What’s the difference between a KINK and a FETISH? Does it matter if you ASSUME or PRESUME? English is full of these close groups of words, and author Eli Burnstein has untangled many of them in his delightful book The Dictionary of Fine Distinctions. Eli joins us for this episode.
Timestamps
Intros: 0:42
News: 9:54
Related or Not: 24:11
Interview with Eli Burnstein: 37:33
Words of the Week: 1:10:13
The Reads: 1:33:45
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@becauselangpod What’s the difference between a MAZE and a LABYRINTH? Talking to @eliburnstein ♬ original sound – Because Language
@becauselangpod A special moment with Daniel and Ben. Our new episode with @eliburnstein is out now! Check out The Dictionary of Fine Distinctions. becauselanguage.com
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Selective Action Prediction in Infancy Depending on Linguistic Cues: An EEG and Eyetracker Study
https://www.jneurosci.org/content/44/14/e1301232024
The language spoken by others conditions our ability to predict their actions from an very early age, according to a study by UPF
https://www.upf.edu/en/web/etic/home/-/asset_publisher/nT5ucm2DcHyd/content/llengua-parlada-altres-condiciona-capacitat-predir-accions-petita-infancia/10193/maximized
Word Recall is Affected by Surrounding Metrical Context
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7531771/
PBS Kids adds American Sign Language interpreters to some of its children’s shows
https://www.fastcompany.com/91107318/pbs-kids-american-sign-language-interpreters-childrens-shows
Dictionary of Fine Distinctions: Nuances, Niceties, and Subtle Shades of Meaning
https://www.unionsquareandco.com/9781454952350/dictionary-of-fine-distinctions-by-eli-burnstein/
COCA Corpus
https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/
English Synonymous Or the Difference Between Words Esteemed Synonymous in the English Language, Useful to All who Would Either Write and Speak with Propriety and Elegance, By John Trusler · 1804
https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/English_Synonymous_Or_the_Difference_Bet/3MxmAAAAcAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0
DELVE: Thread by Jeremy Nguyen
TechScape: How cheap, outsourced labour in Africa is shaping AI English
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/16/techscape-ai-gadgest-humane-ai-pin-chatgpt
Is It Too Late to Do Something About Dangerous “Forever Chemicals”?
https://slate.com/technology/2024/04/pfas-drinking-water-limits-epa-forever-chemicals-dangerous.html
Welcome to Kidulthood
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2024/04/adult-stuffed-animal-revival/678012/
Why Did People “Look Older” In The Past?
https://www.iflscience.com/why-did-people-look-older-in-the-past-64432
Police arrest suspected ‘bank jugger’ in Hollywood
https://www.local10.com/news/local/2024/04/17/police-arrest-suspected-bank-jugger-in-hollywood/
jug | Green’s Dictionary of Slang
https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/y5nxyjq
jug-heel | Green’s Dictionary of Slang
https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/tdnbvka#n5c76ga
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
DANIEL: Wait a minute. How shall I describe you? Because you’re an author, blogger?
ELI BURNSTEIN: Humor writer. Humor writer?
DANIEL: Humorist. Are you a humorist? You might be a humorist.
ELI: Yes. Although some people would argue humorist is more of an essay humor writer, but I think you could get away with humorist.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Stop it. Stop it. You’re bringing the book into real life.
ELI: That’s right. Satirist.
DANIEL: Oh.
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]
DANIEL: Hello and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley. With me now, it’s my podcast pal and partner. He might be the top of the centaur, he might be the bottom of the centaur. But I’m pretty sure that together, we form a centaur. It’s Ben Ainslie. Hi, Ben.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Hi, Daniel. I don’t know what that’s a reference to, and I’m kind of happy not knowing. I would prefer to imagine that you just have a thing about centaurs in your life.
DANIEL: I don’t have a centaur thing. No.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Centaur fetish [DANIEL LAUGHS] Fauvians? Is that what we call them? I don’t know.
DANIEL: I don’t know. But let me ask you a question, Ben. What’s your Roman Empire? You know what I mean when I say Roman Empire?
BEN: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My Roman empire…
DANIEL: Maybe for some people who don’t know, it became apparent a few years ago now that dudes think about the Roman Empire a lot.
BEN: Some dudes. Some dudes think about the Roman Empire at surprisingly, some would argue concerningly high rates, [DANIEL LAUGHS] myself possibly amongst them.
DANIEL: Every once in a while. Lynnika and Fasa both mentioned this on our Discord as a Word of the Week, and we never got to it. But “your Roman Empire” has become shorthand for “a place or a time that you think about often.” So, do you have one?
BEN: I personally have heard Roman Empire the way you’re using it, not interpreted as a place that you think about often, but just like a fixation you have, like a thing that occupies your brain a lot.
DANIEL: Okay, that’s even more interesting. Cool.
BEN: I’m going to do a really low-stakes one, because if I thought about this harder, I’m sure there would actually be a really insightful, get-to-know-Ben-Ainslie answer. But to be perfectly honest, the thing that’s been on my mind recently, because I’ve seen it four or five times… this is actually a double-up as well. This is a TikTok meme that’s been doing the rounds of, “What’s something that is wrong in movies that drives you crazy and no one else cares about?” This is the same answer both ways.
I hate it. Hate it with a passion. Really, it just gets under my skin when in some adventure film or a suspense movie or whatever, there’s a dark environment and someone is holding a hurricane-style lantern, and they are holding it up in front of their face and using it to cast light around and look around, and it does my head in because anyone who has ever existed in the dark before would know that if you hold a giant light up in front of your face that is shining back in your face, you will see three parts of fuck-all.
DANIEL: Can’t see anything.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Cannot see anything. And look, I get it. It’s a little bit the same as every space and scuba movie ever made, they have lights in the helmet to illuminate the face. Not because that’s a thing, but because we need to be able to see their face in a movie.
DANIEL: Because cinematography being what it is. Yep.
BEN: Both of those things really frustrate me, even though I know why they’re done, and I understand that it’s necessary because the audience needs to see the face… It just, ugh, I don’t know why. Just that they’re like, “Hmm, what’s in this dark, mysterious cave? Well, you know who I’m not going to ask? Old man McGuckin with a flashlight in his eyes.” Anyway, that’s my thing.
DANIEL: You know that they’re being set up for a jump scare.
BEN: What is your Roman Empire, Daniel?
DANIEL: I know that the Middle Ages were not a great time for humans, and a lot of people died and had a hard time. But I am also the parent of two young daughters, and so fairycore is a going aesthetic at our place. [BEN LAUGHS] Yeah, I think Fairytale Castle is my Roman Empire. I imagine a fresh morning, seeing the castle and a valley. And I’m always the king. I’m never a serf. Which I would totally be the serf in real life, right?
BEN: Yeah, 100%.
DANIEL: Yeah. But that is my happy place, which I suppose is very white and cis of me, but that’s my Roman Empire.
BEN: Hey, look, there is a reason that most fantasy took place in Medieval Europe, because most of it was written by white dudes who grew up with people being [MOCKINGLY] knights and dragons and fairies.
DANIEL: But it was just an evocative place in time.
BEN: I think so.
DANIEL: All right. Well, thank you for joining me on this episode. We have no Hedvig today. We miss her, but we will catch her next time around. We’ve got some stuff coming up. Ben, I have a question for you. Since we talked about centaurs, what’s the difference for you between a kink and a fetish?
BEN: Ooh.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Yeah. I never thought about this before.
BEN: I am 100% certain that there is a good answer to this and that I don’t possess it.
DANIEL: Well, what’s your instinct?
BEN: My instinct would be fetish… If we drew a spectrum, and at one end of the spectrum was just like the most kind of benign, mild curiosity it’s possible to possess, and down the other end of the spectrum is like a full-tilt pathological compulsion, I would then chart kink and fetish onto that spectrum. And I would put kink a bit more towards the curiosity end, and I would put fetish a bit more towards the compulsion end.
DANIEL: Interesting.
BEN: But neither of them are right down the end by any stretch of the imagination.
DANIEL: Okay. That’s interesting. Well, I thought maybe a fetish was about a thing like shoes, and a kink can be an action. I didn’t know because I’m… Well, I’m…
BEN: You’re vanilla.
DANIEL: Terribly vanilla. [BEN LAUGHS] But I decided to take this question to The Dictionary of Fine Distinctions by Eli Burnstein.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: And it says this. A kink is an unconventional sexual preference. A fetish is an unconventional sexual requirement, which is what you said. You said it. You nailed it.
BEN: I like that. I like that. That’s fun.
DANIEL: Yeah. Wanting to touch someone’s feet is a kink if you can’t be aroused. Otherwise, it’s a fetish and it goes on a bit about the more fine distinctions. Oh, and there’s a delightful illustration by Liana Finck as well. So.
BEN: [LAUGHS] You had me right up until the illustration.
DANIEL: Oh, it’s fun too.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: But I got the chance to talk to Eli Burnstein. He’s an author, word lover, humor writer. He’s written for the New Yorker, and now he’s written The Dictionary of Fine Distinctions. And I’m going to be talking to him on this episode.
BEN: I, for one, cannot wait to see what other sorts of repressed ex-Mormon, sexual stuff you’ve put to this poor guy. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Why did I gravitate toward that one example?
BEN: [LAUGHS] Let’s not pick that scab. Let’s just leave it. Let’s leave it unexamined.
DANIEL: Pressed against the window, [LAUGHS] looking inside.
BEN: Hey, before we talk about what’s coming up in the show, I was going to say, hey, if you haven’t done so, and you’re listening to this show and you’re thinking to yourself, “Geez, I don’t hide what this is,” consider throwing a bit of money our way on Patreon. The sorts of things that we do with that money, I assure you, is not get rich by any stretch of the imagination.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: What we do with that money is we pay a service to transcribe our shows so that people who are hard of hearing or deaf, who cannot access the show through audio, can access the show through the written word. But also, that has a sideline benefit of making those shows searchable. So, if you’re ever stuck in a good old-fashioned pub stoush, and you know, you remember, we settled this on the show somewhere, but it’s not coming up on the internet, Google is not your friend. Well, my friend, our podcast is your friend because you can search the text of our show, and that is something that is done because of the people who support us via Patreon. What we also do is we make an offer to the people that we have on the show for like a fairly moderate amount of money. But I think it’s really… we think it’s really important that we always make that offer so that podcasts like this one aren’t just built off the careers and labor of other people without any acknowledgement. Look, not all people take us up on that offer. Some people are just happy to come on the show and chat about their field of expertise.
DANIEL: Some people ask us to donate to a cause instead, which is great.
BEN: Exactly. And all of those things are great. And it’s through our lovely, lovely patrons that we are able to do those things and more. You can become a patron by going to patreon.com. Obviously there’s like benefits and stuff. But to be perfectly honest, all of the people who are our patrons who hang out on Discord, that’s the real benefit. You can come along and hang out with a real fun group of tremendously nerdy human beings, just the most nerdy. If you’ve thought to yourself, “Man, I’ve always really done well with nerds,” boy, oh boy, is our Discord for you.
DANIEL: Yes. I think community building is really important. I mean, there are a lot of communities that are bound together by lies and conspiracies, but we try to be a community bound together by love. A love of language and caring for other language speakers. So, join us for a… love bombing? We’re patreon.com/becauselangpod.
BEN: Hey, Daniel, what’s been going on in the world of linguistics in the week gone past?
DANIEL: Ah, man, this one is a bit of a downer. We’ll start off with this one. We are dedicating this episode of Because Language to the lexicographers at dictionary.com who are facing layoffs.
BEN: Oh, no. Didn’t we just have someone from dictionary.com on the show?
DANIEL: Yes, Grant Barrett. And we’ve had other lexicographers as well who have been dictionary.com folks. And yeah, it’s been hard for lexicographers. Dictionaries have become commodified. Grant told us on our last episode with him, if you look for a definition of a word, Google just gives you definitions from an old Oxford edition. You never have to click through. And then, the dictionary websites don’t get any money from clicks. People may not realise that language is moving on and somebody has to do the work of lexicography. So, to everybody at dictionary.com we’re thinking of you and we’re wishing you success in the next thing and get in touch because we like to hear from you.
BEN: Do we think that in the same way that public media is a solution to the fourth estate being profit oriented, is there space for us to just take this and move it into a public space where the government goes, “All right, well, we’re going to have… the Macquarie Australian Dictionary, we’re going to nationalise it and it’s going to be like paid for by the government and we’ll have a staff of lexicographers and we’ll just do that work”?
DANIEL: There has been some call on our Discord for a universal basic income so that lexicographers can do their thing.
BEN: Okay, that seems like a more roundabout… or I think it’s likely that we’ll be able to get the government to pay seven lexicographers rather than pay all people.
DANIEL: Everyone.
BEN: But I’m here for UBI. So, if that’s the gateway drug to [DANIEL LAUGHS] UBI, then let’s get it happening.
DANIEL: I’m a big believer in government doing stuff that doesn’t make any money, but that needs to be done. So, I think of lexicography as a public good.
BEN: So, are we thinking that this is a shift in the wind, as it were? Are we likely to see this across more dictionaries around the world?
DANIEL: It’s been an ongoing process. I mean, I know lexicographers who’ve had to stop doing what they love and do something different. A lot of dictionaries have been hit really hard and this is just one more blow to the lexicography community. It’s just tough.
BEN: Sending our love out to the lexicographers listening, because I’m sure we probably have a few.
DANIEL: Yep, we do. And they’ve all been our guests. [LAUGHS]
BEN: Sorry.
DANIEL: This one comes from Dr Marc Colomer of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and a team published in the Journal of Neuroscience. It’s about babies.
BEN: Oh, good. Those little squidgy things.
DANIEL: We know that they are keen students of language. They’ve been hearing language ever since they were in the womb…
BEN: True.
DANIEL: At least for speaking parents, and probably more. And this project looks at how babies predict actions.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Now, the reason I’m interested in prediction, I’ve just been obsessed… It’s my Roman Empire. I’ve been obsessed with language prediction and how we do it. Because we had an episode with Dr Mark Ellison a while ago, Lazy in a Good Way. And that was about how our brains are just these prediction engines. Our brains are just always going nuts making predictions about what’s going to happen.
Because then, with all that going on under the surface, we can pay minimal conscious attention to the conversation. And then, if we get something that we don’t expect, then we can go, “What?” And focus in and pay lots of attention then. And his work showed that we remember strings of numbers better if they have certain intonational patterns, like if we go 134567…
BEN: [SINGS] 1300655506.
DANIEL: Which is why they always used to sing the phone numbers on old commercials. Well, this is about babies and how they make predictions. What they did was, in this research study, they looked at six-month-olds, and they presented them with a video of a person doing stuff. There was eye tracking so that we could see what the babies were looking at. And they also used EEG so they could know more about what was going on in the baby’s motor cortex.
BEN: Okay. Okay, so we’re getting some brain waves and we’re getting some eye dots.
DANIEL: The person in the video would speak to them and then reach for a thing, and they could see that the babies were making predictions about where that person would reach because of the eye tracking and also the babies would activate their motor cortex. You know how if I squidge my hand in a fist, my brain is doing squidgy things, but also you watching me, your brain is doing squidgy things?
BEN: Yeah, yeah, like mirror neurons and that sort of stuff, right?
DANIEL: Yeah. We haven’t seen a lot about mirror neurons. They were all the rage in the 2000s, and now they’re starting to come back a little bit. Well, that’s because they’re predicting what’s going to happen.
BEN: Based on what the person is saying?
DANIEL: Based on what the person is saying, and based on that person’s gestures, because gesture is a really big deal.
BEN: Sure. Huge part of language.
DANIEL: But now, there’s a twist. They gave the babies a speaker of a foreign language.
BEN: Ah.
DANIEL: Well, what happened?
BEN: Ooh. I’m going to guess that the study probably didn’t have this level of granularity, but my guess would be if you had a Spanish baby — el bebé español — and the person was Italian…
DANIEL: …Or German in this case. Yeah.
BEN: You would probably have a baby kind of maybe figure a little bit of stuff out still, maybe a tiny bit. But then, if you gave them Korean or Urdu or something like that, they would be like, “Buh?”
DANIEL: The babies got a German speaker, and they were like, “Buh?”
BEN: Okay, but what was their background? English?
DANIEL: It was Spanish and Catalán.
BEN: Okay, see, well, this isn’t proof that my idea is right, [LAUGHS] but I’m not surprised, because German and Spanish are very, very different languages.
DANIEL: They are and they just didn’t recruit their motor system. Their motor system wasn’t doing the same thing. They just basically ignored input from a person whose language they didn’t speak.
BEN: So, by six months old, babies have acquired a measure of familiarity with a language, their language that, like…
DANIEL: The language that would be theirs, yeah.
BEN: Yeah, the mother tongue. And when confronted with a language not their own, none of that familiarity clocks. None of the brain work. “My process offers me nothing here.”
DANIEL: They just wouldn’t do the effort. They just wouldn’t put any effort trying to figure it out just not worth it.
BEN: Perhaps they just really hated Germans. I mean, it happens.
DANIEL: Yeah, maybe. Which is why we need to have programs to educate babies in linguistic diversity and explain why it’s important to listen to people, even if they do speak German.
BEN: It doesn’t matter. Germans don’t count.
DANIEL: No, maybe not. This reminded me of another study that I shared on our Discord, and this one’s from 2020, but it’s still really interesting. This one is by Dr Amelia E. Kimball at the Université Paris Diderot and a team published in Language, Cognition and Neuroscience. Now, imagine that I gave you eight words. I’ll give you the list. Here’s the list. In fact, maybe I should have you try to memorise them.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Cupcake, elbow, candy, chicken, pocket, morning, stomach, ocean. Okay.
BEN: Should I recite them now?
DANIEL: Yes, please.
BEN: Cupcake, elbow, chicken, pocket, candy, something, ocean, something.
DANIEL: Okay. You did great. You did well.
BEN: Well, I got six, but they weren’t in the right order. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Okay, you remembered one and two exactly. You remembered eight exactly. And then you remembered some others, but they kind of mixed around a little bit. There was morning and stomach. You missed out on six and seven.
BEN: Morning. There we go.
DANIEL: Did you notice anything that these words have in common? I’ll say them again.
BEN: Well, hang on. I’m running through them in my head.
DANIEL: Yep.
BEN: They’re all two syllables.
DANIEL: Yes, they are. They are all two syllables. And beyond that?
BEN: I don’t know the word for this linguistically, but they’re all like you hit them both quite hard, like cup-cake.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Morning, like…
DANIEL: Morning.
BEN: There’s no like [MUMBLED ONOMATOPOEIA]
DANIEL: That’s right. They’re all two syllables, and they’re all trochees.
BEN: What does that mean?
DANIEL: Well, Ben, a trochee is a word where the first syllable gets the stress.
BEN: Okay. okay.
DANIEL: Stomach, ocean. There was another list that other people got where it was the opposite. Regime, baboon, guitar, award.
BEN: [LAUGHS] That would be much harder, I think.
DANIEL: Maybe but the results were the same regardless. It didn’t seem to matter. Everyone did pretty much what you did, Ben. They remembered the first couple, and they remembered the last maybe couple, but the ones in the middle were just hard.
BEN: I’m average.
DANIEL: Yes, you are but you did very well.
BEN: I’ll take it. I will take being average.
DANIEL: Nothing wrong going on here. But that’s because we remember the first items and remember the last item. We have primacy effect, and we also have recency effect. We remember those two things really well.
BEN: Yep.
DANIEL: But what would happen if I take a list of trochees and in position number three, I swap a word with the opposite stress pattern?
BEN: Oh, so you go from a trochee to… what did you call the other ones?
DANIEL: I forget. I didn’t look it up.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Okay, just say the word trochee backwards.
DANIEL: Eetroch. What if I had rabbit, mountain, cashier, beat and then go back to beetle, student and so on? Would they remember that better?
BEN: I feel like you would because it would stand out. It would be… So, you’ve got primacy effect, you’ve got recency effect, and then you’d probably also have uniquity effect or something.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Yes, that is the exact term. So, in fact…
BEN: [LAUGHS] You liar.
DANIEL: They did remember the third word better, uniquity effect had its place.
BEN: Stop it. You’re making fun of me. What did they actually call it?
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] I don’t know. I haven’t got it in front of me.
BEN: Unique-titude.
DANIEL: The paper says that the words in the list have metrical irregularity. So, let’s call it that. But it also worked when it was in some other position besides word number three.
BEN: Yeah. That makes sense.
DANIEL: But that makes sense, because we’re always looking for what’s different, and we can manipulate the attentional focus of our listener by saying something a little differently. So just that alone was enough to make people memorise it better. I like that.
BEN: Every good and potentially helpful. I mean, this is a very edge use case scenario, I imagine. But for those of us out there in the world who need to come up with mnemonics and remember lists of things and all that sort of stuff, if you have to organise your information in a certain way now, now you know, “Okay, well, is there a synonym for this word that’s got the stress on the second?” like that sort of stuff. So, you can increase the memorability of your… the worst part of this is, as I’m saying this, I’m realising the place that it’ll probably get used is advertising that’s where the…
DANIEL: Oh, no.
BEN: …the human beings who definitely…
DANIEL: They care about this stuff. They’re always looking for an edge. Dang.
BEN: I know. Yeah. Sorry advertisers, love you.
DANIEL: That’s all right. Let’s go on to our last item suggested by Diego. PBS Kids in the USA.
BEN: Good for them.
DANIEL: You remember PBS watching it?
BEN: That’s a significant chunk of my childhood is…
DANIEL: Mee too.
BEN: …smashing PBS kids. Yeah. Some truly wonderful, wonderful work. Like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
DANIEL: Yep.
BEN: Sesame Street. And even contemporarily like some of the Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood which is like spiritual successor of Mister Rogers, is actually really lovely and really good.
DANIEL: When were in the USA a little while ago on a trip, we didn’t watch a lot of TV, but sometimes you’d just be doing nothing and you turn it on and there was Work It Out Wombats, which doesn’t air in Australia on the ABC.
BEN: Is it an American show? Like, is it an American-produced show?
DANIEL: Yeah, it is. [BEN LAUGHS] Featuring wombats. Is it the Outback Steakhouse of kids shows?
BEN: Oh, that’s cute. Can I ask, are they truly appalling Australian accents?
DANIEL: No, they just had American accents. And I’ll bet they didn’t poop cubes like wombats do either.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: But starting this week, PBS Kids is making American Sign Language interpretation available for six of its shows.
BEN: Oh, wonderful. Do you have the list of which six?
DANIEL: Yeah, it’s Arthur, Alma’s Way, Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, Work It Out Wombats, Pinkalicious and Peterrific, and Donkey Hodie.
BEN: Cool. That’s really cool. I imagine it’s their six most popular, that would make intuitive sense.
DANIEL: I think so. It’s really cool to see. There’s an article on it, and we’ve got a link on the show notes for this episode, becauselanguage.com. But it’s really cool to watch the implementation. The interpreter isn’t in a box.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: The background is removed. They’ve been greenscreened or whatever. And they’re kind of in the scene. Okay.
BEN: Like a bit of a dirty Photoshop job?
DANIEL: Like a bit of a character in the show. They’ve had to play with the contrast and opacity and things to make it work. Also, they’ve cast ethnically and racially diverse interpreters, so.
BEN: How wonderful.
DANIEL: That’s in there as well.
BEN: Look, we’ve spoken before on the show, I think potentially in the previous incarnation of the show, back in the Talk the Talk days, about how hard it can be to make young deaf people feel incentivised to learn sign language in an era where technology in phones and there’s so many accommodations that are available that many young people are finding it hard to get there because it’s as hard as learning any other language. So, I think this is a wonderful step towards that being just a thing just in the media for all young people, but especially for deaf young people so that’s just normal for them from a very, very early age.
DANIEL: Yeah, let’s promote it. It’s wonderful.
BEN: Definitely.
DANIEL: All right, good on you. And thanks, Diego, for that story.
BEN: Ooh, ooh, ooh. It’s time for [SINGS] Related or Not.
DANIEL: It’s time for Related or Not. And we’ve got a theme song.
BEN: Get the fuck out of here. How do we have a theme song?
DANIEL: Well, you remember how we put out the call for people if they wanted to donate a jingle for Related or Not.
BEN: Definitely do.
DANIEL: And we have had people taking us up. Adam sent a bunch of AI-generated ones from suno.ai.
BEN: Oh no.
DANIEL: They were really good. But here’s another one. Hedwig and I got to listen to it last week, so now I’m playing it for you for the first time. And this one was by Hugh S who has been listening to us since the Talk the Talk days. I feel like all of our listeners have been listening to us since the Talk the Talk days. But the thing about this is, one time you improvised a little music thing, so he’s taken that. Here it is.
[RELATED OR NOT THEME MUSIC]
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: You don’t like hearing your own voice?
BEN: I appreciate…
DANIEL: When did this happen?
BEN: I do understand the only way to make my voice palatable in any kind of song format clearly is just be like: How much distortion is possible? Because that’s how much we need. All of the distortion.
DANIEL: You sounded good! And I love the idea of slapping a guitar track all over you. That made you cooler.
BEN: That’s Smoke on the Water, right? Like a real possibly not quite falling afoul of copyright legislation but just like just on the right side of it. Like ba-na-na-tan, tan, tan ta na.
DANIEL: Wasn’t it a bit…? It’s a bit In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.
BEN: Oh, sorry! That’s what I was thinking. Not Smoke on the Water. Sorry.
DANIEL: Well, it’s all that. That whole vibe. I love it.
BEN: Power chord metal.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Hugh S, thank you. And I am sorry for the core material that you had to work with and how grimy it was. [DANIEL LAUGHS] So, what are we figuring out is related or not today, Daniel?
DANIEL: This one comes from James on our Discord. Got to apologise to James. We had a Word of the Week last time from our friend scarequotes. It was QUALITY ESCAPE, but James had also suggested it and I didn’t mention. So, I wanted to say sorry for not mentioning, James. You rock. Okay, here we go. BUCKAROO, old-time American slang term for a cowboy.
BEN: Yep.
DANIEL: BUCK, in the sense of animal jumping into the air and arching its back.
BEN: Yep.
DANIEL: And BUCK as slang for a dollar. As in DOLLAR BUCKS. I still want dollar bucks. I still want dollar bucks.
BEN: I’m more about DOLLARYDOOS, as we know but that’s okay.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Okay. So, first of all, shoutout to my previous use of BUCKAROO. Do you remember what it was? Do you remember the last time we came around BUCKAROO?
DANIEL: If I searched the transcripts, I think I would find it with BUCKAROO USAGE.
BEN: Nope.
DANIEL: That was Hedvig.
BEN: Close. You’re close.
DANIEL: Hedvig subscribes to buckaroo usage. What was your usage of BUCKAROO?
BEN: But okay. Here’s the thing. Where did she get BUCKAROO USAGE from?
DANIEL: Oh.
BEN: It’s a callback.
DANIEL: You mentioned it. You mention it somewhat, no?
BEN: No, she did. This is something that she came across. I am absolutely attributing fair thing here.
DANIEL: It was BUCKAROO. It was people… like, we call them cowboys sometimes. These people who aren’t qualified to work on the electricity or whatever.
BEN: Nope.
DANIEL: Okay. Okay. Go ahead.
BEN: It was BUCKAROO PARKING. This is the phrase that exists in her city for people who park poorly or illegally, because apparently there’s a big problem with it.
DANIEL: On the grass.
BEN: Yeah. Like, double parking or parking where you’re not supposed to and stuff. And so, in German, this is not the translation of the German words. This is just: Germans call it BUCKAROO PARKING.
DANIEL: Buckeroo parking. That’s awesome. I kind of remember that now.
BEN: And I think that’s how she’s acquired BUCKAROO USAGE, because now she’s just like, well, anyone who’s shooting from the hip is clearly a buckaroo. So, this is what we’re doing.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Okay.
BEN: Okay. So, BUCKAROO. BUCK as in a bucking bull.
DANIEL: And then, a BUCK as in a dollar buck or a sawbuck. What do you think? All three related, or two, or none?
BEN: Well, I mean, the easy money here seems to be that BUCKAROO and BUCK as in a bucking bull or some other animal that tries to jump and fling things. That seems like a very obvious synergy because cowboys work with bulls, rodeos, bucking bronco, all that stuff.
DANIEL: Yep. And therefore too obvious and therefore wrong?
BEN: No, I’m going to go… I think this one is the clearer, Like, Occam’s razor style, those two are related. I’m going to go with that. I’m not thinking red herring.
DANIEL: Yep. What about money?
BEN: I choose to believe that James is not a bastard.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: That’s true.
BEN: Bucks, greenbacks, that sort of thing.
DANIEL: Backs, greenback.
BEN: I’m going to say no. I’m going to say the BUCK is different. The only way I could get to a buck having anything to do with that — with animals and that sort of thing — is BUCKSKIN. And perhaps, like, trappers and traders at one stage, like, the buckskins became dollars, bucks, bucks, that sort of thing.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s true.
BEN: That’s the best I’ve got, and that is tenuous and flimsy. So, I’m going to go first two related. Third, dollar bucks, out on its own.
DANIEL: I wrote: I’m pretty sure that BUCKAROO is unrelated to the other two. I think it comes from Spanish VAQUERO. Vaquero, the horseback riders. The VACA is cow. So, a vaquero is a cow… -er. As for the other two, I thought maybe the unifying sense is back. You buck somebody off your back and we talk about a buck as a greenback.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: So, I could see it if those two shared a sense somehow. So, I said the one that was…
BEN: You did the exact opposite of me.
DANIEL: I did. But I like your reasoning. I like your reasoning. Okay, answer. The one that’s not related is BUCKAROO for the reasons that I said.
BEN: For the reason that you said?
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: Ah, boo.
DANIEL: Yeah, but however, Etymonline mentions that we don’t call them VUCKAROOS. Instead we call them BUCKAROOS, probably because of BUCK.
BEN: Okay, okay.
DANIEL: Which exerted some influence.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: So, you weren’t that far off. So, to BUCK someone off comes from a buck, a male deer or a male goat. Sometimes, we just give the same name to an animal and that thing that the animal does, like DUCK. We call ducks DUCKS because they do the bloop! thing.
BEN: Is that true?
DANIEL: Yeah. The action, ducking, came first.
BEN: Daniel, you have buried the lede on this section [DANIEL LAUGHS] so badly. We call ducks because they duck under the water.
DANIEL: That is correct.
BEN: What? My whole life is a lie.
DANIEL: But with BUCKS, it works the other way. Bucks, we call them bucks because they do buck off. And then, dollar BUCKS, you were right. BUCKSKIN is the motivator. So, they really are connected. I’m going to give you that one as like half a point.
BEN: Half a point. Because I thought of the right answer and then thought it was dumb and wrong. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Then, you swerved away from it. Thanks, James.
BEN: Good job, James.
DANIEL: This next one is from scarequotes, who says, “Now that I’m a patron, apparently my brain is fixated on asking Related or Not. So, here it is: related or not? REPLICA and REPLACE.”
BEN: REPLICA and REPLACE.
DANIEL: You could replace something with a replica, like if you were a jewel thief.
BEN: REPLICA and REPLACE.
DANIEL: Do you want me to go?
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: I said no. I think PLIC and PLACE are just from different places. So, I said no.
BEN: Do you know what? Everyone who’s listening is going to be like, “Oh, yeah. This is a real easy thing to say after the linguist has already said it.” [DANIEL LAUGHS] But I was actually thinking that REPLICA sounds like maybe Greek in origin, something because it’s got that hard consonant progression, where REPLACE sounds very French to me, like that -PLACÉ ending just seems like a very romancy sort of job. That was going to be my issue with it.
DANIEL: So, you think maybe not related, like me?
BEN: Yep.
DANIEL: We’re both right. They’re not related. REPLACE is just RE- and PLACE. That’s simple. Although this was a cool thing I found out. In the 1590s, it just meant you took it off the shelf and now you’re putting it back in its place. “He replaced the vase.”
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get that. Like, I mean, I use that usage sometimes. Can like replace the thing back on the shelf or whatever.
DANIEL: Yeah. It wouldn’t be until the 1760s when the meaning extended to taking a different thing and putting that in the place. REPLICA, on the other hand, just comes from replicāre. That’s Latin: to duplicate. In this case, the Latin PLIC- or plicare is not to plicāre, but to fold like a “pli”.
BEN: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: We see that in French…
BEN: Like pleats? Like, that sort of thing?
DANIEL: Yeah. Like pleats. Yeah.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: You fold something over, and it’s a copy of the thing. We’ve seen FOLD a number of times on the show. Like with LAP, a fold of cloth that catches food in your lap.
BEN: Okay. Okay.
DANIEL: Not related. Thanks, Scarequotes. Last one from Rebecca on Instagram.
BEN: We got a triple header today. This is exciting.
DANIEL: I like to do three. Rebecca says, “Hello, I have a related or not: SKI.”
BEN: The thing you do down a mountain.
DANIEL: The thing you wear on your feets.
BEN: Yep.
DANIEL: And SCHIZOPHRENIA.
BEN: Oh.
DANIEL: Which starts with SCHI-.
BEN: But a different kind.
DANIEL: But a different kind.
BEN: I’m going to go not, because I imagine SKI and SKIING and that thing is just a borrow. Like, we’ve just yoinked it out of some of…
[LAUGHTER]
We looked at Austrians, presumably, or Norwegians or someone like that, and we’re like, “Geez, that’s a pretty interesting thing you’re doing there. What’s that called?” “Oh, yah, ski?”
DANIEL: Ski.
BEN: “Cool. That’s easy to pronounce. I’ll take that.” Schizophrenia seems very complex and medicine has its own systematised way of getting to words, and it doesn’t always follow them, but it just has a way. I’m going to go with not for that reason.
DANIEL: Okay. Can I tempt you? What if I told you that people used to pronounce SKI as SHI? You would go sheing.
BEN: That just hurts me in my soul. I hate the idea that people are, “Ah, Johannes, let’s go sheing.” I don’t like that at all.
DANIEL: Apparently, a lot of English speakers felt the same way because they changed it. [BEN LAUGHS] “I’m not going to put on my shis. I want skis.”
BEN: Skis.
DANIEL: Does that tempt you?
BEN: But then, the logic would be like shi-zophrenia or something like that.
DANIEL: Well, that’s how it looks.
BEN: I’m still going no.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Like, what’s the… I guess my thing would be, what similarity links the two, because…
DANIEL: Well, what is schizophrenia?
BEN: At least if you’re doing it correctly, skiing, the activity, shouldn’t really look anything like anthropomorphised or like a personified psychotic break.
DANIEL: What is the SCHIZO- in schizophrenia? What is the sch?
BEN: I would have thought SCHISM or SCHISM.
DANIEL: Yeah, yeah. Like a split?
BEN: Yes. Oh, no@ Are skis called skis because you go skiing down ravines or something? Is this what this is?
DANIEL: No.
BEN: Okay. Then, I’m still going no.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Okay. Here’s what I…
BEN: Ohhhh, ’cause it’s aplit… Okay. [DANIEL LAUGHS] All right. All right. All right. All right. I see what’s happening here. [DANIEL LAUGHS] I hate you so much. You gave me every opportunity to pull out of this nosedive, and I just steadfastly refused to. So, I’m sticking my two split skis in the snow, and I’m saying they’re not related. Tell me how I’m wrong, Daniel.
DANIEL: Don’t hate me. Hate the game. I wrote.: I’m pretty sure that the SHE, the SCHI in SCHIZOPHRENIA is from a word meaning split or separation. And I knew that it contributed to the word SCHISM but also to the word SCIENCE, because you’re separating. You’re splitting off what’s true from what’s not. Also related to SHIT because poop is something that you separate from your body.
BEN: This is just getting more and more disappointing.
DANIEL: I’m afraid so.
BEN: So, just to be clear, the SKI is called that because the two things that you wear on your feet are split apart. Is that what it is?
DANIEL: That is correct. It is a piece of wood split off from timber and schizo comes from Greek, schízein, to split. They’re both from the Proto-Indo-European root, *skei, to cut or to split. And they are related. Ain’t that a hoot?
BEN: There we go. That is, that is genuinely very interesting, and I appreciate learning that information, even if all of the different split based words kind of make me sad.
DANIEL: I’m sorry.
BEN: That’s okay.
DANIEL: But thanks, Rebecca. This was a lot of fun. And thanks to everybody who’s giving us these. Oh, and thanks to Hugh for giving us a theme song. We’ve got more. So, we’re going to be rolling some of those out a little bit later.
BEN: I look forward to hearing them.
DANIEL: But keep bringing them, hello@becauselanguage.com, or on our Discord. They’re a lot of fun.
[MUSIC]
[INTERVIEW BEGINS]
DANIEL: We’re talking to author, humorist, or perhaps humor writer Eli Burnstein. He’s the author of The Dictionary of Fine Distinctions. Eli, thanks for coming on and chatting.
ELI: Great to be here.
DANIEL: This is a fun book. Did you have fun writing it?
ELI: I did most of the time. I’d say sometimes you get into kind of overanalysis mode, and it can be a dark place to be. But for the most part, yeah, it was a lot of fun.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Well, I was wondering, because this is a book about the fine distinctions between different words in English, and I wondered if maybe the project changed you a little bit, where you had to stop yourself from saying, “No, actually, that’s not a jetty. That’s a pier.”
ELI: That’s a good question. I like to say the answer is no. I hopefully didn’t make me any more pedantic in everyday life. But let’s be real, probably a little bit. It probably has made me a bit more aware of those things, but I hope that my sense of not being annoying to whoever I’m talking to kicks in and says, “No, don’t correct them. Don’t say that. Just appreciate in your own mind that it’s not a jetty but a pier.”
DANIEL: Nice. Now, in reading the book, I found myself exclaiming, “Ah, I’ve always wondered this. This has actually been bugging me,” which was great. And then, I kept reading and it became something like, I had never thought of the difference between these words before and now I feel uncomfortable. And then, I kept reading and I thought, “I don’t know anything.” [ELI LAUGHS] I had never considered the difference between a gully, a ravine, a gorge and a canyon. It’s always just been, this is what we call these things. And I haven’t seen enough gorges to know the defining features of a gorge. I mean, if you’re talking about a sandwich versus a hot dog, I’ve seen enough of those. But when you get into things that are really quite abstruse, like street versus boulevard versus avenue versus road, I didn’t know that I didn’t know this stuff.
ELI: No, I think you’re bringing up a meta fine distinction that’s operating throughout the book, which is, is this a fine distinction because you often confuse the pair, or is it a fine distinction because you didn’t even know there was a distinction in the first place? And I experienced a lot of both of those throughout the writing of the book.
DANIEL: Well, there are lots of confusable pairs that aren’t here and that you explicitly don’t treat, like its and it’s. I mean, that belongs in some books. But this is really about the world of things, isn’t it?
ELI: That’s right. Yes. I explicitly chose not to treat homonyms, words that look alike or sound alike, and that are commonly confused for that reason. Not because that’s not interesting and, as you point out, there are lots of great books out there already, Dreyer’s English comes to mind as a good resource for that kind of thing. But no, I was really interested in this book about differences out in the world and the ability of language to track those differences. Things more along the lines of ethics and morality or dinner and supper. These aren’t things we would confuse because the words look similar, but they are very similar things. And yet, there is a slight difference between them.
DANIEL: There is. There is. I found myself wondering, why does English have so many fine distinctions, and do other languages have them? I mean, I think other languages probably do, but I also know that English gets a lot of words from many sources. So, the meaning has the opportunity to be quite fine as lots of words crowd into this semantic space. But what’s your sense? Why do you think English has so many of these fine distinctions?
ELI: That’s a good question, and I don’t speak any other language well enough to weigh in with authority on it. But I would guess that English probably does have a uniquely high number of distinctions of this nature because it’s kind of an internally bilingual, if not, multilingual language. So, most people who have nerded out over the history of language know that it started as a Proto-Germanic tongue. And then with the Norman Conquest, it got very French. And then, there was Latin that was woven in other than through the French at some point, and so on and so forth. I think that was with the Romans even earlier.
So, there’s kind of layers and waves to the language that make it, as I say, internally bilingual or I don’t know. You could probably coin some term for that, intra-trilingual. And I think that means that you often have a Germanic word for something, a Latinic word for something. And I think it just does a really good job. Maybe there’s something in the syntax of the language that allows it to keep absorbing new words, coining new terms, and yeah, it just gives you a lot of flexibility.
DANIEL: Yeah, and that’s good. I mean, I love being able to put my hand on the right word, le mot juste. It’s a good feeling.
ELI: Or the bon mot [LAUGHS].
DANIEL: Or the bon mot.
ELI: Both French. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: It’s true. Oh, my gosh. So, tell me some of your favorites. What was a favorite that you worked on that you just had a good time with?
ELI: Good question. I would probably say the difference between MAZE and LABYRINTH was fun for me.
DANIEL: I like that one.
ELI: Yeah. I mean, I’d like to say, partly because I didn’t know that one before, but that’s true of probably 95% of them. But I loved mazes as a kid. It was cool to learn about labyrinths as this entirely different thing that I had no idea about. And then, I learned about this somewhat niche academic debate about whether or not the ancient Greek mythological labyrinth is in fact a labyrinth or a maze. I don’t know if we want to go down that rabbit hole thing.
DANIEL: Let’s get into it, because this is one of the ones that I focused on too. I kind of nerded out about it because I love doing maze books as a kid. It sounds like the one with the minotaur would be a maze.
ELI: Probably right. Yeah.
DANIEL: So, the difference in your book, tell me what you came up with for that answer. What’s the difference?
BEN: Sure. So, yes, many listeners will be familiar with the ancient Greek myth of Theseus and the minotaur. So, Theseus, this Greek hero, goes into the labyrinth to slay the minotaur, and he leaves behind him this length of thread so that he can find his way out. Now, that would suggest that though we call it a labyrinth, it is really more strictly speaking, a maze, because you would only need a length of thread or string to navigate your way around somewhere you could get lost. And that’s what a maze is, is a puzzle with lots of dead ends and forking paths. The technical term for it is multicursal. So, it is multipath.
DANIEL: Nice.
ELI: Whereas a labyrinth is unicursal or single path, and kinds of winds around in this recursive fashion. But you cannot, strictly speaking, get lost in a labyrinth.
DANIEL: You wind around, but it’s really only one path. Yeah.
ELI: Yeah, exactly. So, to go back to the myth of Theseus, it would have to be a maze because of this whole string thing. But then, all the ancient coins that depict the labyrinth depict it as unicursal. They depict it as a labyrinth and not a maze. So, it remains this unsolved mystery. There’s a cool book on it. I wish I had the name of that. I noted in a footnote. I think it’s called the problem of the labyrinth or something. But it’s very interesting.
DANIEL: Well, I really like labyrinths because they’re often these round structures and you start at the outside and you go in, you wind around, and then you end up at the middle, as long as you keep walking, but you’re winding around. I had a really nice experience where there was a big labyrinth and it didn’t have walls. It was just a path, a round path, and you could see the whole thing.
And I had this friend of mine that walked in slightly earlier than I did, and then I walked in. We were both walking the same path, but I could see that at various times in our course, it was taking us… She was over there now, and now I’m over here. And then, we would sometimes pass each other, and sometimes we’d be far away. And it just reminded me of… It was nice. It was like, “Oh, we’re both on this path, but sometimes we’re closer, sometimes we’re farther, but we’re still walking through this life of ours.” I just really loved that.
ELI: That is great. I mean, you could get that for free at an airport in a much less comfortable environment where you’re waiting for security check and you just keep asking the same people over and over. But I agree, I think… [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: That’s not as nice. [LAUGHS]
ELI: No, no, that’s not as nice at all. But I agree, I think there is a very therapeutic component to a labyrinth, whether you’re alone or with friends. I’d never really thought about it in the terms you just put. But I agree, that would be nice to keep seeing your friend and seeing how you get closer and further away as the kind of logic of the labyrinth dictates.
But yeah, the back history of labyrinth is interesting that they have this long ritual and spiritual role in human civilisation, and then nowadays, in a more clinical therapeutic setting, have this relaxing effect. And I can vouch for that myself. There’s one at a park not far from where I grew up. Like the one you described, it was just a design on the ground, but you could walk around it and it would chill you out.
DANIEL: Yeah, it really was. It really felt that way. When you found a pair of words that were close in meaning, how did you decide to sort them out? What methods did you use? What resources did you use?
ELI: Yeah. So, dictionaries, usage manuals, encyclopedias, JSTOR, things like that would be my first line of research. So, desk research was definitely a big part of the process. Desk research and yes, head banging analysis. But occasionally, I would speak to a few experts when I was really stuck. For the difference between electric and electronic, for instance, I spoke to the Head of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. And for the difference between four-four time and two-two time in music, I spoke to a dean at The Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. Because these things got real complicated real quick and I needed help.
And then thirdly and lastly, for a few entries, you could say I did a bit of field research, using the term liberally, because what I mean by that is I went to a lot of grocery stores and read the ingredient labels on club soda cans and sparkling water bottles. Did that a lot. And then, I also interrogated a lot of baristas about the difference between cappuccinos and flat whites.
DANIEL: Did you find much variation there?
ELI: I did, actually. [DANIEL LAUGHS] Not just variation, but strong opinions.
DANIEL: Oh, my gosh.
ELI: Some coffee shops I’d go into, and they would only have one item listed, or they would have both listed, but on the same line with a slash between the two, and they’d be the same price. And then to the baristas to whom I spoke, some would say they were identical. Then, I would say where there was variation, and as I talk about in the book, cappuccinos either have a little bit more milk and/or that milk is aerated more.
DANIEL: Okay.
ELI: So, the barista term for that is stretched, which results in a fluffier texture as opposed to the signature velvet texture of a flat white. You’re in Australia, correct?
DANIEL: I am.
ELI: So, you’re in the homeland of flat whites, although it is a subject of debate because the New Zealanders also claim to have invented it.
DANIEL: And sometimes, they have carried the day. I mean, we thought that we invented pavlova in Australia, but it turns out the first reference is a New Zealand reference. So, sometimes we have to give it to them. And yeah, flat whites are everywhere, but I’ve noticed… So some things, like, I think cappuccino is pretty straight. Flat white, I think, is pretty solid around the world, kind of the same thing. But then, you get coffee names, around here, I’m in Perth and we have this thing called a long mac, which…
ELI: Interesting.
DANIEL: Which is it’s not exactly the same as a flat white, it’s a macchiato. So, that’s espresso, but not just a dot of milk. It’s actually filled up the rest of the way with milk.
ELI: Mm. But still on the short and strong side.
DANIEL: Yes. But if I go somewhere else and I ask for a long macchiato, they will have literally no idea what I’m talking about.
ELI: So, long mac, I realize, is short for long macchiato. I didn’t realize that. So, that actually sounds like a cortado rather. Although another term for a cortado, and I didn’t get into this in the book, partly because my entry, this already is probably the longest entry in the book, [DANIEL LAUGHS] weirdly, something so arguably insubstantial. I mean, I love coffee, but compared to other things in the book, it’s pretty light fair, but it ended up taking a long time to get right. So, when I got to cortados and something similar to a cortado, which is a… Oh, no, I’m blanking on the term. Starts with a p, a piccolo.
DANIEL: Oh, cute.
ELI: And I want to say a piccolo, it’s actually short for a piccolo cappuccino or a piccolo latte. So, a little latte is people debate about whether that and a cortado are identical. Others say no, a piccolo needs a ristretto shot, which is a more restrained version of espresso, or that the amount of milk is a bit smaller. And really, there’s no international governing body of standards for these things. And that’s probably fine.
DANIEL: And you watch what happens. I’m going to get baristas giving me emails saying, “No, no, a long mac is not the same as a cortado, and so on.
ELI: Well, please keep me in the loop on that. I will be listening out for that.
DANIEL: Okay, so how much of this is regional? How much did regionality matter in the examples you’ve got? I’m thinking of dinner versus supper, which seems to be urban versus rural, I guess.
ELI: Good question. Yes. So, the short answer is yeah, the regionalism is, if anything, kind of a thorn plaguing the project from the beginning because I wasn’t generally interested in tracking fine distinctions that are simply regional. That gets back to the language thing. I’m interested in differences out in the world, more so than just we say it one way over here and over there, they say it differently, but it does plague some of my entries. So, for instance, I have sorbet versus sherbet, which to North Americans very much reads like a fine distinction because they’re both frozen sweet desserts. But in the UK, and I believe in Australia as well, sherbet is a fizzy sweet powder.
DANIEL: Yes.
ELI: So, it’s hardly a fine distinction. But in North America, sherbet refers to sorbet, to which a little bit of milk fat has been added, and there’s actually rules with the FDA on how much milk fat before it tips over into official ice cream territory. And it makes sense because sorbet and sherbet have the same etymological origin.
DANIEL: Yes. They’re doublets, aren’t they?
ELI: Yes, exactly.
DANIEL: Very nice.
ELI: Yes. But yes, regionalism kind of haunts the book a little bit. And I hope that English speakers around the world will feel comfortable writing in and letting me know where I’ve failed them. But I have a footnote, for instance, on the SHERBET debacle.
DANIEL: Okay [LAUGHS] Debacle. Strong words.
ELI: That’s right. That’s right.
DANIEL: What’s the difference between DEBACLE and a FOOFARAW? That’s what I would like to know.
ELI: Oh, gosh.
DANIEL: Can I share with you a method that I use to distinguish between pairs of words?
ELI: Absolutely.
DANIEL: You can use dictionaries and resources. You can do fieldwork. I like to use corpus-based techniques and I’d like to show you a technique I use with the COCA corpus. The Corpus of Contemporary American English.
ELI: Yes, I neglected to mention the COCA, but I used this a little bit too.
DANIEL: Did you? Okay.
ELI: Yes.
DANIEL: Well, maybe I’ll show you my method, and then you can show me what you got. So, if I were trying to distinguish between CRISP and CRISPY, what’s the difference? Would that be a good example of a fine distinction?
ELI: CRISP and CRISPY. Well, I guess… No, they are the same part of speech. Yeah, this is great. I think it counts.
DANIEL: Okay, cool. So, what I do is I head over to english-corpora.org, and I type in CRISP. But I hit this “word” button, and I “find detailed info”, and I just look at the words that occur nearby. Because, of course, as a guy who has done corpus linguistics, I would like to know what words are statistically likely to occur near CRISP and CRISPY. So, if you have CRISP, you’ve got air, shirt, bacon. A crisp morning. Minute. Now, I imagine that’s because of cookbooks, and they say for this many minutes until it’s crisp, something like that. Apple, you can have a crisp apple. So, there’s a lot of things here.
But now if I go to CRISPY, now we have skin, chicken, bacon, fry, potato, crust, rice, and minute. Now, it’s all food. There are no crispy shirts. You would never have a crispy morning. That would be very weird. So, my distinction here, what I’m getting off of these words, is that crisp is for normal things, but crispy is for food.
ELI: So, I’m trying to calculate how many hours this would have saved me.
[LAUGHTER]
Had I known this technique. Maybe I could put this to use if there’s ever a second volume. But no, this is great. And I kind of see why too. Number one, it’s rigorously empirical, which is better than me just saying, “Mm, I think it’s this.” But on the other hand, I did consult the English language corpora a few times. But what I would do, really, was when I would look at a number of different dictionaries, I would compare their definitions and I would compare their sample sentences. So, I would take, say, yes, CRISP and CRISPY… or, I’m trying to think ETHICS and MORALITY, let’s say. So, I first compare the definitions of the two and subtract the difference, like the inverse of a Venn diagram. What are they saying about one that they’re not saying about the other?
DANIEL: Nice.
ELI: And then, I would look at the sample sentences as well. And Merriam-Webster Online is great because they often provide a whole whack of them. And so, I would look across all of them. So, I think I was doing it in a slightly cruder, more rudimentary form of what you were just showing me, which just surfaces all the most affiliated terms, which is great.
DANIEL: No, but your method is really good, because if I’m doing it my way, I’m left to infer what I can from the different words that occur or that co-occur, and I might be inferring something completely wrong. Like, sometimes there’s just a weird oddball word that occurs near some word that you’re looking at and you don’t know why, and you could easily get that kind of thing wrong.
ELI: Like, CRISP is for vegetarians and CRISPY is for meat eaters. You could extrapolate the wrong… Because bacon’s only in one of them and apples are in the other.
DANIEL: I think bacon was in both. But it might be people who eat shirts. You [LAUGHS] might get that impression. This is fascinating. The distinction between words is such a good bit of material for a book. Were there any that you had to discard because you realised, “Oh, crap, there just is no difference”? Or does it work like that? Maybe there are no true synonyms.
ELI: Well. Well, that’s a big, big question, and I’d love to get to that too. I actually included one that was a non-distinction. Well, a couple, arguably. So, one was the distinction between FUSILLI and ROTINI. So, this ultimately becomes more of a regional difference. So, despite everything I said before about not wanting to include regional differences, this was one where I thought there was a difference. I’d already begun writing it. I had commissioned our wonderful illustrator, Liana Finck, to do an illustration of it. And with further research, I thought, “You know what? No, this is actually…. Or realized no, this is more of a regional difference, that rotini is a predominantly north American term. Fusilli is used elsewhere around the world, and even in North America, fusilli is quite common too.
So, it’s a messy thing, but in North America, you see both and you hear both. In more culinary circles, you tend to hear fusilli more. And if it’s handmade pasta as opposed to the machine extruded, boxed variety of pasta… We’re talking about the corkscrew shape, by the way, for those who don’t know. And for the hand extruded, you might hear fusilli more. For the box variety, you might hear either/or. But ultimately, rotini is just a variant term for that.
But that gets to the question of, are there any true synonyms, pure synonyms? And I think no. I mean, I think no matter what… I mean, I guess there are some-cop out answers, like the spelling will be different or more surface things like regionalisms. But I think no matter what, even the sound of a word conveys something. And I think even… I would say the best example of a peer synonym would be something like preventive and preventative. But if anything, you could just then say that’s the same word. Actually, those are two words that’s the same word with variant spelling. So, I want to stick to my guns and say there’s no two words that you can’t find a modicum of difference in meaning. And that’s a wonderful and amazing thing.
DANIEL: Yeah, I think so too. I mean, even AUTOMOBILE and CAR, they describe the same things, but they’re going to have different distributions of words. There are going to be different words that cluster around AUTOMOBILE and cluster around 4.
ELI: Absolutely.
DANIEL: That’s just how it works. Okay, so back to fusilli for a second. Is it the case that fusilli has prestige, and so it’s incoming, and so rotini is going to get pushed out? Is that what we should expect to see?
ELI: That’s the impression I get, is that in addition to it being regional… what’s the term? Like a sociolect or something? Well, one has a bit more… I defer to the experts in these matters, but yes, one seems to have a bit more cultural cachet that if it’s the…
DANIEL: It’s an incoming prestige variant.
ELI: Exactly. I think it’s more strictly speaking, the term used in Italian. It is the term used in culinary circles. This is, again, based on my, as you’ve seen, relatively rudimentary research methods. But that’s the impression I get.
DANIEL: Well, I grew up in the ’70s as a young child. I was born in the ’60s. So, my family was giving me heaps of crap when I referred to all that stuff as NOODLES.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Nobody’s seen noodles since the Great Pasta Incursion of 1979.
ELI: That’s right. But it just goes to show you that language you can keep… The closer we get to something, the more we use it to chop things up ever so finely. Eventually, we’ll have fusilli. We’ll have bronze-cut fusilli. Well, maybe that’ll turn into one word. And then the non-bronze cut type of box, fusilli, whatever that is, is something else. You already see that. You see penne, but then there’s penne rigate or rigatti, which has the ridges. Just obviously the better kind.
DANIEL: Obviously, yeah. “This bronze-cut stuff is a flash in the pan. You’re never going to see it in five years.”
ELI: That’s right.
DANIEL: I’m surprised you didn’t do NERD, DORK and GEEK. What kept you away from that?
ELI: [SIGHS] Only that I didn’t think of it. That’s a great one.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Oh, wow. Okay. Okay. Okay. Well, hey, volume two. Is there enough for a volume two?
ELI: Maybe I just didn’t want to draw too much attention to myself.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Yeah, that’s it. Yeah. I hate it when writers just obviously write about their own lives. It’s so transparent.
ELI: Exactly.
DANIEL: I’ve noticed that frequently confused words is one of these things that people really feel strongly about that. “No, it’s not this. It’s that.” And I know a lot of people who feel like there are right and wrong answers. And if you use the wrong ones, then you’re doing a disservice to language. And they feel that by being pedantic, that they’re somehow doing a service to language. What has been the response so far to this book?
ELI: Yeah. I mean, I think that this will cover what we spoke earlier about homonyms. And I think when I described the book to people, some people came forward and suggested some of the usual culprits, like EFFECT and AFFECT, or THEY’RE, THERE, and THEIR and things like that.
DANIEL: That seems tedious.
ELI: And like I said, I think that there are great books out there that cover this stuff. But as mentioned before, I’m pretty quick to point out the book isn’t really about language slips so much as differences between objects out in the world. Objects, ideas, phenomena. So, even something abstract like ETHICS and MORALITY, or to ASSUME and PRESUME, that’s a bit of… those are arguably homonyms too, but they also have differences in meaning. They refer to things that are very similar, is what I mean. And so, these things, they might not be physical objects out in the world, but they’re human behaviors. They’re realities.
And so, my interest is in tracking those realities. And not in order to correct anybody about them, but to just draw attention to these differences and maybe cultivate appreciation for them and the ability of language to capture them.
DANIEL: That’s the reaction that I had. I just sort of stand in awe that human brains could keep so many things unconsciously in order, but also that there are groups of people who have such special needs that they need to lean on these distinctions and codify them and really get them down, because a gorge is going to be different than a canyon and we need to be sure about this stuff. It’s not just about cognition. It’s also about society. That’s so interesting.
ELI: It’s true. I think that this urge does seem to come from somewhere. And I think that we were talking about usage guides earlier, and the two that I looked at mostly were Fowler’s Modern English Usage and Garner’s Modern English Usage. And Fowler’s definitely wins for tone of voice, especially the earlier editions.
DANIEL: Oh, dear.
ELI: Where you really hear Fowler’s curmudgeonly prescriptivism. But what I like about Garner’s is he has something called the language change index, where instead of just saying, “This is okay and this isn’t okay,” he ranks things from one to five in terms of totally acceptable in all scenarios to best avoided.
DANIEL: Nice.
ELI: And in between is okay in speech, but maybe best to avoid in writing. Okay in speech and writing, but maybe the not most formal of settings, like an essay or an address of some kind. And I think that it acknowledges that there are different speech contexts and contexts of writing, different registers that you want to use, where we… So, even right and wrong is a shifting, moving thing.
DANIEL: Hmm, it is. I mean, I’ve always said correctness in language is situational.
ELI: Totally. And I think that if we can understand one another, then that’s all we need. Right?
DANIEL: Yeah. And yet, the way that we say things matters. I mean, yeah. I’m not going to be a jerk about it if I understood you, because then that’s not linguistic, that’s social. And I don’t want to be a jerk about social things. But also register communicates something. And the way that we present our image, we can manipulate that by being aware of the distinctions between language. And then, we can present ourselves in a way that we want to, or we can present our message in a way that won’t confuse or distract our listener. And that’s very important too.
ELI: That’s true. Yeah, absolutely. I think that if we want to be more formal or less formal or any… It’s funny, I say, “if we want to,” but if anything, it’s the context that often primes us to speak in certain ways. So, if I’m in an assembly hall or at a place of worship or something like that, I might be less inclined to swear or to speak with aggressive slanginess to a large community of people. I don’t know why. Or we could unpack why, but even without unpacking why, it just kind of happens. You just do it automatically.
DANIEL: Unconscious again. Okay, so we mentioned a few resources. We’ve got Fowler, we’ve got Garner. We’ve got corpus tools. We’ve got existing dictionaries. What other tools would you like to share with people who are trying to sort out their own issues? For example, my daughter today: “Dad, what’s the difference between a goat and a ram?” [LAUGHS] I thought I knew this, but I’m not sure. Is a ram a sheep? Is it a male sheep? Big old sheep? I don’t know. They feel the same to me. I don’t know.
ELI: Oh, yeah. That’s a whole… yeah, I don’t… I wish I had the answer to that.
DANIEL: Do you know? I don’t know.
ELI: Don’t put me on the spot.
DANIEL: Please!
ELI: I could know in a couple minutes with the internet at my disposal, but…
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Yeah, exactly. Send your comments to hello@becauselanguage.com.
ELI: That’s right. Yeah, so in addition to the dictionaries and the usage guides, I would say the third really helpful category of resource is a slightly more obscure text, and that’s called a synonymy. So, to introduce yet another fine distinction.
DANIEL: Mr Burnstein! [LAUGHS]
ELI: Yeah, we have. That’s right. To be trotting out the big words. To introduce another fine distinction, we have the thesaurus on one hand, which we all know is a word finder. Basically, you’re looking for a word, and thesaurus will list similar words to it, but it won’t provide any commentary about the differences between the words. A synonymy is a text that not only lists the words, but provides commentaries on them. So, it will explain… And it actually predates the thesaurus. So, the thesaurus comes from one man what’s his name Peter Mark Roget.
DANIEL: Roget.
BEN: I’m actually not sure how to pronounce it.
DANIEL: That’s right.
ELI: Roget in the 19th century, but in the 18th century is the origin of the synonymy. The first one was called The Difference Between Words Esteemed Synonymous in the English Language, and the Proper Choice of Them Determined from 1766.
DANIEL: Amazing.
ELI: And these books are discourses on the difference between to pester and annoy, or to lie and dissemble and things like that.
DANIEL: Prevaricate. Oh, my gosh.
ELI: Yeah. Exactly. They’re less well known than their dictionaries and thesaurus siblings, but the tradition continues to this day. Merriam Webster has a book, A Dictionary of Synonyms, that probably won’t have… The problem is they’re great for the ones that are that fall on the language side of the language thing spectrum. But for the ram, what was it? Ram and sheep?
DANIEL: Ram and goat.
ELI: Ram and goat. You see, I’m betraying my own ignorance. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: They’re different animals. They’re completely different.
ELI: Was it ram and chicken? But would the synonymy contain that? Probably not. Right? So, it’ll cover a lot of territory, but eventually you just have to pick up an encyclopedia, or hopefully volume two of Dictionary of Fine Distinctions. Volume two through to end because there’s no end to it.
DANIEL: Or volume one, which is fantastic. The benefit of The Dictionary of Fine Distinctions is not only it has your unique writing style, but it’s also got illustrations by Liana Finck, which are delightful.
ELI: Yes.
DANIEL: How did you bring her into the project?
ELI: Sheer luck. I reached out to her when I was casting about for an illustrator, and she said yes. She said, “This seems like a great project. Count me in.” And she was wonderful to work with, and I was very lucky to have her.
DANIEL: That’s fantastic. Well, the book is a lot of fun. And yet, I don’t think it’s just a book for fun. I think it’s somewhere between fun and reference. That’s the impression I get. Is that kind of by intention, did you mean to do that?
ELI: Definitely, yeah. It’s an undecidable genre. It’s a neurotic, quirky reference book, is often how I kind of view it. So, whether it’s light bathroom reading or something, you want to sit down and scrutinize more seriously, I like to think of it as versatile.
DANIEL: Yeah, I think of it that way too. Well, we’re talking about The Dictionary of Fine Distinctions, available now from Union Square and Company, I’m talking to the author, Eli Burnstein. Eli, thanks so much for hanging out and talking with me about your book. It’s really fun. It’s a really good read.
ELI: Oh, my pleasure. This has been great.
[INTERVIEW ENDS]
[MUSIC]
DANIEL: And now it’s time for Words of the Week. Our first word, DELVE.
BEN: Ooh, I like the word DELVE.
DANIEL: Do you like the word DELVE?
DANIEL: It’s look, to be clear, part of me that likes the word DELVE is the part of me that read a really concerning amount of fantasy and sci-fi novels from between the ages of ten and today.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Today years old.
BEN: There’s something… I don’t know, there’s something about DELVE that just has very strong, fantastical associations in my mind. I don’t even know why, just other than the fact that most people don’t say DELVE, but you do come across it when like a wizened wizard is like, “I’ll have to delve into the old knowledge to find the answer to this one.”
DANIEL: “Time to delve into the eldritch scrolls.”
BEN: Yeah, something like that.
DANIEL: I say DELVE all the time. I took a look in our transcripts for DELVE, and there were seven shows where I used the word DELVE. And that’s just Because Language alone. If I go back to Talk the Talk, “We’re delving into blah, blah.”
BEN: Ooh. I forgot about DELVING. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, interesting, right? DELVING far more common than DELVE. Like, it’s not a word that gets used in its isolation form as much I wouldn’t imagine.
DANIEL: That’s interesting. Let’s just find out with the Google Ngram Viewer. I’m looking at DELVE, and then I’m doing an underscore, and then in capital letters, I-N-F, _INF, which shows you all of the inflected forms of that word. And the most common is DELVE. Next most common, distant second, DELVING, then DELVED, and then DELVES. Ah, anyway.
BEN: If you add those three together, are the inflected forms more than the original?
DANIEL: The base form? No. You know what? It probably would be. Yeah, I think it would be. Okay, but why are we talking about DELVE?
BEN: Why are we talking about DELVE? Let me think, let me think, let me think.
DANIEL: Can you guess? This is a puzzle, isn’t it?
BEN: Delving. Delving. No, I haven’t got this one. This hasn’t hit my radar.
DANIEL: It might be a giveaway for AI text.
BEN: Interesting. So, AI is using DELVE a lot more than human beings do? So, what I’m hearing, Daniel, is that you are a robot.
DANIEL: I might be, yeah.
BEN: Yeah, okay.
DANIEL: But I could just be a normal human who just likes to use the word DELVE. You got to be careful. Don’t misclassify me as a robot.
BEN: I… I’m going to be honest, Daniel. If you turn out to be some AI, I’m cool with it. It’s fine.
DANIEL: Yeah, okay.
BEN: You’re an AI who has done enough to earn my trust. We’re fine, man.
DANIEL: I’m playing the long game, right?
BEN: Yeah, and it’s working. Okay, so AI is using DELVE a lot.
DANIEL: It was noticed that ChatGPT and other large language models like to use the word DELVE. They used it may be about 10 to 100 times more than humans do in their writing. So, here’s the timeline. Jeremy Nguyen on Twit/X said, “Are medical studies being written with ChatGPT? Well, we all know that ChatGPT overuses the word DELVE.” And there’s a chart here. “Look below at how often the word DELVE is used in papers on PubMed. Ten times increase and way more than humans. Why does ChatGPT use the word DELVE so much?” So, there arose this idea that DELVE was some tell that you had used AI to write your paper.
BEN: Which you have to imagine is just now that it’s out, is going to get fixed.
[LAUGHTER]
Like a patch will happen and it won’t be a thing anymore.
DANIEL: Anika Gupta on Twitter said this tweet, “Delve, safeguard, robust, demystify and in this digital world, all ChatGPT. I am rejecting all content with any of these words. There is no problem with these words, but they make human language mechanical.” And other folks would say that explore, tapestry, testament and leverage all appear way more in AI text than in human text.
BEN: Yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: Well, the mystery has been solved.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Thanks to Alex Hearn, Tech Editor at the Guardian UK. Link in the show notes for this episode, becauselanguage.com. There’s a tantalising clue. Tell me what you make of this, Ben.
BEN: Okay, I’m here.
DANIEL: DELVE. DELVE seems to be very popular in Nigeria.
BEN: Spam or like spam adjacent. Like scams, phishing, that sort of thing.
DANIEL: Good guess. Nigeria is definitely known for that sort of thing. That is true, yes.
BEN: Or what if… Oh, this is a long bow to draw, but here I go, drawing it anyway.
DANIEL: Take the longbow. Here we go.
BEN: So, large language models are based on corpi of things that they’ve just scraped, right? And these can be books, but they can also be like whole lot of emails or whatever it happens to be.
DANIEL: Yep.
BEN: Now, a lot of scam material or phishing material or whatever comes by way of Nigeria, but Nigeria, much like India, is a former British colony.
DANIEL: Okay, this doesn’t involve scams, but keep going.
BEN: Okay, what I’m wondering is if some of the material that’s been scraped is from places like Nigeria and India, whose English learning and education style and stuff can often end up with like different word usages than in…
DANIEL: Totally normal.
BEN: …than in like America or Australia or something like that. By way of example, someone once told me a story of going to buy a ticket at a stall in India and basically queried like, “Are you trying to cheat me? Like, this seems way more expensive.” And the attendant basically was like, “No, sir, I’m not trying to bamboozle you.” And they were just astounded that the word BAMBOOZLE, which they’ve probably heard like twice before in their life, was clearly like a regularly used word by this guy. Not because he had bad English, but because that’s just not a word we use in the West very much.
DANIEL: Any, any communities that use a language and that are slightly separate from each other are just going to develop their own quirks.
BEN: So, I’m wondering if DELVE is just like a quirk of Nigerian English. And because they’ve scraped something from Nigeria, some corpus from Nigeria, it’s like much higher?
DANIEL: DELVE is a peculiarity of Nigerian English, but the way that it got into large language models is a bit different.
BEN: Oh, okay, go ahead. I’m not going to take up any more time, but I think I know what the answer is now.
DANIEL: When you train a large language model, you don’t just have it crunch the data and then it’s ready to generate words. You have to put it through another step. It’s called Reinforcement Learning, Human Feedback.
BEN: Right. So, you basically hire for as cheap as you possibly can because you’re a capitalist fucking swine, people to give back feedback to the large language model, which I’m assuming they did with Nigerians, because that was who was very cheap.
DANIEL: You are correct, sir.
BEN: [SIGHS] I don’t want to be correct though.
DANIEL: So, the large language model generates a bunch of outputs. The humans then do a thing where they tell it what humans like. And then, the model has this other step where it tries to predict not only what’s likely according to the model, but what kinds of likely humans enjoy.
BEN: This sounds a little bit like it could make a really good science fiction short story. Like, if we take ChatGPT and other large language models, to their, like, doom and gloom place that a lot of people are prognosticating about and like it alters our language forever and the written word in the anglosphere is now definitively decided by machines, part of me low key enjoys the idea that Nigerian English is the English that we’ve got because we paid Nigerians very little money to train the model. Is this not just a really perverse…
DANIEL: Justice?
BEN: Not justice, but isn’t this just a huge supercomputer version of the kids of rich white New Yorkers having like Trinidadian accents?
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] I like that a lot. But the cruel irony is that, having paid these workers very low wages to do the work of training the model and doing the reinforcement learning training and having gotten the model to sound like them, we will now apparently be punishing these very same humans for sounding like AIs.
BEN: Ugh, yeah, that sucks.
DANIEL: And that is another way that AI perpetuates bias. Let’s go on to the next one. This one is FOREVER CHEMICALS. This one was suggested by Diego, who’s pointed us to an article in Slate by Mary Harris interviewing Esme Dupre. The article is, “Is it too late to do something about dangerous forever chemicals?” What do you know about these?
BEN: I suppose it depends on the chemical. Like, I’d say, I think we can categorically say it’s too late to do anything about DDT. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: That’s in the food chain now forever.
DANIEL: So, that’s out there.
BEN: Yeah. My understanding of FOREVER CHEMICALS came from DDT, although I don’t think they called DDT that at the time.
DANIEL: I don’t think it’s one of those but it might be…
BEN: But it is, though, right? Like, the thing that the reason why everyone was like, holy shit, we need to get rid of this stuff is because they all clocked, “Oh, this stuff never, ever goes away.” It doesn’t biodegrade ever. And so, it’s just going to sit in like, whales, apparently, because they’re at the very top of the food chain. I’m not super across what the new ones are. I have a feeling one of them is like Teflon or some other non-stick technology.
DANIEL: Yes, that’s right. They’re in a lot of things we use every day, especially things that are waterproof, things that are slippery. So, these have the name, PFAS, perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances. Basically, they have carbon atoms bonded to fluorine atoms and these bonds are tenacious and they don’t break down.
So, these chemicals have been around for decades and now they’re building up in us and they’re causing health problems like cancer, infertility, high cholesterol. In the USA, last week, the Biden administration issued the first national PFAS drinking water standards. So, local utilities are going to have to test the water and treat it. And researchers are finding alternatives to these forever chemicals. So, we’re stuck with them. But maybe we can mitigate some of the damage.
BEN: Yeah, well, like… Yeah, by the very nature of them, the stuff that’s out there is out there. That’s why they’re terrible. Like, lead is kind of one, right?
DANIEL: And plastic, microplastics, another one. Gosh. Well, stay healthy out there, folks. Let’s go to the next one suggested by James on our Discord, MVP for this episode.
BEN: This is like a fifth thing from James. James, stop it. Save some for the other shows, bro.
DANIEL: This is an article by Valerie Trapp in the Atlantic. Welcome to Kidulthood. That’s the word. KIDULTHOOD.
BEN: Okay. I mean, I can infer from the portmanteau itself, but I’m wondering what aspect of our social tapestry… Sorry, I had to drop that one in there.
DANIEL: Hey. Hey! You were accusing me of being an AI. Ah, it’s you. Argh! [SIREN NOISE] Yeep! Yeep! Yeep!
BEN: ~It was me all along.~ I’m wondering what aspect of our social reality has created the need to make a label for kids who have to behave like adults because I believe we used to call these latchkey kids.
DANIEL: Okay, actually, this is the reverse. This isn’t about kids who are forced to act like adults. Oh, it’s adults who have the luxury of acting a little bit like kids.
BEN: You mean people who don’t have children themselves? The people who I envy and want to be all the time? [LAUGHS] Is that who we’re talking about?
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Ben. Well, it’s not necessarily about child free status. It’s about stuffed animals, soft toys.
BEN: Okay, go on.
DANIEL: A whole bunch of products marketed to the kidult market, anybody over the age 12 and adults are collecting plushies. It seems that about four in ten American adults sleep with stuffed animals. And this is part of the kidult market.
BEN: I find that hard to believe. 40% of all American adults are currently sleeping with some form of teddy plushy, whatever.
DANIEL: Four in ten are willing to say on a survey that they sleep with stuffed animals.
BEN: Huh.
DANIEL: Isn’t that odd? It’s a little funny, isn’t it?
BEN: Look, let’s be honest. One of the bizarre quirks, I think, of being an adult is the fact that, for instance, Daniel, I’ve known you for 15 years now, right? Like, we’ve known each other for a really, really long time. I have never once in my life seen your bedroom.
DANIEL: No, you haven’t.
BEN: And that’s, I would imagine, not that uncommon. Like, when you become an adult… When you’re a kid, obviously, you’re in each other’s rooms all the time, but when you become an adult, you don’t go into other adult’s bedrooms very often. You mean to tell me that 40% of people have teddies in their bedroom?
DANIEL: Well, actually, I’ve got a couple if you go back there. But they’re things that I collected when I was a child and also things that we thought were nice, but which were too nice for the children. So, there’s a really cute bear with a special…
BEN: [LAUGHS] You’re the bad guy from the Lego movie. You’re the dad who glues it all together.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: I am? I am.
BEN: You’re Will Ferrell.
DANIEL: I’m Will Ferrell. And an AI.
BEN: Look, okay. So, I’m surprised. I’m a little suspicious. That still strikes me as a pretty high number. But what I would wonder is how much of this is because of the influx or the influence, perhaps is a better word, of nerd culture.
DANIEL: Yeah. Like collecting Legos…
BEN: Yeah, collecting that stuff and then having certain Pokémon as a plushie or having your favorite video game character as a plushie… or Funko pops, which I’ve never understood as a thing, are just huge. And people collect hundreds of them. So, yeah, I mean, okay, I guess. And so, because of people having lots of teddies, someone’s come up with the word, kidulthood?
DANIEL: That’s the market. It’s about a $9 billion a year business.
BEN: Oh, I see. This is the marketers who have created this.
DANIEL: Yeah. But I want to ask a question. Do you know how… Maybe you don’t feel this way. Do you ever feel like adulting is weird? We sometimes go, “Oh, wow, look at me doing adult stuff. I don’t…”
BEN: Sure. And I think it’s almost gotten to the point now where other generations look at millennials or zillennials and kind of I think potentially somewhat fairly deride us for that. Like, “Ah, adulting is hard.” And it’s like yeah, it is. It absolutely is. I’m not for a second contesting that adulting is hard. Someone once said to me, or someone once showed me a meme that basically said parenting is saying, “Fuck this shit” under your breath over and over and over again, but then having to do this shit anyway.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: And that, to be perfectly honest, that also just seems like adult life as well. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: It is. It is.
BEN: That’s just most of what being an adult is unpleasantness that you must soldier through. And I don’t know, maybe you can have a cookie…
DANIEL: With occasional moments of fulfillment.
BEN: Yeah, exactly. [LAUGHS] You get a tasty treat. Adulting is hard, but I don’t know if… Ah, look, it’s tricky, right?
DANIEL: Like, I’m an Elder X, an elder Gen X, and I feel like adulting does not come natural to me. And I’ve often wondered if earlier generations felt that way or were they just instinctually adults? Like, you know how they all look really old in photos, even though they’re 21?
BEN: Let me ask you this, Daniel. How many rotations of the sun has the earth completed since you’ve been alive?
DANIEL: Coming up in May, I will be 30 million minutes old.
BEN: I hate you. So much.
DANIEL: You do the math!
BEN: Give me a number. Come on. Come on.
DANIEL: I’m going to be 57 in May.
BEN: Let me ask you this, Daniel. With every ounce of honesty and truth out of you, when you hang out with a random smattering of other people approximately your age, do you feel like a relatively well-fitting-in person, or do you feel like a bit of an outlier with other 57-year-olds?
DANIEL: I can frequently be the person on the outside of the party depending on how I feel. If I feel introverted, I do. But I am really, really good at making people comfortable in a situation.
BEN: Yes. Yes, Daniel, I understand that. But that’s not the question. I didn’t say, “Can you be comfortable?” I said, do you think, if we were to analyse you with an AI, and we were to use a Facebook ad profile you and all of your interests and all of your things and all of your proclivities and your willingness to put yourself out there and all the rest of it…
DANIEL: Yep.
BEN: All that sort of stuff. Are you an average late 50-year-old or are you pretty unusual? Look, I’ll answer the question for you, Daniel. You’re not most late 50s.
DANIEL: I’m not most. I feel younger than most. I feel…
BEN: And I would say to you that the feeling that adulting doesn’t come naturally to you is probably because you have held onto… And I think it’s a large part of the reason why people who listen to this show really adore you and really enjoy your personality and that stuff is because you’ve held on to your inner child a lot more effectively than less people do.
DANIEL: Way longer than is sensible. Yeah. The way I think of it is life keeps presenting me with new beginnings and I’m very grateful for that.
BEN: However, the danger, which I don’t think you’ve fallen into — but who can ever be sure? because I can’t see inside your bedroom — The danger, and it’s the most dangerous for the people with the most privilege, so like white men and white women and then move your way down the list from there is if you hold on to your inner child, you have to work really, really hard to not like Peter Pan syndrome…
DANIEL: Yep.
BEN: Right. And just become a…
DANIEL: An aggravating man boy.
BEN: Not even just aggravating, but just like a quite selfish and irresponsible adult human being. Because that’s the danger. We have to train selfishness out of children. It’s part of developmental progress. And so, if you hold on to that aspect of your inner child, I think that can be really concerning. So, what I would say about this kidulthood thing, this word I am looking for, phenomenon, first of all, anything that is identified by marketers is immediately suspect. So, let’s just put that… That’s like lip filler industry. That’s like convincing men that they need to be really muscley, all that stuff is just immediately fucking suspect because people are trying to make money off insecurity. I don’t like that. I don’t agree with that. I don’t think that’s a thing that we should ever support.
DANIEL: Gotch.
BEN: Having said that, yeah, absolutely. Find a little bit of joy in your life. Like, find the stuff that fills your cup, find the stuff that puts a little bit of a sparkle in your eye and all the rest of that sort of thing. And if you want to call that kidulthood, you can call it whatever you want. If you are doing a thing and it brings you a little bit of happiness, like if you’re learning how to skateboard or if you’re drawing little doodles or you’re collecting plushies or whatever it happens to be, and that’s your cool thing and you like that thing and it makes you happy, power to you, sunshine. Go for it.
DANIEL: Yeah. Some of us need to work on nurturing our inner child, and some of us need to work on building our inner adult. [BEN LAUGHS] So, I grew up in this situation where being nice was valued, but being responsible and grown up kind of wasn’t. And so, I thought that as long as I was being nice, then that was good enough. And it took me a really long time to figure out that there are certain kinds of cluelessness that nice people are very capable of, but that make life hard for the people around them. And so, I have worked to try to get past that.
Let’s do the last one. This one was suggested by Aristemo, and it’s about a bank jugger. The article is: Police Arrest Suspected Bank Jugger in Hollywood. Can you figure out what JUGGER is?
BEN: JUGGER?
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Fuck no, I can’t. [LAUGHS] I’m really struggling.
DANIEL: I’ll tell you what it is. Bank jugging is when criminals target people who withdraw cash from banks or ATMs. You watch them, you see them take out the money, and then you rob them.
BEN: Okay? And we’re calling that JUGGING instead of MUGGING because…
DANIEL: I couldn’t figure out the JUG.
BEN: [LAUGHS] That’s really unsatisfying.
DANIEL: Are they wearing jeans? Is it a jeans…? Is it a jogging mugger?
BEN: That’s. Yeah. Jugger.
DANIEL: Okay, well, maybe I should tell you.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: This is a really old slang term.
BEN: Oh. Are we going back to Polari or something?
DANIEL: We’re going back to 1909.
BEN: Okay. That is old.
DANIEL: A JUG is a cup, but it’s also a container.
BEN: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Could be a place. So, it could be a prison like the jug house.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Could be a post office. In this case, the jug is a bank.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Green’s Dictionary of Slang, link on our website, has JUGMAN from 1909. That’s a bank robber.
BEN: Yep.
DANIEL: Also, JUGHEEL, a bank robber. And then there was a move that bank robbers could do, which was the JUG TOUCH, the robbery of people as they come out of banks. That’s from 1937.
BEN: Okay, so the jug touch. So, are they saying a bank jugger because there’s literally just some super archaic law on the book somewhere where if you rob a person who’s just withdrawn money, you’re guilty of jug touching or something?
DANIEL: But it’s just a really old technique. I mean, if somebody has just taken money out of the bank and they’re walking around with these big money bags with dollar signs on them…
BEN: Who the fuck remembered this word from 1909 though? Because I’ve never heard this word before.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] I know. Maybe it’s just been kicking around. Maybe the crime scene has got an institutional memory. Somebody must be out there. He’s like the old guy. “Oh, yeah. I remember when we did that. That was the old jug touch. Yeah. Come on, Scampy. Let’s give him the old jug.” Anyway, that’s how we get JUGGING. Watch out, people.
BEN: There you go.
DANIEL: Thanks, Aristemo. So, DELVE, FOREVER CHEMICALS, KIDULTHOOD, and JUGGER, our Words of the Week. Big thanks to Eli Burnstein, all of our listeners who gave us ideas for the show, SpeechDocs for transcribing all the words, patrons like you who keep the show going. And, of course, Ben, it’s been so good to see you again, and to do a show, feels good.
BEN: Stop it. [LAUGHS] Oh, god. So complimentary at the end.
DANIEL: I’ve really appreciated your uniquity.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Good callback. I like that. I appreciate that. The tapestry of this show, Daniel, truly remarkable.
DANIEL: By the way, secret reveal. We’re both AIs.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: Sorry, everybody.
BEN: Surprising absolutely no one, especially our romantic partners.
[MUSIC]
DANIEL: If you like what we’re doing, you can support the show. And there’s lots of ways to do it. Some involve money, some don’t. Here are some ways. I got four. I got four suggestions. Number one, tell a friend about us or leave us a review. Did you know we have a new review?
BEN: I did not know that.
DANIEL: Here it is. “Awesome intelligent conversation, five stars. I’m so glad I have the chance to gain inspiration from your discussions of language. Awesome stuff.”” And that’s from Bonjour Language. Isn’t that nice?
BEN: Aw. Make you laugh, make you think.
DANIEL: We also got a one-star review. Here it is. “Not academic, one star. The hosts are very well intentioned, but their work is full of overgeneralisations and a fair amount of bulverism.” Hey, Ben, I’ve never tried bulverism before!
BEN: Bulverism. That’s a wicked word. I like that. I love when people insult me with words I don’t know. That’s so fun.
DANIEL: I had to look it up. “This isn’t a pod with much serious analysis, and it might leave listeners misinformed in some cases.” And that was from b_blobbb with Apple Podcasts. Okay.
BEN: Fair enough.
DANIEL: The reason I wanted to read that one-star review, even though it’s not as much fun, is we don’t like to shy away from criticism. We like to see if there’s anything that we need to do. But we also want to show you, the listener, what kind of things people are saying out there about the show. And if you disagree with that person’s assessment and you haven’t written a review yet, there’s something you can do.
BEN: Go and review us.
DANIEL: You can drown out that person’s one-star review with a many-star review. Do it on your listening place of choice. The second thing you could do: follow us. We are @becauselangpod in just about every conceivable social space. Number three, you can send us ideas or comments, ideas for the show. That’s on our Discord. That’s by email, hello@becauselanguage.com. Or, you can even send us your voice. Just record a little phone message and ship it to us becauselanguage.com or we have SpeakPipe on our website, becauselanguage.com. There’s lots of ways to get a message to us.
And the big one, you can become a patron. Your support means that everyone gets the regular episodes, means we can compensate our guests because no one works for free on Because Language. It means we can get transcripts from SpeechDocs so that you can know how many times we’ve said BUCKAROO on the podcast. And people can enjoy the show even if they can’t hear. And if you are a patron, you get bonuses depending on your level. Discord access, mailouts, live episodes, and bonus episodes.
BEN: And shoutouts like the shoutouts that I’m about to do right now. Here are our patrons at the supporter level. Termy, Matt, Whitney, Chris L, Helen, Jack, PharaohKatt, LordMortis, Lyssa, Elías, gramaryen, Larry, Rene, Kristofer, Andy, James, Nigel, Meredith, Kate, Nasrin, Joanna, Nikoli, Keith, Ayesha, who is really great.
DANIEL: She’s awesome.
BEN: Steele, Margareth, Manú, Diego, Ariaflame, Rodger, Rhian, Colleen, Ignacio, Sonic Snejhog, Kevin, Andy from Logophilius, Stan, Kathy, Rach, Cheyenne, Felicity, Amir, Canny Archer, O Tim. Alyssa, Chris W, aengryballs, Tadhg, Luis, Raina, Tony, WolfDog [DANIEL and BEN HOWL], Molly Dee, J0HNTR0Y, sæ̃m with the funny little ae that’s joined together like DÆMON in the His Dark Materials trilogy.
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: And our newest patron at the listener level, Keet. New free patrons. Free patrons?
DANIEL: We have free patrons.
BEN: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: You can be a free patron. You don’t get very much, but you can do it.
BEN: New free patrons Michaela, Becca and Hezekiah. Many thanks to all of our patrons. Our theme music, the one at the beginning of the show, not the really cool one for Related or Not, the theme music was written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who also performs with Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible who has a new album out that you should check out. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time, Because Language.
IN UNISON: Pew, pew, pew.
DANIEL: Did you know that Ryan Beno reformed for a couple of Perth gigs last month?
BEN: That’s fun.
DANIEL: It was really fun. And I went to both, and I feel glad that I lived long enough to be able to go.
BEN: [LAUGHS] That’s good.
DANIEL: I know that sounds very dramatic, but it was very fulfilling.
BEN: Are you getting to that age of your life where you are thinking about your mortality a lot?
[BOOP]
DANIEL: I had enough trouble convincing… That party group we played at in my place, I had trouble convincing them that I wasn’t a werewolf.
BEN: That’s true.
DANIEL: They killed me.
BEN: Because you were a werewolf.
DANIEL: I was a villager.
BEN: [LAUGHS] That’s exactly what the werewolf would have us think.
DANIEL: This has been resolved. The jury is back on this one. [BEN LAUGHS] Don’t you…
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: I am not a werewolf AI, all right?
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]