Language titan Tiger Webb is helping us with our voluminous Mailbag. Hedvig is giving her annual Eurovision language roundup. And we’re sorting through the lexicon of the 2022 Australian election.
- Is MAYBE a compound word? What about ANOTHER, or GARBAGE?
- Are GONNA and WANNA portmanteaus?
- What does it take to be a linguist?
Listen to this episode
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Become a Patron!Show notes
In praise of cut, copy, and paste
https://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/news/2018/05/08/in-praise-of-cut-copy-and-paste.html
Who are the independents likely headed to parliament after election night’s ‘teal bath’?
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-21/teal-independents-election-night/101085766
Labor’s Fowler parachute for Kristina Keneally leaves a succession plan in tatters and a diversity problem
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-12/kristina-keneally-fowler-labor-diversity-woes-tu-le/100451344
Bob Carr destroyed NSW, says Newman (parachuted)
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/bob-carr-destroyed-nsw-says-newman-20120303-1u9ib.html
Queenslander Looks Down His Nose At Those Rednecks In Victoria Who Only Elected 1 Greens MP
https://www.betootaadvocate.com/breaking-news/queenslandr-looks-down-his-nose-at-those-rednecks-in-victoria-who-only-elected-1-greens-mp/
France’s Eurovision entry to sing in Breton language
https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/encore/20220513-france-s-eurovision-entry-to-sing-in-breton-language
Moldovan language | Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldovan_language
Could Switzerland break apart?
https://lenews.ch/2015/11/25/could-switzerland-break-apart/
The world according to Putin
https://www.economist.com/international/2014/05/08/the-world-according-to-putin
The Economist has a heavily sarcastic map up | All Things Linguistic
https://allthingslinguistic.com/post/85564449122/the-economist-has-a-heavily-sarcastic-map-up
Are words like “otherwise” and “maybe” considered compound words?
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/142922/are-words-like-otherwise-and-maybe-considered-compound-words
Wanna know what it coulda be…
https://painintheenglish.com/case/532
Farewell – ETAOIN SHRDLU – 1978
https://vimeo.com/127605643
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
HEDVIG: Recording in progresssss!
TIGER WEBB: Would you mind… sorry… Just because I left and came back, is it okay if you post the link again [CHUCKLES] in the chat to Zoom?
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: All right, I can do that. I got it in my…
DANIEL: Thank you.
BEN: What you call it? Pastebook? I was about to say pastebook. Clipboard. There we go.
TIGER: There we are. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Ooh, I like pastebook!
DANIEL: I like pastebook.
BEN: My pastebook. Fuck! [LAUGHS] Oh, the covid!
TIGER: It makes about as much sense as any of the skeuomorphic little floppy disk icons for save. That hasn’t made sense for decades.
BEN: Yeah, I suppose that’s true.
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE PODCAST THEME]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to this special bonus edition of Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. I’m Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. He exists and he’s here. It’s Ben Ainslie.
BEN: I 100% endorse that categorisation of me. That’s fantastic. That’s the best that’s ever been done.
DANIEL: It was a callback. You know, I tried to say it as enthusiastically as I could.
BEN: Nah, I love it. I suppose the first time you did that, I would have arched up at it. But now that we’re two and a half years into a global slow apocalypse, I’m just kinda like, “That fits.” Yep.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: That washes.
DANIEL: What more? What more can be expected?
BEN: [LAUGHS] I exist and I’m here. That’s a win condition.
DANIEL: You know who’s really going to be happy that you’re here? The folks at SpeechDocs who do our transcripts. They’ve got this hashtag #BringBackBen.
BEN: [LAUGHS] I don’t know why they would! Unless, they have some… What’s the opposite of a sadist? Masochistic tendencies. Unless they have some sort of masochistic tendency, I don’t know why they would possibly be happy, because I must be horrendous.
HEDVIG: I don’t know.
DANIEL: They heart Ben.
HEDVIG: I’m so confused by that.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Like, he’s not– [crosstalk]
BEN: but but but… guys, you… the… thing… you… but… [incoherent and hard-to-transcribe babbling]
DANIEL: [Same]
BEN: Just a lot of that. There’s a lot of that.
HEDVIG: [BABBLES SOME MORE] Okay, okay. I get it, I get it, I get it. Introduce me now.
DANIEL: Okay. [LAUGHS] She is who she is or is she WHOM she is? It’s Hedvig Skirgård.
HEDVIG: Thank you. I exist. I perceive and I choose to be perceived.
BEN: Hey! Hey hey hey! That one was mine. Don’t take mine. You have your own.
DANIEL: Do you have any feels on WHO and WHOM? Does it give you any difficulty?
HEDVIG: I know when vaguely when to use them and I use them if I want to sound old timey. I think that’s like everyone else, right?
DANIEL: I think so. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Yeah, I’m in a position where I only use WHOM if I’m roleplaying a snob who needs to get punched in the mouth. That’s the only time. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah. And when people say it, I know what they’re doing. I can also pick up when people are using it wrong, because WHOM is the objective one, like the THEM of THEY/THEM. So if you say: Whom is coming through the door, then, like, you’re doing it wrong, mate, but I know you want to sound medieval. So, it’s cool.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Well, I would call that bug-for-bug compatible, right? We have a very, very special guest cohost on this episode. It’s language guy Tiger Webb. Hey, Tiger.
TIGER: Hello. That’s the most accurate intro I’ve ever had actually.
DANIEL: Language guy?
TIGER: Well, yeah, I think so. My actual job title is Editorial Policy Advisor, which…
DANIEL: Well, that’s bullshit.
TIGER: …makes people go to sleep. It’s got a certain soporific quality, and it doesn’t really capture the bulk of what I do during workhours. Language Guy is far more apt, I think.
HEDVIG: What do you do during workhours?
DANIEL: Well, I think that because you’re on the language beat for a noted public broadcaster in Australia, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the ABC.
HEDVIG: Noted?
TIGER: One of them.
BEN: One of two.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: One of them.
TIGER: Well, we won’t tell you which one. We should have kept the suspense up. It would have been… yeah.
HEDVIG: Mm.
DANIEL: I don’t want to out you or anything. What is it that you do around the ABC? I’ve seen your articles that you’ve written, like, doing bits on language history, on English history. You were the one who broke the story on Jacinta Ardern’s name pronunciation?
TIGER: Yes. So, the bulk of the language-related work I do at the ABC is really just two things. I look after the internal pronunciation database that they’ve had going since the… Well, I assume, since the ’50s. And the other thing that I do language-related there is we have monthly language meetings, and we have a style guide, and so, I do a lot of just tinkering around arcana and flotsam to do with language at a public broadcaster.
HEDVIG: Can I ask questions?
TIGER: Yeah, no, please.
DANIEL: We all’ve got questions. Ben’s first.
HEDVIG: Oh, Ben has also raised his hand. So he’s first.
BEN: It’s okay. Hedvig can go first. She’s rude. It’s fine. [HEDVIG LAUGHS] She’s very direct. She’s Swedish.
HEDVIG: I don’t know if that’s true. There’s a nation that’s currently at war with Russia. How does ABC pronounce it?
TIGER: Our guidance…
HEDVIG: Yeah.
TIGER: Wait. Oh, Ukraine?
HEDVIG: Right. Okay. Yeah.
TIGER: With no article.
HEDVIG: Not…
TIGER: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah, no article, but not like…
TIGER: Not like they would. Whatever, Ukrainia is the… like, it’s…
HEDVIG: Ukraina or something.
TIGER: Yeah.
DANIEL: Ukraina.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
TIGER: It’s the exonym.
HEDVIG: Ukraina.
TIGER: Yeah. It’s established. We’re bigots. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Okay, right. I’m just checking. I’m just curious, because I agree with you that you want to broadcast news and you want people to, like, understand the sentences that’s being said without going, “uh?” So, you don’t maybe want to do too many changes at once, but I just thought it was…
TIGER: Well, yeah, it’s case by case and it’s super… I mean, not arbitrary, because there’s usually a good line of reasoning that goes into official guidance for this stuff. But the decisions are made differently by different people, and you get to the point where it’s like: Okay, so, we don’t say Ukraine how Ukrainians would say it in Ukrainian. But we are making efforts to… well, not say Kyiv, but also to tell people to say Kuyv.
HEDVIG: Right.
TIGER: Which is a little bit closer to how Ukrainian speakers might say it. My Ukrainian is nonexistent. It’s probably not all the way there. But yeah, you tend to make a bit of an effort within the constraints of English phonology to get to endonyms…
HEDVIG: Yeah, fair enough.
TIGER: …but it’s hard to go all the way there, obviously.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah, fair enough. It’s just something I listen to — German, and Swedish, and a couple of other news — and I’ve paid attention. Some of them have switched and some of them haven’t, and I’m like… you know. There are other people, there are other Tiger Webbs on their… in their businesses telling them stuff and I’m just… yeah.
TIGER: Yeah. We should have meetings. I’ve met the BBC version of… this job.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah? Are they nice?
BEN: You can say “of me”. I’ve met the BBC me.
TIGER: Well…
HEDVIG: Yeah!
TIGER: I’m really like an Aldi-brand, private-label BBC version of the job, to be frank. It could be different now. I’m sure there’s been huge cuts at the BBC. But when I last met with one of the people who works there, they’re all protegees of John Wells. There’s, like, nine of them and they are just a unit of linguists, who offer fantastically accurate IPA advice to broadcasters, which is then ignored for modified respelling.
[LAUGHTER]
TIGER: They have the sort of resources — or did have the resources; you’d have to check now I suppose — to be a lot more comprehensive than I can be. I have to collaborate with a lot more journalists and the… Necessarily, it’s usually a little bit less detailed than they get. But yeah, similar conversations in the states. Really interesting. Maybe you’d find this fascinating, Daniel, because there is such a assumed level of knowledge of Spanish that… what’s viewed to be out of reach for the average English speaker in America is different from what would be assumed to be out of reach for the average English journalist in Australia.
It’s not an exact or perfect parallel, but you can’t assume in Australia that people can do initial velar nasals for Indigenous words or place names. You can’t assume that. I mean, you can do it. You can do it in English by trying. Yeah, can you roll your R’s to do Spanish place names or whatever? There’s an equivalent conversation happening there and it’s a little bit further along.
HEDVIG: Cool.
DANIEL: Okay. Ben, your question.
BEN: Well, now, I’ve got, like, four more.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: This is the problem with really smart people who do really good answers to things. I’m like, “Fuck, I can’t remember. I’ve got three other ones now.” So I’m just going to move on to one of them. Tiger, do you know — and this is actually maybe for Daniel as well because, Daniel, you are both a person who is American and can speak Spanish — Why the fuck do Americans call it the Rio Grande /gɹænd/? They all do.
HEDVIG: Do they?
BEN: They don’t call it the Rio Grande /gɹande/. I don’t know why.
HEDVIG: I’ve heard them say Rio Grande /gɹande/.
BEN: Nah. Every American I’ve ever heard talk about that river, they say, “The Rio Grande.” /gɹænd/
DANIEL: Hmm.
BEN: And the reason I ask the question is because — like you’ve just alluded to, Tiger — the just passive phonic awareness of what goes on in Spanish in a lot of America is really high for a country that is quite pop-culturally condemned, for lack of a better word, of being complete idiots and never taking notice of anyone else. Actually, I think you’re spot on the money. A lot of Americans know a lot of Spanish quite well. So I just don’t… yeah. It’s always annoyed me every time I see it, because I’m like, “The E is right there!”
DANIEL: I have a guess, but Tiger, what do you think?
TIGER: Yeah, I’m not sure. I think part of it could be that it’s a compound, so by the time you get to Grand /gɹænd/, you’ve made the decision [LAUGHTER] to just really anglify. But you know, there’s a similar thing at play, one we get complaints about quite a lot of the ABC about, Las Vegas. It’s LAS or however it would be in Spanish, based on sort of spelling pronunciation demanded. No one in Las Vegas says LAS Vegas in English.
HEDVIG: Las.
TIGER: I haven’t had any conversations in Spanish there, because I don’t speak Spanish. But I have been there and it’s just not a pronounci… It’s a pronunciation that people demand, but you never get. So, I’m not sure. Individual words and place names may be stored in an English part of the brain, is a phrenology answer that I can give you.
DANIEL: I think there might be a little bit of interference, because in French, the word GRANDE exists and it would be /gɹand/.
HEDVIG: I was thinking that too. Yeah. I was thinking that.
BEN: I was thinking, maybe it was just a really definitive choice, like a political choice back when America took all of the northern part of Mexico from Mexico and they were like, “It’s not the Rio Grand-e. It’s definitely the Rio Grande. We took it, and it’s ours, and we’ll call it what we want.”
DANIEL: Well, Tiger is going to be using his considerable language skills to help us get through our Mailbag. We were going to make this episode about the failed LSA resolution on freedom of expression and then…
TIGER: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: …we just realised that we didn’t really want to.
TIGER: Sure.
BEN: No, I think we all… As the non-linguist in this collective, watching that message train in our little Discord go down, it basically was like, “Oh, should we do an episode about this?” and Hedvig just sort of paused. Hedvig left it on read for a little bit and then she was like, “Nah, it sucks as a topic, basically. I don’t have anything to fucking say about it. All the people who are on the right side of it are on the right side of it now, and all the people who aren’t are fucking shit. We’re going to spend an entire episode saying that over and over and over again?”
HEDVIG: Yeah, sort of. I mean, I’m so glad we have Tiger here today as a guest. I love hearing the Australian accent he has. There are many reasons, but like, America, I don’t know. I try to put that feed a bit on a diet.
DANIEL: Mhm.
BEN: I’m thinking it was a particularly good call, given what’s gone down in America since we’ve had that conversation.
DANIEL: It’s exhausting.
HEDVIG: (Fucking hell.)
BEN: Like, I think everyone is just very tired of this no-win scenario that just seems completely stuck. And so it’s just really good to not be talking about a stupid thing that could be fixed and isn’t being fixed, because that just makes everyone sad.
HEDVIG: And not that freedom of expression and the LSA and gun violence are causally related in any way.
BEN: No, no, no.
HEDVIG: But yeah.
BEN: But they seem to be symptoms of the same disease.
HEDVIG: Maybe.
DANIEL: I broke up with the USA some time ago and right now, I feel the USA is… You know how sometimes, there’s an ex and it’s pretty clear that they’re just not doing well? I feel like America is that ex for me.
HEDVIG: I feel like Daniel, though, that you’re a little bit more on the side of stalking your ex on Facebook still, a little bit. Because you’re American. So, you keep track of it more, right?
DANIEL: Well, yes, I am. But that’s…
HEDVIG: Because you tell me about things that are going on with LSA that I haven’t even noticed and I’m like: Oh.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: Yeah, but Daniel, I think the thing in your metaphor that you need to make clear is that America isn’t an ex-girlfriend; America is an ex-wife. Like, it was more significant than just a fling. You know what I mean?
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I agree with that.
DANIEL: Well, now that I’ve reached my Australian half-life earlier this year…
HEDVIG: Congratulations again!
BEN: Yeah yeah yeah. An ex… a really… an ex-wife from a long time ago, sure!
TIGER: Yeah. You got married young. It was…
DANIEL: By the way, I’m not saying that this pertains to my actual life situation at all. Okay? [LAUGHTER] She’s doing very well. It’s fine. But it’s kinda like, “Hey, America, we just elected a whole bunch of progressives. How’s it going? Oh, really? Oh, shit. I’m really sorry to hear that.” But! You are listening to this, dear listener, because you’re a patron. Well, if you’re listening soon. So, thank you for your support. If you’re not hanging out with us on Discord, why not? We’re having a good time. You might like it. Many of us are getting supernaturally good at Redactle. Do we know Redactle?
HEDVIG: Oh my god.
BEN: I haven’t played Redactle yet!
DANIEL: Redactle all is where you get a random… not a random, but a certain Wikipedia article. But all the words are blanked out.
BEN: (What’s redacted?) Oh, okay. Okay.
DANIEL: They’re all redacted except for prepositions like OF and TO, and IS. You get conjunctions like SO, BUT, AND. And then, you’ve got to uncover the words by typing them in. And if you type in the title, then you win and it uncovers all the words. Me and Ditte and Ariaflame are getting really good at nailing it with one guess.
HEDVIG: Wow.
BEN: Look, I was broken by Semantle.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: It has bested me on more than one occasion. But I will go toe-to-toe with any of you on Framed or Movidle.
DANIEL: Ohhhhh, I bet.
BEN: And I maintain that I am a fucking God-tier player of both of those.
DANIEL: You can have that. You can have that. I’ve tried it and I am no good, but I swear to Zeus, if you stare at that redacted text long enough, words start appearing.
BEN: [LAUGHS] It just makes itself clear! Sorry, I’ve realised I’m laughing like Snagglepuss. I apologise, everyone. It’s the covid.
DANIEL: Oh, poor Ben! I’m sorry, buddy.
HEDVIG: Okay.
BEN: It’s okay.
HEDVIG: Is there any interest… I have never played Redactle. Is there any interest in seeing me play for the first time, or is that very boring?
DANIEL: Yes. Let’s do it afterwards.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: I want to see your process.
HEDVIG: Because I just looked at it. Okay. Let’s do it afterwards.
DANIEL: Do you think you got it?
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: Six letters up top.
HEDVIG: No, no.
DANIEL: It’s a six-letter thing.
HEDVIG: Oh, it’s always a six-letter word. Okay!
DANIEL: No, but this one is. As you can see if you mouse over the text. But anyway, if you are listening to this episode later, please consider becoming a patron. Depending on your level, you can hear bonus episodes, you can get shoutouts on the show, and every patron gets to hang out with us on Discord. Come on! So go see us, we’re on patreon.com/becauselangpod. So, hey, we had a little election a little while ago. And I noticed that…
HEDVIG: Congratulations!
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] It’s so good! It’s so good.
BEN: Yeah. Australians…
HEDVIG: It’s over.
BEN: Australians quite surprisingly did not fuck it! I was shocked how much we didn’t fuck it.
DANIL: I’m shocked.
HEDVIG: And for everyone in the international audience, “fucking it” here would basically just mean reelecting Scomo. We’re also putting Tiger, I think, in an awful position here being employed by the ABC. Let’s just say that we can say that fucking it would be reelecting Scomo, and that any other alternative would basically be not fucking it.
BEN: Tiger, we understand because of the awful capitalist system that we live in, you are monetarily obliged to be like: Mhm, well, I mean, you know, like, everyone deserves a point of view, blah, blah, blah.
DANIEL: You guys, are any of you actually following Tiger on Twitter? He’s pretty freewheeling. What’s going on for you?
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I know. But like…
TIGER: Well, it’s super funny actually. There’s a really, I think, hysterical meme in the Dawkins sense that you shouldn’t be able to… If a journalist is good at their job, you shouldn’t be able to tell how they vote, which I think is kind of funny. It may be true. But a couple of Australian journalists did admit during the election campaign that they don’t vote, as an extension of this kind of: if you’re truly wise, wisdom of Solomon, impartial…
BEN: Oh, that’s an interesting one.
HEDVIG: Oh, what? No. What.
BEN: In a country where you have to, like, it’s weird.
DANIEL: You have to vote in Australia.
TIGER: Well, exactly. It’s, like, illegal not to vote. You get fined for it. It’s a hugely funny thing, I think, to admit on current affairs panel shows as an example of how objective you are.
BEN: As a flex, essentially.
TIGER: Yes.
BEN: Like, that’s what that is.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: That’s so weird.
TIGER: You wouldn’t go and be like, “Well, I get parking tickets all the time and I never pay them.”
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Yes!
TIGER: So, it’s funny what people think it’s smart in that arena. But no, the ABC does have standards around impartiality that preclude me from saying anything here.
DANIEL: Okay. We’ll say it.
BEN: Okay. That’s fine. I saw you blink in the right morse code collection of blinks. I knew what it meant.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Is this like… the Swedish radio public service broadcaster has a policy that you’re not allowed to say anything about party politics, but you can express certain political opinions. So you can be like, “I think climate change is real and we should do something about it.” But you can’t say, “And therefore, vote for the Greens!” Is that similar?
TIGER: Yeah, it’s an interesting wording, but there are sort of carve-outs within our impartiality standards around freedom of expression and the rule of law. Equality of opportunity, I think, is in there. There’s a few other ones.
HEDVIG: Oh.
TIGER: Yeah.
BEN: As in: you are not allowed to say you’re against any of those things. If you work for the ABC, you can’t be like: Oh, man, that fucking rule of law nonsense. That’s gotta go.
TIGER: Exactly. Yeah.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
TIGER: Yeah. You can’t say democracy is bad, unfortunately.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Right.
TIGER: And you can’t say people shouldn’t be free to… There should be a state religion and other religions should be purged. That’s bad. You can’t say that. Is that overreach? It’s not for me to say.
HEDVIG: Right.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Ooo — I see what you did there.
DANIEL: Okay. Well, let’s talk about some of the words that we noticed, that at least I noticed and some of our Discordians noticed. PharaohKatt noticed this one: #binnight. Taking out the trash. Apparently, there’s somebody named Josh Free-denberg, who lost his seat and Scott Morrison, who went to his horrible megachurch and cried, because it was so great being Prime Minister or some shit. They’re in the bin. Peter Dutton, not so much. Did anyone notice this one?
BEN: Just to be clear, BIN NIGHT is the term that has come to be used for taking out the trash of the former party. Is that what I’m hearing?
DANIEL: Succinct, isn’t it?
BEN: I like that.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Is that thunder or is that just the outgoing government?
DANIEL: …okay!
BEN: For our international audience, that is a joke about the fact that when you take bins out in Australia, the rumbling sound they make as they get taken down the driveway sounds exactly like thunder.
DANIEL: That is interesting.
TIGER: They throw garbage bags out on the street in New Zealand. There’s no bins.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
TIGER: It offended me no end. Apologies, New Zealand listeners. But thatt’s interesting that the only thing of interest I can think about the taking out the trash… or sorry, the bin night thing is that there is already a Australian political term, ‘taking out the trash’ or ‘dumping the trash’ for putting out negative news late on a Friday.
DANIEL: Oh, yeah!
HEDVIG: Oh.
BEN: Yes. Yeah yeah yeah. I remember that from the the West Wing.
TIGER: So there is this kind of politics-as-rubbish metaphor running throughout. That’s not good, probably, for a politician.
DANIEL: Okay. Here’s the next one. We’ve noticed that there were a lot of TEAL INDEPENDENTS. They settled on the colour teal as a marketing strategy. Even though… They were largely climate focused, they were accomplished women, they weren’t a monolith. They didn’t all believe the same things. But this one came up: TEAL BATH. Oh my god, it’s a teal bath. It’s like a bloodbath but teal.
BEN: Before we get on to the analysis, does anyone want to… I have a conspiracy theory about how they settled on teal. Does anyone else want to take a guess?
DANIEL: It was unoccupied?
TIGER: Was it not…? I don’t know what came first. It’s like when people are like: was it orange the fruit or orange the colour? But wasn’t there initially some discussion that they’re labeled teals because they are Liberals — represented by the colour blue — who are a bit more green on climate.
BEN: Yeah, that’s what I was thinking as well.
DANIEL: Ahhh…
TIGER: But one or two of these independent candidates have also used the teal colour prominently and my political memory is not really good enough to remember the last election, when the first “teal candidates” started coming up. Obviously, this election a lot of the — again — “teal candidates” didn’t use teal colouring for their seats. You think about Monique Ryan in Kooyong, which is one of the electorates here, I think she was a purple gal, if she picked a colour, so confusingly not teal at all.
HEDVIG: Hmm. Purple’s also nice and unoccupied, right? Sort of.
TIGER: It is unfortunately the colour of the Australian Electoral Commission. So, you’re not allowed to impersonate the Australian Electoral Commission.
BEN: That’s like a lavendery purple though. So, I reckon you could probably get away with a deeper darker, like a Roman royalty purple.
TIGER: Yeah, I could be misremembering the purple, but I’m pretty sure I saw purple and gray for her. If I’m wrong, please contact me and I’ll recant publicly.
DANIEL: Speaking of orange the fruit and orange the colour, by the way, do we know which one came first?
HEDVIG: [HOLDS UP CAT] Orange!
DANIEL: Hello, Orange!
BEN: It’s an orange cat.
HEDVIG: It’s Sandy.
DANIEL: I’ve forgotten the cat’s name. Is that Cement?
HEDVIG: No, that’s Sandy.
DANIEL: Hi, Sandy.
HEDVIG: I’m the only one awake, so they’re…
BEN: Did Sandy change for her man? Did she just start wearing leather clothes and generally just chart a really problematic path?
HEDVIG: Sandy, like most ginger cats, is a boy.
BEN: Ah, fair enough.
HEDVIG: But he wouldn’t change for any man.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Orange the fruit came first.
DANIEL: Correct!
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Narancia, which then hundreds of years later became orange, the colour. Teal is also the name of the bird. Which came first? Teal the colour, or teal the bird?
BEN: Well, I didn’t know that there was a bird called teal, which makes me guess that it was probably the bird because I haven’t heard of it.
HEDVIG: Yeah, me, too.
BEN: Which means, it’s really old.
TIGER: The progression of colour terms, right? It sounds like teal’s further along.
HEDVIG: Mm, yes.
DANIEL: That’s correct. The object comes first and then the colour. So yeah, congratulations. Teal dates from about the 1300s — teal the bird — and then, teal the colour, not till the 1900s.
BEN: Quick one, Daniel, just on orange.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: We have orange from naranja, right?
DANIEL: Narancia, uh-huh.
BEN: And originally, we in English, we’re calling it a NORANGE and then we attached the a, because AN ORANGE, right?
DANIEL: I know what you’re saying, but ORANGE was always ORANGE in English, but I know what you mean. You’re thinking about rebracketing, which we’re probably going to see a little later.
BEN: Yeah. Okay.
DANIEL: Okay, next one. I noticed PARACHUTED. Kristina Keneally was said to have been parachuted into the multicultural electorate of Fowler…
BEN: Oh! Nom nom nom nom…
DANIEL: …dropped in because she was a Labor candidate, and it looked like a safe seat, and she needed a job. But the community didn’t feel like this person was really connected to them and they elected independent Dai Le.
BEN: Can I just say how much this particular story for me… heralded? No. It was the standard bearer for how all the stuff that happened in our election was actually quite cool. Right? Like, it could have been a bunch of center right people, who just aren’t complete lunatics about climate change getting in, and might still be, and that might end up still being a fairly conservative voting bloc and all that kind of stuff. But what happened in that seat, in Fowler, with the Labor Party just putting in a typical apparatchik…
And just to be clear, Keneally did some really great work in the past around refugees and a bunch of other things. Her history as a politician is not actually a suspect one. It was just how things went down in this particular instance that was really odious. And just basically fucked over this poor woman who had been building a ground of support, and had really energised the base, and all this kind of thing. And then, and then! she was like, “All right, fuck ya then. I’ll go independent too,” and just wiped the floor with it. And it just makes me feel so good.
DANIEL: Mwah.
BEN: Mwah. Yeah, it’s a real chef-kiss moment in politics. It really is.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: It’s also one of those things that as a European and not British person — and I know we have non-European, non-British listeners — the Anglo voting system is really centered around this idea of local representation. So, someone should be from the community, and have lived there, and you vote for them, and you might know them, and you might vote for Labor, or Tory, or whatever candidate in your local electorate, but you might not agree with them higher up. So like, I know some British people are like, “Oh, no, we still vote for this Tory guy, because we like that person, but we don’t like the Tory Party upwards.”
BEN: Yeah yeah yeah.
HEDVIG: Whereas in a lot of other European countries, we don’t really have that attachment like that. People aren’t really representatives in that way.
BEN: It’s a slightly more indirect democracy.
HEDVIG: No, we vote for… There are people, but we just, like… I also need to find out more about it.
DANIEL: You just don’t get attached.
HEDVIG: The other day, I did find out we did have electorates, which I didn’t think we have.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Like, that was how it was!
DANIEL: Oh, how about that? Wow. Okay.
BEN: It’s just like the whole… [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Right? But I know we have some things that are similar to that, but just not like that.
BEN: Look, the example in the Australian Federal system that best exemplifies that, I think, is a guy we have called Bob Katter, who all Australian listeners will know as soon as I say the name but anyone from outside will probably have never heard of him. And he’s this real 10-gallon-hat-caricature kind of guy. But he’s been sitting in the same seat for, like, 35 years or something? I think he’s an independent now. He was LNP a million years ago, and I think he’s just been independent for years and years and years.
I think the reason is he is just a man on the ground. He will show up to everything, and he knows fricking everyone in his electorate, and they’re just like, “Yeah, look, you know, all that politics malarkey, I’m not sure about that. But Bob Katter, he’s a good guy!”
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
BEN: “He comes to my footie opening. He shakes my hand. I like him.” That’s how he’s been there for… he’s essentially barnacled on at this point.
DANIEL: I really just like the parachuting metaphor of dropping somebody in. Is that something that you’ve noticed before? It was the first time I’d become aware of it.
TIGER: It’s hard to think of a more prominent… The last parachuting political event in Australia, I think, might have been, god, the late aughts or in the ’10s perhaps, when Bob Carr, former New South Wales Premier was parachuted into a Senate seat federally. I don’t think that was really viewed as a parachuting. It was kind of like: you’ve done the hard yards being a titan of industry and the establishment here. So, go on, go become the national guy, perhaps. But that was maybe the last big parachuting I can think of.
BEN: It’s funny as well, isn’t it, that certainly in the Australian system — I’m not sure about other federations — but our attachment to Senate and Senate “electorates” is so much less firm, because each state gets a certain number of senators and they kind of control like a region, but it’s usually really large and it’s not a thing, so when you assign a person a Senate seat, we feel a lot less precious or less ownership as voters, I think, generally. Not absent ownership, but certainly when you do it at the lower house level, and the electorates are really quite small, and they represent a hundred and something thousand people and all that stuff, then people are like, “Oh, holy fuck. This is unacceptable. That person hasn’t shaken my hand. They haven’t kissed my baby!”
TIGER: Yeah. Not to get too arcane about all this, but there’s the broad decline in membership of political parties in Australia that’s been going on in tandem with declining union membership rates and so on. People are just less part of this establishment. I think that also makes it a bit harder. I’m sure there were times past where parachutings were made. People were parachuted into spots left, right, and centre, but there might have been an implicit trust then that the Liberal Party or the Labor Party knew what they were doing, and entrusted them, and you were at the meetings, and so, you saw it all happen, and you were fine with it. Whereas maybe now, with a bit more of a disconnect from institutional party politics at large, people see this parachuting happen and they get, I guess, a bit more aggro.
DANIEL: Let’s do two more about the Greens. Elías noticed GREENSLAND, which is what we’re calling Queensland.
BEN: Oh, yep. Yeah.
DANIEL: How surprising was it that Brisbane managed to put — I mean conservative Queensland put, how many? Are we talking four or five Greens?
TIGER: Maybe four, I think. At last count.
BEN: Yeah, it’s looking like four. Yep.
DANIEL: Four. Possibly four. That’s quite surprising. And I believe the Betoota Advocate satirical headline was, “Queenslander Looks Down His Nose at Those Rednecks in Victoria, Who Only Elected One Greens MP.”
TIGER: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: And then of course, PharaohKatt noticed GREEN-SLIDE. It was in a tweet by Adam Bandt. So, yeah, Greens. There was a swing away from the Liberal Party, but that doesn’t mean that Labor got it. It looks like a lot of that support went to Greens, because of their record on climate change, it would appear.
HEDVIG: Yeah, fair enough. Sounds about right.
BEN: I think the other thing about the Greens taking conservative seats away, I don’t think that’s particularly surprising really, in the sense that the only place Greens are ever going to get numbers enough to win are, for lack of a better phrase, rich places. And rich places tend to have a lot of people with a lot of money, and people with a lot of money often have in their perception of things, a lot of things to conserve. So, it’s often a fairly conservative place that will then shift over into a sort of progressive-thinking place, because generally speaking, people who are doing it really tough don’t have the — what’s the word I’m looking for — the spare resources to be like: Yeah, let’s save the world. Because they’re like: Aaa, where am I going to live?
TIGER: Daniel and Hedvig, do you know about Tree Tories?
HEDVIG: No. What’s Tree Tories?
DANIEL: Don’t think so.
TIGER: Is that an Australianism?
BEN: I’ve not heard it before.
HEDVIG: Yeah, no, I’ve never heard of it. Is it, like, similar to drop bears?
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Why, yes!
TIGER: Very similar. They’re very dangerous, very common. Don’t go outside a major city in Australia. You may be accosted by a Tree Tory. Well, they are, I guess, what we what we now call… It’s a Tory, a conservative voting person, so usually Liberal Party in Australia, who has some kind of concern about the environment or climate change. So, tree Tory. I think Bike Tory is another one that has that Tory productive element where, I guess, a conservative voting person who likes bike lanes or rides a bike on the weekend. It’s a pejorative.
DANIEL: Wow. All right.
TIGER: But yeah, the Teal, then Tree Tories, I think in the popular imagination are the same thing.
DANIEL: Well, that’s our rundown of the lexicon coming out of the recent Australian election.
BEN: That was fun.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: But now, Hedvig will be… Oh, were there any others to be noticed? ‘Cause I had my list, but…
HEDVIG: Doot doot doot… I don’t know and I don’t care, because we’re coming up on Eurovision report. But okay, is there any more election words?
DANIEL: Okay! It’s the Eurovis…
BEN: Oh, no — no!
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: No, no, no. I think we’ve done it to death.
BEN: [GROANS] Hold on. I need a cat for this.
DANIEL: Hedvig will now give us the annual Eurovision report from a linguistic perspective. I paid no attention to Eurovision. Tiger, are you a fan?
TIGER: Very passively and having a new baby, so I didn’t see any of it. Sorry.
DANIEL: Congratulations.
HEDVIG: That is a good excuse. Tiger is excused.
DANIEL: That’s pretty good. I’ll accept that.
BEN: I didn’t watch it, because Eurovision is bad, and only bad people like it.
TIGER: Oh!
HEDVIG: Right.
DANIEL: I didn’t watch Eurovision, because I knew Hedvig was going to do this, so…
HEDVIG: What the f… What? What is with you people?! It’s a good time. You don’t need to think hard about it. I know peop… When I say I like Eurovision, they’re like, “Oh, did you watch the second semifinal?” I’m like, “No, I watched the grand final and that’s it.”
TIGER: Yeah, I’m normal.
HEDVIG: I don’t listen to the songs beforehand. I’m a normal person and it’s a good time. It’s a good night and I had a lot of friends over. We were able to have people over and we had some friends who aren’t European, who had just moved to Europe, and they thought it was really interesting because they got to hear all of us gossip like, “Oh, everyone knows that Moldova always does this. Ho, ho, ho.” And they were like, “Oh, you guys have perceptions about each other and things going on.” I’m like, “Yeah.”
DANIEL: Welcome to Europe!
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: ~I think you’ll find that we fought two, not one but two wars that encompassed the whole world. So, yes, we have thoughts.~
HEDVIG: Yeah. We have opinions. We have opinions about each other. So just general nonlinguistic news. So this last year… Well, okay. During the pandemic, this is the first time it’s been a really big festive event, where a lot of people could attend in person. There was voting and everything done the regular way it was before the pandemic. So that’s one thing to note.
BEN: The Before Times.
HEDVIG: Russia didn’t attend. I realise now that I didn’t look it up, but I don’t think they were allowed to attend even if they wanted to, because I think the saying was something like: their actions don’t align well with the idea of peace and a peaceful contest.
BEN: There’s like a byline somewhere in the Eurovision charter that’s like: If one member state invades the sovereign territory of another member state, then you’re not allowed to do a song and dance!
HEDVIG: Yes, yes. The other interesting thing that is not linguistic related is that generally in the contest in the last few decades, the UK has tended to do quite poorly, and it’s perceived as an instance of everyone’s like: “UK gets a lot of attention anyway in the pop world,” and people have resentment towards the UK in general for being a native English-speaking country that sort of dominates the others in a way, and Brexit, and blah blah blah. And the UK this time got a lot of votes. So much that #WhatIsHappening was trending on UK Twitter, because people were just like: “What? I don’t understand. What is going on?”
DANIEL: ~This never happennnnnnnnns~
HEDVIG: Last time, the UK got zero points, which is impressive, because there are a lot of people voting and they managed to get zero points.
BEN: It’s an achievement to do that badly.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Nul points.
HEDVIG: They got zero points from the jury and from the public vote last time. This time, they did really well. They did a smart move. They got this guy who’s really, really popular on TikTok, [CHUCKLES] and who is nationally known and has millions of followers.
BEN: Oh, yeah. That’ll do it.
HEDVIG: So all the probably young people in the rest of Europe were like, “Ooh, I know him. I’m going to vote!” He also did a good song. The UK usually does a good song. That usually doesn’t give them any points.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: To which the rest of Europe is just like, “Fuck off.”
HEDVIG: Yeah. But that didn’t happen this time. So, that was nice and he was very sweet. Oh, I have one linguistic-related thing, which is that…
BEN: [LAUGHS] I love it. On our linguistics show, right at the end, Hedvig’s like: “Oh, by the way, I have shoehorned in a stupid…”
DANIEL: Just one?
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] No, no, no. I have other linguistic… but just about this thing about UK. Often, France and also Belgium will read out their points in French. Everyone else will be like, “We give 12 points to Moldova.” And then, the hosts say, “Douze points à la Moldavie” or something. But for France and Belgium, it’s the other way around. So, they say, “Douze points à la Moldavie,” and then the hosts say it in English, which meant that they zoomed in on the United Kingdom delegation when France said, “Douze points à la Royaume Uni,” which is the United Kingdom. And you could see on the British people’s faces that they were like, “So, who did they give the twelve to?” [LAUGHTER] And then, there’s a couple of seconds until they read it out in English and they’re like, “Fuck, we got 12 points from France. What the hell?”
BEN: From, from, from, France!
HEDVIG: Yeah!
BEN: Of all of the people, from the French!
HEDVIG: So that was pretty fun, because usually, a lot of British people do know some basic French, but they didn’t know the name of their own country in French, which is fair enough. So onwards to linguistic news. There were only six songs in the grand final that were entirely in not English. So, Iceland sang in Icelandic.
BEN: Out of how many? Like six out of…
HEDVIG: 18. I forget how many it was total. Ish. Something like that.
BEN: Our reporter on the ground, “Hedvig, how many were there in total?”
HEDVIG: Shut up.
BEN: “I don’t fucking know. Shut up.”
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: There were six people. That’s what I looked up. That what’s my notes say.
BEN: I’m normal. I’m not taking notes!
HEDVIG: I’m not taking fucking notes! I wrote down what I’m…
BEN: Ben, I need you to understand, I was drunk as shit, all right? The fact that I remembered that there was six not in English is a big deal; get off my back.
HEDVIG: Right. Okay. So there were some usual suspects. Iceland sang in Icelandic, France sang in French… No, sorry. France did NOT sing in French, but they sung in not English… [OMINOUS MUSIC] doot doot doot dooooo…
BEN: Did they sing in an Arabic?
HEDVIG: No. Ooh, we can do a fun game! What language did France sing in?
DANIEL: Dark horse: German!
HEDVIG: No. It’s a language of France.
BEN: Oh, um…
DANIEL: Oh, Breton.
BEN: Yeah. Something like that?
HEDVIG: Yes! There you go. Daniel, good job.
DANIEL: Thank you.
BEN: So, Breton is a minority language from the Brittany region? Is that right?
HEDVIG: Yes. It is a Celtic language.
BEN: Oh!
HEDVIG: This is the second time that France has sung in Breton. So, that’s interesting as well. I first wrote down in my report: “It is the first time that France has participated in a Celtic language”, and I was like, “I better check that,” and then I googled, and it was like, “No, they’ve done it before!”
BEN: All of Brittany just shuddered at once as you wrote that down, being like, “No.”
HEDVIG: [CHUCKLES] The first time was in 1996, and then it was again this year. I have never studied a Celtic language. The Fulenn, I think, is the pronunciation of the title, which means spark. So that was very nice. They sang in Breton. And then, Italy sang in Italian, Lithuania sang in Lithuanian, the Netherlands sang in Dutch, and Ukraine sang in Ukrainian and also Ukraine — dah, dah, dah, daaah, spoiler — won.
BEN: Yeah. Even I knew that.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: I knew that one.
HEDVIG: So that was nice. They sang a song and the song was called Stefania and it’s a song devoted to motherhood and specifically to the main singer’s mother, whose name is Stefania. So, that was very nice and touching. There were some other notable language things. Some people just had some words in another language. Romania had a chorus partially in Spanish. It was mostly English and then it was “ola me be-be-be, llame, llame.” And my friend who was at the Eurovision party who’s Romanian, she was like, “This is so embarrassing. Bebebe is not a word.” It’s just like bey-be like baby, but then bey, bey, bey. And she thought was very embarrassing.
BEN: To bev fair, that’s pretty normal in pop music like, “Ooh, baby, baby, baby.” That’s a thing. That’s totally a thing.
HEDVIG: Yeah, Fair enough. And again, my unpreparedness but last year, there was also, I think, it was a Balkan country that had part of the lyrics just in Spanish, just because Spanish is just the cool party language and English is not the only one.
BEN: I mean, fair.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah. Other notable things for me was that I had… Moldova is a small country next to Romania, which a lot of people are learning a lot about right now.
BEN: Yeah. People are becoming really brushed up on just Southeastern, near Eastern geography!
HEDVIG: Here is your regular reminder that in Moldova, they speak Romanian, not Moldovian.
BEN: But not in Transnistria where the majority speak Russian. Correct?
HEDVIG: Yes. All people speak Russian in Transnistria. But in general, most people in Moldova speak Romanian and my Romanian friend said that, generally, there’s not a lot of difference and people consider it one language, and share each other’s news and things. The rule otherwise in Europe is often that Italy speaks Italian, Sweden speaks Swedish, Finland speaks Finnish. But Moldavia speaks Romanian, the majority speaks. As with most European language, people aren’t all monolingual and aren’t all just speaking one language and the same language in the same country.
BEN: Is there, like, Moldovan? Is there a language like that? Is there any kind of?
DANIEL: From what I can gather, it looks they’re just two different names for the same language.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: And Romanian, also your regular reminder, is not a Slavic language. It is a Romance language. It’s related to Italian!
BEN: Ro-manian.
DANIEL: Ro-man. Yeah
HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s in the name. If you just think about it a little bit.
BEN: It’s right there on the tin. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: It’s right there on the tin. It’s related to like Roma, and Italian, and French, and whatever. Of course, it is essentially entirely surrounded by Slavic languages. Yeah, they’ve picked stuff up like, I guess, you would. But it is at its roots, a Romance language. That’s it for my Eurovision report.
DANIEL: Thank you. [APPLAUDS]
BEN: Look, I gotta say first of all, well done. Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap. Second of all, the idea that Moldova speaks Romanian… England, depending on how you want to count it is between… The United Kingdom, sorry, is between four and six different countries, all of which speak the same language. The idea that different countries would share a language is not at all surprising to me.
HEDVIG: Right. Good on you.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: The idea that it would be surprising that Moldovans might speak a language other than whatever language might have been, that’s normal, right?
HEDVIG: Well, in Europe, it’s generally the case with English and French, which are quite big languages. Belgium also speaks French and a variety that’s related to Dutch.
BEN: Right, but they call it Flemish. They’ve got their whole own thing going on.
DANIEL: Tiger, you had a thing?
TIGER: Oh, just like there are annoying small exceptions to the rule, where you have Malta, which has Italian but also Maltese. I’m sure the smaller countries like Liechtenstein, perhaps, there may be…
HEDVIG: Monaco, yeah.
TIGER: Yeah.
BEN: Switzerland’s just flying by the seat of its pants.
HEDVIG: Have you heard about Saddam Hussein’s opinion about Switzerland?
BEN: [LAUGHS] No, I want to though.
DANIEL: No, I haven’t. Spill the tea.
HEDVIG: I’m pretty sure it’s Saddam Hussein or it’s another horrible dictator. Someone’s going to write in and tell me if I’m wrong. But he said in his speech, he was like, “Switzerland should not exist. We should split it up. Give one part to Italy, the Italian-speaking part. Give the French-speaking part of France. Give the mainly German-speaking part to Germany. He was like: I don’t get it. It shouldn’t be a thing. Fuck ’em.
BEN: I’ve never been to Switzerland. So, I don’t know for sure, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it just turned out that due to just a quirk of history that none of those bits actually perfectly map to the bits that they’re near. Like, it wouldn’t surprise me if the Italian-speaking bit was actually more towards the Germans and stuff. So, if they did that…
HEDVIG: It does map.
BEN: …there would just be this… Oh, okay. Damn.
HEDVIG: I’ve been to Switzerland. I have Swiss friends. It does map, but there are plenty of people… By that logic, Austria should be a part of Germany too, essentially.
BEN: I’m sure, by the sound of it, Saddam Hussein probably thought that as well.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: This Saddam Hussein character sounds like the kind of fellow what causes unrest!
[LAUGHTER]
TIGER: Yeah. I think we tried a lot of these language-based ethno-states in the 18th and 19th centuries. And what we’re now feeling is just very either successful or unsuccessful amalgamations. Again, not to bring up that two World Wars again, but we did have a couple of World Wars over stuff like this.
BEN: I was about to say! And then the Germans decided to give it another college try, and now, the Russians are giving it another-nother college try.
HEDVIG: Yeah. There’s this map that The Economist made a couple of years ago what it would look like if everyone did that. It looks a bit odd, but it’s probably not a good idea. Not only were a lot of these places already multilingual from before, it was never clear cut. If you look into German history, it used to be just like hundreds of tiny kingdoms, and they joined up as certain coalitions. It’s not necessarily a monolith as it was. And I know that a lot of African nations are facing this as well, because they got like… colonial white people put a ruler down, like, “I’m going to draw a line here,” like, split things really weirdly.
Yeah, modern nations have to grapple with the idea that maybe they can’t redraw that and maybe they have to define themselves some other way. And yeah, it’s really interesting and probably not a good idea to resplit it.
DANIEL: Thank you, Hedvig.
BEN: Daniel, you want to move us on, don’t you?
DANIEL: Yes, I do.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Hedvig, thank you for that Eurovision Language Report. You’re going to give us another one next year?
HEDVIG: Always.
DANIEL: Always!
BEN: yayyyyyyy 🫥
HEDVIG: Always with my Eurovision.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: Let’s get to our lovely mailbag questions. Real questions from real people.
BEN: My goodness. It’s a mailbag episode, we haven’t even got to any questions.
DANIEL: I know. So, let’s try to keep it rather terse. Thank you. This one is from Susan on Facebook who says, “Asking for a friend. No, really asking for a friend. She’s doing a uni assignment this weekend with a COVID-affected brain.” That’s probably a few weekends ago. Sorry. “And has asked, ‘Are the words ANOTHER, MAYBE, and GARBAGE compound words?’ She’s delving into the morphology and is stumped. Many thanks, Susan for Elise.” All right, ANOTHER, MAYBE, and GARBAGE. Compounds or not compounds? First, what is a compound word?
BEN: [SCHOOLBOY VOICE] ~It’s where you get two separate words, and ya smoosh them together.~
DANIEL: Thank you, high school instructor.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Yeah. That was primary school. That was Mrs. Terwillegar basically being like, “Oh, verbs are doing words. Compound words are when you smoosh words together.” That’s lit…
DANIEL: I always enjoy it when she shows up.
BEN: Thanks, Mrs Terwilliger.
DANIEL: Okay. So, to put a little more university…
BEN: You have to put it in—
DANIEL: …to put it in a varsity way…
HEDVIG: I thought that was really good! I don’t know if university definitions are going to be that much better, honestly. We don’t fucking know what compounds are.
DANIEL: Well, let me try.
HEDVIG: Okay.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Let him take a crack.
DANIEL: So morphemes are bits of words that contribute to meaning. There are free morphemes and there are bound morphemes. Free morphemes can stand by themselves like CAT and SAUSAGE and FIRE. Bound morphemes typically cannot like UN-, or RE-, or -IST. And when two fee morphemes get together to make a word, we call it a compound, like FIREPLACE or BABYSITTER.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Okay. So, do any of these words — ANOTHER, MAYBE, and GARBAGE — seem more compound to anyone?
HEDVIG: So, MAYBE is my best candidate.
BEN: No. I think none of them are compounds, but GARBAGE is the most not compound.
HEDVIG: Yes. Agreed.
DANIEL: Interesting.
BEN: Okay. Like Animal-Farm style, if all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others, I think GARBAGE is more noncompound.
DANIEL: Interesting. Okay, we’ve got two guesses. Tiger, your thoughts?
TIGER: I agree. Part of the task — I think for historical linguistics in English, at least — is like: you want to have the years of reading fall away and work out where there could have once been morpheme boundaries. If they’re not there anymore, what are we preserving here? And I have to say looking at this question, I went to garbage and thought, “Where would you…” I can’t really think about garb-age, as, like, a piece of clothing, sort of the mood thereof. No, it doesn’t really work for me. But I can see MAYBE, I can see ANOTHER being compounds.
DANIEL: Let’s talk about ANOTHER for a second. What’s going on there? An? Other?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: It’s like: give me an other.
DANIEL: So I guess we got two free morphemes, AN and OTHER. Boomp. There they are. Looks pretty compoundy.
HEDVIG: Usually, with compounds, we like each of the parts that are going into the compound to not be grammar functional words. We like them to be more lexically heavy and semantically heavy. So, FIREPLACE, FIRE and PLACE have a lot of semantic content to them, whereas AN is an article and is very semantically bleached. So, that’s my motivation for ANOTHER not being a great compound.
Also, when we put compounds together, we — with certain restrictions — like the meaning to be compositional, so like, FIREPLACE is the PLACE where the FIRE is. ANOTHER: I’m going to have another beer. I’m going to have an other beer. OTHER, if I make space in between them, it’s like AN OTHER, different from the one I had before, [NOISES OF ASSENT] whereas ANOTHER beer could actually be the same beer that I had before. I just want more of them.
BEN: Yeah. That’s a good point.
HEDVIG: So, it’s not really…
BEN: So, that separates it from MAYBE a little bit as well then, doesn’t it?
HEDVIG: Exactly.
BEN: Because if you do that with MAYBE, it doesn’t separate its meaning at all. MAYBE just means MAY BE.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah. I think of maybe as the most compositional of these three, definitely a compound. ANOTHER really gave me pause, because there’s something else that makes this a bit murky and that is that re-bracketing, we kind of think of A-NOTHER. We think of that N as moving to NOTHER. In fact, we even split it with A WHOLE NOTHER. In fact, this re-bracketing isn’t new. People in the 1300s used NOTHER as a word. But it does appear that ‘another’ really does come from it’s just AN OTHER, pretty straightforward. So, I’m putting this one down as historically a compound, but it’s drifted.
BEN: But hang on. When you started this whole shebang off and you got all varsity on me, you said that the two… hey, that was your word, not mine.
DANIEL: [laughs]
BEN: You said that the two…
DANIEL: Morphemes.
BEN: …morphemes needed to be…
DANIEL: Free.
BEN: Free.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: But AN doesn’t seem like the freest of free. It seems a bit closer to a suffix, kind like the A in A LOT. Do you know what I mean?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: It could be uttered in isolation. I don’t see what’s not wordy about it.
BEN: Yeah. No, no, no. He’s right in the sense of…
HEDVIG: I think what Ben is getting out if I translate it into university linguistics…
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Make it varsity.
HEDVIG: …is that AN can’t really be the head of a noun phrase.
DANIEL: Mhm.
HEDVIG: So, you can’t say, I want a.
BEN: I want an.
DANIEL: Utterability in isolation.
HEDVIG: You have to say something else next to it. Because it often occurs with another like noun like that like, “I want a beer,” then, arguably… in linguistics, we argue about this a lot like, “What is a word? What is a bound? What does it mean to be bound?” And you could play the same recording to different linguists, and they would maybe put the boundaries at different places. There are a lot of arguments for saying A and AN in English could be written together with the other thing. We could call them prefixes.
BEN: I want to just throw in my constant… this is another chipping away at the constant thing for me of like: I want ALOT to be a single word.
DANIEL: Yeah, me too.
BEN: I really want that alot.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Just write it like that! Just write it!
BEN: No, pun 100% intended. Because ANOTHER and MAYBE, and all these words that never used to be one word!
DANIEL: Like AHOLD! If you can do something for AWHILE and you can get AHOLD of yourself, then surely we could have ALOT.
BEN: Come on, just give me ALOT, one word.
HEDVIG: People write ALOT as one word and you can too. And if we believe Tiger enough, maybe all of the ABC will.
BEN: I know, but there’s still all of the prescriptivists. But here’s the thing.
TIGER: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Come on, Tiger.
BEN: I feel for Tiger, because I know that he might in his head agree with us. But I also know that he has to deal with a whole bunch of human beings, where if he was like, “Okay, everyone, we’re going to write ALOT as one word,” that would storm the castle with pitchforks and torches!
TIGER: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Is that true?
TIGER: Yeah. That’s… well, yeah. They’d threaten to. Sure.
[LAUGHTER]
TIGER: Yeah, you can be the change you wish to see in the world, I suppose. Bump up the ratio of A LOT two words to ALOT one word over the course of your life, maybe significantly, if you use ALOT a lot. But, yeah. The tricky thing for me, the bind I get into at work is, we tend to go off reference works, which are out of date the second they’re printed, if not before they printed. Yeah, I think ALOT would be a hard needle to move inside the halls of Ultimo.
DANIEL: It’s stigmatised. That’s one problem.
BEN: Yeah. This is what I mean. That’s why we fixate on ALOT… quite a bit 😏, [LAUGHTER] because yeah, there really seems to be in the minds of some prescriptivists this idea that: this far and no further, like ALOT is my line in the sand.
HEDVIG: It’s so weird. Hey, Tiger, when you said that it made me curious. What is the worst thing that someone has threatened to do, given something — advice, policy — you have enacted?
BEN: Ooh.
TIGER: What was the worst thing someone’s threatened to do is pretty unquestionably… and this is a relatively, relatively extreme example, but well, to sodomise me with an apostrophe and also to kill me.
BEN: Holy fuck.
TIGER: Yeah.
HEDVIG: I’m so sorry!
TIGER: No, that’s fine. Well, the death threats, and it was only a few of them, but they’re very, very rare. Rare in comparison to anyone who goes on TV for journalism, for example’s sake. It only happened after certain…
HEDVIG: What did you do?
TIGER: …very extreme media figures picked up things that I had written.
BEN: Just to be clear, this is…
DANIEL: Was this the apostrophes article? Because I felt that article. I loved that article about how apostrophes are unnecessary, and we could do fine without them. That was the one, right?
TIGER: Yeah, the apostrophe one, yes, and just some of the stuff I wrote. Yeah, we have…
BEN: Was this members of the public or your colleagues?
TIGER: Oh! This was members of the public. The colleagues tend to be more civil, not always.
HEDVIG: Wait, what? You get serious flak from your colleagues?
BEN: Well, because this is what I was getting at before.
HEDVIG: They’re in a professional environment. They have bosses.
TIGER: [laughs]
BEN: Yeah, but they’re also like personalities, right? They’re giant egos.
TIGER: Well, language is a topic that people feel very strongly about. And also, standard ideology is real. A lot of what I have to say about language, even professionally, is kind of illegal thoughts to people. It’s very, very difficult to convey there may be more than one spelling or pronunciation for a given word. Yeah, so again, I don’t want to give the impression that I’m frequently accosted by ABC employees, because I’m not. The bulk of the communication I have are received quite well. There have been one or two times, as with anyone in a professional environment, you have people who just don’t… they’re not picking up what you’re putting down. That’s happened a few times to me.
DANIEL: This is what I’m on about, Hedvig. This is what I’m on about what the ABC audience. It’s real.
HEDVIG: This is the ABC employees I’m concerned about. Because like…
TIGER: Oh, yeah. One of the worst interviews in my life I ever did was when I was doing Word of the Year for Macquarie a few years ago and MILKSHAKE DUCK had been chosen as word of the year. I got into a 15-minute argument with [LAUGHS] a colleague of mine, who was the presenter on air because he couldn’t abide by the idea that our word can be multipart, like a single lexeme can consist of more than one…
DANIEL: Ohhhhh 😩 That shit!
TIGER: So we just had that argument forever.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Oh my god.
TIGER: That’s probably the most publicly bizarre it ever got. That was one of the strangest experiences of my life. I was just shocked by how rude this person was to me. His producer called me up afterwards to apologise, which again, that’s never happened before and it hasn’t happened since. So, these things are rare, but it’s just language. It excites people and often not in the best way.
HEDVIG: No, I’m happy that it excites people. I guess that I thought people had some professional decorum and behaved in non-disagreeable… Anyway! Okay.
BEN: You’ve got to remember, Hedvig, as a person who used to work in the media, it is full of insane people. Your thought that, “It’s a workplace”… like, you need to take your conception of what a normal workplace is and then you need to warp it a bit to get an on-air media environment workplace. Because it tolerates a level of behaviour from people that other workplaces don’t necessarily tolerate.
HEDVIG: To be fair though, I’m in academia. It gets weird.
DANIEL: Keep in mind also that people consider public bodies like the ABC to be strongholds of linguistic correctness. And sometimes, one of those workers, one of those colleagues is going to take that to heart. So, I could totally see it.
BEN: Yeah, I’m, I’m on the bulwark of the denigration of everything that we hold to be dear. That’s the kind of thinking.
DANIEL: Yeah, you’re there too. You’re exactly there. Okay, anyway, got to close this off. So, I’m saying that in order of likeliness of being compounds, the word MAYBE, probably the most prototypical. ANOTHER, I’m calling it peripheral. And GARBAGE, we just don’t know it. Etymonline listed it as of unknown origin. You look at the -AGE morpheme and say, “Yeah, that’s a bound morpheme. So, probably not a compound.” And also, we don’t know where it comes from. If we knew more, maybe we would say.
HEDVIG: Maybe Susan knows something we don’t.
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Susan, tell us if you know maybe about GARBAGE. Because we need to tell all these…
BEN: Susan, do you have a time machine?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Is that what’s going on there?
TIGER: is there a folk etymology going around about GARBAGE that we don’t know? Because I can’t think of one.
BEN: Ooh, yeah. Like Fornication Under Consent of the King.
TIGER: Yeah, exactly.
DANIEL: Like it’s old, so it’s AGE, right? I’m slipping this one in. This was a late entry from Skirt the Norm on our Discord. “I have a question that I’m sure has a very obvious answer. Are words like GONNA and WANNA portmanteaus?” And I’m putting this here, because I wanted to establish a relationship between compound words, portmanteaus, combining forms, and just normal affixation.
HEDVIG: Oh my god. Okay.
DANIEL: So, GONNA, WANNA… what’s going on?
HEDVIG: GONNA is the short form of GOING TO and it is very widespread. I don’t know where it started. There are other forms in the same paradigm like IMMA that I know are more common in, like, Black American English than other… I don’t know if that’s also the origins of GONNA. A portmanteau is a word that does several things at once without you being able to tease apart the things that it’s doing. [LAUGHS] That’s my best explanation. So, there are words, there are grammatical words that can do several jobs at once and I gotta think of a good one. Do you have a good portmanteau, Daniel?
DANIEL: Well, CHORTLE, which is CHUCKLE and SNORT. That one was coined by Lewis Carroll. So, two free morphemes, but instead of accepting them both, we clip bits. It’s like compound, but clipping.
BEN: Yeah, I thought it was just a fancy pants word of saying conjoined… like a combined word. I thought it was just the way you say it.
DANIEL: A blending.
TIGER: Yeah, a blending, yeah. But I think if you’re going to describe things technically, probably, there would be a bit of a difference there.
DANIEL: Well, I did a little bit of digging and it turns out that there is a term for what GONNA and WANNA are doing.
BEN: Mhm.
HEDVIG: Mhm.
DANIEL: The TO is a clitic!
BEN: Oo! That’s fun.
DANIEL: A clitic and it is a word that comes from Greek, klitikos meaning ‘inflectional’ and it’s a piece of a word that depends on something else. So the apostrophe-S on “John’s house” — that’s a clitic. It’s not a full word anymore. It’s been sort of reduced and it’s dependent on the other word for its existence. -N’T as in DON’T is another clitic. Does that sound right, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: I would be a bad typologist if I didn’t say that clitic is one of the most controversial words in typology, unfortunately. [LAUGHTER]
TIGER: I was going to say…!
HEDVIG: Daniel Everett has said that they don’t exist. Martin Haspelmath has backed him up. I saw them actually talking about it on Facebook the other day, because they’re on each other’s Facebook feeds. So clitic, sometimes people mean a thing that is sometimes free and sometimes not free, so like DON’T and DO NOT. Sometimes, it can occur as a free thing, and sometimes it can’t. Some people say clitic is a thing that attaches not to a word, but to a phrase, so, “John’s house”, “John who I met last night’s house” — the ‘S goes at the end of that whole thing.
So some people use those two different definitions. Some people say that it’s both of those. And some people have yet other definitions. And when you read grammars, they will say, “This thing is a clitic,” and you look at it and you go, “Man, okay, I don’t know what you mean by that, but I’m going to assume it sometimes at least is bound to something.” That is like…
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Just to be clear: in the original, Daniel, the way you framed it, is it clitic just anytime you have, like, the apostrophe-T or whatever? Like you have a contraction with an apostrophe?
DANIEL: I think it works that way a lot, for example, I’M and I’LL. But how would you define a clitic, Hedvig, if you wanted to give the textbook, probably wrong, definition?
TIGER: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I would say it’s one of those two. So it’s either something that is sometimes free and sometimes bound, so I WILL and I’LL, or it’s something that is always bound but goes on things that are larger than words. Because I’LL and “John who I met last night’s” — they’re not of the same… the S can never be free, whereas WILL can be free.
BEN: Like John’ll. Meaning, John will, kind of thing.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Oh, would you say, “John who I met last night’ll to go with me to the movies?”
TIGER: Mm.
BEN: I suppose you could.
DANIEL: Possibly?
HEDVIG: Would you?
BEN: Especially if you’d been drinking.
HEDVIG: Okay!
TIGER: We’re getting some percentage science in acceptability here!
DANIEL: I think so.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay. So, if I’m doing my University 101 English, I’d say it’s a clitic. But if I’m being a little more careful, I might have to revise that.
BEN: Well, it sounds, from what — and I don’t know anything about the controversy of clitics or not clitics — but it sounds a little bit how brown isn’t a thing, but it totally is a thing.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Are you guys familiar with this as a concept?
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Like brown doesn’t exist.
TIGER: Sorry, you’re saying: brown.
BEN: But it does. Brown, the colour.
DANIEL: The colour brown.
TIGER: Okay, brown doesn’t exist.
BEN: Yeah, the colour brown doesn’t exist. And anyone who’s listening to this, I’m not going to give you any further explanation. You can fall down your own personal nightmare rabbit hole about this.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: Go onto YouTube, type in ‘brown doesn’t exist,’ watch a whole bunch of videos.
DANIEL: [WHISPERS] It’s dark orange. It’s just dark orange.
BEN: Yeah. But the point is, it clearly does, in the sense that everyone can see the colour brown. Right? I’m seeing many versions of it on this Zoom call, which I’m looking at right now. But in a certain realm of colour physics, brown doesn’t exist if you look at certain physics questions hard enough, and it feels to me this clitic question might be one of those.
HEDVIG: Maybe.
BEN: We can look at all of these words that do this thing that we all inherently feel and understand, but I can totally buy that if you look deep enough — like I have with the brown rabbit hole — you’d be like, “Oh, wow, brown really doesn’t exist. Who knew?”
HEDVIG: I guess, the difference here is that there are 7,000 languages in the world, and we have all these grammar descriptions, and they differ more than we think. And CLITIC is a word that linguists invented, whereas BROWN is a word that a lot of people know. People have roughly the same optical nerves and roughly the same amount of whatever those tap things are called in your head, whereas languages actually differ more than that. The advice I always get, because I have friends who write grammars is like, “You can use whatever terminology you want. Like, use the word CLITIC, use the word WORD, and TONE and INTONATION. Just give me some meat to go on so I can guess what you meant.”
BEN: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: Just add another sentence after saying clitic. “Look, here’s an example where it attaches to a word and where it doesn’t attach on the… oh, okay, this person is using this definition of clitic. Good.”
TIGER: Show your working!
DANIEL: Yep. Show your work.
HEDVIG: Sorry!
BEN: Show your working. I like that. That’s fun.
DANIEL: That augmented my understanding. Thank you, Hedvig. And thank you to Skirt the Norm for that question. Nikoli asks on our Discord server, “Might have been asked before on the pod, but when can you call yourself a linguist? Asking for my Twitter bio.” How do we feel about this? Ben?
BEN: I am definitely not a linguist. I do not claim to be a linguist. I don’t say that I’m a linguist to people. Sometimes, when people find out I partake — I’m not going to say that I have — but when I contribute to a linguistics podcast regularly, they’re like, “Oh, wow, are you a linguist?” And I have to immediately stop and be like, “It’s very important that you understand what I’m about to say to you. No.” [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: But Ben, you know a lot about linguistics, you’re curious about language, and you’re on a linguistics podcast. How can you not be a linguist?
BEN: I do. I think the way I can not be a linguist is because I can say things about linguistics like I just did with clitics a second ago, and be horrendously wrong and misguided and corrected.
HEDVIG: (You weren’t horrendously wrong!)
BEN: To be a linguist, I think you…
DANIEL: Yeah, but me too. 🥺
BEN: I think to be a linguist, you need to practice a rigor in your thinking about linguistics that I absolutely don’t. I follow flights of fancy. I follow my own personal intuition. Sometimes, that’s super reliable and accurate, because I have parasitically osmosised a lot of linguistic knowledge from people that I have been forced to spend time with me every week for five years.
DANIEL: (Five years?)
BEN: So, I don’t consider myself a linguist because I don’t practice the kind of internal discipline I think any -ist deserves. Right? Like, I wouldn’t want to go to the doctor to get my colon checked by a proctologist and just have them just be a, like, every-weekend enthusiast with that knowledge.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: I want them to apply a really sincere rigor to ther learning and to their thinking, and I just admit that I don’t. I absolutely don’t.
DANIEL: Well, okay, on that, I feel like I’m very permissive about people calling themselves linguists and I wouldn’t be nearly that permissive about somebody who calls themselves a proctologist. With a proctologist, you’ve got to have a degree, and you got to have equipment, and…
TIGER: Certifications.
DANIEL: …standards and knowledge. Like, being a physicist, there’s a uniform and…
BEN: What?! No, there’s not.
TIGER: Oh, there is, absolutely. Yeah.
BEN: No! No no no.
TIGER: We’ve all seen the tweed jacket.
BEN: I’m sorry. Looking uncool is not a uniform. It is just a vague direction.
DANIEL: Fine! But I feel there’s a hard science thing… like, the bar for hard sciences is a little bit higher than the bar for soft sciences. Hedvig, what do you think?
HEDVIG: I disagree!
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Everyone’s surprised. I just think that…
DANIEL: Is a polyglot a linguist?
HEDVIG: A lot of humanities scholars assume things about STEM that aren’t really true. For example, biologists argue about a lot of things that are very similar to what linguists argue about, like how to make trees, and what species are, and what subspecies are. It’s like the same thing as our history, the… sort of about linguistics, and what’s a language and what’s a dialect? They have a lot of fuzzy categories in their fields and also fuzzy categories about themselves. So, I don’t necessarily think that’s true.
I think maybe a basic, meaningful definition of linguist is something like: first of all, you’ve got to get over that prescriptivist threshold. I don’t think you should be allowed to call yourself a linguist if you still have, like, moral binding opinions about people’s language use. You can have aesthetic ones. You’re allowed those. You can say…
DANIEL: Don’t we all.
HEDVIG: …I like this sound, blah, blah, blah.
BEN: “My personal preference would be…”
HEDVIG: But you’ve got to recognise that that’s the same as like, “I like this pop music,” or “I like the colour green on my clothes,” and you’re not going to kill anyone for that. You’re not going to send threatening messages to Tiger. That’s the first…
DANIEL: It sounds like what you’re saying is, it’s not about how much you know. It’s about what direction you’re oriented.
HEDVIG: No, my next criteria was going to be: I think you should take a university unit in linguistics.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Okay! Okay.
HEDVIG: And then if that’s baked into a language-specific class, like you took French and you took French linguistics, I don’t know, we can argue about that. People who only take a lot of languages but who don’t take a proper linguistics class, I’m a little bit unsure. I can say that knowing a lot of languages is definitely an advantage being a linguist. But not everyone who knows a lot of languages actually is good at thinking rigorously about linguistic research. And that might sound weird, but it’s true. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: And then, I think we can be quite permissive. But like, yeah, take some university classes in linguistics and don’t be a prescriptivist. I don’t know. Then you can sort of call yourself a linguist. What do you think?
DANIEL: Tiger, what do you reckon?
TIGER: Yeah, I think that part of the problem here is that there are two ordinary definitions of what a linguist is listed in — or at least, two — listed in English language dictionaries. One will be a person who speaks a number of languages competently. The second is a member of the profession/social order that studies the language scientifically. And so what can you do to satisfy that second one? Because there’s so much unscientific and unsystematic discourse around language, I do find myself being not very permissive about who I would prefer call themselves linguists. Also, because it is a word that laypeople who are not part of the linguistic, I guess, community or communities around the world will happily just denote people as linguist. I get called linguist all the time by my family and friends. I’m not one. I do not…
HEDVIG: Wait, you’re not one?
TIGER: No! No, no. Absolutely not.
DANIEL: Yeah, I was going to ask.
HEDVIG: What?
TIGER: No, I would never.
DANIEL: Why not?
TIGER: Ah, oh, it sounds so… Ugh…
DANIEL: Why not?
HEDVIG: Wait, what?
TIGER: I don’t have a degree in linguistics. I have never published academically.
HEDVIG: Did you take at least one university credit?
TIGER: Yeah. So no publication, no accreditation. And so for me, in my internal lexicon, I guess I do feel that there is a publication or credentialism threshold you should pass, only because language is this field where so many people are keen to claim expertise, and a lot of the people that do that are so uninformed and often just giving moral judgments… that I want some easy demarcation. But maybe that’s changing. Maybe people are thinking about language publicly a little bit differently, possibly because of a podcast like this! They’re having more open and less judgmental dialogues and maybe in 30 years’ time, it won’t be the issue it is for me and I’ll say, “Finally, I’m a linguist,” on my deathbed and die. I don’t know. [LAUGHS] We’ll find out.
DANIEL: We’ll look forward to that.
TIGER: Hopefully, in more than 30 years, actually!
DANIEL: Yeah, let’s leave it about 40, 50 years. Okay, this is interesting. Yeah, where does that leave us? I’m attracted to Hedvig’s… I don’t publish anymore. I’m not a complete dilettante. I have a degree.
BEN: I don’t think… Hedvig, your threshold wasn’t that you have to consistently keep publishing and as soon as you stop publishing, you are no longer a linguist, right?
HEDVIG: You don’t have to publish at all.
TIGER: Have published. Yeah. I mean, again.
BEN: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
HEDVIG: I don’t even think you would have to publish it at all. Looking at the interviews with people on the Superlinguo blog, for example, where they talk about like, “If you do linguistics, where can you get a job?” And there are a lot of jobs that aren’t in academia. Like, I’m quite surprised that Tiger wouldn’t call himself a linguist.
DANIEL: I am too.
HEDVIG: Maybe you don’t have a degree in linguistics. You’ve taken at least, like, one university credit somewhere in linguistics.
TIGER: Yeah, heaps.
HEDVIG: Yeah!
BEN: Tiger, I would articulate that you could — more so than me, sir — you could at least get some serious RPL for what you do.
TIGER: [LAUGHS] Some serious what?
BEN: Recognition of prior learning.
TIGER: Oh, okay. Sorry. I know about that.
BEN: You could definitely, given how extensively you make use of and explore linguistic concepts in your day job, get away with at least getting a lot of the way towards a linguistic degree, I would imagine.
TIGER: Right. Sure.
HEDVIG: Right.
DANIEL: I mean, if we tighten up that definition, I’m not sure I qualify, to be honest.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: And then, we also get into the weird thing like: okay, if we take Tiger’s more narrow definition of a linguist and say that: let’s be super, super narrow and say that both Daniel and Tiger doesn’t qualify, what are they then? What are they? Are they…
BEN: Cool guys!
HEDVIG: No, but they’ve done something. They know something. They’re doing something that has to do with language, and we don’t have a word for what that is.
BEN: Paralinguists? We have paralegals.
TIGER: Yeah. I like paralinguist! I’d happily describe myself as a paralinguist. Yeah, again, paramedics usually have to do a pretty…
BEN: [LAUGHS] Hedvig does not approve. She looks like someone just walked into the room and just did a massive fart. That is the facial expression I’m seeing right now.
HEDVIG: It’s also because there’s something called, like, paralinguistic usage of something, which…
TIGER: Yeah. That’s going to be confusing. Yeah.
HEDVIG: See, Tiger knows that! [LAUGHTER] You knew… When I said paralinguistic, you knew what I meant.
BEN: I feel like we’ve started an accidental thing now where the game is: Hedvig is going to convince Tiger that he is a linguist… to call himself a linguist!
DANIEL: Admit it! Damn you!
HEDVIG: I’m just saying! Most don’t know what paralinguistic is.
TIGER: But you think about engineers and architects. In Australia, you have to be certified to be an architect. Architects and engineers, I think there is a similar certification requirement to be an engineer at a state level. You know, you can be certified by the Architecture Board to be an architect. There also a general… You can be… and we often in the news describe people as the architect of usually a bombing or something.
HEDVIG: Right.
TIGER: And architects get really, really mad about that. And what we have to contend with is that there’s two concurrent things happening here. It’s surely on everyone to describe themselves in a manner they wish. I do a lot of research.
DANIEL: I think self-identification is definitely part of this thing.
TIGER: Yeah, absolutely. Like, I would say I’m a researcher, because I feel that’s what I spend most of my time doing and I think people understand the mechanism of that as well. And again, I think if more people knew exactly what linguists do, all of the various colours and shades of that, maybe it would be easy to call yourself a linguist, but not have… I think if the current popular imagining of what a linguist is, like, a spectrum. On one side, you’ve written the grammar of a language that didn’t have one previously, all the way down to: you took a unit. You know? I don’t know. Sorry, I’m rambling.
HEDVIG: That’s how you show your Australian-ness, by the way, Tiger. Because for you, the height of being a linguist is writing a grammar, which is very influenced by this… I think Bob Dixon and Sasha Aikhenvald’s, like, Australian… like, the pinnacle of your education should be writing a description of a previously undescribed language. Whereas in Europe and America, there are plenty of people who would be really offended if you didn’t call them linguists and who have never done documentary linguistics in their life.
TIGER: Yeah.
HEDVIG: No! Just… We’re an Australian show and I appreciate that and I feel I need to point out to people like in Australia, documentary and descriptive linguistics is really important, as it should be.
TIGER: Yeah. It was a bit tongue in cheek. I think there’s definitely a lot of… the good thing to do is to go out and write a grammar, is itself… There’s a lot of ideology to unpack there.
HEDVIG: Yeah, for sure.
DANIEL: Hmm. Well, like I feel we’ve…
HEDVIG: Made it worse.
DANIEL: Being a linguist looks a lot of different ways. There are a lot of different ways to be a linguist. Maybe there’s a lot of ways to be a physicist or a proctologist as well. No, I don’t think there are very many ways to be a proctologist.
BEN: Nope.
HEDVIG: Proctologist, no.
BEN: Nope. I’m calling no on that.
HEDVIG: Physicist, yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah, okay. Physicist, yes. And linguist… I think, fair. So I think there’s a few things. Yeah, having the right orientation — and by that, I mean the right attitudes about prescriptivism or a few different things maybe — having some kind of knowledge, but then also self-identifying as one. And I don’t know if I’d be able to say, “Hey, wait a minute, you’re not a real linguist.” That’d be hard for me to do.
BEN: I think that’s just because you’re too nice a guy.
DANIEL: Well, okay. And also, you have to be nice. You have… No, that’s definitely not part of being a linguist.
BEN: ~You’ve got to be nice.~
DANIEL: We have a lot more questions, but I think we are going to have to leave it right about there. But we will get to those leftover questions another time. Let’s get to some comments. Patricia via email, hello@becauselanguage.com, says, “Hi. I enjoy your podcasts mostly.”
BEN: Oo, spicy.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] You’ve got to enjoy it when they do that.
BEN: She probably hasn’t been enjoying the ones that I’ve been missing from. I assume that’s what she means.
DANIEL: That’s what it is.
BEN: Yep.
DANIEL: “The one thing that I’ve noticed that I find quite uncomfortable is a persistent ageism that has been present in every podcast of yours that I’ve listened to. It’s funny, because you are otherwise so aware about not being biased against other groups in terms of how you use language. However, older people are frequently used as a general scapegoat, epitome of negative being on your pod. I’d be happy to point out instances that seemed like examples of ageism. In my opinion, if you were interested in exploring this at all. Best wishes, Patricia.” Any guesses as to what this is about?
BEN: Daniel?
DANIEL: Yeah?
BEN: You’re old. How do you feel?
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I feel fine. I feel good.
BEN: Look, Patricia is right, first of all. I definitely, I definitely engage in some ageism on the show.
DANIEL: Like what?
BEN: So, just from a purely factual standpoint, Patricia is absolutely not wrong. I am, however, not all that upset about it as you can probably tell from my tone of voice.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Look, Patricia, all I would say is that, much like how I will just freely and just gaily rag on white people on this show, you have the misfortune of being part of a demographic that has just truly terrible people in it. I’m sorry. I’m also part of one of those demographics and I think the thing you’re just probably going to have to learn how to roll with the punches with is that when you are a member of a demographic that just has so many toxic members, you’re going to have to put up with people venting their frustration at that demographic, especially if that demographic tends to have lots and lots of people in power, which your demographic does. I’m sorry. If there wasn’t so many just awful, powerful, old people who were still just really committed to making the world a fucking terrible place, then we probably wouldn’t be making fun of the old people so much. Sorry.
DANIEL: In what way do we make fun of old people on the show?
HEDVIG: Well, we sometimes especially talk about Boomers, I think in particular as having…
BEN: Definitely.
HEDVIG: …not great opinions about things. I think to their…
BEN: My imagination was that that’s what Patricia means when she says older people, is just our rampant teasing of Boomers.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Because I don’t seem to recall me being like, “Oh, octogenarians are scumbags.” I don’t think she means actual elder-type people here.
HEDVIG: But some of that also comes from that, like, a lot of older people, believe it or not, grew up a long time ago, [LAUGHTER] where, like, education around things like language wasn’t as good. They tend to, for example, be more prescriptivist more often and be more judgmental about language more often, I’d say. Not that there aren’t 20-year-olds who are dicks about language as well.
BEN: Total douches.
HEDVIG: That very much happens as well.
BEN: Yeah, absolutely.
HEDVIG: But I think…
BEN: And on the flip side as well, I should note it’s not like there aren’t some absolute legendary Boomers…
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
BEN: …that I’ve met in my time, right?
DANIEL: They are tons of awesome Boomers!
BEN: Like, just wicked, wicked people who are part of that older demographic who are just being their best selves, and living the change, and all that good thing. No question.
HEDVIG: Dolly Parton is my favorite.
DANIEL: But I have noticed that we got… like… I do two things. I do Because Language, which has a mostly younger audience and I have the ABC gigs, which is mostly an older audience. And the overwhelming preoccupation with the older ABC audience is, “A thing that bugs me about language is…” and that NEVER comes up with the younger Because Language audience. It just never does. Our Because Language audience could not care less about linguistic prescriptivism. We never get this kind of thing.
So yeah, it’s true. The question is, could we be a little kinder and less ageist about it? Could we recognise there are loads of awesome Boomers, while acknowledging that yes, people need to be chill about language and yes, a lot of those people are older.
BEN: Here’s what I’ll say. As we just did, I will try and make a little bit more of an effort to highlight and elevate instances of when a Boomer is doing a cool thing.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: If, Patricia, what you would like is for me to never again make fun of privileged classes, I’m sorry. I’m not going to be able to meet you halfway on that one. I’m still going to make fun of stupid, reductivist, old people who just should go and die and let the more progressive individuals inherit the world, basically.
DANIEL: I think we’re fighting reductivism. We’re not fighting old people. We’re fighting terrible arguments. Let’s do that.
BEN: And it just so happens that a quite a few members of that generation subscribe to a bad belief, basically.
HEDVIG: And it might be something just about getting older. We don’t know, like Ben and I are Millennials and we’re now not the youngest generation anymore. And it’s possible that as we grow older, we’ll see our peers and ourselves become more reductivist and shitty. It seems like that happens partially, because as you get older — I know as a 33-year-old! — you have less ability to, like, learn things and cope with a lot of things. So I’m like, “I don’t want to watch a new TV show.” I still watch new TV shows and learn new songs, but I’m getting less good at it.
DANIEL: You think Millennials are terrible, try Generation Xers. I thought that I would love it when we got into politics, because we’ve been overlooked. But have you seen us? We’re terrible!
BEN: [LAUGHS] Well, I was going to say, actually, in terms of the some of the data that I’ve seen about psychographic breakdowns of demographic groups, Gen Xers are actually a little bit less conservative on the whole than Millennials tend to be. Millennials are actually socially a pretty conservative bunch. Now, that term gets a little bit fuzzy, because a lot of people hear that, they think, “Oh, Millennials must hate gay marriage or whatever.” Obviously, we don’t. As a generation, we’re, like, totally fine with it, generally. But more just a lot of Millennials, “I would very much like to be wealthy, and own a home,” and some fairly, socially quite conservative aspects as a generation. So it’s interesting. I’m just sort of mostly responding to what you said, Hedvig. I think there is actually going to be a pretty significant conservative bulge in our group as we get older, where they’re all going to be like, “Ah, yes. Now that I’ve got a house and lots of money tied up in investments, I believe in less tax and the rest of that shit.”
HEDVIG: Now, you can see, I’m planning a wedding this year and a lot more Millennials I suspect than Gen X want in Sweden their father to walk them down the aisle, the bride, which is not a Swedish tradition. You walk down together, the bride and groom. And it’s so common that the bride is walked down by the father who was Millennial that our priest when we were talking to him was like, “So, I just want you to know that I really don’t want you to do that. I want you to walk down together please.” And we were like, “Oh, yeah, that’s what we were going to do.” He’s like, “Okay, good.”
BEN: That’s a very progressive priest. Good for him.
HEDVIG: That is actually the older state in Swedish wedding tradition. That is the conservative take. These Millennials are watching, like, American movies and getting brainwashed.
BEN: Right.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Well, because the other one I’ve noticed with the generational shift is that a lot of Gen Xers kept maiden names and a… very few Millennials do.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Like, not a thing.
DANIEL: Oh, interesting. Oh, okay. Thank you, Patricia, for that question. I’m sorry if that’s not the response that you wanted, but we got to play it like it is. Tiger Webb, thank you so much for helping us with these questions. How can people find out what you’re doing?
TIGER: Find me, I’m on Twitter. I suppose it’s the main way to contact me. My full name — I don’t think I’ve said this publicly before. It’s not a secret. You can find out — But my full name is Tiger Francis Seaton Webb.
DANIEL: Wow!
TIGER: That’s why all my public internet stuff is @TFSWebb.
DANIEL: I was wondering about that.
TIGER: Yeah.
DANIEL: So, Tiger is not a nickname. That’s a real…
TIGER: Oh, yeah. That’s my real name. I’ve got a normal first name as a middle name, and then a totally random Welsh word as another middle name. Tiger Francis Seaton Webb.
BEN: And an animal as a first name.
TIGER: Yeah!
DANIEL: And an animal’s home as a surname.
TIGER: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Francis is nice.
BEN: Oh, yeah. Fun!
HEDVIG: Francis is one of those… One of them was Francis, right?
TIGER: Yes. The second one, yes.
HEDVIG: Francis is one of those fun names that can be for a boy or a girl that people don’t think about.
TIGER: It can be.
HEDVIG: My husband has Francis as one of his middle names and he’s named after one of his female ancestors.
TIGER: Ah, cool!
HEDVIG: They spelled it the male way, but he’s named after her.
TIGER: There you go.
DANIEL: Once again, Tiger, thank you so much for hanging with us today.
TIGER: No, it was great.
DANIEL: And come back someday?
TIGER: Yeah, love to, love to.
DANIEL: Awesome.
BEN: Yeah. Three times and you’re an official cohost. That’s the rule.
DANIEL: There’s a t-shirt.
[END THEME]
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BEN: [LAUGHS] A hundred.
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HEDVIG: And our theme music has been written and performed by Drew Krapljanov who is a member of Ryan Beno and of Didion’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time, Because Language.
[PEW-PEW AND AIRHORN SOUNDS]
[BOOP]
BEN: I was watching the newest season of Stranger Things. I have been watching the last couple days.
HEDVIG: I heard it’s good.
BEN: It’s fine. Like, I stopped caring overmuch about Stranger Things a while ago, but I have covid and there’s fuck-all else to do. So, that’s what I’m doing. In it — and Daniel, I know you’re going to just hear me say this and be like, ~Oh, yeah, I fully remember during that~ — They, like, do the school paper, and they are physically gluing pieces of paper down to a backdrop sheet of paper to make copies of the school paper and I was just like, “Oh, fuck! This is where copy/paste actually comes from!”
DANIEL: It does. Amazing.
BEN: They are physically copying things and pasting it? Holy shit.
DANIEL: There is a video somewhere of how they got rid of the old linotypes in newspapers. And it says something like, “And now, the latest wave is digital print.” And it shows them printing things and then actually pasting the pieces of paper that they have pulled off of a laser printer.
BEN: Oh, bless. They got so close, didn’t they? They dropped a few steps out of the way, but it’s like, “Oh, monkeys, you didn’t quite get there, did you?”
DANIEL: Oh, but they will. They will.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]