Our ever-popular Mailbag is bursting with questions, so let’s get to them!
- How do you communicate expressively with a mask on?
- Which was the first language with a set spelling?
- Why is the word caterpillar so long? Did it come later?
- Why are some news outlets writing “since the pandemic begun“?
- As prescriptive linguists, can we reasonably disagree with someone’s definition of a word, if that definition is being used by people?
Listen to this episode
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Government coronavirus messages left ‘nonsensical’ after being translated into other languages
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-13/coronavirus-messages-translated-to-nonsense-in-other-languages/12550520
E-mail error ends up on road sign
When officials asked for the Welsh translation of a road sign, they thought the reply was what they needed.
Unfortunately, the e-mail response to Swansea council said in Welsh: “I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated”.
So that was what went up under the English version which barred lorries from a road near a supermarket.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/7702913.stm
Language Log » R.I.P. Geoff Nunberg
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=48087
UC Berkeley’s Geoffrey Nunberg, famed NPR linguist, dies at 75 | Berkeley News
https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/08/14/uc-berkeleys-geoffrey-nunberg-famed-npr-linguist-dies-at-75/
How face masks affect our communication
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200609-how-face-masks-affect-our-communication
How to Express Emotion When Wearing a Face Mask
https://www.aarp.org/home-family/friends-family/info-2020/showing-emotions-face-mask.html
Want to know what someone is feeling through a mask? Look at eyes | wfmynews2.com
https://www.wfmynews2.com/article/news/local/good-morning-show/masks-hidden-emotions-eyes-feelings-body-language-expert-blanca-cobb/83-0385a519-5df2-4878-8d1d-943201b80b5d
How Old is Latin? – Ancient Language Institute
https://ancientlanguage.com/how-old-is-latin/
Problems with Latin and the documents – Latin
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/latin/reference/problems-with-latin-and-the-documents/
The History of English: Spelling and Standardization (Suzanne Kemmer)
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~kemmer/Histengl/spelling.html
Chapter 11 – Language Standardisation | Language Evolution
https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/hss-language-evolution/wiki/chapter-11/#2_Stages_of_Language_Standardisation
Processes of Standardisation
https://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elltankw/history/Standardisation/B.htm
A Brief History Of Chinese Characters | The Chairman’s Bao
https://www.thechairmansbao.com/brief-history-chinese-characters/
Writing – Ancient History Encyclopedia
https://www.ancient.eu/writing/
A short history of writing | Language Insight
https://www.languageinsight.com/blog/2019/a-short-history-of-writing/
caterpillar | Etymonline
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=caterpillar
Old English Translator
https://www.oldenglishtranslator.co.uk/
Hockett’s Design Features
http://abacus.bates.edu/acad/depts/biobook/Hockett.htm
What determines the length of words? MIT researchers say they know
https://phys.org/news/2011-02-length-words-mit.html
Word lengths are optimized for efficient communication | PNAS
https://www.pnas.org/content/108/9/3526
Big thanks to Kevin for these screen grabs of since the pandemic begun.
Cardi B – WAP Lyrics | Genius Lyrics
https://genius.com/Cardi-b-wap-lyrics
I mean, has anyone actually seen any proof of a Wet Ass P-word? – Ben Shapiro, probably : Fuckthealtright
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fuckthealtright/comments/iajxqr/i_mean_has_anyone_actually_seen_any_proof_of_a/
In her formal VP announcement, Kamala Harris went hard on Donald Trump
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-13/joe-biden-kamala-harris-first-speech-key-takeaways/12552918
simpatico | Etymonline
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=simpatico
Transcript
DANIEL: Welcome to this special bonus episode of Because Language, a podcast about linguistics, the science of language. My name’s Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team! Smart person and honorary linguist, Ben Ainslie.
BEN: [LAUGHS] I’ll take it!
DANIEL: And smart person and actual linguist Hedvig Skirgård.
HEDVIG: I… [LAUGHS] thank you.
BEN: I was thinking Hedvig, that, like, it only just occurred to me. You are technically the most senior linguist on the show now.
DANIEL: And the best.
HEDVIG: Almost. The Australian university system still needs to go through a couple more motions until I get a paper that says I’m officially…
BEN: Oh, pishposh and poppycock! As far as I’m concerned, Hedvig, you’re the boss!
DANIEL: Oh, yeah, totally. I’m totally content with being the third best linguist on the show.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Okay, let’s… easy…!
HEDVIG: I have a… I have a secret. And since this is a Patreon episode and we trust all of our patrons, essentially with our lives. So here in Germany, if you have a PhD, you get to title yourself Doctor. You don’t only get to, you should every time anyone asks you what your name is basically, including when you make a doctor’s appointment.
BEN: Because they’re hell classist?
HEDVIG: They’re so classist. It’s really, really important. And it’s any PhD, and there are all these complicated titles if you have more than one PhD, what kind of PhD you have, you can make these long titles. So when I get my official degree and everything, I will be Frau Dr Skirgård. Right?
DANIEL: Nice.
HEDVIG: We spent six weeks applying for apartments and getting nowhere. And then someone was like: Why don’t you guys just say, put doctor on the form? And we were like: But we haven’t got all the paperwork yet, we’re not doctors. And they’re like… [LAUGHTER]
BEN: Oh, you horrible fools.
HEDVIG: …Just say it. You’ll be doctors in like a couple of months. Just put it on. Next application we sent in, we got.
DANIEL: Yep.
BEN: I love that there is a really good chance that that was just like a hundred percent sort of, like: sample size of one confirmation bias! But at the same time…
HEDVIG: I know.
BEN: …hell, yes, that is exactly what happened.
DANIEL: A big thanks to everyone who has signed up recently as a patron. This episode is for you. Eventually,, we’ll release these bonus episodes into the wild and Hedvig can get arrested for fraud, but…
HEDVIG: Oh, god, god, god, god. Maybe, maybe we should cut this.
BEN: No, don’t! What? This is so funny. Are we doing news? Are we just straight into questions?
DANIEL: We got some news. First of all, the Australian government has failed a bit in translation. Of course, they have the responsibility to promote good coronavirus information. But, according to the translations left on the web and in government documents, well, the translations have been described as “nonsensical and laughable”. In some cases, a document was published in a mixture of Farsi and Arabic, as though they were the same language. And another image told Chinese speakers… it was supposed to tell them where to look for information about the pandemic. But instead, the text just says, “use your language supplied information.” Ahem.
HEDVIG: This is copy paste mistakes by someone who… they’ve contacted a translator and they’ve put the text to them and they’ve gotten the text back, and then they have to put them inside the graphic, and the person who is putting it inside the graphic has made copy paste errors.
BEN: Oh, good guess.
DANIEL: Yep.
BEN: Yeah. There we go. Because I was going to go straight to Google Translate fail, but I… as much as I’m willing to rag on the Australian government, I had to imagine in a global pandemic they didn’t just give it to me to go to Google Translate, surely.
DANIEL: According to the ABC story, the department said it intended to have translators check material once it was posted online to avoid future problems. Good idea, folks.
BEN: But they didn’t do it.
DANIEL: Not this time.
HEDVIG: Well, they probably checked. Yeah, I don’t know… why am I defending the Australian government? [LAUGHTER] But like, I feel like they got the text and the text was okay. And the translator thought… because I’ve done this before, I translated things and someone else has put it into a thing. But because it’s been Swedish and the words are like recognisable from English, people have been like putting it in the right places. But if a person copy-pasting it in has no idea what the language is.
DANIEL: Wasn’t there a story about a Welsh… a bit in Welsh, like a public sign that said something like, “I am out of the office. If you want me to do any translations, just send them to this address?” [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember that.
BEN: That’s really fun.
DANIEL: Being able to have materials in your own language is really important, especially when it’s about health. We already know that covid hits migrant communities disproportionately hard, and it’s partly because they miss out on important information in their own language. So adequate translation is definitely a priority.
HEDVIG: Indeed.
BEN: Next.
DANIEL: Next news story, we’re kind of sad this week, because we’ve lost one of our great language explainers. Geoff Nunberg of UC Berkeley passed away last week after a long illness.
BEN: Tell me about this Nunberg character, Daniel. For I know zero about him.
DANIEL: Well, I didn’t get to hang out much with Geoff Nunberg, but I did get to hear him on Fresh Air, which is a program on National Public Radio. He did, apparently 435 episodes from 1987 to 2019.
BEN: What are we at? If we do, like, the old system and the new system?
DANIEL: Four hundred and five or so?
BEN: Oooh, we’re going to do it.
DANIEL: Pretty soon. I’ve also read a lot of his Language Log posts, and I’ve used them in my teaching. And I was very lucky to be able to appear with him for an LSA seminar last year: Media, How to Own It. You can see that still on my web page, danielmidgley.com. But I just wanted to pay tribute to Geoff Nunberg, who was a good guy and a great linguistic communicator.
BEN: Oh well, vale.
HEDVIG: That is very cool.
DANIEL: Yes, indeed.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: It’s a mailbag episode where we take the questions you give us, and we do stuff with them.
BEN: Hopefully, hopefully we answer them!
HEDVIG: I mean, I think that’s a very good framing because sometimes we just talk about them and say things that we think are just related to them, but we don’t have an answer.
BEN: We talk around the question. Some people like to come straight at the question, not us. No, we do it differently.
HEDVIG: But it’s because we have too smart listeners. This is… I know I keep saying it, but they ask us too good questions and we can’t answer them. Sometimes it’s like: no one on this planet knows the answer to the questions our listeners ask.
DANIEL: But we’re going to pretend!
BEN: I liked that, Hedvig. I really liked that sort of real subtle flex of like: Yeah, we can’t answer it because NO ONE ON THE PLANET CAN. [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: No, but like, sometimes we, like, try and research to see if someone else has answered it, and no one has. And like, what are we supposed to do?
BEN: Come on, stump us, listeners. We are fresh and primed for stumping.
HEDVIG: No, no, no. Ask us super easy questions, like what comes after Y in the alphabet or something.
DANIEL: Ah, well, that’s not actually a simple question because…
HEDVIG: [SNORTS] Sorry.
DANIEL: Anyway, let’s start with one by Nikoli via email. That’s to hello@becauselanguage.com. “Hello”, says Nikoli, “I am an undergrad psychology and linguistics student and I’ve been listening to the show since high school.”
BEN: Get right out of town!
HEDVIG: Wow!
DANIEL: Wow.
BEN: First of all, let me just say: you were probably super un-popular in high school, and that’s okay, because I’m sure, like other people like you.
HEDVIG: Wait, what?!
BEN: Hang on. Let me finish. Let me finish. I’m sure when you go to uni, shit got really cool for you. And I am so on board with that particular life journey. Because I can promise you: any kid listening to a linguistics podcast in high school, wow, that’s a choice.
HEDVIG: Hey, hey, hey, no, no, wait. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case.
BEN: No, I worry that you are hearing that I’m saying that this is a bad thing, and I’m saying this is a fucking awesome thing, and the world and schools in general are not sufficiently structured to encompass the level of awesome of being a high schooler and listening to a linguistics podcast.
DANIEL: You know, I did like linguistics in high school, and I wasn’t a terribly popular kid. I think the only popularity I got was because of drama. So, not linguistics.
HEDVIG: Mmm, I’m just saying that I think that there’s this trope that circulates in the Anglosphere that comes from Hollywood, that being popular in high school is necessarily a bad thing and that it means you’re shallow and a bad person, and that you peak in high school and not later. And I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I don’t think all high schools are like coolest.
BEN: Okay, Hedvig, subtle flex number two, you were hell popular in high school, we get it. [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: No, I wasn’t. I wasn’t.
DANIEL: Oh, no? Oh, okay. Well, then! [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: No, I don’t want to go into too much detail, but I wasn’t. But I just think that there’s… especially — maybe this is just me as a girl and maybe Nikoli’s a boy — but like there’s a certain kind of disdain that sometimes gets put on, especially girls who are popular in high school, that I think I did as well, and like look down upon them because they’re popular in high school. And I just I don’t like it.
DANIEL: Okay, that’s fine.
BEN: I can see that I have dragged into a little bit of discomfort, and I do apologise for that.
DANIEL: Okay, but now I’m going to needle that, because Facebook has shown us that all the popular kids in my high school totally peaked in high school.
BEN: [UPROARIOUS LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: [STEAMING MARGE SIMPSON SOUND]
DANIEL: N=1, N=1. Can I get back to Nikoli?
BEN: But okay. Sorry, Nikoli: Anyway, what’s your question?
DANIEL: Nikoli says, “I’m pretty certain this show influenced my decision to study language, by showing me the wide array of interesting subfields and ideas in linguistics, and for that I thank you.”
BEN: Yes!
HEDVIG: Aww, very cool.
DANIEL: “I’ve noticed people, including me, find it really difficult to tell the emotions of someone when they’re wearing a pandemic face mask. It seems we are literally masking our emotions. This reminds me of the ambiguity of texting, but we’ve created emojis for that. What are ways we can communicate the emotional content of our speech when our face is covered?”
BEN: Oooh, ooh, ooh! Can I say something?
DANIEL: Yes, Ben?
BEN: There is a science fiction series called, “The Expanse” which tackles this exact problem. So, in The Expanse, there is a class of people who are born and raised in space and thus wear a spacesuit, including a helmet, for like a huge portion of their working lives. And so a sort of physicality hand signal… what’s the word for like a side language, like an abject language that happens at the same…?
HEDVIG: People usually call it para-linguistic.
BEN: Yeah, so like a para-linguistic suite of gestures which would confer sarcasm or, like, affection or, like… essentially serve in the same way that emojis kind of do in the way we use texts now. So that’s one way we could possibly do it. But I think we would have to be wearing masks for a really long time for that to start to develop.
DANIEL: Well, you’re in luck because [NOISE OF DESPAIR].
BEN: Okay, sure.
HEDVIG: So, here in eastern Germany where I now live, people wear masks when we go to the shop, and when we are on the train, and all these instances where you might accidentally bump into someone. Or you might want to smile to your cashier and say, you know, Sprechen sie Englisch? because they asked you something complicated and you don’t know what it is. And the good thing for me as a newcomer to this country, is that I think Eastern Germans smile on average less than Australians normally.
BEN: The East Germans are a dour people? This is news to me! [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: And not seeing that part of their face means I don’t see the lack of the smile. [LAUGHTER]
BEN: So what you’re saying is the classic, like, essentially vapid, empty male, who then can have, like most of personality sort of projected onto them? You’re doing that with East Germans. You don’t see any facial expressions, so you’re just like: I bet they’re smiling!
HEDVIG: But it just makes it the absence of it less jarring for me. [LAUGHTER] Me, on the other hand, on the other end, am acutely aware that people aren’t seeing my face. So I am smizing more with my eyes and my head gestures.
DANIEL: Smizing? Can we go back? I like smizing.
HEDVIG: Tyra Banks.
DANIEL: Yep.
BEN: What?
HEDVIG: Tyra Banks. Smizing.
BEN: I… neither of you… [NOISE OF CONFUSION] Who is Tyra Banks, first of all? And what is smizing, second of all?
HEDVIG: What?! Tyra Banks is a famous supermodel. She is the host of the show America’s Next Top Model…
BEN: Oh, okay, I have heard of that show.
HEDVIG: …in which random women and sometimes also men from around America, and then also expanded to outside of America compete to become…
BEN: Compete to be a model. So where does smizing come in?
HEDVIG: They do photo shoots, and sometimes they are supposed to smile with their eyes, but not their lips. And, they basically are giving them like these crazy instructions for how to do body language and how to do things in order to make the photo shoot the way they planned it.
BEN: Is smizing just squinting a little bit?
HEDVIG: It is essentially squinting.
BEN: Okay, cool.
DANIEL: Okay, so it sounds like we don’t have an elaborate para-linguistic gesture system in place yet, but certainly…
BEN: [IMPATIENTLY] Ugh!
DANIEL: …certainly using your hands to communicate could be something that we do.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I try to do that.
BEN: Yeah, but the only problem is you need… as with emojis, right, you need consistency. Right? You need there to be a relative lack of ambiguity, so you would need people to kind of agree.
HEDVIG: Speaking of agreeing on gestures, yesterday I was asking someone if they had milk in the staff kitchen, and I wasn’t sure they were hearing me. So I tried to gesture them…
BEN: Tell me you milked a cow, please.
HEDVIG: I did. I did.
BEN: Yes! Oh, god, I love it when people do that.
HEDVIG: And everyone else in the staff room, like, the person I was asking, was like, “Oh, no, sorry, I don’t have milk.” She was like entirely normal about it. Everyone else was like: What did you just do? Why did you do that? Why didn’t you do the “take a milk carton and tip it into your cup” gesture? And I was like: But that can be ambiguous! I want cow milk!
BEN: I just love that in your brain the importance here is like a hundred percent clarity. So, like, legs akimbo, I’m hoping you mimed sitting down on a little stool, like, you got the actual relative height of the udders correct, you set up a little bucket and you started sort of like… [LAUGHTER] You warmed your hands first. You really just went to town on this, like, pitch perfect Marcel Marceau fucking cow milking.
HEDVIG: Okay, no, I just did the thing that in the air. What would you guys do? Daniel, what would you do?
DANIEL: If I wanted to communicate milk, but not any kind of non-bovine milk?
HEDVIG: Uh, just if you want to communicate milk, because I honestly would have been happy with any milk at that stage.
DANIEL: Yeah, I guess I would probably pull some teats, my friend.
BEN: I’ve got to be honest. In a work environment, at least in my work environment, miming, pouring anything into a cup would mean milk.
DANIEL and HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Because there’s just no other fluids that are consumed at work.
DANIEL: All right. So basically our channels are gesture, we’ve got eyes and then you’ve got to do it through your voice.
BEN: No Daniel, stop it. We’re talking about miming cows! How dare you drag us back on topic! [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: In answer to Nikoli’s question, I have also — because I looked it up for my sister — there are special masks you can buy, a bit more expensive, that are clear but are either clear, if only in a little window in front of your mouth, which looks grotesque because, like…
DANIEL: That’s weird.
HEDVIG: That looks very weird. But there are ones that are fully clear. I don’t want to name any business names, but if you basically Google, like, “clear face mask medical”, there are… because these have been produced for, for example, elderly homes or for people with hearing disabilities so that they can read lips. Or in general, like, people with dementia, if they are cared for by people who are wearing fully covered masks, they can actually get quite anxious because they can’t read the facial expressions.
BEN: Can I offer a last piece of advice to Nikoli, which I think we are all very silly for not having said sooner. There is a fair amount of compensation, emotionally speaking, that can be done if you start getting a bit better at your vocal delivery.
DANIEL: Voice, yeah.
BEN: So because like we three do a podcast, and Daniel and I did the radio before that, and like I did radio in uni a billion years ago, you can actually through pitch, pause, tone, pacing, all that kind of stuff. You can communicate, not anywhere near as much, I don’t want to say that, but you can definitely convey some emotionality in how you think and how you speak as well. So that’s always something that you can have a little fun… I feel like Seymour Skinner. See how many envelopes you can lick in an hour and then try and beat that score. You can have a little bit of fun trying to practice, getting a bit more expressive tonally with how you deliver what you say.
HEDVIG: That’s a very good point.
DANIEL: That’s a good point. Well, so in general, we’ve got a range of choices. We’ve got hand gestures, we’ve got posture, we’ve got the sound of our voice, the intonation and the rate of delivery.
BEN: Don’t be afraid. Nikoli, as well. if you’re worried that someone’s taking things too seriously, just take one step forward and run the back of your hand down the side of their face…
HEDVIG: Oh god, what. No! What.
BEN: to let them know that you just really, just you’re very sensitive and gentle towards whatever it is they’re saying. I think that’s a really great idea and I think it will work really, really well for you. And you should 100 per cent do it to everyone.
HEDVIG: Oh my god.
DANIEL: Thanks, Nikoli.
HEDVIG: This is like, this is the wrong episode… wrong answer episode.
DANIEL: Wrong answers only. [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Okay, let’s see if we can sneak in one wrong answer per question.
DANIEL: This’ll be a snap!
BEN: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Let’s try to sneak it in. It’s not like, yeah we’ll have to, we’ll have to start trying to do that, Hedvig. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: This next one from Benjamin @Gladclef: “Which was the first language with a mostly settled spelling. Was Latin or English first?”
HEDVIG and BEN: Ooh.
HEDVIG: Settled spelling, because that’s different from just a spelling.
DANIEL: I mean, English has always had… I mean, as long as there have been words, there’s been spelling, but the spelling hasn’t been standardised.
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly.
DANIEL: What was the first language to be standardised, probably?
BEN: I feel like this is probably going to end up being one of those trick questions where it’s like: Psych! None of them have! They’re all living languages. Sucked in, dickheads! But…
HEDVIG: Well…
BEN: If that’s not the answer…
HEDVIG: Benjamin did put “mostly” in the question.
BEN: Say again?
HEDVIG: Benjamin did put in “mostly settled”. So we can be like: We draw a border somewhere.
BEN: In that case, I’m going to go with my second best guess, which is: One hundred percent, not a Western language.
DANIEL: Okay, interesting.
HEDVIG: My guess is that… so the first writing was about accounting. Like: I gave you this many sheep, I’d like this many sheep back.
BEN: It’s cuneiform, right? Like it was Sumerian…
DANIEL: Mesopotamian…
HEDVIG: Yeah, cuneiform and stuff. Yeah. So, and I bet that was, like, a number and then a noun, right? Like, how much variation could there really be? And the pressure for being standardised must be quite high because we’re talking about economy and people don’t want to be like: No, you owe me twelve, no, you owe me two.
DANIEL: I can’t speak to the standardisation of cuneiform, but let’s start with Latin, because that was the one that Benjamin mentioned. Latin spelling has always been in a state of flux. In the classical period from about six hundred BCE to one hundred BCE, you get things spelled lots of different ways. But then in the 1st century BCE, this book came out, actually it was twenty five books “De Lingua Latina Libri”. It was written by the Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro. And once you start getting books and writing that are widespread in the language, you start getting into a phase called the standardisation phase, where things start getting a little bit locked down. But spelling can still have a lot of flux. Even in the medieval Latin period, like from the 1000s–1700s, still differences in spelling for lots and lots of words.
Now English is another story. David Crystal, in his book “The Stories of English”, points out that in the days of old English before 1066, books were handwritten by scribes, and they would spell things kind of how they sounded. And this would be different from place to place because people sounded different in different places. And not only that, but sounds were also changing over time. And all of this was happening faster than standardisation could cope with. But I think we could probably say that by the time we got to the advent of printing, like maybe the late 1500s, we had the beginnings — still not locked down totally — but the beginnings of what we would call spelling standardisation. So is there standardisation in English? Yes, but it takes a long time to do it, and it’s usually tied to books.
HEDVIG: I bet there were various Chinese dynasties that tried to standardise writing. Chinese traditional characters at various point in time.
DANIEL: Yup, that’s my answer.
BEN: BOOM! Ben Ainslie, right answer, love it! You notice I got the right answer by simply saying “not these things” — non-western language — which I’m going to claim me being right.
DANIEL: Okay, I’ll give it to you. So the first standardised Chinese was probably during the Qin dynasty, about 221 BCE.
BEN: That’s… now, just to be clear, that is the Qin dynasty from which China gets its name, right?
DANIEL: That’s correct.
HEDVIG: And upon which the movie “Hero” is based? Question mark?
DANIEL: Oh, I saw that one.
BEN: Good film. Good film.
HEDVIG: My Chinese teacher didn’t allow us to watch it because she thought it was propaganda.
BEN: Hmm.
DANIEL: Is it not propaganda?
HEDVIG: Uh…
DANIEL: I think it’s totally propaganda, but it’s still a good movie.
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly.
BEN: Look, let’s be clear. Isn’t all national mythos propaganda?
DANIEL and HEDVIG: YES.
BEN: Okay. [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yes. Usually this dynasty is spelled with a Q.
BEN: Oh, okay.
HEDVIG: Correct?
DANIEL: Yes, exactly.
HEDVIG: We’re talking about the same dynasty?
DANIEL: Yep. Same one.
BEN: There’s been a few, we should clarify.
DANIEL: So that’s my answer. Neither English nor Latin, but Chinese was probably the first one to really be standardised. And I realise that spelling in an alphabet is not quite the same as spelling in a logographic language. But I think standardisation is standardisation.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Okay. That’s cool.
HEDVIG: Well, the question was standardised writing… no! spelling. Oh, okay… what is spelling if you’re…
DANIEL: What is spelling?
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s spelling.
DANIEL: It’s spelling. Why does alphabet spelling feel different?
BEN: We’re just classifying as what, like, characters we used to associate with what concepts? Right?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: We should we should also clarify that, like standardisation of spelling, as maybe was evident by the information Daniel gave earlier, is connected with like empires, nation states, mass media, education, television. These kinds of things are the venues where a, like, thoroughly standardised spelling is useful. So we could maybe imagine that at one point during the Roman Empire peak, there was some effort to standardise some things, because like the emperor wanted to send a letter to, you know, Gallia and get it roughly understood. And that’s the same motivation that would drive standardisation in premodern times in most places, I believe.
DANIEL: All right. Hey, thanks, Benjamin, for that question.
HEDVIG: Benjamin Bean, that’s a good last name.
DANIEL: Next one comes from Franz on Twitter. This was a series of tweets. Franz says, “Linguistic thoughts. We know that basic words in each language are more likely to be short. I, YOU, MA, PA. ONE, TWO, THREE. Same goes for animal names. Common animal names in English have one syllable: DOG, CAT, COW, BIRD, FISH, WORM. But how come CATERPILLAR is four syllables?”
HEDVIG: Can I be the boring person and say most thinking on this has to do with frequency. So when we say… there’s the term basic vocabulary, which in historical linguistics is used for a set of words that are thought to change slowly. So these are I, YOU — actually not MUM and DAD, because they get excluded for other reasons. But ONE, TWO, THREE…
DANIEL: Body parts.
HEDVIG: FIRE, VOMIT, FLEA. My favorite one is LOUSE. These are basic in that…
BEN: Wait, hang on. I’m sorry. Could we just, just to be clear, LOUSE as in the creature that, like, goes in your hair is one of the most basic and slowest changing words in a language?
HEDVIG: Yeah. Like over the world, when you try and compare, and try and find language families, there’s a list that people have slowly been evolving and adding in. But most of the lists include HEAD LOUSE, yes.
BEN: [LAUGHTER] Sorry.
DANIEL: Those little critters have been with us for a long time.
HEDVIG: Well, when you think about it, like…
BEN: Yeah, I get it. I get it. I get it. I get it. But so have, like, caterpillars, right?
HEDVIG: Well, A) caterpillar: not really a thing everywhere. Not really that important. They don’t really bite us. And we don’t require like a whole social ritual for like removing them from our scalp.
BEN: True. But we do require social rituals away from like getting them off crops and stuff.
HEDVIG: Yeah, but like having crops is, like, fairly recent.
BEN: True, I think. I forget about the time scale we’re working on. Right? The agricultural revolution was ten thousand years ago and you’re like: Jeez Louise, way to come in recently with your johnny-come-lately bullshit, Ainslie.
HEDVIG: I mean, to be fair, historical linguistics usually say they can’t get beyond eight thousand. So I’m exaggerating a little bit. But, like, even ten thousand years ago, agricultural revolution didn’t hit everywhere at the same time. Right? There are still places now that are not agricultural. What I wanted to say is that those basic words, basic vocabulary, at least that historical linguists use for this kind of thing, are not the same thing as the things that are most frequently talked about in language. So like, you know, in an everyday conversation, you might say, I and YOU and ONE a lot, but you might not say HEAD LOUSE as much. Right?
BEN: Oh, Hedvig, when you have a child, things will change.
DANIEL: Oh, dear.
HEDVIG: Well, we’ve talked about this. That’s probably not going to happen. But anyway, so there’s the other thing, which is the most frequent words in language, which are likely to be grammatical, functional items, which are usually not included in these basic vocabulary lists, because they have a whole different set of change dynamics to them, and historical linguists generally think that they are not good for historical reconstruction in the same way. But things that are said often tend to be shorter.
DANIEL: Mhm. And that’s why I feel pretty certain that if there was a reason for us to be talking about caterpillars suddenly a lot, like, for example, if there were a caterpillar plague or something — I don’t want this to happen, you know, and there’s still time because it’s still 2020 — But if that would happen…
BEN: Wait, wait, we hate caterpillars?
DANIEL: …I’m sure we would start abbreviating them to CAT: Oh, I saw a cat the other day.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Yeah. So the theory that Franz is driving in this series of tweets is essentially because they all survived, people must have interacted with caterpillars long before agriculture. So the idea is that if we’ve been around a thing for a long time, then natural wearing down of the word should mean that it becomes shorter.
DANIEL: Yeah. That’s right.
HEDVIG: That’s the theory. And counterargument to that is that if there’s a thing that we don’t talk about that often, we might be more likely to borrow in a new word from another language from it, because it’s not very important to our identity that we use, say whatever it is we’re saying. Because CATERPILLAR looks like a loanword.
DANIEL: It is a loanword, and it hasn’t been around quite that long. It’s only since the mid-1500s. It comes from CATERPILOSE, which is an old French word, which… The CATER actually is the cat. And the PILOSE means having ‘lots of hair’. So it’s a furry cat.
BEN: Ah, because some caterpillars are, like the ones we get here in WA are actually tiny, little fluffy things.
DANIEL: That’s right. And before we had that word, what they called them in old English was either cawelwyrm, which is cabbage worm, or leáfwyrm, which is leaf worm. I think.
HEDVIG: We have [kɔl.məs], like in the translation I had of Alice in Wonderland, I believe the caterpillar was called Cabbage Worm.
DANIEL: Oh, wow. Yeah, okay.
HEDVIG: But we usually call them a thousand footies or a hundred footies.
DANIEL: What, millipede and centipede?
BEN and HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Anybody know why BUTTERFLY looks like butterfly?
BEN: Oh, yeah, good question.
HEDVIG: Ooh, I have a story about this! Sorry. This is tangent town, isn’t it? Sorry.
BEN: Hey, one wrong answer.
HEDVIG: So, here in Germany it’s illegal to kill wasps. If you kill a lot of them, you might get a fine. If you kill one or two, probably no one is going to care. But I killed some wasps accidentally. This is, this is really the patron episode where our patrons could really fuck me up.
BEN: Just really quickly, moths are not bees, right? Like, moths are not some sort of like super essential component of the ecosystem, the way a bee is.
HEDVIG: Wasps.
BEN: I feel like killing a wasp is not that big a deal. You should not necessarily be hung out to dry for this. They are, like, predators. That’s what all.
HEDVIG: So the wasps here in Germany are classified as… they actually do pollination and they are classified as important. So I was looking at this article about this. So there’s like, it was like 50,000 euro fine.
BEN: That is huge.
HEDVIG: So I was like, okay, well… because I made a funny video about my dead wasps, and I got a text from my supervisor saying: Maybe take that down.
DANIEL: Oh, shoot. Wow.
HEDVIG: So I did. So I was looking at the list anyway and it was like also other things you can’t kill. And it was like bumblebees. And I was like, fine, I’m not going to kill bumblebees. And then it said, butterflies. And because I was thinking about flies, I was wondering, please don’t tell me that I can’t kill fruit flies because I really want to kill fruit flies. So when I saw butterfly, I went: Hm! Here’s a fly associated with butter, do you know?
DANIEL: Yeah. Is that… would that be your guess, Ben, that it’s something to do with butter?
BEN: No. I reckon it’s closer to the… I reckon it’s got more to do with the… [SINGS] words are failing me…
HEDVIG: Colour?
BEN: No.
HEDVIG: A lot of butterflies are yellow.
BEN: In the way that bumblebees are called bumblebees because of, like, an association with like an older English word. Like, I think Dumbledore is actually what a bumblebee used to be. I have a feeling BUTTERFLY did the same thing. Like, it used to be older words, and we’ve kind of morphed it into kind of more contemporary sounding words. Does that make sense?
DANIEL: Mm.
HEDVIG: Ohh. Yeah. Like if it became normal to say hamburger.
BEN: Yeah. In the same way it used to be Dumbledore and then it became bumblebee because those two things sound a bit more like their actual words than, I’m thinking BUTTERFLY was the same thing, it actually maybe be used to be called like bloooterfloor! or something. And we just, after a while, as a language speaker≤s we were like, that sounds dumb! Let’s call it butterfly.
DANIEL: Okay, well, surprisingly, the butter in BUTTERFLY is actual butter.
BEN: Oh, what!
HEDVIG: Yay!
DANIEL: Yeah. People thought that they actually ate, or they would steal the butter. You got a bunch of butterflies in the barn molesting the cattle, trying to slurp up that milk. I mean, they don’t.
BEN: Hedvig, you need to add that to your milking mime; batting away butterflies left and right as you try to milk the invisible tits.
DANIEL: Yeah, they don’t do that. They don’t actually drink milk, but people thought they did. And so they were thought to be butter-flies, so there you go.
HEDVIG: Wow! So until I saw that article and I read butterfly, I had never actually segmented the word BUTTERFLY into BUTTER and FLY.
DANIEL: How about that.
HEDVIG: Had you? Like that was like genuinely a revolution for me. I was reading it and I was looking for fruit fly and I saw butterfly and I was like: Huh, I’ve never heard of that kind of fly before! And it took me like a full couple of seconds until I was like, oh, it’s a different thing.
BEN: I feel like we need to, what’s that… we need to spoonerise it.
DANIEL: Flutterby?
BEN: Yeah. Makes a lot more sense.
HEDVIG: Ohhh, flutterby.
DANIEL: I thought that maybe one of you two would tell me that that was the real etymology, because that’s something that people think and that’s not quite so.
HEDVIG: That’s really cute though, because they flutter by!
DANIEL: They flutter by, but that’s not the etymology.
BEN: I love when my real just shit off-the-cuff jokes really land with one of you! It makes me so happy.
DANIEL: So in general, our answer to Franz’s question: Yes, words for tiny things can be longer. This is one of Charles Hockett’s design features of human language: arbitrariness. So tiny things can have big words. Microorganisms are tiny, but cows are big. But if we start using these words more often, we will shorten them. And this is known as the brevity law or Zipf’s law of abbreviation.
BEN: Zipf’s law, by the way, is so cool.
DANIEL: It’s so dope.
BEN: I just… I like it so much.
DANIEL: And then more to his question, it turns out that caterpillars used to be leaf worms or cabbage worms, but then the word got borrowed in. There you have it. Let’s go on to Kevin’s question on Facebook. It’s all dudes. Women, give us your questions.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: Kevin says on Facebook: “Today in a radio address, Georgia’s governor said, ‘Since the pandemic begun’.” Since the pandemic begun. “I cringed, not just because BEGUN without an auxiliary sounds non-standard, but also because it’s the kind of construction that even if it were to come naturally to a speaker, likely will be suppressed, lest that person’s speech come across as too regional and thus less prestigious. I say this as a Southern American English speaker myself. Regardless, I googled and found several examples of where a news story used ‘since the pandemic begun’, instead of what I thought was a more conventional ‘since the pandemic began’.” The list includes the Daily Mail, LA Times, Washington Post and some others.” And Kevin has included screenshots of all of these ‘since the pandemic begun’ in major newspapers. And you can find them with a Google search yourself.
BEN: Kevin, I just want to quickly interject to say: I really love the conspiracy theorist vibe of clicking out all of the different ones. I’m huge. I’m for it, mate. I really… You’re marching to the beat of a drum I really enjoy marching to. Keep doing the good work.
DANIEL: “Is this”, asks Kevin, “maybe something that’s been promulgated because spellcheck or predictive text is getting it wrong, or has this usage made its way into standard American (and beyond) English and I failed to get the memo?” What do you think?
BEN and HEDVIG: Hmm.
DANIEL: Is this a change in progress?
BEN: I’m going to go no on consistent autocorrects, simply because, as much as journalism has taken a huge hit over the last, like, 15 years of its existence, I find it very hard to believe that copy editors at places like The Washington Post are letting grammatical errors like that just slip past. So I’m thinking autocorrect spellcheck is not the right answer.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I read this and I thought: I’m going to think about it and feel about it instead of looking it up because… [LAUGHTER] No, I honestly, because I wanted to sense if…
BEN: This is how you got your PhD, right? You just sat down and you were like: Cosmos, speak a thesis to me!
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] No, but I wanted to get the sense of what my English would do and what I think this how this works. And I found it really hard to meta-analyze this, actually, because I think I would say ‘since the pandemic began’. But if someone said ‘begun’, I would assume that they are American and a certain part of America. But I… if you asked me, like… so Kevin wrote something about auxiliary verbs. I mean, so I assume he means something like “I’ve begun drinking” is what he thinks of as the typical use.
DANIEL: Mhm. I have begun.
HEDVIG: And that you can’t say “I begun drinking”.
DANIEL: Right.
BEN: I would also say, I can’t speak to The Washington Post stuff, right, like the other news articles. But I could 100% believe that Georgia’s governor is playing up his strong accent, [SOUNDS OF AGREEMENT] as opposed to toning it down. I completely agree with Kevin that nearly all speakers of regional or non-standard accents, when they reach public office, will tone down things quite a lot. But I also think that we have been seeing pretty, shall we say, verdant resurgence in leaning into non-standard dialects from, sort of like, conservative spaces particularly.
HEDVIG: Yeah. No. George W. Bush — the junior one — is known for having done this to sound more non-Washingtonian and non-standard.
BEN: More Texan.
HEDVIG: Yeah, in order to sort of… and people like it, like people will respond to that, even if it’s not even their dialect, like even people from other places will be like: Oh, he sounds so genuine.
BEN: ~He sounds so folksy!~
DANIEL: Mhm.
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly.
DANIEL: Well, I took a look in the Google Ngram Viewer and found that in books up to 2019, there isn’t really any move towards saying “since * begun”, it’s… “since * began” is much, much more common. I can only explain this by saying: it’s just an editing error. You know how that thing you do when you say… you want to type “a big dog”, but then you change “big” to “enormous”. So now it says “A enormous dog” and you just forget to change it to “AN enormous dog”. I think it’s something like that. However, I will say that ‘begin, began, begun’ is an interesting set of verbs, you know, because we’ve got a lot of these in English. We’ve got ‘ring, rang, rung’, ‘swim, swam, swum’. But then we’ve got some weird gaps like SPIN and SPUN right, where yesterday I… so what’s happening is today I SPIN yesterday I SPUN and I have already SPUN. A lot of varieties of English say SPAN.
HEDVIG: I say SPAN a lot of wool.
BEN: Hang on, what? We’re missing, a past tense here.
DANIEL: Yeah, and so we stick it… a lot of people stick it in. “The world SPAN round”, you know, so there’s a…
HEDVIG: Yup, that’s what I do!
DANIEL: So there’s some interesting additions and there’s some interesting attritions going on. And yeah, yesterday I BEGUN to do something, or yesterday… you know the one that really is confusing is SWIM.
BEN: Swim, swam, swum?
DANIEL: Swim, swam, swum. Like a lot of people say “I swum”.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: And also with SING, SANG and a lot of people will say “I SUNG” something yesterday.
BEN: Is that wrong?
DANIEL: Uhhh, I mean, it’s just shows that there’s a bit of attrition going on, a bit of leveling with those…
HEDVIG: People trying to merge those categories, and people are arguing about which one you should pick.
BEN: Right, I see. Should we just change it into like, should we just create a new one? Kind of like, it’ll just be like, “I swud”. So you’re swimming, you have swam, and you plan to swim? Yes. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: For now, I’m calling this one a mistake. But I’m watching it, because there are some interesting things to say about it. Kevin also says, “I’m very much enjoying the new podcast and was glad to see y’all kept the light yet intelligent vibe that made the last podcast so much fun to listen to.”
BEN: Oh! Well, I’m glad it appeals to you, Kevin. And can I just say we will definitely put up your maybe a crazy person collage of just sort of conspi… the only thing that it’s missing is, like, the red thread to the pins connecting all of the various dots. It’s so good. I love it. And again, I worry that people hear this and they’re like: man, Ben’s being really mean. It’s, I love weird shit like this. It’s so good!
DANIEL: Let’s finish up with a question from Bill via email, hello@becauselanguage.com. Bill says, “Guys, y’all, yinz, I know the drill.”
BEN: What’s, what’s yinz?
DANIEL: Yinz? Oh yeah. That’s something they say in Pixburgh: you ones.
BEN: You ones? As in, as in the royal one? Like: “one” must…
DANIEL: No, it’s like the plural “you”, all of you guys.
BEN: Right! Hey, there you go, Bill!
DANIEL: Bill says, “I know the drill: IRREGARDLESS is a word because people say it and listeners know what they mean by it….”
BEN: [EXTENDED LAUGHTER] I’m sorry.
HEDVIG: Yeah, go on…
BEN: I’m laughing because, I swear to god, this is how so many conversations start between me and my partner Ayesha, because she is still a prescriptivist, but she knows she doesn’t get any play with me! She’s like: [MOCKINGLY] “Yeah, I know. I know what you’re going to say. ~People use language however they want!~”
DANIEL: And Bill says, “LITERALLY is an intensifier when people use it that way. No problem, I routinely make these defenses.” Now watch out. Bill is going to do something you don’t expect here. So watch out.
HEDVIG: Oooh.
DANIEL: “But I also routinely make the argument that being criticised on Twitter for saying something awful is not censorship.” I mean, we would all agree with that, right? If someone criticises you on Twitter for saying something terrible, that’s not censorship, is it? Really?
BEN: No, not at all.
HEDVIG: No, that’s response. That’s criticism.
DANIEL: Bill says, “Even losing your job for saying something awful isn’t censorship generally, or so I have argued. Now, clearly, there are a lot of bad faith arguments out there. There are people misrepresenting the extent of the consequences that they or others have experienced as a result of the aforementioned awful assertions.”
HEDVIG: Exactly, yeah.
DANIEL: “That said, in cases where one of these belligerents is arguing only things in evidence, that person X said something awful and some segment of the public responded negatively, and they describe that as censorship, and if there are enough such cases in which censorship is being used to mean harsh public scolding in response to things one has said…”
HEDVIG: [UNDERSTANDING] Ohhh…
DANIEL: “…am I a hypocrite for insisting that they’re using CENSORSHIP incorrectly? Would it be reasonable for one of them to argue that while the legal sense of censorship is very narrow, in non-legal contexts, it can have a broader range of meanings?” Bill says, “I think I’m okay with being a hypocrite, for the record.”
BEN: Oh, well, man!
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: Okay, okay Hedvig, you first.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I thought about this. I thought about the exact same thing, because I saw someone else posting, I think this was on the account “She Rates Dogs”, which is just like women sending awful messages they’ve gotten from men. And one of them was a guy who refuses to apologise for things. And he uses the, like, legal definition of guilt in order to say he doesn’t need to apologise for something, because he didn’t “mean” to hurt the other person. And that’s definitely a case where the modern normal use of GUILT and APOLOGY is not the same as the law term of GUILT and APOLOGY, right? So you can’t be sentenced to jail if you can prove that you didn’t intend to hurt someone, for example, with an action you did. You have to… a lawyer has to prove that you have intent to be hurtful. But in common usage, you still apologise, even if you didn’t mean to hurt the other person, right? Because we think that you should be considerate and have some, you know, theory of mind, empathy skills to be able to understand the actions of what you did. And I think this censorship thing is a little bit in the same category that, like, we can have a legal definition of censorship, but I think this is an interesting question. I actually like this question. I don’t know what to do about it because it is possible, like Bill is saying that the common discourse term of censorship is drifting in another direction.
BEN: Like, first of all, I want to throw a massive kudos to Bill because this is… like, remember how we said before that, like, our listeners are heaps fucking smarter than us. This is… what a great example of that. Like, Bill, this is such an awesome question. It was a curveball. It was a really interesting curveball. But I’m going to fling one straight back at him. You ready for this, Bill? I hope you got your catcher’s mitt. What if… we use a word that currently exists that means exactly what this broadened definition of censorship is becoming to mean, right? And bonus, it already sounds exactly the fucking same as this word… CENSURESHIP [sen.sjɔ.ʃɪp].
DANIEL: Oh, I see.
BEN: It’s a word, it exists! The act of blaming, criticizing or condemning as wrong. That’s censure.
HEDVIG: What? Wait, what? This is when your like media studies skills come in.
BEN: Okay, I’m going to take you through this step by step, all right? If your mind has not sufficiently been blown, listeners, prepare for a step-by-step blowing. Okay, CENSORSHIP. The word that Bill’s question was about is spelled, where are we see, c-e-n-s-o-r-e, right?
DANIEL: c-e-n-s-o-r
BEN: Censor. There is another word in English called CENSURE, which is c-e-n-s-u-r-e. And the definition for CENSURE is the act of blaming, criticizing or condemning as wrong or reprehensible.
HEDVIG: Whaaaat!
BEN: And, and if you add the suffix ‘ship’ to that word, well, gee willickers, what you get is the act or process of censuring or condemnation. [CELEBRATORY AIR HORN NOISE] Pow pow pow pow pow pow.
DANIEL: That’s funny, because I see that on Etymonline, those two words, CENSOR and CENSURE are related. They both come from the same place.
BEN: Ooh, ooh, yeah. Yeah. Ben Ainslie for the win.
HEDVIG: This is very interesting.
BEN: So I want to be clear. I’m not digging up a fossil. Like, CENSURE is still a word that is used.
DANIEL: Um. Yeah, okay. I feel like we haven’t really touched the people who want to say… because I think what’s happening is Bill is having discussions with people saying “He was censored” and Bill says, “No, he wasn’t, that’s not the meaning of that word.” And the other person says, well, it is by my definition. It is by the expanded definition of the word.
BEN: I know, I know it really doesn’t answer the question, but it feels like such a good thing where he can just come back and be like: it’s actually censureship.
DANIEL: And then you’re that annoying guy.
BEN: Yeah, I know.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I know.
DANIEL: Well, okay.
BEN: I think Bill’s right. I think unfortunately, like, there is a little bit of a live-by-the-sword-die-by-the-sword thing going on here. Right? We can’t in all good conscience do a news story about how a really awesome person has written to… I think it was Merriam-Webster to be like: I’m really sick of your narrow definition of RACISM. It now means something much bigger and it needs to encompass more. And having people be like, yep, totally. And then not also acknowledge that this is happening here, too.
DANIEL: We had the same discussion with Jane Solomon, the lexicographer who said, you know, the word FEMINIST has different definitions. Like some people say, it’s somebody who is interested in advancing the cause of women. Other people say: it’s a woman who hates men. And…
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: And that’s what it means to them. And so what do you do? Well, in a dictionary, you describe them both, but then you use a usage note and you say: this definition is archaic, or not everyone agrees with this definition, or this is only in certain places. Like, I do this with ATHEIST. Right? Like people say, oh, an atheist is someone who’s certain that God doesn’t exist. And I say, well, you know, I don’t use ATHEIST that way. So I guess, I’m a linguist, but I’m a language user like everybody else. And it’s okay for you to stump for the meaning that you think is most appropriate. At the same time, we can’t just say “~that’s not the meaning!~”
HEDVIG: I think also when people talk about censorship online and when they have these discussions about being criticised — and this is going to maybe sound weird coming from a linguist — but like words, words represent concepts and you can use a longer sentence or something and you can say, you know, in order to talk more clearly. And if there’s confusion around terms, maybe you need to use a full sentence or something to explain what you mean. You can say something like: I don’t believe that it is a problem that you are being criticised for this thing, because Twitter isn’t forbidding you from saying this thing.
DANIEL: Mm.
HEDVIG: Right?
BEN: Twitter, classically the home of long-form, thoughtful statements. [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Indeed. No, no, but honestly, like, if there’s confusion around this term, and if people are getting hung up on the words… like words, words are only meaningful to, you know, do nonconsensual telepathy. And if that word isn’t good for having that discussion, then maybe you do need to break it down and talk about law and prohibit… what was the word, FORBID in noun term?
DANIEL: Prohibition?
HEDVIG: It is prohibition? Okay. I guess it sounds, like, alcohol-related.
DANIEL: It is.
HEDVIG: Yeah. So maybe it is useful to break it down, and maybe avoid that word in order to have a more clear discussion, honestly.
DANIEL: So I guess you could say either: okay, if that’s censorship, it’s not a kind of censorship that we really should care about. That’s one way to go.
HEDVIG: Exactly. Yeah. And be like: this term is clearly not helping us in our discussion. What I wanted to say is that it’s okay for you to be criticised as long as you get to say what you’re saying.
BEN: I do… I worry that we are not honouring in good faith the spirit of Bill’s question. Right? Because I feel like we have been fairly happier to sort of shut down criticisms somewhat like the ones we’re leveling at the wrong use of censorship right now.
DANIEL: Mmm.
BEN: Does that make sense? Like I worry that Bill quite rightly identified a bit of a “if it’s good for the goose, is good for the gander” thing going on and… we’re still doing it a little bit. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: We’re clinging.
HEDVIG: What I’m trying to say is that like if a word is changing in its meaning, like he’s observing, then that’s fine. But if we want to have a discussion that pertains to the earlier meaning, we shouldn’t maybe go around and say, “~oh, that’s the wrong word to use for this~”. We should maybe be turning to other other words.
BEN: Right.
HEDVIG: Other ways of expressing…
BEN: Like censureship!
HEDVIG: Well, if this word has been around since the 1400s and it’s the first time I hear about it, maybe that word isn’t doing a good job.
BEN: Hey, hey, hey! You’re the one who was all like: “Since the agricultural revolution? That’s pretty fucking new, Ben!”
DANIEL: Well how about this: So someone says: “This person was censored!” Then I could come back and say: “When you say he was censored, do you mean that he was prohibited from saying, was stopped from saying the thing?”
BEN: No, Daniel, that is exactly the kind of shit we give people a hard time for.
DANIEL: No, no, no. Because then I’m asking for clarification, because I’m aware the words have different meanings. So I can say: When you say that word, do you mean that he was prevented? No, he wasn’t prevented. Okay, well, and then you can say, well, okay, then he wasn’t prevented.
BEN: You’re right, technically. But at the same time, god, that’s the kind of weirdly linked, like, language police bullshit that we do normally have such a big go at.
DANIEL: I’m not trying to split hairs…
HEDVIG: It’s not language police bullshit, because we’re not saying that it is necessarily the wrong term. We’re just saying: There’s a change going on, people are using this word to mean more than one thing. Can you unpack it for me?
BEN: Do we not… It strikes me that, it feels like a “well, actually” argument, but said in such a way that no one can ping you for making a “well, actually argument”.
DANIEL: Well, if what they care about is that someone was prevented, then let’s talk about prevention.
BEN: Okay, all right. I think on this one I’m just… I feel a bit triggered. I’m a bit defensive. I apologise. And Bill, I’ve got to say, mate, what a bloody corker of a question.
DANIEL: Yeah, it is. It’s a really interesting question.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: And you know what? It’s not a question that we know what to do with, because there will always be people who will define a term that we feel really strongly about, and they’ll define… like I do with, you know, ATHEIST or FEMINISM or whatever. And I’ll say, that’s not a good definition! And then I’ll have to say, but you know what? That’s words.
BEN: Fucking, goddammit, our smart fans! We could have been Joe Rogan, and just had an army of chads who we were just way smarter than…
HEDVIG: Yeah, thank you, Ben. Welcome to my team. Welcome to my team.
BEN: …and yet, fuck! And then here we are with just all of these geniuses listening to us.
HEDVIG: Exactly. All of our Patrons: get your stupidest friend to start listening to us, please.
BEN: We need more Joe Rogan fans. No, please don’t make that happen. That was a joke. Please.
DANIEL: We are so lucky because I am seeing intellectual dark web folks just turn their fans loose on people on Twitter and make their lives a real problem, at least their online lives.
BEN: Yeah, please don’t come for us, IDW people, I don’t care about you.
HEDVIG: Oh fuck, yeah, no, uhh, okay, sorry, yeah.
DANIEL: But yeah, but like, our fans would never do that. I can’t even imagine our listeners doing that. They’re awesome.
BEN: I would just love us siccing our fans on someone and some person would just have a whole bunch of incredibly polite kindly people just, just, just sort of suggesting helpful ways that they might be able to, if they wanted to, possibly make different decisions. That’s, like, the most severe I could imagine our fans being.
HEDVIG: I… on an honest note… again, this is the episode of like, our patrons could really fuck me up.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Just lay it all on the table.
HEDVIG: Yeah, no, but like, I can find myself… when I want to be mean to someone online because I believe they have a wrong belief or something. I must admit that I slip into a patronising stance of like trying to help them…
BEN: Hedvig, you are, this is exactly what I was identifying before.
HEDVIG: …in, like, the most passive aggressive way.
BEN: This is 100 percent what I was getting a bit triggered by with Daniel’s statement before, because, smart, like, highly educated Westerners all fucking do this. We all do.
HEDVIG: Yeah, and it’s like…
BEN: We just… we lord ourselves over someone. And the more we can make it clear that we are making them stupid, not because we’re trying to, but because we’re just existing at our own level of intelligence. It’s such a fucked up thing to do. And I do it too.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And it is… I mean, it is better than like saying like “you fucking twat” and being rude to people.
BEN: “Go die in a fire, you piece of garbage”
HEDVIG: Yeah. And the alternative — and I think Daniel’s suggestion was actually a little bit better than my patronising things — which I don’t want anyone to look up — is to…
BEN: Yeah. Definitely ask for that now, after you’ve just outed it the way you have.
HEDVIG: [NERVOUS CHUCKLES] No, but like starting with a question, asking someone to clarify, trying to do it as nonjudgmental as possible is a little bit better than unprompted, offering helpful advice in a patronising manner.
DANIEL: Yeah, the wrong way to do it is, “That’s not the right definition”, but the right way to do it is, “Do you mean this? Okay, I don’t think that”.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah. Like, it’s a little bit better. Because the alternative is, look, the alternative is either being super rude and joining, like, the legions of trolls, or not engaging in it.
DANIEL: I choose not engage.
HEDVIG: If one of our listeners — and we do have very smart listeners — know another path that isn’t being patronising and judgmental and trying to be like, ~oh, did you mean blah~, or being a troll or leaving it be, that would… that is, like, a life question I would like help with.
DANIEL: Well, you know, my rule of the internet. It comes from the Billy Joel song: “It ain’t no big sin to stick your two cents in, if you know when to leave it alone.” And there comes a time when you’ve got to say, I said my bit. And then you just don’t come back.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is… I’ve started to notice this, I’m in my 30s now, so I think I’ve reached, like, peak wisdom, which is probably not true. [LAUGHTER] But it’s hard, though, man.
DANIEL: It is hard.
BEN: It is. Like, being your best self is a fucking chore. It’s no fun at all.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, hey, thanks to our listeners for all their good questions. You know, you can send us questions too. Engage with us on Facebook. On Twitter. hello@becauselanguage.com, we want to hear from you.
BEN: Let’s get questions from as diverse a collection of our listenership as we possibly can.
DANIEL: Yes, please.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: We’re going to move on to Words of the Week.
BEN: [LIMPLY] Yay.
DANIEL: We got a couple this time.
HEDVIG: I saw the first word here. Uh-huh, yeah.
DANIEL: W-A-P?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Had you encountered this before?
HEDVIG: I believe I know what it stands for, I’m a little bit a bit confused why we have it here.
BEN: Oh, tell me the P stands for penis!
DANIEL: No.
BEN: Aww!
HEDVIG: No.
BEN: Because the way you were sounding cagey was like, oooh, it’s a sex thing.
DANIEL: You’re right there.
HEDVIG: It is a sex thing.
BEN: Ah, wicked! I love sex things.
DANIEL: This is the name of a track from Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion.
BEN: Ahhhh, Wet Ass Pussy!
HEDVIG: Yeah, thank you.
DANIEL: That’s the one. Wet ass pussy. It’s a sexuality-affirming women’s empowerment anthem, I guess? Cool.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: It’s about… you know, it’s about prioritising women’s arousal and enjoyment. Regardless of actual moisture content, it’s still a wonderful thing. So there were two things that were great about this. Number one.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHTER] Yeah, sorry.
BEN: I can’t tell you how great it is that we have a 50-something, white ex-mormon explaining the Cardi B song, Wet Ass Pussy. Like this might be the zenith of our show. Everything from here is going to be a slow descent.
DANIEL: I’ve worked hard for this moment. Just let me have this, Ben!
BEN: Okay. No! No, no, no. Forge ahead, mate. Go for it.
DANIEL: So there are two things that were great about this. Number one, linguists had a huge debate over whether it should be pronounced WAP [wæp], or WAP [wɔp]. Any feelings either way?
BEN: Can I just…
HEDVIG: [wæp]
BEN: I mean [wæp], obviously.
HEDVIG: Yes, thank you.
DANIEL: Why?
BEN: But more pertinently, this song was released, and the linguistic community decided to have a fight over how the acronym should be pronounced?
DANIEL: Yup! Well, not a fight.
BEN: You boring, sexless nerds!
DANIEL: It’s about sex, Ben. It’s all sex, deep down.
BEN: [FALLS ABOUT LAUGHING]
HEDVIG: I like Nicole Holliday’s tweet, which was not picking a side either way of saying, like, what if this actually was [wɔp] in the streets, but [wæp] in the sheet… in the bed? Sheets, it should be really. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: And you better change those sheets, for that matter.
BEN: I feel like much, much like in the previous few shows, I’ve had such a massive issue with people just not saying, doing a poo, or like defecating or whatever. That everyone’s always tiptoeing around the fucking tulips on that shit. I feel like the point of this song very explicitly is to like, let’s not acronymise it.
DANIEL: Just say it! Wet Ass Pussy. They couldn’t even say it in the YouTube video.
HEDVIG: I also like the idea that… so you guys, well, one of you is from Australia, one of you has lived there for a very long time. And one term that I really like in Australia is the construction like “sweet ass [æs] ” something, which is actually just one s, and it’s like “SWEET AS [æz]” cherries, or whatever. But you guys just say SWEET AS [æz]. My mom, when she came to visit and we got some tickets to go to Taronga Zoo and the ticket salesman said, “Oh, sweet as [æz], you know, you can take this boat and stuff”. And my mom had to ask me in Swedish, and she was like, why is this stranger talking to us about butts?
DANIEL: But it’s not, hey.
HEDVIG: But it’s not. And she like, credit to her, she didn’t ask him or like confront him right then. She understood that something was, you know this was something.
BEN: Something is awry.
DANIEL: Why do you both think it’s [wæp]? Because there’s a case for [wɔp], even thought [wɔp] is an unpleasant word, meaning a person… yeah…
BEN: The reason it’s [wæp] for me, is because the only other acronym that I know of that starts with a W and an A is WAN [wæn], for Wide Area Network and that has an “a” [æ] sound as well.
DANIEL: A few people have tried to make the case that it should be WAP [wæp], because ASS starts with an “a” [æ] sound, and so therefore the acronym WAP should also have an “a” [æ] sound.
HEDVIG: I think that the abbreviation isn’t abbreviation of the sounds in the word. I think the phonology becomes different when it gets put in this context.
DANIEL: Like with the word scuba [sku.ba], it’s not uunder [un.der]water, self-contained under [un.der] water breathing “a” [ei] pparatus or “a” [ʌ]pparatus.
HEDVIG: Oh my god, I just had a sip of coffee just before you said that, and I had to struggle to keep it in, because I love the idea.
BEN: [un.der]water.
HEDVIG: [un.der]water. Very funny.
DANIEL: The other case for WAP [wɔp], is that they rhyme that with mop in the song.
BEN: Ooh.
HEDVIG: Oh, well then.
DANIEL: And of course, you knew the mop was going to make an appearance in that song. Maybe a couple. [LAUGHTER] So that was one thing that was great. The second thing that was great was the self-own by one Mr Ben Shapiro.
BEN: Oh my god. It’s so…
HEDVIG: Do we have to talk about him?
BEN: Look, I’m with you, Hedvig. Normally that guy is just such an annoying dickwit, and is not worth the time or attention, but this is one of possibly the best own-goals I have ever seen a person do. Truly.
HEDVIG: Okay, so what did he do?
DANIEL: Basically, what he did was, he decided to read some of the lyrics out on the show and he does… I can still hear… he wouldn’t even say pussy. He would say “wet ass P-word”. All right. He tweeted later, “As I discussed on the show, my only real concern is that the women involved, who apparently require a bucket and a mop, get the medical care they require. My doctor wife’s differential diagnosis, bacterial vaginosis, yeast infection, or trichomonis.”
BEN: Basically, Ben Shapiro was like: ~ummm lady vaginas shouldn’t be wet, and I would know because my wife’s a doctor~ to which the entire internet was like: Um, you should probably get better at pleasing your wife.
DANIEL: Which is the message of the song! There we go. Okay, let’s go on to our second and last word of the week. Presumptive US presidential Democratic nominee — and I’m sorry if I got those adjectives in the wrong order — Joe Biden has chosen Kamala Harris as his running mate. Yes, it’s KAmala [‘ka.ma.la], not KaMAla [ka.’ma.la]. Some people refuse to get this right. And…
HEDVIG: Oh, I’ve never heard that.
DANIEL: Here’s a word that came up in the discussion. The Washington Post says, “As speculation dragged on in July, Biden said he wanted to be” — here’s the word — “SIMPATICO with his running mate. That is,” — and then they helpfully explain — “he wanted someone he could get along with.” Have you heard the word SIMPATICO?
BEN: I have.
HEDVIG: I have. And I didn’t understand it when I heard it. And I’m not trying to study here because famously, and I thought that was a good selling point for Kamala Harris as the vice-president. She didn’t get along with him in a debate.
DANIEL: Oh, there was a testy exchange.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And I thought that was great. I thought that showed that he chose someone who was willing to criticise him. And I was like, that’s cool.
DANIEL: That is cool.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Not that I don’t, this isn’t an American politics podcast, don’t @ me, I don’t know enough about this. But just getting along and then choosing someone who’s publicly criticised you. Weird move.
DANIEL: Yeah. I mean it’s hard to imagine the current president and Kremlin asset Donald Trump doing that. He just… some people are just allergic to criticism, but Biden shows he’s not. And that’s admirable, ad-mire-able? admirable? Admirable. The word SIMPATICO comes from Spanish SYMPATICO, sympathetic, which ultimately ties back to sympathy. But of course, sympathy is one of those weird words where, in English, if you say you have sympathy with someone, it means something terrible has happened. But you can be SIMPATICO without having sympathy.
HEDVIG: Have you guys read The Kingkiller Chronicles?
BEN: I have. Well, only the first two. Come on, Rothfuss!
DANIEL: I have not.
HEDVIG: Yes, indeed. There’s a type of magic there called sympathy, which is when you establish a link between two objects and make them have a connection and make magical things happen and it’s not… it’s supposed to be… the more equal, the better.
DANIEL: Right. Okay. There’s also a term SYMPATHETIC MAGIC, which we talk about in skepticism, where if you eat, like, walnuts and you think the walnuts are good for your brain because walnuts kind of look like a brain and the two things are kind of similar, that’s sympathetic magic. Some people think that eating fat makes you fat. That’s not true. And it’s a form of sympathetic magic as well.
HEDVIG: That’s actually real similar to Rothfuss’ use.
DANIEL: Yeah, okay.
HEDVIG: Because you can make a wax doll and make it look like a human and then that can be a good link.
DANIEL: So you got SIM, which is ‘together’ and PATHOS, which means ‘feeling’. So SIMPATICO and WAP [wæp] or [wɔp]: our Words of the Week.
HEDVIG: Amazing.
[END THEME]
BEN: Well, here we are. At this point in the show. When I turn to you, my wonderful, tremendous, nerdy, weird listenership, and I say, if you’ve got some reactions, if you’ve got some ideas… well, you best communicate them to us so that we can make an episode like this one with all of your really, really, really, really, really annoyingly, frustratingly smart questions. You can get us Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon and of course, Patreon. And we are becauselangpod in all of those places. If, however, you like it a little bit old school, a little bit rustic, a little bit agricultural, well, then you can sling us a cheeky email: hello@becauselanguage.com. And if all of that wasn’t sufficient to whet your engagement appetites, if you, having done all of that are saying: But how, Ben, could I possibly engage more? Well, you can engage more by giving a friend the gift of a recommendation for this podcast, and then tell that friend to leave a review somewhere.
HEDVIG: And make that your stupidest friend.
DANIEL: And the cycle continues.
HEDVIG: Yeah, because it’s a patron episode, your friend won’t know that we asked you to recommend it to your stupidest friend until they also become a patron, and they’ll become a patron once they listen to enough, at which point maybe they won’t be stupid anymore. So, you know, do it.
DANIEL: And the cycle continues. [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Speaking of, we also would like to thank everyone who has become a patron. We hope you enjoyed this episode. And we would love to hear from you how we can make your patronage better, what kind of perks and little things you would appreciate from us. We love serving you. A special thanks goes to our patrons: Termy, Chris B, Lyssa, The Major, Chris L, Matt, Whitney, Damian, Helen, Jack, Elías, Michael, Larry, Kitty, Lord Mortis, Binh, Christopher, Dustin, Andy, Nigel, Bob, Kate, Jen, Christelle, Nasrin, Ayesha, Keighley, and Emma. Thank you so much.
DANIEL: Our music is written and performed Drew Krapljanov, and you can hear him in Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible. Check them out on Bandcamp or anywhere you get your music. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
HEDVIG: Boop!