Anacostia is a rapidly gentrifying suburb in Washington DC, and as Anacostia changes, so does the language. How do the original Black residents use language to establish their cred? What about the language of the new Black gentrifiers?
Dr Jessi Grieser has been listening. She’s the author of The Black Side of the River, and she joins Daniel for a chat.
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48a: A revolting aside
SUPER NOT SAFE FOR WORK
This discussion happened during our pre-show chat, and why? Why did we get onto this topic? It started with a cat, and it ended with at least three bodily fluids.
It’s a fun chat, and we weren’t trying to be gross, but if you decide to listen, just be prepared.
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Become a Patron!Show notes
One-word gaffe invalidates thousands of US baptisms
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60409113
Study suggests words are needed to think about numbers
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-02-words.html
Words are needed to think about numbers, study suggests
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/02/220208191741.htm
International Mother Language Day 2022
https://elararchive.org/blog/2022/02/18/international-mother-language-day-2022/
Why do children often skip 16 when learning to count? | Quora
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-children-often-skip-16-when-learning-to-count
How Many Languages Are Spoken in Australia?
https://australiantranslationservices.com.au/how-many-languages-are-spoken-in-australia/
The Black Side of the River | Georgetown University Press
http://press.georgetown.edu/book/georgetown/black-side-river
The Story of Bussy Cat
https://milled.com/everpress.com/the-story-of-bussy-cat-h6QsAAaomO94XaZB
Premium Episode 154: NFTs & Bored Apes | QAnon Anonymous
https://soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous/premium-episode-154-nfts-bored-apes-sample
Five films that could never come out in 2022 (tincture of a damn)
https://thegrio.com/2022/01/21/five-films-that-could-never-come-out-in-2022/
Tincture | Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tincture
The meaning and origin of the expression: A tinker’s damn | Phrase Finder
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/tinkers-damn.html
Vowel Movement: How Americans near the Great Lakes are radically changing the sound of English. | Slate
https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/08/northern-cities-vowel-shift-how-americans-in-the-great-lakes-region-are-revolutionizing-english.html
American Accent Undergoing Great Vowel Shift | NPR
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5220090
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
DANIEL: Hi everybody, it’s Daniel here. You won’t hear any references in this episode to the Russian invasion of Ukraine because we recorded it before all of that happened. It’s taken us a while to get this episode out because it’s all been a bit much, and one does what one can. But we hope that you enjoy this episode, a nostalgic reminder of a bygone time: last week. Our thoughts are with the Ukrainian people. Thanks for listening. Peace.
[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. If you anagram the letters of his name, you get… LIE… IN BEANS… You know what? No, I’m not going to do it that way. I’m not going to do that way. You know what? Ever since Ben and I have been doing the show, I’ve always been impressed by his ability to rock up and ask the good questions and know what’s going on.
HEDVIG: [laughs]
BEN: [shrinking in his seat]
DANIEL: He’s just been…
HEDVIG: This is his worst…. [laughs]
DANIEL: He’s my rock.
HEDVIG: [laughs hysterically]
BEN: [emits high-pitched sound]
DANIEL: I’m so full of admiration for him. So, that’s great. It’s Ben Ainslie!
BEN: [cringing, his face a mask of tension] Cool! That was cool. I really enjoy people saying nice things about me.
HEDVIG: Yeah, you can see it in his face.
DANIEL: And the same is true for Hedvig. You know, she showed up in our lives, mostly by chance, and she’s just come to be such an integral part of the team. I get along with Hedvig because she’s full of linguistic knowledge. Ben gets along with Hedvig because they both share an affinity for pop culture. I mean, verybody identifies with Hedvig. Everybody digs Hedvig because she’s just so relatable. So, it’s great to have her on the show.
HEDVIG: That’s weird. I’m relatable?
DANIEL: The two of you… Yeah, I think, everybody just digs you for some reason or other. Oh, and also if we anagram the letters of your name, you get AVID SHARK DIGGER. Like, it’s somebody who digs sharks.
BEN: That’s awesome.
HEDVIG: What did you do with the Å?
DANIEL: I had to change the Å into two A’s, but it worked.
HEDVIG: Aha, you got double letters then, you can spread them around. Oh.
DANIEL: I had do something.
BEN: What about me? What did I get?
DANIEL: Oh, you got… [chuckles] LIE IN BEANS. Have you ever lied in beans, Ben?
BEN: Yes.
DANIEL: Lying around the house?
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Sitting there?
BEN: I have no follow-up information. But yes, I have.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: I watched that Try Guys video where they fill the pool with spaghetti and got into that.
DANIEL: I keep thinking of that Who cover, the cover of the Who album with Pete Townshend in a tub full of beans. Gross.
HEDVIG: Oh, nice.
BEN: That is gross. I mean, mostly ’cause Pete Townshend.
DANIEL: That was the worst part.
BEN: Yeah, that’s the gross part of that image, obviously.
HEDVIG: Anyway, fun times. We’re having a show. We’re all here. We’re all excited. And we’re going to hear the news, or Daniel’s going to say something else before. What are you going to say?
BEN: What a great segue!
HEDVIG: Mhm. I know.
DANIEL: I had a great conversation with Dr Jessi Grieser, a sociolinguist at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. She’s the author of The Black Side of the River. And we’re going to be hearing from her pretty soon about the book. So, that’s going to be really cool. Folks, if you want to hear better intros, [chuckles] you have to write them.
BEN: [laughs] Daniel’s had a bit of a day today, folks. That’s the impression I’m getting.
DANIEL: Could you just make something fun? Last time was great. And you can do that by hitting us up with an email, hello@becauselanguage.com. You can also send something by SpeakPipe. It’s on our blog, becauselanguage.com.
HEDVIG: Hurray!
BEN: And if you want to hang out with all the peeps, we’re hanging out on Discord these days. So, come and join us there.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: It’s pretty fun.
BEN: Yeah, it’s pretty good.
HEDVIG: I should not post gross medical videos to our Discord. That might…
BEN: No.
HEDVIG: Well, I’m not sure I want to be relatable. So, if I post gross skin stuff, maybe I’ll become unrelatable.
BEN: What are you? What are you? Bob Dylan’s third album? You’re sick of being popular, so now you want to turn the fans away or something? Jesus.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I’ve got to be indie, gotta be… whatever. I don’t know.
DANIEL: By the way, our last episode was a bonus patron edition where we talked about the recent flareup of conflict in the world of pragmatics, people reassessing…
HEDVIG: Grice.
DANIEL: …Herbert Paul Grice. And that was with Rikker Dockum, the Thai phonologist, so there’s some really fascinating stuff there. I really enjoyed that episode.
BEN: He was great fun. I really enjoyed our time with Rikker.
HEDVIG: And I think we ended up with some valuable advice for people who are teaching pragmatics. Like, you can still teach Grice, but you can you can put it in context and stuff. It was a good conversation.
DANIEL: So, if you want to hear that, why don’t you join our Patreon? We’re becauselangpod.
BEN: Right-O. Enough shilling, you stumpees. Let’s get to the news.
DANIEL: It’s nice to hear that you’re not in the pocket of Big Language.
[laughter]
HEDVIG: Big Language.
DANIEL: This one was suggested by Aristemo, and it’s about a priest who committed an infelicitous speech act for decades.
BEN: Ah. Even I heard about this.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay, right!
HEDVIG: Yeah, I was thinking of suggesting this as well.
BEN: This is how far it penetrated into so many different, like, realms. God, the virality on this story was white hot.
DANIEL: I just haven’t stopped thinking about it.
HEDVIG: It is amazing. Words can be magic.
BEN: Can I do the thing?
DANIEL: Would you, please?
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: Can I share what understand from the story?
HEDVIG: Yes!
BEN: So there was a priest from the Catholic Church who, for years, was baptising people wrong. Now, as a non-faith person my entire life, I didn’t believe that there WAS a way you could baptise people wrong, because as a heathen…
DANIEL: Oh, my friend. [chuckles]
BEN: …it all seems like… to my point of view, it’s all made-up nonsense, magical woo-woo mysticism anyway! [chuckles]
DANIEL: If you do it the wrong way, it does nothing. And if you do it the right way, it does nothing!
BEN: So apparently this priest has been doing it the wrong way for, like, decades!
HEDVIG: [objection noises]
DANIEL: Yes, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: I may be an atheist, but I have a great deal of respect for religious people. And I think that the way they choose to do important rituals in life are important, and to them… Specifically to the Catholic Church, apparently, this specific phrase you say when you baptise someone matters. So, I heard some various Protestant priests being interviewed in other places where they were like, “Oh, different Protestant churches do it differently,” or like, “As long as you say something along these lines and put some water on their head, you’re good.” You can’t have…
BEN: That’s dirty Protestantismm where anything goes. That’s the wild west of Christianity.
HEDVIG: Right. You have to do the water though. And they said [foreign language], like dry baptism is not baptism. So, there was some sort of line. But apparently, yeah.
DANIEL: There are churches were dry baptism, where a verbal baptism is doable. So, it does exist. And like you say, Hedvig, we respect people, we don’t necessarily respect bad ideas.
BEN: Ugh, this is why she’s so relatable. Looking at her relating to other kinds of people, honestly.
HEDVIG: [chuckles]
DANIEL: I do have fun bashing away at religion. But that’s not what I want to do with this one. I’m just so fascinated, because what happened next was, they discovered that this priest was saying — instead of, “I baptise you in the name of the Father and of the Son,” which you’re supposed to do — he was saying, for decades, “We baptise you,” which makes it sound like it’s us here in the congregation. But, of course, according to officials, who picked up the error, it’s not us that baptises you, it’s Jesus.
BEN: And therefore, it has to be an anointed…
DANIEL: Through the priest.
BEN: …representative of Jesus who gets to do that.
DANIEL: Right, the vicar. It’s done vicariously, right? which is where the word VICARIOUS comes from, because you’re a vicar.
HEDVIG: The priest can still say, “I,” but referring to in that moment, that person being Jesus, essentially.
DANIEL: That’s right. It’s not the community that does it. It’s the priest that does it. And by proxy, it’s Jesus doing it. Now, as many people know, I used to be a Mormon, and there is something like this in my background, and that is that young boys aged 16 or so, they read the sacramental prayer over the bread and the water. And this one needs to be word-for-word perfect. Otherwise, the young man has to start over, and everybody understands that there was a slip up, start over. And in fact, after the prayer, they will glance over to the local leader — the bishop, it’s called a bishop — to make sure that they got it right. But I’ll just read this from the article: “According to the Catholic Diocese of Phoenix, Reverend Arango was reciting the words used for baptisms incorrectly. The Church has declared all baptisms he conducted up until that date… invalid.”
BEN: This is actually kind of a big deal though, right?
DANIEL: It is.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: So from my understanding of the story, this means certain things like weddings — sorry — marriages and deaths…
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm. Communion.
BEN: …and other stuff is also not valid, because you need to be baptised into the church before any of that stuff can happen. But I want to make the distinction, that doesn’t mean that all, like, civil versions of those things are null and void, right? Obviously, if people get married under the law of Arizona…
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: I guess so.
BEN: …they’re still married. The Arizona state legislator is like, “You’re married, people.”” There’s not… “Oops, sorry, Catholic Church says no.” No tax breaks for you.
HEDVIG: For example, those children probably have a name.
[laughter]
DANIEL: Yeah, but what happens if some of them died in the interim? I’m no Catholic theologian but…
BEN: Ooh.
HEDVIG: No, that’s true. The problem here becomes, maybe — I don’t know, we’re not Catholic theologians, so maybe we shouldn’t speculate too much — but I’m suspecting that it’s about intention of the persons, like if the parents of the child all intended to go through the baptism and thought that they had, there might be some wiggle room for them. Right?
DANIEL: Well, apparently not according to this diocese, because… and that’s what’s fascinating about this. So let’s bring in the linguistics. John Austin, language philosopher, in his Harvard Lecture Series way back when… a book came out about How to Do Things with Words, he describes different kinds of acts that are going on when we say things. So there’s the locutionary force, that’s the thing that you say, the actual words, and that’s what the priest got wrong. Then, there’s the illocutionary intent, which is the intentions that you had when you said the thing. And then he also describes perlocutionary effect, the effect that happens by saying something. But what happens in this case is that the locution, what you actually say, is the thing that matters and doing that wrong actually invalidates the intention that you had!
BEN: So my understanding of Catholic dogma would be that if someone who had been baptised this way and it is now invalid, or it was never valid in the first place in the eyes of the Catholic Church, if any of those individuals have died, they’re goin’ to purgatory.
DANIEL: Hmm. Limbo is no longer a thing for babies.
BEN: No heaven for them.
DANIEL: Oh, that’s pretty serious consequences if that’s what you believe.
HEDVIG: But they go into purgatory and then potentially heaven, right? In other words, you should be going to hell. Purgatory is…
BEN: Well, maybe they go to hell then.
HEDVIG: -where you burn off your sins, and then you go to heaven.
DANIEL: Any consequence in this case!
BEN: I thought though that if you’re not baptised, you cannot go to heaven, like full stop.
HEDVIG: Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. I think there’s variation.
DANIEL: Reading through the article, this is the view expressed by the article writer’s understanding of Catholic doctrine. It’s a weird thing. It’s just so strange, because this is supposed to be a god that knows the thoughts and intent of your heart. But this is a case where people can have the right intentions, but because the wording is wrong, the speech act becomes infelicitous.
BEN: Look, this isn’t unique to the Catholic Church by any means.
DANIEL: No.
BEN: Right? Like, we’ve done stories about how the Oxford comma cost a company literally millions of dollars. So, in any kind of contractual format, the language matters very, very, very, very much. I guess at the end of the day, this is all this really is, is a contract with God.
DANIEL: Yeah. And the intention can’t really matter, because you’d like to say, “Well, God will give them a mulligan because it was intended that they be baptised.” But if God can give mulligans, well, then you can give mulligans on lots of things, including, like, salvation, maybe baptism isn’t necessary at all. I don’t think that’s a road that the church folks want to go down.
HEDVIG: That sounds like a little bit of a slippery slope problem, because we’re talking about ‘I’ versus ‘we’, and we includes ‘I’. So, it’s not like a dramatic difference, right?
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
BEN: I could see how the Catholic church, not necessarily renowned for being, like, progressive New Age thinkers, would say, “Mm, this seems like an encroachment on our power and validity. I say no, sir.”
DANIEL: Yeah. I mean: is baptism necessary? Or is it not? If it’s not necessary, fine. There’s no need for a Catholic church.
HEDVIG: But they also believe in a forgiving God, and that Christianity is being forgiving.
BEN: Have you met Catholics? They really don’t. They really don’t believe in forgiveness. [laughs]
DANIEL: Here’s the other thing. They’re treating this like a product recall. It is so interesting, because they’re saying, “If you have been affected by this event, please come forward, and we will…”
BEN: [laughs] Come on down! Bring your faulty unbaptised spawn and we will… [laughs]
DANIEL: And maybe I am going to be bashing away at religion a little bit. But it seems to me, like, I remember what my mom and my sister went through when I left the Mormon faith and just how confused and hurt they were, and worried. They were really legitimately worried for me, and it just seemed to me like religion…
HEDVIG: You left their world.
DANIEL: Yeah, I left their orbit. It seems to me like that religion was the cause of a lot of unnecessary suffering. And I just want to say to all those Catholic people, I know that this isn’t going to be very comforting, but my belief is that it’s okay. It’s all okay. Nothing bad has happened here. But, I guess…
BEN: I’d say from what I’m familiar with, in terms of Catholic families and Catholic culture, having worked in a Catholic school for many years, the people who are going to be most distraught about this, are the grandparent tier of Catholics that exist, who will be very, very concerned. I think the middle-age tier and the kid tier are going to be like, “Oh, okay, well, if abuela is particularly upset about it, I’ll go and get baptised by the new priest. It’s all good.” Whereas I think it’s only the older generation who are going to be like, “Oh, no!”
HEDVIG: Yeah, maybe that’s true.
DANIEL: Again, it’s the people who believe it most that are harmed the most.
HEDVIG: Maybe we should also just tie it briefly back to linguistics, because there’s one word that we didn’t use, which is performative speech acts.
DANIEL: Yes, please. Yes, please.
HEDVIG: Which is what this is about. There are certain verbs that are special that when you say them, you are doing them. For example, “I promise Daniel that I won’t tap the table and disturb the audio recording in this podcast session.”
BEN: [laughs]
DANIEL: And when you did that, it changed the world because now a promise exists and it didn’t before.
HEDVIG: Yes, so the thing that the verb promised describes…
BEN: That’s very funny.
HEDVIG: …is also the action that saying that word is. So, you can also do this in sentences by saying like, HEREBY. Like, “I hereby pronounce you husband and wife,” or whatever. And it is in that sentence, it’s this weird thing that only happens with certain sentences where you do them at the same time. Because otherwise when you say, like, “I’m drinking water,” saying that isn’t drinking water.
DANIEL: Right.
HEDVIG: But by saying promise…
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you have to actually… Well, by the very nature, you can’t be drinking water when you say drinking water.
HEDVIG: Exactly. But even if like, I’m farting, and I am farting, while I’m saying it, me saying, “I’m farting,” is not the farting, but saying, “I promise”…
DANIEL: But if I say, “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” in the right situation, then magically, you’ve got two married people in front of you!
HEDVIG: Exactly.
DANIEL: It’s magical.
HEDVIG: And they’re also tied into… if you like you do Butler and stuff when they talk about performing gender that when you… Yeah, it’s all sort of linked, and it’s very interesting. So in this case, the sentence is performative according to the Catholic Church, but it is only performative if it is said exactly the way they have mandated.
DANIEL: Otherwise, it’s infelicitous.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Otherwise, you’re just saying the words, when you’re not doing the action. So, yeah, performative verbs are really cool. If you can think of any other common ones besides PROMISE, I think SWEAR, like, “I swear that I won’t hurt you.”
DANIEL: VOW.
HEDVIG: Uh, VOW.
BEN: Yeah. Can we think of anything that isn’t just a synonym for PROMISE? [laughs] Like, that’s what I want to know.
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly. It’s really hard, isn’t it?
DANIEL: I can think of one. I use this example a lot of my classes, ARREST. If the right person says, “I arrest you in the name of the law,” and…
HEDVIG: Ah, that’s a good one.
DANIEL: …in the right situation.
BEN: I’m placing you under arrest.
DANIEL: You’ve got an arrested person there. That’s what you’ve got.
HEDVIG: Is it like, “I declare you innocent in the eyes of the court?”
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: Actually, Daniel, I might push back on that.
DANIEL: Mm?
BEN: Uh, I don’t think that’s true.
DANIEL: Oh, really? Okay. You must know something about the situation that I don’t.
BEN: No, not at all, because I’m just picturing a police officer yelling after me running away into the distance, “I’m placing you under arrest!” It’s actually the act of violating my autonomy to do things that I want to do that is the actual reality of being under arrest. Right?
HEDVIG: No, you can be placed under arrest by distance.
BEN: Really?
DANIEL: Can you?
HEDVIG: Yeah. Or at least in Swedish.
BEN: Hedvig, I want to know this story.
[laughter]
BEN: How you learned this one firsthand!
HEDVIG: No, like, someone says, “This person is arrested,” and if you encounter them, you should…
BEN: No, you have to put a warrant out for someone’s arrest, I believe. Right? So, if there is a warrant for someone’s arrest, that means the arrest hasn’t happened.
HEDVIG: [typing] “Arrest someone by distance.”
DANIEL: This doesn’t necessarily invalidate my point, which was that if the right person says it in the right situation, then the arrest happens.
BEN: I guess so. But my…
DANIEL: We’re just talking about what that situation is.
BEN: But then, I’m thinking about Hedvig saying, “I’m farting,” and farting at the same time. It’s the farting that does it. I would be really interested to know. I would love to know the answer for this one.
DANIEL: It’s just such an interesting area where you have magic words that can do magical things. The situation is rife for weird little eventualities, and this is certainly one that has got a lot of people thinking.
BEN: I bet our Discord is going to have this answer in, like, a second after the show. There’s going to be a big long list of other ones like this.
HEDVIG: Uh-huh.
DANIEL: By the way, it was Llewellyn Moss.
BEN: Llewellyn, who’s that?
DANIEL: Llewellyn Moss, the character whose name we could not remember in our last episode from No Country for Old Men.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
BEN: Oh, of course it was. Good memory. Okay, we should do the next news story.
DANIEL: Let’s go to the next news story. This one comes from Steven Piantadosi and a team from MIT and the University of California at Berkeley, and it’s about numbers and thinking. You know, I’ve watched my little daughter’s acquired numbers. Like one and two and three, they happened pretty quickly. Four… four came a bit later. But then, there was just this explosion where they just, “Dad, I want to count to 100.” “Okay, go.” “One,” [chuckles] then I had to listen, “Two,” children counting. And what would happen was, they would… they would get to 20. 20 was a big deal. Of course, they would skip, like, maybe 16 or 17.
BEN: What is with 16?
DANIEL: 16! Both of them!
BEN: My kid couldn’t count 16 for a year and a half.
DANIEL: Why do they always skip 16? Anybody else? Is your child skipping 16?
BEN: I need to know this. I need to know if it’s just an English thing. If it’s just your and my kids are the same kind of dumb thing. I need to know.
DANIEL: I’m really surprised to hear this. But then, they sit on 20 for a while and then suddenly it just goes 30, 40, 50. Once they get that, then it’s off to the races.
HEDVIG: Unless you’re speaking Danish or French.
BEN: Oh, French. Don’t. Don’t even.
HEDVIG: Danish is worse.
BEN: No, that can’t be possible. Surely not.
DANIEL: Danish is very strange.
HEDVIG: Danish is worse, it is.
DANIEL: Maybe we’ll get onto Danish.
HEDVIG: We can talk about that at some point but it is worse than French.
DANIEL: It’s about that Tsimane people who live in the Bolivian rainforest, they have numbers up to 100. After that, they have to borrow from Spanish. But the people themselves, the experimental subjects that they used could count from anywhere to maybe six, maybe 20, maybe 40. And so what they would do is a certain kind of counting task where they put a bunch of batteries or sticks or whatever in a horizontal line. And they say, “All right, I want you to take some sticks, and you give me the same number of sticks that I just gave you. Except don’t put them horizontally, put them vertically,” so you can’t just line them up, one to one.
BEN: Right, right, right.
DANIEL: So, it’s a counting task. What the team found was that people could do it, but they tended to get wrong answers at a certain point. And it was just below the level that they could count at. If they could count to 14, they started making mistakes about 12 or 13. If they could count up to 30, they would make mistakes a few lower than that.
BEN: Interesting. So, what’s going on there? Is it like we just put enough mental space aside for the numbers that we have, like when we’re redlining an engine, we just kind of get a bit flugelly when we get to the top?
HEDVIG: Let’s for a moment think about what it means to be a person who counts to 14 and not much further, because it doesn’t mean that you are less intelligent or stupid or that you can’t do math or trade, because you can actually do trade without numbers. You can, for example, tell if you have the same number of something without being able to count, either. And you can also count different objects in different ways.
DANIEL: And people who don’t have numbers are actually pretty good at estimating. Like, if you have: how many would this pile plus this pile make? And they do just as well as we would.
HEDVIG: Right. What the task is, it involves counting. So, if you rarely count above 14, you might not encounter counting situations above 14 often in your life, and that’s the reason why you don’t have more words for it. So, it might not be the lack of the words themselves, it might be the lack of encountering such situations.
BEN: Okay. I get you. Like, you can count to 14, but the reality is, if there’s almost a probability distribution of all of the times you’ve had to count in your life, the 14 — if the number is 14 that you get to — is probably one of the smaller probability bars in that graph. Like, you probably counted to 8 or 9 heaps of times, but you’ve probably only counted to 13 a smaller number of times.
HEDVIG: Right. Like, I can embed six levels of clauses into one sentence.
DANIEL: That’s tough.
HEDVIG: But I rarely do. [laughter] If I were to try it, I’d probably be not very good at it, because I don’t get much practice. But theoretically, if I had a pen and paper and some time, I could probably work it out.
DANIEL: Theoretical depth: infinite. Observed depth: two.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Are we dancing around the idea that our language affects our cognition? Having words for numbers makes it easier to think in terms of numbers? Could this be a way in which Whorfians might actually be right?
BEN: I’ve got to say, I find Hedvig’s explanation of, like, probabilities of how often you’ve done a task to be a far more intuitive answer than the numbers you have guide how you think about the world.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Okay.
BEN: But I also think there’s a bit of a chicken and an egg thing here as well. Right? Like, yes, the probabilistic distribution of the things you’ve had to count in your life probably impacts how good you are at certain numbers. But at the same time, how good you are at certain numbers probably impacts the types of things you tend to see and interact with, and the kind of counting tasks you gravitate towards, and all that kind of stuff as well.
DANIEL: So, in that case, it’s not about not having the words for things or not using the words for things. It’s just your experience in performing a certain kind of task.
HEDVIG: I’m sorry for being the party pooper.
DANIEL: No, that’s fine.
HEDVIG: But yeah, when people say like, “Oh, this language has more distinctions or more words here and there,” they probably have that because their environment and the context is such that they encounter situations where they need more of those words. So, we can’t really tell if it’s the fact that they have more words for it, or the fact that they live in surroundings where they do that experience more often. And, like, I don’t know how to tell those apart.
BEN: The longtime listeners of this show will have heard this example so many times now, but it’s one of my favorites and I love it. There’s that terrible racist thing that, like, Eskimos, which is a terrible word, have 30 words for white, which is just not true.
DANIEL: For snow.
HEDVIG: Snow.
BEN: Well, no.
DANIEL: For white?
BEN: The misunderstood one is… the thing that a lot of dumb white people will say is like, ~Oh, yeah, they have, like, 30 words for white.~ The reality is: the Sámi people or any herding persons who live in the tundra will have dozens and dozens of different words for snow because there are dozens of different varieties of snow that might impact how their herds can access feed underneath the snow or access how they can travel across the snow, or impact how they can access fish underneath frozen river, and just all this kind of stuff. Right? Like, there’s a crusty layer, and then there’s a thin layer, and there’s another layer and another. So yeah, they do have all those words for snow because snow when you look really closely changes quite a lot.
HEDVIG: Mixed up Inuit and Sámi, but I think it still applies.
BEN: No, that’s because my experience is with the Sámi people who are herders, whereas a lot of the Inuit peoples aren’t necessarily herders. They might just be pure, sort of like, fisher-hunter-gatherers kind of thing.
HEDVIG: I have a word for a snow thing that you don’t. [ǁǁǁ]
DANIEL: Really?
HEDVIG: Yeah, we have a different word for the crust, that is not the same as crust on bread or whatever.
DANIEL: Cool.
HEDVIG: Skare. It’s only that. Like you say, Ben, if you live in a place where it snows more… I also have other words for like different kinds of mush snow and things — snö modd — is, like, a certain kind of mush snow, because, [chuckles] like you say, it matters.
BEN: It matters. [laughs]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: We’ve started off talking about Whorfianism, but I think that the example that you’re giving is not really… it doesn’t pertain. Because remember, there are three things: language, culture/environment, and thought. Those three things. And the Whorfian idea is that language influences thought. Ben: the example you’ve given is culture influencing language, which is not under dispute, and is separate from the Whorfian question.
HEDVIG: It is. But what…
BEN: I guess, what I’m trying to say then is that I believe that this is a more ready explanation than the Whorfian explanation for the counting example that we’re looking at.
HEDVIG: Right. So Ben and I are saying that the surroundings and the culture is influencing…
DANIEL: Thought.
HEDVIG: …what they can do and the experiences… No… well, language or thought, like, either. But it’s not like a full triangle, because there’s not necessarily… This example doesn’t prove a link between language and thought, irrespective of the third one.
DANIEL: I agree.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And it’s really hard to think of examples that don’t… in order to do that, we need… I can think some of those things with the Spanish and German gendered words and asking people to associate adjectives.
BEN: Oh like bridges, and is, like, a bridge powerful or beautiful and all that kind of stuff.
HEDVIG: Those ones are better, I think.
DANIEL: I think so too.
HEDVIG: Because they’re more well controlled.
DANIEL: But I’m still really interested in this idea that numbers make it easier for you to think in terms of numbers, because there are other experiments. For example, Dutch kindergarten children, when you give them two numbers to add up, they perform worse than English-speaking children. And they think that that might be because it’s 4-20 instead of 24. And that might make it harder in some way. There’s just a number of little experiments that that have just been piling up, and I’d love to air them someday, but not today. But I think numbers are just this really interesting proving ground that a lot of people who do believe in Whorfianism are sort of coming to and expanding. So, I don’t know when that’s going to end up. I don’t know what I think about it. But I do like Hedvig’s explanation. So what you’re saying is, this might not be a case of language influencing thought. This might be a case of…
HEDVIG: Experience.
DANIEL: …the environment influencing… experiences influencing thought, which is totally fair. I don’t have a problem with that. And we can’t really tease apart whether it’s language or whether it’s experience. I get that. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for clarifying that for me. Let’s finish up with one from Hedvig, actually.
HEDVIG: Yeah, no, so this was something I don’t know if anyone pointed this out in our Discord as well. But for those who are interested, so we’re going to air this episode after, but we’re recording it before, right? Because today that we’re recording is [phew phew] can I tell a thing to our listeners? It’s 20th of February we’re recording, which is a Sunday, and tomorrow on the Monday, 21st of February, is the International Mother Language Day, and it is proclaimed by the UNESCO and it’s been going on since 1999, and it’s to promote the preservation and protection of all languages used by peoples of the world. It’s still called Mother Language Day. If you want to call it your native language or first language or anything like that, I’m sure you’re still included! And yeah, it’s the day people celebrate in all kinds of different ways. So, the ELAR, the Endangered Languages Archive, are celebrating it with various events going on that you can check out. I think some of them are going to be recorded. You can look at them later. We’ll put a link in our show notes. I like to celebrate it by just tweeting and using social media in Swedish instead of English for a while, which I do anyway, but it’s just fun.
DANIEL: What would you recommend that an English speaker like… I learned English as my first language. What can I do to celebrate International Mother Language Day? Speaking English doesn’t seem like the thing.
HEDVIG: Well, so you might just try and learn about linguistic diversity in the world and the… I would suggest actually trying to learn about the first languages spoken by people in your community. So like, in the town you live in, what kind of linguistic diversity is there? And is there anything you could learn from them, maybe? Learn some basic words in other languages. This year is also the UNESCO international Decade of Indigenous Languages. So, that’s going on from 2022, which is this year. Remember, everyone, it’s 2022.
DANIEL: Amazing.
HEDVIG: As bonkers as that sounds.
[chuckles]
HEDVIG: And it’s going to go on for another decade, and there’s going to be various events going on celebrating Indigenous languages.
DANIEL: We will have a link to a few of those things. Maybe even for Australians, I will include a link to the Census website, which you can look up your suburb and see what are the most common languages other than English that are there.
BEN: That’s fun. That’s a fun thing to do.
DANIEL: That might be a good little awareness builder for me personally. I think I know, but I’m not quite sure.
BEN: I’ve looked at the linguistic demographic breakdown of Perth before. It’s not very surprising. So, we’ve got…
HEDVIG: German, French?
BEN: Ah. I mean we do, but not very high at all. Our big ones are Mandarin. We’ve got a lot of Italian.
DANIEL: Vietnamese.
BEN: A lot of Vietnamese. And then, what’s…
DANIEL: There’s a lot of Hindi speakers.
BEN: I was about to say: probably a bit of Hindi but I mean Hindi is a bit tricky obviously because you don’t know whether someone’s probably coming from like an Urdu background or a Bengali background or something like that.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s right.
BEN: And then I’m trying to think there’s one big obvious one I’m forgetting, I reckon. Spanish is not huge.
DANIEL: Spanish is coming up though.
HEDVIG: Greek?
DANIEL: It’s getting bigger.
BEN: Greek.
DANIEL: Greek.
BEN: There would probably be a fair bit of Greek as well.
DANIEL: Heyyyy. Well, happy International Mother Language Day, everybody. We want to hear what your ideas are for celebrating this day.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: I’m here with Dr Jessi Grieser, sociolinguist at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, and the author of The Black Side of the River. Thanks for having a chat with me today.
JESSI GRIESER: It’s an absolute delight to be with you again, Daniel.
DANIEL: Yes! It seems like a world away from the last time we talked, wasn’t it?
JESSI: Right? There was an in-person moment and, like, we could both be in the same place in… [laughs]
DANIEL: New York City. It was very nice.
JESSI: Yeah.
DANIEL: But things have changed. That time, we talked about Talking Place, Speaking Race. Did I get the name backwards?
JESSI: No, I think that’s right. It’s Talking Place, Speaking Race. This is an outgrowth of that project. And so the big thing that has happened is just a real shift in the focus of that particular project to make it more accessible and more readable, which I really enjoy. Because as a sociolinguist, one thing that is a major problem in sociolinguistics is we draw a lot from working class communities, from minoritised communities, these communities that have these particular ways of speaking, that have these really interesting linguistic features. And we go and we record them, and we collect their data, and then we don’t really do anything that is useful to those communities.
And so what my publisher really pushed me toward was, “Let’s write something that could actually be read by the people who this is about.” And that’s where The Black Side of the River came from, where I just said, “Look, what I need to do is not write an academic thing that’s going to exist for only linguists and only linguists to be interested in. It’s got to be something that’s for the community, by the community, about the community, accessible by the community, purchasable by the community,” all of those sorts of things.
DANIEL: So I want to start with a sentence from the book. “When Black people cross rivers, it matters.”
JESSI: Yep.
DANIEL: What’s behind that sentence?
JESSI: So when you really think about it, it started with the sense of where this place is. Southeast DC is a quadrant of DC. DC crosses at the Capitol. There is Capitol Street, which runs north and south. And then there’s actually not a street that runs through the center of the Capitol in the center of town. But there is Constitution Avenue and Independence Avenue. So Constitution Avenue is what would be First Street in the north, and Independence Avenue is what would be First Street in the south. And so, the rest of DC is all oriented around where you are in relation to the Capitol. If you’re north and west of the Capitol, you’re in Northwest, if you’re north and east, you’re in Northeast, and so on so forth. And then, there’s this quadrant called Southeast. There’s part of the quadrant that is just… it’s south of the capital, east of the capital, but it’s also west of this particular river. And that river was originally called the Eastern Branch River. And then, it became named after the Native American tribe that originally owned the land — that continues to own the land because it was seized from them illegally — the Nacotchtank tribe, which eventually became anglicised as the Nacostin, and that’s where we get the name Anacostia. It is this this whitification of the Native American tribe that was there.
DANIEL: That’s pretty fitting because the A means “without” and the Nacostia means “Nacostin”. No, I’m just…
JESSI: Yep. Without the… [laughs] I haven’t thought of it that way, but, yeah, it is without the Nacotchtank people anymore.
DANIEL: oof.
JESSI: And so, we named that a river, and then the neighbourhood on the other side of that river, Anacostia. The fascinating thing, and when I give public talks about this, where I get to show slides and things, I actually show a couple of maps of DC where they just flat out leave this part off.
DANIEL: Oh, my gosh.
JESSI: Yeah. And so very often, when you look at maps of DC, especially ones that are made for public consumption or artistic reasons, they’ll just forget about this whole part of DC because it is technically part of the southeast quadrant. But there’s also a part of the southeast quadrant that’s on the other side of the river, on the richer, whiter side of the river. And so people think of that as being part of DC. And then once you cross the river, they just forget about it. Or, they think of it as… some of the things I talk about in the book is The Washington Post has called it ‘The Basement’ or ‘The Stepchild’, or all sorts of just terribly negative things that they use to describe it. At the same time, as DC has changed, or throughout the rest of the city, it has been where Black people have settled. And so it is one of the Blackest parts of DC. So it’s this neighbourhood that’s incredibly rich with Black culture and history and conversations.
A really recent thing that has happened in the past couple of months — and in fact, I didn’t even know this, this gets to be a Because Language exclusive — DC is divided up for governance reasons into eight wards, and this neighbourhood has been part of Ward 8. And so, it’s always been Ward 8, and people talk about it as being Ward 8. It’s Anacostia and several other neighbourhoods that are part of Ward 8. Well, recently, Ward 8 has extended across the river, and now includes this… BOUGIE is the right word for it.
DANIEL: [chuckles] Love that word.
JESSI: [chuckles] Yeah. Very gentrified. And I stayed there when I was giving a book talk a week ago, and then learned, like, “Oh, like that part of the city has now been annexed as Ward 8.” That is what it means that when Black people cross rivers, it matters. The ways that this part of DC is becoming connected to other parts of DC, and what that means for the history and the culture and the people that have always lived there, what that means for who chooses to live there in the future… One of the big things was, “Oh, well, we don’t have grocery stores.” And a big thing that several of my interviewees said was, “Well, we don’t have a Whole Foods. We’re going to know that we’re in trouble once we get a Whole Foods.” But now Ward 8 has a Whole Foods! It’s just on the other side of the river.
DANIEL: Oh, okay. Because they redrew the boundary.
JESSI: Right.
DANIEL: Oh, okay. So, I was going to say: You know you’ve made it when there’s a Whole Foods, but they’re not saying that. They’re saying, “You know we’re in trouble when there’s Whole Foods.”
JESSI: Yeah. You know you’ve been gentrified. You know that you know that some other culture is there when you have a Whole Foods. So there’s a real concern of what is takeover versus what is agency? What are the ways that people get to control this land for themselves? And I think that’s a really important part of what this neighbourhood is. And a really important part of what I’m trying to write about and what I’m trying to bring forth is a way for us to think about, how do we allow a Black community to speak for itself, to make claims for itself, and what kinds of things do we need to be listening for where maybe the white developers might think, “Oh, this is people asking for X, Y, Z kind of change.” But what discourse analysis shows and what variationist sociolinguistics can show is, ‘Mm. No, this is actually people saying, “We’re doing pretty good. And what we actually need you to do is to support the black culture that’s already here.’
DANIEL: So, being able to say, “This is who we are, this is who our neighbourhood is,” that’s being challenged.
JESSI: Exactly. Yeah.
DANIEL: And in fact, it’s always been challenged, because media narratives about Black neighbourhoods, you know.
JESSI: Yeah.
DANIEL: There’s a lot of bad vibes.
JESSI: Yeah. There’s this real narrative. So I talk about the really the Big “D” Discourses, and this comes from James Gee, who is both a linguist and a rhetorician. So, he works really well for someone like me who’s in a rhetoric division of an English department. I can assign him to my graduate students and know that they’re getting what they need, no matter what their direction is. But James Gee has this idea of a Big “D” Discourse. A Big “D” Discourse is the overarching narrative that we have about a particular phenomenon. The Big “D” Discourse about urban change — gentrification specifically, if we want to use that word — is often that it’s about flows of money. And it’s about helping people or about helping neighbourhoods. It’s about blight and fixing blight, or things like that.
What that ignores is the ways in which people might not consider it to be blight or might not consider it to be a problem. It ignores the ways that people have always found community and the place that they live. And it especially — and I would argue deliberately — ignores the racial aspects of it. You come into a neighbourhood and say, “Well, this neighbourhood has deteriorated, and so we’re going to fix it up.” And like, “Won’t this be great? We’re going to have this wonderful fixing up of this neighbourhood.” When you really listen to the voices of the people who’ve lived there all along and the people who are invested in the community, what they say is, “No, no, no, that’s not what this is. The city has allowed this neighbourhood to deteriorate, they’ve not put money in, and they’ve let it get to a point where then they can come in and say, ‘Oh! Well, the neighbourhood is in shambles. So now we’re going to offer you help and we’re going to fix it.’ But that fixing is going to draw other people in.
The really interesting thing that I discovered in my work was that there’s really a way to listen to the people who are already in the neighbourhood in a way that amplifies the things that Black people need and the ways in which this can actually contribute and continue the Black community that’s already there.
DANIEL: Okay. So let’s dig into how this plays out in language. I think if our listeners have listened to our Talk the Talk episode with you back in the Talk the Talk days, we found that there were Black residents, they’d been there the whole time. They were using language, especially African American English, as a way of establishing their presence in the neighbourhood in the face of, I guess, what I want to say is encroachment but maybe that’s not the right way to think about it, by, I guess, white people who were speaking white American English, I guess what’s considered standard US English.
JESSI: Mhm.
DANIEL: But now the picture that I’m getting is also that they’re promoting the idea that, “We’ve been here all along, and we’ve been fine all along.” What does that kind of talk sound like?
JESSI: At a micro level, which is what I talked about the last time you had me around, so at a micro level that looks like using African American English in certain kinds of topics. And so that’s things like: Okay, if I’m going to talk about the neighbourhood, I’m going to use a greater percentage of my talk using features of African American English. So, things like stressed BEEN, we’ve been here all the time, or multiple negation, and negative concord. When we use these features of African American English, more often when we’re talking about things that are about the neighbourhood, when we’re talking about things that are about Southeast more generally or DC more generally, it’s a way of instantiating, “Okay, this is Black space.” When I talk about this Black space, I’m going to sound a little Blacker when I talk about it. Actually, I was just rereading because I assigned it today, a piece by Kara Becker from 2009. And she was studying the Lower East Side of New York City, which is where Labov did his famous work that basically founded the field of sociolinguistics in the 1960s. She found really similar things where she’s found that, okay, when people talk about the Lower East Side, they use this New York feature of lack of R more often.
DANIEL: Even today?
JESSI: Even today.
DANIEL: Wow.
JESSI: Or, at least 10 years ago. But, yeah, so like, there’s this feature that is registered as New York. If you’re trying to say, “Oh, I’m a New Yorker,” as you talk about being from New York, you’re going to use that feature. And I found the exact same thing in DC. Like, if you’re going to try to sound more DC, well, DC is enregistered as Black space. It is called the Chocolate City. You even see white people wearing shirts that say DC Chocolate City [chuckles] on it. So it’s enregistered as Black space, and so people are more likely to use Black English when talking about it.
DANIEL: I remember the bit about Gus, who says, “They ain’t make improvements fo’ us.”
JESSI: Exactly.
DANIEL: That’s on the micro level. Okay, cool. I got that far.
JESSI: Yeah, that’s the micro level. At a micro level, you see these minute changes in the actual morphological and syntactic structures that people choose to use. But on the macro level, you also see things like anticipating the criticisms of the neighbourhood. For example, this neighbourhood, as I mentioned, the Washington Post has called it “The Basement,” they’ve called it “The Stepchild.” There’s a joke map of DC that makes fun of different neighbourhoods. For instance, Georgetown, which is a very gentrified, bougie upper class neighbourhood. On the map, it calls it, “The “Metroless popped collar land.”
DANIEL: Oh, okay.
[laughter]
JESSI: Describing the people who are there, or another part of the city, where the National Zoo is, it says, “Single Ladies and Pandas” [chuckles] is the joke about what’s there. I’m like, “Yeah, no, that’s legit. That’s where I lived as a single lady and visited the pandas.”
DANIEL: Fair. What are they saying about Anacostia?
JESSI: In Anacostia, it is “The Zone of Perceived Danger.”
DANIEL: Okay, that hurts.
JESSI: Yeah. So, you have these ways of talking about the neighbourhood, “It’s dangerous, it is unsafe, it’s unclean, it’s full of poor people.” And those are the things that are just out in circulation. And of course, being a good interviewer, being a good academic, you’re not going to bring that to the table and go, “How do you feel about these sorts of things?”
DANIEL: You wait for them to bring it up if they want to.
JESSI: Right. You wait for them to bring it up. The answer is they don’t bring it up, but they automatically counter it. And so instead of… nobody volunteers, nobody talks about, “Oh, people think this neighbourhood is unclean.” But instead, they volunteer, “Let me talk to you about the ways that this neighbourhood is beautiful.”
DANIEL: That’s nice.
JESSI: “Let me talk to you about the ways that it was rural when I was growing up.” Oh, people had chickens in their yard, people had gardens in their yard. When you go up on this hill, you have the most beautiful vista of the entirety of DC, which is true, by the way. And so people volunteer this as a way of just preempting those other sorts of conversations and saying, “No, no, no, this is a place where I felt wonderfully secure as a child. This is a place where I felt welcome. This is a place where I feel safe. This is a beautiful place.” And so, all of these ways of just cutting the conversation off at the pass essentially. Instead, just getting out there, “No, this is a place you want to be.” It’s not just about, “Let me tell you how beautiful my neighbourhood is.” It is, “Let me tell you how beautiful my neighbourhood is because you think it’s ugly, and you think it’s in need of fixing.”
DANIEL: There’s also middle-class Black residents who are kind of newcomers.
JESSI: Yeah.
DANIEL: At the same time, they’re trying to distinguish themselves from the white gentrifiers. Have you noticed a difference in the way that those two groups of Black residents use language?
JESSI: Absolutely. This was one of the things that I fully confess, I’ve underplayed a little bit in the manuscript that ended up being the book, because I wanted to emphasise some of the more broader similarities. Some of these are a little bit more highly technical, and so to talk about them involves more statistics and things like that. So, I didn’t want to throw all of that into the book, because again, I wanted to write a book that was like, “Okay, if you’re interested in this neighbourhood, you can read this book.”
DANIEL: Ooh, but we get it here on the show. Yay.
JESSI: We get it, right?
DANIEL: Okay. I’m ready.
JESSI: You see these really subtle differences. For example, I went in to this study as a doe-eyed graduate student 10 years ago going, “I’m going to find all sorts of interesting things to talk about, about class differences in African American English.” And that was why I wanted to study this neighbourhood where middle-class black people were moving into the neighbourhood from other parts in DC. But what I found was that the same sorts of patterns were happening, even at a lesser extent, because what happens is: that becomes the way that middle class Black residents can criticise what’s happening. Because otherwise, if you’re, say, a lawyer, who’s educated at Howard, which is the historically Black college and university in DC. It’s a very famous HBCU and sort of one of the roots of the history of Black wealth and Black success in DC, is that lots of Howard-educated Black people. So, say you’ve graduated from Howard, and you’re a doctor or a dentist or a lawyer, but you’ve been vaguely priced out of the rest of DC or at least maybe you see more opportunity in this spot of DC where white people are still hesitant to move into, but you feel comfortable moving because you’re a Black person, and there’s other Black people there.
DANIEL: Yeah. But then, you’re also kind of part of the problem as well, so there’s this weird…
JESSI: You’re part of the problem, and if you criticise the problem, you’re criticising yourself, to some extent!
DANIEL: That’s exactly right! Oh, it’s a dance. Okay, cool.
JESSI: It’s a very careful dance. And so, that’s part of the reason why we see the patterns in morphosyntax that we do. So I was going, “Oh, okay, I’m going to find these wonderful patterns in the actual language structure.” And what I found instead was that no matter what social class people were from, the kinds of things they talked about led to an increase in use of these morphological or syntactical features, because it’s a way for everybody to go, “Oh, this is a problem. And I’m laying claim on this neighbourhood as being a Black neighbourhood by increasing the kinds of Black language I use to talk about it.” For people who don’t use very many of those features to begin with, it’s really subtle, like you’re talking 2% to 6%. And for people who use a lot versus, you’re talking like 12%, to like 20%. But you see that same increase, and so that becomes one aspect.
And then, another aspect you see is less overt discussion of what’s happening in the neighbourhood, and more sort of inferential discussion. So you’ll see people going, “Well, when I was a child, this is what it was like. People were looking out for me. You felt very safe, you felt very protected.” One of my participants, Tawna, talks about the neighbourhood pool as being idyllic. And she goes, “It was almost idyllic. It was almost idyllic, the way that it was for us to go to the pool.” Those sorts of contrasts are the ways that people have an opportunity to talk about the neighbourhood, and to not back away from the struggles that the neighbourhood has had, to not hide the fact that, like, “Yeah, there’s deep poverty here. There are drug problems here.” But to say, “This is a wonderful place that we have moved to, that we have lived in. This is a place we want to be as middle- and upper-class Black residents of DC.” The moves that are made are much more subtle. And that’s one of the big things that I think about what I would like the book to do, for people to recognise those more subtle moves.
DANIEL: I was just wondering if you had any observations on what your language was like when you were doing the work for this? How did your language change? How did you use language to position yourself? What did you notice yourself doing?
JESSI: Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that’s really interesting about my work is… I won’t lie, I consider myself a very white-positioned researcher because of my upbringing. And so I’m transracially adopted, I have two white parents. They were both raised in the same very small county in Northwest Ohio and that I grew up in the city in the south and southwest, I grew up in Cincinnati. So, I should have seen the linguistics thing happening far earlier. I went to the magnet school for foreign language.
DANIEL: Oh, right. Gee, you were a linguist all the way through.
JESSI: I was a linguist all the way through. My parents put me in the magnet school for Mandarin Chinese when I was five. So, here I am, this little Black girl with white parents learning Mandarin. That was my upbringing! But yeah, so in some ways, I feel very similar to my classmates, my graduate school classmates who are raised differently, but sound the same as I do. At the same time, to my interviewees, I’m very much read as, “Oh, this is a Black woman who’s come to interview us.” And I even have some work exploring that, where I had an interviewee who just completely changed the way that he was talking when my classmate left, and my classmate was also from Cincinnati. She also grew up in a very similar family, we actually went to two high schools that were run by two different branches of the same convent of nuns.
DANIEL: Okay. [chuckles] My gosh.
JESSI: [chuckles] You could not find two people with more similar linguistic backgrounds than the two of us.
DANIEL: And yet.
JESSI: But the difference is we are different colours when we look at our faces, and so she had to leave halfway through the interview of this sort of elderly Black gentleman in DC. And he completely changed the way that he sounded when she left.
DANIEL: Oh, delicious. Delicious.
JESSI: It’s so good. I’m just like, “Wow, the only thing that changed was the skin colour of the person he was talking to. This is amazing.”
DANIEL: That’s fantastic. In our last chat, you mentioned that going forward, you hoped that the neighbourhood would retain its features, its Black American features. Has it? Or has it really, really changed?
JESSI: I think that it has. I’m really anxious to see what will happen moving forward in the 2020s with this recent… I mean, it is literally weeks old. It happened about two months ago, this annexation of what’s called Navy Yard.
DANIEL: Wow.
JESSI: It is this neighbourhood. My colleague, Nicole Holliday, who’s a linguist at Penn, very well known in the social spheres. She’s @mixedlinguist on Twitter.
DANIEL: She’s on Spectacular Vernacular, which we all listen to.
JESSI: Yep, she’s the host of Spectacular Vernacular. She’s wonderful and a delight. She retweeted something that I said in a talk in DC, and she said, “Ward 8 used to have far fewer IPAs.” [laughs] I’m a big beer drinker. I was like, yeah. So it’s going to be really interesting to see what happens as some of the monetary flows happen that are associated with these… with the other side of the river, now that it’s monetarily part of the east side of the river.
DANIEL: Yeah, it’s not slowing down. It’s speeding up!
JESSI: Right, exactly. When I first moved to DC, they had just opened the ballpark. And you could get off the subway — the metro, as it’s known in DC — so you could get off the metro, and you would pop up out of the metro, and there was a baseball stadium. And that was it.
DANIEL: And then, they made the 11th Street Bridge, and that’s finished.
JESSI: And then, there was the 11th Street Bridge. And now there’s the Frederick Douglass Bridge, which is finished. Absolutely beautiful poesy of my book. The 11th Street Bridge was under construction when I started this book project, and I had this very convoluted way of getting to my research site. And they sort of finished the 11th Street Bridge as I was finishing the dissertation work and finishing some of my graduate work. And then, the Frederick Douglas Bridge, which is on the other side of the community, they placed the last piece of the bridge the day that I turned the manuscript into the publisher.
DANIEL: Wow.
JESSI: It is this beautiful sort of metaphor for, “Okay, what does it mean to have two brand-new bridges, connecting the east of the river to the rest of DC?” It means that people who are east of the river are going to be able to come in to the rest of DC. It means that they’re going to be able to pop across the Frederick Douglass Bridge and go get that IPA and go to that fancy brunching place and go to spend their money and still have it be within Ward 8 and still have it financially benefit their part of the neighbourhood.
DANIEL: That’s true.
JESSI: But it also means that other people are going to be able to come in, and who are those people going to be? What are those people are going to bring? How much are they going to be invested in the neighbourhood? Right now, it continues to be people who seem to be pretty deliberate, who seem to care about the same sorts of things. But that might not always be the case, and it probably won’t always be the case.
DANIEL: But do you think that despite all that, they’re hanging on to features of their original language?
JESSI: Absolutely. The very last chapter of the book, I talk a little bit about the fact that whenever you have something that’s linguistically unusual in a series of interviews, you back up and you go, “Whoa, why is this happening?” And the unusual thing that happened was the word BASTION.
DANIEL: Oh, that’s an interesting word, isn’t it? It’s like we always… Oh, my gosh, I’m using it. I’m talking, I’m doing a thing later on Australian radio about oxbows, these funny words that only occur in limited contexts like AKIMBO. Only a few things can be AKIMBO. Well, there can only be one kind of BASTION. A last bastion! You can’t have a first bastion.
JESSI: [laughs] You can’t have a first bastion. Yes. You can only have a last bastion.
DANIEL: Yeah, I think I’ll go for the second or third bastion, maybe not the first one because you never know with bastions. [laughter]
JESSI: It’s that fourth bastion, that’s the one that’ll get you.
DANIEL: Yeah, but then, you’re pretty close to the last bastion. So, there you go.
JESSI: Yeah.
DANIEL: What do they say about BASTION?
JESSI: I had several people who talked about this neighbourhood as being the last bastion of DC Black culture.
DANIEL: Oh, a siege metaphor. Oh, my gosh!
JESSI: Yep! It is this idea, which of course, it’s doubly interesting, because east of the river was, in fact… so there’s Fort Stanton Hill, which is where you can actually go and see that beautiful vista of downtown DC. But Fort Stanton was a fort in the Civil War. [chuckles]
DANIEL: Oh, okay.
JESSI: There really is a bastion in southeast DC. But there’s a real sense among several people who do not know each other, who do not have any reason to otherwise be all using this term, but that DC has historically been a Black city. In 1970, it was 70% Black. That’s when it became known as Chocolate City. It was this place where you could go, you could go to Howard University. If you didn’t go to Howard University, you could work for the government who couldn’t discriminate against you because of the colour of your skin. You could guarantee that you would be able to earn a living and pass money on to your children, and then your children could earn a living and pass it on to their grandchildren. And it was a way to get a foothold in the pre-Civil Rights Era as a way against the Jim Crow South. That’s where the Lovings moved when they were fighting against interracial marriage. And so it’s been this place of Black success. There’s a sense that that might be slipping as the Black community starts to slip from DC.
And so people have this sense — and I have this sense — that southeast DC, and particularly the east of the river neighbourhoods, need that protection, as the place where DC culture is going to be instantiated, where DC culture is going to be protected. And I realise I’m using DC culture as a stand-in for DC Black culture, because that’s really what it is. DC culture is a Black culture. It is go-go music, it is Mumbo sauce, all of these things that come out of the history of Black people in in Washington, and southeast is going to be the last place where those things are going to be protected, and that’s vital to protecting the nature of the city more broadly and protecting the nature of Black culture more broadly.
DANIEL: Just to wrap it up, tell me something that white folks like me need to know about race and language. What are we getting wrong and what do we need to know?
JESSI: I think the biggest thing that people are getting wrong — and it’s not just white people, it is lots of people in thinking about the nature of the interconnectedness of race and language — is that we think of language as being something that is somehow tied to race that, okay, if you have a particular racial identity, you’re going to use language in a particular way. If you don’t have that identity, you’re going to use it in a different way. If the area you’re coming from has a particular racial identity, you’ll use it in a particular way. Instead, we really need to be thinking about race as a thing that is done through language. The ways that we create our racial identities that we express whiteness, blackness, Latinidad, through language, and that these things are agentive, these things are responsive to the broader social situation we’re in. So, you’re going to sound different if you’re a Black person in a gentrifying community than you’re going to sound if you’re a Black person in a neighbourhood that has stayed exactly the same. You’re going to sound different if you’re a Black person who is in a neighbourhood that is surrounded by white people than you are as a Black person in a neighbourhood that has always had a really rich, stable Black culture.
And so for people to think about these intersections of race and other kinds of identities in ways that are productive, that are fruitful, and that those intersections then tell us a lot about the kinds of things that race… or not the kinds of things that race is doing, but the kinds of things that language is doing with respect to race is extremely important.
DANIEL: It seems like white people don’t feel like they’re performing whiteness, just like, if you sound like most other people in a place, you say, “I don’t have an accent.” But everyone’s got an accent, everyone’s got a race. Race isn’t just something that those other people have.
JESSI: Right. Exactly. When we think about… and linguists have fallen into this trap, as we think about different sound features and things we go, “Oh, okay, this is regional.” It’s like, “Well, no, that’s not just regional, it’s white!”
[laughter]
JESSI: The reason it varies is that it varies among white people and nonwhite people do things differently. That’s another flip side of this is: white language is also agentive. It’s just that white people are doing different things with the kinds of language that they’re doing. And so maybe they’re doing more class things or maybe they’re doing more regional things, but those things are also situated within racial identity as well.
DANIEL: The book is The Black Side of the River. It’s available now from Georgetown University Press. Dr Jessi Grieser, thanks so much for hanging out with me today. It’s just been really, really fun to talk about your book.
JESSI: Yeah, this has been a delight. It’s really wonderful to talk to you again.
[transitional music]
DANIEL: Let’s get to the Words of the Week and the first one was suggested by Nikoli on our Discord server. This one is extreeeemely not safe for work.
HEDVIG: Uh-huh
DANIEL: But it’s fascinating as well. It’s not a suffix, but I think it is a combining form. It’s -ussy /ʌsi/, or is it -ussy /ʊsi/? I’m not sure.
HEDVIG: Ussy.
BEN: Okay. Are we thinking of the word HUSSY or the word PUSSY?
DANIEL: We’re thinking pussy, but he with a B.
HEDVIG: Is it from a sign for a cafe that they misspelled?
DANIEL: What? No.
HEDVIG: There’s a thing going on on Instagram. I think it’s, like, in Iran or something, there’s a cafe called something, it’s supposed to be something pussy, because it’s a cat. But they’ve spelled it Bussy. And in this case, it’s because P is not really a sound in Arabic.
BEN: Ah.
HEDVIG: But B is.
DANIEL: Of course, why didn’t I think of that?
HEDVIG: And it’s really funny that people get t-shirts with a sign on them.
BEN: So why… Let’s go back a step. Why is pussy with a B, bussy? Why is that the… what is that in relation to? Why is that word in my eyeballs and earholes right now?
DANIEL: That word caught fire because it was part of the queer community slang, and it’s a portmanteau, it’s boy pussy, which means a male anus or a transmasculine anus. Which is a phrase that I’ve never said before.
HEDVIG: Hmm, okay.
BEN: Okay. You’re right, that is quite not safe for work.
DANIEL: So, we start there…
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: …and then we go on to -ussy /ʌsi/, /ʊsi/… or /ʌsi/. See, I’m stuck on -ussy /ʌsi/, I don’t feel like saying -ussy /ʊsi/, but I’m going to try. It’s become productive and it’s attaching itself onto, well, just about anything. So, for example…
BEN: Give us the portmanteau front ends. Right? So we know that BUSSY is combination of boy and pussy. Give us the interchanges with boy.
DANIEL: Well, for example, people have cited thrussy… um, throat.
BEN: Oh, wow.
DANIEL: Or, in another sexual use, nussy.
BEN: Hang on.
HEDVIG: Nose?
DANIEL: Improbable, but yes.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Okay. I find that hard to believe, sir.
DANIEL: Nasal sex is not something that I would recommend. But now it’s sort of kind of expanding…
HEDVIG: It’s really popular on Twitch, have you noticed?
BEN: Nasal sex?
DANIEL: Is it? What productive -ussy?
HEDVIG: No, nasal sex.
BEN: How is nasal sex popular on Twitch?
HEDVIG: Well, I was on Twitch the other day and I saw the ASMR section, and I was like, “I’ll just check what’s there.” And everything that was popular…
BEN: I’ve seen the ear licking.
HEDVIG: Yeah, that’s the one I’m talking about! That’s the ear sex, right?
BEN: Okay. But that’s… Yeah, but he said nose.
HEDVIG: Oh, sorry, nose! Sorry. Yeah.
BEN: Those are different holes.
DANIEL: Different orifices.
HEDVIG: They’re close to each other. [laughs] Anyway, I was very surprised, it’s so popular. And nose seems weird. Yeah.
DANIEL: Since then, it’s just expanded, mostly as a joke, I think. But people are referring to an -ussy as any sort of canal or place that… things can…
BEN: Any fuckable crevice? Is this what we’re going to?
DANIEL: It’s becoming disconnected from sex. For example, let me just play some audio from this TikTok video. It’s from Floor Boy, link on our website.
VOICE: What is the name for the conntectussy, where you enter the plane doors from the boarding gate?
fl00r_boy: My fear for the future of our language is that the suffix -USSY is just going to be accepted and part of regular speak.
fl00r_boy: I mean, this room is great, but it only has three chargeussys in the walls. How am I supposed to plug in my lamps? This radio has a cassetteussy. I didn’t know we used cassetteussys anymore! Now this is a midi keyboard but it actually uses a USBussy port.
BEN: [laughs]
DANIEL: Obviously, this is in fun, but it is fun, and fun is one way that we get new language things.
HEDVIG: I think it’s really fun! So he’s just using -USSY for anything that’s like an opening.
DANIEL: Any orifice, metaphorical or otherwise.
BEN: Wow. There you go.
HEDVIG: That’s funny.
DANIEL: Thanks, fl00r_boy!
BEN: I do love people my age roasting younger people on TikTok. [chuckles] It’s something that comes up in my feed a lot.
HEDVIG: Is that because you’re a teacher?
BEN: But it’s meant in good fun. Like, I will say this about that gentleman. I think he was teasing in a lighthearted and genuinely nice kind of way.
DANIEL: Like I say, only half joking. People are using productive -USSY, and it’s too bad for the actual word USSIE which once referred to a selfie with more than one person in it, but then nobody cared about that word because they just called everything a selfie. So productive -USSY /ʌsi/ or -USSY /ʊsi/. Watch for it at an orifice near you.
HEDVIG: Mm!
BEN: [laughing / shuddering]
DANIEL: Next one! Hedvig, do you want to do one of yours?
HEDVIG: Yeah. I felt very inspired because for some reason, I found more new words and phrases this week than I usually do. One of the ones is NOT. NOT is obviously not a new word. So, it’s not as in the negation, I’m not lying.
DANIEL and BEN: N-O-T.
HEDVIG: N-O-T. So, I’ve noticed a pattern on Twitter and other places where people say, for example, so I pulled up some examples. “Not my aunt blasting Mr Worldwide on TV.”
DANIEL: Oh.
HEDVIG: “Not my aunt telling me to buy condoms.” “Not my boyfriend getting me a cameo of Miriam Margolyes for my birthday.” “Not-my-best friend getting into NFTs.”
DANIEL: And what is the person doing in this?
HEDVIG: Yeah. So I’ve noticed this pattern. So: “Not my best friend getting into NFTs.” Their best friend IS getting into NFT’s. And they’re reacting similarly to, if someone said like, “I’m getting into NFTs,” and you say, “No, you’re not.”
DANIEL: Oh, not NFT’s!
HEDVIG: It’s that one, right?
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: So, it has to be a thing that’s happening. It has to be someone else. And you, the person talking about it, kind of have to be a bit disapproving of what’s happening.
DANIEL: Oh, no, not you.
HEDVIG: You might be able to do it about yourself. You might be like, “Not me spilling milk all over my dress.”
BEN: Right. Yeah, okay.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: I think you can do that.
BEN: Gotcha. But it has to be a bad thing.
DANIEL: It’s a little bit sarcastic, isn’t it? “Well, this is not me doing the thing.”
HEDVIG: I think it’s sarcastic… It’s negative, but maybe… like, “Not my aunt telling me to buy condoms.” They’re embarrassed and shocked that their aunt told them that, maybe but they don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing that…
BEN: There’s a negative quality to them in some way though, right?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Negative valence.
BEN: If not a negative valence, an embarrassing valence.
HEDVIG: Yes. Some of these things I think would fall under cringe in a way. Right? “Not my best friend getting into NFTs,” because NFTs are a bit cringey. Right?
BEN: If the 14-year-old boys that I teach are any metric, they are definitely cringey.
HEDVIG: Also, if you want to know more about how NFTs could actually like maybe sometimes be a good idea, but they’re probably overall not, the QAA crowd, the QAnon Anonymous did an episode all about it. Because people should be getting money for their art. There’s something that is bordering on good, right?
DANIEL: Mm.
BEN: I can’t recommend enough the Folding Ideas video on NFTs. It’s like one of those videos of like, “Are you a smart person who has looked away from this issue for far too long, and now don’t know anything about it, but you really want to know lots about it? Here’s a two-hour explainer video on the birth, rise, plateau, and eventual death and demise of NFTs.” And it was so good. So, the video is called Line Goes Up, and it’s by a great, great YouTube channel called Folding Ideas. So, go check it out. If you, like me, consider yourself to be a not-stupid person who just has just desperately not looked into NFTs because [Daniel laughs] it’s just so wacky and annoying, this is the video for you. If you’ve got two hours of free time to just like go down the rabbit hole. It’s the deepest of deep dives.
DANIEL: All right, Hedvig, give me another one.
HEDVIG: Okay, next word of the week for me is, and Ben’s probably going to know this, and Daniel probably isn’t. Uncut gems.
DANIEL: Uncut gems. No idea.
BEN: Argh.
HEDVIG: Ben, do you want to explain or should I?
BEN: Okay. I don’t know the backstory of this particular video, I’ve just seen it blow up on TikTok, so I can’t name you the actress or any of the relevant people. But basically, if you’re not familiar with TikTok, something that can happen on TikTok is the sound from one TikTok can be used for lots and lots of other TikToks.
DANIEL: Stitching, right?
BEN: No.
DANIEL: Dueting.
BEN: Also, no.
DANIEL: Oh.
HEDVIG: [laughs]
BEN: God, Boomer. Jesus, shut the fuck up and get back in your box!
DANIEL: I’m three years away from Boomer. I resent that statement.
BEN: [laughs] Look, basically it’s just a thing, right? Like any video can just dub, essentially, the sound from another video or any number of things, songs, a bunch of other stuff. There is a interview that was loaded onto TikTok of a woman just sort of saying a very regrettable thing about herself. Basically going, like, “Yeah, I was someone’s muse. I was so and so’s muse, on Uncut Gems.” And the way she pronounces GEMS is, I believe, Hedvig, with just like a fucking black hole’s worth of vocal fry.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s amazing. I put a link on our Word. I’ll put it in Discord as well because I think we should definitely play it. I definitely think we are allowed to play it. And Sylvia Sierra for example was one of the people who tweeted this out. So the person in question is Julia Fox and she’s talking… apparently, Uncut Gems is a movie and, like Ben was saying, she was talking about being a muse, which like, maybe is cringey or whatever. But I think what most people caught on to is the way she says “Uncut Gems,” so if you want to hear it, Daniel, you can click the video.
BEN: And here it is, listeners. Listen to how she says it now.
DANIEL: Here I go.
INTERVIEWER: What is a muse?
JULIA FOX: I mean, I was Josh Safdie’s muse when he wrote Uncut Gems /dʒæːmz/.
INTERVIEWER: Right.
JULIA FOX: Do you know what I mean? Like…
[end of clip]
DANIEL: [with accent] Uncut Jaaams.
HEDVIG: [with accent] Uncut Jaaams.
BEN: Can I jump in at this point? Like, I fully think that this person was being a bit conceited for lack of a better phrase. Right?
DANIEL: She was flexing.
HEDVIG: No! She was speaking perfectly good a vocal fry, California Valley Girl English.
BEN: Oh! No, no, no. I want to be… I want to be abundantly clear. I’m not talking about how she’s pronounced anything here. My thing is that she’s flexing about being someone’s muse. That’s a conceited thing to say.
HEDVIG: Yeah, maybe. Fair enough.
BEN: That, I think, is a fair criticism to offer.
DANIEL: I was Muse’s muse! For the band Muse! I was their muse.
BEN: What I don’t love and what I started seeing a lot of, is just people making fun of how girls speak because that’s all that I’m seeing here, is just a whole bunch of people, ~Look at this fucking dickhead who speaks like a dumb bitch.~
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: Like, that’s literally… And I don’t think I’m being unfair when I say: that is actually the cultural subtext in nearly every response to this that you see on TikTok. A lot of it is women, it’s not just misogynistic men. But there is just a real vibe of, like, ~Ah, aren’t these dumb bitches such dumb bitches?~ And I don’t have a lot of time for that, personally.
HEDVIG: No, neither do I. It’s a couple of things. So she’s elongated vowel a bit, she has a lot of vocal fry, and she’s going up a bit because she’s talking to actually another woman as well, and she’s saying like, “Do you agree with me?” Or, getting feedback. So, she goes, “Uncut Gems.” She goes up to get the other person… And it’s a perfectly normal fine thing to say. I like it because I actually… like, I like vocal fry. I think this is a fun example. When I started seeing it, I actually didn’t pick up on the criticism, like people dunking on her first because I was just like, “Oh, that’s just a fun valley girl vocal fry snippet. I like this!” And I think there are some other people like me, who just thinks it’s fun and not bad. But it’s hard to tell.
DANIEL: Can we talk for a second about the vowel, instead of gems, which is a mid-vowel…
BEN: It does sound almost like “jams” doesn’t it?
DANIEL: Jaaaams.
HEDVIG: Yeah, a lot of people are transcribing it with an A.
DANIEL: That’s fantastic. So is that similar… Is this happening with the Northern US Cities Vowel Shift? Because there are a number of vowel shifts in progress. The Northern Cities Vowel Shift is huge. And for example, the name Bob would be Bab. “Well, Bab, let me tell you.”
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Oh, so we’re talking, when you say northern cities, you’re like Minnesota, Milwaukee, and Wisconsin, and that sort of thing?
HEDVIG: Except that it’s now happening everywhere.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Oh.
DANIEL: So I wonder if this is partaking in that. I don’t have enough experience to be able to say yes or no, but I’m…
BEN: Too far removed from the West Coast, my friend.
DANIEL: Since I had my half day… you know I had my Australian half-life, this month. It happened this month.
BEN: Holy shit. Really?
DANIEL: Yeah. I’ve lived in Australia now a few days longer than I’ve lived in the USA ever.
HEDVIG: Wow.
BEN: That’s it. You gotta give your Seppo card in, my friend.
DANIEL: That’s fine with me.
HEDVIG: We got to file off that dialect though. You’ve got to…
BEN: [laughs] Yeah, we’ve just gotta round off those hard edges!
DANIEL: Well, I’m afraid we’re a little bit late, brain plasticity being what it is. I got some of the vowels. I’ve lost my cot/caught distinction.
HEDVIG: Hmm.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Mmm, that’s right.
BEN: [laughs] Look how proud he is. He’s like a cat that’s brought, like, a bird home.
DANIEL: That’s right, Bin.
[chuckles]
BEN: Well done.
HEDVIG: Yeah, very good.
BEN: And you don’t say Melbourne /beɹn/, so that’s good.
DANIEL: I really liked that clip. That’s a great clip. I’m really enjoying that. Thank you for bringing that.
HEDVIG: And I think we should all aspire to use more vocal fry. I love vocal fry. I’m going to try and have more vocal fry in the rest of this episode.
DANIEL: Vocal fry’s awesome! [in a vocal fry tone] Yeahhhh.
BEN: You know what? I’m going to leave that for the people for whom it works for, because [frying with uptalk] for me, it totally doesn’t. It just makes me sound like I’ve had like a laryngectomy or something.
DANIEL: And let’s all try to cultivate the mindset of, when we hear somebody doing something different, thinking, “Oh, that’s interesting. I wonder what’s going on there.” Instead of, “Uh, this person sucks, and I rule.” Especially in language.
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: And let’s maybe also, when we think something is fun and interesting, if we’re meeting someone in person, even if it’s on Zoom, remember that [chuckles] being like, “You’re really interesting. I want to study you,” can also be creepy. [chuckles]
DANIEL: Mm, yeah.
BEN: This is not a thing normal people have to worry about, Hedvig. I think this is a you problem. [laughs]
HEDVIG: No, but like… [laughs] I mean…!
DANIEL: No, but linguists do this.
HEDVIG: Because linguists, you first have to get them out of the prescriptivism, like: You’re saying something bad! And then they get into that: You’re saying something interesting. And then, you have to be like: Not everyone wants to hear how interesting they are.
BEN: Not in the granular degree of your PhD thesis application. [laughs]
HEDVIG: Yeah, so just… But we can learn about it to ourselves unless that’s acceptable.
DANIEL: And that is what we do.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Cool.
HEDVIG: Uncut Gems, I love it.
DANIEL: Uncut Jaaams.
HEDVIG: Uncut Jaaams, so fun to say.
DANIEL: We got a couple of comments, one from Bill via email hello@becauselanguage.com. He says, “This is not a question but I had to share what I think is an eggcorn for…” eggcorn, by the way? What’s an eggcorn?
HEDVIG: Yeah, he’s written eggcorn. He means acorn, maybe?
BEN: No, hang on. Eggcorn is a thing. We’ve talked about them!
DANIEL: Yes, it is a thing. We’ve talked about them a lot. So, eggcorns are little slip-ups that makes sense.
HEDVIG: [exhales] Oh.
BEN: So, nipping it in the butt…
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: …is a classic example, instead of nipping it in the bud.
DANIEL: That’s right. Or, “I give my husband free range to do what he wants,” instead of free rein.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: And the reason they’re called eggcorns is because an internet writer wrote about acorns, but wrote eggcorns instead. And you know what, darned if it doesn’t make a little bit of sense because they’re related to trees? So, corn, and they’re a seed like an egg grows into a chicken, acorn grows into it, so it’s an eggcorn. So that’s the name of these things. So, an eggcorn for — here’s what it’s for — tinker’s damn. Bill says, “And it’s the most interesting eggcorn I’ve seen in a while.” So here was the quote from the article that he linked me to. It’s about the movie Purple Rain. “But it was as an adult that I realised no one involved in the making of this film gave even a tincture of a damn about women.”
BEN: Oh, there we go. I like it.
DANIEL: You know a TINCTURE is a very small amount of… like, a medicine in a lot of liquid. So, that’s an interesting little eggcorn there.
BEN: Thank you, Bill.
HEDVIG: Oh, is that what TINCTURE is? I thought it was a blend of things. I thought it was a tonic.
DANIEL: Ah, let’s just look that up very quickly.
HEDVIG: No, I could very well be wrong.
DANIEL: I’m happy to be corrected on that one.
HEDVIG: It’s the type of word that you can probably get away with for your almost entire adult life misunderstanding and, like…
BEN: Well, to be fair, unless you are constantly going to, like, ren fairs or something. I’m not sure that like tinctures and poultices and like [chuckles] Like, unless you’ve legitimately gone into a person’s shop who is pretending to be an apothecary, I don’t think this is a thing that necessarily comes up in day-to-day life.
DANIEL: By the way, what is a tinker’s damn… why is it tinker?
BEN: Well, tinkers were traveling persons who, like… of no fixed address, who throughout all of the medieval ages would come to towns and fix things and just perform various services and that sort of thing. So, I’m guessing even back then, they were treated and thought of very poorly. So what they cared about was at the very bottom of the hierarchy of people giving a fuck about things. So, what tinkers care about is the lowest thing to care about. So I couldn’t even give what they care about things to this thing, let alone what I, a normal relevant person, would. Again, I don’t think that’s a fair thing. I’m just thinking that’s what maybe where it came from.
DANIEL: Yeah. That’s better than the best explanation that I got and I am accepting it wholeheartedly.
BEN: Okay, cool. What was your one?
DANIEL: Yes, Hedvig.
HEDVIG: I was just going to say I looked up TINCTURE.
BEN: And?
DANIEL: And? Was I right?
HEDVIG: It is typically an extract of a plant dissolved in ethanol.
BEN: Oh, there we go. Yeah, a small amount of something in a thing.
DANIEL: Yep.
HEDVIG: Uh… small is not in the definition.
DANIEL: Okay. I might have gotten the small bit wrong. So there are lots of fake stories about why it’s a tinker’s damn. There’s a story that it’s a damri which is a coin, but that’s probably fake. Some people say it’s a wall of dough raised around a place that a plumber wants to flood with a coat of solder. It’s worthless after you do it, and so you throw it away, and so it’s not even worth a tinker’s dam. But those are probably wrong because people have been saying something is not worth a damn, way before they started saying it’s not worth a tinker’s dam. And the explanation that I have heard is that tinkers tend to swear a lot, and so if talk is cheap, then their swearing is cheap.
BEN: Oh, okay. Right. Like a sailor’s damn kind of thing.
DANIEL: Yeah. They just say it all the time. It’s worth nothing. So, not even a tinker’s damn. But I’m really enjoying your definition as well.
Last comment, and this one is from our newest patron, Ayelet, from Israel, who says, “I just listened to Episode 46, and wanted to share about Word of the Week, “No, because.”
HEDVIG: Mm, yes.
DANIEL: Remember, “No, because?”
BEN: Yes.
HEDVIG: Similar to the “not” thing.
DANIEL: It is very similar to the “not” thing! “No, because check this out,” which means drop everything and check this out. Ayelet says, ‘In Israeli Hebrew, we’ve been using “no, because” another way. When someone complains about something, and you tell him he’s not so great either or his argument is inconsistent. Comes with a sarcastic tone. For instance. George says, “I wouldn’t date her. Her hair looks silly.”” And Elaine says, “No, because your hair is perfect.”‘
BEN: Right. Yep. That makes sense. I can see that for sure.
HEDVIG: Hmm.
DANIEL: ‘Or, “This cake ruined my diet.” And Person B says, “No, because before you were following your diet perfectly.”‘
HEDVIG: Hmm.
BEN: Yeah. I like it.
DANIEL: Ayelet continues, ‘It’s so common that people now just say “No, because you” as an answer in an argument without finishing a sentence.” How about that?
BEN: [laughs]
DANIEL: No, because you.
BEN: You don’t have to provide evidence anymore. It’s just like, “No, you’re the problem.”
DANIEL: Because you. [laughs] I like that a lot. So, thanks, Ayelet. That’s so awesome. And I love your comments. Ben and Hedvig, thank you both for being here. Thanks also to Dr Jessi Grieser of the University of Tennessee Knoxville, author of The Black Side of the River, now available from Georgetown University Press.
[end theme]
BEN: If you wanted to give us a comment or get in touch with us in any way, there’s so many different ways you can do it. You can follow us in all of the places, we are becauselangpod in basically everywhere. Daniel is very, ah, shall we say, fastidious in his adherence to different platforms. We’ve even started making TikToks, just quick show excerpts. So, if you want to find us on that TikTok app, you can. That’s a thing you can do now. You can also, and this is something that I really want to push, you can record something for us to play on the show using SpeakPipe. It’s now a link on our website. So, go check it out. If you want to drop us a little thing, any of the comments that you want to make for us — and we’ve got people who make all sorts of wonderful comments, show ideas, story ideas, Words of the Week — you could do it as a voice memo. And then we could play your voice here in the show and you wouldn’t have to listen to as much of my dumb voice, and I think everyone would agree that’s a great outcome.
DANIEL: John, jump back on, your audio was terrible, and I need to hear you say it again. Okay? Thanks, John.
BEN: Oh, yes, John. Thank you, John. And, of course, if you are just that old fashioned, you can always send us an email at hello@becauselanguage.com. If you want to help the show, you can. You can send us show ideas like articles, stories and Words of the Week, we mostly hang out on Discord. Come and say “G’day.” And you can also recommend us to friends and strangers like Dustin of Sandman Stories still does, every single time someone asks him for a podcast recommendation on Twitter, something that Hedvig and I and Daniel are still amazed that he opens himself up for.
DANIEL: Did you know that Sandman Stories is actually a really good podcast? You should listen.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Now, because of our great patrons who give us amounts of money every month, we are able to do stuff like run this show for everyone without putting ads in the middle of it. We’re also able to make transcripts so our shows are readable for people who like to read or who can’t listen, and they’re searchable so you can find out the stuff that we say. Can I just also say that the team at SpeechDocs is doing an amazing job on our transcripts? They are so on the ball and they get it right. They’re fast and accurate. I’m pretty sure that they go through our show notes when they hit a weird word that they don’t know, because it’s in there, and I’m surprised.
BEN: I am just so sorry, SpeechDocs. I know. I know how fucking awful I am to transcribe. I’m so sorry.
DANIEL: You’re just making their work harder, Ben.
BEN: I know. I… just… [chuckles] You’re listening right now, I’m sorry!
HEDVIG: Is Ben bad?
DANIEL: Ben’s wonderful. I can listen to Ben’s voice at night.
HEDVIG: Yeah. I love Ben’s voice. I can hear everything he says.
BEN: It’s not a quality thing, apparently. I just remember when… Yeah, when…
DANIEL: It’s the bones in your head, that’s what it is.
BEN: When we spoke to our last transcriber, I could tell. There was a facial expression. There are many versions of language, not just verbal, spoken communication. And some of those pathways were saying some pretty clear things to me.
HEDVIG: Wow.
DANIEL: Okay. I’d just like to give a shoutout to our top patrons, Dustin, Termy, Chris B, James S, who boosted his pledge, thanks for that. Matt, Whitney, Chris L, Helen, Udo, Jack, PharaohKatt, LordMortis, Elías, Larry, Kristofer, Andy, James, Nigel, Meredith, Kate, Nasrin, Ayesha, sneakylemur, Moe, Steele, Andrew, Manú, Rodger, Rhian, Colleen, glyph, Ignacio, Sonic Snejhog. If you give yourself a cool name, then I’ll take extra time and I’ll linger over it. Kevin, Jeff, Andy from Logophilius, Samantha, zo, Kathy, Rachel, Cheyenne, Felicity, Amir, Andy, O Tim, and the wonderful Kate B who didn’t contribute via Patreon, but instead smashed the one-time donation button on our website, becauselanguage.com. Also, thanks to our newest patrons, David and Ali, at the Friend level and smashing through at the Listener level, our newest patrons, Clark, Ayelet, Ellen, Shai, Piri, Anna Marie, and Lena. And thanks also to our good friend, Israel, for boosting to the Listener level. Thanks to all of our amazing patrons.
HEDVIG: Yes, thank you to all of our amazing patrons, indeed. Our theme music has been written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who’s a member of Ryan Beno and of Didion’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time, Because Language.
DANIEL: You sound like me when you say that.
HEDVIG: It’s because usually you say that.
BEN: Pew, pew, pew. You don’t sound like me, which is probably good for the transcribers.
DANIEL: [chuckles]
[boop]
HEDVIG: Can we just talk for a moment about how millennials and zoomers have migrated to like either loving seven-second clips of content, or two-hour video essays?
[laughter]
HEDVIG: Right?
BEN: Why not both?
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]