How much can we really know about the words we use? What are the facts behind some of the most tangled etymologies in English? And is our “Related or Not” game a good way of approaching word history?
We’re talking to Dr Anatoly Liberman, perhaps the world’s preëminent living etymologist and the author of Origin Uncertain: Unraveling the Mysteries of Etymology.
Timestamps
Intros: 0:19
News: 3:27
Related or Not: 22:50
Interview with Anatoly Liberman: 36:18
Words of the Week: 1:08:36
The Reads: 1:31:03
Outtakes: 1:36:36
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Become a Patron!Show notes
New Study Explores Alphabetical Ordering of Last Names and Grading Fairness
https://michiganross.umich.edu/news/new-study-explores-alphabetical-ordering-last-names-and-grading-fairness
Jeffrey R. Stevens & Juan F. Duque | Order matters: Alphabetizing in-text citations biases citation rates
https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-018-1532-8
New paper – Phonosemantic maps for exploring iconic associations
https://www.bonniemclean.net/news/2024-04-28-phonosemantic_maps/
Iconicity mediates semantic networks of sound symbolism
https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0025763
Anatoly Liberman: Origin Uncertain
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/origin-uncertain-9780197664919
Oxford Etymologist | OUP Blog
https://blog.oup.com/category/series-columns/oxford_etymologist/
Anatoly Liberman: A Bibliography of English Etymology
https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/a-bibliography-of-english-etymology
Humans are not perfectly vigilant. And that’s bad news for AI.
https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-04-01-human-in-the-loop-monkey-in-the-middle-14e72bd46b7a
Cruise Reports Lots Of Human Oversight Of Robotaxis, Is That Bad?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2023/11/07/cruise-reports-lots-of-human-oversight-of-robotaxis-is-that-bad/?sh=1f9fd3372895
Cruise confirms robotaxis rely on human assistance every four to five miles
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/06/cruise-confirms-robotaxis-rely-on-human-assistance-every-4-to-5-miles.html
Automation | XKCD
https://xkcd.com/1319/
Word of the week: Wankpanzer
https://fritinancy.substack.com/p/word-of-the-week-wankpanzer
Girls und Panzer Wiki https://gup.fandom.com/wiki/Girls_und_Panzer_Wiki
wankpanzer | Urban Dictionary
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=wankpanzer
Researchers make a plastic that includes bacteria that can digest it
https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/04/researchers-make-a-plastic-that-includes-bacteria-that-can-digest-it/
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics and science of language. My name’s Daniel Midgley. I would like to introduce my cohosts, Ben Ainslie and Hedvig Skirgård.
Here’s what’s coming up in this episode. We always have a great time playing around with etymology on this show, because we have a game called Related or Not.
BEN: [SINGS] Related or not… Oh, no, I can’t do it anymore because we’ve got our own theme song.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] We do, and we’ll hear it later. But we are rank amateurs compared to this guy. I’ve been reading his Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology. He’s blogged for years under the name, the Oxford Etymologist, and he’s on our program. I’ll be talking to Dr Anatoly Liberman.
BEN: Ah, that sounds like heaps of fun. I would like to ask him the etymology of rank.
DANIEL: Rank.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Like, rank amateurs. Does that mean stinky, or does it mean a ranking of things? I want to know.
HEDVIG: Oh, no.
DANIEL: Yeah. Well, he’s got a new book titled, rather tantalisingly, Origin Uncertain.
BEN: [LAUGHS] That’s a good title. I’m giving that a big Ben Ainslie ticket.
DANIEL: That’s what it always says in etymological dictionaries. Either origin uncertain or etymology dubious. Origin Uncertain: Unraveling the Mysteries of Etymology. I’m also going to ask him what he thinks about our game, Related or Not.
BEN: Oh, okay. That’s fun.
DANIEL: I’m a little nervous.
BEN: Hopefully, Etymology Daddy doesn’t smack us down!
DANIEL: I know. That’s what I’m worried about. “This is far too simplistic.” Well, we’ll see what he says.
BEN: Hopefully, he looks at us and goes, “Rank amateurs. Now, interestingly, rank is a…”
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Does anybody want to do the plug? I’m tired of doing the plug.
HEDVIG: Ben, do the plug.
BEN: Completely apropos to nothing at all, I thought I’d just jump in here real quick and mention, if you are listening to the dulcet tones of Hedvig and Daniel and the somewhat less dulcet tones of Ben Ainslie, and you’re thinking to yourself, “Damn-”
DANIEL: You’re dulcet.
BEN: “…these are some nice ideas spoken by nice — and Ben Ainslie — people. And I think that I would like to support the show somehow.” Well, the way you can do it is by jumping onto Patreon and contributing a little bit of money. Now, it’s not just buying a whole bunch of drugs and sex workers for the three of us, although that does happen.
DANIEL: It’s not just that.
BEN: It’s not just that. We also use the money for paying for someone to transcribe our shows. Think about that for a second. Someone’s job is to listen to this idiot’s voice and turn it into the written word and you can help pay that person. How great is that? The bonus is you get to search the show’s transcripts. And people who can’t hear can access our show, which is pretty groovy.
It also allows us to throw a little stipend towards the people who are guests on our show. Now, not all of them take us up on that. Some of them elect to donate that money to a worthy cause or something like that. But it’s important that we believe it’s important that we don’t just take their labor without offering something in return.
That’s stuff that you can do if you become a patron at any level at all, the very top level, the most expensive level, or the tiny little baby level with not very much money, you can do all of it. Just head over to patreon.com and search for Because Language.
DANIEL: That’s patreon.com/becauselangpod. All right, time for some news.
BEN: What’s going on in the world of linguistics?
DANIEL: We’ve all been doing teaching. We’re all teachers as well as learners. And of course, the most fulfilling part of teaching is… marking. But did you…?
BEN: [LAUGHS] I thought you were going to go like, “Shaming children.” I was like, “Yes.”
DANIEL: Oh, that’s good too. But no, it’s definitely marking. Love it. Can’t get enough. No?
HEDVIG: I thought it was thinking really hard about your jokes and memes, and getting really excited…
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: …and running them past your peer group friends who are also like, “Oh, yeah, that slaps.”
BEN: The real Hedvig answer is…
HEDVIG: “That’s so good.” And then put it in… [CROSSTALK]
Ben: …overthinking how relevant you are to Gen Z.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yeah. And then, have this big smile when you get to that thing and you’re looking at your students and being like, “Yeah? Yeah?” And they’re like, “Uh-huh. Yes, Miss. Yeah, lovely.” [LAUGHS]
BEN: That’s so funny. I’ve never seen you teach a class in front of these people, but I really feel like I have. You’ve painted a very evocative picture.
HEDVIG: I’m the same. Yeah, I’m exactly like that. I look very expectantly at them as well like…
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Did you see? Did you see what I did?
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: Okay. So, marking, Daniel. Tell us about marking.
DANIEL: Well, there’s been some work on marking. This is work from Dr Zihan Wang of the University of Michigan and a team published in SSRN. They did analysis on some 30 million grading records from the University of Michigan. They found that if you had a name, a surname that started with A, B, C, D or E, your grades were lower or higher than average?
BEN: Higher. Obviously, higher.
HEDVIG: Higher.
BEN: As a person with the surname, Ainslie, obviously, higher.
DANIEL: Nice job, Ainslie!
BEN: What can I say?
DANIEL: The Midgleys of the world salute you. And the Skirgårds can only hope that somebody mistakes their S for an H.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
DANIEL: Am I right? Am I right?
HEDVIG: I’ve never thought of the idea of doing that. That’s…
DANIEL: Why higher? Why would it be higher? What’s the mechanism here?
HEDVIG: Because when you start grading exams, you have one idea of how the scale is, and then you see more… You just get tired. Number one, you get tired and grumpy.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: That’s one.
BEN: I was going to say…
HEDVIG: That’s definitely one thing.
Ben: …drunkenness or grumpiness is at play.
DANIEL: The other thing is, I actually feel like it could go either way, because in the beginning, you grade them to work against your abstract idea of what a good answer would be. And at the end of the grading, you have a lot of input on what people actually said. So, I actually find myself doing…
BEN: So, you know what the normal distribution looks like.
HEDVIG: Right. I actually find myself doing the opposite. Because at the beginning, I’m like, “Well, my imagined answer is not like that.” And then when I’m halfway through, I’m like, “Oh, no one got my imagined answer. I should be nicer.”
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: You do the principal’s kind of thing. “Am I wrong? No, it is the children.”
DANIEL: “It is the children.”
BEN: Except you do the opposite. You’re just like, “Oh, I must be wrong.”
HEDVIG: Yeah. I’m like, “No one got that. Oh, okay.”
DANIEL: I thought that was a really good question. Oh, okay.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, students whose surnames start with A, B, C, D, or E got a 0.3% higher grade out of 100 points. They also found that if students came later in the alphabet, they got “comments that are notably more negative and less polite.”
BEN: Oh, now, that tracks. That absolutely tracks. By the time you get to the end of your stack and people are doing dumb things, I will often just write on a paper, “Whhhyyyy?” and would circle something.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: The authors say, “We kind of suspect that fatigue is one of the major factors that’s driving this effect, because when you’re working on something for a long period of time, you get tired, and then you start to lose your attention and your cognitive abilities are dropping.” But I’m also going to echo what Hedvig started with, and that is, you don’t know what the baseline is. I’m getting this from a Veritasium episode about the number 37. There’s a link in the show notes for this episode. Anyone seen this one, about the number 37?
BEN: No.
HEDVIG: Oh, the people think that’s a good random number if they get asked?
DANIEL: That is very much a part of it. But it also explores the relevance of 37. Let’s just say you’re trying to figure out who to partner up with in your life. There are two suboptimal strategies. One is to accept the first person that comes along. That’s a bad strategy, because you don’t know what’s out there.
HEDVIG: That’s a bad… Okay.
DANIEL: Another bad strategy is to accept no one until it’s too late and everybody’s out of the market.
BEN: I contend, sir, that is not a bad strategy. I doff my hat to the people who have standards and spend their life just being like, “No. Sorry.”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Maybe it’s wrong for me to say that’s a suboptimal strategy. A strategy of questionable utility.
BEN: Fair enough.
HEDVIG: Let’s maybe… So like, the way sometimes people in stats visualise this is imagine you’re in a desert and it’s flat all around you. You’re in a flat place. And then that there are hills and valleys. And you want to get to a really high hill. You find a hill, you climb up that hill. You see another hill further away that is higher than the hill you’re on. But in order to get to it, you need to go down and then up. And that’s no fun. So, you have an incentive to stay on your hill. And some people might just be in a valley and they’re like, “No, everyone fucking sucks. I’m not going to settle for everyone down here.”
DANIEL: Yeah. It might be a local maximum.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Yeah, they’re just flipping through people holding up fish and they’re just like, “Nope. Nope.”
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yup.
HEDVIG: No, this is not happening. Yeah.
BEN: So.
DANIEL: So, the optimal strategy, apparently, is to play the field a little bit, find out what’s out there. And the math suggests that you should automatically reject the first 37% of what you’re imagining 100% is going to be.
HEDVIG: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: And then after that point, then you accept anybody who’s better than what you’ve already seen, because the first 37% was training data. So, you can apply this to marking. If you start from the beginning, you don’t know how well everyone is done, so you might not be too tough on them because you’re still fresh.
HEDVIG: Yup.
DANIEL: By the time you get about a third through, you’ve seen enough to know what the range is and how good they are generally. One fix for this would be just don’t mark. Just read a bunch. Just glance at the first 37%. But that would eat into your time. So, maybe not 37%.
BEN: So, now’s the bit where I want to chip in. This is 0.3%. So, a 0.3% out of 100% difference…
DANIEL: Yup, which can make a difference.
Ben: …up. Hands down. Can it?
HEDVIG: Barely. I was going to ask…
BEN: I am astounded that the thing is that small. I would have thought the effect would be way bigger than this. 0.3% of 1% is urkel.
DANIEL: Okay. Unless you’re on the border.
HEDVIG: I wonder how many people and how strong that effect is. Like, how significant is that effect?
BEN: Yeah, obviously. Look, if they’re reporting it, you have to imagine it’s at least somewhere above like 0.6% or whatever, right?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: But even if that’s the case… When we talk about stats a lot, there’s two things that we want to care about, like, how strong is the effect?
DANIEL: Significant.
BEN: How significant is it? But then also, if there is a linkage, how significant is the thing that it does?
DANIEL: The effect size.
BEN: And so, in this case, even if this is an R of 1, [CHUCKLES] I would argue that it still doesn’t matter.
HEDVIG: Very small.
BEN: Because 0.3% is almost never even a rounding error. You could add 0.3% to most people’s things and even with rounding, it won’t change what’s going on most of the time.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: So, I’ve got to be honest. If someone’s on 49.7% and the 0.3% takes them over the edge or the flip side, 51.3% or 51.2% or something.
DANIEL: Another thing to remember is that when you look at the students who are alphabetically lower, they got a 0.3% lower score. So, what we’re talking about is a 0.6% spread. And that can add up over an entire classroom.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Also, the humanness of that. I don’t know about you, Hedvig and Daniel. But if anyone ever gets 49%, I give them 50%, right?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Figure out how to give them 50%.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] Well, there you go. That 0.3% could matter a lot.
HEDVIG: I don’t give them 50%. What I did recently now when I graded, fun insights into my grading, is first of all, I get random codes for the students, so I don’t know their names. So, I don’t know what order they’re in.
BEN: Yeah. Fair enough. That’s good.
DANIEL: Good.
HEDVIG: I had 50%, and I took the first 10 that I came up in the order, and I graded them. And then I had a meeting with the person who had graded the course before, and I was like, “They’re giving some of these responses that I hadn’t imagined. I was imagining this grading. What do you think?” And then we talked it over and we settled on a sort of procedure, and then I regraded those 10, and then I graded everyone. And then, anyone who was right on the pass-fail, I went through and checked, was I being overly harsh or not. If I found that I wasn’t, then I was like, “No, this is exactly like I graded everyone else,” then they did fail.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Fair enough.
DANIEL: Okay. Well, I think that’s very sensible.
BEN: You got three teachers talking about marking, Daniel. This is going to go for a while. [DANIEL LAUGHS] You’ve got to wind us up.
DANIEL: I’m going to wind it up. We’ve talked about numerical patterns, especially Benford’s law, where the number one seems to be the first digit of many sequences, very strangely. Hedvig, you and Ste talked us through that. But this was an interesting example of an alphabetic effect where there seems to be a certain bias in a certain direction.
BEN: I remember years ago, we did a story about… [LAUGHS] published by someone-someone name starting with a Z, about the bias towards early alphabetical names in published papers and stuff like that. Like, that was a thing that we’ve touched on as well.
DANIEL: Yes. That was more recent than a couple of years ago. There is a very strong tendency for alphabetically early names to get cited more often. That’s right.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: But, teachers, let me give some suggestions. Randomise your marking. Canvas and other marking apps allow you to turn on random, make it random by default. And try to stay fresh. And also, just try reading a few just to get a feel, just so you’re not giving overly generous marks to early students.
HEDVIG: Do a little pilot study.
DANIEL: Thank you.
BEN: I don’t know about you, guys, but overly generous is not a problem I have with marking.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: This is not something I struggle with.
HEDVIG: Our next item have to do with sound associations. So, I am going to give you two words, and they are describing… In your mind, I need you to imagine a jewel.
BEN: Got it. Like, the thing that would sit on the top of a pirate treasure chest as you enter the cave, gleaming enticingly.
DANIEL: The thing that I try to steal when I’m wearing my catsuit, dodging lasers.
BEN: Yes, exactly.
HEDVIG: It’s a jewel. Imagine diamonds, sapphire, emeralds, blah, blah, blah. Okay, I’m going to say two words. Now, you have to imagine two jewels, okay?
BEN: Okay. Gotcha.
HEDVIG: Okay. Two jewels.
DANIEL: I’m ready.
HEDVIG: Two words.
DANIEL: Yup.
HEDVIG: And the first one is going to be called upu. And the second one is going to be called iki.
BEN and DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Okay. Now, I want you to tell me which one of them is the brightest, shines the brightest, if you shine light on it.
BEN: Oh, it’s iki. All the way. Iki.
DANIEL: Iki definitely shines the brightest.
BEN: Yeah, 100%.
DANIEL: Yup.
HEDVIG: Okay.
BEN: I feel like it has a sound cue as you enter the cave. Like, the light falls on your face, and it’s like, [MAKES A CARTOONISH LIGHT SOUND].
DANIEL: Iki.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Okay. Which one is largest?
BEN: Uba. Upu.
DANIEL: Upu’s huge.
HEDVIG: Upu’s huge.
DANIEL: Iki might be tiny.
HEDVIG: Okay. Which one is…? And now, I have to remember which the third category was…
DANIEL: Hardest. Hardness.
HEDVIG: Ah, darn it, Daniel.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Okay, hardest. So, if I wanted to cut glass, which one of these should I use? Iki or upu?
BEN: Iki.
DANIEL: You should probably use iki.
HEDVIG: Okay. All right.
BEN: I feel like the reason we’re in this pirate cave is because iki will be placed into some kind of space laser that will allow us to mine things on Ganymede or something like that.
HEDVIG: What is upu good for then?
BEN: Sitting in a museum on a giant pedestal with a plaque that’s like, “This is really important to some people that we stole it from.”
HEDVIG: Oh, god.
DANIEL: Well, it’s nice and big.
HEDVIG: Okay. Well, in a study by Kimi Akita and others, they studied these things. So, they gave people a set of words where they varied the vowel, as you notice, with E and U and also the consonant. And then, they asked them a bunch of questions. They wanted to know if speakers of Korean, Japanese, English and Mandarin had different associations between these sounds and…
BEN: That is fun.
Hedvig: …these properties. So, again, they were brightness, size and hardness. What’s the noun for hardness?
BEN: I think it’s hardness.
HEDVIG: Oh, hardness.
DANIEL: Hardness is fine.
HEDVIG: Hardness. They made this lovely little map illustration that you can go look at, where you can see the vowels, /i/, ae, ah, u, o, o-u. The letters in the international phonetic Alphabet don’t map one on one onto Swedish or English, so I have to think a lot…
BEN: Fair enough.
Hedvig: …in the background.
BEN: I can see the cogs turning. It was very impressive.
HEDVIG: Oh, well. They found that basically everyone thought that /i/ were small things and bright things, but there was some variation there as well. English thought that /u/ was dark…
BEN: Oh, yeah. Yup.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: /e/ was dark, but not /a/.
DANIEL: So, roughly speaking, languages tend to agree.
DANIEL: Yeah. In the abstract, they say that just about everybody agreed on stuff. The Japanese speakers associated the voiced stops like /g/ with large and dark jewels, whereas Mandarin speakers associated /i/ with small and bright jewels. /u/ and /e/ were both considered dark, mostly.
HEDVIG: Right.
DANIEL: Now, here’s another interesting thing. Japanese, Mandarin and English speakers associated /u/, that is to say, vowels that use lip rounding, /u/, with darkness and softness. Now, my question is, why would /u/ be dark? Why would our brains go /u/ is a dark sound. And why would our brains go /u/ is a soft sound? What’s the connection for those two things, and are they linked? That was my question.
HEDVIG: Wait, are you asking what is the individual connection between /u/ and dark, /u/ and soft? Or, what is the connection between dark and soft?
DANIEL: I’m kind of asking all three. Why the /u/…?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Let’s start with those two things. Why would /u/ have those two qualities associated?
BEN: I have some thoughts.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: If we suppose that the fact that these are connected across lots of different languages is suggestive of the fact that it exists for humans at a stage of development maybe prior to language, like the fact that it’s fed into this linguistic phenomenon across heaps of different languages means there’s something innate and human about this thing, I wonder, then, if it’s to do with the fact that as we developed as a species, darkness is kind of scary and threatening and dangerous to us as animal. We don’t have particularly good night vision. We don’t have particularly good claws or defensive mechanisms or anything like that. So, when it’s dark, we tend to speak quite softly, I think. Whereas sounds like /i/, /i/, /i/ is not… Like, I imagine going into a cave, no one talks like that, right? [LAUGHS] When we go into dark things or when it’s dark outside, we kind of /u/.
DANIEL: /u/.
BEN: We’re just a bit lower [DANIEL LAUGHS] and a bit darker. I can’t speak to the softness thing, other than the fact that the mouth, when we go /u/, the face feels softer, whereas a /i/, /i/ is like a tighter, harder feeling.
DANIEL: It’s all teeth.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yup. Hedvig, you’ve read what the authors wrote.
HEDVIG: I read what the authors wrote, and I also… I’m downloading, because they put all of their data online, all of their code…
BEN: Oh, good for them!
DANIEL: It’s nice, isn’t it? Good on ’em.
HEDVIG: …all of the stimuli, and I’m listening to some of them now because I was wondering, if the speaker was producing /i/ at a slightly higher pitch than /u/, because I would. So, I’m trying to listen through, but I know the people who wrote this, and I highly suspect that they’ve been controlling for that and if she did anything like that. This isn’t, by the way, computer-simulated recordings. It’s a person who’s saying the words. So, it sounds like a person.
DANIEL: So, I studied sound symbolism a whole lot back in my degree. One of the theories that was going around was that /u/—Like, when you say /i/ and you say /u/, just try it.
DANIEL And HEDVIG: /i/, /u/, /i/, /u/.
DANIEL: When you’re saying the /i/, everything’s more toward the front of your mouth, toward your teeth. But when you say /u/, it’s back farther in your mouth. It’s called a back vowel.
HEDVIG: Yeah, that’s what the vowels are.
DANIEL: That’s how they are. And it’s dark in there, the further back you go.
BEN: [LAUGHS] The mouth cave.
HEDVIG: Oh, no.
DANIEL: The mouth cave.
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: You’re in the mouth cave. Why not?
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Because…
DANIEL: No. This was speculative even when I was studying it, but it’s one thing. However, the authors also say that /u/ uses lip rounding, and lips are soft, which can help with the softness association.
BEN: I don’t have a better answer than that.
DANIEL: I don’t either. There must be some motivator.
HEDVIG: There must be some motivator.
DANIEL: Something in our brains is going /u/.
BEN: I think it must be primal. Like, it must be a monkey brain thing. The reason I say that is because primates can… Those are the kinds of sounds that you do see chimps and gorillas and orangutans and other sort of higher order primates doing a lot. They have a lot of high, screechy vowels, and they also have a lot of low lip-rounded vowels and that sort of thing.
So, I think our usage of these things as a species predates us as a species. And so, I think it’s going to be really hard to tease apart how we relate to this thing, which is, like, I don’t know, older than certain aspects of our physiology, potentially.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I also wanted to say that you may be overinterpreting here, because it could be that /i/ is associated with brightness and smallness. And therefore, /u/ is associated with all the other things.
BEN: Right.
DANIEL: Oh, that is good.
BEN: Not this, then that kind of thing.
HEDVIG: Right.
DANIEL: Ah, the elimination.
HEDVIG: Like, don’t go digging where there might be nothing.
BEN: No, I want to dig. That’s what this show is for. [DANIEL LAUGHS] I watched a lot of TikTok, and a lot of podcasts are just people sitting around talking about pop tarts. So, if I want to dig into the [LAUGHS] linguistic physiology of monkeys, I’m going to do it.
DANIEL: We’re not academic.
BEN: [LAUGHS] That’s your job.
HEDVIG: To the listeners, this paper is really cool. It has a lot of really cool coauthors. One of them, Bonnie McLean, also has her own website and wrote up a little bit more public-friendly summary of that paper.
BEN: Oh, that’s nice.
HEDVIG: All of the sounds are up. You can quite easily access them and listen to them and test it on your friends and family, maybe if you want.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: The map illustration that they made with the different vowels, where they show what’s associated with where is also quite easy to understand. So, I think this is an A++ for accessible thing. It’s like a research question that’s accessible. It’s excessively presented. It’s transparent. I think it’s right.
BEN: [APPLAUSE] Good jumping.
DANIEL: Six thumbs-up.
HEDVIG: Good job.
DANIEL: All right. And thank you, Hedvig, for bringing it to the show.
[RELATED OR NOT THEME]
HEDVIG: [IMITATES THE RELATED OR NOT THEME]
BEN: So much distortion. Just all the distortion.
DANIEL: It’s so good.
BEN: They ran it through a distorter, and then they were like, “Let’s do that again.” [LAUGHS] And then, did it like three more times.
HEDVIG: Yeah. I think it’s excellent.
DANIEL: That theme song brought to us by Hugh S. It’s our Related or Not theme song in which Ben sings.
BEN: Now, Daniel, you told me there was more than one.
DANIEL: We will. We will be getting to those.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Ben, the actual riff that you made wasn’t Smoke on the Water. It wasn’t what I thought it was, which was In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. It’s actually Sunshine of Your Love by cream.
BEN: That’s it
HEDVIG: [SINGING] Sunshine of your love.
DANIEL: Almost perfect.
BEN: Yes. That’s like…
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: All right. Our first one is from Andy from Logophilius via email. “This could be a fun Related or Not to discuss. JET, the thing air force aces fly, and JET, intense black. Related or not?”
BEN: Oh.
DANIEL: And he even made a bet as to which ones of us will get it.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Okay. First, we guess. Then, you tell us how he thought we’d guess. And then, we get points, and he gets point. Because he gets point on how correct he is in predicting us.
DANIEL: That’s right.
BEN: What were the stakes? He said he bet. What did he bet?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: I don’t know. But from now on, [BEN LAUGHS] if you give us a Related or Not, you have to say who’s going to get it right.
BEN: Yeah. And you’ve got to put stakes up. I want to know, either I’ll embarrass myself or you embarrass yourself. This is the game.
DANIEL: No fair. I always embarrass myself. Now, my guess was I bet related, because a jet is, of course, when you squirt something through a nozzle, through a nozzle. Jets fly because they propel stuff. And why jet black? Because ink is black, and ink can be propelled through an octopus. Yes, octopus is definitely the unifying sense here.
BEN: Wow. Really, I am going to be surprised if Andy from Logophilius put money down on that shit.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: “I think Daniel’s going to talk about octopi.”
DANIEL: Yeah, you didn’t see that one coming, did you, Andy?
BEN: I think not related simply for red herring sort of… I’ll be perfectly honest. I’ve spent my entire life thinking, when I say the word JET BLACK, I have been referring to the black that is on a stealth bomber or a SR-71 Blackbird or some other stealth plane.
HEDVIG: Oh, they’re black?
DANIEL: Interesting realisation.
BEN: Yeah. So, stealth planes are typically coated in this black, rubbery stuff that’s designed to absorb radar rather than reflect it back to its source. But because I’ve been thinking that, I’m going to do Opposite Day. I’m going to be like: I bet it’s like some Germanic thing of, like, /xrɜːt/. And then we’ve been saying it differently, and then it’s just a whole completely different thing.
DANIEL: Okay. Very good. Hedvig?
HEDVIG: Well, as the Germanic /xrɜːt/ representative on this show, JET is a short word.
DANIEL: It is.
HEDVIG: Short words are suspicious.
BEN: [LAUGHS] This just in, folks.
DANIEL: Why are short words suspicious?
HEDVIG: Because you increase the likelihood of accidental similarity. You have so few characters to vary. And as words get into the language, they tend to get shorter and shorter, and they’ll accidentally sound alike, because they’ve been shortened to /nem/ or something.
DANIEL: There’s only so many words possible…
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: There’s only so many words possible. However, JET has that hard ass /ʤ/ thing that English has that’s really hard and I have to really pay attention to. I think I’ll never… Fuck, I married an Englishman. I’ve been living in an English country. Like, I’m not going to get better than this.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Yeah. Like, this is it. What you see is what you get. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: As good as I am now is as good as I am getting at English…
DANIEL: This is your final form.
Hedvig: …in my life. That is hard.
BEN: Are you saying that it’s really hard for you not to be, like, YET?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. That’s totally understandable.
HEDVIG: It’s like SHEEP and CHEAP, and BEER and BEAR, and WINE and VINE. They’re hard.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: They’re hard.
BEN: Yeah. Fair enough.
DANIEL: Classic.
HEDVIG: So, short, but with a spicy consonant.
BEN: Oh. Have we done WINE and VINE?
HEDVIG: Oh.
DANIEL: I’ll put that on the list.
HEDVIG: All right. It’s on the list.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Anyway, please.
HEDVIG: Anyway, it’s short, but it’s got one of those spicy English hard ones for me, which is like, mm.
DANIEL: Yup.
HEDVIG: They’re special to me. So, if you share those, if you share that sound, that means something. But I’m still going to go with too short, not related.
DANIEL: Okay. I said related. Hedvig and Ben said not related. Andy from Logophilius guessed that Hedvig and Daniel will get it, and Ben won’t.
HEDVIG: Oh.
BEN: Ooh. So, we’re already wrong.
DANIEL: The answer is, they are not related.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Hedvig gets it!
BEN: Get in, son!
DANIEL: And Ben gets it!
HEDVIG: Me and Andy.
DANIEL: So, jet black comes from a stone called jet stone. It’s still called that.
BEN: Oh, wow.
DANIEL: So, once upon a time, there was this town in Asia Minor called Gages. They had black stones, and this was the stone of Gages. It was gagātēs in Greek. Gagātēs.
BEN: Is that related to GARNET or GANNET?
DANIEL: No, they aren’t related though. This worked its way into French as gaiet, from gagātēs to gaiet, and then in English as JET.
BEN: Oh, literally, the exact thing that I said was going to happen is what happened.
DANIEL: It shortened down. Yup. And then the word JET, like squirting water through a nozzle, comes from Proto-Indo-European, *(H)yeh₁-, to throw or impel. Can I say that this suggests a strong connection to YEET?
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: The JET and YEET are related.
HEDVIG: Yeah, fair enough.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Okay.
BEN: Oh, that’s fun.
DANIEL: Good job, you two. Thanks to Andy from Logophilius on that one. Teal Sea on our Discord. Related or not, HOLSTER and HOLDER?
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Wait. The username is TLC?
DANIEL: Teal Sea. That’s teal, the color plus sea, the body of water.
HEDVIG: Oh, I thought it was like, [SINGING] “No, I don’t want no scrub.”
BEN: [SINGING] A scrub is a guy that can’t get no love from me. Hangin’ out the passenger side.
HEDVIG: [SINGING] Hangin’ out the passenger side
HEDVIG AND BEN: [SINGING] Trying to holla at me.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: That’s very good.
DANIEL: While we’re off track, how many -ER and -STER pairs can you think of? There’s… a SPINNER is not the same thing as a SPINSTER.
BEN: Isn’t it?
DANIEL: Not really. No.
HEDVIG: Oh, god.
BEN: Yeah. No, it is. That’s why we call them spinsters, because they were spinning.
HEDVIG: Spinning at the wheel.
BEN: Like, they spun wool.
HEDVIG: Yeah, they’re home making wool.
DANIEL: They are related. But what’s the difference between a SPINNER and a SPINSTER? Why are they two words?
HEDVIG: Why are they two words? Because the one is more like an agent, like -TER, like it’s a perso… I don’t know. It’s probably an agenty thing.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: HUCKSTER, HUCKER.
DANIEL: Versus a HUCKER. [LAUGHS] If we’re talking about hucking things, there’s a LOBBER and a LOBSTER. Those are different.
BEN: I don’t think that’s a thing.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: No. I’m out of -STER endings.
DANIEL: Well, I did think of one. During the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, there was a term that arose: a BANKSTER.
BEN: Oh, no, I don’t recall that.
DANIEL: There were BANKERS, but then there were BANKSTERS. People referred to BANKSTERS if they wanted to impute some kind of crime.
BEN: Yeah, right.
HEDVIG: MOBSTER, PRANKSTER.
BEN: Oh!
DANIEL: Oh, a PRANKER is not the same as a PRANKSTER! So, what’s the difference? Ooh, interesting.
BEN: But see, on a lot of these things, I don’t think a PRANKER is a thing. I don’t think a MOBBER is a th…
HEDVIG: I think the PRANKSTER is a repetitive, like, that person does that all the time.
DANIEL: Oh, okay. Frequentative. Hmm.
HEDVIG: Whereas you had one scene, and you ask like, “Who’s the prankee and who’s the pranker?”, you could point.
BEN: Oh, okay. I gotcha.
DANIEL: Interesting. Interesting.
HEDVIG: MOBSTER. I don’t know what a MOBBER is. Sorry.
BEN: Yeah, neither do I.
DANIEL: Okay. Well, let’s go back to HOLSTER and HOLDER. They clearly describe the same thing, but are they related or is there a difference?
BEN: I’m going to let Hedvig go first on this one because I jumped in on the last one.
HEDVIG: I’m sorry. What is a HOLDER?
BEN: Something that holds something. Like, a candleholder or a…
HEDVIG: A candleholder.
Ben: …cupholder.
HEDVIG: HOLSTER is, like, for guns.
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Like, it’s on your hips.
BEN: Yeah. The thing you wear on your hip when you’re a cowboy.
DANIEL: And not candles.
BEN: I’m going to go with not related. I think that this is one of those, like, it’s so close that it can’t be a thing.
DANIEL: Okay. Not related. Hedvig? Maybe I’ll do mine. I said yeah, sure, let’s make it related because I have this connection in my head between -ER and -STER.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: What do you say, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: I don’t know. I think -ER could be inanimate. -STER is more repetitive and animate. I don’t know.
BEN: You’ve got to know. That’s the point. That’s what the game is. You’ve got to make a call, man.
HEDVIG: Wait, what the call is…
BEN: Are they related or not? It’s the name of the game.
DANIEL: Do we need to do the song again?
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Well, I think the -ER is related to the -ER, and then the -STER is the new part.
DANIEL: Oh, okay.
BEN: Yeah. So, you are saying related then. So, holder and holster are related through the hold.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Through the er to er.
HEDVIG: No, through the er.
BEN: Okay. The hol is unrelated.
HEDVIG: Er and ster are related through the er.
BEN: The hol is unrelated, folks!
DANIEL: Very good. Thank you. All right. Ben, you’re right. But, Hedvig, you win. You win twice.
BEN: Oh, what?
DANIEL: Because -STER is connected to ISTRIAN. That’s Proto-Germanic. It was an agent suffix, which was the same as -ER. It was just the feminine form of -ER, which is why spinsters are women.
BEN: Okay. So, what’s the HOL- thing then?
DANIEL: That one is the part that’s different. HOLDER is, of course, from HOLD. But the HOL- in HOLSTER is a different word. Something like hide. Something hidden which, you know, you might keep your gun a bit hidden. And so, there we go. Not related. Thanks to Teal Sea for that one.
BEN: Man, I’m killing this today.
DANIEL: Last one. aengryballs gave me the idea for this one, but I’ve changed it. I’m going to give you three pairs of words about money. Only one of the pairs is related.
BEN: Okay. Find the confederates.
DANIEL: Roman DENARIUS and English DOLLAR. That’s one.
BEN: Wait. Oh, sorry. DENARIUS and DOLLAR. Yeah, gotcha. Yeah.
DANIEL: Number two, Indian RUPEE and the Russian RUBLE. And number three, the Chinese YUAN and the Japanese YEN.
HEDVIG: I happen to know some… Can you say A again?
DANIEL: DENARIUS, that’s Roman. And DOLLAR, that’s English.
HEDVIG: Okay. I think I know these.
BEN: I’ve got a guess as well.
DANIEL: Okay. Hedvig, I’m going to go to you first, because you haven’t been first yet.
HEDVIG: Okay. Well, I know that C is related.
BEN: Okay. That was going to be my answer as well.
HEDVIG: I think their signs are… They’re both related to the Kaori Xiao.
DANIEL: Yup.
HEDVIG: They have a little thing that looks like they have two little feet or little clam feet that walk around.
BEN: I was also going to say C for the reason that a huge amount of Japanese culture is adopted Chinese culture, as in like… We’re talking many hundreds of years ago. When I was traveling around Japan, a lot of tour guides were like, “Eh, we mostly just stole everything off China, like, many centuries ago, and then we just kind of made it our own.” So, I’m just going to work from those tour guides and go that’s what I think happened.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Tokyo means eastern capital and Beijing is northern capital. It’s like they’re all something together at some points in time. We’re massively simplifying.
DANIEL: You are both correct.
BEN: Yay.
HEDVIG: Rubles and Rupees?
DANIEL: RUBLES and RUPEES are not related. RUPEE comes from Sanskrit, rūpya, which is wrought silver, whereas RUBLE is from old Russian, something like to chop or to cut, which suggests that maybe they were chopping coins out of this lump of silver or something like that. Not related. Also, DENARIUS and DOLLAR, not related. Since you both got this right, I’m taking it to a tiebreaker.
BEN: Ooh. Fun, fun, fun.
DANIEL: aengryballs wanted to know, is RUBY related to either RUPEE or RUBLE?
HEDVIG: If it’s related to either… Okay, so now we know that the RUBLE one has to do with cut and that the RUPEE one has to do with silver.
BEN: Silver. I’m going to go no.
HEDVIG: Ben, I’m going to coach you. Don’t get distracted by the /b/, the ruby.
BEN: I’m entirely distracted by the fact that RUBY is an English word. [LAUGHS] I don’t believe that Sanskrit or Russian necessarily calls a ruby a RUBY.
HEDVIG: I can help you by telling you that Swedish call it RUBIN.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: But we’re also Germanics. So, like, you don’t need to care.
BEN: Yeah. Exactly.
DANIEL: Okay. So, Ben says not related. Is that right?
BEN: Correct.
DANIEL: And, Hedvig, are you going to go yes, related or nah?
HEDVIG: So, the game is related to both.
DANIEL: Either one, or is it completely on its own?
HEDVIG: Neither. I think it has something to do with red.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: You are both the champions. [LAUGHS] You both win the tiebreaker, and therefore you are legends. It comes from Latin, rubinus lapis, the red stone, which is interesting that in Swedish, it’s rubin. That’s direct from Latin.
BEN: There you go.
HEDVIG: Yay.
DANIEL: Nice going, you two. And thanks to aengryballs for giving us that one. If you want to send us a Related or Not question, we’re trying to get through them all, we’re having fun doing it, so thanks for sending them, just send them to hellobecauselanguage.com. We’ll get to them as soon as we can.
[INTERVIEW BEGINS]
DANIEL: We’re talking to Dr Anatoly Liberman, Linguist at the University of Minnesota, blogger under the name of the Oxford Etymologist and author of the new book, Origin Uncertain: Unraveling the Mysteries of Etymology.
Anatoly, thanks so much for coming on the show and having a chat with me. It’s a real honor to have you.
ANATOLY LIBERMAN: Well, it’s my pleasure really.
DANIEL: Let’s talk about the title, Origin Uncertain, as it’s abbreviated, orig uncert. We see it a lot in dictionaries and etymologies. Sometimes, it’s just there, the trail goes cold. You can’t go back any farther. When that happens, as an etymologist, what do you do?
ANATOLY: Yes. Well, first of all, let me tell you that there is a cornucopia of such words, origin uncertain, unknown, unclear, debated and so on. Etymologists are very clever when it comes to concealing their ignorance. It is uncertain, because etymology means origin, and the origin of most things is unknown. It all depends how far you want to go.
If you want to know why it is raining now, for example, where I am now, it’s raining, it’s very easy to explain because there are clouds and everything is fine. There is no great explanation. But when you begin to discuss it all in detail, why it sometimes rains in the morning, and why it’s more often not, then you have all kinds of questions. Words are sometimes very old, and they appeared from nowhere.
It’s especially true of slang. Everybody knows it, that when you have a slang word, it comes from nowhere. But of course, it does not come from nowhere. It comes from somewhere. Someone always coins a word. That’s how it is. Sometimes, we know where the word started. Sometimes, we know something about it. But especially if you deal with such very ancient words, come, go, get, see, here, they were coined so long ago, there is no way of finding out who coined it, how and what the motivation behind the coinage was. Dictionaries very often stop there. They say, “Oh, here is a word.” They offer a whole list of cognates or read, “That’s what it is in this language, in that language,” which is totally uninteresting. Who wants to know how it is in German, French or Spanish, if you want to know the origin of an English word? But when it comes to the root, so to speak, why this root? Then, we’re in trouble.
So, we usually don’t know the origin of any word, if you want to go, as they say, the whole hog, if you want to discuss the beginning of beginning. That’s why dictionaries are so sly or so coy about the origins of the word. But sometimes, it’s fine. We know where the word comes from, or at least part of it. So, it doesn’t surprise me at all.
DANIEL: One thing I’ve noticed from reading Origin Uncertain is that I used to have the idea that you’re trying to find a thread that can take you back. But no, you’re talking about finding a web. You say, “Okay, here’s a word. It belonged in this system. We think it went back to there. But wait, if that were the case, we should find other words in similar languages that had the same word and we don’t. So, now we have to lean away from that and go over here.” This was what I noticed with TIP, where you had to find not only where TIP comes from, but also a whole range of words that have to do with tippling, and being tipsy, and tipping things over and tipping a coin into somebody’s hand. It’s a whole neighborhood.
ANATOLY: Correct. If it is a word which has a root and a suffix or a prefix, you try to find the meaning of the root. Of course, very often you are misled. You think the tipsy is because you tip over. It may be true, it may be not. It’s what people think is true. Really, very few etymologies are final. Some of them are and some of them are not.
Well, let me give an example. When something goes wrong, someone falls down, children especially say OUCH. It seems that this OUCH is a natural sound that one makes. No, it’s extremely artificial. When one is in pain, one begins, as they say, generally in the United States, to holler. I don’t know whether to holler is American or not, but it’s H-O-L-L-E-R. One begins to holler, [MAKES PAINFUL SOUNDS] that nobody says the genteel and nice OUCH.
It’s probably even a borrowing, a word borrowed from Dutch. That is a word that came from another country and then was assimilated and became English. Who invented it there in the Dutch-speaking world? Again, there are some ideas, and whether they’re right or wrong, nobody knows. If there is a problem with the word OUCH, you understand what problems there are with everything else, especially when it is slang.
I have a folder about all kinds of words meaning police detective. Such words usually come from the criminal world. How do you find the root there? There is a great book in German written in the 19th century about this language, and there are many books in English, but they say something yes, or perhaps it’s a gypsy, that is Romania, as they say now, and perhaps not. So, when you really come to the beginning, you’re always in doubt.
DANIEL: Well, I guess I want to take it to a question by our listener, Diego, now, who asks “How many unknown origin words do we still use in English, like boy and dog? And do we have more or less compared to other languages?” I guess what you’re saying is it’s a matter of timescale.
ANATOLY: Yes, indeed. I had the same question about 25 or 30 years ago when I decided to have a list of all words about which it is certain dictionaries, origin unknown, uncertain, debated and so on. One of those formulas which I have already mentioned. There are about a thousand of them, about which dictionaries say “origin unknown.” But it doesn’t mean that they know the origin of the words whose origin is known. They only know something about them. Origin unknown means that people know practically nothing about them.
As to the number, lots, lots. You may say to your listener, Diego, that there are lots. My ambition, many years ago, decades ago, was that I should write exactly such a dictionary. A dictionary of only such words whose origin is debatable, and known, and so on and so on. My Analytic Dictionary, which is an introduction, is all about such words. The most irritating thing is that the most common words, boy, girl and so on, are obscure. As to the other languages, of course, I cannot say anything definite, but I know it from German, Scandinavian, Dutch and the Romance languages, approximately the same proportion.
DANIEL: Okay. Let me take it then to a similar question by James, who asks, “When words have an unknown origin…” I suppose we’re talking about the thousand words in your folder, “…are there common but false origins attributed to those words? People assume it came from X, even though it clearly came from some other unclear place. Are there degrees of unknown?”
ANATOLY: Of course, the whole etymology is about this. They are practically only opinions. Once you learn the most basic things, that is the word is indeed from French or from the underworld or something like that, then it’s a matter of opinion. If you look up a word in a really good dictionary, good etymological dictionary, because a real dictionary, even like Webster’s or even the great and incomparable OED, is not an etymological dictionary. It’s a dictionary only which provides etymologies. But if you look it up in an etymological dictionary, you simply find a list of opinions. “Some people think so. Some people think so.” The editor sometimes says, “This opinion seems better than that one.” And that’s it. That means that there’s probably no way of finding the answer.
But sometimes, just sometimes, you have an inspiration. You think that is really where the origin of the word is. I’ve had it a few times. That is, I’ve discovered etymologies which I think are beautiful, which doesn’t mean that anyone will agree with my etymology. Etymology is a branch of scholarship which is all about disagreement and debate.
DANIEL: Then, tell me an example of an etymology that you think you probably got it right, but which might be controversial.
ANATOLY: It’s the word WIFE whose origin is unknown. The problem with word WIFE is, of course, it meant woman. Today, it means spouse, but it was woman. The German word, weib, means just woman. There is a volume of opinions. One can write a book, 300 pages, only about what has been said about the word, because the word is so basic and everybody wants to know it. But there is one problem. And if you don’t answer this question, then you haven’t answered anything.
The word, weib, which is German, is neuter. How is it possible, that is to those listeners who don’t know anything about genders, masculine, feminine and neuter? English has no genders. German does. French has two, Romance languages have two. And Latin had three, masculine, feminine and neuter. Now, the word for woman should be feminine. That’s so obvious that there is nothing to discuss. And yet it’s neuter, it’s “das Weib”. It was neuter everyone.
I’ve looked over all the hypotheses and found out what I very often find out, that the most important thing is to try to discover what everyone has said about a word, which is very difficult, because the literature is scattered. That’s why I produced that huge bibliography of English etymology. And now if you want to know the origin of the word, you look it up there and you find that someone said something about the word in the gentleman’s magazine 300 years ago, and someone said it in another journal, notes and queries 100 years ago. I’m very proud that now you can look it up. But it does take time to look it up.
Anyway, I thought that the word WIFE was a collective word with the root “we” and the suffix, “ba”. And that the word went back to the time when the word for women was a collective word. So, the word I thought meant all the females together. That’s why it’s neuter. It’s still neutered, but it makes no sense. Is this etymology correct? I have no doubt. I have written a long article about it. I have not been able to see any reaction to it. But no one said no, which is a very good thing. So, perhaps, it’s right. If it’s right, I’m tremendously proud. If it’s wrong, I won’t weep.
DANIEL: Okay. Wow. On that note, Anne has asked us a question. “I might ask how useful spelling is as a clue to an English word’s origin, whether it sometimes leads down the wrong path?”
ANATOLY: English spelling is the stupidest spelling in the world.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] You’re a spelling reform advocate, aren’t you?
ANATOLY: Well, whether you’re interested or not, I’m the President of the English Spelling Society, and I’m very proud of this unpaid job, because I think that English spelling should be reformed. English spelling is tremendously, maddeningly misleading. So, if you want to know something about the origin of the word, it’s the last thing that you should consult. Unless it is a word like big, three letters… Well, big is big, and that’s a correct spelling. But the moment you begin to deal with other words, forget about how the word is spelled. It’s probably misleading, wrong and gives you no clue to where the word came from.
DANIEL: But surely you must feel a sense of gratification that we have, if not a spelling system that preserves the sounds of words, a spelling system that preserves the etymology of much of our words.
ANATOLY: Well, that is something which should be discussed. Etymology is something which is for scholars and not for speakers. I am not sure, for example, that the verb, to knock, K-N-O-C-K, really needs the initial letter K only because once upon a time, it was indeed knocken and so on. Etymology may or should be preserved in some cases when it is reasonable. But I assure that the word commission needs two M and two S’s. Even Italians have the word comonisto with one M. And it’s a Romance language. So, some changes I think would be very welcome.
DANIEL: I want to tackle some questions that we’ve had a hard time with. We have a game that we play called Related or Not. And we, in our own simplistic way, try to say, “Okay, do these words come from the same source or is the similarity merely coincidental? Now, one day, we tackled SCAPULA and SCALPEL, and we said not related because SCAPULA ties back to Proto-Indo-European, *skep, to cut and to scrape, whereas SCALPEL ties back to a different root, *skel, to cut. But one of them is *scep and one of them is *skel and they both mean to cut. Are they really that different?
ANATOLY: Well, be very careful when it comes to Indo-European. Indo European was spoken so long ago that nobody has heard it. Nobody will ever hear it. This is a matter of reconstruction. In good dictionaries, all Indo-European forms are given with an asterisk and that means be careful. In the starry sky of etymology, it is very easy to break one’s leg! Also, when you have those roots, those are also a matter of reconstruction. Don’t be so certain that those rules exist.
You are quite right. Those two words may be called unrelated if they go back different roots. But you can cut off the last letter or the last sound and you will have the first three letters which are the same and you will say this is the root and the letter is only a suffix and then they will be related.
It’s really a matter of reconstruction, how deep your reconstruction is. The words are not related from our point of view, but perhaps, they were related once upon a time. We don’t even know what once upon a time means. We don’t know when it was. 2,000 years ago, it was certainly not Indo-European. It was already Germanic. So, what, 3,000 years ago? That’s rather long ago. Or even 4,000 years ago? You suddenly find yourself in archaeology rather than in linguistics. But the game is fine. It’s a very clever game. You told me about this game before and I like the idea and I like the game, and it’s something that’s very entertaining.
DANIEL: Okay, good. I used to say that sociolinguistics was the gateway drug to linguistics. I think that along with that, maybe etymology might be an apt gateway drug for linguistics. It’s intuitive. People like it. It’s interesting.
ANATOLY: They do. You are quite right. People always ask questions about word origins. Any talk on word origins, and you have a full room of people who ask questions. They, of course, always ask the same questions, but that’s fine. That doesn’t matter. They want to know it. If you have a lecture on historical grammar, that won’t attract a crowd. On historical phonetics, no one. But when it comes to word origins, everybody is… Well, everybody, of course, is a great exaggeration, but everybody’s really interested.
DANIEL: You say everybody asks the same questions. What’s the one you get most often?
ANATOLY: It’s usually about slang. At one time, I suddenly became famous because I wrote a long article about the F word. The F word is about the only word that modern speakers use all the time, because the great epithet f…-in’, you can use it about absolutely anything. Not that you may or can, but you do everything from a piece of bread to your computer. Is everything f…- in’? It does not show that people have a very extensive vocabulary. But the origin of the word is interesting, very curious. I’ve written an article about it, and there is an entry in my dictionary about it. At one time, people used to say, “Oh, that’s the guy who described the origin of the F word.” It was a very short-lived fame, but I enjoyed myself five minutes or three minutes of visibility.
DANIEL: And acronyms are never the answer, except for OKAY.
ANATOLY: Oh, no, always wrong. Whenever someone says something, “Such a word is an acronym, whichever word it is, whether it is snob or the F word, always wrong. There are, of course, some words from acronyms. GasCo, Amoco, and so on. There are such words, but who cares?
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Allison has suggested this one, but I wasn’t able to be really sure about it, so I haven’t used it in the game. Maybe you can help me. TEMPLE, the building, and TEMPLE, the part of your face on the side of your forehead.
ANATOLY: Oh, yes, the temples. Yeah.
DANIEL: Oh, yeah.
ANATOLY: It’s one of the most hopeless couple in the world.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Oh, my goodness.
ANATOLY: Nobody knows really whether the words are related or not. As always in etymology, there are two schools. Some people think that they are related and others that they are not related. It’s not even clear whether the root is the same. Because in TEMPLE, the P may be a later insertion. It’s very easy to say ump for um. So, it may be that it’s T-E-M rather than T-M-P for at least for one of those words. They were already clearly associated in Latin. In Latin, the word was used only in the plural, tempora, the temples.
It is possible, of course, and that’s probably what the Romans thought, that the words were the same. The two words were the same. A designated area for a shrine, for a temple, and a designated area or the most vital area where everything’s so important because if you have a wound in the temple, then you are dead. And the temple is your shrine, or as they used to say in the day of romantics, the word which nobody understands today, fane, F-A-N-E. That was a word for a temple. So, they may be related or maybe not and we’ll probably never know the answer. I think that the words are different and simply converged as time went on. But my opinion is just my opinion. I do not have any facts to prove it, and no one does.
DANIEL: Now, it turns out that a wizard has given me a magical time wand, and it allows you to go to a region and time of your choosing, so you can listen into how people use language. I can’t think of anywhere good to go, so I’m going to give it to you. But you only get one go. Where and when?
ANATOLY: It depends upon how tired you are. If you want to walk and walk and walk, then you find yourself in something called Indo-European. You will be disappointed, because every language has dialects. To us, Indo-European is something more or less unified. But of course, people always use different forms. So, you might be disappointed. You think, “Oh, well, this is the source of everything.” No, people just spoke different dialects there. Some people understood one another, others did not. So, you still want to go another mile. This another mile is the origin of language, and that’s a long journey. We don’t know how people started. They probably had something.
You know there are two words here, sound imitative and sound symbolic. Probably all our first words were sound symbolic or sound imitative. And then, you could find yourself among a universe of primordial cries. That’s possible. It sometimes would be useful to reach old English, for example, simply to see what the word was which is now lost, and whose form, we don’t know. But if you really want to go all the way, you won’t, because there is no place to stop. There is no beginning. There are only sources, and there is some foggy bottom somewhere and fog, fog, fog and a swamp. I don’t think there is any beginning. It’s a nice thing to dream of.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] I think so too. But we still got the wand. We could sort out one thing. Is there anything that has just always bugged you that you would just love to sort out for once and for all?
ANATOLY: You cannot imagine how hard the word BUG is for etymologists.
DANIEL: Did you say entomologists??
ANATOLY: Oh, well, yes. [DANIEL LAUGHS] That’s what they always say. They always answer that etymologists are interested in bugs only when there are bugs in their computers. [CHUCKLES] Other than that, no. But that is a mistake that is made from coast to coast in the United States and probably everywhere in the world. This is folk etymology, so to speak. People know about entomology and do not know anything about etymology. So, the words are confused. That’s how many words have come about, the result of confusion. Now, they’re nice, accepted words. So, let us not be too snobbish about our language.
DANIEL: We did have a question a while ago from listener Pontus, affectionately known as Moon-Moon, about folk etymology. We thought that maybe that was a slight on the folk. Some of those folk were pretty clever. And really, the difference between folk etymology and etymology was just certainty and time. How do you think about folk etymology?
ANATOLY: Folk etymology is guesswork. Etymology is also guesswork, but it’s informed guesswork. That’s really the only difference. Folk etymology is when you think that you know the origin of a word because it looks certain. “Oh, that’s probably where the word came from.” No, no, no. I’m sorry to say. “How do you know?” Well, because I know how the word sounded 1,000 years ago, and I know that your etymology is wrong. That is, if I know it. In most cases, I don’t know even that. But if I do, I do.
And so, real etymology is guesswork, but it’s intelligent guesswork. Whereas just folk etymology, they constantly say that’s occurring… It’s not on the F word, but there are other words which are acronyms. That’s folk etymology. It’s sometimes very clever. We owe some words to folk etymology. That is, people think that a certain word has a certain root, if I can say so, garble the word, the garbled version becomes everybody’s version. That’s what you find out from an etymological dictionary, that is something that people thought was true, began to use this form and here you are.
There’s nothing wrong with folk etymology. The term was invented by a German scholar more than a 100 years ago, Volksetymologie. It’s a very interesting thing. Sometimes it’s funny when asparagus is called sparrow grass. Clever, clever. Only that sparrows are not interested in asparagus. And sometimes not, folk etymology is a respectable branch of scholarship.
DANIEL: This is something that has come out for me reading Origin Uncertain. It’s got a ton of great stories, but I ultimately came away much, much less certain about how we know the origins of words. I learned a lot about how you do the work, but I’m much less confident about the outcomes.
ANATOLY: Well, you are quite right. There is a lot of sadness in great wisdom. The more you know, the better you realise what goes wrong. The problem is that in etymology, you can go only that far. And that’s very disappointing. Even when there is a word which is clearly sound imitative or sound symbolic, you cannot be certain of anything. You can more or less say, yes, all those words like SLUSH and SLUM, there is something in SL- which is sound symbolic to an English speaker, though it’s not clear what is wrong with SL-. Or, when you have FLATTER and FLUTTER and FLOW and FLITTER, yes, there is something in FL-. But then, FLUTTER, and especially the FLATTER is not… We don’t even know whether FLATTER is fluttering around someone trying to cajole someone into liking you. It’s not very clear.
But in any case, even if you know something, you don’t know everything. I think it’s also true of everything else in the world. You know enough, but you never know everything. It’s the same in physics and in chemistry. Otherwise, there would have been nothing for scholars to do. A well-solved problem means that you now have another problem, which is deeper than the one that you have solved. That’s not disappointing to me. I think that etymology, like every scholarship, is a road to knowledge and not a cookery book. You probably say COOKERY BOOK and Americans say COOKBOOK, a cookery book of recipes.
DANIEL: And it’s no help picking words that are closer to us. We’ve been talking about getting lost in the mists of time and oh, Proto-Indo-European. But we’ve got words that are 50 years old, and we have the same problem. We just don’t know.
ANATOLY: Quite right. Slang, all slang is such. Words appear from absolutely nowhere. I have dealt with some such words. For example, words for a police detective, I think, is one of such words. And of course, every country has its own words. You may not know these words, because some of them are American, others are British slang, others are Australian slang. They’re all different. There is the word SHAMUS, which is also a police detective. Very little is known about them.
They are not old. You say 50 years old? Yes, maybe 100 years old. In some cases, you know that this word was first recorded, which doesn’t mean that is when it was coined. Recorded in 1928. Did it come from the underworld, from criminals? Is it a mixture of several languages, some German, some English, some French? Quite possible. A word doesn’t have to be old to be unknown. The words BOY and GIRL are Middle English, not Indo-European. But probably slang, both of them. They’re as mysterious as the words you have already mentioned.
DANIEL: Tell me something that you’d like people to know as a result of reading Origin Uncertain, or your other books? Are there any misconceptions that you want to correct? It sounds like we’ve already dealt with some. But what would you say?
ANATOLY: I, first of all, don’t want to tell anyone that that is the be-all-and-end-all of scholarship, and I’m not going to teach anyone anything. I’ve been teaching all my life. I’m very skeptical about the results of teaching. But I would like people to realise how interesting it is to study word origins. How inspiring, how great it is to know these things, how wonderful linguistics is, how much there is to know about words and what a great joy it is to deal with them. Not only to use them, but to play with them, to think about them and to have a whole world which we exploit so cruelly.
We just open our mouths, and words come out of it, and we never think about the miracle. It’s like breathing. You can breathe and you don’t have to know anything about lungs. But once you open a good book on anatomy, yes, that is what you find out. So, the anatomy of language, if someone gets interested in these things after reading my books, I’ll be hugely recompensed for my trouble.
DANIEL: Well, it certainly worked for me. I’ve been having a lot of fun reading your books and finding out more about this language thing that we all do. So, thank you for your incredible work in this area for so long.
ANATOLY: Well, thank you. It’s always a pleasure to speak to those who are interested in what you are interested. It was a great pleasure, has been a great pleasure speaking to you. Thank you very much.
DANIEL: We’ve been talking to Dr Anatoly Liberman, author of Origin Uncertain: Unraveling the Mysteries of Etymology, available now from Oxford University Press. Anatoly, thanks once again for hanging out and chatting with me.
ANATOLY: Thank you.
[INTERVIEW ENDS]
DANIEL: And now, it’s Words of the Week. We got a bunch.
BEN: We do.
DANIEL: The first one, CENTAUR and REVERSE CENTAUR. This is from Cory Doctorow, who, of course, coined or helped to coin the term… or helped to popularise the term, ENSHITTIFICATION, which was our Word of the Year, last year.
HEDVIG: I’ve been telling so many people about ENSHITTIFICATION lately, by the way, because…
DANIEL: Yup.
Hedvig: …like, people who aren’t on the internet at all. We were in a lecture room the other day, and a guest was giving a lecture, and the person who’s hosting it was like, “I can’t get the computer to work. I can’t get the projector to work. This used to work in the past. It’s not working now. What is going on?” It’s because the IT department has installed some sort of new fancy thing and it’s all [MAKES A DISGUSTED SOUND]
DANIEL: Enshittified.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, Cory Doctorow has described a lot of the situations we find ourselves in, definitely, and he’s coined a lot of terms for them. So, AI is sometimes a centaur, but sometimes it’s a reverse centaur. My car is sometimes a centaur and sometimes a reverse centaur. So, a CENTAUR is when the human is on top of the system supported by strong horsey legs.
HEDVIG: Oh, I like this.
BEN: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Those horsey legs are very good at what they do. They’re doing stuff that I’m bad at. So, when I’m driving, my car is always watching to see if I’m getting too close to others. If I start running up on somebody, it goes beep, beep, beep, beep, beep to warn me. Or, when I’m at the light and it goes green, it goes BOOP and it lets me know that it’s time to go. And those are great. Those are centaurs. AI centaurs are really good.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Until they’re not.
DANIEL: Until they become reverse centaurs.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: This is when the system is on top and you have to watch out for its mistakes, which humans aren’t very good at doing. The one thing I will say…
HEDVIG: I like this a lot.
DANIEL: …I’ve never tried Full Self-Driving in my Tesla because it’s not out in Australia yet. But I do use Auto-steer in the car all the time. It makes mistakes sometimes, which I have to watch out for. I’ve got to say, if anything, it’s needlessly deferential to pedestrians and other vehicles.
BEN: That’s not what the pedestrians would say, Daniel.
DANIEL: What pedestrians? Karplunk.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I find that the mistakes are in being too cautious. And then, I have to override to be normal so that I don’t cause trouble. But Doctorow also argues, this is the quote, “The only path to AI profitability lies in reverse centaurs.”
BEN: Yes, that’s true, where you get a bunch of labor taken care of by AI, and then you still need a small number of highly skilled people to be like, “No. No. Still no. Also no.”
DANIEL: Well, that was the thing with GM’s Cruise, which has been abandoned, because it was a self-driving car thing. It killed somebody. And then, the investigation found that for every Cruise vehicle, there was one and a half or two humans watching it, and they were reverse centaurs. Humans just are not good at that.
BEN: I think you could just extend this to the self-checkout in…
HEDVIG: I was going to say exactly that.
BEN: Yeah. This is the exact version of that, where you have one or two people overseeing a whole bunch of machines. But as anybody who has been through the self-checkout knows, those poor humans have to just pinball around that little zone, just problem solving constantly.
DANIEL: Yup.
HEDVIG: A problem will occur and I’m like, “Why would that happen?”, they’re like, “I don’t know…””
BEN: Doop, do, do.
HEDVIG: “…and I don’t care at this point, but this is the solution I know.” I press boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, and then you can go from here. And I’m like, “Okay, great.” I’m curious why that happened, but…
DANIEL: I still adore self-checkout.
BEN: Oh, I’m not saying self-checkouts are bad. What I would say though is that, as with many things like this, it has created harder work for certain people. It has gotten rid of jobs that paid relatively well, at least in a place like Australia. That’s almost certainly not true in America, I’m sure. Being a till person is probably a pretty cruddy, cruddy, cruddy minimum wage job.
DANIEL: They’re reverse centaurs.
BEN: But having a minimum wage job is better than nothing. Anyway, point being, yeah, reverse centaur is a wonderful, if somewhat complicated, [LAUGHS] evocative imagery to try and convey how this works. I think it’s quite jargony, but I think for the people in that world, for those of us who think about AI and its role and stuff, it’s a really helpful mental heuristic about, which one of the two is working.
DANIEL: I think so.
HEDVIG: I think it’s good recognising that there’s stuff humans are good at, and there is stuff computers are good at and there are things that they’re there for tasks that should be allocated based on that, based on our ability to perform accurately on those tasks. When I see people, my colleagues, doing tasks where I’m like, “You’re renaming files, or you’re sanity checking that all your file names are the…? We could do a script like…” You don’t… But there comes a certain cutoff. There’s some tasks are worth doing manually for a certain amount of objects, and then you want to automate it. So sometimes, I step in a little bit too early, perhaps because I get so excited by the idea of solving something.
BEN: Randall Munroe famously has a great comic about this on XKCD. It’s like: you multiply the amount of time by the thing, by the thing, by the thing. But then invariably nearly all of us just happily spend four hours trying to make it work for a task that would take one.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Exactly. I saw someone say like, “Oh, this would take you 10 hours. I’ve written a script that can do it, but it’ll take it 10 years to run through that script.” And it’s like, “Yes, but it’ll do it automatically. It’ll be so nice.”
BEN: [LAUGHS] “I made a little robot that can do the work for me.”
HEDVIG: “I made a little robot.”
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: It’s so satisfying. But I really like the centaur thing. In our department, we have a group which… I’m going to get it right. The abbreviation says, CALC, Computer Assisted Language Comparison. I think I’m going to double check that. I got a Computer Assistant Language Comparison. Yes! I got it right.
DANIEL: Nice.
HEDVIG: They like to use the term “computer assisted” for the things they do. So, they’re like, “We’re building tools and software that can help historical linguists do things, but we still have an input and an oversight by humans.” Instead of saying computational language comparison, which would basically mean the same thing, they’ve opted for the term “computer assisted” to be like, “That’s the leggies. We’re still on top.”
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: That’s the horsey legs. I feel like just bringing up the point of: instead of SANITY CHECK, maybe REALITY CHECK…
HEDVIG: Ah, okay. Yup.
Daniel: …I just feel like doing that. Okay. So, next one. This one was suggested by James on Discord. It’s WANKPANZER. What could a wankpanzer be?
BEN: I don’t know what this is. A wanktank?
DANIEL: Yes, it is.
HEDVIG: Oh, you mean like it’s an army vehicle…
DANIEL: Okay, you’re on the right track.
BEN: I thought it might have been, you go into one of the vehicles for a little bit of private alone time.
HEDVIG: I have one time made out in a vehicle like that.
BEN: In a tank?
DANIEL: That’s hot.
HEDVIG: I was told later that it wasn’t technically a tank. It was like, they have a…
BEN: Oh, like an armored personnel tank?
HEDVIG: Yeah, something like that. But it looked like…
BEN: Cool. [DANIEL LAUGHS] That’s still really cool.
HEDVIG: My boyfriend was doing his military service in Sweden, and there was family and friends visit, and we got to visit, and I got to go inside a tank and I was like, “It’d be really cool if we kissed in a tank, because then I can tell people I kissed in a tank.” [LAUGHS]
BEN: That’s awesome.
DANIEL: And now, you’re telling people.
HEDVIG: It was so uncomfortable.
DANIEL: Achievement unlocked.
HEDVIG: It’s so uncomfortable.
BEN: Very tight. Yeah.
HEDVIG: And a lot of just things sticking out, it’s not comfortable. It’s not fun.
BEN: Okay. So, what is a wankpanzer then?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: This is, as defined by Urban Dictionary — link on the show notes for this episode — “a pointlessly large and overpowered 4×4 vehicle, usually purchased as a boost to driver’s ego, who is likely to have some kind of inferiority complex.” Now, what other names have you heard for massive trucks?
HEDVIG: Okay.
BEN: I know British people call them Chelsea tractors.
DANIEL: Interesting.
BEN: The idea being like wealthy people from Chelsea who don’t have any need for a giant four-wheel drive were driving them around, kind of thing.
DANIEL: Yup, yup.
HEDVIG: I have to say, I feel like we need a bit of a reality check. I live in Europe.
DANIEL: Thank you.
HEDVIG: I live in a relatively big town. It is good for you to not have a huge car if you want to park.
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: Or get anywhere.
BEN: Yeah, it’s funny.
HEDVIG: So, it’s very rare that I see these beasts, actually.
DANIEL: Yeah. Okay.
BEN: Yeah. I would imagine large four-wheel drives in Europe are comparatively rare in urban environments, like, in any kind of urban environment.
HEDVIG: In rural environments, people have them because there’s snow and mud and shit and you need it. But in towns, people don’t have them.
BEN: What have you heard, Daniel? What other… what else do you call…?
DANIEL: I’ve heard YANK TANK.
BEN: Yes, YANK TANK. That’s a very Australian one.
DANIEL: I’ve also heard SUBURBAN ASSAULT VEHICLE, which is fun.
BEN: Oh.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Hmm.
DANIEL: But James has pointed us to word watcher, Nancy Friedman, on her Substack, who has an entry, WANKPANZER or VAHNK-pahntser.
BEN: Yeah, [IN A GERMAN ACCENT] VAHNK-pahntser.
DANIEL: Yeah. She points out the Cybertruck from Tesla, which…
BEN: Oh, yeah.
Daniel: …has been coming out.
BEN: That’s like the Socratic form of the wankpanzer, I would imagine.
DANIEL: It is the platonic wankpanzer. Yes.
HEDVIG: Daniel?
DANIEL: I can’t wait to get a wankpanzer as soon as they’re available in Australia.
HEDVIG: Daniel?
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: You are the only Elon boy I know.
DANIEL: I’m not an Elon boy. I am a Tesla boy.
BEN: [CHUCKLES] You just said you wanted a Cybertruck. I think it makes you a card-carrying Elon boy.
DANIEL: No. I draw a distinction between Elon and Tesla, but we can talk about that.
BEN: No.
HEDVIG: I know you do. I know you do.
BEN: I don’t disagree with that…
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: …necessarily.
HEDVIG: Ben, we know he does.
BEN: What I would argue…
DANIEL: Yes.
Ben: …is that the distinction that separates Tesla from Elon Musk [DANIEL CHUCKLES] absolutely does not apply to the Cybertruck, [DANIEL LAUGHS] which is, in every conceivable way, the facile dump of a turd of an idea of a habitual Peter Pan psychopath.
DANIEL: Interesting.
HEDVIG: And I think it’s possible that a lot of listeners on this show also don’t know that many Tesla fans in person.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. I might be the only one.
HEDVIG: So, I always feel very excited… Because sometimes you’re on the internet and you see people who have a different opinion from you, but you never meet them. But, like, I spend time with you, Daniel.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Here’s one in the wild!
HEDVIG: And so, I feel like sometimes I want to do a little Tesla check in to be like, “Daniel, so how are you faring with the latest stuff?”
DANIEL: Everything that’s been going on. Yes.
HEDVIG: So, the Cybertruck, for example, seems like besides maybe being unsafe or not being bulletproof or something, that it actually can’t go through a… Like, you can’t wash it. It seems like not be a functioning truck.
DANIEL: Oh, okay. There’s a lot of discussion about that. So, full disclosure. I am a Tesla investor. I drive a Tesla. I found that there’s a lot of FUD, which is fear, uncertainty, doubt, being spread about the Cybertruck. Like, “Oh, it gets rusty. Oh, you can’t wash it.” None of those things are true. “Oh. You can’t take it off road.” No, there are videos of it going up canyons and things. It’s a functioning truck.
At first, I thought they were weird. If somebody hates them because they look stupid, I totally get that. That’s totally fine.
HEDVIG: That’s not the thing I hate about it.
BEN: Yeah. That’s not actually my gripe either, believe it or not.
DANIEL: Oh, what’s your gripe?
BEN: I think my gripe is the context that Elon has… If what he wanted to do was design a really… I’m all for big swings when it comes to aesthetics, whether that’s…
DANIEL: Design.
Ben: …film or television or whatever, right?
DANIEL: Yup.
BEN: What the Cybertrunk sort of… Trunk?
DANIEL: Truck.
HEDVIG: [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: Cybertruck represented to me was an acknowledgement that actually very few people use in terms of the total…
HEDVIG: Innovative. Yeah.
Ben: …number of sports utility vehicles sold…
HEDVIG: Oh, my god, 100%.
Ben: …95% of them are not used. So, the fact that it has a relatively nonfunctional bed and all that kind of stuff, that doesn’t fuck with me at all. It’s more like grotesque machismo, tech bro, “I’m going to shoot it with a gun. It’s going to have all of these things.” Here’s what it is. It’s the drum and bass of cars, which is to say, if you were to remove all of the people around the thing who are the most vocal supporters of the thing, the thing would actually be pretty cool. Drum and bass is actually pretty great. I love drum and bass. And then, you go to a drum and bass gig, and you are surrounded by drum and bass fans and your opinion of drum and bass changes substantially.
HEDVIG: I think it’s interesting to have a new shape of car.
BEN: Yeah, 100%.
HEDVIG: I think that cars all look the same. I don’t understand people who are like, “Ooh, that car looks bad.” They’re all streamlined. They’re all black, white or silver.
BEN: There’s little creasy lines on them everywhere.
HEDVIG: They look very identical. I think that’s because they’ve reached some peak and they can’t get out of it. Back in the day, in the 1970s or something, cars had different silhouettes, and you could tell what a car looked like based on the silhouette. You can’t do that anymore. So, that’s fun. I love that.
I am not a driver, but I think that having everything on touchscreen seems bad. I think people have muscle memory associated with physical buttons that they push, and sticks and stuff. I think that reaction time of that motor thing is faster than anything that has to go through, “Oh, I clicked on a new menu. I want to reverse,” or whatever it is. I think more things need to be tactile to be safe.
DANIEL: There’s an argument.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Anyway, back to wankpanzer. Can I ask about PANZER for a second?
DANIEL: Sure. It’s the German tank, right?
HEDVIG: No, no, no. But, Ben, we have to acknowledge that we’re in the slightly shitting-on-Daniel side.
DANIEL: Okay. Well, I roll pretty deep in the Tesla community.
BEN: [LAUGHS] “I’m on the forums.”
DANIEL: I’m really there. I will say that, yes, there is an element of toxic fandom, but there’s also a lot of us who, A: love Tesla, B: are pretty intense greenies and that’s why we liked Tesla in the first place. C: are frequently dismayed by, and in fact, can’t stand Elon. It is a substantial part of the community.
BEN: I have this mental picture of you up the back of a drum and bass gig chin stroking, [DANIEL LAUGHS] and just quietly talking to people and be like, “Listen, man, that guy over there on speed who is just freaking everyone out, he doesn’t represent us, man. It’s fine.”
DANIEL: That argument is a tough sell to say. “Elon doesn’t represent us.” That’s a tough sell.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: But as for me, the reason I like the design of the Cybertruck is, A: it’s kind of cool design. B: it reminds me of Atari Battlezone. Do you remember that game?
BEN: I do. Yeah.
DANIEL: Nobody’s making that comparison. But that’s what it reminds me of it. It’s weird, and it’s so stupid and it makes me laugh.
BEN: It’s the most evocative for me of a warthog. Not the animal, the car from Halo.
DANIEL: Oh, right. Well, I don’t care if people decide to make fun of my car and my tiny penis. I will [BEN LAUGHS] take all that unpleasantness.
BEN: [IN A GERMAN ACCENT] I will drive my wankpanzer.
DANIEL: I will drive my wankpanzer, and I am going to name it the wankpanzer, by the way, and I will do it knowing that I am ensuring the safety of me, my family, the other people around me and the planet.
BEN: So, really quickly, Hedvig, as the closest to a German speaker that we have…
BEN: Sure. Yeah.
Hedvig: …the PANZER in panzer, wankpanzer and then obviously PANZER meant tank for Germans starting around like…
HEDVIG: Well, panzerwagen.
BEN: Right.
HEDVIG: Same as Swedish. Panzerwagen.
BEN: Because PANZER means armor, correct?
HEDVIG: Yes, exactly. There are other words for armor too. But PANZER is one of the things that means armor.
BEN: So, here’s my question. Does it also mean PANTHER?
HEDVIG: No.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: What is it?
HEDVIG: Panther in Swedish? Google Translate…?
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: It does seem to mean armor from Middle High German, panzier, and it’s related to belly. It’s armor for your belly.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Yeah. So, German is panthère.
BEN: Oh, so they pronounce the TH kind of thing.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
HEDVIG: The reason I ask is because I’ve always… I’ve now come to realise, had the wrong association in my head, because German tanks, especially during World War II, were all named after big cats. There was tigers, and leopards and all these sorts of things.
DANIEL: Oh.
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: And so, I had thought that panther was their ultra… All tanks of panthers. But then there’s the tiger panther, and the leopard panther and the lion panther.
DANIEL: Interesting. It doesn’t seem to be related.
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: No.
HEDVIG: No.
BEN: Oh, there we go.
HEDVIG: No.
BEN: That was a fun little digression, brought to you by Ben.
HEDVIG: I can recommend a really… You know how in Japan you have very niche topic animes and manga?
BEN: Yes, I do.
HEDVIG: Yeah? There’s one called pantsu-pantsu, which I can recommend. [Hedvig has the name a little bit wrong here. Actual name: Girls und Panzer —D.]
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Which is imagine a post-apocalyptical world where all kids go to weird… It’s like Pokémon. You see things, but you don’t know what’s going on. They’re all on board huge ships, the schools are.
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Their favorite sport to do, like you would do cricket or something, is to play panzerwagen war.
BEN: Oh, like little baby wagons?
HEDVIG: Yeah. So, they all get into their little wagons, and they play against each other. And then, each school is like a stereotype of a country. So, the default school is like Japanese, and then they play against the Americans, [BEN LAUGHS] who are all tanned and blonde and blue eyed.
BEN: Yeah, of course. Buff, bronze, and bitching.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And then, they play against the British, who are always drinking tea and having cucumber sandwiches, etc.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] Cute.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Anime is never a subtle art, is it? There’s always someone just…
HEDVIG: No.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: They’re just like straight up… You drink tea, don’t you?
BEN: We get to the article, national stereotypes. Tea, cucumber. “Stop there, boys! We’ve got what we need.”
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yeah. Anyway, it’s pretty fun. It’s called pantsu-pantsu.
BEN: Okay. Come check it out.
DANIEL: Next one…
BEN: Next.
Daniel: …our last one, is suggested to us by Louise via email, SPORULATE. That is to say, to produce spores, especially by multiple fission. But why is this the Word of the Week?
BEN: Can we…
HEDVIG: Yeah.
Ben: …backtrack just for a second?
DANIEL: Not nuclear fission.
BEN: Well, okay, this is an important thing that we need to… Do you guys understand what fission is outside of a nuclear context? Because I sure don’t.
DANIEL: Well, I remember that when you were in D&D, and you saw a spore and you decided to hack at it with your sword, it would blast out multiple spores.
BEN: Wait, but do mycologists call that fission?
HEDVIG: Wait.
DANIEL: Yes, they do.
HEDVIG: We need to get back to fusion and fission first. Fusion is when you take two atoms, and you try and make them into one.
BEN: Correct. And fission is where atoms break up.
HEDVIG: And fusion is when you take an at… and you try to make them into more than one. So, if that’s true in general, outside of just molecules and atoms and stuff like that, then fission should be that you have spores, and then somehow after you have ejected the spores, they are able to split and become more spores.
DANIEL: Multiply.
BEN: Or maybe it’s just the idea, like, you knock a mushroom and that’s what jettisons its latent spores into a cloud of sporey badness, or goodness.
DANIEL: But why is this in the news? Why would this be a Word of the Week? Can anyone guess the topic?
BEN: What?
HEDVIG: Okay. Is it plants or…? Is it plants?
DANIEL: In connection with a certain material.
HEDVIG: Is it to do with the heating of the earth that they’re doing it earlier or more than they otherwise would have?
DANIEL: Not this time.
BEN: Or, is it to do with…? We’ve figured out how to turn mushrooms into a person’s new liver or like some other amazing substance, like a bulletproof window for a site for a wankpanzer or something like that.
DANIEL: Oh, man, I’m looking forward to that. But this one is about plastic.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: We have a problem with plastic. It’s everywhere. It’s not going away, and it’s causing health problems.
BEN: Oh, do remember this.
DANIEL: Louise has pointed us to an article in Ars Technica by John Timmer with a possible solution. Ben, what is that solution?
BEN: Mycelium. Like, the stage of… Is it to do with the stage of…? So, most fungi work in a two-stage lifecycle, I believe. The first stage is mycelium, where basically a whole substrate of something gets all like gooey and fungusy and ganky. And then, the fruiting bodies, the things that we actually eat, the mushrooms, will grow out of that mycelium substrate. I believe some people have figured out a way to make that first stage be able to process waste plastic.
HEDVIG: Mm. You can feed it to them.
DANIEL: That’s correct. There are some bacteria now that we’ve found that eat plastic. Good so far.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: But how do you get the plastic together with the bacteria that eat them? Well, you could wait until the bacteria finds the plastic. That’s fine. But what these researchers have found is a way to embed the bacteria into the plastic during the manufacturing process…
BEN: Okay.
Daniel: …so that it’s already there. But you don’t want the bacteria to eat the plastic right off, because then your bacteria is all holes and sludgy. So, they used a kind of bacteria that, A: could handle high temperatures that happen when plastic is extruded. I love extrusion.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: And, B: wouldn’t activate until the plastic finds its way into some place moist and murky like compost.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Like, oo.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Like, oo!
HEDVIG: Coom-poost.
DANIEL: Anyway, they found that in experimental conditions, the plastic lost about 93% of its mass, while just plain old plastic that didn’t have the spores embedded only lost about half of its mass over the same time.
BEN: So, just to be clear, the atoms of the plastic are being broken down and turned into constituent parts. The plastic is going away. It is being degraded, biodegraded.
DANIEL: Thanks to these bacteria that are grown up, made to SPORULATE and then embedded in the plastic. So…
BEN: Wow. Cool.
Daniel: …SPORULATE, one of our Words of the Week.
BEN: Wait, you said bacteria, but we were talking about fungus for the whole time.
DANIEL: Yeah, bacteria have a way of sporing as well.
BEN: Okay. So, fungus is not involved.
DANIEL: Sporing is a strategy…
BEN: Okay. Cool.
Daniel: …that many items can use. So, CENTAUR or REVERSE CENTAUR, WANKPANZER and SPORULATE: our Words of the Week. Let’s say a big thank you to Dr Anatoly Liberman, all of our listeners who gave us ideas for the show, to SpeechDocs for transcribing all the words, and patrons like you for making this show what it is.
BEN: That’s my turn. You can support Because Language in lots of different ways. You can tell a friend about us or leave us a review. Always fun, especially, if in your review, you give us five stars and you talk about how great the show is and then you slag me off. It’s really fun. I enjoy that very much.
DANIEL: It’s the best. We love those.
BEN: I like it a lot. Even if you don’t actually hate me, just for my edification, if you could leave a review like that, come up with a creative, most cutting Ben burns you’ve got. I would really appreciate that. I’ll even read some of them out and then react to them live on air. It’ll be great.
You can follow us. We are @becauselangpod in all of the socials and places and places. You can also send us comments by email. That’s hello@becauselanguage.com, or send us your voice. Very fun. We have SpeakPipe on our website. You click on the thing and it’s like, “Please, say the thing you want to say,” and then that comes to us and then we put it on the… I was about to say on the radio, on the podcast.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: [WHISPERS] Hedvig’s turn now.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] Sorry, I just read ahead.
DANIEL: Yeah, it’s funny, isn’t it?
HEDVIG: [CHUCKLES] Yeah. We really appreciate all of our supporters on Patreon. The things we do with your money, you wouldn’t believe. We made some jokes earlier about some of the things we do. But we do good things that make sense that I hope you’re happy that we spend it on. Like, that we are able to make episodes at all, the free ones and the Patreon ones, and that we get the transcripts. And you also get little bonuses like little cute little mailouts, you can talk to us on Discord and suggest things to us. We get so many suggestions for you, guys. It’s amazing.
DANIEL: Oh, it’s incredible.
DANIEL: You also get to hang along… Hang up. I think my English is deteriorating. You also get to hang along on live episodes sometimes when we do have those. And that’s really nice as well. And now, it’s time for the time-honored tradition of the shoutouts.
DANIEL: Oh, hang on, hang on. Andy has sent us an email, and here it is.
HEDVIG: Is it the same Andy that won the show earlier?
DANIEL: Yes, this is Andy from Logophilius.
HEDVIG: Well, we better listen to him.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: He says, “Have you ever considered reading your list of patrons in a different order? I’m getting to the point that I can sing along to the list. And I’m not just pushing for alphabetical order because my name starts with an A.” Ooh, theme!
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: This is a good way to get us to change it, and to guarantee you go dead last.
DANIEL: “You could also do it by,” says Andy, “Length of name, reverse alphabetical, alphabetical by last letter or just random.” So, okay, Andy from Logophilius, here are our patrons at the supporter level in reverse alphabetical order by second letter. And then, if…
BEN: [LAUGHS] You’re a madman.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] If two people have the same letter, from shortest to longest. Go, Hedvig.
HEDVIG: Oh, my god. I’ve got to say, I also didn’t know that being able to sing along with it was a bad thing, but I take it that… It’s fun to mix it up a little bit every now and then.
DANIEL: Sure.
HEDVIG: Okay, here we go. Lyssa, Ayesha, Luis, Stan, O Tim, Steele, gramaryen, Kristofer, Ariaflame, Tony, Joanna, Rodger, Colleen, WolfDog.
DANIEL: [HOWLS]
HEDVIG: Molly Dee.
IN UNISON: LordMortis.
HEDVIG: Sonic Snejhog, Andy, Andy from Logophilius. See, we got two.
DANIEL: Yup.
HEDVIG: Amir, Elías, Alyssa, Nigel, Diego, Nikoli, Rhian, Chris L, Chris W, Whitney, Cheyenne, PharaohKatt, Ignacio, Rene, Termy, Helen, Keith, Kevin, Meredith, Felicity, aengryballs, sæ̃m, Matt, Jack, Kate, Manú, Rach, Larry, James, Kathy, Tadhg, Raina, Nasrin, Margareth, Canny Archer, J0HNTR0Y.
DANIEL and BEN: J0HNTR0Y.
HEDVIG: And our newest patrons at listening level, Aini, with a yearly membership. That is…
DANIEL: Is that someone you know, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: If that is not my mum…
DANIEL: It is your mum.
[LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: …then it is the second person I ever met that has that name.
BEN: That is wild. As a person who owns a mum with a entirely worldly, unique name, I share your feels on this one.
DANIEL: Okay. Well, I will tell you that the person’s name is Aini Skirgård.
HEDVIG: Oh, wow.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Oh, how did she figure that out? How does she know how Patreon works?
DANIEL: I don’t know.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I don’t know. But it is your mum. I’m reasonably certain, unless there’s two Aini Skirgårds.
HEDVIG: I don’t know this.
BEN: Yeah. I’m thinking not.
HEDVIG: No, no, no.
DANIEL: She’s listening to this, by the way.
HEDVIG: [GASPS]
DANIEL: Is this okay? Your mum supports you.
HEDVIG: My mum supports me. Oh, my god.
BEN: Oh, must be nice. Way to flex it.
HEDVIG: I already have anxieties about the idea that my employer and colleagues listen.
DANIEL: Now she knows that you made out in a tank!
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I think I told her. That was fine. Oh, my god.
BEN: That’s gold.
DANIEL: What else?
HEDVIG: We also have a new listener at the friend level, TheFishmonger, and a new… You can be a part of Patreon without paying at all. There’s a free tier. We have aluminum sky on there. We want to thank everyone who supports us on Patreon.
DANIEL: Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who also performs at Ryan Beno and Dideon’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
IN UNISON: Pew, pew, pew.
DANIEL: [IN EDITING MODE] Okay, everybody. Here’s the intro that we couldn’t use. See what you think.
[BOOP]
DANIEL: [IN RECORDING MODE] First up, it’s Hedvig Skirgård. Hedvig, I would like you to tell me something hopeful that you’ve heard lately or something that made you smile, something kind of optimistic. Have you had anything like that?
BEN: No pressure.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Hold on.
DANIEL: Has there been anything? Because we’re surrounded by a lot of doom.
HEDVIG: Hold on. Yes. Can I get a moment to search?
DANIEL: Okay. Get a moment. Yup.
[THEME MUSIC CUTS]
HEDVIG: Sorry. No, not that.
[LONG PAUSE]
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: What kind of scale?
DANIEL: I’ll take anything at this stage.
BEN: Did you make a sandwich and it was good?
DANIEL: Does anything give you hope for the future?
HEDVIG: Hope? I mean, the things that give me hope for the future are like the static things, like my husband. Like, they’re not news.
BEN: I just want to be abundantly clear. With all of this time to think, if you ask me the same question, Daniel, I got [CLICKS TONGUE] nothing. Nothing for you.
DANIEL: Oh, okay.
HEDVIG: Someone I know got a grant.
BEN: Hooo.
DANIEL: Awesome. [LAUGHS] That’s not nothing. That’s something.
BEN: Take the win.
HEDVIG: To study Estonian Swedish, I think that’s pretty cool.
BEN: Ooh, Estonian Swedish…
DANIEL: Okay. Cool.
Ben: …that’s fun.
HEDVIG: Yeah. There’s Swedish over in Finland. Well, it’s not so much anymore in Estonia, but there used to be. Anyway.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: A lot of other people I know didn’t get various grants.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Up here! Down here.
DANIEL: In the midst of hope, we are in despair, etc.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Thank you. Ben Ainslie, our third member of our team of three, what do you got?
BEN: Something that is hopeful that I’ve run across recently. Regular listeners of the show will know that I’m a high school teacher and I teach media studies. And so, one of the things that I’ve realised that I’ve had to shift and adapt in my teaching of the senior years, so in years 11 and 12, when I have to write a lot of essays and do a lot of deep analysis of film and television and that sort of thing, is I’ve actually had to change the messaging that I send out to the kids around things like representation and stereotypes.
So, for years and years and years — I’ve been teaching for about 12 years now — for at least the first eight or nine of them, that series of classes looked like: “Hey, everyone, stereotypes are simplistic patterns of representation, and almost uniformly are super fucked.” [CHUCKLES] Like, “They’re these simplified things that do lots of damage in the world,” and blah, blah, blah.
But recently, I’ve had to go… “But great news. Over the last four or five years, we’ve actually been starting to see real inroads in terms of gender diverse representations, complex representations of characters that were always one dimensional and stereotypical. You have to look for it. Certainly, it’s not like it’s infiltrated the mainstream and it’s across the board. But if you were to, you can see examples of nontoxic masculinity on display, and you can see examples of disabled people regularly in the media and all that sort of stuff. That’s actually, dare I say it, kind of a good thing.”
DANIEL: Hmm. All right.
HEDVIG: At some point, we might also be getting people from different groups represented not only in a positive light as well. Like, I want to see…
BEN: No. That’s part of what I’m… Yeah. So, I talk about that. I talk about how model minority is not a thing anymore, and that you’ll often see…
HEDVIG: Yeah. It is a lot. It is.
Ben: …Asian characters represented as just like wankers or naughty kids or whatever. Like, a breadth of representation is now being afforded to people, which is really good. Beyond that as well, just as importantly as being able to see those faces on the screen is also those voices are now showing up in writing rooms. So, the stories that we get told now are far more reflective. Again, I need to moderate this a little bit.
DANIEL: We need to tighten this up.
BEN: Sorry.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: The increased diversity of representation in both writing rooms and in performances is somewhat hopeful.
DANIEL: Cool. Thank you. All right. My hopeful thing was, I’m doing a lot of discussion, talking to a lot of people who are knowledgeable. Climate change is a serious problem. We can’t get complacent. But things seem to be moving in the right direction, and the steps that we’re taking seem to be buying us a bit of time. So, that’s my hopeful bit. That could be wrong, but.
BEN: Someone’s left the oven door of the planet slightly ajar, and some of the heat is escaping.
DANIEL: Unfortunately, because we’re having cleaner air, that means we’re not blocking as much of the heat as we used to. So, okay, fine. Okay.
DANIEL: [IN EDITING MODE] We got there in the end. This next bit is a little bit not safe for work. If you don’t want images in your brain surrounding witchcraft and bodies, then maybe peace out now.
[BOOP]
DANIEL: [IN RECORDING MODE] You would never have a candle holster.
HEDVIG: No. Sorry, I get this image because at Easter, all the witches go and have a party with the devil, right?
DANIEL: Is that Easter or /i/-er?
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: No, they fly to this place and they have a party with the devil. There are all these descriptions of like, what happens at this party, and they’re always wild. I think I might have told you about one of them before, which is, that the room is lit up by candles, the women are all contorted so they have their bum in the air.
BEN: And they’re the candle holders.
HEDVIG: And they have the candles in their hoo-has.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: That’s how the devil’s party is lit up.
BEN: Okay. Sounds like a Court of Thorn and Roses type stuff.
DANIEL: Very Kubrick.
HEDVIG: I think it’s just like peasant children in the medieval times trying to outdo each other, and the horrible things they say the village old lady made them go see.
BEN: I think that’s a great game to play in an era before television. I would 100% play that game.
HEDVIG: Great game.
DANIEL: Yeah, that would never get out of hand.
HEDVIG: It’ll never get out of hand.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: No one will die. But I was trying to think if they were holders or holsters, but I think they’re still holders.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Oh, god. Well, that’s going at the end of the show.
BEN: Well, I said that Hedvig should go first. Now, I am rescinding that offer.
DANIEL: Yeah, I don’t think Hedvig should go at all for that.
HEDVIG: Okay. I don’t go at all.
BEN: [LAUGHS] I’m going to go with not related.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]