Kamala Harris is the first woman — and woman of colour — to be Vice President of the United States. In the campaign, she had to pull off a tricky task: stay true to her voice and multiple aspects of her identity by employing features of African-American English that would resonate with Black voters, but that wouldn’t alienate white voters. How did she do it?
Dr Nicole Holliday joins Ben, Hedvig, and Daniel on this episode of Because Language.
Listen to this episode
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Scientists have taught spinach to send emails and it could warn us about climate change | Living
https://www.euronews.com/living/2021/02/01/scientists-have-taught-spinach-to-send-emails-and-it-could-warn-us-about-climate-change
Nitroaromatic detection and infrared communication from wild-type plants using plant nanobionics | Nature Materials
https://www.nature.com/articles/nmat4771.epdf
How Plants Secretly Talk to Each Other | WIRED
https://www.wired.com/2013/12/secret-language-of-plants/
152: Listening to Plants (featuring Monica Gagliano) – Talk the Talk
http://talkthetalkpodcast.com/152-listening-to-plants/
Talking to Plants Can Help Them Grow Faster
https://www.thespruce.com/should-you-talk-to-your-plants-3972298
The effect of frequency-specific sound signals on the germination of maize seeds
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5526260/
Deaf Children of Hearing Parents Have Age-Level Vocabulary Growth When Exposed to ASL by Six-Months – ScienceDirect
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022347621000366
Quick Statistics About Hearing | NIDCD
https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/statistics/quick-statistics-hearing
Ms. version of De Houwer, A., 2004, Trilingual input and children’s language use in trilingual families in Flanders’. In C. Hoffmann & J. Ytsma, eds., Trilingualism in the Individual, Family and Society, Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 118-138.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332906871_04DeHouwerTrilingualInput
Opinion: ‘Dude gotta go!’
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/08/26/dude-gotta-go/
Democratic debate: Kamala Harris says ‘Dude gotta go’ about Trump
https://www.jacksonville.com/zz/news/20191015/democratic-debate-kamala-harris-says-dude-gotta-go-about-trump
Kamala Harris Said ‘Chithi’ During Her Speech as VP Candidate And Tamilians Can’t Keep Calm
https://www.news18.com/news/buzz/kamala-harris-said-chithi-during-her-us-democratic-national-convention-speech-and-tamilians-cant-keep-calm-2803157.html
‘Millions of Americans’ are googling ‘chithi’ after Kamala Harris uses Tamil word at Democratic convention
https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/diaspora/millions-of-americans-are-googling-chithi-after-kamala-harris-uses-tamil-word-at-democratic-convention-128829
Cacophony of human noise is hurting all marine life, scientists warn | Marine life | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/04/cacophony-human-noise-hurting-marine-life-scientists-warn
cacophony | Online Etymology Dictionary
https://www.etymonline.com/word/cacophony
COVID return to work: Will remote-IRL hybrid environment work?
https://www.jsonline.com/story/tech/columnist/2021/02/01/covid-return-work-remote-irl-hybrid-environment-work/4268421001/
To Hear America’s Mothers, We Let Them Scream
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/06/insider/primal-scream-section.html
Pictures show the gritty work: Ms. Quintana on her laptop in the closet, or “cloffice,” with her 3-year-old Mila…
Transcript
NICOLE HOLLIDAY: I know you guys are podcasters, but you have much better… I’m having some mic jealousy here.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: It’s just a pop shield.
BEN: No, we are very, very lucky, Nicole. Daniel dropped a bit of coin, at least certainly on mine. And oh, oh! Makes a world of difference! If anyone ever actually meets me in real life – Daniel can attest to this – I’m horrifically annoying sounding, but the microphone just… ah!
HEDVIG: Really?
BEN: It’s magical.
NICOLE: Maybe it does something to you? Like you… you feel like you’re an old timey radio announcer, so you get that ~smooth radio voice~.
BEN: I try as hard as I can not to, because I know if I lean into that, it’s gonna be like: [SMOOTH RADIO VOICE IMPERSONATION] ~All right, cool cats, and welcome to Night Time Radio.~
[LAUGHTER]
NICOLE: [SMOOTHLY] ~Smooth Jazz, 96.7.~
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: [SMOOTHLY SMOOTH] ~This one goes out to all the lonely hearts out there.~
[INTRO MUSIC]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to this episode of Because Language, a podcast about linguistics, the science of language. I’m Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team! She’s a linguist, gamer, and all around good human… Hedvig Skirgård.
HEDVIG: Love getting gamer. Thank you.
DANIEL: That wasn’t presumptuous, was it?
HEDVIG: No, no, I play games.
BEN: There are many games to be played as well. That’s the other thing. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah!
BEN: She’s a pluralistic gamer. Her gaming house is wide.
DANIEL: Big tent, big tent.
HEDVIG: I’ve been trying to get more into gaming culture by going into Paradox Interactive’s forum, but they are a little bit of a cesspit. So I’m backing back out, and just staying in my games.
DANIEL: And… he consumes truly alarming amounts of media, but it’s all for science! It’s Ben Ainslie.
BEN: I feel really jealous that I didn’t get gamer. I just want to put that out there. I want, I want gamer too.
DANIEL: Next time, next time.
BEN: Okay. That’s fine. Let’s just start on a really sort of like sour note. That’s fine, Daniel! It’s fine. Let’s move on. Just move on.
DANIEL: [PAUSE] Oh, and he’s a gamer.
BEN: Yeah, thanks. Yeah.
DANIEL: ~No, you can’t fix it now!~
BEN: Too far!
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Thanks for being with me on this show, you two.
BEN: Always a pleasure.
HEDVIG: Always fun.
DANIEL: We have a very special guest co-host for this episode. It’s Dr Nicole Holliday of the University of Pennsylvania. Nicole, thanks for coming on the show for I think the third time?
NICOLE: Hey, nice to see you all again! Yeah, I’m a longtime listener, longtime repeated guest, at this point.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: I think… I think one more show appearance and I think we will have to officially bump Nicole up to, like, part-time co-host.
HEDVIG: Official co-host.
BEN: Surely.
NICOLE: Do I get, like, a T-shirt? Or…?
DANIEL: Well, no. What’ll happen is every time that we have an episode without you, I’ll just say: Now, Nicole Holliday couldn’t make it this time.
BEN: Nicole’s out this week!
HEDVIG: Really busy. Yeah. That’s not bad, yeah.
DANIEL: You’re gonna be talking to us this time about the sociolinguistic style of US Vice President – this sounds so good to say – Kamala Harris. And this has been an area of study for you.
NICOLE: Yes! So I am generally interested in how people do their identity with language, in particular, their racial identity. I work on African-American English. My dissertation was about people with one Black parent and one white parent and how they sort of manage having some kind of Black or multiracial identity through their linguistic performance. And I’ve been interested in Barack Obama forever. I have joked that, like, I got into grad school because of Obama. I wrote about him in my personal statement, when I was writing to NYU. And then there started to be more Black politicians in the last ten years, which is wonderful. And so I was like: Well, I know what Obama’s doing, what are these other folks doing? So I started in the debates, the Democratic primary debates looking at Cory Booker and Kamala Harris. And then he got less interesting and she got more interesting, in my opinion. So I’ve actually… I started working on Kamala Harris in, like, October of 2019. And then when Joe Biden picked her for Vice President in August of 2020, I was like: Oh my god, this is the best thing to ever happen to me professionally!
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: YES!
NICOLE: Like, I bet on the right outcome. Glad I wasn’t still looking at Cory Booker. But I’m interested in her because she continues, you know, the work that I was interested in, in my dissertation, looking at multiracial people. And then also, this is my own identity. Like, I’m also a multiracial Black woman. And so I guess I am sort of interested in what people like her do, because it’s part of my own experience as well.
HEDVIG: Cool. Yeah. I’m really curious to hear more about that, what people do, and how they negotiate that. That sounds like a really interesting research topic.
BEN: But before we do that, Daniel, do we need to check in with what’s happening in linguistic news in the week gone past?
DANIEL: Yes, let’s take a look. We’re gonna begin with spinach emails.
BEN: Spinach emails. I love… I like how you’re like: Ben consumes a crazy amount of media! And then without fail every show, every week, it’s like: here’s a thing. And I’m like: Well, the kids these days, pshh, I dunno.
HEDVIG: I saw this in the run sheet and I have… I don’t… I read the sentence Daniel’s gonna say, and I don’t understand it.
BEN: I feel like Lisa Simpson. I know what all those words mean. But I don’t know what that sentence means!
HEDVIG: I don’t know what they mean together. No idea.
DANIEL: You’re not allowed to bring up that reference again in the next episode. That’s two.
BEN: Okay, fine. Three strikes, and I’m out.
DANIEL: Here’s the headline from Euro News, “Scientists have taught spinach to send emails and it could warn us about climate change.”
BEN: [SIGHS DEEPLY]
NICOLE: [FAINT FACEPALM NOISE]
BEN: I don’t know if my sigh registered on the microphone just then. So if in case it didn’t, I’m gonna do it bigger. [VERY LOUD EXHALATION]
NICOLE: I did a facepalm. You couldn’t hear the facepalm, but I did it.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Did they link up spinach like leaf growth to If This Then That?
DANIEL: You have the story.
HEDVIG: Which is this service where you can link emails to stuff.
BEN: I was gonna… I was gonna go with… what are water moisture detectors? Hygrometer? I was gonna go with a hygrometer.
DANIEL: Okay, what do we know about plant communication? We’ve talked about it with, for example, Monica Gagliano of UWA years ago, but what do we remember?
BEN: I know that recently, the big, the big, sort of like, talking point is the so-called Wood Wide Web, this idea that there is a interconnected series of root systems linking, like a… like a crazy, almost kind of like Avatar, James Cameron’s Avatar, where like, all living plant matter is all kind of touching each other and kind of sending signals backwards and forwards. I think that’s a thing now? Or it’s always been a thing, but we’ve called it a thing.
DANIEL: All right…
HEDVIG: And something with fungi. So the Wood Wide Web is dependent on fungi in some sort of way. But there was also this thing that was… I don’t know if it was a myth or if it was true, that like, grass when it’s being cut screams, and that’s the smell of freshly cut grass? That, like, that’s like a hormone or something?
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] You’re smelling plant terror. Is that what it is?
BEN: It just feels like something out of Rick and Morty. It was just like: ahhhh!
NICOLE: I do remember reading about a study that like plants grew faster when they listened to Beyonce.
BEN: Yeah, yeah!
[LAUGHTER]
NICOLE: However, it doesn’t seem to just be Beyonce. I mean, I wish it was. It seems to be like with music of any kind.
HEDVIG: That’s funny.
DANIEL: And in fact, it is white noise as well. So does talking to your plants help? Yeah. There was an episode of Mythbusters on this, which is why I remember it.
Well, if I’d known Wood Wide Web, I would have made that a… Wood of the Week, but anyway. Plants can communicate through their roots. They can also communicate through the air with something called volatile organic compounds. So if they’re getting eaten by bugs, they can communicate to other plants: Hey, I’m getting eaten by bugs! Put out some nasty tasting chemicals to your leaves. That kind of thing.
HEDVIG: That’s the mown… the lawnmower great thing.
DANIEL: Yeah. Okay, okay.
BEN: Which says to the other blades of grass: Watch out, giant spinning blades are coming! Protect yourself!
DANIEL: It’s a little specific.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And like, what are you going to do next? Yeah.
DANIEL: [LAUGHTER] Yeah. Run!
NICOLE: I like that the plants have solidarity. Like, that’s really heartening.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: We can’t move, we go really slowly, all of these “animal beings” just completely fuck our shit up, so let’s band together.
DANIEL: So this is a new study in Nature Materials by a team from MIT. They are studying plant nanobionics.
BEN: Cool title. That’s a… that’s a fun thing to be able to… What do you do? Uh, no big deal, plant nanobionics, it’s whatever.
DANIEL: You know. So spinach plants are always slurping up water and chemicals from the soil. This team has used… carbon nanotubes. It’s been a while. It’s been a while.
BEN: Ah, good old carbon nanotubes. They can fix everything!
DANIEL: So for example, when an explosive chemical is detected — maybe there’s somebody making explosives in the near vicinity —
HEDVIG: Oh!
DANIEL: The carbon nanotubes can send a signal to an infrared sensor, and this can send an email warning to you about pollutants or other stuff, like maybe changing drought conditions.
BEN: So the carbon… if I’m following this correctly, for the sake of our listeners: Carbon nanotubes in this instance are kind of working like very tiny syringes that are tapping into the interior of the plants, and then reading various chemical signals and then sending — like Hedvig said at the start — If This Then That is set up, so that, like, when this chemical is seen, do this.
DANIEL: That’s it. That’s it.
HEDVIG: Oh, okay.
BEN: That’s very cool.
DANIEL: It’s very, potentially quite useful.
BEN: I feel really bad for sighing at the start.
DANIEL: Well, let’s remember, there’s been an awful lot of terrible bad science and bad linguistics around plants and communication, right?
BEN: True.
HEDVIG: I don’t know. I was kind of enjoying the plant solidarity, I thought that was pretty fine. Why are you saying bad? Sounds great.
DANIEL: Yeah, but it’s not all upside. I got an email offering me $20 million from some prince, and then… turned out to be a carrot.
[CONSTERNATION]
BEN: [GROANS] Oh god. Oh. The thing I worry about is how long you spent on that joke. I really hope it wasn’t a long time.
DANIEL: Hang on, hang on, I got another one.
HEDVIG: Next!
DANIEL: I didn’t think anybody was even using Hotmail still.
BEN: [GROANS] Ooh! Burn on Hotmail.
DANIEL: Oh!
HEDVIG: I don’t understand that one.
NICOLE: I don’t want to be a co-host of this. I’m happy with occasional guest.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Next time, I’ll get Ben to write the jokes.
HEDVIG: Nicole, I’m so sorry! They’re usually not this… Usually, they go off on other tangents.
NICOLE: A way with play on words.
DANIEL: This is what happens when they let me talk.
BEN: Yep.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Beyond the bare exposition.
BEN: So. That is pretty cool.
HEDVIG: So. That’s fun. That is fun. That’s useful. Good.
DANIEL: Let’s move on. Let’s move on. This one’s about Deaf children and hearing parents. Take a guess, what percentage of Deaf children are born to hearing parents?
HEDVIG: Oh, we’ve talked about this before. It’s a very, it’s quite a high percentage. I think it’s something like only…
BEN: 85 percent?
HEDVIG: …something like only 10% of Deaf children are born to Deaf parents or something like that. So most of them are born to hearing parents.
DANIEL: Mhm.
BEN: So Hedvig’s gone with 90, I’ve gone with 85.
DANIEL: 85. Nicole? Whatcha got?
NICOLE: I’d go a little lower, like, yeah, I agree, I’d go 85.
DANIEL: Okay. Well, according to the NIDCD, the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders in the USA, about 95% of Deaf children are born to hearing parents. Well, the NIDCD says 90%, but the authors of the paper say 95%. And I’ll get to the paper in a second. Now, lots of those parents have never learned a signed language until they have a Deaf child. We know it’s very important to give children language. But if there’s someone who’s a hearing parent with a Deaf child, you know, they’re learners themselves. They might be thinking: is my learner knowledge going to be good enough for them to learn from?
HEDVIG: Yeah, that’s a conundrum.
BEN: I mean, I… the initial like knee-jerk response would be no, I imagine. When you stack it up against two Deaf parents with a Deaf child, that level of interplay and fluency and turn-taking and all that normal sort of language learning stuff, you have to imagine is just if not completely absent, at least drastically, drastically reduced when compared to the alternative.
NICOLE: So I don’t… I don’t remember the citation off the top of my head. But I do remember reading a paper about raising children bilingual. And if you have like one English-speaking parent and one Spanish-speaking parent, and the English-speaking parent learns Spanish and everybody wants to talk to the kid in Spanish, it actually isn’t that helpful for the parent whose L2 is Spanish to be speaking Spanish to the kid, because they have less-than-native speaker performance and competence. And also, it tends to be just hard for them to maintain the language. So they go back to English more frequently. So this is actually not as beneficial as the L1 Spanish speaking parent speaking to the kid, and I would imagine that it might be similar in this situation.
DANIEL: Okay. And then I seem to remember Annick de Houwer’s study on trilingualism, where she found that if… for example, if you’re in an English speaking country — this was Dutch, but I’ll say English — both parents don’t speak English, but they do speak… both speak the other two languages, then that was the best outcome. Interestingly.
BEN: Oh, okay.
HEDVIG: All right.
DANIEL: Okay, so this is a study from Dr Naomi Caselli and a team from Boston University asking how well do children learn from imperfect data? They looked at 78 children learning ASL, who had hearing parents. The kids were between eight months old and five and a half years old. And they compare those kids of hearing parents to Deaf kids with Deaf signing parents. And then they examined the vocabulary of both groups. And they found that the kids with hearing parents and the kids with Deaf parents didn’t show much difference at all.
BEN: Interesting. Interesting.
HEDVIG: Hm!
NICOLE: This is also not surprising, I think. Because children are language machines. [LAUGHTER] Like, if you think about how we… we think about acquisition in the community, and some of the theories on Creole language emergence, this is totally, totally reasonable. Even if children get imperfect input, they’ll fix it.
HEDVIG: But I was wondering how the study worked with that. Because if they got sort of imperfect input, they might have fixed it, but they might have made, like, a new standard, like a home-lect, right?
DANIEL: That happens all the time.
HEDVIG: So like, they might have lots of words, they might have lots of lexicon for things, but was what they’re being evaluated for if they… their communicative ability, or their conformance to like standard ASL? Because you’d have to guess that conformance of standard ASL probably might be lower. I don’t know.
BEN: Well, I mean, the other thing to bear in mind… So when we had Drisana Levitzke-Gray on the show, one of the things she mentioned is that even if you do grow up with Deaf parents, you still tend to make a homelect anyway. Like, that’s just a very common feature of signed families.
HEDVIG: Right. And also, I don’t know but, like, the things you say to children, the kind of interactions you have with children are different from the kind of interactions you have with adults. They tend to include less maybe unique signs anyway, at least include less unique words for hearing families. So you could imagine that the learners, even if their capability of communicating with adult signers might not be as proficient, communicating with children maybe is easier? I don’t know.
NICOLE: This is a good point too, because the time, right… so like, you are hearing and you have a Deaf child, they are going through the process of language acquisition all the time, but you have time to become a more proficient signer before you have to, like, give them lectures on Shakespeare, right? [LAUGHTER] So you’ve got like 10 years before you need to talk to your kid about Shakespeare. So you’ve got time — right? — to get your proficiency to the level that you might want it to be.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: That is a great point. There was one interesting thing about the study: the children who were hearing, and the children who were Deaf didn’t have much difference in their vocabulary, unless the children had been exposed to ASL after they were six months old. For those kids, they had a solid receptive vocabulary, but their expressive vocabulary was lower than their peers, than their Deaf peers.
BEN: That young?!
DANIEL: Six months.
BEN: That’s madness!
HEDVIG: But they might still catch up in later years, right?
NICOLE: They might catch up. And I think, too, you know, I have not read this study, but I think this is something that we should keep in mind is very difficult to study objectively. So if we’re looking at vocabulary size, and children and parents in a laboratory setting, this is not necessarily going to give you something the way that the kid behaves authentically at home, in all situations. And I’m sure it was well done. But there’s also all of the social confounds. So I was thinking about the issue of if you have… if you’re hearing parents, and you have a Deaf child, are you more likely to seek out those communities? Are you more likely to put more effort into making sure that your child has, you know, other people to sign with from a young age and things like that? And so I think the effects of those kinds of interventions might eclipse whatever kind of initial advantage a child might have, in different circumstances.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Maybe we should do… we should do a more dedicated episode where we get some more people on and have some interpreters talk to some Deaf folk, as well?
BEN: I would love that. The Drisana episode is one of the favorites that we’ve ever recorded. For me anyway.
DANIEL: So all parents have to make their own decisions, but we know that language is essential for a child’s development, and that includes signed languages. And for those parents who learn a signed language, it seems that their learner input is good enough. And that’s really good news.
Let’s go on to our last item here. Hedvig, you showed me this one. It’s a new video series from the latest linguistic YouTuber, Caroline Kilov.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I know Caroline from uni. She’s from my alma mater, from the Australian National University. And suddenly on my timeline, it popped up that she was doing, like, quirky poppy linguistics, fun stuff on the internets. And I was very pleased. I always love an ANU person doing something fun. And then I just got a message from Daniel saying: Oh, I had a chat with her. And I was like: Oh, fun! Great.
DANIEL: Yeah. Her first video is about spurious etymologies. It’s funny, it’s pretty informative, and it gives you some good resources to do your own research. We’re gonna have a link on our blog, becauselanguage.com. So I got the chance to talk to Caroline Kilov. And I asked her how she got into linguistics.
CAROLINE KILOV: I guess I’m an aspiring linguist? So I got into linguistics, kind of I feel like most linguists did, and that is by accident. And I took a linguistics course in undergrad and was very much enthralled. And so after my second course, I decided this is amazing, and changed my entire major to be linguistics. And yeah, I ended up doing honours. I think I took 17 courses in linguistics during my undergrad, which is, like, double the amount you’re supposed to take for a major. [LAUGHTER] And yeah, and now I’m doing my PhD in linguistics, currently online.
DANIEL: Right. Okay, very cool. So what is it that made you decide to get into videos?
CAROLINE: So I had always been aware that sort of younger, younger people — kids as well — have sort of YouTubers that they follow and just are obsessed with. And I hadn’t really… yeah, I didn’t really get into this myself until mid last year. Exactly when I started my PhD, which is great timing.
DANIEL: Yeah, good. That won’t be a distraction at all.
CAROLINE: Not at all. I stumbled across a YouTube channel by Curtis Connor, who does commentary and it’s… so it’s a comedy channel kind of, but he also weaves in social commentary with his videos. And, yeah, I got hooked. And there’s just, you know, so many people in this genre. And so I’ve basically since then watched multiple hours of YouTube most days. So eventually I kind of just went: Well, I’ve… I feel like I’ve been consuming too much YouTube and haven’t been doing enough linguistic indoctrination recently, so I’m going to use what I’ve learned from YouTube and try and get some, yeah, linguistic awareness happening in that kind of space.
DANIEL: Okay! Well, I got a look at your first video. It’s really cool.
CAROLINE: Thank you!
DANIEL: What is the process like for you? What goes into the making of a video?
CAROLINE: Well, I write down topics as I think of them. And then whatever topic I’m most obsessed with at that point, I’ve only done two of these so far, so it’s a very new sort of process for me. But I spend two weeks or so researching. And then it’s a case of writing. I write about 80% of the script. And then I record, but it’s like a fake recording, because I’m not actually recording it to do the video, I’m recording it to practice the script.
DANIEL: Wow.
CAROLINE: But something about having the camera on helps. And I find that when I do that, I come up with a lot more sort of jokes or like, yeah, better ways of saying things. And so then I work that all into the script again. And then I do another filming session, each of which takes like 45 minutes for like a 10 minute video. And yeah, that’s how I ended up with with the video. And the recording itself is very much yeah, it’s very much me going: Hi, my name’s Carolyn, welc…. Oh, oh, no.
DANIEL: Oh damn. [LAUGHTER] Exactly.
CAROLINE: There’s a lot of awkward pauses and just me staring blankly at the camera going: What was I supposed to say? And yeah, it’s very painful to watch the unedited footage.
DANIEL: [LAUGHTER] Right. Okay. Sort of like listening to unedited audio of us, I think.
CAROLINE: Yeah!
DANIEL: And then it all comes together in the edit.
CAROLINE: Yes, exactly. Oh, yes. That’s the other thing. I have a wonderful, wonderful editor who just happens to be one of the best friends of my husband, and he is a professional at this stuff, and was just like: Oh, I’ve always wanted to edit a YouTube channel. So let me do that for you. So extremely lucky on that respect, because he’s… yeah, done an absolutely great job.
DANIEL: Yeah, yeah. It’s, it’s really smooth. And it’s got a good feel. It’s funny. It’s laden with effects. And it sounds like you kind of have found your groove a little early.
CAROLINE: [LAUGHS] Thank you! Yeah, it was a lot of fun to film. And yeah, a lot of workshopping went into it. And as you can tell, hopefully, from the video, I’m very enthusiastic about linguistics and very enthusiastic about sharing and making people laugh. So I… yeah, I hope that it continues. I’ve been overwhelmed with the positive response that I’ve been getting. And yeah, I’m very grateful.
DANIEL: Okay. Very cool. Well, tell me about your notebook. What ideas have you got ready to go?
CAROLINE: Okay, so next up is going to be looking at season 22 of America’s Next Top Model.
DANIEL: Oh, gosh.
CAROLINE: Yeah. So the winner that season, Nyle DiMarco, was also their first ever Deaf contestant. And so I’ve been working with my American Sign Language teacher, I’ve been learning American Sign Language for about a year now. And been workshopping it with her. And so I’ll be basically poking fun at this particular season, but also working in parts about, you know, Deaf representation and signed languages and all that sort of thing as well.
DANIEL: Very cool. And we’d like to ask: What is your favorite thing about language?
CAROLINE: Oh, my goodness, this is such a mean question!
DANIEL: [LAUGHTER] Muahaha!
CAROLINE: My favorite thing at the moment is that… even the same language can vary so widely across different locations and dialects and all that sort of thing. I’ve been having a very interesting time learning, as an Australian, talking to my American colleagues at my university, working out what exactly is in both of our dialects and what isn’t, and I’ve been very surprised by some of them, really.
DANIEL: Really? Like, what’s a surprising thing?
CAROLINE: So ACROSS IT… are you across this term?
DANIEL: Oh, yes, I am across this term, being Australian.
CAROLINE: Yeah, I do have a few Australian friends who haven’t heard it, but almost all my Australian friends know this term, and I myself use it a lot. But none of my American colleagues so far have heard this term, or really knew what I meant when I said that I was across this particular topic.
DANIEL: What would they say? They would say something like: you’ve got your head around it or something like that.
CAROLINE: Yeah, ON TOP OF IT, was another option.
DANIEL: ON TOP OF IT! Good ol’ prepositions, huh?
CAROLINE: Yeah! But then even then they were like: Is it like, on top of that? I was like: kind of, but you can be, like, on top of your workload, but you can’t really be, like, across your workload, unless you mean something like you have a full understanding of what your workload is. So it’s like a little bit different. And then…
DANIEL: Dang.
CAROLINE: Yeah! So yeah, a few surprises.
DANIEL: Well, you gotta tell them about AMONGST IT as well.
CAROLINE: Oh, yeah! [LAUGHTER] Oh, wow. Thank you.
DANIEL: Okay, that’s for next time. Caroline Kilov, thank you so much for coming on and having a chat today.
CAROLINE: Thanks so much, Daniel, I really appreciate it.
[END OF INTERVIEW WITH CAROLINE]
DANIEL: I’ll say it again, a lot of people think that language variation is some terrible thing. But then you get amongst linguists, and they’re like: Language variation is just the best!
BEN: Can I ask the three linguists on the show currently: Did you all get into it accidentally?
NICOLE: I mean, I don’t know what you mean, “accidentally”. [LAUGHS]
BEN: I’m just going… I’m just going on what she said.
NICOLE: Yeah, I mean, I didn’t… when I went to college, I didn’t know what linguistics was. And I was majoring in Spanish and Arabic. And I had a friend whose dad had studied some linguistics and just told me I would like it. But I think I might have found it, like otherwise, because at Ohio State where I was an undergrad, within the Spanish major, you had to pick a track and one of the tracks was Hispanic linguistics. So I think it… I think it was coming for me either way.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: You got there. I know so many students who, you know, took my wonderful first year lectures and then said: Oh, my gosh, this is amazing. I just wish that they didn’t wait until they were at uni to find out about linguistics.
HEDVIG: Flex? Sorry.
BEN: Yeah, I know, right? What a humblebrag, jeez louise.
DANIEL: Total flex. Total flex.
NICOLE: Well, this is the problem, right? Like, we don’t… linguists have a little bit of a PR issue, which is why it’s nice that Caroline is doing, you know, she’s on YouTube and everything like that. There’s been an initiative in the LSA in the US to try to get an AP linguistics class in high schools for a while, that I think hasn’t, you know, we haven’t gotten there yet. But maybe. But I do think like, you know, my experience before I came to Penn, I was at Pomona College. Some kids who went to really fancy privileged high schools knew what linguistics was, were exposed to it as an elective or something like that. But I think we could do a lot of good if we got it in everybody’s consciousness earlier on, for sure.
HEDVIG: Yeah. In Sweden, I sort of had that track. Even though I went to like a public general school, I was in a linguistics and languages program. So I actually had linguistics in a secondary school, which was very lucky.
BEN: Okay, Scandinavian education system flex, we get it!
HEDVIG: No, but it wasn’t a privileged school in terms of money, but it was a privileged school, you have to have certain high grades to go there. It’s like an inner city school, was one of the four like prestigious schools and they offer this and… but it was actually because I tried for that school for the singing, for the music tier.
[DANIEL AND BEN CHUCKLE]
HEDVIG: And I, I wasn’t good enough. And my second choice was the language linguistics tier. So I don’t know if that’s an accident or not, that my singing voice is so bad that I’m a linguist instead.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: I think it counts.
DANIEL: I gotta say, though, I did a thing where… last year where I designed and taught a high school unit. At Scotch, it was a privileged, sort of… it was, it was…
BEN: The most privileged, some would say!
DANIEL: Okay, yep. Cool, okay. And I thought, Man, I wish I were, you know, doing this for everybody so that, even if they’re a working class speaker or whatever, they’ll know that their language has value. But you know what? I think there is value in showing the privileged folks that: you know what, language discrimination is real, and you can stop it. That was a message that I, you know, tried to promote. I’m glad I did for them.
NICOLE: Yeah, I taught… Back in California, I taught a linguistic discrimination class that was, it’s in the format of Inside-Out Prison Exchange. So I took the kids from Pomona, and we took them to a medium security prison, California rehabilitation center, and we did the class with incarcerated students and not-incarcerated students together. And it was linguistic discrimination. And when I would tell people, friends about this, they’d always be like: Oh, like, so good for the people that are incarcerated! And I was like: I mean, yes, but like, also really good for the not-incarcerated students, like, it’s actually really good for every…!
BEN: That is not a unilateral direction of benefit at all.
NICOLE: And in fact, maybe more beneficial for the kids who aren’t incarcerated, because they live in this liberal arts bubble. They never talk to people who don’t sound like them, because even the students of colour have been kind of forced into mainstream language norms. And yes, in fact, for the incarcerated students, a lot of them, people told me that they never received feedback on the content of things that they had written in their whole lives until they were in a class, you know, some of the college classes that they were taking while they were incarcerated, because all that happened was that they were policed for their grammar. So all the way around this was a good thing! But I… but I agree, because what I thought, you know, the, the more privileged, the non-incarcerated students were getting was… you know, they’re going to be important, important people with social power. They’re going to be lawyers and doctors and politicians and stuff like that. And they’ll be able to say: You know what? I met somebody who talked in this variety that isn’t considered prestigious, and we had a good learning experience together, and I remember them. And so I have more basic respect for people that don’t sound like me. And I can use my social power and the fact that I know that to be — I don’t know — less of a jerk in the world? Affect positive social change!
DANIEL: More linguistics is always the answer.
HEDVIG: I wonder how we can get those kinds of discussions into… so I’ve been involved in these Linguistic Olympiads, so in Australia, OzCLO, and in North America, NACLO, Computational Linguistics Olympiad. And they tend to be focused on puzzles and actually very often sort of, fairly… I think my experience for going to the national contest and seeing these teams from different countries, is that it tends to be, like, these well-to-do high schools that promote their teams to go into these contests, right? And they tend to be fairly nerdy. And I love these kids. They’re super cute. And I really like them. And we had the OzCLO winners on for the show. And they’re very sweet and very cute. But it’s sort of hard to make linguistics discrimination into a little logic puzzle that they can solve.
BEN: You can’t gamify all learning experiences.
HEDVIG: No. Can you?
NICOLE: No, but you can treat variation as though it is part of the linguistic system, because it is, right? I give a quiz at the very beginning of when I teach African-American English in Intro to Linguistics that is about the grammar of African-American English. And guess what? People that have never encountered that variety before… fail it!
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yeah!
NICOLE: Yeah! Because it’s rule governed, and it’s got a set of rules that you don’t know, if you don’t speak it!
HEDVIG: That’s fun. That’s fun. Usually, these tests are not testing specific language competence, but maybe just for funsies, we could do it anyway. It’s a good idea. I like it.
DANIEL: There’s a lot to say here about education and access to information. What I find especially encouraging about linguistic YouTubers especially, is that they take the information that we’re trying to promote and they do an especially good job of getting it out there. And in amongst it is Caroline Kilov. We’re gonna have a link to her stuff up on our blog, becauselanguage.com.
BEN: Do a bunch of co-pros!
[SILENCE]
HEDVIG: …Co-pros?
DANIEL: Did you say co-pros?
BEN: Yeah, co-productions!
DANIEL: Oh, co-pros, of course.
HEDVIG: She’s hired that cute meme-y video editor style person. So. Anyway, let’s get on to the main thing. We’ve gone too long with things that aren’t about Kamala Harris and Nicole.
BEN: Yes. That has to end… now.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: We’re here with Dr Nicole Holliday of the University of Pennsylvania. Thanks for hanging out with us! It’s fun having you here.
NICOLE: Oh, it’s nice to be here. This is brand new stuff I’m talking to you about today. So I’m… it’s like, you know, world media premiere!
DANIEL: I know! This is the debut, isn’t it? Oh my gosh.
HEDVIG: Cool!
NICOLE: Yeah! I did give a talk, I gave a talk at Brown University a couple of weeks ago. So they were the first people to see it. But you’re the first recorded people to see this work.
BEN: It’s soft launch. Soft launch at Brown, and here is the big….
HEDVIG: Oh, I’m excited! I like it.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Yup, that’s us. We might be the slightly less soft launch. Soft launch two. So this is work about Kamala Harris’s social linguistic patterns. I don’t really know where to start with this, so Nicole, I’m going to handball this to you. What got you into this?
NICOLE: Yeah. So I have a couple of papers on Barack Obama, one about Barack and Michelle Obama. And I’m really broadly interested in how people do identity work with language, particularly as I was saying in the realm of race. And I like politicians, because their performance is overt. So for a sociolinguist, we think about people performing their identity, and everyone’s doing it all the time. Like, you’re always giving off information. So if you’re listening to me right now, you probably have some pretty good probable guesses about things about who I am, right? Clearly, I’m American, I’m in my early 30s, you might or might not know that I identify as a Black biracial woman. That one’s a little harder on me, but like maybe easier on other folks. So you know this stuff about me. And when I’m talking, I’m giving you that information.
Politicians are not only giving you that information, they’re doing it in a really explicit way, and are trying to persuade you of something. And so what they’re doing… their motivations are always pretty bare. Whereas for regular speakers, we don’t know that. And that’s why I like studying them as it’s like, I know what she’s doing, she’s trying to tell us that she belongs in this community or cares about this community or you know, is competent about this particular issue. So I love studying politicians. And Kamala in particular is very interesting, because she does not fit into any of our boxes. Or about, you know, sort of… there’s nobody to compare her to. And this is also why I was interested in Obama. Before Obama was on the scene, we had an idea of what a president sounded like, and it’s not… it’s certainly not the case that he was the first one to sort of break that mould.
DANIEL: Well, I was thinking about Barack Obama, the time that he was at a cafe and the worker offered him change. And he declined, saying, “Nah, we straight”. And people kind of flipped out over this.
NICOLE: Yeah, the “Nah, we straight” heard around the world at Ben’s Chili Bowl in Washington, DC! [LAUGHTER] This is an earth shattering moment, if you’re me.
DANIEL: There’s a lot of expectations on Black politicians.
NICOLE: Yeah. I mean, it’s not new, right? This is true. Like Bill Clinton was, you know, kind of panned for how he sounded, because he was from Arkansas.
BEN: And sounded like it, right? Like, he didn’t… he didn’t make a huge attempt to sort of gussy up or yank-ify his voice in any way. He was just like: Yep. Arkansas.
NICOLE: Yeah. Of course, it didn’t hurt him, because he was able to spin that piece of his identity. I mean, it hurt him with some people, right? But he was able to spin it to his advantage. This is exactly what I’m saying. Like, there’s a lot of overt, you know: Oh, I’m folksy, or I’m this or I’m that.
BEN: Yeah, Uncle Bill.
NICOLE: Yeah, this thing with Obama and the “nah, we straight” part, he got it from all sides about this, right? Because people were saying he doesn’t really talk like that. That’s not authentic. He’s not really Black. He doesn’t really command African-American English. This is some kind of performance. And other people were saying: Oh my god, terrible grammar! Like, how could you possibly ever use a zero copula, my, you know, clutching their pearls and whatever. But what these conversations miss is that everybody commands multiple styles, and particularly for people that have multiple identities, they command them in different places. I have pretty good evidence in the stuff that I’ve done that Barack Obama does command some, you know, personal variety of African-American English. And I don’t think that this is not something that’s in his grammar, I think that we don’t see it very often, because we almost always see him interacting in very formal situations, not like getting change at a restaurant!
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: I can’t help but feel that in that moment — and you can probably speak to this very articulately, Nicole — he probably goes, “Hmm, I said a thing. And everyone says I did it wrong. This is a familiar feeling.”
[LAUGHTER]
NICOLE: Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe he’s over it at this point. [LAUGHTER] But this might just be your every day, you know, when you’re a politician. But this is why I think they’re interesting, is that, like, their speech is overtly self conscious all the time.
BEN: Yeah, one hundred percent. It must make just the most interesting testing case for you, because you can just go: Oh, great, like, Politician X is now heading to this completely other geographical region, and they’re clearly going to change up what they do a little bit to, like sort of, speak to that community. Let’s see what happens.
NICOLE: Yeah.
HEDVIG: I was gonna ask — I heard, I don’t know if this is true, and I’m sure all of you know much more about this than me — but I heard that George Bush Jr was sort of hamming up some of his regional speech patterns a bit more in certain contexts to sound more folksy and more trusting and things like that. And he sounds, in those situations, my understanding was he sounded a bit more Southern. And that was a choice that was available to him to do in certain formal settings that I imagine is not maybe available for Kamala Harris or Barack Obama, to sort of be like: Oh, no, I’m going talk more African-American Vernacular English to sound more authentic. That choice isn’t really available in the same way, because there’s so many people who would react negatively to that, whereas a lot of people like that a southern…
BEN: Because of white supremacy.
HEDVIG: Because, rural white dialects of English are sort of like… are easy to be coded as sort of cute.
NICOLE: Yes. So the indexicality, right, the sort of imagined features that come along with different varieties, is different. And it’s also different for your audience. So George W. Bush was doing this whole, like “I’m from Texas and therefore authentic” thing. And it makes sense because he was running against Al Gore… or sorry, is that right? Yes, correct. [LAUGHTER] What year are we in? AAA!
DANIEL: It’s been a while. It’s been a while.
NICOLE: And Al Gore, people forget, is from Tennessee! So actually did have like, had kind of a claim to this and, you know, maybe even more than George W. Bush. But because there was this kind of sea change, this idea that Democrats were elitist and, like, looking down on people, and like not representing, you know, rural people, not representing the South. This is sort of the beginning of that conversation. It made sense for George W. Bush to lean into being Texan, because those are the voters that he was trying to appeal to. The ones who felt like Al Gore was looking down on them, even though he was also from Tennessee. So this is what I mean about, like, the politicians having a very specific goal that is transparent.
HEDVIG: And maybe also if he leans into being Texan, the white voters not in Texas from the north wouldn’t be necessarily that negative towards that, either. So you have a sort of like win-win scenario there, in a way.
NICOLE: Yeah, it could be. Obviously Southern white varieties are stigmatised in the United States too. I don’t want to say that they’re not, they certainly are. And this is part of the reason I think that George W. Bush in the historical memory gets painted as stupid, people call him stupid all the time. And I do think that that has to do with part of this stereotype, you know, in addition to whether they agree or disagree with his policies. But I do think that the range of linguistic choices that he had was more available as the son of a former president who attended Yale, and was like, you know, a Texas tycoon kind of guy. Like, he’s got more range, he’s got more latitude to move through linguistic styles without being kind of stigmatised for that.
DANIEL: So let’s focus on Vice President Harris.
NICOLE: Yeah, enough of that white guy!
DANIEL: We’re always centering them! What kind of identities are we talking about here? She’s a woman. She’s Black. She’s of Southeast Asian heritage. There’s a bundle of things to look at here.
NICOLE: Yeah. So it’s hard, because you can’t ever really disentangle things, right? She’s also very California. And she’s also in her mid-50s. She’s also, you know, part of the Democratic Party, and in this particular way. So she’s got to do all of these things at once, which is really complicated, because sometimes these things are seen as kind of in opposition. So we don’t imagine African-American English to be something that women do. It’s very heavily stereotyped with masculinity, which is why it’s available as a resource for young white men to sound quote-unquote cool. So just to begin with, sounding like a Black woman — and an older middle-aged Black woman — is very hard, because that’s not sort of the stereotype that we have in our minds. Now add on top of that all of the other things that she has to be at the same time AND appealing AND quote-unquote articulate. And blah.
So, the study that I did, I looked at what’s going on with her in a few different domains. Primarily, I study prosody, which is, like, intonational variation. And we could get into the weeds a little bit, but the Cliff’s Notes of what’s going on with her prosody is: she does use some features that we believe are part of African-American English. So the way that her pitch moves throughout the phrase, you’ll see moments where she has sort of more dramatic jumps between her low pitch and her high pitch in a very short setting. So I compared what she was doing in terms of these pitch jumps, how many prominent syllables, how many things that kind of stood out in a particular phrase she had, across different issues. And this is data from the 2019 Democratic debates, the primary debates, so when there are all 12 of them onstage, like, fighting for space, what is she doing in that setting?
And she does kind of different strategies on different issues. One thing in particular: when she talks about race, she has more prominent syllables. And this makes sense, because this is work that we have seen before from Black speakers. So in a 2018 paper, Jason McLarty found this, both with modern African-American speakers and recordings of people that had been previously enslaved, that you have more prominent syllables. And she does that when she talks about race. When she talks about the economy and immigration, she has more of those local pitch jumps. So she doesn’t have more prominences, but she’s moving her pitch up and down more, and particularly up more. And I think it’s because she’s trying to sound like a charismatic policy person. So when you’re talking about policy, it’s hard to sound charismatic. So she’s making up for the fact that she’s talking about things that are kind of dry, by doing a linguistic style that’s charismatic.
DANIEL: Do we have any examples of this?
NICOLE: Okay, so this is from one of the debates and she’s talking about racial inequality and how Black women, by virtue of being both Black and women, experience a lot of inequality. So this is an explicit discussion of race. And you’ll hear her sound very emphatic. So listen to her pitch move up and down, but also listen to like all of the syllables that seem to stick out to you.
KAMALA HARRIS [ON RECORDING]: Because when Black women… [APPLAUSE] when Black women are three to four times more likely to die in connection with childbirth in America, when the sons of Black women will die because of gun violence more than any other cause of death, when Black women make 61 cents on the dollar, as compared to all women who tragically make 80 cents on the dollar, the question has to be: where you been? And what are you gonna do? And do you understand who the people are? [END RECORDING]
NICOLE: Okay. There’s something rhetorical going on here too. This is outside of my domain because I study prosody. But when Black women, when Black women, when Black women.
DANIEL: Da-da da-da.
NICOLE: She does this repetition.
HEDVIG: She sounds a little bit to me like, like someone in a church.
NICOLE: Ah, Black preacher style! Okay!
HEDVIG: Yep. So I should say, not native speaker of English, not American. So I’ve got a lot of things I can get wrong.
NICOLE: That’s good. That means it’s real. [LAUGHTER] This is a style that people associate with Black preachers. Walt Wolfram has some work on Martin Luther King, where you see this rhetorical style. In their book about Barack Obama, “Articulate While Black”, Alim and Smitherman write about his use of this kind of thing. But it’s a little bit hard to capture, you know, what’s going on with the prosody, with the intonation, just from hearing short clips. But hopefully you get a flavour of sort of how she sounds when she talks about these issues that she’s kind of more personally invested in.
It’s interesting, because I’m describing this as like: Oh, it sounds emphatic. It sounds emphatic, because if it was a white speaker, that’s what they would be doing, they would be doing emphasis. So we are sort of biased by our own ears. There is a particular pitch accent that is characterised, it’s a prominent… a thing that happens on prominent syllables, characterised by a fall and then kind of a dramatic rise in pitch. And this is something available to white speakers in America, most white speakers in America. But you only see it when they’re doing some kind of correction. So if I were to say like: Oh, today is Monday, you might say no, today’s Sunday. Da da-da. She does that all over the place when she’s not correcting something or being particularly emphatic, because it’s part of her style. This is a feature of African-American English, to have these pitch jumps in places that don’t necessarily have the meaning of emphasis or contrast.
HEDVIG: Okay, cool.
DANIEL: And then that’s kind of dangerous, because white people might listen and say: Woah, is she correcting me??
NICOLE: Yeah. Or like: why is this person speaking with so much energy? Or like, it gets read in weird ways. I think it gets read as hostility. So like, why are you doing so much drama with your pitch? And so if you start in a place, you know, if you start in a: wow, this is a society with racism, and then you project onto Black voices, this person is being like, I don’t know, aggressive in their speech.
BEN: Provocative, or like…
DANIEL: I was thinking angry.
NICOLE: Angry! Oh, angry Black woman, right?
DANIEL: Yeah.
NICOLE: We have a ready-made stereotype for her.
DANIEL: This is… so that… she’s really doing a tricky task here, because she’s got to signal her identity to Black voters in a way that doesn’t put off white voters. That is hard!
NICOLE: It is really hard! You’ll notice… So okay, I did… you know, I did three parts of analysis here. So one thing was the prosody, which is the thing that I was primarily interested in. I also looked at her vowels. And I also looked at her speech for a really wide variety of morphosyntactic features that we see in African-American English. And like, here’s where the story gets a little bit more juicy. Her vowels are a hybrid of, like, mainstream, also Northern California, also African-American. So if you look at her vowel speech, she’s all over the place. She’s… it’s very clear that she’s simultaneously doing all three things. [LAUGHTER] So she’s got /u/ fronting, which is like super Californian.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I heard that.
NICOLE: It’s all over the United States now. But for someone of her age for her /u/ to be that fronted would be weird, unless she was Californian, which she is.
DANIEL: Okay.
NICOLE: Um, in terms of the features that are more, you know, African-American-like, she has UH [ə], like, BUT raising and BAIT-BET overlaps. So the EY [ei] E [e] is kind of occupying the same space. And these are features that we’ve… that we see with African-American speakers too, sort of super regionally, in some cases.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: I thought I picked up on some of the Californian stuff in the clip we just heard.
NICOLE: Yeah, I think it’s in there.
HEDVIG: I definitely remember. And a little bit of nasal as well, some of the vowels.
NICOLE: Pff, I have questions about her nasalisation, but that’s a… that’s another study. If she is doing some nasalisation in unusual places, this is probably not Californian or African-American. It’s probably authoritative female style. That’s my guess about that. Yeah. And then, okay, so looking at what she does with the morphosyntactic variables. She does not… basically never uses any of the highly stereotyped features of African-American English in the United States. And of course, like, there’s regional variation, and I’m really like, collapsing this stuff down, you know. But like, she doesn’t do zero-past-tense marking. She doesn’t use AIN’T very much. She doesn’t use perfective DONE. She doesn’t use negative concord. She doesn’t use third singular -S absence. Like, the whole battery of features that we’ve seen documented as characteristic of African-American English, she avoids like the plague. Because of course she does! Right? One, this is a formal setting. So let’s say she commands every single feature I just listed, she’s not gonna to use it here in a debate where she’s standing between Bernie and Biden! Like, are you kidding me? She’s just not.
[LAUGHTER]
NICOLE: Um, and maybe she does, you know, in more informal situations. I don’t… you know, I haven’t looked at everything she’s ever said, but maybe someday. But she does still have to sound relatable, and sufficiently Black and sufficiently young, and et cetera. So what you see her do — and I have the debate speech from five different debates that happened in the end of 2019 — she has seven moments where she does something that’s kind of like non-standard morphosyntax. And what these things look like is: she says, “Dude gotta go.” So we have a clip that’s “Dude gotta go.”
DANIEL: Okay, let’s hear that.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah, let’s listen to that.
KAMALA HARRIS: [RECORDING] Dude gotta go. [END RECORDING]
HEDVIG: Oh, she does her vowels differently there as well. She does both… yeah.
BEN: Yeah, that sounded… um, I don’t know. Very…
DANIEL: California. Plus African-American.
NICOLE: Yeah, it sounded really!
BEN: Yeah, I just, I think we’re all hedging around here. It sounded like something from The Wire, straight up. Like, it just sounded very, very African-American English to me.
HEDVIG: Yeah, me too.
NICOLE: If you’ve never heard Kamala Harris in your life and you heard that, I bet you that you’d be like: That speaker’s Black.
BEN: Yeah. 100%.
NICOLE: In isolation. From the first one, content aside, you might not have really gotten that. What I do see her doing is this kind of auxiliary deletion thing that isn’t quite zero copula, but is attested. I’ve talked to a lot of people that study African-American English about this. So Mary Kohn and Rachel Weissler both, you know, consulted with me and Charlie Farrington, and I was like, is this a thing? Because it like sounds Black to me, but we don’t have any literature on it. Yeah. So she’s not using zero copula. She’s not saying, “Dude out of control.”
DANIEL: Right. Getting rid of the IS. Yeah.
NICOLE: Yeah, there’s no IS, but the sort of mainstream equivalent of “Dude gotta go” would be, “Dude has got to go.” So we’ve got this like, part of the verb elided here, this part of the auxiliary is not there.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
NICOLE: This is so interesting to me, because she does it several times in the debates. It’s kind of the only non standard morphosyntactic thing that she does. I think this goes back to… Arthur Spears in 1988 said that there was a standard African-American English used by middle-class African Americans, and that it was characterised by having prosodic features of AAE and some morphosyntactic features that he called “camouflaged”. So, these are things that let you say to your audience: I’m Black, without your audience going: [GASP] Zero copula!
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: It’s like zero-copula adjacent.
HEDVIG: Not picking one of the obvious well-known ones. Slipping under the radar a little bit for some people, maybe.
NICOLE: Yes. And she does it a lot, kind of. I mean, like, in these particular moments, but like, it happens, you know, in this pattern.
BEN: I went back and listened to it a second time while you guys were talking…
HEDVIG: Yeah, me too.
BEN: …just to make sure, because my memory said: She said, “Dude’S got to go”, right? I was like: oh, because if there’s the invisible H-A, just eclipsed by a sky comma there, then it’s not a thing. And then… but she very clearly goes out of her way to make sure there is no -S anywhere there.
NICOLE: Oh, I looked at the spectrogram!
[LAUGHTER]
NICOLE: I was like: is there any high frequency noise? Let me make sure there’s no fricative here. There is no fricative.
BEN: None at all.
NICOLE: Yeah. And that’s why I think this particular feature is available to be a camouflage form, is: if you want to, as the listener, you can just be like: Oh, there was an S there.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s like grey area.
BEN: Yeah, I just, my brain 100% inserted one that did not exist. My memory just manufactured that -S out of nowhere.
NICOLE: And in fact, if anybody called her on it, she could be like: No, there was an S there!
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Yeah, and then Nicole Holliday in the background: “I got the spectrogram!”
NICOLE: You’re lying!
DANIEL: I got receipts!
NICOLE: This phrase though, this dude’s gotta go. She says it. I found these GIFs of her saying it multiple times on the campaign trail. So it becomes, like, one of her calling cards, it becomes like a catchphrase that she says all the time.
BEN: Which you have to imagine was 100% deliberate, right?
HEDVIG: It’s very meme-y.
BEN: Like, she sat down with her speech writers and go: I’m going to make this little rhetoric unit and it’s going to do a thing. She might not have sort of linguistically analysed it to this point, but the repetition was 100% deliberate. Right?
NICOLE: I wonder if it just came out in the debate, and then it got talked about a lot the next day like: Oh, remember when Kamala Harris said ‘Dude gotta go?’ And she was like: This is my thing now.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: We got it! I know how I’m going to refer to Trump: Dude gotta go!
HEDVIG: So, Nicole, I wanted to know, how do you think people… because I think it’s very interesting, this idea that there are, like, gray-area morphosyntactic things she can use, that can like, signal to some people, and for some people can sort of slip under the radar. Do you think this is, like, a conscious… Like, how would a person like Kamala Harris go about finding out how to construct her linguistic identity in this way? Do you think it’s a deliberate effort? Or do you think it sort of comes naturally from having been in this context for so long?
NICOLE: I think that she – like everyone else – talks like their community, mostly. Middle-class Black people sound like this. The problem is that most listeners don’t have a lot of input from middle-class Black people.
HEDVIG: Right.
NICOLE: Right? We don’t see representations of that. I’m thinking about, like, all of the… in the early 90s, there was an explosion of, like, Black sitcoms. So you know, these shows like Family Matters, and like, A Different World and all of these things like that. And they were so meaningful. And there’s a lot of, you know, Media Studies literature on this, because people were like: Oh, we’re seeing Black folks on TV, who are doctors and lawyers and not criminals, right? And they talk in this way. And so like, I think, for her, this is actually an authentic way to be. Now, because she is doing overt, you know, political persuasion, I don’t think she wakes up in the morning and says, like: I’m going to use three aux deletions today, in this particular sentence. [LAUGHTER] Like, I don’t. That’s pretty hard, especially for a non-linguist. But she has a feeling for what the style that she should target should be. And that’s what she’s doing.
BEN: It’s the vibe of it. Like, she just sort of… she…
NICOLE: The vibe.
BEN: And I think we all do this, as we code switch, in whatever capacities that we can code switch. We just kind of like… I don’t know if anyone else has this experience when they do it, but in my head, it’s just kind of like, it’s almost spatial, right? Like, I’m going to drop down a little bit into this other, like, register, or I’m going to, like, move to the right, or I’m going to move to the left. And you can kind of feel this… there’s a sense, but it’s definitely not like: I know what I’ll do now, I’m going to say the following words in the following order to achieve outcome X, or whatever.
NICOLE: Yeah, that’s a lot of cognitive planning that we’re expecting. But I also like, I… you know, I talked to biracial people in my dissertation, and asked them if they felt that they had styles that were different with white audiences and Black audiences. And almost all of them said yes. And then when I said, Oh, what do you change? They were like, ~uhhhhhh…!~
HEDVIG: Uhh, I don’t know.
DANIEL: Uhhh!
NICOLE: Yeah. So they would get the things that we believe are at really the level of consciousness. So they would say, like: it’s my words. Okay, maybe some of it is your words, but like, they’re not going to tell you like: I use 100 hertz pitch jump between syllables that are prominent when I talk to white friends, and… no, people can’t do this.
BEN: It reminds me of like, grammar, right? Like, if you ask a single language knower: what are the rules of grammar? Most people have forgotten, like, Mrs. Terwilleger’s class in year three, when you get taught those rules for a little bit. And so you’re just kind of like: I dunno, there’s rules, whatever. And it’s like: But the way you speak follows all of them in an ironclad fashion. So you do know, but you don’t know. It’s tacit knowledge.
HEDVIG: Do you think one of the reasons she sounds so unique — you were saying earlier that there aren’t that many middle-class middle-aged Black women that we hear in the public space a lot — so is some of it just that she sounds special and has her brand because she’s one of the few members of that category, really?
NICOLE: Yeah, I think so. I think so. So like, um, you know, when I was looking at Cory Booker, he sounds so much like Obama. And I don’t know if that is… and they’re very different, right? They’re different in age, they’re different in where they’re from, they’re different in their upbringing, and all this kind of stuff. And I don’t know how much Cory Booker is targeting Obama, or whether they just kind of happened to sound the same. But I do think that if we had, you know, 10 more senators that were more demographically like Kamala Harris, she would stand out less.
BEN and HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: I was thinking of someone else. I was thinking of Raphael Warnock who was running for Senate in Georgia, and won.
NICOLE: And is literally a preacher.
DANIEL: He’s literally a preacher. But really seemed to want to de-racialise his image to the point of — even in one of his ads, a very famous ad — having a beagle, which is a dog that typically a white family might have. I just wonder if you noticed anything in the Warnock ad?
NICOLE: Yeah, the one where he’s like: I like puppies. They’re saying I don’t like puppies, but I do. Look at my puppy.
HEDVIG: Wait, what? What is this?
BEN: Politics is inherently absurd! Can we just, I feel like we haven’t announced that clearly enough. Politics is insane.
[LAUGHTER]
NICOLE: So Kelly Loeffler, who was his opponent, his Republican opponent in Georgia, really ran a campaign to try to make him seem scary. Scary and radical, which is part of the zeitgeist at the moment, but it’s also, you know, just racist. And he was like: Uh, I am a pastor, and also I like puppies! And literally ran an ad that was like, here’s me with my beagle! [LAUGHS] And it was absurd, because what she was doing was absurd, right? And so he was like: I’m just gonna show you that I’m, like, a regular not-scary person.
BEN: Don’t hate the player, hate the game, right? It’s just, this is how you do it.
NICOLE: And he does use, you know, these sort of persuasive rhetorical styles. Of course he does; he’s a Black preacher. But he definitely had to sort of pitch himself more as mainstream, I think, because of where he was coming from. Also, this is Georgia. Also, this is a Senate race. Kamala Harris had been in California, which is a very different place to be a politician, because she doesn’t have necessarily a primarily Black constituency, the way that you would in the state of Georgia, especially if you were a preacher.
It doesn’t really make sense to paint her as some kind of Black radical, when she was literally the Attorney General of the state of California. [LAUGHTER] So that’s not what she’s responding to. Right? She is responding to being not likable, or ideas that she’s phony or ideas that she’s, you know, not really Black, or not really Indian. And so the way she kind of manages that linguistically is going to be different. And we haven’t talked at all… I mean, I gloss over this a lot about the fact that she’s Indian-American!
BEN: Well, I was actually just about to ask that. We haven’t mentioned any linguistic hallmarks of, like, a South Asian heritage at all. Do they exist? Have you come across it?
HEDVIG: Kamala is a South Asian name, right?
NICOLE: Yes. Her mother is… like her parents are both immigrants. Her mother immigrated from India, her father immigrated from Jamaica. And she grew up mostly in Oakland. So like, in a mixed, but also Black community. I did get the question of like, whether she really did command African-American English, like, given, you know, where and how she grew up, and the fact that neither of her parents do because her father’s an immigrant from Jamaica. I mean, to the best of our knowledge. And my answer to that question is: she went to a historically Black college and pledged a Black sorority. Like, come on now. Like, Alpha Kappa Alpha at Howard University?
BEN: I think she’s had some exposure.
NICOLE: Yeah, like, it’s fine. Um, coincidentally, I’m also… we’re in the same sorority, Kamala Harris is my soror.
HEDVIG: Are you? I’m learning… I don’t know anything about American sororities, but I looked this up. So apparently the colors are green and pink.
NICOLE: Yes. Salmon pink and apple green.
HEDVIG: And there are 20 important pearls?
NICOLE: Yes. There are pearls, the founders. It’s… there’s a whole mythology. There’s a whole thing.
HEDVIG: I love all this, like, magic ritual things to these things.
BEN: I just have to, I feel like if we’ve called it on politics, we have to call it on sororities and fraternities… so weird!
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yeah, they are pretty weird.
NICOLE: No, I… yes, it is an unusual culture. I’ll give you that. But so… you know, we have these — I mentioned this to say — we have these examples of her making these very clear identity choices, right? Going to a historically Black college, joining this organisation. She talks about her Indian family — and particularly her mother — a lot. Her mother passed away, right, so this is, you know, one of the pieces of the story. When she accepted the vice presidential nomination, she goes up to thank all of these people. And she thanks all her sorors of Alpha Kappa Alpha, and she thanks Howard University, and she thanks all of this. And she thanks her aunties and her chithis. And that is Tamil for aunties. And, you know, from what I saw on a lot of, like, Indian newspapers that people were sending me, and websites and things, this was a really big deal, because we were like: Tamil? In an acceptance speech? And so it’s not that it’s not part of her identity. And she tells us at times that it’s part of her identity. It’s harder for us to look at, you know, the specific socio-phonetic features that might be part of her Indian-American identity because we just haven’t studied them. We don’t have a good descriptions of what Indian-American or even more broadly, Asian-American varieties sound like phonetically, the way that we do for African-American English.
HEDVIG: And what about Jamaican?
NICOLE: Yeah, right? Like, what are we supposed to guess about what her authentic linguistic style is, given the fact that she has immigrant parents? I don’t know. We actually just don’t even know what that does to people, right? If your parents are from a place, do you retain those features? And the answer is: probably. It depends on everything else about your socio-linguistic environment and also, like, who you want to be.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
NICOLE: So yeah, that’s a mystery.
HEDVIG: Right. But um, I mean, we were talking, you said it before, but like we’re talking sometimes as if African-American Vernacular English is this sort of, like, monolith? And obviously, it isn’t. And there’s got to be lots of speakers who identify with speaking those sets of registers or dialects who don’t necessarily… who are immigrants or second generation immigrants in the US, right? And that… there’s got to be such a diversity where people come from. Not everyone who speaks African-American Vernacular English are directly descended from African slaves who directly came to the US, right?
NICOLE: Yeah.
HEDVIG: This is something I don’t know about, so.
NICOLE: No, really, um, it’s interesting, because, you know, there are this set of features widely that we will say, are part of, you know, the African-American English variety. But nobody has 100% of them. And also, you know, I subscribe to the idea, you know, put forth by Sarah Benor that people have a ethnolinguistic repertoire. So they have some features available to them that they pick and choose at different moments, to do whatever their communicative and socio-linguistic goals are. And so even if you yourself… yeah, Kamala Harris’s dad is an immigrant from Jamaica. He might command some of these features as part of his socio-linguistic repertoire, even though they’re not the ones that he was raised with. And also, of course, like, there was a lot of immigration to the United States from the Caribbean during the time of slavery, and after, right? There were these sort of migration patterns that moved in that direction.
And so it’s not that there’s no shared features, we just…. For any particular speaker, we can’t know what features they have as a result of their upbringing, unless we ask them. And yeah, people don’t have great metalinguistic awareness of what they’re doing. So this is a challenge. We can only kind of look at what they give us, and then try to reverse engineer it from what we know about the situation, and them.
DANIEL: What you’ve done here is a fascinating look at untangling the multiple identities of Kamala Harris, and how they are performed to not only show the various parts of her identity, but also her own unique self. So Dr Nicole Holliday, thank you so much for telling us all about this work and debuting it here.
NICOLE: Thank you so much. Yeah, it’s been a really fun project. It’s been… it’s been long, but it’s been fun.
HEDVIG: You bet on the right horse, didn’t you?
NICOLE: I really did.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Yes! Yes!
HEDVIG: Good job.
DANIEL: This question comes from River, on our Discord channel. River says, “I just finished my unit on sociolinguistics last semester, and absolutely loved it. One focus of our study was how the style and specific language someone uses is deeply connected to a sense of self-identity and a connection to others. But is this link just as strong when it’s talking about the type of language that is used by others, to talk about someone? I think the best example would be preferred pronouns and misgendering. But there are of course more. Has there been research or insights between a person’s self-identity and the language used by others to talk about said person?
NICOLE: Um, I don’t think that linguistics is the right place to look for an answer to this question. I think that you might want to look at psychology. And the reason I say that is that we don’t really know what’s going on in speakers’ heads. And I’m just thinking about Kamala. And I know that you guys talked to Kelly Wright before about it, and mentioned how her name was being mispronounced. So people were calling her Ka-MA-la, but her name is KA-mala. Um, and you know, whether this was intentional disrespect and things like that. So like, you know, to put it to the way that the listener has framed the question: What effect does it have on VP Harris if people call her… I can’t even say her name wrong. [LAUGHTER] If people call her Kam… Ka-MA-la, what does that do to her?
I mean, I don’t know, right? Like, we would have to ask about the psychological damage. But what does it do to her sociolinguistically? Nothing, right? She is the one with the agency. The speaker is the one with the agency. When people mispronounce her name, that tells us about them as the speaker, it doesn’t tell us anything about her. It tells us about the pundit who refuses to get her name. right. Right? And this is why we can talk about it as disrespectful. But I don’t think it really… you know, maybe it does some psychological damage to call somebody the wrong name, but it doesn’t necessarily influence their sociolinguistic behavior. That’s my guess.
DANIEL: Okay. Thank you. And finally, last week, we talked about the pronunciation of Herbert Paul Grice. It is Gr-ice [gɹaɪs] for you, is it not?
NICOLE: What?
DANIEL: Do you say [gɹaɪs] or [gɹis]?
HEDVIG: You know, the one… the guy with the Maxims.
NICOLE: [gɹaɪs]. [LAUGHS] Like, the maxims? Yeah, [gɹaɪs].
HEDVIG: I know, ’cause people say [gɹis], apparently.
NICOLE: [gɹis]?!
HEDVIG: I know.
DANIEL: But then nobody does. But okay, whatever.
HEDVIG: Okay. Well, some people did! Some people did! I saw that Twitter thread. Some people were, like, both.
DANIEL: You’re at the University of Pennsylvania with Bill. Mr Fourth Floor.
NICOLE: Oh, no, don’t ask me this!
[HEDVIG CLAPS]
DANIEL: Yes! I am going there. I am going there, because he’s in your department. I want to know: How do y’all say his surname over there?
NICOLE: Labov [la bʌv] [rhymes with above].
DANIEL: Okay!
NICOLE: I have, in the department I have heard LaBOVE [lə ˈboʊv].
DANIEL: In the department?
NICOLE: But it seems that the dominant pronunciation is [la bʌv]. Fortunately now, because I’m at Penn, I can call him Bill.
[EVERYONE CHEERS]
HEDVIG: Nice.
BEN: Daniel… Daniel’s thirst remains unquenched!
DANIEL: No, I feel… I feel slaked. I do.
BEN: What? But Nicole just said both names are used! How does that slake your thirst?
DANIEL: Well, she did give me two names, but she excluded like five more, so that’s a win.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: So we heard that he enjoys this.
DANIEL: Yeah, he likes it.
NICOLE: Yeah, he’ll never disambiguate, because he wants to perpetuate the variation.
DANIEL: That’s why I didn’t ask what he says. That’s why I asked what y’all say, in the department.
NICOLE: I don’t think he’s ever had to introduce himself since I’ve been alive.
HEDVIG: Oh, interesting!
DANIEL: Well, thank you, that helps me.
HEDVIG: Secret mic in his office, because sometimes, you know, you got to call your doctor or something. You got to say your name.
DANIEL: Ohhhh, is that ethical?
HEDVIG: Sounds very evil. No, I’m not gonna do that.
DANIEL: No, this is never going to clear ethics.
NICOLE: We’re not recommending surreptitious recording of sociolinguistic legends!
BEN: I 100% believe — based purely on what you people have told me, because I have no idea who this human is — that this person is the kind of person who is metagaming this to the point where, to the same doctor, he will announce himself differently on different calls.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Possibly.
NICOLE: That’s part of his, it’s part of his linguistic repertoire. Let him do it.
DANIEL: Variation is normal.
NICOLE: Yep.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: We are to our favorite segment, and that’s Words of the Week.
BEN: Yesss!
DANIEL: Nicole, I believe you brought a word for us.
NICOLE: I brought a series of words. I’m cheating, I brought a phrase.
BEN: No, no, no, we do series of words all the time.
DANIEL: Yeah, good.
NICOLE: Thank you. So I’m a member of the American Dialect Society. And we recently voted on our Word of the Year. I think we picked PANDEMIC.
DANIEL: No, it was COVID.
NICOLE: Oh, we picked COVID. I knew we picked something that I didn’t support, because I thought it was dumb.
DANIEL: Oh, that’s right! You liked 2020, didn’t you?
NICOLE: I liked 2020 in the final round.
DANIEL: We were on the opposite side of this. And in 2018, we were also on the opposite side of YEET versus TENDER AGE FACILITY.
HEDVIG: Interesting!
NICOLE: Yeah. Now… I did not like TENDER AGE FACILITY. I also didn’t like YEET.
DANIEL: You didn’t like YEET?
[LAUGHTER]
NICOLE: Maybe I don’t know how to pick winners. But…
HEDVIG: Well, we know you do.
BEN: Hey, hey! Kamala Harris.
NICOLE: Just… just Kamala Harris. One thing that I advocated for in the ADS meeting was a thing that I was seeing on TikTok: GIRLS GAYS AND THEYS.
BEN: Yes, yes.
NICOLE: That’s… oh, y’all.
DANIL: So good.
NICOLE: Someone should write a dissertation. There is a lot going on there.
BEN: So wonderful.
HEDVIG: And also just the way that GIRLS can be used. Yeah, I think Nicole’s making the eyes for a reason that we might be thinking of the same thing.
NICOLE: I mean, yes.
HEDVIG: Because, like, for example, I hang out on YouTube a lot. And there’s like a gay man who does commentary about fashion. And he says often, like: the girls are hanging out, which is like boobs. Fine. I get that. Breasts are girls, fine. But then sometimes he’s like: Oh, the girls are all talking about this and this, but it’s a mix. It’s… it’s fashion designers and fashionistas, and some of them are men and some of them are women. But it’s THE GIRLS. It’s as if you’re in high school. It’s like: the girls are doing X. You know what I mean?
NICOLE: The community.
BEN: Yeah, I guess… I don’t know if it’s deliberate or not. But is that an attempt to normalise that instead of, like: Hey guys, to a mixed-gendered unknown?
NICOLE: I don’t think it’s that. Because it actually happens in domains that are considered traditionally feminine. So like, you know, we’re talking about fashion and whatever here. We can talk about GUYS for a long time. You gotta bring me back and I’ll tell you what I think about GUYS. Because it is my default second person plural pronoun, and that is, ooh, a challenge.
HEDVIG: Mine as well, yeah.
NICOLE: I like GIRLS GAYS AND THEYS, because it’s very explicitly mentioning its audience. And you can, as the listener, decide whether it’s for you or not, right? So like, it’s not… it’s not just like: here, gendered term of address. It’s not LADIES, which can be interesting. It’s y’all, y’all, and y’all. And these are big-tent categories. So it’s for you, if you want to put yourself in one of these categories, and if you don’t, it’s not for you. So it actually gives the listener a lot of agency.
DANIEL: Okay. Thank you! That’s awesome. Yeah, that’s a good throwback. Here’s another one: ACOUSTIC FOG. So animals that live in the sea have to use sound to find food and navigate and find mates and to warn each other about attacks. But we, as humans, make a lot of noise with boats and sonar and even detonations, and it’s making the oceans intolerably noisy for our… moist friends.
NICOLE: Ugh.
BEN: [SHUDDERS]
DANIEL: So this is from, this is from an article… sorry, Ben, was that an involuntary reaction to MOIST?
BEN: It’s not even a word I normally dislike. I think your emphasis on the word is what really rubbed my back the wrong way. If you’d just been like: our moist friends, I’d be like: yeah, cool. But you’re like: our… moist… friends.
HEDVIG: This thing about everyone hating on MOIST. It’s even gotten into Swedish. People now hate the Swedish word for MOIST and I’m like, you’re just copying stupid Anglo people! MOIST is a fine word!
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: It’s great!
NICOLE: What is the Swedish word for MOIST?
HEDVIG: FUKTIG. Yeah, people just are just like: Oooh, it’s so disgusting.
DANIEL: [SHUDDERS]
HEDVIG: No, what?! This is just a meme you borrowed from Anglos.
BEN: All words are abstract, you biscuits! Like, it doesn’t mean anything, it’s all nonsense!
HEDVIG: Yeah. It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine.
DANIEL: Okay, okay. This is from an article by Damian Carrington, the environment editor at The Guardian. “Professor Steve Simpson at the University of Exeter in England described this noise pollution as an acoustic fog in the ocean.” Here’s just a clip.
[CLIP PLAYS. CONTINUOUS STATICKY SOUND]
DANIEL: It sounds like a really bad early Boards of Canada song.
BEN: Wow, what a helpful reference, Daniel. Thank you.
DANIEL: It’s the most accurate I could do, but the most accessible.
HEDVIG: I heard that during the pandemic and during lockdowns, this has done wonderful things for acoustic fog. That it’s gotten, like, a lot better.
BEN: Yeah, I heard about this as well.
DANIEL: Nature is healing.
HEDVIG: I heard it on one of those podcasts that Ben and I both listen to, but I can’t remember which one it is.
BEN: That would have been Reply All.
HEDVIG: Radiolab? Or Reply All, yeah. That’s what I was guessing. Yeah.
DANIEL: We’ll find it.
HEDVIG: Anyway. Cut that out. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: There’s a couple of things we can do: We can modify propeller design for some vessels, we can use quiet electric motors, or we could just go a little bit slower. There was one other word to come out of this story, and that was CACOPHONY, which appeared in the headline, and I love that word.
BEN: I do love CACOPHONY, as a word.
DANIEL: Break it down. Is anyone aware of the etymology?
BEN: I’m wondering if CAUCUS, similar to CAUCUS?
DANIEL: No. What was yours, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: Something to do with chickens?
DANIEL: No… good guess.
[BEN LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Birds?
DANIEL: Nicole?
NICOLE: I have no idea, but to me, CACOPHONY is a little onomatopoeic? onomatopoetic?
HEDVIG: yeah. Caw caw, caw caw!
DANIEL: Well, the PHON- part is sound, and the CACA- is poop.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: No!
HEDVIG: Ohhh!
DANIEL: Poopy sound.
BEN: Really?
DANIEL: Seriously. Kakos is Greek, which means bad and evil, but that goes back to Proto Indo-European, CACA, to poop. So it’s poopy sound.
HEDVIG: That’s funny.
BEN: Wait a minute. Do you mean to tell me that CACA, the expression for poop that a lot of sort of parents in different parts of the world use, has been going solidly since Proto Indo-European?
DANIEL: I cannot make that claim. It might have come back around because of Greek. But…
BEN: Just… it’s just a casual 8000 years of continual usage. No worries.
DANIEL: It’s super old. And it finds itself in CACOPHONY, which I think is great.
HEDVIG: Or maybe we’re missing something onomono…. I can’t pronounce that word either.
NICOLE: Onomatopoetic.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Maybe there’s something about poop and caca. The reason why it’s going so strongest because there’s something all four of us have not discovered about pooping. And that it somehow makes that sound.
BEN: What? How?
DANIEL: No, no, no, no, no. If anything, it’s the sound that you make to your child when they’re trying to play in it, which they will. Kakakakaka! Stop it! Stop it! It’s sharp, you know.
BEN: What are you, a demented kookaburra? How do you [LAUGHTER] how do you…? What? When your child is doing something wrong, KAKAKAKAKAKA!
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Let’s do our best kookaburra impersonation: waakoookakaka!
HEDVIG: Yeah, that’s pretty good!
BEN: Oh, man.
DANIEL: I am not a demented kookaburra, but I wouldn’t, you know, if somebody came upon that: KA! Ka. Okay. I’m… you know what, I’m giving up on that hypothesis.
BEN: Okay, fair enough. Good!
DANIEL: I’m moving on to our last one. And that is, I’ve been noticing words that pertain to this new world of work that we’re finding ourselves in, now that vaccines are slowly being rolled out. And we’re having to contemplate a future where we no longer work solely from home, but instead maybe do a bit of at-home work and a bit of in-the-office work. So what would you call that mixture?
BEN: Okay, the mixture of home and work.
HEDVIG: Home office.
BEN: Well, it won’t be telecommuting.
DANIEL: Well, a home office is where you work at home, but what about when you’re doing a bit of both? Sometimes you go in and work, sometimes you stay home and work Oh, I do…
HEDVIG: Oh, I’m doing that right now, actually. I’m going in tomorrow.
BEN: Moffice?
DANIEL: Okay. Moffice?
NICOLE: I mean, we have, we do this for school, right? We call it HYBRID. And we did before the pandemic. So like, I in college, I had a chemistry class mysteriously that was a hybrid class. We only came in for the part with the chemicals. The other parts were online.
DANIEL: HYBRID WORK is the term that I’m seeing pop up for this kind of setup, HYBRID WORK. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel says: “The problem is that there’s no clear answer on how to best approach this challenge. One common theme that has emerged is the concept of hybrid work, which essentially entails people continuing to work part of the time at home, and part of the time back in their offices.” So expect to hear a lot more of that one. There’s also an article from the New York Times featuring moms during covid, and what would you call a closet that you work from?
BEN: A home cloffice?
DANIEL: That’s it! Ben wins! [FANFARE SOUND] CLOFFICE. “One of the photos shows Ms. Quintana on her laptop in the closet, or cloffice, with her three year old Mila.” Are you in a cloffice? Is that part of your work scene?
BEN: I… no.
HEDVIG: You’re in one.
BEN: You are in a… well no, you are in a POFFICE, a pantry office.
DANIEL: Well, I think of it more of as a… I’m in a pantry. So I guess this makes it a PANTRUDIO. That’s what I’d like to….
HEDVIG: What? I don’t understand.
DANIEL: No? I took a long time to think about one.
BEN: Yeah. Devote that energy elsewhere.
NICOLE: I am… I am childfree at the moment, and I have a real home office that I share with another person.
BEN: Wow. Oh, my goodness.
NICOLE: I’m very… I feel very privileged to not have to work in an cloffice or a pantry office.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Yeah, right. I have… I have a question for all four of you, before we like, wrap up the show in terms of, like, the new…
HEDVIG: Including yourself?
[DANIEL LAUGHS]
BEN: Oh, yeah. Well, yeah, I’m gonna give you my answer. I’m gonna ask you a question. It’s gonna be like one of those TikToks. I’m gonna be like, I’ll go first. So, what is one rule you’ve learned in regards to having to do work online in this new world that we live in? I’ll go first. Don’t ever come to an online meeting early, like at all, like any kind of early, not even a minute early, because however many minutes early you get there, you’re just gonna have to make super awkward small talk with whatever other random strangers are there until the meeting actually begins. That’s, that’s my learning. That’s the rule that I’ve written for myself, in the time of COVID: Don’t come early to zoom meetings.
HEDVIG: I actually have a solution to that, which is maybe what I’ve learned is that I’ve learned how to share only sound on Zoom. So I put on, like, lo-fi hip-hop beats to relax and study to for the first, like, five minutes before a meeting and the first four minutes into a meeting and then I just tell everyone: Just mute yourself, we’re just going to hang out here. I’m going to look at the agenda and we’re gonna start. And they all just sit and chill and listen to lo-fi. That kind of works.
NICOLE: That’s perfect. What a good idea.
DANIEL: Okay, that was Hedvig’s. Nicole?
NICOLE: I bought a ring light early on and I…
BEN: Oh, yes.
DANIEL: I’ve got mine!
NICOLE: And you know what? It’s not even that I care about my lighting, whether I look good to other people. I care that I look good to myself.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: There you go! You deserve that.
BEN: I’ve been spending this entire interview not enjoying the, like, super washed out, grainy, high ISO garbage that my camera has been spitting out. I don’t care if you guys like it, I’m just looking at myself and being like: I teach media, I can do so much better than this!
[LAUGHTER]
NICOLE: Yeah, you know, like $40. It was worth it to not look at myself in an unflattering light for the last year.
DANIEL: I got mine for 25 bucks, free shipping. And it’s been one of my best purchases. My response would be: The way to achieve work/life balance is to work less. That is the only way to do it. Which I… thanks to my wonderful partner and our choices, I’ve managed to achieve by making Because Language my only job. That and being daddy. Love it!
BEN: Excellent.
DANIEL: But I’m very, very fortunate. Very privileged that way.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay, so: GIRLS GAYS AND THEYS, ACOUSTIC FOG, HYBRID WORK, and CLOFFICE: our Words of the Week. Nicole Holliday, thank you so much for hanging out with us and sharing your expertise, debuting your material for us.
NICOLE: Thank you for letting me debut it! It was so fun to talk to you all.
BEN: Oh, it’s always a pleasure. So next time, though, you realise if we invite you back and you say yes, in our people’s culture of the podcast kingdom, that means you’re an official part-time co-host.
NICOLE: But I do want that T-shirt though!
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: We gotta… okay, Daniel this is…
HEDVIG: Easy!
NICOLE: Where’s the merch?!
BEN: This is the easiest sell ever. We send her a T-shirt and we get an official part-time co-host! This is genius!
DANIEL: Fantastic. I’ll do it.
[OUTRO MUSIC]
HEDVIG: And that was our show for today. If you have a question or comment about what you just heard, or you just want to say hi, or get in touch with for some other reason – god knows why – you can find us on all the popular social media platforms. We are on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon, Patreon, and even TikTok. And we are becauselangpod on all of those places. Same one everywhere. It’s great. You can also send us an old fashioned email if you’d like. You send that to hello@becauselanguage.com. And if you like the show, be sure to tell a friend about us or leave us a review. We’re still hoping to get reviews from non-students of Mr Ainslie, and leaving reviews and telling friends about us is the way that we get more listeners and then we get to spread linguistics to the planet, so please do that.
BEN: Also, advertisements? [SPITS INTO THE MIC]. That’s what we all think of advertisements. You know who’s keeping this show ad-free? All of our patrons. What deadset bloody legends they are! And they help us do a whole bunch of stuff, like transcribe our episodes, and offer a tiny recompense for some of our guests and a bunch of other stuff that we really really love to be able to do, that we can’t do if we don’t have any money coming in.
So the people who are making that wonderful stuff happen are: Termy, Chris B, Lyssa, The Major, Chris L, Matt, Damien, Helen, Bob, Jack, Kitty, Lord Mortis, Elías, Michael, Larry, Binh, Kristofer, Dustin, Andy, Maj, Nigel, Kate, Jen, Nasrin, Nikoli, Ayesha, Moe, Andrew, James, Shane, Eloise, Rodger, River, Rhian, Jonathan, and Steele.
DANIEL: Special shout out to Dustin of Sandman Stories, who has once again been relentless in recommending us and lots of other pods to anyone who happens to ask the internet for a podcast recommendation. What a legend. Check him out on @StoriesSandman. Our music has been written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who’s a member of Ryan Beno, and of Dideon’s Bible. Thanks for listening. Catch you next time. Because Language.
[MUSIC STOPS]
ALL: Yay! [CLAPPING]
[PAUSE]
NICOLE: Here’s a fun anecdote. I did this video for Wired that you guys might have seen, with the dialect coach Eric Singer. And I got some nasty YouTube comments about how I was not allowed to speak, like talk about African-American English because I sounded like I do. So even when people saw me…
HEDVIG: OhHH.
BEN: So people would hear you, and they’d be like, no, no, no. And then they saw you and they’re like: Never mind!
NICOLE: No, both! They saw me and heard me and they were like: She can’t talk about that.
DANIEL: Gatekeeping!
HEDVIG: Wow!
BEN: Wait, so… So they were basically saying, because you’re not speaking more in a sort of vernacular accent, that you shouldn’t just get to say anything at all? Wow!
NICOLE: Yeah, and than I didn’t comment on these myself, but somebody in the comments…
BEN: Don’t ever. Don’t ever. Comments are where dreams go to die.
NICOLE: Yeah, somebody — I guess this was Reddit, actually — Somebody in the comments said, “She has a PhD in linguistics. How do you think she’s talking on a video that’s for a million people to watch?” Like, like, clearly that’s not the right style for me to be using in this video as… when I show up as my expert. So like, even though I command African-American English, no African-American English speaker would use AAE in that… in that situation, which is true.
BEN: Yeah, yeah. And also, you’re you, so you get to speak however you want because you’re you and that’s a choice that you get to make!
DANIEL: Hey, I trust you to make your own sociolinguistic choices! Hey, your repertoire.
BEN: Imagine that.