The American Dialect Society Word of the Year has been chosen — and it’s a wonderful and terrible pick! Depending on who you’re talking to. In this episode, we’re talking about -USSY and all the words.
And we’re getting to our Mailbag, with our most intriguing research project ever: can you spot the pattern in the way Ben pronounces EITHER and NEITHER? Is there one?
Listen to this episode
Video promo
Bonus video: Hedvig asks Ste about Benford’s Law
In this episode, we hit a roadblock because Hedvig couldn’t believe that Benford’s Law was a thing. That’s the spooky numeric pattern that, in collections of numbers, more of them will have the first digit 1 than you’d expect from random chance. So Ste breaks it down.
Ben’s EITHER/NEITHER files
Download files here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/15uY7AvCFWqamWG2WhEZ1O_AQaeo_DTcj?usp=sharing
Contents:
- BEN either.txt — A text file with all the instances of Ben saying either and neither, with the surrounding sentences for context. Also, which way he pronounced them.
- Ben EITHER wavs.zip — An archive of WAV files with all the eithers and neithers. Only for the very keen.
Patreon supporters
Huge thanks to all our great patrons! Your support means a lot to us. Special thanks to:
- Iztin
- Termy
- Elías
- Matt
- Whitney
- Helen
- Jack
- PharaohKatt
- Lord Mortis
- gramaryen
- Larry
- Kristofer
- Andy B
- James
- Nigel
- Meredith
- Kate
- Nasrin
- Joanna
- Ayesha
- Moe
- Steele
- Margareth
- Manú
- Rodger
- Rhian
- Colleen
- Ignacio
- Sonic Snejhog
- Kevin
- Jeff
- Andy from Logophilius
- Stan
- Kathy
- Rach
- Cheyenne
- Felicity S
- Amir
- Canny Archer
- O Tim
- Alyssa
- Chris W
- Felicity G
And our newest patron at the Listener level: Ryan
Also Elliott, who smashed the one-time donation button right up there on your screen.
Become a Patreon supporter yourself and get access to bonus episodes and more!
Become a Patron!Show notes
2022 Word of the Year is “-ussy” | American Dialect Society
https://www.americandialect.org/2022-word-of-the-year-is-ussy
The full list
https://www.americandialect.org/wp-content/uploads/2022-Word-of-the-Year-PRESS-RELEASE.pdf
Why 200 Linguistic Scholars Decided That ‘-ussy’ Is the Word of the Year
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/ussy-word-of-the-year-linguistics-1234658148/
Sudden Russian Death Syndrome | The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/russian-tycoon-pavel-antov-dies-putin-ukraine/672601/
On the Cover of New York Magazine: Extremely Overanalyzing Hollywood’s Nepo-Baby Boom
https://nymag.com/press/2022/12/extremely-overanalyzing-hollywoods-nepo-baby-boom.html
An All But Definitive Guide to the Hollywood Nepo-Verse | Vulture
https://www.vulture.com/article/hollywood-nepotism-babies-list-taxonomy.html
Sure, moaning about ‘nepo babies’ is fun – but we’re missing the bigger problem | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/23/sure-moaning-about-nepo-babies-is-fun-but-were-missing-the-bigger-problem
Why do we only remember the first things on our grocery list? Primacy Effect, explained.
https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/primacy-effect
Jeffrey R. Stevens & Juan F. Duque | Order matters: Alphabetizing in-text citations biases citation rates
https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-018-1532-8
Australia’s most popular baby names 2022
https://mumsgrapevine.com.au/2022/05/australias-most-popular-names-2022/
The Top 100 Names of the 1920s in New South Wales
https://waltzingmorethanmatilda.com/2015/09/21/the-top-100-names-of-the-1920s-in-new-south-wales-2/
The World – Top 100+ Cities by Population
http://www.geoba.se/population.php?cc=world
Benford’s Law | Wolfram Mathworld
https://mathworld.wolfram.com/BenfordsLaw.html
Numbers follow a surprising law of digits, and scientists can’t explain why
https://phys.org/news/2007-05-law-digits-scientists.html
Louise Pound (1932): On the Pronunciation of “Either” and “Neither” | American Speech
https://doi.org/10.2307/452960
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
Transcript
Daniel: If I want to know about all the words, do I have to get on TikTok? What do I– you know, come on.
Ben: Yeah, probably.
Hedvig: Nah.
Ben: Certainly if you want to find out about young people’s words, definitely.
Daniel: I just have to open it up and just, like, start watching. I got shit to do.
Ben: Because young people don’t read Twitter.
Hedvig: I’ve seen you on Twitter, Daniel. You don’t have shit to do.
[laughter]
Daniel: Okay. No, it’s just that Twitter is one of that shit, one of those shitty things that I got to do.
Ben: What I would say is just do a bit less Twitter and a bit more TikTok.
Hedvig: Yeah.
[Because Language theme]
Daniel: Hello, and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. I’m Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. We have the hardworking, the capable, the one who cats love to sit on.
Hedvig: Oh.
Daniel: Hedvig Skirgård.
Hedvig: Yes. Hello. It’s cold in Europe, so my cats sit on me because it’s cold. It’s science, baby.
Daniel: I think it’s charming. Heat seekers.
Ben: Oh, yeah. Heat-seeking purrmissiles.
Hedvig: Yeah. I have two hot water bottles with very cute covers. This is one of the covers.
Ben: I really feel like you should have more respect when you talk about your cats. That’s not right now.
Daniel: It’s not the cats. It’s actual hot water bottles.
Ben: [laughs] I’m joking.
Hedvig: But I have placed these around a bed and around the house, and the cats actually do not particularly go for them.
Daniel: That’s funny.
Ben: Well, that would suggest to me, Hedvig, that something is at work beyond simply warmth.
Hedvig: Exactly, so.
Daniel: They want to take up the space that you’re taking up.
Ben: [laughs] Yes. Baser level dickheadery–[crosstalk]
Daniel: Trying to drive you out. They don’t care about the water bottles.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: We also have the lovely and talented Ben Ainslie, who has a cat who probably sits on him.
Ben: Nah, nah, not as much. Australia is pretty warm. My cat, as affectionate as she is, and she is a very affectionate cat. She’ll come in for it, and she’ll be like, “Oh, hey, what’s going on? I’m in a real purry mood. Hey, I should definitely sit in your lap and purr away.” And then, you start patting her, and after about five minutes, she clearly is like, [growls] “It’s time to go, bro. I got to go. I’m sorry. This has been nice, but I’m out.”
Daniel: My kids do the same thing. “Daddy. Ugh, you’re hot. Oh, my goodness.”
Ben: “You’ve been way too warm.”
Hedvig: What is the temperature in Perth right now?
Ben: It’s actually been a very mild summer so far.
Daniel: It’s been very temperate.
Ben: Not too many stinkers. So, it’s just been sitting around, like, 30, 32, 33 kind of thing, which for us is, like, luxurious.
Daniel: Hmm. And has everyone had a good break? We have taken a bit of a break, but now we’re back. I’ve enjoyed the holidays.
Hedvig: I had a pretty good holiday.
Ben: It’s really nice to see you guys.
Daniel: Yeah, great to be here. Hey, in our earlier episodes, we did our Words of the Week of the Year for 2022. Of course, our Word of the Week of the year was–
Ben: I can’t even remember.
Hedvig: Yes.
Daniel: It was “Yes”. Yes for nonpolar questions.
Hedvig: How many meatballs do you want? Yes.
Ben: Yes. [laughs]
Daniel: Yes. But earlier this month, members and friends of the American Dialect Society piled into a room, as they do every year, and voted on their Word of the Year. I wasn’t able to attend this time because it was live only, but it sounds like it was a lot of fun, as always. It’s always kind of fun to see which ones of our words get selected. Of course, we nominated many of ours. We nominated “bachelor’s handbag” even though it was Australian, just for fun.
Ben: How do we tend to do out of interest? How on the money does Talk the Talk tend to be?
Daniel: What show? What’s the name? What?
Ben: Oh. [laughs] Shit. Ooh.
Daniel: That’s a dollar in the Talk jar.
Ben: Hedvig has clearly infected me with her slow, getting started of the engine.
Daniel: Don’t blame Hedvig. Hedvig doesn’t do that shit.
Ben: [laughs]
Hedvig: Have I been slow in this conversation so far?
Ben: No, not at all.
Daniel: [laughs]
Ben: But I am desperately grasping at straws to justify my own–[crosstalk]
Hedvig: Yeah, okay.
Daniel: We just know that it’s early for you, and you just woke up with cats.
Hedvig: You can throw me under the bus, it’s okay.
Daniel: You woke up with cats on you. We don’t blame you at all.
Ben: How does Because Language end? In a prior incantation, the show that shall not be named, how do we stack up? How do we tend to do are we, like, tastemakers who never fail to miss a shot? Or are we on our own little weird level?
Daniel: We’re about 50/50. There are only a few that I’ve never, ever heard of, and then most of them have been at least featured if they didn’t make our top 10. There are a lot of emoji that we didn’t get. There are some forehead slappers. It’s like, “Oh, I can’t believe I missed that one.”
Hedvig: Can I just say, I’m not confident that I care?
Ben: About emojis?
Hedvig: No, I would be quite happy if Because Language was a little separate universe sphere.
Ben: Okay. You wanted to find our own weird, wild, and wonderful parts of linguistics.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: Okay. I understand that.
Hedvig: I feel like I’m very happy with that. I don’t feel like we need to conform to the rest.
Ben: Cool, cool, cool, cool.
Daniel: Okay.
Ben: Well, gee willikers, Daniel. Now, I want to know, what do we got? Lay them on me.
Daniel: Well, let’s start with their Word of the Year, because it’s the one that everyone’s seen around the place, and, boy, is this one polarizing. Their Word of the Year was a combining form, a piece of a word that you stick on to other words and it’s…
Ben: Oh, I know what’s coming.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Ussy.
Ben: Yup.
Daniel: A suffix that started its life as pussy. It then moved in the gay community to bussy, a boy pussy, which is your ass. Also, ussification, the process of creating new blended words with the ‘ussy’ suffix. Man, oh, man. It won, and it was not close.
Hedvig: And people were mad.
Daniel: And people were elated as well.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: What are the other productive endings of ‘ussy’? Because I know bussy. Boy pussy. What else is-
Hedvig: There are not that many.
Ben: -more than just like, a flash in the pan?
Daniel: You can fuck somebody in the thrussy.
Ben: Okay.
Hedvig: I think people argue that you could also do it for, like, mailboxes, a mailussy or USB– [crosstalk]
Ben: Okay. I’m sure people could argue that, but are they using it?
Hedvig: I– Umm.
Ben: I sense a strong vein of doubt in Hedvig. That’s what I would [crosstalk] is.
Hedvig: It’s like when we had on the show a couple of episodes ago, we were talking about the ‘fucking’ infix, and people are like” Abso-fucking-lutely.” And then people can think of, like four more–
Ben: Fan-fucking-tastic and like a few–
Hedvig: Fan-fucking-tastic.
Daniel: Unbe-fucking-lievable.
Ben: Now, we’re going to get listeners coming in with the other three members of this category.
Daniel: It’s not three. It’s terribly productive. You can do it with any–
Ben: Then, bet, buddy. Give me a list. Come on, let’s hear it. Ones that you have used.
Daniel: Give me a four-syllable word.
Ben: No, as in–
Hedvig: No, ussy.
Ben: Not the in fucking–[crosstalk]
Daniel: Oh, with ussy. Oh, okay. Well, we featured a TikTok video where a TikToker said, “Hey, there’s only one chargeussy in this room.” I like electrussy personally. “Hey, this stereo has a cassettussy. I didn’t know we still use those.”
Hedvig: But that was a comedy TikTok video.
Daniel: It was.
Ben: They’re making fun of the ridiculousness of it as a, “I want numbers. Damn it.” [laughs]
Daniel: Let’s be clear. Anybody who does use this is doing it so that they can be funny and a little bit offensive and creative. That is true.
Ben: I’ve got to be honest though. Can I be like the curmudgeon? Oh, that’s unusual for me, I know. Just be like, is the vaguely funny– I’m not ruling on the quality of the funny because obviously that’s super subjective, but more just the fact that it’s not that popular as a satirical motif. Is that really what we think should be Word of the Year?
Daniel: Here’s the other aspect. You wouldn’t believe how happy some people were that this one– but there was a sense of lightness of frivolity. We’ve had so many political dark words. We’ve had so many cohort words. The idea that this was something fun and silly and gender neutral– I wasn’t even there, and the sense I got from reading all of the tweets was just this palpable sense of joy and disgust.
Ben: Look, I guess I kind of get that. But at the same time, I’m also like, “Is this just the tragic desperation of a bunch of people who just don’t want another sad thing?”
[laughter]
[crosstalk]
Hedvig: Also, I think it’s masquerading like– a lot of people, in particular Americans, and for good reasons, don’t want to talk about the pandemic being over. Right?
Ben: Hmm.
Daniel: Hmm. Because it’s not.
[crosstalk]
Daniel: It’s fucking not.
Hedvig: Last Word of the Year was something at least crisis related, right?
Daniel: What was the ADS Word of the Year last year? I should remember this. This is the problem with the whole enterprise, isn’t it?
Ben: Well, look, I think within our show, we can pretty clearly see there’s two nays and one yay to this being the Word of the Year. Daniel seems pretty chuffed by it, and the Hedvig and I, we’re both against it–
Hedvig: It’s fine.
Ben: It’s fine but you don’t want fine to be the thing that wins. You want something awesome and really productive and linguistically impressive and all those sorts of things to be the thing that wins the Word of the Year, in my opinion. Anyway, what did it beat out? Let’s really get our pitchforks sort of like– [crosstalk]
Daniel: I’m not done. I’m not done with ussy. I think the emergence of a new productive form is something interesting, like “because” it’s an old word, but it got used in new ways, and so they liked it.
Ben: Oh, like the no–
Daniel: No, because.
Ben: Like that. I’m seeing that way more than ussy, like everywhere.
Daniel: Okay, all right, here’s the other thing. There’s another template that ussy is used for, and that is putting one’s whole ussy into something. I used it when I was talking about Grover on Sesame Street during the Grover Dance. He put his whole groverussy into it. One of the items that our patrons are going to be getting is a sticker. Put your whole linguussy into it.
Ben: [gasps]
Hedvig: It’s a funny joke. I agree with you.
[laughter]
Hedvig: It is funny how it is so evocative of something like fleshy.
[laughter]
Daniel: Yes, very much.
Hedvig: Immediately, right?
Ben: It is.
Hedvig: If someone says electrussy or USBussy or something, you’re like, “Hmm. It’s now wet and fleshy and moist.”
Ben: For me, it’s really reminiscent of the lack of a word, in English certainly, for the butthole. There’s no–
Daniel: I feel like there are many.
Ben: No, there are many. What I mean is there is no authentically neutral way to refer to that thing. Like, you could say-
Hedvig: Anus.
Ben: -penis. No. Yeah, you can say penis. You can say vulva or vagina depending on where you fall on that particular one. But if you say anus, it sounds weirdly scientific, as opposed to the other ones, which just sound like normal descriptors. But if you don’t go with anus or sphincter– like if you’ve got a problem that you need your partner to look at, for instance, and you need to say to them, “I need you to have a look at my–” if you say anus-
Hedvig: Butt.
Ben: -it’s like you’re doing a weird doctor thing. If you say butt, you’re not being clear enough because they’re going to ask, “What part of your butt?”
Hedvig: No, they’re not.
Ben: And you will say– [laughs]
Daniel: My bussy. That’s what I need. I need you to look at my bussy.
Ben: And then, you have to say, I mean, “my anal sphincter,” or “my butthole.” And there’s just no neutral– there’s no middle line. There’s no pun intended.
Daniel: [laughs] For some people, there is, Ben.
Ben: I find pussy and ussy a similar thing. It’s a deeply–
Daniel: Deeply.
Ben: If you say butthole, a person is just like, “Hah. Yep, that is just right there in my head now.” I feel like ussy is exactly the same thing. Like, if you say vigussy or groverussy or whatever, there’s just an instantaneous like [onomatopoeia].
Daniel: Oh. That’s the look that Hedvig gave just a second ago, [Hedvig giggling] the squashy Kermit face was the same.
Ben: That wasn’t me.
Daniel: I was describing ussy to my 27 year old son and he just sat there with a look on his sour lemon face and then he said, “No.”
Hedvig: No. That’s not the thing you want your father to describe to you.
Ben: Yeah, exactly. Right. Okay.
Daniel: Sorry, kid, your father’s a linguist.
Ben: Anyway, ussy is the Word of the Year. Are we done? Can we talk about what it beat?
Daniel: The other ones that it beat out: Dark Brandon, the sinister, powerful alto ego of Joe Biden.
Ben: Ah, boo.
Daniel: Quiet Quitting, boo.
Ben: Yeah, I’m also not done with that.
Daniel: Slava Ukraini. Glory to Ukraine.
Hedvig: Is that a Word of the Year or a sentiment we have? That’s the question.
Ben: I haven’t come across Slava Ukraini much myself. I don’t know if that’s more prevalent in European blogosphere or something.
Hedvig: I’ve heard it a lot at demonstrations in TikToks and things, but I don’t think anyone would call it the English Word of the Year.
Daniel: It’s something that I’ve seen people say and write and stick on their profiles.
Hedvig: Yeah, but people– yeah, anyway. Mm-hmm.
Daniel: Special Military Operation.
Hedvig: That’s an interesting Word of the Year because it doesn’t mean what it looks like it means.
Ben: Yes, it’s a lie.
Hedvig: It’s a lie, which is–
Daniel: It’s a euphemism. I think we’ll see it come up again in the Euphemism of the Year, but anyway. Let’s see the one that I missed. Rizz, short for charisma.
Ben: A fresh entrant in the oh-so-special category of words you should not use if you are over the age of, like, 25, 26, lest you run the very real risk of seeming horrendously, tragic and out of touch. It is a very young person’s word.
Daniel: Come on, I got the rizz.
Hedvig: That sounds like Hedvig Catnip.
Ben: [laughs] I’m trying to warn you now, mate. It’s not for us.
Daniel: [chuckles]
Hedvig: I’m going to walk up to some young people.
Ben: I will say this though, rizz has definitely taken off.
Hedvig: Oh, yeah?
Ben: It is the word that everyone under the age of 25 uses to mean essentially how sexy they are or how attractive they are to the people that they want to attract in the world. No one says, “Oh, you’re looking good,” anymore, if you’re young. I see predominantly young people be like, “Oh, check out the rizz,” or like, “Look at this person’s rizz.” “Look at my rizz.”
Hedvig: It’s like swag.
Ben: Yeah, basically.
Daniel: Yeah.
Hedvig: Cool.
Ben: But specifically, from an attracting a mate kind of dimension.
Hedvig: Yeah. Okay.
Daniel: That quiet confidence, that effortless, attraction, power.
Ben: And then, you see a lot of people playing with it, like people in wheelchairs making jests about, like, “What’s my rizz?” And then, the camera zooms out to, “My wheels and my rizz,” and stuff like that.
Daniel: Okay.
Hedvig: Ah,okay.
Ben: Next one, most useful or most likely to succeed, the word, Climate Criminal, somebody who flies in jets a lot.
Ben: Okay.
Daniel: Long Termism, a view toward improving the distant future.
Hedvig: Wait.
Ben: Yeah, I kind of like that.
Hedvig: Question. This category is the word that people think is going to stick around the most?
Daniel: Correct.
Hedvig: Okay, this sounds like a good Word of the Year.
Ben: [laughs]
Daniel: It’s a good category.
Hedvig: Like that category sounds like what Ben and I want the Word of the Year to be.
Ben: Sure.
Daniel: You want it to be [crosstalk] something that’ll stick around?
Hedvig: Let’s focus in on this.
Ben: Cool.
Daniel: All right, all right. Nepo Baby.
Ben: Hmm. Wow. [crosstalk] A late entrant, right?
Daniel: A late entrant.
Ben: But ooh, but hit the scene strong.
Daniel: Yeah. [unintelligible [00:16:45] was the one who put that out there. Switching to a different document, there was an article by Nate Jones in New York Magazine, possibly a tad deranged in its completeness revealing that supermodels actors, photographers, people in the industry are there, they may not be there because of their parents, but they definitely have parents. And Hollywood and politics.
Ben: [laughs] What does that sentence mean?
Hedvig: They got a privileged start.
Ben: Everyone got [crosstalk] parents, Daniel.
Daniel: They got a privileged start. I’m not saying I know why they’re famous because, of course, they work hard, it’s like that.
Ben: Well, the article is very much saying that. You can just say what the article was saying. The article was definitely saying that they are famous because their parents parachuted them into fame and success.
Daniel: That’s what the article alleges, yes. Hollywood acting and politics, definitely dynastic. You know what else is dynastic? Academia. One of the best indicators of being an academic is that your parents were academics, like my dad was.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: Absolutely. Shame you’re not, Daniel. Oh. Pew, pew, pew.
Daniel: I escaped. [laughs]
Hedvig: I’m the first in my family to have a PhD, though. No, I’m a second.
Daniel: Congratulations.
Ben: No one cares about the sophomore PhD.
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: My cousin, Frederick, were the same kinship tier and he–
Daniel: You’re still special.
Ben: What PhD did he get?
Hedvig: He is in computer security, cybersecurity stuff.
Ben: Oh. That’s a good one.
Daniel: Ooh. Okay.
Ben: [crosstalk] -PhD.
Hedvig: He gets interviewed on the news sometimes when they’re like, “Oh, no, someone is being hacked.”
Ben: [crosstalk] -what a wanker. Oh, we hate Frederick.
Hedvig: [laughs]
Daniel: When we’re talking about nepotism, we often don’t talk about the flip side of nepotism, and that is that poverty can be passed down from generation to generation. There are certain kinds of professions that aren’t paid well, and they get taken up by successive generations too.
Hedvig: It’s passing on profession, but that is not what the word ‘nepotism’ means.
Ben: No.
Hedvig: Nepotism is passing on privilege and success. Do you know where ‘nepo’ comes from?
Daniel: Go ahead, Hedvig. I know this one, but I want you to say.
Hedvig: I think it’s Latin for nephew, right?
Daniel: Yes, it is. Italian. Yes, nipote.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: There we go. I think nephew is a good spot.
Daniel: What if it’s not your nephew?
Ben: It’s just nisotism?
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: Nibblingism.
Ben: Nibblitism [crosstalk] got the same time.
Daniel: Nibblingism. We need that. That’s the word. The winner in this category, quiet quitting. Drawing a line between your work and your life and not letting it invade.
Ben: Here’s my thing on why I don’t particularly love quiet quitting. Sorry, I want to be clear. Here’s my thing on why I don’t like the phrase ‘quiet quitting’ as a representation of the idea behind it. The idea behind it is perfectly valid. It’s just exercising professional boundaries. That is a very acceptable thing that all people should be doing.
Daniel: That’s not quitting at all, in any respect.
Ben: It’s not that for me. Quiet quitting for me, it has an inherently negative connotation to it, which I feel like people who want to work against it, bad actors who want to bring it down, like this idea [crosstalk] can latch onto and just be like– it’s got laziness connotations. It’s got all this stuff. And none of the stuff that happens when you exercise professional boundaries and when you say, “I am fulfilling my fiduciary responsibilities, but not more than that.” None of that is lazy. That is just a perfectly– not only reasonable, but a healthy societal thing to have in place. So, I don’t love the fact that it’s so easily sneered at.
Daniel: People will demagogue it definitely.
Hedvig: Wasn’t there another competitive term that had a better vibe?
Ben: It was “act your wage,” I believe.
Hedvig: Act your wage.
Daniel: Act your wage is one of ours. But the way people have described it is “work to rule.” Work to rule is a tactic that’s been used, it is the same as quiet acquitting and it’s been used effectively for a long time. Let’s call it that. Work to rule or act your wage.
Ben: What does work to rule? Rule what?
Hedvig: I don’t understand.
Ben: Or like working to the rule, as in working to your job description.
Daniel: I have underresearched this one. Work to rule–
Hedvig: Is this like work to a ruler?
Daniel: Work to rule has its own Wikipedia page, and why is it called that? Yes, that’s correct. You are working according to the rules required by your contract and strictly following the rules. Yes, that’s right.
Ben: In Australia, we call those duty statements, like doing your duty would be just fulfilling the dot points in your contract.
Hedvig: Which for a lot of people’s– yeah, okay.
Daniel: No, please.
Hedvig: There are a lot of professions where that is not obvious, unfortunately.
Ben: That is true. I would say the vast majority of professions is like that, actually, if we’re being completely candid.
Hedvig: Yeah. It is tricky because– Veronica, right? Like the TikTok, Sketch with Veronica.
Ben: The cup lady?
Hedvig: Yeah. She is seemingly at a call center or something–
Daniel: Or on a phone all the time, something.
Ben: I think I might have started there, but then it just broadened to just be a general like amorphous work situation.
Hedvig: Right. Because I’ve been thinking lately about the similarities between academia and being an artist.
Ben: Go on, please.
Hedvig: They’re a bit similar actually, because in both cases you’re a bit working for yourself. I’m employed somewhere to do research, but I am also employed to develop myself. Right?
Daniel: True.
Ben: Academically speaking, like your body of knowledge, you–
Hedvig: Academically speaking, like my CV. If I publish things that I think are interesting and I publish a lot of papers, then I’m doing my job for my employer. But when I go to a new job, that still benefits me, that’s like building my thing. And similarly, if you get a grant–
Ben: Can I ask, is that hugely different from any professional development in any line of work?
Hedvig: In the sense that you’re sort of– I don’t know how to explain it. I feel like you’re a bit like a freelancer in a way.
Ben: It’s a little bit more amorphous rather than like, “We need you to go and do this course so you can build this specific thing for our company.” It’s like, “Go to this conference– I don’t know, what you pick up is good, I guess.”
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: [laughs]
Ben: I do feel like a lot of places and professions do that though. They’re just like, “Oh, okay, there’s a symposium on blinds,” so the people in our blinds industry are going to go to the symposium or whatever.
Hedvig: Yeah. But they’re going there to then go out to customers and get better at putting up blinds. Whereas I feel like I’m not sure if we ever do that part.
Ben: And have affairs, obviously.
Hedvig: Anyway, what I wanted to say, and we’re going to circle back-
Ben: [laughs] Sorry, Daniel.
Hedvig: Daniel is making signs, is that acting your wage sounds great and quiet quitting sounds great. Part of that, if we’re going to give practical advice, is also figuring out what that is and having a frank conversation with your employer about what that is, because it might not be obvious.
Daniel: True, that’s a good point.
Ben: That’s also really contingent on having a good boss who is a good communicator, which like fucking vanishingly few people are lucky enough to have. I am one of those people. I count my blessings every single day. But I know many, many humans have just really unhelpful humans in that position in their lives, and my heart goes out to them.
Daniel: Mm. Let’s go quickly to Digital Word of the Year. Here were the nominees. Chief Twit, meaning Elon Musk. That’s how he described himself on Twitter. Crypto rug pull, which is where there’s a crypto scam and then the guy with the hat disappears out of town a monorail.
Ben: Can I ask on this one, why did they go with crypto rug pull and not just rug pull?
Daniel: I think crypto rug pull is specific to the way that scammers will start NFTs and then just disappear with the money.
Ben: No, I totally get that. I think the thing that I– if you are in those spaces, because I definitely descended into those spaces, not because I wanted to be part of them, but because I wanted to see and understand, they do not call them crypto rug pulls. They call them rug pulls. Pump and dumps and there’s rug pulls.
Daniel: Let’s go with that.
Hedvig: I feel like I need to explain to our non-English listeners, because I had to read. The word that Daniel and Ben are saying is ‘rug’, as in the thing you have on the floor and ‘pull’ rugby, as they know you pull it. They’re saying it very quickly, and they’re saying ‘rug pull,’ and it sounds like they’re saying rugby, but it’s not.
Ben: Okay. I apologize.
Hedvig: No, it’s okay.
Ben: My Australian is showing.
Hedvig: I heard you speak and I read the thing, and I was like, “Now, I get it.”
Ben: To literally pull the rug out from under someone is where this comes from.
Daniel: Isn’t it funny how expressions start out as an entire sentence and then they just go to a two-word phrase, like a rug pull–
Ben and Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: I’m supposed to know what that is.
Hedvig: How everyone is wishing me a Happy New Year.
Ben: What?
Daniel: They are?
Hedvig: Instead of a Happy New Year.
Daniel: Happy New Year instead of a Happy New Year, it’s stress. Did people wish you a Happy New Year?
Hedvig: Ben, please wish me something.
Ben: Here it is. I hope you have a super Happy New Year.
Hedvig: Okay.
Daniel: That was pretty even.
Hedvig: That was pretty even.
Daniel: Happy New Year.
Hedvig: A lot of people are wishing me a Happy New Year instead of Happy New Year.
Ben: Oh. Okay. Emphasis in syllable. Yeah, got it.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: We also had touch grass, which we know about.
Ben: Love it.
Daniel: Go and touch grass.
Ben: Big fan of the idea. Big fan of the linguistic sort of encapsulation. Love it.
Daniel: I think that was one of ours for the previous year. But the winner ‘dle’ suffix for Wordle like games. Yeeesss.
Ben: I do not like this.
Daniel: Why not?
Ben: Because it’s not the D-L-E suffix that gets used. It’s the L-E. The D gets dropped all the time.
Daniel: Okay, Ben.
Ben: All the time.
Daniel: Movie?
Ben: No, global.
Daniel: Okay, but if it’s movie, it’s not moviele, it’s moviedle. The D is in there.
Ben: To be fair, the better one is framed anyway.
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: Ben, there’s this thing in linguistic called allomorphs.
Daniel: Yes, please.
Hedvig: You know how in English you can do plurals by adding an S?
Ben: Yes.
Hedvig: Word words. Sometimes, you add an ‘es’.
Ben: We are really digging deep on the linguistic situation here. Yes. I know [laughs] ‘s’ creates plurals.
Daniel: But do you?
Hedvig: But do you? What’s a good example when it’s ‘es’?
Daniel: Horse.
Ben: Like buses. Horses, whatever.
Hedvig: Bus, buses, right. Okay. We say that ‘es’ and ‘s’ and ‘za’ are all the same thing. They’re just realized a bit differently in different contexts.
Ben: Okay.
Hedvig: Would you accept the same thing for ‘dle’ and ‘le’?
Daniel: They’re allomorph, so the same morpheme.
Ben: I’ll allow it.
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: There we are. We arrived.
Ben: So begrudgingly, but I’ll allow it.
Hedvig: [laughs] I saw that. I heard and I saw it. You were not happy.
Ben: [laughs]
Daniel: Had to extract that ‘D’, I had to extract the ‘dle’.
Ben: Okay. With the ‘le’ suffix, as I will think of it and refuse to think of it any other way. [laughs]
Daniel: Next. Informal Word of the Year. There was the ick. Feeling gross about one’s date, gives me the ick.
Ben: Oh, hang on. Can we rewind one second?
Daniel: Yeah.
Ben: My understanding of ick is that is absolutely not, A, where it came from, or B, where it most gets used.
Daniel: Yeah, I think so too.
Ben: My understanding certainly the place I see it used the most is people from the autism spectrum disorder community talking about the things, both physical and nonextant, that cause them significant aversion. So, like, microfiber cloths seem to be one that [crosstalk] autistically for the world over [crosstalk] the ick for.
Hedvig: I totally agree. [crosstalk]
Ben: I just wanted to really just get in there and say I feel we’ve, first of all, appropriated ick from the autism community. B, it has such a wider connotation than just romantic dating. You can absolutely get an ick from a person, no question, but it’s bigger than that. Carry on.
Daniel: Cool. Thank you.
Hedvig: There is a weird thing that’s happening that I don’t know if it’s this show’s thing to talk about, but [honk] did you guys hear that?
Ben: Whose house is that?
Hedvig: That was on my street. Someone honking.
Ben: Damn. That was not someone. Surely, that was a truck.
Hedvig: No. I don’t know. There’s a problem in Leipzig with buckaroo parking.
Ben: [laughs]
Daniel: Well, there’s a Word of the Week.
Ben: What is buckaroo parking? Is it double parking?
Hedvig: It’s what Germans call illegal parking, a wild parking. People are parking in weird places. And the Leipzig municipality [crosstalk] [Ben laughing hilariously]
Daniel: Buckaroo parking. That’s so Texas.
Hedvig: I was reading Leipzig News, and I’ve been annoyed with people park in strange places here. At intersections, they park on the corners.
Ben: What are we living in like a post-apocalyptic hellscape? No. Come on.
Hedvig: No, exactly. Anyway, my guess is the film was honking because someone was buckaroo parking.
Ben: We’re coming back to it, by the way, buckaroo parking [crosstalk].
Daniel: Totally.
[chuckles]
Hedvig: About the ick thing, there’s a weird thing that happens if you are in TikTok and if you almost enter from anywhere and are in any of the TikToks, sooner or later, it seems like a lot of people, me, and I think Ben included, will get content that are about having ADHD and/or autism.
Ben: And I’m nodding firmly.
Hedvig: And it is a little bit odd because it’s not something that I think I have, but it’s content that is popular because sometimes it overlaps with feelings that people that don’t have those things also have. Like, when you feel hyper focus or something, or when you feel you’re procrastinating, but it gets framed as, like, when you have ADHD, and it’s like, “I’m not sure I have that.” So, it means that this term, ick, when people in the autism spectrum are talking about it ends up on mine and Ben’s pages. It’s like, “I don’t know how it got there, but okay.”
Ben: Look, I think we can all agree, just working purely by the numbers, it was either pilfered from gay people or black people probably, originally. If we really had to take a stab, I think we are really well placed to feel like that’s probably where it was originally appropriated from.
Daniel: Or taken from black people and then queer people.
Hedvig: Our run sheet says black drag culture.
Daniel: Oh. Wait, wait, wait, wait.
Ben: Double header.
Daniel: No, that’s for the winner. Which was it’s giving X.
Hedvig: Oh, yeah. Sorry.
Ben: Oh. Okay.
Daniel: Description of something exuding a particular vibe or energy, and it comes from black drag culture, and it’s not one that I’ve ever, ever, ever heard.
Hedvig: What?
Ben: Can you give us an example from your research, Daniel?
Daniel: Hedvig, please.
Hedvig: What do you mean?
Daniel: You seem to know.
Ben: Oh, it’s giving like big nose vibes or something. Like something is that–? [crosstalk]
Hedvig: Yeah. Or like if I went and said, like, “Extra-extra,” you can say it’s giving newspaper boy. [crosstalk] [laughs]
Daniel: The X is just a noun, is that it?
Hedvig: Yeah. Or an adjective, but usually a noun. But it’s like–what’s a good–
Daniel: If I throw up on the rug, it’s giving cat.
Hedvig: Yes. I am currently obsessed with painting things in bright colors, and I think that’s giving millennial women an existential crisis.
Ben: Yes. Okay, cool, gotcha. There can be a lot of nouns. [laughs]
Daniel: Wow. An entire noun phrase.
Hedvig: Right. I have had to switch to almost entirely decaf coffee. I think that is also giving millennial women existential crisis.
[laughter]
Daniel: That is fascinating. Thank you. I didn’t know about that one. There are two here that seem to trade on the platty jubes templates. Remember how we talked about platty jubes for the platinum jubilee? I said, “I feel this is a template and I just don’t know what it is,” And many people have been very helpful. Kitty gave us a whole list, not PharaohKatt, but the other Kitty. But Helen on Twitter and Lord Mortis on Discord pointed me to cozzie livs. There’s a possibly fictional conversation. “I can’t go that low. Sorry, babe. Especially with the cozzie livs and all that jazz,” and the–[crosstalk]
Ben: Cost of living, got you, yeah.
Daniel: Slang, cost of living, prices.
Hedvig: Ah, cost of living. Thank you.
Ben: Took me a second, I was struggling.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: [laughs]
Daniel: But the one that made the informal Word of the Year nomination was one that I’m not too keen on, menty-b, having a bit of a menty-b, mental breakdown, which I feel like I want to bop that person upside the head and say, “Talk better about mental health issues,” but those two things do seem to follow that template, so I thought I would point them out.
Hedvig: That reminds us that all of these dictionaries of the word and things, everyone is using different ways of measuring what that is. It feels like some of the things is, “We want to talk about a phenomena that we like or that got a lot of attention, and not like–” Daniel, when you just said that you don’t really love the term, menty-b, for a mental breakdown because maybe you feel like it trivializes or makes it smaller or something. You’re speaking as a subjective person about your judgments and opinions about it. It’s not obvious what this exercise of picking a word is doing, because if it’s just like picking the most unique word for this year that wasn’t around much before and that popped up a lot this year and signified something, then it should just be a numbers game.
Ben: I would also say as well, that is definitely informal. Like, it takes a very serious thing and very informalizes it, like that’s its category.
Hedvig: Oh, yeah, the menty-b. Yeah.
Ben: I thought you were going to say, people might be doing it to work through their own issues and came upon that phrase and words, so okay, if that’s the case, maybe. Let’s just run through a few little scraps here. The euphemism of the year was special military operation, but I noticed also leg booty.
Hedvig: What?
Ben: Please.
Daniel: [laughs] No, it’s not the same as under bum. It’s substitution for LGBT, and they might be using it for fun. They might be trying to use it to disguise what they’re talking about in places where that might be illegal. LGBT becomes leg booty.
Ben: Okay.
Hedvig: It’s like boomstick for gun on TikTok.
Daniel: Yes. It’s another example of Voldemorting.
Ben: Unalived.
Hedvig: Unaliving. Yeah. Okay.
Daniel: Grape instead of rape and that sort of thing.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Elon becoming El-no and then Elmo, rather amusingly. [crosstalk]
Hedvig: Okay, leg booty.
Daniel: Leg booty.
Hedvig: I thought Alphabet Mafia was like– I liked Alphabet Mafia.
Daniel: That was good. That was one of ours.
Hedvig: I thought that was pretty funny. [laughs]
Daniel: Another one of ours that didn’t win the Phrasal Template of the Year was “hits different.” That was one of ours last year, and hits different was good. The one that did win the Phrasal Template of the Year was, “not X.” That was ours. So, yay for us.
Hedvig: Ah, okay.
Ben: I’ve got to say that I am seeing that in many places. I’m seeing it on Twitter, I’m seeing that on TikTok, I’m seeing that in Facebook posts.
Hedvig: Yeah. I think we need to expand the template to make it more understandable to listeners, maybe. If I, for example, tweet, “Not me eating the same food three days in a row because my husband’s out of town.”
Ben: Yeah. Not me desperately trying to cross my legs on the subway because I got a giant mustard stain from the hot dog. I am hoovering into my disgusting more kind of thing.
Daniel: It’s always not person doing action. That’s the template.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Another one. The Emoji of the Year. The skull was the winner. Dead. Dead from laughter, dead from frustration. But check out the roster of non-winners. The melting face. Love it. The saluting face.
Ben: [crosstalk] -these are actually showing up in the run sheet because they’re so new that they’re not in the–[crosstalk]
Daniel: They’re not on your computer? Oh, I’m sorry.
Ben: That’s okay.
Daniel: The saluting face. The dotted line face. One of my favorites. I’m just going to vanish here into the background.
Hedvig: Oh, that one.
Ben: The Homer Simpson into the hedge face.
Daniel: Colored boxes for Wordle results. But I think that the one that everybody was sleeping on, and I tweeted this was the pointing finger up, which you use as a reaction to someone’s comment, “Meaning, I agree with this.” I’m seeing a lot in Discord.
Ben: This one is the right one.
Daniel: This.
Hedvig: There are also gifs of people pointing or saying the word ‘this’, or you can write the word this. I would argue that those are all allomorphs.
Daniel: Yes. Very good. Allomoji.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Let’s get away from the ADS Word of the Year. Congratulations to ussy. There were also some recent words that our listeners suggested. Diego suggested–
Hedvig: Before that.
Daniel: Oh, yes, please.
Hedvig: You asked me in previous episodes to report on the Swedish Word of the Year.
Daniel: Yes. Hedvig, would you please report for us on the Swedish Word of the Year? What did you find?
Hedvig: Well, Sweden has mainly one institution that issues something that’s similar to Word of the Year, and it’s called the New Word List. And it is not one word. It is several words that the Institute for Language and Ethnology, you could call it, folkminnen, like people memory, issue a list of words that are being added. They are a little bit mysterious, if I’m honest, about how they select them. Sometimes, I disagree with the process by which they get them. But there’s a bunch of words. Most of them are somehow crisis related in nature. For example, energy, poverty, energi fattigdom or energy, war, energi krig or hunger stone. I think we had hunger stone one episode.
Daniel: Yeah, we did. What was it again?
Hedvig: In some European cities, when you have a river going through–
Daniel: Oh, yeah.
Hedvig: You have stones on the bank of the river. And when the river is low enough, there can be certain stones that become visible and that have inscriptions that are very old that say, “If you can see this shit–“
Ben: “Fucking watch out, because a bunch of people died when this river was this low.”
Hedvig: Yeah. “If the river is this low, it’s not a good time, man.” I looked through the list and I was trying to find one that wasn’t depressing. I think I have two for you. One of them is Epa-dunk.
Ben: Epa-dunk.
Hedvig: Epa-dunk. It’s a fun word to say.
Daniel: Epa-dunk.
Ben: It sounds very onomatopoeic. Is it throwing a stone into a pond? Like, you go, “Epa-dunk.”
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: It’s a compound, if that helps. So, Epa and dunk.
Ben: Neither of us speaks Swedish. I’m not getting anywhere near this definition.
Daniel: Well, let’s go with dunk. It’s a dunk tank, naturally, when you–
Hedvig: I don’t know what a dunk tank is.
Daniel: When you dunk [crosstalk] water.
Ben: Is it [crosstalk] dunking? Like when you dunk on yourself?
Hedvig: Okay, I’m just going to put you out of your miseries, none of these things.
Ben: Okay, fair enough. That’s good.
Hedvig: Dunka-dunka is an old term for dance music.
Ben: Okay. Like duff-duff music?
Daniel: That’s good.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: Okay, cool.
Hedvig: Epa is a kind of vehicle that is similar to a car, but it’s not a car, and you can drive already when you’re 16.
Ben: Okay.
Hedvig: It’s like in between a car and a moped, I’d say.
Ben: Oh-kay.
Daniel: Wow.
Hedvig: If you screw with it a bit and trim it a bit, it’s a lot like a car. If you live in a rural area and you want to drive because you want to have a license as your friends and do stuff, you are probably going to get an Epa license. And Epa-dunk is a music genre.
Ben: It’s the kind of duff-duff music that comes out of cars that 16-year-olds drive.
Hedvig: Yes. I think if you can imagine– it has connotations of bogan.
Daniel: Yeah, okay.
Ben: Yeah. Oh, you [crosstalk] [laughs] that for me. As soon as you say the young, rural men in cars music, I’m right there with you.
Daniel: I mean, duff has the same connotations for me.
Ben: Exactly. This is a guy who is a devout EDM fan.
Hedvig: Yeah. That one I thought was pretty cute. Most of the other ones are somehow crisis related. There’s one that is not crisis related. That is just a word in English. So, Barbiecore.
Daniel: Oh, yeah. Cool.
Ben: Cool.
Hedvig: Which is a visual aesthetic inspired by Barbies. It’s like the same as nerdcore, normcore, golfcore, blah, blah, blah.
Ben: Can I ask a potentially– um.
Hedvig: Yes.
Ben: Rude question?
Hedvig: Uh-huh.
Ben: From a pop cultural perspective, Swedes as an export pop culturally to the world, have you not all been Barbiecore exemplars since like the late 70s? Like, if I go onto Google Image Search right now and type in “Swedish woman,” will my image results not 100% conform with Barbiecore? Like, there’s just going to be beautiful made-up blonde–
Hedvig: No, you’re wrong. What you’re thinking of is, there’s an American movie I think it’s Dumb and Dumber, where they get stranded somewhere and, like, a bus of Swedish women pick them up and they’re all like–
Ben: I’m sorry. I’m so right, and you are so wrong.
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: No, no, no.
Daniel: You did it, didn’t you?
[laughter]
Hedvig: Wait, okay. Sorry. When you say Barbie, I think of like silicon boobs, platinum blonde and bright pink clothing.
Ben: Okay. Except for the pink clothing, if you put light blue and yellow clothing in its place, that is certainly the image that it’s like–[crosstalk]
Daniel: But it’s got to be a–[crosstalk]
Hedvig: I don’t know how to explain, that is what– as a Swedish woman living abroad, I can tell you that that is what people think Swedish women look like. And it’s not what Swedish women look like.
Ben: 100%, that’s all I was talking about.
Hedvig: Which is why you talked about export.
Ben: Yeah. I completely– in the same way that people go, “Oh, Swedish, [gibberish].”
Hedvig: We don’t export to Swedish chef. You guys made that up.
Ben: Exactly.
Hedvig: No. I feel like export is something we’re trying to export.
Ben: Oh, sorry, you’re absolutely right.
Hedvig: You’re talking about extorting, like pulling.
Ben: The version of this is Australians liking Foster’s beer, right?
Hedvig: Yes, exactly. Which you don’t.
Daniel: No one does.
Ben: Which precisely zero Australians drink or enjoy that beer, and yet the entire world thinks of it as the quintessential Australian beer that everyone is drinking. That’s all I was saying.
Hedvig: Exactly.
Ben: It’s hilarious that this has risen to prominence when, to an outsider perspective, [laughs] that was the main thing people would associate with Sweden.
Hedvig: It’s just not like, we’re more classic Continental European, like wearing black, trying to look elegant and suave and Persian, it’s like Swedish fashion.
Ben: I’ve watched my share of Scandinuva. I know what you guys look like. You are, like beautiful but stern 45-year-old women who will not rest until you find the murderer.
Hedvig: That is all of us. You’re correct.
[laughter]
Hedvig: We’re all one 45-year-old woman.
Daniel: Even the men.
Ben: Chic but capable. Beautiful, but–
Hedvig: Chic. There we go. That’s the aesthetic ideal. Barbiecore is not necessarily chic.
Ben: Fair enough. Sorry, we have digressed so far. I’m sorry, Daniel.
Hedvig: Sorry. Anyways, there were lots of words I’m going to give you Epa-dunk and Barbiecore.
Ben: Okay.
Daniel: Thank you. What would you have chosen for if you were on the board for your Swedish Word of the Year? Perhaps, I’m springing this on you.
Hedvig: You are.
Ben: You just want to say Epa-dunk because it’s so fun to say, don’t you?
Hedvig: I think– yeah. Epa-dunk is really fun.
[laughter]
Daniel: Okay. Hey, sometimes the fun captivates you, and that’s what we want. Thank you, Hedvig, for your report. There were a couple of words that slipped under the wire. Diego suggested this one, sudden Russian death syndrome.
Ben: Ooh. Now, that could mean two things. That could be the euphemism Russians use to describe why a whole bunch of the young men from their country are no longer alive.
Daniel: Not that.
Ben: I can absolutely see that being like a really caustic thing that Russians would say to each other. Be like, “Oh, where’s Ivan?” “Well, he’s succumbed to sudden Russian death syndrome.” Instead of like–
Daniel: It’s not that. What else could it be?
Hedvig: It could be the opposite as well. It could be being killed by a Russian.
Daniel: No. Secretly not.
Ben: Could it be the thing that happens to Vladimir Putin?
Daniel: It could be the thing that happens to Vladimir Putin’s former supporters.
Ben: Oh, okay. Either way.
Hedvig: Yeah, it’s [crosstalk] shock.
Daniel: It refers to the way that about 20 to 25 Russian oligarchs have met their demise, strangely in suspicious circumstances, like falling out of buildings and so on.
Ben: Man, look, if history has taught us anything, you got to watch using that as a solution to your problems, because it seems to very reliably end up happening to you.
Daniel: Hmm. It’s true.
Hedvig: Did you know that one of the assassins’ attempt on Navalny, who’s a Putin critic, a common thing they’ve tried to use is Novichok, which is a particular toxin. At one point, they put it in his underwear.
Ben: Hey, man, if it’s good enough to try and kill Queen Elizabeth poisoning clothes, some things never go out of fashion.
Daniel: Just another reason to go commando.
Ben: [laughs]
Daniel: There are some people who reckon that they may not all be getting killed. They may have killed themselves. They are facing sanctions, they’re losing their money. It is possible for some people to die by suicide under those circumstances, but by golly, doesn’t it look suspicious?
Ben: I think, given the geopolitical reality that exists in the world right now, it is definitely not possible to say that categorically didn’t happen. [laughs]
Daniel: Did we learn anything from the Words of the Year this year? Are there any larger lessons?
Hedvig: I think we learned that picking Word of the Year is a very subjective exercise. If people are clear– I think we learned that Hedvig’s and Ben’s favorite category is most likely to succeed.
Ben: Yes, definitely. That should be the Word of the Year category.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: Like, what will people be saying 15, 20, 50 years from now? I reckon, to be honest, I wonder if by that logic– I’m going to put my hand in the air here. Going to do a real, like, Hail Mary call. I reckon, of all of the words, nepo baby will be around in 50 years.
Daniel: Oh, okay. Nepo baby. I think you’re probably right. I think the one that we’re still going to see–
Ben: Now, what Daniel-
Daniel: I’m looking over my list.
Ben: -thinks will justify my answer simply because, unlike all the other things, I think nepo baby describes an aspect of humanity that is just so fundamental to us that it won’t stop being a thing. So, we won’t stop having reasons to use that as an insult and a pulldown on people.
Hedvig: Counterargument.
Ben: I’ll cede the floor.
Hedvig: It has been a thing for thousands of years, and this word is not doing a better job than any other word.
Ben: What are you, a linguist or something? Jeez, get off my back. [laughs]
Daniel: I’m just not seeing any long-termers here. I’m just not. Not like app. Remember app?
Ben: Yeah. Okay.
Daniel: Where are the apps of today?
Hedvig: I think that “it’s giving” is actually a pretty– I would bet a lot of money on “it’s giving.”
Ben: Okay. Well, we’ll just have to wait and see.
Daniel: I guess we will and we’ll be reporting on all the words we can.
Ben: Check in 50 years with you, Hedvig. And, Daniel, before you die, if you could just, like, let us know.
Daniel: I will. Hey, Ben, ask me what I’m doing.
Ben: Hey, Daniel. Whatchudoing?
Daniel: I’m addressing envelopes.
Ben: Why are you doing that, Daniel? Such an archaic form of communication.
Daniel: Because I’m sending our special yearly mail out to every last one of our patrons.
Ben: Get right out of town.
Daniel: Yep. It’s got our special designs that we’ve made. If you are a patron, make sure your physical address is right with Patreon. I was going to say sorry for not getting these out by Christmas, but actually, you know what? I’m glad that we wait until after the Word of the Year vote because I always get some inspiration from it. That’s the case this time with our “Put your whole lingussy into it” sticker, our design. I expect to see it on chests all over the world. I’d just like to say thank you for being a patron. We enjoy seeing you on Discord. If you’re listening to this later and you’re not a patron, why don’t you get on? There’s patreon.com/becauselangpod. You’ll get all kinds of goodies. Thanks for supporting the show, everybody.
Ben: We really appreciate it.
[Because Language music]
Daniel: Let’s get to that mailbag. We’ve got time for a couple of questions.
Ben: Let’s pull them out of the mailbagussy.
Daniel: Thank you. Ooh, sounds like a title.
Ben: [laughs]
Hedvig: I had just recovered from lingussy.
Ben: [crosstalk] Sorry.
Daniel: Matias via email, hello@becauselanguage.com, says, “Hi, Daniel and the team.” That’s you too. “Whenever I see lists of names in alphabetical order, like lists of popular baby names or class, lists of patrons at the end of YouTube videos, etc., there’s always a bias toward names starting with a letter from the first half of the alphabet, A through M.” Is it M?
Ben: [whispering]
Daniel: Yes. A through N. Mathias says N, but actually the first 13 letters are A through M.
Hedvig: For English boring alphabets, yeah.
Daniel: Correct. Thank you. “Like if the alphabet was put into random order, I’d expect half the names to start with the letter from the first half of the alphabet. But instead, it seems like it’s always about two-thirds of the names to start with a letter between A and N. I’ve noticed this in both English-given names, Danish-given names, and in online nicknames that people choose for themselves. M I just imagining things or is this something that has been studied previously? Did humans arrange the alphabet so that the most popular letters are first? Or did the first letters on the alphabet become more popular because they were in the beginning of the alphabet? Does this happen in other languages and cultures with other scripts? Also, why are almost all the vowels at the start of the alphabet?”
Ben: Okay.
Hedvig: Okay.
Daniel: There’s a lot here.
Hedvig: Okay.
Ben: Okay.
Daniel: Okay.
Hedvig: I have theories, Ben has theories. Ben, go first.
Ben: Wait, no, before I even want to get into theories, I’m not even getting that far yet. Can we just acknowledge that Mathias has like one awesome stoned question of the fucking decade award? Like every aspect of this question is God-tier linguistic genius. As the question kept going, I had mind blow after mind blow revelation where I was like, “Oh, my God. Oh, does it? What? How? Did we– [crosstalk]” So, Mathias, I salute you, sir. Now, let’s try and answer the many different ideas that you’ve brought up in your question.
Daniel: Okay, first thing. Is this really happening?
Hedvig: I think it might be happening and I have a theory for why.
Ben: I’m just going to trust Mathias. If he has had this level of insight into these things, I’m just going to assume his base knowledge is correct.
Daniel: Well, I didn’t trust Matthias, so I decided to check it out.
Ben: [laughs]
Daniel: I grabbed the top 200 baby names from this year. Boys and girls, 200 names. Take a guess. What number do we see the first N at? You’d expect it to be at 101, where it wasn’t, really.
Ben: Okay, I’m going to go with him. I’m going to say 140-ish.
Daniel: Hedvig?
Hedvig: Is this American babies?
Daniel: It’s not.
Hedvig: Is it boys and girls mixed?
Daniel: It’s English-speaking babies. I mixed the names, yes.
Hedvig: Okay. Because I think there are more Ns in the boys. They have like Nicholas and shit. Yeah.
Daniel: Mm. I decided to mix them up because–
Hedvig: Yeah, fair enough. 60?
Daniel: What, the first N?
Ben: Ooh. You’re going in the opposite direction. So, you’re saying there’s vastly more–[crosstalk]
Hedvig: I don’t know. I just got to do something interesting.
Daniel: It was. It was Nicholas at number 150.
Ben: Oh, so Mathias is like 100% on the money here. Like he even got the ratio right.
Daniel: Well, what about 1920s New South Wales? First name, why not? It was available Nancy at 142. Top 100 cities in the world by population. Top 100. Nairobi at 62.
Ben: Wow.
Daniel: So, this is happening.
Ben: Mathias absolutely hit on an extant phenomenon, like this is definitely–[crosstalk]
Daniel: What’s going on? Hedvig, your hypothesis, please.
Hedvig: Okay, so first of all, alphabets are a thing in some languages, and they mean that you have one character that roughly represents one language sound. There’s some, [crosstalk] ‘sh’ is something and ‘ng’ is something, blah, blah, blah. But generally are one character, roughly one sound, and then you get things like how English people spell, like, I don’t know, cough.
Ben: Let’s just leave ‘gh,’ please. We know we don’t have the time.
Daniel: It’s a rough guide.
Hedvig: Through, though, thought. Fuck you, guys. Okay. We’re over that bit.
[chuckles]
Ben: [crosstalk] -fuck us, that’s just the worst.
Hedvig: And then, we get like, okay, the particular alphabet that we use in most European languages starts with A, and it goes ABCD, blah, blah, blah. As far as I know, it’s usually traced back to Phoenician. So, before Latin and Greek, there’s something called Phoenician writing and it’s all around the Mediterranean and East Mediterranean. But as far as I know, you keep adding letters as you need them for a while. So, I think that you start with the more common sounds in some sort of order that might have to do with the physics of it, like how many lines you’re doing. Because I think also, if you think about it, they get more complicated the further you go a bit.
Daniel: A bit. Chinese script, especially by design, their so-called alphabetic order is based on stroke numbers.
Hedvig: Yeah, because that’s definitely true for numbers.
Daniel: Yes, it’s true for numbers. It’s true for letters as well. For example, in the English alphabet and the Roman alphabet, Y and Z just came later. And so, they had to go to the end.
Hedvig: Yeah, exactly. So, if that’s true, then I think that there are more common sounds at the beginning of the alphabet. And therefore, what Mathias observed just falls out of that.
Ben: And Mathias basically said that. Is it just a case of the ones were using, we started with and then as went on, they got rarer and rarer?
Hedvig: I think so.
Daniel: There is something else at work though. I think that might be part of it. The order of the alphabet is the way it is because we needed those sounds first. In some cases, there’s been some slop, but there’s something else going on.
Ben: May I guess?
Daniel: Yes.
Ben: Is this a self-fulfilling prophecy?
Daniel: Yes.
Hedvig: Oh, no.
Ben: Yeah. I’m essentially going to posit that this is a phonebook phenomenon, for lack of a better phrase.
Hedvig: You mean that people are like, “I’ve given birth to a child, I’m going to choose a name that is earlier in the alphabet because I think it’ll benefit them more.”
Ben: I’m going to say in terms of big data, over many years, yes. Like little tendencies in one way or another have resulted in that.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: There is a name for this effect. It is called the primacy effect. We remember the first items on a list better. We remember the last ones pretty well too, but the ones in the middle is like, blah. In fact, there’s been a 2019 study from Jeffrey R. Stevens and Juan F. Duque published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review where they found that surnames earlier in the alphabet were cited more often than those later in the alphabet when journals ordered citations alphabetically compared with chronologically or numerically.
Ben: I can’t remember where I saw it, but I did see a journal article that was just the unfair advantage conferred to alphabetically earlier names, and it was written by like a Ziegler or Zana or somebody.
[laughter]
Ben: I just thought it was so funny. [laughs]
Hedvig: I can believe that.
Daniel: This actually reminds me though of Benford’s law as well. And Benford’s law points out that if you have a list of numbers of populations of cities or phone numbers or whatever, there’ll be more ones at the top. There’ll be more that start with one either thousand or hundred or ten or a billion or whatever. So, Benford’s law–
Hedvig: Oh, okay.
Daniel: Yeah. There is just this weird– even in stats, it’s not even people choosing, it’s just this weird feature that ones, there’s a lot of them.
Ben: [laughs] Hedvig is pulling a face right now that I just have to describe to the audience. I have very rarely seen her unhappy with an answer the way I am seeing her unhappy with this answer. She looks like a video– and I say this with so much love in my heart, Hedvig, I promise, you were pulling a face just then like when people give dogs lemon, [laughs] like an animal that has been given a treat and then has just gone [onomatopoeia].
Hedvig: I was trying really hard in my brain to think.
Ben: Accept this answer. [laughs]
Hedvig: And also just to think about numbers and be like, “Okay, so what he was saying, that was numbers starting with one, not like large numbers, but numbers starting with one, like one million, one thousand, one hundred, ten, are all starting with one, but they’re very different quantities. And that they would occur more at the top instead of like–“
Daniel: They would occur more often than numbers beginning with two or three.
Hedvig: Right.
Ben: Is Benford’s law also the thing that governs street name popularity? The most common name in America, I believe, is probably Main Street. Then the second most common is First Street.
Daniel: First street.
Ben: The third most common is Second Street. The third most common is Third Street.
Daniel: You’re never going to have a Third Street without a First Street.
Hedvig: You have streets name First Street?
Ben: Yeah. Like, First [crosstalk] and stuff.
Daniel: All the time. Yeah, I grew up in Fifth Street.
Hedvig: That’s just great American–
Ben: But, but, but the phenomenon holds true. Yes, there are going to be a lot of First Avenues, for example, but there’s probably not going to be anywhere near as many 11th Avenues.
Daniel: Right.
Hedvig: Right, but that’s people naming things. How many people live in a city is not–
Ben: But, Hedvig, when we name babies, that’s people naming things.
Hedvig: No, no. Daniel said the hundred top most populous cities in the world.
Ben: Yeah, people name those too.
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: No, wait, you said the name? I thought it was a population number.
Daniel: No, hang on. We’re talking about the primacy effect, which is words, but then I switched over to Benford’s law, which is about numbers.
Hedvig: Yeah. Which has nothing to do with people choosing anything.
Daniel: No, that’s right.
Hedvig: No one chooses how many people are born in a place. If they’re–[crosstalk]
Daniel: No, just one of those things where if you’ve got one thing and then two things and then ten things, now it’s all ones, eleven things, twelve things. Those all start with one. You might get to 20s, you might get to 30s and they’ll show up as well, but then you’re into the hundreds, and then it’s all hundreds for a while. So, that’s ones.
Hedvig: Yeah, but it’s hundreds, then there’s two hundreds for a while.
Daniel: And then, it goes on. And you might get to those. You might get up to 500, but then you might get up to a thousand. And then, it’s thousands for a while.
Hedvig: There you go. [crosstalk]
Daniel: You won’t suddenly jump into the two thousands, without getting into the thousands.
Ben: The answer to Mathias’ question though is essentially the primacy effect.
Daniel: That’s what I think. That’s my answer.
Hedvig: [blows raspberry] Okay.
[laughter]
Ben: Hedvig is just so unhappy with that answer.
Daniel: Why are we unhappy with this answer? How can I help you?
Hedvig: Still thinking about the numbers. I’m going to call my mathematician husband later and talk about the numbers. The shit about people–
Ben: Just let go of the numbers.
Hedvig: No, I’m not. The shit about people naming their daughters Amelia and whatever, fine, whatever, fine. Like cities in the New World being like, “Oh, yeah, First Street, Second Street,” whatever. Humans do crazy stuff.
Daniel: But it’s population too.
Ben: [crosstalk] -your idea of crazy is just the absolutely most boring, logical way to do a thing.
Daniel: But it is bonkers. Benford’s law, I don’t know of a good explanation for it. We talked about it with Caleb Everett on the Talk the Talk episode, Numbers and The Making of Us. It’s just this weird artefact.
Ben: Here’s a fun game. I genuinely think you should do this because I just feel like this will be so fun for me in particular. But I assume if I enjoy it, other people will enjoy it too. Can you just record you sitting down with Steve at your kitchen table with like two microphones or whatever or one Bluegrass, I don’t care.
Daniel: Yes, please.
Ben: Just being like, “Steve, can you please explain Benford’s law to me?”
Hedvig: Yeah, I can do that.
Daniel: And he’ll be like, “Oh, Benford’s law, yeah.”
Hedvig: I talked to him about math a lot, and it’s good time, but it is like painful times.
Ben: I’ll hear this.
Daniel: If you would allow us to sit in.
Ben: Yeah, let us be the–[crosstalk]
Hedvig: Okay. I’ll ask Steve if he wants to do that.
Ben: [crosstalk] -fly on the wall for that particular conversation.
Daniel: That’s coming up on our Discord. Thanks, Mathias. Okay, Ignacio has a question about ee-ither or is it ei-ther? Ignacio says, “Random question. Do people usually have a consistent way of saying neither or either or neither or either? I can’t figure out what I say. I know I use both long and short ‘e’ sound. I can’t even really figure out if there’s a pattern that has to do with surrounding words, stress, emphasis, place in sentence, etc. It just seems random. But it’s not that they both sound normal to me all the time. Some situations make me use one sound or the other, and the alternative doesn’t seem to sound right, but I’m not consistent from what I can tell.” What do you think?
Ben: I just ascribe to buckaroo usage on this one.
Daniel: Oh, really? Free variation. This is what’s called free variation. No pattern.
Ben: I don’t think I have any rules or rhyme or anything. It’s just like whatever little neurons are firing through Ben’s teeny little brain at that moment is what he says.
Hedvig: That’s good that you feel that way because you make for a good subject.
Ben: I’ve got to be honest, guys. Whenever someone says, “You’d be a great research candidate,” my immediate brain is like, “Oh, no.”
Hedvig: I mean, linguists famously do this to people around them a lot, and I’m sorry. And you’re around us a lot.
Daniel: And you’re around us a lot.
Ben: [laughs]
Hedvig: Free variation is what we call things we haven’t figured out yet.
Daniel: Yeah, that’s right. So, I decided I was going to try to figure it out. You know our transcripts?
Hedvig: Oh, yeah.
Ben: [laughs]
Daniel: You know how it’s got every single word that we say in there?
Hedvig: Uh-huh. Yes.
Ben: Okay. So, you’ve got a really interesting dataset.
Hedvig: Oh, my God. Can we do what is the most common word Ben says? What’s the most common word Hedvig says? Oh, my God. [drumming the table]
Daniel: The transcripts are made by the wonderful people at SpeechDocs. And I found every instance of either and neither as said by Ben. And then, I hunted them down in the audio files, and I have just sent them to you.
Ben: How much time do you have?
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: Too much. This time, you can spend on TikTok. Oh, my God.
Daniel: This is every instance of you saying ee-ither, ei-ther, nee-ither or neither. Go.
Ben: [Ben’s clip uttering either and neither in free variations]
[laughter]
Hedvig: That is so funny.
Ben: That is the most fucking, surreal–
Hedvig: That is so good. And it is mostly ee-ither.
Daniel: Now, in our Discord, I am also pasting what you said. At the top, you’ve got ee-ither, and then a little farther down, you’ve got ei-ther and all the sentences that contain those. Then there’s nee-ither and neither. I hope that’s clear.
Hedvig: Mm-hmm. It is. I love this. I love this.
Daniel: I’m posting these on the episode page for this episode. That’s becauselanguage.com.
Hedvig: This is brilliant. I forgive any, any love you’ve ever shown for Elon Musk.
[laughter]
Daniel: There is none. There is none. I’m a Tesla guy who doesn’t like Elon. But anyway.
Ben: Okay. Wow.
Hedvig: Okay. Tell me, give me the–
Daniel: I know this the–[crosstalk]
Ben: I can’t be bothered reading all of this, but just going from what I heard, there was a fair amount of back and forth to my ear. I heard–
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Oh, and what I really loved, I’m going to send you this now. There was a sentence, I actually found a sentence where you alternated ee-ither and either. Here that is.
Hedvig: Oh, my God. Yes.
Daniel: In the same sentence.
Ben: “You know how when you walk into a home for the first time of someone ee-ither you know well, or perhaps you don’t know well, but either way, if it’s the first time into that space.”
[laughter]
Ben: Just based on that sentence alone, my tiny little neurons firing explanation seems to hold up. It’s just this weird mish-mash.
Hedvig: The second one was either way.
Daniel: Either way.
Hedvig: So, you know your brain is like a, “Imma my way to way, so I go–” [crosstalk]
Daniel: Let’s start there. And then, we pour through the data, and I see that the expression “either way” exists in both the ee-ither and the either camp.
Hedvig: Fuck. Argh.
Ben: [laughs] That’s right, bitches. I’m just a dice man. Every time I use the word, I’m just [onomatopoeia].
Hedvig: People complain about me. But like, fuck, yes.
[laughter]
Daniel: All right.
Ben: I am chaotic neutral. That is my alignment.
Daniel: So, we have ee-ither way, either way. They both appear in the list, but there may be a slight pendency. I only have a few instances here. I noticed also, as far as the end of the sentence, you’re just as likely to end a sentence with ee-ither as you are with either. There’s, “I don’t ee-ither. I didn’t know that was the case ee-ither.” But then, there’s also, “there no fuzziness about what people would be talking about either.” Maybe that one was a fluke. I don’t know.
Ben: Look, what can I say? Some people follow the rules, and some people are just buckaroos.
[laughter]
Hedvig: Can I say, I have some theories about some patterns, but I would like to open up that if you are a linguistics teacher and you have some students who are taking a sociolinguistics course and you are looking for a term project for their term paper, then all the transcripts are there, our material is already transcribed, the audio’s there.
Ben: Use me. Use me, my delightful– Look, I’m going to say it right now. I’m going to use the words in this episode right now so they have to hear this bit. Ee-ither use me or don’t use me. Neither way, I don’t care.
Hedvig: Oh, my God.
Daniel: [laughs] This is a genuine gap, I think, because the literature on either and neither are kind of scanty. There was the linguist, Louise Pound. She wrote about it in the journal American Speech in 1932.
Hedvig: 1932. See?
Daniel: She doesn’t discuss how this varies within the same individual, but instead she writes about how Americans say ee-ither and British people say either. Actually, this is really fun. She quotes WD Whitney from 1874, who didn’t like either. Check this out. Whitney says, “Whatever actual foundation either may have in the native usage of any part of the English speaking people, it has spread in recent times far beyond that foundation by a kind of reasonless and senseless infection, which can only be condemned and not to be stoutly opposed and put down.”
Hedvig: Oh, my God.
Daniel: I know.
Ben: [laughs] This man would not have enjoyed me.
Daniel: Ooh. There really isn’t that much going on here. But I do notice this, I will drop a crumb that in my goings through this data, take a look at neither and neither. Ben says, “No. Nee-ither do I. No. Nee-ither can I.” Then he says, “Neither of you.” And then, he says, “English is neither in Australia–“, talking about official languages, “English is neither in Australia, correct?”
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: I’m noticing that there’s a vowel at the beginning of the next word for neither and there’s a consonant at the beginning of the next word for neither and it doesn’t hold all the time.
Ben: That’s a dataset of two as well.
Daniel: But then I went back to ee-ither and either, and it holds pretty well. I mean, either way, it can go either way. [chuckles] ‘va’is a bit of a semi-vowel. There’s also ‘ya’. What was the one, “Can either of–” no, “Ee-ither you do this.” Here’s the either. I don’t say either of those phrases, ean either of you. A weird lumpy shape that tails off toward either end. It’s got nothing to do with either election. So, it’s vowel, vowel, vowel, vowel.
Ben: Okay, okay, okay. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Hedvig: Mm-hmm.
Daniel: That’s just the posit rule of the– [crosstalk]
Ben: We just [crosstalk] the term paper for everyone, Daniel. Good one.
Hedvig: No, it’s a suggestion for a theory based on a few examples of one weird Australian guy.
Daniel: It’s a conjecture.
Hedvig: People can do more things. Yeah.
Ben: No, it begins and ends with me.
Daniel: Call it Daniel’s suspicion.
Hedvig: Honestly, I’ll put in a bonus, or maybe a not bonus, but if someone is a linguistic teacher, it’s fairly easy to get the podcast mp3 or vob files or whatever. And fuck it, I’ll volunteer me and Daniel as co-supervisors.
Daniel: I’ve already done the work, so it’s there for you.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: I just love that we are all three of us the kind of people who are so on board with fair and free usage that we’re just, like, “Steal it. Steal it all. Use it, my pretty ones. Use it well.”
Hedvig: I love podcasts for– just a fucking free RSS link. It’s so beautiful.
Daniel: If I want to take money, do you know what I would do? I would play on people’s fears and insecurities. I would say, “I can help you with my plan to speak better so that you can find love and acceptance.”
Ben: Yeah, that would be a good way to make good money, for sure.
Daniel: I’d like do accent stuff. Oh, my gosh, it would be so unethical. Anyway, I’m putting that in your hands. Sorry if that was a little hard to listen to. It’ll make more sense with the supporting materials. Once again, those materials will be on our website, becauselanguage.com. We have time for some comments. Do you want to do the boomers one?
Ben: Ben’s in trouble.
Daniel: This one comes to us from Lawrence via email. “I was encouraged by the letter writer who raised the issue of ageism on the show. I have heard it too.” Apparently, we’re a bit ageist. “I was disturbed by the response–” Can we summarize the response?
Ben: Basically, someone called me specifically, I think, out on ageism for having a massive go at boomers time and time again, and I doubled and then tripled down on why I’m not particularly nice or forgiving of people in that particular age bracket, which is a completely fair encapsulation of my response. I do not disagree with how they characterized how I responded to the criticism. It’s true. I did respond that way.
Daniel: Lawrence says, “I was disturbed by the response, and I became more disturbed as it turned into a hate-filled rant from Ben. He doubled and tripled down. He seems to base it on a notion of collective guilt based on demographics and actually wishing death on older people. Perhaps, hyperbole but he seemed dead serious. Aren’t we trying to get away from that kind of thinking? I don’t think it makes the world a better place. I don’t think this is telling it like it is. This is not fighting against reductive thinking. This is indulging in it.”
Obviously, we are as a show against anyone dying for any reason ever, ever, ever, but there’s a couple of threads here. I think one is what I was saying at the time was there are lots of awesome boomers. I give talks to boomers who are trying their best and blah, blah. We got to give them props. Ben’s response has been something like, if I could put words in your mouth, Ben, generationally, this is the generation that destroyed the housing market, that destroyed the job market. Me personally, if you go to my Twitter bio right now, you will see that my profile pic is that graph of how worker productivity has climbed but wages have stagnated for the past 40 years. That is a situation that boomers have presided over. And then, on top of that, they have continually traduced millennials for being lazy, superficial, blah, blah, for destroying avocado toast or whatever. Even though there are lots of boomers #NotAllBoomers do that, it’s not the kind of thing that millennials are going to forget easily.
Ben: Yeah, I think there’s a bit of that going on. I’m sure Lawrence probably wants to hear from me more than anyone because it was me that Lawrence, who I am assuming is going to be male Lawrence, he, what do we think?
Daniel: Fair.
Hedvig: Lawrence is usually male– [crosstalk]
Ben: [crosstalk] -assumption. No, Lawrence can be female.
Daniel: It’s a name typically ascribed to men.
Ben: Anyway, I’ll keep it neutral. I’m sure Lawrence would probably want to hear my response to his criticism of me or sorry, their criticism of me. I guess what I would say is I probably did go straight into hyperbole for the sake of a bit of humor and a bit of that. But if you’re looking for me to wind back my general position, you’re probably not going to find it, because in the same way that I just categorically reject and don’t ascribe to the “not all” suffix of any kind, I find that a completely illegitimate form of discourse, like #NotAllWhitePeople, #NotAllMen, #NotAllBoomers, blah, blah. If you are, through the lottery of birth, a part of a privileged class across one of your intersections of privilege, of which I am in nearly every conceivable intersection of my identity. Male, cis, white, now vaguely middle aged, blah, blah, blah.
If someone is criticizing white people or men or anything like that, the least helpful and relevant thing you can do as a member of that subset is to say, “Hang on a second, not all” insert whichever defense you want to put in here. Lawrence, I fully, fully accept that you probably feel really upset with the nasty shit that I said about boomers, and I feel bad that you had a negative experience based on the things that I said. I will continue to criticize white people and boomers and men and other people who exist in positions of power and continue to abuse those positions, which, I’m sorry, mate, most boomers still do, and most white people still do, and most men still do.
If you’re looking for me to go, “Oh, you know what? You’re right. It was unfair of me to engage in absolutist thinking about your segment of society,” boomers, or transpose that into any of the other ones, white people, men, so and so forth, no, I’m not going to. Sorry. If you want that to be something that happens from me on this show, unfortunately, you’re going to be pretty disappointed. If that leaves you feeling like I’m not being the best version of myself or I’m not engaging in the fully most high minded and educational discourse I can possibly engage in, you are fully free to think that, and you are fully free to think that I am just not a very good person. That is absolutely your prerogative. I do not mind. All good.
Hedvig: [chuckles] I think there’s maybe a conflation possibly happening between– so at one point this letter writer said, “Aren’t we trying to get away from that reductionist thinking?” I don’t know personally if I am actually, because I think that there are meaningful things in patterns and generalizations, and they’re going to be outliers. The reason I support Ben in this is because I think that for all the groups that he mentioned, it’s a fair generalization. It is true of enough members of that category that it is meaningful to talk about it. Whereas if you say something that is–
Ben: If I can jump in here really quick, sorry. Just because I’m very confident that Lawrence’s response to that would be, “Well, why shouldn’t I do that about things that aren’t privileged classes?” like we know that it’s wrong to do that about black people or indigenous people or poor people or disabled people or gay people or so on and so forth. To that, I would say, absolutely. It is wrong to do it to all of those things. The only groups of people that I would say that I engage in reductionist thinking over are people who exist in positions of unquestioned power. If Lawrence is sitting here going, “Well, hang on, but being old isn’t necessarily powerful,” I would say, mm, generationally, I have to disagree.
Boomers are absolutely the most powerful generation and from a generational perspective, hold all the cards, just as white people do in a racial spectrum, just as men do in a gender spectrum, just like straight people do in a sexuality spectrum. Being a member of a privileged class means you’re going to have to cop a lot of licks. That’s my philosophy. You just have to take them with grace. If you don’t accept that, that’s fine. You totally don’t have to agree with me but you are not probably going to hear me being very recalcitrant about offering out those licks for members of those protective classes. Sorry, not protective, privileged classes.
Hedvig: No, exactly. Whenever people say that, “Oh, then why can’t I make fun of a generalizing pattern I’ve found of one of these other groups?”, it’s like yeah, but you know the difference between those two groups, like you just said, one hand, on the other, which means you know that there is a difference between the groups. Like you’re aware of something. [Ben and Daniel chuckles] We can use that information, you have some knowledge, but also the point about it’s not an entirely untrue generalization, even if it’s not true for all members of the category sometimes. I don’t know. You don’t, Ben, say that, “Oh, I don’t like boomers because they always buckaroo park.” I don’t know if that’s true. I’m not sure that’s true.
Ben: And you know what I’ve been just really making sure I don’t do, which is a real strong impulse in me, and I think it’s probably an impulse in a lot of people, is I immediately wanted to start talking about, “The members of that generation that I’m really good friends with and have great relationships with,” all that kind of stuff.
Hedvig: It doesn’t matter.
Ben: It’s not at all relevant to this, I don’t think. I genuinely am bummed that one of our listeners has heard a thing that I’ve said and they’ve felt like real shit about it. I don’t like that feeling. I don’t like the idea– It’s so easy when you do a podcast, especially when it’s a podcast where three people sit in various rooms of their house and talk shit to each other, [Hedvig laughs] it’s so easy to go on a bit of a rant and lose your way. I definitely, definitely invite people offering me feedback on all of the things that I say, which is why we’re talking about this. I’m super happy to hear what people think about the things that I have to say. This one, I think, unfortunately, it’s just a bummer that I think Lawrence probably isn’t going to like me and the things that I think and the things that I say very much, and that sucks, and it’s not a great thing.
I’m certainly not ever going to be the person who revels in fucking people off. I’m not sitting here being like, “Yeah, I got the fucking Lawrences of the world with their knickers in a twist. Oh, aren’t I great?” It does not– None of the reward centers of my brain are firing off right now. It still feels kind of yucky in my tum-tum. But it doesn’t mean that I’m probably going to change very much in the way that Lawrence would want. Sorry, mate.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: It’s an old conflict, isn’t it? We exist as members of a generation, but we experience life individually. There is this thing for me, when someone criticizes white people, it’s like, “Hey, I’m one of the good ones. I’ve really worked hard to uncover my prejudices, and try to–“, well, you know what? Maybe I haven’t fucking done enough.
Ben: [laughs] Absolutely. For the longest time, like, “Yeah, man, I’m one of the good ones.”
Hedvig: Or even if you have, who cares?
Ben: It turns out maybe I’m not.
Daniel: Okay, how about this? White people, not enough of us have done enough to change things.
Hedvig: Clearly not. Even if in a situation you think that you are, that doesn’t entitle you to say to other people that they cannot criticize that group. Even in those cases, it doesn’t make sense. You can just be quiet and smile and sit back, it’s fine.
Daniel: And learn from this. Learn from this and take your callouts well and say, “You know what? I’m going to have the intellectual humility to say.”
Ben: Which Lawrence would argue I’m absolutely not doing right now, I’m sure. Like, I’m not taking my criticism well.
Hedvig: I think you are.
Ben: I hope that Lawrence feels like I have spent the time and the energy to map out what they think about what I said and to hear it and to understand it. Unfortunately, at the end of that, my position is, sorry, mate, I don’t agree.
Daniel: Thank you for that. I appreciate hearing that. And it was cleansing.
Ben: I hope you still listen, Lawrence. I hope you still listen, and maybe you just fucking hate my bits, but you really enjoy Daniel and Hedvig. [laughs]
Daniel: [laughs] Or like, “I like Ben, but not when he starts talking about X,” which is how I feel about a lot of people.
Hedvig: I mean, I want to Ben, so I don’t think this is going to go well.
[laughter]
Ben: Oh, shit, no one should want that. That is definitely a suspect [crosstalk]
Hedvig: You are a great role model.
Ben: [laughs] Daniel, don’t you dare allow that to make it into the show.
Daniel: I’m going to use that sentence as our clip.
Ben: Authentically dangerous information to have in the world.
Daniel: That goes on the promo. Pontus on our YouTube channel comments about the word spicy, because Hedvig and I talked about spicy cough special.
Ben: Spice is fun, spice is great.
Daniel: The most famous one is perhaps spicy accountant.
Ben: Well, I don’t know about the most famous, but certainly the most recently big.
Daniel: Okay. The meme is that sex workers often claim they are accountants, and the actual accountants were like, “I’m actually an accountant.” From there, we started getting spicy accountants, as in sex workers, which I didn’t know. That’s a great Word of the Week. Thanks, Pontus.
Hedvig: I think it’s partially from this comedy music song saying, “If you don’t want to tell people what you do, say you’re an accountant. No one ever asks an accountant what to do,” and it’s like a funny–[crosstalk]
[laughter]
Ben: It’s a conversation-ending statement.
Hedvig: Yeah. No one’s going to ask you follow up questions. I actually do because I to as well. Okay. “What do you do every day? What kind of accountancy do you do? What program do you–” I don’t know. I’m just curious. I ask hairdressers a bunch of shit as well. There’s another one, the euphemism, that’s just a little spicy, but for sex workers I’ve noticed on TikTok, I don’t know why, but people say, “My job is to offer people side quests.”
Daniel: [laughs] Okay.
Ben: Oh. That’s completely new to me.
Daniel: I’m an NPC.
Ben: I’m [crosstalk] TikTok yet.
Hedvig: Yeah, it took me a really long time to get because I got all these videos of people looking, and I kept watching them because I was like, “What the fuck is going on?”
Ben: That is interesting. It seems like a very niche nexus of both sex working and video game enjoying. [laughs]
Hedvig: That’s why I was so confused because it was coming up in my gamer feed and I was like, this woman is raising her eyebrows and being like, “So, I work with giving people side quests.” I was like, “Okay, what is that?”
Ben: [laughs]
Hedvig: Daniel, if you ever go into TikTok, problem is people sometimes make intentionally confusing videos so that you keep watching.
Ben: There’s a whole gaming algorithm thing that happens that can be really– and then, the really fun thing is there’s like a cottage industry of creators who subvert that, which I really like. I’m subscribed to a bunch of people, a video will start and it’ll go for about like five seconds where you establish whatever the hook or bait of the video is, and then it’ll just cut to someone being like it was strep throat went too far and then they lost their fingers. It cuts straight to the end of like– it takes a minute’s worth of watching and possibly a part two video and a part three video and they cut all of that out and they put it into five seconds of information– [crosstalk]
Hedvig: And, like, here are the five celebrities they’re going to list. Blah, blah, blah.
Daniel: And I’ll be like leg booty?
Ben: [laughs]
Hedvig: It’s the opposite of clickbait.
Daniel: Thanks to everybody who asked questions. Thanks to Dustin of Sandman Stories who still recommends us to loads and loads of people. Thanks to the team at SpeechDocs who transcribes all the words, or–
Ben: All of the neithers and the nee-ithers and eithers and ee-ithers.
Daniel: Yeah, but they don’t split them up into category. That would have made things so much easier. Could you please just transcribe everything into IPA that’ll make it all so much better?
Ben: [laughs]
Hedvig: [laughs] Oh. No.
Daniel: Most of all of our patrons who give us so much support and make it possible to keep the show going. We heart you with both of our hands. Mwah.
Hedvig: [laughs] If you like the show and you want to keep us going and support us and keep us talking, but you don’t want to give us money directly, there are things you can do that work that has to do with how humans work, which is you can go one of these social media platforms and tell the algorithm that you like us by actually following or liking us on the various places. That helps. You can also leave us a message on SpeakPipe so we can hear your beautiful voices. You can do that on our website which is becauselanguage.com. And you can also send us an old-fashioned email, hello@becauselanguage.com. Then, the most important thing that I think you can do is you can tell someone you like about us. That is how I get most of my podcast recommendations and I think that’s how most people get them. We would get more listeners if you told people about us.
Daniel: Doesn’t that sound like a lot of work? Wouldn’t you rather give us money instead? Ben will tell you how.
Hedvig: [laughs]
Ben: Now if that isn’t your thing and you would prefer to just give us some cash, oh boy, is there a way to do that? You could become a patron. You’ll get bonus episodes before they come out to like gen pop. You can hang out with us on Discord and the rest of the people who are patrons with us, of which there are some truly stellar human beings. Like Mathias’ question today on the show, which blew my mind in three successive mind blows, that’s like Tuesday on our Discord, honestly. You’ll be making it possible for us to transcripts of our show, so Daniel can do the same kind of data analysis that genuinely made Hedvig squeal with joy today.
Hedvig: It was so good. So good. So good.
Daniel: We’re going to have a conference on the linguistic uses of Because Language transcripts. The first conference on Because Language.
Hedvig: Fuck yeah.
Ben: The patrons who are currently just doing their all to make all of those things possible and reaping the many, many benefits are Iztin, Termy, Elías, Matt, Whitney, Helen, Jack, PharaohKatt, Lord Mortis, gramaryen, Larry, Kristofer, Andy B, James, Nigel, Meredith, Kate, Nasrin, Joanna, bumpting up to the supporter lever after years of being patron. Thanks, Joanna. Ayesha, who, word on the street is the most beautiful person who have ever lived. Moe, Steele, Margareth, Manú, Rodger, Rhian, Colleen, Ignacio, Sonic Snejhog, still love it, even if it’s hard to say. Kevin, Jeff, Andy from Logophilius, Stan, Kathy, Rach, Cheyenne, Felicity S, Amir, Canny Archer, O Tim, Alyssa, Chris W, Felicity G. And to our newest patron, Ryan. Welcome at the friend level, Ryan. Also, Elliott newest smasher of the onetime donation button on our website, becauselanguage.com. Thanks to all the people I just named and all of the people that I haven’t named. Person listening who hasn’t donated or liked anything on social media, thanks to you, buddy.
Daniel: There were 42 names just then and we didn’t see an end until Nasrin at number 32.
[laughter]
Hedvig: Oh, my God.
Daniel: It’s still a thing. It’s a thing.
Daniel: Our theme music has been written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who’s a member of Ryan Beno and of Didion’s Bible. Thank you for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language. Cozzie langs.
[beep]
[all make pew-pew sounds]
Hedvig: Wait, what exactly is Ben’s problem?
Ben: So, on my phone, I’m in the gallery view, but the gallery tiles, for some reason, are proper teeny, dial-up internet, save as many of the kilobytes as possible thumbnails. They’re like teeny-tiny.
Hedvig: Switch to landscape.
Ben: I am on landscape. That’s what I mean.
Hedvig: Okay. Hide yourself.
Ben: Okay, hiding. No.
Hedvig: There should be a hide yourself somehow.
Daniel: Hide Ben from himself. Oh, if only.
Ben: Oh. Yeah. [laughs] Therapy has tried and failed, guys, I’m sorry.
[laughter]
Ben: Actually, no, if I’m honest, therapy tries to do the exact opposite.
Daniel: Tries to do the opposite, and I don’t like it.
[beep]
Hedvig: We hosted Christmas dinner at our house and then we were like, how can we do this as low effort as possible, but still hit the right marks?
Ben: Notes. Yeah.
Hedvig: We drove to Ikea-
Ben: Naturally.
Hedvig: -and bought large amounts of meatballs.
Ben: Yeah. Sounds like a Thursday.
Hedvig: And then, cooked up some potatoes and other things and parsnips. British people are obsessed with root vegetables for Christmas.
Ben: Yes. In their defense, until wheat and stuff made it to England, it was literally everything they could eat. [laughs]
Hedvig: No, fair enough. I mean, that’s the rest of Europe too, but they really go for it. Steve did all the root vegetables and we did a bunch of meatballs, and I can recommend it. If you don’t want to cook like a turkey or a ham or bird of any kind, just get pretty processed food and serve it to your guests.
Ben: With authentic reindeer meatballs.
Hedvig: Sorry?
Daniel: Reindeer? Nobody eats reindeer.
Ben: Yeah, Ikea sells reindeer meatballs.
Hedvig: People do that. It’s just you can’t get it out of Ikea.
Ben: You can get it at our Ikea.
Hedvig: Reindeer meatballs?
Daniel: Reindeer meatballs?
Ben: Yeah-huh.
Hedvig: At your Ikea? Wow, that’s very luxurious. No, we could just get the regular bland stuff and the plant stuff and that was it.
Ben: Oh, okay.
Daniel: I’m having a credibility gap. After we finish this call, I’m going to drive there and I’m going to make sure.
Ben: They’ve closed the cafeteria in the Perth one now, and I very much know for sure that they used to sell the reindeer meatballs for you to eat on the spot in the cafeteria.
Daniel: Goodness gracious. I didn’t know they closed the cafe. That’s huge.
Ben: If they haven’t, they’re going to, one of the two.
Daniel: Yeah. Okay. Probably too low margin. Anyway, enough about that.
Ben: We should probably start a show eventually.
Hedvig: [chuckles]
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]