What’s a corpsicle? How old is the word hyperspace? Who was the first writer to use the term warp drive?
These and many other terms can be found in the landmark work The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, and with us is the editor, lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower.
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Egg box soundproofing: does it really work? – Technical Foam Services
https://www.technicalfoamservices.co.uk/blog/egg-box-soundproofing/
Universal principles underlying segmental structures in parrot song and human speech | Scientific Reports
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-80340-y
Colors evoke similar feelings around the world — ScienceDaily
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200910150247.htm
Universal Patterns in Color-Emotion Associations Are Further Shaped by Linguistic and Geographic Proximity
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797620948810
When is a blue bird not blue? | Smithsonian Institution
https://www.si.edu/stories/when-blue-bird-not-blue
Are blue jays not really blue? Plus: has the copyright on “Happy Birthday” expired yet?
https://www.straightdope.com/21343483/are-blue-jays-not-really-blue-plus-has-the-copyright-on-happy-birthday-expired-yet
Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction
https://sfdictionary.com/
How a 10-second video clip sold for $6.6 million | Reuters
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-retail-trading-nfts-insight/how-a-10-second-video-clip-sold-for-6-6-million-idUSKCN2AT1HG
Biden calls states’ relaxing virus restrictions, including mask mandates, ‘Neanderthal thinking’
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/03/03/world/covid-19-coronavirus/biden-calls-states-relaxing-virus-restrictions-including-mask-mandates-neanderthal-thinking
https://twitter.com/EmInPortland/status/1366412418570625024
Transcript
DANIEL: You sound good, Hedvig, you don’t sound echoey, hardly at all.
HEDVIG: Great!
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: Well, my solution is to have a whole wall of books behind me, so that absorbs any…
DANIEL: I’ve seen that wall of books and it’s impressive.
JESSE: Well, thanks.
HEDVIG: Do you want to guess what this sound is? [RUSTLING SOUNDS]
BEN: I’m gonna guess that that is a piece of styrofoam?
HEDVIG: No, but close.
DANIEL: What’s close to styrofoam? Hmm…
HEDVIG: Well, close. Sort of close.
BEN: Okay, it’s foam from a coffee that you have somehow solidified and eaten like a treat.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: No, it’s a much more readily available source of acoustic dampening in a household.
JESSE: It’s an egg carton.
HEDVIG: It’s an egg carton.
DANIEL and BEN: Oh!
BEN: I feel compelled to tell you, Hedvig, that my radio background taught me that that is a fallacious wrong.
DANIEL: [GASPS] Gasp! Really?
HEDVIG: Sorry, what? Fallacious?
BEN: Apparently. That’s the word on the street.
HEDVIG: Well, you all said I sounded way better…
DANIEL: I do think so.
HEDVIG: …so either you’re lying, or…
BEN: But Daniel is endlessly positive and supportive though, because he is a good man.
HEDVIG: That is actually true.
DANIEL: Whereas Ben…
BEN: Is a c-
[CUT TO INTRO MUSIC]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to this episode of Because Language, a podcast about linguistics, the science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. She’s the one we turn to when we need the real language knowledge: It’s Hedvig Skirgård.
HEDVIG: Thank you. I am continuously honoured that I have this role in this show, as if I just know everything. I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve it. But… Can I put that on my, like, CV or something? I was looking at job applications the other day, and I don’t know, I kind of need more things to put on it. So if I can put “able to answer all questions about language”, it should get me somewhere.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: I really feel like all Mailbags have taught us that this is not the case. And that we are very easily stumped by our very smart listeners.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Because I’m also the one who’s like: Everyone’s too smart, stop.
DANIEL: But you do do the thing where you’re like: Oh, I read this one paper that answers this exact thing. And I’m like: Why did I not know that?
HEDVIG: Because I have like a semi-ADHD network brain. So I just remember little bits here and there. And I connect really quickly, but I don’t remember all the details from them.
DANIEL: Okay! Standing next to him temporarily increases your intelligence score by three points: It’s Ben Ainslie.
BEN: Ooh, I like that one. That’s fun! I like being characters that give off passive buffs, because it’s one of the only times in my life when people choose to be near me!
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: We need you. We need you.
HEDVIG: It’s true. You make us smarter, I agree.
BEN: Yay!
DANIEL: And we have a very special guest this time. He’s been an editor at the Oxford English Dictionary. He’s the author of “The F Word” from Oxford Books. He’s an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University. He’s the purveyor of the Threesome Tollbooth… Wait, I’m getting the name wrong. What is it?
JESSE: No, that’s correct.
DANIEL: The Threesome Tollbooth. With only room for three, it’s the smallest bar in Brooklyn and perhaps anywhere. According to New York Magazine, he’s one of the 100 smartest people in New York City and I’m told that the competition was extremely fierce on that one. He can deadlift 200 kilograms, so he has the strength of ten men. And most to the point, he’s the editor of the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, which you can find online at sfdictionary.com. It’s lexicographer and polymath Jesse Sheidlower! Jesse, thank you for coming on the show.
JESSE: Oh, thanks so much for having me, guys.
HEDVIG: Is that true that you can lift 200 kilos?
JESSE: Two hundred and three, at least before pandemic. Now I can barely get out of bed, but yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Okay, yeah, fair, fair.
BEN: And as luck would have it, my weight has accordingly compensated so that I would have to deadlift 203 kilos to get out of bed!
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: We saw you when we were talking about your book, “The F Word”. Welcome back for the second time.
JESSE: Oh, sure. No, again, thanks. Thanks for having me.
BEN: Watch out. Watch out — a couple more times, and you become an unofficial co-host of the podcast.
HEDVIG: That’s true.
[PAUSE]
DANIEL: You do get a t-shirt.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Daniel, you made it so bad! It was great! I really sold it, and then you were just like [AMERICAN ACCENT] ~You get a t-shirt.~
DANIEL: The curséd shirt.
BEN: I am just pumped AF to talk about sci-fi shit for an entire show. And so I know that I really need to be the person right now who’s like: We should get to the news because I want to get through the news so that I can talk about sci fi shit, like pronto. So can we do the news?
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: We can.
DANIEL: But first remember: our last episode was a bonus episode, it was… what did we call it? Journal Club.
HEDVIG: I was hoping it was Journal Club. Yes.
BEN: Ah, Journal Club. Very good.
DANIEL: We scanned all the wires for the latest research, and we brought it to you along with our trenchant and incisive commentary. Whoops, that’s redundant. Our next episode is a Mailbag. So get those questions in. You can hear all of our bonus episodes by becoming a Patron. We don’t run ads. So Patreon is really the only way that we can use to get some money coming in and keeping us going, you know.
HEDVIG: Buying me more egg cartons for my acoustic buffering.
DANIEL: Mhm. Those egg cartons don’t come cheap, by the way.
BEN: For my egg carton THRONE! That’s the real reason.
DANIEL: I mean, there’s Patreon and there’s the merch store. You know. How do ya think that’s goin’. Yep.
HEDVIG: What? What, Daniel, do you want us to do now?
DANIEL: Let me just tell you what you get. At any level, you get our yearly mail out. At the Listener level, you get bonus episodes. And at the Supporter level you can hang out with us on our Discord channel — well, usually just me — where we sometimes ask for questions for our guests. You’ll get credited on blog posts, and you’ll even hear us read your name in hushed and respectful tones at the end of every episode.
HEDVIG: Hushed.
DANIEL: That’s patreon.com/becauselangpod/
BEN: Unless, to be clear, your name is [LOW VOICE] Lord Mortis.
DANIEL: Ah. Then you’ll hear it in imposing and dark tones.
BEN: Yep.
HEDVIG: Mhm mhm mhm.
DANIEL: And that’s patreon.com/becauselangpod/ Hit us up. Come on. Join us. We’d love to have you.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Spruiky spruiky spruiky. All done! Let’s go.
HEDVIG: Come join the cult.
BEN: I want to talk about sci-fi shit so bad!!
HEDVIG: Okay okay okay! So in this news segment, we have two pieces of news that suggests there’s some sort of universality in language. The first piece of news is research from… Researchers from New York, Maryland, and Austria have shown that budgerigar bird, so a kind of parrot that’s very popular as a pet, I believe? Did you ever have budgies (boogies)
DANIEL: Budgies (bUdgies)
BEN: Oh, yeah. Okay, we’ve got, we’ve got to sort your pronunciation out.
HEDVIG: I know budgie.
BEN: Budgie.
HEDVIG: Yeah, and then when it’s the full word you want me to say?
BEN: Budgerigar.
HEDVIG: Oh my god. Okay. Budgerigar.
DANIEL: Nice.
BEN: Yay!
HEDVIG: Pretty great. Okay, great. Anyway, so they’ve been studying these birds and their vocalisations. And they found that there are some patterns in the vocalisations that look a lot like human speech. What do you think the patterns are?
DANIEL: Mmm, already I’m narrowing my eyes a tiny bit.
BEN: I’m gonna say it’s not vocabulary.
HEDVIG: No, no.
BEN: It’s nothing to do with vocabulary and like distinct noises or anything like that. So then it would be like conditionality? Something, something to do with, like, in different contexts, they shift sort of systems of communication in a way that’s like, vaguely similar to how we do it? I don’t know.
JESSE: Intonation?
HEDVIG: That’s a good guess.
DANIEL: That was one thing I thought.
HEDVIG: We just adopted cats. And I swear she… the one that’s chirping a lot, because you know how cats chirp?
JESSE: Mhm.
BEN: [CHIRPS]
DANIEL: [CHIRPS]
HEDVIG: She does [CHIRP WITH RISING INTONATION] and she does [CHIRP WITH FALLING INTONATION], and I swear they mean different things. But anyway, what these researchers found has to do with something that looks like consonant or vowel-like segments and vocalisations. And they argue that there are something that is a bit similar to a syllable, where there’s consonants first, and then vowel-like things after. And yeah, and that the segments at the end tend to be longer, quieter, and sort of lower in pitch, and that this is similar to human phonology.
BEN: So for the dummy non-linguist, you don’t actually mean things that roughly map to, like, what I would think of as a consonant sound and vowel sound, right? But more just what those things represent?
HEDVIG: Let’s talk about, let’s talk about consonants and vowels in human speech first. So consonants is when you make a sound and you push air up from your lungs, through your vocal folds and out of your mouth, and you make some sort of constriction. It can be an abrupt constriction like a [p], a [b], or a [k]. Those are sort of what we think of as like maybe the most prototypical type of consonants. But it can also be a continued narrowing of the passage, like in fricatives. Like [s], [v], [f]. Those ones you can actually hold for a while. So you can say, ssssss for about as long as you have breath. And vowels are when you don’t have any constriction at all. There are things that are sort of in the between a bit, so like [w] or [l] sounds are sort of like maybe somewhere in the between? But regardless of your… parrots aren’t humans obviously, and they don’t have the same anatomy, but they can make constrictions, and they can make not-constrictions.
BEN: Okay, I get you. I’m following that. That was very well explained.
HEDVIG: Oh, thank you.
DANIEL: So they tend to go from constriction to non-constriction in their — I don’t know — speech segments?
HEDVIG: Yes. So they claim that they found something that looks like speech segments, and that in these, there are these kinds of sounds are not occurring randomly, but they’re occurring that they’re mostly consonants first and then there are vowels. And so even though you can make syllables in human languages that have a vowel first and a consonant after, it is quite common to have consonant and vowel. It’s quite a common way of forming words, even in English.
DANIEL: I was noticing also that in this paper, this is by Dan Mann and a team, they tend to – just like we kind of do – they start off a little bit higher at the beginning of a speech bit. And then, just as we tend to get a little bit lower in pitch — da da da da — in frequency, and we tend to get a little bit quieter, they do too. They start off a little bit noisier, a bit higher, and they end up a little bit softer and a little bit lower.
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly.
DANIEL: What are we saying about this? So we saying that birds got speech?
BEN: It… from my lay person perspective, isn’t this just kind of saying, like: there’s certain physical realities to the physics of making noise?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: And then, you know, like, the universality here is basically like: it’s really hard for any system that hears things to differentiate purely vowels, right? Like, if all of your noise making capacity’s like aaiiieeooouuu
DANIEL: Aaoooueee
BEN: It doesn’t… it’s fucking indecipherable basically, and so you got to break it up with consonants.
HEDVIG: Well, I mean have you heard whales? [IMITATES WHALE SOUNDS] They don’t seem to do consonants.
BEN: Isn’t the thing with whales that, like, if you speed whale song up considerably it sounds just like bird tweeting? Isn’t that like one of those like hippie dippie things of like: [STONER VOICE] Whoa, the whole universe is connected, man.
HEDVIG: What?
BEN: Yeah, so if you speed whale song up by a significant amount, it sounds like budgerigars tweeting.
HEDVIG: But, how do I say this? Don’t a lot of things sped up sound like that?
BEN: I dunno.
EVERYONE: [I DON’T KNOW SOUND]
HEDVIG: Okay, we clearly need an animal sound expert.
BEN: You reached the exact end of my knowledge of slowing down animal songs, which is one instance!
DANIEL: I’m having a little problem here, because we tend to start our utterances or our syllables with a consonant and then move on to a vowel.
HEDVIG: Most… quite often.
DANIEL: Because it’s more salient. Most often. Because it’s more salient. For example, if I say, [pa] and [ta] and [ka], that’s easier for you to understand me than if I said [ap] [at] [ak]. It’s really hard to distinguish those last three, but it’s really easy to distinguish the first three.
HEDVIG: Oh!
DANIEL: And that’s important for human speech. Because I’m saying something. I’m communicating something, and [pa] and [ta] and [ka] can mean different things.
HEDVIG: That’s… I’ve never heard of that link before! But that sort of makes sense. So you’re making the argument that if the consonants appear at the end of a syllable, it’s harder to distinguish the different consonants from each other.
DANIEL: Yeah. Like, I cover my mouth and go [ap], [at], [ak], you might have trouble understanding what… which ones I said. But if I say [pa], [ta] and [ka], it’s easy.
BEN: It’s true. I do find that easier.
HEDVIG: That is… that is… I also found that easier, and I’ve never heard anyone say that to me! And that is really interesting.
BEN: We just hit on a new language gimmick for Hedvig!
DANIEL: But budgies aren’t saying things.
HEDVIG: Oh, whoop, whoop, whoop. Surely birds are saying something to each other. They’re saying, come here. Let’s screw. Get out of my territory. That’s my food. Come over here, honey. You know.
DANIEL: They’re saying something, but [pa] and [ta] and [ka] can make different utterances. Are we trying to… how strong is this claim we’re making for budgies?
HEDVIG: Well, I don’t know. I think these researchers are merely noticing that there’s something in the phonotactics. It might be, like Ben was saying, that this is just like what happens when you produce sounds? I don’t know. I don’t think they’re making a super-duper strong claim beyond that they’ve just saw these phonotactic sort of similarity and they think it’s sort of neat.
BEN: Do you know how I know they’re not making this claim? Because we haven’t seen a bunch of hell trash headlines being like, “Budgies have LANGUAGE!”
DANIEL: Oh, we would, wouldn’t we?
HEDVIG: Well, I tweeted from our account, are we humans or are we parrots? People love that. So is that… Do I get bashed now, Ben?
DANIEL: You’re doing Satan’s work. You’re doing the work… of the devil.
BEN: [EVIL VOICE] The devil.
DANIEL: Jesse, you got anything you want to throw in?
JESSE: My main thought here is that if people aren’t… if there aren’t headlines screaming budgies can talk, then these guys have done a bad job on their press release, because that’s clearly the purpose of the study, you know?
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: That’s what I was thinking!
JESSE: I mean, no one cares about what budgie phonotactics are, they care that they can talk to them. So like…
BEN: Right. Jesse, I like that I was, like, congratulating these people for being, like, really restrained, and Jesse’s like: No, [EVIL VOICE] embrace the evil. Sell! Sell!
JESSE: I mean, if there’s a press release, then it’s going badly. This is just one of a billion studies that gets published every day, fine, but we’re noticing it for a reason. So…
HEDVIG: I think I found it through either EurekAlert or Science Daily, so I did see, but I might have filtered it down to the more sensible variety for our show. There still might be some of this.
DANIEL: That’s what you get around here.
BEN: You heard it here first, folks: Budgies can talk, just like we can.
DANIEL: Stop! Stop. You’ve… Let’s move on to our next story. And this one is also about some universal tendencies in language, but this time about colour. What feelings do you associate with the colour green?
BEN: Jealousy, because of Shakespeare, obviously, but also feeling, like, ill? Feeling unwell.
DANIEL: I guess that’s being green.
HEDVIG: Mhm, yup.
JESSE: It’s not easy being green.
DANIEL: Hmm.
HEDVIG: It’s not easy being green.
BEN: Ah, Kermit.
DANIEL: Is there any colour that you think brings out more than one emotion?
BEN: Red. Certainly.
DANIEL: Really?
BEN: Absolutely! Red is danger, red is anger, red is love, red is fortune to people from Eastern cultures. Yeah, red’s… red I find symbolically is just like, anyone’s for the taking.
HEDVIG: But they’re all intense things, right? Like, they’re all like death or love, which famously are supposed to be a bit close.
DANIEL: Any colours that seem kind of emotionally neutral? I’ll let Jesse get in on this one.
JESSE: I’m not sure. I’m not sure I tend… I myself tend to associate colours with emotions.
HEDVIG: No? So when you…. There’s some people who do this productivity research where they’re like: ~ooh, you should have, like, blue wallpaper in your office~.
BEN: Taupe walls and, yeah, all that kind of stuff.
HEDVIG: You’ve never felt an impact of anything like that, like a white wall, or was a black wall for example. If you walked into a room that was entirely black?
JESSE: Probably not emotionally. I mean, I don’t have any synesthetic kinds of things going on. I mean, I know a lot of people do but…
BEN: I think my response to a black, an entirely black room, wouldn’t be emotional so much as it would be the optical illusion of feeling like it is a much smaller space than it actually is. To answer your question, Daniel, I find – and this Jesse, I swear to God, is not a comment on your hair – purple is fairly emotionally neutral for me. Like, it doesn’t, it’s not overtly happy or weird or like… It’s quite free, or more to the point, it can just kind of drift into a lot of different things for me.
HEDVIG: I think if opf, opf, obs, opu, opulence… what’s it called?
DANIEL: Orpiment?
BEN: Opulence, yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah, because I think of it as an expensive and rich colour. And I think I got that from… I took Latin, and all the senators in Rome wear purple, and for a long time was very hard colour to produce. So only rich people could have it. I think of it as, like, quite fancy.
JESSE: But is that only because of your association with the history of it? That is, right now you can create any colour for the same amount of money. So it doesn’t cost much to have purple.
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly. So I know that now. Like, I’ve had purple hair. And I know that it’s not that much harder than… it’s harder to maintain, but it’s not that much harder to make than the others. But yeah, I still have that. It’s like, I still go into the supermarket and I think kiwi fruits are exotic, even though they’ve always been there my entire life.
BEN: That is weird!
HEDVIG: I know, right?
BEN: Why would you find kiwi fruits exotic if they’ve been there the whole time? I would get it if you grew up not having kiwi fruits and then you were like: what is this fuzzy green dynamo of a fruit?
HEDVIG: I think it’s just cultural heritage. Like, I think you just learn it from your parents, and you see it in books and things, and they’re always included in exotic fruit salads. And… you know what I mean?
BEN: Yeah, right.
DANIEL: Well, one thing about kiwi fruits is they’re not exactly prototypical fruits, they’re almost edge cases. When you think about different kinds of fruits, you’ll probably name them less often. And it’s funny that prototypes are coming up here because the reason linguists have studied colour terms over and over again for a very long time is because some colours are more prototypical. Like, there’s a kind of blue that you think of as really, really blue. And there’s a kind of red that is like super, duper red. But the funny thing — and you’ll know this if you’ve read George Lakoff’s “Women, Fire and Dangerous Things”, reporting on the work of Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, we’ve mentioned this on a few shows before – is that let’s… This is true, not just for English, but for different languages. People who speak different languages see the same blue that you do as, like, the most blue, or the genuine, prototypical blue.
BEN: That’s interesting. I thought this story was going in the place that we’ve also covered before of like, how colour names tend to evolve pretty similarly across like a bunch of languages. Like, we figure out black and white and then we usually figure out like something else bla bla bla. So this is genuinely interesting, because I was like: oh, boo, snore, like we’ve already talked about this a bunch of times. But this is fascinating! So yeah, like the classic stoner thing of like: Hey, man, have you ever wondered if, like, my blue and your blue are, like, the same blue? Like, science now says: Yep, they are.
DANIEL: Yup, they are. Because we all have human perceptual organs. And here’s the really weird part. Even if your language doesn’t have a name for blue — like, let’s say that your language has one name for everything from blue to sort of green, and let’s just call it grue. All right? Grue. So we have a colour and the name is grue. Right. And if Berlin and Kay ask you what’s the best example of grue, you think that they would pick something like turquoisey or something in between? And it’s not. They’ll either pick the same blue that we pick or the same green that we pick.
BEN: Ohhh.
HEDVIG: That’s freaky!
BEN: That is fascinating.
DANIEL: There’s something about that.
HEDVIG: The very popular Australian comedy YouTuber, Mike’s Mic does these ranking videos, and he recently ranked 134 shades of blue. If you don’t get enough Australian accent in your daily feed, I can highly recommend watching this video. It is funny, he places 134 shades of blue into a five-tier system of how good blue they are.
DANIEL: Oh, wow.
JESSE: And what wins?
HEDVIG: There’s a whole… there’s 20 colours that are blue. They are all quite saturated, I would say. And the ones that are edge cases are all getting a lower, like the turquoise and the grayish ones and the things are getting a low… But if you like Australian comedy…
DANIEL: That fits in with this, exactly! All right. Well, let’s take that knowledge now, that the focal colours, the prototypical blues, the prototypical reds are kind of the same for everybody, at least they group along a narrow band. Now comes some from research from Dr Daniel Oberfeld-Twistel, and a team from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. This is published in Psychological Science. What they wanted to check was to see if people had the same psychological or emotional responses to colours, even between languages. Take a guess. What do you think they found? I’m going to throw it to Jesse, if you don’t mind.
JESSE: Um, let’s say that they did?
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Yup, we wouldn’t be talking about this if it was just like: Nope, there’s no connection.
JESSE: No one publishes negative results, so clearly all languages have the same response to some basic colours. Yeah.
DANIEL: Damnit. This is true. Red was the one that was not only recognised sort of the same across languages, but also both the ways that we mentioned. Ben, you mentioned, you know, love and anger. People around the world, no matter what language they speak, have those two exact feelings and they associate that with red. Brown was the one that had the least emotional response.
HEDVIG: Hmm!
BEN: Oh! I should have… Yes! Brown is the emotionless colour.
DANIEL: Brown. There’s no fluorescent brown.
DANIEL: But there was one interesting thing, and that was that these things… Like Hedvig, with your thing with purple, which was, you know, an emotional response, but it was mediated by culture.
HEDVIG: Fancyyy! Yeah.
DANIEL: There were other things like that, too. For example, in China, white is considered a colour of sadness. Not so much because of the way it looks, but because you wear white at funerals in China.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I’ve heard Chinese friends be really weirded out by Western weddings. It’s just like: what? Arghhh…
BEN: Ohh, true. In the defense of anyone who’s ever felt that way from a non-Anglophile culture, there’s… it’s not just dressing in white, there’s plenty of reasons to be weirded out by Western weddings! There’s some weird shit that goes on!
DANIEL: Oh, another finding that they had was that in cold places where they don’t see the sun very much, yellow is interpreted as a joyous colour. Whereas if you’re continually blanketed by sun all the time, this is less so.
BEN: Interesting. I guess that checks out.
HEDVIG: But [WARNING SOUNDS] Warning, warning! They sampled 30 countries, over 4000 participants, I looked up the countries, and they’ve… so 22 of those are countries where they’ve said that the participants speak an Indo-European language.
DANIEL: Oh no!
BEN: Skewed.
HEDVIG: So if you speak a language where you have sayings such as green with envy, or red eyes, etc., and if you have contact with other languages that are similar, which, you know, Indo-European languages are not only related to each other, they’re often also in contact with each other, so it gets worse, then you’re going to agree more. So…
DANIEL: Do you think the shortcomings here are dealbreakers?
HEDVIG: No, I think it’s still interesting. And I think they could have controlled for it. So they could have, they could have lumped these cultures and said we’re going to treat them as a singular data point for something. They could have drawn a phylogenetic or a geographical, like, control in their study. It’s just that wasn’t really in the Science Daily summary. And in their abstract, they don’t say if they did that, and how. So I don’t know.
JESSE: It just seems very odd to me that you would do a study like this now, and have it so highly skewed for Indo-European. I mean, I don’t know why they would do that.
HEDVIG: Probably because they’re psychologists and… I don’t mean to be… some of my best friends are psychologists! Actually, my boss is a psychologist! So I really shouldn’t be slagging them off.
BEN: Watch yourself, watch yourself!
HEDVIG: So… but I think psychology, not all, they’ve always had this discussion about WEIRDness: Western Educated Industrialised Rich Democratic samples, but I don’t think it’s fully reached them. And to be fair, like I said, they could have in the paper done a control for this. They could have actually, you know, adjusted for this. It’s just I couldn’t really tell if they did. Sorry to be a party pooper!
DANIEL: No, no, no, this is good. This is good. Why don’t you take us to the next one?
BEN: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
DANIEL: What, what, what, what?
BEN: Did you guys know that brown doesn’t exist? Were you aware of this? I only found this out recently.
HEDVIG: I’ve heard of this. I think it’s silly.
DANIEL: I think brown exists. Okay, I haven’t heard this. Jesse, have you heard this one?
JESSE: No.
BEN: This is not a joke, by the way. This is absolutely not me like: two guys walk into a bar and brown doesn’t exist.
HEDVIG: ~What’s this?~
BEN: Yeah, like it clearly does, in the sense that, like, we all see brown, right? But if you ever just, like, open up a piece of editing software, or anything else, like, brown isn’t in the colour wheel. It’s not there. Like, you can’t… like, brown is just dark orange. That’s all it is. And that broke my brain.
DANIEL: It seems like this is a limitation of the kinds of colours we typically see on a colour wheel.
HEDVIG: Isn’t it in terms of how you define a colour wheel? So colour wheel is defined by like the RGB or HCL or whatever you use.
BEN: You can, you can set up your base to a colour wheel any way you want. But no matter how you set it up, brown isn’t there.
HEDVIG: But dark orange is, which is brown. So I don’t know, it’s like saying…
BEN: Yes. Kind of? Like, brown only exists with context. If you would love a wonderful – this is another YouTube plug – if you would like a wonderful, wonderful video about this, there is a YouTuber who I adore, who has a channel called Technology Connections. He is everyone’s favorite dorky uncle. And he does, like, a 35-minute explanation of this. It’s wonderful. Go check it out. Anyway, I just love sharing funky things that I’ve found.
HEDVIG: Cool. I like that! That’s fun.
BEN: Go, go, next story. Ben, what are you talking about?
DANIEL: Actually, there is one… since we talked about colours and birds. Birds’ feathers are not blue or green.
BEN: Yes, blue is exceptionally rare — right? — in nature. Like, it’s like, borderline non-existent.
DANIEL: But like, even if you do find a feather that looks green, you take it in a blender and you blend it up. There’s no green pigment anywhere. It’s just because of the light.
BEN: This I have heard. It’s all refraction. Right?
DANIEL: It’s all refraction.
HEDVIG: [MUMBLES] What’s what… refraction… that’s just what colours are. Colours are just things that bounce off other things into your eyes.
BEN: Yeeaah… Yes.
HEDVIG: Things aren’t coloured. The light that goes to them and then to your eyes is coloured.
BEN: I think what Daniel was saying is there’s no absorption happening in a duck’s feather. Right? Which is classically how a pigment would work. Right? It will absorb all light except green light.
DANIEL: That’s it.
HEDVIG: Okay. All right. Well, now that we’ve waded sufficiently out of our depth, I think, maybe…
DANIEL: It didn’t take long.
HEDVIG: Let’s get to the last news item. So this is a news item that comes to us from the ABC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. So more children in the Solomon Islands will be taught in their local languages in schools, in primary education. The Minister of Education there has established two pilot programs in 2013 where primary school students in several provinces were educated in local languages, and they’re currently evaluating this and going to roll it out to more schools. So this is part of this idea that I think we may have discussed in the show before, which is that if children are to acquire things like maths or art or something else, they are going to acquire it better if they’re first introduced to it in their own language, rather than if they are introduced to it through a second language, because then you have to learn that language and do the other thing at the same time.
BEN: Can I ask a very stupid white-guy question? What language do they speak in the Solomon Islands?
HEDVIG: They speak several languages. So this is part of the sort of… I don’t want to say a problem. But as part of the challenge of a program like this, is that you would actually have to adapt it to the different provinces. And you might even be using a language that not all the kids have as their absolute first language. I don’t know if they’ve done this. But that could happen if you had to aggregate children in schools. There’s also, I believe, a similar thing being tested out in PNG. But I think the results haven’t been conclusive yet. And they’ve had more struggles, I think, than the Solomons. But yeah, I thought that was pretty cool.
DANIEL: It is cool. And one nice thing about educating kids in their traditional home languages is that you start seeing attendance go up, and parent support go up. And those are really important factors in child education.
BEN: Oh, yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And it makes sense. It makes sense if you’re going to learn math. So it makes… it’s a lot if you have to learn a language and learn math at the same time. It makes sense that you’d be introduced to it in your local language. It might be that, I’m imagining that these programs might still at high school level, at university level, it’s likely that you’ll still be speaking either an English-derived Pidgin or Creole or English or French if this program is rolled out in other places in the Pacific as well. I don’t imagine that it’s going to be rolled out to higher education.
BEN: But I mean, this is where it starts, right? Like, if it is eventually going to end up there, and you’re going to have Solomon Island based universities where people can speak their first language, like, it has to start where it’s starting right now.
HEDVIG: Yeah! Yeah, exactly.
BEN: This feels like the… and I almost said, this feels like the… what I used to call the unicorn chaser. You know, at the end of the news, they put on something that makes people be like: Yay, that’s nice, the world isn’t terrible. This feels like one of those. Like, yay!
HEDVIG: This also reminds me because the ABC also interviewed Deborah McDougal for this and we still have an interview with Deborah McDougal that we haven’t run yet.
DANIEL: Yes, about, not teaching mathematics, but teaching grammar in the native language of the people of the Solomon Islands. So we’ll be working on that.
BEN: Okay, do we get to talk about sci-fi shit now?
DANIEL: Yes, we do.
BEN: Yesss!
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: We are chatting with Jesse Sheidlower about the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction. Jesse, thanks for… thanks for coming on.
JESSE: Of course.
DANIEL: And having us beat you about the head with linguistics stuff.
JESSE: That’s my favourite way to get beaten about the head!
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Of all the many head-bludgeoning methodologies, by far my favorite.
DANIEL: Tell us about your connection to science fiction. What’s in this project for you?
JESSE: Well, two things. I mean, I did enjoy science fiction when I was growing up. I read a fair amount. I don’t read it as much now. But I mean, I liked it, you know, at the time, I read more, you know, older classic authors. So being able to study that in some kind of, you know, serious way was a nice thing. The other thing was that it just… it worked out well for this particular project. So this originally started with the Oxford English Dictionary. And there were a number of reasons why we went in this direction. It turned out that in almost every way, science fiction was the ideal thing to use as a basis for this project.
DANIEL: So just to make sure I got it straight. This used to be an Oxford project, but then they dropped it, and you managed to convince them to let you take it up?
JESSE: Well, let me tell you a bit about the history of how this works. So this originally started around 2000. And one of the things we wanted to do… so the OED has been called the original, the first crowdsourced project ever when it originally came out, James Murray, the editor, put ads in literary magazines, asking people to help and you know, he would send them books, and they would read them and mark them up for interesting words, and this would all get filed. And thousands of people did this. There were a lot of contributors who volunteered in that way. And some variation of the reading programs continue to this day. You know, people still do send things in sometimes on a random volunteer basis, sometimes as part of a formal program there. That’s still part of how the OED works. We were looking at the time at various targeted ways of doing research. And one of the things we wanted to do was use the fact that everyone is online now or… I mean, at the time, not everyone was online. In fact, that’s part of the story, that people were getting online more, but not everyone was that familiar with how to function online. You know, there wasn’t the universal thing that it is at this point.
So we wanted to set up projects that people could help that we could say: Okay, well, if we’re interested in American football, let’s say there’s a lot that… you need to know a lot of details about the sport and the history, and there are people who do this kind of research and… let’s have something that people who know about this can can help us, rather than randomly sending things in, which they might not do. And science fiction… I mean, American football was in fact one of the things that we thought about, but science fiction was the one that we decided to start with, for a number of reasons. One is that the kind of people who… who like science fiction [LAUGHTER IN THE BACKGROUND] were also the kinds who were most likely to be online and be comfortable communicating online at that time. Another very important thing is that the arguments for what, or the discussion of what science fiction means are very complicated, and there’s a whole story with that, but…
HEDVIG: Yes, I was going to ask you an important question that is the foundation of the first fight I ever had with my husband. Star Wars: sci-fi or fantasy?
JESSE: Well, yeah, science fiction or science fantasy and so forth. But let’s come back to that if we can. Because you know, I do… I do discuss…
BEN: You just got shelved!
JESSE: No, I mean, I do spend time on the site discussing terms like this, and how they relate to each other. But in general, broadly speaking, you know what science fiction is, and you know what science fiction isn’t. Okay? Granted, granted, there are a lot of arguments over whether this fits in, whether Margaret Atwood is science fiction or whatever. But, you know, for the most part, if you say science fiction, you know what it is, and you know what it isn’t.
BEN: I’d say there’s like… like, there’s far more cohesion over it than there is dissonance, right?
JESSE: If fundamentally something is published as science fiction, everyone will agree that this is science fiction, and something that is not published as science fiction, you know, might have science fictional elements, but you won’t think this is core science fiction. So for the first project we did, we wanted to be something where it was pretty cohesive, where there wasn’t going to be something like, okay, politics, you can find politics terms anywhere, you know, it’s hard to do, because you have to look so broadly. So it was, it was a limited area that was well defined. Another important factor was that most of this was not at the time easily available, easily findable online. So for example, in 2000… so you had databases of 19th century fiction, and you had all sorts of different databases that were out there. If you want newspapers, even at the time, there were a lot of things out there. If you wanted stuff published more or less in the middle of the century, this was not out there. You couldn’t find that easily online. And even offline, a lot of science fiction was originally published in pulp magazines, which are not generally held by research libraries. So even if you know that the first example of something is probably in this story from you know, Galaxy or Astounding or Amazing Stories, you can’t then go to a research library and find it, because for various reasons connected to the study of popular culture, people don’t care about that, and it wasn’t collected. So the way you find that is by personal collectors who have that, and again, people who read science fiction might be those collectors.
BEN: [LAUGHS] I love it. I just love how delicately you’ve basically said sci-fi nerds really are humungous nerds and this worked in our favour very much.
JESSE: Well, it’s true when you start doing… when you’re looking at weird subjects in the dictionary, and everything is a weird subject — you know, you… one day you’re working on science fiction term one thing you’re you, you’re, you know, Aussie Rules Football and one, you know, 19th century gold mining terminology and whatever — you start realising that some of the most widely read things of their time are vanished. Like, they’re not out there. So we were looking at one point… there’s some term used by a hero of a series of action adventure novels in the 1960s and ’70s. There were literally hundreds of these published, all by — or purportedly by — the same author. And when we started looking into, you know, WorldCat, or various library databases, it turned out there were like three copies of any of the books in a library… in a research library, in the entire country. Like Erie, Pennsylvania had a copy of, you know, number 27. And, you know, of course, if you go to a rare book site — or not even rare, if you go to, you know, AB books, whatever — it turns out, you know, there are thousands and tens of thousands of them out there, because there were hundreds of these books published, but they’re all in the, you know, 10 cent bin at the, you know, discard section. And this is something… this must have been important because they wouldn’t have published hundreds of novels, if someone weren’t buying them and reading them.
And, you know, if that many people were reading them, like, this is interesting in some way for the study of what people are reading, as opposed to the things that, you know, people who write for fancy magazines read and review. But you can’t even get the copies of books anywhere. So, you know, science fiction in a certain way is like that. And the fact that there are serious people who collect and study this is, it is important, and whether they’re nerds in other ways, okay, that helps you out, they don’t throw them out, or they get online to talk about it.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: I’m getting the sense, just like I did with “The F Word”, that you seem to specialise in things that aren’t considered high culture, and so they don’t get written down, or they don’t get saved. Have you built up a bunch of skills to track down hard-to-find stuff?
JESSE: I don’t think so. But I mean, I am interested in these things, where… and I tend to think lexicographers tend to be, at least, it’s something that you think about a lot. So when you have… let me just think of the best way to phrase this. If you look at dictionaries, the kinds of words that you find often, and especially now… So now you have… you have corpora, you can get a sense of how common things really are. And it’s a cliché among lexicographers and people who, you know, think about dictionaries that dictionaries are very, very good on, let’s say, terms for parts of armour. You know, heraldic terms. Like, dictionaries are great for this because the kind of person who writes a dictionary, the kind of person who enjoys reading dictionaries are obsessed with stuff like that. But in terms of the English language as a whole, these words effectively don’t exist. Like, if you took all parts of armour out of… you know, if you look at a corpus of a billion words, none of them will be names for, you know, esoteric parts of armour. None of them, you know, like, you have to get really into it for that.
BEN: Like, if we lose the word GREAVES forever, it’s really not going to be huge impact.
JESSE: It won’t impact anyone.
HEDVIG: So I don’t have to know what it means then, great. I don’t know what GREAVES means. Do I need to know?
DANIEL: What are GREAVES?
JESSE: Nope, part of armour, doesn’t matter. In fact, it matters a lot for you know, certain people. But in terms of language as a whole, it doesn’t matter at all.
HEDVIG: Do you think there’s similar tendencies in the kind of interest that lexicographers have to the kind of interests that Wikipedia editors have? Because there’s a returning discretion with Wikipedia edits when someone opens a new article on a topic and Wikipedia editors say it’s not noteworthy in some sort of fashion?
JESSE: Yes, I do think there’s a lot of overlap in all these places. And I’m not by the way, I’m not arguing that, you know, armour is in fact… I mean, it is fascinating and, you know, tremendous history, you can study this stuff. And someone should, and they do, and I’m glad that they do. But in terms of looking… if you were going to produce a dictionary, on any sort of a non-specialist dictionary, it would have no terms for armour parts at all, you know?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
JESSE: So I’m interested in these areas that have traditionally not been studied well. You know, if you want to know about armour, there’s libraries full of books written about the history of armour, great. If you want to know about, you know, mid 19th century, mid 20th century action adventure novels, there’s nothing out there. Like when I started doing, you’re doing research on the word FUCK, you know, everyone finds this very interesting, and no one’s published anything serious about it, because you couldn’t in the academy, like, that’s not an appropriate subject for research. So I find that interesting.
And in fact, science fiction is not in that category. There’s been academic writing about science fiction, or serious writing about science fiction for a very long time. But even to this day, it is still often dismissed, or regarded as not a serious or a worthy topic of research. And I am interested in things like that, where the only reason that we reject them is for some kind of social or cultural reason, not because they are intrinsically unworthy of study, or because there’s nothing to say or anything like that. It’s because you’re told this is not serious, and you know, don’t do it, you won’t get anywhere in your career or don’t do it, this is not important. You know, let’s learn about middle Kentish diphthongs and move on.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: So why…? So I also like science fiction, and I think Ben and Daniel are also sci-fi fans. Is that true?
DANIEL: I’m less so.
BEN: I think Daniel is a sci-fi, like, daytripper, at best.
HEDVIG: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: Yeah… What have I read? I’ve read some… I’ve read all of Hitchhiker’s Guide.
BEN: I fully expect Daniel right now to be like: [NOOB VOICE] I read Jules Verne. Has there been sci-fi since then?
HEDVIG: You’ve read Frankenstein, maybe?
DANIEL: No, no, I think I’m pretty much a noob. I’ve got my areas. But how far back are we going to? Is Jules Verne kind of the beginning?
HEDVIG: Frankenstein’s the beginning, right?
JESSE: Well…
HEDVIG: We all agree! Yes, good! Here we go!
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Hedvig, I’m detecting that you’ve got some axes to grind. And I feel like the fights that you’ve had with your partner that you now need to…
HEDVIG: No, no, no, we both really agree on Mary Shelley. That’s actually really one of the first times I was like: Yes, I’m getting married to this man, we agree Mary Shelley’s the first sci-fi author. It was in the 20 questions scenario, and I was, I fell in love with him then. And we don’t need it, you’re right. I think, Jesse, that even though there are these sort of fringe cases like, like Star Wars, or this, this whole discussion isn’t there between Le Guin and some other people about, like, the definition of sci-fi and where the boundaries is to fantasy. Most of us agree that it is: fiction which imagines another kind of world where technology has an important… it has in an important way changed society. Something like this. Right?
JESSE: That’s, I mean, again, there are, there’s literally… literally a cottage industry in coming up with definitions of science fiction, and that’s…
HEDVIG: But something like that.
JESSE: Something like that, sure. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Okay, great. So what have you found? Because this was actually another thing I was discussing with my husband. What have you found in terms of the history of terminology in science fiction? Who was the first person to use WARP DRIVE, say?
JESSE: Well, sorry, I… [TYPES]
HEDVIG: Or just any example that you find interesting.
BEN: I just love how lowkey you presented that. Like, that was like, like, the person at the shop being like: [CARELESSLY] Yes, I was wondering if you had several items that I was looking for, like… oh, I don’t know… condoms.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Absolutely.
HEDVIG: No, but there are certain terms that have sort of spread across different sci-fi authors, right? So for FASTER-THEN-LIGHT TRAVEL, there’s multiple… yeah.
JESSE: Well in fact, one of the things I find interesting about it, looking at it in this detail, is that you find that the core terminology of science fiction — this by the way is something important for what ends up on the site, because there are a lot of things in there… a lot of things that aren’t in, not because they’re unimportant, but because they are not core — you know, if you look at the authors who are most frequently… who have the most early examples — not the most cited authors, which is itself more of a accident of collecting, or things like that— if you look at the ones who coined the most… — and not coined, that’s not accurate, and I say that it’s not accurate — the ones that have the earliest examples. Robert Heinlein is the first. But when you start going down the list, there are people that might not be as familiar to modern readers, even modern readers of science fiction. So E.E. Smith, Doc Smith is number two, you know, John Campbell, you know, Asimov is in there, but you know, Jack Williamson, Edmond Hamilton, you know, Ray Cummings, Nat Schachner. So, you know, authors who were part of the, you know, the earliest pulp writing in the 1930s.
And in some way, this is, obviously… like, the earliest writers are going to be the ones who are the earliest users of terms. But the point is, if you look at the core concepts in science fiction, which include things like time travel, and faster-than-light travel, and, you know, ray-based weapons, and so forth, you know, the people who were first using these, well, they use these terms and other people writing about the same thing, then use those terms as well. So, you know, the people who were the first ones, I mean, in fact, RAY first appears in HG Wells. But… which perhaps wouldn’t be surprising, but it might be a little bit. But the authors who were writing in the 1930s, when science fiction as such really got its start, those are the ones who coined the most terms, who used the most terms that were then shared by other writers.
HEDVIG: Fair enough.
BEN: But a lot of them — and this is what I find interesting — a lot of them have, like, more or less faded from even, like, fairly devout nerd sort of conceptions, because like you said, there was just so much of this going on. And it was lowbrow art that was not preserved. So a lot of these people just sort of like motored off into the distance.
JESSE: Yeah. Some of them… I mean, some of them were not really that great. They were pulp writers, and they did what they did, and even if they were widely read by their people, and some of them — and this is the same with mystery or other things, you know — certain people wrote a lot and are forgotten and certain people wrote a lot and are remembered because, you know, they are better. And there’s a reason why you read Dashiell Hammett, you don’t read, you know, other Mystery Writers from you know, from that era, you know, they’re better writers. You know, they had more to say. But also the style is just different enough that, you know, some people still do read Doc Smith today. You know, it’s it’s in print, but a lot of other stuff isn’t. It’s just… it’s not as interesting to read.
BEN: As we talk about this, I don’t know why this keeps coming up. I keep thinking to myself, I wonder if in 60 years, everyone will have forgotten R.L. Stein.
HEDVIG: Sure.
JESSE: Yeah.
BEN: The Goosebumps guy.
JESSE: Yeah.
BEN: Right? The dude who wrote all the Goosebumps books, because that, for me is the most sort of analogous modern example of just churning out just volumes and volumes of just stuff. Like, it’s — and I’m not having a go at R.L. Stein — like, that dude made mad bank off something that was clearly very successful. But like, that seems like the sort of thing that could very easily just not persist. Right?
HEDVIG: Or all the horse books. I don’t know if you had this when you were little. But there’s a very big industry of these pulp short horse books for young girls.
BEN: Ah yeah, like horsie-girl stuff.
DANIEL: Yeah, horsie-girl stuff.
HEDVIG: There is so much. SO much.
JESSE: There are in fact, two interesting things to look at. One is if you go back and look at the bestseller lists from, whatever, 50 years ago, and you find out that you haven’t heard of many of them, or the stuff isn’t being read now, as opposed to the authors that you might think. The other thing is those lists themselves are highly curated, and they are not, in fact, based on the things that the books that sold most. They are generally booked based on the books that sold most in particular venues, you know, in you know, proper bookstores. And again, these like, you know, these pulp action and adventure things like don’t get counted, no matter how much they sold. And that’s true today as well. Like when they were… it’s still somewhat true. I mean, now there’s… they have developed more accurate ways of measuring what’s sold, and like this has really up-ended things in the book industry where, like, it turns out that even people in the industry didn’t realise: oh, this is actually selling a ton of copies. Because it wasn’t reported broadly in the right way.
BEN: This feels… this feels like a bigger story than I fully understand. So like what, what’s an example of that? Like, in modern times, what was the revelatory thing where they were like: Oh fuck, this is selling super well?
HEDVIG: Surely romance smut.
JESSE: I don’t have an anecdote right here. But I mean, I think an example, I don’t have a specific example. But I think that, you know, the extent to which let’s say in America that, you know, that Christian books really do sell astonishingly well, surprised even people who publish in that area. Or, you know, you have a Christian imprint, but, you know, wasn’t… I think people were surprised by just how well that does sell.
BEN: That’s fascinating. And that’s because it’s selling through sort of like…
JESSE: Other venues.
BEN: Random websites and just like, churches and stuff like that.
JESSE: Yeah. And, and there’s a lot of interest in this, of course, because people… like, the New York Times bestseller list is viewed as the most important thing and do book contracts that major publishers often have… like, if you get onto the Times bestseller list, you get bonuses or things. It’s viewed as the most important thing. But, you know, the Times bestsellers, and this is itself, like, there are histories of this out there. You know, it’s based on a number of factors, and those have changed recently, but um, you know, but it was always in a large way based on you know, the, quote-unquote, better bookstores. So it was possible to game this, which people have done by going into, like, one of these bookstores and buying 50 copies of your book. And it turns out that it has an enormously disproportionate effect on how the numbers are reported.
BEN: Skewed. Those dirty word nerds! Can’t believe it.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: I just had a question about the word HISTORICAL. Because this is the Historical Dictionary of Sci-Fi. But I mean, dictionaries are kind of historical by their very nature. How is this dictionary different from other dictionaries of sci-fi, which are out there?
JESSE: Well, in lexicography, HISTORICAL is a term of art. It is not… it is not a description, it is a category. So a Historical Dictionary, of which the OED is the most famous example, is, generally speaking, a dictionary that includes citations, you know, dated citations from sources. And generally, where those citations range from the earliest to the most recent. So, you know, that’s not necessarily true. There are historical dictionaries that are not focused on language change, but will still be citation based, and there are historical dictionaries in many different categories. And so there are dialect things like the English Dialect Dictionary, the Dictionary of American Regional English. There are ones based on register, like Green’s Dictionary of Slang, or the Historical Dictionary of American Slang. You know, there are ones based on era, so the Middle English Dictionary, and various overlapping things. There are ones devoted to subject areas, like the Historical Dictionary of Golfing Terms, actually a very good little dictionary.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Now that is bespoke.
JESSE: Yeah. But you know, again, important if you’re interested in golf. Like, it’s got a long history, hundreds of years of history with very interesting terminology that is different in different places in different eras. So no reason why this couldn’t be a subject for serious research too. So when I call this the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, it’s just reflecting the reality of it that you look at entries, it doesn’t just have a definition, it has quotations, dated quotations from a variety of sources. And that’s what it means in that context.
DANIEL: I was surprised by how many authors have used the term CORPSICLE, being a frozen person.
HEDVIG: Oh, I’m also exploring the site, by the way, clicking around. It’s a fun site. So maybe you should repeat it for the listeners. Again, it’s sfdictionary.com. There’s a nice little graph here, for example, that shows the date of the entries. So they start from the 1900s till now. And there’s a big sort of peak in the ’30s ’40s and ’50s, which I’m not surprised by. But I’m wondering if that’s also, that’s new terminology. So maybe there are a lot of sci-fi published also in the ’80s say, but they are not coining as many new terms.
JESSE: Well, that graph is the date of the first quotation of the words there. So yes. And, of course, it’s obviously a self-selected thing. There are words being coined in the ’80s. And they’re not in because they’re, you know, they haven’t caught on yet, or they’re not as widely used, or things like that.
HEDVIG: Fair enough, yeah.
JESSE: So, you know, it is going to reflect what’s in the dictionary. And, you know, since I’ve said over — you know, I’ve used the term before — the core terms, it will feature more things from the, you know, from the Golden Age heyday, the ’30s to ’50s era, let’s say, then later things.
HEDVIG: But it’s also possible for people to suggest words to be added. Is that true?
JESSE: Yes, absolutely. And I have put in a number of things in from reader suggestions. Generally, these are things that I knew about, but had decided not to put in for various reasons. In some cases, there were things that people said: You should probably have this in, and I thought: Yeah, that was a mistake, I missed that.
DANIEL: Like what? I would love to hear an example.
JESSE: So let’s take a look at the most recent list.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: My most recent failures!
HEDVIG: I’m also scrolling through now that I said Frankenstein, I think she didn’t actually coin, she didn’t actually use almost any new terms. So there’s also like, there’s… you can write science fiction, I think without using so much new terminology really, as well.
JESSE: Yes.
BEN: I mean, I just really, really, really want you to say, Jesse, that you don’t think that Mary Shelley was the first sci-fi author, because I wanted to see what happens when you do.
DANIEL: Yeah, I wanted to hear that too.
HEDVIG: No, you don’t want to say that. That’s not a thing we’re going to do.
BEN: Hedvig definitely won’t marry you, that much we know.
HEDVIG: No. Yeah. Not gonna go to a polygamous state. But let’s get back to Daniel’s question, which was recent additions. So did you find any fun recent examples that you wanted to bring up that people have suggested that you added?
JESSE: I think… so some of the recent ones that people pointed out were terms… A lot of the big ones were things that were associated very much with a particular area. So like Star Trek, or Star Wars terms, for example, that, you know, I certainly knew about, but I thought, like: Well, this is too specific. And one of the things that I’ve wanted to avoid doing is just putting in a bunch of things from one place that are only used in that place. Like, that’s one of the most important decisions is to not just include things that are, not include things that are very restricted to a single source.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Is that why BABELFISH isn’t in?
JESSE: That’s one reason why BABELFISH isn’t in. I mean that’s exactly… it’s on the list of something that could go in. And in fact, there is… I do have an example from I think the 1950s of the term BABELFISH, but it’s not used in the same way. It’s not the Adams way. And I was thinking of putting it in just so I can say: Oh, I have this other example, look, I’m cool. But in fact this other thing is so like, it’s just a random name for a fish on Venus or whatever it is. It’s… you know, there’s no connection. But in fact, if something is broadly used… is used even in one thing, and widely known, it can go, you know, like LIGHTSABER, JEDI… like, these are things. These are things that do go in, even if they’re only used in the Star Wars universe. So there were things in that category like TRICORDER from Star Trek. You know, VULCAN, which for some reason, I’d had, you know, ROMULAN and KLINGON, but for some reason — I don’t know why — like, I just didn’t put Vulcan in. You know, so I put VULCAN and VULCAN NERVE PINCH and VULCAN MIND MELD… you know those went in, and they should have been in from the start.
BEN: Do you, Jesse, I’ve got to ask, do you cop a lot of hate from people who are like: My favorite thing in all of fiction isn’t in your dictionary, and you need to fix this situation immediately?
JESSE: I don’t get too much. I have gotten things along those lines. But there’s a great… I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Scott McCloud book, “Understanding Comics,” which I think… It’s a graphic novel about comics. It’s great. I mean, I think, honestly, this is one of the best works of criticism of the modern era. I’m not… no exaggeration, it’s, it’s phenomenal. And early on… he discusses everything of the history of it, you know, different styles, techniques, you know, how to read comics, all these things. And early on, he is discussing, he’s trying to define comics. And he goes through this whole long thing. And in this section, like, his character, and like, again it’s in the form of graphic novels, so his character is like, up in front of an audience talking about this. And eventually, he comes up with a, you know, a definition of comics that he thinks works. And someone in the audience immediately gets up and say: Hey, what about the X-Men? You can’t define comics without the X-Men! It’s like: Ughh. You know, and it’s a great example, because it’s true. Yeah, well, you know, you don’t have this therefore, like, how can you not have this?
And my answer is usually what I said before: that, if something is limited to one source, whether it’s one author or one universe, I tend not to put it in, not because it’s unimportant, but because it’s not core. And also because on a practical basis, the question is, why would someone look something up?
BEN: When it’s just in this one place.
JESSE: Yeah, like the idea of this, at least is to tell people things they might not know and give, you know, give the background on it. But we know exactly where some of these terms appeared. So my merely saying so doesn’t really add much to it.
HEDVIG: And also a lot of specific novels and things often include… sci-fi and fantasy are both known for having little glossaries frequently. I was just reading the Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin. And she has a very long glossary at the end. And if you wanted to know what COM or SESSING means in her books, you can look it up there, and as far as I know, no one outside of her books uses those terms.
JESSE: Well, exactly. And N.K. Jemisin is a great example of something that I don’t… I mean, I think I might have one quote from her, and that’s it. And I like her writing a lot. And I think she’s a very important author, yet there is nothing in there. And this… people have asked a lot: well, you have all these all these examples of this stuff, but nothing from that, or nothing from Nnedi Okorafor, or whatever. And you know, the reason… it’s just that these terms are used only in one place only by one person. And even then they’re not necessarily that widely known by people who haven’t read her works or read their works. And it doesn’t mean that they are… the lack of, the absence of a term from my dictionary doesn’t mean that it’s not important or that the author is not important. In fact, it can mean just the opposite. The more creative you are, the less likely you are to be in this dictionary.
BEN: That’s, that’s a really good, that’s a fascinating point. Yeah, absolutely. You’re not derivative, right? You’re just coming up with all of this kooky, totally unique stuff.
JESSE: So, you know, if you want to be, you know, put in… one way, like, if you want to be in, the best thing to do is be a white guy writing about space warfare, you know? [LAUGHTER] Like, those are those the things that are likely, you know, you’re gonna use the same terms as everyone else who’s been writing about, you know, space war for the last 100 years, or, you know, eighty years. If you do something original, you know, unless it becomes so massively common that everyone knows what this term is, it probably won’t go in. And you know, that’s not a comment on quality or importance or anything like that. It’s just a comment on who… you know, how these words get spread and used.
HEDVIG: Have you ever considered — just so you can have an easy way to get out of this kind of criticism — keeping a list of sorts of just like: here’s a list of sci-fi novels I am aware of exists and I have considered them in some capacity.
JESSE: I do… I have… well, I still call it frontmatter. Even though there’s no front, but you know, I have a, you know, several sections that talk about the dictionary itself, and inclusion policy. And, and I do… like, I mentioned N.K. Jemisin by name. And I have a brief version of what I just said about why these things aren’t in. There’s… it’s very, there’s only one dictionary I know of that really does a good job — I shouldn’t even say good — but because it’s so iconoclastic but um, that includes words that are explicitly outside its remit. And that’s The Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, which has, I think, 130 terms which are not Canadian.
HEDVIG: What, why?
JESSE: And there are seven different categories. There are terms coined in Canada, there are British terms that are now only used in Canada, there are terms that are used everywhere, but have special meanings in Canada, and so forth. And one of these categories is terms that are not Canadian at all. And they are included. [LAUGHTER] Yes, like: what? And they are included because sometimes people think they are Canadian. But they’re not. [NOISES OF COMPREHENSION] So: Oh, we use this term, well, everyone uses that term, too. But it’s extremely unusual to have a dictionary where you say: Here, I’m going to have an entry for terms that don’t belong in this dictionary.
HEDVIG: Yeah, that’s odd. Definitely.
BEN: I mean, I guess you could do that as well. Right? Is there, there must be items that people think is sci-fi shit, that isn’t sci-fi shit. Like, there’d have to be examples.
JESSE: Sure. Well, the problem is there’s an infinite number of things like this. And there’s a finite number… First of all, there’s a finite amount of time that I have, or that anyone has. And also the question is: how useful is this? So if you were going to take, you know, every term out of out of N.K. Jemisin’s glossary and put that in, you know, like, what benefit is that?
HEDVIG: Yeah, if you’re reading her book, you can just scroll to the back.
JESSE: You know, an example, one actual letter I got, an email I got, was about the author Cordwainer Smith. Everyone’s looking blankly. Cordwainer Smith, he’s an important author historically, but he’s not widely read now. And he did have a, you know, series of connected books that used a particular vocabulary. And, you know, no one knows this now. It’s like: Well, why don’t you have this? And I have a half dozen examples from him, but for more regular terms. And if you talk to science fiction people they’ll say: Oh, he’s a very important author. But these words don’t go in. So, you know, maybe 50 years from now, no one will read N.K. Jemisin, and no one will care that these words are in. But you know, if I had 100 examples from Cordwainer Smith, you know, they would get in the way of everything else that people want to look at. And that’s also something I want to avoid. An example that I give in the front matter — I know I’m clicking a bit because… — an example I gave in the frontmatter. Um, there’s a Wikipedia page with 60 — six zero — examples of named sentient species in the Star Wars universe. And this page only covers A through E. [LAUGHTER] There are five or six other pages for the rest of the alphabet, you know.
So, you know, I’m not saying that this is unimportant or uninteresting, but you know, unless you’re an absolutely passionately devoted Star Wars nerd, you don’t care. Like, you know, there’s a place for… there’s Wikipedia, there are Star Wars specific wikis, or sites that talk about this. The value for most people to have anything other than Wookie and maybe Ewok, or whatever… there’s no value in including these, you won’t ever encounter these. And if you do you know what they are.
So, you know, the goal of… you know, yes, I could put in everything conceivable under the sun if I had infinite time. But, you know, even if I did, it’s of questionable benefit to anyone, and in fact would make the dictionary worse in certain ways because it makes it unbalanced. This is something that you consider with, like, unabridged dictionaries or the OED. Like, you can’t… you don’t put in everything just because it’s big, or you have effectively unlimited space online. And even ignoring issues like, you know, it takes time and therefore money to put in terms, multiple people have to do research or whatever. You know, even if you forget about that, you know, having everything possible in is a problem. That’s like Wikipedia, you know, not notable. And, you know, however badly this policy may have been applied, or may be currently being applied, it’s not unreasonable to exclude certain things as being not notable.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I think that’s very fair.
BEN: But Jesse, if we don’t throw absolutely everything into the OED, how am I going to do a hell flex, by having the 26 ridiculous tomes stacked up behind me? And just be like: ~Look at my words!~
HEDVIG: Or get really high points in Scrabble.
JESSE: What you’ll find that even if you don’t have everything in, the OED will still be pretty damn big.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: True, touche.
DANIEL: We like to get some questions from our Discord listeners. So I’m going to throw one here from PharaohKatt. PharaohKatt says, “When I think sci-fi, I immediately think of fandom spaces. What are some fannish words, if any, that have made it into standard English?”
JESSE: Sorry, just give me a second because in fact, I have a…
HEDVIG: Yeah, I noticed you have a category for this. There’s a category for criticism and general and fandom.
JESSE: Mhm. I mean, in science fiction, fandom is a sort of separate area of vocabulary. You know, where there are a lot of fannish terms that are only used when discussing fan activities. But things that have spread… I mean, ZINE is a good example. You know, FANZINE was originally referring to science fiction fanzines, I think, late 1930s, early 1940s, when you start seeing zine-related words. You know, CON for conventions, now used of any kind of convention.
DANIEL: You know, I noticed CON-DOM as well, which is just anything having to do with the sphere of cons.
HEDVIG: What?! Oh my god, no.
JESSE: FANFICTION turns out to be originally referring to science fiction fandom. And, you know, there are a bunch of things that are very specific to… FILK and FILK SINGING, so forth. This is very, very much restricted to science fiction and not other kinds of fandom. You know, MUNDANE, referring to, in fact, referring to things lying outside a particular sphere of interest, which is still viewed as sort of a technical term, but that was originally a science fiction term, science fiction fandom term.
BEN: The word MUNDANE was originally a sci-fi term? Or like, a sci-fi fandom term?
JESSE: Well, MUNDANE referring to like someone who like who has interests outside of a particular sphere of interest.
BEN: Huh! That’s fascinating.
JESSE: And in fact, it’s my surprise, it’s not a fandom term. It’s a… it’s in the SF criticism category. And this surprised me a bit but the word mean… and again, there are many meanings of MUNDANE and this one is a bit more restricted than I think you might be… than I might be explaining correctly. But MAINSTREAM in the main sense, in the sense that we’re all familiar with MAINSTREAM meaning, you know, the core of anything, the main literature like that is in fact, originally a science fiction term. You know, MAINSTREAM, MAINSTREAM was originally used in science fiction referring to general literature.
BEN: WOW! That’s fascinating.
HEDVIG: That is very interesting. Yeah. Speaking of we had a last episode, we talked a bit about fandom suffixes because I found a funny wiki called Aesthetics Wiki, which had a bunch… a super category of things that are CORE: Nerdcore, golfcore, dad-vacation core, which I think means similar thing to mainstream. It means like: boring, muggle, mundane, a bit ordinary, naff. Then I think it’s funny that you, I think, yeah, you’ve said several times that you want to include terms that are core, but they’re obviously core to sci-fi that aren’t mainstream, not normcore.
[LAUGHTER]
JESSE: Well, I mean, I don’t actually have the -CORE suffix in; it’s probably something that I could consider.
HEDVIG: Maybe, maybe, yeah, I don’t, I don’t know. But I think it’s really important what you say to sort of have a definition for inclusion, both so that you’re not wasting all of your time, and also so that it is actually useful. And I think one of the most interesting things with a project like this, besides just being able to see the history of words, is to also be able to see the connections between authors and who has been influential in sprouting terminology in the network. Do you have any stats on someone who’s been unusually good at coming up with terms that have been propagated?
BEN: Yeah, who’s the William Shakespeare of sci-fi?
JESSE: Well, again, the examples I mentioned before for the most number of coined terms, you know, Highland, Doc Smith, John Campbell, Isaac Asimov, you know, Jack Williamson, some of whom are more or less familiar than others. There are, I mean, Asimov is known. And he coined a lot of things sometimes, because he was the first to write about stuff, like a lot of the robotics terms or whatever. But also things like your psychohistory, which is still viewed as an Asimovian term. But I put that in because it’s, you know, it’s broadly used by other people, or used in reference to him. But there are terms in there. And I’ve put in a few more of these recently, like, originally, I left a lot of these out, but, you know, terms when they are really associated with one author. And sometimes they’re things that people have wanted to look up. I mean, a more obscure one that I did put in was SPIN DIZZY, which is from James Blish’s Cities in Flight novels, which I thought: Well, this is again very specific to this, and we don’t need to put this in. But, you know, like, it is broadly used enough that other people refer to it, I thought was worth sliding in there.
BEN: That reminds me of a word, a phrase from the Cadence series of books, many of which the cities operate via centrifugal force, like, walking SPINWARD or COUNTER SPINWARD, as like a geographical term for like navigating centrifugal structures, and I always just remember thinking that was just so good.
HEDVIG: That is very good.
JESSE: In fact, I, those are, I’m probably going to add those in the next week or so.
BEN: Yay! Finger on the pulse.
HEDVIG: Yeah, good!
JESSE: I’ve had this on the list: SPINWARD and ANTI SPINWARD. But one that I added relatively recently was in fact, HUBWARD, you know, of a rotating body like a space station near the center, near or towards the center rather than the edge. So that is…
HEDVIG: Oh! I like that.
JESSE: And that’s relatively… 1970s is the earliest I could find for that.
HEDVIG: There’s… speaking of things like going viral in the news for no good reason, there’s a bunch of astrophysicists that want to make these maps of different planets. And if you make a map of a planet that isn’t Earth, even on Earth, it’s very hard to say what is the western and eastern hemisphere. It’s, like, a meaningless term unless you use a time date or something. So SPINWARD and NOT SPINWARD. So if you want to make a map of another planet, and you don’t really have a meaningful definition of east and west on that planet, you just put the poles in the middle. Like, you put the North Pole in the middle. And preferably, you make two circles. So you have one with the North Pole in the middle, and one with the South Pole. And that’s the sort of the easiest way of making planets… maps of other planets, but Earth.
JESSE: Yeah, seems sensible, sure.
HEDVIG: Yeah. For this reason. Because even now, when people say: Oh, it’s eastern hemisphere, I’m always like: Wait, do we include Europe?
DANIEL: Let me read this one from Mr Bobby Hunt. “Not sure if an alternative history is considered sci-fi. But Jesse worked for a couple of seasons as a script consultant for the TV series The Man in the High Castle. Were there some words that surprised you that would not have existed if the Allies had lost World War II?” I don’t even… I haven’t seen this show. What is this?
BEN: Did you not read…? I’m surprised you haven’t read The Man in the High Castle, Daniel.
HEDVIG: Yeah, me too.
DANIEL: Sorry!
JESSE: So this is, it’s based on a novel by Philip K. Dick, who is in fact widely cited in the dictionary, and everyone likes making films of his works.
HEDVIG: As they should.
JESSE: But it’s basically, well, it’s an alternate history, which is set originally in the early 1960s, on the premise that the US has lost the Second World War. You know, there was in the 1930s, you know, pacifists had more influence and we were late getting into the war and then got in and lost. And so now, the US is, the East Coast is Nazi controlled, and the West Coast is Japanese controlled. And the language is a very interesting question. So there are two issues. One is just the usual — well, a thing that should be more usual, perhaps, if you care about accuracy— is you know, is this language accurate to the 1960s or whenever it’s set? And, you know typically, TV shows don’t have language consultants, and even people who care, like Mad Men were, you know, extremely interested in the great accuracy of everything in there, including the language but never bothered hiring a language consultant. So there are all sorts of things that you know, on Mad Men that are anachronistic.
But most of the time, so most the time, people don’t care at all. So there’s anachronistic language in there, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is if you think it’s good, and you don’t do it. I, in fact, think that you could make a good argument for not having a historically accurate language on a historical show. But in any case, in this case, they wanted the language to be accurate. So it being accurate, like, not having terms from the 1980s would be a good thing to have. But the other thing is the question, like, this is an alternate history. So there are two things that are going to be different. One is that you will have terms from Japanese or from German being used by English speakers in America, where in the actual world you do not have that, or did not have that in that way. And the second thing, and the more interesting thing to me is that you will have terms that existed in, in our 1962, but would not exist in that world, because for example, let’s say the likelihood of terms from Jews or African Americans, these would not have been widely spread, either because…
HEDVIG: Like SCHMUCK.
JESSE: Either because they would be, they would have been killed — like in The Man in the High Castle, there are still concentration camps, killing Jews, and so forth, you know — or because, you know, any kind of Jewish or African-American terminology won’t have been accepted by the powers that be. So that was a little bit trickier trying to figure out well, what were, like… these words are common, and were in use, but probably wouldn’t have been in use in this universe. So those were the kinds of things that I was thinking about.
You know, as it turns out, like, there were some terms that were coined for the show, or that were specifically used for the show, you know, terms, like Japanese-derived terms, or German-derived terms that were names for things on the show, and it makes sense that these would have, you know, this kind of name. There ended up being a bit less of that more interesting category of terms that I thought probably wouldn’t exist, but there were a few of them. Jazz related… like, there was a lot of discussion of music, and the precise question of that is itself a complicated thing. I mean, in fact, there was interest in jazz in Nazi Germany, but um, you know, the question of how the terminology would have developed or which performers might have been more or less likely to be, you know, to have continued on is an interesting one.
HEDVIG: Wow.
DANIEL: Wow. Well, the work is the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, the editor is Jesse Sheidlower. Jesse, how can people help if they want to contribute to this work?
JESSE: Well, there is a page on the website called How to help. And there’s a link there for emailing me if you have any thoughts. I would only suggest that you do, like, look, I do have discussion of a lot of the things in the frontmatter. Read through that first. And if people are interested in either… like, have things that are missing, or want to do research or, or anything like that, just, you know, get in touch with some sense of what you might be up for.
HEDVIG: Cool.
DANIEL: The URL is sfdictionary.com. And that’s the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction. Thanks for telling us all about it.
JESSE: Oh, my pleasure. Thank you for letting me do so.
HEDVIG: It’s really cool.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: And now it’s time for our special segment, the one we love: it’s Words of the Week!
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] Yesss.
BEN: I feel like we’ve got a person on the show who literally has, like, an entire book of possible words of the week.
DANIEL: A week’s worth!
HEDVIG: Of words.
BEN: Like, it’s just not fair at this point.
DANIEL: Jesse, what do you got, have you got a word for us?
JESSE: I think this was in fact on your list. But NFT is probably the… like, this went from nowhere to all over the place exceptionally quickly.
DANIEL: Exactly!
BEN: N-F-T. Not For Transfer? Not for…
JESSE: Non-Fungible Token.
DANIEL: There’s that word again.
HEDVIG: I think it says a lot about…
JESSE: Fungible, I know we discussed it at the beginning. In fact, I think I mean, I just took the quickest look, but I think this first comes up in 2018, in one of the Etherium… part of the Etherium Git repository for a suggestion for something they needed to implement. But no one wasn’t, you know, obsessively knowledgeable about and interested in, you know, cryptocurrency-type stuff and knew about it until like two weeks ago.
HEDVIG: I think it’s interesting that Jesse and Daniel both are like: This was really viral on all of the news. And I saw it for the first time when I saw it on the run sheet!
JESSE: Well, sorry, it’s, um, it’s a bit hard to explain. But more or less, let’s just say, you know, it’s a way of guaranteeing the uniqueness of a digital object, you know. So you can sell an online… you can sell an image, which of course, you can reproduce, you know, it’s a digital image so you can reproduce it perfectly and send it anywhere you want. But you can recognise one incarnation of this image as the real one or the authentic one, and then charge a lot of money for this. And it does raise interesting questions about: what does it mean to be unique? Because you know, like, the image itself, you know, there’s nothing unique about that, apart from having this thing embedded in it.
BEN: There’s some like, real post-, like, human philosophy implications here.
JESSE: Yeah. But this is, you know, I mean, it’s an interesting question, because it ties to all other sorts of collecting. Like, why does like, proving that this is an original, you know, Da Vinci or whatever, as opposed to something else? Like, if you can produce an absolutely perfect copy of something, of a physical artwork that even experts couldn’t tell that this is a fake, or — I don’t want to say fake — that it’s not the original one by the hand of Picasso, and no one at all can tell that difference, what does that mean in terms of collecting? Or what does that mean in terms of art or production? Like, why is…?
HEDVIG: Or currency indeed.
BEN: It almost feels like a way to try and solve the Ship of Theseus dilemma. It’s like, someone’s like: ~I will fix this thing that has plagued philosophy for, like, 3,000 years!~
DANIEL: Well, now you have to explain the Ship of Theseus dilemma.
BEN: Like, so the idea is like, if you take, like, a Tyrion, and you have it somewhere and you — piece by piece, plank by plank — you replace each of the constituent parts of this ship, over a long period of time, when you have replaced the last piece, is it the same ship?
HEDVIG: People’s use of a Golden Gate and the human body, right? Because the human body does the same thing within seven years and the Golden Gate has the same thing.
JESSE: It is an interesting question of why one artwork… you know, various experts can debate, you know, some narrow principle of art history and conclude that okay, this is worth $90 million, as opposed, you know, this is a few thousand dollars.
BEN: It’s like if the Mona Lisa was revealed tomorrow to have actually been a fake for, like, the last 100 years, like, people would be bitterly bitterly disappointed, except for the fact that it hasn’t stopped millions upon millions upon millions of people going and seeing the Mona Lisa, and be like: Oh, my god, it’s the Mona Lisa.
JESSE: Yeah, right. But why would, you know, if it turns out that well, no, the real one has been in storage the whole time, because it’s too fragile and we’re showing this one, like, who would know? Why would your reaction be different? Why should it be different if you can’t tell the difference? Again, if like, three experts disagree and you know, two of them conclude this, and like, okay, now it’s worth a billion dollars, you know, why should that matter? So, you know, for whatever fun you want to make of it in this context, because in fact, these are digital works of art, you know, they can be absolutely identical in every way. And therefore, to say, well, you’re crazy for spending a zillion dollars on this when it’s exactly identical to, you know, I have infinite copies of it that you can make online. You really do have similar questions with physical artworks.
BEN: Fascinating.
DANIEL: There’s another thing about NFTs and that is that the artist can retain equity in the work, so that every time it changes hands, every time it gets sold, the artist can get a cut.
HEDVIG: Oh! Like, what’s it called when, I don’t know the term for this actually in English. What is it called when you make a song, and the radio plays it, and you get some money?
DANIEL: Royalties.
HEDVIG: Royalties. That thing.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s right. That’s an interesting one. Okay. Let’s move on to the next one. Thank you. NEANDERTHAL (neander-TALL). Or -THALL? Neanderthal (neander-TALL)? Neanderthal (neander-THALL)?
BEN: I say NEANDERTHAL (neander-THALL) I don’t know that I should. Like, now that you’ve said it a different way, I’m like: have I been saying it wrong?
JESSE: I believe NEANDERTHAL (neander-THALL) is probably the more common pronunciation, but NEANDERTHAL (neander-TALL) is historically more correct.
HEDVIG: I think it’s a German name, German or Swiss name for a place where some bones were found. It’s NEANDER and THAL. It’s like a valley. Right?
DANIEL: Oh, okay. Now that you say that, THAL, it’s like it’s an English cognate of DALE.
HEDVIG: I think so, yeah.
DANIEL: And the reason why we call dollars DOLLARS is because there was a Joachim’s Dale. And that was Joachimsthal. They mined stuff. And one of the coins they made was a Joachimsthaler. And that became our dollar.
BEN: There you go!
DANIEL: How about that?
HEDVIG: Cognate solo, very Germanic.
BEN: But that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about Neanderthals.
DANIEL: We’re talking about Neanderthals! US President Joe Biden was making reference to many states at this point in history lifting covid restrictions. And he said that this is “Neanderthal thinking”. And I thought: Hey, hey…
HEDVIG: Why is…? Yeah, I was gonna say, don’t we think of it higher? Okay, well, Neanderthals weren’t maybe as smart as humans, but part of their DNA is with us. They were humanoid. We don’t have evidence to think they were incredibly stupid, right?
DANIEL: I mean…
BEN: Isn’t this just like a holdover from the sort of like, the fairly ugly old days of, like, archaeology… like, I’m talking like, 150 years ago where we had this idea that, like, cave people said “oogabooga” and hit each other with clubs, and this kind of stuff?
HEDVIG: People had that more recently and probably still today, but yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Yeah, whereas like, wasn’t the whole deal with the Lascaux caves and the Altamira caves and stuff that, like, that was the first time people were like: Holy shit, there is like a fully realised expression of art and culture here that we always just thought was just, like, primitive cave- dwelling morons. But actually, no.
HEDVIG: I’m not sure I understand the use here. It’s just means, he’s just means that he thinks it’s stupid, is that it?
BEN: Correct. He does think that the people he’s calling Neanderthals are stupid. That’s the clear… like, the line that he’s drawing.
HEDVIG: Or is it that this is a… people call it a reptile brain reaction? Is it… What does he mean here? Why is this? This kind of stupid?
DANIEL: Well, I think it’s a way of saying that this is regressive thinking or this is… it’s a little bit like Hillary’s “deplorable” comment. The “basket of deplorables”, without actually singling any humans out.
BEN: Yeah, it seems like it’s… it seems like a like a contemporarily more politically correct way to call people a bunch of fucking idiots, kind of thing.
HEDVIG: Why not just say that it’s a dangerous decision?
BEN: Because you want to, like, we live in the world where saying things sensibly doesn’t get you clicks, or repeats of your soundbite.
HEDVIG: Or on Word of the Week?
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Ahem! Yes, quite.
BEN: Self burn, self burn.
HEDVIG: Sorryyy…
DANIEL: Well, I did want to take a look at the things that we’ve said about Neanderthals in previous shows, because we have talked about them on Talk the Talk, back in the Talk the Talk days. So what we know is that all non-African people are related to Neanderthals, because there was lots of interbreeding. They had a cranial size about the same as ours, they had brains about the same size, probably. And they took care of the sick among them, they lived in social groups. So there’s, for example, the La Chapelle Neanderthal man buried in a cave in France 50,000 years ago. He had probably lost most of his teeth, and he had arthritis, but he was alive, which means that he…
BEN: That he was being looked after.
DANIEL: He was being looked after. However, researcher Richard Klein has argued that their tools were very simple. And so that means they probably didn’t have a lot of mental acuity. But they probably had language or some version of language.
BEN: There we go.
HEDVIG: Yeah, there was that sound clip that went viral of some people trying to replicate a Neanderthal speech apparatus that was made a lot of fun of, and it was quite silly, but I mean, fair, they tried to make it, to bring alive how Neanderthal speech might physically sound. And it sounded very strange.
BEN: I remember.
DANIEL: Well, dehumanising language is kind of a scary thing. But I think this… I don’t know, is it a narrow miss on dehumanising language?
BEN and HEDVIG: Umm…
DANIEL: Or is it dehumanising?
HEDVIG: I think it’s just not clear enough. And it’s better to critique the policy than people. Just… I think it’s better to say this is a harmful policy than to say, people who do it are stupid.
BEN: Hedvig, stop being a sensible parent. That’s not what politics wants or needs from anyone. [LAUGHTER] They want… they want viral making sound bites you can just repeat ad nauseum.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Let’s go on to our last one. And this is a word that Americans are kind of surprised to find turning up in connection with vaccinations, which are rolling out all over the world. The word is JAB.
BEN: Oh, yeah!
DANIEL: Hmm. For example, @EmInPortland on Twitter, tweets this, “In the UK, they called the vaccine shot a jab. Not sure why you need this information. But here it is.” So JAB is spreading. Is that because nobody wants to get a SHOT? We used to talk about getting shots and I don’t really want to get shot. So…
BEN: Does it come from England originally? Or is it us? And by us I mean, Australians.
HEDVIG: ‘Cause yeah, it’s really popular in Australia. ABC The Signal did an episode called “A Jab for a Job”. Like, you have to get a jab in order to get a job.
BEN: We also had “no jab, no play”.
DANIEL: In Australia.
BEN: Yep. So kids who were unvaccinated were not welcome at educational facilities.
DANIEL: Jesse, what are your impressions on this one?
JESSE: I haven’t looked into it in too much detail. You know, certainly JAB is much more common in British English. It is known here, but it’s not what you would usually say. You know, I think that at least to an American… Americans would find it a bit less threatening, perhaps, and it sounds, you know, sounds more casual. And that’s probably a good thing in this context.
BEN: Does it… Do we have an etymology for it? Is it related to the sort of like quick, not particularly violent punch?
JESSE: Well, I mean, JAB itself is originally a Scots word. The earliest for JAB with an A, with that sound is actually just from the early 19th century. And it’s probably originally… it goes… JOB in the same sense, which is now not really used goes back, you know, 15th century or earlier. But yeah, I mean JAB is relatively recent, it’s probably an expressive coinage, you know, meaning to thrust or to strike. And yeah, that’s, that’s where it comes from.
DANIEL: You know what? JAB reminds me of these words that I call thinnernyms. Like, words that they use in headlines because they’re short and punchy. So vaccination or injection, a little bit long. But jab: nice and quick. You can throw it in.
BEN: I like that. That’s good. Thinnernyms. I like that.
DANIEL: Thinnernyms. And I also looked up jab-related words in the GLOWBE corpus, which breaks down words and phrases by country and GET THE JAB — that’s one I looked up — and then FLU JAB. Those two expressions are always British, not American.
BEN: That’s not surprising.
HEDVIG: And maybe Australian.
BEN: A cheeky jab.
DANIEL: A cheeky jab.
HEDVIG: A cheeky jab.
DANIEL: Well, NON-FUNGIBLE TOKEN, NEANDERTHAL (neander-TALL) or -THALL and JAB: our Words of the Week. Let’s read through a quick few comments. In our last episode, we mentioned COVID BRAIN and PANDEMIC BRAIN and we thought they were kind of the same. But Victoria on Twitter says, “Thinking about saying COVID BRAIN versus PANDEMIC BRAIN as meaning the same thing. When I hear COVID BRAIN I think of a person who has or has recently recovered. PANDEMIC BRAIN, on the other hand, makes me think of the general fatigue and depressing that we endure”. That’s interesting.
HEDVIG: Ohh.
BEN: Interesting, interesting, interesting.
HEDVIG: I can see that. I’m not sure if I have that full distinction. But yeah, that’s a good point. Well taken.
DANIEL: And then Theresa via email has sent us a message about… sometimes we’re looking for different alternatives to “that’s crazy” or “that’s insane”. And we’ve thought of BONKERS and BIZARRE, things that don’t have the same sort of stigmatising effect.
BEN: Non-ableist language.
DANIEL: That’s it. She says, “My favorite word to use instead of CRAZY, INSANE, or NUTS. That’s OUTRAGEOUS!” So…
BEN: I’m sticking with BANANAS. I love it. I love bananas. That’s bananas!
HEDVIG: Bananas is good.
DANIEL: Which came about because — in my research at least — monkeys act crazy, bananas are associated with monkeys, and so the meaning jumped.
BEN: There you go.
HEDVIG: Hmm!
DANIEL: So, Jesse Sheidlower, thank you so much for coming on Because Language and having a chat with us.
JESSE: Oh, no, thanks. Always good to be here.
DANIEL: How can we find out what you’re doing?
JESSE: Probably follow me on Twitter is the best thing. It’s just @jessesheidlower. There is a separate Twitter feed — @sfdictionary — for the dictionary itself, where I post important antedatings and new entries and so forth, but um, either one of those depending on your interest.
HEDVIG: Cool.
BEN: Lovely.
DANIEL: Thanks again.
JESSE: Thank you.
[OUTRO MUSIC]
HEDVIG: And we are also on Twitter. If you want to get in touch with us, it’s a good idea to tweet at us. We are @becauselangpod on Twitter. We’re also using that username on all the other social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Patreon, TikTok, and now Clubhouse. Basically, if you think of another social platform, Daniel will probably register @becauselangpod on it at some point. You can also send us a good old fashioned email at hello@becauselanguage.com.
DANIEL: [SPOOKY VOICE] Hello.
HEDVIG: Hello. If you like the show, why don’t you tell a friend about us? Or leave us a review in all the reviewy places. In particular, the iTunes Store is a great place to leave a review for podcasts you like. Doing all of those things will help people find us and spread the good news about linguistics to the rest of the world. You can also do what Dustin of the podcast Sandman Stories does, which is: as soon as anyone on Twitter asks for podcast recommendations — which I still think is so brave for anyone to just go on Twitter and say “Can anyone give me any podcast recommendations”, because they always get inundated with so many messages — but Dustin at Sandman Stories always makes the point of replying and mentioning us and that’s very nice. Very sweet. Really appreciate it.
DANIEL: Can I share a quick recent review? This was one from macnsak. They say, “Great listening. Five stars. I listen to many podcasts and this is one that keeps me laughing while at the same time engaging my mind.” Aww.
BEN and HEDVIG: Aww.
BEN: We’ll make you laugh, we’ll make you think. We’ll probably make you cry.
HEDVIG: Does that mean that we can get nominated for an Ignobel award? Isn’t that…? No, you have to do research, okay. We have to make a research project that makes people laugh and then makes people think, and then we can get an Ignobel award.
DANIEL: Okay, okay, we’ll do it.
HEDVIG: Yeahh.
BEN: Now, you may not know this, but our show is transcripted. We take all of voicey words and we turn them into typey words. And Maya Klein is the person who does that, of Voicing Words, and she does a tremendous job. She listens to every word we say and she writes them all down. Having transcripts is really important because it makes our show accessible to people who can’t listen, or some people who just don’t want to. It also means our shows are searchable. So if you ever be like: Ah, fuck, like they said that thing in that thing that one time, but there is literally hundreds of episodes of that. You can search, so that’s really good. And you know what makes transcribing our show possible because it costs the dolla dolla bills, yo? It is our Patrons. So if you become a Patron, you might be like one of the people I’m about to name. You could have your name read out by Ben Ainslie on a podcast.
HEDVIG: That is an amazing thing.
BEN: That is the thing that you could get from becoming a Patron. Also, I guess like the benefit of transcribing shows whatever blah, blah, blah. So our Patrons 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, James, Nigel, Kate, Jen, Nasrin, River, Nikoli, Ayesha, Moe, Steele, Andrew, James, Shane, Eloise, Rodger, Rhian, Jonathan, Colleen, glyph, Ignacio… what a name, Ignacio. Wow!
HEDVIG: That’s a good name.
BEN: And new this time: Manú, and Kevin. Thank you to all of the people that I just named, and the people who are Patrons but aren’t Patrons of the bracket that gets your name read out. You’re bloody frickin’ legends, too.
HEDVIG: My name of my current character in D&D is Kevin. [LAUGHTER] I’m a Goliath. Everyone has like really fancy fantasy names, but I’m Kevin.
BEN: ~Kevin~
DANIEL: Big Kev.
HEDVIG: And if you want to hear about Kevin, you can actually listen to our D&D podcast Negative Inspiration, if you want to hear about the adventures of Kevin the Goliath.
BEN: I absolutely do. I hope that when he goes to the nether realms, he’s the kind of stupid idiot who just like lays down in the bones and makes bone angels.
HEDVIG: No, he’s… he’s very cautious, and really into HR.
DANIEL: I think you can bet your ass I’m not going to be listening. [LAUGHTER] Our theme 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 FADES]
[SOUNDS OF JUBILATION]
DANIEL: My four year old daughter told me that she wrote a story about a box and it was called Rosie the Box. And I said, is she a box with anything inside? She said no. I said, Oh, so she’s a box, but she feels kind of empty inside. She’s like, No! I’m trying to…
BEN: That’s what you get for trying to be funny to children, my friend. They decide what is funny, not you.
DANIEL: You know what’s hilarious? Poop.
BEN: Yeah. Oh! a perennial favorite.
HEDVIG: I was always really perplexed as a child, because I didn’t find poop funny.
BEN: You were just too refined in your tastes.
HEDVIG: And it wasn’t like… it wasn’t like I thought it was beneath me. I just didn’t…
BEN: What about farting? Where did you sit on farting?
HEDVIG: I also didn’t think it was… I knew that I was supposed to laugh, to the degree that I think I had one of those fart pillows.
JESSE: Mhm.
DANIEL: Wow.
BEN: Is that, out of interest, is that what I would call a whoopee cushion?
HEDVIG: Probably yeah.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Fart pillow. Never heard it called that.
DANIEL: Farting is objectively hilarious.
BEN: No. I agree… I agree with you, Daniel. But I’ve I’ve run across several people of the “that is not funny in any context” variety.
DANIEL: Oh, darn.
HEDVIG: Well, as an adult now I think it’s more funny.
[BOOP]
DANIEL: Awesome. Well, then we’re ready.
HEDVIG: Cool. Koo-ell. I started saying COOL like Germans; koo-ell.
BEN: Do you say it when you hang up when speaking to someone on your ~handy~?
DANIEL: Ben loves that one.
BEN: I really do.
HEDVIG: No, I just I just say like: Oh, that’s so cool (koo-ell).
BEN: You have one of the most fungible accents of just about anyone I’ve ever met.
DANIEL: That word. It’s gonna come up again.
JESSE: My favorite, for people trying to remember what the word means… There’s a poem by XJ Kennedy. I don’t remember the title, which is probably something interesting and relevant, but [RECITES] “One fury alone God hath found inexpungeable: the wrath of a woman who finds herself fungible.”
DANIEL: Yikes! [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: So I don’t know what FUNGIBLE means. I’m hoping I’ll find out later.
DANIEL: We’re gonna find out.
JESSE: Able to be exchanged.
HEDVIG: Oh.
DANIEL: It’s a poetic version of a pithy proverb!
HEDVIG: Okay.