Language helps us build and maintain social relationships. Cults — however we define them — exploit this function and subvert it for their own ends. Amanda Montell is the author of the new book Cultish, and she joins us for this show.
And researcher Jared Holt explains why QAnon conspiracy catch phrases seem to be dropping off in popularity from the mainstream web.
Listen to this episode
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Covid-19 variants to be given Greek alphabet names to avoid stigma
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/01/covid-19-variants-to-be-given-greek-alphabet-names-to-avoid-stigma
Stigma (letter) – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigma_(letter)
stigma (n.) | Online Etymology Dictionary
https://www.etymonline.com/word/stigma#etymonline_v_22082
Red-Handed Tamarins Can Mimic Other Species’ Accents | Smart News | Smithsonian Magazine
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/red-handed-tamarins-can-mimic-other-species-accents-180977855/
Monkeys adopt ‘accent’ of other species when in shared territory – study | Animal behaviour | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/may/27/monkeys-adopt-accent-of-other-species-when-in-shared-territory-study
[$$] Convergent character displacement in sympatric tamarin calls ( Saguinus spp.) | SpringerLink
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00265-021-03028-x
A chimp with a Scottish accent? You cannae be serious, says new study | Animal behaviour | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/nov/03/chimpanzee-study-accents-scottish-dutch
Is there any evidence for vocal learning in chimpanzee food calls?
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(15)01089-1
Holt and Rizzuto: QAnon’s hallmark catchphrases evaporating from the mainstream internet
https://medium.com/dfrlab/qanons-hallmark-catchphrases-evaporating-from-the-mainstream-internet-ce90b6dc2c55
QAnon Now as Popular in U.S. as Some Major Religions, Poll Suggests
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/27/us/politics/qanon-republicans-trump.html
Cultish :HarperCollins Australia
https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9780062993151/cultish/
Steven Hassan’s BITE Model of Authoritarian Control – Freedom of Mind Resource Center
https://freedomofmind.com/cult-mind-control/bite-model/
Podcast: Sounds Like a Cult
https://www.soundslikeacult.com
Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution | HRW
https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution
NFL pledges to halt ‘race-norming,’ review Black claims
http://apne.ws/hDTRYVl
Rent Free | Know Your Meme
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/rent-free
“Living In Your Head Rent-Free” Is The Perfect Insult Of Our Times
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/living-in-your-head-rent-free-is-the-perfect-insult-of-our
Ann Landers Quote: “Hanging onto resentment is letting someone you despise live rent-free in your head.”
https://quotefancy.com/quote/766492/Ann-Landers-Hanging-onto-resentment-is-letting-someone-you-despise-live-rent-free-in-your
That Rent Free Girl On TikTok Is Now Living Rent-Free In My Mind
https://www.buzzfeed.com/andriamoore/rent-free-tiktoks
Rövarspråkspodden
https://rovarsprakspodden.podbean.com
Transcript
Daniel: Can I tell you how dumb I used to be?
Hedvig: Uh Yeah!
[LAUGHTER]
Daniel: I was reading a bottle of Worcestershire sauce for the ingredients just to see if it was vegetarian and I noticed that…
Ben: Excuse me? It’s not by the way. I can ruin that for you.
Daniel: No, some kinds are. Sorry, Hedvig. How should I be saying that?
Hedvig: [wʊstər] I think.
Daniel: [wustər] sauce. Yes. And it said that it had tamarins and I thought… why would they put a monkey…?
Ben: Oh god. Nooo, Daniel…
Daniel: In the sauce [LAUGHTER] I didn’t…
Ben: Oh, you were just raised too American.
Ben: It’s strange things like tamarins just didn’t come your way.
Daniel: Why would… Hmmm. Made no sense. Let’s move on!
Hedvig: Let’s move on!
[INTRO MUSIC]
Daniel: Hello and welcome to this episode of Because Language, a podcast about linguistics, the science of language. I’m Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. If she’s not at the absolute top of her game tonight, it’s because she just got the human 2.0 upgrade. It’s Hedvig Skirgård.
Hedvig: Yes, I have my first Astra Zeneca. And also it’s just like really hot here and I don’t know about you guys but when it’s hot, I just melt into a puddle and I can’t do anything.
Daniel: That’s one of the symptoms of the human 2.0 upgrade.
Hedvig: Oh okay! Well…
Daniel: melting
Hedvig: Maybe its both at the same time, but I’m perkier today. It’s been a few days. I’m looking up. I definitely don’t have like flu. I don’t have a fever. I’m good.
Daniel: I got mine, coincidentally, last week also on Tuesday.
Hedvig: Congratulations
Daniel: Thank you! And yes, I felt rubbish. Laying there burning in bed at night and thinking, I am so glad to have this feeling. I welcome this feeling.
Ben: Hey Hedvig. Just apropos to like our previous shows, did you imagine the little sparkly emojis around Daniel’s nothing just then because I totally did.
Daniel: Oh, yeah! the sparkle star emoji.
Ben: Like when you’re saying something that’s like kind of not sarcastic but kind of is
Daniel: Rubbish [SING-SONG VOICE]
Ben: I felt like … rubbish [SING-SONG VOICE].
Hedvig: Oh, yes. Rubbish. Rubbish, I got the sparkles on. Yes! Yes, I did.
Ben: Oh sorry I said nothing didn’t I.
Hedvig: Yeah, I got…
Ben: Speaking of people on the top of their game.
Daniel: Who’s that guy?
Hedvig: No, but I didn’t get any of these like sickness type things. I did get just a full on migraine the day after but I also get migraines like randomly anyways [Laughter]. So I have no idea.
Daniel: Hmm… Irrelevant
Hedvig: But they’re also only for one day so. I’m good.
Daniel: He brings the knowledge of a [UPBEAT] linguist and combines it with the personality of a [DISAPPOINTED] linguist. It’s Ben Ainslie.
Ben: How? What? How?
Hedvig: What? [INCREDULOUS VOICE]
Ben: Did you confuse our two introductions?
Hedvig: I’m confused yeah.
Ben: Cause like my one job on the show is to be the not-linguist.
Hedvig: Not-linguist yeah.
Daniel: You think you’re not the linguist, Ben.
Hedvig: Ah yes. This I agree with actually. No, I’ve shifted now, Ben. I think this is correct. Daniel’s clueing onto something which is that you have essentially got all the instincts and behaviors and like intuitions of linguists, but you are a bit more skeptical than that. And it’s pretty good combo.
Daniel: It is a good combo.
Ben: I elect to take both of those statements as compliments.
Daniel: But I didn’t say which era of linguists I was talking about.
Ben: Yeah yeah yeah [LAUGHTER]. I’m just like a real shifty Chomskyan Whorfian kinda…
Daniel: [LAUGHTER] That time
Ben: and not the cool kind of Chomskyan like on political issues. But like the bad kind
Daniel: No No… yeah [LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: I was gonna say that there are cool Chompskyans both on linguistics and politics and there are bad on both. They’re like, you know, humans are mostly.
Daniel: I guess we all are.
Ben: And we’ve got an extra special guest who is substantially more better and linguisticy than I am.
Hedvig: Yes!
Daniel: It’s Amanda Montel, the author of Word Slut and more recently Cultish. Amanda, thanks so much for joining us on the show.
Amanda: Oh, thank you for having me. I’ve always wanted to be described and introduced as more better and more linguisticy, so thank you.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: And this is why I refute the claim that I am in any way linguist like or linguistic adjacent.
Daniel: Oh, no, no, no, no, no, that was very linguist. That was all linguist
Amanda: Yeah. No, I’m really only scarely linguist… scarely? Whoa, it’s 7am here in LA.
Hedvig: Ooh I like it.
Amanda: I guess. Scarcely, scarcely linguistic adjacent.
Hedvig: No, no, scarely.
Amanda: Yeah, no, that was a Freudian slip.
Daniel: That’s a word of the week is what that is.
Hedvig: What do we call Freudian slips when they should just be a thing? Yeah, scarely is great.
Amanda: Scarely. [laughter]
Ben: I feel like we should probably… Like it’s my responsibility. Normally Daniel does all of the sort of impressive lead in bits but I think it’s either down to me or Hedvig and I’m just jumping in there with it.
Hedvig: Yeah. No it’s up to you.
Ben: Daniel is gonna nerd the fuck out on this show. He has already like squeed [HIGH PITCH SQUEAL] quite intensely before we started recording. So I’m just letting our listeners know that Daniel is more excited to speak to Amanda than I have seen him be for a guest for a while now.
Daniel: Yes!
Amanda: Oh wow. Okay. I’m going to smack myself in the face and really try to prepare myself myself to squee. [LAUGHTER]
Daniel: Okay, cool, cool. You know, recently we had an episode with our Patrons. It was the episode, “It’s all Semantics”. And we were able to do that, because we have amazing Patrons who support the show. That means we don’t have to run ads and you don’t have to listen to them. And we can do some cool stuff that we like to do. So if you want to support the show, hear, bonus episodes, nerd out with us on our Discord channel, or get some merch, then head over to Patreon. We are “Because Lang Pod” over there.
Hedvig: Yes, and especially right now. I need all of our Patrons who are listening to give me help, because in a few months, we’re gonna run that also OzCLO quiz again, where we’re going to pit Daniel and Ben again against a bunch of very smart kids. And I need some ideas for good quiz questions, pub quiz questions. And if you’re a Patron, you’re welcome to send those in. And I’m really looking forward to it. I need some good things that are really gonna roast them.
Ben: [GROANING] Oh my God. Ugh we got so…
Daniel: We’re gonna win this year.
Ben: No, fucking no.
Hedvig: No you’re not
Ben: No, we are not. We got smoked like a Christmas ham last time. And if we’re now putting the call out to like, our listeners… who, this is known, are much smarter than us all of the time. Then we’re just gonna get absolutely destroyed.
Daniel: And we are going to love it!
Ben: Yes, look I’ve got I’ve got a borderline kink for getting destroyed [LAUGHTER] by people on some sort of podcast show. Who doesn’t like looking stupid!?
Hedvig: Ben do you want to take that again, considering you’re playing as th junior team this time?
Ben: Ah….. [NERVOUS GIGGLING] Let’s just cut that bit!
Daniel: All right. Well, Ben, should we get to the news?
Ben: I would very much like to find out what’s been going on in the world of linguistics in the week gone past.
Daniel: First up Coronavirus variants are now getting Greek letter names instead of the place names that correspond to where they were first kind of discovered.
Ben: Yes. That seems like a thing… that should happen, right? Like so that poor South Africa, the UK, India don’t just continue to have like real awful branding for a while.
Hedvig: I noticed that it took a while for this to kick in. So at least in the Swedish news, they’ve been saying such and such… I forget now which one is which? Which one is the one that we used to call Indian?
Daniel: Delta.
Hedvig: Delta. So they started saying Delta, which was first discovered in India, because no one remembers.
Daniel: India Variant
Hedvig: Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe it’ll take a while and people will… you know, know it. I mean, to be honest, when I hear news reporting, if they just say, “new mutation variant” is more blah, blah, blah. I don’t know if I always need to know which ones which… is that me being a bad news person?
Ben: Yeah no, I’d back you on that one. Like, my epidemiological literacy is about as good as anyone else who isn’t an epidemiologist. So when people say variant, I mostly tune out and my brain turns that into bad stuff.
Daniel: Yeah, maybe we’re lucky in that we don’t have to… like they’re not so different or so much more virulent that we really need to know “Oh, no, the Kappa variant”. Sounds like a Robert Ludlum novel right?
Amanda: Yeah, when I think of variant, really, my brain just turns it into the word varietals so that I can then think about wine.
[LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: Wait, wine?
Amanda: Yeah. Like a grape varietal?
[LAUGHTER]
Daniel: Yeah, the South African varietal.
Amanda: Yeah, exactly. I’m like South African… South African wine sounds delicious. I would love to partake in that and think about that instead of a disease.
Ben: See, I turn it into valorant. Because it’s like video game adjacent.
Hedvig: But a varietal is a kind of a stage act. Sorry, no?
Ben: Wait what?
Amanda: Is it?
Hedvig: Like a Cabaret is a kind of varietal?
Daniel: Isn’t that a variety show?
Amanda: No that’s a variety show. Yeah.
Hedvig: All right. You guys pick variety show? A lot of languages call it a varietal. I thought it was a varietal. Okay.
Amanda: Oh really?
Ben: Yes. Yeah Okay. I will back Hedvig on this one. I’ve heard it called a varietal as well.
Amanda: [EXCITEDLY] Oh well, I also do love the theater. [LAUGHTER]
Daniel: Okay. Then we’re… recovered either way.
[LAUGHTER]
Daniel: But you know, naming these things after Greek letters is probably better because we know that hate speech and hate crimes can follow when diseases are identified with the places that people come from. So yeah, that’s not great.
Ben: Well, classically, you know, the Spanish flu. Not from Spain.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Not from Spain.
Ben: Right. From like Kansas, I think?
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: It’s not sure where this thing came from. But we do know that because Spain was more or less neutral in World War One, their press was just reporting everything without the blockades that other countries had. And so people got all the Spanish news and said, “Oh, guess it’s a Spanish thing”.
Ben: “There’s a real bad Spanish flu.”
Hedvig: Yeah. Oh God that’s so bad. Yeah.
Daniel: However, the great part of the story was, and this is from Deborah Pickett on Twitter. She observed, here’s the tweet: “This is perhaps the best accidental language pun of all time.” Here’s the headline: “COVID-19 variants to be given Greek alphabet names to avoid stigma.” And I didn’t get I didn’t get the joke.
Hedvig: Oh, is it because stigma sounds like sigma?
Daniel: Stigma is actually a Greek letter. But as the name suggests, it’s a combination of sigma and tau. It’s the S and the T together. So stigma…
Hedvig: Oh! And why does that mean stigma? Sorry,
Daniel: It’s like, you know how sometimes you’ll see two F’s written together or like the ‘ae’ digraph. Well this is ‘s’ and ‘t’, sometimes a thing.
Hedvig: Yeah yeah yeah. But why does like… I’m sorry. Like ‘th’ is a common liturgy.. which maybe is the word for this?
Daniel: Ligature.
Hedvig: Ligature. Oh. Okay. Oh, yeah, liturgy is a religious thing. Uhm Ligature.
Daniel: We’re just playing that game aren’t we? Like no, no, no you’re thinking of lemonade.
[LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: But maybe for next time, we can look up why the liturgy stigma means the semantics that stigma means, which means bad stuff associated with it.
Ben: Yeah, I get the question Hedvig is asking like, why did that thing from the Greek alphabet turn out to mean really, really bad shit we don’t talk about?
Hedvig: And I also don’t have any synonym for stigma. I just realized.
Daniel: Okay, well, now I’m looking up the etymology of stigma, the bad feeling around it.
Daniel: Oh no we’re doing so badly. We’re like 13 minutes in.
Hedvig: We can use the thing I said, which is, bring it up next time if we want.
Daniel: No, no.
Ben: We should have a put a pin in it sound effect. Like a wacky DJ, like [BA-WHOOP]
Daniel: According to etymonline, a stigma is a thing that you use to burn somebody with. And it comes from the same root as a stick.
Ben: Oh, okay. So it’s convergent evolution.
Hedvig: Oh so they have nothing to do with each other.
Daniel: It’s unrelated. Nothing to do with each other.
Amanda: Oh my God. That’s like, not quite a false cognate. But what was the term you just used?
Hedvig: Uh, yeah. False friend, false cognate yeah.
Amanda: Because I was ready for him to say, “and they used to burn in ‘st'” because…
Daniel: You were a sheep thief!
Amanda: ‘state treasure’ or something…
Ben: Sheep thief. I like that. [LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: Yeah… sheep thing.
Daniel: Well, I hope we don’t get so far down the alphabet with these variants that we end up at stigma. That would be really, really bad.
Amanda: Yeah, unless we’re talking about grapes!
Ben: Yeah true!
Daniel: Then it’s a variant. Okay. Next, this is some work by Dr. Jacob Dunn and a team from Anglia Ruskin University published in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology. We know that one thing that people do with language is they accommodate. They can talk like or even sometimes sound like somebody else, if they’re trying to bridge the social distance. But this is a study that shows that monkeys might be doing the same thing.
Hedvig: [INCREDULOUS SOUND]
Ben: It feels like we’ve had a lot of these stories, right? Where it’s like, “we identify a language like thing that maybe some animals do, too.”
Hedvig: And also, specifically, we’ve heard the accents or dialects idea before, I think. Mole rats had dialects, and that made them kill each other, because they’re extremely xenophobic apparently,
Amanda: Oh, don’t whales have dialects? And that’s why when you put random whales into a SeaWorld tank together, it’s fucked up on many accounts, but they can’t talk to each other or communicate because they don’t speak the same whale language. And it’s sad.
Hedvig: I think with whale language, I think I’m pulling from my animal communication husband here, but they also have conventional songs that they learn. So like, they have repertoires of songs. And if they’re from a certain generation or place, which like, I mean, for all intents and purposes, we can talk about that as accents or dialects.
Amanda: Right. It’s just musical.
Hedvig: Yeah, they’re just like, “Oh, I know everything from Hair” and the other one is like, “Oh, but I only know Phantom of the Opera”
Daniel: and Jesus Christ Superstar.
Hedvig: Yeah, nothing happens.
Daniel: Right.
[LAUGHTER]
Amanda: That sounds like a nightmare from my theater kid days.
[LAUGHTER]
Amanda: It’s like, “No, I want to sing RENT today”. It’s like, “No, we’re singing Next to Normal today.
Daniel: Oh, God. The RENT Faction. Here they come.
Amanda: Yeah, that one’s the worst.
Daniel: Well, we have been burned by monkey accents before. We did an episode, 191: Ape Accents, back in the “Talk the Talk” days. The story was that apes were moved from a zoo in the Netherlands to the zoo in Edinburgh, and they started grunting in the way the Edinburgh apes did when they were offered apples.
Ben: I remember that story.
Daniel: A long time ago. But then… I don’t know if I reported on this. A response paper in Current Biology dismantled the results and the paper never recovered. They argued that the groups of ape sounded the same before and after, so there was no real difference between them so…
Ben: So what about this time?
Daniel: Well, this time it looks pretty good. There are pied tamarins. There are red-handed tamarins. And when they get in the same area, the red-handed tamarins accommodate. They start making the calls of their neighbors. But the pied tamarins don’t do the same accommodation, which I thought was kind of interesting.
Ben: I love it. It’s It’s such a. like if we were to anthropomorphize that situation, right. Someone new has moved into the neighborhood and is just like a super-friendly, good neighbor, and is baking dishes, and trying to ingratiate themselves, and the established people are just like “fuck off. I got no time for your shit.”
Hedvig: The social thing I experienced with human dialects, which is, I like to adapt. I’m not a native speaker. So I don’t have much invested in either way. But when I hear people with like very, very different dialects of English speak together, it sort of makes me a little bit stressed.
Ben: Oh because you’re trying to simultaneously code interpret switch
Hedvig: No because I think they’re being rude to each other.
[LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: I’m like “Why are you guys persisting in your extremely different vowel inventories”
Amanda: Oh, that is so funny.
Ben: Oh, man, you must avoid Scottish people traveling internationally like the plague.
Daniel: Guys, Guys. Don’t fight!
Hedvig: I listened to an extremely British person and extremely American person talk once and it was just… hmmmm.
Amanda: Wait. But wouldn’t it be so much worse, if they attempted to poorly recreate one another’s accents? That would be hilarious. That would be a disaster.
Hedvig: They don’t need to like… I don’t know how to explain it, they just need to like…
Ben: I think what Hedvig is saying is to her, it would absolutely not be worse. It would be much, much better and preferable because they’re trying.
Amanda: [LAUGHTER] That’s so funny. No, I get that because even if you’re an American who does not speak a lick of Spanish, if you’re in a Spanish speaking country, it’s polite to at least attempt it. So it’s like if you’re an American in England, you can at least attempt to use “bloody” and pronounce ‘h’ like [heiʃ]. And it doesn’t need to be much!
Hedvig: That’s the thing. I don’t need them to be actually trying to fully imitate because that can easily come off as as making fun of, and rude in a different way.
Amanda: Definitely [LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: And I also don’t think this makes sense. Because I like variety. It’s just an instinctual feeling, and then I’m like… Okay.
Amanda: Okay, no. Actually, I do feel like I know exactly what you’re saying. Because people who do not have a natural ability to codeswitch on any level… There is something socially awkward about that. Even if you’re not accommodating to the person’s vowel inventory, at least if you’re not accommodating to their register or their level of familiarity or casualness or formality… And I feel like some accents inherently feel more formal or less formal than others. Or feel more homey, or less homey than others, at least in the US. And so, yeah, I actually have found that my mom is like kind of a formal person. And most of her family lives in the deep south. And, well, I guess actually, now that I think about it, she’s very good at codeswitching to accommodate to her family. But if she’s coming up against another very informal accent that is not familiar to her. She doesn’t really accommodate to the informality or homeyness of it. And I’m like, “Mom, come on. Like, chill out”
Hedvig: Oh, yeah, that’s a little bit funny. Yeah, yeah. It’s that kind of thing. I don’t know if it’s necessarily formality. It can be other things. And I recognize that it’s like it’s a silly instinct to have. But I’m going back to these monkeys in the examples. Yeah, it seems nice and makes sense that some of them would sort of accommodate to the place they’re going to.
Ben: Which ones were the polite monkeys and which ones were the rude monkeys?
Daniel: The red-handed tamarins were the nice ones and the pied tamarins were the ones who were just like “Meh”.
Ben: So, I think the takeaway message here to our listenership… which I don’t think we’d need to educate them on this because I think our listenership is pretty much already on this team anyway, but like, don’t be like the pied tamarins. There’s there’s your life advice. Just don’t be like a pied tamarind cause they’re fucking wankers.
Daniel: If you are a speaker of like a Pacific Northwestern American accent and you run across somebody with a New York accent, don’t try to accommodate exactly to them. Just try to meet them halfway. Like, you know, Minnesota.
[LAUGHTER & AGREEMENT]
Ben: I just love that you pick a totally distinct and in no way related to the two. It’s not like Minnesota is a midpoint halfway between the two.
Amanda: That’s why that’s funny! That’s why that’s funny.
Daniel: It must be halfway. Well maybe it’s not halfway. But if you’re both doing it, you won’t know that you’re doing it badly.
[LAUGHTER]
Ben: I mean, didn’t Americans come up with this? like, as in did Americans and specifically Americans in the movie industry in like the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s. They did create an accent for exactly this purpose.
Amanda: Oh the Mid Atlantic accent. Yeah.
Daniel: Yeah! That’s the one.
Ben: Yeah, so like, you’ve already got one. Just go back and use it.
Amanda: Oh my god. I would love if like contemporary Americans were walking around being like, [MIMICKING ACCENT]”Oh, Charlie, where are you going tomorrow? I would love to be there as well”
Daniel: [MIMICKING ACCENT] “I can tell you that I’m here for this accent and I want to hear everyone doing it.”
[LAUGHTER]
Ben: Yeah, just everyone sounds like a news reader. Sort of recounting propaganda-ish news from like, D-day. [MIMICKING NEWSCASTER] “Ah well our boys are fighting well on the beaches, and they’re going to have a great time.”
Amanda: Yeah, that sounds like a cut for time SNL sketch.
[LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: I have another suggestion that I think, considering that we’re an Australian based podcast. There are a lot of places in Australia where you speak the indigenous language of the place that you are on physically. Which is one of the reasons why there’s so much multilingualism in certain parts. Because when you go and visit your neighbor, you speak their language, because you’re in their place. And that actually happens with different languages. So instead of like all of us going into this Koine merge, maybe we should just honor the specific place were in. Which means that I now should try and get a German accent on my English, which… I can try.
Ben: It’s gonna happen I reckon. I reckon it’s gonna happen anyway. Cause Swedish and German are related languages. Are they not?
Hedvig: I already say “cool”.
[LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: I’m getting there. “That’s very cool”.
Ben: Do you refer to your phone as a handy though?
Hedvig: No.
Ben: Ugh, give it time.
Hedvig: I also don’t really talk to people much about phones.
Ben: No, but surely, when you have the option of referring to a phone as a handy, you would take it up!
Hedvig: Alright, from now on, I’ll start saying handy. “Darling where’s my handy?” Yeah, yeah yeah.
Daniel: Smartphones aren’t handys.
Ben: Oh, are they not?
Ben: I don’t think they are but maybe somebody knows.
[DISAPPOINTED SOUNDS]
Hedvig: What’s the next news?
Daniel: ResearchElf on Twitter alerted us to this story. We all know about QAnon: the loose collection of conspiracy mongers that are ruining the joint.
Hedvig: I just finished watching HBO’s Into the Storm. Amanda, have you watched it yet?
Amanda: No, I’m kind of exhausted by cult documentaries at this point.
Hedvig: Fair enough. Sorry.
Ben: I listened to a podcast that sort of tried to backtrace QAnon’s sort of foundation and I feel like… in the world of sometimes food nonfiction storytelling QAnon is like the most sometimes of sometimes foods. Like I feel like I’m done now for quite a while because ensconcing yourself in that world. You just feel gross.
Daniel: ResearchElf hipped us to a piece on Medium by Jared Holt and Max Rizzuto from DFRLab. That’s the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council. They study domestic terrorism. It looks like QAnon slogans have undergone a sudden drop in popularity on mainstream platforms, and no one knows why. It’s just dropping off the map.
Ben: Interesting.
Hedvig: Well, we know sort of why, right? Because, well… Should we listen to the interview with Jared Holt first?
Daniel: Yeah, I got the chance to talk to Jared. He’s the Resident Fellow at DFRLab. He researches domestic extremism. He’s also the host of the SH!TPOST Podcast. So, I started off by finding out a little bit about what beliefs were core for Qanon.
Jared: You know, at the core of the QAnon conspiracy theory is this belief that there is a network of satanic and nefarious people at the top of society around the world orchestrating its downfall, and that Trump and his inner circle are working to undo that network. And that, you know, someone in the Trump circle is logging on to anonymous image boards to share riddles that once decoded contain details of national security information regarding that supposed plan. It’s pretty ridiculous. But it has, unfortunately, made a lot of ground in US politics in the last couple years.
Daniel: And what can I say, cults… It’s fair to call it a cult. Cults can be pretty ridiculous sometimes, but we’ve always had them. They’ve always been with us.
Jared: I think that’s a pretty fair comparison. It might not be like a one-to-one. But there’s certainly a lot of cultish elements to it.
Daniel: The way they use language is interesting. The drops are called crumbs and people who pick up and massage the crumbs into a coherent narrative are called bakers. There’s a whole thing.
Jared: Yeah, they really have their own language that they use to communicate with each other. There’s kind of like a in-group speak.
Daniel: So listeners to the show will know that there are lots of things that language, or shared vocabulary, can do for groups. That can help to build and maintain a sense of social identity. It can conceal the workings of the group for people who aren’t in the know. Is there any benefit to the language of QAnon that maybe isn’t so obvious?
Jared: You know QAnon is kind of a umbrella that contains a multitude of various beliefs. There’s some groups that are really focused on supposed and real allegations of child abuse in Hollywood. There’s some that are very concerned with partisan politics. That Democrats, like Hillary Clinton are engaged in child sacrifice. There’s a very, sort of evangelical Christian denomination within QAnon. But this language is kind of the uniting factor. And I think it also gives the sense that the people who are interpreting Q-drops and the crumbs that Q is leaving are part of some sort of intriguing, like secret mission, or undercover work, you know. It also creates this air of alure that can bring people in thinking that they’re, you know, characters working in this larger movement to crack the code and solve this larger mystery.
Daniel: Hmm. So tell us about what you did. You came to this project looking at the slogans they used. You were tracking their frequency over time, what what exactly were you looking for, and how?
Jared: So, what we did was we came up with, I think it was 13 slogans, that are frequently deployed by QAnon believers. A lot of the language for those slogans come straight out of the Q-posts themselves. Things like, “WWG1WGA” (Where we go one, We go all), “The storm is upon us”, you know, the “Great Awakening”.
Daniel: Oh, wow. That’s an old phrase.
Jared: Yeah. So, you know, we went through. We had a bunch of these phrases, and we kind of went through some initial searches, and whittled it down to this list of 13. Because that list was, you know, what was generating the least amount of false positives. So, when we ran this, it was so broad that, you know, somebody like myself going online and making fun of the “Great Awakening”, and somebody going on there, screaming, you know, “a great awakening is upon us” like that. Both count as one point in the data.
Daniel: Oh right.
Jared: So, you know, we chose these terms based on their unlikelihood to generate a significant amount of those, you know, first category of points. Of people making fun of it, or people reporting on it.
Daniel: Something so in group-y that that somebody else, a normie like me, wouldn’t even know about it.
Jared: Right. So, you know, for example, there’s a phrase that they use “dark to light”. “Dark to light” is so vague. It can be used in so many concepts. It can be used by somebody, you know, dyeing clothing or something, you know. So that’s an example of something that we didn’t use. But these phrases are also kind of what is thought of as part of the QAnon canon. At least, like, the OG canon. Typically these are the type of phrases that would be interpreted by people who research this movement as a telltale sign of an individual who believes in QAnon kind of expressing that belief.
Daniel: Okay.
Jared: So, that’s what we looked at. We ran it over the course of about a year and a half. Really honed in a timeframe of about a year from April 2020 to April 2021. Particularly charting with, sort of the explosion of QAnon in mainstream consciousness. And we just wanted to see, kind of, these phrases, these catchphrases, how often they were occurring, how often people were posting them, and how that charted against different things that were happening in the news, things that were happening in the tech sphere, and things that were happening in QAnon world?
Daniel: And what did you find?
Jared: We found that these phrases really sharply declined in recent months, particularly after the attack on the US Capitol. When tech companies really ratcheted down and ramped up their moderation against QAnon. But it seemed to be declining even before then, starting at the end of the summer. Summer 2020 was a huge time for QAnon. There was a time where QAnon was able to kind of break out of its contagion of being a, you know, uniquely Republican and uniquely pro-Trump phenomenon.
And particularly, you know, you had the “save the children” movement going on at that time. And it was getting into communities that it normally didn’t. And it was getting more mainstream attention and pick-up. Particularly, over the summer of 2020, when there were racial justice protests in the US, and some of those protests were resulting in property destruction or violence. Trump’s response there, threatening to send it in the military, to quell some of that, some of the more negative sides of protests. That excited them quite a bit, and got them very active. You also had a pandemic, so people were online more often than they normally are. So, you know, there’s this whole host of factors that showed us a huge swell in the early part of summer 2020, that started to subside with some content moderation, and then, you know, dwindled down to a low murmur after the capital attack.
Daniel: So why did it drop off a cliff? I mean, is it that it was all over? I know, Facebook and Twitter were big homes to Q? Did it just go underground at that point? I know, there’s Parler and Gab…
Jared: Yeah. So one thing I do need to say about the data set is that we didn’t have a really comprehensive way to assess Telegram. There’s not, you know, a single data collection to run terms through or something. In the future, I’d like to take a look at Qanon on telegram. But unfortunately, those tools just aren’t there yet. So there is, like, a gap in the data as far as alternative platforms. Telegram is, like, massive for QAnon channels, but we couldn’t get, you know, a really solid look at it. So we just ended up passing on it.
Daniel: Yeah. Okay.
Jared: So, there is kind of like a limit to what I can say. Right. But, you know, there’s a lot of different factors kind of all in the mix at once. On one hand, when some of the earlier actions and tech moderation was being announced, Q was urging people to, quote unquote, “deploy camouflage”. So, this shared language that they had, and a lot of the language that we were looking at in this study, there was a trend for a while to intentionally misspell things. Like, for example, they would write QAnon as “CUE Anon”. Or they would just use the number 17 to represent Q as the 17th letter of the alphabet. Then you also had a election that Trump did not win. You had the capital attack, which ended up being kind of the traumatic event for right wing extremist movements. Q stopped posting. Hasn’t posted in six or seven months now.
And, yeah, to some degree, there is a migration to alternative platforms. Although our data saw that, at least when it comes to Parler and Gab, that migration really wasn’t even close to a one-to-one. Some critics of moderation against extremist movements will make the argument that, well, if you ban it from a place like Facebook, then it’ll just go somewhere else. But what we saw, at least with what we were able to assess, was that it didn’t really go over to these new platforms in the same kind of numbers. But what I think ultimately what this points to is not a QAnon that’s dying, but rather a QAnon that is changing. In, you know, the Trump era, QAnon is kind of, on the way out. This traditional way that we think of how QAnon has to change because the language is changing, the topics of conversation are changing, and even the sources of direction in the movement are changing. So I think our data set kind of reaffirms that, and also provides kind of an interesting insight, to the degree that tech moderation, you know, kind of scared this movement because they rely on these mainstream platforms so much. And then once the tech moderation started to take effect, really how effective it is.
Daniel: It reminds me of crime. Crime has dropped over the years. It’s sort of 40 year low and people are trying to figure out why. And one answer is that crime is kind of opportunistic. If I leave a bicycle out there somewhere, somebody might steal a bicycle, even though they wouldn’t have tried to steal a bicycle under normal circumstances. It was just there and they did it. And now we’re getting better at removing opportunities from potential criminals. Do you feel like, if it’s under people’s noses on Facebook and Twitter, they’ll go for it. But if it’s not, they won’t seek it out. I keep thinking of Donald Trump’s blog, which he can after 29 days, because people just weren’t going there to find it. It was out of their way so, it wasn’t in their normal places. So it wasn’t something they sought out. Do you think there’s anything to that?
Jared: Definitely. And, you know, any extremist researcher or, you know, member of government that is tasked with this, will always tell you that we’d much rather have them underground than in public. You know, this stuff is better in the shadows, because it reaches less people.
Daniel: Oho. Huh that’s interesting.
Jared: But yeah, it’s this concept of friction, right? You know, adding an extra step to get to this content introduces a degree of friction there. And, you know, it’s kind of a small thing, relative, right? You think, you know, okay, well, maybe you just download another app. And that’s how you get to that community. But that extra step is enough to get people who aren’t, you know, 100% into it, to just kind of move on to something else, or find something on the platform they like, instead. You know, I go back, I forget where I read this. But if you’re a business, for example, and you have two doors available to walk into your business, but one of the doors breaks. You could put a sign on the door that says, hey, please don’t go through this door. Or if you really don’t want people to go through it, you could just lock the door. Or you could put, you know, tape in front of the door or something like that. Now, somebody who really wants to go through that door could always smash right through it, right. But for enough people, you know, if they go and they see the doors locked, they’ll just go over to the next door. And it’s, I think, you know, it can be helpful to think of moderation against misinformation, sort of like that, you know. If you just, you know, in theory, lock the door, the most devoted, people are still going to go find it, right. But, for the general public, it has a bit of a butterfly effect where people go for it, maybe they try it, they see it’s locked, and then they just kind of move on or go to the place that they can. And that’s sort of the broader trend and the group behavior.
Daniel: So I guess de-platforming works? Does this mean that platforms should be hard on misinformation and disinformation because it has a real effect?
Jared: Well, I Definitely think it has a real effect and I would put it asterisk on “de-platforming works”, because we have to be clear on what we think it does. De-platforming does not solve any of the root societal or cultural issues that make people susceptible to beliefs like this. De-platforming does not make the problem go away. But what it can do effectively, is make it much more difficult for these movements to expand their reach. And it can also disrupt any sort of community organizing that’s going on. So, part of what made QAnon so big was that it had these massive Facebook groups until Facebook removed them. And some of these had tens of 1000s, hundreds of 1000s of people in them. And these groups, these communities, on Twitter, etc. Like, sometimes they could make content go viral all by themselves, and get it to, like crash through the algorithm. It’s part of their, you know, ethos as thinking that they need to kind of evangelicalize QAnon and get more people involved. So, you know, they would very aggressively share links, comment, engage on these posts, so that they would rank higher and higher, with the hopes that more people would see that. And taking that out of the toolkit does have a very noticeable and measurable effect.
Daniel: Jared Holtz of the DFR lab. Anything surprising?
Hedvig: Hmm… Surprising? I find it encouraging, when he was saying that de-platforming, that some people think that it doesn’t work, but that it can work in the sense that, your random… I feel like Boomer now has become a slur term so I wanna find another word [LAUGHTER]… your random old generation who might not be as used to internet or mainly maybe using Facebook, and they’re not going to be downloading these new social media platforms that people are spreading. So it’s sort of decreases the range. Which to me, as a person who doesn’t think QAnon on is a force for good in the world, sounds promising.
Amanda: I have fully formed thoughts on this conversation.
Hedvig: Yeah [LAUGHTER]
Daniel: Please!
Amanda: Yeah, I think what Jared’s study proved is totally accurate and I think that the the de-platforming really works, but I also think that QAnon, as he mentioned, has really changed a lot since that sort of OG, Trumpy sort of sect of QAnon on where you’re signing up to follow Q-crumbs and you ascribe to slogans like “where we go one, we go all” and you believe that Hillary Clinton drinks the blood of children to remain young, and you’re on board with the elites child trafficking and such. I think since then, QAnon has evolved to become more of this all encompassing black hole that kind of sucks in any breed of conspiratorial thinking that exists on the internet right now. And this is like a very conspiratorial time, in general. The psychological quirks that drive conspiracy theory belief include, like a craving for uniqueness in addition to a craving for certainty and comfort and closure during crisis ridden times, like now. So there are a lot of people who you might not think of as that sort of like incel type in his mom’s basement, you know, trolling whatever, like the internet’s fringes for conspiracy theories. There are people who do not fit that description whatsoever, who are now entertaining QAnon ideas. Maybe not as far as Hillary Clinton drinking the blood of children, but there have become these like offshoots of QAnon.
So, it’s kind of like the spider web, and the, and language has a lot to do with that. So, I mean, everyone, we’ve seen so many articles about like QAnon moms and, like, the Wellness Community overlapping with QAnon. And that has formed this like conspiratuality community, that portmanteau of conspiracy theory and spirituality.
Hedvig: Yeah, what’s it called? 5D reality?
Amanda: Yeah, like that. That’s one of their buzz words. And so, they are sort of these different dialects of QAnon that reflect the different offshoots. But I think that there are people who align with some QAnon ideology. Like you can cherry pick QAnon ideology. And there are people who align with some of it, including the more disturbing ideas, but they would never claim to be a part of QAnon. They regard QAnon as something completely different, even though I would group them under the same QAnon umbrella. And so now, I think a lot of QAnon’s key buzzwords, have become really, really vague. They’re kind of like dog whistles. So, if you’re new to the ideology, you’re not going to recognize them as something sinister. But if you’re on the inside, you’ll know exactly what they mean. And these include words like “awakening”, “paradigm shift”, “do your research”. I mean, there are a ton of them. And I think these are useful because they’re so vague, they’re like a horoscope. You can project whatever you want them to mean, directly onto the language. And they can be used to recruit new believers who might not be willing to sign up for ideas about like… Tom Hanks and Anderson Cooper being a part of this cabal or whatever. But they are willing to sign up to the idea that big pharma is trying to microchip us and whatever. So I think QAnon’s language is, first of all changing all the time so that the algorithms don’t catch up. But I still think that big tech thinks of QAnon as this very specific, like insurrection style, hate group. And I don’t think they’ve necessarily caught on to the idea that much more innocent looking people and accounts can be spewing QAnon, or at least QAnon gateway-type rhetoric online.
Hedvig: Yeah, that’s very interesting. I should say, I think I said on the show before that I really like and listen to the podcast, QAnon Anonymous. And they sometimes use the term “big 10 conspiracy”. And it’s impressive how many things can fall into this thing. There’s this really old school conspiracy theory in Britain that the royal family are reptiles. And there’s a particular man who’s associated with it. And apparently, now like random millennial Americans know his name, and are like, “yeah, there might be some truth to that”
Ben: Is that where Reptoids came from? Is that maybe like the germ of reptoids?
Daniel: Yep.
Hedvig: Maybe. I don’t know but there’s a particular man has been touting this apparently in America. And now he’s like, well known in the UK, and he’s considered a weirdo there. But now like various Americans really like him. And so it seems like they’re very welcoming, big family where a lot of people with different conspiracy theories are welcome.
Amanda: Yeah! Right, exactly. Because, you know, the research consistently shows that if you’re willing to believe one conspiracy theory, you’re willing to believe them all. Because what conspiracy theories do is break down your trust of the institutions that you always thought were your authorities. And if one conspiracy theory, say Flat Earth, has broken down your your trust of science. Now it’s like, well, if you’re willing to mistrust science, now you’re willing to mistrust so many other things.
Hedvig: Yeah like 5G.
Amanda: Yeah! Exactly like, no one just believes in one conspiracy theory. You have to kind of sign up for it all.
Hedvig: Yeah. I am particularly worried about like, the older generation, the Gen… the two ones above me. But probably everyone’s equally susceptible. But I think… I don’t know. For a while when I was listening to all these things, I got very worried that like, one of my parents was going to get really into this stuff, but it seems like only one of them has slightly. And the other one, I think my mom just wouldn’t. It seemed too crazy to her too early. And she wouldn’t even like consider the research I think. I hope.
Ben: My dad would be all over this.
Daniel: Really?
Amanda: Yeah, I think it transcends age. I mean, I’ve talked to so many people who have friends and family members who’ve gotten wrapped up in like some denomination of QAnon. Which, I don’t know if anyone saw the New York Times report from last week or maybe it was the week before that QAnon is now as popular some major religions in the United States. But I don’t know how they’re measuring QAnon. That’s the thing. It’s like what counts as QAnon because I’m willing to rope all kinds of ideology including, like Anti-Vax stuff, into like the the QAnon sphere. I think of it is like QAnon is like Christianity.
Ben: Yeah. I was gonna draw the same parallel because, if you say that about American Christianity, you’re talking about a, pardon the pun, church that is so broad with so many different behavioral tendencies.
Amanda: Yeah, like you’re talking about everybody from Jehovah’s Witnesses to like your average, whatever, like Methodist down the street.
Ben: Like Catholics to WASPS to … you know like all of it.
Amanda: Yeah. Yeah, totally.
Daniel: I was intrigued by the idea that underground is good. Oh, you’ll just drive it underground. Good. That will help.
Amanda: Yeah, actually, I was talking to a mis- and dis-information scholar the other week, who was saying that you do not want to… ah what was she saying? She was like, you do not want to crack down too hard on these groups, actually, and stifle their freedoms too much, because you don’t want them all to band together and turn against the authorities or whatever. You want there to be in-group fighting.
Ben: Well, that’s what I was sort of keying into in that interview that we listened to… which is the hope, for lack of a better phrase, that what will happen to this pan, wacky collection of conspiracy theorists will kind of be the thing that is also plagued my own political sort of affiliations. Which is to say like, if you’ve got heaps of different people who kind of have relatively divergent pluralistic beliefs and goals, not a lot gets done really.
Amanda: Yeah. Yeah.
Ben: And so I’m hoping that if there’s like a bunch of kooks who do not have a common enemy, necessarily, they’ll mostly just fight each other in their spaces.
Amanda: Exactly. And then they’ll destroy themselves.
Ben: Or at least keep themselves busy. And, like, the fuck out of my business.
Daniel: Yeah, sounds sounds great. Thanks to Jared Holt of DFRLab for that. Let’s move on to our last item, the LSA, the Linguistic Society of America, in times past has been, shall we say plagued by not great social media skills, but now they have announced that there’s a new social media panel, and here they are: Jen Nycz, Claire Bowern, Kendra Calhoun, Lisa Davidson, Megan Figueroa, Joe Fruehwald, Kelly Wright, and Sonya Trawick.
Ben: How many of these people have we had on our show?
Daniel: Two or three?
Ben: Okay. I was gonna be like “isn’t that like all of them?”
[LAUGHTER]
Amanda: Lisa Davidson was my college phonetics teacher
Hedvig: Interesting!
Daniel: I think this is a great team. I’m super positive about this. It seems like earlier, they were happy to hand the job off to any non-linguist intern who had time for it. And that meant that we had the LSA posting articles on Twitter about “ancient indigenous languages” or just whatever. And now it looks like the LSA will be an actual positive force for linguistics on the internet. Yay!
Hedvig: Yeah it’s really cool!
Ben: It really feels like the statute of limitations have really sort of lapsed now on institutions being like wishy washy on this shit. Like, there was like maybe the last… I’m going to say maybe six years? Large companies, non-governmental organizations, that kind of thing, kind of had like a bit of a grace period as it seemed like people were just kind of trying to figure out how to do better. But then it also seemed like the LSA really kind of nudged up against like the end of that period and kind of kept going a bit too long when everyone else had figured out, “Oh, like, the cool thing to do is just to be the most this, instead of trying to please, all sides. You just go in this direction, and you go really hard, and you make some old people fairly unhappy. And then everyone forgets about them, and no one cares.” And it feels like finally the LSA has kind of gone “Huh. Maybe we’ll do this thing that’s working for everyone else and we’ll do it too.”
Daniel: It’s good.
Hedvig: Yeah, seems good. And also, it’s a big increase in number, right? Because that was how many people did you list? Six, seven. And before? I don’t think there was that many?
Ben: It was like one unpaid intern.
Hedvig: Yeah, I’m not sure. Maybe it’s not an increase in number, but… sounds like that’s a good idea as well.
Daniel: Well, here’s to placing that difficult task in the hands of people who have the domain knowledge. That is pleasing.
Hedvig: And that is respecting the issue, I think.
Amanda: Yeah, absolutely.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
Daniel: We are moving on to our next area, and that is the book Cultish and we know that… and we have the author here, Amanda Montell… Right now! This is what happens when I don’t write my intros out completely. So we know that language has many important functions to build and maintain social relationships to communicate information. Cults take the social function of language and turn it upside down and use it to keep people inside. Let’s talk to Amanda Montel about this. Amanda, tell us about what brought you to this area?
Amanda: Yeah, well, my whole life I’ve been fascinated by fanatical fringe groups and metaphysical belief. My dad spent his teenage years in a sort of notorious cults called Synanon. He was forced to join by his father who sort of wanted in on the blossoming countercultural movement of the late 60’s and early 70’s. So he moved my dad onto this compound that had a lot of really strange rules and protocols, and after my dad defected, ended up turning very violent and disbanding. But I grew up on my dad’s like very riveting stories of Synanon. And simultaneously, I grew up the daughter of research scientists who were quite quick-group-phobic. They, you know, sort of the disdained supernatural belief and religion in general.
I was kind of raised Jewish, but casually. And I was just always anthropologically really, really fascinated by ideologically-bound fringe cliques. And was desperate to understand what motivates people to join and stay in extreme groups that might be called cults. And I never really saw a sharp distinction between, you know, culturally accepted religion, cults, culture… there seem to be a lot of overlap. And the most exciting parts of my dad Synanon stories to me were always the language parts, because Synanon had its own special vocabulary that everyone there would use to communicate with. Buzzwords and thought-terminating-cliches and special names. And I was always amazed by how effective that was at creating this world. This culture of shared understanding.
And then as I went about my life, I would hear, you know, similar cult language… like similar Synanon style cult language showing up everywhere from, you know, politics to my theater camp… to, you know, all kinds of fanatical affiliations. And the idea to really turn this into a book arrived when I was talking to one of my friends who had just started going to AA, or Alcoholics Anonymous, and she had started talking to me about all the jargon. They have this robust canon of very clever zingy jargon in AA that’s used to, you know, do everything that one of those groups need to do; create solidarity and instill ideology and make people feel like they’re a part of something. And I was like, whoa… that language is so culty. But why? Like, what’s behind that? Like, what is cult language and what can it do for better and for worse. I was like… I should write a book about that!
Hedvig: Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Daniel: And then you diiiid!
Amanda: ‘n thenahdid
Ben: So it sort of sounds to me like… because my first question was going to be the one you’ve pretty much already torpedoed, which is what is the Venn diagram and all the circles look like between all of different things that we call like a cult and, you know, culture and all that kind of stuff or religion. It sounds to me like it’s more like… um, what the picture you just put in my head is like, one of those… What do you call them? Like, hue fading, you know, like hue strips where you just sort of fade between all of the different colors?
Amanda: Yeah.
Ben: Yeah, like a hued gradient strip kind of thing. And so like, there’s a certain midpoint where you can be like, yeah, this is a really strong red. This is like a real cult.
Amanda: Totally. Yeah, you know, what’s so interesting is that… well, first of all, there’s no hard and fast definition for the word “cult”. And the history of the word cult really sheds light on that. Like we think of it as having these really dark sinister undertones. But, only quite recently did the word cult become so negative. It’s only really since like the Manson Family murders of 1969 and the Jonestown Massacre of 1978 that cult has become this, you know, nationwide symbol of fear. A little bit before then the word was associated with like quacks and charlatans, but it wasn’t really… cults weren’t really this, like priority, or this the symbol that everybody understood. And even before that cult was really just a sort of churchly classification like sect, or something like that.
Hedvig: Yeah, I was gonna ask about that.
Amanda: Yeah. And then, of course, as soon as cults became scary in the ’60s and ’70s, they also became cool. So then you had words like “cult following” and “cult classic” enter the lexicon. And now like cult is sometimes used as like a marketing buzzword. “You know, you must buy this cult followed product” or like “this cult classic film will change your life”. And so it’s invoked in such a vast array of contexts. And even like, the religious scholars that I spoke to, or the cult experts that I spoke to, none of them could come up with a single unifying definition for the word cult. Many have tried. And there are a lot of scholars who don’t even use the word because it’s inherently pejorative. It’s not specific enough. And that’s why there are all these alternative phrases like fringe religions, alternative religions. Me, I just like calling these cultish groups.
[LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: Yeah, maybe that’s a good compromise. Yeah, I was gonna ask about the religion stuff because I’ve heard people say that Christianity is a Jewish cult. Have you guys ever heard that?
Amanda: Yeah.
Daniel: The one that I’ve heard is that in both a cult and a religion, there’s somebody at the top who knows that it’s all fake. But in a religion that person is dead.
Amanda: That person is dead. Yes!
Daniel: Yeah, but in a cult that person is alive.
Amanda: Yes, yes. There are a lot of these like idiomatic expressions to sort of distinguish the the difference or the lack of a difference between culture and religion. Like the religious scholar Reza Aslan has said, you know, the biggest joke in religious studies is “cult + time = religion”. And then I’ve heard a cheekier expression: “A cult is like porn. You know it when you see it”
[LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: Yeah but what I was gonna ask was maybe more about the this pre-Manson use of the term where cult actually just meant, maybe part of a religion. So the thing that I heard, that Christianity is a Jewish cult was supposed to be like a factual, like it’s a sect. It’s a part, right?
Amanda: Like a sect! Yeah. Actually, in Belgium, in the French that they speak in Belgium, the word cult really does mean sect and sect means cult.
Amanda: So yeah, there’s been a lot you know. The, the words have evolved differently.
Hedvig: Yeah. What does sect mean in English?
Amanda: Sect? Sect to me means like a denomination.
Hedvig: Right? Because in Swedish, that’s the same. But… sect means cult and cult means cult.
[LAUGHTER]
Amanda: Yeah. Yeah, it’s interesting. But, you know, the word cult has also just become like, so sensational at this point that if you’re invoking it in a sort of serious context, accusing something of being a cult.. first of all, it’s unspecific. It’s like, what are you even talking about? Because it really just feels like a judgment, you can toss around the word cult to describe anything that you don’t agree with. But actually, interestingly, as hard it is to define the word cult, scholars have been arguing for even longer about the definition of a religion. So it’s actually not clear how to how to really classify any of these things, and that nebulousness is something that I address at length in the book.
Daniel: When we talk about the language of cults, it sounds like we’re talking about two different kinds of things. One is a shared vocabulary that brings people together as we’ve seen with QAnon, for example. But then the other side of the language used by cults is that of persuasion. The first part makes them feel all cozy because they’re in a group but the second part locks the exits.
Amanda: Yeah.
Daniel: By persuasion. By, as you mentioned, thought-terminating-cliches. Am I covering the two areas here or is there more I’m missing?
Amanda: Yeah. Right. No, you’re right there. So, what cultish language works to do is to convert, to condition, and to coerce. And I’m leaning on the work of a religious scholar named Rebecca Moore here, who’s written very interesting stuff about the brainwashing myths. How we take the word brainwashing really seriously, and it’s the, the reasoning that the prevailing media and prevailing wisdom will give for why people end up in cults. “Oh, they were brainwashed”, but brainwashing is really just a metaphor. And it’s this like, pseudo-scientific concept used to morally divide us a lot of the time. Like, “Oh, they were just brainwashed, no, you’re brainwashed”.
But really what’s going on are these methods of conversion, conditioning and coercion, that have a whole lot to do with language. So yeah, you need language at first to love bomb people, to make them feel special, to make them feel like they can have access to this exclusive wisdom that’s going to solve the world’s most urgent problems. And then you need language to condition them in order in order to get them on board with certain behaviors and rituals. And there’s a certain system of shared truths. And then you need language to to coerce them. To get them to do things that seem totally at odds with their former selves, with their former ethics. And at a point, you know, the language works to really help people brainwash themselves. Because at a point, all these ingrained human reasoning flaws kick in, like confirmation bias and sunk cost fallacy. And at a point, it becomes, you know, so emotionally and psychologically awful, the idea that you’ve wound up in what others might call a cult, that you’re going to do everything in your power not to accept that and to just believe what you want to believe. And language can work as a cue to help you really brainwash yourself.
Daniel: That’s what the Mormon mission was, like. Honestly. I don’t think it was even to bring other people in. I think it was to subject you to pressure from outside so that you could come up with excuses for the religion and then you get good at doing that your whole life.
Amanda: Right.
Daniel: And then you run back to the safety of the group, you know. “Oh, finally, some people who understand me. The real understanders”.
Amanda: Yeah. Understanding in quite a literal sense, because a lot of these groups have a pretty impenetrable language. I mean, I looked pretty lengthened to the language of Scientology. And that’s an extreme example. Like if you were to listen to to, you know, high up Scientologists having a conversation, you could not understand what they were saying. Legitimately. Like, it is an entire dialect that you’re introduced to slowly. And people love an exclusive code language!
Amanda: Like who didn’t love learning Pig Latin, like on the playground as a kid. We love feeling like we have this elite knowledge or that we know something that someone doesn’t and language is so powerful in helping us feel that way.
Hedvig: Yeah really. I gotta tell you guys, speaking of tough games, there’s a Swedish one where you just repeat a consonant and insert of vowel in between. So say a word.
Ben: Fish
Hedvig: fofissoho [fɔ fis sɔs hɔ]
Daniel: [LAUGHTER] Okay
Ben: What?
Amanda: Oh, you say every consonant. You say every consonant in the word and insert like a different vowel.
Hedvig: You’re… Amanda… you’re good at this. I recently found this whole podcast all in this language because some people are good at speaking it really fluently and understanding people and there’s a whole podcast in it.
Ben: Oh Gosh
Hedvig: And I listened to a full episode [OTHERS GASP] and I was lying in bed and my husband was like.. “What are you? What? What is this?” I was just like, “No, no, no, I just gotta concentrate a lot!”
[LAUGHTER]
Amanda: Oh that is so fun!
Ben: Ste really is doing the Lord’s work.
Daniel; He’s putting up with a lot…
[LAUGHTER]
Ben: In terms of being in a relationship with you, isn’t he? He’s just listening to a bizarrely bespoke, completely idiomatic code language so you can sleep better.
Amanda: No, I coerced my boyfriend into speaking the secret code language that we have together called Crease. And every vowel is an E and all TH’s are S’s and all S’s are TH’s and that the voicing applies. And then all B’s are V’s and all V’s are B’s all P’s are F’s and all F’s are P’s.
Hedvig: [GROANING]
Daniel: This is terrible.
Hedvig: Oh god.
Amanda: [LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: Can you say something?
Amanda: Yeah, like… [ep e wer gen te ken ten eze ken ber fe shen encrethe et weth thend leg zes].
Hedvig: Oh, God. There’s a whole intonation that goes with it as well. That was amazing! Thank you. I’m looking for new ways to weird out my husband.
Amanda: Oh, there’s one for you! [LAUGHTER]
Daniel: If you can translate please let us know on our on our Facebook page.
Hedvig: And if you are a Swede, check out checkout Rövarspråkspodden.
Ben: I feel like somewhere in Hedvig’s house Ste has just like shivered. Like, he doesn’t know why he shivered. He’s just like he’s just sitting drinking a cup of tea probably out in the backyard enjoying the sun, and he’s just gone [BLEGHHHHH].
[LAUGHTER]
Amanda: I know. I’m sorry. I feel… I don’t know, it must be because it’s so early in the morning that I felt vulnerable enough to disclose that.
Hedvig: It was wonderful, thank you so much.
Daniel: Thank you.
Amanda: Thank you.
Daniel: Tell me about what it was like meeting up with people who had left cult-like groups. Did you notice anything that made them seem… “Oh, yeah, you’re totally the type” or is there no type?
Amanda: Um, I think there is a type, but it’s not the type that you might think, you know. Our impression that most of us have of the type of person who would wind up in a cult is someone who’s, you know, desperate, disturbed, intellectually deficient, naive, really vulnerable. But really, the through line was that everybody was just like, extremely optimistic. Like to a fault. A lot of people that I talked to, you know, ex-members of the most notorious cults in all of history: Heaven’s Gate, Jonestown. They reminded me of like, you know, my progressive young friends in LA. Like, they were really bright, really service minded. They really wanted to help the world. And they really believed these pernicious leaders’ messages that they had the answers. So, you know, I talked to you, I know you brought up Steven Hassan, and like the show notes before we started recording, but I talked to him and he’s an ex-Moonie, so he used to recruit people to the Unification Church. So, he he knows a little something about the type of person that this cult would go for.
And it was not people who were disturbed or desperate, because those people were liable to break down quickly, you know. They would put a lot of effort into recruiting people. And so they wanted people who were bright and idealistic, and who had the metal in order to stick out an experience that might not be so pleasant all the time. And so that was kind of the through line. And then there were of course, things that made these people vulnerable. Like maybe they joined when they were fresh out of college and had stars in their eyes. Or maybe they joined because they were feeling oppressed by their community or by you know, America at large. Cults are a very American thing. I’ve definitely learned over the course of writing this book and also over the course of just like telling people that I wrote a book about cults. American’s initial reaction is like, “Oh, my God, that’s fascinating and can’t wait to read it”. And people who aren’t familiar with American culture, who like didn’t grow up here, like “what… cults? Why?”. Just because, yeah, I don’t know. I mean just like the history of cults in the United States and just our particular distinctively American tumult lends itself to these alternative fringe belief systems. We just, you know, we don’t have a lot of support here. [LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: Given what we said about Belgium, I wonder if you get a much of a different response if you said sects are cults. Because, for example, all the cases I know of this kind of behavior in Sweden are all… like they’re all tied to a major religion directly.
Amanda: [AGREEMENT NOISES]
Ben: And like, in the same way the Mormons have that particularly, particularly wacky, bigamist sort-of offshoot.
Hedvig: There was, when I was in middle school, outside of my town of Uppsala, there was a small community where there was a certain denomination of them, a Pentecostal church. There was a certain… how do you say, instance at church, that got very culty and there are actually murders. But that also always gets described as a sect, usually. But I think it’s definitely would qualify us at least cultish in English.
Amanda: Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. But right. So I dive into that a little bit in the book. Like why cults are such a particularly American fascination and phenomenon. But yeah, I did not find that the former cult members that I talked to were much different than than people that I know in my real life. And I also found that, you know, if anyone has ever been in a toxic one-on-one relationship, you can imagine what it’s like to wind up in a cult because the techniques of manipulation are very similar. An abusive relationship is just a cult of one. So…
Ben: I am… Now I’m just super worried. I now have to be on the lookout for signs that we are all living in a simulation and signs that I might already be in a cult and I don’t realize it.
[LAUGHTER]
Amanda: Yeah, I mean, I think the probability that you’re likely in a cult and not realizing it is way more likely than us living in a simulation. I was just watching all kinds of videos on the probability of us living in a simulation. It seems extremely unlikely.
Hedvig: Oh, wow. Okay
Daniel: Okay, but what are the red flags of cult language? You mentioned some of these already…
Ben: Exactly. I’m looking around myself. I’m going “fuck, I might be in a cult already”. How would I know?
Amanda: Yeah. Well, I’ll name a few. So we talked, we mentioned the phrase thought-terminating-cliche before.
Ben: So what is that? Like, what does that actually look like? Terminate one of my thoughts.
Daniel: Because like this… because I can tell you because I grew up in this. One of them is, “well, we don’t have to know everything right now”.
Amanda: [AGREEMENT NOISE]
Daniel: “We’ll learn more as we go” and this is what you get when you hit a part of the story that contradicts another part of the story.
Amanda: That’s right.
Daniel: Because it was written by humans. It’s like, “well, we don’t know everything right now”.
Amanda: Mm hmm. Yeah, exactly. So a thought terminating cliche, it’s this term that was coined in the early 60s by the psychologist named Robert Jay Lifton, and it describes a type of stock expression that is easily memorized, easily repeated. And it’s aimed at just as you were saying, shutting down any type of questioning, independent thinking, any attempt at solving a wrinkle or pointing out a wrinkle in a piece of logic. And thought terminating cliches are not exclusive to cults. We hear them in our daily lives, in the form of phrases like, “well, boys will be boys” or “it’s all it’s all in God’s plan”, or “everything happens for a reason”.
Hedvig: God works in mysterious ways.
Amanda: Yeah, exactly. And thought terminating cliches are really effective because they alleviate cognitive dissonance, right? Like it’s really uncomfortable to have to hold two conflicting ideas in your mind at the same time. And a thought terminating cliche is cue to not to have to do that. And so in a cultish group, let’s say in a group like NXIVM ([ˈnɛksiəm]), you might hear a thought terminating cliche come in the form of some sort of like New Age platitude like “well, don’t let yourself be ruled by fear”. That’s kind of a QAnon-esque one, or dismissing very valid concerns or anxieties or doubts as “limiting beliefs”. So you have these sort of catchy stock phrases. In Synanaon, the cult my dad was in, one you would hear all the time was “act as if”, and this was a cue… ugh it’s so spooky. If you disagreed with something that the leader there Chuck Dederich put in place, they would just say “act as if” and that meant act as if you support this and believe in it until you do, because Chuck is all knowing and Chuck is right.
Hedvig: Mmmm right.
Amanda: So yeah.
Daniel: Doubt your doubts.
Hedvig: It’s like the thing, you should buy a pen so you activate your smile muscles, because if you smile, you’ll become happier. You guys heard that one? No?
Amanda: Huh! Yeah I think…
Daniel: Fake it til you make it.
Hedvig: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, specifically happiness is the thing.
Amanda: Totally. Yeah, yeah. So if you’re in a setting, whether it’s like a startup, or I don’t know, an Instagram community, wherever you are, and you’re just being like, hit with thought terminating cliches every time you try to express dissent, that’s a red flag.
Daniel: Any others besides thought terminating cliches? What else could we be watching out for?
Amanda: Oh, definitely. I mean, I described another phenomenon in the book: loaded language. This is just, you know, a phenomenon you see all over the place. Emotionally charged words that come in many forms. One of which, really fascinating is when you take existing English words that have a meaning that everybody knows in everyday English, and you slowly and deliberately twist them to have a really emotionally charged cult-specific meaning. And so one of the first interviews, the very first interview, I think I did for the book was with this young woman who had been a member of this group called the Happy, Healthy, Holy Organization (3HO). It’s a Kundalini Yoga cultish group that has a lot of sort of, like Hindu-derived beliefs, Eastern beliefs, new-age beliefs, and really weird rules and practices and it was very controlling and whatever. It was a traumatizing experience for her but she to this day, shudders every time she hears the phrase “old soul”, because while in English, regular English “old soul” is kind of a compliment, you know, a phrase that you use to describe someone who’s like wise beyond their years. In the group “old soul” meant someone who had reincarnated life after life after life after life and could never get it right. Had always fucked up in life. And it could be used as a threat, right? Like you could throw the phrase “old soul” in someone’s face in order to get them to obey. And so yeah. I would say just like whenever you’re in a group that has like too robust a lexicon of special buzzwords, especially when those buzzwords feel really emotionally charged, that’s a red flag too.
Hedvig: Right. How… this might sound like a weird question but specific lexicon… I mean, maybe the key there is the emotionally charged because I was gonna say that like various professions or social groups or on certain hobbies also have…
Ben: The one I’m thinking of is like gaming, right? Like if you genuine,
Hedvig: Gaming. Maybe yeah.
Ben: If you genuinely want to get into a new, especially online multiplayer games, right? Like you essentially have to be like a field linguist first.
Amanda: Oh, so that’s totally different. So, I talked about this in the book, too, like a lot of fields need specialized jargon, in order to make communication more succinct and more clear. Like you need that jargon in order to understand what everybody’s talking about. But cultish language does the opposite. It makes language less clear. It makes it more obscure, more emotional. And so like the language is used to obscure truths and to, like, help you or get you to stop thinking and to start having like a strong emotional response. And so…
Ben: So would we call 4chan cult-like then? Because it really feels like that’s what that’s doing?
Amanda: Oh yeah!
Hedvig: Definitely, definitely. I was gonna say, as well that, for reasons that are a bit obscure, I’m reading a sociology book right now. And I’m having to dive into all this sociology jargon that I don’t understand. I have to look up a lot of words all the time. And especially the continental philosophy has a lot of very odd terms. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to read it. But there’s a quote by Foucault, I think, where he says at some point like, “Oh, no, but that’s the point. Like we try to obfuscate”. He’s almost like, you get a peek behind the curtain when he says something like, No, no. Sometimes we’re obtuse by… how is that… by design. To make the reader read in whatever they wanted to it and feel like they understood it. Because when you read these things, that can be… so sometimes non cultish jargon can also do that. They think… it’s not desirable, though. And he says it like it’s a… he says it in a derogatory way about his discipline. Like, I know this isn’t good, but we do it. And I was trying to read some of that stuff. And God.
Amanda: Well, it’s funny actually. Slightly related point. I talked to so many academics for this book. And I would always ask them the question like, “Are there any groups that you know, are not maybe considered cults by the larger culture, but that you think of is kind of cultish”. And they were all like academia!
Hedvig: Yeah, yeah. But at least like, good academics, are able to know that there is a jargon that they talk to with their colleagues. And that knowing that jargon is not the same as knowing that knowledge. Like you were saying, like you need jargon to be present and effective in communication, but you can communicate those ideas with other words. It might just take longer time. So the reason you use those words is because you want to have quick conversations with your colleagues, but a good academic, I believe should be able to express basic ideas to non-academics.
Amanda: Oh definitely. But cultish language, by contrast, you cannot translate it.
Hedvig: Yeah Right.
Amanda: Like it has this specific cult connotation that… and it might not even mean anything at all. It might just be like a Shibboleth or a sign that you’re a member of this group. That you’re an insider and that if you’re not using the language, maybe you can’t be trusted.
Hedvig: Right. Ugh Scary.
Daniel: The book is Cultish by Amanda Montel available from HarperCollins. Amanda, thanks so much for telling us about your work.
Amanda: Oh, thank you. And I also want to mention if people want snippets of what I talked about in Cultish in this format, in podcast audio format, I actually just launched a podcast of my own about cults.
Daniel: What?!
Amanda: Yeah.
Hedvig: I just found out it actually
Amanda: Yeah, it’s called Sounds Like a Cult. And it’s about the the Zeitgeisty groups, the Zeitgeisty cults we all follow. So if you want to know what cult you’re in, it’s a good listen.
Ben: Ah see this is the information I needed.
[LAUGHTER]
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
Daniel: Now we’re to our favorite segment: Words of the Week. Boy, this was a tough one because usually I go to the news to find items, words, breaking phrases. Here are all the things that did not give me a word of the week.
Ben: Oh, wow. So this is like this is like the loser pile of like the honorable mentions
Daniel: Came up utterly empty. Naomi Osaka leaving the French Open, Netanyahu’s potential ouster, the Melbourne lockdown, the Bitcoin conference, Dodgecoin, Naomi Wolf’s COVID truther meltdown, and suspension from Twitter…
Hedvig: huh?
Daniel: And the Harvey Norman boycott.
Ben: So like none of these things gave you a good word.
Daniel: Nothing! Nothing! Amanda, help me out. You’ve already given us one. scarely.
Hedvig: [LAUGHTER]
Amanda: Yeah, scarely. I was thinking early this morning about the slang phrase when something “lives rent free in your head”.
[GENERAL AGREEMENT]
Ben: Oh man hasn’t TikTok just thrown that into the Zeitgeist.
Hedvig: Yeah yeah yeah. Yep. Very good.
Amanda: Definitely [LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: Do you want to, maybe for people who aren’t on TikTok or Twitter? Do you wanna explain what it means?
Amanda: Yeah, well, actually, I think I had been misinterpreting it. Because the internet was telling me that it means some video or some meme or really anything at all, that plays on a loop in your mind and causes some amount of agitation. I thought it was like a video or a meme or a piece of content that just kind of is like an ear worm and like, gets stuck in your head. And maybe you kind of like it.
Hedvig: Oh [SURPRISED].
Ben: That was always my interpretation, right? Like, it’s things that you have to think about normally consume mental resources, right. But certain things tickle you in such a way that they essentially just have like, no overhead cost, and they’ll just sit in there… just just just just, and they might be super dumb, but they are just doing their thing there. And they don’t require you to think about them. And every now and then you just like, look off into the distance and smile
Amanda: and think of it. Yeah, I like that.
Daniel: Gosh you guys. This is so not the way that I understood this phrase.
Hedvig: Yeah no!
Daniel: My understanding of it was that somebody has gotten to you. Somebody has found that little bit of your armor that was missing and gotten in and now…
Ben: Oh, so like, you’re interpreting it as like your creepy uncle is staying in your house rent free and you don’t want him there.
Hedvig: [LAUGHTER]
Daniel: You think about them when they’re not around. It’s like they’re working on you psychologically when they’re not around. And yeah, they’re in your head man. Living in your head rent free. .
Ben: Oh wow. That’s so menacing. It’s cause you grew up in a cult probably.
Daniel: Did I?
Hedvig: Yeah… I think that Amanda’s choice of words with agitation, I think was really good. Because, I think it is agitation and it can be sort of pleasurable or annoying.
Amanda: Mm hmm.
Daniel: Yeah. Well, I have had the chance to do a little bit of digging, and it looks like the phrase originates from the advice columnist Ann Landers in one of her columns in the probably mid to late 90s. She said “hanging on to resentment is letting someone you despise live rent free in your head”. But then it looks like Jess Marciante @jessthemess. She’s a TikToker. She put out a video that asked what’s the video that lives in your head rent free? So it sounds like this phrase is changing. It doesn’t entail resentment. It could actually just be something that’s playing on a loop in your head and maybe you quite like it.
Hedvig: For the record the movie Minority Report lives rent free in my head. My mind, like so many things, it’s like “oh, that’s like the Minority Report”. It’s in my my head constantly.
Ben: You do this to me every, I’m gonna say three to four months, which is you just drop this like crumb to use QAnon language of like some sort of deeply significant pop cultural reference. And like..
Ben: Oh and you’ve seen Minority Report?
Ben: Yeah, of course. Like, like… okay. I’m not a gorilla in the like, the jungle here. Yeah.
Hedvig: Yeah but if you’re a listener listening, you haven’t seen it, that’s okay. You’re allowed to…
Ben: Yeah yeah totally. I mean, like you just missing out on probably one of the most significantly pop cultural futurist visions of the last 30 years, but whatever.
Hedvig: Yes. Yes.
Ben: But that’s … You do you. No but like EuroVision, right, on brand. 100%. But when you were like, ah, I stan Community so hard. I’m like … you can’t see it. But I’m like, taking my glasses off. And kind of being like, Huh… And then, Minority Report is the same thing. I’m not saying you strike me as a person who hasn’t seen Minority Report, but someone who really, really, really finds relevant to lots of things.
Hedvig: I think about it a lot.
Ben: Yeah! That surprises me.
Hedvig: Yeah, no! I think this is… We should say, for our listeners, and maybe for Amanda as well.. Ben and I have never met in real life.
Ben: Yep.
Hedvig: Our only interactions… and I think about 70% of our interactions…. are recorded and broadcasted.
Ben: Yeah, that’s actually true. Someone who’s listened to this show substantially knows both of us as well as we know each other.
Hedvig: Yeah!
Daniel: Has heard it all!
Amanda: That’s beautiful.
Hedvig: So I’m on this show to talk about language. That’s usually what I talk about.
Daniel and Amanda: Yeah.
Daniel: Let’s go on to our next one. This one was suggested by Ignacio on our discord channel, who says “apartheid as possible Word of the Week? I think the discussion of its use at the moment in the context of Israel and Palestine has brought up some interesting points about when a term moves from the specific to the generalized. There has been a lot of people complaining that it can’t be apartheid, because apartheid is the specific South African experience. And we should be saying, apartheid-like state. Weird pointless hairsplitting, in my humble opinion. But, also pushback saying that as it has long been detached from that context, and has specific legal definitions.” Thanks, Ignacio, we don’t usually wade into this conflict. But it sounds like a fun thing to do. We should totally do that
Ben: My super lukewarm take on this one is I would actually come down on the side of I think this gets to be South African. Right, in the same way that when that awful awful person shot up a bunch of massage parlors in Atlanta, right? In the really nascent stages of that unfolding, there was a sort of an early push for a sort of like an online hashtag of #AsianLivesMatter. And really, quite quickly, a lot of people sort of went, hmmmmm no. Basically. Like, that’s ….
Daniel: You can let somebody else have that one.
Ben: Like we get it. 100%. And something needs to be done here. But that kind of belongs to someone else. And given how many decades… fucking centuries of just rampant, awful stuff went down in South Africa. It kind of feels to me like that gets to be theres as well. Like, I’m not saying… Hmm put it this way. If a Palestinian wants to use that word, I’m the last fucking person who’s going to get in their face and be like, “Uhmm actually, I don’t think it’s appropriate to use that word.” But if like a random white person talking about on the internet is like using that language, I might be inclined to go, “Oh, I don’t know if that’s I don’t know if that’s our word to use.”
Daniel: Okay!
Hedvig: I had the the opposite sort of intuition about this word apartheid. That, maybe it’s just because I’ve always thought about it as broken down as to “apart-hood”, like separation, apartness.
Ben: Yeah like apartness or whatever it is.
Hedvig: And once you start doing that, I think it just means separation of people based on class or race or something. So I had heard it, I think applied a lot of times outside of South African context. So, yeah, I thought it came quite natural. But yeah, I see here that Daniel has something from Human Rights Watch, that will shed some light on it.
Daniel: But they describe it as apartheid in their report. “Israeli authorities of the crimes of apartheid and persecution”. I’ll just quote, “in certain areas, as described in this report, these depravations are so severe that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.” So Human Rights Watch thinks that this is an apartheid situation, or an apartheid-like situation. I can certainly see some parallels, but I can also see where some people would be like, “Hmm, maybe not.”
Hedvig: Hmm. What what would be another word you would use?
Ben: Well I mean, that’s exactly what I was about to say. Like, it’s certainly not our place to come up with a word, obviously. But like, one of the things that I think has made apartheid so potent a concept is the fact that it has been, more or less, indelibly linked with this horrific set of events over many, many, many, many years. And so I feel like in terms of this particular time, moment, and space, you would probably find more potency from that community coming up with a word that better sort of encapsulates or…
Hedvig: Yeah maybe.
Ben: That’s a good point, and I haven’t seen one.
Ben: Cause that way there would be no fuzziness over what people would be talking about either. Does that make sense? Right, like it would be quintessentially locked down to that situation. And it would come to mean, as much as apartheid did all through the 70s 80s and 90s, it will come to mean unquestionably, like a certain set of crimes and violations and terror, but for like a different situation.
Daniel: Okay. So we need to find what Palestinian folks are calling the situation.
Ben: And you know I’m not Palestinian, so if they settle on apartheid, well, then, you know… Go for it.
Daniel: Then Semitic extension.
Ben: Yep.
Daniel: Yep. Okay, good. This one was suggested by @thesandman on Twitter. It’s about a way that racism got into policy in sports. So “football players have an unfortunate tendency for brain injury and many retired football players with dementia have had to file claims with the NFL, the National Football League, in the States. Now, this means that they had to show that their cognitive functioning was impaired. But if they were black, the NFL had a practice called…” here it is “race norming.” “I could not believe this when I read this. What it said was, well, we don’t really know if your brain functioning has really been impaired because you’re black. Black people don’t have very good cognitive functioning in the first place. So we got no idea.”
Ben: Woooooooooooooowwwww….
Daniel: Yeah, yeah. My jaw dropped. It was breathtaking. Seems that about 2000 NFL retirees have filed dementia claims. Fewer than 600 have received awards and the bulk of the people who are NFL retirees are black. So there’s a lot of black folks getting excluded. The NFL has agreed to stop race norming when it assesses who should get damage claims, and they’ve agreed to a $1 billion payout.
Ben: My God. I mean…
Daniel: 2021
Hedvig: Yeah, that’s the thing.Yeah, I don’t know what to say about it. It’s so crazy. I didn’t know that that kind of thing was still going on. And yeah. It makes it makes me wonder if it goes on somewhere else, because when I saw it popping up this term “race norming”, I was like, I’m not even sure I understand what that means. And then when I understood it, I was like, Oh, right….
Daniel: I guess my thought is that structural racism takes many forms. And some of them just seem really unbelievable to some of us. Because we haven’t experienced them over and over and over again, firsthand.
Ben: Yeah, I’m just speechless like that… that floored me.
Hedvig: Yeah, yeah same.
Daniel: Yep!
Ben: I can’t. I can’t. What do you say to that? Other than the fact that that’s fucking appalling. And we should probably burn the NFL to the ground? Maybe? I don’t know.
Daniel: It’s wrong for many reasons.
Ben: Yeah.
Daniel: Mm. Hmm. Okay. Let’s go on to our last one. This one’s more fun. Suggested by Diego on Patreon. We’ve been talking about revenge things like, obviously revenge porn, unfortunately, but there are some nicer ones. The revenge dress with Princess Diana. What else?
Ben: Revenge bedtime procrastination.
[GENERAL EXCITED AGREEMENT]
Daniel: Yeah! One of my favorites. Revenge bod.
Ben: Revenge bod? Ooh Well, I haven’t heard that one. But I can automatically tell what it is.
Hedvig: Yeah, exactly. You get dumped by someone and then you work very hard on your physical appearance to make them feel bad for dumping you.
Daniel: That’s the one.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: You might even be listening to a revenge anthem when you’re working out.
Ben: Oh, yeah. Yep.
Hedvig: Okay.
Daniel: Well, this is one from Diego on Patreon. “Hello, I just heard this on the news. But I think it’s been around since at least April 2020. Pertaining to post-pandemic shopping. Revenge spending.”
Ben: Oh, yeah. Okay.
Daniel: Or revenge buying?
Hedvig: Wait. This one I don’t know what it is. What is it?
Daniel: Well, Any guesses?
Ben: I can guess… Amanda, do you want to take a stab?
Amanda: Revenge spending?
Hedvig: Yeah….
Ben: Yeah!
Amanda: That is when you break up with someone and… no, that’s retail therapy.
[LAUGHTER]
Amanda: Umm revenge spending… Oh, that’s when you have someone’s credit card information and spend their money?
Daniel: Not exactly. No that’s…
Ben: Can I take a run at this? Or Hedvig? Do you want to have a go?
Hedvig: I have a guess. Which is you have a bad experience with one company. So you buy products a lot from another company to like, shift the balance.
Daniel: Wow, lots of creative answers.
Ben: Okay, I reckon I’ve got this right. Like I don’t know this. I haven’t read this on the sheet or anything. But I feel pretty confident on I’m gonna take this one. It is when you have been in lockdown for a while. You haven’t spent a bunch of money because you’ve been in fucking lockdown. And lockdown lifts. And you just go nuts with this sort of probably modest surplus of cash that you may have saved in the period that you’ve been locked up.
Daniel: If you haven’t spent them on stocks already.
Ben: Yeah.
Daniel: [DING] Ding! That’s right, Ben. He’s got it.
Hedvig: [EXCITED] Oh, wait. So what is the..
Amanda: Oh, you’re taking revenge on just like the world.
Ben: Exactly. You’re taking revenge on circumstance.
Hedvig: Oh…
Daniel: Revenge on COVID. Revenge on lockdown.
Hedvig: That doesn’t seem like revenge. I think mine and Amanda’s ideas were more like revenge.
Ben: [LAUGHTER] Revenge oriented
Hedvig: Yeah, this just seems like, bottled up something
Daniel: revengy.
Amanda: Yeah.
Daniel: Pent up. I think is what we’re looking for
Hedvig: Pent up. Yeah there we go. Yeah.
Amanda: Yeah, this would more be like tension spending.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Well, I like how revenge is showing a bit of a bit of movement in this way.
Amanda: Or like angst spending.
Daniel: Hmm pent up spending antsy-ness.
Ben: Yeah.
Daniel: As a retail therapist, I know how this feels.
Ben: Oh my goodness, you and I couldn’t be more different.
Daniel: We are sooooo different. I just go to the store and it makes me feel happy.
Ben: Oh God.. ughhhhhhh [DISGUSTED SOUNDS].
Hedvig: I am different in different stores and my husband is… we are complimentary. [LAUGHTER] We get happy from different stores.
Ben: No that’s the worst circumstance. That’s what you don’t want!
Hedvig: It is the worst!
Daniel: Oh my God.
Ben: Cause no where’s safe!
Hedvig: We were in one of those. You know, JB Hi-Fi type, like kitchen appliances and audio appliances and lots of appliances, and I was happy for maybe 20 minutes and he was happy for like an hour. I had to go sit down somewhere else.
Daniel: Well ‘rent free in one’s head’, ‘scarely’, ‘apartheid’, ‘race norming’ and ‘revenge spending’ are our Words of the Week. Let’s have to do some quick comments. Last week. we had our annual Eurovision report from Hedvig. Thank you very much. I enjoyed it. This was a comment from Alessio on Twitter, “Hiya, just listening to the latest episode and wanted to clarify that one Måneskin
Hedvig: [mɔnəxɪn] I think
Daniel: Which… [mɔnəxɪn]?
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: I’m giving a [χ] it’s not a [χ]. It’s a [x]. Try me again, Hedvig.
Hedvig: I think… I’m not Danish. [mʷɔnəʍɪn] or [mɔnəxɪn]. Yeah, [mɔnəʍɪn] surely. Yeah.
Daniel: Which, we wondered ~why does the Italian band have an [ɔ] in its name? Alessio says Måneskin uses a Danish word because one of the band members is half Danish. One day, while brainstorming band names, they started asking her to list random Danish words and they all liked that one. And that’s how an Italian band ended up with the Danish name.
Hedvig: Yeah, yeah, I think I think we figured out during the show that it was Danish I didn’t know that particular origin story. But that’s really cool. Thank you, Alessio.
Daniel: Yes, I mentioned that someone… we talked about whistle register and I said women can do it men can’t. Aristemo on Discord says “men are very much so capable of singing in whistle register. It’s just neglected and underdeveloped in the modern Western tradition in much the same way falsetto is despite how ubiquitous falsetto is among chart topping singers.”
Hedvig: Yeah, I think The Weeknd often does falsetto. Or at least like head voice.
Daniel: Ever heard of countertenor? It’s quite striking. To see a guy singing falsetto as the altos just singing the alto part in falsetto. It’s fascinating.
Hedvig: I should say, Amanda, because maybe you didn’t listen to my Eurovision repot. In this Eurovision, there was the highest note ever.
Hedvig: Yeah. And it was in whistle register, which is why we were talking about it.
Amanda: Um another embarrassing game that my boyfriend and I will play… actually, I can’t play it. But he’ll try to sing his lowest note that he can possibly sing in falsetto. And a low falsetto coming from a man is funny. [LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: Oh! I love all this fodder you’re giving me for my interactions with my husband. We’ve been in essentially just….
Ben: He just shivered again! He’s coming out of the garden and he’s just finished his tea and he’s sitting down to do some work and he’s sitting there going bleghhaghh [DISGUSTED SOUNDS].
Hedvig: Yeah, this is excellent. I’m loving this send me more ideas.
Amanda: [LAUGHTER] Oh, I will I have. I have soooo many annoying little games I can share with you.
Hedvig: Ah amazing. I love it.
Daniel: I got to just get this comment from Dermot on Patreon. “I was glad to hear Hedvig’s summary of the Eurovision from a language perspective. I noticed a lot more non- English being used by presenters also. Since it seems Hedvig didn’t also watch the semifinals…”
Hedvig: I didn’t… I’m Sorry, I’m not a good Eurovision person.
Daniel: “I would advise she checks out the only non-English Scandi entry Denmark’s, Fyr Og Flamme. I enjoyed it immensely and I imagine she would too.”
Hedvig: Ah! Very good Yeah, Denmark often has very strong entries and Fyr Og Flamme sounds like it means ‘fire and flame’. So that sounds cool. Yeah. Thank you.
Daniel: Andrew on YouTube commenting on our anti-Garamond court case says “I don’t believe it’s a pedantry thing. Having clerked for judges, I believe the issue is about ease of reading. Judges read a lot and tend to be on the elderly end of the age spectrum. Most judges still read briefs that are printed on paper. And I believe serif fonts with typical kerning are easier on the eyes when on paper. Also, I don’t think it’s about attorneys trying to squeeze in more words into a brief. Most courts now use word limits rather than page limits because counting words is quick and easy when software does it for you.
Hedvig: Ah, okay. So it’s not… that they are doing a smart… because we are saying like, ~oh, why aren’t you doing like word counts?~ But it’s about ease of reading. Oh, that makes a lot of sense. That’s a good point.
Daniel: You know, I’ve always heard that things are easier to read when you’re used to them, but I can see how Garamond with its low ‘x’ height would be a little tricky for older eyes. Now that I’m getting them. Stefan on Facebook. Hey, could someone pass on to Ben that Adebisi Shank are from Wexford, Ireland, not Scotland. Great band, though, good taste, Ben.
Ben: Dammit. Thank you so much for fixing that. I did know that! And I for some reason, I just did the thing of confusing the two places because I’m a numpty. Thank you, Stefan.
Daniel: Thanks also to all the people who told us that the movie Ben has been looking for about the Chinese man who learns Irish, so he can go to talk to everyone and then he finds that Ireland’s full of English monolinguals. About 70 people told us the name of the movie is Yu Ming Is Ainm Dom. My name is Yu Ming.
Ben: Oooooohhhhhhhhhh. I’m gonna…
Amanda: I know… I know what that actually means because I took a semester of Irish in college.
Daniel: Hey!
Amanda: Oh that just means so and so is my name.
Hedvig: Ah okay. Fair enough.
Daniel: My name is Yu Ming. We’ll have a link to that on our blog.
Ben: I am going to watch that and I’m going to bring a review in the same way that Hedvig did a Eurovision review. I’m going to bring you a review of that film.
Hedvig: Yes. Love it!
Daniel: [LAUGHTER] Very good. Amanda Montel, it’s been great to have you on the show.
Amanda: Thank you for having me. I hope I bantered okay in the end there. [LAUGHTER]
Daniel: Yeah! You did great!
Hedvig: Yeah you did very well. Especially giving me fodder to tease my husband. Love it.
Amanda: Oh yeah. That’s my pleasure.
Daniel: By the way, you’ve got a cause. Do you want to tell us about your cause?
Amanda: Oh, sure, yes. Well, I volunteer for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. It’s a nonprofit that raises money for cancer research and patient support. My mom and my best friend are both lymphoma survivors. So yeah, if someone wants to donate to that worthy cause, just find me on Instagram and I’ll direct you where you need to go.
Daniel: Or you can head over to our blog, Because Language, because we’re gonna put a link. We were very pleased to donate on behalf of Amanda for this episode. So if you want to donate too, link on our blog page for this episode, Episode 29: Cultish. That’s on becauselanguage.com and please go buy Cultish.
Amanda: Oh Thank you.
[LAUGHTER]
[MUSIC]
Ben: If you have a question or comment or just wanted to say hi, you can get in touch with us in all of the places. Here’s but a few. BecauseLangPod is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Mastadon, Patreon, Tik Tok, and Clubhouse. I’m going to get better at making TikToks because I have found, like so many millennials, I installed it and then and now I spend a huge portion of my time there. [LAUGHTER] If however, you would like to send us the most old fashioned of missives, you can of course, send us an email Hello@becauselanguage.com. if you want help the show out, there’s two things you can do. I’m gonna leave one of those things for Hedvig to tell you about but the other thing you can do is that you can big up us you could give us a review, you could tell your friends about us… Here is a review from one of the best named people ever, Elsbeth. Her review was titled “This is my favorite podcast by far”, five stars. “The three co-hosts to linguist Daniel and Hedvig, and the far from every man teacher, Ben….” [WHISPERING] I didn’t say that that was her, that wasn’t me [CONTINUES QUOTE] “play off each other wonderfully. Full of humor, self deprecation and wild tangents. Through it all you learn a lot about linguistics and how people communicate. They’re on just about every possible social media and pay attention to all of them. I mostly interact on their discord channel, and it’s great to be able to ask questions, answer questions, or just have a random discussion. The combination of humor and learning works wonderfully, and it’s helped to keep me sane.” What a great review Elspeth, thank you so very, very much except for the bit where you spoke positively about me. Don’t ever do that again. [LAUGHTER] And if you are listening, and you like this show, it would really do such a big favor if you could leave a similarly, laudatory review in the places where you get the podcast from.
Hedvig: Yeah, I’m just floored by that review. I love also self deprecating, because now that I’m married to a Brit, I understand us being self deprecating is like the highest form of compliment. [LAUGHTER] So thank you very much for that. And another thing you can do is you can also tell a friend about us or you can be like the brave Dustin of Sandman Stories (@storiessandman) who is always on Twitter and just recommends this to everyone who ever asked for podcast recommendation, which I still believe was a very brave thing to ask for. And we’d also of course, want to invite you to also become a patron if you want to support the show further, because of our lovely lovely Patreon supporters, we can make episodes and release them for free, without any annoying ads. We can make transcripts of these records. Thanks to the work of Maya Klein of Voicing Words and making transcripts means that our show is accessible for people who can’t listen or just don’t want to and also that they are searchable. So if you want to find that episode, where we said that one particular thing you can find it.
Ben: If you want to settle a pub argument, you can now search it.
Hedvig: [LAUGHTER] Yes, yes. And Maya Klein does a great work of transcribing our episodes. And we’d like to give a special shout out to our top patrons so now it comes. Okay, I’m going to breathe in. Dustin, Termy, Chris B, Chris L, Matt, Whitney, Damien, JoAnna, Helen, Bob, Jack, Kitty, Lord Mortis, Elías, Erica, Michael, Larry, Binh, Kristofer, Andy, Maj, James, Nigel, Kate, Jen, Nasrin, River, Nikoli, Ayesha, Moe, Steele, Andrew, Manú, James, Shane, Roger, Rhian, Jonathan, Colleen, glyph, Ignacio, Kevin.
Ben: You did one little breath. I heard it.
Daniel: That was nice. I heard the breath. It looks good! I’ll take it out. I’ll fix it in post.
Hedvig: Thanks to all of you. We’re very happy to have you in our little podcasting family.
Daniel: Our theme music has been written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who’s a member of Ryan Beno and a member of Dideon’s Bible. Thanks for listening. Catch you next time. Because Language.
[MUSIC OUTRO]
[BEEP]
Hedvig: You’re not hearing anything funny from me.
Daniel: No, but if I were I could take it out with noise reduction because I am a magician.
[LAUGHTER]
Ben: Yeah, I love how you claim the skills of like some coder somewhere probably like 15 years who wrote a very impressive algorithm module. [LAUGHTER]
Daniel: No, it was me. I am the worker of the magic.
[BEEP]
Daniel: I got one more question. QAnon was able to get some traction on Facebook and on Twitter. There was one place that they never really did get any traction at all. And that’s Reddit. What was going on there? Why did they have such a hard time on Reddit?
Jared: You know, Reddit, their model of content moderation is quite a bit different. It’s community based. And I think that, you know, it’s kind of a better way to do content moderation, in my opinion. The Reddit… you know, Reddit is an umbrella for, you know, 1000s and 1000s of these smaller communities that all kind of feed into the main homepage feed. But, you know, for the most part, Reddit is like, very aware of what’s going on on its platforms. And even the moderators within communities are very aware of what’s happening in their communities. And there’s kind of a incentive there that, you know, the members of that community, sort of content police that community because they know it best. And we see that same idea played up on larger scale with stuff like Facebook, where, you know, people say, “Oh, well, if you’re going to moderate posts in Myanmar, you should have content moderators based in Myanmar so they know the context of everything.” This is really the same idea. And that is kind of gaining a little bit more popularity. But yeah Reddit was… it is also, you know, very good at trying to squeeze out stuff that is harmful or toxic, or, you know, taking action against communities that aren’t enforcing the rules on their own. So I think, you know, it’s kind of the result of what I feel at least is a better model of content moderation.
Daniel: I noticed also that Reddit has one thing that Facebook and Twitter don’t have. You can upvote on all of those platforms. But on Twitter and Facebook, you can’t downvote on Reddit, you can and things will get downvoted to oblivion, and anybody could do that. So it really was the community doing the collective moderation. I think maybe the power to punish comments can actually be as valuable as being able to upvote them.
Jared: Yeah, and it’s, you know, that’s, of course always subject to being abused. But I think like Reddit is a great model for finding some sort of balance there.