Our Mailbag is at capacity! Time to get to these questions.
- We have pronouns and proverbs. So why don’t we have proadjectives and proadverbs?
- Is it on accident, or by accident?
- What’s the past tense of speedrun?
- When has a loanword become just another word?
- Why do we say we’re going ham?
- Why do people pronounce dynasty differently?
- When we talk about accents, why is so much of the discussion about vowels?
Listen to this episode
Patreon supporters
Huge thanks to all our great patrons! Your support means a lot to us. Special thanks to:
- Termy
- Chris
- Lyssa
- The Major
- Chris
- Matt
- Damien
- Helen
- Bob
- Jack
- Kitty
- Lord Mortis
- Christelle
- Elías
- Michael
- Larry
- Binh
- Kristofer
- Dustin
- Andy
- Maj
- Nigel
- Kate
- Jen
- Nasrin
- Nikoli
- Ayesha
- Emma
- Andrew
- New this week: Moe
- and James
- And a special shoutout to Shane.
Become a Patreon supporter yourself and get access to bonus episodes and more!
Become a Patron!Show notes
Fugging hell: tired of mockery, Austrian village changes name | Austria | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/26/fugging-hell-tired-of-mockery-austrian-village-changes-name
Uncensored: World’s Dirtiest Town Names
https://www.smartertravel.com/uncensored-worlds-dirtiest-town-names/
Up against the wall, mother-fugger – Strong Language
https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2016/04/28/up-against-the-wall-mother-fugger/
Germany to wipe Nazi traces from phonetic alphabet
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55186459
Why Germany plans to return to pre-Nazi alphabet tables – The Local
https://www.thelocal.de/20201203/germany-plans-to-return-to-pre-nazi-alphabet-tables
pronoun | Online Etymology Dictionary
https://www.etymonline.com/word/pronoun
Danish proverb: Young pigs grunt as as old pigs grunted before them.
https://www.quotes.net/quote/7162
“Several More Proverbs to Live By” – February 23,…
https://lifeinhellarchives.tumblr.com/post/139614879487/several-more-proverbs-to-live-by-february-23
adverb | Online Etymology Dictionary
https://www.etymonline.com/word/adverb
On Accident Versus by Accident | Grammar Girl
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/on-accident-versus-by-accident
TRANS Nr. 16: Leslie Barratt (Indiana State University, USA): What Speakers Don’t Notice: Language Changes Can Sneak In
https://www.inst.at/trans/16Nr/01_4/barratt16.htm
Language Log » Past tense troubles
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=19944
Scuba dived | Sheldon Comics
http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/090331.html
go, v. — Green’s Dictionary of Slang
https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/asvivkq#zui53qq
The Origin of “Going Ham” or Why You Aren’t Going Ham
https://fromtheholocron.com/blog/2018/08/28/going-ham/
What is the Great Vowel Shift?
http://facweb.furman.edu/~mmenzer/gvs/what.htm
Northern Cities Vowel Shift: How Americans in the Great Lakes region are revolutionizing English.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/08/northern-cities-vowel-shift-how-americans-in-the-great-lakes-region-are-revolutionizing-english.html
:Trisyllabic Laxing: | SID
http://blogjam.name/sid/?page_id=3814
Trisyllabic laxing – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trisyllabic_laxing
(PDF) Rempel 1975: An introduction to: trisyllabic laxing, vowel shift, and Canadian raising
https://prism.ucalgary.ca/bitstream/handle/1880/51254/001_winter_75_Rempel.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
Home | Orbisculate
https://www.orbisculate.com/
Is ‘orbisculate’ a word? The late Neil Krieger’s children want it to be. – The Boston Globe
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/12/02/lifestyle/is-orbisculate-word-late-neil-kriegers-children-want-it-be/
Sniglets Collection : Words which should be in the dictionary but aren’t.: Sniglets Collection
http://snigletscollection.blogspot.com/2006/01/sniglets-collection.html
Theories abound over mystery metal monolith found in Utah | US news | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/24/monolith-utah-theories-what-is-it-mystery
Mysterious monoliths: What on Earth are they? Here’s what we know
https://www.traveller.com.au/mysterious-monoliths-what-on-earth-are-they-heres-what-we-know-h1snng
Another Mysterious Monolith Suddenly Appears — This Time In Romania : NPR
https://www.npr.org/2020/12/01/940441737/another-mysterious-monolith-suddenly-appears-this-time-in-romania
The explosive problem of ‘zombie’ batteries
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-54634802
These Zombies Threaten the Whole Planet
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/30/climate/oil-wells-leak-canada.html
Opinion: Beware of ‘zombie’ companies running rampant in the stock market
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/beware-of-zombie-companies-running-rampant-in-the-stock-market-2020-11-24
Yes, it’s safe to leave your smartphone plugged into the charger overnight | Business Insider
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/safe-charge-smartphone-overnight-2017-8
Charge your devices the right way | Popular Science
https://www.popsci.com/charge-batteries-right/
Martigues – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martigues
Transcript
[INTRO MUSIC]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to this special bonus Patron edition of Because Language, a podcast about linguistics, the science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team! It’s the person with all the answers, Hedvig Skirgård.
HEDVIG: [SURPRISED] Oh, yes!
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Yep. I was figuring out how I would have to, like, unctuously slither out of that compliment. And then I didn’t have to, so I call that a win.
HEDVIG: Is that how I come across? That’s not great.
DANIEL: No, I don’t mean that… I don’t mean to say she acts like she knows all the answers.
BEN: She performs. Yeah, no, no, she just has them.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: And the person with all the answers…
BEN: Ugh, god damnit…
DANIEL: …Ben Ainslie.
BEN: I don’t care for this at all!
HEDVIG: I like it.
DANIEL: I wasn’t gonna do that. But based on your reaction, I thought I would just…
HEDVIG: It’s very cute! I like it.
BEN: I have so few of the answers.
DANIEL: Tried to weasel out of it, and then I weaseled you right back into it.
BEN: Yeah. I like that. I like that.
HEDVIG: When you choose to answer things, you answer them well.
DANIEL: Well, I think so!
BEN: Oh, there we go. That makes me sound like that really annoyingly thinks-he’s-cool kid in class who’s like: ~Yeah, I could totally ace it if I wanted to, I just don’t want to.~
HEDVIG: No, no, no. It’s just you’re a mature adult who chooses to interact when you think you have something to contribute.
BEN: [LAUGHS] I’ll take that.
DANIEL: And he does. Well, this is a very special patron edition. So this one’s for you, folks. This is the one where we incriminate ourselves a lot.
HEDVIG: Oh, no. Yes. Okay. Mhm.
BEN: Oh, the Mailbags.
DANIEL: Has anybody gotten back to you on any of your confessions of illicit behavior?
HEDVIG: No! That’s true!
BEN: Hedvig looks really confused. Do you not remember? Do you not remember this?
HEDVIG: I remember some of it. I remember, maybe something to do with…
DANIEL: It’s all a blur.
HEDVIG: …German bureaucracy and trying to get an apartment?
DANIEL: Yes, that one.
HEDVIG: Yeah. [LAUGHS] No one. Yeah, no one. I mean, every Swede I’ve mentioned it to is just like: Well, that’s ridiculous, and we’re glad you did what you did to survive. You know, so…
BEN: [LAUGHS] Play that card. Just fling it out of the sleeve, like Spider-Man’s web.
DANIEL: Well, this is an episode where we do the questions, we do the answers. And we’re doing this for you. And I actually enjoy these most of all, because I learn lots of new things. And it’s really fun.
BEN: Because our listeners are substantially smarter than we are.
DANIEL: Oof.
HEDVIG: What is it we bring to this? Are we… funnier?
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Lots and lots of time looking up answers. That’s what it is.
HEDVIG: Okay.
BEN: Right, Daniel, now that you’ve done all of the work, please. Ferry us into the start! Are we gonna do the news? Or are we just straight into questions?
DANIEL: We are going to do the news. Oh, but before we do, remember our Redbubble store is open. Just look for talkthetalk.redbubble.com because… they can’t change it yet.
HEDVIG: Eh? Oh no!
DANIEL: Yeah, you’re kind of stuck with it, which is why it’s… if you think your show might change in the future, just give it an arbitrary name that belongs to you, and then you can use it for whatever. Give it something nonsensical.
BEN: Oh, well. Look, Talk the Talk did us good for many years and it’s just ticking along in the background.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] It’ll always be a part of us.
BEN: Close to our hearts and our e-store.
DANIEL: Exactly. All right, let’s start off with the news. This one was picked up by a lot of places. And I want to cover it because I think it’s funny, and also I’m kind of immature. The town of Fucking, Austria…
HEDVIG: Ooh, yes. I was noticing that.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: You noticed this one?
BEN: I knew this was coming. I knew this was coming. You big ex-Mo. You just love the swears, deep down.
DANIEL: I just think it’s funny that there was a town with the name of Fucking. I thought, what does it mean? How did you get it?
HEDVIG: It’s about breeding animals, right?
DANIEL: No.
HEDVIG: What?!
DANIEL: It’s not. Any other guesses?
BEN: A totally arbitrary thing that doesn’t have anything to do with the English word?
DANIEL: Yeees.
HEDVIG: Oh. But isn’t FIKKEN in other Germanic languages to do with like, breeding? And upbringing cattle?
DANIEL: Well…!
BEN: Is it from the same root as FECUND?
DANIEL: No. If you take it way back, it goes back to a Dutch word FOKKEN, which means to thrust or to strike. A jolly good…
BEN: I feel like this is definitely what Hedvig is saying. [LAUGHTER] To thrust or to strike?
HEDVIG: No, but I thought it was like a thing you like… I have reared. REARED as in like, reared my children, reared a hoard of whatever kind of thing.
BEN: SIRED, kind of thing?
HEDVIG: Yeah, I thought that was it. Anyway, tell me what it is.
DANIEL: I did a little bit of research on this.
HEDVIG: Thank you.
DANIEL: And found out it goes back to a person’s name.
BEN and HEDVIG: Oh.
BEN: All riiiight!
DANIEL: Get this: Adalpert von Vucckingen.
BEN: Adalpert von Fucking. I like that.
HEDVIG: But von Vucckingen would mean that he is from a place. Like, von is usually that you’re from a place, right?
DANIEL: Rrright. And…
BEN: Ooh, the plot thickens!
DANIEL: So that that name dates from about 1070. But it could be that it goes back to a sixth-century Bavarian aristocrat called Focko, who founded the settlement.
BEN: Oh, okay.
HEDVIG: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: Lord Focko. And that is probably just a coincidence. It’s probably not related to fucking at all.
BEN: Like, that was just probably a name.
DANIEL: Probably just a name.
BEN: Like, a boring old fashioned, not a name that means a thing. Just a name.
DANIEL: It meant something, we don’t know what it is.
HEDVIG: So it feels like they had three choices here. The village town on Fucking.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Three?!
HEDVIG: Yeah, three. They could either change the name to something completely different. They could change the name so the spelling reflects some older version, so it doesn’t sound exactly like Fucking, that it’s… Fuckoville or something.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Fuckostan! Yeah, these are all way less bad!
DANIEL: Fucksberg.
HEDVIG: Or they could just, like, way lean into it…
DANIEL: Yes!
HEDVIG: Have lots of merchandise.
DANIEL: Yes!!
HEDVIG: Have a little museum.
BEN: Yeah, yeah.
HEDVIG: And just like charge people for taking selfies with their signage.
DANIEL: Or just say — you know, because their sign got stolen loads of times — they finally had it up on a two-meter pole…
BEN: Just sell signs!
DANIEL: Sell signs! Have a thing say: Don’t take our sign… just…
BEN: Here is… here is a bloody, like, a replete sign shelf, full of all of the Fucking signs you could possibly want.
DANIEL: Here’s a QR code. We will mail it to you.
BEN: Yeah. Free of charge.
DANIEL: You know? Something like that. It would have been a source of income. No, they piked out. They changed… and they changed it to something… Oh, man. They changed it to Fugging.
HEDVIG: Oh, this is my second option, yeah.
BEN: Isn’t that what… some some variety of English uses that as the swear word, right? In the same way the Irish say SHITE, there is someone who says FUGGING instead of FUCKING, right?
HEDVIG: Or FOGGING?
DANIEL: I don’t know about that. I do know that that in the ’50s — 1940s and ’50s — what with the laws being what they were, Norman Mailer in his book The Naked and the Dead had to change the word FUCK to FUG, which prompted the actress Tallulah Bankhead to come up to him and say, “So you’re the young man who can’t spell FUCK.”
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Great old story.
HEDVIG: Yeah, that’s good. Well, I can understand them being tired of being the butt of a joke.
BEN: Yeah, for sure. One of the things – as an Australian – that I found really weird when I went to Austria — and this really took me by surprise — is how kind of, like, a bit weirdly insecure Austrians are about not being Australia? Like, there has been zero times in my life ever where I have ever had to explain to someone: I’m from Australia, not from Austria. But like, many of the stores and pubs and bars I went into had, like, “We’re Austria not Australia” paraphernalia, and many Austrians that I met were like: Oh, you’re Australian! We get confused for you all the time! And I’m like: That’s odd, because I’ve never been confused for you ever!
DANIEL: Uh-uh. Not by English speakers anyway. Does that have anything to do with nearness?
BEN: When I went there, I was like: This is the first country on earth that I’ve been to that, like, values the perspective of Australians!
{LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Well, the Fuckingers — which is the name of the people in the town —
BEN: Love it.
DANIEL: The Fuckingers will have to just get used to a different name. No word on whether – by the way this comes from the BBC – no word on whether the towns of Oberfucking and Unterfucking will have to change those as well.
BEN: Out of interest, are they called that because they’re further up and further down the hill that all of these towns are on?
DANIEL: Oberfucking and Unterfucking are some distance away from Fucking, but they’re still pretty close to each other. Anyway, so now we will have to settle for other towns with risque names like Condom, France; Wankdorf, Switzerland; Gofuku, Japan…
HEDVIG: Pretty good.
DANIEL: And Anus, France. Which is weird because Anus… ANUS means ANUS in French too. It’s like the town is literally called Anus.
BEN: Well, if I’ve learned anything from all the French people I’ve ever met, is that they don’t give a fuck. [LAUGHTER] They’re just like: Yeah, my town’s called Anus, what up.
HEDVIG: My friend’s in Europe, when I told them I was going to ANU, they immediately were like: Do you realise that whenever there’s going to be possessive, it’s going to be ANUS?
DANIEL: Thank goodness for that little apostrophe.
BEN: Thank you.
HEDVIG: But, like, no one at ANU really cares much. They make like… ANU Sports has, like, big t-shirt that says ANU Sports and stuff.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: See? Option number three, lean into it.
DANIEL: I just figure that calling your town Anus is, like, the thing everyone does when they say: God, this town sucks.
BEN: No, well surely they’d call it Cock then, right?
DANIEL: We could have named it something else but, but it’s like: no.
BEN: No, I like it. If I lived in a town called Anus, and in my language that meant Anus, I’d be like: This is us. Welcome.
DANIEL: Let’s go on to our next item. And this one is about the phonetic alphabet. When I say phonetic alphabet — Ben, just as the non-linguist of the team, what do you think of?
BEN: Oh, I would have…
HEDVIG: [SINGS] Foxtrot, Unicorn
BEN: If something… if someone said that to me, I would assume they were talking about IPA.
DANIEL: Oh, okay. Like, you mean the one that linguists use?
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Hmm.
BEN: Because…
DANIEL: Because you’ve been on the show for 10 years.
BEN: Yeah. Well, because like, English isn’t phonetic. And you don’t… you… the… this is breaking my brain a little bit because I’m like, well, the letters that are in the Roman alphabet can be put together phonetically as in Spanish, and they can be put together non-phonetically as in English, so…. So that’s why I would assume they meant the IPA.
HEDVIG: I was gonna – because I know where this is going – I was gonna try and lead Ben down the path. Do you think of something that isn’t really like… So, so: A very generous interpretation of phonetic?
BEN: Sounds… looks like what it sounds like.
HEDVIG: Yeah, no, no, but like, actually just remove the word phonetic! [LAUGHTER] Because it’s not, it’s not…
BEN: Okay, now we have alphabet. I’m aware that alphabets exist.
HEDVIG: This isn’t going very well Daniel, you’re better at this.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: I like that, I like the world leading me to the answer. And we are now substantially further away from the answer than when we began.
DANIEL: I’ll lead you back the other way.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Tiger Webb did a tweet recently. “When I say” — here’s the tweet — “When I say phonetic alphabet, which of these do you primarily associate that with?” And one answer was IPA. Only got 40% of the vote.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: The other one was NATO with 60%. If I say NATO phonetic alphabet, does that mean anything?
BEN: Oh, do they mean radio alphabet? Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, that sort of thing?
DANIEL: Yes, that’s correct.
HEDVIG: That’s why I was humming the Blink-182 song. [SINGS] Foxtrot, Unicorn…
DANIEL: Uniform.
HEDVIG: [SINGS] …Charlie, Kilo. See, I link to news items!
DANIEL: Bloodhound Gang, actually.
BEN: Ooh!
HEDVIG: Oh, no! Yes, so it is! Aargh. They’re very similar.
BEN: Oh!! Shkshhkshhkshk, pop culture knowledge fail!
DANIEL: Thank you. Thank you.
BEN: I can do it. I can do it all, thanks to my very militaristic high school.
DANIEL: I have some gaps.
HEDVIG: Why?
BEN: Because we did those things. Like, we would march in unison into the hall every Friday. And we did, like, militaristic, scout-y things all the time and all sorts of… very, very fun stuff.
DANIEL: Wow.
HEDVIG: Are you good with knives?
BEN: I’m good with knives in the sense that I can butcher an animal.
HEDVIG: That’s good with knives!
DANIEL: You can slaughter a shoat.
BEN: A shoat? Is that a sheep and a goat?
DANIEL: I don’t know. [LAUGHTER] I have never understood that Yosemite Sam line, but I like it. Anyway.
BEN: So what about the phonetic, the what I would call the radio call sign alphabet?
DANIEL: Well, we are talking not about the one for English, but the one for German. Germany is changing its radio alphabet.
BEN: So I’m assuming German does a similar thing that English does, which is that it takes existing words and attaches them to the letters so that you can say them out loud, and if garbled things come through, people can still kind of, like, muddle their way there.
DANIEL: It is exactly that kind of thing. And the reason why they changed them was because back in the ’30s, they purged all the Jewish names.
BEN: Oh…
DANIEL: Yeah. Mm.
BEN: How many? How many left, out of interest?
DANIEL: There were…
BEN: So if I followed you correctly, just for the sake of our listeners, right? Like, the military has been using this style of call signs for letters for a really, really long time, since the birth of radio, because you need to. And it had an existing set. And then because of da Nazis, a bunch of things got dropped because of Jewish connotations, or just explicitly being Jewish names?
HEDVIG: Replaced.
BEN: Yeah, sorry. Dropped and then replaced. So how many were dropped, and will now be coming back, I assume?
DANIEL: I’m just looking over the two lists, just quickly. It looks like four that I can see right now. D for David became Dora. N for Nathan became Nord Pole, the North Pole. S was Samuel — it turned into Siegfried — and Z was Zechariah, but it became Zeppelin, as you might expect.
BEN: Yeah, well, that’s definitely got much better connotations!
DANIEL: Mmm, yeah. So they are changing them back thanks to Michael Blume, an anti-Semitism Commissioner for the state of Baden-Württemberg. So.
BEN: Baden-Württemberg?
HEDVIG: Wait, so only one of the states is changing?
BEN: I reckon what’s happened is this person, on behalf of this place has done it, and then everyone’s gone: That’s a not terrible idea.
DANIEL: Yeah, it’s all of Germany.
HEDVIG: Okay, good.
BEN: Because it’s definitely not a thing that can happen in a localised way. Right? Like, there’s no way you can just have one tiny little sect doing it differently.
HEDVIG: No, exactly. Yeah, no, it doesn’t work. However, like when I have to spell my name. I don’t know, I’d be curious Daniel to know some of the other words, because often, people seem to use names. So the American alphabet has these, like, Foxtrot, Unicorn… that we just discussed.
BEN: Yeah, so like yours would be like: Helo, Echo, Victor, India…. I’m trying to spell your name in my head, sorry. I missed D! Delta.
DANIEL: Gulf.
HEDVIG: That’s okay. When I do it in German, like on the fly, on the phone, and people ask, we tend to say like: Heidi, Eric… Like, it’s always names.
BEN: Huh? Mind you, that’s what English speakers do who don’t know that alphabet, right? Like, P for Paul. J for Jill. That sort of thing.
DANIEL: Yeah. This is weird. M used to be Marie, but it changed to Martha. Martha, which I didn’t think Marie was that…
BEN: To be honest, I was surprised that some of them got ranked. I have a feeling — I mean, we should probably pause here and just grab someone of Jewish extraction and just ask them, but… like your son who speaks Yiddish for example — But I wouldn’t… it sounds to me like some of these names just kind of got caught in this huge Nazi like, Jewish scare kind of campaign. Like, Nathan isn’t explicitly Jewish.
DANIEL: It is. It’s… it’s Old Testament.
BEN: Yeah, right.
DANIEL: Anyway, so some of those names are gonna be coming back. So I thought I would mention.
BEN: That’s cool.
HEDVIG: That is cool.
BEN: I like that. And phonetic alphabets, which is not what I’ve ever heard them called before, but man, they are fun! Like, of all of the really bizarre things that I had to do because of my high school, I like that thing the most. I love the radio call sign alphabet. It’s just heaps of fun!
DANIEL: I think I’m gonna take it on because I’m sick of saying N for uh… uh… numbnuts or something, you know, just having to make up something on the fly.
BEN: What is wrong with you today? You know, you’ve got the Fucking story. You’re just dropping numbnuts all over the place. Just like: ~hehe, there’s a town called Fucking.~
DANIEL: You know, I let my hair down.
BEN: You’re particularly mature.
HEDVIG: What is numbnuts? I only know NUMTOTS.
BEN: NUMTARTS?
HEDVIG: Well, explain numbnuts first.
BEN: No, I want… we must stop immediately and explain NUMTARTS!
HEDVIG: NUMTOTS is a very, very popular Facebook group called New Urbanist Means for Transit Oriented Teens.
[DANIEL SNORTS]
HEDVIG: It’s for people who are into infrastructure and urbanisation and anti-NIM… you know about NIMBYs?
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: Yeah, anti-NIMBYism.
HEDVIG: So NUMTOTS are the reaction to NIMBYs.
BEN: Oh, okay.
HEDVIG: So a lot of memes about trains.
BEN: I would mock you, but I am part of two different infrastructure shitposting groups from Perth [LAUGHS].
DANIEL: Why are they not YIMBYs?
HEDVIG: Is one of them called something… something something memes for something something teens?
BEN: No, though Ayesha does follow a couple of those. Yeah.
HEDVIG: And I think NUMTOT is the originator of that pattern.
BEN: Yeah, right, okay. Cool. I will tell her about that. I think she’ll be very interested.
HEDVIG: What are numbnuts? Are they what I think they are?
BEN: Numbnuts is just, like, a dickhead, like, stand in.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Okay.
BEN: I don’t know why it would be bad to have nuts that are numb, and why that would make you a bad person. For me, having a dick on your head is a far more obviously bad thing.
HEDVIG: Maybe you sit on them in the library and they go numb?
BEN: Possibly.
DANIEL: Because you didn’t realise?
BEN: Yeah. Okay.
DANIEL: I think we could look that one up for next time.
BEN: Yeah. Okay. Etymology search.
DANIEL: Yeah, we’ll throw it on.
HEDVIG: Wow. Are we through the news section?
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: Welcome back. We are having the Mailbag episode on Because Language. You know how it works: People send us great questions, we give them great answers.
HEDVIG: Great.
BEN: And then Daniel does a whole bunch of work, and we ride his coattails all the way to the stratosphere!
DANIEL: Not so, dear friend. Not so.
BEN: What’s the first question? We can let you answer, Daniel.
DANIEL: This one comes from PharaohKatt on Twitter.
BEN: Oh good ol’ PharaohKatt. She gives us the best questions.
DANIEL: I’ve learned so much from her questions. “We have pro-nouns and pro-verbs. Why don’t we have pro-adjectives and pro-adverbs? What is the PRO?”
BEN: Yeah. Okay, great. I’m gonna need you guys to stop where you are, and do a whole bunch of linguistic explaining. What is a pro…verb and a pro… What is the PRO-?
DANIEL: So what’s a pronoun?
HEDVIG: So I always thought that the reason why it’s called pronoun is that it can stand in for the noun. So you can say, “Daniel looks very nice today” or “He looks very nice today.” Right?
DANIEL: That is correct. It is PRO-, in place of, and NOMEN is the name or the noun.
HEDVIG: And I have actually heard people discuss pro- other things. But pro-verb as in, like, a saying…
DANIEL: A proverb.
HEDVIG: What’s a good one? I can only think of Swedish ones right now.
BEN: “Loose lips sink ships”
HEDVIG: Yeah, there you go.
BEN: …Was a proverb in World War II in Britain, meaning like: don’t talk about what’s going on, because the spies might hear you.
DANIEL: “Young pigs grunt as old pigs grunted before them.”
BEN: Okay, I like that.
DANIEL: I want a Swedish proverb, Hedvig. COME ON, GIVE ME A SWEDISH ONE.
HEDVIG: I have one that’s the same thing as Ben. I don’t know if it’s a proverb: En svensk tiger, can either be a noun for saying a Swedish Tiger, or a Swedish person is silent. It’s not a proverb, it’s more like a slogan.
DANIEL: Oh, okay. Cool.
HEDVIG: It was for the same thing, Ben.
BEN: YEAH. Same idea.
HEDVIG: For don’t talk to Russians.
DANIEL: Yeah. Okay.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Such good advice.
DANIEL: The PRO- in PROVERB is not the same as the PRO- in PRONOUN, because the PRO- pronoun
HEDVIG: That’s what I was going to say, they don’t sound the same.
DANIEL: No, that… Well, no, that’s true. The PRO- in PRONOUN is in place of a noun, but a PROVERB, it comes from VERBUM, which is word, and PRO- means forth, like forward. So these are words that you’re putting forward. I put this forward as a proverb.
BEN: Just laying it out there.
HEDVIG: Oh, like an announcement or something.
BEN: Pontificating.
DANIEL: Hmm. So why don’t we have…?
BEN: Do we have PRO- anything else?
DANIEL: We don’t.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Or do we, Hedvig? We don’t have pro-adjectives?
HEDVIG: No.
BEN: What about the other ones? The other kinds of… the other modifiers. So we’ve got verbs, and we’ve got adverbs. What other modifiers? Like, how do the modifiers work for all of these things?
DANIEL: So adverb: AD- is TO. So it’s something that’s added TO a verb.
BEN: Oh, okay. So adverbs aren’t verbs. They’re things that happen next TO verbs.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: All right.
HEDVIG: Yeah. “She ate the porridge very quickly.” Very quickly, QUICKLY is the adverb.
DANIEL: Well, I suppose if PRO- means in the place of, and a pronoun is in the place of a noun, there isn’t really anything that we use in place of adjectives or in place of conjunctions.
BEN: I’m sure that if we actually sat down and nutted it out for a while, we could come up with something. Surely somewhere in like, how people are using English, or languages generally on the internet, like in the way that we’re seeing BECAUSE change, right? Because language. Surely there is now some standing in of words for other words in the same way pronouns stand in for the nouns of that original place. That must happen!
HEDVIG: What about things like “She had a certain je ne sais quoi”? Like, when you… when you don’t have the word for it and use a generic big word for it. Like, there’s something she has.
BEN: An X factor.
HEDVIG: She has it. Or like, there is something about him. When you say something like that.
BEN: And the only way you can understand it is if you are in tune with that speaker enough to understand that they are sort of linguistically genuflecting towards this thing that everyone has to understand is a thing, but we can’t really… yeah.
HEDVIG: They don’t really have a word for it.
BEN: Hmm, yeah, that’s interesting.
HEDVIG: Is that? Is that?
DANIEL: I think that’s just circumlocution.
HEDVIG: Yeah, but, but if I can get philosophical here, HE instead of a name is also… you need a lot of… the other hearer needs to do a lot of work to know who that HE is.
BEN: Yeah, there’s a lot of heavy lifting there, right? Yeah. Absolutely.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s true. Well, so I guess the short answer then, is that the PRO- in pronoun and the PRO- in pro-verb — proverb — are not the same thing. It’s just a coincidence. And there aren’t other kinds of PRO-, because we just don’t do that with anything but nouns. Not really.
BEN: That’s the short answer. The long answer is, that’s quitter talk and we should find some.
HEDVIG: I was also thinking about DO and MAKE were verbs.
DANIEL: Hmm?
HEDVIG: When you say “do it”, when you mean “bike”?
DANIEL: Oh, wow. Yeah, that’s right. That’s kind of a pro-verb.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Yeah. Right. So a non-proverb, a pro-verb. I like that. That’s fun.
DANIEL: Hmm.
BEN: Do it!
DANIEL: Thanks PharaohKatt, for that great question. Next one is from Brendan via email — he emailed us at hello@becauselanguage.com — “I was speaking with my father the other day and used the expression ON ACCIDENT when referring to a mistake I subconsciously had made the other day. My father immediately commented that the proper expression is BY ACCIDENT and although I do realise…”
BEN: [GROANS]
DANIEL: Yeah, you got to watch your prepositions, right? “And although I do realise that absolutely is the proper use, I feel that I certainly have heard the expression ON ACCIDENT at some point before.”
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah, for sure.
DANIEL: “I mean it just makes sense. You do something ON PURPOSE or ON ACCIDENT. I was wondering if you’ve ever heard someone misuse this expression in the same way I have or if you have any similar experiences.”
BEN: Definitely.
HEDVIG: I wouldn’t even call it a misuse, it’s super common.
BEN: Yes, I will cut straight to the end here and just be like: that is a thing that a lot of people say. So you get to have that really fun conversation with your dad about like: [MOCKING TEENAGE VOICE?] ~Hey dad, in linguistics there’s prescriptivist and descriptivist, and one person says you should do something and blalalajajdlkjfdjf.~ [NORMAL VOICE] And so you could have that conversation, or you could just be like: Shut up, I’ll say what I want.
DANIEL: It depends on your relationship.
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Daniel, did you check the Ngrams for this?
DANIEL: I did. And I found that BY ACCIDENT is far and away the more common in writing, all the way through history.
BEN: Sure.
DANIEL: But like Brendan says, ON still makes sense. And then I also found, I found a post by Grammar Girl Minion Fogarty, who found a paper on this by Leslie Barratt, Professor of linguistics at Indiana State University. And Barratt points out that if you’re under 30, you’re probably likely to say and accept ON ACCIDENT – the less common one. If you’re over 40, you’re probably likely to reject it and say BY ACCIDENT instead. So this is a… you know, one of those up and coming changes in progress.
BEN: This reminds me. This tugs a little, like, memory string in my brain of one of my pet peeves, which is people who get very sort of demanding around the correct formulation being AT THE WEEKEND, not ON THE WEEKEND.
HEDVIG: Oh my god, what? AT the weekend? What is that?
BEN: And it just… Ohhh, it breaks my brain because it’s like one of those… it’s the same thing… I find it’s just like one of those, like, “look how clever I am” dog-whistling moments, in the same way that people make sure to sort of pronounce APPRECIATE [əpriːsijeɪt] [WITH A ROLLING R AND AN S] that way. And I’m like: Yeah, okay, we get it, you’ve read some books, whatever.
HEDVIG: (It’s APPRECI… [əpriːʃ]…
BEN: Like, it seems like one of those really, annoyingly difficult, like… being all up in arms about it being BY MISTAKE, not ON MISTAKE, I think says a lot about the person who gets up in arms about that thing.
HEDVIG: But at least BY ACCIDENT is more common, at least with writing. So like… So I think the dad has got a bit of a point. Whereas AT THE WEEKEND, ON THE WEEKEND, the frequency there is… like, they can’t be… ON THE WEEKEND has to be more common. Right?
BEN: You would… I don’t know
HEDVIG: And appreciate [ə.pɹi.si.jeit] and appreSHiate [ə.pɹi.ʃi.eit]… Who…? What…?
BEN: Daniel, I want to quickly write a question to Because Language, if you could just check the inbox and then just add it to the end of this show and research it while we do the rest of them, that’d be great.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Sure, great. I had to get used to AT THE WEEKEND, when I came to Australia. I also had to get used to AS AT March 30, instead of AS OF March 30.
BEN: I hate this stuff.
HEDVIG: What? I’ve never heard this.
BEN: Maybe it’s… maybe it’s because I grew up in the States or something. But I just find it so conceited and unnecessary. Like, everyone understands this. It doesn’t…. What did you get up on the weekend? [PRETENTIOUS VOICE] ~Oh, I think you mean, what did I get up to AT the weekend?~ And I’m like, just stop. I don’t care anymore. Don’t answer my question.
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly.
DANIEL: Could it be that you did something in the past ON the weekend, but when something is coming up, it’s gonna be AT the weekend?
BEN: Bahhhh.
DANIEL: Ohh!
HEDVIG: Oh.
DANIEL: Prepositions in time expressions are super weird, but Brendan continues, “Also I just want to say I absolutely love the podcast. I frequently have to drive long-distance to see my partner, and nothing breaks the monotonous and mind-numbing music better than listening to an episode or two. I hope that you’re all doing well in these times. And just want to thank you again for the countless hours of intellectual engagement.”
BEN: Well, if you are listening to this while you’re on one of your long drives, Brendon, let me be the first to say: Cow. Tree.
DANIEL: Let me be the first to say: you need some better music. May I recommend Tycho.
BEN: Sign. Another sign. Fence post. Sorry, anyway.
HEDVIG: Hey, speaking of music, can I know what you guys’s top song on Spotify was this year?
BEN: I don’t use Spotify because I am old and crotchety, but I can give you my most listened to song on YouTube, which is where I do most of my music these days.
HEDVIG: But isn’t that going to be something from from Ellis, isn’t that going to be…?
BEN: No. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, nooo NO. I don’t let him pollute my YouTube Music feed that way.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: I don’t use either one.
HEDVIG: Oh god.
DANIEL: I have all my mp3s.
BEN: What is your most listened to track then, Daniel?
DANIEL: My most listened to track? Of all time?
BEN: No. This year.
HEDVIG: No. This year.
DANIEL: If you give me 15 seconds, I can get it.
BEN: Okay. Well, while he’s doing that, I can tell you almost certainly what mine would be. It would actually probably be a song called Holy Harbour, by a German marching band called Meute.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] What?! Okay.
BEN: Look it up!
HEDVIG: That’s… okay.
BEN: Look it up. Daniel’s busy doing other things. So Holy Harbour, Meute. And I reckon Meute will be like so far up your alley, it’s gonna get stuck, by the way.
HEDVIG: Wow.
BEN: M-U-E-T-E.
HEDVIG: It’s a marching band?
BEN: Yes.
HEDVIG: Didn’t know you’re… well, now that I learned about your military upbringing, maybe I’m not so surprised.
BEN: So so so, it’s not that. It’s not that at all. It’s… they mostly do covers of EDM tracks and I love EDM. So that’s how I got into them. But this is one of their originals and it’s really really good.
DANIEL: [IS BACK] Okay.
HEDVIG: M-O-E-T-T-E?
BEN: M-U-E-T-E. It’s… I pronounced it Mute for a long time, but it apparently it’s pronounced [mwe.te].
DANIEL: Track number one is Bâton Rompus by Nick Duffy, because my daughter loves it. The one that is really mine is First Class by Khruangbin. And then number three is HTRK with Real Headfuck. And number four is Yumi Zouma, Cool for a Second (the Japanese Wallpaper Remix). There you have it.
HEDVIG: Ahh. Very interesting.
DANIEL: Thanks, Brendan, for that great question.
BEN: Absolutely. And by the way, Brendan, now you just get three tracks. Oh, wait, no, Hedvig, what’s your most listened to track this year?
HEDVIG: Um, it’s a song called Softly by Clairo. Basically, my top lists were all, like, my PhD writing playlist. It’s all very soft pop.
BEN: Oh right, yeah, okay, so not a super representative kind of sample necessarily.
HEDVIG: No, I’ve been listening a lot to lo-fi pop all year, regardless of writing or not, actually.
BEN: Lo-fi is… man, I don’t know who 10 years ago was like: Let’s just lo-fi everything, but that person deserves a medal.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah. No, it’s great. My number two was actually New Slang by The Shins, which, fair enough.
BEN: You definitely have a Manchester husband.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Next question. Matthias on Facebook says, “What’s the past tense of ‘to speedrun’? I thought it was ‘speedran’ but I just heard ‘spedrun’ and now my life is in shambles.”
[BEN LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I like SPEDRUN, I like SPEDRUN.
BEN: I like them both, actually. SPEEDRAN, SPEDRUN. I like SPEDRUN actually, yeah, absolutely.
HEDVIG: I like SPEDRUN.
DANIEL: Ugh, I hate it.
HEDVIG: I think intuitively I would say SPEDRUN.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, what do you think about SPEEDRUNNED?
BEN: Oh, no! Nooo.
DANIEL: Why not? Why not?
BEN: Gross. Do you know why? Because it sounds like — and it’s another one of those really annoying, annoying things that just always really irrits me — when you HANG a person to kill them, they have never been HUNG, they have been HANGED.
DANIEL: Yes, yes.
BEN: And I’ve just always found that pedantic.
DANIEL: It is.
BEN: Sort of really dumb and annoying.
HEDVIG: Wow. I have never had to discuss that, such that I knew that.
BEN: Don’t you play D&D? That’s never come up? Never?
HEDVIG: No!
BEN: Oh, you clearly have a much nicer DM than I ever am!
HEDVIG: What? People were hanged?
BEN: Oh, there are gibbets in most of my campaigns. I like a nice sort of Eastern European, the Witcher style sort of fantasy mythos, where things just get grim as hell.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Wow. Okay. Yeah, no.
DANIEL: Let me ask a question: SCUBADIVE, past tense. Do you like SCUBADOVE? Or SCUBADIVED?
HEDVIG: SCUBADOVE. SCUBADIVED.
BEN: I would actually probably, I would say, I would be a cheat. I would say “I went scuba diving.”
DANIEL: Oh, no, you don’t get to!
HEDVIG: I was gonna say that about the speedrun, that I was gonna say “did a speed run”
DANIEL: Did a speed run. That is not available to you.
BEN: Okay. All right. Scuba…. Scuba…. Aww, they’re all bad! SCUBADIVED.
DANIEL: If SCUBADIVED sounds good, why does SPEEDRUNNED sound terrible?
BEN: Because RUNNED isn’t a thing.
DANIEL: Yeah, but neither is DIVED. Well, okay it kind of is, isn’t it?
BEN: Yeah it… What?! Yes, it is.
DANIEL: He DOVE under the water. DIVED is.
HEDVIG: DIVED is a thing.
BEN: RUNNED is just… it’s just an abomination. It’s like a healthy animal with a giant growth on its side. It’s just wrong. It’s abhorrent.
HEDVIG: Or it’s something a child says.
DANIEL: Yeah, I runned.
BEN: Which is also terrible.
DANIEL: Well, I was thinking it also sounds okay, SPEEDRAN sounds okay. Because we have so many RAN verbs like “they outran the storm” or “they overran their budget”.
BEN: SPEDRUN for sure. SPEDRUN all the way.
DANIEL: Why SPED? No, I don’t like SPEDRUN. He SPEDRUN?
BEN: SPEDRUN is good… it’s something like…
HEDVIG: It’s short.
BEN: It just fits! Like there’s something about it, how it just kind of clicks into the puzzle pieces of that context. Like, have you ever like engaged in speed running, Daniel? Have you ever tried it?
DANIEL: When I run, I can’t get up to any speed, so…
BEN: [PAUSE] So… you do know that it’s not to do with running…
DANIEL: I do know. You finish the game, and then you try and finish the game again faster.
BEN: We had to just clarify.
DANIEL: I was doing a bit.
BEN: Okay. It was a very good bit. You did well, dad, good job.
DANIEL: But if that’s the case, then why… Okay, tell me about HANGGLIDE. What did you do yesterday? You HUNGGLIDE? Come on.
HEDVIG: No. HANGGLIDED.
BEN: HANGGLIDED, yeah.
DANIEL: You don’t past tense the first…
HEDVIG: Also, GLIDED is a word.
BEN: Yes. Exactly, Daniel.
DANIEL: Yes. Yes, it is. Okay. Okay. So you’re, you’re proposing a fairly complex set of rules here. You’re saying if it’s a thing…
HEDVIG: That’s not a problem. Speakers can deal with it.
BEN: All I’m saying is if it feels good, it works.
HEDVIG: Exactly.
DANIEL: But can you think of any other compound verbs that are kind of irregular, where the first one gets the tense?
BEN: But that’s… That doesn’t have to be the rule. This could be a thing. This could be a beautiful unicorn of vocal manifestation.
HEDVIG: Mhm.
DANIEL: Okay, but what we try to do is we’re trying to look for patterns, right? Is this part of any pattern that you know?
BEN: Okay, let’s see.
HEDVIG: Let’s start with the pattern: speed, sped, run, ran.
DANIEL: Yeees.
HEDVIG: Yeah, that’s enough for me.
BEN: What about this, Daniel? What if, given the context in which it takes place, which is to say a hyper-specific clique-y sort of in-dom of human beings?
DANIEL: And pretty new too.
BEN: What if, for lack of a better phrase, what if the uniqueness of it is its appeal to the users of that community? Right? We want to set ourselves apart by… and this happens in gamer lingo all the time, right?
DANIEL: It’s true.
BEN: There is a constant sort of treadmill of: First you would be “elite” at something, then you would be “leet” at something then you would be “1337” at something. All of these things being a manifestation to make them less and less sort of, like, accessible to the layperson.
HEDVIG: What is NOOB from?
BEN: Ooh, good question, actually, I don’t know. What is the etymology of NOOB?
DANIEL: Oh, it’s from a NEWBIE. You’re someone who’s new at the game.
HEDVIG: Okay, there we go!
BEN: Yeah, but what is NEWBIE?
DANIEL: So it’s NEW plus BIE, but then the B jumped. It got re-bracketed, so now it’s NOOB.
BEN: Yeah, right, there you go. SPEDRUN.
DANIEL: And in fact, you know, Hedvig, you have said that we often underestimate — I think it was Öst…, was it Mikael Parkvall? — who said that we underestimate the influence of humour on language change and language innovation.
BEN: Absolutely!
HEDVIG: Yeah, people like to have fun.
BEN: If internet linguistic, like, change has taught us anything, it’s that fun drives a lot of this stuff.
HEDVIG: Have you seen all the people online? There’s various Facebook groups and things where they they pretend that N is a forbidden letter and they only use M.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: The forbiddem masal.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah. I love that.
HEDVIG: So there’s like chickem mugget.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: You just dom’t. You dom’t type it.
HEDVIG: Chickem… mugget?? God, I can’t even.
DANIEL: You mever do.
BEN: Why?! Like, why?
HEDVIG: It’s fun! It’s so much fun!
DANIEL: Because you can’t have a group identity if you just do normal stuff. You have to do weird stuff.
HEDVIG: Yeah, right.
BEN: Gotta be weird, true.
HEDVIG: And this is wholesome weird, at least. Like, it’s not, like, Pepe the Frog or something.
DANIEL: Oh, yeah. Okay, Matthias, is the verb is SPEDRUN. There you go.
BEN: Daniel has been pooh-pooh-ed.
HEDVIG: We decide. We are the Alliance Anglaise… no! Why do I keep calling it that? The Acadamie Anglaise, sorry.
DANIEL: It’s two against one.
HEDVIG: I keep mixing up Alliance Française and Academie Française.
DANIEL: Hmm, common mistake. This one comes from Matt on Facebook, “So I have questions for linguists. I was watching a TikTok.”
HEDVIG: Yes. A tikitok.
BEN: A tikitok?
DANIEL: What?
HEDVIG: A tikitok.
BEN: Oh, is this the Svedish or is this the Hedvig-ish?
HEDVIG: No, no, it was a joke. There was some NBA players. I don’t understand, it’s American sports! One of the players was really popular on TikTok, and the other one came over and said, “Hey, my son really likes you, can you put me in one of your tikitoks?” And I thought that was very funny.
BEN: That’s amazing. That sounds wonderful. I like that.
HEDVIG: Tikitoks.
DANIEL: “I was watching a tikitok — started as a rebellion against a certain person trying to ban the app and now I’m addicted — where an English teacher in Japan was explaining that students shouldn’t use Japanese in English class.” Fair enough. Very common. “But some Japanese words are okay, like SUSHI.”
BEN: Okay, well, okay, because they’ve been, because they’ve been adopted into the English language.
DANIEL: Mhm. “But” says Matt, “if a word like SUSHI is borrowed into English, it’s now an English word, right?”
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly.
DANIEL: “Meaning that saying SUSHI wouldn’t be using Japanese in English class, just an English word of Japanese origin. Or how does that work?”
BEN: But isn’t that what the teacher said? Isn’t that just how you told the story? Like, the teacher said you can’t use Japanese words. But there are some Japanese words you can use, because they’re in English.
HEDVIG: Yeah, but they aren’t Japanese words anymore.
BEN: Ah, okay, I get it.
HEDVIG: Also, probably SUSHI the way English people pronounce it isn’t the way that that word sounds like in Japanese. Right?
DANIEL: Mm, that’s gonna come up in a second here. “So the TL;DR is when does the word borrowed from a second language become part of the first?” Do we have any… do we have any indication?
BEN: I’m thinking Hedvig’s probably on the money here. Like, when it substantially changes pronunciation in common usage.
DANIEL: I think that’s one thing. Definitely.
BEN: Yep.
DANIEL: So I think another thing, not only pronunciation, but when people forget that it’s a loanword. When enough people forget that that’s where it came from.
BEN: Ooof, that’s a tough bar to clear, though.
DANIEL: I know.
BEN: Like, that’s gonna be centuries before we’re there with something like SUSHI, surely.
DANIEL: And it can happen really quickly. Like, PIZZA is only… less than a century old but it’s fully English now. Any other guidelines, Hedvig? We got pronunciation, we’ve got sort of opacity of etymology.
HEDVIG: Can you take morphology? Can you say “I had lots of sushis yesterday”?
DANIEL: That was my next thing. Yes.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Or EMOJIS. You know, right now everybody pluralises it EMOJI, but I think if enough people say lots of EMOJIS…
HEDVIG: To be fair, I think SUSHI is like a mass noun. So you say, like: “I had lots of SUSHI yesterday”, the same way you say “there’s lots of water in the room.”
BEN: I saw lots of sheep.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s right. This isn’t an easy question. Words don’t get an induction ceremony, but it can happen really quickly. And I think it has to do with pronunciation.
BEN: What’s an example of one that’s happened really quickly?
DANIEL: I think EMOJI is… Is it fully English? Maybe not.
HEDVIG: Oh! yeah.
DANIEL: You just gotta feel for these things.
BEN: I would assume so.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I think a lot of people don’t know it has other origins. They just think it’s like a cute affix to, like, EMOTICON, which it’s not.
BEN: I would imagine it… The rapidity with which that’s been inculcated into English is to do with the thing that birthed it? I’m not making a lot of sense here. IE, emoji, the actual thing that the word represents, came about very quickly and rose to popularity very, very quickly, right? In the West. SUSHI, like, spent a long time building itself up in first sort of the United States, and then other Western nations as, like, a food item. And you have to go to a Japanese store to get it, right? But on your phone, you don’t have to go into the Japanese part of your phone. You don’t have to go to the Japanese district of your iPhone and be like: Oh, but I really need like the crying eyes emoji, like, I’m gonna have talk to this vendor who I don’t really understand and it’s gonna be really difficult. Like, no. And so I think because of that, the lineage of SUSHI is going to remain super clear for a really long time, whereas something like EMOJI just doesn’t.
DANIEL: Do you know what I also think might be happening? I think that a word from a language is going to feel more adopted in quicker, if that culture is more similar to ours. If they are not “the other”. You know, I feel like there’s some social othering.
HEDVIG: Yeah, sure.
BEN: But by that logic, EMOJI should have taken just as long as SUSHI should have, right? Because Japanese and Western culture are not super similar.
DANIEL: But we still feel like SUSHI is a foreign word, or do we?
BEN: But we don’t feel like EMOJI is.
HEDVIG: Wait, do we?
DANIEL: Do we?
HEDVIG: Maybe that part, that domain of Japanese society feels more similar to our behaviour, like texting.
BEN: Hmm, yeah.
DANIEL: Because it’s in everybody’s pockets.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I dunno.
BEN: And it’s… and if I’m being fair as well, I think it’s more… it’s mostly that what happened was the rest of the world caught up with how Japan had been living their lives through their phones for many years before the West got to it. So I was surprised to learn that computer ownership in Japan is actually quite a lot less than in the West. Right? So like, in the same way that a lot of people now don’t really have laptops or computers or whatever — like us three do, obviously, because the work we do in podcasting, that sort of thing — but like a lot of people just don’t have a computer, right? Because they’ve got a phone, and it does most of what they need it to do. And if they go to work, there’s a computer there. And that’s that, right? Which is how Japanese society had been running for, like 10 years before we figured out that, like, smartphones were a thing and a bunch of stuff, right? Like, Japan had made smart phones smart a long time before Apple came along.
DANIEL: Wow. Okay.
HEDVIG: That’s really wild to me. Like, I still… like, I know people who use pad… what are we calling them again?
BEN: iPads.
HEDVIG: Yeah, but the things that aren’t Apple?
BEN: Tablets.
DANIEL: Tablets.
HEDVIG: I know a lot of people use tablet computers instead of a computer. And I just can’t… like, they type on it. And they like connect a keyboard. And I’m like: why don’t you have a computer? Just buy a computer! Don’t understand.
BEN: Mate, if you really want a really fun time, what you should do is come and do my job and see an entire generation of kids who have no computer literacy, because everyone’s just like: [MOCKING VOICE] ~oh, they’re digital natives, they’ll just like figure it out.~ And it’s just like, no. You need to discrete instruction. You absolutely do. Kids don’t know how to copy and paste a file. They don’t understand the concept of a file, and like, hard drives and folders and stuff. Because Apple was just like [MOCKING VOICE] ~I’m not gonna like, people don’t need to know how to store things.~ [NORMAL VOICE] Screw you, Apple.
HEDVIG: Yeah. No, I’ve had to… because I teach like beginning programming to some people sometimes. And it’s one thing when the older people, like, I’m like: download this file, put it in a place where you know where it is in your file structure. And I see the look of some of the older people and also some of the younger people looking like: folder structure, don’t know really how comfortable I am with that.
BEN: Do you know? It’s at the point now where I would rather a 55 year old than a 15 year old. If I was just to roll the dice, if I was to like play the averages, I would definitely go trying to explain the concepts to a person who was there before computers came along, then someone who’s just been born into it but doesn’t know. Because they’re just used to total ease of service, right? They are used to being able to look at a phone screen and with very few sort of, like, contextual clues be able to like tap their way to whatever it is they want to do. Whereas a computer you have to, like, know stuff.
DANIEL: Hey, Matt, thanks for that question. Interesting stuff.
BEN: You got Ben ranting. Matt! Well done.
DANIEL: Let’s go on to a question from Moxie from Your Brain on Facts — that’s @BrainOnFactsPod — who tweeted us: “If anyone will know this it’s y’all. Does the recent phrase GOING HAM descend from GOING WHOLE HOG or maybe GOING HOG WILD?” Do you, have you heard this one, Ben? GOING HAM?
BEN: I have not.
DANIEL: I had not either.
HEDVIG: I have no idea what you’re talking about.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: We are OLD.
DANIEL: Going hell for leather is going ham. But where does it come from? Okay, well, your best guess? Does Moxie’s guess sound pretty good, or do you have a better one?
BEN: Going full ham. I wonder. I like to call things biscuits in place of like, stupid or dumb or whatever.
HEDVIG: What?
BEN: Like: Oh, you biscuit. I don’t know why, I just do. And I’m wondering if it’s just like one of those funny word games where you just put a deeply nonsensical word in.
DANIEL: Okay, well, let’s see.
BEN: Is it WHOLE HOG?
DANIEL: No. I took a look at Green’s Dictionary of Slang and they’ve got… John Green has an entry for GO HAM. Comes from the 2000s: “to put in maximum effort or to go hard as a motherfucker.” H-A-M.
BEN: Okay. HAM meaning, like, the genitals with which you are like, fucking this task to destruction?
DANIEL: I don’t think so. I just think it’s like somebody who’s completely mad. Somebody who’s completely crazy, like: rawwwrrrr, like a berserker.
BEN: That’s strange, though, because HAM is very sedate and boring an idea.
DANIEL: Now this was popularised in the Jay Z and Kanye West song HAM.
BEN: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: But I’m not sure if this is a backronym. If the term was in fact, you know, came from somewhere else but then people sort of attached this “hard as a motherfucker” acronym to it. I don’t think so. But I’m reserving that possibility that maybe it was popular like around 2000, 2005, people were saying it for some other reason. And then the motherfucker interpretation sort of took over.
BEN: So, like a folk etymology essentially. Like a Fornication Under Consent of the King type of thing?
HEDVIG: Excuse me?! Oh. I got it now.
DANIEL: Well, just like people think that BAE, if someone’s your bae… Before Anyone Else. Or THOT, t-h-o-t, is That Ho Over There? Neither of those are true, but people have this history of when it is a term, they love to invent backronyms.
BEN: It’s got to be an acronym!
DANIEL: Everything’s an acronym! No, it’s not. So Moxie, at this point the best I could do is say it looks like it’s the motherfucker interpretation, going hard as a motherfucker. But people could have been using it earlier and it could have been a backronym. At this point, it doesn’t look like it, but there you go.
HEDVIG: Ham…
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: …why HAM…?
BEN: It feels like Hedvig’s has just now caught up to the very first part of this question!
HEDVIG: Well, I’m just trying relate back, I’m just like: why… okay, never mind.
DANIEL: Two more. Dynasty [‘dɪ.nə.sti]. This one’s from Diego on Patreon. “Hi there. Listening to episode seven, Mailbag of One Wrong Answer. I noticed Hedvig’s pronunciation of DYNASTY [dɪ.nə.sti] with the first syllable as din [dɪn] instead of dine [daɪn]
HEDVIG: Yep, what’s up.
BEN: Both are acceptable, right? Dynasty [daɪ.nə.sti], dynasty [dɪ.nə.sti]
DANIEL: Yeah, it’s fine. Yeah, I say dynasty [daɪ.nə.sti], I’m from American English.
HEDVIG: I play more Crusader Kings then you, so my opinion rules.
[BEN LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Ah, there you go. You play infinitely more than I do.
BEN: Have you spent 300 hours meticulously crafting a dynasty [dɪ.nə.sti] digitally, Daniel? No? Then you can shut the hell up, you serf, good for nothing.
HEDVIG: Dying twice in a day? I died twice in a day the other day.
DANIEL: Is this what this is about? Okay, okay. A challenge. [CARTOON KNIGHT VOICE] A challenge?!
BEN: How do you lose Crusader Kings? Does every member of your family have to die out?
HEDVIG: I lost twice in a day. No, your heir, the character you’re playing… So for everyone, Crusader Kings is a computer game where you play a character and you try and advance your dynasty, your lineage. If you don’t have any heirs that will carry forward your legacy and you die, then the game ends.
BEN: Gotcha. Gotcha. Gotcha.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Sorry. Carry on.
DANIEL: Diego continues: “It got me thinking about how there are several words in English with a syllable that can be pronounced as either I [aɪ] or a schwa. Civil-[aɪ]-sation, d-[aɪ]-rection” — civil-[ə]-sation, d-[ə]-rection. “I know the modern I [aɪ] sound is a result of the Great Vowel Shift, but my question is, does the Great Vowel Shift have anything to do with this? Have these words always had both pronunciations? Have these syllables always been in flux between a schwa and an [aɪ]? Was REALISE ever pronounced realEEze instead of realAIse? Thanks.”
BEN: Wow.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Wow, this is some galaxy brain thinking.
BEN: Diego. This is fucking… This is hard shit, man. You have really like… other people are like: what do you think about proverbs. And you’re just like: Listen, I know the Great Vowel Shift…
HEDVIG: That was a good question!
BEN: No, no, I don’t… none of these have been bad questions. But this is like, this is rolling in the deep cuts, I think we can say. This question has touched on the Great Vowel Shift, and the like vocalisation unit, schwa [ʒwa] All right, this is not some Johnny come lightly bullshit. This is like: ahhh!
HEDVIG: We need to explain both those things, I think.
DANIEL: Okay, let’s do it. So the Great English Vowel Shift was somewhere between 1400 and 1700 CE.
HEDVIG: Sure.
BEN: And if what… as the nonlinguistic, for everyone listening who is about to learn about the Great Vowel Shift for the first time, like, take a massive hit on a doobie you’ve got nearby, because this shit is gonna bake your noodle. Straight up, like when someone’s just like: Oh, by the way, at a certain point in history, everyone just said vowels, like, a different way!
DANIEL: And no one knows why!
BEN: What?! What?!
DANIEL: Hedvig, you want to take this, or have you got a good bit on this?
HEDVIG: I’m not sure I’m the best… So basically, what you need to do in your brain, first of all, is to make a little triangle, where you have [i], [u], and [a] at the extreme ends. And then you imagine that there’s a space between that, and you plot in all the rest of the vowels you can think of in that space. Now what happened was that what you can think of as letters and how they map onto these sounds, they all sort of just did a little roundabout, swigabout movement.
BEN: They did a do-si-do, didn’t they? They were doing a barn dance, and they all just went: And now swing your partner round and round!
HEDVIG: Yeah, they all step one step forward.
DANIEL: Yep. Everybody said: Hey, you know that word, RIDE [ri:də], which means: Hey, I need a [ri:də] to the bus station, right? I’m just going to start saying that RIDE [ɹaɪd] instead. I’m just going to make that totally long. And then what used to be [i], I’m going to take all the sounds that are [e] and I’m going to move them up to [i]. So now clæne [klænə] becomes CLEAN. All right? So everything’s just swirling around here, and nobody knows why. And it happened, you know, for over the course of 300 years.
BEN: If ever there was… I know, like, archaeologists love to point at pyramids and be like: Mm, aliens. I feel like this is the alien thing. 100%, right? Like, a bunch of aliens came down with and were drunk, first of all, and were just kind of like: Hehehe, you want to do something fun? You just want to change how this entire civilisation speaks for, like, the next two millennia? Hah hah hah!
DANIEL: No, no, no, no, no, dude, let’s wait 100 years until they have books and their spelling gets mostly settled. Let’s do it then. After that. That’ll stuff ’em!
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: It’s so weird. Okay, so that’s the Great Vowel Shift.
HEDVIG: The vowel shift, so this Great Vowel Shift is an interesting thing that people mostly have talked about. I mean, so we’re talking about English here. But there’s no reason to assume that this kind of phenomena doesn’t occur in other languages as well. But we just don’t know really about them yet. It would be really fun if, if anyone knew the same thing.
BEN: Well, I just worry about like… when I heard the story for the first time, there’s the initial like, what?! That’s crazy! And then I assume like everyone who hears about the Great Vowel Shift, eventually, my brain was like, it could happen tomorrow! [LAUGTER] No one knows why it came. No one knows where it went! It could come back again. And so tomorrow, I could be, like, RUDING to work instead of RIDING to work, and a bunch of other crazy nonsense.
DANIEL: Well, there is… there are shifts in progress. I mean, there’s the Northern Cities shift in the US where instead of saying Bob, they say Bab [bæb].
BEN: Bab, bab, bab.
DANIEL: Well, Bab…
HEDVIG: Well, that also underlines the why historical linguists don’t really use vowels that much, because vowels are so…
BEN: Just make no sense.
HEDVIG: They’re on such a continuum. And you can… it seems like humans are able to accept so much variation with vowels. Like, a lot of different people have different vowels, and people don’t seem to have a massive problem understanding each other.
BEN: And I guess that’s mostly how accents work as well, right?
DANIEL: That’s our next question!
HEDVIG: Yeah. A lot of…
BEN: Like, when you go to Liverpool, right? It’s the vowels that are really doing the legwork of making that accent, right? DRUM becomes DROOM, and all that kind of stuff.
HEDVIG: It seems like vowels, and also, maybe intonation and maybe stress placement are things where people… the human brain is like: yeah, I’ll accept variation, because I’ll still understand what you’re saying. Which means you can grab on to it if you want to use it for identity marking, because people will notice it, but they won’t… they won’t have comprehension.
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: This is my personal theory that there are certain things… like, you can’t just start pronouncing all the consonants differently, because then people won’t actually understand you.
BEN: Yeah, unintelligible.
HEDVIG: But if you want to mark where you’re from, you can just shift your vowels around a bit. Yeah. It’s like, I’m watching The Crown right now. And the Queen’s vowels famously.
DANIEL: Yeah. Okay, we got… We’ll come back to this for Nikolai’s question next, but let’s go back to dynasty [dɪnəsti] dynasty [daɪnəsti]. So you know how, so dynasty [dɪnəsti] has three syllables, dy.na.sty. You know how it’s proNOUNce — two syllables — but when it turns to three, it’s proNUNciation? Or like SERENE [sə.ɹi:n], but SERENITY [sə.ɹen.ə.ti]?
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay. So this is happening, because this is part of a process called — get ready, this is the term — trisyllabic laxing.
BEN: All right.
HEDVIG: Okay.
BEN: God bless you!
DANIEL: So what’s happening here is that you got a long vowel in a three-or-more syllable word. And instead of being really tense — like SERENE, [i], really tense — it turns more to an [ə], SERENITY, serenity.
BEN: So what’s longer version, like DYNASTIC? What’s the bigger word that we’re trying to get to here?
DANIEL: What’s the short, what is the shorter word? I don’t even know what that would be.
BEN: Dyn, dyn…
DANIEL: What was the… what’s the tense version of dynasty? Well, dynasty’s [daɪnəsti] the tense version.
HEDVIG: Dynastic was the closest thing, I think.
BEN: Yeah, that’s interesting.
HEDVIG: Dynastic head.
BEN: Dynastic.
DANIEL: But we do it in words like this. And the interesting thing is that in British English, it’s more likely to lax than American English. And that’s why we have words like DYNASTY [dɪnəsti] instead of DYNASTY [daɪnəsti], PRIVACY [pɹɪvəsi] instead of PRIVACY [pɹaɪvəsi] and VITAMIN [vɪtəmɪn] instead of VITAMIN [vaɪtəmɪn].
BEN: Oh! Interesting.
HEDVIG: Ohhh, so TOMATO [təˈmeɪtoʊ] and TOMATO [təˈmɑːtəʊ].
DANIEL: Yeah, so it’s PRIVATE [pɹaɪvət], but PRIVACY [pɹɪvəsi], VITAL [vaɪtəl], but VITAMIN [vɪtəmɪn] — all right? — and American English just keeps the tense versions. Now, back to Diego’s question: Does this have anything to do with the Great English Vowel Shift? And the answer is no, this stuff happened way before the Great English Vowel Shift. Once again, the vowel shift was between 1400 and 1700, and this goes all the way back to Middle English and even to Old English. This is a constant thing that’s been going on in English for a long time. So nope, they’re not related.
BEN: Interesting.
HEDVIG: That’s pretty cool.
DANIEL: Okay, finishing up. Let’s get back to our earlier discussion. Nikoli asks on our Discord channel: “Why is it so common for English dialects to differ mostly in their vowels? Do other languages have similar dialect contrasts? Is this related to our having tons of vowels? My linguistics final paper is on the cot-caught merger. Muahahaha.”
HEDVIG: So I feel like… I feel like we all have, like, theories that we keep returning to. Ben, for you… did we talk about this, that children have an easier time learning because they don’t have much else to do?
BEN: Yeah, like, yeah. Like, children are no better learning languages, they just have literally every need taken care of.
HEDVIG: Yeah, they have nothing better else to do, and the only thing they want to do is control their environment and they need language to do that. And mine is, there are certain things in language that people are able to accept variation in and still keep comprehension, but they accept variability, and you can use that variability to do something else that isn’t meaning. That is, for example, what we call indexicality, which is identity things.
BEN: Identity.
HEDVIG: So that’s my… so I call that theory. So if any of our… if any of our listeners listen to this show, and are gonna write a paper, you have to write, like, H… there’s probably… they always want to have good ideas!
BEN: But someone’s also had them first.
HEDVIG: Someone wrote a book on it in the ’80s.
BEN: Didn’t you discover this when you were doing your PhD? It’s really hard to come up with new ideas!
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah. [LAUGHTER] No, I… my professor in Stockholm, Östen Dahl, I would sometimes, like, go around and think I had a good idea, and then I would research, and he would almost always have written a paper about it. It’s like, he like, set me down a cognitive path. And it just led…
BEN: That he’d already trod very well.
HEDVIG: Yeah! And then I came across something, and I was like: Oh, this is a wonderful landmark! And then like: No, no, no, he’s put a flag here.
BEN: Damn. Damn!
DANIEL: Well, okay, so Hedvig, it sounded like what you were saying earlier is that vowels… there’s a lot of shift possible in there because they’re kind of slippery. And also, there’s a great deal of tolerance for variation in vowels, whereas for consonants, you wouldn’t have that much variation. So this kind of thing could happen anywhere? Accents in different languages are going to be also vowel based, like they are in English, mostly?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Ooh, but hang on, though. What about tonal languages?
HEDVIG: Yeah, I think they do too. I think vowels are a thing. Yeah. And the tricky thing is also — I would argue, based on, what was it, Lithuanian and Swedish, a couple more? — that if you have some sort of tone intonational stuff, you can maybe use that as well. Not if you’re a super tonal language, but if you have a little bit of it, you could… what’s a good…? For English, for you guys, it’s probably stress placement rather than intonation.
BEN: Right.
DANIEL: Mm. I feel like Nikoli’s question is interesting though, because like, I’m thinking of my one point of comparison that I know really well, Spanish. You know, Spanish doesn’t have… like English has 14 vowels or 15 vowels, depending on how you want to slice it. And Spanish has maybe five or six? And I can think of lots of consonant-based variety differences, like the L in MILLION, some people say million [mɪlion], some people say million [mɪλon], and there’s [mɪʒon]. There’s the S turning to H thing? MISMO [mizmo] turning to MISMO [mihmo], and there’s an S to theta thing.
BEN: True, actually, yeah, no, Spanish does a lot of consonant shifting, doesn’t it?
DANIEL: But I can’t… I can hardly think of any vowel differences in Spanish.
HEDVIG: But is that because… okay, so the other thing we got to think of is: if we have our vowel space, and if you have 15 or 14 things in there, then as soon as you… if you imagine them as little districts, they sort of carve up the space. In English, as soon as you move a little bit, you might move out of your designated space and then people will be like: Ah, it’s a big change. But what I’m seeing is that maybe Spanish are moving within those districts. It’s just that people don’t think about it, because they don’t get out of the neighborhood.
BEN: Right, So, [a] and [eɪ] are different in English, but in Spanish, that would just be the same vowel.
HEDVIG: Yeah. This… I’m happy for this… I like hypothesis to be disproven. So, so far my “vowels are prime territory for identity marking”… I’m happy for it to be disproven.
BEN: But I mean, Daniel brings up a good point, which is that you were kind of saying I can’t think of a lot of… like, a lot of examples of how consonants shift, but it’s true. In Spanish, like, that is where a lot of that work does happen, right?
DANIEL: So is Nikoli right? Do we perceive lots of accents because we have such a detailed vowel space?
BEN: Maybe. I mean, the thing I think about — and this kind of adds to Hedvig’s theory — is like, we’ve all seen those dumb internet things of like: If you can read this, you’re a genius, and they’ve just removed all the vowels from all of the words. Right? And you’re not a genius. It’s just that the consonants are the things that do a lot of the work.
HEDVIG: That’s also just how Hebrew works, right?
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Yeah. And Arabic, right? Like, you just write without vowels? I think. Yeah, I think that the consonants, certainly in English, the only language I actually speak, are the things that are actually letting you know the meanings of words. And, and as I said, this is sort of backing up Hedvig’s theory, and the vowels are like flavour text. Like, it’s just like: make it a bit nicer.
DANIEL: I just think this is such a good question. And it could lead to so many interesting ideas coming out.
BEN: Who wants to do a PhD? Not this guy!
DANIEL: Not me. No way… Okay! Hey, that was a great question. And they were all such fantabulous questions. I feel like I learned a lot through all of this. So thanks to everyone who suggested them.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: And now it’s time for Words of the Week.
HEDVIG: [TELETEXT NOISES] Boop boop boop!
DANIEL: Let’s start with one that I think you won’t know, because it’s a neologism. Take a guess as to what this one means: ORBISCULATE. Orbisculate.
HEDVIG: Excuse me? Orbisculate.
BEN: Orbisculate.
HEDVIG: Is it used BISCUIT to mean NUMBNUT?
DANIEL: No, not this time.
BEN: It reminds me of DEFENESTRATE, that unnecessarily complex word to throw something out a window. ORBICULATE. Is it to do with, like, maiming or injuring someone in a certain way?
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: Ah!
HEDVIG: Is it ORE, as in gold?
DANIEL: No
BEN: ORBISCULATE… orbs… like, taking scoops out of a person’s flesh?
HEDVIG: Ohh, it’s gouging eyes out.
DANIEL: You’re on the right track with the eyes, but it’s not that terrible.
BEN: Just poking someone’s eyes.
HEDVIG: Put your finger in the eyes. The thing you’re not allowed to do in wrestling.
DANIEL: Hedvig, I feel like you’re so close, so I’m going to describe what this means. This word comes from the late Neil Krieger, a dad, father of Jonathan and Hilary Krieger, the latter a journalist. They say, “Our father invented ORBISCULATE in college to describe when a citrus fruit squirts in your eye, [LAUGHTER] and then proceeded to use it so often when we were growing up that we were shocked to discover it wasn’t in the dictionary.” So they are trying to get ORBISCULATE into a dictionary. They’re on a campaign.
BEN: I’ve got to say, their dad needed better technique, if so regularly did this occur that he needed a word for it.
DANIEL: Or just stop eating grapefruit. That’s all you got to do. So you can go to orbisculate.com, you can use it, you can type it. If people start using it, then dictionaries will notice and it will make its way in, and it will be a fitting tribute to their dad.
BEN: It’s good. ORBISCULATE.
HEDVIG: I like it. I’m much for using one word for a thing when you can. Ste’s learning Swedish right now and he’s finding that we have a lot of, like, one word for things that English just like phrasal verbs for and I’m for it. DEFENESTRATE, ORBISCULATE. Thumbs up.
DANIEL: This grapefruit ORBISULATED into my eye!
BEN: Disagree.
DANIEL: And now I’m going to defenestrate it.
BEN: Disagree. That’s okay. We can. We’re allowed to.
DANIEL: Next one: MONOLITH.
BEN: Oh god!
DANIEL: We like a bit of mystery, don’t we?
BEN: It’s not a mystery!
DANIEL: No, it’s not. So these enormous metal things about three or four meters tall, about as wide as a person…
BEN: Plinths. I’m going to call it a plinth.
DANIEL: A plinth! Yes, it’s a plinth. These silver things have been appearing. The first one appeared in Utah and then was subsequently carried off by people who objected. Romania, one appeared there. And then lately California, because of course California.
BEN: Naturally.
HEDVIG: Wait, I don’t know what this is about. Also, monoliths are stone.
BEN: Have you not seen this story, Hedvig? Have you not seen any of the internet stories about this?
HEDVIG: No. I’ve been LARPing parent for two weeks.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I don’t… And then tried to do my job. I haven’t followed news at all.
BEN: Yeah, fair enough. It is a large metal pillar thing. Think 2001: A Space Odyssey, that thing, but like silver and shiny.
HEDVIG: I reiterate, monoliths are supposed to be stone. That’s what LITH- is about.
BEN: Well, then what would you call it out of metal?
HEDVIG: Plinths!
DANIEL: No, that’s… that’s true though, etymologically these are not monoliths, because LITHOS is stone. PLINTH is good, metal plinth.
HEDVIG: Why am I like this right now? I don’t know. I’m choosing this hill. [LAUGHTER]
BEN: Seriously!
DANIEL: ~That’s not a monolith! And a house can only be DILAPIDATED if it’s a stone house, because LAPID.~
BEN: So to catch you up, Hedvig: there was, as you can imagine, there was a bunch of like: ~Is it aliens?!~ Like, that clickbait-y stuff.
DANIEL: Yeah, but people are just being silly because they like it.
HEDVIG: Is it to do with Elon Musk?
DANIEL: No.
BEN: I think it’s pranksters, I genuinely think it’s like… did you ever watch the Ghost in the Shell television series Standalone Complex?
HEDVIG: Yes, I did.
BEN: Right. So I believe, personally, that it’s one of those. A standalone complex, right? Like where someone did a thing. And then some other people did a thing. And now it’s becoming like, like a Baader-Meinhof complex, right? Like, where it’s, like, a self-sustaining sort of thing.
DANIEL: Copycats.
HEDVIG: I love that that was your reference for that. You could have picked so many other things. Good job.
BEN: Nerd!
DANIEL: And David Astle, the crossword constructor has tweeted: “Monolithium: Narcotic effect of misery, in a year of general misery.”
Finally, ZOMBIE. Back in 2018, we commented on ZOMBIE compounds like the ZOMBIE ECONOMY, ZOMBIE BANK, ZOMBIE MEME. Well, I got a few more zombies for you. ZOMBIE BATTERIES. You know, lithium ion batteries are extremely flammable, and sometimes they get disposed of wrong and damaged. They can cause massive flare up fires. Nasty, nasty. Yeah. ZOMBIE OIL WELLS. These uncapped wells that are spewing methane gas. And ZOMBIE COMPANIES, which are like ZOMBIE BANKS, in that they don’t make enough money to pay off the interest on their loans. So we’re seeing an expansion of ZOMBIE. I like it. So I thought I would throw it in.
BEN: I’ve always thought that it needed to be applied to botnets.
DANIEL: Mhm.
HEDVIG: Speaking of zombie batteries, and lithium batteries catching fire, I’m very bad at doing this. But if I can, it’s prob… I’ve heard that you’re not supposed to charge things when you’re sleeping. Because weird things can happen when you overcharge things. Is this with lithium batteries… is this crazy?
BEN: I would be flabbergasted if that was true with contemporary consumer electronics.
HEDVIG: I know! I know. But I’ve been told it is, and now I’m scared of charging things when I’m sleeping. But maybe that’s…
BEN: What I’ve heard of that is legitimately a thing, is that you — because a lot of people do do this — you shouldn’t charge your phone under your pillow, because the shorting of, like, charger cables can start fires, kind of thing. As you, like, move around and that sort of thing.
HEDVIG: Yeah, that’s good.
BEN: But no, like, surely… surely we’re not in an era where, like…
HEDVIG: I know, right?
BEN: …this gets damaged by being plugged in for too long. Like, my phone today, I spilled some water on it. And I got a little message that was like: Hey, um, some water got in your USB jack so we’re shutting it down for now and we’ll let you know when it’s safe to be, like, rejiggered, kind of thing. So if my phone has the intelligence to do that, surely it has the intelligence not to overcharge.
HEDVIG: I’ve heard that even if it doesn’t start fires, if you overcharge your battery, it might make the lifespan a bit worse.
DANIEL: That is true. That one is true.
HEDVIG: It’s not gonna start a fire, but it might not be the best thing for the battery in the long term.
DANIEL: They tend to like being charged up between 20% and 80%. 100% all the time, you might see some decrease in battery life.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: But also like our phones don’t last long enough for that to be a thing.
HEDVIG: Mine did.
BEN: Like, my previous phone went for, like, five years without a problem. Then again, ~I don’t buy Apple because they’re trash.~
HEDVIG: ~I don’t buy Apple either.~
DANIEL: Away with you! We’ll have the Apple debate some day. ORBISCULATE, MONOLITH, and ZOMBIE: our three Words of the Week. And don’t forget to participate in our annual Word of the Week of the Year vote. It’s going on right now on Facebook and Twitter. Every word is a separate comment in our massive thread, and you can react, and that’s a vote. You can also make funny comments about any of the words, and you can advocate or disadvocate some of them. So that’s a lot of fun. We’ll have the results for our next episode.
BEN: Get in there and roast some words!
HEDVIG: I’ve forgotten the ones that I’ve suggested. I’m going to go in and figure out which ones I’ve suggested and upvote them in pure narcissism.
DANIEL: A few comments from Stig Martyr on Twitter. “Hey, @becauselangpod, can we make SCREENSHAT the past tense of SCREENSHOT?” Done.
BEN: [GIGGLING] I like that a lot.
HEDVIG: Not that. To be fair, Apple encourages me to use the word SCREENGRAB.
DANIEL: Oh, that’s all right. Well, I think according to your rule, it should be SCRONESHAT, right?
BEN: There’s no past tense of SCREEN!
HEDVIG: SCREEN is a noun!
DANIEL: SCREEN is a verb, come on, y’all. We’re gonna… we’re gonna SCREEN the picture. Never mind.
HEDVIG: SCRONESHAT.
DANIEL: SCRONESHAT. Thanks, Stig. And from Elías, “Currently listening to the episode, and since you’re struggling to find a city rhyming with Hedvig, I’m offering you Hedvig à Martigues, a cute little town in the southeast of France by the Mediterranean Sea, where I’m sure you’ll find decent coffee.”
HEDVIG: Ah, that’s super cute! I love it.
DANIEL: Thanks, Elías. What do you think of Hedvig, would you go?
HEDVIG: That’s lovely. Thank you. I love it.
DANIEL: I still want to watch the Netflix show “Hedvig in Leipzig”.
HEDVIG: Well, I’m not in Leipzig right now.
DANIEL: It’s the show’s concept. I’m not sure it would translate to the south of France.
HEDVIG: Isn’t the show’s concept Hedvig is somewhere in Europe?
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: I guess so.
HEDVIG: And with a bad microphone.
BEN: Where in the world is Hedvig today?
DANIEL: Well, I think I would like to watch Hedvig à Martigues. That would be cute as well.
HEDVIG: That is very cute. I like it. Thank you very much.
[OUTRO MUSIC]
HEDVIG: If you have some fun Words of the Week that you want to suggest, words that have been buzzing around in your brain during the week, please send them to us. And also other reactions, comments and praise. Please don’t send negative things. No, I’m kidding.
DANIEL: Abuse.
HEDVIG: You can send… you can send abuse. Well, not abuse, but you can tell us when we’ve been wrong in a way you think we care about.
DANIEL: Yes, please.
BEN: Ugh, this is the most qualified over-justification of how they should comment.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yeah, no, but it’d be fun to get some Word of the Week ideas actually, maybe. Yeah. If you want to do that, you can send your reactions, comments and praise to Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastadon, Patreon. We are @becauselangpod everywhere on those. You can also send us an old school email at hello@becauselanguage.com. And you can check out our Redbubble store where – reminder, reminder – we are Talk the Talk still. Better still, if you like the show, and you want other people to find it, tell a friend about it. Or leave us a positive review somewhere where you get podcasts.
DANIEL: Good time to mention Sandman, who for the last two or maybe three weeks has been absolutely relentless in promoting us, and other linguistic podcasts. It’s like he searches for people who are looking for podcast recommendations and then mentions us, so we’re very grateful. Thanks Dustin. Check out his show @StoriesSandman.
BEN: Now if you’re listening to this as it comes out, that means you’re a Patron, because this is one of our shows that we do for Patrons. We’ll drop it for the general public later on, but you get a tasty early listen in your ear holes. And it’s Patrons like you who are able to allow us to keep this show going and to do bonus episodes like this one. We use the money for a bunch of good purposes. It’s not just lining our pocketbooks, I give you the big tip. No, we are using this money to transcript our episodes so that those who are Deaf or non-hearing can access our fun interesting linguistic show as well. So you are definitely doing good work for other people. If you’re a patron, make sure your details are up to date at patreon.com/becauselangpod and we will be sending you postcards and stickers real soon.
Among our wonderful Patrons are [BIG BREATH]: Termy, Chris, Lyssa, The Major, Chris, Matt, Damien, Helen, Bob, Jack, Kitty, Lord Mortis, Christelle, Elías, Michael, Larry, Binh, Kristofer, Dustin, Andy, Maj, Nigel, — sorry, had to scroll — Kate, Jen, Nasrin, Nikoli, Ayesha my wonderful partner, Emma, Andrew. And new this week: Moe and James. Thank you, our patrons.
DANIEL: Our music is written and performed by Drew Krapljanov. He’s in the band Dideon’s Bible. Their new single “John Candy” is on their Bandcamp page right now, and it’s a packing listen. Drew is also a member of Ryan Beno, another great band. Thanks for listening. Catch you next time. Because Language.
[PAUSE]
ALL: Wooo!
[PAUSE]
DANIEL: Did you know that some people are actually… we’ve had two people buying stuff lately?
HEDVIG: Yeah?
DANIEL: Yeah, one was the Lingusitic sticker and then the other one was the t-shirt… the Language Police t-shirt with you on it, Ben.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Wait, which one? The sweary one, or the non-sweary one?
DANIEL: The non-sweary one.
BEN: Oh, boo.
DANIEL: I know. But somebody is gonna be walking around with you throwing an emoji into a crowd of…
BEN: Looking like the whitest of all revolutionaries.
DANIEL: Well, antifa, you know.
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: That is still funny.