Listeners have once again sent us some great questions, and we have answers!
- Why do we TALK SHIT and not SPEAK SHIT?
- Do we KEEP OUT, or STAY OUT?
- Why are so many acronyms three letters long?
- How do we break young people out of the prescriptivist mindset?
- Isn’t “folk etymology” just… etymology?
- Can you think of any anagrams that are also synonyms?
Plus our favourite game, Related or Not!
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Become a Patron!Show notes
shit | Green’s Dictionary of Slang
https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/2jwxjqa
(look for the string “(v.)” to find the verb entries)
TLAs: Are Common These Days
https://www.embs.org/pulse/articles/tlas-are-common-these-days/
What Is a ‘Fae Trap’? Meaning Explored As Mythological Term Goes Viral
https://www.hitc.com/en-gb/2022/10/03/what-is-a-fae-trap-meaning-explored-as-mythological-term-goes-viral/
Jaywalking in Germany
https://www.toytowngermany.com/forum/topic/1409-jaywalking-in-germany/
@williamhansonetiquette Clinking, common! #dining#drinking#etiquette#williamhanson @theenglishmanner ♬ Common People – Full Length Version – Pulp
Linguistics Books for Kids – the Superlinguo list
https://www.superlinguo.com/post/617132449842003968/linguistics-books-for-kids-the-superlinguo-list
Linguistics books for kids: How You Talk
https://www.superlinguo.com/post/686892011250450432/linguistics-books-for-kids-how-you-talk
Anagram extractor — a ZIP file that contains • the anagram extractor script, • a list of all the anagrams, and • a special list of the ones Daniel thought was interesting.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1A2svqHkLQg6_t2R4BnWxxpY7B52v0nR9/view?usp=share_link
no niin! | r/Finland
https://www.reddit.com/r/Finland/comments/zow8xo/no_niin/
9 Meaningful Finnish Expressions That Don’t Exist in English
https://matadornetwork.com/read/9-meaningful-finnish-expressions-dont-exist-english/
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
DANIEL: It’s just the three of us. Yay.
BEN: Yay.
HEDVIG: Yay. That’s nice. I like that.
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to this bonus Mailbag episode of Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name’s Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. I’d like to introduce to you, media teacher and avid follower of popular culture, Ben Ainslie. Ben, I’d like you to tell me what you like about Mailbag episodes, because I know they’re some of our favorites.
BEN: Uh, I like the… I find myself the most delightedly surprised — suplighted — I find myself the most suplighted by Mailbag episodes.
DANIEL: Deprised.
BEN: That’s what I like about it.
DANIEL: Okay. All right. Thank you. Also here is linguist and great friend, Hedvig Skirgård. Hedvig, tell me what you like about Mailbag episodes.
HEDVIG: Ooh, what do I like about Mailbag episodes? I like that they have a little bit of a different structure from the other episodes…
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s true.
HEDVIG: …and I like to just get… Yeah. I also actually like the surprise element. Like, people ask questions that we haven’t thought of. And I think that I have thought of everything. I’m a bit of a megalomaniac. And it’s good for me to eat humble pie sometimes and be like: I haven’t had all the ideas.
BEN: It’s so tasty. So humble.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: There’s certainly a lot of things that I haven’t thought of and that our listeners do, and so they send them to us. It’s fantastic. And there are a lot of questions like that this time.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah?
DANIEL: But I was able to really get into… Yeah, really crunchy questions that I was able to really bust out some skills. So, we’re going to answer them today. This episode is a bonus Mailbag episode, and you’re hearing it now as it comes out because you’re a patron at the Listener level. So, thank you. You’re keeping the show going with your ideas, with your conviviality on our Discord, and for your kind donation every month. And because of you, everybody else gets to hear regular episodes for free. So, stay with us. Your support matters to us.
BEN: Do we still release these to the public, eventually?
DANIEL: Yes, we do eventually. Every…
BEN: Do you remember, Daniel, or is there a backlog of, like, 10 of these things that you’ve forgotten to release?
DANIEL: There might be a bit of a backlog of like two, but…
BEN: Okay. That’s fine. Two’s an acceptable buffer. Yeah, that’s fine.
DANIEL: That means the wait time is like six months instead of three, but okay. Soon, we’ll be doing a potluck episode. So, keep an eye on your Patreon notifications to find out when that’s going to be. Everyone’s going to bring their stories, and their news, and things that they want to talk about. So, that’s always a lot of fun, always very newsy. That’s coming up.
HEDVIG: News.
DANIEL: But are we ready for some mailbag questions?
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: Let’s do it.
DANIEL: This first one comes from Lady of Nasrin on our Discord. The question, it’s very succinct. “Why do we TALK SHIT and not SPEAK SHIT?” Just talking shit. Not speaking shit. We just never say it.
HEDVIG: Is it because…? Is it because…?
DANIEL: Is it because…?
HEDVIG: …talking is more of a dialoguey thing and speaking is more unidirectional?
DANIEL: Interesting.
BEN: I thought that as well. But when we use it, we never are using it in a way that is discussional, right? When someone’s talking shit, they’re doing a bad thing, right?
HEDVIG: Yeah, but they’re doing it with another person.
BEN: I feel like they’re more doing it AT another person rather than WITH that person.
HEDVIG: Oh.
DANIEL: We were just talkin’ shit.
BEN: Right? It’s not two people who are engaging in gossip, it’s one person who is talking shit about another person. Right?
DANIEL: Are you sure we’re not talking trash? Could I say, “Oh, man, we were on our show today. We were just talking shit. It was great.”
BEN: Ah, yeah. Okay.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: I’ve heard it both… I’ve definitely heard the… Like, I’ve seen… I hate to say this, but I’ve seen people get into fights! Like, right? Be like…
HEDVIG: What?
BEN: As in, like, “You come in here shit talking me, not today,” like that.
DANIEL: Yeah. Or talking shit ABOUT somebody. That’s the other thing. That’s definitely a gossipy thing.
HEDVIG and BEN: Mm-hmm.
BEN: Interesting. Interesting.
HEDVIG: But either way, I have the feeling that talking is more of a two-way thing and speaking is more of a one-way thing…
DANIEL: Interesting.
HEDVIG: …and that gossiping and talking shit and shooting the shit and stuff like that, this is more of a two-way activity. And that is why, in the answer to Nasrin’s question… But that is my hunch as a speaker of language. Do we know anything else?
BEN: Talking shit. Shooting the shit. What else do we do with shit? So, we talk it and we shoot it. Do we do anything else?
HEDVIG: Well, in terms of doing, I don’t know if we do, but you can BE the shit.
BEN: Oh, yeah. No, because talking the shit and shooting the shit…
HEDVIG: Shooting the shit and shit talking.
BEN: …seem vaguely analogous.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, that means we need to go to Green’s Dictionary of Slang and see.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: That delightful repository!
DANIEL: Okay. I’m looking up the entry for SHIT. I’m going to share this.
BEN: Surely, that would be one of the biggest entries in this corpus. Surely.
DANIEL: Yeah, I think it might be. Okay, here we go. I’m just scrolling down.
HEDVIG: Rip shit, shitbag…
BEN: Shit-all, shit balls, shit breath. Oof.
HEDVIG: Shit box, shit breath. No, these are all, like, nouny things.
BEN: I think you’re going to need to control-F this one, Daniel.
HEDVIG: Shit lover?
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Find some TALK entries.
HEDVIG: I’m interested in how some of these have hyphens and some of them don’t.
DANIEL: There we go.
HEDVIG: Oh, pick shit.
DANIEL: You can pick shit, that is to pick a fight with. You can make a shit; to matter. You can poke shit or you can pull some shit on.
HEDVIG: You can pull some shit. I have that one, Ben.
DANIEL: You can act like your shit don’t stink.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: And you can not know from shit. All kinds of things here.
HEDVIG: Oh, is that the same? I don’t know him from Adam.
DANIEL: Those are a lot of things you can do with shit. In our show notes; that’ll be there.
HEDVIG: That wasn’t… Hmm.
DANIEL: In our show notes, that’ll be there. So, now we know that there are lots and lots of phrases that involve shit. But Hedvig, did you ever… when you were learning English, did you ever have a discussion about verbs of speaking, like TALK and SPEAK and SAY and TELL? Did you? What do you remember from that discussion?
BEN: Plumbing the depths of like, what, year 8, maybe? [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Well, also, so much of my English learning is… um…
BEN: Incidental?
HEDVIG: …exposure and not in classroom.
DANIEL: Implicit. Yeah, okay.
HEDVIG: So telling and… What else did you say? TALK, SPEAK, TELL, and what else did you say?
DANIEL: SAY.
HEDVIG: SAY. Ooh. Well, SAY is entirely one directional.
DANIEL: Feels like it.
HEDVIG: You don’t SAY something with someone.
DANIEL: And you TELL a story, but you never SAY a story.
HEDVIG: Yes, but you SAY specific statements. Like, “I said he’s a cunt.”
DANIEL: And then you’d take an expression like, if I say, “Hey, talk American.” That sounds different from, “Hey, speak American.” Can you tell the difference? How did those feel? “Hey, talk American.” Do they give you a different feeling?
BEN: For me, the difference between in that particular accusation is regional dialect, right?
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: So, someone from the south would be like, [IN A SOUTHERN ACCENT] “You better speak American,” Whereas, a New York Italian would be like, [IN A NEW YORK ITALIAN ACCENT] “Hey, now, talk American already.”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] It’s always a good show when we do accents.
BEN: I’m sorry. That just…
HEDVIG: That is how you feel.
BEN: Let’s flip it, right? If a New York-Italian guy was like, [IN A NEW YORK ITALIAN ACCENT] “Hey, speak American,” it doesn’t sound right, right?
HEDVIG: It does.
BEN: You got to be like, [IN A NEW YORK ITALIAN ACCENT] “Hey, talk American.”
DANIEL: Talk American.
HEDVIG: No, they’re both SPEAK American for me.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Okay.
HEDVIG: I would love more chances to hear that.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Oh, my.
DANIEL: All right.
BEN: I’ll keep some in the holsters, ready to go for this show.
HEDVIG: Thank you.
DANIEL: Thank you very much. Well, I feel like these words of speaking and talking, they take up different areas of semantic turf. We just use them with different words. So, let’s investigate the words. Whenever I want to know the difference between two words like SPEAK and TALK, I always look at the nearby words.
BEN: You know them by their neighbours, famously.
DANIEL: That is correct. So, I am going to just share with you some information from the COCA corpus.
BEN: COCA. Now, for those of us who might not work as linguists, tell us what is COCA?
HEDVIG: That is Colloquial Conversational American, something like that.
DANIEL: COCA is the Corpus of Contemporary American English. You can find it on…
HEDVIG: There you go.
DANIEL: …english-corpora.org. And I’ll have this graphic that I’m showing Ben and Hedvig on our website, becauselanguage.com.
HEDVIG: It’s sort of like when you want to google a word, but you don’t want to use Google, you want to use something that actually doesn’t try and do anything smart. It just looks for that word in a bunch of newspaper text, and novels, and stuff like that. That’s what that is.
DANIEL: That’s it. So, let’s take a look at the nouns that are likely to occur near the word TALK. You can see that it’s TRASH, NONSENSE, and SMACK.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Oh, smack.
DANIEL: The word BOUT is in there as well, but that’s…
BEN: As in like ABOUT?
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s a mistake.
BEN: Oh, got it. Okay. Is it a mistake or is that just how some people use that?
DANIEL: No, people do say, “What are you talkin’ ’bout?” But it’s taken the word BOUT, which is a noun, but it’s acting like a preposition, right?
BEN: Oh, like a BOUT of… match, right? Yeah.
DANIEL: So, they’ve mislabeled that. That should be in the prepositions because that’s what everybody’s doing. But we can see how you talk trash, you talk nonsense, you talk smack, and you talk shit. So, that fits right in. TALK is what we do with kind of vulgar things. But then with SPEAK, the nouns that come nearby are LANGUAGE, speak a language, word, voice, and truth. Those are the words that occur nearby. Very different!
BEN: So, basically, what we’re figuring out is, talk is like gutter [DANIEL LAUGHS] and speak is bougie.
DANIEL: You talk bad things, and you speak bougie things.
HEDVIG: No, no, no. I might be wrong, but this still confirms my two-way, one-way hypothesis. Because these are all like speak your truth, speak with your own voice.
DANIEL: Speak truth to power. Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: Speak truth to power. They’re all like one person doing it at someone. Whereas talk nonsense, talk smack, I don’t know, they sound more like dialoguey activities.
BEN: I would put it to you that both talking nonsense and talking smack are pretty one directional, like it’s a person just running their mouth.
HEDVIG: Right.
DANIEL: Kind of. I don’t know what it means. I just know that that’s what we do when it’s something that we’re…
BEN: I think this is where Daniel was going, and I would definitely agree with it. One clearly has fancier friends than the other. That’s without debate, I think. One is very much in a vulgar space, and the other one is almost like not just neutral, but above neutral. Right? It’s quite high-status. Language, voice, truth, condition, volume. These are all educational or educated linguistic words.
DANIEL: Let’s take a look at the adverbs. The adverbs that are likely to occur near TALK are openly, nice, loud, loudly.
HEDVIG: Nice.
DANIEL: I don’t know, it seems to deal with the way you talk. But speak, you see generally, directly. Notice how you speak publicly, but you talk privately. I think that’s very interesting.
HEDVIG: Oh.
BEN: Mm.
DANIEL: Don’t know what’s up there. Softly, notice how you’re more likely to talk loudly, but you’re more likely to speak softly. That could be lexical. I don’t know.
BEN: See, I think this further reinforces this idea that one is like brash, vulgar. You don’t do vulgar things quietly. You do them loudly. When you’re talking shit, you do it with volume.
DANIEL: I noticed that LOUDLY does appear with SPEAK as well, but it’s further down the list.
BEN: Yeah yeah yeah.
DANIEL: Notice also the adverbs like endlessly. This is with talk. Endlessly, nonstop, excitedly, incessantly, candidly. Seems like when we talk about talking, we’re talking about the making sound. Whereas with speak… Sorry, Hedvig, were you saying that speak was kind of a two-way thing for you and talk was a one-way thing or were you saying the opposite? I think you were saying the opposite.
HEDVIG: I was saying the opposite.
DANIEL: [IMITATING HEDVIG’S TONE] Saying the opposite.
HEDVIG: But I am okay with being wrong.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: We are gleaning…
HEDVIG: Humble pie.
DANIEL: …what we can glean.
HEDVIG: Yum, yum, yum.
DANIEL: It’s okay. But talk is loud, and speaking is careful. That’s the feeling I get from these words. But if we looked at a different corpus, we might get different results.
BEN: To answer…
HEDVIG: Nasrin.
BEN: …Lady of Nasrin’s question, “Why do we TALK SHIT and not SPEAK SHIT?” is because when we’re being brash, nasty, vulgar people, we TALK. And when we’re being high minded, erudite, philosophical, thinkers, we SPEAK. Or at least that’s how we tend to use the language. I’m just going to flip it and fuck with people now. Whenever I want to be really vulgar, I’m going to be like, “Come here and speak that shit to my face!”
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Let us know how that goes.
HEDVIG: Let us know how often you’re in situations where you’re openly aggressive and in conflict.
BEN: I’m a high school teacher.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah. That’s true.
BEN: Thumbs up. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Thanks, Lady of Nasrin. Let’s go on to our next one. This one’s from skirtthenorm on our Discord. Does anyone want to read this? You’ve got the run sheet just like I do.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: I do.
HEDVIG: So, skirtthenorm on Discord asks, “Is it keep out or stay out? It’s keep out of trouble. Stay out of the fridge. They seem interchangeable to me. Or is it a regional thing?” I don’t know. I know that at construction sites, those little signs, they usually say KEEP OUT, right?
DANIEL: Keep out. Mm-hmm.
BEN: As resident media teacher, I will say that in fictional media, the KEEP OUT sign is like elevated to trope status now, right?
HEDVIG: Right.
DANIEL: Like, if you’ve got kids who are out at night and they come across a fence, it’s always going to say KEEP OUT. It will almost never say STAY OUT.
HEDVIG: And both of them are something like “continue to”. Keep out. Like, you are outside, please continue to do so. Stay out is like you are out, stay there.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: That’s right. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Right? So, they’re a bit similar in that way. Like, please continue what you were already doing, just not being in here.
DANIEL: And this is kind of lexical. If I invite you to choose either KEEP or STAY, and the next word is doing something, would you KEEP doing something or STAY doing something?
HEDVIG: Keep, keep, keep.
DANIEL: How about AWAKE? Which word would you choose?
HEDVIG: Stay, stay, stay.
BEN: Stay awake. [LAUGHS] So much you’d do it three times.
DANIEL: How about calm?
HEDVIG: Stay.
DANIEL: Stay calm?
BEN: Stay calm.
HEDVIG: I know you can say “keep calm and continue… praising the queen”.
BEN: So, that brings me to something that I was going to put forward, which is, I agree that there is an element of regionality to this, which is what skirtthenorm said in their question. So, I can, for instance, skirtthenorm says, “Stay out of the fridge,” is an example. But I can very much imagine a speaker of a regional dialect being like, “You best keep out of that fridge.”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Okay. Yup. All right. Let’s talk about the words. KEEP is a really old word. We see it in Old English, where it means a lot of things, but it especially means to hold onto something or someone.
BEN: Which is where we used it as like the architectural structure, like…
DANIEL: That’s right.
BEN: …part of the castle and all that sort of thing.
DANIEL: That’s exactly right.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: But then by the 1300s, we see KEEP plus adjectives. So, “The bee keeps clean.” That’s 1340. “This traitor kept him close that night.” That’s 1430. We don’t really see keep verbing — keep going, keep doing — until the 1800s. So, this is a really new formation. STAY, for its part, is a bit newer. Only since the 1300s. It came from French via Latin from a word meaning stand. And then by the late 1500s, we see stay with adverbs like stay up, stay away. So, these two verbs were on a collision course and they’re kinda duking it out.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Well, if that’s the case though, because that’s several hundred years that they have been in direct conflict now. Perhaps this is just… I don’t know how many instances there are of this. Is this just going to be one of those things where through convergent evolution, we’ve just got these two words and we kind of use them? Or maybe it’s going to end up like TALK and SPEAK from the previous question, where we’re going to have a strong set of uses for one and then a different set of uses for the other, along some sort of differentiation?
DANIEL: Well, I think two things are going on. I do think these words are duking it out, because if you take a look at the Google Ngram corpus, I took a look at KEEP OUT and STAY OUT, and their popularity has flipped recently. So, KEEP OUT was more popular until about 1990. Now, STAY OUT is more popular. This process was slightly earlier for STAY OUT OF THERE, and also STAY OUT OF TROUBLE.
BEN: Interesting.
DANIEL: Interestingly, KEEP OUT OF DEBT and STAY OUT OF DEBT about equally popular. So, KEEP is losing ground and STAY is coming up. But that’s not happening everywhere uniformly. This data comes from the GLOWBE corpus, which breaks things down by country. You can see that keep out is more popular where it’s darker. Great Britain,…
HEDVIG: Great Britain.
DANIEL: …Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and some other countries.
HEDVIG: What’s LK?
DANIEL: I wasn’t sure what LK….
HEDVIG: It could be Sri Lanka. I’ll check.
DANIEL: Kuala Lumpur? Yeah, please.
HEDVIG: Sri Lanka!
DANIEL: Ah, there you go. All right.
BEN: Nicely done! Very impressive.
DANIEL: So, that’s KEEP OUT in the British English countries. But you can see that STAY OUT is more popular in the US and Canada and then some other countries.
HEDVIG: Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines.
DANIEL: So, this does appear to be a little bit regional. And in fact, if you break the Ngram results into British books and American books, you can see that, yes, STAY is rising in all countries, but it’s doing it in the American countries earlier. So, America is at the head of this change.
HEDVIG: That’s fun.
DANIEL: That was a fun little thing. It’s partly that KEEP is losing ground to STAY, but it’s partly regional in some ways, and there you have it.
HEDVIG: That’s fun. Wait, what’s TZ? Is that Tanzania?
DANIEL: I think that one is Tanzania.
HEDVIG: Yeah, TZ.
BEN: We’ve just invented a new game for Hedvig, which is like guess the countries based on letters.
DANIEL: Guess that country code!
BEN: Tanzania. Yeah, it is.
DANIEL: Okay. Great.
HEDVIG: This was really great. And also, thank you for showing those maps, because it also reminds people that there are English spoken in places outside of the UK and America.
BEN: The traditionally conceived-of anglophone world.
HEDVIG: Yeah. [GIGGLES]
DANIEL: So, thanks to skirtthenorm for that one. Let’s move on to Fiona. Our Discordians are asking us lots of questions. This one’s from Fiona on our Discord. Hedvig, you read the last one. Ben, do you want to read this one?
BEN: Oo! Is it my turn?
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
BEN: All righty. Our next question comes from Fiona on Discord. “Has anyone done any research into why so many acronyms are exactly three letters long?” I was thinking about this recently…
HEDVIG: This is good.
BEN: …independent of this! How bizarre. Fiona, get out of my head!
HEDVIG: This is good.
DANIEL: Well, what did you come up with?
BEN: Hold on, I just need to figure out what I think. I reckon that in the anglophone world, we have a thing for threes that doesn’t necessarily exist in other cultures. I’m not convinced that it’s like a pan… You know how certain cultures will have certain cadences and rhythms informed by things like what their musical tradition is and all that kind of stuff. I have a feeling that in the English-speaking world, we just have a bit of a thing for like a ba-ba-ba kind of cadence. So, that’s why it happens a lot. Because two just feels a bit short. And four, unless it turns into a true acronym instead of an initialism, doesn’t work very well. So, the NDIS in Australia, for instance, is like just a pretty crummy and unwieldy initialism that doesn’t sound very nice. Whereas the TSA just rolls off the tongue.
HEDVIG: Let’s just have a think about if this is true, because I was thinking about it and we were just talking about country codes in that Google corpus thing. There, traditionally just two letters is the ISO standard that most people use. That’s also the one that come up in domain name. So, probably Sri Lanka’s websites are .lk. Sweden is .se, and Australia is .au, et cetera. So, UN, EU are two… If three is the top, then two is a strong contender.
BEN: For second place.
DANIEL: Well, you’re absolutely right. Before we can answer the question of: why are there so many three letter acronyms, we have to say: are there that many three letter acronyms? Or is it possible that there are more four ones?
BEN: If only someone had done this research. Daniel?
DANIEL: I fuckin’ scraped Wikipedia’s…
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: Of course, you did.
HEDVIG: Oh, my god.
DANIEL: …List of All Acronyms.
HEDVIG: List of… They have a list?
DANIEL: It goes over 26 pages, and I’m going to post this on our website.
BEN: Holy fucking shit.
HEDVIG: Oh, God.
DANIEL: There’s almost 11,000 of them. Some of them I had to go to… because like CD, I think the most common. It’s got a separate page. So, I scraped that and put that in. Whenever it said “See the entry for this,” I went there. And… you ready?
HEDVIG and BEN: Yeah.
BEN: I’m pumped. I’m excited about acronyms. Look what you’ve done to me, Daniel.
HEDVIG: I am excited about the spreadsheet.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I saw a spreadsheet. I love a good spreadsheet.
BEN: You somehow made it more nerdy!
HEDVIG: I love a good spreadsheet.
DANIEL: We all do. Out of the 11,000 some acronyms…
BEN: Yeah. Okay.
HEDVIG: Uh-huh.
BEN: So, three smashes it. Absolutely smashes it.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah. So, let’s do this for the listeners.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Two-letter acronyms, there are about 2,500 of them. Three-letter acronyms: 5,100 of them, twice as many. By the time we get to four-letter acronyms, there are about 2,000. So, back down to 2,000. And then…
BEN: And it tapers off severely after there.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: It really does. There’s about 1,100 five letters and up. So, it’s true, at least according to the Wikipedia pages for List of All Acronyms _ and that’s a biased list. I took it as it was. We can take issue with it — yeah, there’s a lot more three-letter acronyms than anything else.
HEDVIG: Wow.
DANIEL: Question is, why?
HEDVIG: Whyyyy?
BEN: I just feel like we’ve got to because… As much as we’ve fought against pedantry for a long, long time, I’m sure some people are listening to this and it is doing their head in. We are using initialism and acronym interchangeably for this statement.
DANIEL: Oh, yeah, That’s right.
HEDVIG: Sorry.
BEN: That’s fine.
HEDVIG: Abbreviations.
BEN: I’m happy for us to keep doing it, but in case people are listening and they’re like, “Wuh, but are you including initialisms in there?” Yes. Very much yes. This is a list compiled of both initialisms — which is when we say like TSA — and true acronyms, which is when it turns into a word like NASA or whatever.
DANIEL: Okay. Thank you for that distinction. I think that’s going to be meaningful when we start putting things into words. I liked Ben’s answer about how… if you’re going to shorten things, you got to shorten it. There’s no point in making an acronym that’s just as long as the thing you’re trying to shorten. So, that means you got to keep the acronym short — four letters tops — or you got to make it into something word-like. But it’s hard to make a long acronym into a word unless you’re really shoehorning it in there.
BEN: I think there’s an entire piece that we could do about the creative liberties that people go to make a snazzy-sounding acronym out of there. Sometimes, you’re just like, “Hang on, you’ve acronymised OF, but you’ve left out IN? Come on, pick a side.”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I’m impressed recently in the news, as we’ve been seeing stuff about the strikes in Hollywood with the actors and the writers. One of the unions is called SAG-AFTRA. And I’ve heard so many people say that whole thing. They’re like, “As the SAG-AFTRA president said…” And I’m like, “That’s a long one.” You’re all…
DANIEL: But three syllables.
HEDVIG: SAG-AFT-RA, right? [RETCHES]
DANIEL: Yup. So, you can do it.
BEN: Unwieldy.
HEDVIG: The AFTRA part is not pretty.
DANIEL: It is.
HEDVIG: But people say it.
DANIEL: But at least, it’s not five syllables. Well, that’s because it’s three things, right? You can have an eight-letter acronym as long as it’s word-like. So, there’s no problem. It’s only when it gets nasty, like some of the nastier ones, it’s like, “What is the point?”
HEDVIG: But the other thing I’m amazed about with that one is, that is not… mm. Other initialisms that you pronounce sound like maybe they… Okay, NASA doesn’t mean anything, but some of them sound like a word, right?
BEN: Some of them are words, right? Some of them have been deliberately constructed to be a word that we know and are familiar with.
DANIEL: Some of them sound very word-like. yeah.
BEN: Like WHO, right? The World Health Organisation.
DANIEL: And everything beginning with UN. Like, lots of things like that.
HEDVIG: Yeah, UNESCO.
DANIEL: I think there’s something else at work. A lot of names for things just ARE three words long. Like, you look at university names, a lot of them are two or three letters, because it’s always University of Place. You know, University of Washington. Or University of Modifier, Place, like Eastern Washington University. And they don’t tend to go for more than two letters, three letters, or four letters, because that’s the way we structure information. We go thing, of, modifier, other thing.
HEDVIG: I swear to everyone watching that I did not plan this at all, but have you seen my t-shirt today?
BEN: It’s the ANU.
DANIEL: Yes.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Australian National University.
DANIEL: Yeah, there you go. Place, modifier, thing. That’s university. So, I am kind of cherry picking. But I think there’s something about the way that we structure the names of things and then also how long we’re willing to let an acronym get. If it’s like 10 letters, we’ll probably just do the Russian thing where we say, instead of Uniform Society, we’ll just say UnSoc or something like that.
HEDVIG: Oh, I see.
DANIEL: Yeah. We’ll just take it out of the game, and so the ones that are left are three letters.
BEN: I don’t feel like we have adequately answered Fiona’s question. Right? I don’t know if she’s going to sit there being like, “Oh, a lot of things are just three words long.” I don’t know. I don’t buy that! That doesn’t strike me as…
HEDVIG: I don’t buy that either.
BEN: That’s not… Do we think things are three letters long roughly twice as often as things are two words long? I doubt it.
DANIEL: Good question.
HEDVIG: I was thinking maybe it’s like a sweet spot thing, because we saw that the other high numbers were two and four. So, maybe it’s like…
BEN: It’s a normal distribution.
HEDVIG: Yeah, but around three, because…
DANIEL: Around three.
HEDVIG: …just if we think about the possibility. So, if you have 27 letters in the alphabet because you’re a boring anglophone…
BEN: [LAUGHS] I just love this low-key jab at not enough vowels in the alphabet! That’s brilliant!
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: I love how you got 27 letters. Was one of them ampersand?
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Oh, is it 26? Yeah, I don’t even know. How many is it?
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: So, you were just trying to give us an A somewhere. I’m sure, like an Aa.
DANIEL: The Time Hedvig Forgot How Many Letters Were in the Alphabet.
HEDVIG: What do you with the W? You count the W, right?
DANIEL: Oh, you count the W for two.
BEN: Do y… Are you counting W twice, because it’s two U’s. Is that what’s happening?
HEDVIG: No, no, I’m just stupid.
BEN: Or should we count it less times? Should it be 25?
DANIEL: Wow. We are taking the historical view. Woo!
HEDVIG: Okay. 26, is it?
BEN: Yes.
HEDVIG: Okay, thank you. All right.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I’m here as the foreigner. It’s fun.
BEN: Hey, I speak one language, and I don’t even speak that one particularly well, so I’m the last person who should judge.
HEDVIG: 26 letters. So, if you have two letters in your abbreviation, the possibilities that you have are 26 to the power of two. Is that right? Is that how that works?
DANIEL: Yup, that’s right.
BEN: Yup.
HEDVIG: And then if you have three, you have 26 to the power of three, which is a lot more, like a lot a lot a lot more. And then four is even more. But there’s some sweet spot about how distinctive you can be because you don’t want an abbreviation that someone else uses. That’s why a lot of… We have about 193-ish countries in the world, maybe let’s say 200. So, we can do with domain names ending in two, because we can distinguish all the countries.
BEN: I agree that it’s possible, but it’s not ideal. I think we should have done three for countries because there’s just way too much double up that results in not at all intuitive letter pairings for certain countries. Like, one of the countries has more people, so they get the good one. So, I don’t know what Austria’s…
DANIEL: Poor Austria.
BEN: …double letter pairing is. But it’s not AU, and I bet they’re salty over it.
HEDVIG: Yeah. [TYPES] Oh, Austria, language code. Sorry.
BEN: Ah, yes?
DANIEL: Is it AT?
HEDVIG: I think it might be AT. I’m going to check. No, they have plus… Oh, my god, I spelled it wrong and it was like, “Did you mean Australia?”
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Fucking hell.
DANIEL: Poor Austria.
HEDVIG: Two letter code for Austria is AT.
BEN: An Austrian would be very not fond of that reason. [LAUGHS] AT. Okay.
DANIEL: It is AT. I guessed right. I would be salty. What are we, Atria? Come on.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Totally.
HEDVIG: Right. And Switzerland has CH, because of funny reasons.
DANIEL: Confederatio Helvetica.
HEDVIG: Yeah. But anyway, I’m just saying that if you have 200 things, then having two-letter abbreviations is probably going to do you fine. But as you step it up and you have more, you want to be more distinctive, probably three and four is more suitable. But then, there’s maybe some upper cap on human memory and capability of ordering elements correctly. And then, there’s something that sort of like that’s a bit of a cutoff. Some people can say SAG-AFTRA and good on them, but most people are going to say SAG-ATRA. Like, it’s going to struggle. It’s giving struggle. So, three maybe is that sweet spot.
BEN: Do you know what? I’m going to support what you’re positing there, but I’m going to say that most are three, because two is not enough.
HEDVIG: That’s what I said.
BEN: Yeah, I agree with you as in, but I would put it to you that even with datasets much lower than 200. Right? So, even with a dataset of 50, you’re going to run into a whole bunch of… because your data set isn’t going to be a lovely, perfect distribution, right?
HEDVIG: Oh, right.
BEN: I’m sure most of our listeners have already done this, but this is where I have to bring up Gary Gulman’s wonderful stand-up bit, where he talks about the man who abbreviated all the states in the US. It’s like a funny pretend thing about the guy who came along and did all the abbreviations. One of the things he points out is that like, AL, for instance, counts for three of the states, reasonably.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
BEN: MA counts for four and all that kind of stuff. So, you can really run into trouble with quite low numbers of things that you’re trying to abbreviate. So, that’s why I think three is most likely.
HEDVIG: Because the things you have the 200 or 50… How many states are there? I don’t even know. 50 something. Let’s say 50. I’m clearly not good at knowing numbers or things.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: What you’re saying is that like Alaska and…
BEN: Alabama.
HEDVIG: …Alabama, the things you have, are not going to be the random uniform distribution of all the letters. Some things are more common. So, Maryland and Minnesota and Mississippi and…
BEN: Massachusetts.
HEDVIG: …Massachusetts are all going to be like, “Oh, those sound like MN to me.” As we just saw with Australia and Austria, both of them could be like, “I’d like AU, please.”
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: So, there’s a number of things going on here. Two is great, but there’s only so many combinations. Three gives you a lot more. But there’s also cognitive limits on how long a name is allowed to be and what people are willing to say. So, I think that shrinks us down to three or four letters. Two, three, and four, they’re just perfect, and that’s where the bulk of it is.
BEN: Yeah, I think it’s genuinely… I reckon two would be the winner if two did enough of the work. So, then we’ve gone into three, and then it just starts tapering off from there, not even just for cognitive limits, but we get what we needed from the three. Right?
DANIEL: It works.
BEN: And then the stuff that the three doesn’t handle, we do a bit in four. And the stuff that the four doesn’t handle is like, “Oh, fuck [MUMBLES].” There’s just crumbs after that point.
DANIEL: So, there’s not enough possibilities for two. Four is getting a bit long. Three is a sweet spot. I agree. Thanks, Fiona, for that one. Okay, let’s take a break and hit our favorite game. We’ve got a couple of them from our listeners. Are you ready to play…
BEN: All right. [IN A SINGSONG VOICE] Ben and Hedvig, head to head. [AIR GUITARS]
HEDVIG: I’m ready.
DANIEL: This first one comes from Liz via email. Liz says, “Here’s an idea for your Related or Not segment. I got to thinking about the ’80s toy.” Hey, ’80s toy, come on. “Etch a Sketch.”
HEDVIG: Oh.
BEN: Ooh, that’s earlier than 1980s, surely.
HEDVIG: Okay. Yeah, I think I know what that is.
DANIEL: It’s perennial.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
BEN: The two knobs in red, magnetic board.
HEDVIG: We had it; we just call it something else. Yeah, got it.
DANIEL: What do you call it?
HEDVIG: I don’t know. Not Etch a Sketch.
DANIEL: Okay. “Where you twiddle knobs to draw pictures and shake it to erase the drawing and start again. It made me wonder whether the words ETCH and SKETCH are related or not.” What do you think?
HEDVIG: Ooh-hoo-ooh.
BEN: Ooh, this is a tricky one, because the low hanging fruit here is the yes, right?
DANIEL: Mhm.
BEN: They’re so conceptually related, when you etch something and when you sketch something, that the act that you’re doing is so similar. But I feel like that’s a red herring. Oh, this is a tricky one.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Or is it?
DANIEL: Is it just one of those obvious ones? Some of those are like that.
BEN: If it’s stupid, but it works, it’s not stupid. Okay, I’m going danger zone. I’m saying not related.
DANIEL: Not related. Okay, very good. Hedvig, what do you think, and do you have any thought process?
HEDVIG: Well, ETCH is like etching, like you etch into a copper plate. Right? So, you make an indentation, very old stuff. SKETCH, figuratively, “Here’s a sketch of what we’re going to do,” but the physical thing is like pen and paper and coal, which I feel like is a more recent thing. But those pen and paper and coal thing is similar to… the activity is similar, right? I’m saying very obvious things here, but I’m thinking.
DANIEL: Yeah, they are. They are kind of.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: They describe the same kind of thing, and they sound the same.
HEDVIG: One of the differences is that ETCH is like super… Like, if you etch something into something, you can’t erase it. Whereas if you sketch something famously, that’s part of the thing. It’s a draft, so you can erase it. So, that’s quite different. Now I’m just pitching into other languages.
DANIEL: Yeah, go. Where do you think these come from? Because I’ll tell you, for me, SKETCH, that gave me a Scandi feeling. It’s giving Norse.
HEDVIG: Because they’re quite different in Swedish. ETZA is like ETCH and SKETCH is SCHIZA. And SCHIZA sounds like it’s a French borrowing. And I know that it’s something similar in French. I’m pretty sure. I know it’s dəˈzīne, but it’s also like… I swear there’s like SQ somewhere. So, I’m going to say that they are not related as well, and we’re either both going to lose or both going to win.
BEN: Oooh.
DANIEL: I also said no. I bet they came from different times. I thought that ETCH was going to be an Old English word, and I said that SKETCH was probably from something Scandi, but much later. Okay, time for the answer. The answer is: they are not related.
BEN: Oh, we rise together like a glorious trio.
DANIEL: Yes, we do. Now, I was way off about the timings. They’re both from the 1600s.
BEN: Wait, are we calling that old or new?
DANIEL: That’s modern.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: That’s really new. ETCH comes from Dutch “etsen” or from German, “ätzen”, to etch. And SKETCH probably comes… Hedvig, what was the word you were mentioning, schiza?
HEDVIG: Schiza. Yeah.
DANIEL: Schiza. That’s a Low German word.
HEDVIG: Ooh, is it? I thought it was from French.
DANIEL: It appears to be barred from Italian SCHIZO, which means sketch or drawing.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: But the answer is not related. Interestingly, sketchy… Oo, sketchy, is it related to Sketch or is it a different word?
BEN: I would have thought SKETCHY is related to SKETCH, for sure.
DANIEL: I think so too, and I was thinking that it’s because a SKETCH is incomplete or there’s…
BEN: Rough. It’s not particularly faithful to a final product, all that kind of thing.
DANIEL: Details are missing, like somebody who… Yeah, and that’s right. They are related, and that’s since 1982. All right, thanks for that one, Liz. And this one’s from Magistra Annie on our Discord. She says, “I have a Related or Not idea. SORRY and SORROW.”
BEN: Oh, we’ve got another low hanging fruit! I feel like these are both like fae traps. Right? Like you’re walking along the forest, and then you see the magical glowing blue flame, and just like, only an idiot would investigate it, because you’re going straight to the fae realm where you’ll be, like, succubied in pleasure until you die or something.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Sounds good. SORRY and SORROW. Hedvig, have you got a sense of this? Surely… surely, these must be related.
HEDVIG: Oh, the way you said that.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: That’s what I feel like! [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I am not eating from the fae buffet.
BEN: [LAUGHS] The fae buffet! I love it.
DANIEL: Take the bait, Hedvig. Take the bait.
HEDVIG: But you know, you come into a glade and there’s a lovely table with lots of food. That’s what they do. That’s how they get you.
DANIEL: I know.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Don’t eat the food. Don’t eat the food. Okay. SORRY…
DANIEL: SORRY and SORROW.
HEDVIG: The thing is, SORRY looks and sounds like it’s a shortened version of something else.
DANIEL: It’s just a little bit of sorrow. Just a little bit.
BEN: Is SORRY… Hang on, can I ask a…? Well, actually, I can’t ask a question because that’s cheating and that’s not how the game works. But I have an inkling that SORRY, despite what we might imagine, is actually a very recent word, historically.
DANIEL: Interesting.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it looks like it, doesn’t it?
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: So, it’s got the Y, it’s got all the little baby signs.
BEN: It’s so interesting as well, because you would imagine… My brain is like: any word that is in the first 15 words that you learn for a language when you’re going to a country should inherently be a very, very old word.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Surely people have been saying SORRY or some version of that in that language for like a bajillion years.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: But I feel like we were either saying something else, or maybe we were just never apologising ever in the English-speaking world.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: No, you were saying something else or doing something else. But if you do something a lot, there’s also the theory that things happen to it.
BEN: Mm, okay.
HEDVIG: Words like MULTIPLICATION, you say very rarely. So, it’s long and funny and weak.
BEN: Right.
HEDVIG: But like TO BE, you say a lot.
BEN: Look, OKAY is the same thing, right? It’s one of the most used articles of speech and it’s also super new, super young.
DANIEL: That’s right. 1830s.
BEN: Okay. I’m going to put my thing out there. I am going to do the opposite of what I did last time. I’m going to say, this is related.
HEDVIG: I’m going to do the same thing. I’m going to eat from the feast.
BEN: The fae buffet.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: The fae buffet.
BEN: Mm, these jelly tarts are simply delici… Whoa, what’s that giant glowing thing?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: My answer was no, because you’re asking the question!
BEN: All right, fair enough. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Well, it turns out that Magistra Annie wrote us the answer as well. Here it is. “SORRY and SORROW are technically etymologically unrelated.” You sup from the buffet and now you get devoured.
BEN: Hang on, hang on, hang on. One second.
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: I can’t help but notice that you kind of used a couple of pretty big qualifiers there.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm. Me too.
BEN: So, what is the technicality that is required to make us wrong, essentially?
DANIEL: Would you believe, she goes on to explain.
BEN: Oh! Good on you, Magistra Annie.
DANIEL: “I say technically because SORRY ended up assuming its vowel sound because of influence from SORROW. But their root words are different. SORRY comes from words to do with pain and hurt, whereas SORROW comes from words meaning sad and grief.” Magistra Annie continues, “I could use some backup source checking, but I heard ‘I’m sorry’ to express sympathetic remorse has been around since Beowulf, and ‘I’m sorry’ as an apology is only as old as 1807 by Jane Austen.”
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Wait, what you just said didn’t help me understand fully.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: I’m also in the same boat. So, what vowel did it borrow? So, obviously, it borrowed the O from SORROW. So, did it have a U beforehand?
HEDVIG: What was it before?
HEDVIG and BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: I was wondering about that too. So, I looked it up. It seems that SORRY comes from old English “sarig,” S-A-R-I-G. And it’s a word talking about pain and distress, physical and mental.
BEN: So, this would be like, “He was feeling very sorry for himself,” kind of usage. Because when you’re feeling sorry for yourself, you’re not apologising to yourself. You are experiencing distress.
DANIEL: Well, in this one, yeah, you’re in pain and then you feel sorry.
BEN: Right. “He had a very sorry demeanor,” would be like another usage.
DANIEL: And also, you felt SORE. SORE is another one that’s related.
BEN: Oh, okay. SORE. SORRY. Yeah, gotcha.
DANIEL: Okay. But SORROW comes to us from Old English, sorg, and that had an O sound. And so, because those two words were kinda similar, they grew together. So, SARRY with an A turned into SORRY to be more like SORROW and SORE.
BEN: Fascinating.
DANIEL: So, the SORRY one seems to be like pain, and then the SORROW is like sick. They both go back to words meaning sick eventually, but different words.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I was thinking Proto-Indo-European root for SORROW is *swergh. It means to be ill or to take care of. How do you have a word that means to be ill and to take care of someone who is ill?
DANIEL: It’s an early contronym!
HEDVIG: That’s weird.
DANIEL: Maybe because you’re sick with them. Maybe that’s why we say, “I feel sorry for you,” because I’m taking care of you and I’m feeling your pain.
BEN: Speaking of contronyms, because I know this is for our Discord listeners first — I really, really liked, and I can’t remember who said it, when contronyms came up in the chat the other week. Someone mentioned that SANCTION is actually not really one, as in… Yes, I guess, technically in its usage, but really what’s happening is SANCTION just means declaration. So, you can declare something is forbidden or you can declare something is acceptable. I just thought, “Oh, wow, that’s really clever that a person actually thought about that.” So, whoever you were, hopefully you’re listening right now, you’re a clever cookie, and I thought that was really cool.
DANIEL: It was Ben, Not the Host One.
BEN: [LAUGHS] The much smarter, better one than me.
HEDVIG: Ben thought the other Ben was smart?
BEN: [LAUGHS] I didn’t mean to do that. I promise!
DANIEL: It’s true.
BEN: It’s not like I’m just going through and looking at all of Ben’s posts, you guys. [WHISPERS] I actually have been doing that.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I was going to say that sounds exactly like what you’re doing.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Well, thanks to Liz and thanks to Magistra Annie for giving us a couple of great games. You can give us a Related or Not, but let’s try to not make them all like, “You won’t believe that these similar words are unrelated!”
HEDVIG and BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: We got to throw in some curly ones too. All right, let’s move on to our next bracket of questions. This one’s from Pityrosporum on our Discord server. They say, “One useful thing I’ve learned from Talk the Talk/Because Language is to resist prescriptive impulses, because prescriptivism is often racism or classism in disguise. One of my kids, age 10, is a kind soul that thinks a little rigidly and is showing occasional prescriptive tendencies. ‘It’s biscuits, not cookies.'” Sorry, I gave that kid the mean kid voice. Anyway.
HEDVIG: Kids… This is how children work, right?
DANIEL: How do chil… Well, let me finish the question, then we can talk about it. “We can talk this through, but I’m wondering if anyone has any kid-friendly resources on why linguistic prescriptivism is a problem and language diversity is welcome. Articles, books, videos, anything that you found helpful. Thanks.” This is how kids work, isn’t it?
BEN: Yeah. So, I think all three of us are about to say, kids go through various phases that manifest as kind of jerky behavior, because they… It’s true! When they figure out a rule and they figure out… So, my son is the king of this. It’s probably because I’m not a particularly patient dad. So, when he feels like he’s got one on me with the rules and stuff, so if I forget to turn off a light or if I use unkind language, any of the things that are frowned upon in the house, [LAUGHS] he will rule-lawyer me real fast.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: And I think that’s not uncommon with children. I don’t think that this person’s child is necessarily doing that. But I think there is a whole spectrum of reasons why kids, when they figure out something like this, they go, “Oh, yeah, I know. I learned this rule. I get this.”
HEDVIG: And it’s a sense of control, because most of the time, adults are just like, “Do this, do that.” And you ask why? And they’re like, “It’s just… I don’t have time. You have to do this.” As a child, you have control over very few things in your surroundings. You don’t get to decide when you eat, you don’t get to decide when you go to bed, you’re constantly being pushed around. I don’t know how this person is as a parent, but I’m just saying… And for the good of children, that is sort of how most human upbringing works. We tell them like, “Don’t go out into the street. You have to go to bed now, because…”
DANIEL: I will control you so that you do not destroy yourself, because you will.
HEDVIG: Yeah. “You have to eat something now because you’re grumpy.”
BEN: I know we don’t rep Noam Chomsky for linguistic reasons, but in a nonlinguistic talk, he was talking about how parenting is one of the only morally fine forms of totalitarian governance. There has to be some level of just like shoonk!
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah. My parents explained a lot of things to me. So, they were like, “You can’t go into the street because you’ll get run over, and I’m afraid… I don’t want you to die.” And sometimes, my mom would say that it got a bit annoying because I would ask for reasons when it was like, “We’re in a very rushed situation and I don’t have time to explain to you. You have to just do what I say.”
BEN: Yeah. It’s really hard to be your best self in all ]. It’s like, [IN AN ANGRY VOICE] “Put your fucking shoes on now.”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah. And it’s also, I had to learn the lesson that sometimes, I just do what mom says, and that is the end of it. And when you, as a child, learn a rule, maybe in school… Like, when I was working as a substitute teacher, there were some groups of kids who were like, “In our classroom, we have… insert arbitrary rule. We always put our right hand up, not our left hand,” or whatever it is. They had some sort of rule. And if I would break it as a substitute teacher or another child, they would be like, “[EXCITED SQUEAL] It’s happening.” And I was like, “Look, it’s just one day out of the week. Your regular teacher’s not here. You guys can…”
BEN: Oo, oo, oo, I can I ask a question, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: You are living in Germany.
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: Some people in the world have no qualms with jaywalking.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
BEN: Then, there are Germans.
HEDVIG: Oh.
BEN: So, what noise do German children make when you jaywalk?
HEDVIG: I don’t know because I’ve never tried it. So, in Germany…
BEN: Oh, are you from another place that is also like a not a jaywalking place?
HEDVIG: No.
BEN: Oh, okay.
HEDVIG: I knew about this before coming to Germany and I knew how socially frowned upon it is to walk when there’s a red light. So, for context for people who haven’t been to Germany, there’s a common belief… I don’t know if it was a public social campaign or something, but there is a belief that if you walk when there’s a red light, if you walk and a child sees you, they will walk, and they will get run over, and you are responsible for their death.
BEN: It’s like a proper… Yeah. It carries more significant social weight than you would anticipate if you come from basically anywhere else in the world.
HEDVIG: It really does. And I was told about this rule before I came here, and I’ve never broken it. Certainly, not in front of a child. Maybe like, late at night when there are no cars, maybe I’ve done it.
BEN: I was unfortunate enough to go to Germany when I was in my early 20s. And what we know about people in their early 20s is that they are uniformly fucking morons. Right? Myself, absolutely no exception. So, I didn’t know any of this. I was just like a stupid tourist being a stupid tourist. And I jaywalked in front of a whole elementary school class who were, like, going on a trip somewhere, like holding hands, double file, all that kind of thing. And if memory serves, there’s a cultural thing where they actually make a noise as a group. Right? And I distinctly remember this whole group of kids, I think they made like a [MAKES SIREN WOO WOO SOUNDS] noise, all of them simultaneously.
HEDVIG: Oh, my god.
BEN: It was the cutest thing ever and I was like, “Oh, my god, that’s so cute.” And then, I saw that they all looked tiny and angry, and I was like, [HEDVIG LAUGHS] “I’m doing something wrong.” Point being, another example of kids, when they feel like they understand the rules and they see people who normally enforce the rules breaking the rules, they are definitely going to be like, “Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, yes!”
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: Yes!
DANIEL: I thought that story was going to go differently. I thought that you were going to be responsible for all those children suddenly following you into the street. The dam bursts.
BEN: Daniel, come on. No.
DANIEL: Splat! That’s a weird piece of folklore though.
BEN: What the Germans believe is true. All children are constantly like an excited dog at the limit of their self-control, and it takes just one person stepping onto the street and they’re like, “It’s fine.” Zhoonk!
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: You do realise that children are trying diligently to not exist.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: That’s why they put everything in their mouths.
HEDVIG: So, going back to the question we got from Pity… Petey… Peters…
DANIEL: Can I just add one more thing though?
HEDVIG: Oh, okay.
BEN: Yes, Daniel.
DANIEL: Let’s add on top of parents clamping down on you with their parental authority, there’s also the school thing, which we’ve talked about school a little bit. But knowing the right answers in school makes you special. So, naturally, you are trying to… Well, at least some kids with a certain predisposition…
BEN: Yeah. I was about to say, Daniel, your children and my child are extremely different human beings. So, this carries no weight for Ellis. Nah.
DANIEL: This is only personal experience for me. I was eager to make teachers know how special I was. And so, when you find out a pattern or when you notice a rule or something…
HEDVIG: Get excited.
DANIEL: Yeah! You could be a little bit heavy handed, especially when you’re not good with exceptions to rules, you know, principled exceptions.
HEDVIG: Yeah. So, going back to the question, it sounds like this is a phase that a lot of kids go through when they’re like, “I found a rule, I’m going to enforce it, and it’s very important to me.” And I was thinking of helpful advice. So, this is going to maybe sound odd, but I’ve seen some content lately about etiquette and upper-class society. And for example, there was a guy that said, “You’re not supposed to clink glasses together when you do cheers.” But if you’re in someone else’s house and the hostess moves to do a clink, the polite thing is not to correct them. The polite thing is to do the clink because it is worse to make your host feel embarrassed and wrong than it is to do the clink. Right?
BEN: I saw exactly the same content as Hedvig, and it should be noted that then the guy finishes by saying, “And then, you die a little bit on the inside.”
HEDVIG: Yes, you judge them, and you die a bit on the inside. But the point is sort of that maybe there’s some way of teaching people that you can have aesthetic rules… Like, I hate certain shades of lime green. I think it’s very ugly. I would never wear it. I don’t want it in my house, but I am not going to walk up to everyone wearing lime green and tell them that it’s ugly. Right? So, maybe there’s some way of saying, “You can have individual rules and there can be rules in school, but it is worse to correct people on things that are a bit arbitrary than it is to break your rule.” I don’t know, it sounds hard.
BEN: One thing I would say to Pityrosporum is: depending on how much mental energy and space you have, stuff like this is just an interesting opportunity to just dig deeper into these sorts of things. So, in the example that they have provided — it’s BISCUITS, not COOKIES — as a person who grew up both in America and Australia, and as a person who really likes to cook and to bake, if Ellis said this to me, I would sort of immediately be like, “Oh, that’s interesting. Why do you think it’s biscuits and not cookies?” Because we don’t actually know, based on the evidence that we’ve got here, whether this person is doing a “Well, in this country, we say this thing,” and blah, blah, blah. Because you’ve got an opportunity to just talk about, obviously, regionalism and people from different places, but you can also just… here in Australia, I defy anyone under the age of, like, 65 to say chocolate chip biscuit.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: That’s not a thing that we eat or that we consume. That’s not how we think of them. There is actually also a semantic difference between a COOKIE and a BISCUIT, at least here in Australia. I don’t know where Pityrosporum comes from.
DANIEL: I think it’s all lexical.
BEN: Pardon?
DANIEL: I think it’s all lexical. I think it’s just phrases we say.
BEN: Well, I mean, obviously, Americans say BISCUIT, but they mean something entirely different. I have to assume this person is talking about, like an Australian context, we say BISCUIT, they say COOKIE. But that’s not a hard and fast rule.
DANIEL: No.
BEN: There is gray area there. And then, you get to talk about semantics, which is really, really fun. And then, you get to talk about senses of words. And then, if you want to be really bananas, then you start talking about things like, “Hey, did you know that biscuits mean this entirely different thing in America? And also, did you know cookies were a thing that are all on computers and they have this whole other thing going on?”, and you can just basically use it as an opportunity to open things way up. Maybe your kid’s receptive to that. Mine’s super not. He just gets like a glazed look in his eyes, “Dad’s starting to bang on about weird, boring nonsense again.”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: But sometimes, even that can be a useful [CHUCKLES] disincentive because he doesn’t engage in word policing because he knows dad is just going to start talking for, like, 25 minutes.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS]
BEN: So, he’s just like, “All right, fine, I’ll give it up.”
HEDVIG: I think it’s very hard to have discussions with small children about serious matters because, for example, if a child comes home from school and says, “You can’t say, ‘I didn’t see nobody.’ That’s wrong. My teacher said that.” And that is a perfectly valid thing in Afro-American Vernacular English. Your child is probably not saying that’s wrong because they are racist — I assume — but they heard it in school or they made a rule in their heads and they’re saying it. I was wondering, if Daniel and Ben, how do you deal with that deep…? You don’t want to say to your child, “You’re being a racist.”
BEN: How do you address systemic racism with children, essentially? That’s the question, right?
HEDVIG: Yes. When it comes to language and cultural, the link between those concepts can seem so far away.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
BEN: Yep. Well, look, I think that is a very answerable question, except just not by me. My partner is so much better versed in these issues than I am. Any idea that I’ve ever communicated on this show that even has a semblance of actual tangible worth and currency on these matters is directly taken from her. All I would say is, all of her reading and thus all of the osmosised knowledge that I have acquired because of that is that you can definitely have these conversations, even really, really little. You just start in very young, age-appropriate ways.
So, my son is eight, and we regularly talk about why life is just generally going to be easier for him because he has white skin and because he’s male and all that kind of stuff so that when he comes home and says something like, “Oh…” Not that he ever has, but if he were to say, “Oh, you can’t say this thing,” — and it’s a thing (say) in Aboriginal English, that’s perfectly acceptable — then we would say, “Well, actually, mate, that’s not strictly speaking true.” And then, we’d go into the detail about why in certain instances, you can say it in a certain way, and in other instances, “the rule.” But then, we talk actively about, like, but who makes the rules, right? Your teacher is a white lady who grew up being taught almost certainly by other white people. So, her “rules” are only one set of rules, and then there’s this whole other set of rules, and it’s all up for grabs, basically.
DANIEL: I had an experience where I brought a library book home. It was The Little Fairy Who Lost Their Wand. And all through the book, The Little Fairy is referred to as THEY. And when I said this to Little Two-Year-Old, she said, “No, The Fairy who lost HER wand!”
BEN: Oh, wow.
DANIEL: It was really set for her, like even then. I said, “Well, this fairy is a THEY.” So, we just read the story a bunch of times, and then she was more accepting. But we also back that up. We do have discussions about sexism. We have discussions about LGBTQ people.
HEDVIG: But how do you have it in a way that doesn’t sound heavy handed and…? Like… mmm.
BEN: I think some of it should sound heavy handed, first of all.
HEDVIG: Okay. Yeah.
BEN: So, some of it should be heavy, but not all of it.
HEDVIG: But accessible, maybe.
BEN: Certainly, the younger they are, the less heavy it needs to be.
DANIEL: You just keep it light and short.
HEDVIG: I think maybe not heavy handed, but children can understand.
DANIEL and HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: I think keeping it light and short, like, as short as that explanation that I gave was. Or, sometimes it’s like, “Did you know that if your mom lived 50 years ago, she couldn’t be a doctor? They didn’t let girls be doctors because of sexism.” “Whaaaat!” Just that short, and then you’ve brought in the discussion and the relevant terms. It can happen.
BEN: I will say this to Pityrosporum as well. If your kid is age 10, which you say they are, I think you’ll be really, really surprised at the level of adult understanding that is capable there. Ten is definitely the age where you can start bringing in some pretty surprisingly serious, heavy, or just complex notions. A 10-year-old can wrap their head around a really surprising amount assuming you have a good relationship with them, and you’ve done a lot of groundwork about discussing complex or difficult things. Really, I would love to see how surprised you are that things of a very significantly complex nature can be handled.
DANIEL: It’s true. Let’s talk about resources. Lauren Gawne, our pal from Superlinguo and Lingthusiasm has a list. We will put that on our website, Linguistics Books for Kids – the Superlinguo list. One of them was The Dictionary of Difficult Words, which is one that I like to share with my kids. It’s by our pal Jane Solomon, and Louise Lockhart did the illustrations. Remember that episode? That was so much fun.
BEN: I do. I still have that book. It’s four meters from my hand right now.
DANIEL: Also, do you know what? The episode of Bluey called Dunny [BEN LAUGHS] is just a super-duper good intro to, “Well, we don’t say these things, but other families do.” And it’s a good introduction to how different people do language differently and tone and register. It’s actually quite funny and good.
BEN: I do feel like though, if I had to call it, that episode ends on a slightly prescriptivist note.
DANIEL: Ahhhh, yeah. And then we can talk about that. I think one thing I do is I’m protecting my young children from teacher attitudes, because this is the age when they will get screamed at for saying “me and John” or something like that.
HEDVIG: Oh.
BEN: Look, I’ll be honest. So, my son is going through primary school now. I’m not seeing all that much of that anymore.
DANIEL: Good.
HEDVIG: Nice!
BEN: He’s just going to a random down-the-street government school. Like, he’s not at some sort of like hippy-dippy Montessori, anything like that. I genuinely don’t encounter very much of that. I don’t know.
DANIEL: That’s good. What a relief.
BEN: I know what you’re talking about Daniel, though. I have memories of people being like, “There are rules, and you will learn the rules of words.”
DANIEL: Yeah. All right, well, we are going to throw this to our listeners because we’ve mentioned some resources. Not many though. So, what have you found? Please hit us up. You can email us, hello@becauselanguage.com, or you can get onto our Discord. We’ll have a thread on that coming up. Thank you, Pityrosporum, for that one. We’ll do our best to get a better handle on the actual resources. This one comes to us from Pontus — affectionately known as Moon-Moon — on TikTok, who says, “Hey, peeps. I posted a question or a thought on TikTok that I’d be interested in getting your input on, if you have the time.”
Now, Pontus is duetting a video on TikTok where someone is talking about folk etymology, which is kind of like a notion that a non-linguist would have about the origin of a word, that’s folk etymology. And Pontus says…
PONTUS: As a layman linguist, that’s really strange to me because the way I understand it is like etymology is just what is the origins of a word? Where does it come from? So, folk etymology would just be a part of it. That’s the way my brain wants to think about it. So let’s put it like this. If this would have happened like for a word that’s 1,000 years old and this happened 500 years ago, it would just be etymology. You know, there wouldn’t be any distinction. So, why do we make a distinction in modern times? That’s what I can’t really understand.
BEN: First and most importantly, Pontus has a exquisite voice.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Wonderful.
BEN: I just had to put it out there. Read a washing machine manual to me, my man. I will listen. That is just… what an oaky timbre! Oh, sorry, had to notice.
DANIEL: Delicious.
BEN: Just sounds great.
HEDVIG: Great.
DANIEL: We like it when people send us audio of them talking. Not just Pontus, but just about everybody.
HEDVIG: So, there’s a couple of things. Etymology has been the pastime of the idle rich and nerds for a very long time.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Dilettantes!
HEDVIG: In the last 80 years, it’s been more of a scientific discipline. So, it is true that further ago in time, what we might today describe as folk etymology was just etymology. Like, people did science, bad and good in olden times. Sometimes they got it right, sometimes they didn’t. Folk etymology, the way I’ve seen it used is for when people make up origins that make sense contemporarily, but that when you apply a more rigorous scientific method, you can find out it’s not true. So, case in point, maybe… What’s a good one? Handburger?
BEN: Fornication under the consent of the king, right?
HEDVIG: What?
BEN: That’s one of the most common folk etymologies ever, right?
HEDVIG: What are you talking about?
BEN: So, the folk etymology, the famously incorrect folk etymology for the word, FUCK, is that it is an acronym that stands for “fornication under the consent of the king”, which is not true.
HEDVIG: Right, okay. That’s weird.
DANIEL: That’s a folk etymology.
BEN: There is no data that would suggest that that is a thing that means that.
HEDVIG: So, folk etymology, just like with other folk things, it’s usually laymen or amateurs who make up something. And we call it folk etymology explicitly when we think that it is not true. And Pontus is sort of onto something, because when a layman comes up with a true etymology, we don’t call it folk etymology. We call it etymology, right?
BEN: Right.
DANIEL: Yeah. So, we’re saying folk is wrong, like people are wrong and people suck.
BEN: Which is unfortunate, because didn’t we have someone on our show recently who was talking about this? The idea of folk things should not be thought of as bad things?
DANIEL: Yeah, I think that’s the good point here.
HEDVIG: I’m a big proponent of that, especially folk art. A lot of things that I think are really cool in the art world are like folk art and are not proper art, because they haven’t gone to university or whatever. But unlike art, with language we have some rigorous methods of finding out the etymology of things that are quite tried and true. And unlike art, there is a bit of not… perfectly objective, but there is a bit of a gold standard that we can compare to. And we call it folk when people just… Yeah.
BEN: So, what should we call it instead, do you reckon? When it’s incorrect etymology, when it is not backed up by any evidence and there’s strong evidence to suggest it’s a completely different thing, instead of folk.
HEDVIG: But it’s so much fun. Well, it’s called folk now. I don’t think we have a choice, Ben.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Yeah. But we want to shift and change our ideas, right?
DANIEL: I think it’s the name.
BEN: Who was talking to us about this?
HEDVIG: Misetymology. Dysetymology.
BEN: Oh, I like that.
DANIEL: Maybe instead of trying to change the words we use, maybe it would better to think better about folk etymology and to think of… I’ve been reading “Fixing English” by Anne Curzan. And her thing there is that we typically think of prescriptivism as terrible and bad and classist, and it sometimes is. But the prescriptive tradition is also a part of the story of English. Talking about English, thinking about it, making decisions about how it should be. So, it kinda just is. So, we say crayfish. Oh, people took the word “écrevisse,” and they saw that “visse” ending, and they thought it was fish. And we say, “Oh, that’s a wrong etymology. It’s a folk etymology because fish isn’t related to crayfish. It’s unetymological.” Maybe that’s the term. It’s unetymological. But that’s part of the word’s…
HEDVIG: It kind of is now. You say crayfish now.
DANIEL: Yeah. It’s part of the word’s path. And here’s the other thing. Often, we don’t know the real etymology, and we rely on what people thought the motivation was. For example, the word, HUMBUG. If you say, “Oh, don’t listen to them. They’re just a humbug.” It’s just bullshit. It’s just a fraud or something like that. “Oh, it’s a humbug.” HUMBUG is a word that just started popping up in the 1800s.
BEN: Like, it’s just a random…
DANIEL: Or 1700s. It was just this thing that happened, and nobody knew why at the time. Nobody thought to write it down. People at the time noticed that this word was popping up, and they made a lot of speculations as to the answer. And sometimes, those speculations are the answer, like it was with OKAY, oll korrect. But sometimes, they’re just speculation. If it’s 500 years in the past, we’ve got no idea whether those speculations are unprofitable folk etymology or the actual thing, because they thought it at the time. It’s contemporaneous. So, the line between folk etymology and real etymology is sometimes, for some words, really, really thin.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: So, that’s a really good point Pontus makes.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I think exactly that. And I’ve been diving in recently into historical linguistics methodology. And like, it is hard. And because it is hard, they argue a lot, and sometimes they’re wrong. These are people who have spent 40 years of their careers working on these languages, and they still argue, and they’re still wrong, and it’s still shaky, because it’s really hard. It’s a really hard topic. And the more people are interested in it, the more we’ll learn about it. So, we should welcome anyone wanting to… I don’t know, random amateurs being interested, I’m not sure if their success rate is that much worse.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] We do want to make a distinction between scholarship and uninformed speculation. There’s a place for that definitely.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: But sometimes, it makes us a bit gatekeepy on linguistics, and sometimes we need to think a bit better of the folk. So, that’s why I liked Pontus’s comment. Thanks for doing that. We really like to hear from you. We like to hear from lots of people. So, send us TikToks, send us SpeakPipes, send us your voice. Any more to say on that one, or should we move on to our last one?
BEN: Nope, I like that.
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: I just want to hear Pontus’ voice some more. That is my main takeaway from that whole segment, is just how wonderful that man sounds.
DANIEL: Well, follow him on TikTok. We’ll have a link on our website, becauselanguage.com. This one’s from Keith via email. Keith says, “Longtime fan of the podcast from the good old days of Talk the Talk.” Mm!
BEN: [INTONES] The ancient and distant past.
DANIEL: “I’ve been doing a lot of cryptic crosswords lately, and I’ve become captivated by the idea of a word having anagram that is a synonym for the original word.”
BEN: Oh, man, this is niche. [LAUGHS] This is really niche.
DANIEL: “The only example I know of that vaguely fits the bill is EVIL and VILE. Do you know of any others?”
HEDVIG: So, I hate cryptic crosswords.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: And Ste likes them and is good at them. We recently went to England and there were cryptic crosswords around. Oh, my god…
DANIEL: I love them.
HEDVIG: …he would ask for my help, which I hated. And then, he…
BEN: Oh, he doesn’t need your help.
HEDVIG: No, he doesn’t.
BEN: That’s not a dig on you. That’s just… Yeah.
HEDVIG: No, he doesn’t. Did you know one time I tried to solve a crossword in Swedish, and helped me?
DANIEL: He’s good.
BEN: [LAUGHS] He doesn’t speak Swedish.
DANIEL: He’s a keeper.
HEDVIG: He does not speak the language.
BEN: It’s like that guy who won the Scrabble competition in France, not knowing French.
HEDVIG: So stupid.
DANIEL: Not knowing French, he just memorised the wordlist. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Anyway, I know that there are a lot of conventions in cryptic crosswords where it’s like, there’s something and then there’s the word like IN, and you’re supposed to understand that one of the things is inside the other. It’s all this, like, meta language.
BEN: [CROSSTALK] It’s a game. Yeah. So, this is the thing that I think…
HEDVIG: I hate it.
STEVE: …a lot of people… I don’t love cryptic crosswords either. I spent a hot second in my teen years getting sort of into it. Like Hedvig’s alluding to, it’s just there is a game and like all games, there is a set of rules. And those rules are a little bit fuzzy, but not hugely. Just like learning Sudoku, where you get your little heuristics and you figure out how things tend to match up and play out, you will quickly get a bit of a handle on cryptics. I think… I anticipate that all the people who are big fans of cryptic crosswords are essentially gambling addicts, right? They get a little dopamine hit when they get the thing right and they go, “Ooh!” But there’s about 50 of those hits spread over like an hour. So, once every 30 seconds, they get a little ooh! ooh! and that just keeps them there going. But Hedvig and I, we don’t get the little dopamine hit because we don’t do them.
DANIEL: Stop. This is not about cryptic crosswords. This is about anagrams.
HEDVIG: Right.
DANIEL: So, do we know any?
HEDVIG: No is the answer. Do you want me to go ask Ste?
DANIEL: Oh, well, okay. I’ll take any that Ste has. You want to go ask him?
HEDVIG: Yeah. [CHAIR CREAKS]
BEN: I feel like this would be a game that crew members in the Star Trek universe would play, right? They would sit around a table because they’re all such clever clogs, and they’d be drinking their synthehol, and they would be going, “Oh, who can tell me any anagrammable contronyms or anagrammable synonyms,” and all that sort of thing.
DANIEL: Okay. Here comes Ste.
STE MANN: Hi.
BEN: Hi, Ste.
DANIEL: Hello. Hey, Ste. How nice to see you on a day like today.
STEVE: [LAUGHS] You too. How’s it going?
DANIEL: We are well.
HEDVIG: Yes. You’re here for a job.
STEVE: Okay.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: The question is, anagrams are synonyms, so EVIL and VILE.
STEVE: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: We want anagrams that are synonyms.
STEVE: We had one the other day.
DANIEL: You did?
STEVE: The clue was “tender name expressed differently.”
BEN: Oh, god. Come on, Daniel.
DANIEL: Wait. So, the… okay, so I think…
BEN: It’s a synonym for tender, and then you can rearrange the letters of whatever that word is into another word that means the same… a similar thing.
DANIEL: Okay. We want a synonym for tendon.
STEVE: Sorry, “tender name”.
DANIEL: Tender.
HEDVIG: Tender, like meat is tender.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay. That’s what we want. And then, we have to take something about a name and rearrange it differently.
HEDVIG: Oh, my god, you have to take the entire TENDER NAME, right?
STEVE: Yeah, it’s anagram of TENDER NAME.
HEDVIG: TENDER NAME.
STEVE: Oh, okay.
STEVE: That means TENDER NAME.
BEN: Oh, interesting. Okay. Tender name.
HEDVIG: I remember this one.
DANIEL: Expressed differently. How many letters?
HEDVIG: Same. The letters of TENDER NAME.
BEN: Nine. Yeah.
DANIEL: A tender name expressed differently. It’s a pet name. It’s a
BEN: Oh, uh… Mate…
DANIEL: No, I haven’t got it.
HEDVIG: I think I remember it. Can I say?
STEVE: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: Endearment.
DANIEL: Oh, nice.
BEN: Ah, okay. Very nice, very nice.
DANIEL: That’s lovely.
BEN: I bet Ste got a massive hit of dopamine when he got that one right.
STEVE: [LAUGHS] Yes.
DANIEL: All right, well, thank you, Ste. You’re welcome to hang out.
STEVE: That’s the only one I know. So, now I’m going to leave. Bye.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Okay. I emailed Keith back saying I could remember PARENTAL and PRENATAL. So, that was pretty good.
HEDVIG: What? That’s not synonyms.
DANIEL: No, not really is it? Because it’s prenatal…
BEN: It’s close. I’ll give it to them.
DANIEL: And then Dan on X said ANGERED/ENRAGED is another classic.
HEDVIG: That one’s good.
BEN: Oh, that’s a good one.
HEDVIG: That one’s good.
BEN: I like that.
HEDVIG: That one’s really good.
DANIEL: So, I decided to hack up a little script that would find anagrams.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Okay.
HEDVIG: Oh, god.
DANIEL: Can you guess the way that I found anagrams? If you have a word list, how would you find out which words are anagrams?
BEN: Oh, did you use the negative values in Semantle type thing? So, if you’ve got a semantic association list, if you go far enough away, does it become an opposite?
HEDVIG: First of all, he had to just find anagrams, Ben. That’s the first task.
DANIEL: Just anagrams.
BEN: Oh, that’s right. Well, that’s easy. Isn’t that just like take these letters and jumble them and then run it through a dictionary and anything that is a word, put on a list?
DANIEL: Well, here’s what I did. I took a word like ACCORDION and I said just rearrange the letters into alphabetical order, so that it becomes A-C-C-E… [CROSSTALK]
HEDVIG: [GASPS] Smart!
DANIEL: Okay?
HEDVIG: Smart!
DANIEL: That’s the word’s signature. Now you go through all the rest of the words in the wordlist, and if any of them have the same signature, they’re anagrams.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Daniel, I have known you for a long time, and you have done a lot of things that are smart and impressive. This is the smartest thing I’ve ever seen you do.
DANIEL: What‽
BEN: Okay, hang on, hang on. For those of us who don’t code regularly, play that out a little bit because Hedvig got it very quickly, because she plays with code a little bit more than the average bear, I would assume.
HEDVIG: So smart.
BEN: Okay. So, you take the word ACCORDION.
DANIEL: Yup.
HEDVIG: Take a smaller word, Daniel.
BEN: And you rearrange the letters, so that the letters are in alphabetical order, which literally just spell it out for me. What’s the alphabetical order of ACCORDION rearranged?
HEDVIG: Oh, god.
DANIEL: Let’s see. A-C-C-O-R-D-I-O-N.
HEDVIG: A-C-C-D…
DANIEL: It’s A-C-C-D-I-N-O-O-R.
BEN: Okay. So, that’s not a word, right?
DANIEL: That’s not a word, but that’s the word’s signature.
BEN: But it creates a thing called a signature.
DANIEL: I decided to call it that.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: And then, you take all the other words in the wordlist, and you look at their signature, and if they match, you found an anagram.
BEN: Oh, I see!
HEDVIG: Do you see the brilliance?
BEN: That is actually really, really smart. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: I’m backing Hedvig. That’s the smartest thing I’ve seen you do.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: That’s really clever.
DANIEL: Picking you guys for cohosts.
HEDVIG: Did you come up with that yourself or was this Stack Overflow?
DANIEL: I did!
HEDVIG: Wow.
DANIEL: Yeah, I did.
BEN: Hang on, hang on, hang on. Did you run it past a son?
DANIEL: No.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: This was all me.
BEN: I’m just making sure there’s no stolen valor going on here.
DANIEL: Why does everybody think that I can’t…
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Okay. And then, I just looked through the entire list, this was the boring part, and just saw what was going on. I’m going to show you some that were maybe interesting, but not very. ABODE and ADOBE. Mm.
BEN: Okay, I get it. You make abodes out of adobe. That’s cool.
DANIEL: ASPIRE and PRAISE? Oh, I liked ASSISTANT and SATANISTS. That was fun.
BEN: [LAUGHS] That is fun.
DANIEL: BEDROOM and BOREDOM seemed more like a comment rather than an actual anagram. CALLIGRAPHY and GRAPHICALLY, that was fun. Would anyone like some OCEANIC COCAINE? Okay.
BEN: I think CHUNDER and CHURNED are pretty good.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Yeah, just read out any that you think are interesting.
HEDVIG: DESPAIR, DIAPERS. Sounds pretty accurate.
BEN: GLISTEN and TINGLES, I enjoy.
DANIEL: Yeah. MUTILATIONS and STIMULATION. Does that sound enticing?
BEN: No.
HEDVIG: I like HOMEOWNERS and HORSEWOMEN.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Oh! Hedvig — Can you please remind me to tell you about a book recommendation based on that at the end of the show?
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Okay. But now, let’s get to the good ones, the ones that are a little bit more synonymy. BABBLING and BLABBING.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: If you’re FLIRTING with someone, you are TRIFLING with them, perhaps.
BEN: I like that.
HEDVIG: Ah, yeah.
DANIEL: This is the only partly. LISTEN and SILENT, you must… Okay. OOPS, POOS! All right.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: SWEAT and WASTE.
HEDVIG: RESCUE, SECURE.
BEN: STATEMENT and TESTAMENT, I think, are very good.
HEDVIG: Oh, that’s a good one. That’s a good one.
DANIEL: Now, let’s go to our second tier. AGREE and EAGER, better. ARISING and RAISING. What else do you see?
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm. I like LUST and SLUT.
DANIEL: Yup.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: You can clip that for anything.
DANIEL: And of course, ROWDIES and WEIRDOS.
BEN: I like that. I like rowdies and weirdos. That’s fun.
DANIEL: Okay. Now, we’re getting to our top tier. Here we go.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: ADULATORY and LAUDATORY.
BEN: Oh, that’s a good one.
HEDVIG: Sorry, what is adulatory?
BEN: Okay. ADULATORY is what Daniel is trying to say.
HEDVIG: What does that mean?
DANIEL: ADULATORY means you’re adulating someone. You’re giving them praise.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Just like when you are being LAUDATORY.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: What else? DISTENSION and TENDONITIS, which both involve swelling.
HEDVIG: What is distension?
DANIEL: It means that something’s getting swollen. Yeah. Over…
BEN: Overstretched.
HEDVIG: Ah, okay.
DANIEL: Is that really a synonym then? Maybe that’s not right.
BEN: No no no, distension, like something is distended when it has been like either bent past its point or engorged past… Wherever its normal status is, distension is when it’s gone beyond that.
DANIEL: So, would it be fair to say that tendonitis is a kind of distension?
BEN: Yeah, it’s a reach.
DANIEL: Maybe. I liked IMPREGNATE and PERMEATING.
HEDVIG: I like it too.
DANIEL: When you impregnate a sponge with some… yeah?
BEN: That’s good. That’s good.
DANIEL: And then, this three-part thing, PARENTAL, PRENATAL, but also PATERNAL, which I missed out on.
BEN: I think PATERNAL is better than PRENATAL, I’ve got to say.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: It is.
HEDVIG: Of course.
DANIEL: And then, oh, finishing up, DEDUCTIONS and DISCOUNTED.
BEN: Another very good one.
DANIEL: I’m going to put my script up on our…
HEDVIG: That’s so fun! [WHISPERS] Aaaaaaaaa!
DANIEL: …on the show notes page and also the list. You can look through my big old wordlist and you can see…
HEDVIG: [WHISPERS] Aaaa, love it.
DANIEL: …what you think are the best ones that maybe I missed. So, that’ll be up on…
HEDVIG: I love it so much.
DANIEL: …the episode page for this episode, becauselanguage.com. Oh, I almost forgot. ERECTIONS and SECRETION. Maybe I…
BEN: Ooooh. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: …shouldn’t have…
HEDVIG: Let’s end it there.
BEN: Ending on a hard note. Well done.
HEDVIG: Oh, gross.
DANIEL: Thank you. Thank you.
HEDVIG: So gross.
DANIEL: Well, I’ll stop that. Well, a big thank you to everybody who gave us ideas for this show. Also, a huge thanks to the team from SpeechDocs, who transcribes all the words. And most of all, our patrons who keep the show going. You all are legends.
[MUSIC]
HEDVIG: You can help the show by contributing to episodes like this or our upcoming potluck episode by sending us ideas and feedback. I think that the #show-ideas channel on Discord for our patrons is a great place, but you can also reach us on @becauselangpod on X [MAKES RETCHING NOISES]
BEN: Okay, guys, we’ve gotta… When you go to the website, you type Twitter still. We can call it Twitter. It’s still the thing. You don’t have to…
HEDVIG: I didn’t know, but did you know you can rename apps on your phone?
BEN: I did know that yes.
DANIEL: I know now.
HEDVIG: I just renamed it Twitter, because I was like, “No, no, no, no, no. Fuck right out of my life.”
BEN: I’m just surprised that both of you are kowtowing to the new… You don’t have to call it what Elon wants you to call it. It’s okay.
HEDVIG: No, but I think it’s fun to make fun of him, so I like to say it so I can like [MAKES RETCHING NOISES]
BEN: Oh, I see. Right.
HEDVIG: Okay. We’re @becauselangpod on lots of things. I feel like there’s a bit of a war going on. So like, there’s Cohost, there’s Bluesky, and there’s…
DANIEL: Mastodon!
HEDVIG: There’s lots of things. And we’ll see where we end up. We’re going to follow where people are. It doesn’t to me seem like… what I want from my new microblogging social media website is programming, and data science, and cats, which means that a fellow director at my… like — not fellow — another director at my institute, Richard McElreath, wherever he goes, I’m probably going to go because that’s all of his content. He’s a good….
DANIEL: Cool!
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: It is literally. And cooking.
DANIEL: I like how there’s multiple sites. I think it’s great.
HEDVIG: I don’t think it’s great because I get stressed by multiple platforms. I just want to go to one place, and I want everyone else… I want all my friends to be there, and I don’t want to go lots of places.
DANIEL: I know what you mean.
HEDVIG: Yeah. But maybe that’s what like WhatsApp and Discord are for now. We’re back to forum days of internet. Anyway, this is a segment, this is the reads, and I’m going to say thank you to everyone. And if you want to reach out and contribute to our show with content, look at whatever thing you’re on and write @becauselangpod and we’re probably there. You can also go to our website, becauselanguage.com and leave us a message on SpeakPipe. I think that Ben would love it if Pontus did so.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: Mmmmmm. I’d just listen to it over and over. That would be my go-to sleep podcast.
HEDVIG: Yeah. You can send us an email, hello@becauselanguage.com. And if you want to help out the show, a great thing to do is just tell a friend. If you like the show and you know someone else who likes languagey things and who would like to be along for our little chats, then tell them about our show and they might listen.
DANIEL: Also, consider becoming a patron, because you’ll be helping us to pay the bills, transcribe our shows so that they’ll be readable and searchable. In how many episodes has Hedvig mentioned disliking lime green clothing? Mm.
HEDVIG: I think it’s at least two.
DANIEL: Now you can find out. Depending on your level, you’ll get bonus episodes, mailouts, shoutouts. And of course, patrons at any level can come to our live episodes where you can listen to the show as it happens, contribute, and say stuff. Also, our Discord server, which is an absolutely great place. So, big shoutout to our top patrons: Iztin, Termy, Elías, Matt, Whitney, Helen, Jack, PharaohKatt, LordMortis, gramaryen, Larry, Kristofer, Andy, James, Nigel, Meredith, Kate, Nasrin, Joanna, Keith, Ayesha, Steele, Margareth, Manú, Rodger, Rhian, Colleen, Ignacio, Sonic Snejhog, Kevin, Jeff, Andy from Logophilius, Stan, Kathy, Rach, Cheyenne, Felicity, Amir, Canny Archer, O Tim, Alyssa, Chris, Laurie, aengry balls, Tadhg, Nikoli, and most recently, Luis. Great to have you, Luis. There’s a new patron at the Listener level as well, probably listening to us right now. It’s John. So, thanks to all of our great patrons.
BEN: Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who also performs with Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible. Such a busy fellow! Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
HEDVIG: Pew, pew, pew.
DANIEL: Yay.
BEN: Have we checked to see if both of those bands are still active?
DANIEL: Uh, Ryan Beno, no. But Didion’s Bible coincidentally just dropped a new album last week, so check that out.
[BOOP]
HEDVIG: So, I was in Finland in February.
BEN: Everyone’s favorite!
DANIEL: Yeah. Finland’s lovely.
BEN: Except for all the Swedes.
HEDVIG: No, I…
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: No, that’s Denmark.
HEDVIG: Oh, you mean we don’t like it, or that’s not your favorite part?
BEN: I have experienced… So, if the Swedes overtly don’t like Denmark stereotypically, I have always detected that they, like, good naturedly look down on the Finns. They don’t have the active animosity, but there is definitely that like: “Oh…” There’s a real head-pat feel.
HEDVIG: Patronising. Yeah.
BEN: Yes. Patronising.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Oh, massively. Yeah. Very patronising. But Finland’s really similar to Sweden, how the cities are planned and design-wise and how things work. So, being there, I was like, yeah, they speak a funny different language, but like, I get it. I get how this… I walk into a place that I’m like…
BEN: The social democracy stuff is very clearly played out.
HEDVIG: They also have this 1960s functional buildings. I was like: I understand this. So, it was nice.
BEN: And bonus, their language just kind of sounds like birds tweeting.
HEDVIG: I’ve learned a pragmatic phrase that they say a lot, which is NO NIIN. It can mean indeed. It can mean you say. It can mean so many things.
BEN: Get out of here, like that sort of thing?
HEDVIG: Uh… No niin. Maybe. Yeah. I don’t know!
BEN: Yeah. Okay.
DANIEL: Does it keep the conversation going? Is it one of those little cues that you do to keep them talking?
HEDVIG: It can be. It’s an incredibly versatile little thing. And I think it is very, very common.
[BOOP]
DANIEL: If you can’t take me at my Twitter Elon, you don’t deserve me at my Tesla Elon. [REACTIONS FROM BEN AND HEDVIG] Okay, that didn’t work!
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]