What is a woman? Or a man? Or a chair, or a sandwich? Or anything, really?
“Gender critical” people are making language into a vector to attack the rights of trans people. They treat categories like man and woman as binary and obvious.
But cognitive linguistics has a response, in the form of a new paper in Nature Human Behaviour. Are categories concrete, or are they mental, social, or something else? How do we categorise objects at all? Author Dr Andrew Perfors brings the science on this episode.
Listen to this episode
Patreon supporters
Huge thanks to all our great patrons! Your support means a lot to us. Special thanks to our top patrons:
- Iztin
- Termy
- Elías
- Matt
- Whitney
- Helen
- Jack
- PharaohKatt
- LordMortis
- gramaryen
- Larry
- Rene
- Kristofer
- Andy
- James
- Nigel
- Meredith
- Kate
- Nasrin
- Joanna
- Nikoli
- Keith
- Ayesha
- Steele
- Margareth
- Manú
- Rodger
- Rhian
- Colleen
- Ignacio
- Kevin
- Jeff
- Andy from Logophilius
- Stan
- Kathy
- Rach
- Cheyenne
- Felicity
- Amir
- Canny Archer
- O Tim
- Alyssa
- Chris
- Laurie
- aengry balls
- Tadhg
- Luis
- Raina
And our newest patrons:
- At the Listener level: David and Georgina
- And at the Friend level: Coco!
Become a Patreon supporter yourself and get access to bonus episodes and more!
Become a Patron!Show notes
[PDF] Epenthesis
https://pages.ucsd.edu/~colavin/epenthesis_comps_1.pdf
My shirt
https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/33270170-angry-jelly-donut-plain
Ben’s shirt
https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/6626786-brave-new-world-aldous-huxley-vintage-book-cover
Hedvig’s shirt
https://www.bonfire.com/joe-friday-never-said-just-the-facts-maam/
(The above links are not spon-con; we just like the shirts.)
Language Learning App Duolingo to Mothball Welsh Course
https://nation.cymru/news/language-learning-app-duolingo-to-mothball-welsh-course/
Which countries study which languages, and what can we learn from it? | Duolingo
https://blog.duolingo.com/which-countries-study-which-languages-and-what-can-we-learn-from-it/
Hearing ‘Bad Grammar’ Results in Physical Signs of Stress – New Study Reveals
https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/2023/hearing-bad-grammar-results-in-physical-signs-of-stress-new-study-reveals
The surprisingly subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231025-the-surprisingly-subtle-ways-microsoft-word-has-changed-the-way-we-use-language
Word Flags Two Spaces After a Sentence as an Error
https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/24/21234170/microsoft-word-two-spaces-period-error-correction-great-space-debate
Associate Professor Andrew Perfors
https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/individuals/associate-professor-andrew-perfors
Andrew Perfors: Why Are We So Vulnerable to Bad Information?
https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/why-are-we-so-vulnerable-to-bad-information
People Drawn to Conspiracy Theories Share a Cluster of Psychological Features
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-drawn-to-conspiracy-theories-share-a-cluster-of-psychological-features/
NASA Faked the Moon Landing—Therefore, (Climate) Science Is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science
[$$] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797612457686
[PDF] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=3f3ad951efb5618f5b793f160714014645166e35
[$$] Trans-Inclusive Gender Categories Are Cognitively Natural
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01657-y
[PDF] Trans-Inclusive Gender Categories Are Cognitively Natural
http://colala.berkeley.edu/papers/perfors2023transinclusive.pdf
What did Wittgenstein say about what ‘a game’ is?
https://magne.medium.com/what-did-wittgenstein-say-about-what-a-game-is-d333383cf8b4
Is it a Mug or Cup? Recent Progress in Fuzziness Studies
https://improbable.com/2017/02/23/is-it-a-mug-or-cup-recent-progress-in-fuzziness-studies/
The Use of Gender-Neutral Language in Maternity Settings: A Narrative Literature Review
https://www.britishjournalofmidwifery.com/content/literature-review/the-use-of-gender-neutral-language-in-maternity-settings-a-narrative-literature-review/
Taking Up the Challenge of Trans and Non-Binary Inclusion in Midwifery Education: Reflections from Educators in Aotearoa and Ontario Canada
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0266613823000086
The Analytical Language of John Wilkins | Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Analytical_Language_of_John_Wilkins
Astronomers have noctalgia (sky grief), or sadness at the loss of dark skies
https://earthsky.org/earth/noctalgia-sky-grief-loss-of-dark-skies-light-pollution/
Satellites and space junk may make dark night skies brighter, hindering astronomy and hiding stars from our view
https://theconversation.com/satellites-and-space-junk-may-make-dark-night-skies-brighter-hindering-astronomy-and-hiding-stars-from-our-view-202047
Causes of light pollution
https://darksky.org/resources/what-is-light-pollution/causes/
Who is the real Buffy Sainte-Marie?
https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/features/buffy-sainte-marie
Buffy Sainte-Marie is the latest public figure accused of being a ‘Pretendian.’ Here’s why that matters
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/29/entertainment/buffy-sainte-marie-cbc-indigenous-questions-cec/index.html
WA parrot 28’s numerical name may have links to French explorers
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-06/wa-parrot-28-named-after-a-number-french/102394176
Australian Ringneck (twenty-eight) Barnardius Zonarius Semitorquatus (last one on the page, by Fred W. Loetscher, Jr.)
https://media.ebird.org/catalog?taxoncode=polpar3&mediatype=audio
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
DANIEL: Hi, Hedvig!
HEDVIG: Hi. How are you?
DANIEL: How you doin’?
BEN: Gunten tag.
HEDVIG: [ABOUT TO GIGGLE] Gunten tag?!
HEDVIG: Is that… Did I… Did I fuck it up?
DANIEL: Guten. We’re doing N epenthesis. Right? Like…
HEDVIG: It’s guten tag, but…
DANIEL: No, gunten!
HEDVIG: I’m going to start…
BEN: Is it really? Have I thought for my entire life that there’s an N in there, and there’s not?
HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s GUT as in “good” and then…
BEN: Oh, no! Okay.
DANIEL: Wow! You just learned that. Cool.
BEN: [SINGS] My entire life is a lie, is a lie, doo doo dooo…
HEDVIG: No. No. Actually, I feel terrible for saying this to you, Ben, because I would have loved you coming to Germany and saying “gunten tag” to people.
BEN: [GREETING PEOPLE VERY ENTHUSIASTICALLY] Gunten tag. Gunten tag!
HEDVIG: They would have been like…
BEN: Gunten tag!
HEDVIG: [GIGGLES]
BEN: The most gunten of tag to you, sir!
DANIEL: Ben says “Gunten tag”, and then Hedvig says in German, “Nobody tell him.”
[LAUGHTER]
[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: Ben Ainslie and Hedvig Skirgård. Folks, currently, I am wearing a t-shirt that has the character Angry Jelly Donut. Angry Jelly Donut is a book by our friends, Iva Cheung and Steve Kleinedler. Do you have any items of clothing that reference a work of literature?
BEN: I have a Brave New World T-shirt that has the… I think it’s like the 1970s imprint of the cover. It’s like a real kinda Art Deco wavy, impressionistic thing, which I really like.
DANIEL: Now that you say that, I’ve seen you in that in the RTR Studios many, many, many, many, many a time. What about you, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: Okay. So, are podcasts literature? [BEN LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Are podcasts literature. Let’s extend it. So, you’re coming up empty on books, is what I’m getting.
HEDVIG: Yes, but I have an all-time radio detective American radio drama t-shirt.
BEN: Mm.
DANIEL: [GASPS] You’ve shared that photo of you wearing that.
HEDVIG: Have I?
DANIEL: It’s the one with “just the facts”.
HEDVIG: Yeah. It’s Johnny Dollar. No, not Johnny Dollar.
DANIEL: What’s his name from Dragnet?
HEDVIG: Friday from Dragnet. Never says, “Just the facts, ma’am.”
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: Daniel has a photographic memory specifically for T-shirts, as far as I can tell.
HEDVIG: Yeah, fairly.
BEN: It was like, “Ah, yes. I remember you wearing it on this date of the certain year.”
DANIEL: I did not know this about myself.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, thank you both for being here. It’s great to chat after a little while. Here’s what’s coming up on the show. I’ve been watching a lot of people online debating gender. Some of them are fighting against the rights of trans people, which sucks, and they’re trying to use language to make their points. For example, they act like the category of MAN or WOMAN are just these set things locked down, super obvious to everyone. They’re claiming that science is on their side. So, into this scene is a new paper entitled “Trans-inclusive gender categories are cognitively natural.”
BEN: Ooh, I like this. This is fun.
DANIEL: Mm. It’s using cognitive linguistics to make the point that categories aren’t that simple. And we’re going to be talking to Dr Andrew Perfors of the University of Melbourne, one of the coauthors on the paper.
HEDVIG: Nice.
BEN: That sounds really cool and interesting. I’ve been really excited to do this show, obviously, because this has been a thing that’s been bubbling for a while. And I’m particularly excited that we are hearing from a trans person on this issue, which is really exiting.
DANIEL: Yup. Super good. You know, our latest bonus episode was Mailbag of Dog Sushi with linguistic MVP, Dr Nicole Holliday. It was a lot of fun. You two weren’t there for it because of scheduling, but our friend Wolf told us about dog sushi, a tasty treat for dogs. But when it’s duck sushi, it’s a tasty treat made FROM ducks. So, we explored, is there a logic to what happens when you put words next to each other? And we had lots of other questions as well.
HEDVIG: Mm.
BEN: My guess would be, if the word is our pet, it’s unlikely that we would be eating our pet, right? [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: Like, cat sushi. Mind you, then there’s the middle ground. Like, horse sushi. Mm.
HEDVIG: Cat sushi though…
DANIEL: Meat is this weird area.
HEDVIG: …is that sushi for cats?
BEN: Yeah. Surely, sushi is just also cat sushi.
DANIEL: I feel like if I were describing cat sushi, I’d be describing the way that a cat lies in a circle, and I was being funny. Doesn’t that sound right?
BEN: Oh, yeah. Like a little maki roll of kitty. A kitty roll.
HEDVIG: Oh.
DANIEL: I don’t know.
HEDVIG: I had one of those on my chest last night. Sandy did a perfect little circle.
DANIEL: Aw, cat sushi.
BEN: Oh, that’s very sweet.
HEDVIG: Yeah, he’s a good boy.
DANIEL: So, that was our last bonus episode. Our next bonus episode is going to be Linguistic Time Machine. We’re going to be looking at what language was like 1 year ago, 10 years ago, 100 years ago, 1,000 years ago. We’re just going to keep adding zeros for as long as we can back in the mists of time. We’re going to be using everything we’ve learned.
BEN: Ooh, are we going back to prehistory?
DANIEL: We certainly are.
BEN: Yes.
DANIEL: We’re going way past prehistory. We’re going prehuman. So, you’re going to want to hear all our bonus episodes, and you can do that by becoming a patron at the Listener level. Even if you’re not a listener, there are other perks as well. Like, every patron gets our yearly mail out, which we’re putting together.
HEDVIG: Mhm.
DANIEL: Every patron gets to come to our Discord, has a lot of great people on it, and every patron gets to come to our live episodes. You know what our next live episode is?
BEN: Oho, it’s getting to the end of the year. I know what that means.
DANIEL: Yeah. What does that mean?
BEN: I hear the jingling of the bells, Daniel, the bells that are attached to the necks of all of the linguists who get together in America.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Well, before that though, we’re going to be releasing our very own contest for the Words of the Week of the Year. We gather up all the words that we featured on Words of the Week, and we’re going to let you vote using reactji. We’re going to be putting it up on Discord, Bluesky, Twitter, Facebook, Mastodon. We’re @becauselangpod on all those places. We’re going to count up the votes and count them down on a live episode in December. So, to get all of this, become a patron. You’ll be supporting the show, keeping us talking. That’s patreon.com/becauselangpod.
HEDVIG: When is the last day for voting, Daniel?
DANIEL: I’m going to drop the poll just as soon as I can after I drop this episode that you’re listening to now. And then, we’re going to have it for a couple of weeks and the votes come pouring in.
HEDVIG: Because, Daniel, you’re going to do the counting, I think you should pick a time because then people know to go and do it. People like deadlines.
BEN: Come on. Come on, one day, Daniel. Get it done in a day.
HEDVIG: Day before is a lot for Daniel. Maybe two days before?
DANIEL: No, one day. Well, day before. Day before. So, we’re going to close it off on the 15th of December 2023.
BEN: There we go.
HEDVIG: Excellent.
DANIEL: Okay. Kaboom. As long as it’s the 15th of December 2023 somewhere, you’re okay.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: All right.
HEDVIG: Oh, my god.
BEN: Well, now that we’ve sorted all that, and before we dig into the very interesting topic of trans-inclusive language…
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
BEN: …or just inclusive language generally, I’m not sure, I suppose we’ll find out.
DANIEL: You’re on tenterhooks.
BEN: What’s going on in the world of linguistics in the week gone past, Daniel?
DANIEL: This is a story suggested by PharaohKatt. It looks like Duolingo is going to mothball its Welsh course.
BEN: Oh, no!
DANIEL: Oh. There’s an article in Nation.Cymru, Nation Wales. It says, “Language learning app Duolingo is going to mothball its Welsh course at the end of…” I suppose October. So, it’s already happened, I think. So you’ll still be able to use it to learn Welsh, but it won’t be edited or updated. Bit disappointing.
BEN: Oh, okay. Well, look, mothballed is a bit less bad than canceled.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I was going to say there’s no cost for them just having it lying around, right?
BEN: Yeah, true. The resources that you’ve built are good, hopefully.
DANIEL: Yeah. But it’s surprising though, because at one point, Welsh was the biggest growing language course on the platform, and Welsh learners were quite committed. They were third in longest average daily streaks and third for most lessons completed.
BEN: Good on you, Welsh bastards! Well done.
DANIEL: Keep it going.
BEN: Or, non-Welsh not-also-bastards who might just be doing it for fun. Good job, you too.
DANIEL: It looks like the National Center for Learning Welsh was doing the development, but they’re stopping and the relevant bodies in Wales are trying to figure out how to get things going. So, this is an issue that we’ll definitely keep our finger on because we know that there are some Welsh learners certainly in our Discord, and we’re just going to keep an eye on that one.
HEDVIG: And probably in Wales, right? Like people who move to Wales and want to learn Welsh.
BEN: Yeah, totally.
HEDVIG: So, it’s in the interest of the Welsh government.
BEN: My boss at work is Welsh. And every significant day or anytime something of note happens, there’s always a loudly exclaimed series of Welsh words that I have to furrow my brow at, and then he translates into normal, disgusting English talk for me.
DANIEL: Well, you should be on Duolingo.
BEN: Clearly.
DANIEL: I think the biggest language of Duolingo in any given country is that country’s main language, because people come to that country, “Dang, I got a job now.”
BEN: Right.
DANIEL: I’ve got to learn this language.
BEN: That makes sense. Yeah, that actually really tracks. It seems counterintuitive, but of course.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Okay. So, next one. This one was suggested to us by Liz on Patreon. How do you feel when you hear bad grammar? And I don’t just mean silly prescriptive rules. I mean like somebody doing language wrong.
BEN: Like Yoda grammar? Like that?
DANIEL: Yeah. Flipping things or using the wrong articles or things like that. For example, let me give you the sentence.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: “I think that culture is one of the areas most affected by a globalisation. It is hard to say whether it is the positive or negative impact. I think that thanks to a globalisation, people all around the world listen to same music, watch the same movies, and read same books.” What’s going on for you right now?
BEN: Well, I mean…
HEDVIG: Not a lot.
DANIEL: How much?
BEN: Not… yeah, I was going to say not a lot, but I also think we are the very worst candidates to ask this to!
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yeah, we’re the worst at this. We’ve got very stretchy little mind boxes.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: We do.
BEN: In this regard specifically, right?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Well, look, Hedvig, I don’t mean to claim to not understand the stretchiness of your mind box, but certainly in my mind box, it’s like stretchy in some ways and not stretchy in others. But yeah, when it comes to this, it’s like, “Oh, cool.” Like, weird word shit. That’s something that I’ve been doing for… 11 years.
DANIEL: Okay. Fair enough. But there’s an interesting bit of research coming out of the University of Birmingham from doctors Dagmar Divjak, Hui Sun, and Petar Milin, published in the Journal of Neurolinguistics. Here’s the headline, “Hearing bad grammar results in physical signs of stress,” new study reveals.
HEDVIG: Well, so what I experienced was, like, a little hurdle, right?
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: I had to be like…
BEN: Slightly more cognitive work.
HEDVIG: Oh. When he said “a globalisation,” was there something I parsed wrong earlier such that that is…? blah, blah, blah. And then my brain quite quickly went, “No.” And then when I heard that it was articles multiple times, my brain went, “This person and articles is going to be bumpy. Ignore in future.”
BEN: [LAUGHS] Buckle up.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: And then, your brain might have done a thing where you just adjust your expectations for the transition probabilities for next word prediction. That’s what you do.
BEN: But that’s also stuff that Hedvig does because she is able to be like, “Oh, it’s all the articles,” right?
DANIEL: Mm.
BEN: You know. There is a serious amount of diagnostic ability that Hedvig possesses that the average bear probably wouldn’t. So, there’d be more cognitive load for just a regular talker, basically.
DANIEL: But there might also be something going on physiologically, because this research team took 41 British English-speaking adults, had them listen to audio clips of people saying sentences like the one I just read you. Half the clips had grammatical errors, half didn’t, and they were tracking their heart rate. What they were looking for was something called HRV or heart rate variation.
BEN: I know about this.
DANIEL: Tell me what you know.
BEN: I’ve actually had to do one of these studies on me. I have been studied in terms of HRV data. So as part of one of the courses that I was in, they wanted to measure people’s relative stress levels. And so, heart rate variability is not, as the name implies, how much your heart rate varies by, i.e., does your heart rate go up and down a lot. It is, in fact, micro differences between the spaces between your actual heartbeats, right?
DANIEL: That’s right.
BEN: So, if we assume our heartbeat goes…
HEDVIG: Oh, the little…
BEN: [IMITATES HEARTBEAT]
DANIEL: The little valleys.
BEN: The [IMITATES HEARTBEAT] comes at a period, like whatever that period happens to be. But when you are in a relaxed state, that period is actually pretty loosey-goosey, relatively speaking. So, your heart rate at, say, 60 beats a minute might be some… Sorry, yeah, 60 beats a minute, meaning one beat a second, that heartbeat might come next 0.95 of a second later, and it might come 1.05 of a second later. Actually, the interval between the heartbeats can vary substantially. Again, very small amounts, but substantially.
HEDVIG: Okay.
BEN: That’s when we’re relaxed.
DANIEL: And that’s normal.
BEN: When we are stressed or when we are in a heightened state… note, this doesn’t necessarily mean our heart rate elevates. Right? The rate itself might not necessarily go up, but when we are experiencing stress, the interval or the period becomes extraordinarily regimented. It varies very, very, very, very, very little. So, that heart rate variability goes down when you are stressed and it’s quite variable when you are relaxed.
DANIEL: That’s correct.
BEN: That’s what heart rate variability is. Ask me how well I did, guys.
HEDVIG: How well did you do, Ben?
DANIEL: Did you experience signs of stress?
BEN: So, this is a sleep study, and it basically measured how often you slip into a physiologically relaxed state. We got these big graphs. And like, if your line was up the top, it means you had good heart rate variability and you were very relaxed. It essentially measured how restful your sleep actually is. And if it’s down the bottom, it’s not very good. Most people will have like plateaus, essentially. They’ll have nice big stretches and then you’ll dip down for a period of wakefulness and then back up. I was just… It looked like a heart rate monitor. It was like down the bottom, spike, down the bottom, spike. I just was shocking.
HEDVIG: Really?
DANIEL: Wow.
HEDVIG: Interesting.
BEN: Anyway, tell us what happened with people’s relative stress when it came to hearing bad grammar, Daniel?
DANIEL: When they heard the mistakes, their heart rate variability just went way down. Their heartbeats got very regular like they were experiencing signs of stress, especially when it was a British accent person saying it. When it was a Polish accent person, eh, the heart rate variability just stayed normal. Not stressful.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Right. They were like, “I expect this person to maybe be doing this thing.” Okay. Can I ask something?
DANIEL: Yup.
HEDVIG: Or a number of things? It’s very easy to think that we are little machines inside of our heads poking out through our eyes driving around a body.
BEN: Like Men in Black!
DANIEL: A Ratatouille.
HEDVIG: But we are not. We are embodied things that exist in our bodies all the time. And by saying that something cognitive has a physiological reality and by that being surprising, that’s saying that we’re surprised by that connection that we shouldn’t be. Everything that happens in our minds probably has effects on our body all the time.
BEN: We are a system.
HEDVIG: We are a system. It’s easy to forget that, especially when you do a very intellectually job where your body is not involved that much… You have an easier time thinking of yourself as a little body snatcher driving around a little body, but you’re not. Anyway, that was the first thing. But the other thing…
BEN: I just got a homunculus picture in my head inside, a little homunculus Hedvig inside Hedvig being like, [LAUGHS MANIACALLY]
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: No. But honestly, it’s, what’s it called? Exacerba… What’s it called? Poxacerbated? Axacerbated?
DANIEL: It’s exacerbated.
BEN: Exacerbated?
HEDVIG: Exacerbated. When by saying things like, when my brain does this or my leg does this or something, you’re like, [DANIEL LAUGHS] You’re not. You’re all those…
DANIEL: I am Joe’s executive function.
BEN: Yeah. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly.
BEN: Fight Club style.
HEDVIG: Like, “When my stress does this,” or something. But anyway, it doesn’t matter. That can be helpful too.
BEN: Can I ask…? Oh, sorry.
HEDVIG: I have a question first, Ben! Actually.
BEN: You were taking a very long time.
DANIEL: She’s working towards something.
HEDVIG: I know. Incorrect grammar, unexpected grammar was one thing. But if people say things that are semantically weird, like “The coconut had a nice holiday in space,” I think they’d get the same things as well.
DANIEL: That is interesting. I do not know. I don’t think that research has been done. Not that I know of.
HEDVIG: So, if we’re creating the list of, “Now we’ve done this, let’s do some more research.” So, Hedvig wants to do semantics, which I think is really good. I want to vary who you’re measuring as well. I would be really interested to know if a bunch of, I presume, predominantly monolingual British people offer you a different dataset than say… I don’t know, I’m just going to pick a place I know to be pretty varied linguistically, someone from Réunion Island.
DANIEL: Mm.
BEN: Right? Someone who potentially regularly comes into contact with many different languages and many different — potentially — levels of knowledge of languages and potentially grammar fuckery just all over the place, whether they’d just be like, “Neh.”
DANIEL: I’d like to test children.
BEN: Aah.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Okay. Well, we’ve got a hat trick. We’ve got three suggestions that [DANIEL LAUGHS] we can put forward.
DANIEL: The thing is, I saw this research and I decided let’s make it the topic for The Speakeasy because I have a weekly gig on ABC Australia Radio invited…
BEN: You absolute baiting motherfucker.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: Oh, my god.
DANIEL: They did. They unloaded…
BEN: [LAUGHS] You know what you’re doing!
DANIEL: Yeah. The responses that they gave were annoyance and sometimes pain, but of course, I guess I primed them for that. But I really am aware of how deep this stuff goes. Like, I’m critical of people who act terrible, and they give this performative grammar outrage. But at the same time, this stuff does go pretty deep. So it’s like we say: you can’t control your first response, but you can control your second. And I guess that’s an avenue for me to help people who have grammar outrage to be able to make better conscious choices even though your body isn’t cooperating.
HEDVIG: I mean, we live in societies nowadays of thousands and hundreds of thousands of people who are different. Like, humans are made for variation, but maybe some people were not used to this amount of variation in their personal lives, and they’re just not really built for it, and it’s a bit of an obstacle. But you’re right. You maybe can’t control your first impulse unless you can do like me and just like wear it the fuck down over years and years and years.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: By sheer force of will.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Sheer just like sand papering. But you can control your second, like you said. If you’re aware that doing a face or something makes people feel bad and it’s like, “Yeah, it took me like two milliseconds longer to parse that sentence,” you can afford that.
DANIEL: Yeah, good point. Let’s get to our last news story. This one was suggested by… Hedvig, your brother. Was this Hannas?
HEDVIG: Yes. My brother, Hannas, sends me stuff sometimes that he thinks we’ll like for the show, and this was one of them. So, Microsoft Word has been with us for a long time.
DANIEL: 40 years.
BEN: Since the ancient and distant past.
DANIEL: Happy birthday, Word.
HEDVIG: It has become THE tool to use for word processing. And it turns 40 this year, which I actually thought was… I actually thought it was older somehow. I don’t know why.
BEN: No, that’s right in the sweet spot for me of like, stuff is… My first thought would be like, “Oh, Microsoft Word must be like 20 years old now.” And now, I’m old enough and I’ve had that thought enough, where I’m like, “Ben, you need to add two decades to whatever your default guess for a [DANIEL LAUGHS] lot of these things are, because you’re lowballing it to a concerning degree.” So, 40 years is right where I would have addified my guess to.
HEDVIG: All right. Well, lucky you for being in touch with reality.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: BBC, Victoria Wollaston wrote an article about Microsoft Word and its impact on language because it makes choices, doesn’t it?
BEN: It does.
HEDVIG: It is not a neutral tool. No tool is neutral.
BEN: More so now than ever before. I’m actually… with fresher and fresher installs of Microsoft Word in various workplaces that I partake in — [CHUCKLES] partake in — that I work at, I have noticed that Microsoft Word really has become far more of a copy editor than it ever was before. Right? Microsoft Word previously was like: red squiggly line most of the time, blue squiggly line some, but not very often, and usually for very, very simple like, “Oh, you’ve put a comma here, but we think it should be somewhere else.” But now, it’s like, “Oh, we think this series of words could be simplified to this statement, which would flow better.” And I’m like, “Whoa, pump the brakes there, Microsoft Word. I don’t appreciate that line-by-line feedback.”
DANIEL: Do you take those suggestions? Because I can’t imagine anybody being anything but annoyed. Unless they’re learners.
HEDVIG: I take some of those suggestions. Well, so maybe we should clarify that. Red squiggly line is when there’s something that isn’t in its dictionary. So, there’s a name or a jargon or something, or you’ve spelled a word in an unconventional way. It’s like, “I’ve never seen that word before. You sure that’s it?” Whereas blue squiggly line is: there’s something with the flow or the phrasing or the commas or something like that that all the words exist in its dictionary, but it’s like something about the combination of these words doesn’t jive with me.
DANIEL: Usage. Mm.
HEDVIG: I don’t use Microsoft Word almost at all because I use Google Docs and LibreOffice. And in Google Docs, I have the Grammarly activated, but it does a very similar job. Because I don’t appreciate English conventions of commas and I am refusing to learn it.
BEN: Oh. But Hedvig, they’re so good. I love me a good comma. I love it.
HEDVIG: They are not. They are not.
DANIEL: What’s the title of this article by Victoria Wollaston?
HEDVIG: The title is “The surprisingly subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language.”
BEN: Well…
DANIEL: Provocative.
BEN: Some language.
HEDVIG: Many of the things they mention in the articles are maybe subtle to some people, less subtle to other people, but they talk about things like the fact that it defaults to American English spellings and also specific versions of that. So, it has potentially erased dialectal or other kinds of variation. That’s one thing.
DANIEL: If you take their suggestions, yes.
HEDVIG: If you take their suggestions, which a lot of people do, because you want to reduce that stress in people. Right? That makes perfect sense.
DANIEL: That’s what I want to know.
BEN: Hold on. Wait, save your pushback, Daniel. Let’s get to the end [DANIEL LAUGHS] and then you can push back.
DANIEL: Okay, okay.
HEDVIG: “There’s some evidence that in adults at least, rather than making users lazy spellers, autocorrect features can reduce exposure to misspellings, and so avoid the disruptive impact this can have on our memory for how a word should be spelt.” So, I’m not sure I understand…
DANIEL: Oh, I think it’s saying that it’s making us worse spellers because we’re not getting corrective feedback.
BEN: Yes, that’s what I interpreted that as well.
HEDVIG: Right.
BEN: Because you learn effectively when you do something wrong and someone says, “No, no, no. we must do it differently.” Righter.
HEDVIG: So, when it’ll invisibly just go in and correct LANGAUGE to LANGUAGE.
BEN: When it auto corrects, which it does a lot, right?
HEDVIG: I will never learn. Yeah, that’s fair. That is me.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: All right, Daniel, let’s hear your pushback.
DANIEL: I’m not ready for pushback yet.
BEN: Oh, god.
DANIEL: There are some other claims that it makes. One is that Word templates make documents look the same for a lot of people.
BEN: Okay. That’s a dumb thing to say because that’s how templates work, but sure. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: That’s what I thought! I mean, templates look the way they do because there are norms, right?
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Like, pleading papers have to look a certain way in legal circles.
HEDVIG: Sorry, this is not a dumb thing to say at all. Suddenly, every machine in the world in lots of different countries have the same templates. That didn’t happen before.
BEN: Oh, okay.
HEDVIG: Like, different companies, different countries…
BEN: Right. Sorry. I get what you’re… I heard a criticism of use of templates and I’m like, “Well, yeah, but that’s how templates work.” But the criticism is because it’s ubiquitous, it’s just Word’s templates that are being used.
HEDVIG: Which is not criticism. It’s just a statement of reality.
BEN: An observation. Yeah, okay, fair enough.
DANIEL: Okay. Another claim that the article makes, Word made English into the language of business because the Word processers were made in English-speaking countries and things just took on the English-speaking way of doing things.
BEN: Yeah, I personally don’t feel comfortable with the level of knowledge that I have about the evolution of globalisation and business, blah, blah, blah to be able to either agree with or refute that claim. Like,: okay, maybe, possibly. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone was like, “No, English was going to be that anyway for these other reasons.” But fair enough.
HEDVIG: It’s probably Microsoft Word and the fact that the World Wide Web was started in America. There are lots of these factors and they’re interlinked and causing each other.
DANIEL: But I think the main claim, and Hedvig has said this, is that Word’s spell checker and grammar features are exerting a subtle pressure on language and are making us either worse spellers or better writers or something, but either way having a certain effect.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: I think that’s probably… I can’t inherently disagree with that. I would agree that there is a impact that is being exerted by the fact that there is one tool that is almost universally used that is making suggestions. I think, Daniel, from what I’m sensing, your pushback is like, “Okay, but how significant is that impact?” But I wouldn’t argue with the fact that clearly there is a force being exerted here.
DANIEL: I guess so. I just am skeptical about the effect size, because as we’ve mentioned, we all hate Word processor suggestions because they’re terrible.
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: Or, because they’re intrusive.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: No! No no no.
DANIEL: Or, because…
HEDVIG: You said that.
BEN: I think you might be… Daniel, I think you might be doing the thing…
DANIEL: Is that me?
HEDVIG: That is you.
BEN: I think you might be doing the thing that white guys have a bad habit of, myself included, which is like, “My experience is THE experience!”
DANIEL: Well, what’s your experience, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: So, spelling is a big global conspiracy, and I have to participate in it [BEN LAUGHS] to reduce…
BEN: Big Spelling!
HEDVIG: …the variable heart rate in my friends and colleagues.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: And I am not interested in learning the individual spelling of each English words, because they’re all idiosyncratic. So, if a little computer can help me and spell these bullshit words correctly, I’m going to take that help.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: When it comes to spelling, I’m in complete agreement. The red squiggly line, I will happily make use of and all that kind of stuff. I push back on the blue squiggly line a little bit more, but not always. Right? So, I just recently finished writing a very long report on family and domestic violence in Western Australia as part of my university thingy-thingy. And I ignored nearly all of the blue squiggly lines, because I felt confident in the style that I write in and the way that I wanted to express my writing and all that kind of stuff.
However, if I am not doing a thing that I am potentially going to have to present to a room full of people who run family and domestic violence shelters in WA — i.e., if the stakes are low, — yeah, blue squiggly line it up! It’s all good. I want to get done. I want to finish the boring thing that I am doing so I can go back to patting my cat.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Here’s what I was looking for. I traveled the world and the seven seas looking for research on this, [BEN LAUGHS] and I was trying to find something other than testimonial evidence, and it’s really sparse. So, for example, here’s what I was looking for. In 2020, it came out that Word was flagging two spaces after a sentence as a mistake.
BEN: Ah, yeah, this classic one. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: Right? Okay. Now I would love to know if attitudes followed, if before we saw people saying, “Yeah, two spaces, probably okay.” But afterwards saying, “Nah, probably not.”
BEN: But we don’t have that data. Is that what you’re saying?
DANIEL: We don’t have that data. And I don’t think anybody knows whether Word is really exerting any effect on things at all. I can see it plausibly…
BEN: It sounds to me like someone listening to this show right now is like, “Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, linguistics PhD thesis, here I come!”
DANIEL: Well, I think so. And if you can find for me any opinion polls of two spaces versus one, for instance, before 2020 and then after, I would love to see it, because I have looked. It’s possible that Word is exerting some kind of subtle influence, but I just don’t think anyone knows.
HEDVIG: That said, what I said before about appreciating the red squiggly lines to help me communicate in this stupid language, I have to say the reduction of variation is always a cause for concern. Humans are good at variation, and by smoothing everything out and reducing all the bumps, we are not only reducing the bumps that are big obstacles for people, but we’re also reducing the fun, little sightseeings on the way, right?
DANIEL: Yup. Totally.
HEDVIG: Like, we are reducing alternative spellings or words. I personally teach my word processing all the time about words. So, it’s like I’ve never seen this word before, and I’m like, “Yeah, and you better learn it now because I’m going to use it a lot.”
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: “You put this one in the library, buddy. It’s coming back.”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah. I would really encourage people who use these kind of programs, be they Word or something else, customise it, add things. Grammarly lets you add things. Google Docs lets you add things. Add shit!
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Yup.
BEN: [LAUGHS] We should move on. I appreciate this. Can I share with you, and you guys can think of your own, my most annoying unfixed autocorrect mishap?
DANIEL: Yeah…?
BEN: So clearly, with my stupid pudgy fingers and my known hatred for typing on phones enough times, I have fucked up writing “thank you” and I wrote like T-H-A-space-full-stop-K-U. That series of characters got touched and it’s clearly like a thing I did a bit because I’m not paying attention and now it…
DANIEL: Oh, no.
BEN: It sometimes autocorrects to that and I’m just too lazy to fix it.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: And so just every now and then, if you’re getting a text from me, it might be like, “Tha .ku.”
DANIEL: Oh, tha .ku. [LAUGHS] Well, I have one. I have a distressing inability to type Daniel. I type Danbiel or Dabiel. I have literally gone to autocorrect and told…
BEN: Dabiel. Dabiel. Dabiel.
DANIEL: I’ve told it to correct Dabiel and Dabniel to Daniel. “Please just put it right for me. Thank you.”
BEN: Help.
DANIEL: Happy birthday, Word. Even though you replaced WordPerfect, you’re still probably a good product.
BEN: I’m going to put my cards on the table and say that I think Microsoft Word is one of the least evil, terrible things Microsoft has ever made.
DANIEL: Oh, I have thoughts on that.
HEDVIG: I wish it would get better at multilingual documents. I wish everything would be better with multilingual documents.
BEN: Ooh, that must be really tough. Yeah. I appreciate that that would be really challenging.
DANIEL: And now, it’s time for our favorite game, Related or Not.
BEN: [SINGS] Related or Not. You’re going to find out about these words and what they mean.
HEDVIG: Sandy, do you want to participate?
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: [MIMICS CAT]
DANIEL: The cat is going to participate. Here we go. This one’s from Pontus on Facebook, Pontus says…
BEN: Pontus.
DANIEL: “I wrote a little game for you, guys. If you want to use it, it’s a spinoff from Related or Not that I call false friend or not.” I can’t read it in Pontus’s voice. I’m sorry that I can’t do that. But anyway.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Here we go. Number one, Related or Not, English BELLOWS. You know that thing that you use to floof up the fire? Hoot, hoot, hoot.
HEDVIG: Yes, or the thing you have to pump when you’re smithing iron in the blacksmith.
DANIEL: When I’m smithing iron, I use my powerful lungs to blow the flames.
BEN: No, pish posh. Your face would be scalded to the bone. You must use a tool, sir. Perhaps… a bellows?
DANIEL: I’m very strong. English BELLOWS and Swedish BÄLG. Hedvig, am I saying that with any degree of accuracy? BÄLG, which means bellows.
HEDVIG: Let me look at…
BEN: The fact that she has to look up the spelling, Daniel, suggests, “No, you’re not doing it well.”
HEDVIG: Well, okay. So, for the listeners, what Daniel had been supplied with is an A with two dots, not an O with two dots. So, it’s BÄLG.
DANIEL: Aah. BÄLG.
BEN: So, it’s BÄLG.
HEDVIG: Aa, not oo.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Aa, BÄLG.
DANIEL: BÄLG.
HEDVIG: BÄLG, which Pontus claims means BELLOWS as well.
DANIEL: Does it?
HEDVIG: I know it as a verb to… What do you do when you drink something quickly in English?
BEN: Guzzle or scull?
HEDVIG: Guzzle. BÄLG. Yeah.
BEN: Yeah. Okay.
HEDVIG: That’s how I know it. But I don’t tend to fires as often as…
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: It’s been many a year since I’ve been at the anvil.
DANIEL: Well, it’s time to guess. I’m going to go on a limb and say, I think yes.
BEN: [MUSING] BELLOWS and BÄLG.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: They mean the same thing. They’re same looking. I don’t know enough to say no, so I’m going to say yes.
HEDVIG: Okay.
BEN: I’m going to go with no, just for a point of difference.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
BEN: I wonder if it’s related to YELL, the English, like bellows. To bellow.
DANIEL: Yeah. Well, that might be coming up. Let’s find out. But okay. Hedvig, your answer?
HEDVIG: I think no, and I think BELLOW is related to BELLY somehow, and BÄLG is related to something else. But it’s not a word I use a lot.
DANIEL: Interesting.
HEDVIG: So, I want to say my speaker advantage is very low here.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Okay. [LAUGHS] I say yes, you both say no. Pontus says, “They are related.”
BEN: Argh.
DANIEL: Both come from Proto-Indo-European bʰelǵʰ, to swell. How about that? Okay, one for me. Next one. English BELLOW. That is to say the deep, loud sound when you bellow out a sound.
BEN: Baa.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: And Swedish… Hedvig, help me, please.
HEDVIG: BÖLJA. That is an aa now. BÖLJA is also like what a liquid does.
DANIEL: It boils?
HEDVIG: No, it bellows, like around the ship.
BEN: Or gurgles.
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: Do you mean billows? What the wind does?
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: Oh.
HEDVIG: No. [GIGGLES AND SNORTS]
BEN: I don’t think we have… This might be a lost in translation thing. I don’t think English has a particularly good word for the sound that water makes as it runs…
HEDVIG: No, it’s not a sound.
BEN: …around it. Oh.
HEDVIG: It’s a movement.
BEN: Oh, that’s billows, then. Yeah, we just use it for wind.
DANIEL: Yeah, we don’t really use water for…
BEN: Yeah, billows.
DANIEL: No, waves can billow.
BEN: Like, wind billows sails, and that sort of thing.
DANIEL: Yeah, it does. But waves can also billow.
BEN: Oh!
DANIEL: Yup.
HEDVIG: Yeah. BÖLJA is… yeah.
DANIEL: Okay. So, I think we’re talking about the word BILLOW, not to BELLOW. Okay.
BEN: Ah, interesting.
HEDVIG: I think so. Unless it also… Again, Pontus has picked very low frequency words.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Okay. So now, I think we’ve accidentally extended this. Is BELLOW related to BÖLJA, which is related to BILLOW. [CHUCKLES] Are all three related?
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] All right.
BEN: I’m going to go with yes.
DANIEL: We got a yes. Okay.
BEN: Because I just want all three of those things to be connected. That pleases me.
DANIEL: It’s a no from me. It’s a no from me.
HEDVIG: I’m going to stick with no.
DANIEL: Oh, you got a no. Okay.
HEDVIG: Also, I think I have a cat sushi already.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] I think you do.
BEN: You do have a cat sushi. It’s a jiggly sushi. It’s like jellyfish sushi. Jiggly!
DANIEL: Squish!
HEDVIG: He likes to be in a circle.
BEN: Is your house kind of cold?
HEDVIG: Yeah. [GIGGLES]
BEN: Okay, fair enough.
DANIEL: Pontus says, “They are false friends.”
BEN: Argh.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: BELLOW comes from a Proto-Indo-European root, bʰel, to sound or to roar, and BÖLJA comes from Proto-Indo-European bʰelǵʰ, the last one we saw, to swell, just like English BELLOWS does.
BEN: Hmm, there we go.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Because you swell up before you yell, perhaps.
DANIEL: I guess you do. And the waves and the wind swell as well. Last one from Pontus. “English KRAKEN, the mythical sea monster and Swedish KRAKE.”
HEDVIG: Kra-ke.
DANIEL: Say it again?
HEDVIG: Kra-ke.
BEN: Kra-ke.
DANIEL: Kra-ke.
HEDVIG: Like, lille krake. Like when you’re pitying someone. Like a child comes in from the storm, and they’re very…
BEN: Oh, poor thing.
HEDVIG: Poor thing. Poor thing. Yeah. Poor thing.
DANIEL: Poor.
BEN: But not said maliciously, but sympathetically.
HEDVIG: You could maybe say it cruelly as well.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Like, two people are fighting, and you say one of them is a krake, like one of them is not gonna do very well.
BEN: Oh, poor darling!
DANIEL: But what’s the relation here with WEAKLING, somebody who’s not very strong? Because that’s the gloss that Pontus gave it, WEAKLING.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Is that? Okay.
HEDVIG: Weakling could be another translation. Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay. Cool.
HEDVIG: But also, poor thing, I think.
BEN: I’m wondering if the root for KRAKEN comes from a word just for squid or some other small squishy, not particularly effective thing.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: And we’ve just used it to mean horrible sea monster, but it actually just means like tiny squiddy.
DANIEL: Okay. Was that a… yes?
BEN: I’m going to go related. I’m going to go 0 for three. I can feel it.
DANIEL: I said no. I’m not convinced, because of the opposite meanings.
BEN: Hedvig?
HEDVIG: I think they are related.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Yay! Little squiddy.
HEDVIG: They’re both creatures. They’re both people, sort of.
DANIEL: Yeah.
DANIEL: All right.
BEN: What do we got?
DANIEL: Pontus says related.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Does that mean two for all of us?
BEN: No, there’s one for me.
DANIEL: One for you.
HEDVIG: I think there’s one for me too.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Okay. So, Pontus says, “They’re both from Norwegian KRAKE directly borrowing for Swedish. But English has a special older use of KRAKE, which is a pole or a stake or a post. Also, a crooked tree, a stunted animal or a person.” How about that?
BEN: And so how did that become KRAKEN, stunted animal?
DANIEL: Well, it seems that krake, a crooked tree, is cognate with CROOK — you know, CROOKED, and a sea monster would be really crooked or really twisted.
BEN: There we go.
DANIEL: Last one. Susie has sent us a message on SpeakPipe. Hey, Ben, somebody sent us something on SpeakPipe.
BEN: Ooh, this is so exciting. Can we hear it?
DANIEL: Yeah, let’s hear it.
BEN: Okay.
SUSIE: Hi, Because Language. My name is Susie, and I’m wife of the MVP Chris. Hoping that you can get that reference. So, my question for you is, is CALF and CALF related? CALF meaning the part of our leg and then CALF, the young cows. Thank you for creating the content. We really enjoy it. Bye.
HEDVIG: Oh, Susie!
DANIEL: Isn’t that sweet?
HEDVIG: That’s really nice.
DANIEL: The MVP Chris reference: In our last episode, Chris asked us a question on SpeakPipe about the word, MVP. So, she’s the wife of MVP Chris.
BEN: Oh, that’s really fun. That’s so sweet.
DANIEL: You can imagine them listening to our show together. Don’t you love that?
BEN: Hey, everyone. You should all use SpeakPipe way more often because this is the coolest thing ever. Fucking just rustles my jimmies like nobody’s business. I really like it.
HEDVIG: Yeah, me too.
DANIEL: And you can do that on our website, becauselanguage.com.
BEN: Okay. CALF and CALF.
DANIEL: So, why are they called CALVES?
BEN: I’m going to go with yes.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: And the reason I think yes is I’m going to take a stab that calving, like calf, calving… Like, when seals on the beach are having young, we call it calving, right? Not carving, but calving.
DANIEL: Not carving, but calving.
BEN: I have this idea that we actually say that because that word originally in English means things splitting off other things.
DANIEL: Interesting.
BEN: And I’m wondering if the shape of things that split off were the weird human back of the lower part of the leg shape… So, when rocks fall off the side of a hill and that sort of thing, they might fall off in lumpy, calf-like shapes, that’s what I’m going with. I realise now, as I’m saying it, [DANIEL LAUGHS] it’s pretty crazy. But I put my flag in the sand. Let’s find out.
DANIEL: Okay, okay. Hedvig?
HEDVIG: I think they are related, and I think of a much grosser analogy, which has to do with cutting meat. I think there’s something about dishes and body parts and the way people like to eat young dairy stock.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
BEN: Interesting.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: [TO CAT] Never going to eat you.
BEN: No, she’s a predator. She’d not be very tasty.
DANIEL: We do have a tradition of naming body parts after animals. Like, your hams are your legs and ten little piggies. Right?
BEN: Yeah, but they’re all really cutesy. Like, the calf isn’t like a tiny cutesy thing.
HEDVIG: And the ham is also like… the ham that you eat is the same body part on the animal as it is on you.
DANIEL: That’s true.
HEDVIG: That’s what I’m claiming this on.
DANIEL: Okay. But I said yes. So, we all said yes, did we?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: For different reasons.
DANIEL: Well, it’s no!
BEN: Argh. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: They’re completely unrelated.
HEDVIG: No. Fuck.
BEN: Gosh darn it.
DANIEL: The baby cow is inherited from Germanic, something like cealf, or goes back to Proto-Germanic, kalbam, whereas as calf, the leg part, is from Norse, kalfi. There is a note on Etymonline: “possibly from the same Germanic root as CALF”. But because it’s a possibly and not a likely, and they come from seemingly different sources, probably not related.
BEN: Oh.
HEDVIG: Boo.
DANIEL: Yeah. Or, shall we say, moo.
DANIEL: I can’t believe I got that one wrong because I even did this one on the ABC. Thanks for your suggestions. We’re having a lot of fun with them, and keep on sending them, hello@becauselanguage.com or via SpeakPipe on our website. It’s fun.
[INTERVIEW BEGINS]
[MUSIC]
DANIEL: We’re talking to Dr Andrew Perfors, Professor of Psychology at the University of Melbourne. Hey, Andy. Thanks for coming on, having a chat.
ANDREW PERFORS (hereafter ANDY): Thanks. It’s a pleasure. Should be very interesting.
DANIEL: I think so! You’re the coauthor of a new paper in Nature Human Behavior — awesome — along with Dr Steven Piantadosi and Dr Celeste Kidd. And the paper’s called “Trans-inclusive gender categories are cognitively natural.”
ANDY: Yeah.
DANIEL: I like paper titles that are sentences.
ANDY: [LAUGHS] We had a hard time making that a short enough sentence, but yes, that way people get the point even if they don’t even read the paper.
DANIEL: Titles are hard. Titles are hard. But yeah, that’s a good strategy. Your coauthor Steven Piantadosi caught my attention with a tweet, and it said this: “We are happy to share our new commentary on why using language inclusively for transgender people is perfectly appropriate biologically, socially, and scientifically.” So, maybe you could tell me, what does that mean? Using language inclusively for transgender people, what does that look like?
ANDY: Well, mainly it means just using the pronouns that trans people request. Right? So, if a transwoman says, “Call me HER,” or a trans guy: “Call me HIM”, or a non-binary person says, “Call me THEY,” it says do that. Or, I think more broadly saying a transwoman, meaning someone who was born male and has transitioned to female, calling her a woman. So that’s all we mean. So, it’s kind of a mouthful for a simple idea, but it’s in response to this prevailing view… Well, I don’t think it’s a prevailing view. It’s a niche view, but it’s a very loud view among a niche set of people, which is that essentially: “unless your gender category is something like ‘woman based on having large gametes or certain sex physiological properties’, then you’re basically denying reality or being unscientific” are just wrong. And it’s a response to that because we study categorisation, and that is an empirically false statement.
DANIEL: Okay. Okay. We’re going to get into that. I also think that as well as pronouns, are we also talking about things like referring to people as “pregnant people” instead of “pregnant women”, or “birthing people”? Are you extending into that area, or was that not even on your mind?
ANDY: I guess…
DANIEL: Because it’s going on.
ANDY: It’s going on. I think that the main arguments we’re addressing don’t really apply there because… So, people basically who want to say: “Don’t call people pregnant people”, they’re not saying, that’s an incorrect category usage. They’re just saying, “I feel offended by this,” right?
DANIEL: Yeah.
ANDY: And so, what we’re really addressing is the comment that says that’s about incorrect category usage.
DANIEL: Okay. I want to back up a little bit since you mentioned a social context here, because I found out that you’ve done some work in misinformation and disinformation.
ANDY: Yeah.
DANIEL: So, I got really excited, because how we communicate is also part of our remit. So, tell me how the issue of trans rights is wrapped up in the issue of misinformation. Is there a connection there?
ANDY: Oh, there’s a deep connection. And I guess I’m going to back up slightly myself and note that my interest in writing this article comes from two places. One is that I study misinformation and disinformation. The other is that I am trans. And so, I feel like I’ve gotten, in some ways, a front-row seat to a very powerful kind of misinformation and disinformation that’s going out there, which is about trans rights. And in a way, it’s a very privileged front row seat because I have intimate knowledge of all the ways in which it’s incorrect and also all the effects it’s having. And so basically, a desire to, in my fruitless way, do something about that was what was behind writing this paper.
So, in the misinformation sphere, people make a distinction between disinformation and misinformation and malinformation. And so, disinformation is stuff that people are saying that they know is wrong, but they’re saying it anyways. And then there’s misinformation which people just haven’t bothered to look if it’s right or wrong. It sounds good to them. They’re passing it on. And then there’s malinformation which is technically true but is caused to either… taken so much out of context or framed in such a way that people get the false idea, or it’s taken to cause bad things.
So for instance, an example of malinformation might be, if you… say you find some child, some pedophile or something and you’re talking about the person that that is, but you always talk about it in the context of: “All people like this are child predators.” You never say that directly but that’s the framing. So, you’re never saying anything false but you’re making people come away with a false generalisation. Right?
DANIEL: Okay.
ANDY: The point is that, when I look at the discussion around trans stuff, it’s a combination of all of them. But the thing that I think I find most problematic is the disinformation-to-misinformation pipeline, where you will have people who put forth arguments that they know are false and then they’re picked up by a lot of very credulous people because they sound good, or they want to believe them and they spread very widely. This is one of them, is this sort of: “Oh, calling transwomen women is incorrect and unrealist.” That is actually misinformation, and the article’s about why. So, it’s just about trying to stop that. I think many of the people who originally said it, they know it’s wrong. But many people, it sounds plausible, right?
DANIEL: Well, we are living in this time when a lot of people, lots of especially public figures, are losing their goddamn minds, not just about the issue of trans people but about a lot of things. And it’s all just coming together into a big messy ball of batshittery. I mean, in Melbourne, we saw a protest where TERFs and Nazis — that’s trans-exclusionary radical feminists — they were coming together at protests. And then you throw in some vaccine nonsense, and it’s just this horrible, [LAUGHTER] shitty ball of grossness.
ANDY: Yeah, it is.
DANIEL: So, I don’t think we can talk about this paper without describing this wider area. It’s happening in a context of misinformation and enshittification.
ANDY: Yes. And I think also some of it is not accidental. So, I won’t say I think most TERFs are not Nazis. Right? But I also think that many of the people who are behind the disinformation are in fact either very right wing or don’t care if they are used by right-wing people. So, you do see, just empirically, this confluence of Qanon, anti-vax, pro-Trump, this whole confluence of beliefs is all tied together. And I think partly, there’s interesting psychological research on why people who believe one kind of conspiracy theory believe another, and that’s part of it. But part of it is it’s all being driven by the same behind-the-scenes actors. And it’s hard to talk about that without sounding like a conspiracy psycho person yourself.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] I know. And yet, it might be true. Yeah. Okay.
ANDY: Again, I think you look at many TERFs or many people who believe a lot of the anti-trans stuff, they aren’t themselves that, but they’re opening themselves up to that kind of radicalisation because that’s a thin end of the wedge.
DANIEL: So why is misinformation and disinformation and malinformation… why is it so attractive? We’ve talked about this on the show before. I think I’ve got some ideas. I think one thing is that it prevails because lies are quick to make, so the info gets out there fast and people just believe the first thing they see. Does that sit right with you? with your knowledge?
ANDY: I think that’s part of it, yes. I think there’s other factors too. Another factor is, they’re not just quick to make, they’re usually simple. The truth is complicated. I mean, you see this in this paper. We go through all this, “Well, if you look at the history of concepts,” and blah, blah, blah. Whereas there’s this intuitive, “But women don’t have penises.” Right? Like, that’s simple. And so, there’s a very strong thing of that.
And then, there’s another thing is, you look at the people who tend to get sucked into conspiracy theories or… everyone believes some misinformation, like everyone.
DANIEL: Sure.
ANDY: So, there’s no, you know.
DANIEL: Everything we think is at least a little bit wrong, right?
ANDY: Exactly. And I include myself, and we all have these heuristics. But the people who really get sucked into these very strong misinformation echo chambers, they tend to be often people who are… essentially, there’s emotional reasons they’re doing it. They find community there, they are looking for not just clear answers but clear answers that give them some sense of control like: “I know the secret, you don’t,” that sort of thing. And then, once they alienate enough of their friends by basically being dicks about all the misinformation, then they’re really effectively trapped there because their only friends are the people who believe the same thing. So there’s a strong emotional component, I think.
This is my anecdotal impression. But if you look at a lot of the people who are very strong anti-trans, gender-critical people, they are women who have basically had some really bad experiences with men. And men are a much less-safe target than transwomen who they see as men. And so, the emotion thing is this. Right? It’s driven by some real, legitimate experiences, but they’re so big, and the real target, the real problem is this vague society, patriarchy, whatever, and it’s much, much easier to focus your rage and hurt and pain on a minority scapegoat. That’s my sense of a lot of what’s going on there. It’s emotion driven. Yeah.
DANIEL: If you know somebody who’s gone down the rabbit hole, how do you get them out or how do you keep somebody out? Surely… surely Andy, if we do some debunking, if we just write enough papers like yours, they’ll hear the voice of sweet reason and agree with us.
ANDY: I wish. I mean, I don’t know.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
ANDY: Obviously, on some level, I hope this is true because I bothered to write the paper.
DANIEL: Right.
ANDY: But also, I wrote the paper more for the people. So, I feel like there’s a particular angle of radicalisation that this paper is aimed at, which is the person who is… they start off, they mildly don’t care. They don’t know any trans people. They think: they seem like a bunch of weirdos, but whatever, live and let live, which many people believe in, is fine. We live in a pluralistic society.
But then for some reason, there’s some emotional thing happens. And for many people, it’s like a divorce or some people get radicalised when their own children come out as trans or someone in their family comes out as trans. I think Elon Musk…
DANIEL: Elon Musk. Classic.
ANDY: …this happened to him. But there’s another trick, a type of person that this happens, and it just offends their sense of rationality. They feel like, “This makes no sense. Those people are irrational and wrong, and I am a realist and they’re not.” And then, they get pushback when they say that as: “You’re being transphobic”, and that just puts them further in because they think, “Wait, I’m the only one…” They feel like it’s an Emperor’s New Clothes situation. “I’m the only one pointing out that the emperor has no clothes, that the trans people are totally being irrational and the whole society is behind them. What the fuck is happening?” Like, that’s their personal narrative, right?
DANIEL: It’s attractive. It’s attractive.
ANDY: It’s attractive. And if you have this unexplored knowledge of what concepts are, again, it sort of would be like, “How can someone legitimately say that someone who has a penis is a woman? They seem insane.” If you have that very superficial knowledge. And so basically the purpose of this paper, I think, is to catch those people, right when they’re just starting at that and be like, “Actually, you think you’re really rational and empirically driven. Well, here’s the actual facts of the matter. Think about categories, think about concepts. It’s actually no different than… Your intuition that every category is very sharply defined and built based in things in the world, that’s actually the thing that’s wrong.”
DANIEL: Okay. Well, then let’s talk about categories. This sentence appears in the paper: “Human lexical concepts are almost always vague, fuzzy and graded, as well as impossible to specify precisely.” What do you mean? What are some examples of that?
ANDY: So virtually, anything you can think of. We have this intuition: chair. A chair.
DANIEL: Chair.
ANDY: It’s a thing that you sit on with four legs. Well…
DANIEL: Wait a minute. It might not be. Like, is a box a chair?
ANDY: Well, a box can be a chair if you’re sitting on it. We sometimes refer to it as a chair. Or, like a horse. You sit on that. It has four legs. Right? Or, there might be three-legged chairs.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Yeah.
ANDY: There’s a very, very famous paper by Wittgenstein, the philosopher of language.
DANIEL: I was going to bring up Wittgenstein. Awesome. Yep. Yep.
ANDY: And that’s true for virtually any concept. If you actually try to define it, you get into these narrow and narrow, weirder and weirder things and you can find exceptions. And that’s true. Again, almost no one has been able to think even something that you’d think of, okay, mathematical concepts. And those do have a strict mathematical definition, but our personal way we think about things, “Okay, so which seems like a better even number to you? 2 or 1,732?” or something like that. Most people would say, “Well, two seems better even though they’re both even.”
DANIEL: I know they’re both even, but two seems prototypically even whereas the other one is… not an edge case, but kinda?
ANDY: Exactly.
DANIEL: Like, I wouldn’t think of it first.
ANDY: Exactly. And this very real sense of: there’s a prototype? That is how we think of categories. There’s a prototype with fuzzy edges. Some things, people will disagree about what’s in or not. And even when they have sharp boundaries, all sorts of people are slower to say those things are in the category, more people… It’s true for everything. Every single thing.
DANIEL: Like, right now, I’m drinking from a cup. Is it a cup or is it a glass? It’s a glass.
ANDY: Exactly.
DANIEL: But something could be made of plastic, but the same sort of tapered shape. Is it still a glass? No, I think it’s kind of a cup. Okay. So, what if this thing had a handle? Would it still be a glass? Well, no. Now, it’s a mug. This is William Labov, isn’t it? Talking about cups, mugs, glasses and jugs.
ANDY: Yeah. That’s exactly the case. But again, with everything, all of our categories are like this. And the gender-critical people, they want to say that WOMAN and MAN is unlike those. That it’s this very sharp definition. You’re a woman, if you have… Of course, it’s actually funny, if you look at the history of their papers, because they run into this exact problem of, sort of, they’ve said something and people have been like, “Oh, what about this?” And so, they’ve now narrowed in on this strict biological definition, which is about the size of your gametes, “Do you have an egg? Then you’re a woman.” Or, “Do you have sperm? Then you’re a man.”
DANIEL: Yup.
ANDY: And that’s a strict definition, and that’s why biologists settled on it. But…!
DANIEL: But Andy, I can’t see if somebody has eggs or sperm. [LAUGHS]
ANDY: Exactly. That’s why it’s totally useless. And then occasionally, there actually are people who don’t produce either, and then the gender criticals are forced to say, “Well, it’s about the potentiality of the kind of person they are.” And then you’re like, “You are just talking in circles.”
DANIEL: Yup.
ANDY: Yeah, this is not natural.
DANIEL: Yes. Okay. So, I think with your example of CHAIR, there are things that chairs have in common. As Wittgenstein said, there are family resemblances. I think he was talking about the concept of GAME when he was doing his thing. So, some games you compete, and some you play by yourself, and some have equipment, and some don’t. Some have an endpoint, some don’t. But what happens is that they seem to have some family resemblances that make us look at them. And then at the time of classification, we say, “All right, that’s a game.” Or, “No, that’s not really a game. That’s more of a race.” Or, “No, that’s a hot dog,” or, “No, that’s a sandwich,” or, “That’s a cup,” or whatever.
So, it’s like there are some real differences, and they’re not even on our radar. But then in our brains, there are these fake differences that we perceive as real. Like, bears and dogs are really closely related. And then, there’s wolves. But we think of wolves and dogs as different things.
ANDY: Exactly. We think of koala bears as bears.
DANIEL: It’s Aristotle, isn’t it? I think Aristotle is responsible for a lot of intellectual mischief.
ANDY: [LAUGHS] He is.
DANIEL: So, you’ve made the case for me that a label like CHAIR or WOMAN or CUP is a conceptual cloud.
ANDY: Mmm.
DANIEL: It’s not well defined. We’ve seen this with our “Is a Hot Dog a Sandwich?” episode. We don’t gain knowledge of a category by somebody describing the category to us. We just see a billion examples. When there’s a sandwich on the counter, somebody says, “Do you want a sandwich?” The word SANDWICH comes up when there’s a sandwich nearby. And gradually, we imprint this idea of what a sandwich is, but they’re all different. Is that why we have these fuzzy categories? Why are we such weird lumpers and splitters?
ANDY: So I think there’s a distinction actually between what our perceptual and representational system is doing and what our communicative system is doing. The real world, it does have a lot of complexity, right? Every hot dog is slightly different. I’m sure you read that Borges story about… Well, there’s a lot of interesting Borges stories, but there’s one about…
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
ANDY: It’s about categorisation and basically about someplace with, like, I forgot the name of the story. I’ll send you the link afterwards.
DANIEL: Okay!
ANDY: It’s about really terrible category systems which make categories based on really stupid things like, this bread has a piece sticking out here or whatever, you know…
DANIEL: Oh, right.
ANDY: …instead of the intrinsic sort of things. But in fact, the real world is every hot dog is slightly different. Every dog is slightly different. Right? And our representations are formed by our experiences in the world. We just see those things, we remember them, and we abstract. But that’s not useful. Like, you need to have something much more simplified to communicate about, and also even just to reason about. It’s a huge cognitive cost to remember all these individual dogs. There’s a whole lot in psychology about the science of memory. Are you remembering individual dogs? Are you abstracting details?
But what we know is that it’s some combination of those, but we’re almost certainly abstracting detail or abstracting away and forming this general idea. But what language does is it abstracts even further. So, we don’t even have to think about the details of dog when we say the word DOG, it’s just like it’s almost a pointer to the concept. And it’s very easy. It’s a symbol. It’s very psychologically easy to manipulate and everything.
And that is what makes communication so powerful, because I can talk about these complicated things with you by using these symbols, and you’re not having to, for every word I say, think about your whole vast entire life’s experience with dogs in order to have this conversation. You just think DOG, the symbol, right?
DANIEL: Yeah. That’s efficient because then… So ambiguity: People complain about, “Oh, why does language have to be ambiguous?” No, ambiguity is a strength because then I can attach a word to a nearby object or an adjacent object. Yeah, when you say DOG, our understandings of dogs can be slightly different, but we could still communicate about…
ANDY: Yeah, exactly.
DANIEL: …dogs meaningfully.
ANDY: The only way it would not be ambiguous is if you had a slightly different word for every single different dog there was in the world. And then basically, all our words would be intensely long. Language is essentially compression, right? What you want is something that’s balancing, it’s simplifying but not simplifying so much. It’s still doing useful things for you.
DANIEL: Okay. So, what we’ve come up with is that — and this is something I love talking about — language is a low-resolution representation of reality. So, some detail is always lost.
ANDY: Yeah. And I would add, it is that but not just reality. The parts of reality that matter to us, either representationally or communicatively.
DANIEL: And sometimes, that matter in that moment for that particular purpose, which is why it’s different every time.
ANDY: Exactly. And that’s also why things change all the time, because reality changes, and the things you need to talk about change, and different subgroups of people have different realities they’re talking about.
DANIEL: Wow, this is so cool. Which is why if you say: the word WOMAN has a specific definition, then you just do not understand how language works.
ANDY: I would say, except unless you are using it in a particular context where that makes sense.
DANIEL: Ah!
ANDY: I’m not against the gamete definition, if you’re a biologist and you need to know about gametes for the particular classification or purpose, you’re using it. The point is, on a societal level, we don’t need to know about gametes or care about gametes. No one knew about gametes until like, you know, 200 years or whenever gametes were discovered. And we functioned fine as a society. That’s just not relevant to… And so that’s the point. And if you care about gametes and you try to go around and classify people you see based on gametes, you’re in for a really hard time. It’s impossible.
DANIEL: So, what happens is I walk up to a chair and I say, “That thing is close enough to my internalised concept of a chair for my purposes right now.” And if I had more specific needs, like if I had a community that specifically needed to talk about different kinds of chairs and it needed to be really precise, then we could do that.
ANDY: Exactly. And if you’re a carpenter and you have to make a specific kind of chair, then you will make… Yeah, you might come up with a particular word for that particular kind of chair. But again, it’s a social purpose, right?
DANIEL: Yup. It’s purpose dependent.
ANDY: Yes.
DANIEL: Okay. All right. This is blowing my mind, and I think I got a grip on it. So, this is good. Okay. Now, I opened this up to the folks in our Discord, to our great listeners, and there was a question from PharaohKatt. This involves purpose as well. So, let me get your feedback on this. PharaohKatt asks, “How do you balance gender-inclusive language with language meant to be understandable to a wider population? Thinking especially about immigrants, refugees, people who might not speak a lot of English.”
And then, PharaohKatt continues, “I can’t find it now, but I remember an Australian midwifery group putting out a statement that they weren’t transitioning to gender-inclusive language because they were worried about being understood by people who spoke English as a second language.” And I might add, people who may themselves suffer systemic discrimination and may not have any… are already working with a lot of complications themselves.
ANDY: So I think there’s a couple of things to say. First of all, again, I think the main point I would make is that gender-inclusive language is actually the less confusing option most of the time. I really struggle to see a context in which PREGNANT PERSON is confusing. [CHUCKLES] A lot of the times people are talking about gender-inclusive language like that, it’s actually giving you increased precision, because we’re not talking about all women, we’re talking about the ones who are pregnant or whatever.
So, there are only two times in which I think gender-inclusive language might be confusing. And almost always, they are confusing because they are taken out of context by gender-critical people, out of a context where they aren’t confusing, where they’re being used to a community of speakers where it makes sense, and then they’re saying, “Look, they want all of us to talk like that.” And no one actually wants that. It’s like you’re talking to these professional carpenters and saying, “Look, you’re using all these ridiculous words for chairs. You want to change reality. You want us to use those?” No, actually, we have developed… so I’m talking specifically about… there’s various weird pronouns and stuff, which I personally often don’t see the point of them. But when those have been developed, again, it’s usually for very small specific community use. It’s not meant to be a broad claim of: everyone needs to start using the word ZIR, or whatever, you know. The other thing that I think people generally struggle with is using THEY for a single person.
DANIEL: Yes, I had that as a question yesterday on my show, The Speakeasy, where people were like, “I have a hard time with THEY, help me out. What can I do?”
ANDY: Yeah. I think that is a genuine… I sometimes struggle with this! I think many non-binary struggle people struggle with this, despite feeling that it’s right. The reason people struggle with is, again, very cognitively interesting, because — I’m sure you know this, it’s about language — there’s a big difference in how we process and learn, like, open class versus closed class words.
DANIEL: Tell me what those are.
ANDY: So closed class words are things like function words, pronouns. So, function words like prepositions, these types of grammatical categories that there’s actually very few of. Right?
DANIEL: It’s hard to make new ones.
ANDY: It’s hard to make new ones. Those are, generally speaking, quite different in how we process and use them than… It’s really easy for us to learn new nouns or verbs. When we’re learning a new language, if it has really different, say, pronominal systems or determiner systems, those are the things that are hard to learn. And so, using THEY is essentially asking people to add a pronoun to a closed-class system. So, it’s hard. It’s just hard. But it’s hard because it’s hard for the same reason learning a new language is hard. Right? It’s not because it’s wrong. Kids learn this fine. Right? And in fact, if you think about it, we actually do use gender-neutral THEY all the time for a single person. If I said something like, “Oh, so, hey, that person walking down the street, they look really annoyed.”
DANIEL: “Somebody left their keys on the table.”
ANDY: Yeah, we do that all the time. So, the difference is applying it to a person we know consistently. And that again is just a hard thing. So, I guess my first thing is: give yourself credit for finding it hard. But the other thing is, like all of language, it’s like language learning practice and practice mentally in your head. The other thing is, the people I’ve noticed that have really struggled with my pronoun transition, which isn’t THEY, which is easier, but they’re the ones who seem to have mentally internalised the news that I was trans as, “Oh, she thinks she’s a guy. I need to pretend to use… I need to remember to use HE.” They’ve not actually internalised the thing as being about me. Whereas if it’s people have actually tried to internalise it as, “Oh, this person, we thought this person was a woman, but it turns out not. It turns out he’s a guy at heart,” then it works much better. So, it’s actually about changing the concept it’s attached to.
And I’ve seen that in, again, very, very… people who don’t know any LGBT people. Like, I had a good cis guy friend who he did not ever struggle with my pronouns, and at some point, I asked, “Why?” You know! And he was like, “Oh, it’s easy. I just realised… we had a conversation shortly after where you were complaining about something and you sounded just like a guy, and I was like, ‘Oh, he’s a guy.’ And it just kind of clicked.” So that’s the thing about non-binary is: a THEY is if you just actually internalise, “No, this is not a woman trying to say they’re not a woman,” or whatever. This is someone who is genuinely not got a gender as we understand it. And so, they are THEY. That in practice, that helps. Yeah.
DANIEL: If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, then it is hard. It would be like if you’d never, ever heard of sandwiches before, or chairs, and suddenly you’re in a world of chairs, and it’s like, “Oh, I’m having to do all the work of working on this new category that I wasn’t used to all at once.” So yeah, I guess…
ANDY: Although I think it’s even harder than that. Because I’m going with the closed class thing, maybe a better example would be: okay, we see this. So, people who speak languages that don’t make the distinction between AN and THE, sort of precise… man, they struggle! When do I use THE, when do I use A.
DANIEL: It takes a long time.
ANDY: Yeah. It’s a distinction you’ve not grown up with, and it takes a really long time.
DANIEL: Yeah.
ANDY: I don’t know. My dad’s 40 something… or not 40 something. 70 something. He’s known me my whole life. He misgenders me still. And I absolutely understand that. And it doesn’t bother me because I see he’s trying and all of that. And I think most trans people are the same, honestly. Yeah.
DANIEL: We’re all sorting our shit out here, you know?
ANDY: Yeah, exactly.
DANIEL: We’re all doing our thing. A little bit of kindness and a little bit of… As you have said in your work on disinformation, a little bit of intellectual humility really goes a long way.
ANDY: And I think that’s the other thing. I mean, we’re getting a little bit aside from categories here, but I really think that a lot of the reason that sometimes people struggle to understand trans people is their internal experience is nothing like that. Right? So, they imagine how terrible it would be for them to be forced to do a gender transition. They think, “We have to stop people making mistakes because it would be terrible for them.” When really, the converse should be: they think about themselves being born in the other gender body. And the mistake is: do nothing about it. Anyways, I’m going off. But it is a bit… you know, recognise that people have internal experiences that are not yours, basically.
DANIEL: Yeah. That is so hard. That takes a level of intellectual sophistication. Well, it takes a level of sophistication that I think a lot of people really struggle with.
ANDY: Yeah. People may struggle with that, but I think there’s a lot of people who are pretty good at the next level, which is, “I don’t understand this, but I trust that they know themselves.” And I think that’s all I want from people. You don’t actually have to understand, but just trust that I know myself.
DANIEL: Yeah.
ANDY: Yeah.
DANIEL: I feel like we’ve spent more words talking than appear in the actual article itself.
ANDY: Yeah.
DANIEL: It’s a short article, worth a read. By the way, it’s going to be on the show notes page for this episode, becauselanguage.com. Just one more question though. What do you hope people will do as a result of this paper?
ANDY: [SIGHS] Well, mainly I just hope they’ll share it to people. I hope it’s out there because again, you see this talking point come up all the time. It would just be really nice if this became a go-to of, “No, that’s actually not quite right.” Because, again, my biggest hope is that it stops the people who are on the verge of this radicalisation. I don’t know how to stop people once they’re already radicalised. But there’s so many… In fact, I think the majority of people are innocent but benignly well-meaning. Basically, “I don’t know much about trans people, but fine, they can do their thing.” It’s really about stopping them from falling down this garden path.
So yeah, it’s a little unfortunate. It’s not an open-access article but there are ways to get the PDF. It’s on our web pages. And so, yeah. That’s my big hope. It’s just that it’s out there. I want people to know this. I’m a scientist. This is information, and misinformation drives me crazy, even if it weren’t about a thing that I care about so much. Yeah.
DANIEL: Because it’s not just about language. It’s about people’s rights, and that’s really, really important.
ANDY: Yeah. Because I think that’s how we ended it. If this were just an abstract philosophical debate, I think we would be much less bothered. I guess people are wrong about lots of things, and no one can go around like, “I can’t solve every wrongness in the world.” Right? But when it’s the basis to say, “No, this person who lives as a woman, most people perceive as a woman, but she can’t go somewhere into a bathroom where frankly she is a lot safer because of my lexical category,” that’s problematic. That’s what we’re worried about.
The other right I think that I’m very concerned about is medical access, because that has a huge effect on basically our health and happiness. Yeah. So, people use the categories to affect rights.
DANIEL: Language has consequences.
ANDY: It does. Yeah.
DANIEL: Talking to Dr Andrew Perfors of the University of Melbourne. Andy, how can people find out where you are and what you’re doing?
ANDY: Luckily, I am the only Andrew Perfors in the world as far as I know.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Cool.
ANDY: Well, luckily or not. So, if you just google me, check out my website and that’s got a lot of information also about how to contact me. Actually, it occurs to me, I have to put this paper on my website, but all my papers and everything are there. Yeah, definitely.
DANIEL: Awesome. Andy, thanks so much for hanging out with me and talking today. This has been really fulfilling. I feel fulfilled.
ANDY: Yeah. No, it’s really nice to talk to people about this, particularly the right balance of nerdiness about the cool science of it and also the… but let’s not forget the real-world context it’s all embedded in. Yeah.
DANIEL: That’s a balance we continually fail at.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Thanks, Andy.
ANDY: Thank you.
[INTERVIEW ENDS]
[MUSIC]
DANIEL: Let’s go to Words of the Week.
BEN: [SCATS] Words of the Week.
DANIEL: This one comes from Diego on our Discord. Hi, Diego. NOCTALGIA. NOCTALGIA.
BEN: [CHUCKLES] I think I can guess what this is.
DANIEL: Oh, okay. Go for it.
BEN: I suspect this is a sadness about not being able to see the stars.
DANIEL: Not being able to see the stars. It is true. Why wouldn’t you be able to see the stars?
BEN: Because of light pollution. So, um, cities are super bright at night, like a lot of cities… Well, certainly in the Western world and other developed places, we just butz out heaps of light at night, like streetlights and car lights and just all sorts of lights. It makes the sky really… not starry. Because a lot of stars are really, really, really, REALLY weak light, like super stupendously weak light because they’ve come across squagillions of light years of whatever. So, if they come to us and we’re sending light up, it kinda like beats that light.
DANIEL: It wins.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Why else, Hedvig? Why else would we be having more difficulty seeing the night sky besides just cities emitting light? Are you aware of any other things?
HEDVIG: I thought light pollution was the deal… maybe something in the atmosphere as well. Maybe there’s more particles and stuff. Maybe that would do something as well? I don’t know.
BEN: Global dimming?
HEDVIG: I can recommend… I’ve done this in Australia that sometimes astronomers have star-viewing nights, and they put up all their telescopes at a nice spot, and you can go as the public and look and I did that once at Mount Stromlo. It was really nice.
DANIEL: It is nice.
HEDVIG: If there’s one around you, and it’s a fun thing to do with kids as well.
DANIEL: Take a child.
HEDVIG: Kids get to be up at the middle of the night, and you get to look at stars. And these people who are hobbyists who have bought very expensive equipment that they rarely get to show off to people get to point them at like, “And that’s Venus.” And you’re like, [AWED] “Ooh.”
BEN: And there’s nothing in this world more charming than a deep, deep nerd who gets to share their love for their special interest when they don’t normally get to. That is a special kind of delightful human.
DANIEL: It is.
HEDVIG: And there’s people willing to lis… Like, they’re not sharing it to people who are like, “Fuck off.”
BEN: Yeah. There’s an audience.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Everyone’s like, [AWED] “Ooh, it’s Venus! Ahh.”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Another problem is that the number of satellites in orbit is more than ever before. SpaceX and other companies are more or less unloading satellites into the atmosphere, and that means that they show up in photographs as little streaks, little white lines.
BEN: Ah, boo.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: It’s no fun.
DANIEL: It’s kind of a tough time for ground-based astronomy, and possibly also for Indigenous people for whom astronomy is a part of their heritage and culture.
BEN: If no one has had the opportunity to, I would highly recommend you make space in your life before you die to go to a place in the world that doesn’t have a lot of light pollution on a night with a new moon. Meaning, like, the opposite of a full moon.
DANIEL: Gorgeous.
BEN: On said nights, the Milky Way will be bright enough that it casts a shadow onto the ground. Like, you will see your shadow on the ground from the Milky Way alone. It is truly amazing.
DANIEL: Gorgeous.
HEDVIG: That’s never happened to me.
DANIEL: And you can see a lot more shooting stars than you’d think you would.
BEN: Yeah. It’s one of those like… I’m not a religious person, but I look up and I go: Oh, I can kind of get how people think, like, there’s a god.
HEDVIG: There’s something big.
BEN: Because it’s just unbelievable.
DANIEL: Transcendent.
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly. It is transcendent.
HEDVIG: To me, this didn’t even have to happen in… I didn’t seek it out. I was just living in Canberra, and there’s parts of Canberra where there’s not a lot of streetlights, and the streetlights that are, are in the middle of trees.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: When you try and bike there, it’s in the middle of the night, it’s just you…
BEN: You’re taking life into your own hands.
HEDVIG: …you have to either know the road very well or have a light. And I was biking home one day the first week I was in Australia, and I looked up and I was like: What’s that streak across…?” And I was like: Oh, wait, is that the Milky Way?
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I had never seen it. I didn’t know.
BEN: It’s wild, isn’t it?
DANIEL: Oh, it’s gorgeous.
HEDVIG: I didn’t even know it was like this. I had never seen it. I thought that all the pictures of it were enhanced and stuff. And I saw it, just like…
HEDVIG: Or, with some sort of space telescope from the top of a mountain or something.
HEDVIG: Yeah, something like that. And I saw it in the middle of Canberra, which is why they call it the Bush Capital, because it is barely a city in some ways.
BEN: You’re just like wandering home drunk from the pub, and you’re like: [SLURRING] “There’s a streak in the sky. What is that about?”
HEDVIG: Yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I was like, “What? What the fuck? That is lovely.”
DANIEL: It’s something I took for granted because I grew up in a small town. The only time we saw the lights in Spokane was when it was snowing and it cast a glow. “What’s that glow?” Light pollution. Next one, from Mr Bobby Hunt on our Discord says, “Not new, but PRETENDIANISM is probably the Word of the Week in Canada.”
BEN: Pretendian, I’m guessing is like the keyword here?
DANIEL: Yes. PRETENDIAN plus -ISM. Any idea?
BEN: I know what this is. Hedvig, do you want to guess?
HEDVIG: Canada? Is it pretenders to the throne? Is it my favorite Romana Didulo saying she’s the Queen of Canada?
DANIEL: Oh, that would be nice. Not this time.
HEDVIG: My favorite in a very jokey sense for anyone who knows who that is.
DANIEL: Ben, you want to spill the tea?
BEN: Look, I’m going to just state very clearly that I know only the broadest strokes. Like, I know the definition of this word. A PRETENDIAN is a non-Native person from the Americas who is claiming to be in First Nations when they are not.
DANIEL: Yup. And this is in the news because — it’s kind of heartbreaking — Buffy Sainte-Marie is an entertainer and Indigenous activist who, it has come out, is not of Native American ancestry. At all. Like, her parents are Italian and English. So, I was kind of heartbroken to find out about it because I remember her from Sesame Street in the 1970s. She was out there being a singer and performer, representative of First Nations people, and well, it wasn’t real. That’s super sad.
HEDVIG: How does this relate to…? I am not an Indigenous person of North America at all, but I know that there is a lot of resentment about the way that the colonial nation states have identified indigeneity and blood quotas, and how Indigenous do you have to be in order to be Indigenous. I know nothing. I’ve never heard about Buffy Sainte-Marie before. I know that Sainte-Marie is a place with a lot of Ojibwe folks, but maybe I’m wrong.
DANIEL: It was Santamaria. It was her old surname that was franglicised.
HEDVIG: No, but I know Sainte-Marie is a place.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Okay.
HEDVIG: It is a place in Canada, I think, as well.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: I think. Well, I might be wrong about everything, but I imagine that there’s got to be trickiness here about… I know the same discussions goes on in Australia, right? Like, what if you’re a white, passing Aboriginal person who didn’t grow up in Aboriginal culture, what do you… It’s not obvious and easy, right? what people want to be called and want to call other people. So, I could see also how this maybe could be weaponised against Indigenous people as well.
BEN: Yeah. That was something that I wanted to mention, which is that I am aware that this is a thing that happens in Canada and is a thing that also happens in Australia. There’s a community of people in Australia who have claimed to be a particular Indigenous tribe for a really long time, and pretty much all of the Indigenous people around that place are like, “These people are not Indigenous. They’re just doing a weird semi performance art. I’m going to fuck with the system,” kind of thing.
HEDVIG: Like, green wave hippies?
BEN: No. Sometimes? Right? I think there’s… This is actually quite a complex social phenomenon. Sometimes, it’s white people just being fucking idiots and wanting to be different and be special in some way.
HEDVIG: More interesting?
BEN: Yeah. So like, we have all of us seen white people acquire one axis of disadvantage, and then just build that up into an entire persona for no compelling reason. And I think that’s something that’s going on here. Then, there’s the people that I mentioned in Australia, I get the distinct impression are like far-right nut jobs who are sort of going like, “Oh, look how much we can fuck with the world and its stupid woke sensibilities by claiming this stuff, because no one’s going to be brave enough to call us out,” and all this kind of thing. So there are people who are engaging in this behaviour in a really awful, duplicitous and not good way, and those people are bad. And we should address that, because claiming indigeneity when you are not Indigenous is a bad and awful thing to do.
DANIEL: Mhm.
BEN: However, I agree with Hedvig that we need to be extraordinarily careful that we do not afford other right-wing fuckhead nut jobs ammunition to come after Indigenous people who might not fit their idea of what Indigenous is or should be. Right? Like, Indigenous communities should and will and do have the ultimate right and ability to talk about who is and isn’t a member of their community. That’s how communities work.
So, the last thing I think we should ever engage in is like a whole bunch of white people pointing at certain people and being like, “You’re not a real Indian. You’re not a real Aboriginal.” Right? That should never, ever really be a thing. I think it should only ever be other Indigenous people saying, “Uh, FYI, this person is not us.”
HEDVIG: “We found out about them 20 years ago. We’ve never heard of them before.”
BEN: [LAUGHS] Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, to that end, Mr Bobby Hunt has pointed us to a statement from the Indigenous Women’s Collective in Canada in which they say, “This was a deception. It allowed her to benefit from a very deliberate and false narrative that misled thousands of Indigenous youth, adults, and most tragically Indigenous survivors of cultural harm.” Skipping down: “The false origin story and the appropriation of indigenous intergenerational trauma is intolerable and an act of colonial violence.” So, strong words there from the Indigenous Women’s Collective.
BEN: Yeah. Understandably right. Like, I can very, very much understand if you were First Nations and someone had pretended to be First Nations, how you would be ropable.
DANIEL: But it’s also very painful because here was somebody that’s been looked up to for something like 40 years, and they had a fraudulent origin story.
HEDVIG: Oh, I didn’t know about them.
DANIEL: Very sad days. Okay. Last one. Andy from Logophilius gives us one. “While editing a story about death and dying, fun stuff, I know, I came across the term END-OF-LIFE DOULA, which I had never seen before.” Isn’t that interesting?
BEN: I know this!
HEDVIG: I know this!
DANIEL: Okay. I had never heard this. I’ll just keep going. “I knew from my two forays into fatherhood about doulas as people who assist emotionally, physically, and informationally with the birth of a child. The term only goes back to about the early 1970s, as far as I can tell. When I saw END-OF-LIFE DOULA, my knee jerk reaction, as usual, was a sigh that enveloped the concept of ‘you’re using that word wrong’ and ‘why do people keep doing this to my language?’ But the more I think about it, the more I like it. There’s a nice symmetry to it. Having a doula help a family bring a life into the world, and another doula to help a family send a life out of it.”
HEDVIG: I think word-wise, it makes a lot of sense for the reasons you say. My mom’s a midwife, and she has a lot of friends who are midwives, and they are very close to… You’d think of them as being very close to birth, but birth is very close to death in many ways, sometimes practically in the situation.
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: Sometimes, really tragically.
DANIEL: Risky. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And they are… people who are involved in those situations are people who have a lot of experience dealing with very high adrenaline situations and the emotional reactions people have to them. So, I think it makes a lot of sense.
DANIEL: It does. Andy continues, “Word-wise though, I wonder if this means we’re going to have to come up with a retronym for the traditional doula?”
BEN: BIRTH DOULA?
HEDVIG: Oh, like, BIRTH DOULA or something.
DANIEL: I think we only need retronyms for things that are phasing out. I don’t think this is one of those things. Maybe there’s stakes for both.
HEDVIG: No, no. We need retronyms for things like… What’s a good one? Like…
DANIEL: Acoustic bike.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Acoustic bike. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Like acoustic guitar, electric guitar is a great one. So there used to only be one guitar, and then that was just guitar, and then we got electric guitars, and now in order to refer to the first thing, we need to specify acoustic guitar sometimes.
BEN: Yeah. Acoustic guitar hasn’t like been phased out.
DANIEL: They are not fading out. No, they are not.
BEN: There are still a lot of annoying people around campfires pulling those things out.
DANIEL: Well, maybe BIRTH DOULA.
HEDVIG: BIRTH DOULA, yeah.
BEN: I’m wondering if the contexts are so different practically that you might not need a differentiator. Like, if you’re talking about your grandpa, Steve, who has just been placed in palliative care and you say, “Yeah…”
DANIEL: “The doula’s been great.”
BEN: “Best news ever is we got put onto a great doula to help him.” I don’t feel like people are going to be like, “What? Like a birth doula??” And it’s like, “Well, no, obviously.” Uncle Frank isn’t having a baby at 97.
HEDVIG: So, Daniel, did you look up the etymology of doula?
BEN: Ooh, I want to know this.
DANIEL: I have not. What is it?
HEDVIG: Do you want to make a guess?
DANIEL: Okay. Well, since it’s from the ’70s, it doesn’t seem… Andy told us it’s no further back than the ’70s, what could it be? I am really not sure. Let me think here. DOULA. I’m coming up blank. What do you think, Ben?
BEN: I have no idea. This is always a word that I’ve been like, “That’s a weird word. I wonder where that came from.”
DANIEL: Okay. Well, lay it on us.
HEDVIG: So I had the mistaken idea before, for some reason, I think I first heard about it in West African countries, so I thought it was from West African languages, but it’s actually from Greek.
DANIEL: Oh.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: And it means “female slave”.
BEN: Oh… 😟
DANIEL: Oh, that’s nice.
HEDVIG: Just like PEDAGOGUE means… PEDAGOGUE was who usually male slaves accompanied children to the school. They walk with the children to the school. And DOULA was a female slave who attended to women, and it became that they attended during birth, etc.
DANIEL: I did not know that. That’s cool.
BEN: Yeah, neither did I.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Wow.
HEDVIG: So I guess today there are doulas who are men as well. I wouldn’t be surprised. Yeah.
BEN: I imagine not heaps, but I also imagine it’s a thing.
DANIEL: I love the concept of an end-of-life doula. I just feel like that’s so poignant. Thanks, Andy, for that one. And so NOCTALGIA, PRETENDIAN, and END-OF-LIFE DOULA: our Words of the Week. Let’s take some comments just quickly. We mentioned a couple of episodes ago that many bird names are onomatopoeia, and I always thought that the 28 parrot, 28 got its name because it sounded like 28. But Liz says, “Hello. About the naming of the 28 parrot, it might be actually from the French.” Which leads us to a story on the ABC Australia site from none other than Peter Barr who wrote this one.
BEN: Oh!
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Hello, Peter Barr.
DANIEL: Our old pal from the Talk the Talk days. “WA parrot 28’s numerical name may have links to French explorers.” So, I found the call. Can we just take a listen and see if it really sounds like 28? Because in French, it wouldn’t be 28, it would be vingt-huit. Vingt-huit. Let’s hear it.
HEDVIG: Vingt-huit.
[28 PARROT SOUNDS]
BEN: Yep.
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: I’m not hearing it personally.
BEN: The first ones. Show me the first one.
[28 PARROT SOUNDS CONTINUE]
BEN: I can hear it a bit there. And go to the first thing you played, the very first.
[28 PARROT SOUNDS CONTINUE]
DANIEL: That was the clearest one right there. That was the one.
HEDVIG: That was the clearest.
[28 PARROT SOUNDS CONTINUE]
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Vingt-huit. Vingt-huit. Vingt-huit.
BEN: Look, if we acknowledge in the history of onomatopoeia, a lot of onomatopoeias are a fucking stretch. [LAUGHTER] Like, people are like, “Oh, it’s an onomatopoeia for this thing.” And I’m like, “Okay. Whatever the ear version of squinting is, I’m going to have to squint my ears really hard to get there.” So, I think if we accept that, then yeah, that could totally be vingt-huit in French.
HEDVIG: But I have to say that, if you can hang up the name of something on something connected to that thing, because like PARROT, you have to learn the word PARROT associated with those birds, and there’s no link. So even if you have the most tenuous of links to aid your memory, that probably helps.
BEN: Yeah. Oh, I’m not saying it’s not a thing. What I mean is those calls didn’t sound all that much like it, but they sounded enough like it that I could see that being a thing for sure.
DANIEL: Yeah. Thanks, Liz. This one is from Franco via email: hello@becauselanguage.com. “In your latest show, you asked for feedback about show length. Personally, I’m loving the longer shows. They mean I just get that more content.” There’s that word CONTENT again. “I can’t always listen to the entire show at one go, but that works out even better for me. I break it up myself, and I’m treated over several days to your thoughtful topics and your outrageously clever banter. Keep it coming.”
BEN: Aw.
DANIEL: Isn’t that lovely?
BEN: That conforms with my existing worldview. So, I like it. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: But we’re going to be doing a survey, and we want to hear your views. So, we’ll be announcing that one. Keep following us on the socials. Big thanks to Dr Andy Perfors. Thanks to everybody who gave us ideas for this episode. Thanks to the team from SpeechDocs for transcribing our words. Most of all, our patrons who keep the show going. And Ben and Hedvig: useless as always, no real contribution.
BEN: There we go.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: That I will definitely agree with. Speaking of supporting us like the patrons do, you can support us in other ways. You can give us ideas and feedback on the socials where we are @becauselangpod on most of the things. But we are most active on the tweets, the Facebüks, the Bluesky and the Mastodones. You can leave us a voice message on SpeakPipe like dead-set legend Susie did today. That was the coolest thing ever. I loved that. Thank you, Susie. You can do that too. So, head to our website, becauselanguage.com. You can also, if you are particularly archaically minded, send us a good old email, hello@becauselanguage.com.
And finally, the most important and wonderful thing you can do, tell a friend. Be like, “Yo, you like podcasts? I got this great podcast where three idiots just talk about linguistics until the cows come home for really long episodes. Some people hate that. Some people love it. You can decide for yourself.” That’s what you could do. You could just give a hot reccy to the old Because Language and that would be just tip-top.
DANIEL: You could also consider becoming a patron. You’ll be helping us to pay the bills, transcribe our shows so they’re readable and searchable. And depending on your level, you’ll get bonus episodes, mailouts, shoutouts. All of our patrons get to come to live episodes like the one that’s coming up pretty soon, our Word of the Week of the Year show. It’s going to be great. You don’t want to miss it. And also, every one of our patrons gets to hang out with us on our Discord server.
I would just like to give a quick shoutout to our top patrons and here they are. Iztin, Termy, Elías, Matt, Whitney, Helen, Jack, PharaohKatt, LordMortis, gramaryen, Larry, Rene: bumping it up to the Supporter level.
BEN: Ooh.
DANIEL: Been a patron for a really long time, but just became a Supporter. Kristofer, Andy, James, Nigel, Meredith, Kate, Nasrin, Joanna, Nikoli, Keith, Ayesha, Steele, Margareth, Manú, Rodger, Rhian, Colleen, Ignacio, Kevin, Jeff, Andy from Logophilius, Stan, Kathy, Rach, Cheyenne, Felicity, Amir, the Canny Archer, O Tim, Alyssa, Chris, Laurie, aengry balls, Tadhg, Luis, Raina, and our new patrons at the listener level, David and Georgina. Also, don’t forget, Coco has joined up at the Friend level. So now, we’ve got two Cocos. Remember how we got a bracket of Felicitys for a while? That was awesome. Now we got a bunch of Cocos. Love it.
HEDVIG: I like Coco.
BEN: It’s like a JJ Abrams debut TV series in here.
DANIEL: Something like that. Thanks, y’all.
HEDVIG: Thank you. And our theme music was written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who is also performing with Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time, Because Language.
ALL: Pew, pew, pew.
[BOOP]
BEN: Send us a good old email, hello@becauselanguage… [BURP] dot com.
DANIEL: There’s that Indian food.
BEN: You should leave the burp in. I think that’s important. I think that’s an important part of the…
DANIEL: It’s never appealing.
BEN: People are going to have trouble because they’re going to write, becauselanguageburp.com.
DANIEL: Burp. Was that a Unicode character?
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]