Our listeners have voted, and here are all the words! Which were our top Words of the Week? Which were the worst? And what did the dictionary people pick?
We’re joined by our very special guest (and lingopod pal) Dr Lauren Gawne for this very cheugy episode of Because Language.
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In choosing ‘strollout’ as its Word of the Year, the National Dictionary Centre alludes to a uniquely Australian problem | ABC Australia News
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-11-17/australian-word-of-the-year-is-strollout-referencing-vaccines/100626698
Cambridge Dictionary reveals its word of the year for 2021
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/cambridge-dictionary-reveals-word-2021-000100181.html
Cambridge Dictionary names ‘perseverance’ Word of the Year 2021
https://www.cambridgenetwork.co.uk/news/cambridge-dictionary-names-perseverance-word-year-2021
Word of the Year: Vaccine | Merriam-Webster
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/word-of-the-year/vaccine
Strollout chosen as Macquarie dictionary’s 2021 word of the year | Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/nov/30/strollout-chosen-as-macquarie-dictionarys-2021-word-of-the-year
NFT beats cheugy to be Collins Dictionary’s word of the year | Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/nov/24/nft-is-collins-dictionary-word-of-the-year
Dark Academia | Aesthetics Wiki
https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Dark_Academia
Dictionary.com names allyship as word of the year for 2021
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/dec/06/word-of-the-year-2021-dictionary-allyship
The Kirk/Spock Dichotomy and Toxic Rationality
https://anthonyskewspolitics.medium.com/the-kirk-spock-dichotomy-and-toxic-rationality-44ebba254dc
Lingthusiasm Episode 46: Hey, no problem, bye! The social dance of phatics
https://lingthusiasm.com/post/623851629729464320/lingthusiasm-episode-46-hey-no-problem-bye-the
The Facebook Thread
https://www.facebook.com/becauselangpod/posts/319921226801858
The Twitter thread
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
Hedvig: I don’t know if you guys use Spotify that much, but the Wrapped, which looks at your listening statistics of the past year and makes a playlist to say like, “Oh, this represents your twenty-twenty-twentyone.” 202021 is how it feels.
Daniel: It’s been a long year.
[Because Language theme]
Daniel: Hello and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley. With me now, the only linguist ever to be able to offer an unambiguous definition of the linguistic concepts of language, dialect, word, and sandwich, it’s Hedvig Skirgård.
Hedvig: Oh, I really thought that was going to be Lauren. [chuckles]
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: [coughs] Sorry. I was [unintelligible [00:01:08] Lauren’s going to speak now. Those things aren’t true.
Daniel: I know. But it’s a fun fiction that we can enjoy.
Hedvig: Okay. Yes, it’s a fun fiction that we can enjoy. Hedvig is very smart and Santa Claus exists. Yes, true.
Daniel: Very good. Ben can’t be with us for this one. But we do have a very special guest cohost joining us. She’s one half of the podcast Lingthusiasm, along with Gretchen McCulloch, proprietor of the blog Superlinguo, and senior lecturer in the Department of Languages and Linguistics at LaTrobe University. It’s Lauren Gawne. What up, Lauren?
Lauren: I have no way of neatly defining a sandwich. So, I’m very relieved. I’m also extremely end of 2021 voice.
Daniel: Oh, no.
Lauren: I’m kind of– [crosstalk]
Daniel: Does your voice deteriorate over lectures, like over the semester?
Lauren: We had the Australian Linguistics Society Conference last week. I’ve been catching up with a lot of people. Just feeling it and expressing it today.
Hedvig: Fair enough.
Daniel: Well, thank you both for taking the time to hop in and do another very end of the year thing. That is our Word of the Week of the Year where we scoop up all the Words of the Week that we do, and we put them in front of our listeners and friends. And they vote, and we’ve got the top 10. We’ve got–
Hedvig: Yay.
Daniel: [laughs] We’ve got all the words.
Lauren: So excited.
Daniel: Me too.
Hedvig: I like our Word of the Week of the Year because contrary to everyone else who’s a dictionary or something, they think hard about something that’s going to represent the year, but I feel our listeners pick things a bit more out of left field, and I enjoy it.
Daniel: Yeah, everyone feels it’s got to be some big statement.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: And we don’t.
Hedvig: Well, I mean, maybe it does for them. Maybe they can have a big statement, and we can just have a little bit of fun.
Daniel: That’s what it is. It was completely out of left field last year with orbisculate, which totally caught on and everybody’s using.
Hedvig: I now remember how to say orbisculate. There we go.
Daniel: All right. Nice. Lauren, thanks for joining us. I may have mentioned that you were going to appear to a few people down the pub. And they asked some questions, which I want to put to you now, is that okay?
Lauren: That’s great. Maybe, let’s see what the questions are.
Daniel: You have the right of refusal for any of these questions. River says, “I told my friend about this, and she has a question.” Asking for a friend literally. Lauren, we know that one of your areas of focus is emojis. You’ve done such great work on the emoji-gesture link. River’s friend asks, “Do you think there has been a loss of nuance in the shift from ASCII emoticons to face emojis?”
Lauren: I’m going to answer this question on the presumption that River’s friend is a user of ASCII emoticons, which is where you have :).
Hedvig: I think that’s a good assumption.
Lauren: And so, they are used to using one set of resources, and now we have to reconstruct your way of using text online to think about how to incorporate emoji and we do see the beginning of some potential generational variation, which ones they find the most natural or the least stilted, the use of emoji in conversation. So, I think for some people, it feels they’ve lost the kinds of expressions that they managed to convey with colon s or colon angle. They’re still to find the right kind of rhythm with emoji. It really depends on who you are. It is fascinating that the top 100 most frequently used emoji really take up over 90% of what we go to. Even though we have over 3000 different possible emoji now, we still gravitate towards a really small set. I think that reflects the same elegance of the ASCII system as well.
Daniel: Okay. River has their own question. “Are emoticons used in the same way as emojis? Or is there some fundamental difference about them, other than one being preexisting characters, and one being unique characters?”
Hedvig: I’m a user of both. I was wondering, Lauren, if you are as well?
Daniel: Yes, there is something particularly cozy for me about using an emoticon when I could just pull out an equivalent emoji. What we’re finding is because emoticons were really a finite set that were used frequently for English speakers for kaomoji, which are those ones written horizontally and use fun characters and are more common in Japan. They have a lot more variation, and there are a lot more options. But for the ASCII sideways smileys that are more common on Western uses of computer-mediated chatting, they just had fewer options. So, what you find is that the 🙂 to make a smiley face, the physical equivalent of that, as the basic smiling face is now seen as insufficiently sincere, because there are six more smiling-type things. And so, that ASCII smiling face is the equivalent of tears of joy. That means that the basic smiling face really has this underwhelming meaning. In opening up the space, you open up all this nuanced possibility.
Hedvig: Yeah. I would really agree with that. The emoticons as well, they’re so different for me, because almost– I think I type quite fast, not always accurately, I’ve done test but I type quite fast. And if I have to stop and pick an emoji, that is like a break in my flow. I use emoticons because they are similar for me to making words with my keys. I don’t know all the shorthand for– I prefer writing on a computer. Maybe I should figure that out, but I only use emojis when I’m on the phone, really.
Lauren: Yeah. When you have a computer that converts your emoticons into emoji, that’s really offensive, because it’s making presumptions about the tone that you want to convey that are incorrect. I think that the emoji encoding process slows down. A couple of years ago, you’d have 50, 100 new emoji every year. Now, you’re getting 20,15 that are much more thought out. That means that there’s more time for your phone maker or your computer makers to start thinking about more thoughtful ways to interface to make it easier for people who are used to typing to get those emojis into their interactions.
Hedvig: Yeah. Like you were saying, when I make the :), it covers that into the basic yellow smiley face. And I’m like, “That’s not what I meant.”
[chuckles]
Daniel: That other smiley.
Hedvig: Yeah. I meant the one with the blushed cheeks.
Daniel: Really fine distinctions that I’m not really aware of.
Lauren: And increasingly, so.
Hedvig: [laughs] I think, increasingly– [laughs] Oh, no. Sorry, that’s mean. Daniel, you’re great. You’re doing a great job.
Daniel: Thanks. I’m going to go to AJ’s question. AJ asks, “Do you have any favorite examples of emojis’ meaning shifting over time?”
Lauren: I do have a very specific set, because I’m interested, as you said in how emoji are like gesture, because most of my day job is about how we use gestures alongside our speech. A lot of what I see in how people use emoji is that they are the equivalent of gestures for typing instead of speaking. But then, to go one level more meta, I’m also interested in the subset of emoji that are actually hands, and are hand gestures in the emoji set. There have been hands in emoji sets since before they became available on international phone. Emoji started in Japan, and they started on a couple of different mobile phone carriers. So, if you have two big mobile phone carriers in your country, imagine if you could only send emoji to people who were on the same network as you. Both of these had hands as part of the set, and they both had thumbs up and they had a peace sign, and they had a raised stop hand. But the original encoding and the original way they were described wasn’t as those gestures. They were described as rock paper scissors.
Daniel and Hedvig: Oh.
Lauren: They were intended for you to play rock, paper, scissors somehow, I don’t know how the timing worked, with your friends on your phones.
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: That’s so strange.
Lauren: It’s only because we have the documentation from the early import into Unicode when Unicode who now make sure that it doesn’t matter what phone carrier you’re on, you can send an emoji and someone can read it on their phone somewhere else or on their computer or in a document. Thanks to the magic of Unicode, the people who encoded them chose the gesture name. So now it’s thumbs up gesture, peace sign gesture, and raised hand. One thing I like about gestures, and I like about well-designed emoji is that they have this flexibility. You could still play rock paper scissors, with those three, but you could also use them to give a thumbs up what else I want to stop.
Hedvig: Yeah, the magic of Unicode, hey, such a good project–
Daniel: Ah, thank goodness.
Hedvig: [crosstalk] -consortium. I say as someone who spent the past week trying to get a scientific journal to accept non-ASCII characters in people’s names. [chuckles] I’m just like, “Ah, you’ve heard about this thing called Unicode?”
Lauren: Things we generally take for granted so much now that if I send you a document, whatever script is written in the world, your computer should be able to support it as well, and it’s all run for the last 20-30 years by very enthusiastic people who are really passionate about the world’s writing systems. Most of it is done as a volunteer organization. It really is just one of those magic things that we take for granted, and it’s a miracle.
Hedvig: Yeah, truly is.
Daniel: What do we do for their effort? We pester them with emoji proposals so that now they have to sit there and think, “Okay, do we need a taco and a burrito? Or, do we just need a taco?” Truly, their effort is promethean.
Lauren: It does speak to their values. They still believe in the need to have open proposals for emoji because they could just choose not to, but they very strongly believe that they are creating technical standards for the internet, and that the internet should be able to contribute. And a lot of those contributions are people figuring out that glyph order in Mongolian or the special additional characters in Devanagari to encode the way this particular language sounds. And then, you also have people who say, “Yeah, maybe we need a taco as well.”
[chuckles]
Daniel: I never thought of that. It’s like, “Okay, what order are we going to use for this character set?” Do they have a song? Let’s find out if they have a song, that might help.
Now, our previous episode was a fun Journal Club with our patrons. They brought stories, words and even pets. We do like to have special events that we invite our patrons to. Also, if you’re a patron, hitting your mailbox pretty soon, our yearly mailout. There’s all kinds of things that we like to do for our patrons. If you’d like to support the show and get some goodies. Besides, you’d like to hang out with us on Discord, get some bonus episodes, then become a patron. We are at patreon.com/becauselangpod.
Let’s get to the Word of the Year. This Word of the Year thing has gotten pretty huge. It started small, but everyone’s doing it now. Don’t you think?
Hedvig: These dictionaries have been doing it for a while, right?
Daniel: Yep.
Hedvig: But I enjoy ours because every week, we have Words of the Week, which is either Daniel has carefully crafted something from the news or Hedvig, what’s been in her feed the past week that she thinks is a new thing.
Daniel: That’s what I want. I want that.
Hedvig: Which is too difficult, guys. [laughs].
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: And then, we get to this show where all of our listeners get to see all of the Words of the Week, we’ve had all the year, and get to vote, and it’s a ton of fun. I like it.
Daniel: It is fun. But first we’re going to do all the boring, rotten stuff, which is other people’s words. Everybody else’s words from dictionary bodies and language lovers all over the place. Shall we get started?
Lauren: Are these eliminated from your options? Are you hardline different to everyone else? Or, are they still up as contenders for you as well?
Daniel: They are absolutely still on the list. We just let it roll, whatever the people pick. In fact, there’s some overlap. Some of these words of the year for these dictionary bodies were on our list and they did not actually do that well. So, let’s start with Oxford with their crappy word, “vax.” Vax is good.
Hedvig: [chuckles] [crosstalk] Do you want to call everyone else rotten and crappy?
Lauren: Am I meant to say good things about it? Or am I meant to trash talk it? I’m confused now.
Daniel: All right. It’s just a little trash talk. That’s all it is. Vax is a great word of the year.
Hedvig: Okay, Daniel can trash talk but, Lauren, you and I can be nice if you want.
Lauren: Thanks.
Daniel: That’s it. Good linguist, bad linguist.
Hedvig: Yeah, okay.
Daniel: They chose vax based on lookups. By September, it was over 72 times more frequent, but at the same time last year. 72x, that is huge. What I really like about vax is that it’s super versatile. I want to ask, have you noticed any other words that are based on the vax morpheme?
Hedvig: I haven’t seen vax in anything else but antivax. People say that they are vaccinated. I don’t hear that many people say that they are vaxxed. Oh, maybe people say that they have double vaxxed.
Lauren: Definitely double vaxxed is a thing I’ve heard.
Hedvig: Now that I think about it, yeah, that’s true.
Lauren: I’m always a big fan of shortening. It’s nice. As an Australian, obviously, we are world champions at shortening words. This feels very comfortable to me as a word. I’m a big fan.
Daniel: Well, we have had three different Words of the Week over this year with the with the vax particle here. We’ve got convaxulations, which is what you say– Convaxulations. There was bivaxual, which is somebody who’s had maybe one Pfizer, one Moderna, has had a mix. And then, there was maxxinated, which seems a little archaic now that there is hypothetically no maximum to the number of vaccines that you could get, which is a bit unfortunate.
On the last speakeasy that we did on ABC Radio Perth, one of our listeners suggested vaxillating, instead of vaccine hesitant. I imagine David Astle tweeting, “What idiot came up with vaccine hesitancy instead of vaxillating?’ which would be something that he would tweet. For their part, Merriam-Webster also had vaccine, not vax but vaccine. This was also based on lookups. I thought this was very interesting. It had implications for how people use dictionaries. We imagine that people use dictionaries to look up stuff they don’t know. But lots of people know what a vaccine is. So, why are people looking this up?
Lauren: I think some of us use a dictionary just to check the spelling something right. I hope that Merriam Webster has a little bit of etymology, because I do love the way that medical history is captured in the story of the word ‘vaccine’. [crosstalk] It is Latin vaca is cow, or if it wasn’t, vaca is Italian now, but the same root ‘cow’ because it was cow pox that was originally used to treat smallpox by Ed Jenner when things get a bit hazy for me, but I just love this little bovine history caught up in this word.
Daniel: We honor the gentle cow. The other thing that might have caused this to spike was that people were looking up how to spell it, but also looking up technical definitions. The Merriam-Webster folks say that a number of stories in August show the discussions about policy approval and vaccination rates, rather than the vaccine itself sent people to the dictionary. So, that was their explanation for why this spiked. They had a few alternates. They had ‘cicada’ because apparently the little critters hatched and then ‘wokelash’, backlash against people who are social justice activists.
Lauren: I’ll stick with the cicadas, celebrating 17 years of randomly hibernating.
Daniel: Okay. There were two dictionary bodies that had this one. It was the National Dictionary Center of ANU and Macquarie, ‘strollout’. You’ve heard this one, I’m sure.
Lauren: I think it’s unsurprising both of them chose it given how uniquely Australian that problem has been, but also how uniquely Australian that coinage has been like, it’s just a perfect melding of a deeply political, deeply national, a deeply problematic thing that really summarized how a lot of us felt about 2021 but with a bit of larrikin into it.
Daniel: There is a bit of larrikin, isn’t there? Maybe we should say what it is.
Hedvig: I haven’t been in Australia during 2021. But I think it’s based on– Wait, is it based on lockdown?
Daniel: Not exactly.
Lauren: It’s based on rollout.
Hedvig: Oh, yeah. Sorry.
Daniel: So, this one comes from the Australian Council of Trade Unions Secretary, Sally McManus who tweeted in May, “We don’t have a vaccine rollout. We have a vaccine strollout.”
Lauren: Oh, Sally.
Daniel: Even in May, the frustration was growing. Although she, when contacted, told the ABC in Australia, it was actually said by the Assistant Secretary Liam O’Brien in an internal ACTU meeting when we were discussing our frustration at the lack of urgency from the Morrison government to vaccinate aged care. I think it goes beyond aged care. I think we’re all frustrated. We’ve got five months until you can get a booster, when other countries are three. It just seems like the whole process, “Let’s get on with this. This is kind of important.”
Hedvig: Luckily enough, you don’t have right now as much community spread as a lot of places in Europe. I am in UK right now.
Lauren: Oh, my gosh.
Hedvig: Yeah, I’m just trying to think carefully about what we’re doing. Testing ourselves all the time.
Daniel: Yeah, gosh. Hope you’re staying safe out there. Let’s see, I just wanted to talk about some of the ones that didn’t make it on Macquarie shortlist. I just felt some of them were very natural sounding, like there was frontstab instead of backstabbing, you can frontstab them. Hate follow.
Hedvig: Oh, hate follow I like.
Daniel: Hate follow is useful. That is a useful one.
Hedvig: I like that one. Yeah, that’s good.
Lauren: Explains on ever growing nuance about how we use social media.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Yes, it does.
Hedvig: I’m trying right now with my feed, because I know that social media giants feed off my excitability, be it positive or negative. They feed off the extreme emotions, like either I’m loving the little kitten, or I’m outraged about something. When I see things that outraged me, I tried to scroll past them a bit and not feed into it too much. I feel hate follow is the thing a lot of people do. Yeah, follow someone because you hate them.
Daniel: Can I just give some advice? Instead of hate following someone, for example, don’t follow JK Rowling, her brand is basically transphobia. So, if you follow her, it increases her power in a miniscule sense. Instead of following that person, put them on a list, put them on one of your lists and then you won’t be following them, you’ll just see them and all the other people who you want to hate follow in that list. And that way, it denies them the power.
Hedvig: But that still boosts their statistics, Daniel, it still does, because they get statistics on how many people view their tweets.
Daniel: Does it?
Hedvig: Yeah, it does.
Daniel: Okay, fair enough.
Hedvig: Also, it’s in your feed. Regardless of their statistics and their brand and whatever, you in your personal life have a feed where you have chosen to have things that make you angry. I think you should think about that as a life choice. [chuckles] You know what I mean?
Daniel: I agree. Let me suggest then one other reason why you should list them instead of actually follow them. And that is that I see someone and it says, “Hey, this person also follows this hateful person and that hateful person.” And then I have to say, “Oh, do they like that person or they hate follow them?” I don’t know. I don’t want people to wonder that about me. So, you know what? I’m just going to keep them off my list of follows, and I’m going to keep them on a separate list.
Hedvig: And Hedvig is going to not keep them on any list, and just click like on all the kittens I see in my feed, desperately.
Daniel: That is good, too. Next one, Cambridge. The Cambridge folks, they had ‘perseverance’.
Hedvig: That seems like wishful thinking. We’re in the second year of COVID, and we would like for perseverance to be what we have and what we strive for. I’m not sure that’s true. It’s a good concept. I wish we all had more of it.
Daniel: There’s nothing wrong with it.
Lauren: Every year, there’s always one or two dictionaries that have these really heartfelt options, and they’re always the dictionaries I want to just check in with them. “Are you okay? Can I send your office some chocolates? It seems like you’ve had a really tough year.”
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Aww. They’re trying to be encouraging, but there is such a thing as toxic positivity.
Hedvig: Yeah, maybe persevere isn’t toxic– I don’t know. But we should persevere in terms of sticking to restrictions where we are and that seems good, that maybe we shouldn’t be like telling everyone, “I’m doing great. I’m so positive. Everything in my life is great.” That seems a bit toxic.
Daniel: Well, if you’re seeing that, then you’re not on Twitter, because everybody on Twitter lets it all hang out, I have noticed.
Hedvig: Yeah, that is true.
Daniel: There is another reason why perseverance might have gotten a bit of play, and that is because of NASA’s Perseverance rover, which got to Mars in February.
Hedvig: Oh, that’s true.
Daniel: So, it’s a little bit of both.
Lauren: Great double duty there, Cambridge.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: It is. It’s nice to see. Also, keep in mind that Cambridge is a lookup site for people who are learning English, and so that seriously might have been out of vocabulary for some people.
Hedvig: Yeah, for sure.
Daniel: Collins is another learner one. They chose NFT, non-fungible token, which was one of our Words of the Week of the Year. I don’t think that did very well. That was the one that got the most angry reactions on Facebook.
[laughter]
Lauren: I feel like this is the equivalent of Time naming Elon Musk their person of the year.
Hedvig: Oh, God. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. 100%.
Lauren: Which is like, “What does ‘of the year’ mean?” It seems like for your listeners, NFT was not something to be. Recognition and celebration can be very difficult to disentangle. It seems like your listeners are taking the sensible approach of not voting for it.
Hedvig: Did we count angry reactions as votes?
Daniel: We did.
Hedvig: See, we’re like those social media giants. It’s whatever excites people. People who angry reacted probably thought they were downvoting it maybe, but they were just–
Daniel: All right. So, I should take one away.
Hedvig: No, I’m saying they are not clear in their intentions about what that gesture means. We’re just going to count every reaction just to do it consistently, but it’s tricky.
Daniel: It was number 53, it was equal 53rd.
Hedvig: Okay, all right.
Lauren: Hang on, there are only 52 weeks of the year.
Hedvig: Oh, we do more than one word per week.
[chuckles]
Daniel: We did many more. There were 93– [crosstalk]
Lauren: [crosstalk] -was like in the negatives.
[chuckles]
Daniel: Others that Collins didn’t elevate to Word of the Year were cheugy, double vaxxed, that one didn’t last long for the same reasons as maxxinated. Neopronoun, and tell me if you can guess this one, regencycore.
Lauren: Oh, that would be the absolute explosion of made for television, Netflix TV shows. Bridgerton was the big one this year, I think.
Hedvig: It’s what’s known as an aesthetic, isn’t it?
Daniel: Yes. I was going to say, and the associated fashion.
Hedvig: Yeah. Like cottagecore, dark academia. There’s a whole aesthetics fandom wiki that– nerd core, yeah. It’s so much fun. Dark academia is clearly–
Daniel: Dark Academia?
Hedvig: Dark academia, yeah. Lauren, you know right?
Lauren: Yeah, it’s like Bletchley Park era women’s wear, librarian tweed.
Daniel: Yeah. Okay.
Hedvig: Jumpers, plaid, skirts, Erik Satie music. [crosstalk]
Daniel: Right. What would I be wearing if I were going dark academic? Basically, just what I’m wearing now?
Hedvig: No. Well, I don’t know what you’re wearing right now. I’m suspecting you’d have to tweed up a bit.
[crosstalk]
Lauren: Some brogues?
Hedvig: Yeah. Glasses.
Daniel: The suits that are very severe. The suits with the jackets that button way above your sternum.
Hedvig: Ah, yeah, maybe. Just think like British librarian in the 60s, at least if not older.
Daniel: Yeah. Okay. I think I got it. By the way, what happened to cheugy? Cheugy just did not rate on our Word of the Week of the Year. I’m just wondering what happened? Was it one of those that just got floated and then everyone was like, “Nope, not doing cheugy?”
Lauren: The problem with elevating a word like cheugy, which just means your common or basic or old, it’s very unclear how widespread it was before a reporter elevated it as a term that the kids were using. It’s unclear if it had a currency before that and if it did, it certainly didn’t after the olds’ claimed any interest in it. So, I don’t think it ever really stood a chance, even though it is a fun word to say. I think that’s the only reason it’s had any brief celebrity life.
Hedvig: Yeah, that’s a tricky thing. A bunch of years ago in Sweden, the Swedish Language Council puts out actually not one word of the year, but a list of 50. One year, it had a compound, it always has a lot of compounds. But one of them was ‘girl collect’, which is to collect items like stamps or something but collect them, like a girl. Collect shoes. It’s very strange. I looked into it, and basically one person had used it in a column once, and then all the other mentions I could find were about, them that word being on the list. [crosstalk] And it’s like, “Okay, is that really an organic word that came about?”
Daniel: That’s how I felt about cheugy. I was trying to define it, and I came up with five things. It’s a combination of daggy, off trend, basic, tryhard, and cringe. But then I realized, that’s basically just naff. That’s what the word naff means.
Lauren: But all of these words have meant that very strongly for a particular generation, like daggy is a word that’s slightly older people might use, compared to basic and then compared to cringe. So, it’s just another one of this endless wave of intergenerational compare and contrast.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Oh, wow. It’s like a euphemism cycle.
Hedvig: And then, the next generation, the one below me, also has the positive one, normcore. Which is to be basic, but in a positive way. [laughs]
Daniel: Like consciously basic. [laughs]
Hedvig: Yeah.
Lauren: Another great use of the ‘core’ suffix.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Yes. Love our cores.
Hedvig: Exactly.
Daniel: Let’s go to our last one, and this was Dictionary.com. They chose, one that I actually quite like, not sure why they chose it, but allyship. The status or role of a person who advocates and actively works for the inclusion of a marginalized or politicized group, not as a member of that group, but in solidarity with its struggle and point of view, and under its leadership. I think that last bit is important, under its leadership.
Hedvig: I wonder if everyone who considers themselves allies are truly adhering to that last part.
Daniel: Yeah. That seems significant to me.
Hedvig: Yeah. How did they go about choosing it?
Daniel: They added it for the first time in 2021. But they also wanted to elevate it because they say it “captures important ways the word continues to evolve in our language and reflects its increased prominence in our discourse.” Originally, an ally was somebody, not necessarily a friend, but somebody who you align with. So, ally and align are related. But lately, it’s come to mean a friend of LGBT people, even if you’re a straight, cis, dude, or something. I like that, because it’s so different. It didn’t seem to travel in the same tracks as the other words.
Lauren: Yeah. Good on Dictionary.com for something not COVID related.
[music]
Daniel: We are through the other dictionaries and word bodies lists. Now, it’s time for our Words of the Week of the Year. Are we ready?
Hedvig: Yay. I’m ready.
Lauren: Absolutely.
Daniel: Okay. As we’ve said before, the Words of the Week were sometimes chosen by me, sometimes chosen by Hedvig. Actually, a lot of them were chosen by our friends and listeners. Some patrons, some not. Very often, I would just get floated this, “Hey, what about this thing?” And so, I would get that. And then we threw them all up on Twitter and on Facebook, and they were all individual comments or tweets. People could like those individual tweets, and that was the way that they would vote for the words. The fact that this was on Facebook and Twitter provided an interesting contrast, because there were some that were super popular on Facebook, and some of them that were popular on Twitter.
Hedvig: Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. [chuckles]
Daniel: Sometimes, that’s just because somebody on Twitter would say, “Hey, everybody, vote for this one.” And some people would jump in, and that would just be on Twitter, but not on Facebook sometimes. But tell me what you think about these. The ones that were popular on Facebook were the Great Resignation or the Big Quit, and sleeping, when you talk about languages sleeping instead of being extinct because they can be awakened, so that was a Facebook thing. The ones that were popular on Twitter were mockdown, it’s a badly implemented lockdown where the instructions are unclear or partial. Acoustic fog, which is the way that we humans put lots of noise into the ocean to the detriment of the critters that live there. And horny jail/bonk, very popular on Twitter, just about nonexistent on Facebook.
Hedvig: Huh, that’s funny.
Daniel: AJ brought us that one last week. He pointed out especially that hearing bonk, you could just use bunk in isolation, and that means, “Knock it off, you’re being horny on main.”
Hedvig: Is Facebook just more wholesome, is that why?
Daniel: Is Facebook full of people who are there for the leisure and not there for the fight? I feel people on Twitter are there for the fight.
Lauren: If your Facebook crew gravitated towards the Great Resignation, it might suggest that they’re a bit more American than Australian in a particular subgroup, because I feel that’s something that’s been in the US discourse a lot. It hasn’t really been a thing that’s happened in Australia. I don’t know about you, Hedvig.
Hedvig: No, I agree with you. I’ve mainly heard it from American outlets. It’s still a thing here. Earlier in the week, I was in London, and I was at a cafe with my sister. My sister was asking, “Oh, how come you guys are closed three out of seven days of the week?” And the waiter said, “We don’t have enough staff.” Lots of people in London, in the hospitality industry are just leaving it and because of Brexit, there’s not enough immigrants coming into London to work the jobs. So, this cafe literally can’t be open, because they don’t have enough staff. It’s definitely happening here, and I don’t think to at a large degree, and I don’t think people have been using that word as much. Partially because not all Europe speaks English. [chuckles] A different matter.
Daniel: Yeah. Okay. We’ll see some others that they skew Facebook or they skew Twitter. But let me just take a second and give our dishonorable mentions. These are the ones that only got one or no votes at all.
Lauren: Amazing.
Daniel: These are the ones that nobody liked. Lab leak. Nobody liked this one. What’s this? Nobody likes the annoying toxic conspiracy theory? Okay, cool. All right. Red tourism, that is tourism to significant sites for the Chinese Communist Party.
Hedvig: Oh, that was my word.
Daniel: Oh, was it yours?
Hedvig: Yeah, that’s one of my words.
Lauren: Okay, because everyone just resents the idea of traveling at all. So, no votes for that.
Hedvig: Because the Communist Party is coming up on a lot of important jubilees, so people are going to specific places that are important to the Communist Party. Maybe not a lot of our listeners are interested in China stuff. That’s also possible.
Daniel: Possible. Another one, murraya, a flowering citrus plant that was the winner for Zaila Avant-garde, the US Scripps Spelling Bee. For some reason, failed to land. One that I thought would really do better, swoveralls. They’re sweat pants, they’re overalls, they’re comfy.
Lauren: Oh, gosh. I feel like [crosstalk] we had to explain that blend to me, is what doomed it from its start.
Daniel: Sorry, what else could the swo mean besides sweat pants?
Hedvig: Swibble?
Lauren: Sway? Swipe?
Daniel: Sweep. Sweeping in your overall, so these are my swoveralls.
Hedvig: Swine.
Daniel: Yeah. [chuckles] Overalls for our porcine friends.
Lauren: About time.
Daniel: Yes, you’re right. I was mistaken. But only one vote for those, potentially from someone who really likes pigs a lot. The ones that got no votes were baking, the makeup move where you put on a lot of–
Hedvig: And the conspiracy theory thing. That’s also my word. Everyone hates me.
Daniel: No, they don’t hate you. They just hate baking.
Hedvig: Yeah. Baking was a double whammy as well because it’s both the conspiracy theory thing and the makeup thing.
Daniel: See, I liked it for that. The other one that didn’t make it was Baligate.
Hedvig: Oh, that was also mine. But only Swedes would have voted for that one. That’s fine. I don’t mind that. Hanif Bali can go hide under a rock.
Daniel: Fair. It got on because Ballgate, which also didn’t do very well. They traveled together. It was Ballgate brought a friend. The friend wasn’t very popular, but that wasn’t the intention anyway.
Hedvig: That’s fine.
Lauren: [chuckles]
Hedvig: I like this. I think I’m going to make my own personal contest every year, which is I’m going try and suggest Words of the Week that make it into the honorable mentions, because that seems to be what I’m good at.
Lauren: It is impressive that you find something that so perfectly captures your week, and then doesn’t capture the year. [crosstalk] It means you’re actually just incredibly good at choosing the Word of the Week.
Hedvig: [laughs]
Daniel: Yes, it is of the week, it is a moment in time, and then it is gone.
Hedvig: Not the year. Yeah. Also, thank you, Lauren. That’s very kind of you, but I also think it captures my week.
[laughter]
Daniel: We value this perspective, Hedvig. Don’t ever stop. I just want you to keep throwing on stuff that you find, please. Here are a couple of honorable mentions. This was a late addition, so it didn’t have much chance, but it was one that I came up with and decided to float and it was toxic rationality. I noticed that a lot of people say that they’re from the rational community, they pride themselves on being very rational thinkers, but the humanizing qualities are a bit absent.
Hedvig: It’s the kind of people like Dawkins and Pinker would fall a bit into this category, maybe?
Daniel: Storbin Plankwell would definitely fit into this category.
Hedvig: Yeah. Also, partially, people who say that, “Oh, no, everything is just going better and better, and more people live longer and more people are fed.” It’s like, “Yeah, that’s true” but it’s related in my mind to toxic positivity.
Daniel: Hmm. I was trying to find out if anybody had done this phrase before, and I ran into a really good essay that’s going to be on our blog, becauselanguage.com. It’s called The Kirk/Spock Dichotomy and Toxic Rationality. It’s from 2018. It’s by Anthony Skews on Medium. And the gist of it is that nerd culture seems to value Spock-style thinking where we put our emotions aside, emotional reasoning is bad reasoning, which I mean, it’s kind of true. But emotions are also a way of tempering our worst impulses.
Hedvig: Yeah, and they’re real.
Daniel: And they’re real. What he points out is that we often use rationality as a way of saying, “Oh, I came to my conclusions rationally,” when what we really do is sort of– He says, “Rationality is a better tool for post hoc justification of behavior than an a priori generator of moral behaviors.” So today, we see rationality offered up as an exculpatory excuse for abhorrent opinions and social policies.
Hedvig: Also, you can build a rational argument, but you can have the flaw in it that you’re actually not considering all of the evidence. But if you don’t make that visible to your reader or your listener, they might not know that your argument is faulty. So, yeah. I get what you mean. Toxic rationality, I like it. It’s interesting, because you introduced that recently, but bonk was also recent, but got a lot further.
Daniel: Exactly. This is to our listeners, if you think you have a rational mindset, but it’s not informed by human values like compassion, and humility and generosity of spirit, it really doesn’t function. It is not good for anything and it will probably lead you into terrible people and terrible opinions, which you will think are great because you arrived at them rationally.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Okay. And then, the other one that didn’t do very well which I really wanted to, it was in the top 20, it was horny jail/bonk. I wanted to see this one do better than it did.
Lauren: I guess the trouble with bonk is that the famous, in Australia at least, parliamentary bonk ban was from 2019. So, bonk has already had it stay in the sun in Australia.
Daniel: Oh, that’s true.
Hedvig: I just remembered the bonk ban. Can you learn please explain to our non-Australian affiliates?
Lauren: Okay.
Daniel: How do we miss that one a couple of years ago, by the way?
Lauren: As part of my cross-cultural translation competency. It was definitely at least 2019, maybe even 2018, because it was at least one prime minister ago. A very senior member of the coalition in power, his partner announced she was pregnant. It was a surprise she was pregnant. It was a surprise she was his partner. He left his family for her. It caused such a ruckus that the prime minister, his response was just to issue a statement that all [unintelligible 00:41:22] and everyone working in Parliament had to not date people in Parliament, which lasted about seven seconds in the media before it was reported as a bonk ban.
[chuckles]
Daniel: And that’s totally doable, by the way. You can totally mandate that.
Hedvig: Yeah. I’m not massively surprised that stressed, high-achieving people who get locked into an environment where they 24/7 almost only see their colleagues. I’m not super surprised.
Lauren: A slightly dark coda has been that this year, in the last month or two in Australian Parliament, in our national parliament, there’s been a report released about just how much misconduct and sexual assault takes place in that space. Even though we could all laugh about the bonk ban a few years ago, it does make you reassess how you feel about that, and whether anything has improved, and hopefully it will in the future.
Hedvig: Exactly, because those kinds of intense environments can lead to consensual relationships, but they can also lead to people thinking that more things are okay than they are because they are seeing these people all the time and they think that they are more intimate than they are and confuses–
Lauren: My apologies for ruining bonk, which is a totally great and hilarious word, and kills any sense of sexiness. [chuckles] I’m glad it got an honorable mention.
Daniel: What an awful situation. Everyone deserves to work in a safe workplace.
Hedvig: Yes.
Daniel: Let’s get to our top 10. And this one’s going to be more fun. Number 10, epistemic trespassing, which is when experts weigh in on areas outside of their expertise, like when economists comment on linguistic relativism.
Hedvig: Yeah. I don’t know, Lauren, how you feel about this one, because this one is to me a little bit– I’m a little bit in mixed emotions about it, honestly, because I do think that there’s some things people talk about physics hubris as well and there’s the thing where certain fields, especially STEM fields, have too great confidence in their abilities to analyze things outside of their field. But then, there is also good and fruitful cross-disciplinary collaboration.
Daniel: Yes. Very much.
Hedvig: It can look like epistemic trespassing.
Lauren: As someone who works on linguistics in terms of epistemic modality, which is a feature of language, I’m just super happy that more people know what the word ‘epistemic’ is. The fact this is number 10 is just a personal massive win for me. I’m so happy that everyone else’s thinking about domains of knowledge and authority, even though the phenomenon itself is murky and irritating when you feel you are being trespassed.
Daniel: And we all need to just cool our jets about that feeling of, “Hey, what are they doing in my yard?” This was something that [unintelligible [00:44:16] on Twitter pointed out to me, they said, “I agree, but,” and then mentioned a lot of linguistic areas that come from other fields, and says B. F. Skinner asked in Commentary magazine what he read replied that the best ideas he found to inform his own ideas are from other fields. Crosspollination is amazing, and it helps science move forward. What doesn’t help science move forward is when somebody decides they’re going to walk into linguistics and stomp around for a while in an effort to prove what they want to prove. And this is linguifying claims is how I’ve heard it used. And then when linguists say, “This is a bad idea, and we already know that this is a bad idea,” then what they do is they claim that the linguists are wrong and that they’re right. This is epistemic trespassing. This is what we’re talking about.
Hedvig: Also, we’ve seen some very positive cases of this. We’ve seen some cases, especially involving a friend of the show, Seán Roberts, when economists made some claims, and then Seán reached out to them, and they cooperated and they were open to that. And then, they copublished something together. So, really positive things can come out of it as well. I would advise people, if you see something that you think is epistemic trespassing, have a look at the author list and see if there’s anyone on there who you respect as a linguist, and then have a second think about what the paper is doing.
Daniel: We can have respect for people who aren’t linguists, we really can. It’s just that sometimes there are known issues that someone in– not in the discipline might be unaware of, and we’ve all seen cases where there’s, for example, a Nobel Prize winner who decides to come out against climate change. It’s a good reminder that if someone is super smart and an expert in their own field, this does not necessarily translate into expertise in a different field. That’s all I want to say.
Hedvig: What’s it called? Is it called a halo effect?
Daniel: Oh. I heard that for lots of things.
Hedvig: Recently, a couple of months ago, I reviewed something for the National Science Foundation in the United States. Before I reviewed, they made me sit through a little tutorial about cognitive biases, which I thought was really neat.
Daniel: That is cool.
Hedvig: They were like, “Here are some things you should be aware of, like anchoring bias.” First impressions, like don’t read the abstract, and then make up your mind and then read the rest of the paper, have an actual think about what they’re doing. They’re all sensible things. One of them was halo effect. Just because someone is smart or not smart in a certain area, that doesn’t necessarily equate to expertise or non-expertise in another area. I think they call it the halo effect. I think that’s the same thing.
Daniel: That’s super cool that they had you do that.
Hedvig: Yeah, that’s nice. I liked it.
Daniel: Okay, any more comments on that? Or should I move on to number nine?
Hedvig: Number nine.
Daniel: I’ll move on to number nine.
Lauren: Let’s keep going.
Daniel: Number nine, touch grass. And this means, step away from computers in the internet and connect to nature for a while. Similar to me to dandelion break in the comic strip, Bloom County, where they would all have a bit much from media and frightening stuff, and they would go and sit in a field for a while. I thought that is very similar to touch grass. Anybody remember Bloom County even?
Hedvig: No.
Daniel: Probably not.
Lauren: No. Sorry.
Hedvig: No. Don’t know.
Daniel: Okay, drat. [chuckles] Never mind.
Hedvig: Yeah, I sort of like this one. As an indoor mouse, the past couple of months, there’s been stretches of four to five days where I haven’t left the house. I mean, yeah, [chuckles] touching grass actually doesn’t give me that much serenity. [laughs] I’m sorry.
Daniel: I think that’s totally valid but I’m glad you say that, because it really can be different.
Hedvig: Yeah, I mean going outside and seeing the cityscape and getting a takeaway coffee brings me serenity. [laughs] But everyone’s– I don’t know. Lauren, have you needed to touch grass during these past two years?
Lauren: I feel I’ve definitely lived in places with better grass than I have in my current place. So, mileage may vary on that one, I think. [chuckles]
Hedvig: Yeah, fair enough.
Lauren: I got a few too many prickles. But a good reminder, I’d like to thank your listeners for reminding us all to step away and take a break.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Number eight, the sparkle emoji. Lauren, maybe you could help refine this definition for me, because I do get some definitions wrong. A sarcastic indicator that everything is fine sparkle-sparkle when it’s not fine.
Lauren: Sparkle emoji is one of my favorite emoji. And one of the reasons I love it so much is that is so flexible. When it’s surrounding something like this, it really does give off this sarcastic vibe and people have been talking about finding punctuation for sarcasm for a long time. I’m so happy that my little sparkle friend has stepped up in this function. But it can also just be used ornamentally, it can be used as just adding a bit of magic to what you’re saying. I think it’s the putting it at either end as a form of what one of my friends who I used to write the Superlinguo blog with would describe as sparkly unicorn punctuation. This is a very finessed version of that. It’s a really great function of a really fabulous emoji.
Daniel: I do too.
Hedvig: I’ve heard it said that’s one of the first uses of emoticons, the horizontal smiley faces in Western media in particular, was to try and indicate sarcasm because text is so void of context clues like that so that when people were first chatting online on messaging boards, they had miscommunications because someone couldn’t understand when someone else was sarcastic or not serious. So, people started using the smiley faces to indicate that. So, it seems like a very, very big need.
Lauren: Yeah, emoji and other kinds of punctuation and emoticons have all been about putting that humaneness and that bodily experience of communication that we’re so used to with voices and face-to-face things into the written form as well.
Daniel: On sarcasm, Lauren, would you say that the /s is the most common sarcasm indicated these days? Or is it something else?
Lauren: /s is very accessible for people who are used to thinking in code. A slash means to end something. So, if you’re used to working in HTML, you’re used to seeing /b to end a bolded section or /i for italics. I think if you are used to hand coding your internet experience, it’s very accessible to you what’s happening there. I imagine, to put it gently, Daniel, for you, there may be some generational differences there, I think.
[chuckles]
Lauren: The upside-down smiley face emoji does a lot of heavy lifting in this area. The saying something very negative, but adding tears of joy, does some really good cognitive dissonance balancing there that does sarcasm really well. There are lots of options, and this is what’s so fun about the innovation of informal internet language as its own kind of paradigm, is that you do have more than one way to achieve the same ends, depending on who you are and who you’re talking to.
Hedvig: I’ve never seen the /s as sarcasm speaking of the generational gap. That was complete news to me.
Daniel: Some of these are going to be platform dependent. For example, Reddit uses /s extensively.
Hedvig: Oh, okay. Yeah, I’m not on Reddit very much.
Daniel: Let’s go to number seven. We are up to stonks, a humorous way of referring to stocks in the investment community. Investing really has changed. It used to be the Wall Street broker types who would handle all the trades. But now we have online trading platforms like Robinhood and Webull and E-Trade and so on. So, now regular folks are retail investors. As we’ve seen with GameStop, they can sometimes swing things around a little bit. So, it’s a new age, and also there’s a lot of money, and there’s not much to spend it on so much. Stocks and investments are seeing an uptick there. So, I think stonks has been increasing in popularity.
Hedvig: Hmm, yeah, I like that. Also, another one that’s good for this. The way that misspellings or introducing or extra characters or removing them. I don’t know, what’s another good–?
Lauren: Well, from the same subset of internet users, you have HODL, which is that metathesis of hold, so it gets switched around, hold being a stock’s term to like– I’m going to share my complete ignorance of the stock exchange compared to my knowledge of the internet, but is a term from stock trading, that was initially just a typo, and then became a thing of its own. And this is part of internet subgroups creating their own language and their own culture as a way of keeping out and building their own subgroup through fast moving language play.
Hedvig: Another one is maybe very much older one, but pwn, as an in owning.
Daniel: Oh, pwn, yes to own someone.
Hedvig: Which I think is a misspelling as well from the start, right?
Lauren: Yeah. Because your P and your O are next to each other, so instead of typing O-W-N, I will P-W-N you.
Daniel: By the way, HODL was one of our Words of the Week and it did incredibly poorly. I think it only got three votes. It came in at number 79.
Lauren: I would say it was given a new lease of visibility with the gamestonks shenanigans, but it had already had its day.
Hedvig: Yeah, probably.
Daniel: Yeah. Okay, we have a tie for fifth place. One is “rent-free in one’s head.” Someone lives rent free in your head when they are a constant source of irritation and you can’t stop thinking about them. I have to say also, Zoey on Facebook says, “I’ve also seen this used in a positive sense.” That is, “I’ve been loving Adele’s new album. It’s been living rent-free in my head ever since it came out.”
Hedvig: I like it.
Daniel: Didn’t see Spotify Rewind thing– No, what was the thing?
Hedvig: Wrapped.
Daniel: That’s it, Wrapped. This thing that you like has been living rent-free in your head, and I get the feeling that a lot of people are using it positively. So, that’s an interesting semantic shift.
Lauren: I like rent-free in one’s head because you could just share a social media post about like, “Oh, I think about blah all the time.” But if you say, “This one pizza I had once lives rent-free in my head for the last 10 years,” suddenly it just is like such a great little frame that you get to hang your own little piece of creative art in. I really like when these percolate through the internet and people get to riff on them.
Hedvig: Yeah, me too.
Daniel: It sounds weird for a pizza to live rent-free in your head.
Lauren: It was a pretty good pizza.
Hedvig: Yeah, you think about it a lot.
Daniel: I wasn’t there. [chuckles] The other one that was tied for fifth place was “saying the quiet part out loud” although Kate on Facebook says, “I’ve also heard this saying the quiet part loud, which I personally prefer and I’m willing to say that I probably added the out and I shouldn’t have.” Saying the quiet part loud, publicly divulging some subtext that was supposed to be secret, but probably actually obvious to all.
Hedvig: I was listening to a sort of socialist podcast, Chapo Trap House. And they had Slavoj Žižek on it. This says a lot about me.
Daniel: Wow, they did?
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: That’s amazing.
Hedvig: He comes on the show and talks. Anyway, he said that the Slovenian government, they have vaccine in Slovenia and it’s not obligatory, but they had accidentally made the statement, the health ministry had, they said, “It is obligatory for all schoolchildren to voluntarily choose to take the vaccine.”
Daniel: [chuckles]
Hedvig: No, they had said, “It’s obligatory for them to make the voluntary choice,” I think.
Daniel: You’re being voluntold.
Hedvig: And it’s a bit saying the quiet part out loud, because what they want to say is that everyone should get it but yeah.
Lauren: I agree with Hedvig, that I definitely have it as saying the quiet part out loud with the out there.
Daniel: Oh, okay. It’s not just me.
Lauren: I think [crosstalk] interesting oscillation against, 10-15 years ago, like the concept of the dog whistle was really prominent. What people have realized is that the dog whistle was never really only attracting certain segments of the population and people weren’t as clever as they thought, and that’s becoming increasingly obvious as well.
Daniel: Okay.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: It’s just that cycle, like dog whistle is so yesterday, but now we have saying the quiet part loud.
Hedvig: It’s like Oprah says, “If someone tells you who they are, pay attention.”
Daniel: Yeah, I remember that.
Hedvig: Sometimes people actually just tell you who they are, and you can just listen to it and be like, “Ah, okay.”
Daniel: Our friend Kendon also replies, it originated on an episode of The Simpsons as we said at the time. It was Krusty the Clown who said the quiet part loud.
Let’s see number four, anecdata, the tendency to accept anecdotes as data or a self-deprecating recognition that one is taking an anecdote too seriously. This was a very different word of the week, it was suggested by our friend, Steele. Our Words of the Week usually have a news item or some kind of hook to tie them into. This one really didn’t. He just heard it, and he hadn’t heard it before, and he liked it. So, he suggested it, and we all liked it, and then we put it into the poll, and everybody liked it, and now it’s number four. So, anecdata.
Lauren: It’s a favorite word of mine. I just like acknowledging that sometimes you want to say something as though it has some weight, but it’s really just a single datapoint and shouldn’t be taken too seriously.
Daniel: Yeah, that’s what my anecdata tells me.
Lauren: Well researched.
Daniel: Thank you.
Hedvig: It shouldn’t be confused with the fact that sometimes you talk to your friends, and you tell them a story about something that happened to you. And you’re not necessarily saying that it is happening to everyone else, but you’re actually– you can’t tell anecdotes without saying that they are universally applicable. Am I making sense?
Lauren: It is a way of preventing you from epistemically trespassing.
Hedvig: Yeah. Oh, Lauren, thank you.
Daniel: Yeah. That’s right.
Hedvig: Oh, it’s so good we have you on.
Daniel: Well, a callback. [chuckles] Nice. Okay, we’re to the big three. This one came up a couple of times. We got it from our friend, Kory Stamper, Lexicographer and Author. And then I think I made it official in the episode with Pardis Mahdavi a little later. Let’s hear now from the recording from Kory.
Kory: I have had a long conversation with friends of mine about finding the best soft pants, which is one of those amazing terms that that only the pandemic could give. Soft pants being comfortable pants you wear at home, and of course, hard pants then being business trousers that you wear in the office.
Hedvig: We call sweat pants soft pants in Swedish. So, we’re one step ahead of ya.
Lauren: I was going to say the Swedes are so much better at so many things in America.
Hedvig: But we don’t have hard pants. I like hard pants. That’s very good.
Lauren: You like hard pants? Hard pants is a great term. It’s one of those that you say it and you know exactly what you mean by it. Oh, yes, hard pants. They’re not actually hard, but yeah.
Hedvig: These are hard pants.
Daniel: Is that a retronym?
Lauren: Oh, it might be.
Daniel: I think it is.
Lauren: Yeah, a retronym with a little bit of lexical distinguishing. Yeah.
Daniel: [tongue clicks] [chuckles]
Lauren: Nice.
Daniel: In the transcript, you’ll notice that I actually did put in those lateral clicks. That was my little–
Lauren: As IPA?
Daniel: Yes, I did.
Hedvig: Oh, God.
Daniel: Yep. [chuckles] Those who will know, will know. In the episode where we brought it up as an official word of the week, Ben pointed out that we’ve had sweat pants, which people for 40 years have not been sweating in. And now, we have active wear, which people are just not active in, and then there are hard pants that aren’t even hard.
Hedvig: Yeah, they were never hard.
Daniel: I mean they kind of are.
Lauren: Daniel is so outing himself as someone who isn’t stuck buying women’s gendered clothing.
Hedvig: [laughs]
Daniel: Okay. I accept your expertise on this matter, and I want to hear more.
Lauren: Women’s clothing is just cut badly and tight and involves useless pockets and poor fasteners. Okay, I just can hear Hedwig completely backing me up.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Lauren: A very good solidarity. But yeah, they’re a travesty, and I’m completely unsurprised, people who have come up with this distinction. It also just makes me feel really sad that we have to come up with it. As someone who has avoided hard pants before I knew it was a term that I had very grateful to have this term now to continue actively avoiding them.
Hedvig: And this type of phenomena is not unique to pants either. If you’ve ever met a female friend who has bought a skirt or a dress that has proper pockets, and-
Daniel: They really let you know.
Hedvig: -they will let you know. They will put their hands in their pockets and put out their hands and go like, “It has pockets. It has pockets.” I have a skirt right now with pockets on it, and I love it. And every time someone compliments me on it, I go, “It has pockets as well.” And all women I know go, “Oh, wow, it has pockets. It’s so exciting.” It’s just ridiculous.
Daniel: I have begun looking for people who have dresses that have pockets, but a person has pockets in their dress, I notice it and I compliment them, I say, “Your dress has pockets. That’s really cool.” And they’re like, “Yes.”
Lauren: Yes, it is.
Daniel: They show me the pockets and– [crosstalk]
Lauren: Do a little pocket dance.
Hedvig: Yeah, and it’s funny because–
Daniel: The pocket dance– [laughs]
Hedvig: Yeah, exactly. You do a little pocket dance. And it’s funny because I meet so few women that like to have the tiny pockets in their pants. I’m like, “Who are these manufactories making the clothes for?” I basically don’t know anyone who likes it, but maybe that’s just, I don’t know, Lauren, if it’s same experience for you, but maybe that’s something more about my bubble than about the world.
Lauren: I think the creation of the term ‘hard pants’, makes that seem quite likely.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Well, I got a comment from another Lauren on Facebook who says–
Lauren: Great name.
Hedvig: [laughs]
Daniel: “I just want y’all to know that after the episode with this phrase, my teleworking research group started counting days without wearing hard pants. After 600 hard-pantsless days, we made smores over the flaming remains of ill-fitted jeans.” And there’s actually a photo of flaming jeans toasting a marshmallow over it.
Lauren: I love it.
Daniel: “Thanks,” says Lauren, “For the vocabulary to celebrate our non-work trouser joy.”
Hedvig: That’s very good.
Daniel: I just have a couple of warnings though. Number one, there is a non-trivial risk that the jeans were made with chemicals that could leach into your marshmallow. And even though it’s the dose that makes the poison, just watch out for that. Also, please remove the jeans before igniting.
[chuckles]
Lauren: Thanks, Daniel.
Daniel: My pleasure.
Hedvig: I had to parse that sentence twice to understand what you meant. [chuckles]
Daniel: [chuckles] We often say that many sentences are one-offs, just created for the moment and then never to be said again. Remove jeans before igniting, that was one. Brand-new sentence. Also, this one was disproportionately popular in Facebook. I don’t know why. Okay, we’re up to number two. Pandemic fine. Which means– well, you know what pandemic fine means?
Hedvig: Well, it’s not a fine as in something you pay.
Daniel: No.
Hedvig: It’s the dog in the burning room saying everything is fine.
Lauren: Sparkle emoji.
[chuckles]
Hedvig: Yeah, exactly. [crosstalk]
Daniel: I’m fine.
Hedvig: Everything is fine.
Daniel: Not great but not terrible given current circumstances.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Lauren: I find this one really interesting to put it in parallel with, especially in Australia, a lot of the government speak has been around COVID normal. And I feel like it’s trying to do a similar thing, just like putting this word ‘fine’ or ‘normal’ that we all want to reach for just with that little caveat.
Daniel: It makes normal seem so far.
Hedvig: Yeah. It’s like you start a Zoom call with someone and they ask you how you are, and instinctively, you know and the other person on the other side of the screen knows that you’re not doing great, but you’re probably doing better than 90% of the people on the planet, or at least a very high number. And you say, “It’s fine. I haven’t been outdoors for three days and I just work at home,” whatever else that’s dragging down your mental health, but you’re essentially fine. Given the circumstances, you’re fine.
Lauren: It is interesting how it’s taken an event of this magnitude to fundamentally make everyone suddenly really aware of this little dance that we do at the beginning of conversations or the end of conversations, or that can be whole conversations in, like, shopping interactions. Linguists call these phatic, because we want to separate them from normal conversation where actual information is taking place, because normally, if you say, “How are you?” “I’m fine,” that’s a zero-information thing, because everyone just has the same call and response. And it’s taken something like this to fundamentally make everyone suddenly aware of the zero-information load that these little bits of interaction normally take up.
Hedvig: Sometimes, they’ll go really far. Like in posh British society, you can say, “How do you do?” And you’re not even supposed to respond. It literally means hello. And you say, “How do you do?” “How do you do?” “How do you do?” And that’s fine. But as a person who isn’t brought up in an Anglo community, like within Sweden, people will be like, “Ah, I talked to a British person, and they asked me how I was, and I told them, and then they were confused,” [chuckles] because it’s much more likely in Swedish conversation that you don’t do as much pretending. But we have certain phrases similar to pandemic fine, like, [unintelligible [01:06:38] livet går, which means, “Life is progressing.” And it’s going.
Daniel: It’s going. Somebody says, “How’s it going?” And you say, “It’s going.”
Hedvig: Exactly. You pretend a little bit. You’re not brutally honest with people, but there’s a little bit less of the pretending. When people do have to converse with Anglo folk, it’s like, “Alright, I have to remember that when they ask me, how I’m doing and they look me in the eyes, I’m not supposed to say anything, really.” [laughs]
Daniel: [chuckles] I did find that my “how are you doing” became a little bit nonphatic there for a while. I think it’s back to phatic. But for a little while, I was like, “This is a bad question.” You’re okay, how you doing?”
Hedvig: Suddenly, everyone was experiencing at least a small drop if not a big drop in their health and mental health. It was pointless pretending because it’s public knowledge that no one is doing great right now especially. So, it’s just the pretending becomes so jarring that you have to do something.
Daniel: If you haven’t checked out the Lingthusiasm episode about phatic utterances, definitely worth checking out. We will drop a link on our blog, becauselanguage.com. We’re to the number one. The Word of the Week of the Year for 2021. Are you ready?
Lauren: Mm-hmm.
Daniel: “Do a capitalism,” which has meant different things, as we’ve discussed in our last episode. It only made it in our last episode, but it’s the number one, and it means basically to go to work or to do a job or to do a gig or something. “I can’t meet up for coffee tomorrow, I have to do a capitalism.” People responded.
Hedvig: I have mixed feelings about it. Lauren, how do you feel?
Lauren: I find it interesting that for a group of people who actively didn’t vote for NFT, this did rise to prominence. It’s something about it being something we all recognize that a lot of us are. Even if we have jobs that we love, they are jobs and we are doing them as part of a system. But then, there’s also something so absurd about the way it’s phrased that just makes that really brings it home even more. I feel it is a word or, I guess, it’s more of a lexical item that really does capture how a lot of people feel about complicated relationships with their jobs and financial stability or not over the last couple of years.
Hedvig: Yeah. I remember when this word first occurred, we had a bit of confusion about whether it meant to go earn a wage or if it meant to go to an ATM and take out money.
Daniel: In the original Animal Crossing that I saw, as we mentioned, our last episode, there was a dog character, Harvey, who had installed the equivalent of an ATM in a certain place and said, “I’m hoping there’ll be more shops, so I installed one in case you need to do a capitalism.” Harvey, in Animal Crossing was intending, you take out some money out of an ATM, but then I saw a tweet from Dr. Gerald Roche, who said I could share this, he said this will be okay to share. And he said, “I can’t make the meeting because I have to do a capitalism,” which I guess in his case meant, “I have to teach,” or, “I have to do some work.” I also like the way that it takes capitalism, the abstract noun, and turns it into a concrete thing that you do one-off. You don’t just do capitalism, you do one of the capitalism things. [laughs] I like that a lot. I think that playful nature attracted a lot of people to it as well.
Well, there it is, “do a capitalism” our Because Language Word of the Week of the Year for 2021. Let’s take a look back. Do you get any sort of vibe off of the words that were voted the most up? Voted up the most? Are we okay, that’s what I’m wondering?
Hedvig: I think we’re pandemic fine.
[chuckles]
Daniel: I think so too. Do you have any inkling as to which will be most successful?
Hedvig: Hard pants.
Daniel: Definitely. That was my vote too.
Lauren: I think hard pants is a wonderfully transparent coinage. In Australia, our word for sodas/pop/ whatever you call it is soft drink, and you can order hard drinks as well. In Australia, at least, we have one set of parallels to draw on that make it nice and accessible. Hopefully, everyone else can just also embrace not forcing themselves to wear uncomfortable clothing as you return from post COVID to something beyond pandemic fine. Something beyond pandemic fine can have better pockets, people.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Okay. Well, thank you for taking us through that. Let’s just talk about some comments that we got. @kathselbow on Instagram, she says, “Hi, guys. Love the episode. Is this a reference with Sylvia Sierra about intertextuality and the act of joking among millennials? As a gen Xer, who is increasingly becoming as clueless as my boomer mother was, really appreciated the stop-and-step-back explanations of, ‘Sir, this is a Wendy’s,’ etc.” We talked about Wi-Fi passwords, so kathselbow says, “Just wanted to share my favorite router password was, ‘pretty fly for a Wi Fi,’ but given my newfound irrelevance to society, you’ve probably already heard it, so I don’t expect anything new. I’ve elected to use ‘fuck the cistern’ instead, as it was my favorite piece of toilet graffiti. Anyways, keep up the great work, Kath, the middle-aged lady who is only a couple of letters away from Karen.” So, thanks to that. I’m also Julia on Patreon says, “You guys fueling my language nerd fire was a big part of my motivation to switch up my professional field again, and I am now very happily working at a wonderful little translation/language services company.” How about that?
Hedvig: Very cool.
Lauren: Cool.
Hedvig: Congratulations.
Daniel: I love hearing stories like that. Julia also says, “I have never heard my name in the credits. Perhaps, it could happen someday ‽ Thank you so much for all you do. You have brought me so much joy, comfort and learning over the last year plus.” Aw, thanks, Jules.
Hedvig: Oh, that’s very nice.
Daniel: No, that’s not happening. Okay.
Hedvig: [laughs] Maybe you should explain how you get on the credits.
Daniel: You get on the comments by being a patron at the supporter level because we don’t have to– Oh, you know what? Okay, Jules, keep listening. Keep listening.
Lauren: I feel like things may change for you pretty soon, Jules.
Daniel: We’d like to give a big thank you to our patrons, and to our guests over the year, who are, you ready for the list? Here we go. Kory Stamper, Nicole Holliday, Caroline Kilov, Jesse Sheidlower, the Layman’s Linguistic, Gail Clements and Marnie Jo Petray, Fabio Trecca, Maya Klein, Pardis Mahdavi, Emma Schimke, Georgia Dempster and Kirsten Ellis, Amanda Montell, Jared Holt, Helen Zaltzman, Grant Barrett, Wu Mei-Shin, Ye Jingting, and Israel Lai, Elizabeth Mayer, Henry Wu, Victoria Papaioannou and the students of Melbourne Girls Grammar School, Lesley Woods and Alice Gayby. Our wonderful generativist, David Adger, John Goldsmith, Taylor Miller and Adam Talman. Sylvia Sierra, Game Master Hakan Seyalıoğlu, Caitlin Green, Martine Gice and Bodo Winter. Hadas Kotek, and of course, the always great, Lauren Gawne. Lauren, thanks so much for being on our show.
Lauren: Thank you so much for letting me come along on your Word of the Week of the Year ride. It’s been so nice to revisit the year of words with you.
Daniel: Yeah, I feel like we’ve been through a lot here.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: This was emotional and it wasn’t always easy. So, thanks.
Hedvig: Yeah, this year has been rough, been a ride. Let’s just all cross our fingers that 2022 is a little bit better.
Lauren: Thanks for crunching the numbers, Daniel.
Daniel: [chuckles] It’s a pleasure.
Hedvig: Yeah, I’ve postponed my wedding now twice. And 2022 is the year that we’re having her wedding and we’re not postponing it a third time. Everyone, go and get your boosters and get your vaccines and stay safe. I want to get married. [laughs]
Daniel: [chuckles] Come on, do it for Hedvig, people.
Hedvig: Do it for my wedding.
Daniel: Hedvig, you know what? 100,000 people just said, “Oh, all right.” Lauren, how can people find out what you’re doing?
Lauren: They can listen to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that is enthusiastic about linguistics at lingthusiasm.com. Or, we have transcripts, if you prefer things written, or if you prefer things written with far more typos, superlinguo.com is a place where I blog about language. I’m also on Twitter a lot as @superlinguo. They’re probably the best places to hear me talk about linguistics.
Hedvig: I really like your blog. I really like the series you do where you talk to people about their career choices and the jobs they have in linguistics. Also, outside of academia, Lauren, you’re doing amazing work there, because there’s so many people who perceive that if you get a linguistics degree and you don’t get a job in academia, that you’re no longer a linguist or that you’re not doing proper linguistics. I really appreciate that series that you’ve done.
Lauren: Absolutely untrue. That’s a series of interviews I’ve been running for the last six years with people who’ve studied anything from a couple of units in undergrad through to a PhD and postdoc, and then have gone on to careers other than academic linguist. And those careers are broad and wonderful, and they all talk in different ways about how their linguistic skills contribute to their success in a range of careers. It’s time to put together some more resources based on those interviews. I’m very excited from next year, they’ll all be run by Martha Tsutsui Billins who runs the fabulous Field Notes podcast.
Hedvig: Ah, super.
Daniel: Mm-hmm.
Lauren: So, yeah, we’ll have another year of those stories as well.
Hedvig: That’s so cool.
Daniel: Well, Lingthusiasm has been very inspirational for us as far as content, as far as even just your update to your website. You just keep throwing ideas out there for everyone. And thank you for doing what you do.
Lauren: Look, if you’re new to lingthusiasm.com, our website hasn’t always been this wonderful and shiny and finessed. Don’t listen to anything Daniel said.
[laughter]
Lauren: We’re very, very happy with the new website. It’s been really fun hanging out with pod buddies. So, thank you again so much for having me.
Daniel: Yeah.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Hedvig, and I’m going to tell this to Ben also, a huge thanks to you for this year of shows. I love the shows we’ve done this year. Looking forward to even more great topics and guests next year. So, thanks for being a great podmate.
Hedvig: Oh, thanks. Thank you to basically coordinating everything and doing all the editing. [laughs] You’re doing all the hard work, Daniel. I know how much hard work it is because whenever I chip in a little bit and plan a show or do something, I’m like, “Oh, my God. There’s so much to do.”
[laughter]
Hedvig: I really, really appreciate you.
Daniel: [crosstalk] -I do this every week.
Hedvig: You do this every week, and I really appreciate it. Ben a lot as well as, shame he couldn’t be here today. But I hope he’s well and I’m very grateful to have shared this year with you. It’s really fun.
Daniel: Let’s do it again soon.
[music]
Hedvig: If you like this show or didn’t like it, and if you have suggestions for other Words of the Week, get in touch with us. You can get in touch with us in a lot of different ways. On almost every conceivable social media platform, we are BecauseLangPod. I don’t think we’re on Weibo, but we’re on TikTok and Instagram and Facebook and all the other places. So, go have a look for us and we’ll probably be there. And if you want to send us an old-fashioned email, you can do that as well. We are hello@becauselanguage.com. And if you like the show, you can support us by becoming a supporter on Patreon or you can also email us your show ideas, articles, stories, or Words of the Week. And I think what’s really helpful to shows in general and I think Lauren can probably agree with us, is tell a friend about us or even tell a stranger about us. I find that podcast recommendations and growth of listenership is built on trust and shared experiences, and if you trust people who know more than– ah, that wasn’t good. Sorry. I’ll try–
Daniel: Keep it going.
Hedvig: Okay, I’ll keep it going.
Lauren: I liked it. It was genuine. I like it.
Hedvig: [laughs] That’s nice. As always, we like to thank our wonderful Dustin of Sandman Stories who whenever someone on Twitter asks for a podcast recommendation, just recommends our show to a bunch of strangers, which I find very sweet. Thank you so much, Dustin. Another good thing you can do if you want to support the show is leave a review. Leaving a review is a free thing you can do that is a great support to any podcast you like. Often, iTunes, Apple Music is a good place to leave reviews but you can also leave reviews in other places and that does a lot to boost the show. I think we’re past that hurdle before a while Ben’s students were leaving us one-star reviews as a joke.
Daniel: They’re still there.
Hedvig: [laughs] They’re still there.
Daniel: Maybe when they grow up, they can edit those. Hey, students, edit your frickin’ one-star reviews.
Hedvig: If you want to help us deal with this generational attack of sarcasm on our show, please leave us a higher than one star. Five would be great, but if it’s just higher than one, that’d be lovely.
Daniel: Two stars, that’s twice as many.
Hedvig: That’s twice as many. [laughs] So, if we can bring up our average a little bit from this funny, funny event that happened to us, that’d be great.
Daniel: Our patrons make it possible for us to do the show without any ads. They also make it possible for us to make transcripts so our shows are readable if that’s what you’re into and searchable. We would like to give a shout out to the entire team at SpeechDocs. They’re doing a great job on our transcripts. They are fast and accurate, and we’re a fan of their work.
Shoutout to our top patrons Dustin who is not the Sandman, he is his own Dustin. Termy, Chris B, Matt, Whitney, Helen, Udo, Jack, Kitty, Lord Mortis, Elías, Larry, Kristofer, Andy, James, Nigel, Kate, Nasrin, Ayesha, sneakylemur, Moe, Steele, Andrew, Manú, James, Rodger, Rhian, Colleen, glyph, Ignacio. Hedvig, help me out, Sonic Sneh-hog or is it Snej-hog?
Hedvig: Do you think it’s Scandi?
Daniel: Is this a Swedish thing?
Hedvig: No.
Daniel: Just Snejhog?
Hedvig: Sneh-hog.
Daniel: Like the hedgehog, what would that even be?
Hedvig: Sne is–
Daniel: Is it snow?
Hedvig: Well, it might be. But sne is to be not stable to be on the– How do you say that in English?
Daniel: I don’t know.
Lauren: As in mentally unstable?
Hedvig: No. As in like the painting, it’s not straight. It’s–
Lauren: Wobbly, wonky?
Daniel and Hedvig: Askew.
Daniel: I like wonky though.
Hedvig: Wonky.
Daniel: Wonky is good.
Lauren: I love that I went straight to mentally unstable.
[laughter]
Daniel: I did too. It’s not just you. Kevin, Jeff, Dave H, Andy from Logophilius, Samantha, zo, Kathy, Rach, Taylor, Cheyenne, Felicity, Amir, the fabulous Kate B. And also, our lovely friend and patron, Julia. This one’s for you, Julez. Okay, go ahead, Lauren.
Lauren: I’m going to read this last bit of the credits using a very magical pronoun, which is the first-person plural, our/we, self excluded.
Daniel: Very good. I didn’t know that existed, but of course it does.
Lauren: It only exists for very specific contexts, like when I say: our theme music has been written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who’s a member of Ryan Beno and of Didion’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
Hedvig: Yay. [clapping]
Daniel: That was great. That was really nice.
[beep]
Daniel: Reddit can be terrible, but the more niche Reddit gets, the better it gets.
Hedvig: The only Reddit I check in on is Stats and MapPorn. [chuckles]
Daniel: And by the way, I really love porn as a nonsexual word, like earth porn and map porn and food porn, and there’s all kinds of porn and none of it’s sexual.
Hedvig: Non-sexual to you maybe, but I think there’s some people out there. Anyway.
Daniel: As always, depends on what you’re into.
Hedvig: Yeah, bonk, bonk. Let’s go on.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]