Women’s bodies, women’s occupations, women’s experiences. So often in history, the discourse about women has been by men, about women. And that means that women’s words have been lost.
Dr Jenni Nuttall has charted the lost history of women’s words in her new book Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words, and she joins us for this episode.
Listen to this episode
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Study shows the power of ‘thank you’ for couples
https://news.illinois.edu/view/6367/772090023
Expressing Gratitude to a Partner Leads to More Relationship Maintenance Behavior
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/50393453_Expressing_Gratitude_to_a_Partner_Leads_to_More_Relationship_Maintenance_Behavior
Dolphin moms use ‘baby talk’ with their calves (with sound files)
https://www.science.org/content/article/dolphin-moms-use-baby-talk-their-calves
Bottlenose dolphin mothers modify signature whistles in the presence of their own calves
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2300262120
The manifold costs of being a non-native English speaker in science | PLOS Biology
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002184#pbio.3002184.s028
Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words by Jenni Nuttall
Virago Press
https://www.virago.co.uk/titles/jenni-nuttall/mother-tongue/9780349015309/
Viking Press Australia
https://www.hachette.com.au/jenni-nuttall/mother-tongue-the-surprising-history-of-womens-words–fascinating-intriguing-witty-a-gem-of-a-book-kate-mosse
Penguin Random House
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/678235/mother-tongue-by-jenni-nuttall/
Dr Jenni Nuttall | University of Oxford
https://www.english.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-jenni-nuttall
[PDF] J N Adams: The Latin Sexual Vocabulary
https://monoskop.org/images/7/79/Adams_JN_The_Latin_Sexual_Vocabulary.pdf
Google Books link
Merrie Ballad of Nash, His Dildo, By Thomas Nashe (1567–1601)
https://www.bartleby.com/lit-hub/poetica-erotica/merrie-ballad-of-nash-his-dildo/
Francis Grose: A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1788)
Public Domain Review
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/a-classical-dictionary-of-the-vulgar-tongue-1788/
Project Gutenberg
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5402
Native Tongue: Suzette Haden Elgin
https://www.hachette.com.au/suzette-haden-elgin/native-tongue
A grammar of Chukchi: Dunn, Michael John
https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/handle/1885/10769
The Crunchy-to-Alt-Right Pipeline
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/fringe-left-alt-right-share-beliefs-white-power-movement/672454/
Alt-right pipeline | Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right_pipeline
Examining the “Wellness”-to-Far-Right-Conspiracy Pipeline
https://brownpoliticalreview.org/2021/11/examining-the-wellness-to-far-right-conspiracy-pipeline/
The school-to-prison pipeline, explained
https://www.vox.com/2015/2/24/8101289/school-discipline-race
School-To-Prison Pipeline [Infographic] | ACLU
https://www.aclu.org/issues/juvenile-justice/school-prison-pipeline/school-prison-pipeline-infographic
RIP, LOL
https://slate.com/human-interest/2023/08/ijbol-meaning-definition-acronym-lol.html
asg | Wiktionary
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/asg
How To Laugh Online In 20 Languages (includes ASG)
https://beelinguapp.com/blog/how-to-laugh-online-in-20-languages
What is a #hurriquake? It’s something SoCal never thought they’d face.
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/national-international/what-is-a-hurriquake-its-something-socal-never-thought-theyd-face/3209706/
Hurriquake in California: What is a hurriquake and can it wipe out cities?
https://www.outlookindia.com/international/us/hurriquake-in-california-what-is-a-hurriquake-and-can-it-wipe-out-cities–news-313796
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
Daniel: This was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences or…?
Hedvig: PNAS. Very cool.
[Because Language theme]
Daniel: Hello, and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley. With me now my cohost, linguist, and friend, Hedvig Skirgård. Hey, Hedvig.
Hedvig: Hello. Yes, we are friends.
Daniel: Yes, we are.
Hedvig: I’m proud to say that.
Daniel: Aww, thank you. I feel a little bit bad though because–
Hedvig: Why?
Daniel: I’ve been bothering Hedvig a bit with my intros, because I tend to give these very showbiz intros like, “Hey, she’s awesome and smart and funny, and she’s the greatest ever.” And it bugs you.
Hedvig: Ah, yeah. It does bug me. Where do you get that showbiz thing from? So, just the Americanness?
Daniel: I don’t know. Probably years of watching game shows as a kid. I don’t know.
Hedvig: Uh-huh.
Daniel: So, here’s what I want to say for this intro. Hedvig is smart sometimes and not other times, but that’s okay too. She’s awesome sometimes and likable sometimes and funny sometimes, but not other times. But no matter what Hedvig is at any given time, we just like her a lot.
Hedvig: Oh, thank you. I like being liked.
Daniel: How’s that?
Hedvig: I like that a lot, and I like you too. I can recommend, if you are often saying “I love you” to someone in your life, like your spouse or your kids or something, try alternating every fifth one with “I like you.”
Daniel: Oh, really?
Hedvig: Yeah. I can recommend it.
Daniel: There’s one thing that I noticed that I do with my partner, and that is I just thank her a lot for various things.
Hedvig: I know. You thank everyone all the time.
Daniel: Well, [chuckles] hey, gratitude is a very important ingredient for relationships, and I think maybe that’s worth doing.
Hedvig: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Daniel: Yeah. All right, that’s enough of that.
Hedvig: Mm-hmm.
Daniel: Ben is not with us. Ben is wearing his teacher hat, and so he is doing his teacherly duties at this moment. He’s not with us this time, but he will be joining us in future episodes.
Hedvig: And we still like him.
Daniel: Yeah, he’s pretty good.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: [chuBut you know what?
Hedvig: What?
Daniel: Even if we didn’t, he’d still be a worthwhile person.
Hedvig: If we didn’t like him.
Daniel: Even if we didn’t particularly care for him or if nobody liked him,-
Hedvig: Oh.
Daniel: -that would not change-
Hedvig: Oh, I see.
Daniel: -his intrinsic value as a human.
Hedvig: Right. Okay. Yes, sorry. I see what you mean. Okay, sure.
Daniel: Okay. We’re changing to a relationships and psychology podcast.
Hedvig: [laughs] Even though-
Daniel: But it’s all language.
Hedvig: -neither of us know anything about that.
Daniel: [laughs] Well, let’s talk instead about what’s coming up on this episode.
Hedvig: Yes.
Daniel: On the show, we’ve often talked about gender and language. We’ve talked about how some words tend to lean toward being applied to women. Some words tend to lean toward being applied to men. Words like feisty and hysterical–
Hedvig: Handsome.
Daniel: Right. Well, we’re talking to an author who’s done some pretty hefty historical analysis on the words we use for women in English, for women’s occupations, women’s bodies, women’s lives. And so, we’re going to be talking to Dr. Jenni Nuttall. She’s the author of Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words. Looking forward to that, Hedvig?
Hedvig: That is neat. Yeah, I am. I think there’s a lot of nuanced and complex things that studying words can tell us about societies at different points in time. So, I’m really looking forward to it.
Daniel: I think it deserves some interrogation, some analysis. Seeing it from the broad historical perspective from the year 400 till today, I think we’re going to find some worthwhile things.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Our latest episode was a bonus episode. It was a Mailbag. We talked about three-letter acronyms or TLAs.
Hedvig: Oh, yeah.
Daniel: Are there really a lot of them and why?
Hedvig: I forgot how many letters there are in the English alphabet because I don’t care.
Daniel: And then, we made a promo out of it and it was really fun.
Hedvig: And then, we made a promo, and all of my family and everyone thought it was really funny and was like, “That’s really you.” It’s like, “Right. Well.”
Daniel: [laughs] Hey, it’s actually not a straightforward. We also talked about anagrams that are also synonyms. I liked rowdies and weirdos, but there were lots of others.
Hedvig: Mm-hmm. You amazed me and Ben by the algorithm by which you found them.
Daniel: Yeah, well, it was just a perfectly ordinary hashing algorithm, which is a term that I know.
Hedvig: If you think Daniel is smart, then become a patron, listen to this special episode, and you will hear– According to me and Ben are in agreement, the smartest thing we’ve ever seen you do.
Daniel: Oh, my God. Why is that the smartest thing? That’s like any programmer would be like, “Well, if that’s the best [laughs] he can do, then he must be pretty crap in other ways.”
Hedvig: No.
Daniel: Which is true.
Hedvig: No, you underestimate how smart that was.
Daniel: Okay. If you want to hear our bonus episodes the minute they come out, then become a patron at the listener level. You’ll be supporting the show and keeping us going. And you’ll get various goodies at the various levels. Mailouts, shoutouts, and every patron gets to hang out with us on our Discord server and join us on our live episodes. Speaking of which–
Hedvig: We have one coming up, in a time sphere that makes sense for people in the Americas.
Daniel: We’ve never done that before.
Hedvig: We’ve never done that before.
Daniel: Because it sucks for Europeans.
Hedvig: Because I live in Europe, and Daniel and Ben and a lot of other people live in Australia. So, we’ve been focusing on those two time zones, which has often meant that the people in the Americas, it’s not fitting for them. So, we’re going to instead optimize for Australia and the Americas, and fuck Euros.
Daniel: Which means that Hedvig will join us if she’s awake.
Hedvig: Yeah, we’ll see.
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: To be fair, Friday night, I stayed up until 04:30 to submit a paper.
Daniel: Oh, gross.
Hedvig: Because the platform submission system was driving me bonkers.
Daniel: [laughs] Oh, no. That’s a really bad system.
Hedvig: Yes.
Daniel: Oof.
Hedvig: It could use some Daniel magic.
Daniel: This one’s a Potluck episode. Our listeners will be suggesting their favorite stories and words and talking on air and giving their comments and hanging out with us. So, check your Patreon account to find out when that is. And if you’re not a patron, please become one at patreon.com/becauselangpod. Big thanks, big love to all of our patrons.
Hedvig: Indeed.
Daniel: Okay, you ready for some news?
Hedvig: I am.
Daniel: Let’s hit the with the news.
Hedvig: This is morning for me. I have my coffee. I’ve listened to my Swedish news, I’ve listened a bit to my Australian news, and now I’m ready for my linguistics news.
Daniel: All right, here we go. What do you know about child-directed speech? We’ve talked about this a number of times.
Hedvig: I know that it’s not the same all over the world.
Daniel: True.
Hedvig: I know that there are companies that try, and capitalize, and extort money from anxious parents by selling them products that claim to improve children’s language learning.
Daniel: True.
Hedvig: And that some of those products maybe work, maybe. And some of them just don’t. I know that people have– as with a lot of things parenting, I know that people have a lot of opinions and like to share those opinions with new parents.
Daniel: Yes, they do.
Hedvig: Which is not always helpful. Like, “You should not speak baby talk to your children. You should speak to them like adults,” and blah, blah, blah.
Daniel: Baby talk is great. Baby talk helps children.
Hedvig: Also, it’s fine. Just don’t butt into other people’s parenting unless they’re actively skewering their child over a fire, probably.
Daniel: If they’re doing the forbidden experiment, yeah then. Language deprivation is no joke, by the way, especially for deaf children who do suffer language deprivation, because every child deserves language, a language that they have access to. So, yeah, this is no joke. But back to child-directed speech. We know that parents, but also people who aren’t even parents-
Hedvig: Mm-hmm. I am not a parent.
Daniel: -at least in some places, speak a certain special way to children. They speak, let’s go down the list, slower, louder, more nouns.
Hedvig: Shorter words, fewer words that are repeated more often, like not a lot of synonyms for the same thing. Melody. People call it engaging, like a bit up and down like, [with an exaggerated intonational contour] “Ooh.”
Daniel: Exaggerated intonational contour. Yeah, that the line.
Hedvig: Yeah. And what else do people usually say? Well, in practice, it’s also coupled by facial gestures and gaze and stuff. That’s quite intense.
Daniel: Yeah. And children use that when they’re interpreting utterances as well.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Okay. So, I think we hit the main points there. The idea is that this is how caregivers structure language in a simplified way that, in theory, allows children to grip onto language to be able to understand it better. And then once they’ve learned some bits, they can start chaining those bits together and grow a language. So, that’s the idea behind child-directed speech. But Hedvig, as you mentioned, there are some cultures where adults don’t do any child-directed speech, because I’ll talk to you when you’ve learned a language and you’re worth talking to.
Hedvig: And in the meantime, you can talk to your peers. My theory that I am, at some point, going to convince someone to give me funding for is that children, when they talk to younger children, do child-directed speech.
Daniel: They’re still getting child-directed speech from their peers.
Hedvig: I think so, actually.
Daniel: I think so too. Well, let’s find out. But let’s get away from the world of people for a little while, because there is apparently another animal that uses something like child-directed speech, and it is bottlenose dolphins.
Hedvig: I did glance at the run sheet and see this. I am interested in this. I know that human interest in dolphin has a complicated history. There were many experiments in the 60s, 70s where people believed that dolphins were enlightened creatures that knew the wisdom of the universe, and tried to teach them English, and did a lot of weird things. I also know that dolphins are not as cute and friendly as they may seem. They can bully each other and they can be violent.
Daniel: Yes. They’re not the playful critters that they seem to be.
Hedvig: Right. They are also social creatures that move in groups. They rear their own young, like they hang out with their kids, which not all animals do. Some animals are just like, “You’re out of my body. Fuck off. I never want to see you again.”
Daniel: [laughs] Turtles. It’s like, “I’ve laid the egg. We’re done here.”
Hedvig: Yeah. Or, some creators are even like, “You’re out of my body. I’m going to eat some of you-
Daniel: Bears.
Hedvig: -and then fuck off.”
Daniel: Bear dads. Yup. Nature is rough, I tell you what. Okay. So, let’s not take this, dolphins have language thing off a cliff. What we usually do is we say, “Well, hey, there’s something interesting going on brain wise or social wise that shows the buddings of language, or the makings of communication or communality as it showed up in other animals, and that’s interesting.”
Hedvig: Right.
Daniel: So, that’s the direction that I want to take this.
Hedvig: As soon as we find another animal that is A, social and spends time with their young and uses some sort of signaling, some sort of communication system, be that language or not– as long as they rely on usually auditory signals to do things in their group, we would expect them to try and teach their children that. So, what dolphins do?
Daniel: So, this is work from Dr. Laela Sayigh from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and team. This was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences or–
Hedvig: PNAS. Very cool.
Daniel: The team selected 19 females. Some of the females had calves sometimes and no calves at other times. They examined the whistles and squeaks when the calves weren’t around and when they were. They found that all 19 mother dolphins produced higher– I’m reading this, higher frequency whistles when in the presence of their calves than when alone. Shall we listen?
Hedvig: Yes. Oh, my God. We can listen?
Daniel: Yes, we can.
Hedvig: I didn’t know we were going to listen to stuff. I’m very excited now.
Daniel: So, this is one when the calf is not around. Ready? Go. [dolphin whistles] So, you’ll hear that? It goes whoopa-doopa-doop.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: But now, let’s listen to one when the calf is around.
Hedvig: Okay.
Daniel: [dolphin whistles] Whoo-haha-woo. That one went way, way up. Now these are slowed down a little bit, so that we can hear them. It’s not in real time, but you can hear that the one when the calf was around was a lot higher. It’s whoopa-dodoopa-dadoop.
Hedvig: ow.
Daniel: All right. All the moms did it when the calves were around-
Hedvig: All the moms did it.
Daniel: -and not so much when the calves weren’t.
Hedvig: Hmm. The calves are smaller as well, right?
Daniel: They are smaller critters. Yes.
Hedvig: So, the calves might make higher-pitched sounds because they’re smaller.
Daniel: I don’t know. Maybe they have smaller ears that are better for higher frequencies. For me, I’ve lost the ability to hear higher frequencies, because I have children. [laughs] But it appears that in the words of the team, “Our data provide an example of convergent evolution of motherese in a non-human mammal and support the hypothesis that motherese can facilitate vocal learning and bonding in nonhumans as well as humans.” Hedvig, what do you think?
Hedvig: I’m thinking if those conclusions are entirely justified. Maybe they are. If all motherese or baby-directed speech or whatever you want to call it, if all that is a social being doing something different with their auditory signal while the offspring is of a certain age in order to facilitate them learning the signals, then it seems like they’ve found that in dolphins.
Daniel: Seems that way. Remember, the propositional content could be nothing more than “I am here, I am here, I am here.”
Hedvig: Yeah, but that’s fine. Whatever they’re doing with their signaling system, they have done something to it because they’re speaking to a child.
Daniel: One problem I’m having is that this is one aspect. International contour is one aspect of child-directed speech in humans, but there’s a lot more in humans. This team has found one thing. One thing.
Hedvig: I don’t mind that. What I did mind is when I actually listened to the sound, they were a bit higher but– So, I hope– they haven’t read the papers. When I looked at the spectrograms, I wanted to know like, “Where are the mean frequencies of the pitch?”, and blah, blah, blah.
Daniel: I know.
Hedvig: I’m assuming that the paper actually contains that stuff. I don’t care that it’s only one thing. I mean, the dolphin signaling system doesn’t have that many variables to screw around, right?
Daniel: Yeah. That’s true. I think we could say we have found one thing that is analogous to child-directed speech in humans, but not other things. It’s a lot to hang the whole thing on, so I wouldn’t want to go over it once again. I wouldn’t want to take this to the edge.
Hedvig: I disagree.
Daniel: But it’s interesting. Oh, okay.
Hedvig: Because there are things about human speech that don’t have an equivalent in dolphin signaling systems, so why would that thing–? If all baby-directed speech is a modification of your system for babies–
Daniel: Then we found it.
Hedvig: Then we found it. The fact that it’s not modified in the same way for humans and dolphins, why would it be?
Daniel: No, that’s true. Well, I like this a lot because-
Hedvig: I like it too.
Daniel: -I’m always fascinated when you find some kind of commonality like this between humans and nonhuman animals because what you found is either something that goes back to primitive hardware that would eventually become language in us, or you found something about how communication works generally.
Hedvig: Right. Exactly. I was just going to say that. The convergent evolution thing, I’m just like, maybe it’s an emergent property of, if you’re a social being and you use auditory signals, you’re probably going to stumble on this solution sooner or later, which, I guess, is what convergent evolution is.
Daniel: That’s so functionalist of you.
Hedvig: Yes.
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: I am functionalist in many ways. Not just whatever linguists believe. Yeah.
Daniel: Me too. Okay, cool. Let’s go on to our next story.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: We’ve talked before about trying to do science not in English. Do you remember the percentage of scientific research that is done in English?
Hedvig: No, but I remember us talking about this. It’s really high, right?
Daniel: It’s really high. It’s something like 95%, according to some estimates. I did a whole an ancient episode of Because Language, one of those rare solo episodes with Michael Gordin and his book, Scientific Babel, which talks about why English has become the dominant language. But of course, there is a cost. There are researchers who have to take some of the time that they would be doing in research, and they have to partition that off and use some of that to learn English, which is something that people who are scientists, who are proficient in English just simply don’t have to do.
Hedvig: Yeah, there’s a cost we have to pay that you don’t have to pay. Yeah.
Daniel: Yeah, which is kind of not fair. Well, this is an attempt to quantify just how much extra difficulty there is. This is work from Tatsuya Amano and a team in PLOS Biology, which– is PLOS a better acronym than PNAS.
Hedvig: I don’t know what PLOS stands for, and I’ve published in PLOS. [laughs]
Daniel: Hey, wait a minute. Is it one of those things where it’s like GPT. Like, I use GPT things all the time, but I have no idea what it stands for. I know the T is transformer. What is PLOS?
Hedvig: Public Library of Science.
Daniel: That was far more straightforward than I thought it was going to be.
Hedvig: Yeah, me too.
Daniel: Okay.
Hedvig: Nonprofit open-access publisher. Yeah.
Daniel: Well, they gave a survey to a lot of academics who publish in English, and they found out about their proficiency in English, whether they were new learners, or experienced English speakers, or whether English was their L1 or not. They asked them about the time it took them to do certain kinds of things. Did they get English speakers to proofread their papers? Did they present at conferences? What kinds of publications did they do?
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: So, I’m just going to run down some of their main points here. First, non-native English speakers need more time to read papers. They need more time to write papers. This is obvious. They need more effort to proofread their papers. They’re more likely to have their papers rejected by journals because of English writing compared to native English speakers. They have to spend more effort, because they try to publish their work in multiple languages, which adds a little bit of extra cost, which I hadn’t thought of. They also sometimes find that it’s a barrier to attending conferences. And then if they do present at conferences, they have to take a lot more time to prepare their presentations than L1 English speakers do.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: So, there were just a number of things that I, English speaker that I am, hadn’t really thought of. There is a cost, and they’re documenting that cost in this paper, which is, I think quite good.
Hedvig: That’s really cool. If we’re real here, it’s not like English is going to stop being the scientific lingua franca anytime soon. When science was more like a hobby for rich people, it used to be that you had a classics education and you could also speak French, Latin, and classic Greek. That’s no longer the case. It’s mainly English, which, in a way, actually democratizes science, ironically, because now you don’t have to know French and English and Latin and Greek.
But for people who listen, who are scientists, and who are native English speakers, and who are feeling spoiled, which you sort of are, I’d like to encourage you to consider that English is the lingua franca in science, but it’s not the same English that you use. It could be something different. Like, it is a particular variety of English, that’s lingua franca, and we have some power over that. I would like people to, if they could, avoid super infrequent words that we, non-native speakers, have to look up all the time because– [crosstalk]
Daniel: Yeah, take that into account. Yeah.
Hedvig: Because when people use idioms or very rare words in their writing, I have to stop, and English speakers don’t. And it is a little bit annoying. This is a function I wish that Grammarly or any of those had, which is just like, “Just so you know, you use super frequent word, and there is a more common word for this that’s essentially a synonym. Why don’t you use that instead?”
Daniel: That would be good.
Hedvig: That would be really good.
Daniel: And of course, every field has its jargon, but we could be doing better than we are.
Hedvig: Well, jargon, if you’re in that field, you should pick up on. But when people use flowery language– I know people who vehemently disagree with me and who are like, “No, scientific writing should be flowery and poetry and beautiful.” And I’m just like, “No, it shouldn’t. It should say the facts.”
[laughter]
Hedvig: You’re not Hemingway.
Daniel: It’s a weird register, isn’t it?
Hedvig: It is.
Daniel: I mean, it’s a written-only register and it’s comprised of really infrequent English.
Hedvig: It’s funny as well how much people hinge– like, how much people equate your intelligence with your proficiency in this register.
Daniel: Yeah.
Hedvig: I have friends who are proofreading papers I’m writing at the moment, and sometimes they’re like, “Hedvig, you’re so informal.” And I’m like, “Am I? I’m factual. Why do I have to contort myself to fit into–?” Ugh, anyway, sorry, I interrupted you.
Daniel: No, that’s a good suggestion. So, use as simple language as appropriate. I think that’s a good suggestion. Another suggestion could be, if you are a proficient English speaker, then offer to help researchers who are English learners.
Hedvig: Yeah, that’s also true. I happen to be married too. We’re talking here as if I am not very good at English. I don’t mean to brag-
Daniel: You are proficient.
Hedvig: -but I am fairly good at it.
Daniel: [laughs] Pretty good.
Hedvig: I’m pretty good. I actually have some trouble reading Swedish now.
Daniel: Oh, okay. I’ve been trying to avoid the term “native, speaker” because it, A, assumes that everybody whose L1 is English is equally good, and I don’t think that’s true. But also, it holds learners to this impossible standard, because you’ll never be native if you’re not, but you can still be super proficient. So, I tend to talk about being experienced in English or proficient in English in that way.
Hedvig: Right. And being proficient in the variety that is expected, because just like you say, there are people who have English as the first language who don’t know the variety of register you need to use for scientific English, which is not the same as-
Daniel: That’s right.
Hedvig: -spoken English, right? Yeah, no, I have a lot of friends and colleagues from places like, I don’t know, French or Spanish-speaking cultures, which are pretty big languages, where they’ve been able to do a lot of their education in their languages or China. It’s not always easy writing English. A lot of those hurdles that you mentioned are very, very real.
Hedvig: Okay. Well, those are some suggestions that we could do. Oh, forgot to mention. One of the problems with the study is that it might actually be worse than the study says, because when they were recruiting people for the survey, they were looking at people who are actively publishing in English, and that excludes people who gave up. So, the problem could-
Hedvig: Yeah, definitely.
Daniel: -be worse than that.
Hedvig: Survivorship bias. Yeah.
Daniel: If we want to help the situation, there are things we can do. We’re taking other suggestions as well. Hit us up, hello@becauselanguage.com. It’s time for our favorite game, Related or Not.
Hedvig: Yup. Okay.
Daniel: You ready?
Hedvig: Yes. I’ve been thinking a lot about this game lately.
Daniel: I have too.
Hedvig: Because I’ve thought of candidates, but then-
Daniel: Have you?
Hedvig: -I thought about what you said, which is, we can’t just have word pairs that are surprisingly connected, because then me and Ben are just always going to guess, yes, they’re related, because why would else be in the game? There has to be some red herrings. There has to be things that look like they’re related, but they’re not.
Daniel: [laughs] Yeah. I do love the surprising ones that people present to us. They’re great.
Hedvig: I do too.
Daniel: But I like the ones that arise naturally from conversations throughout my day.
Hedvig: Oh?
Daniel: They do pop up once you start thinking about them.
Hedvig: Is that one now?
Daniel: Yeah. My six-year-old daughter says–
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: I would think I was sewing a button on something, and she says, “Why is it called a button, when it’s not the butt of anything?” [laughs] She just latched on to the word, “butt” inside the word button. She’s like, “What’s the relationship?”
Hedvig: That’s smart.
Daniel: My kids hand me a lot of these, by the way. So, I thought, you know what? All right, I’m just going to take this one as it comes. This is probably nothing.
Hedvig: You got a smart cookie.
Daniel: Oh, I know. They’re really thinking about language. So, I thought, “Well, this is probably not a thing, but I’m just going to do it. I’m going to pop it in the show.” Let’s try it. So, is there a chance that button and butt are related? I mean, butt as in the end of something, the butt end of something, like your bottom, your posterior, or the butt of a rifle, or the butt of a cigarette, or something like that. Not the verb “to butt somebody,” like a goat tries to butt you. So, what do you think? I have made my guess.
Hedvig: Wait, when a goat tries to butt you, like headbutt you, you’re saying that that’s unrelated to the butt of a bread?
Daniel: Oh, no, I’m not making any claims about related or not for that one. I’m just saying, let’s focus on the end of bread or the end of a rifle or something like that. Let’s focus on that sense of butt.
Hedvig: I know. How are buttons made?
Daniel: How are buttons made?
Hedvig: Is it that you have a cylinder that you chop like the candy?
Daniel: Right.
Hedvig: Because if so, then each button, when it’s getting made, is the butt of that cylinder.
Daniel: It would be. I don’t know how that used to be made when the word was getting coined. So, you found a little tie in there that it might be the end of something.
Hedvig: Well, if that’s how buttons are made, they’re probably made from a sheet that you stamp out the holes, and that’s not the same thing.
Daniel: No, it’s not. Could be extruded, if it’s plastic.
Hedvig: The way we started this conversation is leading me to believe that this is one of the magical not related ones.
Daniel: Okay.
Hedvig: So, I’m going to guess for that.
Daniel: Just a total coincidence that it’s– okay. My guess was, before knowing anything about it, I thought this was related.
Hedvig: Okay.
Daniel: Because a butt is the end of something and a button– Like your butt protrudes or the butt of a rifle, it protrudes, and a button protrudes as well.
Hedvig: Through the hole.
Daniel: Through the hole. So, I said related.
Hedvig: It’s also at the end of the textile part.
Daniel: Yeah, it’s an extremity.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Am I changing your mind?
Hedvig: No, you’re not.
[laughter]
Daniel: Okay. Then, I went and looked it up and here’s the answer.
Hedvig: Mm-hmm.
Daniel: They are related.
Hedvig: [gasps]
Daniel: Yup. A butt is the end of something and a button is too. So, here’s the path. They both come from a Proto-Indo-European root, bhau, B-H-A-U, to strike, which is why a goat can butt someone with its head. Okay. Now, the word from there went to Proto-Germanic, bouton, where it probably meant something like to thrust or to strike or to push. So, there we go. We got to Proto-Germanic. Now from there, butt moved to Dutch bot or low German bouton, meaning, blunt or dull, and it meant the thick end of something. And by 1450, it meant the butt end of animal that you might eat because that’s pretty thick. Spell that however you want.
Hedvig: Wait, wait, wait, wait.
Daniel: Yup.
Hedvig: You have a knife, you have a sharp edge, and you have a blunt edge.
Daniel: Yup.
Hedvig: You’re saying that the Dutchmen called the blunt edge bot something>
Daniel: The butt of the knife is the handle part.
Hedvig: Oh, okay. Not the blunt edge of the blade.
Daniel: Right. That’s a different thing. Not under consideration here. Okay.
Hedvig: Oh, okay.
Daniel: So, that’s where butt came from, and human butts came from that as well. Now, while this was going on, Proto-Germanic bouton, which meant push or thrust, was moving over to old French where people used it to describe a kind of bud, like a flower bud, that you would push or thrust through a hole in your clothing. They described it as a bouton, which then became button.
Hedvig: Oh, my God.
Daniel: So, these two are related.
Hedvig: Wow.
Daniel: They are a protrusion that you push or thrust through a thing.
Hedvig: [laughs]
Daniel: As it were. [laughs]
Hedvig: I didn’t know this episode was going to get lewd.
Daniel: So rumpy-pumpy. I know. Okay. Well, let’s take it to bed then, because we had a– This is our second one.
Hedvig: What’s that mean?
Daniel: Well, on our Discord, we had a discussion about the word, doona, which is– You know what that is.
Hedvig: In Australian English, it’s the fluffy thing that you put into some sheets and you sleep under.
Daniel: That’s right. You might call it a duvet or even a comforter. The view was floated that doona was probably from down, because, of course, doonas are filled with fluffy blankets that are filled with, sometimes, down.
Hedvig: Yes, but the way the Australians spell it is D-U-N-E-R, I believe, which sounds like it’s like–
Daniel: What? Oh, I’ve never seen that. No, I’ve only seen D-O-O-N-A.
Hedvig: Okay.
[laughter]
Hedvig: When it comes to spelling, I think our listeners have learned. Don’t trust me. I don’t know. Bad at spelling.
Daniel: Anyway, one of those Scottish things.
Hedvig: Exactly.
Daniel: It’s a doona, because it’s full of doona.
Hedvig: Like, doon it in.
Daniel: Yeah. But then I thought, what about down the feathers and down the opposite of up. Are they related or are they not? What do you think?
Hedvig: Oh, my God. You’re going so galaxy brain. I feel like we need to ring you in.
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: But your daughter is the same. So, maybe it’s impossible.
Daniel: I know. I’m not going anywhere. It’s just going to happen.
Hedvig: All right. So, birds have down.
Daniel: They do.
Hedvig: Only birds have down. Alpacas don’t have down.
Daniel: No, they don’t.
Hedvig: Okay, good. So, it has to be feathers.
Daniel: Have you ever felt an alpaca? Alpacas are frigging soft, man. I tried to stroke an alpaca at one of those farms. It was weird. It was a weird experience stroking an alpaca, because I could feel the warmth of the animal, but I couldn’t feel the fur. It was so fine that my coarse fingers couldn’t feel it. All I could feel was the warmth. Amazing.
Hedvig: That is weird. Okay.
Daniel: Anyway–
Hedvig: But down is only for birds. It’s only for feather stuff.
Daniel: As far as I know.
Hedvig: Okay. I mean, surprise, surprise. If birds are flying or something down is going to fall down.
Daniel: [laughs] That’s right. It’s going to come down. It’s not going to go up.
Hedvig: I’m sticking with my red herring guns. I think it’s not related.
Daniel: Okay. I thought that it was related. Now, I haven’t investigated ducks and geese thoroughly, but I do know that if you want to get at those little teeny feathers, they’re not up at the top.
Hedvig: No.
Daniel: You have to go down.
Hedvig: Yeah. No, you have to go in.
Daniel: Yeah. Inward. Yes. It’s not really down, is it? Hmm. Anyway, I thought there was enough of a relationship that maybe they were related. Okay, so, you’re saying not related. I’m saying related.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: The answer, they are not related at all.
Hedvig: Yes. Finally, face-off.
Daniel: Yes. So, let’s talk about down, the direction, because there’s a surprising history here. It comes from Old English, of dūne, which means off of the dune, where the dune is a hill. So, when you’re coming down off the hill-
Hedvig: What?
Daniel: -you’re coming down. Yeah, down and dune are related. I did not see that coming.
Hedvig: What?
Daniel: Yup.
Hedvig: That’s in time for the Dune movies as well.
Daniel: That’s right. You’re up on the dune, then you come dune.
Hedvig: Oh, my God.
Daniel: Anyway, so, that’s Old English, off dune. But down, the feathers, come from old Norse, dun, and we can’t go back any farther. Do you know any Scandi reflexes for dun?
Hedvig: Yeah, dun.
Daniel: Feathers?
Hedvig: That’s just what down is called in Scandi, dun.
Daniel: That’s just what it is. Yup.
Hedvig: Dunes on the desert are dune. Just dune, dune.
Daniel: What’s the direction, down?
Hedvig: Nedåt.
Daniel: Really? Oh, I see. Yeah. Well, that’s pretty convincing then that it’s not related. How about that?
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Okay.
Hedvig: Yeah. Up is up. Near [unintelligible 00:35:38]. Yeah. No, it’s all– This D thing is not a thing.
Daniel: Yup. Well, that was fun. Congratulations. We both got one for this one.
Hedvig: Yeah. Okay.
Daniel: And Ben got zero.
Hedvig: I have one that I want to send to you and that you can research.
Daniel: Okay.
Hedvig: And I can guess.
Daniel: Okay, good.
Hedvig: Okay.
Daniel: Do you want to register it now? Let’s register it then.
Hedvig: Yes, I want to register it. Okay. Mug as in a mug. Here’s my beautiful Bolton Wanderers Football Club mug. I’m showing to the camera.
Daniel: Yes. Thing you drink from. Yup.
Hedvig: And mug as in face and therefore also mugshot.
Daniel: We’ve seen some famous mugshots this week, haven’t we?
Hedvig: We have. We have indeed. We have indeed.
Daniel: [laughs] I know this one. Do you want to guess?
Hedvig: You know this one? How do you know this one? How?
Daniel: Because I field a lot of questions from a lot of people.
Hedvig: My God.
Daniel: Related or not? [laughs]
Hedvig: Oh, shit. Now, I’ve put myself in the–
Daniel: In the hot seat. Ooh.
Hedvig: Maybe I’ll go against my trend today and say they are related, that there’s something about face? I don’t know, I’m going to guess they’re related. I don’t know why. I just have a gut feeling.
Daniel: Okay. The answer is they are related.
Hedvig: [gasps]
Daniel: Yup.
Hedvig: Wow.
Daniel: So-
Hedvig: Really?
Daniel: -here’s what’s going on. It’s because in the 1700s, there were cups that you would drink from, and they were shaped like people’s faces. You’d say, “Man, that’s one ugly mug you’ve got there.” It was just a common thing. It was just this weird thing where there would be this drinking vessel, and it was like in the shape of this grotesque cartoony face.
Hedvig: On like the side, like the side of the mug?
Daniel: The way I envision it is you hold the handle, and then the face is pointing away from the handle. That’s how I imagine it. It was just this wacky thing that they had in the 1700s. There were just a lot of cups shaped like people’s faces. It could also be metonymy, where the meaning of a thing transfers to a nearby thing. So, you have a mug that you’re drinking from and it’s near your face. So, the meaning jumps from the mug to your face. I’m looking at his mug, and then that’s his face.
Hedvig: Right. But mugs are not always in our faces.
Daniel: Not always, no, but often enough. Is there a Scandi reflex for mug?
Hedvig: Mug, as we just borrowed for the drinking vessel, but not for the face.
Daniel: Yeah. Okay. Etymonline says, “Based on the old drinking mugs shaped like grotesque faces popular in England from 17th century.” The 1600s.
Hedvig: What about to mug someone?
Daniel: Ah, that one comes from thief slang, because a mug was a mark or the dupe, the one who gets fooled or the one who gets robbed. That’s because somebody hits you in the face, they hit you in your mug, and then you get mugged. So, they’re all related in that way.
Hedvig: This is fascinating. Daniel, you’re a treasure throw– throve– However, you–
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: It’s my last bastion of not being a perfect English speaker is the fucking “tha”.
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: Treasure throve.
Daniel: Trove?
Hedvig: God. You are– [crosstalk]
Daniel: It’s not a throve. It’s a trove. So, you’re okay. You’re saying it right.
Hedvig: You are great.
Daniel: Well, thank you. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. I’m glad that that came up, because that’s strangely– If we didn’t want to make that a Word of the Week and I didn’t, we’re able to stick it here. Yay.
Hedvig: Yeah, that was my like Related or Not into Word of the Week.
Daniel: All right. Hey, everybody, thanks for playing at home. Remember, if you want to give us your Related or Not questions, please do. Remember, the best ones are the ones that eventuate spontaneously, not from lists. So, send them to us, hello@becauselanguage.com.
[music]
Daniel: We are talking to a very special guest on Because Language. She’s a lecturer in English at Oxford University, and she’s the author of the new book, Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words. It’s Dr. Jenni Nuttall. Hey, Jenni, thanks for coming to chat with us.
Jenni: Hi, thanks for inviting me on.
Daniel: Let’s start with you. What’s your connection to words, and how did that lead you into this project?
Jenni: At Oxford, I teach Old English and Medieval English. I also teach a first year very, very introductory– It’s called Approaches to Language, ideas about language. I was thinking more and more about– as well as all the literary work I did. I’ve worked on Chaucer and other authors, just more and more fascination with how language has changed over time and how words appear and disappear. I was thinking that there was a space for this kind of book. There hadn’t been a really great book about women language for a while, and particularly one that really went all the way back to the first phases of English. So, I thought I might be–as someone who teaches the first bits of English, I thought, “Well, that might be a really good focus for me to write something for a wider audience on women and language.”
Hedvig: When you go back in those kinds of sources, I imagine that a lot of them are written by male authors about women, right?
Jenni: Yeah, exactly right. So, I’m thinking particularly about– It’s that the various meanings of women’s words, but women’s words in the sense of sets of vocabulary that are used to describe women’s lives, their experiences, their bodies. Yes, exactly right. Just occasionally, you can pick up straight from the horse’s mouth women’s words. But more often, as you say, most of the sources reflecting what men say about women.
Daniel: That was one of the ideas that I got from the book, because one of themes is, especially with body parts and bodily functions, these things were taboo. And so, the only people that we were hearing from about these things were men. So, it was clearly discourse about women, but very much on men’s terms. That’s the feeling I got.
Jenni: Yeah, it’s funny looking at it from the beginning forward. So, I think that’s particularly the case as you go through to say, 18th century ideas of decorum, and then that sort of classic stereotype we have of the Victorians and prudishness and that’s half right. These topics become unsayable in certain public contexts, and lots of rude words and words about body parts, for example, taken out of dictionaries, in case women and children might see them. But men in those centuries are carrying on the talk they’ve always done. And that’s why I think we get a lot of or some of the words for body parts and particularly, to do with women sexuality and things like that, coming out of these beginnings of gynecology, and psychology, and sexology, and things like that.
Because there hasn’t been this continuing of even women just talking in the shared set of words that have been used up to that point. We get this strange split into quite formal language in a lot of cases. And then later on, you get slang. But we’ve lost the bit that– There always has been taboo, but I have a slight sense that as you go back in the story of English, there were slightly more words that were sort of just in the middle.
Hedvig: Right. But maybe didn’t get written down in the literature that survived today or got written down at all. Maybe people just spoke about them in their kitchen.
Jenni: Yeah, exactly. Maybe you just pick them up occasionally as synonyms in early dictionaries or as glosses to Latin. They’re round the edges. You’re right. Probably more spoken, probably less learned. But there were phases of earlier words that then get lost in the churn. One of the things I was finding over and over again as I was researching for this book, I would think, “Oh, actually, from the perspective of a medievalist, that’s quite a new book that we have in modern English.” Was it the case that there was complete silence before that on that topic? Well, often the answer was no. There were antecedents that have come and gone. I thought it’d be fun to go back and look at those and see what they could tell us.
Hedvig: Does that also mean that those words that were taboo showed– Because I had this lecture in linguistics in Sweden when I was at uni who was interested in words that were taboo, because they can have a fun variation, because no one in school is going to– For example, for us, it was– In Sweden, we have a particular verb to push snow into someone’s face. Very practical word if you live in Sweden and you’re in playground. And that word has a lot of variation throughout the country, because no teacher is going to tell you that you use the wrong word. They’re just going to tell you to not do it.
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: So, you don’t get the standardization of mass media and mass education because they’re never going to take this word in their mouth. I imagine the same is true for taboo words to do with, for example, women’s bodies that there could be a lot of variation and fun things going on, because no one’s going to tell you, don’t say blah.
Daniel: They’re not going to say blah. Instead, they’re just going to say, “Don’t talk about that.”
Hedvig: Yeah.
Hedvig: Yeah. I think there must have been a theory and practice issue that a lot of the words, even the earlier words we have, are coming out of medical writing, scientific writing, what counts as expertise in its time, anatomical [unintelligible 00:45:58]. There’s a certain sense of these labels, particularly for body parts, not necessarily correspond or these are often on paper terms. And you’re right. There are some nicknames. When I was really trying to research parts of female sexual anatomy, you find there’s confusion words referring to more than one part and changing around as if they’re quite hard to tie up.
But then, you also get, quite often preserved in just some of these kinds of vernacular, either metaphors or nicknames or glosses that might give you a sense of what’s being said. And they’re slightly different from what we have now, which is the formal and the Latinate on the one hand and then slang and euphemism on the other. So, it was interesting to find where there was taboo and where wasn’t.
Chaucer’s Wife of Bath is often cited as a woman or depiction of a woman very confidently talking about sex, and sexual reproduction, and parts of her anatomy. But even Chaucer has slightly sidestepped some of the rude words or give you a fancier version of what his audience must have known as other words, rude words for that courtly audience that he’s writing for. So, even before taboo really, really kind of strengthens and they become unsayable, it’s a language that’s got quite a lot going on depending on who’s speaking and why.
Daniel: I feel like we’re tiptoeing around it here. Can you give us an example of a word or an area that’s gotten mashed up, recombined? What examples are we talking about here? We need to get rude.
Jenni: Oh. There’s a sort of blurriness to start with. So, you get words like womb, belly, and sheath, or lap can refer to the general area as well as particular things. Vocabulary to do with things like the clitoris and the labia, that’s quite unstable and you’re not quite sure whether the name and the part are always staying the same– Vulva shifts around, originally, perhaps meaning womb, and then meaning a collection of parts. And then as you get more and more terms and things differentiate as vagina comes in, thanks to Renaissance anatomy. So, even that small set of words to do with women’s private parts are responding to each other as new words come in and as more or less knowledge is being used about them.
Hedvig: I know the vagina vulva thing. I don’t know if you remember, Daniel. Do you remember when I had a fight with that guy on Twitter like two years ago? No?
Daniel: You’re going to have to remind me, I think. [laughs]
Hedvig: It was just someone– someone had written a piece about– In the title, there was something vagina, and talking about something. A man had commented under and been like, “The part you’re talking about is actually called vulva.” Maybe if this person was writing a gynecological thesis, this would be a good point, but this is not– [crosstalk]
Daniel: Thanks, genital police. [laughs]
Hedvig: Yeah. It was so weird and it was like, “Look–” Because nowadays people have this very strong idea that vulva is only the outside parts and vagina is only the inside parts up to the cervix. I think historically, like Jenni was saying, that might have floated around anyway. And also, it just seems like not the right time to police someone. I don’t know. It was funny. But those are quite Latinate formal words to me.
Daniel: Yeah. And also, I keep thinking of vagina, the word meaning, as I learned in the book, meaning sheath. It’s like not a thing. It only exists in response to a sword. But the sword is the thing. The sheath, I see a lot of people wanting to just get rid of it.
Hedvig: Yeah. In Sweden, the word is literally sheath, like the same word that we use for sheath.
Daniel: Well, there you go.
Hedvig: Because in vagina, at least you can be like people don’t know that’s sheath, right?
Jenni: Mm.
Hedvig: Unless you look into it.
Jenni: You shouldn’t– not mounting a real defense but it turns out, just as a descriptive analogy, this is the work of Renaissance anatomists who are now looking– not like the medieval guys trying to match the name and the thing in theory, but looking at the fabric of the human body, and starting to pin down some of these older terms that have floated around. So, clitoris for a long time, but starts to be right there. I can see it. Vagina coming just as an attempt to explain coevolution and how what– Of course, there’s no accident that that particular metaphor is chosen. But it’s interesting that then jumps to become the word for the thing, clearly in more than one language.
Daniel: Then, cunt during this time has become completely unsayable, whereas this was not always so.
Jenni: Well, I’m glad you said it. I’ve had to be very careful because I’ve had other people on recording radio programs saying, “Whatever you do, you must not say that word.”
Daniel: [laughs]
Jenni: Yeah, I think it always has– Where does it turn up in the early mid ladies in jokey place names, sometimes in medical textbooks as a kind of gloss. But it does carry on all the way through to Renaissance dictionaries. It turns up there as a synonym. So, for quite a long while, it’s not anywhere near where it is today which, for some people and some circumstances, completely unsayable. That shows you that even that process of taboo is kind of dynamic and unstable. But Chaucer’s a coward. Chaucer does one of these almost like minced oats. He just swerves the word a couple of times in The Wife of Bath’s Tale. I find that interesting, whereas there are medical textbooks and university town place names that are keeping that word at that point in time.
Hedvig: I guess one great way of avoiding taboo words was to use metaphor. I learned recently that in ancient Greeks, it was well known that if you talked about a fig, that meant lady parts. So, you can always– apparently– Sorry, this is really derailing. Never mind. Never mind. Scratch that.
Daniel: [laughs] All right.
Hedvig: Fig lady parts. I like that.
Jenni: Yes. Although I did– I think there’s a colleague at Oxford who wrote a blog who said, “Ah, no, it’s male parts.”
Hedvig: Really?
Jenni: There is a great dictionary which I used for obscene Latin. I think it’s called the Dictionary of the Latin Sexual Vocabulary. You can find your way into all of these terms. I was interested in finding things that weren’t quite slang, that just at that point where English is being used to gloss, and translate, and offer synonyms, and move knowledge out to a broader audience. So, I was really interested to see what– they may not have been the words used in the everyday, but words that people thought readers would understand. So, wings or lips or ports or passages or wickets, these just-
Hedvig: Wickets? Oh, my God.
Jenni: -functional descriptions.
Hedvig: I’m married to a British man and I have been– I think I finally understand cricket now. But one thing that frustrates me with cricket is that wicket means at least two, if not three things.
Daniel: Yeah, I think I understand cricket less now.
Hedvig: Yeah. Wicket.
Daniel: Wicket.
Jenni: So, a little gate.
Hedvig: [laughs]
Jenni: Now, I’m not sure about cricketing vocabulary, but it might be the thing with the bails on that looks like a little gate.
Hedvig: It is. That’s one of the things it is.
Jenni: Then, you get one of the things that the extensions that it also becomes the name for getting a person out, the name of the thing run on. Yeah, English has duplicates and duplicates. But there is a sort of euphemism, description.
Hedvig: A little gate.
Jenni: A little gate.
Hedvig: Oh, now I kind of like it.
Daniel: Co-occurs with sticky. Sticky wickets.
Jenni: There we are. You’ve lowered the tone.
Daniel: Never thought about that. Mm.
Hedvig: Mm.
Daniel: I want to talk about a different word. I want to talk about the word, woman, because that goes way, way back. Lately, the authoritarian right is trying to turn the word woman and the definition of woman into a kind of gotcha. Was this predictable? Did you expect that? What’s been your reaction to seeing this?
Jenni: Makes me want to write something about the fact that words can have distinct or different but related senses at the same time. Polysemy, you might call it. The attempts to turn to the dictionary or to offer a short definition that doesn’t take account of usage and the possibility of related but distinct uses sitting alongside each other is going to– People think it works as a gotcha. And I suppose it does work as a gotcha if you’re trying to give a easy answer. What I want to do is just say, “Okay, why is this discussion going on?” I think linguistics can help by saying, “Look, words don’t work with necessarily a core, stable, central denotation, and then thinks round the edges.” Actually, what you can have is related but distinct meanings that the users are all using together at the same time, and we negotiate them.
Hedvig: I like that a lot because I like to think about it as, if I have an idea concept in my head and I’m articulating words, I am trying to get that concept into your head. I’m not going to get exactly the same concept into your head. I’m not going to have 100% perfect information transfer, because you have different experiences and you’ve learned different things and you have a slightly different interpretation of the word. But it’s going to be close enough, right? It’s got to be similar enough that when I point at the thing and said, “Get me that thing,” you get me that thing. That is the point. Not like that he have– it just needs to be enough overlapping enough similar that we can get through life and society and communicate and get things done. But it doesn’t need to be that kind of stable. Because there is that similar overlapping enough, you get dynamic, you get changes, you get variation, and words change.
Jenni: Though I’m really interested in etymology, I don’t think that if you find out the etymology, you solve or create a definition. What I show in the book is that lots of terms move around and change and evolve, and that’s where you come to senses and usage.
Hedvig: I feel though, Daniel, you might need to do an explanation of what your question is about.
Daniel: I think we’re talking about transwomen, and some people are saying, “What’s a woman?” The authoritarian right has an easy answer. They talk about chromosomes or genitals or whatever. And then, if you say, “Mm, this is kind of a complicated area,” then they say, “Aha, you’re so stupid. You can’t even define what a woman is,” blah, blah, blah. So, I think that’s what’s going on.
Hedvig: Oh, God, that is so stupid, it hasn’t even registered on my radar. [giggles]
Daniel: Oh, so, here we’ve been talking around it. Okay, well, I think this is why you speak very specifically, isn’t it?
Daniel and Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: So, that’s where I was going with that. I think that’s what the debate is. Everyone is just so weird it, but that’s where I think this is going.
Hedvig: That’s not a debate. That’s someone’s saying something stupid and everyone else being like, “Let’s just not talk to them.”
Daniel: You’re right. [laughs] Good point. Jenni, tell us about a word that you have found interesting that has– You’ve written an entire book about them, but what do you want to pull out and show us about how words have wound around, and remixed, and gone different places? Tell us a great story.
Jenni: Oh, okay. Well, I was interested to think about Miss and Mrs., Mrs. particularly. Once you get to be a doctor something– If you’re a married doctor something, you’re quite pleased sometimes, if people are fishing to say, “Am I going to call you Miss or Mrs.,” and you say, “Doctor, actually.”
Daniel: It’s doctor, actually.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Jenni: I’d just assume that I didn’t want to be Mrs. Whatever. Sorry.
Hedvig: No, I’m the same. I am married and I am a doctor, and I like getting to use doctor. It’s fun.
Jenni: But I discovered reading some really great scholarship that actually that Mrs. distinction for adult women unmarried, married, only really comes about in the middle of the 18th century. So, quite recent. And then before that, you have Mrs., it’s a speeded-up version of Mistress. It starts off as a way as an honorific to address lots of different types of women, married and unmarried, who are exercising authority or in charge of people or have a certain status. And then obviously, Miss is the junior version of that for under 18, the people who are going to grow up and become probably mistresses. So, that made me think again and think, “Oh, okay, we didn’t used to slice and dice things that way.”
Mrs., Mistress was a word that wasn’t necessarily quite so tightly connected to marital status as we think of it now, but to do with other social status. It’s only when the marriageable but not yet married daughters of wealthier families want to be able to have a title that’s separate from the other Misses in their households, maybe senior servants and tradesmen that they come across, that you get this new fashion for an adult Miss. This is what I was trying to do a lot in the book, to take some of these things that we think of as kind of fixtures in our vocabulary and perhaps in our thinking about feminism and just check them out and see whether things were quite as simple.
Daniel: It seems like with Mistress, once it was uncoupled and became Mrs., then Mistress was free to do what it wanted. And then, you had things like someone you’re having an affair with or perhaps, a dominatrix. So, Mistress has really gone some interesting directions.
Jenni: Yeah. So, really perpetrated and losing its sense of an equivalent for Master. Master-Mistress. And sometimes, we say the Mistress of all she, all that kind of thing. But you’re right. Mostly, feminist linguists have pointed this out over and over again that there are asymmetries, things that start off as pairs. The one that’s applied to women often goes through a very different kind of evolution, and Mistress is one of those.
Daniel: Hmm.
Hedvig: I read a sci-fi book where there are androids and there are humans. All humans get the title just M, which is like a combination of Ms., Mr., Mrs., and Miss.
Daniel: And Mix.
Hedvig: Androids get A.
Daniel: A?
Hedvig: I really like it. [laughs]
Daniel: Because android. Yes.
Hedvig: It’s just fun. Just fun sci-fi. But I come from a culture where we don’t use titles at all. I don’t care so much about Miss, Mrs., Ms., but I get annoyed when I have to supply one, which happens a lot abroad. Especially I live in Germany now, where I can thankfully use doctor some of the time. But I’m just like, “Why is this a thing?” But anyway, that’s just my problem, living in Germany as a Swede.
Daniel: Hey, Hedvig, give us another one from the list. Which ones did you find interesting?
Hedvig: There was one that I marked. So, it’s called knick. Knick. Knick-knack. Knick-knick. Was it? Where is it? Ah.
Jenni: You might be thinking of– there’s this lovely word for a shop selling trinkets and objects that I chuck in passing called a Knick-Knackatory.
Hedvig: Yeah. Sorry, I just highlighted that, but I realized that was not actually a woman’s word.
Jenni: That comes in because supposedly, it’s one of the places you might buy a dildo.
Hedvig: [laughs]
Daniel: Tell us about dildo, because I’ve seen any number of etymologies for that and I haven’t been able to get to the bottom of it, so to speak. Is it Italian deleiter for delight, something like that? Where do we get it from? Where does this word come from?
Jenni: I follow Oxford English Dictionary where obviously, you’ve still got some of the older etymologies and definitions in there because of its history. But you can look and see when the definitions and the etymologies were checked. I follow OED for dildo, which is that it may just come from nonsense syllables, which I like. I wrote a little article on gibberish. I used to be slightly obsessed with gibberish and these things called non-lexical vocabulary, the kind of syllables you sing in songs, things like, “Hey nonny-nonny and with a dill and do,” [crosstalk] and that kind of thing. Yeah, that’s late medieval Tudor choruses and bits that are sung in songs.
One of the connections that’s suggested in the dictionary etymology there is that there’s a double entendre, a nudge-wink thing going on with, “Hey, nonny-nonny,” because it rhymes with cunny, which takes us back to coney and slang for vagina, vulva. All of quite a lot of these chorus, singable bits of nonsense get borrowed to become slangy euphemisms for things that are becoming increasingly taboo. The dildo comes from there because it has this slightly wicked sense of something I’m not going to say. It’s first recorded, I think, in the work of a poet called Thomas Nashe, the object itself. He’s in exactly the right place to be seeing this move of nonsense syllables that are becoming rude words you can use for things.
It’s interesting. Dildo, there’s a dictionary of vulgarity and dildo is there in the earlier editions of that dictionary. But as it’s published, its definition is hidden and put into Latin and greatly reduced. So, I think that’s one of these words that were talked about somewhat more publicly and then over decades, over centuries are pulled back out of public glossing and explanation. So, we just get left with this funny word that sounds a bit Italian or Latin or whatever, whereas it’s there in early dictionaries and gone in later ones, and then comes back again, obviously.
Daniel: I want to ask about timing for a second because I had this idea that, “Oh, people were clamping down on rude words and then in the 1800s or 1900s, people just opened it up and started saying whatever.” But I’m feeling like that’s wrong. I’m feeling like there was a time when the language was open and people were talking about things, but then there was a clampdown or a bottleneck of some kind, and it has opened up. Can you give me a sense of the timing? When did we start just avoiding these things out of shame or sex negativity or censoring them?
Jenni: Yeah, I’m painting with very broad brushstrokes here because to talk about the whole fields of usage like that is difficult. But if you look, for example, of what words are and then aren’t in dictionaries, there is definitely a process through the 18th century and 19th century that dictionaries are being advertised as not having these words. It’s a kind of two-strand thing. I think that’s what makes it a hard idea to get right. Because it’s clearly right that the Victorians say are very interested in sex and sexology and psychology and anatomy and gynecology and all of those things happening, the “scientific” a lot of the time, often to prop up bits of sexism or racism or other things like that are at the risk of being disproved. So, that language is flourishing and it gives us lots of our modern words today. The sexual senses of climax, say, orgasm or frigidity, all those sorts of things.
But at the same time, I think you can make an argument that there’s a bit more restriction on what non-expert, non-authoritative speakers are allowed to say when it comes to some of these more tabooed topics. If you go backwards, back to the early 17th century and the 16th century, I don’t think there’s quite– partly because English is doing a slightly different job at that point, still coming out of that space where it’s been the language of glosses and translation and speech in the everyday. I don’t know whether it’s to do with social mores or to do with hierarchies within language. But some of the first dictionaries, which are often dedicated to women patrons and sometimes presented as being for women to help them understand language, now, sometimes that might be a bit of a marketing ploy because you don’t want to tell male readers that they need addiction, you need another way to– [crosstalk]
Daniel: Ah.
Hedvig: Oh, you could buy one for your wife.
Daniel: [crosstalk] wife.
Jenni: But you can see that the glosses contain much more of this language that later on is tabooed. If you look at say printings of Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale, which is one of the famous rude fabliaux with the ass kissing and the bottom out of windows, that is cleaned up as you move forward in time that Chaucer has ass, for example. And then it becomes bum, and then it becomes completely euphemized. And then in some of the Victorian collections of Chaucer, that tale is not printed at all.
So, there are processes by words which were there can fall out of use, I think. I was interested going back and seeing what had got lost in these quite big complicated shifts about public speech and about taboo and about registers within language.
Hedvig: What’s the word that you found had stayed quite stable?
Daniel: I like that question.
Jenni: Ooh.
Hedvig: Maybe most stable is [giggles] the title rather than stable, because it seems like this is an area, like you were saying, there’s so much going on.
Daniel: There’s a lot of churn.
Hedvig: There’s a lot of churn. So, a lot of things getting overturned. But was there anything that stayed more or less the same?
Jenni: You can have words where the reference is pretty much clear all the way through, but usage is shifting.
Hedvig: Oh, yeah?
Jenni: It’s interesting that we have body part words that are not tabooed, often come straight from old English or old Norse and with all their sound changes, basically come all the way through. Yeah, that’s a good point. Lots of language doesn’t get lost, doesn’t change. I think the language I was looking at, where you do get words like words for menstruation, which were once used, now disappeared, you think, “Oh, those are the spaces where there’s some pressure,” just as you get those pressures for jargon or slang or euphemism, where you need to keep renovating in that concept. So, it’s a useful thing to look at, kind of [crosstalk]
Hedvig: Daniel, we made a word, didn’t we? The euphemism, bicycle? Did we call it that?
Daniel: [laughs] What did we come up with?
Hedvig: We’ve talked about this before on the show, both for– [crosstalk]
Daniel: The euphemism cycle.
Hedvig: Both for rude words, but also for words like the word for the person who cleans a space.
Daniel: Or racial terms. They’re always being updated.
Hedvig: Yeah, racial terms. Professions that people look down upon, people that people look down upon or things that are taboo tend to have a higher rate of change. But yeah, was there anything that–
Daniel: Yeah, what’s stayed the same?
Hedvig: You said there were things that where the reference stays the same and the word stays the same, but the usage differs? Can you think of an example like that?
Jenni: Well, I suppose, we were talking about what kind of senses, woman and female, those are terms that come from really quite early on in English. You don’t get lexical change. You get different types of semantic change and expand things of meaning. As I was writing this book, you’re looking for the things that have changed in interesting ways. I think that’s what people might be interested to read. The things that have got lost, the things where the– now, like vagina, we were talking about, we don’t necessarily know the origin, but it’s interesting to find it out. Or those words where there’s been enough lexical or semantic change to really show you that anything we might look at and think, “Oh, that’s very fixed and stable,” that’s probably a bit of an illusion to some degree.
Hedvig: Mm.
Daniel: Speaking of female, I was wondering what’s going on with the adjective female, because some people don’t like being described as a female doctor. They would say a woman doctor. Have you observed anything new in this process?
Jenni: That’s interesting. I wonder if that’s a bit more localized and personal. I might turn that on its head and say I would prefer female X than the woman. When women start moving into certain professions and joining, doing things that only men have traditionally done, you get woman used as a prefect woman, poet, woman doctor. And then, female might be for possibly the less marked way of just pointing that out, if you need to point it out. I don’t know what’s going on, because I think maybe different people have a different sense of which of those two is preferable.
Hedvig: I think the reason, I, as a woman, don’t like the female one is because I don’t like it when it’s used as a noun that I am a female, because to me, that signals that I am like a horse.
Daniel: Yeah.
Hedvig: [giggles] That’s the word. I don’t know. In English, you don’t have a good word for it, but that’s the word we would use for “that thing.” But like you say, actually, I don’t have super strong feelings about it, with female versus woman doctor. I think if someone said something like that, I would be like, “Why are they pointing that out? Do I need to know that?” If it’s something like, “Oh, would you prefer a female gynecologist instead of a male gynecologist?”, I can understand that, maybe.
Jenni: Yeah. If I’m thinking of where people are talking about the first female referee, to do a certain thing, I think the usage maybe is going back around to using female for that just to note that fact, point out that the history of sexism means that kind of women haven’t done that thing. Again, that’s a good example of where pressures around words just shift the usage in interesting ways.
Daniel: Okay. I want to ask this very speculative question. You point out in the book how the discourse around women has largely been invented by men, right down to some of the words that have been invented and the terms that have been invented. What if we could wave a magic wand, and get rid of all the words that men have invented about women or about the women’s domain. No more fallopian tubes. No more Braxton-Hicks contractions. We reset all of those. What kind of things would we no longer have, and do we have any idea of what the words might be now, if we wave that magic wand?
Hedvig: Oh, God.
Jenni: Gosh. It’s almost like a science fiction thought experiment, isn’t it?
Daniel: [laughs]
Jenni: Some of those I can think of. So, yeah, Braxton-Hicks, there’s a medical expert named something, and contraction for that part of giving birth is, I don’t know, not to me the most helpful terms, I point out, but because it makes you think of something closing up. The truth, of course, is that the job contractions is doing is the muscle is contracting, but it’s the cervix that is opening up wider and wider. So, even just at that metaphorical level, contracting goes one way. Actually, what you want your body to do ideally at that point is to go the other way. It’s interesting to me that before they were called that, they were called things that are a little more every day. Perhaps, pangs or throes, a bit like the throes of passion.
So, I’m not sure I can answer the bigger question, but I think we could imagine a world in which some of those somewhat more either metaphorical or descriptive or informal terms had made it through. There weren’t these situations where yes, being in childbirth is one of them where you have to learn a whole new language to process what’s going on. I don’t know. I think so much of what I found, you can’t think of it because so much of our vocabulary bears some trace of this process of a patriarchal society subordinating women in various ways. It’s almost that you can’t imagine your way back through.
There is a sci-fi novel called Native Tongue by Suzette Elgin, which makes that thought experiment, women living in a very oppressive society and invent their own secret language as part of a resistance movement. She has a kind of glossary and she was the kind of linguist who came up with a new language, but it didn’t catch on.
Daniel: [chuckles] Wow.
Hedvig: A lot of the time in the book, I was thinking, people have asked me that question and you think, well, yeah, I wouldn’t start from here, but I’m not so naïve to think you could somehow renovate everything from– We’re stuck with the vocabulary we have in some senses. There are these around birth, not to call things natural birth, instead to call it a physiological birth. There’s some great work around just unpacking the vocabulary that we inherited and thinking about how we can change it. But I’m not sure that wholesale thing is– I’m not sure I can even get my head around that as a speculation.
Hedvig: There are some examples in other languages where there has organically within languages arisen different registers used by men and women. So, I know Michael Dunn talks about that in Chukchi. There are other languages where there are certain words that only women use and there are certain words that only men use. In some of them, it happens that it ends up being certain sounds that happen to only occur in one of the registers. So, you could say that that sound is only used by one of the genders.
But those have come about because of certain communal activities. Naturally, I think a lot of these kind of speculations about English in particular language– In medicine, maybe you can have a discussion of a specific thing. So, when you have specific concrete differences like natural and physiological birth, where you’re like these evoke different things. It’s good to talk about them in a more clinical, precise way. But I don’t know, Daniel’s larger question about like– I took the question out to be a call to action, Daniel, but more like a sci-fi thought experiment. Was that right?
Daniel: Well, that’s kind of what I was thinking. The feeling that I get through the book is that I am hearing a little bit of a call to action, because it feels like you’re describing something about the language of feminism that, as it developed, it helped us to see male supremacy as illegitimate and as something that could be challenged. Is that something that you were trying to do with the book?
Jenni: Yes, I think that’s a good way of putting it. So, the vocabulary in all sorts of ways bears the traces of the ideology, the conceptualization that are being used to prop up some of these things. But I also wanted to show that if you let yourself, as I do in the book, think a bit more playfully, creatively, what if could we use that word? Is it better than–? That kind of thing? Even in very imperfect language, very marked by its sexist origins, there might be ways you can think, “Well, we could upcycle that word or think of it differently.”
Yeah. As we were talking about with childbirth, it’s always good to stop and think about what assumptions are coming with certain sets of vocabulary. I think one of the things I noticed was that you’re always trying to chase a moving target, that when one sexist logic is exhausted, another one springs up. But right the way back into history, even in a society dominated by men, you can find moments of challenge, people challenging the word or challenging a prevailing idea.
I suppose I wanted to draw that out in the book, that even some of those big sexist ideas that we can dredge up from the past about women’s nature or bodies or sexuality, you can find people at the time just putting their hand up and going, “No, this is ridiculous. Why are you saying that?” So, that was fun to unpack, to some of the– because progress is not always linear, I think. You can see even within one moment in time, regressive ideas and progressive ideas being debated. And that’s interesting.
Hedvig: Women have always existed, and the Dark Ages are not a total hellhole for– I think there are some ideas about Middle Ages or European medieval history that are unnecessarily ignoring some things that maybe were a little bit progressive or that there were voices. So, I think that’s really nice that you focused on some of those. That’s really cool.
Daniel: You mentioned the term “genderdome,” and I liked that. Trying to break out of your gender dome.
Jenni: I was trying to write the last chapter, which is about what might the early vocabulary of feminism be. I wanted to get across that even to– Because the metaphors we live, by the way, in which language structures thinking, it can be very hard to even to get started and think your way out of your social moments. So, I was even interested in words like custom. Just the points at which writers start to say, “Ah, we treat women this way but it’s a custom.” It’s not natural. It sounds like a very tiny shift, but makes a big difference.
So, rather than just starting that chapter with the beginnings of modern feminist writing that we know, I thought, well, I want to go back and just try and show you these tiny places in which the supposed inevitability that starts to peel away and people are feeling under the surface and saying, “Okay, is that how things are? Maybe not.” You can pick up one or two words that are important in those early ways.
I think that just on a personal level, I think the book is me. I’m coming up to 50 now. I’ve been a wife and a mum for a certain amount of time. I’ve been a working woman, grown-up girl, young woman. I’m thinking about what I experienced in that genderdome of how I thought about things. For me, vocabulary is a way to– Other people would use all sorts of other things, but for me, it’s words just– If I think about words really hard, does it help me kind of see through some of that stuff? And I think it does.
Daniel: Language is only one way that we can break down the genderdome. But I think it’s an important way, because it reveals a lot about how we think. I think questioning the terms that we use can be useful.
Jenni: Yeah, I think that’s right. I always think of certain words, certain language is trying to be wall-to-wall carpet. It’s trying to not let you see around the edges. I just want to say, “No, actually, it’s a rug and we can lift it up and move it and someone put it there. It’s not covering everything.”
Hedvig: And it has moved.
Daniel: And it has moved.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Jenni: Yeah.
Hedvig: I think it’s really helpful– Things in our social world exist and are real concepts in the world, but they used to be a bit different. Isn’t there famously that blue used to be a little girl color? You get these flips, right? There’s nothing natural about any of this. Doesn’t mean it’s unreal, but it means that it can change, and it will change. If you don’t fit perfectly in that category, that’s not that unexpected.
Daniel: It’s not you.
Jenni: Yeah. That language is often doing both jobs at once, sort of trying to make it wall to wall, but also letting slip things if you look at the history. So, even the history of a word like girl is not straightforward. It comes in as a word to mean both male and female children. Then, it only begins to specify female children, young women a little bit later. And for an interesting period, it’s used as a rather new and marked term. You might call a female child a young woman. A girl when she’s not being a maiden or a daughter, when she’s doing something that’s a bit boundary pushing where it needs to be marked.
Hedvig: Ah.
Jenni: Then, once girl settles down, you get this wonderful rush of words like tomboy, and there are lots of other words like rigsbys and romps, and ramps to carry on talking about girls and young women who are not living up to the supposed good behavior of their time. Those words are there to tell off people, to kind of say, “Don’t be like that.” But just their existence betrays something, I think.
Hedvig: Mm. Yeah, it’s very beautiful.
Daniel: The book is Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words. It’s available from Virago Press. Virago, how did you work that one?
Jenni: In the sense of how did that come about?
Daniel: Yeah. You’ve got a bit on Virago in the book.
Jenni: Yeah. No, it’s really nice, isn’t it, to have a press where the name was chosen with a word with this rich history, these warlike women, or sometimes it’s used as a word for a woman doing a man’s job. There’s another bit of language portraying something that women do these things. I was so pleased that my wonderful editor at Virago was interested in it as a project. I think my agent was like, “You’re sold on this, aren’t you?” Because they have such an amazing history of publishing feminist writing. They are celebrating 50 years. But it’s also coming out with Viking in the US. So, I have Virago and Viking, which is suitable in various ways.
Daniel: So, it’s been out from Virago Press in the UK starting May 2023, but it’s out on Viking Press everywhere else now. Yesterday, I believe.
Jenni: Yes, yesterday.
Daniel: Uh-huh. Very cool. We’re talking to Dr. Jenni Nuttall. Jenni, how can people find you?
Jenni: They can find me– I have a website and I’m on Twitter, although Twitter seems very empty these days.
Hedvig: [laughs]
Jenni: My handle is completely unpronounceable [unintelligible 01:31:13] @stylisticienne, the female person who teaches stylistics, which is what I sometimes do. But if you put Jenni Nuttall in, I’m sure you’ll find me.
Daniel: Jenni, thanks so much for having a chat with us today on Because Language. It’s been great to talk to you.
Jenni: Thank you.
[music]
Daniel: Let’s go on now to Words of the Week. The first one that I have is one that I just feel like deserves its own mention, and it’s pipeline.
Hedvig: Uh-huh.
Daniel: But not the kind of pipeline that carries liquids, but the kind of pipeline that funnels you from one ideological point to another. So, the first way that I noticed this and we start seeing this expression in the early 2000s is the school-to-prison pipeline or the cradle-to-prison pipeline referring to the way that people, especially people of color, are funneled from the school environment to prison because of overly harsh zero tolerance disciplinary policies or bringing police into schools, that sort of thing. In 2022, I noticed an article in the Atlantic by Kathleen Belew called The Crunchy-to-Alt-Right Pipeline.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: We’ve talked about crunchy, so, it’s nice that– What’s crunchy again?
Hedvig: Well, crunchy, in predominantly I think American discourse means someone who is maybe a little bit similar to what you might think of as a hippie in the 1960s and the 1970s, but a bit more of an adult version of that.
Daniel: Kind of granola.
Hedvig: Makes their own granola.
Daniel: Yeah.
Hedvig: It’s a person who is conscious about what they eat and eat a lot of organic and raw and natural stuff. It’s a person who is shying away from certain aspects of the commercialized nature of the capitalist hellscape we live in.
Daniel: And modern society as well.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: They feel like the answers are in the past and that we need to get back to nature, that kind of thing?
Hedvig: Yeah, the answer is like certain versions of the past. They’re not like the Liver King, they’re not primal like that. But if you’ve seen the movie. About A Boy-
Daniel: [crosstalk] crunchy.
Hedvig: -the boy’s mother is very crunchy.
Daniel: Yeah.
Hedvig: It’s like, you don’t buy your kids candy, you give them raisins instead. Some of that is things that I grew up with that I think are very normal and good. Like, I got raisins a lot.
Daniel: Yeah, totally.
Hedvig: Similar with almond mom and things. People refer to it as an extreme stereotype. This crunchy-to-alt-right pipeline, I want to flag as well. It’s not all crunchy people, and it also is connected to things like people who have an interest in certain esoteric beliefs about reincarnation or alien presences or being a so-called starchild or stuff like that. There’s become an overlap between those ideologies and alt right ideologies and conspiracy theories.
Daniel: Yeah. I think that’s not very hard to spot at all. If you travel among crunchy folks, as I have done somewhat in my past, picking people I bumped into and stuff, there is a lot of conspiratorial thinking, especially about Big Pharma. I think that’s really where it branches out. You think that Big Pharma is trying to do bad stuff to us for their own profit. Hey, which maybe. Reality is complex. I do think that folks in Big Pharma are trying to get all the money they can, but also, I think that if it weren’t for them, I’d be dead.
Hedvig: Yeah, it’s really complicated. That’s the thing. Some of the things that people say about, for example, Big Pharma, for example, insulin prices in America, there are things that big pharmaceutical companies do or that their business end and research end do that are harmful to the global society. The conspiracy theories tend to go a bit further and say things like they’re intentionally putting chips into the vaccines and mind controlling us. Like, taking it a step further and be like, “No, no, no. they can be shitty in more boring ways.”
Daniel: [laughs] For sure.
Hedvig: It doesn’t have to be like sci-fi, like X Files. They can be shitty and there might be alternatives that don’t involve rejecting everything as not true.
Daniel: So, I’ve seen crunchy-to-alt-right pipeline. I’ve also seen the crunchy-to-conspiracy pipeline. Anyway, let’s go on to our next one.
Hedvig: Yes.
Daniel: There’s a couple from Diego, actually. I-J-B-O-L, ijbol. Had you heard this one?
Hedvig: No, but I’ve seen the run sheet. That is a Gen Z thing. As a desperate millennial who wants to stay tip with Gen Z– It’s not that I want to stay young. I want you to understand this. I am proud of my crow’s feet.
Daniel: You just want young people to like you.
Hedvig: I want to be fun and cool forever.
Daniel: You can only do that, which is by association with young people if they say you’re cool.
Hedvig: A lot of people that are younger than me, and I want all people to think I’m cool. I think millennials think I’m cool. So, I need to conquer the next market, which is Gen Z.
Daniel: I see.
Daniel and Hedvig: Okay.
Hedvig: So, I see here. Gen Z is replacing L-O-L with a new word, but will never stop Warren. Okay, so, I-G-B-O-L. So, O-L might still be something laughing.
Daniel: Yup, that’s what I got.
Hedvig: I just burst out laughing.
Daniel: Oh, you got it. You got it. Okay, I just bowled over laughing. Wow, you’re much closer to the Gen Z than I am.
Hedvig: No, burst out laughing is not a new expression.
Daniel: No. It goes back a long way. But this abbreviation is, and there’s an article by Heather Schwedel in Slate called R-I-P-L-O-L. You’re still feeling good about this. Okay, good. I’m going to let you have this one.
Hedvig: I’m going to rattle this all day.
Daniel: [laughs] Heather Schwedel says, “The longtime default phrase for online laughter, L-O-L, short for duh, laughing out loud may be on its way out as a new abbreviation for communicating hysterics comes to the fore, IJBOL.” Originated in K-Pop communities, where it was mistaken for a Korean thing, because lots of words in Korean end in bol. But IJBOL is not. It is just an acronym. I just burst out laughing.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Which in time will not mean that. You’ll be able to say it with a straight face, just like Lol.
Hedvig: Can I also encourage all the Swedish speakers in the audience that we should bring back ASG?
Daniel: What’s ASG?
Hedvig: Which is what we had before lull colonized everything. ASG is asgarv, which means to laugh a lot. It used to be the standard default abbreviation in Swedish for laughing. And now people write LOL in Swedish, and we should write [unintelligible [01:38:14] again.
Daniel: Okay, I’m going to do that from now on, and I’m going to explain it every time.
Hedvig: No, no, no. you don’t have to.
Daniel: Well, what can I do? I want to throw my support behind this. Death to LOL. Let’s kick its corpse on the way out. Next one from Diego. Hurriquake.
Hedvig: Oh, no. Is it a hurricane and an earthquake?
Daniel: It is, which makes me think, what the heck is going on in California? It seems that Ventura and Los Angeles County got their first tropical storm in more than 80 years, and at the same time, a magnitude 5.1 earthquake, which is kind of big.
Hedvig: Fuck.
Daniel: Yeah.
Hedvig: That’s not fun. I’m sorry for everyone who experienced that.
Daniel: Yeah, me too. But it is nice that quake lends itself so well.
Hedvig: [laughs]
Daniel: I was thinking we could come up with other weather portmanteaus, like a hurrinami or a hurricano or anything with nami or anything with cano.
Hedvig: How do you feel about NATOquake?
Daniel: NATOquake. It’s raising tremors because– [crosstalk]
Hedvig: QuakeNATO?
Daniel: QuakeNATO. That’s better. That’s better, because I feel like NATO belongs at the end. If you start lopping it off and stick it into the beginning, it’s going to cause confusion, and we don’t need that.
Hedvig: Okay.
Daniel: But quake, quake, you can stick anywhere.
Hedvig: Okay. QuakeNATO.
Daniel: Quakecane. Yup. I like it.
Hedvig: Okay. All right.
Daniel: You can even have a pancyclonami. I wanted to get cyclone in there, but it’s not working. A panhurrinami.
Hedvig: I think we put a lid on this now and feel sorry for everyone experiencing it.
Daniel: Yeah. We hope everybody stays safe out there. And now, our last one from the Sandman. He’s given us the “ungus” productive suffix. Sandman of Sandman Stories has showed a meme on our Discord channel. Memes where the joke is the suffix, ungus. Here are some items. Amongus, chungus.
Hedvig: Uh-huh.
Daniel: This is one that I have seen. If you got a cat that’s really huge, “Man, that’s a big chungus there.” There’s blongus and clampong. “You fool, you blongus, you absolute utter clampongus.” It just means anything kind of big.
Hedvig: Huh. Well, I never heard about it, but okay.
Daniel: Never heard chungus? Okay.
Hedvig: Chungus, I’ve heard.
Daniel: Okay. I think we have to go back to the source here. Humongous, of course. But where does that come from? All the sources I’m seeing say it’s something like a mashup of huge and monstrous.
Hedvig: Oh.
Daniel: I’m not sure if monstrous is the best choice here. I feel like enormous is more likely than monstrous. Humongous, enormous. We also have ginormous and even hunormus can be found. But the humongous, I think, is where we get our ungus suffix from, and now it’s being picked up and applied to lots of things. It’s very suggestive of an absolute unit. Yup. So, we’ll be watching out for that one. So, pipeline, IJBOL, hurriquake, and ungus the productive suffix, our Words of the Week.
Hedvig: Pew, pew, pew.
Daniel: Big thanks to Dr. Jenni Nuttall, everyone who gave us ideas for this episode, the team from SpeechDocs for transcribing our words. And most of all, our patrons who keep us going. Thanks, everybody.
[music]
Daniel: We’re just thankful for everyone who listens to us. It’s great to be in your ears. But if you want to help us and promote us, here are some things you can do. You can give us ideas and feedback. We are @becauselangpod everywhere, including Bluesky. You can send us ideas and feedback through email, hello@becauselanguage.com. Why not send us your voice? Just make a recording. We’ll put it on if it’s of good quality. SpeakPipe is a good way to do that. That’s on our website, becauselanguage.com. Another way you can help us out is by telling friends about us. We rely on word of mouth and reviews that people leave in reviewy places. Hedvig, did you know that we have a new review?
Hedvig: I see it in the run sheet. I didn’t know it before then.
Daniel: Do you want to read it?
Hedvig: Okay, I’ll read it. Okay. We have a new review from Tigger04. They say, “A real gem, 5 stars.” And then comes a review. “I found myself quadriplegic in hospital bed staring at the ceiling for seven months–” So, if I understand correctly, that means that four limbs are not possible to use?
Daniel: That is the definition of quadriplegic. Yikes.
Hedvig: Okay.
Daniel: Wow, Tigger.
Hedvig: That sounds rough. I hope you’re okay. “Seven months staring at the ceiling. This is one of a handful podcasts that kept me sane.” I’m feeling a lot of things. “The chemistry between the hosts, the deep knowledge, and how they make it accessible to an armchair linguist like me, I’m always learning something new. This one is a gem. Long may it continue.”
Daniel: That’s amazing.
Hedvig: As a person who rely on podcasts to make me feel sane, it feels like a great honor to be able to do that for anyone else.
Daniel: Isn’t it?
Hedvig: I know what an enormous part of my life those podcasts are, and to be that for someone else is just wow.
Daniel: Yeah, it’s humongous.
Hedvig: We hope you’re okay. We hope you’re not staring at the ceiling in a hospital bed anymore. But if you are, we’re here with you.
Daniel: The idea that it was for seven months implies that it’s ended, so I’m really glad to hear that, and I hope that you’re okay. Tigger, thank you for writing a review for us. We’re really glad that you enjoy the show and that we have chemistry. Hedvig, we got chemistry. How about that?
Hedvig: I’m trying to think of how I cannot have chemistry to make it funny, but I don’t know– What do you do? How about that? Yes, how about that? That’s the best [laughs] non-chemistry I can do.
Daniel: That was very chemical.
Hedvig: I’m contrarian. You know this.
Daniel: Yeah. No, you’re not. So, [laughs] if you do a review for us, we will find it and we’ll read it if it’s good. Another thing you can do to help us is consider becoming a patron. You’ll be helping us to pay the bills and transcribe our shows so that they are readable and searchable. Which of the three of us, Ben, Hedvig, or me is most likely to say humongous during a show? Now, you can look it up. If you’re a patron, depending on your level, you’ll get bonus episodes, mailouts, shoutouts, and all of our patrons get to come to live episodes and hang out with us on our Discord server, which is very special.
Hedvig: Coming up on our episode, we’ll be inviting all of our patrons, and especially we’ll be inviting our top patrons, and I’m going to say who they are. So, this is our invite list for the next Potluck episode.
Daniel: Okay.
Hedvig: Plus, some more folks. Iztin, Termy, Elías, Matt, Whitney, Helen, Jack, PharaohKatt, LordMortis, gramaryen, Larry, Kristofer, Andy, James, Nigel, Meredith, Kate, Nasrin, Joanna, Nikoli, 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, Luis. And we have a couple of new people who have joined us at the listener level and have taken out yearly membership, not just monthly, which is the thing you can do. They are Bron and Lee-Sien. Thank you to all of our generous patrons.
Daniel: By the way, that’s amazing that you can do yearly patron memberships now, and you will save a little bit of money by doing so, but also you’re showing your confidence in us that we will keep doing this for another year.
Hedvig: Mm-hmm.
Daniel: I can personally guarantee that I’ll be still doing this until they carry me out of my pantry where I record from. We’re just going to keep banging out shows as much as we can. [laughs] So, I’m in.
Hedvig: Yeah, me too. I’m looking forward to many more years.
Daniel: Me too.
Hedvig: Thank you to all of our generous patrons. Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who is also a member of Ryan Beano and Didion’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
Daniel: Pew.
Hedvig: Pew, pew. Did I do everyone’s name correctly?
Daniel: Everyone’s name was very correctly.
Hedvig: Ah, very good.
Daniel: Okay. I’m going to tell you another story about a smart programming thing I did. I used to work at WordPerfect in another life.
Hedvig: Uh-huh? What did they do?
Daniel: I did tech support. I help people with their paragraphs and their outlines, stuff like that.
Hedvig: Okay.
Daniel: Also, the WordPerfect macro programming language was my first scripting language that I ever did. WordPerfect macros. We used to write these macros and then unleash them onto customers to help them. I was carpooling one day with Dave, one of the other tech support guys, and he said, “I’m working on this script, this macro, to change outline numbers, the automatic kind, into ones, twos, and threes, and As, Bs and Cs, actual text.”
Hedvig: Okay.
Daniel: I said, “Well, that’s pretty straightforward because there’s a command where you can take an automatic thing and turn it into its letter or number equivalent as text. That’s a thing that you can do.” He says, “Yeah, I know, but when I change one into an actual text number 1, all the other automatic outlines further down change. The one that was 2.”
Hedvig: I see. It becomes 1.
Daniel: Now becomes 1.
Hedvig: Mm-hmm.
Daniel: He says, “I can’t figure out a way around it.”
Hedvig: I have an idea.
Daniel: Did you come up with the thing I came up with? What’s your idea?
Hedvig: You just add +1 as you’re going looping through it.
Daniel: You could. I don’t know if the WordPerfect macro programming language had that functionality. Tell you what I told him.
Hedvig: Okay.
Daniel: I said, “Why don’t you just go through the document backwards?”
Hedvig: Oh, that is smarter.
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: I didn’t know that was a possibility.
Daniel: Yup. You can find the previous item. So, he said, “Yup, that was it.”
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: And [unintelligible [01:49:14]
Hedvig: That is smart.
Daniel: So, that’s the second smartest programming thing I’ve ever done.
Hedvig: I think the thing in the secret patron episode was still smarter. But anyway, this is not the podcast of Daniel and Hedvig relationship advice, nor their programming endeavors.
Daniel: [laughs]
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]