The Words of the Year are out! And we’re talking about ’em.
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- We have here, there, and where. We also have that and what. Was there ever a hat?
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- Is the distribution of emoji Zipfian?
- If you study linguistics — the science of language — are you a STEM major?
And Hedvig springs a game on us.
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Wordle
https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/
What’s the Curse of Knowledge, and How Can You Break It?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/i-hear-you/202104/whats-the-curse-knowledge-and-how-can-you-break-it
2021 Word of the Year is “Insurrection” | American Dialect Society
https://www.americandialect.org/2021-word-of-the-year-is-insurrection
[PDF] American Dialect Society Selects “Insurrection” as 2021 Word of the Year
(Contains all nominees and winning words)
https://www.americandialect.org/wp-content/uploads/2021-Word-of-the-Year-PRESS-RELEASE.pdf
Audience-Alienating Era, aka: Dork Age | TV Tropes
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AudienceAlienatingEra?from=Main.DorkAge
Do Coco Chanel’s Nazi Connections Matter For Fashion Today?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/oliviapinnock/2020/10/01/coco-chanel-nazi-connection-matter-for-fashion-today/
[PDF] What are mergers? | Warren Maguire (University of Edinburgh), Lynn Clark (Lancaster University), Kevin Watson (University of Canterbury)
https://www.bu.edu/isle/files/2011/07/Warren-Maguire-Lynn-Clark-Kevin-Watson-What-are-mergers.pdf
Category:Splits and mergers in English phonology | Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Splits_and_mergers_in_English_phonology
Zipf’s Law | WhatIs.com
https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/Zipfs-Law
Zipf’s law | Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law
just some simple comparative plots | Hedvig’s Rstats outlet
https://hedvigsr.tumblr.com/post/674186058970300416/just-some-simple-comparative-plots
Our SpeakPipe account — record yourself asking us a question!
https://www.speakpipe.com/becauselangpod
UCLA Corrects Academic Codes for Five Linguistics Majors for STEM Classifications
https://linguistics.ucla.edu/general/ucla-corrects-academic-codes-for-five-linguistics-majors-for-stem-classifications/
Why I invert the camera controls in video games: Empathy | VentureBeat
https://venturebeat.com/2020/12/02/why-i-invert-the-camera-controls-in-video-games-empathy/
Science may figure out why weirdos play with inverted controls | Quarter to Three
https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2020/12/02/science-may-figure-out-why-weirdos-play-with-inverted-controls/
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
HEDVIG: Why aren’t you… Why isn’t this function doing…? I thought it was going to give me a Zipfian distribution if I gave it a number! [LAUGHTER] Give me… a Zipf… there’s… Ah! Argh!
BEN: Out of interest, Hedvig, what we’re listening to right now — and I hope Daniel keeps that particular bit in — is this your job? Just yelling at computer screens until numbers do what you want?
HEDVIG: Shut up. Shut. Up.
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to this special patron bonus episode of Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team! Her starting word for Wordle is XYLEM, for some reason.
HEDVIG: What? No, it isn’t!
DANIEL: It’s Hedvig Skirgård.
HEDVIG: What?
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] It’s not? Oh, okay. Actually, I was trying to goad you into telling us what your starter word was. Do you…?
HEDVIG: Oh, it used to be BRAVE, but then someone said that RADIO is a really good one, and because I’m now trying to do Wordle in English, Swedish, and German, RADIO works in all of them.
DANIEL: Oh, very good!
BEN: Did you guys love that super subtle flex just then? I enjoyed that. It was just like: ~Yeah, I just like doing Wordle in three different languages, no big deal. I’m just finding the words that work in all three.~
HEDVIG: To be fair… The disappointing news is that I do pretty poorly in Swedish.
BEN: You’re bad at all three?
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: You have a certain amount of ability, and you spread it equally amongst three pillars!
HEDVIG: I think the key is that I write mostly in English, and this is a writing task, and I struggle.
BEN: Fair enough. Is it too far into this particular tangent to ask what Wordle is?
HEDVIG: No. Do you remember the game, Mastermind, where you had, like, coloured dots, and then you played against another person and they would tell you if you put the colour dots in the right position, if it was the right colour in the wrong position?
BEN: I absolutely don’t remember that game. No.
DANIEL: Okay. Well, it’s Word Mastermind. It’s also very shareable. That’s why you’re seeing green and yellow squares all over your feed.
BEN: I’m not seeing that either! I feel like I must sit in a very different side of all of the different social media. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah, I think so. If you want to know more about Wordle, you can listen to the latest episode of Spectacular Vernacular where they talk to the guy who invented Wordle, and it’s very sweet.
BEN: Fair enough. Or, you can just learn one of three languages and verse Hedvig in the game.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it is fun. Because you don’t see the end result, you just see how people did. So you see the pattern of their guesses. So, you can be like, “Ah, Ste only got it at the fourth word, but in the third one, he had three positions correct.” It’s just fun. I enjoy it. I’m maybe only going to enjoy it for like another week or whatever, but I am enjoying it right now.
BEN: I like how you’re super defensive, like either of us are attacking you about enjoying Wordle. I have no skin in the game.
HEDVIG: I was posting my Wordle in, like, a group chat. And one of my friends was like, “I’m a bit tired of seeing these green squares.”
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: We’re having a big old time on our Discord posting our little graphs. It’s fun.
HEDVIG: It is fun.
BEN: So what do you reckon, Daniel? Have we got enough social media content about not our show? Yeah? Do you think?
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Shall I introduce you, Ben?
BEN: Yes, sure!
HEDVIG: Yes!
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: That surely has to take the new record for longest digression before I was even introduced into the episode.
DANIEL: By miles. Yeah. By miles.
BEN: Yeah, go for it.
DANIEL: This won’t make any sense. He thinks Wordle is better than Scrabble because it’s shorter, but he also thinks it’s worse because people are more likely to tell you about it. It’s Ben Ainslie.
BEN: Hmm. From what little I know of the game…
DANIEL: Did that work?
BEN: …that’s probably true.
DANIEL: Okay. Okay.
HEDVIG: What is this trend of Daniel just lying about us?
DANIEL: I have to make up something.
BEN: Look, to be honest, when he’s sincere/nice, I find it far more uncomfortable. I’ll take a good lie any day.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Let’s find out. Beautiful human being, Ben Ainslie.
BEN: 🤮
DANIEL: I see what you mean. It’s great to see you both. Thank you both for being here. It’s a New Year with new shows.
HEDVIG: You’re welcome.
BEN: Very welcome.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: We’re doing a lot of stuff this time. We’re talking about the American Dialect Society Word of the Year. We’re talking about some mailbag questions. It’s a mailbag episode. Also, Hedvig has promised us a new secret segment and she won’t tell us what it is. So, that’ll be a lot of fun.
HEDVIG: Yip, yip.
BEN: That all sounds amazing. Do we have any news before we do all of that shebang?
DANIEL: We do. But first, just a quick note to our patrons. Thank you all for being patrons listening to this and supporting the show. Thanks also to you who join us on Discord. We’re still talking about old Wi-Fi passwords.
BEN: Oh, no. Ohh. Wait, did I talk about my Wi-Fi password, is that what kicked this off?
DANIEL: That’s what kicked this off.
BEN: Oh, no! [LAUGHS] No!
HEDVIG: You did.
DANIEL: You did.
BEN: That was a mistake.
DANIEL: We’re also having a great time sharing Wordle scores. My new hobby is getting Wordle in two guesses, posting it and then saying, “Ah, two’s just luck.”
HEDVIG: Two is just luck. I agree.
DANIEL: It is!
HEDVIG: I was talking to Ste’s family because if you get it in one or two, then that’s just random chance. Three and four is skill, five and six, I can actually argue it’s still skill, because depending on the word… like last week the word was POLAR. And I went MOLAR. No, that wasn’t it, SOLAR, that wasn’t it. POLAR, and I don’t remember what order but like…
BEN: No, I get what you mean, like, the curse of knowledge. If you’ve got a whole bunch of possible words that fit, then you’re real smart, but you’re not scoring well.
HEDVIG: Exactly.
DANIEL: But that’s when… okay, so if it’s SOLAR, MOLAR, POLAR, you find a word that has S, M, and P in it…
HEDVIG: Not if you’re doing the hard mode.
DANIEL: Not if you’re doing hard mode. Yes, that’s why it’s hard. Okay. Anyway, to those of you who are not patrons but you are listening to this later, you can become a patron by going to patreon.com/becauselangpod, you’ll be supporting the show and helping us get the message of linguistics out there, getting yourself some goodies besides. So, we’ll see you real soon. Okay, enough of that.
The American Dialect Society Word of the Year was online this year, again. And so that means that I got to vote and I got to tweet things in real time. Did anyone notice my tweet storm? No.
HEDVIG: I think I did. It was a lot.
DANIEL: I think you were there.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Clearly what you had to say left a deep lasting impact.
DANIEL: It was huge.
HEDVIG: No, it’s just I was a bit overwhelmed because other people are tweeting about it too. There were so many things about Word of the Year that I sort of got a bit…
BEN: To be fair as well, I’m pretty sure between when Daniel sent out his — and I’m using his words, I don’t endorse them — “tweetstorm”, and now, you caught COVID. So, I feel there’s reasons why you might not necessarily remember.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah. Does anyone want a COVID update from Hedvig?
DANIEL: I do want a COVID update from Hedvig.
BEN: Everyone listening wants a COVID update.
HEDVIG: Okay, I am still coughing a bit, but I’m essentially free, and on Friday, I got my booster.
BEN: Whoo-hoo.
HEDVIG: I think everyone should get a booster, and I had an awful time of it. Those things are both true.
DANIEL: Were you really tired? My booster, I got super tired.
HEDVIG: I was already super tired. I got fever and chills and stuff. It was weird as well because it was like, I was very sick for three hours and then I was fine again.
DANIEL: Ah, so weird.
HEDVIG: It’s always been a ramp-up and then a downgrade, but I was very sick for like three, four hours in middle of the night, and then I was fine.
BEN: It was like a bell curve with a standard deviation of like 0.01.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it was so strange. But I’m fine now, and it blew over, and I think everyone should get a booster. But you know, take the day off, probably.
DANIEL: Good idea.
BEN: [GIGGLES] I certainly did.
DANIEL: Well, let’s just talk through some of the words that I had. This will be just super, super quick.
BEN: Whistle-stop tour.
DANIEL: Yeah. In the category euphemism of the year, there was ELECTION INTEGRITY, which was a euphemism for voter suppression. Yay. TFG, abbreviation for THE FORMER GUY.
BEN: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: Which is a way of Voldemorting Trump. But the winner was UNALIVE, used as a substitute for SUICIDE or KILLED to avoid social media filters. Cause to become unalive, very semantic.
BEN: I’ve noticed that there’s a fair bit of that going on in TikTok with tagging. Right? If anyone’s been wondering why le$bian is a thing, you can thank TikTok for that one.
DANIEL: Okay. Yeah, so that was the winner. Next category, most creative. We had CHIN DIAPER, which is a face mask worn below your nose.
BEN: I don’t like that.
DANIEL: Oh, my gosh, people in Perth have just gotten on board with masks because we kind of have to now, finally, at long last, and it’s like we missed the whole nose discourse. Come on!
HEDVIG: I think a lot of places though, like in Germany, there’s much more mask wearing than for example in England, and I see not so much anymore, but I see a fair bit of people just not covering the nose.
BEN: Yeah, it baffles me a little bit. I’m just like: Then, just be the person who doesn’t wear one. If that’s where you’re at, then just…
HEDVIG: You’re blocking one out of three.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: One orifice.
HEDVIG: It seems like it’s worse to not wear it, right?
BEN: Yeah, I suppose.
DANIEL: Their heart’s in the right place. Bless ’em.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Another one, COPIUM. The rationalisations, justifications, and denial, one uses to deal with a severe letdown or personal failure. It’s a blend of cope and opium. This was the inspiration for a design in our shop. It’s new, it’s “less copium, more hopium”.
HEDVIG: Yay.
DANIEL: And it’s very colourful, and it’s red and blue paint, and it was painted by my two dear daughters. I was very happy with that.
HEDVIG: That’s very sweet.
BEN: But what won?
DANIEL: FAUCI OUCHIE, which was one of our Words of the Week. A COVID vaccine.
HEDVIG: Were there any one that were top ranked that weren’t COVID, Trump, or American politics related?
DANIEL: Why yes, there was. And it’s in the category of Informal Word of the Year. CHEUGY was not as popular, it was a distant second. So, it wasn’t CHEUGY’s year. FLOP ERA was another one, time in which a person, such as a popstar enters an unsuccessful period.
BEN: Like the opposite of their empirical phase.
DANIEL: Empirical.
HEDVIG: Golden days.
BEN: Have you not heard of that phrase?
DANIEL: No!
BEN: The empirical phase of an artist is that run that they have, where everything they touch is just solid gold. Like Eminem’s first three albums I kind of considered his empirical phase where he’s just creating an empire basically.
DANIEL: Ah, okay. Empire, I get it.
BEN: Like Kanye’s early work, that sort of thing.
DANIEL: But then, the band gets into its era where… like, I used to be a huge Lilac Time fan, and I just found out they released an album three years ago, and I didn’t even know.
BEN: I think this is probably… we have returned to the really, really fun, but less and less used game in our show of: what super obscure indie band did Daniel just reference.
HEDVIG: [CHUCKLES] Yeah.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I had no idea who that was.
BEN: There’s one or two people listening who are like, “Oh, yes! That band!” And everyone else is just kind of like, “Oh, we’re playing this game again. That’s fun.”
HEDVIG: I feel also, we talk badly about artists when they’re not doing things that are having monetary success, or saying that people are one-hit wonders, or knocking down on them when they’re not always producing massive hits, and I think that’s a bit cruel sometimes. If they’re artists, and if they’re producing things and can earn a livelihood by it, great. And if they’re producing things that they love, and they want to do, good. And then, if they’re not selling as much as Ariana Grande, I don’t know if that… does that need to be our measure of success?
BEN: I don’t think necessarily that flop era is a hardline objective metric of how well they’re doing. I would more put it to the thing of like, if you’re, say, a band… am I supposed to say a music band?
DANIEL: Music band!
BEN: Clearly, I’m not boomer enough.
DANIEL: How do we do, fellow kids?
BEN: If you’re a band, let’s say, I’m going to use something relatively not mainstream, like The Decemberists. Not necessarily widely known by people who listen to top 40 music or whatever. Their first two albums are really good, but then the next two albums, by the people who listen to them, they’re like, “Oh, I don’t know. This isn’t doing it for me anymore. I can’t really see the point. Blah, blah, blah.” I think those people would still be able to use this as a way to critically describe the overall contour of the quality of the work of the artists. I get you…
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: …in the sense that we shouldn’t just rag on people when they don’t make great art. But at the same time, you’ve got to be able to talk about art.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah. No, definitely.
BEN: Like, you’ve got to be able to walk out of movie that really sucks, and be like, “Oh, my god, that was so terrible!”
HEDVIG: Yeah, but you also got to recognise when people move into a different phase and make different music. I liked Belle and Sebastian for a long time. And they went into, like, a disco era for a while and a lot of their fans were like, “This isn’t indie pop!” And I was like, “Yeah, it isn’t. Also, I like it.” And even if I don’t, let them live their lives. I don’t know.
DANIEL: Yeah. If you want to listen to that same album again, you go back and listen to that same album again. They don’t have to make the same album again.
BEN: I would suggest that artists who change things up and do it well, don’t get described as having a flop era. No one looks at David Bowie, and they were like, “[CHUCKLES] Oh, well, didn’t all of your weird different stuff suck?” They’re just like, “Oh, David Bowie is amazing because he just never did the same thing twice.”
DANIEL: Well, bands have trajectories. Young and hot and successful, and then they kind of transition into a flop era where maybe their sound that they pioneered is either picked apart by everyone in derivative ways that makes them sound derivative. And then if they can get past that, then they become untouchable, eternal masters. But if you’re in your flop era, even your fans might not be aware of your work. And the AV Club — RIP AV Club — they describe this as the DORK AGE. I remember that. But here it’s been described as FLOP ERA.
BEN: I want to vaguely back Hedvig in though, what I feel you were kind of getting at is, taking risks is good and interesting, and we shouldn’t hate on people for taking risks, and I 100% back that. But the thing about taking risk is sometimes you fuck it up, and that’s cool too.
HEDVIG: Yeah, and people can not like that. But I guess what I’m saying, which may be a bit blue-eyed or whatever, if you don’t like something in an aesthetic sense, you don’t need to tell them about it.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: If they’re doing something bad morally or unethically, you can be like, “I think this is bad.” But if someone just released a song that you didn’t like, they’re going to know by the fact that they’re going to have fewer plays and views on that music video and that track, that not as many people liked it. You don’t need to comment underneath their music video, “I think this isn’t as good as your first hit.” You can actually just say that to yourself in your head. You can just choose to not release.
BEN: [CHUCKLES] So just to be clear, you’re waging war against people leaving unkind comments on the internet.
HEDVIG: Yeah!
BEN: That’s a winnable goal!
DANIEL: Can I just say in connection with that? Whenever I go to a song on YouTube or a song on SoundCloud, I can’t remember a time when I’ve seen a negative comment. All I’ve seen are frothingly positive comments about the music, no matter what song it was.
HEDVIG: Yeah, that’s changed a bit also with YouTube’s new comment moderation system where downvoted things will get removed, you know about this?
DANIEL: I’m glad.
HEDVIG: And upvoted things will appear… Well, it also means that when people have comments that are critical, that makes sense. For example, if they’re criticising something more ethical…
BEN: Think about a Jordan Peterson comment section, Daniel.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Because you better believe this stuff I’m putting in that comment section is going to get downvoted.
DANIEL: Downvoted to hell.
HEDVIG: Yeah. But YouTube is like: “This is the comment section we want to have,” so that’s their choice whatever. Anyway, that was enough of a tangent on FLOP ERA. Can we know more about the American Dialect Society’s Words of the Years?
DANIEL: The winner of the Informal Word of the Year was YASSIFY. Yassify, any guesses?
HEDVIG: I did see it.
DANIEL: I didn’t know this one.
BEN: I mean, I’m assuming it’s to do with YAAS.
HEDVIG: It is.
DANIEL: It is. And PharaohKatt and AJ mentioned this one on our Discord server way back in August 2021.
HEDVIG: But it got popular on Twitter and other social media platforms in specific reference to a filter that you could put on people’s faces, where it would make you look more glammy. So, it would put like bronzer and elongate your face a bit and do your eyes up, and people would take, for example, pictures of the Seinfeld crew and like yassify all of them, and they look insane.
DANIEL: That’s right. Next category, Financial Economic Word of the Year. This included a lot of our Words of the Week. GREAT RESIGNATION, that was big. NFT, SPAC.
BEN: SPAC? What’s SPAC?
DANIEL: If I have a company and I don’t want to do an IPO and put my stock out there, I can join up with somebody who’s created a SPAC, a special purpose acquisition company. They do the work of putting my stock out there and then I have basically an IPO. Except they’ve really been bad this year. All the SPACs that I’ve seen have turned into garbage.
HEDVIG: I hate it.
DANIEL: STIMMY for stimulus. STONK, that was one of ours.
BEN: STIMMY: I’ve got to say: STIMMY just really rubs me the wrong way because it’s just so close to STIFFY, which is Australian slang for an erection, and I really struggle with it. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I’m pretty sure that STIMMY is something as well. But anyway.
HEDVIG: Is the winner something with TO THE MOON?
DANIEL: No. SUPPLY CHAIN.
BEN: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: That makes sense.
BEN: Because the global economy has really got quite a bit of sand in those gears.
DANIEL: Pandemic-related Word of the Year, special category. What? All the rest of them haven’t been pandemic related?
BEN: [CHUCKLES] I was about to say: Isn’t that every category?
DANIEL: BREAKTHROUGH, DELTA/OMICRON, LONG COVID. Let’s spare a thought for people before we start describing Omicron as mild, let’s think about people who have long covid because that is nothing to sneeze at. We’re thinking about you.
BEN: Daniel? No.
DANIEL: What?
BEN: Nothing to sneeze at.
DANIEL: Okay, sorry.
BEN: Really?
DANIEL: Sorry. I’ll say that again.
BEN: You might say that’s a bit on the nose, Daniel.
DANIEL: I was just going to… you know what I love about the phrase ON THE NOSE?
BEN: What’s that?
DANIEL: In American English, it means absolutely accurate and correct. But in Australian English, it means it stinks. I love how to me, ON THE NOSE kind of borrows from both, like you said something that was so accurate that it’s painful. Anyway, there was VARIANT. I was gunning for VAXX like with a double x, because I thought it’s so useful. Anyway. The winner was BOOSTED, which… as you would.
HEDVIG: Are we all boosted?
BEN: I am boosted. I am freshly boosted.
DANIEL: We are boosted.
BEN: I’m two Pfis and one Modern.
DANIEL: Nice!
HEDVIG: I’m two AstraZeneca, one Moderna.
DANIEL: Let’s see. Could I get two Astra and one Pfizer? Thanks. Can I also say that one of the candidates, FLURONA, is very good. I like that a lot. And I don’t know if it’s going to be prominent because some people get the flu on top of a coronavirus case, but because we are going to see combination vaccines. The yearly vaccine is just going to be a combination of your yearly flu shot and your yearly covid shot, and it’s going to be FLURONA. Watch out for it.
BEN: There you go. Okay.
HEDVIG: Yeah. I got both this year. I got all of them that I could get. [LAUGHS] But I got the yearly…
BEN: Fill me up, Doc!
HEDVIG: Yeah, because also my workplace was like, “We’re going to do flu shots in house,” and I was like, “Sure.”
BEN: Sweet.
HEDVIG: Sweet.
BEN: I can’t fathom why any workplaces don’t, honestly. Of a certain size. If you’ve got two employees, fine, make them go to their doctor or whatever. It doesn’t make any sense to me.
DANIEL: Digital Word of the Year. There was GIRLBOSS. I feel like GIRLBOSS is a bit cheugy. HORNY JAIL, I really wanted that one but they didn’t have BONK, we did. Watch out for BONK. Thanks, AJ. PARASOCIAL, describing a one-sided relationship with a celebrity that you don’t actually know on an online platform.
HEDVIG: I like the term PARASOCIAL. I think is something everyone should pay attention to and watch out for both as content creators and content consumers. There’s some great video essays on YouTube about what it’s like and how to manage it. I think that’s a really good word. There’s some content creators that really lean into that, and it’s a bit creepy.
BEN: When I am consuming content and stuff like that tends to happen, that is very quickly the point where I’m just like: And slowly backing away!
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Wasn’t there that comic that was so Hedvig? Remember that comic, Hedvig? It was like: “A friend told me a story the other day.”
BEN: Oh, this is Sarah’s Scribbles, I know exactly what you’re talking about.
[CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: “Who was it?” “Oh, you don’t know him?””
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: “It was a podcast presenter, wasn’t it?”
HEDVIG: Yeah. That happens to me.
DANIEL: There was also BONES DAY and NO-BONES DAY, which I liked, which we talked about. But the winner #freebritney, what do you think?
BEN: What category was that again? ?
DANIEL: Digital.
HEDVIG: Digital. I don’t know. What do we want these words of the years to do? If they’re meant to represent the year, the #freebritney represents something of the year, but it doesn’t represent a lot of people know. I mean I am all for #freebritney. Even…
DANIEL: Even though I do not care. I’m very pleased.
HEDVIG: I mean, I care and I’m pleased. I think her recent Instagram posts are a bit… funny, but it doesn’t mean that she should have a guardian.
DANIEL: Yep.
BEN: It seems very particular. [CHUCKLES] I’m sorry, Daniel. It seems like the word version of Daniel dropping whatever band he dropped like 15 minutes ago, Lilac…
DANIEL: Lilac Time.
BEN: Lilac Time. For people like me who… Yeah, okay, cool. Britney is a human being who doesn’t deserve to have her autonomy stripped from her. But the #freebritney movement is, like, a million miles away from anything that I have anything to do with. That doesn’t seem like a particularly broad church of a word. Yeah, I agree with Hedvig. What are these awards signifying?
DANIEL: People just wanted to vote for them. There they are.
HEDVIG: Yeah, people wanted to vote for them.
BEN: It’s a popularity contest of linguists.
DANIEL: Let’s see, the winner for Most Useful was HARD PANTS. Very pleased about that one.
HEDVIG: Yay! Good. Good. Good.
BEN: What was HARD PANTS again?
HEDVIG: You have soft pants and hard pants, remember?
BEN: Oh, so soft pants is tracksuits, and hard pants is like anything else when you have to do real person stuff?
HEDVIG: Jeans.
DANIEL: When you have to do a capitalism.
BEN: Gotcha.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And that’s a category that I think makes sense, Most Useful Word of the Year. It’s like I know what that is doing. When I want to vote for that thing, I know what everyone else is thinking in their minds. When I’m voting for Digital Word of the Year, I don’t know what other people are meaning by that.
DANIEL: By the way, you can now get the hard pants design, a new one, drawn by our Mystery Illustrator.
BEN: Ooh!
HEDVIG: Hooray. I love it when they do stuff.
BEN: One of these days I’m going to have to reveal who the Mystery Illustrator is. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: No, don’t.
HEDVIG: I don’t know, and I’m pleased.
DANIEL: It’s now in our shop. You can get hard pants in blue, gray, and russet.
BEN: To the Mystery Illustrator, hey-o!
DANIEL: Hey.
HEDVIG: I’m very pleased.
BEN: Because I know they are definitely listening.
DANIEL: They’re very good.
HEDVIG: Sweet.
DANIEL: Most Likely to Succeed, the word that won was ANTI-WORK, which I really like. A position supporting the refusal to work pushing back against labor exploitation. You can tell dictionary writers wrote this. It’s very good. And the Word of the Year among… here were the suggestions. I wanted VAX, with one x or two. OMICRON, LONG COVID. There were some good arguments for LONG COVID among the audience. ANTI-WORK, BIG LIE, GREAT RESIGNATION, but the one that won was INSURRECTION.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: I mean it is the American Dialect Society. So, I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that it was very Amerocentric.
DANIEL: It was.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: It’s a big fucking deal that I don’t… I know, sometimes people are like, “Hmm, you focus a little bit on America.” I’m like, “Okay, that’s a valid criticism, I’ll take that.” But at the same time, the country that holds itself up as the leader of the free world had an actual coup attempt happen. This is not something that we should just be like, “Oh, isn’t this…” By the same logic, right now, there is a very, very real chance that that country is going to make abortion illegal across the country. That’s fucking bananas that that is happening in a modern Western democracy.
DANIEL: Yup. Terrifying.
HEDVIG: I think you’re right. It’s really hard to keep these two things in mind. It is not reasonable to entirely ignore what goes on domestically within America. But also, I do think we… even though that’s true, I think everyone focuses on it too much.
BEN: I agree with that.
HEDVIG: I think those things are both true at the same time! We should pay more attention to American internal politics than… Mongolian internal politics. It’s probably going to affect us more, as in my case, like living in Germany, and you guys living in Australia, and a lot of our listeners being in similar conditions. But it’s even so, it’s like even more. Yeah, anyway.
DANIEL: It’s an issue that we think about a lot and try to get the balance right. Sometimes we don’t, sometimes we do.
HEDVIG: Yeah. It’s tricky. I realised that I actually haven’t reported from the Words of the Year from the Swedish institutions. And that’s because the Swedish Language Council release a list every year and they don’t rank it, and they don’t have any categories. I’m looking at it now. It’s so many entries…
BEN: [LAUGHS] They’re so socialist, I love it.
HEDVIG: Yeah, they do this every year.
BEN: It’s just like, “Here’s a word soup.”
DANIEL: Here are the participants.
HEDVIG: Yeah. It’s just… So there’s lots of words here that we’ve seen before, like… What’s the good one? Oh, here’s a good one that I actually haven’t seen any of these, which is MASKNE.
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: That is good.
HEDVIG: Mask acne.
BEN: Really good, because no one needs it explained to them. Like you said MASKNE, and we all just went: Yep.
DANIEL: Yep.
HEDVIG: Yep.
BEN: I understand what that is.
DANIEL: And it’s productive -NE. That’s really cool.
BEN: Just like bacne and chacne.
DANIEL: I should probably point out that maskne was on the American Dialect Society Words of the Year last year. So, that’s not totally new. Still great to see it come up. Do you know a word that everyone missed and @seejanecricket on Twitter and on our Discord has been trying to get us to recognise, like Cassandra shouting at us, and it’s COOKED.
BEN: Oh! As in like how Australians use it, how I use it all the time?
DANIEL: How do you use COOKED?
BEN: At the end of a long day, if someone proposes that we have a staff meeting or something, I might just go, “Listen, mate, I would, but I am absolutely cooked. Stick a fork in me, I’m done.”
DANIEL: Not quite. She said this in November on our Discord. “I’ve noticed COOKER starting to be used for the anti-lockdown-vax-whatevs protesters. I’m thinking this is an extension of drug slang. Conspiracy theories are described as cooked, so there’s a kind of loose association there too. In Australia, it seems to mean the Nazi adjacent rather than the Nazis themselves.”
BEN: Interesting.
DANIEL: Also says, “I do notice it more in tweets from Indigenous people in Australia with some leakage into people who monitor Australian conspiracy and weirdo types.” That was from @seejanecricket. I noticed this when, what was his name, the tennis player? Novax DjoCovid.
BEN: Oh, no.
DANIEL: Anybody see any good nicknames?
BEN: Don’t do it, Daniel.
HEDVIG: That’s the best one.
BEN: I’ve just got such a pet hate for the way Australia media, in particular, comes up with a funny name, and then everyone jumps on board with the funny name. Argh, it’s so boomer-y. I hate it so much.
HEDVIG: He seems to be a dick when it comes to respecting other people’s health conditions and things. But he has said that being in detention in Australia and meeting people in Australia that’ve been in detention for over nine years has made him want to advocate for those people, like Afghan refugees.
BEN: I hope he does. I absolutely hope he does.
HEDVIG: I hope he does.
BEN: If this was his come-to-Jesus moment, fucking fantastic.
HEDVIG: Yeah. What’s the opposite of a MILKSHAKE DUCK? I think he should have gotten kicked out of the country. I think he should get a COVID vaccine. And simultaneously in my head, maintain the thought that if he does something right by those people who have been in detention for over nine years since they were teenagers and haven’t had a fair trial in Australia, then he’s doing something very good.
DANIEL: “I suddenly became aware of this issue because it affected me.” But anyway.
BEN: Hey, if it’s stupid but it works, I’m not against it.
DANIEL: Well, this tennis player has been described as COOKED or a COOKED UNIT — that’s really interesting.
BEN: Ah, the unit, what would you call it? The noun UNIT, in Australian slang, is just fantastic. I love it.
DANIEL: Yeah. We see it in like ABSOLUTE UNIT especially.
BEN: Look at this absolute unit! And you might be describing like a particularly stocky dog or something.
DANIEL: Yeah. By the way, Jonathan Green’s Dictionary of Slang says this ABSOLUTE UNIT is UK Black slang. So, credit there.
BEN: Oh!
DANIEL: Here’s another word that popped up. It’s kinda too late for us to do as a Word of the Week, so let’s just talk about it here. EMMERDER, the French word used by French President Emmanuel Macron, who said he was going to make life miserable for anti-vaxxers. He said, “The unvaccinated, I really want to bug them” like, by excluding them from restaurants and bars and things. But he used the term EMMERDER, which has the word MERD in it. And everybody’s been talking about, what’s the best way to translate EMMERDER?
HEDVIG: The other thing we should note about that word is it has “em” in it, which means like to make someone that, like causative. It’s like to make someone shit or, in this case, to make someone angry, I think. I want to make them “en-anger”.
BEN: Oh! In Australian slang, we would probably say to make someone SHITTY. Shitty, meaning like pissed off and angry.
DANIEL: That’s it.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: You could be shitty. You know what I also thought of? I also thought if you’re making fun of somebody, if you’re making life hard for someone, you HANG SHIT on them.
BEN: Yes. Okay. I like that.
DANIEL: I think there’s a way in Australian slang for us to have a really good translation of EMMERDER that’s true to the MERD root. And we can say, “These anti-vaxxers, I am going to hang shit on them.”
BEN: All right. I’m going to make them real shitty.
DANIEL: Yeah. And make them shitty.
HEDVIG: We have a perfectly good word: to ANGER somebody.
DANIEL: Yeah, but it doesn’t cover it.
BEN: It doesn’t have the shit in it, right?
DANIEL: Because there’s no shit in anger.
BEN: There’s no lost in translation if you actually use one of me or Daniel’s… I mean, I’m sure there is a lost in translation because that’s how translation works. But still.
DANIEL: French speakers, we need your help. Even at this late date, what have you read? It’s a few weeks old now, but we still want to hear about it. So, get in touch.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: Let’s go into our Mailbag. We’ve got a lot of great questions. This one comes from O Tim via email, hello@becauselanguage.com.
BEN: Can we think of a funny… I’m going to think of a different way every time we have to say O Tim’s name to say his name: “O Tim.”
HEDVIG: [EXASPERATED] Oh Tim.
DANIEL: [AS SUMMONING TO DINNER] O Tim! Why are there so many WH words that are answered with TH and H? For example, where, there, here. Wither, thither, hither. Whence, thence, hence.
HEDVIG: Wherefore, therefore.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES]
BEN: Can we just drill down into THITHER for a second?
DANIEL: Wherefore, therefore, herefore?
HEDVIG: Yeah, okay. Herefore, I don’t know if that happens so much. But, yeah: wherefore, therefore.
BEN: Can we just drill down into THITHER for a second?
DANIEL: Let’s talk about hither and hence.
BEN: Well, hang on. What is THITHER? I know DITHER with a D. What is THITHER with a TH at the front?
DANIEL: Okay. HERE is where I am. THERE’s where you are, and WHERE, I don’t know where anything is. But THITHER is to where.
HEDVIG: The direction away.
DANIEL: That’s right. And HITHER is toward here. THITHER is toward there.
BEN: Oh, so this is like HITHER and TITHER. But I’ve always heard it pronounced TITHER instead of whither.
DANIEL: Have you???
HEDVIG: Yeah. Me too.
DANIEL: Fascinating. When you say WITHER, you’re saying where’s it going? When you say hence, you’re saying from here. Get the hence. Or if you say thence, it’s from there. And if you say whence, it’s like, “Where did that come from?”
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: So O Tim asks, “Does who, thou, you fit somehow? Did we ever have whom, thoum, houm? And check this out, when, then, did we ever have HEN? What, that. Have we lost HAT?” What’s going on here? It looks like there was a productive system once, but it’s got a few gaps now. What do you reckon?
BEN: Well, first of all, he said WHOM. We have WHOM.
DANIEL: We do have WHOM.
BEN: Did we ever have houm, thom, whom? And it’s like, “Yeah, whom.”
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] Okay.
BEN: But you had that word.
DANIEL: But WHOM doesn’t mean that.
BEN: All right. Yeah, true.
HEDVIG: I think there’s a good point to make maybe about natural languages and artificial languages in that natural languages form productive regular paradigms, sometimes, often and is great for language learners and it’s great for making a table in a grammar. But there can be good reasons that have to do with the world and communication why not all cells are filled. So for example, when, then, hen… HEN would mean then… would it mean the time right now?
DANIEL: It would mean NOW! We already have a word for that.
HEDVIG: We have a word NOW.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: But that’s not true. We could have HEN instead of NOW, but what use… Yeah, I’m not sure about the use there.
DANIEL: It just didn’t work that way.
HEDVIG: Yeah, and it might just have lost.
BEN: Is it a case that we sometimes, in the case of WHEN, THEN and the possible HEN, we had a word. I’m sure we had a word in a lot of these instances, and in this particular instance, we just stuck with NOW, because for whatever reason, in the argy-bargy of words surviving and dying, NOW just like fucking destroyed HEN, or something like that.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Exactly. That’s likely to happen, especially with really frequent words, probably have a popularity contest and some wins out. To O Tim’s question, have we lost HEN? Did we ever have HEN and lose it for NOW? Or, did we have NOW and then later create a productive paradigm where everyone was like, “Well, we don’t need a cell in that part of the paradigm, because we already have it.” I don’t know. I suspect that our good friend and host Daniel has done some etymology digging. Is that true?
DANIEL: It is true. I haven’t found any HEN. I also haven’t found a HAT. We have WHAT and we have THAT, but we don’t have a HAT — Meaning, the thing over here — because we already had by this time, the word THIS. There’s that, and now there’s this. Interestingly, THIS comes from THA — that thing — plus an S, which is the reflexive, like the thing itself, and that S reflexive shows up in Spanish as well. I just thought that was interesting. And a bit of Russian as well: свой.
BEN: To his original question, why do so many WH words end with a TH or an H?
DANIEL: So I made a chart of all the TH, H, and WH’s, and of course, there were some that were missing, but there were a lot of them ticked, like WITHER, HITHER, and THITHER. We had HITHER and THITHER, which means to this place and to that place. THITHER was once THATHER but HITHER pulled it into line and made it more like itself. But once you get these words, it’s easy to just add a WH- and get WHITHER. The WH- comes from Proto-Indo-European. It was just QUO, KW, that QU- thing. In English, it turned not into QU- but into WH-. Basically, it’s like taking a word like that and just adding an interrogative WH- in front of that. And we just did that for a bunch of things down the chart.
HEDVIG: Yeah. The KW- to V- is funny because most Germanic languages have made it into WH-, V- these things. But in Northern Norwegian, they actually say KA for what.
DANIEL: [GASPS]
HEDVIG: They say KA. It’s really weird.
DANIEL: They kept it. Oh, my gosh.
HEDVIG: They kept it or they got it again, I don’t know. But they’re very strange. So, they say…
BEN: But interestingly, they’ve lost the W bit. Right? So, they kept the… whatever you’d call the K sound, and they’ve dropped the W that came after it.
HEDVIG: Yeah, they don’t have the V. Actually, I should look into this more, and if anyone knows more about her or speaks Nordic, Norwegian or something. But I’ve heard them say Ka, ka ede? Like, what is that? It’s really fun.
DANIEL: The short answer is: the H, TH, WH thing was part of a system where words acted on each other and influenced each other. But sometimes there are just words that don’t fit in the grid, not because words got kicked out of the paradigm but just because we already had words that meant those things, and those words won.
HEDVIG: And the grid came after those words as well, was the idea.
DANIEL: Correct.
BEN: O… Tim, that was a great question.
HEDVIG: That is a really good question. Thank you.
DANIEL: Thank you, O Tim.
HEDVIG: It was a neat one.
DANIEL: Ignacio on our Discord channel asks, “On the Dialect Playthrough episode,” which was a lot of fun, by the way.
BEN: Already referenced one in this show, because it was just so fucking fun.
DANIEL: It was great. “When Ste said: I’m grips with some of the scientists” — and GRIPS was our word for friends, grips with some of the scientists — “it made me think about how we say, “I’m friends with so and so. What’s happening there? Any ideas?”
BEN: I don’t understand his question because I can only think in the language that my brain operates in. So my brain is like, “What do you mean? That’s what the words mean!”
DANIEL: Okay. Well, let me give you a few examples, and maybe you can tell me if they sound natural or not. “I’m friends with John.” That sounds good, right?
BEN: Yep.
DANIEL: “I’m brothers with John.”
BEN: Sure.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay. “I’m cousins with John.”
HEDVIG: Yeah, fine.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: “I’m spouses with John.”
BEN: Okay. No, you’re losing me there.
HEDVIG: I’m John’s spouse.
BEN: I guess if you were in a polygamous relationship, and I don’t judge, do whatever you want…
DANIEL: That is interesting.
BEN: …I guess that could work.
DANIEL: I’m so glad you said that. That is exactly my intuition. But let’s go on. Are there any other relationships that sound weird?
HEDVIG: Colleagues?
DANIEL: I’m colleagues with John?
HEDVIG: Fine, to me.
DANIEL: Okay. Is it only spouses or is there something else?
BEN: Spouses sounds weird, but I don’t know if that’s my weird monotheistic…
HEDVIG: Also, just doesn’t work with parents. Like, “I’m mother with…” Also, that’s a unidirectional relationship, so doesn’t work anyway, because she’s not my mother.
DANIEL: Yes. It’s asymmetrical.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: That’s why I chose BROTHERS actually.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Actually, now that I think about it, BROTHERS and SISTERS doesn’t work. “I’m brothers with John,” “I’m sisters with Mary,” doesn’t work.
HEDVIG: Right. It has to be same. It has to be bidirectional. But can I say, “I’m sisters with Mina.”?
DANIEL: Sounds okay to me.
BEN: It doesn’t sound to me.
DANIEL: Oh, okay.
BEN: I would say, “I’m Mina’s sister.”
DANIEL: Yeah yeah yeah.
HEDVIG: Hmm. Or, “Mina’s my sister.”
DANIEL: It is a little bit… it’s just on the edge, isn’t it? So, it seems to work when it’s a symmetrical relationship, when more than one person is possible.
HEDVIG: Yeah…
BEN: I now get why Ignacio is asking the question. Thank you for helping me to have a better awareness of how words work, and now I just feel like word are ugly in my mouth.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Words aren’t real. Language is imaginary. Sounds are just throat wobbles.
BEN: [SHUDDERS] Yeah, but this is a bad one now.
HEDVIG: It’s fun though that English does… so, when you say “I’m friends with so and so”, that’s a different WITH from like: “I’m going to the movies with Stina.” That’s a different WITH. And “I’m cutting the bread with a knife,” that’s a different WITH again. WITH is really polysemous, like it has many functionalities in English. And some languages choose to have different words for those different meanings. Usually, you don’t create confusion.
BEN: That’s so true. Again, I have never thought about that before, and now there’s another ugly word in my mouth! Goddamn it!
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Or, “That girl who’s walking down the street with the purple jacket.” That’s a different WITH again, I would argue.
DANIEL: Yeah. With is…
BEN: How is that different from, “I’m cutting the bread with a knife?”
HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s not as different, but it’s not… the jacket is not helping her walk.
DANIEL: Yeah, you cut the bread WITH a knife, that’s instrumentality. But the girl walking down the street WITH the purple jacket is accompaniment.
BEN: I was trying to bring it back into some semblance of working in my head, and you guys just like 🤯… kicked it right out again.
DANIEL: That’s semantics, baby!
HEDVIG: It’s fun, and it’s not a problem.
BEN: And that’s why you guys are linguists and I’m not, because my brain is like, “No, it’s not. It’s not fun.”
DANIEL: So what is this WITH, “I’m brothers WITH John,” or, “I’m friends WITH some of the scientists?” Is it like the relationship is a box and I’m in there with them? Is it accompaniment?
BEN: No, I don’t think so. I get the impression… in my brain, it’s like a tether. When you are tethered WITH something, you are signifying that you are one part and then there is a tether of some kind, whether abstract or literal, and then there is another thing. Right? So like, “I’m tied with Sarah for first place.”
DANIEL: Oh, wow.
BEN: And that sort of dynamic, there’s two sides with a thing that connects them.
DANIEL: Yeah. Okay. Can you say, “I’m coworkers with John?”
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Yeah, I would say that.
HEDVIG: I was thinking about this and how I would do it in Swedish. If someone would say, [Swedish language], that would be okay. But I would prefer, “John and me are friends.”
BEN: Yes. And this is what I mean, instead of “I’m coworkers with John.” It’s like, “John is my coworker.”
HEDVIG: Or, “We are coworkers,” or, “John and I are coworkers.” I would so much prefer both of them than this WITH construction.
BEN: I would agree.
HEDVIG: Almost always.
DANIEL: So, it works for symmetrical relationships, but not when there’s only two people possible in the relationship. If there’s more than two people possible, like you can be friends WITH more than one person, but according to most of the rules, you can’t be spouses WITH more than one person. But if you are, then it becomes okay, I guess. I’m spouses WITH John.
BEN: Ignacio definitely deserves some smart person cookies for this question. This is actually a really good one.
DANIEL: It’s really made me think about WITH a lot.
HEDVIG: WITH is fun.
DANIEL: And there’s something else that’s interesting about WITH just before leaving it, and that is, that WITH means a couple of things. I mean, it means a lot of things.
BEN: We’ve established quite a few senses!
DANIEL: But it could mean causation. Like, “I cut the bread with the knife,” so I caused the bread to be cut with the knife. But it could also mean, things happened at the same time. Like, “He arrived with the rain.”
BEN: That’s really poetic.
HEDVIG: Yeah. You can say that, but like, would you?
DANIEL: Okay, well, how about, “With a flourish, he entered the room”?
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: So I think it’s interesting how correlation and causation are both handled by WITH, and they’re both things that humans confused with each other.
BEN: Used in the sentence about itself. Nice one.
DANIEL: Thank you.
HEDVIG: Yeah. You confuse things for each other with each other.
DANIEL: Thanks, Ignacio. Hedvig, I believe you’re going to favour us with a surprise segment.
BEN: A surprise segment?
DANIEL: A surprise segment.
HEDVIG: Hedvig’s Surprise Segment. Hurray! Welcome.
BEN: Okay. Is it Eurovision related? I just want to know that straight out of the gate.
HEDVIG: It is not.
BEN: Okay, good.
HEDVIG: Okay. Welcome listeners to Hedvig’s Surprise Segment. This one is something that I actually shamelessly stole from the podcast, Hey Riddle Riddle. This was a little quick segment…
BEN: [LAUGHS] So, it’s only a surprise to people who haven’t heard that podcast.
HEDVIG: But I’ve made new…
BEN: Oh, okay. Right. It’s not appropriation, it’s a modification.
HEDVIG: Yeah! I’m remixing. Okay.
DANIEL: I’m ready.
HEDVIG: In the popular podcast that I like a lot, Hey Riddle Riddle, the podcast host, JPC, has a quiz where… so what’s going to happen is, you two are going to compete against each other. I’m going to need some pen and paper.
BEN and DANIEL: Yes!
DANIEL: We are ready.
BEN: I love these games.
HEDVIG: Daniel. Ben
DANIEL: Do I need paper!
BEN: Yeah. Do we need pen and paper?
HEDVIG: No. Okay, we have a couple of different segments. The first one, I’m going to say a name, and then, if it is a clothes designer, you are going to say PIN. And if it’s a journalist, you’re going to say PEN.
BEN: What the f… Oh, sorry. A clothes designer is PIN and a journalist is PEN, that makes sense, because that’s the thing that they use to do the work that they do. Okay, good. I did not understand when you said clothes designer, and I thought you were using a highly specific linguistics term about how words work and I was like, “Oh, this is going to be an unfun game.”
HEDVIG: Stop going off on tangents on my special segment!
BEN: [LAUGHS] Okay, sorry. See, this is what you’ve got to do, Daniel. You got to crack the whip.
DANIEL: I’m not over there. If I were in your room, I would do it.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Okay, so you buzz in by saying your name.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Okay. Coco Chanel.
DANIEL: Daniel.
BEN: Pin. Oh, sorry. I did it wrong.
DANIEL: And I did first, anyway. Pin. And also, Nazi spy.
HEDVIG: Okay. Barbara Walters.
BEN: Ben.
DANIEL: Daniel.
HEDVIG: Ben first.
BEN: Pen.
HEDVIG: I’ve got to remember how D and B work on my sheet.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: The two letters I often confuse, but you’re now 1-1! Okay. Karl Lagerfeld.
DANIEL: Daniel.
BEN: Ben.
HEDVIG: Daniel was first.
DANIEL: Pin.
BEN: Very good.
HEDVIG: Christiane Amanpour.
BEN: Ben.
DANIEL: Daniel.
HEDVIG: Ben.
BEN: That is a pen.
HEDVIG: It is. Very good. Vivienne Westwood.
DANIEL: Daniel.
BEN: Ben.
DANIEL: Pin.
BEN: Who won?
HEDVIG: I think Daniel was first maybe, I’m not sure. Listeners, write in and complain but I think it was Daniel.
BEN: Look, we’ve got to remember as well, for me and Daniel, our voice comes through our own microphone to us in under a millisecond, and then the other person’s voice has to go to space and back! [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah. I’m looking at your videos as well, so I’m looking at mouth movements as well. I think it was Daniel, I’m pretty sure.
DANIEL: I’m pretty sure.
HEDVIG: Okay. That sort of worked out. For the next one, I’m going to get you to not say your names because I thought that was actually a bit boring. The contest is a vegetable or capitalism, and it’s CELERY or SALARY.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: So, you’re going to say things and we have to figure out if they’re a type of vegetable or something to do with capitalism?
HEDVIG: You’ve got it.
DANIEL: It’s lucky we don’t have these mergers.
BEN: Okay. [CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: Yeah, you haven’t had any of the mergers yet.
DANIEL: No.
BEN: So, it’s celery or salary.
DANIEL: Celery or salary.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah, very good.
BEN: We’re just going to say it.
DANIEL: We’re just going to say the CELERY or the SALARY?
HEDVIG: Yeah, and I’m going to just tell you, who’s right first, don’t worry about it. Okay. Aubergine.
DANIEL: Celery.
BEN: Celery.
HEDVIG: Factory.
DANIEL: Salary.
BEN: Salary.
HEDVIG: Surplus value.
DANIEL: Salary.
BEN: Salary.
HEDVIG: That was both. You’re gonna both to get a point. Jerusalem artichoke?
BEN: Celery.
DANIEL: Celery! Ben got it.
HEDVIG: Ben got it. Very good. Okay, you haven’t got that merger. Okay, next person, it’s either a dead famous person or a berry. And you’re going to say BURY or BERRY.
BEN: Oh, no, no. Hang on, hang on.
DANIEL: Oh, no. Hang on. No!
BEN: This is not going to work because in my accent, you’re not gonna be able to tell the difference! [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I do have this merger.
HEDVIG: I’m the final arbiter of this! Don’t worry about it. [LAUGHTER] Betty White.
DANIEL: Bury.
BEN: I didn’t hear it.
HEDVIG: Betty White.
DANIEL: Bury.
BEN: Bury.
HEDVIG: Okay, good. Goji.
DANIEL: Berry.
BEN: Berry. Just to be clear before you say anything else, the words I’m saying — I just want to make this clear — if it’s a kind of fruit, a small fruit, I say berry. If it is a famous person, I say bury.
DANIEL: Bury.
HEDVIG: You say whichever one you want and I judge.
BEN: Fuck! Okay.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: There you go. Barry White.
DANIEL: Bury.
BEN: Bury.
HEDVIG: Uh, I think that one went… I think Ben sounded more berry.
DANIEL: Argh.
HEDVIG: Chuck Berry.
DANIEL: Bury.
BEN: Bury.
HEDVIG: I think that went to Daniel.
BEN: Hang on. Am I supposed to be saying BURY here if it’s a person?
HEDVIG: Just go with it! Grape.
BEN and DANIEL: Berry.
HEDVIG: Okay. That was both of you, both get points. Good job! Okay, next one is child star or criminal. So, it’s COT, CAUGHT.
DANIEL: [LAUGHTER] Oh, no.
BEN: Hold on. I still don’t understand.
DANIEL: Child star.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Because a child sleeps in a cot.
BEN: Cot or caught, gotcha.
DANIEL: Or what was the other one? A criminal, because they get caught.
HEDVIG: There you go. Daniel’s on the ball.
DANIEL: I’m at a disadvantage here, okay? I just want it to be known.
HEDVIG: Okay, Ned Kelly.
DANIEL: Caught.
BEN: Caught.
HEDVIG: Ah, you both did it. Ma Barker.
DANIEL: Caught.
BEN: Caught.
HEDVIG: Drew Barrymore.
DANIEL: Cot.
BEN: Ca-cot-caught. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Macaulay Culkin.
DANIEL: Cot.
BEN: Cot.
HEDVIG: Winona Ryder.
BEN and DANIEL: Cot.
DANIEL: Dang it, that was a tie.
HEDVIG: That was a tie. Ironically, Winona Ryder is also known for…
DANIEL: Oh, yeah. [LAUGHS]
BEN: Oh, true.
HEDVIG: But I don’t think she’s been deemed a criminal because of it.
BEN: Right.
DANIEL: We’re just going to expunge that from her record. That’s just not…
HEDVIG: Yeah. Okay. Next one is either a bad man or a boat. So it’s DICK or DECK.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Are you going to manage that one, do you think?
DANIEL: I think so.
BEN: How do you… what? Some of those were so perilously close. And these are two completely different vowel sounds now.
DANIEL: Mergers are mergers.
HEDVIG: Okay, let’s hear Ben say them.
BEN: Okay. Dick, deck.
HEDVIG: Okay, pretty good. Daniel?
DANIEL: Dick and deck. Not a merger for me.
HEDVIG: Okay, they’re not a merger for you. Okay, Columbus.
BEN: Deck.
DANIEL: Dick!
BEN: Ah, boat. He was on a boat.
HEDVIG: Ben, I swore you said deck. He was on a boat. Yeah, that one is both. Fair enough. Titanic.
DANIEL: Deck.
BEN: Deck.
HEDVIG: Ah, Lady Penrhyn.
DANIEL: Deck.
BEN: Deck.
HEDVIG: Very good. For those who don’t know, it’s a boat in the Australia First Fleet of colonisers and comics. Harvey Weinstein.
DANIEL: Dick!
BEN: Dick.
HEDVIG: Good job. Queen Elizabeth the Second.
DANIEL: Deck.
BEN: Dick.
HEDVIG: So, that’s a boat?
DANIEL: It’s a boat.
BEN: Yeah, but at the same time, she… Oh, it has to be bad man. Yeah, okay.
DANIEL: One for me.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Scrooge.
DANIEL: Dick.
BEN: Dick.
HEDVIG: Good job. Okay. Next one is holy woman, Christmas, or marriage. So, it’s MARY, MERRY, MARRY.
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: Oh, Jesus.
DANIEL: Oh, man. You’re going to have a better time than I will on this one. Okay.
BEN: Hang on. Hang on. Hang on. First one is…
HEDVIG: Mary. Holy woman.
DANIEL and BEN: The holy woman is MARY.
HEDVIG: Christmas is MERRY.
DANIEL and BEN: Merry.
HEDVIG: And then, something to do with marriage is MARRY.
DANIEL and BEN: Marry.
BEN: So, Mary, merry, and marry, gotcha.
HEDVIG: Very good. Okay. Mother Teresa.
BEN: Mary.
DANIEL: Mary.
HEDVIG: Okay. Yule log.
DANIEL: Merry.
BEN: Merry.
HEDVIG: Oh, very good. Proposition 8.
DANIEL: Marry.
BEN: Marry.
HEDVIG: Jadwiga of Poland.
DANIEL: Mary.
BEN: [BLOWS RASPBERRY] I don’t know what that is.
HEDVIG: She was sanctified. So, that’s a holy woman. Nuptials.
BEN: Marry.
DANIEL: Marry. Dang it. Ben got that.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Scrooge.
DANIEL: Merry.
BEN: Merry.
HEDVIG: Yeah, merry. Okay, you’re almost done. We have the final round. You’re doing great.
DANIEL: How are we doing?
HEDVIG: I’m like sort of keeping track, like it’s not [LAUGHS] going well.
DANIEL: Oh, it’s a tie. Oh, good. It’s going to come down to the wire.
HEDVIG: Daniel, I think you’re winning! I think Daniel is winning. Okay, the next one is MEAT, MEET. So, it’s either a form of food or a software for chatting.
BEN: Oh, fuck! Geez. Okay.
DANIEL: Argh.
HEDVIG: Okay. Zoom.
DANIEL and BEN: Meet.
HEDVIG: ICQ.
DANIEL: Meet.
BEN: Meh-meet.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: What did you do?
BEN: I don’t know. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: What happened inside of you?
HEDVIG: Slack.
DANIEL: Meet.
BEN: Meet.
HEDVIG: Shank.
DANIEL: Meat! The A kind!
BEN: Meat!
HEDVIG: WeChat.
DANIEL: Meet.
BEN: Meet.
HEDVIG: Back fat.
BEN: Meat.
DANIEL: Me-at.
HEDVIG: Okay, all right. Thanks everyone for playing my fun game of Merger Quiz. I think Daniel won.
BEN: Oh, boo.
DANIEL: [EXCITINGLY] YES.
HEDVIG: You did good.
BEN: How can you win at that game? What does winning even look like? Especially in that last round.
DANIEL: And yet I feel diminished. [CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: Good job.
BEN: What was the point of that game? Was it to be silly?
HEDVIG: It was to have fun!
DANIEL: We know about mergers now. There were so many mergers.
BEN: Help me get this across to the listeners.
HEDVIG: What?
BEN: Other than sounding like fucking idiots, what is… [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: That was the main point.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: It worked!
BEN: What was the linguistic grist of what was going on there?
HEDVIG: It was a phonological merger-based way of making my two cohosts look like idiots.
BEN: I see.
DANIEL: That was great. I really enjoyed that. But tell me, I have the MEAT-MEET merger, but I feel like everybody has the MEAT-MEET merger. Am I wrong?
HEDVIG: Everyone has the MEAT-MEET merger.
BEN: Is it technically still a merger if the two words have always been pronounced the same?
HEDVIG: I don’t think they always have.
BEN: Oh.
DANIEL: No, probably not. I think a lot of people have the BERRY-BURY merger. I was really struggling. I was making my chin go down for BURY because you put somebody UNderground when you BURY.
BEN: Oh, that’s why I was fucking that up because I thought you had me saying Barry, a person’s name.
HEDVIG: No, it was dead people.
BEN: Right. Bury.
HEDVIG: And for funsies, one of them was Barry White, and one of them was Chuck Berry to just, like, screw with you.
DANIEL: Yeah, you just threw those in.
BEN: Yes. You’re a bad person. That’s what was happening.
DANIEL: Uh… dick!
BEN: [LAUGHS] I see what you did. Good.
DANIEL: I think I’m on a hair trigger now. Hedvig, thank you. I really enjoyed that segment, and I encourage you to do more.
BEN: Yeah, more fun things.
HEDVIG: Yeah. I encourage everyone to come up with silly games for me to play, if you have any other ones.
BEN: Ooh, standing challenge, make us look like idiots. As Hedvig just did with us two, you have, listener, valid listener, have a blank check to cook up a ridiculous thing that will just make us look as stupid as Daniel and I just looked.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yay.
HEDVIG: That’d be good. This is fun. Yeah. Okay, what’s up?
DANIEL: Let’s go on to question number three. Alison via email, hello@becauselanguage.com, says, “I was listening to the recent episode with Lauren Gawne and had a question about emoji use. Does emoji frequency also follow Zipf’s law the way that natural languages do? I love your podcast. You guys are awesome.”
BEN: Ooh, ooh. Can I try?
DANIEL: Go!
BEN: Okay. As the non-linguist, I want to have a red-hot crack at explaining Zipf’s law.
DANIEL: Awesome.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: That’s Z-I-P-F, everyone. That’s if you didn’t understand why Daniel was going like: Zipf’s.
DANIEL: I think he’s got this.
BEN: Zipf’s law is essentially a mathematical reality, like the Fibonacci sequence, right? It’s a thing where a number sequence manifests in linguistics, whereby whatever the most commonly used word in that language is — so for English, that’s probably THE…
DANIEL: It is.
BEN: …the next most common word… let’s say A, or I, or AN or whatever the fuck it is.
DANIEL: I think it’s OF.
BEN: Of. The next most common word will be used about half as much as that first word. So word number one is used a million times. Word number two, half a million. Word number three, quarter of a million, so on and so forth all the way down to like nonmeaningful words and numbers.
DANIEL: Coulkd I just correct one thing?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: The number three word is going to be used a third as often as number one.
BEN: Oh, so it’s all relating back to one. It’s not a halving of each previous thing.
DANIEL: Word number 10 is going to be a 10th as common.
HEDVIG: Wait, isn’t it a halving of each previous thing?
DANIEL: No, it’s not a halving. It’s like a power law, one over N, where N is the number. Okay, now I’m just going to confirm that.
HEDVIG: All right. I’m also going to confirm that.
BEN: For everyone listening at home, I’m watching two linguists, furiously…
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: And this is the contest that Daniel and I were just doing, but with nerdy linguist shit, who’s going to win?
HEDVIG: I know that if you log it, it almost becomes a straight line.
DANIEL: Yes, yes, that’s right. Okay, according to Wikipedia, the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word, three times as often as the third most frequent word, etc. Yeah, okay.
HEDVIG: That’s what Daniel said, yeah. So I’ve just been memorising it wrong. There’s another law as well. Ma-ma-mem’s law, which is an adjusted version of Zipf’s which tends to be… Mandelbrot’s law!
DANIEL: The second order Zipfian distribution.
HEDVIG: Yeah. That’s a different thing.
BEN: Did you guys say Mandelbrot, as in the Mandelbrot?
DANIEL: The fractal guy.
BEN: Yeah. Okay, cool.
HEDVIG: /ǁ/
DANIEL: I always wanted to go to Mandelbrot’s lectures and say, “I have three questions. And each of those has three sub-questions.”
BEN: No, stop it.
DANIEL: Um, so the thing about Zipf’s law is that it works not just for English — well, it’s purported to work not just for English — but for all human languages, even ones like Esperanto and artificial languages, but we don’t know why.
BEN: I love the ‘we don’t know why’ things.
DANIEL: So, Hedvig, I need you for this part because you’re the statistical analysis guru, and you can use R.
HEDVIG: That’s what I’m doing right now.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] What I did was, I handed Hedvig some data. I handed her the data from Emojitracker at a certain point in time, and it tracks real emoji use on Twitter. The most common one is Face With Tears of Joy. The next most common at number two is Heart. And I look at that, and I go: I don’t know, I guess the heart looks like about half as much. I guess the face crying looks about as a third as much, and so on and so forth.
BEN: But you want the numbers lady to really just figure it out?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Hedvig, could you crunch that for me?
HEDVIG: I am doing it right now. I’m also annoyed because you didn’t name the columns anything.
DANIEL: Oh, I’m sorry.
HEDVIG: But I have two columns called [onomatopoeia].
BEN: What? [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: This is why you’re the data science person.
HEDVIG: It’s fine.
DANIEL: Sorry. Just name them.
HEDVIG: Am I? Is that why?
BEN: Surely… Couldn’t we just take whatever the most common number was, and then just run the formula down next to it and see how close it matches?
HEDVIG: That’s actually what I was doing by hand first, and then I was like: Why am I doing this by hand, it doesn’t make any sense.
BEN: [CHUCKLES] Why do you think we have Excel?
HEDVIG: It’s a little bit hard to add a Zipfian thing, but I can tell you that their curves are a bit different. Oh, I added the same thing twice. [LAUGHS]
BEN: Now, I want to open this up and just see if I can beat Hedvig at this task!
DANIEL: Yeah, quick — learn R.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: What I’m trying to do now is to make a test, write an R script that does an official test of, maybe you’re not perfectly Zipfian, but are you sort of Zipfian?
BEN: Like, what’s your best fit here?
HEDVIG: Yeah. And that’s what I’m trying to do, and it’s going so-so.
[BOOP]
DANIEL: We’re back after a couple of days. Here’s where it stood. We were looking at the Zipfian thing, and we were using three different methods. Hedvig was using actual statistics with R, a program.
BEN: [LAUGHS] I don’t appreciate the way this has been front loaded. But yep, fair enough. Carry on.
DANIEL: I was using the eyeball method, which was very good. And Ben was…
BEN: And Ben was using a kind of ad hoc, hodgepodge halfway between eyeballing it… I was eyeballing it with Excel. That’s how I would describe it. I was eyeballing it with a spreadsheet.
DANIEL: That’s exactly right… What you were doing was, you were saying, “Okay, if the number two is half, what would that be? How far away is it?” And we had some numbers.
BEN: And the answer was super far away. So, I felt very good in saying [BLOWS RASPBERRY] not Zipfian. And now that you guys are back and have run the numbers, I can’t wait for you to tell me that I was completely in the right.
DANIEL: Well, my eyeballs said this doesn’t look Zipfian.
BEN: So Daniel and I will both be in the right. This is going to be great. Awesome. Can’t wait.
DANIEL: I thought if the emojis aren’t Zipfian, then it looks like the words aren’t Zipfian either. Have we disproved Zipf’s law? So Hedvig, you did some work. You did a lot of work, actually.
HEDVIG: Thank you. I didn’t do a lot of work but I thought it was fun. What I did was, so you gave me the frequencies of the top 20 emojis and top 20 words. And as my colleague and supervisor, Simon, pointed out, it’s emojis in among other text, right?
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: So, it’s not some sort of special emoji language that’s only emojis?
DANIEL: Which doesn’t exist.
HEDVIG: Exactly. So if we said that the emoji data does or does not follow Zipf, it’s as if we say that, like, proper nouns follow Zipf. It’s a part of a text, not… do you see what I mean? See what I’m going for?
DANIEL: Yes. I do see what you mean. So, this is…
HEDVIG: That’s a different beast.
DANIEL: It’d be like saying: is punctuation Zipfian?
HEDVIG: Exactly. Exactly! Exactly. It’s like saying, it’s punctuation Zipfian or is, like…
BEN: Is it terrible that now I really want to know if punctuation is Zipfian or not?
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah, maybe I should look that up as well.
BEN: Like, I’ve already moved on to the next thing. Look, I’m going to be honest. I’m not liking where this is going. My spidey sense is tingling. I don’t like being wrong about things.
DANIEL: Yeah. I think we’re going to be defeated here.
BEN: I’m feeling wrongness heading squarely in my direction.
HEDVIG: Well, the short answer is that you’re probably wrong.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: Don’t. No.
HEDVIG: The long answer is that…
BEN: Don’t mollycoddle me. It’s okay. I don’t need sugar around the bit of medicine. I am wrong.
HEDVIG: No, but the long answer is that I found out that to test this properly, I need to do more work, even more work. But…
BEN: Wait, so you’re not happy with your answer that you have, is that what you’re saying?
HEDVIG: What I did was, I normalised them, so the only thing I cared about was the relative distance between the points, the ranks, so the first and the second or whatever. I normalised them so that they all were divided by the highest value so that they are comparable. Then, I made like, what would be the perfect Zipfian score given this range? Just like one, and then divided by two, divided by three.
BEN: Yeah. What is true Zipf?
DANIEL: One and then a half and then a third.
HEDVIG: Yeah, the true Zipf. But what you should be doing is you should simulate the Zipfian data around the true Zipfian. And then, you should do a power law test with this package called Power Law that uses a bunch of R structures that are really complicated. Anyway, but the simple correlation, if you just compare the emoji data and the word data to this true, super, perfect, ideal non-existent Zipfian curve, then the simple correlation, just if you just test: are these points correlated, is really, really high.
DANIEL: Really?
BEN: It feels to me like you’re saying, “Oh, I need to do more work.” But what you’ve described is actually a bit of a workaround that academics use to judge…
HEDVIG: Yeah, that’s a little bit true.
BEN: …real Zipfian in the real world, but what you’re saying is: even if you use ridiculous idealised Zipfian distribution, it still adheres super strongly to that.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it does. And also there’s like… so I just ran a simple, it is called a Pearson correlation test, which is super simple, but there are more fancy things you can do that are better. But the correlation is just so high. I mean, between Zipf and emoji, the correlation ranges between one and zero.
DANIEL: Yeah. So zero is unrelated. One is perfect.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Usually, people say if something is above 0.7, they say like, “Oo, that’s a strong correlation.”
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: This is 1.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] You mean like 0.99 repeated?
BEN: Yeah. You’re saying, is it a true 1 or is it very close to 1?
HEDVIG: It’s not a full 1, but the computer has rounded it up to 1.
DANIEL: Yeah, okay.
BEN: Right. Yeah, but Excel… Argh, I’ve got to be honest, Excel is pretty liberal with its rounding, I find. Anyway.
DANIEL: That’s pretty strong.
HEDVIG: Right. Well, 0.99 is also really high.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: Yeah. Look. I’m not at all trying to walk it back. I think mostly, I’m just worried, if it’s a true actual 1, that suggests to me that something’s gone wrong. Right?
HEDVIG: It’s not true actually.
BEN: Nothing could be perfect.
HEDVIG: Yeah, no no no, it’s like… yeah.
BEN: I’m just as incredibly wrong as it’s possible [crosstalk] basically.
DANIEL: Yeah. Me too.
HEDVIG: Well…
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: What about words? Did the words show up really strong?
HEDVIG: Words is also… it’s 0.99. Yeah, it’s really, really high.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: So, there you go.
HEDVIG: But the thing is this is me doing a basic… anyone who does stats for a living is going to contact me and say like, “You should actually test it and this is…”
BEN: Yeah. I’ve noticed that you were equivocating like a mother bitch.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: There are fancier ways of testing this. They’re so correlated that I’m like, “Why go through the trouble?”
DANIEL: Why even go farther? Yeah. Okay, so it looks like the distribution of emoji that I sent to our team from Emoji Tracker is extremely Zipfian and probably would be if you tested it in different ways. And the top 20 words of English language have a Zipfian distribution as well.
HEDVIG: And if you enjoyed that and if you like R, I also put up the R script online, so you can run it yourself and tell me how to improve it if you want.
BEN: Nerrrrrds.
DANIEL: We will be dropping a link to that on the episode page for this episode, and that’s becauselanguage.com. Thanks, Hedvig. Thanks, Ben.
[BOOP]
Now to our last question. This one’s from Nikoli. And Nikoli used a new thing that we’ve got, thanks to our friend and listener, Aaron, who sent me an email hello@becauselanguage.com. It’s called SpeakPipe.
DANIEL: What is SpeakPipe?
BEN: SpeakPipe lets people record messages, questions, and love messages for us.
BEN: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Oh.
BEN: Okay, I get that. That’s fun. Ooh, can we start playing people things?
DANIEL: Yes, we are. That’s what we’re doing.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Nikoli recorded us a message for inclusion in this show. And here it is.
NIKOLI: If I study linguistics, the science of language, am I a STEM major?
BEN: Yes.
DANIEL: Oh, we get a yes.
HEDVIG: What country are you from?
BEN: Yeah, good question.
DANIEL: Oh, it matters?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay. Why does it matter? Because STEM is science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Basically, anything that isn’t people.
HEDVIG: Um. No, that’s not true. Because in some places, the word SCIENCE includes anything that practices the scientific method including sociology, psychology and anthropology. And in some countries, there’s two words: science, one meaning everyone who practices of scientific method and one word meaning natural sciences only. This is a point of annoyance for me and has been for a very long time, because, for example, when I was in Sweden, I was doing this outreach work for an organisation called Young Researchers, and they would sometimes support linguistic things and sometimes not depending on their interpretation of what a researcher was, which was very annoying. And when it came to Australia, I found that there was a group called Youth Science Foundation, I think, they’re supported by Rotary, and they actively invited linguists to events, which was very nice. I was like, “Well, I don’t even have to ask if I’m invited!” They asked us! I was like, “Oh, this is a warm feeling!”
BEN: I would definitely, personally adhere to the scientific method thing myself. Philosophy, god bless their little cotton socks, no. Linguistics, yes, because scientific method. It doesn’t mean that everything that doesn’t use the scientific method is dumb or bad or anything. It just means that they’re like… the arts isn’t in STEM. Cool. I’m down with that. That’s fine.
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly.
BEN: Linguistics should be because it’s science.
HEDVIG: Yeah. So, it depends a bit. I actually have changed Swedish politics once. Have I told you about this?
BEN: You have not.
DANIEL: You changed Swedish politics?
HEDVIG: Well, the Ministry of Education is handing out a grant for a contest for high school students in science. And they said they weren’t going to hand it out for the Linguistics Olympiad, because their regulations from the government said that it was for the Natural Sciences and Mathematics specifically. I wrote to various people, I wrote to some admin people who were like, “Yes, this is what it says, you can’t get money. Bye.” And then I wrote to some politicians, and I got through to the Director of the Ministry, and she was like, “Oh, that’s no good. You’re right. Yeah.” In Swedish, this is very easy, because you just need to drop the word NATURE. So, you change it from Natural Sciences to Sciences. And then, we got it!
DANIEL: Nice! I noticed also that there’s an article in UCLA, University of California at Los Angeles, Correct Academic Codes for Five Linguistic Majors for STEM classifications. It talks about how at UCLA, they changed four majors: Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Linguistics and Anthropology, and Linguistics and Computer Science. And they have given it the cognitive science general code, which makes it indeed STEM.
BEN: Well, my brain goes: let’s think about the linguists who are working on natural language processing, right? How you could possibly conceive of that as anything other than hard science [CHUCKLES] is pretty baffling to me.
HEDVIG: But the thing that our listener asked, Nikoli asked, “I’m studying linguistics, the science of language,” like we say at the beginning of the show, “Am I a STEM major?” By the way, you’re using the word major makes me think you’re an American, because…
DANIEL: Ah.
BEN: Or at least studying in an American system. Might not be American.
HEDVIG: Yeah, at least studying in an American system. In many American places, linguistics isn’t counted among the sciences, because they only count natural sciences. I also think we should abolish the word HARD SCIENCES. I hate that term.
DANIEL: I don’t like that disctinction at all.
HEDVIG: I don’t understand it and I don’t like it.
DANIEL: Okay, so it sounds like the answer is…
BEN: Maybe?
DANIEL: …methodologically, yes, you’re definitely a STEM major. As far as your organisation is concerned, they might consider you a STEM major, and many do, but they might not consider you as such. And I think we could probably agree that there are some parts of linguistics that seem very STEM-y and others that don’t seem very STEM-y.
BEN: Yeah, okay, I’d pay that. Yeah, for sure.
HEDVIG: That’s fine.
DANIEL: Awesome. That’s a great question. Thanks, Nikoli. And thank you for using SpeakPipe. If you’d like to use SpeakPipe to give us a message or a question or a comment, we’ll play the good ones, just head over to our website [HEDVIG LAUGHS] becauselanguage.com.
HEDVIG: Play the good ones. That’s nice.
DANIEL: [RADIO ANNOUNCER VOICE] becauselanguage.com. [REGULAR VOICE] Both of you, thank you so much for working so hard to answer these questions. I really enjoyed them. Thanks to our listeners for sending them. It’s really great to have you, you keep us going. And if you would like to record a question, we’ve got SpeakPipe on our website or you can just send us a regular email. But I feel I’m protruding into our reads, so I’m going to stop.
BEN: Yeah, get off my fucking lawn, Daniel.
DANIEL: Sorry, man.
[END THEME]
BEN: Hey, if you want to say anything or to ask us a question or just get involved in the show in any way, you can get in touch with us in a lot of different ways. We are @becauselangpod on every conceivable platform under the sun. Our email is hello@becauselanguage.com. Daniel already said it, but I’m saying it way better. If you want to help the show, you can. You can send us show ideas which we love, like articles, stories, and like Words the Week suggestions, and recommend us to friends and strangers. It is just such a wonderful thing to do. I know I love it when someone, for instance, Hedvig, suggested to me that I should listen to The Signal, a podcast about Australian politics, which sadly since then has subsequently stopped.
HEDVIG: I know!
DANIEL: Aw.
BEN: But when it was going, it was rock solid, and it broke me out of my little, weird: ~uh I don’t really like Australian podcasts~. So, I loved that Hedvig did it for me, and you should do it for your friends with this show if you think it is up their alley, because it’s so far up their alley, it’s going to get stuck.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS]
BEN: Dustin from Sandman Stories is a person who does this at such a furious pace, you would think he is some kind of recommendation engine.
DANIEL: He could be.
BEN: And of course, if you really, really, really, really want to, you could always do what I just said to complete strangers, like just total random, nonpeople you don’t know, and you do that by leaving us a review in the places where you can review podcasts.
HEDVIG: And this is a patron special, isn’t it? Yes. Which means, I get to talk to our patrons on Patreon directly, and I just want to say thank you for all that you do, and we really appreciate you. It’s great to have you with us for another year. It gives us a lot of hope and happiness to know that you’re there rooting for us and wanting to listen to us. One of the great things that you make it possible for us to do is to have a show without ads and also to make transcripts so our show is readable. And a shoutout to the entire team at SpeechDocs for doing a great job on our transcripts and also, I think, has set up a Twitter rule to automatically like every tweet I tweet.
DANIEL: I think so.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: It’s hilarious.
BEN: Or possibly just doing it manually.
HEDVIG: I know because sometimes I think they miss once, and I’m like, “Wait, are they manually doing this? Or…” Anyway.
DANIEL: I think that they started listening to us and they became entranced by our voices.
BEN: Ensorcelled.
DANIEL: And then, they became fans, so shoutout to them.
HEDVIG: All my tweets, including random tweets in Swedish get at least one like. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: From SpeechDocs.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] Yes. I kind of like it. It’s kind of sweet.
BEN: [HEDVIG VOICE] I’m important!
HEDVIG: A special shoutout to all of our top patrons and they are, Dustin, Termy, Chris B, Matt, Whitney, Chris L, Helen, Udo, Jack, PharaohKatt, Lord Mortis, Elías, Larry, Kristofer, Andy, James, Nigel, Meredith, Kate, Nasrin, Ayesha, sneakylemur, Moe, Steele, Andrew, Manú, James, Rodger, Rhian, Colleen, glyph, Ignacio, Sonic Snejhog…
BEN: Ha!
HEDVIG: …Kevin, Jeff, Andy from Logophilius, Samantha, zo, Kathy, Rachel, Cheyenne, Felicity, Amir, Andy, and new for this episode, O’Tim. Also, big thanks to our wonderful Kate B who have not contributed via Patreon, but with a really big one-time donation, which was very sweet on our blog becauselanguage.com. And thanks to Lana, our newest patron at the Listener level.
DANIEL: Our theme music has been written and performed by a human. [LAUGHTER] The human’s name is Drew Krapljanov. He’s a member of Ryan Beno and of Didion’s Bible. Thank you for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
[BEAT]
BEN: It feels like Drew got in touch with Daniel as a robot disguised as a human and was like, “Hey, I think they might be onto me. So, can you just really sell that I am a real person?”
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS]
BEN: Daniel is like, “Our music who’s totally made by a real human man.”
HEDVIG: Not an AI at all.
DANIEL: Totally not robots.
[BOOP]
BEN: Do you know my favorite ‘we don’t know why’ that I discovered recently?
HEDVIG: No, I don’t know it.
DANIEL: What.
BEN: That was a silly thing for me to ask. Hey, guys, do you want to hear my favorite ‘we don’t know why’ that I’ve come across recently? It goes like this. You know how when you play computer games, three-dimensional computer games, computer games where you have to navigate a 3D environment, some people when they play those computer games, and they’re using a controller, need to invert the Y axis to navigate and to use the camera and stuff, and other people, like myself, are not insane psychopaths and just use it normally? We have no idea why that happens. We have no idea why some people need to invert the camera controls and other people don’t. How do we not know that? That’s crazy.
Some people need to invert it so that up is down, down is up. Otherwise, they’re just like: Brrrp! Doesn’t work. So, my partner, who has been on the show before, Ayesha, we play a lot of video games together. One of the great frustrations when we’re playing a single-player game where we pass controller the back and forth is that we have to invert the camera back and forth each time. And I don’t know why. It’s crazy. Anyway, sorry. Digression. Carry on.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]