Time to get to this Mailbag!
- Why are flip-flops called ‘thongs’?
- When people write the date as ‘7 April’ or ‘April 7’, do they also say it that way?
- Why do we add ‘up’ to verbs like ‘cut up’ or ‘eat up’?
- Why do some words have opposite meanings?
Listen to this episode
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Become a Patron!Show notes
A Missouri Woman Got Merriam-Webster to Agree to Update Its Definition of Racism
https://www.theroot.com/a-missouri-woman-got-merriam-webster-to-agree-to-update-1843981946
Florissant woman helps change Merriam Webster’s definition of racism | News Headlines | kmov.com
https://www.kmov.com/news/florissant-woman-helps-change-merriam-websters-definition-of-racism/article_30bba202-a9d9-11ea-ba9d-cb6e06fdc201.html
Fawlty Towers: John Cleese attacks ‘cowardly’ BBC over episode’s removal – BBC News
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-53020335
Fawlty Towers, John Cleese: UKTV reinstates The Germans after racism row
https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/tv/flashback/uktv-reinstates-fawlty-towers-episode-the-germans-after-racism-row/news-story/cd4a46fb42a0336c5643c29c29485eff
How effective are language learning apps? | EurekAlert! Science News
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-06/msu-hea060820.php
Why do Americans write the month before the day? | US news | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/dec/16/why-do-americans-write-the-month-before-the-day
Why do Americans put the date the wrong way around?
https://www.news.com.au/technology/why-do-americans-put-the-date-the-wrong-way-around/news-story/2623ac4a756a5948df44c0233ea8b4a9
flip-flop – Wiktionary
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/flip-flop
thong – Wiktionary
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/thong
weather | etymonline.com
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=weather
Twitter: Monuments topple around the world
https://twitter.com/i/events/1271522610548015106
King Leopold Ranges renamed by WA Government amid global Black Lives Matter protests – ABC News
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-12/king-leopold-ranges-renamed-amid-black-lives-matter-protests/12349532
The Woman with the Handbag – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woman_with_the_Handbag
Swedish town nixes statue of woman hitting neo-Nazi | The Times of Israel
https://www.timesofisrael.com/swedish-town-nixes-statue-of-woman-hitting-neo-nazi/
The New York Times Tom Cotton op-ed: Why the media must defend American values – Vox
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21281309/new-york-times-op-ed-editor-tom-cotton-is-trump-authoritarian
“Vagenda of Manocide” Is Our Pick for Best Sign of the 2016 Election
https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/vagenda-manocide-election-sign/
Facebook reax thread
https://www.facebook.com/becauselangpod/photos/a.1020661894627269/3697840903576008/?type=3&theater
Twitter reax thread
https://twitter.com/becauselangpod/status/1272013562894938112
Transcript
BEN: Hey, patrons.
HEDVIG: You going to do this saucy?
DANIEL: Uh… saucy?
HEDVIG: Oh, Ben sounded saucy.
[THEME MUSIC]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to this bonus episode of Because Language, a podcast about linguistics, the science of language. I’m Daniel Midgley, let’s meet the team. It’s…
[AWKWARD PAUSE, LAUGHTER]
BEN: Well, I suppose I should introduce myself then.
DANIEL: It’s Ben Ainslie.
BEN: Hi, patrons. It’s lovely to see you.
HEDVIG: What are you drinking, Ben?
BEN: I just had a sip of cordial. Thank you, by the way, for outing me to everyone. I appreciate that.
DANIEL: Well, this is a bonus episode, so we can, you know, get a little bit casual. You’re having… What flavor cordial?
BEN: Grapefruit. I like things bitter and sour simultaneously.
DANIEL: Dang. You know what I’m going to do, since you’re having grapefruit cordial, I’m going to break out a can of Squirt from the USA.
BEN and HEDVIG: Squirt?!
HEDVIG: Oh, lord!
BEN: That is a revolting sounding thing.
HEDVIG: Uhh, anyway, yeah, let’s get off track for that. Ask me who I am, Daniel.
DANIEL: Okay, and we’ve got Hedvig Skirgård. Hi, Hedvig.
HEDVIG: Hi! I’m here. I’m drinking coffee, like a normal person.
DANIEL: Hmm.
HEDVIG: Yeah. I’m drinking Irish cream coffee. It’s just not Irish cream, it’s coffee flavored like Irish cream.
DANIEL: Dang!
HEDVIG: Yeah. It’s very nice.
BEN: Is that just Bailey’s? Is that what that’s supposed to be?
HEDVIG: Um, yeah, sort of.
BEN: Is that what makes it… Irish?
HEDVIG: Yeah. It’s just a very pleasant… I’ve gotten into… I think now that I’m over thirty, I’m allowed to drink things that I used to think were silly. So I’m drinking, like, vanilla lattés? [LAUGHTER] And just like, caramel syrupy coffee flavoured things.
BEN: So you are Benjamin Button-ing, in terms of your palate.
HEDVIG: Yeah!
BEN: You started off sensibly, and you’re now going into ridiculous childhood flavours.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I think I’m just secure in my adulthood.
DANIEL: One of the effects of getting a PhD.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah, and just like: I can do whatever I want.
DANIEL: Well, I’m just drinking water and the aforementioned carbonated beverage, Squirt.
HEDVIG: Anyway, I hear we have a show now.
DANIEL: We do. [LAUGHTER]
BEN: On the grapevine. Turns out we’re not just chatting to each other for the lolz!
DANIEL: Well, the response to our first show has been tremendous, so thanks once again, everybody who contributed. Also, everybody who gave us your favorite things about language. And we’re going to read those at the end.
HEDVIG: Yes. Amazing.
BEN: I cannot wait. But before we do that, Daniel, should we not check out what’s going on in the world of linguistics?
HEDVIG: In the week gone past.
DANIEL: This one has been suggested to us by Bob and Ayesha.
BEN: Yep.
DANIEL: The question here is: what is racism? Definitions differ.
BEN: Yeah, this one this one floated across my desk, as well. And I really liked the genesis of this story, which was basically: a woman just cracked the shits, and was just so sick of trying to engage people in discussions about what racism is, and the systemic realities of living in a racialised, white supremacist world, and having a whole bunch of numpties be like: ~Uh, well, um, I think you’ll find that the actual definition of racism doesn’t quite match up with that~ and she was like: “Fuck. I am so done with this shit.” So she just wrote a bunch of letters to Merriam-Webster, being like: “Can you just sort your fucking shit out, please?”
DANIEL: We are talking, of course, about Kennedy Mitchum, a graduate of Drake University, 22 years old, living in Florissant, Missouri.
BEN: Yeah, so, like, at 22, I was just getting drunk a lot, and this woman has just, like, fixed the definition of racism, so…
HEDVIG: Good job, yeah.
DANIEL: I think that those bros should have agreed on the unwritten rule for white people and that is: I don’t get to decide if something’s racist or not.
BEN: No, but that’s the classic thing about dictionaries. And I know, based on our survey that we put out to our listeners — there’s a whole bunch of our listeners who charted, like, the same path that I have in being on this show, which is once upon a time feeling very smart and snooty about, like, knowin’ the rules and knowin’ the dictionary and stuff…
DANIEL: ‘Cause that’s what makes us special at school, you know.
BEN: And then… yeah, exactly, right? And then just busting that out whenever you feel like it, like a doofus. And then it’s only through this show that I was like: Oh, wait, that’s just being a massive douche. And so, yeah — like, I totally… I’m unsurprised that a whole bunch of people have been using the dictionary as a really handy straw man for, like: ~Mmmm but racism is actually really fun still, so I’d rather not accept your definition if I could?~ Essentially, that’s what people say, right? When they’re just like: “Mmm, yeah, okay. Or… it could be this much narrower thing that doesn’t make me need to change any of my behaviour.”
HEDVIG: It’s doubling up on bullshit, because dictionaries aren’t the end-and-be-all of the meaning of words, and racism… races are socially constructed. It’s just a lot.
DANIEL: Let’s get into the definition of racism.
HEDVIG: Yeah, what’s the new and what’s the old definition? I want to know.
BEN: Yeah, let’s do that. Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, I think we can all agree that an integral part of racism is something like: treating people badly because of the color of their skin. But some people are convinced that this necessary condition is in fact a sufficient condition, and that if a Black person treats a white person badly because they’re white, then this is somehow racism.
BEN: Right, so the classic, like, reverse-racism argument. And I’m using, like, the most air-quoty air quotes I can when I put forward the word “argument” to describe that.
DANIEL: Right. And they would say: ~Well, black people can be racist too.~
BEN: It’s almost a game for me to play with my students of just dropping the following sentence, be like: “Oh, but you can’t be racist if you’re Black.” And just watching them lose their minds. It’s just… it’s so much fun.
DANIEL: Well, people who write and think about this would agree that a necessary condition of racism is systemic or structural oppression. The entire system is set up for white supremacy and so, because people of colour don’t have access to that kind of unjust social advantage, racism isn’t a term that can really be applied to things that people of colour do. You know, you have to call it something else, like being a jerk or being discriminatory or something, but you can’t really call it racism unless systemic oppression is in the mix. So the Merriam-Webster dictionary is updating according to Ms Mitchum’s emails. Here’s a quote: “I basically told them they need to include that there is systematic oppression on people. It’s not just ‘I don’t like someone.’ It’s a system of oppression for a certain group of people.” And the editor Alex Chambers says: “This revision would not have been made without your persistence in contacting us about this problem. We sincerely thank you for repeatedly (!) writing in, and apologize for the harm and offense we have caused in failing to address the issue sooner. I will see to it that the entry for racism is given the attention it sorely needs.” Hurrah!
BEN: She Andy Dufresne’d them!
DANIEL: Yes, she did!
HEDVIG: What’s that?
BEN: She wrote a letter every week to the Department of Corrections, asking for money for the library, and then they finally gave it and she’s like: Now I’m going to write two letters a week!
DANIEL: So there you go. Kennedy Mitchum, fixing the dictionary. We salute you.
HEDVIG: Good job.
BEN: Every day hero. Love it. Love it. Making me feel terrible about the deeply mediocre life I’ve lived right up until this point.
DANIEL: Oh, Ben, you’re on this show!
BEN: [LAUGHS] I stand by my statement.
DANIEL: One of the news items that floated across the desk is that UKTV, owned by the BBC, removed an episode of Fawlty Towers — it was “The Germans” — from their streaming service. And then they put it back.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Now I haven’t dug down into the specifics of this particular story, but there has been this story going on quite a bit across a bunch of different platforms, right? Like, certain episodes of, like, children’s cartoons have been taken down. “Gone With the Wind” has been removed from streaming services, and a bunch of other things. So the thing that I wanted to ask you guys, because I’m not super familiar with this one, is why did it go back up? Was it kowtowing to a bunch of butthurt people? Or was there something else at work?
DANIEL: I believe the phrase they used was “public outcry”, but that meant that the BBC decided against dropping the episode and instead running it with a bit of context. But you know, at first I was unclear on why it even went down in the first place, because I didn’t remember that episode incredibly well.
BEN: I don’t either. I mean, there’s only 12 episodes, but I don’t remember all of them super well.
HEDVIG: So I was chatting to Ste about it earlier. So in that episode they used the n-word?
DANIEL: That’s the one.
BEN: Oh, dear.
HEDVIG: My understanding is also that the character that does it is not to be understood as, like, an authoritative character.
DANIEL: Right, the character is the Major, that elderly conservative mildly racist character. And in the scene, Basil and Polly are sort of listening but not agreeing, so there’s a bit of context there. I was actually okay with leaving it out. I think the show works without the joke.
BEN: Yeah, like, I’m… the one that’s just really playing with me is how many people are getting bent out of shape around stuff being taken down. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Right? Like, if you take a single episode of Fawlty Towers away, it’s not like… Everyone keeps banging on about this, like, ~erasure of art and history~ and stuff, and I’m like: Um, okay, fine, I guess, but like — one out of 12 episodes of Fawlty Towers going away; is that really just like ~erasing art and history?~ I don’t think so.
DANIEL: Or even just editing out the joke.
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: I am not sure I disagree, but I do think that… I don’t think, like, the Fawlty Towers joke is like prime history and art that needs to be kept. But it was there, and… I just don’t want people to get, like, gaslighted when they look back and they look at these shows and: “Hm, people said these shows were problematic, but they don’t seem problematic to me. Am I pretending things?”
BEN: Ah, I see what you mean.
HEDVIG: It’s like: no, there used to be things in there that people then removed. It’s like… so I’m a big fan of the podcast “My Brother, My Brother and Me.” And they have publicly said several times — they’re a bunch of comedians — that the first 100 episodes of their podcast — this is a podcast that’s been running for ten years — they have publicly said several times that they think that they did a lot of bad things in it. That that they made jokes that were inappropriate that they don’t stand for anymore, but they have decided to keep it up. As in: We did this; we’re not gonna pretend we didn’t; we changed and we do other kinds of comedy now, and this is what we do now. But they don’t want to remove those things because they don’t want to…
BEN: Yeah, I’m not down for sanitising. Like, I’m not down for editing things to make them different from how they were, but I am down for making them not necessarily readily available in a streaming package, right? So like, in this particular instance, if (let’s say) Fawlty Towers is available on Netflix, and Netflix just stops that episode, I’m fine with that. ‘Cause that creates a situation whereby someone goes: “Hang on. It just went from episode 8 to episode 10 and I don’t really understand why. Oh, I know what I’ll do: I’ll go on to the entire compendium of all human knowledge and I’ll find out why.” And then it’s going to be like: “Oh, yeah, in this thing, which is not available on most streaming platforms because a person said the n-word a bunch of times, then… cool! I have my answer, right?” Like, it had a whole bunch of problematic stuff in it and it was kind of fucked up and now people don’t play it anymore, because it’s kind of fucked up.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And I guess that’s the difference between their podcast feed, is that their podcast feed isn’t really indexed anywhere else but their storage! So if you start at episode 101, you’re like: What happened? You can’t really go anywhere else to find out about it.
BEN: Yeah, true. True, true, true.
DANIEL: We’ve had this discussion before about Bugs Bunny cartoons that have been offensive.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: I used to be really on board with what they did, which was: put that big message up at the front, which is basically like: So, it turns out this shit’s pretty fucked! and then play it anyway. I’m not sure I’m as supportive of that position as I used to be.
DANIEL: Mmm. I agree.
BEN: I think those things could very much stand not to be played anymore. Because the thing is, right — this stuff is never ever ever disappearing. Right? With the internet the way that it is, a industrious fellow or lady will always be able to find this stuff if they genuinely want to go and find it. So I absolutely do not accept the argument of like ~uh, erasing history.~ False! Like, it’s just patently false. Look, don’t know about if that’s true when it comes to, like, I don’t know — statues, or whatever but certainly any kind of digital media is just like forever now.
DANIEL: I feel like the historical erasure argument would be stronger if we somehow lived in a post-racial society where we say: Okay, now that we’ve knocked racism on the head, we must preserve this so that no one ever forgets that racism existed.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, like one of those terrible teen dystopian films, like The Rememberer or whatever the hell that thing was called.
DANIEL: Exactly. It’s not a strong argument in the timeline that we’re in, sorry.
HEDVIG: Sorry. I was just going to… if we’re getting to the end of this, I haven’t listened to this yet, but I know there’s a new… there’s a podcast from Maximum Fun called Fanzi, where they talk about problematic fandoms.
BEN: Oh, yeah.
HEDVIG: So, I heard them doing…
BEN: God, I hope they talk about Rick and Morty!
HEDVIG: They might! Or that might be a good suggestion for them for future episodes. I just heard a little trailer for another podcast I was listening to and I’ve been meaning to listen to it, and they talk about… the example I heard was Kanye.
BEN: Oh wow, yep, okay.
HEDVIG: They’re like: We like his music, but then there are other things we don’t know what to do with. And like, what should we do about our mixed feelings?
BEN: Oh, okay. So, problematic on both sides of that equation.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah. There’s just trying to come to grips with it, and my understanding is that every episode they sort of do another fandom and… yeah! Maybe it’s great. Maximum Fun is usually a good podcast, so I’m going to check it out and if anyone else listens to this, and checks it out, we can check back in later.
BEN: Have fat chats.
DANIEL: That is really interesting, because we do need to at some point… are we able to divorce our love of the work from the love of the artist? I’m thinking of, you know, J.K. Rowling, of course.
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: Oof, yeah. Wow. Speaking of.
DANIEL: It’s been a week, hasn’t it? Phwoar.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: My apologies to anybody who’s Black or trans, or who’s watching this debate play out and maybe even listening to us debate this as well, and you know, I hope you’re doing okay. We see you, we support you, and we hope that you’re getting what you need from your people.
HEDVIG: It’s gotta be rough.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Last one from the news. New study by Professor Sean Lowen at Michigan State University. How good are language learning apps? Do they help?
HEDVIG: Ooo, I need to know this because I’m trying to learn German, and I just checked myself into Duolingo for the first time ever yesterday.
BEN: Oh, fun!
HEDVIG: I’ve never…
DANIEL: That owl is going to get you.
HEDVIG: Yeah! It’s being really friendly to me so far. It was like: “Good job! You’re doing so good!”
DANIEL: Oh, sure…
BEN: I strongly rate Duolingo. It’s got a place dear to my heart, for sure.
HEDVIG: Yeah!
DANIEL: Not everyone digs it. Occasionally when we mention it, people say: Why are you promoting that terrible app that doesn’t actually do any good? This study used Babbel. And what they found was that when people completed it, they moved up in proficiency. You know, it actually did pretty well.
BEN: That doesn’t… I’ve got to be honest, that doesn’t surprise me.
HEDVIG: No, me neither.
BEN: Like, all we’re really talking about is gamified flash cards, right?
HEDVIG: Yeah!
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Like, of course that results in at least some measure of upped retention.
HEDVIG: Especially the kind of retention that tends to be measured in tests.
BEN: Yeah, exactly!
DANIEL: Okay, well, that is the question: does this relate to communicative competency, which is the gold standard.
BEN: Okay, well then, I would argue, probably not then, right? Because as we’ve said on this podcast a billion times over and over…
HEDVIG: No — I object!
BEN: Well, like, we’ve gone over and over and over, right? Like yes, this can be like a helpful way to augment improving your vocabulary and stuff, but at the end of the day, right, how do you get good at talking a language? Through, like, endless hard work and using the language, and talking to people.
HEDVIG: Yeah, Ben, but that doesn’t mean that getting some repetition on some vocabulary items isn’t going to make it easier for you in the shop when… It’s still good to know words! Words are still good! [LAUGHTER]
BEN: What kind of radical linguist stance is this — “it’s good to know words”! I have no time for that argument!
HEDVIG: It is good to know words! Yesterday I learned that the…
BEN: This is what you get when you get a PhD in linguistics! “It’s good to know words.”
HEDVIG: It’s good to know words! Words help with communication. I learned that, in German, their word for STUFF or THING is ‘zeug’, and I’m glad I know that. [LAUGHTER]
BEN: All right, fair enough; it’s good to know words. You heard it here first, folks.
DANIEL: Here’s another stat: 36% of the participants who started the study ended up quitting.
HEDVIG: Okay…
BEN: Learning language is hard.
DANIEL: I think we need to include them in the total as well. So, language is complicated, there are lots of aspects to language. Communication is one thing, but analysis is another. Different people learn different ways. The key thing is motivation, I think.
BEN and HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: If you’re motivated, you’ll probably do a pretty good job, no matter what method you’re using, although let’s remember that communicative approaches are generally considered better in the applied community.
HEDVIG: Sure, but… yeah. I’m still on the “It’s good to know words” camp.
BEN: But knowing words is important! [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Like, yeah. the thing of me, of late in general, when people say…
DANIEL: Oh, Hedvig, you radical! [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: No, it’s not that… I don’t think anyone’s suggesting that Babbel or Duolingo are, like, full replacements. I don’t think anyone’s suggesting that.
BEN: No. Some people… I do think some people are suggesting that they are, like, a flat-out waste of time, and I don’t agree.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah, and that’s also wrong. Like, you can’t…
BEN: Let’s go back to my original point, which is, like, yeah, it’s gamified flash cards. Of course it’s going to help!
HEDVIG: And it’s almost to a degree like, you know when you’re on the toilet, I play a bunch of, like, puzzle, like games.
DANIEL: Yep!
BEN: Gross. Gross!
HEDVIG: Okay, so some people play Duolingo instead. Even if they don’t even learn the language, I’m still like: That’s a fine puzzle game to be playing on the toilet. That’s fine.
BEN: I have said it before, and I will say it again: you toilet-doing people are weird! You go in, you do your business, you get out! There’s no reading, there’s no phone, and it takes less than 30 seconds, all right? Come on, people!
HEDVIG: Don’t tell me you poop in 30 seconds.
DANIEL: Yeah, but do you have as much fun as we do? Are you learning a language? That’s my question.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Yeah.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Yeah, you’re right. Yeah, you’re right — I’ve really got to rethink all sorts of life priorities.
DANIEL: I rest my case.
BEN: Case closed! Shall we move on to, like, actual audience questions? ‘Cause I’m sure they are well and truly sick of finding out how pitstop-like my toilet breaks are.
DANIEL: Let’s do.
[TRANSITION MUSIC]
DANIEL: And now we’re back with the Mailbag questions. I love a Mailbag episode.
BEN: I do as well, and when I told my partner that it was a Mailbag episode, she was like: Yay! I love Mailbag episodes. So, that’s… from the data set of three, that’s three out of three.
DANIEL: That’s 100 percent.
BEN: Yep.
HEDVIG: I like Mailbags, as well. My partner likes Mailbags, as well, so he had me go through them. We had our…
BEN: Five out of five!
DANIEL: Five out of five.
HEDVIG: We had our pre… What’s it called? We were supposed to get married today, but we didn’t because corona. So we went out for a date yesterday. Is that a pre-versary?
DANIEL: Oh, pre-versary!
BEN: Oh, I like that! I like that.
DANIEL: I like the combining form -versary. Awesome!
BEN: Yeah. Pre-versary.
HEDVIG: We spent our pre-versary partially going through your Mailbag!
DANIEL: Oh, lovely. Well, pre-gratulations!
BEN: Yeah! Pre-commendations!
DANIEL: The first question comes from Lord Mortis on our Discord channel.
BEN: PS: Lord Mortis: great name!
HEDVIG: It’s a good name, yeah.
DANIEL: “Having a discussion about FLIP FLOPS / THONGS. and there was a question as to why the Australian word is ‘underwear’ elsewhere in the world.”
BEN: I’m going to guess that the genesis for THONG in both instances is the same thing.
DANIEL: Which is?
BEN: Well, a thong is, like, a cord of leather, right?
DANIEL: Yes, it is.
BEN: Right. So the cord of leather could go up the crack of your ass, or it could go between your toes and in both instances, the thong (as such) kind of makes sense, right?
DANIEL: Yeah, you could have it one or the other, but please not both.
BEN: [SHUDDER] Yep.
DANIEL: This was in fact PharaohKatt’s response. She says the back of the underwear looks similar to the toe part of the thongs. But THONG is a really old word. The first reference in the Oxford English Dictionary comes from 950 CE. and it’s so old, it was spelled with a letter we don’t have anymore, the eth (ð). [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Amazing.
BEN: You gotta love when something’s so OG, it uses, like, a phoneme that doesn’t exist anymore.
DANIEL: [SURFER VOICE] Whoa, that’s Viking!
BEN: [SURFER VOICE] Vicatious, dude!
DANIEL: It’s the backward looking 6 with a line through it, and it’s known as ‘eth’ and it referred to a narrow strip of hide or leather, and… yup! It can go between your toes or between your butt cheeks.
BEN: The only reason I know this is because I read a metric butt-ton of fantasy and so, like, various amulets and important pieces of armour were all fastened via thongs.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Oh, right. Hm. Now thongs versus flip flops: Hedvig, any sense of this?
HEDVIG: Australians say THONGS…
BEN: Well, THONG is just Australian isn’t it? Yeah.
HEDVIG: Everyone else has FLIP FLOPS. Basically.
BEN: No, woo — hang on…
HEDVIG: Mm? New Zealanders.
BEN: If I may. New Zealanders say JANDALS.
HEDVIG: Yeah, they do.
BEN: Which is my personal favourite.
HEDVIG: This is true.
BEN: And I think JANDAL is better than both of the other words.
HEDVIG: So it comes from ‘Japanese sandal’, correct?
DANIEL: REALLY??
BEN: Oh, I didn’t even know that! That makes it even better!
HEDVIG: What? What do you mean?
DANIEL: Is it?
HEDVIG: Haven’t we talked about this on the show?
DANIEL: No!
BEN: I don’t think so.
DANIEL: We have not.
HEDVIG: Jandal. Japanese sandal. Googling like a crazy person.
BEN: Oh, that’s pretty good.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Usually the J means like ‘jeans’, as in JEGGINGS or JORTS. So I was confused.
BEN: I just thought it was just them being kooky and basically being like, “It’s kind of like a sandal, but it’s, like, a jandal!”
HEDVIG: No, no, no. But you know the particular style of shoe…
BEN: I do, like the mud walking shoes, yeah?
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly, they have a little elevation. They’re like a sort of plateau, yeah.
BEN: Yeah. What the samurai would wear when they’re doing cool flippy kick things. That’s how I know them.
HEDVIG: Can you really… really? Because they look tricky to walk in.
BEN: Okay. Hedvig, I need you to watch a anime series called Samurai Champloo, where there are breakdancing Samurai doing all kinds of cool stuff in their elevated mud sandal things.
HEDVIG: Wow.
DANIEL: Wow. This is weird for me, because I learned THONGS in my US English upbringing, but now according to the GLOWBE corpus, FLIP FLOPS is heavily American, THONGS strongly Australian. Could this be a case of taboo avoidance, where Americans just didn’t want to say that they were wearing thongs because, like, the underwear?
BEN: Absolutely.
HEDVIG: Wait…
BEN: And the inverse as well, I reckon — I reckon Australians were very resistant to adopting FLIP FLOPS as a word because they were like: Well, that’s what the bloody Seppos say, isn’t it?
DANIEL: Charming.
HEDVIG: So wait, what is underwear called in Australia? Just to recap?
BEN: Uh, G-string, I think?
HEDVIG: G-string.
DANIEL: Yeah, which gave me pause. There I was, planning a musical number for church, back when I was a churchgoer, and I wanted to do a bit of Bach. And the number that I chose was “Air on a G String”. [LAUGHTER, CHOKING]
HEDVIG: Sorry, cough-laugh.
DANIEL: What the hell, semantic shift?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, there you go. There is a relation between them, and it’s the strap.
HEDVIG: Mhm.
BEN: Called it.
DANIEL: Let’s go on. This one’s from Bill. Bill says: Hello! I’ve known for awhile that Americans typically write dates month first. April 7th…
BEN: Wrong. It’s the wrong way to write the date.
DANIEL: …whereas most other English speakers write them date-first — 7th of April. But only recently did I realise that this reflects a difference in the way they are spoken, as well. I assumed that all English speakers would say “April 7”, or “April the 7th”, but apparently people who write “7 April” typically say “the 7th of April”.
HEDVIG: Yep. I think that’s true.
DANIEL: Bill also adds “Thanks for your time and, as always, love the work y’all do to bring language science to the public in a way that’s both enjoyable and rigorous.”
HEDVIG: That’s us! Poop and dictionaries.
BEN: Yeah! Ben Ainslie: rigorous as hell.
DANIEL: Let’s take a second and complain about middle-endian-ness.
BEN: Middle-Indian-ness??
HEDVIG: What… what??
DANIEL: Middle-endian-ness.
BEN: Oh…
DANIEL: Americans are middle-endy.
BEN: Yeah. Yeah, I don’t care for that at all.
DANIEL: No.
HEDVIG: Oh, the fact that… yeah, right. Okay.
DANIEL: We’re little-endians over here in Australia. But they go… they stick the middle up in front, so they are middle-endians.
BEN: It just… it inherently makes no sense. Why would you start with not the smallest unit? Come on! Or if you’re going to change it up, at least start with the biggest unit — the year — and work your way down. Come on, Americans! What’s going on?
DANIEL: By the way, that that you’re describing there — the really big endians — is the only kind of date approved by the ISO.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: It’s ISO Standard 8601: YYYY-MM-DD. And I use it all the time.
BEN: Which — you know what — I’m fine with, right? ’cause it still makes sense. But this whole month-first malarky has got to go!
HEDVIG: I have to say — so, we were chatting about this yesterday, my pre-husband, also known as fiancé.
BEN: Your Ste and you.
HEDVIG: My Ste and me.
DANIEL: Your pre-ancé.
HEDVIG: …and I’m quite flexible on this. Like, I usually think I… hmm! It depends on if I’m writing the year or not. I’ll say it like that. So if I’m writing the year, I prefer to go day-month-year but if I’m just writing the month, I might go either way.
DANIEL: I don’t want to defend weird stuff that only Americans do, like the imperial system of measurement, or US Letter paper, or libertarianism. [LAUGHTER] But if the year is assumed, then the order of the day and month doesn’t matter so much.
BEN: Wrong. Wrong! Wrong! WRONG!
DANIEL: Like, go from the broad category, then the narrow.
BEN: Wrong!!! No!
HEDVIG: No, I agree, I agree.
BEN: Incorrect!!
DANIEL: Eh.
BEN: [SPUTTERS] If this was a thing, right? If this was a thing that was readily differentiate-able by sight, right? Like, if instead of writing the months as numbers, we just used the three-letter abbreviations, I would not give one flying single fuck about what order it went in, right?
DANIEL: Mhm. Yep.
BEN: Because whether it was “7 Jan” or “Jan 7”, that would just be immediately decipherable. But the whole numbers thing just means that we’ve got to pick a side.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Because it’s dumb and annoying and it can cause, like, legitimate confusion.
DANIEL: That’s true.
BEN: And I know I’m getting all worked up about a very minor thing, but this we know about Ben Ainslie: he gets the most worked up about the most minor things. But to talk about what Bill said: I’d never clocked what he’d clocked, which is really interesting.
DANIEL: It is.
BEN: I did not know that that was the case either, because I do. I say, like, the 7th of April.
DANIEL: Well, is it true? Is it true that Australians do this? Or that British speakers do this?
HEDVIG: I think it is true. I tested it out on Ste and I said: What would you… like, if I said April 17th you’d be like “Hm, that sounds American”. I wanted to give another perspective, which is that how we write doesn’t necessarily have to reflect how we speak.
DANIEL: That’s true.
HEDVIG: So I prefer the ISO Standard set of dates and I write that, and I write, you know, 2020- and then 06- and — what date is it today… it’s the 14th, yeah, I already knew that. But I’m happy to say it any other way, and this is also true for the clock. So like… and for a while, being abroad, I thought I was the weirdo but now that I’m back in Sweden, I have come home to my people and I’ve noticed that they’re also like this. So we write 24-hour clock…
BEN and DANIEL: Yep.
HEDVIG: …but we always basically speak 12-hour clock.
DANIEL: Wow.
BEN: Ooo — interesting! I had always assumed you guys spoke 24…
HEDVIG: Nope!
BEN: …as well.
HEDVIG: No, we don’t.
BEN: Aw, I’ve lost a little bit of respect! [LAUGHTER] Like, I genuinely just thought… ’cause 24-hour time, for exactly the same reason makes infinitely more sense.
HEDVIG: Yeah! No, it’s just… am to pm confuses me a lot and I often have to remind myself which is which. There’s that song, like, “Party from AM to PM” — which doesn’t make any sense because you should be partying from pm to am…
DANIEL: That’s true.
BEN: Yeah!
HEDVIG: Anyway. Even though I’ve taken three years of Latin, and I know what AM and PM stand for, in order to remember which is which, I have to play that song in my head.
DANIEL: Oh, interesting.
BEN: Is it like, ante meridian, post meridian? I’ve never even thought about it before.
DANIEL and HEDVIG: Yeah. It is.
DANIEL: Okay, well, I wanted to check out to see if Australians and UK people really do say “7th of April”.
BEN: Oh, you did science!
DANIEL: So I decided to check in two ways: one using the GLOWBE corpus, which is the Global Corpus of Web-Based English, so this is in writing.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: But I also wanted to check speaking, and so I used Youglish.com to see…
HEDVIG: Mmm!
DANIEL: Now I couldn’t… it’s hard to check for dates broadly, but I decided to focus on one, and that’s June 30th of June. Okay? The 30th of June 30th. [LAUGHTER] Now…
BEN: I see what you’re doing there. That’s good.
DANIEL: Thank you. Using GLOWBE, I looked up “* June” and “June *” and that gave me all the numbers. “June NUMBER” is strongly favored in US and Canada, whereas “NUMBER June” happens in Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand. Okay, but that’s writing. In speaking, I used Youglish.com, which allows you to look up words as they’re spoken in YouTube annotations. I just typed in “June 30”.
BEN and HEDVIG: Mhm.
DANIEL: “June 30”: 156 hits for the US, but for the UK, only 2, for Australia only 4.
HEDVIG: Mhm.
BEN: Wow.
DANIEL: Okay, then we go to “30 June”, which also gives you hits for when people say “the 30th of June”. Only one hit for US videos, but in the UK, 13, in Australia 10.
BEN: Oh, snap, that is definitive!
DANIEL: So, you know, for at least that… well, only for that one date, but at least for that one date, and we could do more — and I invite other people to follow up, because I don’t have time, I had to do this episode — but it looks like there is, in speaking, a tendency for UK English speakers and so on to say “30 June” or “the 30th of June”, whereas Americans and Canadians tend to say “June 30” or “June 30th”.
BEN: I hate to be a proponent of bad science, but I’m willing to call that case closed. Like, that’s huge!
HEDVIG: Are you saying that Daniel’s doing bad science?
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: No, more just like that’s — like Daniel said — it’s, like, a single day blah blah blah, but at the same time, that was pretty overwhelming.
HEDVIG: Yep, yep, yep. You got to know… There’s something I’ve also learned through my youth, being 30 — [SINGS] 32-year-old lady… 31-year-old lady — is: just because it’s not… you can never fully prove something and sometimes you just got to stop digging, because like, it’s overwhelming in one way or another.
DANIEL: Science doesn’t tell us what’s true; it tells us what’s false.
BEN: Oh, wow. That’s pretty deep!
HEDVIG: We can always critique. We’ve got to decide where to, like, stop digging.
DANIEL: That’s right. Okay!
BEN: Okay, let’s go on the next question.
DANIEL: Ellie on Facebook: “I love your podcast and wanted to see if you guys might know more about how the word UP has become softening in English for some verbs typically as commands like CUT UP, CHOP UP, TEAR UP. Seems a little softer then to CUT or to CHOP or to TEAR.”
HEDVIG: Yeah, so I was thinking about this!
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: I don’t know if I agree!
HEDVIG: I don’t think… I am a little bit unsure of… so Ellie is using the word ‘softening’. And I don’t think it’s softening. But I think it’s something.
DANIEL: Okay. What do you think it’s doing?
HEDVIG: I think it’s changing [POSH ACCENT] the temporal aspect of the verb.
DANIEL: YESSS!
BEN: Tell me what you mean by that.
DANIEL: Getting excited!
HEDVIG: So there’s tense, which is a relationship between the event or the state that you’re describing, and either the time of speaking or some other time of speaking. So, is it before? Past. Is it after? Future. Blah blah blah blah. Aspect has to do with the internal temporal consistency. Is it a repetitive event? Is it an elongated event that goes on at the same time as something else? And, important for this one: is it an event that has a clear end point?
DANIEL: There we go.
BEN: Aah.
HEDVIG: When you CUT UP a pig, there is a point when you have cut enough, such that you have completed the action: CUT UP the pig.
BEN: Or WASH UP the dishes…
HEDVIG: WASH UP the dishes…
BEN: CLEAN UP the room… or EAT UP your food.
DANIEL: The word that I like for this is “telic”. It’s “telic”. So the test is: if you got interrupted, did you do it? So, you know: He ATE the food. If he got interrupted, well, he still ate the food. But: He ATE UP the food. If he got interrupted in the middle of it, he didn’t really EAT UP the food. It wasn’t finished.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Mmm! This is fascinating! So what do we call this? Telic.
DANIEL: Yes, it’s got a perfective aspect, or a telic aspect.
BEN: Interesting. So when it is followed by UP, it acquires the telic aspect?
HEDVIG: It has telic…. UP is, like, a telic aspect marker.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: There’s more fine nuances within telic. There’s, like, accomplishments versus achievements, and blah blah blah blah, but basically if you have a clear end point…
BEN: Right. You know, there are other examples that aren’t as telic to me. Like, it does seem like a goal state. Like for example: He’s fixing the car. He’s fixing UP the car. It sounds to me like fixing UP the car for some kind of goal, okay?
HEDVIG: Mhm.
BEN: Yeah, fixing up the car suggests you’re reconditioning some, like, vintage machine into, like, some immaculate condition.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Whereas fixing the car means, like, I have to get it working again.
DANIEL: Yeah.
DANIEL: Or getting DRESSED — He’s upstairs getting DRESSED. He’s upstairs getting DRESSED UP.
BEN: Oh, yeah, interesting! [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah. It’s…
BEN: Both denote like a level of fanciness!
DANIEL: Kinda. Yeah. But that’s telic as well, kind of, I think, because it implies some sort of purpose, or some sort of goal that you have.
BEN: Mmm. Very cool!
HEDVIG: The question then becomes: why is it UP? And Ellie also has some examples when there’s a pair where you can also use DOWN.
DANIEL: Mmm?
So TEAR UP a piece of paper; TEAR DOWN the establishment.
BEN: Ah, interesting.
HEDVIG: Both of them sound telic to me.
BEN: I think TEARING DOWN is vaguely directional.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: No, but in a way that UP isn’t.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I think so too.
BEN: So like, when you TEAR DOWN wallpaper, or you TEAR DOWN the establishment, it is evocative of something crumbling down.
DANIEL: It is DOWN.
BEN: Yeah. Whereas chopping UP something doesn’t throw it up in the air, do you know what I mean?
DANIEL: No, it does it for a certain purpose, I guess. Whereas chopping DOWN, it really is coming down.
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And I was wondering what might have made Ellie think of softening. And so I was thinking about the commands — that maybe if you give a command that has a clear end point, that is a bit nicer [LAUGHTER] than say, you know, dish… like, do the dishes… wash, like, indefinitely. You know, sounds like you’re becoming a servant or something. Whereas: Can you wash up these dishes right now? It’s more like: can you do this thing?
DANIEL: Yeah, there’s a difference between cleaning and cleaning UP the kitchen. Why don’t you clean up the kitchen, or…
HEDVIG: Yeah. Yeah. So I think… I don’t know, I’m not sure, but I was trying to… ’cause she did describe it as softening, and I was trying to think of what that comes from. That’s my only theory.
DANIEL: A gentler way. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, that’s an interesting question. So the concept here is telicity or perfective. And that’s an aspect, not a tense.
BEN: I hope everyone had their notebooks out for that particular answer! It got very technical. I liked it, though!
DANIEL: I did too! This one comes from Brooke on Patreon.
BEN: We’ve had two Washington-arians… Washingtonians? in a row!
DANIEL: Washingtonians. Yes, that’s right. “Hello, Talk the Talk friends! I am a long time listener from the US, currently in Daniel’s native WA state, who will be moving to Australia in a few short months.” Whoa, she’s probably here by now.
BEN: Wait, hang on — she’s moving from WA to WA?
DANIEL: Yes, she is.
BEN: Fun!
DANIEL: Going through whiplash like I did. “If ever I’m in Perth, I’d love to attend one of your live events.” Oh, that sounds fun, doesn’t it? “The reason for my message is that I’d like you to address a question that has baffled me for years: how can a word like SANCTION have two completely contradictory meanings: ‘to punish’ versus ‘to allow’? Not only are the meanings contradictory, but they are also used within the same semantic sphere, that of rules and laws. How did this happen? Why is this still a thing?”
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: True — I’ve never clocked that!
HEDVIG: I think we… have… Daniel, something tells me we’ve talked about these before.
DANIEL: I think we’ve talked about these before. We call them contronyms. They’re also called Janus words, named after the Roman god who had two faces looking in opposite directions. We’ve got SANCTION, we’ve got TRIM — where you can TRIM something off, or you can TRIM the tree and add something on. The same thing happens with CLIP.
HEDVIG: Oh my god, yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah, you can CLIP, which means you remove, or you can CLIP things together, which means you add.
BEN: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: You can also CLEAVE things apart, or you can CLEAVE together with someone. What’s going on?
HEDVIG: Ste added SCREEN — as in: it used to be that SCREEN meant dividing and shielding something.
DANIEL: Mhm.
HEDVIG: But then when you started projecting to it, it means showing.
BEN: Oh, good one, Ste!
DANIEL: Oh, yeah. Nice.
BEN: From the deep cuts!
HEDVIG: And that one is like, we can sort of understand the etymology. If that theory is correct, then we can understand that path.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: So any insights here? Why is this happening?
BEN: The SANCTION one seems to me to be, like, the most ridiculous of the contronyms, right?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Like, the TRIMs and the CLIPs and stuff — you kind of think about it for a second, and you’re like: Oh, yeah, I guess it does mean that. And then you think about SANCTION, and you’re like: They literally mean as opposite a thing as it’s possible to mean! [LAUGHTER] And Brooke is absolutely right: in exactly the same semantic sphere, as well. Right? Like, these are things that, like, diplomats will say to each other, and that sort of stuff.
DANIEL: Yep. Well, so, for SANCTION, this is a legal term about what is permitted and not permitted, because sometimes people were talking about something that was okay, and something that was not okay, and the word kind of absorbed both of those meanings. So that’s one thing that can happen — it’s just, you know, a bit of semantic flippery. The same thing with WEATHER — you know, we say the ship weathered the storm, which means it did great, but: “The boards looked weathered”, which means they don’t look great. The other thing that can happen is that two unrelated words will join together, and that’s what happened with CLEAVE. The two meanings of CLEAVE came from totally different words. When you use your cleaver to CLEAVE apart something, that comes from Old English cleofan “to split”. But when you CLEAVE unto someone, you stick to them, and that comes from Old English clifian — totally different word — “to stick”, and that’s also where we get CLAGGY and also CLAY, which can be quite sticky.
BEN: Oh, there you go. So this is just literally — like, this is just language actually just being kind of a bit shit, if we’re being honest.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Like, basically everyone is like: ~Aw, SANCTION kinda means this but I guess it kinda also means this other thing. Ah, well! We’ll just leave it like that.~
DANIEL: It’s imprecise.
HEDVIG: And I think the question also — that Brooke might want to know — is if there’s, like, a general process that can account for all of these. But you seem to say it’s all, like, independent trajectories.
DANIEL: Well — so again, there’s two things. Sometimes a word will split in meaning, but then sometimes two other unrelated words will join in meaning.
HEDVIG: Right.
DANIEL: So the principle here is that meaning jumps, and sometimes it jumps to an adjacent thing. Sometimes it even jumps to an opposite thing. Although there’s an interesting observation here with computational linguistics. You know how we know what words mean because we look at what other words are in the same neighborhood?
HEDVIG: Uh-huh.
BEN: Sure. Yeah, you know it by its friends.
DANIEL: Yeah. So BREAK and SHATTER often appear in the same neighborhood, near GLASS and WINDOW and that’s how we know that BREAK and SHATTER mean similar things. But the funny thing that we’ve discovered computationally is that sometimes opposites appear in the same neighbourhood, like BLACK and WHITE. So a computer will think that they’re synonyms, and they’re not. So opposites are closer than we think sometimes.
BEN: Fascinating!
HEDVIG: I often confuse opposites.
BEN: As in, in your mother tongue?
HEDVIG: Yeah!
BEN: Really??
HEDVIG: Just like, you know the thing below your mouth? Chin?
BEN: The chin, yes.
HEDVIG: And the thing above your eyebrows? Forehead?
BEN and DANIEL: The forehead.
HEDVIG: Mmm.
BEN: Are those two words similar in Swedish?
HEDVIG: No!
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: I just… they’re live in the same block. [LAUGHTER] It’s like left and right! They live close to each other. Sometimes I’ll swap them.
DANIEL: Interesting. Interesting.
BEN: Okay — fair enough! And you take your phone to the toilet. Like, this we know. We’re the other kind of person.
HEDVIG: Yeah!
DANIEL: Do you stroke your forehead when you’re confused?
HEDVIG: N…n… Only words! [LAUGHTER] It’s not a Sapir-Whorf thing. Only… Like, I think people can recognise this about LEFT and RIGHT. That I struggle with remembering which one’s LEFT and RIGHT, but I always put forward the right hand when I shake someone’s hand.
BEN: Right. Yeah, I guess that is true. LEFT and RIGHT is more confusing. Like, there is something deeply wrong feeling about shaking the left hand.
HEDVIG: Yeah, so like, if I don’t remember which one is right, I’m like: Hmm, which one do I shake WITH? Ah, it’s this one. I know that I shake with the right, therefore that must be the right.
BEN: That’s way better than the left and right from the shape of the fingers. That’s… I like that.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s good.
HEDVIG: Shape of the fingers?
BEN: You know, if you hold your hands up with the…
HEDVIG: OH MY GOD I JUST SAW IT [LAUGHTER] Okay!
BEN: I’m so glad that I was able to bring that to your life.
DANIEL: Now you can’t unsee it, can you?
HEDVIG: No! But I’m also going to struggle with it. [LAUGHTER] I’m going to stick with the shaking hands.
DANIEL: Okay, sounds good. That’s all the questions that we have time for today, but we’re going to get to more of these. We’re going to try to do them a little more often than we have done before, so get those questions to us. We’ll have contact information at the tail end of the show.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
BEN: Are we going to do our normal read?
DANIEL: Wait, it’s Word of the Week.
HEDVIG: After Word of the Week.
BEN: [VERY SLOWLY AND SARCASTICALLY] Oh… yay. [LAUGHTER] I had forgotten. But goody! It’s still there! Even in the bonus episodes!
DANIEL: That’s right. I decided to throw it in.
HEDVIG: Yeahhhhh…
BEN: [QUIET MANIC VOICE] So happyyyyyy! Let’s go — Word of the Week, yay!
DANIEL: Okay, well, it’s been a bad week to be a statue.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Not necessarily — there’s that really cool Swedish statue of the woman smashing a guy in the… the Nazi.
HEDVIG: What? Oh, but that’s, like, old, right?
BEN: There’s a statue of an old lady smacking a neo-Nazi in the head with her handbag.
DANIEL: Awesome!
BEN: That’s a cool statue. I love that statue!
DANIEL: Well, Christopher Columbus has been beheaded, I think twice. Awesome.
HEDVIG: Good job, everyone.
BEN: I actually feel like that number is a bit low. Come on, society! There has to be how many frickin’ Columbus statues peppered around the place. Let’s get a few more of those heads on the ground.
DANIEL: Who else — Ghandi?
BEN: Ooo, yeah, Gandhi’s an interesting one.
DANIEL: Mhmm. Robert E. Lee — there have been lots of Confederate statues where people have finally lost patience and ripped those things out.
BEN: I don’t want to… I know the statue issue has been at play for a lot longer than this, like, recent resurgence of Black Lives Matters awareness. But the current, sort of, spate of statue situations was all kicked off by the Bristol one, yeah?
DANIEL: Mmm, tell me more.
BEN: Well, a statue of a slave owner in Bristol was dumped into the bay that his slave ships used to, like, pull up to.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: That’s the one. Closer to Perth, the King Leopold Ranges — it’s a mountain range in Western Australia — named after…
HEDVIG: …the Belgian king??
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Why… is it… why… I… mmm!
BEN: It seems a long way away.
HEDVIG: Australia! Yeah! I was surprised when I heard this.
DANIEL: Ten million dead. He never visited WA. Has no connection to the state.
HEDVIG: Yeah!
DANIEL: Yep!
HEDVIG: You guys! I don’t know how to say this, but like, at least like… I don’t know, like, at least James Cook, like, visited Australia! Like, why’d you go and name something after some dickhead who wasn’t even here! Like, 😡!
BEN: It gets worse. The only other mountain range we have in WA — so for everyone outside of Western Australia, Hedvig included, like one of the most consistent features of Western Australia as a place is: it’s just fucking flat, right? Like, we are one of the flattest places on Earth. and the quote-unquote mountain ranges that we have are laughably small by any normal person’s standards, right? Like, so I grew up in the Rocky Mountains, and then I saw real mountains, and I came back to WA, and I saw these hills! [LAUGHTER] And I was like: Oh, wow, we’re really reaching on this one. So anyway, the only other mountain range we have is called the Stirling Ranges, also named after a person who just ordered the massacres of a whole bunch of Indigenous Australians. So we’re really not doing well when it comes to naming our mountains at all.
DANIEL: But we’re renaming them to something else. It’s going to be in…
HEDVIG: Really?
DANIEL: Yes! King Leopold Ranges… King Leopold is going to be out. It’s been announced by Minister Ben Wyatt of WA.
HEDVIG: Oh, wow!
DANIEL: Yay!
HEDVIG: Is it going to be, like, a contest for another name? or…?
BEN: Oh, god, I hope not. Please no.
DANIEL: I think the people whose land it is are going to get to name it.
HEDVIG: That sounds like a good idea.
BEN: That is a great way to do it. Yeah. Maybe even… they’re not going to name it. They’re just going to tell us what they’ve always called it.
DANIEL: Yeah, there you go. There we go.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: That’s what I want.
HEDVIG: I don’t know how long this mountain range is, but sometimes local names aren’t necessarily of the entire range. That’s the thing that can happen when people want to use local names and you might have to say: “Oh, okay. We’re going to use three different names.” Or: we’re going to, like, append them, or make up a new name. When I’ve been making these maps with Indigenous place names of the Pacific, many times I’ve found that for a certain large land mass, like the big landmass of New Guinea, people don’t have a word for all of that.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s the case here, too. The ranges span at least three different language groups. There’s going to have to be some consultation. Well, in the midst of all this iconoclasm, some conservative folks are fretting over the disappearance of the old order…
BEN: Oh, here we go.
DANIEL: And this brings us to US Senator Tom Cotton, who is auditioning for Donald Trump’s job in 2024.
BEN: [SHUDDER]
DANIEL: Most recently he’s notable for writing an op-ed in The New York Times where he encouraged the military to show a “overwhelming show of force” against Americans who are protesting. How about that. He says: “Are we going to tear the Washington Monument down? Are we going to rename it the Obelisk of Wokeness?” Which… I thought the Obelisk of Wokeness was the best thing I’ve heard since [HEAVY METAL VOICE] “The Vagenda of Manocide”. [LAUGHTER] Termy suggested: Can we call it the Pointy Thing of Getting Along with One Another? which I thought was a nice Rodney King callback.
HEDVIG: That’s very good.
BEN: Could we just call it the Black-built Stone Dick?
DANIEL: Now you’re getting into Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys, who once in a song referred to it as the Great Eternal Klansman.
BEN: It’s like… it’s just… it’s so clearly a cock, you guys! How is that not clear to everybody? Like, there’s just no other… We’ve built this giant spire! Why? ‘Cause. How is that not the very definition of a giant dick measuring contest?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: So that was one. And then I noticed something about FOMO, so I wanted to bring it to our attention. I think it’s going through some semantic extension.
BEN: Ooo! So, okay, other than a fear of missing out, what could it be?
DANIEL: Well, I think it’s not only a fear of missing out on something in the future, but I think it’s also being applied to things that you’ve already missed, and you regret.
BEN and HEDVIG: Ohh…
DANIEL: So tell me if this sounds weird to you: “Oh, I didn’t go to that concert last week and now I’m suffering serious FOMO.” Is that okay or does it sound weird?
HEDVIG: I think it sounds okay.
BEN: Yeah, it sounds okay but my brain is like: 🌀 No… no… no…!
HEDVIG: It wouldn’t be okay to say “…and now I’m suffering serious fear of missing out.” That I wouldn’t accept.
BEN: Yeah. There I draw the line!
HEDVIG: But FOMO…
DANIEL: I took a look in the NOW Corpus. There are lots of references to buying stocks… you know, in the future you will miss out if you don’t buy it now. There are some about regret, like for example: “They took a cooking class together in Florence, giving the rest of us a serious case of FOMO”, because we missed out.
BEN: Oh, yeah!
DANIEL: “In short, I’ve been suffering from Sonos FOMO for years.” Sonos… the headphone company, I guess?
BEN: Yeah, right.
HEDVIG: No, no, the speaker system you have in your house.
BEN and DANIEL: Yeah.
DANIEL: So I did a little Twitter survey.
BEN: Look at you doing the science this week! Settle down, you lab-coat-wearing nerd!
DANIEL: You think a Twitter poll is scientific, then I have some news.
BEN: [LAUGHS] It’s 100 percent more scientific than my lived life.
DANIEL: Well, in this case, 62% of everyone said that it’s just a fear of missing out on something in the future, but 27.6% said it could be a regret for something that you’ve already missed out on in the past.
BEN: Yeah. I reckon this is definitely semantically shifting up. For sure.
DANIEL: Yep. I think so. Let’s watch out for that.
HEDVIG: Hm, interesting. What would be an alternative? Maybe ROMO.
BEN: Regret of missing out. That’s good.
DANIEL: I think Paul says RAHMO. Regret At Having Missed Out. I’m suffering from RAHMO.
ALL: [MUSING] No.
BEN: I like ROMO.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: ROMO’s fun.
DANIEL: So: FOMO and Obelisk of Wokeness — our Words of the Week. Let’s get to some comments from our last episode.
BEN: Oh, yes, please let’s do! Where are we reading those out?
DANIEL: Twitter and Facebook.
BEN: Fun!
DANIEL: Oh gosh, there’s a lot here. Okay, I’m just going to read them pretty fast. The first person to kick this off was Byron: “Thinking about what my favorite thing about language is after listening to @becauselangpod’s inaugural episode. It’s hard for me to say, but one of them is that the patterns in language are fractal. Patterns in patterns in patterns, which means there’s so much to discover.”
BEN: It’s the Ian Malcolm of language.
HEDVIG: It’s constructions all the way down.
DANIEL: Kelly Wright — we’re going to be talking to her later on — “Language as part of our evolution is the externalisation of thought. We willed ourselves to be able to do that as a species. It is this skill that allows us to reflect on what we’ve accomplished, to build a history. This is what defines us biologically. Universal human knowledge.” Wow! Mark and Aven from the Endless Knot podcast: “Two things: that it’s a record of human culture like fossil remains of every version of humanity that’s gone by, and that it’s an endless playground because it’s so malleable and mercurial, and any individual can shape it into whatever they want it to be.” Good one, huh?
HEDVIG: I like malleable as a word.
DANIEL: Mmm.
BEN: It’s so good.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s good.
BEN: Bendy.
DANIEL: Lynnika says, “Lots of cool stuff, but polysynthesis and voiceless lateral fricatives are definitely in my large and growing collection of favourite things.” Can you make a voiceless lateral fricative?
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: [ɬ]
HEDVIG: [ɬ]
BEN: [SHUDDERS]
HEDVIG: I can do it ingressive.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: [ingressive ɬ]
DANIEL: Good. So put your tongue like you’re going to make an sound. [l]. Now don’t make any sound, just blow.
BEN and HEDVIG: [ɬ]
DANIEL: It’s a speech sound in some languages.
BEN: Wow.
HEDVIG: The trick to doing voiceless things is often to think that you’re whispering.
DANIEL: Yes. Very good. Very good.
BEN: There you go.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Or just being gross.
DANIEL: Maybe.
BEN: Yep. That’s how I did it. Okay, I’m going to be gross now.
HEDVIG: [ɬ] [ɬ]
DANIEL: Termy says, “The huge variety of different grammatical features that languages ‘choose’ to include or not, plus the fact that every language is still capable of expressing the same concepts regardless. Oh, and the infinite creativity of people when they want to express something in a novel way.”
HEDVIG: Yeah…
DANIEL: That’s a good one.
HEDVIG: Termy likes himself some Boaz.
DANIEL: Mhm.
HEDVIG: That’s a paraphrase of Boaz.
DANIEL: Elías says, “One thing I love about language is the various scripts humanity came up with. I find scripts fascinating, both for the aura of mystery when you see a new one like a new code to crack, to unlock the door to a whole new facet of the world or humanity, and for their incredible aesthetics.” Mm, mm, mm. Natalia: “What fascinates me in language is that it can be bland, simple and seemingly unoriginal. It can also be juicy, flourishing, recognisable. Either way it’s still individual, nearly like your DNA.”
HEDVIG: Yeah. I like this one. And it made me think of another thing that I have discovered as I’m growing older… question mark? besides liking vanilla lattés. It’s also that I think I started appreciating poetry.
DANIEL: Oh, interesting!
BEN: [SPUTTERING] That… how… what… augh!
HEDVIG: We’ve talked about this before.
BEN: Every week, Hedvig, you do this! [LAUGHTER] Every week, you just do this, like, mind-splinter, stereotype-defying… [HEDVIG VOICE] “I’ve decided that as a 30-year-old hhhwoman, I like vanilla lattés, and also poetry.”
HEDVIG: Yeah! I’m fine with it! It’s a fun ride, actually, ’cause someone wrote a poem about the Bristol statue tearing down.
DANIEL: Oh!
BEN: Right.
HEDVIG: And I read the poem, and I was like: Oh, this is poetry! Oh, I like this! [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Cool. Nancy says, “I am charmed that we have this shared, agreed-upon abstraction.” That’s cool. And then finally we’ll end with Erika: “My favorite thing about language is that it is one of the very few necessary and sufficient conditions to be human. If we study language…”
ALL: Oooo…
DANIEL: There’s an assumption there.
HEDVIG: This is… yeah. There was a someone earlier who said something similar, and is it? Is it really? [SMALL COMPLAINING NOISES]!
DANIEL: “If we study language,” she says, “we study the essence of being human.” Whether I agree with her or not, I think it’s an intriguing thought to kick around. What do you think?
HEDVIG: Yeah. No. I’m being a bit contrarian for the sake of being contrary and there’s something quite… Clearly, monkeys don’t write poems, you know? Right?
DANIEL: Yep.
HEDVIG: It is something different about us. It might be a bit more gradual than we might be comfortable thinking about but… hmm.
DANIEL: Well, that’s awesome. I am so glad to hear everyone’s views. Thank you so much for sending these to us. And we hope that you enjoyed hearing us reading your thing on the air.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Thank you so much.
DANIEL: On the air? On the air.
HEDVIG: On the air.
[END THEME]
DANIEL: Well, you know what that music means. That means we’re coming to the end of this episode. But…
BEN: We’ll be back! [LAUGHTER] Is that… is that what you were leading towards?
HEDVIG: We have a little tail text.
DANIEL: Yep.
BEN: Well, that’s what I thought, but like, I didn’t want to start with like: “So now it’s time for us to read some script!”
HEDVIG: We will be back. And in the meantime, it’s really lovely hearing all of your comments from our inaugural episode. And keep ’em coming. You can send them to us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon, and Patreon. On all of these platforms, we are becauselangpod. And you can also email us, if you want to do that. That is hello@becauselanguage.com.
BEN: Hello! [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG and DANIEL: Hello!
BEN: It just seems so weirdly nice, I can’t help… I think every time anyone reads that, I’m just going to follow it with, like: Hello!
HEDVIG: If you like what we do, and you want to help promote good language science podcasting, you can tell a friend about us or leave us a review wherever you’re getting your podcasts. You can also write about us on Facebook or just, in general, spread the good news.
BEN: Thanks to everybody who’s become a patron. It… gee willikers, it’s really nice to get a little bit of money for doing this show, which takes, like, a lot of time and effort. Mostly of Daniel.
HEDVIG: For Daniel, yes. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Ahem.
BEN: But of Hedvig and I, as well. We hope that you really enjoyed this episode. Patrons, please let us know what we can do to make your patronage experience better. A special thanks this week to Lyssa, Kate, Termy, Chris, Carolin, Anna, Helen, Christelle, Andy, Jack, Kristofer, Kate, Michael, Nasrin, Binh, Elías, Jen, Dustin, Kitty, Lord Mortis, Larry, Whitney, Matt, Nigel, Damien, and Bob.
DANIEL: Our music’s written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, and you can hear him in two bands: Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible, worth checking out. Thanks for listening. Catch you next time. Because Language.
BEN: PEACE!!!