129: They Started It: Children and Language Evolution (with Madeleine Beekman)

We’ve asked linguists about how language began, but what would an evolutionary biologist tell you? Prof Madeleine Beekman says it’s part of a complex web of body, brain, and community, and at the heart of it is (perhaps surprisingly) childcare. Madeleine is the author of The Origin of Language: How We Learned to Speak and Why.

Timestamps

Cold open: 0:00
Intros: 0:42
News: 9:07
Related or Not: 30:02
Interview with Madeleine Beekman: 49:43
Words of the Week: 1:40:49
Comments: 2:01:30
The Reads: 2:08:07
Outtakes: 2:17:38

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Show notes

Arizona Couple Wins Halloween Dressed As Viral Pig Show Girl Who Stares Into Your Soul
https://www.whiskeyriff.com/2024/10/28/arizona-couple-wins-halloween-dressed-as-viral-pig-show-girl-who-stares-into-your-soul/

The ASL Dictionary, Monolingual Edition
https://theasldictionary.com

History Made as ASL Joins Major Languages with All-ASL Dictionary
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251030799299/en/History-Made-as-ASL-Joins-Major-Languages-with-All-ASL-Dictionary

When the second language attracts but the first does not: A large-scale study of number agreement attraction in Czech learners of English
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bilingualism-language-and-cognition/article/when-the-second-language-attracts-but-the-first-does-not-a-largescale-study-of-number-agreement-attraction-in-czech-learners-of-english/017FB6723E804214F18D96AEAEE72B29

Neil and Saras Smith Medal for Linguistics
https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/prizes-medals/neil-saras-smith-medal-linguistics/

Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us by Nicholas Evans
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781444310450

Langues d’oïl | Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langues_d%27oïl

The History of the Guernsey Jumper
https://www.guernseywoollens.com/pages/history

The origin of language: How we learned to speak and why, by Madeleine Beekman
https://www.simonandschuster.com.au/books/The-Origin-of-Language/Madeleine-Beekman/9781761634369

[$$] A Comment on Design Features: Charles F. Hockett | JSTOR
https://www.jstor.org/stable/30028165

Jakobson’s Linguistic Model of Communication: Beyond the Transmission
https://journalism.university/fundamentals-of-development-and-communication/jakobsons-linguistic-model-communication-analysis/

More Than Words by Mary Ellen MacDonald
https://www.maryellenmacdonald.com/books/more-than-words

Supernormal Stimuli | Edge
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27203

[PDF] Nikolaas Tinbergen: The study of instinct
https://pages.uoregon.edu/avinash/Teach/AnimBeh/Art1_Tinbergen.pdf

“Chatfishing” is the new texting hack getting people more dates. There’s just one problem.
https://www.mamamia.com.au/what-is-chatfishing/

What Is Group 7? What to Know About the Viral Slang
https://www.eonline.com/news/1424081/what-is-viral-slang-group-7

https://bsky.app/profile/stephenwest.bsky.social/post/3m47ghhnj422s

Chinese kinship | Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_kinship

Kinbank
http://www.kinbank.net

Transcript

[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]

HEDVIG: Ste and I are moving from this town next year and we have talked about for five years going to see the local football team play. And they’re playing a game.

DANIEL: Oh, nice. [BEN LAUGHS]

HEDVIG: And they don’t always do that.

BEN: That’s good.

HEDVIG: And now, Ste has seen all the three local football teams lose at home. [BEN LAUGHS]

DANIEL: Yes.

BEN: As god intended.

[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]

DANIEL: Hello and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. I’m Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. First up, it’s Ben Ainslie. Ben, for this Halloween just gone, as you know, I was Protest Frog.

BEN: Yes.

DANIEL: I handed out buckets of candy with my tiny amphibian hands. I want to know if it impacted your life in any way, this Halloween thing, or if you observed any costume trends.

BEN: So, as I think one of the sort of probably best global pastimes for Halloween now is just the social media content that’s generated of people just doing incredible costume stuff, it’s like cosplay for not cosplayers, I guess. So, everyone…

HEDVIG: Oh.

BEN: I had my faves there. I had two favourites. I had one lady show up on my TikTok feed who made what I can only describe as a prodigiously well-articulated armadillo costume for her little like her six- or seven-year-old daughter that she could actually roll up in. And I also just have a huge affection for armadillos. I think they’re just great creatures. So, that was one.

And then, another one I saw was a couple’s costume of — and I’m sure this has probably hit your feed as well, Hedvig — they dressed up as the German girl at the pig contest. The really intense German girl who was showcasing the pig. Do you not know what I’m talking about? Hedvig, do you not have any understanding of this?

HEDVIG: Intense German girl showcasing a pig? No.

BEN: I won’t slow us down too much now, but I’m sure there’s a whole bunch of people listening to the podcast who are like, “Oh, yeah.” So, the guy was dressed in a very almost belittling pig costume.

DANIEL: Wow. Okay, we’ll have a link in the show notes for this episode. And we have Hedvig Skirgård. Hedvig, same question. Did Halloween touch your world this year?

HEDVIG: Yes, absolutely. I like Halloween. I like dressing up. I am one of those… I like a classic vampire, scary, Frankenstein…

BEN: Monster.

HEDVIG: I like the cohesion. I know that’s not everyone’s cup of tea and some people just dress up as whatever, but I like there to be a scary element. I think it’s good to be scary. I think kids need to be scared sometimes. I think scary stories for kids and scaring kids is something I’ve gotten into trouble for before. I think I’ve talked about before.

BEN: You got that crazy auntie energy.

HEDVIG: I just think there needs to be a bit of an edge in their world…

BEN: 100%, yeah.

HEDVIG: …and I understand that… I have understood in my later years that I should dial it back a little bit with some kids that I don’t know.

DANIEL: Scary is good because it prevents overfitting in their training data.

BEN: Overfitting. Can you explain that to a non-research scientist?

HEDVIG: Does it?

DANIEL: You know what I mean, Hedvig.

HEDVIG: I’m just thinking if it does.

DANIEL: Well, overfitting is a problem in machine learning because the algorithm learns the training data too well and so it can’t generalise to new problems. But having something scary just throws a spanner in that training data and keeps your brain from falling into a local minimum or maximum.

BEN: Keeps them on their toes.

DANIEL: Hmm.

HEDVIG: If you ever watch any Addams Family media, you’ll understand that they look very scary and they are the nicest people in the neighbourhood.

BEN: Yeah, yeah.

DANIEL: [LAUGHS] That’s right.

HEDVIG: It’s like Edward Scissorhands.

BEN: 100% and Gomez Addams, I think, low key is probably the single greatest template for unrelenting husband love. Like, he just loves his wife so much. [DANIEL LAUGHS]

HEDVIG: Yeah, he loves everything about her and always have.

DANIEL: So, we gave away thousands of pieces of candy this Halloween. And my observation, speaking of Addams Family, I found that the costume trend this year was Wednesdays. We had just…

HEDVIG: Oh.

DANIEL: Wednesdays for days.

BEN: Because it just come out, yep.

DANIEL: But all the costumes were really different from each other because ??? Beetlejuice is a really well-defined costume, stripey suit. But a Wednesday costume is much more of a vibe.

HEDVIG: Wait, what?

BEN: Yeah. It’s just vague, gothic lacy something, something.

HEDVIG: Isn’t it black dress with a white collar, a tie, braids?

DANIEL: Yep.

BEN: It should be noted though, Hedvig, you can manifest that in a lot of different ways, right? Like, the phrase “black dress” means many different things.

DANIEL: That’s what I saw. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

HEDVIG: I see. Well, maybe they did what I did, which is that… I didn’t go to a Halloween store and buy a black dress. I have a black dress at home and I’m not going to buy new shit for no good reason.

DANIEL: Something purpose built. Yeah, that’s right.

HEDVIG: Yeah. So, maybe the parents were just like, “You have a funeral dress. Let’s pick that.”

DANIEL: Also, there were some couple’s costumes. One with the number six on them and one with the number seven.

BEN: Argh, kill me now.

DANIEL: Hey. [LAUGHS]

BEN: Kill me now.

DANIEL: Oh, no. Did some young people say numbers to you, Ben?

BEN: [LAUGHS] It’s just whatever the cultural equivalent of semantic satiation is, I am there. [LAUGHS] It’s been bleached of all meaning and content, and it is now akin to seagull squawking, which is to say [DANIEL LAUGHS] they’re not hugely unpleasant. But also, if it went away, I wouldn’t be upset.

DANIEL: It’s not content-ful.

BEN: None.

DANIEL: Well, thank you both for being here. It is great to see you for this episode. Here’s what’s coming up. Across our desk at Because Language Headquarters, we got a book called The Origin of Language. That’s the title. [OMINOUS THEME] Bom bom bom. The Origin of Language.

BEN: Yeah, that’s a big swing. That’s a big swing.

HEDVIG: Big swing.

DANIEL: [LAUGHS] It certainly is. It’s by Professor Madeleine Beekman, Professor Emerita at the University of Sydney. It’s about how language got to be. And Dr Beekman goes for childcare as a prevailing mechanism that drove language. But here’s the interesting bit. Dr Beekman is coming at this from the perspective of an evolutionary biologist and not a linguist.

BEN: That’s fun.

DANIEL: Yeah, I know, right? It’s good to listen to different people. So, Hedvig and I had a chat with Professor Beekman and decided to find out what was on her mind and how the evolutionary biology facts converged with the linguistic facts. And should we give some spoilers, Hedvig?

HEDVIG: Well, one spoiler maybe is because I think some linguists, when they hear that there’s a book The Origins of Language, will go [ANGRY CAT HISS]. [LAUGHTER] So, one spoiler is maybe that, she discusses a lot of different things, and I don’t think that was her original choice for a title.

DANIEL: That is what…

HEDVIG: Is that fair to say?

DANIEL: …I got as well. That is fair. Well, that’s what she told us. [LAUGHS]

HEDVIG: Yeah.

DANIEL: But I will say that her book did not suffer against the linguistic facts as I have them.

HEDVIG: No, no.

DANIEL: That’s what I’m going to say.

BEN: So, what I’m hearing between the lines here is basically, you were both ready to be like, “Oh, here we go.” And then, you walked away from being like, “Oh, we didn’t go there. This is great.”

HEDVIG: Yeah. She’s reading a lot of stuff and maybe she’s not going to the conferences and talking so much directly to but I think she got things on the right track. She’s a good researcher. That’s the sign of a good researcher, right? She’s dug deep and she’s read all these things. And I think it made a lot of sense.

BEN: I would put it to both of you that all of the people who would enjoy spending time at linguistic conferences already do.

DANIEL: Yes. [LAUGHTER]

BEN: I’m just going to put it that way.

DANIEL: Well, we’re having that chat with Dr Beekman later on in this episode. Now, it’s November 2025 as we record this. That means we’re getting ready for the annual mailout with stickers, magnets, merch, the annual postcard, it’s going out to all of our paid patrons. We’d love you to get some of that juicy merch. So, why don’t you sign up? patreon.com/becauselangpod, we’ll will make it worth your while.

BEN: Have we decided what it all is yet? Or should we put a call out to people to like, “We want Ben to do a version of the Coppertone ad,” or something like that? [LAUGHTER]

DANIEL: The classic Coppertone ad. Get out those buns… [BEN LAUGHS] He’ll do it. He’ll do it, folks. He will.

BEN: 100%.

HEDVIG: Don’t know what you’re talking about, but that’s fun.

DANIEL: I have some ideas for merch items. There are certain quotes that are memorable from our show. There’s always a Word of the Year that I turn into some kind of item. Last year, we had the Linguistic Chaos Goblins. That was fun.

BEN: That was fun. Yeah. That was fun.

HEDVIG: There are very cute. That were so cute.

DANIEL: Yeah. So, we’ll come up with some good stuff. Once again, patreon.com/becauselangpod. All right, let’s have some news.

BEN: Let’s do it.

DANIEL: Or Ben can do a lead into the news.

BEN: No. Do you know what, Daniel? I cede the ground to a better segue. You did good.

DANIEL: Very good. This one was suggested by PharaohKatt and Diego on our Discord. It’s a new American Sign Language dictionary. What does an American Sign Language dictionary look like to you, Ben, in your mind’s eye?

BEN: Ooh, I’m guessing it isn’t a series of illustrations anymore. Methinks that would… And when I say illustrations, I don’t mean animations. I mean literally like the kinds of things that you would have had to print in a book. I’m guessing it’s not that anymore.

DANIEL: It is not that anymore.

BEN: And it’s either animated or it’s video.

DANIEL: Mm. He’s good. He’s very good. It is entirely online. It is video.

BEN: Oh, cool.

DANIEL: It has about a thousand signs in it. And you’ll see signed words defined using other signs. Just like when you have a dictionary in English, it defines words in terms of other English words. Well, this defines signs in terms of other signs. How about that?

BEN: That’s so fascinating.

HEDVIG: I am going to it right now. So, it is theasldictionary.com. The ASL Dictionary Monolingual Edition.

BEN: Monolingual edition. So, that’s the key aspect, right? Because if there was any written component, I’m guessing that would make it bilingual. Yes?

DANIEL: Well, Tigertonia on our Discord has pointed out that written words are still a part of ASL, and they’ve got their own conventions, like all caps. So, that’s a part of it. But this seems to be something special for the ASL community. This is a quote from one of the designers, MJ Bienvenu. “Creating a monolingual ASL dictionary is not just about the signs, definitions and sentences. It’s about honoring ASL as a complete, independent language. This work celebrates our culture, our identity, and the power of seeing ASL defined through ASL itself.” Pretty cool.

HEDVIG: It looks really nice.

BEN: Can I dig in just a little bit there, Daniel, to the idea of… So, first of all, I need some help with the vernacular. So, ASL can be expressed through the hands, or all signed languages can be expressed through the hands. But you’ve just mentioned that there is a written component which differentiates itself from written English in some key ways. What word do we use to describe those two aspects of ASL? Do we call them modes?

HEDVIG: Modes.

DANIEL: Yeah. I mean, we could say it’s multimodal, just like spoken English is multimodal because there’s writing and speaking and gesturing. Lots of modes.

BEN: Okay, okay. So, the reason I ask about this question about modes is I, until this very moment… and you would have thought that this would have come up before now for me in this show. I’ve just now learned that the written expression of a signed language is different from English, right?

DANIEL: It’s not just English.

HEDVIG: So, there’s different ways of “writing” sign languages. On this website, for example, there are English words written in Latin characters. There’s an item here that says phone. And if I click on it, a little video will play and it’ll give me the ASL word for phone. But also, when I click it, I see little symbols that say sort of midpoint… I actually can’t read it. [LAUGHS]

DANIEL: That’s what I noticed.

BEN: This is really interesting. And I had until this very moment… and I think this just goes to show how easy it is to fall into the trap of your own perspective and framework, I had just assumed that the written mode of ASL or Auslan or BSL would have just been written English, and it’s not. And that’s a really important thing for me to understand. But then, we do this podcast. Hey, everyone. Did you know? [LAUGHS]

DANIEL: It’s some different thing.

BEN: Wow. That is really fascinating.

HEDVIG: I think I can suss it out.

BEN: Okay, what have you worked out?

HEDVIG: The first thing is whether you use one or two hands. The second thing is hand orientation, then it’s hand shape, then it’s other parts of the body and then it’s direction. Something like that. What I’ve learned is like different components. It’s describing different components because you could hold your hands like this, with your palm…

DANIEL: In a fist, fists. Yeah.

HEDVIG: … facing towards me like this, like, up and down. You can hold them lots of different ways. All those dimensions, if they are relevant to the sign, need to be described. But I have seen also other ways of transcribing. So, there’s many ways of transcribing it.

BEN: It’s really cool. What a really, really, really, really cool project.

HEDVIG: It looks really cool. Yeah.

DANIEL: Yeah. I’m glad that it exists. Okay, let’s go on.

BEN: Yes.

DANIEL: I liked this next story. This is one I noticed, and I liked it because we have talked, have we not, Hedvig, about subject-verb agreement in English and how tricky it is?

HEDVIG: I still nominate a listener who’s doing a BA thesis in linguistics to take the transcript of this podcast and study what causes me to get it right because I’m interested in that. When do I do right? [BEN LAUGHS]. Why is that?

DANIEL: That is one thing that I do not correct. So, that one will be authentic. You can just treat that one as it is.

BEN: Remind Dummy Ben of this linguistic phenomenon.

HEDVIG: It’s when I need to remember to say “they is” versus “they are.”

BEN: Oh, okay.

DANIEL: Yeah. You say, “The man eats food.” You don’t say, “The man eat food.”

BEN: Got you.

DANIEL: But it’s not as simple as that. So, Ben, tell me if the sentence sounds weird. “The accuracy of the results are being questioned. The accuracy of the results are being questioned.”

BEN: Not weird.

DANIEL: Okay.

BEN: Not to me.

HEDVIG: It should be.

BEN: Okay.

DANIEL: Should be weird.

HEDVIG: Because it’s the “accuracy” that’s singular. “Of the results”, that’s plural.

DANIEL: Usually, you can take out the prepositional phrase “of the results.”

HEDVIG: Yeah, but it’s the accuracy that’s being questioned, the accuracy.

BEN: Okay, okay, keep going, keep going, keep going. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

DANIEL: Let me take out the prepositional phrase “of the results.” I’ll just do, “The accuracy are being questioned.”

BEN: That’s weird.

DANIEL: That’s weird.

HEDVIG: That’s weird.

BEN: Yeah, for sure.

DANIEL: So, that means the first sentence should have been weird as well. “The accuracy of the results,” now, grammatically, the “of the results” part is not really relevant. So, we take it out. It should agree with “accuracy”. The accuracy is being questioned. So, it should be the accuracy of the results is being questioned. And yet, somehow having that word “results,” that plural exerts a magical attraction.

BEN: It does. There’s a field. It’s going whomp, whomp, whomp, whomp.

DANIEL: I’ll do it. ??? The next sentence — “president”, is singular, right? So — “The president has been shipped off on a rocket to Neptune.” But check out this sentence. “The president, along with a number of his associates, have been shipped off on a rocket to Neptune.” Or “has”.

BEN: No, that still sounds okay to me.

DANIEL: Yeah.

BEN: Yeah, these are tricky ones. These are edge cases.

HEDVIG: No, but there are a lot of these. There are a lot of these. Like, what we did in the beginning where we said, “they is, they are,” I think I get that right most of the time. But I think a lot of native speakers of English have variation in this space and are moving. And some varieties of English are moving more than others.

BEN: The ones that Daniel’s presenting do not strike me as inherently bolted down at all.

HEDVIG: Yeah.

DANIEL: Mm. Well, here’s the funny thing. When we’re doing agreement, we have to figure it out structurally. But sentences aren’t said structurally. They’re said one word at a time. And if there’s a plural just before our verb, it might just cause a…

BEN: It’s going to fuck with our shit. [LAUGHS]

DANIEL: It’s going to fuck with our shit. It’s going to mess up our agreement. So, this is agreement attraction. Now, agreement attraction happens in English, but what about other languages? Turns out there are some languages that don’t show agreement attraction like this.

BEN: I would have assumed that’s the case simply because non-English speakers struggle with it. Like, as ever you see someone from, say, a Latin background mixing up verb order or whatever, my presumption is like, “Oh, you must just be doing it your way.”

DANIEL: Well, here’s the funny thing. You can take sentences like, “The veracity of the results are being challenged,” you can take a sentence like that, that would trip up an English speaker, and it trips up people in other languages too. Other languages also show attraction effects. But there are some languages that don’t, and one of them is Czech. If you take some sentences that trip up English speakers or other speakers and you give them to Czech speakers, translated into Czech, of course, it doesn’t sound right to change it like it does for us. Doesn’t happen.

BEN: Okay. So, does that mean they just use the same way for all of the things, and they just don’t alter it, or…?

DANIEL: No, you have to be studying a language that also has some kind of agreement, but they just don’t fall into the same traps like we do. But what happens when a Czech speaker is learning English? Do they resist agreement attraction, or do they fall into the same traps that we just did?

BEN: Okay, like, is it just inherent, and when they encounter it, they too encounter problems? Or because they were trained not to care about it, do they just continue not caring about it? Ooh, this is fun. What?

DANIEL: This is work from Jan Chromý of Charles University in Prague and a team published in Bilingualism, Language, and Cognition. So, the team first tested native Czech speakers on the kinds of sentences that tempts people into agreement attraction, and they found no effect in Czech. Okay. Then, they said goodbye to all those Czech speakers, and they got a bunch more native Czech speakers who were learning English. Got them to try reading and answering questions about sentences like, “The file for the archivers likely was tightly sealed by the authorities.” Did that sound good? Remember, it’s “the file was,” “the file for the archivers likely was.”

BEN: That seems so deliberately obtuse that [DANIEL LAUGHS] I can’t even begin to penetrate what’s supposed to happen there.

DANIEL: All right, then let’s try it the other way. “The file for the archivers likely were tightly sealed by the authorities.”

BEN: That seems okay.

DANIEL: Sounds okay? They tried it other ways too. Like, “The files for the archiver likely…” was or were. They tried “the files”. “The files for the archivers were.” That one’s WERE all the way down. So, they tried different people on all of these sentences, all these combinations. And sure enough, when they tried the English version of the test, the Czech speakers did show attraction effects in English.

BEN: Interesting.

DANIEL: The sentences that sound good to us, even though structurally, you could argue, not correct, sounded great to them.

BEN: Okay.

DANIEL: But there’s a funny twist. When they got the volunteers to first do the experiment in Czech where there’s no attraction effects, and then they got them to come back a couple of weeks later for an English version of the test, the effect vanished.

HEDVIG: Weeks.

BEN: Weeks.

DANIEL: Two weeks later, no more English attraction.

BEN: Yeah, I would have thought that would have to be a rapid turnaround for that kind of effect to take place.

HEDVIG: Yeah.

DANIEL: I thought so too. [LAUGHS]

HEDVIG: Did all those undergrad students that they had the first time go to the same party the day before and talk about the experiment or something like… [LAUGHTER]

BEN: Right-o, guys.

HEDVIG: I’m like, wow.

DANIEL: Well, here’s what they say. The authors say that this is syntactic adaptation. They say it could have decreased the magnitude of the effect in the second session to the point of disappearance. In other words, they figured out the test. They figured out what was going on.

BEN: Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

HEDVIG: Yeah.

DANIEL: They pointed to factors such as familiarity and attention being relevant. So, it sounds to me, it’s still an interesting effect. It just means, “Oh, I did a test. I figured out that they were looking at this thing. Now, I’m alert.” And that was enough to make the attraction effect disappear.

BEN: There you go.

DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] Pretty cool though.

HEDVIG: Yeah.

DANIEL: Attraction effects are certainly one of the more interesting things. And we’re going to be talking a little bit early next year about an entire book dedicated to this and other linguistic illusions.

HEDVIG: I like this a lot because it speaks to that gray area. Grammar is supposed to be hard rules that are strict that, like, “You have to do this. Every time you say a sentence, you have to put a tense on your verb. You have to put a gender on your noun. You have to do this every time.” But in practice, when we look at what people actually do, there’s a lot of these gray areas where people are like, “Yeah, that’s okay. I’m taller than you or you are taller than me. You are taller than I, yeah, yeah, mm, mm.” And I really like to be there and prod because that is like the prime hunting territory to take down a proper grammar police person. Because they often have these. [LAUGHTER]

And when you alert them to it, they’ll sometimes be… I have a friend who’s a bit of a grammar a police person. And she didn’t know yet about the “taller than me, taller than I”. So, she didn’t have a strong opinion. [BEN LAUGHS] And when I mentioned it to her, she formed a strong opinion right away.

BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

DANIEL: Oh, no.

HEDVIG: Which was a bit…

BEN: Because she’s a rule follower and now she knows how the rule.

DANIEL: Why’d you tell her?

HEDVIG: And I told her the rule and she was like, “Oh, well, then I have to do this every time.” And I’m like, “Well, look. Look how beautiful this… like, 100 flowers bloom. Look at this variation.” She’s like, “Yeah, no, I’ve just extended my territory now.”

DANIEL: “Nah, they’re dumb!” [LAUGHTER]

BEN: So funny.

DANIEL: Well, also, it’s interesting not just for unearthing and quashing grammar police, but also, it’s one of those areas where our brains show a little bit of slipperiness. It’s like, “Well, sometimes, usually I’m going to choose the version of the verb that matches with my subject, even though I don’t know what a subject is maybe, but sometimes I’ll do it a different way because the balance of probability makes that other thing seem likely. So, that works too.”

HEDVIG: It’s also cool because it gives us a window into change, because this is probably how change happens. So, if English is ever going to get rid of its subject-verb agreement, this is the areas where that will start. This is where the creeping in starts. And as someone who… my native language is Swedish, we don’t have any agreement on our verbs for anything other than tense. So, I welcome you into the fold, should you choose to take this path. [LAUGHTER]

DANIEL: Especially if it’s not stigmatised. If there’s an oncoming change that gets stigmatised, then maybe that’s going to get stomped down. But this one is just below the level of awareness for many people, and this is one [CHUCKLES] where you could see some movement.

BEN: Definitely.

DANIEL: So fun, fun, fun.

BEN: I’ve just… to button this little story because we were talking… we’d moved into a territory of grammar rule lovers and that sort of thing. I’ve recently expanded my thinking in terms of grammar police just a tiny bit. Obviously, we are all three of us pretty radically accepting of most things linguistically and at times somewhat derisive or dismissive perhaps is the best word of people who like to hew close to the tradition, as it were. I found what I have found to be an acceptable place or space for quite staunch grammar followers. And that is people who find themselves in the role of teaching either people who have English as a second language or people who have speech problems, full stop.

Some people, not all people, but some people really, really, really, really love to learn from knowing the rules. And so, they will learn best from someone who can just top to toe be like, “The rule is this. The rule is this. The rule is this. The rule is this.”

HEDVIG: 100%.

BEN: So, I think there is a place, I will concede that there is a place for people who have knowledge of and are probably themselves very inclined to be like strong rule followers. I would just hope that individual has the capacity to know and to acknowledge the breadth of human expression whilst they take their preference and use it for other people for whom that preference works as well.

HEDVIG: I think we’ve talked about this before because the other side of that coin is also there is variation, but often one of them will give you a better result in a job interview, right?

BEN: Sure. Yeah.

HEDVIG: And it’s all well and good to say that all varieties of English are beautiful, all dialects are beautiful, all registers are beautiful. But I think we’ve talked about this on the show before, there’s also like the hard-hitting reality of like, if you come from…

BEN: Stacey needs to get paid. [LAUGHS]

HEDVIG: Yeah. Stacey needs to get paid. And if Stacey comes from a working-class family where she doesn’t have access to those registers, it’s great if maybe the school could give her a little bit more of a level playing field later when she meets a bunch of bigoted people in the workplace.

BEN: 100%. Yeah, for sure.

DANIEL: I’ve done a lot of English teaching in my time. That’s how I got started in linguistics. And you wouldn’t be a very good linguistics teacher if you just said, “Do it however, because all varieties of language are valid,” [BEN LAUGHS] Students would want to know what’s going to be considered correct.

BEN: You’re the cool, fun teacher that low key actually is the biggest destructive influence in the school environment. [DANIEL LAUGHS] Like, “Hey, guys, no harsh vibes. Let’s just do it. Let’s whatever.”

DANIEL: You’re the cool mom holding parties, right?

BEN: Yeah, yeah, [LAUGHS]

DANIEL: But if you’re an English teacher, what I would hope you would do is be aware that variation exists. Be aware of what both versions — or all the different versions — mean socially, and then communicate that in a way that students like, because students are hungry for this information. Let’s finish up with a story about friend of the show, Nick Evans, who has just been awarded the Neil and Saras Smith Medal for lifetime achievement in the field of linguistics. Hedvig, tell us about this because I think you noticed this item first.

HEDVIG: I noticed it but now, wait, wait, wait. I need to just look up some details about the prize.

DANIEL: Well, tell us who he is because we know who he is. I know who he is. I’ve talked to him a bunch of times. Had him on the show back when it was Talk the Talk. Not recently, but tell us about his work and what you know about him, which is lots.

HEDVIG: Oh, Professor Nicholas Evans of the Australian National University is a great linguist. He’s Australian. He has worked on Indigenous languages of Australia and also languages of Papua New Guinea and many other places. He’s now branching a bit into Oceanic territory, which is fun for me as someone who’s worked in Austronesian languages. He’s done a lot of really good, well-respected research in the fields of language description, especially in working out new ways that grammar can be maybe is one way of phrasing it. He’s also interested in things like poetry and oral stories and a lot of different things. His scholarship is very wide. He was my PhD supervisor, I should clarify. So, he is my doctorvater, and he’s an all-around very cool guy.

Besides knowing various Indigenous languages of Australia, etc., he also is surprisingly good at German. I listened to an audio interview with him on a German radio station once and I actually couldn’t tell when he started speaking and the other people were speaking because I didn’t know his German was that good. So, I thought I was going to pick up like the Australian-speaking German.

BEN: Just clunkily ham-fisting his way through Deutsch. [DANIEL LAUGHS]

HEDVIG: Yeah. I did not. What else is there to say about Nick?

DANIEL: He’s also the originator of CoEDL, the Center for the… Oh, no. What does it stand for or what did it stand for?

HEDVIG: It stands for the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Language Dynamics.

DANIEL: Which studied language change, language diversity. It was an umbrella under which a lot of people worked for a decade, so including you, Hedvig.

HEDVIG: Yes, including me. Including my husband as well. He’s a great man. And besides being a great linguist, he’s also very good at taking care of his flock, I would say. He’s funded a lot of…

BEN: Aww, a good boss.

DANIEL: That’s what I want to be.

HEDVIG: Yeah, he’s funded a lot of cool people and found ways of making them their career in academia work, which is very cool. On the website for the award, there is a longer description with more things that I probably haven’t mentioned that I probably should. If you want to read a book by him, I think it’s in this list, surely. Isn’t it called Dying Words?

DANIEL: Yes, Dying Words.

HEDVIG: Yeah. It’s a beautiful book. It’s a sad book, but I could recommend reading it.

DANIEL: Well, congratulations to Professor Evans. That’s a great honour and very well deserved.

Now, it’s time for Related or Not. We have a new jingle. And here it is.

[LATEST RELATED OR NOT THEME, FROM STE]

DANIEL: And we’re back.

HEDVIG: And we’re back.

BEN: It is an impressive human being who can put a bridge in a song that goes for 31 seconds.

DANIEL: Strong all the way through.

HEDVIG: That’s my man.

DANIEL: Yep. [BEN LAUGHS] For those who are not familiar, that was my husband, Stephen Mann, playing piano and singing. He also recorded a much longer version for us as well, which maybe we could put at the end of the show. Is that appropriate?

BEN: That’s fun.

DANIEL: Yes. Or a Patreon extra or something like that [BEN LAUGHS] or something.

HEDVIG: Okay.

DANIEL: Definitely.

BEN: Did you notice that…? ???

HEDVIG: Has more words in it.

BEN: Did you notice that quick sort of redirection of force that just happened tehre?

DANIEL: I’ll do it. I’ll do it. We’ll stick it there. Thank you, Ste, special friend of the show and sort of fourth member of our team. Okay, this one is from Gordon and partly from me. Gordon emailed and said, “I have a few pairs of homonyms I’d like to submit for Related or Not. In each case, one is a verb and one is a noun. Hope you enjoy. Hope it’s not too obvious. Love the show, love the feature.” Okay, so in this one, I’m giving you three pairs. Two pairs are related. You have to find the distraction. Here we go. Number one, LOAF as in the bread, and LOAF, to idle about. That’s the first one.

Number two, HIDE, from animal, as in the animal’s skin, the animal’s HIDE. And HIDE from an animal because it’s going to bite you. [LAUGHS] Okay, there we go.

BEN: To conceal oneself.

DANIEL: To secrete something. And the third pair: JAM, the fruit preserves and JAM, to crowd something in together. LOAF and LOAF. HIDE and HIDE. JAM and JAM. One of these is a distraction, but the other two pairs are related. Which one’s the distraction?

BEN: I’m feeling good about this.

DANIEL: Okay. Ben’s going first.

BEN: Yep.

HEDVIG: Yeah, me too.

BEN: I think that HIDE and HIDE are false friends. I do not think they are related as in, if you would ask me, just by itself, I would say they were related, but I think they are unrelated because the other two seem so, so very related to me. JAM and JAM for me is like a nonquestion. We call ??? JAM because we jam all the stuff in there or vice versa. I don’t care which one. I don’t know which way it went. [LAUGHS] And LOAF and LOAF…

HEDVIG: And tell me about bread and walking around.

DANIEL: Yeah, what’s the, to idle about?

HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.

BEN: If someone is loafing, right, they are sitting there doing nothing like a loaf of bread sitting on a countertop.

HEDVIG: Are they sitting?

DANIEL: Just sittin’ there like a loaf of bread. ???

BEN: Just loafing.

DANIEL: Yep.

BEN: I genuinely think that started where someone looked at some lazy git of a 12-year-old and was like, “You might as well be a loaf of bread for all you’re contributing right now.”

DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Okay. We found a unifying sense. Hedvig’s not convinced. Hedvig, which do you find the most likely to be the distraction?

HEDVIG: I think LOAF and LOAF because…

BEN: Ooh.

HEDVIG: …first of all, I thought loafing around also could have a smoovement in it, no.

DANIEL: Smoovement?

HEDVIG: Movement, that you’re wandering around. You’re saying no.

DANIEL: Mm.

BEN: No, I suppose it can, but I think it’s semantically expanded to be like if you’re bumming around the house, you might be moving, but you’re not doing very much kind of thing.

DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

HEDVIG: See, I think that back in the day where people used more animal hides… By the way, I just bought Icelandic sheep fleece…

BEN: Ooh, yummy.

HEDVIG: …which the cats really love.

BEN: I bet they do.

HEDVIG: I think HIDE and HIDE. I think you can hide under hides. See? That’s what I think.

BEN: Okay. Yep. I can’t say that is any more insane sounding than LOAF and LOAF, so. [LAUGHS]

HEDVIG: Right, right.

DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I also chose LOAF and LOAF. I thought that JAM was a nonstarter because it’s easy to see the connection. HIDE and HIDE are a little bit hard to tell, but I just think LOAF, it goes back to old English hlaf. It’s so old that there was a /h/ in front of it. And loafing, to idle about, seems much more recent. Okay, well, first of all, JAM and JAM were in fact related. So, you really are jamming. It’s possibly a variant of Middle English cham, to bite upon something. Don’t cham your food. And then, jam, the preserves are just the same. You really do jam all those berries together. HIDE and HIDE are in fact related.

BEN: Oh, son of a bitch.

DANIEL: [LAUGHS] So, what’s going on here?

BEN: Goddamn it.

DANIEL: The connected sense here is that you hide, meaning you conceal yourself, and the animal’s own skin is something that covers it. Covers it up, hides its middle. Oh, we have an animal here. Let’s find out what colour its hide is.

[CAT APPEARS]

BEN: Hello, Sandy.

DANIEL: I would say orange. Hey, Sandy. However, loaf, the word LOAF, the bread is really super, super old, Old English. Whereas, to LOAF around first appeared in American English around the 1830s and it comes from a word “loafer,” loafer. So, it’s backformed. ???

BEN: But loafer, the shoe. Why do we call it that? Is it because the loafer looks like a loaf of bread?

DANIEL: Well, there was… This is from Etymonline, our pal, Douglas Harper, possibly coming from the German word, Landläufer, meaning somebody who is a vagabond.

BEN: Oh, okay.

HEDVIG: Runt.

DANIEL: So, from there, you go to the shoes that they wear, the loafers, and then you back form the verb, loaf. So, that’s a backformation.

BEN: Okay, I was trying to clutch my way to success there, but no sale.

HEDVIG: Yeah, because lauf is… I think it’s run. Am I right?

BEN: A landrunner.

DANIEL: A landrunner. Hey, like the vehicle.

HEDVIG: And I think in that case that it’s connected to maybe LEAP.

BEN: Okay.

DANIEL: Ooh, that’s interesting. We’ve seen that LEAP and LOPE are connected words.

BEN: Ah, yep, yep.

DANIEL: This was a while ago. Thank you, Gordon. Let’s go on to our second one. This one’s from PharaohKatt from real life, because listener, Rene, was in town recently.

HEDVIG: Oh, yes, sir.

DANIEL: So, I got together with Rene, PharaohKatt, and LordMortis and we had a hang. It was great.

HEDVIG: Nice. I saw the picture. It was very nice.

DANIEL: Yeah. There’s the picture of us on the Discord. And because they were going to the football, I didn’t, but they did, we got to wondering, GUERNSEY and JERSEY.

BEN: Okay.

DANIEL: GUERNSEY and JERSEY.

BEN: Can we throw a third one in here?

DANIEL: Maybe.

BEN: The island.

HEDVIG: I thought we were talking about the island.

DANIEL: I think we’re going to wind up on the islands. Yes, tell me what you know about the island.

HEDVIG: They’re suspiciously close to France for belonging to the UK. [LAUGHTER] Then again, Gibraltar belongs to the UK and is land attached to Spain.

BEN: My understanding is actually there is an Isle of both Guernsey and Jersey, is there not?

DANIEL: In the Channel Islands, yes, they both exist.

BEN: Okay. So, the real question is if the garments are both related to the island names, are the island names related to each other? I’m going to guess that they are. And this is a classic “French says this, English says this” scenario.

DANIEL: Okay. Okay, good. That’s a vote for connected. Okay. By the way, just for anybody who’s not aware, I know that a football JERSEY is a thing that you wear, and a GUERNSEY is also the thing that you wear.

BEN: Yes.

HEDVIG: Is it a groin thing? ???

DANIEL: A groin thing? No, it’s not…

BEN: No, no, no.

DANIEL: It is just a sweater.

BEN: It’s the same word for the same garment, right? Some people will call the thing a football player wears a jersey. And some people will call what a football player wears a guernsey.

HEDVIG: Oh.

DANIEL: Okay. But then, you say, “Oh, wait, they’re two different islands. Could they be different?” But, Ben, you’re saying, “Nah, they’re the same. They’re the same word.”

BEN: I don’t want to get anyone at the tax havens pissed off, right, because they probably have a lot of resources to come after me. The islands are different, but I’m wondering if the names are related.

DANIEL: Okay. I said, of course, related. If WARDEN and GUARDIAN can be the same thing because /g/ is such a weak sound, then GUERNSEY and JERSEY can be the same also. I thought they came from the same time.

BEN: Okay.

DANIEL: I know they’re both the name for a kind of cow. [BEN LAUGHS]

HEDVIG: I also think they are related. I recently saw a little TikTok video of the language the spoken on Guernsey and Jersey. They speak a sort of language that has touches of English and French. It’s very interesting. And they had a lot of pairs that were, like, one letter off from each other. So, I think they probably have that for their place as well.

DANIEL: Both of those languages are Romance languages, and both of those languages are langue d’oïl. They are both yes-having languages. We know about the no-having languages of Australia, correct?

BEN: Oh, we’ve talked about this.

HEDVIG: I think we might need to remind our listeners. This is a fun thing. There’s a paper on it by, I think it’s Patrick McConvell, that sometimes you don’t have a word for your own language. You might call your language like “the language” or like “our tongue” or something. But then, you meet other people that are neighboring to you, and they speak something that’s a bit similar. What you do is you pick a shibboleth. You pick one word that tells you apart, and then you say where the blah language is, and you’re the blah languages for that thing. ???

BEN: So, this shibboleth is the no.

HEDVIG: Yes. So, in Australia, there’s a set of languages that do this for no. Not all languages of Australia do this. Some do. So, let me get that right. That’s happening in Queensland, right?

DANIEL: The one example that I can think of is the language, Boonwurrung, where “boon” is their word for no, and then the woiwurrung, where “woi” is their word for no. And so, people just say, “Oh, yeah, they’re the Boonwurrung,” which means, “They’re the no sayers.” They say boon for no. “Oh, yeah, they’re the Woi sayers. They say Woi for no.” So, those are the no-having languages.

HEDVIG: In Southern New Guinea, languages that Nick Evans has worked on, they do the same thing, but with the word “what.” So, the different ways of saying the word “what.”

DANIEL: Okay.

HEDVIG: And in ancient times, in the Middle Ages, in France, before France… all over Europe, there wasn’t… we’ve talked about this many, many times. But nation states are a new thing.

BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. French is a fairly modern concept linguistically.

HEDVIG: French is an agglomeration. Like, you jam a bunch of different things into one. And one way of distinguishing the different Romance varieties that were spoken in what we today call France is how they said the word “yes.”

DANIEL: Yes. So, in the north, they said oïl, and in the south, they said oc, which is why you have Occitan in the south. And that’s also why in Paris they say oui, because it’s a leftover from the oïl languages. Okay, so we all three said that they are related, GUERNSEY and JERSEY.

HEDVIG: Yes.

DANIEL: Nope, they’re not.

HEDVIG: What?

BEN: Triple wrongness. What? Okay, you’re going to have to work hard to convince me of this. Lay it on me.

DANIEL: For both of them the -ey, jersey, guernsey, it’s old Norse for island. That’s just island.

HEDVIG: And as we’ve talked about before, those ones we kind of unfortunately count out as the obvious ones.

BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And for good reason, I think.

DANIEL: That’s right.

BEN: If they’re both islands, I don’t think that’s fair.

HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah.

DANIEL: I just did a little bit of digging. This kind of went everywhere. But the guernsey is kind of a sweater because the men were going out to sea. And this is from guernseywoollens.com. Many families had their own variation of the patterns in their knitwear that became a means of recognition when unfortunate sailors were lost at sea.

BEN: Okay. Oh, wow. Like a dog tag.

DANIEL: Kind of. So, they both have their own languages. As far as the names, Wikipedia says, “Scholars variously surmise that jersey and Jèrri derived from Jorð, old Norse for earth), or jarl which was an “earl” or perhaps the Norse personal name, Gyr, thus Gyrsey Gry’s Island. So, those are three possibilities there.

BEN: But this is for Jersey.

DANIEL: Yes.

BEN: Okay.

DANIEL: Gyrsey, which became a ja.

BEN ??? : Okay. Now, as far as guernsey, that’s also of Norse origin. The original root, Guern is of uncertain origin. Could have been Grani or Warren, which is a person’s name. Different name. Or from grǫn, meaning spruce or pine. So, different names, different places. Yeah, say it again?

HEDVIG: Grǫn is spruce or pine.

DANIEL: Okay, good. Thank you for that pronunciation.

BEN: So, it might have just been like Sprucey Island, Gron-sey.

DANIEL: Spruce Island. Pine island.

HEDVIG: Doesn’t grow that far south, does it?

DANIEL: I am not sure. There’s one expression that we talked about, the four of us, when we were hanging out. What about getting a guernsey? Why is it called that?

HEDVIG: Getting a…? What is that?

BEN: In that formulation, that means being awarded usually something.

HEDVIG: Oh.

DANIEL: Mm-hmm.

BEN: And I have always assumed it meant in the tradition of some sports, like in the Tour de France, you get a certain jersey or guernsey when you win or when you do a special thing or whatever. So, getting a guernsey has become a homonym… No.

DANIEL: It means you made the team.

BEN: Yeah.

DANIEL: You got selected.

BEN: So, basically, you either you make the team, or sometimes in certain sports, you also get a special one for winning a thing.

DANIEL: Mm. There you go.

HEDVIG: Aah.

DANIEL: Okay, so Jersey and Guernsey. Shout out to people who speak those languages. I enjoyed finding out about that, and we’d love to hear from you.

BEN: There you go.

HEDVIG: Can I do a callback?

DANIEL: Sure.

HEDVIG: So, that means that Nick Evans has gotten the guernsey for joining the team of everyone who’s gotten this Saras Smith Medal.

BEN: Yes.

DANIEL: Well, who else got that medal?

HEDVIG: Which includes Noam Chomsky, William Labov, Marianne Mithun, John Lyons, Barbara Hall, Partee and Bernard Comrie, former director of the institute I work at. But that means that Noam Chomsky and Labov and all of these people all have this Saras Smith guernsey. Am I getting it right?

DANIEL: There you go.

BEN: Yeah. You nailed it.

DANIEL: Last one from Hannah on Facebook who says, “Hi there. This is probably not the best place to put a Related or Not pair of words, but maybe better than nowhere.” She has correctly figured out that I sometimes forget that Facebook exists. What about BOURRÉE and JAMBOREE? They both have to do with dancing, etc. If I say bourrée, does that mean anything?

BEN: Do you mean the hat that French people stereotypically wear?

DANIEL: No, not the beret, but a bourrée. Johann Sebastian Bach wrote lots of bourrées. It was a lively dance with two beats in a bar, a bourrée.

BEN: Spell?

DANIEL: B-O-U-R-R-É-E and the first e has an accent aigu.

HEDVIG: Oh, my god, this is hard.

DANIEL: Bourrée and jamboree, okay. Now, I’m going to have to spoil this one. I guessed no. Your instincts, just quickly?

HEDVIG: No. But because it’s being asked of me, I’m like, “Yes.”

BEN: Yeah. So, for me, the bourrée of jamboree, it sounds like there would be something where, like, “Oh, then this jam bit got added to the front.” And so, I could see how that could happen for a lively dance.

DANIEL: I could too.

BEN: Especially if we’re talking the difference between snooty high-class people and, like, the working folk and all that kind of stuff, it’s a bourrée when rich people do it, and it’s a jamboree when the poor folk do it. [LAUGHTER]

DANIEL: Well, I took a look. I dug as far as I could. And unfortunately, this is one of those rare pairs of words…

BEN: Unclear.

DANIEL: …where for both words, we just don’t know. We have no idea where these words come from.

HEDVIG: Ohh.

BEN: Oh, it’s a twin mystery, like, into the fogs of history. [LAUGHS]

DANIEL: And I liked it. So, thank you very much, Hannah, for that Related or Not. It was fun to look up.

BEN: This reminds me of every now and then, I really respect certain inanimate objects and just entities in our world for being so effectively resistant to being known. I’ve always had an affection for a meme I saw, which was someone saying, “I really, really, really respect the moon’s steadfast refusal to be photographed effectively on a phone.” [LAUGHTER] I love it. I have held onto that. And I also love that the moon refuses to be photographed effectively on a phone. I like that these two words are just like, “You don’t get to know. You don’t get to know. I’m mysterious, bitch. You don’t get to know.”

DANIEL: You will never crack our secrets.

HEDVIG: I learned a word for this.

BEN: Yeah?

DANIEL: What?

HEDVIG: Stop me if I’ve told you before: HANNIBALISM. Okay.

BEN: Mm-mm.

DANIEL: Mm-mm.

HEDVIG: Okay.

BEN: Hannibal, like the Lecter?

HEDVIG: Hannibal was the…

DANIEL: The warrior.

HEDVIG: …Carthaginian military officer who marched on Rome with elephants through the Alps.

BEN: It should be noted that for nearly everyone in the world, they will think of Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lambs first.

DANIEL: Fair enough.

BEN: Fair enough. ???

HEDVIG: Okay. Carthage was a Phoenician empire that was rivaling with Rome, and Hannibal was warring on Rome. And he walked through the Alps. So, he walked through Spain and France and the Alps, into Italy and then into Rome. And historians have tried desperately to figure out exactly how he walked. So, like, what path did he take?

BEN: Like his route. Yep, right.

DANIEL: Yeah, okay.

HEDVIG: His exact route. But this is really hard because he did it once. So, there’s not like a ton of archaeological remains and the writings don’t say exactly where he went. But some people are really trying to figuring it out. And some other people have coined the term HANNIBALISM for you’re trying to figure something out that like, it’s lost in the sands ??? of time.

BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

DANIEL: Mm-hmm.

HEDVIG: You can’t know if he…

BEN: Like, we get it. You really want to know, but no.

HEDVIG: You really want to know. But, like, if he took a left or a right here, we’re never going to know and maybe this is a waste of resources. Like, calm down.

BEN: I like that, HANNIBALISATION. That’s fun.

DANIEL: HANNIBALISM.

HEDVIG: Yeah.

BEN: And it has 100% less cannibalism than I would have thought. So, that’s great.

DANIEL: That’s a win. Well, thank you to Gordon, thank you to Hannah, and thank you to the team for these Related or Nots. Thanks also to Ste for putting together a brand-new theme for us. If you’d like to send us your Related or Nots or any jingles, then you can do that in all the usual ways, hello@becauselanguage.com or on the socials.

[MUSIC]

[INTERVIEW BEGINS]

DANIEL: We are here with Professor Madeleine Beekman, who is an evolutionary biologist, a bee watcher, a cassowary enthusiast, and author of The Origin of Language: How We Learned to Speak and Why. Madeleine, thank you so much for hanging out with us today.

MADELEINE: Thank you for having me.

DANIEL: Now, you’re an evolutionary biologist. What was it that fueled your interest in language?

MADELEINE: I didn’t have any interest in language. That’s the funny part. [DANIEL LAUGHS]

HEDVIG: Okay, all right.

DANIEL: Despite the fact that it’s so interesting?

MADELEINE: Yes. Now, I know it’s interesting, but I didn’t, because I never thought about language, apart from trying to learn new languages, etc. So, the story is, as you said, I’m an evolutionary biologist, bee watcher, ant watcher, slime mold watcher, all sorts of things, but never humans. However, at some stage, I decided I need a new challenge. And I wanted that challenge to be to write a book for a general audience. And that book had to be about evolution because I’m an evolutionary biologist.

Well, the other main reason for wanting to write that book on evolution is because I felt I didn’t quite understand how evolution works because I always looked at organisms from the Darwinian level. So, these ones survive and these ones don’t survive. But I never tried to link that back to what happens at the genetic level. And of course, everyone started talking about genetics and genomics and all these complicated things they do in the lab, which I tried lab work once [LAUGHS] and that was enough because you can’t see stuff. You can’t see DNA. And you move something from one tube to another, and then apparently you lost it somewhere. Anyway, so that was my career in the lab. So, I thought, I’m going to write about it anyway.

So, that was my desire to write a book on how evolution works. But then I thought, that’s a big question.

HEDVIG: It’s very big.

MADELEINE: It’s very big. [HEDVIG LAUGHS] That’s a bit of a problem. So, then I thought I need to have some framework, and I want that framework to be interesting to people. Well, what do people care about? They care about humans. So, I sort of progressively thought, okay, I’ll get into human evolution. It’s never been an interest of mine at all. But then, of course, I started reading and I realised this is actually really, really cool. Still, language had nothing to do with it. Sorry.

HEDVIG: Mm-hmm. That’s all right.

MADELEINE: Then, I started putting all these different pieces of the puzzle together. So, all this weird stuff that happened, humans or our ancestors came down from the trees, started walking on two legs. That required changes to the skeleton. It made them extremely vulnerable in an environment full of large predators. So, they had to become social. Giving birth to children became a little bit more difficult because of the change in the rotation of the birth canal. So, now the mother couldn’t help the baby out, so she needed help from someone else. So, our early ancestors started to be social.

And if you are a social organism, you have to have some form of communication. Bees do it. Ants do it. Bacteria do it. Social birds do it. Other primates do it. Still didn’t really think about language until [CHUCKLES] much later in our evolutionary history, we had this weird mutation that made our brain just explode, balloon, which meant that our skull needed to change. Either… it was basically die or the skull had to adapt to having that large brain in it. That worked because otherwise we wouldn’t be here. That gave us the morphology to be able to speak more precisely or to make sounds that we can control better, I should say, by controlling our breathing, controlling the muscular of our face, our tongue.

But at the same time, we had these babies with massive brains. Because if you have an adult with a huge brain, of course, an adult starts as a little baby. These babies could now no longer stay in a mother for longer because, first off, brain tissue is extremely expensive. So, the mother could not afford energetically to extend the duration of pregnancy. But the other tiny slight issue is that if you’re a baby with a really big head and your mom has relatively narrow hips, two things don’t really work together. [CHUCKLES]

HEDVIG: Yeah, I’m always so envious when I see other species. Have you ever seen like a panda give birth or a giraffe? It’s so effortless. It is so…

DANIEL: They just pop those things out.

MADELEINE: [LAUGHS] Not for humans.

HEDVIG: And then, the ones that outsource it even more to making eggs or marsupials, that’s so…

MADELEINE: Yeah, well, they are tiny, tiny, tiny.

DANIEL: And you talk about brain size. My young one’s brains, I’ve got a seven-year-old and a nine-year-old and their brains, you mentioned in the book that their brains start out about a quarter of the size that it’s going to be in adulthood and then it grows by age, you said I think seven, it gets to about 95%? So, right now their brains are growing so fast and it’s driving them crazy because they’re getting all this brain tissue and neural connections and they’re basically just little maniacs with no emotional regulation, [HEDVIG LAUGHS] no long-term memory before the age of four. It drives them mad. So, we’re seeing a lot of brain changes going from babyhood to adulthood. You’ve got to get those big heads out quickly. But what does that mean?

MADELEINE: What’s even worse though is by the time they become teenagers, they have complete rewiring of the brain. That’s when they really go insane. So, you’ve got something to look forward to.

DANIEL: Oh, lovely.

HEDVIG: How does the growth of the brain size work with the fact that often people talk about that pruning of synapses is the thing that happens as a child grows up, that you have all these connections in the brain that you prune away so that you have fewer connections. But how does that work if your brain size is also increasing?

MADELEINE: No, your brain size… Well, I guess your brain size is increasing because your tissue is increasing. I don’t really know. I’m not a neurologist. But also, scientists keep changing their minds about the way the brain is connected. There’s a paper I cite in the book, which came out quite late and I think I only edited in later when I read it. This claims that it’s not so much the actual connections between neurons via the axons, those little long little thingies that you see often stereotyped in cartoons, etc. But it’s more different parts of the brain are connected via waves of signals. So, as I said, people, because they start to have more advanced technology to really look at the ways brains work, I guess…

HEDVIG: I think I see what you mean. So, it’s like, have you heard of that urban planning where when you build an area for walkways, the first year you only put in lawns and then you’ve watched where people walk and then you make paths there. So, is that the kind of metaphor that sort of works? Like the brain, in the beginning, everything is low-level connected, but then the things that you do more often are strengthened?

MADELEINE: I guess so. Because that’s how learning works, doesn’t it?

DANIEL: Yeah.

MADELEINE: If you never use parts of your brain… I mean, it’s like muscles, if you don’t use your muscles or particular muscles, there’s no point in putting energy in them to maintain them. So, you basically lose them.

DANIEL: But I’ve also heard it, and I’m not an expert… Basically, over the last 10 years of doing the show, I’ve absorbed some really good things and some terrible rubbish. [HEDVIG LAUGHS] But one thing that I absorbed was that your brain is a certain way and then at certain ages you develop — voom — tons of new neural connections. And then they get pruned and pruned and pruned and pruned. And then, in adolescence — voom — more neural connections again, prune, prune, prune, prune.

HEDVIG: Oh, I see.

DANIEL: I hope I’m right here. But that’s how I’ve heard learning described.

MADELEINE: Just to follow up on that, because I have a granddaughter who is now… seven months or something, and her parents, because it’s their first child, so they do a lot of reading about developmental jumps, etc. It’s a little girl. She goes through this phase where she’s just hard to handle, she doesn’t want to sleep, etc. And then soon after, there’s something that she can do now that she couldn’t do before. Apparently, they link that again to jumps in the development. Maybe it all gets a little bit scrambled and then, “Oh, now I understand why I’ve been so bad, because now I can do whatever it is.” But again, I’m not a neurologist or whatever, so.

DANIEL: Okay, we won’t lean too hard on that.

HEDVIG: No, but just bring it back to the book and the overall story that you were telling about the development of the brain size and the shorter gestation period. So, you’re pregnant for a shorter amount of time, maybe because you need to get your baby out earlier and childbirth becomes more difficult, you need more help with it, etc. So, where was that going? What was your next step in your narrative that you were building there?

MADELEINE: So, pregnancy actually isn’t shorter. It’s funny because I too thought that human pregnancy was exceptionally short or something, but it’s not. It falls within the same range as all the other great apes. It’s just that when we poop them out, they’re just totally useless babies. And they stay useless for about 15 years. So, people have done…

DANIEL: Oh, my god. [LAUGHS]

MADELEINE: And that’s probably an underestimate because this is based on the energy that they bring in relative to the energy that they require to sustain themselves. And that’s based on hunter-gatherers. So, if you’re talking about modern teenagers, you can probably add about 10 years or something.

DANIEL: To be fair, it’s harder to be a human than it is to be a giraffe.

MADELEINE: I don’t know. That long neck must be quite troublesome.

DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Okay, the vagus nerve alone. Okay, well, then let’s build up the picture because I had a huge list and you just ran through a bunch of them. So, let’s go through the ones that you ran through. There’s brain size. We have big brains, big, smart brains, and that helps language. But hip size hasn’t increased. You’d have to have just this massive pelvis, and that’s no good for running around like the exhaustion hunters that we are. You mentioned also early birth, but that makes mum and bub very vulnerable. So, it takes a community and what are you going to do with the community? Talk to them. I have got a ton of other things as well. You mentioned sweating in the book.

MADELEINE: I am doing that.

DANIEL: That was a part of the picture.

HEDVIG: Sweating. I don’t enjoy sweating. What is it good for?

MADELEINE: Oh, don’t move to the tropics then.

HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] I have lived in the tropics. It was rough. Yeah.

DANIEL: But if you’re chasing stuff down, it helps.

MADELEINE: It does.

HEDVIG: But do humans sweat more than chimpanzees?

MADELEINE: Yes.

HEDVIG: Huh.

DANIEL: We have sweat glands all over the place.

MADELEINE: So, we have… particularly on the head. And we need that to keep that bloody brain cool because that brain requires a quarter of all the energy. When you’re sitting still, you don’t do anything, you still need about 25% of the energy that your body requires just to stay alive goes to your brain. And your brain is extremely vulnerable to overeating. So, it’s the sweating that keeps our head cool. And it’s the sweating that allowed us, together with the changed skeleton that comes with walking on two legs, that allowed Homo erectus probably to outrun, or not so much outrun, to run for longer than its prey. So, the prey can’t sweat, so they basically have to stop running. And then the hunter comes and says “Hello. Bloop.”

DANIEL: Scary. We’re scary beings.

HEDVIG: Yeah.

DANIEL: There was something else you mentioned in the book and that’s eyes. We can see the whites of each other’s eyes, which means we can track eye gaze, which means that we can read each other’s expressions. So, eyes are a part of the picture too.

MADELEINE: Well, eyes are extremely important for nonverbal communication for one thing. Because it’s still hard to imagine how language actually started, isn’t it? So, we can imagine that individuals made noises, chimpanzees make noises, they have particular grunts for particular reasons, etc. But they don’t have the control over their breathing, they don’t have the control over the tongue and facial muscles, etc., to really mold the sound that comes out of my throat, that goes over my vocal cords. But then, you still have to ask yourself, well, where did the first words come from? And I can imagine that if I make a particular sound because I want you to look at something, if I make that sound and I look at it, then because of the way our eyes are structured, you can easily see where I’m looking. So, it helps basically in a way communicate what I’m trying to tell you.

DANIEL: Reading intentions.

MADELEINE: Reading intentions.

DANIEL: The Pixar movie, Brave — I suppose I can spoil something about it because it’s a multi-decades-old film — The plot of the movie, Brave, is a young girl who accidentally, using magic, turns her mother into a bear.

MADELEINE: As you do.

DANIEL: As you do. [CHUCKLES] And at first, this mother bear is a funny bear, and they’re trying to turn her back into a human. But later in the movie, there comes a point where it looks like mom is going to turn irreversibly into a bear. They’re not going to be able to use magic to get her back. And the animators did something very interesting to communicate that. When mother was a nice bear, kind of a human bear, you could see the whites of her eyes. You could see her sclera. But when she starts to turn irrevocably into a bear, that’s gone.

MADELEINE: Really?

DANIEL: Her eyes are just eyes. And I thought that’s such a good way of communicating that.

HEDVIG: That’s smart.

DANIEL: So, I just thought that was interesting.

MADELEINE: That is funny.

HEDVIG: That is funny. That’s also why I was at the Halloween store yesterday, as you may or may notice, and I was looking at various contact lenses. So, you can make contact lenses… you make your eyes red or green or something, but you can also just have large ones, and they can be pretty large. There are one special ones you can get that cover your entire eye, and it gives black or something like red. And it is so small change. It’s such a small thing, like, if you’re going to go to a Halloween party, you can spend lots of time and lots of costumes, but if you want to really freak people out, then just do something with your pupils. It really is very unsettling, very quickly. [LAUGHS]

DANIEL: Wow.

HEDVIG: It’s very fun. I have bought some.

DANIEL: Oh, wow. That’s a really good idea, to put those things into your eyes.

HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah, yeah. They’re green like a cat. I can’t use them yet. They need to soak for a bit longer. But social species such as bees and, I believe, slime mold.

MADELEINE: No, slime molds are not social. There was an aberration.

HEDVIG: No, they’re not social. They’re not social [LAUGHTER] but they communicate.

DANIEL: I guess they’re not, are they?

MADELEINE: No, yeah. Slime mold is confusing. There is two major types of slime molds. There is the ones that live alone, communicate, and then come together. Or, that’s the one that I worked on, which is basically a big blob of slime. I mean, seriously, it can be really big if you just keep feeding it and giving space. That’s the one I worked on. And the idea was to see if you don’t have a brain, if you can learn things and remember. Well, the answer is no, you can’t. But we try.

HEDVIG: I know about this because friend of the show and my husband, Stephen Mann, came to visit you in Sydney and saw some of your slime mold when he was a PhD student at ANU and he’s interested in communication and signals, etc.

MADELEINE: Oh.

HEDVIG: Yeah, he says hi, by the way, but you might not remember.

DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Oh, nice.

HEDVIG: But I wanted to know how your work on other social beings, slime mold excluded, bees included, because bees don’t have whites of their eyes and they don’t have tiny pelvises and whatever else. So, is there anything you learned from your previous work on nonhumans that informed the writing of this book?

MADELEINE: Well, the main thing, and that’s probably why language popped out when I was thinking about human evolution, is that in order to be social you have to be able to communicate. Because even very primitive forms of communication, there’s the other slime molds that I just talked about, like many bacteria, they’re not bacteria, but similar. They use very simple communication if they want to come together to form an aggregate. And they use chemical cues. Other primates, chimpanzees, live in social groups, they use communication. The gorillas use communication. Orangutans don’t because they’re solitary.

But all the social insects, they all have a form of communication. So, in ants and termites, that tends to be chemical because they don’t fly. So, they just lay pheromone deposits on the ground often, depending on the species, and that’s the means of communication. Others have more direct communication. They talk with their antennas. In fact, they also talk with their antennas because, “Are you my family or someone else?” So, chemical cues are extremely important in social insects.

And the bees, of course, they dance. They have a famous dance language. Now, that dance language has been studied since it was first described in the 1950s by Karl von Frisch. But what people don’t necessarily realise is that there’s about 11 or 12 species of honeybee, depending on whom you ask, because some people like to split species and others like keep them together, but anyway…

HEDVIG: As linguists, we are completely unfamiliar with this problem. We don’t know anything about language and dialect.

DANIEL: Lumpers and splitters? No, this is very strange to me.

HEDVIG: That’s news to us. Yes.

MADELEINE: So, the 11 or 12 species can be put into three basic groups. One is the one that everyone’s familiar with, that we often keep in hives. But in the wild, they live in a hollow in a tree. And somehow, when they move house, which they do when the first hollow becomes too large, they reproduce by making what we call a swarm. And that swarm is basically a daughter colony that has to find its new home. Now, how do you communicate where there is an entrance which can be this small in a tree? You have to have some form of communication. So, the dance language of those species that nest in hollows or in hollow trees is much more precise than the same dance language, because all the species have the same basic dance language than, say, the dwarf honeybees.

So, the dwarf honeybees, they all live in Southeast Asia. They make colonies. This is a single comb, it’s about this size. And it hangs off a twig in a shaded tree or bush or whatever, they basically need a little twig and they need some shade. Now, when they communicate, when they’re going to move, as I said, they use the same dance language, but it’s sort of like, “Ah, we go somewhat sort of that direction and sort of out…”

HEDVIG: Yes, vaguely this.

MADELEINE: Yeah, “We sort it out when we’re there.” Whereas the ones that live in the hollows, it’s, “No, that’s where we’re going and nowhere else.” I’ve worked on that for, I don’t know, way too long, probably, had the large number of students and other people in the field, which is always lovely. So, that must have been in the back of my mind. And I actually wrote a paper synthesising that all linking that back to the evolution or the necessity of precise communication in the bees. And then, the argument was, or still is, that if you have a difficult problem that you need to solve for which you need communication, then that communication needs to be much more precise than when the problem you’re trying to solve is much easier. Now, what is a very difficult problem in our human evolution is producing those totally useless, dependent babies which you can’t raise by yourself.

HEDVIG: You can try, but…

DANIEL: It’s hard.

MADELEINE: People do try, but now it’s different because not many women do it really by themselves, because that’s probably still impossible. But throughout our evolutionary history, so going back to about 4 million years, when our ancestors first came down from the trees, found themselves in this really dangerous environment, now walking on two legs, can’t run anymore. If I have a baby, I have to hold it in my arms. So, what else am I going to do with my arms? Don’t even have tools anyway. So, they started to be social. Maybe they were social up in the trees. But when they came down from the trees, then it was really necessary to be social, just safety in numbers. Then, you start to have communication, as I said.

Then when we had this brain fluke — you can call it a brain fluke — then it really became important to have very strong social bonds who help you raise those useless babies. But at the same time, those useless babies are actually really important in the whole story. Because when you’re born with a very undeveloped brain, you have a lot of neuroplasticity because the brain is not finished. So, these babies, their brains are just sponges for information. But the other thing is because they are so totally useless, they are totally dependent on other individuals. As soon as they’re born, they have all these tricks to make sure that there are enough people that fall in the [HEDVIG CHUCKLES] trap of falling in love with them and looking after them until they are mature enough to do it themselves.

So, you get this two-way communication basically. So, the babies learn to manipulate the other individuals around them. The other individuals around them learn to manipulate the other people around them to help them with babies. [HEDVIG LAUGHS] And that’s just a very strong selective force to shape a primitive communication system in something that’s much more sophisticated which now at the same time wasn’t just necessary, but it was also possible because of the changes to the skull. That was a very long answer. [DANIEL LAUGHS]

HEDVIG: What do you think about this idea that one of the great things about being human is that we have these brains and they’re very plastic. And in a way, if you need a community of people to do something, if you hard code it into the genes, that’s a very expensive thing to do evolutionarily. It’s like selective pressure takes a very, very long time. You can do it very incrementally. But cultural evolution, like having a norm or a practice or a way of doing things, it’s much cheaper evolutionarily cost for the community. So, one of the benefits of having the brains being so big and so plastic is that you can actually bypass in a way some of the genetics, which is very expensive and takes forever and it’s not very flexible.

So, if you find yourself in a new revolutionary landscape and you need to start eating different food, behaving differently, it’s going to take you hundreds, if not thousands of years. Well, yeah, to change your genetic makeup, but it’s going to take you a couple of generations to maybe change your cultural behaviour. So, what do you think about the load…? So, you talked about that the need to have language comes from this need to solve this difficult specific problem about childrearing. How much of… now, that comes the million-dollar question, right? How much of that do you think is about a genetic change?

MADELEINE: So, are you getting to the Chomsky’s Language Acquisition Device?

DANIEL: [SHAKES HEAD NO]

HEDVIG: I think we can kind of… Can we…? We’re actually…

MADELEINE: Are we not talking about Chomsky?

HEDVIG: No, I just think that he’s one character in this debate, and I guess I’m just tired of talking about his perspective at all times. [LAUGHS]

MADELEINE: Good. That’s just totally ignored. I think too many people, especially when I started talking about the Human Genome Project, once we have the genome of humans, we will know what it means to be human, etc. And that was a massive disappointment because, as a matter of fact, a “gene for” is extremely rare. So, people did look for the language gene. They thought they found the language gene. Turned out it was not the language gene. It’s a gene that’s important for vocalisation. But birds have it, mice have it, and they don’t have language. I think it’s misguided often that people are looking for a gene for something particular.

DANIEL: I did read how… you mentioned about how the story about FOXP2, supposedly the language gene, unraveled. And are we still looking? Are there any new candidates? It doesn’t sound like that’s really a productive angle.

MADELEINE: No, as far as I know, I couldn’t find anything. So, when I was looking for the language gene, it was FOXP2 that came up. Then, it was debunked. And I think people have realised, “Well, this is just too complicated to have a gene.” So, you have a species that already has primitive communication because it is social. And there’s this weird fluke that allows it. “Oh, I can actually really control the sound that I make.” And then, that’s combined with the need to communicate more clearly because if you communicate more clearly, you’re better able to ask for the help that you need, which means you can increase your reproductive output, which is what Darwinian selection acts on. And then Bob’s your uncle. So, it’s changes in morphology that were driven by this weird mutation that made the brain balloon.

But like so many major things that happen in evolutionary history of any species that you look at in detail, they’re just flukes. Some weird thing happens, and either the individuals that have it go extinct or they’re not. They don’t. And that’s because they find a solution. And that’s what I find so fascinating about our own evolutionary history. If you go back to the ancestor that we shared with chimpanzees and bonobos, it’s just one mistake after another after another, after another and natural selection thinking, “God, what do I do with this now? Shall I let them go extinct or shall we find a solution? Oh, what? We’ll find a solution.” And then the ultimate solution for the biggest problem is, “Oh, let them speak and let them talk all the other ones out of existence.” And here we are, still talking about it. [LAUGHS]

DANIEL: Still talking.

HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] But it is… with the risk of sounding like a high schooler who’s on weed, humans are really… like, we’re very… I know we’re not… I know there are similarities. I know humans are animals. I know humans are animals, but we’re quite different.

DANIEL: We’re weird.

HEDVIG: And I know that there are things that happen in other species that look somewhat similar. People like to play this game of taking Hockett’s design features of language and then seeing how many of them, gray parrots or bonobos fulfill, etc. But the truth of the matter is no one else is building like skyscrapers and United Nations and…

MADELEINE: Termites do, come on. Termites are tiny and they build huge skyscrapers.

HEDVIG: No one else has Temu and AliExpress. I’m not saying that’s the best of our production.

MADELEINE: I don’t think…

HEDVIG: I’m not saying that’s the height of human… [LAUGHS]

DANIEL: The way you said it once, Hedvig, and I really liked it. I remembered it was, yeah, we’re weird. Other animals do communication stuff, but they’re not writing newspapers.

HEDVIG: Newspaper is a good one. National parliaments. We do things at a level, at a scale, if not difference in quality, which is probably Austria, but certainly difference in quantity. And it is bizarre to think that… you just called it, Madeleine. You just said a fluke. Another fluke. But it’s…

DANIEL: Can I read something? Hedvig, you mentioned Charles Hockett, and there’s a quote that I really like that he said, and I wasn’t aware of this until much, much later, as a linguist. It’s a little long, but I’d like to read it.

“The crucial property notion is like the old idea that our ancestors rather suddenly crossed a Rubicon by learning to speak. Now, to be sure, there may actually have been some single most vital step, genetic or cultural or both, in the emergence of language from what preceded. And if there was, the feature involved may be one we have not yet identified. But I believe,” says Hockett, “a much more fruitful working assumption is what some investigators have called the mosaic, or perhaps now the hodgepodge theory. This theory proposes that the universal human institution we call language, no matter how well integrated or monolithic it now seems to be, came into being as the result of the serendipitous coming together of various innovations that had occurred at diverse times and places, some of which may not at the outset have had any particular connection with one another.”

And I just like that quote, and I wonder what you think about it.

HEDVIG: That’s a nice quote.

MADELEINE: No, I totally agree. Short answer? [HEDVIG LAUGHS] But you’re right that once we had language, nothing was ever the same again because it is the most powerful tool that allowed us to build skyscrapers, to write newspapers, to come up with political systems. We have parliament, etc., etc. So, cultural evolution, which was important, and cultural evolution also happens in other social animals, but once language was there, it just went through the roof. And it just sped up our evolutionary change. Even though our bodies haven’t changed, although our brains got a little smaller [CHUCKLES] since, which is interesting, but otherwise we haven’t changed. But of course, everything else has changed because we’re not masters of the universe, but we do have much better control or much more control over our own destiny than any other species has because we organise things.

HEDVIG: Yeah.

MADELEINE: We build things.

HEDVIG: Yeah. When I think about it too much, I do really feel like those people on Ancient Aliens on the History Channel or someone really high, because it is amazing what we can do. And I also find it exciting as a researcher that there’s so much that we still don’t know. I work at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and I’m surrounded by people who are trying to answer these questions all the time. And everyone has a different angle and there are also trends and waves. Like you said, for a while, people were fascinated by this idea. Then, this idea. So, such a fruitful area for research as well. And it is ourselves. Yeah, sometimes it really blows my mind.

DANIEL: There’s one little gap that I’m still having here. We’ve been describing a lot of preconditions for language, like being social, immature young brains. That one brain fluke that caused a mutation that allowed our brains to just become massive. But let’s just talk about here we all are. We’re a bunch of beings with the brains that we have. We’re in a social relationship. But we’re not quite doing what we might describe yet as language. What was the step? How did we get there? You mentioned being able to make sounds very precisely. Is that what we’re thinking was the Rubicon? And then, we go to words and then to syntax. What’s the on-ramp that you see from your research?

MADELEINE: Well, that’s a very good question, and I’m not a linguist.

DANIEL: Like we’d be any use. [LAUGHTER]

MADELEINE: But if you think about the way children learn language, they hear the sound, or someone is pointing at something and they say the particular word, and here are the eyes again. That makes it easier. So, the baby or the toddler or whatever. No, it starts as babies, really. So, they start making these associations. Apparently, babies are extremely good at making statistical associations because that’s how they learn syntax. Okay, well, this word more frequently follows this word than, etc.

DANIEL: Prediction.

MADELEINE: Prediction.

HEDVIG: We also have our own theory from this podcast. We call it the Ben Ainslie theory, I think, of children’s learning which is, I think, a joint labour between me and Ben, to be fair, Daniel, which is babies also, going back to what you said about needs. They can’t control their environment very much, and they want to control it. They want to eat or poop or something at certain times, and they have nothing better to do. They don’t have jobs. [CHUCKLES] They don’t have anything else to do but to try to get the thing that they want and to learn the communication system around them that enables them to do that.

DANIEL: And they’ve got like 14 hours a day just to listen to the patterns all around them. So, there’s nothing else going on.

HEDVIG: There’s not a lot else going on, yeah.

DANIEL: Not much.

MADELEINE: The question still is, well, what was the first word, and how was the first word constructed? I don’t know. I don’t think anyone will ever know. What I do know is that somehow, we took control over the sounds that we make, because we could. And maybe, well, you probably know this better than I do, that song was basically the basis of language. Had song first and language came second.

DANIEL: I’ve heard that.

HEDVIG: I think I have heard that…

MADELEINE: And song being really important, again, as a social glue, getting people together, but also to make work lighter, etc.

HEDVIG: Well, there is a function of language that Jakobson talks about as well, which is phatic, which is just, “Is the channel open? Are we doing a thing together?” Not really transmitting information as such, but more just testing the social bond, which is a function of language that I think people ignore sometimes when you think of it as pure informational transfer. But I think I’ve heard the theory that gesture comes before speech more often than song before language.

MADELEINE: Yeah, gesture became first again. Gestures must have been there from the beginning, because if you can’t speak, that’s the only thing you can do, isn’t it? You can look at things, and you can point or try and say, Well, it hurts, or, you know.

HEDVIG: Well, I guess you could theorise that you could grunt badly. [DANIEL LAUGHS]

MADELEINE: Yes.

HEDVIG: But I agree with you, yeah.

DANIEL: I just give the mushiest answer of all and that is I just think it was all happening at once and we were just trying everything because we had lots of needs and we had lots of abilities and we were doing gesture and we were doing precise sounds and we were doing imitations of nature. And oops, I can’t talk any more about this because we banned a discussion of the origin of language on the show in 17…

HEDVIG: Oh, did we?

DANIEL: Oh, sorry. But anyway, no, I’m going to break the band. Yeah, we were just trying everything and seeing what worked. I think that’s just a really human thing. And I don’t see how we can say, oh, no, it was all gesture until at some point we made a jump to say, no, come on. We were doing all the things.

MADELEINE: Chimpanzees, they use gestures, they use grunts. I often try to keep my hands still when I’m speaking, but I can’t. And I’m not even Italian. [LAUGHS] So, we still use gestures all the time as well. It’s part of language. Body language. You call it body language for a reason, isn’t it?

HEDVIG: But it’s interesting that all three of us are sort of like, we’re having other shared views here that I think it’s important to point out to the listeners are not necessarily universal in the research world, one of them being that gesture was probably coevolving or before speech. And the other one is that language evolves for connecting communicatively to other people and not for cognitively structuring your inner world, which is actually another perspective that I personally tend to forget sometimes. So, I feel like it’s…

DANIEL: Are you smuggling Chomsky in here?

HEDVIG: I don’t think it’s only Chomsky. And I think there’s nuance in that view as well. I don’t think it’s… maybe we’re making a strawman out of it, but we’re talking here about a perspective that is that, like, humans have problems and they need to solve them and they throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and some of it sticks. And that’s sort of how evolution kind of works. As a species, you’re in a new environment or a new problem, or you need to expand somehow or you find a niche that you can exploit to have more reproductive success, and that’s why you do it. Yeah, sorry, that wasn’t a question. That was just a note to our listeners, I think.

MADELEINE: So, I just started reading a book and unfortunately, I don’t have it here, but I think the title is More Than Words.

HEDVIG: More than Words.

MADELEINE: But anyway, and if I’ve only started the first chapter last night. But her main argument, she’s a psychologist, I think. So, her argument is that language is more than just communication. It’s also important for our inner life or inner workings. Why do we talk to ourselves? Why do we talk in our head? And I know it’s controversial again because there’s also a theory, isn’t it? I can’t remember because I was told very early on when I was writing this book, just forget that that’s outdated. People don’t believe that anymore. That people who speaks different languages think differently.

DANIEL: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

HEDVIG: Wow. We can tee up a coming interview about… It’s the thing we’ve talked about this show many times, like the general linguistic relativity hypothesis, sometimes known as Sapir-Whorf that…

MADELEINE: Whorf, yes.

HEDVIG: …because of the way. You can also see more broadly linguistic relativity. I would say that there is still active work in that, but usually it tends to focus on relatively small and specific effects rather than broad cognitive patterns. There’s this great sci-fi book called Babel-17 where they theorise that a language really can constrain, like, in a very dramatic way, what you think is possible and how you act and how you live your life. But I think most active research in this regard is a bit smaller scale, I would say. What would you say, Daniel?

DANIEL: The claims have become more modest over time. I had a question. Madeleine, you’re coming at this from an evolutionary biologist’s perspective, doing a book about language. And the book has kind of led you here with us linguists and probably taken you into a lot of linguistic spaces. [HEDVIG LAUGHS] Is that strange for you? And how do you feel coming into the linguistic space? And what’s been your experience with linguists? What’s the response been?

MADELEINE: Well, it’s interesting you ask that because only before you contacted me, I only had one email from a linguist who is in his 80s, lives in Australia, actually lives in Queensland. So, we had this long conversation which was very confusing to me because he started mentioning all these people who work in linguistics that, of course, I’ve never heard of because I’m not a linguist. And in the end, he wanted to let me know that he actually agrees with my thesis. Yet, then sent me a massively long document about cognition, because I think what he’s trying to do is trying to link the evolution of cognition and language. Anyway, but then I never had time to read it because then I was going to Argentina for five weeks and I only just got back.

So, I was actually a bit scared because it was not my intention to put the evolution of language in the title of the book because I never set out to answer that question.

HEDVIG: Oh, interesting.

DANIEL: Okay.

MADELEINE: But publishers have their own mind.

HEDVIG: Who convinced you of the title?

MADELEINE: The publisher. Well, my editor, I think. And also, because somewhere it says that I also criticise Steven Pinker, which I don’t really.

DANIEL: Why not? [LAUGHTER]

HEDVIG: We’re not huge fans of Pinker on this podcast, I can tell you, but…

MADELEINE: Yeah, I gathered that. [LAUGHTER]

DANIEL: Okay, so it’s just us, basically.

MADELEINE: I don’t know enough about linguistics because it was, as I said, answering how we came to speak and why was never something I set out to address.

HEDVIG: Well, it sounds like what you’ve done is taken, like, a very broad view and summarised a lot of research for a general audience, which is always really useful. I think, as scientists, sometimes when we’re in it, when we’re the fish in water, we think these grand synthesis arguments are sort of obvious. So, some of the things you’ve mentioned, I’ve heard other people say, like, “Oh, and everyone knows that this is kind of how this works because of that study and this study.” But it’s always great when someone takes the time to sort of synthesise it, especially for a general audience. So, it sounds really useful.

DANIEL: And especially with an interesting angle like evolutionary biology. I will just say, for the record that as a linguist, I read the entire thing and I never found anything that made me go, “Oh, fuck, that was rank.”

HEDVIG: Embarrassing.

DANIEL: “That’s out of date.” Or, “Oh, my god.” No, I never said that because I always thought, “Nope, there’s nothing here that strikes me as not very solid,” just so you know.

MADELEINE: Well, thank you. Because the weird thing is that the book wasn’t reviewed either. I know that the publisher had a few proofreaders, because I got something wrong with Trotsky. Apparently, I called Trotsky something he wasn’t at the time, because that office didn’t exist at the time, and there was something else. So, from that, I do know that some people read it, but I don’t think anyone with specific linguistic background or evolutionary biology background read it. So, it was a bit scary, to be honest, to see the book go out in the world and think… well, especially since it’s “The Origin of Language” in the title and I’m not a linguist, but I survived, I’m still here.

DANIEL: It’s a hardcore title, that’s for sure.

HEDVIG: Did you know that the EvoLang Conference abstract submission deadline got extended? You could probably still submit to it if you wanted.

MADELEINE: Which conference is that?

HEDVIG: The EvoLang Conference. It’s the most fun… It’s the Evolution of Language Conference.

MADELEINE: Yeah, well, that’s scary.

DANIEL: I don’t think they’d have you for lunch.

HEDVIG: No, that’s a really cute… And that’s like Sean’s crowd.

DANIEL: Exactly, exactly. No, I think we had some good chats.

HEDVIG: I think they’re the nice ones.

DANIEL: They are. I got a question. You mentioned… this is just… I’m just getting all the last questions that I want to get in here. You mentioned child cuteness as a motivating factor. Do you have an explanation for cute aggression or what’s known as gigil? The way that you want to just grab a cute infant and aggress them and I want to bite you and tear you apart [FIERCE ONOMATOPOEIA]. What’s behind that?

MADELEINE: [LAUGHS] I don’t know. Weirdness?

DANIEL: [LAUGHS] It’s really normal.

HEDVIG: I had it yesterday with one of my cats. I was just like this with him. I never hurt him. That’s the interesting thing. We all have the instinct. We all want to bite or crush. But it never, of course, happens.

MADELEINE: It is true because parents, and grandparents, I guess, do tend to bite the bottoms after they clean the babies, don’t they? [LAUGHS]

DANIEL: How can you not?

HEDVIG: Yes, this is the thing.

DANIEL: How can you not?

MADELEINE: It’s probably… So, Konrad Lorenz had this theory about overstimulant. What do they call it in German? I can’t remember. But basically, that many organisms have this… Well, they basically have this overreaction to a particular stimulus. The reaction to the stimulus has an evolutionary advantage, but you can take it too far. And actually, I think it was Nikolaas Tinbergen who did this wonderful experiment with, I think, oystercatchers, birds that nest on the ground. So, they gave them the normal size eggs, and they made them bigger and they just went for the biggest egg, which would never, ever, ever work. But its stimulus is, “There’s an egg. I need to incubate the egg.” So, maybe for us, the stimulus is there’s something really cute and they have to look after it, but I take it a little bit too far and bite it on its bottom.

HEDVIG: I’m so glad you brought up the bird egg because I have been telling people that exact same fact, and I thought it was geese, but I’ve been trying to look it up. But maybe it was…

MADELEINE: No, the geese were… Because the geese imprint on the first living thing that they see when they come out of the egg and they just happen to see him. So, there’s this wonderful photo of him walking through the meadows with all the little geese behind him. But the other one, it may not be an oystercatcher, but it’s definitely a bird that breeds on the ground. But it’s this famous drawing that Tinbergen made himself.

HEDVIG: I’ve seen it, too. I’ve heard about it. Because people say the same thing about human’s reaction to sugar. That in our environment, having some sugar was good and we never had access to these amounts of sugar. So, having the instinct to just eat sugar when we see it was good for hundreds and thousands of years. And it’s not until the last 200 years that it’s become a problem. And we don’t have a cap because we never needed one.

DANIEL: We broke the food game.

HEDVIG: And these birds don’t have a cap on, like, how large an egg should because they never encountered a silly human who gave them an egg to three times the size of a normal egg. Again, humans, we choose to do strange things.

DANIEL: We’re these weird beasts. Weird beasts.

HEDVIG: Yeah.

DANIEL: The book is The Origin of Language: How We Learned to Speak and Why. It’s available now from Simon & Schuster. We’re talking to the author, Professor Madeleine Beekman. Madeleine, thank you so much for coming and hanging out with us. This has been a really good chat.

MADELEINE: Well, thank you. And thank you for not eating me, even though you couldn’t because online.

DANIEL: I’m coming over. Coming over.

MADELEINE: Oh, you’re coming over.

HEDVIG: You [CROSSTALK] Sydney. [DANIEL LAUGHS]

MADELEINE: Well, you asked earlier, what’s it like to enter a new world? I find it fascinating talking to people who have different backgrounds and have been thinking about things in a very different way. So, it’s really delightful. And thank you for making the time in your interest.

HEDVIG: Our pleasure.

[INTERVIEW ENDS]

[MUSIC]

BEN: Ooh, it’s time for Words of the Week.

DANIEL: It’s time for Words of the Week. This one was suggested by Eric via email. “Have you guys covered the word POLYCRISIS yet? Specifically, as I learned today, the term, the polycrisis being used to describe all of the interconnected turmoil we are all feeling in the year 2025.”

BEN: So, this could have gone one of two ways for me. It was either that or trying to describe the insanely difficult social things…

HEDVIG: Scheduling a polycule.

DANIEL: Scheduling a polycule.

BEN: Exactly. [LAUGHTER]

DANIEL: Yeah.

HEDVIG: But I’m going bowling on Tuesday. But you wanted to do, yeah.

DANIEL: I’ve got to make sure everybody feels happy and respected here. We have looked at OMNISHAMBLES, which I think was somebody’s Word of the Year back in 2017 or ’16 or something.

BEN: I think its total nonexistence now says everything we need to know about that.

DANIEL: Let’s go on. This one was suggested by Andy from Logophilius via email, hello@becauselanguage.com and by Aristemo on our Discord. Andy says, “I stumbled across the word CHATFISHING the other day, and somewhat weirdly, I immediately knew exactly what it meant.” Okay.

BEN: CHATFISHING.

DANIEL: There you go. Not catfishing… Well, how would you describe CATFISHING?

BEN: Misrepresenting yourself online.

HEDVIG: CATFISHING is when you’re trying to get something to your advantage by trying to be someone you are not.

DANIEL: Okay, very good. Both of you, congratulations. What’s CHATFISHING?

BEN: I’m guessing when people are deploying AI in order to imitate a human being for some phishing scam, P-H phishing scam.

DANIEL: Could be. You’re right there. You might be dealing with a real person when you’re being chatfished. It’s just that this person is running everything through [LAUGHS] ChatGPT.

BEN: Ooh, ugh, argh, yucky.

HEDVIG: Oh.

DANIEL: What should I say to this person? How shall I represent myself?

BEN: Yucky.

DANIEL: It’s a gross example of secondhand thinking. Sorry, Hedvig, you got a thing?

HEDVIG: I’m making a face because I feel like it is a bad solution to a real problem, which is people are anxious about messing up in social communication and they figure, by asking a large language model, they’ll get the average response that most other humans would have done, and then they won’t at least fuck up and be really made fun of. So, I feel like it’s a bad solution to a real problem, but there should be better solutions out there.

DANIEL: Mm, yeah.

BEN: We’ll put it in the same category as things like heroin, [LAUGHS] a bad, bad solution to very real problems.

DANIEL: Andy says, “Because developers are pushing GenAI into everything, this word might actually have some staying power. So, I figured it would be a good Word of the Week.” If this is you, if you’re chatfishing, just be yourself. Get rejected cleanly. On your own terms, if that’s what you’re worried about.

HEDVIG: That’s how I’ve been feeling lately about job applications and grant applications, because a lot of people are telling me what I should do and what to do and stuff. And I’m like, “Well, if I do what all you say and then fit into that, then when I get rejected or when I get accepted, it’s not actually me.”

BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And possibly very bad reality of like, “Okay, I make the perfect marketing document for myself. And it gets me to this place. And then I arrive, and I am not the perfect marketing document. I’m me,” [LAUGHS] which is a messy human being, like all messy human beings are. That’s tough on me. That’s tough on other people. That’s not ideal.

DANIEL: Yep.

BEN: Would it not better to find a place where my weirdness and my peculiarities, people are like, “Hey, man, I’m digging that weirdness. That’s a good fit. That’s a great fit”? Find that.

DANIEL: It only has to happen once.

HEDVIG: I think there are things I shouldn’t. I think there’s some rating in that’s good.

BEN: Oh, yeah. To be clear, what I’m not saying is, like, if you’re not chatfishing, therefore — info trauma dump — every possible conception of thought you have on a person simultaneously, there’s a middle ground. [LAUGHS] Socialisation is still important.

HEDVIG: Yeah.

DANIEL: Let’s go on to the next one. Hedvig, I think you just dumped a bracket of them on us. This one’s…

BEN: Oh, what have you got for us, Hedders? From the wild.

HEDVIG: I have three from the wilds of TikTok. Of course. Let’s see how many of them Ben knows.

BEN: Okay.

HEDVIG: GROUP 7.

BEN: Tangential.

HEDVIG: UNC.

BEN: Yes.

HEDVIG: You should know this, Ben.

BEN: Yes, I get called this a lot.

HEDVIG: And CHOPPED.

BEN: Yes. So, I’m hitting two and a half out of three here.

DANIEL: Okay, Hedvig, hit us with GROUP 7.

HEDVIG: It’s good to know one thing which is like the way TikTok and a lot of other social media apps work, right, is that they try and recommend you things that they think you’ll interact with. Remember, interact with, not like. You stay there. If you like being mad, you’ll also get things that make you mad. And you can get into sort of clusters, right, where it’s like, “You’re like these other users. So, maybe you’ll also like this thing.” And some, and I see this mainly on TikTok, are essentially doing what in marketing, you call AB testing but themselves. So, they made a new song and they make two different little videos for it and they see which one does best. So, they’ll have like one with like a blue tone light and one with a red tone light or something like that. There are small differences and then they see which one does best. So, one user, Sophia James, she made… How many? Seven videos.

DANIEL: Seven.

HEDVIG: And they all started like, “If you’re watching this video, you are in group 3, group, blah, blah, blah.” I actually think what actually happened was the Group 7 one for some reason just got more viral than all the others. But people got obsessed with this idea of knowing which group they’re in. So, like, “Ooh, I’m a Group 7.”

BEN: There was a very ingroup-outgroup dynamic that developed.

DANIEL: I’m reading this article in E! Online by Brahmjot Kaur, link on the show notes for this episode. But the first six videos got between half a million and one million views. But the seventh one got 16 and a half million views. A lot of people in Group 7.

HEDVIG: People also like the idea… It’s like astrological signs. People are like, “Ooh, I’m an Aries.” Like, “It says something about me that I’m in Group 7.” And for some reason, it snowballed such that Group 7 was supposed to be the coolest group and then that one just went mainstream, right? So, just like everyone watched this. Like, most people are Group 7. It’s not that special.

BEN: The impression that I got from this was that it was a funny little thing, like a quirk, an oddity to begin with, right? And it should be noted that TikTok absolutely has the capacity to just wave a magic scepter and make a video go viral, right? They can make that happen. They can just put it into the eyeballs of as many people as they want. And they do that regularly as a mechanism to try and entice more content generation out of content creators, right? So, if your videos are like 10,000, 10,000, 10,000 and then you hit 100,000, boy, oh boy, you’re going to start trying a lot harder after your 100,000, right? So, I assume something like that was at work here.

And then, a whole bunch of people did what gross, messy humans do, which was they started projecting a whole bunch of their shit onto a completely abstract and meaningless reality. So then, By the time, I got to the Group 7 stuff, I got to the part of it I got in at, not the ground floor when all I was seeing was just like, “How great is it to be Group 7?” and stuff. And I dug for about 30 seconds until I reached the conclusion that I’ve just articulated now, at which point I was like, “Well, that’s fucking dumb. I’m out of here.” [DANIEL LAUGHS]

HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah. But people like to be special. So, for a while, it was like, “Alpha, omega, beta, sigma, blah, blah. I’m a type A personality. I’m a type of B personality.” By the way, I’ve been seeing type C, personality lately, which I don’t understand yet. But people like to have a label that describes them. So, this was one of those things. And you might see people saying, like, “Ooh, I’m Group 7.” And that’s what that is. They’re like everyone else, is what that is.

BEN: If it helps, I have recently been admitted to the category of UNC. We’re moving on now to the next one. So, an UNC is basically just…

DANIEL: Can I guess? Can I guess?

BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

DANIEL: Is it uncool? Or uncoordinated?

HEDVIG: I mean it is.

BEN: I had assumed it is. You’re absolutely true. But it comes from UNCLE, is my understanding. And so many things are to do with cool words that the young folk are using, this has just been stolen from the Black community yet again. Well, how UNC is used in African American vernacular English is it refers to… You could use it interchangeably with, like, old head. So, like, a person from the sort of bracket of humanity before this one who’s kind of a bit out of touch, a bit not with it. But crucially, with UNC, I think it carries an overtone of they think they’re still with it. They think they’re still cool. They think they’ve still got it going on. So, an unk is a person who will show up at the barbecue or something and dap up the young kids and all that sort of thing. And they’ll put up with it, but also when that person leaves, they’ll be like, “Oh, man, it’s unc.” [LAUGHS] What are we going to do with him?

DANIEL: [LAUGHS] The uncool uncle.

BEN: That’s the vibe that I think UNC tends to carry semantically.

HEDVIG: Importantly, it’s not as negatively coded as, “Okay, boomer.”

BEN: Yes. Not at all. No, no, no, no.

HEDVIG: So, it is a little bit more affectionate, is the usage that I’ve seen, right?

BEN: Definitely. I have been accused of doing an unc move like three separate times last week alone, [LAUGHS] if that’s any indication.

HEDVIG: Yeah. And I think it also speaks to the Gen Z, Gen Alpha relationship to maybe millennials and Gen X. Like me desperately trying to be with it and get on the new trends and stuff, and they’re like, “Yeah, that’s cute,” but.

BEN: Like a little head pat. “That’s very sweet. Good job.”

HEDVIG: Yeah.

BEN: And then finally, CHOPPED.

DANIEL: Is it the same as being ripped or swole?

BEN: It is not.

DANIEL: With lots of muscles?

HEDVIG: It is not.

DANIEL: Dang, okay.

HEDVIG: It is not. When I was trying to…

BEN: [LAUGHS] Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I really hope he thought that because a bunch of people we were calling him chopped. [LAUGHS]

DANIEL: I did not.

BEN: Okay. [DANIEL LAUGHS]

HEDVIG: So, as I was trying to look up things about both UNC and CHOPPED, the problem is that they’re very hard to google because there are a lot of things. There are a lot of organisations, for example, that abbreviate to U-N-C and chopped. If you google chopped, you get a lot of results for the reality show about… No, no, you don’t. That’s botched. But you get a lot of irrelevant results, is what I’m saying. You get a lot of things…

BEN: Chopped is a word that means other things. [LAUGHS]

DANIEL: Yes.

HEDVIG: And I think that maybe there was like a cooking show because I got a lot of results that weren’t meaningful. And then, finally I got a YouTube channel called The FADER and they made a video nine years ago about the meaning of this term. So, Ben can get points again if he guesses where it seems like this term comes from.

BEN: Once again, I’m going to guess AAVE. And I think this might be a sport… like a Black culture sports specific thing, maybe. But basically, it means…

HEDVIG: Sports?

BEN: I think possibly not. It’s either that or it’s maybe haircuts, one of the two.

HEDVIG: So, my understanding is that it just means something that is not good, is maybe the broad…

BEN: Yeah, no, no. Sorry, yeah, my bad. I was trying to identify from whence it came.

HEDVIG: Oh, oh, oh, sorry. I don’t know more specific than North American Black English, seems like it is. This channel seems to be New York based. But the guy who was explaining the term is from Toronto. But it seems like it comes from that kind of sphere. And chopped means something is not good. People keep using like WEIRD or CRAZY or FUCKED as synonyms.

BEN: I was just about to say that. I think the best synonym for like a non-AAVE speaker would just be FUCKED. Like, you would say when something… like, if you’re at the, I don’t know, the local McDonald’s and a whole bunch of totally skeezy rabblerousers, just like run through the place and just make a whole scene, when that finishes, you might turn to your friend and be like, “That was just chopped.” Like, that was fucked.

DANIEL: Okay.

HEDVIG: And a person can be it, a situation and an object.

DANIEL: Okay.

BEN: Yes.

DANIEL: Okay.

BEN: Much like FUCKED has just tremendous breadth and depth. So too does chopped.

DANIEL: I feel like pointing out, just for the record, that I’m not hearing AAVE very much anymore because of course, not all Black American English is vernacular. I’m hearing African American English way more and I feel like…

HEDVIG: Yeah. That can happen.

BEN: Could you help me understand the difference? As in, like, when does it stop being vernacular and it starts being African American English?

HEDVIG: When it’s used in more formal context.

BEN: Okay.

DANIEL: There are formal varieties of African American English. There are informal varieties. Obviously, it’s not just one thing, just like all of English isn’t one thing.

BEN: Okay. The word “vernacular” there sounds the key differentiator. Would we say that both CHOPPED and UNC are examples of vernacular?

DANIEL: I think we can definitely say that, yes.

BEN: Okay, okay. Cool, cool, cool.

HEDVIG: Right. So, I think what Daniel is getting at is that there are features of Black or Afro American English that are being more acceptable nowadays to be used in also formal contexts. So, people are using them there. For example, the classic one like copula dropping, like: they… they…

DANIEL: They not like us.

HEDVIG: Oh! Right. Not like us. They not like us. Those parts might be becoming more often used in more formal contexts and therefore aren’t accurately described by vernacular. However, I think that CHOPPED is not there, I would guess. [LAUGHTER]

DANIEL: But I just never hear people talk about African American vernacular English or AAVE. I’m much more likely to hear African American English. I haven’t heard AAVE for a long time. Last one suggested by LK, who says, “Apologies for bringing up another US politics related candidate for Word of the Week. But apparently, today’s discourse is about who gets to be called an aunt or an aunt.” Does anyone know which political figure in the US this is related to?

BEN: Ooh.

HEDVIG: Kamala Harris?

DANIEL: Nope.

BEN: Yeah, no, I’m at a bit of a loss on this one, an aunt.

DANIEL: Ah, New York City Mayor Elect, Zohran Mamdani.

BEN: But he doesn’t…

HEDVIG: But he is a man.

DANIEL: Yes.

BEN: I’m confused. His auntie is famous? Is that what’s going on here?

DANIEL: Well, he told a story once about an aunt and I’m just going to this New York Post story. Now, you know that the New York Post is very anti-Democratic party, very right leaning…

BEN: It is very fun. It is so fun.

HEDVIG: Is that the one that’s funded by… No, one of the Washingtons is funded by the Moonies.

DANIEL: Oh, that’s The Washington Times.

BEN: Washington Post is Bezos, I think.

DANIEL: Yes, that’s correct.

DANIEL: Washington Times is Moonies.

HEDVIG: And Washington Times is Moonies. And New York Post is…

DANIEL: It’s Murdoch.

BEN: Look, just think of the basest conservative tabloid rag you can and the Washington Post… Sorry, the New York Post is your shining standard bearer of that.

DANIEL: Here’s the headline. “Mamdani Didn’t Tell The Whole Truth About His Hijab Wearing ‘Aunt’, Who Feared for Safety Post 9/11.”

BEN: Okay, okay.

HEDVIG: Okay.

DANIEL: And then, here’s the underline. The “aunt” who Zohran Mamdani said was too afraid to wear her hijab on the subways after 9/11 is…

BEN: Wait, wait, wait. Quick pause. Quick pause. Can I guess this?

DANIEL: Go ahead.

BEN: He was using a brown person’s version of auntie.

DANIEL: Correct.

BEN: Yeah. He was saying auntie to mean any one of probably dozens and dozens and dozens of his mum’s friends, because that’s just how they use the word.

DANIEL: Here’s the undertext. The aunt who Zohran Mamdani said was too afraid to wear her hijab on the subways after 9/11 was actually his dad’s cousin.

BEN: Oh, no.

DANIEL: What? [LAUGHTER] So, it’s raised some discussion about who gets to be called auntie. I mean, who hasn’t said, “Now, go to your auntie,” and it’s actually not an auntie, it’s a family friend, or a different relative?

HEDVIG: But this seems also so dumb from the newspaper’s point of view, because I don’t think that people who don’t like Zohran Mamdani are going to think that this is a smoking gun, that he called his dad’s cousin an aunt. Like, they’re going to be like, “Oh, maybe that was like…

DANIEL: Smoking gun, folks. Smoking gun. What else is he lying about? [LAUGHS]

HEDVIG: Like, it’s not that interesting, is it? Even if you thought it was incorrect.

DANIEL: In the worst version, completely irrelevant.

BEN: Yeah, that’s so funny.

DANIEL: So, Hedvig, I wanted to talk to you because I went to Kinbank to look at words for auntie in different languages, and that was kind of interesting. Kinbank is cool. It’s time to go to Mandarin, the most specific system I can think of. I’m going to name some people that you could call aunt in English, and then the term for that person in Mandarin. You ready? Your father’s older sister is gūmǔ. I’m sorry about the pronunciation. I’ll do my best on the tones. Your father’s younger sister is gūgu. The woman your father’s older brother married, bómǔ. The woman your father’s younger brother married, shěnmǔ. For your mother, it doesn’t appear that younger or older matters. So, your mother’s sister is yímǔ, and the woman your mother’s brother married, jiùmǔ. I’m noticing now for the first time that almost all of them end in -mǔ, but not all. Sorry if I’m wrong on all of this. There may be more than just those six, but is there any other bizarrely detailed systems you know of?

HEDVIG: No, not really. Well, maybe stuff with clans and when you rotate over generations. But Mandarin already has different words for younger and older brother and… like, siblings of younger. Is it gēge is older brother, etc. So, there’s already that. So, as soon as you think of an aunt as your father’s sibling, that kicks in, if it does, which it doesn’t for the mother. In Swedish, we would also maybe… I was actually discussing this because I was at a family event, a wedding, recently and we were talking to my family members about whether I could call my aunt’s husband my uncle. And everyone was like, “Well, it depends on also when they married,” because if they married after I became an adult, it’s weirder.

DANIEL: Oh, wow. Cool.

HEDVIG: Much weirder to call them uncle.

BEN: Oh, that’s an interesting… Yeah, that’s a strange… Yeah, cool.

HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s just like, it’s weird if your dad remarries in his 60s, you don’t call that woman your stepmom.

DANIEL: Okay.

HEDVIG: Maybe.

DANIEL: Yes. Okay.

HEDVIG: Right?

BEN: Mmm, fascinating.

HEDVIG: Because they haven’t performed a motherly role to…

BEN: You call her like Jessica or whatever. [LAUGHS]

HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly. Or like my dad’s wife. So, I understand, I like having a distinction there. So, I would maybe say something like, “Oh, married-in uncle or my aunt’s husband,” or something like that. So, I get that, and I think it makes a lot of sense. And I get confused by English all the time because people keep saying, like, “My grandma did this and that,” and I’m like, “That is one of two people. Who is it? Tell me now.”

DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Yep. There should be dad-mum or mum-mum.

BEN: I need the context.

DANIEL: That’s much better. So, POLYCRISIS, CHATFISHING, GROUP 7, UNC, CHOPPED, and AUNT are Words of the Week. Let’s get to a comment from Luis via SpeakPipe. Now, remember, in our latest episode, crossword constructor and author, Natan Last, gave us some questions, some crossword clues whose answers were the same thing twice but pronounced differently. Like, a corsage can be a flower and a river can be a flow-er because it flows, all right? Spelled the same way. Well, Luis has some more for us, so let’s listen.

LUIS: I loved the episode on crossword puzzles, and there was three clues. I don’t know them exactly, but they were really, really fun. It’s like someone who pulls a building. A shoeshine in Warsaw. And there was a bathtub salesperson. I thought those were so fun. Great episode. This is Luis. Bye.

BEN: Okay, I’m going to need some help.

DANIEL: So, someone who pulls a building. Now, the answer to this is going to be two words, and they’re spelled the same, but maybe pronounced differently.

HEDVIG: Can I call for help? Because Ste is really good at this.

DANIEL: Okay. You can phone a friend.

HEDVIG: Okay, I’ll go get him.

BEN: Someone who demonstrates bathware. I’m very bad at this. I’m really struggling.

DANIEL: Hedvig is back and Ste is with her. Holy shit.

HEDVIG: Here he comes. I’ve got help.

DANIEL: It’s on.

BEN: I got the middle. Hey, Ste. We liked your song.

STE: Oh, thanks.

DANIEL: So, number one. I’ll just repeat them. Number one was someone who pulls a building. A shoeshine in Warsaw. And number three was bathtub salesperson. I just want to amend that. Maybe someone who demonstrates bathware. And the answers to all three of these are going to be the same word, maybe pronounced differently. So. Okay.

HEDVIG: Okay. Warsaw, specifically weird.

STEVE: Well, shoeshine and Warsaw is polish, Polish.

DANIEL: There you go. Polish, polish.

BEN: Polish polish.

DANIEL: Nice. Okay.

BEN: Polish polish.

DANIEL: Now, we’re on 1 and 3.

HEDVIG: So, but…

DANIEL: A little think music here.

BEN: [LAUGHS] Hedvig’s not there.

HEDVIG: Pulls building. So, like pulls… there’s going to be…

BEN: Pull. He’s saying the word pull, right? P-U-L-L?

DANIEL: To drag it along with it. Instead of pushing, you’re pulling it.

BEN: Pulls buildings.

STE: Yeah. Drag, take.

BEN: Yank.

HEDVIG: Yeah. Pull.

DANIEL: Grab. Not tug.

HEDVIG: Puller.

DANIEL: Not tug. Not pull.

STE: It has to be the name of a building. Yeah. Tug was the first thing I thought but that would be like a boat rather than a building.

DANIEL: Let me give you the verb. This is a verb that you would use when you’re specifically pulling a car.

STE: Tower, tower. To-wer.

DANIEL: You got it.

STEVE: Like flower, flow-er.

BEN: Oh, tower tow-er.

DANIEL: Tower to-wer. Very good. Very good.

BEN: Of course.

DANIEL: And now, the third one I think is a little easier. Someone who demonstrates bathware?

STEVE: Show-er, shower.

DANIEL: Hey. They’re a shower show-er. Good job.

BEN: [LAUGHS] Ste is good at this.

HEDVIG: He is good.

DANIEL: Ste is good at this. Thank you, Ste.

BEN: Yeah.

HEDVIG: Yeah,

DANIEL: And thank you, Luis, for giving us a fun time.

BEN: Yes, thank you.

STE: Too early on a Sunday to be thinking that hard. [LAUGHTER]

BEN: And yet, we got there.

HEDVIG: Yeah.

DANIEL: Finally, this one is from Lucy via email with the subject line, “Thank you from a ‘failed’ linguist.” Who says, “Hi, everyone. I just came across your podcast and I’m enjoying it so much. I love the fun you have. It makes me laugh in a way I can’t share with those around me who don’t geek out on linguistics like I do.” Oh, but you can. You can share. Okay. Lucy says, “I was originally accepted into grad school to study linguistics, but when financial aid fell through, I ended up taking a roundabout path to plodding away in accounting, hence failed linguist.” Mm. “My interest has never waned, and I try to keep up with the latest research and developments. But access to academic articles is hard for laypeople who don’t actually work in research. I really like how you discuss research methodology. Thanks for being fun and educational while providing a geeky outlet all at the same time.” Thanks, Lucy.

BEN: Aw, that was very sweet.

HEDVIG: Thanks. Yeah, and the thing about access to academic articles, it is hard for laypeople. It is getting better for both laypeople and academics as more journals are moving into more open access formats. So, that is removing paywalls. I think it was last year the Journal of Linguistic Typology became fully diamond open access, which they’re trying out for… I think they’re in maybe a bit of a trial phase because they’re doing the subscription models where different organisations and libraries can subscribe, and that’s how they’re sustaining it. So, it is becoming easier.

But then again, there’s also like, even if you get access to the article, if it contains a lot of the latest jargon that you’re not up on, that’s another accessibility angle. But at least open access is becoming more common.

DANIEL: True. I just want to say, who paid for that research again? Who paid for it?

HEDVIG: Taxpayers, most of the time.

DANIEL: Yeah, us. I just want to say it’s lovely to get a compliment like that. I’m glad that we could help you scratch that linguistic itch.

HEDVIG: But?

DANIEL: But I want to address that subject line, “Failed linguist.” Am I a failed singer? I love to sing. Singing is something that I’ve done in choirs off and on, but I’ve never become a fully professional singer. But I’ve been able to engage with singing on a level that I want to in a way that fits in with the rest of my life. Thanks to the people who decided to do it full time.

BEN: I got the impression from Lucy’s email that she did not have a hugely negative valence on “failed.”

DANIEL: Okay.

BEN: I think she’s tongue-in-cheek-ing herself when describing herself that way. So, I don’t think we have to worry about… If she wants to call herself that, she can.

DANIEL: I hope that she’s being easy on herself in that way. You’ve helped me feel like we’re encouraging people to do linguistic stuff and that feels very good.

HEDVIG: Can I just say, for the record, the reason why I was struggling so much with Luis’ crossword problem, I was under the impression that I was trying to find one word for all pairs. [BEN LAUGHS]

DANIEL: Mm, that would be difficult.

BEN: Yeah. Oh, god.

HEDVIG: Desperately trying to combine PULL and POLISH.

BEN: Okay.

DANIEL: And the others. Yeah. Okay, well, we’ll put that in the record.

BEN: Defense notes the objection. Yep.

DANIEL: Big thanks to our guest, Professor Madeleine Beekman, everyone who gave us stories, words, comments and Related or Nots. Thanks to SpeechDocs for transcribing all the words. And thanks to you great patrons for being awesome and helping us do the show.

BEN: If you want to give us a hand, there’s a bunch of ways you can do it. You can follow us. We are @becauselanguage.com on BlueSky and @becauselangpod just about everywhere else. You can send us ideas, news and words just like was done today on SpeakPipe so we could hear your luscious tones. Or you can do it just with a good old-fashioned email, hello@becauselanguage.com. You can also just tell a mate about us and you can tell digital stranger mates about us by leaving us a review such as this one.

The review is titled Juvenile Nonsense, one star. It reads. “I could barely make it through half an episode of this drivel. The host is embarrassingly uninformed and seems more worried about virtue signaling than actually understanding how language works.”

If you would like us to keep annoying people, all you’ve got to do is like spread the word. Also, if you want to balance out not very complimentary review, you could go to the places where you can leave reviews for podcasts like Apple Podcasts and all those other sorts of places, and you could leave us a review that counters our ire. [DANIEL LAUGHS]

HEDVIG: That was an interesting review.

DANIEL: It’s okay because…

BEN: I liked it. That made me feel good in my tummy.

HEDVIG: You cannot say that you liked it. I am literally going to go to… So, if you aren’t an Apple user and you don’t use iTunes for your podcast, which a lot of people don’t do, there are other places you can leave reviews like Podchaser and because I strive for positivity in my life, I just went there to… I’m going find… I’m going to find… okay, here’s a three-star review.

DANIEL: Oh.

HEDVIG: Okay, I like this. I’m a three-star review giver where I’m like, “It’s decent, but like, meh, it could be better.” Okay, so, should I go for the three star or you want to hear a five one?

BEN: [LAUGHS] Hedvig, you’re so funny.

DANIEL: Let’s hear three. Let’s see if it differs marginally from a one-star review.

HEDVIG: “Here’s your honest review. The concept is wonderful, but their reveling in your smugness and judgmental nature is off putting.” Fucking hell. All right.

DANIEL: That sounds like a one-star review to me, honestly.

BEN: It’s okay. You don’t need to balance it out, Hedvig. I like that there was a one-star review of an angry person.

HEDVIG: I don’t know what to do about things like this because I don’t know…

BEN: Nothing, you don’t do anything.

DANIEL: We don’t need to be there for all these conversations.

HEDVIG: Yeah, okay.

BEN: This is not something that needs to be addressed. It’s okay.

DANIEL: Do you know what I did? I read this review. I read the one-star review to my daughter because she was just having trouble navigating the kinds of social issues that a kid has in school. And I read that review and I said, “Somebody wrote that about us. What do you think I should do? Do you think I should stay home and cry? Do you think I should change my show?” She said, “You get back out there, dad, [BEN LAUGHS] and do your thing.” And I said, “You too, sweetheart. You too.”

BEN: Aww. It was a teachable moment.

DANIEL: It was. It became one. So, thank you, reviewer.

HEDVIG: Okay, Become a patron. If you do like us, you can become a supporter on Patreon. You get stuff. We’re about to gear up for sending out some different little merch things. So, we’re trying to aim for things that can fit into an envelope so we can easily mail it out to all of you. So, stickers and cards and the likes. We also invite all of our supporters to live shows where you can get on a big old Zoom call. And we have little votes, and we decide things and it’s very fun. We also make bonus episodes for you that don’t appear in the regular feed or appear in the regular feed later. We do beautiful little shoutouts.

And you can also hang out with us on Discord where you can do things like suggest words or send in Related or Not theme songs, unless you’re my husband, in which you can just send the file to me directly. [LAUGHTER]

And with all this support, it helps us keep doing this thing that we like doing and that we hope you like us doing. And it also gives us the ability to create transcripts for our show and offer a small enumeration for our guests. It makes the show good. And Daniel has written in here that it helps us to throw lavish parties during a governmental shutdown in the US which…

DANIEL: Oh, sorry, skip that bit. That was Donald Trump, not me. Sorry.

HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] Okay. Yeah. And now here comes the shoutout to our patrons at the supporter level or higher on Patreon. And now, Daniel has ordered it somehow. I see five… I see numbers.

DANIEL: Yep. Well, why don’t I tell you what this all means. For this one, I was thinking of the old method of inputting stuff on phones where you had to press a button a number of times to get a letter.

HEDVIG: Yes.

BEN: Oh, yes, yes.

DANIEL: So, if you wanted to type the letter A, you had to press the number 2 just once. But if you wanted to B, you had to press the number 2 twice. A, B. So, if you wanted to type hi, you would type 4, 4 to get to H and then 4, 4, 4 to get to I.

HEDVIG: I see what you’ve done here.

DANIEL: And I thought, whose name requires the most key presses? Now, of course, there’s going to be a rough correlation between the length of the name and the number of key presses. What’s going to be interesting here is when there’s a person with a lot of letters in their name, but it could be typed with relatively few presses.

BEN: Yeah, because you can just…

DANIEL: Or the reverse.

BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

DANIEL: All right, well, let’s see what we have got.

HEDVIG: So, more unusual letters should get you more points.

DANIEL: Well, it’s Z, and what is it? M N O P, what were the fours? There were some fours.

BEN: Seven and nine, from what I remember.

DANIEL: Yes, that’s right. Would you mind reading the list?

HEDVIG: I can read the list. Okay, so at five points, as it were, we have, as you might suspect, short names. So, Amy, A, very few presses, and sæ̃m. And then on six points, we actually get Ben here. Ben, very short name, very common.

BEN: Yes. Oh, very easy, very easy to text. Yeah.

HEDVIG: Manú and Tadhg. And then, on seven, we have Stan. Also, quite few letters and common letters. Eight, Aldo, Amir, James. Nine, Kathy, Martha…

HEDVIG and DANIEL: O Tim.

HEDVIG: Rach, Rene and Tony. On 10 points, we have Andy B, Diego, Joanna, Keith, Laura and Termy. And on 11, we have Helen, John K, Luis, who we heard from earlier.

DANIEL: Yes, we did.

HEDVIG: Nigel. And on 12, we have Ayesha spelled out with all the letters. And then, Daniel comes at this point. And then, we have Elías, Fiona and me, Hedvig, is also here on 12 points. Iztin, J0HNTR0Y, Kevin and Mignon. That’s spelled M-I-G-N-O-N. At 13 points, we get… this is a surprise to me, Larry. That seems…

BEN: Yeah, and Lyssa.

DANIEL: Well, here, I’ll just break that down. Larry was 13 because L, R and Y are all three taps, so that boosted the name a lot.

BEN: Ooh, tough sell.

HEDVIG: Right. Lyssa, Rodger and Steele are also here on 13 points. On 14 points, we have Nasrin, Rachel, Sydney. 15, Margareth, Meredith, Wolfdog. See, now we’re getting into the longer names.

BEN and DANIEL: Mm-hmm.

HEDVIG: On 16 we have Ignacio and Nikoli.

BEN: Nikoli is crazy. Six characters, but 16 keystrokes? That’s bananas.

HEDVIG: Yeah.

DANIEL: It’s 2, 3, 2, 3, 3, 3.

HEDVIG: There’s one that’s going to surprise you later, Ben. I’ll tell you that for free. 17, gramaryen. 18, Ariaflame, Cris L, Colleen, PharaohKatt. And now, we get the ones that are really on the top of the list. So, at 19, we have Molly Dee. At 21, we have Felicity.

BEN: That’s crazy.

DANIEL: Just about all three key presses.

HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] Yeah, you really need the T9 predictive text there so that you don’t have to tap all that out. Kristofer at 23.

HEDVIG and DANIEL: LordMortis.

HEDVIG: …at 24. Canny Archer at 26. Faux Frenchie and Sonic Snejhog are both in third place with 29 points. Linguistic Chaos 37. And I think a lot of listeners might have guessed this, Andy from Logophilius. That is very long. That is 46 points. And Andy gets the top place.

DANIEL: Whoo-hoo.

HEDVIG: And we also want to give a special shout out to all of our latest patrons. So, at the Friend level, Deborah has joined us. At the Listener level, we have Charley. And we have a bunch of people who have just started subscribing on Patreon at the free level, where you just get messages and you’re sort of in the club, but not fully in the club. [CHUCKLES] That is Shannon, Esther, Hunter, Katie Kaboom, Lambda, and Brittany S. Thank you to all of our supporters and listeners.

DANIEL: Hey, Katie. Good to see you again. I remember Katie from the Talk the Talk days. So, it’s nice to see you back.

Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Kraplianov, 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.

[BOOP]

DANIEL: I don’t know why you feel this way about no sugar. No sugar is my secret hack.

BEN: Ruin something so lovely as grape soda by going no sugar.

DANIEL: I defy you to tell the difference. I defy you.

BEN: No, it’s not… Ah, it’s just… [DANIEL LAUGHS] Okay, first of all, it’s not just me. You can absolutely run double blinds on this stuff. And people pick fucking like all the monosaccharides and all the wannabe sugars straight out of the gate, then yes. 100% yes. They taste objectively gross. They’ve got that… Honestly, it’s…

DANIEL: I’m coming over. Fucking… I’m coming cover.

BEN: It’s the meme. Can we have sugary soda? No, we’ve got sugar at home and there’s like sugar-free stuff. And you can always tell. Sugar-free cordials. [SHUDDERS]

DANIEL: Oh, gross. No, I’m bringing this… Do you like grape soda, by the way? Grape flavour artificial?

BEN: Yes, very much so. Yeah.

DANIEL: I’m going to bring two bottles of this over to your place because I have a book I have to give you back.

BEN: Okay.

DANIEL: And we’ll do a blind taste test.

BEN: Double blind taste test.

DANIEL: Double blind. A double-blind taste test. Okay.

[BOOP]

HEDVIG: Hello.

BEN: Hello, Hedvig.

DANIEL: Hi, Hedvig.

HEDVIG: Hi.

BEN: Hedvig, Daniel thinks that people can’t tell the difference between no sugar drinks and sugar drinks. And I told him he’s fucking dreaming.

DANIEL: We will know. We will find out.

HEDVIG: Oh, wow. I really, really, really can. I hate, I hate Pepsi Max and Cola Light. And if I get given it, I know. I can smell it.

DANIEL: That’s because it’s Pepsi. [BEN LAUGHS]

HEDVIG: No, it’s the same… I went to a restaurant and they gave us… They were like, “Okay, one of these three is like Cola Light and one is regular cola.” And I was like, “All right, that’s no worries. I’ll smell it.” I smelled them and I figured it out.

DANIEL: One of them smelled like death and sadness.

BEN: One of them smelled like someone’s memory of happiness rather than actual happiness.

DANIEL: [LAUGHS] It was described to an AI. [LAUGHTER]

[BOOP]

BEN: Yes. What I observed about Halloween in Australia, Daniel, and I think we touched on this last week when you and I just caught up briefly for other friendship reasons, was that…

DANIEL: I don’t have friends.

BEN: Yeah, what are those?

DANIEL: What are friends?

HEDVIG: In Australia, we have manifested a very different kind of Halloween than the United States on a couple of key factors. One, it happens when the sun is entirely in the sky. Like by the time the sun goes down, all Halloweening is done.

DANIEL: 5 to 7.

BEN: Which doesn’t seem right to a non-Australian Halloweener. But the other really interesting thing is what has developed in Australia is the idea of location Halloweening. Daniel lives one of these streets.

DANIEL: Destination Halloween. [LAUGHS]

BEN: Yeah. They are a street where every single house goes coo coo ca choo. And people from a really long way away will come and do trick or treating on these notorious streets. So, one of the really interesting cultural things that has developed that I did not observe in America when I grew up there, was parents go trick or treating with their own bag of refill candy. [DANIEL LAUGHS] So, they will have these like big packs and they will still start pouring it into the houses because they realise that it’s pretty inequitable that these poor houses spend thousands of dollars on candy. So, they go and they sort of contribute. And I think it’s pretty rare for me to give like Australian culture a big thumbs up.

HEDVIG: That’s very cute.

BEN: But that is a really awesome Australian culture thing where were all just like, “Oh, seems a bit off. Just doesn’t seem on that Stevo would have to spend all that money on lollies. Oh, we’ll top Stevo up, eh?”

DANIEL: It is lovely. It’s one thing that I really don’t like.

BEN: Because you’re American.

HEDVIG: Oh.

DANIEL: Well, for myself, because I always have loads of candy on hand and I’m pretty discriminating. You know how if somebody really likes music, it’s hard to buy them an album?

HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.

BEN: Daniel is a candy hipster is what he’s saying.

DANIEL: I am. So, here they are trying to bring some sort of nondescript candy. And I always say, “Thank you, thank you. No, no, we’re fine. We have plenty.” Because we do. We just got gobs of it. And I said, “Somebody else will like it, please.” And… although actually this year they dropped some pretty good shit, so…

BEN: So, I just have this… I just have this picture of Daniel in like full Empire Records mode where he’s just like, “Mars Corporation? In this giveaway? I don’t think so, scrub. Get the fuck out. Go, go. Walk on.”

DANIEL: It was like, “No, no, no. Keep your trash candy out of it. Wait a minute. Milky Way bars? Yeah, no, we’re good. We’re good.”

HEDVIG: No, so we had a Halloween party and I was dressed up and other people were. And we said, like, “If you can’t dress up, just dress in black.” And I think that kind of worked.

BEN: Woo. That’s a good one. That’s a nice gift to the non-dresser uppers.

HEDVIG: I bought scary Halloween contact lenses, which I still have actually. I can go put on if you give me five minutes.

BEN: I’m okay.

HEDVIG: No?

DANIEL: Maybe next time. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

BEN: I find eye stuff quite unsettling.

HEDVIG: Yes. So, I wore them to a Halloween party at work and they’re green with sort of like… how do you say, lenses like a cat.

BEN: Oh, slit pupils. Did they start doing this [ONOMATOPOEIA]

HEDVIG: Yes, they do, and I have to correct them. But most of the time, they stay fixed. But I went to a Halloween party and there was a colleague there who she looked at me and then really freaked out and was like, “I find that so unsettling. I cannot look you in the face.”

BEN: I’m not that severe, but I 100% the direction of feelings that person is experiencing.

HEDVIG: She tried a couple of times and then she was like, “No, no, no.”

BEN: It’s sort of uncanny valley stuff. And I also wonder if it keys into the thing that some people have with clowns. So, I’m told that one of the reasons that people who are afraid of clowns are afraid of clowns is because there is a painted-on disconnect between the emotion the face is expressing and the emotion that is being displayed.

DANIEL: Oh, very good.

BEN: So, the smile is painted on. But obviously there’s a tradition of like sad clown and all this kind of stuff. And so, that noncontiguousness between those emotive states can be really unsettling for some people.

DANIEL: The disconnect. Yep, yep, yep.

HEDVIG: I can understand that.

DANIEL: Plus, also, we’ve developed a cultural script that clowns are scary.

BEN: Mm, mm, mm, mm, mm.

DANIEL: You don’t think that’s factoring in?

BEN: No, no, no, we have. But once again, Daniel, I think and, Hedvig, I got there before you did. I think that is a very Amero-centric perspective.

HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] Yeah. I did too.

BEN: I think that Europe has a…

DANIEL: It has been decades.

BEN: No, no. But Europe has a really, really rich clowning tradition that many Europeans still absolutely adore. Like, if you ask a French person if clowns are scary, they will not tell you yes. They will be like, “What do you mean? Clowns are like a delightful child’s entertainment that we still take our kids to,” and all that kind of thing.

HEDVIG: And generally, they’ll say, “Clowns. Oh, I saw a clown one time when I was four.” Like, they’re not that common. It’s like someone saying that they’re afraid of, like… I don’t know.

BEN: [LAUGHS] There’s not a spate of clowns.

HEDVIG: No.

[BOOP]

BEN: Hedvig, that’s you.

HEDVIG: Yeah, I was just trying to figure out, like, if I care about people don’t liking my… I don’t… I’m trying to…

DANIEL: Hedvig’s destroyed.

BEN: I think what we’re seeing is you very much do. [DANIEL LAUGHS]

HEDVIG: Okay, okay, okay.

[BOOP]

DANIEL: Whatchu doing, Hedvig?

HEDVIG: I’m flipping to my web browser tab what I’m going to say next, which is that if you do like us… [LAUGHTER] I need to remind myself that in a second, Daniel’s going to read a very convoluted ordering of a list of people who do like us. By the way, that person who left a review on Podchaser said that they are a supporter on Patreon. [DANIEL LAUGHS] So, you know when I end the show by saying, like, “If you don’t like us, you should like subscribe to us and hate on our episodes.” Apparently, that’s working.

BEN: Yep.

DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Yeah. And it’s spinning you out. Never let them see you spin out.

HEDVIG: And it’s also a three-star review. And as a fellow three-star reviewer… Okay, let’s get out of Hedvig’s existential crisis file.

BEN: We need to keep things moving.

[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]

129: They Started It: Children and Language Evolution (with Madeleine Beekman)

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129: They Started It: Children and Language Evolution (with Madeleine Beekman)

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