23: Mailbag of YouChoob (with the Layman’s Linguist)

We’re tackling these Mailbag questions with the help of the Layman’s Linguist!

Where do they say CHUBE instead of TUBE?
When did contractions come into English, and why don’t characters in period dramas use them?
Did Hebrew displace Yiddish when it was revitalised?
Do bilingual children have delays in syntax?
When did the word APOLOGY move from a defence to an expression of contrition?
Did linguistics affect your religious faith?

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Show notes

Layman’s Linguist on TikTok
https://www.tiktok.com/@laymanslinguist

LingFest 21
https://lingcomm.org/lingfest/

[PDF] Olivier Glain, 2012. THE YOD /j/ : PALATALISE IT OR DROP IT! How Traditional Yod Forms are Disappearing from Contemporary English
http://www.cercles.com/n22/glain.pdf

Yod-Dropping in American Accents
http://dialectblog.com/2011/09/06/yod-dropping/

Did English Speakers Really Not Use Contractions in the 19th Century as Depicted in True Grit?
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2014/11/origins-english-contractions/

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen – Free Ebook
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1342

Raymond Holt | Brooklyn Nine-Nine Wiki | Fandom
https://brooklyn99.fandom.com/wiki/Raymond_Holt

[PDF] Elizabeth Freeburg, 2013. The Cost of Revival: the Role of Hebrew in Jewish Language Endangerment
https://ling.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/alumni%20senior%20essays/Freeburg%2C%20Elizabeth%20-%20Senior%20Essay.pdf

Revival of the Hebrew language – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revival_of_the_Hebrew_language#Revival_of_spoken_Hebrew

350: Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish (with Zalmen Mlotek and Motl Didner) – Talk the Talk
http://talkthetalkpodcast.com/350-fiddler-on-the-roof-in-yiddish/

Canadian cop’s lack of French cancels speeding ticket | BBC News
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-40973959

Ben is thinking of the film Yu Ming Is Ainm Dom, directed by Daniel O’Hara.
Yu Ming Is Ainm Dom – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yu_Ming_Is_Ainm_Dom

FAQ: Raising Bilingual Children | Linguistic Society of America
https://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/faq-raising-bilingual-children

[$$] Johanne Paradis and Fred Genesee, 1996. Syntactic Acquisition in Bilingual Children: Autonomous or Interdependent?
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/studies-in-second-language-acquisition/article/abs/syntactic-acquisition-in-bilingual-children/9DF7C51BF77D6A1BD4612375DFE77B53

apology | Online Etymology Dictionary
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=apology

DEBATE TOPIC: Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient history of ancient American peoples, or a work of 19th century religious fiction?
http://www.mormonthink.com/backup/packhamdebate.htm

Richard Packham: A linguist looks at Mormonism
http://packham.n4m.org/linguist.htm

Many non-LDS scholars claim that the second half of the book of Isaiah was written after the time Lehi left Jerusalem, Yet the Book of Mormon contains material from both halves. How do we explain this?
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1984/10/i-have-a-question/how-do-we-explain-material-from-isaiah-in-the-book-of-mormon?lang=eng

Ch. 10 – Anachronisms of Objects and Language
https://www.aaroncase.live/ch-10-anachronisms-of-objects-and-language/

Transcript

DANIEL: Layman’s Linguist, I do not know your real name and I do not need to, but how would you like us to refer to you? Should I say something like, “Layman’s Linguist…?”

KATE, THE LAYMAN’S LINGUIST: You can call me Kate. Kate is fine.

[ALL LAUGHING]

BEN: We have the Layman Linguist on the show. Her meatspace name is Kate.

HEDVIG: Meatspace name. Good stuff.

KATE: Deep cut.

[INTRO MUSIC]

DANIEL: Hello and welcome to this episode of Because Language, a podcast about linguistics, the science of language. I’m Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. He’s an educator and the winner of best hair in Carnarvon three years running: It’s Ben Ainslie.

BEN: I’ve got to be honest, it’s an easy comp, because hair and teeth are in short supply in Carnarvon.

DANIEL: I did not mean to make enemies of everyone in Carnarvon.

BEN: It’s okay, we have one listener in Carnarvon, and that person arrived here by mistake.

DANIEL: She’s a linguist and the inventor of the color fluorescent gray. It’s Hedvig Skirgård.

BEN: [LAUGHS] I like that one.

HEDVIG: So for everyone listening on the show, I… before Daniel says things, neither me nor Ben has any idea what he’s gonna say. He keeps a little run sheet for himself that he doesn’t share with us.

DANIEL: Of course I do!

HEDVIG: And what does that mean? Does it mean that I’m trying to make boring fun?

BEN: That’s top five for me by the way, that’s top five of the two of us.

DANIEL: You like that? Which was the top one? The one where I burned you both scorchingly?

BEN: Oh, that was too real. No, I didn’t like that at all.

DANIEL: Bottom ten?

HEDVIG: I blocked that out.

BEN: That was, that was too much like therapy.

DANIEL: Too on the nose? We have a very special guest co-host. If you are on Linguist TikTok at all, you know who this is, because she owns the game. It’s the Layman’s Linguist. Welcome.

KATE: Hi.

DANIEL: It’s great to hear you.

HEDVIG: Welcome.

DANIEL: I know you don’t do a lot of shows, so you know, this is special.

BEN: A little Because Language exclusive.

KATE: Yeah, it’s a first.

DANIEL: For anyone who’s not familiar with your work on TikTok, what do you do?

KATE: So TikTok is… I’m on and off on TikTok. I like mostly sharing everyone else’s linguistics TikTok videos. That’s my favorite thing to do. Because there’s so much on there. I feel like I’m a curator of linguistics TikTok for the Twitter experience. So yeah, there’s a lot of stuff on sign language or stuff on, you know, new tech coming out for linguistics. There’s a lot of, I would call them linguistic dialectal activists, kind of standing up for, you know, non-standard English and stuff like that, but I really enjoy sharing with the broader linguistics society.

DANIEL: Oh, pish posh, your own original videos are none too slouchy!

KATE: Yeah, they’re so much more popular on Twitter than they are on TikTok. However, all of my students have found my TikTok. So all of my comments are from my students now. Which is great.

BEN: How delightful.

KATE: Yes. Oh, yeah, it’s very exhilarating.

HEDVIG: And how did you come up with the name? If I may ask.

KATE: Layman’s Linguist… like, I had a different name that I can’t remember now, but it was really pretentious. And I hated it. Like, I immediately hated it. And so I recreated my website, I think within one day. And I liked Layman’s Linguist, because I was like: Well, I have a Bachelor’s, so maybe like take it down a notch. Maybe, like, have a realistic view of myself and then I kind of really leaned into that.

BEN: I like that. I also just like the life approach of, like, doing a thing and then one day later being like: Fucken hate this, light the matches [EXPLOSION SOUND]!

KATE: Yeah, destroy it all, never speak of it again.

HEDVIG: Sometimes I’m on Facebook and I see the need for linguists to have an opinion or clarify something, and I tend to sign off with Your Friendly Neighborhood Linguist, because I think it’s cute, it sounds like Spider-Man [mən]. But I think Layman’s Linguist is a bit more approachable.

[LAUGHTER]

DANIEL: [LAUGHING] Spi-

BEN: [LAUGHING] Can we…? Wait, no, sorry…

DANIEL: Time out.

BEN: We cannot blow past the fact that you just pronounced Spider-Man, Spider-[mən]. Like…

DANIEL: Friendly Neighborhood Spider-[mən].

[LAUGHTER]

BEN: [LAUGHING] Like, what? Like, it just happens to be a guy, like Jarl Edmonson.

KATE: Peter Spiderm’n.

DANIEL: This is how surnames work, Ben.

BEN: Peter Parker, Spiderm’n.

[LAUGHING]

HEDVIG: God, I can’t believe this is the thing you’re going to…

DANIEL: Oh, look! It’s Superm’n!

BEN: [IN TEARS] Sorry, I very rarely stan anything, but you can’t be calling Spider-Man Spider-m’n. It’s like it’s a vitamin made of spiders! It doesn’t make any sense.

DANIEL: [LOSING IT]

BEN: Sorry. I want you to know that was entirely your fault.

HEDVIG: I did not expect THAT to get that much laughter, but okay, sure.

DANIEL: [CLEARS THROAT] Um, yes. On that note, what tips would you have for any aspiring public linguist who wants to up their media game?

KATE: I mean, honestly, just… my greatest fear is also like my number one tip on that, which is the networking thing. I mean, my least least favorite part of all of this is trying to make connections, because, you know, you feel like you’re kind of butting into other people’s conversations on Twitter or other social media. You know, it feels like: Is this really my place? But it went from zero to sixty real fast once I started having actual conversations with people, with other linguists within the twittersphere. And it gave me credibility, it also gave me access to resources. I mean, it just opened up a whole lot of new ways I could expand my own brand, if you will, and also make it more, you know, reliable. Making it something that, you know, is actually answering questions that are being asked, that’s using resources that people do trust. And that’s how I found a lot of that. That’s how I found kind of my reputation that I’m building right now.

HEDVIG: Yeah, that’s, I think that’s really good advice, both for if you want to do like public outreach stuff, but also honestly, in academia itself. I have benefited a lot from the networks I’ve made. And it is a… how do you say? It is a double edged sword. Like, because if you’re… if you’re not the kind of person who likes mingling at parties and things like that…

KATE: Not my favorite. Not my favorite thing.

HEDVIG: Which a lot of people aren’t. And I am not in certain circumstances, but in others, it is being… a lot of people are smart, but unfortunately, you kind of need more than just being smart.

BEN: Social intelligence is an intelligence, too.

KATE: Yeah, it’s not one that I excel at. It is one that I have learned, slowly but surely. So yeah, it can feel very intimidating to start that process when, you know, you’re kind of like nameless. If you’re like fresh out of school, and you’re trying to make your name in academia, like you said, I mean, it can be really intimidating. But yeah, just kind of go for it! You start getting a sense for which people are a little bit more welcoming than others, perhaps? And you just start making better connections that way.

HEDVIG: For example, you can write fan mail to a podcast you really like and then you can become a co-host!

[LAUGHTER]

HEDVIG: I can highly recommend just giving people compliments. I’ve walked up to people at conferences and been like: I really enjoyed your talk. I thought this thing was really smart and, like, not having a smart question at all. Not having anything like to add, but just being, like: That was really good. Also because, like, academia is often a negative place where most of the feedback you get is negative, so when someone comes to just says the basic thing of like, that was…

KATE: I enjoyed that.

HEDVIG: And you shouldn’t lie. You shouldn’t say that if you don’t mean that. I should underline that. But you can actually just go up and say to people that what they’re doing is good and they’ll be like: Oh, who are you? What are you doing?

KATE: Yeah, they’re always very surprised.

BEN: Hedvig’s guide to success in social situations is just unbridled flattery.

DANIEL: Just find cool shit and plug it.

HEDVIG: Very good.

DANIEL: That’s it. Now Nikoli on our Discord channel was curious, and what I ask unto the Layman’s Linguist, I ask to all: In Anime, sub or dub?

KATE: Oh, so in everything, almost everything, subtitles. But I mean, unless it’s something that’s already really campy and cheesy, and then just like lean in and dub.

DANIEL: Okay. How about Ben? Let’s go to Ben.

BEN: I was a massive otaku growing up and so I have this like, borderline pathological like [NECKBEARD VOICE] ~dubs are the devil, they’re Satan’s instrument~. But if I have to be, like, really honest, I will admit that most of the Studio Ghibli dubs which have been done by Disney over the years are tight as a drum, right? Like your Porco Rosso and your Princess Mononoke and that sort of stuff. I will definitely enjoy it and love reading those in subtitle form and hearing the wonderful, wonderful voice acting that went in with the Japanese cast. But if I am also being honest, being freed up from having to read that dialogue, and to be able to see just the breathtaking genius of Miyazaki undistracted is pretty great. So I will say subs always, dubs for the Miyazaki so you can get that [INTENSE VOICE] ~sweet, sweet prettiness all up in your eyeballs~.

DANIEL: Very good. Hedvig, sub or dub?

HEDVIG: Oh, um, depends on if I’m eating at the same time or not. Currently Ste and I are watching Hikaru No Go, which is great. But we also like to do it while we’re eating dinner. So we do use subtitles, but it is… yeah, but if we’re not eating that is easier. But usually subs, yeah.

DANIEL: I feel like subs can be a learning experience.

BEN: I… look, if that’s true, I managed to not take up the gauntlet that is that learning experience over like 11 years? Of watching just a despicable amount of fan sub anime illegally downloaded from, like, IRC servers and stuff. I knew no Japanese by the end of that.

HEDVIG: You know! You know… So, let’s try some words that I’ve learned from anime. You know MATTE.

BEN: Nope.

HEDVIG: It means WAIT. It’s like, when people are running ahead of other people, they say “Matte!”

BEN: Yes, I understand what WAIT means, thank you.

[LAUGHTER]

HEDVIG: [SIGHS LOUDLY] You know OKUSA, OTUSA, like words like that?

BEN: I know some family words.

HEDVIG: Yeah. Okay. You knew they were family words. There you go!

DANIEL: Good job, li’l camper!

BEN: Oh good, Daniel; your patronisation perfectly matches my inner monologue as well.

DANIEL: And speaking of patronisation, this is a special bonus Patron episode. So if you’re listening this soon after it’s released, it’s because you are a Patron and thank you for supporting us. You are helping us do the work of bringing linguistics to everyone. And you’re helping us to make transcripts of these episodes. And if you’re listening a few months down the road because you’re not a Patron… well, thanks for being a listener! You’re helping to support the show as well. But if you can, if you can spare even $1 a month, then consider becoming a Patron. That’s patreon.com/becauselangpod.

BEN: Ya god damn Patreon shill.

DANIEL: Our live show is coming up for LingFest21. It’s on the first of May, 7pm Perth time or 11am UTC. If you’re a Patron, you can listen live. We are going to be having some great conflicts in semantics. We’ve already seen what happens when you turn the air conditioning down.

BEN: Do not even get me started. Now. We do not need to revisit this. Okay, we do not need to open this can of worms.

DANIEL: The whole show is basically getting Ben started. That’s the title of the show.

BEN: All Hedvig needs to do is say Spiderm’n over and over and we are there.

[LAUGHTER]

DANIEL: We are going to get a live audience to vote for the right answers. So if you are a Patron at any level, you can join us. So watch for announcements that way. And if you’re not a Patron, you can listen later.

HEDVIG: I like this idea of democracy in language use. It’s good

DANIEL: It’s just usage. Yeah.

HEDVIG: And some uses are more important than others ie., our Patrons.

DANIEL: Exactly. I mean, because who really counts?

BEN: Like a good western democrat, I believe in it insofar as it perfectly matches my values, and then I hate it.

KATE: Up to that point and no further.

DANIEL: Yup, that’s how it works. All right. Are we ready for some questions?

BEN: Yeah, let’s do it.

HEDVIG: Let’s go.

DANIEL: Okay. This one is from PharaohKatt on our Discord channel, “Do other dialects of English say too as choo, like a tube is a choob?” I am a toob sayer, but Ben you are a choob sayer.

BEN: Yeah, are you going to squeeze out the tube (choob) of toothpaste? Yep, I say it with a ch-.

DANIEL: Kate, I assume toob?

KATE: I… yeah, just toob. Yeah, I always associate with the glide in there as being a British accent. That’s like one of the markers for me is choob.

HEDVIG: Really?

DANIEL: Yeah.

BEN: Hedvig? Has Ste made you a choob gal?

HEDVIG: Well, so my English is not a very good example. I have a lot of friends who are linguists and they… like, we had some people for dinner recently. And one of them was like, looking at me fascinated me and said, “You sound very different from when I met you two weeks ago”. And it happens a lot. I meet people at conferences and they’re like, “You don’t sound the same like when last I met you”. And I’m like yeah, I’m around other people. And also, I mean recently I’ve been in lockdown with my husband to speak British English so you know whatever. I don’t know! I changed a lot. I think it, can we try and think of a naturalistic scenario? Can you ask me something and I can say the word.

DANIEL: Hey, Hedvig, I need to brush my teeth. Could… where’s the thing?

HEDVIG: The tube of toothpaste. Yeah, tyoo, tyoo.

BEN: Oh, it’s like it was like a midpoint.

DANIEL: It’s almost halfway. Tyube.

HEDVIG: I’m gonna get the tyube. Tube today, like if you’re in London and you’re getting an underground. Tube (tyoob) tube (choob)

KATE: So it’s got the glide, but maybe not the…

BEN: Out of interest, if you wanted to direct me to a really good online video, what website we usually do that to?

HEDVIG: YouTube (toob). YouTube. Yeah…

BEN: Yeah, see, it’s more of the T, it’s more of the T.

HEDVIG: More of the T, definitely. YouTube (toob) not YouTube (choob). Oh wait, no, I can do that too!

KATE: But then there is a glide, though. She has the glide after the T still, the Y.

BEN: Hedvig, if you were a superhero, your superhero name would be Ms Fungible.

DANIEL: There’s that word again. So are we saying that Hedvig is tyoob, but not quite all the way to choob?

KATE: Right. That’s what I would say.

DANIEL: Palatalised a little bit, but not like so far that it’s pulling the T into that CH sound.

HEDVIG: I feel like YouTube is a different. YouTube is a different word.

KATE: Well, you might hear other people say that as a unit. So then you might mirror how they say it. So we hear a lot of Americans saying YouTube, you know, the, you might just be mirroring that specific one.

HEDVIG: Yeah, I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube lately.

DANIEL: Yeah, I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube as well.

HEDVIG: I’ve been watching a lot of meta YouTube commentary where people talk about YouTube, on YouTube. So I hear the word YouTube a lot.

BEN: So okay, so it’s British and Australian. And I’m presuming probably Kiwi as well, because they’re all kind of a similar constellation of like English accents, the English dialects. Would there be any others? Do we think? Ooh! Ooh! What about a Bostonian?

HEDVIG: Canada.

KATE: No, no, no Boston. I’m outside Boston. [INDICATES] That’s a Patriots Jersey right there.

HEDVIG: The only thing I know about Boston is coffee (caw-fee). Right?

KATE: No, no, that’s New York. That’s New York. We don’t say coffee (caw-fe), we say coffee (ca-fee).

HEDVIG: Oh right, coffee (ca-fee), sorry.

BEN: Exactly.

KATE: Yeah, we don’t say coffee (caw-fee), that’s New York.

BEN: Because the Bostonians have dropped the rhotive r, right? Because in my head I’ve associated them with like the most British of the American accents.

KATE: Non-rhotic. So Bostonians do like to pretend that that’s why there’s a non-rhotic accent in southeastern New England, but that’s, but the same thing is said of like Virginia, they think that they sound like that because of Britain. So it’s really anyone’s guess. But no, we definitely don’t have Rs. I’ve met people who never sent an R in their life. Not an intervocalic R, never.

BEN: Like me.

DANIEL: This is something called yod dropping or yod coalescence, depending on whether you’re saying it or whether you’re not. And this is a continuum, because every variety of English is somewhere on this spectrum of keeping the yods or dropping the yods, and it’s not uniform. In Australia we keep some and drop others so we get: We’re in the nude (nood), but we read the news (nyewz), and we play a tune (choon) and we look very cute (kyoot). In my variety of Pacific Northwest US English we dropped more of the yods; we get nude (nood), we read the news (nooz), we play a tune (toon), but we look very cute (kyoot)

HEDVIG: You play a tune (toon)?

DANIEL: We play a tune (toon).

KATE: Yeah, not tune (tyoon).

BEN: Whereas in Australia, if a banger comes on: TUNE (CHOOON)!!!

DANIEL: CHOOON. In East Anglia, England, they drop them all. They get nude (nood), they read the news (nooz), they play a tune (toon) and they look very cute (koot).

HEDVIG: Cute (Koot)!?! What?

KATE: I love all dialects the same but like, not a fan of cute (koot).

DANIEL: Not that one.

BEN: I was just about to say the same thing. I’m like, I know that like everyone is created equal, but I don’t care for that at all.

KATE: Very hypocritical here, but I don’t… that one doesn’t pass.

DANIEL: Well, okay. Who’s the actor that plays Wolverine?

BEN: Hugh (hyu) Jackman

HEDVIG: Hugh (hyu) Jackman

KATE: Hugh (hyu)

DANIEL: In East Anglia, he’s Hugh (hoo) Jackman.

[LAUGHTER]

HEDVIG: That’s bizarre.

DANIEL: I’m serious.

HEDVIG: Is this the same people who say, who say white [hwɑit]?

DANIEL: I don’t know if they say that.

HEDVIG: I have a friend who says which [hwɪt͡ʃ]. Which one do you mean? Why?

BEN: I always thought that was like one of those bizarre artifacts of like royal Queen-y English, like [STEWIE VOICE] Which one do you think it is? That sort of stuff.

KATE: I definitely know, like, older southerners in the US.

DANIEL: So taking it back to PharaohKatt’s question. Here’s the big list of everyone who says CHOOB instead of TUBE. So this is in Scotland, in Darby. Could be it occurs many places in England and then Canada, and also Australia and New Zealand, and South Africa.

BEN: I’m surprised that [SINGING] Oh, Canada! is on there.

KATE: All of Canada? Or like… this feels odd.

BEN: Surely not.

DANIEL: Let’s see. Glenn says it is in the province of Newfoundland. And along the middle border from Thunder Bay to Saskatchewan, where it is rather common according to Wells 1980.

BEN: There you go!

HEDVIG: Interesting. Thunder Bay. I was in Winnipeg for a while, and people would think that I was a native speaker of English, but they couldn’t place where I was from. And I quickly found out, because my roommate was from Thunder Bay, that very few Canadians know what Thunder Bay people sound like. So I just said it was from there. And they bought it. It was great. To just be like: Oh, I’m from Thunder Bay, they’d be like: Okay.

BEN: Welcome, eh?

DANIEL: So apparently the choob thing is even on the rise in RP, Received Pronunciation.

KATE: I very much associate it with British English, which apparently is like… there’s, like, three neighborhoods that have it. But yeah, maybe that’s why.

HEDVIG: You know, speaking of royal English, isn’t it going to be so interesting now when Harry and Megan are trying to become American celebrities, what’s going to happen to Harry’s speaking?

BEN: I feel like “so interesting” is probably an exaggeration, but mildly interesting? I could go there. I can meet you at mildly interesting.

KATE: It’s gonna be interesting to see the, like, a direct royal line. Like, his kids not sounding British. I don’t think, that’s going be…

HEDVIG: Thank you, Kate, it is interesting. It’s like The Royals, it’s like what all of them are, like, centered around.

KATE: Yeah, I do think it’s interesting that one of them is gonna sound American or Canadian. I think that’s going to be kind of weird for the royal family.

HEDVIG: Yeah.

DANIEL: So just to finish up. Ben, in previous episodes, we have mentioned how we feel about people who say APPRECIATE (a-pree-cee-ate) versus APPRECIATE (a-pree-shee-ate).

BEN: [SEETHING]

DANIEL: But remember, this is just a case of yod dropping. Some people drop the yod, some people keep the yod.

BEN: Is it, Daniel? Or is it a really intense form of bougie dog-whistling so you sound smarter than you are?

KATE: There are people who have very strong opinions about the yod dropping. I mean, I’ve definitely had some, as a Layman’s Linguist. I’ve heard some layman’s opinions on that yod.

BEN: Just to be clear, as well, I was only talking about the APPRECIATE (a-pree-cee-ate) APPRECIATE (a-pree-shee-ate) device. None of the other stuff.

DANIEL: What about VISUAL (vi-zhu-al) versus VISUAL (vi-zu-al)?

BEN: That I don’t care about as much. That’s just weird, like whatever. You do you.

HEDVIG: What about the thing? What about issue (i-shoo) and tissue (ti-shoo)?

DANIEL: Issue (i-soo).

HEDVIG: Like issue (i-soo) and tissue (ti-soo)? Ugh, so weird.

KATE: I’m a fan.

BEN: So for me, that’s all just fine. That’s like, that’s variation.

KATE: It’s just the one?

BEN: It’s the APPRECIATE (a-pree-cee-ate) thing that I always see specifically politicians and principals of schools doing, even though I have met them in real life and they don’t say it that way!

KATE: It’s put upon.

DANIEL: I think we got evidence of affectation.

BEN: Oh, I’ve got I’ve got receipts, buddy!

DANIEL: Let’s go on to our next one. Also from PharaohKatt on our Discord channel, “When did people start using contractions like DON’T and WON’T? In period shows like Bridgerton…” — Oh, somebody’s been watching Bridgerton! — “…they use very precise speech e.g. DO NOT. Is this a class thing? When did contractions become common and normal?” Anybody?

BEN: That is a dope question, PharaohKatt.

KATE: The first thing I thought of when I read this question was that it is still very – at least in American schools – it’s still very, very frowned upon in like essay writing in really any formal setting. But yeah, I don’t think I used a contraction for four years in college. So you know, it always takes a much longer time to convince the written language that something is changing. It is a spoken language. So I’m sure that I don’t know what decade that really made the leap. But I’m sure that that is simply just a relic of that proper intelligent, formal speech. Should it be? Now it’s really just apparent in our writing.

HEDVIG: Yeah, I had to remove all the contractions from my PhD thesis. My supervisors are like: Now you know, it’s easy with some of them because you can just go like replace all don’t with do not

BEN: WON’T turns into WILL NOT.

HEDVIG: But yeah, it was an especially I feel like it’s, hmmm, I feel like there’s different degrees of which contractions are considered good and bad?

KATE: Y’ALL and AIN’T are certainly down at the bottom of the barrel. It’s my favourites.

BEN: Did you have any triple bangers? Did you have like, SHOULDN’T’VE or something?

KATE: Oh, I say Y’ALL’D’VE all the time.

DANIEL: Y’ALL’D’VE!

KATE: Y’all’d’ve done that.

HEDVIG: Y’all’d’ve done that, okay, yeah. Cool. I like that

DANIEL: I’m taking a Bridgerton and it has for example, this was in Episode Three. “How am I to find a proper husband if I do not even know what I am to be searching for?” Wow.

HEDVIG: Oof.

KATE: That’s the worst.

DANIEL: Yeah, that’s fun.

BEN: So do we have a bit of the straight dope on this?

DANIEL: I’ve got some dope, but what do you find? Anybody got any truths to drop on me?

BEN: I’m gonna guess as the layman layman. That this in terms of speech is way old. Like, we’ve been saying… certain members of English have been using contractions for a very long time.

HEDVIG: Shakespeare!

DANIEL: Okay. Okay. I am going to drop a year on you. A year span. Can you tell me what might be, what years might be on either end of that span?

HEDVIG: I think the earliest examples of this in written are going to be like some of the earliest examples of written English.

BEN: Yeah, I agree. Okay, like Shakespeare is like Early Modern English, right? So and there has to be a bunch in there.

HEDVIG: Maybe not King James Bible, but like not not too soon after.

DANIEL: So you think, Hedvig, that we’re gonna see like maybe pre-1600, because King James’ Bible is 1611. So 1600 on the not-contraction side and then maybe like 16 something on the other side?

HEDVIG: Sure.

DANIEL: Okay, any other guesses?

BEN: I reckon, I’m gonna go older. I reckon before English looked like English. I reckon there’s like contractions in Beowulf and shit like that.

KATE: Yeah. As the existence of contractions in written English, pretty far back. But as far as them being accepted and common? I think it’ll be a little bit later than that. But as far as Yeah, this existence of one, sure

DANIEL: Well, here’s what we got. So I’m looking at DON’T and WON’T and CAN’T and COULDN’T. And I found that they all switched in writing from not contracted to contracted about the same time. Right around 1670.

KATE: Oh, wow.

HEDVIG: See? See?

KATE: Nice, nice.

DANIEL: So Shakespeare was largely uncontracted.

BEN: Really?

DANIEL: Yeah. Dryden was really contracted, like we start seeing WON’T in 1710, we see CAN’T around 1721. So back pretty late for some of these. DON’T 1704 and couldn’t right around by the 16th 17th. So something was going on in that period from like, 1670 to about 1710 because all the contractions are popping up.

HEDVIG: But hey, wait. There’s a separate thing here, which is like, we don’t know how long do-support, so using DO like that might have also not been a thing. Because didn’t we? We looked up before this funny thing English did for a while with negative prefixes, like “I nam British” I’m not British.

DANIEL: Oh, I amn’t?

HEDVIG: So it could be specifically that the “do” are, you know, a bit special? Maybe?

BEN: And then there’s also the idea of like, is this only entering English simultaneous to a period in, like, romance literature, when people actually start writing naturalistic speech?

KATE: Well, it’s also when people started having more access to writing. Like, you didn’t necessarily have to be a member of academia or the church or, like, you could just like, be a guy who wants to publish a pamphlet, like that was, pamphlets were big.

BEN: You didn’t have to be the firstborn son of the Earl of Leicester or whatever.

KATE: Yeah, throw something on the printing press real quick.

DANIEL: That is an interesting point. Because the emergence of the novel, especially Jane Austen… because remember, Bridgerton is supposed to take place about 1813. And yet they speak like they’re from the 1600s. And I, you know, why do we have this idea that by 1813 they were still speaking uncontracted, when these contractions came in, in the 1700s? And then I thought: well, let’s just take a look at Jane Austen. Let’s take a look at Pride and Prejudice, which by the way, was published in 1813, and start counting up contractions. So I AM occurs 303 times, whereas I’M occurs one time.

KATE: Wow.

BEN: Wow

DANIEL: And it’s Lydia, which you know, it would be, wouldn’t it?

KATE: Of course. Oh Lydia!

[LAUGHING]

BEN: I love… I love how you are basically a Sex in the City fanboy, but for Jane Austen. ~Oh, that’s so Lydia!~

DANIEL: That’s so Lydia! Well, she was the young one, right? I mean, she would be, she would be the one. DO NOT occurs in Pride and Prejudice 137 times, whereas DON’T occurs only six times. WILL NOT occurs 73 times and WON’T occurs once.

BEN: Were these other ones coded to low class characters, out of interest?

DANIEL: Not always.

KATE: I wonder if a lot of that is because of coding for your audience, which is, look, these people are fancy. So they don’t use contractions, like, not because it’s realistic, but because it is shorthand for the audience to understand that like, these are educated people, just so you know.

BEN: It’s just like APPRECIATE (a-pree-cee-ate)!

KATE: Right. So you don’t have to say it in so many words. Look, they’re not using contractions. So they’re fancy.

DANIEL: Yeah, I think you’re right. I think the long forms stick around, they seem to stick around longer than they really did because they were frowned upon in books, just like you say, Kate. It was only later that writers like Mark Twain and Charles Dickens would try to write characters the way they really sounded. That was kind of a new thing.

KATE: Naturalistic.

HEDVIG: I would also be a very bad Trekk-y if I didn’t mention that the main way you can tell apart Data and Lore is that Lore is able to use contractions.

BEN: Could you run that one past me again?

HEDVIG: In Star Trek, the next generation, there is an android called Data.

BEN: Oh! Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, I didn’t hear the Data bit. I only heard law and I thought you’re talking about like legalese from like the 1600s. And I was like: Okay, this is a pretty bespoke reference, but I’m there for it.

HEDVIG: Basically for those that haven’t watched Star Trek, there are two characters that look the same, but one is like a bit evil. And the one who’s a bit evil is also a bit more socially intelligent, maybe is the word?

KATE: More human.

HEDVIG: He can like, lie, and understand humour, and stuff like that. Whereas Data is desperately trying to become human. And one of the ways you can tell them apart is that Lore can use contractions. So whenever Lore pretends to be Data, you can spot him if he uses any contractions.

BEN: It’s also how you know Captain Raymond Holt is under stress or in trouble.

[LAUGHTER]

KATE: That’s right.

HEDVIG: Yeah, that’s true.

BEN: Finger on the pulse, finger on the pulse guys. Me and pop culture are like this!

DANIEL: I’m gonna… What an interesting device though, that a writer can use. Let’s move on to our next question from Steele on Discord: “Does anyone think Yiddish would have made more of a comeback after World War II but got displaced by Hebrew among its own potential base when Israel started?”

HEDVIG: Well, so I’ve been looking a little bit into this. Or rather, I happen to have an acquaintance who wrote a paper before. Because Yiddish actually lives on, in a way, in Hebrew? So because a lot of the people who learned and planned and revitalised Modern Hebrew were often Yiddish speakers, you can see traces of Yiddish in modern Hebrew, particularly in the phonology. But my understanding is this…

BEN: Like an unavoidable cross pollination kind of thing? Like, if a bunch of people are making a language, then they’re gonna bring their own stuff.

HEDVIG: And it’s not only that, and also a very large majority of the people who were learning Hebrew — or not, maybe, a majority — but a lot of people had Yiddish as their first language. So it makes some sort of sense. Maybe we should also briefly say what Yiddish is. So Yiddish is a West Germanic language. So it is an Indo-European language of the Germanic branch, and it was, and is still mainly spoken by Jewish people in Eastern Europe and also in Germany. And as the question asker is implying here, a lot of speakers didn’t live to see the end of World War II. In fact, I looked up, it’s about 85% of the people who were in concentration camps or something like that, were Yiddish speakers. So it’s an intense slaughter, in lack of a better word.

DANIEL: Well, yeah. Before the Holocaust, there were about 11 million Yiddish speakers. And after that many, many fewer.

HEDVIG: Yeah. Yiddish does still live on in several places, including, as far as I understand, in America in Hasidic communities.

KATE: Yes. I went to school with a large Jewish population, and especially their grandparents, who many of them had immigrated during that time, I mean, they were born in, like, the ’20s. They knew Yiddish. I mean, fluidly. It wasn’t… you know, I picked up, just as an Irish Catholic kid, I picked up a handful of Yiddish words I didn’t even realise weren’t common in other parts of the country. Yeah, ’cause it’s, it’s very, very common in certain areas. Like, the east side of Providence, you definitely hear people’s grandparents speaking it.

HEDVIG: Oh, cool.

DANIEL: One of the great experiences for this show was going to New York City and talking to Zalman Mlotek and Motl Didner, part of the creative team that brought Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish on Broadway.

KATE: That’s awesome.

DANIEL: I went to their office, and Zalman is the older man. And his parents were part just just holding on to Yiddish. And Motl expressed his gratitude to families like those of Zalman who held on to it so that there would be something to come back to.

KATE: That’s really sweet.

DANIEL: It was very moving. Um, there’s a weird side that I found. I found this essay by Elizabeth Freeburg of Yale. It’s called “The cost of revival: the role of Hebrew in Jewish language endangerment”. There’s a link on our blog, becauselanguage.com. This is her undergrad assignment, so I don’t want to hang too much on it. Please do not dig up my undergrad assignments. [LAUGHTER] But Claire Bowern was the supervisor. So it’s a really interesting read. And what I found was kind of surprising. I expected competition, right? I was like: oh, Yiddish is coming up, oh, but wait, Hebrews coming up too, too bad for Yiddish. But what I didn’t expect, and what was mentioned in this article, was the overt hostility that Hebrew revitalisers had towards Yiddish. Absolutely fiery hostility. They actively tried to suppress it, along with minority languages like Ladino and Karaim. And they didn’t like Yiddish, because it was number one, the language of the diaspora. Number two, it was like, it was super European. It didn’t seem to them, like authentic. So as Hebrew succeeded, it was a minority language that was being revitalised. But it also kind of was a majoritarian language that endangered other languages. Yiddish, for example, it was stigmatised by the Israeli government. When there were Yiddish plays and things, they were broken up by Hebrew speaking protesters, and the people were, the audience members were harassed. This is a quote, “Rabbis preach that Yiddish was treif, or non kosher. One rabbi is recorded the saying that Yiddish was more treif than pork.”

KATE: Wow. Wow.

DANIEL: So that was going on.

HEDVIG: That’s how important language is to nation-state building. I mean, it’s a bit of a special example in the case of Israel because they built a nation state and revitalised the language in quite a short amount of time. But if you look at larger timescales and nation-states that build up elsewhere having a language of standardising and and punishing variation and exterminating variation and other languages spoken within your realm is the thing nation-states do. That’s part of the idea.

BEN: But then how do countries like Switzerland and stuff just like casually rock three majority languages?

HEDVIG: That’s a good question. I actually had, I was talking to a Swiss friend of mine recently and she says something that’s a bit anti that. Because the Swiss apparently value diversity a lot. I believe their national motto is “one for all, all for one” or something. But it’s the idea of plurality.

KATE: Musketeers?

BEN: Shamelessly cribbed, but okay.

HEDVIG: I know, I know. But so they… Switzerland is made up of lots of cantons. And in each canton, usually you speak majority French or German, or Swiss German and you speak of different dialects. And she said that when you move to a new place, so she had moved from Bern to Zurich, you shouldn’t switch, you shouldn’t accommodate. So she kept speaking Bern Swiss German in Zurich, and even Zurich speakers there would not like it if she conformed to them. Like, everyone should stay… everyone should stay…

BEN: Almost like enforced diversity. Right? Like, stay diverse. Don’t mould yourself.

HEDVIG: Yeah, and she also said a part, a big part of being Swiss is the idea that they’re only Switzerland and Swiss out of choice. It’s not something they’re forced to. So like, if a conton ever wanted to go like Liechtenstein and, like, break away, that should at least theoretically, like, be possible. There’s supposed to be, like, a collection of little states, not a state. That’s quite an unusual case, I think definitely. Unusual.

BEN: Good old Ben, bringing the edge case into the middle.

HEDVIG: There are other places, like Vanuatu, who has as their national motto, I believe “Strength in Diversity” or “Strength in… Strength in Plurality”. So there are other places that are a bit like this.

DANIEL: Well, I guess it’s worth taking a look at places where there’s solid language diverse… I’m sure this has been done. But like politically, when there’s more than one official language, how did they do it? Like, what are the motivations? How strong are the languages? Yeah, because sometimes you get people… you get countries where they say this is also an official language. And it’s not spoken by a lot of people, but it’s culturally very important.

KATE: Well, if it’s an indigenous language often. So for a lot of it, it’s just showing respect, I think, too. I mean, America, for instance, doesn’t have an official language but you know, you tell about half my country that.

BEN: Yeah, it doesn’t… Just like Australia.

KATE: They have some opinions about that. But I think for a lot of them it’s especially, I’ve seen in Africa, a lot of countries in Africa because they just got completely bulldozed linguistically in pretty much every other way by European countries and colonisers, that just because the majority of their country speaks French or English, I can see why they have retroactively said also these very important Indigenous languages are still very much spoken by the people.

BEN: Where does India sit these days? Five, six official languages?

HEDVIG: They also have different official languages for state levels. So states within the Inda??? can have more or less as well.

BEN: Exactly. So it’d be interesting… I know, I think is Gujarat has at least four that is officially supported by, like, the state or the province government. So I reckon India would be a great place to measure that stuff.

HEDVIG: When I was in Canada, as well, I was in Winnipeg, which is Manitoba, which has the largest French speaking population outside of Quebec. And there are some rules that say that you should be able to speak French in official business. There was a man who was famous for consistently, like, refusing to pay parking tickets unless he could get them in French and stuff like that. But it was clear that that was in, you know, most people were just submitting to English I think most of the time.

BEN: What are…? Can you guys… one of the three other linguists currently on the show with me will be able to pick this. There is a very famous book, which I believe got turned into a movie about a Chinese or Japanese man who falls in love with Irish culture and the Irish language, not English, but like Celtic Irish, and teaches himself it and then goes to Ireland having read like this one book, expecting, as a bilingual Irish Japanese speaker or something, expecting to find a country full of people who can speak Irish and no one can. Does anyone know the book I’m talking about?

KATE: That sounds so familiar.

HEDVIG: It’s really interesting.

BEN: I was once told about it by an Irish poet who is, like… it’s basically like a book for Irish people about how maybe we should be a little bit more into our language. I would love to… I would love to track it down. So if anyone is listening and knows what the hell ??? talking about, could you please get in touch? Because it has been borrowed in my head for like 11 years.

HEDVIG: I have a friend who works in, like, anthropology and comparing Jamaican music industry to Korea. And she gave me an example of a Jamaican music artist ??? came to Australia and thought that — I don’t know how — but he thought that Australia was majority, brown Indigenous people. So he was really happy that his music was popular there and expected to go and play a show to a bunch of not white people and turned up and had a full room of majority Anglo Australians and was really, really confused.

DANIEL: Crushed.

HEDVIG: But I like the idea that he lived for a while in the world where…

BEN: I was just thinking that as well. Like, what a beautiful world inside his head that he got to live where, like, the majority of Australia was the Indigenous inhabitants who, like, wasn’t awfully sort of murdered and brutalised by white colonisers. Just for a second, that happened in his head, and that’s really lovely.

DANIEL: Let’s keep going with the theme of bilingualism with this email from Theresa. She emailed us, hello@becauselanguage.com. Theresa says, “Huge fan and longtime listener.” Thanks, Theresa. “Way back on the discussion of bilingual advantages” — that was Episode 4 with Iryna Khodos — “I had some questions about the overlap of second language learning, and language delay or impairment. As a speech language pathologist, I have to evaluate students of all language backgrounds for a language disability. And sometimes this includes English language learners. Obviously, no two bilinguals are the same. And this makes standardised testing, even bilingual standardised testing near impossible. Many bilingual children have difficulty with syntax. How can you tell if this is a normal step on their bilingual journey, or an indicator of a language impairment? What about parents who are using their second language to speak to their children, when they are not completely fluent in it? Could that cause their children to learn broken English — hate to use that term, can we think of something better? — Thanks for the great show.”

KATE: I will say, as far as a parent who is teaching their second language to their child, no, their child will not learn their quote unquote – and I’m using big air quotes here – “broken English”. They will fill in the gaps, especially if their peers speak that second language. If, for instance, their parents are immigrants, and they are in the country that has that as their first language, all those gaps will be filled in, they absolutely won’t have any problem with their language whatsoever. So that part, that was probably the easiest answer of the question.

BEN: I see what you’re doing here! You’re just plucking the low hanging fruit!

DANIEL: And, you know, we have talked about hearing parents who sign. They’re learning Auslan or ASL or whatever themselves, but their input is still good enough for Deaf kids under five. There’s no vocabulary impairment. That wasn’t syntax, it was vocabulary. But still.

KATE: It’s still important that they have peers and educators who are also reinforcing that second language, especially for signers. It’s that you need to have the input around them. It doesn’t necessarily have to be their parent, right? Their caretaker.

HEDVIG: Besides the problem of standardised test for bilinguals, I wonder also how it works cross culturally? Like, a lot of these standardised tests assume certain things about, like, social roles and things about like… a strange adult that you haven’t met before comes into a room and asks you questions. I’m sure this is something speech pathologists talk about, but I’m imagining that that might be more of an issue with bilingual children than monolingual children, where you might know to expect what kind of social settings would be.

KATE: Especially considering their other experiences. If other people who have been, say, English speakers come into their lives and ask them questions, that might have been a threatening experience for that kid before. It’s not always a positive experience to have this ????says bilingual specific experiences.

HEDVIG: And I wonder, I mean, I’m not a speech pathologist. I’ve never studied it. But I’m guessing… a thing that I’ve heard many times that is, like, kids can have various sort of delays or gaps, but usually, by the time they’re a certain age it evens out.

KATE: It evens out.

HEDVIG: So you shouldn’t freak out too early if something takes a longer time or something. And I’m guessing this is something speech pathologists are trying to detect if, like, what is a quote unquote, “normal” delay and like reasonable and possible to catch up with, and what is something that you’d actually need extra support for? I don’t know how you do that.

DANIEL: Yeah, I’m noticing this FAQ from Antonella Sorace and Bob Ladd for the LSA. They say “bilingual development sometimes results in slightly slower language development than for some monolingual children. Our older child was still saying things like ‘where you are’, instead of ‘where are you’ in English at four and a half. This is a normal developmental stage for monolingual English children, but they usually figure out that they have to say, where are you by the time they’re three or four, our older child just took a little longer.” So expect some mixing.

KATE: Yeah. And they will reach that, though. That’s what people are kind of worried, like, okay, so yeah, I guess if you want to call it a delay, then yes, a bilingual or even trilingual child might take a little longer to reach those milestones, but they will be reached. And they will, you know, given the right amount of input in both those languages. There’ll be perfectly fine, fluent speakers by the end of it all.

HEDVIG: Maybe that’s a good way of putting it as well. If it’s just about inputs. If you’re actually hearing more than one language, or hearing about the same amount of utterances, you’re actually getting a little bit less input for each of those languages.

KATE: Sure.

DANIEL: And I don’t know if I can say authoritatively that here are the warning signs that you should watch for if there is a real problem. I do not know what those could be. And I invite any syntacticians among the speech language pathology folks to give us any guides that they might have.

Let’s go on to one from Anne who emailed us hello@becauselanguage.com, “Something has been rattling around my head and it clicked when I listened to the ‘Swearin’ Time’ Episode. Specifically, Daniel said that reasoning with people who believe The Big Lie” — that that Trump won the election and it was stolen — “reasoning with them is ineffective because it’s like being part of a faith community and they turned to each other to reinforce their beliefs. I’m not religious, but I used to hear a Christian radio broadcaster talk about apologetics, which as far as I understand, is a formalised or codified body of argumentation and evidence that he would use to convince somebody that his faith is true. This is what I think of when I hear people bring up all of the fake evidence of voter fraud; suitcases full of votes, the Dominion machines, the algorithm broke and so on. My questions are number one, can we apply the word apologetics to cults or non religious beliefs? Or is it specifically a Christian thing? Number two, is the word related to APOLOGY. And if so, which came first?” This is from Anne, describing herself as ‘Not a Trump Supporter’.

HEDVIG: Can I ask, because I wasn’t sure I understood the example. So there was a Christian radio broadcaster, who used the term APOLOGETICS for a bunch of quote unquote, excuses or like arguments for keeping to a particular faith that is being questioned?

KATE: It’s commonly related to apologists. So if you hear of, like, such and such apologist, it’s making excuses for why that was acceptable or normal or good. And apologetics is specifically religious, but often related to that idea of an apologist.

HEDVIG: So… but I’m confused about the fact that it was a Christian broadcaster who was then critiquing other?

KATE: It’s usually about Christianity. In my experience, I’m going to say that with a veil question mark over it? But it’s… Yeah, it’s used, I’ve heard it in terms of any religious theology, but it’s almost always in relation to Christianity. It wasn’t originally, but apologetics and apologists in that setting are usually Christian. Okay.

DANIEL: Yeah, I used to have a book club with some Christian… they turned out to be pastors. So there was me and some other atheists, and then these Christian pastors, and we would talk about the Bible and stuff. And it was interesting for a while, but they didn’t mind referring to themselves as apologists.

HEDVIG: That’s the thing I don’t understand, because to me, it sounds negative. It sounds really, really negative.

KATE: It’s not necessarily negative.

HEDVIG: Because when you apologise for something, it’s because you did something wrong. Right?

KATE: Outside the Christian usage, I have almost always heard it have a negative connotation, but it’s within the theological circles within the Christian circles, where it seems to be just just a term that’s not necessarily as loaded.

HEDVIG: Wow.

BEN: Is this like some crazy Nietzsche, like ressentiment response type shit where the Christians have just been like: Not only are we apologists, we’re now going to reformulate that to be a core identity, and we’ll do it better than you.

DANIEL: We are unapologetic apologists.

KATE: I know it comes from the legal term in Greek It was, apologists was just I believe the defense.

DANIEL: That’s it.

KATE: Yeah, it wasn’t… when it was originally coined for Christians, it didn’t have that negative connotation yet, and then it gained the negative connotation outside of Christians.

HEDVIG: Because aren’t Christians of all branches quite into like Latin and Greek etymology? Like, I…

DANIEL: [GROANS]

KATE: Well, Catholics had to be, because Catholics until like, when I was a kid, they finally started allowing mass in English, but you weren’t allowed to go, you weren’t allowed to say Catholic mass in English until just a few years ago. So that’s why you get things like SINISTER just means left in Latin, but the left hand of God was like the bad one. So like, you get these little things were, like… yeah, because you literally just listened to Latin all day on Sunday. That’s all you had.

HEDVIG: So interesting you get borrowings from an ancient language. When I went to Samoa, I stayed with a Methodist pastor, who has since passed. And when he found out I was a linguist, he was very interested because in theology school he had learned about like, Greek and stuff. And he wanted to talk about ancient Greek tense constructions and whatever. And I went to a Assembly of God…

BEN: To which you’re like: Sure…

HEDVIG: Yeah, I was also like: This isn’t really what I do, but sure, okay, okay, fine. All about these ancient, you know, migrations in the Middle East, like 3000 years ago, people movements into it.

KATE: Yeah, they’re so into it.

HEDVIG: And yeah, I went to an Assembly of God, some Sunday school in Samoa where the most of the school was about Greek articles. And whether or not their God is THE word or A word.

KATE: Yeah, the translations for the Septuagint especially, people are like: Well, that wasn’t right. You know, that’s why you get to include… oh yeah, that’s big in theology school.

HEDVIG: Oh, yeah, that’s so interesting! It was, yeah. It’s just ancient Greek. Very interesting.

KATE: They’re very into it. Yeah.

DANIEL: Yep. Kate, I’m curious if you… would you mind telling us how you know all these things?

KATE: [LAUGHS] So I, as someone who never went to church, probably the only non-baptised Irish person in Rhode Island, I just thought it, like, objectively fascinating. My cousin, who is deeply Catholic, got me a Bible for Christmas when we were kids. And then she got mad, the next Christmas, I saw her and I was like: Okay, so I really liked the part with the dragon. She’s like: No, you’re not supposed to sit down and read it. That’s what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to get lessons. It’s like: No, hear me out. There’s a dragon!

BEN: You went straight to the Lutheran interpretation. You were like: This is all personal, baby. I am just cover to cover on this bad boy and I will take out any bits I want.

KATE: Yeah, I told her the New Testament was kind of boring. And she there were ??? But I did also study Latin and Greek and things like that. I found really interesting about the, you know, a mistranslation here and there in the Septuagint. And can really just throw your entire faith up. And I just found that kind of fascinating.

HEDVIG: And where you place??? commerce, right, this whole thing?

KATE: Yeah, it really matters.

HEDVIG: Really, really matter. There’s something about, specifically… oh god, I can’t remember. There’s a Catholic partisan divide about some comma placements regarding Jesus’s crucification.

BEN: Hey, hey, like, that company in the states had to pay millions of dollars because of the Oxford comma. Like, these things matter, all right? These things have real world consequences. PS: Oxford commas are amazing, and I stand by them.

DANIEL: So just to summarise Anne’s question: Yes, you can use the term APOLOGIST for non-Christian things. For example, there’s a lot of Google hits for “Trump apologist”, for example. And yes, the two words are related. The ‘defense’ meaning comes about the late early 1400s. And the ‘sorry’ apology wouldn’t come around until the 1590s. And they’re probably related. Because when you make a defense, you’re explaining the fault. But then if your defense breaks down, then you accept responsibility for the fault. So that’s how those two meanings of APOLOGY are, in fact, related.

HEDVIG: Interesting.

BEN: That’s a good question. I like that.

HEDVIG: I’m interested to know if… because I definitely had the negative interpretation the first time around. So to the idea that people would describe themselves as it in a sort of neutral way is bonkers to me.

DANIEL: I thought it was interesting.

BEN: Well, I mean, it’s not all that different from RHETORIC and RHETORICAL, right? The lay person or the like, the common understanding of like, a rhetorical question is a question that doesn’t really need an answer. Whereas rhetoric and rhetorical language usage is like way more ancient, and has like a whole like field of study around this kind of stuff.

DANIEL: Yeah, somebody could study rhetoric, but if you say he’s only interested in rhetoric, or the rhetoric coming out of the White House or something.

KATE: Yeah, I think Plato even wrote up a whole collection of essays called Apologia. Like, I mean, that was, yeah, that’s a… that was a very, like, they very much studied that and it was very much I guess, neutral. Yeah. I mean, it was definitely an area of study.

DANIEL: Great question, Anne, thanks. Our last question comes from Austin, via email hello@becauselanguage.com. “I’m a new listener, so apologies if this or anything like it has been covered before. But as someone who also grew up Mormon or a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, to get into a whole ‘nother linguistic controversy. I had a question for Daniel: Did linguistics play any part in your decision to leave the Mormon faith?”

HEDVIG: That is a good question.

BEN: Well, Daniel, let me start off with my opinion… No, I’m kidding!

HEDVIG: It is interesting how science can influence your life choices elsewhere. And the other way around. I was listening to some interviews by some evolutionary by??? ecologist who was saying that part of the reasons they asked the questions they did about what his heritage and what his culture was because they had a fundamental Marxist and materialistic understanding of the world, and it didn’t make sense to them that ideology would be born into you. So their political persuasion actually informed their science question that they asked. And the other way around should also be possible.

BEN: So Daniel, did linguistics help you just like set a fire to the, to the temple?

DANIEL: Yeah, two things. One was the Tower of Babel. With the story where God confounds the languages, because people tried to build a tower to heaven. It’s obviously a fable.

BEN: No heaven for you! [WHIPPING NOISE]

DANIEL: Ah! The Book of Mormon contains a bit about somebody who claimed to be there. And so you can’t really say it’s a metaphor, and still believe in the Book of Mormon. That was one thing where linguistically, it was clearly wrong. And yet everyone at Church believed it. And that was a big eye opener.

BEN: So is that sort of like your personal, like, personal version of, like, God buried dinosaur bones to test the non-believers kind of thing?

DANIEL: It was a real click moment when I realised that was wrong. Another one that came a little later was Isaiah. So this one takes a little bit of explanation.

BEN: Okay, I’m buckled in. I’m ready.

DANIEL: So the book of Isaiah is supposedly written by Isaiah. But because there are three distinct bits where they write differently and talk about different things, modern scholarship has figured out that there were probably three people who wrote all of it.

BEN: We did an episode about this, right? Like, someone put a computer on it, and basically the computer was like: Ah, here are the different authors.

DANIEL: I don’t know if the computer stuff worked out well. It was mostly just modern scholarship, but it’s been known for, like, 100 years.

BEN: Okay. Okay, well, somewhat modern scholarship. Like, modern only if you were using the 2000-year history of Christianity as your benchmark.

DANIEL: Yeah, well, kinda. So, in the Book of Mormon, which is the foundational text of Mormonism, there’s a character called Nephi, who loves to quote long passages of Isaiah from the Bible. And you could say that that’s because you had to fill up pages. But you could also say it’s because this, this writer was really into it. Okay. Now, this writer called Nephi wrote allegedly 600 BCE. That would have been the right time for the first Isaiah to have done his thing.

BEN: Okay, I gotcha.

DANIEL: But the second Isaiah and the third Isaiah wouldn’t have done any writing yet. So the question is, when Nephi quotes Isaiah in the Book of Mormon, does he only stick to the first Isaiah? Or does he accidentally — mistakenly — include stuff from the second and third Isaiah, which wouldn’t even have been written yet?

KATE: Because he wasn’t really… yeah, that’s interesting.

BEN: I’m gonna guess given that the Book of Mormon was laid down before 100 years ago, they pilfered from all three.

DANIEL: There’s all kinds of second Isaiah in the Book of Mormon. It’s an obvious mistake, and it shouldn’t be there. But there it is.

KATE: So it’s… because what I’ve heard from, from other former… so I used to manage a GameStop, where all of my employees were ex-Mormons. I don’t know why it worked out like that. But they told me it was all or nothing. It was that you had to believe the whole book, or you believe none of the book. So they, if I may ask, you know, kind of ask you that leading question was the fact that okay, well, that’s I don’t accept these two slices of this book then I guess the whole thing gets thrown out. You know?

DANIEL: Let me put it this way. Let’s say — and I’m borrowing this argument from Richard Packham — let’s say that I claim to have a letter that was written by George Washington on the eve of the Battle of the Potomac. And it says things like, you know, we’ve got our boats, the horses are ready. Our iPods are charged, let’s rock and roll.

KATE: It ruins the whole thing.

DANIEL: Even if there are facts in there that nobody knew, that nobody could have predicted, that one thing kills it. Okay, it’s a non-authenticat document. So that, those were two things. And then, of course, that the thing that other people have said is, why would God use language to communicate to humans? Which changes over time, which is imprecise, which is ambiguous, which needs to be translated to different languages. Why? That’s what humans would use. Why would God need to use that?

BEN: God would for sure use telepathy. Obviously.

KATE: For sure.

DANIEL: You would just know. Or something. I don’t know!

KATE: Or stone tablets by the burning bush. There’s a lot of options.

BEN: A series of, like, unendingly horrifying mental hellscapes because of course, their consciousness is so far beyond our own they just seem like pure terror all the time. Yeah.

DANIEL: I mean, I don’t know how to communicate ideas completely faithfully over time and regardless of language, but God knows. And God’s not doing it.

KATE: Yeah, he could probably piece it together.

DANIEL: So Austin, thanks for the question. I hope this answers… I hope this is what you wanted to hear. And if you want to tell me more about how language relates to your preservation of faith, I would be very interested to hear that too, because I like to hear… I still like to hear about Mormon stuff. Those are our questions.

HEDVIG: Yay!

BEN: Shall we…? Oh, that was a “yay”. I thought that was an “eh”.

HEDVIG: No, it was good questions. I think it was good questions. People are sending the questions down, Daniel did a good cull of the questions. I like it. And I think we had also unexpected moments for Kate to participate, which was great.

DANIEL: Yeah.

[INTERLUDE MUSIC]

BEN: Speaking of which, we need to move on to Word of the Week. And seeing as we’ve got a bonafide TikTok megastar, I’m gonna have to think that her sort of understanding of the ragged fringe of English language change is much better than all three of us combined.

KATE: You mean teenagers?

BEN: Because I’ve been on TikTok a little bit, and there is some weird fuckin’ shit going down on TikTok.

KATE: I didn’t even think to mine TikTok for my Word of the Week, that would have been brilliant. That would have been so much smarter than what I did.

BEN: Silly goose!

KATE: That’s an untapped resource. Because I did have to learn. Yeah, there’s a lot of — I guess for lack of a better term — a lot of slang that I’ve had to pick up to just like, get the comments, like at all.

HEDVIG: Like what?

KATE: Well, for instance, like, there’s right now, like, this is not a word. But it’s that little emoji, like: sparkle emoji, the star emoji like when you’re like mocking someone or something like that. You use that on either side of a word. Or just like: I am ✨depressed✨, and you have these stars on either side of depressed.

HEDVIG: I’ve seen that one! In YouTube comment sections.

KATE: Yes. So that I don’t think I don’t know where it originated. But where I saw it the most initially is TikTok, and I’ve like loved using it since then, too, because I’m just like, yeah, just add a little spice to whatever stupid thing you’re sayin.

BEN: God bless Gen Z, god bless ‘em.

HEDVIG: I thought it was referring to you know that that animation that I know is from, it’s from Reading Rainbow, whatever, the one that says “The More You Know”.

KATE: Oh yeah. So you can do it kind of like that. You can do it like very sarcastically. It’s kind of like people might use asterisks on either side. This is like just bringing that like, full force.

BEN: By the way, you have just found your Word of the Week.

DANIEL: Yeah, this is it.

BEN: You 100% just like, I was about to say sorry.

KATE: Okay, okay, can I do sparkly star emoji? Can ✨sparkly star emoji✨ be my Word of the Week?

DANIEL: Yes.

KATE: Then Sparkly Star Emoji is it. Done. Nailed it!

BEN: So just to be clear, as well, just so I have it through in my head. It’s basically a, like, a very contemporary version of a parenthetical statement. Right? Like, you’ll put it around a certain thing and depending on what you put it around…

KATE: You’ll put it around, but it’ll be like an emphasis. So a lot of times like it is very, it’s very tongue in cheek. So it’s usually like, either mocking yourself, or mocking the person who like that you’re kind of quoting. But there’s something very, it’s a very tongue in cheek sarcastic kind of usage. And it’s… Yeah, very funny to me.

DANIEL: Is it jazz hands?

KATE: Yeah, it can be quite… Yeah, I can see… I can see there being a parallel to jazz hands. I’ll find some good examples of it because it’s very like, you only use it like inappropriate settings, I have found to be the most impactful moments for that, for sure.

DANIEL: Okay! While we’re on the topic of paralinguistic internet stuff. There’s a new one that’s appeared in our Discord channel, from River. And that’s using strikeout as sotto voce voice. Like, I have never seen this before, [WHISPERS] but I have totally seen this before.

BEN: Oh, I didn’t know that was called sotto voce voice. That’s fun.

KATE: Well, there’s also that like, superscript. There’s kind of like the cousin of that strikeout. If you use superscript it’s like: I’m not really saying this.

HEDVIG: And then there’s the lots-and-lots-and-lots-of-diacritics kind. We talked about that before. That has. Yes. Oh my god. So hard to read.

DANIEL: Zalgo text.

HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s in the Sims as well. Yeah, that’s a good word.

DANIEL: Okay. Wow. Thank you very much for that word slash emoji usage of the week. This one was suggested by Diego: STIMMY. STIMMY.

HEDVIG: STIMMY.

BEN: This sounds… for an American one, for an American colloquialism, this sounds strangely Australian to me.

DANIEL: I thought so too.

KATE: I could see it, I’ve definitely heard this have some backlash too though. Like, for instance, this is one of… one of the ones that made me cringe a little bit. Was saying like, if you say the word STIMMY, then you definitely need a stimmy. For instance… so yeah, so like very, like… there’s been some judgmental backlash on that. But there’s still some ownership on the other side of the term, so…

BEN: I just got it. Sorry, that took me really quite a long time! I was like…

HEDVIG: Maybe you should say it out loud then.

BEN: Yeah. Is it an ableist thing? What’s going on here? And I was like, Oh, I get it! It’s classist douchery, got it.

KATE: Yeah, if you’re using a dialectal term, then you’re… then you’re broke. So… guilty as charged!

HEDVIG: So does someone want to say out loud what it means please for our listenership?

BEN: [LAUGHS] Yeah, true! Stimulus check.

HEDVIG: Yes.

KATE: Or stimulus package, yeah.

HEDVIG: Which is when the government gives lots of money to you so you go and spend the because the economy’s not doing good.

KATE: Well, “lots of” is relative, but yeah, ideally.

BEN: And I think you could also in America’s context be like: When the government gives you money so that you have food to eat.

KATE: Yes.

DANIEL: Suddenly we decided that a universal basic income was kind of plausible.

KATE: Yeah! Weird how…

BEN: It’s just like telecommuting to work. Apparently that thing that, like, all people who have families have wanted for, like, the last 20 years, and everyone was saying was way too hard and completely impossible… Turns out we could have done that overnight, the whole time!

DANIEL: Yeah. Hmm. Hmm. What else? Next one. ANECDATA. This one was suggested by Steele.

HEDVIG: Very good.

BEN: Ooh, I know this one!

DANIEL: I knew this one. But, because nobody knows everything, and there’s always 10,000 people who are encountering something for the first time today, this one’s for you. Steele says, “Can I throw ANECDATA into the Word of the Week pool? It’s anecdotal data. I like ANECDATA, because we’re in a world where there’s tons of formal research into different topics. And I think a lot of people are willing to accept that there are procedures for figuring out how things really are. But we all know that we prefer to hear anecdotal evidence from people we know. And if somebody says ANECDATA, that signals that they know that. Whereas people who unironically complain about fake news legitimately think that most institutions have an anti-them agenda.” So anecdata is: Yeah, I know that this isn’t… I know this is an anecdote, but still, I’m gonna say it anyway.

HEDVIG: Hmm. Yeah.

BEN: Yeah, I like ANECDATA. It’s like, it’s an acknowledgment that the story that I am telling you, which I think is important and worthy, is also not science.

KATE: Is a story. Yeah.

BEN: So please don’t go doing the thing that I just did, because I have an N of one.

KATE: I also appreciate any… any kind of portmanteau. Like, any excuse to make a portmanteau is a good new word for me.

HEDVIG: You should lall… I feel like… The word that this is replacing, is the phrase just: anecdotal evidence, correct? Because people have been saying that kind of for a while. Like: Oh, this is just anecdotal evidence, but yesterday when I did this, this happened or something?

BEN: I’ve encountered ANECDATA, I’m going to say like 15 years ago on Boing Boing, the, like… the truly ancient web zine-cum-blog thing. So like, it’s certainly not particularly new.

DANIEL: It’s a good one, though.

HEDVIG: Yeah, I like it.

DANIEL: Hedvig, you had one.

HEDVIG: Well, now that I’m back in Europe, from Australia. I was in Australia for five years. And I think Australia is great. And I miss it dearly.

BEN: You don’t have to… it’s fine…

DANIEL: We miss you too!

BEN: We don’t know where you sleep, it’s fine, you can rag us out as much as you like.

HEDVIG: [MUTTERS TO HERSELF] What? We don’t know where you sleep… don’t care…

BEN: Doesn’t matter.

HEDVIG: Anyway, doesn’t matter. I miss Australia a lot for many different reasons. One of them just being that, you know, we’re working on our third month of lockdown. And… yep.

DANIEL: And we’re not.

HEDVIG: Yeah, you’re not. But other reasons, too. But I also have realised in which part the Australian academic linguistics world is a bit different from the European one. And just what kind of questions people ask, and what they’re doing and things. And one the specific terms that sort of become more noticeable to me is that in Australia, it’s not that uncommon to use the term SLEEPING for a language, usually an Indigenous language that doesn’t have fluent first language speakers. And the term is supposed to invoke the idea that the language is merely sleeping and it’s possible to be awoken and revitalised and used again.

BEN: It’s like a nice, gentle thing.

KATE: Well, that’s… Yeah, I’ve heard that a lot recently. I don’t know if you know Kelly Wright, but she was actually just talking about that, about how it is not the same as a dead language. That there are intermediary steps between a living language and a dead language. So I think she in particular, would really appreciate that that’s common in other areas.

HEDVIG: It’s very common in Australia. And I’ve noticed it’s also common in North America, I believe, for Indigenous languages to use the term SLEEPING, or also DORMANT. And if you look into various catalogues that have sort of scales of what they call language endangerment usually, there’s the endangered languages — ILA, Indigenous Languages Archive, there is the UNESCO World List of Languages in Danger, which is looking like it’s going to get a big revamp, because we’re coming in next year on the UNESCO Decade of Indigenous Languages, so I suspect that website and that catalogue will be remade. And then there’s also of course Ethnologue, by SIL International. And some of them use the term DORMANT as another sort of step in this hierarchy, or instead of the terms DEAD or EXTINCT. And I thought it was interesting, because it’s not as much used in Europe, it seems. And I’ve been asking around for some friends who do work on languages, or who live in African countries or in Asian countries. And it doesn’t seem to be as much used there either. But it’s gaining popularity, and for sort of good reason. Because the idea is if you are a person who is looking to revitalise your language, or learn more about your heritage, and you look up your language in one of these catalogues, and you find them declared DEAD or EXTINCT, that can be quite demoralising.

KATE: Disheartening. Yes.

HEDVIG: So that’s one of the arguments for using SLEEPING. Then there are, of course… we can talk about, you know… what’s a good… like, Akkadian or like very ancient languages that existed thousands of years ago and aren’t spoken by anyone, and we barely have very little evidence of it. Maybe those languages could be called dead or extinct.

BEN: Or extinct or something like that.

HEDVIG: Yeah.

KATE: Well, I’ve had people ask questions, often non-linguists, I think it’s a very fair question: Is Latin really dead if it has all these descendants? And my answer immediately was yes, because no one speaks Latin. But that’s a great question, because there are ones that literally dead end — you know, there was this language, it doesn’t have descendants, you know, how do you distinguish between the two? You know, the more I thought about it the more I thought that’s kind of a fair question, actually!

HEDVIG: It’s a very good question! I’ve heard some people say, the linguist Balthasar Bickel has in some calculations said, if we make a guess that we call a language a language, if it’s chronologically mutually intelligible from one point in time to another, then a possibly maximal timespan is probably about 1,000 years. And then we start getting into that the two ends can’t really understand each other. And by that measurement, Latin would no longer be a language that is spoken. There’s also discussion, I know about whether Latin is actually the ancestor of French and Italian, or whether Latin is a language that existed and there was a dialect continuum. And maybe there was a sister language of Latin that is actually the ancestor, or whether it’s all like a mishmash dialect continuum.

KATE: Well, people tend to think that, it’s when you say it’s from Latin, that we’re saying it’s from like, the great senators writing their essays. Yeah, we’re talking about Vulgar Latin! We’re talking about the spray paint on the walls kind of thing.

HEDVIG: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So in that sense, that is an argument even more in favour for the fact that that Latin spoken by the senators is probably very much more even more dead.

KATE: Very much dead. It was probably dead when they were writing in it. In reality, they probably didn’t speak like that whatsoever.

HEDVIG: Yeah, that as well. But this word SLEEPING is sort of come back to me now that I’m no longer in Australia. And I’d be very interested to learn if… yeah, if there are people in Europe working on Indigenous languages of Europe, or various places in Asia or in Africa who are using the term. And also South America I’d be interested in, because so far I’ve mainly seen this used by Americans and Canadians and Australians and New Zealanders.

DANIEL: All right, well, ✨STAR EMOJI✨, STIMMY, ANECDATA, and SLEEPING: our Words of the Week. Layman’s Linguist, Kate, thank you so much for coming on the show and talking to us! You know, it was kind of an idea that I had. I thought: I think I’d like to have the Layman’s Linguist on, and I’m so glad that we’ve had you on.

KATE: Yeah, it was very fun. Thank you so much for having me.

BEN: Just be aware, we kind of have a low-key rule: If you appear on the show two more times, you officially become, like, an unofficial host.

DANIEL: One of us. One of us.

KATE: I’ll keep that in the back of my mind.

BEN: Just keep a little tally. Just somewhere. Just be like: when the second one’s up there, be like: Ooh, do I really want to? I don’t think so.

KATE: Okay. All right. Marking on the wall.

DANIEL: Last question. How can people find out what you’re doing?

KATE: Oh, me personally? Well, I have thelaymanslinguist.com. You can always check me out @laymanslinguist on Twitter. That’s probably where I’m the best at updating. So go ahead and follow me on there.

DANIEL: Thanks again.

KATE: Thanks.

[OUTRO MUSIC]

BEN: If you have listened to this show, and pfft! impossibly there is something that we haven’t answered and you still have questions, then you should probably get in touch with us. And there are so many many ways that you can do it. We are becauselangpod on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon, Patreon, TikTok and now on clubhouse, which I’m pretty sure is just Discord but a different app. But anyway. Send us an old fashioned email hello@becauselanguage.com if you just are so ancient that that is your way to do it, that’s fine. You do you. And tell your friends about us because word of mouth is a really, really, really great way for us to get into more earholes of people who want to hear us. You can also leave us a review in all the places that you can leave reviews, like all of the various podcast apps that you use to get your show on your phone, presumably, or like that one person who still listens on their laptop. Please go and like Dustin of the podcast Sandman Stories, @storiessandman, he is just doing the Lord’s work in terms of recommending us anytime anyone asks about a linguistics podcast. Be like Dustin. Recommend us. And of course — of course! — you should definitely go and check out the Layman’s Linguist.

HEDVIG: In fact, Dustin even recommends us when someone just asks for a podcast, as well.

BEN: What a guy. What a guy.

HEDVIG: What brave — again, we’ve said this before — it was a brave question. Anyone going on Twitter saying: Does anyone know a podcast? Because anyone who listens to more than two podcasts probably listens also to 50 podcasts. And is probably obsessed about them. One of the great things about working on this show now is that we have transcripts so you can search and see if we said something very smart. And if you want to go back to that particular episode and find it.

BEN: Yes. “Smart.”

HEDVIG: Interesting, let’s say interesting. Maybe you know you don’t remember exactly what episode we said what in. We cover the news segment versus usually the title has to do with the main part of the show. So it can be a bit tricky to find that episode where we said something particularly intelligent, Ben. [LAUGHTER] That’s one of the charms of having Patrons who give us money, is that we can pay people to do transcripts. And we are very grateful for Maya Klein of Voicing Words who does all of our transcripts. She listens to every word we say and writes them down, which is… an impressive task.

BEN: What was that? What was that you were saying about intelligence? I can’t…

HEDVIG: What?! That was an intelligent word! Ugh, now you broke me!

BEN: No, I more meant the idea of Maya Klein, poor poor Maya Klein having to sit down and listen to all of our words.

HEDVIG: I’m sure she adores us. I don’t know if that’s true.

BEN: I’m sure she adores getting paid.

DANIEL: Let’s find out. Let’s ask.

HEDVIG: Yeah, let’s ask her, we can see. Maybe we should actually just have her on the show some time and tell us, ask her what she thinks!

DANIEL: That is an amazing idea, because I would like to hear about it

BEN: Oh, wouldn’t that be great? Who do you hate the most?

HEDVIG: Who’s the worst? Who speaks the fastest or slurs the most?

DANIEL: We’ll do it.

HEDVIG: Okay, all right. Great. Great.

DANIEL: Hey Maya, get ready.

BEN: Yeah, what I love is that Maya Klein is currently at some point in history listening to this right now and timing it out.

KATE: She’s going to find this out.

BEN: Hey, Maya!

HEDVIG: Hi! Yes, so, Maya Klein of Voicing Words does a great job on our transcripts, and we’re very grateful for her to exist. And we’re also very grateful that we have patrons on Patreon who give us money, which among other things we can give to her, so she can continue her great job. Some of our top 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, Manú, and Kevin. And Kevin is my favorite because it’s also the name of my D&D character. Thank you, all of you.

DANIEL: Our theme music has been written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who is a member of Ryan Beno, and of Dideon’s Bible, a lot of great music coming out of that particular person. Thank you for listening. Catch you next time. Because Language.

[MUSIC STOPS]

BEN and HEDVIG: [AIR HORN NOISES]

[PAUSE]

HEDVIG: Can someone explain to me what queso, so like I know that queso means cheese in Spanish?

DANIEL: Yeah, they’re cognates. Isn’t that amazing?

HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly. But why, when… when Americans say “queso” they mean a particular… they mean something in particular. That means sort of white stuff.

DANIEL: Well, we have a guest here who can help us with that, we have the Layman’s Linguist. What is queso?

HEDVIG: Hi.

KATE: Hi! Oh, queso… okay, so yeah, in America queso is this like dipping kind of cheese. There’s like usually a spicy little bit kick to it, but it is what we consider… what we think Mexican cheese is. I’m very aware that that’s inaccurate, but it’s very much we think Mexican cheese is.

BEN: One of the fun things I was always taught before I, like, went out into the world and went traveling and stuff — and it was a red hot tip and I’ve loved it ever since — is like when you travel, eat international food, foreign to that place, because it’s different everywhere you go. Like, Mexican food in Japan is way different from Mexican food in, like, Spain. Stuff like that. I have found it to be so delightful because yeah, different cultures interpretation of what like, I don’t know, Brazilian is, is just such a hoot.

DANIEL: Wow!

HEDVIG: I had pan-Asian food in Poland. Not to be recommended. There was one item on the menu that said, it was like palak paneer, the Indian style with spinach and paneer cheese, but the paneer had been substituted for tofu. And we all said: Oh, that sounds exotic and weird and sort of interesting. We’ll have that please. And the waiter — I’m not kidding you — he said: It’s not very good!

[LAUGHTER]

KATE: I appreciate the honesty.

BEN: Oh, wow. That is a service worker who is just doing you the biggest solid.

HEDVIG: And we did order it, because we were just interested. And it’s not very good.

BEN: Oh, you got to. If a waiter turns you off it, that’s an ironclad obligation to order that dish!

DANIEL: That’s like crossing something out. That’s like, I want to read that more!

HEDVIG: Yeah, it wasn’t good, it wasn’t a good idea. Don’t do that, friends.

[BOOP]

BEN: Hedvig told us her most recent meal was filled pasta, which we, through some investigation, figured out was tortellini. What was your last meal, Kate?

KATE: My last meal? Um, eggplant parmesan.

BEN: Ooh, yum! That confers a mining and defense boost in Stardew Valley. So.

KATE: There you go. Yeah, there’s only like Irish and Italian people in my state. So you get, like, very bland, or very flavourful food. There’s only kind of like two, two ends of that spectrum.

HEDVIG: That’s nice.

KATE: Yeah.

HEDVIG: I like that. I’m a big fan of aubergine, eggplant.

KATE: Yeah.

HEDVIG: So good. This per– I don’t know if it’s interesting, but this pesto had zucchini in it.

KATE: Oh, that’s good.

BEN: Oh!

HEDVIG: Interesting. Interesting.

BEN: And Daniel, your last meal?

DANIEL: Of course, like every night, kids leftovers. The remainder of a Beyond Burger that my youngest daughter did not eat.

BEN: You know, Daniel — and this might come as quite a shock — you are allowed to make yourself a meal as well.

KATE: But when you have access to such delicacies as kids leftovers?

DANIEL: Why? Why would I go anywhere else?

KATE: What else do you need?

BEN: Fair enough. I personally prefer my meal with substantially less floor, table, and saliva on it, but that’s just me.

KATE: Additions. Flavour.

DANIEL: In a concession to good taste, I did remove the bun and give myself a new one.

BEN: There you go.

KATE: Yeah, that’s called self care.

BEN: You removed the bacteria sponge, that’s good.

DANIEL: We’re all just doing our best here.

[BOOP]

DANIEL: Okay, Hedvig, I lost you, so let’s see if you come back.

BEN: [HUMS WAITING MUSIC] See, this is how my brain works: I’m immediately thinking about the fact that a nuclear explosion has just happened in Germany.

DANIEL: It just hasn’t reached us yet.

BEN: That’s… like, I don’t, like… I don’t know why my brain does this. Every time I see like a a big…

DANIEL: Why are you like this? Who hurt you?

BEN: I don’t know. I see, like, an unusually big flock of birds. And my brain immediately is like, this is it. This is how it ends. This is how it starts.

KATE: It’s just like in the movies!

DANIEL: That’s so 2020.

BEN: I went to the library the other day, and I walked out onto like, the main road where the buses go and stuff. And I just guess I haven’t been on that main road during peak hour, like, ever before. And it was just, like, wall-to-wall traffic in both directions. And it wasn’t moving. And again, my brain was just like: I mean, yup, this is… the only logical…

KATE: This is how Independence Day starts.

BEN: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

DANIEL: We lived through 2020. Nobody can ever blame us for this.

KATE: It’s been there longer, but like now it’s at least justified.

BEN: Well, all that’s… all that’s changed is I have acquired a justification. It was always there.

KATE: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

[BOOP]

DANIEL (to HEDVIG): If it happens again and you can’t get back in, just start, like… record yourself shouting things that you might want to say. I’ll find a way to edit you in.

23: Mailbag of YouChoob (with the Layman’s Linguist)

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23: Mailbag of YouChoob (with the Layman’s Linguist)

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108: Mailbag of Etymology (with Douglas Harper of Etymonline)

107: Linguaphile (with Julie Sedivy and Matt Spike)

106: What One Thing? (with Mark Ellison) [Bonus episode]

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