Everyone’s favourite tabletop grammarian is back! It’s Ellen Jovin, proprietor of the Grammar Table. She dispenses grammar advice around New York City and the world, and now she’s written a book about her grammar adventures. Ellen is the author of Rebel With a Clause, and she joins us for this big episode.
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Become a Patron!Show notes
France’s linguistic watchdog issues edict: it’s not esports, it’s ‘jeu video de competition’
https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/31/23148358/france-academie-francaise-esports -gaming-translations
Placeholder for the paper: Compositionality, metaphor, and the evolution of language by T. Mark Ellison and Uta Reinöhl in the International Journal of Primatology.
Keep checking back for when a link is available!
Rare Stone With Pictish Symbols Discovered in Scotland
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/rare-stone-with-pictish-symbols-discovered-in-scotland-180979709/
Pictish symbols revealed as a written language through application of Shannon entropy
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.2010.0041
Viking Graffiti – Personalized Messages Left all over Europe
https://www.thevintagenews.com/2019/05/06/viking-graffiti/?safari=1
Maeshowe’s runes – Viking graffiti
http://www.orkneyjar.com/history/maeshowe/maeshrunes.htm
Ellen Jovin – Rebel with a Clause: Tales and Tips from a Roving Grammarian
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/rebel-with-a-clause-ellen-jovin?variant=39935173066786
Ellen Jovin: Author & Grammar Table Proprietor
https://www.ellenjovin.com
Lizzo changes derogatory lyric after backlash
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-61794502
NASA Snaps Photos of Underwater ‘Sharkcano’ Erupting
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/nasa-snaps-photos-of-underwater-sharkcano-erupting-180980143/
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
BEN: Hedvig, I need you to catch me up on the latest Swedish furore around you guys not feeding visitors kids. What is up?
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Ben did not listen to the last episode.
BEN: No, I didn’t. I did not.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Because Swedengate was one of our Words of the Week last week.
BEN: Swedengate! I love it.
HEDVIG: I’ve already done that. I’m not repeating myself.
BEN: I desperately want to know. Would… [CONSPIRATORIALLY] Would your parents feed strangers’ kids?
HEDVIG: I think we generally would. The too-long-didn’t-read answer is there’s a lot of variation, and there can be good reasons for not feeding kids.
ELLEN JOVIN: I may be part Swedish because that story did not disturb me at all. I was like, “Oh, that sounds reasonable.”
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: That’s so interesting. I think it’s like: Do you wash your legs? I think it’s one of those ones. Is the dress blue or gold? It’s one of those things that just divides people and those in twain camps cannot fathom the opposite.
DANIEL: I have just remembered that I was such a weird kid that when eating at a friend’s house, I actually offered to pay.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: I was a child!
HEDVIG: Oh, that’s…
BEN: God bless.
HEDVIG: …weirder.
DANIEL: I had no idea!
HEDVIG: That’s proper weird.
DANIEL: I was a small robot trying to figure out how to be a human. That’s what I was.
ELLEN: Did anyone ever take the money?
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to Because Language, a podcast about linguistics, the science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. She eats punks like you for breakfast. It’s Hedvig Skirgård.
HEDVIG: So funny because I don’t usually eat breakfast. But if I did…
BEN: But when you do, it’s fibre-rich punks.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah!
BEN: Accept no imitations.
HEDVIG: That’s totally my vibe. Yes. Mhm.
DANIEL: Good. He eats breakfast for punks like you. It’s Ben Ainslie.
BEN: That is actually incredibly accurate. If someone came along and was like: I need you to eat breakfast for me, I’m like: Finally, my calling. The true skill I have in this life, which is just shamelessly gluttonously eating food. Ah, now is my time.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Would breakfast be your most important meal of the day?
BEN: No, I seldom eat breakfast because I find I don’t really get hungry until about lunchtime anyway.
HEDVIG: Exactly. But I like breakfast food.
BEN: Oh my god.
DANIEL: Breakfast is the best kind of food!
BEN: Breakfast for dinner? Greatest thing ever.
DANIEL: Oh, yeah. Okay.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: I literally just made sausage hash for dinner.
DANIEL: Yeah. And cereal for dessert is a classic. You can’t beat it.
BEN: Especially American cereal.
DANIEL: Mmm. We have with us a very, very special guest, three-time guest, which means she’s an honorary cohost now, whether she wants to be or not.
BEN: Official cohost status!
DANIEL: It’s the proprietor of the now-famous Grammar Table and author of the new book, Rebel With a Clause: Tales and Tips from a Roving Grammarian. It’s Ellen Jovin. Hi, Ellen.
ELLEN: Hi, thank you for that lovely introduction. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Well, we wouldn’t give you any but the most lavish praise.
BEN: It’s true.
DANIEL: Thanks for coming and hanging out with us.
ELLEN: I am very happy to be here. Aren’t you going to ask… say anything about my breakfast?
DANIEL: I was getting to that. Yes.
ELLEN: Okay. I just don’t want to be left out of this.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: You want in on this discussion.
BEN: This deeply trite series of introductions.
ELLEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah, what did you eat for breakfast?
ELLEN: It’s actually pre-breakfast time for me. You know that I’m not a morning person.
DANIEL: I do know that.
ELLEN: So, this is definitely… Yes. But I’m here and I’m fully caffeinated.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Good.
BEN: As a person with a partner who is a lifelong not-morning person, I can’t tell you how thankful we are because I know what it takes to get your people to be where you are right now.
ELLEN: [LAUGHS] That’s really nice of you. I did not mean to sound whiny because I’m very happy to be here.
BEN: No. No, no, I have… I have endless lived experience.
ELLEN: But anything that I say that I disagree with later, I’m going to attribute to the hour.
DANIEL: Okay, very good.
HEDVIG: Good job. Yeah. Do it.
DANIEL: I was thinking though, you get a different grammar audience if you were hitting, like, the 6:30am slot in the subways and stuff.
BEN: Yeah, true.
DANIEL: It’d be a different book.
ELLEN: I did try it once in 2018. [LAUGHS] And I decided… So I went to my usual spot outside the subway station near my home and I discovered that people are — at least my impression, because it wasn’t a statistically significant sample, it was a sample of one morning — but I think people are in a hurry to get to work. So, I think it’s better when they’re coming back from work.
DANIEL: No time for grammar.
BEN: Peak boring.
HEDVIG: Yeah, for sure.
DANIEL: I suppose I really gotta mention just because there might be some people who don’t know, Ellen, what do you do. Could you tell us a little bit about the mission of Grammar Table and what it is that you have been doing with your days?
ELLEN: I need a Grammar Table mission statement. [LAUGHS]
BEN: Mhm. A charter.
ELLEN: I set up a table. I unfold it wherever it is that I want to be, on that particular day for that particular hour. I have a big Grammar Table sign. I come out with my reference books, and I answer questions and take comments and complaints from passersby about grammar. And sometimes, grammar-adjacent things. As you can imagine, people sometimes don’t restrict themselves to just grammar. But language-related things usually.
HEDVIG: You are a very patient woman.
BEN: Well, all I can say is we definitely don’t run it that way on the show. All language, no digressions, here we go.
ELLEN: Never, right. I respect that.
DANIEL: Sometimes, you do punctuation, and I do think of punctuation is grammar adjacent. Can I get a ruling?
HEDVIG: Yeah, sure.
ELLEN: Do you guys want to say something? I’m curious to hear what you would say about that.
HEDVIG: No, but if grammar are the rules that we use to make strings that we either write or say or sign, then punctuations are part of grammar.
DANIEL: Yeah.
ELLEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: In the written medium. Okay.
ELLEN: I think of it that way, because I’m basing those marks on the word units. And so for me, they’re all put together. I use the punctuation to help group words, add meaning, and so on. So, I have heard people stand — I think this has happened at least twice — stand far away from me and look at the sign and say, “I have a question, but I don’t think it’s grammar.” And then, I learn that it’s punctuation. So, they’re reluctant to bring up commas because it might not be relevant enough.
BEN: Imagine!
ELLEN: Yeah. Well, anyway. A lot of what I do is punctuation now, a lot. At the table, there are lots of punctuation questions.
HEDVIG: Are there people who come up to you and ask punctuation questions, and don’t have this hesitant attitude? They’re just convinced that you are the person to speak to?
ELLEN: Yes, they go straight up to me, and they don’t say anything else. But just go… they’ll walk up to me and say — no hi, just — “When do I use a semicolon?”
BEN: Oh god. Argh.
HEDVIG: Right.
ELLEN: [LAUGHS]
BEN: Not the semicolon. Anything but the semicolon.
DANIEL: Always the semicolon.
ELLEN: Are you users? Do we need to discuss this? You don’t… no?
BEN: I am not.
HEDVIG: No. I’m not users.
DANIEL: I have used a semicolon on occasion. But maybe, what do you tell people, just to give us a flavour?
ELLEN: It’s one of the more complicated questions because some of… there’s a lot of art in the semicolon, it’s not just, “Oh, you put a comma, if you…” I don’t know, it just is not quite as straightforward. I tell them that it can often occupy the spaces that a period might occupy. But that the ideas, the two things that could stand apart as sentences are thematically closely related. And maybe you want to bring them together a little bit more with less of a break, a mental break, or an audible break, if you are reading it aloud, that sort of comes together more closely. But I think so much of the semicolon use is really about a sense of the quiet drama that it can bring about. And that kind of sensibility comes from reading good writing. It’s not so easy to just explain, but I can at least keep them from putting it where they really just can’t have one. So that, I can forestall that.
HEDVIG: Nice.
DANIEL: We’re going to be talking about your book Rebel with a Clause, but I just wanted to know, what has it been like writing this book, and going back over your many Grammar Table experiences?
ELLEN: Well, it was kind of cheering in a way because the timing of it worked out that I had made it to 47 states when covid hit. Actually, when I was on the road, I was looking at the covid data from China and I was thinking, “Oh, this doesn’t seem good at all.”
BEN: Uh-oh. Uh-oh!
ELLEN: Yeah, because that was December…
BEN: Trouble’s a-brewin’!
ELLEN: [LAUGHS] That was December 2019 and January 2020. And I had a Facebook friend who was posting things from Wuhan at the time, and so, you know, it was alarming. Anyway, we came home — Brandt and I, my husband went all over the country with me — we came home, and then suddenly, all of our plans for the winter and the spring to finish the remaining states and do some cities that I also wanted to do went out the window. But the great thing is for me, it was very fortunate and I had a book deadline, and I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere. One of the challenges of writing is discipline.
HEDVIG: That’s good.
ELLEN: I know. Right? What’s the expr…? It’s too early for me to come up with the expression I want. What is the cloud, the rosy…? Well, whatever.
DANIEL and BEN: Silver lining.
ELLEN: Anyway. Yeah, the silver lining. Right, not the rosy lining. That is wrong.
BEN: Rose-tinted glasses, silver lining.
ELLEN: Yes!
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES]
ELLEN: I sometimes have them at the same time. And I tried to have them in that moment. So, I was sitting there writing, not being allowed to go places. But it was sad, because so much of the book and this experience is about human contact. And so, I went from an — not an overdose for me, because I loved it — but I went from nonstop talking to strangers everywhere — I mean, that was my 2019 agenda — to being alone with my computer, which was part of what I tried to avoid with the Grammar Table, being alone with my computer too much. But I did have a lot of time to write.
HEDVIG: And you wrote a book. That’s amazing!
ELLEN: I did!
HEDVIG: That’s a big feat. Yeah.
DANIEL: That’s huge.
ELLEN: Thank you for that.
BEN: I mostly just put on weight. I think you win.
[LAUGHTER]
ELLEN: I have actually… Brandt and I have tickets for Alaska now, so that is very–
BEN: [GASPS]
DANIEL: Oh, you’re doing it.
BEN: That sounds exciting.
ELLEN: That is new development. As of maybe three nights ago, we decided, it is time.
BEN: Oh, that’s awesome. Are you going to watch some glaciers calving?
ELLEN: Well, I think we are going to try to get some glacier stuff in there. I mean, it just feels like what you should do when you go to Alaska. That is the only state I’ve never been to. So I’ve taken the Table to 47 states, but I’ve been to 49. So, Alaska is the one — in my life, I mean — and now Alaska is the one that I’m missing. When we got the tickets is a little bit emotional, because the connection… I love grammar, you can tell that I like grammar at this point. I think that’s an obvious point. But the human part of it is just… I don’t know, it touches my heart and really makes this whole thing… This is what works for me, so I’m happy.
DANIEL: Well, why should Americans get all the fun? I think the next stop might be Australia.
BEN: Woo-hoo!
ELLEN: Oh, I would absolutely love that. I haven’t been to Australia. And I feel that is a hole in my experiences.
BEN: And there’s only like five states.
ELLEN: [LAUGHS]
BEN: You just go tick, tick, tick.
HEDVIG: It is a hole in your experience.
DANIEL: It is.
HEDVIG: Yeah, Australia’s great! You should go.
ELLEN: I would love it.
HEDVIG: There’s just lots of fun grammar things as well.
DANIEL: Mhm.
ELLEN: Right.
DANIEL: Australian English.
ELLEN: No, it would be very educational for me too. Yes, Australian English, I’m all over it because I don’t get enough access here.
BEN: Nah, yeah, you should come.
DANIEL: We might be testing you a little bit on that a little later on.
ELLEN: Oh, no. I already can tell you my grade will be an F.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: All right. We’re going to find out. Our next bonus episode… we don’t know. It could be a Mailbag. It could be Diego’s Digest.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] I was looking at Daniel and I was…
BEN: What kind of promo is this?
DANIEL: It’s a promo.
BEN: “By the way, guys, coming soon: a thing.”
DANIEL: “We’re not sure.”
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: It depends on how we’re feeling and who’s available. But if you want to hear it…
HEDVIG: Yes!
DANIEL: …as well as all our other bonus episodes, then you’re going to want to become a patron at the Listener Level. All patrons, no matter what their level, get to hang out with us on Discord, where we test our mettle on all the -LE games, and you’ll be supporting the show. So, head on over to patreon.com/becauselangpod. Thanks to all our awesome patrons for supporting us. Mwah.
BEN: Do we have some news, Daniel, or are we just jumping straight into Ellen’s tasty book?
DANIEL: We do have some news.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: This story was suggested to us by Lord Mortis. It’s the Académie Française. They’re doing it again.
BEN: Oh! Our friends at the Academy.
DANIEL: Views: they have them.
BEN: So many ‘pinions. All of the ‘pinions.
HEDVIG: They have them.
DANIEL: Now, let’s see, this is related to the streaming gaming, professional videogames.
HEDVIG: Colour me thoroughly curious.
DANIEL: There’s a story on The Verge by James Vincent. They say that instead of “eSports… sorry, I read that as essport, which is… am I reading that right?
BEN: Esporte.
DANIEL: No. But essport or is it eSports? They say that…
HEDVIG: They have a lot of English loanwords in French already to the great disgruntlement of Académie Française.
DANIEL: Would you say it’s to their [trying to sound French] chagrin?
HEDVIG: They, for example, say “le weekend.”
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: But they don’t have an indigenous word for the weekend. They say “le weekend,” usually at least. So, I suspect they say, “le eSport.” They probably try and pronounce it English ways.
DANIEL: I suppose.
ELLEN: Oh, I actually looked this up because I wasn’t sure.
HEDVIG: Oh, nice.
ELLEN: I didn’t actually find anything definitive. [LAUGHS] At least not easily enough, but I heard [ispoʁ]. That’s what I think they… and… yeah.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Okay, that makes sense.
BEN: The T in — to the two people possibly three, Ellen, I don’t know if you speak French, sorry. To the two people who kind of speak French — the French avoid hard T’s, right?
DANIEL: At the end of the word.
BEN: Yeah, that’s not a thing they really fuck with generally, right?
HEDVIG: No, they can have T.
ELLEN: Well, but on a lot of words that end in T, you wouldn’t pronounce it. Right?
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: But, Ben, maybe the rule you should internalise instead is that French spelling reflects French from a while ago, and a lot of things at the end of words get removed in speech.
DANIEL: That’s true in every language, isn’t it? That’s like the one place.
BEN: I was about to say, “English certainly looks very modern!”
[CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: Yeah. And then, it just so happens that a lot of things at the end of words have T in them. And therefore, you’ve made it that they allied T’s, but like T’s at the beginning of syllables, T’s at the beginning of words are pronounced just as normal.
BEN: Okay. Can we just also… before we move on, I feel we just breezed past the fact that Hedvig just dropped there. The French didn’t have a word for the weekend? What?
HEDVIG: Yeah, I don’t think they do, right? Am I wrong?
BEN: I feel like that’s big news.
HEDVIG: Like they say: On se recontre…
DANIEL: They say FIN DE SEMAINE.
HEDVIG: Oh, no, they do, they do! But who says that? I don’t know anyone who says that. Everyone says “le weekend” that I know. Biased sampling. They have FIN DE SEMAINE, which is like end of week.
BEN: Right. Okay.
DANIEL: Anyway, instead of esport, ésport, you should say, “de jeux vidéo compétition,” which is lovely.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: I’m going to say that.
BEN: That is not gonna catch on.
DANIEL: Instead of pro gamers, you would say, “joueurs professionnels.” Okay, not as wordy as the last one, but okay. And instead of streamers, they must refer to “joueur animateur en direct” and so on.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: That’s not going to happen.
DANIEL: By reading that, I have just paid more attention to the Académie Française than the majority of French people.
BEN: Not only that, but if we talk about the population with whom this most significantly contends, which is to say, broadly speaking, young, computer-oriented, global sort of citizens, yeah, they’re really going to be like, “Oh, well, I mean, if the Académie Française says it, I better start changing how I speak as a 19-year-old gamer!”
HEDVIG: But does this mean that French public service news organisations and things need to say this?
DANIEL: Government employees do. The public, not so much.
HEDVIG: But like TV broadcasters? So on one of those episodes, we had Tiger Webb here, and he can tell people in Australian Broadcasting Corporation what they should say. Is there an equivalent poor man like Tiger in France who has to tell radio and TV presenters to say “joueur animateur en direct” instead of STREAMING?
BEN: Good memory. That was really well done. That might be the only time someone ever says that.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: No, no no — it’s not memory. I have the run sheet in front of me.
BEN: Oh, okay! I was going to say! [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Oh, yeah.
HEDVIG: I have a shit memory, and it’s hot.
HEDVIG: I feel very bad for French Tiger anyway.
DANIEL: I do not know if there is a French Tiger, but I hope that there is.
BEN: I just like that all of our listeners who didn’t hear that episode are just like, “Why are they talking about big cats in France?”
[CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: French tigers! Opinion on our Discord has gone back and forth about the Académie Française. Should they be killed? Or, should they be humanely killed? My view is just that the Académie Française is this advisory body that’s pretty full of themselves, but mostly harmless, I think. What do you think? Am I being too kind, like always?
HEDVIG: I don’t think anyone should be killed.
ELLEN: I think this is really interesting because… I don’t know if everyone knows this, but you can write to them and get an answer to your grammar question. So, I think this is fascinating. I have done this. You can write to the French Academy and get an answer to your language question, and they’ll write you back and they’ll write you back promptly, and with authority. And so, it’s not as wishy washy [LAUGHS] as I am at the Grammar Table, where I often say things like, “Well, in this case, I might do this. And in that case, I might do that, and it depends on the audience.” Some people find that very irritating, you know? They just want an answer. They want to move on and worry about more exciting things. But you can get an answer about the preferred language. For some people, it scratches an itch. Maybe not on this particular word. We don’t have anyone you could do that with.
I remember when I was in my early 20s, I wrote to… I had just arrived in New York, and I wanted an opinion on the formation of a certain specialized possessive. So, I wrote to the English department at a local university and the answer came back. And I was like, “Well, that’s clearly wrong,” [LAUGHS] whatever the answer was. And it was at that moment that I started to realize we’re on the wild frontier with English. No French Academy for that.
DANIEL: It’s true.
HEDVIG: I think it’s interesting what you said about people who just want to get an answer from you, because part of it is also that they want to use a language that they think will be advantageous for them in society, that employers, and strangers will respect them and not judge them and treat them badly, and they want you to tell them what that is so that they can get on with their life and live their best life. Whereas people who care deeply about language don’t want that to be true about the world. [CHUCKLES] We want for you to be able to use whatever you naturally use and to not be judged, and it’s a bit of a conflict, right? They have a very different goal in mind, I think. And Académie Française is like, “No, we’re going to cater to these people who just have accepted that the world is a shitty place, and that you might be judged for the way you use things. And we’re going to tell them what to do to not be mistreated.”
ELLEN: I think there’s a spectrum though. Like, if there’s a word I come across and I don’t know how to pronounce it, I just want to know the standard way. I don’t want to know all the ways necessarily. I mean, well, maybe I do in some cases, because I actually often ask people about pronunciation in my online Twitter polls, but I just want to know what the standard pronunciation is. I don’t want to micro-analyze everything that I come across, because there’s a lot of fun stuff to do in the world.
DANIEL: It’s true. Let’s move away from the Académie Française and get into some new work from our pals, Mark Ellison and Uta Reinöhl. Now, in an earlier episode, we had a talk with Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater about language being the result of lots and lots of language games. But there was a question that I didn’t quite have solved for me. And that is how do we get from lots and lots of improvisational charade games, how do we get from there to a language with patterns and order? And Mark and Uta think that it has something to do with metaphor. So.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Mhm.
DANIEL: At the heart of this paper is an interesting observation. Let’s say that I use a word in a more or less straightforward construction. Like — this is one of their examples — “Here’s a box of sweets. You will find some chocolates at the bottom of it.” Or, I could say, “You will find some chocolates at the bottom.” That sounded equally good, right?
BEN: Sure.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Mm? Mm? Okay. But what happens if I take that word, ‘the bottom’ and I use it in a metaphor like this? “Something weird is going on there. I just can’t get to the bottom…”
BEN: Aha.
DANIEL: “…of it.” It sounds weird if I do that, right? If I start subtracting words from a metaphor, suddenly it weirds.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: I feel like the example you just gave me, I wouldn’t feel particularly weirded out by, but I get where you’re going and I think in other metaphors I would have. I think you might have accidentally chosen, like, the only one that exists where I would be like: “Oh, yeah, get to the bottom. Okay, fine, no worries!”
DANIEL: Let’s try another one.
BEN: No, no, no, but true. I can see how it would.
DANIEL: “I saw a house in the distance, and it took me a while to arrive.” Good. Because I’m arriving literally. Now I’m going to use ARRIVE in a metaphor. “Please tell me your conclusions and how you arrived…”
HEDVIG: Yep.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: “…at them.”
HEDVIG: That doesn’t work.
BEN: Now you’re sounding… now you’re sounding a bit Yoderish.
DANIEL: Okay. Even a construction like HAVE TO do something: “I’m doing this because I have.”
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: To.
DANIEL: “I’m doing this because I have to.”
BEN: Have what? Have what?!
DANIEL: Have TO! [LAUGHTER] TO is really vacuous in that example, but I’ve got to do it because it’s metaphorical. So, it’s an interesting observation, and it seems to hold for a number of languages. But their idea is — and this is the very short version — this possibly led to grammar, because in normal conversation, you can leave stuff out if it’s obvious, like with our non-metaphorical words. But as people started to use metaphors, because they wanted to transplant knowledge from one domain to another, they had to suddenly include certain words in those metaphors, even if you already know what somebody’s talking about, like ARRIVING AT A CONCLUSION. And because people had to use certain wording with their metaphors, and they had to do it often, this led to the buildup of set words and expressions, and from there, you get syntax and word order and stuff like that.
BEN: So, it’s just pattern repetition?
DANIEL: Yeah! And metaphor is at the heart of it. What do you think? It’s pretty intriguing, isn’t it?
HEDVIG: We should also say, I think, that Mark Ellison and Uta Reinöhl, they are at least indirect friends of the show.
DANIEL: Our pals.
HEDVIG: Mark was my PhD supervisor, and Uta was at ANU at the same time as me. So, I know a little bit about them. Actually, I haven’t read this latest thing. But are they arguing in this case that this gives us insight into the very origins of language, like tens and thousands of years ago, or that this is relevant to how language changes once we’ve got it?
DANIEL: They do take it that far back. So, they notice that in written records as far back as we’ve got ’em, metaphors are prevalent. And in animal communication systems, they don’t seem to happen at all, no matter how you read them. So, they’re kind of saying this could be something… this metaphoric change in language could have enabled word order, things like encoding of arguments, even things like pronouns. Those are the things that give us fully-fledged human language. So, yeah, they do. They take it back as far as that, which I think is pretty… pretty interesting.
HEDVIG: Yes, pretty brave.
BEN: That’s a fun new pub fact.
DANIEL: It is, isn’t it?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: When you’re getting a drink on and people are hitting that point, when everyone’s in the slot, you know? and you’re starting to talk about some…
DANIEL: Things are getting deep.
BEN: …slightly higher order weird sort of topics to be like, “You know what I heard the other day? Language basically exists because of metaphor. Let me tell you why.” It’s a good little…
ELLEN: You have different pub experiences than I’m used to.
[laughter]
BEN: Perhaps, I’ve just outed myself as the really annoying person at the pub that everyone’s slowly edges away from.
DANIEL: You’re the one person who gets quantum mechanics and you will explain them.
HEDVIG: Oh my god.
BEN: To this day — to this day! — I maintain I have never bailed anyone up about crypto, and I will keep that until the day that I die.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: I’ve never, ever been that guy.
DANIEL: Good.
ELLEN: It’s interesting that that’s a thing one can brag about now.
BEN: Oh. [CHUCKLES] Being my age and my race, and not having ever tried to convince someone of some weird crypto pump-and -dump nonsense, it’s basically the biggest brag I have.
ELLEN: Well, we still have time left in this show.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: There’s still time.
HEDVIG: I was going to say that as a white woman of my generation, I should be proud that I have never tried to convince my friends to join an MLM.
DANIEL: Niiice.
HEDVIG: But I do have an aunt and she sells me aloe vera deodorant, and you can only get it from this MLM, and…
BEN: Here we go.
HEDVIG: …it’s the only deodorant that doesn’t make me itch. I don’t buy any of their other products.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
ELLEN: [CHUCKLES] So, this is now an ad.
HEDVIG: I’m not even going to tell you what it is, but it’s just…
BEN: No, I just see Ste in the background with, like, an Enjo mop being, “Yep, the only thing!”
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: This episode of Because Language has been brought to you by Hedvig’s aloe vera deodorant.
BEN: By Ponzi schemes writ large.
DANIEL: It’s the only kind that doesn’t make me itch.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: The other one that doesn’t make me itch is actually Old Spice, but that’s another story.
DANIEL: Wow, that’s another kettle of fish.
HEDVIG: Anyway. Yeah. Back to metaphor. Regardless of whether this is how you get syntax or not, it is an interesting observation in itself that we don’t seem to get metaphor in nonhuman communication. So, we know that bees and parrots and different primates and stuff can do a lot of the things that we can do with language. They can combine units. They can do a lot of quite complex stuff. And some of them do do it naturally between each other. Some of them do it because we humans withhold treats for them until they do it.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: But the observation that they don’t do metaphor is, I think — regardless of whether this is how we get syntax or something like that — that’s actually neat, like, in and of itself.
BEN: Self-contained coolness.
ELLEN: I just pictured a news headline that read “Bees have literature!”
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Wow. All right.
BEN: Here we go. There’s grist for milk for next week.
HEDVIG: And we also know that fish are bees from the last episode. So, fish are bees, and bees have literature, so fish have literature, that’s amazing.
DANIEL: Oh, we’re going to hear from that.
ELLEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Okay, I’m going to cut the last news item because I feel like the time is right to go to main.
ELLEN: Are we not going to talk about the Picts?
DANIEL: Um, do you want to talk about the Picts? I felt like it was good to skip.
BEN: Are we talking about Picts as in P-I-C-T, the Indigenous peoples of like England?
DANIEL: I guess we are talking about Picts. Okay, here we go.
BEN: Yeeeeah, let’s talk about the Picts!
HEDVIG: We are talking about the last news item that Daniel tries to bury because he has anti-Pict sentiment.
BEN: Nom nom nom.
DANIEL: I tried to submarine it, but, okay, here we go. All right, our last news item suggested by Diego, it’s about the Picts. Ben, do you get excited about Picts?
BEN: I have an unidentifiably sort of… I don’t know where the origin for my fascination with Indigenous peoples who haven’t existed for a really, really long time. But for some reason, I just love it. Right? Like, if you talk to me about like the Indus Valley Civilisation, or the Picts, or any of these people who have just been gone for millennia, I’m just like, “Oh, my god! It’s so interesting.” I just love it. I really do. I’m sorry.
DANIEL: It is pretty interesting. All right, well, they found a new stone made by the Picts.
BEN: Yay!
DANIEL: A new one.
ELLEN: Oh, my god. [LAUGHS] I can see this is going to come up at the pub.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Yup.
BEN: You know the worst part, they’re going to be like, “Oh, god, not the Picts again, Jesus.”
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: This stone was found about 20 miles north of Dundee, Scotland. It dates to the fifth or sixth century CE. It’s five and a half feet long. Only 200 of these things exist in the world, but they were created by… the Picts. Ben, you’ve already told us, these are Indigenous Britons who lived a long time ago.
BEN: Kind of all over. Yep.
DANIEL: All over the place?
BEN: All over and a fair while ago, but not, like you said, like 500 CE isn’t, like, the ridiculous ancient and distant past. The Egyptians were around when the woolly mammoth was still on the Earth, so compared to that, this is like yesterday. But still a long time ago compared to us.
DANIEL: Sort of pre-Christian.
BEN: Yep. Crossover, I believe.
HEDVIG: I’m going to reveal my lack of knowledge about the history of the country my husband is from, but are Picts… they’re Germanic, right? They’re not Celtic?
BEN: I think they were a bit earlier.
DANIEL: Oh, earlier? Okay.
HEDVIG: Do you want to hear what Encyclopedia Britannica says?
BEN: Oh, yeah, well… I mean, if ever there was an encyclopedia.
HEDVIG: No — Pict comes from ‘picti’ meaning painted, because of their body and possibly tattooing. Some linguistic evidence suggests they spoke a Celtic language.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Okay, so they’re not Germanic. Cool.
DANIEL: Awesome.
ELLEN: I was intrigued by this story because whenever I read about things like this… and actually, the story might have mentioned it, I think about how excited the people who discovered it were. I’m assuming and hoping that there’s a video clip of the moment. And I just think it’s very charming. I mean, anything that people get… well, within reason. [CHUCKLES] Most anything that people get really excited about like that, intellectually, I don’t know. I just find it very stirring and…
BEN: I’m right there with you. 100%.
ELLEN: Yeah. I have of all these language film fantasies that will never happen, because film didn’t exist. But I think it also would be really cool to see that thing being carved and then, to have a movie of what happened to it and how it emerged in modern times.
HEDVIG: I have a good piece of news for you, sort of. There’s a movie called The Dig.
DANIEL: Yes. I was going to say.
BEN: I’ve seen it.
HEDVIG: Which is pretty good. And which is about archeological digs by amateur archaeologists in, I think they’re in Yorkshire, up in Northern England, and they find an old burial ship. It’s a very beautiful movie and it’s based on a real story. They don’t have reenactments of the people who carved the ship, like you would like, but they do cover the unmounding of it. It’s a very nice movie.
DANIEL: It’s very nice.
ELLEN: That thing, that pure joy is a very beautiful thing, and I find it uplifting.
BEN: Just a quick one. It’s not… I don’t think it’s in Yorkshire. I think it was in like Sussex or something. But anyway.
DANIEL: So back to the stone. I took a look at Pictish symbols because I wanted to know what the deal was with them. Like, were they just artwork, or were they writing, or what were they? And there’s not a huge corpus of it. The symbols include birds and animals, circles, including something called a double disc, which is two circles connected by lines. There’s something called a V-rod, which could have been a broken arrow, but it just looks like a V that goes through some of the circles and things. And they’re really cool drawings but I read that a 2010 study showed some researchers have advanced the idea that they might not be just artwork, but they may actually be written records based on…
BEN: Oh.
DANIEL: Ah, don’t get too excited.
BEN: Ah. Okay. Moderated.
DANIEL: What was our story last week that was about whether this was writing or language or what… Oh, it was the apes, it was the chimpanzee. Like, looking at the sequences of symbols from an information theoretic standpoint to see if it was non-random or not. Well, a group did this in 2010, and they figured it was non-random as well. But randomness is really hard. And there was such a small corpus that it’s difficult to say. Possibly unlikely that it’s writing, not everyone agrees. But still, the symbols are very cool, and very beautiful. Now, there’s one more piece that’s added to the corpus of Pictish symbols. Very neat.
HEDVIG: That’s very cool.
BEN: That’s very cool.
HEDVIG: I suspect if it’s not writing, it’s usually accounting, these ones.
DANIEL: I think so too.
HEDVIG: Or memorials of dead people, or some sort of important event: “This person died here, they were really great,” or…
BEN: “Keyo owes me four goats.”
HEDVIG: Exactly.
ELLEN: It’s like the equivalent of a monthly status report in a business. [LAUGHTER] That’s slightly less romantic, but often it is kind of that record keeping.
DANIEL: Sometimes, it’s just, “Eric was here.”
ELLEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Sometimes, it’s really just that.
ELLEN: Well, it’s good to know. I mean, that’s cool to find that out centuries later.
BEN: My favorite version of that is like one of the islands north of Scotland that was used as a staging island for Vikings. It’s just covered in some of the best examples of runes, and a lot of it is just like, “Thor was here,” and like “So and so is a douche.” Just like really, really just normal, boring grafitti. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
ELLEN: Good information.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: We are talking with Ellen Jovin, the proprietor of the Grammar Table, from which she dispenses grammar and usage advice in New York City and around the world. She’s also the author of the new book, Rebel With a Clause. Ellen, once again, thank you for being here.
ELLEN: Thank you for having me.
HEDVIG: How did you make such a good book title?
[LAUGHTER]
ELLEN: I did not make it. That’s how.
BEN: Oh.
ELLEN: So, I worked very hard on that… I’m sorry. I know. I wish this were not the story, but that is the story. I worked for weeks on this… on the book title. I must have come up with like 500 book titles.
DANIEL: All right. Let’s hear some.
ELLEN: They were all… Oh, I don’t remember now.
DANIEL: Come on. [LAUGHS] There must be a good one.
ELLEN: No. NO! They were all rejected. And then finally, the editor just wrote and said, “Oh, this guy here says blah, blah, blah. How about that?” And that became the title. That’s the end of the story! [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Wow.
DANIEL: All right.
ELLEN: But it took me about a year to remember what it actually was, because if you’re used to hearing ‘Rebel Without a Cause’, and I can hardly remember saying it now, rebel without a cause. Right? That’s the original…
HEDVIG: Yeah, you’re not a rebel without a clause, you’re with a clause.
ELLEN: Right. First, I have to change the preposition, and then I also have to change the object of the preposition. And for my brain, that was a lot of work. And I’ve noticed actually, that this is highly susceptible to being said wrong.
BEN: Yup.
ELLEN: So, Daniel, I commend you on saying it right. I’m going to have to correct it, I think a lot. Then, people feel bad, and I don’t want them to feel bad. It doesn’t make any difference. There’s a rebel, there’s a clause. You know.
DANIEL: It’s in there.
ELLEN: That’s it.
HEDVIG: Good job. I like it.
ELLEN: Yeah. Sorry, it’s not a better story.
DANIEL: That’s all right. But I’ve noticed something about that. You mentioned about wanting people to feel good, and the book is full of examples of that, because people feel so bad about grammar. It’s something that hurts them sometimes or the education they got or the discrimination that they face. And I’ve noticed in anecdote after anecdote, they feel better after talking to you. Is that just my impression, or do you feel that way too?
ELLEN: I think that’s right, and I think it’s because… Well, first of all, the people who actually come up to me are probably somewhat self-selecting. [LAUGHS] If someone’s having a traumatic childhood flashback… well, I don’t know. That’s not even true though. Those people come up to me too, and I just think so much of it is the way you meet them. I’m not radiating disapproval. [LAUGHS] I don’t sit there at the table with a giant ruler in my hand smacking it against my open other hand. So, it’s friendly. And then, I think one might also be amazed at how many people will very happily come up to me and say: my grammar sucks, or my grammar is horrible. They find it kind of funny, it’s not such a terrible thing. They’re happy to improve on it. And I think that’s very productive.
It’s like if I wanted to learn how to make a better vase or something, I don’t know how to do any of that. I don’t even have the vocabulary of the clay stuff. I would have to go to a class and be taught how to use the wheel and all that kind of stuff. And if you can see it as an external skill, the kinds of things you need to know to, say, write for work, or write for publication, if that’s what you want to do, if you can see it as a less personal thing and more of a thing that you can learn, then that’s less traumatic.
HEDVIG: Because everyone naturally, unless there’s been a horrible thing in their past, acquires at least one human language during their lifetime.
ELLEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: And they use that one very well. Like what you were saying, the skill to write — A: write well, write for a specific audience in a specific style — those are not things that we’re naturally born with. If you come from, like, a middle-class academic household, you might learn some of those things in your home. But otherwise, you might not. And if you don’t write very often… My mom was writing the other day. She needed to write a longer letter about something serious. And she had written it, and then I cut her sentences in half, put periods, put some spaces in, made explicit… in Swedish, we often drop subjects, put some explicit subjects in, and she’s a perfectly…
BEN: Educated.
HEDVIG: She can write and she’s fine.
BEN: She’s a normal grown human woman.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And she’s educated and everything, but she doesn’t do this kind of writing often, so you know. It’s a skill, and you can make it external and you don’t have to feel bad because you don’t… like I don’t know how to make pots.
BEN: I had a experience like that recently at work. I’ve just recently started a new job at a new school, and this new school that I’ve gone to do report comments. So, you’ve got to type report comments. And many of the schools that I’ve been at recently don’t have those. And they’re a real drag, they’re a real time suck, and it’s just a thing that education is mostly moving away from. Anyway, I’d completely forgotten about it, because I forgot that this school did these things. And so, on the day that they were due, the person who needs them from me was like: “Um, your report comments?” And I was like, “Oh, yeah, cool. I’ll get them to you soon. I haven’t started them yet. But I’ll get them to you in a second.” And you could see on the face of this person, they were just like: “There is no way in this world, this human being is going to get these comments to me in time, because to their conception of it, so few people have to like sit down and write proper, formal grammar type stuff anymore. It’s just a skill that atrophies in nearly everyone, and for whatever reason, because union and still writing reports and that sort of stuff, I’ve kept those skills. So essentially, like an hour later, I’ve sent these through and you could see this person just being like, “He’s a wizard!”
[LAUGHTER]
It’s just a practiced skill. It’s not a flex, it’s exactly what Hedvig said. It doesn’t make you a bad person if you don’t know how to do it. It’s just like: Have you spent time on the pottery wheel? If no, it’s not a reflection on your quality as a human.
ELLEN: Right. I also think the fact that I get so excited about what other people might view as rather mundane questions, like past participles, it’s like: Woo-hoo! So, if they’re coming up to me, and I’m excited about it, I think that has an effect on how they feel about the question.
DANIEL: And you smile, and you laugh, and you’re very friendly and you have a very friendly and nonjudgmental attitude towards people, and you’re happy about it.
ELLEN: Thank you! That’s very nice of you to say that.
BEN: Can I divulge how I’ve always pictured, Ellen, you interacting with people at the Grammar Table, as in doling out advice as it were, or like providing “answers” and that sort of thing, even though I know you acknowledge that, “I’m not giving answers, here’s some direction.” I picture it as a quintessential New Yorker giving street directions, which is to say, like: [ITALIAN NEW YORK ACCENT] ~Oh, okay, what you want to do is you want to use the semicolon in the middle, but you don’t always have to do that. And if you want to do it a different way, that’s okay!~ [LAUGHTER] I don’t know why, you’re not Italian American, but that’s just the picture I…!
ELLEN: That is what I do. I do it just like that.
[LAUGHTER]
ELLEN: Wait, I feel I should correct the record here in that I do give definitive advice, because if you give me a situation and you ask me about certain things, there are going to be specific answers that I’m going to be: “This is it. That’s done.” But there are lots of murkier kinds of questions. And the other thing is: I am a native Californian. So, I operate the Grammar Table like a native Californian, and that perhaps is also confusing to people, because… I felt very comfortable doing the Grammar Table on Venice Beach, for example. That was my home turf.
DANIEL: Okay, let’s talk about one of those weirdy areas. We really need to fix subject-verb agreement in English, because nobody knows how to do it with any but the most obvious cases. I just had a look at your surveys. You know, I do see your surveys on Twitter, you are @GrammarTable. And, boy, you really have a knack for finding those splits, those fracture points that are going to cleave people in one direction or another. So, I’m just going to read this one. And Hedvig and Ben, what do you think about this one? It’s a recent one. “All they seem to read… IS or ARE… “All they seem to read is comic books and cereal boxes.” “All they seem to read are comic books and cereal boxes.” Do you like ’em both, or does one feel better? “All they seem to read IS or ARE comic books and cereal boxes.”
BEN: It’s so funny. I went to I went to get my eyes tested today for some new glasses. And so, I went through the process of like: number one, number two, number one, number two.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: IS or ARE! Can I see ARE again?
BEN: And it feels like this one for me, because when I got my eyes tested, there was a couple of times where I was like: “They’re basically the same,” and so I feel like this is that for me. This is basically the same, IS and ARE work equally in my brain.
HEDVIG: I prefer in spoken when I heard you speak it, I definitely prefer the second one, ARE, but I know in experience from going over texts that I have written that this is something that when I write text I don’t seem to care about. Like, I frequently… There’s various automatic-type checkers like Grammarly and whatever is inbuilt in your program. And then I also have my beloved husband [CHUCKLES] who I often get to read things. And my supervisors when I was reading my PhD thesis, they were like: “Hedvig, you don’t seem to know or care about this.” But when I hear it spoken, I sometimes have some preferences, but I prefer the second one, yeah.
DANIEL: Okay. Now that was the one that most people chose at 55.9%.
HEDVIG: [ǁ]
DANIEL: Did you agree with that one, Ellen, or were you expecting that result?
ELLEN: I think that I was a little surprised that it tipped as much into plural as it did. I was expecting a fairly even split. I personally prefer the IS there, but it’s just a preference. I think you can argue in both cases. But I think a lot of the people who are voting are probably… my guess is that they think it has to be ARE because they look at what comes after the verb and their argument is that that is the subject. But that isn’t really how it works and so like, we don’t say, “All I want are you,” you know what I mean? “All I want is you.” So, we don’t necessarily agree with what comes after.
For me, the concept feels more singular. I don’t mind splitting them into plural. It doesn’t bother me. All I want is you, you, and you. Wait, this is going a different direction that I meant!
DANIEL: No, that’s fine.
ELLEN: So then, I asked what people thought the subject was. I did a follow-up poll because I was surprised by that result. So, I don’t know what that’s showing now because that’s still in effect, is the subject. I gave them four choices: is it ‘all’? Is it ‘all I want’… ? Or, wait, what’s the sentence again? I forgot my own sentence.
DANIEL: Here it is. “All they seem to read are comic books and cereal boxes.”
ELLEN: Yeah, so I give them the options is the subject ‘all’, is it ‘they’, is it ‘all they want to read’? Or, is it the thing that comes after the cereal boxes and the comic books.
DANIEL: The comic books and cereal boxes.
ELLEN: So, I don’t know how that’s shaping up.
HEDVIG: I have voted now in your poll. And I can tell you what currently the standing is.
DANIEL: Yes, please.
HEDVIG: So, the choices are ‘all’, ‘all they seem to read’, ‘they’, and ‘comic books and cereal boxes’, and 35% so far — 117 votes — have picked ‘comic books and cereal boxes’.
DANIEL: Yeah, I kind of agree. Even though it’s weird. Because it’s clefted, isn’t it? It’s what they call a cleft sentence. “Comic books and cereal boxes are all they seem to read,” so if you unwind the sentence, if you decleft it, then the comic books and cereal boxes come up the front. This is weird, isn’t it? This is weird to do.
ELLEN: How many people voted for ‘all they want’? ‘All they seem to read’, how many people voted for that, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: 23%.
ELLEN: Interesting. Yeah. But, anyway, it’s messy and kind of fun. I love sentences like that.
HEDVIG: Yeah! I also see you in my Twitter feed, and I see all of your polls like this, and they’re really fun. Yeah.
DANIEL: They are fun.
ELLEN: Oh, thank you. Thank you. It definitely scratches an itch for me. So, I love the Grammar Table and being on the street. But I swear, the Twitter poll thing, I think that made the pandemic a lot better for me. [LAUGHTER] Sometimes, people ask me how I line these up. They ask, like, “Where do you get them from? How do you distribute them?” And literally, the second I think of one, it goes up, and so there might be four in a row sometimes. And it feels necessary. In the moment, I just really need to know, I want to know. I want to know what people think. Or, in some cases, I also have a clearer idea of what I think it should be. I mean, there’s a blend in there. But a lot of times, I just want to know what people think of this sort of gray area, and it’s so satisfying. Like, you cannot do this on Facebook, because when you vote on Facebook, your vote shows up. So, you can see how people voted ahead, and you can also see who voted for what. And so, that doesn’t work. Anonymity and the lack of pre… you don’t get a signal ahead. I’ve actually done an exper… well, not an experiment, but I tried posting a couple polls on Facebook too. And if it starts heading one direction, it keeps heading that direction. Whereas with Twitter, you can see: ooo, it’s more like a horse race.
HEDVIG: How often do you make a poll on Twitter because you are having a sort of argument with a loved one?
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Because that sparks most of my Twitter polls.
BEN: Oh my god.
ELLEN: That’s hilarious!
HEDVIG: And they’re not only about language, they’re about anything.
BEN: Do you put the tomato sauce in the fridge, that sort of thing?
DANIEL: Is my partner a douche, ☐ yes ☐ no?
ELLEN: [LAUGHS] Most of them are not like that. For example, when I was editing my own book, especially the copy-editing phase, that generated a lot of topics. The ones that come mostly from my domestic situation are pronunciation ones, because as a Californian, I have about three vowels total. [LAUGHTER] So, a lot of things that are distinguished on the East Coast are not distinguished in my mouth. Sometimes, Brandt, my husband, will look at me when I say something — and it doesn’t happen often — but he won’t know what I’m saying, because his vowel is quite clearly different. He’s from Connecticut. And his version is usually the one that’s listed first in the dictionary, in that case. Mine is not!
DANIEL: Interesting.
ELLEN: So it’s kind of a pattern. I’m talking about like the DON and DAWN thing. So, D-O-N, D-A-W-N are more or less the same for me, but not for him.
DANIEL: DON and DAWN.
ELLEN: Yes.
DANIEL: I do a weekly gig on the ABC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and it’s an older audience, and they have questions about grammar and stuff. But a lot of people are kind of taking this from a bad place, like: “This bugs me. I hate it. People suck. I’m better.” There’s this really strong culture of complaint and moral superiority around grammar. Do you kind of accept people where they’re at? Or do you try to help them out of that way of thinking? How do you come at people?
ELLEN: I think it’s important to use humor and information when I’m confronted with that. So, it is the case that on occasion, a person has come up to me and just been so grumpy and kind of… I don’t know, maybe they’ve also gotten me in a particular mood, but if they’re just ranting, it can go two ways. One, I could just end up sort of like: “Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.” Then, the conversation pretty much, they’re done, and they leave, But more often, I have all my books in front of me. I have all the reference books. So, if I feel that they’re receptive, I will bring up an actual fact of usage that there’s more variety or that there’s been evolution and how this is treated even in authoritative reference books. And usually, it ends up in a better place, but I have this feeling about grammar pedantry, which is that if you meet grammar — and I don’t know how you’re going to feel about this — if you meet grammar pedantry with scorn, that that’s another form of pedantry in a way, because people are educated the way they’re educated. They learn a certain way. They have busy lives with conflicts and financial pressure and all kinds of things, and they may just not… Weirdly, they may not read grammar books for fun. Grammar usage books, language books, for fun as I do, and they don’t learn things and there’s…
BEN: Such people exist?
[LAUGHTER]
ELLEN: Yeah, I know! It’s so weird. If you’re going to talk about the elitism inherent in grammar pedantry, I think there’s also an elitism in the kind of knowledge that people have acquired in scholarly pursuits of language. And so, I really try, and I usually don’t have to try, but in the moments where I’m irritated by people’s unpleasantness, which is rare, I try to remember that.
HEDVIG: I think that’s a great stance. Yeah.
ELLEN: Oh, thank you. Well, I don’t mean to make this sound like some giant moral mission, but I’m just struck by the ineffectiveness of greeting scorn with more scorn. And so, for me, this is a conciliatory process, that I want to be educational, and I want to have be positive. I have turned people who are really… they’re kind of mad when they come up. I have turned people into a different frame of mind. And I feel happy with that and I think they do, too.
DANIEL: That really comes through in the book.
ELLEN: I really hope that doesn’t sound obnoxious, because… Can I just, as a side thing…
HEDVIG: No, it doesn’t.
ELLEN: Here’s the thing: if this were about something that I feel angry about right now, because there are things that I feel angry about in the world. There are things that I feel mad about in this country. And if I had a table that had a sign on it that said, “Come up and talk to me about what you’re pissed about,” it’s just not gonna go well.
[LAUGHTER]
ELLEN: But we can have the comma conversation or the past participle conversation. And then no matter what is going wrong in the way, like, how we might come at each other for some other subject we have, we can have this kind of meditative process where we’re bonding around the letters that go on a page or that come out of our mouths. And for me, that’s a very powerful thing, and actually really, genuinely works in my heart and makes me feel better.
BEN: I think one of the important things that probably you seem to really, really… you articulated really well just then and you seem to be able to keep in mind really well, is that nearly 100% of the time with grammar, the stakes are low. Unless I’m wrong. Can you tell me an instance that you know where the stakes are really, really high? Or, if not, it’s just an important thing to remember, is that when it comes to grammar, we’re talking about ephemeral made-up ruley-type things. It’s not, you know, legislation.
HEDVIG: But sometimes the way people feel about certain language reveals deeper problems that aren’t really about language in themselves, but are expressed via their opinions about language, that might have to do with, for example, race or gender.
BEN: Okay, fair enough.
HEDVIG: The stakes… you’re right, exactly what word you choose in a sentence, the stakes there, you could understand them as low. But the reason people have such strong emotions about them have to do with more than that. And then, I find it a little bit harder to keep my cool.
ELLEN: I think the stakes… I hadn’t really thought about this way, but the stakes may be high for people in certain contexts. But they’re not high when they walk up to the Grammar Table.
[LAUGHTER]
ELLEN: This is very instructive to me to think about, because then I can really have a no-consequence discussion with people about something that maybe feels very important to them at work, but it can just be a calmer discussion when we’re sitting there on the beach [LAUGHS] or wherever.
BEN: Giant people working out in the background.
ELLEN: That’s right. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I was at a party one time and a guy was trying to convince me that… it’s one of those situations where I did the first thing that Ellen mentioned, which is where for a while, you just say, “Okay,” and then they talk and you say, “Okay,” and he was trying to convince me that French as a language is inherently better to do philosophy in.
BEN: Oh, god.
DANIEL: This one.
HEDVIG: And that is just not weird from a European perspective. This is weird from a colonial perspective, like the status that French has had in a lot of places and French colonialism and imperialism. And that one is just like: yes, maybe he thinks it’s about language, but it’s not really, is it? It’s not.
BEN: Yeah. There’s just good old-fashioned racism at work there.
HEDVIG: Yeah, kind of. Yeah.
ELLEN: I encounter some of that at the Grammar Table, but very little of that kind of thing. Like, this is the oldest, richest language with the most vocabulary and the best language for XYZ. That is what I encounter on Facebook. But in real life, I actually don’t encounter that much at all. So that’s a blessing, I guess.
HEDVIG: But do you encounter people coming up to you and saying that what people call double negation or negative concord — like, when you say, “I don’t see nobody”, or, “I didn’t see nobody” — do you encounter people coming up and saying that this is irrational and weird and bad, and people shouldn’t do it? Because, that I think, as far as I know, that pattern is more common in southern states and in Afro American English, and I feel those are sort of tied together there a bit.
ELLEN: Yeah, it’s funny. I don’t think anyone has ever brought that up at the table. But if they did…
HEDVIG: Really??
ELLEN: Yes. Actually, I don’t remember.
HEDVIG: People complained to ME about it and I don’t have a grammar table!
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Maybe you’ve just got one of those faces, Hedvig.
ELLEN: This is one of those things I’ve seen more online. I just don’t really encounter it in real life. But, yeah, I always find that one strange. I mean, if you begin looking at other languages… first of all, I think it’s cool as a linguistic feature, but also if you look at other languages, you see plenty of piling up negatives that don’t add up to a positive. So, the whole math and logic argument wouldn’t be convincing for me, but yeah.
HEDVIG: No, it doesn’t work. What about the thing you said about meeting linguistic pedants with scorn, and in yourself being pedant about them that they should behave a certain way? Is that something that you had already when you started, or did you come to that throughout the project?
ELLEN: I think I’ve refined my ability to deal with it and I’ve thought more about the best way to — I’m reluctant to say it this way — but to educate people. I don’t think educating people works very well when you are at the same time trying to make them feel bad about themselves, and I understand why that happens. I mean, people hold objectionable views and when you want to dislodge those views, it’s hard not to have a feeling about, for example, something that’s class- or race-based about language. Often, when people look down on other people, there’s ignorance involved. And that’s what I try to remember.
There’s ignorance about, first of all, the variety of language that is out there in the world, especially when we’re talking. I mean, English has so many versions all over the world really far away from where you live that you never hear! So, this thing that you think is crazy, like people, for example, get bent out of shape sometimes about preposition choice. But then the example I like to use… we tend to say DIFFERENT FROM — or DIFFERENT THAN in American English — but you can hear DIFFERENT TO, if you go somewhere else in the world. ‘X is different to Y’. And that for me is a great example of how there’s not logic or consistency and that part of this is just getting out there in the world and hearing more than you might have heard.
I’m losing my train of thought. But I think also there’s a lot of superstition bound up in what we experienced as children, that we have a hard time separating from just the way that we become attached to… well, I was going to say religion, I don’t know if want to make that comparison. But a lot of our most deeply held beliefs come to us very young. And that’s the same thing with language. You don’t tend to be reading grammar books after your seventh-grade English class, so the thing that you’re told in seventh grade may stick really long and hard. I feel like part of the point of the table is to bring to light the imperfection of our memory, of days gone by because a lot of a people’s problematic beliefs are grounded in that. Not just about language, but about all things. And I feel once again that I have lost the train of thought.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: No, no! I think I know where you’re going. Also, you come to this exercise as an educator, which is not how everyone who has these discussions, that’s not how everyone encounters them. So I come into this discussion sometimes late night at parties when some guy’s just trying to tell me something. And then I take off my educator hat and after a while, I’m just like, “You’re wasting my time. I want to go, drink a beer,” like, “Fuck off.”
[CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: But you…
BEN: But, but, Hedvig, I haven’t even started on Bitcoin yet!
[LAUGHTER]
ELLEN: Some people can’t be persuaded.
DANIEL: Mmm.
BEN: Many? So many. An incredible number!
ELLEN: Yeah. Right! But most people who come up to the table are probably predisposed to have an open conversation. I just think about this a lot online when I see people getting mad that, I want to put my energy into building positive bonds in discussions. If I squander too much of my energy on trying to fix what I think isn’t working correctly, it’s not going to go that well. It’s an instinctive allotment of time spent on [CHUCKLES] a positive discussion versus… I still kind of remember the preposition person who really was very mad about people ending with prepositions. There’s been multiple people like that, but when people are really adamant about not ending with prepositions, some of them cannot be dissuaded from that point of view, and I don’t always try.
HEDVIG: Some of them might have learned that in school by their parents or by their teacher, and have been told that, “If you don’t do this, you’re doing it wrong.” They want to teach their children and everyone around them to do right so that they don’t get judged for it. That could also be baked into it.
ELLEN: Right. And then, some parents also want their kids to put two spaces after periods, but that’s probably not good advice either!
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Argh.
HEDVIG: Oh my god. I have some collaborators who do that and I just go Ctrl+F in the document. I look for all the double spaces and I replace them with single spaces.
BEN: Yup. Find and replace. For sure.
DANIEL: Very good. Very good.
HEDVIG: I’m not putting up with this.
BEN: I remember once hearing about — just in terms of ending a sentence in a preposition because it seems to be certainly from what you said, Ellen, and what we’ve experienced on the show and what Daniel’s spoken about on his other older-people, sort of permutation of being a linguist communicator — It seems to be the hill that a lot of people are willing to die on, like this far and no further, the prepositions things seems to be blah, blah, blah. I remember hearing about how dementia tends to work on people as a progressive illness, right? It always sticks in my memory that people lose animals until they usually get down to just CAT and DOG as sort of the earliest and most common animals that most humans living in a western society come across. As stuff starts to go, it strips back down until you get to that level.
I suspect the prepositions thing is like a grammar version of that. Like you said, Ellen, we stop learning formal grammar really early. We only have a pretty short window of when teachers are like, “Well, you’ve got to use a verb here, and you’ve got to do this, and you’ve got to do that.” And that all stops when we’re still in primary school generally. And so, I think the preposition thing is one of the last things that people can remember and hold on to, sort of across a large group. I’m sure there’s people who remember all sorts of grammar stuff, but generally, I think pop culturally, we just all tend to fixate on like: “You can’t end a sentence in a preposition.” And then, if you ask them, “What’s another grammar rule?” they’re like: “You can’t end a sentence in a preposition.”
[LAUGHTER]
ELLEN: Right. Well, the thing that’s funny… Oh, you did remind me of one thing that I didn’t so much expect, I guess. I can have a whole conversation with someone at the Grammar Table about, say, something like this, and show them… like, open a book and show them where examples of where it’s natural to end in prepositions and where they probably do. And they’ll nod and say how interesting it is, and then at the end, they’ll say, “Right, so I’ll never end in a preposition.” [LAUGHTER] It’s as though the conversation didn’t take place at all.
BEN: Yeah.
ELLEN: And then also, I think a lot of people are familiar with the gap between the principle that people think they follow and the principle they actually follow, which is… Oh! And this has happened multiple times: people will be arguing about not ending with a preposition, while they’re ending with a preposition in conversation with me.
[LAUGHTER]
In this case, they might actually even notice and say, “Oh, I shouldn’t have done that.” In the book, I have an example where a teacher did that. And I said, “Well, you’re allowed to. And why do you think you do that, if you’re not supposed to?” And she said something like, “Because I was brought up wrong,” or something like that.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Oh, wow. Whoo!
HEDVIG: Oh.
DANIEL: Yeah.
ELLEN: They can’t quite… ! I mean, as a joke, but still. [LAUGHS] Something very bad.
BEN: I assume she just shriveled up like the Wicked Witch of the West, like: [WICKED WITCH’S VOICE] “I’m melting, I’m melting!”
[CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: That gap that you mentioned, it’s really interesting. I’ve been hanging out a lot recently with people who do field work on less documented languages with the people of an Indigenous language, a documentation program in Berlin. And we’re talking about methods when there’s a language we don’t know the grammar of, and people try to understand the grammar. There are different ways of going about it. You can ask people, you can give them lots of examples and say, “Is this one right? Is this one wrong?” But it can be hard to get people’s sort of unconscious, unjudgmental reading of things. And what I’ve learned from some of my friends is that it’s a good idea to not ask, “Do you do this?” But to ask, “Have you heard any other people in the community doing this?” So, in the same recording, you can get people doing a certain thing? And if you ask them, like, “Oh, do you do this?” they’ll be like, “No.” And you say, “Are other people in the community doing this?” And they’ll be like, “Oh, yeah, all the time. They’re all doing it wrong!” And then later in the recording, you can find examples of them doing it too. And you can just be like, “Oh, okay, well, there’s a bit of a gap here.”
BEN: I like that.
ELLEN: I do sometimes in my Twitter polls end up with options where I have phenomenon X: “Do you do this”? People can pick, “I do this”, “I don’t do this, but I hear other people do this”, “I’ve never heard it”, that kind of thing. And I find that interesting too, that… I don’t know if that captures a little bit of that but perception is really… self-analysis is very problematic. And entertaining too! It’s kind of entertaining and interesting. It annoyed me at some point, you know, I was like: Fuck, why can’t…? Earlier in my life, when I was less calm, it’s frustrating. There’s something wrong on the internet and you want to fix it. And now, I don’t worry about that as much and I feel less pressure.
DANIEL: What I like about the structure of the book is that each of the chapters treats a topic — or TREAT a topic — very briefly, and then do the quiz afterwards so you can learn. I love the quizzes. But more importantly, we get to see people’s stories and how these topics relate to them and how they come to you feeling bad sometimes, and then you help them feel better. And I feel like in the book that really comes through. Is that how you were aiming for?
ELLEN: I don’t think that aspect of it was so much conscious. Because Brandt films most of these encounters, the overwhelming majority of these I actually have the dialogue for, a recording of the dialogue. Not all of them, but almost all of them.
DANIEL: Oh! Okay. I was wondering.
ELLEN: I actually think this is a very important piece of the book, because I noticed when I recreated scenes that I did not have recordings for, it was harder in a way, because what I remember, I remember better what I said, but I might lose some of the features of their speech that I think are fascinating to record. I used to love Studs Terkel’s stuff, where you’d have conversations with people and have these interviews. And I think, for me, this is really documentation that he was very close to what actually happened. And so, if that is a product of these chapters, it’s because it’s a product of the encount… it’s what happened in the instances themselves. So, that’s a byproduct and not a design thing.
DANIEL: Well, it’s a fun read. The book is Rebel With a Clause: Tales and Tips From a Roving Grammarian by Ellen Jovin. It’s available from HarperCollins Publishers. Ellen, thanks for telling us about your work.
ELLEN: Thank you so much for having me.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: But now, you’re not done because-
BEN: Pew, pew, pew.
DANIEL: We have Words of the Week. Ellen, we would love it if you would grace us with a word that’s been on your mind lately or a word that you’ve noticed. What do you got?
ELLEN: Well, this is a word that’s been on my mind for more than a week. It’s been on my mind for about seven years. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Fresh. Straight out of the oven.
ELLEN: This is my opportunity and I thought about this, and I picked the form specifically for… Okay, I’m going to stop and just tell you the word. SYCOPHANCY.
DANIEL: SYCOPHANCY.
ELLEN: That’s my word.
HEDVIG: Oh!
ELLEN: Because I feel that that is at the heart of a lot of the things not at the Grammar Table that are irritating me these days. The power-seeking, ass kissing… Am I allowed to say ass kissing on the show?
BEN: Oh, yeah. I swear.
HEDVIG: You’re allowed to say anything.
DANIEL: No. No. No.
ELLEN: [LAUGHS] I guess I already knew the answer to that. That’s me delighting in the freedom that I have here. Yes, I just feel like that is at the heart of so many things that are troubling me in the social-political scene. The obsequious, power-hungry, ass kissing. Yeah. SYCOPHANCY.
DANIEL: So many good words.
ELLEN: I picked that form because often… so SYCOPHANT, you hear a lot. But I like sometimes to look at the forms that are used less frequently. Well, SYCOPHANT and SYCOPHANCY are both nouns, but the SYCOPHANCY focuses on the larger phenomenon. So, all the sycophants can be stuffed into this larger phenomenon of sycophancy. That’s my word.
BEN: And bonus points. It sounds like sicko-fancy.
ELLEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: A little bit of both.
HEDVIG: Yeah!
ELLEN: So, people who are doing that: stop. That’s my message.
DANIEL: Thank you. That’s great.
BEN: Please don’t be as sicko-fancy-ish. There we go.
ELLEN: [LAUGHS]
BEN: I’m just adding suffixes.
DANIEL: It’s funny though, when you get into words from the 1800s or 1700s, they actually did play around with different Latin forms before they settled on one. So, I don’t know if SYCOPHANCY is… or SYCOPHANTIC or SYCOPHANTICAL, you could see many different versions of the same word.
BEN: Ooh. I like SYCOPHANTICAL. That’s fun.
HEDVIG: Too fancy.
ELLEN: Yeah. What’s one of the ones… We need one of the ones where you can do multiple forms. I spend a bit of time on those when I’m writing, picking the one… you know, whether it’s the noun ending in -NESS, or -MENT, or there could be multiple things going on. I kind of get a kick out of that. But I think that annoys people who want less choice. They just want someone to tell them the form.
DANIEL: I wonder if anybody’s aware of the slightly lewd origins of the word SYCOPHANT.
BEN: Ooh, I’m not.
HEDVIG: Yeah, isn’t it like a succubus?
DANIEL: No, it’s not.
BEN: Argh, I was so excited! That was such a good folk etymology. Argh, bugger.
DANIEL: Nice try. But SYCON in Greek is a fig. Now, figs have a rather lewd reputation. Partly because figs… people used to think that they looked a bit like a vulva. But also, you cover yourself with a fig leaf because the leaves are kind of penis-y looking. And that’s the SYC- part. And then the PHAINEIN in Greek is to show. So, somebody who shows the figs. The figs is a nasty gesture where you do this to someone: you put your thumb in between your two fingers, and it’s a very rude gesture. So, the reason why apparently a sycophant is somebody who does that — because there are a false sort of person — is that the senators in ancient Greece, the politicians weren’t supposed to make rude gestures. But if you were a politician and you encouraged your followers to make rude gestures, to show the figs, to taunt other people while you were supposed to stay above it, you’re being…
BEN: Oh. They were the figgy hand types.
HEDVIG: Oh.
DANIEL: That’s right, the figgy hand types. So, this is a way of being fake. A way of being false.
ELLEN: I’m still hung up on the fig looking like the vulva. That seems like a [LAUGHS] stretch to me!
HEDVIG: Oh, I thought that was obvious. [LAUGHS]
BEN: Yeah, me too. I was just like: when you open a fig to eat it, that seems pretty challic, for a lack of better phrase.
HEDVIG: A lot of people think that anything that has roughly a shape like this and has anything inside is like a vulva.
ELLEN: Oh.
BEN: To be fair…
HEDVIG: You have to really…
ELLEN: This has been really educational for me!
DANIEL: Good. [LAUGHS]
ELLEN: I did not know about that whole tradition.
HEDVIG: Like people say papaya, mango. Like, I have a tattoo on my arm of an apple. Like this!
BEN: Oh, wow. You definitely have a vagina on your arm.
ELLEN: Well, yeah.
HEDVIG: No, I didn’t think that when I made that. But my brother said that, and my ex said it was a Pokémon ball, so, you know.
BEN: Which one’s worse? That’s what I want to know.
HEDVIG: Kind of Pokémon ball.
ELLEN: Yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Let’s go on to our next one. This one was suggested by Kieran. It appears in a Lizzo song. Lizzo included a word in her single, Grrrls. The word… I feel bad about this word, because it’s a word that was very common in the late ’70s, early ’80s to describe someone that you didn’t like. The word was SPAZ, and that was the only way that I encountered the word and then I found out that there was the Spastic Center in Australia. They have since renamed to the Cerebral Palsy Alliance or in the UK, they’re called Scope. And they’ve changed their name, but what they do is they help people with certain disabilities. So Lizzo included this ableist slur and then copped some heat for it on Twitter and on social media. But then, check out what she did.
BEN: This is pretty god tier.
DANIEL: You know this, right? Go ahead, Ben, tell me.
BEN: It’s kind of one of those wonderful examples in the modern era when people are banging on about ~cancel culture gone crazy~ and all that kind of stuff, where you can just point out exactly what happened here and be like: “It’s not that hard. Lizzo did it. She did real good.” She did a thing wrong, people called her out on it, she apologised, she corrected her mistake, and she made efforts to further the cause or to reflect on the fact that this was a bad thing that she did. But also, didn’t make like a massive song and a dance about it. It was just a straightforward, simple acknowledgement of error and apology, and a genuine attempt to make amends.
DANIEL: She re-recorded the lyric and released it without the word.
BEN: Like, in a day as well. I think the turnaround was 24… Like it was really, really short. She was just like, “Oh, cool, right? Well, I fucked that up. Let’s fix that.”
DANIEL: She could have doubled down like so many people do, but you can always change that. You can always turn it around. She says in a statement, “Let me make one thing clear. I never want to promote derogatory language. As a fat Black woman in America, I’ve had many hurtful words used against me. So, I understand the power words can have whether intentionally, or in my case, unintentionally. This is the result of me listening and taking action. As an influential artist, I’ve dedicated to being part of the change I’ve been waiting to see in the world.” Like you say, Ben, god tier correction.
HEDVIG: There’s a goddess in her.
BEN: Yes.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES]
BEN: I think just as importantly, is I think in — I don’t want to say conservative circles — but in the circles of people who engage in that idea of like ~Cancel culture gone mad!~ and all the rest of it. In their minds, if you play by the rules of ~the mob~ or their conception of the mob, if you’re always trying to stay on the right side of the Twitter mob and all that kind of thing, you have to make work that’s so mild and bland and boring and unentertaining, because you just have to, like, appease everyone. But I will happily go on record and be like: Lizzo’s music slaps, like it’s really doing…. And so, you don’t have to be a bland, boring person. You can still make really fun, funky, interesting, cool stuff, and be a person who reflects on and is conscious of all of the ways that you’re not fucking there yet.
HEDVIG: And you can have opinions and take stands and be part of change like she is. It doesn’t mean you can’t have any opinion.
ELLEN: For me, this also offers interesting insight into… I keep saying interesting. I hate when I do that. That’s so annoying. Okay. That story made me think about the question of authority, like the idea that someone is supposed to be perfect and knows everything and all that kind of stuff, I think that contributes to this reluctance to make mistakes, acknowledge them, and fix them. If you go into a situation feeling humble — “There are things I don’t know, I’ve had my own life experience which cannot cover all of everyone else’s. I don’t have all the information yet. So, I’m open to learning” — that’s a completely different position. She diffused the possible negative reaction by having that humility and that willingness to be imperfect and to grow from the information that other people give her and she was humble. That was the thing that struck me.
DANIEL: Intellectual humility is so important.
ELLEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: On a side note, I’ve tweeted Weird Al Yankovic, who I really enjoy, because he also has this word — the longer two syllable form — in his song Word Crimes. It’s still there. I asked if he’d be open to changing it also, but no response yet. I’ll keep it up.
BEN: Oh, come on, Weird Al, come on.
DANIEL: You can do this.
BEN: Be the change.
DANIEL: Lizzo showed you how. Next one, Sharkcano. Not Sharknado.
BEN: No.
DANIEL: There is an underwater volcano near the Solomon Islands called the Kavachi Volcano. It’s really hot and acidic and some animals like to live there, so much that they’ve adapted to the sulfuric and hot conditions.
HEDVIG: Aww!
DANIEL: I’ve heard a lot of -NADOS in my time, like Sharknado and firenado, but I’ve never heard a -CANO. So, I thought Sharkcano was a fun way to coin this. A fun way to dub this place.
HEDVIG: Do sharks like it?
DANIEL: Some sharks do.
HEDVIG: Some sharks do.
DANIEL: Sharkcano sharks do.
BEN: [CHUCKLES] The most discerning of sharks enjoy the underwater volcano.
ELLEN: I really loved the Sharknado movies.
DANIEL: Did you?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
ELLEN: [LAUGHS] I did.
BEN: You’re a fan of the schlock?
DANIEL: The title was as much as I enjoyed it because I love the idea of a gigantic… I know nothing about this. Is it the case that a tornado scooped up a bunch of sharks, and then the sharks sort of just came and ate everyone that the tornado came in contact with, is that what happened?
ELLEN: Well, there are multiple movies, you can’t just summarize like that.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: [STERNLY] Daniel.
DANIEL: In the Sharknado canon.
ELLEN: There are lot of complex layers. That’s what I think I recall vaguely that but I think there were several because I recall watching them.
BEN: The SNCU is a deep and rich cinematic universe that has an incredible evolving…
ELLEN: It’s really strange to me now that we’re talking about that, I can’t recall the subtle differences from one Sharknado movie to the next. And I think that is just my own personal limitation and it has nothing to do with the movie at all.
HEDVIG: {LAUGHS] Yeah, that’s very strange.
DANIEL: Please do not send us feedback on this.
HEDVIG: I do think though that if you enjoy something fictional, you can sometimes consume it many times and get enjoyment every time, so you know you like Sharknado movies. You can watch it again. Lovely.
ELLEN: Or just hope for a new one.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Or, why not hop onto the Sharkcano franchise? I think there’s potential here.
ELLEN: I love that there’s a sharkcano, I mean that idea that people can — or not the people — but that creatures can live in a place that would be completely unpleasant for me. I find that fascinating.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s right. Okay, we’re going on. This one… Howie Manns, a good friend of ours at Monash says: “LINGUISTIC DROPBEAR”.
BEN: Oh. This is bespoke.
DANIEL: “It’s a great word slash phrase coined by our pal Lee Murray. It means to trick someone — especially a seppo _ into thinking something is Aussie slang, when it’s actually not or even a made-up word.” Linguistic dropbear. Ellen, do we know about dropbears?
ELLEN: Well, I’m already nervous here. [LAUGHS] What’s going to happen to me now?
DANIEL: Oh, those dropbears, they’re terrible.
HEDVIG: [crosstalk]
ELLEN: What are you about to do to me?
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: We’ve conspired with your husband to drop a bear on you.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Look out. Get that bear spray ready.
DANIEL: So, it’s a lot like a bunyip or it’s a lot like a jackalope. A mythical creature that doesn’t exist, but you tell people they do, and the naïve folks will not know. It’s fun when people come to Australia to tell them about the dropbears. You’ve got to watch out, you know. They’re up in the trees. They’re savage. But they don’t exist.
HEDVIG: I feel a little bit sad because I think this place on Americans’ quite often trusting nature and the way that they don’t want to make someone else lose face in a conversation. So when you tell them, like: “Oh, yeah, no, in Sweden, we have polar bears walking on the street.” They’re like, “Well, I’m a stupid American. I don’t know anything about the world. Maybe that’s true. Oh, yeah, how fascinating!” There’s something very sweet in that. And I feel like maybe it’s fair, but we’re taking advantage of them a bit.
DANIEL: I know.
ELLEN: Right, exactly.
BEN: One of the things I try and remind people of as well — especially in the case of Americans — if an American has actually spent a decent amount of time outdoors — like if they have gone camping and hiking and stuff — unlike Australia, there are large predators that will fuck your shit up.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: There are bears and wolves and mountain lions. There is legitimate stalking, you are the prey, you are food, danger in America. And that doesn’t actually exist in Australia. It’s a bunch of tiny things that will kill you if you’re lifting rocks up and stuff. But generally, there’s nothing big that will hunt you for food. So, when we tell Americans this, I feel really bad because…
HEDVIG: It’s plausible.
BEN: …it’s not dumb as an American to be cautious of the wild because the wild will fuck you up in America.
ELLEN: I’ve spent some of my pandemic watching reality shows based in other English speaking…
BEN: Oh, did you watch Alone? Are you going to Alone right now?
ELLEN: I have seen some of Alone, but watching reality shows from different parts of the world so that I can pick up slang. And I did pick some up, but I don’t think it’s going to probably prepare me for anything you might throw at me now. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: All right. Well, it’s time to try out the linguistic dropbears. Let’s see if Ellen can spot the Australian expressions. Some might be actual Australian ones, some might not be. Ben and Hedvig, I’d like to encourage you to make up some.
BEN: Okay. So, can we call this game Yeah or Nah?
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] Good. Yeah or Nah. All right, number one. CRACK THE SHITS, which means to get mad. Is that an expression that I just made up, or is it a real Aussie expression? “He cracked the shits.” Ellen is thinking.
ELLEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: That’s a yeah?
ELLEN: Yeah, it’s real.
DANIEL: You are correct. [BELL] That’s one for you.
BEN: Well done. Well done well done well done.
ELLEN: Woo!
DANIEL: Nice going. One of my favorite Aussie expressions. Ben has used this on a show. Ben or Hedvig, one for you?
BEN: I’ve got one. Sorry, I’m just going to try and frame it in a good way so it sounds nice on a podcast.
ELLEN: You’re going to try to make it up.
BEN: No, no, I’m not.
ELLEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Aha, so you’re not!
BEN: To CHUCK YOUR HANDBAG means to sort of throw a bit of a tantrum. To chuck your handbag.
DANIEL: Aussie or not?
BEN: Yeah or nah?
ELLEN: Yeah.
BEN: Correct.
[BELL]
DANIEL: Yes, very good.
BEN: That is a thing.
DANIEL: All right, Hedvig, let’s hear one of yours.
HEDVIG: Do you think that the Australians’ diminutive thing has gone so far so that they call teachers TEACHIE?
DANIEL: Oh, so we know that there’s already some expressions, like your RELLIES are your relatives. That is a real thing. But is a teacher a TEACHIE in Australia?
ELLEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: As far as I know, that’s a no.
BEN and DANIEL: That’s a nah.
[BUZZER]
[LAUGHTER]
ELLEN: I was doing so well with the yesses.
BEN: Do you want to know a fun Australian slang for TEACHER?
ELLEN: What?
BEN: In Australia, a lot of professions, we attach, like, an -IE suffix to, so a carpenter is a CHIPPY, an electrician is a SPARKY, and so on and so forth. Teachers are CHALKIES.
ELLEN: Oh, that’s so cute. I love that. I could be that. I would like that.
BEN: It’s pretty archaic. You don’t hear it much anymore.
HEDVIG: That’s so cute.
DANIEL: Okay, our $50 note is yellow, so it’s called the GREAT YELLOW RECTANGLE.
ELLEN: No.
DANIEL: I just made that up.
[BELL]
ELLEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I was going to say, I don’t think it is yellow. Isn’t it pink-reddish?
BEN: No, that’s the $20! The $20 is like the rose… No, sorry, the $5 is pink. The $10 is blue. The $20 is red, and the $50 is yellow. And we call them PINEAPPLES.
ELLEN: Cute!
DANIEL: Ellen’s doing really well. What’s she on, like, three out of four now?
BEN: Yeah. She’s sniffing us out.
DANIEL: Let’s try one more. If someone talks a lot, we say, “They COULD TALK UNDERWATER.” Real or fake?
ELLEN: Real.
DANIEL: Yes, it is!
[BELL]
DANIEL: You have the sense. I think that when you come down here and set up this table — upside down, of course, on the other side of the Earth —
BEN: Naturally, yeah.
DANIEL: In fact, ou’re just about on the opposite side of Perth, to be honest. I think the closest–
BEN: I think New York is pretty much dead on the antipode of Perth.
DANIEL: It is. You’ll be in good shape.
ELLEN: That will be a good marketing tagline for the trip.
DANIEL: There we go. So: SYCOPHANCY, that one word that Lizzo removed from her song, SHARKCANO, and LINGUISTIC DROPBEAR. By the way, dear listeners, please send us your linguistic dropbears. We want to hear yours. Those are our Words of the Week. Ellen Jovin, once again, thank you so much for coming and hanging out with us today.
ELLEN: It is an honor and privilege.
DANIEL: Oh.
BEN: Well, you’re a cohost now, so come by anytime.
ELLEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: We’ll see you next week.
BEN: I feel like everyone thinks I’m joking when I do that. I’m 100% not.
DANIEL: Just totally, we’ll publish our schedule. Ellen, how can people find out what you’re doing? What’s the best way to reach ya?
ELLEN: My website, ellenjovin.com. But the place where I have the most daily regular fun is @grammartable on Twitter.
DANIEL: All right.
ELLEN: And spell GRAMMAR right, or you won’t get there. [LAUGHS]
BEN: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: Gotcha.
BEN: Uh-oh. But they haven’t met you, how will they know?
DANIEL: Quick comments. Katrina via email listened to our episode last time and we refer to the Platinum Jubilee 70 years of Queen Elizabeth II as PLATTY JUBES. But I said I wasn’t sure about… there was something bugging me about it, and that was that it sounded like other kinds of slang, but I couldn’t think of any instances. I appealed to our listeners, what else, what other kind of slang is constructed like this? Katrina says, she emailed us, hello@becauselanguage.com. “I just finished listening to your episode on slang, and I was thinking about PLATTY JUBES and what other shortened forms fit that template. I couldn’t think of an exact match but I did think of two that sort of fit. If it’s the syllable structure that matters, HUNDO-P for 100%. And if it’s adding the -S that matters, SOC MEDS for social media. Thanks for the awesome entertainment and interesting discussions.” SOC MEDS.
BEN: SOC MEDS, that’s fun.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay. Last one from Jack via email. Ben, this one’s for you. This one is about you feeling annoyed by people who say PROCESSES [pɹoʊsesiːz] and ASSOCIATE [əsoʊsieɪt] and so on.
BEN: APPRECIATE [əpɹisijeɪt]. Argh!
DANIEL: Anyway, Jack says, “Hello, this one’s directed at Ben, who I like. I find his obnoxiousness relatable.”
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I like this, yeah.
BEN: I’m glad… well, one! I’ve got one. I’ve got one fan!
DANIEL: “You’re wrong, Ben, about people who say PROCESSES [iːz] the fancy way. Seems just as likely to me that the slightly insecure grinding bootstrapper fortunately endowed with the smarts and/or environment to do the fancy pants tertiary work, but perhaps not with the educational pedigree, is just as likely to say PROCESSES. But I agree about the tissue and the punishment should be guillotine.” Now let’s get this. Jack says, “If we are to infiltrate, we need solidarity. Let’s make sure we are actually punching up. And if we are not sure, let’s not punch. Let’s tickle. I could whinge all day, but I simultaneously love the show. Big up.” What do you think?
BEN: That’s a good phrase, Jack. I like that.
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: That’s really nice.
DANIEL: Isn’t it good?
BEN: That’s very sweet. “Let’s not punch, let’s tickle.” Ooo, it’s cute!
DANIEL: Maybe somebody says processes because they’re trying to survive. It could be a survival mechanism and they know they’re doing it, but…
BEN: That is fair enough. I should probably clarify that when people of color or other sort of members of minority groups who find it really hard to climb social ladders do it, I have absolutely no problem with it. But when our, like, political leaders do it, I’m like: I know what you’re doing.
DANIEL: Well, big thanks to Jack for that question. And thanks to everybody who contributed to this episode.
[END THEME]
BEN: It’s my turn. I’m doing the thing. If you liked the show like Jack, my one and only fan — hey, Jack, I’m going to direct all of this to you — Jack, you can send us ideas and feedback. You can follow us as @becauselangpod everywhere except Spotify because Joe Rogan, blah 🤮. Leave us a message with SpeakPipe, that’s on our website, becauselanguage.com. You can send us an email, Jack, if you want to hello@becauselanguage.com. Jack, if you have any friends — which is unlikely because you find my obnoxiousness relatable — but if you do, you should definitely tell all of your friends about Because Language because… who doesn’t want some more obnoxiousness from Ben in their lives? And, of course, Jack, if you are not already, you should definitely become a patron because you can find out about cool stuff in our bonus episodes. And you can join our Discord and just have a great time hanging out, sharing photos of cats, and playing all the -LE games.
ELLEN: This is a lot of pressure on Jack. [LAUGHS]
BEN: Do it, Jack. DO IT!
HEDVIG: No! Jack is going to do all of it.
ELLEN: I think we should make this apply to all Jacks because that’s going to be a larger body, yes. All Jacks.
DANIEL: Hello, Jacks.
ELLEN: [LAUGHS]
BEN: A pan-Jack plea.
DANIEL: Everybody named Jack.
HEDVIG: There’s a joke in here somehow about jack of all trades, but I am not sentient enough.
BEN: Yes.
DANIEL: Can’t find it. It’s the heat.
HEDVIG: I can’t find it.
ELLEN: I put Jack in a lot of my grammar examples. Jack is a good name for grammar examples because I often need to…
BEN: Like Fight Club!
ELLEN: …minimize the space, because you’re only allowed a certain number of characters. So, I use two-, three- and four-letter names a lot.
HEDVIG: Okay. Well, one thing you can do is do like Jack, unless there are more Jack’s in the world, which I can’t believe that there are. There’s one person called Jack in our Patreon list and I’m going to read that list now. Our lovely patrons make it possible for us to make transcripts so that our shows are readable and searchable. And we are very grateful to the lovely team at SpeechDocs who do the transcription for us, which we’re very impressed by all the time.
Okay, here we go. I’m not going to be able to do it in one breath because I am too warm. But our top tier patrons are Dustin, Termy, Chris B, Elías, Matt, Whitney, Chris L, Helen, Udo, Jack — maybe the one who is Ben’s fan, we don’t know — PharaohKatt, Lord Mortis, Larry, Kristofer, Andy, James, Nigel, Meredith, Kate, Nasrin, Ayesha, Moe, Steele, Manú, James, Rodger, Rhian, Colleen, Ignacio, Sonic Snejhog, Kevin, Jeff, Andy from Logophilius, Samantha, Stan, Kathy, Rach, Cheyenne, Felicity, Amir, Canny Archer, O Tim, Alyssa and Chris W. And we’re also very grateful to the lovely Kate B, who smashed a one-time donation button on our website, which you can do as well. Go to becauselanguage.com for that. Thank you to all of you.
DANIEL: Our theme music has been written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who’s a member of Ryan Beno and of Didion’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]