oh no, you did it. You turned him off. By the way, can I just say: I have not followed the latest Chomsky stuff where he… did he essentially say that sociolinguistics is just not very interesting and isn’t real linguistics?
KELLY: Probably? I wasn’t on Twitter that day. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: You miss a lot if you’re not paying attention around here!
KELLY: It’s true.
DANIEL: Okay, I’m going to go to the next thing. And this one is, we have to say goodbye to a great type designer, Ed Benguiat, who passed away at the age of 92. He was an incredibly influential type designer. His most influential typefaces were his revival of Souvenir Benguiat, the one that had his name Benguiat Gothic, Tiffany. You would know his work from the title card of the show Stranger Things.
BEN: Oh! He did like, the what I’ve always thought of as the Stephen King pulp novel font.
DANIEL: Yeah, it’s influenced by Art Nouveau. It’s called Benguiat. And I always think of the A as especially distinctive, because the crossbar isn’t straight. It’s like sloping and it’s cool. It’s a good look.
BEN: Oh, I’m really trying Daniel, but when you talk about crossbars sloping like: Fuck man, you’re just leading with the jaw.
DANIEL: Wait till I get into it! Okay, okay, fine. I’m going there. Tiffany.
BEN: [AGONISED LAUGH/GROAN]
DANIEL: I want you to imagine a big old letter E, all right? And then it’s got little serifs, but it doesn’t have tiny wimpy serifs, the little hangy downy bits that that give your eyes something to lock onto, It had big fat triangular serifs that just go every which way in just the perfect dimensions. Mwah!
BEN: sigh
DANIEL: Here’s an interesting thing; he worked on 600 typefaces and before he became a designer, he played drums with Woody Herman and with Stan Kenton.
BEN: Okay. Well, I’m very sad to hear that this man has died, and that his fonts, by the sound of it, were very good.
DANIEL: Yes, they were good. I mean, his work seems a little dated and fusty now, but it probably is because his typefaces are anchored in the ’70s and ’80s because of the enormous popularity and utility that they had.
BEN: Hey, look, when we’re 92 and people are listening to our podcast, I’m sure they’re gonna be like: blegh, this sounds dated.
DANIEL: It is, but that’s the nature of the thing. [LAUGHTER]
BEN: Yep.
DANIEL: So vale Ed Benguiat, and thanks to Bob on our Discord Channel for alerting us to that one. That was a great find.
BEN: Come hang out on our Discord. There is a marked lack of alt-right white supremacist agitation taking place in our Discord.
DANIEL: Yeah, yeah. There’s not much of it at all. It’s really good. We’d love to see more of you.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: We are back on Because Language, and we are here with Kelly Wright of the University of Michigan, a scholar whose work embraces language and race. In fact, you are @raciolinguistics on Twitter, are you not?
KELLY: That’s right. @raciolinguistic.
DANIEL: @raciolinguistic. No S.
KELLY: Yeah, it was too long.
DANIEL: Oh, yeah. That’s why we didn’t get becauselanguage.
BEN: Curse you, word limit! Or character limit!
DANIEL: The thing that made me think of you in your work was — and it seems like a long time ago — it was a Twitter drama. Everything’s a Twitter drama because Twitter is essentially a video game where you try to rack up as many followers as possible without destroying yourself. Few make it. But it was the LSA, the Linguistic Society of America, who have made a number of strange self-owns on social media, like using a photo of someone who didn’t know that they were using their photo. They were just sitting there at a conference and got snapped, and then there you are on the LSA’s website.
BEN: There was the letter.
DANIEL: There was their response to the LSA Open Letter. They referred once to an Aboriginal language as “ancient”. Oof. And this week they linked to a New York Times article — how shall I describe it? — that kind of downplayed white supremacy? I don’t know if you read the article, Kelly.
KELLY: I did. It’s, yes… It’s the LSA… So I guess full disclosure, I am the editor’s assistant at the journal Language.
DANIEL: Yep, cool.
KEELY: I am not officially employed by the LSA, but I do work for the journal. And so I’m part of the small cadre of people that knows things, I guess, about how the LSA works.
DANIEL: Oh, oh, shoot. Okay, then let me guess. Can I guess? There’s at least two, maybe three groups of people that have differing agendas and they don’t talk to each other?
KELLY: I mean, yup! [LAUGHTER]
BEN: Congratulations, Daniel. You just, you’ve literally just encapsulated every, like, body of creatures that has, like, more than five people in it.
DANIEL: Fine.
KELLY: And also, I guess like, as far as the social media presence, I mean, I’m honestly… it’s like two people, one of whom is an intern who is incred… underpaid, like incredibly underpaid. Right.
DANIEL: Oh, yes.
KELLY: So I can’t, like, feel too bad about, like, this person who is a non-specialist, like a person who is a non-specialist and an intern sharing things that aren’t great, you know, that like… And they’ve had a history of doing this, right? Like on their Facebook page, like forever. I mean, pretty much every popular article that they link to is, like, either pseudoscience or isn’t actually quoting any linguists. And yeah, that’s a course like this… We’ll talk about the New York Times article, I guess. But it’s, you know, the same thing that The New York Times has been doing all summer, where they actually interview people on one side of an argument and then just quote things out of context from the other side. It’s like: talk to a Black person. Like, just find a Black person and speak to them! Like, it’s all I want.
BEN: This is not rocket surgery!
KELLY: Yeah. And so the LSA, I guess they’re struggling. I was just in a… we did a webinar for them, me and four other people, about how to be a linguist on social media. And it was kind of…
DANIEL: That was an awesome session!
KELLY: Oh, thanks. And it was like: this was for y’all! And then like next week, they’re like: but you didn’t listen!
BEN: I think whenever I see this, whenever I see a, like a an entity handballing their arguably primary outward-facing message platform to, like, some poor underling, I’m like, I’m sorry, the statute of limitations on not getting it have elapsed. Right? Like, that job that you are just like siphoning out to whoever you, like, can make do it, as opposed to like who you hire to do it, is really important, and also not actually super easy. Like, maintaining good personal sort of like message control and brand identity — I don’t want to get old, like superduper like capitalist on it, right? — but like when you are trying to represent yourself in an online space through messaging, messaging matters. Like, it feels stupid to have to say it?
KELLY: I’m just wildly shaking my head over here.
BEN: Like as in, like, you disagree with me?
KELLY: No, I totally agree with you. [LAUGHTER]
BEN: Like, it’s like… I just, I don’t, I don’t quite understand why. I mean, I actually do understand. There’s a bunch of old people who don’t get it, and they just seriously still aren’t on board with the idea of like: this is the thing that everyone else sees of you. This is your billboard. This is your… this is your everything. Right? Like, don’t put that in the hands of an intern!
DANIEL: And this is not the part where we bash away at the LSA, because, like, what we came… what I came up with at the end of our Open Letter show was: support the LSA, because this is a fight that we all need to be a part of. So I really… I want to support this organisation. It’s one of the most significant professional organisations for linguistics. And yet we still, we… some of us are fighting white supremacy and some of us are making excuses for white supremacy. And that’s hard.
KELLY: Yeah. And I think that’s it. It’s like, the LSA came out with this statement. You know, it started at the institute in 2017, and was co-authored and co-produced by a number of minority members and signed on, you know, to by every, you know, like member, you know, almost every member who was registered at the LSA, which was like an incredible feat of organising! And then for them to just like… not care about it at all. Like, so much of what they have, they’ve shown this this whole summer has just been like: that was empty, like, this was empty. And people are not having it and we’re not going to be having it! Right? So it’s like we need to keep organising. Yeah, I’m convinced that our field is small enough for us to really make a difference, like, to be an example to other fields of how to just be equitable.
BEN: Yeah. Like you actually are nimble enough to be able to just get people on board.
KELLY: I hope so.
DANIEL: Let’s talk about white supremacy for a second, because the gist of the New York Times article was that the definition of white supremacy is kind of changing.
KELLY: Yeah, I would say that white supremacy is perhaps the thread that connects my various research projects. Yeah, I think what the New York Times article was really, I guess, what was being observed there is like, yes, this this expanded definition of white supremacy. In my opinion, that is what white supremacy has always meant, right? So it’s this idea… they’re saying, like white supremacy used to mean David Duke and Strom Thurmond and like, all these other folks. And it’s like, no, those are white suprem-acists, right? White suprem-acy is this like wider project, and these were the people who are standing up and championing it, right? So it’s like, just like there’s a difference between fasc-ism and fasc-ists, right? And like the difference between like Santa Claus and like the spirit of Christmas. You know, it’s the same thing.
BEN: It sort of feels to me like the article’s subtitle could have been, like: white people are starting to hear rumblings that apparently white supremacy isn’t exactly what we thought it was!
KELLY: Yeah, pretty much, I mean…
BEN: Like, that’s what… that’s what it sounds like to me. Not like: white supremacy’s definition is changing, but like: hey other white folk! Ummm, so turns out possibly we’ve been thinking about this incorrectly.
KELLY: Yep. I think that’s exactly what… you don’t even need to read it… you summed it up pretty perfectly. Yeah, it was. And that’s kind of how I thought was like, no, no, no, it always meant this! Y’all just didn’t know.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like we… like so many things with white people, we’re coming to the party so tragically unfashionably late.
DANIEL: Ugh. We’re a lot of work, that’s for sure.
KELLY: So like, how does this relate to my research is kind of, it’s maybe like a longer discussion. But really I’m interested in lexical meaning. I’m interested in voices, too. But I look at it like with my work in sports journalism and slurs and profanity generally, it is like how do the prevailing ideologies of a time, or like a particular shared event, something like 9/11 or World War One, right? Like, how do those things change how we use language? And so when we think about, like, the effects that white supremacy has over our language, I mean, white men named the heavens, white man named everything in the body, right? They named all the people and the places and stuff. Right?
BEN: So much of all of those places isn’t just named by white men. It’s named after white men as well. Like there’s a whole bunch of structures inside your female body that have actual men’s names.
KELLY: That’s right. There’s an empty space in my womb that’s named after a man! There’s all kinds of stuff. It’s really great.
DANIEL: Braxton Hicks contractions.
KELLY: Yeah, no. It’s so true. You can’t. Yeah. So so you think about, like, everything, right? I mean, any comparison or baseline or like norm or default in basically any scientific field. I mean, any institution has this this background of being very much defined, described by white men and then later white people. So this era where people of colour have been active in naming and renaming and reclaiming things, is like this very short window of lexical history. So we look at Oumuamua. Oumuamua was this, like, asteroid-like thing that came into our solar system this summer. And the reason that it’s named Oumuamua is because it was tracked by this telescope array in Hawaii. And part of them having this array on Indigenous land meant that anything that was discovered had to be named with that, like, linguistic background?
BEN: Oh, that pleases me, likem in a place that just… what a great… someone, some Hawaiian is just so savvy to be like, hey, guys, guys, you guys. I’ve got a really, really great thing to add to this contract. Are you ready for this? All the shit in the sky is going to have to have Hawaiian names. How good is that?
KELLY: I think it’s great. So like, yeah, when we look at, like, white supremacy, I mean, we can really dig into some, I guess, specific, like linguistic examples. So I think just deficit models in general sort of pervade our descriptive history of linguistics. So you get something like…
DANIEL: Deficit models?
KELLY: Yeah, so a deficit model is like: something that is like a deviation from the typical is seen as like needing to be fixed or something that’s like particularly exotic. So you have like the zero copula. Like, just that term to describe like Black English. So you have a construction like “She workin'”, which means she has a job, right? And they call that a zero copula, but the only reason why it is a zero is because white language has one. Right?
BEN: Right. Right.
KELLY: So that’s like a deficit model playing out in linguistic description.
DANIEL: And then if students come to school with African-American English, then that’s thought of, unfortunately, many times as some kind of problem that needs to be fixed.
KELLY: Correct. And yeah, the supremacy of, like, writing over speech and sign. The supremacy of formalism and curricular requirements. Yeah, all of this is like larger and less agentive than I think people perceive it to be. And so yeah, the expansive definition of white supremacy is like a historical fact and a consequence of power, right? We get organisation and colonisation and industrialisation and commercialisation and globalisation and standardisation, that’s all controlled by white people in power, right? So this -isation suffix that denotes the act or the process or the result of doing or making something, it’s like: all of the doing and the making was done by white people in power who are trying to actively suppress the lower classes and therefore, in turn, all people of colour, all marginalised people. And so anything that was kind of -isated by white people is carrying a history of white supremacy.
DANIEL: Tell us about your work with sports language. How were the descriptions of white players different from the descriptions of Black players or players of colour?
KELLY: Yeah. So my corpus is 8.5 million words. It tracks 120 athletes over 108 years. And I use that time depth in particular, because I’m trying to look at these like ideological change moments over time, like the civil rights movement or like Women’s Lib to see how that affects the semantic field. And so what I find is that white players are described with skill-based terms, like the ability to read plays and, like, leadership skills, whereas Black players are described with like animalistic terms. So these things are like BRUTE FORCE, you know, SAVAGERY, a lot of violence, a lot of physical strength.
DANIEL: Wow.
BEN: I, um, I’ve always wondered and I’m a bit uncomfortable about using this word because I don’t know if it’s gone into the realm of things that we’re not supposed to say anymore. But like whenever in sports language in particular, directed towards people of colour, I’ve always wondered if there’s that really gross, like Negro-philia thing going on as well, right? Where there’s a like a almost like a, like a, like a, like a, kink fascination. Like: ooh it’s, it’s so like animalistic and intoxicating. And there’s, it seems to me there’s this undertone of like, I kind of want that?
KELLY: Oh yeah.
BEN: You know what I mean? It was explored for me really well in Get Out, for example.
DANIEL: I was just thinking of that.
BEN: Where all of these sort of white people, white supremacist individuals had this like weird almost like: it’s less than me, but I want it and I’m going to have it. Did you find that there’s an aspect of that going on in the language?
KELLY: Absolutely! It’s… so my master’s thesis is about Serena Williams. And there’s, like, this whole section there that really traces that kind of, like, fetishisation from like Mandingo fighting on slave yards. So this is, like, going back to Django Unchained, right? And just all the way through till today, especially with female Black women’s bodies. Yeah. And the people, like it really comes up in things like blogs where people are just like: look at her, she’s so powerful and amazing, look at those thighs, look at all of it. Whereas, like, obviously there’s skill… like, this divide between like innate strength and skill at this, like, white/Black divide in sports journalism. It’s just crazy to me.
BEN: Like, you’d be hard pressed to point to a definitively more skilled and accomplished, like, sort of single athlete in any field anywhere right now. Right? Like, I don’t know. I’m not a sports fan. I don’t know the top ten people who are good at their sports in the world. But you have to imagine she’s in that list.
KELLY: Well, and it’s so fascinating because… So in 2017 I finish this work. This top word that has been used to describe her is UNSTOPPABLE, that falls into this racialised category. And the way that I trace that is by seeing how it’s applied to other actors, right? Like, it doesn’t occur in the white half with my corpus.
BEN: And you have to imagine there is exemplars in the white half of your corpus who exist in a sort of comparable space, right?
KELLY: Absolutely.
BEN: White individuals who were absolutely sort of top of their field, incredibly skilled. And so I guess I’m making a point of it, because a person listening to this podcast might kind of go: well, but like, hold on a second, UNSTOPPABLE doesn’t have, like, a racialised dimension. It’s like: well, if it only gets used for Black people, then yeah, obviously it does.
KELLY: Yeah. So I guess like, so two points. She has named her fragrance line Unstoppable. So it’s like she’s used this word to describe her own product, which I think is insane. But no, but you’re absolutely right. The one thing that I have the most difficulty conveying to people when I talk about this work is that it’s not negative, it’s not… racialisation is not inherently negative. In fact, most of these words occur when people are trying to be like laudatory, when they’re saying somebody did an amazing thing, it was so good. Let’s describe how good it was.
BEN: And then you’ve got to have the conversation at parties with drunken idiots of like “positive stereotypes can still be really fucked up, dickhead”.
KELLY: Yeah, pretty much, so…
DANIEL: Tell me about your work with, I think the term that I’ve heard is redlining. Keeping people of colour out of certain neighborhoods and how language is used to do that. That was part of your work as well, was it?
KELLY: It is, yes. Yeah. So redlining…
BEN: Is that the thing that comes from McDonald’s, out of interest?
DANIEL: Redlining?
BEN: Yeah, I could have sworn I heard this in relation to McDonald’s being… Black franchisees who were opening a McDonald’s like had drastically lower options about where they could… basically if you were Black and you wanted to franchise McDonald’s, they’re like, okay, here’s the Black neighborhood you could go to. And I think they called it redlining. Anyway, sorry.
KELLY: Yeah, no, that’s absolutely. So any type of property. That’s exactly how redlining works. So any type of property that you need a loan for, right? This goes back to the creation of the FDIC. So our modern banking system, we created this option for people to get home loans. So this was, like, new after World War Two. And they went, they took individual auditors, like the way we think of, like, people who used to do the census and go like door to door. And they took notes on, like, every street in 750 American cities. And so these individual people were looking for specific things. You can read the guidelines and it is like: toxic waste, industry, and Black life. Like, essentially like, if any of those things were near or on your street, it was downgraded. And so red is like the lowest. It’s like green, blue, yellow, red for quantities and red is the lowest. So if you lived in a red area, or you wanted to start a business in a red area, you couldn’t get a loan or it was much, much, much, much harder. And so Black people, who at this first time had, like, had newly built generational wealth, essentially wasted that wealth to try and build homes in the neighborhoods that they were allowed to do.
And this is also the same areas, like, racially exclusive covenants. So at the same time, you have white flight from the cities because the inner city areas are marked or downgraded. So people can’t get loans to build houses in the city. They move out to the suburbs, and the suburbs have racially exclusive covenants. So the Black people are confined to the city, in places that are more expensive and, you know, ignored, I guess, by other administrations, right? So you’re not going to put schools there and you’re not going to put all this other nobody is going to be investing, reinvesting it. So my work is now like: okay, it’s been 50 years, 50–60 years, what do we see now? So redlining is not an official federal, federal – I have to… I always have to say that because it was the federal government that did this – policy, but covert segregation absolutely still exists. So what my research shows is not only does this discrimination extend to the voice alone, so people can be discriminated against in all of these ways that people are supposed to be protected against in the Fair Housing Act. But it happens. It happens just on the phone. And so not very many people use phones anymore, I know. But I called…
BEN: To be fair, though, like when you are dealing with a government bureaucracy, you do.
KELLY: Yes.
BEN: But yeah, that’s the other thing. Like, a lot of people don’t use phones between other younger people. But fuck, if you’re calling like the housing department, you’re calling the housing department.
KELLY: Yes. And so it’s such a thing. So what I found was very explicit evidence of steering, which is explicitly illegal. So that is like: I call about a property that’s perhaps in one of those upper tier neighborhoods, like a blue or green neighborhood, and they point me back towards the Black community when I’m using the Black voice. So like: yeah, this place is great. But here’s like some negative things about it. Maybe you’d want this other place, here are some positive things about it. But that other place is back in the Black neighborhood. So, yeah. And that study also included some attitudinal assessments of my voices. These are all my native dialects too. So it’s my voice the whole time.
DANIEL: Oh, gee!
KELLY: Yeah, it was really hard, really hard. And so people find, like, the Black voice to be the less trustworthy, less educated, less confident sounding than the other two whiter voices. So the third dialect I’m using a Southern American. I’m from Appalachia.
BEN: So you’re tri-dialectical?
KELLY: That’s right.
BEN: Wow. I’m fighting every impulse in my brain to be the kind of fuckstick who then immediately demands that you do those things. I’m not going to do that. But that is really cool sounding.
KELLY: Thanks for not asking me to do that!
BEN: You’re welcome.
KELLY: They’re on my website, if anyone wants to hear my voices, they’re on my website. [LAUGHTER]
BEN: I got sick of doing it, I recorded it, go find it.
KELLY: It’s actually weird. I’m… but yeah. Yeah, it was really hard to hear people, I guess, just like open myself up to discrimination every day. That’s like part of the reason why I’m not continuing this work now into my dissertation, it’s just it was very… it was like emotional trauma.
DANIEL: That’s crushing.
KELLY: Yeah, it was hard. It was hard. And I don’t know how… like, I now understand why no one replicated this study for 20 years.
DANIEL: Okay, wow. So if we’re talking about white supremacy and language, we’re talking about a number of language ideologies that hold Standardised English up as the standard, that serve to reward language that is identified as white and punish language that is identified as Black. And it just seems to show up in so many other ways, it shows up in media, in education, economics…
KELLY: Yeah, I mean, pick your example. And it really is like, spoken standard English because sign language, signed languages are absolutely discriminated against in this way. Any non-white language is discriminated against in this way. In our constitution, in the US, whiteness is equated to language. There’s a couple talks that I have floating around out there where I talk about this in detail. But yeah, “white person” does not refer to color of skin, but instead a common… understanding built in the common parlance and literature. So whiteness equals language, equals standardised language. And so when you look at… when you dig in to, like, individual naturalisation cases in the United States, you find people who are more dark skinned but more affluent-sounding being allowed to come into the United States as a citizen, and other people from the same heritage being rejected because they have an accent.
DANIEL: And I think of that is happening in Australia as well, where in my lifetime the White Australia policy used language as an exclusionary tool to keep certain people out. And in fact, now they’re trying to bring back a citizenship test and an English test, where, you know, if… There are some people who will do really well. Like, there are people for whom English is well known, well studied, people have a lot of exposure to English. And then there’s another group where English is happening, but you have to work at it. English is in the mix, but it’s one language out of many. And there’s going to be a difference in the skin colour between group A and Group B.
KELLY: Yeah, it’s shocking.
BEN: I mean, my… just really quickly on the the Australian language test, in regards to like citizenship, I, I can’t help but feel like there are Aboriginal Australians who would not meet that standard, to which for my money means that standard can’t possibly be a standard. If the traditional custodians of the land don’t pass your language test to belonging in the country, your language test is broken!
DANIEL: Your language test sucks. And then here we are in the academy, where you are writing in academic English.
KELLY: Yeah, it’s such a thing. So I’ve taught writing and linguistics for a number of years now, and it is always so very difficult to do this in a writing classroom where it’s like: okay we’re going to talk about how messed up Standard English is. And like here all these, the history. But I still have to prepare you to use it. That is, like, my charge in this course. It’s my learning objective. And it’s become a very murky ethical space for me that I feel very uncomfortable in.
BEN: I was, I was actually going to ask you exactly the same thing. So I deliver a unit called Academic Writing. And yeah, I exist in exactly the same space. And I’ve sort of broadly tried to take the same tack, which is like: This is fucked up, but it’s powerful. So do you want to learn it? Kind of thing and yeah, I’m like you. I’m like: I don’t… I’m… I don’t know if I’m doing a good thing here.
DANIEL: Yeah, I did the same thing. I struggled with teaching my students that all varieties of language were valid. And then when it came to marking…
BEN: Yeah, now to get a good mark, of course, only do this.
DANIEL: Yeah. Could you please perform whiteness for me? And I actually toyed with the idea of, if someone wants to do assignments in Aboriginal English or, you know, I don’t know, how far do I take it? In learner English? Can I can I do that? I want to do that. But can I do that?
KELLY: I mean, I do.
DANIEL: Do you?
KELLY: I do. I mean, I honestly haven’t had that many students take me up on it, right? I mean, they, at the University of Michigan, our students want to learn how to participate in all of these very professional spaces. And so they’re into it.
BEN: Yeah! Yeah, right? And you feel like you, at least, or at least I feel, I know I don’t know if you share this. Like, you feel compelled to help the students who are learning from you do the thing that they’re trying to do.
KELLY: Yeah, I just so I’ve taken grammar as like a writing teacher would call it, like, out of assessment. So I’ll give people comments on their grammar if they want them, if they opt in, I guess. But I don’t… it’s never part of the grade. I really… I started teaching writing in a rhetoric program. And so I very much tell them, you know, it’s about an audience. Any communicative endeavor is about understanding your audience. If your audience isn’t going to understand the variety that you’re using, and you have a point that you want to get across, you need to… you would need to change the shape of your argument. So a lot of the assignments that we do involve, like working… my writing class, like takes like one project through four stages and they redesign it for a different modality each time. So it’s like you have an essay, but then you… you have an essay, but then you have a website, then you have a podcast. So that’s like so… and in each modality change your audience changes, and therefore the content of your writing changes. But that’s my, that is my, like, sick and not satisfying work around.
DANIEL: Well, it makes me happy that you’re doing that. It makes me feel like I was kind of onto something, which is nice. But let’s bring it back around to linguistics now, because that’s where we kind of started. White supremacy shows itself in linguistics as a discipline as well. What have you noticed as far as that?
KELLY: Yeah, I mean, aside from just the sheer numbers of white people in the discipline, I think that… I really think one of the places where it stands out is just like curricular requirements across the… across the discipline. Sociolinguistics and anything else like Language and Discrimination that might address some of these issues for students who are not going to be part of the professoriate in our discipline, right? Who are taking just one language class or a few language classes. It’s absolutely absent. And that to me has to… white supremacy has to be part of that. Now, I’m not saying that every person who’s designing curriculum at, you know, like US institutions, is a white supremacist, but that our institutions are absolutely founded, as I was mentioning before, like, they’re built on this foundation. And therefore, it’s absolutely part of how they work that, like, formalism is more important. Like, none of the formalists have to read my literature. You know, so I had to do double work, I guess? Just because I wanted to talk about social issues, and so therefore people can get an entire degree in linguistics without ever having to think about how language is used in society. And to me, that’s white supremacy.
BEN: Can I offer just to sort of like a different discipline’s…. So my partner’s a doctor. She also teaches medicine at university, and she talks about how, like, medical ethics comes in quite late in the course and how she finds that endlessly infuriating. Like, her sort of argument, and she has a far more articulate one than I’m about to present. But it basically boils down to: um, shouldn’t ethical decision making and like sort of like balancing the injustices visited upon BIPOC people kind of be the foundation stone through which all other knowledge that we’re using in this course be like sort of pushed through? To which the resounding answer is like, no, shut up, go away. Like, this is the boring, annoying stuff that we have to put in, basically. I don’t… look, that’s not entirely fair. I’m sure there’s some very, very sensitive and articulate people in that world who are trying to sort of fight a good fight. But it strikes me that you’re sort of like maybe nudging in a similar direction whereby, like, everything that we study needs to acknowledge this.
KELLY: I mean, even if you don’t…. You’re absolutely right. And it’s like even if we don’t want to teach, like… morphologists are like, what do I have to say about sociolinguistics? Like, just engaging with the history of the discipline is enough for you to address the presence of white supremacy in the field. Right? Like, missionary work and, you know, anything you want to talk about with like the early founding of the field. It’s like, yeah, I just… I can’t.
BEN: Yeah, and the thing with that as well as, whenever I sort of make an argument like that, because these conversations obviously play out in lots of different fields and in lots of different settings, and the political is the personal and all that kind of stuff. And when, sort of like, I’m talking to lay people about this in totally non-linguistic context and I say, yeah, but like, you know, like Catholic missionaries pushed as far as you can go into Australia and did some of this stuff and they’re like: Yeah, but like, why are we still banging on about this? I’m like, the missions are still there! Like…!
DANIEL: The past isn’t past.
BEN: This happened in the living memory of people who could have this conversation with you, who aren’t me! How else do I phrase that to you?! Like, other than just basically being like, shut up, you’re wrong.
KELLY: Yeah. I mean, it’s exactly that, like, English only policies still exist in the United States. Like people, you know, people go to jail because they aren’t understood by a court transcriptionist and therefore the juries when things are read back, are not accurate. I mean, people die because health care workers still think that Black people exaggerate their pain, right? I mean, it’s not… there are things happening right now that matter that are tied directly to this history. And so, yeah, I feel like to me, it’s really hard for me to actually think, like conceive of my future in this discipline. I mean, I love language so much that I’ll never do anything else. But it’s just hard for me to imagine, like, what my place will be, because it’s very daunting. Especially when I look at all of these people who like, I’m like, do you not realise, like, how fortunate you are to have this knowledge? You know, because nobody, we’re not teaching linguistics in secondary school in this country.
Like, I know there are other countries that are doing much better and that, but it’s like people don’t even realise how much power there is in their own voices, like and how much it tells them about their history and their place in the world and their identity and all the stuff, like… I just want individual people to understand how wonderful, you know, like voices and signs and like all these other things that we do with language are. Like, I just want to be able to flatten out like all the bad stuff and talk about the good stuff. But I can’t… it can’t just be on sociolinguists alone and a handful of allies to do this work, right? And so I think we’re getting there. I think we’re at like a watershed moment, especially because we have, like, Anne Charity Hudley doing her fantastic work, and just a handful of other people who are really like on the vanguard. And it makes me feel, especially like being on Twitter, it really makes me feel less alone because I never would have been connected to these people in these efforts without a platform like that.
BEN: I think it’s an important… I’m so glad to hear you say that because, I mean, for so many people, Twitter is just an architect of so much misery, right? And not even just misery, because obviously I’m sure, Kelly, you can have all sorts of trauma visited upon you, like prior traumas revisited to you through Twitter. But more the idea of, like, for so many people that I speak to, Twitter is a, like, a maelstrom that hope just pours into. Right? Like it is a hope sucking engine. So I’m so, so glad to hear that, that you’re actually finding the flip side to that, that there’s all of these wonderful, awesome voices doing such great work.
KELLY: Yeah, it’s really actually been… It was the last place I ever expected to find a community. I think too, for BIPOC folks like we’re so scattered, it’s like tokenisation is real. We’re all alone in departments. Like, we’re like I’m the one here, you know? And so just being able to connect to those people, like on Twitter and be like, okay I’m not the only one who sees this. I’m not the only one who thinks this is crazy is just like it’s… it’s refreshing.
BEN: So I did, just to share like a personal, like from my field, in a similar vein, I did a search on Facebook the other day. I was looking for a… I literally just searched “feminist teachers”, “feminist educators” and “anti-racist teachers” and “anti-racist educators”, looking for like communities of people who identify that way and to like share ideas and stories and like share the load on how to, like, fight the good fight and all that kind of stuff. NOTHING.
DANIEL: Oh my gosh.
BEN: Nothing out there. Just… just crickets. Do you know the most hilarious thing was? Those four search parameters were the ones that I looked with, and in all four of those searches, the closest thing I got to was the same feminist doctors group popped up in all four. And I was like, oh, good on you medicine, or like those people within medicine trying to fight the good fight. Oh man, it really depressed me.
DANIEL: So it sounds like keep fighting, keep talking about this, stay connected. Any other tips for fighting white supremacy? Sorry, I don’t mean to make this a listicle.
KELLY: No, but I mean… It’s, I guess, you know, talking about like the -isation of it all. I think that like, white people need to be agents of, you know, like actualisation and mutualisation and normalisation, in that we need to make not being white okay. That sounds like it’s a very simple statement, but obviously, it’s a generational task. But white people need to hear about these things from other white people. Because, again, like, this audience and like author relationship, it really weighs heavily on our decision making process and like our meaning making process. So this comes from me knowing how, like, each iteration of an utterance is kind of taken into the brain, and then we, like, sort it out with our own personal experience and we decide, like: I care about that or I don’t care about that, or was that weird? It was weird. You know, like when you’re sitting at, like at night or like thinking through the things of your day. And so I feel like those moments where you can speak to someone who shares a background with you, and then perhaps also has a differing opinion, are much stronger for your own sort of like meaning-making a decision making process.
So that is why I say that white people need to do this work. Not because, like, I’m not engaged in doing it. I know a lot of people, too, are like: it’s not my job to educate you. I actually do think it’s my job to educate people. [LAUGHTER] But I just think, yeah, we all need to be purposeful in seeking out knowledge and be agentive and making changes to our thinking. So I often point to, you know, like the politically correct movement, which people don’t… I think about this lexically where, you know, we got to like MAIL CARRIER and FLIGHT ATTENDANT, right? You had to, you know, and now like this larger conversation around pronouns that has been going on for a number of years now, it’s like: you have to be agentive about changing your language use and changing, like, how you feel about people using language in a way that’s different from you. It doesn’t take a lot of work, but it does take a purposeful work to realign your thinking in that way. And so I just like, I challenge people to do that, to speak up and speak out when they see inequality, and to be agentive and making changes to your thinking.
DANIEL: As a white straight cis het dude, I know that other people like me will probably listen to me a lot more. They’ll upweight my opinion for all the wrong reasons. But I am also, at the same time, probably very poorly educated, despite my best efforts. Probably… I’m the most listened to and the least capable of doing this. And I find that one way that I do it is to pass the mike. For example, to you.
KELLY: I think it’s great, I have really enjoyed this summer of folks, like, inviting me and getting to talk to lots of different audiences and hearing the questions they have. It’s nice.
DANIEL: Kelly Wright of the University of Michigan. We’re so glad to have you on to talk about these issues. We hope that our listeners have found something that they can take away from all this discussion. And thank you for doing what you do.
KELLY: Thank you both! This was so nice.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
BEN: We didn’t scare them away yet, but we’re going to.!
DANIEL: We’re not done yet because we’re doing Words of the Week.
BEN: Have you prepped Kelly for what this is, Daniel?
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: Oh, okay, great. Just wondering if I need to explain the shitshow that was coming.
DANIEL: I would like you to explain the shitshow, if you please.
BEN: All right. So Word of the Week is when Daniel brings a bunch of words and we talk about them, and invariably it makes me like instantly transmogrify into a very grumpy 85-year-old person.
DANIEL: Oh Ben, you’re always like that.
BEN: It’s true.
DANIEL: You just don’t know it. Kelly, have you got a word for us?
KELLY: I do. I think.
DANIEL: Yay.
BEN: “I think.” Ooh.
KELLY: I picked SARS.
DANIEL: Oh.
BEN: Oh, interesting.
KELLY: Which has… is back in the news because of the conflict in Nigeria.
DANIEL: What?!
BEN: Oh yes. The police force.
KELLY: Yes. The Special Anti Robbery Squad, or SARS. And Nigeria is protesting against them because they’re essentially just an armed mob that has been terrorising people for a while. And so I saw #SARS, #EndSARS like back in the news, and I was like: Not another pandemic! I cannot handle it.
DANIEL: Oh god, please. That’s exactly what I thought. Oh my god.
KELLY: But it’s in fact a more even more depressing thing. So you’re welcome. I started us off on a terrible footing.
DANIEL: Thank you. I’ve got another one, from Bob also, on our Discord channel. I wonder if you caught the video of US Senator David Perdue mocking Kamala Harris’ name in a stump speech. I don’t even think I’m going to play the audio because it was just so juvenile.
BEN: You know what? I’m going to unmute this video right now so I can hear it. [PAUSE] Oh, god. Oh, god, I mean…
DANIEL: Just stop.
BEN: Look, I know I say this every week, I’m going to say it again. I see that in my job. And in case this is the first time you’ve listen to the show, my job at times is wrangling, like, 13-year-old fucking idiots. Like, this is… that is the caliber of quote unquote burn that this dick-stain of a human being is busting out.
DANIEL: [SHOCKED] That’s a US senator, Ben.
BEN: Yes.
KELLY: Oh, man. I just… I can’t handle it. It’s so disrespectful.
DANIEL: Exactly. Confession time. I have really had to sit down and train myself to put stress on the first syllable for Kamala.
KELLY: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: Because it didn’t come naturally to me and I don’t know why, but I felt bad about it and now I’m working to do better.
KELLY: But you tried! That’s the point.
BEN: I think I can guess why. Because you probably don’t have, like, heaps of experience with, like South Asian names.
DANIEL: Fair enough.
BEN: But that’s cool. Like, just learn, like, which is what you did.
DANIEL: Well, that’s it. Just freakin’ learn. Anyway, in response, writer Anand Giridharadas tweeted this: “Call it what it is. Not mispronunciation.” And here’s our Word of the Week… DISPRONUNCIATION. He wrote an article in The Ink, “Kamala vs. Daenerys”. And here’s what he writes: “The obvious word for what Purdue did is mispronunciation. But I would like to correct that. The proper term is dispronunciation. Consider, that misinformation is information that merely happens to be false, whereas disinformation is false information purposely spread. Similarly, mispronunciation is people trying to feebly and in vain to say our names, and dis-pronunciation is people saying our names incorrectly on purpose, as if to remind us whose country this really is.” He goes on. “Mispronunciation is a matter of limited tongues. Dispronunciation is a matter of limited hearts.”
BEN: I like that.
DANIEL: I guess not getting names right is just another way of not trying, but I think it’s more than that. It’s a way of communicating who belongs and who doesn’t, who’s authentically American or Australian or whatever and who isn’t. You know, and really ultimately like who that person thinks matters in society.
BEN: Can I ask both of you a question? Like a… like a: Hey, people who have to do a job that’s like ostensibly similar to mine, insofar as you regularly introduce to a fresh batch of human beings, all of whom have very different names, and you have to learn them. What’s your play when you hit a name you’re sort of unfamiliar with or you’re not confident with, and you try and sort of you ask the person how to pronounce the name and then you struggle? Because I’m always, I always feel like… I’m always very scared of feeling like I’m putting that person on the spot and sort of spotlighting them in a way that makes them feel unsafe and unwelcome by, like, going, “Sorry, what? I’ll try again. I’ll try it again. I’ll try it again.” What do you guys do?
KELLY: Yeah, so I have… I actually just had this, like, a very awkward exchange with a friend who, I was like: So I said your name in and talk snd then somebody messaged me and said, I said your name wrong, which is like not maybe the way I would suggest going about it, but… [LAUGHTER]
BEN: Oh no, oh no. This is this is much worse than I was expecting.
KELLY: But I called them on the phone and I was like: Hey, I have to ask you something. Can I please… can you please tell me, like, am I saying your name wrong? And they had me say it and then gave me like, this whole wonderful, like, history of their name. And we practiced it together, which was so kind, because I felt terrible even bringing it up.
BEN: How long had you been doing this to this poor person?
KELLY: I well, I guess twice. Twice in like a big public venue had I said their name incorrectly. But it was really more of a stress thing, than like a… like, all of the sounds were right, which is good. But I just I think that… yeah, it’s hard to have those conversations, but I’m always going to be the person to I guess ask. I had heard their name pronounced and was pronouncing it the way someone else did, but that was also wrong. So I think you have to just like go to the source and try and tell people like, I’m trying to do this because I want it to be good. And I think a lot of people are really like understanding of it. There is a great Twitter thread recently by @AnpuLondon, that’s A-N-P-U London about like: my ethnic name and like how to pronounce it and like what it means and like all of this, like, history that’s behind, like, why some sounds sound foreign and why some sounds don’t. So, yeah. Anyway, it’s a good primer from a person with a name like that about how to approach them.
DANIEL: We will put that up on our blog, becauselanguage.com. Last one. FAILSON. Have you heard this word?
BEN: FAILSON? So son, as in like human male progeny?
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: F-A-I-L-S-O-N. Take a guess, Ben, as to when this word comes from, and it’s only just recently gained prominence.
BEN: Failson, failson.
DANIEL: And it kind of means what you’d expect.
BEN: Like: You’re a fail, son!
DANIEL: An epic fail, son.
BEN: Yeah, okay. I mean, it stinks of a sort of like a meme heritage to me. So I’m going to say like late… right around 2010 and it’s probably coming from 4chan then.
DANIEL: Damn, Ben, your instincts are good.
BEN: No, fuck off, really?
DANIEL: Well, okay so I, I felt it was a late 1800s thing. Did you get that sense, Kelly? I don’t know.
KELLY: It does sound older than it is. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: It’s 2016. It’s 2016.
KELLY: It’s a great word.
DANIEL: It comes from the podcast Chapo Trap House, which I have never listened to. The reason this is on my mind is that @CailinMoriah on Twitter says, “Dear @AmericanDialectSociety, if one of the contenders for word of the year is not “failson” in this, the year of the failson, I do not know if I will ever recover.” So Jia Tolentino did a piece in The New Yorker, “What Will Become of the Dirtbag Left?” and she writes, “For white middle class male useless people who have just enough family context to not be crushed by poverty, they become failsons.” And the folks from Chapo Trap House use it to describe their audience. But I’ve been watching it creep up the social scale to describe incompetent sons of very wealthy people. And I’m thinking of two in particular. But there are others.
BEN: Okay, so let me just… I’m just trying to sort of follow the etymology here. So, it started out just to like where all of the sort of like middle class white dudes sort of like soft land themselves.
DANIEL: Yes, that’s right. Yeah, you never succeed in establishing yourself. You’re just a failson.
BEN: Right. But you also like but like also…
KELLY: But you’re fine.
BEN: Yeah, right. Like you, you will live out your days in just like boring, crushing mediocrity, having never really suffered anything.
KELLY: Correct.
DANIEL: As a mediocre white man, I would just like to say yes. [LAUGHTER]
BEN: Okay, cool, cool, cool.
DANIEL: But I feel like it’s moving from middle class to upper class? Is that a sense that anyone else is getting?
KELLY: I think so.
DANIEL: I think so.
BEN: I mean, it seems like the zeitgeist is right for this to sort of, like, leapfrog its way from the middle class to the upper class when we can look at like… what the fuck is the name of that family who made OxyContin? Whereby like, you can basically be like proved to be single handedly responsible for like half a million people’s deaths and still be like: Eh, well, you know, okay, sorry! And also, we’ll keep all our money now.
DANIEL: Failing upward is a hallmark.
BEN: Yes, exactly. That’s what I mean. Like failing upward, like a series of just like being shit and still elevating.
KELLY: Yeah. I mean, I think about like how much of my, like, our undergraduate student population on this campus are failsons. [LAIGHTER]
BEN: “What are you doing here?”, “I don’t know, isn’t this… didn’t you all get on the bus from your high school at the end and came here, isn’t that what you did?”
KELLY: “Uhh, I’m a business major.”
DANIEL: Mmm. So SARS, DISPRONUNCIATION and FAILSON are words of the week. Let’s get some comments from previous episodes. One of our Words of the Week last week was SHITSHOW.
BEN: Oh, yeah, that’s right. We were looking for… because it came from the Baader Meinhof trials and we were looking for the original German because we only had the transcript. Did we get one?
DANIEL: We got one.
BEN: Yes! Thank you, German speakers in our listening audience! I really wanted to know this. What is it?
DANIEL: This one comes from Maj and from Adam. The phrase was SCHEIßETHEATER. Theater.
BEN: Oh, yeah. That makes heaps of sense.
DANIEL: The actual quote was »Wir wollen das Scheiß-Theater nicht mehr.« Sorry about the pronunciation. I’m not a German speaker.
BEN: And what does that actually translate to?
DANIEL: Okay, so this is the interesting part. This is a calque — a word for word translation — but it doesn’t have the exact same meaning in German. Adam and Maj have mentioned that Scheiße here isn’t actually, it’s more like SHITTY, like an intensifier. A shitty car, you know, which doesn’t actually have any poop in it. It’s just a shitty car. Or FUCKING is another one. And then THEATER has connotations of theater, but also of drama, like fuss and bother. Something that’s been drummed up.
BEN: Like this is coming from the Baader Meinhoff trials, right?
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s right.
BEN: So they’re referring to the trials as, like, political theater.
Danie: Yeah, that’s right. KABUKI is the word that I sort of came up with. Right?
BEN: Right. Whereas in English, SHITSHOW is, like, a catastrophically shambolic event, not necessarily a “goddamn fuss”.
BEN: No, no, no. Yeah. A SHITSHOW in the English usage is like… if Murphy of Murphy’s Law fame came in and had a decision making capacity in every creative choice in a theatre production…
DANIEL: It would be a shitshow.
BEN: Like, fucked it the whole way through.
DANIEL: All right. So mystery solved on that one.
BEN: Thank you, Maj and Adam. Oh, man. That filled a hole I had forgotten was there.
DANIEL: Yeah. Javier wrote us about our discussion of IRREGARDLESS and how it’s a bit like other words that have a negative prefix that is an intensifier. It seems superfluous, but it’s actually intensifying things like UNTHAW and UNRAVEL. Javier says in Spanish we use DESCAMBIAR. Let’s just break that down. DES is DIS-, and CAMBIAR is CHANGE, to dis-change? Javier says “If you’re not happy with an item you just bought, you go back to the shop and un-swap it for a different one.” Well, you swap, right? Yeah, but un-swap is an intensifier there.
BEN: Okay, so un-swapping something so… In that, could you swap something?
Daniel; Yeah, you could. You could swap it. You could CAMBIAR it. Yeah, you could.
BEN: Yeah, okay.
DANIEL: Yeah. But if you DESCAMBIAR it, then it’s stronger. And Javier says, “This word is frowned upon by many, but I find it very useful and funny.”
BEN: Not unlike IRREGARDLESS.
DANIEL: Any feels, Kelly, on IRREGARDLESS?
KELLY: I just… I think it’s really amusing how upset people get about it.
BEN: Yes! This is this is where I’m with it as well. I don’t say IRREGARDLESS. I don’t hate anyone who says IRREGARDLESS, but I tremendously enjoy laughing at people who hate people who say IRREGARDLESS. I’m just like: ohh, that is a level of pettiness that is so powerful. I’m kind of impressed.
KELLY: Yeah, I kind of feel that way about most of these. Like, I hate this word because of this reasoned discussion. Of course, we all have our own, but it’s like…
BEN: That’s the thing, right? I’m sitting there going, yeah, but if someone’s DISORIENTATED, ughhhh…
KELLY: [LAUGHTER] You’ve got to find something else to care about.
DANIEL: I mean, I don’t have any of those things, but, you know.
BEN: Liar. Liar! [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: You’ll never get it out of me.
BEN: Liar! This is the thing, when you don’t own up to it, Daniel, right, you are perpetuating a problem. You’re just… you’re just… you’re stuccoing over the hole you’ve punched in the wall a really long time ago. That’s not a good fix, Daniel. It’s not a good fix.
DANIEL: I’m reminded of a quote, “Our dark side is not our bad side. Our dark side is the side that we refuse to acknowledge exists.”
BEN: Exactly right! Yeah.
KELLY: Nice.
BEN: Well, thank you for proving my point to you to me.
DANIEL: Well, you’ll never find out what it is. Finally, Maria on Twitter just posted to us this tweet from Sylvia @sociolinguista, “accidentally just coined a new blend: DISAPRESSING which is a combination of DISAPPOINTING and DEPRESSING, really should be the 2020 word of the year.” Gosh, we’re going to get into word season soon, aren’t we?
BEN: We are.
KELLY: I’m doing that. I’m working on the Word of the Year with…
BEN: [GASP]
DANIEL: [GASP] Oh my goodness!
BEN: Dang! We just… we just found out that for the last hour and a half we’ve been like having a social drink with the person in charge of picking the best picture at the Oscars. And now we have to pretend like we aren’t just going to just fucking bombard you with questions!
KELLY: That’s fine, I’m not in charge. I’m just helping run the Zoom.
BEN: Yeah, but you have seen some words!
KELLY: I have. I love DISAPRESSING, because it’s like when you get a new blend like that and you’re like, I felt it. I felt it. Especially… like, we were on strike at the beginning of the semester. And yeah, my whole experience with the administration has been disapressing. But I mean, it’s like, at least I have a word for it now.
Daneil: Yes. That’s something.
BEN: That’s some… that’s some fucked up silver lining shit right there.
KELLY: Thank you. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Kelly Wright, thank you so much for joining us on this show. We’ve really enjoyed having you.
KELLY: Thank you, guys. That was really nice.
BEN: Please, please, please, please, please come back.
KELLY: Okay.
BEN: Yeah. We love, love returning guests, so much fun. Because now you’ve, like, managed to, like… that initial sort of thing that I’m sure you had, which was like “da fuck?” has hopefully either mostly waned or at least you’ve learned to ignore enough of it now, so by the time you come in for round two, it’s just kind of like: Oh yeah, these guys are fucking weird. All right!
DANIEL: Cool, ready.
KELLY: Sounds good
[OUTRO MUSIC]
DANIEL: Ope, you know what that music means, Ben.
BEN: Oh, I got to… I have to do the reads?
DANIEL: It’s time for the reads.
BEN: Send your reactions and ideas to us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon and Patreon. We are @becauselangpod in all of the places. And if you can get a question to us via email, the email address you would want is hello@becauselanguage.com. Tell friends about us, leave a review. All of those things help us tremendously.
DANIEL: We’re really grateful to our patrons for making this work easier and helping us stretch to some goals that we like to do. A special thanks to Termy, Chris B, Lyssa, The Major, Chris L, Matt, Whitney, Damien, Helen, Bob, Jack, Christelle, Elías, Michael, Larry, Kitty, Lord Mortis, Binh, Kristofer, Dustin, Andy, Maj, Nigel, Kate, Jen, Nasrin, Ayesha, Emma, Andrew, Nikoli. And new this week, Samuel. A big thanks to all of our patrons.
Our music is written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, and you can hear him in Ryan Beno and Dideon’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
BEN: bow bow bow bow
[PAUSE]
DANIEL: Actually, it was kind of funny because I was at the library talking to my daughter, saying, let’s go to the car and get the library books so that we can return them and get more books. And then there was this woman who was looking at me really funny, and then she said, “You’re Daniel from the ABC Radio Perth, doing the language show!”
BEN: Ah, you got the thing where for a second you were cool. Isn’t it weird?
DANIEL: It was lovely. And she was lovely and it was still strange.
BEN: Yeah, I don’t care for it at all, either. It’s like, it feels… I don’t know about you, but I just have ferocious imposter syndrome, and it’s super rare like I don’t want to because I’m sure you use this in a promo somewhere, so I really, really don’t want to come across as a person who’s like: Yeah, when I’m like just besieged by my adoring fans, because that is not at all the correct characterisation. Like, once every year or so someone’s like: Hey, you’re… you sound really familiar, who are you? And I’m like: I’m the person from the thing. And they’re like oh yeah oh yeah, I like your stuff. But you shouldn’t because I’m bad. I’m bad at all of this stuff. Like, there’s so many better podcasts out there. Just stop it. Get away from me. And then invariably everyone leaves the situation far less happy than they started it.
DANIEL: “I’m the person from the thing.” That’s how you introduce yourself?
BEN: Yeah, totally.
DANIEL: It works.
BEN: Usually what happens is like, I’m like: I’m a high school teacher because usually that clears that up actually a fair bit more readily than the actual podcast. And then after a while of like, no, it’s not that, I was like I used to be into bikes or whatever. And then after a few things, I’m like, ~I’m in a….linguistics podcast?~ And then they’re like, oh yeah! And I want to be clear as well, I’m not at all ashamed of being on Because Language. I freaking love the show, like it’s the best. Yeah. But I always yeah. I just like my shoulders hunch up, like ~oh I’m in a podcast~. And the worst part is I reckon… and then I’ll shut up completely and we can just, I don’t know, do a show or something.
DANIEL: Thank you.
BEN: But the worst part is, is like: I have been doing this now for like six years. So for, like, way longer than the whole, like pop culture, like everyone-has-a-podcast now kind of thing. And it doesn’t make me OG or anything, like you would think we would be far more successful having done it that long.
DANIEL: I would think that.
BEN: But I would think like I don’t even I don’t even like… I don’t even belong to the fresh cadre of like everyone has a podcast people. I’m like the OG forgotten about podcast people. So I’m just like, oh, it’s so self-conscious when I’m like ~I have a podcast~.
DANIEL: Well, I’m just impressed that you have imposter syndrome and you’re not even doing a PhD. [LAUGHTER]
BEN: Oh Daniel, all educators can have imposter syndrome.