“More people have listened to this episode than you have.” Why does this sentence look so right, but feel so wrong? When grammar says one thing, but your brain says another, you may have found a linguistic illusion. We’re talking to Dr Dan Parker, author of Linguistic Illusions: A Case Study on Agreement Attraction.
Timestamps
- Start: 0:00
- Intros: 0:27
- News: 6:30
- Related or Not: 34:22
- Interview with Dan Parker: 49:53
- Words of the Week: 1:38:00
- Comment: 1:54:16
- The Reads: 1:58:19
- Outtakes: 2:05:39
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Promo videos
@becauselangpod French overtakes Arabic for fourth place! 🤔 Maybe. What kind of French do you like? It's in our new episode with Dan Parker! becauselanguage.com
@becauselangpod How many of each kind of animal did Moses bring on the Ark? Dan Parker brings us a ✨linguistic illusion✨. From our latest episode, which you can watch or listen to in all the places. https://becauselanguage.com/135-linguistic-illusions/
@becauselangpod Why does this ungrammatical sentence sound just fine? Dan Parker of @theohiostateuniversity is the author of "Agreement Attraction". Available now from @cambridgeup ♬ original sound – Because Language
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Adelson’s Checker-Shadow Illusion
https://www.illusionsindex.org/i/adelson-s-checker-shadow-illusion
MPF processa “Globo” por pronúncia da palavra “recorde”
proibidas.https://www.poder360.com.br/poder-justica/mpf-processa-globo-por-pronuncia-da-palavra-recorde/
[Auto-translated] Brazilian Federal Prosecutor’s Office sues Globo for mispronouncing the word “record”…
https://www-poder360-com-br.translate.goog/poder-justica/mpf-processa-globo-por-pronuncia-da-palavra-recorde/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp
French overtakes Arabic to become world’s fourth most spoken language
https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20260320-french-overtakes-arabic-to-become-world-fourth-most-spoken-language
When it comes to language, context matters
https://news.mit.edu/2025/when-it-comes-language-context-matters-1210
[$$] Three distinct components of pragmatic language use: Social conventions, intonation, and world knowledge–based causal reasoning
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2424400122
High-Context vs. Low-Context Cultures. Mind the Gap.
https://medium.com/@federicovitali/high-context-vs-low-context-cultures-mind-the-gap-c05b0c5aac7f
Hero shrew: Adaptive significance | Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero_shrew#Adaptive_significance
The oestrous cycle of the rufous elephant-shrew, Elephantulus rufescens | Reproduction
https://rep.bioscientifica.com/view/journals/rep/66/2/jrf_66_2_037.xml
Linguistic Illusions: A Case Study on Agreement Attraction by Dan Parker
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/linguistic-illusions/8A32219D7ABE35F934FA65B1B98F4CC2
Trump Putin: US president reverses remark on Russia meddling
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44864739
Comparative illusion | Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_illusion
Dragon Illusion | Imgur
https://imgur.com/gallery/dragon-illusion-H9nqVll
Understanding Trumpflation: Inflation Concerns During Trump’s Era
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/trumpflation.asp
Double Dutch Bus by Frankie Smith, 1981
@mollylong21 DOUBLE DUTCH BUS @Project 21 ♬ original sound – mollylong
Why I’m Suing Grammarly
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/opinion/ai-doppelganger-deepfake-grammarly.html?smtyp=cur&smid=bsky-nytimes
Grammarly ditches “Expert Review” after expert rebellion and class action suit
https://www.avclub.com/grammarly-expert-review-rebellion-class-action-suit
Sloptimisation post
https://bsky.app/profile/gamefiend.bsky.social/post/3mhgwvvrlks2m
The sneakerina: must-have item or step too far for hybrid fashion?
https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2025/feb/09/sneakerina-hybrid-fashion-ballerina-flat-sneaker-footwear-trend
Red Rooster Rebrand
https://www.themarketer.news/post/red-rooster-rebrand
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
BEN: What are we going to do with you, Midgley? Honestly?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: I know what you’re going to do with me. You’re going to do a show. That’s what you’re going to do.
BEN: Game on.
HEDVIG: Okay.
[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 linguist friend and esteemed colleague, Hedvig Skirgård. Hi, Hedvig.
HEDVIG: Hello. Hi. How are you doing?
BEN: Swell!
HEDVIG: Not ready for that. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: And educator, friend, and my podcast mate for 15 years, Ben Ainslie. Hey, Ben.
BEN: Daniel.
DANIEL: How does that make you feel?
BEN: Permission to wither on the vine, please.
DANIEL: Let’s all move on. You know what’s coming up on this episode? One of the areas that I’ve been fascinated with is when we think something should be one way, but under certain conditions, our brain tells us it’s a different way. And we see this in optical illusions. Do you have a favorite optical illusion, Ben? And Hedvig?
BEN: I mean, it’s hard to go past a good Escher, right? Like, OG optical bro.
HEDVIG: I went to the Escher Museum in Den Haag.
BEN: Cool!
DANIEL: Oh, man.
HEDVIG: It’s very cool. And they have like a little interactive thing where you can take pictures where there’s like rooms set up to make optical illusions so you can go with your buddy and like make silly stuff.
BEN: Did you get caught on the stairs just infinitely going upwards? Is that a thing that can happen?
HEDVIG: They don’t have the stairs, but they have like the room that’s like… It looks like you’re standing next to each other, but you’re actually very far apart and one looks tiny.
BEN: Oh, yeah. The Lord of the Rings effect. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: The forced perspective.
BEN: Yeah. Yeah.
HEDVIG: You can also call it… Yeah. Yeah.
DANIEL: I’m a huge fan of the Checkershadow Illusion, even now.
HEDVIG: That’s my choice. Yeah.
DANIEL: But I do like a good Rotating Snake.
BEN: Would we say that — we’re going back in time now — Magic Eye counts as optical illusions?
DANIEL: Why not?
BEN: Because that stuff always… I realise it’s very hokey and very gimmicky, but there is a part of me that has maintained a kind of fascination with it because of the brain hack nature of it. Like, if you do just the right thing with the focal distance, an image appears, [CHUCKLES] that was always really fun.
DANIEL: It is cool and I’m really good at it. I just go [CROSSING EYES ONOMATOPOEIA] Brrrnk! with my eyes and I can see them very closely. Well, this is what happens in optical illusions, but we see this in language too. There are cases when the grammar of the language kind of works one way. But under certain conditions, our brains tell us something else should be happening. And these are linguistic illusions. So, when we see linguistic illusions, we find that a number of things are going on. By the way, Ben, did it sound strange when I just said “a number of things are going on”?
BEN: No. Should it have?
DANIEL: Does it sound better if I say “a number of things IS going on”?
BEN: This is one of the ones where my brain doesn’t care.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Don’t care, Sugar Bear.
BEN: Yeah. My brain is like, no difference. Like, if you had said one and not the other and then one and not the other, I would be like, “You said the same thing twice. That’s strange. Why would you say the same thing twice?” [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Sounds just as good. Now, according to the prescriptive rule, you would say, “A number of things is going on,” because it is A number of things. One number of things IS going on but for some reason, saying, “A number of things ARE going on,” sounds okay.
HEDVIG: Sounds standard, doesn’t it?
BEN: I feel like I can answer that question why it’s okay.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Because whilst the grammar, if interpreted literally, would suggest that it is a specified number, the way it is used is an unspecified number. When we say a number of things, very few people are thinking like 11 things. [LAUGHTER] They mean some, a few, several.
DANIEL: So, conceptually, some plural number could be going on.
BEN: Exactly.
HEDVIG: But, Benjamin, it sounds a bit like you’re mixing specified, unspecified and singular and plural, because they’re not the same thing.
BEN: Mmm. Okay, fair enough.
HEDVIG: A number, the number, it doesn’t matter as long as it’s singular, right?
BEN: Yeah. So, a number of things, in terms of usage I still would put forward is an unspecified, amorphous kind of thing.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. I always explain this by saying that the word THINGS is plural, and because it’s really close to the IS or the ARE, it’s kind of like pulling it over to plural.
BEN: Interesting.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: So, that’s a linguistic illusion. And today we’re going to be talking with Dr Dan Parker of Ohio State, the University. He’s written a book, Linguistic Illusions, and we’re going to be talking about them. Spoiler alert, my mind gets blown.
BEN: Will he pierce the veil of illusions, Daniel?
DANIEL: We might get to step behind the curtain and find out what’s really going on.
BEN: Take that, wizard.
HEDVIG: Besides the entertainment value, I also really enjoy talking to Dan because I think that these kinds of cases can also reveal more like foundational truths or knowledge about how language works generally. So, this is like a good way of setting up experiments to learn things about language, more than just sort of coffee table entertainment.
DANIEL: And learn things we will. I’d like to say a big thank you to our latest patrons, new at the Supporter level, it’s Lance. Woo. And at the Friend level, Emma and Sousa K with a yearly membership. Our newest free patrons, Adam W, C41v, Bodil, Sneaky Lemur sneaking back into our mentions. Nice to see ya. And Leon. We love our patrons. We have a great time on the Discord. We share photos and words, we get ideas from you, and we hope that we take up a little bit of your day in a pleasant way. I want you to come and join us if you’re not a patron. It can be as little as a buck a month or even free. Just come see us at patreon.com/becauselangpod.
HEDVIG: I think that one of our newest patrons would appreciate me saying that I suspect that this name is Bodil.
BEN: Bodil.
DANIEL: Bodil.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: This is a familiar name to you?
BEN: That is a name from Svenska?
HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s a Svensk-Scandi name. It occurs all over Scandis.
BEN: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: Thank you.
HEDVIG: Bodil is probably a woman, I would guess, but.
DANIEL: Hello, Bodil, and welcome.
BEN: What’s going on in linguistic news, Daniel?
DANIEL: This one was sent to us by Flaviano who says, “My name is Flaviano Matos from Brazil.”
BEN: Hi, Flaviano.
DANIEL: Hi. “And I have always listened to the podcast since the times of Talk the Talk.”
BEN: Wow, that’s pretty cool. As we’ve established in the opening of this episode, that’s a really fucking long time ago.
DANIEL: Yep, it’s been a while and they’re still there. “It may interest you, the news that a federal prosecutor is seeking 10 million Brazilian Real, just shy of US 2 million in damages from the main TV broadcaster in Brazil, TV Globo, over the pronunciation of the word RECORDE /xe ˈkor dʒə/.” I’m not a Portuguese speaker, so I hope I’m doing okay there, re-COR-de /xe ˈkor dʒə/. On that channel, presenters and newscasters have always pronounced the word as RE-cor-de /ˈxe kor dʒə/.” Did you notice how I normally… I said it with the second syllable? Re-COR-de /xe ˈkor dʒə/.
BEN: To a non-Portuguese speaker, and let’s assume that you’re doing an okay job at this, that is a subtle difference.
HEDVIG: It’s a stress shift. So, it would be the difference between like a RECORD and a RECORDER.
DANIEL: Here’s what’s going on. Many Portuguese speakers say re-COR-de /xe ˈkor dʒə/ on the second syllable.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Whereas sports folks in that are saying when somebody sets a world record, they say it’s a RE-cor-de /ˈxe kor dʒə/ with the stress on the first syllable.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: It’s only the stress shifting. But the question is, how on earth is this a lawsuit?
BEN: A 2-million-dollar lawsuit.
HEDVIG: Okay, let’s… I haven’t read ahead, Ben. We should guess what we thinking.
BEN: Yeah. what’s behind this?
HEDVIG: So, my suspicion is Brazil speaks Brazilian Portuguese. Another place that speaks Portuguese is Portugal. [BEN CHUCKLES] Maybe they’re trying to be too much like the colonisers, mainland Portugal variety of Portuguese. So, maybe it’s like anti-European Portuguese, that’s my guess.
BEN: Okay. I was actually going to go in the exact opposite direction. I was going to guess that it’s like old biddies in Australia getting up in arms about people not saying APPRECIATE or something like that and are saying “appreshiate” instead. So, it’s like some old guard entity who’s just like, “No, the language of the coloniser must be maintained because that’s how we know that the rich people are good and the good people are rich.”
HEDVIG: Right. Okay.
DANIEL: Well, I think what’s really happening here is you might have guessed that RECORDE, R-E-C-O-R-D-E is a loanword from English.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: It’s spelled with no accent mark. And that means that according to Portuguese rules, which I barely understand, but I assume they’re kind of like Spanish…
BEN: This is a good linguistic basis. Yeah, sure. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Why not? The penultimate syllable, the second to last syllable, usually gets the stress, unless there’s an accent mark somewhere else, in which case, put it where the accent mark is. There’s no accent mark. So, there is a tension here because many people would say that word, re-COR-de /xe ˈkor dʒə/ but people who know the word from English would be tempted to put the stress on the English way and say RE-cor-de /ˈxe kor dʒə/.
BEN: Okay, so this is like a hating on English thing.
DANIEL: Maybe. But also, there’s something else, and that is that sometimes the word is said RE-cor-de /ˈxe kor dʒə/ and sometimes it’s just RE-cord /ˈxe kord/, which means that the stress would go there.
BEN: Yeah, yeah. Okay.
DANIEL: Argh, there’s a lot of things going on.
BEN: But the RE-corde /ˈxe kord/ would be even more English like, right?
DANIEL: It would be, wouldn’t it?
HEDVIG: And we’re suing each other for… What is the basis of the loss?
BEN: Yeah. What are the damages here?
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] What are we doing?
DANIEL: Flaviano sent a copy of the document in Portuguese, the legal document, which has been translated automatically. Here we go. “The Brazilian Federal Prosecutor’s Office in Minas Gerais has sued Globo for the incorrect pronunciation of the word, RECORDE (record). The lawsuit was filed by prosecutor, Cléber Eustáquio Neves, who is asking the broadcaster to pay 10 million Brazilian Reals for,” here it is, “damage to the intangible cultural heritage of the Portuguese language.”
BEN: Oh, dear.
HEDVIG: Right. Okay. This is some Académie Française…
BEN: Yeah. That’s what I’m picking up here.
DANIEL: Oh, it really is.
BEN: Yeah. Yeah.
DANIEL: There’s more. According to the prosecutor, “When a nationwide broadcaster repeatedly and systematically propagates a pronunciation error, known as a prosodic error,” see how they dress it up a little bit there? I’ll continue. “It violates…”
BEN: Violates.
DANIEL: “…the collective right of society to access programming with an educational and informative purpose.” How? How are people going to know how this word is pronounced if everyone’s saying it wrong on the public broadcaster?
BEN: That is a big woof. So, honestly, I reckon this would be… the Australian version of this, if we were to see, it would be someone taking the ABC to court because a presenter said, “Yeah, nah,” at some point. Like, this, for me, is that.
DANIEL: Or LEARNINGS, saying the word LEARNINGS.
HEDVIG: Or I suspect that what would come up in Australia is more Americanisms.
BEN: Oh, yeah, true.
HEDVIG: That fits the vibe a little bit more, I think. So, if there was something that is a very American thing to do and Australian broadcasters started doing it, it would feel like an affront to Australian national identity or something like that.
BEN: But even that’s a bit weird, right, because Daniel and Hedvig, actually, because you’ve both had to write in official, academic, published ways. Most Australian style guides do not agree on whether PROGRAM is two M’s and an E or whether the words should have a Z or an S in the various words that have Z’s or S’s and blah, blah, etc.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: So, like, even we are just kind of like: Muhh?? [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: It’s not something you’d haul somebody to court over, is it? I mean, really.
HEDVIG: No. It might feel different because Brazil and the US, which I’m taking is like this supposedly pollutant origin. That’s a different relationship than Australia-US, I think. Both are English speaking, blah, blah.
BEN: I suppose that’s true. I would be really interested to hear from any Brazilian Portuguese speaker listeners who could tell us a little bit more about the breadth of, shall we say, like accent diversity within Brazil because just from a purely looking out in perspective, I would imagine it would be tremendous, right? Brazil is huge. It’s got massively divergent populations of people in all sorts of different ways and spaces and places and means and income and blah, blah, blah, blah. I would imagine there’s heaps of different versions of Brazilian Portuguese.
DANIEL: That’s a really great point.
HEDVIG: If you want to hear some Brazilian Portuguese, I can recommend the Oscars winner for at least one reward, The Secret Agent.
BEN: I haven’t seen it yet. I’m so excited to though. I really want to see it. Have you seen it?
HEDVIG: I’ve seen it. I think it’s good.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: There’s some… All of the movies are nominated for everything are too long, but Secret Agent was also a bit too long, but that’s just all of them at this point.
DANIEL: Thank you, Flaviano. I was very interested in that. And it’s good to know that other people are weird about language, not just English speakers, so thanks. Our next story is from Diego.
BEN: Good old Diego.
DANIEL: I have a quiz night question for you.
BEN: Ooh.
DANIEL: What are the most common languages of the world by number of speakers?
BEN: Oh, we’ve dug into this recently, didn’t we?
DANIEL: Well, yes.
HEDVIG: So, it should be Mandarin, Spanish or English. And now, we’re getting into the tricky ones. It depends on if we merge Hindi and Urdu, they should be pretty high. Japanese is higher than you think. Russian is higher than you think.
DANIEL: I just want the top five.
BEN: Okay, hold on. Hold on, I’m going to take a stab.
HEDVIG: Mandarin, Spanish, English… Oh, spoken first and second.
BEN: Yeah, that’s what I was going to say.
DANIEL: Now, this is the problem. This is the problem with that kind of list. Okay, so, Ben, why don’t you get us going here?
BEN: The way that you phrased the question in terms of total number of speakers, which would include second, third, however many languages down the line…
DANIEL: How do we define fluency? How do we…? Anyway.
BEN: I’m going to guess that two languages that Hedvig didn’t mention are probably higher than we would think, which would be Arabic and French.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Yes, also…
BEN: I’m thinking both Arabic and French will sit quite high because in one case, #coloniser, and in another case there’s just fucklots of places that speak Arabic.
HEDVIG: With Arabic, we have the same “problem” as we do with Chinese, Hindi, Urdu, that’s like… So, Egyptian Arabic I believe is the largest first language speaker Arabic variety. But Iraqi, Syrian, there’s a lot of Arabics and then a lot of them similar to like German in Austria and Switzerland, a lot of people learn so-called Standard Arabic at school. And then… yeah.
BEN: Okay. I think Mandarin obviously goes on the list. I think Hindi goes on the list. I think English goes on the list. And then I’m chucking Arabic and French at the end.
DANIEL: Okay, so here’s… By the way, I hate getting this question at quiz nights because it’s such a difficult question.
BEN: Let’s all observe Daniel lose all friends in one night.
DANIEL: I know, right? Because I don’t know what list they used, I don’t know how reliable. And then, I say, “Well, this is a complicated que…” And then when I get it wrong, they look at me like, “You had one job, Midgley.” [LAUGHS]
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HEDVIG: I always just ask… Like, I ask the quizmaster, like, “Just tell me what webpage did you like… Is this Business Insider or is it like Ethnologue? Like, what did you get this from?”
DANIEL: What’d you use? Just tell me that. Yeah. Well, depending on what we count as a language, yes, you’re absolutely right, Hedvig. Arabic is not exactly a language. It’s like a macrofamily, like Chinese. But a pretty good estimation if you count first and second speakers is English up the top because so many second language speakers. Next, Mandarin, then Spanish…
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: …tons of countries. And then, you’d have French and Arabic.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: But here’s the story. Used to be you’d say Arabic and French, Arabic at number four, French at number five. But now, French has pulled ahead and passed Arabic to become world’s fourth most spoken language, according to what you count as a language, what you count as a speaker, what you count as fluency and so on. So, French has overtaken Arabic, [CHUCKLES] according to a report from the International Organisation of Francophonie. [LAUGHTER]
BEN: You don’t say.
HEDVIG: Alliance Française has made their own little survey. Yeah.
DANIEL: “Almond milk consumption booming, says International Organisation for the Promotion of Almond Milk.” [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yeah. It’s important to remember that French is spoken in a lot of former French colonies, but also other places… So, am I right in that Morocco was never officially colonised by France?
DANIEL: Good question. Not sure.
HEDVIG: Good question. They do speak French though, which suggests that they are.
BEN: And then also, do we… And this is another… I know you alluded to this earlier, but like at what point does it stop being a regionalisation dialect of French and start being a Creole that is functionally indecipherable to French speakers, like Mainland French speakers.
DANIEL: Well, let’s check the claim. I wanted to know if these numbers sounded right. So, for Arabic, Wikipedia has 380 million, depending on what you count as Arabic. Still lower than the claim to 396 million for French.
HEDVIG: And a correction to what I said earlier, I just looked it up. So, Morocco has been a French protectorate for about 40 years.
BEN: Ah.
DANIEL: Okay, very good.
BEN: [IN A FRENCH ACCENT] We were never colonised. Oh, cool. We will protect you, though. And you don’t get a say in it.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Let’s pull some quotes from the article at least. Seems that people in France only make up 66 million of the total. By 2050, French is expected to be spoken by 590 million people, “nine out of ten of whom will live in Africa,” says Louise Mushikiwabo, who is the Secretary General of the International Organisation of Francophonie. She says, “The future of French will no longer be shaped in Paris, but rather in Abidjan, Beirut, Brussels, Dakar, Kinshasa, Montreal, Port-au-Prince, Tunis or Yaoundé.”
HEDVIG: For any French learners out there, I can really recommend West African French if you’re learning French. I find it easier. My mum has some friends from Côte d’Ivoire, and I’ve listened to West African French, and it’s much…
BEN: [LAUGHS] Hedvig.
HEDVIG: From my perspective.
BEN: For those listening to the podcast, Hedvig just did chef kiss motion.
HEDVIG: It’s much… I don’t want to go so far as to say better, but I think it is more easier to parse and to hear word differences and stuff like that than in European French-French.
DANIEL: Well, there’s an interesting point that’s coming out, I think, and that is that we’ve been talking about how Arabic is not just one thing. There are multiple varieties of Arabic. But French isn’t one thing either. There’s a ton of them. Maybe one day, we’ll classify it as a macrolanguage.
BEN: Ooh, that’d be fun. Boy, wouldn’t the Academy love that?
HEDVIG: And it never was one, you could argue as well. So, it’s like…
BEN: Yeah, exactly right.
HEDVIG: …bunch of kids going into a trenchcoat, and then we’re like ripping away the trench coat, like, “There’s a bunch of children in here.”
DANIEL: We’re French!
HEDVIG: Always was.
DANIEL: Well, a big happy International Francophonie Day to all who celebrate. That was on the 20th of March. And thanks, Diego, for that story.
DANIEL: All right, next story. This one’s about inference. Hey, Ben, I want to ask you a question.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Actually, Hedvig, this one’s for you too. So, this happened tonight, and I asked if I could share this story, and my neighbor said yes. Our neighbors were planning on coming over for a visit. Getting ready. We were making some pizza. Actually, my partner was making some pizza, which she’s very good at. But I got this text. Here’s the text. “Hi, Daniel. Okay if we head over after our daughter has cleaned her room?” What’s going on?
HEDVIG: Are you supposed to know when the daughter… Is there like, “Oh, she always cleans her room at 3 o’ clock”?
BEN: I think I get what they’re saying here. Here’s how I would interpret this text had I been the recipient of it. I translated in my head to, “Hey, Daniel, we will be over in the next 15 to 30 minutes. Is that okay?”
DANIEL: Okay, I got something else.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: I thought it was unusual that they mentioned her cleaning her room. I thought that was kind of funny. Wouldn’t you just expect him to say, “Okay if we come over in about 15 minutes?”
BEN: Oh, yeah. That doesn’t make heaps of sense to me.
DANIEL: Why would he bring that up?
HEDVIG: But, Daniel and Ben, you both have kids and parents. Parents be weird. Parents be overstimulated, overwhelmed, do weird stuff, right?
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Okay, so maybe he threw that in because he wasn’t in control, sort of in some sense, couldn’t help himself.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Or was he doing an implication?
BEN: There’s a lot about people that doesn’t really make that much sense to me. And so, if someone goes, “Oh, we’ll be over after my daughter cleans her room,” that’s weird. But if they’d said, “We’ll be over in like 45 minutes,” my brain would be like, “That’s weird. That’s too long.” Like, there’s all sorts of weird. And I just kind of put it all in the big “people are kind of weird” bucket, I guess.
HEDVIG: Yeah, people are quite weird.
BEN: It’s got to be quite weird to sit outside of the acceptable weird parameters, I find.
HEDVIG: And I kind of sometimes secretly wish that there was like a little rule manual that everyone just followed and didn’t have to talk to each other and you could just like… Anyway, let’s not talk about that.
BEN: That’s not Northern European of you at all.
HEDVIG: Anyway. But is it possible that the parent in question was trying to get Daniel to participate in a thing about his daughter? Because, for example, I went to a theme park where the staff were handing out chocolate coins. And I winked at the waitress and I said, “Ooh, is it the case that if my nephews eat their dinner, they might get a chocolate coin?” And she was like, “Oh, no. They can have one right now!” and gave them chocolate coins right away. And I was like…
BEN: Did not interpret the…
DANIEL: Didn’t get it. Didn’t pick it up. You were trying to rope in the person to get them to eat.
HEDVIG: I thought it was going to be Daniel saying that you can’t come over until you’ve cleaned your room.
BEN: Oh.
DANIEL: That’s exactly what I thought. Maybe there’s some foot dragging on the room. And he’s like, “Now, Daniel says that you can come over, but only after you’ve cleaned your room. So, I’m going to text Daniel and I’m going to say, ‘Hey, after she’s cleaned it.” And when they came over, I said, “Is that what was going on?” which he confirmed was, in fact, the case.
BEN: Interesting.
DANIEL: Nice going, Hedvig.
BEN: Do you know, here’s how Ben Ainslie is weird. I would resent that a little bit.
DANIEL: Okay, yeah. It’s like, “Don’t rope me into this.”
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: This is not about me. I’m not in this.
BEN: I’m sitting there being like, “Whoa, whoa, you fucking narc. How come I’m now suddenly the person who’s laying it out?”
DANIEL: I’M the bad guy here! [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I’m just pleased that like, Ben, how many children do you have? How many children do I have?
BEN: Uno. Zero.
HEDVIG: Zero, and I got it.
DANIEL: The non-parent worked it out.
BEN: That’s true. That’s true.
DANIEL: Well, we’re always making and interpreting inferences, but how do we interpret them? And usually in a linguistics class, like the ones that we’ve all taught (except Ben), [BEN LAUGHS] we go to Gricean maxims. Like, relevance. Like, my daughter says, “Dad, I want food.” And I say, “I’ve just sat down,” which sounds like a total non-sequitur, but because we assume relevance, we say, “Oh, he’s doing a thing where he’s explaining. I can read between the lines, and I can say, ‘Dad’s just sat down. That’s why he’s not going to get me any food. Dang it.'”
HEDVIG: Yeah. This is like something that a former guest on our show, Steve Levinson, has written a lot about, which is like how people work this out. So, the Gricean maxims are four maxims that were made up a long time ago. Some people use other versions of it or newer ones, but basically, the rules, the informal rules that we use to sort of derive what’s in there, which can be really hard and also can be very culture specific. Like, sometimes, you’re in a culture and someone says something, you’re like, “I don’t understand how that follows from that.” And then, someone says, “Oh, it’s because don’t you know?”
DANIEL: Inference is complicated.
HEDVIG: It is.
DANIEL: Well, this is work from Dr Sammy Floyd of Sarah Lawrence University and a team published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They wanted to know if this ability to do inference was one skill or was it a lot of different skills.
The way that they decided to work this was not by sticking people in fMRI machines and having them answer questions. Instead, they gave people lots and lots of examples of inferences to figure out, lots of question answer stuff and seeing if they could work out the meaning. Like, maybe one of the utterances would have a different intonation like, “Oh, I wanted the RED one.” And the implication there is, “The one you gave me was wrong,” or something. Or maybe connecting the dots would require somebody to be good at knowing stuff. Maybe somebody would be good at doing all of these, in which case you could infer that they all used the same one skill. Or maybe some people were good at some of the inferences, but maybe not good at the others, implying that this would hinge on different skills. What’s your guess?
BEN: I’m thinking different.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: I’m scrolling through the paper to see what kind of participants they had. [LAUGHS]
BEN: I’m looking for the answer.
HEDVIG: No, I’m looking for what kind of people were in it.
DANIEL: It was 400 people doing tasks.
HEDVIG: In English.
DANIEL: Good point. Thank you.
HEDVIG: I’m assuming. I think it’s a bunch of different skills. I think that the knowing things is going to be really helpful because if you don’t know what things mean, it’s hard to connect the dots.
DANIEL: Yeah, but you’ve got to have like real world knowledge as well, right?
HEDVIG: Yeah, to a certain level, you do have to have that.
DANEIL: Okay.
HEDVIG: I struggle sometimes with inferences because I think that everything is possible.
DANIEL: Oh, you’ve got to know what’s unlikely. Like, everything’s possible, but only a few things are likely.
HEDVIG: Yes, and I’m very… I’m bad at… I think everything… I think a lot of things that other people think are unlikely. Like, the thing I’ve told before when someone talked about a submarine, but they were talking about a boat. I’ve done this one before. Like, someone said boat, but they meant I heard U-boat and I thought they were talking about a submarine. But apparently, it’s very unlikely that private people own submarines, but I don’t know that.
DANIEL: What? [LAUGHTER] That would make interpreting that rather difficult.
BEN: That was such a great insight into your brain for a second. That’s so wonderful. Like, what do you mean? Is that not a thing many people have, like just private submarines?
DANIEL: Well, as we know, Hedvig grew up in a very privileged environment where submarine ownership was pretty high among the…
HEDVIG: I’ve been on a retired submarine for a 40-year party when I was a kid. I have.
DANIEL: Okay. There we have it.
BEN: First of all, who your parents knew as a 40-year-old that was renting out a fucking retired U-boat type shit.
HEDVIG: It wasn’t allowed to go underwater.
BEN: That doesn’t matter. Still cool as hell!
HEDVIG: I know, right?
DANIEL: That is awesome.
BEN: That’s wicked.
HEDVIG: Anyway, so for working out the inferences, there has to be some level of knowledge about what’s likely and unlikely. Like, you have to not be me. And then, you also have to be able to work out logical combinations of things. And those feels like at least two different “skills.”
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: So, it’s not one skill. It’s got to be many.
DANIEL: Okay. Okay. Well, that’s what the team found. They found three different skills. You could collapse all the different talents you need into three different skills. Here they are. Number one, understanding social conventions.
BEN: Oh. Oh, dear. I’m in trouble. [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I’m in trouble.
DANIEL: So, for example, if I say, “Ben, you’re coming in hot,” you know what I mean, right? You know that I’m doing a thing and it’s a request. It’s not just a simple description.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: The second thing they found was you had to understand intonation patterns, like, “I want the RED one.” The third thing was making causal inferences based on world knowledge. Here’s one of the tests they used to measure that one. [CLEARS THROAT] “Sometimes, a truck drives by the house. The dishes start to rattle.” Do these sentences form a coherent story?
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: Yes.
DANIEL: How’d you know that?
HEDVIG: I lived next to a railroad, and the house shook every time the train went past.
BEN: [LAUGHS] I was going to tell the exactly the same thing. I lived on a major trucking route, and we would have things rattle off the table. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: There you go. That’s a piece of real-world knowledge that you needed to know to establish the coherence of the start of that story. So, three different skills. I like this because it helps us to get to the specific mechanisms that we use to unwind inferences and read between the lines.
BEN: Cool. I guessed multiple straight out of the gate just because language is really weird and tricky and it uses heaps of different parts of the brain. So, I was like, “Well, it probably is the same thing.”
DANIEL: It’s not all general knowledge.
HEDVIG: There’s this anthropologist from the 1960s and 1970s called Edward Hall. There’s also a guy called Hofstadter who have done these theories about that cultures can differ in how much they expect the other person to be doing the inference work.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: The theory goes that there are some cultures where the person who’s speaking assumes that they have very little shared knowledge with the other person and is likely to sort of state a lot of basic things. But in some cultures, you might veer towards the… You can think of it as like a trade-off. Like, it’s either more the hearer or the speaker.
Now, naturally, saying anything broadly about cultures is a gross oversimplification. Every situation is going to be different. A teacher in a classroom talking to students, a parent talking to a child. Two people who have been married for 50 years. These are all different interactions. But the idea was to sort of help actually part of the American diplomatic service and military personnel…
BEN: Okay, makes sense.
HEDVIG: …stationed abroad to sort of understand that just because you know French doesn’t mean you understand French conversational pragmatics.
BEN: Right.
HEDVIG: So, the idea was that… for example, that Americas might be more on one way and other cultures on another.
BEN: Would this track to, like, high-context and low-context stuff? Like, if you’re a high-context…
HEDVIG: It’s exactly that.
BEN: Yeah. Okay.
HEDVIG: Okay, so high context and low context comes from Edward Hall’s work. He originated…
BEN: Really??
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: I didn’t know that.
HEDVIG: Yeah. There’s a really cool piece in Medium that someone wrote on an overview of Hall’s work, and I’m very interested in this both on a personal level and on a professional research level. I’ve submitted one, two research applications that have gotten rejected doing work on this kind of topic. [LAUGHTER] That’s all right and most applications get rejected. So, it’s just par for the course. But the idea is sort of that, yeah, people might have different cultural expectations. The problem is that if you come from a place where you do spell out a lot of things and you talk to someone who’s not used to it, that person might feel themselves getting overexplained, treated like they’re an idiot.
DANIEL: Beaten over their head with your meaning.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Like, of course I know that dishes rattle when a truck drives by because of the vibrations in the ground. Why are you telling me that? Whereas the opposite can also occur when someone is, like, assuming shared knowledge that isn’t there. And they say, like, “I have no idea what this person is talking about. They mention trucks and then dishes? I don’t know what’s going on.”
DANIEL: And then, the other person thinks, “Man, this person’s thick. Oh my gosh, I have to spell everything out for them.”
HEDVIG: Yeah. So, for me, thinking about that has sort of helped some interactions I’ve had, I’m like, “Ah, this person expects this. I should do this more.” What I tend to do because that’s just how I’m wired is I just tell people, “I might say a lot of things that you already know. It’s not because I know that you don’t know them. It’s just because I deal with a lot of uncertainty all the time and I assume very little as a basis.”
DANIEL: That’s cool. That’s great that you sort of background it like that. That’s really adaptive.
HEDVIG: Well, yeah, I don’t know if it is. The more tired I get, the less social flair I have, I’ll just say that.
DANIEL: Aww. Sounds normal.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: And that’s the news. And now, it’s time for Related or Not. Our theme comes from Hugh.
[RELATED OR NOT THEME]
HEDVIG: I like it. I think we’re getting further away from copyright infringement, which I think is good.
DANIEL: All right, this one comes from Tygertronia on the Discord. Here we go. SHREW, the animal.
BEN: Yep.
HEDVIG: Oh, okay. Paper and pencil…
DANIEL: And SHREWD, having keen judgment.
BEN: Okay. Interesting.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: These little animals are pretty canny, I’ve got to say.
HEDVIG: And that’s it, only those two?
DANIEL: Just those two.
HEDVIG: Okay. I have a fun fact about elephant shrews.
DANIEL: Oh, please.
BEN: I was about to… Okay, I…
HEDVIG: Are we going to say the same one?
BEN: No, I was going to tell you a completely…
DANIEL: Is it about menstruation?
BEN: …different fact about shrews. And it’s not about menstruation. We’ve each got a fact. We’re taking it in turn. Hedvig first, me next, and then Daniel.
HEDVIG: A lot of mammals don’t menstruate like humans do. A bunch of the primates, I think, do but other animals don’t. There’s something else they call estrus cycle that dogs have, which also includes bleeding, but that’s not the same as menstruation. That’s actually a kind of opposite thing. They’re more fertile while it’s happening. But elephant shrews do menstruate like humans. So, whenever I see them in the zoo, I see these tiny little animals and I look at them and I’m like, “You. Me.”
BEN: You and me, sister, doing it together. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Isn’t it like every nine days or something? How quick is their cycle?
HEDVIG: Oh, fuck. They do live shorter lives though, so maybe, I don’t know.
BEN: That tracks.
DANIEL: All right.
BEN: Okay, my shrew fact is if you have never looked at the skeleton of a hero shrew, a shrew that is a hero…
HEDVIG: Hero shrew. Googling, googling.
BEN: …you should do so now. Be warned, it is approaching kind of semi-body horror, how drastically different their skeletons are than any other mammal you have ever seen.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Oh, I’m looking at the pictures now of a hero shrew skeleton.
BEN: Yes.
HEDVIG: And it looks like a tiny dragon or something like that.
BEN: Right. So, what you’re seeing, that weird conglomeration of like armor-looking stuff running down its back, that is its spinal column, that interlocking network of reinforced plates is its spine.
HEDVIG: Oh, shit, sorry. I just saw the skeleton from another angle. Now, I’m seeing it from above, so I can see the spine, and that is crazy.
BEN: So, the hero shrew gets its name because you can stand one with your full weight one foot and it will survive that experience.
DANIEL: Wow.
HEDVIG: Have you ever seen a skeleton of a snake?
BEN: Yes.
HEDVIG: Not the same.
BEN: I would note: snake and shrew, quite distant relatives on the animal tree.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah. But you get parallel evolution, solving similar niche problems, like hyenas and dogs with similar jaws, etc.
DANIEL: Well, thank you for those shrew facts. I feel like we’ve all gotten shrew’d. Yes.
HEDVIG: Nature Corner!
DANIEL: SHREW and SHREWD.
BEN: I’m going with unrelated.
DANIEL: Okay. Any reason?
BEN: I think that the temptation of the -ED being the explanation for SHREW turning into SHREWD — like SHREW + ED — is too juicy, it’s too tasty, it’s too easy. I think that instead, there is a… that D has a different genesis, and we’ve morphed down to SHREWD over like we’ve lost some stuff along the way.
DANIEL: Okay, okay. I like what you’re thinking. Hedvig, what do you think?
HEDVIG: I would like to ask whether the Shakespeare play, Taming of the Shrew, has any bearing here, because that is a sort of smart and not very attractive woman, right? Is that what a shrew is?
DANIEL: A shrewish woman.
BEN: Yes.
HEDVIG: Is that what that is?
BEN: So, we use SHREW to describe sort of homely women.
DANIEL: Who act in ways that we don’t like.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: Are they also too smart for their own good?
BEN: Yeah. So, it was like a word that we would use to describe women who had the audacity of wanting to be people with agency and that sort of thing.
HEDVIG: Right. Which sounds similar to being shrewd.
DANIEL: That’s true. Sure.
HEDVIG: I think the female thing, the taming of the shrew… shrew is a shrewd woman.
BEN: And ol’ Billy Shake-shake, he did make up a few words. This is a thing he did.
HEDVIG: Yeah. I’m going to say they’re related because I think… Yeah, I think… I don’t know. I have a vibe. Maybe he was trying to make a funny thing about tame, because taming is something you do to animals. So maybe, he was making a funny point about, like, SHREW being animal and a woman.
BEN: Yeah, I think so. Yeah.
DANIEL: I’m just about positive that SHREW the animal and SHREW the shrewish woman are related. But I also do think that SHREWD is in there. I just went by and I looked at the beginning of the word. I thought /ʃ/ and an /ɹ/, and I just thought those two sounds, that’s just too coincidental. So, I’m saying related.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Answer. They are related. [BEN GROANS] So, SHREW probably comes from some Proto-Germanic root, *skraw-, going back to Proto-Indo-European, *skreu-, to cut, or some kind of cutting tool and then applied to the animal. SHREWD, for its part, Etymonline says, and Oxford concurs, probably like a bunch of words that we used that we just added E-D to. Like, if you have something that looks like a CRAB, it’s CRABBED. If you have someone that follows someone like a DOG, they are DOGGED. And if you have someone who is like a WITCH, they are? Add an E-D.
HEDVIG: Witched.
BEN: Witched.
HEDVIG: Bitched.
DANIEL: Wicked!
HEDVIG: Oh my god, we’re so… [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: How about that?
HEDVIG: …so failing. Yeah.
DANIEL: So, this was part of a pattern that was being used. And SHREW and SHREWD, very much related.
BEN: Damn it. The juicy thing was exactly the thing. I hate it when that happens.
DANIEL: I just dangled it right in front of you like a piece of meat before a shrew.
BEN: And I walked across it being like, “That’s a trap.”
DANIEL: Thanks to Tygertronia for that one. Now, this one’s from Cameron via email, hello@becauselanguage.com.
BEN: Email? Mm, how quaint.
DANIEL: Cameron says. “Hi. I had another Related or Not inspired by my current anatomy of speech class.” What do we know about the anatomy of speech? What kind of things do we use?
BEN: First of all, question for the dummies in the podcast. Are we talking about anatomy in the human sense of the word? So, literally, like the articulators and the resonators and that sort of thing?
DANIEL: Yep.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: I think that they’re going to ask about… Okay, so there could be LABIA.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Oh, no.
DANIEL: LABIA and LIPS. Interesting.
HEDVIG: Possible. LABIA and LIPS and other labias and… Okay, what else could they be asking about? GLOTTIS and GLOT, other things that mean like wordy things.
DANIEL: There’s all kinds of tantalising things going on, aren’t there?
HEDVIG: We’ve already talked about UVULA, I think, before which is a little grape.
BEN: Oh, oh, I’ve got it. I’ve got it. I think I’ve got it.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm. Velum?
BEN: Is it GLOTTIS and GUTTURAL.
DANIEL: Oh, interesting. Those are all tasty, but not where Cameron was going. We have a bone called the hyoid bone, and it’s a free-floating bone, not connected to anything. But it’s thought that it helps us to speak. It’s right near our chin. So, Cameron asks, “Are GENIO-, like the geniohyoid muscle, meaning chin, GENIUS and GENIE related? Thank you, Cameron.”
BEN: I thought perhaps GENIAL could go in there.
DANIEL: Oh, interesting. I was going with INGENIOUS. So, I’m going to chuck on INGENIOUS. Now, to keep it simple, we’re going to step through this pairwise, step by step, and see who manages to make it to the end.
BEN: Okay. Okay.
HEDVIG: Okay.
BEN: So, it’s a knockout round.
HEDVIG: Question. The first one, please spell it for me, please.
DANIEL: Geniohyoid. G-E-N-I-O-H-Y…
HEDVIG: I-O. Okay. Okay.
DANIEL: H-Y-O-I-D. GENIOHYOID. Okay, so the first pair. GENIUS and INGENIOUS. I say yes. I think they’re related.
BEN: Yeah, I’m going with yes on that one as well.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I’m going with yes. Also, fun fact about INGENIOUS. I’m not that good at spelling always, and I type really fast. And very often, when I want to spell INDIGENOUS, I spell INGENIOUS.
BEN: That’s good. That’s a nice one.
DANIEL: Ingenious. [LAUGHTER]
BEN: That would be so… that’s such a good save. Like, if you’re going to talk about Indigenous researcher, Samantha Schmamana… Ingenious researcher, Samantha Schmamana! Like, you’re doing great.
DANIEL: They’re both good. They’re both good.
HEDVIG: Ingenious languages of Australia. Yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: Ingenious languages. We all said yes and we’re all correct. The two of them are related.
BEN: Starting off soft, I know this.
DANIEL: We know about the root, GEN-. It means give birth or beget. That’s where we get words like our GENES, GENERATE, GENERATION, what else?
HEDVIG: GENUS.
BEN: GENESIS.
DANIEL: GENEALOGY, and yes, INDIGENOUS and of course, GENIUS. So, INGENIOUS uses the GEN- root and it means of good natural capacity, full of intellect and innate qualities. Okay, second round.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: GENIUS and INGENIOUS. They’re both related. And a GENIE.
HEDVIG: No.
BEN: Unrelated.
HEDVIG: Because that’s from DJINN.
BEN: Yeah, yeah. I’ve played too much Dungeons & Dragons.
HEDVIG: Djinn, it’s like pre-Islamic era Arabic Peninsula stuff I think.
BEN: Hang on, is Arabic Proto-Indo-European?
DANIEL: Nope.
HEDVIG: Nope, it’s African.
BEN: Then, I’m going a hard no then.
HEDVIG: Also, people borrow stuff, though, so that doesn’t help, but I don’t think this is one of them.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and sometimes things grow together. If they have a slight similarity, they grow together more. Okay, GENIUS and INGENIOUS plus GENIE. All three related.
BEN: Get the fuck out of here.
HEDVIG: What the…?
DANIEL: Yep.
BEN: Okay, explain to me how DJINN has tracked that.
DANIEL: Well, first of all, DJINN is Arabic, but when we found the word, DJINN, we just repurposed the word, GENIE, and kind of lumped them together because we thought this thing’s like that thing.
BEN: Wait, wait, wait. Hold on.
HEDVIG: So, DJINN and GENIE aren’t related is what you’re telling me.
DANIEL: DJINN and GENIE are not related, correct.
BEN: What the fuck? How is that possible?
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Okay, let’s take it back to the beginning. I mentioned that GENIUS went back to the GEN- root. Turns out the real path has an interesting bend to it. Latin, a GENIUS, doesn’t mean a smart person. It means a guardian, deity, or spirit, which you sort of get when you’re born. It guides you through your life and then takes you to the other side when you’re done. So, if you’re a GENIUS, it’s because you have a GENIE that inspires you.
HEDVIG: Like, literally a guardian spirit.
BEN: Okay, wait. So, we’ve been using the word, GENIE, for a lot longer than we’ve been had the loan word DJINN, or we encountered Arabic and found out about djinns in their folklore. And so, we already had the word GENIE. It sounded a bit like DJINN. The creature in the folklore was a bit like the genie we had, so we just used it.
DANIEL: Yep. We started out with GENIUS, and that meant the little being. And then, we started applying that to a person who has a really good genie. And when we found DJINN, then we sort of used GENIE for that.
BEN: That blows my mind. I literally just thought we encountered the word DJINN, and were like, well, you can’t put a D and a J next to each other, so we better call it something else. And then, we just did the best we could with GENIE.
DANIEL: Okay, last round. Now, let’s add to this the prefix GENIO-, as in the geniohyoid bone. I thought, yeah, why not? It’s something having to do with your head, which means, like, being smart, so I said yes.
BEN: I reckon this is where we fall off the wagon.
HEDVIG: There’s got to be a point where we fall off the… Well, Ben, we’ve played this game a lot.
BEN: Yeah. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Sometimes, it’s a double, triple bluff.
BEN: Inside baseball. Yeah. Okay.
HEDVIG: So, let’s just think about the actual words instead. That doesn’t always help us that much because the words are pretty short by this time. So, we have, like, GEN-. Not a lot to go on.
BEN: I mean, actually, yes. I think they are related because the bone we are hypothesising, like, to the best of our knowledge, the bone is used in the generation of the sound and language. So, it would make a lot of sense that we’re using like a GENIO- kind of prefix there if we accept that GEN- is GENESIS and GENERATE and blah, blah, blah.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: But I feel like things have to do with birth, should be, like, groin area.
BEN: What? Sorry [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Unless you’re born with a good brain. Unless you’re born with innate qualities.
BEN: I need help.
HEDVIG: But this isn’t brain.
BEN: I think we’ve just had a thing where you’ve assumed that everyone has a submarine. Could you help me on your mental path for just a second?
DANIEL: Everyone has a submarine.
HEDVIG: He was telling us it’s got to do with birth, right?
BEN: Well, I heard…
DANIEL: Birth or origin or innateness.
BEN: Yeah, I heard it as creation, right, more than just like outright human, mammalian birth?
HEDVIG: Okay, all right.
DANIEL: Ben and I are saying yes.
HEDVIG: I’m going to say no because I am contrarian and at this point, I have no clue what’s going on. [LAUGHS]
BEN: The GENIE-DJINN thing fucking threw me. Like I’m seat of my my pants here.
DANIEL: The answer given by my sources, Etymonline plus the Oxford English Dictionary, not related. But I have questions. Oxford says this goes back to a different place. Ancient Greek genion, meaning chin. In fact, you can see how genion and chin are kind of related. This goes back to a Proto-Indo-European root, *genu, meaning your chin or your jawbone.
Now, this is different from what we’ve been seeing with GENIUS. It’s ge-nu. You can hear the difference, ge-nu and ge-ne. And my sources are saying, well, these are different Proto-Indo-European roots. Dang, they sound kind of similar to me, but I’m calling this one for now, not related.
BEN: Yes.
HEDVIG: Pew, pew, pew.
BEN: All right, there we go. I can’t believe I was siding with Hedvig. Why was I doing that? What an idiot. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Congratulations for navigating those twists and turns and thanks to Cameron. Thanks also to Hugh for giving us that jingle. If you’d like to contribute anything like that, please do, hello@becauselanguage.com.
[MUSIC]
[INTERVIEW BEGINS]
DANIEL: We are here with Dr Dan Parker from the Ohio State University. He’s linguist and the author of the new book, Linguistic Illusions: A Case Study on Agreement Attraction. I’ve decided that every time I say ✨illusions✨, it’s going to be… [GESTURES]
DAN PARKER: Yeah, there has to be some magic, like pulling a rabbit out of a hat or something like that.
DANIEL: Well, these things are rather magical, I think. Tell us how you got into this study of linguistic ✨illusions✨ in particular.
DAN: So, it stems back to when I was in graduate school. So, when I was a very naïve, fresh-minded student in grad school. I came in and my advisor was like, “Hey, there’s these really cool things that we’re working on in our lab here.” Gave me a couple sentences.
HEDVIG: We’re confusing the heck out of people. Yeah.
DAN: Yeah, yeah, exactly right. So, it was like hard to make sense of these things. And they were trying to… At the time, they just started doing this like kind of systematic research on these things, trying to figure out what’s going on with them. I got swept up into that. And after that, it was downhill from there.
DANIEL: Okay, well, tell us your favorite linguistic illusions. I’ve got some. Hedvig, you might have some that we’ve talked about. No? Okay, never mind.
HEDVIG: I’ll think of some.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] But I’ve got some. Dan, you’ve got some. Tell us one of yours.
DAN: Sure. Yeah. The ones that I always give in my class are these, what are called the Moses illusions. So, these are cases where you ask something like, “How many of each kind of animal did Moses bring on the Ark?” And you ask students to respond as quickly as possible.
DANIEL: Go on, Hedvig, what’s the answer?
HEDVIG: Two.
DAN: Two. And that’s what they always say. And then, you say, “No, it’s zero. You’re wrong.” And they look puzzled. And then, you repeat the question to them, and you say, like, “Oh, it wasn’t Moses who brought these animals on the Ark.” That’s right.
DANIEL: It was Noah. And anyway, he brought two of the clean animals and seven of the… Wait, I got it wrong. Seven of the clean animals and two of the unclean animals. Anyway, so there you go.
DAN: That’s right. Yeah. So, there’s a whole series… There’s a couple other ones from the Bible.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Hedvig’s looking confused.
HEDVIG: You’re just…
DANIEL: Hang on, we lost Hedvig.
HEDVIG: I feel like what you’re doing is you’re hijacking my efficiency parts of my brain that is trying to pragmatically guess and, like, I don’t hear everything. I get to the end of the sentence. I’m like, “Okay, I heard some things. What could it have been?” You might mean Noah, and you said Moses, but I’m going to be kind to you and just assume. So, like…
DAN: Absolutely.
HEDVIG: …you’re exploiting me.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
DAN: Right. So, I’m playing a little trick on you.
HEDVIG: Yeah. You’re taking advantage of my kindness.
DANIEL: As you mentioned in the book, the trick doesn’t work if you say, “How many animals of each type did Nixon bring onto the Ark?” Because that doesn’t work at all.
DAN: Right. Yes, there’s these cases where you can make one small change to it, and then all of a sudden, you don’t overlook it. So, it’s not just that I’m hijacking your attention. Like, you are paying attention. So, if I make a change, as you said to, like, Nixon, then all of a sudden, you realize, “Hey, that doesn’t make any sense.” And so, that’s like kind of the cool thing about these. You make one small change and then all of a sudden, they see what’s going on. They see what you’re trying to do. And that’s really informative about what’s going on right under the hood.
DANIEL: I’ve got another one.
DAN: Okay.
DANIEL: One of my favorites is gratuitous negation. For example, “it’s not like it isn’t the kind of thing you don’t see every day.”
HEDVIG: Again, with the unnatural like… Wasn’t there famously… Have we talked about this? Wasn’t there famously a speech by Trump where he didn’t use a negation and then was like, “Everyone know there was supposed to be a negation in there.” Like, negation seems weird.
DAN: No. Yeah. I mean, negation can trip people up really quickly. Either they’ll admit it or they add gratuitous negation. Negation trips up people all the time.
HEDVIG: And it doesn’t help that there are like a lot of constructions where you do this, like, negative concord. Like, “I didn’t see nothing” is like a perfectly legit way to say that you… I don’t know how to say this without saying negations, you were blind to things.
DANIEL: I’m trying to get by without saying “blind”. Anyway, another thing about negation is that there are certain words that aren’t expressly negative like not or no, but they have a slightly negative valence, like ANYMORE, right?
DAN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Or even something like, “I’m not going to UNRAVEL the thread,” versus, “I’m not going to RAVEL the thread,” which could mean the same thing.
DAN: That’s right. Yeah. So those are cases of, like, these NPIs that have to link up to something negative. And then, in the same vein, you have like what we think of as negative verbs. So, like doubt where it conveys some sort of like… Something negative.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. And that could throw people off.
DAN: It’s not your standard, like, NO or NONE.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Negative existential, famously. Yeah.
DANIEL: You mentioned also, Dan, the comparative illusion with the very famous sentence, “More people have been to Berlin than I have.” More people have been to Berlin than I have.
HEDVIG: Wait, I’m going to be the dumb little kind person who’s trying to make sense of all the nonsense you’re spitting out.
DANIEL: Perfect. [LAUGHS] Thank you.
HEDVIG: So, more people had been to Berlin than I. I’ve only been once. There are a lot of people who have been more than once. So, more people have been more times to Berlin than I have.
DANIEL: Yes, yes. That’s probably the intended meaning. And yet, the sentence is constructed in such a way that you start off and then you get to the end, and it sounded like a grammatical sentence. There’s nothing that pings your “this is not grammatical.” And yet then you try to figure out the meaning and you go, “Eww, no, something went wrong here. What was it? What was wrong with that sentence?”
DAN: Yeah. I mean, what you’re trying to do is you end up… You’re making a comparison of two quantities that aren’t comparable, like the number of people to the number of experiences. Those aren’t two things that you normally compare. And as it turns out, that exact sentence was what got me hooked into all of this.
When I was doing my on-campus interview for grad school, who would become my advisor, gave me that sentence and asked me, like, “What does it mean?” And I thought there’s like… The first time I’ve heard it and I thought, there’s a correct answer. And I was trying to find this correct answer and I stumbled. But that was the exact point, these things don’t mean anything. As soon as you try to make sense of it, you stumble, and it’s fun to watch people in this kind of weird, sadistic way trying to come up with a response. And you get a whole range of different responses. And the fact that you get all these different conflicting responses, it engages everybody.
HEDVIG: It’s part of the reason why you get so many different responses, because a lot of these types of illusions are more easily solved if you have more context. So, if you know who you’re talking to and you know who many people are, it’s everyone in this room or something like that, you have more information to go out to unravel what might be going on. But in linguistics and in writing, we take things out of all of that. We take them out of the world that they occur in, and we put them on a blank piece of paper, and some sadistic grad mentor or interviewer just takes it entirely in isolation and says, like, “What is this?” And that’s not really how language occurs naturally in the wild.
DAN: Right. Yeah. So, I mean, you’re highlighting a really good point here. So, as soon as you put these things into some context, what it invites is the opportunities for students to make these rational inferences. Like, what is it that the speaker’s trying to communicate? What are some potential targets, and what’s the delta between what they’re saying and what I’m hearing and trying to make sense of that.
And so, when you have things in a natural context, they’re willing to overlook certain errors, repair certain things and make inferences about what it is they think you’re trying to say. And so, there’s a very active, productive line of research thinking about when and where these rational inferences about speaker intent, what they’re trying to communicate, where does that come into play here. And then, there’s the related question of when you don’t have that context, when you don’t have the opportunity for those inferences, what are the kind of the base mechanisms that you’re using or you’re recruiting to make sense of these sentences. So, you can do it in the lab, or you can put it in context.
DANIEL: This is all reminding me of optical illusions.
DAN: Right.
DANIEL: There’s a very interesting optical illusion where it’s like a dragon’s head. Have you seen the dragon’s head?
DAN: No, I haven’t.
HEDVIG: No. Googling.
DANIEL: You walk past it, and the whole thing seems to be turning towards you as you walk past. It’s a stationary object, but it seems to be turning toward you. And then, you get to a certain angle and you realise, “Oh, what I thought was the outside of a convex box was actually a concave box and the face that I was seeing was actually on the inside of this concave surface.” And we never see that kind of thing. Our visual system is completely unprepared to deal with faces in concave objects in reverse, because faces are always convex. Faces are just faces.
HEDVIG: I mean, a listener can definitely write into us and tell us if there’s any animal on this planet that has a concave face. So, a face where the nose part is further in than the edges. But generally, we’re not set up to recognise those type of things. And some of these illusions are also maybe not things that don’t occur, but maybe things that don’t occur so often or don’t occur in isolation, so they sort of… We have to make use of weird parts of our understanding to unravel what’s going on.
DAN: Most of the time, we see faces that are coming out into the world. We don’t see things that are going in that’s giving the illusion of the dragon. But a lot of that work in the vision sciences has come about from the fact that sometimes you do see things where there’s an imprint, so you have to make sense of, say, a footprint in the sand. And your vision system has to determine, is that coming out or is it going in?
And so, I think what vision scientists have done is they’ve figured out these nice little cues that your visual system might be tuning into, and they’re trying to figure out what are those cues that tells you that’s a footprint rather than something coming out of the sand. And so, these illusions actually come about by seeing something in the real world and then you manipulate it in a little bit of a way to see what’s going on. And then, all of a sudden, you’re like, “Oh, that’s how we determine that a footprint is a footprint rather than coming out of the sand.”
And the same thing happens with these linguistic illusions. Somebody will make some error out in the world. They’ll say something nonsensical that you notice still works fine in communication, or the inverse of that, and you’re like, “Hey, something’s interesting about that.” And then, you go into the lab and try to tease that apart.
HEDVIG: So, when you take things out of the context, what you’re saying is that when we have all that context, we can guess the emphasis and we know people, we have so much material to guess. But what you’re interested in and what a lot of other people are interested in, like, what is the bare skeleton of the skills we have to tell these things apart when we don’t have that context?
DAN: Yeah. So, I mean, that’s a reasonable starting point. So, you can sit there and say, “Wow…” Context, and all these inferences that you make, and natural communication, that’s really rich. And if you want to make sense of that, you kind of have to first scale back. So, let’s start off like just very simple things and then ultimately, the goal is to scale up to natural language use, where we’re…
As we’re doing here, we’re communicating, just talking back and forth. We want to be able to build a model of that. But in order to do that, you have to kind of just scale back and just make these small little changes in controlled environments, and then eventually scale that up to see what’s going on in the real world.
HEDVIG: Doesn’t Chomsky famously say that in some book that we should first try and understand an idealised conversation between only two people where no one is overlapping and they know what each other means? And then, if we can understand that, which we don’t yet, we can maybe understand what the fuck goes on when you get on a bus and the bus driver is mumbling.
DAN: Yes. I mean, there’s a wide difference and wide range between those two contexts. Like I said, it’s a reasonable starting point to say let’s just do the simplest case where we don’t have the context. And then, you systematically add things into the experiment, to the context, and you see what systematic differences these make. If they make a difference, if they don’t, then you can start to get an idea of what’s contributing, what’s not, what are people paying attention to, what are they not paying attention to, and so on.
DANIEL: Okay, and we’re going to hear some examples of especially subject-verb agreement, where you’ve constructed experiments to just find that little hinge, which is the difference between not confusing and slightly confusing. I was just interested in one more thing though. Garden path sentences are a fascinating kind of linguistic illusion where the structure of the sentence leads you down the garden path into one interpretation. And then, you realise that fails completely.
And I’ve been collecting, or I’ve been enjoying collections of headlines. Now, headlines are very interesting because they do remove a lot of context in the form of grammatical words. So, they do have a tendency to get a bit tricky. Here’s one. “Honduran military chief quits saying he is fatigued.” Oh, thank goodness, because that guy was just bugging me. He was just… Yeah, complaining. No, he quits saying he is tired. And then a classic one: “Eye drops off shelves”.
HEDVIG: Oh, wait, no, no, no. Was there an S on the eye, the first eye?
DAN: Eye?
DANIEL: Eye drops.
HEDVIG: Eye drops off shelves. There are no more eyedrops on the shelves.
DAN: Okay. Yes.
DANIEL: Oh, did an eye drop off the shelves? Okay.
HEDVIG: It’s with the drops off shelves.
DAN: Yeah, you get a whole bunch of these in the headlines. Like, one of my favorite ones is the “Stolen painting found by tree,” where…
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] I found it!
DAN: Yeah, like this tree all of a sudden…
DANIEL: “Large church plans collapse.” Oh, sorry. Large church-plans collapse. There we go.
HEDVIG: There we go.
DAN: Yeah, you have to get the right prosody with this to make sense of these.
HEDVIG: See, if you were speaking a language where verbs had a bunch of stuff on them that meant that you know that they were verbs, like if they had a bunch of little markers on the beginning and end and like, they couldn’t be confused for nouns, so plans and plans is both a noun and a verb, then this wouldn’t really…
DANIEL: Wouldn’t be a problem.
HEDVIG: …occur as much. These kinds.
DAN: That’s right.
DANIEL: Well, Dan, now it’s time to get into subject-verb agreement which, Hedvig, I know is one of your favorite things because you’re such an expert at it. No, famously not.
HEDVIG: I seriously… so, I speak on this podcast and have done for many years, and I’m not a native speaker of English, and subject-verb agreement seems to be like one of the last things. Also, some of the voicing contrast, I’m not very good at it. And I am very bad at learning it. I do it in writing as well. I fuck it up all the time.
DANIEL: Maybe for the listeners who don’t know, what are we talking? Can you give me an example of a sentence where you might get tripped up?
HEDVIG: So, if I was planning to make a church, I would say, “I plan to build a church.” And if she does, she planS with an S.
DANIEL: Yes, it does.
HEDVIG: That’s the easiest.
DANIEL: Okay, but WAS and WERE can be tricky, right?
HEDVIG: WAS and WERE, really hard. And the thing is, also, I don’t get any negative feedback because no one misunderstands this. Half of the time, they don’t even seem to notice I don’t do this. So, what’s up with that?
DAN: Yeah, I mean, that’s the whole thing. So, I mean, the classic example is as you were pointing out, WAS and WERE is the tricky thing. So, you can take something like the key, if I say, “The key were rusty,” I can give this to my class and everybody’d be like, “That sentence is horrible.” That’s bad, right?
DANIEL: Right. That’s bad.
DAN: But if I all of a sudden put in this intervening plural item, like the key to the cabinets WERE. It’s still bad for the same reason that the original KEY and WERE. Right? You still have a mismatched singular and plural item. But as soon as all of a sudden, you put in that plural cabinets, it sounds better than it should.
DANIEL: So, let’s just go back over this, because I think this example is going to be key. [CHUCKLES] So, the sentence that was unambiguously wrong was, “The key were rusty.” Obviously, it’s the key WAS rusty. WAS has to agree with KEY, because KEY is singular.
HEDVIG: Y’all had like a strong reaction. You were like, “Eww, don’t like it.” Can I just say that I think there are things you would have a stronger reaction to, like, “The key be rusty,” probably, you guys would like even less.
DAN: Oh, for sure.
HEDVIG: Like, even less.
DANIEL: Yep. I would say, “Well, that’s…”
HEDVIG: So, there’s gradients here, like your little senses go off, but they’re not flipping out. You can still continue.
DAN: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: And there are some varieties where “The key were rusty,” is completely fine. Oh, the key were rusty. Yeah. So, we are making assumptions about standardised English and that’s fine. We can talk about it.
DAN: Yeah.
DANIEL: But now, we started off with the sentence, “The key was rusty,” sounds great to everyone. “The key were rusty,” sounds not so good to some people. Then, we stuck in, “The key to the cabinet…”
DAN: Cabinets, plural.
DANIEL: Key to the cabinets were rusty.
DAN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Bad for the same reason that “The key were rusty” is. And if I’m understanding correctly, the “to the cabinets” thing is a bit of a distractor, or rather an attractor in your parlance.
DAN: That’s right. That’s where the terminology comes from, agreement, attraction. It kind of attracts you. In standard cognitive psychology, we would talk… In experimental psychology, we would call that a distractor or a lure, but it seems to attract that plural agreement in there.
HEDVIG: It’s as if your brain goes like, “Well, I saw a plural and WERE is plural. So, all should be fine.” Not paying attention to the fact that WERE/WAS is supposed to agree with the first subject that you had of the noun phrase, the key.
DANIEL: The key.
DAN: Right. Yeah. So, we try to figure out what’s going on with these. And at first glance, you might say, like, “Oh, hey, this is…” I mean, admittedly, these agreement things are not the first things that I jump out of the gate with illusions, because it’s like, they’re not the most exciting ones, but they’re also super informative. And so, at first, you might think like, “Oh, this is just something where I had to learn this back in grade school. These are just these stuffy rules that my grade schoolteacher had to impose on me.” Or, “These are things that linguists just kind of make up into the world about how a language should or shouldn’t work.”
And as it turns out, you don’t make these errors. You don’t hear these errors all the time. If it was just something that we were just flouting, we didn’t care about the rules, we would have a whole range of different types of errors. We’d have WAS and WERE. They just would go all around and you’d use them very freely. But as it turns out, not everything is susceptible to that. If you do it with the same equivalent with the singular WAS, then people are very good at detecting the errors. So, it’s not just the case where you get misled all the time.
DANIEL: Now, let’s try it the other way because you mentioned there’s an asymmetry there. Our sentence right now is, “The key to the cabinets were rusty,” which… the WERE is kind of… people are misapplying WERE. I might say, The key to the cabinets was rusty.” Let’s try it the other way. “The KEYS to the cabinet WAS rusty.”
DAN: Yeah, that’s bad. You get the same… you ask a group of people, they’ll give you the same, like, “Oh, something’s off about that.” And then, if you try to put in… That WAS says, I need something that’s singular, let’s now put a singular attractor or a lure in there. And you say, “The keys to the cabinet was rusty.” And you get an asymmetry. It doesn’t sound as attractive, as you will, as the plural example.
And to be clear, it’s hard to intuit these things in spoken language like this. What we do in the lab is we pose these very rigid time constraints on people. So, you ask for judgments like within three seconds, or we look at word by word reading times, and so we can see what’s happening at each word. And so, one of the things that I’ve shown in some of my work is in that moment by moment timing, people are really susceptible to being misled.
But when you give people a little bit more time to think about these things, it’s easier for them to detect the error. But you do get this asymmetry between WAS and WERE, singular and plural. So, you don’t get these errors all the time. And if it was a case where we were just flouting the rules of agreement, we would expect all of these cases to be equally as susceptible to being misinterpreted, but we don’t see that. And so, when we take these in the lab, then we see these effects coming out here, but not here. And then, that’s really informative about what’s going on underneath the hood. So, that’s what we try to do.
HEDVIG: And these are the kind of psycholinguistics experiments that historical linguists or language typologists sometimes like to use as evidence for certain paths of change. So, like, “Oh, would we expect… If a language is losing its verbal agreement and there’s a singular and a plural form of the verbs, do we expect it to keep the singular or the plural?” And these experiments can show that people have certain asymmetries and cognitive biases already in their head. So, we would maybe expect certain changes, which is a really fun way that different domains of linguistics can actually inform each other and I don’t think happens enough.
DAN: No, it’s certainly ripe for cross-fertilization there.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Yeah.
DANIEL: Let’s talk for a second about why this is happening because this asymmetry, the fact that CABINETS is attractive for plural, but CABINET isn’t attractive for singular, even though they could both be just as wrong. I thought that it was just as simple as proximity. Like, there’s a word back there. But then, you threw me CABINETS, plural. So, now I’m just going to remember the last verb and it’s not structural agreement, but it could be considered sort of proximal agreement. But then, you’ve just kind of blown that theory because CABINETS attracts plural, but CABINET doesn’t attract singular. It should go both ways.
DAN: Yeah. Okay, we’ve got this asymmetry between singular and plurals. What might be going on with the plurals, and it could be a proximity thing. But then, as it turns out, if we take that attractor and put it before the thing that we’re supposed to be agreeing with, we make it such that it’s not intervening.
DANIEL: Like what? Like what? Like what?
DAN: A really good case of this is. It’s hard to construct these things, but they’re usually done with like, say, relative clauses. So, you say something like “the driver who the runners wave to”. The driver who the… These are always hard to construct. The DRIVERS, plural, who the runner waved to. So, you have this relative clause verb is plural WAVE. It agrees with… It should agree with the RUNNER, the subject of that relative clause. But as it turns out, it’s that distant first noun that you hear, the DRIVERS, that trip people up. So, as soon as you take it into a context where it’s not in a proximal relationship, then we still get misled.
DANIEL: So, it’s not proximity.
DAN: Yeah. And so, what happens is we start to tease this apart. Maybe it’s about proximity. If it is about proximity, that makes this a really nice prediction. If we make it such that it’s not in a nearby position, then we should fail to see this… to elicit this effect. As it turns out, the effect persists. So now, that starts to narrow down the space of possible causes for this.
DANIEL: [SIGHS] Okay.
DAN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Let me ask another question.
DAN: Sure.
DANIEL: Are trees real?
DAN: Like syntax trees?
DANIE: Like, in your book, there’s a lot of syntax trees and you do a lot of explaining of, “Oh, well, you see, this thing should hook onto… but this thing should agree with the noun back there and not with the thing that’s nearby, because that’s a completely different branch of the tree.”
HEDVIG: Linguists, like certain linguists in particular, a lot of linguists like to draw syntax trees to represent sentences.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. They’re awesome.
HEDVIG: That’s how we can… For example, in the sentence, “The keys to the cabinets WERE…” something, something, we can see in the little representation of the graphical that the WERE is attaching to a certain place on the noun for some of the other things. And we can tease these things out that people can sort of naturally do. And we can find this experimentally by asking people to like, “Oh, what happens when you remove this? What happens when you add this?” And we can figure out the tree structure.
However, is that what is going on in people’s heads? Because these proximity effects, which might not explain everything but maybe is explaining some things at least some of the time, don’t act through the tree, they just act through linear time. This was the most recent thing I heard. So, what’s up with that?
DAN: Yeah, so I think there’s two things. There’s one question of, what’s the nature, what’s the kind of the mental status of the trees that we might draw on a whiteboard for a syntax class or in a syntax textbook? And there you can… The way that I think about those is, are we mentally drawing trees in our head? Absolutely not. That seems kind of farcical, but at a very fundamental level what we need to do is we need to figure out… as we’re getting words coming in word by word, we need to figure out how they are grouped together to interpret their meaning.
And syntax trees can be thought of in one way as kind of just like a history, here’s one way in which we put these words together to make sense of them. Like, these things go together like a determiner and a noun go together. And this thing operates as a unit that… I mentally represent this as a unit. We can represent that as a tree, and we can say that maybe that’s like a representation or a history of the mental steps that we took to put those things together.
Are we putting those trees together? Like I said, are we drawing trees in our head? No, I think about them in the same way that when you look at, say, a model of the solar system, so, you see those models where it’s like a crank gear thing of the sun and the planets go around it and they’re on this wire. So, we can think of the solar system as this model where these wires go around. We can talk about the orbits in this circle here or this ellipse. But we go out into space and of course there’s not these actual wires or these lines in which they follow. So, you have the representation of that. There’s different formalisms to say, like maybe how things are represented and so on. So, we can think about things in that way.
And then, there’s another question that comes from that says if that is how things are represented and that’s how we want to represent things, during moment-by-moment communication, are we interpreting things and building some sort of kind of internal representation of those words in that way that we might draw on the whiteboard? And that’s a really active area of research. Are we constructing hierarchical representations of the input? And it turns out that some evidence is in cases we’re just paying attention to like linear order. What comes before…? What are we doing? And that seems to be imposed by like, “I’m just quickly trying to get a quick understanding of the sense. So, like, I’m not going to take the time to build all this hierarchical structure. That’s just too much work.”
And then, there are other really interesting findings coming out that saying, like, “Hey, in order to do the really subtle nuanced things that you need to do for language and hooking things up and understanding how words relate, the only way that you can do that is to understand the abstract relationships between those words.” So, you have to pose some structure behind that. You have to structure the input in some ways to make sense of that.
And so, the question then becomes, under what conditions are we just looking by word-by-word linear order, building words on a string, and what are the conditions under which we have to actually do put in the work to figure out the structure, figure out the details of how things are going together to make sense of the input?
HEDVIG: And some of those ways that we might be grouping things nonlinearly might also be structured but not be tree-like.
DAN: Yes, exactly right. Or they might involve like what we think of as little treelets or templates, like things that… We like to think of things as either you do or you don’t build this structure and that creates this really nice debate that gets papers published?
HEDVIG: Yeah, I was going to say it creates a fun…
DAN: But it’s not really that.
HEDVIG: …playground. Yeah.
DAN: Yeah. I mean, it turns out that like when you take a careful look at the literature, it’s not an either/or. It’s like sometimes you’re doing it. And then, if we’re looking at natural language, there is research showing that as soon as you feel like you’ve got an understanding of the sentence after you’ve put in the hard work, then you just start paying attention to linear order.
So, it’s not an either/or. What we’re interested in is, like, what causes us to build that structure? Why do we have to build that structure, when we do build it? How can we get by when we don’t have to build that structure? And so, I think that’s the really interesting question, is not if you do or don’t, but why do you have to do it when you do? Why don’t you do it when you don’t have to do it?
HEDVIG: I agree with you. You’re a hoot. You’re a fun guest. [LAUGHTER] I think part of what you’re saying is what I also find interesting about studying language, which is like, what are the bare minimums? What are the skeletons of what we need? And where do some of these theoretical models predict things that are too complex that we don’t need, or people don’t make use of, or don’t really… like, people don’t embed sentences five levels deep, really.
DAN: Yeah, exactly. Even when we do, we have ways of trying to… One of the illusions I talk about in my book is when you start to embed things, people will skip out on a verb. They’ll drop one of the verbs. And so, we have ways of trying to get around it. Of course, if you omit a verb from the structure, then something is… You can’t build a full fleshed-out hierarchy, like the structure of that. You can’t do the entire robust complete tree. So, something has to happen where you’re kind of skipping some steps. You’re skipping over things. And what are the consequences of that? I think that those are the interesting questions.
DANIEL: I keep coming back to constructions. Constructions, these form-meaning pairings that are maybe multi-word expressions that we could just sort of rip out and use if we want to, or maybe single words or pairs of words that may be connected to each other via, I don’t know, maybe tree-like sort of hierarchical things, or maybe not. But do you have a place for constructions in your view?
DAN: There’s always a place for these things. And so, the question becomes, when are you using those things? And how are they used? The question that interests me is, maybe we have these particular constructions or templates that we like to slot in the input. That is a very reasonable, valid way to think about how we might structure the input. The question then becomes, when are you using those? When do you have to go beyond the template or the construction template that you’re trying to fit the input? Because the input is always so variable. Like, you’re going to always get something that deviates from that. And so, I think those are reasonable approaches to how you might structure the input.
What are you bringing to the table to say, like, “Hey, I need to make sense of all of this input that’s coming into me. Like, let me throw in everything that I have to make sense of this.” I know that there are certain constructions out in the world that I frequently encounter, and so I’m going to use that information. At the same time, I have this very detailed, stuffy grammatical constraints that says, “For whatever reason, here’s how my language works, that I have to put together these things.” And so now, I’m going to have to recruit those things to guide what I’m doing.
And then, that’s impacted by other things like how crappy your working memory system is. You’re trying to navigate all of that at the same time. And so, it creates this very dynamic process where you’re trying to balance all of these things out, at the same time, not waste too many cognitive resources so you can actually move on with the conversation.
So, I think there’s certainly a place for these things. And then like I said, the question is not if there is or isn’t, but when do these things come into play and why are we using it under these conditions, not these other cases, and so on.
HEDVIG: There are also… like you just said with the Moses and Noah thing, in general, there are expectations about who is a likely agent or object in certain sentences. So, like, trees generally don’t speak and stones don’t eat. So, if someone said that the stone was eating something, you would assume they meant something else or stop them or something. But if you took like a pure, like non-semantic grammatical view, then there’s no reason why stones can’t speak.
This happens sometimes with friends I have who are like field linguists who want to… They want to get the full paradigm of the word SPEAK, and they try out all different types of agents and then they get to like, I don’t know, a stone or something. And then people are like, “What are you…? Why do you want me…? What is this? This is madness.” Or something like gendered, like, “No, men don’t do that,” or, “Women don’t do that. So, I can’t say that sentence…
DAN: Absolutely.
HEDVIG: …because… And that’s a fun way of viewing because I think in a lot of Western European countries in particular, and generally in sort of like heavily standardised school education, you get taught that grammar sort of exists, like devoid from the semantics a bit, as if it’s like a separate set of rules where you can say anything, but that’s not how everyone else conceives of what a rule in a language necessarily is.
DAN: Right. Yeah. I mean, the way that I like to think about them is they’re kind of like instructions on what to do. So, you’re getting this input and the grammar is not so much a rule, but it says like, “Hey, here’s a set of instructions for putting things together. What do I need to find? What do I need to link up? How should it link up? What are not possible ways of linking things up?” They’re just kind of like instructions for you to figure things out. And sometimes, you pay attention to instructions, sometimes you don’t.
DANIEL: We recently covered a study that showed that some languages just don’t show attraction effects. If you try to tempt them with a plural or something, they just don’t go for it. Like, for example, Czech is one of these.
DAN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Why do some languages just not show these effects?
DAN: For the small group of people in the world that care about agreement attraction on a daily basis, that’s like a huge puzzle for them. It was a case where for the longest time every language that we’ve sampled, it was like, hey, susceptible to these errors. And they all seem to be showing the same sort of patterns. Language after language, some nuance across languages. Of course, languages make different pieces of information available with their morphology and syntax and so on. And so, we see some nuance across languages. But then, all of the languages that we’ve tested have always shown it. Then, all of a sudden, recently, it’s like, hey, Czech is different. It’s like, what? Like, all of a sudden you’re not… It’s not susceptible. And so that’s really surprising. So, when… I mean, that’s just a super cool finding.
And so, the question then becomes, what’s going on? And like I said, in my book, I put together this survey of like, “Hey, we have like nearly like 100 studies on attraction, and they all show this except for this like one case.” And so, anytime you see this, the question in any kind of science is like, is there something really unique about the language? Which would be super informative if that’s the case. Or is it that we just haven’t figured out the right manipulation to elicit the effect? We haven’t figured out the trick to do it yet. And that’s hard because like Czech is not some completely obscure language that linguists haven’t… like, they just discovered… We know about this there. We have a good understanding of the grammar of the language.
HEDVIG: And importantly, they have found these kinds of attraction effects in other Slavic languages, right?
DAN: Yes. So, family related languages show the effect. So, what’s going on? And so, the question becomes, is there something truly unique about Czech? Which would be super cool. And then, what we would have to do is figure out what it is that’s unique about Czech that all these other languages that we’ve tested… like, what’s the difference? That’s going to be whatever… If that’s the case, whatever that turns out to be, that’s going to be super informative. That’s going to be informative not just for psycholinguists but also syntacticians, morphologists. That’s going to really interesting.
Or what it is, is there’s something about the methods or the stimuli or the constructions that we’re using to try to elicit the effect where we just haven’t tapped into the right thing yet to show that there’s a case.
In some of my previous work, what I’ve tried to do is take cases where for the longest time, we predicted that you shouldn’t be susceptible to an illusion. And then, if you dig hard, like deep enough, you can do something that will all of a sudden flip the switch and make the illusion come on. Maybe that’s what’s going… Maybe we can do that. We just have to dig a little bit deeper.
Maybe like I said, it’s just something, there’s something fundamentally unique about Czech. And maybe if we test other languages, there might be other languages that don’t show the effect, but maybe there’s something unique about Czech. And it’s either what is unique about Czech and/or why is it so hard to elicit the effect. If there is… turns out to be effect, why is it so hard to do that? Right now, those are the questions on the table.
HEDVIG: Well, it’s minimally true that the methods by which these evil psycholinguists have tried to trick everyone else isn’t tricking Czech people yet. That is minimally true.
DAN: Yeah, exactly.
HEDVIG: So, there’s either, like you were saying, maybe we just need to work harder at more complicated tricks, or there’s something very special about Czech. Time will tell. I mean, when there is one outlier out of so many languages, you’re always tempted to go, “Well, maybe something went wrong in that experiment,” or like, maybe something, time will tell, but it’s a fun avenue of research.
DANIEL: This has been a really high-level grammatical discussion, but I think it’s time to bring it home.
DAN: Sure.
DANIEL: I’m going to ask you to distill the book a little bit and say, from all your work in linguistic illusions, what have you learned about the way that we perceive and process language?
DAN: What I’ve learned is that it’s a very dynamic process. It’s an extremely sophisticated system. So, when we are interpreting language just as we’re talking here right now, it’s not a hard thing. I feel it’s something that’s intuitively easy to talk and communicate. We make these errors. So, what it suggests is we have these very sophisticated mechanisms that allowed us to do what we’re doing right here, right now. Very smart things, very rich, interacting systems, but those systems are not infallible. And so, they can go wrong.
And what I’ve learned from my work on all of this is it’s a very dynamic process. And I think what’s most interesting is trying to figure out kind of the nuts and bolts of all of that. So, trying to figure out how all of these things work together. And when things do go wrong, can we pinpoint what’s going wrong? So, you’re kind of playing the version of a mechanic of the human mind for the language system.
Somebody comes in and says, “Hey, my system’s making this error. You have to diagnose what’s going on.” And when you start to do that, you learn something really cool about the language. You learn something really cool about how the language is working and hooking up with all these other different cognitive systems like working memory and cognitive control and attention, all the things that say you care about in cognitive psychology and neuroscience.
And putting all of that together, you end up getting this really rich picture of a very sophisticated system that’s interacting, and it’s very dynamic and trying to figure out how all of those pieces are going together and how I’m able to put all of that together when there are days where I can’t even remember where I put my keys. Like, I can do this easily after a cup of coffee, but I can’t figure out where my keys are. So, something very rich and sophisticated is going on. What’s going on there? I think that’s just an absolutely fascinating question.
DANIEL: I love how it has to work, but it doesn’t have to work perfectly, it just has to work well enough.
DAN: Yeah, right? And so, what are the conditions that… Where am I pushing things just to get by? Where do I have to put in the real work to make sense of things? And so on. Those are all super interesting questions that I think are kind of the forefront of where things are going.
It’s not so much like if you do or don’t put in the work, what’s the dynamic process that determines when I’m doing the work and when I’m not doing the work? And that sort of thing. I think what I’ve learned is there’s a lot more that we don’t know about that than there is that we know about it. It’s like that kind of classic problem in science, the more you learn, the more you realize you don’t know. That just opens up all these interesting questions about what we don’t know yet.
HEDVIG: This reminds me a lot of the chat we recently had with Steve Levinson, which I believe is also now as a video on our YouTube channel, where…
DAN: Oh, okay, great.
HEDVIG: …we were talking about, like, how… Like, sometimes I get this feeling of like you know how people describe when they’re very high or something, you look at your hand and you’re like, “What the fuck is this? How does this work?” And as soon as you start thinking about language and communication, it’s like, I have ideas in my mind, and then I manipulate some fleshy bits in my throat and then similar ideas occur in your head, that’s bonkers. Like, that’s wild. [DANIEL LAUGHS] And that it works so well most of the time.
DAN: Yeah. I mean, you make these little perturbations of air molecules that hit my ear, and then all of a sudden, like, bam. Like, almost instantly, within hundreds of milliseconds, I’m able to comprehend, put together thoughts and have this very rich experience of communication. But at the same time, I make these really stupid errors, these simple things where I mess up subject-verb, agreement. Like, “Huh, if this system is sophisticated, why am I messing up something so simple?” I think that’s just a very fascinating [MUSIC][???] set of conflicting results. At one time, I’m doing something rich and sophisticated. At the same time, I’m doing something incredibly stupid. And why is that?
And as it turns out, it’s really informative about how these different systems interact. You have your knowledge of language, you have your working memory, you have your cognitive control. And figuring out where the problem is and that just tells us something about what we’re building, what we’re doing, paying attention to what we’re not, I think that’s just… For me, that’s just fundamentally fascinating.
And then, you can extend this to other domains, like when things do go wrong for cases of, say, health purposes, somebody has some language deficit or some cognitive deficit that affects language, you can start to figure out and diagnose the problem in a little bit more straightforward way. You can figure out, “Oh, this is a memory problem. This is a control problem.” You can start to apply these things to large language models and so on. So, I think it’s just a very rich area of work.
DANIEL: The book is Linguistic Illusions: A Case Study on Agreement Attraction, and we’re talking to the author, Dr Dan Parker. Dan, thanks so much for hanging out with us today. It’s been a lot of fun.
DAN: Thanks. It’s been a pleasure.
[MUSIC]
[INTERVIEW ENDS]
BEN: And now it is time… Wow. Do you know what I’ve realised, Daniel? I’ve forgotten that for a good, solid chunk of our podcast relationship, I performatively hated Word of the Week. Like, for a solid eight or nine years of doing the show, I’d completely forgotten about that.
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: We knew.
BEN: No, I know, it wasn’t hidden from you guys, but what I mean is it’s been so long that I was like, “Oh, yeah, I used to pretend to hate Word of the Week. How strange.”
DANIEL: I know. You kind of look forward to it, right? It’s like the one thing. It’s like your special thing.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: All right, well, here we go. First one, I noticed this one in the pages of the West Australian and it was the first time I ran across it, so I’m mentioning it, TRUMPFLATION.
BEN: Oh, that’s fun.
DANIEL: Yeah. We’re all seeing a bit of Trumpflation, aren’t we?
BEN: We’ve got a few -FLATION productive endings, don’t we?
DANIEL: Yes, indeed, SHRINKFLATION.
BEN: STAGFLATION.
DANIEL: DEFLATION, naturally, all the ones. Yeah. As things get worse and worse, including this. [SIGHS] So, I’ll move on.
BEN: [LAUGHS] That was quick.
HEDVIG: When can I do mine?
DANIEL: You’ve got one. Hedvig, why don’t you hit us with it?
HEDVIG: I’ve got one that Benjamin might know about. The reason I’m calling him Benjamin is because he put that name on the platform.
BEN: It is also my name, so fair enough.
HEDVIG: So, my Word of the Week is DOUBLE DUTCH.
BEN: Double Dutch. Oh, okay.
DANIEL: Double Dutch. The jump rope technique.
HEDVIG: [SINGING] There’s a Double Dutch bus coming…
BEN: Yeah. Yeah. Daniel, yes. Hedvig, also, yes. I know about both strands of this meaning.
DANIEL: Strands.
HEDVIG: Right. So, there’s a popular dance craze swiping TikTok. Molly Long has done a choreography to a very funky song that came out in 1981. And the song is called Double Dutch Bus. And now, the question…
DANIEL: I remember that.
HEDVIG: …is, Daniel, you remember this song?
DANIEL: It’s back in my consciousness because I was a music dork in the early, early 80s.
HEDVIG: Right. What do you think double Dutch means?
DANIEL: Oh, well, I do know this one. I mean, double Dutch in the jump rope sense means you’ve got two jump ropes. It’s a way… I don’t know exactly how to do it, but I’ve seen videos of young girls playing together, doing this jump rope technique, and it’s called double Dutch with two ropes.
HEDVIG: So, that is most likely the meaning that’s evoked in this song. It’s about playing a game on the street and jumping around. There are three other meanings of double Dutch.
DANIEL: Cool. What are they?
BEN: All right, let’s take it… Let’s see if we can take a stab at this. I’m actually thinking that the jump rope has appropriated one of these names, probably. And when I say appropriated, I just mean, like, it came to be called that from something else. There’s GOING DUTCH, so I’m wondering if there’s a version of going Dutch that became double Dutch to do with, like, sharing resources or something like that.
HEDVIG: Not to my knowledge. So, I’m getting these four meanings from a Wiktionary because a lot of places didn’t list all of these. And two of them are actually very similar to each other. So, you can just guess. One of them is not appropriate for children.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: I’m guessing that one or two of these are extremely derogatory because we’ve got a lot of Dutch expressions. Like, a Dutch uncle is an abusive uncle. Dutch courage is fake courage from drinking liquor. Dutch ovens, a big pot that you stick in the fire because they’ve been too stupid to have a real oven. And going Dutch, which is a bit of a slur. You’re saying that they don’t like to pay for stuff, and so they’ll make you pay and you go Dutch. So, is double Dutch like language that’s not understood because it’s just gibberish?
HEDVIG: Double Dutch is incomprehensible language. Yes, that is one of the meanings. So, it’s similar to…
DANIEL: Got one.
HEDVIG: …that’s all Greek to me, that’s gibberish. There’s also apparently a language game similar to Pig Latin that is called Double Dutch. So, two of the meanings are like incomprehensible language. The other meaning, I don’t think you’re going to get, so I’m just going to say it. Apparently, Double Dutch can be used as slang when you have sex, and the girl is on the pill and the man has a condom.
DANIEL: Double Dutch.
BEN: Oh, okay. Gotcha. Yeah, double protection.
HEDVIG: Belts and braces, really not getting pregnant.
DANIEL: Well, that just sounds like responsible, safe sex to me!
BEN: Yeah, it sure does.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Yeah. Doubling up. So apparently, that is also another meaning of double Dutch. But the meaning that’s evoked in the song that’s currently having a bit of a revival seems to be the jump rope game one.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Can I suggest as well… anyone who might only be encountering this in passing, can I please implore you to watch more than the first sequence of the dance? Because the dance is actually quite long and everyone, nearly all of the clips that I’ve seen cut off after about like maybe 30 seconds and… yeah, exactly, Hedvig is now doing a second phase of the dance, which is so good. It is a really, really good dance. It’s one of those things of like just sit and watch some people be excellent at a thing for like three minutes. It is a well-spent three minutes.
DANIEL: Well, we’ll be slapping up a link in the show notes for this episode. Thank you, Hedvig. Next one. This one was suggested by Bill on Bluesky. Thanks, Bill. So, something happened with Grammarly recently. I don’t know if you noticed this one.
HEDVIG: Yes, I contacted Grammarly and asked them about it.
BEN: You what?
DANIEL: Did you?
BEN: Sorry, hang on.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Backtrack, say more.
HEDVIG: Well, you can just file a support ticket and ask stuff. It’s not hard.
BEN: I know people can, but…
HEDVIG: I always do. [LAUGHS]
BEN: …no one does.
HEDVIG: I’m the annoying person who does. So, what Daniel is alluding to, I believe is the thing that happened where Grammarly, a popular online service that can help you sort of correct grammar, has recently expanded a lot of the services to include more text generation and more sort of comprehensive edits and stuff.
BEN: AI stuff.
HEDVIG: AI supported, large language models supported. And recently, they’ve come up with this function that is supposed to be like, “Oh, if you’re writing a text and you want to know what Mark Twain would have thought about your text, here’s us sort of impersonating him,” using his text and suggesting edits that would make it more Mark Twainy.
BEN: I hate this very much.
DANIEL: Same, same. It’s not just Mark Twain either. There’s an article by Julia Angwin in the New York Times, Why I’m suing Grammarly. Some of the people were Stephen King.
BEN: Oh, dear.
DANIEL: Bell hooks. The late bell hooks.
BEN: Oh, that’s a big oof.
DANIEL: The journalist and podcaster, Kara Swisher. These are people who are alive.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: I don’t like that. I can understand why they would really not like that.
DANIEL: Mm. So, if you’ve had someone create an AI of you, what do you call that person? It’s your… SLOPPELGANGER.
BEN: SLOPPELGANGER is phenomenal.
DANIEL: Isn’t that great?
HEDVIG: Very, very good.
BEN: I like that. I mean, I am on record as being a tremendous fan of SLOP in all of its many, many forms. It’s such a wonderfully disgusting, derisive term. Like, the mouthfeel on SLOP is just exquisite.
DANIEL: Buncha slop.
HEDVIG: So, what had happened was I saw a lot of these news reports about various names being mentioned and people using the service and finding them occurring and not being very happy about it. So, I couldn’t find a list of these so-called experts that you could ask for writing advice. So, I wrote to Grammarly as a… I think I have an account there and I thought I’ll just ask the support if I can see a list because it’s a sort of paid service and I thought I want to know what it is. I don’t have that tier yet. And they responded to me and said that… They responded to me, I think on the 11th of March and said that, “Tomorrow, 12th of March, we are canceling this feature.”
DANIEL: Okay. Yeah.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Everyone hates this.
HEDVIG: And I said, “Cool, cool. Can I still get a list of that?” And they were like, “No.” [LAUGHTER]
BEN: Yeah, yeah. They sniffed you out real good.
DANIEL: The class action lawsuit had its intended effect. Technology needs to be consentful. That’s not consentful. That’s infuriating.
BEN: It really doesn’t though, Daniel. I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention. It doesn’t need to be. I think what you meant to say was it would be really nice if.
DANIEL: Oh, that would be nice. How about: I’d be willing to fight for consentful technology. We need to fight for the world we want, but there are so many corporations to fight with and they all have so much money. So, one fight we need to have is to have the rules and regulations in place and one of those is data, technology needs to be consentful. You don’t get to impersonate actual people. That should be a hard line. Even dead grandparents or dead celebrities. That’s just… That’s gross.
HEDVIG: That is gross. And one of the reasons I’m happy to be living in the European Union, where the European Union as a whole takes more of these stands compared to, I think both Australia and certainly compared to US, where move fast and break things seems to be the preferred mode.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Do it before anybody knows what you’re doing, and you don’t need to get permission. So, a sloppelganger is a digital agent impersonating you. Thanks, Bill. Diego also suggested SLOPTIMISATION.
BEN: Oh, okay. We’ve got two of my fav. Coming in strong. What is SLOPTIMISATION?
DANIEL: Here’s the Bluesky post. This is from gamefiend.bluesky.social. “My son came up with the best term for the DLSS 5.” Do you know about this? It’s a modeling engine.
BEN: Okay. Now, we’re talking Ben Ainslie’s language.
DANIEL: Okay, so if I understand correctly, it’s a photorealistic rendering engine.
BEN: Okay, I will do this as quickly as I can for the sake of people listening and my fellow gaming nerds, please don’t come at me for, like, being overly simplistic, but it’s very complicated, and we need to boil it down quite a lot.
In recent time, various graphic chip manufacturers have invented essentially a new way of rendering graphics that is essentially a form of AI upscaling. But this was happening before we had this big AI revolution and generative text and all that kind of stuff. It’s been going on for maybe say like 10 years.
Nvidia’s version one of these is called DLSS. And the most recent one, there’s been like four generations up until this point, and they’re just previewing the fifth generation and it’s done some rendering passes on existing games and people, specifically game designers, are unhappy with the results of this new version of DLSS.
I’m not actually hugely across why they’re hating on it so much because to me it looks like a relatively boring next step towards photorealistic graphics which, from my perspective as a gamer, has been a conversation that’s been going on for like 30 years. And for at least 25 of those years, it’s been a very boring and uninteresting conversation about like how many more polygons we can squeeze into a thing and how many more light beams we can reflect off a thing to the detriment of like good game design a lot of the time, in my opinion, anyway. But a lot of game designers are, I think, quite irate about the fact that this hyperrealistic rendering is sort of gazumping their design choices around characters and what they look like and that sort of thing.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Is this similar to that AI feature that was built into some people’s TVs that was doing some sort of weird smoothing filling in, do you remember?
BEN: Yeah, yeah. So, it is a bit like that as in, it’s not a frame rate thing, it’s a rendering thing. So, it’s about how like light is falling on characters, faces and that sort of thing rather than the smoothness of the motion. But I think fundamentally you are kind of conceptually right in the sense that…
I mean, one of the things that I don’t quite understand about it is a lot of people are talking about like uncanny valley stuff. But if I’m being honest, I feel like games have been in the uncanny valley for a solid decade already. And a lot of the games I look at and play, I’m like, “Eww, your digital puppet creeps me out.”
HEDVIG: Aren’t we at the level that like some video game footage of games where there is war is taken out of context and then being spread? It’s like, This is a little clip from what’s going on in Iran right now,…
BEN: Oh absolutely.
HEDVIG: …which is crazy. But it has happened, I think a few times and people are not able to spot it, though some gamers are like, that’s whatever game it is.
BEN: Yes, I think that is a thing that exists, but I would also say that it is as prevalent as, like, AI deepfakes of politicians saying things that they’ve never said or something like that. It happens, but it’s not actually as like…
DANIEL: Okay, well, let me get back to the skeet then. “My son came up with the best term for the DLSS 5 and other weird gen AI non-improvement. At least the first time I’ve heard it, SLOPTIMISATION. It’s perfect.”
BEN: No, no, I like it. Yep, SLOP. Always good.
DANIEL: I love seeing SLOP as a combining form. I think that’s what it’s breaking into.
BEN: It’s fantastic. Yeah.
DANIEL: Finally, this one was suggested by James on our Discord. It’s a combination of a sneaker and a ballet flat. It’s the SNEAKERINA. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Do a little search for sneakerinas.
BEN: I’m doing this right now.
DANIEL: I think they look quite comfy, secretly. It’s an amalgamation of a ballet flat and a sneaker. I think I would wear these.
BEN: I’m going to be completely honest.
HEDVIG: I see.
BEN: I don’t understand how this is that different from a ballet flat.
HEDVIG: No, it’s quite different from a ballet flat. I’m looking at the pictures here, but it is also a type of sneaker shoe that I’ve thought I’d seen for a while.
BEN: Yeah, it’s kind of like it’s giving a bit loafer as well.
DANIEL: Mm.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Mm, there’s a bit. I think I would wear these. As a kid in the 1980s, I actually wore China flats. A lot of us did because I was an arts and theater kid and I was cultivating an effete anti-jock aesthetic.
BEN: I feel you, Daniel. I get you. I get who young Daniel was.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Say, does anyone have a favorite hybrid word for fashion? For me, nothing comes close to JORTS.
BEN: JORTS as the jean shorts.
HEDVIG: SKORTS are also pretty good. Skirts…
BEN: Yeah, skorts. Skirt shorts.
HEDVIG: Skirt shorts. Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s pretty good.
DANIEL: Brilliant.
BEN: What else is there? I’ve always thought the way I think it’s Americans say JEAN JACKET is really cute and quite twee.
DANIEL: Oh, right. Instead of a denim jacket.
BEN: Yeah, exactly.
DANIEL: It’s a jean jacket.
HEDVIG: I’m trying to think of…
BEN: That’s all I got.
DANIEL: I can’t think of anything else. Portmanteau clothing. SNEAKERINA is interesting.
BEN: I’m not feeling it. I don’t like it. As in the things themselves, fine. I’m not liking sneakerina as a name because we don’t call them ballerinas, like, no one says, “Check out my ballerina shoe.”
DANIEL: No, but remember…
HEDVIG: No, it’s ballet flat.
DANIEL: …if you’re going to do a portmanteau, each bit of it has to be recognisable and I think -INA is the ending that works. So, thanks, James, for that.
BEN: Sneaklays. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Sneak flats.
BEN: Sneaklay flats. Doesn’t work.
DANIEL: So, TRUMPFLATION, DOUBLE DUTCH, SLOPPELGANGER, SLOPTIMISATION and SNEAKERINA — this is fun to say — our Words of the Week. Let’s talk about a comment. Actually, a bunch of comments because we had a TikTok video go nuts last week.
BEN: Oh, fun.
DANIEL: Yep. It was one with Kory Stamper about colours. It got 150,000 views and hundreds of comments.
BEN: Whoa.
DANIEL: I know, right?
BEN: It’s like the XKCD thing, man. When you get people talking about colour, they lose their fucking mind.
DANIEL: They do. They certainly did. We’ll never be this famous again. That’s it. That’s it. I like it.
HEDVIG: What’s really nice about it in the conversation with Kory is that you’ve colour coded so you can actually… When we speak like this and we say chartreuse, we have to describe what the colour is, but what’s so beautiful about video is that you can just put in the colour, which Daniel very expertly…
BEN: Chartreuse on the screen.
DANIEL: I just dropped it in.
HEDVIG: Yes, you can just show what the colour is, which really helped.
DANIEL: Kind of weird to have hundreds of people commenting on our stuff. People that just don’t know the show. They just saw the video. They’re just coming in cold.
BEN: Also, TikTok comment sections are fucking, like, loose as all hell.
DANIEL: They really were. So, there was some discussion. Me and Kory were talking about why people don’t get what colour vermilion is or chartreuse. So, people had comments. One set of comments focused on, people think vermilion is green because chameleon. That was…
BEN: Oh, interesting.
HEDVIG: Mmm.
DANIEL: …number one. Some focused on the movie Coraline. Elven Princess says, “Chartreuse is a button colour option for Coraline.” Rosesareprettiest says, “It’s Coraline. That’s why they say vermilion and chartreuse in that movie. So, everyone always mixes up the colours.” There’s a TikTok video of that bit and I’ll link to that. Also, many people focused on Pokémon. Jacob2 says, “Vermillion City in Pokémon is where the Water Gym is.”
BEN: Oh, yes.
DANIEL: “And I always thought it was like a seafoam colour.”
BEN: That’s why I’ve been… Vermilion, for me, has been like firing off a little fucking disused neuron in the back of my brain this whole time, and that’s what it is. Vermillion City. Yeah. In the Kanto region, Johto region, one of the two.
DANIEL: Momo says, “I used to think Vermillion was yellow because of Pokémon. I misassociated the colouring of the city with yellow because that is where the Electric Gym is. And upon further recollection, the city is actually very red. Epic.”
HEDVIG: I like one of the comments, JB, who said, “I thought chartreuse was a red shade because of -reuse, which sounds like rouge, which is red in French.” And I agree with that.
DANIEL: I did make a joke about how chartreuse had to be from the Chartreuse region. Otherwise, it’s just sparkling green. I made a joke about that, but little did I know how right I was. Q333 says, “Cool fact. The colour chartreuse was named after the spirit chartreuse of the same colour. There’s two varieties, but the original yellow is where the colour comes from. And yes, it is the Chartreuse region or the monastery of the Carthusian order.” There you have it, folks.
BEN: There you go.
DANIEL: So, thanks to all you commenters. Thanks to Kory for our one shot at fame.
BEN: Wow, what a productive TikTok comment section.
DANIEL: I know. It was really great. For the rest of my life, I’ll be chasing that dragon. We’ll never be famous again. It’s all downhill from here.
HEDVIG: As opposed to Daniel, you and I are more active TikTok users. We can come up with another thing that will do this. What will that be?
BEN: No, we can’t. No, we can’t. No, no, we can’t. There is no rhyme or reason.
HEDVIG: We just got to throw lots of shit at the wall and then something.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah. That same video was dogshit on Instagram.
BEN: Yeah, that’s what I mean.
HEDVIG: We can try and get Daniel to do the Lush Life dance.
DANIEL: Not doing it.
HEDVIG: Or the double Dutch dance.
DANIEL: Okay, I’ll do it. Hey, thanks to our guest, Dan Parker. Thanks to everybody who gave us ideas, words and news. Thanks to SpeechDocs for transcribing all the words. Thanks to you great patrons. And, Ben and Hedvig, thanks for hanging out with me every once in a while. I really enjoy it.
[MUSIC]
BEN: I want to put a call out before we go any further because now that I’m a desiccated grape upon the vine, 15 years a-swayin’, we would love people who are currently listening to my voice in your ear holes for you to spread the word about Because Language. You can follow us. We are @becauselanguage.com on Bluesky and @becauselangpod. And if you are thinking to yourself: ”Well, you said spread the word, but now you’re getting us to join socials,” in the weird media hellscape that we exist in now, that kind of is spreading the word, like engagement is spread and stuff.
But more importantly, far more importantly, you can send us ideas, you can engage with us. Daniel is a red-hot good guy at getting back to people. Like, if you are the Hedvigs of the world and you want to lodge a support ticket with Because Language, Daniel fucking talks to you. He will. He will get back to you.
DANIEL: I do. I do.
HEDVIG: And if you are a listener of this show and you listen to us all the time, we have been doing more TikTok videos. So, if you ever wonder, like, “I can’t tell Ben and Daniel apart,” I don’t know why that would be a thing, but, like, let’s pretend it is. You could see them and you could also see that they kind of look a bit alike as well. [LAUGHS] So, it wouldn’t really help that much. You do look a bit alike. You’ve got blondish hair. You’ve got similar face structures somewhat.
BEN: So, what Hedvig is saying is we are two balding, middle-aged white men.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: You’re not balding, are you?
BEN: Yes, definitely. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Anyway, if you want to see videos, there are some on the YouTube channel, but there is also the TikTok channel where you can see. You can also see videos sometimes of our guests because we record them as well. So, Kory Stamper we’ve recorded, and other people. So, that’s really nice. If you want to put faces to voices, which is not something you have to do, but if you do want.
BEN: And if you want to put your voice into this show, you can do that as well by going to SpeakPipe. You can get to the SpeakPipe from our website or you can email hello@becauselanguage.com like someone did today, in the quaintest and most adorable old-school format of getting in touch with us. And of course, the most important one of all, you can just tell people about our show and be like, “You should give them a listen. They’re really fucking good, bro.” Or a different voice of your choosing, whatever you like.
DANIEL: No, that was good. You can also become a patron. You can get stuff depending on your level. There’s live shows, bonus episodes, mailouts, shoutouts, Discord access. We get your support, which helps us to keep the show running. It keeps us in supplies and software, which is considerable. Keeps the regular episodes free for everybody. So, hey, you’re doing a public service there and you get shoutouts like this one. I’m going to give a shoutout to our patrons at the Supporter level. So, you know how I love to order the names in weird and wonderful ways. And this time.
BEN: Yes. What is this week’s insanity crawl?
DANIEL: We’re doing an alphabet walk.
BEN: An alphabet walk? What’s that?
DANIEL: Yep. So, let’s just say that I look at your name and I just want to see how many letters, how many steps it takes to get from one letter to the next one. So, Ben, I start with B, and then I walk over to E. That’s three spaces, C, D, E. And then, I walk over to N, and that’s a certain number of spaces. And then, you get a score. Divide by the number of letters, of course, so that it’s roughly normalised.
BEN: Oh, okay.
HEDVIG: And it doesn’t matter if it’s in the order. So, B-B would be not penalised that you go back and forth. It’s just steps.
DANIEL: Oh, well, if there’s double letters, then that’s a zero. But also, I decided to add a little twist. I decided that you could only go forward, not backward.
HEDVIG: Oh, okay. So, B to A would be a problem.
DANIEL: So, B to A is 26 plus one.
HEDVIG: Right.
DANIEL: So, the first one on our list is. Ben, you had the shortest steps to take.
BEN: Does that mean I win or does that mean I lose? Which way are we…?
HEDVIG: You’re the simplest.
DANIEL: Yes. You’re the simplest.
BEN: Thank you, Hedvig. I am the simplest.
DANIEL: You know who’s also simple? Rach had a score of 4.
BEN: Oh, okay, tied. Well, then, I’m not the… Yeah, tied. Rach and I are…
DANIEL: Tied for first.
BEN: Yeah, exactly.
DANIEL: Yep. There’s Stan, there’s Molly Dee and LordMortis.
BEN: I can’t believe that many letters is that low.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Divide by the number of letters to get the average…
BEN: Oh, true, okay. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Oh.
DANIEL: …so, it’s normalised. We’re around the fives. Around the sixes, we get O Tim.
BEN: Tim.
DANIEL: We get Steele and Sam. Up to the 7s, Joanna, Diego, Xekri, Rachel, and Larry. Now, we’re up to eight steps. Amy, Lyssa, Luis, Ignacio, Manu. And now up to nine. Colleen, Lance. Hi Lance, thanks for joining. Fiona, gramaryen, Sydney, Lucy, Rene, and Keith. Now, we’re up to 10. Aldo, John Mac, Chris L, Andy B, John K, Rosemary, Amir, Faux Frenchie, Canny Archer, and Linguistic Chaos.
Now up to 11. Kevin, Martha, Amanita, Iztin, Whitney, Helen, JOHNTROY, with the zeros converted to O’s. Laura D, James C. Now, for number 12. 12 steps for Ariaflame, Nikoli, PharaohKatt, Kristofer, Meredith. Now, it’s getting a bit long. Now, Ayesha is 13, so is Nasrin, Rodger, Mignon, Elias, Kathy, Andy from Logophilius. Oof, it’s getting a bit of a walk now. Tony, you’re on 14 and a quarter. I’m here, 14 and a third steps on average. Nigel is 15. Wolfdog is 16, so is Sonic Snejhog. And the winner for the longest path, it’s Hedvig.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Daniel, did you do this deliberately? Did you seek to find something that would put Hedvig and I at the beginning and the end of the list?
DANIEL: I don’t have that much time!
BEN: Okay. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Let’s look at this as well, because… So, Nigel, 15.20. And then, it’s Wolfdog and Sonic Snejhog, which are not… I’m going to call them not common first names.
DANIEL: No. That’s not…
HEDVIG: And then, Hedvig, relatively not crazy name.
DANIEL: Yeah. But look what had to happen. We had to start at H and go all the way around the alphabet to E, then all the way around the alphabet again to D.
BEN: Oh, yeah, true.
DANIEL: Then, fairly straightforward to V, all the way back to I, and then all the way back to G.
BEN: So, you lose because you’ve kept having letters that are actually one letter after the letter.
DANIEL: One or two before. Yep, that’s what’s happening. This would have been shorter if you could go backwards, but nope, I’m not allowing it. Thanks to all of our patrons.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] Sorry, I just… Yeah. Okay. Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who also performs with Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
IN UNISON: Pew, pew, pew.
DANIEL: Thanks very much.
HEDVIG: Thank you.
[BOOP]
DANIEL: I now confer upon you honorary linguist status, the highest honor that I can bestow.
BEN: No, no, no. Do you know what? I don’t want it. Not because I’m like, “Eww, I don’t want to be a linguist.” But more just like I don’t want to besmirch linguistics with my addition.
DANIEL: Befoul.
BEN: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I don’t want to foul up the linguistic waters with my presence.
HEDVIG: I think Daniel and I can say that you’re not the worst thing to swim in the linguistics pool. [BEN LAUGHS] You’re alright.
DANIEL: We’ve done shows about this, by the way.
BEN: Just to be clear, not the compliment you think it is. Ben, there’s scum at the bottom of the pool that is slightly worse than you.
DANIEL: Mm, it’s true though. And we know it’s true.
BEN: Thank you for aging me and withering me in one unified statement, Daniel.
[BOOP]
BEN: Do you know, it’s so funny that we bring this up, because I was sitting in traffic today and I was gazing at some signs absentmindedly and I saw what I think might be the single, like, the full spectrum of amazing Australian graphic design. Like, the very, very best anywhere in branding, and the very worst end they were exactly alongside each other.
DANIEL: The SAXA salt container?
BEN: No, no. Okay, so, no, no. I’m talking about logos specifically. What do you think the single greatest logo in Australian branding is? And what do you think the single worst is? And I’m talking, like, really, really big names. These are two giant signs I saw on the side of the road.
HEDVIG: Okay, okay, hold on. I quite like JB Hi-Fi.
BEN: Mhm.
DANIEL: Oh, it’s good. Yes, it’s a good bit. It’s not flashy, but it’s good.
HEDVIG: It’s clear.
BEN: Hedvig might not know the best one because it’s a rebrand that happened maybe in the last three or four years or so, maybe five.
HEDVIG: Is it food?
BEN: It is food. One of them is food. The good one is food, and the bad one is banking.
HEDVIG: Is it cheese?
DANIEL: Didn’t you like the Commbank branding?
BEN: No, Commbank is adequate. Okay, okay. I’ll put you out of your misery.
DANIEL: You better tell me, please.
BEN: The very worst is the weird little… Is it a ghost logo thing that ANZ has, the three kind of like semicircles that are stacked together and it doesn’t mean or look like… It is just the most abstract piece of nonsense.
DANIEL: I think it’s a person reaching out for a hug.
HEDVIG: It’s a person doing this, right?
BEN: Yeah, but like, is it? [DANIEL LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: So, what’s that got to do with Australian New Zealand banking?
DANIEL: They tried for the negative space and I just don’t think it worked.
BEN: Okay, now for the very, very best and, Hedvig, I implore you to look at this. Red Rooster’s new logo.
HEDVIG: I’m googling everything you say. Red Rooster’s logo.
DANIEL: Oh, that is good. It’s R’s, but it forms a chicken head.
HEDVIG: That’s the two R’s?
BEN: Yes, it the two R’s but it makes a chicken face. And that shit is fucking brilliant.
DANIEL: It’s good.
BEN: That is as good as the hidden arrow in FedEx. That’s like Saul-Bass good in my opinion.
HEDVIG: I would argue that it makes an owl.
BEN: Mm-hmm. That’s true.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]