Our accents are great! They represent our origins, our languages, our community, and our identity. But too many of us feel like we can’t speak with our authentic voice. Accent prejudice is real.
Linguist and author Dr Rob Drummond joins us to explain all about accent and accentism. He’s the author of a new book You’re All Talk: Why You Are What You Speak.
And Dr Robbie Love is joining us with his research about how the word fuck is changing in the speech of British teens. Spicy!
Listen to this episode
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Become a Patron!Show notes
opening joke shamelessly cribbed from here
https://old.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/15b39pd/what_is_the_biggest_thing_that_could_cause_the/jtolzm8/
New Indo-European language discovered during excavation in Turkey
https://phys.org/news/2023-09-indo-european-language-excavation-turkey.html
New Indo-European Language Discovered
https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/news/new-indo-european-language-discovered/
Societies of strangers do not speak less complex languages
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adf7704
The consequences of talking to strangers: Evolutionary corollaries of socio-cultural influences on linguistic form
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0024384105000999
MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology | YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJuEvfaKVGgDsvlONXAODMg
Kinbank: A global database of kinship terminology
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0283218
Roman Jakobson – Why ”Mama” and ”Papa”? | Archive.org
https://archive.org/details/roman-jakobson-why-mamaand-papa-1971
Why Mama and Papa? | Lexpert
https://www.lexpert.ca/archive/why-mama-and-papa/351347
CorpusCast
https://robbielove.org/corpuscast/
Corpus-pragmatic perspectives on the contemporary weakening of fuck: The case of teenage British English conversation
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378216623002163?via%3Dihub
“PISSETH” in the KJV Bible
https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/search.php?q=Pisseth
Richard Stephens: Swearing Reduces Pain – But Not If You Do It Every Day
https://www.keele.ac.uk/research/researchnews/2011/swearingreducespainbutnotifyoudoiteveryday.php
Rob Drummond
https://www.robdrummond.co.uk
YOU’RE ALL TALK: why we are what we speak by Rob Drummond
https://scribepublications.co.uk/books-authors/books/youare-all-talk-9781914484285
Do some languages sound more beautiful than others? | PNAS
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2218367120
Former Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull says Rupert Murdoch’s ‘anger-tainment’ damaged the democratic world
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/sep/22/former-australian-pm-malcolm-turnbull-comments-rupert-murdoch
List of words ending with TAINMENT | Lots of Words
https://lotsofwords.com/*tainment
One Man Invented Two of the Deadliest Substances of the 20th Century
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/one-man-two-deadly-substances-20th-century-180963269/
https://fightingchancefantasy.com/news/show/drakes-takes-engagement-farmers-vs-content-creators
Cory Doctorow: The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok
https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
Cory Doctorow: Platform capitalism and the curse of “enshittification”
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/futuretense/cory-doctorow-enshittification-platform-capitalism/102492918
What’s in a name? The renaming of the pink cockatoo is no small thing in Australia’s violent history | Andrew Stafford | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/commentisfree/2023/sep/16/pink-cockatoo-australian-bird-of-the-year-guardian-birdlife
Onomatopoeia in American Bird Names
https://www.avianecologist.com/2017/09/24/onomatopoeia-in-bird-names/
Why ‘Girls’ Rule the Internet
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/10/style/girls-internet-gender.html
I Believe from the Book of Mormon Musical on the 65th Tony Awards.
Stroads are Ugly, Expensive, and Dangerous (and they’re everywhere) [ST05]
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
Daniel: But now, it seems like the right time to tell you my favourite joke right now.
Ben and Hedvig: Okay.
Daniel: And it’s about Jesus and aliens.
Hedvig: Oh, yeah. Hit me.
Daniel: Okay, here we go. Aliens come to visit earth, and they don’t want to kill us or anything. They’re super nice. They want to share their technology and tell us about it.
Hedvig: Lovely.
Daniel: And they’re super into earth history and earth society. They want to find out all about like Galileo and Newton and Einstein and stuff.
Hedvig: Cool.
Daniel: And then, the earthlings ask, “Have you guys heard about Jesus?” And the aliens say, “Jesus? Jesus Christ, savior of the universe? Yeah, we know about Jesus. He hangs out with us on our planet all the time.” And the earthlings are like, “Whaaaat?” And then the aliens are like, “Yeah, he comes about every year. He comes and hangs out. He just checks on us, makes sure we’re okay, gives us advice and stuff.”
Hedvig: Is he Santa?
Daniel: “Yeah no, he’s totally cool.” And the Earthlings are like, “That’s really odd because it’s been 2000 years, and he still hasn’t even come back once.” And the aliens are like, “Oh, wow. Um. Hmm. Well, I don’t know. Maybe he just likes our chocolate better than he likes yours, do you think?” “And the earthlings are like, “Chocolate? What are you talking about?” And the aliens are like, “Oh, well, when he came to visit us the first time, we gave him a big box of chocolate. Why? What’d you do?”
Ben: [laughs]
[Because Language theme]
Daniel: Hello, and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. Fresh from a whirlwind tour of talks and lectures around the world, it’s Hedvig Skirgård. Hey, Hedvig. Busy times?
Hedvig: Hey. Oh, is this because I did a remote talk in Arizona?
Daniel: Well, yes, and also the workshop for Grambank. So, you’ve been busy.
Hedvig: Oh, my god. Ugh.
Daniel: Yeah. That was huge.
Hedvig: I’ve been busy. I’ve been busy. A lot of talking, a lot of people. It’s been great fun. Yeah. I’m really happy to be here with you though.
Daniel: Good on you. Thank you.
Hedvig: I love our regular chats.
Daniel: We almost never get to the actual show until we’ve had a good old natter.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: During this introduction we are already like 25 minutes deep.
Daniel: Oh, well. [chuckles]
Hedvig: Yes, it’s good. Fresh from a whirlwind week of students and classes, it’s Ben Ainslie. Hey, Ben.
Ben: I am on school holidays as of two days ago and I could not be happier because term three, certainly in WA schools, is the worst. And so, I really dragged my corpse over the line on that one. So, I’m very happy to have a bit of free time to chill, to hang out with my friends, like I’m currently doing.
Daniel: You know it’s funny about school holidays. I got two young daughters, and were kind of… yesterday, when school got out on Saturday, we were like, “I think we’re kind of ready for a little bit of a holiday. Not to have so much regimentation.” And then by the end of that same day, we’re like, “I can’t wait for school to start.”
[laughter]
Daniel: They wore us out the first day.
Ben: You don’t ever willingly give up structure and routine. Never. That’s crazy talk.
Hedvig: I am unwillingly giving it up right now because Steve’s abroad and I’m left to fend for myself, which turns out to be very unstructured.
Ben: I’m a little baby. [laughs]
Hedvig: [in a babyish tone] I’m a baby.
Daniel: And are you having girl dinners?
Ben: [in a singsong voice] Girl dinner.
Hedvig: Sort of. Well, I discovered a new way offending Turkish people, which is as a Swede, something we’ve been exercising a lot this year. You’re not following international news?
Ben: No, no, no.
Daniel: I got it.
Ben: I know exactly what you’re talking about but I’m worried about what food related thing you have done.
Daniel: This is a whole new area.
Hedvig: So, you take Turkish yogurt, 10% fat. You put in lingonberry jam because you’re a Swede, and you put in salt. And then, you pour in milk instead of water.
Ben: Oh, wow.
Hedvig: And then, you mix it up and you put it in a jar, and you put it in the fridge. And then in the morning, when your husband doesn’t bring you breakfast because he’s abroad, you have a lovely little nutritious treat.
Ben: So, it’s like a salty up-and-go, as far as I can tell.
Hedvig: Do you know what an Ayran is?
Ben: No.
Daniel: No.
Hedvig: Okay. This is a Turkish staple, which is yogurt, salt, and water.
Ben: Oh, okay.
Daniel: Why salt? Does it taste good?
Hedvig: Because it’s a hot country and you need salt because salt is good for you.
Ben: Interesting.
Daniel: Yeah. Okay. I get plenty… [crosstalk]
Ben: I would imagine there would be more salty beverages here in Australia but yeah, fair enough.
Hedvig: It’s like a salty lassi sort of.
Ben: Okay.
Hedvig: You had a salt lassi?
Ben: Not really. No. Mango lassi, which is sweet and delicious. Anyway, not important. You have…
Hedvig: Anyway, putting milk instead of water is Turkish people are upset by it.
Ben: Yeah. Okay. There you go.
Daniel: Maybe just don’t tell them.
Hedvig: It’s my home and my leftover pesto jars.
Daniel: Well, apart from offensive food, today on the show, we are talking to two public-facing linguists named Rob. We’re talking to the two Robbies.
Hedvig: Rob-Rob-off.
Daniel: Yes. It’s a Rob-off.
Ben: Robb-a-lubba-ding-dong.
Daniel: We’re talking to Dr Robbie Love of Aston University. He’s the host of CorpusCast. He’s going to be talking to us about the pragmatics of fuck. Fuck is changing, you know.
Ben: Is it?
Daniel: Yep. It’s winding this way and that.
Ben: How so? You know what? He’ll probably answer that question. Let’s wait for then.
Daniel: Okay. And we’re also going to hear from Dr Rob Drummond of Manchester Metropolitan University. He’s written a new book called You’re All Talk: Why We Are What You Speak. It’s about accent, accent prejudice, thinking about the way that we use language. And we’re going to get both of them to tell us what makes them do public linguistics, see if they got any tips for us.
Ben: That’s really interesting and apropos to something that happened in my life. At the school I teach in, we have a staff member who teaches speech and drama, which is not a subject that I had ever heard of or knew was a thing before I started at this school. Like, I know what drama is…
Daniel: Speech and drama.
Ben: Speech and drama is a thing. And it’s essentially teaching people like oration and enunciation.
Hedvig: [unintelligible 00:06:28]
Daniel: Wow.
Ben: Yeah, that sort of stuff. Which is not something I’d ever encountered certainly in Australia before, because we don’t have a strong culture of wanting to do that and to culturally sort of valuing that. Anyway, she corrected some of how I was speaking because that’s her vibe. She’s like an older white lady, and also this is her field. So, she’s just spent her entire life like delightfully, playfully being kind of quite combative and correcting people and stuff. And so, she corrected some way that I spoke, and I just immediately shot back of like, “Oh, but that’s not wrong. That’s just not following your set of rules. But there’s heaps of sets of rules and that’s fine.”
[laughter]
Hedvig: Oh. Hello. What happened?
Daniel: Does she not realize that variation exists? That’s so funny.
Ben: Well, as I’m sure so often happens to people who listen to our show, they found themselves hard up against the prescriptivist/descriptivist divide.
Daniel: Wow.
Ben: It was basically like, “Well, because there is no wrong, obviously. There’s no wrong way to speak,” which admittedly there is in the sense that you can have an acquired brain injury and how you speak can fail to communicate and stuff like that. But…
Daniel: Yeah, you can say it wrong.
Ben: …in a broad sense, there’s no wrong. There’s just different ways. And she was not having a bar of it.
Daniel: [chuckles] Get her on to me.
Ben: Not on any level. She’s like, “No, there is a right way. I teach it. I would know.” And I was like…
Daniel: How tiresome.
Ben: “You know what? I’m just going to… You are a 65-year-old woman who has done this for your entire life. I do not believe that I’m going to be able to change your mind on this. So instead, I’m going to get a cup of coffee.”
Daniel: Sounds good.
Hedvig: I have mentally made a decision which is maybe a little bit offensive, but it’s sort of just like with some people, if they really have an opinion and it’s not too harmful and they’re of a certain age, I’m like you made it through 60 years of life with this ideology in your head, meeting lots of different people. I’m probably not going to be the one.
Ben: Strategic retreat, where you just go, “Okay, any effort that I put in here is going to be totally wasted.”
Daniel: Yeah, there are 85-year-old ex-Mormons who are like, anybody can change. But they’re the anomaly, I think.
Hedvig: [unintelligible 00:08:53] of conserving my energy. I’m just like, “That’s okay.”
Daniel: Yeah, self-care.
Ben: Also, just to be clear, this lady is in most other ways a nice lady. If she was kind of a nasty person, I might fight just for the enjoyment of jousting with a person that I don’t like very much, but this is just like [onomatopoeia]. Anyway, moving on.
Hedvig: Moving on.
Daniel: Our last episode was a live episode for patrons called Girl Dinner.
Hedvig: Yes. And I wasn’t there.
Ben: But there was no girl.
Daniel: No, but you know who was there? Our patrons and friends. We piled everybody into a Zoom room and talked over stories and words they brought us. It was a lot of fun.
Hedvig: I listened to it. It was a lot of fun.
Daniel: It was. And you can listen to that episode in all the usual places, or you can even watch it on YouTube or on our website, becauselanguage.com. Watching is fun, because then you can see all the messages in chat that people make.
Hedvig: Ooh. Yes.
Daniel: Which is fun. All patrons get to come and hang out with us for live episodes. And depending on your level, you can get bonus episodes, mailouts, shoutouts. And all of our patrons get to hang out with us on our Discord server, which is a great way to find out about linguistic stuff, give us story ideas, and just have a lot of fun.
Ben: A nice space to socialize.
Daniel: Our next bonus episode is going to be Diego’s Digest.
Hedvig: Oh, yes. I like those.
Ben: Cool. Yay, Diego.
Daniel: Diego’s going to join us. He finds us so many language stories that it just seems logical to have a Diego show and let him tell the stories himself. So, hop onto Patreon, join up. You’ll be supporting the show, helping us promote good linguistic science. That’s patreon.com/becauselangpod and that’s the end of the spruik.
Hedvig: And I believe I’m not telling a lie when I say that your Patreon money also goes partially to Diego…
Daniel: Yes, it will.
Hedvig: …when he comes on the show. Yes. Very good.
Daniel: We get a chance to give our contributors a bit of money, which is good. All right, let’s get to the news. There’s a lot of news.
Ben: Lay it on me, Daniel.
Daniel: This one was suggested by Lenika on our Discord. The title of this one is New Indo-European Language Discovered. Good gracious. They’re coming out with new ones.
Ben: Wait, like as in proto Indo-European or just like there is just a language that were like, “Oh, we didn’t have that one written down before”?
Daniel: The second.
Ben: Okay, cool. What is it?
Daniel: Well, there’s this site in Türkiye called Bogazköy, Hattusha. It’s in North Central Turkey. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site because there have been so many documents found from the Hittite civilization. About 30,000 clay tablets with cuneiform writing. I’ve got to confess, I don’t know a lot about Hittites. Hedvig, do you know more than I do about Hittites?
Hedvig: There was lots of empires that came and went over there. Akkadian, Assyrian, Hittites. They were one of them. They did some cuneiform. We have some writing of them. The answer is no. But I know that Hittite and a couple of those are… if you’re familiar with Indo-European languages you might be familiar with like Romance, Germanic maybe, but Indo-Aryan, which is a really big group, including, like, most of Indo-European further east, Celtic. Hittite and all of these guys are in none of these groups.
Ben: Oh, okay. So, this is like another branch of the tree.
Hedvig: Yes.
Daniel: Is this the Anatolian branch?
Hedvig: I believe so, yes. And they no longer exist. So, if you imagine a tree, they are sort of like a branch…
Ben: Oh, it’s a branch that ends.
Hedvig: Ends, yeah.
Daniel: Okay. So, they moved into Türkiye around… what’s now Türkiye, around 1600 BCE. And one of the things that they did was they collected… they made a lot of ritual texts telling how to do rituals and the importance of the rituals and stuff, but they also were really interested in ritual texts from other people, and so they collected them, and now we have them and we found them.
Ben: Cool. So, are we doing like a little bit of a Rosetta Stone-y thing where we can do, like, some comparative stuff?
Daniel: Well, I wish that were the case. I mean, we do have lots of clay tablets written in two languages called Luwian and Palaic, and those are Anatolian, Indo-European languages that are related to Hittite.
Ben: Okay.
Hedvig: I know about those because we are actually coding those for Grambank right now. And I know that there’s Luwian hieroglyphic and Luwian cuneiform.
Daniel: Oh, exciting.
Hedvig: Because we’ve decided to split them because we’re like we think that they’re sort of the same thing, but they’re written a bit differently, and maybe they’re not exactly the same thing.
Daniel: Oh, my gosh. You mean like this language bridged the time gap between cuneiform and hieroglyphics?
Hedvig: I guess. I don’t know that much about it. I know I was asked to add them to our to-do list, and then one of our Grambank coders was like, “Oh, I’m writing my master thesis on that.” And I was like, “Great. You know a lot. You do that.”
Ben: Sounds like someone just volunteered.
[laughter]
Hedvig: Yeah, I was like, “I have a work task for you. Would you like it?”
Daniel: Okay, well, in addition to those two languages, they found… the team. This is the team from Universität Würzburg, headed up by Professor Daniel Schwemer. He’s the Chair of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the university. He says these texts that they found refer to this language that it’s in as the language of the land of Kalašma. Now, we can’t decode what it says yet, but they’re able to make out that term, and so they’re calling this the Kalašma language.
Hedvig: Cool.
Ben: That’s really cool.
Daniel: So, Hedvig, how come we’re not finding more Indo-European languages everywhere? Is it because we just kind of found them all? This is like kind of a big deal. People are saying, “I didn’t think we were going to find a new Indo-European language in my lifetime,” and yet here one is.
Hedvig: Well, okay, so the reason we can find out about languages of the past are two. We can find actual evidence, like texts, and we can be like, “Hey, we found some writing. Other people say that these people were called Hittite. We found lots of writing.” And we’re like, “Okay, they seem to be a language. Their language maybe work like this. Their culture maybe work like that.” Or we can infer and we can be like, “We know a lot about different Celtic languages and we think that maybe at some point they used to be one community that split.” And we had no writing of that community but we can infer. Those are what we call proto languages. And the first thing is what we called ancient languages because ancient languages are ones where we actually have some sort of material.
Daniel: But proto languages are theoretical. We have to figure them out.
Hedvig: Yes. Proto languages are theoretical, ancient languages are real, and ancient languages can sometimes be… For example, for Latin is ancient language. We have tons of writing. Romans wrote all the time. They loved that shit. They wrote down everything. They wrote all their things. And at the same time, we have something we call Proto-Romance, which is what we think was the original language that all the Romans come from. Like, Proto-Romance and Latin are not the same probably.
Daniel: Oh, wow. Yeah, okay.
Hedvig: Right. But they may have existed at a similar time, so they ought to be fairly similar.
Ben: Right.
Hedvig: So maybe Latin is like a sister language of Proto-Romance. But all this is to say ancient languages, we need textual evidence. And writing is… In the human history, we’ve had language for about 200,000 years, Indo-European as a language family, about 400 languages, there’s 7000 in the world, it’s about maybe 8000 years old, something around that. And we have had writing not that long.
Daniel: Would be 5000 years.
Hedvig: Right. So, the fact that we can discover anything [chuckles] that isn’t about ancient languages. Honestly, ancient languages like this, where we have textual evidence, it’s really rare in the world. For most of the language families, we have nothing like this.
Daniel: Yeah, okay.
Hedvig: We’re lucky to get anything.
Daniel: So, it sounds like Kalašma is now an ancient language that we can’t decipher yet, but we know it existed.
Hedvig: Right. But it might also turn out that Kalašma is just a funny way of writing Akkadian.
Daniel: Yeah, yeah. That’s right. That’s possible.
Hedvig: Right. That could still happen. Maybe. I don’t know.
Daniel: And you know what? This is kind of a weird story because the information seems to come only from the press office of the university that the team is from. I didn’t know how to…
Ben: Is that that surprising, really?
Daniel: Well, usually things are all over the place, but whenever I would find five articles about this, they were all just from that press release.
Hedvig: That makes sense. What do you mean? That’s normal.
Daniel: They’re the ones who knows.
Ben: If I’m inferring correctly, I think Daniel is saying, “This should be bigger news. There should be way more stories about it than this.” And it’s like, “Daniel, you’re talking about hyperspecific linguistics research. I don’t think it’s going to set the…”
Daniel: You’re correct.
Ben: “…the journalistic world of fire.
Daniel: Fair enough. But I’ve been doing this for a while, and it’s always, like, Scientific American and New York Times and University Press Office.
Ben: So basically, you’re worried that more reputable news organizations haven’t almost vetted the press release by virtue of releasing it and talking about it”?
Daniel: Well, let’s see what happens in the coming weeks. This is a hot off the press story.
Hedvig: It’s cool.
Ben: You scooped the New York Times and like Le Monde and stuff.
Daniel: No. Lenika scooped The New York Times.
Ben: Ah, touché.
Daniel: So, thanks to Lenika for that one. Now, we’ve got a couple of bank stories by which I mean Grambank and Kinbank, and they’re kind of upsetting some things that I thought I knew.
Hedvig: Sorry.
Ben: We blame you.
Daniel: So, let’s see. This one was suggested to us by Wolf via email. hello@becauselanguage.com. There’s a new article called societies of strangers do not speak less complex languages. This is written by a ton of great linguists at the Max Planck Institute, including a linguist we have here with us today.
Hedvig: Pew, pew. Hello, I’m an author on this paper.
Daniel: Dr Hedvig Skirgård.
Ben: Well, no conflict of interest here. Let’s discuss.
Daniel: Well, it’s not me suggesting this. It’s our listeners. So, Hedvig, once you told me that one of the papers you read every year was The Consequences of talking to strangers: Evolutionary corollaries of sociocultural influences on linguistic form, by Alison Wray and George Grace.
Hedvig: Yes. Beautiful paper.
Daniel: Okay, cool. And if I understand correctly, from what I remember of our discussions over the years, the idea was, tell me if I’m right, when there’s a small number of people in a language community, there’s a lot of variation because everybody can just memorize each other’s quirks. But then when you get a community of a lot of people and you’re talking to a lot of people you don’t know, you’ve got less stuff on the common ground, you’ve got to do something to bridge that gap. So, people just start sort of standardizing the language, making it predictable to someone that they don’t share any knowledge with, and the language starts to look different in large communities as opposed to small communities. Have I got that right?
Hedvig: Yeah, that’s along the right lines, I think. So, Wray and Grace paper is very long, and I think about it so much that sometimes I think I mess up what they say and what I think they say. So, what you just said is what I think they say. Sorry, I have a very, very cuddle-demanding cat who just came.
Daniel: Hello, cuddle that cat. Hello, Sandy.
Hedvig: Desperate cuddles.
Ben: Sandy.
Hedvig: Hi. Steve isn’t here, so I’m on cuddle duty.
Daniel: On cat duty. [laughs]
Hedvig: Yes. The broad idea, first of all, is that languages exist in a social landscape. And that landscape has valleys and bumps and features to it in a similar way to what we think about ecological landscapes for biological species.
Daniel: A niche.
Hedvig: There’s a niche, exactly. There are needs and there are pressures and there are things that are easier and things that are harder and that those things end up shaping what the language looks like. So, the things that it could be shaping is… I mean, how the language works is optimized for that niche, yeah. And Wray and Grace talk about something called compositionality, which is this idea that you make sentences and words made up of lots of little parts that all the parts, when you add them together, make up the sum of the whole.
Daniel: Right. So, if I say bookstore, it’s a store about books. And if you know what a book is and you know what a store is, then you kind of know what it means. The parts go together. But if I say something like silver beet, that’s not exactly compositional because silver and beat together, it’s not a beet that’s silver.
Hedvig: Like, Sandy wants cuddles and the whole is Sandy wants cuddles and it means the sum of the whole. Whereas…
Daniel: If I understand the pieces, I know what the thing means, right?
Hedvig: Yeah. Whereas something like, “C. S. Lewis has kicked the bucket.”
Daniel: Has kicked bucket. [laughs]
Hedvig: Yeah, always the one to go to. Doesn’t mean he kicked the bucket. It means he passed away. So, it’s not the [unintelligible 00:22:33] best part. Anyway, that’s sort of one of the things that people have talked about. And then, we have Lupyan and Dale, who wrote about morphological complexity, and a lot of other people have picked up strands about these things that are broadly called linguistic complexity. And in this paper, which was led by Olena Shcherbakova together with a bunch of my colleagues, we wanted to, first of all, tease apart what these things are that people call linguistic complexity. So, we looked at the original paper by Lupyan and Dale, we looked at our grammar features, and we thought, “Look, there are some things that are sort of being combined here and maybe we’ll learn something if we tease them out, not combine them into one measure.”
So, we made two measures. One called fusion, which is basically for all of our questions where we say, “Do you have blah on the verb? Do you have blah on the noun?” All the questions I ask, if something is tacked onto the noun or the verb, how much bound stuff are you lugging around? How much obligatory stuff?
Daniel: So basically, if I have a verb like work, I can add works and working and work to it. And that’s fusional and I can stick that on.
Hedvig: Yeah, exactly. So, the first question is, how much bounce stuff are you looking around the other one? We made a measure called informativity, which is, how many distinctions do you have? So, we have a question… for example, we have a question asking if you have an elevation distinction in your demonstratives. This is a fun one. Ben might like this one, I don’t know.
Daniel: All right. Okay.
Hedvig: This is like whether you can refer to things that’s far away from you and close to you, but also low down and up.
Ben: Okay.
Daniel: So, if I say in English these cookies and those cookies, these cookies are the ones that are close to me, those cookies are the ones that are far away from me. But I can’t say there’s cookies and that means the ones that are uphill. That never happens in English.
Ben: Right, right, right.
Hedvig: Yeah. Or up in the cupboard and down on the floor or something like that.
Daniel: Okay. And if it’s got all of those things, then it’s more complex, that’s what we mean by a complex language.
Hedvig: We say it has more information distinctions. And look, we pick the ones that we have grammar features for. So, we made these two measures, and then we said, “Okay, so the rest of the claim is something like about speaker niche stuff.” So, we got data from the Ethnologue about population of languages, and we said, “Okay, look, how many first language speakers do you have? How many second? What is the proportion of second language speakers of your first language speakers?” And some other measurements like this.
And then, we said, “Do these things predict each other?” So, does the proportion of second language speakers predict any of these of our deconstructed complexity measures?
Daniel: And you were trying to figure out, like, if you got a small group of people, it’s less complex. And that was the idea anyway. Maybe if you had a big group of people speaking the language, you got more complexity because you’ve got to standardize…
Hedvig: Other way around.
Daniel: …you’ve got to… other way around? So, more complex if you got a small group, less complex if you got a big group. That might have been the idea, but what did you actually find?
Hedvig: Yeah, we found that this wasn’t really holding up.
Daniel: Cool.
Hedvig: For the way we tested it and the way we deconstructed complexity, we didn’t find the effects. We also did what’s called phylogenetic and spatial control. So, we said, “Look, we assume that maybe if you are in the same language family, if you’re related to each other, maybe you’re more similar. So, let’s throw that in as a control.” And so, we did a bunch of smart things. Olena has done a bunch of smart things, and we all have been helping her. She’s been doing great work. But that is my brief summary, yeah, for the news.
Daniel: All right. What’s the significance of this? Does this overturn what we talked about with Wray and Grace, or does it go along with it? Is it harmonious?
Hedvig: Well, the way I like to think about it, as one of the authors of the paper and thinks is that we did a very rigorous test of one of the core parts of these theories, but there could still be other parts. So, for example, we didn’t have a straightforward compositionality measure, so maybe that’s an effect. But at least we know that for these things that are very popular in linguistic complexity measurements, which is the fusion and the informativity, which are features we see all the time in linguistic complexity research, we could at least say that those don’t seem to have been affected very much for the way we control it. But maybe there are other facets of these linguistic niches that do are affected. [crosstalk]
Daniel: Okay. And this is just one way in which linguists are starting to use the massive amount of information in Grambank. We’re starting to see a torrent of work coming out.
Hedvig: Yeah. As you alluded to, we had a Grambank workshop last week where we celebrated the release and had lots of people, and many of the talks were recorded and are going to be up on the MPI Ava YouTube channel. So, if you want to see me talk for 20 minutes, [laughs] if anyone is not happy with this show in terms of [crosstalk] talk.
Daniel: You know I do.
Hedvig: You want more?
Daniel: [crosstalk]
Hedvig: You want other people? We’ll have more.
Daniel: Okay, well, let’s go on to our next one because we’ve got some new research coming out from Kinbank. Not Grambank, but Kinbank, which I always read as Kink Bank.
Ben: [laughs]
Daniel: Oh, sorry.
Hedvig: Oh, don’t. I never heard that before.
Daniel: [chuckles] Okay, fine. It’s just me. This one’s about kinship terms and one of the results that’s in this work, which is from Sam Passmore of the Australian National University and a team published in PLOS One.
Hedvig: It’s from a bunch of people who were here last week as well. [laughs]
Daniel: Yeah. Okay, so this is about mama and papa words. Ben, we’ve talked about mama and papa words. Do you have anything that you can remember from that area?
Ben: Yeah, if my memory serves correctly, it’s basically like most languages, little, tiny baby names for mom and dad will all kind of work around a really similar mouth shape system. So, mama and papa, obviously, but I know in a lot of East Asian languages, it’s like baba for dad and grandma and stuff like that. That format is really, really common because it’s really easy for a tiny, very recently born brain. Like, you only really have to do two things, you have to be able to open and close your mouth and make some kind of a sound.
Hedvig: Baba, ba, ba.
Daniel: Some kind of vowel.
Ben: Baba, kaka, dada, or like foo-foo, blu-blu. And I think the vowel sounds tend to be relatively consistent as well because it’s like the simplest one of those two, if I’m not mistaken. So, it’s basically like what can a tiny, tiny idiot brain manage to do with very little control over anything. Because we’re talking about creatures that still can’t walk and that sort of thing because language comes in really early, or at least it starts to, much earlier than other things. And it’s relatively fine motor skill stuff as well. It’s like handwriting, but with the mouth, and kids start doing it really soon, so it’s tough. And so, they find like little [unintelligible 00:30:28] shortcuts.
Daniel: Well, work on mama and papa terms tend to center around the American anthropologist, George Murdock. In the 1950s, he studied the Words for mother and father in 470 languages around the world.
Ben: How many of them were Indo-European languages?
Daniel: I don’t know. I didn’t have time to go and check.
Ben: I [crosstalk] try to ask you is, how predictably Eurocentric was this research?
Daniel: Well, I’m pretty sure that he didn’t include any Australian languages or very many, because that’s going to influence the story. But he found that something like “ma” showed up in words for mother in 52% of the languages that he studied, but only 15% of the time for father. So, there’s a skew there. Ma seemed to skew mother wise. And then words for father had something like “pa” or “ta” in 55% of the languages he looked at. And mother only had pa and ta about 7% of the time. So, people have tried to explain these results. Linguist Roman Jakobson wrote a big paper in 1971, Why ”Mama” and ”Papa”? He argued that ma tended to be for mothers because you’re breastfeeding and you’re going, “Mm,” and then that extends to not just when you’re feeding, but anything that you want.
Ben: So, this is actually sort of the next step from what I was talking about. So, we’ve established that babies tend to make this format of sounds, but now this researcher was basically like, “Not only that, but there is a significant gender divide on the types of these types of sounds that they make.”
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Okay. But—
Ben: But I’m guessing they’re wrong.
Daniel: Into this steps, Kinbank, this work from this team, and this is work published in Plos, the Public Library of Science. I remember that.
Ben: I thought it was going to be a journal explicitly about plosives.
[chuckles]
Daniel: It should be.
Hedvig: No, it’s a really fun open access journal that I published, my first ever paper in. Pew, pew, pew.
Daniel: Yay. This team says, “Our analysis has shown that the bilabial-low vowel combination, we’re talking about ‘ma,’ which is often thought to be linked to mothers, is actually equally linked to fathers. No difference.” Boom. “On the other hand, we present strong evidence in a global sample for “ŋa,” and “na” sounds aligning exclusively with mother terms.
Hedvig: So, nana.
Daniel: Yeah, nana. And the reason why this seems to have overturned the previous work is because they included Australian languages and that’s a feature for Australian languages. Although nana does seem to be a mom thing or at least a grandma thing or something like that.
Ben: Well, I mean, in English certainly, but I don’t know any other languages, so I have a sample size of one.
Daniel: N equals one. So, I thought it was interesting that overturned that little bit of previously thought research.
Ben: So, just to be clear though, the original underlying thing is still very much a thing, which is like across different cultures and languages, the nana, baba, kaka, whatever. That format still very much holds true for mom/dad, like caregiver names.
Hedvig: I’m pretty sure. Did you see, Daniel? Because I was looking at the paper right now. I don’t remember if they tested that general question that Ben just asked.
Ben: Ooh, we should.
Daniel: The “ah” thing?
Ben: We should get on that. Hedvig, I’ve just given you another paper. You’re welcome.
Hedvig: No, no.
Daniel: I’ve always thought that what happens is the babies are going ga, ga, ga, ba, ba, ba, da, da, da, and then parents come along and say, “That’s me.”
Ben: Yeah, for sure.
Daniel: “They’re talking about me,” when they might not be.
Hedvig: Okay.
Ben: But then obviously, the kid responds to that because humans are like patent recognition machines. So, they’re just like, “Oh, that must be nangya.”
Daniel: I got the thing when I said the thing. When parents say they said their first word today, I’ve often thought that we miss real first words for two reasons. Number one, the things that we think are first words probably just aren’t. The child is probably just babbling. And then the things that actually are what the kid intends to be first words get missed because they don’t sound like what we think a word is.
Ben: Right. So, they’re cooked in every possible direction.
Daniel: Both directions. Well, maybe it’s time to move on to our final news story. This one is about the word “fuck”. Ben, what are people doing when they use the word fuck? What kind of pragmatic jobs are they trying to do?
Ben: Infinity.
Daniel: [laughs]
Ben: I’m not trying to be difficult here but is it not one of the most sort of… not the most, but certainly it must be up there in terms of how versatile sort of semantically and pragmatically, as far as… famously “fuck the fucking fuckers.” Like, you can make useful sentences using nearly no other words, which means it can do a lot.
Daniel: Syntactically, it’s very versatile. And of course, there are an infinite number of intentions, just like always. But of course, we can categorize them into different bins, like abusive fuck and non-abusive fuck.
Ben: Like, you can mean it, you can absolutely wield it as a way to try and do sort of linguistic harm. You can use it in a way that signifies alignment and attunement or belonging. You can just do everything.
Daniel: Yes again. If I told you that the use of fuck was changing over time and you had to make a guess as to how young people are using it slightly differently these days, what would you guess?
Ben: Ooh, good question.
Hedvig: Wow.
Daniel: Because it is changing.
Ben: I’m wondering if it’s like doing a thing… Okay. Are the youth treating it the same way they treat Facebook? Which is to say, is it kind of like gross and passe? To the minds of young people, is that like stupid boomer shit?
Daniel: Okay, interesting guess. How about you, Hedvig? What do you think is going on?
Hedvig: Um. I mean, it’s probably getting more abstract, more vague, more bleached. So, maybe people are… maybe it’s becoming less bad and also more positive.
Daniel: Interesting you say about bleaching, semantically bleached, like it’s not about sex anymore. It’s about hardly ever about sex.
Ben: It’s like expletive, it’s like, [forcefully] “Hmm.”
Hedvig: Yeah, I feel like that ought to be the case.
Daniel: Well, we got Dr Robbie Love on the line, so Hedvig let’s jump in. We’re here with Dr Robbie Love of Aston University. He’s the host of CorpusCast, and with Anna-Brita Stenström, the co-author of a new paper, Corpus-pragmatic perspectives on the contemporary weakening of fuck: The case of teenage British English conversation. What a title. Robbie, thanks for hanging out with us today.
Robbie: Hi, thanks a lot for having me. It’s a real pleasure to be here. I’m so excited to be on. So, yeah, thanks for inviting me along.
Daniel: We’re excited to have you.
Hedvig: Yeah. Fuck yeah. We can say fuck as many times as we want. How fun is that?
[chuckles]
Robbie: Yes. I mean, you got it out the way with the first mention. You just went straight out of the gate there, Daniel, with the mention of fuck. And that makes my job easier because then I can just say it without having to sort of pretend to hedge it a little bit or worry about what people might say. So, we’re straight in here. I love it. I love it.
Daniel: Yeah. In fact, you know what? I should do it again just to really go for it. The title of the paper is Corpus-pragmatic perspectives on the contemporary weakening of [forcefully] fuck.
Robbie: Yes.
[laughter]
Robbie: I love it. [laughs]
Daniel: First of all, tell us about CorpusCast.
Robbie: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. So, I’m the host of my own little podcast, CorpusCast. It’s a podcast about corpus linguistics and what it can do for society. We’ve been running for nearly two years now. And in each episode I interview a bit similar to what you’re doing here, really. I interview somebody, in this case in the field of corpus linguistics who’s doing research and ask them all about their career and their research. And each episode has a focus, really, on a particular application, mostly of corpus linguistics. Sometimes, we do a dive into a particular tool that somebody’s developed that people are using software or a particular event that someone’s organized. But most of the episodes are about a particular application, whether that’s forensic linguistics or all sorts of things with contemporary societal relevance.
Yeah, it’s a monthly episode, comes out beginning of each month. It’s part of the Aston Originals series of podcasts and videos here at Aston University. And it’s available both on YouTube in video format and also audio on all of the major providers of podcasts. So, if you search for CorpusCast, all one word, online, you’ll find it.
Hedvig: And do you need to be a linguist to get something out of it?
Robbie: No. I mean, I would say that obviously having some understanding of linguistics will certainly help when the conversations maybe dive into some of the more technical aspects occasionally. But on the whole, the idea behind the podcast is really less about the technical detail and more about the so what? How is corpus linguistics potentially, or how has it made a difference and how potentially could it continue to make a difference in the future? So, no, I’d say anyone with an interest in language would hopefully get something out of it. Yeah.
Daniel: I was wondering about how being a public facing linguist works for you. It looks like you’re getting support from Aston University, which is super cool.
Robbie: Yeah, Aston have been really good. I’ve been working there as a lecturer in English language for nearly four years now, and I think quite early on they identified me as somebody who was comfortable. I have a theater background. It’s my sort of main hobby outside of work. I’m a performer, an actor, a singer, that sort of thing. And so, I think they kind of recognized that I was relatively comfortable in that environment, speaking to public audiences about my work. And so, kind of over time, they’ve just sort of encouraged me to do more of this sort of thing. And the podcasts CorpusCast is a big part of that, but they arrange kind of these public facing events. So, I’ve given some talks recently about swearing in bars where people are sat having a pint or whatever, and I’m stood there with a pint as well and just chatting away about the research in a totally kind of nontechnical and accessible and sort of fun way. And it’s really good fun.
Hedvig: It is really good fun. I agree. There used to be events on like that in Australia when I lived there that were really good called linguistics in the pub. We also did one with… [chuckles] My husband was in philosophy and I convinced one of the philosophers there who work on free will to go up on stage and talk about free will for 20 minutes while at the same time, in the background, I played a copy of The Sims with the bar owner because in The Sims, you can turn on free will, which is really fun.
Robbie: All right.
Hedvig: And then, I had the bar owner running around, being a little agent, exercising his free will, and the philosopher talking about free will. I love stuff like… It’s so much fun. A lot of academics think that it’s not worth it or it’s hard. It’s so much fun. It’s so worth it.
Robbie: Yeah, I think it is worth it. I think certainly in the UK, there’s an increasing kind of focus on, how do I say it, value for money, to put it bluntly, in terms of students and tuition fees and what they’re getting out of their degree experience in return. And I think that sentiment extends to the public as well, at Aston, certainly, we’re really interested in doing more and more of this kind of public engagement work and connecting with the local community. In this case in Birmingham, in the United Kingdom, which is where Aston University is, in the city center of Birmingham. But also more broadly, and I do think it’s important to make that connection as much as possible beyond the, okay, sit and write a journal article or whatever, that’s fine. And they serve really important purposes in terms of sharing your findings and having your research available for other researchers to critique and for quality purposes. But I think getting out and sort of engaging with the public where you can, I think it is important. Yeah.
Daniel: Is it part of your workload, officially?
Robbie: Yes, actually. I hesitated because I couldn’t actually remember, but, yeah, it is actually part of my job. Obviously, compared to other elements like teaching and actually doing the substantive research work. It is a smaller proportion and admin, of course, but it is there. Yeah, it is part of my job. And Aston have been great in supporting me and giving me time to work on the podcast. It’s not loads of time in that I do one episode a month, it’s light, but I wanted it to be like that from the beginning, so that it wasn’t something that I started and said, “Okay, we’re going to do weekly episodes.” And then after two months I just ran out of energy and couldn’t find the time to do it. I thought if we start with something that seems on paper to be manageable, I’d rather do that and keep that up for a long time than start something and then it just kind of fizzles out really quickly. And so far, that’s worked really well.
Daniel: And the reason I ask is that many academics are encouraged to do outreach, but you’re kind of on your own as to how to do it and you’re supposed to fit it in along with all the other stuff that you’re supposed to do. And for a lot of people, it’s just too much.
Robbie: Yeah, I mean, I think to an extent that has been part of it with some of the stuff that I do, but also a lot of the activities that I’ve done in the last couple of years have sort of been tied into other things that I am doing as part of my job anyway. For example, going out and speaking to schools and talking about linguistics there. Well, that already is something that as part of our recruitment and marketing our programs that we’re doing anyway. And you can bring in elements of the sorts of fun activities that you would do with people who are not specialists in linguistics there as well. So, there are definitely ways of tying that into activities that you are doing as part of your workload. But in the most case, I think the thing is that because with the press and communications team at Aston to do the podcast as an official Aston University podcast, that has obviously meant that they are supporting with production. I have my colleague Sam Cook from the press and comms team at Aston, who is with me for every recording online and does all of the sort of sharing and uploading and putting it out there.
Hedvig: Oh, Daniel work is what we call that.
Robbie: Yeah. [chuckles]
Daniel: Okay. [chuckles]
Robbie: And then, what I do is I have a website where I just add the links once he’s uploaded them and keep them updated.
Hedvig: Yeah. [chuckles]
Daniel: Man.
Hedvig: [crosstalk]
Robbie: So, I don’t do any editing on the episodes. I don’t do… [crosstalk] any of that stuff.
Hedvig: Tell you what, I tried to edit once, I did an interview with someone…
Daniel: Oh, I remember that.
Hedvig: I was like, “I’m going to help Daniel, I’m going to edit this audio before I send it to him and remove silences and things.” And I sent and I thought, “I’d done a really good job,” and I sent it to him, and he was like, “Can I please have the raw file?”
Daniel: It was good.
[laughter]
Hedvig: And then, I was like, “All right, okay, well, I tried my best and it wasn’t good enough. And this is not something where I have pride. So, you do it.”
Daniel: It just takes time. It just takes time to get experience with those things.
Hedvig: Yeah. Hey, we’ve come to a secret surprise part of the show that Daniel doesn’t know about.
Daniel: What?
Robbie: Uh-oh.
Hedvig: Which is, “Hedvig, guess that British dialect.” Okay, I have heard Robbie talk for a bit. And I am married to a Brit and my sister’s married to a Brit, so I consider myself somewhat of a connoisseur, even though they’re both from Lancashire.
Robbie: Okay, this is going to be interesting. [laughs]
Hedvig: Yeah. So, you’re currently living in Birmingham, are you?
Robbie: Yes, that’s right.
Hedvig: Okay. All right. So Mid or North or Wales?
Robbie: Did you say Mid, North, or Wales?
Hedvig: I’m counting out Southwest for sure.
Robbie: Okay.
Hedvig: Unless it’s like Bristol.
Robbie: Do you want me to sort of give you confirmation as you go? I can tell you that…
Hedvig: You want to say something you think is iconic?
Robbie: [chuckles] Oh, no, I think that if you make it too obvious, but it’s not something I actually say. But it is something that’s very common where I’m from. Would that help? “Oi, I like mank.” [chuckles]
Hedvig: Oh, just straight up mank?
Robbie: No. [laughs]
Hedvig: Wait, what did you say? This is going to be so… Steve is going to divorce me. This game is fun because I am a bit bad at it.
Robbie: Do you want to hear it again? Okay.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Robbie: “Oi, I like mank.”
Hedvig: Is it just Liverpool, then? These are all of Steve’s family members. I’m like, “It’s got to be one of them. Those are all the people I know.”
Robbie: Okay, okay, I’ll help you a bit more. You are in the north of England, so you’re correct there. I’m not from Wales and north of England is correct, but Manchester and Liverpool are not correct.
Hedvig: Do you hate the idea of coming from Lancashire?
Robbie: I’m not from Lancashire, so…
Hedvig: If someone said Lancashire, would you be violent about it?
Daniel: Offended?
Robbie: Well, just my reaction… Well, I’d find it funny just because it’s wrong, it doesn’t bother me. It’s just funny. [laughs]
Hedvig: Geordie?
Robbie: Yes. There you go.
Daniel: Nice.
Robbie: I mean I say that, but I don’t sound like a speaker from Newcastle really.
Hedvig: You do sound like, what’s her name? Sarah Millican.
Robbie: Well, yeah, indeed. No, I don’t sound like her. I think I did more so when I was younger. And I moved away from that area to go to university when I was 18, and I haven’t lived there full time since. I’ve still got, obviously, my family there. I go and visit regularly, but I haven’t lived in the area for a long time and my accent has changed.
Hedvig: Yeah. Okay. All right. Surprise segment over. I’m sorry to pounce that on you, Daniel.
Daniel: That was fun. Okay, let’s talk about the swearin’.
Hedvig: Yes.
Daniel: One of the things that people often say, like people who aren’t very linguistic, who don’t study this for a living, which is most people, they’re often of the opinion that, “Oh, swearing is getting so common these days, and young people swear so much more.” And is that right or is that a misconception?
Robbie: Well, it depends on when you’re comparing against. So, the work that I do is really looking at quite recent change in the last sort of two, three decades, really. And in that time frame, it’s hard to kind of say that swearing as a whole has become more common in that period. But if you go back further, then, yes, that sort of assumption really is true in the sense that there’s a lot more exposure to swearing in the media, broadly defined, and over time, the kind of standards around what is acceptable. For example, if you’re rating a film as an 18 or a 15 or whatever.
In the language, yes, there is a sort of increasing kind of liberal approach to seeing and hearing swearing in those contexts, but in recent decades it’s less a sense of really sort of do people actually, when they’re using language day to day, do they swear relatively more? There isn’t evidence from the work that I’ve done of that. The rate of swearing overall has kind of been estimated to be roughly between 0.3%, 0.6% of linguistic output. And those estimates from various data sets are relatively stable. But individual words do much more readily over time, go up and down, and you can spot those in shorter time periods.
Daniel: Okay. Now, you mentioned that abusive instances of fuck are on the wane. People aren’t doing that as often in the speech of British teens, and also that the taboo strength is weakening. Are those two things connected?
Robbie: Well, I think they’re part of the same phenomenon. So, you’re right. The paper that we’re talking about is looking at teenage speakers in casual conversation, in conversations with other teens. And I think that’s an important point to make because there’s a lot of variation socially and contextually in the use of swearing. And in this context, we’re looking at people within the same level of the hierarchy, so to speak, in terms of power. And they’re very familiar with each other, they’re friends with each other and it’s comparing two data sets, one from the early 90s and one from less than a decade ago really. In similar sorts of circumstances in terms of teenagers in the London and sort of southeast of England area. And, yes, there’s very little evidence in this particular context of people using fuck to sincerely offend or abuse or cause someone harm. It’s just not really there.
And so that does sort of logically go hand in hand with the idea that maybe the strength of this word in general in casual conversation among teenagers is weakening over time because what you do see in the more recent data is a lot more fixed sort of idiomatic usage of fuck. It’s significantly more often that you see fixed expressions like “for fuck’s sake,” “what the fuck,” etc., where you kind of lose the sense of fuck as a word having its own kind of meaning and more kind of it’s a single unit that you see “for fuck’s sake.” You almost treat it as a single word because it’s these fixed idiomatic expressions.
Hedvig: So, I really want to fit in with Zoomers, just another recurrent theme in this show.
Daniel: Yes, it is.
Hedvig: If they’re not saying fuck anymore, what are they saying?
Robbie: Well, it’s not that they’re not saying fuck anymore. But rather using it differently.
Hedvig: How can I be cool and offensive? [chuckles]
Daniel: [chuckles] So stick with the expressions, “What the fuck?” And, “For fuck’s sake,” and “I fucking…” wait. What about intensifier fuck?
Robbie: Well, that is the other really common function as well. On the one hand you have the idiomatic fixed expressions that have really increased in frequency and then another usage of fuck is as an emphatic intensifier. And that is very, very common, that has been common for a much longer period of time, but that is still very much dominant in terms of the usage. And again that is also associated with the idea that the taboo strength and really the actual sort of meaning as a word of fuck.
Hedvig: Yeah, a gist.
Robbie: if you say, “Oh, that was fucking ridiculous.” What does the word fucking mean? Other than…
Hedvig: Very.
Robbie: …very, very, very… making the force of the adjective stronger? Does it mean anything beyond that?
Hedvig: No.
Robbie: No, not in that case. And if you look at the origins of the word “fuck,” fuck has been observed in many languages. Obviously, I focus on English, but you see it all over the place. It’s been observed for centuries and the earliest kind of attested meaning that linguists have found is essentially this idea of striking or hitting something. And then over time that sort of became more exclusively associated with sexual intercourse. And I don’t need to spell it out how you can make a connection between repeatedly striking something and sex.
Hedvig: Yeah. There is the expression, hit that.
Daniel: I’ll hit that.
Robbie: Yeah, exactly. Apparently, I wouldn’t know. [laughs]
Daniel: Oh, come on.
Robbie: And then, it’s really more recently in the last century or two where that has then generalized into these much vaguer, less contentful meanings.
Hedvig: It’s interesting to me where intensifiers and stuff like that come from. I did a little survey of Swedish intensifiers and their etymology ones. I’ve been meaning to write a paper about this and I never get around to, but I found that a lot of them came from poop.
Robbie: All right.
Hedvig: There was [Swedish words] and something else and there were some words, and they were so worn down semantically that people had no idea that… some of them, like shit, people still knew meant shit. But there were some older ones, I was like, “Oh, this one looks a bit weird. I have no idea what that is.” I looked into it and I was like, “Oh, it’s poop.” And looking into another one, it’s like, “Oh, it’s poop again. Okay.”
[chuckles]
Daniel: And people just didn’t know? Like it had become so opaque etymologically or…
Hedvig: At least two of them were really opaque. The [Swedish words] are like people know that.
Daniel: Yeah.
Hedvig: Once something becomes an intensifier, even if it starts for negative stuff and then it goes into neutral stuff and then it goes into positive stuff as well, your semantics are just going out the window. You don’t need anything anymore.
Robbie: Yeah. And actually, that is what has been shown to have happened with fuck. There’s a chapter by [unintelligible 00:58:08], who is a legend, if you will, in pragmatics and corpus linguistics, demonstrating exactly that that you have more of a sort of neutral spread of positive and negative emphasis with fucking more recently, which is exactly as you say. Maybe I don’t really like looking into the crystal ball with language, because I think…
Daniel: [chuckles] I was going to ask this question.
Robbie: Potentially, a bit of a fool’s game, because I could say something and then you could look back and go, “Oh, he said that’s going to happen. He was completely wrong,” because there’s so many unpredictable things in terms of what especially when you’re talking about a specific word. But maybe similarly to the example you just gave, there may come a point where speakers are using fuck in these generic, if you will, ways, and it may get to a point where they don’t even necessarily recognize the association with sexual intercourse, for example. That may go. I mean, I’m not going to say that it will, but it might.
Daniel: “You know that word fuck? Did you know that used to be about sex?” “Really? I had no idea.”
Robbie: Yeah, that could happen because as you say, it has happened with other words. It’s already happened with fuck in the sense of… it’s been long enough since the general meaning of hitting and striking. I mean, I don’t think there’s anybody who would really know that unless they’d actually researched the origins of it, that has gone right. Nobody would really know that. So maybe the same will happen eventually with sex.
Daniel: Yeah. So do you think that’s going to happen as well with the other big six. You know what? I was so taken by the term big six, I’ve forgotten what the big six are. Could you, A, remind me what they are and then, B, predict what they’re going to do?
Robbie: Yes, the big six, in a way, it’s a bit arbitrary in the sense because I think there are far more than six so called big swear words. But, yes, I mean, this is a term that is floating around. The other five, I wrote them down myself are cunt, cock, ass, shit and piss. Again, to an extent, it already is happening. With shit, for example, that is a swear word that has significantly increased in British English casual conversation in the last few decades. Unlike fuck, which is the most popular overall, but it’s remained stable in the data that I have available, whereas shit has actually increased significantly in the last few decades. And again, it’s maybe not so far down this path, but again, there are lots of examples where shit, you can see it as an emphatic intensifier as well. I’ve definitely found myself saying things like, “Oh, shitting hell,” [chuckles] things like that, possibly.
With others, some of them potentially so far gone that you might not even consider them a swear word anymore in a lot of contexts. I mean, like ass, for example, is probably far less likely to be censored in public context compared to a word like fuck or cunt. It’s generally a weaker word, I think, in the British context anyway. But obviously there is a lot of variation culturally around these terms.
Hedvig: Oh, there’s that whole thing, which is a phrase that I liked, which I don’t know how offensive, like something-something my ass, I guess. Like a lot of Americans who think of as prude will still say that. So, yeah, maybe you’re right. Yeah.
Daniel: “Oh, my ass, that’s spicy. No way.”
Hedvig: Yeah.
Robbie: [laughs]
Daniel: I was really surprised to see piss on the list of big six because that’s had an interesting path. The word “piss” occurs in the King James version of the Bible six times.
Robbie: Really?
Daniel: And it must have been considered pretty mild. “The warriors cut off all of them that piss against the wall,” which means they killed all the men.
Robbie: Ah, okay, that’s interesting. I think, with piss, it is interesting because I think there is a sort of divergent path in terms of the strength, for example, between American English and British English. I hear a lot in American sort of TV shows and films. If someone’s pissed, it means that they’re angry, but in British English, you’d be more likely if you want to say someone’s angry, you’d say they’re pissed off. In British English, if someone’s pissed, you’re more likely to be saying that they’re drunk.
Daniel: Australians too.
Robbie: Rather than that they’re angry, which I think has an effect on maybe the perceived strength of that word in that case as well.
Daniel: What about AF? The expression “as fuck,” like horny AF or…
Hedvig: Hot AF.
Daniel: Is that part of a reticence to swear in certain quarters of the internet?
Robbie: Well, you’re right, this is clearly a term that has spread online social media.
Daniel: From African American English, of course.
Robbie: And again, it’s coming from one of these fixed idiomatic expressions, something as fuck. And that is one of those expressions that is a lot more common in the data that we looked at in this recent paper. And you do now actually see people saying that AF instead of as fuck when they’re speaking as well, which is kind of an interesting kind of exchange of something that emerged in speech, moving into computer media communication, then being pushed back again in a new form.
Hedvig: Like wtf, lol.
Robbie: Yeah, lol. I used to say lol, maybe not so much anymore, but I went through a phase when I was at university of saying lol, yolo, words like that.
Hedvig: [crosstalk] -more, how do you say, pan…? What’s it called when your face doesn’t have emotion? Deadpan.
Daniel: Deadpan.
Robbie: Deadpan. Yeah.
Hedvig: Lol is better than more deadpan.
Daniel: Lol.
Robbie: I love that. [chuckles]
Daniel: So, it sounds like what we’re seeing is that fuck is still incredibly popular, but what people intend by it is changing. And I guess we’re saying that what swearing is is kind of changing too, a little bit.
Robbie: Well, I think swearing is really interesting anyway because there still remains quite a big sort of gap, if you will, between the kind of everyday what people assume swearing is and what it does, as opposed to what linguistic research and research from other fields, like psychology, cognitive science fields in cognitive science. What is swearing doing either interaction or internally in the brain, and the biggest gap in perception is that swearing is the idea that swearing is just inherently this bad thing that people do, and they shouldn’t do it because it’s always bad. And then the kind of social scientific perspective which is saying, well, actually it can be used to do harm. Of course, it can offend and it does in many contexts. But in addition to that, it’s also doing all sorts of other things which are nothing at all to do with intending harm or causing harm or being perceived to be harmful at all. And I think that is the real difference.
There’s some really fascinating work. There’s a psychologist called Richard Stephens, he’s at Keele University in the UK and he’s published extensively on the effects of swearing in the brain and he’s found really interesting stuff around how swearing out loud can help you perform physical tasks for longer. It can boost your endurance. It can boost your strength. It’s sort of looking at the cathartic effect of swearing, but from a…
Daniel: Reducing pain. Mm-hmm.
Robbie: Yeah. That suggests that there are positive applications of getting people… for example, in a workout, maybe you start telling personal trainers, “Hey, if you want your client to go further, you should encourage them to start yelling out fuck and other swear words in the middle of the gym.” I’m not sure how popular that would be [crosstalk] that sort of stuff. And from a communicative perspective, yes, I mean, we’ve been talking about these functions, if you will, of fuck that are nothing to do with causing offense. In casual conversation, it’s in the vast majority of cases to do with helping the conversation flow, signaling your solidarity. You’re probably sort of, maybe even conscious of if you’ve got a new colleague or if you’re meeting someone new and you want to kind of break the ice and sort of show, it’s okay, we’re friends. We’re on the same level.
You might modify your language to include some of this more taboo stuff. Drop in an F bomb here or there to sort of show solidarity, that sort of thing. So there are all sorts of totally harmless usage, obviously humor as well. I mean, swearing is very effective in storytelling, and I think that’s why you see it so much in stand up comedy, because the knowledge of the fact that it’s a taboo word, even if you’re not offended by it, can help with emphasizing or something or making something funnier.
Hedvig: But this thing about telling little kids not to swear to me seems to be part of a larger discussion about how to deal with the fact that what you’re trying to teach your child probably is that there are different registers, there are different domains where certain things are appropriate and certain things aren’t. And it’s hard to teach all those nuances. So, one easier way to do it is to just teach your child one register that you think is the least offensive in all circumstances, but then they’re soon going to discover that if you speak like that all the time, that might not work either. You have to adapt. Like, you probably, generally most people don’t swear so much when they write, but you swear more when you speak. We know these things. We know them through exposure.
And I think that language teaching in school and parenting is going through this thing of, stop talking about correct and incorrect and talking about appropriate for a setting and saying, “Look, if you’re applying for a job, you probably shouldn’t swear in your resume.”
Robbie: Yeah.
Hedvig: That’s probably a good advice, right?
Robbie: Yeah, definitely. But I think you make a really good point in that. Language is so complex, the human brain is so complex. And linguistics at its heart, it might be just simply about trying to articulate and understand how it all works, especially in educational contexts. If you’re teaching anything, it necessarily involves potentially oversimplifying something. So, I can totally see how appealing and convenient it is in the context of swear words to just basically say, “Here’s a list of words you should never say because they’re bad.” I totally get that because that is so much easier than bringing in the nuance of saying, “Well, actually, if you’re just hanging out with your friends, then you can say fuck all you like because it probably isn’t going to cause anyone any harm. But if you’re in this situation, you shouldn’t say that.” And if you’re bringing in the nuance and all of these kind of conditional circumstances where sometimes it’s okay, sometimes it’s not, which better reflects the reality of how people actually use language, but is much harder to teach and also brings in much more opportunity for someone to get it wrong.
I do think that there is something about, like swear words. Really, what is this about when we’re talking about what’s appropriate and what’s not appropriate? Is it actually about swear words as this kind of list of words that we’ve identified? Or is it just about language can be used to cause harm… I could really offend somebody without using a swear word at all.
Daniel: I think it’s also about power because children… I mean, yeah, children aren’t good at switching because they are still growing in their social knowledge. But also, swearing is power language. And we have this idea children shouldn’t have power. And that’s why women were also forbidden to swear. It wasn’t socially acceptable for women to swear because they shouldn’t have power either, according to that standard. So, there’s a number of things going on here.
Hedvig: But it’s also, I have to say it’s fun that it’s a little forbidden.
Daniel: [chuckles] The allure.
Hedvig: If you had parents and teachers who are like, “Swearing is totally fine, you can do it all the time,” then that does rob the swear words of their power. And that’s also why we need new ones. And that’s why we grow out and wear down the ones we have. And that’s why I was hoping that Rob was going to tell me what the kids are doing now, because whatever I know is probably outdated and not cool.
Daniel: So you can be cool. Yeah.
Robbie: [laughs] I’m afraid I can’t help you there because certainly in the context of analyzing speech, to build a corpus of casual conversation that is big enough to try to generalize any kind of observation takes a long time. And so the data that I’m looking at is already a few years old, and there will be things that people are doing now in the last handful of years that aren’t captured in this data, which is why I’m so excited about advancements that are going on at the moment in AI, generally. In this case, transcription. Automated transcription, it is getting better. It’s getting better to the extent that there are currently big corpus projects, new corpus building projects that are mainly using automated transcription now, which has not been the way it’s been done until very recently. That if it’s good enough quality, if it’s accurate, will massively speed up and scale up what we can do, and mean that these data sets can be built quicker and therefore more regularly, and we’ll be able to keep a better sort of track of how language is changing over time.
Daniel: Don’t worry, Hedvig, you’re on TikTok. So, I think you have access to all the new language. I think you’re fine.
Robbie: Yeah.
Hedvig: Don’t hear them swearing that much. I also hope that they’re having sex later and they don’t drink as much, they don’t use as much drugs, so maybe they also swear less.
Daniel: Well, or they’re just sticking to that repertoire, like Robbie’s saying.
Hedvig: I’m not in the right place.
Daniel: It’s going to be embarrassing if you try to do it. It’s going to be embarrassing. It’s going to be cringe.
Hedvig: I’m willing to embarrass myself.
Robbie: But I think the process of birthing a new swear word is not something that happens overnight, because swear words, by definition, are words that are kind of widely recognized, and therefore they have to be common enough and used by an awful lot of people to be kind of agreed sort of societally that this is a swear word. And that takes time. It takes time for words to emerge and be used so widely to be recognized in that way. So, it may be that there aren’t any candidate swear words that have appeared recently that are widely used enough.
Hedvig: Tell you what, out of the semantic origin wellsprings that I’m looking at, that I’m assuming things will come from, based on the little I know so far, is words to do with sexy times, words to do with feces. And then, I know that the Dutch love a good disease.
Daniel: Disease word.
Hedvig: Cancer, stuff like that.
Daniel: Yeah, cholera. Cholera is great. It’s go-to. Hey, but are we forgetting shitgibbons? Come on. There’s a whole area… you splendid cockwomble. No, I’m talking about the compounds of like jizztrumpet… or there’s just tons of them. They’re endless. You’ve got one sort of sharp four-letter word compounded with a two-syllable object and it’s great.
Robbie: Oh, yeah.
Daniel: Shitgibbons… [crosstalk]
Robbie: Oh, yeah, there are so many.
Daniel: Fucknuggets.
Robbie: That’s right.
Hedvig: Do people use those actually?
Daniel: They were pretty big a couple of years ago.
[laughter]
Daniel: Maybe it’s a bubble. Maybe the bubbles already burst.
Hedvig: I don’t know. I just don’t hear that. [crosstalk]
Robbie: I do like fuckwit. That is one that I use.
Daniel: Yeah, classic.
Hedvig: I do like that one too.
Daniel: Hey, we need to wrap it up. But, Robbie, I got one more question for you. You’re a public linguist… Oh, sorry, public facing. You’re a public’-facing linguist, we’re public facing linguists. What have you learned from CorpusCast that you can share with us? Some advice or something that you try to keep in mind when you’re doing your thing?
Robbie: Well, first of all, I’ve learned not to be afraid to just email somebody, even if they are a very senior person in the field, which I’m not. And even if they’re somebody that I’ve never met before, because I would say the acceptance rate of guests that I’ve invited to come on has been very high.
Daniel: People are super cool about it.
Robbie: There’s probably only one or two who’ve said no, and that’s only because they just don’t really like doing that sort of thing. Not because they didn’t want to. Or they were embarrassed about being associated with me. The vast majority of people I’ve asked have just enthusiastically been like, “Oh, yes, that would be great. Thank you.” So that’s one thing.
I think the other thing is something that I’m glad I’ve done is that obviously each interview is unique and it’s on a completely different topic, and everybody’s got their own story to tell. One thing I’ve tried to do is at least for one or two of the questions I’ve asked more or less the same question to everybody and compiling over time how all these different people, because we’re up to nearly, well, one episode a month for two years. So, nearly 24 episodes. By December, we’ll have had 24 episodes, some with more than one guest, some have two or three. And asking all of these corpus linguists the same one or two questions and looking at how they answer them has been really interesting.
And actually, the Sydney Corpus Lab in Sydney has compiled sort of transcribed snippets of these questions that I’ve asked the first year’s worth of guests and made them available on their website, in a blog. And it’s just really nice to kind of see the bits where they overlap and also the bits where they vary. One of the things that they say, almost without fail, when I ask students who are interested in corpus linguistics say, if you an undergraduate or a postgraduate or post PhD student, what’s the one bit of advice to somebody who’s starting out as a researcher in this area? And almost without fail, they say, “Learn how to code.” That’s something that I didn’t do, and I wish that I did. It’s been really interesting. I do really enjoy it. Really do enjoy it. Yeah, it’s good fun.
Daniel: We do have such a question. Maybe I’ll ask that of you right now. Is it okay if I ask you the question that I ask everybody?
Robbie: Sure, go ahead.
Daniel: Tell me something about language that you think is really, really cool.
Robbie: [laughs]
Daniel: You’re thinking of something. You’re thinking of something, what is it?
Robbie: Yeah, that is a good question.
Daniel: It doesn’t have to be deep.
Robbie: Well, I would go to the concept of collocation…
Daniel: Oh.
Robbie: …which is the way that words are patterned in their co-occurrence. You get repeated strings of words that seem to stick together nearby each other over and over and over again, and other combinations that very rarely have ever kind of appear near each other. And learning about collocation and the way that language is so much more, there’s so much more recycling of fixed expressions that we use over and over and over again. Before I went to university and started studying linguistics, I just had no idea. I hadn’t thought about that at all. And when I started learning about that my mind was blown. And obviously from a corpus linguistics perspective, that is a really useful concept to bear in mind because one of the main things you want to do is find patterns, find repeating patterns of language. I’d say that kind of element of what people have learned about language is just so interesting. And when I first heard about it, my mind was blown. [laughs]
Hedvig: So, are you saying that even though we can make entirely unique, never-before-heard sentences, we just don’t?
Robbie: Well, that’s what’s really interesting because you can play a game on Google or any of a search engine. You can sort of put in quotes, you can start typing a sentence. And then even though so much of language is recycled in these short chunks, you can get five or six or seven words even. And you already will retrieve zero hits for that very specific quote combination of words. And that for me is just incredible because you both have the fact that language relies so much on these chunks, units that are longer than one word long and associations of meaning between different words. But also, it’s almost infinitely creative in that we can create very easily new, never-heard expressions before. And I just find that so interesting.
Hedvig: I was going to say exactly the opposite. So, this is fun.
Robbie: Oh, no.
[laughter]
Daniel: Like how, Hedvig? Just that we’re capable of creativity but we don’t.
Hedvig: Yeah, if you look at corpora and you’re like, what do people say? They’re like, “Hello, my name is… I have a dog… [crosstalk]”
Robbie: Yeah, so we’re capable of it doesn’t mean we do it loads.
Daniel: No, but I think you’re both right. I think Robbie’s got it right in that when we get to six or seven grams, they start getting really unique. But when it comes to phatic expressions or just the stuff we say every day… like, I was looking at a bad news report of a fire. And of course, you know what the fire did? It ripped through a place. I could predict what it was going to do because we always talk that way. There are these habits. I’m a big believer in construction grammar, even though I hardly understand it.
Hedvig: Yeah. So, we’re all saying the same thing.
Robbie: I think so.
Hedvig: Okay. [laughs]
Daniel: [chuckles] As you’d expect.
Hedvig: We can do a lot, and I’m saying, isn’t it fun that we don’t, and you’re saying, isn’t that fun that we kind of do, though?
Robbie: That’s possible.
Hedvig: It’s possible.
Robbie: You’re right. Again, I work a lot with frequency data, being a corpus linguist, and yes, so many things that you find in corpora, you’ve got a small number of expressions that are really, really, really frequent and then you get this tale of a large set of very rare items. This is a very common pattern that you see in all sorts of contexts. And I think that demonstrates exactly that point.
Daniel: All right. We’ve been talking to Dr Robbie Love of Aston University. He’s the host of CorpusCast. How do people find it? Just look for CorpusCast.
Robbie: Yeah. Look up CorpusCast, you’ll find it online and, yeah, do join us and give it a go, give it a listen. Thank you.
Daniel: And we’ll also put a copy of your paper on our website, becauselanguage.com. The paper is called Corpus-pragmatic perspectives on the contemporary weakening of [emphatically] fuck: The case of teenage British English conversation.
Hedvig: [crosstalk]
Robbie: [laughs] Yeah, that was a bit weird, but let’s roll with it.
Hedvig: Okay. All right.
Daniel: Dr Robbie Love, thanks so much for hanging out with us today.
Robbie: Thanks so much. It’s been great fun. Thanks a lot.
Daniel: It’s time for our favorite game. Related or Not.
Ben: [in a singsong voice] George isn’t at home. Please leave a message after the beep. Love that. Please, please continue, Daniel, I want to play this game. I want to beat Hedvig. Those are two deep drives that exist within [Hedvig laughs] my core being.
Daniel: Well, you’re going to have to beat me as well, because I’m playing too.
Ben: I’ve been waiting so long for you to say it, Daniel.
Daniel: It occurred to me that when I said a sentence, I said, “I can ride down that road forever.” And I thought, “Hmm, ride, road.”
Ben: Oh.
Daniel: When you ride, you can ride on a road.
Ben: Sir, you bring only the most scrumptious of etymological questions. I do, I like this one. It’s nice.
Daniel: It’s fun, isn’t it? So, all right, let’s have some guesses. Ride and rode, do they tie back to the same word somehow, or is the similarity between them merely coincidental?
Ben: Same, related. Putting it in there.
Daniel: Okay, Ben’s got a guess for related. Do you have a feeling as to why?
Ben: I genuinely think the most boring explanation is, “He rode that way.” Like the place where I rode, blah, blah, blah. Until eventually it was just like the London rode. It was like the [crosstalk] way that.
Daniel: Past tense even sounds the same.
Ben: “The way that I rode to London.” “Oh, you mean on…” “Yeah, London.” And it just kind of like [onomatopoeia] and so rode.
Daniel: All right. Hedvig, are you taking the faye feast?
Hedvig: I have bad news.
Daniel: What?
Hedvig: While you were talking, I was continuing my investigation into mother and father.
Daniel: Yes?
Hedvig: And now that Ben explained his thing, I understood what the question was.
Daniel: Oh, okay. That’s good news.
Hedvig: I don’t think they’re related.
Daniel: Okay. Not related.
Ben: Good. This is fun, because one of us will win and one of us will lose as God intended.
Hedvig: Yes.
Daniel: My guess was…
Ben: No, let her explain, Daniel.
Daniel: Please explain.
Ben: Let her give the thinking. Come on.
Hedvig: I think road, as in the way, the street, I think is an old thing related to route.
Daniel: Ah, right. Dang.
Hedvig: I think rode, I think it has to do with horses and rider and… yeah. I don’t know. I think they’re different. I don’t know. I have a hunch. I have explained myself.
Daniel: I think you’ve done a great job. My guess was not related. Even though it was normal for words with a vowel change to be related to each other, I remembered that ride was once rīdan with the silent e pronounced it wasn’t silent, which to me made the connection seem less likely.
Ben: Oh, I’m not liking how this is going for Ben.
Daniel: Answer. Ben wins. They’re related.
Hedvig: Fuck off.
Daniel: They both go to Proto-Indo-European, Hreydʰ- to ride, and that’s as simple as that. They are related.
Hedvig: Fuck off.
Ben: For the exact reason that I said like the most boring of possible reasons.
Daniel: Well, I don’t know if the past tense rode worked its way into rode, but they do certainly both go back. On the other hand, having a route, taking a different route pathway is not related. It’s from Latin rupta, that is to say, a place that you break through, you rupture.
Ben: Oh, like a mountain pass or…
Daniel: You’ve got to hack away through that.
Ben: …a road going through a city gate or something like that.
Daniel: That is correct. Okay. This one is also from Lenika. Lenika making a couple of appearances on this show. Thanks. Lanika says, “Related or Not, core, like your ab muscle group, and corset like the clothing item. This came up when my friend was complaining that her abs were tired from dancing, and I said she should wear a corset so she wouldn’t have to use her abs. And it got me thinking.” Okay, so core and corset, related or unrelated?
Ben: I’m coming out strong with not because I feel like that’s the less likely one. And I’m whiteknighting on this one, and I’m going to throw myself into the wrongness just for the sake of having it be an interesting segment.
Daniel: Sure.
Ben: I reckon not related. I reckon it’s a red herring.
Daniel: Okay. I can tell you my answer. I can go second if you want.
Hedvig: Yeah. Go second.
Daniel: I said nah. I bet that core, the word is really old, but I bet it didn’t really get applied to your core until the 1900s. Meanwhile, corsets are from, I guess, the 1600s, and I just thought it was too late.
Ben: What do you think, madam?
Hedvig: Corsets are French borrowing. Core also means the core of a peach or an apple core. No, I don’t think they’re related.
Daniel: Okay, since we all guessed no, I’ve got another challenge. What is the “cor” in corset? I bet that it’s French. I bet it’s from courir to run. And I don’t know why, but I thought maybe a corset runs around you somehow. Yeah, something like that. Can you tell me what the cor in corset is?
Ben: I think Hedvig will do better at this than me insofar as she speaks French. Is it related to, if I’m remembering this word correctly, corpulent? Corpusculent? Like a meme word, like—
Hedvig: Corpulent.
Daniel: Corpulent.
Ben: For large, for overweight.
Daniel: Okay. Something like that.
Ben: I think it’s related to that because it gives the illusion of being very slim.
Daniel: Hmm. Okay.
Hedvig: Hmm. Oh, and body, cor. Cor, body, corpus.
Daniel: Like corpus, huh?
Ben: Of course. Yeah, you’re probably way righter than me.
Daniel: Which is where we get corpulent, by the way.
Hedvig: And then you get corset, set is like a diminutive. So, it’s like a little body.
Daniel: The correct answer, we are all three correct. They are not related. And Hedvig you win. Of course, it does come from corpus.
Ben: Okay.
Hedvig: Fuck yeah.
Daniel: [laughs]
Ben: [crosstalk]
Daniel: Very nice. Very nice.
Ben: I doff my hat to you, madam.
Daniel: I’m giving you the win.
Hedvig: Do that. But my first answer was that was related to courgette.
[laughter]
Hedvig: And then my mind went corvettes.
Daniel: The word cor comes from Latin cor, meaning heart, and that goes back to Proto-Indo-European ḱérd. We start seeing this only in about 1882 for the core, the heart of something, the heart of the matter. And core didn’t get applied to your core muscles until 1972, as far as we can tell.
Ben: It sounds like real Jimbro slang, like it’s really come in there quite recently. “Working on my core, brah.”
Daniel: Meanwhile, corset appears in, apparently from the OED, 1299. So, my timing was wrong. And it is a diminutive of old French, cor, body. And that goes to a totally different proto-Indo-European word, [unintelligible 01:30:40] which means body or form or appearance. Now, there’s a little tag here. Ben Not the Host One, asked us on Discord since he saw the discussion, are corps and [unintelligible 01:30:48] You know how there’s the army corps? C-O-R-P-S. Because this is audio, I’m going to say corpse. And in fact, the army corps, they used to pronounce it like that, so I’m going to say it like corps. Okay. He asks, “Are core and corps related or just homophones?”
Hedvig: This is the same question again, because of the army corps’ body.
Daniel: It is. It’s the same question. Now, there is a Scottish word core, meaning the people, C-O-R-E, and that is just French corps, spelled like it sounds. But otherwise’, no. Corps comes from Latin corpus, body, you are the body of men. So, this is why corps, as in army corps, is related to corset and to corpse and to corpulent, but not to your core or the heart of something.
Ben: And also to corpse.
Daniel: And also to corpse.
Ben: Like a dead body, right?
Hedvig: Yeah, dead body.
Daniel: Yep, that’s correct.
Ben: Cool.
Hedvig: And corpus, as in a linguistic corpus, is a body of text.
Daniel: A body of text. There we go. So, you two, Ben and Hedvig, you both win today’s show. And thanks to Lenika for that puzzle. Keep them coming in. You can just send those to us on our Discord if you’re a patron or hello@becauselanguage.com.
[interview begins]
I’m talking to Dr Rob Drummond, Professor of Sociolinguistics at Manchester Metropolitan University. He’s written a new book called You’re All Talk: Why We Are What We Speak. Hey, Rob, thanks for coming on, having a chat.
Rob: You’re welcome. It’s a pleasure.
Daniel: I first became aware of your work because you did a chart, and it was the chart about linguistic knowledge and linguistic pedantry. And when people get a little bit of linguistic knowledge, their pedantry goes through the roof, but then as they get more knowledge, then it goes down. And I’ve used that chart a lot of times in classes and stuff. When did you do that chart?
Rob: That’s so good. I did that quite a few years ago.
Daniel: I know.
Rob: Yeah. And I can’t quite remember when it was, and I remember exactly where I was. I was in a hospital waiting room with one of my kids for something, and we were just chatting about stuff. It kind of came to me, and I remember kind of jotting it down on a piece of paper, thinking, “Oh, this is quite clever.” And then I just made it into something. So, originally, I think I put it out on Twitter just as that sketch, and then people got interested in it and I made it a bit prettier. And, yeah, no, it was great. I hadn’t forgotten about it, but, yeah, I haven’t used it for a while, but yeah, I still stand by that. Although I added a bit a few years ago, I added this kind of post pedantry kind of blip where there was an extra bit, because that was quite an interesting thing. I decided that kind of anti-pedants. Then they’re in danger of looking around, looking around for things to be crossed about… [crosstalk]
Daniel: The new pedantry, right?
Rob: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that’s great. No, I’m glad that’s still doing the rounds, because, yeah, I was quite pleased with that.
Daniel: Well, I guess what I want to say is you’ve been at this for quite a while, this whole linguistics and public linguistics thing.
Rob: Yeah, I think so. I think that’s always what’s interested me, to be honest. I really like doing all the work, I really like doing all the research, but I especially like then trying to communicate that to maybe a non-academic audience. Part of that is simply because I’m surrounded by really, really clever sociolinguists. There are some kind of phenomenal people around. I’m quite clever, but I’m not that clever. But I think what I am quite good at is communicating that, and I think it needs all sorts. I think academia needs the people who are at the forefront of new theories and all this, and then it needs people who kind of understand what’s going on and can maybe communicate it in a different way. And I think I fall more into that side.
Daniel: I feel that. I feel that because that’s exactly where I’m at. And by the way, I’m not very clever, that’s not a thing that not very clever people say. Not very clever people will say, I’m clever, but to be able to say, “Yeah, I’m clever, but I’m not that clever.” But anyway, you have that skill of being able to communicate to a lay audience, which is something that we really need, because I think that linguists are in a position to make the world a little bit of a better place. And in fact, you have written, the world will be a better place if people knew just a bit more about how we communicate.
Rob: Yeah, and I think that’s true. I think personally, I think everyone could benefit from some sociolinguistic training specifically, but I think language in general, I think that’s important. But I think looking at all of the things when we teach our undergrads, and it’s always such a nice subject to teach, because everyone, even if people don’t really understand what it is when they first come to it, it sparks an interest in, and I think, almost everyone someone recognizes something in themselves. And then some of the things we’re teaching people, or some of the things we’re encouraging people to realize for themselves, it’s like switching on a bit of a light bulb and they think, “Oh, no, actually, yeah, what I’m doing isn’t really that kind of fair, and this is a nicer way of thinking about things.” And of course, language is so central to everything. It’s so central to almost everything we do. So, of course, I think it’s really important.
Daniel: Okay, so now you’ve written You’re All Talk, a book about accent and the kinds of prejudice that can follow it. Why did you decide that this was a good angle to work from, to try to make the world a better place?
Rob: I think it’s something that I’ve been interested in for a long time. So, in terms of accents generally and how the way we speak relates to who we are and this is only a gradual thing that happened throughout my work. When I was doing my PhD, I was looking at identity, but in quite a vague way. But then everything I’ve done since, identity has become more and more central. So, accent has always been there, I’ve always been interested in accent. And then a few years ago I was giving some talks, as you said, I like doing things, kind of public-facing things and media things and public talks. And I was just giving some talks about kind of generally about my work, about spoken language and identity. And again, it seemed to strike a bit of a chord, people seemed interested. And that was the beginning of this book.
And so, it tries to cover the whole lot history of accents, accent identity, people’s attitudes to accents. But, of course, within that comes sort of negative attitudes and prejudice. I think that’s quite a central part in what I do and what the book does. And yet, if anything is going to maybe kind of challenge people’s perceptions and make people rethink the way they behave, then I think that’s probably the bit that will do it.
Daniel: Do you think it works? We’re going to talk a little about what works today. But is the message getting out there or do you still get a lot of people who are like, “No, those people are still bad for the way they talk”?
Rob: Yeah, now that’s a really good question.
Daniel: “I’m going to stick to this until I die.”
Rob: [laughs] Okay. So, I think there’s a real debate within language, within, I guess, sociolinguistics particularly, about whether this kind of intervention or awareness raising has any effect whatsoever. And I know there are some people who think it just doesn’t. It’s a very superficial thing to do. We’re not really just changing people’s behaviors. I don’t agree. I think just by raising awareness, by making people think, I think we are doing something, it might not be okay, it’s not drastic kind of change, societal change in any way. It’s not getting to the heart of society’s inequalities but it is raising some awareness because I think often the problem is when we go in too hard with this stuff, we turn people away straight away. And so people just become more entrenched. So if you’re coming in saying, “This is a really important aspect of societal inequality and we need to challenge this.” If you’re really almost attacking people’s ways of thinking, their immediate reaction is to just kind of dig their heels in and reject it.
I think if you come in a slightly more gentle way to say, “Have you thought about it in this way?” I think you start to change people’s minds and attitudes. Not everyone, but I think that’s a more successful way of doing things. I guess it needs everything. It needs the people who are going to come in and say, “Right, we need to really change the way society exists and is created.” And that’s great. Absolutely fine. And then it needs people who are sort of willing to take a bit of a more gentle approach, maybe. So, I think it works in combination with other things.
Daniel: A multiplicity of approaches, perhaps.
Rob: Exactly. That’s what we need.
Daniel: I find that in my doing this, bringing the positivity seems to help because then people are like, “Oh, wow, there’s this guy. And you’d think that he’d be really stuffy and uptight, but actually he is just nerdily enthusiastic about language and he seems really happy. I guess I just like that guy,” or something.
Rob: Yeah, that’s it, that’s how people think about it. Look at the positive thing. Don’t keep trying to tell people off. Let people see the good, [Daniel laughs] but the good things. And I think people are more acceptable if you can then kind of gently persuade them that maybe what they’re thinking is not ideal.
Daniel: How is writing this book different from your other work in scholarly writing?
Rob: It’s been an absolute pleasure for a start, I think the biggest…
Daniel: Yeah? Okay. More fun than academic writing, do you think?
Rob: Yeah, just so much more fun for me.
Daniel: [laughs]
Rob: I do the usual academic stuff and I write articles, I write book chapters. I’ve written a book before and this was just a pleasure in that. You can kind of write what you want. You really have a voice. Now, to be fair, my academic writing, I don’t kind of subscribe to the very sort of formal, impersonal type of academic writing. Well, maybe I don’t find that particularly interesting, and I don’t find it that easy. So when I’ve written an academic book before, people have commented that it was quite personal, it was quite accessible, and so I kind of like to do that anyway. But this was even more so. You can just write, you can just throw in opinions and anecdotes, and you don’t have to worry about… of course, everything’s backed up. Everything’s sort of backed up by the research.
Daniel: Sure.
Rob: But you don’t have to be quite so kind of rigorous about the whole thing, about the whole referencing thing, because it’s a different audience. And I love the fact you can just throw in kind of personal stuff. But what struck me, so I’ve been telling anyone, a few people have asked me about this, few colleagues, what struck me was the rigor with which it was edited. So compared to… if you say somebody from the outside comes in and you got academic writing one side and you’ve got kind of mainstream, public facing writing on the other, and you got to think, “Okay, which one is more rigorous in its editing and fact checking.” And you kind of think, “Well, it’s going to be the academic stuff,” and it’s just not the case. So with academic writing, you write articles and it goes out to reviewers, peer reviewers, and they kind often give it a hard time or whatever, and then the actual editing process is really light touch, to be honest. It’s just a little bit of tweaking here and there.
This one, it was just great. Like I say, it was a bit of a shock, but they really go for it. And you kind of think, “Oh, I can write. I’m all right. I know what I’m doing.” And you send this off and it just comes back full of suggestions and just ways of making it sound better. They’re not saying you have to do this, but they just offer loads of suggestions and they’re so good. And then it goes through that editing, then it goes through a line edit when they go line by line, then it goes to the proofreaders. And it went to a sensitivity reader, sensitivity editor to make sure I hadn’t offended anyone. And it’s been great. Hard work, but great. So, yeah, it’s good.
Daniel: Let’s dig into the content. I’ve got a quote here, “In a sad pattern we shall see repeated again and again,” you write, “if you want to access the best opportunities, the first step is to speak in a similar way to those who hold the power, even if it means virtually abandoning your own voice.” What was going through your mind? Were you thinking of anything in particular, writing this?
Rob: No, I guess sort of more generally just, I guess, kind of colonial English dominance across various parts of the planet. So that on a really big scale, that idea that English speakers come in, have the power, do bad things, and then people are really forced to use that language, the language of their oppressors, in order to survive. And then even on a smaller scale, just things like within individual countries when you’re talking about varieties of a language. So even in the UK and looking at the people who have the power, whether that’s in politics or broadcasting or in the past, just the people who owned the land and had that kind of power, they spoke in a certain way and then other people were expected to use that language. So I think it can be seen in terms of different languages, but can also be seen in terms of standard varieties within the same language, that people really do feel they have to change the way they speak. Either abandon the way they speak or change the way they speak, which I think is a bit depressing.
Daniel: Well, this is not the best example of this, but I talked to a fellow in Australia, I’m living in Perth, in Boorloo, and he said that his father, a British guy, couldn’t get a job in Australia because he didn’t sound Australian. And he remembers his father looking in the mirror, trying to like I say, boohoo. This is not the best example of this, but he remembers his father trying to look in the mirror and sculpt his face in a way that would make him sound Australian so that he could get a job and feed his family. And this is a thing that plays out over lots of places all the time. And the thing that I recall taking from that is that when we don’t feel like we can speak with our authentic voice, then we all have a problem.
Rob: I think that’s right. The world is full of examples. Everyone has similar examples to that, more or less extreme. And I’ll be honest, this is something I face quite a lot because it’s never happened to me and it never will happen to me because I happen to have a voice that matches the standard variety of where I live. And it’s not a thing. But the more you learn about it and the more you find out and listen to other people’s experiences, which is what a lot of my work does, it kind of tries to elicit stories from other people. And it’s a thing, sometimes on quite a superficial scale or I don’t quite fit in or I wish I sounded more like that, and sometimes on a really, really fundamental kind of scale of existence and surviving.
Daniel: Yeah, I feel that. Again, this is not about me, but I do have the experience as someone who grew up speaking American English, now living in Australia, and I get comments, this is comments given to the organizer, “I really enjoyed the talk, but it would be also nice to have an Australian linguist talk to us,” and I say, “I am an Australian linguist.” But of course, we live in a world where how Australian you are, for many people, has a lot to do with how you sound. And once again, don’t worry about me, I’m fine. I’m playing with all the privilege in the book. But I had a student once from Singapore who couldn’t get a job teaching ESL because she had a Singaporean accent and that’s not very fashionable. And she said, “I’m not very good at accents. How can I change my accent?” She said I could share that story.
Rob: I think it’s really difficult when people kind of have that experience, because, again, we can have it even within countries, within so called native speakers. But speaking the wrong variety, the variety doesn’t give them access to the privilege. And you kind of say, “Well, should you change the way you speak?” Now, there’s kind of two answers to that, because on the one hand, on an individual level, for somebody’s individual experience in that situation, who am I to say? No, you shouldn’t. You shouldn’t change the way you speak. I can’t do that. But on a societal level, we need to challenge that. So, I think we need to be doing two things, people working in this kind of area, you need to have that kind of dual perspective. You can challenge the society that makes that change a necessity, but you can’t be going around telling individuals, “No, you shouldn’t change the way you speak.”
I can tell society that society shouldn’t demand that people change the way they speak, but I’m not going to tell this individual, because that would just be unfair, because they would be sabotaging themselves, because until society catches up with this idea, then they’ll be doing themselves harm. And this is true for… I’ve had it, especially when I did a lot of work with young people in the UK who were kind of stigmatized for various reasons, and the way they spoke was stigmatized. And they’re speaking to teachers, and they say, “Well, they’ll listen to what I’m saying,” and saying, “Well, am I supposed to tell this 16-year-old who’s got an interview for college tomorrow that he might get into to not switch his language, to speak something more formal?” I said, “Well, no, of course not. He’s got to do whatever it takes in order to navigate the system.” But we could at least give him the understanding of what he’s doing. We could at least let him know, you’re feeling obliged to do this and it’s wrong that you are feeling obliged. You do whatever you need to do, but kind of be aware of the implications of that and maybe take that forward with you to help some other people along the way.
Daniel: Yeah, once you get in, then you break it down.
Rob: Yes. Once you get in, that’s it.
Daniel: Create the space.
Rob: Yes, exactly.
Daniel: Like, I would rather break linguistic fascism down than help people learn how to pass. I mean, I understand why they want to pass but they’ll just get them on something else because it’s not about language. But that’s not my call. Ben’s answer, Ben’s not with us right now, but he always has a very good answer because he’s a schoolteacher, and his approach is, “Teach students the game, but call out the game.”
Rob: Oh, nice.
Daniel: Say, “I’m going to teach you how to speak to standardized variety. But I also want to tell you what’s going on here, that what is considered standard is about power and privilege and things like that.”
Rob: That’s it. That’s the way to think about it, definitely.
Daniel: Yeah. So, let’s talk about your experiences, because another thing that I’m aware that happened was that as a public facing linguist, you caught some flak, and you write about this in the book as well from right wing media. You were put up there as some sort of woke linguist or something. What happened there?
Rob: Yeah, I kind of faced that a few times over the years, but it got a bit spectacular a couple of years ago.
Daniel: Yeah, it sure did. [laughs]
Rob: I think fundamentally it’s because generally people have quite conservative views about language, and they don’t always take kindly to some kind of smug, bald academic telling them that they’re doing something wrong. And so I used to pop up on breakfast TV quite regularly in the past, and then it would be something really kind of mundane about, I don’t know, me telling people that apostrophes aren’t important anymore, or people shouldn’t worry about slang and all sorts of things. And then I get a bit of kind of online stuff on Twitter just saying, “Who is this guy?” But the best one was in July 2021, a couple of years ago, and it was a debate on a kind of a morning TV program, a bit more kind of a bit over to the right, I guess, morning TV program. It was about accent. The story that sparked it was about whether it was okay to mimic foreign accents. The story that sparked it was a guy who owned an Italian restaurant, and he was fed up with people kind of putting on fake Italian accents in his restaurant and kind of taking the mickey. And so that was the story that sparked it.
Daniel: Were they accommodating or were they taking the piss?
Rob: They were taking the piss, 100%, yes. He was just like people putting on kind of mock Italian accents. Definitely not. So that was what sparked it then. They sort of wanted to have this debate, so they had me on to say, “I think it’s bad. I don’t think we should be imitating people’s foreign accents.” And then, somebody else to say, “No, it’s fine. You’re too sensitive about all this.” So, we did it, and it was fine. We had this debate. It kind of went the way I thought it would. I said what I wanted to say, it was all right. And then it was literally just later that morning, I was just doing some work. I was working at home and just went to make a cup of tea and had a look on my phone. And someone had pointed out there was an article in the Daily Mail, which is kind of a very sort of populist, right wing, kind of tabloid newspaper.
And, yeah, that was just a big picture of me and just saying with the headlines saying, “This bloke is destroying British comedy, because I—” [crosstalk]
Daniel: “Shame on you for destroying British comedy.”
Rob: Yeah. And I can only apologize to everyone for having done that two years ago.
Daniel: Can’t believe it.
Rob: So, I don’t know what’s going on since. But, yeah, it’s only because some of the examples, obviously, they were bringing up all these examples of, I don’t know, kind of faulty towers or all of [crosstalk] these old comedy programs. The whole comedy rests on these kinds of foreign accents. And there’s me pointing out there, “Maybe we should at least think about why we’re doing all this.” And then it got picked up, obviously, online. And then somebody called me Professor of Woke. And then it was just, as always, the story actually wasn’t that bad. The story was quite a fair reflection of the conversation. It was just the comments. They just come in thick and fast about, “Who does this guy think he is?” And, again, on the one and then a few people sort of contacted me, a few friends said, “Are you okay about all this?” I thought was very nice.
And I am, of course, it’s fine. But it did make me think like we were talking about before, I’m very lucky, I have this all this privilege, and I’m educated, middle class white man, and I just… so it didn’t really bother me, and I’m quite confident in what I’m doing, and I kind of expect it, and I put myself out there, but it did make me think, “Well, hold on. So, if there was somebody in a less secure position or a less. It really doesn’t encourage people to do public facing stuff if soon as you put your head vaguely above the parapet, you just get all this abuse.” And I’m sure other people could handle it just as well or even better than I did, but some people wouldn’t, and I think it’s a real shame.
So, on the one side of it’s quite funny having all these people that you’ve never met making really quite bizarre comments about you and about your appearance and everything, and then thinking, “Hold on, this could really be really, really hurtful to somebody.” So, yeah, it’s a strange one, but it was quite funny at the time. And I did cling on to the Professor of Woke thing and kept that going for a bit. I thought it’s quite like.
Daniel: An enviable title that goes straight into the Twitter bio.
Rob: Yeah, exactly. That’s where that goes. I liked it.
Daniel: It doesn’t sound like you would have done anything differently, but any lessons learned? Just walk it off or any advice for anybody?
Rob: No, in terms of advice, I would just say think of the worst that could happen and just think, “Would I be prepared to do it?” I think you can expect you will get some kind of backlash, but then you’ll also get lots of people saying, “Oh, well done, thanks for saying that.” And that was really important. It outweighs. It’s literally just one person saying, “Oh, do you know what? That really resonated. That really kind of changed the way I thought about that. Thanks for doing that.” Just one of those is worth 20 people just saying, “Who did this guy think he is? Why is his head on upside down?” That kind of thing. So, I can deal with that.
Daniel: I feel very lucky myself because I have a weekly gig at the Australian ABC on radio and I get to be out there just sharing the good word and just saying the two things. It’s normal for people to use language differently, it’s normal for language to change. I just say those things over and over again and I feel really, really lucky that I get to put that message out there. And it does work because the things that the audience says, the audience feels different now than it did six years ago when I started doing that. Except that there’s one thing that keeps happening and that is that the presenters keep telling me they said a word a certain way, like they said impordand with a D or they said uz instead of us and people called in and complained. And there’s this really sort of nasty mindset that goes on of like, “The presenter should say things properly, and properly means the [chuckles] way that I say things.”
And I just find that radio presenters especially, or television people, get singled out for this kind of appropriate. What do you think is going on there? Can we just dig into that a little? Because it happens so often.
Rob: It does. People see them as sort of really familiar figures and forget that they don’t know these people, just because they listen to them every day or they see their faces every day, it doesn’t mean they’re suddenly friends where this is appropriate to do this. So, yeah, I do feel for… I mean, I think anecdotally I wonder if it does happen to women, especially younger women, more than men, which adds a whole layer to it. Actually, I’m almost certain because I mentioned in the book some kind of abuse, that one presenter, Alex got, a football kind of commentator, Pundit got, and she seemed to they’re picking up on features in her speech that just aren’t even recognized in the speech of a very similar speaking male commentator. And it just seems that she was she was getting a lot more stick than her male counterparts.
I don’t know what gives… I guess we all notice it, we all notice when somebody says something a particular way. We’re linguists, we kind of notice it out of interest. “Oh, okay. Yeah. It’s interesting, they pronounce it that way,” but in the past, before you have that awareness, yeah, you might kind of pick up on the way something says something. And I don’t know, you might make a comment if it’s someone you know.
Honestly, I don’t really get what then gives someone that energy even to then write an email to sit down, get your phone out, and actually write an email to point out somebody’s incorrect allegedly pronunciation. I don’t know. I don’t get it.
Daniel: Well, I don’t really I love what our pal Kelly Wright, who’s been on the show before, she’s African American and she said that I could quote this, by the way. I asked her because it was so good. Somebody made some sort of absurd complaint. And she said, “You had the time in your day to give one single fuck about that thing. You must have all your bills paid.” And I think she really hit on something there, because this kind of criticism is coming from people who do have their bills paid, who were well educated in a certain way, and they also feel like the media has this gatekeeping role. We’ve got to enforce linguistic standards. But as you mentioned in the book, when we think we’re enforcing linguistic standards, we’re often policing social barriers.
Rob: Yeah, absolutely.
Daniel: So, there’s that. Could we just address for a second? We are a couple of white guys, and we simply do not see a lot of the prejudice that’s leveled at women. Well, we might see it, but we don’t experience it. And it’s often kind of invisible to us. And I do ask this question of linguists of color and linguists who are women, but maybe if I could just talk to, between us two white guys, what’s our role? Because we’re the ones who know the least about this experience, and we’re the ones who people listen to the most, which is not fair, but that is how it goes. And we want to have a good impact on the world, but we also want to stay in our lane. How do we approach this?
Rob: Yeah, I think it’s difficult. I don’t think we should shy away from it. So, I don’t think our voice is irrelevant. So, yes, we might have more access in order to make our voice heard. But even if we don’t experience, I don’t experience things, I don’t think we should simply back away from all of that.
Daniel: Because it can’t be people of color, it can’t be Aboriginal people doing all the work here.
Rob: No, it can’t be that. Yeah, exactly. So we have to use that. We have to use the privilege we’ve got in terms of… I was going to say, but it sounds really patronizing in terms of amplifying those other voices. But we have to at least listen to those other voices. We have to know that our place is simply that because of the privilege we have access to making our voices heard. So therefore use that privilege in the best way you can and make sure that your voice is saying something worthwhile. And for me, that would just mean listening to other people’s stories and including those people who perhaps don’t have such a loud voice in all of your work, which is only something I’ve learned, I think, or learned and acted on more strongly over the last few years, is there’s loads of good work out there.
But if I got a choice between using this work as an example, this study A or this study B, and this study B was done by somebody who doesn’t have as traditionally allowed a voice as loud a voice as person A, then we’ll do study B. And so it’s using examples a bit more strategically. And that might be to do with gender, that might be to do with race and ethnicity, but it might be to do with age as well. And it’s kind of amplifying younger voices, basically amplifying… I have the privilege, I’m kind of a 50-year-old white guy, and I have that we don’t need to hear more voices like me. I’m not ashamed of kind of using my voice, and I like the position I have and I really enjoy talking about it, and I don’t particularly want to be silenced, but I will make sure that I’ll bring in other voices and make sure they get try and promote those other voices. And I guess that’s what we can do, what we should be doing.
Daniel: Pass the mic.
Rob: Yes, exactly that.
Daniel: It reminds me of the movement Cite Black Women, and there’s a website citeblackwomencollective.org, but for podcasters, I like to give a little different spin on it. Invite black women. Pass the mic. What advice would you have for our listeners who aren’t podcasters, who aren’t public facing, maybe, who aren’t even linguists, but we have listeners who want to make a better world, who are aware of these issues, what advice would you have for them? What should we all be doing?
Rob: I think we should all be aware of the kind of language situation around us. What I always tell my students is when they’re starting with sociolinguistics courses and/or language variation and accents and everything is I tell people to just listen, to really listen. So much of our stuff is listening. People don’t realize how much of our time we just spend listening to other people. It’s a brilliant topic, it’s a brilliant discipline to be in because there’s data everywhere. I always think you’ll never be bored. You can’t be bored as a sociolinguist because there’s always something to listen to just overhearing conversations and start to thinking about how those particular people are sounding and why they’re sounding that way. So, I think there’s always something.
So, I would say the same thing in terms of challenging ideology is to start local. And we’ve all got family members, who may be extended family members especially, who make comments that we don’t really agree with, be that to do with anything, really. But I think we can start to politely call those out. I would never encourage people to put themselves in positions where they’re going to, I don’t know, damage relationships or put themselves in danger in any way, obviously, but start calling things out, start just pointing things out where you see these things because it’s so acceptable. In the same way society changes, and we know that what was acceptable in, God forbid, in the 1970s in terms of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity, so many things that were acceptable then just clearly aren’t. Now we’ve recognized that, and things move on. But language, it’s still languishing behind that. It’s still way behind. So, people are just saying stuff that really, really doesn’t… there’s no place for it in 2023. So, we can at least start just signaling that I think, to family and friends and be that person. If you’ve already got an interest in social justice through language, you’re going to be that kind of person anyway. So, yeah, don’t feel afraid to just maybe call people out on it a bit.
Daniel: It’s hard though, because you want to preserve the relationship because in the relationship, that’s where we have our persuasive power. You don’t have that persuasive power with somebody you don’t know, but with somebody you do know, you can play the long game and try to bring them around. But it’s hard because then there’s somebody that you quite like. My partner has been with me for a long time and she’s on board with social justice and she’s on board with language and language change. And she knows everything that I would probably say because I probably said it. And yet, she’s got these weird little pockets and I’ve got these weird little pockets where someone will say a thing and it’s like, “Oh,” [laughs] and we give each other permission to kind of be terrible around each other sometimes a little bit. Say stuff we wouldn’t normally say, but, argh, just how exactly to do it is kind of hard because if you say nothing, you kind of beat yourself up afterwards. And if you say something, then you can say it wrong and it’s just correction is super risky socially.
Rob: No, it is. And I think you have to pick your battles. Definitely, without a doubt. And I agree, and within families as well, because I had this when I was talking about when I did that media stuff about foreign accents, and a lot of the comments were like, “Who does this guy think he is telling me what to do in the privacy of my own home?” And you’re absolutely right, and families have their own in-jokes as well. When all this came out, I think I mentioned, I said something about mimicking accents, and then it was my wife said, “Well, I presume this means you’re going to stop mimicking your kids’ accents because my kids have a very different accent to me because of where we live. And just like, “Okay, yeah, fair point.” This is a kind of a running joke with our family. It’s kind of one for the exposé. “Let’s make note of when Rob says something inappropriate to do with language, and it’ll all come out one day and we’re going to bring him down.”
I would never intrude on people’s internal kind of, I don’t know, family conversations and opinions. Everyone’s got a few things that it’s within the privacy of their own home. I think it’s absolutely fine. So again, it’s picking your battles and knowing what’s appropriate.
Daniel: Yes. I mean, it’s really insidious because I myself, I’ve become aware, and I’ve stopped doing it. But there was this thing that when there was an opinion, a political opinion that I disagreed with, I would give it the dopey accent. And you can imagine what kind of dopey accent it was. Like, what… It’s the accent of a certain place full of people who they’re not all stupid. There are quite a lot of intelligent people that have this accent, but it’s really insidious, even if you know and it’s kind of like I say about skepticism. Skepticism isn’t a weapon that you wield against other people. It’s a weapon that you use against yourself. And I think this knowledge about language and language attitudes, you got to work on yourself just as hard as anything.
Rob: Yeah, I think so. And I think it’s tough. Whenever you do stuff like this, it’s quite uncomfortable because you realize, “Hold on, I have these thoughts.” And that was part of the we’re talking about at the beginning, about the whole pedantry thing. That was the whole point about that little chart thing, graph, whatever it was, is that it was a process. The whole thing was a process. It’s a process that I went through, and it’s a process that everybody I’ve spoken to who’s interested also admits to going through that because when you become interested in language, you do become a bit of a pedant because you have suddenly acquired this knowledge. And there’s a kind of satisfaction. Of course, there’s a satisfaction in pointing out that knowledge that you know a bit more than other people. Everyone likes that. Everyone likes to be the expert.
So, I think then it’s quite hard to then look back at yourself and think, “Oh, hold on, maybe this isn’t appropriate, or maybe what I’ve been doing isn’t appropriate,” and that’s fine. And I think that’s true for everything. I think that’s true also across academia in terms of how you develop as an academic and as a writer and a thinker researcher, whatever. There’s probably stuff that people write. Certainly, it’s true for me that at the beginning of my career where I think I don’t actually kind of think that anymore. And that’s fine because you move on, you develop, your thinking develops, and you become more kind of nuanced maybe, or the opposite. You become more kind of entrenched in the way you believe things. And that’s absolutely fine. So I think we need to look at ourselves definitely in terms of what we’re doing.
And also, it’s fine to have preferences, I think, when it comes to language. Everyone’s got favorite words or favorite even favorite accents. I’m not against favorite accents. All I’m against is when you use that favoritism in a negative, either as preferential treatment for somebody or negative treatment for somebody else. But of course, we’re going to like the way some people speak because it’s probably related to the type of person that we know, somebody who has that accent, and we like them, and therefore we like the way that person speaks, and therefore that accent becomes attractive in our mind. So that’s okay. That’s normal.
Daniel: Yeah, we’re normal.
Rob: Yeah, it’s good.
Daniel: Let’s finish up with something that we call Lightning Round. Just quick answers to great questions. Are you ready?
Rob: Yeah, I’ll try.
Daniel: Here we go. Many people are convinced that their children are adopting an Australian accent because of Bluey or a British accent because of Peppa. The Peppa effect, the Bluey effect. Not a thing?
Rob: Not a thing. Or a very temporary thing. Very temporary thing. And also, because we pick up on tiny, tiny things, think about how accents change. It’s tiny changes. So, somebody will just say one word and think they’ve gone Australian accent or hear one pronunciation of a T sound and think, “Okay, they sound British.” No, it’ll disappear.
Daniel: Yeah. Okay. Are we losing regional accents? Because there’s a lot of stories about the Georgia accent or the US Southern accent fading away. Is it? Are we losing them?
Rob: No, definitely not losing. I think changing. That’s the thing. People are only focusing on how certain things are staying the same, but they’re not looking at other things that might be diverging, might be keeping this different. Young people around the world, in the UK, for example, young people in Leeds still speak differently from young people in London, from Liverpool, from Cardiff, from Manchester, whatever. So, they can’t be disappearing. Maybe certain things we’re watching are becoming the same, but other things we’re not watching are developing and keeping that distance. I saw the Georgia… That’s kind of my opinion on this, that things aren’t disappearing. But I can see there’s research to suggest some people in some areas are speaking in a more homogeneous way. I would suggest that if that’s the case, there’ll be other things that are emerging to keep those distances because identity is so important.
Daniel: So, accent leveling is a thing? Accent leveling happens.
Rob: Yeah, I think accent leveling happens, but I think—[crosstalk]
Daniel: But other things get different.
Rob: Exactly. And we’re focusing on things that we know. So, we’ll look at in this region, it used to be that this sound or this sound was pronounced in this way here and this way here, and now they’re gradually being pronounced in the same way. So, we’re looking at that. But meanwhile, there might be something else that we’re not really looking at which is actually even becoming more different.
Daniel: Okay. Some accents are sexy, other accents are annoying or other accents are beautiful. How many times have you seen this kind of story? And how irritating do you find it?
Rob: Yes, so many. All the time. I don’t usually find them irritating, only because it usually gives rise to an opportunity for somebody to then a linguist somewhere to be asked to comment, and at least then it kind of gets it out there a bit, of course, just doesn’t exist. There’s no such thing. Well, no, it’s interesting that people think that, and that’s of interest as well to sociolinguists. I think it’s interesting that people have those attitudes. It’s nonsense, but the very fact that somebody could say that’s interesting.
Daniel: On a related note, we’ve noticed some new work that says that when people find languages pleasing, it doesn’t have anything to do with the way the languages sound, it has to do with how familiar they are with the language.
Rob: I think it’s really interesting. There’s a nice analogy with music here, and I say that because I was in Vietnam a couple of weeks ago and we were listening to some… we had this brilliant thing where there was a shared lullaby. We had somebody from Manchester, a folk singer from Manchester singing a lullaby, a children’s lullaby, and then we had a singer from Vietnam singing a Vietnamese lullaby and we kind of merged the two together. And what struck me was—
Daniel: Oh, nice.
Rob: Yeah, it was really, really powerful. But what struck me was the musicality of the Vietnamese one to my ears, because it really sounded quite strikingly different, but it was a soothing song, but it didn’t immediately sound soothing to me. And of course, if you know anything about music, you realize that different music around the world, we have used different scales. We’re very attuned to the Western kind of scale, where we have our notes in particular intervals, but another culture will have different sets of scale, different intervals, and so we’re using different scales. And if we listen to music from somewhere else, it might not sound very musical to us, to our Western ears, in the same way.
So, I think in that way, accents are very similar. Again, yeah, definitely to do with familiarity. We find that beautiful because it’s familiar to us and we associate it. It must have some other kind of positive connotation. Whereas this is completely kind of alien to us, and it sounds kind of jarring, or it doesn’t sound as comforting. So, yeah, I agree.
Daniel: I have lived in Australia now for more than half my life, and I still sound like a dang American, and it’s really noticeable, but I don’t seem to be changing very much. Maybe I am changing my accent a little bit. What do you think is going on? Why am I not sounding Australian?
Rob: I think because of your job. You’re too aware of the way you speak. This is very similar to my own situation. [Daniel laughs] I’m from the southeast of England, and I live in the north of England, where there’s a very different accent. So, I’ve lived here for longer than I haven’t, and my accent hasn’t changed in the slightest. I think a lot of it is to do with it will never change, because I’m so aware I’m listening to accents all the time. But also, I think it’s related to people’s sense of identity. I think some people’s accents do change, other people’s accents don’t change. I’ve looked into it in my own research, and it always comes back to me. It always comes back to something to do with sort of attitude and identity and the feeling of kind of belongingness or the need to maintain a particular aspect of your own identity. But of course, yours might be changing. I don’t know if you’re kind of friends and family from where you were originally. I don’t know if they ever comment that you don’t sound like one of them anymore.
Daniel: You’re right. I have lost my cot–caught merger.
Rob: There you go.
Daniel: Yep. And I also what else? Also, the Mary–marry–merry merger. I’ve lost that one. And, oh, I’m working on a trap-bath split, which is interesting.
Rob: Very good. I like the fact that I’m working on this.
Daniel: It was weird to hear it coming out of my mouth the first time. That was very strange. So, there are things that are changing.
Rob: Yeah. There you go.
Daniel: I’m not distancing.
Rob: No, yeah, subtle changes. And I think, to be honest, equally, there are subtle changes in mine. Funny enough, it’s around trap-bath when you mentioned that.
Daniel: Oh, really?
Rob: Yeah, just a little bit I noticed myself. So, yeah, small, small changes. But honestly, I think it might be awareness that we’re hyperaware of this anyway, given the jobs we do. But also, when you’re coming from an accent which has prestige, whether that’s important to you or not, I think that probably plays a part. Your accent isn’t stigmatized at all.
Daniel: The book is You’re All Talk: Why We Are What We Speak. It’s available from Scribe Publications in the UK and Australia. We’ve been talking to author and linguist Rob Drummond. Rob, how can people keep track of what you’re doing?
Rob: Well, I’m still hanging in there on Twitter, and I might be the last person standing, I don’t know, but I’m still there @RobDrummond on Twitter.
Daniel: Rob, thanks for having a chat with us today. This has been really interesting to have you.
Rob: Absolute pleasure. It’s been great. Thanks for having me.
[interview ends]
Daniel: It’s time for Words of the Week. And our first one, angertainment.
Ben: Oh, I have not heard this one, but I think, like everyone listening, I immediately know what this is about.
Daniel: What is it about?
Ben: Well, surely the sort of last 25 years of slow decline of the fourth estate… no, longer than that, probably like 35 years mid-90s to now, the fourth estate just was like, “Hey, what if we make heaps more money by making people irate rather than informing them?”
Daniel: It’s also somebody saying, “Hey, if the media were more amenable to Republicans, Richard Nixon wouldn’t have had to resign.” So, this week…
Ben: Don’t you love how me and Daniel have different clear conspiracy leanings? Like, Daniel’s like, “Evil men want to do things for power.” And I’m just like, “It’s capitalism. It’s the money.”
Daniel: [laughs] Hey, you’re both right.
Hedvig: Ben, can you explain to the listeners, please, what the fourth estate is?
Ben: Sure, sorry. I spent so much of my day talking about it that I forget to explain it. In society, about like 200 to 300 years ago, when journalism was kind of first being a thing, people basically were like, “Hey, so there seems to be like three locuses of power in society.” There’s, like, the monarchy, the clergy, and then the mob. Essentially, like people have a kind of power if they all get together and decide to burn things down. And that morphed into the separation of powers that we have. So, like, the executive, the judiciary, and the legislative. And then basically, people from a very early stage were like, “Oh, actually, though, there is a fourth power, which is the group of people,” journalists, “who report on the actions of the other three locuses of power in society,” and that kind of collectively became known as the fourth estate.
So, the fourth estate is any media that is attempting to inform people about real things that are happening in the world. As opposed to fictional media, which is designed to artistically and culturally reflect our lived experience and allow us to experience grief without having to actually lose something and all that kind of stuff. So, it still fulfills a function, but then the fourth estate fulfills, like “This thing really happened and you need to know about it” function.
Hedvig: And? Yes, thank you very much. And then also, can you explain why you as Australian and I think particularly Western Australian, correct, have a particular interest in this week?
Ben: So, I think you’re talking about two separate things. One is a concentration of media ownership. So basically, the idea that in certain markets, depending on what happens with businesses being bought out by other businesses, you can get a Rupert Murdoch who can potentially own 95% of the media fulfilling a fourth estate function in a particular place. So, in WA where…
Hedvig: Isn’t he originally WA?
Ben: No.
Hedvig: Oh, shit. Sorry.
Daniel: He’s Australian.
Hedvig: He’s Australian.
Ben: I think he’s a banana bender.
Hedvig: [with accent] Banana bender?
Ben: Yeah.
Daniel: Queensland.
Ben: I think he’s from Queensland. You know what? So, I don’t sound like an absolute prick.
Hedvig: And also, who gets it first?
Ben: Murdoch. come on.
Hedvig: Melbourne.
Ben: Damn it.
Daniel: Oh.
Ben: I don’t know the name for Victorians. I don’t know the funny, quirky name.
Daniel: Really? I don’t either. Well, Rupert Murdoch, the single most damaging human in the history of humanity who created a very…
Ben: No, no, Daniel, I’m sorry, your namesake, I think, holds that title. Thomas Daniel Midgley.
Daniel: Thomas Midgley is definitely up there as the creator of Freon, which damaged the ozone hole and lead in gasoline. Definitely up there. But I would say that whereas Thomas Midgley polluted the air.
Hedvig: [laughs] I didn’t know this.
Ben: Yeah, Daniel, this is so good.
Hedvig: Oh, man.
Ben: The guy who has Daniel’s exact three-word name, Thomas Daniel Midgley.
Daniel: No, he’s not Daniel. He wasn’t Daniel.
Ben: Hold on.
Daniel: He was just Thomas Midgley.
Ben: Okay, fine.
Daniel: Nice try.
Hedvig: But wait. Freon and lead in gasoline.
Ben: Yeah.
Daniel: He really had an instinct for the regrettable.
Hedvig: Oh, man.
Ben: He is genuinely held up by a lot of significantly intelligent people as the person who has probably killed more humans than any other person, including Genghis Khan, like the Holy Roman Empire, all of it. Think of the worst despots, and Thomas Midgley is like, “Hold my beer. I got this.”
Daniel: Okay, you know what? Historically, you’re probably correct, but whereas Thomas Midgley polluted our planet, Rupert Murdoch has poisoned our information ecosystem.
Ben: True. Yeah, he has put a cancer in the heart of our culture.
Daniel: And may well lead to the death of all humans from climate change. Well, he’s retiring and becoming chairman emeritus of the Fox… of News Corp.
Ben: Do we think that is a true retirement, or do we think that he will be able to sit in this position and whenever he likes, pick up the magic phone and be like…
Hedvig: That is what we think.
Ben: “I don’t care for this story.”
Daniel: Yeah, we do think that.
Hedvig: And he says he’s going to do that. When he was resigning, he said, “I’m going to continue to review the products.” He said that.
Ben: That makes an awful kind of sense.
Hedvig: His whole family was the inspiration for Succession. But getting back to angertainment, I think why we’re talking about angertainment is because a lot of Murdoch’s media enterprises has made a lot of money tapping into intense negative feelings. Like when Alex Jones says, “They’re turning the freaking frogs gay,” and stuff like that, people get a sense of satisfaction and joy out of being angry together or watching someone else being angry. There is a lot in our media—[crosstalk]
Ben: Rupert Murdoch was the guy essentially who was like, “Oh, if I make people irate but then make them feel like I’m on their side in that, I will sell so many more papers, I will have so many more viewers.” And unfortunately, he was absolutely correct. Like Fox News was the most popular cable news station in America for its entire history, basically.
Hedvig: This is your weekly reminder, I would say to myself and to Daniel and Ben and anyone who listens to this show, to pay attention to what you consume and how it affects your emotions. Because there’s a lot of money to be made from negative emotions. Anger, shame, guilt, sadness as well. But right, there’s a lot of money to be made by saying, like, “Your body should look this way,” or, “You are not a good parent because of this,” or stuff like that.” There’s a lot of money and people who tap into those negative emotions within you, you can make a lot of money this way. So, if you’re consuming something that is making you angry or shameful, then see if you can tone down and consume something else.
Ben: Ben Ainslie’s famous little quip on this front is anything that’s fulfilling a fourth estate function, that might be YouTube videos or explainer videos or video essays or like traditional journalism or whatever…
Hedvig: Podcast.
Ben: …fourth estate media is like eating your vegetables in the most boring sense of the word. Like, you should not feel a whole lot of strong emotions. You should feel like you are boringly and sensibly being informed about things that impact your life in some way or another. Which is not to say that when a natural disaster happens, you should absolutely… I was watching information about the Libyan floods, and it made me feel truly horrendous to know that that kind of experience happened to other human beings. But outside of that sort of stuff, good news should be pretty boring. [chuckles] So if you’re feeling really, really strong things all the time, that’s a really good indication that you’re probably not availing yourself of the healthiest news diet.
Daniel: And you’re getting addicted to angertainment. This came up because former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has said, “The media mogul had created angertainment ecosystem.” It’s a great example of the combining form “tainment.” We have infotainment, edutainment, many kinds of tainment, but also angertainment. So, watch out for it. Let’s go on in a related way, engagement farming.
Ben: Oh, interesting. I’ve heard this called something else.
Daniel: What have you heard it called, attention seeking?
Ben: No, rage farming.
Daniel: Rage farming, okay. I’ve heard that. Posting obnoxious things to get replies or likes. What do you think about this metaphor? Farming?
Ben: I really like it because I’m a computer nerd and a gamer. And so, farming has a long history within game spaces of being an activity, not like a literal… I say that, and I play a lot of Stardew Valley, which is an actual farming game. But what I mean is, in a lot of videogame spaces, if you’re trying to get a certain doodad from an enemy, you will farm that doodad by engaging in that behavior lots and lots and lots, that sort of thing. So, it makes a lot of semantic sense in my brain.
Daniel: Me too. You’re trying to grow something, so you have to go out and tend the garden. There you go.
Ben: Exactly right. There’s a real husbandry sort of thing going on.
Daniel: Yeah. Let’s also mention this one, suggested by Lord Mortis on our Discord, enshittification. This one is popping up in a lot of places.
Ben: This is like OG internet guy, Cory Doctorow, isn’t it?
Daniel: Is that from him?
Ben: Yeah, I think so.
Daniel: I was trying to find the original. I found David Astle our pal who does crosswords tweeting it @dontattempt on X. He says, “The enshittification of X (née Twitter) feels almost complete. So, where are all you cool wordy kids heading?
Hedvig: So, what is enshittification?
Daniel: Things becoming more shitty.
Hedvig: At the same price?
Daniel: The “en”means into. That’s right? The shit is going into and the “fication” means the process of… mm-hmm.
Hedvig: Is it sort of similar to shrinkflation?
Daniel: Well, I mean, there was crapflation where things got either smaller or worse. No, not crapflation. What was the thing? It wasn’t shrinkflation either. It was…
Hedvig: While Daniel looks that up, shrinkflation is when you buy something, and the packaging is about the same size, but the content is less. So, you buy black pepper, and it is 20 grams instead of 30 grams but the same price, but the same packaging. So, you might notice, but you’re actually getting less product.
Ben: Dirty bastards. Once again, capitalism.
Daniel: We had skimpflation as a companion to shrinkflation. And Margaret suggested krympflasjon, which was the Norwegian version of this.
Hedvig: But enshittification seems to be in making it shittier.
Ben: I reckon this is actually related to a little bit further away semantically, but more similar structurally to… because I know it comes from Cory Doctorow, who has been like an internet guy for a squajillion years. I reckon this is more related to internet slang, like embiggen, to make a thumbnail image get larger and that sort of stuff. It seems to follow that kind of like, playful, let’s make this word kind of slightly more structurally complicated than it needs to be. Or take the actual word like enlargen and then replace it so that you know exactly what it is but it’s also just like a bit different and quirky and almost like playful. And I feel like enshittification is kind of following that format a little bit because you could just say worsen or like…
Daniel: Pejorate, yeah.
Ben: But it’s just like a more fun, slightly more complex way to go about it.
Daniel: Yeah, well said. The next one, pink cockatoo. This one was suggested by PharaohKatt. Have you seen these colorful little blighters?
Hedvig: No, I’ve only seen yellow.
Ben: No, because they don’t exist in WA.
Daniel: No, they don’t.
Ben: I worry that our Australian listeners might have the wrong idea on this because I did at first. A pink cockatoo and a pink and gray galah are different animals.
Daniel: Not the same.
Ben: And they also look different. I didn’t even know the pink cockatoo existed.
Daniel: They’ve been called the red-crested cockatoo as well.
Ben: So what you need to think of, listeners, is if you’ve ever seen a “cockatoo,” so the white bird with a big yellow crest that flips up when it’s all interested and activated in things, it’s that, but pink.
Daniel: Mm-hmm. So, the bird’s name is now officially the pink cockatoo, in contrast to an earlier name.
Ben: Oh, what was it called before?
Daniel: It was called Major Mitchell’s Cockatoo.
Ben: Oh, that’s what I knew it as. But I knew them as white.
Daniel: Okay, well, let’s see. Members of the Royal Australian Ornithologists Union, now they’re called BirdLife Australia, decided to change the name in 1977 to Major Mitchell’s Cockatoo because Sir Thomas Mitchell, the Surveyor General of New South Wales in the 1800s, wrote a really nice description of it.
Hedvig: Yeah. I think pink cockatoo is more helpful because it sounds more easy to know recognize it, But also, let me guess that this man was not a nice man.
Daniel: Oh, he didn’t just have birdwatching as one of his interests. No. He also had genocide in his portfolio against Australian Aboriginal people.
Ben: And let’s also just quickly note, and I’m not trying to detract from the fact that this person was almost certainly a fucking horrendous villain of a human being, but even if this person didn’t have all that shit in their back catalog, still change the name. Let’s just not be calling animals that have existed in Australia for a really long time after random white colonizers, just as an outright principle.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Yes. So, friggin’ colonial, so BirdLife Australia has reverted to using the old name pink cockatoo. Just don’t name things after people. Not space telescopes.
Ben: Very good principle.
Daniel: Not trees.
Ben: I will say I am a little bit surprised that they didn’t go with an indigenous name. Not because… I bet someone’s listening and being like, “Oh, fucking you always bring on about this shit, Ainslie,” but more just like that happens a lot in Australia. Like, we have either renamed things or just named things the indigenous name, like infinity times. I’m a bit surprised they didn’t go that direction.
Daniel: Yeah, that’s a good point. Although cockatoo…
Ben: Oh, true. Yeah, that’s a good point [crosstalk] name.
Hedvig: I’ve looked it up, it is Malay.
Daniel: Yes, it is.
Ben: Oh, because cockatoos exist there as well.
Hedvig: Yes.
Daniel: The entry that I have is Malay, kakatua, of uncertain origin, but also probably ultimately imitative of the call of the bird.
Hedvig: Oh, yay, I like a good name onomatopoeic name.
Daniel: Well, you know, if you like onomatopoeic names, then birds are the place to go because lots of birds names are probably imitative. And I’m going to give you a list. Here’s the list. Owl.
Ben: Oh, yeah, true.
Daniel: Goose, believe it or not.
Ben: [chuckles] Yeah.
Daniel: Finch and jay. The crow.
Ben: Yes.
Daniel: The crane and the quail. And of course, the obvious ones like kookaburra and 28 and all the ones that you think of.
Ben: Is that where 28 gets its name? I did not know that.
Daniel: How it sounds.
Ben: I genuinely thought that it was like the 28th thing identified all of this and then [Daniel laughs] people just went with that.
Daniel: That’s 28. So, pink cockatoo. Thanks, PharaohKatt, for that word. Helen from Twitter says, “My colleagues and I use the term ‘spicy’ when referring to something undesirable or unusual.” We love a good spicy chat, don’t we?
Hedvig: What? Oooh.
Ben: Oh, wow. That’s not at all how I’ve heard it be used.
Daniel: Yeah, me neither. It’s more like controversial, like spicy takes.
Ben: No, nope.
Daniel: Sexy times.
Ben: Yes. So maybe this is a big age thing because I absolutely I’m in complete alignment with Hedvig. And strangely enough, when we were watching Season 4, Episode 1 of Sex Education last night, they used spicy in this way, and we returned and remarked to each other, like, “Yeah, that’s what…”
Hedvig: That’s how that works.
Ben: Yes.
Daniel: Seems very natural. Well, Helen continues, “I learned from students today that spicy means something else for them, something closer to dirty in a sexy way. Something to revisit for Words of the Week?”
Ben: There we go.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Hedvig?
Hedvig: Also, I think controversial isn’t like, “I have a spicy take on blah.”
Daniel: That’s how think about it.
Hedvig: Doesn’t necessarily mean I have a sexy take. [laughs] I don’t even know how that really would work. But it can also mean, yeah, controversial or something like that.
Daniel: And of course, coronavirus, referred to as the “spicy cough” is decidedly unsexy.
Ben: It’s funny you say that. When I heard that reference that way, I was like, “I don’t care for that at all.”
Daniel: Oh, okay. Interesting.
Ben: When people say spicy cough. And when people say spicy water about bubbly water, it doesn’t fit for me. I’m like, “There’s not… no, that’s not what that is.”
Hedvig: It’s not sexy.
Daniel: What an interesting term. How in flux is spicy? Oh, my gosh.
Ben: Mm-hmm. Do you know why? I think because spicy, as in the literal experience of eating spicy food, is itself so divisive. So, for me, chili on everything, 100% of the time, basically no exceptions. But for other humans in the world, like, “Ooh, this dish is very hot. I think they put black pepper on it.” There’s all the way down the other end of the spectrum. And I think the word “spicy” as a modifier is probably reflecting that. So, people who would use it to mean, like, “Oh, that’s a bit controversial,” are kind of maybe a bit more on the, like [makes spicy mouth noises] end of the spectrum.
Daniel: And we have, of course, found that when words describe physical experiences, they tend to get used metaphorically and they have real staying power. Spicy could be one of those. So, angertainment, enshittification, engagement, farming, pink cockatoo and spicy are Words of the Week. Let’s have a comment from Cameron on Patreon. Now, the background for this is that we just released a live episode called Girl Dinner because I thought that was a better title than Potluck. And Cameron says, “I really enjoyed the live show. As someone who recently started grad school, as the only man in my program and 10 years older than most of my cohort, I’ve really been interested in the all-new girl terms and phrases. I loved this recent article in The New York Times about it and would love to hear y’all’s take.”
The article is a piece by Marie Solis in the New York Times. I’ve gifted it on our Discord because I can do that. She describes “girl” as a slippery word. A girl could be anyone who doesn’t fall into the gendered idea of the word she said or even anyone on the internet.
Hedvig: Oh, as in… I know this one.
Daniel: Go ahead.
Hedvig: Well, it’s just like when people on the internet say something like, “All the girlies like when I do blah,” they mean anyone who isn’t a straight cisman, sort of.
Daniel: Having dinner with the girls means your women friends. Like, a woman dinner sounds different than a girl dinner.
Hedvig: Yeah. Wait, but also the gay man.
Daniel: Possibly as well.
Hedvig: Bipolar. Just not bipolar. This is I’m… [crosstalk]
Daniel: Bisexual.
Ben: Bisexual.
Hedvig: No, I was going for…
Ben: Transsexual.
Hedvig: No.
Ben: Okay, we can do this.
Daniel: Let’s keep guessing.
Ben: We can find out what Hedvig wanted to say.
Hedvig: Nonbinary.
Daniel: Ah, there we go.
Ben: Sorry. I should have guessed that sooner. That’s on me. That’s my fault.
Hedvig: I’m getting tired here. [laughs]
Daniel: So, girl is definitely having a moment. It’s a little hard to define what it is, but if you think it’s hard to define, it could be that you just don’t get it. And that’s kind of the point.
Ben: Cool, if you have to ask.
Hedvig: That’s fine.
Daniel: Cameron continues, “Unrelatedly, your discussion in Episode 80 about how to discuss difficult topics with children reminded me of how it is often dealt with in Khmer.” Khamer? Khmer.
Hedvig: Khmer.
Ben: As in like Cambodian? Is that the name for Cambodia?
Daniel: Yes.
Ben: Yeah, Cambodia. Khmer is several languages, many of which are spoken in Cambodia.
Ben: Okay.
Daniel: “Usually when a child does something their caregiver doesn’t want them to, they yell a one-word warning describing the worst possibility of what will pass if the child isn’t careful.” Fall.
Ben: That’s great. [chuckles]
Daniel: Crash, die.
Ben: [laughs] I love it.
Hedvig: I like it.
[laughter]
Ben: Anyone who’s ever spent any time with small humans immediately is going to respond to this positively, I think.
Daniel: [laughs] Fall. Cameron says, “Although I also engage in the conversational style of parental warnings y’all describe. I do think there’s something to be said for the short, abrasive interjections used by Khmer speakers.”
Hedvig: I like it as well because there’s not a negation in it. It’s not like, “Don’t do that.” You don’t have to do the switch in your mind of, do it, and then the opposite.
Daniel: Fall is what’s going to happen.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: I guess I didn’t mention it in that discussion, but I think I’ve said to you guys before, I can do the really, really abrasively loud finger whistle. Like, that’s a skill I have.
Hedvig: Oh, fuck.
Daniel: Okay. Never…
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: And I reserve it exclusively with my son, for “This is a very important thing” interjection sound. Like, he knows if hears the whistle, he has to stop, drop and roll, essentially. He’s like, “Okay. Everything stops. Where is dad? What’s going on?” And for a similar reason, I think if you reserve things for only very important things, then you can command that sort of Attention, I guess. And it sounds like this is a very similar thing, and I approve.
Hedvig: I like that it’s short. I was watching an episode recently of British Taskmaster where Mike Wozniak says, “Get yourself to a safe place,” when something is about to fall, which is really funny because it’s really long.
Ben: And not at all helpful.
Daniel: Not helpful. “What did you say, Bob?”
Ben: Like, move would be—[crosstalk]
Hedvig: Get yourself to a safe place. It’s really funny and not very effective.
Daniel: Well, I like using apprehensives for this. Apprehensives are particles that you use for things you don’t want someone to do by accident.
Ben: Such as?
Hedvig: Lest.
Daniel: [laughs] Lest is exactly the word I was thinking of. “Tie your shoelaces lest you fall,” or, “so that you don’t fall.” What we should say is we should say, “Fall lest.” That would be an apprehensive in English. It’s terrible. No?
Ben: Yes. I hate this as much as I liked the Khmer thing.
[chuckles]
Daniel: Well, then let’s just use one-word phrases for important stuff. Saves time. Thanks, Cameron. And thanks to Dr Rob Drummond and to Dr Robbie Love. Thanks to everybody who gave us ideas for this episode. So many of you. Thanks to the team from SpeechDocs for transcribing our words. And most of all, our patrons who keep us going. Thanks, y’all.
Hedvig: And if you want to support us, you can, for example, become a Patreon and participate in our potluck dinners. Give us ideas and feedback and items for the news shows or Word of the Week. We really like it when we get input from brains that aren’t ours because we’re only three.
Daniel: There are so many of them.
Ben: And our brains are trash.
Daniel: [laughs]
Ben: Bring your juicy, fresh brain to the table, please.
Daniel: Yes, please.
Hedvig: [crosstalk] I have to say, I kind of like our brains, there’s something to say for integrity and consistency. But we will filter your brains—
Ben: Okay. We’re dependably mediocre.
Hedvig: We will filter your brains through our brains. And if you want to do that, you can engage with us by going on all the socials, BecauseLangPod, also on Bluesky, you can leave us a message on SpeakPipe so we can hear your lovely, lovely voice. You can send us an email, hello@becauselanguage. But one of the coolest ways of doing this is become a Patreon and engage with us on Discord and message with us directly. You can also, if you want to support the show, a great thing to do, and as a very intense podcast listener, tell someone about it. That’s the best way. Ads don’t do it. Nothing does it like someone you trust and believe in saying, “I really like this show. Maybe you want to give it a go.”
And you can also leave us a review. And if you write a funny review, we’ll read it on the show as well. We like reviews, preferably five-star ones, but if we’re only a four star, I’ll take that too. [Ben laughs] You can go to things like Podchaser or iTunes, these are all great places to leave a review. You’ll be helping us in all these different ways. You’ll be helping us pay the bills, transcribe our shows, and give our guests some money for their trouble. Depending on your level, you’ll also get a bonus episode, mailouts, shoutouts and stuff like that. And like the one we just did, all our patrons are welcome to our live episodes.
Daniel: We’re doing more of those. They’re fun.
Hedvig: Yeah. They’re fun. I like them even though I didn’t get to participate in the last one because we prioritized bloody Americans.
[laughter]
Daniel: Yeah, and they showed up too.
Ben: I still maintain, madam, that 02:00 AM v 08:00 AM is still your preference.
Hedvig: Oh, 08:00 AM, yes, for sure. Today was 9:00.
Daniel: Okay, that hour.
Ben: A huge shoutout to our top patrons. They are Iztin, Termy, Elías, Matt, Whitney, Helen, Jack, PharaohKatt, LordMortis, gramaryen, Larry, Kristofer, Andy, James, Nigel, Meredith, Kate, Nasrin, Joanna, Nikoli, Keith, Ayesha, who is pretty great, Steele, Margareth, Manú, Rodger, Rhian, Colleen, Ignacio, Kevin, Jeff, Andy from Logophilius, Stan, Kathy, /ɹaʃ/, Cheyenne, Felicity, Amir, Canny Archer, O Tim, Alyssa, Chris, Laurie, aengry balls, Tadhg, Luis. And new patrons at the listener level, Ben L, love the name. And Anne, who has taken out a yearly membership, not just monthly, because she is a lady who knows what she wants. You know what? I just presumed that person’s gender. She is a person who knows what they want. Our thanks to all of our wonderful patrons.
Daniel: Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who’s also performs with Ryan Beano and Didion’s Bible. Still spinning that new Didion’s Bible album.
Ben: It’s quite nice. I thought it was quite good.
Daniel: It’s good. Yeah, it’s really good. Get it on Bandcamp. They’ll get more money that way. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
Hedvig and Ben: Pew, pew, pew.
Daniel: Wow, that’s quite an episode, wasn’t it?
Ben: Yes.
Okay, can I share one joke and then we’ll start a show?
Daniel: Okay. [crosstalk]
Ben: It’s not religious and this joke is predicated on having met and interacted with Finnish people before, but it is one of my favorite jokes in the whole world.
Hedvig: Yes, yes.
Ben: So, an American, a Frenchman and a Finn are walking along in a part of Africa as tourists. And they come across an elephant, and none of them have ever seen or heard of an elephant before. So, they are astounded by this magnificent creature. And the American looks at the elephant and he says, “My god, I wonder how much money we could make with this creature.” And the Frenchman says, “My god, I wonder what sort of a lover this creature is.” And the Finn looks at the elephant and says, “My god, I wonder what it thinks of Finns.”
[laughter]
Hedvig: That is smart.
Ben: First of all, that joke was told to me by a Finnish person in an attempt to explain Finnish cultural psychology.
Daniel: Finnish self-consciousness. Yes.
Ben: After living in Finland for six months, I have never found a better joke for group of people more than that joke… [crosstalk]
Hedvig: That’s actually good, because usually the Finnish jokes are just they are…
Ben: Mean, right?
Hedvig: …quiet, they are introverted, they throw knives into darkness.
Daniel, I have found out that another person that is very dear to me is an ex-Mormon, and I have learned new Mormon things.
Daniel: Oh, what’d you learn?
Hedvig: All right, Ben, did you know? Well, God exists, number one.
Ben: Naturally.
Daniel: Amazing.
Hedvig: And God lives in a particular place, like a physical place. He’s probably omniscient of the universe still, an omnipotent. But He lives…
Ben: He’s got a house.
Hedvig: He’s got a house, and the house is this star…
Ben: Cool.
Daniel: Called kolob.
Hedvig: And He lives there.
Ben: Wait. This is sounding like it’s getting perilously close to like…
Hedvig: Scientology.
Ben: …L. Ron Hubbard stuff. Is that what’s happening here?
Daniel: Mormonism is Scientology v1.
Ben: [laughs] Okay.
Hedvig: And I also learned that which might be a thing that the current LDS church is walking back, but that if you’re really good, if you become a saint, hold on to your panties now, Ben, you get your own planet.
Ben: Oh. This is fringe stuff, right? Like, this isn’t what we would call mainstream doctrine?
Hedvig: [laughs] Daniel is…
Daniel: This was particularly interesting to me because nowadays, because the Book of Mormon musical made them sound silly, because Elder Price in the song, I Believe, references, “I get my own planet.” They don’t like to look silly, so they’ll say, “No, no, that’s a distortion. We don’t believe that you get your own planet.” Whereupon all Mormons are like, “Wait, we don’t? When did that one go away?”
Ben: “Why am I being nice to people? I was in this for the planet, bro.”
Daniel: And what modern-day apologists will say is, “No, that’s a distortion. You don’t get your own planet. Instead…” And then they’ll say something that is exactly like, “You get your own planet,” but that doesn’t sound stupid. That’s all they do. [crosstalk]
Hedvig: Oh, you get to administrate a planet for God?
Daniel: You get to learn and grow and progress and become like our Heavenly Father, becoming cocreators and get your own planet. That’s what really happens.
Hedvig: Yes.
Ben: Wait, before we move on, can I just do a shameless plug to a YouTube creator that I really like?
Daniel: Please.
Hedvig: Oh, yeah.
Ben: Because we are talking about roads and relatedly streets just before, Hedvig said, “You know road, like the street,” I recently learned then street and road are, in fact, not synonyms. Obviously, there is no such thing as synonyms. We’ve talked about this before, but they are less synonymous than you would originally think. A road and a street from a town planning and an urban planning point of view fulfill quite different functions. Roads being like big, heavy traffic things where vehicles move at quite high speed. Streets being things that houses should be on that should be prioritizing sort of pedestrians and bikes and that sort of stuff.
And part of the reason why if you’ve ever traveled to America, as in… sorry, the USA or Canada and other places like that, and you’ve thought to yourself, like, “Man, this must be an awful place to live,” is because they have a lot of things called stroads, where there’s streets fulfilling the function of roads. And so if you would like to learn more about this, there is a tremendously lovely creator on YouTube called Not Just Bikes, which is all about urban planning and city design and that sort of stuff. And they’ve got a great video called Stroads are Ugly, Expensive, and Dangerous (and they’re everywhere).
And so, you should go check it out because it’s really fun. And then fall down the rabbit hole of that content creator like I did and then become like an armchair expert on urban design around the world and just be like, “That’s bad. That’s bad. Ooh, that’s really good.”
Hedvig: That sounds like classic non-talk content. Those things exist in Australia too.
Ben: Oh, big time. [crosstalk]
Hedvig: No, but also when you’re driving from Canberra to the coast, because that’s my experience, and you get to Braidwood, which is a lovely sort of vaguely Western American town with a big thoroughfare where all the houses are lined up.
Ben: What you might call high street, right? Like a main drag?
Hedvig: Except that road is the one that you have to go on to get from Canberra to the coast. So, all the heavy traffic, everything. But also, it’s the one you have to park on to get off, to get into your house, to have a coffee. So, whenever you need to cross it, it’s like I have to cross a motor highway essentially to get across. It’s not a good time.
Daniel: Yeah. My partner and I were trying to figure out why it was so terrible driving in Seattle, why it was so hideous and stressful. And what we arrived at was, in Perth, there are four kinds of streets. There is like our street, small. There’s, I don’t know, like Morley Drive, larger, faster. There’s the Reid Highway, getting pretty fast. And then there’s the Mitchell Freeway, which is super fast. And Seattle just doesn’t have type three. If you want to get to the next town, you’ve got people driving on the interstate to get to the next place. And it’s just awful and stressful. So, that’s what we worked out.
Ben: Urban design is really hard. That’s the reality. And we’ve been getting it wrong for a long time. And when you get urban design wrong, it’s horrendously expensive and difficult to fix.
Hedvig: It’s not city skylines. You just demolish a bunch of buildings and they’re unhappy for like a couple of months and they get happy again.
Ben: Yeah, but don’t forget, that’s exactly what we did with communities of color when they built the interstates, and that was real bad times.
Hedvig: No, it very much was. I’m being very facetious.
Can I do a callback?
Daniel: Mm-hmm.
Hedvig: Because earlier, Ben asked if kinship words for mother and father generally contain ma, fa, pa, ba, ta type things. And I haven’t done like a [unintelligible [03:00:13] control thing, but I looked up the terms in their corpora, and I did find some that aren’t like that.
Daniel: Was it AB in Arabic?
Hedvig: No, but I found things like ise, ia.
Daniel: In which language?
Hedvig: Oh, you’re asking me many questions now. I only have the [unintelligible [03:00:35] code.
Daniel: Okay, never mind. Don’t worry about it.
Hedvig: I don’t. I can’t. There are languages but it took me a while to find these. Ele, kurla, guyu, taiya. So, there are languages that use other words, but the majority were ma, ta, pa, ba, na, nga.
Daniel: Nya.
Hedvig: It took me some work, but they’re not impossible. But I think they were in the minority. But I can do a proper stats thing. But it looked like most of them were ma, ba, pa, ta, sa. No, not sa.
Daniel: And some of those didn’t sound like baby words either.
Hedvig: Yeah. Yiv, yay, oog. I like oog.
Daniel: Oog, that’s cool.
Hedvig: Oog.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]