Each letter in our Latin alphabet tells a story. But what about spaces? Or writing direction? Should we get rid of some letters, or could we even do with more? Here to answer all these questions is Dr Danny Bate, author of Why Q Needs U: A History of Our Letters and How We Use Them.
Timestamps
00:00 Start
00:44 Intros: Special letters
05:46 News: Spanish okay at World Cup?
09:30 News: Forgetting is helpful in language acquisition
21:18 News: Bluey in Yolŋu
25:41 Related or Not theme by Jo
27:21 Related or Not: prodigy, prodigal, and prodigious
34:19 Related or Not: vice, device, divide
43:09 Related or Not: gauntlet and gaunt
49:48 Interview with Danny Bate, author of Why Q Needs U
50:16 About Danny’s podcast: A Language I Love Is…
52:24 The Alphabet: greatest innovation since sexual reproduction
56:08 The case against boustrophedon
58:51 Letters flipped over time
01:02:40 Why are some letters more common than others?
01:06:14 Why does H get used in so many digraphs?
01:10:52 Thoughts on spelling reform
01:18:07 Why are L and R so squirrelly?
01:28:53 The evolution of spaces in written language
01:31:46 What letters can we get rid of?
01:35:15 Actually, no, we need a new letter
01:36:53 Communicating linguistic ideas to the public
01:44:02 Word of the Week: monoculture
01:53:43 Word of the Week: algae-TBQ agenda
02:00:15 Word of the Week: hobbylos
02:03:14 Word of the Week: tokenmaxxing
02:06:27 Word of the Week: Claudeonomics
02:11:21 The Reads
02:18:18 Outtakes: Back on our Bluey nonsense + On being a Dan
Listen to this episode
Video
@becauselangpod Our spelling mistakes are *fixing* English. New episode with Danny Bate, author of "Why Q Needs U" Get it in all the podcast places. https://becauselanguage.com/141-why-q-needs-u/ @bonnierbooks_uk ♬ original sound – Because Language
@becauselangpod Caitlin has a certificate and she will defend it. Just some of the zany hijinks we get up to when it's time for Related or Not. Check out our latest episode with Danny Bate and @caitlinmoriah ♬ original sound – Because Language
Patreon supporters
Thanks to all our patrons! Here are our patrons at the Supporter level.
This time, scores are based on how similar the lower case letters look to their upper case counterparts. Two points for exactly the same, one point for coming close, and no points for not very similar.
| Name | Two points | One point | No points | Score | Letters | Normalised |
| Luis | us | li | 6 | 4 | 1.50 | |
| sæ̃m | s | m | 3 | 2 | 1.50 | |
| Lucy | uc | ly | 6 | 4 | 1.50 | |
| O Tim | o | tim | 5 | 4 | 1.25 | |
| Lyssa | ss | ly | a | 6 | 5 | 1.20 |
| Nikoli | ko | ili | n | 7 | 6 | 1.17 |
| Wolfdog | woo | lf | dg | 8 | 7 | 1.14 |
| Linguistic C̷̛̤̰̳͉̺͕̋̚̚͠h̸͈̪̤͇̥͛͂a̶̡̢̛͕̰͈͗͋̐̚o̷̟̹͈̞̔̊͆͑͒̃s̵̍̒̊̈́̚̚ͅ | usccos | liiti | ngha | 17 | 15 | 1.13 |
| Chris L | cs | il | hr | 6 | 6 | 1.00 |
| LordMortis | oos | lmti | rdr | 10 | 10 | 1.00 |
| Kristofer | kso | itf | rer | 9 | 9 | 1.00 |
| Sonic Snejhog | socso | ij | nnehg | 12 | 12 | 1.00 |
| Kevin | kv | i | en | 5 | 5 | 1.00 |
| Andy from Logophilius | ooopus | yfmlili | andrgh | 19 | 19 | 1.00 |
| Tony | o | ty | n | 4 | 4 | 1.00 |
| John K | ok | j | hn | 5 | 5 | 1.00 |
| Xekri | xk | i | er | 5 | 5 | 1.00 |
| Becky | ck | y | be | 5 | 5 | 1.00 |
| Colleen | co | ll | een | 6 | 7 | 0.86 |
| Ignacio | co | ii | gna | 6 | 7 | 0.86 |
| Caitlin | c | itli | an | 6 | 7 | 0.86 |
| Yevaud | vu | y | ead | 5 | 6 | 0.83 |
| Keith | k | it | eh | 4 | 5 | 0.80 |
| Fiona | o | fi | na | 4 | 5 | 0.80 |
| Kathy | k | ty | ah | 4 | 5 | 0.80 |
| James | s | jm | ae | 4 | 5 | 0.80 |
| Elías | s | l | ea | 3 | 4 | 0.75 |
| Stan | s | t | an | 3 | 4 | 0.75 |
| Molly Dee | o | mlly | dee | 6 | 8 | 0.75 |
| Aldo | o | l | ad | 3 | 4 | 0.75 |
| Faux Frenchie | uxc | ffi | arenhe | 9 | 12 | 0.75 |
| Rosemary | os | my | rear | 6 | 8 | 0.75 |
| PharaohKatt | pok | tt | haraha | 8 | 11 | 0.73 |
| Whitney | w | ity | hne | 5 | 7 | 0.71 |
| Steele | s | tl | eee | 4 | 6 | 0.67 |
| Amy | my | a | 2 | 3 | 0.67 | |
| Mignon | o | mi | gnn | 4 | 6 | 0.67 |
| Sydney | s | yy | dne | 4 | 6 | 0.67 |
| Diego | o | i | deg | 3 | 5 | 0.60 |
| Laura | u | l | ara | 3 | 5 | 0.60 |
| Lance | c | l | ane | 3 | 5 | 0.60 |
| Nasrin | s | i | narn | 3 | 6 | 0.50 |
| Joanna | o | j | anna | 3 | 6 | 0.50 |
| Ayesha | s | y | aeha | 3 | 6 | 0.50 |
| Rach | c | rah | 2 | 4 | 0.50 | |
| Amir | mi | ar | 2 | 4 | 0.50 | |
| J0HNTR0Y | jty | hnr | 3 | 6 | 0.50 | |
| Hedvig | v | i | hedg | 3 | 6 | 0.50 |
| Canny Archer | cc | y | annarher | 5 | 11 | 0.45 |
| Ariaflame | iflm | araae | 4 | 9 | 0.44 | |
| Amanita | mit | aana | 3 | 7 | 0.43 | |
| Larry | ly | arr | 2 | 5 | 0.40 | |
| Nigel | il | nge | 2 | 5 | 0.40 | |
| Daryl | yl | dar | 2 | 5 | 0.40 | |
| Meredith | mit | eredh | 3 | 8 | 0.38 | |
| Manú | m | an | 1 | 3 | 0.33 | |
| Rodger | o | rdger | 2 | 6 | 0.33 | |
| Martha | mt | arha | 2 | 6 | 0.33 | |
| Daniel | il | dane | 2 | 6 | 0.33 | |
| gramaryen | my | graaren | 2 | 9 | 0.22 | |
| Helen | l | heen | 1 | 5 | 0.20 | |
| Andy B | y | andb | 1 | 5 | 0.20 | |
| Rene | rene | 0 | 4 | 0.00 | ||
| Ben | ben | 0 | 3 | 0.00 |
And our newest patrons:
- At the Supporter level: Daryl
- At the Listener level: Josh
- And our newest free members: Emily, Kutlu, Appletaterghoul, Matthew M, empressdaze, and ✨Breezy✨
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Become a Patron!Show notes
FIFA reverses course and ends Spanish language press conference controversy
https://www.mundodeportivo.com/en/20260615/1004195355/fifa-reverses-course-and-ends-spanish-language-press-conference-controversy.html
Big thanks to Elisa for this story!
FIFA Reverses World Cup Language Policy After Hakimi Incident
https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2026/06/320596/fifa-reverses-world-cup-language-policy-after-hakimi-incident/
@sophiasmithgaler Spanish speaking World Cup footballers were being told they…couldn’t speak Spanish? The clips went viral, audiences questioned why this would happen for any major language but especially one spoken by a host nation and…today FIFA announced a big change!
New study finds: Forgetting may be the secret to better AI language learning
https://www.mpi.nl/news/new-study-finds-forgetting-may-be-secret-better-ai-language-learning
Findings of the BabyLM Challenge: Sample-Efficient Pretraining on Developmentally Plausible Corpora
https://arxiv.org/html/2504.08165v1
Bluey: Dad Baby | ABC iView
https://iview.abc.net.au/show/bluey/series/2/video/CH1903Q019S00
Harden up, Pat! #Bluey
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1776237499824823
National NAIDOC Week
https://www.naidoc.org.au/about/naidoc-week
Bluey translated into an Indigenous language for the first time
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-17/bluey-launches-in-yolnu-matha-for-naidoc-week/106803138
Why Q Needs U: A History of Our Letters and How We Use Them, by Danny Bate
https://dannybate.com/book/
A history of Alphabet | kyokotomiyama
https://kyokotomiyama.wordpress.com/2016/11/15/a-history-of-alphabet/
Interpunct illustrated and explained
https://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2008/06/interpunct-illustrated-and-explained.html
Praeneste fibula | Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praeneste_fibula
Runes: Do you prefer Elder or Younger Futhark? Has anyone tried to become fluent?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Viking/comments/101lhzw/runes_do_you_prefer_elder_or_younger_futhark_has/
Pauline Hanson says Australia ‘must be monocultural’ in National Press Club speech
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jun/17/pauline-hanson-national-press-club-address-speech-australia-ntwnfb
Pauline Hanson’s full speech at the National Press Club
https://thenightly.com.au/politics/pauline-hansons-full-speech-at-the-national-press-club–c-22444111
Hanson’s monoculture comments are from her three-step playbook and the Liberals played right into it
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-28/pauline-hanson-monoculture-multiculturalism-socceroos-words/106847648
Pauline Hanson wants a ‘monocultural’ society. But this version of Australia has never existed
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/24/australia-multicultural-history-never-monocultural-ntwnfbkw
Company owned by Trump donor won $1.7 million no-bid Reflecting Pool cleaning contract
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/company-trump-donor-cafaro-reflecting-pool-no-bid-contract/
A Meta employee created a dashboard so coworkers can compete to be the company’s No. 1 AI token user—and Zuckerberg doesn’t even rank in the top 250
https://fortune.com/2026/04/09/meta-killed-employee-ai-token-dashboard/
‘Ballmaxxing’: A potentially dangerous men’s health trend
https://www.nebraskamed.com/health/healthy-lifestyle/mens-health/ballmaxxing-a-potentially-dangerous-mens-health-trend
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
HEDVIG: Are we waiting for Ben at all?
DANIEL: Nope. He’s in the Kimberley region.
CAITLIN: That’s why I’m here. I’m Ben. Hi, it’s me, Ben.
HEDVIG: Hi.
DANIEL: Caitlin is being Ben. Yay.
CAITLIN: I don’t have that energy that he brings. I’m so sorry. I can’t do that.
DANIEL: Eh. [CAITLIN LAUGHS] See, it gives me a little bit of license to sort of, I’m not a good Ben, but sometimes I’m funny.
CAITLIN: Bring the whimsy.
DANIEL: All right, here we go.
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]
Hello, and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. First up, linguist and researcher Hedvig Skirgård. Hedvig, your name uses a special letter. It’s an A with a ring on it. It’s the ring A (Å). Do you have any feelings about that?
HEDVIG: Well, I feel like it’s one of the easier, non-sort of English Latin alphabet letters. So, I get a bit annoyed when people are like, “I can’t find it on the keyboard.” And I’m like, “You can just like google A with a dot and you can copy paste it, man. It’s not that hard.”
DANIEL: For anybody who does keyboard stuff, the ring A is option A. If you do an option A or option capital A, you’ll be able to get that. This has been a public service…
HEDVIG: On your machine and your keyboard layout.
DANIEL: Are you using AZERTY?
HEDVIG: No, I’m using a Swedish keyboard. I especially request to get one everywhere I am.
DANIEL: Oh, let’s see that thing. Oh, wow. Is it just to the right of P? Neat. And it’s esteemed co-host not only of our show, but also of the podcast Half the Answer with Trent R. Nelson. It’s Caitlin M. Green. Caitlin, hello.
CAITLIN: Hi.
DANIEL: Do you have any feelings whatsoever about any letters of the alphabet?
CAITLIN: I feel that they’re all beautiful, and that I would like to use every single one at some point in my life if I can get the chance. And I also do love a touchscreen keyboard, because then you just hold the A and it’ll give you every possible A you could ever hope to see and you just select. It’s the best.
DANIEL: Some that you will never use.
CAITLIN: Right. Well, unless you’re me, because I have a goal. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] So, does that include all the Latin character set, just like everything?
CAITLIN: Yeah, all of it. If it’s in an alphabet, I want it. I’m not committing to characters. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: My letter thing is… When I was younger, I always wished my name had an R, and it doesn’t. I just liked R and I didn’t have one. My friend Eric had one, but I didn’t and I just thought the letter R is such a cool letter. And yeah, I was always envious.
CAITLIN: Mm. I’m so sorry that didn’t happen for you, Darnel.
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly. We can squeeze one in.
CAITLIN: Daniel Midgler. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] Yeah, but then you get rid of the Y.
CAITLIN: Oh, that’s no good.
DANIEL: And Ys are kind of cool for different reasons. In fact, I learned about Ys and Rs and the history of all these letters, because I checked out a book called Why Q Needs U by Danny Bate. And it’s a great book. I had a chat with linguist and author Dr Danny Bate. He has a podcast. It’s called A Language I Love Is. He’s written a book about the greatest invention in all human history, arguably, the alphabet. In our case, it’s the Roman alphabet. There are others, but the book is Why Q Needs U. That chat is coming up.
We get a lot of ideas for the show from the folks on our Discord. They are sharing links and ideas. They’re even giving feedback on designs that I’m making for the annual mail out. Yes, already, I’m on top of it. Our Discord is like a nerdy community that you — yes, you — can belong to, and that is just one benefit of becoming a patron. There are many others.
HEDVIG: I’d also like to add that. If you do join the Discord and you make suggestions… So, I also make suggestions and Daniel usually doesn’t pick mine. He picks everyone else’s things but mine. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. Either it means I have bad taste or everyone else has very good taste.
DANIEL: I do a lot of yours when I notice them. It’s not meant to be a comment on you. It’s just that sometimes I don’t get high enough up the feed, because it’s a busy place. There’s a lot of stuff flying around. But you know what? When Hedvig drops a news item or a story or a word, I esteem that highly.
HEDVIG: Okay. All right. A big welcome to our newest supporters on Patreon. Our newest person at the supporter level is Daryl with a gift membership, ooh, I wonder from who.
DANIEL: Did you know that you could do that? that you could just gift somebody a membership? Whether they want to or not, they’re a patron now.
HEDVIG: That’s really cute. I feel like podcast listeners overall… I don’t know, Caitlin, if you’re like this as well, but when there’s a podcast you really like, you want to tell everyone to listen to it. And if you give memberships, I feel like that’s even stronger.
CAITLIN: You’re like, “No, I need you to hear this podcast so badly. I paid money for you to do so.” [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah. We have a new person also at the Listener level. That’s Josh. And we have a number of people at the free tier as well. That’s Emily, Kutlu, Appletaterghoul, Matthew M, empressdaze, and ✨Breezy✨. Welcome.
DANIEL: Breezy, that’s with sparkle emoji on either side.
CAITLIN: Yeah, not just a regular Breezy. [CHUCKLES] Deluxe Breezy.
DANIEL: With extra breeze. Well, thanks to everybody who supports the show. We couldn’t do this show without you. So, shall we get into the news?
HEDVIG and CAITLIN: Yes.
DANIEL: This one was suggested by Ignacio and Diego on our Discord. There was a bit of a viral moment at the World Cup involving language. Did anyone catch it?
HEDVIG: Yes.
CAITLIN: If I say yes, will you believe that I watch sports? [CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: I don’t normally watch sports, but I did marry into a family that likes football a lot, so I do try to keep up to date. So, it’s currently the men’s World Cup in football is going on the national competition in the US, Canada, and Mexico right now. A lot of the players don’t speak English or speak more things than just English.
And for every team, there is a set of official languages that they speak. My understanding is at the press conferences, FIFA had provided translators in some languages. But then sometimes the players would just be able to speak even more languages that were on their sheet. And funnily enough, one of those more languages was just Spanish, which feels like a obvious one that a lot of people would know.
Also, the competition is partially played in Mexico, so not that weird that there would be Spanish language press at these events. And sometimes the players and the journalists wanted to speak Spanish to each other, but someone had to be like, “Hold on, we didn’t get a Spanish translator,” which feels like they could have figured out, also just because Mexico is a co-organiser and also not that hard to fix in post. I don’t know.
DANIEL: The press conference was with Vinícius Júnior, Achraf Hakimi and Frenkie de Jong started speaking Spanish, but they were halted by the FIFA official. Do you notice how they seemed really surprised? They even said, “Es un poco raro,” which means that’s a little bit weird.
CAITLIN: This doesn’t happen much. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: They pointed out that the three of them were perfectly able to converse in Spanish, but they were stopped. So, the reason that they were stopped… I got this from a TikTok video by Sophia Smith Galer, who’s a really good follow. We might see her popping up at some point. The matches didn’t happen in any of the Mexican host cities. So, that was one reason why allegedly it wasn’t eligible.
The teams weren’t from any Spanish speaking countries and the players themselves were not deemed to have Spanish as their primary language. And so, they were stopped and people noticed and people commented on it and enough people were… Well, people were a bit miffed. There was miffage. And so, the mifery was so miffull that FIFA walked it back and announced the translation services will now be offered.
HEDVIG: For a lot of more events, right? They’re still not going to provide translation for every other possible combination, right?
DANIEL: I think their usual rubrics will be still upheld, but I think Spanish will get a little bit more translation coverage than it had before, which is good, because when you have the chance to converse in a language you know well or a language you prefer, you just get a better conversation. More languages is more good.
CAITLIN: Oh. Well, then. [CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: I also thought it was interesting that couldn’t they just have… Like, why do there need to be like simultaneous translation at the time? Why not just fix it in post, unless they thought that there could be something offensive going on? Like, journalists would ask an inappropriate question FIFA would want to censor?
DANIEL: Having control I know is probably important. Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Something like that, I would suspect. Because otherwise you could just let them talk and then put subtitles on later.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s right. Thanks to Ignacio and Diego for that story. Now, let’s move on to some research. I’ve been thinking a lot about forgetting. Is there anything good about forgetting? Usually, I hate forgetting. It annoys me. Walk into a room, can’t remember what I was there for, have to go back, then I remember.
CAITLIN: It’s increasingly a presence in my life, forgetting, [LAUGHS] as I continue through my lifespan. [CHUCKLES] Yeah. I think I forget more than I used to. I think that my kids don’t help, because being distracted does not exactly help you remember things. And so, I’ll walk into a room and then somebody will be like, “Mom, mom, mom.” And then, now I have no idea why I’m in that room other than to escape…
DANIEL: What?! [CHUCKLES]
CAITLIN: …those voices that are going, “Mom, mom, mom.” [CHUCKLES] They’re at the age where they can open their own snacks, so I don’t know what they need me for exactly.
DANIEL: Could it have a cognitive function, like a positive benefit?
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm. Like, physically in the brain is forgetting like synapses getting less connected?
DANIEL: I want to say that, yes, knowledge is represented by the position and strength of the synapses in your brain. But I’m not aware of just how closely that goes.
CAITLIN: Yeah. We tend to have this layperson’s understanding of brain space as being like computer space that you could wipe clean and then it’s available. And that’s why we have jokes like, I don’t know why I have every single word of every single Disney song in my brain forever, but I can’t remember the quadratic formula or what the name is of the person who checks out my groceries at the grocery store. I would so much rather reassign that space. But that’s not really right about brains. We are not computers, it turns out.
DANIEL: No.
HEDVIG: Maybe if you forget something that you learned that wasn’t correct and you learn the thing again. Maybe you have a chance at learning the correct thing. Is that a good part of forgetting?
DANIEL: That would make sense. If information can drop off the back eventually, not counting ’80s lyrics, which is basically everything that’s going on up here… [POINTS TO HEAD]
CAITLIN: Yeah.
DANIEL: …then it gives you a chance for…
CAITLIN: I think I would prefer that to all the Disney that’s in here.
DANIEL: Why? Disney’s awesome.
CAITLIN: You don’t know how much crap Disney has pumped out over the last decade, okay? If you had preschool and elementary school kids in your house, you would agree with me, because you would be walking around your house singing under your breath all of the words to the songs from Descendants 4: Rise of Red, okay?
HEDVIG: Oh, I see.
DANIEL: Okay.
CAITLIN: Nobody needs that in their life.
HEDVIG: It’s not all Lilo and Stitch, Moana, and Hercules, and Mulan.
CAITLIN: Exactly. I’m not just walking around thinking about how far I’ll go, okay? I’m thinking about how the queen’s not very friendly. That’s for sure. Inspiring? No. [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: All right. Well, I do happen to have young ones at home, but the thing is, they don’t do movies and that goes double for Wish.
CAITLIN: [LAUGHS] Oh, don’t get me started on Wish.
DANIEL: Not doing that. [LAUGHS] Well, this story is about large language models, and they just keep on teaching us about language, especially language acquisition. So, there’s a new study that I wanted to touch on.
This is work from Abishek Thamma of the University of Amsterdam and Micha Heilbron from the… Oh no, the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics! Argh, got another Max Planck story! Oh my god.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
CAITLIN: Constant.
DANIEL: I can’t stay away.
HEDVIG: I know. There’s a lot of us.
DANIEL: This is published in Transactions of the ACL, the Association for Computational Linguistics. This concerns BabyLM. Do we know what BabyLM is?
CAITLIN: Now, Daniel, you know that I do my very best to not learn about LLMs.
DANIEL: I know. [LAUGHS]
CAITLIN: It hurts my brain, and I guess I’d rather watch Descendants Four: Rise of Red. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Good job on our last episode, by the way, with that in mind.
CAITLIN: Oh, thank you. I did my very best.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: If this is part of a body of research that uses large language models or language models, in general, as a proxy for how humans work, which we know is of limited success. There’s a lot of assumptions and prerequisites that you need to spell out and make sure are fulfilled.
The basic research that says that like, “You can learn grammar from just the frequency of input a baby makes.” That one, I’m like, “Yeah, that makes sense that you can detect structure.” But for further cognitive tests, I’m not sure large language models are a good proxy for the human brain.
So, I’m going to guess that a Baby Language Model, because that’s what it is, right? Baby Language Model is somehow a proxy for babies and we’re using them as little experimental subjects to see how babies learn things, and somehow they’re forgetting things.
DANIEL: Well, let’s just start from the top. One thing that large language models have taught us is that it’s possible to learn to do grammatical linguistic output with stats alone from observation. You don’t have to be a human to learn grammar, contra Chomsky. But then you can argue, “Well, of course, it could pick up patterns in language. You gave it trillions of words, more than any human could ever observe or memorise.”
CAITLIN: What about the poverty of the stimulus? I’m always saying this.
DANIEL: That’s right. [CHUCKLES]
CAITLIN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Okay, so, let’s give it only as much data as a human baby could reasonably be exposed to. And when language models are given only that much input, do they learn? Answer: yes, they do quite well. Not at the human level on many tasks, but very close and getting better.
So, for this research, they used a BabyLM training set. But they also introduced a way of making it forget. Because computers just hold everything in memory. They don’t have to forget, so they induced memory decay. They called it memory decay and they made it so the data would drop off the back. They say: “Fleeting memory transformers, a simple modification of the transformer architecture that adds a memory decay to the self-attention operation to simulate human-like forgetting.”
Now, they say that it actually does very well. It is able to do a good job of learning. In fact, it outperforms baby language models that don’t have a memory decay. But they say only when the memory decay is combined with, and here’s a term: echoic memory buffer, which perfectly retains three to seven words.
HEDVIG: I’m looking at the paper and I’m trying to figure out, because I’m trying to figure out what languages they’re trained on. Because for example, if it is the German with then, because… So far I’m having a bit of a Bender rule problem where…
CAITLIN: Yeah, is this just English?
HEDVIG: I’m struggling to find out what language the material is in.
DANIEL: Uh-oh, that’s a good point.
HEDVIG: I can see that it is OpenSubtitles / CHILDES, which I know exists for non-English.
CAITLIN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah, the BabyBabelLM project has data for lots of languages. For anyone who doesn’t know what the Bender rule is, Dr Emily Bender had a thing where she would go to papers and say, “Excuse me, what language were you using?” Because everyone just acts like English is the only language that exists or is worth doing research in.
CAITLIN: That’s right.
DANIEL: And they would say, “It was done in English,” and she would be like, “Thank you.”
CAITLIN: Yeah. Maybe you say that. You tell us. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Good to know. I constantly forget that as well. By the way, the BabyLM task is not like a data set. There are many different kinds of corpora that you can use, but it’s human level likelihood of exposure.
HEDVIG: So, chucking out the bit that you’re not learning that much from and just keeping the most informative, distinctive bits is helping you learn more things.
DANIEL: It’s interesting that forgetting would be good, but I can see why forgetting some things would be good. There are a couple of reasons. I mean, it means that rare elements can drop off the back, because they don’t get repeated. But common ones that you hear over and over again, those work their way into sort of abstraction level and you can get them.
CAITLIN: There’s a bunch of words I learned for the GRE that I can’t remember what they mean anymore, because they haven’t ever come up again. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Yeah. Rare items can be forgotten, and you can save memory and learn more efficiently.
HEDVIG: But we’re not randomly forgetting. So, it’s not the value of randomly forgetting.
DANIEL: I think that it makes sense that forgetting isn’t harmful to language learning, because language has been sculpted by brains that forget. I’ve pointed out that human language is the way it is because of our cognitive limitations.
Like, we have attentional issues, we get confused, we get bored, we get tired, we have memory limitations, and so we have to do language in a way that makes sense for human brains with all of our weirdnesses. So, this shows that language is the way it is because of forgetting. That’s weird to me, because I always thought that language learning was like just bulk memory, but no, forgetting isn’t harmful and in fact, in some cases, can help.
CAITLIN: I guess, once you’ve done some abstraction, then you can remember that the abstraction, but you don’t necessarily have to have all of the exemplars in it, right?
DANIEL: That’s a really good point. They point this out in the article. It makes sure that we abstract. If we can’t remember the words directly, then we have to get some kind of representation. I don’t know what that would be. Like, maybe the overall meaning or maybe noun, verb, adjectives, sort of things.
CAITLIN: Yeah, what word type it is.
DANIEL: So, maybe forgetting helps us to abstract.
CAITLIN: Children’s memory is really impressive in my anecdotal experience, where my kids can remember where something got left way better than I can. The last time they saw something, they know where it was. Because they’re quite young, they haven’t started not caring about that kind of thing.
Words that they’ve heard once or twice, they can remember the meaning of it. I have a rising second grader, and so she’s being introduced to more advanced books with words that she hasn’t encountered before. And if I ask her later, what was that word, she still has it in there, somehow.
DANIEL: I feel like our memory is really good in funny little ways. Hedvig, you’ve mentioned this, but I’ve just experienced this. I’m driving in the car, I’m listening to a podcast, I get home. Now I want to listen to the rest of it. Oh, shoot. It reset, lost my bookmark, and now I’m back to zero. Where was I in that podcast? No, I’ve heard this. And I can see where I was when I heard that.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
CAITLIN: And songs, I know where I was. Yeah, I can remember where I was when I heard the song before, you know, that kind of thing. It’s pretty cool. [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
HEDVIG: I have a scent that I use when I read a particular book, and now when I smell that scent, I just get a full Proust…
CAITLIN: Scent? Yeah.
HEDVIG: …like, I’m reading the book.
DANIEL: Nice.
CAITLIN: So, Anastasia with the peppermint oil on the carpet. [SILENCE] We all remember. No?
HEDVIG: Eh…
CAITLIN: The children’s animated film Anastasia.
HEDVIG: I think of Proust and the cake, but I bet that’s the same thing, right?
CAITLIN: [CHUCKLES] Yes.
DANIEL: Finally, this one from Elías. He’s Elías Leetmogger now. Remember how he said that we could turn all of his letters into leet numbers? He did better than everybody else in that reading. So, he’s Elías Leetmogger now.
HEDVIG: Oh my god.
DANIEL: Yeah. This one’s about Bluey. How deep do we roll in the Blueysphere?
CAITLIN: Oh, extremely deep, I would say.
DANIEL: Oh. Okay.
CAITLIN: Yeah, I would say encyclopedic knowledge at this point. So, we live in the United States, which means that if we want to watch the episode called Dad Baby, we got to fire up the YouTube, because it’s not on Disney+. But we’ll do it because Dad Baby rocks.
HEDVIG: I don’t personally have children around me who watch Bluey, but through osmosis of everyone else loving Bluey so much, I have acquired some knowledge about Bluey and I’ve tried to push it on various children in my surroundings, because it seems good.
DANIEL: Good.
HEDVIG: It’s an Australian cartoon…
CAITLIN: It’s a great show.
HEDVIG: …similar-ish in age span to like Peppa Pig, but Australian and very cute.
DANIEL: It’s been said that Bluey is so that the young ones can learn and so that the old ones can heal, which I always liked.
CAITLIN: And also learn, actually, honestly, because there’s a lot that those parents do that can help you get through your day, like buying into the games, committing to the bit, having a good… Like letting the unimportant stuff go a little bit, so that the kids can have an experience.
DANIEL: Joining their play enthusiastically and wholeheartedly. As you listen to this dear listener, probably early July 2026, it’s NAIDOC week. Now in Australia, NAIDOC stands for National Aboriginal and Islanders Day Observance Committee, in which we celebrate the history, culture, and achievements of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people.
And it seems that for NAIDOC Week, five episodes of the TV show Bluey are being translated into the Yolŋu language of the top end Northern Territory. There are five episodes that are being dubbed into Yolŋu Matha, and they are… Here they are. The Creek.
CAITLIN: Oh, The Creek is beautiful.
DANIEL: The Creek is lovely. The beach. Sleepytime, of course.
CAITLIN: That’s easy. There’s not that much language in that one. [LAUGHS] It’s mostly Holst.
DANIEL: Yeah. Well, if you really want to do no language, just go with Rain. Anyway…
CAITLIN: Oh, true. Yeah.
DANIEL: Granddad and Rug Island.
CAITLIN: Oh, Rug Island is so good.
DANIEL: I noticed that those episodes take place mostly outdoors.
CAITLIN: And they have a lot of intergenerational negotiation of like, what’s a grownup? What’s a kid? What are dads for? What is the role of an adult child in a parent’s life?
DANIEL: Yeah, Rug Island especially. Oh my gosh.
CAITLIN: Is Granddad the one where Grandad’s trying to avoid a medical procedure?
DANIEL: Yeah, Chilli is chasing him around outside.
CAITLIN: Oh yeah. Okay. Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s the one.
CAITLIN: So, yeah, really interesting sort of like family dynamics in that one.
DANIEL: Mm. I agree. And connection to the land and places. I feel like that’s…
CAITLIN: Because he has to go back to the place that he’s from to feel safe and in control, right?
DANIEL: Yeah. So, Yolŋu is spoken in the top end of Australia. That’s the most northern bit of the Northern Territory of Australia. Not the pointy bit, but the big square bit. And Yolŋu isn’t one language, it’s about six. And they each have different varieties. It’s complicated, but all up, Yolŋu has about just a bit under 5,000 speakers. And having materials like Bluey will help young people, I think, have a connection to the language. So, congratulations to Yolŋu for joining the Bluey Club. Let’s do more.
CAITLIN: Hooray. [CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: If you want to have adults… I was going to say adult content, that sounds wrong, there’s a great film by Werner Herzog called Where the Green Ants Dream. There’s some Yolŋu spoken in there. They pretend that it’s like a super small language that no one understands, but it’s like a language spoken by thousands of people in Australia. [CAITLIN CHUCKLES] But if you want to hear Yolŋu in a non-children’s movie, I can really recommend the movie Where the Green Ants Dream. It’s very good.
CAITLIN: Okay.
DANIEL: Cool. Thanks, Elías, for that story. All right, it’s time for Related or Not. Let’s hear our theme.
[LAUGHTER]
Caitlin, are you psychologically preparing yourself? I saw that.
CAITLIN: Yeah, I am. I’m doing my deep breathing.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Don’t worry. You don’t have to replicate your perfect score from a couple of episodes ago. You’re fine.
CAITLIN: I’ve already failed since then. So, yeah, I have to let go of that.
DANIEL: You got nothing to prove. You’re fine.
CAITLIN: I still have my certificate on the wall. Like, I’m not taking that down, but… [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I sent a certificate. [CHUCKLES] I’m coming over and I’m going to rip it off the wall, depending on how you do. [LAUGHS]
CAITLIN: I said you were welcome to stay here anytime, I didn’t mean that!
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: I gave this to you. I can take it away! [LAUGHS]
CAITLIN: I’m putting an alarm on it. You can’t have it! Cold dead hands, my friend. It is guarded by Skeleton. What are you going to do?
DANIEL: You’re right. It is, isn’t it? Okay, okay. Okay, let’s just take a step back here. It’s cool. Let’s listen to Jo.
[RELATED OR NOT THEME]
DANIEL: Isn’t that lovely? Thank you, Jo.
CAITLIN: Wow, that’s beautiful.
HEDVIG: That’s very nice. I like it a lot.
CAITLIN: I do feel like I’m in the 1990s and we’re all very emotionally close now, so that’s nice.
DANIEL: Music brings us together and then Related or Not tears us apart. So, let’s do our first one. This one is from Pete via SpeakPipe.
PETE: Hello. Wondering if PRODIGY and PRODIGAL, as in, the Prodigal Son, are etymologically related? Thank you.
DANIEL: Thank you, Pete. Tell me what you know about the Prodigal Son. What is this story?
HEDVIG: It’s a biblical story about a man who has two sons, and one of them stays home and is very good, and the other one goes out into the world and commits lots of sins, and comes home and gets embraced by his father, and the other son gets jealous. Because Jesus loves a sinner that he can forgive more than someone who never sinned, which I found like: Why are you telling that to people?
CAITLIN: What is the lesson that we’re supposed to learn from that? I think, like an LLM, I stopped paying attention partway through and I don’t remember [DANIEL LAUGHS] exactly what. Was I supposed to be wild for a while and then come back? Did I make a mistake by being the first son?
DANIEL: You’re supposed to have a rumspringa.
HEDVIG: Yes.
CAITLIN: I’m supposed to sow my wild oats.
HEDVIG: If the assumption is that there is that… What’s the non-prodigal son called? The…
CAITLIN: The other guy. Him.
HEDVIG: Okay. If the assumption is that there actually are no non-prodigal sons, that everyone’s a sinner, then it kind of whatever.
CAITLIN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Then I guess if you get more love, the more you sin, then it gets worse because then serial killers who find God in prison are closer to Jesus than ones who just committed robbery. I don’t know. Christians, don’t let me know how it works.
DANIEL: Yeah, I’m sure we’ll get lots and lots of explanations.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
CAITLIN: People know this.
DANIEL: But the son who stayed home and was not wasteful, he’s like, “Why are you giving him a feast with the fatted calf? You never even did that for me.” And the dad says, “Okay, look, your brother was lost, but now he’s found.””
CAITLIN: Now he’s found.
DANIEL: “He’s lost his income, but you’ve still got yours, so, just chill.” Everybody is…
CAITLIN: Yeah. My only real thought was like, “Hey, you have eaten a meal here every single day since the day of your birth. [DANIEL LAUGHS] You have been getting fed and sheltered and getting the gradual daily dose of paternal love from me that you get by living here. He has had none of it for this much time, so we’re doing it big, all at once,…
HEDVIG: Okay.
CAITLIN: …so, that he can get all of that. It’s been accruing in an account somewhere, and now we’re paying it out.”
DANIEL: Maybe it’s just a story. Maybe it’s just a story.
HEDVIG: That makes sense.
DANIEL: I don’t know.
CAITLIN: Okay, fine, Daniel. But aren’t they all? [CHUCKLES] So is Granddad. So is The Creek. So is Sleepy Time, you know? I still cry. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: So, here are our words, PRODIGY and PRODIGAL. I’m adding to this PRODIGIOUS. PRODIGY, PRODIGAL, and PRODIGIOUS.
HEDVIG: What does the last word mean?
DANIEL: If you have prodigious output, it means you’ve output a lot of stuff.
CAITLIN: Lots. Yeah.
DANIEL: Hedvig publishes prodigiously, I’m sure.
HEDVIG: Not really.
CAITLIN: [MUSING] Quantity, young expert, weird kid. [CHUCKLES] Missing… what is it? Missing, but returned.
HEDVIG: The problem is, the PROD means like POKE. [LAUGHS] That’s my problem there.
CAITLIN: I do not think that that’s a part of this equation. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I’m pretty sure… This is just me, I’m pretty sure that the PRO- is the same, something like forward. I’m kind of interested in the DIG. What is the DIG? I’m realising now that I have no idea what the DIG is.
HEDVIG: It’s not finger, is it?
DANIEL: Digit?
CAITLIN: I think some of it might be. I think it might be related to dexterousness maybe.
DANIEL: Hmm. Dexterity. Okay. Interesting. Let me go first. I’m going to say PRODIGY and PRODIGIOUS are related, because you have outstanding output from an early age. I think PRODIGAL is probably its own thing.
HEDVIG: I’m going to say that they’re all related and that they’re all things that you point at that are outstanding.
DANIEL: Interesting. Pointing. Okay. Were you still thinking of PROD? [MAKES POKING GESTURE] bark
CAITLIN: Yeah, you got to get your fingers in there somehow.
HEDVIG: Digit. I’m thinking DIGIT.
DANIEL: Oh, the digit. Pro, digit. Moving the finger forward, right? Yep. Okay. Caitlin?
CAITLIN: I do feel pretty confident that PRODIGIOUS and PRODIGY are related, because they’re about like exemplary or like… I don’t know, yeah, something like notable output or notable achievement. PRODIGAL. Okay, I’m going to just say not related.
DANIEL: Okay. Sounds like you and me, we both have the same answer and we’re both right. PRODIGAL is the odd one out there.
CAITLIN: It was truly 50:50 for me. It was like when the waiter comes up to the table and is like, “Are you ready to order?” And you’re like, “Once you fix your icy stare on me, I will be. But you just have to put me under the pressure.”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] “Okay! The chicken!”
CAITLIN: “I want the chicken.”
DANIEL: I don’t even want chicken. [LAUGHS] I’m vegetarian. Okay, so, we do have Latin PRO-, which is forward. Here’s the surprise. The DIDGE was not a DIDGE. It was an IDGE. According to Etymonline, it’s something like igium, a suffix or word of unknown origin. We just don’t know what it is, for PRODIGY. But I suppose it’s interesting that the /d/ was there because saying that someone is a pro-igy was just too hard.
CAITLIN: You want to interrupt that.
DANIEL: So, PRODIGIOUS is related to PRODIGY for reasons I mentioned. PRODIGAL, different. This one’s from Latin, prodigus, which means wasteful. Prodigal Son doesn’t mean the son that comes back home guiltily. It means wasteful. There was even a verb to PRODIGE, which meant to squander.
CAITLIN: Now, you seeded a hint in your discussion of the story, because you talked about waste, which I didn’t remember…
DANIEL: I did.
CAITLIN: …as being a part of the story. But it turns out to be a key part of the story. [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: He wasted his inheritance in riotous living, in the King James version. So, let’s break it down. The PRO- is forward here, the idg is not idg or dig. It’s ag- from Latin agere, to set in motion, or to do or to drive. So, you’re taking all your stuff and you’re driving it forth (PRO-) -age away from you.
Hi, everybody. It’s Editing Daniel from the future. Just dropping in to say I know that the Online Etymology Dictionary lists Latin agere, to do as a possible etymon for both PRODIGY and PRODIGAL. But it was a perhaps. I didn’t feel like it was strong enough, so not enough to get the point. Back to the show.
DANIEL: All right, that’s number one. Thanks to Pete for that one. Now, let’s go to one from Robert S, who says: A quick Related or Not that a friend and I came up with that we thought would be fun. DEVICE, like a device that you use. VICE, like the tool, a grippy thing. And then VICE. Well, what is the vice? It’s the thing that you stick something in there, and then you’d wind it and wind it and wind it, and that clamps it down tight. That’s a VICE.
HEDVIG: I’m going to go and a little google.
CAITLIN: And then, a VICE like a behavior…
HEDVIG: It’s a clamp.
DANIEL: It’s a clamp.
CAITLIN: Yeah, yeah. And you turn the crank and it comes together.
DANIEL: That’s the one.
HEDVIG: So, when people say they’re in a VICE.
CAITLIN: They’re caught.
DANIEL: Ooh.
HEDVIG: I’m learning. We’re all learning.
CAITLIN: They’re being squeezed.
HEDVIG: I learned two new words today.
DANIEL: Okay, well, that’s the third one. A VICE, like smoking and drinking and so on.
CAITLIN: Okay. I’m going to put VICE, sin.
DANIEL: VICE, sin? VICE, tool. Okay, we could do that.
CAITLIN: As like a synonym. Yeah. [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: Yep. Gee, we’re getting a lot of sin and biblical stuff here going on. Okay, so, our three words are DEVICE, VICE the tool, and VICE the sin. Let’s take this pairwise and see where it breaks. So, let’s start with VICE the tool and VICE the sin. Related or Not?
CAITLIN: If you think of a sin as something that has you in its grips. It traps you, it doesn’t let you go, it doesn’t let you act the way that you wish you would act.
DANIEL: I was thinking the same thing. I was thinking, this one’s related, because something might seem like a tool at first, but then you lean on it too heavily and it becomes something bad. What once were tools are now vices.
CAITLIN: Yeah. Now you’re trapped in its vice like that.
HEDVIG: That’s true. But also, you need coping mechanisms, so it’s not like…
DANIEL: No judging. We’re not judging here. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: It’s good if they don’t get toxic.
CAITLIN: We are not on this podcast saying things like ever imbibing alcohol or using a drug is wrong. [CHUCKLES] We’re saying that…
HEDVIG: Yeah, that’s right.
CAITLIN: …if it is ruining your life, then it might be something to work on. It’s okay that you need help, because your brain is not helping you right now.
HEDVIG: I feel like VICE in that sense is like the little cousin of sin. Because you can say like, “Oh, what’s your…” I don’t know, like, “What’s your poison? What’s your drink? What’s your vice?” Like, you can say like, “Ooh, I like to like crochet until my hands hurt.”
CAITLIN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: I don’t know, that’s not a very good one.
CAITLIN: That’s me right now. I’m like, “I can’t stop.” [LAUGHTER] Sometimes I’m like, “Oh, do I have a problem, like a crochet problem?” Because there’s a line on my finger where the yarn goes that doesn’t go away. [LAUGHS] I feel like maybe I’m doing something. Yeah, my posture is getting worse, because I’m hunched over the project.
DANIEL: I just made a decision never to start.
CAITLIN: That’s much safer. Your budget will also thank you, because you just keep buying yarn, just more and more yarn. Just yarn forever.
DANIEL: Hanging out at the Yarn Barn.
CAITLIN: Every new project requires a couple new skeins. I don’t have exactly the color I want. Better go to the craft store. It’s not good. But yeah, your vices could be things like crocheting, or watching reality television, or too many chocolate covered pretzels. It doesn’t have to be things that are considered like actual sins.
DANIEL: All right. So, what do we say?
HEDVIG: Mine is Crusader Kings. I think they’re related.
DANIEL: We’re all saying related.
CAITLIN: Yeah, those ones I would say, yeah.
HEDVIG: I think they’re related. VICE the tool and VICE the small sin are related.
CAITLIN: Yeah, the behavior.
DANIEL: Then we’re all wrong, because they are not related!
CAITLIN: I think change it.
DANIEL: Ugh. Curses.
HEDVIG: Fuck. Shit.
DANIEL: VICE, [CAITLIN LAUGHS] the bad thing — like saying SHIT — is from Latin vitium or visium, some kind of defect or offense or imperfection. Came to us from French about 1300. VICE, the tool, I think I might have done better on this if I remembered that this one is sometimes spelled VISE with an S, V-I-S-E.
CAITLIN: And I even almost wrote it that way. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Mm. Mm. This is cool. This comes from Latin, vitis, meaning a vine. Now, can you figure out the relationship between a vine and the tool thing where you crank it up and grab the clamp?
CAITLIN: Like, a creeping vine?
HEDVIG: Have you ever been to a vineyard?
CAITLIN: Yeah. Right.
HEDVIG: They hang on to things.
DANIEL: They twist, they twirl.
CAITLIN: They make a little lasso until they hit something and then they go around it, right?
DANIEL: Yep. In a process called thigmotropism.
CAITLIN: What is that kind of photography?
DANIEL: Time lapse.
CAITLIN: The time lapse footage of a vine curling around stuff is so fun. I can watch that forever. Maybe that’s my vice.
DANIEL: So, yeah, that which winds is a grabby thing that you crank that handle and clamp it. Okay, round two. Let’s redeem ourselves. Is DEVICE related to either of those or not?
CAITLIN: Is it a vine or is it a defect? I think neither.
HEDVIG: I mean…
DANIEL: Is it a clampy thing? DEVICE. I mean, I could see how a device would be a tool.
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly. But now you said the thing about the vine stuff, which… But at what point did this become… And also this DEVISE, the verb, like to DEVISE a plan.
CAITLIN: I was going to ask if that’s related, actually. Yeah, device… Is a device something that you devise?
DANIEL: I was thinking of DIVISIVE. So, I thought, “Hmm, is it related to divide?”
HEDVIG: Oh shit.
DANIEL: That’s interesting. Yeah.
CAITLIN: I think not.
HEDVIG: But isn’t that VICE as in side? Caitlin, I don’t know about you, but the longer we play this game, the less I’m like, “Should I get my linguistics PhD diploma revoked?” Like, I just feel… and what makes it worse is that…
[LAUGHTER]
CAITLIN: Dude, I… yeah. Maybe it’s the wrong certificate I have to return.
HEDVIG: I know that a lot of linguists that I know and respect listen to the show… I happen to know that being good at English etymology is not what my expertise is supposed to be in.
CAITLIN: But they’re all going to be equally not good at this game, okay? Let’s just hold that in our hearts and keep it close. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Okay, here’s the new question. Is DEVICE related to DIVISIVE, DEVICE, to DEVISE a plan, or both?
CAITLIN: I’m going to say it is related to DEVISE a plan. I think it’s some kind of like cause, effect, relationship that we’re like…
DANIEL: But not DIVISIVE?
CAITLIN: …we’re just going to tweak it a little. No, not DIVISIVE. Stop trying to make DIVISIVE happen, Gretchen.
HEDVIG: 100% agree with Caitlin. Stop trying to make DIVISIVE happen. It’s not going to happen, Gretchen.
DANIEL: I got news. DIVISIVE just happened. Here’s what’s going on.
HEDVIG: What the fuck?
DANIEL: It’s not related to VICE or VISE, but it is related to DIVISIVE. So, here’s what happens. They both come from Latin dis, apart; and videre, to separate. And a DEVICE continues that sense of separation. Here’s how it works.
First, a DEVICE was a plan to bequeath or to separate an inheritance into portions. There’s that separation. We’re separating things. And then, it was any kind of plan or contrivance, and then it was any kind of tool. So, all three of those words: DEVICE, DIVIDE, DEVISE, they are all from the same word.
CAITLIN: He’s going to be unbearable from now on.
DANIEL: It’s terrible.
CAITLIN: So smug.
HEDVIG: Can I make a request, Daniel?
DANIEL: What?
HEDVIG: In future, starting with this episode, perhaps, when you’re finishing up and doing things, could you make a little social media, five by five, little all the words, and then lines between them and they’re crossed out or use whatever metaphors you want for like…
CAITLIN: A little visual aid.
HEDVIG: …are not connected, because I feel like we talk about this so much, and I talk myself into circles. So, what happens is after we record, I go and tell Ste, “Oh, what do you think? DEVICE, VICE, blah, blah, blah?” And then, he says something and then he asks me what the answer is, and I’m like, “Uh, I believe everything and nothing.”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Okay, that’s a good idea. That would help people to remember.
HEDVIG: Yeah. You can make one version without the lines. And then, when you flick to the right, there’s the version with the lines, so you could actually test yourself.
DANIEL: Wow. Okay. Well, let’s put that in the ideas bin. A big thank you to Robert. Last one, one from Ash, who says, “Thought of this when I was wondering if the -LET diminutive,” — like piglet or cutlet, I guess — “whether that -LET diminutive implied another form. Here are the words: GAUNTLET, as in to throw down the gauntlet. GAUNTLET, the armored glove. GAUNT, meaning thin. You’re looking very gaunt today. And I’m going to add: to RUN THE GAUNTLET. That’s one that I’m adding just for me. And Ash says, “Very much enjoying the show.” All right. So, we got…
HEDVIG: Thank you, Ash.
DANIEL: …GAUNT. GAUNTLET the glove, GAUNTLET, throw down the gauntlet as a challenge, and then run the GAUNTLET.
CAITLIN: Oh, throw down the GAUNTLET is a challenge, isn’t that just your glove? That’s what you’re doing? It’s the act of, like…
DANIEL: I think it’s the glove. Why would you throw a metal glove? Aren’t they expensive?
CAITLIN: I imagine so.
DANIEL: I challenge you. Clank!
CAITLIN: But they’re also tough, famously.
DANIEL: True.
HEDVIG: Or, it just means glove, and you guys just… We’ve just got hung up on the metal one.
CAITLIN: Right.
DANIEL: Yeah. It could just be like a softer glove.
CAITLIN: Okay. This is where French helps, because gant, G-A-N-T, that’s a glove.
DANIEL: It is. Spanish guantes. Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: But then, how does that become like skinny and tall and lanky and whatever else GAUNT is?
CAITLIN: And does it have a -LET on it? Gantelet: c’est mon petit gant. C’est trop petit pour toi.
DANIEL: Yeah. It’s so old. I think GAUNT is different.
HEDVIG: Sorry. GAUNT means like a person who’s tall and slim, right?
CAITLIN: GAUNT, I think just unhealthily thin. You don’t have to be tall. You can be looking gaunt if you’re not a tall person.
DANIEL: Why? What are you getting, Hedvig? What’s this giving for you?
HEDVIG: Well, I get confused between GAUNT and LANKY, I think.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
CAITLIN: I think you can be lanky and still give the appearance of good health. You can just be like, “That person’s body just wants to be that way.”
HEDVIG: Oh. But GAUNT is like unhealthily slim.
CAITLIN: Yeah, something’s wrong. You’re sick or you’re not eating enough or something is happening. Yeah.
HEDVIG: So, how is that related to gloves? Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah. Probably not.
CAITLIN: Skinny fingers. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: That’s what I said. I said GAUNT is its own thing.
CAITLIN: You look like a finger from a glove. You’re looking gaunt.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Oh, that’s not the worst guess I’ve ever heard. Okay.
CAITLIN: [LAUGHS] There’s been worse ones, probably from me.
DANIEL: Okay, in that case, do we all think that GAUNT is unrelated?
CAITLIN: I’m going to say yeah.
DANIEL: Okay. We are all correct. GAUNT is unrelated. It just means thin.
There is an old Norse GAUNT, a thin stick, which also is a tall, thin man. Now, that leaves us with three gauntlets. And I will tell you that one of them is the odd one out. Is it the glove, is it running the gauntlet, or is it throwing down the gauntlet? One of them is not related.
CAITLIN: I mean, if throwing down the gauntlet isn’t about a glove, I’m going to freak out.
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly. So, it has to be the running the race that is unrelated. But that’s just weird.
CAITLIN: I read so many of those Arthurian novels for children as a kid, that if I got this wrong, I have to re-examine my entire life.
DANIEL: I do not wish to do that. Therefore, I will not choose that option.
CAITLIN: [CHUCKLES] Yeah. I can’t go all the way back there.
DANIEL: So, you both think that RUNNING THE GAUNTLET is the odd one out?
HEDVIG: Yes.
CAITLIN: I thought they all were related, but I’m going to say that, sure, yeah,…
HEDVIG: Me too.
CAITLIN: …if I had to pick one.
DANIEL: Okay. You had to pick one. Well, you are correct. The one that’s unrelated is RUNNING THE GAUNTLET. People really did throw down these metal gloves as a challenge. Ka-plank!
CAITLIN: Well, because you can’t slap someone across the face with a metal glove. That would be [DANIEL LAUGHS] death.
DANIEL: I challenge you. SPLAT! [LAUGHS]
CAITLIN: You can’t be like, “I demand satisfaction.! KLONK! That’s not going to work.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] You’ve already won right there. You did it. You blindsided him.
CAITLIN: Yeah, I demand satisfaction, and now I have it because you’re on the ground.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] “Ow, you hurt me!” The word GAUNTLET that you run was originally a different word. It was gatlopp, and it comes from Swedish. Help me out, Hedvig.
CAITLIN: Yes, lopping around.
HEDVIG: Lopp is like a race. Like a marathon is a kind of lopp.
DANIEL: It’s a race course.
HEDVIG: It’s a race. Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: And gant, so, does that have to do with the sticks?
DANIEL: No, it’s gata.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah. Gatlopp. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, GAUNTLET is gatlopp? That’s crazy. Why’d you add an N?
DANIEL: It was gatlopp.
HEDVIG: And a T.
DANIEL: Hang on. What is gata?
HEDVIG: Gata is street.
DANIEL: Okay. So, I’ve got street or lane. So, it’s a lane, course, a gant. The N was just epenthesis. Like, you have a message… Who sends a message? Who brings the message to you?
HEDVIG: Messenger.
CAITLIN: Oh, the messenger! The messager. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: The messager. But for some reason, it just sounded better for us to call it a messenger and stick an N in it.
CAITLIN: And if you’re going along a passage, what are you? You’re a passager.
DANIEL: I hadn’t thought of that one! That’s a good one. That’s how the Swedish gatlopp became a gauntlet. It was influenced by that unrelated word. It’s an eggcorn. This was cool.
There’s a little false etymology that got stuck in the OED from 1656, not long after the word started being used. Here is what they said. Gantlope, in parenthesis gantlope, a punishment of soldiers first invented at Ghent and therefore so called. It wasn’t invented in Ghent. It came from Swedish.
CAITLIN: That’s fun. Love an apocryphal…
DANIEL: But that’s what happens.
CAITLIN: Like, a kangarooism.
DANIEL: So, GAUNT, unrelated. RUNNING THE GAUNTLET, unrelated. Thanks a lot, Ash. Thanks also to Jo for that theme song. If you’d like to send us an item or a jingle for Related or Not, get them to us all the usual ways. On BlueSky, we’re at becauselanguage.com, or send us an email, hello@becauselanguage.com.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: We are here with Dr Danny Bate, linguist, host of the podcast A Language I Love Is, and the author of Why Q Needs U: A History of Our Letters and How We Use Them. Danny, thanks so much for coming on the show.
DANNY: Thank you so much for having me. As a longtime listener of Because Language, this is a little surreal and just very lovely. So, thank you.
DANIEL: Oh, pshaw. Now, for anybody not familiar with your podcast, what kinds of things have you talked about?
DANNY: Yeah. So, reaching around for something to podcast a few years ago, very much motivated by the decline of a particular social network that I miss… I miss its glory days very much. I was really just wanting to get into something else, some other expression of linguistic goodness and I hit on podcasting.
What I decided that I can do best or better is interview people. So, A language I Love Is has an unchanging format. Every episode I interview one guest about a language that they love and know about. So, I asked them three questions as well as general language biography, what is your relationship, what’s something you love about this language, and what do you want the listeners to know about this language? Three seasons so far, and a fourth season when I regain the energy soon.
DANIEL: Nice. Yeah, okay. It’s true you know. Avoiding burnout is something that we all have to work at and also choosing what our goals are. We look at ourselves and we say, “Am I doing what I want to do here? Am I achieving some good?” How do you evaluate your podcast?
DANNY: Ooh, that’s hard to say, because I suppose in this game, it’s always about faking it until you make it and projecting strength. That’s what I do all day. But of course, I’d love to moan and gripe and grumble about how much work it takes and how… It is quite tiring. I think unlike with the first and second series, I crossed the finish line of the third series, tired. Really quite tired, and thinking that this podcast is…
I haven’t made it any easier for myself. I haven’t found a way to slot the process of making this better into my life. So, yeah, it’s not all sunny. I’ll say it that way. The guests are brilliant. The interviews are great. But the editing, uploading is taxing, and it’s never got any easier.
DANIEL: It can be that way. Okay, so, I did have a read of Why Q Needs U. One of the contentions is that the alphabet is the greatest invention in… Sorry, did I dream that? That’s in there, right? Or, is it in the promotional materials? Did you make that claim?
DANNY: [CHUCKLES] No, I don’t make that claim. I’m a linguist. I’ve never made a grand claim in my life.
DANIEL: Okay, I do. I’m going to make that claim. My question to you, Danny, is the alphabet the greatest invention in human history? I mean, human history. I don’t mean, like, we’re not talking sexual reproduction or something like that.
DANNY: Sure. Sure. I think I can agree with you with a slight modification, which is just to expand the alphabet to writing, in general. I think writing is incredible and amazing and also underappreciated, because we’re so good at it that it fits very unobtrusively into our lives, which is so literate and so good at the business of reading and writing.
And within that incredible achievement, the alphabet gets to take a huge share of the glory. I just make that modification, because the alphabet is not all writing. It’s a family tree of writing, a tradition that is awesome, but not the totality of all human writing, if that makes sense.
DANIEL: Well, yes. We realise that there are other kinds of writing systems. There’re logographic writing systems, there’re abjads, where you only do the consonants and not the vowels. You’ve got syllabaries, some of which are very nice. I’ve always been a fan of the semantic determinatives wherever they appear. But you know what? I look at the alphabet and I say, having vowels and consonants seems to confer some distinct advantages.
Or, maybe not. Maybe we don’t need vowels. Maybe consonants are just enough. Maybe it offers a little bit of compactness, an increase in information density. Maybe I’m questioning my alphabetic bias.
DANNY: [LAUGHS] See, this is what happens. You get into this subject, and it’s awesome and rich, and before you know it, all of your values are gone and you’ve no idea what’s true and what’s not. That’s just standard linguistics procedure. It happens in every subdiscipline of our beloved field.
Take my home within academic linguistics, which is syntax. Very quickly you lose all conception of what a good grammatical sentences in your language. It just happens. It’s a health hazard. So, yeah, no bother about that.
DANIEL: Okay. Maybe that’s healthy. Maybe it’s good to be less certain.
DANNY: There you go. See, I like that view very much. I hope it’s true, because I’m feeling very uncertain about everything in linguistics. I’m okay with that. It just goes along with the territory.
So, take for example, the alphabet. It’s really a matter of what are you trying to write down, what kind of language are you trying to write down. And different ways of writing will suit different languages. First off, are you trying to write down speech? There are other modalities of language, of course, the big one being sign language, which to my knowledge, no sign language as yet has an associated unique way of being expressed in writing. Writing is very much privileged sounds.
So, with that as the big picture, that’s the first decision you have to make, what are you writing down, speech or sign? Secondly, within speech, what is your spoken language? What is it like? If you have few vowels in your phonological inventory, you don’t have to write them. And that’s very true in the history of the alphabet. If you have loads, you probably should, especially when the vowels could make a difference between one word and another. Of course, you can take this to an extreme and look at English, which has way more vowels than it has vowel letters, but that’s a different matter altogether. It just all depends on your speech.
DANIEL: Yeah. I think that’s going to come up as a theme as we talk about the alphabet here. However, there is one thing that I’m certain about, and that is that the direction of writing known as boustrophedon, is terrible. Let’s talk about boustrophedon, all right?
So, it means as the ox plows, the BOUS- is… It’s Bossy, it’s the cow, and it’s the way that the cow plows. So, you start out on one side of the page, you go all the way to the margin, and then you just drop it down. But then instead of going back to the beginning of the next line, you just start heading the other way — doo da doo da doo da doo — until you get back to the margin you started at drop it down a line. Or, maybe you just go in a spiral. Spiral like that. It’s terrible.
Everybody in the world looked at that method of writing, of putting characters together, and said, “We’re not doing that. That’s not what we’re doing. We’ll go top to bottom, we will go left to right, we’ll go right to left, we might even go bottom to top, but we’re not doing that.”
DANNY: Well, there you go. There is a reason why it’s not really survived. For context, we have it in the history of the alphabet, early Semitic writers, so people speaking Semitic languages in the Middle East, hugely important in the history of the alphabet. I think we have a couple of examples of this, but not many. And then, a lot more examples of them from ancient Greece and ancient Italy. And it doesn’t survive. It doesn’t survive, because there is something a little bit more practical about just starting each line in a very consistent way in the same place.
That being said, these are examples of languages that have tried it and not liked it, ultimately. I think there is one particular writing system that hasn’t tried it, but should and could benefit from it, which is Braille. Braille very much could benefit from a system where your finger does not leave the thread of writing, because you’re reading it in that direction. If you are blind and you are having to go back to the start of the line, the line in Braille, well, where is it? You will struggle [CHUCKLES] or you cannot see it. So, actually, boustrophedon could make a comeback. Just throwing that out there.
DANIEL: That’s an interesting idea. Although, I will say that if you are doing boustrophedon and you start in the middle of the page, you will have to feel around a little bit to determine what the direction is for that particular line. So, yeah. But you’ve incepted the idea for me. I’m now feeling less certain about that. So, that’s good. Feeling less certain. Another theme. Very good.
By the way, this is just reminding me of, I, as a child, my parents had a gigantic encyclopedia set. At the beginning of every letter, it had the letter, but it also had… I think this is why I was a linguist. I just loved these pictures of how it looked in Greek, in Hebrew, in Etruscan, in Phoenician. Boy, oh, boy! all of these writing systems and I loved it. But I also noticed that these characters, they started out a certain way and then at some point, they flipped. I think that gimel, the G, doesn’t that start at one a certain way and then flips.
DANNY: There’re just two things going on here, one of which is that we today, us scholars who are trying to write about these scripts, will have to make a decision, what was the dominant direction of writing and therefore what direction do we put our letters in? So, an encyclopedia might have to mix and match. So, the Etruscans overall tended to prefer right to left, whereas Latin overall just tended to prefer left to right. That’s what English still uses to this day. So, there is a variation in the overall direction of writing.
In addition to that, individual letters have also flipped. They’ve been mirrored horizontally, mirrored vertically, because there’s just such diversity at the history of the alphabet. The letters fundamentally don’t come with a direction of writing. There’s nothing intrinsically directioned about them. This is matter of consensus and a matter of habit, and we arrive in certain directions, whereas other branches of this family tree of writing settle on letters positioned in another way. So, it’s a big mishmash.
When you look into the alphabet’s history, especially the early centuries or the first couple of millennia, up to, let’s say, I don’t know, the year 1 AD by Christian reckoning, there’s a tremendous amount of diversity and any poor scholar who wanders into this has to somehow summarise this delightful variation somehow. [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: So, it’s not the case that the letters flipped at the same time as people said, “We’re not going right to left. We’re going left to right.” Was there a relationship there, or was it just… There was heaps of churn and it was all flipping. There was a lot of flipping going on.
DANNY: [LAUGHS] Yes, I like it. It’s all flipping. I like to say that they flip the script, which works really well.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] It is.
DANNY: It’s hard to explain these things, because again, if you poke around into, say, the front and back of a letter, if you poke around into it, these intuitions just disappear because you think, “Okay, what is particularly back about the stalk of a capital D as opposed to the bulge of a capital D?” I think we might do a little bit of maybe anthropomorphising. We’re thinking, “Okay, that’s maybe the face and this is the back.” But letters don’t have faces and backs. They’re abstract symbols. So, it’s all a bit mixed.
You got to separate out two things, vaguely how a letter is positioned with respect to the top, the sides and the bottom of whatever medium you’re writing on, and how it’s positioned with respect to other letters. And we see variation in both of those aspects. So, you might find a letter that is flipped from our perspective, but it’s just a matter of variation where the Greeks at this point in time are quite comfortable writing in one way, then another way, and boustrophedon, why not.
Sometimes though, you find examples where we must say, actually, with respect to everything else on the page, this individual letter is indeed backwards. But what is backwards at the end of the day? It’s all in flux. It just settles via consensus.
DANIEL: It’s a gigantic crowdsourced experiment.
DANNY: I like that.
DANIEL: I got a comment from a young listener recently on a different show that I do. They asked, “Why are some letters more common than others?” And I thought, “Oh, that’s a seemingly obvious question.” But when you try to answer it, it’s not at all intuitive. My answer was, it’s not weird that letters occur with differing frequencies. What would be weird is if they all occurred with the same frequency. That would be very unusual because we use some sounds more than others. We use vowels more than others, and we use some sounds less frequently. So, naturally, they would just show up less. But why is Z and Q so uncommon? And not coincidentally, they appear at the end of the alphabet as well.
DANNY: Yes, absolutely. I mean, why are some letters more common than others? So that somebody can win at Scrabble, I guess, ultimately. [LAUGHS] No, you’ve got…
DANIEL: There have to be winners.
DANNY: There have to be winners. You’ve got a couple of things going on. So, if your writing system, such as the alphabet, is fundamentally based on sounds, it’s all about representing the key sounds of your language, then, as you correctly say, you’re going to have some sounds that are just more common than others. These may be a product of sound change, this may be a product of what are the loan words in your language. This may be a product of maybe sound changes creating new phonemes which are finally recognised and given their own sound, but they’re quite limited. So, naturally, speech is going to have a say.
But there’s a couple of other factors. I really cannot give a straightforward answer with anything with the history of the alphabet. [DANIEL LAUGHS] One would be that you have letters coming in at later dates. So, there are letters that could well be used for different purposes, but their later date leads to a marginal status, which means that they’re not used everywhere that phonologically they could be.
I think a great example of this is Z. All of the alphabets of Western Europe, including English, have had a very lukewarm relationship with Z, because the Romans only acquire it or reacquire it to spell Greek words. So, it’s very limited to just Greek words. Consequently, it’s not there in words that have a Z sound, like NOSE and SURPRISE, or even all those plurals like DOGS, where really it’s a voiced Z sound. So, that’s an additional factor where it’s not just about speech, it’s about the usage of the alphabet.
And lastly, letters maybe one step removed from the straightforward phonemic principle can be given new functions. So, if you take something like E and H in English through chance, it’s certainly not there in older stages of the alphabet, but through the needs of writers and readers, these have been selected as the workhorses of English spelling. E allows us to spell more vowel sounds, as in all your diphthongs in, I don’t know, LATE and ATHLETE and things like that.
And H allows us to spell more consonants, as in TH, CH, SH — /θ/, /ʧ/ and /ʃ/ — sounds of English that weren’t there in the Latin speech of the Romans, so they don’t get given their own letter in the alphabet, and we’ve just had to make do somehow. So, there are multiple factors going into why E reigns supreme among the letters, and Q and Z languish at the bottom of the Scrabble bag. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: It’s interesting that you mentioned H /eiʧ/, because we notice… Or, sorry, H /heiʧ/. I’ve got children who are H-ers /heiʧ/ and I grew up an H-er /eiʧ/. So, H dropping rears its head again, But H really got pressed into service for a lot of digraphs. And you mentioned this in the book as well that you got PH, TH, CH, SH, WH, which is another interesting case. Why was H chosen?
Oh, and by the way, even more if we’re talking about Gaelige… I understand you studied Old Irish. And we just had a show recently about Irish and how there used to be a B with a little dot. And then, after a while they said, “We’re not doing the dot, what are we going to do? We got to use something else.” Oh, H is just sitting there, let’s use that, and so now you’ve got a lot of Hs. What is it about H that makes it so useful in this context? Is that it doesn’t seem to be anything? It’s just a puff of air and so we can go ahead and pick it up and use it and it won’t harm anything? Is that what’s going on?
DANNY: Yeah. So, I think that that is the absolute root of this whole story. It’s a ginormous collection of facts and languages and contributions, so many of which of course are confusingly present together in English spelling. But at the heart of it, if I could identify one original prime mover in this whole story of H, it is exactly what you just said, that H is barely something and so often it becomes nothing. The sound drops out. I mean, phoneticians struggle to classify H as a consonant. It’s just this breathy voice.
And that individual sound, let’s just call it a consonant for simplicity’s sake, that can just drop off. So, this happened in ancient Greece, where one particular dialect became an H-less dialect, the Ionian dialect, and consequently the letter for H, heta, is reassigned to a vowel and it becomes eta or ita. This looks like an H and it’s basically because there was a letter going spare. This happens to this day in so many circumstances and dialects of English, most famously the London Cockney English, dropping their H’s across the board. And it happened also in late Latin, where we can see…
I love this. We can see in non-standard inscriptions and texts from the Roman Empire that people are dropping their H’s in Latin. There’s this pronouncing, whereas once they would have said habeo, I have. They’re starting to say things like abeo. And this will of course become French ai, as in j’ai. Or, Italian ho, you know: Io ho. So, this is being dropped. This time and time again, not for a single reason but maybe for the same phonetic principle, this frees up H to be put to new purposes. It’s partnered up with other letters to spell aspirated sounds. So, this is what the Romans are doing with PH, TH, and CH, because they’re trying to spell Greek aspirated sounds and from this practice, we get things like photo and theatre and stomach, orchestra. These are all from Greek ultimately.
Then you have, in the post Roman period, the Middle Ages, obviously the best period of history, you have TH and CH, where people are just… They’re really grappling with the fact that Latin has just not given their language, be it Irish or English or some other kind of Germanic or even Old French. It’s not given them enough letters. And H is there. H is there for the taking, because they’re not using it for anything else. So, time and time again for different reasons, which I think there’s no need for me to go into H, it’s the hero that we need in our time of phonetic trouble, and often because it’s a letter going spare. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: The ero that we need.
DANNY: The ero. Yeah, exactly. The ero. It keeps dropping out.
DANIEL: It keeps dropping out, and then you get American English with ‘ERBAL instead of HERBAL. It was just a function of how fashionable H-dropping was and who was using it and who took what away with them as they went.
DANNY: Exactly. Exactly.
DANIEL: This is why spelling reform is so difficult. Because you could have a perfectly phonetic one-to-one relationship, and then the sound would change, and there goes your perfect system. It’s never going to stick around unless, unless you’re one of these languages where they go ahead and update the spelling every once in a while. But that’s not English. We tend to do it not by committee, but by just over time. Do you have any thoughts on spelling reform? Does it need to happen? It’s garbage, isn’t it? There’s a reason why nobody wants to do it.
DANNY: Yeah. I have many thoughts about spelling reform.
DANIEL: Oh, okay. Let’s get spicy. [LAUGHS]
DANNY: No, no, no, no, no. The thoughts are all in conflict with one another. Actually, in the book, I refuse to give a definite opinion on this. I just say, “We should always be open to it. And by being open to it, acknowledging all the problems that come along with it.” This is exactly this principle. It’s actually one of the principles why significant people in the history of English have refused to engage in some thorough reform.
So, one of my personal heroes, Dr Samuel Johnson, living in the 18th century, he actually says in the preface… I think it’s the preface or introduction to his dictionary, “If I update the spelling, it’s only going to change in a 200 years’ time,” which is correct and also the wrong attitude. Because yes, it’s going to keep changing, but also you’ve got to keep updating it, you’ve got to keep on top of this as people do where I live in the Czech Republic. There is a society that still just about has the social currency and power, the means, to update spelling if need be. It doesn’t happen very often. We don’t all wait every Christmas: oh, what are the new letters going to be? It doesn’t work like that. [DANIEL LAUGHS] But it is something that we should be open to.
Reform doesn’t have to be wholesale. It can be on a micro scale. Little oddities, absurdities that are there for reasons and for principles that are no longer ours. So, basically, everything in English spelling is there for a reason. It just may not be a good reason or a modern reason anymore. So, things like the B in DEBT and DOUBT or the H in GHOST, they’re there because of other languages. And people’s priorities in the past, we could get rid of them. I think we should be open to that.
Spelling mistakes are so often phonemically accurate, organic mini reforms. And of course, in our society, we uphold the standard so strictly that you’ll say, “Absolutely not. How dare you even think about that?” despite also claiming to have a phonemic spelling system. “How dare you drop the H in GHOST?” Or, if your predictive text will correct it for you or your word processor will give you the red squiggly line of doom, things like that. So, all of these things are going on, but the wholesale reform is nonetheless really, really challenging.
You have to answer two big questions if you’re going to try and reform a language like English. The first question is, who are you? That’s it. So, do you have the prestige, the power? Do you have international cooperation? Are you part of a committee that people are going to listen to? Are you in touch with the technology? Are you in touch with the mood and the social atmosphere? Are you recognising that there is a general appetite for spelling reform? If there isn’t, then no one’s going to listen to you and people are just going to say, “Well, I’m not going to do it.” So, that’s hugely important and arguably such a single person or body of people just doesn’t exist in the English writing world.
And then, secondly, the equally big question, whose English? So, American English? Well, why not? It’s the most prestigious, it’s the most dominant in the world today. Well, then you’ll annoy all the other English-speaking countries. So, you have to answer these two big questions. I cannot see this current situation changing without big societal and geopolitical shifts. I think that’s what it would take to dislodge standard spelling from its current position.
DANIEL: It’s just much easier instead to just spell things the old way and let everybody work it out wherever they are. Some people are going to have an R that they won’t say, some people are going to have H’s that they don’t say, but we will just read right through them and that’s how it goes.
DANNY: Yeah.
DANIEL: With that in mind, though, you mentioned how DOUBT and DEBT came to us from French without the B. No B. This is the story that I always tell in my classes. Then, Latinisers, people who thought Latin was just the coolest language. They said, “Hey, Latin had dubitum and debitum, let’s stick that B back in” and so there it was.
I’m still wondering how they got everybody to believe them. Because we’ve commented, we’re talking here about how difficult it is to get things to happen, to get spelling change to happen. And yet somehow a bunch of hoity toity Latinisers managed to do scores of words. Absolutely scads. How do they manage to do it? I guess they had the prestige, and it was the moment.
DANNY: This is it. This is just it. They were the intellectual top dogs. So, if you are operating in what would this be the 15th century… I think we first start to get the examples with the re-added B in DEBT and DOUBT. It really tends to be the 15th century. It’s no coincidence that this is also the era of the printing press. So, people are reading more, people are spreading different languages around Europe more, and people are just gaining access to more Latin and more Greek and things like that than you’d previously had in the Middle Ages. Of course, we have the Renaissance ongoing and things like that.
And who are you, who’s writing English at this particular time? You could well be somebody at court, because English has become again a language of the court by this century. You could be somebody in the church. It’s returned to ecclesiastical circles in Britain, or indeed somebody in one of the great universities. There’s a couple in England, some really good ones in Scotland, as well. And these people are the people who are going be setting the standard.
If you want to write proper, you’re going to write like these intellectual heavyweights of the English writing sphere. Because that’s good. That’s cool. I still emulate to this day standard English spelling. I don’t just set off on my own. I spell like other people spell. I spell like the Oxford English Dictionary and the professors who’ve taught me spell. We’re all connected in a network of influence, and consideration, and identity as well. And the 15th century was absolutely no different. Maybe on a much smaller scale, because we don’t have mass literacy yet. But nonetheless, you’ve got people who are able to set the tone of English spelling, and these people really like Latin. They really like Latin. [LAUGHS]
I cannot stress how this is not like, “Mm. Oh yes, I read a bit of Latin the other day.” This is, “I am going to go down the hall to my colleague and speak to him — and it will be a him — in Latin. I am going to translate English poems into Latin or Latin poems into English.” So much of Western European history is like a big wave of Latin and Romanness that I think only peaks and crashes and ebbs out in maybe the end of the 19th century. Up until that point, we’re all just a group of intellectuals pretending that we’re Romans.
DANIEL: They really had their moment. They saw their chance and they took it. They did.
DANNY: Yeah.
DANIEL: It’s not just B. Also, there’s another change that the Latinisers made that I want to focus on, because I’m noticing it over and over again. I’m noticing it in questions I get and I’m noticing it in Related or Nots that we do. And it is L. The letter L dropped out of a lot of words in French, because L does that, right? Just takes off. Goes for a walk, right? WALK, TALK. You’ve got SALMON, you’ve got ALMONDS /amənz/. Although maybe you do say ALMOND /almənd/, maybe there’s a continuum.
But words like FALCON came to us without the L. People stuck it back in. Words like VAULT and FAULT, people stuck it back in. SOLDER, that metal stuff that you use on a circuit board in American English that I used to speak, it was /sodɚ/. What’s going on? Well, people stuck the L back in, because it goes back to Latin solidus or something like that goes back to SOLID, so they stuck the L back in to remind everyone: this is Latin, peeps. And then, people said “There’s an L. I guess we better say it.” And some people just kept saying it the old way. So, the L is just one of those letters that just goes off for a smoko now and then.
DANNY: [LAUGHS] Exactly.
DANIEL: It comes back after a while.
DANNY: It’s one of the liquid consonants. It goes and has a drink. It minds its own business for a little while. It’s true. This is partly the joy of any historical phonology, and studying, writing systems as well, in that you just recognise the same sound changes over and over again. There are properties of sounds that lead them to undergo the same sound change in different languages in different time periods and also in different parts of the world. Many of these will then make a contribution to English, as English absorbs so much vocabulary.
So, this happens as you say, in the history of French at a pretty early point in time. We can really see in our record for old French words that have an L in Latin being spelt with maybe a U and an L, and then eventually just a U. So, this explains the difference between something like Italian caldo, meaning hot, and it becomes chaud in French. It would have been maybe something like chaldo — relative chronology is always difficult, not sure which one’s happening first — but chaldo, chaud, and then just chau and then cha, eventually something like that. Both coming from Latin, caldus with an L.
The same thing has happened in Polish. Your crossed L that you have in Polish. So many Polish words. It’s a /w/ sound. It’s the same sound change. The same thing is happening in so many dialects of English to this day, and in a way that really kind of stings my ears. My English doesn’t really have this so much, but I go back to the UK and members of my own family have examples of this change where an L is becoming like a /w/ sound, where it’s becoming in a PILL and BOTTLE and things like… A WALL.
DANIEL: Brazil.
DANNY: Brazil. Really, really common sound change over and over again. Specifically, I think we must be clear for our listeners, it’s not happening across the board. It’s only an L at the end of a syllable. It’s in a coda position. It’s not happening at the beginning. This is dark and light L. And some English varieties don’t have both dark and light L. I think Irish has both light. So, we don’t expect this change to happen in Irish, because it only affects dark L. I think Australian English and Northern England English has only dark Ls, I think, in general. My English has both.
DANIEL: What do you mean by light and dark L’s? In our episode on Irish, we were talking about metaphors. People use like eclipses and things like that. But light and dark, can you describe that in an IPA way?
DANNY: Yes, of course. Of course, yeah. And of course, in Irish you have your metaphor slender and broad, which just sounds delightful.
DANIEL: That’s it. That’s what I was looking for. I couldn’t come up with it.
DANNY: These letters, some thinner and some fatter than others. But we resort to metaphors, some are better than others, I think. Some help teachers more than others. But yeah, sure. Light and dark L, they’re two types of L, and we tend to use them for when speaking about a particular L sound in a language. They are almost one and the same, but with a dark L as well as the tip of the tongue being involved, like a /l/ sound. The back, the velar. So, in between the back of the tongue and the soft fleshy bit in the roof of your mouth, that’s getting involved too, that makes a dark L. So, it’s a difference between like a /l/ and /w/. There’s a slight darkness.
It’s all a metaphor at the end of the day. There’s no actual darkness going on. It doesn’t sound any more evil. But for some languages, these are treated as one and the same sound. We think of them as phonemes in that they are dependent on context. Other languages, I should say, these are just two different sounds able to create two different words. But in English or at least in my English, my English has both and my English in the south of England is especially susceptible for that dark L to turn into a /w/ sound, as keeps happening.
DANIEL: That totally makes sense, though, because I mean, /l/, it’s an approximant.
DANNY: It can function as a syllabic consonant. Can do that.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. Like BOTTLE /bɒtl̩/.
DANNY: Right.
DANIEL: So, it’s not a vowel, but it’s darn close. So, naturally, it would tend to go to a /u/ sound or a /w/ sound or something like that. That makes total sense. And the other approximate that I’m thinking of is /ɹ/. And that is interesting, because the /ɹ/ sound and the /l/ sound, many languages simply don’t distinguish. They’re very close to each other on the IPA chart. They’re very similar in the way that we make them. A lot of languages just stick them together in the same category. I’ve got to say that R’s do have a tendency to move around a little bit as well. Like, with BRID and BIRD. You know, a BIRD used to be a BRID, a HORSE used to be a HROS, thirteen used to thriteen, and so on. So, these R’s and L’s are very mischievous. They move around, they leave, they twiddle, they come back, and they disguise as each other for some languages. How interesting.
DANNY: Sure. Yeah. No, they really are these interesting sounds. By pairing certain written symbols, letters up with these sounds, we can’t be too surprised that they’re going to misbehave in spelling as well, that we’re going to have WALK and TALK and things like that where the L has dropped out. But not before causing mischief. Because if you take out the L from WALK or TALK, let’s just stick with my English where it’s like a rounded /ɔ/ sound. If you take out the L, it becomes /wæk/ and /tæk/. So, the L is working in conjunction with the A to spell a sound that it helped to create.
Once upon a time, they would have been /wælk/ and /tælk/. And then, because of the L, specifically dark L, you go /wælk/ and /tælk/, and then you get maybe what would be something like /wæʊlk/ and /tæʊlk/ with an added /ʊ/ sound and then maybe /tæʊk/ and /wæʊk/ in… I don’t know, maybe late medieval, early modern period. The L at this point is basically part of the vowel. It drops out or it becomes increasingly inaudible, and eventually you end up with my English pronunciation of WALK and TALK. Take out the L, you get /wæk/ and /tæk/. So, it deserves to be there. It’s standing next to the mess that it made as a word. [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
DANNY: But I would just say there’s one thing that I do love about these two letters, which is that, as you say, there are languages of the world, indeed linguistic areas of the world, where these are not separate sounds. And consequently, it can be quite hard. It’s a stereotypical feature of Chinese English or Japanese English of mixing up the /ɹ/ and /l/ sounds. And you might think, “Okay, that’s just a quality of East Asian languages.” Back in Europe, we have no problem with them. But even around Europe, you’ve got mix and matching, you’ve got these sounds becoming different things, you’ve got these sounds shifting and becoming.
And even for hoity toity, prestigious Latin, there’s a quality of these sounds where they’re interacting with one another. And you see this in English vocabulary. The Romans could make adjectives by adding -alis. This is a Latin ending, -alis. You add it to the end of a word, and this is at the end of a word like AUTUMNAL or I don’t know, BIENNIAL in English. Super common ending for adjectives.
But if your Latin word, like a noun, whatever you’re adding -alis to, if it includes another L in close approximation, very close to the ending, -alis becomes -aris. So, sol, meaning sun, solalis? No, solaris, hence we get SOLAR in English. LUNAR, lunalis, or adjective related to the word. No, we don’t get lunal. It’s LUNAR with an R at the end. And so, this is a pattern in English that we’ve inherited from the Romans. It’s maybe a dead pattern. It’s not an active feature of English. But it’s clearly pointing to the Romans also like speakers do in East Asia today having a little bit of acoustic difficulty and finding similarities between L and R.
DANIEL: I had never made that connection before, but it’s so obvious now. Oh my god.
DANNY: Isn’t it? Yeah.
DANIEL: It’s funny, because I speak Australian English. I don’t have the accent, but I’ve been around Australian English a lot. My two young sons grew up in Australia, where they were at least partly speakers of Australian English. When I was getting het up about something, they would tell me to “calm the farm”. And for them, it rhymed: /kam/ the /fam/. The R was R-less, and the L was not really there either. But it didn’t work for me and it didn’t work for two ways, because I would try to make it rhyme, and I couldn’t. It would be carm the farm. Nope, didn’t work. I couldn’t tell them to carm the farm, but they could tell it to me and it would rhyme.
There’s so much great stuff in the book here. I did want to talk about the letters, but I feel like now if we intrude on the 26 chapters that you’ve got. I feel like I want people to go ahead and read it for themselves. But I do want to talk a little bit more about spelling and things that you didn’t get to include. Naturally, you went through all 26 chapters and you’re done, but I’m thinking about spaces. We didn’t always have spaces and we stuck them in. When was that?
DANNY: Yeah, at least in terms of the alphabet, that seems to be something that crops up in antiquity. And it’s optional to begin with. It’s something that people experiment with spaces. We have spaces, some of our earliest inscriptions using the alphabet from Greece and Italy. And then, in some cases, the spaces are abandoned. The Greeks and Romans or early Italian writers… I mean, Italian in the geographical sense. These are not modern day Italians.
They think, “Actually, we just don’t need these.” I mean, let’s face it, there are no spaces in speech. So, it is not something that your writing system absolutely needs to have. They’re, I think, very useful things, very natural things, but of course, on reflection, spaces are one of the few things that we’ve got to hold on for when we’re searching around for the definition of a word.
I’ve often said that old linguistic chestnut, how do you define a word? And people say, “Well, it’s the thing with spaces either side of it,” which I really like as a definition. But nonetheless, it doesn’t work in all contexts. We can really see in antiquity that many people have no problem with what’s known as scripta continua, continuous script. We find this in loads of sources. In some cases, people are putting a dot between the words. That works as well. And you just read that. It could be a dot.
DANIEL: Very attractive.
DANNY: Very attractive. It could be a dot. It’s often in the middle between words. You might find that on a Latin inscription. We also have some really unusual things going on where people are putting dots, maybe one or maybe several, between morphemes, things that we’re pretty sure are bound elements that you can’t have as a single word.
We’ve got really unusual people writing in, let’s call it Iron Age Italy before the Romans fully take over. People writing in Etruscan, people writing in Venetic, the area around Venice to this day. They are doing this really odd thing where they’re putting dots, maybe one, maybe three, between a morpheme, like reduplicated sound, a morpheme that something like the earliest Latin text, if it’s not a fake that we have, is the Praeneste fibula. It’s like a gold brooch.
I think one of the words is :fhe⋮fhaked:, meaning I have made. The fhe is kind of reduplicated. It’s an archaic bit of grammar. And there are dots between the fhe and the rest of the word, which the Romans never did. So, there’s huge diversity in also how you are spelling the bits in between your words as well.
DANIEL: Okay. I feel like we have too many letters. I think that maybe we could put some away. We have a grudge here on Because language against the letter C. We think that maybe it doesn’t need to exist. We could just use K and S. Or, if it does need to exist, then we can still use a C, but it can be the ch sound, so that the name Chuck would be spelled C-U-K. Nice and simple. 40% savings. Can we get rid of anything, or does it just turn the English language into a terrible pile of gibberish?
DANNY: [CHUCKLES] We could always get rid of things. We always have that power. Every generation has the right to make changes if they see fit. This may be changes to individual words, this may be changes to the whole alphabet. I do find it amusing that C is this deceptive letter, because for the Romans, it’s the star letter, it’s the one they have absolute faith in. The Romans abandoned the letter K, which is really old, in favour of C. Because by the time that the alphabet reaches the Romans, those two letters stand for the same sound, it’s a kind of /k/. But then, in Latin speech, you get the emergence of a palatalised /k/ sound before certain vowels, where it’s becoming… Well, it will become /ts/ and then /s/ in French and then it will become /ʧ/ in Italian. This is known as soft and hard C.
So, it rises in Classical Latin to be the default letter. And since then, it’s become the suspicious, the unreliable letter. And K has become the reliable one, the one that is stalwart in representing the /k/ sound. So, all of these letters are in flux. And sure, we could get rid of the letter C. We could repurpose it. We could, for example, reduce Q and U into just Q. So, we’re spelling quick with just a Q. There’s a couple of indicators that that’s maybe happening. Over history, there have been reductions in the alphabet. Over history, there have been…
DANIEL: Wait, wait, wait, wait. Go back. Hang on, go back. There are indications that this is happening. What are you talking about?
DANNY: For the Romans. It’s the Romans who really…
DANIEL: Oh. [LAUGHS] Okay. Sorry. Okay.
DANNY: …partner those two up. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah, it could happen. Do you know what? With every possible bit of English spelling that you can think of, it’s probably been tried at some particular point in time.
DANIEL: I’m thinking of the airline Qantas, which is Q-A-N-T-A-S.
DANNY: Can we get it?
DANIEL: And people get mad when I call it Qantas /kæntəs/. Where’s the U? I say. Where’s the U?
DANNY: Or, it’s maybe a uvula. So, like Qantas /qantəs/ something like that.
DANIEL: Qantas /qantəs/.
DANNY: Qantas /qantəs/.
DANIEL: Let’s do that. [LAUGHS]
DANNY: This is the thing. Can we get rid of some letters? A language can do okay with fewer. So, we’ve got examples in history of people really thinning the herd with the alphabet. So, this happens in the history of Runes, the writing system of the Vikings. You go from the elder to younger Futhark which is like an Alphabet. It’s the Runic Alphabet. And the younger, despite all the sound changes that are going on in Norse speech, has way fewer letters than the elder. They really prune it down to what they can the kind of minimum that they can get away with, so it can work. Sure, in English, we can get rid of a few. It’s just, as you know, English now has way more phonemes. So, arguably, we could keep some, repurpose them and add a whole load more, and then maybe we’d be up to the ideal ratio of letters and sounds.
DANIEL: Ooh, that sounds good. Okay, okay, okay, okay. In that case, you know what? I’ve just changed my mind again. I think we don’t have enough letters. We need to make another letter. I don’t care what it looks like. And because I have the Because Language magic wand, you get to wave it and create a letter and everyone just have always used it. Everyone will just know what to do with it. What letter do we need? I have my answer.
DANNY: Mm-hmm. It’s interesting if we can compare. For me, this is the tricky thing, because obviously English speakers know spoken words so well that there’s so many aspects of spelling that they just have no problem with. They just know that that’s how you pronounce it and I don’t really care that maybe there are vowels that don’t have a letter. I just know how the spoken word is, because I’ve been hearing it all my life.
I am always thinking of English as an international language where we have second language learners trying to get to grips with this awful relationship between sound and spelling with them in mind, with the rest of the world in mind, basically, it has to be schwa. It has to be the schwa vowel.
DANIEL: Yeah! That’s exactly right!
DANNY: Yes.
DANIEL: God damn, yes! It is schwa! That was my answer!
DANNY: Good!
DANIEL: We gotta have schwa! It would get rid of so many spelling problems with reduced vowels. Imagine IRRESISTIBLE. Is it -ABLE or -IBLE? No need to worry about that anymore. No longer a problem. Schwa deserves its own letter.
DANNY: It really does. I mean, of course, it has its own letter in the IPA. Let’s bring it in.
DANIEL: Let’s do it.
DANNY: Let’s welcome it.
DANIEL: Schwa. Everybody, “Schwa, schwa, schwa.” [LAUGHS]
DANNY: I love it.
DANIEL: Are we vibing? I feel like we’re vibing.
DANNY: Feels good.
DANIEL: The book is a lot of fun. I want to talk for a second about you and your podcast. You’ve got a podcast, ¡ay! I’ve got a podcast. I want to know what you’ve learned about communicating ideas to the public, because we engage with some really tricky linguistic ideas and we try to get them out there. Have you got any tips for how you do what you do?
DANNY: Mm. Yeah. So, I have many thoughts on this topic, so many that I’ve actually collated them into a lecture that I’ve given at universities to students and things, and talked about public linguistics and just opening up the possibility of public linguistics, which many academics remain very unaware of, and also potential benefits and potential dangers as well.
With the podcast, it’s tricky because it’s a guest format. So, I can’t coach my guests’ answers. It’s difficult, especially not being face to face with them in the same room most of the time. You can’t really interrupt if they say something that’s not ideal, if they’re not vibing with the general mission of the podcast, if they’re using terms that are not thinking critically of, like, “How well known is this piece of jargon?” Because jargon’s totally welcome. It just needs to be explained. That’s difficult. All you can do in my position is maybe get in there with a little explainer or say, like, “Well, can you introduce that term for us? What do you mean by that?”
And ultimately, thinking far beyond the podcast thinking to my writing that I do… I do lots of writing about linguistics. Back in the day, it used to be tweeting, that was my thing. It’s an art, not a science. It’s all about trying to place the threshold of assumed knowledge. So, what can you assume that your audience know and what do you need to explain? This is never, ever going to be precise, and yet somehow you can almost achieve this impossible thing. You can get it just about right, and appease, and satisfy, and keep on board a lot of people, but it’s never going to be everybody. I feel all too aware of how, through my book, through the podcast, I’m constantly being surprised by what people know and what people don’t know and how people react to that.
I had a review in a newspaper in the UK where someone was a slight critique, a little bit of nitpicking of the book, he just said like, “It defines the word syllable twice.” I’m there like, “I think syllables are really complicated things. But okay. Right. Sure. If you thought that was unnecessary, then that’s absolutely fine.” Another example of this was I was signing copies of the book in a London bookstore, and I have an elevator pitch or lift pitch, as we prefer in the UK, about the book in a very short sentence. Usually, I can hook it to whoever I’m speaking to. I can say, “Oh, what’s your native language? Tell me about your writing system. Okay, I can link English to that.” There’s an Italian gentleman who was like, “Oh, okay, Italian, that’s my native language.” I’m like, “Fantastic. Italian. I mentioned it many times. I hold it up as a good example of spelling. I think it’s pretty phonemic.”
I say to him like, “So you know how English spelling is really weird?” And he goes, “No? Is it?” So, [CHUCKLES] you are constantly learning and just adapting this everchanging threshold of what do I need to explain and what don’t. That’s part of the fun. But at the end of the day, treat it as fun. So, that’s my top tip.
DANIEL: I think the fun is really important, because I think we have to communicate the positivity and bring the love. There’s so much negativity around language and correctness, and there are language ideologies that people really hold to very dearly. But I think if you can convince them, “Hey, we’re having fun over here, and we’re more accepting of language.” And “Hey, if you don’t know something, then this is your chance to find out more about it and it’s super cool.” So, I think bringing the love, bringing the positivity, but also, yeah, keeping aware of what did they know, maybe it’s about being a super good listener as well.
DANNY: Yeah. I like to think I’m a good listener and I’m attuned to the level of my audience. And I can adjust it. Perhaps if I’m giving a talk or something like that, I can adapt. But it’s always going to surprise. I think everybody in my position will have felt this at some point. It can be really tiring. And you, as the bringer of linguistic joy, have to hide that. You have to hide that fatigue.
I have done quite a few interviews by now, many of them for just general radio, not linguistic specific. They’ll throw me what they think is a softball question, something like, “So, you know how English is just getting worse over time?” [DANIEL LAUGHS] I cannot share how sad that makes me feel and how much hurt is behind that belief and how I desperately want to shout and challenge that view. I can’t do that. I have to smile and I have to say, “Well, you know…”
I’ll answer that question with another question. The one I often go for is like, “Do you remember your grandmother complaining about your English?” And they’ll often say “Yes.” And that invites them to think about constant change and how this has been going on forever. You just have to work with your audience. Eventually, if you can get through some of these pretty often harmless, sometimes harmful ideas about language, then there is gold and joy waiting for you on the other side when you’ve got them on board and you can just have a great time.
DANIEL: Well, that sounds great. That is the goal, is having a great time. I feel like that’s what I’ve been doing here today. This has been a lot of fun chatting. The book is Why Q Needs U. It’s available now for from Blink, an imprint of Bonnier Books. We’re talking to the author, Dr Danny Bate, who is a linguist and on the podcast A Language I Love Is, which you should check out. Danny, how can people find you?
DANNY: Yeah, I’m not hard to find online. Danny Bate will bring up something me flinging linguistics into the void on some platform. So, my personal website, dannybate.com, which I update with blog posts, accessible articles every month. I’ve gotten into Substack recently, which just has better algorithms, in general. Bluesky, which I have great fondness for. Instagram, which I’ve reluctantly got into and found to my surprise I quite like it. Basically, everywhere but TikTok. That’s me.
DANIEL: Oh, interesting. Well, you’re going to be on TikTok now, because there’s going to be a promo for this episode.
DANNY: I’m not against it.
DANIEL: Say hi to everybody.
DANNY: Hi to everybody on TikTok. I’m not against it. I’m just terrified of it. It’s the difference. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I’m just too old for it. That’s all. I’m too old for TikTok, but that’s all right. We bring the love, anyway. Danny, thanks for hanging out with us and telling us about the alphabet. It’s been great fun to chat with you.
DANNY: Absolute pleasure. Thank you very much.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: And now, it’s time for Words of the Week. Cailtin, do you have anything feelings about Words of the Week?
CAITLIN: In general, as a category? I mean, I do. I love it, actually. I get excited every time. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Okay. Ben used to do a thing where he performatively… He had a bit where he pretended to hate on Words of the Week. But I got to say, I’m losing my taste for ’em.
CAITLIN: I can’t go down that path with him. I’m so sorry, Ben. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Well, this one was suggested by Ignacio on our Discord, who says, “It pains me to bring this up, but we’ve been hearing a lot about MONOCULTURE this week. A word I’m sure existed prior, but I’d never heard it. It’s being used by a leader of Australian far right party as an attack on multiculturalism.” What are we talking about?
HEDVIG: Well, usually, people talk about monoculture as a bad thing, that it is a bad idea to suggest that we’re all the same…
CAITLIN: That we should all be acting the same.
HEDVIG: You can also use it in biodiversity. like it’s bad if you have a monoculture of only one banana species, for example. That’s also, I think, monoculture.
CAITLIN: Right. And like agriculture, it makes your stuff worse at growing if you’re not introducing other plant life.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Or, is just like susceptible to, like, if you get wiped out, [LAUGHS] everything gets wiped out.
CAITLIN: That’s it.
HEDVIG: However, I don’t think that’s the metaphor we should use for human monoculture and diversity necessarily. It’s also just a statement of fact, like, humans are diverse. We’re whether we want them to or not. And that’s how societies are. There are many strengths that can come from that. What has Pauline Hanson done now? I have not kept up, Daniel.
DANIEL: Let’s talk about a speech given by leader of the One Nation Party in Australia, Pauline Hanson. That’s our far-right party.
CAITLIN: That’s one heck of a name for a party.
DANIEL: How about that? Ein Reich, ein Volk. Sorry, what? What?
CAITLIN: Yeah. That really sets off some alarm bells. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Big time. Well, it’s been setting off big alarm bells for us for 30 years. She’s been trying to turn Australians against each other. Now, she’s being incredibly well funded by billionaire nepo baby and mining magnate Gina Rinehart, so that means the media is now on board. She gave a National Press Club speech. It was supposed to be a Q&A, but she took all the question time herself. Here’s the relevant quote. “We cannot be a multicultural society. We are a multiracial society, but we must be monocultural. Australians must live under the one cultural umbrella.”
CAITLIN: Yeah. Okay, so, in the United States, the key word that we are using for this is assimilation. That’s what all of our far-right leaders are talking about. It’s like “They don’t assimilate. That’s why we can’t let them in.”
HEDVIG: Yeah. I mean, I have many thoughts about it. I don’t want Pauline Hanson to be in my head more than she already is, which is…
CAITLIN: Right. Too much.
HEDVIG: Yeah. But it’s also disregarding diversity within what she thinks of as her own culture as well. It’s dumb on many fronts and it’s just dog whistling for a bunch of bullshit. Okay, MONOCULTURE is the Word of the Week. I’m now don’t want to think about Pauline anymore.
CAITLIN: I’ve heard it used in the past, not about this necessarily, but about monoculture being the idea cultural artifacts, the top-down kind, like what the TV stations give us or what the streaming services give us is too the same, like too samey.
DANIEL: Oh my.
CAITLIN: And that people are not able to get a diversity of entertainment anymore. I think that was maybe more of an issue before internet shows. Now, you can get every flavor of slop that you want right.
HEDVIG: Kind of. So, here in Europe, we do talk about like you’ve met Europe at a very Chinese point in our lives, I think. [CAITLIN LAUGHS] There’s some people who are like, “Maybe the American hegemony.” [???] But I think people use hegemony more for that. Maybe the American cultural hegemony is going to be replaced by Chinese cultural hegemony.
CAITLIN: Right.
HEDVIG: And some people are like, “That would just be fun for diversity.” [CHUCKLES] Just spicy, different flavour of cultural dominance.
DANIEL: Have you ever noticed that it’s never anybody saying, “You know, we need a monoculture. And the culture that we need to be the monoculture is the culture of this other guy over there. Not my culture. No, no, their culture. It’s great. What a great culture. Let’s all do his,” right? Never happens.
HEDVIG: Do you remember when we talked about Jamaican patois being spoken in the Jamaican parliament? That is a little bit like that, because it’s a bunch of people who are in Jamaica talking to other Jamaicans saying, “You shouldn’t use our regional variety. You should use…”
CAITLIN: “Use the colonial language, please.” Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yes.
CAITLIN: See, that’s where prestige really plays in heavy for that kind of thing where the colonial variety has more prestige, and therefore, we will be more legitimate in if we continue to use that instead of our local variety.
DANIEL: Here’s where it gets dark for me. What happens if people just don’t stop doing their culture? What if they keep doing their culture stuff? What do we do then? What measures do we take to make them stop?
CAITLIN: As a United States resident, I’ll tell you what, it’s bad.
DANIEL: Deportation? Monitoring?
CAITLIN: Deportation. Refusal of entry, right? So, we have not admitted any non-white refugees this year at all other than… Oh, maybe two. I think we got two. Woo. Otherwise, yeah, we just don’t…
DANIEL: Amazing.
CAITLIN: Yeah. It’s all white South Africans and they’re moving from arguably a more comfortable life to a refugee’s life here, and they’re like, “Oh wait, actually, that’s a raw deal,” and so some of them are moving back. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Okay.
CAITLIN: Yeah. Because they’re being put in like low-income multi-family housing and it’s hard to get to your amenities. People are all different from you and weird, and they don’t talk like you, and they don’t treat you nicely because of it. None of it is the kind of life that they were envisioning when they thought, “We’re going to move to America.” And so, yeah, it’s not working out for anybody.
HEDVIG: Sounds like the conservatives in Russia.
CAITLIN: Yeah. Exactly.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] I love that for them.
CAITLIN: Totally is. Yeah. Forget this, I’m moving to Russia. Oh wait, it’s so Russian. [CHUCKLES] I need to go home. Yeah.
DANIEL: But happened. Well, look, I think there is a parallel here. I mean, Pauline’s plan is to pump out cruelty and then hope that it emboldens racists to put pressure on Black and Brown people. It lets them know that there won’t be any consequences for violence or intimidation. And then, multicultural Australians, whatever that means, they comply in advance.
CAITLIN: Yeah.
DANIEL: So, what do you reckon we do? Caitlin, help us out.
CAITLIN: Oh no.
HEDVIG: Solve it, Caitlin.
CAITLIN: I’m the guy?
HEDVIG: You’re our only hope.
CAITLIN: Yeah, I’ll solve it. Okay. Well…
DANIEL: What needs to happen?
CAITLIN: Yeah. So, what needs to happen is… Because she’s not in power at this time, right? Her party doesn’t have like majority rule or anything. So, there’s a window there to do something that moderates are going to think is like illiberal and not democratic or whatever, but that is to take extremist parties and say these are not legitimate to prevent them from accessing the levers of power that they would need in order to execute their vision for Australia.
It’s an existential question, and so that is what we wish we had had in the early 2020s and it’s what we would like to see our non-far right party promise us in order to get voted for in the upcoming elections here in the United States. So, that’s what you need.
DANIEL: I would like to see us be loud in our support of multiculturalism. Let politicians know that we support this, be public about it. Let them know that we’re behind it. And they won’t suffer if they support multiculturalism.
CAITLIN: One of the greatest things that American people have been doing is hitting the streets and creating hyperlocal networks, like neighborhood sized networks, to make sure that everybody’s on board with protecting their neighbors and supporting… Not just the ICE watch. That’s huge. People going out standing in front of elementary schools, daycares, hospitals, things like that, to make sure that the coast is clear for their immigrant neighbors. But also food drives, food drop offs in towns that are under siege, so that people don’t have to go to the grocery store to get their food. They can have it delivered, so that they are not exposed.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Unfortunately, I believe this phrase was popularised by someone… Not very nice. But what’s the phrase? “Think globally, act locally.” [CHUCKLES]
CAITLIN: I think it’s expanded beyond it’s, like, original sphere.
HEDVIG: Okay, great. I love to hear that. But yeah, not just being on the Internet, doing things physically in your community.
CAITLIN: Yep.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay. Thanks, Ignacio, for that term, even though… I mean, it’s a warning. It’s something we got to really watch out for.
CAITLIN: Yeah.
DANIEL: All right, Caitlin, tell us about what’s going on with a certain reflecting pool. This… you’re our US correspondent.
CAITLIN: Yeah. Well, I’m your US correspondent and I’m also your green stuff correspondent. As Caitlin M. Green, I’m here to tell you about stuff that is green. And that reflecting pool is so green. [CHUCKLES]
So, in the nation’s capital, what we have is a big memorial space. Okay? It has the Lincoln Memorial, it has the Washington Monument, and it has this big pool. It’s called the reflecting pool. Do not swim in it. You will get gangrene. It’s there as a beautiful water feature. If you ever watched one of those Marvel Avengers movies, I think Captain America jogs around it. It’s supposed to be lovely and still and blue. The thing about still bodies of water is they are an exciting habitat for stuff that grows. And so, what was happening is…
There was an original way that it was set up, which was fine. But then, I believe it was Barack Obama who said, “We’re going to use water from the Potomac River. But in order to do that, we need to ensure that there’s an extremely effective filtration system that is actively stopping algae from growing on this thing. Because if it does so, it will become super green and gross and smelly and dangerous to your health.” And so, that is what happened.
It was this big project, the filtration system went in, it was working fine. It wasn’t as crystal clear blue as before when everything was super artificial, but it was at an acceptable level and it was the price that we were willing to pay to have Potomac River water feed it as opposed to carting in water from somewhere else.
Trump, who is pathologically unable to allow anything Obama ever did stand, he trashed the JCPOA and sent us into war with Iran, because Obama did that. He is now trashing the reflecting pool, and he was like, “For America’s 250th birthday, that thing is going to be American flag blue. That’s the goal,” which to me is like, I don’t think a pool should be that blue. That’s like navy blue. Not sure. Or, like royal blue. I’m not sure.
HEDVIG: It’s quite dark.
CAITLIN: It’s blue-blue. It’s dark blue. So, why would that be our color match that we’re looking [CHUCKLES] for? Don’t know. But that was the goal. And so, he drained it, he brought in a $13 million pool guy and was like, “You have to put epoxy on the bottom to make the blue happen.” So, it’s like colored blue colored epoxy. And so, he put that epoxy down, refilled the thing. The epoxy didn’t bond correctly, and so pieces of it started floating up to the surface. Meanwhile, an algae bloom the likes of which has never been seen on any part of this planet took place, and so the thing is rancid.
I have sent [CHUCKLES] friends who live down there to tell me what it’s like. It’s bad. It’s a bad time. Amanda Moore, who’s a photojournalist who contributes to half the answer sometimes, she’s been down there and she’s like, “I can’t convey it to you how gross it is. It’s so gross.” So gross, in fact, that they’ve got National Guard and Homeland Security investigations… People down there stopping people from getting too close, because Trump has decided to blame antifa, like vandals on the problem as opposed to microorganisms, which is, who did this? It is…
DANIEL: Don’t you mean algifa? [LAUGHS]
CAITLIN: Ooh.
HEDVIG: This is a very important place for American State Security. So, presumably, it’s under video surveillance at all times. So, if someone put something in there, you see that.
CAITLIN: You’re not getting away with that. Right. No, I don’t really know what the surveillance situation is over there, because it is a public monument. It’s not the Capitol building. It’s this other nearby situation. Yeah, I really don’t think you could get away with… If you just lean over it right now, there’s going to be somebody with a large weapon confronting you and telling you to step away.
HEDVIG: Interesting.
CAITLIN: Amanda actually caught audio of… Like, there’s a loudspeaker out there now that if you get too close, it tells you off. It’s like, “Oh, this is not a place for loitering.” It’s public land. It is a place for loitering. It’s like definitionally the place for loitering.
DANIEL: It’s a place for reflection. That’s the point of it.
CAITLIN: Yeah. You’re supposed to be able to sit there and think or take a little stroll or have a picnic or whatever. Like, you’re supposed to be able to spend time there not doing much of anything, which I believe is what loitering is.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] I think so.
HEDVIG: I was recently in Morocco. And in Casablanca, there’s a park called a Arab League Park. They have a water feature there that’s a very long fountain which has little steps. It’s very simple, but it has running water all the way. It has a little waterfall and then the next bit…
CAITLIN: You might solve a lot of your problems. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I was going to suggest maybe it shouldn’t be still.
CAITLIN: Could we have a reflecting fountain?
HEDVIG: It’s just falling continuously a little bit. So, it’s never sprouting.
CAITLIN: Yeah, that would be so cool. That’s not what we have. [LAUGHS] What we have is now a bog. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Okay, so, let the puns begin. One from Thor Benson on BlueSky. Link on the show notes for this episode. “The reflecting pool is being sabotaged by paid Protistas.”
CAITLIN: Yeah, that one’s my favorite one. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Which are planty things. Heard any others?
CAITLIN: There are some people that go down there now with T-shirts that say Team Algae on it, [CHUCKLES] which is not a pun, but it is fun that they do that. Mine was like, “Hey, you wanted a green new deal, here we are.”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Some people are blaming it on the algae-TBQ agenda.
HEDVIG: Very good. Algae-BTA mafia. Yep.
CAITLIN: Yeah.
DANIEL: So, that’s our Word of the Week, algae-TBQ agenda. Let’s go on to… One suggested by you, Hedvig. What’s yours?
HEDVIG: Oh, mine is HOBBYLOS,…
DANIEL: HOBBYLOS
HEDVIG: …which is just hobby-less, which is a German word I learned recently. It’s like a negative term you can say about someone who doesn’t have a good outlet for their energies…
CAITLIN: You don’t have enough going on.
HYEDVIG: …and is there for doing dumb things, destructive things.
CAITLIN: I love that.
HEDVIG: I don’t know, like placing fireworks in public bins and blowing them up is like hobbylos behaviour. Like, you should paint Warhammer figurines.
CAITLIN: It would be more productive and safer.
HEDVIG: It would be better for everyone involved.
CAITLIN: I think I have heard this in English, HOBBYLESS. Or, maybe I’ve even used it. I’m not sure. Yeah, the idea that, like, yeah, you don’t have enough going on. You need to pick up something because what you’re doing right now is not great. Don’t do that. [LAUGHS] I think it joins a lovely family of like suffix -LESS insults. Like FRIENDLESS and MAIDENLESS. HOBBYLESS is now like in the family.
DANIEL: Nice.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, our friend Gretchen McCulloch from Lingthusiasm posted this on Instagram from @abbiistabbii on Tumblr. There’s going to be a link in the show notes, but I’ll slap this up on the screen.
“The Germans really cooked making hobbyless behavior an insult. It is both devastating, applicable to a wide range of people and behaviors, and doesn’t resort to swearing. Man ranting on the Internet about the super bowl halftime show or complaining that something is woke, hobbyless behavior. Girls mocking another girl for not looking right, hobbyless behavior. Mindless vandalism, hobbyless behavior. It is more powerful than get a life or the English you’re sad, because it gets to the central point of the matter and that is wonderful, Danke-Deutsch.” Hobbyless behavior. Hobbylos.
CAITLIN: Yeah. It is frequently collocated with BEHAVIOR. In my brief, internet search, you see a lot of like, “Oh, that’s hobbyless behavior right there.” Somebody was like, “Watching The Office all the way through for the fifth time, like that’s hobbyless behavior. You need to do something.”
HEDVIG: That! That… that one I think is like anxiety coping.
CAITLIN: I know. I know that was going to raise some hair.
DANIEL: Harsh. Harsh.
CAITLIN: Yeah. I know, I was like, “Actually, sometimes you…” As a crocheter, I do need some, like, noise, and sometimes I would prefer it to be something I’m already familiar with, so I can focus on the pattern.
HEDVIG: Yeah. I think it’s specifically bad if it’s something that’s destructive to other people. If it’s not destructive or only destructive to you or just like a waste of time.
CAITLIN: If it’s considered a waste of time. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah. But very subjective.
CAITLIN: What you use your time for is your choice.
HEDVIG: Yeah, people who pick weird hills to die on or minor vandalism. One popular thing to complain about in Europe is that now all of our lids on our plastic bottles are more closely attached to our bottles in order to make recycling easier. And people who want to talk about that, I think, require…
CAITLIN: They could use a hobby. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Thank you, Hedvig. Last one. This one’s from Pontus, affectionately known as Moon Moon, who says, “Hi, found a new interesting use of the combining form maxing: TOKENMAXXING.” Help me out here.
CAITLIN: Oh, and here I thought I had provided this one, but someone beat me to the punch.
HEDVIG: My understanding is that some companies have this belief that if their employees use more AI tools, they would become more effective in their work and in their output. So, in order to get them to use more, you have a leaderboard in your company of who has used the most tokens. And in this case, you can think of tokens as the currency that you’re paying to use a large language model. So, TOKENMAXXING is trying to maximise that in order to get to the top of these company internal leaderboards.
However, what happens is you’re making the target be, just use a lot of tokens, regardless if you’re actually producing more profit for the company or whatever it is, efficiency or something. So, you’re specifically tokenmaxxing.
The other problem that has happened is it turns out that some companies had not introduced a ceiling of how much people were allowed to use, which meant that they got really, really, really large bills. Or, if they had a ceiling, the ceiling was for a year and they found out that they had used to all of their year’s tokens in a few months.
CAITLIN: Oh right. Yeah. Because people were doing stuff like setting up two chatbots to just talk to each other, and stuff that’s completely useless, that all it does is spend tokens, because that’ll get you up the leaderboard and that’s what matters.
HEDVIG: Yeah. This goes back to the perennial problem, which seems to be that in a lot of white-collar office work, managers are picking easily monitoring targets, like how much you use to your mouse or how many lines of code you write or something like that, instead of, like…
CAITLIN: I know people who wrote a quick script to mimic mouse wiggling every once in a while, so that they could beat that thing. Yep.
HEDVIG: Yes! There are devices you can buy, physical ones that you can put on top of your mouse, that will move your mouse around.
CAITLIN: They just shake it around.
DANIEL: So you’re mousemaxxing.
HEDVIG: Because these managers don’t want to actually engage with the work and talk to their employees. That’s the whole… If they just…
CAITLIN: Well, yeah. That’s right.
HEDVIG: …actually paid attention to what’s actually happening.
CAITLIN: In fact, in all of these large tech companies, there’s a major organizational problem overall of poor communication with up and down, with management, poor communication between teams. So, there’s redundancy in a lot of places, or balls get dropped and nobody notices because one team stops working on something that it turns out was important and they never told anybody, so nobody picked it up.
There’s real problems with that across the board. And here is an example of, like, why that happens. It’s because they would rather institute like a blanket, easy to measure, algorithmic measure of success that doesn’t give you anything, because human beings are going to figure out how to maximize it.
Oh, and I have a related word if you’re interested, which is CLAUDEONOMICS. Claudeonomics is the system of figuring out how to maximize your token usage, because you’re being expected to use Claude, which is an AI system. And so, you have your claudeonomics as your system, what you deviced to get it right.
DANIEL: Very good. I will also point out that our Discord friends have given us SCOTSMAXXING, which is a World Cup item. That’s from Kudravlou who says, “The only acceptable use of maxing as a Scot. I’m beaming with pride. Did Scotland win something in the World Cup?”
HEDVIG: Well, no, Scotland has just crashed out of the group stage.
CAITLIN: They won culturally.
HEDVIG: They won culturally.
CAITLIN: They won emotionally.
HEDVIG: [CAITLIN CHUCKLES] Scotland fans, they hadn’t qualified in a very long time for the World cup. And when they qualified, they got very, very excited. And then, they went over and drove to the US. The Americans seem to be confused and fascinated by them, because they famously went to a lot of bars in Boston and drank almost all the beer, and then they put traffic and all the statues, and then they convinced everyone that they were very jovial and nice, which maybe was true. They got a lot of love, but aren’t they have… [CROSSTALK]
CAITLIN: Oh, they were on vacation. Aren’t you in a good mood when you’re on vacation? But yeah, they went to Boston specifically, which is known for doing a good job handling high drinking holidays. They have a big St. Patrick’s Day festival. The bars are ready for a high volume of customers. However, Scotland really caught them unawares, and they truly did run out of everything except for the absolute lowest quality stuff, which apparently the Scottish tourists would not touch.
They did the traffic cone thing. They sent bagpipers down the Boston cop slide, and it was amazing. The Bagpipers managed to continue playing all the way down, which I don’t know. I feel that our audience is probably pretty aware of the Boston cops slide as an item, but it was fun to watch them go down.
HEDVIG: Nope, but I can’t… It’s a long slide.
DANIEL: Sounds delightful. Well, [CAITLIN CHUCKLES] they were scotsmaxxing. PharaohKatt saw MUMMYMAXXING, referring to the maximum mother that you can be doing lots of mum stuff.
CAITLIN: Oh, not a spooky mummy from a pyramid.
DANIEL: Not that kind. No. And Elias Leapmoger saw BALLMAXXING, which is a process so painful I don’t even to want to go into it.
CAITLIN: No, common.
HEDVIG: It’s not the slapping…
DANIEL: I think injecting saline into one’s testicles.
HEDVIG: Why??? Also, I don’t think men want big ones. Who wants big ones?
CAITLIN: Throughout history, people with testicles…
DANIEL: [STRUTS IN A VERY BOLLOCKY FASHION] Walkin’ down the street…
CAITLIN: …have been modifying them, a thing that I find horrible and nightmarish. Right? Like, I remember something from the 1800s of putting goat testicles, like transplanting goat testicles. Just none of it should happen. None of it makes any sense, don’t do it. Leave your balls alone.
DANIEL: They’re fine. They’re beautiful the way they are.
HEDVIG: I am 100% sure — and I don’t want to yuck anyone’s yum — There’s probably someone who likes really big testicles. There’s something for everything.
CAITLIN: If you can think of it, someone likes it.
HEDVIG: Someone likes it. I am sure.
DANIEL: Yeah, somebody’s into it.
HEDVIG: I just don’t think that that many people like it.
CAITLIN: As a trend.
HEDVIG: And also, famously, I don’t have balls, but don’t it hurt doing stuff to them?
CAITLIN: You famously don’t have balls. [CHUCKLES] It’s because of that billboard that I got made about how Hedvig doesn’t have balls. I’m so sorry about that.
DANIEL: Hedvig has no testicles.
CAITLIN: But now, you’re famous for it.
DANIEL: Thank you.
HEDVIG: I don’t have any. But don’t they… I got the famously stuck in the wrong part of the world. Doesn’t it hurt?
CAITLIN: [LAUGHS] Right. Aren’t they tender?
HEDVIG: Famously, aren’t they sensitive?
CAITLIN: Aren’t they sensitive? Aren’t they…
DANIEL: I can tell you that they are.
CAITLIN: Because it’s your future generations in there and you have to keep them safe, and so your body knows that and gives you many, many nerve endings to help you in that pursuit.
HEDVIG: Yeah. So, maybe don’t. Maybe leave them alone. I don’t know.
DANIEL: This has been a public service announcement from Because Language.
CAITLIN: Leave your balls alone.
HEDVIG: From two women about men’s balls. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: No, I’m just enjoying all of this discussion going past me. I don’t need to participate at all.
CAITLIN: We just have a lot of empathetic discomfort about the idea of tampering with your balls.
DANIEL: Usually, I’m the ball defender. But this time, I don’t have to be and I thank you for that.
CAITLIN: No, we’re here for you.
DANIEL: Thank you. And thanks to Pontus for giving us -MAXXING. A very good instance of -MAXXING. So, MONOCULTURE, ALGAE-TBQ AGENDA, HOBBYLOS or HOBBYLESS BEHAVIOUR, TOKENMAXXING and other forms of -MAXXING: our Words of the Week.
I’d like to say a big thank you to our guest, Danny Bate. Thanks to everyone who gave us news, words, and Related or Nots. Thanks to SpeechDocs who transcribe all the words, and you, great patrons for keeping us going.
Because Language lovers, there are some things that we would like you to do. We’d like you to follow us. We are becauselanguage.com on BlueSky. We’re @becauselangpod just about everywhere else. Check out all the people who send us great news, words, and ideas, Related or Not. Send us stuff. We love to hear it. We’ll stick it in there. You can stick it in our inbox, hello@becauselanguage.com, or go to our website and speak into the SpeakPipe.
We’d also love it if you could tell a friend about us or write us a review, because that does mean that we get the attention that we crave. And nobody would know if we were even there, if nobody gave us any attention. So, please let everyone know that we’re here.
HEDVIG: One way to support the show is by becoming a supporter on Patreon. We will send you some stuff depending on your level. You get access to bonus episodes, you get invited to live shows. If you want, we’ll also send you physical things in the mail. And we give you shoutouts. And also, you can join us on Discord and suggest things to us like Related or Not or news items, all sorts of things.
The support that you give us makes us be able to do the show. It also means that we can buy supply and software, and it also means that we can keep the regular episodes free for everyone, and it also means we can give a little bit of a money chocolate to our guests.
DANIEL: Oh, by the way, Caitlin, you typically do not accept the small honorarium that we offer.
CAITLIN: That’s true.
DANIEL: Instead, we send it to a charity. What is the charity that you like us to send it to?
CAITLIN: I’m going to stick with my old favorite, The Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund, please. [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: Duly acknowledged. Thank you.
CAITLIN: Thank you.
HEDVIG: If you’re a patron at the supporter level, we also read out your names. And one time someone said that the order we read them in got boring. And ever since then, Daniel has devised new ways of ordering the names. I don’t know what it is. I can guess.
DANIEL: You’ll never guess it from the number.
HEDVIG: No, no, no. Hold on. Hold on. Let me try. One and lower 0.75.
DANIEL: No, this show is about the alphabet.
HEDVIG: The show is about the alphabet. You have done how alphabetical is your name.
CAITLIN: Ratio of vowels to consonants.
DANIEL: I’ve already done how alphabetical your name is.
HEDVIG: Yes, exactly. So, it can’t be that.
DANIEL: That would have been good.
HEDVIG: It’s very confusing, because at the top, we have both Luis and Linguistic C̷̛̤̰̳͉̺͕̋̚̚͠h̸͈̪̤͇̥͛͂a̶̡̢̛͕̰͈͗͋̐̚o̷̟̹͈̞̔̊͆͑͒̃s̵̍̒̊̈́̚̚ͅ, which are wildly different in language, which means you have normalised for length somehow. Is it…
DANIEL: I have.
HEDVIG: It’s not like we weird letters, because sæ̃m and Linguistic C̷̛̤̰̳͉̺͕̋̚̚͠h̸͈̪̤͇̥͛͂a̶̡̢̛͕̰͈͗͋̐̚o̷̟̹͈̞̔̊͆͑͒̃s̵̍̒̊̈́̚̚ͅ is in there.
DANIEL: It’s not frequency based.
HEDVIG: It’s not frequency based. Is it front or back vowels? [GASPS] Is it age of letter when the letter got invented?
DANIEL: That was a very good idea, and I did think about doing that. That’s, I’m saving that for another time. But that’s brilliant and I almost did that. I did say something else instead.
HEDVIG: Okay, tell me.
CAITLIN: What is it?
DANIEL: As I learned from the book, Why Q Needs U, lowercase letters evolved from uppercase letters when late Roman scribes started using a more free script for body text, used uppercase for the titles and a cursive for the body text. And those letters that would become lowercase looked a bit different. So, I started asking myself, how similar do the uppercase letters look to the lowercase? Some letters look a lot alike, like the letter C, virtually identical. K, O, P, S, U, V, W, X, Z. They just look the same. That’s two points. You get two points if a letter does that. Some look similar, like a lowercase f looks a bit like an uppercase F, but not totally.
Modifications. I and J, same deal. L, M, Q, T, Y. Kind of similar, they get one point. And the other letters, A, B, D, E, G, H, N and R, not very similar at all. And then normalised for number of letters in the name. So, because some letters get two points, you can get a ratio over one. All right, so, this is how many letters in your name look the same, virtually identical, upper and lowercase. Take it away.
HEDVIG: Okay., So, at the top, we have Luis, sæ̃m, Lucy, O Tim.
DANIEL: O Tim.
HEDVIG: Lyssa, Nikoli, Wolfdog, and Linguistic C̷̛̤̰̳͉̺͕̋̚̚͠h̸͈̪̤͇̥͛͂a̶̡̢̛͕̰͈͗͋̐̚o̷̟̹͈̞̔̊͆͑͒̃s̵̍̒̊̈́̚̚ͅ. And then, we have one and lower, Chris L, LordMortis.
DANIEL: LordMortis
HEDVIG: Kristofer, Sonic Snejhog, Kevin, Andy from Logophilius, Tony, John K, Xekri, Becky, Colleen, Ignacio, Caitlin.
CAITLIN: I’m doing great.
DANIEL: You’re here.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yevaud, Keith, Fiona, Kathy, and James. I’m just reading them and thinking about them at the same time. [LAUGHS] Then we have at below 0.75. Elías, Stan, Molly Dee, Aldo, Faux Frenchie. Yeah, all those E’s are really going to do something to you.
DANIEL: The X helped.
CAITLIN: Yeah, the X helped. The X saved you from below half. [CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: Rosemary, PharaohKatt, all the A’s. Whitney, Steele, again the E’s. Amy, Mignon, Sydney, Diego, Laura, Lance. So, I’m seeing that E’s and A’s are screwing up your ratio.
DANIEL: They heard you. Yep.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And then, we have Nasrin, Joanna, Ayesha, Rach, Amir, J0HNTR0Y, me, Hedvig, Canny Archer, Ariaflame, Amanita. Yeah, that’s a lot of A’s. Larry, Nigel, Daryl, Meredith. That was 0.5. And then, at the bottom tier, we have, Manú, Rodger, Martha, Daniel is at this point, so the A’s and the E’s. gramaryen, Helen, Andy B. And then, we have two people with zero points. [CHUCKLES] So, none of their letters look alike in upper and lower case. So, that’s Rene and Ben. I’ll be sure to rub Ben’s face in it when we see him.
CAITLIN: Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who also performs with Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible. Thank you for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
HEDVIG: Pew, pew, pew.
DANIEL: Pew, pew, pew. Oh, Caitlin, do you want to give us a pew? [LAUGHS]
CAITLIN: Oh, sorry. Pew, pew, pew. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Thank you.
[BOOP]
HEDVIG: Daniel, I know that you have designed a font which I heard you talk about at one point, and then I accidentally… Caitlin, this is fun. I accidentally came across Daniel’s font when using a free editing software. I was looking at fonts, and one of them was called Daniel. And I was like, “Daniel, is this one yours?” And he was like, “Yes.”
DANIEL: It’s true. I am Daniel. About the year 2001, I was really into making my own typefaces, and I thought, “I’m going to do my handwriting.” So, it was really a beginner effort. I put it out there on the internet, and I put a note saying, “You can use this for anything you want, commercial or not.” It pops up everywhere. It’s my own little contribution. The Daniel font will be around after I’m long gone.
CAITLIN: Oh my gosh, I will be finding that after this. [CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: It’s kind of nice. Like, you’ll exist in the accumulation of cultural goods that humanity has produced. There’s some very small part. I mean, bigger than a lot of us.
DANIEL: I’m the ghost in the machine.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
CAITLIN: And you didn’t do it for profit. That’s so beautiful.
DANIEL: Yeah. But you know what? I have actually been paid multiple times. Funny story. There was a corporation that was doing an apartment block in Warsaw, and they said, “We love your font. We want to put it in our promotional material. How much will you charge us?” And I said, “How much do you want to pay me?” They went away and they said, “We want to pay you €1,200.” And I said, “Okay, that’s how much it’ll cost.”
CAITLIN: Deal. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] And they did. So, there it is.
HEDVIG: So interesting.
DANIEL: Yeah. It pops up everywhere and people have paid me and I’ve been amply compensated. So, it’s a lovely thing.
HEDVIG: You have so many weird side hustles, Daniel. I’m always like,
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Don’t we all?
HEDVIG: I don’t do anything.
CAITLIN: Your lore is replete with little nooks and crannies, interesting tidbits.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: But it does mean that nobody ever gets to criticise my handwriting, because I know that it’s beautiful.
CAITLIN: [CHUCKLES] A European apartment complex paid me money for that handwriting, actually.
DANIEL: So get it straight, folks.
[BOOP]
So, we both have been at various times in our lives. We have been Dan. I don’t mind the Dan, but it’s not something that I fully conform to anymore. Perhaps, it’s a vision of masculinity that seems a bit lumberjackish, a bit terse.
DANNY: Yeah, and we thought maybe it could happen in our adult lives, but it hasn’t, and I’m okay with that. [DANIEL LAUGHS] I am very much a Danny, and I’m quite content with that.
DANIEL: Okay. Well, that’s interesting. It seems like you’re referring to Danny as the boy who never grew up or something. That’s not how it is.
DANNY: No. No, it’s not that. It’s just maybe a little bit… I think it’s slightly friendlier, perhaps it’s a bit more diminutive. Of course, because in English, we do associate that vowel with diminutives. Whereas Dan is simple. Dan is a man of few words and [DANIEL LAUGHS] few syllables.
DANIEL: Dan the Man, whereas Danny reduces the social distance. It’s very nice in that way.
DANNY: Yeah. And no one says Danny the Manny, for example. But Dan the Man is an established phrase. And Daniel is just very official for me. If you were to call me Daniel, I would assume that I’m in trouble.
DANIEL: I see. I see. Well, so, you’re Daniel officially, but you’re Danny for the show.
DANNY: Yes, very much. So, Danny, for all intents and purposes, which is odd because I live in a country with an extremely rich culture of diminutives, and yet they find it odd that I will insist on Danny even in formal contexts. So, on the front cover of my book, for example, I’m Danny Bates. It would be really odd for me to put Daniel, which took my…
DANIEL: [HOLDING UP COPY] This book.
DANNY: Oh, that book, yes. Okay, that old thing.
DANIEL: It arrived. Yay!
DANNY: Oh good. It made the journey. At least one copy.
DANIEL: Two copies in the frame. Two. Two.
DANNY: Here we are. People where I live, which is the Czech Republic, found it extremely odd that I wouldn’t go with the official form of my name for the front cover of the book. But that’s a big no-no for me. That would be very strange.
DANIEL: Right. Right. We have these personas. We’re using language to perform identity, even with something as small as a suffix.
DANNY: Yep. Exactly so.
[BOOP]
DANIEL: What’s your favourite line from Dad Baby?
CAITLIN: Oh, it’s got to be, “We grew sorghum!”
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: That’s mine too.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: The ancient Roman… like the ancient grain?
DANIEL: Yes, the ancient grain.
CAITLIN: Yeah. So, Bluey’s father is simulating childbirth with Bingo in the baby carrier. He always does this to the neighbor. He ropes in Pat, the next-door neighbor, to help him give birth in a kiddie pool in the yard, and Pat is completely overwhelmed. [LAUGHS] I thought you grew up on a farm, Pat.
DANIEL: “We grew sorghum!” [LAUGHS]
CAITLIN: And I maintain that Bandit really should have gone to Wendy, because Wendy has worked with sheep and therefore she would know what she’s doing, but he went to the wrong house.
DANIEL: It’s true. Wendy hadn’t really fleshed out as a character by this point.
CAITLIN: So we weren’t aware of her sheep prowess.
DANIEL: So, yeah, all this goes at the end, by the way.
CAITLIN: Yeah. Right. This is ridiculous.
[LAUGHTER]
[BOOP]
Unfortunately, we have incorporated the featherwand into our lives, and so sometimes my shopping bags get inexplicably heavy all of a sudden. It’s not my favorite, [DANIEL LAUGHS] but it’s just a fact of life.
DANIEL: Bluey games that are forbidden for you? We don’t do Shawn. Sean is Shawn.
CAITLIN: Shawn cannot happen. Shawn is uncool. [LAUGHS] Nobody likes Shawn.
DANIEL: [PECKED BY HAND EMU] Ow! Ow… [LAUGHS]
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]