We’re taking over Pint of Science (or are they taking over us?) for this episode! Three researchers are presenting their work in language, and they’ll also tell us what they’re learning about public science communication.
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2021 | Pint of Science Australia
https://pintofscience.com.au/festival/2021/
Shandy | Definition of Shandy by Merriam-Webster
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shandy
France Bans Gender-Neutral Language in Schools, Citing ‘Harm’ to Learning
https://www.newsweek.com/france-bans-gender-neutral-language-schools-citing-harm-learning-1590092
France Bans Schools from Using ‘Gender-neutral’ Words in French, Says It’s ‘Harmful’
https://www.news18.com/news/buzz/france-bans-schools-from-using-gender-neutral-words-in-french-says-its-harmful-3727547.html
New French Dictionary Celebrates a Language That is no Longer Just French | Voice of America – English
https://www.voanews.com/europe/new-french-dictionary-celebrates-language-no-longer-just-french
New French dictionary aims to embrace diversity of world’s Francophones
https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20210316-new-french-dictionary-aims-to-embrace-diversity-of-world-s-francophones
Dictionnaire des francophones
https://www.dictionnairedesfrancophones.org/
Linguists predict unknown words using language comparison | Mirage News
https://www.miragenews.com/linguists-predict-unknown-words-using-language-550338/
Language Comparison Predicts New Words | Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
https://www.shh.mpg.de/1988800/list-prediction
Reflex prediction | John Benjamins (Open Access article!)
https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/dia.20009.bod
Australian Company Loses Ugg Trademark Battle
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/10/business/uggs-lawsuit-australia.html
The Ugg Boot Story
https://melbournebusinessawards.com.au/latest-news-item/30933/the-ugg-boot-story/
Ugg: The battle over an iconic Australian boot
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-41464142
Where did UGG boots get their name? Is the name really short for “ugh?” – Dictionary.com
https://www.dictionary.com/e/ugg-boots/
France Has ‘Champagne,’ Portugal Has ‘Port.’ Should Australia Have ‘Uggs?’
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/world/australia/uggs-trademark-australia.html
List of generic and genericized trademarks – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericized_trademarks
Emma Schimke of the University of Queensland
If you snooze, you… win! PhD student’s sleep research takes out 3MT
https://www.uq.edu.au/news/article/2020/09/if-you-snooze-you…-win-phd-student’s-sleep-research-takes-out-3mt
The overfitted brain: Dreams evolved to assist generalization – ScienceDirect
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666389921000647
Georgia Dempster – University of Melbourne
Georgia Dempster | ResearchGate
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Georgia-Dempster
Kirsten Ellis – Monash University
Dr Kirsten Ellis – TapeBlocks
https://sites.google.com/site/drkirstenellis/tapeblocks
PEOPLE: “Often by designing activities for people with disabilities we create better activities for everyone” – Dr Kirsten Ellis – Echo Chamber Escape
https://echochamberescape.com/2020/08/20/people-often-by-designing-activities-for-people-with-disabilities-we-create-better-activities-for-everyone-dr-kirsten-ellis/
Official GoldieBlox Store
https://goldieblox.com/
Human Resource Machine on Steam
https://store.steampowered.com/app/375820/Human_Resource_Machine/
Defence Minister Peter Dutton bans celebrations that ask people to dress up | OUTInPerth | LGBTQIA+ News and Culture
https://www.outinperth.com/defence-minister-peter-dutton-bans-celebrations-that-ask-people-to-dress-up/
‘We are not pursuing a woke agenda’: Dutton bans special morning teas at Defence after IDAHOBIT
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/we-are-not-pursuing-a-woke-agenda-dutton-bans-special-morning-teas-at-defence-after-idahobit-20210521-p57u2g.html
The phrase ‘Nul points’ – meaning and origin. | Phrase Finder
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/nul-points.html
Lord Mortis has documented many instances of maxxinated on podcasts, for your edification
latest mention on ATP.fm – Episode 431, 0:45 https://overcast.fm/+R7DXCWO3Y/0:45
then 430 – at 0:25 –
https://overcast.fm/+R7DWbtBmQ/0:25
then Atp.fm – 429 – 00:00 and then 04:29 – https://overcast.fm/+R7DUS9Ob0/0:00 and https://overcast.fm/+R7DUS9Ob0/4:29
then atp.fm – 428 – 10:57 –
https://overcast.fm/+R7DVE5lis/10:57
and then later in that episode, he says where they got it from: 16:08 https://overcast.fm/+R7DVE5lis/16:08
and the first mention – 427 –
https://overcast.fm/+R7DU8rudU, right at the start
<iframe name="ngram_chart" src="https://books.google.com/ngrams/interactive_chart?content=nul+points%2C+nil+points&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cnul+points%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cnil+points%3B%2Cc0" width=900 height=500 marginwidth=0 marginheight=0 hspace=0 vspace=0 frameborder=0 scrolling=no></iframe>Maxxinated | David Sinclair
https://dejus.com/2021/05/12/1546/
Transcript
Daniel: Because this is Pint of science, your beverage?
Kirsten: Should I, should I not do the Coke ad? Actually, there was a joke a couple of years ago. [LAUGHTER] I always turn up when I’m lecturing to either, with a Diet Coke or no sugar Coke. And my students were apparently sort of taking bets on which I turn up with. And then someone wanted to scam it by actually providing me with a drink one week so that they could get at 100%. Right.
[LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: Ohhh, that’s good
Daniel: Devious, devious
Kirsten: I think I deserved it!
Hedvig: Yeah,
Daniel: Man, when that stuff came out, I was like: I hope this stuff is good, because I’m going to be drinking a ton of it. Emma, I’m gonna go to you What was your beverage?
Emma: My beverage was a water
Hedvig: You’ve ever seen?
Daniel: Ah, purest. Very good.
Emma: Water, so that it doesn’t interfere with my sleep tonight.
Daniel : [LAUGHS]
Hedvig: Very good. Very good
Daniel: Of course. Well, then I’m screwed. Okay, and Georgia yours?
Georgia: Yeah, I’m actually missing a beverage. It’s 10 o’clock.
Hedvig: Oh! Fair enough
Daniel: All right, so no pint, all science cool.
[MUSIC]
Daniel: Hello, and welcome to this episode of Because Language, a podcast about linguistics, the science of language. I’m Danielle Midgley. And with me now; her knitting is high-quality but somehow still low-fi… It’s Hedvig Skirgård
Hedvig: Thank you very much. My knitting is not very good. I started with 40 stitches and somehow got to 65, and now I’m trying to slim it down. I don’t know how I did it. I’m learning how to undo it.
Daniel: Combinatorial explosion, don’t fight it.
Hedvig: I wasn’t gonna make like a circle as a scarf. I wanted to make a rectangle.
Daniel: Circular scarves are dope. You should embrace the, embrace the randomness.
Hedvig: Maybe
Daniel: Ben Ainslie is out tonight. We miss him. We love him. So do you. Now Hedvig, this is a Pint of Science show, a collab with Pint of Science, which is an organization that helps to promote science in pubs around Australia. We’ve done a live show with Pint of Science before, but we’re all online in our lives these days. So here we are online as well. I believe this is what’s known as a takeover show. But it’s not clear if we’re taking over Pint of Science, or they taking over us?
Hedvig: [LAUGHS] Yeah, I guess they’re taking over us. That’s how I read it.
Daniel: I guess I’ll just have to be okay with that.
Hedvig: Yeah, I’m okay with that.
Daniel: I feel like I’m kind of taking over them a little bit as well. Just, there’s a there’s a mut- there’s a commensalism going on.
Hedvig: [MUTTERS] commensalism Oh, my God, what words?
Daniel: That’s what we do.
Hedvig: It is, what is this? Words are what we do, it’s is true.
Daniel: We also have guests who will be telling us about their cutting-edge research in language, or language-adjacent topics. So I’m really looking forward to that. They’re super awesome. Their work is really interesting.
Hedvig: Yes, this is gonna be a really fun episode. We’re gonna have a lot of researchers talking about their own research. Usually we maybe do one per episode. And this time we have three, so it’s gonna be pretty exciting.
Daniel: Yeah. Hedvig, what is your beverage? Since this is Pint of Science?
Hedvig: Yes. I have coffee and water. Because I am in Germany, and it is not really…pint drinking hour, I’m afraid. It is Sunday. And tomorrow is a public holiday. So I guess… I mean, I could
Daniel: Oh, what are you doing?I like how you have both the coffee and the water to avoid the dehydrating effects of the coffee. The mildly diuretic effects
Hedvig: Yes. I, this is… you know how they say that certain traits skip a generation? Like me and my grandmother are both really into having more than, preferably more than two beverages at any one time.
Daniel: Oh, wow.
Hedvig: So we’ll drink like milk, water, coffee and juice like next to each other
Daniel: Just line them up!
Hedvig: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Beer and coffee is a favorite of mine. Yeah.
Daniel: Beer and coffee. Isn’t that what they call a Shandy? I don’t know my alcohols.
Hedvig: [TRYING NOT TO LAUGH] No, no, that’s not Shandy. [LAUGHS] For anyone listening, Daniel, how long have you not had alcohol for, or have you ever had alcohol?
Daniel: Infinity years. I have never drunk alcohol. But for now I’m having a brown cream soda. They make a zero sugar variety now and so I’m having that.
Hedvig: Sounds good.
Daniel: All right. Let’s get to it, in a segment that I’m calling boo, France! So this is France’s education ministry, the president of which is somebody from the Academie Francaise, who is coming out against gender-inclusive language. Hedvig, we’ve done shows on French gender-inclusive language reform before
Hedvig: And also on the Academie Francaise, I believe has been spoken about in this show before. The Academie Francaise is a bit unusual when it comes to language academies in that they have a fairly conservative and fairly outspoken attitude. They will say this is how it should be done, and this isn’t how it should be done. For example, the Swedish Academy will just say: we describe language, and they won’t generally issue these kinds of strong things. So that’s the first thing to notice. Academie Francaise a bit special in that, the other thing is about
Daniel: Would you say precious? Would precious be a good way to describe that?
Hedvig: Is precious?I don’t fully understand what English means by precious ,except when it comes to stones. So don’t ask me. But yeah, so I know that there’s a discussion in a couple of languages that have grammatical gender and their languages that has the categories of masculine or feminine, there’s a discussion whether or not it’s a good idea to have a gender-neutral version of things like teacher or professor. So here in German, for example, if you’re a man, you’re a Professor, and if you’re a woman, I think you’re a Professorin. I think that’s the distinction. And yeah, some people will say you should have a gender-neutral version, that that’s good. And then other people say no, you should have a gendered version, because then it becomes obvious how few women there are in places. You make gender more visible, and that that’s a progressive idea as well. So I know there are a lot of conflicting emotions about it. So tell me what what have they been doing?
Daniel: Well, here’s what they have been doing. We reported on this. It was our French correspondent Dr. Sophie Richard, a couple of years ago who told us about this. So let’s just say that you have a bunch of male friends or you have a bunch of female friends, or it doesn’t really matter what their gender is. Normally, in French, what you have to do is you have the word ami, A-M-I, which is the word for one friend, my male friend is an ami, A-M-I, my female friend is an amie A-I-M-E. But if it’s a bunch of male friends or mixture, it’s A-M-I-S, but if they are all women friends, then it’s A-M-I-E-S. So what they’ve been doing is just sort of making it possible to sort of derive every possible combination by just doing this: saying ami.e.s (A-M-I-E dot E dot S), and the Acadamie Francaise has come down on those infernal dots. Because if you use a bullet, like option 8 on your Mac keyboard, that’s a pretty chunky character to stick in the middle of that word, especially twice.
Hedvig: So this is where like in English, for example, you might say, “bring a friend”, or like “I was out with my friend”, and then you can do parentheses s parentheses, meaning either one or several friends.
Daniel: Yeah, sure, right, that would be one way to do it
Hedvig: And instead of using parentheses…es…they’re using dots. So are they coming down on the practice of doing the alternative things, or the dot instead of the parentheses. Because I’m, I’m with them on the dot, because I don’t like the dots.
Daniel: The dots are ugly. If you use anything, you should use option nine, which is a much nicer sort of dot, it’s, the smaller dot. But here’s what they’re saying. They’re saying, this is Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, the perpetual secretary of the French Academy, the Academie Francaise, and Marc Lambron, he’s the current director of the French Academy. They’ve said that the use of this in schools is, quote, “harmful to” English, by the way, English quote in translation, “harmful to the practice and intelligibility of the French language.” They say, “with the spread of inclusive writing the English language, already quasi-hegemonic across the world would certainly and perhaps forever” [TRIES TO HOLD IN LAUGHTER] “defeat the French language.” [SNIGGERING]. Is this is not a weird thing to think?
Hedvig: Okay. [SIGHS] This is a lot of things at once. So…
Daniel: There’s just a lot of things going on here
Hedvig: The Acadamie Francaise, and like French society, in general, is generally like institutionally against the idea that English is the one only national language that should be spoken. In fact, now with Brexit, people have raised the concern that like maybe EU negotiations should be more often in French than in English, because now it’s Ireland and Malta that are the English speakers in the Union actually? But that’s not the same. Like this, this gender inclusive language doesn’t necessarily need to be a power move from English.
Daniel: No, it doesn’t. And that’s why it’s so weird. I mean, it’s like the Academy is so scared of change. They’re like looking over their shoulder at English. Oh, no, it’s coming. It’s weird for them to think this. Is it my imagination or prescriptive is just kind of not really understand how language works at all?
Hedvig: No, I don’t, I don’t want to say that. I think the Acadamie Francaise understands how language works. I think they might be doing a lot of things at once. Because they know that for example, I think it was Macron or someone else in France had said that one benefit if if the European Union would switch to using more French, is that the European Union would adjust to, like would include French ways of thinking. So they’re doing some Sapir-Wharf here.
Daniel: Yes they are
Hedvig: I also had a, I had a long discussion with a guy at a party who claimed that French is the only language you can do philosophy in because
Daniel: Oh please! I’ve heard that too
Hedvig: It makes you think in the correct way, so I think they are tying this together, that gender-inclusive language they attach with an English an Anglo way of thinking. And they see this thing as like a borrowing of English into French. I think they do. I think that’s probably maybe wrong and not linked, but I think they’re making that link. I think they’re very Yeah, they’re very Sapir-Whorfian about this
Daniel: And therefore they don’t really understand how language works… This is what I’m kind of on about here. I just viewed the Acadamie Francaise as entirely malign. They’ve moved from French protectionism, we got to keep all the foreign words out. Now they’re fighting against gender-inclusive language. Are they for anything good? Or are they just jerks? I vote jerks.
Hedvig: I think.. I think the news we hear about them are jerks. I’m going to be the, the nice guy in this dichotomy. I think the French Academy do good things as well that we don’t hear about. We hear about them when they go bonkers.
Daniel: Okay, so one vote jerks and one vote secret heroes,
Hedvig: Not [LAUGHS]. No, just like
Daniel: Superheroes, underground
Hedvig: We don’t have to sensationalize it. Because they, we only hear about them when they when they do weird things.
Daniel: Yeah, like jerks. Now this, there was one bright spot here. The French teachers union, the SUD education union, has issued a statement saying that they’re not on board, they say, quote “SUD education demands from the minister that he stopped trying to impose his backwardness on the educational community. SUD calls on staff to take no account of these instructions from another time, and to exercise as they wish, depending on professional situations, the full use of their pedagogical freedom,” End of quote. I think that’s interesting that they’re casting it as a freedom thing.
Hedvig: That’s very interesting.
Daniel: Yeah. So yay, France?
Hedvig: [SIGHS] Good things can come out of disagreements.
Daniel: Okay. In other Yay, France! news, we have a new more diverse French dictionary online. Take a guess Hedvig, and you at home. French is an official language for better or worse in how many countries?
Hedvig: Well, I’m gonna do my euro-vision report in a little bit. So I’ve brushed up on this a little bit. I know. I mean, because Switzerland, especially. So it should be Belgium, Switzerland, France, Canada, on the national level, but not all provinces and territory level. And then there’s a bunch of West African countries that will have French like, Cameroon might have it, a bunch of other ones. Senegal would have it. So a whole heap there. And then maybe one of the South American countries next to Suriname? would maybe have it and then the the islands in the Caribbean speak French. I think they’ve technically part of France. So that just counts as France. French Polynesia is part of France, New Caledonia is part of France. Then there’s French, French indo-China. I don’t think any of those countries still have French as an official language, so?
Daniel: No, it’s kind of a minority language, but it’s still in there. Yeah, so So yeah, at first I was impressed by the depth of your response. But now I’m thinking that you’re playing for time. How many countries, Hedvig?
Hedvig: I’m gonna guess 12 to 15?
Daniel: Well that’s a good guess. My first guess was way off. I’m not even gonna say what it was. The answer? 29.
Hedvig: Yep. Okay. Yeah,
Daniel: That’s it. And you nailed the places as well.
Hedvig: A lot of African countries.
Daniel: Yes, it is. As with, as with English, most French speakers are not French. So… Last week, we had international Francophonie day. That means French speakers. And it turns out we have a new online French dictionary from the French government, which has a lot of French words from countries that are not France. It’s the Dictionnaire des Francophones. Contains about 600,000 terms and expressions. That’s a lot. And ah, one of the cool parts it has etymologies. I feel like English etymology is really sort of, it’s been worked over. There’s a lot of it, but I haven’t seen a lot in other languages. This has etymologies for French words. Oh! [CHEF KISSES]
Hedvig: Most major European languages would have decent ethnological dictionaries I think
Daniel: They would
Hedvig: And I should say, I can say if anyone who’s learning French, if you find French, French hard, especially Parisian French, I can really recommend looking up some recordings of people speaking either West African or Swiss French, because it’s just clearer.
Daniel: Right? Okay.
Hedvig: Especially West-African French. If you’re an L2 learner of French, it’s much, much easier to understand. It just is.
Daniel: The thing I love about this dictionary, is that it explicitly intends to take words from these countries
Hedvig: Cool, that’s super cool
Daniel: Yeah, it is really cool. The quote, “The idea is to create a dictionary of world French and decentralised, featuring words from French countries, French speaking countries that are France. You can go to Dictionnairedesfrancophones.org. There’s a link on our blog, becauselanguage.com. And you can check that out. Yay.
Hedvig: That’s super cool.
Daniel: Okay, we have now the Eurovision report. Hedvig, have you got that report?
Hedvig: Yes.
Daniel: Fire away.
Hedvig: So hello everyone. I don’t know how many people who are on this call watched Eurovision last night. I know that Australia’s broadcast is currently going on. So some people might have watched it live. Some people might be watching it after the fact. But we are going to broadcast this after the fact. So I, spoilers are not a concern because you all should know who the winner is. Does anyone here not want to know who the winner is?
Daniel: Skip about 12 minutes, just kidding, not 12 minutes. Skip about two minutes.
Hedvig: Um, Eurovision happened last night and there are a lot of languages associated with it. I’m going to go through them in a brief fashion. So for starters, several entries were not in English. Russia, for example, competed with a song in Russian. We’ve had a few sentences of English in it. The performer who’s from originally from Tajikistan, Manizha, said the following, “it’s important for me to preserve the Russian language. I sing in English myself, and I understand how cool it is. But when I watch Eurovision, I was thinking how cool it is to sing in the native language as Portugal did with Salvador Sobral, and Serbia with Marija Šerifović.” So I don’t know if you know, but Portugal won a couple of years singing in Portuguese, and we had several entries following in this fashion this year. So we have Spain who sang in Spanish, Switzerland sang in French, which is only spoken by, well only but, 22.9% of the Swiss population. So it’s not the largest language of Switzerland. We had Ukraine performing entirely in Ukrainian, with an electro folk song. We had France singing in French. That’s to be expected. That’s usually the case. We had Serbia sing in Serbian with a bit of Spanish. We have Italy who won with a hardrock entry in Italian. So I counted to seven out of 26 finalists singing mostly in not English. It should be noted that Portugal did sing in English, despite winning in Portuguese a couple years ago. All Scandi entries were as usual entirely in English, it’s a bit disappointing. Another noteworthy language produced from Eurovision 2021 was that Netherlands competed with an entry in English, but also its Sranan, which is a creole from the former Dutch colony of Suriname. That’s, I haven’t heard much Creole or Pidgins in Eurovision, so I thought that was pretty exciting.
Another thing I noticed about Eurovision language wise was that there’s this tendency to use Spanish randomly song as a shorthand for party. So we saw this for example, both was Cyprus, who sang about El Diablo. The rest of the song was an English but then it was like El Diablo
Daniel: [WHISPERS DRAMATICALLY] El Diablo
Hedvig: was very sensual and passionate and cool. And then we also had Serbia who sung almost entirely in Serbian, but also talk about going loco. And I think, I think it’s just something people just perceive Spanish as
Daniel: The party language. Yeah, yeah.
Hedvig: You also see a lot of songs in English where people just randomly count in Spanish for no good reason. Perhaps the most famously Offspring, “Uno dos, tres, cuatro, cinco
Daniel: “cinco, cinco, seis”
Hedvig: “cinco, cinco, seis” Russian entry last year also just had a lot of counting in Spanish for seemingly no reason whatsoever. It’s just cool to count in Spanish somehow. We also had Malta performing with a song entirely in English but with the refrain with a French slang phrase “je me casse” I’m out of here. And they also sang, “excuse my french”, and then the refrain “je me casse”. French is not an official language of Malta. The official languages of Malta are Maltese and English. And Maltese is a Semitic language. I don’t know why they sing in French for someone could tell me I have no idea.
Daniel: “Excuse My French” is a funny thing that Americans say when they’re about to swear.
Hedvig: Yeah, so it’s a funny it’s a funny pun to say “Excuse My French” and then actually sing in French. That seems to be the extent of the joke. But I don’t really know why. Yeah. And then my last piece of Eurovision news is just briefly about the music. So this contest saw the highest ever note. It was a B6 whistle note. That’s the highest note that’s ever been performed in Eurovision history. For those who don’t know, Eurovision has been going on since the 1960s. So that’s a fair bit of history to have been going on. We also saw the longest evernote, a 17 second F sharp 5. Ste and I tried to diagnose it just before we got on the call. We think it’s an F sharp 5. That’s from Moldova. And the highest note ever was from Israel, from their performer Eden. So yeah, a lot of a lot of fun things happened at Eurovision last night. If you’re not a person who likes Eurovision, I can recommend getting into this kind of Eurovision? Just noting down who’s voting for who and the languages and things. It’s quite fun.
Daniel: Whistle register is a very, very interesting phenomenon. men can’t do it. Women can.
Hedvig: It’s not whistling. It’s, ugh I don’t know how to explain this.
Daniel: It’s whistle register, which is a special way of using your voice that gets super hot. Yeah, everyone associates it with Mariah Carey. Of course
Hedvig: Yes, exactly when she goes like [HIGH-PITCHED NOISE] super duper high
Daniel: Minnie Riperton is also, back from the 70s is also associated with whistle register. I had a language related question. So the Italian band had a character in it. It had a ring a, an A with a ring on top, which is not normally used in Italian. What’s up with that?
Daniel: No, and of course it’s Mötley Crüe [PRONOUNCED WITH UMLAUTS]
Hedvig: No. And first when I saw it, so they’re their band name. The time by name is Måneskin. So it’s Danish. So usually when you see funny diacritics in hard rock or metal bands, like Motörhead, which spell their… which spelled Motörhead [PRONOUNCED WITH AN UMLAUT] for no good reason.
Hedvig: Yeah, that’s just being funny and putting diacritics on for no good reason. But this a with a dot is actually, a Scandi letter signifying [ɔː]
Daniel: [ɔː]
Hedvig: They have a Danish name.
Daniel: And does it mean? What does it? Do we know what it means?
Hedvig: Moonshine.
Daniel: Okay. Yeah, I thought, if you’re doing metal diacritics to be cool, you have to use umlauts. You can’t use ring. No. What are you doing?
Hedvig: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. When I saw it at first I thought it was a metal diacritic. But it’s not. Yeah.
Daniel: Cool. Thank you very much our Eurovision vision correspondent, Hedvig Skirgård
Hedvig: Was that, was that fast enough for you?
Daniel: That was great. I really enjoyed that. Looking forward to next year. All right. Let’s get on to a research piece that I really liked. I thought this was so cool. But do you want to take us in?
Hedvig: Oh, I just had to have a breather after that. I tried to go Eurovision as fast as possible. Next up, no, I don’t… I want you to do it. Oh, I know what this one is! No. Yeah, you do it Yeah.
Daniel: Okay. This is work from Tim Bodt from the University of London and Johann-Mattis List from the Max Planck Institute, published in Diachronica. So we know that if you want to know what languages were like, way, way, way, way, way back, you take a look at existing languages, what they’re like now, and then you sort of work your way backwards to figure out what the earlier proto-language forms were. And you can do that even when no written records exist. But this was an interesting sort of related project from these two. They used it to make predictions for a language that does exist. But, but maybe the language hasn’t been studied, maybe the language has been studied, but the lexicon is kind of incomplete and there are gaps /Because, you know, you say to somebody, “hey, what’s your word for blah,” and maybe they don’t know the what a blah is and they don’t, they’re not able to quite say it, right. So there’s a gap, there’s a gap. So they took a look at gaps for a language family that exists today. It’s languages from the western Kho-Bwa family, which is a Sino-Tibetan sub family. So the first thing they did was they took a look at all the words that they had, and then they use that knowledge to figure out what the words should be for the gaps. And then they invented the words and then they published them. They put them out there first, so that they could say: here are guesses, come at us. And then they went there. And they saw if those words were right, and about 76% of the time they were! [LAUGHS] Which is super cool, isn’t it?
Hedvig: Which is pretty cool, isn’t it? Yeah, yeah, it’s super cool. I should say for full disclosure, so Mattis List is a colleague of my department. So I am familiar with this work and
Daniel: Oh, so what am I doing talking about it?
Hedvig: And yeah, it’s super cool. I was just a bit winded from the Eurovision [LAUGHTER]. I just let you do it. And you did it beautifully. Yeah. So when you predict languages you can both predict proto-languages but if you have a known tree for all of these things, you kind of need some sort of tree or some sort of understanding of the relationship between the languages. And then you can also do what’s called like infer unknown states, which is like other languages that are tips in the tree, you can base, you can try and infer them. Lots of different methods of doing it. I’m having fun doing a similar thing for for Oceanic, but for grammar. It’s tons of fun, It was super cool project. I really like it.
Daniel: Would this be top 10 of the year like are we gonna see this one again in our top 10 rundown?
Hedvig: I think this is a really fun research. I particularly like the idea of first putting it out there like you said, and putting it on record. There’s a thing called, what’s it called? When you pre register as a study. You can do that as well. Before you do a study, you can go to our repository, say, I’m going to ask this thing with this data. And then I’m going to get back to you in a few months. And we’re gonna, you’re going to hold me accountable that I tested it, and particularly the way I said I would. And this is to prevent various kinds of P hacking or manipulating of results where you try and fit your results to what you want to see,
Daniel: Oh my gosh, that is really true. Because you could say, “Oh, well, this word has semantically drifted a bit or It looks a lot like a different word that is kind of related and blah, blah, blah.” But if you pre register it
Hedvig: There are lots of ways of, exactly, lots of ways of grooming your results if you’re not holding yourself accountable, so that’s super cool.
Daniel: Precisely. Okay, I like it. So let’s go on to our last news story. Um, you know, UGGS?
Hedvig: Yes.
Daniel: Do you have any Uggs?
Hedvig: No.
Daniel: Do you know where the word comes from? The special fleecy boots that everyone loves to wear, and that are so fashionable.
Hedvig: Yes. Very Australian.
Daniel: Hmm. That’s gonna come up.
Hedvig: They’re Australian by origin. No?
Daniel: They are. But they quickly, they quickly jumped to different places, which is where our story kind of starts. But do you have a guess as to the etymology? Why Ugg?
Hedvig: Is that an abbreviation?
Daniel: Of?
Hedvig: Universal garment? Gopher?
Daniel: By George! You’re correct. is the universal garment gopher? Who?
Hedvig: [LAUGHS]
Daniel: People thought that the woolly fleece looked like gopher fur when they traveled?
Hedvig: What?!!?!
Daniel: No, I’m just kidding. [LAUGH] I’m just shitting ya.
Hedvig: Yeah. Yeah, don’t do that.
Daniel: Okay, sorry.
Hedvig: I’m a very gullible person.
Daniel: Now, we’ve spoken about genericide before, when a product can be so successful, that becomes a generic term for anything like it. For example, aspirin used to be a trademark name and the others
Hedvig: Velcro.
Daniel: Mm hmm. Spam
Hedvig: Oh spam? I didn’t know that. Heroin?
Daniel: One good one, good one. Escalator
Hedvig: Heroin was a brand name. They probably didn’t mind being disassociated with that.
Daniel: They called it that because it was like, you know, a heroine of a novel or a hero of story.
Hedvig: Yeah, and I think it was particularly marketed as soldiers that, like it’ll be free from pain
Daniel: What a time, you know? Have you got a cold? Have some cocaine mixed with heroin. We will fuck you up. Yeah, okay. Well, this is kind of like that but in reverse. So Ugg boots as you say Hedvig did start in Australia. We start seeing references in 1916 to Fugg boots.
Hedvig: Oh, fugly, something like that? They’re fugly boots?
Daniel: They were… in 1913?
Hedvig: I don’t know? I think?
Daniel: Okay, so pilots and navigators used to wear these things, because they keep your feet warm when you’re in an open cockpit and that’s kind of important. So people in 1916 were writing about thigh high sheepskin fuug boots. And it’s thought that this refers to not Fucking Ugly Boots, but Flying ugly boots.
Hedvig: Okay, yeah still fugly
Daniel: Still Fuggly. And I thought, Wait a minute. Is this one of these things where, like, like snafu, where I was a military thing, and it meant fucked, Situation Normal All Fucked Up but they didn’t want to say that to civilians, so they would say All Fouled Up? Could it, could it really have been Fucking Ugly Boots but they just said that it was Flying Ugly Boots? And I think probably not, because the first reference we have to actual fugly, like, fucking ugly is from the 70s. And that would be a long time for that term not to appear anywhere and then suddenly pop up later.
Hedvig: Yeah. So yeah. What’s the, what’s the story?
Daniel: And the story is, they started in Australia, they quickly moved to America. And in Australia, it was always used generically. Anybody could make Ugg, boots didn’t matter. Anybody could use it. But while all this was going on, another company; Deckers Outdoor Corporation, registered the Ugg trademark in the USA. Starting in about 1985. So that’s a long time ago. And they definitely did not think it was generic. So fast forward to about five years ago, there was a guy Eddie Oyger, founder of Australian leather. He sold a few pairs online in the USA. And as a result, the US manufacturer went after him and said, No, no, no, no, no, this is our trademark. We’ve had it since 1985. And then Australians are like no, this this that’s not right. This is this is generic over here.
Hedvig: Yeah, god
Daniel: So it’s become a whole big thing. And
Hedvig: It’s like the, that we talked about before about the Bula bar I think? Bula means hello in Fijian and there were bars in America who were like: no, it’s a trademark of our bar. It’s the Bula bar! And Fijians were like: it literally means hello. You can’t trademark Hello. Yeah,
Daniel: Exactly. And that’s the whole. So that’s where this has become a whole thing because Australian’s are like hey, those Americans have taken our trademark from us. And yeah, so an American appeals court rejected the Australian argument. And so it looks like a setback for for Mr. Oyger of Australian leather.
Hedvig: I’m sorry, we need to think of a new term then. We’ll… if you have a good idea for another term that he can sell Ugg boots in America under, that’s funny and good, then send it in and we’ll try and popularize it. Fugg boots. There you go!
Daniel: Yeah, maybe. Yeah, fugg boots. Yeah, of course. You know, the thing is, they’re only Uggs if they come from the Ugg region of Australia. Otherwise, they’re just sparkling boots.
Hedvig: Oh, I see. Very good, very good.
Daniel: I will never get sick of that meme. I will never get sick of it.
[MUSIC]
Hedvig: We had a lot of news. That was fun. But we have some lovely, lovely guests who we’d like to bring in.
Daniel: Yes, we would. We’ve got Emma Schimke of the University of Queensland, Georgia Dempster of the University of Melbourne and Kirsten Ellis of Monash University. Let’s start with Emma, who’s going to be taking us to her research of sleep and word learning Emma, Hi, how’s it going?
Emma: Good. How are you?
Daniel: Great. Thanks for listening to all that.
Emma: Thanks for having me on the show today.
Daniel: It’s a pleasure.
Hedvig: Yeah, it’s super fun to have you here.
Daniel: Tell us about your work in your own words what you do?
Emma: Yeah, so I’m really interested in sleep and memory consolidation. And, in particular, I’m interested in the role that sleep plays in new word learning.
Hedvig: Right? So I’m also very interested in sleep. [LAUGHS] For many reasons, I enjoy just napping.
Daniel: I’m a bit of an enthusiast.
Hedvig: I’m a bit of an enthusiast, I do love a good sleep. So are you going to be able to tell us if all these news that we hear about like these tapes that you can play while you’re sleeping, and you’ll wake up speaking fluent French, is that a thing?
Emma: I would love to say it’s a thing. I think I could make a lot of money if it was a thing. But there are some interesting things going on in the world of research at the moment, though, where actually they’re able to reactivate memories during sleep by pairing them with stimuli such as odor cues, or auditory tones. And they’ll pair the memory trace with that before sleep, then they’ll play the tone or spray the odor during sleep, and it will actually reactivate them, which is super fascinating.
Hedvig: How do you know that it’s? So Ii that that you like ,I’ll just ,if I have a perfume, and I always spray it when I pet my cat. And my partner sprays a perfume when I’m sleeping? Well, I dream about petting my cat, or will I remember it better?
Emma: Yeah, it’s about remembering the memory better. But I wish that was my PhD topic. But that’s just something else that’s going on in the world of research at the moment. So my topic’s more looking at encoding new words before having a sleep. Then the participants go have a sleep and then we test their memory again after they’re paired asleep at home in their own beds. And we compare this to a group of participants who stay awake. So they learn the memories at the beginning of the day, stay awake all day, and then we retest them that night. So I’m comparing the two groups with my research
Hedvig: So do the people who sleep remember things better?
Emma: Yes. So with them, so we’re looking at both young and older adults. And with the young adults, we found that the participants who slept did indeed remember more words than the group who stayed away. But with the older adults, there was no difference whatsoever between the groups.
Daniel: I wonder why?
Hedvig: Oh!
Emma: Yeah, so there’s lots of interesting things that happen across the lifespan with language and sleep. So with the older adults, there’s changes in relation to language can include, so your vocabulary will get bigger, but then you might have more difficulty retrieving the word. So you might have what’s called that tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, where you know what you want to say, but you can’t quite recall it. I’m sure we’ve all had that at one stage or another.
Hedvig: Yeah, definitely.
Daniel: Yeah. At this point, I got to ask, I mean, what even is sleep? What what’s going on with our brains during sleep?
Hedvig: Oh yeah
Emma: Yeah, so that’s an awesome question. So. So what happens while we’re sleeping with memory consolidation, is that there’s specific characteristics of sleep that are thought to reactivate and strengthen new memories. So when we acquire new memory, it usually is acquired in the hippocampus. So in initial short-term storage in the brain. And then while we’re asleep, specific aspects of sleep, such as slow wave sleep, so that’s that deep sleep we have throughout the night, that’s thought to reactivate and strengthen the memory. And overnight the memory then shifts from that initial acquisition in the hippocampus into more stable, longer term storage within the neocortex. And so they’re able to, I guess, see these in research correlations between specific aspects of sleep architecture, and then retention of new words or new memories.
Hedvig: Yeah cuz I’ve heard that before. Because for a long time, I thought that people weren’t really sure why humans necessarily sleep. Like what the point is of sleeping and sleeping in the particular way that we do. And I’ve heard this before being floated, as like maybe it’s for consolidating memories from short term to long term. So there’s some some facts to back that up.
Emma: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. So I think, you know, sleep used to be considered like, I guess, a luxury maybe in popular culture? But now we’re starting to see how essential it is to health. And just one element of that is consolidation of memories.
Daniel: I heard a weird theory over the week, that as far as dreams go, that dreams… you might be familiar with the term overfitting. That’s where you learn all your training data, but you learn it to well, and then you only learn your training examples, and that doesn’t help you with new stuff. So, so one idea about dreams. This, I might be going off on some weird thing here, but I’m just fascinated. And I’ve got you. So here we are. The idea was, the idea was that dreams are just like a bunch of weird data that our brains give us to prevent overfitting.
Emma: That’s super interesting. Yeah. I mean, I don’t know too much about dreams. But I do know that with memories, they’re looking at the moment at which sleep at the generalization of memories, so I’m not sure if that’s similar to what you’re talking about. But where we’re able to generalize that memory trace to other situations or examples. So there’s a body of research looking at that as well.
Daniel: Sorry, this is Pint of Science. So I’m like that guy at the pub who’s like: [STONER VOICE] no, but like, dreams are like, these things that, man… anyways
Hedvig: Because there’s different kinds of like learning and remembering, right? Because like, my little niece is learning lots of things right now. And she’s learning words and things, but she won’t remember like, what happened yesterday, but she can like learn how to say hello. And it’s like, those are different things. Like the episodic memory of like, what happened yesterday, and like, how to walk, and how to say hello, and how to wave or like different kinds of stuff.
Emma: Absolutely Yeah, and, in particular, I’m looking more at that episodic memory, and the recall and recognition of memories or words. And in particular, I’m looking at two types of word learning. So one type is called associative learning. So that’s where we might say, an example is the word cat, you might see your pet cat, and you know, to associate the word cat with that pet. Or you might see a picture of a cat and you learn that association. Or you might hear a word in a foreign language, and you pair that with the word cat. The other type of learning I’m looking at is called contextual word learning. And that’s where we infer the meaning of a new word through the semantic context in which it’s presented. So that might be when we read a new book, an example is, say Harry Potter, where there were lots of new words that I, you know, when I was reading that I wasn’t sure what they meant, but I could work out what the meaning of the word was based on the context of the sentences or words around it. So I’m really interested in whether sleep has a different effect on these two types of word learning? Because they actually involve different neural processes. And
Hedvig: I know what you mean, the second kind of contextual learning, I read books, and sometimes there’ll be like super… words that are like really, really, really uncommon. The other day was an English word like was it sursser? It’s like the sound that brook makes, but an adjective?
Daniel: Oh, sussurative?
Hedvig: Yes, that word. And I saw it in a context. And I was like, no idea what this means. But it sounds like it’s a kind of noise that’s low frequency. And my partner, Ste just knows, I don’t know how, but he has just learned all of these words. I can just ask him and he like, says it directly. But most of the time before I try and guess it and I said: Oh, is that the kind of noise that’s like low frequency? And he’s like yes, it’s the type of so very often from even in your native language, even in Swedish and in English, you can often guess yeah, what was mean in the context quite accurately I find
Emma: Yeah, it’s quite fascinating. And we yeah, looked at these two types of word learning in the lab. And so we had all these nonsense words, so that we knew that the participants hadn’t ever been exposed to the words before. They couldn’t look them at home.
Daniel: Love that!
Emma: And these words are here to like the legal constraints of words within… So we were looking at English words. So the spelling of the words had to follow the rules of English. But they were all words that were completely made up. And then we embedded those in sentences, or we associated them with pictures. And then that’s how we had the participants learn these unfamiliar words.
Daniel: And which, do we have results on which one is, is working better?
Emma: Yeah, so far I’ve just looked at the associative one. So where we painted a word with a picture, and in this case, we paired the words with pictures of aliens that the participants had never seen before. Which was, yeah, quite fun. And yeah, found out that sleep did boost that type of word learning. And we’re still to look at the contextual data.
Hedvig: Oh that’s really cool!
Daniel: I’m really fascinated by little kids, because I’ve got two of them right now. And when it comes to memory, like they don’t have, my understanding is that they haven’t grown their prefrontal gyrus to have super long term memories, which is why we can’t remember anything. Like they were like, one of mine is two and a half, she won’t remember anything. But she’s a genius, when it comes to language. And I feel like they can remember a lot of stuff. So that’s really good for their language learning, but they don’t have other kinds of memory? I’m just, can you tell me anything at all about little kids’ memory and language acquisition?
Emma: Yeah, so, um, a little bit that I’ve read about is just around the importance of napping actually, for children with their memory consolidation. So there’s a real push at the moment to, I guess, prioritize napping, you know, within the preschool or kindergarten environment. Because it is important for not only word learning, but other types of learning throughout the day.
Hedvig: Yeah, napping is important.
Daniel: Napping is important
Emma: Yeah, and now we can all say, let’s have, yay to having enough, right? Because Science backs it up.
Daniel: So it sounds like what we’re saying is the upshot is if you are a second language learner, or you’re you’re trying to acquire a language, don’t shortcut on sleep.
Emma: That’s right. And so there’s that I guess, you know, dilemma when you’re a student, where, you know, do you stay up all night to cram? Or do you just give up and go to sleep? But what if you actually, by going to sleep, you’re actually consolidating those new words? So it’s a win win.
Daniel: [LAUGHS] True. Fantastic, Emma Schimke of the University of Queensland. Now what I’m going to have you do is I’m going to have you move over one spot on the couch. But stay with us. Don’t go away. Because there are three hosts now, you are one. And we’re going to invite Georgia Dempster of the University of Melbourne to come on, who is looking at how officials communicate information about COVID to the public. Georgia, thanks for coming on with us.
Georgia: Yeah, thanks very much for having me. Um, so yeah, basically, my PhD is about communicating public health related information to public audiences. And I apply PhD into a couple of different studies. But um, one study that I’m completing at the moment is about the communication of COVID-19 related information to the public. And I’m, in this study, I’ve recruited public health experts, both sort of researchers, clinicians, and yeah, like people who work in sort of Department of Health type area. And I’ve interviewed them about their experiences of communicating in media, because I want to understand their experiences. So you know, how we could do things better basically. As the communication of COVID information to the public is vital in terms of the population’s sort of behavioral response, including things like vaccine uptake, and wearing masks. It’s important to understand how, you know, we communicate to minimize the spread of disease.
So I’m currently analyzing my interview data at the moment, so I can’t really give you any solid outcomes of my work. But I do have one kind of interesting anecdote from a participant that I spoke to recently. They said when they communicate to public audiences, that they really try and communicate with ethos, pathos, and logos. So ethos is about establishing the authority of the speaker. So being able to establish credibility of expertise in a field. And then pathos is about appealing to audience’s emotions. And then logos is about communicating using logic. So I think this is a pretty interesting takeaway for experts communicating to public audiences. You can’t just explain things simply and logically, you really need to embody ethos and pathos as well.
Daniel: So let me just, let me just break that down a little bit. Because we do tend to focus on the logos, the words, the facts, the things. But you’ve also got to work on establishing your credibility as a professional, I get that. How do we work on pathos? How do we establish a connection with a public audience who we might not even be talking to face to face?
Georgia: Yeah, I think that’s an interesting question. I guess when it comes to things like vaccines, if people are vaccine hesitant, you can’t just dismiss their concerns, like you really have to try and understand them, and be very empathetic in your communication and that kind of thing. So you can’t just say, you know, the risks are non-existent, you have to really be empathetic in the way you communicate with people.
Hedvig: Yeah, and communicate clearly, it’s because we have those biases, don’t we? For example, when it comes to risk and vaccines, that there’s a natural bias that to do nothing, even if doing nothing like, the chance of being harmed by COVID are greater than the side effects of vaccines. But taking a vaccine is doing an action. So we tend to have a cognitive bias against doing things, even if the thing that we’re going to do is less riskful. That must be really hard to communicate, like with those cognitive biases in mind. Another thing I wanted to ask besides ethos, pathos, and logos. Another thing that I have experienced both with my Australian friends and I live here in Germany, and my people in Sweden and British is… consistency.
So you hear different advice from different authorities, or webages are outdated or conflicting. Here in Germany, Germany is a federation, as is, Australia. Ao you can get different information from different states. Yesterday, my partner and I did a COVID test at home. And we bought two different brands. And one of them said, to swirl around your nose for 10 seconds, the other one for 15. That’s a very minor difference. But we get a lot of variation all the time. And I wonder how as communicators, people try and stay… because some of the inconsistencies makes sense as well. If the situation changes, if the next week, you know, it is good, if you do this, this instead of that, that it’s going to be a dynamic situation is going to differ from place to place from time to time. But it seems like a lot of credibility is often being doubted, because people perceive the advices as inconsistent or unclear. What are communicators doing to mitigate that?
Georgia: Yeah, sure. I mean, I think that there’s a real place for disagreement. And I think that’s okay. And I think in many ways it can be constructive. If people are having like a respectful conversation, in a public forum, I think it actually can help some people understand situations and differences of opinions. And I think as information evolves over time, as we learn more and more about COVID, people will disagree, and people will disagree with themselves too like, their opinion, opinion will change. And I think that’s fine. I think one thing that is really problematic is when media are trying to create headlines by putting experts against each other and saying, “These experts disagree. So, you know, this is terrible.” And I think that’s actually really, really harmful. And so I think that maybe instead of focusing on experts disagreeing, it should actually be framed as like a, like a helpful, healthy kind of disagreement. And I think that’s okay.
Hedvig: Hmm. I agree with you. But I’m also speaking and I think most everyone else in this call as someone who’s like, fairly, like science literate. Like I’m, I’m used to disagreements not necessarily being a bad thing. But a lot of people aren’t, right? A large part of the population just wants to be told what to do and get clear advice, and then get on with taking care of their kids and their work and, you know, walking their dog, they don’t want to have to sit and sift through a different. Yeah, I don’t know what I have to say, but it’s just it sounds incredibly difficult to try and do this communication well.
Georgia: Yeah, sure. I mean, like maybe the go to place for people who just want one source of information might be like your government’s health department. But then I feel like health departments can also be a little bit outdated quite quickly. But then that’s where academia comes into play. And like, you know, the latest scientific evidence should inform government policy and that kind of thing, but you can’t be bothered sifting through the headlines. Yeah, maybe. Maybe the Australian Government, for example, in Australia would be a good place to go to for the latest advice.
Daniel: Well, let’s talk about that for a second. So in the Australian Government with Australian experts. In the Australian media, government scape, what do you find is going well? And what do you find is really needs to be changed?
Georgia: Well, I think in Australia, we have to recognize we’ve done a really, really good job if we don’t have much COVID in the community at the moment. And I think that’s for a number of reasons. Firstly, we’re an island far away from many other places. But also the communication has been very good. And people have been following health advice. You know, like, we’ve been wearing masks and social distancing, and quarantining, and all that kind of thing. So I think I think Australia’s actually done really, really well. I think that there are some things we could do better, I think we could communicate to culturally and linguistically diverse populations much better. I think there’s been a complete and utter whitewash of, you know, middle-aged white men speaking at press conferences. So I think there’s a lot of things in that regard we could do better. But I think, you know, Australia’s actually doing really, really well. And I think it’s also, so you know, experts communicating in media and the media supporting, you know, an agenda. Not just picking people who are arguing with each other, but actually trying to communicate a really helpful message that’s ultimately going to promote Australia’s public health.
Daniel: One last question, what about, what about podcasts? Do you feel like they are doing a good job, there are lots of COVID podcasts. How are they doing?
Georgia: I can’t speak to the effect that they’re having. But I know that, for example, like the Coronacast on ABC, that’s hosted by Norman Swan, who’s a physician and also journalist, I think, that might be daily. And that’s like a constant update on the latest evidence with like, Australia’s best experts. And I think that’s a really solid way to communicate, especially the updating information as the science changes over time. So I think they have that put in place, I don’t know, the effect that they have, but I think it’s a really good addition to the information that’s available for people to consume.
Daniel: Well, this is super important research. And I think it really has application more broadly to what we do. So thanks for that, Georgia. We’re gonna move both of you over on the couch. Thank you very much. And we’re going to talk to Kirsten Ellis of Monash University, who is making tools to encourage inclusion of people with disabilities, disabled people, including Braille keyboards and software for teaching sign language. So hello, Kirsten, thanks for coming on.
Kirsten: Hi, thanks for having me.
Daniel: Great to see you. First of all, tell us about your main research. Before we get to the language stuff, what do you do?
Kirsten: Okay, so, at the moment, I’m doing a lot of STEM engagement. And that means that I’m trying to make STEM available to people that don’t usually participate. So one of the activities that I’ve made is a circuit making activity that anyone can do. And if you have cerebral palsy, for example… can I actually show it or not?
Daniel: Would you please?
Hedvig: You can show it and we can describe it. So it looks like two rectangular quadrant. They’re yellow and red, and they have some sort of light on them, and the light is shining. And when you put the blocks together, they’re shining. And when you separate them, they’re not.
Kirsten: Yes.
Hedvig: Why? Magic!
Kirsten: Okay, so this is magic tape check. This is conductive tape.
Hedvig: Oh, it is magic!
Daniel: Yay!
Kirsten: So this is basically conductive tape. And it has, it’s a nickel copper. And all it does is it acts as wires, but it gives you a really big surface area. So you can put them together. But it means that people with disabilities can actually engage in science because all of a sudden… so if you’ve ever done breadboarding, there’s these little tiny poles in straight lines, and you need really good vision to be able to do it and it’s just really hard or you can solder.
Hedvig: I had to solder in school,
Kirsten: And it’s hot and it has really stinky fumes. It gives me migraines. And so it’s not… But then you go: Okay, so for people who are blind, how would they know if the light comes on?
Hedvig: Hmm, that’s a good point.
Kirsten: [BUZZING SOUND INCREASES] Can you hear that? So there’s a little something else there.
Hedvig: Oh, it’s a little buzzing sound.
Kirsten: Yep.
Hedvig: Oh!
Daniel: Cool!
Kirsten: That’s a vibration motor. And you can actually feel if the circuit is working. And then of course, the proliferation of drones. They have these little tiny, drone-
Daniel: It’s a fan!
Hedvig: Oh, it’s a little propeller that’s spinning around.
Kirsten: Yep. So these are called tape blocks. And they’re basically they really are EVA foam block, wrapped in tape, and then a battery inserted or a component put underneath. You make them from scratch. Everyone can do it. And they’re really really versatile in terms of, people can either use them pre-made, if that’s the level of disability that you have. So I’ve had people with quite significant disabilities pushing them together on wheelchair trays, or you can make them from scratch. So people with intellectual disabilities. School children can use them. And then, because I do STEM engagement, so I want to get kids interested in STEM, I want them to feel that technology and science is for them. So if I come into a classroom and say, This is a
Daniel: Let’s describe this
Hedvig: Something on the camera that looks like a, I would say, a Furby, because I was small in the 90s. But it’s a fuzzy little thing with two big eyes, and sort of white hair. And it’s has some sort of light that’s going on in there? What’s that?
Daniel: It’s a nose.
Kirsten: So it has a light up nose. So to make this, it’s like three pieces of conductive tape, an LED and a battery. And it looks like a little, little fur creature with big eyes and blue wings. And I have hundreds of different versions of them. You can make trains you can make dragons, I have lots and lots and lots of dragons. Because I’m really into dragons, so I’ll just grabbed the battery off there.
Hedvig: So the idea is that you take these tapes and you put them together and you make a light shine, or you make the eyes shine, now that is a very beautiful dragon you showed right there. And then you can learn about how electricity works. And maybe also learn some basic programming mechanisms of turning off and on and making chains and stuff as well?
Kirsten: So you have tilt switches, all different types of components. And so you can learn about them. They’re accessible to everyone. And it just, it just makes it available to a whole lot of people who’ve never made a circuit before, which is really impressed for me, and it becomes about being me. So then you can do lots of different things with them. And yeah, it’s it’s to hook kids in. I work with adults with intellectual disability who’ve always been told, you cannot make a circuit, right, because you can’t solder or you can’t breadboard or it’s too hard. It’s not that the activity is too hard. It’s the way we go about doing it is too hard. So if we change the way that we do things, then they can participate. So then you go, if you can participate, because we change the way activities are done. What other activities can we change so that everyone can participate? So it’s really about activity design, and really thinking about how do we design things so that everyone can participate?
Hedvig: That’s super cool.
Daniel: It is cool. And now we’re getting to areas like, for example, Braille keyboards, which you have some experience with, and other accessibility items. Tell us more about that, if you wouldn’t mind.
Kirsten: So I do a lot, a lot of stuff around inclusive technology. And we specifically chose inclusive, as opposed to assistive because I want it to be about everyone being able to participate. So things like Braille keyboards, a lot of blind children don’t actually learn Braille. And the reason that they don’t learn Braille can be because their parents and teachers don’t feel confident in supporting a child who’s using Braille, because they haven’t come across it previously.
Hedvig: Let’s just make sure we, because I know what Braille is and Danielle knows what Braille is, but not everyone knows what it is. Would you like to explain to us why it is?
Kirsten: Okay, so Braille is a series of dots. For English, Braille, English Unified Braille, it’s six dots. Each dot, each letter of the alphabet is represented by that cell of six dots. You can it, also has a whole lot of contractions and shorthands. But just learning the basic letters, each cell represents a letter. Punctuation’s covered there’s also Braille for music and maths.
Hedvig: Oh, I didn’t know that actually.
Daniel: IPA for Braille as well.
Hedvig: And we should say so the dots are raised. So which means that if you’re blind, you can put your finger on a line or you can run it across and you can read it the letter.
Kirsten: Feel the letter. Yes. So I do things like Braille keyboards for sighted people. So when I look at Braille, when I look at the dots, it looks like a rectangle of dots. And because I have prior knowledge to learning, I see it as a rectangle of dots. And when I’m, so I’m basically making those dots as I see them. When children are learning Braille from scratch, they actually learn Braille in a straight line when they’re typing it, because of historically, they used a Perkins Brailler, which was like a keyboard that you punch the dots and there were six basically six buttons on it, that you punch the the different dots in and it strikes the paper raises the dots, so that you can then feel it from the other side. Yeah, which is kind of kind of cool. So I make a keyboard that just makes it easier to learn for sighted people. And not necessarily better for blind people, because they learn one dot at a time. So they’ll, or one letter at a time. So they’ll learn the letter A with all the other kids. And then they’ll learn the letter B, with all the other… and it’s done much more slowly, where as an adult, you tend to want to go, I just want to learn the entire alphabet in, you know, a very short period of time.
Hedvig: I already know what an A is. Yeah, can you tell me what that looks like? It’s like learning another script, like, another script that’s vaguely like alphabetic. You’re just like, I just want to know what A is. I don’t need to like be told that A as an apple.
Kirsten: Yes. And especially when it’s in the same language as, what you’re actually typing in English, it’s spelling in English. And you’re you’re using Braille in English, then no, you don’t need to be taught that A is Apple. So there’s some really interesting things with Braille. If you’re actually typing Braille, you can type it faster then you can type standard text, because there’s a whole lot of contractions. So TH, the, knowledge, are all single cells. So you can actually get a lot faster. So if you want to get really fast on your typing, you’re actually typing Braille. And it’s, it’s a chorded system. So you press multiple buttons at a time.
Hedvig: Ah, that reminds me of, have you seen those stenographer? Court stenographer keyboards,? I don’t know, if anyone ever wants to see some of this chord kind of pressing and action we all know like Ctrl F, you can tap them at the same time. And technically, I guess that’s sort of like a chord in a way. You’re accomplishing, or when you’re doing just caps on your keyboard, you’re also pressing more than one at a time or an @ symbol, etc. But these are for for, for Braille, you’re saying that there are certain sounds, like TH, that is a chord, but stenographers they have it for entire words, I think, so.
Kirsten: So in Braille, every letter is a chord. So A is a single dot at the top, B is the dot below it as well. So that’s two together to make a B. And then, but if you type the letter space, k space in Braille, that’s word “knowledge”. Because it’s the, in contracted Braille, you’re processing design… you’re going to go to have a word. Braille is just fascinating! [LAUGHS]so you that you think that as you’re looking at Braille, like I read the signs on toilets, just to practice choosing Braille over time. And that is, that is letter for letter. So you know, T-O. But when there’s a book or something like that, I can’t remember how Braille takes a lot of space by comparison. So they use a lot of contractions to bring it down. So it’s actually quite complicated and sophisticated, incredibly sophisticated in its full form.
Hedvig: That’s really cool. I didn’t know that.
Daniel: That is cool
Hedvig: Yeah, I find this work very interesting. I have a lot of like God-children and nibblings, so I try and keep up with various ways of introducing STEM to children. Like the GoldieBlox engineering play things where they learn about like, a mouse trap type of tools. And these programming things. There’s a fun game core Human Research Machine where you learn the basics of programming that I’ve been trying to get my nephew to play. But all of these things are usually directed at able-bodied children. What’s really interesting about this, this is ways of bringing in people who have other kinds of functionalities as well.
Kirsten: And with the Braille, if you think about children who are sighted, are able to see language words written around them all the time. And blind children actually don’t get that exposure to written language all the time. So it actually has to be introduced to them quite early on. So so one of the pieces of research I’ve done with a colleague, Leo deHolloway is actually doing tactile stories. So you make stories or a story page. And then you put a vibration motor under the important thing, or under something. And then the children feel with their finger in order to find that thing. And what they’re doing is, and you have, make sure that you you close your eyes and you feel the page and you want to be able to feel the whale or feel the flower or field so that children actually learned that they can gain knowledge. Blind children can learn that they can gain knowledge by feeling and that’s really really, it’s a critical preschool to learning to read.
Hedvig: Because you’re right, because when I was learning to read as a child, I would just obsessively read out everything I saw. It was actually quite a bother for my family, when we were driving a car be like “stop 60”, um “supermarket” like whatever I saw out the window. I just like no filter, would just like read and, of course would help me to learn how to read because I just like all this input. But yeah, if you’re blind Yeah, you have to learn that you need to feel things to get information. Yeah,
Daniel: And what you’re doing is helping differently abled people get input. That’s so fantastic.
Kirsten: Yeah, it’s Yes. Cool. And it is. It’s, it’s being inclusive. It’s including people in the use of technology and that sort of thing, which is really exciting.
Daniel: Let’s bring all three of our guests back for a second, because I’ve got a question for all of you: Your work involves your subject area, the things that you’ve been doing. But it also involves, to some measure, public communication of science, because that’s what you’re doing here on the show tonight. And this is, what Pint of Science is all about. What have you learned by your good experiences and your bad experiences about how you want to do science communication? And how maybe it ought to be?
Hedvig: Why don’t we start with Emma, who we spoke to most, most long ago?
Emma: Yeah, sure. Yeah. So recently, I participated in The Three Minute Thesis competition, where I had to summarize my whole PhD in 3 minutes. Which was quite challenging. I think the main takeaway for me was that to engage an audience, they had to be interested in my work out of curiosity, or concern. And so I had to really think of, I guess, a hook to have them listen into why was my research important. And I think also translating what the implications are to the wider community is so important, because as researchers, we can get very good at, you know, writing up journal articles and publishing our output, but to be able to explain it in a way that’s relevant to the wider community is essential to translate our research.
Daniel: I have often thought about the nature of the hook. And it’s something I try to do when we get a new story. It’s like: Oh, well, this is interesting. People will already know something about this, how do we get them in?
Emma: That’s right. And it’s like, why should they care? And so you really have to think about that for a second
Hedvig: From the negative side as well. I also try and remind myself I try to, to be sure that I can explain things to my mum. And if I can’t, I try to say: okay, should I be doing this? Like, is this an interesting research? If I, if I actually can’t explain it to my mom, and I can’t engage a lay person, then? Not necessarily… That doesn’t necessarily mean you shouldn’t do that research. But for me, at least, it makes me do a little rethink and think, what can I do that is relevant? Because I do want to be able to connect personally, for me, that’s like, necessity.
Daniel: Georgia, what you got?
Georgia: I guess one thing I’ve been thinking about recently is, obviously like, as researchers, we write academic journal articles, but one thing I’ve been doing recently is writing reports. So usually for funding organizations, they want their deliverables and reports. And the language that you have to write those reports in is so much simpler than academic journal articles. You can’t have any jargon, you can’t have any acronyms or any abbreviations. And it’s really challenged me to just communicate my work in a much simpler way than I was doing before. And I already thought I was making considered effort to write simply, but um, I wasn’t. And yeah, that’s a bit of a slap in the face about how to, you really need to make your academic writing as accessible as it can be.
Hedvig: That’s a very, like, brave thing to be willing to do. Because it sounds like it’d be a rough experience. Like, I would find that rough. And probably you might get negative feedback the first time around you try, and ugh, sounds very courageous thing to do.
Daniel: Kirsten, how about you? What have you found,
Kirsten: I’m really into community impact. So actually taking research out of the research lab, out of the academic paper and taking it out into the community. So I have spent a lot of time take… which I’m also not very good academic [LAUGH]. I work in a very, very obscure area. So there aren’t that many academics that work in the area. I think there are, on my main research at the moment, I think they’re about three papers available. Maybe five if you sort of stretch the bounds of what it is. So mine is actually just engaging people and actually getting it out in the work that we’re doing out into the community, so that it has impact. So that people can actually use the tools that we’re developing. Because a lot of great research is done that’s never actually makes it out of the lab. So I have been doing a whole lot of YouTube videos. And so to put this in context, I have 200-ish citations? I have 5,000 YouTube views. So I know where my audiences and it’s not in academic papers.
[LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: Fair enough? Yeah. And I personally, I mean, we do this show, so we also like to talk to a lay audience, obviously. But no one says to my face, but sometimes I worry that academics will perceive my research work as less [BLOWS AIR OUT] less mature or something? Because I engage in this kind of thing. Have you had? Do you have such worries? Have you met with such concerns?
Kirsten: I absolutely, absolutely struggle with the number of things that we’re required to do as an academic/ In terms of, I’m actually very good at getting grants in terms of the work that I do, people can see will have impact. And then if I want that impact to actually exist in the community and make it out into the community, I need to write papers, but there are so few people who actually are able to review papers that I’ve written in a meaningful way that it’s actually really difficult. Yeah, look, I really struggle as an academic to actually work out where I should be fitting, because. And the other thing is that I mean, there’s, I have worked in research in signed language teaching for children using technology. So I make puppets that you teach sign language with. There’s no one else in the world doing that. So if you go, if I get five citations on a paper about that, then I have hit 100% of the researchers of the world. [LAUGHTER] You know, not many want just five citations, right? Yeah, that’s good for my academic institution, you know, so, so I, this is real tension of producing sign language software that every child in Australia kind of had a copy…. sorry every deaf child in Australia had a copy of. It doesn’t fit into academia, you know, it’s sort of not… there’s movements around to actually have more of an impact in, you know, or have more weighting within academia that you come into. But I guess the question is, where do we want to have our impact? And I’m glad I’m actually making a difference to people. That’s why I started my PhD, and why I started my research career was actually to have an impact on people. So I think that if it depends what your motivation for being there is, and I know why I’m there. So that’s okay.
Daniel: I’m feeling that
Hedvig: I feel particularly encouraged, because I did my PhD at ANU, Australian National University and our Vice Chancellor there, Brian Schmidt, made a statement a couple years ago, where he said something like: I am actively not caring about our rankings anymore. Because the rankings are clearly motivated by values and things that I don’t necessarily think are the most important. So like, I’m going to promote work within our university that I think is good, and that might bring us down in the rankings and like, I don’t care. And he was my Vice Chancellor, and a Nobel Prize Laureate. So I was like, okay, you can have values outside of these rankings. I thought that was Yeah.
Daniel: So I guess the feeling that I’m getting here, the takeaway from the three of you is we need to focus on simplicity, we need to focus on utility, like how useful and how personally relevant our work is to members of the public. And also, engagement, like public engagement, and all those things are very complex. But those are, those are all great things. So thank you so much for sharing your work with us. That’s Emma Schimke of the University of Queensland, George Dempster of the University of Melbourne, and Kirsten Ellis of Monash University. Thanks so much for sharing your work with us on the show tonight.
Emma: Thank you.
Georgia: Thank you
Kirsten: Thank you
[MUSIC]
Daniel: We’re now moving on to our favorite segment…
Hedvig: [SINGING] Word of the Week!
Daniel: [SINGING] Word of the Week
Hedvig: [SINGING] It’s word of the week, Ben’s not here!
Daniel and Hedvig: [SINGING] Word of the week!!
Hedvig: Word of the Week is our segment on the show where we bring up a word or a phrase that’s been in the news lately, and we have some words prepared, or Daniel has some words, I have one phrase that I added just before the show.
Daniel: Awesome.
Hedvig: Let’s do, any of our guests have any words that you’ve noticed in the week gone past that you think would nominate? You can say no.
Kirsten: No.
Hedvig: It’s a hard task. Every week when we record I’m like: I don’t, I don’t know what’s a good word. It’s rare that I find a good word. Daniel’s very good at finding
Daniel: You know what, though? No, I’m not. I’m not. They’re staring us in the face all the time. Like, I totally missed plant-based even though it was like everywhere. And I was just like: Oh, that’s a good word plant-based
Hedvig: This week, particularly?
Daniel: Oh, no, no, no, this was last year.
Hedvig: That’s cuz beyond beef
Daniel: Yeah, exactly.
Hedvig: It’s hard. It’s a hard task
Daniel: But I think I found a couple of good ones.
Hedvig: What do you got?
Daniel: I got “woke agenda”. So it seems that some [LAUGHS IN DESPAIR] some folks in the military were observing IDAHOBIT (eye-da-hoe-bit). IDAHOBIT is the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, Interphobia, and Transphobia, and this comes from the publication Out in Perth. We’ll have a link to this article on our blog. Out in Perth is awesome. It says, “earlier this year, IDAHOBIT was highlighted to defense staff in an internal communication. It suggested staff could show support on the day by holding a discussion or hosting a morning tea. It was suggested that attendees could be asked to be conscious of people’s pronouns, or show their support by wearing rainbow clothing or a pin to show they are an ally.” That’s the end of the quote. But when defense minister and most loathsome political figure in Australia, Peter Dutton found out about it, he put the kibosh on it and here’s the quote, “I’ve been very clear to the Chiefs that I will not tolerate discrimination, but we are not pursuing a woke agenda.” So what is the work agenda? Anybody know? I missed the memo. What is it?
Hedvig: Yeah, I don’t fully understand this either. Because as often when we talk about inclusivity, which often comes up when we talk about social justice in general, you can either see it as like a simple sort of HR and equality thing. So he says here, “I don’t tolerate discrimination.” That’s something most people say and they agree on.
Daniel: I’m not a racist.
Hedvig: I’m not a racist. I don’t tolerate sexism. I don’t tolerate racism, but discussing it or having a morning tea is somehow like, more than just doing that. It’s not an instance of just being inclusive. Somehow. I don’t know where that line is either.
Daniel: I don’t know. But it looks like morning tea.
Hedvig: Yeah, I should explain maybe to a non-Australian listeners that Australians love to have morning teas that are themed according to different things. It’s when at your workplace or education center, you go to a place and you have a cup of tea or coffee and a biscuit. And maybe someone talks and gives a sort of speech.
Daniel: Yeah. You have some, you have some tea, somebody brings a pack of those shitty Arnott’s biscuits. And… no, no, no, I love the orange ones. I will eat the orange ones. But yeah, so it sounds like the woke agenda is morning tea and less systemic discrimination. Is that it? That’s that’s basically it. I like those things.
Hedvig: And I think it sounds… I think he’s exaggerating. And He’s exaggerating, because he’s dog whistling too. Yeah, it’s a whole….yeah
Daniel: What’s the dog whistling?
Hedvig: [SIGHS HEAVILY] I don’t, [LAUGHS WEAKLY] I don’t have enough juice in me to…
Daniel: C’mon, Hedvig!
Hedvig: Yeah, who is he dog whistling to?
Daniel: Well, yeah. So it seems to me like, I’ve noticed something interesting about “woke”. it seems to be a replacement word. Like, if you don’t want to say you’re a racist or a homophobe, or that you, you don’t want to say that you support those things, you could just say you’re anti-woke, and it does the same job. I think people since the 90s have said “politically correct,” right? Complaining about politically correct stuff. Which means “I know that I have regressive views, but I don’t want to change. So I’m going to externalize all that and complain that everybody else is wrong. And I’m not a terrible person. It’s just that everybody else is too ‘politically correct,’ too ‘woke’, they want to cancel you,” and then you can feel okay about that. Because then they’re the bad guys. And not you.
Hedvig: Yeah, something like that. They feel like it’s going too fast. Because things that were considered woke and politically correct in the 60s are now considered very, very normal values. So it’s, there’s there’s a bit of a lag effect, I think.
Kirsten: I had never heard of woke until about three months ago, I woked to woke.
Hedvig: Oh, really?
Daniel: Oh really? Okay
Kirsten: I’d never heard of it has a… I mean, I’d heard of all the concept, but not under the label of woke.
Hedvig: So, isn’t it from American Black English?
Daniel: Yeah.
Hedvig: Originally, that might be why it’s taking a while to get to Australia.
Daniel: Yeah, there are references to it from the 60s also, the Erykah Badu track “Master Teacher” was influential. And people make fun of it now, you know, it’s like: oh, those silly, well, you know, like we say. It’s used as this near term to make fun of people who are trip. Look, I’m a lefty. There’s a lot to make fun of about me.
Hedvig: [SARCASTICALLY] Oh, are you? Didn’t know. Couldn’t tell.
Daniel: Fair enough. Fair enough. There are many of us who are trying very imperfectly to examine ourselves and try to be less racist and not be accepting of racism and sexism and homophobia and stuff like that. We don’t always do a great job, okay. There’s a lot to criticize. But anti woke is a way of saying, You suck because you’re too focused on social justice or you want things to move too fast or something like that.
Hedvig: And we’re facing a situation increasingly where people are, you know, bubbles and silos and all those terms that we used to say that people are perceiving different realities, and therefore reading in different definitions of the word, and assuming different things. So Peter Dutton, by someone having a morning tea talking about LGBTI issues, he’s reading in a bunch more things that other people aren’t. So, you know, they load them with different meaning.
Daniel: Like, for example, Dutton used the term again, he says, “Our task is to build up the morale in the Australian Defence Force. And these ‘woke’ agendas don’t help.” Seems to me that if you’re somebody who is LGBT, having our national organization showing their support would actually be very good for morale.
Hedvig: Yeah. Especially because the military probably have people who are LGBTI in their ranks, and it’s good if they don’t leave the ranks. They need people to fight the wars.
Daniel: Okay, so “woke agenda.” That’s one. Hedvig, you got yours?
Hedvig: Well, it has to be… I’m sorry, it has to be [IN FRENCH] “nil points” from Eurovision,
Daniel: Nil point?
Hedvig: I’m wrapping it up for Eurovision again.
Daniel: [LAUGHS] it’s only once a year, folks.
Hedvig: Nil point… It’s only once a year, and I go mad for it for that week, and then not at all for the rest of the year. But UK received zero points from the jury, and zero points from the public.
Daniel: Ouch!
Hedvig: This happens sometimes in Eurovision, but it’s not that common. Also Spain, and Germany and Netherlands also got zero from the public vote, but UK was the only one who got zero in total. In Eurovision, they read out the points in French and English, so they say “zero points,” “nil points”
Daniel: So I noticed that in French, it’s no point but in English, we kind of go back and forth between nil point and nul point. They’re both about as popular.
Hedvig: Yeah, I think the UK wasn’t that bad. And when it was announced, he sort of got up and you know went like: Well, you know, I’m here and we’re having a good time. All the other artists got up and applauded. It was a special moment, but I think, you know, there’s Brexit, there is the perception in Europe that UK maybe has been not doing vaccine policy the way everyone else wanted to. So a lot of politics that go into this. It wasn’t a shit song, but got nil point.
Daniel: Okay….
Hedvig: It’s once a year! I’m gonna, every year Daniel, every year I’m gonna talk about Eurovision on this show.
Daniel: I am here for it. I am here for it. I love music. I love silly things. I’ve got weird hobbies as well, you know. Let’s go on to our last one. Kitty on our Discord channel says that she’s been vaccinated and [NORMAL VOICE] Lord Mort- Sorry, [SCARY VOICE] Lord Mortis, says that in two weeks, she’ll be “maxxinated,” our Word of the Week: maxxinated. Any guesses as to what it means? Yes, Kirsten
Kirsten: Had the maximum number of vaccines required.
Daniel: Theoretically, there is no maximum. Not yet anyway. [LAUGHS] No, I love it. I love it.
Emma: Yeah, it’s gonna say that they’ve had two doses of the vaccine that were required?
Daniel: Yes, you are. You are both correct. You’ve received, you’ve, you’ve maxed it. you’ve maxed out. You’ve had both of them and so people are starting to, this is starting to turn up on podcasts, starting to show up. Interestingly, two x’s in maxxinated.
Hedvig: Because of vaccinating having two C’s?
Daniel: That’s a, that is not an answer that I had considered, but that is actually a really good answer. The vaccinated has two C’s. Why should vaxxed or maxxinated not have two x’s? I just wondered where that started. And I noticed this tweet from Benjamin Dreier @BCDreier, “who decided to double the X in anti vaxxers and vaxxed, and what can I do to get back at them?” I was interested in the first question not so much the second. So I decided I was going to head over to the Google Ngram viewer, which is a massive database, millions of words over hundreds of years, I decided to look up anti-vaxx, anti-vaxxer and anti-vaxxers. Because that was the three phrases that I thought I would encounter this the most. So curious fact number one: anti vaxxer double x much more popular, about four or five times more popular, than the single X version. Has been since about 2003. Anti-vaxx with two x’s does not appear at all with a hyphen or without so that’s one thing.
Curious fact number two: I can’t find any older words with two x’s it just does not come up. Like fixer and waxer and relaxer only one X ever. I could find one in a new word. And that is doxxing, which is revealing the real life information, like an address or identity, of somebody else online. But that was only the only one. And then curious fact number three: When we double consonants, it’s usually because we’re changing the vowel before/ So if you got one P, we get striping, but if it’s two P, then it’s stripping the vowel changes from an ay to an eh. So maybe we don’t normally double the X because the letter X is like not one consonant, but two, it’s like a K and a S. So doubling it would be weird. It’s like, you have the word salting, or halting, but you would never double the L and/or the T. It just seems to work differently. What do you think?
Hedvig: [CONSIDERING] Yeah, yeah. There’s not that many X’s in general in words. Not very common letter. That’s the last thing. And then the the amount of consonants makes you change the vowel before, not necessarily much about the consonants, so the consonant should matter too much. But yeah, I yeah. doxxing. I could imagine. Yeah, I just don’t think it’s a very common letter and that’s why it’s not happening. Is that boring? Sorry. Did I ruin it?
Daniel: Okay, now I’m going to try to think of a less common letter where it does happen. Q? No. Z (zed)? I mean, buzz, buzzing, but buzz already has two zeds. What’s a zed with only? Fez, fezzes?
Hedvig: Q is even rarer.
Daniel: Q is weird.
Hedvig: Q is weird.
Daniel: J I can only think of one word J, two J’s: hajji. And that’s the only word
Hedvig: But you’re also trying… Daniel, You’re trying to look for sensitive English spelling. And I’ve got to find i think i think yeah, I think the two x’s in vaccinated is because there’s two Cs in vaccinated. That’s it.
Daniel: We’ve come back around to your good idea. And I don’t want to admit that I wasted my time. So..
Hedvig: [LAUGHS] So yeah. Sunk, sunk cost fallacy.
Daniel: Exactly. But I probably did. Hedvig, I love your answer. So: “Woke agenda,” “nil point,” and maxxinated are Words of the Week. Oh, also, our dear guests. Have we heard the word “cheugy” in like the last week or so? Emma, you have?
Emma: Yeah, was that on your last episode?
Daniel: Oh, you listened?!
Emma: And I had a little chuckle when I heard that word. Found it quite interesting.
Hedvig: Why did you chuckle?
Daniel: Yes. Why did you chuckle?
Emma: I don’t know. It just seems kind of, it seemed like it was almost like in… in jest. I guess you could use the word maybe? But maybe I’m not. I had never used the word before. And so when I googled it, then I came up with like blogs where people were using the word to kind of… Yeah, I don’t know.
Daniel: Anybody not sure? Kirsten, Georgia, you lost on this one?
Georgia: Yup
[LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: Basically, the whole internet thought that cool TikTokers is was using this words a lot. And everyone started using it. But it seems like maybe the young people weren’t using it that much,
Daniel: Or they are? So the word. We figured out that the word kind of sits at the convergence of five different things: like daggy plus basic plus off-trend plus tryhard plus cringe. But it turns out that everyone who was using cheugy last week is no longer using it so you don’t have to remember it now. Thank you very much. Let’s have some quick comments. Our last episode was a live one where our Patreon Patrons helped us determine that fish are indeed wet. That “deceptively simple” just means simple and that if you got electrocuted, you did not necessarily die. A few people sent us comments.
Daniel: Adam on Facebook says “‘weekdays’ I never use next Friday.” Next Friday can be confusing because is this Friday, or is that the one after that? “I always say which week it affects the coming Friday or Friday this week.”
Hedvig: That’s good
Daniel: Friday, the coming week, Friday the week after. Yes.
Hedvig: I agree
Daniel: Also, are fish wet? He says, “in diving, they talk about a wetsuit if it lets water through, so your skin has contact with water, and dry suit if the suit insulates your skin from the surrounding water. I thought that was interesting because you can be in the water and still be dry. In a sense.” I need everyone’s help on this one. Zach on Twitter @ZanyBR says, “I just thought of this one after listening to your episode. If I’m in my underwear, and I say something to the effect of ‘let me get out of my underwear,’ am I my putting on pants or am I getting naked? I can’t tell”
Hedvig: You’re getting naked.
Daniel: Okay. Hedvig, we’ve got a vote for nude. Any other votes.
Hedvig: Emma’s nodding hesitantly. I agree is unclear. But I think you’re getting nude.
Daniel: Okay, okay. Okay. There’s another one that I found: If I say “I had to walk 10 kilometers there and back.” How far away?
Hedvig: Oh yeah, was it? 20 or 10?
Daniel: Was it 5 or 10?
Hedvig: Yeah, I have a five kilometer commute to work. Is your house five kilometers or 2.5 away from work?
Daniel: So, we’re gonna attack that one on an upcoming episode. I also Tyson on Twitter @sibernt said, “this was a great episode that both enlightened and infuriated me. I chuckled and cursed at the results of these polls.” Isn’t that wonderful? It had the intended effect?
Hedvig: That’s good. I like, I like cussing. Yeah. Isn’t that, isn’t that the new world of content, is that you goto engage people, be at negative or positive. We just made people mad
Daniel: Engagement. Getting clicks. Love it. We did it. No bad publicity. Let’s say a big thank you to our Pint of Science guests: Emma Schimke, Georgia Dempster and Kirsten Ellis. Thanks so much for joining us. This was a lot of fun.
Emma: Thank you
Kirsten: Thank you
[MUSIC]
Hedvig: Those are all of our lovely comments. And if you would like to leave us some more comments you can do as in much the same way. So most of these comments I believe came from Twitter, so you can tweet at us. We are @BecauseLangPod on Twitter. We are also the same thing, Because Lang Pod on Facebook, Instagram, Mastadon, Patreon TikTok, Clubhouse. If you find anoter social media, Daniel will create an account for us there.
Daniel: I will
Hedvig: Um, you can also send a good old fashioned email. We are Hello@becauselanguage.com. And if you liked our show, tell a friend about us. I think this is the most likely way that podcasts get new podcast listeners is if you like it, and you know someone else who has similar interest, tell them about it. And they can check it out and see if they like it as well. Also, feel free to leave us a rating at all the places you can leave a rating and a review.
And as always, we’re thankful to Dustin of Sandman Stories (@storiessandman) who continues to go on Twitter and say that people should listen to our show whenever they ask for random podcast recommendations, which is a brave thing to do on Twitter. All of those things, tweeting about us, telling a friend about us, and leaving us a review will help people find us. So we’d be very grateful if you did that. We have got a review, pew pew!
Daniel: A new review!?
Hedvig: The title is “thought provoking and fun.” And then there’s a paragraph, I’m not sure I should read all of it. Should I?
Daniel: Um, why don’t you?
Hedvig: Okay, Chriselle says, “I feel anyone can find something on each show to get excited about, almost like you want to participate in the conversation. The hosts are having to ask more questions, or give more examples. It’s the first podcast I’ve ever listened to, and” oh, wow. Oh, my goodness. Oh, god.
Daniel: I know!
Hedvig: “And I’ve been following it for a few years. It’s so well researched and rich in content that I’m always having things I want to learn more about after I listen to an episode. The hosts and guests are very funny too. So it’s a great combination.” That’s, oh, wow, we were someone’s podcast virginity.
Daniel: Why would you not want to read all of that? I’m just savoring. Just all of that.
Hedvig: Well, like you’re American, you take two flattery better, I think.
Daniel: Oh, thank you. Thank you. Our show has transcripts. The wonderful Maya Klein of Voicing Words listens to every word we say and writes them down. And that’s good. Because if you can’t listen, or you just don’t want to listen to a podcast, it means that you can still get all of our yummy content. And also you can search for who says what. That one thing that you can ever find. It’s our Patrons that make these transcripts possible. And we’ve just wanted to get a quick shout out to our top patrons: Dustin, Termy, Chris B, Chris L, Matt, Whitney, Damien, JoAnna, Helen, Bob, Jack, Kitty, Lord Mortis, Lyssa, Elías, Erica, Michael, Larry, Binh, Kristofer, Andy, Maj, James, Nigel, Kate, Jen, Nasrin, River, Nikoli, Ayesha, Moe, Steele, Andrew, Manú, James, Shane, Eloise, Rodger, Rhian, Jonathan, Colleen, glyph, Ignacio, andKevin. Big thanks to all of our Patrons for your support. Thanks also to Pint of Science for putting the show together. Our theme music has been written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who’s a member of Ryan Beno and Dideon’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time, because language