Creators have to be mindful of what to say and what not to say in their content. This affects the language we’re exposed to — and what we say IRL. But it’s part of an old process. Popular LingToker Adam Aleksic breaks it down. He’s the author of the new book Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language.
Timestamps
- Start: 0:00
- Intros: 1:42
- News: 12:25
- Related or Not: 29:59
- Interview with Adam Aleksic: 44:07
- Words of the Week: 1:15:10
- Comment: 1:37:56
- The Reads: 1:39:56
Listen to this episode
Video
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Whose turn is it? The question is at the heart of language and chimpanzees ask it too
https://theconversation.com/whose-turn-is-it-the-question-is-at-the-heart-of-language-and-chimpanzees-ask-it-too-258736
Turn-taking in grooming interactions of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) in the wild: the role of demographic and social factors
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-025-01940-7
Gen Z doesn’t want to say ‘hello’ when answering the phone. I’m concerned.
https://www.businessinsider.com/gen-z-phone-ansewring-hello-2025-7
Where does ‘hello’ come from?
https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/the-origin-of-hello
“Weird Al” Yankovic – Pancreas (Official Video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqDBB0no6dQ
Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language by Adam Aleksic
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/776856/algospeak-by-adam-aleksic/de
FYI: TikToks beauty algorithm is designed to have a preference for Chinese facial features
https://www.reddit.com/r/Splendida/comments/ntxm7i/fyi_tiktoks_beauty_algorithm_is_designed_to_have/
[PDF] SCUT-FBP5500: A Diverse Benchmark Dataset for Multi-Paradigm Facial Beauty Prediction
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.06345
The fallout from the Coldplay concert exposes just how ethically dubious the kiss cam has always been
https://www.abc.net.au/religion/coldplay-concert-viral-moment-ethics-kiss-cam/105554344
@gianmarcosoresi It’s Coldplay comfort but 🎤📺🤣#coldplay #msnbc #comedy #funny ♬ original sound – Gianmarco Soresi
What is the ‘Gen Z stare’?
https://news.northeastern.edu/2025/07/23/what-is-the-gen-z-stare/
The Gen Z stare: ‘There it was, like the human version of the buffering symbol’
https://www.thejournal.ie/readme/gen-z-stare-6772778-Jul2025/
@intrnetbf shoutout to Monica. Incredible command over the English language
AI claims and a hoax spokesman: Viral band confuses the world of music
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp8mjnn7eqno
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
DANIEL: And because of our great patrons, we don’t have to run ads and bore you.
HEDVIG: Okay, question to my fellow cohosts, Ben and Daniel. What is one ad you wouldn’t mind doing?
BEN: I would probably accept money from some kind of linguistics institute. I fully understand, as I say this, these are not bodies that necessarily have a lot of money to throw at podcasts.
HEDVIG: They don’t have that kind of money. They don’t want to do that. I would maybe because it’s very, very topical and our listeners know this from previous episodes, maybe companies that produce cooling gel products. [LAUGHTER]
BEN: Oh, what are we going to do?
DANIEL: Frozen hat.
HEDVIG: I got the shoes now as well.
DANIEL: Cooling shoes?
HEDVIG: I used them yesterday. I had the hat on, the eye mask, the shoes and the big sheet, and I was lying down like a corpse.
BEN: Hedvig?
HEDVIG: It’s great. Yeah.
BEN: Is it possible that for your entire existence, unbeknownst to you, you are in fact some sort of magma spirit, you are not human, and in fact run at a temperature in the range of like thousands of degrees?
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: You’re Lava Girl and you don’t know it.
BEN: Right. The fundamental point being patrons are good. You should be a patron.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] Yes, you totally should.
DANIEL: Wow, Ben, bringing us back.
BEN: That’s how you know it’s bad.
[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. We’ve got Ben Ainslie and Hedvig Skirgård. Hi, everybody.
HEDVIG: We do.
BEN: Good day, sir.
HEDVIG: Thank you. Thank you for having us. It’s such a special treat.
DANIEL: It is a special treat. Every time’s a treat.
BEN: Highlight of my maybe fortnight. We tend to do these semi regularly, but it’s never quite clear if it’s going to be like two weeks, three weeks, one week, who knows?
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Let’s just give it a miss. I’m not ready.
BEN: So, it’s the highlight of my indeterminate, probably, on average, 13 and a half days.
HEDVIG: Do you, Ben, like I do, like the fact that Daniel just schedules these recording sessions in our calendar and he no longer tells us about it. And I just look in my calendar, and if it’s an awful time, I tell him. But otherwise, I’m just like, yep.
BEN: Yep.
DANIEL: Yep.
HEDVIG: I think that’s what people in offices do with their shared office calendars. They just like schedule each other’s meetings.
BEN: Do you know what we’ve become, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm. What have we become?
BEN: We’ve become that kind of useless husband who just kind of very openly says, like, “Oh, I don’t really know what’s going on. I just let my wife tell me what’s happening.” We’re that. We’re that guy. And Daniel is the wife who is just running our life.
DANIEL: I’m the emotional labourer.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Ste said our relationship… Someone asked me how old my nephew was the other day, and I was like, “Ste knows. I don’t know.” [LAUGHTER] Someone asked me how old our cats were, and I was like, “I’m not sure.” And then, crown achievement, someone asked me how old I was, and I stared at Ste, I was like “37, right?” And he’s like, “No, you’re 36, honey.” I was like, “All right.”
BEN: Ouch.
DANIEL: He knows.
BEN: Well, it’s good to see that you are the useless husband on multiple fronts. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Let me ask a question. We’ve talked about our relative popularity, and we’re a relatively medium-popular linguistics podcast, which means not very popular overall podcast.
BEN: I take great pride in describing ourselves as mid. I think we are extremely mid.
HEDVIG: Mm.
DANIEL: Okay, great. If we wanted to chase the algorithms and get massively popular…
BEN: Oof.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: …how would you go about doing it? How would you change the show?
BEN: Oh, okay. I have some thoughts.
HEDVIG: I think that it’s tricky because with podcasts, a lot of people would say, “Ooh, put a lot of small funny clips, and then people will find the podcast that way.” However, I have seen funny podcast clips online where I’ve subscribed to the podcast and I don’t like the show.
BEN: Yeah. [BLOWS A RASPBERRY]
HEDVIG: So, I don’t know if that’s actually working.
BEN: I sometimes feel like the modern phenomenon on places like TikTok and reels of podcast clips is actually the other way around. They do a podcast to generate content for the socials, and that is in fact…
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah.
BEN: …where a significant portion of the income comes from. So, there is… Yeah, I know, I’ve gone and listened to… not because I particularly wanted to, but because I was a bit curious, listen to an episode of the ShxtsNGigs or The Basement Yard or whatever, like these notorious TikTok friendly ones. And I was genuinely struck by how overwhelmingly boring and quite uninteresting they are most of the time. And then, you would get this moment of engagement and you’re like, “Okay, so you’re just farming content.” Like, the podcast is not the main thing. It just creates the… So, I wouldn’t do that for us, Daniel. I wouldn’t go that path.
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: Haven’t I done that by putting up one-minute clips, by the way?
BEN: Yeah, but we…
HEDVIG: No, I think they’re cute and I like them, and I think they are helpful. I just don’t think that if we wanted to really push the podcast to be much more popular, someone would tell us, like, “Oh, you should do ten of those a day.” And I don’t think that’s it. I think a couple here and there is very nice.
BEN: So, I’ve got an idea about how we would go about doing this, and I want to preface it by saying I don’t want to do this…
DANIEL: Don’t do this!
BEN: And I’m glad we aren’t doing this because I do this because I like it, not because I’m chasing the hallowed, halcyon spot of huge podcaster or whatever.
DANIEL and HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
BEN: I think you engage in analytics, and I think this is what we see most of the people who get huge audiences. We talk about this morphing or this sort of push that certain creators, like the Joe Rogan effect of starting off, is actually a kind of not particularly out there human being. And then, certain things get rewarded and they push that thing more and so on and so forth.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Audience capture.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: I didn’t fully understand the granularity that it is possible to understand engagement with. I have TikTok videos… Sorry, I have YouTube videos up for my students. I’ve made some explainer videos about certain media concepts and that sort of thing. And I, for the first time in my life, because I’m not putting these things up there because I want to create content, I clicked on the analytics button on YouTube, and I was astounded at the granularity of feedback that it’s possible to get. You can see when people dip out. You can see when people peak. You can see when people click and blah, blah, blah. So, you can just go and…
HEDVIG: You can see what they searched on to get there.
BEN: Exactly, exactly.
HEDVIG: Which is not necessarily what you think is going on. You can see where they are. You can get a demographic profile. Yeah.
BEN: So, you can… And sort of like for a hot second, my brain looked at the peaks and looked at the dips and then asked itself the question, “Oh, well, I should do those things more and those things less.” And then, I was like, “No, stop it. What are you talking about? [DANIEL LAUGHS] That is not how we approach this,” because when you do that, you create this world of content without information that we currently are awash in. And yeah, your numbers would probably go up a lot, but your content would suck, because I personally think a lot of content sucks these days.
DANIEL: Okay. This is not to diss people who do chase the algorithm, and there are people…
BEN: I am. I diss it. I’m dissing it. I think that’s dumb and bad and inherently genuinely makes media worse.
HEDVIG: I’ll take an opposite stance, which is, just like with large language models, I think there is a conservative, careful way of using them that is not terrible. I think it’s vaguely good to know your audience and yeah, that can be good.
DANIEL: And it is possible to make viral videos that are good, that people like and that are good.
BEN: But the universal thing, I think, with a truly good, non-harmful and enjoyable viral video is that you can’t try and do it. It’s always, or it should…
HEDVIG: Got to be organic.
BEN: …in my opinion, be always a delightful surprise to the people who have done the thing, where they go, “I cannot…” So, I had a friend recently, guy I work with, go viral. He’s a comedian. He released a TikTok. He’s a really nice bloke. He’s like a 50-something Indigenous dude who has a son at my school and he does like funny content, and he’s got one going now that’s got like 35,000 likes or something. He blew up. And it’s awesome because it’s just nice and it’s wholesome and it’s cheerful. Yeah, I think…
DANIEL: And he did not expect it to happen at all.
BEN: Not at all.
DANIEL: He wasn’t trying to make it happen.
BEN: No, no, no.
DANIEL: Mm. For this episode we are talking to one of the more popular LingTokers out there. We’re talking to Adam Aleksic, who you might know as Etymology Nerd. He’s done loads of videos. He has attained a measure of popularity that I think in the linguistics world is kind of rare. And…
BEN: [LAUGHS] That was the most diplomatic diss on your own field. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: I think so. But he’s found something interesting. He’s got to avoid certain words or else get stifled by the algorithm.
BEN: Uh-huh. We’ve talked about this phenomenon, haven’t we?
HEDVIG: We’ve talked about this.
DANIEL: Yes, we have. What that means is that people who have had experiences can’t talk about those experiences using the normal words they would use because they will get quashed.
HEDVIG: And also, it might… What’s interesting is that we’ve talked about this before on the show and we’ve had like ideas about how real or what kind of words we think are actually involved. But besides the actual thing that might be going on, there’s also like a self-censorship paranoia effect as well, which means that some words might not be restricted, but people think that they are. And then, people start behaving… So, it’s similar to the deepfake problem that it’s not even a problem that deepfakes do things. It’s also a problem that they exist because then people doubt real world. So, there’s effects, like unintentional, indirect effects.
BEN: It’s like a panopticon thing.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah, as long as the algorithms are not well understood and well publicised, then everyone’s involved in a kind of guessing game. Well, Adam’s got a book out. It’s called Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language.
HEDVIG: Ooh.
BEN: Funsies.
DANIEL: And I had a good old chat with Adam about algorithms and his experience in the world out there. And so, we’re going to be listening to that a little bit later.
BEN: Before we do that, Daniel, you want to do some spruikers first, don’t you?
DANIEL: Yep.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Hey, guess what, guys? I got a message again from our hosting provider. And guess what this message said.
BEN: What did this message say?
DANIEL: It said, “You can stick ads in your show and make lots of money. Do you want to do it? Yes or no?” Yeah, that’s right. You know what I said? I said, “Listen, you hosting providers, you ad inserters, we already get money from our wonderful patrons who not only keep us going, who not only keep our regular episodes free for everyone to listen to, but they also give us ideas, they give us words, they give us Related or Not’s. Sometimes, even like on this episode, I ask, ‘What questions would you ask our upcoming guest?’ And they give me some really great questions. Listen, you people, they give us more than you ever could. So, you know what you can do with your ad money, your annoyance tax? You can take that money and then give it to somebody else who feels like annoying their listeners because we don’t want to.”
BEN: Patrons allow us to continually not enshittify our product and it’s wonderful.
DANIEL: Yes, that’s right. You can join us, that’s patreon.com/becauselangpod. Oh, Ben, save me.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Hey, Daniel?
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: After the world’s longest and most derided spruik, what’s going on in the world of linguistics?
DANIEL: Let’s see. We had a chat with Stephen Levinson a couple of episodes ago, a legendary linguist who mentioned turn taking as an important factor in language. Think about it, when somebody else is talking, we’re quiet usually, unless it’s us.
BEN: I was about to say: We are particularly bad at this.
DANIEL: Well, it’s called overlap avoidance and that means that in general, we can exchange information because it’s hard to absorb information when you yourself are talking. He also mentioned that turn taking happens in apes, and I got very curious. So now, here’s some work from Dr Kayla Kolff of Osnabrück University and Simone Pika. They studied chimpanzees in Kibale National Park, Uganda, and they studied turn taking.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
BEN: That sounds like a really, really fun place to do work. And sometimes, I sort of wonder if some of these linguists are just like, “I’d like to be a linguist in a really nice place. Where do the chimps live? [LAUGHTER] Where’s the really awesome mountainous national park that I can just live for a while?”
HEDVIG: But, Ben, they are going to a place, looking at vaguely where the primates are, setting up a bunch of cameras, going away, recording a bunch of videos probably, this is what I suspect. And then, sitting and looking at like hours of a chimp grooming another chimp.
BEN: In Uganda. How great is that?
DANIEL: Now, we do something called turn transitions, which is maybe like when I say, “Um,” or I sort of start talking a little bit and then I notice that you give way, or maybe you won’t! [BEN LAUGHS] Maybe you won’t stop talking. Maybe you’ll just keep it going.
HEDVIG: Barrel over.
DANIEL: Maybe that says something about our relationships, right?
BEN: Mm-hmm. Okay.
DANIEL: Maybe that says something about our relatives, something or other. So, this team, this pair wanted to look at turn transitions in chimpanzees with both actions and gestures. Maybe they’ll do a gesture that makes the other person groom them. Maybe one of them will groom one of them and then the other one will groom, they’ll take turns that way.
So, they were studying, not speaking, because they don’t, but whether apes would produce a gesture that would trigger a turn transition. Like, maybe if you’re a powerful ape, you might make the other apes stop and listen, or maybe groom you for a while if you want. So, they wanted to find out what the relevant factors were.
Now, I’m going to pose this as a question to you. What do you think the relevant factors are going to be? Here’s what they looked at. It was age, dominance, rank, social bonds — whether you spend a lot of time with a certain ape or not — and then relatedness, whether the other ape is in your family. Which one do you think would be the most relevant?
HEDVIG: Dominance.
DANIEL: Once again, those factors. Age, dominance, rank, social bonds, or relatedness?
BEN: I reckon it might be relatedness.
DANIEL: Interesting. So, a bit of family support.
BEN: I think you can afford to fuck off someone who’s not in your face every day a little bit more than you can afford to fuck off someone who’s always there.
HEDVIG: I think that, and I mean this in a kind way about our fellow cousins, the primates, I think, in general, they know siblings and parent-child relationships. But if it’s anything I know from some people I know who work in primatology is that once relationships get further away than that, the apes themselves don’t seem to be entirely aware of it.
DANIEL: You’re just an ape.
BEN: Mm.
HEDVIG: So, you do get niece and uncle getting it on, etc.
BEN: Close, close.
DANIEL: Oh, right, okay.
HEDVIG: And they don’t seem concerned always is the vibe I’ve gotten. So, I think beyond sibling and parent-child, I don’t know if they keep track of much more. But I was thinking about if you were a nondominant ape and there was a dominant ape, maybe you would look at that one and attend to that one and be like, “Ooh, he really needs a good groom right now. I’m going to run over,” and you’d care more about pleasing the dominant one.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. You defer more. You might do what they want. You would attend to when they signal that they want a turn, and do that.
HEDVIG: Something like that.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: Maybe.
DANIEL: Okay, well, here’s the answer. They found two factors that were relevant and two that weren’t. One was age.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: They say, “Turn transitions were more likely when they were initiated by an older individual, when they involved younger recipients.” And now, here’s the second one, dominance…
BEN: Ah.
DANIEL: …when recipients had a lower rank. However, they say the social bond, strength, and relatedness did not influence the likelihood of turn transitions.
BEN: How interesting.
DANIEL: They also say, “This ability to coordinate action and respond to others suggests a basic foundation that may have helped lay the groundwork for the evolution of human communication.” They got turn taking, we got turn taking. It’s a normal thing.
BEN: It makes sense.
HEDVIG: What would it be to be a social species and not have turn taking? You just…
DANIEL: If your goal is information exchange and you’re not turn taking, it doesn’t work. You both compete for the floor relentlessly or nobody says anything, and then you don’t know whose turn it is to exchange information. We keep it tight.
HEDVIG: I guess bees or ants are technically social communicative beings, but I don’t think they do turn taking. They just leave their pheromones and then someone else finds it, some of the time. One of the things they do.
DANIEL: Yeah, or there are multiple bees doing the waggle dance and you’ve just got to choose which bee you’re going to attend to, right? Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah. But among mammals, it does seem impossible to do any kind of social coordinated action without having some basic turn-taking conventions.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
BEN: I have sort of been struck when I’m at different cultures like family gathering or a large sort of like dinner get together or something where I observe to my cultural perspective, there to be just substantially less turn taking and yielding taking place. And I always have been struck by how not effective as a form of communication I have experienced it as. So, to put it in very not, like, beating around the bush framing, I have been at dinner parties with Italian families and that sort of thing where just to my eye, it just seems like everyone is yelling at everyone else and no real shit is actually being heard or understood. It’s just everyone fighting really hard for their thing to be the thing. Ah, I don’t know, it’s just…
DANIEL: Well, then maybe this takes us into other reasons for language. Like, one is information exchange. But I’ve noticed at family gatherings, that’s not what’s mostly happening. [BEN LAUGHS] Instead, what’s happening is the building and maintenance of social relationships…
BEN: The establishing…
DANIEL: …and some of that might be…
BEN: …of dominance order. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: But also, I don’t know, because I have been in situations where a lot of people talk at the same time and I think it’s also just like, if you’re not used to it, you’re not good at it, then maybe you’re just not good at it.
BEN: Yeah, I’m a definite newbie. I make no bones about that. Like, I’m a green horn.
DANIEL: Well, just maybe go into chimpanzee mode and [BEN LAUGHS] attack them, that’d be cool. Just bite ’em.
BEN: Throw some feces.
DANIEL: It’s the only way.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: This next one was suggested by James on our Discord. James has pointed us to a Business Insider article link in the show notes for this episode. The article’s titled: “Gen Z doesn’t want to say ‘hello’ when answering the phone. I’m concerned.”
BEN: Argh, I’m concerned about the collection of words that you’ve just said in the order that you said them.
DANIEL: Ben, let’s roleplay this. Pretend you’re calling me.
HEDVIG: Okay.
BEN: Oh, hold on, hold on. Sorry. It’s like, unlock the phone. Scroll, scroll. Annoying Dickhead, call.
HEDVIG: Find the phone app.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] You’ve got me down as Annoying Dickhead?
BEN: Sorry. No, of course not, Daniel. I’m old enough and boring enough to just have you in my phone as Daniel Midgley. [MAKES TRILLING SOUNDS]
DANIEL: Okay. Me: answers phone, not making a sound.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHTER] That is…
DANIEL: Now, have you noticed this in your own life or in the lives of others, or do you actually say hello?
BEN: I do not have occasion yet in my life to make a lot of telephone calls to someone who is a member of Gen Z. Give it another four years, and I will very much be in that space, but at the time… Actually, no, that’s not true. Ellis has a phone, and I guess he’s technically a member of Gen Z. Is a 10-year-old a member of Gen Z?
DANIEL: Oh, getting into Alpha…
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: …territory there.
BEN: Okay, Alpha Z’ers.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Because when I call him, he goes, “Hi, dad.” [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Right.
DANIEL: Okay, great. But that’s because he knows who you are.
BEN: Yeah, I suppose.
HEDVIG: But I have to say I think this is just a consequence of what had already started in the Millennial generation, which is like the idea of someone we don’t know calling us at a time, random time that we’re not prepared for, is deeply… This happens to me in Germany. People like to call… hospitals or like governmental bodies or banks, like to call you and talk to you about something and I’m like, “I’m in the middle of doing something. Hello? Hi? Okay. I’m sorry, who are you?”
DANIEL: Are you even who you say you are? Yes.
HEDVIG: Well, there’s also just like, “Why are you choosing to call?”
BEN: See what’s going on here is yet another instance of Hedvig’s fascination and pandering to the Gen Z’ers. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: No, no, no. I have always felt like this. I felt like this when I was fucking 22. I lived in a country where people didn’t do this. Swedish people email. The bank sends you like a direct message in the fucking bank app. It was when I moved to Germany that they started calling me and I was like, “That’s interesting about my test results. I’d like to take notes and have this information preserved somewhere. Can you email me?”
DANIEL: I’m an elder Gen X and I remember when people used to just ring you any time they wanted to and you would just go to the phone and answer it, not knowing who they were.
BEN: Daniel has memories of using an answering machine. Legitimately, authentically using an answering machine.
DANIEL: Yes. And then…
HEDVIG: I’ve done that.
DANIEL: …I get a call now and I’m like “Mmmm. I don’t know who this is.”
HEDVIG: Mmm. Yeah.
DANIEL: I’m not going to answer anything because… I’ll tell you why I’m not going to answer anything because I connect. I push the button to answer the phone and I hear a freaking call centre. I can hear the chatter of office workers. And if I say hello, then a button will pop up and someone will say, “Ooh, we got a live one here, Floyd.” And I’m not interested in your call centre.
HEDVIG: Yeah. No.
BEN: So, this is the interesting thing, and I don’t want to continue to be the old guy, but like…
DANIEL: That’s okay, Ben. I’ll be the old guy for you.
BEN: No, but here’s the thing. I’m older than you, clearly, when it comes to this. So, my partner is older than I am by about four or five years. And she is thoroughly in the zone that both of you have just described. If an unknown number calls her phone, she’s like: absolutely not. If an unknown number calls my phone, I’m like, ooh…
DANIEL: I’m curious. [LAUGHS]
BEN: …Who’s this? Who could be on the other end of this delightful mystery box? And so, when people are like, yeah, but what if it’s a call centre, I’m like, I’m going to role play that for you right now. “Hello, Ben speaking.” “Oh, would you be interested in…? “No, thank you.” Like, that’s not hard. That isn’t challenging. That causes no difficulty in my life whatsoever.
DANIEL: Well, Katie Notopoulos, the author, gives two reasons why Gen Z folks might not want to answer the phone with any sort of sound. One is scammers and call centres that don’t start until you say hello. Also possibly, they might be gathering data to duplicate your voice, who knows?
BEN: Yeah. Okay.
HEDVIG: Argh, What?
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: I don’t want to have to worry about that. That’s such bullshit.
DANIEL: It’s remote.
BEN: Yes.
DANIEL: But the second reason is “Some young people simply believe that if you’re the one who’s calling, you should initiate the conversation.”
BEN: That’s weird. That’s a weird… That’s a weird norm to establish.
DANIEL: It is a different norm, right? Because establishing the connection is you ringing me.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: That’s one half of the conversation. And then, I bring the other half by saying, “Hello?”
BEN: That’s weird. Yeah, I would find that very odd, especially considering all of the devices say who it is.
HEDVIG: Number one, that doesn’t happen for me in Germany very often. Number two, when some unknown number calls me, I am a little bit tempted to go, [HESITATINGLY] “Hello? I’m sorry.” I am confused. And if they started the conversation, I’d actually like that.
DANIEL: It’s norms getting rewired. It’s norms rewiring.
HEDVIG: I can see bridging context, as a linguist would say.
BEN: I genuinely. And again, [SQUIRMS]
DANIEL: Come on, Ben.
BEN: I’m just… I am that guy. I don’t understand. Like, am I crazy for thinking that you change how a system works when the system is no longer working effectively, and I just cannot be convinced that calling someone and then the other person picking up and saying hello was like a broken system? Like, it’s initiate contact, acknowledge contact has been established, discuss. That doesn’t seem like in any way, shape or form a complicated framework to me.
HEDVIG: No, just… If you don’t get it, you don’t get it.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: That’s twice now. It’s just like, it’s just you, Ben. It’s a skills issue. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, maybe it’s just the case that HELLO has had a good run and now it’s time for it to stop. We had a fun time in episode three with David Crystal where he reminded us that HELLO just simply didn’t exist before the 1800s as a greeting. You would say hello if you were shouting to someone, “Hello, is anyone home?” Or if you were surprised, “Hello, what’s this?” But you just didn’t use it as a greeting…
HEDVIG: I use that one a lot.
DANIEL: …until… Do you?
HEDVIG: Yeah. Hello, what’s this?
DANIEL: …until phones. Because Alexander Graham Bell wanted AHOY to be the greeting. Thomas Edison suggested HELLO. This was taken up by the young women who worked on the telephone exchanges who became known as Hello Girls because it was just this new thing.
BEN: Can I put forward a Ben Ainslie theory about why this is possibly happening?
HEDVIG: Can you do that after I say something more about the etymology of HELLO?
BEN: Okay, of course.
DANIEL: Yes, please.
HEDVIG: I posted on the Discord the other day a funny, fun tweet by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary where they said: Hey came before hi and hi came before hello. Hi is most likely a variant of hey. Hello is not related to either. Goodbye. [BEN LAUGHS] Which if you read it five times and you draw a graph for yourself, makes perfect sense.
BEN: Right.
DANIEL: Until then. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: When you hear it the first time, it sounds like a ring of nonsense.
BEN: Yeah, I was very confused. The order that you were establishing there was like, “I’m going to say the third part second and the second part fourth,” and this… [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: It is so fun. I loved it so much. It took me such a long time to work out. And once I worked it out, it was like: Oh, this is just facts. This is entirely normal.
DANIEL: Oh, okay.
BEN: It’s a little brain puzzle.
DANIEL: Thank you, Webster [CROSSTALK] who comes after Merriam.
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly.
BEN: Here’s my theory about what’s going on. First of all, and I think this is the most important thing and you should probably edit this out, Daniel, and put it at the beginning of this segment. Any article from a place like Business Insider that has “Gen Z is doing X” in the title should immediately be distrusted like thoroughly, utterly distrusted. Because it is a boomer rag that’s like, “Check out what the fucking young people are doing,” and that shit is noxious and you should just not pay attention.
DANIEL: It’s tired.
BEN: I think that the mechanism that we are observing, if indeed there is one of like Gen Z not wanting to say hello, is that they are extremely inexperienced with taking phone calls because their generation doesn’t take many phone calls. They don’t call each other very much, and a lot of their communications with one another is mediated through other formats like Discord or whatever. All that suggests to me is that they’re going to take a little bit longer to learn how to do these things, because if anyone wants to look at me and be like, oh, Gen Z are going to go into the workforce and be, I don’t know, secretaries or whatever, and then just not acknowledge how phone etiquette works, you’re fucking crazy. Of course, they’re going to learn, anyone’s going to learn, because that’s just the world in which you have to operate.
It’s just in the same way that I have less experience with streamers as like a format because I just don’t watch it very much and that shit is confusing to me, if someone was like, “Your new job is to monetise streamer accounts,” I’d learn. I’d be bad at it for a while, but I’d learn. We’re just seeing people who are bad at a skill that don’t practice very much and that doesn’t make them bad people…
HEDVIG: Yeah. I agree.
BEN: …it just means they’re inexperienced.
DANIEL: Isn’t it wild that’s a weird skill, [BEN LAUGHS] like navigating a file structure on a computer or something?
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Wow. What a different world. Well, that’s the news. And now it’s time for…
[RELATED OR NOT THEME]
BEN: I like that a lot.
HEDVIG: That I think is probably my favorite one so far because they’ve gone with a duh-duh, but re-digged it a bit so we’re not in breach of copyright. [LAUGHS]??
DANIEL: Yes indeed.
BEN: I like also that just like Ozzy Osbourne died and that just feels a little bit Sabbathy and I like that.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: And it uses Ben’s voice, and I like that too. Thanks to Hugh for giving us that jingle. So, I was listening to the new album by Svaneborg Kardyb and it’s got a song called St Pancras. And I’ve encountered this name every once in a while, St Pancras, apparently a saint.
HEDVIG: Oh, like the train station in London.
DANIEL: Exactly. There’s a St Pancras station, and I just thought that was delightful.
BEN: Spell? Spell for Ben?
DANIEL: P-A-N-C-R-A-S.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Misread by me many times as PANCREAS.
BEN: Yes, that’s what I would have assumed. In fact, I thought you were missaying PANCREAS.
DANIEL: Indeed. Well, all right. So, there’s your pair. PANCRAS, the saint, and PANCREAS, related or not?
HEDVIG: Oh, shit, I see, I see.
BEN: Oh, interesting.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Why would you be a Saint Pancreas? That’s ridiculous.
HEDVIG: What we’ve got here, Ben, is we can fall into that thing where Daniel tells us that if a part of the word are related to the other part, then that doesn’t count.
BECCA: Okay.
HEDVIG: So, if PAN means all, like pansexual, pan…
BEN: Yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: That’s my guess.
HEDVIG: I don’t know any other PANs. [LAUGHS] What’s another PAN? besides pan…
DANIEL: I’m pretty sure the PAN- in PANCREAS is “all”, but I don’t know about PANCRAS.
HEDVIG: Right. So, if both of those PANs mean “all”, he might not give it to us.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: So, we’ve got to be more on our game.
BEN: My understanding of…
DANIEL: I really want to know if PANCREAS is a special variant of PANCRAS or vice versa.
BEN: Well, okay, so let’s be investigators here. The pancreas, to the best of my knowledge, creates bile for the digestive system, correct?
DANIEL: Might be the liver, not sure. Everything I know about the pancreas comes from the Weird Al song, which actually contains a lot of information.
BEN: So, it would be great if you could confirm or deny the thing that I just said. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I have forgotten [BEN LAUGHS] because I have the Weird Al song in my head.
HEDVIG: Is pancreas next to the thyroid?
BEN: Hold on, let’s…
DANIEL: That’s not in the song, so I don’t know it.
BEN: Your song has not helped you at all.
HEDVIG: Okay, right, okay, and that to me, illustration, pancreas.
DANIEL: It’s a Beach Boys pastiche. It’s a Brian Wilson sort of thing.
BEN: Behind the stomach, producing, digesting enzymes and hormones including insulin. Yes, so it is exactly what I thought it was. So then, the question becomes, do we believe that St Pancras had anything to do with digestive things or acidy things or bile-y things or, like, apothecary things? All of which I could see as that being related, but if not, then I don’t think so.
HEDVIG: If they are related, it could be at a time when people didn’t know what different organs did.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Yeah. True.
HEDVIG: So, if they could have found this big thing next to the stomach and be like, “That’s where all the emotions are.”
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: “And he’s the saint of emotions. Therefore, it’s pancreas.”
BEN: I’m sticking my flag in not related. I think pancreas, like all that Latin-y body shit, is going to be like a different path for different things, and it’s just going to be like a false friend.
DANIEL: I thought so too.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: I think they are related, and I think the St Pancras is maybe the saint of travelers or something. And if wombs were thought to travel around the body, why not the pancreas?
BEN: Okay, okay.
DANIEL: Okay. Answer, nah, they’re not related. You were, however, all correct in the PAN in both is Greek PAN, “all”. However, the pancreas that comes from pan plus kreas, kreas meaning flesh, entirely flesh. It has a really, really uniform consistency. It doesn’t seem to be made out of bits.
BEN: So, it’s going to be like I feel like we could call most things in the body pancreas, entirely flesh except for the bones, maybe? No.
DANIEL: It was named by Rufus of Ephesus, a Greek anatomist, who gave the pancreas its name. That was from the Wikipedia page. However, St Pancras, the PAN is still all, but in this case it’s Pankratios, which means all powerful or all ruling, which is pretty heavy considering that he was beheaded for his faith at the age of 14 around the year 304.
BEN: Wow.
DANIEL: Well, that kind of sucks. Who would behead a 14-year-old kid for just believing stuff?
BEN: I don’t know. Whoever killed Joan of Arc, they did that too, didn’t they?
HEDVIG: Yeah, I feel like…
DANIEL: There’s probably more to this story.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] Wait, Daniel, you mean the child must have done something really bad to have been killed?
DANIEL: No, but I’m thinking somebody had it out for him for reasons unrelated to his belief.
HEDVIG: Maybe he was the son of a noble and was going to inherit something or some bullshit or something.
BEN: You’ve been playing too much Crusader Kings. [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I may or may not have murdered children.
DANIEL: All right, one for me and one for Ben.
HEDVIG: It did give me nightmares, I feel like I need to underline.
DANIEL: Let’s go on to this next one from John via SpeakPipe. Yay, it’s a SpeakPipe.
BEN: Here we go. Here we go.
JOHN: All right, I’ve got a cross-linguistic Related or Not, if that’s okay. The first word is the English word LOCK, as in a mechanism for keeping a door closed. The second word is the Scots word LOCH, meaning a large body of water, totally or partially enclosed. The next is the German word LOCH, meaning a hole or hollow, a divot in the ground. And the fourth word is the English word LAKE. So, tell me which ones you think are related and which ones aren’t related.
DANIEL: That is LAKE.
BEN: Okay, last one, LAKE is in just like the thing that’s in my picture behind me.
DANIEL: That’s it.
HEDVIG: I cannot believe you felt the need to explain that John said LAKE.
DANIEL: It didn’t sound like LAKE to me. It sounded like LIKE.
BEN: I genuinely could not tell that was LAKE. LEEK, and I was like, do you mean the vegetables?
HEDVIG: You heard him talk about holes in the ground and LOCH and you were like, “What could this word be?”
DANIEL: I just wanted to make sure that that’s what he said.
HEDVIG: Okay, okay. Anyway.
DANIEL: Okay, so once again, the four words are English LOCK, the thing you open with a key, Scottish LOCH, German LOCH, which means a hole in the ground or somewhere else and then English LAKE. And now, just to make it easier — John didn’t mention this to us — but I will tell you that only two of these are related; the other two are just hangers on, unrelated. But you got to figure out which of the four is the pair.
HEDVIG: I think it’s going to be German and Scottish, LOCH, LOCH.
BEN: Can I ask the linguists, is Scots Gaelic a Germanic language?
HEDVIG: No, it’s Celtic.
BEN: Okay. And they are unrelated.
HEDVIG: But then a lot of words in… No, they’re both Indo-European. Celtic is related to Germanic at a similar-ish level to Romance and Slavic.
BEN: Oh, okay. So, distantly.
HEDVIG: So, you’ll get a bunch of things when we say, like, “Oh, this goes right to *káput Proto-Indo European,” that could be in all of them.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: You also get things in Scottish English that are from Norse stuff. So, you get like another fun input.
DANIEL: I’m rejecting LAKE and LOCH.
HEDVIG: I am also.
HEDVIG: LAKE and LOCH as in the German divot thing?
DANIEL: Nope, as in the Scottish LOCH. I’m rejecting English LAKE and Scottish LOCH.
BEN: Sorry, did you say rejecting?
DANIEL: I’m rejecting those.
BEN: Okay. I was going there as well. I feel like LAKE would have just come some other way. I think LOCK and LOCH, the divot in the ground, probably makes the most sense, because the thing about lochs, in the Scottish sense, my understanding is they’re very, very deep. They are a kind of lake that is only formed when there is a massive cleft in the earth that fills with water. So, lochs can be like hundreds of meters deep, which is very unusual for freshwater bodies and they’re not always freshwater, they can be saltwater as well. And so, like, cleft or divot that kind of tracks for me, but then I’m wondering, is that a false thing? Is that like a red herring thing? Who knows? But I’m sticking with the… I’m going German and Scottish senses are the ones that are related to me, and the other two are just like, never mind. I also wonder why John didn’t throw LOCK, as in the structure that lifts boats from one level of water to another, into this list.
DANIEL: I was wondering about a lock of hair, to be honest.
BEN: So many senses. Okay, that’s my answer.
DANIEL: Here’s the funny thing. It sounds like we’ve all chosen because I chose this too, Scottish LOCH and German LOCH.
BEN: Oh, hang on. She’s pursing her lips, Daniel.
HEDVIG: It just occurred to me, that was my first instinct, was Scottish LOCH, German LOCH. But then, I was just like, but wait, Scotland and Germany?
DANIEL: Yeah. They’re not related.
HEDVIG: That’s kind of far away. Like, they are related, but if they’re related, then English should be in there in the mix as well a bit or like, it just seems…
BEN: Like, at that point, maybe LAKE is in play again kind of thing.
HEDVIG: Or it’s like LAKE and German LOCH or something like that. Something stupid.
DANIEL: Mm.
BEN: Mm. I’m sticking with it.
HEDVIG: Okay. No, okay, I’ll go against you and I’ll go Scottish LOCH and English LAKE.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Oh, okay. You’re going for the one that I rejected.
BEN: Bold, bold.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: We’re all wrong. Do you want to guess again?
BEN: Okay, it’s LOCK, as in the mechanism that closes a door and the Scottish LAKE. [He means LOCH. — D]
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: It’s LAKE and German divot in a ground, LOCH.
DANIEL: Okay, let’s hear what John has to say. He’s given us an answer.
JOHN: Okay, so from what I could find, the German word LOCH and the English word LOCK are related, you know, only going back as far as Germanic. The Scots word LOCH and LAKE, not only are neither of them related to each other, neither of them are related to either to the related pair, LOCH or LOCK.
BEN: Argh.
DANIEL: Now, let’s start with LAKE. This comes from French, it’s lac from Latin, lacus, a tub or a tank or a pond or something like that. Scottish loch comes from just Scottish Gaelic and beyond that, we don’t know. It’s just its own thing.
BEN: It’s its own very old word.
DANIEL: But English LOCK comes from Germanic, where there are other reflexes, like Old High German dungeon, Old Frisian, it’s an enclosure, and in German it’s a loch. Say it again, German speaker?
HEDVIG: LOCH.
DANIEL: LOCH which is an opening or a hole. There you go. That’s your pair. Thanks, John, for that puzzle and for the audio. It’s really nice to hear you.
Now, this last one comes from a listener on ABC Radio Perth who asked me this one live on air, and I thought it was fun. The two words are REHEARSE, like when you rehearse a play or a song, and HEARSE, the vehicle.
BEN: Ah, the carriage for a dead person.
DANIEL: Yep. Surely not, said I.
HEDVIG: And can we put HORSE in there?
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: If you would like to put a horse in the hearse, then you’re perfectly welcome. You could even rehearse a horse. Of course, of course.
BEN: REHEARSE and HEARSE. Well, if they are related, then it would mean that the RE- prefix is doing the thing that RE- does there, right? That’s the only way…
DANIEL: You mean like again?
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Ooh.
BEN: The only, could… Argh, could it be a thing?
HEDVIG: What if it’s…
BEN: Yeah, okay.
HEDVIG: …a hearse going to the funeral goes in a sort of… what’s it called in English? Not a parade, but…
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: You know?
BEN: A procession or something.
HEDVIG: Procession, yeah, that’s the word. And you rehearse those.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: You do rehearse a procession. It is true.
BEN: I was actually coming at it from a different direction. If they’re related, I was wondering if in Greek tradition, everything’s either a drama or a comedy. And if something’s a drama, then people would die and so you wheel the dead body out and so when you rehearse, you’ve got to bring it on and off and on and off. That’s the only thing I can think of as a related, but I’m going to be honest, I’m going with a no.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Just seems too…
HEDVIG: And also, HEARSE doesn’t sound like it’s coming to us via Greek.
BEN: Yeah, good point. [LAUGHS] Maybe Latin, Romans. I’m not sure.
DANIEL: So, that was a… Are we all three no or are you going yes, Hedvig? Just to…
HEDVIG: I’m going yes.
DANIEL: Going again yes, all right.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Such a contrarian.
DANIEL: There we go.
HEDVIG: Also, because otherwise we just all get the same point.
BEN: Yeah, true.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Well, when you rehearse a play or a song, you’re going over the same thing over and over again. You’re just raking, raking, raking, dragging that rake over the ground over and over again. The RE- is again and the HEARSE is hercier, I believe French to drag or to trail on the ground, to rake over.
BEN: Oh, no.
DANIEL: Do you know what else you drag? A dead body to the grave in a hearse. They are totally related.
BEN: No way.
DANIEL: Amazing. Hedvig gets the point.
BEN: Unbelievable. I don’t care for this at all.
DANIEL: Ah. Thank you to anonymous listener for giving us those Related or Nots.
HEDVIG: That’s really fun.
DANIEL: And thank you to Hugh for the theme. If you’d like to send us one, why don’t you do that? SpeakPipe is on our website. Or you could just send it to us, hello@becauselanguage.com.
[MUSIC]
[INTERVIEW BEGINS]
We’re talking to Adam Aleksic, a linguist, a science communicator, a well-known LingToker at @etymologynerd. And now, the author of Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language. Adam, thanks for joining us on the show.
ADAM: Hi. So excited to be here.
DANIEL: Yay. Hey, congratulations on the book. Writing a first book is huge.
ADAM: Thank you so much. Yeah, it was kind of like three senior theses because that was my only previous long writing project.
HEDVIG: Oh, man. Well, it’s a good read. And I just kept writing down questions for you. But first, I remember seeing your talk at LingComm25 where you talked about your work on TikTok, and I was suitably impressed by how feverishly and how cannily you have to choose what to make content about. And I think it takes a very unusual kind of person to do what you do.
ADAM: I remember talking a lot about tradeoffs at that conference. When you’re making educational content, you have to play into the fact that the only thing that’s going to go viral is entertainment. You have to do edutainment. There’s no other way to spread your message. And this has always been true in education to some degree. A teacher needs to entertain their students and make sure their attention doesn’t drift in the classroom. But I think algorithms compound and amplify human behavior, that’s a theme that shows up a lot in the book.
But when I’m trying to make an educational message, I still have to unfortunately do some degree of sensationalizing and hyperbolizing my own personality, but the trick there is navigating your boundary of what you’re comfortable with.
DANIEL: Okay. Some of that involves the rate at which you speak, some of that involves the things that you choose to talk about, but it also affects your intonational contour. Are you doing the TikTok voice now or is this your normal voice? Or is it something in between?
ADAM: No, this is pretty much my normal voice. Although also, that’s not really a thing. It’s just made up. We switch how we talk depending on our perceived audience, always. I’m going to talk differently to my mother. I’m going to talk differently to my friends. I’m going to talk differently to you. I’m going to talk differently to my TikTok audience. We’re code switchers. That’s natural. That’s natural human behavior.
DANIEL: And then, there’s some code switching that’s like a bit more out there, a bit more extreme like to make what you’re doing more noticeable.
ADAM: Right. When we perceive it to be more extreme, then it stands out. The algorithm makes us do crazier and crazier things if we want our messages to be seen, which makes it a little bit more extreme, and then we pay more attention to it.
DANIEL: In that case, what can we learn about the algorithm? What have you learned about these methods that you need to adhere to if you want your material to be shown at all?
ADAM: Right.
DANIEL: What do you have to do?
ADAM: There’s a reason I’m talking about influencer tactics when I’m also talking about language change. Because we have to use certain linguistic tricks to keep your attention. We end up replicating those linguistic tricks. They end up being adopted by people who aren’t even influencers.
DANIEL: Consciously or subconsciously?
ADAM: Also, that’s a stupid distinction. [DANIEL LAUGHS] It’s some gradient in between. Sorry, there’s no neat answers here. But for myself, like, I’m very analytical with social media. I was paying very close attention, I was noticing, “Oh, these tactics work.” And I started implementing certain word choices, certain intonations. If you stress more words, you keep people engaged, and if you talk a little faster as well. So, there’s influencer accents that replicate because they’re good at keeping attention. And there’s different influencer accents for different perceived audiences. There’s the lifestyle influencer accent, there’s ASMr there’s Mr Beast. All these people talk differently, but addictively for their own medium.
There’s individual word choice. If you use trending metadata, the algorithm will pick up on that and push your video further than if you hadn’t. But trending metadata is also just words now. So, certain words are more viral than other words and we tap into that by using those words and then we replicate them for other people, and we like to pretend that the internet is this separate domain of use that doesn’t bleed into real life or whatever, but it does. And then sometimes, children start using those words, that’s how that happens.
And also, with influencers and with offline users, there is subconscious replication. You have to remember there’s a huge survival bias when a video goes through, it already means it’s good at going viral. So, whatever you see ultimately on your For You page is already something that is evolutionarily fit, if we’re using that metaphor, to go viral. And then, these strategies replicate themselves because as humans, we engage in imitative learning. We replicate what we see. We assume things are the norm, the standard way to speak online, because that’s what we know to be our reality.
DANIEL: You point out in the book that what happens online doesn’t stay online, that there are certain words and phrases that we use, certain so-called algospeak terms that we use to avoid internet censorship. And then, these terms take on a life of their own. And you mention, for example, UNALIVE and there are loads more examples. So, the boundary between internet and real life, I’ve always thought of them as pretty hard set, but it seems a lot more porous than that now.
ADAM: Right. I think that’s one thing I’m trying to make people realize. The book opens with that example of UNALIVE. And on the 30th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s suicide, the Seattle Museum of Pop Culture put up an exhibit talking about how he unalived himself at 27 and it caused a huge backlash because people weren’t ready for that word in that context. But it’s happening. It’s happening whether you like it or not. It just felt especially weird because it’s a museum using this word that’s supposed to be used in a different context.
In middle schools, there’s children writing essays about Hamlet contemplating unaliving himself. And there’s classroom discussions on the unaliving that happens in Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde. And this is proof that… Unaliving, for those who don’t know you, can’t say the word KILL on TikTok and many people in the online space have chosen to use the word UNALIVE as a euphemism, replacing that. But it’s also taken on a new life as a euphemism offline.
DANIEL: You point out in the book that algospeak moves fast and dates very quickly. What efforts did you make to ensure that the book would stay up to date for as long as possible? Or, is that even a thing that you could do?
ADAM: Well, the book is not about these slang words. It’s about the infrastructure of algorithms and how that’s affecting language. My argument is that because we’re now in this… That we found the most addictive possible form of social media, we’re probably only going to continue to have our lives dominated by algorithms in the future, it’s about time we started talking about how that affects language.
And, yeah, I use words that I think are more evergreen, words that hopefully should stick around more, or words that might get stuck in this era, but at least it’s going to be a time capsule of this moment in time. It’ll still explain why we were talking like that in 2024. But yeah, it’s less about the words. It’s more about… I think algorithms are a huge inflection point in the history of language as a whole.
DANIEL: I was surprised by that too. I was expecting it to be about words, and I was surprised to find that it’s really about us.
ADAM: Well, at the end of the day, I always say that’s what language is too. Language is just who are we?
DANIEL: That’s us.
ADAM: What do we find compelling? That’s how we create words. And then, how do we share them with other people? And that’s language. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Let’s talk about that dynamic then because I’ve been thinking about attention a lot. I’ve been thinking about attention so, so much and how we chase it and how valuable it is. There are people who have lots and lots of money, but they will give up that money so that they can have attention. And for example, in elections, if you have attention, you have it. And if you don’t have attention, then you need to spend money.
ADAM: Right.
DANIEL: But if you have attention, you don’t need to spend as much money. So, how valuable is attention?
ADAM: Let me zoom out for a moment and first look at what these platforms are doing.
DANIEL: Okay.
ADAM: When they give you content, when they give you entertainment, they are commodifying your attention so they can cram in more ads, get more user data, and then, yeah, they’ll recommend you, I guess, “better content” as a result, but at the end of the day, they’re here to harness your attention to sell you things. That’s baked in to the platform structures. It’s baked into the algorithmic incentives that creators now have to work with. Which means downstream influencers are also using attentional tactics because they have to, because that’s the infrastructure that’s there.
So, we use whatever tricks we can to keep eyes on our videos. That means insane hooks in the first few seconds because 50% of your viewers will scroll away right away. It means including little micro hooks throughout the video to make sure, like if somebody’s attention starts to drift, to lock them back in. Having visual stimuli in the background sometimes, all this stuff.
And of course, language is not exempt from that. We use words that we think are going to get more attention. I sit down every day, do my research for my video, and then script it out in a way that’s both accurate to what I’m trying to present, but also in a way where I’m using words that I think are better at getting attention. I think about that very deliberately. Again, maybe people don’t think about as deliberately as I do. I’ve interviewed a lot of creators for this book and many of them do, but the ones that don’t, it works because it already innately is good for attention.
DANIEL: And so, if you decided to say, “Fuck it, I’m doing what I want. I’m not going to chase the algorithm,” what would happen? Would it find its own place? Would it find its own audience? Or, would it just dwindle?
ADAM: Well, always, this is always the thing, that you need to entertain people, like I said. So, if I put this on Substack and email my email subscribers, and they begin to think, “Wow, this guy is writing really boring essays,” they’re not going to start clicking on my emails. You always have to entertain people. You always have to be conscientious about how you’re doing it.
DANIEL: It seems to me that we’re hearing from a certain group of people who are… They’re the ones who decided that they had enough time to pursue this full time. And yet somehow, our brains see this very atypical group of attention seekers. Sorry.
ADAM: No, I’ll take it. Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay. And our brains go, “Oh, this is probably the norm.” I think there’s a lot of availability bias going on there. Am I getting that right?
ADAM: So, many biases. It’s really interesting, your perception of reality versus the behind the scenes. I make one-minute videos on TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels. For each of those one-minute videos, I probably put two to three hours of research in, 30 minutes of scripting, 30 minutes of filming, 30 minutes of editing, all of that goes in. So, there’s like four, maybe five hours of work in a single video and you watch in one minute. And that’s just one example of how you don’t think about all that, the production.
You don’t think about how the algorithm brings you things. There’s been proven to be a beauty score on TikTok, whatever that means, so they recommend more attractive people. Also, there’s an innate human social bias in what videos we like and then the algorithm amplifies natural human social bias on that level as well. So, on multiple levels, you’re now watching more attractive people. That’s, again, just one example here. You’re looking at more attractive people, you think, “Oh, this is what people are supposed to look like.” And then, you construct your worldview, thinking that I need to fit into this beauty standard.
Also, the algorithm amplifies extreme behaviors, which means that super extreme political views on either end of the aisle are going to be amplified. You’re going to have more of AOC and you’re going to have more of Marjorie Taylor Greene than you’re going to have Congressman Paul Tonko, because Paul Tonko is boring, centrist, establishment Democrat. But the algorithm is not going to amplify his message. So, you’ll have this sort of bimodal distribution of political beliefs.
And then, we have this perception gap in real life that we think other people’s views are more extreme than they actually are. And this perception gap has been proven to be growing over time. Why? Because the algorithms are recommending us a different filtered version of reality that is more entertaining, that has more eyeballs on it.
DANIEL: Is there a way out of this? Is there a way for us to say, “Okay, you know what? I’m probably not getting the real picture here.” How do we break out of this?
ADAM: Yeah, I don’t think algorithms are completely bad. I think they can be a good platform for communicating messages. I certainly think that… I mean, I wouldn’t have a job, maybe I’m biased here. I’m glad that I can use algorithms to communicate all these cool ideas about linguistics I have.
At the same time, I do think it’s probably pretty good to be on multiple platforms, get your news from multiple platforms, support creators on multiple platforms, just engage with non-algorithmic media because that’s taken away your agency in the world.
DANIEL: I have kind of a weird question. What do you think was the bigger deal? Printing press, internet, or phones in pockets? Which I know uses the internet, but if we can separate those out. They’re all kind of the same insofar as they allow different people to seize the reins. But then, the phones in pockets thing, it feels different to me. What do you think?
ADAM: There’s always institutional gatekeepers at each step. With the implementation of the printing press, yeah, we have mass production of books, so you can’t just gatekeep Bibles to be in Latin anymore or whatever. But now, you also have language academies set up and institutions that regulate how we’re printing books.
Then, we have the internet. We allow for the written replication of informal speech. But at the same time, internet starts centralizing around certain platforms. These platforms due to Section 230 of the Communications Act, they can just regulate speech however they want to. They can decide what’s advertiser friendly and either demonetize you or strike your videos if you’re not up to code. And now, creators have to mold their speech within what the platform wants. So, there’s always going to be gatekeepers.
The phones in pockets and the vertical short form video and the algorithmic media allows for no manufactured consent in who gets to have a voice. There’s no institution saying, “This person gets to talk, this person doesn’t.” But at the same time, maybe there’s a new institution, and that institution is the platforms themselves. The platforms control, “Okay, the only people who get a voice are the people who are also making us money as a byproduct.”
DANIEL: Yeah, I thought of the life before the internet and thought, “Oh, yeah, we have gatekeepers. There are editors, there are news folks.” And then, the internet version 1, “Hey, this is the democratisation. There are less gatekeepers,” and now, “Oh, we’ve got gatekeepers again.”
ADAM: It might be unfortunately innate to human structure that we organize ourselves in layers like that.
DANIEL: Mm.
ADAM: I try to draw a lot of analogies to previous mediums in my book because again, this isn’t just a book about explaining words or something. It’s a book about this frame shift in how we’re using language. And there was censorship in books too.
In 1948, when the American author, Norman Mailer, tried to publish his book, The Naked and the Dead, they wouldn’t let him publish his copy because he used the F-word too many times. So, he replaced it with the word FUG, with a G. And today we have people replacing the word SEX with SEGGS with a G because the algorithm won’t allow the word SEX. And so that’s exactly the same phonetic process happening.
It’s not like a new thing. I do think algorithms are compounding and amplifying human speech and making it happen faster than ever before, perhaps, but the underlying linguistic process is not new. And it’s so much more than algorithmic censorship, which is the easiest to point to example of this so-called algospeak. I think it’s happening with memes, trends, attentional tactics which ingroups and echo chambers are being formed that then serve as incubators for the creation of new language and then how language spreads outside of those communities to a broader demographic as a whole.
DANIEL: One cool insight I got was that some terms have been created to avoid algorithmic censorship, like SEGGS or LE DOLLAR BEAN for LESBIAN.
ADAM: Right. That is kind of out of fashion now. Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah, I know, still love it. But sometimes, self-censorship like this is the only way that some people can communicate their experiences, like, “Oh, I want to talk about a thing that I went through. Oh, no, that’s a banned term. Now, I’ll have to hide it somehow.”
ADAM: Right. We’re constantly coming up with new ways to express ourselves based on our perception of what reality is when we think… Sometimes, we don’t know what the algorithm is actually going to the censor or not, but we overcorrect as well. But it’s kind of a game of Whack-a-mole where the algorithm starts censoring something and then a new word pops up, and then the algorithm starts censoring that, and then a new word pops up again. That’s not new.
DANIEL: Are you seeing this process in real time? I know that you’ve described how it’s like, “Oh, that last video got like one view. I must have done something wrong. I wonder what it was.”
ADAM: The word UNALIVE is also now censored. I did a series on incel language recently to promote my book, and unfortunately, some of those videos got struck because they were using incel language. So, even if I’m talking about it in an educational capacity, it’s still a dangerous line to tread. So, I was sort of navigating the boundary right there. Yeah, for sure you can feel the algorithm rerouting in real time, that’s definitely happening.
DANIEL: You have a chapter in the book on appropriation, which I thought was really fascinating. And I’ve got some questions here from our listeners because I mentioned, “Hey, we’re talking to Adam Aleksic. Do you want to throw us some questions?” And they always have really good questions. So, this one’s from Diego. If you’ve read the book, this won’t be difficult to answer, but let’s just hear your take on it. ‘How do the internet and social media platforms contribute to linguistic appropriation? Are there any trends, like certain groups “stealing” from other groups?’
ADAM: Yeah. Well, nobody wakes up thinking, “Oh, I’m going to steal from African American English.” That’s not…
DANIEL: No.
ADAM: It happens because of a phenomenon called context collapse, where you perceive a message as coming to a different audience than it was intended. And let’s explain how this happens faster and more immediately online. Algorithm creates these echo chambers, these filter bubbles where people feel like they’re speaking to their community. Most of the time, these videos get sent out just to that person’s community. So, they can speak as if they’re speaking to their own people. They actually don’t know who their audience is. They have an idea in their head of who the audience is, but the algorithm might reevaluate that and send it to who’s going to make more money.
Now, somebody outside of that initial group also happens to be caught in the additional group of who the algorithm’s sending the video to. And then, I don’t know, maybe they’re peripheral. Like, if this is African American English and it’s a Black creator trying to speak to other people in the Black community, maybe it gets somebody who’s like, I don’t know, Latino somebody who’s like close, has a lot of Black friends, I don’t know, they still feel in the community. And then, they start using this word because it’s on your For You page, you think it’s for you, and it comes back to what we were talking about earlier with your construction of reality.
You see what’s on your For You page, you don’t think about the fact that the algorithm might not have sent this to the right people. You don’t think about the fact that the creator might not have made this for you. So, you look at this person. This person’s usually looking in your eyes. It’s parasocial. Your phone’s right there next to your face as you’re lying on the side of your bed and it’s a unique kind of haptic sensor experience. All this makes it feel like this is a message for you. And then, you look at it and you’re like, “Yeah, that’s a cool or funny word that this person’s using. I want to start using that word,” and then you do.
But now, when you use the word, you’re talking to a completely different audience. And your audience is way outside of that initial filter bubble, echo chamber community that person was trying to speak to. And just like that, with only one degree of replication, there’s hundreds online. With only one degree of replication, we’re already seeing a word move well beyond its original community.
And algorithms have these sort of porous boundaries to what the echo chamber actually is. There’s gradients of how involved people are in communities, and the more successful a video is within a community, the more the algorithm will push it out, paradoxically. So, true efforts at building community will always leak out, and then memes diffuse across the Internet, and then we lose the context, that’s the context collapse. We forget where it comes from. And by losing that, we feel even more empowered to use it. There’s people who always feel this sort of gut reaction to, “Oh, I don’t think I’m stealing a word. I heard this from another white person,” or something. And that’s just like explaining how this process happens.
DANIEL: So, I am watching the feed. I’m getting things on my For You page that weren’t initially for me. But now, they’re for me, and then I start using them, and now I kind of am that person. I mean, I’m not that person, but I sound like that person.
ADAM: Yeah. It’s a circular construction of identity, I think. Now, we do like to pretend like our online selves are different than our offline selves, but again, it bleeds in. And I talk a lot about identity formation with labels, like aesthetic microlabels on TikTok, that’s very common. You can be cottagecore, goblincore, or pastel goth or cyber goth or whatever. And all these labels, one, they serve to categorize you better, so the algorithm now knows how to send you more targeted videos. Two, their creators attempt to latch onto this algorithmic imaginary what we think is going on, how we think we can reach our audience. Three, they’re all microtrends. We’re also just tapping into that. We’re hijacking ongoing trends that the algorithm then pushes further, that more people then interact with, that more creators then hijack. I call that the engagement treadmill. And on your end, it’s a really fun little aesthetic. It’s cute, but it’s also packaged as a lifestyle. And now, you’re packaging your own lifestyle in this little label. And some people do it consciously, some people do it subconsciously, but the existence of these words means we define our identity in relation to them.
DANIEL: Okay, now we’re getting to the etymology questions. So, you’re answering these in your capacity as Etymology Nerd. So, this could go anywhere. Aengryballs asks, if you could forget one language you speak and replace it with a different language with the same level of proficiency, what would it be? Ooh.
ADAM: Oh, that’s a dangerous one. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: You’ve got one language you speak… I don’t even know what your repertoire is.
ADAM: Well, personally, I mean, I speak obviously, English. I could have a decent conversation in Spanish. And I grew up speaking Serbian or Croatian or whatever that language is, the four of them.
DANIEL: Yeah, it’s got many names. [LAUGHS]
ADAM: I think those languages are pretty central to my identity. And I know enough Latin to kind of read it, and that’s very helpful as well for English etymology. I really wouldn’t want to replace one. I feel like I’d anger a demographic if I say that as well.
DANIEL: The languages you chose or you chose them, or they chose you, and those things are kind of you. How do you get rid of them and say, “Oh, I’d like to replace it with something I don’t have any connection to so far”?
ADAM: I guess, gun to my head, I guess Serbian or Croatian can go. And I’ll put in Chinese or something to be more useful, but that’s not… No hate to my fellow Serbs. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: We will take that under advisement. Thank you. Yavod asks, what are the biggest differences and similarities between internet dialectology and out-in-the-field dialectology? Do you have answer for that one?
ADAM: Yeah. Well, dialects on the internet are also… It’s kind of like we see dialects offline dying out, we see accents dying out, and there’s a lot of concern, like, is the internet just killing them? I do think the internet is sort of maybe supplanting them in its own way.
DANIEL: Do you?
ADAM: It’s creating new dialects.
DANIEL: Okay.
ADAM: I think each Discord server has its own unique style of speaking. I think each online community has their own unique style of speaking. It is just how human language naturally works. We find the best way to communicate with the people we want to be communicating with in each specific group. And anytime that group gets a little isolated or gets their own community, they’re going to modify their speech a little bit. It’s actually really fun doing dialectology on the internet.
DANIEL: Yeah. So, how do you go about it? I mean, obviously… here’s my problem. We have a thing called Words of the Week. And at the end of the year, when the Words of the Year roll in from different places, I’m like, “Gah, I missed that one.” And I was looking for it, and I missed it because it blended into my normal speech so naturally or I just wasn’t in the right place at the right time. Do you have a trick for noticing things when they change or when they pop up?
ADAM: Well, I have an extra cool hack as an online linguist. Now that I’m conducting my research in the open on the internet, people just tag me in videos when there’s new, trending slang words. So, I’m usually seeing where these words come from a lot faster than most people. It gives me extra access to language change behind the scenes. And I think the brainrot community, especially like the meme aesthetic community, they’re coming up with new language all the time. I’m sort of tapped into what’s going on there. But then occasionally, I’ll get tagged in a K-pop video. I don’t watch K-pop, but they’ll be like, “Hey, this is new.” And then, that’s exactly my way. I think more people should be conducting their research in the open.
DANIEL: Well, it sounds like you’re building community. That’s what that sounds like to me.
ADAM: Maybe my community has its own dialect as well.
DANIEL: True. Let’s see. James asks: What false etymologies are surprisingly stubborn? Not just widely believed, but hard for people to let go of even when the word’s real history is laid out for them.
ADAM: Well, the classic example is the acronym etymologies. Back before the internet, people would say, “Oh, the F word comes from fornication under the consent of the king.” You’ll still see that kind of stuff circulating on the internet, but we see a new genre of etymological acronym back formations on the internet. The word GYATT, for example, which comes from African American English, was reanalyzed as either, “Girl, you ate that,” or, “Girl, your ass thick.” [DANIEL LAUGHS] And the fact that people think that’s the etymology. I think maybe more people think that as the etymology than understand that it comes from an exaggerated pronunciation of GOD from the word GODDAMN.
DANIEL: Oh, my gyott. Yep.
ADAM: Right. Yeah, but it’s exaggerated in a way that’s like, comedic or whatever. The fact that more people think gyatt means, “Girl, you ate that,” means it’s easier to forget that it comes from the African American English speaker community at all. And that’s another way, another mechanism for these words to diffuse through filter bubbles.
DANIEL: Since we’re here, maybe you could straighten me out on something. I was trying to figure out the etymology of THOT, that is to say a promiscuous woman. From African American culture.
ADAM: Oh, it’s definitely not “that hoe over there.”
DANIEL: Okay.
ADAM: That’s the fake one.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s the first thing I thought, because I thought, well, it’s never that. And then, I tried to find out where it did come from. And the farther back I went, it seemed like… I’m no expert, but it seemed like the signal for the acronym was getting stronger as I went.
ADAM: Interesting. I think it comes from the 1990s rap scene. I’m not quite sure. I think I looked into this at one point too, and I just said, origin unknown.
DANIEL: Okay. It’s never an acronym. It’s never an acronym.
ADAM: Yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: PharaohKatt asks: If you could invent one false etymology [SCOFFS] and have everyone believe it, what would it be? [LAUGHS]
ADAM: What are these targeted questions? Ideally, as linguists, I’m not inventing fake etymologies.
DANIEL: Come on, man, do it. Make an acronym. [LAUGHS]
ADAM: My last name is Aleksic. Aleksič in Serbo-Croatian, right? And people sometimes say, it’s funny that sounds like LEX, like the word thing. So, I have people believe that my last name comes from “toward words” or “against words,” either one. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I like it. I have just found out that the word GUN comes from something like Gunhilda, a woman’s name.
ADAM: Yeah, yeah. It was also referred to bigger cannon barrels at some point a narrowed in definition. But it was like, yeah, this big cannon is like a big Norse woman or something. Yeah.
DANIEL: I couldn’t believe… I thought it for sure it would go back to something old English, but it’s a woman’s name.
ADAM: What was always crazy to me is that GUY, like guys, like when you talk about a group of guys or something, that just comes from Guy Fawkes, the guy who tried to blow up English Parliament. And then, it got like semantically bleached into like any contemptible man and then it got bleached into any man. And now, you just used the word GUY — you guys — all the time. And it’s just this dude that tried to blow up Parliament, that’s crazy to me.
DANIEL: It’s amazing. Do you have a favorite etymology? Probably the most annoying question you get asked.
ADAM: Such an annoying question. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: My favorite etymology is that algorithms were invented by Mr Algorithm.
ADAM: Al-Khwarizmi.
DANIEL: That’s the guy.
ADAM: Yeah.
DANIEL: I love that.
ADAM: That’s a good one. Very topical to a book about algorithms changing language too. Well, in that exact vein, he also invented ALGEBRA and that comes from the Arabic word, al-jabr, meaning like the reshuffling of bones or something. But that’s the same guy that the word algorithm comes from. And I think the word ZERO also came from ṣifr, which was an Arabic word coming from… There’s a lot of mathematical innovation at the time in that area. Sifr is also the root of the word CIPHER. Yeah, there’s a lot of really cool stuff there.
DANIEL: So good. What are you hoping that people will do as a result of reading Algospeak?
ADAM: I hope people will be more aware, and that’s the call in the last chapter. I’m laying out this whole roadmap of how algorithms are not just affecting our language but affecting our culture. Language is a proxy for understanding culture here. And everybody should be making their own calls about what words do you actually want to be using. Now that you know where these words come from, do you still want to be using these words? That’s your call. Everybody should be thinking, “Wow, how much is my phone affecting me and my construction of reality? Do I want to be using algorithms as much?” That’s your call. I personally really advocate for mixing different forms of media.
The algorithms can be pretty good for certain kinds of communication but let’s not forget that we can communicate in longform books as well, so people should buy the book. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: The book is Algospeak: How Social Media is Transforming the Future of Language by Adam Aleksic, available now from Knopf. Adam, thanks so much for joining us. This has been so fun.
ADAM: Thank you for having me.
[MUSIC]
[INTERVIEW ENDS]
DANIEL: It’s time for Words of the Week, and this first one was suggested to us a while ago by James on our Discord. And we just got a recording on SpeakPipe from Linda, and here’s what she has to say.
LYNDA: Hello there, podcasters extraordinaire. This is Lynda Franco. I have a nomination for Word of the Week. At the risk of overrepresenting American culture, consider the impact over the past few weeks that the term GETTING COLDPLAYED has had. [LAUGHTER] I don’t know how long lived this term will be, but it’s really getting its minutes here in the US.
BEN: Oh, man.
DANIEL: Yeah, it took us a while, but we finally got to this one.
BEN: What a moment.
HEDVIG: I feel a little bit bad for these people.
DANIEL: Are we feeling bad or is it good that somebody finally got consequences for bad behaviour?
BEN: Look, I… mm…
HEDVIG: It’s good to get consequences for your bad behaviour, but are these consequences in proportion anymore?
DANIEL: I don’t know. Good question.
BEN: Yes. I do actually get where Hedvig’s coming from on this one, and it’s going to… [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Can we please just say what we’re talking about here?
BEN: On the scorecard of those things I was not expecting to be in today’s episode. One, continuously, like the oldest fuddy duddy in the room. Two: like, infidelity apologist, but…
HEDVIG: That’s not what I said!
BEN: No, no, no. I know, I know. But this is the thing. If for even a second you sort of say, “Hey, guys, maybe we’re going a bit hard here,” the thing that everyone rounds on you is like, “Oh, so you think it’s fine then?” That’s not what I said.
DANIEL: Somebody please tell us what we’re talking about. People will be listening to this…
HEDVIG: At a lot of events, especially in America, people like to point a camera at someone in the audience and show them on a big screen like a jumbo jet. And it’s sometimes called Kiss Cam and you zoom in on a couple and then everyone goes, “Kiss, kiss, kiss.” And then presumably, if they are like in a couple and like to kiss in front of people, they will kiss. Sometimes, they zoom in on siblings or like people who don’t know each other, best friends and it gets awkward. In this case, they zoomed in on a man standing behind a woman cuddling her, and it turned out that they both were very embarrassed.
BEN: And they both dived, like dived out of the shot.
HEDVIG: They tried to hide their faces in a very sort of funny way.
DANIEL: In an admission of guilt way.
HEDVIG: And it turned out that these people were having an affair. And it turned out also that this was a CEO.
BEN: And it turns out that Chris Martin, he actually says that out loud, he’s like, “That’s weird. Only people having an affair would react that way.” And then, people behind those people point at them and smile and go, “Yeah.” [LAUGHTER] Have you not seen this, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: I didn’t see that bit.
BEN: There’s people around them just being like, “You got it, Chris Martin of Coldplay.”
HEDVIG: Former CEO. Has he lost his job?
BEN: He has.
DANIEL: It was the former CEO — he has resigned — of US tech company, Astronomer, Andy Byron and the company’s head of HR, Kristin Cabot.
BEN: Which is bad.
DANIEL: That’s not… that’s not rock and roll.
BEN: That’s really, really bad.
HEDVIG: Yeah. That is bad.
BEN: It would be like if you were the chief safety inspector for some sort of very important safety-oriented organisation and there was a video of you just being like, “I love starting fires randomly,” or something. It’s like: I do the one thing my job is telling me not to do.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Very much.
BEN: So, what’s the actual Word of the Week out of this, Daniel? So, the event is the thing, and it has been pretty global.
DANIEL: So, there are a number of items that have come from this one that Lynda suggested was GETTING COLDPLAYED. [BEN LAUGHS] Also, COLDPLAYING. GETTING COLDPLAYED is the act of being unintentionally exposed while cheating, especially in public, usually during major events. However, also KISSCAM. My mind is on CAM for a second. The combining form CAM, we’ve seen DASHCAM. That’s the first one that I could probably find, popular in the ‘70s, first pops up in the Oxford English Dictionary, 1998. But there are other kind of cams as well. How many cams do you know?
BEN: I know CAMCORDER.
DANIEL: Yep. WEBCAM.
BEN: Webcam. CONFESSIONCAM from like reality TV.
DANIEL: Oh, right. Okay.
BEN: Yeah. Daniel is…
HEDVIG: HANDYCAM?
BEN: …like, “They put cameras in confession booths. What?”
DANIEL: Yeah, that would be… Why not, why would they not?
HEDVIG: HANDYCAM?
BEN: HANDYCAM. Yep.
DANIEL: STEADICAM, which keeps the camera steady. It’s a very useful combining form.
BEN: And it always just does mean CAMERA, doesn’t it?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: It’s just a cam.
BEN: Okay. My favorite moment from this whole like Coldplay thing was from up-and-coming comedian who people on TikTok might be familiar with, called Gianmarco Soresi, whose work I quite enjoy. And he was being asked about this, and he said, “Look, all I can say is this if you were this poor woman who was the wife of the man who was cheating at least you can take solace in the fact that as they were caught at a Coldplay concert, you know that they’re only ever doing it missionary.”
HEDVIG: I did see that. I did hear that people have been really cruel to this woman and like writing mean things to her online and that she’s… I just think it… Look, you shouldn’t be… It’s also stupid. If you are having an affair, don’t go to a public place where even if you don’t get caught on the Kiss Cam, someone you know might just see you. It’s just dumb. So, you’re being dumb and mean.
BEN: Here’s what I’ll say about the level of notoriety is, like, may, in my worst fuck up in my life, I not be in that moment catapulted into global notoriety and knowledge. I don’t think anyone deserves that. This could have been a cataclysmic event within all of these people’s lives anyway and it would have been awful and terrible and there would have been divorce and all this kind of stuff. No one deserves to be the standard bearer globally for infidelity or something, that is unfair. And I do… I can’t believe I’m saying this, I do feel for these people a little bit because it’s orders of magnitude beyond anything that they could have possibly anticipated happening.
DANIEL: I feel like having a Kiss Cam is having cameras everywhere that could be trained on random people. I know that you’re in public and I feel like invasions of privacy can happen in public. That’s what I think.
BEN: Yeah, these guys just lost. They lost so bad. They lost as hard as you can lose in this particular situation.
DANIEL: Now, let’s see. Does anyone know about the GEN ZED STARE or GEN Z STARE? Has anyone heard of this?
BEN: Yes.
HEDVIG: Yes, I do.
DANIEL: You know more than I do, so let me know what this is.
HEDVIG: So, it’s all over TikTok and many other places. There’s this thing where like the Gen Z people on social media was making fun of some Millennials, for example, for the Millennial pause or whatever like there are these different things that people. And in the grand scheme of things, if all we’re getting made fun of is like not interacting with social media in the way they do and that’s kind of fine by me. But apparently now, some Millennials have pointed out that… this is connected, I think, to the Gen Z not saying hello potentially, if that is what they’re doing. I’m still not convinced that’s the case.
DANIEL: We’re paying out Gen Zed on this show.
BEN: No, we’re defending them, to be clear.
DANIEL: I guess we are, actually.
HEDVIG: Yeah. I also think we’re picking up on minuscule distributional differences. Not everyone is doing everything. But supposedly, what can happen in certain hospitality work or retail work is that you’re a customer and you say, “Oh, I’d to like a cappuccino,” or something, or coming into the restaurant and the young employee will just supposedly stare at you with a very impassive face and not say hello or welcome, “And I’ll get that for you,” or something.
BEN: Yeah. It’s another piece of evidence that… And when I say piece of evidence, I want you to imagine a big set of air quotes, that Gen Z is socially inept in some sort of key way. “They don’t know how to do conversation. They don’t know how to do phones. They don’t know how to do social graces.”
HEDVIG: And they’re defending themselves by saying, “We only do that when you guys are stupid.” So, “This is a tea place, and we don’t have cappuccinos. I’m staring at you because you’re being dumb.” And then people are saying, “No, you’re doing that in the wrong places as well.” And there’s this whole, people are like…
BEN: It’s a real… I find the generational tribalism of social media space is really boring and uninteresting. And also, I think anyone who genuinely believes that there is this inherent tribalism are also the sort of people who believe that Love Island is a really anthropologically accurate read on American love culture at a particular time. Which is to say, I think you have to be almost psychopathically naïve to believe these things to be true. Sure, are there going to be some Gen Z people who are super socially inept? Absolutely. Guess what? There’s people my age who are. There’s people Daniel’s age who are. There’re Boomers who are like. There’s been many a person… Okay, if I may, a story from Ben Ainslie’s life from in the wild.
DANIEL: Sit down, kids.
BEN: I went to the auto parts store because one of my indicator lights had stopped working and I needed to replace the bulb. I had purchased the bulb, and I went outside to the car park of said store to install the bulb because I wanted to make sure that I had, in fact, got the right bulb. With my bonnet or hood up and top half of my body fossicking around inside the engine bay of my car, I heard, and I’m going to do the accent because it was, to my ears, a very cute interaction, [IN A RUSSIAN ACCENT] “Hello.” And I look around… Now, for those who might only be tuning in for the first time. Ben Ainslie lives in Perth, Western Australia. And I turn around and I’m like, “Oh, hi.” And there was a younger than me, probably in his early 30s, apparently, Russian man standing there just smiling at me. And I said, “Hi, how are you?” And he goes, [IN A RUSSIAN ACCENT] “You do work on car?” And I just sort of like look down at me very obviously and clearly doing work on my car and go, “Yep, just replacing an indicator bulb.” And he pointed at the little bit where you put water in for the washer fluid of your car. And he’s like, [IN A RUSSIAN ACCENT] “You need fresh cap for this.” And I was like, “Yep, I do.”
HEDVIG: Probably, yeah.
DANIEL: Just get me out of here.
BEN: And well, see, here’s the thing. He was so disarmingly not aggressive or odd or whatever. He wasn’t engaging in the social interaction in a way that I am accustomed to, but also was not giving off creeper vibes in any way. So, I was just rolling with it. And anyway, as he was talking to me, I was still doing this thing. And then, I finished, I was like, “Well, that’s me.” [CLAPS HANDS] And he goes, [IN A RUSSIAN ACCENT] “Okay, bye!” and just walked away. [LAUGHS]
So, the point of that story, everyone, is that sometimes social interactions play out in a way that is deeply unfamiliar to you, but not necessarily bad. Like, something not going the way you expect it to doesn’t make it wrong, necessarily, or bad. And, I don’t always get this right, but if you just kind of roll with the punches, often you will just be quite pleasantly surprised and you walk away with a neato story to tell people about an interaction that you had.
DANIEL: Well, I am going to defend the strategy. When you’re dealing with an unhelpful or angry or irate customer, the strategy of simply sitting and staring silently while they sputter to a close.
BEN: [LAUGHS] We’ve got so many panderers today.
DANIEL: And then, you can tackle… Once you’ve listened, then you can tackle what the problem is, but you haven’t bought into their anger. You are simply a mountain of silence. And then, you can go on ahead and help that person.
BEN: You’re like a conversational Bruce Lee. You must be like water.
DANIEL: And also, you’re not having any.
BEN: Right. Okay.
DANIEL: You’re waiting.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I wonder… I’m interested in this Gen Z stare at hospitality and retail work in America because a common complaint by Europeans who go to America is that it’s too much like, “Ooh, and can I get you a water? My name is Julian. I’ll be your waiter today.”
BEN: Yes, 100% right. Like, “Hello, sir, how can I help you today?”
HEDVIG: And Europeans famously often find that a bit uncomfortable and familiar and are like, “I am not your friend. Why are we on first name basis? And why are you…? Please bring me a coffee and go away.” And with a lot of screens that you order at or tablets that you order at and more like that being automated… for me, a person who likes to like sit and look at the menu and not have someone smiling over me and being like, “Today’s specials,” I like it. And maybe you can call that socially inept or unfamiliar, but maybe a lot of younger people in America prefer that. And then when there’s a bit of a clash where people expect you to do certain things, then you get this stare, maybe.
DANIEL: Are we talking about norms being negotiated again? Maybe this is what we’re talking about.
HEDVIG: Maybe they’re going to get rid of tips.
BEN: [LAUGHS] I still think that I’m going to put my money on, we’re talking about a skill issue. We’re talking about people who, for a huge… Because Gen Z is still very young in the sense that the individuals of Gen Z that you’re going to come across in the workplace are like 20 and younger. What’s the…
HEDVIG: Oldest members of Generation Z are roughly 28 years old.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: I remember how I was. I was still young at that point.
BEN: No, that is kind of old. I was thinking…
DANIEL: Ah, okay, we’re getting up there.
BEN: Okay, yeah, fair enough. But a good middle chunk is still quite young. And I think if you’re 20 or 21 and your adolescence has been largely mediated and your social interactions have been largely mediated through screens, I do think you’re going to be less adept at conversational ways than people who spent all of their teenage life sitting and talking with people, because that was the only… Hedvig, are you just old enough to remember sitting on the phone for hours with your friends?
HEDVIG: I did call landlines. I have a funny story about that because I was talking one time and I was running around our apartment and I was like, I guess, 13. And somehow, I tripped and I fell flat like this while I was talking on the phone with like quite full speed. And there was some bags of trash at the hall and [BEN LAUGHS] I put my face straight into them and I just like bonk. And I was on the phone to my friend and I just hysterically started laughing because it hurt and it was very funny. She was like, “What is going on?” And I was just like, “I just fell. I just stumbled.”
DANIEL: I just fell into the garbage.
BEN: I’ve just got the memory. The reason I was laughing so hard is because I was imagining the radio play that your friend heard. It’s amazing. [LAUGHTER] And then, maniacal hysterical laughter on your part. But probably tinged with pain, like, audibly, noticeably…
HEDVIG: Yeah, it hurt.
BEN: …like she’s clearly in pain but laughing like a crazy person.
HEDVIG: It was mainly… anyway.
BEN: The point I’m making is 20-year-olds do not have those memories and did not have the hours and hours and hours of sitting on phones and talking to your friends and all that kind of stuff. They’re just a little bit less experienced and they’ll get there.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I get that. But also, like, they’re better in chatrooms probably.
BEN: Yeah, almost certainly. Definitely.
HEDVIG: Right. Yeah.
DANIEL: I like where this is going. I like how we’re saying no to generational warfare. That’s positive. Let’s finish up with this one. Hedvig, you showed me this one. Let’s listen to a TikTok video.
BEN: Oh, yeah, I saw this as well.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
TIKTOK VIDEO: A friend of mine has coined the term SLOPPERS for people who are using ChatGPT to do everything for them. I think that’s amazing. That’s incredible verbiage, slopper. That’s such a good slur, bro. Slopper.
BEN: [LAUGHS] It is. It’s such a good slur. It’s hard.
HEDVIG: It’s good.
BEN: It comes in there strong.
DANIEL: What kinda slopper are you?
HEDVIG: And the comment section is pretty good as well. So, this guy’s friend, Monica, invented the word SLOPPER for people who use ChatGPT to do work. And in the comment section there was also SECONDHAND THINKERS, which I thought was pretty good as well.
DANIEL: Oh, nice, nice, nice.
HEDVIG: And yeah, I like it.
DANIEL: Let’s not forget that this comes from AI SLOP, which has been a Word of the Week for us before. The slop that comes to us is obviously fake, like all the piss-tinged graphics that we see. Did anyone notice that one fake band, what was it? Velvet Sundown? And it was an AI band, and I knew it was an AI. And people were like, “Are they real or is it AI?” I knew it was AI because the sepia-tinged band photo looked like it had been soaked in piss, like everything else from AI these days because of the Studio Ghibli filter that’s been…
HEDVIG: Something like that.
DANIEL: …sort of descended over everything.
BEN: Yeah. I will admit in my TikTok feed I’m seeing… So, what this person is talking about is people who use it for like everything. And I didn’t understand this, that there are… I saw a different TikTok where a person was recounting being on a first date and their date sitting down at this place and looking at the menu and then getting their phone out and asking ChatGPT, “I’ve just sat down at X restaurant. What should I get?” And I think this is the thing that video is talking about, is the people who are like now bringing AI usage into just weird everyday realms.
DANIEL: That’s secondhand thinking.
BEN: Yeah. And I just… again, this is like the 15th time in this episode where I’m just like the old guy, I don’t get that like at all. I do not understand… I’m sure someone will get on here and drop a comment about like, “Oh, you don’t understand. Some people have like really bad social anxiety,” or something. And I’m like, “Okay, maybe.”
HEDVIG: Not many people have that bad though.
BEN: Just, it boggles my mind.
HEDVIG: I think there is a golden lining to this, which is that if there are jobs where you can use AI slop instead of your actual job performance, then maybe those jobs…
BEN: Shouldn’t exist. Yeah.
HEDVIG: …are not good jobs. If you’re writing copy for the back of shampoo bottles, maybe that is fine that an AI does and maybe that’s not the end of the world. The problem is that we’re in a system where people need to have a job in order to have healthcare insurance and money. Like, that’s the problem as I see it.
BEN: My concern here is the same concern that I articulated at the top of the show about the reason we’re seeing the enshittification of YouTube and TikTok and all the rest of it is because the incentives are such that we just keep turning all the knobs up to 11 and everything’s already getting really shit. All of the streaming services have just become cable. They’re expensive cable. They all have ads again. They’re all really fucking annoying. The only thing they offer that cable didn’t was like a modicum of on-demandness. YouTube fucking sucks. Everything’s like 55 minutes long and most of it is trash and it’s full of ads and all that sort of shit.
My concern with the AI stuff and people using it all the time is that it will get very bad before we all start going, “Oh, actually, this is a bit fucked.” And it’s like, yeah, well, at some point we could start stopping things before they get really fucked up, maybe.
HEDVIG: What worries me the most is these reports of psychosis of like, “My AI assistant has told me that I am an enlightened being and I know the truth of the universe and I have made a perpetual energy machine,” or just…
BEN: Lisa, in this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics! [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yeah. Or like the people who are using it in their marital arguments, they’re being like, “My wife said this. That’s crazy, isn’t it? Why am I right?” And it’s like…
BEN: Why am I right? [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: They’re not saying that but they’re essentially saying that because these machines are made to agree with you, right?
BEN: No, no, no, I know. And look, at the end of the day, when you catch up with your mate in the pub and you complain about your spouse, you are essentially doing exactly that. “Blah, blah, blah. Why am I right?”
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] You are a little bit. But sometimes you have good friends who are like… that happens to me. I get a little bit angry and they’re like: Ste’s got a point. And I’m like: MUHHHHHH! [LAUGHTER]
BEN: How dare you?
HEDVIG: That’s healthy. That’s good. That’s what you want. I also worry that… not worry, but like… So, I use large language models sometimes in my work because I do coding and sometimes reading documentation or finding information about things is very hard. What’s good about that is that when it tells me, “Oh, this is how that works. So, this is this kind of structure,” I can test that. I can run it and I can look at the output and I can independently verify whether things do the thing I want. You can’t do that with, I don’t know, your marriage or whatever.
DANIEL: No, it’s not programming.
BEN: Sounds like quitter talk to me, Hedvig. Sounds like you’re not willing to put the data on the line.
DANIEL: Not with that attitude. So, KISS CAM, COLDPLAYING, GEN Z STARE, and SLOPPER, our Words of the Week. Let’s hear a comment from John on SpeakPipe. This is a different John, not the first John.
BEN: Ah, okay.
JOHN: Hello, John Kelly here. In episode 122 when Stephen Levinson was asked about what explains the most about language at around 46:30, he paused for a second and then Hedvig jumped in and said, empathy and collaboration. And I thought that was a perfect illustration of exactly what they were talking about. [HEDVIG LAUGHS] I don’t know if that was on purpose or by accident, but it was wonderfully meta.
DANIEL: Finishing each other’s sentences.
HEDVIG: That’s very cute that you interpret it that way. It is more that I’m a yapper [BEN LAUGHS] and that I have not a good threshold for when I should interrupt people and fill out their sentences. I’ve been told this and I’ve been trying for a long time to rein this in. And unfortunately, I also do it to people who are senior to me and in a higher authority. I have no good… I don’t know if his empathy or just megalomania, but…
DANIEL: And isn’t Stephen kind of your boss or a supervisor or something?
HEDVIG: He’s a senior colleague to me, yes. He’s not currently my employer. He has been.
DANIEL: Okay, very good. Well, I just like how John provided timings so that we could track that back to the original source.
BEN: Can I also say that John sounds remarkably like a young Donald Sutherland?
DANIEL: That missed me, but okay.
HEDVIG: Donald Sutherland.
BEN: Oh, god. Listen again. See if you can’t hear it.
HEDVIG: [TYPES] Donald Sutherland.
DANIEL: Okay, I’m not well versed enough in…
HEDVIG: Canadian actor.
DANIEL: Donald Sutherland to know, but John you can…
BEN: He’s got such a quintessential voice.
DANIEL: Yes, I’ve seen him in any number of films, but I don’t have a Donald Sutherland voice in my head.
BEN: Oh, fair enough. Fair enough, fair enough.
DANIEL: Like I do other people. Hey, thanks John. And thanks to our guest Adam Aleksic and everyone who gave stories, words and comments. Thanks to SpeechDocs for transcribing all the words and thanks to you, great patrons, for keeping us afloat. Ahoy there. Doot, doot.
HEDVIG: Doo-doo.
BEN: It’s Hedvig’s turn.
HEDVIG: I know. You keep yappin’ about it. Gimme a hot second…
BEN: Oh, okay. Sorry, [CROSSTALK] I thought you were looking at the thing and doing the thingy. I thought I had distracted you with Donald Sutherland. That’s my bad. I was trying to fix my own mistake.
HEDVIG: Ben, I have the thing of like, I’m looking at the thing and I’m like, my choices are, I need to go pee soon. So, do I just read out what Daniel has put, or do I do a funny other thing?
DANIEL: And wet yourself.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: And I was using a microsecond… I’m not going to wet myself. [LAUGHTER] I’m a very good bladder holder. And this comes from because my mom can talk on the phone for like four hours and we’re both excellent bladder holders.
DANIEL: Yeah, well, you know what? As a nearly 60-something, I’m finding that pee planning is becoming a part of my day.
BEN: Wow.
DANIEL: Get ready, kids.
BEN: Yeah, that’s a thing.
HEDVIG: Oh, my god. That’s very interesting to know.
DANIEL: Yeah. Just saying.
HEDVIG: Anyway, I have… For those who don’t know, at the end of the show we do what we call in our document, the reads, and they are divided into three parts and they are telling people to do follow us and contact us, read out all the patron names in a crazy new order and give credit to Didion’s Bible. So, I have the first one, so I have to say something funny but we already spruiked at the top of the show. Daniel’s going to cut all of this out, so I’ll start again.
DANIEL: I’m not.
BEN: If you…
DANIEL: Keep it going.
HEDVIG: If you like us, and who wouldn’t like us? You don’t need to love us, you just need to like us a little. If you enjoy hearing our voices, we do this show and we like to have listeners. And while we don’t want to get into an audio capture rabbit hole, we’d like to have more listeners. We’re not going to lie, it’d be fun if more people heard our ramblings. It’ll give us a sense of satisfaction in this life that we might not be able to achieve professionally or family wise otherwise. Therefore, you can do a number of things. You can follow us. We are becauselanguage.com on various social media platforms such as BlueSky and… Yeah, sorry, we are becauselanguage.com on BlueSky and we are @becauselangpod basically everywhere else, so that’s your Facebook, your Twitter, etc. You can also send us ideas, news and words like John and John did today.
BEN: Double John.
HEDVIG: You can go to our website, becauselanguage.com, and then there’s like a little button that says like SpeakPipe. You can also just do a voice note on your phone and send it at hello@becauelanguage.com. You can also send us other emails to be like, “Hey, I really like what you’re doing,” or, like, “You’re totally wrong about something,” or something else. You can get in touch with us.
One of the greatest ways of getting new podcast recommendations is friends. So, why don’t you tell a friend about our show if you liked it?
DANIEL: Telling us that you like us is more likely to get you a cohost spot than [BEN LAUGHS] telling us we’re wrong, historically.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: You can also, should you want to throw your support in a Because-Language-ward direction, become a patron. Patrons allow us to do all sorts of really neato things like offer a small stipend for the people who come on our show, many of whom just get us to donate it to a charity or something. But still, it’s really important that we acknowledge the value and the labour of those people who come on our show and do really cool and interesting work. It also allows us to transcribe all of our shows. So, if you want to torture someone by making them have to listen to all the words that I say and turn them into the written word, you can do that by becoming a patron.
And if you become a patron, you might get your name read out at the end of the show like I am about to do, but we have started changing up the order of the list. And like the crazy inventor in the basement who emerges with a hair askew and smoke trailing from some sort of contraption he’s just tinkered. Daniel, how have you accosted the list this week?
HEDVIG: Ben, have you looked at it? Because I tried to guess and I don’t know what the hell it is going on.
BEN: No, no. I do not have any idea here at all.
HEDVIG: He’s made two lists. Some of the people are in one list and some are in another. So, that’s the start of the insanity. I don’t know why Whitney is in one list and Rachel is in another.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm, and you won’t know until I tell you.
BEN: Yeah, there is such a weird thing going on here. Okay, so given the bog witch status that you have now ascended to, Daniel, what arcane magics have you wrought upon our patrons this week?
DANIEL: Well, my mom was visiting from the States for the past few weeks and it’s been so great to have her here. And one thing that we did every morning was just play Wordle together instead of playing Wordle like in separate places and sending our scores.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: So, I thought, I wonder, what was the Wordle word on the day that our various patrons made the decision to become a patron? So, I looked it up.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Never in a million years would I have got there.
HEDVIG: I was starting to notice that they were the same length.
DANIEL: They are all five letters.
HEDVIG: I was getting there.
DANIEL: Okay. And if you listen carefully, you might find that the Wordle word when you decided to come become a patron, is a key to your personality. What does it say about you? Let’s find out.
BEN: But hang on, Daniel, what about the order of the list? Because it’s not alphabetical according to either the name or the Wordle word.
HEDVIG: But, Ben, did you hear that he said something about dates?
BEN: Oh, so it’s the date on which they joined. Okay, gotcha.
DANIEL: Yes, indeed. It’s from earliest to latest. So go ahead, Ben, read the first bit and then of course, got another bit after that.
BEN: Okay, in a particular order, Andy from Logophilius: ABATE. Fiona: ADOBE. Stan: SPIKE.
DANIEL: That’s your nickname.
BEN: Kathy: MAXIM. Rach: FORTH. Felicity: ABACK. That’s a pretty cursed Wordle word, by the way.
DANIEL: That was a tough one.
BEN: Amir: COMET. Laura: BLURT. Canny Archer: GRIPE. [IN UNISON] O Tim: ASIDE. Alyssa: DEPOT. Ooh, that would have been another absolute noodle scratcher. Chris W: GAMER.
DANIEL: Nice.
BEN: Tadhg: AGONY. Luis: WINDY. Tony: FRIED. Wolfdog: RIDGE. Molly Dee: IMAGE. J0HNTR0Y: FLAME. sæ̃m: CHEER. James: STUNG. Linguistic C̷̛̤̰̳͉̺͕̋̚̚͠h̸͈̪̤͇̥͛͂a̶̡̢̛͕̰͈͗͋̐̚o̷̟̹͈̞̔̊͆͑͒̃s̵̍̒̊̈́̚̚ͅ: SHANK. Amy: VAPID.
DANIEL: That’s not a comment.
BEN: Aldo: REBEL.
DANIEL: That is a comment.
BEN: Mignon: BOAST. Faux Frenchie: BONUS. Rachel: HOVER. Sydney: SPEAR.
DANIEL: Now, this other list is from people who predate Wordle, because Wordle only came online in, like, what, June 2022, I think.
BEN: Insane.
DANIEL: We’ve got patrons who have been with us for a lot longer than that, so we would like to not give them a word but just honor them especially.
BEN: And now, is this also chronological? So, am I starting with the very oldest of our existing patrons?
DANIEL: Yes, you are, from back in 2016.
BEN: 2016, the grand pappy of the patron list. Whitney, Chris, L…
DANIEL: Thank you.
BEN: Helen.
HEDVIG: Thank you, Whitney.
BEN: Jack, PharaohKatt, Lyssa, Elías, gramaryen, Larry, [IN UNISON] LordMortis, Rene, Kristofer, Andy, Nigel, Meredith, Nasrin, Joanna, Nikoli, Keith, Ayesha, Steele, Margareth, Manú, Diego, Ariaflame, Rodger, Colleen, Ignacio, Sonic Snejhog, and Kevin. So, there is a divide betwixt Kevin and Andy from Logophilius, and that is the epoch that is Wordle’s emergence in the internet world.
DANIEL: Amazing. Thanks to all of you for supporting us for so long. And it’s a pleasure to see ya just about every day on the old Discord.
BEN: And we’ve got a couple of new patrons. I can’t help but note, Daniel, that none of these people have a Wordle name next to their names. That’s fine. I guess these people don’t count. At the Friend level, we have Christine. And hello to our newest free patrons, Sara, Ana O, Marie, Paige, Monica, and Lokkkk. That is L-O followed by four K’s, which is a good number of K’s. That’s one…
DANIEL: That’s a better number of K’s than less.
BEN: That is a safe number of K’s. So, thanks to all our patrons.
HEDVIG: Lokkkk might be a German football supporter.
BEN: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: Really? Okay. Awesome.
HEDVIG: Lots of different cities have a team called Lokomotive.
BEN: There we go.
DANIEL: And do they use a certain number of K’s?
HEDVIG: No, but that’s the only thing I can think of.
DANIEL: Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who also performs with Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
IN UNISON: Pew, pew, pew, pew.
DANIEL: Thank you both. This is great.
BEN: Thank you, Daniel.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]