We’re talking to Dr Kelly Wright, friend of the show and data czar for the American Dialect Society. They run the biggest and most prestigious Word of the Year event, and she was there when the 2025 WotY votes came in. She’s talking us through all the words we missed. Plus we get to some listener feedback.
Timestamps
- Start: 0:00
- Intros: 0:41
- The ADS WotYs for 2025: 7:12
- Related or Not: 1:00:51
- Listener comments: 1:09:53
- The Reads: 1:20:28
- Outtakes: 1:27:01
Listen to this episode
Video
Full video episode
@becauselangpod Listener Flo tells us about "weeaboo", an enthusiast for Japanese culture. But what about someone who's into French stuff? With Kelly Wright!
@becauselangpod How did kids feel about 6-7 at the 2025 Word of the Year vote? Kelly Wright is the data czar for the American Dialect Society, and she tells us all about it.
Patreon supporters
Thanks to all our patrons! Here are our patrons at the Supporter level.
This time we are ordering by occurrence of repeated letters (multiplied), divided by number of letters. The more letters your name repeats, the higher your score.
- Canny Archer: 1.455
- PharaohKatt: 1.091
- Linguistic Chaos: 0.800
- Sonic Snejhog: 0.667
- Joanna: 0.667
- Andy from Logophilius: 0.632
- Colleen: 0.571
- Meredith, musing: 0.571
- Molly Dee: 0.500
- Steele: 0.500
- Rene: 0.500
- gra-mary-en: 0.444
- Amanita: 0.429
- Larry: 0.400
- Lyssa: 0.400
- LordMortis: 0.400
- Helen: 0.400
- Iztin: 0.400
- Kelly: 0.400
- Faux Frenchie: 0.333
- Mignon: 0.333
- Laura D: 0.333
- Rodger: 0.333
- Ariaflame: 0.333
- Ayesha: 0.333
- Nikoli: 0.333
- Nasrin: 0.333
- Sydney: 0.333
- Martha: 0.333
- Wolfdog: 0.286
- Ignacio: 0.286
- Rosemary: 0.250
- Kristofer: 0.222
- Xekri: 0.000
- Lucy: 0.000
- Rachel: 0.000
- John Mac: 0.000
- John K: 0.000
- Aldo: 0.000
- Amy: 0.000
- James C: 0.000
- sæ̃m: 0.000
- J0HNTR0Y: 0.000
- Nigel: 0.000
- Andy B: 0.000
- Elías: 0.000
- Tony: 0.000
- Luis: 0.000
- O Tim: 0.000
- Amir: 0.000
- Rach: 0.000
- Kathy: 0.000
- Stan: 0.000
- Fiona: 0.000
- Kevin: 0.000
- Diego: 0.000
- Manú: 0.000
- Keith: 0.000
- Chris L: 0.000
- Whitney: 0.000
- Daniel: 0.000
- Ben: 0.000
- Hedvig: 0.000
And our newest patrons:
- At the Listener level: Sean G and Joanna C
- At the Friend level: M Jason, Dave N, Sea Archivist, and Lého G
- And our newest free members: N, Pigfo0t, Jo, Ant, Cecy, Lidia, Andrew G, Harley and Me, Bee, Tara P, Hatte B, Ashley M, Anil K, Daryl M, Renee OnTheBeach, Greg S, Koala, Luisa M, Ma, br pe, Alex R, Hillary B, Tracey D, Michael B, Jami Jo, Jason L, Hans D, Josephine P, Brenda C, and Tony
Become a Patreon supporter yourself and get access to bonus episodes and more!
Become a Patron!Show notes
2025 Word of the Year Is “Slop”
https://americandialect.org/2025-word-of-the-year-is-slop/
[PDF] Full press release, including all winners, candidates, and vote tallies for all candidates
https://americandialect.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/2025-Word-of-the-Year-PRESS-RELEASE.pdf
Not Every Co-Op Game is “Friendslop”
https://www.avclub.com/not-every-co-op-game-is-friendslop
“Italian Brainrot” Characters: The Wildest Way to Learn Italian
https://www.icls.edu/blog/italian-brainrot-characters-the-wildest-way-to-learn-italian
World-first social media age restriction laws behind Australia’s Word of the Year
https://reporter.anu.edu.au/all-stories/world-first-social-media-age-restriction-laws-behind-australias-word-of-the-year
Weeaboo | Perry Bible Fellowship
https://pbfcomics.com/comics/weeaboo/
-aboo | Wiktionary
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-aboo
weeb n. | Green’s Dictionary of Slang
https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/euw4dgq
HGSE Remembers Courtney Cazden
https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/news/26/01/hgse-remembers-courtney-cazden
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
DANIEL: If the people of Minnesota are nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize and they get it, I am like… that is great. That is great.
KELLY: That would be pretty cool. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: They have been so brilliant.
HEDVIG: I don’t think… As a Swedish person, I think everyone should stop caring about Nobel Prizes. All of them.
DANIEL: Hedvig’s opinion on this matter is not to be taken lightly.
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. We have our good friend, Hedvig Skirgård. How’s it going, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: We’re friends? I’m not a co-host? [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Okay. Let me just tell you something. I had one generation of children, which did the thing that it always does where you lose all your friends. And then, I had a second generation of children, which not only took out that next generation of friends, but also destroyed my ability to have… Hedvig doesn’t understand what I’m talking about, but other parents will. And so now, you’re the closest thing to a friend that I’ve got. You and Ben. So, congratulations.
HEDVIG: I am your friend. I just didn’t know… When you said, like… It sounded like you meant, like, “Friend of the show, Hedvig, is on for a special episode.” And I was like, “Mm-hmm.”
DANIEL: Oh, oh, that’s not good. No…
HEDVIG: That’s fine, that’s fine.
DANIEL: …friend of the show. I don’t know.
HEDVIG: A friend of the show. I am a friend of the show. I am very much a friend of the show.
DANIEL: Okay, good. And friend of the show… just kidding. It’s Kelly Wright.
KELLY: Hello.
DANIEL: Honored co-host and somebody that we’re always happy to hang with. Hi, Kelly.
KELLY: Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Happy to be back. Happy to be back. I’m like, “Call me friend.” Isn’t that… like… That’s, like, the best… I feel like that’s the best thing you could call me.
DANIEL: Friend is good, isn’t it?
KELLY: Friend is good.
HEDVIG: Friend is good.
DANIEL: You’re also as close as Hedvig. [LAUGHS]
KELLY: I think of you as a friend.
KELLY: The Quakers got it right. Friends are cool.
DANIEL: Friends are cool. And I’m going to start using THEE and THOU to both of you.
KELLY: Okay.
DANIEL: Okay. I should mention that our other friend, Ben Ainslie, is not with us for this episode. He has a selfless act of service that he’s performing in the service of a friend. Somebody that is actually a friend to him, which, you know, he’s got others.
On this episode, we’re getting up to speed for a whole new season of Because Language. But we’re also taking another look backward at the Words of the Year 2025, this time from the perspective of the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year vote. And, Kelly, you have a special role to play in this one. I know.
KELLY: It was a fun year. I think the years that are the most fun are the ones where we have no idea what’s going to happen. There’s not a clear frontrunner. Like in the covid years where it was like, “It’s probably going to be a covid term.” [LAUGHS] This time, it was like: field’s open.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Did it feel that way? It felt kind of wide open, like there was no clear…
KELLY: A little like there was a lot of spread, a lot of different types of words. Meaning that my job, which is usually sometimes very easy, is like organizing nominees into just like apparent categories. So, when it’s all covid-related terms, you’re like, “Here’s the category of covid-related terms.” Like, that makes the job easier. When it’s a lot of big spread, then I have to be like…
DANIEL: Simple.
KELLY: It’s a little puzzle. I get to be like, “What’s… who’s related?” And I get to play Related or Not. I get to do a lot of things by myself in the spreadsheets.
DANIEL: Yes, you do. [CHUCKLES] But the other thing is that has to happen really, really fast because the turnaround time between the noms and the actual vote is one evening. It’s one day.
KELLY: Yeah, it is. It’s like four days. It’s four days. But in that…
DANIEL: Really?
KELLY: Something like that. Because it closes New Year’s Eve and we usually meet like the fourth or the fifth or the sixth or the seventh or something like that. But I have to get my whole body to a place in those four days. I usually have to go to some exciting locale, like New Orleans this year. And so, it is about a day. It gets about a day. It gets a solid human workday’s attention from me right before the vote. Later in the year, I get to play with it more. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Hmm.
HEDVIG: How many nominees are coming in?
KELLY: So, it was a big year in both directions. Almost as many submissions, like, it was kind of tied for first place, 111, which the most we’d ever had was like 113. But we have way more lexemes nominated this year than ever. The previous highest total was like 330 something and this year it was 965.
HEDVIG: Wow.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Ooh, okay.
KELLY: People are filling out the form, which I appreciate.
DANIEL: Nice going, everybody. Okay, now we’ll have more to ask you about this. And I guess we have to mention that for the actual voting, tons of linguists, lexicographers, word lovers pile into a room and argue and joust and jostle and fight and have a great time. At least, that’s how I remember it. And then, the winners get selected.
KELLY: Yeah, it was really nice. This year, the room was actually very big. It was like aircraft hangar big. It was huge. It was wild. It was like a maze of those weird partitions that were, like, subdivided inside this big, giant cavernous space. But it was actually quite nice because there was plenty of standing room. People definitely milled in and we had some weird technical difficulties. So, we had to do the hand raising, counting as we did before…
HEDVIG: Oh, that’s fun.
DANIEL: [GASPS]
KELLY: It was fun because I’d never done it before and I got to run around through the audience. I had a great time.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Wow. Well, thank you for your service. Yeah, that’s great.
KELLY: Of course.
DANIEL: Now, just a note to all of our patrons. The merch drop for this year has been mailed. They are all winging their way to you, including one sticker inspired by Dr Kelly Wright. It says, “In it for the words,” because you said it. I liked it. I made the sticker.
KELLY: I love the colors.
DANIEL: And you are in it for the words.
KELLY: Very much so. That’s why I do it.
DANIEL: Cool. Thanks to all our patrons, free and paid. If you’d like to become a patron and support the show, there’s an easy way to do it. Just head over to patreon.com/becauselangpod. You can decide your level. There’s lots of fun goodies that you can get. Thanks to all of our patrons.
All right, now, as far as the American Dialect Society Word of the Year vote for 2025, you can see all the nominees and winners on the American Dialect Society website. We’re going to have a link up in the show notes. That’s on becauselanguage.com. So, Kelly, what was your feeling heading into this? Did you feel solid? Did you feel prepared? Were you ready for a stoush or controversy or was it chill?
KELLY: We always, I guess, have our backs up for political controversy because it has happened in some years and there were a lot of political terms this year, but that didn’t really happen. We spent a lot of time on 6-7.
DANIEL: How so? You mean because it was in two categories. It was the Informal Word of the Year nominee, but it was also a nominee for actual Word of the Year. Is that right?
KELLY: Word of the Year. Yeah. So, it came up… We spent a good chunk of time on 6-7 in the nominating session and the live session. There were a couple different camps. We actually had two very young people, like middle schoolers who were there, two sisters who came up and were about the same age and expressed completely different opinions, which the audience loved because the first one came out and she was like, “I don’t like it.” It was like a kid. And all these people had been coming up to the microphone, being like, “Kids use this word, and it’s important, and we can’t… Just because we don’t like it, we can’t, like, shy away from it,” or something. And then, like, a little kid came up and she was like, “I hate it.” [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Oh, come on, kids. We’re celebrating your language. Take the W, please.
KELLY: I know. Her sister was, like, right behind her, and she’s like, “Yeah, I’m her sister and I love this word and blah, blah,” all this stuff, and it like destroyed the room. So, it is a really convivial experience.
DANIEL: It’s nice to see somebody younger than 13 who’s not related to Ben Zimmer giving their input.
KELLY: Yeah, his son was like… he was like, “Blake Zimmer, student at Cornell.”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Is he a student at Cornell now? What?
KELLY: It was so nice! Yeah, it’s his first semester in college.
DANIEL: I remember when he was…
KELLY: I mean, first year, academic year. I know.
DANIEL: Oh, my god.
KELLY: So, yeah, he’s like crushing it.
HEDVIG: I don’t know who this this is.
KELLY: Ben Zimmer’s son…
DANIEL: Okay, let’s talk about who it is.
KELLY: …Blake Zimmer is the WOTY Kid because he’s been coming with Ben.
DANIEL: Should we start with Ben Zimmer? Maybe not everyone… he’s been on the show three times.
KELLY: Ben Zimmer is the chair of the ADS New Words Committee. He actually runs the Word of the Year vote. I just count the data. I’m so glad I’m not in charge, Ben’s in charge. [LAUGHS] Yeah, so Ben does everything for us to get Word of the Year together. Prolific public writer. Check him out.
HEDVIG: And he has a nepo WOTY kid.
KELLY: And he has a kid who has been coming with him to Word of the Year for all of these years. And so, once he got a little older, he started coming up to the microphone and expressing his opinion. So, each year, we’re all very invested in what the WOTY Kid has to say.
DANIEL: Definitely.
KELLY: And I do believe it was Jesse Grieser who dubbed him the WOTY Kid. So, there’s the whole lore.
DANIEL: Okay, it’s time to dig into the categories. Do you want to start at the top with Word of the Year? I think maybe that’s a good place to start. And then, we can dig into some of the subcutaneous levels.
KELLY: Sure. Are you looking at the press release?
DANIEL: I am looking at my copied and pasted version of the press release. Yes.
KELLY: Perfect. Okay. Yeah, we can dig into categories.
DANIEL: Okay, so these were nominated on the spot and then voted on the spot. And here we go. Some of these are from other categories, so we might see them again. There was 6-7. Tell me about your feelings about 6-7.
KELLY: I like it because it’s supposed to be a container for nothing and that’s cool.
DANIEL: It’s a wrapper.
KELLY: It’s a wrapper and that’s cool.
HEDVIG: I also like it because it’s like nonsense internet humour and there’s a lot of nonsense internet humour. It’s been around for a long time. And before internet, there was nonsense humour elsewhere. I like it because I like people having fun with numbers. Like XKCD said, there’s like 69 and 420, and 42 and like they’re all these like fun numbers and it’s just fun when numbers are at play instead of letters. It’s just…
KELLY: Exactly.
HEDVIG: Yeah, variation.
KELLY: Yeah, variation indeed.
DANIEL: I mentioned this on Half the Answer with Caitlin Green. But remember how we were talking about it and I said, “This was the first time that Generation Alpha has become mimetic beings with their own sort of…” And Hedvig, you said, “Wait a minute, don’t we remember all the brainrot stuff like skibidi toilet and rizz? That’s Alpha.”
And I thought about that and I thought, yeah, I did kind of forget about that. But then, I realised if you’re an Alpha, you could be 15 years old. But I’ve got a couple of little Alphas, nine years old and seven. And a 9-year-old kid is a very different thing from a 15-year-old kid. And the skibidi Ohio rizz thing missed my girls, but they are just glomming onto 6-7. So, I think we’re seeing micro-generations here. I think the concept of generation is really quite fluid and it’s just a different level.
HEDVIG: I also just think that there’s a bigger difference between 12 and 13 than between 37 and 38. It’s just exponential like that all through life. And that happens to every generation.
DANIEL: Yep, yep, yep.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: REHEAT NACHOS. Looking at your list, there were so many that were so different from the ones that we grabbed for our WOTY.
KELLY: We actually went through your list in our dictionary meeting yesterday and your top 10 is good.
DANIEL: Thank you.
KELLY: Your top 10 is like very on… what we’re interested in both like… Yeah, ELBOWS UP, especially. We were surprised that ELBOWS UP didn’t win the Canadian Word of the Year because this is one of the first years they did that on the national level. It ended up being MAPLEWASHING. You all may have talked about that, but ELBOWS UP is so good.
HEDVIG: Yep, similar but.
KELLY: Anyway, it’s… And so… yeah. And we love, like, an anthem, like a rallying cry. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Well, thank the listeners, because they’re the ones who voted. They made the list what it is.
KELLY: Well, it’s a great list. It’s a really good list. Yeah. REHEAT NACHOS is a fun one. I’m glad that it actually made it through because there were a couple fun ones that didn’t. I don’t get to choose. I have my favorites, but it’s chosen in the room. So, I was glad REHEAT NACHOS made it.
HEDVIG: I don’t think I know what REHEAT NACHOS means.
KELLY: Okay.
DANIEL: It doesn’t sound great.
KELLY: It’s not great. You know how they keep remaking the same movies? There’s been a new… The new Superman was like… Didn’t they just do a new Superman?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
KELLY: There’ve been like how many Supermans? That’s reheated nachos. But then also, it can be more insulting where it’s like you redo something, but it’s not as good. So, I’ve heard… Or I’ve seen… like, one of our examples we put in the dictionary is “Sabrina Carpenter as Britney Spears’ reheated nachos”, which is like not nice. That’s not a nice thing to say.
DANIEL: That’s so disrespectful.
KELLY: And I don’t know if I would exactly compare them in that way, personally, but that’s how people are using it.
HEDVIG: Yeah, if anything, it’d be Christina Aguilera.
DANIEL: But if you just keep repeating yourself, “Oh, my gosh, your show, you just keep saying the same things over and over again. It’s like reheated nachos.”
KELLY: Right. So, to reheat someone’s nachos… and also, reheated nachos are inferior. The idea is like you have nachos, but you bring home leftover nachos and you do what with them? There’s no scenario where they end up as good as the original, beautiful, crispy nachos.
HEDVIG: That is a little bit how I feel about covers in music. So, I play music and sometimes with friends. And sometimes, people want to do a cover of a famous song. And then, we rehearse it a little bit, and then someone’s like, “No, but we have to do it exactly like this because that’s how they recorded it on the CD.” And I’m like, “Yeah, but we’re not that band though and we’re never going to produce that. So, like, I think it’s better if we make it bossa nova instead and make it different.”
KELLY: Right.
HEDVIG: Like, you blend the nachos and make a bread and fry it because…
KELLY: Do something else. Yeah. Now, it’s dip.
HEDVIG: Yeah, because you’re not going to make the same thing. But there are some covers that are really good.
DANIEL: I have a cover beef. My young ones were like, “Oh, we got to listen to this song: Royals by… Walk off the Earth.”
HEDVIG: Oh, interesting.
DANIEL: And I said, “Walk off the Earth? That’s a Lorde song. Is it the same song?” It was the same song. They’re like, “Yeah, we played it at school. And then, they have this other great song called Hello.” I’m like, “Okay, just a darn minute. We are going to listen to the original version before we do whatever Walk off the Earth is doing. Okay?” Because they’re basically a cover band. They don’t do… And they’re fine. They’re fine.
HEDVIG: But do they do an interesting take on it?
DANIEL: No! They do not!
KELLY: You’re like: in my opinion: meh.
HEDVIG: Oh. Then, I’m a little bit like meh. Then, meh.
KELLY: Reheated nachos.
DANIEL: It’s reheated nachos.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: So, we are hearing real nachos first, and then we can go on to the reheated version. All right, thank you for this. I think that needed some explanation. What’s the next one for the big category that you want to do? What’s another one that you have comments on?
KELLY: You know, I like AMPHIFA.
DANIEL: I like AMPHIFA. That was cute.
KELLY: Of course.
DANIEL: I didn’t… I never heard it until I saw it on your list.
HEDVIG: Oh, it’s the frogs.
DANIEL: It’s Protest Frog. I was Protest Frog for Halloween. I didn’t realise I was a member of Amphifa. [LAUGHTER] Is it really being used?
KELLY: I don’t know.
DANIEL: I’m on BlueSky. Don’t lie to me. [LAUGHS]
KELLY: I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s actually being used.
HEDVIG: I’m confused, by the way, in general, as a European, like, Antifa exists in a lot of different places, and it exists in Germany and Sweden, etc. And it’s actually known for different things. And I’m a little bit confused by how it seems to be working in the US. Also, the name… Anyway, Amphifa, amphibians against fascism.
KELLY: Yeah.
DANIEL: We need to bring all the members of the animal kingdom in on this, we need that. Okay, I’m getting RAGE BAIT, which is one of my favorites. BAIT was one of ours because we’ve seen RAGE BAIT and all kinds of other kinds of bait. But also, I said once on the Australian ABC, there’s a lot to get angry about and that’s okay because there’s some kinds of anger that we need, but rage bait is not really good for us. And please make sure that your level of anger is commensurate with what you can do about it, because helpless anger is a lot like depression.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I think that’s true. And also, it’s just always worth reminding yourself that when you’re in social media, one way that some people can make money or a lot of people is by engagement and that engagement doesn’t matter if it’s positive or negative. So, people are trying to make money off of you. By commenting on a video, you are driving that video’s engagement and that, if they are in like a partnership program or something, they can get money for it.
There’s another category here that is similar that I saw, which I was going to have as Word of the Week for upcoming show. I don’t know if I should mention it now or not.
DANIEL: We can bring it up again next time.
HEDVIG: VAGUE-POSTING.
DANIEL: Oh, good.
HEDVIG: Of which SUBTWEETING is a category, arguably.
DANIEL: I’m so annoyed by vague-posting.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s when you post something on a social media feed or something, or probably you could even use it about talking when you say something like very vague like, “Oh, I hate it when… Did she really have to do that?” with like no context. And what happens then is that curious people respond and are like, “Who do you mean? What does she do? Who is she?”
DANIEL: To the comments, folks!
HEDVIG: And that is a similar way of milling engagement as rage baiting, because you’re trying to provoke people into commenting on your video. However, it’s a little bit… It’s more frustrating and annoying. It’s not enraging.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s true.
HEDVIG: So, in that way, I kind of think it’s better. It’s better than rage baiting, possibly.
DANIEL: And then there’s some kinds of vagueness that are very useful. For example, I’ve seen a hundred posts that go exactly like this “When it finally happens, it’s going to be the most epic day,” and everybody knows what we’re talking about. Everybody knows.
HEDVIG: No, wait, what is it?
DANIEL: Yes, it is.
HEDVIG: No, no, I don’t know what it is.
DANIEL: It’s exactly what you’re thinking.
HEDVIG: I listen to the QAnon Anonymous podcast. If you say that, I’m going to think you mean the Storm, and I don’t think you mean the Storm.
DANIEL: No, I do not mean the Storm. Kelly doesn’t know what I’m talking about.
KELLY: I’m not online anymore!
HEDVIG: Eurovision?
DANIEL: And the reason why we don’t say that is because that kind of thing can get you in trouble traditionally, but this is why people vague-post it instead.
HEDVIG: You guys are overworrying, I think.
KELLY: No.
DANIEL: Kelly?
KELLY: I don’t know.
DANIEL: Am I overworrying?
KELLY: I don’t think so. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Thank you. Let’s go on. Should we go on to the… Is it time for the winner or do we want to play around with some of the other ones? Maybe we better go through all of these. THE ALGORITHM, right.
KELLY: THE ALGORITHM, like Megan Thee Stallion or The Ohio State University. It is The Algorithm.
DANIEL: Mm, it is The Algorithm. It is.
KELLY: Which I think is really cool because this one I do see used a lot. And it is people talking about like it as one concept. Like, The Algorithm is everywhere. It could be like on your platform, it could be on your Google Search, or like you’ve been talking to a friend and then you get an ad on your phone for some product or device or service. The people refer to that experience, like the experience of living with assisted technology, assistive technology as interacting with The Algorithm, so it’s an entity.
DANIEL: An unknown black box that you’ve got to appeal to if you want your content to be seen or just the way that it pushes stuff at us.
KELLY: And so, part of the question is, like, do people think of The Algorithm as an actual physical entity when they refer to it, like that is stored somewhere and exists? Or do they refer to it like love or sincerity or honesty…
DANIEL: Justice.
KELLY: …as this thing that is like superficial overlord?
HEDVIG: Yeah, well, part of The Algorithm is like the exposure and engagement and the things we talked about just before, like rage baiting and vague-posting and the way that platforms want to keep you on the platforms, so they want to have engaging content. But then, as a lot of YouTubers will talk about and also TikTok users, there seems to be little hand-tweaks to The Algorithm sometimes where like in the early days of YouTube, there used to be YouTube Spotlight, where employees, I think, at the YouTube offices, would pick videos that they liked. And that’s a very like hand-cranked way of messing with the algorithm. And various content creators would sometimes say, like, “Oh, last week these and these kinds of videos of mine were performing like this. And this week, they’re not.” So, someone twisted a knob somewhere and they don’t know why. And then, they try and adapt, but this also gets into a word that I think we’ve had in our list. I don’t know if you had, Kelly, which is AUDIENCE CAPTURE.
KELLY: Oh, no, that’s good.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Which is when you tailor your content so much to your audience that you become captured by your audience. And if they want more rage bait, you might start making more rage bait, sort of sacrificing your content creator integrity to please whatever seems to please The Algorithm gods and your audience, which, yeah, it surprises me.
DANIEL: Here’s my hot take. This is my hot take about The Algorithm. You know when people say, “I talked to my friend about skiing and now I’m getting skiing ads.”
KELLY: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: I think this happens all the time. And what I think is happening is just there are so many ads being sprayed out to so many people that it would be weird if you didn’t talk about clam chowder and then get clam chowder ads. And maybe, you were getting them before, but you didn’t notice because it wasn’t significant. I think it’s just…
HEDVIG: There’s a confirmation bias, a Baader-Meinhof effect for sure. But then also, most of us are basic bitches. Like, you talked about skiing in northern Europe in January? Oh, wow, other people did as well.
DANIEL: Oh, really?
HEDVIG: You’re not that special, honey.
DANIEL: No, man.
HEDVIG: Tone it down.
KELLY: Yeah, I’m taking voracious notes over here because this is so interesting.
HEDVIG: Oh, really?
KELLY: Yeah. I really love the idea of thinking about how this concept has… Or whatever people are sensing, when they are saying, “The Algorithm did this. The algorithm…”, because we have tons of examples of it being used in this way. But my job is just to document the examples, done. But like the scientist and analyst in me is like, “What is happening?” And it’s so fascinating to think about how we have interacted with this concept differently throughout time as these technologies have been evolving and I absolutely remember the YouTube Spotlight thing of being like… It did feel like that. It did feel like it was equal parts program and programmer who are working to serve content each day when you’re on the platform. And it maybe doesn’t… The programmer’s presence is less detectable today, I feel.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
KELLY: So, that’s interesting. Yeah, and I love the idea of… yeah, like vague-posting being something that could be intentional or unintentional. Like, some people are just sub-tweeting. They’re just, like, in a flow state reacting to what’s happening and not thinking, like, “Oh, I’m crafting content for an audience.” [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
KELLY: But then, sometimes content can be crafted for an audience that is intentionally vague. It gets you a bunch of people paying attention, and then you get stuck in that wheel of what those handful of people that you’ve now captured their attention, that you get stuck in what they want and what the algorithm wants, so you’re not creative anymore. Like, even if you were creating something that was intended to gather people, now you don’t even… You don’t even get to be commercially creative. You just get to be responsive, which is not as fun.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah, for sure. And a lot of people online might also be vague-posting, like you said, unintentionally, because they don’t think about the fact that they made a public post. You think of… Like, some people might use Twitter, and most of the time they only get engagement from like 10 people that they know, and they know what they mean when they vague-post. And then, one of them spreads outside of their circle and they’re like, “Oh, well, I didn’t talk to you anyway,” so. [LAUGHTER] But you did, you are shouting in the town square. Everyone is here.
DANIEL: True.
KELLY: Everyone is here.
DANIEL: Let’s see, there was DOGE. I was in Japan recently, and I saw an actual Shiba Inu and it was so cute. And I thought it’s a… I feel gross. I feel bad now. It used to be whimsical and playful, and now it just feels bad because it’s Elon Musk canceling a program, USAID, among other things, stealing our data, whatever, but canceling a program that was keeping people alive. It amounted to a rounding error in the US budget, and it got canceled and now hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people are going to die or are already dead. This is terrible and illegal.
HEDVIG: It is not the fault of the Shiba Inu you saw in Japan though.
KELLY: I know.
HEDVIG: That bird… Bird! [LAUGHS] That dog… [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: That dog is blameless.
HEDVIG: That dog is blameless.
DANIEL: I did not impute any ill will to the dog, but I did feel a bit of ick.
HEDVIG: Really?
DANIEL: For that matter, Elon… Just because of the word. Elon Musk is being hauled before Congress to testify to his role in Doge and in canceling USAID, which he didn’t get to do that. That was illegal and unconstitutional. He didn’t get to divert money that was congressionally appointed, but I’m yelling into the tube here.
KELLY: We’ll be documenting just the verb form, to GET DOGED. That’s what we’ll be putting a small entry in the dictionary for.
DANIEL: What happened to your research budget? Got doged.
KELLY: Got doged. And also, Elon Musk ended up getting doged. So it kind… yeah, we’ll see what happens.
DANIEL: We did a story once on a young guy who was engaged in the Herculaneum scrolls project. These burnt, blackened scrolls that were rolled up and they scanned them 3D. And this one guy, he was a SpaceX intern named Luke Farritor and he figured out the first word. He found the word purple. He developed a technique to make the words stand out, and he noticed the word, purple. And now, everybody’s found lots and lots of words on the Herculaneum scrolls. Yeah, he was a Doge bro. He was a Doge bag, unfortunately. Really sad.
HEDVIG: People can do something cool and then something bad.
KELLY: That’s true. And also, I would… they’re doing a lot of really technically cool things with text. Like you said, they stole all our data, yeah, because they’re feeding it into these actually really sick algorithms, which I wish we were using for good. That’s all. [LAUGHTER] I just see that some of their models are really doing cool stuff that is stuff that we used to talk about when we would be like, “It would be so great if you could X,” like with like certain… Like, if we had, like, I don’t know, every recording of every phone call that it’s been, “This phone call may be recorded for quality assurance,” if I could just have those recordings, I could do so much. I can do so much to improve automatic speech recognition technologies and make them more equitable and do X, Y, and Z and that’s not what they’re going to use it for. [LAUIGHS] It’s frustrating. It’s professionally frustrating because…
DANIEL: Be careful what you wish for.
KELLY: …it will take us independently, decades, maybe longer, with no funding to develop that, like a parallel technology to use for research, for one thing, but then also altruistic purposes. And so now, I’m screaming into the void. But it does become this thing of it’s like, “Dang, I wish that we just had like the access, ability, talent to have gotten there first,” or something. Like, I don’t know, it’s, yeah…
HEDVIG: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know if we don’t. There’s a lot of really cool things that tech is built on that is built on a lot of open-source nerds that are nice.
KELLY: Oh, sure, sure.
HEDVIG: Right?
KELLY: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HEDVIG: Like, a lot of things wouldn’t be possible if Linus Torvalds didn’t create Linux. And I kind of think we sometimes don’t give those kind of people enough attention.
KELLY: And no credit.
HEDVIG: And also, one of the redeeming qualities about Elon Musk is that he wants to be seen as cool by people who are actually cool. So, that might mean that he makes some things open sometimes, maybe.
DANIEL: That’s true. And this was way back when I started following him. He opened all of Tesla’s patents. All of Tesla’s patents are still open for anybody who wants to use them to build good electric cars. He says, “We won’t come after you,” unless you try to lock them down and shut everybody out. But there has been an openness historically, so, bleh. Anyway. That was before he became gross. Should we move on from Doge and get onto the winner? The winner was, Kelly?
KELLY: SLOP. Yeah.
DANIEL: SLOP. A brilliant choice. I actually saw this one coming.
KELLY: Oh, yeah? It’s good. A couple other dictionaries also chose it, so it’s not a huge surprise.
DANIEL: Yeah, yeah. But I liked seeing SLOP as kind of a combining form, like AI SLOP, but also… what are some other examples?
KELLY: FRIEND-SLOP is one. [DANIEL LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: FRIEND-SLOP?
DANIEL: What is FRIEND-SLOP?
KELLY: It’s like a genre of game or show or something. So, there’s this post from the AV Club that says, “Not every co-op game is friend-slop.” So, I guess friend-slop is like, there are things that are not competitive, like ways that we interact with each other that are not competitive or, like, shows are just about friendship. And some of them are genuine shows, but some of them, again, like in this vague-posting situation, is they move into content that is targeted for just like friendship as like [TITTERS] I think that’s like the friend-slop part of it.
DANIEL: All right.
HEDVIG: Wait, is friend-slop parasocial content?
KELLY: No, I don’t think so. Friend-slop is like… Because a lot of these posts are talking about like co-op gaming. There’s a bunch of like board game… things that you can physically buy in the store that are supposed to be for three to four players but are just like junky. Like, there’s a lot of them that are like mystery-solving games where the four of you are supposed to sit down and solve a mystery, but the stuff that they give you is kind of basic AF. So, it’s like the content is sloppy.
HEDVIG: I know, exactly.
DANIEL: I think we’ll get to see a lot more of slop as we go on and maybe we’ll value things that are individually created.
KELLY: We documented the combining form last year. It did very well in the 2024 WOTYs. And it’s our winner and we will be talking more about it because it’s been incredibly productive in the last 12 months, moving very fast.
DANIEL: AI SLOP was our second place last year as well.
KELLY: Yeah.
HEDVIG: There’s a new content type turning up on my TikTok feed that is short-form drama videos in like Ancient China or sometimes Ancient Japan or Omegaverse. And it’s all like terrible actors, terrible scripts, terrible line performance. And it’s like one minute and it looks like the comment underneath is often like, “If not AI slop, why AI slop-shaped?” [LAUGHTER] because it is actual recordings. There’s actual actors and lighting and costumes and makeup and whatever else. It’s just quite bad.
And I have yet to understand the business model of these companies that are putting this out because… anyway, people like it. I don’t know what to call it though. I haven’t found a word. It’s some sort of slop.
DANIEL: Let’s just do a really quick run-through of the other categories. Here we go. Most Creative Word of the Year. The winner was REHEAT NACHOS. Do we have anything to say about any of the other ones? I’m noticing FRIDGE CIGARETTE, which is going to the fridge and getting a fridge cigarette, which is like a Diet Coke or some kind of drink, I suppose, for its addictive qualities.
KELLY: I wish that had won. That was like my favorite for the whole year because it’s so funny and it already… It had like really dedicated memes. [LAUGHS] It’s a Diet Coke.
DANIEL: I never saw it. I never saw it.
KELLY: I think it’s so funny.
DANIEL: But okay, I’ll be watching out for it. Informal Word of the Year, 6-7 was the winner, but I noticed there were some that I just hadn’t seen. Since you put this on the list, I have noticed SMOKE. Don’t want no smoke.
KELLY: You don’t want no smoke. Don’t want no smoke, I feel like is the most common because people, like, look at, yeah, like, someone not engaging in some sort of… And it’s like, yeah, they don’t want that smoke. Like, there’s either going to be a fight or someone was going to ask somebody out and they chickened out or there’s another clear leader in the category, like Beyoncé or something, and be like, yeah, no one wants that smoke. Like, no one is trying to come for the crown because you don’t want that smoke.
DANIEL: Do you have any intuition as to why the word SMOKE is employed here?
KELLY: I think in some ways it’s like the drama. If people are going to verbally fight before they physically fight, it kind of parallels like, smoke before fire.
DANIEL: Fire. Got it. Got it. Okay, that’s good. That’s fair. That makes more sense. That makes more sense. Okay, let’s go on to Political Word of the Year. The winner was ICY CONDITIONS, which means…
KELLY: Yeah. So, ICY CONDITIONS are the ways in which folks have been signaling that ICE is in a neighborhood. And what’s interesting is that they’re using weather apps in some cases because you can update. You can live update what you’re seeing on your map to be like, “There’s ICE outside,” or, “There’s ICE in this neighborhood,” “There’s ICE on this street.”
DANIEL: ICE, of course, which stands for…
KELLY: Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. So, it is the winter, and it has been very icy, but we’re getting ICY CONDITIONS reported on weather apps in places where meteorologically it is not icy. [CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: I guess that incorrect usage of the weather app is at least… The worst case is that people are more careful in driving.
KELLY: Sure, I guess.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] If they misinterpret it.
KELLY: Right. And if they were trying to drive through that street, they couldn’t drive through it because uniformed officers are patrolling anyway, so.
HEDVIG: Did you hear that there’s ICE officers at the Winter Olympics in Italy?
KELLY: Oh, yes. Oh, yes, I did.
DANIEL: What are they doing? I did hear that. Yeah.
HEDVIG: I am also confused. And the US Olympic troupe, I think, has officially said, like “It’s none of our reasons.” One theory is that they’re there to protect JD Vance. I thought he had bodyguards. I don’t know why…
KELLY: He has the Secret Service, right?
HEDVIG: I don’t understand it.
DANIEL: I think the Secret Service does that.
KELLY: Yeah. That’s interesting.
DANIEL: I’ve just been so impressed by the way that the people have come together. They’ve correctly interpreted the presence of ICE as damage, and they’re routing around it. They’re finding ways around it and largely staying very nonviolent. It’s the people. It makes my heart feel good, even though it’s a dreadful time. Okay, any more things we want to talk about for Political Word of the Year we had? Oh, DISAPPEAR. To disappear someone. God, what a dark timeline.
KELLY: I know, I know. But we had some folks who came up to the microphone and made a really well-reasoned argument for us not to vote for this. And so, I think that’s part of the reason why maybe it didn’t win the category. And it was a good argument in that the ways in which DISAPPEAR as a verb has been used in describing conflicts in Central and South America, particularly what is happening in the United States, they argued, has not risen to that level.
And so, folks are using this word, but it is not the ways in which it has been traditionally used and is currently used and is understood in international law. And so, they were like, “We don’t think that we should mark it as an interesting change,” or anything like that. And so, I think that’s why it didn’t win because there was a really good linguistic argument at the microphone, which [LAUGHS] was nice to hear. Yeah, but I love it when people come prepared. Thank you for bringing notes. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Not to mention the way that when someone is disappeared, it’s passive voice and it turns it into… Instead of government agents made them disappear or kidnapped them or abducted them, it makes it seem sort of with a lack of agency. And that’s not the right impression.
HEDVIG: Oh, I thought it was like a transitive verb.
DANIEL: Yes, it’s taking DISAPPEAR and turning it into a transitive. Yes, it’s true. But we do typically say, “They were disappeared.”
HEDVIG: Yeah, but you can also say, “They were disappeared by blah, blah,” which is not proper transitive, but no.
DANIEL: Still passive voice. But I don’t have a problem with passive voice but I can see why you would want to actually say who’s doing the thing. Okay, let’s go on to Digital Word of the Year. The winner was SLOP but I noticed ITALIAN BRAINROT. That was hilarious.
KELLY: Yeah. Another Gen Alpha innovation. ITALIAN BRAINROT. It’s a little racist and also complicated, but Italian brainrot is these ideas of like we’re already saying, like SKIBIDI TOILET and OHIO RIZZ, MUNCHER… whatever. And this ends up being, like… yeah, Ballerina Cappuccina, and things like that, which but is like tied in the same way skibidi toilet is tied to a video, like a viral video, like the Ballerina Cappuccina.
So, the thing is though, there was a really short distance between when this was a real thing that young people were doing that was just fun on the internet and when that behavior got capitalized on to send them all sorts of nonsense to captivate that audience. And so, if you Google… Like, if you were a kid and you put “Ballerina Cappuccina” in your iPad, you would get a video, but some of those videos end up being not produced by the people who were originally doing them and go to fund all kinds of terrible things we’ve since found out. So, it’s like this thing.
HEDVIG: Oh. Similar to what’s happening with AI slop generally on YouTube where it’s a lot of like really questionable stuff.
KELLY: Yeah.
DANIEL: Great names though.
KELLY: Great names. But it sucks because it is like people in the age range of 6 to 13 [LAUGHS] that are clicking on these things, and so that sucks.
DANIEL: And that’s why we don’t have YouTube on the kids’ iPads. Mm-hmm.
KELLY: Yeah. Yeah.
DANIEL: Let’s go into most useful. The winner was THAT’S AI. An expression of distrust when determining that something presented as real is in fact AI-generated. Good one.
KELLY: Yeah. Nominated from the floor by Nicole Holliday, who I know is also a friend of the podcast.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
KELLY: She was like, “I hear it all the time.” People say it, and they say it in reference to things that certainly aren’t AI, when two people discussing like the behavior of a third individual and someone being like, “That’s AI,” like, this person is full of it.
HEDVIG: That’s dumb. Yeah.
KELLY: It’s dumb. Yeah. And so that’s so interesting because that’s spreading fast, but it’s spreading fast in a different way than some of these other productive compounds we’ve talked about.
DANIEL: Notice also ROT is breaking away. Like, there’s bedrotting, but also brainrot. So ROT is becoming its own thing. Very cool.
KELLY: Just ROT itself. Yes.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: BEDROT for sure.
DANIEL: And then, the last category we’ve got is Most Likely to Succeed. The winner was CHOPPED, from African American English, something ugly or undesirable. There were others?
HEDVIG: When we had CHOPPED on our episode as a Word of the Week last year, I was looking up some of the origins and I found a video of someone explaining it. And that video was like, I don’t know, like 10-plus years old. I think it was a Toronto-based musician. Like, CHOPPED is not new.
DANIEL: It’s old.
KELLY: No.
HEDVIG: It’s old. But it is getting into that… Yeah, it’s that thing that we see very often with especially American English of like words coming from either African-American English or gay community and then making it through.
I was at a pub quiz recently and one of the rounds was identify Alpha slang. So, it had like Ohio and stuff. And one of the words was slay. And I was like, “That’s not Alpha slang, is it?” But if you… yeah, if that’s where you heard it…
DANIEL: It is now.
HEDVIG: …then well…
KELLY: Okay, so, like, there are levels to these things where…
DANIEL: First place.
KELLY: …accommodation, appropriation, acquisition. Acquisition is part of this first level because we have to… Again, we have to let 7-to-13-year-olds encounter the language where they are. They can’t help but be seven. So, if they’re saying SLAY a lot, then it is Gen Alpha language even if they don’t know… It’s not an expectation that you understand the full etymology of every word you employ. So, that’s okay
But then this year, Valentine’s Day, kitschy gifts in the United States, a lot of them have the word SLAY on it. And it’s like a little teddy bear with a heart and the heart says “Slay.” And I saw cards with it on there and stuff like that. When you get to that level, that’s like full-on appropriation. When it goes corporate, when the word goes corporate, when it ends up on t-shirts and teddy bear, cups, and pencils and… Yeah.
HEDVIG: But wait, there’s the thing I don’t understand. First of all, I don’t live in a country where Valentine’s is like a huge deal. I don’t really understand the whole teddy bear thing, but I consume enough American media to kind of get it. But I thought that if it was slay like the imperative, it’s a bit similar to, like, “You go.” Like, “Hooray for you.”
KELLY: Exactly.
HEDVIG: But why would you want to say, like, “You go, girl,” to your date on Valentine’s Day?
KELLY: But maybe you want to give… Like, it’s Galentine’s Day and you’re meeting up with your girlfriends and celebrating friend love.
HEDVIG: Oh, shit, right. Sorry. No, I think of Valentine’s Day as like a romantic couple thing.
KELLY It is, it is. It’s many things. [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Okay.
KELLY: It’s many things.
DANIEL: As many things as there are people.
KELLY: Yeah. Maybe the most corporate-trap holiday, I feel, of all the holidays. I could be wrong.
HEDVIG: I think when it comes to Halloween and Valentine’s Day, I think Europe is like, at least like, 10 years… Like, for me, Halloween, I prefer that it’s scary.
KELLY: I love Halloween. I want to feel scary.
HEDVIG: We had a scary doll that’s scared our guests, and I had weird contacts and scary. But I know that in America you can also just dress up as Ariana Grande and that’s Halloween.
KELLY: There’s Halloween, and then there’s Gay Halloween.
HEDVIG: Somehow.
KELLY: Which was also nominated. Gay Halloween.
DANIEL: Let’s not forget SLAY, the interjection. Maybe you’ve been talking about that all along, but somebody sent me a message saying, “Oh, I’m not too late for the mailout, am I? Here’s my address.” And I’m like, “Yeah, you got it. It’s going out to you.” And they were like, “Slay, thank you,” which means awesome.
KELLY: Yeah, cool. Good. Got it.
HEDVIG: Cool.
KELLY: Yeah.
DANIEL: So, watch out for that.
KELLY: So, that one’s fun. It is changing. So, that’s like what’s interesting about it is, like, yeah words change through use. So, whoever is using them is reshaping them. And that’s so neat.
DANIEL: It is neat. Tell me about PERFORMATIVE MALE. This is the one that was the newest to me. I was unprepared.
KELLY: We have a wonderful entry for PERFORMATIVE MALE from Nancy Friedman that’s come into dictionary. She submitted it yesterday, and it looks great. Performative male, to me, when I read the description, to me, what I think is METROSEXUAL, which I know we don’t use that term anymore, but it seems so similar to the ways in which the metrosexual was described back in the day. Is that back in the day now? I suppose so. [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: 2010.
KELLY: 2010, 2009. Yeah. [CHUCKLES] So, the metrosexual is a clean guy who’s dressed well and enjoys hanging out in… they’re saying like coffee shops. This person has a matcha, performative male. But in some ways, performative male is less positive. It has a more negative sentiment, or it’s used in certain ways. The way it was described at the microphone was that women on dating apps will see a guy. As you’re swiping, you’ll see a man who’s like, “Look at me with my matcha. Look at me in a nice pair of pants. Look at me out wearing a scarf,” and be like, “Performative male.” He’s trying to be the opposite of the dude holding a fish or something in all of his pictures.
DANIEL: “I listen to Sarah McLachlan.”
KELLY: “I listen to Sarah McLachlan. I’m a feminist. Look, I’m at a protest.” Yeah.
HEDVIG: Well, in defense of men… I don’t know why I started the sentence like this. This is going to go badly.
KELLY: Men! [LAUGHS] No, no! It’s okay.
DANIEL: Oh, dear. Bad start. Bad start.
HEDVIG: I mean, dating apps are a place where you perform.
KELLY: Sure, sure, sure. Yes.
HEDVIG: So, like, and I feel bad for the people who just like matcha and think they had a cute pic at the coffee shop, but that’s… I link this more to something I’ve seen, which is, like, people who really go in for especially like progressive political things, very quickly, very deeply, I am very suspicious of people who go from nothing to wearing for example… what are they called in English? Is it called keffiyeh? Like a Palestinian scarf?
KELLY: Mm-hmm. Keffiyeh.
HEDVIG: Like, if someone goes from nothing to that and then a lot of other accoutrements in a very short space of time and get very vocal about it, they have a tendency to burn out within a short amount of time and then go back to not doing that at all. But I thought METROSEXUAL was also like the idea that they were half-signaling that they were gay, was that the case?
KELLY: Yes.
DANIEL: They didn’t mind a bit of grooming, that’s all. That’s all.
KELLY: I think that’s where it comes into the slightly pejorative nature… So, I think that these terms originally like METROSEXUAL was like something that’s trying to describe an alternative masculinity or something. And then, people hear the word and they attach it and use it derogatorily towards people who are maybe, like, not straight appearing.
HEDVIG: As a European, this is extra confusing because some of the things that were associated with metrosexual is just how a lot of European men just dress.
KELLY: Like tight pants. Wearing tight pants.
HEDVIG: It just like wear pants that… No, but just pants that fit at all.
KELLY: That’s hard for American men. That’s really hard for American men to wear pants that’s tight. It’s very difficult.
DANIEL: Is that because they’re secretly lumbersexuals? Is that what’s going on?
HEDVIG: [SIGHS] I feel bad for you.
KELLY: I don’t know. I don’t know! Yeah, because we’ve had these other -SEXUAL like as a productive compound. Since METROSEXUAL, there have been others. But I think that this is interesting because, yeah, it made me feel old. It made me feel old. The women who were coming up to the microphone who were describing the performative male, I was like, “I don’t know him.” So like, the men in my… None of the men in my life are the… [LAUGHS] whatever it is!
HEDVIG: I don’t know anyone either.
KELLY: [LAUGHS] Whatever it is, I don’t know. I don’t know him.
HEDVIG: I have this so often when people describe shitty men, I’m like, “I don’t know these people. You tell me they exist, I will believe you. I’ve never met them personally. So, I don’t know what you’re talking about, really.” But when it comes to this, performative male, they’re all performing. The guy with the fish is also performing. So, this is only attached to what is seen as catfishing as more socially progressive than you are.
DANIEL: It’s a new virtue signaling. That’s what it is.
KELLY: Yeah, or it’s like…
DANIEL: Closely aligned with virtue signaling.
KELLY: It is closely aligned with, like, virtue/vice signaling.
DANIEL: Only ever applied to lefties.
KELLY: Yeah, I think that it’s that. But it does come from like a Judith Butler version of performative, where it’s saying like, “Oh, it’s an aesthetic.” Like, there’s a very specific type of aesthetic that people are appealing to. But this is me in the moment of also deeply learning about it, because I read Nancy’s entry yesterday, so.
DANIEL: Would you mind reading Nancy’s entry? Like, was it good?
KELLY: It’s good. I could read it. It’s like 200 words.
DANIEL: Would she mind? Hi, Nancy.
KELLY: I don’t think so. I don’t think so. Yeah, an exciting teaser trailer for the WOTY installment. So, Nancy says, “If in mid-2025, you spotted a young man clutching a matcha in one hand and a tote bag stuffed with feminist literature in the other, he may have been a performative male, ‘a man who superficially appeals to progressive or sensitive ideals through aesthetic presentation.’ Nominated in the Most Likely to Succeed category, PERFORMATIVE MALE or PERFORMATIVE MAN began appearing in the summer. Its earliest Urban Dictionary entry is from July as a new disparagement for a type that in previous decades might have been mocked as a metrosexual or a poser. ‘The performative male reads Jane Austen and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, listens to Clairo, drinks matcha, and prefers analog media,’ explained a reporter who took part in a San Francisco performative male contest. Many young men cheekily post videos of themselves reading dense books upside down or carrying three or four or five Labubus to exaggerate the aesthetic.”
“The New York Times also reported in August, ‘While PERFORMATIVE has had a grammatical sense for more than a century, relating to an utterance that affects an action by being spoken, the newer sense of PERFORMATIVE stems from the feminist critic, Judith Butler, who argued that all gender is performative.’” Thanks, Nancy. It’s so good.
DANIEL: Very good.
HEDVIG: I think I was really glad that the Butler quote was there, because I’m looking at a Google Image search now of the word PERFORMATIVE MALE, and I think this is overhyped in terms of the hate. They’re just wearing cute sweaters and like reading women authors. And I feel like if we make them scared of doing that, we’re fucking up a little bit. Like, it’s good for some boys to read Jane Austen. I’d be glad if they did that. That sounds good.
DANIEL: Guys like me have been copping shit for 50 fucking years. I’m just going to say.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I think this is… I think…
DANIEL: 40 years.
HEDVIG: I mean, manipulative people are terrible, but wearing baggy slacks and reading Angela Davis has got to be okay.
DANIEL: It’s got to be cute. Maybe the hate is overestimated. Maybe it’s actually a cute thing. Not pejorative as much because there are contests. It’s like there were Valley Girl contests in 1982. You know what I mean?
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly. And that was also bullshit.
DANIEL: Yes, it was, but it was also partly real. Mm. We’re commenting. We’re commenting on our society, and that’s all right. Wow, so that was the WOTY. Last thoughts on what happened in the room that night?
KELLY: I just… I really love it. I love it when people come together. Like, it was so neat to have just a handful of folks come and say, ” I talked to my… I made this an assignment, and here’s what my class did this semester with it.” Or, “I’ve been keeping a list all year,” or, “I have something really specific to say that comes from my decades of fieldwork in South America about this particular term.”
It means a lot to me when folk… It is like a convivial space where it is absolutely open to all levels of expertise. But I really enjoy it when people prepare just even a very short statement. And so, when those come up, they’re really powerful and so fun to witness. So, it’s nice to be in the room. If we’re ever in a city near you, which we will never be in Australia, but if we are ever in a city near you…
DANIEL: No, maybe not.
KELLY: …please come check us out.
DANIEL: When the United States is a country of laws again, I will be right there, my friend. I’ll be there voting. [CHUCKLES] Oh, no. But speaking of Australia, there’s a new entry! It’s coming in with a folding chair! It’s the Australian National Dictionary Centre with their Word of the Year. A late entry. Woo-hoo! Why is it a late entry? Because it looked like their funding was going to get cut and an anonymous donor stepped in to save the Australian National Dictionary Centre. They do great work. There has to be more than one Australian English dictionary, folks, Macquarie can’t do it all. So, theirs was SOCIAL MEDIA BAN.
HEDVIG: Oh yeah, very apt for Australia. Of course, Australia’s been discussing and also, is it already implemented?
DANIEL: Yes, it is.
HEDVIG: A ban for people under 16, I want to say?
DANIEL: No, see, I should know this because 13 was the number in my head. I should know this. Can we look that up?
KELLY: [TYPES] Social media bans Australia. Yeah.
DANIEL: Would you please…? This was an issue where I feel like maybe there’s some things wrong with it, but maybe let it cook? Was it 13 or 16?
HEDVIG: 16.
DANIEL: Thank you. The argument is that companies like Meta and X and TikTok, etc., have comprehensively failed in their duty to users and there’s no good use case for young people, so they should be banned off the platforms, which may not be true. I’m aware that queer youth are now having a tough time or maybe not if they’re good at evading the ban. But the argument is that they’d be unable to find each other and rely on each other for support, which is an important use case.
HEDVIG: At the same time, we’re seeing more and more people flee from these public feed-type social media platforms and revert into WhatsApp/Signal groups where…
DANIEL: Yikes.
HEDVIG: Yeah, so those groups are going to exist and people are going to post memes on those and we won’t know what kind of memes they’re sharing.
DANIEL: Because we’re not there.
KELLY: We’re not there.
DANIEL: How about instead of trying to ban young people from sosh meeds, what would happen if we instead tried to force those companies to have acceptable and agreed-upon standards for trust and safety, which would be a move that would benefit everyone.
HEDVIG: We’ve tried that.
DANIEL: Oh, come on.
HEDVIG: I think the best example of that is probably actually YouTube Kids where they… You have to pass certain bars to be able to post. But I don’t know. Do you trust Meta on anything?
KELLY: No.
DANIEL: Sometimes, I forget that they exist. I still don’t believe Threads is real.
HEDVIG: Threads is above Twitter in the iPhone App Store now, I think, in terms of something. Number of downloads or something.
DANIEL: Good to know. I have been guilty of ignoring our Facebook audience kind of aggressively because I hate Facebook so much. [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I’ve been having so much fun on my Facebook group. If anyone wants to know more about Maps of Oceania, they can join my group, Maps of Oceania. All I post is maps of Oceania and other people post and there’s lots of people there who are from countries in Oceania and they share like, “Ooh, I know where that island is. I’m from there.” And I’m like, “Hello, that’s nice,” and that’s great.
DANIEL: Neat. Thank you, Kelly, for that look-in. And now, it’s time for Related or Not.
[RELATED OR NOT THEME]
DANIEL: [IN A SINGSONG VOICE] Related or Not [SCATS]. Okay, this one comes from Hannah, who emailed and said, “Hey, Daniel, here in the Boston area, we just had our first snowstorm of the year.” Admittedly, this is kind of an old email. “While shoveling my car out, I wondered, is ‘to SHOVEL’ related to ‘to SHOVE’? Or could it be related to SHUTTLE or even to SHUFFLE? Thanks for considering, Hannah.” Now, astute listeners will know that we have already covered the SHOVE/SHOVEL connection. Does anyone… Hedvig, do you remember? Or, Kelly, do you want to take a guess?
HEDVIG: I feel so bad when you say stuff like that because I’m such a bad… Like, I’m trying to remember what we said.
DANIEL: We’ve done a lot of shows. Don’t worry. This is SHOVEL.
HEDVIG: Is SHOVE/SHOVEL the same relationship as GRAB/GRAVEL?
KELLY: No.
HEDVIG: GRAB/GRAVEL, ooh.
DANIEL: SHOVE and SHOVEL are the same relationship as HAND and HANDLE. The -LE is an instrumental. It’s called a SHOVEL because you shove it. Sometimes, the -LE ending is frequentative, which means you do it a lot, like JOUST and JOSTLE or SPARK and SPARKLE. I love the -LE ending. That’s frequentative, but I think this one might be instrumental.
Okay, but let’s talk about SHOVEL, SHUTTLE, and SHUFFLE. Do you think that any of these are related? Maybe I’ll go first. I don’t think that any of these are related, but I do think they’re all using the productive morpheme -LE either as an instrumental — that’s the thing that you do the thing with — or perhaps frequentative, but I don’t think that they’re related. Okay, your guesses.
KELLY: I don’t think SHUTTLE is related.
HEDVIG: SHUFFLE, SHUTTLE and…?
DANIEL: SHUFFLE and SHOVEL. We know SHOVEL and SHOVE, but I’m interested in SHOVEL, SHUTTLE, and SHUFFLE.
KELLY: I think maybe SHUFFLE and SHOVEL are related, but SHUTTLE is not.
DANIEL: Is that a phonemic thing? Because of F and V being so similar?
KELLY: Maybe. But SHUTTLE, I think weaving. Like, SHUTTLECOCK.
HEDVIG: I was going to say, yeah, looms, yeah.
KELLY: Looms.
DANIEL: Yep. Okay.
KELLY: And so, I feel like maybe that comes from a different place because of the shape. Like, a shuttle bus, the shape of the shuttle bus is, like, similar to the…
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Okay, we’ve got a vote for SHOVEL and SHUFFLE. Hedvig?
HEDVIG: I’m going to vote for all related. They’re all about pushing things around.
KELLY: Okay, that’s nice.
DANIEL: All right. They’re all about pushing things. Okay, here’s the answer. Two of these are related and one isn’t.
HEDVIG: Okay, then it’s SHUFFLE and SHUTTLE.
DANIEL: Interesting. The correct answer, Kelly wins. The two that are related are SHOVEL and SHUFFLE. So, let’s see. We’ve got, of course, SHOVEL is the thing that you shove, and SHUFFLE comes from Middle English shovelen, to move with dragging feet. I’m getting this from, I forget, is it Etymonline or Oxford?
KELLY: That’s called shovelen.
DANIEL: It’s a frequentative form of shoven, see shove. And also, it’s related to SCUFFLE, where people shove each other around in a scuffle, don’t they?
KELLY: Oh, that’s nice.
DANIEL: Yep. But the one that isn’t related is SHUTTLE. From Old English scytel, a dart or an arrow. It’s probably related to SHOT, a thing that moves very quickly.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Let’s go on to one from me. WIGGLE, WRIGGLE, and SQUIGGLE, all of which describe quick, squirmy lateral motion. WIGGLE, WRIGGLE, and SQUIGGLE. And I will tell you that two of these are related and one is the odd one out. So, you’ve got to pick the two that are related. WIGGLE, WRIGGLE, and SQUIGGLE. I’m going Hedvig first. What do you think, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: Well, Kelly, let’s just… He’s obviously fucking with us.
KELLY: Yeah.
DANIEL: When have I ever? [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: All right. Okay. So, the problem here is that two of them contain a W, right?
DANIEL: They do.
HEDVIG: That sort of draws the eye.
DANIEL: Arguably, the squiggle contains a W sound.
HEDVIG: That’s true. The Q is arguably just… Yeah, you’re right, that’s also W. Okay.
DANIEL: It’s KW.
KELLY: It’s not W. All right.
HEDVIG: WRIGGLE, SQUIGGLE has two consonants in the first onset. Maybe that means something.
KELLY: Right.
HEDVIG: They’re all semantically… I don’t know. Sure.
KELLY: Very similar.
HEDVIG: Right?
KELLY: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Then, there’s all of these. There’s the GIGGLE, and there’s more of these -iggles. Like, is it a… I think this has got to be the repetitive L thing.
DANIEL: There it is again, frequentative -LE. Man.
HEDVIG: So, I’m going to discount that part. So now, I’m down to…
DANIEL: WIG, RIG, and SQUIG. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Well, I’m actually down to IG, RIG, and SQUIG, because I’m chasing out W as well.
KELLY: Sure.
DANIEL: So true.
HEDVIG: I don’t know. I’m going to say WRIGGLE and SQUIGGLE.
DANIEL: WRIGGLE and SQUIGGLE. We’ve got a vote for WRIGGLE and SQUIGGLE.
KELLY: I feel the other way. I feel the WIGGLE and SQUIGGLE. Yeah. Is that what you said? WIGGLE and SQUIGGLE are related? I think that WRIGGLE…
DANIEL: Hedvig thinks WRIGGLE and SQUIGGLE are related. And you seem to be saying WIGGLE and SQUIGGLE?
KELLY: WIGGLE and SQUIGGLE. Yeah. I don’t know why, but WIGGLE feels slightly semantically different to me, so I’m going with that. I’m leaving that one as the odd one out.
DANIEL: I felt like WIGGLE and SQUIGGLE were related as well and we were right. Good job, Kelly. You’re two for two. Oh, man.
KELLY: I don’t think that’s ever happened on here.
DANIEL: Very difficult. So, let’s start with WIGGLE. Comes from Middle Dutch wigelen. It’s a frequentative of wiegen, to rock or to move back and forth, related to the word CRADLE. There was a word, weige, which is a cradle that rocks, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European root *wegh-, to go or to move.
SQUIGGLE, for its part, didn’t show up until the 1800s, probably… So, this is where accounts differ. Etymonline says probably a blend of SQUIRM and WRIGGLE. Sorry, I’m getting it wrong. You got… sorry. Oh, I got it wrong. Sorry, I lost it in my notes. Kelly, we blew it. It’s Hedvig that got this one.
HEDVIG: [MAKES TRUMPET NOISES]
DANIEL: Oh, she got it. Okay. Now that I read the darn thing.
HEDVIG: [SINGS RELATED OR NOT THEME]
DANIEL: So, Etymonline says, probably a blend of SQUIRM and WRIGGLE. But then, the OED says it’s probably a blend of SNIGGLE and WRIGGLE. To sniggle. And so, you say, “Well, okay, what’s sniggle?” And I have actually forgotten, where is SNIGGLE? [HEDVIG LAUGHS] Well, it’s meant a lot of things. It could be to sniggle, to snigger, or to snicker. It could be to fish for eels with your hands. There are lots of meanings that this word has had.
But anyway, the one that’s all on its own is WIGGLE. It kind of blows my mind that WIGGLE and WRIGGLE are not the same. They don’t go back to the same word. But WRIGGLE goes back to a different Proto-Indo-European root, which now we have to be a little bit wary because this is all in the reconstruction. And if the reconstruction wasn’t good, then okay. But it comes from *wer- *wer-, to turn or to bend, not the one, to go or to move, at least in the opinion of Etymonline and OED.
So, WRIGGLE and SQUIGGLE related. WIGGLE is on its own, not related to the others. There we go. So, congratulations, Hedvig, for that one and congratulations, Kelly. Thank you, Hannah, for giving us a great Related or Not.
KELLY: I love frequentatives. Frequentatives are so fun.
DANIEL: Ah, they’re the best.
KELLY: Yeah.
DANIEL: Once you see them, you just can’t miss them. All right, let’s go on to one from Flo. Here’s Flo’s message.
FLO: Hi, this is Flo. I’m calling in from Ireland, but I’m originally from California and I’ve got a submission for Words of the Week. It is the -ABOO, A-B-O-O productive suffix. You may know the word WEEABOO, which is somebody who is obsessed with Japanese culture. There’s also KOREABOO. I’ve heard AMERICABOO. My roommate was obsessed with World War II German military history and jokingly called herself a WEHRABOO, W-E-H-R. And I’ve heard English people obsessed with English culture to be called TEABOOS, T-E-A, like they like to drink tea. But really, anything could be appended to -ABOO, like saying you’ve become a MEXICABOO because you like tamales and burritos. So, that is my submission for Words of the Week.
DANIEL: Thanks, Flo. Okay, comments?
KELLY: Well, I’ll just say that -ABOO seems to be just generally derogatory and, like, has been into the depth of time when we look back at the -ABOO thing.
HEDVIG: Is it like SIMP?
KELLY: Maybe it is like SIMP because it comes from the same thing like BUGBEAR comes from. So, like a bugaboo, famous by Destiny’s Child, is also like ancient construction of folklore and myth. Like, the bugaboo could be like a goblin or… Yeah, like, the bugbear is this thing that’s like… it’s like a mythical creature that’s like, put together, and is like made of bugs. It’s like a golem that’s there to bother you and be in your way and all this stuff. So, it’s like that.
Like, the -ABOO suffix, I feel like, is added to things that are annoying or pesky or… So, people and behaviors that are undesirable. But I think it’s like a lighter form. In some cases, or at least today it’s like a lighter form of mocking than it was in the past. Like, in the past, the -ABOO thing was more hate-filled maybe, more pejorative than derogatory.
DANIEL: So, it kind of just means a stan. Somebody who likes a subculture other than their own that they wouldn’t normally pertain to. And you look at that person and you go, “Hmm. All right. They’re being maybe somebody who’s… They’re being maybe a bit performative, somebody they’re not, but they like a thing and so okay.”
HEDVIG: Well, what I don’t understand about this and the performative thing is, if people are being bad people or manipulative or insincere, that’s bad. But just liking K-Pop, it’s not necessarily…
KELLY: Right, right, right. Yeah. Like the stan culture.
HEDVIG: Yeah. I’m reading Wiktionary for other combinations. So, I found SLAVABOO, which is people who are fascinated by gopnik culture and Slavic stuff. And I don’t know.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Fascination is kind of good, I guess.
HEDVIG: It could be. I can definitely see how it can get really weird and exotifying and stuff. But I can also see how it could be someone who just likes Bridgerton. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Is it a way that people used to say, like, BUFF? Like, “He’s like a history buff,” or something? Is it similar to that?
DANIEL: Oh, a camera buff. Yeah. But you couldn’t be a cameraboo, could you?
KELLY: I guess not cameraboo.
DANIEL: I mean because cameras are a thing, not a culture.
HEDVIG: It does seem to be attaching to cultures and countries.
DANIEL: Yeah. It’s like it attaches to cultures. And it also suggests, “Oh, this person might have kind of porous cultural boundaries in a way that feels inappropriate and weird.” Maybe, at its worst.
HEDVIG: I think it’s the Korean, the otakaboo or Japanaboo is the one where most of the negative feelings are coming from because there is a history of people being very exotifying and not actually engaging with the real countries in a way.
DANIEL: They’re not good at their own cultures.
KELLY: So, maybe its like -OPHILE, like Japanophile. I’ve heard that.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Oh, yes.
HEDVIG: That is mentioned as well. I am sorry to report that the word, 4chan, does occur in the Wiktionary entry because apparently they had a word filter that replaced the word, WAPANESE, which…
KELLY: Oh, yeah,
HEDVIG: …I can guess what it means. Anyway, they had a word filter that replaced WAPANESE with WEEABOO…
DANIEL: Which must have popularised it. And that’s when we got WEEB. Weeb culture. Weeb shit.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah. I’m sorry to all listeners who know more about this and who are hearing me waffle on about things I don’t know. I’m very sorry if I say something terrible.
DANIEL: I think we’re hitting the things that I prepared for my notes. I think we’re hitting the main points here. Sometimes when you’re getting a definition, you’ve got to feel your way around.
KELLY: Yeah. It’s interesting to think about… Yeah. How these simple replacements maybe become really effective if it was something that was filtered out/for.
HEDVIG: Oh, my god. Do you want to guess what people have nominated for the Francophile version of this word?
DANIEL: Oh, let me guess. Let me guess.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah, guess.
DANIEL: This isn’t going to be nice though.
HEDVIG: So, British is like teaboo.
DANIEL: Teaboo. Well, what’s especially… a beretabu? How about that?
KELLY: How about that baguetteaboo? [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: All right, I’ll lead you a different way. The Japanese one was weeaboo.
DANIEL: Freeaboo?
HEDVIG: It’s just Oui-aboo, but the word…
KELLY: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: O-U-I-aboo. [LAUGHS]
KELLY: That’s great.
DANIEL: Oui-aboo. Tricky, tricky.
KELLY: I like the others.
DANIEL: Homonyms are always difficult to tease apart.
KELLY: Weaboo, teaboo. That’s nice.
DANIEL: Works in writing. Works in writing.
KELLY: Works in writing.
DANIEL: Thanks, Flo. That was a great one. And we’ll be watching out for that.
Finally, one from listener, Joanna Cazden, who says, “Hi, folks. Longtime listener here. Always enjoy your pod. Just wanted to bring your attention to the recent passing at age 100 of an important person in child language studies. Student of Roger Brown.” Oh, boy, oh, boy. Taught Roger Brown stuff introductory classes, I got to say. “Student of Roger Brown, who also happened to be my mom.”
“All the publicity these days, at least here in California, reminding parents to talk and read to little kids to stimulate language goes back to that group’s 1960s research at Harvard. She went on to study many other applications, aspects of primary education, sociolinguistics and multilingual communities. Worth a little discussion on an upcoming show. Thanks.” And she’s linked to an article about her mom, linguist, the late Dr Courtney Cazden.
So, I took a little dig into the history. She worked with Roger Brown, who studied three children called Adam, Eve and Sarah and noticed what landmarks they were hitting. But she was interested in classroom talk and she wanted to help teachers use language that young students could understand, no matter what their background, their ethnic background, their economic background leveling the playing field. But the part that got me really excited was that she was an advisor on Sesame Street in the early days back in the 1960s.
KELLY: Oh, yeah, right.
DANIEL: And Electric Company. Anybody remember the show, The Electric Company, from 1971 through 1977, 1979? Morgan Freeman played the role of Easy Reader. Rita Moreno was a cast member.
KELLY: Oh, my gosh.
DANIEL: Okay. This was… The deck was stacked. It was a great show. There were great cartoons. No, really? [IN A SINGSONG VOICE] 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. [SCATS] The pinball animation.
KELLY: Yes.
DANIEL: Okay, okay. This will be significant to people of “un certain âge”. That’s me. Anyway, it was a show that helped kids, maybe ages 7 to 11, learning to read. She helped develop the show’s curriculum, helping the cast and the writers to hit the right level for kids from all different backgrounds. And there’s a lot more. You can read about it on the Harvard website, link in the show notes for this episode. But I just want to say, Joanna, thanks for telling us about your mom, Dr Courtney Cazden. We’re sorry to hear of her passing, but she sounds like a dead set legend and language science was lucky to have her.
KELLY: Yeah.
HEDVIG: And what an amazing legacy to have left that has really affected so many people. One can only hope to have done something like that during one’s lifetime.
KELLY: Exactly. It means so much to see someone who is dedicating their career to educating children in language study. That’s really important.
DANIEL: And somebody from Harvard who’s actually a decent person. That means a lot these days.
KELLY: Right. It looks like she worked on New Zealand, so that’s pretty cool, even like a semi-local tie.
DANIEL: Yes, indeed.
HEDVIG: Close enough, close enough.
KELLY: I know you’re on the complete other side of the continent, but whatever.
DANIEL: Well, hey, that’s it for this show. Kelly Wright, thank you so much for coming and hanging out with us. And do you know if you’re going to be helping with the words next year?
KELLY: I’ll be there next year in San Francisco. So, yeah, and I sent some things for you for the show notes. Our submission link is up. 2026 is rolling. We’ve already covered a handful of words that weren’t on the list last year. So, submit often. Submit all year. Keep a list. I will lovingly read them.
DANIEL: Every episode we’re going to be finding Words of the Week. [LAUGHS] Every single…
KELLY: It was a wonderful list you all prepared, so thank you.
DANIEL: Thank you for coming and hanging out with us. Drop in, I’m serious, anytime. I don’t care when. Hedvig, you’re awesome. Thank you for hanging with me. Still here after all these years.
HEDVIG: Still here after all these years.
KELLY: That’s great to see you.
DANIEL: Thanks to SpeechDocs and thank you, you great patrons, who keep the show going.
If you’d like to help us here on Because Language, there’s lots of things that you can do. You already know what they are. Follow us on the socials. We’re becauselanguage.com on Bluesky. @becauselangpod, just about everywhere else. A lot of people are sending us great ideas. You’ve heard from some of them and that’s easy to do. You can just hit us up on the socials. You can send me an email, hello@becauselanguage.com. Why not get on our website? becauselanguage.com, there’s a place where you can press a button and give your voice. We love hearing you. And you can also tell a friend about us or write us a review.
HEDVIG: And if you want to support us by becoming a member on Patreon, you get a lot of stuff. You get little mailouts, invites to live shows and other things. You also just get a warm feeling in your heart for helping us pay for various expenses for our show, including our guests. I got a new microphone stand recently, which is very practical.
Now I see a list before me here. So, every episode, Daniel does something new to the list of Patreon supporters that we read out. And I’ve been trying to figure out what he has done. Now, I have a theory.
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: Because I can see that Canny Archer has the very high score of 1.455 and then Stan has a zero score. My guess is that it has to do with repetition of letters.
DANIEL: Oh, okay.
HEDVIG: Is that true?
DANIEL: It is true. Have we done that before?
HEDVIG: [GASPS] Yes. No. I don’t think so.
DANIEL: You nailed it. Yup.
HEDVIG: Yes. Yes.
DANIEL: So, what I did was I made a script that… No, I didn’t. I used ChatGPT to generate a script. So, I’m being very open about that.
KELLY: Vibe coding.
DANIEL: I vibe coded this. So I got it to notice the most repetitions. So, for example, Canny Archer repeats the N twice, repeats the A twice, repeats the C twice. That’s two times two times two plus whatever else there is divided by the number of letters because you shouldn’t be at the top of the list just because you have a long name. So, Canny Archer has a score of 1.455. Go ahead, take it, Hedvig.
HEDVIG: And then, we have PharaohKatt at 1.091. Canny Archer and PharaohKatt have long names and also love repetition. So, they are at the top of our list with the highest amounts of repetitions. Then, we have a group that is somewhere a little bit less so we have Linguistic Chaos, Sonic Snejhog, Joanna, Andy from Logophilius, Colleen, and Meredith, who are all between 0.8 and 0.5, about 0.5. Then, we have Molly Dee, Steele, Rene. I would have thought these would have scored higher because there’s two Ls and two Es and blah, blah, but they’re at precisely 0.5.
Then, we have a lot of people here at above 0.4: gramaryen, Amanita, Larry, Lyssa, LordMortis, Helen, Iztin, Kelly is at this point.
DANIEL: That’s you, Kelly.
HEDVIG: That’s you, Kelly. Then, we have a bunch of people at exactly 0.333. Now, we’ve been talking for too long for my math brain to engage about why they’re all at exactly that.
DANIEL: It had six letters and one repetition. That’s it. Or a multiple of six.
HEDVIG: But some of them have more than six letters. Anyway.
DANIEL: Okay, well, six, nine. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Faux Frenchie, Mignon, Laura D, Rodger, Ariaflame, Ayesha, Nikoli, Nasrin, Sydney, Martha. And then, we have a group that’s at about 0.2, and that’s Wolfdog, Ignacio, a new member Rosemary, and Kristofer.
DANIEL: Thanks, Rosemary.
HEDVIG: And then, we have a bunch of people at 0 because they have no repetitions at all. We have Xekri, Lucy, Rachel, John Mac, John K, Aldo, Amy, James C, sæ̃m, J0HNTR0Y, Nigel, Andy B, Elías, Tony, Luis.
DANIEL and HEDVIG: O Tim
HEDVIG: Amir, Rach, Kathy, Stan, Fiona, Kevin, Diego, Manú, Keith, Chris L, Whitney, Daniel, Ben, and Hedvig.
Now, out of this group, I want to give a special shoutout to J0HNTR0Y because… Is one of those O’s a zero?
DANIEL: They’re both zeros. But only letters were counted and I didn’t feel like changing it, so maybe the score could be a little bit higher for counting all characters.
HEDVIG: Okay. So, extra points for J0HNTR0Y for sneaking by. I thought one of them was a zero and one of them was an O and that’s the way that happened.
DANIEL: No, no. That’s just it.
HEDVIG: And also, Whitney is a very long name without any repetitions.
DANIEL: Good point.
HEDVIG: So, very nicely done. We have a number of recent additions on our Patreon. You can join us there. Also, at a Friend level or Listener level, there are free levels as well, where you just sort of follow along and you see posts can engage with some things.
So, we have, at the Friend level, Sean G and Joanna C. At the Listener level, M Jason, Dave N, Sea Archivist, and Lého G. And we have a bunch of new free patrons. They are N, Pigfo0t, Jo, Ant, Cecy, Lidia, Andrew G, Harley and Me, Bee, Tara P, Hatte B, Ashley M, Anil K, Daryl M, Renee OnTheBeach, Greg S, Koala, Luisa M, Ma, br pe, Alex R, Hillary B, Tracey D, Michael B, Jaami, Jay-mi Jo…
DANIEL: it could be Jay-mi. There we go.
HEDVIG: …Jason L, Hans D, Josephine P, Brenda C and Tony. Why are there so many new free patrons? I don’t know. Anyway…
DANIEL: We’re so popular. I wish we had a thousand.
HEDVIG: I am very glad that they’re joining us. Thank you to everyone, all levels.
KELLY: That’s a lot of people. That’s so exciting.
DANIEL: Isn’t it great? We get so many great people supporting us. That means a lot. Thank you, everybody. All right, Kelly, take it away. Close us out.
KELLY: Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who also performs with Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
HEDVIG: Yayyyy!
DANIEL: Thank youuuu. Great show.
KELLY: Like, I’ve listened… I’ve listened to it, but seeing it written out made it insane for my brain.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Made it weird.
KELLY: Krapljanov. It did. It made it weird.
[BOOP]
DANIEL: My memory hack is I was in Japan and I was riding a train. And the train conductor, young guy was pointing and saying stuff to his controls. Point and say, point and say. And I thought, “What’s he doing?” And it’s a technique called pointing and calling, which is intended to help you just avoid lapses. Just failing to do something because you were spacing out. It means you’re not spacing out, you’re pointing to the thing and saying, “Did that thing. There’s somebody on the track. Don’t run over that person.” And so, I’ve decided to use it. So, the thing that I always forget to do is, did I lock the door? I’m sitting in the car. Did I lock the door? Go back and check.
Now, I don’t do that anymore because I lock the door and I go pew, you’re locked. Pew, you’re locked. Boom, locked you. [ONOMATOPOEIA] Sat in the car. Did I lock the doors? Yes, I did, because I went pew to all of them. And I remember doing that. And it’s a great technique. Do you have a memory hack?
HEDVIG: Do I have a memory hack?
DANIEL: If you don’t, that’s all right. I got to say the thing that I wanted.
HEDVIG: I don’t know if I’m that good at… I’ve always been the kind of person who only learns something if I’m interested in it, but I also am able to become interested in things that other people don’t find interesting. So, that’s handy.
DANIEL: That’s you. Yup.
KELLY: Yeah. Is it like too pedestrian to say writing stuff down? I feel that I have really realized a physical interaction is very helpful for my memory. So, if I am forced to read something as a PDF that I really want to attend to, I will take notes, like physical notes in a notebook on it. And then, if I’m reading something for teaching especially or research, I feel like I… I read other people’s research more often than I read from my own these days, but it does end up being… I print it out, and I make handwritten notes on it. I actually actively highlight passages that are interesting, and I make annotations in the way that I used to before I started doing everything online and it has really improved my recall, which I feel like is… Yeah, maybe I am… It’s performative. I’m analog life. I feel like analog life is my memory hack.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]