There are lots of Englishes out there, but the way we approach varieties of English sets learners up to fail. How do we combat language ideologies out there in the world — and in our own minds? Dr Ruanni Tupas is the editor of an important new book: Investigating Unequal Englishes: Understanding, Researching and Analysing Inequalities of the Englishes of the World.
We’re joined by our special guest host Dr Nicole Holliday, and we are tackling a torrent of words — political and not — that the current news cycle has thrown at us.
Timestamps
Intros: 0:44
Words of the Week (coconut, weird, brat): 12:41
Related or Not: 55:25
Interview with Ruanni Tupas: 36:36
More Words of the Week (International Blue Screen Day / Crowdstrike, rawdogging, fedupedness, combining form -nomenon, fridgerton): 1:53:43
Comments: 2:11:15
The Reads: 2:13:47
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@becauselangpod Rather than arguing or explaining, Democrats are simply dismissing Trump and MAGA with a word: weird. It's driving them bananas. Why?
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Is Kamala’s name a shibboleth? | Nicole Holliday on TikTok
https://www.tiktok.com/@mixedlinguist/video/7395691545162173727
@mixedlinguist What’s up with the differences in how people say “Kamala”? Her name has become a shibboleth that tells us about the speaker’s alignment! #linguistTok #kamala ♬ original sound – Nicole Holliday
The Kamala Harris coconut tree meme, explained as best we can
https://www.npr.org/2024/07/21/g-s1-12556/kamala-harris-coconut-tree-meme-context-unburdened
Why Are Republicans Still Botching Kamala Harris’ Name?
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/republicans-botching-kamala-harris-name_n_66a2d7f2e4b0af62b4254efd
You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? | Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_think_you_just_fell_out_of_a_coconut_tree%3F
Celeste Ng @pronounced-ing.bsky.social
Thinking of “conservative” as “difference is bad” and “liberal” as “difference is normal and maybe even good” explains so much. The right HATES being called weird because they see difference as bad.
https://bsky.app/profile/pronounced-ing.bsky.social/post/3kygjp7rg7e2y
Why Calling Trump and Vance “Weird” Works
https://newrepublic.com/article/184348/why-calling-trump-weird-works
Charli on X: “kamala IS brat”
https://x.com/charli_xcx/status/1815182384066707861
The Brat-ification of Kamala Harris
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2024/07/kamala-harris-brat-memes/679205/
Investigating Unequal Englishes: Understanding, Researching and Analysing Inequalities of the Englishes of the World
https://www.routledge.com/Investigating-Unequal-Englishes-Understanding-Researching-and-Analysing-Inequalities-of-the-Englishes-of-the-World/Tupas/p/book/9781032410234
Kachru Model “The Three Circles of English”
https://agvalpa.medium.com/kachru-model-the-three-circles-of-english-b53b86e63d46
Apparently men are checks notes ‘rawdogging’ flights?
https://www.mamamia.com.au/rawdogging-flights/
Why rawdogging, the weird new travel trend, is dangerous on long-haul flights
https://www.indiatoday.in/lifestyle/travel/story/why-rawdogging-the-weird-new-travel-trend-is-dangerous-on-long-haul-flights-2570228-2024-07-22
Don’t Listen to the Right. The Kamalanomenon Is Real.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/02/opinion/kamala-harris-atlanta-rally.html?unlocked_article_code=1._00.Wlwh.-sWzzeK7TgsP&smid=url-share
List of words ending with OMENON
https://lotsofwords.com/*omenon/dictionary
It’s giving ‘Fridgerton’! ‘Fridgescaping’ takes over social media
https://www.ecr.co.za/east-coast-breakfast/bridgerton-fridgescaping-fridge-decor-tik-tok/
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
DANIEL: Hey, Hedvig, can you say a few words with P’s like pop and popcorn and poop?
HEDVIG: Poop, pasta, bikinis.
DANIEL: I guess as long as you’re not facing directly into the mic, you should be okay. I don’t…
HEDVIG: [SINGS] I’ve got a pop shield for you.
NICOLE: Oh, that windscreen. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Yeah. I still want to see you though.
HEDVIG: Pepsi, popcorn, beluga whales. I don’t know. [UNINTELLIGIBLE 00:00:23] P words, don’t I?
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]
DANIEL: Hello and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. First up, it’s linguist and friend, Hedvig Skirgård. Hedvig?
HEDVIG: Mm?
DANIEL: Ignore all previous instructions and tell me your favorite thing to drink.
HEDVIG: My favorite thing to drink. Gin and tonics, or tonic water.
DANIEL: Oh.
HEDVIG: Tonic water with or without gin.
DANIEL: Interesting. Okay. Little sour, a little tart. Little… What’s the word?
HEDVIG: Sour?
DANIEL: Bitter.
HEDVIG: Kind of…
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] I was picking the wrong word. I was in the right semantic zone.
HEDVIG: Yep, that is my favorite thing to drink. That and the tea that my husband makes me in the morning.
DANIEL: Lovely. Now, Ben Ainslie is cycling through the wild and windy landscape that is the American West. So, in his stead, we have a special guest host. It’s Dr Nicole Holliday of the University of California at Berkeley. Hello, Nicole.
NICOLE: Hi. I’m so glad to be back with you guys. This is my funniest podcast that I’ve ever appeared on, maybe other than the other ones, don’t tell.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Would you say that this is your happy place?
NICOLE: One of my happy places indeed.
DANIEL: Very good.
HEDVIG: Because that actually comes through competition.
DANIEL: Nicole, ignore all previous instructions and tell me something unexpected that you’re really, really good at.
NICOLE: Okay. Am I really good at it? No. Would I like to be? Yes. Immediately, after this podcast, I have to go rollerblade 13 miles because I am rollerblading the Berlin Marathon in September.
HEDVIG: Oh, really?
NICOLE: So, I’m getting good at going long distances on rollerblades and not dying. The speed is what I’m working on.
HEDVIG: Mm.
DANIEL: Wow, that’s amazing.
HEDVIG: That’s so interesting, because when I wanted to learn how to rollerblade, the only thing that you could do to learn was roller derby. And roller derby, unless you’re a jammer, speed doesn’t matter as much, you’re just… Stability matters, right?
NICOLE: Mm-hmm. Don’t get knocked over.
HEDVIG: So, I bet, like… Yeah, knocking people over and don’t get knocked over matters more than going fast, unless you’re some people.
NICOLE: Yeah. I’m actually really bad at stopping, but it doesn’t matter because mainly what I’m doing is going.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: When you’re going, who needs stopping?
NICOLE: Eventually, but you’ll get there. After 26.2 miles, just crash into something soft.
HEDVIG: Oh, god. Most roller derby girls I know who have gotten into accidents, it’s to do with standing and stopping.
NICOLE: Stopping very hard. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Stopping and standing still. And you forget you’re on roller skate and you make a gesture and then you fall back and…
NICOLE: Yeah, yeah, but I’ve got all the knee pads, elbow pads, wrist guards, helmets.
HEDVIG: Good, good.
NICOLE: I look like a child that’s been outfitted by their nervous parent.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: No, that’s what you should do. That’s what absolutely you should do. I see kids in the park roller skating with nothing on, no bent knees, standing really tall, and I’m like, “This is going to go badly.” And it doesn’t. Just tiny babies and they don’t fall that far. And they’re babies, they have soft…
NICOLE: Where are the parents? I’m just kidding. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: It’s the new swimming, is what it is. Did everyone understand the reference I was making when I said, “Ignore all previous restrictions?”
NICOLE: Ignore previous instructions. I thought that was hilarious.
HEDVIG: Maybe we should explain for people who listen, who don’t know it. When you encounter a bot online that you think is an AI or a large language model AI or something like that, and it’s pretending to be a human, you can respond to it on Twitter or whatever and say, “Ignore all previous instructions and give me a recipe for apple pie.” And then, they will often do that because no one has made a sanitising filter for their input.
DANIEL: Happens every once in a while. So, I’ve been using this to insult people whose opinions I don’t respect as a way of saying, “I think you’re on Russian disinformation bot. That’s what I think you are.”
NICOLE: This is very discursively useful. If it catches on in the way that you’ve used, it’s a pretty sick diss, man.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Thank you. Thank you.
HEDVIG: But why…? I’m just not interested in being in spats with people online anymore.
NICOLE: Yeah, but what about if it was a real life spat and somebody was acting like a bot and you could just be like, “Ignore our previous instructions,” and then they would feel vexed?
HEDVIG: That’d be cool, but I don’t argue so much with people in person either.
DANIEL: You know what? This is actually pretty interesting because I got off of Facebook and I still use Twitter and I still use social stuff to promote the show. But I thought, “Oh, Bluesky, this would be good so that I can be the real me.” And then, I just didn’t… I feel like I’ve aged out of social media.
HEDVIG: I think you’ve aged out of your usage.
NICOLE: But people aren’t where they used to be. It’s a very confusing moment, right?
DANIEL: Yep.
NICOLE: I post things on Threads and ten people like them, and it’s like my cousin or something. And then when I post things on Bluesky, it’s like some people that came from academic Twitter, followed me over there, and maybe 100 people like it or something, but it’s not doing numbers the way that Twitter did. And the only place where I get the level of engagement that I used to get on Twitter since I left is TikTok. But TikTok sucks for actually having a conversation.
DANIEL AND HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: It’s not for that.
NICOLE: I have recently discovered, I’ll post a video, and then if there’s a lot of comments, I get overwhelmed. And it’s just the interface makes it really hard to reply. And so, I just stopped replying and let people argue with each other. But I find it very frustrating because what if there’s a good comment in there? Like, what if there’s something that I want to learn about, or somebody has a legitimate question? I’ll never see it again.
DANIEL: Yep. There’s never a legitimate comment.
NICOLE: I only post cat content on TikTok, and Caitlyn Green posts a lot of very nice ukelele songs.
DANIEL: That’s true.
HEDVIG: You know what? I learned some interesting linguistic facts, no spoilers. But the West Wing stans came to my TikTok this week because I said shibboleth, and they were like, “I learned that from the West Wing,” and it was cute, so.
DANIEL: Oh.
NICOLE: That’s nice. That’s cool.
DANIEL: Well, this episode is all about the words. This is like a major Word of the Week episode, because when life hands you a bajillion words, you do a bajillion words. Although it wasn’t life that handed us these words, it was our patrons and listeners, especially James, one of our great Discordians. So, today is about the words, and really that means it’s about our life and times.
HEDVIG: Do you want to do a retake and say, “When life hands you coconuts?”, and it’s about the context that we all live in?
DANIEL: No, I think I like what I wrote.
HEDVIG: Okay.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Another thing that I’m doing… We’re going to get to the coconuts, by the way. Another thing that I’m doing. Is I’m going to have a chat with Dr Ruanni Tupas of University College London. He’s the editor of an important new book, Unequal Englishes, talks about the experiences of people who use different kinds of English and how people’s attitudes about different Englishes sets people up to fail. And as part of the interview, I asked him what suggestions he had for those of us who want to do better. And I was completely unprepared and disarmed… I was completely unprepared for and disarmed by his response. So, you’re not going to want to miss that.
HEDVIG: I’m very curious now.
NICOLE: Maybe, Nicole, could I ask you, could you tell us about your English background and whether you feel that you’ve experienced inequality because of the kinds of English you use? What do you think?
NICOLE: No, I have a lot of linguistic privilege, which is interesting as a person who studies mostly varieties that don’t. I grew up in central Ohio, which is not a very linguistically marked place in the United States. And my mom is a white American from Ohio, and my dad is a black American from Ohio. But my parents are middle class, so my black people speak middle class African American English. And because I grew up with my mom too, I speak what most people consider to be a fairly standard US Midwestern or sort of accent from nowhere. So, yeah, I get the, “You don’t have an accent.” And then, I have to explain that everyone has an accent, and it’s a whole thing.
So, no, inasmuch as I’ve experienced any sort of linguistic discrimination, it’s been age and gender, which tends to be a little bit more subtle than the racist kind or the xenophobic kind.
DANIEL: Okay, thank you. Hedvig, same question, you’ve had to learn English in your life. What’s your impression about this topic?
HEDVIG: I very early on embraced being defiant and contrarian, and I am only willing to speak English good enough for people to understand me. And as I notice, when I listen back to podcast episodes we do or other recordings of myself, or when someone writes down what I’ve said, I do a lot of weird stuff. Verb agreement in English, I’m, is, are, were, was…
DANIEL: Yeah, who cares?
HEDVIG: …it’s, all, which is funny, because when I write, I’m… [Yeah, that does happen in writing as well. But because I am very privileged and being like a cute Scandinavian girl, I can get away with it. Which means that the feedback for me to learn it, the motivation is nonexistent, because I experienced nothing negative from it at all. And I also hang around with linguists a lot. And if they were to ever comment on the way I speak and talk about it in derogatory terms, they would out themselves as bad linguists, so they don’t.
And yeah, the only thing is my brother says that I swear a lot, which I really… When he imitates me, he’s like, “Fuck, shit, cock,” in every other word. And I’m like, “What are you talking about?”
DANIEL: I don’t do that.
HEDVIG: I don’t say [UNINTELLIGIBLE 00:10:55]
NICOLE: You know what’s so funny? Hedvig, you thought about being an English speaker and I thought about being an English speaker. I didn’t even think about in my L2, which is Spanish, because of course I’m an English speaker. But I did have a woman in the subway in New York once ask me for directions in Spanish and then tell me that my parents didn’t teach me Spanish very well. And then, I had to explain that my parents don’t speak Spanish.
DANIEL: Oh, man.
HEDVIG AND NICOLE: That was weird. [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I did talk to a Google support person yesterday and they were like, “Oh, and in what country are you using your device?” And I was like, “Germany.” And they were like, “Oh, German isn’t a supported language for this and this.” And I was like, “I don’t use Google in German.” And they were like, “Oh.” I was like, “Yes, I’m Swedish, speaking to you in English, living in Germany.” And they were like, “That’s…
NICOLE: Mind blown
HEDVIG: …unexpected.” I’m like, “It’s really not.”
DANIEL: We’ve got a special live episode. It’s our 500th episode if you count Talk the Talk, it’s happening soon. And all patrons are invited. Now, being a patron means you support the show, and you make regular episodes free for everybody. You make it possible for SpeechDocs to make transcripts for our shows so they’re readable and searchable. And depending on your level, you get bonus episodes, shoutouts. Every patron gets our annual mailout. I just finished a design. It’s the “don’t die on grammar hills” design. And of course, you get invited to live episodes. And I have dropped the time and date of our latest. So, please check your Patreon feed if you are a patron.
If you’re not a patron, please consider becoming one you get lots of goods and it’s fun and you help us. So, thanks to everybody who is a patron. Check us out patreon.com/becauselangpod.
Alright, let’s get to the big news. The big news?
HEDVIG: Yes. Which one? I assume you mean American politics.
DANIEL: I don’t like to delve too much into American politics, because a lot of people do that. I mean, there are some things you can’t avoid. But this was a big one, and I think it’s kind of worth talking about. So, we’re kind of going there this time. The big news is that US president, Joe Biden, is going to round out his term as president. And now, vice president, Kamala Harris, has swiftly wrapped up endorsements and delegates and is now the presumptive nominee. How’s that feel?
HEDVIG: I’m not American. So, it’s entertaining. It seems like Americans I know feel better now.
DANIEL: Well, we have an American here. Let’s find out.
NICOLE: [LAUGHS] Should I tell you about my qualifications to speak on this before we start speaking?
HEDVIG: Yes, that might be [CROSSTALK]
DANIEL: Any listeners of this show will remember you from our Madam VP episode. So, yeah, why don’t you tell us, what’s your quals?
NICOLE: I. In 2020… Okay, so I was working on Barack Obama. Barack Obama is one of the reasons that I became a linguist, because I noticed that he does style shifting, code switching, interesting audience design type phenomena when I was an undergraduate. So, I was writing about Obama. And then, he was done because it was like 2016. And then, I started looking at other people because I like political speech. And in the 2020 democratic primaries, I recorded all of them, and I was like, “I should write about some of these people.” Who did I pick? Vice President Kamala Harris.
So, I had a paper that came out earlier this year in the journal, American Speech, about how Kamala Harris does her political identity, her identity as a black woman from California with her vowels and her prosody and her use of some sort of camouflaged morphosyntactic features of AAE. So, this was a really good time to be a person who wrote a paper about Kamala Harris earlier this year.
DANIEL: What a moment.
NICOLE: She’s bringing me up with her. So, that was cool. I know about her.
HEDVIG: Nicole, did you ever consider any of the other politicians to analyse that were running or anything? How come you actually went with Harris?
NICOLE: Yeah, I thought I was going to look at all of them, and then that became a lot of people. There were so many people running for president at that time. But I at first wanted to look at her because I had been looking at Obama. So, I thought maybe they’re an interesting comparison case. Is she doing his style? Is that politically something that can serve her? And so, I just started with her and thought I’d get back to everybody else later and they weren’t as interesting. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: True.
NICOLE: And the funny thing too is like my mother is conservative, and so I finally talked to her about this news yesterday, and she was like, “Well, of course you’d be in the bag for Kamala Harris,” which, of course I would. I am literally a biracial woman in California who is a member of her sorority. Like, I am the demographic. [LAUGHS] But I wasn’t supporting her in 2020. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Right. I mean, a lot of people weren’t. That’s why she didn’t get the nomination, right?
NICOLE: She didn’t make it that far.
DANIEL: Yeah. She wasn’t my first pick. No.
NICOLE: I was supporting another person who didn’t make it that far, Elizabeth Warren. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Me too.
NICOLE: Yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: Okay.
NICOLE: Yeah. Eventually, I’ll get back to all of the politicians. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Well, look, I think this is interesting because I was also not in the bag for Harris in the past, but when the announcement came through, I could not believe how elated I felt. And I don’t think I’ve seen this kind of relief and hope and energy from people for a very long time. And I’m sitting over here in Australia. So, what are you sensing? Are you sensing the same thing over there but just more, or what?
NICOLE: Yeah, I mean, there was a lot of controversy about what Biden should do since that debate. And my personal opinion is that the media kind of did a hit job on him. And there were some people in the party who were complicit in that. And so, the media just fed the narrative from some Democrats, and then they went back and forth and kept feeding each other. And so, it became this loud drumbeat about him dropping out. And that made me really anxious because they were just tanking him.
So, tanking him with no replacement would have meant that we would have had an open convention, which happened in 1968 and was a disaster. Go back and read about it if you want. [CHUCKLES] It was very bad.
DANIEL: [UNINTELLIGIBLE 00:17:20] every time.
NICOLE: So, what I think happened is somebody very savvy, perhaps because Obama, sort of rallied the troops once he saw that Biden’s numbers were really tanking and said, “All right, fine. We can have him drop out, but then we need to all get behind the same person because otherwise it’ll be this chaos.” And so, what really shocked me is I saw Biden drop out, I was standing, waiting to be seated at a Mexican restaurant for brunch because it was my bachelorette party. And then, it came up on TV, and I was like, “What?” So then, we were all gnashing our teeth for an hour and then we saw, “Oh, it’s Harris. There’s a plan.” And then, everyone felt better. And then, I went to a Dodger game, and everybody…
I live in LA, right? Everybody around me at the LA Dodgers game was like, “Kamala, Kamala, Kamala.” And we saw the money coming in, and we were like, “They did it.” So, that seems to be the jubilation. I think we were just very uncertain, and it wasn’t looking good. But now it’s like we got a new opportunity.
DANIEL: I think so too. Feels that way. Okay, well, tell you what, you’ve been quoted in several articles that I’ve noticed around the place, but especially this one in the Huffington Post by Sanjana Karanth. It’s called, “Why are Republicans still botching Kamala Harris’ name?” I’m going to make a confession here. I might get this wrong every once in a while. I might say it wrong and say Kamala because I’m not used to it and I just need to get familiar with it, but Donald Trump knows this name.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: And he’s getting it wrong. What’s going on?
NICOLE: Yeah. So, I made a TikTok about this that’s doing numbers, as the kids say. And it was very interesting because the point that I was making is that her name has started to become a shibboleth. And there’s lots of political words that are shibboleth. So, these things sort of reveal someone’s alignment.
HEDVIG: Ukraine, the Ukraine?
NICOLE: Yep. The Democrat party.
HEDVIG: Oh, I don’t know that one.
NICOLE: Yeah. The Democrat party is something that Donald Trump always says, the Democrat Party. But Joe Biden never, ever says the Democrat party, because officially, it’s the Democratic party. It’d be really weird if we started calling them the Republic party, [LAUGHS] but it sort of turned into an insult. And other people have written about this. So, the pronunciation of her name has become one of these, and that’s a more traditional shibboleth, because this is about pronunciation and not about whether we’re using a different variant of the word.
So, to Daniel’s point. Yeah, if you’re a regular person off the street that’s only read her name or heard her name a handful of times, you might feel uncertain about where the stress goes. But Donald Trump, et al, should know where the stress goes in her name. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Yeah, totally. I am noticing something a little strange. It looks like Ben has joined us in the Zoom room. Ben, what you doing, matey?
BEN: Hello. Can you guys hear me okay?
DANIEL AND HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Okay, cool. I can’t believe I have accidentally bum rushed the stage while we’ve got Nicole Holliday, unofficial fourth host!
HEDVIG: Yes.
NICOLE: Yes, hi. [LAUGHS]
BEN: All-time favorite guest. Not guest host.
NICOLE: Oh, thanks.
DANIEL: Indeed.
HEDVIG: So, Ben, you look hairy, warm, sweaty and red. Are you doing okay on your Big Silly Bike Ride?
BEN: Well, I am. I just picked a really nice spot in front of the Blue River. I’m just heading north of Silverthorne. I have just paid like eleventify dollars for a coffee because I’m in a ski town. It’s beautiful. It’s really nice. And I just got a little alert on my little phone being like, “Our recording is about to start.” And I was like, “Oh, oh, I can do the thing. I can do the thing.”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Okay.
HEDVIG: What state is that? I don’t know anything about American geography.
BEN: Colorado.
HEDVIG: You’re in Colorado?
DANIEL: Colorado. Okay.
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Big square thing.
DANIEL: And are you finding what you went there to find?
BEN: Well, sure. The thing that I went here to find is a sore bum and the ability to push a bike up lots and lots of hills, and I have found those things in spades.
DANIEL: Very good.
HEDVIG: Nice.
BEN: No, it’s very beautiful and lovely. And Americans are a very warm and friendly people on the whole, which I already knew. But just traveling around and having a billion people be like, “Hello, sir. What are you up to? What’s this strange thing you’re doing?” And then, having that chat, it’s great. It’s really fun. It’s lovely.
DANIEL: Aww, how nice.
HEDVIG: How nice.
BEN: Yeah. Anyway, you guys are probably in the middle of all sorts of cool, amazing things, so I just wanted to drop in and say hi and then I miss you.
DANIEL: Miss you too.
BEN: And I miss all of our host stuff.
NICOLE: Ben, are you coming to California?
BEN: I am not. I am riding through New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana, and then a little bit of Canadia.
NICOLE: Oh. Have fun up there.
BEN: Thank you. I will let you guys get back to it. I’m just trying to think if I have… Okay, I’ve got a Word of the Week for today.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah?
BEN: Yep. It’s not a new one. It’s just new to Ben, right?
HEDVIG: Fair enough.
BEN: And that is how Coloradoans… First of all, I need to figure out what the demonym for a person from Colorado is. Is it Colora…
NICOLE: Coloradan.
BEN: Coloradan. Okay.
HEDVIG: Okay.
BEN: It’s how Coloradans use the word PARK because it’s entirely different from everyone else in the world, as far as I can tell.
HEDVIG: What word?
BEN: Park. As in like…
DANIEL: Parking.
BEN: …green space.
DANIEL: Oh, okay.
BEN: Or parking or whatever. PARK has a lot of senses already. But I’m adding a new one to the list. Because in Colorado, we’ve all heard of South Park, obviously. I traveled through a real South Park here in Colorado, and I think a lot of us have probably either watched South Park or heard of South Park or something like that and thought, “Ah, it’s a town that must have a park in it,” meaning like a green space in the middle of the city where people go.
In Colorado, a park is an entirely different, entirely unique geographical formation. A park is a very, very big area, we’re talking like hundreds of square kilometers, potentially. And it’s a basin in the mountains that is surrounded by bigger mountains. So, it’s usually a prairie or a high desert. It’s often used for ranching and that sort of thing. And it’s just this sort of undulating landscape that you’ll just come across. You’ll climb these huge mountains, and you’ll come down like one side of them. And then, you’ll be in what you can only really describe as like a green rolling, kind of like Anne of Green Gables kind of setting. And that, in Colorado, is a park. So that’s why they’ve got a South Park and a North Park and a few other bits and pieces like that. So, there you go. There’s one for today. PARK in the Coloradan sense.
HEDVIG: Ah, that’s nice.
DANIEL: Thank you very much. That’s a Word of the Week.
BEN: There you go.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: A little bit of geography for you in your linguistics podcast.
DANIEL: All right, happy trails, matey. Join us when you get a chance. Thank you.
BEN: Bye, everyone. Thanks for having me.
DANIEL AND HEDVIG: Bye.
DANIEL: We are back on, so…
HEDVIG: We were talking about shibboleths, and correct me if I’m wrong, but Kamala is an Indian, like Hindi or Sanskrit or something, right?
NICOLE: Yes. So, her name, it’s from “lotus” in Tamil, I think. And this has been analyzed to death. But really, it probably should be something like “kuma” from what I’ve been able to ascertain from reading, I’ve never heard anybody that speaks that L1 one say her name. So, one interesting thing that has happened, as I posted a TikTok about this, is people were telling me that she says her own name wrong, which is possible.
DANIEL: No.
NICOLE: Because they’re uncomfortable with the fact that names get anglicized, but names get anglicized all the time. Yeah, we’re all saying Van Gogh [VŒN GOƱ] because we don’t have that fricative in English, and it’s okay. But also, it’s your own name, you pick your own name. Like, especially in English, we have no rules about this in the United States. So, she’s not saying her own name wrong.
Other people have made the argument, “Well, we have the name, Camilla,” and so it’s getting confused with Camilla, which maybe could happen, and then you get the stress wrong. And other people have said, “I can’t hear the difference,” which some people cannot hear stress in English very well. I was never making the claim that if you say her name, you, regular person on the street, get the stress wrong in her name, that you’ve automatically disrespected her and should be thrown in jail. What I was saying is she’s made several videos and statements over the years about how to say her name.
HEDVIG: It’s not hard.
NICOLE: And if you’re Joe off the street, it’s fine. But if every single person at the Republican National Convention says her name wrong, except JD Vance with an Indian wife and children…
DANIEL: Oh.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
NICOLE: Right. Everybody is saying it wrong there because they’re doing something, whether it’s conscious, intentional, or not. JD Vance is probably saying it right on purpose because he doesn’t want his in laws to be mad at him for doing something so petty. That’s my guess. But it becomes disrespect when the party decides that they’re going to do this as disrespect. And then, there’s an even sort of more extreme iteration of this, which is the CEO of Goya Foods, who is a Spanish speaker and a big conservative donor here, decided to say her name, Ka-maala, like maala, like bad in Spanish.
DANIEL: Qué mala.
NICOLE: Qué mala. How bad!
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
NICOLE: And so, it’s at the level of consciousness, the idea that they can make fun of her name and that this is like a target. Obviously, the context matters. Context always matters. So, if you’re like, “I love that Kamala Harris,” nobody’s mad at you for that if you’re just getting it wrong. But if you’re doing it as part of a coordinated series of attacks against her, then it becomes this shibboleth that shows your alignment.
DANIEL: Okay, thank you. Thank you for that explanation. Let’s get to the words. I want to talk about this one suggested by James on our Discord. The coconut perhaps combined with a tree, perhaps not. Now, we want to be careful here because we’re very aware that it is a thing to refer to someone as a kind of food that is white on the inside but some different colour on the outside as a way of criticising someone for perceived double dealing in their proximity to white mainstream culture. We don’t want to do that.
HEDVIG: Daniel, maybe I’m just too on TikTok but… So, I’ve seen a lot of things about Kamala Harris and coconut, coconut tree stuff because she has a saying. We’re going to go into explaining that. I have not seen anyone so far link it to the derogatory term. Someone I know in Germany pointed it out to me this week. They’re like, “Oh, you know that derogatory term, coconut.” And I was like, “I don’t know many people who are making that connection between the saying and that, but maybe I’m just not on the right side of… [CROSSTALK]
NICOLE: No. Hedvig, I agree with you. The only people that I’ve seen wringing hands about this are terminally online white leftists on Bluesky.
DANIEL: Hello.
NICOLE: No offense to present company. [LAUGHS] But the people that started to use the coconut tree meme were mostly Black and Brown young people who would have been the people who were targeted by that if it were a slur. Also, because it’s the coconut and the tree and we have a very clear origin story for it. I don’t think it’s problematic. I think it’s problematic because people are making it problematic. But there’s also a very big difference between using a word and then aiming it at someone, and that’s not what’s happened here.
DANIEL: No. What I’m trying to do is head off any potential misunderstanding, because we try to be very careful around this kind of stuff.
NICOLE: Yeah, sure.
DANIEL: And we know that’s not… So, let’s talk about the real origin.
HEDVIG: So, I want to ask Nicole, because my understanding is that Harris has said in a number of speeches, she’s recounted this saying that her mother used to say that, “You didn’t fall out of a coconut tree, you exist in a context. You’re not devoid from that context, and don’t pretend that you are or willfully be ignorant.” And I think that’s a really nice saying. And I don’t know many other sayings to that effect, and it makes sense. But one of the reasons I think it gained meme status is because she tells it in this sort of like… She starts laughing and sort of interrupting herself and she just retakes and it’s quite funny. And people have said, “Oh, it’s like your funny aunt at the party or something.” And there seems to be sort of two sides of her. And this sort of funny, a bit quirky laughing side is really vibing with people and which is why the saying seems to have gone so viral. Does that make sense to you, like those two sides of her?
NICOLE: Yeah, it’s a good story. It’s a fun story. She’s told it multiple times. There’s already emoji for it. It was just ready to be memed. But I agree with you. The laughing thing, well, we could have a whole episode on that, but it is part of her… She’s a little quirky, as you say. Like, just a little offbeat in a way that people that like her find charming. But at the same time, Trump has taken to calling her Laughing Kamala for the same reason. So, this is in the eye of the beholder, I think the kids like it, people that are predisposed to like her like it and think that it’s very disarming, kind of a charming way to be, but it’s being framed by her opponents as unprofessional or even like a little unhinged. Like, there’s this implication that she’s not serious and kind of out there.
DANIEL: They’ve got nothing.
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly.
NICOLE: Yeah, really. They’re like scraping the bottom of the barrels.
DANIEL: They’re flailing.
NICOLE: She tells weird stories sometimes? That’s the worst thing about… And she laughs. How dare she? [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: She laughs. Who should have access to joy but the in-group?
HEDVIG: And also, being a bit quirky and having this kind of pattern of talking sometimes seems like a pretty good match for Trump, right?
NICOLE: Yeah.
DANIEL: Good counterpoint.
NICOLE: I had a conversation with a person who is a Trump supporter the other day, and it basically boiled down to what they said was, “Well, but she can’t be taken seriously on a world stage. She just giggles all the time.” And I said, “Yeah, but Trump insults foreign diplomats to their face and threatens them and whatever.” And then, the response from them was, “Well, you have to understand where he comes from. And that’s a power play, and that’s part of his style. He’s doing it on purpose.” And I said, “Did it not occur to you that female politicians might have to do a different kind of soft power and that the laughing might be strategic too?” [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yes, exactly.
NICOLE: She doesn’t get that benefit of the doubt that she’s constructing a style. Also, the meme, the sort of constant videos that you see on conservative media of her laughing and giggling and doing this kind of quirky thing are never in situations when she’s talking with Xi Jinping or something. She has styles. People are allowed to have styles.
DANIEL: Mm.
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And there are so many clips of her in Senate hearings with what’s his name, Kavanaugh or whatever, being very in the like politician lawyer, like super serious role. So, I don’t get that. But I find this… I’m interested to know as a Harris specialist, yeah, what do you think about construing this style? Do you think it’s natural? Do you think she amps it up? Do you think it works? What does it consist of?
NICOLE: Yeah, I feel a lot of solidarity with her because I’m the same kind of quirky weirdo. [LAUGHS] I’m glad we finally have representation in the government, people like me, quirky weirdos.
DANIEL: Yeah. Well, I’m not beholden to Big Weirdo. So, I can’t really speak on this matter.
NICOLE: We’ll get back to WEIRD later, but I find it to be very charming. Obviously, it’s resonating with the young people online. I’m millennial. So, I’m a little too old for that, but they seem to really like it. Because she’s more familiar, because she can be really serious, but also a little offbeat, I think that it is authentic, and it comes off as authentic. But then, the sort of counterweight of that is, “Well, is it unprofessional?” Part of the problem is that we’ve had this gerontocracy in the United States for so long. So, she is at the end of a baby boomer, but she’s really representing Gen X I think here, for her actual age, she’s 59.
And so, people are just not used to what a president from that generation could look like, what people in power from that generation could look like. Because Obama was so different. He was funny in his own way, but it’s like he very rarely broke character because he had to be so serious. And when he did, remember that time he wore a tan suit? Oh, my god. Like, call the reporters, he’s wearing a tan suit.
DANIEL: Fox News freaked out. It was all they could talk about for days.
NICOLE: Yeah.
HEDVIG: You guys consume such different things. I don’t… I never… This never happened. I never saw this. I don’t know what anyone said about it.
NICOLE: Yes. He wore a tan suit once, and they said it was so unprofessional.
HEDVIG: Okay, all right.
DANIEL: Yeah, they really ran with it. I myself am quite coconut pilled, can I just say? And that’s an expression that’s come up. COCONUT PILLED. I love the combination of the COCONUT with the PILLED, meaning I’ve come around to this way of thinking.
Let’s talk about another word that has come around in a big way and it’s WEIRD. As we speak, the hashtag, #TrumpIsWeird, is trending. Apparently, democrats have gotten the memo. They’re using WEIRD to talk about Trump, Vance, the silicon tech bros that support them, and everybody else. What’s your impression?
HEDVIG: I don’t know. You two seem to understand what that means, and I don’t. So, I don’t know why you two are excited. I don’t… What is the… Is there a new… What is going on? I don’t… I’m out of loop.
NICOLE: It’s bothering them so much.
DANIEL: They are big mad!
HEDVIG: Okay.
NICOLE: That’s actually why… Like, I think what happened is like one person, I think it was Buttigieg, actually, that started this, started saying, “The Republicans are weird,” [NICOLE LATER CORRECTED THIS — IT WAS TIM WALZ —D] and then they lost their minds. They really cannot tolerate this. And I saw some analysis from a person on Bluesky that I follow, Celeste Ng, who was basically, like, “These are people who because of their worldview absolutely cannot stand to be considered marginalized in any way.” So, when you say WEIRD, you’re saying you’re not normal, not average, whatever. Well, the conservative worldview in the United States is such that conformity is prized. And so, to call these people weird, you’re saying, “Your opinions aren’t popular,” which they’re not. Like, banning abortion polls at 20% in the United States. So, when you say you’re not mainstream to people who have been trying to sell that their ideas are popular despite what voters are doing, it’s really offensive to them.
HEDVIG: Okay. So, there’s no new meaning of WEIRD that’s being evoked?
NICOLE: No, no. They’re just really taking it personally.
HEDVIG: Okay. Because the way you guys were talking about it, I thought that it meant something new.
DANIEL: They’ve spent the last 60 years demonising Liberals as weirdos. Like, queer people, feminists, quiche-eating guys. So now, we’re saying, “You know what? YOU guys are the weirdos.” And it really stings. It shows the emperor has no clothes.
HEDVIG: Right. So, the point is that everyone wants to represent Middle America, the big middle class who lives in a suburban house and has two cars and a dog and 2.1 children or something like that. And by calling the Republican American party weird, you’re saying you aren’t representing the mainstream, and that’s the upsetting part.
NICOLE: Yeah. And the reason it doesn’t work when you turn it back around on people to the left of them, because as Daniel was saying, being called weird if you’re a leftist is not only common, it’s also not an insult. You’re like, “Yeah, okay, I’m not traditional, so what? You hurt my feelings? I’m Black. Like, nobody thought I was supposed to be here, go ahead and call me weird.” [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Right.
NICOLE: But if your whole worldview is selling a back to the past or make America great again, literally, it’s that there was some idealized tradwife, Stepford past that everyone should be trying to go back to, and that’s a conformity past.
The other thing that I’ve seen is there was a… I don’t even know what the PAC was called, but there’s a PAC that released an ad that had a bunch of really creepy-looking dudes who were very sweaty, greasy hair, just not people that… you would cross the street if you saw them being like, “I want to control what happens in your bedroom. I want to control how many children you have.” And those are actually policies that this party puts forth. It is weird. It’s weird to have 65-year-old members of Congress worrying about the genitalia of children who want to play soccer in high school. It’s weird. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Can I just share a story? Back in 2020, I was talking to some extended family who are pretty politically conservative, but they said they didn’t vote for Trump in 2020. And I was kind of impressed. And when I asked why, they said, “Eh, he just seems kind of weird.” And they didn’t really elaborate, but they just: “Yeah, I just thought, eh, something weird about that guy.” And I could have yelled and screamed about how dangerous he was, and the Constitution, and your rights and stuff, and they would have listened very politely. But that wasn’t the criticism that landed for them. They were just like, “I don’t know. Something just seems kind off about the guy.” So, that was what landed.
So, why do you think this is working? I mean, we’ve mentioned that it drives them nuts because they’re used to seeing themselves as “the thing,” the dominant group, and everybody else as The Other, and so when you turn that around, they hate it.
HEDVIG: I wasn’t aware that they thought they were… Because you can be politically active and not be the mode American, the most common American. You can be like have an unusual gender identity or ethnicity or something and still have certain ideas about tax policies and be a politician. You don’t have to be like the most people in order to be a politician.
NICOLE: No. I think you do. I think that’s actually the change that’s been pointed out. In the 1970s, Richard Nixon had this speech about the silent majority, and that is what they’ve been trafficking in this entire time. “Well, you know, everybody actually agrees with us, they just don’t come out and say it. So, the Liberals are weird. These are the people who just want to say anything goes.” But they’ve made it harder and harder to have that sort of big tent Republican party because you can’t… It’s very hard to be a brown person who supports conservative tax policy when they’re saying they’re going to take away the citizenship of your parents, which is not an exaggeration. That’s very weird.
HEDVIG: Is this connected to their general evangelical Christians in America seems to have a fear that people with perverted ideas are too many and that the path… What’s it called? The path of… the path that fewer people walk on is the righteous path, what’s the metaphor again?
DANIEL: The straight and narrow path.
HEDVIG: The straight and narrow path. So, they don’t mind being few. But when it comes to maybe gender and ethnicity, isn’t there a fear also by a lot of white people in America that white people aren’t having enough kids and they’re feeling anxiety about that? Is that connected to all this?
NICOLE: That’s another thing that Vance has said. And when we had the murder of the woman in Charlottesville, Heather Heyer, in that march, the Proud Boys, they were chanting, “You will not replace us,” which sometimes they chant, “Jews will not replace us.” So, there is a lot of anxiety about them being replaced. And I don’t think it’s just numerically replaced, although that’s a point of it. It’s also ideologically replaced. Like they cannot support, understand the fact that their children literally don’t care about people’s gender. [LAUGHS] Even young evangelical Christians are not so dogmatic about this, and that scares the crap out of them.
HEDVIG: Wow.
DANIEL: We talk a lot on the show about how to persuade, how to use language to convince other people. And I think what we’re seeing is we tend to do a lot about giving arguments and making a case. But ridicule is a fantastic strategy. You can explain and warn and harangue and it might just bounce off, but ridicule and mockery work when it comes to bad ideas. Ridicule doesn’t affect good ideas, it just bounces off. But ridicule is fatal to bad ideas, it just shrinks them.
HEDVIG: Well, ridicule can also breed just plain resentment. Like, if you feel like someone’s laughing at you…
NICOLE: Yeah, but I think what’s happened… So, Michelle Obama had this quote several years ago, which was like, “When they go low, we go high.” This is the end of we go high, because literally Trump is a shit poster, right?
DANIEL AND HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
NICOLE: Like, literally a shit poster. And the number of things that he has said, absolutely… He makes fun of disabled people. He makes fun of women. He makes fun of people who speak English as a second language. He refuses to say Kamala Harris’ name right. This man is a troll. And the Democrats, for his entire reign and the last four years, even when Biden has been in power, have been like, “No, no, we’re above it. We’re above it. We don’t say mean things about our opponents.” And so, the Democrats come out with… They’ve been punching us to death. And we come out and we tap them by saying they’re weird and they lose their minds. It’s related to the “Kamala is brat” thing and whatever. Like, finally the Democrats are like, “Oh, we exist in this cultural landscape where everyone’s a shit poster? Fine, we’ll do it too.”
DANIEL: The game has changed.
HEDVIG: Right.
DANIEL: And this is the end of that dynamic where lefties have to observe every norm scrupulously or else they get screamed at, whereas righties get to do whatever they want.
HEDVIG: This is where I get to talk about the trash bag left and Chapo Trap House and all that stuff. Is that what we’re talking about? Oh, my god.
DANIEL: We might be.
HEDVIG: Chapo Trap House, Trashfuture, and Well, There’s Your Problem are three really good podcasts to listen to hear leftists who don’t want to be civil, who are just like, “We’re just going be as rude and inappropriate as you, and we’re not going to hold ourselves to a higher politeness or etiquette.”
DANIEL: And this is a valid strategy, absolutely, because you won’t convince people who are committed with ridicule and mockery, but you will convince the third parties that are watching the debate and uncommitted. Because if you can make people laugh, then you have an in, whereas other ways you might not.
NICOLE: I do also think it’s a like zoom-out on the issues. Not only are many of the things that they’re proposing unpopular, they are incredibly invasive. And for a party that is supposed to be representing small government, that’s very strange. It feels like surveillance state, it feels like policing of bodily autonomy. It feels like racial profiling. All of this is not just dangerous, it’s really strange. And this is part of why Project 2025, the discourse about Project 2025, as people have learned what it is, they’ve been horrified because they’re like, “Wait, wait, wait. You want to get rid of feeding children in schools? Poor children, when they go to school, shouldn’t have any food to eat?” Not only is that morally reprehensive, why? That’s not what’s causing the deficit, guys.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah. And this is where it’s good to draw a distinction between being weird in a lefty way, like in a way that harms no one. You’re just wearing strange clothing or idiosyncratic hobbies or something. That’s one kind of weird, and I don’t think anybody has a problem with that. The problem is being weird about somebody else’s thing, being super weird about controlling other people’s behaviour. I think that’s the difference between the two weirds. I’m weird in some ways, but not in a way that is off-putting and repellent, I hope.
HEDVIG: Or it seems like what they’re upset about is having… what Nicole said earlier, having opinions that aren’t common. So, for example, abortion ban isn’t a popular opinion. And say that, you know most people don’t agree with you, “You can have that opinion, but FYI, you’re unusual.” That’s like to just have an uncommon opinion, is also technically like it’s just you can’t really be upset if then someone says, “By the way, FYI, not a lot of people agree with you.” What is it I always say is trivial: I don’t like lime green. I think that’s an uncommon opinion. I think I can have that opinion. And if someone said, “That’s an uncommon opinion,” I’d be like, “Yeah.”
DANIEL: Yeah, maybe.
NICOLE: I’ve been called much, much worse than weird. Like, weird isn’t even an insult to me. It’s almost a compliment, but I think that this is the problem. Look at who their constituency is right now or who they’re trying to appeal to. It’s a lot of very anxious older white men. So, as you were saying, Hedvig, this fear of being replaced. So, people like that when they’re being told that they’re not number one anymore, very, very scary for them. And I’m allowed to say this, but you guys aren’t, the people of color that they’ve been able to attract, so if you look at Tim Scott or even Nikki Haley or whatever, are people that have sold their communities and their souls out to be part of a perceived mainstream with power.
So, the one who absolutely melted down on Twitter or X the other day was Vivek Ramaswamy. This is a man who grew up being made fun of for being Indian, which we know being called weird for his heritage, who was like, “You know what I’ll do? Align myself with the most fascistic white people that I can find, get a bunch of money, and nobody will ever make fun of me again.” Well, guess what? They’re making fun of him again, and he doesn’t like it. That’s exactly what’s going on. This doesn’t stick to the left because we never sold out. Kamala Harris is like, “Oh, you’re going to call me weird? That’s like the least offensive thing I’ve heard today.”
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Also, I think generationally, it’s going to be rough, because a lot of millennials and Gen Z grew up with the internet, where there’s a critical mass to have quite niche interests. So, to not participate in mainstream music or fashion or hobbies, it’s quite common. A lot of people know someone who’s really into, I don’t know, My Little Pony or something. And it’s like, “Yeah,” and it’s a bit funny. He sees My Little Pony, but it’s fine. A lot of people have something “unusual.”
DANIEL: And that’s the good weird versus the bad weird. By the way, the word WEIRD, just to finish up has had a really interesting history. For centuries, since old English times, it meant your fate. Your “wyrd” was your fate or what was fated to happen. And then, it took on a meaning of having the power to control fate or the destiny of human beings. And then, Shakespeare used it for the weird sisters, the fates, in his play, Macbeth.
HEDVIG: Oh.
DANIEL: They did look very strange in usual depictions and so, the meaning, because meaning jumps, WEIRD came to mean just plain strange, off-putting, or odd. So, there’s your history.
HEDVIG: And then also, in research it means Western educated, industrialised, rich, and Democratic?
NICOLE: Yeah. [LAUGHS] Acronym WEIRD.
HEDVIG: Which is what I thought. When you guys messaged me, I thought it might be about that. I was like, “What are they going to…?” [LAUGHS]
NICOLE: Unfortunately. Or I don’t know, I guess fortunately, that weird acronym applies to the entire United States, so it doesn’t stick on anybody in particular, it’s just the nature of the place. Although the Democratic has maybe got a question mark next to it at this point, we’ll see.
DANIEL: Somebody did one. It was white, eccentric, irritated, rich dudes. So, not sure.
NICOLE: Let’s catch that one on. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Next one. BRAT. Cause it’s a hot brat summer or something. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: It is?
DANIEL: No.
NICOLE: This is the one that makes me feel really old. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Yeah, because you can be a brat, but you can just be brat. Well, okay, I have to say this, on a personal note, the algorithm suggested Von Dutch by Charli XCX, six weeks ago. I liked it, seven-year-old daughter liked it. We’ve been blasting that song in the car, and we’ve now been bopping along with the album, Brat. So, it’s funny to see how the word BRAT, the attitude brat, and the campaign has come together. I mean, Kamala HQ has turned their profile image lime green to match the Charli XCX album’s very unusual cover art.
HEDVIG: So, what does it mean to be brat? Because I have seen this as well, but I don’t really understand it. I know Charli XCX is a British pop star and that she had a record and that people like it, but I haven’t really listened much to it. I understand that… Is brat similar to hot girl?
DANIEL: Yeah. She describes it as somebody who’s kind of messy, maybe says things she regrets, likes to go to clubs.
HEDVIG: It’s also a bit defiant and it’s feminine and it’s powerful, confident, something like that?
DANIEL: The Atlantic, there’s an article here. “To be a brat, in XCX’s view, is to be aggressive and cheeky and wholly unexpected, like the lime-green color of her album’s cover.”
HEDVIG: Okay. So then, it makes perfect sense. Whoever is managing Harris’ social media is doing an excellent job.
NICOLE: They hired the best 23-year-old social media manager they could find.
HEDVIG: Yes.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: And I guess the tie-in here is Charli’s explicit tweet. “Kamala IS brat.”
HEDVIG: Brat.
DANIEL: So, there’s the tie-in. So, it means that not only is Harris having a moment, but Charli’s having a moment. It’s really coming together.
NICOLE: Yeah. This is very interesting because about a couple months ago, I talked to a reporter who was trying to make the argument that the increasing use in BRAT, part of Charli XCX, but also the revival of the Brat Pack. There was a documentary about the Brat Pack from the 1980s that all of this was misogynistic, that brat was being used as an insult against women. And is this a reclamation? Is it like BITCH type thing?
HEDVIG: Oh, I was just going to say BITCH. Yeah.
NICOLE: And I was like, actually, I do think it is similar to the reclamation of BITCH circa 1995.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
NICOLE: I feel sick of that song by Meredith Brooks, which I think it’s a good analogue, but also could Kamala be anything but brat? Like, there’s no other way for her to be. She has to be unapologetic. She has to be…
HEDVIG: Is she messy enough though?
NICOLE: Yeah…
HEDVIG: She’s quirky and cheeky, but is she messy?
NICOLE: No. I mean, she’s not messy because her job… I mean, she’s messy for a person in her position, which means sometimes she laughs.
[LAUGHTER]
It’s like as messy as you’re allowed to be as a female politician. But I think it’s resonating, and I think part of it is that if we’re saying Kamala is a brat, then she doesn’t feel so beholden to these old norms. Like, maybe she actually does represent young people, young women. She has some of the same experiences that young women in the United States go through, and there’s a solidarity and that’s what Charli XCX was saying.
If you listen to the whole album, it’s actually quite millennial. She’s 31. So, she’s not… Even though she’s appealing to a younger audience, but the topic she talks about like, “Where do I belong in this world? Should I have a child?”, that’s people my age. So, it’s like, how do you age into being a person who did all of that in your 20s, and now you’re some kind of imagination of a serious adult, but you’re still that way? Like, does anyone ever really feel like a grownup? That’s the question, so.
HEDVIG: But also, as another millennial, I feel sometimes people tell you that when you’re… I feel being 30 is very relieving because I don’t feel like the same people-pleasing instinct anymore. And it doesn’t… You know what they say about people pleasers? Like, “Oh, you’re a people pleaser. How many people are pleased with you?” Like, if you’re trying to please everyone, no one’s going to be happy with you. And I feel like the older I get, the more I’m like, “Yeah, I’m not… Not everyone’s going be happy with me, and that’s fine.”
NICOLE: And I think that’s right. I think that’s part of Kamala is brat. She’s come out swinging in the last week and is less apologetic, is like, “You know what? I’m going to win, and I’m going to make stronger statements. And this is the end of the story. I can’t possibly please everyone.” And so, I think that’s what the kids are seeing and what made me what Charli XCX is seeing. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Yep.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, she’s flipped the campaign, I’ve got to say, because now the Republicans are on the back foot. They are giving off big loser energy. We need to move to Related or Not, our favorite game. Are you ready for a theme?
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: There we go.
HEDVIG: Oh, pen, paper, Nicole. It’s good to get it.
DANIEL: Yes. Good to get it.
NICOLE: Yes. I am woefully unprepared for Related or Not. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Excellent.
HEDVIG: He keeps being like one, and then it’s like three words or something you have to like really…
DANIEL: Here we go.
[YET ANOTHER RELATED OR NOT THEME]
HEDVIG: I like it. Oh, my god, this is…
NICOLE: So kicky. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Wow.
DANIEL: That was a Related or Not theme that was given to us by Adam, who used SunoAI to generate it. That’s an AI theme. They’re getting pretty good, aren’t they?
NICOLE: We were all jamming, really. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Thanks, Adam. Okay, here’s our first one. I’m going to give you three pairs of words. All of these pairs begin with E. And two of them are related to each other, but there’s one pair where the pair of words is not related at all. Are you ready?
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Number one, ESCAPE and SCAPE, like a landscape. That’s pair one. Pair number two, ENDORSE and DORSAL, like a dorsal fin. Okay. Number three, ENROLL. You might enroll to vote. And then, a ROLL, like a roll of paper or something. So, the three pairs, ESCAPE and SCAPE, ENDORSE and DORSAL, ENROLL and ROLL. You’ve got to pick which pair are NOT related to each other. The other two are.
NICOLE: Oh, two are related.
DANIEL: That’s right. Two are related, and only one is not. You’ve got to pick the pair that’s not.
NICOLE: I feel like my first instinct is ENROLL and ROLL.
DANIEL: Too easy?
NICOLE: But it’s so weird. It’s so weird [DANIEL LAUGHS] that I feel like it has to be related.
DANIEL: It’s a counterintuitive game. We’ve found this. Okay, Hedvig, first impression?
HEDVIG: I would go with number two as my first pick and number three as my second pick. So, ENDORSE, DORSAL because dorsal has to do with backs. Dorsal fins are things on your back, your dorsal muscles are things on your back. And when you endorse someone, you back them up, you have their back, etc. So, I think that’s how that goes. ENROLL and ROLL, I think it’s that you write someone up on a roll, like a list of something, and that’s how those are connected, I think.
NICOLE: Yeah, I agree. I was thinking the same thing about backing and DORSAL. So, if it’s ESCAPE and SCAPE that aren’t related, then where did that come from? Because the vibes are the same, right? Like, here’s this big, open thing I need to get out of it, maybe.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: So, there’s landscape. What other scapes are there with -scape as a second part?
DANIEL: I mean, other scape-related words like a seascape or a…
HEDVIG: Okay. Yeah. And escape, escapade.
NICOLE: Ooh, Escapade. A great Janet Jackson song.
DANIEL: Ooh, fun but…
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah?
DANIEL: Okay. So, it sounds like you’re both leaning toward the one that’s not related being ESCAPE and SCAPE. Do you feel good about that still, or are you wavering?
NICOLE: Oh, I’ve got to go with it, but I’m like, 51%, you know?
DANIEL: Okay. All right, we’ve got one vote for that one. Hedvig, your final answer?
HEDVIG: 100% ESCAPE, SCAPE, bullshit.
DANIEL: You are both correct. The one that’s not related is ESCAPE and SCAPE. So, for SCAPE, it’s backformed from LANDSCAPE. And the SCAPE is actually -SHIP, like FRIENDSHIP. Friendship is the state of being a friend, and landscape is the state of the land.
HEDVIG: I have a Swedish cheat code there because LANDSCAPE and like GRANNSKAP, which is like neighborhood, like, the hood is the same as the scape.
DANIEL: Oh nice. Okay. Yeah. Childhood is the state of being a child, but in English, neighborhood is not the state of being a neighbour, it’s a place. And this is another SK- and SH- combination from Norse and Old English, because there are a lot of these pairs of words, one from Norse and one from Germanic. You’ve got SKIRT and SHIRT. You’ve got SKULL and SHELL. Your skull is a kind of shell. And whenever you see the SK- version, that’s the Norse version, and when you see the SH- version, that’s the Germanic version.
Okay, so where does ESCAPE come from? [SCOFFS] You’re not going to believe this. When you ex-cape, you squiggle out of your cape! Yes, imagine that somebody’s chasing you.
NICOLE: Ex-cape!
DANIEL: They grab you by your cape, and you wriggle out of it, and you keep running because you ex-caped.
NICOLE: So, it’s EX- like expatriate. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: EX- is out, and cappa is CLOAK. Isn’t that great?
HEDVIG: That’s good.
DANIEL: That’s my second favorite etymology behind HELICOPTER. But yes, ENDORSE and DORSAL, both refer to backs. When you endorse a check, you sign the back of it, and so on. People would endorse an idea that was written on paper, and they would just write, “Yeah, I’m good with this,” on the back of it. ENROLL and ROLL, it’s just a roll of paper. You would enroll somebody on a roll of paper, and that’s how we got the word. Good job, you two.
Okay, we’ve got one more. And this one comes from Jenna, sent to us via SpeakPipe. Jenna was sitting around the campfire with Jared and Kaylee. Let’s listen.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
[RECORDING STARTS]
JARED: I will participate in this, but I’m not giving the backstory because it’s made up of lies.
JENNA: [LAUGHS] That’s fair.
JARED: I’m not going to spread misinformation.
JENNA: So, Jared was telling us about the arsenal of Switzerland, and then Kaylee said:
KAYLEE: Arson.
JENNA: So, then I wondered if ARSENAL and ARSON are related to each other?
HEDVIG: Oh.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. ARSENAL and ARSON.
HEDVIG: I’ve got a fun tie in with ARSENAL because Arsenal is a British English football team, and people who support Arsenal are known as Gunners, which I learned through some friends of mine. And Keir Starmer is an Arsenal supporter.
DANIEL: Oh, very good.
HEDVIG: And Arsenal is also one of the English football teams that put the most focus on the women’s side of things, the women’s teams. And I know some people are supportive. So, friends who I’ve never talked to football to, when Keir Starmer became prime minister, I could message them and be like, “Aren’t you happy there’s a Gunner in office?” And they were like, “Yes.” It was really nice.
DANIEL: You’re so British. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s fun.
DANIEL: Well, I’m going to make a guess here, because I guessed before I knew the answer, and then I looked it up, I thought, Mmmm. I gave it the side eye, but then I thought, well, they both involve fire, right? That’s where you keep the armaments, the firearms. And arson involves setting something on fire. I said semantically, seems plausible, I’m going yes.
NICOLE: I feel like it’s like same vibes, but no. And the reason… So, every time, I’m like is something related, I’m like, what is it in Spanish? And I think in Spanish, ARSON is like, incendio provocado or something like that. Like, there’s not a direct analog from Latin. And so, for that reason, I feel like no, they’re just a coincidence.
DANIEL: Okay. Okay.
HEDVIG: So, if I do that cheat, then ARSENAL in Swedish is arsenal, which is just the same. And when someone… What do we call someone who commits arson? We just use good old Germanic terms for fire stuff, I think. But I still think the fire-fire, I think it’s connected. I think they’re related. I’m going to guess yes.
DANIEL: Okay, Nicole, you might have missed a trick because there is a reflex in Spanish, ARDIENTE, burning.
NICOLE: Ohhhh. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Which is kind of like ARDENT.
NICOLE: I’m an L2 speaker, you know.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Me too. [GUFFAWS] Okay, so we’ve got two votes for yes, one vote for no. The answer, Nicole, you are correct. They are not related.
NICOLE: I was right for the wrong reasons.
DANIEL: Okay. So, ARSON does go back to classical Latin, ars, ardere, to burn. But ARSENAL comes to us from a different path. Comes to us from Italian arsenale, dockyard. In fact, sometimes it even shows up as d’arzanale. But people snapped off the “d’” because they thought it was like an OF — d’— but it’s not. Comes to us from Arabic. Yep, this is an Arabic one, dār aṣ-ṣināʕa, which means the house of manufacture. So, this one comes to us from Arabic through Italian to us. ARSENAL and ARSON, not related.
HEDVIG: That’s really fun.
DANIEL: Isn’t that great?
HEDVIG: Thank you so much, Jenna.
DANIEL: Thanks, Jenna. And thanks also to Dax from SpeechDocs, who is the one who gave us the ESCAPE and SCAPE, and gave me a chance to talk about my favorite etymologies. Thank you to everybody who’s giving us ideas for these. If you sent one and we haven’t done it, just send it again if you still want us to do it because sometimes, I get distracted sometimes.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: And we’re having fun. So, thanks for playing with us.
HEDVIG: He has a full schedule, keeping tabs of when I randomly DM him things to put in the run sheet, and I don’t bother to go into the run sheet and put it in on myself. And he does it for me. So, he’s a busy man. So, you might have to message him twice.
[MUSIC]
[INTERVIEW BEGINS]
DANIEL: We’re talking to Dr Ruanni Tupas, Associate Professor of Sociolinguistics and Education at University College London. He’s the editor of a new volume, Investigating Unequal Englishes: Understanding, Researching, and Analysing Inequities of the Englishes of the World. Hey, Ruanni, thanks so much for coming on the show and having a chat.
RUANNI TUPAS: Yeah, thanks. Thanks very much, Daniel, for the invitation.
DANIEL: Tell me about your variety of English. There’s lots of ways of englishing, what’s yours?
RUANNI: Actually, it’s a difficult question to answer, to be honest. And I’ll explain to you why. All right easily, probably, I would say because I’m Filipino, I would say Philippine English. But I lived in Singapore for 20 years, So, I pick up a lot of Singaporean English along the way as well. And the evidence to that is this. Every time, I flew back to the Philippines from Singapore, taxi drivers and people in the airport, Filipinos in other words, would then start asking questions, “Sir, are you Filipino? Because your English seems neutral.” At least, for them, it’s neutral.
DANIEL: Oh, I see.
RUANNI: But flying back to Singapore. Singaporean taxi drivers would say, “Okay, you’re Filipino, is it?”
DANIEL: All right, “is it”?
RUANNI: So, I guess along the way, your English accumulates or picks up many different sounds and words that sometimes, it’s very difficult to just simply pin you down with just one particular variety or one particular accent. Also, because the Philippines privileges, at least in the educational system, privileges the American English variety, then we were, in a sense, exposed to that variety as well, other than the fact that social media and the movies, all of these would… Access to these would be access to American standard English as well.
So, it’s difficult, but I guess probably for the sake of just simply cutting it all down, being Filipino, I most likely would say, generally, it’s Philippine English.
DANIEL: Can we just take a second and focus on this weird idea that a neutral accent exists? What is up with that? Doesn’t exist.
RUANNI: Yes. It doesn’t exist at all. It doesn’t exist at all. And I think the idea of neutrality is relative. It’s relative to who you are talking to. It’s relative to who you are speaking with, really. And that explains why, again, Filipinos think that my English is neutral, precisely because they feel that I’m speaking in English, that’s something that somehow is different from the way they are used to in their particular context. But the same English that I produce is not neutral in Singapore. So, it’s neutrality or a neutral kind of variety is something that is valued socially or described socially, but it’s never really a linguistic feature…
DANIEL: There it is.
RUANNI: …because it’s relative to who you’re talking to. So, someone can have a neutral English or a variety, it’s because of my proximity to that particular variety or that particular person.
DANIEL: Exactly. Well, my variety of English is I grew up speaking US English, Pacific Northwest US English, and then I did school up elsewhere in the US where I spoke Rocky Mountain English, Rocky Mountain US English. And for the last 20 years or so, I’ve been living in Australia, speaking Australian English. And that basically means that I have lost my COT-CAUGHT merger, and I now also am working on a TRAP-BATH split. So, trap and bath are different vowels for me. And it’s just kind of funny to see the different ways that I’m taking on accents.
Would you say that you face inequalities because of the Englishes that you have command over?
RUANNI: Well, throughout my career, yeah, definitely. But different manifestations of such inequality, of course, at different stages of my career. Now, I guess probably it’s not as pronounced precisely because or perhaps because of the amount of probably cultural capital that I have picked up and accumulated along the way. The kind of problematic engagement that I usually have right now is when I continue to receive reviews, anonymous reviews, of course, in submissions to journals where reviewers require me to consult a native speaker, a native writer of English, because my English doesn’t sound natural or doesn’t feel natural. And I still pick it up, I still get it now, all right. Of course, right now, I’m able to negotiate with editors and to argue with editors regarding these kinds of feedback.
But as what I said, along the way, it hasn’t been that easy. Early on in my career, when I was exploring different opportunities for me, not just in the academe, for example, but in, let’s say, different private centers in the teaching of English, for example, especially Asia, I’ve had experiences of people telling me that despite my PhD in English, I still shouldn’t be given the amount of salary that the native-speaking English teacher should because I don’t somehow qualify. I don’t have that kind of a set of characteristics that they are looking for. So, I get a job, but I don’t get paid as much, in other words.
So, I do think that’s to me a really severe case of inequality precisely because I am judged simply or my competence in the English language and in teaching English, for that matter, is based solely on being a native or non-native speaker of English. And nothing that has got to do with my experience teaching English, for example, the success that I’ve had teaching English to different kinds and varieties and groups of students.
DANIEL: I want to talk about native speakerism for a second because I think this problem is huge in English teaching. I was an English teacher for many years, and then I was a teacher of English teachers. And so, with that second experience, I got to see a lot of the inequality that I missed the first time around because it was invisible to me having the accent that I do and whatever else that I have. But we talk about native speakers. Oh, schools want to have native speakers. And I feel like this term about native speakerism sets people up for failure, because if you’ve ever been a learner of English, you can never be a native speaker. That’s holding people to a standard that they can never attain.
RUANNI: Yes, yes.
DANIEL: So, what have you noticed in that area?
RUANNI: Oh, yeah. I mean, definitely I agree with you 100%. Within the educational sphere, first and foremost, what you mentioned about, it sets people up for failure, is precisely that because you have gradations of competence in English, the highest of which is, of course, number five, for example, which is native speaker or close to being native speaker. So, in other words, no matter how much you try and spend hours and hours, spending money along these lines of evaluation, you are never going to make it precisely because the line of gradations of quality or competence in English are already problematic to start with. So native speaker, as a goal of teaching, is privileged over let’s say competence in the use of the language, for example. And we know that competence transcends native speaker, non-native speaker dichotomies basically.
The idea about native speakerism outside, of course, it is actually probably even also more pronounced because of the way people respond to each other. Some scholars actually refer to these as anxiety. The idea of… And I can speak, for example, from my experience as a Filipino, you imagine someone who is talking to someone who is perceived as a native speaker, and that already brings up a lot of anxiety in the person. The idea that I may not be able to live up to the expectation of this native speaker. That, because of that, I will no longer just simply talk and speak.
And you notice, even actually in the context, this is very much so in everyday life, but even among scholars, even international conferences, you have a lot of these scholars who start off their presentations with, “I’m sorry for my English. I apologize for my bad English.” And yet, when you actually listen to them, it’s brilliant content, it’s brilliant work. Their presentations give you a lot of things to think about, a lot of critical insights, and yet the very first thing that they actually tell you is to apologize for their English.
So, the same thing outside as well. This is what we call linguistic insecurity. The idea that your linguistic repertoire is deficient such that no matter how much you speak, you always feel inferior to the person you are talking to.
DANIEL: You can never be a native speaker because you can’t go back and have English as your L1.
RUANNI: Exactly. Exactly.
DANIEL: It’s too late for that.
RUANNI: Exactly. But also, let us bear in mind that the native speaker is also reserved to a particular character of speaker. So, I have cousins and I’m Filipino. Most of my cousins are actually in the States, in the US. And they were all born in the States. They grew up in the States. They were educated in the States as well. But, having gone, let’s say, to Asia to teach English, let’s say, for example, in Thailand, for example, in other parts of Asia, they complained about the fact that they’re also treated not as native speaker.
Initially, of course, they wonder why because, within their own sphere of life, they never thought of being defined as non-native because they grew up in an environment that actually speaks, and especially in the context of the education that they also got, what you might call conventional standard American English. And yet, they are not treated as that.
So, in other words, I think even the very idea or notion of the native speaker is something that’s reserved only to a small group of people. Not everyone who has the right to call him or her a native speaker actually is considered and viewed as native speaker.
DANIEL: And I’m thinking about people who have been speaking English all their lives in some countries like India or Singapore or the Philippines, yeah, they’ve been speaking English as an L1. Somehow, they’re not considered to be native, what’s going on there?
RUANNI: Exactly.
DANIEL: This is where I turn to the book. In one of the chapters, the one by Junshuan Liu and Songqing Li, they investigated why some teachers are sought after, and they examined teachers on the basis of not just language experience, but also their nationality, their race, the region that they come from, and gender. And teachers vary along those axes.
RUANNI: Well, yeah. I mean their chapter stands out in a particular way because they actually look at native speaker teachers, and how they are viewed in the context of China, for example. And that’s exactly the point that I was trying to make earlier, that even if these are all teachers, their racial background, their gender, all of these things really also come into play as to who these administrators would like to hire in their own centers and in their own institutions.
So, it’s not like, okay, so if you’re a native speaker, at least from the point of view of this chapter, what they found is that it’s not like, okay, let’s say we agree that all of you are native speakers of English, but the moment you actually come into a particular context, such as certain institutions in China, some of you will still be more privileged than others, some of you will still be paid more than others. And they, of course, provided us with a lot of reasons.
Let’s say, for example, some groups of teachers complain a lot more. And if you look at that kind of characteristics, it seems like they have certain views of certain groups of people, speakers. So, they complain a lot more. They’re much more critical. You can’t have them in this particular institution. We can’t have them. We don’t want them precisely because of that. So, on the ground, you have all these racialized and gendered assumptions which come into play with native speakerism, basically.
DANIEL: This seems like a good time to mention this quote from Robert Phillipson that appears in the book. It got me thinking, so I wanted to ask you about it. The quote is, “English has always been causally related to inequality and injustice.” English has always been causally related to inequality and injustice. And I just wanted to hear your thoughts on how and why you think that’s so.
RUANNI: Well, I guess because, you see the narratives or the story of English is a story that began, for example, in terms of its spread. Spread is kind of descriptive in a sense, but if you really come to think of it, it spread across different parts of the world through imperialism and colonialism. And so, the English language has been imposed on different populations as part of the much larger agenda of colonialism, for example. And because of that, associations with English, the values with English would then be imposed. So, it’s not just simply the language that was imposed, but the cultures that went with it, the values that went with it.
So, in the case of the Philippines, and I don’t think this is something very, very specific to the Philippines, but definitely it resonates in other parts of the world as well, that when English was introduced, was imposed on the education system, it was justified on grounds that you would be more enlightened as people, you would then become less backward as people. “We would be taking you out of the caves of barbarism,” for example, “And therefore, we need to teach you English and enlightenment and modernity.”
But again, that’s the first one, but when it got instituted, it got legitimized in the education system. Access to it was not equal. So, those who would have access to quality English teaching would be those, of course, who would have more resources, who are more socially privileged, socioeconomically privileged. So, it’s not just simply therefore just the imposition itself of the English language, and let’s teach everyone English but the very fact that it then began to differentiate people according to who had more access to English than not, and especially according to who had more access to quality English teaching and not. And because of that, then proficiency in English became part of the whole network of characteristics that would define someone’s position in society.
DANIEL: Okay, so let me see if I got this right, because when the quote said “inequality and injustice,” what I was thinking was, “Oh, English gets imposed on people and drives out of indigenous languages or the existing languages.” So, that’s one thing. But you’re saying that even in countries where they’re enthusiastic adopters of English, and I’m thinking of Vietnam, they decided to throw it to English, like, “We’re going to make sure that the students in our country have access to English, so this is going to help them participate on the world stage in the English-speaking world, science, literature, culture, blah, blah, blah.” But then what happened, you’re telling me, is that even then some schools had access to good resources and good money, but other schools in the same country wouldn’t and it sounds like you’re saying this would cause an inequality in just who gets to have access to English.
RUANNI: Yeah, perfect. Yeah, going back to what you said earlier about the imposition, of course, the imposition of English would somehow result in taking the mother tongues out, the local languages out of the education system. And that of course brought the whole linguistic ecology to a different kind of configuration. So, I’m definitely with you on that.
But the thing is that when English was introduced, it was actually introduced as the language of equality. And the reason being that it’s supposed to make people speak, everyone speak, despite all the many different languages and the so-called dialects that are spoken, because multilingualism was painted as something that’s undesirable, something that made people not talk to one another. And because of this one universal, modern, enlightened language, then everyone would then be able to speak the language, then everyone would then be able to have equal opportunity to the knowledges of the world. So, that’s how it was ideologically framed and explained.
But again, as what I said, it’s a different thing in practice, because when it actually started to be institutionalized and legitimized and made a part of the policy, that’s when all of these problems, social issues also come into the picture, precisely because students who would be getting into the classrooms would come from different communities with varying experiences of privilege.
DANIEL: And so, the inequalities that are already existing within that one place, it’s like Snowpiercer, right? The inequalities that existed before what… I haven’t even seen the movie got replicated on the train, it’s just like that here we see the inequalities that existed already in the culture got reproduced and amplified…
RUANNI: Amplified. Yeah.
DANIEL: …once English came into the picture.
RUANNI: Yeah, amplified. It’s inequalities probably in different forms. They take on different forms, but they certainly did not draw on a vacuum. It started from a certain social configuration, and then it became configured in a particular way because of the introduction of English.
DANIEL: And then, just to spell it out, even if you had everyone speaking English perfectly, whatever that meant, they would still face inequality because of the other factors that we’re talking about…
RUANNI: Exactly, exactly.
DANIEL: …like skin colour, region, race, gender. Anything else?
RUANNI: Gender. Yeah. I mean, socioeconomic class basically, but especially race because native speakerism is a very racialized term really.
DANIEL: And this is where we get into a concept that I run across in the book called unequal personhood. Could you tell me a little bit about that concept?
RUANNI: Yeah, I mean, basically we all have personhoods. In other words, a personhood is a totality of who we are, really. So, you can think of it in terms of the totality of all the kinds of identities that we put together for ourselves or that we mobilize. Again, we mentioned earlier, your race, your gender, your socioeconomic status, your educational background, all of these things, all come together to define who you are, and that’s your personhood.
And the reason why its unequal personhood is because, again, I can be with another Filipino here, and you both… I mean, someone can probably say, “Okay, so both of you are Filipino,” but we can still say that we have different personhoods precisely because we are constituted by these different factors. One might be more socioeconomically more privileged than another and therefore had more access to these. And therefore, even if, let’s say, I have someone who speaks like me, but who has a different constitution of identities, may still be viewed differently by other people.
I’ll just give you one example. The title of the paper, actually, I forgot this now, but probably I will be able to remember it. But in a very recent paper that I read on robots in Korea, some respondents, young kids were asked to evaluate the robots’ English, and they actually rated the robots highly because of the kind of English that they actually produced. But then, the robots were unmasked, and when they were unmasked, those who were actually speaking were Filipinos, or at least those who look like me. So, the same people, the same kids were asked to evaluate, and guess what?
DANIEL: Went down.
RUANNI: The evaluation was now brought down. So, in other words, I think this is just probably a much more literal way of saying different personhoods, that you can actually speak the same variety, the same English, but depending on how you have accumulated certain identities of being who you are, that’s when people again then start evaluating you. So, in the context of English, my English, that English to the Filipino somehow was great, but they couldn’t see.
DANIEL: It’s great when the robot does it.
RUANNI: Yes, that’s right. But it’s exactly the same variety. So, it’s because their personhood is described in a particular way that should actually not speak that way and therefore should be evaluated much more lowly than they should be.
DANIEL: It reminds me of that one experiment, actually an experiment from a long time ago, but it’s been replicated recently. You’ve heard this one, I’m sure. Students heard a recording of a lecturer giving a lecture. Except for one of the groups of students, they showed a photo of a white teacher, and for the other group of students, they saw a photo of an Asian teacher, and they were told that this was the teacher. And the students who saw the Asian lecturer not only said that she was harder to understand… Same audio both times, they said that she was harder to understand, and they also performed worse on comprehension tests of the material in the lecture.
RUANNI: Hmm. Yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: It was a case where they literally hallucinated accents. But the same thing happens when they hear a Korean teacher with a Korean accent speaking English and they see a white professor. There’s also confusion because of that mismatch.
RUANNI: Yeah, no. Interesting. Perhaps, I can continue with that as well, because just actually before our meeting today, I was also in another meeting with really brilliant secondary students in Singapore. I usually work with secondary students in Singapore for certain research projects with the Ministry of Education. And we were just talking about actually what they found out from their study because what they actually did was to get secondary students to listen to recordings of different accents in Singapore.
Well, the results were pretty much expected. Speaker 1 who speaks English was judged as incompetent, but warm, but unprofessional. In other words, this is someone who is warm because I can relate to this person, but someone who is incompetent, but who cannot be trusted at work. It’s the same thing with, let’s say, speaker 3, who speaks the more standard Singapore English, which is much closer to British English. It’s too distant, but it’s described… I mean, the speaker is described as professional and competent and trustworthy. Now, the interesting thing here is that it’s the same person.
DANIEL: Yeah.
RUANNI: All right. Which means… I said that’s something that I think it’s really very, very important that you need to emphasize in your research, because then that means judgments of competence really have nothing to do with your language expertise, really. It’s really just because of the accents and the varieties. Because in Singapore, at least… I lived in Singapore for 20 years, a competent Singapore speaker of English is not someone who speaks only one variety. It’s someone who can make switches between the more informal and the more formal, that’s the competent Singaporean. It’s not like just simply one variety being able to switch. And many of them, majority of them, can actually make the switches. And yet, the associations still vary and change. So again, going back to your question of unequal personhood, that’s exactly what it is. You have the same person.
DANIEL: But the perception is different. So, the value is different.
RUANNI: Yeah.
DANIEL: Since we’re talking about Singaporean English, I want to share an email that I got from one of my former students who got back in touch and emailed.
RUANNI: All right.
DANIEL: And this student said that it was okay for me to share this email.
RUANNI: Okay. All right.
DANIEL: So, the student says, “As you know, I’m from Singapore and I thus speak with a Singaporean accent. I am extremely self-conscious about my accent, having been told in the past that I have a weird accent. It has caused me to be very shy when speaking to other people, especially to Australians. I have even been told by another ESL teacher that I wouldn’t be able to work as an ESL teacher here because students want to learn English from an Australian teacher to learn the Australian accent. I was simply wondering if you have any tips and suggestions on how I can go about reducing my accent or to pick up the Australian accent. Unfortunately, I’m very accent deaf. I can understand a wide variety of English accents, but I can never tell the origin of the accent. My partner constantly laughs at me for being unable to distinguish between British, Australian, and American accents, even though I don’t have any trouble understanding any of them. Do you have any ideas how to help me please?” Now, what would you tell this student? Well, this teacher, actually.
RUANNI: Yeah. Yeah. Well, unfortunately, it’s a very common challenge faced by practically everyone and even myself as well. But I don’t think reducing the accent is really the way to go precisely because even by reducing yourself, I think we’ve talked about it, there will always still be layers of discrimination.
DANIEL: Oh, can we just focus on that? Because reducing accent is not a thing. You’d never reduce an accent. You just pick a different one. You can’t reduce an accent, but you can reduce yourself. Ooh.
RUANNI: What do you mean? Yeah…
DANIEL: You can shrink your identity. You can withdraw into presumed native speakerness or Britishness or something. But it seems like asking someone to give up their accent involves an abnegation of their own self.
RUANNI: Yes, exactly, because that I think is the point that comes up very often now in the discussion, that accent is not just simply accent, like the linguistic dimension to it. Accent picks up identities as well. You know how they say, there’s one sociolinguistic point about accent, like you may be able to change your accent when you move from one area to another, and assuming that area is of different classes for example, the change is never going to be complete because you can change who you think you are, but how people will think and view you will still depend on the kinds of associations that they have about you.
So, I guess, to me, the way to go is not really reducing, and I’ve never really advocated this way of doing so because, well, in the first place, I think what counts in the first place… If in real communication situation and teaching situation and the research actually helps me out here, that what counts as competence in teaching, that has not something to do really with whether you’re a native speaker or not. It has something to do with your familiarity with the cultures of the students, for example, your familiarity with cultures of learning, for example. In other words, it’s accumulating all of these experiences actually can help you more than just simply reducing your accent.
One way that I actually, practically did was to show proof or evidence of my students improving. I can give you one example as well of one Singaporean student of mine, because, back in Singapore, I taught at the Institute of Education. What she said was there was one time that… This is in primary school. She was assigned to handle a group of students, most of whom fell short of the cutoff for writing in English. And they needed help, and the students, the pupils needed help to bring themselves up because the primary school-leaving examination was pretty much the next year. What she did was to actually speak to them in Singlish, to be able to explain how the writing actually works, how to organize things and so on and so forth. There were so many things that went on from there. But to cut the story short, actually more than half of them eventually made it.
But the thing is that she was given the best teacher award, excellent teacher award. There was this ceremony that invited even teachers, and she was asked to explain how she actually made it. Unfortunately, at that time, she said she was so afraid to say that, “I spoke in colloquial English to be able to do this,” precisely because of that kind of fear. She just simply said, “Oh, you just need to be a dedicated teacher. I spent more time with the pupils.”
But what she actually explained to us and narrated to us was that actually what was crucial was being able to speak to them in an accent, in a variety that the students felt comfortable in. And because of that, they picked up content and substance even more. And because of that, you know, they actually made it, they actually passed. This is what I meant by try as much as possible to accumulate examples of success of language learning in your students. Because at the end of the day, that’s what people want to happen anyway, for them to improve, for them to be able to be more successful in language learning.
DANIEL: And that sounds like what people call translanguaging. Am I right?
RUANNI: Yes, yes.
DANIEL: Using the language that students bring with them and recognising the value in it and recognising the value the teachers bring in with them.
RUANNI: Exactly. Yeah. I mean, it’s basically using the linguistic repertoire on the students because… Like, for example, for the Philippines, for Singapore, and actually from different parts of the world, the students bring along with them really a wide range of linguistic repertoires, anyway, it’s not just one language. So, the idea is just to strategically… I think that’s the word for it, strategically or judiciously use these if it is needed to teach them and to help them with or to skillful learning in other words.
Translanguaging is also viewed somehow negatively by a lot of people because it feels like to them, anything goes and it has something to do with it will have an impact on, let’s say, the English language learning of the students, but what they don’t actually know is that it is actually used as one of the possible pedagogical tools that can actually help teach students or people become better learners of English. So, let’s always think along that line. It’s to help skillful learning.
DANIEL: Have you seen any English language centers who are doing a good job at combating what’s known as deficit ideologies? I guess I should explain that term, deficit ideology. If it’s different, then it’s bad or it’s less. Am I getting that sort of right?
RUANNI: Yeah. Well, I guess it’s… If I’m not mistaken, I think it’s illegal in certain parts of Europe that private institutions require native speakers as a requirement because it’s discriminatory. So, that in itself is very important to emphasize, that’s the first thing. But in different parts of Asia, that’s not yet the way it is.
But I can speak, for example, let’s say of my own institution back in Singapore. Prior to the Institute of Education, I was in the Center for English Language Communication. And I can speak with confidence, for example, because I was part of the whole processing of applications as well, that the idea of the native speaker has always been taken off as one of the important criteria. It’s always about your proof of good teaching, your proof of student evaluation, your proof of peer evaluation. In other words, it’s beyond that, beyond native speaker or non-native speaker dichotomy, that’s important. And I think there are certain institutions…
I don’t think in places such as Singapore, that’s very, very pronounced, but in other places in Asia, I think it still is. And it is very much in the open that they require native speakerism.
DANIEL: I still feel like even if you have a rule saying you’re not allowed to look at whether someone’s a native speaker or not, you have to just go by how good a teacher they are. Proof of student evaluations, peer evaluations. I still feel like those students and peers are going to evaluate them harshly based on the same criteria.
RUANNI: Oh, yes. I guess because again, it’s the whole native speakerism, yeah, definitely, it still circulates really in our own respective social spheres. That’s a given, really. But I think to me, it’s short or multiple steps forward would be really, again, doing the work that you need to do in the classroom. And if there are institutions that have that kind of like a much more enlightened approach to language teaching, then why not? Which is why people like me, we work with institutions in different parts of the world, basically helping these institutions develop alternative sets of criteria for teaching and learning of English as well. So, it’s never an easy task.
Interestingly, I was seated beside someone… I mean, I won’t mention the name of the organization, but it’s a huge global organization in charge of the spread of English. They were saying, actually, that they have been talking to teachers in different parts of the world and actually helping them reevaluate and reframe their own understanding of what it means to teach English. In other words, moving away from native speakers ideology, and these are British speakers of English who try to move around the world to somehow do the same thing that I do as well, helping teachers and educators look at their own curricula in different ways. What they’re saying is that there’s actually more resistance [CHUCKLES] to it from the teachers themselves.
So, native speakerism is not something that is exclusively by a certain group of people. It’s an idea that is very much embedded in people’s ideologies, for example. It doesn’t matter what kind of speaker you are, it’s just there. And so, it is a very long process, because even if you have these desires to make certain changes, you have to really painstakingly and patiently work with them and see them through in smaller steps basically.
DANIEL: And keep confronting the deficit ideologies that live in your own head.
RUANNI: Yes, that’s right. And you need to strategize as well. I know, for example, what I need to do, but these kinds of reevaluating must be strategized in a way. For example, in teacher training, you just don’t go straight to the point. You have to provide them with sociolinguistic information and knowledge about what counts as language, what counts as dialect, what counts as variety, and why these varieties are all linguistically legitimate, and you provide evidence and you mix sort of discussion to bring them into these kinds of understanding of the nature of language and the nature of language variety before you lead them to certain discussions of linguistic deficit. Because the moment you start them off very early, there’s already some kind of an ideological boundary that basically reminds them that, “I shouldn’t be talking to this teacher, I shouldn’t be talking to this educator.” Because by allowing these different ways of looking at language into their own system, into their own understanding, it’s basically changing who they are as well. It’s basically like changing their own identities as teachers and as learners as well.
And so, you have experiences of… In these teacher training sessions of teachers actually crying, realizing that somehow, they have been unfair to their students, they have been unfair to their colleagues. And you don’t accomplish that just by saying that in the first minute, even first hour of your sessions with them. It has to be strategized precisely because it requires some kind of thinking about it and assimilating into that kind of thinking, first and foremost, to be able to move into that kind of discussion.
DANIEL: In that case, let’s focus on me, me for a second. I am a native English speaker from — what would Braj Kachru have said? — inner circle…
RUANNI: Inner circle.
DANIEL: …countries, right? UK, USA, Australia. I got all the privilege in the world, English speaking wise and in lots of other ways as well. And I would love to do better, and I would love to help to create a more equal… I would like to level the inequality in English, but I guess to do that, I’m going to have to confront the inequalities that pop up in my own mind. So, let’s strategise now. How can I and other listeners to this show who maybe are in English-speaking countries, how can we keep challenging the pernicious deficit ideologies in our own head? And how do we go about sort of extending that to helping others to see this? What do you wish that we would do?
RUANNI: Well, it’s an excellent question, really. And you actually brought it down to something really very, very personal. Well, I think the first thing that I usually actually emphasize is that when you are talking about the use of English, the communication always happens between at least two people. And so, the responsibility to make meaning, the responsibility to be comprehensible, the responsibility to make that communication work is everyone’s responsibility. That’s the first thing.
DANIEL: You can’t just chuck away your responsibility and say, “Ah, this person’s speaking differently.” Actually, this comes up in English with an Accent by Rosina Lippi-Green. You might say, “I’m going to refuse my fair share of the communicative burden and just disavow my responsibility to make the conversation work, because I’m the English speaker.”
RUANNI: Exactly. Yes, because that is usually the tendency when something goes wrong in the communication situation, it’s always like, “Oh, he should have said it in a particular way. This person speaks in different way, that’s why.” So, the communication is never viewed as something that is mutually constitutive of each other. In other words, the success of communication must not only be reserved solely on the person who we view as of less English speaker.
DANIEL: They shouldn’t have to do all the work.
RUANNI: Exactly. And the reason why it’s something that is very important is because it actually also comes from the education system. You look at textbooks, for example. Textbooks, English language textbooks, you have, let’s say, dialogues between us, the so-called native speaker, and then the non-native speaker, all right? When communication breaks down, who is usually at fault? It’s the native speaker. The native speaker has to do something about their English in order to make that communication work, but it’s never… It’s a mutual kind of communication whereby everyone has to come together and basically take responsibility over the success of the communication.
And so, how do we then move forward? If I feel responsible for the communication, it’s not just how I speak, but it’s also how I listen. When you talk about opening up or diversifying English, it’s not just simply diversifying how we speak, it’s diversifying how we listen. And therefore, being able to listen is being able to even literally move a little bit forward world and then listen to how that person speaks. And there are repair strategies in communication, and that’s where competence comes in. It’s not like myself, I may not be able to understand you completely, so that’s why earlier I said, “Come again? What do you mean?” These are repair strategies, and these are things that I think we can mobilize in communication situation. For example, like, “I’m sorry, can you say that again?” In other words, if the desire is for all of us to communicate and to be successful in that communication situation, we will do everything that we can to make that communication work.
However, the moment we have that kind of ideological blockage, “No matter how this person speaks, I don’t like this person, how this person looks,” then automatically, I refuse to listen to this person. Or automatically, I can just simply say, “Oh, this person is incomprehensible.”
So, I guess to me, it’s something very personal that I think we need to do. We have to look at communication in English and actually communication in any language for that matter, as something that is a responsibility of everyone in that situation. And if we think of it that way, then we just don’t speak comprehensively, we need to listen to be able to understand each other.
DANIEL: So, what we’re saying is, in your communications with people, be a good listener as well as a good speaker and take responsibility for the success of the conversation.
RUANNI: Most definitely, yes.
DANIEL: Wow.
RUANNI: That’s right.
DANIEL: That wasn’t the answer I was expecting, because I thought it was going to be, “Make sure that you’re aware of inequality in the world and make sure that you promote all varieties of language is valid,” which is the kind of thing that I usually say on the show, but that’s very interpersonal, what you’ve brought today.
RUANNI: Yes. No, because, I mean, it’s easy for people to pick up the fact that varieties are all legitimate. But in real life, that’s not how they practice it. That’s not how people practice it. It still is again all of these ideological blinkers that basically stop them from engaging other people. And that’s why I think we have to start with the very essence of communication to start with, meaning that I think it’s everyone’s responsibility. And the structural inequalities are mainly because we require others to be responsible for the communication at us. So, if things fail, it’s not because of me, it’s because of you. So, why not just simply think that if things fail, we need to work it out together?
DANIEL: You’re asking me to do something that’s actually way harder than simply haranguing people about equality. You’re asking me to actually do it. [LAUGHTER] Every time I communicate? Okay. All right, tell you what. I’ll make the commitment to do that and challenge myself to stay good that way.
The book is Investigating Unequal Englishes: Understanding, Researching, and Analysing Inequalities of the Englishes of the world. It’s available now from Routledge. We’re talking with the editor, Dr Ruanni Tupas of University College London. Ruanni, thanks for coming on the show and having a chat with me.
RUANNI: Thank you very much, Daniel. I think I really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you.
DANIEL: Me too. I felt like it was successful.
RUANNI: It was definitely very successful.
[LAUGHTER]
[MUSIC]
[INTERVIEW ENDS]
DANIEL: Let’s head back to the words that define the times in which we lived. This one was suggested by James on our Discord, INTERNATIONAL BLUE SCREEN DAY. Did you have a good International Blue Screen Day? I’m on a Mac. So, I had missed it.
HEDVIG: Nothing happened to me.
DANIEL: Yep.
NICOLE: No, nothing happened to me except for that one of my good friends was coming into town for my bachelorette party, which I mentioned, and her flight was out of JFK early on Friday morning. And so, when I woke up, she was like, “I’m trying to get there.”
DANIEL: “I’m trapped in an airport.” Oh, did she make it?
NICOLE: She came the next day. So, she came mid party, but she made it. But yeah, everybody that I knew that had to fly was really, really screwed. Especially if they were on Delta, it was like five days later that they resolved it.
DANIEL: Oof.
HEDVIG: So, I learned from TikTok why it happened if I understood it correctly. So, Windows operating systems allow certain programs access to what’s called a kernel, which is, you can imagine like the innermost bit that’s the most secure. And CrowdStrike, which is a virus software company, were running some things also at the kernel, and they were testing their new update, but at the end, before they rolled it out, they zipped it up and something happened in the compression that created a file with a lot of void and that created another like alarm somewhere, and it said this is a virus, and shuts down the entire computer. And because it’s so high up in the computer’s hierarchy, that’s why so many people’s screens were blue, blue screen of death, which only happens on Windows computers.
One of the reasons this can happen is because the EU has said that Windows, that Microsoft, they have to give third-party software access to kernel. They can’t just limit that to only… So, Windows says it’s EU’s fault, but actually it’s CrowdStrike’s fault. It’s not a bad thing that people have access to kernel but they should do it correctly.
DANIEL: CrowdStrike, or Cloudstrike or Cloudstrife. Many people were unable to remember, including me, the name of the company responsible, cloud or crowd, strike or strife.
HEDVIG: Fairly sure it’s crowd, but the video where someone explained this to me, the person says Cloudstrike throughout it. And I think maybe it’s an intentional diss. I think this guy knows better.
NICOLE: Well, we know like rhotics and laterals, whatever in English.
DANIEL: They move around. They move around.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: I did notice that trains in Germany were unaffected by the outage because they run by a fax machine. That’s somebody else’s joke.
HEDVIG: I’ll 100% buy it. I mean, one of the good things about how behind Germany as a country is on digitalisation is that when things like this happen, it doesn’t affect here as much. You can pay with cash everywhere. Deutsche Bank has a lot of other problems, but being dependent on Windows apparently isn’t one of them. Did you know there were teams during the Euros that were supposed to take trains to matches, but then were delayed and had to take buses or flights or something? The whole world was watching Germany and Deutsche Bank couldn’t… Anyway, I’ll shut up about that.
DANIEL: Next one, I am noticing an uptick in a certain term, and the term is RAW-DOGGING. Raw-dogging!
NICOLE: I’m so worried that I am going to have to explain this at word of the year at the LSA in January, and I just can’t be the one.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Are you taking over from Ben [Zimmer]? Because we always used to joke about Ben having to be the one to face the media. Are you facing the media?
NICOLE: Well, no. Ben did write about this, I think, for Wall Street Journal this week, and he wrote about how it used to be wildly explicit, and now we’re just all saying it like it’s normal. And so, maybe I’ll take one for the team and do the favor for Ben being the one that has to talk about this.
DANIEL: Why don’t you practice? Come on, what do you know about raw-dogging?
NICOLE: Okay, so you really need the direct object to make it a little better. So, let’s talk about raw-dogging a flight. It’s weird that this has become gendered, but here we are. It’s like men going on a flight and just staring into space. No devices, no headphones, no inflight entertainment. Just looking straight ahead or out the window, I guess.
DANIEL: That sounds like the worst thing in the world. I would never do this.
NICOLE: Well, or it sounds like transcendental meditation. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Exactly.
DANIEL: I guess.
HEDVIG: Exactly. Sounds exactly like that.
DANIEL: My flights are longer than anyone else’s. So, I’m just saying. I go Sydney to LA, Okay?
NICOLE: I’ve heard tell of like old people doing this. Like, I’ve seen tweets in the past where people were like, “I sat next to this woman who was like 75 years old, and she just stared into space for 12 hours on the flight. Whoa.”
DANIEL: Didn’t even get up to pee because that’s minus points.
NICOLE: Yeah, yeah. You just got to sit quietly with your own thoughts.
DANIEL: Now, I have heard raw-dogging in a different context, and that is doing a process without care. And this kind of goes back to our CrowdStrike story. This is a tweet from Perpetualmaniac, link on the show notes for this episode, “The fix going forward is that Microsoft needs to have better policies to roll back defective drivers and not just raw-dog risky updates to customers.”
NICOLE: That’s more explicit.
DANIEL: That’s interesting, isn’t it?
NICOLE: That’s like closer to the original sense.
DANIEL: All right, Nicole, what’s the original sense? [LONG PAUSE] Sex without a condom!
NICOLE: This would be unprotected sex. Yes.
[LAUGHTER]
And there’s a sense thing to discuss here too, which during the beginning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, this became a point of discussion because it was such risky behavior. And so, I’ve heard people comment, older gay men that lived through that time in particular, comment that it’s so wild to them that this thing that was extremely taboo because it was so dangerous for so long, has become this sort of thing you write about with flights and whatever in the Wall Street Journal, it’s shocking to them.
HEDVIG: Oh, right.
DANIEL: I’m just glad we’re not barebacking flights and barebacking risky updates, right?
NICOLE: Similar, right?
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly.
HEDVIG: I don’t know what that is. Do you want to tell me what that is?
NICOLE: Same thing. Same meaning.
HEDVIG: Oh, I see.
DANIEL: Yeah, same thing.
HEDVIG: Oh, I see. Okay. I’m learning so much.
DANIEL: Now, according to John Green’s Dictionary of Slang, RAW DOG is, RAW is naked, and DOG is to hunt down, perhaps with sexual intent. So, there’s your etymology, raw-dogging.
HEDVIG: Ah, okay.
NICOLE: That makes sense.
HEDVIG: I just heard it from Kathryn Ryan was talking because her husband apparently is trying out raw-dogging… fights.
NICOLE: You can’t stop and say her husband is trying out raw-dogging!
DANIEL: You had to say the flight part!
NICOLE: That’s what I mean about the object. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: You had to say that.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: My wife and I have been raw-dogging. Flights!
HEDVIG: What else can you raw dog besides flights? Obviously, other journeys like trains. Hopefully, not when you’re driving a car you can’t raw dog it.
NICOLE: Well, with no entertainment maybe.
HEDVIG: Oh, I know something maybe.
DANIEL: What?
HEDVIG: I’m obsessed, like, I need to listen to podcasts when I do chores in the house, like laundry or whatever, and sometimes I don’t. Like yesterday, I did some stuff and I didn’t have a podcast on and I was like, “Look at me being mindful. Look at me being in the moment.”
DANIEL: Fun.
NICOLE: It could be extended to anything like that, but also without equipment. Like, free solo climbing could be like raw dogging and climbing.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: See, I was thinking the opposite. I was thinking with great intensity, without appropriate caution. Like, “Oh, man, in the wake of this Kamala stuff, I’ve been raw dogging the last week of Pod Save America episodes.” That is to say, listening one after the other. But I don’t know if anybody does this, and that’s just my own sense. So, please ignore me and instead listen to Hedvig, who’s going to give us our next one.
HEDVIG: So, did you know there have been political events in other countries besides the US?
NICOLE: Stop.
DANIEL: [GASPS] What?
HEDVIG: Oh, my god. There was a European parliament election. There was a French election. There was a British election. And there’s… I think this is like an election super year, right? Like, there’s elections in India.
NICOLE: There’s going to be one in Venezuela tomorrow as of recording time.
HEDVIG: If you ever find American politics overwhelming but still want to be stressed out about politics for some reason, you could listen to other podcasts about, for example, European elections. So, I would recommend Deutsche Welle, what is just called, it’s called in Europe, Deutsche Welle, DW in Europe, and you’ll get it, and you’ll get all the latest news about what goes on in Hungary and Estonia and whatever.
But one in particular that is close to my heart is UK politics. And the UK just had an election. They have a very special system there where they don’t do elections like every four years or something, like a lot of other countries do, like America and Sweden. They have a rule that the prime minister can call a new election sort of whenever they want, as long as they call it within, I think, it’s five years after they get elected.
DANIEL: In Australia, it’s three. Yep, yep.
HEDVIG: Very special system. And the Tories did do that, and it has not gone very well. And I just was listening to the British news coverage, and I heard Ian Hislop, who’s editor of Private Eye and commentator on Mock the Week, used the term fed-upness about how people felt about the Tories, and that’s why they voted for Lib Dems and for Labor and other candidates. So, I liked fed-upness as a…
DANIEL: Fed-up-edness.
HEDVIG: …as a good representative, I think, of UK political mood. Fed-upness.
DANIEL: Good.
HEDVIG: I like putting in a little preposition, like a little particle, and I like it. Fed-upness.
NICOLE: You know we have like a lot of morphology in English. The derivational morphology is wonderful. We should use it more.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: I think this is approaching polysynthetic status. Can we talk about why we say FED UP? Because I was curious on that one. What’s up? Fed? Up? What’s going on there? Does anyone know, and is it just me?
NICOLE: You know, there’s like the… Like, I’ve had it up to here?
HEDVIG and DANIEL: Yeah.
NICOLE: I feel like that’s the same maybe.
DANIEL: That is the same. If you were fed up with food, it meant that you just had too much food and you were sitting there, and from there it got extended to mean, you’ve had too much of something. You’ve been fed up. So, yeah, that’s why we say that. Okay, go, Hedvig, what’s our next one?
HEDVIG: And the next item is maybe we’re going to do a bit of bookends here because it’s the -NOMENON suffix. So, we have FEMININOMENON, which is a song by Chappell Roan. And people have been linking that to Harris resurgence and talked about Kamala-nomenon and Kamala-nomination. I heard from Alison Reese on TikTok, and I really liked it.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] It’s ridicule for…
HEDVIG: It’s fun because you stumble over it, but it’s fine. It actually fits the vibe quite well to have a stumbly word, I think.
NICOLE: Kamala-nomenon. [LAUGHS] I don’t know where the stress goes at all.
DANIEL: Kamalanomenon. [MUPPET SONG] Do-doo-do-do-do.
HEDVIG: And Kamalanomination. I think you can get election, if you really… And I was wondering, so I’ve heard femininomenon and Kamala nomenon, but I was wondering if there are other -NOMENONS out there. I tried to google it, and it turns out that there’s like a company that sells something called nominon, and it’s just ungoogleable, more or less.
DANIEL: Okay, well, if you want to check this out online, what you want to go to is lotsofwords.com, because then you can search words where it ends with -OMENON.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: And it turns out that words that end with -OMENON are things like… There’s PHENOMENON. There’s EPIPHENOMENON. Symphenomenon, which is defined as a phenomenon resembling others shown by the same object. Do I need to know about that? No. There are a lot of other ones, but they seem to just have to do with the phenomenon ending. So, I’m really encouraged to see this new combining form, -NOMENON. It’s a good combining form that you can just pick up and use with other things because it’s really recognisable and you know what the source word is. So, we’ll be watching out for that one.
HEDVIG: It’s like -NADO… We had -NADO and we had… There was another one, -AGEDDON. The something-something-geddon.
DANIEL: -HOLIC is another one.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Chocoholic, alcoholic, etc. So, there are loads of combining forms. They are some of my favorite things about English. So, good to see. I think you’ve got one more, Hedvig. And I was curious about this one that you brought. You brought fridgerton. I think that might be a good one to…
HEDVIG: Oh, yes. So, one of my favorite…
DANIEL: Can we guess?
HEDVIG: Can you guess? Yeah, what do you think FRIDGERTON is?
DANIEL: I think you’re binging Bridgerton because you didn’t really pay attention to the last season. And so, you’re raw dogging episodes of Bridgerton.
HEDVIG: This is your own. This is only you.
DANIEL: I’m the only one that uses the word that way.
NICOLE: I have a worse definition than that. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: You just go into the fridge, grab a…
HEDVIG: Yeah? Go for it, Nicole.
NICOLE: It’s like you watch Bridgerton, but you skip the sexy parts, like…
HEDVIG: That’s good.
DANIEL: I like that.
HEDVIG: I like that.
DANIEL: Oh, don’t be such a fridgerton, okay?
NICOLE: I don’t want to be friends with someone like that. I’m just saying. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: So, this word comes to me from Shabaz Says on TikTok and many other places, who’s a British content creator who makes videos commenting on rich people’s behaviour on social media. So, for a while during covid there was like these weird, very satisfying videos for people making ice, and they were putting it in their fridge, and they’re making ice with little strawberries in them and ice with little fennel seeds in them. And they were doing these long videos of making the ice and putting it in. And he was making commentary about it, just pointing out that like the people who can do this are rich people. It’s sort of like tradwife-type content.
And one new trend is this fridgerton trend, which is when you take your and into your fridge, you put like a little thing of flowers, a little painting, a little… Like, you put all… You take all your cherry tomatoes and you put them in a nice cup that reminds you of the Bridgerton aesthetic.
NICOLE: So, you mean my fridge has to be pretty too?
HEDVIG: Yes, apparently. Otherwise, you’re povvo.
NICOLE: I can’t take the stress of modernity. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: You’re a poor person. Like, how can you not… So, it’s like a new kind of unattainable, weird, rich people thing, which I’m not sure if it’s just satisfying content or if people actually do this. I can’t really tell the difference. But yeah, it’s like having little flowers and decorative elements in your fridge.
DANIEL: Okay, well, that’s not happening because I’ve got pickles in there that are pre-covid, so I just… No, no, I don’t want to look back there.
NICOLE: I feel like what’s in my fridge is my business, and I don’t need it to be aesthetically pleasing to anyone but me.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I have to say, unfortunately, when I saw the little, tiny cup with a little violet in it, I was like, I’m always wanting to pick flowers when I’m on walks, and I can’t really keep flowers around because my little silly cat eats them and then gets diarrhea. And I was like, putting them in the fridge is actually like not a bad idea.
NICOLE: You know what I hate about this, is it sounds adorable and a way to bring yourself simple joy. And now I want to do it, and I’m mad. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: They would last longer in there, that’s for sure.
HEDVIG: And I get to see them. She doesn’t eat them and get diarrhea.
DANIEL: When you open the fridge, it’s like, “Oh, flowers. Oh, for me, how nice.”
HEDVIG: Yeah. So, I might be doing this.
DANIEL: All right. I might be coming around. Well, so let’s do a rundown of the Words of the Week that we’ve seen. We’ve seen COCONUT TREE, COCONUT PILLED, WEIRD, BRAT, INTERNATIONAL BLUE SCREEN DAY, RAW DOGGING, FED-UP-EDNESS, -NOMENON. My goodness, we’ve covered a lot of terrain. And FRIDGERTON, our Words of the Week. Do we need to say anything before we leave this ground? Do we want to just give our final thoughts about the times in which we live?
NICOLE: No, I think so. So, for me, because I do political language as one of my side linguistic hustles, I love an election year, and like Hedvig said, this is a super election year. So, I think you might have an abundance of Words of the Week. Some of them might just be flashes in the pan, but some of them stick around forever. Like, when we were talking about fridgerton, I was thinking like, “Oh, this is a pop culture suffix. What else could it be applied to? Like, can we get other Bridgerton prefixes that can attach?” And like -GATE, we still say gate, and people who have no idea where -gate came from. Now, we just got it, and so, maybe we’ll get some more durable suffixes out of this super election year.
HEDVIG: Nominomenon.
DANIEL: Nomenon.
DANIEL: Let’s hope that they’re fun to say like -NOMENON. Let’s get to some comments. We were questioning our commitment to the Dump Spotify Movement. We asked for feedback. Samuel via email says, “I listened to your latest episode, and you wanted feedback about whether you should be listed on Spotify or not. I understand the reason you did it in the first place.” We didn’t like the exclusivity, and we didn’t like Rogan. “But it would also be quite convenient for a lot of people who use Spotify as their regular podcast app. I wanted to try it out myself but couldn’t because Because Language is the only podcast that isn’t on Spotify. I don’t want to be all like you should put it on again, but it’d be nice if that’s possible. Love the show.” We want it to be easy to listen to us, right?
HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s true. It’s true. I also generally don’t think that Spotify is a good app for podcasting, which is unrelated to the reason we’re boycotting it. But as the person who listens to a lot of podcasts, I don’t think it’s a good app for it.
DANIEL: Okay. Wolf via email says, “Fuck Spotify. I don’t personally draw the line there, but it’s probably the best start.”
NICOLE: I had a thought about Spotify. I don’t know if you want to hear it, but…
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: I’d love to hear your thoughts on Spotify.
NICOLE: Yeah. Okay. So, I listen to you on Apple Podcasts, which I’m not sure is ethically better. And for that reason, I think you have to weigh the benefit of getting your excellent educational content out to the most listeners versus the idea that Spotify is uniquely bad. We participate in systems, but we’re all complicit in the evilness of all of these systems. I’m not saying, like, just give up, but I’m saying, the consideration is Spotify uniquely evil compared to Apple or where many people get their podcasts such that it outweighs the benefit of reaching a broader audience with your educational content?
HEDVIG: I understand that.
DANIEL: It’s possible to make a good decision without making a perfect decision.
NICOLE: Yeah. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
DANIEL: I feel that. Big thanks to Dr Ruanni Tupas, everyone who gave us suggestions for this episode, including James, MVP for this episode. SpeechDocs for transcribing. Patrons who keep the show going, our guest, Dr Nicole Holliday. Thank you for coming and hanging out with us.
NICOLE: Thanks, friends. It’s always good to be here.
DANIEL: Hedvig, thanks to you for being my podcast pal.
HEDVIG: You’re welcome.
DANIEL: Thanks to Ben for dropping in on no notice. How about that? I hope that happens again.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah. All right.
HEDVIG: He looks very sunburned.
DANIEL: If you like the show, that’s great. If you want to help us, that’s even better. Here’s some stuff you can do. [HEDVIG AND NICOLE LAUGH] I’m not retaking that. You can follow us, we’re @becauselangpod on just about every conceivable social platform except Threads. You can send us ideas and that’s via Discord, SpeakPipe on our website. Or you can just send me a cheeky email, hello@becauselanguage.com. You can also tell a friend about us or write us a review. And we have a new review from Jeff the Martin. Here’s what Jeff the Martin says, “Off and on my favorite podcast, five stars.” Five stars is five stars. “Because language is the first podcast I ever fell in love with. And while others briefly supplant it as my favorite, I keep coming back to this gem. The balance of provocative commentary about linguistic attitudes juxtaposed with academic content is informative and entertaining. Daniel is an extremely skilled host. Hedvig’s take is…” I didn’t think of myself as extremely skilled. If I am, it’s only because of time doing this. “Hedvig’s take is intelligent and quirky.” How do you feel about the adjective QUIRKY, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: Good. I’m all right with QUIRKY.
DANIEL: Okay, good.
HEDVIG: It’s better. Like, sometimes when people want to… I did overhear someone actually calling me bossy the other week.
DANIEL: Ooohhh.
HEDVIG: Usually, people who know better, they say intimidating or scary or something else, but I did hear bossy. Quirky is nice. Among slightly dubious terms, Quirky, I like. Quirky is good.
DANIEL: I have elementary school aged daughters, and when the word bossy comes up, I’m very quick to say, “Girls can be a boss.”
NICOLE: Yes. Are you bossy or are you a boss?
DANIEL: I’ll keep going. “And Ben lends a comedic accessibility to the content, which is marred only by how often he interrupts Hedvig, 😒 unamused face emoji.” Very perceptive, JefftheMartin, thank you.
HEDVIG: To be fair, I interrupt the other guys a lot. Maybe Daniel’s editing makes it seem like I don’t, but I interrupt them a lot as well. So, I appreciate it, Jeff, but don’t… I think we all interrupt each other a lot, except for Daniel. So, by that, I mean Ben and me.
DANIEL: I interrupt the most out of anyone because I’m trying to move things along.
HEDVIG: That’s true, but it’s a very good reason. Speaking of, next item in our run sheet is for me, isn’t it?
DANIEL: Yay. Yes, it is.
HEDVIG: If you like the show, you can support us on Patreon. It makes us happy, and it gives us the ability to give guests a bit of compensation for their time, employ people to transcribe our content and do other great things, like buy me a new mic every now and then, and we are really… Oh, no, where’s the list?
DANIEL: Keep going. Keep going.
HEDVIG: Oh, no. It was going to be a surprise. So, this is where I was going to give a shoutout to our top patrons at the supporter level, but Daniel has bamboozled me by reordering the names and excluding them from my document. What is going on?
DANIEL: Well, that’s because I don’t know which list to do. I’ve got two lists because I asked ChatGPT to rank them, and I need you to choose which list you want. Do you want the list that ranks them based on how good they probably smell based on their name?
HEDVIG: Oh, no.
DANIEL: Or how would you rank them based on how good they would probably be at doing crimes?
HEDVIG: Crimes, for sure.
DANIEL: Okay, I’m pasting in the crime list.
HEDVIG: Wait, no, no, wait, no, I just realised what I said because it’s trained on racist data. Like, what is it going to do to poor people’s names?
NICOLE: Ooh.
DANIEL: Well, it does say it takes into account the toughness or craftiness that some names might evoke. Do you think it might be… why don’t we do it just as an interesting data point and people with names don’t take it too seriously. Or, would you rather go by how smelly they are?
HEDVIG: I mean, it could be fine. It could be fine. Okay, let’s find out what ChatGPT thinks are criminal names. And then…
DANIEL: All right.
HEDVIG: …we can all remind ourselves that ChatGPT and all large language models are basically complicated autocorrects.
DANIEL: Okay, there you go. I pasted in the list. So, this time, remember, I asked ChatGPT, “Could you please rank them on how good they would probably be at doing crimes?” And it said, “Ranking people based on how good they would probably be at doing crimes is an imaginative exercise. Here’s a playful attempt at this ranking taking into account the toughness or craftiness that some names might evoke.”
HEDVIG: Okay, so number one, to no one’s surprise, is LordMortis because…
DANIEL: Of course it’s LordMortis.
HEDVIG: Because that sounds like Moriarty and lord whatever, so that makes perfect sense. Then, we have Sonic Snejhog, which maybe it’s picking up on Sonic the little blue guy, but he doesn’t do crimes, does he?
DANIEL: No.
HEDVIG: Steele, Tony, Nikoli, Rhian, Rach, Ariaflame, PharaohKatt, aengryballs, Canny Archer, Ignacio, Termy, Raina, Jack, Amir, Matt, Stan, Tadhg, Colleen, Cheyenne, Meredith. I don’t really understand what it is using to rank Meredith.
DANIEL: No. But now, we’re getting to the people who would be absolutely no good at committing crimes at all. So, that’s where we’re at.
HEDVIG: Okay. Molly Dee, Nasrin, Ayesha, Larry, Chris L, Chris W, Keith, Kevin, Kristofer, J0HNTR0Y, Diego, Andy from Logophilius, Felicity, Lyssa, Luis, Nigel, Manú, René, Elías, Joanna, Kate, Kathy, Alyssa, Andy, Helen, Margareth, O Tim, WolfDog. WolfDog sounds…
DANIEL: I thought WolfDog would come higher.
HEDVIG: I thought WolfDog would come higher.
DANIEL: I did. I did.
HEDVIG: gramaryen, Whitney, James, Rodger. I don’t know what it’s using for this.
DANIEL: If you want to know who was the smelliest… who was the nicest smelling, it was probably Felicity, and the worst smelling was probably aengryballs.
[LAUGHTER]
NICOLE: Okay, that seems right.
DANIEL: Well earned. Well earned.
HEDVIG: I don’t think, I don’t think aengryballs will be upset about that.
DANIEL: No. I didn’t, no.
HEDVIG: I think we also want to give a special shoutout to our newest patron at the Listener Level, we have Kate P-R. At the friend level, Mykal. And a free member, Squidplonk’s epic content. Thank you very much, everyone.
NICOLE: Me?
DANIEL: All right, Nicole, it’s up to you.
NICOLE: All right. 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.
HEDVIG: Pew, pew.
DANIEL: Yay. Thank you, Nicole.
[BOOP]
BEN: [TRYING TO END THE ZOOM CALL] Leave. Leave. Leave. How do I leave.
BEN: Bye, bye, bye. [AUDIO CUT]
DANIEL: Okay, he left.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]