Can dictionaries create a more fair world? One language observer sees that dictionaries, far from being a neutral chronicle of language, are capable of promoting social justice.
Daniel speaks with Dr Rebecca Shapiro, author of Fixing Babel: An Historical Anthology of Applied English Lexicography.
Listen to this episode
Bonus video
Patreon supporters
Huge thanks to all our great patrons! Your support means a lot to us. Special thanks to:
- Dustin
- Termy
- Chris B
- Matt
- Whitney
- Chris L
- Helen
- Udo
- Jack
- PharaohKatt
- LordMortis
- Elías
- Larry
- Kristofer
- Andy
- James
- Nigel
- Meredith
- Kate
- Nasrin
- Ayesha
- sneakylemur
- Moe
- Steele
- Andrew
- Manú
- James
- Rodger
- Rhian
- Colleen
- glyph
- Ignacio
- Sonic Snejhog
- Kevin
- Jeff
- Andy from Logophilius
- Samantha
- zo
- Kathy
- Rachel
- Cheyenne
- Felicity
- Amir
- Andy
- O Tim
and the wonderful Kate B who contributed not via Patreon, but with the one-time donation button on our blog, becauselanguage.com
Also thanks to David, our newest patron at the Friend level.
Become a Patreon supporter yourself and get access to bonus episodes and more!
Become a Patron!Show notes
Frank Wilhoit: Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288
Researchers Find Dogs Can Distinguish Between Languages
https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/researchers-find-dogs-can-distinguish-between-languages/6387635.html
Dogs Can Tell the Difference Between Human Languages | Smithsonian Magazine
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dogs-can-tell-the-difference-between-human-languages-180979383/
Dogs May Understand Even More Than We Thought | Scientific American
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dogs-may-understand-even-more-than-we-thought/
What’s in a Name? Why Turkey Is Now Türkiye | Afar
https://www.afar.com/magazine/why-turkey-is-now-turkiye
Turkey No More: Erdogan Changes Country’s Name to “Turkiye”
https://greekreporter.com/2022/01/19/turkey-name-change-turkiye-erdogan/
Why Turkey is now ‘Turkiye’, and why that matters
https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/why-turkey-is-now-turkiye-and-why-that-matters-52602
‘Rough’ words feature a trill sound in languages around the globe – study | EurekaAlert
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/940817
Trilled /r/ is associated with roughness, linking sound and touch across spoken languages
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-04311-7
Plato’s Cratylus | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-cratylus/
asperity | Merriam-Webster
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/asperity
Absurdle
https://qntm.org/absurdle
Call for Papers | Just Words: Dictionaries and Social Justice
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2021/03/08/just-words-dictionaries-and-social-justice
You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf from Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia | Publishers Weekly
https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-8027-7752-2
Definitions of “Coolie hair” | Jamaican Patwah
https://jamaicanpatwah.com/term/Coolie-hair/946
no because
crumb maiden
Crumb Maiden | Urban Dictionary
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Crumb+Maiden
Dear white people: Stop using the term ‘Uncle Tom’ | Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/dear-white-people-stop-using-the-term-uncle-tom/2018/11/15/8a68e9c0-e84e-11e8-a939-9469f1166f9d_story.html
hate donation
Desire paths: the illicit trails that defy the urban planners | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/oct/05/desire-paths-the-illicit-trails-that-defy-the-urban-planners
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
Hedvig: Who got a notification? Blump. Was it me? Oh, sorry, it was me!
[laughter]
Hedvig: Shut up. That means that only I heard it as well.
Daniel: Yes.
Hedvig: I thought it was you guys.
Ben: Carton of beer!
Hedvig: I’ve closed the thing.
[Because Language theme]
Daniel: Hello, and welcome to Because Language. A show about linguistics, the science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. We have Mr Ben Ainslie.
Ben: That’s what I get this week?
Daniel: And–
Ben: We’ve had years of like funny quips.
Hedvig: I like this.
Daniel: I just thought, let’s just get straight into it.
Ben: Okay.
Daniel: And Dr Hedvig Skirgård.
Hedvig: That is correct. That is me. Thank you very much for welcoming us.
Ben: You named us both.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: That’s who we’ve got on the show. That’s what’s going on. I’ve got these two.
Ben: This is weird. I don’t know how I feel about this. Every week I complain about the weird lead-in, and now that it’s not there, I feel its absence, like a pair of old socks that I resented, but now I want them back.
Daniel: That’s right. How does it feel? [laughs]
Ben: Bad? It feels bad. I don’t care for this but I will soldier on. Somehow, I will deal with the crushing grief this absence in my life, and we will soldier on.
Daniel: You know what I should do? I should get our listeners to write the intros for you.
Ben: Oh, god– [crosstalk]
Hedvig: Ooh, that’s cute.
Daniel: Oh my gosh.
Ben: Please, no.
Daniel: This opens up new frontiers. Okay, listeners, please write intros for these two and send them to us, hello@becauselanguage.com.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Now that we’re past that, let me just ask you both a serious question. How do you think dictionaries could make the world a better place?
Ben: Ooh, okay. Obvious answer, straight out of the gate is dictionaries for endangered languages, obviously.
Daniel: Okay, good. I like.
Ben: Right. Dictionary of Nunga, the indigenous language from the part of Australia where Daniel and I live, absolutely fantastic. Definitely making the world a better place. But was that the question as it was intended? Or, are you thinking more sort of like mainstream languages?
Daniel: We’re brainstorming at this point. There’s no wrong answers.
Hedvig: The other thing, I guess, is to do their job in terms of describing how language is used and updating it correctly when meanings change.
Daniel: Okay, cool.
Hedvig: And communicate clearly what they’re doing because they can’t not have derogatory terms in there but they can say, “This is a derogatory term.”
Ben: I guess my brain goes inherent value as not right now, but as a historical text. So, if you get a dictionary from 1910 or 1840, or whatever, that’s a very valuable thing.
Daniel: Chronicling the past.
Hedvig: I get confused because in Sweden, we have two things. We have the Swedish Academy word list and the Swedish etymological dictionary, and they’re different objects. The word list just tells you how something is spelled and how it’s conjugated, and maybe a very short definition. The Swedish etymological dictionary gives you like so much content, you can’t even handle it.
Daniel: Wow.
Ben: You don’t even know, bro. You don’t even know.
Daniel: You can’t handle this much dictionary.
Hedvig: Also, they’re moving through the alphabet. They haven’t finished the alphabet yet.
Daniel: Well, get on it.
Hedvig: They’re scheduled to finish it in a couple of years. And then, apparently their funding is going to end and they’re not going to start over. Which means the entries from A are hella out of date.
Daniel: Oh, my gosh.
Ben: [chuckles]
Daniel: From when?
Hedvig: Late 1700s, 1800s. They’re old.
Daniel: Oh, my goodness. Wow, it’s like–
Ben: I was expecting 70s at the outside.
Hedvig: No, no, no. This is one of the longest running- I can look up more information about until you–.
Ben: Hang on. First of all, yes, please. Second of all, because I’ve got questions that you probably only can answer. Second of all, here’s one of them. Why would they start at A in 17-whatever the fuck, and just go, “I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to work word by word forward.” Imagine if all the other dictionaries did that and they were all incomplete, so that just like X, Y and Z in every language for just the fucking wild west of words that no one had any bearing on.
Daniel: Yeah. The X, Y Z are all the new words, all the technical words that we have, and A and B would be like ancient.
Ben: Fossils. That’s why it’s akimbo.
Hedvig: I think it was sometime in the 80s, they decided that V and W could be one chapter.
Daniel: [chuckles] Sure. Why not?
Hedvig: Instead of after each other or something like that. There was something with V and W. And it set them back a couple of years because they just had to go through and manually figure it out.
Daniel: All right.
Ben: Good Lord.
Daniel: So, the V and W words were intermixed because of alphabetization.
Ben: All right, Daniel, why are you asking? Why are you getting us to brainstorm the good of a dictionary?
Daniel: On this episode, I’m going to be chatting with Dr. Rebecca Shapiro, the originator of a session at the latest conference of the Modern Language Association. The name of the session was, just think about this, it’s called Just Words: Dictionaries and Social Justice. When I saw that, I thought, “Wait a minute, can dictionaries contribute to social justice?’ I guess we have seen some cases where it mattered.
Ben: They tend more often than not to be used as the rulebooks. What we know about rulebooks is that when it comes to social justice, they tend to get used against one kind of person and not against another kind of person. I heard a great phrase the other day, how did it go? Populations in power want– Ah, I can’t remember. Basically, they want certain groups of people to be bound by the rules, and they want exceptions to the rules for themselves or something like that.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Yeah, I’ve heard that quote before. It was about the law. There are some people whom the law protects, but does not bind.
Ben: Yes, that’s it.
Daniel: And then, there are some people whom the law binds but does not protect. And I love that quote. Such a good quote. If you hadn’t said it, I was going to say, “I also have a quote, and it’s this,” but you picked the same one as I did.
Ben: Yay.
Hedvig: Well, one thing dictionary writers could do is also communicate that they are not a definite rulebook that people should use to hit each other over the head with, right?
Ben: That’s good one. I like that.
Daniel: Yeah, that’s true. With Dr. Shapiro, I had a bit of a discussion about to what extent do dictionaries act as the rulebook and can that be leveraged? Because people do think that the dictionaries are these rulebooks that validate language, and maybe we should own it, and say, “You know what? We have a place to improve things here a little bit.” So, that’s coming up.
Ben: Oh, that’s exciting. I’m looking forward to that.
Daniel: Also, our latest episode was a bonus episode for patrons. We talked about the American Dialect Society Words of the Year for 2021. We answered some mailbag questions. Hedvig sprang a surprise segment on us. That was great.
Hedvig: Yes.
Ben: We will not mention. We will not mention.
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: I’m trying to think of more segments like this. Someone pointed out on TikTok that I stole it from [unintelligible [00:07:40] Moms. I thought I stole it from another podcast.
[laughter]
Hedvig: Apparently, more than one podcast does this, and I do appreciate that someone was listening to [unintelligible [00:07:51] Moms. It’s very funny.
Daniel: It was our friend Pontos who pointed that out. And, yes, thanks very much. That was fun. It was a great game. You can see a snippet of us playing it on our TikTok account, and why not give us a follow, we’re BecauseLangPod. Anyway, if you’re a patron, you can hear these bonus episodes, the minute they come out, instead of waiting until I remember to make them public some months later.
Ben: [laughs]
Hedvig: I like transparency.
Daniel: Go to Patreon and support the show. Hang out with us on Discord, give us show ideas, get goodies. It’s great. patreon.com/becauselangpod and thanks to all of our patrons.
Ben: But let’s do the news.
Daniel: All right. This one was suggested to us by @researchelf on Twitter, a good friend of ours. “We always like to hear what doggos can do with language.”
Ben: They are so charming. [crosstalk]
Daniel: They are. In fact, on occasion, and we’ve talked about experiments where this has happened, you can train them to lie very still in an MRI machine, so that you can give them language input and see what their brains do.
Ben: I’m genuinely amazed to hear that-
Hedvig: Oh, my God.
Ben: -that you can get a dog to be that still because you need him to be real still.
Hedvig: Yeah. Also, not just for like, “We think you have a brain tumor, we’re going to check,” but giving them stimuli, and they don’t go like, [in an excited voice] “Oh, someone gave me stimuli. Exciting. I’m going to get bunch of treats.”
Ben: Yeah.
Daniel: It’s no dog I know.
Ben: Yeah. [chuckles] I’ve never encountered a dog like this.
Daniel: But this word comes from Laura V. Cuaya, and a team from Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest. What they wanted to do was to see if dogs’ brains acted differently to different languages. They played them translations of Little Prince in Spanish and Hungarian.
Hedvig: Pretend that they were Hungarian dogs.
Daniel: They were either dogs that were used to Spanish or dogs that were used to Hungarian. They’d heard one of the two. They also mashed up the Spanish and mashed up the Hungarian, not between each other, so that there would be nonsense sounds, just to see–
Ben: Oh, so like a mishmash Spungarian.
Daniel: Not a Spungarian. It wouldn’t have been Hungrish, but it would have been mixed-up Spanish or mixed-up Hungarian.
Ben: Oh, I see.
Hedvig: Oh.
Ben: In the same way that we do with our own young offspring.
Hedvig: Yeah. Or that famous comedy video on YouTube called What English Sounds to Other People?, a couple arguing like that.
Daniel: [unintelligible [00:10:18].
Ben: [laughs]
Daniel: Can’t get enough of that one. Take a guess, did the dogs respond the same to all human language or were they able to detect a difference?
Ben: I figure because we’re talking about it, they detected a difference.
Daniel: Maybe.
Hedvig: Were the voices the owners? No. The voices were random other people?
Daniel: No. The voices were different people.
Hedvig: Right. So, that makes a difference, right?
Daniel: It does.
Hedvig: Because then they’re not like listening to their owner’s voice versus not their owner’s voice. Okay. All right. They’re all non-owners’ voices.
Daniel: So, that removes that variable.
Hedvig: Yeah, cool.
Daniel: They found that the two languages triggered different responses in the auditory cortexes of the dogs. There were different patterns of activity between the Spanish and the Hungarian, and the scrambled versions. So, not only could they tell the difference between Spanish and Hungarian, they could also tell the difference between real language and smooshed-up language.
Hedvig: Good.
Ben: Hmm.
Daniel: What impresses me is that pattern recognition is so subtle. They’re very good at hearing the kinds of patterns that happen in a language. When those patterns are broken, they notice, or at least their brains do.
Ben: We’re saying dogs, by the way.
Daniel: We’re saying dogs.
Ben: Yeah.
[chuckles]
Daniel: I thought that was cool. Dogs are clever, little blighters, and they’re able to recognize patterns within language, and they notice when they’re broken.
Ben: I guess the question I would have then, the research question as a non-linguist that I would want answered because who doesn’t want my opinion, would be let’s say speaking Hungarian to a dog, at what point of differentiation from Hungarian does it trigger different areas?
Hedvig: Right. If you speak Estonian.
Ben: Yeah. If we establish, for instance, that basically, for all of us, complex sounds get processed in lots of different places, and it’s unlikely that those places are going to double up a whole lot. What dictates when you do get a pattern match in the brain activity? That would be a really interesting question to answer, I think.
Daniel: Sounds like future work.
Ben: Like would Spanish and Portuguese be as eminently different or would that be similar enough? Similar with English and Dutch, would English and Dutch come across really similar in a dog’s brain?
Daniel: Hmm.
Hedvig: Also, does a man, a child, a woman’s voice speaking Hungarian to a different thing? What is the thing that the dogs are trying to do with this pattern recognition? They’re trying to recognize who’s part of their herd, who’s part of their gang and who isn’t, right?
Daniel: I think that is what’s going on. Dogs have a deep need for affection and affiliation. When you combine that with really powerful pattern recognition software, what you get is a critter that can recognize patterns in the language that is heard and distinguish them from patterns that it hasn’t heard. I think that’s what’s driving the effect we’re seeing here. Let’s go on to our next story. This one was suggested by [unintelligible 00:13:28] on our Discord server. It’s about the nation of Turkey.
Hedvig: Yes.
Ben: Hello, Turkey.
Hedvig: I saw this. It’s a trend.
Daniel: You mean the trend of nations remaining themselves?
Hedvig: Wanting to be call their names, yeah. There’s a number of things have happened in last couple of years. More and more people are saying Myanmar for Burma. The Czech Republic, I understand what’s to be known as Czechia, which makes sense for all of the other European languages around. We don’t say Czech Republic. What’s another one?
Daniel: Eswatini instead of Swaziland.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: The Ivory Coast wanting to be called by its French name.
Hedvig: Oh, Cote d’Ivoire.
Daniel: Cote d’Ivoire.
Ben: Cote d’Ivoire. I also came across a TikTok creator today who talked about the facts that the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo mostly get called by Congo. One capital name, Congo, the other capital name–
Hedvig: [crosstalk] -Kinshasa. Yeah.
Daniel: Oh, okay.
Hedvig: Yeah, I think I grew up with that. And I get really confused with the Congos. Anyway, so as far as I understand, this trend or this pattern has also reached Turkey.
Ben: Let me dig into the cobwebby bits of my brain. Turkey’s name in Turkish is like– is it kind of Turkey sounding?
Daniel: Yeah.
Hedvig: It’s very Turkey sounding.
Daniel: It’s very Turkey sounding. But it’s spelled T-U with umlauts, R-K-I-Y-E, and it sounds something like Türkiye or Türkiye. This comes from Türkiye’s President Erdoğan, communicate that he issued says, “The word ‘Türkiye’ represents and expresses the culture, civilization and values of the Turkish nation in the best way. This is also going to affect the way that exports get labeled and the way that other governments refer to the country.” So, why would they be doing this, any indications?
Hedvig: Well, I don’t know how much Australians know about Erdoğan.
Daniel: He’s not a great guy.
Hedvig: He’s a fairly controversial figure. Yes.
Ben: He’s a dictator in the iron fist in the velvet glove style dictator, not like a crazy, maniacal despot, but also not really a Democratic leader in the way a lot of people consider– [crosstalk]
Hedvig: Yeah. We’re not a politics podcast, and there’s a lot to dig in there. But I suspect if I’m a bit cynical, that he largely has campaigned for some sort of own gain that has to do with drumming up support for the Turkish nation state as a sort of monoculture.
Ben: Right. Kind of like fascistic, right wing, nationalism type thing that seems to be working pretty well for a lot of world leaders all over the place these days.
Hedvig: Yeah. But to be fair, the name change is not that big. Turkey to Türkiye, no one’s going to look at products that are labeled ‘Made in Türkiye’ and be like, “I have no idea where that is.”
Ben: Yeah.
Daniel: I’m seeing a few reasons that are going around for this. One, it could be part of a naming scheme that seems more natural for Turkish people. It could be a signal that they don’t want to accommodate to the English-speaking world as much as they have. Some people actually think that it’s because of the name of the bird, which has a negative connotation. As we know, turkeys are kind of dense.
Ben: Yeah, like, “Oh, you being a bit of a turkey.”
Daniel: Yeah, exactly. “Hey, turkey.
Hedvig: I don’t think they’re going to get away from that with this new name. It’s really similar.
Daniel: It’s not Burma and Myanmar.
Hedvig: I don’t like those kinds of jokes. It’s like when people say like, “Oh, you’re from Hungary, you must be hungry all the time.”
Daniel: Argh.
Hedvig: Yeah. [crosstalk]
Ben: It is a pretty low form of year 2 humor.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: Especially when turkeys are not native to Türkiye. They’re native to North America. The reason they’re called turkeys is because there was a bird that came from the Ottoman Empire, the guineafowl, so people called them turkeys. And then, when the North American turkey came along, they sort of said, “Well, that looks kind of like the guineafowl.” So, they transplanted the name onto the turkey.
Ben: Is that also related to where the three different guineas in Africa and the one Guinea–?
Hedvig: There’s more than three.
Daniel: There are a lot of Guineas.
Hedvig: I watched a video about this recently. It’s madness.
Ben: I thought there was three–
Hedvig: No, because there’s Guiana as well in–
Ben: There’s three countries, right?
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: There’s three Guinea countries.
Hedvig: Yes. But then, there’s Papua New Guinea, which is also related to this Guinea.
Ben: Yes.
Hedvig: And Guiana is not related, I think. But it’s all to do with, I think a Berber word for people of West Africa. There’s a great a video about it, I can share it.
Ben: So, it’s not to do with the guineafowl, or is it to do with guineafowl? Is guineafowl [crosstalk] same?
Hedvig: No, it is probably, because they are from there or have some sort of connection or something.
Ben: Right. Okay.
Daniel: Can I just say that I ran across a connection that blew my mind, but had a connection to Türkiye? There’s a certain color, can you name the color?
Ben: That is related to Turkey?
Hedvig: Like Ottoman something?
Ben: Turkish blue?
Daniel: Turquoise.
Ben and Hedvig: Oh.
Daniel: So called because there were these greenish-blue precious stones that came from Turkistan or one of the Turkic empires. In French, they were called turquoise.
Ben: Wow.
Daniel: I had never made that connection between Türkiye and the color ‘turquoise’, isn’t that great?
Ben: That is an interesting connection that I’m very glad you made be aware of. Turkey has wanted to be cold Türkiye, and is going to be called Türkiye? Is that what we’re sort of thinking here?
Daniel: They’re sort of eyeballing it. It might be off in the future, but some things have already started.
Ben: Right. It doesn’t feel as definitive as the Burma-Myanmar one, does it?
Daniel: It’s not a huge change. It’s subtle.
Ben: It’s not just that the Burma-Myanmar one seemed to obviously be quite different, but that seems– usually when countries do a name thing like this– not usually, sometimes when countries do anything like this, it’s accompanied by some sort of significant political, social sort of change-up–
Daniel: It’s a big deal.
Hedvig: Or independence movement from whatever nation is colonizing them.
Ben: Yeah, throw off of a colonial empire, that sort of thing. I’m a little bit on Hedvig’s side on this one where I am just–
Daniel: That you’re underwhelmed?
Ben: No, I’m just looking very squintily at the powers that be in Turkey and being like, “Righto, chaps. Whatchu you up to here?”
Daniel: Oh, we’ll find out, I guess.
Ben: Don’t get me wrong. Absolutely, take that scummy English and kick it off your beautiful shores. I’m on board with that as an idea, no question. But yeah, if it barks box like a dog and walks like a dog, there might be something that can understand Hungarian going on there.
Daniel: Finally, this is some work from our friends, Bodo, Winter, Mark Dingemanse, and team. “We know that language is arbitrary, but we love how some bits really aren’t arbitrary at all.” We already knew because of work by Damián Blasi and a team back in 2016. That words for nose tend to have an “n” sound across languages. Words for round things tend to have an “er” sound in them. But for those of you who have not read the run sheet, what would a /r/ sound mean in different languages?
Ben: Whoo. Like that rolling “ah,” the /r/ [crosstalk].
Daniel: Yes. The alveolar trill, /r/.
Ben: Ah, is it silly that my brain just thinks of a drumroll? So, I’m like, when you’re announcing something important?
Daniel: [chuckles] Okay.
Hedvig: I know that Plato thought that trills and stuff like that were involved in words that had to do with motion and movement.
Ben: Ooh, that’s fun.
Daniel: Plato, really?
Hedvig: Yeah, because he wrote this whole thing about the name givers.
Daniel: Ah, is this from Plato’s Cratylus dialogue.
Ben: I trust Hedvig because she had a European education. So, I just assume all they did was read philosophers.
Hedvig: [laughs]
Daniel: I got bored and stopped reading halfway through, but no, I haven’t.
Ben: [laughs] I love how we went from, “I read Cratylus,” to like, “Well, I skimmed Cratylus.”
Daniel: I skimmed Cratylus because I thought it was dumb.
Hedvig: Yeah, because, basically he had the idea that, once upon a time, these magical divine people walk the earth and gave name to all things and then words denigrated from that. The name givers were so immaculate in their wisdom that they gave iconic names. If you look for iconicity, you can get closer to the wisdom of the name givers.
Ben: It sounds related to the idea of a Socratic true form of a thing and all that kind of stuff.
Hedvig: Platonic ideals. Yeah.
Daniel: Platonic ideals. Plato has a lot to answer for. Lot of intellectual mischief from Plato.
Hedvig: Actually, what have our good friends been up to?
Daniel: They found that across languages, a lot of /r/ sounds are used for words indicating roughness, or abrasiveness, or asperity.
Hedvig: What’s asperity?
Ben: Yeah, I was going to ask the same thing.
Daniel: Ah, did I make that word up? I might have [chuckles] just been making a word up. No, I might be deriving an English word from Spanish “áspero,” which is abrasive or grating. Is asperity a real word?
Hedvig: No, I’ve never heard it before. But I’m looking at this newscast, and it says that they analyze words for rough and smooth–
Ben: No, you’re right, Daniel.
Hedvig: –In 332 spoken languages. I’m looking at the map and it’s a lot of languages, but notably, there are none from the Americas for some reason.
Daniel: Oh, dang it.
Hedvig: It can be really hard to get– Oh, no, this map has 110. They might have had more in the larger sample. I’ll look at some more maps. And they found that there was a significant pattern of trills. When Daniel says /r/ sounds, that’s what they were looking at, in words that had to do with rough, roughness.
Daniel: If your language doesn’t have a /r/ sound like most Englishes don’t, they found that you’ll still probably find the pattern with /r/. That was kind of their fallback.
Ben: Okay.
Hedvig: Right.
Daniel: What do you think?
Ben: That makes sense.
Hedvig: Trills are so funny, because we have them in in Swedish, and my Swedish niblings are trying to teach it to my husband. And they were like “prutta” or whatever, which means fart.
[chuckles]
Ben: Classic.
Hedvig: And they would like point at their mouth, I’m pointing my mouth now and be like, “Look at my tongue. Look what my tongue is doing, rrr.” You can’t see.
Ben: You can’t see shit.
Hedvig: He doesn’t have x-ray vision. My husband is beautiful and super and funny and kind, but he’s not Superman. He cannot see through your skin. [crosstalk] They would just desperately do this over and over again, and be like, “Look at my tongue. You can’t see it.”
Ben: Children are so stupid.
Daniel: What if there’s a pattern between /r/ and farts, words for farting?
Ben: Oh, yeah, because it gives that-
Daniel: [crosstalk] -research, guys.
Ben: has that like [makes a fart sound] quality to it.
Daniel: [laughs]
Ben: I get you. I feel that.
Daniel: Exactly. Or, maybe just any sort of trill? I don’t know.
Ben: I think that is interesting. Also, yes, Daniel, asperity is a word, and it tends to actually be used in material science. You can judge the asperity of a surface, meaning its roughness or its smoothness apparently.
Daniel: Thank goodness. For a second, I doubted my vocabulary. I’ll never doubt it again.
Ben: Oh, by the way, quick update on Wordle. I played it, and got like a zero. I did not get the word.
Hedvig: What? But you understood the game? You understood the rules?
Ben: Well, kind of. Not really. The first time I played, I was convinced that if I got one of the colored letters that I’ve got that letter right, so I was guessing that letter in the right spot, but I’ve now realized that means it was somewhere else in there, blah, blah, blah.
Daniel: I did that the first time too.
Hedvig: I looked at the rules. [chuckles]
Ben: Anyway. Goddamn it, my partner who is so much smarter than me in every way, first try, got a three.
Hedvig: Nice.
Ben: Got it on the third try. I’m just like, “Jesus.”
Daniel: Well, she is smarter than you, Ben.
Hedvig: I think if you get it on the first or the second, that’s just luck. There’s no skill involved.
Ben: Yeah, definitely.
Ben: Third, it can be a bit the same. But third, fourth, fifth, then you’re starting to get into like, you have applied knowledge. If you do it in hard mode as well, then it can get really, really difficult.
Daniel: Well, I’ve been doing a thing because people are posting on our Discord, under the games section. Whenever somebody beats me or ties me, I give them a crowned reaction, like, “You are the king or the queen.”
Hedvig: That’s cute.
Ben: Wow, that’s really egotistical of you.
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: Yeah. A little bit.
Ben: That is incredibly egotistical.
Daniel: I shall dispense the crown. Congratulations, mortal.
Hedvig: For a second, can you talk about the words that are on Wordle, because I’ve forgotten how they come up with the words? Because they must decide like a list of 20 words for the next 20 days or something because they’re not just randomized from a word list. They are [crosstalk] interesting words.
Daniel: There’s about a couple thousand words– the creator of Absurdle has more knowledge than I do. They say that they have about 2000 words that they choose from, but another 11,000 words that you can pick that are legal words.
Hedvig: But that’s Absurdle, what about the regular Wordle?
Daniel: The Absurdle creator was saying this about Wordle.
Hedvig: Oh, okay.
Daniel: They use the same dictionary. That’s what seems to be happening there.
Hedvig: Because the German one the other week had orgy.
Daniel: Okay.
Ben: Um.
Hedvig: I just thought that was funny.
Ben: That’s a four-letter word.
Hedvig: No.
Daniel: German.
Ben: How do German spell orgy?
Daniel: I was thinking about, because the German Wordle should be like nine letters, I think.
Hedvig: No, it’s five. It’s really hard.
Ben: How do German spell orgy?
Daniel: O-R-G-I-E. Orgie.
Hedvig: It was orgy, I know it was. But how was it spelled in German? Good question. I solved it.
[laughter]
Daniel: Good job. I think that the Vietnamese Wordle should be like two letters.
Hedvig: Yeah, it’s I-E. O-R-G-I-E.
Ben: Can I just say that for whatever reason, my brain seems to have a playful attachment to an I-E ending, because an orgy with an I-E seems far lighter and more fun than an orgy with a Y, which is how we spell it in English, which just seems– and I’m not trying to be not sex positive here. But it just seems a little bit gross and mean. Whereas orgy with an I-E is like [onomatopoeia].
Daniel: Yeah, let’s have an orgie.
Hedvig: What?
Ben: Just nipping out for the orgie, folks.
Hedvig: You’re digging too deep into your feelings well for words. You’re exaggerating, and you don’t have that strong attachment to these two words.
Daniel: I have the same intuition, secretly. I do.
Hedvig: What?
Ben: You’re right. I’m hamming it up for the sake of the show but I definitely inherently feel that the I-E is a much funner orgy than the Y.
Daniel: It’s cute.
Ben: Yeah.
[interviewee segment]
Daniel: I’m here with Dr. Rebecca Shapiro, former executive secretary of the Dictionary Society of North America, author of Fixing Babel: An Historical Anthology of Applied English Lexicography. Dr. Shapiro, thank you so much for coming on having a chat.
Rebecca: Ah, thank you so much.
Daniel: You ran a session at this year’s Modern Language Association Conference called Just Words: Dictionaries and Social Justice. Could you tell me a little about the session? How did it go?
Rebecca: At first when it was happening, I was like, “Wow, this is really interesting,” listening to these great papers. And then when I was really listening or rewatching this morning, I was struck by how brilliant these people are. [Daniel chuckles] When you’re rereading a book, you pick up all of the other things that you missed. There was so much to think about and the ways that these papers were so different and yet interrelated. So, yeah, all of the various ways that we can think about dictionaries as being tools of injustice, and then revising them to be tools of justice.
Daniel: Wow, that is such a different view of a dictionary than I’ve ever had. This is one of those things that I flip back and forth on, because when I knew nothing about language, I thought, “Oh, let’s go to the dictionary, because they’re the ones who validate words.” In fact, many people, when I talk to people on the radio or on the show, people get angry at dictionaries when they include words or definitions they don’t like. Like irregardless or literally or things like that. [Rebecca chuckles] That’s where I started off. And then, when I learned a bit more about language, I thought, “Well, that’s kind of silly, dictionaries don’t validate words and definitions. They’re just looking at what we do, and including stuff that that we do as we use language.” Now, I’ve realized I think dictionaries actually do play a role in validating words and definitions. I think that they play a much greater role in setting agendas than we linguists typically think. Am I going way off base here?
Rebecca: No, I don’t think so, but I do think that there’s been a huge shift in– language and its use is always ideological anyway. You can’t escape that. But lexicographers now try to be as neutral as possible. But at the same time, we have to recognize that lexicographers 200 years ago probably thought they were being as neutral as well. Well, maybe they didn’t.
[chuckles]
Rebecca: There are some very specific and obvious agendas. They would say so in their frontmatter, which is part of what I was writing about in my book, but lexicographers today try to think about how expansive definitions can be or the various senses of them, and then try to be neutral and inclusive in a way that was different than the perhaps neutrality of historical dictionaries.
Daniel: Okay. Well, I want to get a feel for what maybe neutrality might look like or what would be better than neutrality. Can you give me an example of a definition that you feel, I don’t know, does it the right way? Or, maybe you could even give me an example of phony neutrality that you didn’t like?
Rebecca: Well, there’s a lexicographical famous example from a couple of years ago. One of the dictionaries, I can’t remember which one and it would be easy enough to find, but included in one of its dictionaries, the term ‘anchor baby.’
Daniel: Oof.
Rebecca: I don’t remember the exact definition either. What happened was, this word was defined in what the editors thought was a fairly neutral, and perhaps benign way. What it lacked was a more socially sanctioned term as such as term of abuse or derision, or slang, or sort of normative. I guess it was lacking that label that would have appeased some people. But on the other hand, without a more judgmental or prescriptivist definition, it probably wouldn’t have appeased a lot of people. People picked up on that neutral terminology, and said, “Aha, this is a dictionary being and endorsing a negative and a pejorative term versus presenting something neutral,” because it’s not a neutral term, you can’t make a term like that neutral.
Daniel: Because what it means is it implies that a pregnant person has come to the United States for the purpose of having a baby so that they could claim, “Aha, I’ve got a US citizen in my family. Now, I’m laying claim to being a citizen,” or something like that, “because I’m the parent.”
Rebecca: Right. What you just said is something that is also occurring. There’s a discussion about a pregnant person– [chuckles]
Daniel: I did that on purpose, because I’m trying to do that.
Rebecca: I know you did, but this is where we are with what lexicography would be. You would have assumed at 20, 25, 40 years ago that the only people who could get pregnant are women, but who are biologically from birth, women, and who are not in the process of transitioning to being anything other than a biological female, if that makes sense.
Daniel: Sure.
Rebecca: I’m trying to parse my own words.
Daniel: [chuckles] That’s what we do, right?
Rebecca: Of course. We’re in a period of transition where possibly not even yet, we’re trying to understand who exactly is the kind of person who can give birth and redefine that. Like I said, we’re not quite in that period of transition with this, because lexicographers and linguists are ahead of what other ordinary humans are doing. And it hasn’t reached outer social linguistic or language uses. I think we’re actively in a period of transition with pronouns, and “they.” If you look at maybe the way that people have started arguing about “they” versus pregnant person, you will see that we’re actually ahead linguistically in terms of “they.”
Daniel: Let’s take it a step farther, because I tweeted and I tagged you in this. I said, “Actually, people are right. Dictionaries do serve to validate words in usage and aren’t just a neutral chronicle of language.” You replied, if you don’t mind me-
Rebecca: Hmm. [chuckles]
Daniel: -putting this out there. You replied, “Yep. That’s it. And their colonial enterprises.”
Rebecca: Hmm.
Daniel: I haven’t stopped thinking about that. Could you tell me a little bit more about what you mean?
Rebecca: Yeah. In my work, and in the works of some of the panelists, the MLA panel on Just Words, we look at what the language of the dictionary says, the language of the lexicographer, and how that affects usage of language and looking things that we know as– Jack Lynch is a really good friend, and he also comes up with fantastic book titles. One of his recent books was You Could Look It Up.
Daniel: [chuckles]
Rebecca: I know, [chuckles] it’s the best. So, what people end up doing, of course, is going to the dictionary, and they hardly ever, at least right now, read the frontmatter and read the historical or social or political perspective of the authors. Today, lexicographers try not to be authors, but editors. The concept of colonial projects is– for example, some of the 18th century dictionaries were discovering new words and incorporating them into the dictionary. The dictionary. Their particular dictionary.
Daniel: It’s so pervasive, isn’t it? [crosstalk] -wording?
Rebecca: Yeah. It’s so powerful too. When I was looking at some words for examples of maybe change over time, I was looking at some of the– there were some colonial words that were being taken in. I don’t mean colonial as in what Tracy Nagle talks about in terms of colonial oppression and India. I mean just, “Here are some interesting and new animals,” or, “Here’s a plant.” There’s different kinds and levels of clonal projects. Another one, I think, that is really interesting is Webster’s Dictionary, because it is the first dictionary that is the English dictionary of the American language. He declared independence from England. He wrote in his front and backmatter, “These are the words that we don’t need anymore, because we are a new country. We are a democracy. We don’t need X, Y, Z words in our dictionary. We will use this instead.” And then in his backmatter, he writes about how this dictionary or the American language is going to be used by more people than the languages of the Americas. So, what he’s doing is saying, “English-English is on the wane, and is going to be adapted and reused for the purposes of the people living in these places.” And he ended up being very right.
Daniel: It sounds like what we’re doing is we’re arguing that we need to own our biases. Maybe it would be good if we could take on a little bit of an activist role if you’re a lexicographer. Does that sound right? Is that what we’re trying for here?
Rebecca: [chuckles] I am no longer or at least at this point working lexicographer, I’m someone who studies words and language. I wouldn’t feel comfortable talking about an activist role. I definitely want to have somebody who is working in dictionaries talk about that. But what I do in my work is I try to show biases and reveal what people might have been thinking about, or what people are thinking about, and what this information that we have can do for or against us, and for what purpose.
Somebody who is more aware of what’s happening, for example, with computers and artificial intelligence was Jeffrey Binder in that panel. What he’s doing is, I think, more like what you’re talking about. His paper in the panel, it was the one that I kept coming back to, and finding new and amazing things about because what he was showing was that– and I knew it to an extent, but he was showing that the binary systems of coding are absolutely binary, but there are also built-in biases.
For example, he described a conflict between different computer scientists who felt that computer languages should be created from English or other natural languages, and then translated into computer languages, as opposed to people who will code according to mathematical principles and algorithms. The problem he’s highlighting about this neutral mathematical coding is that what ends up happening is that computers are going to trawl many texts and look for patterns of usage. And then, they’re going to be able to create new texts from these patterns. But Jeff reminds us that what happens with these patterns is that they reflect actual usage, which means they can be negative, pejorative, biased, and they just get turned into computer languages that we will come up against when we do a search. For example, online, when we look for a synonym in Microsoft, when we do all kinds of things that we don’t know what we’re doing as far as language, these things will come up and replicate what we have as perhaps negative patterns in language use and we just continue to use them, if that makes sense. [chuckles]
Daniel: Yeah, that totally makes sense. I mean computers are drawing on human data. So, of course, that’s going to reflect human biases. Okay, if we’re not just talking about lexicographers writing dictionaries, we’re talking about people who have to define words in any respect, for example, in the legal domain or whatever, what do we do when the definition of a word in reference works, is out of keeping with the vision of social justice that we’d like to promote?
Rebecca: There’s a couple of things. [chuckles]
Daniel: Come on, Dr. Shapiro, fix it.
Rebecca: Yeah. Well, I’m working on it.
[chuckles]
Rebecca: There’s a couple of things is that we have to– “we,” right?
Daniel: We.
Rebecca: We have to get people who understand the distinctions between this kind of usage and that kind of usage, and to be able to maybe pick out different senses and perhaps mark them as maybe the OED does or Merriam Webster’s does, archaic or slang, or regional or something like that. But even then, if you start picking out definitions or senses of words with those kinds of marks, what are you left with? You’re still left with something that’s ideological, but what is the norm? So, do you end up marking everything or do you end up marking a few things? So, you have to create these perhaps new criteria for understanding what kinds of words are used and why. There’s sort of the backend in terms of computer technology, trying to figure out who uses what and why, and do we want to perpetuate these usages? That shows up anytime you look for a term, you just type in definition. Let’s see. I’m going back to “anchor baby.” Now, the term is marked as offensive, whereas it hadn’t been.
Daniel: That’s good.
Rebecca: Yeah. What’s nice is the dictionary is cited, so it’s definitions from Oxford languages. And then, there’s some interesting questions below. What is the meaning of an anchor baby? What is an anchor mom? [chuckles] You can tell that a computer did this search, because now we have what is an ankle baby? I don’t think ankles and anchors are the same. [chuckles]
Daniel: No, but in Australia, we do call children ankle-biters.
Rebecca: Well, yeah, we do too.
Daniel: Oh, really?
Rebecca: Mm-hmm. What I think just happened was that some computer heard people pronounce and then came up with this similar-sounding word. But if you click on the link for what is the meaning of anchor baby, it takes you to Wikipedia, which is a completely different situation, because you know how Wikipedia entries are created, as opposed to Oxford language entries. There’s a whole other, or as my students would say, “A whole nother situation.”
Daniel: Whole nother.
Rebecca: Yeah, right.
[chuckles]
Rebecca: A whole nother situation, because you have the first citation, which is from Oxford languages, and you’ve got very clear offensive labeling right on top, created by human beings, albeit thoughtful and sensitive human beings who probably argue about these terms a lot, to Wikipedia, which is definitely mediated but it’s not mediated or edited to the extent that, for example, a dictionary would be.
Daniel: It sounds like what we’re arriving at then is number one, usage notes will save us all.
Rebecca: [chuckles] Yeah, hopefully.
Daniel: Number two, we’re not going to get it all at once. This is going to have to be ongoing into the future.
Rebecca: Yeah. What I feel sad about is that understandings of the value of dictionaries is diminishing, I think. At the same time, the value of words and definitions are going up. I’ll go to the dictionary. People always say, “Well the definition of this or Wikipedia is that,” but how are we teaching critical reading, critical thinking as far as who can we trust and what can we trust as far as what a word means or what a sense is? That’s a big concern of mine.
Daniel: That is a really big concern. I mean, how do you teach critical thinking about words?
Rebecca: I think one thing that has come up in my teaching a lot, I love to give a historical lexicographical assignment. I ask students to look at a variety of words in the OED and see how they have changed over time. I love when my students who were mainly from Caribbean countries.
Daniel: Oh.
Rebecca: Yeah, it’s fascinating where I teach in Brooklyn. I asked them to look up a couple of terms that may be familiar to them or interesting to them. There’s some things that I would love to have more expansive information on. I guess everything needs more etymological distinctions and qualifications. There’s two things that come up or two words that come up in my teaching that really floors my students. One is the word ‘coolie’. It’s used in a variety of different terms in the Caribbean and it’s also used in the US, but they’re used for different purposes and for different ethnic peoples.
In the US, it was used often for the people from Asian descent, who created the Western expanding railroad system. In the Caribbean, it was often used to apply to people who were imported and brought against their will from India or the Indian subcontinent to the Caribbean, by the British. My students will look at the definitions and history and development of that term, and they will see that. For example, in Trinidad, currently, it’s a positive thing to have coolie hair.
Daniel: Oh.
Rebecca: Yeah. Again, from my students.
Daniel: I don’t know what that is.
Rebecca: Remember, I am not the expert on this, it’s my students who tell me. What coolie hair is allegedly good hair meaning straight, because of the connection to Indian women and Indian hair. So, if you have coolie hair, that means that you have a positive connotation connected to your hair and its structure or style. As opposed to thinking about how those people with that hair got to that place and the history of what those people experienced. When we talked about that in class, my students were, and they’re mostly female who use that term, really shocked to find out that what they thought was a positive term actually came from a very negative sort of place in the lexicon of some of the Caribbean countries.
Another example would of talking about when it comes to the colonialization of dictionaries, or the colonialization of words, the other term that Tracy Nagle and Sumit Ganguly about in their paper on the panel is the term ‘thug.’ What my students start out with is the current definition or usage of the word ‘thug’, which is related to or apply to criminality, or alleged bad behavior by maybe young African American men. And they’re shocked to find out that it has nothing to do with that at all.
Daniel: Wait, I don’t know this one.
Rebecca: You don’t?
Daniel: I don’t think I do. I mean, where does it come from?
Rebecca: Oh, you do.
[chuckles]
Rebecca: It’s from India. It was used by the British in its sort of oppressive domination of that region. And what a thug or a thuggee was, and practice is very different from what the British decided that it was. The people who practised this, it was a kind of banditry, but it was also related, in some ways to a religious structure. It had ritualistic practices. It wasn’t necessarily tied to one particular ethnic group. What the British did though was try to distinguish those practitioners of this cultural practice and link them with all kinds of criminal activity. But it wasn’t that case. What the British were doing was taking this term that had been religiously or spiritually based, and twisting it and turning it into something really violent.
As Dr. Ganguly says, which is really kind of fascinating, is that it’s the product of overworked colonial imaginations. They’re trying to, of course, excuse English behavior and English suppression of the native Indian population. Well, of course, India didn’t exist at that time, and England made it exist. But my students don’t know the origin of that term, and they don’t know that ‘thug’ was not nearly as negative as it had become. And then, we discussed how it migrated from India to England and with some people. And then, we talk about, for example, London and Jamaican music, and the connection there and then how it went back over to the US, so it’s with music. They really enjoy knowing the ways that these terms migrate, they develop, they change over time, and how they’re connected with them.
Daniel: And this is the kind of explanation that a dictionary or a reference work would really, really benefit from. I mean I had no idea of the spiritual origins of thug, and I can see it in a slightly different light now.
Rebecca: Yeah. The fact that my students see that their current usage of ‘thug’ is not necessarily something to enjoy or benefit from but it’s, again, coming from a deeply violent and colonial past and that once they become aware of it, they think maybe twice hopefully about using the term.
Daniel: Can you give me an example of a definition or a sense or a word that you think is not great? If I gave you the Oxford magic wand and you can change whatever you want?
Rebecca: Yeah, ‘wifebeater’.
Daniel: Oh, shoot. That’s– Oh, the clothing. Yeah.
Rebecca: Right. This is a great example of how words when repeated over and over just become sounds, not necessarily connected to meaning. I use that as an example of my students having no concept of what the words actually mean. But ‘wifebeater’ has just become– if you translated into International Phonetic Alphabet, it wouldn’t be ‘wife beater’ as in the man who beats his wife, but it’s just wifebeater sound. They have disconnected or unlinked the meaning of Stanley Kowalski, A Streetcar Named Desire connection with what you wear underneath a shirt.
Daniel: Yep, that’s pretty odious. I remember when I first started hearing that, I was like, “Huh, oh.” But, fortunately, in Australia, singlet is the term. I don’t hear that one a lot. I’m not even sure why it’s a singlet. Once again, just sounds, over time, everything becomes etymologically opaque. As far as you’re aware, what kind of feedback have you gotten on this work? Are the writers of reference works on board? Or, do they imagine that they’re neutral, and they want to stay away from what they might see as political commentary?
Rebecca: The people I know who are doing this kind of work are mostly academics. So, we can say what ought to be [chuckles] all we want. But the people who create and write dictionaries, by the way, are fewer and farther between, because of some of the things that Jeffrey is talking about with them, machine translation and AI. There is less of a need of human intervention. But I think what people who work in these areas would say is that, there’s less and less money for dictionary work, lexicography, reference book making. Less money, less interest. When something becomes more corporatized, then the product often becomes inferior. You’ve got fewer people working on these things.
One of the problems also is that print dictionaries, if you’re going to add a lot of commentary or meta narrative around a particular word with respect to its history and development, that cuts into budget too, because it’s a discrete entity and it’s got a page limit or word limit, and you can’t go over that. Some of the entries that I’ve worked on as an editor was to make something as clearly stated as possible, but often with as few words as possible. It’s not easy to do this. I think that people who are lexicographers would love to add extra commentary and be able to explain and define with context, but it’s not necessarily so easy. Now, an online dictionary, of course, does not have a page limit at all. But then, you get into some of the issues that Jeffrey was talking about, that there’s the lack of human element to some degree.
Daniel: What do you want people to take away most from this?
Rebecca: I was struck by the ways that the value of and power of words, and authority is so embedded in our culture, and we feel we can change it by brute force, but it doesn’t necessarily work that way. We fight over language constantly but we’re, I think, not really aware of how high the stakes can be. That’s really important to take away from all of this, that systemic racism is important to know now, but it’s also important to know the history of racism with respect to Jews and the Holocaust. It’s important to know how imbedded language is into our computer systems and our computer codes. It’s so powerful and it’s so potentially lethal, but it’s also potentially beautiful in a way that we can maybe acknowledge and change.
Daniel: Dr. Rebecca Shapiro is the author of Fixing Babel: An Historical Anthology of Applied English Lexicography. Dr. Shapiro, thank you so much for having a chat with me today.
Rebecca: Oh, thank you so much.
[interview concludes]
Daniel: Let’s go on to Words of the Week. Ben, you found one, but it’s also from Bentley on Facebook.
Ben: I should full tilt say that I did not find it. My partner found it, Ayesha, friend of the show.
Daniel: Ayesha.
Ben: Once-time presenter, probably going to be a presenter again, as she just is better than me at everything.
Daniel: Very welcome. Very welcome.
Ben: I’m surprised I didn’t come across this because we have figured out that her “for you” page on TikTok, and my “for you” page on TikTok are nearly identical. Most times, when we nudge, the other person go, “Hey, look at this cool thing I found,” and like, “Yeah, I saw that.” She found a very fascinating TikTok that is quite relevant to our show, because our show recently, somewhat recently changed its name to Because Language.
Daniel: Yes.
Ben: One of the reasons we renamed the show Because Language is because of how interestingly ‘because’ was being used as a language artifact in the vernacular of young people, specifically young women. Now, we’ve got an update. We’ve got a fresh way that ‘because’ is being used at the start of a sentence, and that is “No, because.”
Daniel: No, because.
Ben: The way “no, because” is being used is that you might hear a person just firing into the blind with a tweet or something like that, and just saying, “No, because, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
Daniel: That’s right.
Ben: That basically seems to mean, “Get out of town, you won’t believe this,” or like, “Stop what you’re doing. You have to–” It’s essentially like, “I’ve got big news,” and it’s surprising. It’s a kind of a modifier.
Daniel: This is what Bentley on Facebook was saying, they say, “I heard about this new construction that’s showing up around Twitter. People are apparently starting a conversation with, “No, because,” not in reply to any question though. The slim amount of looking into it I’ve done seems to suggest that the meaning is akin to, ‘Stop and check this out.’ I thought it might make an interesting word of the week at some point.” Thanks, Bentley.
Ben: Bentley was on the money.
Daniel: Yep.
Hedvig: First of all, if your child says, “I don’t want to go to bed,” and you ask, “Why?” And they say, “No, because,” is that acceptable to you?
Daniel: No, not really.
Ben: I don’t think that’s how it’s being used here. It’s very much– [crosstalk]
Hedvig: No, I know. I’m trying to get the steps in between. I’m trying to get–
Daniel: I don’t think so. I think that if somebody makes an assertion, like, “This happened first,” and then you can say, “No, because that happened earlier.”
Hedvig: Right. So, you can’t use “no, because” without a thing after, because small children in Swedish will be like, [Swedish], just like–
Ben: Swedish children would say a version of “no, because” as a retort?
Hedvig: But as an answer, as like I’m being obstinate.
Daniel: Oh, interesting.
Ben: Oh. If I’m understanding you right, the translated version would be something like, “No, because I said so.” But the “I said so” is just not there?
Hedvig: Yeah, something like that. Also, parents might do it when the children are like, “Why do I have to wear a helmet when I’m biking?” After a while, you’re like, “Because.”
Ben: Yeah.
Daniel: Yeah. This feels different.
Hedvig: This is different. Yeah.
Daniel: Here’s some examples of tweets.
Hedvig: Yeah, I want to have examples.
Daniel: Out of nowhere, nobody said anything, and then this person tweets, “No, because how cute is this,” and there’s a photo of a Nintendo controller. Or, “No, because why are people hating on other streamers?” “No, because why are people following me out of the blue?” I guess, the ‘no’ is stop and then the because is, “Here’s why I’m stopping you.” Does that make sense?
Hedvig: Also, I think it is about things that are in the zeitgeist, if you will. It reminds me a little bit of when people start by saying the masculine urge to race anyone when you’re on a bike, which it doesn’t sound like it’s a complete sentence but it refers to something that everyone’s like, “Oh, yeah.”
Ben: I’m wondering if the things seem quite zeitgeist-y, not because the way “no, because” is being used requires it, but because that’s just the kind of shit you tend to see on Twitter and that sort of thing. I don’t know if there’s a strong link there necessarily, so much as a casual accidental link.
Daniel: It’s like you’re imagining a disagreement that’s coming, and the topic is something that everybody knows about.
Ben: Yeah, it’s fun. I’m wondering if we– and when I say ‘we,’ I mean, like white people. I wonder if this is yet another thing that has been shamelessly stolen from black vernacular.
Hedvig: Maybe.
Daniel: Always a safe assumption.
Ben: Yep.
Hedvig: Often a safe assumption in a slang, yeah.
Ben: If there’s a new thing, I’m like, “Yep. Well, we’ve clearly stolen that from black people.”
Daniel: I do see a relation to, “No, but seriously,” or, “No, but why do people do the thing?”
Ben: Yeah.
Hedvig: Hey, I have a related question that I got into an argument with my friends the other week, where we had a social gathering and talked to people, it was very exciting. I talk to myself sometimes and have pretend arguments with imagined people.
Daniel: I do that.
Hedvig: Or, I used to do this more as a teenager.
Ben: Shower. Do you do it in the shower? I definitely do it in the shower.
Hedvig: I don’t do it in the shower.
Daniel: I do play old conversations.
Hedvig: I used to when I was a teenager, not so much anymore, do this very weird kind of manifesting where I would pretend to be interviewing myself at a future point of my life and talking about my successes.
Ben: Wow.
Hedvig: And be like, “Oh, so, Hedvig, how does it feel to be like,” whatever. It’s ridiculous, but it’s really fun. I can recommend doing it.
Ben: I have a lot of respect for you offering up something that is at least a little bit vulnerable making. Good for you.
Hedvig: Yeah. No, I think I’m an egomaniac, narcissist. No, for sure. No, it’s a ridiculous thing. But it can perk you up, I can recommend doing it. But I was talking to my friends, there’s “no, because” sounds like you’re almost butting in in the middle of a conversation with someone who’s having with an imaginary person. We were talking about it, and I was saying that I actually don’t get into arguments often with other people, like serious arguments, because I only argue strongly about things that I know something about, and I don’t think I know about a lot of things. When people are like– I don’t know, something, I often don’t have an opinion about it. And then, my friend said that they only argue about things they’re unsure about, [crosstalk] because they want to know learn more so that they know where they stand.
Ben: Oh, is this person French?
Daniel: Is there a better way than disagreeing? Come on. Maybe by listening politely?
Ben: I wasn’t joking, by the way. Is this person French?
Hedvig: No.
Ben: Okay.
Hedvig: Also, I might be making them seem worse than they are now, I feel bad.
Ben: No, it’s just that one of the things that I have always really clashed with French culture and French people with, is just how much they love to debate everything all of the time. I’ve noticed exactly what you’ve just described, Hedvig. Not just French people, but the French do it a lot, which is that they will just go headlong into an argument, almost as an exploratory exercise into what’s going on in that space.
Hedvig: I want to test the limits.
Daniel: That’s exhausting.
Ben: Yeah. Whereas I’m right there with you, Hedvig, when people start really arguing about something, I’m like, “Well, I don’t have a PhD in this, so I’m just going to drink my beer.” [chuckles]
Hedvig: Yes. This even happens when people are like, “Oh, I think this current COVID restriction is silly.” I’m like, “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but I’m just going to do what my state tells me and get my vaccines.” I don’t– [chuckles]
Ben: I’m just a good kid.
Daniel: I will come comply.
Hedvig: Yeah, I will comply, I’m sorry. Maybe I’m like sheeple or whatever.
Daniel: I’m a live sheeple.
Hedvig: But if it’s something I do know something about, yeah.
Ben: I think all three of us, Daniel maybe the least, but I think, Hedvig, you’re a little bit like me, I just don’t really care for conflict at all. Many a time in workplaces when people have been like, “No, I don’t know about this vaccine nonsense,” on the inside, I want to be like, “You’re a fucking dickhead, shut up.” But on the outside, I’m like, “Hmm. Well, I mean, I think you should get them, but you do you, I guess,” but I don’t think that. I don’t think that person should do them. I think they should go and fucking get vaccinated and stop whinging like a child, but I don’t say that.
Hedvig: I am willing to get into conflicts if it is something I strongly believe in. I have a reputation with my family and some of my friends’ circle to always have an opinion about something and always like to argue, but I only do it when I know something about it.
Ben: Family doesn’t count.
Hedvig: I often get to lead the conservation, which means-
Ben: Family doesn’t count.
Hedvig: -the topic is– Yeah, anyway.
Ben: We get to be our worst selves around family. How we act to our family is not a good yardstick of the kind of people we are. If that’s the case, literally everyone is a terrible person, because most people I know behave quite badly in comparison to their normal selves when they’re with their family.
Daniel: Home is where when you have to go there, they have to take you.
Ben: [laughs]
Hedvig: I become an entitled annoying teenager who’s on the couch and doesn’t do the dishes.
Ben: Oh, no. [laughs]
Hedvig: It’s really bad. But it only comes out after like five days. The first couple of days, I’m sensible.
Ben: We have digressed.
Hedvig: What’s the next word?
Daniel: I saw this one first from Peter Clarke @MediaActive on Twitter. Take a guess what this might be a ‘Crumb Maiden,’ C-R-U-M-B maiden. A crumb maiden.
Ben: Ooh, hang on. I think I might know this.
Daniel: Oh, really?
Ben: Isn’t a crumb maiden like some sort of funky, archaic actual item that was on tables?
Hedvig: Is it a kitchen appliance?
Ben: Yeah, is a crumb maiden one of those little things that you put on a table that you would sweep crumbs into?
Daniel: That everyone just had these on their tables and we don’t anymore for some reason?
Ben: Well, I don’t think everyone but some people did.
Daniel: I don’t know. Hedvig, does it show any hits when you look up “crumb maiden appliance”?
Hedvig: Am I our Googler? [googling]
Daniel: No, but what is that thing? I want to say tea cozy, but I feel like you’re right. There was a maiden thing.
Hedvig: Like a bread box or something. Urban Dictionary, says something similar to what you put in the run sheet, which is not that, but I know what you mean.
Daniel: This is [crosstalk] I feel like, “Hmm, yeah.”
Hedvig: Crumb maiden, no.
Daniel: A crumb maiden is a person. A person, male or female, who works to maintain power structures, typically gendered power structures, which hurt them and/or their community in the hope that they can gather some small residual benefit.
Ben: There’s a version of this for African American people, which is being an Uncle Tom.
Daniel: Yep.
Ben: I’ve always just used that in other contexts. Like Uncle Tomming women’s issues or Uncle Tomming gay issues or something like that. I’m glad that there’s this because I’ve always felt you have to do explaining when you talk about that when you like Uncle Tomming women’s issues. I’m liking this crumb maiden though. Having said that, I have a feeling I’ll probably have to explain crumb maiden now as well.
Daniel: Maybe. I feel weird about “maiden.” I feel like we could probably get away with it. The definitions that I’ve seen have taken pains to say, “This could be a man or a woman.” But what about crumb chaser or just a crumb? Don’t be a crumb.
Ben: It is, yeah. Look, there is and has been a whole linguistically for this role. As in the last 20, 30 years, where starting to really drill down into some of these power structures and who they support and who they hurt and all that kind of stuff, there has been a need for this. So, I’m glad it exists.
Daniel: The one that I’ve always said was “Pigs for Oscar Mayer.” Like it’s a club. Pigs for D’Orsogna in the Australian context.
Ben: Well, American context because Oscar Mayer is an American company, right?
Daniel: That’s right. The ones who will stand up for the company that kills them.
Ben: Yep. Okay.
Daniel: Let’s see, another one, “rage donation.” We’ve seen lots of different kinds of rage. We’ve seen road rage and even roid rage.
Hedvig: Rage quit.
Daniel: Rage quit. We’ve seen nut rage when a person on a flight was angry because they didn’t get enough nuts. Those little packets of nuts.
Ben: I’ve never come across that one before.
Daniel: Yes, you have because we did it 10 years ago. [laughs] I’ve got it on record. Anyway, this one I noticed from @mmmaiammm on Twitter, replying to the Shepherds of Good Hope, when they were besieged by truckers in Canada who didn’t feel like getting vaccinated against COVID, but they didn’t mind invading the place and demanding free food intended for homeless people. @mmmaiammm says, “So, so sorry that you guys are getting hassled. Walked past you guys most days going to/from high school, always back and know all the good you do. A rage donation for your troubles today.” I thought, “You know what? I have rage donated before.”
Ben: Yeah.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: I can agree with that. I have definitely rage donated.
Daniel: I rage donated to the Shepherds of Good Hope, and I know that I try not to support religious charities and that sounds religious, so we can have our feelings about that. But I just thought, you know what? I think a rage donation is an order. So, I did.
Hedvig: I very rarely do single donations. I have a standing donation for Wikipedia, and a couple of-
Daniel: Oh, me too.
Hedvig: -other things that I’ll just have it rolling, because I’m a very forgetful disorganized person. My random whims is not a way to build a society. But yeah. No, I understand.
Daniel: I do have my regulars, but then I also– I have this thing that up. Okay. Well, whenever I see the Satanic Temple doing something cool, I’m just going to throw them some bucks.
Ben: And you’re ex-mo through and through.
Daniel: Yeah.
Hedvig: Fair enough. Maybe that’s something people like– you know other podcasts do Patreon, but also co-fee or whatever, like single donations? But we have a way of getting single donations.
Daniel: We do. There is a button on our website, which you can use to donate one time.
Ben: I think we’ve had it mashed once.
Daniel: Yes, twice.
Ben: Two mashes.
Daniel: Two mashes. So, mash that thing if you don’t want to be a patron. Last one, Rhian on our Discord server says, “Can I nominate ‘desire path’ as a Word of the Week? I think it’s just such a wholesome term like a collective dream.” All right, you two, I’m sure that you both know what a desire path is.
Hedvig: It is really lovely.
Ben: It’s one of those things, if people know nothing about design at all, they still know this thing.
Daniel: [chuckles] Yeah, that’s right.
Ben: This is the one design-y thing that they know that they hold up is. It tends to be a more wholesome and not as intellectually bankrupt version as, “The American spent $2 million designing a pen that works in zero gravity, and the Russians used a pencil.” It seems conceptually adjacent desire paths due to that thing. But unlike that thing, which it turns out, it’s completely wrong and pencils in space caused terrible fires, and we needed to design that pen, and it was really important, blah, blah, blah. Desire paths have no shitty downside.
A desire path is anytime that in the built environment, when a human or a number of humans regularly travel a path that has not been designed, so the classic here is like a footpath that is going up towards a road at right angles. But lots and lots of people have to get to something that’s around that corner. So, they walk across the grass, cutting at a 45-degree angle across the path. So, you’ll have a path going up, path going across, and then a diagonal line connecting those two bits in the grass that’s kind of trod down, because it’s a desire path or desire line, I’ve also heard it called. I don’t know if this is true, but I think there is an urban myth that a university somewhere was built–
Hedvig: Yes. I think it was in Sweden that they put just lawn for the first couple of months. And then, we’re just like, “Where are people walking?” No, I think it was Linköping.
Ben: Ah. I’ve been to Linköping. It’s the Geraldton of Sweden.
Hedvig: I think so, but I’m looking it up now.
Daniel: I did a little bit of research and tried to find all the places that are listed as ‘the place’ where desire lines were– They didn’t make any sidewalks. Here are the places where they say the desire paths, they just didn’t make any sidewalks, they just let everyone walk everywhere and then they paved at Boston College, University of California, Davis, University of California, Berkeley, Michigan State University, Illinois Institute of Technology. I could have found more, but these places are all claimed. And you know what? Maybe that’s true, because they might have arisen at a time when this was trendy.
Ben: I don’t buy it personally, simply because pretty much all the institutions you just named are very old. So, none of them were built. None of them were like, “We’re going to build a college.” They’ve just been added to and added to.
Hedvig: Yeah, they add to it, but they might have done it when they added in that section.
Daniel: Maybe.
Ben: That I believe. When Berkeley added a chemistry department in the 40s, I fully believe they might have done this. I would love to see if there has been anywhere that from top to bottom when they did a massive new build somewhere that interconnected heaps of different buildings that they did this, I think that would be really interesting and fun and kooky and like Daniel said, “Wholesome.”
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: I have a feeling that there’s a very famous street that is actually a desire path.
Ben: Oh God, is it one of those like San Francisco wobbly streets or something like that?
Daniel: No, it’s New York City.
Ben: Oh, really?
Daniel: Broadway.
Ben: You reckon?
Daniel: You look at how New York is laid out. It’s in a grid. And then you got Broadway, just cutting a big diagonal slash all the way down.
Ben: Yeah, you’re right. It does.
Daniel: Apparently, it was a hunting path that people used and it got kept. So, Broadway in New York City is said to be a desire path.
Ben: There is precedent for such a thing. I believe, I’ve been told by a couple of different indigenous people here in Perth that one of our major arterial roads, Leach Highway, is pretty much sort of meter for meter to laid over the path that Wadjigu people would walk from the hills to the coast and back on a 6- to 12-month cycle following the seasons kind of thing, because it was just like, “Hey, look, this is the flattest and easiest, and when you have to cross the rivers, it’s the shortest and the shallowest,” and all of the stuff that, of course, indigenous people would do because they’re not idiots.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: That’s cool.
Hedvig: That’s really cool. I wonder though, because a lot of times you get wibbly-wobbly grid designs in cities that have to do with land ownership. There used to be a field and then two brothers quarreled, and then they split it halfway on the diagonal.
[chuckles]
Hedvig: At least in like Swedish countryside, a lot of roads will be very wibbly-wobbly between fields because of shit like that. And there’s a creek, there was a stone. I don’t know, maybe that qualifies as the desire path as well, but it’s like other circumstances as well.
Ben: That’s almost like an inverse desire path, isn’t it? That’s like a, “We will put the path in the place that we begrudgingly concede we hate the least.”
Hedvig: Yeah, sort of like that. I always wanted, and if any listener knows of it, a desire path mod for Cities: Skylines, where you can just for a moment turn off and let all your citizens walk on the grass. And then for a certain amount of time track where they’re walking, and then choose to–[crosstalk]
Ben: Hedvig, I think this is your google 20% time sabbatical journey, you make this mod.
Daniel: You are our benevolent leader.
Hedvig: I’ve thought about it a lot. I thought about how difficult it would be to implement because you’d want them to walk on grass, but not on buildings. Yeah, it’d be quite complicated actually, to get them to do it but it’s my dream.
Ben: I can’t wait for your mod.
Hedvig: [chuckles] Yeah.
Daniel: “No, because” “crumb maiden” “rage donation” and “desire path” are our Words of the Week. Thanks so much to everybody who contributed to give us ideas for this show. Of course, thanks to Dr. Rebecca Shapiro. One comment we have from Stan via SpeakPipe. We have a SpeakPipe account. It’s a thing that records you and it sends it to us. Stan had a comment about the best translation for French president, Emmanuel McClellan’s ’emmerder’ comment.
Stan: Hey, guys, I was just listening to the recent episode. As a French listener, although not a native speaker, but the Emmanuel Macron thing seems to best translate to me as more like, “I want to be a pain in your ass.” To make you irritated but also to be an obstruction, I think, that’s an important part of the message that the French carries there. Anyway, just wanted to throw that your way. Have a great one. Bye.
Ben: Ah, okay. I like that. Yeah, it’s fun.
Daniel: Also, it maintains the profanity. It doesn’t have ‘shit’ in it like ’emmerder’ does, but it does have ass and I’m willing to take that.
Hedvig: Poop comes from ass.
Ben: It does.
Daniel: It does. That’s true.
Hedvig: If it comes from anywhere else, go see a doctor.
Daniel: [chuckles]
Hedvig: It should not.
Daniel: Semantically related. Very good. Thanks, Stan. That was awesome. If you would like to record something for us with SpeakPipe, you can. Just head to our website, becauselanguage.com, and it’s right up top on the sidebar. Thanks again to everyone who helped us.
[music]
Hedvig: I would really like to encourage our listeners to record a little bit for us, it’s fun to hear voices. And if you have a fun Word of the Week, why don’t you, instead of just sending it to us [unintelligible [01:23:11], you could also record something. Maybe we’ll play it on the show.
Ben: Ooh, fun, that’s a great idea.
Daniel: Mm-hmm.
Hedvig: Besides SpeakPipe, you can also get in touch with us in lots of different places. We are BecauseLangPod everywhere. We even started doing TikTok videos, we’re trying it out. Ben is the most senior TikTok user. I am trying it out and I’m not– my “for you” page is not that good yet.
Ben: She remains unconvinced.
Daniel: Is this for me?
Hedvig: Daniel, how’s your TikTok experience so far?
Daniel: Limited and tentative.
Hedvig: I also feel like maybe the young kids can just have it. Maybe not everything has to be– I don’t know, have to be in everything.
Daniel: [crosstalk] [chuckles] Maybe I don’t need to be everywhere.
Hedvig: Maybe I don’t need to be everywhere.
Ben: I do.
Hedvig: Except that our shows needs be everywhere. And yeah, you can record something like this using SpeakPipe. And you can also send a good old email, we are hello@becauselanguage.com. And if you want to help the show, there are a number of ways you can do that. If you like what we’re doing, you can send us your show ideas, like articles, stories, Words of the Week. You can recommend us to your friends, foes, family and strangers, like Dustin from Sandman Stories does on Twitter. Or, you can write us a review in all the places you can leave review. For example, iTunes. While we’re on the topic of iTunes, maybe we should say that we have pulled our service from Spotify, correct?
Daniel: Correct. We are no longer on Spotify.
Hedvig: So, if you are listening to us via Spotify, I’m sorry. Spotify is not something we want to be on right now. I also just find the way they’re dealing with podcast, the way they’re doing exclusive deals and paying people, it’s all weird.
Ben: Yeah, it’s very scummy.
Hedvig: Yeah, podcasts should be a basic RSS feed that you can subscribe to with any app you want.
Ben: Yeah. Agreed.
Hedvig: We love all of our listeners, and some of you like to use Spotify podcast app, and I’m sorry. But can I recommend the perfectly free, perfectly fine, Podcast Addict app, which is free and fine and can just take an RSS feed and you can listen to us and everyone else on it, and it collect all stats and it tells you how many hours you spent on podcasts in the last month.
Ben: I’m a huge fan of Pocket Casts on the Android platform. You can get on board, it does great work. By great work, I mean it just has a collection of podcasts that like– the apps don’t do that much. This is what I don’t understand about how Spotify is fucking it up. It’s like, you have a very easy job here when it comes to podcasts, anyway.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: There are lots of ways to listen. And if you want more ways to listen, you can just head over to becauselanguage.com/listen and find your– or you can just go to your podcaster of choice and find it there.
Ben: Yeah. You’ll find us. Daniel has put us everywhere.
Hedvig: I just looked on Podcast Addict, does anyone want to guess on how much time I’ve spent in January listening to podcasts?
Ben: Ooh. I’m going to guess at least 14 hours a week. So, two hours a day. What’s 14 hours times 4, brains, 28– [crosstalk]
Daniel: 56.
Ben: 50? 56?
Daniel: I think you’ve spent– I’m going to go with what I said, 100 hours.
Hedvig: I’ve spent 4 days and 15 hours.
Daniel: Wow.
Ben: That’s pretty much dead on what– No, that’s twice me. So, that’s 100 and something, isn’t it?
Daniel: Yep.
Hedvig: Yep.
Daniel: 24 times–
Ben: You sleep to some of this stuff though.
Hedvig: Yes, but I have a sleep timer that turns off. The sleep timer turns off after 30 minutes.
Ben: Oh, wow. Okay, shit. That’s for real.
Daniel: Yeah.
Hedvig: Yeah, this is the real stuff.
Ben: You average four hours a day.
Hedvig: I don’t know what to say. I’ve been doing some traveling this week. Yeah.
Daniel: Okay, that’s it.
Ben: Our patrons make it possible for us to do the show without ads. I don’t know about you guys, but one of the things I understand but don’t enjoy about a lot of podcasts is that bit in a podcast where the podcasters try and zhuzh up their ad for the week. So, they do like a little bit of a bit and bit of improv and then it’s about mattresses or meal boxes, or whatever. I don’t hate the podcasters, I get it. They’re just trying to keep the lights on. I fully appreciate that. But I still don’t enjoy those parts of the podcast. So, all of our patrons allow us to keep doing the show without ads, which is really, really cool.
The other awesome thing that allows us to do is, it allows us to make transcripts of our show so our shows are readable and searchable. Shoutout to the entire team at SpeechDocs who have to wade through the horrid quagmire that is my audio.
Here are some of our top patrons. [takes a deep breath] Dustin, Termy, Chris B, Matt, Whitney, Chris L, Helen, Udo, Jack, PharaohKatt, LordMortis, Elías, Larry, Kristofer, Andy, James, Nigel, Meredith, Kate, Nasrin, Ayesha, sneakylemur, Moe, Steele, Andrew, Manú, James, Rodger, Rhian, Colleen. No, I ran of breath. [Daniel chuckles] glyph, Ignacio, Sonic Snejhog, still my favorite name. Kevin, Jeff, Andy from Logophilius, Samantha, zo, Kathy, Rachel, Cheyenne, Felicity, Amir, Andy, O Tim. And the wonderful Kate B who contributed not via Patreon, but with the one-time donation button which she mashed like a mother on becauselanguage.com. Also, thank you to David, our newest patron at the friend level.
Daniel: Our theme music has been written and performed by 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.
Ben: [blows trumpets]
Hedvig: Pew, pew, pew. Okay. I’m stopping recording.
[boop]
Ben: I’ve got news.
Daniel: You’ve got news?
Ben: Yep.
Daniel: What’s your news?
Ben: I’m very excited. I made the news, you guys. I’m in the news.
Daniel: You’re in the news?
Ben: I’m in the news in a very minor way. I’m involved in a TikTok video that got one quarter of a million views.
Daniel: My goodness gracious.
Hedvig: Wow.
Ben: It was very exciting, and it’s super silly. So, the mystery animator for reasons that shall remain unmentioned for– to mention would reveal the identity of said mystery animator, got in touch with me and said, “I’ve been doing this thing on TikTok. I set a challenge which is that if a video of mine got a certain number of views, I would reach out to you and show you the video and then tell my followers on TikTok how that went.”
Daniel: So, you were the professor of mention. Yes, I did catch that video, but I didn’t know that was you?
Ben: Yeah. I think the [crosstalk] mystery animator–
Hedvig: Wait. I need a timeline here. You say an animator has a TikTok account where they do animations that are funny. Sometimes, they get popularity. One of them featured your voice?
Ben: No. One of them featured me as a sort of retelling of a story, as often happens on TikTok. You do a little skit, except of course, mystery animator does their skits via animation. They’ll animate like a certain skit or some text. That blew up, or at least it started to blew up. Started to blew up, oh, I’m doing well. [chuckles] It started to blow up and mystery animator said, “Hey, if this reaches a certain number of likes or views or whatever it happens to be, I will show this video to the person that I have made this skit involving.” Which I think the mystery animator did not fully expect just how bizarre the TikTok algorithm can be and how ferociously some things can blow up. So, I think if you hit a certain up ramping speed of views, TikTok is like, “Well, I’m just going to chuck that on a billion “for you” pages. And then, it just went [mimics explosion]. Then, mystery animator showed me, I responded. Then, mystery animator made a follow-up with my response and that’s the one that went like full tilt bananas.
Daniel: Oh, my goodness. Was it safe for work?
Hedvig: Really?
Ben: Yes. It’s all entirely PG.
Hedvig: What was it about?
Ben: I can’t– if people want to do a little bit of sleuthing to uncover potentially the identity of the mystery animator, that is for them to do, but I refuse, madam, to–
Hedvig: But if I would want to watch the TikTok that you’re talking about, you can’t keep that from me.
Ben: I cannot, but I will not show it to you in public fora. I will show you off air.
Hedvig: Ben, you can’t talk– This is so stupid.
Daniel: [chuckles]
Hedvig: Everyone’s going to google like, “Ben Ainslie mystery, animation on TikTok,” and I find it.
Ben: You know what? Maybe, let’s find out.
Hedvig: I’m going to see if that does anything.
Daniel: Let’s get back on track.
Ben: She’s doing it live. Yes, Daniel, please. What’s happening in the world of linguistics outside of me being super mega TikTok famous?
[boop]
Hedvig: Okay, Daniel, you don’t drink alcohol, right?
Daniel: Correct.
Hedvig: I figured out a new adult nonalcoholic drink that I like.
Daniel: Hmm?
Hedvig: Just tonic water with mandarins in it.
Daniel: Oh, okay.
Ben: Okay.
Hedvig: No gin.
Ben: Yep.
Hedvig: It’s not horrible.
Ben: There you go.
Daniel: Not horrible is a good start.
Ben: I give you permission to also just like beverages that aren’t necessarily adult. For instance, I very much enjoy cordial and fizzy water, that’s very nice.
Daniel: Yeah.
Hedvig: I do as well. But I find that a lot of other– This is slightly on the less sweet end of the spectrum. This does that pitcher in this thing that is a bit nice.
Daniel: Tonic water has a sharp note doesn’t it?
Ben: Quinine.
Daniel: Yes, quinine.
Hedvig: Indian tonic water versus plain tonic water is quite different.
Ben: So I hear. Yeah. Like the quinine amount is very substantial in the subcontinent, I believe.
Hedvig: Yeah, because it was used against malaria.
Daniel: Yes.
Ben: Which I think is not a thing they figured out [crosstalk]
Hedvig: I thought it was vaguely a thing.
Ben: They finally went, “Ah, it turns out that doesn’t do anything.” And a bunch of British people just wanted to be drunk.
Daniel: I think that sounds like one of those things that could be true because everything turns out not to be a thing eventually, right?
Ben: Yeah, [chuckles] basically. We should not try it anything because the nihilists are fundamentally correct.
Hedvig: Quinine is a medication used to treat malaria. It can be used to treat it without working.
Ben: [laughs]
Hedvig: Right?
Daniel: Yeah. And you could put a little bit in your drink, there’s so little that it wouldn’t have any effect on–[crosstalk]
Ben: Yeah. They might be doing accidental homeopathy.
Hedvig: As of 2006, quinine is no longer recommended by the World Health Organization as a first-line treatment for malaria because there are other substances that are equally effective with fewer side effects.
Ben: There we go.
Daniel: Okay. That still works-
Hedvig: It still maybe works-
Daniel: -but there’s better stuff.
Hedvig: -but there’s better stuff that doesn’t give you leg cramps and other things that they list.
Ben: I think that leads strength to Daniel’s argument. Has anyone here ever got cramps from drinking tonic water? How much tonic water would you need to drink to–? [laughs]
Daniel: [crosstalk]
Hedvig: I think tonic water is fairly diluted. I think the quinine medicinal use, you get it as a salt. You get it like way more– [crosstalk]
Daniel: The fact that it has medicine, it probably explains why it’s called tonic water because it’s a tonic. “Oh, you too are a tonic. You make me feel better,” that’s [crosstalk] say.
Ben: Oh, stop it.
Hedvig: Yes.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]