We’re talking words, and no one has a way with words like Grant Barrett. He’s here to tell us what it’s like at Dictionary.com, and what went down at the annual American Dialect Society Words of the Year 2023 vote. And perhaps he can help forestall Hedvig’s planned mass human extinction.
Also: World Endangered Writing Day is upon us! It’s a fantastic initiative, and author Tim Brookes of Endangered Alphabets is here to lay out the case for preserving writing systems.
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Use of “Pop” vs “Coke vs “Soda” to Refer to Sweet Carbonated Beverage in US Over the Years | Reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/18fyz9q/use_of_pop_vs_coke_vs_soda_to_refer_to_sweet/
(earlier) Soda vs Pop vs Coke US Heat Map | Reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/ai1vdf/soda_vs_pop_vs_coke_us_heat_map/
Pop vs Soda
https://popvssoda.com
Uncovering The Linguistic Roots Of Soda, Pop & Coke
https://www.foodbeast.com/news/uncovering-the-linguistic-roots-of-soda-pop-coke/
World Endangered Writing Day: 23 January 2024
https://wewday.webflow.io
Anti-Cyrillic protests in Croatia | Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Cyrillic_protests_in_Croatia
Incitement of Hatred | Civic Nation (Vukovar)
https://civic-nation.org/croatia/society/incitement_of_hatred/
Glagolitic alphabet | Omniglot
https://www.omniglot.com/writing/glagolitic.htm
Tifinagh | Atlas of Endangered Alphabets
https://www.endangeredalphabets.net/alphabets/tifinagh/
Writing Beyond Writing | Kickstarter
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/endangeredatlas/writing-beyond-writing
Saraswati Day
https://www.balispirit.com/community/ceremony-public/saraswati-day
ATLAS OF ENDANGERED ALPHABETS
https://www.endangeredalphabets.net
Dictionary.com
https://www.dictionary.com
Dictionary of Regional American English
https://www.daredictionary.com
[PDF] American Dialect Society Selects “enshittification” as 2023 Word of the Year
https://americandialect.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/2023-Word-of-the-Year-PRESS-RELEASE.pdf
Watch the 2023 words-of-the-year voting on YouTube:
What’s the difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism? | BBC
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36160928
Tumblr post by maculategiraffe re CHAT
https://www.tumblr.com/maculategiraffe/735629680810573825
‘Yo’ Said What? | NPR Code Switch
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/04/25/178788893/yo-said-what
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
GRANT: Anyway, we’re tangenting here and I’m seeing the host worry scowl on Daniel’s face.
BEN: [LAUGHS] It’s true. It’s so true. I’m immune.
HEDVIG: It is true.
BEN: I’m immune. I’ve seen it so much.
GRANT: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Moving along.
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name’s Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. He’s here for another year of shows as specified under the terms of his release. It’s Ben Ainslie. Hey, Ben.
BEN: Hello. Nothing makes a person warmer than contractual obligation.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] [SIGHS]
BEN: Yeah. The warm, fuzzy feeling of ink binding you to behavior.
HEDVIG: That’s why I married my husband.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: It keeps me doing what I do in lots of different ways. She’s here after another birthday, which I forgot to say happy birthday to, but it’s never too late. So, happy birthday.
BEN: Happy birthday.
DANIEL: Hedvig Skirgård.
HEDVIG: Thank you. Yes, happy birthday to me. A bit… ah, a little too late but all the same.
DANIEL: All the same. Did you have a good one?
BEN: I heard the tone.
HEDVIG: I didn’t know what to say. What do you say?
DANIEL: Chilly. Chilly is what it was.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Which makes sense, because you’re in a very chilly place right now. You’re in rural Sweden, if I’m not mistaken.
HEDVIG: I am. But I am warm and cozy, because we build houses sensibly for the climate that we live in.
BEN: To be alive, in order to continue to be alive.
HEDVIG: Yeah. So, we’ve got lovely radiators. This room is nice and cozy. I’ve also got a tiled… What do you call them in English?
BEN: A fireplace?
HEDVIG: Tiled fireplace?
DANIEL: Fireplace.
HEDVIG: Yeah, with tiles?
BEN: Maybe like a hearth? Like, that’s the only thing I can think of.
DANIEL: Flame home. Flame home is what we call it.
BEN: [CHUCKLES] Flame house.
HEDVIG: You make a fire inside of it, and then the whole column heats up, and then the column stays warm and heats up your room.
BEN: I think that’s supposed to be what fireplaces are supposed to do. Like, they’ll have a brick chimney… [CROSSTALK]
HEDVIG: But you close it. You don’t have it like open.
BEN: Oh. Yeah. Nope, don’t have a word for that.
DANIEL: Franklin stove. Named after Benjamin Franklin, who invented it.
BEN: There we go.
HEDVIG: No way.
BEN: Yeah. I am extremely sus on that as well, but fair enough.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] Okay. Fine.
HEDVIG: Anyway, they are great.
BEN: I’m not going to tell the American that Ben Franklin didn’t invent the thing, it doesn’t go well.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. We also have a very special guest, honorary cohost, Grant Barrett. He’s got a long bio. So, I’m going to say hi before I do the bio. Hi, Grant. Nice to have you.
GRANT: Hi, Daniel. Thank you for bringing me onto the show again for this world of mayhem.
DANIEL: Argh.
BEN: Grant gets an extra special nod or kudos from the team, because he is in the worst of all of the places to record from, the West Coast of the United States. So, Grant, what is the local time for you right now at the time of recording?
GRANT: It’s 5:21 AM. And the forecast is…
HEDVIG: Oh, fuck.
GRANT: …62 degrees and completely sunny.
BEN: That is amazing.
GRANT: About 16 or 17 degrees Fahrenheit.
BEN: Listeners…
GRANT: [CROSSTALK] Celsius [CROSSTALK]
BEN: …appreciate this man. Appreciate this man.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Appreciate him with a /si/ and not a /ʃi/.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: That’s what we’re saying. So, here’s what I’ve got on your bio. Grant is the cohost on the very popular, more popular than us podcast and radio show, A Way with Words. Pretty good.
BEN: Very good.
DANIEL: Head of lexicography at dictionary.com. Nice. [BEN GASPS] I know. Vice President of the American Dialect Society. Enthusiast of urban dance films. Also, his shirt collar size is 17 and a half. It’s Grant Barrett.
GRANT: It’s this big head. I’m sorry. The shirts are just…
DANIEL: Your big, thick neck.
GRANT: It’s like a canned ham.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
GRANT: One day, we’ll bust it open and find out what’s in there.
HEDVIG: So, urban dance films, is that like, what’s that one called, Bring It On?
GRANT: Yeah, that whole genre. The worst films that you can imagine. I love them.
BEN: Step Up, all that stuff?
HEDVIG: What’s that one…? [CROSSTALK]
GRANT: They’re predictable. But the dancing skill always rises above the terrible plots and the low budgets. The dancing is just something I can’t do.
HEDVIG: What’s that one called that was so weird with all the women dancing on the bar?
DANIEL and BEN: Coyote Ugly.
TIM: [LAUGHS]
GRANT: Of course, the men know that one with the scantily clad beauties. Of course, they do.
HEDVIG: That was massive when I was a teenager. Yeah.
DANIEL: But do they know Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo? That’s what I want to know.
GRANT: Dude, that was the one. That was the one that launched the whole urban dance craze in my life, for me, was Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo. And I believe, is that a young Ice-T who was in that film? I believe.
DANIEL: I do not remember, honestly.
GRANT: I don’t know. He’s in one of those very early films where they’re saving the center, which they always seem to do in these films, or they’re saving the community center, and it’s just a different Ice-T.
TIM: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Amazing.
DANIEL: Let’s have it right here. I just wish that there had been a sequel to that, like a Breakin’ 3: Electric… Jubilee. That would have been awesome.
BEN: Oh.
GRANT: I’m not sure.
HEDVIG: That’s it?
BEN: There was a writing room that needed your help, Daniel, clearly. There was a whiteboard with a big empty bit in the middle, and they just, after a certain amount of time, was like, “Well, fuck it. Pack it up, guys. We don’t have it. [GRANT LAUGHS] We do not have a successor to Electric Boogaloo. Let’s go home.” “But what do I say to my son?” “You just tell him the truth. You tell him that you’re not a man.”
DANIEL: What are we going to tell Grant? I feel like [GRANT LAUGHS] we’re ignoring the lead here. I feel like we should be focusing on his other achievements, which is…
BEN: Okay. Yeah. [LAUGHS]
GRANT: Oh, no. You found out about that?
HEDVIG: Oh, I don’t know about that.
DANIEL: A Way with Words, extremely popular. Great show. Lots of fun. You talk about language variation, and you tell the story behind the expressions. What was your latest one about?
GRANT: I don’t even know, brother. I don’t even know.
[LAUGHTER]
GRANT: You know how it is. You do these shows, and a half hour later, you’re like, “What did we just…? How do we spend three hours of our life?”
BEN: Daniel does it, it’s so frustrating, Grant. Hedvig and I know what you mean. We’ll be like, “Oh, that thing with the thing and the thing. I don’t know, sounds familiar.”
HEDVIG: True. [CROSSTALK] Yeah.
BEN: Where Daniel will be like, “Oh, you’re talking about Episode 76 with so and so and so and so. And what was interesting about that episode is it ran 12 minutes shorter than you would expect.”
HEDVIG: I would be surprised if I keep a consistent line of argumentation throughout these years. I’m sure I’ve contradicted myself or something. I’ve been like, “I hate oranges,” and then later like, “Oranges are the best fruit.”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Because I love to double down on silly, nonsensical things. I think that’s happened. I have a word for it, Ben, by the way. You know how people who don’t have driver’s licenses and who always get driven everywhere are passenger princesses?
BEN: Yes, we’re podcast princesses.
DANIEL and GRANT: Oh.
DANIEL: I like that.
HEDVIG: I think we are podcast princesses.
TIM: [LAUGHS]
BEN: Yes, definitely.
DANIEL: Oh, my two podcast princesses.
HEDVIG: We just show up.
GRANT: She’s like Daniel. She remembers everything. Here’s one expression we talked about on the show recently. It just aired this weekend. In New Haven, Connecticut, instead of calling it pizza, they call it Ah-Beetz.
DANIEL: Ah-Beetz?
HEDVIG: Sorry.
GRANT: Yeah. It’s from a probably Neapolitan dialect of Italian, where la pizza or una pizza goes shortened to a-pizza. And then, because there’s lenition for that final syllable, and the P is those labial sounds do whatever the hell they want, those other transformations came, and it’s Ah-Beetz. And now it’s ensconced as what I call a chamber of commerce word, where people in New Haven know that’s what you say, and you’re an insider, if you know that. So.
DANIEL: That is so cool.
GRANT: It’s like other Italian dialect pronunciations in the US that have, not quite as large a life, but mozzarella becomes muzzarel and prosciutto becomes prosciutt.
DANIEL: Wow.
HEDVIG: Oh, I’ve heard prosciutt.
BEN: So have I from The Bear. [LAUGHS]
GRANT: [LAUGHS] Yeah. Exactly, from The Bear. Well, got to watch your sopranos.
BEN: Yeah. [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: Where do they call it a pie? Let’s go get a pie.
BEN: Pizza pie.
DANIEL: Yeah, I know.
HEDVIG: A pizza pie.
GRANT: I think that’s sprinkled all over the East Coast, because it’s one of those friendly arguments about whether or not pizza can be called a pie. So, you eat lots of great pizza as you argue about it. It’s kind of like barbecue. Nobody ever wins that argument, except everyone wins because they’re eating barbecue.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s right.
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: I always assumed it was just a thing of when this food was introduced potentially a really long time ago, the people who had only experienced British cooking saw this thing and was like, “Fucking pie, I guess.” That’s the closest…
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] I guess that’s a pie.
BEN: That’s the nearest handle I’ve got.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah?
GRANT: I think in Chicago, the deep-dish ones automatically get the moniker “pie.”
BEN: Because they are.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
GRANT: Because they require a serving utensil. You’re not picking up those pieces with your hands. Not like the cardboard stuff they serve in New York.
DANIEL: Well, we’re going to be talking to Grant about what’s going on at dictionary.com. We want to hear all the facts, and then we’re going through all the words on the American Dialect Society list on the Word of the Year Vote for 2023, including lots of words that we missed. Now, let’s see, Grant, I wasn’t there for the actual event this time, but I have been a couple of times. And both of those times, you were operating the screen. You were typing out words, giving out information, and adding stuff hurriedly. Is that what you were doing for this one or what role…?
GRANT: I was. As a matter of fact, I just finished editing the video yesterday and posted it to the American Dialect Society website and [DANIEL GASPS] YouTube channel. And in a few moments, the scheduled social media will go out with the links.
BEN: Oh, nice.
DANIEL: Amazing.
BEN: Hot off the press, fresh out of the oven.
GRANT: It’s a chance to talk truth to power when I don’t have a mic and I’m just running the overhead projectors.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Yup.
BEN: Wait, hang on. Can I establish, do you mean actual overhead projectors?
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
GRANT: Ben.
DANIEL: No.
GRANT: Ben.
DANIEL: No. [LAUGHS]
GRANT: Ben, what decade are you living in, brother?
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: Okay.
GRANT: Is Australia that far behind?
BEN: [LAUGHS] But I’m not… Okay. Fair enough.
HEDVIG: I am fully confused about what you’re talking about.
BEN: Overhead projectors are the… Yeah.
GRANT: He’s talking about the mechanical ones with the lenses and the prism or the mirror and the… [CROSSTALK]
HEDVIG: Oh.
BEN: Light [CROSSTALK] translucent paper.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
GRANT: We haven’t done that since the early 1990s.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
BEN: So, I just use the term for LCD projectors, because they project and they project overhead.
BEN: Fair enough.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: And you know what that means? That means we need a retronym for the old kind.
BEN: Oh, yeah. We do.
DANIEL: An acoustic overhead projector.
HEDVIG: Transparency displayer.
BEN: Underhead projectors.
GRANT: Can I tell you one of the things that I want for the future? Other people want flying cars. But I want this phone to have one more feature, which is a little projector up here…
BEN: Oh, yeah.
GRANT: …so I can project on any wall. High res, low battery consumption, no heat. That’s what I want.
HEDVIG: [CROSSTALK] Oh, my God. That is truly sci-fi, because there are tiny ones that exist that you can connect to via Bluetooth. But they’re big, bulky, and they generate heat and they’re not good resolution.
GRANT: Yeah, exactly. They’re like a compendium of all the great literature in the world. They’re that size, you know?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL and HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: On the show, we’re also going to be talking to author, Tim Brooks. He’s the originator of the website, endangeredalphabets.com. It’s about his new initiative, World Endangered Writing Day. It’s going to be happening on the 23rd of January, we’re gearing up, and I’m going to be talking to him.
HEDVIG: That gives us a great promo to talk about the fact that we have a Because Language linguistic holidays and special events Google Calendar that you can subscribe to.
DANIEL: We do.
HEDVIG: Right? Yes.
DANIEL: And we haven’t been very forward about it. We’ve been building it up. That’s going to be promoted more heavily. And yes, it’s going on the calendar. So, I’m looking forward to that.
HEDVIG: Yay.
DANIEL: Hey, guess what else I’ve been doing speaking of patrons?
BEN: Making the mailout.
HEDVIG: Ooh, I know. Yes, making mailout.
DANIEL: I have. I’ve been addressing envelopes, because our annual mailout is on the way. Have you seen the videos? I’ve been doing videos on our channels. Oh.
BEN: Yes.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I’ve been seeing some… But don’t do one of those George Costanza… Are you actually…
BEN: Susan?
HEDVIG: …don’t die?
DANIEL: I’m not licking any envelopes. They all have…
HEDVIG: Okay, good. Very good.
DANIEL: Those went out with overhead projectors [BEN LAUGHS] or underhead projectors. So, there’s postcards, stickers and all the items that I’ve been making those videos about. So, bit of housekeeping. Patrons, if Patreon doesn’t have your correct mailing address, I mean, maybe you didn’t give it one, but you still want the mailout, at this stage, you’ve got to send me an email, hello@becauselanguage.com, and tell me a mailing address. If you’re not a patron, it’s not too late. You can do it right now. You’ll be helping us to make our regular episodes public and free for everyone. You’ll be helping us make transcripts of our episodes so they’re readable and searchable. And you can join our fun community of language nerds on Discord. Why don’t you come join us? patreon.com/becauselangpod.
BEN: And if you’re listening and you aren’t a patron and you just maybe want to fuck with Daniel a little bit while he does all of this work, just send him an email with your address, anyway.
HEDVIG: Oh, God, no. [LAUGHS]
BEN: And maybe he won’t notice, and he’ll just send you a thing.
DANIEL: That’s a terrible idea, Ben.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: That is terrible.
DANIEL: And you should do it.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Oh, God, poor Daniel. He’s already editing and doing everything else.
DANIEL: Oh, I’m editing in my mind as we go.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: So, let’s start with a story. Let’s do some news.
BEN: Yay, nay.
DANIEL: This one is Diego. He gave us this idea.
BEN: He’s a good boy.
DANIEL: Argh. Could we do the show without contributions from our help people including Diego? Answer: No, we could not.
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: We could not.
HEDVIG: No, PharaohKatt and Diego in particular, I think.
BEN: Yeah. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Mm. They’re awesome. But there are so many. There are so many, as we’ll see during this show. Diego sent me a link on Reddit as well as an article about this. I’m looking at it now. Do I share it on Zoom?
BEN: Yeah. [CROSSTALK]
DANIEL: Yeah, I think I do. All right. So, what I’m seeing here is a map.
BEN: I’ve seen this map before.
DANIEL: The USA. Ben, describe to me what you’re seeing.
BEN: So, it is a… I guess you would call it like a heat map or a region map of the United States with some different colors in different bits.
HEDVIG: Minus…
BEN: Pardon?
HEDVIG: It’s United States Contiguous. It’s minus Alaska, Hawaii.
BEN: Sorry. Yes, you’re right.
DANIEL: That is true.
HEDVIG: And Puerto Rico.
BEN: The lower 48, I believe as [CROSSTALK]
DANIEL: Tasmania isn’t on it, either.
BEN: Yeah. And it has three regions, pop, Coke and soda. Pop is kind of up northward. It’s where, if America was Game of Thrones, it would be like where Winterfell is. Soda is kind of on the west and the east, and Coke is in what you would describe as the deep south.
DANIEL: And that’s 1947.
BEN: Yeah. So, it also shows a shift. So, all of those regions that I’ve just described, just imagine that they all recede considerably by 2023. And soda is the blitzkrieg army that has come in and just obliterated the territories of the other. So, there’s still pop up in the north, there’s still Coke in the deep south, but soda now has all of the Midwest, all of the west, and all of the eastern seaboard.
DANIEL: That is a pretty striking change. It’s not terribly unexpected, but I have my suspicions. Grant, I’m craving your input at this stage.
GRANT: I just don’t want to know what the source is. I looked at that when you sent it around and I’m like, “They didn’t link to a source.” I read all the comments. I did a reverse image search on three different services. I couldn’t find the source for this. So, where does this data come from? But I do want to point out that on the 2023 map, see all those little Swiss cheese holes? Those are all urban areas.
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yes. I thought the same.
GRANT: Except in Colorado and Montana, which I think that is like an elk pathway [LAUGHS] for migration. I don’t know.
BEN: Do you know what I reckon that is? When I saw that, I went, “That is probably fracking and resos.”
GRANT: May be.
HEDVIG: What?
BEN: So, that part of America has fly and fly out work the way WA does or where I come from. And so, I think a lot of urbanised people fly there for work, do the work, and then leave again. And so, those places have urban influence for that reason.
DANIEL: Oh, wow.
GRANT: Yeah. What you really want with this is Canada, and of course, the other two states just to really see what’s happening, because…
BEN: Ah, true.
GRANT: …there’s a lot of cross-border action as well.
BEN: Yeah.
GRANT: Although, Canada’s population falls down to the bottom of the country right against the border, like you shook an Etch A Sketch and all those sand came down.
BEN: [LAUGHS] It’s true. It’s like, all the crud at the bottom of a glass of something.
DANIEL: Many people have seen this map, but a lot of people are surprised when they find out for the first time that in the US south, Coke is a generic name for soft drinks, so that I could say, “Do you want a Coke?” And somebody would say, “Yeah.” And I’d say, “What kind?” And they’d be like, “Orange.” And I’d be like, “Okay.” And it doesn’t have to be… [CROSSTALK]
BEN: No. Do they then say Coke-Coke?
DANIEL: Oh.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
GRANT: Maybe.
BEN: Or do they actually say Cola?
GRANT: No. They say Coke.
BEN: Okay. So, can I have a Coke? What do you want? They wouldn’t say, “I want a Cola. Thanks.” They would be like, “I want a Coke-Coke.”
GRANT: No. Cola would make you an outsider and you’d be shunned.
BEN: Okay. [LAUGHS] We are speaking to a man from Missoura.
GRANT: Missouri. I’m from the Missouri generation. [CHUCKLES]
BEN: Oh, okay.
GRANT: Its map would look similar to this.
[LAUGHTER]
GRANT: Missouri is taking over Missoura.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: The Coke area also has Swiss cheese in it for at least some urban areas, as far as I can tell. Maybe that’s like Austin in Texas or something? I don’t know.
GRANT: Yeah. You’re right.
HEDVIG: Unlike the other three people here, my grasp of American geography is like [ONOMATOPOEIA]
GRANT: Yeah, you’re right. Dallas-Fort Worth is the big one. Austin is the one to the lower left. I don’t know what the one near Dallas-Fort Worth is, but that might be… I don’t know what that is. San Antonio? I have no idea. And you can also see it in Tennessee, Nashville, and the kind of Louisville, Evansville… Oh, not Evansville. Louisville kind of hole there. I don’t know what that is.
BEN: So, Daniel…
GRANT: But Daniel…
DANIEL: Yes, yes. I’m here for both of you.
BEN: Yeah. Well, I was just going to be like, “Okay, so, what’s the so what here, Daniel? Why are you bringing this to the table?”
DANIEL: I wanted to know if this was for real. I’m still not sure it’s for real.
BEN: I have seen this a long time ago, if that helps. As in, I’ve seen this map years ago. Not this exact map. Like, it used a different color scheme and stuff like that, which is, I’m wondering if in the era of people just generating memes and other engagement farming, if they found one of those old maps and were like, “Oh, I’ll spend 20 minutes in Photoshop fudging this around and putting it out again and having it be useful for a bunch of stuff.”
HEDVIG: Maybe.
DANIEL: I can understand why the name “Coke” is genericized in the south, because it was invented in Atlanta, and it’s big there. Do we have any indication of why soda has a big enclave in Missouri?
GRANT: We do. As a Missouri boy, I can tell you. This is the reason why these terms are different, anyway. And this is, people pick up the terms that their local bottlers use. Local bottlers get a license from the national brand to make these fizzy drinks according to the right formula and the right methods, and then they label them and sell them. So, soda, that is nearly a perfect in the 1947 map anyway, which continued well into the 1990s. Is a nearly perfect circle representing the regional market for the bottlers out of St. Louis, including the Illinois side. Actually, that’s what’s happening with Coke in the south. Atlanta is the source of Coke, and it spread from there throughout the south. It is a natural, contiguous map because of that.
BEN: There we go.
DANIEL: And the Western and Eastern bits, because there’s also, like, California, Nevada has soda and also New England and stuff has soda as well. Do we know what’s going on there?
GRANT: Ben mentioned the other maps. This is not the best representation. There’s a site called, I think it’s popvssoda.com, which has a more nuanced map, and actually have the raw data as well, even as bad as some of it is. You can see more clearly there that it’s those major cosmopolitan urban areas centering on the megalopolis that includes New York, Boston, Philly, D.C. And then in California, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, whatever. These all picked up the same moniker, because those two tend to be more commercially associated than anything in between. That’s just one of the weird things about the United States. The California and the Eastern seaboard, at least that megalopolis have far more in common than anything between those two states.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: [CROSSTALK]
BEN: I think what we’re kind of looking at here is roughly early, and then the remnants of nascent commercial, economic and transport logistics zoning of the US. Like, if you were like John DSA and you were operating a series of dealerships, you would probably have a market that is vaguely similar to where pop exists. You would have like Montana and the Dakotas and Colorado and Utah and that sort of stuff. But someone working in Texas would probably have like Texas and Louisiana and Arkansas and all that kind of thing.
HEDVIG: Okay.
GRANT: Yeah, that’s exactly right. You can actually look at the Federal Reserve districts for Missouri, because there’s one in the Kansas City area and the one in the St. Louis area. You can see that [CHUCKLES] there’s a division in Missouri east and west as well, at least in the 1940s.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
GRANT: Actually, that’s what’s the problem I have with this 2023 map. I know from personal experience that pop is more widespread and more scattered throughout the United States than this map. And also, where’s the soda pop sayers?
BEN: Yeah, true. Soda pop.
DANIEL: Me. I am one.
BEN: Clearly, just fence sitters, right? People who were just like, “I don’t want to make anyone angry.”
DANIEL: “I’m straddling the dialect isogloss. Oh.” Okay. So, it sounds like we have our doubts about the veracity of the data for 2023. But do you think nonetheless it is credible that soda is making inroads, or is pop still holding its own?
BEN: Sure.
DANIEL: What do you think, Grant?
GRANT: Yes, it is. It is possible.
DANIEL: Okay.
GRANT: I just don’t like this map.
[LAUGHTER]
GRANT: I want a source, I want the raw data, and I want my own GIS tools.
DANIEL: There we go.
HEDVIG: Fair enough.
DANIEL: Well, let’s move on. We’re talking about World Endangered Writing Day, a new initiative by author, Tim Brookes. And I had a chat with him. Here’s the surprising thing. And of course, if I thought about this, I would have realised this is so. But the choice of a writing system does the same kinds of things that the choice of a language does. People choose the language they do for different reasons. Geographic, social, transactional.
HEDVIG: Financial.
DANIEL: Financial.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: People use writing systems to do the same thing. They use them as a marker of their identity, they use them to claim turf, they use them to say, “We are here.” Just the appearance of signage is a very important part of representation in a different script, a different language, and it can also arouse feelings, good and bad.
HEDVIG: And it can be coopted into how you want to define a nationality. Like, if you want to reinvent or if you want to like… Branding is not the funnest word in the dictionary. [GIGGLES] But one thing that nation states do is they brand themselves as different from others or similar to others, etc. And having a different script is one way of marking that out. So, Thailand, I think, is the only one that uses their Thai script for writing their languages. When you see a signage like that, you’re like, “Oh, Thailand. Oh, that’s a thing. I remember.” That’s a unique identity.
BEN: Korea as well. That’s another idiosyncratic one that I can think of.
DANIEL: Mm.
HEDVIG: Yeah. There’s a couple of those that are like… There are way more smaller scripts that Tim Brookes knows about. But there was big, famous ones. Yeah, exactly. Vietnamese still uses Latin, but with very distinctive other diacritics.
BEN: Oh, so many diacritics.
HEDVIG: So, when you see it, you’re like, “Oh, I know what that is.”
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: So, Tim has collected some stats on the disappearance of writing systems, which blew my mind. So, I had a chat with Tim, and I started out by asking him, “What is an endangered writing system?”
TIM BROOKES: I’m going to take us back about 60 years. And in the early 1960s, nobody spoke about endangered species. The assumption was that if an animal went extinct, it was its own fault.
DANIEL: Yup.
TIM: It was like stupid or in the way or something. And then what came out was the red list of threatened species. And it really not only introduced a new phrase, but it really changed the way people thought about species and extinction. And so, all of a sudden, instead of it being like the dodo became extinct because it was too stupid to run away, which was the general thinking, it became, “Oh, there are only three breeding pairs of Andean condors left.” We should see what we can do about this and why this is happening.
So, the same thing happened with endangered languages in the 1990s. Up until then, it was generally believed that, if a language stopped being used, it was like, “Yeah, the tree got old and fell down.” And with the endangered languages movement, they were like, “No, this is because you have a culture that has become so marginalised that everybody who’s left alive in that culture starts speaking some other language.” And the only people left are those who are really elderly or those who don’t want to speak some other culture’s language.
And so, now, obviously, the endangered languages movement has, in the intervening 25 years, really acquired gravity, momentum, energy. But nobody has started looking at what happens, the same kind of phenomenon with forms of writing. In fact, most people in what used to be called the first world don’t even know there are other forms of writing, except maybe [DANIEL LAUGHS] the Latin alphabet, Cyrillic, Chinese.
DANIEL: Maybe Cyrillic. Yeah… [CROSSTALK]
TIM: Yeah, that’s about it. Right. But in fact, there are 300 scripts to some degree in use in the world today. And the vast majority of them, probably 90%, are threatened.
DANIEL: 90%? Holy shamoley, because I knew that about half of the world’s 7,000 languages are threatened. I had no idea that 90% of the world’s writing systems are endangered.
TIM: And in fact, most people don’t know there are anything like that many. Most estimates say, “Oh, there may be 50 different writing systems, or 100.” So, I’ve spent the last three or four years trying to find out every single script that is in use in the world today. And as I say, there are something over 300, which is a lot more than most people knew. And of course, numbers 200 to 310 are the ones that very few people know about, because their culture that uses them is so remote or poor or marginalised that they have no internet footprint. They don’t show up on anybody’s radar, but they’re there.
DANIEL: Okay. So, I think that the writing system thing is a bit different from spoken or signed languages, because spoken and signed languages go way, way back. A lot of these spoken languages weren’t actually even written for a while. I know that there were these movements during the 1800s, 1900s, “Hey, let’s take these languages that don’t have writing systems and give them a writing system, so that we can, I don’t know, give them a Bible,” or something like that, or whatever. Whereas a lot of spoken and sign languages are killed. They go back quite a ways, but they’re ending now, or they’re going dormant. Are the writing systems that are fading away? Are they the ones that didn’t take, or what’s going on? What have you noticed?
TIM: Yes. So, it’s a complicated and very powerful area, because the people who are doing the defining and who are telling the story belong to the very cultures that are actually causing the extinction. Let’s say, for example, someone says, “Oh, the burrowing owl is in danger of extinction.” And what you discover is that the reason the burrowing owl is in danger of extinction is because people are building parking lots over the burrows. But it’s not cool to say, we are killing off the burrowing owl. We just hope they’ll go somewhere else. Same with wetland creatures, etc.
So, what is happening is that, as with languages, there is no gentle aging and decline period. Invariably, it’s the result of either military intervention or it’s the result of an economic dominance by some other culture. So, I’ll give you a couple of examples. So, up until the middle of the 19th century, there was a kingdom called Champa, C-H-A-M-P-A, roughly in the middle of, what we now call, Vietnam.
DANIEL: Okay.
TIM: It was being harassed for centuries by the emperor of Burma and the emperor of Vietnam. And eventually, in the mid-19th century, the emperor of Vietnam just conquered, just overran it. And the Cham people were a perfectly sound flourishing kingdom up until that point. They had their own culture, they had their own temples, they had their own form of writing. But one of the things that happens when one culture conquers another is that they think, “Okay. So, how do we prevent a kind of resistance? How do we prevent an uprising against us?” And the way you do that is by convincing the conquered people they have no hope. And in fact, the only hope they have is to really change and become part of that conquering nation.
And so, the emperor of Vietnam forced all of the Hindu Cham people to eat beef, and all of the Muslim Cham people to eat pork as a way of degrading them and grinding them under the heel, but also as a way of reducing their sense of cultural identity and integrity. And taking away somebody’s script and declaring it to be unofficial or even outlawed is one of those tactics. And so, in many cases, that’s exactly what’s happened. It’s what happened when the Chinese overran Tibet. It’s what’s happening right now, what the Mongols call southern Mongolia, and the Chinese call the autonomous province of Inner Mongolia. It is a deliberate policy attempt to superimpose one’s will on a defeated people or a minority or indigenous people well.
DANIEL: Well, it sounds like what’s going on with endangered writing systems is exactly the same dynamic as what’s going on with endangered languages that we’re talking about colonialism, domination. Not so much like conscious moving away, not conscious language shift, although I guess that could happen, but it sounds like the same mechanisms are at play.
TIM: Yes, very much so. It’s interesting. If you think about, for example, the Amazigh people, who are also called the Berber people of North Africa, so there was a time when they occupied North Africa all the way from the western borders of Egypt to the Canary Islands… This was their land. And then starting with the Romans, and then with the Arabs, and then the French, increasingly, these newcomers would establish that, not only the official, but the sophisticated language and writing system would be, for example, Arabic. And so, increasingly, anybody who spoke any of the Amazigh family of languages or wrote in Tifinagh, their script, would be identified as being backward or primitive. And you see this happening all over the world.
So, it then requires a major effort. Not only sometimes like an uprising, but more often a very long, slow process of cultural reidentification, of saying, “We are not just the outsiders, the primitives, the backward people. We are people who have our own pride and our integrity,’ which is exactly what’s been happening, for example, with the Native American movement in the last 40 years in the United States, and the First Nations movement in Canada, for example.
DANIEL: I’m thinking of some protest signs from Vukovar in Croatia, where people wrote on their signs, “We are Vukovar,” Roman script, not Вуковар, Cyrillic script.
TIM: That’s very interesting you should say that, because there is… and even later, I guess I should say, more recent movement to write town names on the signs that announce that you’re coming into a particular town in Croatia in Glagolitic script. So, Glagolitic script was created probably a thousand plus years ago as a means of writing the language that was called Old Church Slavonic.
DANIEL: Yeah.
TIM: And it enjoyed a brief period of currency and use in the eastern church.
DANIEL: You see it in the artwork. It’s got rad downstrokes and really thick… [CROSSTALK]
TIM: Yes, absolutely.
DANIEL: Yeah.
TIM: Great stuff. And increasingly, it was taken over by Cyrillic until eventually, there were literally two priests left on an island off the Dalmatian coast, who were still writing all of their stuff in the Glagolitic script. And interestingly enough, when fishermen got a new boat, they would get the boat blessed by the priest, and then they would write the name of the boat in the Glagolitic script, because it’s the script of God. This is what you do to try and get protection. And then, all of that eventually faded and was destroyed in the Yugoslav Civil War. But when Croatia emerged as an independent nation at the end of that war, they started using Glagolitic again as a kind of rebranding.
DANIEL: Wow. It really does sound like the way that people use language as a marker of identity, they also used writing systems as a marker of identity in just the same way.
TIM: And what makes it really interesting is that, of course, writing is visible.
DANIEL: You can see it on a T-shirt a mile away.
TIM: You can see it on a T-shirt, you can see it… Well, for example, if you fly into Casablanca now, then there is a very recent neon sign on the outside of the airport building which announces the name of the airport in Tifinagh. And so, what that says is, for the first time, “We are here.” So, the Amazigh people actually are a majority, not a minority in Morocco. But because nothing is written, there’s been no signage or anything in their script, it’s a way of making them disappear. And now you actually have, by royal decree, this slow reintroduction of the Tifinagh script on the outside of public buildings, government buildings, schools, the airport, for example. Then all of a sudden, somebody flying into Casablanca can say, “Wow, what does that sign say? What language is it in? What people are here?”
And of course, the Amazigh people have been there all along, but they’ve been invisible. And it takes a major initiative on the part of a government to say, “Actually, you know what we need to change? We need to acknowledge that these people whom we’ve been keeping underfoot for a thousand are actually here.”
DANIEL: You’ve been working for many years to raise awareness of endangered writing systems, both with your website, endangeredalphabets.com, and also this new event that you’re working on, World Endangered Writing Day, which is coming up really soon, 23rd of January. I want to know how you got into writing systems, but I also want to know about this new event. Where do you want to start here?
TIM: Great question. So, let’s start with how I got into writing systems, and we’ll come back to World Endangered Writing Day.
DANIEL: Yeah.
TIM: So, I got into writing systems purely by accident. One Christmas, I decided I was going to carve my family members’ signs, wooden signs, that had their name on them because I had no money and I wanted to come up with Christmas presents. Anyway, so, that was how I began carving in wood. And really, the only thing I can carve is writing. I can’t carve you like a buffalo or a giraffe or anything.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES]
TIM: But after I had done that for Christmas, I stumbled on the fact that so many of these writing systems around the world, which I didn’t even know about, are not taught in schools, are not used officially by the government, in some cases are banned or suppressed. And so, I thought, “Oh, I will try carving some pieces of text in some of these endangered alphabets.” In fact, I coined the phrase as a means of documenting them, preserving them. I went to the website, omniglot.com, which has… It’s like an online encyclopedia of writing systems.
The example that Simon, the curator of the site, uses for each of these scripts, or for many of these scripts, is the Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is two sentences basically saying, “Hey, these people have rights.” And that was my first exhibition. And at that exhibition, there were 12, 13 pieces, people said two things that I wasn’t expecting. They said, one, “This is art,” which I hadn’t thought about at all. And the other was, “This is really important. You need to keep doing this.” And that’s what really set me on this passage.
DANIEL: Wow.
TIM: And then, the story about World Endangered Writing Day is a great story, and it involves David Crystal, who is the David Attenborough of language.
DANIEL: Oh, yeah.
TIM: Author of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, and many, many books on language. Great guy. Wonderful person.
DANIEL: Yeah.
TIM: I contacted him when I first started working on the Endangered Alphabets, and he said, “You know, you are the only person in the world who is studying script loss.” And he offered to write the introduction to my first book, Endangered Alphabets, back in 2010, which was typical of his generosity and kindness. So, about two years ago, I started working on a new book called Writing Beyond Writing, which began when I had done one of my carvings of a script that’s used by the Adinkra in Ghana. And it’s not a phonetic script. It’s a series of symbols, each of which stands for a proverb or a piece of traditional wisdom.
DANIEL: Oh.
TIM: I posted that on Facebook, and a very distinguished linguist responded, “This is very nice, but it’s not writing.” And I thought, “Wow, what is writing then?” And in particular, why are these extraordinary forms of graphic communication from around the world, why are they being dismissed in this fashion? So, that’s how the book came about. When I finished it, I sent it to David crystal for him to look it over. And at one point in the book, I talk about the fact that in traditional Balinese culture, they have one-day a year which is devoted to books and to writing and to wisdom. It’s the day consecrated to Saraswati, who is the Goddess of writing and wisdom. And on that day, in traditional Balinese culture, they take their books, which in Bali would be traditional palm leaf manuscripts, it’s like an oblong piece of palm leaf that’s been written on and then perforated, and a string is used to hold them together.
So, they take these books out and they dust them off and they venerate them. They literally put them in a household shrine dedicated to Saraswati, because they recognise the importance of writing. They recognise, in fact, the kind of divinity of writing. And I thought and I say this in my book, “We don’t have a day that respects writing, that really recognises the role of writing in our lives.” And David Crystal wrote in the margin, “You should invent one.”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] And so, you did.
TIM: Yes, so I did. I’m like, “Okay, how do you go about inventing a day? Do you need to ask someone’s permission?” And it turned out, “Well, you just go ahead and do it.” And so, I did.
DANIEL: Okay. So, what kind of things are going on for World Endangered Writing Day? What kind of events are people having?
TIM: Yes. So, like everything I do, it is a full spectrum event in that I’m a person who takes some things very seriously and some things I’m very passionate about. And then also, I’m a lover of games and stuff. So, during the course of the day, there is the kind of thing that you might expect, for example, at a conference. So, we have a number of just wonderful speakers who are talking about either particular cultures or about writing in general. One person is talking about Andean quipu, you know, the knotted string.
DANIEL: The knots. Yes, that’s right.
TIM: One person is talking about a course that she and her colleagues have developed to teach the pictographic Chinese script, the Dongba script, which is just fascinating. They’ve done this incredible job developing a MOOC to try and teach a script, which there are wonderful paradoxes at the heart of that. Anyway, so, we have a series of these live stream talks, and in a way, they are the most substantial part of all of this. But then I also wanted to recognise and praise people who, over the last few years I’ve discovered, are working to reintroduce their own script as a way of revitalising their own culture. So, we have a bunch of awards for people who are teaching activities or artistic activities or calligraphy or type design or various things that are just…
They’re very thankless. They’re often working against the current of mainstream in their culture. And so, I thought, “Right, we should draw attention to the fact they’re doing this, so that people start taking notice of it.” And then we have this online Atlas of Endangered Alphabet, which I created five years ago, where we have a hundred scripts that are profiled and photographs. And we’re adding another hundred scripts. I’m calling it the second wave launch of the Atlas.
DANIEL: Nice.
TIM: That’s going to be at endangeredalphets.net. We have games and puzzles. It’s the launch day of, as I say, my book, Writing About Writing. We have book giveaways. People have sent books in endangered scripts from all over the world that we’re going to be giving away. And we also have some video and some text from reports from the field, for example, what is happening in Bali to reintroduce the really beautiful Balinese script. So, yeah, this is all centered around our new website, the World Endangered Writing Day website, which is, endangeredwriting.world. And then, all of these livestreamed events are going to be on our YouTube channel that can also get picked up by other channels around the world, thanks to a very sophisticated platform that I don’t even understand.
DANIEL: Well, we’re certainly going to be putting lots of links up to your work on our website, becauselanguage.com. We’re going to be getting ready and trying to do something for World Endangered Writing Day. I feel like there are so many things that I wasn’t even aware of that are growing out of this. We don’t want to diminish the importance of languages that don’t have a script, and there are lots of those. We can help people work on those. But I feel like it’s helping to get people to reclaim their writing system, which is like helping them to reclaim their language, which is like rebuilding community, which is like rebuilding identity, there’s a lot going on here.
TIM: Oh, there is no question whatsoever. And in fact, on our poster, it says, “Save a script, save a culture.” So, in a way, this is partly about linguistics. But it’s really about human rights and social justice. Again, for years, people have propagated the myth that language and writing systems just die out or fade away or whatever. But really, in both spoken and written language, it is an issue of the survival of a culture. We also know that [SIGHS] if a people decide to or are compelled to stop using their traditional script, then within two generations, that script becomes unreadable because everyone has been learning a different script, usually the Latin alphabet. And what that means is that the entire written record of that people becomes incomprehensible to the very people who created it.
I’ll give you an illustration of just how personal that is. Obviously, it affects legal documents, it affects land rights, it affects sacred texts, poetry, etc., etc. But I got an email from a young woman in Java. So, Java is an island. It’s now part of Indonesia. It has a long history before the creation of Indonesia. And she wrote to me in part to tell me about the efforts that were taking place to begin to reintroduce the Javanese script, which is, not only a really beautiful script, but does a whole series of things that our alphabet doesn’t even think about doing. It’s remarkably interesting and complex, and we can talk about that if you’re interested.
But the point she went on to make was that she had come across some letters that her grandfather had written when he was a soldier taking part in that struggle for independence after World War II. And she was really interested in this, because she didn’t know much about her grandfather, and she didn’t know anything about what those times were like. So, she had this unbelievable resource in her own hands, but she couldn’t read it, because he had written it in the Javanese script. And as soon as Indonesia achieved independence, the government decided to use the Latin alphabet. And so, she just couldn’t read it. So, there, you have this great illustration of how she had been cut off at the root, if you like, not only from her family history, but also from her sense as a Javanese person in a culture that goes back thousands of years.
DANIEL: Now, you mentioned that you’re the author of the new book, Writing Beyond Writing. When is that available, and how can people get a hold of it?
TIM: Actually, in pre-publication date, it’s available right now.
DANIEL: Okay.
TIM: If you go to our principal website, endangeredalphets.com, and click on the shop button, then Writing Beyond Writing will show up. And I’m in the process of getting it listed on Amazon. So, it should show up there sometime in the next few days.
DANIEL: And World Endangered Writing Day is coming up on the 23rd of January 2024 and every year thereafter.
TIM: Especially given the fact that we are doing all of these things on what is virtually a zero budget. We’re hoping that we’ll start gathering more support, and certainly, we’re hoping that future years are going to be much more interactive and also much less monolingual. So, one of the great weaknesses of everything that I do is that I am limited by being a member of the dominant culture. And so, I can’t read most of the stuff that I carve and demonstrate in display in these endangered scripts. And people say, “Do you speak all these languages?” And I say, “No, I don’t speak any of them.”
So, I am the classic old white guy who needs to be politely shunted off at some point in the near future, so that people who know these cultures better than I do, and ideally are from these cultures, they can take over a bigger and bigger role in World Endangered Writing Day, and in fact, in the Endangered Alphabets Project.
DANIEL: We’ve been talking to Tim Brookes, creator of the website, endangeredalphabets.com, author of Writing Beyond Writing: Lessons from Endangered Alphabets, and originator of World Endangered Writing Day. We’re going to have links to all those things on our website, becauselanguage.com. Tim, thanks so much for getting together and talking with me today, and I hope that the project is a huge success.
TIM: Thank you so much for great questions, and for also going into an area that is so unknown to most people that even the act of formulating the questions is a step into the unknown.
DANIEL: That’s true. Thanks so much, Tim.
[INTERVIEW ENDS]
We are playing our favorite game, Related or Not.
BEN: [SINGING] George isn’t at home. Please leave a message after the beep. Yup.
HEDVIG: Oh, I thought it was going to be, [SINGING] Related or Not. Da, da, daa, da, daa, da.
GRANT: [LAUGHS]
BEN: Oh, that’s… [CROSSTALK]
GRANT: The Christopher Cross song, [SINGING] Related or Not, I’m talking on air. I never thought I could feel so etymology.
DANIEL: That was a good one.
BEN: Oh, that was a nice one. That was the best one.
HEDVIG: Wow. Yes,…
GRANT: It’s called filking.
HEDVIG: …that is theme song from now on.
DANIEL: I believe it was actually Joey Scarbury, and not Christopher Cross.
GRANT: Oh, was it?
DANIEL: Yeah.
GRANT: Okay.
BEN: Daniel had to in-before it, didn’t he? Actually…
DANIEL: The reason I know this was because I had it in my mind, because it’s featured in the viral video, Dog of Wisdom. I was showing that to my daughters, and they were like, “What is that?” And so, I played it for them in the car. They were entranced. They realised this was pop gold. They wanted to hear it over and over again.
GRANT: [LAUGHS]
BEN: Wow.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: You listen, and it’s a solid piece of work, even today. We’re still thinking about it. So, yeah.
BEN: I put that on the shoulders of Seinfeld more than the quality of the song itself, that would be me.
DANIEL: Wow. Okay. Well, our listeners have given us some great etymological puzzles, but Grant, would you like to test us on some words that might be related or not?
GRANT: [SINGING] Related or not. Yeah, thank you for the earworm. That’s like my seventh this week.
[LAUGHTER]
GRANT: Do any of the three of you listen to my radio shows last podcast?
DANIEL: Yes. It is one of the few linguistic podcasts that I do.
GRANT: You can lie, Daniel. Have you caught up? That’s the question.
DANIEL: No.
GRANT: [CROSSTALK] The reason I ask…
DANIEL: There is no way I have caught up.
GRANT: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I am in a weird podcast funk where I essentially only listen to, I don’t know why, but my brain works really well with whodunit podcasts. I listen to radio plays of murders constantly, and then ancient history, and then conspiracy theories. I have a lot of other podcasts in my feed, and I believe very much in that podcasts, you should just go with your gut feeling. And if I keep stats of my gut feeling, those are the three categories I listen to. I don’t listen to basically any other science, any other linguistics, anything else. So, if you, Grant, can pivot to working in a murder mystery…
GRANT: I can. I absolutely can.
DANIEL: I think that would be Claire, wouldn’t it? En Claire would handle that.
GRANT: Oh, yeah, Claire would be amazing.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
GRANT: Yes, I can definitely do that.
HEDVIG: I’m sorry.
GRANT: That’s totally great. [CROSSTALK] I just want to say that we have the evidence here for the radicalization of young women in the world, and it is podcasts that has turned them into these danger, blood-loving fiends.
DANIEL: Oh, wow.
BEN: Podcasts, when will you stop doing great things?
GRANT: So, the reason I asked you if you listen to the radio show is because we talked about this on the radio show, and if you listen to the show and you had caught up, uh-oh, you would already have the answer, and this would not actually be a puzzle for you.
DANIEL: Fire away.
GRANT: So, the question is, is the word CLOT, C-L-O-T, related to the word KLUTZ, K-L-U-T-Z?
BEN: Ooh.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Ooh.
HEDVIG: As usual, I use my other Germanic language knowledge. So, KLUTZ sounds very much like a Yiddish loan.
GRANT: Yes, it is.
HEDVIG: And in Swedish, you can say… KLUMP means like someone who is clumsy, and someone who’s clumsy is KLUMPIG. And one word similar to clot… You mean like a CLOT, like in the pipes?
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: A blood…
GRANT: Yeah. Arteries. Yeah, a blood clot would work too.
HEDVIG: Right. So, KLUMP means a piece of something.
GRANT: A CLUMP, like in English.
HEDVIG: So, I think it would be related. A CLUMP. Sorry. Yes, CLUMP. Yeah, same. So, I’m going to go with yes, but I don’t know how KLUMPIG and KLUMP are related.
GRANT: Wonderful.
HEDVIG: But let’s go with this. [CROSSTALK]
GRANT: I love your thinking here.
BEN: I’m going to go no, and my reason for going no is because of the racism. I reckon medical stuff being as like hoity-toity as it is, they would not have used a word from Yiddish, because they would be like, “No, we must use Latin things for all of the stuff or Greek things.”
GRANT: Okay.
HEDVIG: Wait, what?
GRANT: Listening here, I’m thinking about this. Daniel?
HEDVIG: Wait, I don’t understand the argument. What’s the argument?
BEN: CLOT in English doesn’t mean CLOG, right? CLOG is a different word, and that’s the thing that happens in pipes. Clots are almost entirely relegated to functions within the body. And so, as a medical term, I don’t think medicine would have been like, “Oh, yeah, let’s use like a slang Yiddish word.” They would have been like, “No, we must use like a six syllable,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
HEDVIG: Oh, okay.
GRANT: Whatever.
DANIEL: Well, that’s not the question. The question is not the direction. Did they pull it from Yiddish and name a bodily thing after it?
BEN: I think no because they’re wankers.
DANIEL: The question is, do they tie back…
BEN: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: …to the same word? And I know having Germanic lexification…
HEDVIG: Clotted cream?
DANIEL: I’m going to go against Ben and go, yes.
BEN: Oh, come on, Ben.
DANIEL: I think it might be…
BEN: Beat the two linguists. This is what I want.
GRANT: It always behooves you to agree with Hedvig.
BEN: Oh, damn.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
GRANT: Let me explain this.
HEDVIG: It’s the second compliment I’ve gotten today. It’s very… Mm-hmm.
GRANT: Here’s the thing, Ben. You were close, but you didn’t go far enough back. Where did Yiddish get it? Yiddish got it from German.
DANIEL: German.
BEN: Oh, okay.
GRANT: And so, the German K-L-O-Z means a lump or a block or a tree stump. And so, that’s the magic word there because that K-L-O-Z also gave us CLOT.
DANIEL: Wow.
GRANT: But interestingly, there’s a third word that I could have thrown in here, and I could have started with. CLOD, as in somebody who makes a lot of mistakes or is clumsy, is just a variant of CLOT. So, C-L-O D, meaning somebody who’s clumsy or ungraceful, stems off originally just simply being another spelling of C-L-O-T, CLOT. And there’s another whole thing happening with all three of these words. It’s the idea of a lump. KLUTZ basically means a blockhead. Somebody who has a lump or a knot of wood for a brain or for a head. And that’s why KLUTZ…
HEDVIG: Right.
GRANT: So, BLOCKHEAD is a fourth word that we could throw in there as being semantically related though, not etymologically related.
DANIEL: Wow.
BEN: Fascinating.
DANIEL: Okay. Yup.
HEDVIG: Mm. Interesting. That’s fun. You know what’s fun for Swedish people in the Netherlands? Because you guys are talking about US stuff, so I’m going to ostracise you guys.
GRANT: Yes, please.
HEDVIG: In the Netherlands, the word for client or customer is KLANT.
BEN: KLANT.
HEDVIG: Because the client has just gone to KLANT. And in Swedish, that means a klutz. So, you get letters saying like, “Dear klutz…
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: …you should come into the bank,” or whatever. And it’s like, all right.
BEN: Dear blockhead.
HEDVIG: Right. Thank you very much. I know I’m an immigrant, but…
GRANT: But you’re allowed. That’s fair. [LAUGHS]
BEN: All the Germanic people are so direct, aren’t they?
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah.
GRANT: I don’t know.
DANIEL: All right, one for me, one for Hedvig. Our second one is from Diego. When you go on a JOURNEY, you might write about it in your JOURNAL.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Related or not?
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: JOURNEY and JOURNAL.
GRANT: Ooh.
BEN: Mm.
DANIEL: Okay, Grant, starting with you.
GRANT: Yes, I’m seeing the root of day there. I’m thinking JOURNEY had something to do with a day trip, and JOURNAL, of course, is something that you do daily.
DANIEL: Okay. I have yes.
GRANT: The French word for DAY is JOUR, J-O-U-R.
DANIEL: Jour? Mm-hmm.
GRANT: But it was a direct Latin root. So, I think they both ultimately go back to Latin.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Hard agree. I was also going to say DAY.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Well, Grant said that it behooves me to agree with Hedvig.
GRANT: [LAUGHS]
BEN: So, I say no. I’m going to go with, what do you call it, false friends.
DANIEL: False friend.
BEN: They accidentally ended up being very similar but are not related. Like, maybe JOURNEY doesn’t even come from French or Latin, maybe.
DANIEL: Okay. I know the answer, but before I did, I wrote down my guess, and my guess was yes. I thought they were both related to Latin, diurnalis. So, maybe a JOURNEY is the amount you can travel in a day, or maybe that’s what you do in the day, not at night. And a JOURNAL is where you write down what happened that day. So, three yeses and a no. The answer is yes. Pretty much just like I said.
BEN: [SCOFFS]
GRANT: [LAUGHS] Ben’s disappointment is heavy.
HEDVIG: I have one.
DANIEL: Hedvig’s got one. Let’s hear it.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: That’ll be our third one.
HEDVIG: Okay. So, GRANT, the name.
DANIEL and BEN: Ooh.
HEDVIG: And GRANT, the verb.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: To grant someone…
GRANT: I recuse myself.
BEN: Okay, because you know.
GRANT: [LAUGHS]
BEN: All right. Look, I’ve done two nos. I’m going to make it three for three. I’m going to go, GRANT, no, has nothing to do with allowing, or the gift of, or all the things that GRANT means as like a verb, allow. I reckon the name comes from something different, and it probably had different letters. So, maybe before it was Grant, it was like Gramp or something.
DANIEL: Okay. It behooves me to agree with Ben. I think the answer is they are not related. I think that the name, Grant, has to do with granite or something strong, like a rock, because that’s what he is to me.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Oh, wow.
DANIEL: Okay. Hedvig, are you taking a guess or do you know?
HEDVIG: So, I have googled…
GRANT: Cheater.
HEDVIG: …but I think the places… Well, I said I knew one.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: I was the one initiating. So hopefully, I know.
GRANT: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: So, as far as I can tell from some sources, GRANT, the verb comes originally from a Romance root, meaning to entrust. And GRANT, the name probably, but we’re not really sure, it might come from some sort of Romance word meaning tall, gaunt.
GRANT: Oh, exactly.
HEDVIG: So, they’re not related.
GRANT: Or, large or great or fantastic, super. Those things. Yeah.
DANIEL: They all fit.
BEN: All the superlatives.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Oh, that’s right.
HEDVIG: How tall are you, Grant?
GRANT: I’m 6’2″.
BEN: Oh, yeah. He’s pretty big.
HEDVIG: What’s that in metric?
GRANT: 1.83 meters? I don’t know.
BEN: No. Bigger than that. 6’2″ is like 1.89, I think.
DANIEL: It’s 1.87, because that’s how tall I am too.
GRANT: Okay, got you. 1.87.
HEDVIG: 6’2″
GRANT: I once told somebody in France that I was 2 meters tall, thinking that a meter was a yard. He’s like, “You must be very tall,” because we were talking on the phone.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Two meters is a very… [CROSSTALK]
GRANT: Oh, yeah, a meter is roughly a yard, right?
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Well, that’s three for me and one for Ben. Very good. Thank you, everyone. These were nice and straightforward. Thanks to Diego for sending that one. Keep sending them. We are having fun with them.
[MUSIC]
[INTERVIEW BEGINS]
DANIEL: We’re having a chat with Grant Barrett. Grant is the head of lexicography at dictionary.com, Vice President of the American Dialect Society, which holds the Annual Word of the Year vote, and also the cohost of A Way With Words with Martha Barnette. So, Grant, we want to ask you about all the stuff that’s going down at dictionary.com. First of all, congratulations on getting the gig. That is amazing.
GRANT: At dictionary.com you mean, or ADS, or A Way with Words, or all three?
DANIEL: Let’s focus on dictionary.com for a moment, because I really want to know what goes down.
GRANT: Yeah. That happened this year. Earlier this year, they hired me on, it was a bunch of people whose names I won’t say, but if I did, you would know them, they were also in the running. So, I felt rather chuffed, so to speak.
BEN: Good use of language.
DANIEL: Vindicated? Was there a sense of vindication, or having vanquished?
GRANT: Not vindicated.
HEDVIG: No.
GRANT: Vindicated means that you were professing what you believed to be a truth that nobody agreed for a long time until they did. No, I’m not vindicated, but…
DANIEL: Okay.
GRANT: …encouraged.
DANIEL: Very good. Well, it is encouraging.
GRANT: And the nice thing about dictionary.com is that they don’t know that they’re supposed to be paying lexicography-type salaries. They’re paying dotcom type salaries. So, it’s even better.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Goodness gracious.
HEDVIG: No one tell them. No one tell them.
GRANT: I’m supposed to be reusing my teabag several days in a row, but I don’t have to anymore.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] Nice.
GRANT: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Ooh, interesting. And I’m asking as a precarious academic, how long are you going to work there?
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Is it like until you die?
GRANT: I’m going to ride this candy cane bus until the wheels come off.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Or can I murder you…? Is it one of those Klingon things that if I assassinate you, I automatically get to gig?
GRANT: [LAUGHS] First of all, I have some really disappointing news for you and everyone who’s listening. As the head of lexicography, my title is officially Director of Lexicography. As a Director, I don’t actually get to do very much lexicography on a given day.
BEN: Oh.
GRANT: It’s a lot of meetings. However, I get to rub shoulders with Kory Stamper, who now works with me.
BEN: [GASPS]
HEDVIG: Nice.
DANIEL: Oh, that’s so cool. We love Kory.
HEDVIG: That’s really nice.
GRANT: Kory Stamper [CROSSTALK] Webster. Bestselling author of a fantastic book on dictionaries. She and I work together. She and I, like, two-thirds of every meeting we have are just us goofing off. So, that’s a delight. It’s a wonderful thing.
DANIEL: Oh, my gosh. That alone…
HEDVIG: That’s something.
DANIEL: …is worth doing the job.
GRANT: Yes. The whole team is great. We have staggering amount of expertise of people who’ve worked for all the major English language dictionary publishers. We have people in Wales, we have people across the United States. It’s very good. It’s one of the few ongoing lexicography operations that has paid staff in North America.
BEN: Yeah. True.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I can believe that.
GRANT: I think Merriam Webster is the only other one. Maybe Cambridge. I think Cambridge is withdrawing all their staff to the UK, eventually. So, I don’t know.
DANIEL: Yeah. Well, that’s where I wanted to go, because I wanted to ask you, when you started your career in lexicography, the scenario was very different. I mean, print dictionaries were the norm and now this isn’t. So, what else has changed since you started this biz?
GRANT: More dictionary companies have stopped updating, stopped publishing, or just gone out of business. Macmillan and Longman are the two most recent ones that I can think of. If you see them online or you see their works, just know that they’re zombie outfits.
HEDVIG: Is it because people are consolidating more and not the user…? The customer base doesn’t support so many different ones?
GRANT: Maybe part of it. But I think really what’s happening here is that Google has eaten everyone’s lunch. So, Google licensed what I believe is Oxford’s domestic dictionary content. Not the OED, but what is called NOAD and [UNINTELLIGIBLE [01:10:09], the stuff that appears in your Mac dictionary app. And so, when you google a word and they think because of your keywords that you want it defined, they show dictionary content at the top of the search results, and there is no reason to click through to a dictionary.
BEN: No.
GRANT: It’s kind of like what Craigslist did to the classified ads in the backs of newspapers. It’s just they took a chunk of a profitable niche and destroyed it. It’s easy to be doom and gloom about dictionaries, because they’re always in jeopardy. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Yeah.
GRANT: It’s hard to get anyone to commit to something that takes these kinds of personnel and financial resources, and carry it out over a period of years. People want quarterly finishes to work schedules. And with dictionaries, there’s no into the work, and you never really completely get that done and dusted kind of moment.
BEN: Grant, I often think when there is a thing that is very important societally, like when society can broadly speaking agree thing X is really important but unfortunately, thing X is not something anyone really wants to pay for anymore…
GRANT: Yeah.
BEN: We usually hand that over to the government in some way or another, where we say public funding is the thing that is required to make this work. So, we do that with public broadcasting. We do that with certain research and development tasks. Often defense, but sometimes not. Governments also do R&D in drugs and medicine and stuff. So, do you think that might be a future direction where it just gets folded into some public good type thing?
GRANT: Maybe. There are a couple things happening here. I don’t remember if Ben mentioned it, but I was one of the co-founders of the online dictionary, Wordnik, with Erin McKean and Orian Montoya. We had great hopes. I left Oxford University Press for this. I had been there a few years working on a couple different things. What we discovered ultimately, and there were many other factors for the reason Wordnik never really exploded as a hugely successful company, is that people like good enough. They don’t need perfect. And so, you as a dictionary editor, you have to adjust that mindset.
We could also look at the Dictionary of American Regional English to more directly answer your question, Ben. The Dictionary of American Regional English published for, like, I don’t know, 20 or 30 years. It’s a fantastic work. It’s right up there with the English Dialect Dictionary in terms of the quality of the lexicography and the snapshot of language. But at some point, the national endowment of the humanities said, “Yeah, we’re not going to fund this anymore,” that NEH is one of the big governmental funding sources here for these kinds of humanities projects. And so, DARE is nothing’s really happening with right now. I think there’s one fellow who occasionally makes updates, but it’s not anything grand.
BEN: It’s a labor of love.
GRANT: Yeah. I’ve always had this dream that if I were to win the lottery or something, one of those big pots, that I would give a giant check to DARE, so that they could pick back up where they left off, because there’s so much more work to do. Even when you look at something like Wiktionary, Wiktionary requires I guess basically what you’re saying, the generous donation of people’s time and interest. You have to be a little obsessed to do it. I used to have tons of criticisms of Wiktionary. But now, almost every time I go there, Wiktionary pleases me. You can always quibble with the dictionary. And that’s amazing. So, to wrap this all up… because do not get a lexicographer talking about the future of dictionaries, because you’ll bore yourself.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
GRANT: But to wrap this all up, I would say we should expect further contraction in dictionaries. We should expect dictionaries to stop being updated as regularly, not from dictionary.com’s point of view. Every six weeks, we roll out new updates to the dictionary. We actually have a paid staff, and we have a team of paid contractors who are, again, bringing this world of experience. But from what I see from my colleagues, I went to the Dictionary Society of North America conference in June of last year in Boulder, Colorado, and you know, it’s the usual. It’s everyone going like, “Where’s the work? What’s our future?”
GRANT: And a lot of people who work in academia, that’s what they’ve done. They’ve moved to academia. But in academia, you sometimes forget that you [LAUGHS] don’t have the resources that you can’t ask these commercial publishers to do all these fun, great things to a Thesaurus, because you’ve just tripled the workload.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s very work heavy to produce something like a dictionary or thesaurus. One author writing a book of 400 pages is already quite expensive, but a whole host of lexicographers putting together a dictionary is massive amount of work, for sure. So, when Google shows those hits, I just did a little search and I saw they get it from some sort of Oxford search.
GRANT: Yeah, that’s right. Oxford Dictionaries Online, I think it’s called, or Oxford Reference. They change the name every few years. I’m not sure which it is.
HEDVIG: Do they still update?
GRANT: They do, but what happened was a couple things. They used to have a North American office in Manhattan for Oxford domestic dictionaries. All of that work is now done in the UK.
HEDVIG: Right.
GRANT: I don’t even know that they’re putting up print editions of what’s called the New Oxford American Dictionary, or known as NOAD in the trade. So, yeah, they update. It’s a different editorial… or at least it used to be. I’m not as in touch as I was, but it’s a different editorial staff than OED, but they have direct ties to OED. Since OED is so ponderous and slow, you have to do your domestic dictionaries more often. But yeah, the Oxford does update.
HEDVIG: Okay.
GRANT: But really, these days, if you want the most current stuff, you have to go to Wiktionary. Or dictionary.com, again. We keep up. We do our best to keep up again. But if I had a hundred more lexicographers, I still would not be able to catch up with the flood of language. It’s just always too much.
DANIEL: Goodness. That’s amazing.
HEDVIG: Oh. That brings me to another question I was going to ask you, which is that, and no offense, but published dictionaries and the description of language is a relatively recent thing in the history of… If we think of how long languages have existed and how long writing have existed, the last 200 years is probably where 80% of all the dictionaries were published, right?
GRANT: Yeah, that’s right.
HEDVIG: So, is it the case that it’s like a bit of a blip and we’re going to go back to the…?
GRANT: You’re breaking my heart.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Surely not.
GRANT: You’re killing me, Hedvig. I have such a high opinion of you.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: This is what happens when you compliment me twice. I get very scared and attack.
GRANT: Right.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
GRANT: What does he want? Let me send him off with an insult.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: No, because I like dictionaries and I like learning languages, and I understand that dictionaries are a description of a language at a point in time, and they are not the definite source of what a language is, right?
GRANT: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Words exist, even if they don’t exist in dictionaries. But what do you think? Yeah, do you think it’ll be like a consolidation, that it’ll be like Oxford languages, dictionary.com Wiktionary, and then everything else will disappear, but that those will…? Because there is still a need for it, right?
GRANT: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Sorry.
GRANT: Yeah. One of the weird questions that lexicographers… Just for everyone who doesn’t know a lexicographer is somebody who compiles and edits dictionaries. One of the things that lexicographers hear all the time is, “What are you working on? Isn’t the dictionary done? Aren’t you finished?”
BEN: “Didn’t you finish that?”
HEDVIG: Oh, no.
[LAUGHTER]
GRANT: And it’s not finished. So, the work has to be done by somebody somewhere. But unless you have the free paid army of Wiktionary editors, it’s expensive. It is absolutely expensive. So, I think consolidation has already happened. For example, many years ago, dictionary.com licensed the Random House Unabridged Dictionary. That’s our core that we’ve added… We’ve probably changed 60% of it in some way or another, and that’s our core. Typically, dictionary licensing, just like Google licensed Oxford, is the way that dictionary content moves from company to company.
Certainly, when I worked at Oxford, licensing the dictionary content, slicing and dicing in a bunch of different ways for digital use or print use, and maybe focusing on science or education, that was a profit center, because the same content just cut a bunch of different ways. So, that’s not really consolidation, but it demonstrates that the longevity of dictionary content is there. So, I don’t think that dictionaries are going to go away. I think you may be right that we’re on the downslope of the dictionary blip. I think that’s a very, very perceptive observation, Hedvig.
HEDVIG: Sorry.
BEN: [CHUCKLES]
GRANT: As much as it pains me to say, but the evidence is there. Over the last 30 years in the North American dictionary world, it has been nothing but companies consolidating, closing, reducing, laying off, reducing their publishing schedule, what have you. So, the evidence is there. I mean, we can ignore it as much as we like. That said, in a positive note, everyone that I work with, both for the American Dialect Society, and everyone I know in the dictionary Society of North America and everyone at dictionary.com, the language nerd will not be held back.
[LAUGHTER]
GRANT: They will not be held back.
HEDVIG: No. Nowhere. Yeah.
GRANT: These people will take a sharpie and write dictionary entries on a bathroom stall if they have to. It will happen.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Well, let’s talk about how words become candidates for inclusion. I mean, how do you decide it’s time? What kind of track record does a word have to have? How do you do it?
GRANT: Well, fortunately, the restriction on labor and resources is one of the ways that you can just obviously funnel, you filter, because you really have to be very clear with yourself about, “I don’t have time for everything. Where do I draw the line?” And the line is usually drawn is, “Is this widely used?” And because we’re an advertising-based dictionary at dictionary.com, are people likely to go to this page, if I make an entry for it? And you do have to put in…
HEDVIG: Ah, okay.
GRANT: That’s the thing about the digital world. Now, the lexicographers are not separated from the commercial aspects of the business. Whereas when I was working in a cubicle at Oxford University Press, I didn’t really have to think that much about it. Somebody would just give me work to do, and I would work till the deadline. And then, it was their job to package it and market it originally to come up with a product idea. But now, it’s all integrated.
BEN: So, you guys have to think about click-through potential and stuff like that.
GRANT: Yeah. And the nice thing about it is, as a lexicographer, you want your work seen. And as satisfying as it can be to complete an entry, if you complete that entry and then think that, “Oh, 100 people a year are all that’s going to see this,” that doesn’t feel very good. So, you do want to work on the entries like rizz, for example, which was our most looked up word in 2023. You do want to work on an entry for rizz and really get to the bottom of it, and then you will know that many, many thousands of people a day are going to see your work. It’s pleasant. It’s satisfying.
DANIEL: Are you taking a look at, when people search for something and it’s not there, you can see that people are looking…
GRANT: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: …for a word that doesn’t exist?
HEDVIG: Ooh.
DANIEL: So, it’s like, “Ooh, let’s do that one.”
GRANT: Yeah, I have that. A lot of times, they’re just misspellings.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
GRANT: That’s good information too, because I can make sure that they go to the right entry even though they’ve misspelled it. But yeah, I think we call it the anomalies page. So, we have something called the anomalies dashboard that I can look at, and it just shows me stuff that’s popping up with frequency.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Okay.
GRANT: That’s where we want to be. So, I can get stuff from that. Yeah, absolutely.
BEN: Ooh, ooh. Can I ask what’s like bubbling away in the anomalies right now, like, what’s in the cauldron?
DANIEL: Yes, please.
GRANT: I knew you were going to do that.
BEN: Yeah.
GRANT: How about this? Not really, because that’s like trade secret [CROSSTALK] But I will share a couple of things that we added to our reading program recently.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
GRANT: All right. So, these are just citations, so they’re not full entry. So, one of the things that we shared is the leaky vaccine. This is on our reading program. That’s a vaccine that does not generate enough neutralizing antibodies to stop the virus that it’s supposed to stop.
BEN: Okay. Okay.
GRANT: Yeah. So, it’s stop like… [CROSSTALK]
HEDVIG: Oh, it’s not like potent enough.
GRANT: Yeah, poorly configured. Something’s wrong with it. There’s also a water sommelier.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Oh.
HEDVIG: Oh, my God, Americans…
DANIEL: Americans.
GRANT: These are people who think and study about flavored waters and how they work with meals and with recipes.
BEN: Wow.
HEDVIG: It’s so funny, because Swedish people are making fun of this right now, because on water TikTok, which is a thing…
GRANT: That’s where we got the sites.
HEDVIG: …basically, Americans…
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah. Basically, Americans have discovered cordial.
GRANT: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
HEDVIG: That’s it. It’s just cordial and they’re calling it like, “Ooh, I’m going to make cucumber water.” And they put a powder and they’re like, “Yum, yum, yum.” And it’s like you just made cucumber cordial.
BEN: Meanwhile, Australians are sitting there just being like, “Bruh.”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
GRANT: I think for North Americans, by the way, Hedvig, cordial usually refers to a liqueur…
BEN: It does. Yeah.
GRANT: …which is an alcoholic-based flavored drink.
HEDVIG: Oh.
BEN: Yeah, I know. It’s one of those funny things where they have the same word…
HEDVIG: What do you call the syrup or powder you put in water?
BEN: They don’t really have it. They don’t have a name for it.
GRANT: No. It would probably be generic. We probably would use Kool-Aid as a generic.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Probably soda.
GRANT: [LAUGHS] Probably soda.
HEDVIG: Lemonade?
BEN: No, lemonade is a different thing. Lemonade is a drink.
GRANT: And also, our lemonade is usually not fizzy.
BEN: Yeah, it’s lemon juice with sugar.
GRANT: With lots of sugar.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Goodness.
GRANT: So, those are just a couple of the things that showed up on…
HEDVIG: Water sommelier. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
GRANT: Another one. Here’s one. This is reflective of our times, climate abandonment area. This is an area that, because whose kind of… I don’t know, the area has changed due to drought or flooding, and people move. And so, people literally abandon the area, because they can’t live there stably anymore.
DANIEL: Wow.
HEDVIG: Like, ghost town when the mill shuts down and everyone’s like…
GRANT: Bingo.
HEDVIG: …”Got to go work somewhere else.”
GRANT: Yup.
HEDVIG: But it’s just like, “Oh, this is a floodplain. We can’t live here.”
GRANT: And unfortunately, floodplains usually have very rich soil, great for growing crops, and people are just very attracted to them.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah, for sure.
GRANT: So, those are just three things. So, not quite the question you asked, Ben, but I think I satisfies…
BEN: No, I’ll take it. I’ll hoover up whatever crumbs you cast my way, Grant.
HEDVIG: I have a supervillain pitch regarding the question of a lexicographer’s work is never finished.
GRANT: [CROSSTALK] Supervillain pitch. Oh, hell. I’m with you.
HEDVIG: It is finished…
GRANT: I’m just going to say yes.
HEDVIG: …if everyone who speaks a language dies.
BEN: Oh.
DANIEL: Oh.
GRANT: If everyone who speaks the language what?
BEN: Just dies.
HEDVIG: Dead people don’t innovate.
DANIEL: Well, we don’t want that, do we?
BEN: Just to be clear, Hedvig, are you actively sanctioning the death of every English-speaking person in the world? Is that what you’re advocating for here?
GRANT: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I’m just saying that earlier, Grant talked about… People said, “Oh, haven’t you finished a dictionary yet?” And I was like, “Well, of course he hasn’t, because people keep on speaking and coming up with words.” And I was like, “Well, what if they didn’t though?”
BEN: When society collapses and all the people die, we won’t need lexicographers anymore.
GRANT: Or, everyone just STFU, you know?
BEN: To be fair though, we won’t need any of the other people either, because they’ll all be dead.
DANIEL: But I think that would be a real conversation stopper, wouldn’t it? Somebody says, “Isn’t the dictionary done?” You could be like, “The dictionary is done when all of you are dead.”
HEDVIG: That’s what I’m saying.
GRANT: Hedvig, do these supervillain ideas come to you often?
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: You know how Marvel is obsessed with the ecofascist supervillain trope of like, “Oh, overpopulation. Thanos needs to kill everyone.” Or Poison Ivy, like, “People are too bad against environment.” I want to pitch it into different contexts, and this is what I have for you.
GRANT: I know people who work for Marvel and DC comics. I’m totally taking this idea and crediting you, Hedvig. I’ll take it right to them and say, “Have I got a writer for you?”
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Nice.
HEDVIG: Well, it’s about… Yeah, I’m not going to say more, but yeah. Mm-hmm.
GRANT: Oh, no, no, keep going. Because this evil side of you is kind of a surprise.
DANIEL: Kind of attractive.
BEN: I think Hedvig’s gripe is that it’s not evil enough. She wants the evil to be more evil. She’s like, “What is this stupid, halfway sympathetic villain heel turn nonsense? Let’s get some real [GRANT LAUGHS] villainy in here.” This feels like a linguistic It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia skit where you’re like, [GRANT LAUGHS] “Okay, what we should do is murder.” And someone’s like, “Murder’s wrong.” You’re like, “No, sorry. I didn’t explain it right. What we should do [GRANT LAUGHS] is murder.”
HEDVIG: It’s murder. Yeah.
GRANT: Murder.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
GRANT: My other question for you Hedvig is a little personal, which is, why did you think I was the guy to bring this to?
HEDVIG: Because you said people keep asking you why your work isn’t done.
GRANT: Did that signal to you that I’m all about massive death…
HEDVIG: No.
GRANT: …[CROSSTALK] role of human virus?
HEDVIG: My little brain just as a little other no, that’s like, “What would end his work?” That’s it.
BEN: What I love is that she didn’t think like, “Oh, Grant is going to be down with death.” She’s going to be like, [GRANT LAUGHS] “Oh, do you know what Grant probably hasn’t thought about? Mass murder. I should definitely pull him in. That’s what [UNINTELLIGIBLE [01:28:07]
GRANT: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: In the service of easing the burden on lexicographers. I love how she doesn’t go, “Oh, I’ve got an idea, Grant, but I think I’ll tell you after the recording.” No, she’s like, “I’m going to drop it now.”
GRANT: Hedvig, let me just say, for a lot of reasons, this doesn’t fly. But from a lexicographical standpoint, if we don’t talk about your criminal intentions…
[LAUGHTER]
GRANT: …you’re reducing the number of sources I have for new language, and that just won’t fly.
DANIEL: Ah, less people making citations.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: All right.
GRANT: No, I want more to choose from. I don’t want to choose from the direct that’s left. I want…
BEN: The cream of the crop.
GRANT: a lot of people giving me stuff rising to the top instead of just a few people giving me a little that doesn’t… [CROSSTALK]
HEDVIG: You’re not a completist. You don’t do all the side quests. You just want to…
GRANT: I can’t. I don’t have the money, the staff, the time. I can’t be a completist. No, in my personal life, I’m a completist.
BEN: Well, I think you might, Grant, [CROSSTALK] killed everyone you could.
DANIEL: I think we’ve talked about this long enough, don’t you?
HEDVIG: Anyway.
BEN: Fair enough.
GRANT: No, I’m wounded. I need a balm for my injuries.
HEDVIG: I have a new question, Daniel, but it’s not about mass murder. What about languages that aren’t English on dictionary,com?
GRANT: We include as many as we can of words that have actually seem to have entered English. So, we do work on it. We don’t specialize in any wholesale dictionaries in other languages because again, staff, money, time. But what’s interesting is a lot of the new words that are coming in, of course, are food words. And that’s always fun.
DANIEL: Hmm, that’s cool.
HEDVIG: That is fun. I like food.
DANIEL: Food’s cool.
HEDVIG: And what about Englishes that aren’t American or English? What are like South American English or Kiwi English…
DANIEL: World learner English?
HEDVIG: …whatever they’re up to?
GRANT: Yeah, we work on those too. We have one Canadian and one Welsh speaker. So, we don’t have a broad sample. You like to try to get your lexicographers to be completely in touch with whatever they’re writing about, whatever they’re compiling. But yeah, we do our best. Certainly, when our reading program is set up in such a way that it will draw from the entire English-speaking world. And so, that stuff enters. But we do mainly serve a North American audience, although our Indian audience is growing.
HEDVIG: Fair enough. I like it when people know what they’re doing.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Someone could be like, “Oh, Grant, we want you to do everything.” And you’re like, “Look, I’d love to do everything, but I don’t have the time. And this is what I’m getting paid to do, and this is what our audience wants.” That’s really… I really like that.
GRANT: It’s practical, right? Yeah. Give me $10 million, and I’ll make all your dreams come true, except for genocide.
BEN: Everyone, but Hedvig’s dreams.
GRANT: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: It sounds like dictionary.com is really well placed in the confluence of lexicography and internet and distribution. It’s a good place that you’re at. Do you feel that? Do you feel like you’re in a good spot?
GRANT: I do. Yeah. One of the things that I discovered when I came into the company was this inner vitality that everyone here had this huge amount of energy and the collaborative spirit. It’s weird to talk about your employer in positive terms, because everyone’s like, “Yeah, he’s just saying that because he’s promoting the company,” or “Ah, he’s just a PR shill. Why did I listen?” But you know me from other arenas, you know me from my other lives on radio and for the American Dialect Society, so believe me when I say, that was so encouraging to show up and see all of these people on the same page, working in the same direction, having enthusiasm, cross collaboration.
And as we all know, not every employer is like that. I think it is reflected in the products that we make, and the output that we have, and the way that we interact with the world. I think it comes through, and it’s coming through more and more, just beyond social media. But just even the little messages that you have, just the way that you tweak a page, for example, people pick up on that, even if you’re not overt about it. So, yeah, I agree with you. We’re well positioned. Times are always tough in the dictionary business, but I think we’re doing a great job.
DANIEL: Nice. All right. Thank you for telling us about the inner workings of dictionary.com. I feel like I know a bit more. But now, I want to switch over to the American Dialect Society Word of the Year and talk about some of them. Tell us about what you were doing? You were working the projector. What was it like there in the room? What was the vibe?
GRANT: We met in New York City. On January 4th, Thursday, we did the nominating session. On January 5th, we did the actual vote. And this has grown over the years, because it didn’t used to be like this. It’s one of the main events of the Linguistic Society of America Conference. And the American Dialect Society is what’s called a sister society, and they meet at the same time because they have overlapping members. And so, it’s a room that seats 300 people. I don’t know, my back was turned to the room because I was looking forward at the speakers and the overhead projectors…
[LAUGHTER]
GRANT: …the LCD screens. The projected video, which a part of it is… [CROSSTALK]
BEN: So, I just call them projectors. That’s all.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: I’ve only seen overhead attached to the old kind. That’s it.
GRANT: All right. So, I’m redundant.
BEN: Okay. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Grant, we like you so much.
DANIEL: Redundant [CROSSTALK]
HEDVIG: This is why we do this here.
BEN: This is why we feel comfortable bringing genocide to your door.
GRANT: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Oh, we’re just laying into it. This is just the antipodean way of showing appreciation.
BEN: Yeah, it’s true. I’m sorry.
HEDVIG: It is.
GRANT: The candy and antipodean way. All right, so, the mood in the room. So, what I’m doing is I’m from my own laptop, I’m controlling what’s on the screens. It includes the nominated words, it includes me live typing any new nominations, and it includes my typed snark.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I detected some snark. I detected that.
GRANT: There’s always snark. There’s always snark. And sometimes, it’s a way of adding more information. Like, if somebody is speaking from one of the floor microphones and I know who it is, I’ll put their name in their university on there. If someone says something that I think is patently untrue, [CHUCKLES] I’ll just correct them on the screen and say, “No, that’s not true.”
BEN: Oh.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Sometimes, if somebody goes on too long… No, that’s the thing is, I get a chance to, not be the final word, but it’s a big voice.
HEDVIG: It is.
GRANT: It’s to be on these two giant screens that everyone can read. If you watch the video that I posted to the American Dialect Society website of the 2023 Word of the Year vote, you will see the… [LAUGHS] Some of my jokes fall flat, but I get laughs. What it does is, is it changes the tone of the room, because some people who’ve never been, they think it’s a bunch of dusty linguists talking about Akkadian and Sumerian and their ultimate roots of language, and whether or not Tamil was the mother of all tongues, that sort of thing.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES]
GRANT: It’s not. It’s really a lot of goofing off, and I add to that.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Can you tell us something that you corrected someone on?
GRANT: Oh, that’s not nice.
DANIEL: It’ll be on the video.
BEN: You don’t have to [CROSSTALK] the person, but just… [CROSSTALK]
GRANT: One of them was, people kept saying that… You’ve already talked about this way. People kept saying that, and you’ve had him on the show that Cory Doctorow coined enshittification. But the problem with the word coined is that, sometimes it means invented for the first time. And sometimes it means said in a prominent way. And so, that second definition, he qualifies for. But that first definition, he does not. So, when somebody says, “Cory Doctorow coined enshittification,” you have to correct them and say, “No, he popularized it in 2023.” But there’s numerous forms of shittification and enshittify and so forth that existed before he stepped out with his really strong, absolutely accurate opinion about the gradual degradation of what we take to be online services.
HEDVIG: Yeah, we complain about Google Chrome a lot on this channel.
DANIEL: [UNINTELLIGIBLE [01:36:01]
GRANT: I switched over to Firefox for the New Year.
DANIEL: Nice. Well, we’re going to be looking at these words, because there were a lot that we missed. If you’re listening on audio, we’d like to encourage you to follow along by looking at the American Dialect Society press release. We’re going to have a link in the show notes for this episode. That’s on becauselanguage.com. Let’s start at the bottom. Hey, there’s no emoji category this year. What’s going on?
GRANT: No, there wasn’t an emoji category, because we didn’t get many emoji nominations. The only emoji that we have which won its category was the watermelon emoji, won the category of [CROSSTALK] Political Word of the Year. And this represents the Palestinian solidarity, because if you look at the Palestinian flag, not only has it got red and green, but there’s a red triangle that looks like a watermelon slice.
DANIEL: Yup. It’s nice and simple.
GRANT: Yeah, it’s simple. But it also is what’s called algospeak.
BEN: Yes.
GRANT: In order to not get filtered or flagged, you use the watermelon emoji in order, so that you could talk about things without somebody coming down hard on you. Because in this world of all these bots and tools and alerts, there are people out there who all they do is set up alerts to come attack you for their points of view, when you use a keyword that they think is bad.
DANIEL: That’s one thing that I really hate about the conflict. There’s so much to hate, but I really hate how every term you could possibly use to talk about it has been coopted, dog whistled, turned around.
GRANT: Yeah. Yes, it is possible, right? You cannot have a conversation where you’re both on the same dictionary, you’re both defining words the same way.
DANIEL: No, a term like Zionist can mean different things depending on who’s talking about it. Like, alt right assholes have learned that they don’t say, “I hate the Jews.” But if they say, “I hate Zionism. And let’s face it. There’s a lot to hate about Zionism.” I hate Zionism, then their buddies know that they’re talking about I hate Jews.
GRANT: Oh, yeah. The coding is just ridiculous. But it’s always been the case in politics. But these different sides, and I won’t say there’s two, because there’s more than two, but the different sides of this particular conflict have been honing their language for a long time, what, since 1948? They’ve got it down cold.
DANIEL: Yup. Well, that was our Political Word of the Year, the watermelon emoji. But there was also context.
BEN: As in the word “context”?
DANIEL: The word “context,” I don’t want to talk about all these. I’m just going to blow past these. But if there’s anything interesting to say, I want to know about it. There was context, there was hot labor summer, which PharaohKatt told us about, and we didn’t get time to get to, but that was a good one. Summer of 2023, when a number of unions went on strike. And then I/P shorthand for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Was there anything interesting in any of those? I liked hot labor summer.
GRANT: Oh, just that, if you want to learn more about why context was nominated, watch the video. Sonja Lanehart, who was a linguist at the University of Arizona, Tucson, twice stood up and talked about how, particularly in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict context, was thematically an incredibly important word because everyone, and including also in the comments that got presidents of universities fired or quit. The context intentionally being misconstrued is a big deal in both of these different arenas. But typically, thematic words that don’t actually have a lot of heavy use tend not to win their categories.
DANIEL: Okay.
GRANT: The context here was just a theme.
DANIEL: I want to go to Digital Word of the Year, which was enshittification. But here was another one, chat. Collective term of address for those participating in a streamer’s chat.
HEDVIG: Yes. I’ve been thinking about having this as Word of the Week. Yes, yes, I love it.
GRANT: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: So, for example, to give some context, what I think this word is, for example, if you are a Twitch streamer, and you stream regularly, and you ask your chat for like, “What should I name this new character in the game?” or something. And the chat responds and they’re like, “Dustin, Jordan, Arthur,” whatever. And then sometimes the collective mindset set in and they all start rooting for Puggles, [GRANT LAUGHS] and then you say, “Oh, chat named the character Puggles.”
DANIEL: Yup.
HEDVIG: And it’s as if chat is this hydra with lots of different heads, and somehow it becomes a thing. I love it when podcasters or Twitch streamers are like, “Oh, chat always helps me with something something.”
DANIEL: Chat, what do you think?
HEDVIG: And it’s sometimes the same people, but sometimes it’s just like, “I really like it.”
DANIEL: Yup.
HEDVIG: It’s fun to be in chat. It’s fun to be chat.
DANIEL: I love it. The chat that we get in our live episodes that I stick in the video, it’s like seeing this running commentary. Although…
HEDVIG: Yeah, right.
DANIEL: … PharaohKatt on Discord and Jenna on Facebook pointed this term out to us, chat to refer to a group of people. There was a link on our Discord to a Tumblr post by Maculategiraffe, which tried making the case that this is a fourth person pronoun.
BEN: Oh.
DANIEL: Let’s just hold our fucking horses here, because it’s hard enough to…
HEDVIG: I don’t know if we need to be that.
GRANT: It fails the substitutive…
HEDVIG: It’s strange.
GRANT: It fails the substitutability test.
DANIEL: Tell me more.
GRANT: You need to be able to…
HEDVIG: What do you mean?
GRANT: If it’s a fourth person pronoun, it needs to fit in all the places that you would use a pronoun, and I don’t think chat will do that.
DANIEL: It doesn’t inflect like a pronoun. It’s hard enough making a pronoun, but we’re not going to see the formation of an entirely new group like fourth person.
GRANT: Well, it reminds me of the paper that came out of Baltimore a few years ago where somebody was claiming that Yo had turned into a pronoun. Really, all it was, sometimes they were calling it evocative use at minimum, but it really wasn’t. It was just an emphatic.
DANIEL: Yo said what?
HEDVIG: What’s Yo?
GRANT: Yo, it’s like…
DANIEL: Yo had his shoes up on the table.
GRANT: Yeah, Yo had his shoes up on the table, their shoes. Yo brought pizza to the wedding reception or something like that.
DANIEL: And that wasn’t a thing. Or, was it a thing and then it stopped?
GRANT: The problem is their number of examples were too small, and it wasn’t clear that it was larger than a small ingroup.
DANIEL: All right.
GRANT: I’m kind of misremembering, maybe, but anyway.
DANIEL: All right, cool. Okay.
HEDVIG: I like big brain galaxy thinking. I run a project where we read grammars a lot, and we often have to be like, “What is a word?”
GRANT: Oh, come on.
HEDVIG: And sometimes, we just go off. Yeah, it’s lovely. But then at the end, I have to like… It’s a band, hard line, boil-down-to thing where we have to make a decision, but sometimes we just have a bit of fun. I think you can have a bit of fun with calling chat a kind of pronoun. But then you can also call people a kind of pronoun, etc. So, if you let in that one, you have to let in lots.
DANIEL: Yeah. So, I don’t.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Yes. So, no.
DANIEL: So, I don’t. Tell me about gyat, which was nominated for Informal word of the year. I’m just bouncing around, because this is fun.
GRANT: Yeah, that’s fine. Yeah, gyat, people have done backronyms for it, but you should ignore them all.
BEN: Spell, please.
GRANT: G-Y-A-T. Sometimes double T. But really what it is, is an emphatic pronunciation of God, generally a shortening of Goddamn.
BEN: Oh, my. Like, oh, my gyat.
GRANT: It’s like how bitch became biatch.
BEN: Right.
GRANT: That kind of emphatic pronunciation which contorts its… [CROSSTALK]
BEN: Are we taking it from queer communities? Is that where we have appropriated for?
GRANT: No, African American communities. Young black people. That’s typically where it came to. Particularly that D turning into a T, and emphatic speech is a characteristic of black speech in the United States. You can see this in people writing the word “Lordt,” which is similarly used emphatically. L-O-R-D-T. Instead of my Lord, they write Lordt. There’s a few more of these.
BEN: Cool. I like it.
GRANT: It’s that D just having that…
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Okay. So, Initialism or Acronym of the Year, which was an ad hoc category. Looks like FA-F-O, FAFO, fuck around and find out, which first appears in our generativism show in September 2021 when Hedvig said it. So, prize goes to Hedvig. But we didn’t include it as a Word of the Week.
HEDVIG: Really?
DANIEL: Yeah, you did. Told David Adger…
HEDVIG: That’s a super old saying.
DANIEL: We’re still in the fuck around part of fuck around and find out. It is. It’s super old.
GRANT: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah. I’m not surprised. Things don’t have to be unique or super new to make it into one of these words of the year.
GRANT: No, not at all. Prominent.
HEDVIG: It just means to be…
GRANT: That’s it. It just needs to be prominent in the year in question.
DANIEL: So, why was this prominent? Was it COVID and not getting vaccines?
GRANT: Well, how shall I put this? I personally would not have nominated any of these. I would not have had this category. But I wasn’t in charge, because I just don’t think that any of them were particularly significant for 2023.
BEN: Now that I know that you were running the projectors is just I’m imagining all of the snarky shit you were putting alongside these things where you put up FAFO and then just like in parentheses, boo.
[LAUGHTER]
GRANT: Well, yeah, there’s a lot of it, but for this category, I just basically ignored it and let the vote go because I was like, “Ugh. Oh, what can I say?”
BEN: I will communicate my disdain by not giving this section humor. You will get nothing from me. Initialisms, nothing.
DANIEL: I want to stand up for, am I the asshole?
GRANT: Yeah. But in 2023?
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Yeah, no way.
DANIEL: Well, then, let’s go on to the AI-Related Word of the Year. The winner was stochastic parrot, as popularised by Dr. Emily Bender. You can check out our episode with her for that. But I noticed dictionary.com’s Word of the Year, hallucination, which we’ve talked about a lot on the show, which is something that large language models do. They make up facts, they can fabulate. What was going on for that one, Grant?
GRANT: Yeah. The room generally was down on AI. Pretty much every time it came up, the linguists are not fans of it. Actually, Emily Bender herself, as you know, because you’ve had her on the show, stood up and spoke on behalf of stochastic parrot and talked about how pleasing it was to have a word that she coined [BEN LAUGHS] on the nomination list. When she was speaking, one of the snarky things I did was I called up a ChatGPT window and said, “What do you think of linguist, Emily Bender?”
[LAUGHTER]
GRANT: It had some nice things to say about her, but she’s like, “I’m not reading that. I don’t read machine-generated text.”
BEN: Oh, wow. She’s like a proper live by the sword, die by the sword kind of take on it.
GRANT: Yeah, very impressive. She’s a great speaker. She’s fully versed in her topic. She controlled the room when she was at the mic. It was really nice, but that didn’t stop me from snarking.
BEN: Yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
GRANT: But dictionary.com did hallucinate, because we had seen much earlier in the year, at least by April, that AI was going to be one of themes of the year. So, we started tracking pretty much all the terms that are on this list except for stochastic parrot. And just ultimately, the answer came down to, what are we going to choose out of this whole list? AI as a category, if you go to Google Trends, really shot up in 2023.
BEN: Oh, yeah. Big time.
GRANT: So, any of these words could have stood in for the others. But hallucinate had that real nice feature of taking an everyday word and giving it a new technology spin. This is the same thing that happened to spam, this is the same thing that happened to virus. It just seemed to fit this category, where technology does whatever the hell it wants with language. We were internally in our discussions, included how many people working in so called AI or machine language learning don’t like the term. And there was a lot of commentary at the ADS vote of people saying, “Well, this is not good, because they’re machines and they don’t actually have minds. And therefore, they cannot hallucinate.” But this is a weak argument because so much of English is metaphorical, you know?
DANIEL: Yeah. True.
GRANT: Let’s not be too strict about that.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: We have been trying to find a better word like confabulate, but one that doesn’t imply agency or mind. And on our Discord, Anne suggested, says, “Listening to the Word of the Week episode now, and I think synthesise is a good substitute for hallucinate.”
GRANT: Yeah, I listened to that episode too, and I thought you guys got there. I can’t find it right now, but there was a term that Google had for hallucinate that I’m trying to find here.
HEDVIG: I don’t like synthesise.
DANIEL: Oh.
HEDVIG: Because it means multiple things. A synthetic product is something that could manmade. It’s like plastics don’t occur in nature. They’re synthetic material. But synthesise can also mean taking different viewpoints and combining them into a coherent picture, but all those things still being true.
What the large language models do when they “hallucinate” is that they are very good at writing text that looks like a human wrote it, but they know nothing about the world and what real things are. So, if you say, complete this sentence, it’ll be like, “Oh, I’ll put in some more words there that I know occur in speech. Got no idea what they mean.” It’s similar to how we can say that “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” is a grammatical sentence. It’s a language. It’s English. It’s a sentence. It’s nonsense. But we can make it. And that’s all we’re asking these large language models to do. We’re asking them to make strings of text that look decent for grammatical English. People imbue them with common intelligence and et cetera, but they don’t have it.
And I think hallucinate is good because it taps into the misunderstanding people have about it and says like, “Look, they can make things up. They can hallucinate things based on some data they have.” So, I think the metaphor works well in practice for making people understand that there is a problem. I think that’s so good that it’s worth it that it doesn’t even really mean that.
GRANT: I like that.
DANIEL: I too.
GRANT: I love it. But I think what the linguists are arguing against is that humans have a tendency to anthropomorphize. Like, if you put two dots and a curve on anything like a rock or a can of soda, people will treat it like a…
HEDVIG: As a face.
GRANT: …living creature. They’ll baby it, give it a name and carry it around with them like it needs to be fed and changed.
DANIEL: Yup.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: You leave my Tamagotchi alone.
HEDVIG: But we do that. So, why don’t we do that?
GRANT: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: But if we need to make them understand that the rock is evil, [BEN LAUGHS] then telling them that the rock isn’t a person is going to be too big a step. We have to tell them the rock has bad intention towards you. I’m just saying people can’t really cope. Yeah, it’s too much.
GRANT: The term that Google had used at one point for hallucinate was… They called hallucinations inceptionisms.
DANIEL: Cute. But I don’t.
HEDVIG: Too difficult.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
GRANT: Yeah.
HEDVIG: It’s too difficult. I like hallucinate. I think it’s good.
DANIEL: We got to keep it going. I want to get to the…
HEDVIG: Got to keep that going.
DANIEL: …Words of the Year. What happens is there’s no list of Words of the Year. It gets decided right there on the floor. People nominate Words of the Year. There were like nine. And were there any that you liked?
GRANT: Oh, I had predicted enshittification months ago as the winner of the ADS vote. And of course, if you look at the video that I posted, you will see me [LAUGHS] casting my vote by putting it in bold text and making it flash small and large.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: [CROSSTALK]
GRANT: I don’t usually vote in these because I’m too busy. So, that’s my hand on the scale.
DANIEL: Why did you like that so much?
GRANT: First of all, I work in slang. So, I like slangy stuff. Second, it really does represent more than just what’s happening with the digital world. We don’t need to go into this. It’s been well discussed everywhere. But let’s just say, it’s more than online that is enshittifying. I do feel as I get older, and partly it’s just the process of anyone getting older, that things that I trusted and loved are disappearing. Like, it’s hard to find a print newspaper. I walk around New York City, and there are literally none of the newsstands have newspapers. It’s the craziest thing. Or, bookstores. Bookstores, a thing that I love in the world. And every time I go in a bookstore, I buy a book because I want them to exist, but they’re kind of enshittifying. Like, you go in and two-thirds of the stock is greeting cards. Like, “Where are the books?”
BEN: [LAUGHS]
GRANT: I don’t need that many ink pens. Stop selling ink pens. Sell me books.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: Or clothes that last and are possible to mend.
GRANT: Yeah, agreed.
HEDVIG: Nobody agrees. Maybe it’s just a me thing, but…
GRANT: No, as a large man, I totally agree with you.
[LAUGHTER]
GRANT: As a large man who is hard on his clothes, I totally agree. That’s why I wear Dickies work shirts. They’re built for guys who spend their time on the ground underneath automobiles.
HEDVIG: You’re the second person that told me about Dickies. So, apparently, they make good pants that don’t… So, a women problem, maybe also a large man problem, I don’t know, is the chafing, the holes in the pants.
GRANT: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Apparently, Dickies pants are supposed to be good. I don’t know, this turned into an ad for Dickies.
GRANT: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: But it’s the only brand I’ve heard of where you don’t get holes in your pants. Yeah. Also, funny name, Dickies.
GRANT: Anyway, enshittify. Yes. Enshittification, actually, I thought it was a fantastic word. I was glad to see Cory talking about it very intelligently and really encapsulating the problems with some of what’s happening in the world. He’s a great thinker, and I think he’s a good propagator of good ideas.
DANIEL: Yeah. Well, we were really stoked that enshittification won the ADS vote. It was our Word of the Week of the Year, thanks to LordMortis and Cory Doctorow, who appeared on the show. So, that was really fun.
GRANT: LordMortis.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] So, were there any others from the list that you want to talk about besides enshittification?
GRANT: From the Word of the Year list?
DANIEL: Yeah.
GRANT: No. It was really the only winner for me. The rest of them, as you can see by the votes, derogatory in parentheses was really pushed heavily from the floor by the younger set. It’s a thing that you do where… their example was if… Oh, yeah, he went to Harvard University. And then in parentheses, you put derogatory. Meaning, that you don’t think that’s a good thing. It’s just a way of [BEN LAUGHS] post tagging something with the way that your reader is supposed to understand.
BEN: I really like that. [LAUGHS]
GRANT: But this is just another form of paralinguistic restitution. Restoring to the written text things that are obvious in spoken text.
DANIEL: But in a very dictionary way. That’s like a usage [CROSSTALK], correct?
GRANT: Yeah, it behaves like a dictionary label. That’s true.
DANIEL: Yeah. All right.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: All right. Well, thank you for talking through these words. There was one that we missed. Humanitarian pause. [UNINTELLIGIBLE [01:54:35] on Facebook suggested that one.
BEN: Well, it came in quite late, to be fair. Like, that was happening right as you were building all of your lists and stuff, Daniel.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Does anybody have a personal word of the year?
BEN: Oh.
DANIEL: Because I do.
BEN: Personal word of the year.
DANIEL: My personal word of the year is maintenance. I found that so much of life gets better when you pay attention to upkeep and putting in time to improve on the boring stuff. That’s a personal goal for me. So, maintenance.
BEN: I don’t think I have one from this year. I’m just trying to think.
DANIEL: Well, make one up.
DANIEL: What seems…
BEN: Bluflakatoof.
DANIEL: What seems significant?
BEN: That’s my word of the year.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: You got a cat this year, right?
BEN: I did. What… Second pet syndrome. How about that?
DANIEL: No. Nice. Okay.
BEN: It’s not as good as the first one. But interestingly, it makes me really love the first one even more.
DANIEL: Aww, because it’s hard for them. I think second pet syndrome is something that first pets go through.
BEN: Oh. So, the thing that I giggled about 10 minutes ago, and it’s because my beautiful, gorgeous, angel baby cat, my older cat, was just lying there, having a great time, and my young kitten cat came up and just… Which she does dozens of times a day, and just looked at my cat in true younger sibling-older sibling dynamic and was just like, “You’re way too fucking comfortable. Let’s fix that.”
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, we have to leave it there, but I’d like to say, Grant, thanks so much. And if you want to get more of this Grant person, which I know you do, you want to listen to A Way with Words, which they can get on waywardradio.org. And how else can people find out about you?
GRANT: grantbarrett.com, two Rs, two Ts. Or find our show in any podcast app.
DANIEL: Awesome.
GRANT: And in the United States, we’re on public radio stations from coast to coast, bleeding into Canada and Mexico.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Grant, we love having you on the show. It is so fun to have a chat with you.
GRANT: Thank you for putting up with my nonsense. It was really nice to spend this time with the three of you.
HEDVIG: Thank you for putting up with our nonsense. [GIGGLES]
DANIEL: And our mass murder. That wasn’t our greatest moment.
GRANT: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: The Hedvig-sanctioned genocide so that all lexicographers can lay down.
DANIEL: Argh.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Thanks also to SpeechDocs who transcribe all our words, and our patrons who keep the show going.
BEN: Is it my turn? It’s my turn.
DANIEL: It’s your turn.
BEN: Hey, [CHUCKLES] I’m going to read the language exactly as it is in my little script, because it’s really blunt and direct. I’m going to sound so Netherlandsy right now.
DANIEL: You were meant to elaborate on that.
BEN: No.
DANIEL: Maybe you give the straight version and my mouth translate.
BEN: I’m going to come at this from the Dutchest of possible directions.
DANIEL: Okay. Very Swedishly.
BEN: Support Because Language by telling a friend about us. Leave a review. Give us ideas and feedback. Lots of ways do that. Message us on the socials where we are @becauselangpod on all platform. Leave us a voice message on SpeakPipe, or just another way. Send us an email, hello@becauselanguage.com. The only problem is I imbued even my voice with far too much like…
HEDVIG: You did.
BEN: … joie de vivre, like it should have been far more robotic. But linguistically, I felt that was very Dutch.
DANIEL: Well, it was straightforward. I appreciate that.
BEN: Direct.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Now it’s my turn. We are grateful to everyone who supports our show, and we do it especially by being a supporter on Patreon. They make it possible for us to make regular episodes for free and get transcripts, and they get cute little bonuses like the mailout that we just talked about. Live episodes. They get to look at our cats and other things on Discord.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: And it’s very nice. We want to give a special shoutout to our top patrons, and they are Termy, Elías, Matt, Whitney, Helen, Jack, PharaohKatt…
HEDVIG AND BEN: LordMortis.
HEDVIG: …Lyssa, gramaryen. The name here is spelled differently from grammar. Oh, because we found out. They wrote. Yes.
DANIEL: They did.
HEDVIG: They are grammar-e-n.
DANIEL: gramaryen.
HEDVIG: Right?
DANIEL: It’s not grammar-yen. Here, I’ve been saying grammar-yen. But it’s no. It’s grammar-e-yen. Isn’t that cute?
BEN: gramaryen.
DANIEL: gramaryen.
HEDVIG: gramaryen, Rene, Kristofer, Andy, James, Nigel, Meredith, Kate, Nasrin, Joanna, Nikoli, Keith, Ayesha, Steele, Margareth, Manú, Diego, Ariaflame who recently bumped up to the supporter level. Rodger, Rhian, Colleen, Ignacio, Kevin, Andy from Logophilius, Stan, Kathy, Rach, Cheyenne, Felicity, Amir, Canny Archer, O Tim, Alyssa, Chris, aengryballs, Tadhg, Luis, and Raina. And we have two new patrons on our friend level, and they are Kim and Matthias E-C. Thank you to all of you.
DANIEL: Grant, you want to take this last bit?
GRANT: The Because Language theme music was written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who also performs with Ryan Beano and Didion’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
DANIEL: Lovely.
BEN: Pew, pew, pew, pew.
HEDVIG: Very well.
DANIEL: Grant, you are a lovely man.
HEDVIG: Super good.
GRANT: I should do radio.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Well,…
HEDVIG: You should.
BEN: …you have another podcast under your belt, because you are an official cohost. [CROSSTALK]
GRANT: I got to say [CROSSTALK] I’m waiting for the embossed jacket, the embroidered jacket, just waiting for the silk.
BEN: We need to make that happen.
HEDVIG: Oh, we’re making an embossed jacket.
GRANT: Wear this [CROSSTALK] dressing gown.
DANIEL: We can do that.
BEN: I’m thinking a really like 1980s, like all polyester, like spray jacket kind of thing.
HEDVIG: Purple and green.
BEN: Will be netting on the inside. Purple and green. Exactly, right. Yeah, you’re picking up what I’m putting down.
GRANT: I’m signing off on all this.
DANIEL: What about Ryan Gosling’s…?
HEDVIG: Or, orange.
DANIEL: Ryan Gosling’s jacket in Drive? Could that be…?
BEN: Yeah.
GRANT: There you go.
GRANT: No, that was too satiny.
GRANT: That’s not even the…
BEN: No, I’m talking a little bit more matte.
DANIEL: Okay. We’ll make it happen. We’ll send it.
[BOOP]
DANIEL: I have to tell you this story. I’m at the grocery store, and I’m looking at beans, and near me, there’s some young people doing the shelving. They’re talking loud, so they don’t really care who’s listening. One of them says something like… something about keeping up with new slang. And of course, I’m right next to him looking at beans and I say, “Ooh, new slang. What have you noticed, young person?”
BEN: Just to be clear, you cold-cocked this poor teenager.
GRANT: [LAUGHS]
BEN: You just inserted yourself into their slang conversation.
DANIEL: He wasn’t here for this!
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: He’s not making heaps of dosh on this job.
BEN: All right.
DANIEL: He doesn’t need…
BEN: So, you’ve decided, “Okay, what needs to happen to extract greater value from this nascent worker is he needs to provide new slang.” [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Because there’s something he didn’t know, and that was that he was next to a titan of linguistics podcasting, ready to…
GRANT: Who was that?
DANIEL: …hang on every word. It was me. It was me, Grant.
GRANT: Uh-oh. Oh, I was confused.
BEN: I was like, “Oh, wow, Hedvig was in Perth. She didn’t call?”
DANIEL: Oh, wow, Grant was in Perth?
GRANT: She’s a traveler. Yeah. Hedvig’s all over.
DANIEL: Who is this mysterious person?
GRANT: So, what did you learn as we tangent and tangent and tangent?
BEN: Yeah. Come on. Lay it on us.
DANIEL: He busted out a few, but they were old. He brought out bussin.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: I forget there was one from 2022 or something. And so, I was able to give definitions for everything. Bussin is tasty food. Of course, it comes from African American English, and a few others. And then I asked if he’d heard rizz. He had. I told him that someone once told me to stick out my gyat for the rizzler, but I didn’t know why or how. I have to think that in that moment, he was impressed.
BEN: You don’t have to think it. You choose to think it. Let’s be really clear here.
GRANT: [LAUGHS]
BEN: You absolutely don’t have to. There is no compulsion. You make a choice, sir.
DANIEL: Sorry, Grant.
GRANT: This is where a middle-aged white man lives, speaking from experience. We look for whatever signs of approval we can get.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Excuse me, but this story was about how up to date I am. That’s what this is. You missed that part.
GRANT: Oh.
BEN: That is definitely the title I acquired.
GRANT: I’m a little slow. It’s 05:09 AM here.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: Oh. Good, you are doing the Lord’s work, Grant.
GRANT: Daniel called, I answered.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
GRANT: You know how when you’re 13 years, you had rock and roll crushes on Lita Ford or Ann and Nancy Wilson?
DANIEL: Yes.
GRANT: Ben, I think you’re too young for that.
GRANT: But Daniel’s for my age.
BEN: Yup.
GRANT: [LAUGHS] These badass rock and roll chicks, that’s how I feel about Hedvig. Not quite a crush, but still just admiring. Very good at what she does. Yeah. I think we could have, you know, drinks together.
DANIEL: This is appropriate.
GRANT: Who are your rock and roll crushes, Daniel? Those were mine. There was all these rock chicks, mainstream rock chicks.
DANIEL: Definitely Kate Bush.
GRANT: Oh, Kate Bush.
DANIEL: Kate Bush.
GRANT: I knew so many young women just like her. in a way, not British, but like ethereal, going their own way, not really caring at all whatsoever how they present it to the world. [LAUGHS]
BEN: Kate Bush felt like she was one… I know there’s considerable overlap between these two things, so don’t come at me too hard. But Kate Bush was like proto-Bjork. Like, they seem to have a very similar vibe,…
GRANT: yeah. At by vibe.
BEN: …which is just like, “I am going to do whatever I want, and most of it is going to be weird, nonsense stuff and you’re going to love it.” And then, the whole world was like, “We do love it. Thank you.” [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: We do love it. We do love it. And then, also having control of image and dance and media.
BEN: And just doing it completely their own way.
GRANT: Yeah, I love your voice. That’s all I’m saying. Just like, it’s the perfect, pleasant podcast voice that feel like I’m getting wisdom of the ages when you speak, Hedvig.
DANIEL: And you are.
BEN: Do you know what I love most about this, Hedvig, is that he said all of these lovely things before you joined, and my brain initially was like, “Oh, I could make a joke, like a really bad one about how we were saying [GRANT LAUGHS] awful things.” And then, I was like, “No, no. Her hearing nice things is going to be way…”
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: You know what we talked about before that if you say nice things, we’re just going to be cruel back?
BEN: Shit.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: This is not doing great things for you.
GRANT: All right. So, when I get these anonymous little bitchy emails, I know who they came from, Daniel. [LAUGHS]
BEN: Just remember, she’s coming to kill everyone and you’ll be second last, Grant, so she can be like, “Look, Grant, you can sleep now. They’re all gone.”
GRANT: She’s a Malthusian.
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: They’re all dead.
HEDVIG: I will do that.
DANIEL: Nothing, but dreams. Oh, yeah, I forgot to say, thanks also to you, Ben and Hedvig, for hanging out with me today and making the show awesome. Thank you.
BEN: Argh, we don’t deserve thanks. What are we? We’re podcast…
HEDVIG: No way.
BEN: …princesses.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Yes, you are.
HEDVIG: Yes.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]