Today, we communicate. But once, we didn’t. What had to happen in our brains to make communication possible? And why don’t other animals do it like we do? We talk to Dr Thom Scott-Phillips about his new work in the social and cognitive origins of communication.
And game creator Joshua Blackburn is going to test Daniel’s linguistic prowess with questions from the hottest game on Kickstarter, League of the Lexicon.
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Cats learn the names of their friend cats in their daily lives
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-10261-5
Why Don’t Cats Meow at Each Other? | Cattitude Daily
https://cattitudedaily.com/why-dont-cats-meow-at-each-other/
Evgeniia Diachek, Sarah Brown-Schmidt: The effect of disfluency on memory for what was said.
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2022-82550-001
Parents’ ‘um’s’ and ‘uh’s’ Help Toddlers Learn New Words, Cognitive Scientists Find
https://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=3813
League of the Lexicon | Kickstarter
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/treattrumps/league-of-the-lexicon
Christophe Heintz and Thom Scott-Phillips
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/abs/expression-unleashed-the-evolutionary-cognitive-foundations-of-human-communication/78C4D9A7771514275AF893D668B82EF2
Are We in a Recession? Here’s What the Experts Say
https://www.kiplinger.com/investing/604988/are-we-in-a-recession-heres-what-the-experts-say
Welcome to the ‘Pandemicene’ | The Week
https://theweek.com/covid-19/1014609/welcome-to-the-pandemicene
4 signs you have ‘main character syndrome,’ according to therapists
https://www.businessinsider.in/science/health/news/4-signs-you-have-main-chara cter-syndrome-according-to-therapists/amp_articleshow/88226554.cms
Let’s Vote | Savage Love
https://web.archive.org/web/20201112015503/http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/SavageLove?oid=7446
‘Zoe’ Becomes the World’s First Named Heat Wave
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/zoe-becomes-the-worlds-first-named-heat-wave/
The origin story behind the name Tiffany will make you see it in a whole new light.
https://www.mamamia.com.au/medieval-origins-of-the-name-tiffany/
‘The Tiffany Problem’ is a term coined by the author Jo Walton to describe the tension between historical fact and the popular perception of history. No one would believe that a woman in the Middle Ages could be named Tiffany, yet it was a real medieval name.
https://www.facebook.com/OfficialQI/posts/2038970442784148
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
DANIEL: I keep coming back to this. People say, “Oh, that word’s redundant,” or “Oh, that doesn’t make any sense,” or “You shouldn’t say that.” I’m like: “It has a function. Things do.”
BEN: I agree with you completely, unless we’re talking about the letter C, which can get the fuck out.
DANIEL: If you drop the letter C, everything looks German. Are you okay with that?
BEN: I’m fine with that.
DANIEL: Okay.
DANIEL: That doesn’t bother me at all. Just give C the [ʧ] sound, all right? We don’t even have to evict it. Let’s give it a new job. A better job.
DANIEL: Easy there, tiger. We can’t just “cange” everything.
BEN: Uh, I think we can.
DANIEL: With a K?
BEN: No, no, no. CHANGE would just be C-A-N-G-E.
DANIEL: Hmm, that could be an item for our “Merc” store. Yes, We Kan, with a K.
BEN: [CHUCKLES] Yeah, 100%. Let’s do it.
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME MUSIC]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name’s Daniel Midgley. And with me now: he’s the cohost with the mo-host. [LAUGHTER] It’s Ben Ainslie.
BEN: Now, I have to ask: was that a Daniel special, or was that given to us from the Discord?
DANIEL: No, I made that one up my very own self.
BEN: It had a whiff, it had a whiff of a Danielism.
DANIEL: You thought maybe an AI wrote it or something?
BEN: [LAUGHS] No, I don’t actually think… look, we should probably save that for the show we’re going to do about AI and language, but…
DANIEL: That’s true.
BEN: That seemed a bit too smart for an AI.
DANIEL: Well, it’s all in the delivery, you know.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Hedvig is not with us today. So, Ben and I are coming at you from Noongar country, from Whadjuk Noongar Boodjar. And we pay our respects to the elders past, present, and emerging. For this episode, Ben, we got news, we got words.
BEN: You got all sorts of things. You’re bringing me an interview; you’re bringing me tasty news. You’re bringing me Words of the Week. I’m feeling very spoiled right now. It’s like a linguistic smörgåsbord.
DANIEL: And I lay it at your feet.
DANIEL: I like the idea that somewhere, Hedvig has just shuddered at my pronunciation of a Swedish word, like a goose walked over her grave.
DANIEL: There’s going to be a really good interview in the middle. I’m going to be talking to Dr Thom Scott-Phillips about his new work with Dr Christopher Heintz in a paper called Expression Unleashed.
BEN: Unleashed?
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: What’s a leashed expression? That’s what I want to know.
DANIEL: Okay, well, in the animal world, utterances are kind of instinctual, like a waggle dance or going “rawr”. You know, that’s what you’re tied to. But at some point in our cognitive development, expression became unleashed, and we could move beyond mere noises and get to communication and systems and language. But the question that Dr Scott-Phillips is asking is: what exactly happened in our brains to make that possible? What kinds of cognitive abilities did we need to have before we could look at those people over there and say, “I want to communicate with them, and I think I might be able to communicate with them”?
BEN: Hmm, okay. Well, consider my appetite thoroughly whet, but we should probably go through the news first.
DANIEL: Okay. Well, this first one is fun. Cats, it’s about cats.
BEN: Okay, you’ve piqued my interest.
DANIEL: Cats don’t do language.
DANIEL: This we know, because they’re animals.
BEN: You might think that they’re just adorable little murderbots that only view you as a source of heat or in a pinch, food.
BEN: That is very accurate of my cat, although she is a pretty perfect angel and I love her.
DANIEL: I know. But a new study suggests that these little beasties might be paying attention when we talk to them.
BEN: Doing language adjacent things?
DANIEL: Well, here’s the title of the paper.
BEN: Mhm.
DANIEL: “Cats learn the names of their friend cats in their daily lives.””
BEN: Okay, this is interesting because my understanding, my pop culture knowledge of cats is that they don’t meow at each other.
DANIEL: Right.
BEN: That is a purely human-focused communication strategy.
DANIEL: Only to humans when they want something. And also, kittens use it on mom cats when they want something.
BEN: Yes. So then, what is a cat name then, if they’re meowing at people and not at each other?
DANIEL: They don’t come when you call them. Why do they have names at all?
BEN: Well, I’ve got to be honest, mine does because she is a sweet angel baby. But other than that, you’re right.
DANIEL: Okay. Well, this study by Saho Takagi of Kyoto University and the team, published in Scientific Reports back in April, shows that cats actually remember the names that humans use for other cats.
BEN: Ohhh, okay. So, they remember names, but obviously they can’t use names.
DANIEL: Right. So, it’s the kind of experiment we’ve seen a lot with babies.
BEN: Mhm.
DANIEL: So, you take a cat who lives with people and knows other cats.
BEN: Right. So, a multi-cat household?
DANIEL: Multi-cat household. People are always going around saying the cat’s names throughout the day.
BEN: Mhm.
DANIEL: In the experiment, you get a cat in front of the computer… now I have to… this is adorable! One of the sentences for the paper. One cat completed only the first trial before escaping from the room and climbing out of reach. [LAUGHS]
BEN: Yep, that tracks. That is on brand for catdom.
DANIEL: Stricken from the sample.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Self-stricken! By the sound of it.
DANIEL: Self-excluded. In the experiment, a person saying the name of a cat. And then on the screen, you either show the picture of that cat, or the picture of a totally different cat.
BEN: Right.
DANIEL: And then, you watch and see what the cat does. And they’ve found that if you show the wrong cat, the cat looks at the screen a little longer.
BEN: Right, like, they’re like: “Uhhh.” They do a little… wha?
DANIEL: That’s not the right one.
BEN: That’s not Mittens!
DANIEL: That’s Mr Tiddles! [LAUGHS]
BEN: I know Mittens. She’s a bitch. That doesn’t look like a bitch. I know a bitch when I see one. That’s what I assume most cat internal monologues would be like.
DANIEL: I think you’re probably right. There was another thing that they did. They tested café cats.
BEN: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: Cats in cafés.
BEN: Right, because obviously, they have extensive people and other-cat experience.
DANIEL: Yeah, you got the crew. But then, you’ve also got lots of other people moving around, and maybe names don’t get repeated so much. So, they found that if it’s a house with people and cats, they found an effect that cats recognise the names, seemingly. Whereas with café cats, not so much, the effect disappeared.
BEN: Because it was a little bit more busy.
DANIEL: Yep. And then, they repeated the experiment to see: if cats can remember the names of other cats, do they remember the names of the humans in their family?
BEN: Oh, that’s fun. And?
DANIEL: Mhm. No, not much effect.
BEN: Oh.
DANIEL: When you do it again with human faces, the effect is much weaker. Although if it’s a large family, the effect is a bit stronger.
BEN: Ah.
DANIEL: I think they just ignore human names because humans are basically help.
BEN: It’s so fascinating, isn’t it? Like, I do really like my cat but I am constantly reminded how not hugely intelligent they are as animals.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: We anthropomorphise a lot of intelligence onto them. And yes, they have relatively simple problem-solving abilities, but I really stress relatively simple.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: They can be stumped really easily, especially ginger ones. They’re hell dumb.
DANIEL: So, what this tells us seemingly is that cats are at least minimally aware of speech sounds, and they observe interactions that are happening in the house.
BEN: That makes sense. I mean, there’s enough of a life for them in those settings for that to make a little bit of sense. What I love mostly, Daniel…
DANIEL: Mmm?
BEN: …is that, I guess, there’s like a slight linguistic hook here, but the story behind the story is like: Cats! [LAUGHTER] That’s really what’s going on here. And look, I don’t disagree with your production choice here. Because if I have learned anything from the Because Language Discord, it’s that so many of our listeners have cats. So, so many.
DANIEL: Did you know there’s a cat Caféin Perth?
BEN: I did. I haven’t been to it though.
DANIEL: I haven’t been to it either. I want to go though.
BEN: I don’t love other people’s cats. I like them. I only love my cat.
DANIEL: The cats are hugely popular. And yeah, maybe this does wander a bit. But what I love about this one is that I can just imagine all the researchers going, “Ooh, I want to do the kitty experiment!”
BEN: Yeah, yeah, totally [LAUGHTER]. “Hey, what if we took these baby experiments and we did them with cats?” Genius.
DANIEL: Let’s go on.
BEN: All right, what’s next?
DANIEL: This one’s about UM.
BEN: Um, everyone’s favorite word.
DANIEL: Ummm. It is, we use it a lot.
BEN: Now, are UM’s pan cultural the same way that laughs and nods and shakes and stuff are.
DANIEL: No, there are different ways of doing UM’s. For example, in Japanese, it’s “ano” and “eto”. Ano. It does differ from language to language.
BEN: But would I be right in assuming they have — kind of baby names for MUM and DAD across different languages — they have a kind of vague similarity, like a protracted vowel sound kind of thing?
DANIEL: That’s true. The vowel is the important thing because it’s got to be something you can hold out.
BEN: Yeah, like a “Uhhhh” because you can’t go [t t t t t t t t t].
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Yeah, [b b b b b b] sounds dumb.
BEN: Yes.
DANIEL: Sounds dumb. Why do we say UM or UH?
BEN: Hmmmmm, I don’t know. I mean, the obvious answer is to give us time to think of something to say.
DANIEL: Yep. That’s right.
BEN: Or to stall in some way or another. But is there a more smart-person answer than that?
DANIEL: Well, yeah. The linguistic smart-person answer is that it’s sometimes called a filler, but it’s also called a floor holder.
BEN: A floor ho… Oh, I like that, like you’re on the Roman Senate and you don’t want to cede the podium to someone else, so you’ve just got to keep it going. It’s a filibuster! [CHUCKLES] It’s a linguistic filibuster!
DANIEL: It’s a filler, it’s a filibuster. Well, not really because you’re not trying to end the conversation, you’re just trying to hold your turn so that nobody else jumps in.
BEN: True.
DANIEL: So, that’s one thing, but we have done other episodes on UM. For example, Talk the Talk episode 43. Not with you…
BEN: Yeah. Whoa. Whoa!
DANIEL: …with Stacey Gougoulis. Going back aways here.
BEN: Oh, Jeez Louise, going back, oh, I don’t know, a cheeky 11 years.
DANIEL: I know. We reported on a study that shows that when you say UM with children — they did an experiment that was a lot like the cat one — what they would do is show a screen with a familiar item, and then one with an unfamiliar item that was just made up, and it would have a made-up name like a DAX or a GORP, or something like that.
BEN: Right.
DANIEL: And then, the child would hear a sentence like, “Look at the… UM,” and when they heard the UM, the child would automatically look at the unfamiliar image much more than the familiar one.
BEN: Okay, so they’re just basically hearing a little video with an image in front of them, and when the adult voice is trying to explain a made-up nonsense item, like a GLIPITTOR or whatever…
DANIEL: Yep!
BEN: …They would probably say UM first, because some dumb experimenter has given them a nonsense, shitty thing to do, and it’s like: Ngargh.
DANIEL: If it is the known thing, then you just say the thing. If it’s something…
BEN: Oh, look, it’s a PEN.
DANIEL: Yeah. Easy, right?
BEN: Oh, it’s flibbity-flobbity-flop.
DANIEL: So, when you say UM, the child assumes that the grownup’s brain is working harder, maybe because of some weird object, not a known one.
BEN: Right, okay.
DANIEL: So that was known. We knew that for a long time. Um… Now, I noticed a tweet. It’s the curse of UM. Whenever you talk about UM, you notice yourself saying UM.
BEN: Yes! Yes, absolutely. You cannot help saying UM 40 million times.
DANIEL: So, I noticed a tweet by John Holbein on Twitter. “Remember when your advisor tried to beat those um’s and uh’s out of your oral presentation? Turns out these um’s and uh’s — or disfluencies, as some people call them — may be really useful.” So, this is a paper, The Effect of Disfluency on Memory for What Was Said.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: It’s by Evgeniia Diachek and Sarah Brown-Schmidt, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, Learning, Memory, and Cognition.
BEN: I’m guessing straight out of the gate, that UM’s give people time to remember things.
DANIEL: It does give you time to remember things. It also serves as a kind of attentional focus. It’s a cue to say…
BEN: Ah, it’s emphasis!
DANIEL: Yeah, it’s an emphasis.
BEN: Yeah, right!
DANIEL: Something important is coming up.
BEN: That actually makes a lot of sense! Right? Because a person wants to just sort of pause and think about it and make sure they get the important stuff right.
DANIEL: Yep, that’s right.
BEN: Ah, that’s really fascinating.
DANIEL: So here’s how the experiment went. In phase one, they listened to 80 sentences, and there would be sometimes a fluent sentence, like “My sister had a skiing accident, and she broke her leg”. But sometimes you’d have fillers, pauses, or repetitions. Like, “My sister had a skiing accident, and she broke her — pause — leg,” or “She broke her, um, leg,” or, “She broke her… her leg.”
BEN: Right? Like a little repetition or something like that, okay.
DANIEL: All kinds of things. So, you heard 80 of those. But then phase two, you got two words on the screen. And you had to say which one was old that you’ve already heard in those last 80 sentences, and which one is new?
BEN: Oh, okay, so try and find the unfamiliar word kind of thing.
DANIEL: Yeah, can you remember which one you’ve already listened to?
BEN: 80 sentences is a lot!
DANIEL: It is.
BEN: That’d be, I don’t know what, like 1000 words or something?
DANIEL: That’s a lot, but it’s always the last one in the sentence, like in this case, LEG.
BEN: Oh, okay. Right, right, right.
DANIEL: Now, what they found was that when there was an UM, and to a lesser extent, when there were pauses and repetitions, people were better at remembering, “Oh, yeah, I’ve heard that one before.”
BEN: Hmm. Okay. Wow.
DANIEL: So, UM does a lot of things here. It’s a traffic director. It’s a floor holder. It helps to guide interpretation for known and unknown objects, but also here, helps with memory.
BEN: I can’t wait for the snooty… like the leading person said, the person you quoted from Twitter, I can’t wait for snooty professors or speech and drama people or whatever to go, “Okay. Well, I begrudgingly admit that pausing is okay [LAUGHTER] but I will go to my death, to my grave before I accept UM.”
DANIEL: “It may help you remember stuff, but you still sound like an idiot.”
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: The other thing that popped up in that tweet thread was something by Professor Joe Arciuli of Flinders University, who got people to come into the lab and start telling lies, right? Things that they didn’t agree with.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Researchers are so silly, aren’t they?
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: No word on whether they’re going to get cats to lie in the lab.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’ll be Japan’s next step. Effort.
DANIEL: Yeah, so it seems that people say UM more when they’re telling the truth and less when they’re lying.
BEN: That’s… interesting.
DANIEL: Hmm.
BEN: Perhaps because they’re trying to pass… kind of thing, they’re trying to pass as truthful.
DANIEL: Got to be smooth. Got to be smooth.
BEN: Yeah, yeah. “Play it cool, Ben. Play it cool!”
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] There was no effect for LIKE. People said LIKE about the same. But Professor Arciuli thinks that maybe UM, like you say, isn’t just a filler. It may be functioning like a word, like a kind of interjection.
BEN: Mmm.
DANIEL: And that’s how we use it on the net, like “Um, I think you made a mistake there.”
BEN: Yeah, it’s true. Yeah. When we write it, it’s very deliberate, isn’t it?
DANIEL: Yep, it is.
BEN: Because it’s not really a filler.
DANIEL: Because it’s not a filler. Well, sometimes it is. But sometimes it’s a discourse-pragmatic particle, which means that we use it to do certain jobs. And whether it’s intentional or not, we are doing a lot of calculation when we say it and when we hear it. There’s a lot going on there under the surface for this seemingly meaningless word. Okay, there’s a new game out there. A new linguistic game, Ben. You know how much we love games?
BEN: We do. To this day, our roleplay is one of my favorite episodes we’ve ever done.
DANIEL: And our longest.
BEN: Yeah. Well, that’s roleplay.
DANIEL: Well, I had a chat with a game creator, Joshua Blackburn, of Two Brothers Games. He’s got a new game out on Kickstarter. Although by the time you hear this, it might not be on Kickstarter anymore. But it’s called League of the Lexicon. And I started off by asking him how it was all going?
JOSHUA BLACKBURN: It is going very well. It is very exciting at the moment to see something that you’ve worked on for such a long time actually really happening, and happening in quite big style.
DANIEL: That is fantastic. So look, what is this game? Tell me a little bit about it.
JOSHUA: So. the game is called League of the Lexicon. It actually started because I’ve been trying to find a game about words — not like Scrabble or a Bananagrams, but a game that was about words — to play with my two boys. And I just couldn’t really find anything. This was very much a product of lockdown. I thought, “You know what? I’m just going to go ahead and make it.” We started working on it. I had a team of writers and researchers and designers, and the whole thing just rather got out of hand. [CHUCKLES] And about 18 months later, we’re looking at this beautiful game with 2,000 questions. Contributions from amazing lexicographers and linguists around the world, including your good self who I contacted…
DANIEL: Yes.
JOSHUA: …when we were developing questions for the game. And it’s got people super excited.
DANIEL: It’s got a lot of talent behind it. I’ve enjoyed writing… In fact, you asked me for, like, a couple of questions, but I started just writing more and more because I enjoyed just coming up with them. And I can’t wait to see what other linguists and lexicographers have come up with themselves.
JOSHUA: Well, so it’s interesting you say that you couldn’t stop writing because that was really what ended up happening with quite a lot of people.
DANIEL: Oh, okay!
JOSHUA: I would reach out and say, “Can you write us one question?” And then like 15 questions later, they’d say, “I’ve got to stop now.”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
JOSHUA: And we were really lucky. We have dictionary editors, authors, Michael Rosen, former children’s laureate, Pip Williams, incredible writer. I mean the list is just kind of baffling, how many people we’ve got. But most exciting, we got questions from Jonathon Green and Gaston Dorren. And Jonathon is known as the king of slang. He is like one of the world authorities on slang. In fact, I think you’ve spoken to him.
DANIEL: Yep, just a couple of episodes ago. Yeah, he’s great.
JOSHUA: And Gaston is a published author and polyglot and journalist who’s written about languages around the world.
DANIEL: I see some of our old pals from the show as well. Kory Stamper. I’m seeing Nicole Holliday. I’m seeing Mignon Fogarty, known as Grammar Girl. There’s a lot of people here!
JOSHUA: It really is the great and the good of words and language. What we were trying to do was really knock it out of the park, and we wanted a game that was made by word lovers for word lovers.
DANIEL: Yeah.
JOSHUA: And that was one of the reasons why so many people contributed because they were excited about what we were trying to do and could feel that this is a bit different.
DANIEL: Yeah. I notice also, you mentioned Jonathan Green as a contributor, but he also authored singlehandedly an entire, what 500 question expansion set?
JOSHUA: You can see what I mean when I say things got rather out of hand. [CHUCKLES] So, we have the core game that has got 2,000 questions. And we were talking with Jonathon, talking about slang and thinking, “You know what? There’s an expansion pack here.” And we pitched him the idea of doing a special League of the Lexicon Slang Edition to go alongside the main game. And fool that he is, he said, “Yeah, okay.” So, he’s been writing the questions for the slang expansion pack. Gaston has written 500 questions for a global expansion pack that’s all about languages around the world. It really is for people who love words.
DANIEL: Amazing.
JOSHUA: And you know this better than anyone, but the subject is so broad and so exciting and so endlessly fascinating that you can just keep coming up with brilliant questions that people love to grapple with.
DANIEL: Yep. 400 shows later, and we’re still doing what we do. So, you never run out of material.
JOSHUA: Well, that is exactly why it’s so exciting. And one of the things that we would like to do from this is a kid’s expansion pack.
DANIEL: Ah, okay.
JOSHUA: Because that was actually what the genesis of this whole thing was. I was trying to get my two boys inspired by words and language. Not in a traditional English-subject school-room kind of a way, but just intrigued by how wonderful language is, how mysterious it is, how curious the stories are, how we take certain words for granted. And then, you dig underneath and there’s some amazing story about why it is what it is.
DANIEL: Hmm.
JOSHUA: And so that was always really what I wanted to do, was to inspire people with how rich this subject is.
DANIEL: You’ve been ripping it up on Kickstarter, having reached your target many times over.
JOSHUA: Yeah. We launched, gosh, it’s literally just over a week ago, and Kickstarter is a strange beast. Honestly, you never know how it’s going to go. [CHUCKLES] And privately, I was just like, “Well, you know what? If we make 50,000 pounds, I’ll be thrilled.” We have been absolutely kicking ass. [LAUGHTER] And we just went over 100,000 pounds yesterday.
DANIEL: Nice.
JOSHUA: And it’s got to 115,000 pounds today. I think that what is happening… and this was always how I felt about it as a gut feeling. I think that there is a real audience of people who love words, who love language, and with whom this game really resonates. They get it. They’re just like “Ooh, can’t wait to get this. Can’t wait to start playing it. It sounds intriguing.” And a lot of people are getting in touch saying, “I bought one for myself and I bought one for my mum, because I know she’ll love it.”
DANIEL: Yep, I think a lot of people will love this game. But just in case anyone isn’t sure, I believe you have brought some questions for me. [LAUGHS] I wonder how I’ll do?
JOSHUA: You know what? I think you’ll do just great. How many shows have you done?
DANIEL: About 350 of Talk the Talk and then 50 of Because Language. So, we’re up there.
JOSHUA: I believe you should be well equipped.
DANIEL: Oh ho ho, okay.
JOSHUA: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Well, I’ll test my mettle with the audience. So, here we go. I’m ready.
JOSHUA: Okay, you’re ready. I’ll say that the question categories, there are five question categories. Lexicon Master is all about synonyms and antonyms and categories. Meaning and More is about definitions. Then, you’ve got Usage, you’ve got Etymology, and you’ve got Language Trivia.
DANIEL: Okay.
JOSHUA: So, I’ve come up with five questions that draw on each one of these sections.
DANIEL: Okay, here we go. [CHUCKLES] I’m ready.
JOSHUA: Let’s kick off with something nice and easy.
DANIEL: Okay.
JOSHUA: Here is a spelling bee question for you. I don’t know how you are with your spelling.
DANIEL: I have super spelling. It’s one of my superpowers.
JOSHUA: Can you spell ISOSCELES, as in “I do like an isosceles triangle”?
DANIEL: I do like an isosceles triangle: I-S-O-S-C-E-L-E-S, ISOSCELES.
JOSHUA: And you get a mark.
[DING]
DANIEL: Ah, phew.
JOSHUA: I told you I’d ease you into it. I told you it wouldn’t be too difficult.
DANIEL: That was an easy one, okay.
JOSHUA: Okay then.
DANIEL: Here we go. What category is next?
JOSHUA: This is usage.
DANIEL: Okay.
JOSHUA: Which is an incorrect plural?
DANIEL: Okay.
JOSHUA: SQUID, plural of squid. MOOSE, plural of moose. MONGOOSE, plural of mongoose, or SHEEP plural of sheep. Which is an incorrect plural?
DANIEL: Leaving aside the definition of what “incorrect” is, I’m thinking that mongoose… If there’s a mongoose, and then you’ve got another mongoose, I would say you probably have two mongooses, not two mongoose.
JOSHUA: You’re doing well here.
[DING]
DANIEL: Wow.
JOSHUA: You’re absolutely… you’re knocking these out of the park.
DANIEL: Okay, okay.
JOSHUA: Right. Okay then. I think we should try etymology.
DANIEL: Oh, I love this one.
JOSHUA: I must say I love the etymology questions.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] Yeah.
JOSHUA: Which one of these foods is not named after a person?
DANIEL: Ah, okay. [LAUGHS] Right, okay.
JOSHUA: Salisbury steak, German chocolate cake. Bakewell tart, or pavlova?
DANIEL: Okay, well, I know Pavlova is named after someone. But wait, there’s a possibility that German chocolate cake might be named after someone?? Salisbury steak. I thought Salisbury steak was named after the place! Argh, okay. This feels like a trap, but I’m going fall into it.
JOSHUA: Only a fiend would put something like that in a question to trap people.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] I think, knowing what I know of your fiendishness, which is very little…
JOSHUA: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: …I’m thinking German chocolate cake is not named after a person.
JOSHUA: Argh, do you hear that?
DANIEL: Mm?.
JOSHUA: That is the that is the sound of you plummeting into a trap.
[BUZZ]
DANIEL: Argh.
JOSHUA: I’m afraid that is you crashing into the huge hole I dug for you.
DANIEL: So, it’s named after a person??
JOSHUA: It is named after Samuel German.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Did not know that.
JOSHUA: Salisbury steak is named after James Salisbury.
DANIEL: Ah.
JOSHUA: You correctly identified pavlova as Anna Pavlova.
DANIEL: Yeah.
JOSHUA: But the answer is Bakewell tart.
DANIEL: Ahh.
JOSHUA: Which is a very British pudding named after the town of Bakewell, not a person.
DANIEL: I would have thought that that was a company that made things and they decided to call themselves Bakewell. Okay, all right. Okay.
JOSHUA: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Time for me to pick myself up and go to our fourth question. What’s the category for this one?
JOSHUA: This is a definitions one.
DANIEL: Okay.
JOSHUA: Where would you find grundlecharms, spangleblisters, and gooblies? Would you find them as a games arcade, in a Harry Potter book, in Irish folk stories, or in a man’s underwear?
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] No, no, no, no, no. This can’t be. Everyone knows that it’s always C. If you don’t know, the answer is always C.
JOSHUA: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: So, I’m going for Irish folklore.
JOSHUA: I’m afraid it’s the gentleman’s underwear.
[BUZZ]
DANIEL: No! What are these things?
JOSHUA: They’re all slang words for testicles.
DANIEL: Of course.
JOSHUA: And the answer I’m reading here offers a few other slang terms for testicles…
DANIEL: I’m ready.
JOSHUA: …including goolies, tallywags, spermaria, chicken tenders, knobberries, Bojangles, yarbles, teabags, and happy sacks.
DANIEL: If you’d said yarbles, teabags, and goolies, I would have gotten it right off.
JOSHUA: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Dang, that’s a well-written question. All right, I have met my defeat at the hands of the League of the Lexicon. [LAUGHS] This is the kind of thing that I could imagine sitting around with people and just trying these out.
JOSHUA: There is a whole kind of set of rules about how to play the game and we’ve got these beautifully illustrated cards and you earn artifacts for correct answers. But honestly, I suspect most people will play this just by pulling a card out of the box, and just asking each other questions.
DANIEL: Which would not be a terrible use of an evening’s time, to be honest.
JOSHUA: No, no, it will be absolutely great. And there are so many questions. There’s such a crazy amount of research that’s gone into them, that I think it will keep people happy for a long time.
DANIEL: And it is a really beautiful set. I mean, you look at the artwork and the overall packaging, and it’s just very nice. Something that you’d be proud to have on the mantelpiece. Or next to your goolies, say.
JOSHUA: Don’t put it there. [CHUCKLES] I’m thrilled that you say that. We put a lot of effort into the design to create something that really felt special, as well as having the intellectual substance to it as well.
DANIEL: Well, Joshua, thanks for hanging out with me and teasing my brain with some linguistic questions. So if people want to back the Kickstarter, how do they do it?
JOSHUA: It is still live and kicking on Kickstarter. The campaign is running for about another 10 days. There are about seven or eight different pledge levels that people could support the campaign with. And they should just go to kickstarter.com and search for League of the Lexicon, and it will come up very quick.
DANIEL: What if it’s after the 10 days? Is it gone forever?
JOSHUA: I very much hope not. The plan is to have a kickass Kickstarter, and that seems to be shaping up well. And then, to get it into retail.
DANIEL: There we go.
JOSHUA: But I don’t know what the path of retail will be at the moment, but I think that there is a strong story for us to be telling potential retailers about why this is a really cool game that they want in their shops.
DANIEL: Well, it looks like a lot of fun, and I’ve had a lot of fun talking with you. Joshua Blackburn of Two Brothers Games and creator of League of the Lexicon. Thanks so much for hanging out with me and chatting today.
JOSHUA: Thank you so much. It’s been a lot of fun.
DANIEL: This episode of Because Language is sponsored not only by our fantastic patrons, but also by the Oxford English Dictionary, the definitive record of the English language.
BEN: The thinking man, woman’s, and they’s dictionary.
DANIEL: So, this is a game we call “Yeah Nah or Nah Yeah”. And in it, I give you two words. You have to tell me if the similarity between them is real or just coincidental. Our answers will come from the Oxford English Dictionary. Are you ready, Ben?
BEN: Yeah Nah or Nah Yeah, let’s do it.
DANIEL: Here are the two words: TORSO and THORAX.
BEN: Ooh.
DANIEL: You must admit, they sound pretty similar.
BEN: This is a tricky one because they’re about the same thing.
DANIEL: They are, aren’t they?
BEN: Yes.
DANIEL: I will emphasise that in this game, I did not go to a list of, “You won’t believe that these words are or slash are not…”
BEN: Yeah. You are not Buzzfeed listicling.
DANIEL: No, I literally wondered about this. As I go through my day, I think, “Oh, shoot,” and then I look it up and…
BEN: I don’t know if that’s better or worse, to be honest, of the admittance of like, “I don’t go to a Buzzfeed listicle. I’m a *walking() Buzzfeed listicle.”
DANIEL: No… [CHUCKLES] yes, I am.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I have my list. Icle.
BEN: Okay, um.
DANIEL: Sounds kind of the same. It’s about the same…
BEN: Thorax, torso.
DANIEL: What is a torso?
BEN: Look, I don’t know. For the sake of the game, I do not avail myself of his, hers, and their’s best dictionary. So, I’m punting here. I’m taking a little bit of a rogue kick. The torso is everything from the shoulders to the hips?
DANIEL: Yep. Okay.
BEN: It’s the not-limbs, right?
DANIEL: Not-head either.
BEN: Yeah. Not the ~protuberances~. The thorax, I’m going to guess, is specifically the ribcage to the shoulders. Right? So, not your gut or your viscera, just the bony upper half of the torso, for lack of a better term.
DANIEL: Torso minus abdomen equals thorax.
BEN: That’s what I’m thinking in the body geography of words. Was I close?
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s right. Now that we’ve mapped that out, do you think that these words come from the same place, or is the relationship between them merely coincidental?
BEN: Okay, putting my thinking hat on. Gut instinct says no.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Because it sounds like one of those funny words that are basically the same but came from completely different areas. But I’m wondering if… so, here’s what I’m thinking. The reason I think no is because the -AX at the end of THORAX makes it sound like it’s from a different thing than the TORSO, like one might be Greek and one might be Latin or something like that. But I do remember from previous shows, that lots of the fancy-pants words that we use for things have just had like ugly bits of Latin and Greek stuck on them at some stage 200 years ago, because like Minor Lord Flopoopidah was like, “~I need it to sound more special.~” So, it’s instead of ANTIPODEAN it’s going to be OCTOPODES or something stupid like that.
DANIEL: They did that.
BEN: So, I’m wondering if it is actually the same, but it sounds a bit different because someone tried to gummy, spackle on a dumb suffix from a different language.
DANIEL: And tried to re-latinise it. Yes.
BEN: Yes, Okay. Final answer, I’m going to go same route, and someone did some dumb shit to make it sound a bit different.
DANIEL: Okay, so they are related, but somebody tried to re-latinise THORAX.
BEN: Something like that. I should say, I should have answered that properly in the spirit of the game. Nah, yeah, but someone did some dumb shit.
DANIEL: All right, so you think they’re related. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, they are not related at all!
BEN: Ah! I was so reliant on people’s dumb shit getting me through on that one. So then, school us. Where did they come from?
DANIEL: TORSO comes from the Italian word ‘torso’ and originally it meant the stalk of a plant, like the stump of a cabbage or an apple core or something like that.
BEN: Makes sense.
DANIEL: Later on, it meant the trunk of a statue. Comes from Latin THYRSUS which is stalk or stem. And THORAX is pretty much just Latin ‘thorax’ which comes from Greek ‘thorax’, which means a breastplate, also your chest.
BEN: Okay, okay.
DANIEL: The similarity is merely coincidental. They are not related.
BEN: Hey, if TORSO can mean apple core, is that what we get TORUS from? That, like…
DANIEL: That tube thing?
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Let’s check it out in the old Oxford English Dictionary, the dictionary of all good people.
BEN: Thank goodness, we have such a dependable dictionary of record at our disposal.
DANIEL: Indeed. No, it appears to be Latin ‘torus’, a swelling or a bulge or a knot.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: So, different again. Three different ones. Wow.
BEN: And we got three different ones that all sound like they should be related. TORSO, TORUS, and THORAX have fuck-all to do with each other. You heard it here first folks.
DANIEL: From the Oxford English Dictionary, the definitive record of the English language. Thanks to Oxford for sponsoring the show.
BEN: And as always, I feel like we need to round out this section by reminding Oxford: Anytime you want, I’ll kill someone for you. I’ll do it.
DANIEL: Don’t go stabbing people, don’t go stab…
BEN: I will murder.
DANIEL: He’s referring to other dictionaries, of course. He’s…
BEN: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Not their employees or fans.
DANIEL: Can I just remind us that threats against dictionary makers is a nontrivial threat now?
BEN: Okay. Yeah, actually, that’s a good point. Ben fucked up on that one. Sorry, folks. No stabby-stabby.
DANIEL: How about Ben will put a knife through any dictionary that you want [BEN CHUCKLES] that isn’t Oxford?
BEN: I don’t know. That actually sounds quite hard now that I think about it, like getting a knife all the way through? Because they’re quite big. [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: Even if you can… [LAUGHS]
BEN: And if I was going to work my knife through like a big thick tome, surely a Bible or something would be the better option.
DANIEL: Ahh, that’s a good point. Why don’t you make it, like, one of the small dictionaries for students?
BEN: Oh, yeah. Okay. Aw, I don’t know if the teacher in me can bring myself to ruin student resources.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: You know what? Controversial take, for a show on the internet. Maybe I should just not stab anything.
DANIEL: That’s a good idea. Maybe don’t stab people or books or things.
BEN: Okay. I’ll sit on that. I’ll sit with that.
DANIEL: We’ll see. We’ll check it out.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Okay.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: I’m talking to Dr Thom Scott-Phillips of Central Europe University. He’s the author of Speaking Our Minds, and along with Christoph Heintz, the coauthor of a new paper, Expression unleashed: the evolutionary and cognitive foundations of human communication, soon to be published in behavioural and Brain Functions. Tom, thanks for having a chat with me today.
THOM SCOTT-PHILLIPS: No problem. My pleasure.
DANIEL: There’s a question that I want to ask, and it’s a question I ask everybody. What do you think is something that’s really cool about language? What gets you excited about language?
THOM: Oh, wow!
DANIEL: Yeah, I know!
THOM: Wow, big question. Maybe this is a moment right at the beginning, to start with a confession almost, something I tweeted about a few months ago. So in some ways, I’m a poor linguist. My interest and fascination with language doesn’t come from, I think, where it comes from for many people, which is sort of an inherent fascination with languagES and all the interesting, detailed variations and amazing ways that people use language. It comes more from a fascination with why humans are the way they are, in general. Why is human…? What on earth is it that’s going on around me? Like, why is the world the way it is? And language is clearly so central to that story. That’s how I’ve ended up being a linguist and working on the evolutionary origins of language. So, when you say what’s cool, I think… I mean… maybe it’s a bad answer, but it’s the whole thing. It’s the pivotal role that it plays in making us human.
DANIEL: It sounds like the cool thing about language is that we even do it at all.
THOM: Absolutely, yeah. It’s so distinctive, and I should add, linguists of many different stripes would agree that… do agree that it’s clearly different to what other communication systems or even… I mean, if you’re a generativist, maybe you don’t say it’s a communication system first, but whatever it is, it’s clearly different to what we see in other species and pivotal, as I said, to what makes us human.
DANIEL: Well, I like your answer, because by reading through your work, I’ve gotten an idea of: it’s not just language that’s the thing, it’s how we got here.
THOM: Yes.
DANIEL: And what the situation was that led up to language. Like, we just had an interview a little while ago with Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater. It was about their book, The Language Game, where they described language as a bunch of games of charades.
THOM: Yes. I listen to the show, and I enjoyed it very much. Yeah. [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: Okay, cool. But you’re not talking about the game of charades. You’re talking about how we got face to face to even be in a game in the first place.
THOM: Absolutely. Yeah, that is a question that has framed the large chunk of my intellectual work or scientific work. It’s worth saying these papers are in behavioural and Brain Sciences — and for listeners that don’t know — that journal where they publish these large integrative papers, and then there are commentaries, up to 20 or more commentaries from other people in the field, and then a reply from the authors and we’re just putting the final touches to our reply at the moment. One of the commentaries is from Nick Chater and Morten Christiansen.
DANIEL: Oh, okay!
THOM: And they make the point in their commentary: “Going from where Heintz and Scott-Phillips have put us, then you’ve got this game of charades,” and in our reply, we say we completely agree. In some ways, you can divide the question of how language gets to be the way it is in two parts. One, how and why did humans even become language ready, as it were? And that’s the question that this new paper is most focused on. And then, Nick and Morten are asking the question, once they’re language ready, how do they build languages? And we agree with the spirit of the answer they give.
DANIEL: Okay. Okay, I think I’m getting a picture of how things are fitting together. Okay, now, the paper’s called Expression unleashed. So, I want to start with leashed expression. Like at some point, maybe there were pre-humans or other animals. We could do stuff, we could express ourselves, they could express themselves, but it was bound in some way. How was expression leashed for some animals or even maybe even for us a long time ago?
THOM: I think expression is leashed all over the natural world. The idea of leashed expression is another way of framing what is — or even arguably THE — classic problem in animal signaling theory. That classic problem is, well, what keeps things stable? So, organisms can produce behaviours that are designed to affect the behaviour or the minds of other organisms.
But then, if that’s not good, if stimulating those responses turns out not to be fitness enhancing for the audience, then they’ll evolve capacities to ignore it, or even to avoid it or whatever. So, then the whole system collapses. So in animal signalling theory, the classic question is: well, why is there communication at all? How can it be stable? There’s very large literature developing answers empirical, theoretical to that question. And expression leashed is, essentially, another way of saying that. How do you… the key thing about communication in the natural world is even that it exists at all. And the distinctive thing about humans is… well, it’s not just that it exists. In most other species, it’s a narrow domain. In this domain, it can be stable because the interest is sufficiently aligned between communicators and audiences.
But in humans, it’s not restricted to any particular domain. It’s anything. That is a remarkable fact about human communication, and that we think is really the starting point for explaining why human communication is the way it is.
DANIEL: Now, you’ve mentioned just now that other animals try to… what did you say? They try to influence the behaviour of other animals.
THOM: I said very openly, influence the behaviour or minds of other organisms, super open characterisation.
DANIEL: Okay. Would one difference in humans that other animals tried to influence behaviour, but we try to influence mental states? Like I’m actually trying to put something in your mind that wasn’t there before?
THOM: That’s a great question. I’m of the view that it’s certainly the case in humans. The immediate goal is minds and not behaviour. Obviously, changing minds has knock-on effects on behaviour.
DANIEL: Okay.
Thom. But the immediate goal is minds, and I’ll describe one experiment in a moment that I think reveals that in quite a clean way.
DANIEL: Okay.
THOM: Whether that’s also true for other species is an open empirical question, and I have no strong views. I’m sure that in some cases, in fact, I’m quite persuaded in a lot of great deep interaction… well, yeah, it’s an open empirical question actually, and I don’t have a strong view. In humans, a really revealing experiment done in Michael Tomasello’s lab, the one he ran in Leipzig for 20 years, led by then, I think she was a PhD student, Gerlind Grosse. The title of the paper is very clean: Infants Communicate in Order to be Understood. And what they do is they set up a situation where the infant wants an object that’s behind the adult that they’re talking to. And they say, “I want the ball. I want the ball.” And then, the adult says, “Oh, you want the car.” So, they deliberately misunderstand the child. And they reach for the car, but then accidentally with their elbow or whatever, they knock the ball, and the child gets the ball.
DANIEL: Okay.
THOM: So, the child’s behavioural goal, they wanted the ball, they got the ball, right?
DANIEL: Yeah.
THOM: The question is: does the child complain?
DANIEL: That should be enough, right? I mean, that should do it.
THOM: If they’re interested in behaviour and outcomes, that should be enough. But they complain. They kick up a fuss, they get the ball, but they’re like, “No! But I wanted… You don’t understand.” [CHUCKLES] and in various ways, even 18-month-olds — I think it’s between 15 and 18, I’m not certain — that they tested, they complain because they were misunderstood.
DANIEL: They did want the ball, but they wanted to be understood that.
THOM: Well, first and foremost, they wanted the adult to understand that they wanted the ball. And then, the ball comes by virtue of fact.
DANIEL: Let’s just say there were a couple of animals having this conversation, and I think that I want to be a little bit aggressive. So, I bare my teeth, and I go, “Rawr.”
THOM: Yep.
DANIEL: I’m trying to influence your behaviour to stay away from me or to run away, I want you to do something. It’s possible that I want to influence your mental state. I want you to feel… maybe I want to induce some kind of fear response. But this is really more common in humans, where I want to maybe convince you of something, and it doesn’t have to be about biting or being afraid. It could be about French poetry, or it could be about just really anything. That’s how the expression is unleashed.
THOM: Yeah, so behaviours of all sorts, such as the one you just described, all over the animal kingdom and natural world in general, arguably. One very interesting thing about humans is, we also have spontaneous expressions of emotion, for instance, laughter, anger even, and arguably people in that literature would distinguish spontaneous and volitional behaviours. And we have these spontaneous behaviours. Humans, they’re so creative in their use of communication, that they take those spontaneous behaviours, and they perform them in a volitional way sometimes.
DANIEL: Oh, right. Okay.
THOM: So, I might scream, not because I’m actually scared, but in order to express the idea of the emotion of being scared.
DANIEL: So, if I were an animal, I’d be screaming, I’d be giving some kind of scream response. But if I’m a human and I’m screaming, then what I’m kind of doing is saying, “Hey, look, you. I’m trying to tell you something,” which is not what the animal does by screaming.
THOM: Well, it could be either. Human do scream in a spontaneous way that is, to use a simple term, animal-like. But they also, in addition, take that and impersonate, as it were, in order to echo the ideas that are associated with being scared or whatever it might be.
DANIEL: I think of language — and a lot of linguists think of language — as social behaviour. It arose because we were in social groups, and we needed to do social things. We needed to join up our intention, because multiple people can do stuff that one person can’t do. So I want to know about what some of the preconditions were to getting us in that social situation where then communication could happen. What were some of those?
THOM: Yeah, so I think in some ways, the question you’re asking is the big question. What are the ecological conditions that are particular to humans and not other species that might cause the selection of whatever cognitive capacities is that makes humans language ready? What we’ve argued — and really I’ve been much persuaded by my coauthor, Christoph Heintz here — is that what we call a partner choice social ecology is especially important. Partner choice is a very broad notion.
DANIEL: Partner choice social ecology.
THOM: Partner choice, yeah. Partner choice means that there’s the potential for win-win interaction, and also for win-lose and lose-win interactions as well. So, you have to be vigilant about who you interact with. But if you do interact with the right people, and you collaborate in joint activities, you have very large potential gains.
DANIEL: True.
THOM: Yeah. And then, if you have a species occupying that niche already, has social cognitive capacities, of some degree of sophistication… sophistication is not really a word I like talking about evolution because it sounds like… makes evolution sound like a ladder, which it’s not.
DANIEL: Yeah.
THOM: But it is the case that great apes in particular, that social cognition is of a particularly different kinds to other species. So, you have a species that is alert to the mental states of others in its group, alert to their possible intentions, good and bad, want to influence others’ minds and so on.
And then, you put them in a situation where… in the fission-fusion group, so people can come and go quite a lot. There’s high potential gains to win-win, but also if you end up alone, many potential costs. It gets quite technical, but what we argue is that in that ecology, you can get a gradual evolution of the cognitive capacities that enable what we call ostensive communication, which I think is where maybe where the questions are going to go in a moment. And ostensive communication is for us what is most distinctive about humans, and what enables not just language but all the other sorts of communication we’ve been talking about.
DANIEL: So, you’re saying the first of all, we’re in a situation where mixing it up, getting together with other humans, other people, other beings is mutually advantageous… or maybe just advantageous in some way.
THOM: Hmm, can be.
DANIEL: Okay, let’s say that that’s the case. I’ve got other people around me, but we’re not really communicating yet. What’s next?
THOM: Right. What you want to do next is you want to provide to others around you, credible evidence that some possible activity is indeed win-win. They should join in with you.
DANIEL: Okay.
THOM: Can become adapted to show your intentions, that this is what I want to do. It also simultaneously becomes adaptive in that situation to be cautious, to be vigilant about what others are doing. So yeah, maybe I can join in with them, but they might be trying to manip… to enter into a win-lose situation. So, I don’t want to do that. So, you have this social vigilance, you have reputation management, you have these various cognitive capacities that allow us to navigate social world.
DANIEL: So, it sounds like so far, we’ve got: okay, I’m in a group of people, but we’re not communicating yet, but we do have a few things. We have the belief that we can help each other, and that we won’t hurt each other. We are also being a little bit careful in case somebody is a bad actor. We won’t deal with them, but we’ll deal with people who have good reputations. So, there’s trust and reputation and vigilance. Okay, good. And then, I think the lightning in the bottle is we have to have a way of communicating intention. Not just having intentions, not just wanting stuff, but being able to communicate our intentions, being able to say to someone, “When I do this thing, I’m doing it because I want you to know that thing.”
THOM: Yes, so I know this is where we start getting into pragmatics, the philosophy of language. Paul Grice, who I guess a lot of your listeners will have heard of. So, what you get is a situation where, yeah, it becomes adaptive to show your intentions. And if you look at other great ape species — chimpanzees in particular, because they’ve been studied in most detail — I’m quite persuaded that they show intentions to their conspecifics, to other chimpanzees. I want to be groomed, and they behave in ways that reveal that intention to be groomed.
DANIEL: I was really surprised by the result that you mentioned in the paper of the box test.
THOM: Ah, yes.
DANIEL: Where you have a box, and there’s a treat in one of the boxes, but the animal doesn’t know which one, and then I point to one of the boxes. Now, will the animal be able to figure it out, which one? Because I’m pointing to the one that the treat is in, and I’ll do it every time. And they just think… you say in the paper that most animals just do no better than random chance! That is surprising to me.
THOM: Yeah, it’s amazing. Okay, so it’s called the object choice task and it’s quite simple. You could do versions where you show that… you tip the bins or the boxes so you can visibly see in them, and then chimpanzees will go to the box with the food in it, right? But if instead of tipping them, you point to the one with the food in it, as you say, they tend to behave at chance. The literature is a little bit more complicated than that, and attention seems to play quite an important role. And you can get… there’s a lot of detail to be got there. But inculturation is also important. Chimpanzees who have spent a lot of time with humans tend to perform better than those that haven’t. But unenculturated chimpanzees tend to perform a chance, yeah.
DANIEL: And dogs?
THOM: Dogs are fine. Dogs understand. And the comparison between dogs and chimps is very… I think that’s really revealing. To see why we need to go back to Grice. So, you can show intentions. I want to be groomed and you show your back. I want to have sex, you show your erect penis. Now, if you’re a chimpanzee, that’s fine, fine, fine. What humans do is they don’t show that they want to be groomed. They show that they want you to understand that they want to be groomed. So, we go back to that idea of wanting to be understood. So, we have an informative intent and I show you my informative intent. Not the content of the informative intention, not I want to be groomed, but my intention that you believe that I want to be groomed. That’s what we show in humans. And that’s a point that Paul Grice made a long time ago, seminal contribution to the philosophy of language, in a paper called Meaning, most famously.
So, we drive attention to our own informative intentions, and pointing is the most simple way of doing it. And it’s so simple that humans do it so spontaneously, that they find it baffling that other species don’t. But it is still a case where it’s just an arm, just an outstretched arm. Who cares about an outstretched arm? The reason, humans, we spontaneously pick up on it as an expression of informative intention, but other species not so much.
DANIEL: And if I could just dig into that a little bit, so it sounds like an animal that doesn’t have contact with humans, doesn’t get the box test. They won’t get the treat better than random chance. Whereas maybe a dog or a chimp who has been hanging out with humans, they will get it. And I’m guessing, according to what we’ve said already, it’s because they exist in a relationship with us where they have a belief that we could benefit them and so, they’re looking for cues to that benefit.
THOM: Excellent. Yes.
DANIEL: And also, they’ve figured out that we give off intentional signals, whereas for other animals that just wouldn’t be on their radar at all.
THOM: Yes.
DANIEL: They wouldn’t have those beliefs. And so, they would miss the cue.
THOM: Yes, so it’s about attention manipulation, in essence. That’s the essential thing here. My arm reaches out all the time, just going about the world but sometimes it reaches out in a particular way that seems to grab attention. And what’s distinctive, the key thing about ostensive communication — and something humans do so spontaneously — is that when others attempt to gain our attention in this way, we just assume that it’s irrelevant, which is, “Oh, that…” We might not immediately know why it’s relevant, but we spontaneously assume it’s relevant. So, that point, it’s relevant. What could it possibly mean? Well, given the context, they’re pointing to where the food is.
Dogs, they assume things are relevant, even if they don’t know what on earth is going on. If their owner attempts to grab their attention, it’s relevant. Boom, off we go. Right? And chimpanzees have been interacting with humans for a sufficiently long period of time, stable, cooperative partners, they sometimes develop that disposition ontogenetically, so within the lifespan rather than evolutionary, as is the case with dogs. But humans, from a young age, do it just so naturally that we don’t see it for how distinctive it is of us as a species.
DANIEL: Okay, so now, I guess I just have a question. There are animals that are very smart, and they live in social groups.
THOM: Yeah.
DANIEL: They could presumably have a belief that they act in each other’s benefit, but they don’t do language.
THOM: Yeah.
DANIEL: Why not?
THOM: Language is a special case of ostensive communication.
DANIEL: I need some help with that word, ostensive.
THOM: Oh, right. So, the type of communication we’ve just been talking about, which is where you draw attention to your own informative intention, to your desire to be understood. And then, other people pick up…
DANIEL: I’m doing a thing, but I want you to know that I’m doing a thing.
THOM: Yeah. Other people — excuse me — intended audiences spot that we’re trying to draw attention to ourselves. And again, pointing is a simple example. But you do it with a coffee cup, right? You can drink from a coffee cup, you tilt it, but sometimes you tilt it in a slightly exaggerated way, make eye contact with the waiter or whatever [CHUCKLES] and that reveals, “Oh, I’m drawing your attention and I want you to understand that I’m drawing your attention to my informative intention. I want to inform you, and this is the most effective way I can do it.” And then what humans do so naturally and efficiently is they find the best interpretation of that behaviour, “Oh, this person wants a refill. Oh, they’re pointing to the food.”
So, that’s communication in general, and language is a special case. So when we use language, we’re still drawing attention to our own informative intentions. We’re just using a particular type of tool to do it. And that type of tool, to be theoretically neutral, let’s call them linguistic items. That can be words, morphemes.
DANIEL: Okay.
THOM: I’ve said to some people, I’d be inclined to call them constructions, for those listeners that know construction grammar. But you can describe it…
DANIEL: Mhm, oh, right.
THOM: …in various ways, so all sorts of tools that are available to us. And they’re doing the same thing as point. So, the word THIS or THAT does the same thing as a point, it’s just a different way. It’s just another tool for doing the same job. And this draws attention to my informative intention, that you pay attention to whatever it is, the coffee cup I’m pointing to. Or excuse me, what I’m referring to with the word THIS.
DANIEL: Yeah.
THOM: So, language is just a special case. That’s the essence of what we want to really underline. It’s not that humans become language ready, they become ostensive communication ready. And then, what Morton Christiansen and Nick Chater show or describe is how once they’re ostensive communication ready, we play charades to build all these items or constructions to help us communicate through what we call language.
DANIEL: Okay, so now I think I’m ready for this sentence, which I have highlighted in the paper.
THOM: Yeah.
DANIEL: I’ll just read it out. “In sum then, the open-ended richness of human communication is achieved virtually by a combination of” — and there are three things — “cognitive capacities for the expression of informative intentions.” So, that’s where I can get messages across. I can display my intentions.
THOM: Yes.
DANIEL: Okay, number two, “cognitive capacities for the recognition of informative intentions.” That’s where I can see what you’re doing and say, “Oh, that’s an intended message to me.”
THOM: Yes.
THOM: Okay. And here’s the third thing, and I’m still surprised by this third thing, so I’m going to need some help.
THOM: Okay, yep.
DANIEL: “Cognitive capacities of epistemic vigilance, and all of which are functionally tied to one another.” Vigilance, because I believe that we might be in a mutually advantageous situation where we can benefit from communicating and sharing information, but I also got to be careful because you might be a bad actor?
THOM: Yes, I might be lying.
DANIEL: Okay.
THOM: And if I’m lying and if you recognise my informative intention, then just immediately accept it, you are ripe for abuse and manipulation.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s true. That’s true.
THOM: It’s good for you to recognise my informative intention. “This is what Thom wants to do to my mind.” Now, whether you let me do that…
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES]
THOM: Whether you let me do that to your mind, well, that’s up to you, and it’s not something that I, Thom, can control. That’s epistemic vigilance.
DANIEL: And then, when somebody passes through the vigilance filter, then we have things like reputation and trust, “Oh, I can talk to this person. I can communicate again with this person.”
THOM: Yeah. It’s worth saying: another way of… epistemic vigilance can be characterised in in two… I think these are formally equivalent, but sort of intuitively quite different ways. So, one way, I suppose the classic way is the way I’ve just characterised it, it’s defending yourself against misinformation. You can recognise what I want to do to your mind, but you need to be cautious because I might be a bad actor, might be lying or misleading you.
Another way to say, is this the only way you can actually gain communication or gain information? So, you might recognise that I want to do something to your mind, but you haven’t gained anything unless you actually let me do something to your mind. Otherwise, you’re just: “Oh, look, this person wants to change my mind about… They want to inform me of this. They want to inform me of that.” But I don’t learn anything about the world unless once in a while, I actually let people who are trying to communicate with me change my mind. And so, I can only gain information if I have epistemic vigilance. Epistemic vigilance is not just the filter of what’s true and what’s false. It’s taking potential information from what others are doing when they try to communicate with you.
DANIEL: I like to ask this question of people who are looking at the evolution of language, how we went from nonlanguage to language.
THOM: Hmm.
DANIEL: Do you have any strong views on the channel that it took, like whether it started out as mostly gestural and then moved to voice? Or, do you feel like they went together? Or, was there something besides gesture and voice? Do you have any strong views on how that eventuated?
THOM: I don’t have strong views. I don’t have a strong view in the sense that I don’t feel strongly about it, but I have a strong view in the sense that I’m pretty sure that there must be something along the lines that other people have said before, and I’m sure you’ve spoken to. Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater’s book is a good example, but there are plenty of other people too. It’s got to be something like pantomime. So, yeah, humans evolved to be ostensive communicators, and they can do that, as we’ve been discussing, in all sorts of ways. One way is to use your body to pantomime, to point, to jump around, do whatever it is. And that might be ver… or indeed, to shout and scream and all sorts of ways you can do it.
And then, that becomes… the beginning is multimodal and arguably it still is to a degree, but obviously the sign modality or the speech modality typically dominates. And that’s just “a process of ossification” and gradual… Mike Tomasello calls it the drift to the arbitrary, some people would call it symbolisation, I mean, it goes by a few different names. But you have these elaborate pantomimes and then over time, that elaborate pantomime becomes a little less elaborate the next time you need to use it for the same meaning and a little less elaborate the time after that. And in that way, you can develop symbols, constructions, and so on. There’s a large literature now showing that experimentally in the laboratory, how that gradual process from quite elaborate behaviour at first can become quite simple and easily recognisable by people inside the group.
DANIEL: It’s like those experiments where somebody’s trying to get the other person to guess Brad Pitt, and at first it looks like a gigantic pit with rocks, and it’s very deep and then after about the fifth or sixth iteration it’s just a small… Might haven’t even looked like a hole or a pit or anything. It just looks like an indentation or something like that.
THOM: Yes, exactly.
DANIEL: ‘Cause it’s moved from iconic to symbolic. It’s moved from a detailed representation to just a shorthand.
THOM: Yeah, that’s it. That’s exactly the literature I was alluding to. Those studies that you’re describing were pioneered by Simon Garrett and Nick Fay.
DANIEL: Simon Kirby. Yeah.
THOM: Yeah, Simon Kirby’s done the work with iterated learning. There are a few takeaways from that literature but one of them is how fast and how easily interacting groups go from something very elaborate to something that becomes very hard for outsiders to identify. So arguably, you can call it symbolic. That happens very fast.
DANIEL: And it’s not about intelligence.
THOM: Nope.
DANIEL: It’s about society.
THOM: Well, yeah, it’s about interaction.
DANIEL: Yeah, and the conditions that allow interaction.
THOM: Yeah, if you have competent ostensive communicators, they will very fast find way… the very, very first interaction might be quite elaborate, but very quickly, they’ll start to develop conventions and call them symbols or whatever. One of those studies, just want to pick out one of the former graduate student of mine did, Carmen Granito, we did a study where you have these little interaction groups, and that’s one condition. We get the same as all the other studies that very quickly, they draw their drawings, and they become very symbolic quickly.
In another condition, you have a little bit of interaction between the groups. The group develops its own symbols, and then you swap the members of the group or groups around, you have different groups, and you move people between the groups. And in that situation where there’s a bit of traveling between groups, away from groups, come back to your home group, go to another group, different groups within the same bigger ecosystem, then the system is less symbolic, and it becomes much easier for outsiders to recognise the conventions that the groups hit on.
DANIEL: Ah, okay.
THOM: When you have an isolated group, it becomes highly symbolic, really hard for outsiders to penetrate. When you have a group that has a little bit of interaction with the outside world, they leave, they come back, then the conventions they hit on tend to become more easy for outsiders to recognise.
DANIEL: This is hitting all kinds of stuff that we’ve talked about on the show before.
THOM: Yeah.
DANIEL: But a question just occurred to me. It sounds like we’re saying that the line between animal communication and human languages is not, as some people would say, a hard line. It’s not a qualitative difference between the two. It might be a sliding scale, a matter of degree. If they did some things more, it would be more language-y, I guess.
THOM: There’s a lot to say. So, let me start by saying… There’s an enormous amount to say, I’ll try and keep this to two minutes or so… one minute.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Okay.
THOM: It’s worth distinguishing the things that shape languages and language use in a particular way. So, the vocal tract, for example, is shaped in a particular way and obviously, that has impacts on the shape of vowel systems, consonant systems, and so on. But if we had a different vocal tract and everything else was the same, we’d still have language. It’s just that the sounds, the phonemes, and the phonology would be different. So that’s on the one hand, are things that shape language, but then on the other hand, is things that make it at all possible in the first place. That’s always been more of my focus.
DANIEL: That’s where you live. Yeah.
THOM: Yeah, that’s what this paper, in particular, is about. We’re of the view that ostensive communication is critical here. We think that in its full richness, it’s distinctive of humans. One thing we tried to do in the paper is to describe how, although it is dramatically different in effects, in terms of the underlying social cognition, it’s only a small step away from the social cognition that you see in great apes. I mean, it’s evolution. So, there have to be graded differences somewhere. We think there are slight graded differences in the social cognition. And what they do is they create that virtual domain generality that you were asking about earlier, and that suddenly unleash… that’s what unleashes expression, it opens things up on a grand scale. And languages are the most salient consequence of that, though not the only one.
DANIEL: Which animals would you say, besides humans, come the closest to language-like behaviour?
THOM: Given that I think that the origins of human communication are in attention, manipulation, and social cognition, then I have to say chimpanzees and bonobos in particular. Well, great apes, but chimpanzees and bonobos, in particular. There are important similarities with dogs. So, although there’s all sorts of things that aren’t the same between dogs and humans, one thing they do have is if you attempt to gain their attention, they just assume that it’s relevant. They make different inferences off the back of that, very different inferences. But they do assume it’s relevant. So, that’s similar in one aspect even if it’s very dissimilar in other aspects.
DANIEL: Hmm. And this is not saying that they have language. It’s just saying…
THOM: No.
DANIEL: …they have some of the same conditions.
THOM: Some of the social cognition that is necessary for human communication is also present in dogs, but not all of the same social cognition. To be more provocative, give a more provocative answer to your question, what I think is a slight red herring is… it’s very interesting and it is relevant to the evolution of languages, but a slight red herring is the combinatorics that we see in also in the communication systems and all sorts of other species.
DANIEL: I was going to say that, because a lot of linguists are of the mind that human language is human language because we can take our symbols, we can break them down into little tiny pieces, and then build them up again. That’s the combinatorial thing.
THOM: Yes.
DANIEL: And that’s a red herring, you think?
THOM: Well, that’s clearly important to how languages work. But it’s a further claim to say, well, you have simple combinatorics in some species, and you have complex combinatorics in humans and the evolutionary story is a line between those two situations, a gradual line. We think that story is too simple and misses… Yeah, where we think that’s a red herring basically.
DANIEL: So social cognition and how it drives our pragmatic behaviour. That’s the thing.
THOM: Yeah, the gradual evolution is in social cognition and attention manipulation, and that in turn generates languages. Those languages obviously employ all sorts of complex combinatorics. They co-opt all sorts of cognitive capacities for that sort of thing which must be shared with other species, to some extent. But what sets everything in motion is social cognition, in our view.
DANIEL: Wow. Okay, I feel like with this work, you’ve led us right up to the face-to-face meeting where ostensive communication can happen. Where the language games can start. Let the games begin!
THOM: Yeah, let the games begin, which maybe we should include. We haven’t finished are required to Chater and Christansen yet, so maybe we should use that line.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: You can have it. It’s a gift. It’s a gift from us.
THOM: Thanks a lot.
DANIEL: From your pals at Because Language. Dr Thom Scott-Phillips of Central Europe University, author of the book, Speaking Our Minds, and along with Christoph Heintz, the co-author of Expression unleashed: the evolutionary and cognitive foundations of human communication. Dr Scott-Phillips, thanks so much for hanging out with me and talking about your work today. This has been really, really fascinating.
THOM: It’s absolutely my pleasure. It’s wonderful to have to talk in detail about something that I find so interesting and fascinating. I’m glad you enjoyed it.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] That’s why we’re here. How can people find out what you’re doing?
THOM: Twitter: @TScottPhillips is probably the best place. Yeah, that’s where I am on the internet, so to speak.
DANIEL: All right. Hey, thanks, again.
THOM: No problem.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: And now, it’s time for Words of the Week. Boy, have there been a lot of words. The word RECESSION has been coming up a lot lately. This isn’t on our run sheet but I just feel like it’s coming up a lot.
BEN: Well, I feel like almost here, I would love for you to drop in that scene from the West Wing where they talk about the bagel?
DANIEL: The bagel?
BEN: Have you not seen this bit? Hold on. Hold on.
BEN: All right.
[BACKGROUND TV PLAYING] We don’t ever use that word around here. What, we’re in recession? No, we say it, we give it credence. What should we call it? Call it a boat show or a beer garden or a bagel.
DANIEL: Called it a bagel. It’s a bagel. So, for this bagel, the GDP numbers have come out recently in the US. And so, it’s led to a discussion of are we in a recession? White House says no.
BEN: Which the White House is always going to want to say no.
DANIEL: Yeah, I feel like we’re not really in a recession. I feel like the two-quarter definition is a bit simple, even though I know the White House wants to say we’re not in a recession.
BEN: Yeah, I’ve been sort of abreast of this. I am of the opinion that the word RECESSION now isn’t super useful to us. Like I don’t think smart people who matter in the world of economics really care that much about word RECESSION. What they do is look at fuckloads of different indices…
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] That’s right.
BEN: …and get a relatively nuanced understanding of where the economy’s at right now. The vibe I’m getting, if you put the word RECESSION just over to the side for a second — like you take it and you’re like, “Okay, let’s just put this down for now” — is that some things are bad, i.e., contracted GDP for two quarters. Not ideal.
DANIEL: That’s not great.
BEN: Inflation, not ideal, definitely not ideal. In fact, I would argue that’s the far bigger not-ideal thing at 9%.
DANIEL: Although it kind of depends on what kind of inflation we’re talking about. Demand side, supply side.
BEN: We’re not in a wage-price spiral which, again, is not ideal. A wage-price spiral is almost a better form of inflation, because at least people across the board are doing better. So, there’s a bunch of shit that’s not great. But then, there’s other things that aren’t bad. Right? Unemployment is really low.
DANIEL: It’s really good.
BEN: If heaps and heaps and heaps of people are having jobs and getting jobs, it suggests that during a time where things are tough, i.e., prices are going up, people are finding it harder to make ends meet, and that sort of stuff, they’re not also suffering from massive job losses, which is where fucking like Pain Town lives. Right now, people are doing it tough. And obviously, we’re speaking economically. So, painting with a really broad brush, I have no doubt there’s fuckloads of people in America doing it really, really fucking tough.
DANIEL: Oh, yeah.
BEN: Because it’s a nightmare fucking neoliberal hellscape in nearly every sense of the word. So, there’s definitely people doing it tough. But there’s not people losing their jobs en masse, which is… it could be worse.
DANIEL: It could be much worse. Well, I noticed that on Merriam-Webster, the lookups for RECESSION are way, way up. It kind of speaks to why people look stuff up in a dictionary. It’s not to find out: what does this mean — although sometimes it does — but it’s also because people are having dictionary fights [LAUGHTER] over the definitions. It’s like, “No, it is two quarters of consecutive retraction,” and so it goes on.
BEN: It’s tough as well, because the other thing about economics that is really annoying — and I find the stock market before like algo trading became a thing was like this as well — was that at the end of the day, most of it is just like monkeys-in-shoes psychology shit anyway. It’s about population’s fear levels and their propensity for people to stop spending en masse and save their money which slows down economic activity, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, so much of it is… people in governments and stuff don’t want to say RECESSIONs because just even like a horse on the trail, you can spook the population.
DANIEL: That’s correct, yeah.
BEN: Right, and that’s tough! It’s tough to try and run a multi-trillion-dollar economy where if you say the wrong word, everyone’s like, “Oh, no!” [CHUCKLES] and then they stop spending money and everything gets way worse.
DANIEL: Well, let’s get away from the market. I just wanted to comment on RECESSION in passing, but…
BEN: No, I feel like that could be a Word of the Week.
DANIEL: Okay, cool. It’s a Word of the Week. I want to talk about another one, an article that I noticed in The Week. This one’s called “Welcome to the Pandemicene”. PANDEMICENE?
BEN: Pandemicene. Okay, so Anthropocene, and all that kind of stuff. So, epoch suffix, and now we’re in the pandemic epoch.
DANIEL: Yeah, we had covid, and we’re still having covid. I thought, “Oh, we’ll get vaccines. This will be great.” And then, we got some really good vaccines and here we still are.
BEN: Still are, yep.
DANIEL: And then, monkeypox came along, and I think monkeypox kind of broke me.
BEN: Okay. Okay. Oh, I’m sorry.
DANIEL: Yeah, no, I am feeling like, “Oh…”
BEN: Like, you been ticking along just fine, and then… I’m sorry to make this as a reference because you seem emotionally troubled, but: Chidi in The Good Place, where he was like, “What is that? What is the dot?” And that’s the second Tuesday of every never. [CHUCKLES] “Okay, that’s it! That right there! That was that was the one, that broke me. I’m done.”
DANIEL: Exactly. That is the one. So, this article in The Week says that, yeah, we’re probably living in the age of pandemics just because we are invading areas that we haven’t invaded before. We’re crashing into nature. We’re bumping into animals, animals that are unfortunately reservoirs of viral loads, and it’s causing trouble.
BEN: I don’t think that’s true.
DANIEL: No?
BEN: Yeah. In my vast experience as a geneticist, and a… what’s the disease doctors called again?
DANIEL: Epidemiologists?
BEN: As both a geneticist and an epidemiologist — note, I am neither of those things, and I’ve never been even remotely adjacent to those things — I reckon I would put this idea of PANDEMICENE down to good, old-fashioned human propensity for navel-gazing. And by that I mean: whenever things are really bad for people, we just can’t help but fixate on that.
DANIEL: We try to find out why. We invent explanations. Yeah, that’s true.
BEN: Right? Like we go, “Oh, shit. There’s been a pandemic that’s been going on for several years. Oh, fuck! Now, another one.”
DANIEL: That’s two!
BEN: That’s two.
DANIEL: That’s twice as bad!
BEN: And then, there was AIDS like 40 years ago.
DANIEL: Well, that’s the thing. There was AIDS 40 years ago, and there was, like, smallpox AND polio at the same time. This has always been going on! This has always been going on.
BEN: Yes, we had the plague like 800 years ago. I guess what I’m trying to say is, isn’t just the Anthropocene… THE pandemocene? We are a global species that live in closed quarters, generally speaking, or at least we have done for the last two, three millennia. Yeah, we’ll probably get sick. It happens to rats too, when you stick them all together. Right? Like, you can have all sorts of nasty shit that goes through unclean populations.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: I think the person is right that, yeah, we’re tromping around and we’re finding things that make us sick and all that kind of stuff. That’s unquestionable. And if we weren’t doing it new school, i.e., coming up with vaccines and stuff, we’d be doing it old school, á la the plague, and we would just kill half of everyone and then the other half would be like, “All right, cool. Well, we don’t have to worry about plague anymore because we survived!”
DANIEL: I seem to be magically immune! How about that? All right. Well, I hope you’re right and I agree that this plays into a tendency. I mean, it was kind of inevitable that we were going to have diseases. Climate change means animals are moving around.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: We’re moving around. We’re taking things from place to place, but I guess we just got to get better.
BEN: Shall we dig into the -CENE suffix, like where does that actually come from real quick?
DANIEL: That one comes from geology introduced by Sir Charles Lyell. It’s Greek, kainos meaning new.
BEN: Right. Because he was going through and they’re like, “Okay, and that’s a new age and that’s new age.”
DANIEL: That’s it. That’s the connection.
BEN: Gotcha. What’s next?
DANIEL: Main character syndrome.
[LAUGHS]
BEN: Also known as being white.
DANIEL: Or being me because I have always thought of my life as a movie. And of course, I’m the hero of my own movie.
BEN: I think that’s broadly human nature. But I think people in power, i.e., men, white people, Westerners, so on and so forth, colonisers, etc., suffer from it to a far greater degree than not.
DANIEL: That’s why I connected with this tweet from Alessio, one of our listeners. Instead of claps, it’s got musical notes in between every word. “I am so tired of US main character syndrome.”
BEN: I wonder if that’s to the TikTok sound: [SINGS] “I am so tired of US main character syndrome.”
DANIEL: Thank you. Thank you for… I didn’t know the tune but you do.
BEN: [CHUCKLES] There we go.
DANIEL: It has been popularised on TikTok. It describes people who treat other people like secondary characters in their life, supporting actors.
BEN: And US, the country, does it as a nation state.
DANIEL: And always has, hasn’t it, ever since World War II. Canela Lopez has an article in Business Insider about four signs that you might have main character syndrome. One, everything’s about you and your problems. Two, you frame yourself and your life as perfect. Three, you aren’t good at taking criticism. And four, you feel out of control in your everyday life, so you’re try to take the reins back as the main character.
BEN: Mm. I always think of this when I see Karens going full Karen. Now, I know you don’t like the word KAREN. I am not in the same zone as you because I just see so much evidence of white women behaving appallingly.
DANIEL: I’m sorry to hear that.
BEN: And men as well. White dudes don’t get a pass here, not at all.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: But yeah, I feel like whenever I see a white person going like full tantrum — and you see this a lot on TikTok and Instagram, that sort of thing — that’s what I see. It’s just a person who’s desperately trying to remind the world that actually, they’re the main character and everything that happens around them is for their benefit.
DANIEL: You know, along with main character syndrome, I noticed people referring to other people as NPCs, or non-playable characters.
BEN: Non-playable characters, yeah.
DANIEL: The first time I heard this, it was at a conference, it was in Salt Lake City. So, we were at Temple Square checking out the whole Salt Lake City Temple and stuff. And of course, they have a visitors center…
BEN: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: …where you find out about the church. And there are missionaries, by the way. Story here. There are a couple of women missionaries, and their job is to show people around. And one of them came up to me and said, “Are you okay?” And I said, “It’s cool. I’m an RM,” which is code for Returned Missionary. I said, “I’m an RM. I’m showing them around.” And she was like, “Right.” Gave me a wink.
BEN: A wink. Now, women aren’t normally missionaries in the Mormon Church, is that right? It’s the boys who go out and knock on doors?
DANIEL: They are. The boys are famous, but there are women missionaries as well.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: So I said to my friends, “I might not say much, and I’ll try not to be unpleasant. But if you want, I will tell you when they’re lying, or when they’re shading their history,” or something. And so, one of my friends said, “Oh, so basically, you’ll be an NPC.”
[LAUGHS]
BEN: Yes! Yes.
DANIEL: Which is great.
BEN: That is accurate.
DANIEL: Yeah. Because you can walk up to me, all I exist to do is to convey information. I say the same things over and over again. Anyway, I have heard people referring to other people as NPCs. It’s… the people doing this are always like conspiracy-minded people who maybe think that vaccines aren’t real or…
BEN: Or like crisis actor types.
DANIEL: Yeah, and they refer to people who get vaccines, for instance, as NPCs, like “I’m not going to listen to some NPC telling me…”
BEN: Well, I mean, I guess that tracks. Like in a videogame, there’s one player and like infinity NPCs. So I guess in the mind of a conspiracy theorists, that probably works.
DANIEL: It refers to that need to feel special, doesn’t it? That narcissism.
BEN: Hmm.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Main character syndrome. All right, next one.
BEN: What do we got?
DANIEL: Pegging.
BEN: Um…
DANIEL: Bit of a content warning on this one for sexual themes.
BEN: I was about to say: are we talking about I’m thinking we’re talking about? Cool.
DANIEL: We are talking about what you think we’re talking about.
BEN: Pegging is…
DANIEL: Is?
BEN: Should I define pegging?
DANIEL: Would you please.
BEN: Pegging is when a person is fucked in the ass using a toy, basically. And that’s being pegged.
DANIEL: It used to be considered when a woman specifically straps on a dildo and pegs a man but now it’s much more.
BEN: Because we’ve got like such a gender fluid sort of spectrum out there, people can be pegged by whoever and whatever. It’s all good.
DANIEL: Yep. Exactly. So, this is in the news because #PrinceOfPegging is trending as a hashtag. So, pegging is having a moment. But it reminded me of when Dan Savage, the sex columnist, had a vote to think of a term for this and got his listeners to vote in. This was back in the early days of 2001. So, we’re going back quite a ways.
BEN: Wait. Dan Savage didn’t come up with pegging, did he?
DANIEL: He did. Well, he kind of did. He had people put in their suggestions. The three that he liked were PUNT, PEG, and BOB, which stands for “bend over boyfriend.”
BEN: Right.
DANIEL: “Last night, she pegged me.” “Last night, she bobbed me.” “Last night, she punted me.”
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: And had people vote. 10,000 votes later, PEG won.
BEN: So, have you fact-checked this? Have you looked at, like, the Ngram Viewer or anything like this?
DANIEL: I remember when it happened, and on our website, becauselanguage.com, I will put archive.org versions of the columns where this occurred, and you can watch it.
BEN: Now, that’s true but is it possible that the word existed already, and he just sort of bootstrapped his way onto it?
DANIEL: So to speak! [LAUGHTER] Let’s let me just check Green’s Dictionary of Slang, because that’s where it would be. So, the PEG has always referred to the penis for a really long time. But now, let’s get down to the verb. What do you know? Mr Green has it. So, from 1850, it refers to having sex, “She will let you peg her.” But not until 2004 do we start seeing it in, like, Urban Dictionary, Wikipedia.
BEN: Wow! Okay, good job, Dan Savage.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Then, why is #PrinceOfPegging trending?
DANIEL: Something about the royals, an extramarital affair, and a proclivity. You can look that one up if you want to.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: But here’s the thing. It appears not to be in the OED yet.
BEN: [gasps]
DANIEL: Dan Savage wants to get PEGGING into the OED. It’s used. It’s got a track record. It’s got a long history. We could definitely get that in there. So we’ll use…
BEN: I feel like we should use our considerable influence with the OED.
DANIEL: Oh, yeah, we’ve got all kinds of pull over there, don’t we?
BEN: Oh, yeah. Pun very much intended.
DANIEL: Okay, so PEGGING, a delightful sexual practice that could be in the OED.
BEN: Have we got any more words?
DANIEL: Last one, something unusual I got named ‘Zoe’ recently. Zoe, what was it? Are you ready?
BEN: Mhm.
DANIEL: An animal in a zoo, a heatwave, an AI, or a rocket? What got named Zoe recently?
BEN: That’s a good one. Sorry, I just thought without saying UM, which is not very good for a [CHUCKLES] podcast. I’m going to go with heat wave.
DANIEL: You are correct, sir.
BEN: Yes.
DANIEL: Nice.
BEN: I figured it needed a name because, as far as I can tell, the entire northern hemisphere is on fire.
DANIEL: That’s what I’ve heard. It’s interesting, isn’t it? Because we in Australia look at the kinds of temperatures that they’re talking about — 35 Celsius — and we say, “That’s just summer,” but we got to also remember people are just not set up for this. This is happening in Vancouver.
BEN: Also, 35 fine. It was 40 degrees in England. In fucking England.
DANIEL: Just bizarre.
BEN: 40 degrees, I don’t… Yeah, I’m sure someone who lives up in the Pilbara here in Australia would be like: ~Oh, 40 degrees isn’t hot.~ I’ve lived in Australia my entire fucking life. A 40-degree day is a belting hot fucking day. Like, 40 degrees is when people mostly don’t really want to go to the beach except for lunatics or teenagers who don’t give a fuck about their future. 40 degrees is so fucking hot! And then, you put on the fact that zero homes have air conditioning, a 40-degree day in Australia without air conditioning is REPREHENSIBLE. It’s fucking revolting. If you ask an Australian: what would you do if it was 40 degrees and your air conditioner broke, they would be like, “I am immediately going to a family member’s house. I’m getting out. I’m going somewhere else.
DANIEL: I’m going to the mall.
BEN: There’s no way I’m staying in my fucking house when it’s 40 degrees.” And then, the entire country of England has no choice.
DANIEL: And most of Canada. It’s just bizarre. Happened last year too, you know, this is happening. So just like they name hurricanes, last month, the mayor… this is from Chloe Xiang in Vice, “The mayor of Seville announced a new heatwave ranking system for the city of Seville.”
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: It’s just like hurricanes, except they go in reverse alphabetical order. So, Zoe and then Yago, Xenia, Wenceslao, and Vega. Looks like it’s multiple genders.
BEN: Fun.
DANIEL: Yep.
BEN: Terrible, but fun.
DANIEL: Fun and terrible. It’s ferrible.
BEN: [CHUCKLES] And that’s where we leave it folks. Thank you very much for tuning in. [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: So, RECESSION, PANDEMICENE, MAIN CHARACTER SYNDROME and NPC, PEGGING, and ZOE are Words of the Week. Let’s take some comments. This one’s from Inez via email, hello@becauselanguage.com. “Hello, my favorite Austro-American Swedish language podcast team,”… Aww. “I’m a teacher in Austria, no kangaroos.”
BEN: I love how much Austrians have to emphasise this. When I went to Austria, I have never before My life been to a country that had NPC syndrome to Australia. Australia has always got NPC syndrome, and I went to Austria and there was just shit everywhere being like, “We’re not Australia!”
DANIEL: “We’re not Australia.”
BEN: I felt so bad I was like, “I’ve literally never thought about you guys, not once.”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] That’s exactly what I… I tweeted this once, it’s like: I never mix up Australia and Austria because A, I live here but also B, I never think about Austria. Ever. [CHUCKLES]
BEN: Exactly. I feel so bad.
DANIEL: Is it even still a country? Anyway.
BEN: Stop it.
DANIEL: Shit, now I’ve done it. “I’m a teacher in Austria, no kangaroos, at a middle high school, and the pandemic has been a large and annoying part of every day. To get the younger kids to wear their masks when they have to, my colleague Claudia came up with the Masktopus, a toy octopus that shows the kids when to wear their masks and reprimands them if they don’t.” Look out. Here comes the Masktopus. [CHUCKLES]
BEN: One of eight limbs comin’ for you.
DANIEL: “As restrictions were gradually or sporadically lifted, the little octopus was suddenly out of a job, which is why it retrained to become a Talktopus, reprimanding children who chat during class and a Germanopus, reminding older students not to use German in ESL class. And as you can see, the word ‘octopus’ lends itself to various useful blendings, which got me wondering: is there something inherently combinable about it? The number of syllables, the number of tentacles, the syllable type, the ‘o’ specifically? I feel like CROCODILE would work just as well. If you have further job ideas for the little octopus, let me know and I’ll pass it on. All the best, Inez.” I think that the little octopus should stay a Masktopus, personally.
BEN: Yeah. With what we’re seeing, “Don’t worry about talking German right now. Let’s go back to wearing masks.”
DANIEL: Yeah, I think some people need eight spankings for not caring for other people. This is Because Language.
BEN: We here at Talk the Talk… sorry…
DANIEL: WHAT
BEN: We here at Because Language do not advocate spanking children, just to be clear. Not even with cute, fluffy octopus puppets.
DANIEL: But we do advocate wearing masks.
BEN: Correct.
DANIEL: What do you think makes -OPUS such a good combiner?
BEN: Well, see here’s the thing, it’s an -OPUS. It’s -TOPUS.
DANIEL: -TOPUS. Yes, but it could be a Germanopus, not a Germantopus.
BEN: Aw, true. But Germantopus would work, wouldn’t it?
DANIEL: It would.
BEN: I feel like… yeah, I don’t know why this is productive. I feel like there must be some rules to it, like you need a vowel in the right spot and a few other bits and pieces, but I can’t figure out what they are.
DANIEL: Well, I think that what’s happening here, and we’ve done shows on combining forms, the best ones work because they are recognisable.
BEN: Right.
DANIEL: By just one part. So, -OPUS, you know what that is.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: The ones that don’t work are the ones that just blend in too seamlessly and you can’t tell what they mean.
BEN: Which is why -ODILE would probably work really well. I think Inez was right on the money there.
DANIEL: You could have a Maskodile.
BEN: Yep.
DANIEL: Which is even more terrifying.
BEN: A grindodile.
BEN: A penodile, a handsanodile [CHUCKLES].
DANIEL: Oh, yeah, there you go.
BEN: I’m just naming things around me right now.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] Okay. Well, that’s what I think, but let us know what you think, dear listeners. There are some items of feedback from LE WEEKEND, which we talked about last time. Gillian via email says “Hello Because Language. I just listened to you Rebel with a Clause episode. Great episode by the way, and wanted to mention in case no one else has that LE WEEKEND is widely used in European French while FIN DE SEMAINE is much more common in Quebec.” No surprises there. [Ben CHUCKLES] “Quebec French often uses French terms instead of anglicisms to protect or encourage the use of French. Not to say that there aren’t plenty of anglicisms in Quebec French.” Yeah, that they don’t even know about because it’s so far back. “In addition to many older French terms that are still used in Quebec, but obsolete in European French. LE WEEKEND is a criticised usage in Quebec, for example. Merci bien.”
BEN: Oh.
DANIEL: And from Angery Balls. Angery Balls checking in again with his grain of salt. “I’m listening to The Rebel with a Clause episode, and I wanted to answer two questions you had about French. The normal French word for e-sports is indeed [ispoʁ].” Very good. “There is indeed no native French word for weekend other than the English word which is pronounced wee-kend or even week-en.” There’s that omitting the final consonant thing. “Hedvig correctly pointed out that fin de semaine exists but it is almost always understood to refer to the end of the workweek rather than the calendar week.” How about that?
BEN: What is the difference between the end of the workweek and the calendar week?
DANIEL: I was wondering the same thing myself. Is this one of those things where you think that the week begins with Sunday? I do not think that, but some people might think, “Oh, the calendar week, that’s Friday, Saturday,” whereas the end of the workweek…
BEN: Yeah, ’cause I live in a world where you can just change the settings on all the calendars, so it’s doesn’t [LAUGHS].
DANIEL: And I do, yeah.
BEN: What is it on old paper calendars? Would it flip over on a Monday?
DANIEL: On old paper calendars, the first day is always Sunday.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: And when I see one of those, I have a really hard time getting my head around, there’s like, “Sunday. That’s the end. That’s the weekend.” So, I think that’s what Angery Balls is referring to.
BEN: Okay, okay, okay.
DANIEL: Thanks to everybody for sending us that update.
BEN: All I would say is: don’t forget, if you want to hear your voice on the podcast, you can send some of this feedback via Speakpipe.
DANIEL: What a good idea. We’ll even play it and then talk about it. We’ll even pretend that you’re there. We’ll even carve up the things you say as kind of an imaginary dialogue.
BEN: Yeah, we’ll turn it into a conversation. Just give us nice pauses here and there.
DANIEL: And finally from Keith, “At the end of today’s Diego’s Digests Patreon episode, Daniel mentioned the phrase BUCKET LIST which many believe is older than the movie that actually created it. That reminded me of ‘Everything’s coming up roses.'” Ben, which means?
BEN: Things are turning around things, things are going well.
DANIEL: Things are going well and everything’s coming up Millhouse, the derivative phrase.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Yes.
DANIEL: Which Stephen Sondheim created in his lyrics for Gypsy. You know the song?
BEN: I do not.
DANIEL: [SINGS] Everything’s coming up roses for you and for me. That is apparently where it originated. And Keith says, “And which fits so perfectly into English slang that people thought that they had always known it.” I didn’t know Stephen Sondheim did Gypsy. I thought…
BEN: There is a name for this.
DANIEL: There is?
BEN: Tiffany syndrome?
DANIEL: No.
BEN: Have you heard about this?
DANIEL: No.
BEN: Sorry, it’s not a name for this, but it’s similar.
DANIEL: Yeah?
BEN: Tiffany, as a name, is much, much older than people think. It’s like 1300s old.
DANIEL: What?
BEN: Like, it’s a really old name.
DANIEL: Really?
BEN: And yeah. And people can’t use it in like fantasy settings or whatever because if you were to drop like Tiffany into fucking Lord of the Rings or whatever, people would be like, “What the f…?” “It’s Galadriel. It’s Frodo. It’s Bilbo. It’s ~Tiffany~.” Like, it has some…
DANIEL: You can’t. That name didn’t exist, but it did.
BEN: Yeah. So, Tiffany is actually a really old name. But we as a human species don’t believe it. It’s like the opposite of that, where something worked so well, we just assume it’s… like pegging, pegging is a perfect example of this. I thought for sure, pegging was a thing that has existed at least since the ’50s.
DANIEL: The 1500s or something.
BEN: But yeah, 2001 apparently.
DANIEL: Yep, that’s it. Wow.
BEN: So, it’s the inverse Tiffany reality.
DANIEL: Everything is older or younger than you think it is. Big thanks to everybody who helped us with this episode. Thanks to those who gave feedback and suggestions, thanks to Dr Thom Scott-Phillips and to Joshua Blackburn. Thanks to Dustin of Sandman Stories for recommending us to absolutely everyone, and his podcast is definitely worth checking out. Thanks to SpeechDocs who do a great job on our transcripts for the show. Thanks to the Oxford English Dictionary for sponsoring us and of course, thanks to our great patrons and all of you who listen.
[THEME MUSIC] Oh, I can hear ending music. Here we go.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Thanks for listening, everybody. If you like the show, here’s how you can help us. Number one, you can send us ideas and feedback. Lots of ways to do that. Follow us on the socials. We are BecauseLangPod everywhere except Spotify. You can leave us a message with Speakpipe on our website, becauselanguage.com and we’ll play it, it’ll be good. You can even send us an email, hello@becauselanguage.com.
Thing number two, you can tell a friend about us or leave us a review, and we have a new review by the way. This one is from MLRSnider on Apple Podcasts. I’m going to read it. “Because Language, my number one podcast.” Five stars… that part’s important.
BEN: Just leave it, just leave the review there. Nothing more! [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: “This is truly a great podcast. Super useful as a reliable source of news from the field of linguistics and news about all things language. The hosts master the art of making complex topics accessible to the general public. It’s entertaining too. Practically every episode has snippets that make me chuckle or sometimes even laugh out loud. With an episode of BL in my ears, I feel like I’m with good friends.”
BEN: Naww.
DANIEL: “More importantly, many of the topics discussed by the show hosts and their guests go beyond linguistics, placing them in the context of social justice and social responsibility. If you’re interested in the science of language or just language stuff in general, and you want to have your mental muscles exercised, be entertained, and even get your values and worldview challenged now and again, you should definitely check out The Because Language podcast.” Wow. We do all that stuff?
BEN: So, MLRSnider, you can expect your check in the mail next week or so. That was a very nice review.
DANIEL: That was really nice, thank you. The third thing you can do is become a patron. You’ll get bonus episodes, you can hang out with us on Discord, get goodies. It’s a lot of fun.
BEN: Our patrons make it possible for us to make transcripts of our shows so that they’re readable and they’re searchable and they’re accessible to people who might not be able to hear. Shoutout to our top patrons [TAKES A DEEP BREATH]. Dustin, Termy, Elías, Matt, Whitney, Chris L, Helen, Udo, Jack, PharaohKatt, Lord Mortis, gramaryen, Larry, Kristofer, Andy B, James, Nigel, Meredith, Kate, Nasrin, Ayesha, Moe, Steele, Manú, [TAKES ANOTHER DEEP BREATH] James, Rodger, Rhian, Colleen, Ignacio, Sonic Snejhog, Kevin, Jeff, Andy of Logophilius, Samantha, Stan, Kathy, Rach, Cheyenne, Felicity, Amir, Canny Archer, O Tim, Alyssa, Chris W, and Kate B who just ferociously annihilated the one-time donation button on our website. And to our newest patrons: at the Listener level, Timothy and at the Friend level, Fauxfox, Sequoia, and Kate. Sequoia, my favorite kind of tree. No, cactus?
DANIEL: CACTUS is awesome, but it doesn’t have all the vowels like SEQUOIA does.
BEN: No, isn’t sequoia a kind of cactus?
DANIEL: No, it’s not. It’s a… it’s a… Is it a redwood? I’m not completely certain.
BEN: [LOOKING UP STUFF] Yeah, a genus of redwood coniferous trees. What am I thinking of? Like Looney Tunes cactuses?
DANIEL: Oh, you’re thinking of SAGUARO.
BEN: Saguaro! Thank you. Sorry, I knew I was in the zone there.
DANIEL: Somebody become a patron and name yourself Saguaro for Patreon purposes.
BEN: Please do that. It would make me so very happy. Thanks to all our amazing patrons. Our theme music has been written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who’s a member of Ryan Beno and of Didion’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
DANIEL: Lovely.
BEN: Pew, pew, pew, pew.
DANIEL: Pew.
BEN: All righty.
DANIEL: Makes me happy to have an episode in the can.
BEN: That was fun. I liked that.
DANIEL and BEN: I like top ‘n’ tails.
BEN: Yeah, they’re good, they’re real good. They’re real easy.
[BOOP]
DANIEL: I do have some introductions that AIs have written about us, but umm…
BEN: Are they weird and bad?
DANIEL: They’re actually really scarily good.
BEN: Are they? [SKEPTICAL] Give me one. Come on. Come on, lay it on me. What do you got?
DANIEL: I have to search because I slapped it in Discord.
BEN: Not placed it. Not put it. Slapped it.
DANIEL: The prompt was “Write a description of two people, Ben and Hedvig, as though they were in a Nordic murder drama.”
BEN: Oh, that’s fun. Oh, I like that. Oh, I’m going to come up with one while you look… “A competent cop pushed to the brink by the death of his family, now hungers for revenge.” That’s Hedvig obviously [CHUCKLES].
DANIEL: Obviously.
BEN: And then, “A rookie greenhorn with values and principles that just can’t make it in the real world is trying to bring her back into line.”
DANIEL: I like it. Okay, here’s what it really wrote.
BEN: Now, you got to deliver in your best “introduction voice.”
DANIEL: [INTRODUCTION VOICE] “Ben is a gruff and weathered detective. A man who has seen too much death in his line of work. He’s a loner, but he’s got a sharp mind. And he’s not afraid to use whatever means necessary to get to the bottom of a case.” And then: “Hedvig is a young rookie detective fresh out of the academy. She’s idealistic and determined to make a difference, even if it means working with the grumpy old Ben.””
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: I mean, what is astounding here is how accurate that is to our show.
DANIEL: What’s astounding is that it converged on the sort of descriptions that we’ve written for ourselves.
BEN: Yeah, totally.
DANIEL: “She’s got a lot to learn, but she’s not afraid of a challenge.”
BEN: I mean, it’s good, but it does really show I think… and again, we’ll save this for the AI episode, how all of this language things are very fancy autocompletes. That’s the tropiest, most…
DANIEL: Yes, it is.
BEN: …archetype-laden introduction. I came up with it in a second, I came up with basically exactly the same thing, because all I did was think of the tropiest thing I could.
DANIEL: Tropiest thing that you could. [CHUCKLES]. And, and then Ben, not the host one, decided… he gave it a prompt. “Write a description for Daniel as though they’re being introduced as a character in a Nordic murder drama.” So, this is me. Of course I’m the murderer, right?
BEN: [LAUGHS] Well, the other two trope have been taken, right?
DANIEL: You’ve got it. “Daniel is a cold, calculated killer who always gets what he wants. When he sets his sights on something, he makes sure to get it done no matter who or what gets in his way. He’s not afraid to get his hands dirty and he always leaves a trail of blood in his wake.” Boy, that’s for sure. “Daniel is the kind of person you don’t want to cross because you never know when he might come back to exact his revenge.”
BEN: [CHUCKLES] That’s very sweet in its own way. Like, we all got our little cosplay, didn’t we?
DANIEL: We did. I feel like it’s humanised me too much. I’m too known.
BEN: As the murderer. Yeah, way too humanised. Shall we do a show?
[BOOP]
DANIEL: And animals just fail the Box Test.
BEN: All animals?
DANIEL: Two kinds do okay at the Box Test. Chimpanzees…
BEN: One has to be a dog, surely.
DANIEL: How did you know dogs? That’s right.
BEN: I think because we have prosocial cohabitated with dogs for long enough now that I think there must be something genetic in them that’s just kind of like: “Pay attention to people. Good things happen when you pay attention to people.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] That’s exactly it. It’s attention. It’s attentional focus. That is exactly right.
BEN: Like: enough of my ancestors have been kept alive via paying attention to people and their cues, [CHUCKLES] that like, there is several neurons just built into me that are just like, “Oh, pay some attention.”
[BOOP]
DANIEL: And now it’s time for Words of the Week. Boy, have there been a lot of words.
BEN: Do we not lead into your interview or anything?
DANIEL: Nope, I’m just going to do it cold.
BEN: Okay. I like that actually, because in other podcasts that I listen to, that’s kind of how they do it as well. It won’t seem like a break but the person who has already been speaking — i.e., you — will go blablablabla and they’ll have an interview, and then they’ll come back. Yeah.
DANIEL: No, they’ll book-end it with fricking ads and then…
BEN: Yeah, very true. Yuck. I guess we technically just did that as well.
DANIEL: I guess we kind of just did that. But it was a fun ad.
BEN: I hate me!
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: I’ve become the thing I despise. Admit it though, Yeah No or No Yeah is a lot more fun than an ad.
BEN: Oh, heck yeah. Nah yeah, it’s way better.
DANIEL: Yeah, nah.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]