Here to help us answer our voluminous Mailbag is the tireless Dr Caitlin Green, Vice Cancellor of Caitlin University. Among our questions:
- Non-binary or nonbinary?
- What’s behind coffee names?
- Why is there an L in would?
- Could swearing get in the way of persuasion?
- When is it time to stop supporting a minority language?
- What’s with the D in tiddies?
- Fee fi fo… fun? Why doesn’t it rhyme with Englishman?
- Where does tucker come from?
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Dr Caitlin Green on Twitter
https://twitter.com/caitlinmoriah
nonbinary, non-binary | The Diversity Style Guide
https://www.diversitystyleguide.com/glossary/nonbinary-non-binary/
Why we speak Starbucks: How brands use language to create tribes | The Economist
https://www.economist.com/1843/2020/07/22/why-we-speak-starbucks
This Is Why Starbucks’ Drink Sizes Are Tall, Grande, and Venti
https://craves.everybodyshops.com/this-is-why-starbucks-drink-sizes-are-tall-grande-and-venti
“Grande,” “Venti,” And “Trenta”: What Do The Starbucks Sizes Literally Mean?
https://www.dictionary.com/e/starbucks-trenta/
Would, Should, Could
http://www.butte.edu/departments/cas/tipsheets/grammar/would.html
ShouLd, couLd and wouLd. | r/etymology
https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/3j3rn6/should_could_and_would/
Foreign Language Teaching Methods: Pragmatics
https://coerll.utexas.edu/methods/modules/pragmatics/01/facethreatening.php
Are dying languages worth saving? | BBC News
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-11304255
The death of languages | Aeon
https://aeon.co/essays/should-endangered-languages-be-preserved-and-at-what-cost
Languages: Why we must save dying tongues | BBC Future
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140606-why-we-must-save-dying-languages
List of words ending with IDDY | Lots of Words
https://lotsofwords.com/*iddy
tiddy (n.) | Green’s Dictionary of Slang
https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/c7ejkha
School Life in Paris (1897) [NSFW]
https://www.horntip.com/html/books_&MSS/1890s/1897–1899_school_life_in_paris(HC)/index.htm
The meaning and origin of the expression: Fie, fih, foh, fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman | The Phrase Finder
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/fie-fih-fo-fum.html
[$$] The Historical Importance of Assonance to Poets | JSTOR
https://www.jstor.org/stable/461320
Fee-fi-fo-fum | Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fee-fi-fo-fum
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
Ben: Okay. Oh, we’re doing a mailbag!
Caitlin: Yeah.
Daniel: This is a mailbag.
Ben: Oh, no sheezy. Oh, that’s interesting. Okay.
Daniel: Yeah. Is that okay?
Ben: Yeah. Mailbag is really fun. I guess we hate Hedvig now, that’s cool.
Daniel: No, what? Because we don’t want to have fun and we hate fun?
Ben: Well, we’re doing a really fun thing without her.
Daniel: Hmm, that’s true.
Ben: That’s okay. If that’s a new show policy, we hate Hedvig, I can I can work with that.
Caitlin: [chuckles]
Daniel: Well, I was thinking of making her– giving her a villain arc or something like that.
Ben: Oh, fun! A heel turn, love it.
[laughter]
Daniel: That’s the term. That’s what I was looking for. Because we’ve built you up as the one who’s going to take that spot. And then suddenly, you turn really nice and affirming.
Ben: It turns out I’ve been the face the whole time and the heel was the person with the smile.
Caitlin: Amazing.
Daniel: Too obvious?
Ben: Possibly.
Daniel: Okay.
Ben: Are we literary geniuses?
Daniel: Ah, no, I guess not.
Caitlin: You’re going to have to go for a triple cross.
Daniel: Oh.
Ben: Oh, I like that. Like the Key & Peele skit.
Caitlin: Yeah. [chuckles]
Daniel: Yeah, because you know what’s eventually going to happen? IT WAS ME.
Caitlin: Yeah, there you go.
Ben: Yeah, like that.
Daniel: The whole time.
[Because Language theme]
Daniel: Hello, and welcome to this special bonus patron episode of Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. I’m Daniel Midgley. With me is another white guy with opinions, Ben Ainslie.
Ben: Because the world doesn’t have enough yet.
Daniel: Nope. But we’re going to challenge that hopefully on this episode. Hedvig Skirgård isn’t in this one. She’s having a well-deserved break and we want to normalise taking breaks because we’ve all been going through it and self-care is a thing.
Ben: Definitely. It’s not like I haven’t been. Daniel, I think… oh, YOU need to take a break, and Hedvig and I need to just trash the house while you’re gone!
Daniel: We keep talking about this, but I never have the courage to actually do it.
Ben: Ah, you’ve just got to go to like, what’s the classic like American place in pop culture where parents would go for a weekend? Like to Atlantic City or something? You just need to go to Atlantic City and it’s fun. We won’t have the entire freshman year at our house for a rager. It’ll be totally cool.
Daniel: The title of this episode is Risky Business.
[laughter]
Daniel: Ben dancing in underwear. No. Okay. We’re not doing that.
Ben: Yeah. Moving on.
Daniel: That’s why I can’t. We have a very special guest, cohost. She is the scourge of the dark web intellectuals. She’s the tireless thorn in the side of the anti-woke. The Vice Chancellor… er, Cancellor of Caitlin University, and a darn good twitter follow, it’s Dr. Caitlin Green. Hello, Caitlin.
Caitlin: Hello. It’s so great to be here.
Daniel: Yeah, finally.
Ben: I love that. What was the first one about the IDW?
Daniel: Scourge.
Ben: Scourge of the IDW. Ah, what a great title. I want to be the scourge of the IDW. That’d be so good.
Caitlin: Well, I’ve had a little bit of a kink put in my scourging because they keep blocking me.
Daniel: Oh, man.
Caitlin: I know. It’s tough.
Ben: I interpreted kink in the other– [crosstalk]
Daniel: When you said kink–
Caitlin: [crosstalk]
[laughter]
Ben: That shows exactly how mature I am. [crosstalk]
Daniel: Enough internet for today.
Ben: Yes.
Caitlin: [crosstalk] -should I have said crimp something–
Ben: Yeah, there we go.
Caitlin: [chuckles]
Daniel: Yeah, that’s good. Is it by the way, University of Caitlin or is it Caitlin University? We need to talk about this because–
Caitlin: Well, I’m going to have to do my Google due diligence, which University of Austin obviously didn’t do, and figure out what’s not taken.
[laughter]
Daniel: Was their name taken?
Caitlin: Well, UATX is already an acronym that belongs to a college in Austin, Texas. So, they’re going to have to deal with that. [chuckles]
Daniel: I can’t believe these assholes are trying to set up a phony university like PragerU or BYU.
Caitlin: I know. I mean I can believe it, but I’m not happy about it.
Daniel: Is it real?
Ben: I feel like if I may be so bold on the Caitlin University or University of Caitlin question, I feel like the former Caitlin University because then you could be like CU, CaitU, it’s got that real–
Caitlin: Yeah, that’s pretty fun.
Ben: Or mind you, then it could be UFC.
Caitlin: You asked if it’s real, and I would say define real.
[laughter]
Daniel: Is it a real fake university that they’re going to actually make?
Caitlin: Yeah, they’ve got an office, but it seems to just be their attorney’s office, and they’re hunting for land for a campus. So, we’ll see what happens there.
Daniel: Okay, so this is what I mean. You’re a good follow because you know this stuff and I don’t know how you know this stuff. You must just be tireless on Twitter, constantly researching, constantly on these people’s case. Would that be right?
Caitlin: Yeah, as much as I love to admit it, yes, that’s basically it. [chuckles]
Daniel: Okay. Cool.
Ben: I need to know what sort of psychological pressure wash you subject yourself to at the end of each of these days, because I don’t know how you would keep saying.
Caitlin: Honestly, it’s like a steady diet of toddler tickles, that’s what you have to do. [chuckles]
Ben: Oh, okay.
Daniel: Okay, but you’re very up in their face. I mean, what is it that that keeps you going?
Caitlin: For me, my focus in grad school and after grad school has always been about making sure that students have a healthy and productive place to learn. These people just really seem to be the antithesis of that, and it gets right under my skin.
Daniel: Let’s just say that someone were to look at the panoply of problems that face us in our current situation in our world today. If they were to decide that wokeness was anywhere on that list of problems, how fucking dumb would they have to be? Sorry.
Caitlin: You look at somebody who’s making that claim, and you wonder, “When is the last time you were on a college campus?” A lot of them are employed by universities and ostensibly have been on college campuses. And so, you just wonder, what filter are you seeing the world through? This seems like the biggest problem?
Ben: My homebrew theory on the– I’m just going to say the Sam Harrises and the Jordan Petersons of the world, like people who have accrued huge followings on this, really, really, uber ultra-intellectual kind of foundation, it’s that old adage, except instead of power, you just use the word audience. Audience corrupts, and absolute audience or massive audience corrupts really badly. As soon as people seem to get massive– it’s one of the reasons why I’m glad Because Language has always just languished in the middle success.
[laughter]
Ben: You have to imagine at some stage of their lives where fairly intelligent, thoughtful creatures, are able to go that far awry, because like 8 million people listen to their show every week or whatever it happens to be. I don’t know if I could resist it. That has to be a real pressure that is just changing these people. Or maybe they’re just all fucking wankers, and they just got an audience. I don’t know.
Caitlin: Yeah, somebody called it self-radicalisation via attention. And I was like, “Yeah, that’s pretty much it.”
Daniel: Wow.
Ben: That is a great-
Daniel: Oh, my gosh.
Ben: -great, much better way of saying all of that shit that I just said, but in five words.
Daniel: Oh, my gosh.
Caitlin: [laughs]
Daniel: We’ve done shows about Steven Pinker. And I have my reasons for why I think he’s a bad representative for public linguistics, and why I go out of my way not to use his work. I get the feeling that your list of reasons is much longer and more specific than mine. So, could we just take a moment and do Canceling [unintelligible [00:07:57] : A Short Oral History, what’s his deal?
Caitlin: [laughs] Yeah, okay. There’s this concept that is making the rounds among philosophy people that I follow, and it’s called Epistemic Trespassing.
Daniel: Wait. That was one of our Words of the Week a while ago.
Caitlin: Ah. It’s very much applies here because this is a person who has a very specific expertise who likes to go into other people’s rose gardens and just stomp around. When people say, “Hey, excuse me, I grew those roses. I know how they work. I would love for you to get your dirty boots off of them,” he will then become the victim of canceled culture about it. It just becomes this way of just shouting down the people who are subject matter experts, and acting like they don’t know what they’re talking about and they’re just afraid of his dangerous ideas.
Daniel: I have noticed that when someone grips about them, the cloth of rationality, it is something to be suspicious of.
Caitlin: Definitely, yeah. It’s one of those kinds of dichotomies that we just have that it would be lovely to let go of, which is the rational, emotional, binary. As soon as somebody like Pinker, who already has the floor by default, says, “I am the rational one,” then you look at the people on the other side, and you go, “Well, then they must be irrational. They must be emotional. They must just really hate science and reason.”
Daniel: It’s like if I said, “I am the voice of language,” and if you oppose me, “Hmm, curious that you had to use language to do it.”
Caitlin: But he really did tweet that, didn’t he? [chuckles]
Daniel: He really did.
Caitlin: With his own fingers.
[laughter]
Daniel: Or the fingers of whoever he’s got blocking people.
Caitlin: Oh, yeah.
Daniel: That’s possible too.
Caitlin: No comment.
Ben: The other one that I’ve just never been able to figure out, and this is purely speaking from my own debilitating lack of self-worth, is where do all these people just get the ability to say things and not immediately hate themselves for saying something dumb?
[chuckles]
Daniel: Do you think of anyone in particular?
Ben: I’m just talking about me. If I was to go out on Twitter and just be like, “Language is this,” I can promise you 85 milliseconds later my brain is going, “Why did you say that? That was almost certainly completely wrong. That was the dumbest thing you could have said. You should immediately delete that thing.” I just sit in a fugue state most of the time just musing on my own lack of value as a human being. I just always find it really interesting that there are people who aren’t. That just blows me away.
Caitlin: Yeah, I did that yesterday about identities. I wrote what I think identities are, and I looked back and I’m pretty sure I was correct, but I still was just flooded with that feeling of, “Oh, my God.” [crosstalk]
Ben: [crosstalk] -well, everything was wrong, obviously.
Caitlin: Somebody better than me is going to correct me and be like, “No, Caitlin, you dummy.”
Daniel: That’s why we don’t have 8 million followers, because confidence is sexy, and overweening confidence is overweeningly sexy.
Caitlin: And that’s why I have the Twitter persona I have. [chuckles]
Ben: Can I share something I read just recently, and then we can move on to all of our patrons’ questions and stuff?
Daniel: Wait, no, I’m interested in this. Okay.
Ben: I am a gamer and I read a gaming website called Penny Arcade. There’s basically a guy who writes about all sorts of internet things called Tycho, and I really liked this one. He goes, “If you spend a lot of time on social media are moving throughout the world, eventually, you will discover that there is a class of men who have an almost instinctive ability to identify and manipulate other men with distant, cruel, or useless fathers. Obviously, parenting is a quite lossy form of data transfer but the only way to protect your children from these men is to ensure that they never need what these warlocks purport to offer. It’s probably going to require you to become much, much better than you currently are.” And I was like, [surprised gasp] “That sums up basically, every bro-dude-douchy megaphone guy on social media right now.
Daniel: Hug your kids.
Ben: Yeah, far out. A lot of these people clearly, clearly need a confident person to be like, “This is how the world is.” Whereas I’m just like, every time anyone ever says that, I’m like, “But how do you know?” [laughs]
Caitlin: Yeah, you have to look askance, you have to.
Ben: Every time someone says that, I’m like, “But I think things and I’m wrong all the time! You must be too.”
Caitlin: That’s a skill everybody needs.
Ben: Anyway, I just thought it was a very good take.
Daniel: This is a mailbag episode and for the next few months or so, it’s just for you patrons. So, we want to say thank you for being patrons and supporting us on our work. Also, we’re getting our yearly mail out ready, the items are coming in. So, please make sure that Patreon has your correct address, log into Patreon and update that. By the way, if you’re not hanging out with us on Discord, you should. We used to have a lot of fun on Facebook, but for some reason, we just don’t seem to have the same enthusiasm anymore for it. Maybe it’s the way they became a tool of the global disinformation machine. Maybe it’s the way they lead to people’s deaths. We’re not sure. But these days, instead of Facebook, we’re having fun on Discord. It’s where we chat with listeners about language and show topic ideas. Get onto Patreon. Check your benefits, there will be a link so that you can connect. That’s patreon.com/becauselangpod. Once again, thank you, thank you, thank you. Are we ready for the mailbag questions?
Ben: I suppose so.
Daniel: Hmm. Oh, one of the things we do is tell our listeners about upcoming guests. So, we told our Discord fans about Dr. Caitlin Green, and invited them to ask specific questions. So, MrBobbyHunt did. Here’s his question. He says, “I guess my question is, is there really a backlash on corporate rebranding of racist names and stereotypes?” Yeah, we’ve done a lot of stories about that. “Is there really a backlash? I feel my social media feeds are full of the get-woke, go-broke contingent, but I also feel like Facebook advertising is intentionally engaging me in confrontations.”
Caitlin: I mean yeah.
[chuckles]
Daniel: That’s what it is. It’s like the more time you stay on and aggression feeds, I guess.
Ben: I can honestly say, I have not once encountered the get-woke, go-broke contingent, but I think that’s because I have not at all tried very hard to get out of my silos and interact with ridiculous people who I don’t agree with, so I don’t know. [chuckles]
Caitlin: Oh, that’s great. I am related to the get-woke, go-broke contingent. So, I have not been able to–[crosstalk]
Ben: Oh, no, that sucks.
Daniel: Thanksgiving’s coming, isn’t that–?
Caitlin: Yeah. Well, that’s not the group we’re going with.
Daniel: Very nice. It’s a great phrase, isn’t it?
Caitlin: Yeah. Well, it is interesting. I was curious about it, where it came from, and it’s pretty recent. It’s from just 2018. This guy, John Ringo, who’s an author, and I went to his Twitter because that’s what I always do when I want to know somebody and it is a big ball of yikes.
[laughter]
Daniel: Oh, my goodness.
Caitlin: It’s a lot of antivax, it’s like pro-Rittenhouse stuff. It’s a thing.
Daniel: Yikes. Get woke, go broke, is there any evidence that if you get woke, you will in fact go broke?
Caitlin: Not totally, no. What will happen is, there’s two ways a company can get woke. There’s the very surface-y way, like the Kendall Jenner with a Pepsi way, where you do an ad and it looks pretty progressive but everybody knows that the company underneath is just a monstrosity. And so, nobody buys it. They’re just like, “Oh, my God, get this out of my face, I’m over it.” But then, there’s companies and corporations making real decisions with actual impacts. Like the MLB pulling an all-star game out of Georgia, because they didn’t voter suppression laws there, or Target changing their bathrooms to be gender inclusive. These are actual policy changes that people see and appreciate and think, “Oh, this company shares my values. When I have to choose some kind of mid-range department store, I’m going to go for Target.”
Ben: It’s like there’s skin in the game in those decisions, because both the baseball and the Target example, that’s real people money. They either lost or invested significant dollars in order to pull both of those things off. Whereas hiring Caitlyn Jenner to be in a Pepsi commercial, I’m sure did cost money, but it would have been money that would have been spent on some analogous marketing campaign anyway. It’s not a thing. But yeah, those two companies, and I’m sure there’s many other examples as well, this is it. For me, you can only ever tell what a business cares about by just looking at their business reports. What are they actually spending money on? Because that’s all a business exists to do, is to make and spend money. And so, if they’re actually spending money on stuff, that means they are actively trying.
Caitlin: Yeah, that’s right.
Daniel: My experience with this is, for example, I’m thinking of the no longer racist cheese, which is now known as Cheer Cheese. It’s quite good. Never gave it a chance before, glad I did. When they announced the name change from the racist name, this is about a year or so ago, and on the ABC with its older listeners, the Australian ABC, there was some complaints and it’s like, “Blah, blah, blah, this is dumb,” etc. But then, when the cheese actually started rolling in about a year later, I floated the idea of doing a thing about it. And they were like, “Yeah, no, we haven’t gotten any response from that sort of thing for a while. It’s worked its way through the system, storms passed and people have moved on.”
Caitlin: That’s the thing, is whenever one of these “woke” choices gets made by a company, you do get some very vocal people on the other side going, “This is horrible. We’re going to boycott you.” Then, once push comes to shove, nothing really happens there. Actually, progressives will maybe give them a little bit of extra money. And so, it ends up not really working as a backlash.
Daniel: Hmm. So, I guess the answer is I don’t know, maybe, not really, very much.
Caitlin: Maybe, not really.
Ben: The only thing I can suspect is that there are certain brands and companies, something that comes to mind right now would be something like Harley Davidson, which have a disproportionate clientele within communities that would have this sort of stuff. And then, I would imagine what you’re likely to see is those companies not doing stuff like that, because they are afraid of whatever meaningful backlash might come their way. So, I think it’s almost like a little bit self-selecting, like a business is probably only ever going to do it if they’ve run the numbers and gone, “Well, very few insane rednecky types buy my cheese, so I don’t really care.”
Caitlin: Right. On both sides, it has a lot to do with the relationship between the consumers and the company.
Daniel: I feel when you’ve got a racist name, that your product is a slur, I think that forces the issue in a way that it wouldn’t otherwise.
Ben: Yeah, for sure.
Caitlin: Definitely. I was living in Phoenix, Arizona, when a mountain in our city was renamed from a racist slur about American Indian woman got changed to Piestewa, which is the name of a woman who was killed during the Iraq War. And there was some kind of like rumblings about like, “Oh, come on. We’ve always known it as this other name. It’s so annoying.” But really, most people I know immediately picked up Piestewa Peak and started referring to it as such. And then, I moved to the bay area of California and we have a really famous ski resort that’s name the same thing. So, I have not escaped this word.
Daniel: I think that was a news item a little while ago. I think that they’ve renamed what– if you’re thinking about the Lake Tahoe one.
Caitlin: Yes.
Daniel: They renamed it.
Caitlin: They really have? Because it still says that on the sign last time, I was there. [chuckles]
Daniel: Argh, really? Okay, maybe this is–[crosstalk]
Caitlin: It’s been a while since I’ve driven by there.
Ben: Don’t forget, Daniel, Cheer Cheese announced it a long time ago, and then it took a while for it to actually happen.
Daniel: That’s true. I think this is going to [crosstalk]. Okay.
Caitlin: No, I think you’re right that they definitely did change it. Hopefully I’ll see that sign come down soon.
Daniel: Yeah, okay, I’m seeing on Google Street View that the signage is lagging and also the street still has the old name. Gross. Okay, so that’ll be really good. When that all changes and that works through the system, it’s going to be a great day.
This next one comes from Instructor Florence Ashley @butnotthecity, who says, “Does anyone know where the take comes from that non-binary should be written nonbinary, because more accepted words lose their hyphens.” And it was Treefrog that alerted us to this question. Okay. More accepted words lose their hyphens. True or false, do you think?
Caitlin: I think maybe people are confusing more accepted with older because as a word lives in your lexicon, some of them have lost hyphens over time.
Daniel: It’s true. You look at the progress of goodbye, where it went from ‘good’ and then space ‘bye,’ and then it went to good-bye, and then just goodbye.
Caitlin: I remember being a kid and reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and they kept talking about things happening to-morrow. What is happening?
[laughter]
Daniel: Wild.
Caitlin: Yeah. I looked up some things that lost their hyphens, and they only lost them in say 2007 according to the Oxford English Dictionary, but I cannot imagine them with hyphens now.
Daniel: Like what?
Caitlin: Figleaf, potbelly, testtube.
Daniel: No.
Caitlin: Yeah, and ice cream.
Daniel: Really?
Caitlin: [chuckles] Yeah.
Daniel: Okay, ice cream is a hard one because if you have ice cream, that one has always been two words. But if you pick that up and use it as a modifier, like an ice-cream cone, then it does get a hyphen.
Caitlin: Not to me. Not in my brain.
Daniel: Not to me either.
Ben: My entire understanding of the universe, icecream is one word.
Caitlin: [chuckles] Oh, really?
Daniel: One word?
Ben: Yep.
Daniel: Oh, okay. Well, you are the future, Ben.
Caitlin: I guess so.
Ben: In so many ways.
Daniel: Do we have any feelings about ‘goodnight?’ Goodnight.
Caitlin: Oh, interesting.
Ben: Well, yeah, I’m just wondering like ‘thank you.’ If goodbye has been combined into one word, why in the hell would ‘thank you’ still be two?
Daniel: Yeah, good point. Goodnight, according to the ABC style guide in Australia is one word, which is weird to me.
Caitlin: Yeah. I think it’s just not terribly consistent. And so that’s why the question of non-binary isn’t very intuitive because we don’t have like a lot of rules to intuit from.
Daniel: Yeah. I think what this person is doing is saying we need to be more accepting of nonbinary people, hyphenated words lose their hyphens when they become more accepted. Let’s signal that acceptance by dropping the hyphen in nonbinary. But I think what we’re saying is, it’s not when they become more accepted, it’s just over time, which may correlate to acceptance, but maybe not.
Caitlin: Yeah, and some things will just keep a hyphen because why not keep a hyphen?
Ben: Yeah. I think if you want to turn to of all of the languages, English to be your bulwark of dependability and regimented rule keeping, fuck, you’re in for a bad time.
Caitlin: [chuckles] That’s fair. I think we should try and find out if people really think that less hyphenated words or nonhyphenated words are more normal or more accepted, because if that is an instinct that people have, why not lean into it and take out the hyphen?
Daniel: Yeah, I’m cool with that.
Ben: I’m sitting here on the fringe being like, “Hyphens, do we really need them?”
Caitlin: Are any of them necessary?
Ben: Yeah, seriously.
Caitlin: I still use them in age, like my two-year-old daughter, I’ll put it in between two-year-old.
Ben: Yeah. I mean the modifier rule works. I think sometimes if you have– we get along without the hyphen and cooperate, and we don’t say cooperate. We’re fine that way. So, I guess maybe–
Caitlin: Because we already know it.
Ben: [crosstalk] -we’re secretly think it on the inside.
Daniel: Yeah. The weird one, “doable.” Take a wild flipping guess, what year do you think doable first came in?
Caitlin: Oh.
Ben: That sounds like a real swinging 60s kind of thing to me.
Caitlin: Oh, I was thinking like corporate 80s.
Daniel: I have forgotten the actual– let me just–
Ben: Wow. [crosstalk] -great question, Daniel.
Daniel: Sorry, I didn’t write it down in my notes, but according to Oxford, it first occurs 1443.
Caitlin: Wow. [chuckles]
Ben: Okay.
Daniel: And it didn’t have a hyphen. But then, when you start looking at–
Ben: Here we go.
Daniel: I don’t know like–
Ben: [crosstalk] -English again. “Oh, then we got a hyphen and then it lost it for like three years when one particular French king just decided hyphens were from the devil, and then it came back again.” This is what I mean, English is not the place to go to fucking rely on this shit.
Daniel: [chuckles] Like 200 years later in the 1600s, then we start seeing do-able. We started seeing quotes. They didn’t blink in Middle English when this was going on, but you know, there you go. Okay, so I think we’ve answered this one. If you want to lean into acceptance, if you want to say acceptance, means no hyphens, which I don’t think is necessarily true, but if you want to do that, then don’t hyphenate. Nonsmoker doesn’t hyphenate, nonmagnetic doesn’t. Non-diverse, non-lateral, non-ionized, they all do hyphenate still, mostly according to the Ngram Viewer, so it’s really a mixed bag at this stage with non.
Okay, let’s move on Eugenie, via email at hello@becauselanguage.com. “I was wondering whether you would consider discussing your thoughts on the effectiveness of brand lingo. For example, Starbucks specially designated tall, venti, grande labels in lieu of small, medium and large, and possible ways trying to foster brand loyalty in this way could backfire. I have always been intrigued by the mechanisms behind iconic brand strategies that are equal parts endearing and exclusive. And I thought the examples raised in this short Economist article were really interesting. I would love to hear what you think.” The Economist, sometimes interesting, sometimes turfy.
Caitlin: Sometimes real terfy.
Daniel: Who’s a mixed bag more, The Economist or The Atlantic?
Caitlin: Oh, my gosh.
Daniel: [laughs]
Caitlin: That’s impossible.
Daniel: I love these questions.
Ben: I feel The Economist would be surely.
Caitlin: Yeah, I think you’re right.
Ben: Just from a business-y angle.
Daniel: Anyway, Caitlin: Starbucks, you’ve got one. We don’t. Not in Western Australia.
Caitlin: Oh, yeah, that’s true.
Ben: We killed them.
Caitlin: Yeah, I’m a longtime Starbucks goer. I actually remember going into a pizza somewhere and ordering something grande and then getting looked at, like I just had three eyes or something. And then seeing like, “Oh, you have small, medium, large, sorry.” And I felt like I had outed myself as a poser.
Ben: ~God, what is this? A movie cinema? Jeez.~
Caitlin: I know.
Daniel: Bringing your Starbucks in here.
Caitlin: Well, there was a Starbucks across the street from my work for five years, and so that’s what I got used to. [chuckles]
Daniel: Yeah.
Ben: Can I ask, and this is just an incredibly, culturally myopic question, if I as an Australian from Australian coffee culture, go into a Starbucks in America and ask for a flat white, does that mean anything?
Caitlin: They have a flat white. Whether that’s what you’re expecting is different question.
Daniel: [laughs] That’s it. They do have flat whites now. Whether it’s the same thing, I don’t know. But before they had flat whites, I seriously did not know what to ask for. So, I tried describing what I wanted, and they would look at me like I had three eyes.
Ben: Like, a normal amount of coffee with frothy milk, but not like a cappuccino because that’s just too much froth. [chuckles]
Daniel: Eventually, I just ended up walking into Starbucks and saying, “Just fuck me up.”
[chuckles]
Ben: Give me that Starbucks juice!
Caitlin: So, if you go into a Starbucks and you ask for a flat white, you will pretty much, I think, get what you wanted.
Daniel: Okay.
Caitlin: Okay.
Caitlin: Yeah.
Ben: That’s good. This is not at all answering Eugenie’s question though. So, we should probably get back onto that.
Daniel: All right. Well, there are lots of websites where you can look up the history of these drinks for a long time that had short, tall, and grande. I was like, “Why’s the tall the smallest size?” Well, the short was eight ounces, tall was 12 ounces, grande was large 16 ounces. What’s an ounce? I don’t know. Just fuck me up. But then, along came venti, which meant 20 in Italian, it’s 20 ounces. But 24, if it’s a drink with ice, I have learned this on a website. So, that’s where it comes from. And I can see how once that gets in your brain, you want to keep going back to Starbucks, because they speak your language. You go to that other place, and they’ll just look at you like you got three eyes.
Caitlin: Yeah, I think that’s what they were referring to with this idea of brand loyalty, that once you feel immersed in the culture of your Starbucks, then it’s hard to want to venture out of that.
Ben: It’s interesting in the example of Starbucks though, and I realise I’m speaking a little bit outside of my wheelhouse here, because Starbucks had a relatively unique position in that they essentially taught most of middle America what coffee culture was or is. They entered a market that was bottomless percolated coffee. And your options were, do you want cream or sugar, that was it. There was no frothing of milk, there was no single-origin roasts. None of that stuff existed in the vast majority of coffee drinkers in America. I would argue this is probably why Starbucks kind of failed a little bit when they came to Australia, because Australians already had a pluralistic coffee culture that had just organically grown over time. Whereas Americans just were instructed by Starbucks, “This is what a barista style coffee is, this is the language that you use for it.” So, they got to set the tone in a way for an entire type of consumable products that I think it would probably be the envy of a lot of corporations, and certainly doesn’t probably get to happen all that often.
Daniel: Ripe for disruption.
Caitlin: Yeah. I think this is where my age is a disadvantage because I am baby and I just don’t– like my first coffee came from a Starbucks. I don’t know what things were like before.
Daniel: And I used to be a Mormon, so I didn’t even drink coffee back then. I’m just as much a baby.
Ben: It was the Devil’s juice.
Daniel: It was the Satan’s brew. [chuckles]
Caitlin: I was thinking about In-N-Out Burger, which we have here in California. And there’s a whole secret menu that you’re supposed to just osmose the rules to, which I didn’t. So, at this point, I don’t know what animal style is, and I’m afraid to ask because I will seem ignorant.
Daniel: What?
[laughter]
Ben: I know exactly what you mean. It sucks, doesn’t it, when you sitting there being like, “I don’t want to be uncool.”
Caitlin: [chuckles] Right. I think they put something on your fries. I don’t know if it’s something I want or not. [chuckles]
Daniel: Hmm. I thought it’d be interesting to discuss the concept of a coffee name. Some people have a coffee name, especially people from non-Anglo backgrounds.
Caitlin: Yes.
Daniel: You order coffee and they’ll ask what your name is, so that they can call it out when your coffee is ready. But some people just choose a name that’s easier, which is kind of sad.
Caitlin: Yeah, I had a boyfriend in college who would just say “Bob.”
Ben: My partner’s name is Ayesha and whenever we go to get coffee, the order is always put under Ben.
Daniel: Yeah, my partner, Marin, just chooses Mary because it’s easier.
Ben: One of my friends for me sort of wins the race though. His parents were both librarians. So, let’s spare a moment in commiseration because his name is Stjohn, no spaces, just like, the saint is S-T J-O-H-N kind of thing. This poor boy, rocking up to coffee places. I’ve seen him on a day, I got him to try and do it once and it was a clusterfuck.
Daniel: I feel like Four Weddings and a Funeral did much to normalise that particular name.
Ben: I have never seen that film.
Caitlin: Me neither.
Ben: Although not a baby, I’m not as old as Daniel.
Caitlin: [laughs]
Daniel: I think it’s worth seeing — unlike Love Actually, the other wacky British ensemble piece.
Ben: Which has a lot of problematic messages.
Daniel: Oh, no.
Ben: Moving on.
Caitlin: Yeah, I’ve seen that one approximately 50 times.
Daniel: Oh, no.
Ben: Because it’s in your nostalgia window.
Caitlin: It is.
Ben: And this is the problem with having nostalgia windows is shit gets past the keeper that you then realise is– so for me, Ace Ventura. When I was growing up, Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura was life. I can still to this day quote the first film pretty much from beginning to end without pause. And yet, it’s just fucking awful and transphobic, just horrifically homophobic.
Caitlin: That is so bad.
Ben: It’s really, really bad, and that’s the problem with nostalgic windows. They let the bad things in.
Daniel: The writer, Nyadol Nyuon, had a thread about coffee names, in which lots of white people swarmed in and said, “Oh, yeah, my name is Annie, but everyone writes Anne. It’s such a pain,” which was not the point.
Caitlin: Not the point.
Daniel: Not the point. The point is that lots of people who have a name with a background that I’m not familiar with, they might just, I don’t know, give a coffee name and give up in a little way because it’s too hard to educate dumb folks like me. That’s a form of pressure that I wish they didn’t have. So, I just want to say hello fellow Anglos, make an effort on names, treat it like a part of language. It’s not very often that you’re asked to memorise words in different languages, so give it a try.
Ben: Give it a red hot go.
Daniel: Yeah. Thanks, Eugenie, for that question. PharaoahKatt on our Discord channel asks, “Is the L in ‘would’ as in “I would go but I can’t.” Is the L in would because it’s related to will?”
Ben: Hmm. I feel like there is a bit of a running theme here, and the theme is English. Why are you so fucked?
Daniel: Why are you like this?
[laughter]
Ben: Why? After this, there’s going to be a question about, “ough” I’m sure how it gets pronounced 80 different ways.
Daniel: What do you reckon, Ben? I’m going to throw this to Ben first.
Caitlin: Yeah, let’s do it.
Ben: Because I am a numpty and I am definitely guessing. Would and will, I’m going to go with, no. My instinct is no, they’re not related. And I’m going to guess it’s because they come from different– English has that really awesome thing where it’s a Germanic language, but then it just also borrowed half its vocabulary from a non-Germanic language. I’m thinking ‘will’ is the non-Germanic, maybe a bit of a Frenchie romance-y thing coming through there, whereas ‘would’ sounds it’s like got good teutonic stock behind it.
Daniel: It’s good and woody. Caitlin, take it.
Caitlin: Well, that’s good reasoning, but I think it actually is related.
Ben: It’s okay, you can say I’m wrong. You can just be like, “No.”
Caitlin: Listen, Ben, you’re wrong, but very cool. [chuckles]
Ben: Thanks.
Daniel: Wrong, but very cool. That’s what I should have said for the intro.
[laughter]
Caitlin: You could still rerecord it. [laughs]
Daniel: I’ll do it for next time.
Caitlin: Yeah, it looks like it’s the past tense of to will. So, we got our old English ‘wolde’. I don’t know how it’s pronounced. I’m really bad with that stuff.
Daniel: That was perfect.
Caitlin: Thank you. And then, we have ‘wiljaną’ to will, from proto-Germanic, wijan.
Daniel: Yeah, so ‘would’ has an L because will and it’s got a D, because, ed, it’s the past tense. And it might be a little hard to see how ‘would’ is the past tense of will. But if you think of it, like, “When I was younger, I would go to the park every day.” So that’s kind of like a past tense.
Ben: Yeah, like, “I will go.” Yeah. Okay, that does actually make a fair bit of sense.
Daniel: So, then we pick up these words and use them as models. Same for shall and should, should meant to owe someone something. “[unintelligible [00:37:07] denarii.” “He who owed him 100 denarii.” And we picked up ‘shall’ and ‘should,’ and use them for models too. But that’s not the cool part. The cool part is ‘can’ and ‘could.’ Does anyone know this one?
Ben: ‘Can’ and ‘could.’ Well, I’m guessing that they’ve just imitated ‘would.’ If the other things worked like that, they just like made could that way because so it would fit with the others, so we’d have friends on the schoolyard.
Daniel: It’s exactly right. See, Ben is not always wrong, but he’s still very cool.
Caitlin: Yeah. Good instincts.
Ben: Stop it.
Caitlin: It’s not bad.
Daniel: In the 1500s, we see ‘could’ with no L. By the 1600s, the L is sneaking in, and the rationale is that, “Well, would and should have an L,” so why not?
Ben: It’s like a D in fridge.
Daniel: Kinda.
Ben: Yeah.
Daniel: Why did the L sound drop out? That’s the question. Why don’t we say would and should?
Ben: Can I guess on that one as well?
Daniel: Yes.
Ben: Because it sucks. Like in the same way that we’ve dropped it the B from comb and lamb and all that kind of stuff. It’s just a yucky mouthfeel, basically, and we spit it out.
Daniel: Yeah. I mean Ls drop out sometimes. They turn into vowels easily. So, there are a lots of words you might have an L, but I might not. For example, the kind of fish with an S.
Ben: What?
Daniel: The kind of fish that swims upstream.
Ben: Salmon.
Daniel: So, it’s not an L for you?
Ben: No, I do not say salmon.
Daniel: Some people say salmon.
Ben: Although, again, I always do in my head.
Daniel: Hmm, that kind of nut, that you get milk out of.
Ben: But that’s walnuts.
Daniel: Not those.
Ben: Almond.
Daniel: Yeah, so I say almond, but–
Caitlin: Me too.
Daniel: Yeah? Okay. We were both Pacific coasters, US.
Ben: Where a lot of them come from.
Daniel: When you’re feeling very placid, and it starts with a C.
Ben: Calm?
Daniel: Hmm.
Ben: People say cal-m.
Daniel: I say calm.
Caitlin: Yeah, I’ve heard cal-m, but I say calm.
Daniel: Okay. Around here. People say you should calm the farm, because calm and farm sort of rhyme. I don’t know. Ben, am I getting that?
Ben: Calm the farm?
Daniel: Calm the farm. And of course, chalk. I don’t know anybody who says chal-k.
Caitlin: No, me neither.
Daniel: In fact, you can’t even–
Ben: [crosstalk] -always in my head. I’m saying chalk out loud, but in my head, I’m saying chal-k.
Caitlin: [chuckles]
Daniel: L is just weird. L drops out fairly easily. And that’s why we say will but would, and that also explains the D. So, love that question. Thanks, [unintelligible [00:39:42] you always pick the best ones. Let’s keep going.
This one, I’m going to direct more to Caitlin than anything else. This one comes from BJ on Patreon.
Ben: I’m super suspicious because the title of this question in our run sheet is a “Shithead Move.” [laughs] I’m just like, “Alright, Caitlin. Assume the position, I guess.”
Daniel: Here we go.
Caitlin: Yeah. I’m ready to opine on shithead moves.
Daniel: Okay. We see a lot of them. BJ says, “I’m glad to support you all. One topic that I’m interested in is how to use language to be kind, at least inclusive, to people that I disagree with, say, over politics or religion. Recently, I told the person that parked in a handicapped parking spot that it was ‘A shithead move.’ I wonder if I could have used more kind and persuasive words. He didn’t move out of the parking spot. Would you say that the more swear words the one uses, the harder that it is to be inclusive? Is it reasonable to be thoughtful when using ‘fuck’ in discussions adjacent to charged topics?”
Caitlin: I love this question.
Daniel: I love everything about you, BJ.
Caitlin: Yeah, that was amazing. I mean, it was a shithead move, first of all.
Daniel: It was a shithead move.
Ben: BJ sounds super Canadian. Can I just put that out there?
Caitlin: [chuckles]
Daniel: “Do you think I should have told that guy to not be a shithead and fuck off?” [crosstalk]
Caitlin: I mean, one thing you have to be careful with handicapped parking is people have invisible disabilities. So, it is extremely fraught to tell somebody they can’t be there.
Daniel: There is however a thing that you hang on your–
Caitlin: Yeah, if you don’t have your placard, then someone might call you a shithead.
Daniel: I wouldn’t do it.
Caitlin: No, I’m very meek in real life, despite my Twitter behavior.
Ben: Yeah. I’m super conflict averse. I’m the shouty right-wing’s absolute picture of a pencil-necked lefty.
[laughter]
Ben: In real life when people are getting all shouty, I’m just like, “Oh, can we go somewhere else please?”
[laughter]
Caitlin: But the question of swearing is complicated, because it’s not innately impolite to swear. It’s something that you can do to communicate freedom, fun, informality, closeness with somebody. You see people– I don’t know. I have this terrible stereotype. I do this with my husband all the time, where I’ll grasp his hand firmly and I’ll say, “How are you doing, you old son of a bitch?”
Daniel: [laughs]
Caitlin: It’s like a fun way to come at somebody.
Ben: Because everyone on some level wants their wife to be a grumpy cowboy.
Caitlin: That’s right.
[laughter]
Caitlin: And that’s what I’m here for.
[laughter]
Caitlin: I swear with my friends all the time. I swear with my parents all the time because they’re nice and cool, and they swear too. You can’t make a blanket rule about swearing. What you have to be looking at, I think, actually a really good framework for this is face threat, which is this idea that when you’re talking to somebody, you can potentially make them feel you don’t think very highly of them. Or you can make them feel you’re limiting their freedom to do the things that they want to do, and those things really get to a person. So, you have to do a bunch of work to make that not be so threatening. When you’re correcting somebody’s behavior, that’s extremely face threatening, you do want to think about, is there a way for me to correct this person’s behavior without making them feel hated? It’s not always possible and with a stranger, it’s really, really hard.
Ben: Yeah, super tricky.
Caitlin: Because closeness, being close with somebody makes it a lot easier to correct them.
Daniel: We talk a lot on the show about how to communicate with people we don’t agree with. When I see you on your Twitter feed, I see that you do not shy away from conflict. There must be like 17 people who see you and they’re like, “Oh, fuck. She’s on me again. Not again.” How do you know, Caitlin, when it’s time to put on the soft gloves of persuasion, and when it’s time to put on the stomping boots of antagonism and ridicule?
Caitlin: I probably veer more on the side of the antagonism and ridicule, partly because I’m on a public platform. So, I’m not only talking to the person I’m talking to. I’m also talking to everybody else who’s observing. So, one thing that I want to make sure that I do, is people who also disagree with my target, I want to entertain them, and I want to make them feel brave, and I want to make them feel stronger in their convictions. And people who are fence sitters, I want to make them feel maybe the person that I’m talking to is kind of ridiculous and wouldn’t it be embarrassing if I were to be seen to be agreeing with them? Those are higher priorities to me than being kind to a person that I consider to be powerful and shitty.
Daniel: Because they’re not convincible.
Caitlin: Yeah, I don’t think so. Research on changing people’s minds really suggests that you have a lot better shot at it if you’re already close with them, and I’m not getting close to Peter Boghossian. So, I may as well just yell at him.
Ben: I think to bring it back to BJs question as well is, I don’t know where BJ hails from, necessarily might be America, might be Australia, might be anywhere, in between those two opposite sides of the world, I find stuff in public also, you’ve got to look out for yourself a little bit. You can never really know, certainly in a place like America, when someone might just like full-tilt flip out on you with a weapon potentially. That is a nontrivial chance in a place like America. Even in a place like Australia, I find that the propensity of people just going to a violent place is very much higher than I seem to recall. Perhaps when I was younger, I was just delightfully ignorant and living in my own little world of the pixies where everything was great. And now I’m like, older and crankier and wrinkly, I’m like, “Oh, that person punched on pretty quickly. I don’t know what that’s about.”
I’d say to BJ whilst it’s really good to try and protect disenfranchised groups, putting aside the fact that disabled spaces have their suite of complications that Caitlin mentioned at the beginning of this answer, you’ve got to do so in a way that keeps you safe as well. If TikTok has taught me anything, it’s that some white people really like to throw a tantrum, really like to throw a tantrum. So, just be careful, BJ, you never know when someone might completely flip out on you.
Caitlin: Yeah, and you want to watch out because there are gendered and racialized and other social dimensions too, who is allowed to swear when. That’s something I’ve come up against being a woman on the internet. [chuckles] In fact, the person who’s doing the blocking for you know who actually cited my use of the word ‘fuck’ as a reason why I am uncreative and jealous and need to be blocked because I’m going to defenestrate him.
Daniel: I can’t believe you did that, Caitlin.
Caitlin: I know. I know.
Ben: Thrown out of a window nicely.
Caitlin: [chuckles]
Daniel: No, no. Throwing somebody out of window is fine, but swearing? Terribly uncivil.
Caitlin: Never say fuck.
Ben: Oh, they would not do well in Australia. [chuckles] Fuck is where you start. Fuck is like a handshake.
Caitlin: Yeah.
Daniel: Okay, now I’m thinking of that thing, that tweet where somebody is asking, “Hey, this person I’m seeing,” and it’s a woman writing this, woman identified. “He calls me a mad cunt, says it’s okay, because it’s Australian. Am I being gaslighted?”
Ben: [laughs] Sorry. I shouldn’t laugh at this poor person who probably asked that question really, really, genuinely.
Daniel: Yeah.
Ben: It is legitimately a term of endearment like 99% of the time.
Daniel: Yeah. My response was, “I know that a lot of people will tell you it’s perfectly fine in Australia, but it sounds like you’re not okay with it.”
Ben: If you don’t like it, then don’t put up with it.
Daniel: If you feel like you’re being gaslighted, then maybe that’s a data point for you.
Caitlin: Yeah. It’s always a question if you set a boundary and your partner pushes past it, because that’s not healthy.
Ben: Yeah, totally. That’s red flag city. That’s just billowing red smoke.
Daniel: All of which is my way of saying, if you do use fuck, BJ, it’s possible to make people feel like using with them and not at them. And this refers to drawing on shared goals, shared mutual experience. But, of course, if it’s a stranger, maybe don’t share your goals. Maybe it’s best to just, I don’t know, leave that one alone.
Caitlin: Yeah, keep yourself safe.
Ben: Not yet. I would also say, BJ, I personally in your situation, my preferred option, as Caitlin said, there’s a really low likelihood that you’re going to convince this person of everything, so really what you’re doing is just communicating the fact that you do not sanction their behavior or perhaps that you want to sanction their behavior. Fuck, I hate that word.
[laughter]
Ben: What I like to do is just get really creative with the insults. Don’t go to, what was it, shithead?
Caitlin: Yeah.
Ben: Think of something really great like, you flaming dumpster fire of regret or something like that. Just have fun with it. Just get a little bit Shakespearean with the insults.
Daniel: Nice. Flaming dumpster fire of regret.
Caitlin: At least entertain yourself.
Ben: Yeah, exactly right. Your day just got a little bit better because you said a thing that made you laugh.
Daniel: And entertained your audience because ridicule is okay.
Caitlin: [laughs] Great. I’m glad we came to the right conclusion here.
Ben: If elementary school taught me anything.
Caitlin: That’s right. Sticks and stones make you a better person.
[laughter]
Ben: You know what though, I can just imagine, like some guest on Joe Rogan or something like that, being like, “Well, actually if you look at the archaeological evidence, it was in fact the manipulations of both sticks and stones in early manhood that led to the rise of– Really, I think the metaphor is quite apt. And in fact, we need to toughen up.” I was like, “Wow.”
Caitlin: And then Joe Rogan may go, “Whoa, word, really?” [crosstalk]
[laughter]
Ben: Yeah.
Daniel: Moving on, thanks, BJ. This one comes from our good friend, Pontos, via Patreon. “Hey, I’m listening to Episode 35 and the discussion with Indigenous Australian woman, Lesley Woods. I have a question. I don’t mean to sound cold, but a natural part of language and culture is that sometimes languages stop being used. How do we know when to let a language die and when should we put an effort into saving it?”
Ben: Ooh– [crosstalk]
Daniel: I know.
Ben: I have a fairly straightforward answer to that one.
Daniel: Okay. Always save.
Ben: No, it’s not always save. I know, I know, I always have a movie reference for everything. It reminds me of Dr. Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park.
Daniel: Condors. [laughs]
Ben: Yeah, exactly, condors. And his reply to John Hammond saying, “Condors. If I was saving condors out on this island, you wouldn’t have a thing to say about it.” And Ian Malcolm’s like, “Yeah, but condors weren’t wiped out because of the installation of a dam. Dinosaurs weren’t dead because the installation of a dam, they had their shot and has gone through the natural hoi polloi of existence.” I would not describe colonialism as the natural hoi polloi of linguistic existence. If there’s a really clear indication that a language is dying or has gone dormant because of just an awful, murderous campaign of colonialism in a particular place, which is where the vast majority of languages that have gone dormant have gone dormant because of, then, yeah, I think we are obligated as a society to put infinity effort into saving them.
Over the next 100 and something years of the internet life, if English stops having particularly strong regional realities, if in 100 years, regional English accents just aren’t really a thing anymore or something like that, fucking okay. Great. No worries. That’s the argy-bargy of just languages bumping up against each other, but not in a way it’s like, “Hey, you have all of this land and resources. Do you mind if we murder most of you, beat you if you use your language, and then take them all?” That to me seems like that’s a situation where you should probably definitely save a language.
Daniel: That was my first thing that I thought too. Languages don’t die, we kill them. We being the colonizers. We threw everything we had, the entire force of the government at this people and those languages, and we owe them compensation. But it’s not as simple as encouraging a language like, “Hey, you minoritized people, speak your language, authorized by the state government.” Things have moved on. The language was something that held a community together. And now that language has been broken in a community. And that was part of breaking up that community. So, the community has to be put back together. What happens to the language is up to the community. We’ve talked about a lot of ways to revitalize a language. There’s artistic works in the language that can raise prestige. Rap can bring the language to new generation. Official status and support can pay for teachers and research. So, we owe that as restitution to these communities, and then they can take it up.
Caitlin: Yeah. One of the things that I would teach when we would talk about language revitalization is ethnolinguistic vitality, which is a measure of how likely it is that a language revitalization effort is going to be successful, and that’s something to keep track of. If nobody in that community really wants to be involved in revitalizing the language or if you can’t get institutional support for it, then you’re not likely to have a lot of results. And so, then you have to make a hard choice there. But if you’ve got the support of the ethnolinguistic community, and you’ve got people and structures that are ready to be in place to help encourage the revitalization efforts, then yeah. Basically, as colonizers, we owe it to do whatever we can.
Daniel: And then, we have to make a choice between, are we shooting for revitalization? Are we shooting for documentation so that maybe later on somebody will want to revitalize? Keeping in mind that those two goals are different and they can work against each other.
Caitlin: Yeah.
Daniel: There’s an article by Rachel Nuwer in BBC Future, really good article, link on our blog, becauselanguage.com. An elder told Tom Belt, who worked on the Cherokee language, “It’s all well and good that y’all want to do this, but remember, they didn’t take it away overnight and you’re not going to get it back overnight.”
Caitlin: Yeah, that’s good to remember.
Daniel: There’s just one other thing that sometimes people say in connection with this, and this isn’t a bad question. People do say, “Well, languages have been disappearing forever, and we didn’t know about them. It wasn’t a big deal. Do we really need to throw everything at this?” One thing that people say is that minority languages represent a barrier to understanding and that it would be somehow advantageous for everyone to speak one language. My response to that would be, you know what else is a barrier to understanding? Not speaking minority languages. It works both ways.
Caitlin: Yeah, that sounds like monolingual ideologies is getting in people’s way.
Daniel: It is. I mean, you could say, everybody could understand everybody if we all spoke English. But you could also say, “Well, everybody could also understand everyone if we all speak their language in addition to English,” I mean, you can have communication if you do either of those things but somehow the only the one solution ever seems to occur to us.
Ben: Yeah, it’s interesting that the colonizer’s language voice magically seems to be the one that should just be learned by everyone else.
Caitlin: You see that backed up by ideologies about the natural fitness of that language for modern concerns. People just decide that English, is just there’s something about it intrinsically that we’re just able to talk about really complex issues, and I don’t know, it’s just a natural thing about English. It doesn’t have anything to do with how we’ve culturally given it advantages over and over again.
Ben: If I had my time again, if I could go back in time into human history, and just make not– look, I would love to stop colonialism, but let’s just keep it like a little bit more realistic. If I could just change the language of the dominant colonizer power across the globe, fuck, I would choose anything but English, anything at all, but English. Spanish? I’d take Spanish. Spanish is super sensible. Really straightforward. There’s no such thing as a spelling test in Spanish, because fucking everything spells how it sounds. It’s really easy.
Daniel: Always goes back to spelling– [crosstalk]
[laughter]
Ben: Just honestly, English just had to be just about the least helpful language for this shit. I feel so sorry, so sorry for everyone who doesn’t grow up speaking it and then has to try and learn it later. It must be such a fucking nightmare.
Caitlin: But you know what would happen with Spanish then, is it would go through all of this language contact. all of this globalization and Spanish would become impossible.
Ben: Here’s the question though, because weren’t we already fucked before we colonized everywhere? We were thoroughly fucked before? We haven’t just left our sad little rainy Island.
Daniel: Having studied Spanish linguistics, that was actually a fourth-year Spanish course was my introduction to linguistics, full stop. And I was fascinated by sound change and how Latin moved into Portuguese and Spanish and all the Romance languages. Spanish has been through some contortions itself.
Ben: So, okay, fine. Spanish isn’t the great savior.
Daniel: No, they’ve managed to keep it orthographically tight. What you’re saying, Ben, is also an ideology, which I’m fine with because–
Ben: English is a mess.
Daniel: We’re allowed to punch English. That’s fine.
Ben: Yeah. [laughs] Poor English, just sitting at the top of the pile all by itself.
Daniel: Part of this question is really interesting, and it’s not a terrible question and it’s been raised at different times, because resources are scarce and blah, blah, blah. We sometimes do these cost-benefit analyses, but it sounds like what we’re coming up with is, always live, always choose life.
Caitlin: Yeah.
Daniel: Thank you. Garble Deena on our Discord channel. “Hey, first-time poster, long-time lurker.”
Ben: Welcome.
Daniel: Welcome. “I’m sure this must have already been raised, and I’m way late to the party. But I’ve become really fascinated by the shift I’m suddenly seeing in written English words, formerly ending in ‘tty’ to ‘ddy’ online. I noticed it with the word ‘titty’ a while ago, and recently also saw ‘shitty’ crop up. Is this becoming more widespread? Or is this just sampling bias on my part, blush emoji?” What do we got?
Caitlin: I am so excited by this because I haven’t seen ‘shiddy’ at all, but I’ve seen ‘tiddy’ a lot.
Daniel: Mm-hmm.
Ben: I thought ‘tiddy’ was a bit of an isolate because essentially all that’s happening, I think, is that in that particular word, people just wrote the sound that we actually say, but that exists in so many words with T. We should be writing city C-I-D-Y, surely. Surely.
[chuckles]
Daniel: Well, we should actually be writing it C-I-tap-Y.
Caitlin: Yeah, can we just put a tap in?
Daniel: Let’s put a tap in.
Caitlin: Well, the thing about both ‘tiddy’ and ‘shiddy’ is that they are both a little bit taboo words. Does it have to do with communicating something about like titty, I’m saying a bad word.
Ben: So, kind of like shite.
Caitlin: Maybe, yeah. I think it definitely has some kind of a humorous or a fun connotation to it. When you see that, you feel like, “Oh, yeah, a joke is being made.”
Daniel: I took a look at a website called Lots of Words that I use sometimes for this. It shows you words ending in whatever combination of letters you want. And there was ‘tiddy’ and ‘shiddy’ but there was also ‘preddy.’
Ben: Okay.
Caitlin: Oh.
Daniel: Also, ‘fiddy’, naturally, for 50.
Ben: Oh, yeah.
Daniel: And ‘sadiddy,’ which is stuck up. So, there’s definitely a link to African American English. But the first instance I found of ‘tiddies’ was in a book of erotica called School Life in Paris from 1897.
Caitlin: Whoa.
Daniel: “The points of my tiddies,” and that’s in quotes, by the way, which is a little cue that it’s a little wink, like, “tiddies stood up under the clever workings of their tongues.” It’s quite a read.
[chuckles]
Daniel: Anyway. Yeah, I think we’re just trying to spell it like we say it and that’s a way of doing, what we call taboo replacement.
Caitlin: Yeah.
Daniel: Thanks, Garble Deena. Jenna via email, hello@becauselanguage.com, “In the fairytale, Jack and the Beanstalk, the giant says rhyme. ‘Fe, fi, fo, fum, I smell the blood of an English man. Be he alive, or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.’” Jenna continues, “Seems pretty clear that the poem is supposed to rhyme in an A-A, B-B pattern, but it doesn’t quite– fum doesn’t rhyme with mn. Why would the author not write fee, fi, fo, fun or fan? Does the story or the poem come from a time and place where fum rhymes with man or is fee, fau, fi, fum, a preexisting line?” Well, what do you reckon?
Ben: I’ve been jumping in early, so I would like to give the floor to Caitlin first.
Caitlin: Oh. [chuckles] I’m wondering if maybe Jenna is from the US or North America in general, because it rhymes less for us, I think. If you say, “Fe, fi, fo, fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman,” then it’s just a slant rhyme where the final consonant doesn’t match but the vowel is basically pretty similar. But if you say it the way I want to say it, “Fe, fi, fo, fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman,” that’s really hard.
[laughter]
Caitlin: It doesn’t work at all.
Daniel: This is our Spider-Man discussion again, isn’t it?
[laughter]
Daniel: Makes me wish Hedvig was here.
Caitlin: Oh, no. So, I think if you’re seeing it through an English lens, then you’ve got a slant rhyme which is pretty acceptable really.
Daniel: Yeah, people long ago were perfectly okay with assonance. Close was good enough, and close usually meant that the vowel match, don’t worry about the final sound.
Ben: I’ve always called it like hip hop rhyming. The rules in hip hop are just super loose, because if it sounds right, if it works, it works.
Daniel: There were never was a time when fun rhymed with man, and it didn’t change over time. The story comes from 1711 where the line is exactly as we have it. There is a version from 1595, fee, fa, fum, here is the Englishman.” It actually pops up in King Lear by Shakespeare. It’s even possible that the phrase meant a thing. The Wikipedia page for fee, fi, fo, fum says, I’ll just read this, “Charles Mackay proposes in The Gaelic Etymology of the Languages of Western Europe that the seemingly meaningless string of syllables “Fa fe fi fo fum” is actually a coherent phrase of ancient Gaelic. And the means fa means behold, the fe means food, fi means good to eat, fo means sufficient, fum means hunger. So, fa fe fi fo fum means, “Behold food, good to eat, sufficient for my hunger. And then, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.” But I’m not sure about this.
[crosstalk]
Caitlin: That feels like a stretch.
Ben: I don’t buy it. Yeah, that sounds folk etymology as fuck.
Daniel: Yeah, I’ll cut that.
Ben: Leave it in. I want a record to show that you say that and we knocked it back.
Daniel: Okay. Good. There is one last interesting thing. This is a really good example of ablaut reduplication.
Caitlin: Love it.
Daniel: Yeah, we’ve got a sequence like splish, splash, splosh. And it’s always i-a-o. So, fee-fi-fo-fum or fi fa fo is exactly what we would expect, and it sounds good to English speakers’ ears.
Caitlin: Live, laugh, love.
Daniel: Live, laugh, love.
Ben: [laughs]
Daniel: The answer is no, it’s just assonant, it’s a slant rhyme, and it’s perfectly okay. Our last one. Brooke via Patreon. “Hello, Daniel. Thank you for addressing my question about contronyms.” Like, sanctioned. “I was very excited to hear the shoutout. I have since relocated from Washington State to sunny Brisbane in May of last year, and I’m loving every minute of it. During this time, I’ve been introduced to a plethora of Aussie slang, which is the subject of my next question for you and the gang.”
Ben: Oh, yeah.
Daniel: We’re the gangs.
Ben: This could go bad.
Daniel: No, it’s good. “I was hoping you could discuss the origins of the term ‘tucker.’ Most often, I hear it in terms of bush tucker in discussions about traditional Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lifestyles and cultures. However, I assume that it’s also the basis of the term tuck shop. Does the term stem from English, Australian, or Aboriginal origin? How did it gain popularity? Is the term utilized by any populations outside of Australia? Thank you and keep up the good work. Thanks, Brooke.”
Ben: And just, Brooke, so you know, there’s another manifestation of it that we use in Australian English, which is to tuck in. Not tuck in to bed, but when food is served, it’s like, “Alright, everyone, tuck in.”
Caitlin: This is where having the family I have really messed me up because I thought it was something we say here. But I was raised by a mom who lived in England for half of her childhood and Australia for the other half.
Daniel: Wow.
Ben: Oh, dear. [crosstalk]
Caitlin: This is something that definitely she gave to me as a word that I was just like, “Yeah. In the US, we say tuck in, for sure. There’s tuck shops, why not? No, I’m wrong.”
[laughter]
Ben: I was about to say in Australian accent. “Do you mean the cafeteria?”
[laughter]
Caitlin: I guess I mean a convenience store, like a bodega. I don’t know.
Daniel: I wish we had bodegas here. That’d be awesome.
Caitlin: Right. It’s the thing on campus that you get your food from. I don’t know.
Ben: We used to. We call them delis.
Daniel: Yeah, there used to be a deli on the corner of my street and now it’s just somebody’s house.
Ben: It is just somebody’s house. But that doesn’t answer the question, what does?
Daniel: Well, no, I think that the ‘tuck in’ is very relevant because that’s the original sense. I took a look at Green’s Dictionary of Slang. You can look these up yourself, greensdictofslang.com. Jonathon Green, Mr. Slang, very good. 1821, we start seeing, “The chap came into the Cock and Hen Club, where he was tucking in his grub and bub.” What you’re doing is you’re tucking the food into your stomach, just placing it in there. By 1835, we have ‘tuck’ which was victuals. Let’s see, 1833– so those were both UK references. Then in 1833, we’ve got an Australian reference in the Launceston Advisor, “The Bushrangers then asked for a tucker,” and then in parentheses, it says, “The slang word for a meal.”
[chuckles]
Caitlin: Thank you.
Ben: So helpful.
Daniel: I love that.
Ben: Do you know what?
Daniel: What?
Ben: That really clearly signifies that that means it’s new.
Daniel: Yeah, that’s right.
Ben: Having to show a definition, then it’s not common yet.
Daniel: Yeah. Or at least they thought it wasn’t going to be well understood by the reader. And then, 1852 in the Adelaide Morning Chronicle, we resolved to take only the most necessary, in quotes, I love quotes, by the way, “Swag and tucker, as the colonists in their semi-convict slang denominate luggage and food.” Isn’t that good?
[chuckles]
Ben: Yeah. Semi– [crosstalk]
Daniel: Semi-convict slang.
Ben: I’m wondering if there is also a little bit of a– in the same way that could just molded after would. I’m wondering if we had ‘tuck in,’ to like tuck into your food or you grab or whatever. And then because we’ve got the word supper, it just like ‘tucker’ just seemed to work, almost like its own little slant rhyme.
Daniel: I was thinking about ‘er’ and how that works, like tucker, adding that to a meal. Like if you call it a drink, I don’t know a quencher or a slaker or something like that. We don’t call it that but if by some weird path it did, that would make sense. And so, I guess, tucker, give us a tucker, that would make sense.
Ben: Well, Daniel, in Australia, the quintessential lemon fizzy drink is Solo, the thirst quencher.
Daniel: Hmm. But I wouldn’t ask for a quencher.
Ben: No, that would be weird.
Daniel: One other interesting point, it shows up in Roper River Creole as daga, which absolutely stopped me for a second until I realized it had a connection to tucker because it’s an English-based Creole. Does it show up in other forms of English? No, not really. It’s really Australia, New Zealand where we see this the most, so it hasn’t spread. But there you have it. It actually is a UK– It’s one of those weird UK-isms that turned into a super Australianism.
Ben: That’s us done.
Daniel: That’s us done. We are so grateful to you, Dr. Caitlin Green, for hanging out with us and helping us answer these questions.
Caitlin: I had so much fun. Thank you for having me.
Daniel: How can people find out what you’re doing and who you’re taking after next?
Ben: [crosstalk]
Daniel: Who you’re coming for?
[laughter]
Caitlin: You can go find me on Twitter @caitlinmoriah. I am there causing trouble most days. And I try to post about publications and articles and things there as well, just to keep things centralized.
Daniel: Well, thanks again for joining us. This was a lot of fun.
[music]
Ben: Everyone who’s currently listening to this is a patron, go you. That is really cool of you. You might be listening to this and thinking to yourself, “What the hell are you talking about, Ben? I have not been giving you any money, I need to check my bank accounts. What the hell is going on here?” That’s because sometimes we release the shows that we made just for patrons further down the line for regular people. So, if you’re listening to this later, and you’re not a patron, and you’re thinking, “You know what? These guys and girls, do really good work. I would like to give them a couple of bucks,” well, there’s a really straightforward way you can do that. Just go to patreon.com and go to BecauseLangPod or just search in Because Language because language. This is our last mailbag for the year. We will be doing more next year. So, to all of our wonderful, scrummy patrons, please keep those questions coming in because you’re a lot smarter than us and it really, really makes Daniel’s brain hurt, which always makes me feel like I’m having a great time.
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Ben: Pew, pew, pew.
Daniel: Yay.
[BOOP]
Ben: Okay, well, I have finished my cordial, so we can now officially start.
Daniel: Who drinks cordial?
Ben: Excuse me, Daniel?
Daniel: Okay.
Ben: I think you need to shut your dirty mouth. Cordial is amazing.
Daniel: Depends, what–
Ben: I was just drinking-
Daniel: What flavor?
Ben: -a combination of three cordials. There was some great fruit, some bitter lemon, and some tropical, all in the one glass with some delightfully carbonated water. And if you tell me, Daniel, on a 32-degree day — that’s in Celsius, obviously, Caitlin, so like a hot day — that that’s not a delightful thing, well, then, Sir, I don’t know what you would take delight in.
Daniel: You had me at grapefruit. It’s fine.
Ben: It’s like a normal fruit, but bitter and less good.
Daniel: Ugh. But that’s good in a way. I thought you were slugging down a coola or something like that.
Ben: Oh, typical.
Daniel: Yeah. No, no, no.
Ben: Daniel, come on.
Daniel: Sorry. That’s just my association.
Ben: I know, you’re going to set me up for the villain arc here, but I think that’s a little bit too heavy-handed.
Daniel: Sorry.
Ben: You might as well just have me murdering babies or something.
Caitlin: [laughs]
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]