There’s so much news and research coming out, we can hardly address it all! But we’re giving it a try on this episode of Little Words Newsblast Journal Club.
- Uzbek is romanising
- Honesty / certainty has a prosodic profile
- People with “gay-sounding” voices anticipate rejection and discrimination
- Language patterns emerge in protactile communities
- Gesture shows patterns
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Become a Patron!Show notes
LingComm21 Conference
https://lingcomm.org
Uzbekistan Aims For Full Transition To Latin-Based Alphabet By 2023
https://www.rferl.org/a/uzbekistan-aims-for-full-transition-to-latin-based-alphabet-by-2023/31099723.html
Uzbek alphabet, pronunciation and language
https://omniglot.com/writing/uzbek.htm
Fourth version of Kazakh Latin script will preserve language purity, linguists say – The Astana Times
https://astanatimes.com/2019/11/fourth-version-of-kazakh-latin-script-will-preserve-language-purity-linguists-say/
Askar Mamin chairs meeting of National Commission on Translation of Kazakh Alphabet into Latin Script – Official Information Source of the Prime Minister of the Republic of Kazakhstan
https://primeminister.kz/en/news/a-mamin-kazak-tili-alipbiin-latyn-grafikasyna-koshiru-zhonindegi-ulttyk-komissiya-otyrysyn-otkizdi-280941
Kazakh alphabets – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakh_alphabets#Latest_developments
What is the difference between Kazakh and Uzbek?
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-Kazakh-and-Uzbek
Listeners’ perceptions of the certainty and honesty of a speaker are associated with a common prosodic signature | Nature Communications
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-20649-4
144: Huh? (featuring Simon Tam) – Talk the Talk
https://talkthetalkpodcast.com/144-huh/
People with ‘gay-sounding’ voices face discrimination and anticipate rejection – The Academic Times
https://academictimes.com/people-with-gay-sounding-voices-face-particular-discrimination/
Stigmatization of ‘gay‐sounding’ voices: The role of heterosexual, lesbian, and gay individuals’ essentialist beliefs – Fasoli – – British Journal of Social Psychology – Wiley Online Library
https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/bjso.12442
What it means to ‘sound gay’ – The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/28/what-it-means-to-sound-gay/
Edwards and Brentari (2020): Feeling phonology: the conventionalization of phonology in protactile communities in the United States (PDF)
https://www.linguisticsociety.org/sites/default/files/04_96.4Edwards.pdf
Schlenker (2020): Gestural grammar ($$)
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11049-019-09460-z
Senator Mike Lee of Utah suggests Trump should get a ‘mulligan’ for Jan. 6 speech. | New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/09/us/politics/mike-lee-trump-mulligan.html
Did You Know: Where did the term ‘mulligan’ originate? | This is the Loop | Golf Digest
https://www.golfdigest.com/story/did-you-know-where-did-the-term-mulligan-originate
What’s the origin of the golf term “mulligan”? – The Straight Dope
https://www.straightdope.com/21343165/what-s-the-origin-of-the-golf-term-mulligan
What Is the Origin of the Word ‘Mulligan’ in Golf?
https://www.liveabout.com/origin-of-the-word-mulligan-1561085
Pandemic Fine: The Way Many of Us Are Feeling in 2021 | Everyday Health
https://www.everydayhealth.com/columns/trevis-gleason-life-with-multiple-sclerosis/pandemic-fine-how-many-of-us-are-feeling-in-2021/
Hedvig’s “aesthetic” graphic
Transcript
DANIEL: Oh, now I have a question.
HEDVIG: Oo, okay. What’s up?
DANIEL: What’s a good name for this show? Should it be: Research Beat? Or should it be… NEWS BLAST!
BEN: Not News Blast. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Research Beat.
DANIEL: Why not News Blast? I think News Blast is amazing.
HEDVIG: No, no, no.
BEN: It… mmm…
HEDVIG: Ben, you have to help me rein in the Americanness of Daniel. News Blast is…
DANIEL: [EXPLOSION POSE] News Blast!
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is… Do you know, it reminds me, it reminds me of DJs that have a button on their console that makes a fart noise.
HEDVIG and DANIEL: [AIR RAID NOISE]
BEN: No, no, no… not the air raid noise, more like [FART NOISE].
HEDVIG: [FART NOISE].
DANIEL: [FART NOISE, DJ VOICE] Heyyy! Get ready for the News Blast!
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Yeah, exactly.
HEDVIG: No, no, no. What’s wrong with Research Beat?
DANIEL: I feel like Research Beat is a little pedestrian.
BEN: Okay, what about umm… Little Words?
DANIEL: Little… Little Words?
BEN: Yeah, well, because the idea here is we don’t have a main story, right? We have just a bunch of smaller stories that don’t necessarily warrant their own show. So instead of big words, we’re using little words.
DANIEL: Hmm, not sure.
BEN: What if we go: Hey, everyone, this episode is going to be entirely about news, and we tried to come up with a name for it, but then we all realised that we are different kinds of uncool, and could not agree on a single kind of uncool.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Research Beat it is.
[BEN LAUGHS]
[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! He’s a gamer… It’s Ben Ainslie.
BEN: I really feel like that was undercooked. I feel like that was one of the least done intros you’ve ever given me. Like, you’ve just… you basically were just like: He’s alive… Ben Ainslie.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Didn’t we have gamer before?
BEN: Yeah, exactly. I formally request that you remove any energy or life from it and just be like: He exists and he’s here: Ben Ainslie. This is what I want from you. This is what I… this is what I desire. I feel like you went most of the way to boring and mundane, but you didn’t go far enough. So… I’ll just wait. You just… you just go again. Go.
DANIEL: She’s alive, and she’s here! It’s Hedvig Skirgård.
HEDVIG: Aaaaa! I am!
BEN: I fucken
HEDVIG: Yeah! And in this pandemic, that’s all I can ask for.
BEN: I cannot believe you gazumped my desire for a less inter… you took… hoghhh, this is rough. This is rough. We’ve been together a long time. This is a tough one.
DANIEL: You know, the thing is: I liked what you gave me better than what I had.
BEN: [GASP!] You shameless thief!
DANIEL: You just… just sort of… you know, handed it to me and I went with it. And I’m glad I did.
BEN: I’m going to write a sea shanty about this kind of betrayal. Like, Decemberist style.
DANIEL: You wouldn’t dare!
BEN: [SINGS IN SHANTY] We are two podcasters stuck on this podcast together.
DANIEL: Our co-host Nicole Holliday is out for this episode.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Yes, that’s a thing we have to definitely keep going.
HEDVIG: I am very… yeah.
BEN: If we just keep saying that, just social norms will mean we will make her our co-host.
HEDVIG: She also… when she was on before, we were like: You know if you’re on lots of times, you become a co host. She was like: Oh, yeah?
DANIEL: Do you mean that?
BEN: This is what I mean. I feel like at this point, Seinfeld-ian style, right? We just pull a George Costanza and we just push, right? We just, like: co-host Nicole out again this week, can’t wait to have her back though! And eventually enough annoyed people will Twitter tweet at her and just be like: Nicole, are you ever gonna come back and host Talk the Talk? And then we’ll just have a fourth member! And it will be tremendous.
HEDVIG: Yeah!
DANIEL: If we just say it enough times, she manifests.
BEN: I wholeheartedly endorse doing this, as long as you text her and ask permission so that we don’t piss her off, because I don’t want to annoy her.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: That’s fair.
DANIEL: Also, it’s Because Language now, so there you go.
BEN: Oh, true, true.
DANIEL: This is a Patron bonus episode.
HEDVIG: Yesss!
DANIEL: The story behind this episode is that there’s been a lot of language news lately, eh, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: Yeah. Basically what happened was, I figured: I’ve done my PhD, I’ve got a postdoc, life is kind of boring, I’m gonna make it my regular duty to, like, check out the latest journals and see what happened. And then I started populating our run sheet with news, and Daniel was like: That’s too much.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: help
BEN: You did, you did too bad. You did so well, you went all the way around the Horn of Africa and you came back to bad.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: How about: News Overload?
HEDVIG: Then to be fair, Daniel also added things, and it just turns out there’s a lot of things.
BEN: It’s almost like: if I get two linguists and give you unfettered access to journal articles and the capacity to put interesting things into a Google Doc, y’all don’t know when to stop. You got portion control issues.
HEDVIG: Yup.
DANIEL: Yes, we haven’t been able to cover it all. You know, for all this work that we’re going to cover, I want to cover the “what”, but I also want to cover the “so what”. Do you know what I mean?
HEDVIG: I do. I do.
BEN: I don’t.
HEDVIG: I thought about that when I was reading. Because there were… yeah, I thought about that when I was looking at table of contents and, like, people can describe things and it’s like, yeah and what does that, where does that take us?
BEN: So when I was being trained in how to be a journalist…
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah?
BEN: …in a former life, a lecturer once put this as succinctly as I sort of have ever needed it to be stated. And you may have heard this before: “What’s the story behind the story?” Right? Like, there’s the content, and then just… just give me the thing, give me the thing, why we care, like what matters here? That’s all. That’s what we need, the matter.
DANIEL: Let’s try to remember the matter for these articles.
HEDVIG: And I think that’s a good thing to keep in mind also when you’re writing a paper, like, just like in academia in general. In many ways, I think academia is really similar to journalism. I’m basically hoping that if I five years from now want to be a journalist, I can be like: I hung out a lot with Ben, and academia is basically journalism. So… give me a journalism job!
BEN: It’s not that far off, other than the fact that you have to compromise yourself, like, a lot more often. But in terms of just the actual meat and potatoes of what you do day to day, like writing information out in relatively simple clear, straightforward language that is, like, pertinent to the field, right? Like jargon but simple jargon, like same shit different day.
DANIEL: I guess this is a good time to mention that we have been invited to participate in LingComm21, which is a linguistics communication conference. We’re all in, so if we wanna, we can do it.
HEDVIG: Yes! We wanna!
BEN: I will continue to ride your collective four coattails all the way to success.
DANIEL: You say that, but you’re the fun one.
BEN: [SQUEAKS UNCERTAINLY] Is he? Is he? We should probably do a show though, otherwise this is going to turn into another three-hour recording session.
DANIEL: Fine, fine, fine. First story. This one thanks to Aristemo on Discord. A lot of great people hang out in our Discord channel. We have a lot of fun.
BEN: Discord: More than just neo-nazis.
DANIEL: Oof. No, that’s Parler. Or is it Gab?
BEN: Discord definitely had a sizable neo-nazi component for a while.
HEDVIG: Twitch as well.
BEN: Yeah. But that’s okay. No, no, this like, this is the thing. These platforms, like, they exist in the world and neo-nazis exist in the world, right? Like, it’s a thing. What I’m saying is like, I… do you know how I think of Discord? And I realised the irony that I just shuffled us on, and now I am digressing, so don’t just… it’s fine. It’s already in there. It reminds me of IRC.
HEDVIG: That’s a really good point.
BEN: Discord really reminds me of IRC, which are these, like, funny little pockets of deeply bespoke nerds, where people just hang out and talk about shit. So yeah, there’s neo-nazis. And there’s also us! So like, come hang out with us.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Can we, so for things like Slack and Mattermost and Reddit and Discord, and what are the other things? These things where, like, you basically have your own little topic-focused little Facebook, essentially. You have your own little social media, which is more targeted.
BEN: Just a little message board, a tiny little happy message board.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Do we call them message boards, do we call them forums? What do we call them?
DANIEL: Fiefdoms.
BEN: I always thought of them as message boards. Forums were always like a thing that I never really hugely got into. I stuck with message boards more often.
HEDVIG: Okay. Yeah.
BEN: And everyone who’s listening to me is like: he was on 4chan! And I’m like: only for a second. Okay, I was 14, it happens to all of us.
DANIEL: We’ve been talking for a while about Kazakh’s language and how it is changing writing systems.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah!
BEN: I seem to vaguely remember this from a few years ago. It’s ro… romanising, correct?
DANIEL: Yes, that’s right. Or Latinising. They both refer to the writing system that we use for English. I’m treating Latin and Roman just the same here.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Yep.
DANIEL: But Aristemo has told us that the Uzbek language is also doing this, and they’re trying to do it by 2023.
BEN: Can one of you give me a quick linguistic sort of tour of those -stans that are all quite close together, and sort of like: is Uzbek and, like, Kazakh… are they close family relative languages? Are they super different? What’s what’s, what’s the deal?
HEDVIG: Kazakh is Turkic [KEYBOARD TAPPING SOUNDS], and I thought Uzbek was as well… yes, it’s also Turkic.
BEN and DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: So they are related to Turkish and Mongolian.
BEN: Now in terms of similarity, are we talking Spanish and Italian, or are we talking French and German?
DANIEL: Well, I don’t speak either one, but I am told that they are largely mutually intelligible.
BEN: Okay. Now talk to me about the old character set, though. Like, what are they moving from? Was it Cyrillic?
DANIEL: Well, there’s been a bunch, actually. It was written — Uzbek as well as Kazakh — was written in Arabic characters, until about the 1920s when they moved to Latin script, the one we use. And then in 1940, they moved again to Cyrillic. Stalin put in some pressure there, because you know, they were Soviet states, so Cyrillic it was. And then in 1993, soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Uzbek started to move again back to Latin, but this transition has taken a while.
BEN: Okay, so talk to me then, linguists, about changing a language’s character set, because I…
HEDVIG: Oh my god, it sounds rough.
BEN: Yeah, rough? Because I’m teaching my kid how to like read at the moment, right? Like, we sit down and he reads me little books. He’s six. And I just sit there thinking, like, I have forgotten how hard learning how to read is, right?
HEDVIG: Yeah, fuck!
BEN: Like, geez louise, like all of these dumb – especially in English, obviously – it’s all these dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb little rules and exceptions and stuff. I can’t even begin to imagine how I would deprogram whatever the eye version of muscle memory is for recognising that the word, like, ENOUGH, just is pronounced that way. I don’t have to go through each of those characters, I can see the word ENOUGH as like a word and I ~blah, cool. That’s ENOUGH.~ Imagine having to go completely and, like, detune and retune every single word you know, visually.
DANIEL: I can’t believe that they would shift their entire writing system. It just seems like an agonising… unless they were already kind of using it, like Japanese uses four different writing systems.
HEDVIG: Yeah, that’s… Or unless you have a very government who’s a bit megalomaniac.
BEN: Firm. A firm government.
HEDVIG: That can also… Yeah.
DANIEL: Uzbek has 29 letters, so you wouldn’t think they would have too much trouble mapping it onto the Roman alphabet. And in fact, every Roman letter gets used except for… guess.
HEDVIG: C.
BEN: Oh, please tell me C, please tell me C, the garbage letter that no one needs.
DANIEL: They don’t use C!
BEN: Yes!!
HEDVIG: Yay! [CLAPPING]
DANIEL: Yay! Props to the Uzbeks for having the vision to rid themselves of the one letter we can’t all stand. Okay, but it’s not all good news. They do use it for Ç cedille, C with a little tail, because that’s the “ch” sound.
HEDVIG: Fine.
BEN: Oh, well, but I’ve always said, I’ve always said that, that’s what we should be using C for anyway, right?
HEDVIG: Yeah, if you use it for one kind of sound sort of more or less consistently, then you’re allowed it.
DANIEL: Well, okay, but now, some bad news. J, the letter J is doing double duty. It’s j [d͡ʒ] and also j [ʒ]. So there’s that.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: At least they’re similar.
BEN: But only because… only because we don’t have j [ʒ], right? Like English, you’re gonna have to map it to one of the letters and pull double duty because it’s not like we’ve got a j [ʒ].
HEDVIG: Yeah. You could do a double thing. You could do like Z and H or something.
DANIEL: Well, yes. And in fact, they do have some digraphs, pairs of letters. So there’s is [ŋ], and is [t͡s], so those are pretty straightforward.
HEDVIG: Yeah, that’s fine.
DANIEL: The sh- [ʃ] sound is an S with a tail, an Ş with a cedilla. And the glottal stop is an apostrophe, and I just feel like that’s gonna be kind of ugly.
HEDVIG: That’s really common, though.
BEN: Yeah. But isn’t that just your, like, Western view? Like, isn’t that your norms sort of like… Okay, first of all, glottal stop, question mark?
HEDVIG: I have a great example. I was listening to a song this morning that people might know that has a very good glottal stop in it.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Do you remember the song The Hardest Button to Button, by the White Stripes?
DANIEL: Yeah. [RIFFING]
BEN and HEDVIG: [SINGING] The hardest button to button.
HEDVIG: That thing that you do instead of the T, bu’on.
BEN: Oh, okay. So it’s just gonna… it’s just gonna sound like Klingon. Sweet! It’s gonna look like Klingon, I should say, yeah.
DANIEL: So that’s going to be an apostrophe. I don’t know. I mean, it is common. I think that they should have done what they do with the Native American language, Squamish. In IPA, the glottal stop looks like a kind of hook that you’d use for a question mark. They used a seven. Just give it a seven.
HEDVIG: Oh, that kind of like that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. You want to have something that you have – I’m holding up my my computer keyboard – you want to pick things that that Intel and Mac and other people tend to… not Intel… but like that tend to become on keyboards, right? So seven’s not too bad.
DANIEL: Seven’s okay. And you know, when it’s an apostrophe, you make it sound like it’s just not there. Because that’s what sometimes we use for things that we have subtracted. And it’s not nothing. It’s a something. It is there.
BEN: But that’s only, but again, that’s still just us, though, right? Like, they get to make whatever rules they want to make.
DANIEL: Yeah, I guess so.
BEN: They might look at our apostrophes and be like, what the fuck are these people doing with all these glottal stops everywhere?
HEDVIG: Yeah, all Polynesian languages use a glottal stop, an apostrophe, or an inverted comma. A raised inverted comma as glottal stop. So I’ve think I’ve learned to see it as a thing, but it is small. But yeah.
DANIEL: They decided to make the letter O represent the [ɒ] sound like POSH and HOT.
BEN: [ɒ]. Yeah, okay.
DANIEL: Wherein the O itself, the O sound itself is represented by Ó with an accent. Accent acute.
BEN: Look, I have long — and far be it for me to ever sort of, like, big up Hedvig here — but I have long championed what all of the Nordic languages did with their vowels: just give each vowel sound its own character. Come on, it’s just so much easier. So much easier.
DANIEL: Well, yeah, and they are doing that, especially in Kazakh, they do have accents over a lot of the vowels. And you know that they’re really knocking themselves out — both Uzbek and Kazakh — they’re knocking themselves out trying to make sure that every Cyrillic letter maps on to a different Roman letter. And we’re, in English, we’re just over here going like: hey, in English an A can have like nine different sounds, it’s no big deal, lighten up!
BEN: It sucks. It sucks! Hey, so question to the two linguists: From, like, a social justice and sort of poverty ladder point of view, is there an argument to be made that making the language entirely phonetic would help with sort of literacy rates in the country?
DANIEL: There is some evidence that the difficulty of the writing system can exacerbate problems with people who are predisposed to dyslexia.
HEDVIG: Right, that’s fair.
DANIEL: So for example, in English, there’s a lot of people who are dyslexic and English has a lot of weird exceptions. And in Italian, the spelling is a lot more phonetic, a lot more regular, and it takes very special tests even to detect dyslexia.
BEN: Interesting.
HEDVIG: That’s interesting.
BEN: That is very interesting.
HEDVIG: Yeah. So that means that even if people who aren’t dyslectic would like sort of more or less get by, by that time, it would have a consequence for those people, which is yeah, relevant to know.
BEN: I think, I think that’s, like I said before, that’s a meritorious reason to simplify a written language. And I don’t think simplify’s the right word, right?
DANIEL: Reform?
BEN: Regularise would be the word I’m looking for there. Because you can still have incredible complexity, you just have it be a regularised form of complexity.
DANIEL: Can I just say that the goal of making letters map onto sounds is way overrated?
BEN: What do you mean, Daniel?
HEDVIG: Whaaat?
DANIEL: I don’t think it’s a good idea. Like, I don’t want BREAD the food, and BRED, like, past tense of BREED, I don’t want them to look the same. The system that we have…
BEN: Interesting, interesting
DANIEL: Think about ELECTRIC and ELECTRICITY. They both have a C, but one of them — ELECTRIC — it’s a [k], a [k] sound, and in ELECTRICITY it’s a [s] sound. But having that C there, as much as we hate C’s, [LAUGHTER] maintains the etymological relationship. It tells us about the origin of the word. Or think about OPAQUE and OPACITY. They’re both spelled with an A. But do you really want OPAQUE to change and look something like with an EI, ? I mean, I think we could get rid of PH, and change that to F. That’s fine. But I don’t think we want… I don’t think we would want… I don’t think we would like a phonetic writing system.
HEDVIG: Who but us cares about the origins of words?
BEN: I personally would like a phonetic writing system, for sure.
DANIEL: Well. you say that, but…
BEN: I’m happy to figure out which BREAD we mean contextually.
DANIEL: Well, I’m not even mentioning the big problem here, which is that everybody’s English sounds slightly different. And so whose pronunciation gets represented by the new spelling?
HEDVIG: But what about, Daniel, what about cases that exist right now that are spelled the same and, and mean different things? So let’s all think of a good example here.
DANIEL: ROW and ROW.
HEDVIG: ROW and ROW… Wait, I had a ROW with my spouse last night, and I, that’s a ROW in a table.
BEN: Row, row, row your boat.
DANIEL: I think that would be okay.
BEN: What about the homophones OBject and obJECT, and that sort of thing?
DANIEL: Possibly nothing, or they could be spelled slightly differently.
BEN: Mm. I think we’re gonna have to agree to disagree on this one, Daniel.
HEDVIG: But what are the chances that you are going to have an understanding problem?
BEN: I really, I really want you to explain to me where the BREAD/BRED situation is going to get tricky, because I just feel like that is a hilarious, contextually, situation.
DANIEL: It would make things that are currently different look just the same. And I don’t think that would be helpful.
HEDVIG: Yeah. But I think we’re saying that there are things that do that now, and that the chances that you’ll contextually, you won’t be able to tell them apart, that those chances are quite low. So you will be able to disambiguate, because you can disambiguate these ones already.
DANIEL: It’s interesting, because when I taught linguistics, we did an activity where we did try to reform spelling, and you can’t pull on any threads without making disasters further on down, if you insist on a…
HEDVIG: Unless you have the chance to just start from scratch.
BEN: Year zero, bring it in.
HEDVIG: Yeah, like in Uzbek. Good on them.
DANIEL: So the story here is that Uzbek is changing. And the thing that you should take away is: this is a really complex problem. Kazakh has been through four different iterations and I think they’re finally getting it, but it is, it is hard.
BEN: Next!
HEDVIG: Next!
BEN: Next! What’s the next story on Little Words, Daniel? See, I’m just gonna push it, see how it goes.
DANIEL: No, that’s not… that’s not… the next story on the Research Beat is about lying. We’ve had talks with forensic linguists, including Georgina Heydon and Helen Fraser. And the impression we have come away with is that there’s no reliable way to tell if somebody is lying, and that trying to do that is incredibly dangerous and misguided.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: So we’re talking about polygraphs here, right?
HEDVIG: No!
DANIEL: No, we know polygraphs are junk. But there’s other stuff.
HEDVIG: I found out about this news item because I decided to look at the European Research Council’s Twitter feed to see, like, what kind of things they were tweeting about as like, what they… what was the research they promoted and liked. And this was one of them.
DANIEL: Oh! Shoot, okay.
BEN: As in… wait, the research that proves that it’s not a thing, or the research that suggested it might be a thing?
HEDVIG: Daniel?
DANIEL: Well, this research comes from Louise Goupil of the University of East London and a team. They published in Nature Communications, and they claim that not only IS there a way to tell if someone is honest, or certain — certain is being used as a proxy for honesty —
BEN: Okay…
DANIEL: …not only can you do it, it’s something that we all do habitually and unconsciously.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Oh, okay. Interesting. So we are truth diviners on some sort of tacit level that exists beyond our conscious cognition.
DANIEL: Let’s say that we’re always taking readings on how certain someone is in the information they’re presenting. That, in their words, quote, “humans possess dedicated mechanisms of epistemic vigilance, allowing them to detect when a person should not be trusted.” And that’s the end of that quote.
BEN: I mean, I guess that makes — I don’t mean to use the word “intuitive” here, because clearly what they’re talking about is a kind of intuition — but I guess that makes intuitive sense, right up until a person is very certain about deceiving you.
DANIEL: Yes. And that’s why this isn’t about sort of lying and truth telling, but about detecting certainty. How certain someone is. So usually what you do with this kind of study is you get actors in the studio to lie sometimes and tell the truth sometimes, and see if people can tell the difference between the lies and the truth. And they tend to focus on things like intonation. Like, do they use uptalk or not? Are they loud or are they not? And how fast are they speaking? But this team didn’t do that.
BEN: I was just about to say, it sounds like you’re heading to something else. And so far, my brain has been furiously like churning through contexts where humans lie regularly.
HEDVIG: Politicians!
BEN: I’m like: Okay, okay, they’ve gone to some hotbed of human lying. I’m like: Ooh, they’ve gone to speed dating.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Now, this team did something different. They took pronunciations of pseudo-words, not real words. And they manipulated the pitch, and the loudness and the duration and the intonational contour of these nonsensical utterances, and then they asked people to rate them on how certain they sounded. Because if you’re not certain that what you’re saying is true, then you’re gonna do [UNCERTAIN SOUNDING] things. You’re gonna maybe — I don’t know, what will you do? — you’ll use maybe a different prosodic contour, a different intonational contour. Maybe you’ll talk fast as an effort not to get caught. That kind of thing.
BEN: And so basically, they digitally altered the nonsense words across a bunch of these different possible spectrums, and sort of backwards engineered which ones tended to get the most believability hits from subjects?
DANIEL: Yeah, which ones got flagged as non-reliable and which ones got flagged as reliable.
BEN: Interesting.
DANIEL: Hedvig, am I getting the honesty thing right? The certainty/honesty thing?
HEDVIG: They say that in their study, number one, they did separate the perception of honesty and certainty. But they found that they were… the, “we found that the perceptual representations obtained for honesty and certainty were strikingly familiar for all three acoustic dimensions.” So pitch, loudness, and duration.
BEN: So basically, like: the subjects are treating them as indifferent, so we’re going to.
DANIEL: Now I’m going to have you guess this one.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Did people rate voices as more certain and therefore more likely to be honest if, number one, they didn’t use uptalk? They had a lower pitched voice, or they talked louder? Which ones did people use to say: I think those people are more certain, more confident, more honest?
BEN: BOOP
DANIEL: • They didn’t use uptalk. • They had a lower pitched voice, or • they talked louder.
BEN: I’m… my boop was my buzzer ding. I’m going to go low pitched voice.
DANIEL: So you think the low pitched voice was more believable?
BEN: I do believe that that is what they found. Yes.
DANIEL: Okay. Hedvig, you read this, but…
HEDVIG: I’m gonna think that it’s… no, but but so a lot of the stories we’re going to cover here on News Beat were quite long papers and quite involved.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: So I have read part of this paper, but I’m not sure what I should answer, which maybe says something about me or the paper or the amount of other things I’ve been doing this week, like trying to tame cats.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, look, you’re stalling. We can all see it. So what do you want to answer?
HEDVIG: I think it’s absence of uptalk.
DANIEL: You think the absence of uptalk make people sound more trustable?
HEDVIG: Yep.
BEN: So what I like is that Hedvig and I both took a sexist approach, but in different ways.
HEDVIG: I should also say, these are French speakers, right? I don’t know if that makes a difference for you, Ben. They weren’t English speakers.
DANIEL: I forgot the Bender rule: Always say which language you’re working in.
BEN: It doesn’t, it does not change my opinion in this regard. Because I still believe that French society is a very gendered society.
DANIEL: Okay. Ben, I’m sorry, but pitch was not a good predictor of participants’ judgments.
BEN: Oh! Interesting. Lack of uptalk?
DANIEL: Falling intonation, so lack of uptalk, indeed, were perceived as more confident, certain, honest. So you both win on that one. And then voices that were perceived as certain or honest were louder.
BEN: Really? That is surprising to me. Because I would have, again, gut intuition would say the louder a person talks, the more they’re trying to convince you of something.
DANIEL: Hmm. So quote, “in summary, voices were perceived to be unreliable — that is, doubtful or lying — if they number one had rising intonation, number two, less intensity at the beginning of each syllable. And slower speed rate.”
HEDVIG: Yeah. So to the author’s credit, they actually did a lot of like, clever ways of testing things. Like, they tested: oh, is it true that certainty and honesty are the same? In that case, we can do it and they did. So I think they had French actors reading the original words, then they manipulated them, but they also had French, Japanese, English, and Spanish informers for different parts of the study. So it’s quite robust stuff. Oh, my god, they also, they also tested Russian, Marathi, Polish, Mandarin… This is a decent sample for this kind of study! I don’t think you understand! Usually, it’s like: we tested Dutch AND English speakers.
BEN: Yeah, and there was like 12 of each.
HEDVIG: This is good. I think they should really get… I’m very impressed. Oh! And Swedish! [CLAPS]
BEN: Do you reckon… do you think this is why the European Space Research, blablabla Twitter account was like: Yeah, we really rate this study. Not necessarily because it was like, amazing, but this is just like, super sound research. Good job.
HEDVIG: I think the communications person who’s running their Twitter account thought it would be clickbait-y to have a news article about people lying. I mean, we picked it up as well!
BEN: How great is it, that in addition to clickbait, it was a extremely rigorous article! It sounds like these academics are doing, like, they are winning at academia. Right? They’re getting the clickbait-y stuff right, and they’re getting the sound academia right.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: But remember, this wasn’t about detecting whether people were lying or telling the truth. It would be interesting to see that, when we have recordings of lies… Like, one thing I would like to see is when we have recordings of people saying stuff, and then later we find out: oh, yeah, that person was lying, did those lies fit the profile? I’d be interested to see that.
HEDVIG: “I did not have sex with that woman.”
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: So right now, this is just how people perceive the voices, not whether the voices were lying or not. So that’s an important distinction.
BEN: But interestingly enough, I would hazard that the only reason any of us know about it is because lying was involved in that narrative at one point.
HEDVIG: And this reminds me a bit of just in general questions about… these are linguists actually asking questions about universality and language, but from a totally different perspective than we’re used to. So it’s a little bit similar to the “Huh?” study by Dingemanse et al., where they tried to find if there was an other-initiated repair word. So like: Huh? Can you repeat that? I didn’t hear what you were saying. And they looked at that word differing all over the world to see if there was like similarities acoustically. And this is similar in that, they’re saying of speakers from different places in the world speaking other languages, even some non Indo-European are actually using similar cues to attribute similar meaning, which is like… this kind of pragmatic universality excites me a lot because it’s, I find this more interesting than, like, Chomskyan universals.
DANIEL: Oh, yeah, totally. And yeah, this is weird, because uptalk, you know, means certain things culturally to us in the English speaking world, but it does not necessarily mean the same thing in other languages.
BEN: It’s true.
DANIEL: So yeah, that’s wild.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Next story. Next, what’s… what’s the next Little Word Story we’ve got this week, Daniel?
DANIEL: On the Research Beat next: gay voice.
BEN: Ah! I remember we did a story about gay voice quite a long time ago now.
DANIEL: It was. It was years and years ago. The title of this article in the Academic Times made me sad, “People with ‘gay-sounding’ voices face discrimination and anticipate rejection.” Oh! This is some work from Fabio Fasoli of the University of Surrey and a team, published in the British Journal of Social Psychology. They were looking at different aspects of people’s ideas and attitudes about homosexuality, not just from straight people, but also gay people. And there are three sort of ideas that people have. One is discreteness, like, are gay people super different, or not? Immutability, which is kind of like saying, that’s just the way they are. And controllability: can they change it a little bit? Can they bend it a bit? And we can look at those factors in terms of gay and lesbian people, but also in terms of gay and lesbian voices.
BEN: Interesting. I gotta say, the way all of that was formulated just made me super uncomfortable.
DANIEL: Yeah?
BEN: Like, it’s, like we’re talking about like, like discretion of a person’s identity?
DANIEL: Well, discreteness. So you might say: Hey, gay folks are just like all the rest of us. Or you might say: they are super different.
BEN: Oh, okay. So it’s not a measure of how quote unquote “discreet” a gay person can make themselves.
DANIEL: Not that kind of discreetness, the other kind of discreteness.
BEN: Oh, okay, that’s what made me uncomfortable. I thought it was like a series of measures by which people harshed on the gays. And I was like, I don’t like this at all. This is not fun.
HEDVIG: I have a question. I thought we weren’t really sure if a gay voice existed. First of all, we know that we almost exclusively by this mean, like, American gay men, right? That’s when people say gay voice, to me, that’s usually what they mean.
BEN: Or at least anglo, anglophile gay men.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And secondly, I think, I think another thing that I thought we knew was that not all gay Anglo men speak that way. But there’s something that people associate with them.
BEN: True. And certain straight men speak that way as well.
HEDVIG: And certain straight men speak that way. And that is something to do with like the S’s and some of the vowels, but that I thought that we for sure knew that it wasn’t a reliably tracker of homosexuality, but it’s perceived as it.
BEN: Yes. So that’s, that’s the assumption I was working on, is that it’s a thing in the sense that you can hear it and you can… you like if it walks like a dog and quacks like a dog, right? But it’s actually not true that it’s only dogs that quack.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: And in fact, what we think of as gay voice is actually kind of an important marker of identity among people in that community.
HEDVIG: Yeah, sure. Exactly. So, and there are probably gay men who speak like this. And I think we all agree they shouldn’t be discriminated at for doing that, right? They shouldn’t be discriminated for their identity. They shouldn’t have to hide their identity. They should be able to speak however they want and be perceived as full human beings, and just like everyone else, regardless of all this right?
DANIEL: Of course, of course.
HEDVIG: So what this news is about is that just underlining the thing that we sort of maybe had assumed, which is that people are homophobic.
BEN: Wow, you really, you really should have called it News Blast, Daniel. This just in: Some people are cunts!
DANIEL: Wow. You know, it’s one of those things that you kind of know it’s true, but it’s good to see the actual science on it. Mmm. 🙁
HEDVIG: No, I agree. I just felt like we needed to underline it, because I think… haven’t Vocal Fries done a thing about about the gay voice, haven’t they done an episode? Am I making things up? Maybe they haven’t.
BEN: I think we did.
HEDVIG: Yeah, we did.
BEN: We did an episode that was explicitly about this. And we were like: yep, some gay people don’t speak this way, and some straight people do speak this way, and it’s English only for the most part, and then different languages have their own version of, like, what this is, and it looks completely different.
DANIEL: Because communities have a very strong tendency to use language in a way that reaffirms their membership and identity.
HEDVIG: Of course.
BEN: I think what would be interesting to look at would be other languages and other languages’ manifestations of – and I’m using the airiest air quotes ever here – ‘gay voice’ and sort of seeing the greater or lesser extent that discrimination is applied linguistically in those other languages as well, and see if there’s factors that make that lesser or greater in terms of discrimination against that identity marker. Perceived identity marker, sorry, perceived identity marker.
HEDVIG: I think it’d also be interesting to know… So this is something I have very limited knowledge about, but there are a lot of communities that exist around the world of people who aren’t straight and cis. And some of those like local, non… what are we going to call it? Is QUEER the word people use for like everything that’s not cis and not straight? Sort of sometimes?
BEN: I think we can just… I think LBGTQ is still like in vogue.
HEDVIG: Yeah, but I’m trying to get to the fact that like, not everywhere… There’s a globalisation that’s happening in terms of LGBTI labels, I think, and cultural markers, where there used to exist other categories in places that are now sort of being maybe replaced or heavily influenced by especially American sort of queer culture. So I have friends who are, like, part of the fa’afafine community in Samoa, and who talk about like: no, we don’t, we don’t, some of them don’t want to use the term TRANS. Like, that’s not we’re not that, we’re this thing.
BEN: Like, our culture has this other third gender for quite a while and we’re very happy with it.
DANIEL: Two spirits in Native American culture, as well.
HEDVIG: Yeah, different third genders or not necessarily from third genders, maybe different kinds of sexuality or something. And they’re like, yeah.
BEN: Non… would we say non-heteronormative realities?
HEDVIG: Maybe? Yeah, I don’t, I don’t have a good word for this. But I feel like they probably have other identities and they probably have other markers. And they’re probably discriminated against in other ways than this. Which would be interesting to compare. I’m more and more in my life, the older I get becoming that annoying qualitative anthropologist person that I used to really not like when I was an undergrad, who’s like: these things can’t be compared, though! I don’t know!
BEN: Apples, and the concept of love.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah. Like, should we be comparing those? Maybe not. It’s good that this is a patron episode, because it’ll take a while for my boss to hear it.
DANIEL: Well, this team didn’t look at identifying gay voice. Instead, they looked at the attitudes about voice discreteness, voice controllability. And so that’s the idea that they talk super differently, and they can control it. They found that if people thought those two things — oh, yeah, they talk really differently, AND they can control it — that was a really good predictor of prejudice and discrimination.
BEN: Why the control issue? I guess the perception is you’re like, quote, unquote, putting it on.
DANIEL: Putting it on.
BEN: Right. Okay. And the third one was just not as significant?
DANIEL: The other one, if people had a belief in voice immutability, like, Oh, well, that’s just the way they talk, then that predicted greater tolerance in heterosexual folks.
BEN: Right. Okay. So it maps exactly. Yeah, I guess, again, it makes… I know I’m saying this phrase a lot: That makes intuitive sense.
DANIEL: They also took a look at gay men and women and asked them questions, gave them their own survey. And they found that when they thought that they themselves had a gay sounding voice, whatever that meant to them, they had more expectations of rejection, and of sort of self policing, self vigilance. And Fasoli, the lead author says, “people who sound gay, regardless of whether they are gay or not, are more likely to face stigma, and this is something that creates stress in their lives.”
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: That checks out.
DANIEL: So what’s the “what” of this article? What’s the summary? The takeaway?
BEN: This just in: Data proves that unfortunately, a whole bunch of linguistic prejudice still exists for gay folk, and people who sound gay to people who don’t understand the gay voice isn’t just for gay people.
DANIEL: What I’ve got is: the attitudes that straight people have about gay people extends to voice.
HEDVIG: That’s fair.
DANIEL: The relevance of this article is that this work can be used to address prejudice, both as it’s externalised by straight people, but also as it is internalised by gay people. So, good stuff.
BEN: That’s cool. I would like to imagine that one day, like, training seminars about like, how to not be a fuckhead would include some of this information, right? Where you’d be like: turns out that your belief that a person can change how they speak, and they’re just putting it on is just wrong. And here is the data, and shut up.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: All right, next on the Research Beat…
BEN: What’s the next Little Word, Daniel?
HEDVIG: Next!
BEN: The next News Blast? The next salvo from the News Blast cannon?
DANIEL: [SIGHS LOUDLY] Take it, Hedvig.
HEDVIG: Next on the Research Beat are two items about non-spoken languages. The first one is from a paper called Feeling Phonology, by Terra Edwards and Diane Brentari, in the journal Language, where they are doing a very pioneering study about Deaf-blind grammar. So this is the structures that have been noticed in people who are so both Deaf and blind. So they can’t really make use of sign language because you know, you can’t see each other. So they had, I believe seven… I have some notes here, I’m just going to bring them up so I don’t say it wrong. Yeah. So they have seven participants, all of which had some familiarity with American Sign Language. And then they gave them various tasks and studied and tried to dissect what kind of grammar that was emerging. And it’s… it… I found this very fascinating and a bit hard to understand because, so we’re talking about people who are signing in each other’s hands, right?
BEN: Yeah, this was going to be my initial question.
DANIEL: Yeah, me too.
BEN: Talk to me about how a Deaf-blind person communicates with another Deaf-blind person.
HEDVIG: So all of these seven participants were all right handed. So what would happen is you would be touching each other’s hands, right? And then you’d have your dominant hand, and you’d sign in to the other person’s left hand, if you’re right handed, and the other person would be signing into your hand, right?
BEN: I have to imagine that would mean a pretty restricted vocabulary of ASL, because ASL first of all involves like, two hands often. And also, you can only do things that can be felt, and all of the things that would only be visual can’t necessarily carry across super well. Would that be accurate?
HEDVIG: Um, well, they don’t really address that directly in this paper, but I don’t really see why that would be true. Because anything that… so first of all, there are signed languages besides ASL that make use of one hand much more more. I think ASL is one of the sign languages that are more on the two hand spectrum than other languages. So those sign languages work perfectly well there, right? So my understanding is that these people have all, some of them have learned ASL from birth. So someone has been doing ASL, and they’ve been holding their hands around the other person and then doing it back. So what has then happened is, they’ve entered into this… I think they said about a year they’ve been in this — protactile is what they’re calling this kind of practice — protactile network for over a year, and they’re starting to develop signs and conventions that are different from just plain ASL.
BEN: So they’re developing, like, a home-lect.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I guess you could say that. Yeah.
DANIEL: Hedvig, in our discussion of community size, and how languages look in small communities versus big communities, we came up with the idea that in small communities you don’t really need to have regularisation of patterns, because you can just memorise everybody’s quirks. It’s only when the population size gets bigger that you need to have regularisation. This is a pretty small community size.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it is. So I don’t think they address that per se here. They’re just more trying to tease out what parts of the gestures, the movements, the actions are seeming to conventionalise and the conventionalisation process. I don’t think they’re saying that this is like, an inherently consistent language in that way yet.
DANIEL: Okay. Interesting. So what kind of patterns are they seeing emerge?
HEDVIG: So they focused on four different kinds of… I’m just scrolling so I get the right thing… [MUTTERING TO HERSELF] things about… some of them had to do… a lot of them had to do actually with pragmatic, like, turn taking and things, like initiating contact, or holding the floor, saying like I’m about, I’m gonna say something more, but I’m holding. Hold on, more to come. Those kinds of gestures.
DANIEL: Yeah, like um um um.
BEN: Like, what we might do by going: aaaannd. or something like that.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And then also just objects as well. Body parts. I believe they also they, sometimes they went beyond the hand and also use the rest of the arm as well, which I thought was kind of neat.
BEN: That also sort of makes a bit of sense with ASL. Because sometimes you could incorporate the other person’s hand and arm into the sign, right? Like, so if you’ve got two-handed ASL and one of the signs is like, dragging your fingers down your other your non-dominant hand forearm, well, then you can just drag your fingers down the other person’s non-dominant hand forearm and then they would understand that sign.
HEDVIG: Yeah. So what they’re describing in this paper are different things that are sort of conventionalising and emerging. But it’s a very, it’s one of the first papers ever on this. So honestly, it’s a lot of more things that we still need to learn. I found it really fascinating. I also saw that they had done a webinar, and I haven’t watched that yet. They do the Meet the Author Webinar, and I believe they have a recording of it. So I kind of want to… want to have a look at that as well. It’s something that if people find it more interesting… because you have all these interesting questions and I did as well and I couldn’t really answer them all. So maybe we just invite these researchers on the show to talk about it?
DANIEL: Sounds good to me.
BEN: That is a good idea. Because the thing that jumps out to my head, that I hope is true, is that more than anything else, these participants just got to spend, like, they were given time, resources and like money or like time to just hang out with people just like them, and be able to talk and relate and, and that sounds like it would be a really wonderful thing to just be like: Hey, we’re going to like compensate you for sitting around and talking to a bunch of other people who have life experiences really similar to you that you don’t necessarily maybe get a chance to chat with all that often. That would be awesome.
HEDVIG: Yeah, that’s cool. Hopefully if you like them. There’s the possibility, right? that you’re like, I want to go home and talk to my family who does this, what’s called received ASL, which is just more fully ASL that you just hold your hands around. You know, that’s a possibility as well. But you’re right it’s probably a fantastic experience to finally get to be someone who has similar experience to you.
BEN: It’s like: I really like Paul, Stephanie, and Omar, but fuck, I hate Janice!
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I mean, people are people, right? I thought one interesting note that they note, an interesting point in the article was that they said that there’s been a previous study on Deaf-blind signer’s received ASL. And they had found that there was between 60 and 85% accuracy of transfer of information. I don’t know exactly how they measured that. But they say that the largest source of errors were inaccuracies in the reception of phonological parameters of ASL. So yes, there are things about ASL, American Sign Language, that can’t be fully communicated through this protactile version of it, or this received version of it. So there is a need for for something different and it is perhaps conventionalising. Which is pretty cool.
DANIEL: Wow.
BEN: Well, I think the “so what” of this story is it’s super interesting, and we need to get these people to come on and tell us more about it.
DANIEL: And then we also need to rope in our favorite interpreter, Christy.
BEN: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Oo, can we make her our like, fifth co-host?
DANIEL: I’ll send her the t-shirt.
BEN: I feel like we just need to turn this thing into the Muppet Show. Like, we’re just gonna keep adding voices.
DANIEL: Sounds good.
HEDVIG: I do believe — just for the point — I do believe both of them are hearing, the authors of the paper.
DANIEL: Yeah, but to make it available to more people, we need to bring her in.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah, that. That is a good point. Sorry. I thought you meant us in talking to them.
DANIEL: No, I just feel like whenever we talk about Deaf people, we should just have just have that available for everyone. Like, get the transcript out super fast and have the video out.
BEN: Okay, what’s the next Little Word, Hedvig?
DANIEL: Ugh!
HEDVIG: The next item on the Research Beat…
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: We are fighting each other for control over the title!
HEDVIG: …is a paper from Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, about gestural grammar. So apparently — I wasn’t aware of this — but there are people who argue about the expressiveness of sign language versus spoken language, right?
DANIEL: Boo!
HEDVIG: Boo. They’re probably fine, let’s leave it. But this researcher, Philip Schlenker, suggests that — or other people suggest this as well — that we shouldn’t be comparing spoken language to sign language directly, we should be comparing spoken language plus gestures to sign languages. That there are things that spoken languages, a hearing people do with gestures that are similar and expressive in a similar way, and that that is a more fair comparison. So for example, we have now started doing these recordings here also with video, and I can see your guys’ faces. And earlier when Ben was trying to say something, he was doing big air quotes. I don’t think our listeners saw those. But they definitely added information to me.
BEN: So that’s the premise. That’s the premise of this person’s study is, like, for it to be a fair comparison, we need to also talk about this other mode that spoken language has, that it makes use of.
HEDVIG: Yes. And specifically what they did was they compared gestures to similar things in signed languages and saying, we actually can see similar patterns here. So they talked about the function of, like, role shift when you’re doing reported speech. Like, you might… you might face a different way, or put your gaze away from the speaker in order to indicate that you’re reporting what someone else did. Or what’s called plurectionality or when you’re imitating gestures, you might do the gestures repeatedly in a certain way that’s similar to what people have described as grammatical number for signed languages. Another one was about telicity, so how… how an event is punctual and has a definite end, or whether it’s continuous, and how the gestures we use can sort of look similar to what signed languages do for the same kind of meaning, whether an event is ended or not.
DANIEL: I’d be curious to see how how our gestures, not signed languages, but our gestures handle telicity. The idea that there’s a goal or an end state. Like, would it be…
HEDVIG: So they had the example of, I believe it’s a parachute that’s coming down and whether it’s just like floating in the air or whether it’s landing.
DANIEL: Okay! The landing one is telic. Yes.
HEDVIG: Yeah. So basically they showed gestures to people and ask them to classify them as telic or atelic, and people were able to do it.
DANIEL: I guess if I were doing a parachutist who is floating down, I would have a lot more lateral motion. Whereas if it was telic and they landed, it’ll be more down. That would be my guess.
HEDVIG: Yeah, so they had the example: When skydiving tomorrow, you will circle — I’m doing a circle gesture — for five minutes. So they used pro-gestures, so gestures that are replacing words, so not ones that are accompanying. So when skydiving tomorrow, you will – circle gesture – for five minutes. When skydiving tomorrow, you will circle in five minutes, which has an endpoint. And people use different gestures.
BEN: Ah, interesting.
DANIEL: Wow.
HEDVIG: Yeah, participants were immediately able to classify them as telic or atelic. And I believe… I’m logged into my institution login, but I believe most or all of the papers we’re talking about in this episode were mostly open access. And especially these gesture ones have a lot of images of hands and movements and stuff. So if you want to see more detail, you can look at the paper.
BEN: If you haven’t found our vocal explanations as enlightening as we do, then there are… there are pictorial aids!
DANIEL: We’ll slap a bunch of links up on the blog page for this episode, and you can find that, as with all our episodes, on becauselanguage.com. Well, there you go, our news bag is just about emptied out. And I feel like I’ve been enlightened by the research that we’ve seen.
BEN: This is… I like the idea that we can, for our Patrons, put out something like we have today, where it’s going to be a little bit — I don’t wanna use the word heavier, because it has the wrong connotation — a little bit more rigorous in its linguistic sort of, like, analysis of things going on.
DANIEL: Meaty.
BEN: Or if you want to think of another way, it’s going to confuse Ben more than usual.
DANIEL: Yeah, but how did you do? Do you feel like you got through it?
BEN: I do! I mean, I do the show because I find it super interesting. I like the fact that you guys have the ability to stretch your legs a little bit. I think really what we should call these episodes is Daniel and Hedvig nerd the fuck out on linguistic shit. Like, that’s really… and maybe we just make an acronym like HADNTFU.
HEDVIG: We can do a competition where Ben decides who brought the best nugget.
BEN: Ooooh, that could be good.
DANIEL: Oh! Okay, Ben.
HEDVIG: Is that mean?
BEN: Or, or even better? We get… when Nicole’s done being on break and she’s back in the show as our regular co-host, you impress her with your fancy news stories. Your fancy research stories.
HEDVIG: I think that sounds really good. I’m gonna get better at… usually Daniel does this, and I’m the new one on the more Research Beat. It’s hard to synthesise this information!
DANIEL: You are on the Research Beat, I’m giving that over to you.
HEDVIG: Especially when you start asking me questions. I’m like… I don’t…
DANIEL: I’ll just bring the quirky weird stuff, you can bring the heavy stuff.
BEN: Hey, hey, hey, hey, Daniel. Excuse me. All right? Quirky weird is my little quadrant. Okay? You back the fuck up, all right? If you take that from me, I got nothing. I got nothing left. There’s swearing. That’s it.
HEDVIG: I’ve got another name suggestion: Journal Club.
DANIEL: Journal Club. Aww!
BEN: Oh, that’s not bad. That’s not bad. Oh, I’ve heard of that before. Ayesha does a journal club.
DANIEL: That’s sweet.
BEN: I like that.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Our department has a journal club. It’s a fairly common name… it’s a thing.
BEN: Yeah, it’s a… it’s A Thing. Capital A, capital T.
DANIEL: Journal Club it is. Although I’m gonna miss Ben’s acronym.
BEN: Well, that can be our, like, you know, like Sufjan Stevens, like chuck an “or” in there and then just add, like, a whole second title. Because clearly he just never… like never really zeroed in on whether he wanted his song to be called this thing or this thing.
DANIEL: Yep.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: All right. I’m trying to find a way to get out of this bit, it’s Words of the Week.
BEN: All right, everyone, shut the fuck up! Let’s do Word of the Week. Was that good? Should we use that segue?
DANIEL: That was brilliant. It was bracing!
BEN: It’s just the real: Right-o, dickheads, fucken pull your socks up. We’ve got Word of the Week to sort out.
DANIEL: Okay. Oh, that’s two good ones.
BEN: Yeah, sorry.
DANIEL: All right. So about six weeks ago, twice-impeached former US President Donald Trump incited a mob of his insurrectionist supporters…
HEDVIG: ughhhh
DANIEL: …to riot at the Capitol in which five people died, in an effort to overturn the results of the election and subvert democracy. Can I just say that I lived in Utah for a good long while, and I heard for a long, long time… just often… people who love their guns have argued that at some point they would have to march on Washington. That’s just kind of been an article of faith among these people. And you know, just like, I don’t know, start shooting dudes. The minute that they thought, they thought eventually it would get so bad, that the rulers would become so tyrannical that we would need to take up arms against them. And that for them was, like, a major reason why Americans needed to have guns. To take up arms against tyrannical leadership.
BEN: That’s… I mean, what we’re talking about here is mythos, right? There has been for many, many years a very strong, very real myth amongst a lot of people that yeah, the Second Amendment is 100% valid and real.
HEDVIG: Well-armed guerrilla militia… what is the term?
DANIEL: Well-regulated militia.
HEDVIG: Well… how is that a word? Well, anyway, they weren’t well-regulated. And I personally think that this is all trauma from being persecuted for your religion by the British. That’s why all American sci-fi is obsessed with deep state. But anyway, some nutbags…
DANIEL: Not having a Black president? Really? Wha…? Huh?
BEN: Yeah, you’re going all the way back to the Mayflower, instead of just, like, the very recent racial scarring?
DANIEL: Yeah!
HEDVIG: No, but I mean, I mean, like, look at, look, all American culture is obsessed with this idea that the state is out to get them.
BEN: I agree that there is a… there has been since the Boston Tea Party, a strong vein of, like: the government is your fucking enemy. And, like, hold your like protections close, because you never know when they’re gonna come for you again. I agree. I agree.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, the House voted to impeach and the Senate had something of a trial. And I just want to highlight the words of Senator Mike Lee from Utah. “Look,” says he, “everyone makes mistakes. Everyone is entitled to a MULLIGAN once in a while. And I would hope, I would expect that each of these individuals would take a mulligan on each of those statements.” What is a MULLIGAN?
BEN: I can’t believe I’m gonna say this, because it means I know at least one thing about golf; the worst fucking sport in the world, but it is a thing from golf.
DANIEL: Yes! Okay. What is it?
BEN: A MULLIGAN is when, I believe, you get the ball close enough to the hole when you’re off the green that you essentially get to, like, shuffle it in?
DANIEL: No, I think that’s a GIMME. And I’m sorry to say that you know nothing about sport, Ben.
BEN: I’m fine with that. I’m fine with that. Is it… it’s… it’s giving… It’s giving a player something off, though. I know that much. It’s like: you should get a penalty and you don’t? Like, you should get a one straight penalty and maybe you don’t… something like that.
DANIEL: Basically, it’s a do-over. So you slice it into the trees and you go: Oh, look, just… I’m just not gonna count that one. Do it again.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: It’s not allowed in competitive play. But you know, in friendly games, sometimes you will give each other a mulligan. So the senate, you know, chummy organisation that it is… Mike Lee thinks that they should give Donald Trump — who tried to have them murdered — a mulligan, because it’s the kind of mistake that anybody could make. I mean, who among us hasn’t accidentally…
BEN: …incited a insurrectionist seditionist hellscape mob to storm the nation state center of power? I mean,
DANIEL: Come on!
BEN: We all had a teenage phase when we got seditionist rallies all happening and murdering people.
DANIEL: We’ve all done some crazy shit. So where does this term MULLIGAN come from? I did a little bit of looking, and the answer is nobody knows.
BEN: Well, I mean, it’s Scottish though. Right? Like, it’s a whole St Andrews thing?
HEDVIG: It’s the person. It’s, like, doing a George, right?
DANIEL: It is, supposedly. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, they think that it is the name of David B. Mulligan, 1871–1954, a Canadian born hotelier and amateur golfer who maybe had some atrocious shots and claimed that he was now going to ignore that one and take a “correction shot”. So people called it a CORRECTION SHOT for a while. But then after a while, they call it taking a MULLIGAN. And that’s the story in Oxford.
BEN: I love, I love that like this, this format of insult, which I have been using my entire life from teenagehood onwards, which is anytime anyone does something really fucking dumb, that act gets their name in your social circle henceforth, right? So like, when we were young, the people who would drink way too much and pass out and embarrass themselves and get their faces drawn on. So that was like, doing a Cary, or whatever, right? And so… and so henceforth, when someone got that drunk it was like: Oh, he’s Cary-ing! I just love that was the thing that existed, like, well over 100 years ago, we were burning people the same way. That’s wonderful. That just makes me very happy.
DANIEL: Was there anything that was a Ben?
BEN: Just being obnoxiously talkative? Just bogarting the mic in a social situation?
HEDVIG: That’s mine too. [LAUGHTER] Why are we on the same show? Not good.
BEN: Awkward!
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: And I’ve got to keep the both of you in line. Cecil Adams of the Straight Dope thinks that maybe another explanation could be that this is an ethnic slur, that Irish folks who were starting to join country clubs round about the ’20s and ’30s, and they got a reputation as atrocious players. So this caught on, taking a mulligan, where mulligan became a proxy for Irish folks. I’m glad that’s probably wrong?
BEN: I… my feeling would that would be wrong simply because most Mulligan is not a common Irish name. Like, that is not you know, like the pejorative Mick to mean, like, an Irish Catholic is based on Michael because Michael was just an overwhelmingly common Irish name, right? So it doesn’t… Yeah, Mulligan… like, I would have… I would have accepted if it was, like, Fitzpatrick or something, but not Mulligan.
DANIEL: There is one other possibility. That saloons used to have a bottle, a free bottle of booze, so the customers could have it and that free bottle was called a mulligan and then the term transferred to golf. But!
BEN: What saloons can you go to to get a free bottle of booze? I want to go there.
DANIEL: Good question.
BEN: Ah, Ben, here’s your Mulligan bottle. Thank you.
DANIEL: It looks like Senator Lee among with most of the other Republicans decided to give Trump that Mulligan and they refused to convict him. Good times.
BEN: [SARCASTICALLY] Yay. Look, it is deliberately set up in such a way to be nearly impossible. So it was… I don’t… Yeah. I feel like everything was done that could be done. And it’s a like a rigged game that could never have been conceivably won.
DANIEL: It just bugs me that this chummy golf term is being invoked for something incredibly serious.
BEN: Yes, I don’t… Well, that’s, I mean, that’s very deliberate. Right? Yeah, like that. That’s, that’s an active choice to neutralise, to neuter, to soften, to nerf.
DANIEL: Skilful use of language. Good job, Senator Mike Lee.
BEN: Skilfully evil!
DANIEL: Let’s go on to the next one. The pandemic has messed with a lot of things in our lives. But one unexpected thing it’s messed with is our conversational rituals. Used to be you’d ask: How are you? But now we kind of have to do this weird dance where we say: How are you? I mean, no, really? I mean, because when you say How are you? but you don’t really care what the answer is, it’s because you know that the answer is, you’re fine.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Everything is not fine. And so now you have to kind of go: But seriously, I hope that you’re… you know, I hope you’re okay during this troubled time. And so on.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Now, have you noticed Daniel, that…? Oh, sorry, we haven’t actually said the word yet. So why don’t you say it.
DANIEL: Okay. This comes from @sarahesmith23 on Twitter: PANDEMIC FINE. PANDEMIC FINE is a state of being in which you are employed unhealthy during a pandemic, but you’re also tired and depressed and feel like trash all the time. PANDEMIC FINE.
BEN: I’ve got a series of great image memes about this that I show my students and one of them is that scene from Parks and Recreation, where Andy is like: I’m fine. I’m just not eating or sleeping and my, like, foot hurts all the time and I’m hungry and I don’t know why but I can never say shit, like, but it’s all good.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Daniel, have you come across this, Hedvig? Have you come across this, Daniel? Have you heard people saying this in conversational English?
HEDVIG: No, but I’ve started saying PANDEMIC BRAIN. I even emailed you guys that said PANDEMIC BRAIN. I don’t know if this is the thing that people are experiencing. But I think this week, it started a bit last week, but now it’s a full swing. I’m pretty good today. But I think I’m just… I’m starting to get problems formulating sentences.
DANIEL: Hmm.
HEDVIG: Have you guys gotten any of this?
BEN: No, but I speak one in comparison to four languages. So I have less load.
DANIEL: It’s a bit different in Perth.
HEDVIG: Right, yeah, no, we’re in lockdown, obviously. I basically just see my husband and, like, the mailman every week, and it’s been like this for a couple of weeks now.
DANIEL: We had five days, and I was looped. Okay?
HEDVIG: Yeah. I had a work meeting on Zoom with lots of people, and I had to be like: I have to take long pauses. And I feel like if I don’t take those pauses, I’m gonna like stutter? Because…
BEN: To be fair, my, my, my… well, I just stuttered, so you’re fine. My impression of that tendency in spoken language is that that’s what leaders do all the time when they’re standing up in front of a large group of people. They will just take weirdly long pauses, but because they’re a big leader in front of people, we all just sort of, like, fine with that. Like, my principal does it, my previous principal did it. People will just be like: Now, one of the things that we need to focus on [PAUSE] is our [PAUSE] attitude. They just do it all the time.
HEDVIG: Tht shit. Yeah. But it’s… it is really frustrating. And sometimes I get through a sentence and I’m like: Oh, no, the verb agreement, or like, the subject I chose earlier doesn’t match what I’m now about to say. So I need to do a recap or something. And yeah, it’s very annoying. And I find I… if I close my eyes, I’m starting to do this thing of like, I not only pause, but I also close my eyes, and I get like a pained expression. Ste things I’m getting… I think… it looks like I’m annoyed, but it’s not. I’m just desperately trying to access information in my brain. So I go like, I go like this. You can see in my Zoom now. Like, I sort of close my eyes and I get very intense and I’m like… and then I get the word and I’m like: Aha!
BEN: There is a sideline benefit. Whenever a person looks annoyed in a professional setting, you just look busy. So people are gonna think you are just working really hard. Have you ever noticed that? Did you ever see George do that in Seinfeld? He’s like: So what’s your secret? What do you do all day? He’s like: I look annoyed. [ANNOYED SOUNDS] I’m busy!
HEDVIG: I have to, like, tell other people what to do and lead meetings and be friendly and encouraging a lot in my role, so I can’t really just be gruntled.
BEN: [LAUGHING] Gruntled!
DANIEL: GRUNTLED might not mean what you think it means.
BEN: So, quickly. The thing I was gonna say about people saying PANDEMIC FINE. I have heard this, but not with PANDEMIC. I hear people say COVID FINE. And I’ve had people say it to me. Like, I’ve actually heard this in conversational English, here in WA. Like: How you’re going? Oh, I’m covid fine.
DANIEL: Oh, that makes sense, because we’ve got COVID HAIR, COVID FINE. Hey, maybe that should Word of the Week.
BEN: I’m finding Australians are trending much more towards COVID, than -DEMIC or PANDEMIC type stuff. Our thing is just COVID, it seems to be.
DANIEL: The interesting thing for me about this is that reminds me of another expression. And that’s MINNESOTA NICE. Right?
BEN: [LAUGHS] I’ve heard this!
DANIEL: It’s a reversal of the usual English pattern of adjective noun, but it’s a noun, adjective. So… or maybe adverb? But in like Minnesota, or pandemic or COVID, the noun is being used as a modifier, which is kind of cool and interesting.
BEN: I like that. That’s fun.
DANIEL: Yeah, I’m trying to think of other examples, but yeah.
HEDVIG: Oh, surely there’s loads.
DANIEL: Let me just… Hedvig, for you, this is a quote that I found in an article by Trevis Gleason in Everyday Health about PANDEMIC FINE. He said, “This is not a place any of us expected or planned to inhabit. But it’s our place for now. And we’re doing the best we can.” And when you described what was going on for you, that’s kind of what I thought of.
HEDVIG: I am trying to do the best I can. It’s just I’m used to being… I’m used to… I’m the kind of person who has like, a fairly good bullshit autopilot.
BEN: Yes. Yup.
HEDVIG: Like, I’m usually able to, like, click a switch in my head and, like, make sentences and, like, keep the floor and keep smiling and then be able to get to what I was saying. And I can do that in presentations.
BEN: I think all three of us, as people who have educated groups of people, have fostered this skill. 100%. Daniel and I right now are going: Ah, yes. That pedal in the brain. Mhm. Mhm.
DANIEL: Yes, I know that.
HEDVIG: And it is very weird. When some… a tool you have in your toolkit isn’t there. And you’re like, I’d like to switch my disassociation autopilot.
BEN: Where’s my, where’s my hammer? I use my hammer literally every day. I hit everything with this hammer.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah. And I’m like: whoops, ah… And because I have very nice people I’m working with in one of the meetings last week, I was like: Okay, everyone, I just feel like I need to say that this isn’t gonna be as productive meeting as I’d like, because I have pandemic brain and I can’t really form sentences. And lots of other people nodded and said: Yeah, me too. And I was like: Okay, we’re just gonna take it a bit easier today…
DANIEL: Covid brain. Covid brain.
HEDVIG: …because I can’t do stuff, right? It’s not very fun. Anyway, I had…. Daniel, if that was the last for that one. I had a Word of the Week that I put in our Google Sheet, but I think you don’t have because you have an offline version.
DANIEL: Go for it.
HEDVIG: So I had a word that I wanted to bring today, which is unrelated to America and the pandemic, YAY!
DANIEL: What? Is that allowed?
HEDVIG: It’s actually sort of two things that I think are connected.
DANIEL and BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: The first one is POV PLAYLISTS. Do you know what this is?
DANIEL: POV PLAYLISTS?
BEN: I only know POV as point of view.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL and BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: I should say I’ve made this word up, because I don’t know the word for this. But it’s a phenomena and it should have this word. So here’s me using this place to say that this should be the name for it.
BEN: So just to be clear, your Word of the Week is a word that you have created that doesn’t exist, that you’re trying to… you’re trying to make fetch happen this week on Word of the Week?
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Awesome. That’s what it’s for.
BEN: Okay, good. I like calling a thing what it is, you’re trying to make fetch happen.
HEDVIG: Yeah. So I’ve noticed these and I’m making use of these. These are playlists. They exist both on YouTube and other places. I’ll give you some names of these playlists. They are sets of songs set to still images. And the first one is: You’re the Rich Kid in an Early 2000s Film. So this one has like Britney Spears and Hollaback Girl and Gwen Stefani and TLC on it.
BEN: Yeah, okay
HEDVIG: The other one is: Oldies Playing in Another Room, But You Are in a Dream. And this one is: Old Timey Music from the ’20s and ’30s with Summer Rain and Crickets Effects Over it.
BEN: See, that last one strays a little bit for me, because that brings it closer into your normal sort of lo-fi sort of study beat type stuff, right? But the first two definitely are a new thing that I have not come across before and sounds super interesting.
HEDVIG: Another one is: It’s Summer 1983, You Fell in Love Somewhere in Northern Italy.
BEN: That’s so cool.
DANIEL: Damn, that’s… I want to hear… What songs are on that? Do you…?
HEDVIG: That one had Sufjan Stevens on it as its first. You’re Studying in a Haunted Library with Ghosts.
DANIEL: Cool.
HEDVIG: You’re the Main Character in an Early 2000s Coming of Age Movie.
BEN: Ach, yes.
DANIEL: Always.
HEDVIG: This is what I need right now.
BEN: So you’re calling these Point of View playlists.
HEDVIG: Yeah!
DANIEL: POV playlists? Awesome.
HEDVIG: Decent name?
BEN: I like it. Could I also offer one possible alternative that jumped out to me? They all sound like writing prompts. So, like, Writing Prompt Playlists?
HEDVIG: Yeah, they are a bit. Yeah.
BEN: You’re… You’re Alone on a Road After a Big Night Out and You’ve Had a Great Night, But It’s a Long Walk Home And It’s Starting to Get Cold… playlist.
HEDVIG: Yeah, no, that one. I bet that one exists. No, they’re all like this. And I’m enjoying them. I’m a very mood driven person. I don’t know if that makes sense. Maybe I’m just bipolar.
BEN: Mood.
HEDVIG: Also possibility. But these playlists have a way of not only playing like music that makes you feel a certain way, but they are very engrossing and they bring you into mood and it’s very effective for me.
BEN: [LAUGHTER] You know what I’ve just realised? This isn’t a Word of the Week. This is just Hedvig bringing cool shit to the table! And that’s fine!
DANIEL: That’s what she does.
BEN: I’ve got no beef with that at all. I really really really like the thing that you’ve brought to the table.
HEDVIG: But the word… I think this is the music version of the thing that is a word, which is an AESTHETIC. Do you know what an AESTHETIC is?
BEN: I know that that word can mean many different things in many different like spaces. In what space are you referring to?
HEDVIG: Internet.
BEN: Like TikTok? I’ve seen it on TikTok a bit recently.
HEDVIG: Right. So what I’m trying to claim is that these POV playlists are a musical version of an aesthetic. And an aesthetic is a set of fashion and cultural things that you do. There’s a… there’s a fandom wiki for aesthetics, which has a lot of things like cottage core and emo goth and also vacation dad core. That made me think of you guys.
BEN: Ouch. Daniel, fine. Me? Come on. I’m still…
HEDVIG: You are a dad.
BEN: I’m not… I’m not 35 yet. I’m still, I’m still cool! I’m still hip.
DANIEL: You know, I did ask Twitter, on our account: What is dad rock? Because people are saying, like, it’s Steely Dan and stuff, but I’m thinking: No, man, it’s like Pixies and Joy Division and stuff.
BEN: Well, it depends on what kind of like young person you were. These days, Daniel, dad rock is like the bloody… The Cat Empire and John Butler Trio and stuff.
DANIEL: Exactly. I just figured it’s getting younger and younger. It’s got to be. Like, Regurgitator would be dad rock.
BEN: Regurgitator and Jebediah are definitely dad rock!
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: So the aesthetics fan wiki defines vacation dad core music as Smash Mouth, Aha…
DANIEL: Ouch.
HEDVIG: …Rick Astley, Men at Work, The Bangles, Dolly Parton, Nirvana, and Aerosmith.
BEN: There was only one name in that list that would ever, ever be on any playlist that I have.
DANIEL: Oh, really? Hmmm.
HEDVIG: Dolly Parton.
BEN: [PAUSE] Two names.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yeah, I was like: You have to have Dolly. Obviously!
BEN: Oh, sorry. I forgot Dolly, and that was that was not fair of me. Dolly and Nirvana.
HEDVIG: Smashmouth.
BEN: No.
DANIEL: No.
BEN: No.
DANIEL: No.
BEN: No.
HEDVIG: Okay, this is just a segment of Ben and Daniel trash on Hedvig for her…
BEN: I was not… I maintain I was not trashing on you. I think the thing that you brought was cool as fuck. I really like it.
HEDVIG: Okay. Thank you.
BEN: Like, if you brought me a thing that was like: hey, look, like, a compiled, like, blow by blow of all of the Eurovision competitors over the last 30 years, I would have been like: you can fuck off and die. I have no interest in that thing. Whereas this sounds really really interesting and cool. This is so far up my alley, it has got stuck.
DANIEL: All right. So: MULLIGAN, PANDEMIC FINE or COVID FINE, POV PLAYLIST and AESTHETIC: our Words of the Week.
[OUTRO MUSIC]
BEN: Hey patrons, you canny lot. If you have a question, comment, or just want to say hi, you can get in touch with us with all the ways. @becauselangpod is how you get hold of us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram Macedon, Patreon, TikTok and now Clubhouse. I don’t know what that is. But I’m sure one of my more well-versed members of the podcast do.
DANIEL: So imagine this. Imagine. And I’m so happy because I understand this. I’m not too old to understand new things!
BEN: Yay!
DANIEL: It’s like Twitter, in that you can follow people. But instead of sending tweets, they open a room and you talk on audio.
BEN: Oh, interesting.
HEDVIG: It’s like… in Swedish we call them hotlines. Like, you remember the beginning… I know. You have heard about people like calling certain numbers and act like the wires connecting and they get into like a room with strangers?
BEN: I knew this as party rooms. Yes.
DANIEL: Yeah! That’s it.
HEDVIG: I think it’s similar to that.
DANIEL: We’ve given it a couple of goes but we don’t have enough people yet. So please, please, please follow us and we’ll do more.
BEN: And if you don’t like the sound of that newfangled malarkey, then you can always kick it old school with a cheeky email to hello@becauselanguage.com. Please tell friends about us if you think our show is worth listening to. And if you would be so kind, we would love you to rate us and to leave a review for us in review-y places, especially seeing as some of my students thought it would be hilarious to say nice things but review us quite low and fuck up our rankings. I’m not worried about them hearing this, because this is like an hour and something into an episode, so they never ever would have had the attention span to hang on this long. [LAUGHTER] So if we could go and fix the wayward scrolling of disreputable yoof, we would be very appreciative.
HEDVIG: I fully agree with that. As this is a Patreon special, we would like to say special thanks to our followers on Patreon. You are the ones who keep our show ad-free and making it possible for us to spend more time on this, and also get transcripts for the show and make the show as good as it is. We are very grateful for all your support through all this time. We’ve had a Patreon for quite a while and some of you have stuck with us for quite a while.
We are very grateful that you continue to support us and we would like to say a special thanks. So shout out to our top Patrons! They are: Termy, Chris B, The Major, Chris L, Matt, Damien, Helen, Bob, Jack, Kitty, Lord Mortis, Lyssa, Elías, Erica, Michael, Larry, Binh, Kristofer, Dustin, Andy, Maj, James, Nigel, Kate, Jen, Nasrin, River, Nikoli, Ayesha, Moe, Steele, Andrew, James, Shane, Eloise, Rodger, Rhian, Jonathan, and new for this time: Colleen, glyph, and Ignacio. Thank you very much to all newbies and oldies.
DANIEL: And of course a big special thanks to Dustin of the podcast Sandman Stories, @storiessandman. He’s been relentless in promoting us and so many other great podcasts. It’s been kind of a tradition for quite a while now whenever somebody pops on Twitter saying: hey, give me some podcast recommendations, you wider internet. He’s been there with an answer. Boom, @becauselangpod. And a lot of other people as well. Dustin, you are a legend. We don’t deserve you. Thanks. Our theme music has been written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who is a member of Ryan Beno and of Dideon’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time, Because Language.
BEN: Weee!
DANIEL: Yay.
BEN: All done, well done. Yay us.
[PAUSE]
DANIEL: I feel like I’m forgetting to say something and I don’t know what it is.
BEN: Ham. Is it ham? Is it the word ham? I feel like the word is probably ham. Just because ham is such a fun word to say. Haaam.
DANIEL: No, but I will say it: Ham.
BEN: See? It’s just such a great word. Even if you don’t like ham. I don’t care for ham really. I like meat but I don’t like ham very much, but it’s such a lovely word. Ham.
DANIEL: Okay… great…
BEN: Shall we? Shall we? Should we do a show? Now that we’ve fully fully mapped out ham and its virtues?
DANIEL: I’ve said everything I meant to say.