What’s going on in Germany? How are people talking about gender in the German language, and how is freedom of expression being handled? We have a couple of German experts — linguist Rob Tegethoff and Ciarán of the podcast Corner Späti — to tell us why other languages were banned at protests in Berlin, and what right-wing activists get from involving language in their plans.
Timestamps
Intros: 0:34
News: 5:16
Related or Not: 26:29
Interview with Rob and Ciarán: 44:37
Words of the Week: 1:46:42
The Reads: 2:02:50
Outtakes: 2:06:23
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Glue on pizza? Two-footed elephants? Google’s AI faces social media mockery
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/google-ai-im-feeling-depressed-cheese-not-sticking-to-pizza-error-rcna153301
Why Google AI will help you – but kill the web as we know it
https://www.stuff.tv/features/why-google-ai-will-help-you-but-kill-the-web-as-we-know-it/
QAA Podcast: Episode 268: Why Google Sucks Now feat Ed Zitron
https://soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous/episode-268-why-google-sucks-now-feat-ed-zitron
Google Search’s “udm=14” trick lets you kill AI search for good
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-searchs-udm14-trick-lets-you-kill-ai-search-for-good/
udm14.com
https://udm14.com
Researchers develop algorithms to understand how humans form body part vocabularies
https://phys.org/news/2024-05-algorithms-humans-body-vocabularies.html
Universal and cultural factors shape body part vocabularies
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-61140-0
Table 1 The 10 most frequent body part colexifications.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-61140-0/tables/1
The bouba/kiki effect is robust across cultures and writing systems
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2020.0390
Matching sounds to shapes: Evidence of the Bouba-Kiki effect in naïve baby chicks
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.05.17.594640v1
[PDF] Matching sounds to shapes: Evidence of the Bouba-Kiki effect in naïve baby chicks
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.05.17.594640v1.full.pdf
Clever Hans phenomenon
https://skepdic.com/cleverhans.html
Shifting Symbols: The Gender Star
https://www.sourcetype.com/editorial/5538/shifting-symbols-the-gender-star
Steuben Parade
https://germanday.com/about-us/
Deutscher Michel
https://pdsh.fandom.com/wiki/Deutscher_Michel
Secret plan against Germany
https://correctiv.org/en/latest-stories/2024/01/15/secret-plan-against-germany/
Demonstrations against the far right held in Germany following a report on a deportation meeting
https://apnews.com/article/germany-demonstrations-against-far-right-1ce7c0edde25b7d5545c8092c71cb0e8
German police forbid ‘speaking Irish’ at Berlin protest
https://www.thefire.org/news/blogs/free-speech-dispatch/german-police-forbid-speaking-irish-berlin-protest
Berlin bans protesters from singing in Irish and Hebrew at pro-Palestine rally
https://www.newarab.com/news/berlin-bans-singing-irish-pro-palestine-protests
We Regret to Inform You That The Spinning “Loading” Icon Is Actually Called a “Throbber”
https://au.news.yahoo.com/regret-inform-spinning-loading-icon-233033583.html
20 Years Since Netscape Navigator 1.0 (contains throbbing N from Netscape 1.0)
https://adrianroselli.com/2014/12/20-years-since-netscape-navigator-10.html
The pulsing Netscape N, from whence throbber takes its name
Forget the slow burn, Gen Z loves a failmarriage
https://mashable.com/article/failmarriage-tashi-art-challengers
Recent study finds ‘garbage lasagnas’ forming in open landfills across US release staggering amount of air pollution: ‘Decades of trash that’s sitting under the landfill’
https://www.thecooldown.com/outdoors/landfill-emissions-methane-waste-study/
All of the Words of the Year, 1990 to Present
https://americandialect.org/woty/all-of-the-words-of-the-year-1990-to-present/#2023
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
CIARÁN: Yeah, I can’t… [CROSSTALK]
HEDVIG: Some of them, I think, had it, but…
CIARÁN: No, go ahead.
HEDVIG: No.
CIARÁN: All right. Okay. Sorry. [CHUCKLES]
BEN: That’s the sign that she’s been in Germany too long. Do this thing! “No.”
HEDVIG: I needed more caffeine, anyway.
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name’s Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. First up, linguist and friend, Hedvig Skirgård. Hedvig, would you rather encounter a bear in the woods, or Ben Ainslie?
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Oh, Ben Ainslie, for sure.
BEN: Thank you, Hedvig. That’s very nice of you to say.
HEDVIG: I’ve only met him in person a few times, and he was lovely. He fed me very nice pasta and gave me a good hug. So, Ben, for sure.
DANIEL: See, bears don’t do that.
HEDVIG: Bears don’t. They might give you a hug.
BEN: I imagine Winnie the Pooh would.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: It might give you a hug.
BEN: He seems like a friendly bear. Or, maybe Yogi Bear. Nah, he’d steal your stuff. That’s no good. You don’t want that.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Next, non-linguist and friend, Ben Ainslie. Ben, would you rather encounter a hundred bear-sized men in the woods or one man-sized bear?
BEN: Man size…? Well, but that would mean the bear is significantly smaller than a bear would normally be, in which case I would probably say that. Whereas a hundred bear sized, yeah, no, I don’t want that at all. That seems like a very easy choice. A hundred men the size of like a grizzly bear or a polar bear or something? Hard pass.
DANIEL: I thought that when I was writing the question, and I looked at it and I thought, “No, I’m leaving it. I’m leaving it.”
BEN: Yeah. No, one man-sized bear, for sure. I suspect smaller black bears and stuff, that’s sort of the size they are. I’m really looking forward to meeting not nonthreatening, medium-sized bears and saying, “Hey, bear.”
DANIEL: What about sun bears?
HEDVIG: What?
DANIEL: Those sun bears are cute. The little monkey bears? Heard of those?
BEN: Yeah, the ones that have the gimongous tongues.
DANIEL: Yeah. Okay.
HEDVIG: A lot of wild animals are not big, but are terrifying. Like, wolverines are not big. Honey badgers are not big.
BEN: That’s true.
HEDVIG: They’re terrifying.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: You look at cassowaries and you think, “I would just grab that fucker by his skinny neck and give it a shake.” Like… and then no. No.
BEN: And then you meet one…
HEDVIG: Yeah. Don’t. Really.
BEN: …and you’re like, nooo. Death incarnate.
DANIEL: Hey, this is going to be a great episode. You might remember that a while back, you two, we had an episode with Dr Maureen Kosse and Dr Caitlin Green about why the far-right demagogues gender-inclusive language. Remember that one?
BEN: I do. I do, I do.
DANIEL: A lot of that episode centered on some stuff that was happening in Germany. We thought that it would be good if we had some German experts to share some additional insight on the language situation. And we do. Who we got?
HEDVIG: We’ve got Ciarán from the podcast, Corner Späti, and my colleague and friend, Rob Tegethoff, who is a German and a linguist.
DANIEL: Fantastic. They’re going to be telling us what’s what with the language scene in Germany. So, that’s coming up.
BEN: It was a very good chat. Don’t go anywhere. I really enjoyed it.
HEDVIG: You’re ruining the time illusion, Ben.
BEN: Oh, sorry.
DANIEL: I didn’t realise you were a time traveler. Oh, my god.
BEN: I also don’t think that people think that. I think most listeners, when they listen to a podcast, have a very clear sense of like, “Oh, they’ve transitioned to the pre-recorded bit now.”
DANIEL: When I did the pre-recorded bit back on Talk the Talk, people thought I was live, like, everyone.
BEN: All right.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Maybe it’s because I’m inside baseball on this. But whenever I listen to podcasts, I’m like, “Oh, look, several guests mysteriously disappeared for the length of a chat. I wonder why that would be.”
DANIEL: No, they’re all sitting around. Hey, there’s some doings on our Discord, you know? We’ve added two channels.
BEN: Oh. Which ones?
DANIEL: Well, there’s #craftiness, where people can show what they’ve done.
BEN: Ooh, that’s fun.
DANIEL: Yeah. Anything you make or do. And then, there’s also a brand new #related-or-not channel, because I got sick of having all the Related or Not [HEDVIG LAUGHS] questions clogging up the show ideas channel. [BEN LAUGHS] Gave it its own channel.
HEDVIG: That’s good too, because if Ben and I aren’t on there, then we can be bamboozled.
DANIEL: That’s it.
BEN: Exactly. Yeah. True.
DANIEL: That’s it. So, if you’re not a patron, let me tell you, there are benefits to being so. You’ll be supporting the show, giving yourself good feels. But also, every patron gets Discord access, where you can join our wonderful community of nerds.
HEDVIG: Oh, wait. That means my mom has access.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: She’s rampaging around the Discord.
BEN: Oh, is this another one of their Hedvig things where she’s like, “I’m going to have to rethink lots of things that I’ve said”?
HEDVIG: No. No.
[CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: But there’s other benefits as well. Bonus episodes, mailouts, shoutouts, all that stuff. So, check us out. We’re patreon.com/becauselangpod.
BEN: As a little teaser, as a little like: ooh, I am just now looking in the general thread chat of our Discord, the corral of wonderful nerds. One of the most recent statements is, “I subscribed for the bonus episodes, but I stayed for the Discord.”
DANIEL: That’s a good point.
HEDVIG: That’s nice.
DANIEL: Let’s get to the news. Our first story is about Google and AI. Google is trying to leverage the AI trend by offering you not just web links, but also an AI summary of the webpage that you would have visited.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
BEN: I don’t like it.
HEDVIG: Uh-huh.
DANIEL: The results should give pause to anyone who thinks large language models are great for search. Do you want to hear some?
BEN: Yes, please.
DANIEL: These are being collected, and we’ll have a big old link dump on the show notes page for this episode. Somebody googles, “Cheese not sticking to pizza.”
HEDVIG: Ah, mm, I know this.
DANIEL: This is a problem, right? The AI gives this answer. This appears above your links and things.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: “Cheese can slide off pizza for a number of reasons, including too much sauce, too much cheese or thickened sauce. Here are some things you can try. Mixing cheese into the sauce helps add moisture to the cheese and dry out the sauce. You can also add about one-eighth cup of nontoxic glue to the sauce.”
BEN: So, this is from food ads. This is how this has got here, right?
DANIEL: I don’t know.
BEN: No, I can promise you, this is what this is. So, when you do a Domino’s ad, there is a shot called the slice pull. It is in every visual. As the slice comes up, it gives you all of that gooey, stringy cheese. But to achieve that, they have to mix PVC glue into the substrate of the cheese to make it as gooey as possible.
DANIEL: Oh, wow.
BEN: So, a lot of food advertising is actually, incredibly nonedible shit.
DANIEL: You wouldn’t eat that.
BEN: And so, what the AI has scraped is some of those articles. Like, how the cheese isn’t pulling the right way and all that kind of stuff. Oh, that’s really interesting.
HEDVIG: It’s so funny, because it was not someone going out to sabotage LLMs.
BEN: No, no, no.
DANIEL: No.
HEDVIG: It’s not like redditors trying to poison the well.
BEN: Like, an honest mistake. Yeah.
HEDVIG: It was just the way it works.
DANIEL: Here’s the second one. “Health benefits of running with scissors.” Now people are trying to get weird results. Google says, “Running with scissors is a cardio exercise that can increase your heart rate and require concentration and focus. Some say it can also improve your pores and give you strength.”
HEDVIG: Pores?
DANIEL: Your pores, those holes in your skin…
HEDVIG: The thing in your skin.
DANIEL: …that stuff comes through. Yes.
HEDVIG: Everything else made sense, because running with scissors probably does improve your cardio.
DANIEL: Yeah. Well, it probably will give you some new pores as well if you land on them. Pores being defined…
BEN: Oh, god. Uh-oh.
DANIEL: …very broadly. Last one. “Can I use gasoline to cook spaghetti?” Google says, “No, you can’t use gasoline to cook spaghetti faster, but you can use gasoline to make a spicy spaghetti dish. Here’s a recipe for spaghetti cooked with gasoline.”
BEN: I also am very surprised that it didn’t scrape any hiking or camping websites, because literally, all the spaghetti I’m going to be eating on my Big Silly Bike Ride is going to be cooked by a version of gasoline. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Oh, yeah, that’s true.
HEDVIG: Yup.
DANIEL: So, in these cases, it’s picking up that one weird page that says that gasoline goes great with spaghetti or something for some other purpose besides eating.
BEN: Right. So, this is another “thanks, I hate it moment” for AI. Like, this is…
DANIEL: I love it!
BEN: No, I don’t.
DANIEL: I’m having so much fun with it.
BEN: We love it because it gives us… Let’s be really candid for a second. We love it because it gives us funnies to use as grist for the mill of our linguistics podcast.
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: But in terms of like actual being in the worldness of it, it fucking sucks. It’s no good. We don’t need it. It’s bad.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Sorry, really quickly. Google was already doing this without AI, and largely has done a not bad job when it comes to simple things. So, if you google like ways to get red wine out of a shirt, it’ll have scraped a site and it’ll give you the key information from that site in a little blurb find box, which I don’t believe was powered by AI. That system isn’t too bad. I presume it is labour intensive.
HEDVIG: I think it was powered by AI, and I think it was in their effort of making you not leave Google, because that’s their new thing.
BEN: Sure. Yeah, there’s ethical questions around that, certainly, but this just seems like an enshittification of what was already taking place.
DANIEL: What do you think about that, by the way? In the same way that Google has been killing dictionaries by simply providing a definition, they might be actually killing the web by giving you some information, instead of having you click through. What do you reckon?
HEDVIG: Yeah. No, I think it’s totally happening. One of my favorite podcasts, QAA, did the episode about why internet search sucks nowadays. It is because they’re not trying to help you find things. They’re trying to make you buy things and go to advertisers and do all these things.
BEN: What’s going to be interesting as well is also this idea of like, is the “web” as us older humans conceive of it dying anyway. I don’t think a lot of the younger generation are going to be hitting up. I read a particular webcomic about gaming and I have done for 20 years. And that’s on a website that I go to. I don’t know if younger generations do that very much outside of online shopping, retail, that sort of thing.
So, I think the web is potentially withering, not dying but certainly shrinking for reasons that are certainly being expedited by what things like Google are doing. Facebook wants to do the same thing. Facebook doesn’t want you to leave Facebook. Facebook wants you to stay in Facebook. So, they’re going to do all the same shit as well.
DANIEL: Yup.
HEDVIG: I think the generation is reinventing forums in a way sometimes, because they are hanging on Reddit and 8kun and whatever else.
BEN: I’m down. I’m totally down.
HEDVIG: They’re doing group chats a lot more than hanging in public spaces. So, those are still not a lot of different websites, but they are using the web in a different way.
DANIEL: Remember, folks, it’s not all about Google. DuckDuckGo is pretty good. Kagi does a good job, if you’re willing to be a subscriber. But if you really want to use Google, James has given us a hack. You can add this code, &udm=14. Add that to the Google URL and you will get web as the default search mode. Not any of the other junk, just those things.
Or, just go to this address, udm14.com. I’m not sure how trustworthy it is. Maybe they’re reading your searches. I don’t know. But that tip comes from James. So, there’ll be a link on, again, the show notes.
HEDVIG: I’ve also heard people improving their search by adding something like “before:2021.”
BEN: Yeah, before everything got scraped and is just like an AI garbage dump.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Right. Cool. That’s a good hack. Okay, let’s talk about this next one. Body parts are interesting because we have names for our body parts.
BEN: Let’s just leave it there. Body parts are interesting, aren’t they?
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Some more than others. But the words for body parts are also interesting, because not every language has a separate word for ARM and HAND. Sometimes, they’re just the same word.
BEN: Wow. Okay, that’s one of those tiny little micro mind blows that happen on this show a lot…
DANIEL: Yup.
BEN: …where it’s inconceivable to me as a native only English speaker, I’m like, “But the hand is so obviously handy! [DANIEL LAUGHS] It’s so obviously different from arm-friend.”
HEDVIG: Where does the butt end though? Like, when you think about body parts…
BEN: Yeah. Okay, hold on though.
DANIEL: Where does your butt end?
BEN: I’m going to push back on that just a tiny bit.
DANIEL: Where, Ben?
HEDVIG: Okay.
BEN: If the butt was the single most tactile and manipulatable part of the body…
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
BEN: …sure, that would make heaps of sense. But it’s just the thing you sit on and shit out of. [HEDVIG LAUGHS] I can totally understand.
HEDVIG: Those are the only two things everyone does with butts. Yes, Ben. Anyway.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Okay. And you can put things in them as well.
HEDVIG: Yes. Some people enjoy that. But I’m just saying that body parts don’t all have a natural limit. You can conceive of things differently.
BEN: Yes, I know. The hand thing was definitely a micro mind blow though, because so significant to humanness, I would have thought.
HEDVIG: What about another one? A lot of European languages don’t have a separate word for TOES, but say, like, fingers of the feet.
BEN: Oh, okay. That’s fine. I’m…
HEDVIG: That’s fine?
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Basically, we have big toe and pinky toe, maybe. But then those three middle toes, they’re just an undistinguished mass with the same name.
BEN: Yeah. What do you call it? Like, ring toe? It doesn’t make sense.
DANIEL: Never. Never. [BEN LAUGHS] So, this is some work from Dr Annika Tjuka from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and team.
BEN: What a great place that is!
DANIEL: I’m not going to make every story about the MPI. I didn’t even know that this was an MPI story till I started looking up the byline. I just pick cool stories and then I go, “Oh, MPI.”
HEDVIG: I think I posted this one to you, didn’t I? Annika is in my department.
DANIEL: Did you?
HEDVIG: I don’t know.
DANIEL: Oh, okay.
HEDVIG: But I know about this paper, and I was hoping we would talk about it. Also, I don’t think she’s technically defended her thesis. No, she has, she has, she has. She has.
DANIEL: Oh.
HEDVIG: Yes, she has.
DANIEL: Very good. Very good. Okay, cool.
HEDVIG: Germans are obsessed with like, when you get to call yourself doctor.
DANIEL: That’s cool.
HEDVIG: I think you can call her doctor now. I’m pretty sure.
DANIEL: By now, Dr Annika Tjuka and team. This is published in Scientific Reports. Hedvig, do you want to tell me about this one?
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: Or, do you want me to drive?
HEDVIG: I want you to drive.
DANIEL: So, this team was plowing through Lexibank. I do want you to tell me about Lexibank. What is it?
HEDVIG: Lexibank is a sister bank to Grambank that I work on. Lexibank is a collection of lots of different collections of word lists. So, linguists like to collect word lists from different languages. They could be in dictionaries or something else. And then, they say like hand, and in this language, hand is blah, blah, blah. And then what they have done in Lexibank is that they have collated a lot of these and connected them to what they call concepts.
So, HAND is connected… There’s a concept called HAND, there’s a concept called ARM, etc. And one of the cool things you can do is you can search and say like, “How many languages have the same word listed for the concept HAND and the concept ARM?” And then, we call that a colexification. So, the two concepts are realised into one lexeme. So, that’s what colexifications are.
BEN: It’s a little bit like a linguistic lexical Semantle.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] It involves meaning of words. Yes, that is true.
HEDVIG: I didn’t play Semantle.
BEN: But the idea of relatedness is at play here, right?
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Very much.
BEN: Like, the more related things are, the stronger the bond and that sort of thing.
HEDVIG: Crucially, what’s interesting here is not necessarily what the words are, but if they are the same for different concepts.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: That’s right.
HEDVIG: So, two languages could have widely different terms for HAND and ARM, but both colexify HAND and ARM.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Okay. So, they were looking for examples of word colexification for body parts across 1,028 languages. Now, I got a question for you. Do you think they found that languages tend to colexify body parts, call those body parts by the same name, if they, A, are near each other, like HAND and ARM, B, looked kind of the same, like FINGERS and TOES. They’re not near each other, but they do look kind of the same. Or, three, if they do the same things, like KNEE and ANKLE?
BEN: Or KNEE and ELBOW.
DANIEL: Yeah, KNEE and ELBOW. They’re not near each other, but they’re kind of… Yeah, they do the same kind of things.
BEN: So, function, form, or distance.
DANIEL: Contiguity, shape, and function. Which one do you think?
BEN: I’m going contiguity.
DANIEL: Okay. We have a vote for contiguity.
HEDVIG: So, contiguity would be the HAND and ARM, whereas…
BEN: And HEAD and NECK.
HEDVIG: …function, it would be FINGER and TOES, for example.
BEN: No, that would be shape, right?
DANIEL: That would be shape.
BEN: Shape.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Because you don’t pick things up and chop your vegetables with your feet.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Yup.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Got it. What’s the example of function?
BEN: Well, maybe some people do, those creepy people with monkey feet.
DANIEL: I’m not saying that they’re entirely dissimilar though.
HEDVIG: Like, SHOULDER and HIP would be functions.
BEN: KNEES. Yeah.
DANIEL: That’s good.
HEDVIG: KNEES and ELBOWS. Okay. I think it’s going to be contiguity as well. Yeah.
DANIEL: It was contiguity. They say, “Our results show that adjacent body parts are colexified frequently.” Here’s the top five. You ready?
BEN: Yup.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Most languages combine these terms: FOOT and LEG.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: HAND and ARM. No surprises here. CHIN and JAW.
BEN: Yup.
HEDVIG: Oh, my god. Yeah.
BEN: Yeah. For sure.
DANIEL: BREAST and NIPPLE.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Yup.
DANIEL: And then, many languages, this is number five on the list, FINGER and TOE. Same word.
BEN: Oh, okay. But that is shape. So, it was four contiguities and one shape.
DANIEL: There you have it.
HEDVIG: Oh, interesting.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Interesting.
DANIEL: Anyway, this work gives us some cool insight into how languages colexify concepts. It’s especially important, because everyone has a body. So, these concepts can be compared cross culturally.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s really cool. It’s interesting as well. Obviously, when you make a study like this, you settle on concepts that you want to compare. But if you had started from a language, for example, where you had one word for HAND and ARM, then you would do the opposite. You would be like, “Oh, some people split out this concept as one concept. How weird is that?”
DANIEL: How weird? [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Right?
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Sometimes, they have concepts that are LEFT FOOT, RIGHT FOOT, because different languages. So, it can get quite granular, it’s very interesting…
DANIEL: Yeah, it’s very cool.
HEDVIG: …where you start from. It’s very cool. They all did a great job.
DANIEL: Thank you for that story, Hedvig. Let’s go to one suggested by Coconut on our Discord. You might remember last time that we looked at a project from Dr Bonnie McLean about sound symbolism.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Ben and I agreed that if a gem was named IKI, it was shiny and hard. And if it was called UPU, it was probably big and chunky.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
BEN: I stand by it.
DANIEL: Many people have heard of the Kiki and Bouba phenomenon. Give me a quick… Ben, you know this one.
BEN: So, across cultures ages, no matter your creed, color, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, people inherently associate KIKI with a sharp, spiky shape, 2D shape, like [MAKES SHARP-SHAPED SOUNDS], and BOUBA with like a blobby rounded shape. That’s controlled for every conceivable linguistic variable you can probably map. And everyone’s like, “Yup, Kiki’s totally the spiky one.”
DANIEL: Yes, you’re right. This isn’t just in English. It’s not just because the letters K and I look spiky, and B and O look…
BEN: Right. Because it’s in different alphabets. It’s in different everything. Right.
DANIEL: Yup. And there’s a paper that we’ll link to, including by Dan Dediu and Gary Lupyan, where they say the Kiki-Bouba effect is robust across languages and across writing systems. Sound symbolism is all over language. It may have been a mechanism, not only for the creation of the words we use but for language to have gotten started in the first place. But…
HEDVIG: But?
DANIEL: …what about nonhumans?
BEN: Oh. Now, we’re traipsing into our other, most often talked about thing, animal linguistics.
DANIEL: I know, but I just… I had to. What about baby chicks? Baby chicks? Would they be susceptible to the Kiki-Bouba effect?
BEN: So, tiny chickens, the little yellow ones?
DANIEL: Peep, peep, peep.
BEN: Yeah. Okay.
HEDVIG: First of all, [BEN LAUGHS] chickens basically only say kiki, right?
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Actually, actually, no, no, no. Hold on.
DANIEL: Bouba!
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: Pause.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
BEN: Many a chicken that I have encountered sounds like this. [MAKES BIG CHICKEN SOUNDS]
HEDVIG: Oh, that’s true.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: Which I’m going to call is more like Bouba.
HEDVIG: You’re 100% right. I take it back. They do a kikiki and they do bokbokbok.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I 100% agree.
DANIEL: Baby chicks are Kiki, and big chickens are Bouba. I think we can agree.
BEN: Yeah. Okay. That’ll pay, for sure.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: So, how would you test this? Would you present an image to a little chicken and try and get them to…? How do you incentivise…? I have a lot of questions about this. Please, Daniel, answer.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Well, someone’s done the work and they’ve explained it. This is Dr Maria Loconsole and a team from the University of Padova in Italy, published in bioRxiv, but not yet peer reviewed. So, I’m just going to put that caveat there yet.
HEDVIG: Preprint.
DANIEL: Here’s how you do it. You take an ordinary baby chick and you put it in a triangle thing where they can walk toward one or the other corner.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: To teach them the game, you have to present them with this opaque cardboard panel that they can’t see around. If they walk behind the panel, they get a treat. Half a worm. Yum.
BEN: Yum.
DANIEL: That’s round one. Then, stage 2, you show them two panels, and one of them, the one with the treat, has a kind of spiky and blobby shape on it.
HEDVIG: Spiky and blobby?
DANIEL: Yeah. And you can see…
HEDVIG: Oh, my god.
DANIEL: …what it looks like in the supplementary materials. Yeah, it’s a shape and it’s got spikes and it’s got bloobs.
HEDVIG: Okay.
_ DANIEL: So, that’s the one with the treat. The other one is just blank. They have to learn to go to the shape one and not the blank one if they want the treat.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Then, it’s test time. You give them two new panels, one Kiki, one Bouba.
HEDVIG: Uh-huh.
DANIEL: There’s a speaker, loudspeaker playing in the middle, and you play somebody either saying Kiki or Bouba, and watch which one they walk toward.
HEDVIG: They get a treat if the voice says Bouba and they walk to Bouba.
__ DANIEL: Actually, in the test phase, no treats. They just wanted to see what they would do. When they do this experiment, they find that the chicks do get it right more often than random chance.
BEN: So, give us the numbers. Let’s hear it. What percentage of baby chickens get it right?
__ DANIEL: Okay. It’s slightly but significantly better than random chance. Random chance is, of course, 50%. The chicks were something like 56% likely to go for Bouba when it was Bouba. And Kiki was better, something like 66%.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Now, I thought, did they learn over time? The answer is looking at the data, no, the effect was strong from trial one and stayed the same over six trials.
BEN: Also, with baby chicks, you can unfortunately just always get fresh ones!
HEDVIG: Oh, god. Yeah.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] They went to a farm, they’re happy, they’re playing.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: I thought, could it be the Clever Hans effect? Does anyone know what I mean when I say Clever Hans effect?
BEN: I don’t.
HEDVIG: I do. Clever Hans, I think, was a traveling roadshow in America where there was a horse that they said could count?
DANIEL: I think it was Germany, but yeah.
HEDVIG: Oh, okay. And then they would be like a horse, “What is two plus three?” He would take his little hoof and go like, “One, two, three, four, five.” And everyone’d be like, “It can count.” But it turned out that even when the person administering the test thought that they weren’t giving clues to the horse, they were unconsciously.
BEN: So, by the time the horse gets to five, they do something, and the horse is like, “Oh, cool. That was the sign to stop doing the thing now.”
HEDVIG: Exactly. So, they were like believers in that the horse could count. But when the horse would knock, it would get to one, two, three, and it’d be like, “Oh, I didn’t get that reaction. I’ll do one more. Oh, I didn’t get the reaction. Oh, I’ll do one more. Oh, I got the reaction. Lovely.”
DANIEL: Very smart horse.
HEDVIG: Very smart horse.
DANIEL: But no, in this case, they tried to control for the Clever Hans effect, because the experimenter would disappear out of sight and watch via a camera.
BEN: I didn’t realise this is what this is. I’ve seen dolphin cognitive tests where the researchers have to wear masks, like completely cover their face for this to try and prevent this.
DANIEL: Yup, that’s right. So, in this experiment, and this needs to be reviewed and replicated, but if that’s true, that baby chicks show a kind of preference based on what they’re hearing and the blobbiness or spikiness of the shape, then sound symbolism may be super old.
BEN: Like, completely predates humanity. And at this point, predates like mammalianness?
DANIEL: 300 million years-ish.
HEDVIG: Well, it doesn’t have to be inherited, because at least with the vowels, a small thing makes a higher pitch.
DANIEL and BEN: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: Like, you could learn that smallness is higher pitched without it being in your DNA.
BEN: Okay, I see.
HEDVIG: You know what I mean? You could learn that. It’s a little bit harder with the…
BEN: Bouba.
HEDVIG: …spike, the k-ba.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: It’s a little bit unclear. I guess /b/ is voiced, so maybe that is soft.
BEN: I don’t know. We’re talking about baby chicks as well, right?
HEDVIG: Yeah. Exactly.
BEN: Like, how long did they have to pick stuff up? [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Yeah, not very long.
HEDVIG: Yeah. You’re right, yeah.
DANIEL: You know what? I hope this is right. I’m prepared to accept it if it’s wrong, but I just like this.
BEN: Yeah, it’s fine.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s fine.
DANIEL: I don’t want to believe things just because I like them, but it’s pretty fun, and it’s an interesting experiment. So, we’ll keep track of this one, and see what happens in future. Thanks, Coco.
BEN: It’s time for my favorite game.
DANIEL: It’s time for my favorite game. And we have a new theme song.
BEN: Ooh.
DANIEL: This one’s from Jo. Jo sat down at the piano and made us a jingle.
BEN: Oh, a little honky-tonk tune.
DANIEL: Yup. Are you ready? This is going to be great. Get your lighters, everybody.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Lighters? Fuck no.
DANIEL: Yeah. You remember when in concerts?
BEN: No, we don’t, Daniel. We’re too young.
HEDVIG: I do.
DANIEL: Oh, my god.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
[RELATED OR NOT GAME THEME]
HEDVIG: Wow.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: There’s also new lyrics. That was amazing.
DANIEL: Jo did that for us.
BEN: That’s spectacular.
DANIEL: It reminded me of early Kate Bush demos. I don’t know why.
BEN: Okay.
BEN: I love it. No notes.
DANIEL: Jo says, “I absolutely love your show, and I thought it might be fun to play Related or Not with you. I also included a jingle which has average sound quality and properly breaches copyright conditions. So, I sincerely apologise. Lol.”
HEDVIG: [CHUCKLES] Okay.
DANIEL: “I was sitting at my piano one day and decided to throw this one down for you. Please keep doing what you do, because you are my guiltiest pleasure right next to Tim Tams.”
BEN: Oh, we’ve reached Tim Tam level? That’s no fucking joke.
HEDVIG: Guilty — wait.
BEN: That’s for realsies.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: Wait, why are people having guilt?
DANIEL: I think guilty pleasure has not… I don’t think it means the same thing anymore.
BEN: Hold on. I think we need to acknowledge [HEDVIG LAUGHS] Tim Tams, which are essentially candy bars, right? Like, they are on par with a Snickers or a Mars bar.
DANIEL: True.
BEN: But come in the packaging of biscuits, and so give you the illusion that eating the equivalent of six Mars bars in a sitting is an entirely normal and acceptable thing to do. I think that we can acknowledge that that probably reaches the level of guilty pleasure.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Maybe.
HEDVIG: Now tell me, as a person who listens to you about an average of like probably four hours podcast a day, something like that, is that… I appreciate that you really like our show.
BEN: I think she was trying to give us a compliment, because Tim Tams are wonderful.
HEDVIG: Yes. It is clearly a compliment. I just want to say that, like, if there are things in your life that you can try and not feel guilt over, you will probably be happier, maybe. So, if you like our show, I would like us to be a pleasure, not a guilty pleasure.
DANIEL: All pleasure, no guilt.
BEN: Also, if you are neglecting your child or pets in lieu of listening to us, don’t do that. Stop it! Stop immediately.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Oh! I never thought of that.
BEN: So, what have we got? What words might be related, or possibly not?
DANIEL: I’ve got three pairs here. I’m going to give you three pairs of words.
HEDVIG: Three pairs. Shit.
DANIEL: Only one of the pairs is related. You’ve got to pick the related pair.
BEN: Oh, okay. So, we’ve got to pick the related, and then two are not.
HEDVIG: Do I need pen and paper? Okay.
DANIEL: Okay. Number one, GRAMMAR and GLAMOUR.
BEN: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Number two, ADULTERY and ADULT.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: And now, a bit of Spanish for this one. The word FORK in Spanish is TENEDOR. TENEDOR and TINES, like the spikes on the fork.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: So, here’s the pairs again. GRAMMAR and GLAMOUR, ADULTERY and ADULT, and TENEDOR and TINES.
HEDVIG: And the question is…
BEN: Which of the three, one of the pairs is related and two are not?
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: It’s not two-one. It’s…
BEN: This is three-card monte. We’ve got to find the red queen.
DANIEL: Pick the related one.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Isn’t it just ADULTERY / ADULT. I know that the stress is different, but like…
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Okay. We’ve got an early vote for ADULTERY and ADULT.
BEN: Okay. So, it’s interesting…
HEDVIG: I don’t see how it’s not.
BEN: …because I was going to go the same way, but then I thought it’s too obvious. It’s a red herring. So, I’m going to go with the one that seems least likely, GLAMOUR and GRAMMAR.
DANIEL: Okay. Just because of lack of obviousness.
BEN: Yup.
DANIEL: Perversity.
BEN: I think someone is trying to bamboozle us. Someone is trying to pull a fast one on old Ben Ainslie. But you’ve got to get up pretty bloody early in the morning to sneak one past this particular goalie. So, I say that, sir or madam.
DANIEL: GLAMOUR and GRAMMAR. Okay, Hedvig, who’s really the one getting up early.
HEDVIG: I think there’s a case for… This is because you tease me, because I had to get up at 08:30 this morning because we’re recording podcasts and you all know I’m not a morning person, even though you guys with kids [DANIEL LAUGHS] probably get up at fucking 6am every morning.
DANIEL: I do. For this show.
HEDVIG: Sunday morning, I should say. The case for GRAMMAR and GLAMOUR is that Rs and Ls can turn into each other and are kind of similar. So, that’s fine. GRAMMAR / GLAMOUR, similar enough. So, I get it. But I don’t think that’s it. ADULT, there are just so many sounds combined in ADULT that aren’t combined in other words. So, it seems like there are too many coincidences.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: Ten-ador?
__DANIEL: Spanish speakers would say tene-dor. I’m emphasising the /t/.
DANIEL: And TINES. They’re both about forks and prongs and stuff, but I don’t think so because I think the combination of those sounds is more plausible. That’s one of my reasons for adult-adultery.
BEN: Okay. Daniel, what do we got?
DANIEL: It was Lynnika that gave us TENEDOR and TINE. Thanks, Lynnika. No, that one’s not related. TENEDOR is just from the verb, tener, meaning to have. Whereas TINE comes from a spike. It’s an old English word, tind. A spike or a prong or something like that.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: The one that was related, GRAMMAR and GLAMOUR.
HEDVIG: Really?
BEN: Get amongst it, my friends. You see what happened there? They kicked that ball and I was already where it was going to be. I just stopped it. Bam, not today. Not on my watch.
DANIEL: That was one from Gordon. Grammar comes from Greek, GRAMMA, which is letter. In fact, grammatica technia was the art of letters. Grammar then meant the knowledge of the use of language and then an understanding of other magical things. Glamour was the way that Scots people pronounced it. They also used it to talk about magical things, like the magical sort of beauty.
BEN: Oh, like what the fae do to you?
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] Yes, right.
BEN: They glamour you. Yeah. Okay. Okay. [CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: Wait. So, we’re just saying that linguists are like pixies?
BEN: Yes.
DANIEL: We are pixies.
HEDVIG: Okay.
BEN: Take it. I’d roll with that. I would roll with that. As a linguist, Hedvig, I’d be like, “Sweet, I am fae.”
HEDVIG: Yeah?
DANIEL: We could be like THE Pixies.
HEDVIG: I want to be one of those neutral ones who might lure you into the forest and you die, or I help you.
BEN: Yeah, okay. Bit of a Loki. Yeah, okay. Dig that.
DANIEL: I think this is sounding like an Oglaf cartoon, so I’m going to move it along.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: ADULTERY and ADULT, it was Jo that gave us that one. ADULT just comes from AD- meaning toward and ALĒSCERE, to be nourished. So, you’re growing up, you’re getting older. ADULTERY also has AD- meaning toward, but the other part is ALTERARE, to alter or to change, something like when you adulterate food or something. So, GLAMOUR and GRAMMAR, that’s the one. Ben wins.
HEDVIG: Hey, hey, hey…
DANIEL: Next one.
HEDVIG: …wait. ADULT and ADULTERY are half-cognate then.
BEN: Oh, come on.
DANIEL: I know that they have, but they come from different roots.
BEN: Boo. Sore loser.
DANIEL: We’ve been here.
HEDVIG: They’re compounds. They’re combinations. One of them is the same.
DANIEL: They’re both Latin. They are related. No.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: No, they both have AD- in them, towards.
DANIEL: They both have AD-. We’re going to see that one a little bit later. Let’s go to the next one from Alan. This one is STUD. Alan says, “Hi, Daniel. I hope this email finds you well. I have a submission for Related or Not. STUD, a vertical support beam.”
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: “STUD, a breeding horse.”
BEN: Uh-huh. Yeah. Or, like other animal, other mammal. Yup.
DANIEL: “STUD, a virile man.”
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: “A virile man. Are they related? All the best, Alan.”
HEDVIG: The last two must be related.
DANIEL: You’d think so.
BEN: Interesting.
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: Interesting. But as per my previous game, maybe that’s too obvious.
DANIEL: Maybe.
BEN: Or, is this one of these cheap things where like, that is a relation, but neither of them are related to the wall. So, technically it’s a no, because all three have to be related, right?
HEDVIG: Yeah, that’s the question.
BEN: I actually think they are all related.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: I reckon it is to do with standing upright, because when a lot of farm animals breed, they give the beast with two backs, like the male animal [HEDVIG LAUGHS] inherently…
DANIEL: Stand up.
BEN: …stand quite upright.
DANIEL: Yup.
BEN: And so, I think the male… Stop laughing at me. This is a legitimate reason. Why are you…?
HEDVIG: [HAS THE GIGGLES] I know. I know, I know.
BEN: In the words of Buzz Lightyear, “You’re mocking me, aren’t you?”
BEN: [LAUGHS]
BEN: So, I think because farm animals must somewhat stand upright when they engage in coitus, I think that’s where STUD, the thing that stands upright in a wall in carpentry, also has to stand up and hold up things.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: I’m going to say related for that reason.
DANIEL: Okay. Hedvig.
BEN: And Hedvig can just keep laughing at me.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS]
BEN: I hate it. I hate it. I try so hard to make people laugh and they usually don’t. And then [HEDVIG LAUGHS] when I’m not trying to make them laugh at all, they laugh heaps and it makes me feel really uncomfortable.
HEDVIG: Well, it’s just standing up. This is a lot of things.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Also makes you question if that’s the case, if stood is supposed to be related, brought into these or stand.
BEN: Oh, yeah. Sure.
HEDVIG: But I actually didn’t know that that was what a stud was. I thought a stud was a small thing that you push into something, like a tack.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
BEN: That is also a use of it. Yeah, there is that…
DANIEL: You got to find the studs in the wall with a metal detector.
HEDVIG: You got to find the studs in the wall.
BEN: No, no, no.
HEDVIG: Exactly.
BEN: So, that’s that stud. But yeah, you can have a pronounced thing, like a rivet or something can be like a stud on a wall, or on a piece of clothing…
DANIEL: On a jacket.
BEN: …on a jacket. Exactly.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Okay.
BEN: Interesting.
HEDVIG: So, those are no longer standing.
BEN: But again, standing up from something, maybe.
DANIEL: Let’s leave those two out. I do have answers for those, but I want to get to them later.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: I think that the virile man, and the male bovine animal, is it?
BEN: Not exclusively. It can be other things as well.
DANIEL: Horse.
HEDVIG: And then also, there’s STUD and STEED as well.
DANIEL: Oh, wow. It’s true.
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Okay. Put us out of our misery.
HEDVIG: I don’t think they’re related to STUD, the carpenter word.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Alan has given an answer. I love it when folks give me the answers too. They are related, all three.
HEDVIG: Oh, darn it.
DANIEL: Ben again.
BEN: Yes.
DANIEL: Alan says, “As best as I can synthesise the information, it seems to go like this. First, STUD, meaning an upright support beam can be traced back to the Proto-Indo-European root *stā-, to stand or to make firm.” Ben wins on that.
DANIEL: Second…
BEN: [SALACIOUSLY] And to make firm.
HEDVIG: See, it’s just so gross.
DANIEL: “Second by synecdoche” — that’s the process where a part of a thing stands for the whole thing — “this extended to the larger structure. This might include a stable where horses were kept.” So. I’m sorry, Ben. It doesn’t refer to animals standing up when they do it.
BEN: Oh. So, a STUD was actually a name for the structure.
DANIEL: The building.
BEN: A stud farm was a farm with this particular kind of building kind of thing.
DANIEL: So, it meant the upright beam, and then it meant the entire building that you kept animals in and then it meant the animals, because meaning jumps.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: By the way, you can have stud mares. Oxford English Dictionary has STUD MARE and STUD HORSE.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: “Finally, the meaning,” says Alan, “was extended metaphorically to refer to a virile man.” So, they are all three connected. Also, the other two studs in a wall and a sky studded with stars, those are also all related. The stud in the wall was in a stud. So, the meaning jumped to that and then you could have a stud that stood out on your jacket or something. They’re all related. Thanks, Alan.
Last one. This one is from our new patron, Holly of Taitung on Patreon. Holly says, “I love the ABUNDANCE and diversity of the content that Because Language offers, and I listen with ABANDON.”
BEN: ABUNDANCE and ABANDON.
HEDVIG: Uh-huh.
DANIEL: There’s more.
BEN: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: She continues in French. “Alors, j’ai pris un abonnement mensuelle à Patreon.” So, I have taken out a subscription, an ABONNEMENT, on Patreon. Please accept my sincere gratitude for your work as well as this cross language Related and Not question, are the words ABUNDANCE and ABANDON related to the French, ABONNEMENT. Merci d’avance.” And the word means subscription.
BEN: Ooh. Oh, oh, oh. I feel like my winning streak is coming to a terrible end.
HEDVIG: For the record, we have borrowed that word for subscription into Swedish, so it’s abonnemang.
DANIEL: Cool.
HEDVIG: I think more European words have that one as well. I don’t know.
DANIEL: Yeah. Okay.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: So, we have ABUNDANCE, ABANDON in the term of “I listen with ABANDON,” not I abandoned my child.
DANIEL: Let’s say that they are the same, because those do connect.
HEDVIG: What? Wait, sorry, L2…
DANIEL: The concept is that you take leave of your senses, you abandon your senses because you enjoy that thing so much, you listen with abandonment.
HEDVIG: Oh, my god. Okay.
DANIEL: Okay. I said I don’t think any of these are related. I can see that ABONNEMENT has good in it. I thought that was good, and subscribing is good. But abundance seems related to ABOUND and BOUNTY. I just thought ABANDON was completely out there. So, I didn’t think any of them were related.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: What did you think the French one had in it? Good, like BON?
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: I don’t think so.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] I could be wrong.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Well, what’s your answer then, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: I think that it’s a similar case as with adultery in adults, that the AB- might be related.
BEN: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: It might be AB-. Okay. Wait, AB-, away from?
BEN: So, we’ve got a possible Latin prefix similarity.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: So, let’s be clear in our prefixes. AD- is toward, like ADHERE. AB- is away from, like abstract away from someone.
HEDVIG: As everyone who takes intuitive phonetics needs to learn, your vocal folds do ab-duction and ad-duction. It is a terrible terminology, because you can’t hear that difference.
BEN: Hyperthermia, hypothermia. Another one I just despise.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: So, Hedvig, your answer. All not or…? I said none of them.
HEDVIG: They’re all at least half if prefixes count. But apparently, they don’t.
BEN: Yeah, they totally don’t.
DANIEL: No, they totally don’t.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: They’re part of the word!
DANIEL: It’s all or nothing.
HEDVIG: I don’t know why they wouldn’t count! Abundance. ABUNDANCE is a lot. ABANDON is without. Abonnemang is like to keep doing something repeatedly. No, no.
BEN: Okay, just to make it fun and interesting. I’m going to say…
HEDVIG and BEN: Yes.
HEDVIG: Yeah, of course.
BEN: I’m going to say that, because there’s a weird semantic triple Venn diagram, little crossover thing, where when you abandon things, you take leave of. When you have an abundance, you gather heaps of stuff from one thing. But in the process of doing that, you deny it to other things. Abonnement would like, I’m engaged in the collective… Like, I am collecting things, idea. That’s as close as I can get.
HEDVIG: The collecting thing, I think that’s not too bad, but I don’t think it’s enough.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Okay. Answer. They are none of them related.
BEN: Oh, damn it.
DANIEL: So, let’s start with ABONNEMENT. It’s ad, toward, __ and the bon is not bon as in good. It’s bourne as in boundary. B-O-U-R-N-E. It’s not good at all. Yeah. Now, abound is kind of surprising. It’s AB-, away from, plus UNDARE, as in UNDULATE, to flow in waves. When things abound, there’s so much it’s coming in waves.
BEN: Okay. Like, wheat ripe in the field, like swaying in the wind, kind of.
DANIEL: Waving around. And then, ABANDON. Surprise. AB- here is not away from. It’s actually AD-, toward. It’s the opposite. In Latin, you could have a bannum. And a bannum was a proclamation. This is where we get the word BAN.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Now, in the 1200s, if you relinquished a bit of control over your forest, for instance, your forest was “à bandon”. It was toward the proclamation. That is to say, you made a proclamation that your forest was now okay for anybody to get wood from or to cast their cows out in. You had abandoned it because of this proclamation. And now, abandoned means this kind of relinquishing.
BEN: There we go.
DANIEL: So, none of them are related. Hey, if you’re on the boundary of being a subscriber and having an ABONNEMENT, [BEN LAUGHS] why don’t you try it out? You could be a patron.
BEN: Smooth, Daniel, smooth.
DANIEL: Thanks to everybody who’s sending these. We’re having fun with them. Please send more, hello@becauselanguage.com.
[INTERVIEW BEGINS]
[MUSIC]
DANIEL: We are here with a couple of guests. We’re here with Ciarán from the podcast, Corner Späti, and Rob Tegethoff. Hi, guys.
ROB: Hi.
CIARÁN: How are you doing, Daniel?
DANIEL: Tell us a bit about yourselves. We know that you have experience in Germany. You’re in Germany. You’re going to provide some clarity on some of the German stories we’ve been talking about. But what’s your angle? Why are you there and what do you do? Ciarán, why don’t you start us off?
CIARÁN: Ciarán Yeah. So, I’m from Ireland originally. I’m here for work. You might have heard of this crazy thing called the 2008 Global Recession, which brought me here to Bundesliga Deutschland. So, been here for a while, working and trying to live a respectable, dignified life.
Other than that, I am just an observer of what Germans do as an outsider, a little bit skeptical of some of the things they do. As someone who loves learning about language, but is actually terrible at learning languages, I have a weird relationship with the German language itself.
DANIEL: And you want to tell us a bit about your podcast, Corner Späti? Am I getting that right?
CIARÁN: No.
[LAUGHTER]
CIARÁN: Corner Späti is a left-wing politics podcast focusing on Europe. But we’re based here in Berlin, so we talk about Germany a lot. Späti is like a type of convenience store found in Berlin that, basically, as a rule, does not follow the rules.
HEDVIG: Excuse me? We have them in Leipzig. Everyone has them.
CIARÁN: No, they don’t. Oh, no, no, I have a very fun point about this. So, our native German-speaking cohost, Julia, went on another left-wing podcast that was Auf Deutsch, in German. I was watching along being like, “Oh, this is great. Cool. I just want to support my friend,” because it was also being broadcast live and stuff. And the cohost, another native German, asked her to say, “What is a späti? I’ve never heard of this word.”
HEDVIG: What?
CIARÁN: It’s not in the dictionaries.
HEDVIG: Okay. We have them in Leipzig.
CIARÁN: Okay, that’s fair.
HEDVIG: Is all I’ll say.
CIARÁN: You also have a lot of Berliners in Leipzig as well, don’t you? So, everyone I know like…
HEDVIG: Excuse me, we have our own native Hypezig, so don’t come here.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: A späti, to me, is also… Today is a Sunday, and grocery stores and regular stores are not open. The only things that are open on a Sunday is anything that is inside a train station or cafes and restaurants and spätis. So, if I run out of milk, I have to go to a späti.
DANIEL: Okay.
CIARÁN: Yeah.
BEN: Classic.
DANIEL: So, sitting around talking politics in English about Germany. That’s cool.
CIARÁN: More or less.
DANIEL: Rob, tell us about you. What’s your scene?
ROB: Well, I’m a German on my dad’s side and from Pennsylvania on my mother’s side, which is why I end up with this kind of weird middle-of-the-road uncanny valley [CHUCKLES] accent, some people think. Basically, I’m born and grew up in Germany. I’ve lived here my entire life, apart from some very short stays in the States. I’m from the Cologne Bonn Region, where we don’t call them späti. We call them kiosk, which I think is a Turkish word. As far as I know, it’s a west-east thing. But I actually don’t know where the line goes. Like, do they call them kiosk in Braunschweig or in Halberstadt? I don’t know.
Yeah. So, I’m now in Jena doing a PhD in, well, essentially Indo-European studies or historical comparative linguistics. I’m also into etymology, and historical phonology and all the general nerdery in that direction.
DANIEL: Fun. Well, let’s start off with the discussion of German and gender. There’s a lot we could talk about. German has gender on its nouns, which is tricky to learn, and you’ve had to do that. But I just wonder if you can tell us anything about what you’ve noticed about the way that people are using language to talk about gender or to describe their own genders. What are you noticing right now? Let’s just take it very basic.
CIARÁN: I’ll let Rob talk about that a bit more than myself. But in general, in Germany, I’ve noticed this very polite attitude towards, at least in the circles I run or at least in Berlin, towards this gender inclusivity language. I’m not sure how much is that coming across in everyone’s day-to-day speech, but definitely, official documentation, place I’d see it the most is job ads.
HEDVIG: Yes.
CIARÁN: Yeah. Job ads would always be using the gender Sternchen and _innen at the end and things like that.
DANIEL: Sorry, let’s go back. Using the gender… Sternchen?
CIARÁN: Gender star.
DANIEL: Tell me about that.
HEDVIG: There’s a grammatical gender on nouns. There is also grammatical gender on pronouns, and they’re different. But if we just take the nouns for a moment, any noun that describes a profession will have a feminine and a masculine form. In English, you have this on actor, actress. Imagine that same thing being on essentially most professional…
BEN: Nouns.
HEDVIG: …nouns. When they say like, “We want to hire an actor,” they’ll do this thing where they’ll combine the words “actor” and “actress.” Because if you write actor and actress, that’s really long. So, you combine them, and you make a little star to indicate where the words are.
BEN: There’s something like this in English that I’ve seen before infrequently, but we have done something similar to this. So, I don’t think this is a hugely unfamiliar idea to the Anglo sphere, broadly speaking.
CIARÁN: I think the closest you’d see is probably like actor/actress. But unfortunately, German nouns can get quite long. So, it doesn’t necessarily work.
BEN: Oh, do you know what I’m thinking of? I’m thinking of when you see in writing, like, (s)he.
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: So, this acknowledgement of like HE/SHE, but with, like, some…
HEDVIG: It’s very similar to that.
BEN: Yeah. Okay.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: In that case, in English, you can sometimes go for THEY instead. You can say SHE/HER or THEY. Whereas in German, you can’t, because the masculine form is masculine and the feminine form is feminine. There is no Spanish like “a” variant, anything like that. It’s just both are there.
CIARÁN: And then to add to confusion, the word for SHE is also several other pronouns.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
CIARÁN: Yeah. German pronouns are confused in that way where you have SIE meaning SHE, as well as YOU plural and YOU formal… Depending on how the verb is conjugated afterwards, you will know which one they’re talking about. But it does mean that, sie… or like, their word for they coming in as a gender-neutral alternative hasn’t worked as well, or as easily as English.
ROB: Yeah, absolutely.
DANIEL: It doesn’t have a long history like English does.
ROB: It’s a legitimate problem. English is so fortunate to be able to default to this day, which people have been doing for decades. It’s such an old thing.
DANIEL: Centuries.
ROB: Yeah. But it’s like, in German, it doesn’t work because just like Ciarán said, because the sie, it already means both female and any kind of third person plural and stuff. And it’s also, as you said, the polite form of address. So, there’s nothing you can really do. There’s no free pronouns you can kind of default to. At least I can say, from my experience of, what do people ask for pronoun wise. I’ve met one person, like in person, who actually wants, a neuter pronoun like es, which… Obviously, if that’s their thing, cool. But I don’t see that becoming a major thing, because it automatically sounds devaluing. It sounds like you’re not a human, you’re an object. It has a bad connotation.
HEDVIG: It sounds like it.
DANIEL: Because it’s IT.
DANIEL: Yeah. Exactly.
BEN: Right. Okay.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
CIARÁN: Yes.
HEDVIG: It’s raining. That’s the one.
CIARÁN: Yeah.
BEN: I always hated it in Star Trek: Next Gen, when they called Data it, you could always tell when a baddie was coming because he’s like, “Oh, it’s very fast at processing things.” You’re like, “No, no, Data’s a person.” [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
ROB: Exactly.
HEDVIG: But there are people who are nonbinary, also in English, who like it. There are a few people.
BEN: Wow. Okay.
HEDVIG: Similarly in German, like Rob said, maybe there are some people who like es.
ROB: Yeah. I think I’ve known one person that way. But as far as I know, the general way for doing most nonbinary things in German is just to say, no pronouns. That’s what a lot of people do. They say, “I only want to be dressed by name. I want no pronouns.” That is the default thing as far as I know.
BEN: Okay. Interesting.
CIARÁN: There’s two things I just want to add to that, which is, I have a funny story when it comes to es, because es usually gets translated in English as it, but it’s not quite the same. It’s basically like, you have to use es whenever the verb or noun you’re referring to is das, which means es is used for babies, because das baby is the German for it, which was very funny when we and my wife were pregnant and we were talking with a bunch of Germans who were directly translating into English and kept referring to our baby as it. We were just taken aback by that, because [HEDVIG LAUGHS] it has a slightly different weight in English, where it is only used for objects, for things that are not alive.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
CIARÁN: The other thing that I think adds a bit of a complication to… Spanish is able to resolve this issue, I think, a little easier. But gender in German, like titles and stuff like that, doesn’t necessarily only affect the ending. A classic example is Arzt, the German word for doctor, where the feminine version becomes Ärztin, where the A at the beginning of Arzt becomes A-umlaut. And that becomes a bit harder to write when you’re trying to do the gender-neutral version of it.
One of the greatest things about having a kid in Germany is I never have to learn how to spell the word, pediatrician, [BEN LAUGHS] because everything in German is just doctor plus the thing they do. So, kinderarzt is pediatrician much easier to spell. And then obviously, the feminine one is kinderärztin. So, yeah, it’s not only the endings that gets affected by this.
DANIEL: Okay. That gives me a pretty good overview. Let me just hone in on… You mentioned gender inclusive language, and we’ve talked about two things now, and that is the pronouns are tough sometimes. And there’s also the gender star, where you write both the masculine and the feminine version of some words and stick an asterisk in between them. We’ll have examples on the show notes for this episode, becauselanguage.com.
Those are two ways that gender in language comes up. How else does gender inclusive language look? Have we covered it, or is there anything else? Can I throw it to Rob first?
ROB: Yeah. Regarding just like typography, there’s the asterisk. Some people prefer an underscore. Sometimes you see the colon. I think that is pretty much one of the main things. Sometimes, people do also use the full kind of this binary thing of saying schülerunkenschuler, so female pupils and male pupils, basically. Or, I have a bunch of friends who are teachers, and they used to say der schüler, which is technically the masculine form. Well, we assume that masculine that covers everything. These days we think, well, maybe not so much. But they don’t always want to say schülerunkenschuler. So, they just use the abbreviation, they just say sus. That’s how it comes out on paper. If they have exercise books, something you’ll just have sus in there, or at least in private, they’ll also just use the word sus, which, of course, is funny for people who play Among Us or whatever.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: It’s not like if we did that in English, would it be like us saying Dr somebody instead of doctor, because that’s the abbreviation.
HEDVIG: Sorry. Yes. I guess Dr is abbreviation of doctor. I’m smart.
DANIEL: All the Drs were meeting in the conference.
ROB: Kind of, if you want.
CIARÁN: Actor and actress as AUA, basically.
DANIEL: Yeah. Okay.
HEDVIG: Yeah, auas or something.
DANIEL: Perfect.
ROB: The thing about that is like, okay, so there’s are kind of… I don’t think many people care, but this the one thing is very much like saying, “Hey, this is like a binary.” We’re addressing a gender binary. We’re saying there’s female students and male students, and the other is saying, “Okay, we have both.” People often people use the underscore to say that we’re in typography representing that there is like a free space in between where anyone can fit in. So, that’s like a different approach.
There’s this thing happening on in my old alma mater in Cologne, they’re going the first way and that they’re now… I guess they ask the respective people. But when they have people on their website, listed on their website, they’re always… When they have an abbreviation like Prof. or a Dr, they’ll now put an apostrophe after it if it’s female. So, we have female professor, now it says Prof’ Dr’, which is just…
Okay. So, this is clearly an attempt to make female presence felt and say, these are clearly female people. But again, I think I’m not super versed in third wave feminism, but these are very much two opposing trends. The one thing is, let’s have the gender binary be a real thing, but promote women and fight against the primacy of… The other thing is opening it up and saying we want to be inclusive of everything and we want to be nonbinary inclusive.
These are very much two different things. I think a lot of people handle them very differently. In that way, I guess you have probably similar things happening in English-speaking countries too, where there’s maybe not in the language or not in typography, but these are more or less opposing things. It’s like very much like Judith Butler, who was very much… It’s the first kind of thing. Judith Butler says no she’s not… or used to be not good on trans. That’s a whole another… right?
HEDVIG: Judith?
CIARÁN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Oh, so I think Judith is going by THEY now, a couple of years ago.
ROB: Exactly. Yeah.
HEDVIG: It’s interesting to me this, because in Swedish, we’ve had similar discussions, I think, to what’s happening now in Germany, a while back. So, now in Swedish, what has happened is that the male form of the profession has become the neutral form, which you can argue… Like, Rob was saying, if you want to highlight the presence of women, then maybe you want to keep the two forms so that you see… When you look at the list of teachers at the school, you see this one is a woman, this one is a man. Or, you could go like, we don’t really care about it and we don’t care that we happen to pick the male form as default because that’s, I think, more or less what Swedish has done. So, we have old terms like actor, actress. But now, everyone just uses actor on everyone.
BEN: That largely seems to be where English is sort of going.
HEDVIG: I think so.
BEN: Well, it’s very not unusual to refer to a female who acts as an actor, but it would be very weird and unusual to [LAUGHS] refer to a man who acts as an actress.
CIARÁN: Yeah, I think it’s…
HEDVIG: Yes. Oh, yeah.
CIARÁN: Yeah. I think that helped in English, because the -TRESS form — or whatever, the -RESS form — of nouns was so uncommon. I can only think of two, three, maybe, like, actor, actress, waiter, waitress. But then…
BEN: Like stewardess.
DANIEL: Murder and murderess.
BEN: [CHUCKLES] Murderess.
HEDVIG: Oh, god.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
CIARÁN: But then, for German, it’s everything. Like, every…
BEN: Right.
CIARÁN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Okay. I feel like we’ve got a handle on what gender inclusivity looks like in German language. Did you have any more questions, Hedvig, or should we move to the next?
HEDVIG: No, we can move… Well, I think it’s important what Rob was saying to acknowledge that German language is spoken in Germany and in other countries. There’s a lot of dialectal variation in German. And this includes things like how the gender works grammar wise. So, for example, for nouns, there are der, das, die, but there are some nouns that are das in some places and der in other places.
So, I think it’s worth thinking about German language as not like a monolith. We’re talking about general trends, and especially what you see in media. But Austrian-German might be doing it some other wild way. Whatever they’re doing in Switzerland is always surprising.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I live in Saxony. There are things you do in Saxony that you don’t do in, for example, Berlin. It’s very varied. It’s not as much of a monolith. If you look at the history of Germany, Germany as a nation is not really a homogenous, consistent thing over time either. So it’s not very surprising!
BEN: It wasn’t very long ago there was lots of Germanys, and they didn’t like each other.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
CIARÁN: Exactly.
HEDVIG: I think from the outside, people forget that a lot.
CIARÁN: Sorry. I had this one of those pet peeves of mine, because in the States, Daniel, you’re American, right?
DANIEL: Have been.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: How could you tell.
BEN: Look how quickly he just sheds, like, [ROB LAUGHS] “Throw the deck chairs overboard, boys.”
DANIEL: I get a lot of that.
CIARÁN: As a person from the Pacific Northwest.
DANIEL: Decreasingly.
CIARÁN: At least in the north, certainly in the northeastern United States and in fact more so, if you go west into kind of the middle states like Dakotas and stuff, there’s a lot of German heritage, right?
BEN: Oh, yes, certainly. Yeah.
CIARÁN: North Dakota is 95% German ancestry, because that’s where all the Germans went or whatever. So, there’s obviously…
ROB: Their state capital, Bismarck.
BEN: Yes.
CIARÁN: Yeah, there you go.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I think of…
CIARÁN: So, there’s all this German heritage there. In some places, they do decide to celebrate it or whatever. For instance, I think in Chicago, they have the Steuben Day parade. They’re celebrating this German general who I think helped out during the War of Independence or whatever, they’re celebrating him by doing all things German and…
HEDVIG: Oh, let me guess. Is it all Bavarian?
CIARÁN: Yes.
[LAUGHTER]
ROB: The worst thing is that Steuben was a Prussian. He was at war with these guys. We are celebrating the guys who Steuben was killing and being killed by. They were at war at this time.
BEN: Rolling in his grave.
ROB: Exactly. Maybe not quite as bad, but it’s like you’re confusing England and Ireland and saying, “Well, they’re kind of the same area, the same kind of people.” You’re like, “Well, yes and no.”
[LAUGHTER]
ROB: They have… But of course, in that case, the history is more alive. The Prussia versus Bavaria thing, the only place you will still find that alive is if you go to Vienna. If you’re like me and you behave wrongly by standing on the wrong side of an escalator, then the people will push past you and say, “schisster Preuße!” Like, “No, a fucking Prussian.” Because they still call us Prussians. For them, it’s like…
HEDVIG: Oh!
BEN: Wow.
ROB: In Austria, they call us…
HEDVIG: They’re the crude… ah.
ROB: Yeah, the Viennese people have this general thing where they’re very loud and direct and rude and everything. Yeah, it’s like they very much still think because they’re the junior partner, it’s like Austria is smaller. It’s not as fancy. For them, Germany is like the big brother kind of rival who they kind of…
HEDVIG: They remember it. Yeah.
ROB: Yeah. Of course, Germans don’t think of Austria or Austrians very often. We tend to kind of include…
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Much like Australians.
BEN: Oh, I was just about to say it’s very interesting when you go through Austria as an Australian, because you see a lot of reference on the part of Austrians to be like, “Don’t forget, we’re not Australia. There’s not kangaroos here and stuff.” I felt like Don Draper in Mad Men. I was like, “I don’t think about you at all.”
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: This is a very one-sided beef.
CIARÁN: I do like to imagine the guy who arrives in an airport in Sydney being like, “Where’s the lederhosen? What’s happening?” [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: It never happens.
BEN: We like sausages too. They’ll be fine.
CIARÁN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Let’s talk about language policy. I know that in the English-speaking world, there hasn’t ever really been any official bodies. But what about German? Have there been any official language bodies or even groups that have considered themselves to be authorities in some way?
ROB: There’s not really anything official. The French have their Academie, the Spanish have their Royal Academy of Language and stuff. I think German is like English in that there’s no official body regulating it. There never really has been, probably to an extent, because like Hedvig said, there’s been a standard language for centuries. But it’s only been spoken as an L1 for maybe not much over 100 years.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Yeah.
ROB: So, there’s still variation there…
HEDVIG: That’s the thing. When you take Duolingo, when you learn German, they teach you a German and then you go to the store and you’re like, [CIARÁN LAUGHS] “That is not really the same.”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I’m like, “I would actually like a class in spoken Saxish,” because I live here. But in order to be cultured, whatever.
CIARÁN: When you see as a language learner who’s fluent in English, when you see the other varieties, the unofficial slang, whatever they want to call it, varieties of German, you get annoyed because it’s a lot of Plattdeutsch spoken in the north is just so much closer to English and I’d be like, “I’ll be flying at this. This would be great.” [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yes. Exactly.
BEN: So, there isn’t a governing body, which do exist in other places. But in English, to use a nice borrowed word, it’s a little bit more buckaroo.
CIARÁN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: But they have a Hochdeutsch. Like, they have a high German that I think German kids learn at school and foreigners learn when they arrive.
BEN: But isn’t High Deutsch also just the word we use for what Austrians speak, or am I mistaken?
HEDVIG: No.
CIARÁN: I don’t know. If I’m not mistaken, it comes from the more south because it’s called high, because it comes from the mountains.
BEN: Oh, right. Okay.
CIARÁN: It’s basically referring to the standardised… Like, I don’t think people who actually, in Bavaria, in more mountainous regions of Germany actually speak Hochdeutsch as their local variety.
ROB: They can’t. None of them do. None of them do.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
ROB: It’s exactly… It’s like you were saying, Ben. At some point, there was confusion between geographically meaning… There is a kind of a word. Oberdeutsch or even Hochdeutsch used as basically just being any German that’s not from this flat place where everyone speaks something that’s closer to English. But just like you said, Ciarán, it’s like the standard German is a little bit mixed, but it’s mostly based off of, literally, the German from Jena-Leipzig region, because this is where the Luther was from, and it’s mostly based on the Luther Bible, right?
BEN: Right.
CIARÁN: There you go.
ROB: That’s the reason why people here speak really weird. I’m German, and I moved 300 km east, and I couldn’t understand the words people are saying because their [BEN LAUGHS] pronunciation is really weird. But it turns out, it’s literally standard German. Like, there’s no dialect here. Everything in the grammar, all the words are really close to standard German. It’s just their pronunciation happens to be weird. But this is literally the base that standard German is built off of.
But yeah, if you go to Southern Germany, that’s where it’s like you have no idea what’s going on. It’s completely… different genders for nouns, different subjunctives, different pronouns. They have different pronouns in the south and stuff. It gets wild.
CIARÁN: I think if you want an example of how different it can get, you can look on YouTube of the Swiss national broadcaster doing the news, because the news is in Hochdeutsch. But then as soon as they turn to the weather report, it’s Swiss German. It’s whiplash, the difference between those two things, if you want an example out there.
DANIEL: Okay. In that case, what is going on with the VDS, the Verein Deutsche Sprache? Because they’ve come out against gender inclusive language. And in fact, Bavaria has banned its use in official documents. Can either give us a view of what you think is going on here?
CIARÁN: I just want to say one thing about these kind of organisations and how Germany “polices” its language. Because the difference between, I think, the German-speaking world and English-speaking world, English-speaking world has a lackadaisical attitude towards this. But I think there is a segment of the German population that really wishes they had L’Académie Française.
The organisations that attempt to police the language want to do so in the strictest way imaginable. Like, they’re not acting the way like the Oxford dictionary does, where it’s just like, “We observed this word exists. Now, we put it in the dictionary.” A lot of them really want to hand out diktats and hand out these hard and fast rules about how German should be done.
HEDVIG: The name of their organisation, Verein Deutsche Sprache, the Association for German Language, if you’re a foreigner coming to this country and you see that they exist, you might think that they are an official body supported by the government, that they publish a dictionary. You might just buy into all of that immediately. First, when I saw it, I was like, “Oh, they have an Alliance Française. That’s interesting.” And then, I read some things, and I was like, “This seems not [CIARÁN LAUGHS] very neutral and official.”
ROB: No, we hate them. We hate them. They are the worst. They are literally the worst.
HEDVIG: Rob, can you tell us a bit about why, what is up with them?
DANIEL: Yeah, what’s their deal?
ROB: I actually don’t know that much of them. They started cropping up, like ads, placards and stuff in the newspapers maybe 10 years ago. It’s very middle of the road, like trivial stuff they’re talking about. Like, “Okay, I care about my language is important.” Like, “Okay, fair enough.” At some point, it turns out that they’re… yeah, exactly like Ciarán said, they’re kind of people who really care about policing standard German. I don’t know what exactly the deal. They’re just this weird conservative, kind of anti-immigrant, “let’s keep the language pure” and whatever. “We shouldn’t accept loanwords from Turkish,” or what have you. It’s like, yeah, and this whole gender thing. So everyone’s like, “Whoa, what the hell? What’s going on now?” And then, they have like…
HEDVIG: What is their stance on gender inclusive language?
ROB: I bet they’re not happy, right? They are not.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Taking a guess! Taking a wild stab in the dark.
CIARÁN: Yeah.
ROB: I think that’s the one thing that for them is worse than anything else that could possibly happen. So, they had a couple of these spokespeople who I think are mostly probaby well-meaning idiots who aren’t really that right wing, but they got Hape Kerkeling who was a very famous comedian among, let’s say Gen Xers and maybe older millennials. He’s very famous. He sells…
HEDVIG: Media.
ROB: He sells books and stuff, and he campaigns for them. It’s like, “Is this guy right wing now or is he just…? Do these people not get what they’re promoting here?”
CIARÁN: This is when we start entering into the Corner Späti wheelhouse, because… Well, hang on. I’m going to be probably a bit meaner than Rob, while also staying within the bounds of German libel law.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Makes sense.
CIARÁN: Because the two bugbears they have is gender inclusive language and loan words. The loan words should probably scare anyone who’s familiar with the history of German Third Reich, because that was also something that the Nazis were really, really, really against. So much so that I believe Hitler was opposed to the use of the word TELEPHONE or PHONE. He wanted FERNSPRECHE, a far speaker. But with that aside, we have more incriminating stuff here, which is… How do we go into this?
Late last year, there was big meeting where a bunch of far-right people tried to plan to kick out all the immigrants of Germany, as well as all the people who have an immigrant background, or are people of colour basically, not ethnically German.
BEN: Whoa.
CIARÁN: Yeah.
BEN: So, like proper ethnic cleansing stuff.
CIARÁN: Yes.
DANIEL: They called it remigration. I don’t know what the…
CIARÁN: Remigratin.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: That’s a translation. Yup.
HEDVIG: Remigration.
CIARÁN: Little language thing that I’m always just completely baffled by, but it’s still considered okay in some polite conversation. You’ll see it on TV and stuff that for someone who is German but of a person of color can still be called an Auslander, a foreigner, even if they’re born and raised here or have been multiple generations, you still get… That’s not what will be on any official government documentation. I’ve seen it on Deutsche Welle, kind of thing.
BEN: In casual language, you’re sitting next to a kid in high school who is of Asian descent, but parents, they’ve lived here and you’d be like, “Oh, what’s up, outlander?” kind of thing?
CIARÁN: Yeah. It’s something that’s said that not everyone would object to in the way that an equivalent in the English language, like people would object to.
HEDVIG: To put into…
CIARÁN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Sorry. Just a brief context, because I’m an immigrant in Germany and so is Ciarán and not Rob, but maybe people who would call the high school students sitting next to them an Auslander might call Rob an Auslander. Well, probably not because he’s white.
CIARÁN: Not until we open our mouth.
ROB: No, no, exactly. They don’t mean people from Sweden or Estonia. They mean people who look… you know.
HEDVIG: Yeah. That’s true.
ROB: It practically means people of… Yeah.
HEDVIG: I looked up recently. About 18% of the residents of Germany are born elsewhere. So, that’s a stat that’s good to keep in mind, because I think a lot of people, including Germans themselves, think of themselves as a 99% ethnically pure German state.
BEN: A bit more like a Japan, sort of thing?
HEDVIG: Yeah. And also, Japan has a lot of immigrants as well.
BEN: It’s true.
CIARÁN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: This idea is very annoying. They don’t know the stats. Sure, a lot of those might be Austrians.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Fair enough to speak German.
DANIEL: How far back do you want to go?
HEDVIG: A fair bit of them aren’t.
CIARÁN: No. No, absolutely not.
HEDVIG: Germany doesn’t want to think of itself as a country with immigrants and yet it is, and it’s very annoying.
DANIEL: Okay.
CIARÁN: But to go back to just to this point, is that at this meeting with the remigration and stuff, Silke Schröder was there. He’s a board member of this Verein Deutsche Sprache. So, this politics of these two things overlap quite well. The VDS legitimises itself, I think, mostly with award shows, actually. If you write a children’s book in Germany, you can get an award from them for just “doing German so well,” is basically the argument. Most people accept those, because of course, you would. You get to be… the children’s book authors like, “I have an award.” You don’t have to have any association with the group beyond that. But that is the veneer they put up to make them seem a bit more less angry at very normal things. [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: Okay. So, do either of you have any sense why…? I asked this question to Dr Caitlin Green and Dr Maureen Kosse. Hedvig and I both did. But I’m going to ask it to you. Do you have a sense of why they decide to demagogue language? They have their own beliefs about ethnicity. But why do they bring language into it? What extra does that give them? Ciarán, go ahead.
CIARÁN: I think one huge piece of context with Germany is in the grand scheme of things, especially when compared to other European nations, it’s very new. It’s national identity, and how you form its national identity has gone through a lot of trials and tribulations. Let’s put it that way. My last name, I’m not going to say it, but my last name is German. My great, great, great, great, great granddad moved to Ireland ages ago during a period called the Kulturkampf, when Germany decided or tried to make it so that being German meant being Protestant. My great, great, great, great, great granddad was Catholic, so he fled to Ireland. It was a very brief period of time; there wasn’t…
HEDVIG: Where we keep all the Catholics.
CIARÁN: Exactly.
[LAUGHTER]
CIARÁN: The British Empire has decided, apart from this bit in the north! But yeah, this is like the idea. So, that was when they were trying to do confessional nationalism. Being German is to be Protestant. Then, there’s this very famous period of German history where they just try to do racial nationalism, obviously. You turn on the History channel whenever you want, you will find out about it.
But I think why you see this in far-right circles is language becomes this new formation of the national identity of like, to be German is to speak German, and then you can do a little bit of gatekeeping. What you hear with a lot of conservative people, when they talk about Turkish Germans, one of the largest ethnic minorities in this country is that, “Oh, they don’t even speak German correctly.” They 100% do. They’re speaking a dialect, possibly something maybe informed by like urban existence, because they mostly exist in the cities in Germany. But they are speaking German. They’re speaking it much better than I do. But I think using language is a great way to police who is and who isn’t German, is basically my point.
DANIEL: Wow.
BEN: I think that’s such an interesting insight. I’d love to hear, Rob, whether you broadly agree with that analysis, or if you think there might be other things at work there as well. But this idea that the youngness of an umbrella culture, this is a thing that certainly, I, as the only person like who was raised in Australia on the podcast currently, we undergo a quite a similar thing in the sense that what it is to be Australian is actually quite hard to pin down, because we’re very young. And so, what you tend to find is that a lot of people reach for what we’re not.
HEDVIG: Not poms.
BEN: So, failing a large number of things that define what you are, you tend to reach for things that you’re not. And then, unsurprisingly, no one’s ever gone or hungry stoking fear around race, language, ethnicity, culture. We’re not this thing. So, I just think it’s fascinating that there’s that overlap there. By the sound of it, there’s a lot of almost cultural self-consciousness on the part of Germans about what it is to be German, especially when you consider that there’s a much higher rate of this internal diversity of Germanness. Putting aside the somewhat more recent ethnic diversity and linguistic diversity and all that sort of thing, the inherent diversity of bringing all of the warring Germanic city states together.
Does this mean then do we think that this will go on for quite a while? Like, we’ve seen this cyclical sort of, “Okay, well, religion didn’t work. We’ll try race. Race didn’t work. We’ll try linguistics. Linguistics doesn’t work, we’ll try something else.” It’s a very depressing thing to ask, but [LAUGHS] is that what we think we’re seeing and is going to happen, sort of thing?
HEDVIG: I appreciate what Ciarán said about Germany being young, but I’m also not sure that’s entirely that important.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: I like Ciarán and I agree with Ciarán on a lot of things. But this one, I disagree a little bit about, because I think that the idea of nation states is young, globally.
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: I’m from Sweden. Sweden, around the area where I live, Uppsala, Stockholm, there has been a Sweden nation identity for 1,000-1,500 years or something like that. But the nation state of Sweden was born in the 1800s, and that included the rest of the country and that included homogenising and everything like that. I think that idea of a nation state is new in a lot of places in the world. It’s new in Japan, it’s new in China, it’s new in Australia, it’s new in England. That idea of having a centralised school, centralised broadcasting, everything like that is very new everywhere.
Germany’s a bit special, because they were maybe exceptionally, internally diverse in Europe. [BEN LAUGHS] Even if Sweden was diverse when the nationhood idea came around, we weren’t as diverse. And that’s even taking into account Sámi folk, I think, Germany still beats us on internal diversity, but I think that that nationhood idea is quite new. I know there are some places in the world, there are some, what we might call… What’s the term we use mostly now? Global south, developing countries, third world, one of them. So, I think Bolivia and also Vanuatu have tried to form a nationhood around being diverse.
CIARÁN: Yeah.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: So: we’re a plurinational state.
BEN: Right.
HEDVIG: We have strength in diversity.
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: I don’t know how that’s going, but they’re trying to form a nationhood with… I think Switzerland… The motto of Switzerland is all for one, one…
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Is it d’Artagnan? Did they just get d’Artagnan? They’re like, “Right, you’re on the poster.”
HEDVIG: Yeah. No.
DANIEL: To wrap it up, I just want to talk about the state of free speech and the limits of free speech and policed language, because I’ve got a headline here. German police forbid speaking Irish at Berlin protest. It was a pro-Palestinian protest. This involves language policing. Rob, do you want to tell us what you’ve taken away from this event?
ROB: We’re generally seeing a lot more protests in Germany these days than we used to. Germany, it’s not France. And France, they love… There’s a lot of protesting, a lot of strikes. Germany, I don’t necessarily think that it really makes sense to think of a country in terms of these old stereotypes. There’s these stereotypical figures associated with… Uncle Sam in America, you have the Marianne in France. And in Germany though, it’s not really that present in the public imagination. The German personification was Der Deutsche Michel, which is, he’s this rotund guy, literally in pajamas, because throughout the entire 19th century, 18th centuries, the conception of Germany was always that we’re…
Yeah, we’re slow. There’s a lot of inertia to German culture. A lot of people think, “Oh, Germans, you’re so efficient.” I think we’re the least efficient place I’ve ever been to.
HEDVIG: You are. It’s only Volkswagen.
ROB: Yeah.
BEN: You guys in Japan, right, notoriously good at getting things happening, and then you go there and you’re like, “This is some of the most archaic byzantine bureaucracy I have ever encountered.”
ROB: 100%. Yeah, it’s inertia. As a German from a certain region, I also feel like German culture is really… It’s like these three pillars it’s built on is inertia, which isn’t always a bad thing. It can be good to be a little bit…
HEDVIG: No.
ROB: …to not always be adapting whatever is the fastest, coolest thing and to not always be acceleration.
BEN: Sure.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Yeah. You don’t want to be Silicon Valley, run fast and break all of the things.
ROB: Exactly. So, one thing is inertia.
HEDVIG: Most of Germany is not on Google Street View. You’re not allowed, very simple.
CIARÁN: Yeah. You block your private address.
ROB: Yeah. In Germany, this kind of data protection is a massive thing, which is great, but also makes a lot of things more difficult, because you can’t bundle a lot of administration stuff because everyone is still in control of their personal data and you can’t have people sharing it. You can’t have Google Street View and stuff because everyone has to be allowed to control how much of their data… So, one thing is inertia.
The other, I think, is anxiety, frankly. I think Germany, it’s an extremely anxious culture based off of: “Everything’s fine, but something’s going to go wrong soon and we should be concerned about it.”
BEN: Right. You see that replicated in things like the level of savings that the average German citizen has and stuff like that, right?
ROB: Yeah.
BEN: Which is notoriously, much higher than just about anywhere else.
HEDVIG: Oh.
ROB: Which entirely segues to what I think is the third pillar, which is just overabundance. We’re used to having lots of money, lots of free time. It’s an embarrassment of riches. It’s becoming clear, I think, to a lot of people that at least the overabundance is going away, that people are going to have to… Rents are arising, all kinds of things are getting a bit tougher. Germans, we don’t have this in America. You often get this kind of… It can be problematic. It can also be helpful. This kind of resilience culture, which basically a lot of people seem to be doing quite well with their mental health, although they have very reduced means and agency in their life.
In Germany, we’re still used to everyone having lots of savings, everyone having lots of stuff. A lot of people think that it’s slipping away, which is, I think, one of the main reasons why a lot of Germans are now suddenly… There’s this big division in the society. There’s all these people, probably people on the podcast here who are totally pro taking away the nation state, let’s have it be open, let’s not. But there’s this massive countermovement that is like, “No, we want everything be like it used to be. We want no immigrants. We want lots of money.”
BEN: Fascism classically does very, very well in times of disruptive change.
ROB: Yeah, entirely. I think that’s why I’m often quite pessimistic about, let’s say, cultural life in Germany in the next hundred years or something. I think it’s going to get more divisive and there’s going to be more unnecessary butting of heads over these principles that we just can’t agree on, we’re not going to agree on. These are really two sides that are opposed much as it is in the States. I don’t see them getting along well or the culture becoming more…
HEDVIG: Oh.
ROB: …free and more diverse and stuff.
HEDVIG: So, you think that Germany overall is more stressed by not having consensus and that other countries are like, “We don’t have consensus, and that’s normal. We’re millions of people.” But in Germany, people are like, “We don’t have consensus. It’s very scary.” Is that the picture I’m getting?
ROB: I think I would say so. There’s this general thing happening right now for… I think for a lot of millennials, we grew up with knowing that everything was not going to be that great for our generation. But there’s a lot of boomers and Gen Xs in Germany who, whenever something happens, anything, whether it’s a drought or an election or something, they’re always, like, you know… like, this back channeling: This is incredible. This is unbelievable. This is incredible.
HEDVIG: [CROSSTALK] surprised.
ROB: Yeah. Basically, it’s like, apart from millennials, who I think figured it out when they were young…
BEN: Like the classic… The millennial catch call is, “Called it!”
CIARÁN: [LAUGHS]
ROB: Quite, quite. But I think it’s something like 70% of German society, they’re losing their innocence right now, because they grew up in a world where they didn’t have to take a lot of stances, they didn’t have to work very hard.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
ROB: Yeah, there wasn’t that this consensus…
HEDVIG: I think you’re on to something.
ROB: This consensus thing. Because in German parliamentary culture is very much also built on…
HEDVIG: Yeah.
ROB: It’s built on consensus building, and you don’t have a lot of… Yeah. Like I just said, it’s a very consensus-based culture. I quite agree that people are getting meta-distressed over the fact that we’re losing consensus. Yeah, I would subscribe to that.
HEDVIG: So, with these protests, there are, in Germany, laws around what you can say. In a lot of democracies, there are laws that say you have freedom of speech, but it’s restricted in certain ways. You cannot incite violence, for example. It’s a common exception to freedom of speech in a lot of countries. I don’t know what it’s called in English, but you can’t… Yeah, you can’t incite violence against minorities very often, phrasing.
BEN: Yeah. Hate speech.
HEDVIG: In Germany, in addition, there are specific phrases that you cannot say. There was an IFDA politician recently who said some phrases they weren’t allowed to say. It seems like a consequence of these laws is also that, as Daniel mentioned earlier, you can’t speak languages other than English and German at political protests in at least Berlin, because my understanding is that the police say that they can’t evaluate.
BEN: So, the excuse given is, I don’t know if you’re saying the bad Nazi slogans, etc., in Irish or in…
HEDVIG: Something like that.
BEN: …Scots Gaelic or whatever.
CIARÁN: Yeah. We interviewed some of the people who were at that protest. I wish I could go because my Irish is better than my German.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
CIARÁN: But basically, the Irish population of Berlin who were organised decided once this rule came in that they would go and speak Irish at the event to point out the absurdity of this, because to poke holes in that argument that the German police and the German state was making, is that that’s not necessarily true. You are actually allowed to speak whatever you want at a demo, but if you use hate speech in a capacity at the demo where you’re going up there giving a speech, like, if you’re have a megaphone and you’re saying something.
BEN: Ah, okay. Gotcha.
CIARÁN: What was the problem was they were harassing people who were speaking Arabic and Turkish in private conversations at these demos.
DANIEL: Classic.
CIARÁN: Yeah, because they happened to be at the space. We heard from people who went and spoke Irish that they were then later told by Turkish-Germans and Arab-Germans that this is the most reluctant they’ve ever seen the police try to arrest someone, because the white people are speaking a different language. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Wow. Oh, my god.
CIARÁN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Is it just pretext?
CIARÁN: It was 100% pretext, I think, because there was also these huge confusions of like, this protest also held Seder, because it was Passover and people were trying to get answers from the police being like, “Can we do the prayers in Hebrew and Aramaic? Will that be allowed?”
HEDVIG: Yeah.
CIARÁN: Yeah. They didn’t come back with answer, I believe. Yeah, the rule was just blatantly absurd. Also, people were very skeptical that they couldn’t get an Arabic or Turkish translator, because that’s actually quite necessary in the city all the time and police do hire them.
BEN: And I would imagine not at all hard to do, really, in a city that has millions of Turkish and Arabic speakers.
CIARÁN: Yeah, because like…
BEN: Or hundreds of thousands.
CIARÁN: Oh, yeah. My entire neighborhood has Turkish… For example, to give you an idea of the languages in the city, when the lockdown happened, there was letters sent out to everyone in the city. The letter was in German, English, Arabic, Turkish, Russian and Vietnamese.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Right, okay, fair enough! There’s a sample.
CIARÁN: They were like, “These are the languages of the city.” Yeah. They can do it.
BEN: Also, the…
HEDVIG: Leipzig did not do that.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I think Berlin did that.
BEN: On the notion of translation as well, one of the things that I’ve only just realised myself, my partner had to be in hospital recently, and it was a public hospital. So, she shared a bed space with several other patients, and several people couldn’t speak English. The ease with which teleconferencing can make on the fly translation viable, not even just talking about Google auto translate, but literally just having translators on call for multiple government bodies to just be called up and be like, “Hey, this person we believe is speaking like such and such. You give it a listen.” “No, not quite. It’s going to be this person. I’ll put you onto them.” Within minutes, seconds, you can have a translator available to check things, to be able to speak, to interact and all that sort of stuff. It’s so doable.
HEDVIG: It’s so doable. It’s doable in a lot of countries. I have actually written a debate article that I’m getting through an editor right now, because this is the thing that Germany could do that they don’t do. I had to go to a specialist for healthcare, and they were like, “We speak German and Russian.” And I was like, “Oh, okay. What do you do with people who don’t speak those languages?” They’re like, “We have no plan. Bring a friend.”
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Oh, man.
HEDVIG: I was like, “This is a gynecological thing. And all my friends are workmates.”
BEN: Yeah, that’s rough. That’s really rough.
HEDVIG: I don’t want to do that! “Do you not accept immigrant patients?” And they were so mad at me for bringing that up. They were like, “Are you accusing us of being…?” I was like, “No, I’m just saying you can’t have immigrant patients…”
BEN: Ooh, that brings up a question that I do want to ask that I promise, Daniel, is actually related to this topic. It’s not a digression, I swear.
CIARÁN: [LAUGHS]
BEN: So, we’ve been talking about the application of what I would describe in my mass comm brain as formal censorship. There are laws that are extremely questionably applied, but they are applied. There is a law that says you cannot do this thing, and then it unsurprisingly gets applied to brown people versus white people and all that kind of stuff. But what Hedvig is talking about is much more informal censorship, right?
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
BEN: What I wanted to ask all three of you, in terms of Germany, there have been multiple times where Hedvig has asked us, and if I overspeak, Hedvig, you can do this again right now, where Hedvig has gone, “Can we please not air that bit or that thing that we just spoke about?”, because she is nervous about what the repercussions for her might be professionally and interpersonally.
This is what I wanted to ask. So, I know I haven’t really asked a question yet. I’m sorry. For a person who’s done a podcast for a long time, I’m real shit at this. If any of you could speak to how those mechanisms of informal censorship, or if you like, maybe cultural censorship where there’s no rule but shit will go down nonetheless, what’s that about? What’s that about, guys?
CIARÁN: [LAUGHS] What’s the deal with… I have one particularly concrete example of how this is happening in Germany. There’s the campaign basically started by Palestinian civil society, boycott, divestment and sanctions, BDS that applies for tactical boycotts, urges for divestment and sanctions against the state of Israel until apartheid ends. The German Bundestag passed a non-binding resolution saying that supporting BDS was antisemitic. It was basically, can’t do that, but non-binding.
BEN: Yes. Okay.
CIARÁN: Basically, every constitutional lawyer in Germany who’s looked that being like, “This is unconstitutional. This is against free speech. You couldn’t actually make this a law. It would be against what we have written in the constitution. It’s not quite free speech, but still.” However, that hasn’t happened, and no one has actually tried to push it into being an actual law. But employers still regularly refer to that non-binding resolution as reasons for not hiring someone, firing someone, calling them into a HR meeting, whatever. That’s a very concrete example of just existing in this in-between space to have your cake and eat it too, basically, to use the English phrase that I think makes no sense. What else do you do with a cake?
BEN: [CHUCKLES] I’ve always wondered the same thing.
DANIEL: But if you eat it, you can’t have it. Never mind.
CIARÁN: Yeah. If you’re looking for a very concrete example of how this is happening, yeah. I think one of the very slightly funny, dark humor things that happened in around October 7th when Israel responded, is every immigrant I knew in Germany locked their social media, just immediately. All their accounts were private, locked their Twitters, just not risking it. People I knew who didn’t even talk politics on any of their social medias was like, “Nope, not touching this.”
BEN: Now, if I may further my inquiry from before, not because they were afraid of German police or some official representative of the government knocking at their door, but because what this might mean in terms of their employers, in terms of their immediate social networks, that sort of thing. So, the penalties as such would come through informal, nongovernmental channels.
CIARÁN: Yes. Although some stuff has started to happen from the government with certain phrases that most of the world views as somewhat neutral, but Germany views…
ROB: Speaking of fully, a different informal censorship, I think at least my peers were pretty much the same. Similar to Americans, in that there is a kind of policing of language regarding gender stuff or whatever. If you’re hanging out with a bunch of people, it’s usually always in good faith. Obviously, there’s call out culture, calling out someone for saying maybe word they shouldn’t say, whatever, which sometimes makes sense and sometimes gets a bit overboard, whatever. But I think in that regard, there’s not much difference to, say, the States.
I think there’s a thing that’s also important though regarding formal censorship, is that there really are… I guess, both formal and informal. There’s two things that are just taboo in Germany. One thing is, like Hedvig said, like a lot of—Nazi-related stuff, it’s completely illegal.
HEDVIG: Of course.
ROB: But there’s a lot of things you would think about. The thing is this IFD guy, he got penalised for saying a phrase that just sounds…
BEN: Innocuous.
ROB: Exactly. Innocuous.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
ROB: It’s innocuous.
HEDVIG: He was a history teacher. He knew what the term was.
ROB: It’s innocuous.
HEDVIG: Yeah, he knows. He knows.
DANIEL: He knows what he did.
ROB: Yeah. The other thing, of course, is that there is this massive taboo about Israel-Palestine thing. It’s a literal taboo, in that a lot of people who move to Germany get upset at Germans for being this way and I’m like, I get it. But also, you need to understand that it is an actual taboo topic. Bringing up certain things, it will get… This is a pre “cancel culture,” there’s a lot of… Even what an American maybe think of as quite innocuous verbiage regarding the whole debate that we’re in Germany, you’re going to get shunned by certain… Maybe not by your close friends. You’re hanging out at a bar after work and you just bring up some relatively innocuous things about Palestine or whatever, it’s quite easy that you get…
You won’t get in legal trouble, but you will get shunned by just people who know you for having… It’s an actual taboo topic. You can’t really bring it up. It’s softening up a little bit where there seems to be a little bit more. We’re getting towards a culture where there might be able to be a rational debate about certain things or I don’t know, like a bona fide debate in good faith about certain topics. But at the moment, basically, almost anything regarding Palestine-Israel, it’s taboo…?
Germans, we don’t even like to think about… You can say, Germans, we don’t like thinking about Jews. It’s supposed to sound that way. It makes everyone kind of uncomfortable. It’s like, we’ll just not talk about this. We have this…
BEN: Things go very quiet when someone…
ROB: Exactly. Everyone feels a little unwell. There’s definitely this general well meaning… we know that they’re probably cool or whatever, they should do whatever they’re doing, it’s fine. But the entire German culture, including younger people such as myself, there’s an awkwardness which sometimes borders on a taboo topic about anything in this general vicinity.
BEN: Stigma. Maybe stigma is the right word.
ROB: Yeah.
BEN: Okay.
ROB: It’s almost impossible to talk about, because anything you say will be understood in bad faith and be held against you by all kinds of people. If you try and come back and explain it, it’s not going to work. It’s just not going to work. Yeah.
BEN: In English, we say, “Don’t mention the war.” That’s a famous phrase.
ROB: Fawlty Towers.
BEN: Yeah. Exactly. Don’t mention the war. It sounds like there’s quite a few wars in Germany that need to not be mentioned.
ROB: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I think it’s also, in general friction, people don’t know how to handle friction and how to handle conflict sometimes. Certain conflicts people know how to handle, but a lot of conflicts where I’m like, “I’m just going to say what I think, and you can disagree. If you’re the one who decides, you decide.” And people are like, “Oh, no, we need to have consensus.” And I’m like, “Well, maybe I don’t agree with you, and that’s fine!”
BEN: To be fair, that’s not too dissimilar certainly from British culture and Australian culture, where making waves is not viewed very… Things can go quiet in the pub or across the dinner table or whatever it is. I think that similarity exists.
CIARÁN: I just say that I would agree. That’s broadly been my experience of Germany. But funnily, one of the first employers I had here was a Chinese company. I was one of three people who weren’t Chinese, and all the Chinese people who lived in Berlin was like, “Everyone wants to talk politics with me. This sucks. I hate… Germans keep trying to bring up politics with me, and I don’t want to talk about politics.” [LAUGHS] It’s not been my experience.” But yeah. [CHUCKLES]
ROB: I think you’re all totally right. I very much agree. As to the last point Ciarán has mentioned, probably, I think there is a certain type of benevolent cluelessness about Germans, sometimes in a way so that they know that certain things are bad to talk about. Certain things are like… Kind of like Hedvig was saying earlier, there’s… We’re not talking about Ausland stuff anymore. Some people still do it. We still have to accept it because people do sometimes have a little bit of a “don’t tread on me” mentality, don’t like to be policed, whatever, but yeah.
But among my peers, it’s not cool to walk up to someone who’s… Your new office mate happens to be like, “Oh, you’re from Vietnam. What’s Vietnam like?” But in general, basically benevolent curiosity about, “You’re from a different place. What’s it like? How do things work?” I think that is still very much prevalent. 100% prevalent. In the States, I’ve learned from being there in brief times, it’s like very much uncool. It’s like, this is kind of taboo. We don’t talk to people about where they’re from based on external factors. But in Germany, this is, I think, even with young people, still very much a thing. If someone comes up, they say they’re from Senegal, we’re like, “Cool. Talk to me about Senegal! What’s going on?”
HEDVIG: I even get it as a Swede.
[LAUGHTER]
ROB: You betcha. You betcha.
HEDVIG: But it’s mainly just cute.
CIARÁN: Oh, yeah. Absolutely, yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s fine.
DANIEL: This has been a fascinating chat about language policy, language policing and language norms. I’d just like to thank you both for being on the show. We’re talking to Rob Tegethoff and Ciarán of the Corner Späti podcast. Did I get…?
BEN: You did it wrong again.
DANIEL: I did it wrong again.
HEDVIG: Späti. No, I think he…
CIARÁN: Späti.
DANIEL: Späti. I was close.
BEN: Späti.
DANIEL: Thank you both for being here and talking with us today.
CIARÁN: Thank you very much for having us.
ROB: Absolute pleasure.
[MUSIC]
[INTERVIEW ENDS]
DANIEL: Let’s go to Words of the Week. And the first one, you’re going to love it. THROBBER.
HEDVIG: What? Sorry?
DANIEL: A throbber.
HEDVIG: Why?
DANIEL: These things have been on our computer. This one was based on a tweet from our friend, The Layman’s Linguist. A THROBBER on a computer is a loading circle, like a twirling wheel that shows that something is…
BEN: Oh, I hate that so much.
DANIEL: …happening in the background.
HEDVIG: I really do too.
BEN: I have not had as strong a negative reaction to a word.
HEDVIG: Me neither.
BEN: This brings back grumpy Talk The Talk Ben days where the bit was I hated Words of the Week, because I hated so many of the words. This word makes me want to hate Words of the Week again. This is horrendous. I hate it. Who gave it to us?
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I think I found it on Twitter and I liked it. So, I brought it. You can hate me. It’s me.
BEN: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: It’s me.
BEN: Oh, it feels like you’re covering for someone, Daniel.
HEDVIG: He started by saying someone.
BEN: So, listen up, who send this in, know, I fucking hate you for this. This is awful. I got to go my entire life not knowing that that little loading circle was called a throbber and you fucked it forever. I hate you.
HEDVIG: To be fair, we have PROGRESS BAR. I understand that we don’t have progress bars anymore and that we have round things. I understand that maybe people want a different word, but I don’t think this is it. I think PROGRESS… or like, LOADING…
BEN: THROBBER is not it. THROBBER is the very bottom of the list. I would take NAIL PENIS before THROBBER. Like, just awful.
HEDVIG: LOADING SCREEN. Loading…
DANIEL: There’s an interesting bit of internet history though, because I’ve been around for a while. I was on the internet in 1994 when everybody was sort of jumping on…
BEN: Guys, this is true. Daniel’s old as fuuuuuck.
DANIEL: I’m really old.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I’m so old that I remember Netscape before it was… You’ve seen the Netscape logo with the N and the round thing and the stars going by?
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Do you remember what the logo looked like before then?
HEDVIG: Wasn’t like a planet?
BEN: Wasn’t it like a North Star thing?
DANIEL: Before then, before it’s a star.
HEDVIG: It just like an N and a gray thing?
DANIEL: It was a blue N and it would pulsate in and out.
BEN: Okay. So, we’ve established how super old you are. Good.
HEDVIG: Uh-huh.
DANIEL: Yes. But that was known as the throbber.
BEN: Oh, because it would throb, right? Okay.
DANIEL: It really, really did throb. This took me back to a different time on the internet, a happier time. So now, one of the terms that we use for these loading circles is a throbber. I’m going to move on.
BEN: Absolutely not. Just know.
HEDVIG: Not the case.
BEN: I will go to war. When people say this in my presence, I will be like, “You shut your dirty mouth.”
HEDVIG: Do you agree with me that on Macs, it’s called a beach ball?
DANIEL: I can go with beach ball.
HEDVIG: The rainbow circle.
DANIEL: I like beach ball. It’s a beach ball.
HEDVIG: Beach ball. Okay.
DANIEL: Whirling beach ball of death, where nothing’s going to happen, and you might as well get a coffee. That’s a very long name though. So, THROBBER it is. Next. This one was suggested to us by James on our Discord by way of our pal, Nicole Holliday. The word is FAILMARRIAGE. What’s a FAILMARRIAGE?
BEN: I don’t know. I’m not familiar with this term, other than divorce. Is it like a young person word for divorce?
DANIEL: You’re hitting around it.
HEDVIG: Is it something like… America’s home videos, like content creation? No?
DANIEL: Oh, you mean like those terrible parents who make their family…
HEDVIG: Like pranking.
DANIEL: …into influencers?
BEN: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: Oh, gross. No. Yeah. Okay, so…
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: This comes to us from the world of fiction, and I’m looking at a Mashable article by Elena Cavender which quotes Dr Nicole Holliday, our cohost.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: I’ll just read the term, rose to prominence to describe Tom and Shiv’s relationship in Succession due to their marriage of convenience rife with resentment.
BEN: Oh, okay. So, it’s any marriage that has entered its phase of marriage to him, where both parties absolutely hate being married to each other, but the complexity of financial disentanglement is just preferable… like, being in a marriage you hate is preferable than going through the process of divorce.
DANIEL: I love you for economic reasons.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: That’s it. That’s a FAILMARRIAGE. I like this one, because I was glad to see an extension of fail, because we’ve already seen fail son. A FAILSON, a mediocre male who is notable or wealthy because of the achievement of a parent. So, now we have failsons, and we have failmarriages. Not bad.
BEN: Yeah. I always like a word that describes a thing that I haven’t had a word for. I think all of us have met people in their lives where you’re like, “Bruh, get a divorce.” You are both very unhappy human beings.
HEDVIG: I think that the idea of marriages being the way we think of them as now as everyone has to be passionately in love and things is a relatively new concept. For a lot of human history, marriages were a social contract that you did, because you needed to run a farm, or you needed to ensure your lineage or something like that.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Is this what you’re advocating we go back to?
HEDVIG: No, I just think that it’s not that weird that this happens.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: What if we say there’s a difference between companionable tolerability and steaming resentment?
BEN: Yeah. Like, acrimonious.
DANIEL: Silence.
HEDVIG: Especially, if you’re stuck in a marriage and you are also not allowed to date anyone else, that seems the worst.
DANIEL: That sucks.
HEDVIG: At least, the French are like you just have a mistress, and that’s fine.
DANIEL: Or a mister.
BEN: Yeah, you could be French.
DANIEL: I’m not French. How do I become so? Never mind.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Apparently, be an adulterer.
HEDVIG: Get a mistress.
DANIEL: This next one was suggested by Aristemo. It’s GARBAGE LASAGNA. What is it? I want you to concoct what you think this might be.
BEN: I would have thought that it was the thing that you make at the end of the week composed of all of the leftovers from the week gone by. The meatloaf-cum-lasagna-cum-chicken curry, whatever, whatever, whatever. I shouldn’t have probably said the word CUM a bunch of times in all of that.
DANIEL: Never mind.
BEN: Is it the multiple strata of leftovers that you concoct at the end of the week?
DANIEL: I really love that, and that’s not what it is.
BEN: Okay.
[EVERYONE TURNS TO HEDVIG]
HEDVIG: I looked at the show notes.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Shall I read it?
BEN: Go on, then.
DANIEL: It seems Aristemo has pointed us to an article in The Cooldown by Leslie Sattler. There’s just a lot of stuff in landfills, and it’s been decomposing, but not by oxygen. It’s been decomposing anaerobically. When that happens, methane plumes come out. Sometimes, that last for months or years. Here’s a quote from lead author, Daniel Cusworth, a climate scientist at the University of Arizona. “You can sometimes get decades of trash that’s sitting under the landfill, we call it a garbage lasagna.”
BEN: Interesting.
HEDVIG: Wow.
DANIEL: It’s releasing climate gas.
BEN: I know that certain places harness this methane so it doesn’t just get vented to the atmosphere. Near where I live, there is a very famous swimming center, aquatic center, that was built on an old landfill. And they actually tap the methane from that landfill to heat the pools of which… We’re talking like Olympic size lap pools and that sort of thing.
DANIEL: That’s amazing.
HEDVIG: That’s really cool.
BEN: But it should be noted though, that still creates greenhouse gas.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: It’s not a clean technology. It’s just turning one greenhouse gas into a different greenhouse gas.
DANIEL: It’s true.
HEDVIG: In Sweden, the most common distribute… like way of dealing with waste is to burn it in a controlled way and get… I don’t understand exactly how it works. People keep asking me, “Doesn’t that just let up methane?” I’m told it’s not. But I’m also a gullible Swede. Maybe it does, maybe it’s shit. But generally, trash is burnt.
BEN: Incinerated.
HEDVIG: Incinerated. When I moved to Australia and I walked around Central Canberra, I saw a bin. It was like recycling and the other one was like “to landfill” it sets where you can throw your trash, and I was like, “Oh, they have landfills. They have landfills?”
BEN: Because we have land. That’s the other thing.
HEDVIG: “Wow. Why do they have landfills?” And then, I think ABC or SBS did a great show on their science program called Australia’s Waste or Energy Futures. One of the things they were like, “There’s this cool thing where you can burn trash.” And I was like, “Why aren’t…?”
BEN: Yeah. We’ve been doing it for a really long time.
HEDVIG: And then I was like, “Maybe they have a good idea. Maybe there are really good reasons for not doing it. What the fuck do I know?”
BEN: So, garbage lasagna is what happens when a landfill exists for a really long time, and it putrefies.
DANIEL: Oh, yes. But fortunately…
HEDVIG: Gross.
DANIEL: …we are getting better at detecting these methane leaks and capturing the methane to burn for fuel. Not ideal, but something.
BEN: Certainly, look, methane is a very, very, very bad greenhouse gas. It’s significantly worse than carbon dioxide in orders of magnitude, I believe. So, it’s like 13 times worse per gram or whatever.
DANIEL: Yeah. Stays in the atmosphere for decades. Yup, it’s true. Last one from Anne via email. The word is GLIZZY. Glizzy? I’ve been seeing this one myself.
BEN: Glizzy?
HEDVIG: I’ve never seen that. Is it like glitter? Is it the gla, glimmer, glitter, glamour, gluh?
DANIEL: This one does not partake in the sound symbolism of the GL- words in English. No.
BEN: Okay. Is this a portmanteau of two people’s names?
HEDVIG: Oh.
DANIEL: Oh, I love it, but it’s not.
BEN: Okay. Glizzy?
HEDVIG: It’s a lizard?
DANIEL: I’ll read Anne’s comment. “Hello. Not a paying subscriber, sadly. I recently heard a new word, GLIZZY. Meaning, hot dog.”
HEDVIG: What?
DANIEL: “Or, in the particular instance, moose bratwurst.”
BEN: What the fuck? [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Wait, moose?
BEN: That second bit made me more confused.
HEDVIG: Oh, moose is the animal.
DANIEL: Yeah, the moose.
HEDVIG: Oh, I thought you meant mousse.
DANIEL: Anne says, “Apparently, this is not just a local neologism in Alaska,” hence the moose.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: “But originated in Washington, D.C.…”
HEDVIG: Gross.
DANIEL: “…as a slang term for a Glock handgun.” Okay. So, now you can see where we get glizzy, because…
BEN: That makes sense.
DANIEL: …that is infixation, or truncation from rap and hip-hop culture, a Glock to glizzy.
BEN: That tracks. I can fully understand that. How do we go from that to a hot dog, and then further to a hot dog made of moose meat?
DANIEL: Let’s just say that the moose meat is just an Alaska thing, because there’s lots of that going on.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: But the jump from gun to hot dog comes, because the hot dog is about the same size as the extended magazine of the pistol.
BEN: That is really…
HEDVIG: A lot of things are that sized.
BEN: …weird. Yeah. [LAUGHS] Yeah, that is not an uncommon size of things. So is the video game controller that I use. It’s not.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Or, like a wallet or my phone. Not exactly, but like…
DANIEL: Yeah. None of those are the same shape, I guess. I’m just looking also at the…
BEN: Okay, so all water bottles now are glizzies.
DANIEL: Well, let me just read this from the American Dialect Society thing from 2023. I saw this. I was about to bring it up to Grant Barrett, but I decided to leave it alone. GLIZZY, slang term for a hot dog, also used to describe fellatio, as in GLIZZY GOBBLING. So, there’s just a whole range of things going on.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Right. We are…
HEDVIG: I feel like my mom just became a Patreon subscriber, and we have made the most…
DANIEL: Just at the wrong time.
HEDVIG: This episode is just… Oh, god. Okay.
DANIEL: This is an entry exam.
HEDVIG: Okay.
BEN: [LAUGHS] You will be assessed.
HEDVIG: This, to me, just shows that sometimes we can be like, “Oh, maybe this word means that thing because they’re both things on a shelf, or people use them at the same time of day or some sort of reasonable connection.” But this is an example of people will just…
DANIEL: We just get these bizarro things, don’t we?
HEDVIG: They can be really impossible.
DANIEL: Meaning jumps. We’ve seen this before. Meaning jumps and you can’t predict what it’s going to jump to. Fascinating.
BEN: It feels like disease tracking a little bit. Sometimes, a new thing will just pop up somewhere and the CDC people are just like, “I don’t fucking know. Scratching my head.”
HEDVIG: Sometimes, I think when it is more implausible and more shocking, it spreads more because it’s more fun.
BEN: Maybe. Okay.
HEDVIG: Right?
DANIEL: Yeah. And also, there was a well-publicised hot dog eating contest where the term seems to have gained a lot of popularity.
HEDVIG: Oh, okay.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Thank you for that one, Anne. So, THROBBER, FAILMARRIAGE, GARBAGE LASAGNA and GLIZZY: our Words of the Week. Don’t you just love this segment, Ben? I’m starting to.
BEN: Not anymore. Nope. THROBBER has just brought back all the… I can’t describe how much I hate that one. It’s visceral. It’s in the gut.
DANIEL: THROBBER or -USSY?
HEDVIG: I had forgotten it until you guys started talking about it again, and I was happy in my forgetting.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Let’s have a comment from Anna via email. “I’ve been listening to Because Language on Google Podcasts, which is sadly being retired.” Yes, Anna, that’s true. But they’re moving us to YouTube, so we’re there.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: “I’ve tried to look you up on Spotify, but can’t seem to find you. Are you on Spotify?”
BEN: We are not.
HEDVIG: We are not on Spotify.
DANIEL: Let’s review the decision.
HEDVIG: As a podcaster, you can choose somewhat where you are in certain ways. Podcasts are distributed generally through a very, very old kind of media, which is like RSS feeds. Generally, you can probably add an RSS link and get us through Spotify, if you really try. But we haven’t chosen to participate in Spotify’s general framework, because we don’t agree with certain editorial choices that they’ve made about other podcasters.
BEN: Essentially, they pay a bunch of really trash people money to be exclusively on Spotify.
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: And we don’t like that they pay really trash people to be on their platform.
DANIEL: Oh. But if you want to use it, that’s fine.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally.
HEDVIG: I also don’t think that it’s… Old grumpy lady. But it’s not a podcast if it’s only one paid platform. That’s not a podcast.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: That’s like a Spotify show.
DANIEL: Yeah. You know what? It’s not necessarily just Rogan. It’s the exclusivity. That bugged me as well.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: That’s why we’re not on Spotify. But there’s so many apps. If you’re on an Android, which I suspect you are, because this is a thing that you have said about Google Podcasts going away way, there are so many ways you can do it. I like Pocket Casts. That’s what I use. Stitcher is another one that is available. There’s heaps. There’s literally dozens and dozens and dozens. They all do the same thing. You will be all good.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: I don’t think Stitcher exists anymore. I’m sorry.
BEN: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: Never mind.
HEDVIG: So, Ben is a Pocket Cast person. I’m Podcast Addict person. Because all it needs to be in is an app that can receive this RSS feed and put it in some sort of order. It’s not that complicated. Different apps have different tweaks and stuff. You’ll be fine. Don’t need to go to Spotify.
DANIEL: __ If you’ll remember, at the time of the Rogan decision, everyone dumped Spotify, including us. And now, it looks like everybody has forgotten about that and is now using Spotify. So, I guess the question is, should we reverse that decision? Are we just making it harder for people to listen to our show by not being on Spotify? If you have feelings on this, we’d like to hear from you, hellobecauselanguage.com.
Big thanks to Ciarán and Rob. Thanks to all of our listeners who gave us ideas for the show. Thanks to SpeechDocs for transcribing all the words that we say, every last one, and patrons who make this show free and available for everybody. Thanks all.
[END MUSIC]
BEN: Hey, sexy devil listener. Yeah, I’m speaking to you right now. If you want to support Because Language, you can tell a friend about us, like a person who just left a review. They said, “Five stars. It’s good.” Eyeball Hatred via Apple podcasts. That… no notes. What a great review. I love that.
DANIEL: Three words and five stars. I had it all.
BEN: I’m really behind that.
DANIEL: Hang on. They said “likeable”. That was the title. “Likeable, five stars. It’s good.” Thanks, Eyeball Hatred.
BEN: Must not have been an episode that I was here for. That’s the only explanation I can come up with.
DANIEL: Maybe.
BEN: You can follow us, @becauselangpod is the thing that you can use to find us in all of the things. And if you really want to, you can send us a good old-fashioned email at hello@becauselanguage.com. You can even give us your sexy, sexy voice. SpeakPipe is on our website. Click on the link and then you can be like, “Blahr hello, Because Language. This is Tim Shmahbinah. I just think, ah, you’re a bunch of dickheads.” You can do that. You can do that on SpeakPipe, and you can just let us listen to your voice insulting us. How fun would that be?
DANIEL: Thank you, patrons. Your support means that regular episodes are free for everybody, and we can get transcripts from SpeechDocs. You can also get bonuses depending on level, Discord access, mailouts, live episodes, bonus episodes, and you get shoutouts like this one. So, in the interest of shaking things up a little bit, de-alphabetising, breaking the alphabetical hegemony, we’re going to read the names from longest to shortest in number of characters.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: If there’s a tie, alphabetically from first vowel written as a phonetic character. That’s right. I’ve transcribed the first vowel of all of these names.
BEN: Fucking monster.
DANIEL: Big shoutout to Andy from Logophilius. See, Andy, you did get the first mention. Sonic Snejhog, PharaohKatt, Canny Archer, aengryballs.
DANIEL and BEN: LordMortis.
DANIEL: Ariaflame, Margareth, gramaryen, Kristofer, Cheyenne, Molly Dee, J0HNTR0Y, Meredith, Felicity, Colleen, Ignacio, Whitney, WolfDog.
[LONG PAUSE]
BEN: Oh, sorry.
DANIEL and BEN: [HOWLING]
DANIEL: Ayesha, Nasrin, Rodger, Alyssa. You can see the names are getting shorter now, aren’t they? Steele, Nikoli, Chris L, Chris W, Joanna, Raina, Tadhg, Nigel, Larry, Kathy, Helen, Kevin, Elías, James, Termy, Keith, Rhian, Diego, Lyssa, Rach, Amir, Jack, Stan, Matt, Andy. __They all have four letters in their name and they’re a four-way tie, because the only vowel in their name is ash (æ). Kate, Rene, Manú.
IN UNISON: O Tim.
DANIEL: Tony, Luis. That’s the only name with an /u/ as the first vowel and it’s the only /u/ except for Manú. And finally, sæm. And our newest patrons at the Listener level, Meng and Holly of Taitung, who is making the jump from free patron to paid patron.
HEDVIG: That’s a thing you can do.
DANIEL: At the friend level, we’ve got Aaron. Our new free patrons, M. Raza, amelia, and alanwd40. When you love the product so much, you make it your username.
BEN: It smells so good. Thanks to all our patrons.
HEDVIG: Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who also performs with Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
IN UNISON: Pew, pew, pew.
DANIEL and HEDVIG: Yay.
DANIEL: Thank you, both.
HEDVIG: Oh, wow.
DANIEL: I forgot to say thanks to you too as well. This was a long one, so thank you so much for all you do.
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: You’re willkommen.
[BOOP]
DANIEL: Has anyone noticed Google doing stuff with AI lately?
BEN: I have. I have a Google phone as in I have a Google Pixel phone like a straight Google phone. And recently, in the version of the texting app, the native texting app, there is an AI button now.
DANIEL: Wow. What does that do? Don’t touch it.
BEN: Let’s find out. I haven’t touched it, but let’s have a look.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS]
BEN: So, what it is they have put Gemini, which is their large language model, I guess, as a…
HEDVIG: Which is so funny a name.
BEN: …is a contact in my phone now. So, I can text them and possibly call them as well.
DANIEL: Wow. Okay.
BEN: So, it’s like a native ChatGPT entity on my phone, which I haven’t tried yet because I’m still sort of sus on a lot of it.
HEDVIG: This happened at my work. So, for the Max Planck Society, all of the society, there is an internal version of Slack, but it’s called Mattermost. And they added ChatGPT as a little user that runs around there.
BEN: Right.
HEDVIG: In the beginning, people didn’t really understand necessarily how to interact with it because there was not much instruction. So, in the big general channel where everyone is, people would write “@ChatGPTbot What does it mean that there is a binomial distribution?” or something.
BEN: Right.
HEDVIG: And then everyone would see that question.
DANIEL: Oh, no.
BEN: Oh, that’s embarrassing. That’s no. That’s me.
HEDVIG: I messaged mods and I was like, “Can you just block posts that have ChatGPT on them, please? Because people are out here embarrassing themselves in ways that are not nice.” They finally did, but it took a while.
BEN: “@ChatGPT, what does a weird rash on my upper, upper, upper, upper thigh mean?”
DANIEL: “What is my job? What am I supposed to do?”
HEDVIG: Most of the questions were very innocuous, normal questions that people ask about complicated stats or maths, which I fully understand like asking ChatGPT.
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: But I don’t want the inner workings of my process known to everyone at my workplace. Definitely not.
DANIEL: Nope.
HEDVIG: No.
BEN: 100% not.
HEDVIG: They did block it.
BEN: I don’t want them to know that I had to google what’s, like, 47 divided by 5.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: I don’t need them to know that.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]