You probably communicate with your friends using media references all the time. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But why do we include media references, when we could just talk? Turns out it has a lot to do with identity, building social relationships, and communication — all the stuff that language normally does.
We’re having a media-heavy discussion with Dr Sylvia Sierra about her book Millennials Talking Media: Creating Intertextual Identities in Everyday Conversation
Listen to this episode
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Sharon Henderson Taylor: Terms for Low Intelligence
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3087798
Interview #5 – Ruth Wodak: The Politics of Fear. What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean
https://populismobserver.com/2015/10/08/interview-5-ruth-wodak-the-politics-of-fear-what-right-wing-populist-discourses-mean/
Three-body problem | Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem
Prolific writer Joyce Carol Oates apologises after ‘they’ pronoun tweet sparks controversy
https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2021/10/07/joyce-carol-oates-they-pronouns/
How first-language instruction transfers to majority-language skills
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01200-x#Abs1
Silvia Sierra: Millennials Talking Media: Creating Intertextual Identities in Everyday Conversation
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/millennials-talking-media-9780190931117?cc=gb&lang=en
[$$] Tolins & Samermit (2016). GIFs as Embodied Enactments in Text-Mediated Conversation
https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2016.1164391
The Parka People | The Mighty Boosh Wiki
https://mightyboosh.fandom.com/wiki/The_Parka_People
The Song of My People! | Know Your Meme
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-song-of-my-people
[$$] Barbra A. Meek, 2006. And the Injun Goes “How!”: Representations of American Indian English in White Public Space. Language in Society, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Feb., 2006), pp. 93-128.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/4169479
“Injun” English | The Vocal Fries
https://vocalfriespod.tumblr.com/post/183120001253/injun-english
[PDF] Rosina Lippi-Green, 1997. Teaching children how to discriminate: What we can learn from the Big Bad Wolf. In English with an accent: Language, ideology, and discrimination in the United States.
https://freerangeresearch.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/ic-lippi-green-1997-teaching-children-how-to-discriminate.pdf
The Song of My People! | Know Your Meme
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-song-of-my-people
Kristy Beers Fägersten: Intertextual quotation: References to media in family interaction
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282730357_Intertextual_quotation_References_to_media_in_family_interaction
Nordic Quack: Sweden’s bizarre tradition of watching Donald Duck cartoons on Christmas Eve. | Slate
https://slate.com/culture/2009/12/sweden-s-bizarre-tradition-of-watching-donald-duck-kalle-anka-cartoons-on-christmas-eve.html
“How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?” | Know Your Meme
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-do-you-do-fellow-kids
John Oliver Trashes Brands for Hijacking Twitter Conversations
https://contently.com/2014/09/16/jon-oliver-trashes-brands-for-hijacking-twitter-conversations/
About That Fleshlight 9/11 Tweet
https://www.vice.com/en/article/mv5xxb/about-that-fleshlight-911-tweet-911
Sir, This Is an Arby’s | Know Your Meme
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sir-this-is-an-arbys
Sir? Sir? Sir, Are You There?
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sir-sir-sir-are-you-there
Here comes the Great Resignation. Why millions of employees could quit their jobs post-pandemic
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-24/the-great-resignation-post-pandemic-work-life-balance/100478866
The Great Resignation Is Accelerating
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/great-resignation-accelerating/620382/
Where Did 7 Million Workers Go?
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/how-do-you-make-7-million-workers-disappear/620475/
What is ‘Soaking’ – the Mormon sex practise that’s gone viral on TikTok?
https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/the-hook-up/soaking-mormon-sex-tiktok-viral-jump-humping/13572802
What does Soaking mean on TikTok? The viral NSFW phrase explained
https://www.popbuzz.com/internet/viral/soaking-meaning-tiktok-slang-mormon/
The Red Flag Meme Is a Red Flag for Accessibility | TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/20/the-red-flag-meme-is-a-red-flag-for-accessibility/
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
[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. He’s not a linguist… not that there’s anything wrong with that! It’s Ben Ainslie.
HEDVIG: [CHUCKLES]
BEN: Ah. Yeah, I’ll take it. I’ve… You’ve certainly given me worse.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Okay, move on. She’s a terrible linguist… said no one ever! It’s Hedvig Skirgård.
HEDVIG: [CHUCKLES]
BEN: That took quite a turn, didn’t it?
HEDVIG: Thank you.
DANIEL: You weren’t expecting that!
HEDVIG: Maybe someone has said it, I don’t know. Hello, I’m a linguist. My name is Hedvig.
DANIEL: Not terrible, specifically.
BEN: Well, no, hold on… a moment of legalese here. Just because no one’s said it, doesn’t mean it’s not true. First of all, like, that’s just…
HEDVIG: That is a good point.
BEN: That’s a terrible conjunction.
HEDVIG: Thank you, Ben.
BEN: I don’t think Hedvig is a terrible linguist, but as we have just established, I’m not a linguist, so my opinion means very little on the matter.
DANIEL: I think that lack of negative evidence can count as positive evidence.
BEN: Hmm.
HEDVIG: Hmm.
BEN: We’ll have to revisit this in our subsequent legal episode about our own shit talking.
HEDVIG: [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] Okay, great. We also have a very special guest co-host. It’s Dr Sylvia Sierra. Hello, Sylvia.
SYLVIA SIERRA: Hello.
DANIEL: Sylvia is a linguist and Assistant Professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University. What is that like?
SYLVIA: It’s great. I’ve been there for five years, I think.
HEDVIG: Nice.
SYLVIA: So, yeah, it’s a lot of fun. I get to teach cool classes, have great colleagues, get to research and teach whatever I want. So, it’s cool.
HEDVIG: Wow, that’s really cool.
DANIEL: Is it one of those things where nobody’s doing your thing, so nobody… you get to kind of do what you want, yeah?
SYLVIA: Yeah, pretty much no one really knows what I do.
DANIEL: Yeah, I had one of those. And it was it was nice, but it was lonely, but it was good.
SYLVIA: Yeah. I don’t mind as long as I can do whatever I want in terms of research and teaching.
DANIEL: Well, it sounds like the “whatever you want” is your new book, Millennials talking media: Creating intertextual identities in everyday conversation. This is a very interesting read.
SYLVIA: Thank you.
HEDVIG: And we have at least two millennials on this call, right?
SYLVIA: Awesome.
BEN: Look, I’m an elder millennial and a crotchety one at that.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: So, I feel like the…
HEDVIG: A geriatric millennial.
BEN: Yeah, for sure.
SYLVIA: [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: Practically Gen X, like me!
BEN: No, see, as I have continued to remind Hedvig, there’s this lingering thing I find in older generations of, like, “Oh, millennials.” Meanwhile, us millennials are like: ~I’m in my mid to late 30s, and my knees hurt.~ Lke, we are very much not the cool young people anymore.
HEDVIG: Yeah, no.
SYLVIA: And you turn into someone from southern US as you’re saying it.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Sorry, I… Apparently, I associate the knee pain with the South. I’m not sure why.
HEDVIG: No, no, no. I know exactly what you mean. My knees hurt and I don’t know why, and I don’t like it.
BEN: And I’m a southern belle, too!
SYLVIA: Aw. I feel mine have always hurt. [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: Why did Ben do that?
BEN: Oh. Are we getting meta? Am I creating an intertextual, like, reality right now? Is that happening?
DANIEL: I think we might be.
SYLVIA: Yeah, there’s something going on there.
BEN: Analyse me! This is so good. My four therapists couldn’t do it, but maybe you can!
[LAUGHTER]
SYLVIA: Are you laying on a couch? Like, one of those long, like, Freudian couches?
HEDVIG: Oh my god.
BEN: Hold on, hold on. I’ve got one of the… You’ll hear this loud click. Okay, now my computer chair can lean back.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Oh, okay. Well, before we get into the deep analysis let me just say: we’ve been having a lot of fun on Discord with our supporter patrons. It was kind of an experiment, but it’s gone very well, been lots of fun. We think we’re getting pretty good at this Discord thing and so, we have opened it up. All of our patrons, no matter what level, are now Discordians on the Because Language Discord site. And by the way, all of our old patrons, I sort of put it to them: What do you think? They were all unanimously positive: let everybody in the more the merrier. So, all of our patrons are automatically on Discord now. Yay!
HEDVIG: Yay. That’s nice. I like it.
BEN: Come, listeners. Join us in what I’ve just realised… for the longest time, I didn’t get Discord. And then I got on there and I’m like, “Oh, it’s just IRC for, like, young people.” [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Okay. Yeah, it’s just forums. It’s nothing complicated.
DANIEL: And getting ideas from our great patrons and talking about language stuff. We’ve been talking about the pronunciation of URINAL [ˈjeɹənəl] lately.
HEDVIG: Oh, URINAL [jəˈɹaɪnəl].
DANIEL: Yep.
BEN: Who… Which brand of English calls it a urinal [jəˈɹaɪnəl]?
HEDVIG: I don’t know. But I’m going to side with it because it seems fun.
BEN: [LAUGHS] You contrarian.
DANIEL: Why? What does Australian English do?
BEN: Urinal [ˈjeɹənəl].
DANIEL: Urinal [ˈjeɹənəl]? Okay. Well, I just remember that Morrissey song. [SINGING] “Standing at the urinal [jəˈɹaɪnəl]. He thinks he’s got the whole world in his hands.” This is back when I was listening to Morrissey. It’s a terrible Morrissey lyric, by the way, not the worst.
[CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: Pretty bad. Anyway, enough of my singing. Let me just say that Discord is only one of the advantages patrons get. Depending on your level, you can get bonus episodes, we will read your name reverently at the end of each episode, and every patron, no matter what level, gets our yearly mailout. There’s a new sticker coming, which you’ll only be able to get this way. So, why don’t you come and join us, support the show, get fuzzy feels, help us do the work. It’s patreon.com/becauselangpod. We’ll see you there. And thanks to all of our patrons for your great support.
HEDVIG: Yes, thank you very much.
BEN: You too get my thanks. Moving on.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Moving on.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] Moving on.
DANIEL: We got a little update on our last show because we were trying to find a way to negate the terminology that one… what’s his name? Stuven Punker? Storvin Panker! He invented the term “euphemism treadmill.” And we were trying to think of a way… Oh, and by the way that describes… I’m running out of room here. What’s the euphemism treadmill?
HEDVIG: It describes what happens when you have a social category that is somehow disadvantaged and you make up new words for it. And when you do, that word becomes derogatory sooner or later, and then you have to make up a new one. That’s it, right?
BEN: Yep.
DANIEL: Yep. That’s the one.
HEDVIG: Like, you start saying that people are… and generally, this is more about society, the way society imbues value into these things rather than the intrinsic value that they have. For example, people who clean places are really, really valuable and do great work, but they are associated with low social status. So, people start calling them sanitary technicians, etc., to sort of heighten the status, but the sooner or later it goes down again, because people are dicks and don’t value people who do good labour.
DANIEL: That’s right. Well, Rikker Dockum on Twitter @thai101. By the way, Rikker is a good fellow. He says, “On a recent BecauseLangPod episode, the gang…”
[CHUCKLES]
BEN: We’re a gang, you guys.
DANIEL: We’re the gang, I like that. “The gang had a discussion about alternatives to the term ‘euphemism treadmill’ because why use a P*nker coinage when you don’t have to?” Good news. It had another name for decades before he came along. Did you know?
HEDVIG: No, it didn’t.
BEN: I feel like you’re going to say it and I’m going to go, “I’ve totally heard that before. And I should have thought about it last time.”
DANIEL: What you thought of last time was “superlative entropy”, which I thought was very sciency.
HEDVIG: Very sciency. Also, totally opaque.
BEN: Actually, I’ve reminded myself of my own genius, and now I’m backing me again.
HEDVIG: Oh my god, I don’t like it.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Well, it turns out that Sharon Henderson Taylor in 1974 put out a paper called Terms for Low Intelligence where she examined all of those things like idiot and moron and… yeah. She called it “the euphemism cycle.” Euphemism cycle.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I like the word… I was going to say… because I sort of don’t mind treadmill, but cycle is better.
DANIEL: You know, if I was at the gym, I would choose the cycle over the treadmill.
BEN: Absolutely. Much better on the knees.
HEDVIG: Or as I know, another suggestion is spiral.
DANIEL: Oh. That’s very good.
HEDVIG: Because cycle suggests just that it goes back to the start. Whereas a spiral makes a new loop every time.
BEN: Oh, yeah. Okay.
HEDVIG: Does that make sense?
DANIEL: That’s true.
SYLVIA: This is reminding me of this… Ruth Wodak has this thing about the right-wing populist Perpetuum Mobile. Where it’s like these scandals that, like, cycle round and around, I guess she calls it like… is that how you pronounce, that mobile…?
BEN: Oh, I know what you mean. And that’s really fascinating, because mobiles or however like you say them, where you’re from, they’re kind of a manifestation of the three-body problem. So, they manifest randomised but cyclical motion. So, you can’t really predict how it’s going to play out but you can rely on the fact that that stuff’s coming around again and again and again.
SYLVIA: Yeah. Yeah.
DANIEL: Are we talking about the way that, for example, they took all the complaints about gay people, then that became no longer fashionable, then they just transferred all that hate to trans people? Is that what we’re talking about?
[SILENCE]
SYLVIA: Naaah…
DANIEL: That’s not what we’re talking about! Okay.
BEN: I think… no, I think…
HEDVIG: It sounds like an adjacent example.
BEN: Yeah, I would agree. I think that’s not NOT what we’re talking about, that and guns and the role of faith in people’s lives and just all the talking points that kind of like drift off and then at an indeterminant but reliably annoying time, come back.
DANIEL: War on Christmas.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Blood libel.
DANIEL: Yeah. Well, for now, I like spiral, but let’s go with Sharon Henderson Taylor’s “euphemism cycle”. By the way, that lasted for 30 years until Pinker coined his term in 2003 in his book, The Blank Slate.
SYLVIA: Wow.
DANIEL: All right, we got a little update. Thanks to Rikker Dockum for that one, that was terrific. Now, let’s see. Something happened a few weeks ago. [LAUGHS] Hedvig is bracing herself, is that what’s happening?
HEDVIG: Yes, I looked at the run sheet about what was the next item and I just sort of like, breathe in, [inhaling] breathe out [exhaling].
DANIEL: Do I need to know about this or should I just wait until I have to absorb it, is that what we’re?
HEDVIG: Yeah, I’m just bracing myself.
BEN: As per my usual behavior of not knowing anything about anything we’re doing, I’ve just opened up the run sheet now and I’m looking at it and I’m like, “Whoa, this news item has 18 constituent pieces!” [LAUGHS] Normally, our news items are a title, a link, and a paragraph. And this sheet has a, like, a fucking thesis statement. This is no joke.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Sorry about that. While we’re talking about two notable authors, Joyce Carol Oates and Michael Chabon. Am I saying his name right?
HEDVIG: I don’t know.
DANIEL: Okay.
SYLVIA: That sounds good to me.
DANIEL: It’s one of those things. They had some takes about language which were kind of bad. And this isn’t uncommon. This happens every once in a while, because not everyone’s a linguist.
BEN: We also cover these stories a lot. So, it feels like this happens a lot if you listen to Because Language.
DANIEL: But then, something amazing happened. They changed their minds on the internet!
BEN: I don’t believe you.
DANIEL: I know! Amazing!
HEDVIG: Amazing.
DANIEL: And the way that this played out, I think, has some implications for science communication, and for how we respond to people that we disagree with. So, let’s get into it.
BEN: Okay. Take us through this waltz, Daniel.
DANIEL: Well, first of all, we start with the original tweet by Joyce Carol Oates. She read some… never mind. She said…
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] What did she say?
DANIEL: She read an article in The Atlantic about pronouns written by somebody. And she tweeted, “They” will not become part of general usage, not for political reasons, but because there would be no pronoun to distinguish between a singular subject (they) & a plural subject (they). Language seeks to communicate with clarity, not to obfuscate, that is its purpose.” Okay.
BEN: Clearly, just on face value, clearly this person has never met a lawyer if she thinks that language seeks only to clarify and never to obfuscate. But anyway, moving on.
SYLVIA: That’s just such a tired take.
HEDVIG: We could introduce her to the pronoun “you”.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: You can just have a go at that. That’s fine.
DANIEL: What is the poem that Dennis Baron told us? “Roses are red, violets are blue, singular THEY is older than singular YOU.”
BEN: I like it. Okay, so she’s taking a swipe at THEY, which is not new. What happened next?
DANIEL: Then, what happened was that linguists replied and language lovers replied, not always kindly.
BEN: Twitter is not the place where people go to have reasoned discourse. Let’s be fair.
DANIEL: Well, what they did was they just started spitting the facts, just like we’re doing here. Like, “Well, people have been using singular THEY for literally a thousand years.” There was an interesting thing that I didn’t know. The Maniculum podcast has found evidence that in the 800s, people happily mixed the HE pronoun with the THEY pronoun to refer to the same person. I didn’t know it went back that far.
Anyway, then what happened was: among the responses was this one by Sim Kern, who is a nonbinary writer. They say, “It seems like you’re trying to vaguely walk back, but what you need to do is apologise. Lauded as you may be, you are way out of your element speaking for the English language, and your comments were transphobic and harmful.” It goes on, and there’s going to be a link on our episode page on becauselanguage.com. Then, Oates says… tweets: “Gosh, I did not at all mean this. I do apologise, truly. You are quite right. But it’s very hard to think of myself as a powerful voice as one who lives with cats.”
BEN: [LAUGHS] Sorry! Sorry.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Wow, she really endeared herself to me with that line. Sorry.
DANIEL: Yeah, self-deprecation can be a good strategy.
HEDVIG: That’s quite a funny line.
DANIEL: Keeps going. “I do use the singular THEY pronoun often. It was a purely speculative tweet and not meant to invalidate.” Hm!
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Huh, interesting. Also, as many people pointed out into the discourse as well, the use of THEY to refer to people who are trans or nonbinary is one use, but there’s also the use of saying somebody, like: everybody like to talk about themselves or something like that, and that’s used, been around for ages. As something I think maybe Ben would like, a lot of people have been quoting Ursula Le Guin for this, because she said this back in, like, the ’70s or ’80s or something.
BEN: This is actually more my partner’s true love. She is just a Le Guin mega, mega, mega stan, so I’m sure she will be delighted.
DANIEL: What was the quote? I saw it too, but I can’t remember what it is now, and I don’t have it.
HEDVIG: It’s a bit long. I have it in front of me if you want to… do you want me to read it?
DANIEL: Just a little bit?
HEDVIG: “The grammarians started telling us it was wrong to use plural THEY along in the 16th or 17th century. That was when they also declared that the pronoun HE includes both sexes. ‘If a person needs an abortion, he should be required to tell his parents.’ My use of THEY is socially motivated and, if you like, politically correct, a deliberate response to the socially and politically significant banning of our genderless pronoun by language legislators, enforcing the notion that the male sex is the only one that counts.”
DANIEL: Based.
HEDVIG: I know, yeah. It’s pretty good.
BEN: She was the boss. Like, true boss.
HEDVIG: She’s the boss.
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: She was saying like, “I know what I’m doing and why,” which I really like.
BEN: [LAUGHS] That’s a good way to finish it. Just be like, “Get away from me. I’m smarter than you.”
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Now, about the same time, Michael Chabon made the following tweet, now deleted, “Will no one speak up to call out the silent glyphocide against the letter T now taking place all around us in spoken American English? Maybe you haven’t nodiced” — that’s with a D — “but it’s so impor’ant” with an apostrophe.
BEN: So, this tweet is super racist. Can I just be the first to say that?
DANIEL: Interesting.
HEDVIG: Also, it’s entirely unrelated to Joyce Carol Oates, right?
DANIEL: Right. It’s just a completely unconnected…
HEDVIG: This is like a 180, or a turn I didn’t see coming.
DANIEL: Why racist? Because that’s not one of the…
HEDVIG: It’s a feature of African American Vernacular English, right?
BEN: Yes.
HEDVIG: Among other things.
BEN: That sentence that he has typed for me is just, like, the clear-as-day dog whistle for AAVE.
DANIEL: I guess so. Okay, well, I say noDiced, myself…
HEDVIG: Yeah, most people do.
DANIEL: …and impor’ant struck me as British. But yeah, I can see that.
HEDVIG: Yeah. When you put a consonant between two vowels, and that consonant is what’s known as unvoiced and your vowels are generally voiced, it’s hard to shift your whole apparatus to suddenly producing something unvoiced. So, you just make the thing in between the vowels voiced. This happens all the time. Similar phenomena happen at the end of the word with the reverse situation. Happens all the time. Things get reduced and elided, and you can be sad about it if you want, but it’s a natural part of language change and it’s how it goes. Don’t worry.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: I take this tweet to be, like, trying to be funny.
BEN: Yeah. This goes… I suspect — without wanting to give this poor person too much benefit of the doubt because like, #WhiteGuyOnTwitterDoesntNeedaDefenseTeam — like, I think this is a case of someone: ~Oh, there’s this thing about language that annoys me~ like a pedant thing and then chucking it out there, and then a whole bunch of people being like, “You’re behaving like a fuckhead.” And then, having one of two options. Either being like, “Oh, shit, yeah, didn’t mean to, but I can see now, that was fuckhead behavior,” and/or just being like, “BLURGGH no, that’s not what I meant. You’re all wrong, and I’m going to double down and triple down and quadruple down.”
DANIEL: ♫ Margaret Atwood. ♫ It’s true. There were a lot of people who were spitting facts, like the letter T can sound a lot of different ways. It can sound like /t/ as in TOP, it can sound like /t̚/ as in POT. It can sound like /ɾ/ as in BUTTER. It can sound like /d/ as in IMPORTANT, but then, as you mentioned, Hedvig, D can sound like T in a word like SECOND at the end. And of course, it can sound like a glottal stop in HOT WATER, RAT POISON. Some people say KITTEN /kɪʔən/ and I don’t say that one.
BEN: KITTEN. Yeah, I do. KITTEN.
HEDVIG: Yeah, that’s fair.
DANIEL: Okay. But here was Chabon’s new tweet. “I’ve taken down my tweet from yesterday about the glottal stop after hearing from many whose speech deploys it, and from a kind-intentioned person who made it clear that the tweet amounted to making fun of people for the way they talk, which is unkind.”
HEDVIG: Wow. So, we’ve got two people on the internet saying something a bit mean about other people’s language, and then reverting.
BEN: Well, getting called out for it and then listening to the call out. Good on them.
HEDVIG: Yeah. This is the news.
SYLVIA: That’s a welcome new trend.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I love this.
DANIEL: I just thought it was interesting how, like, the first thing that I thought of doing is saying, “Hey, this thing is historically very normal, and a lot of people do it.” That didn’t seem to do it. What seemed to do it was people saying, “Hey, that’s kind of anti-human.” In fact, in the Oates’ case, Sim Kern was standing up for themself. They weren’t exactly being civil. They were being pretty spiky and direct, but Oates listened and apologised. But Chabon mentioned someone’s kind intention. But in both cases, they were responding to someone saying, “Hey, that’s kind of anti-human. That’s kind of against people. And do you really want to do that?”
BEN: I can’t imagine that all of the… From what I know of Twitter, I can’t imagine that all of the tweets were… Look, I would still call Sim’s tweet quite mild — in the spectrum of Twitter firestorms, that’s a very gentle spring day on [LAUGHS] my radar, to be honest. So, you have to, have to imagine that both of these people read a lot more inflammatory and potentially aggressive and threatening tweets than the ones we just saw in response to the thing. And they still did the right thing, and I think that is laudable because I suspect it would be easy to get, like, death threats and then go, “Oh, you people are crazy. I hate this,” and just, like, double yourself down, so good on them for not doing that.
HEDVIG: And good on them for looking at their replies. I bet famous people like Joyce Carol Oates can tweet about what they had for breakfast, and people’s response tweet would be like, “You should die,” or something. [LAUGHTER] Unfortunately, that’s what happens when you’re famous enough, you have enough followers. People are just mad. So, whenever someone on YouTube or Twitter actually looks at their replies, if they’re a famous enough person, I’m like: Well done, you. Because that means they have to wade through all the other bullshit as well. Like, true bullshit.
BEN: I reserve my personal “well done, you,” simply because we’ve seen so many ridiculously powerful people who clearly have way too big a preoccupation with their Twitter accounts. And it’s just like…
HEDVIG: Yeah, maybe that’s true.
BEN: …you might want to just go run the company with a market cap of, like, $500 million or whatever it is and instead of just sitting on your phone. That would be my personal take.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah, I get that.
DANIEL: What do you reckon, Sylvia?
SYLVIA: Yeah. I think it’s a good trend that people are listening to critiques and responding to them. I do think people on Twitter can be pretty vicious, and I think we can call out people in a way that is more respectful than a lot of cases and I’m glad to see that these people directly apologised and changed their stances.
DANIEL: John Cleese couldn’t do it. He went away and just made a whole big show about being canceled. It’s become a bit of a trope that someone shouts with their enormous megaphone, “I’m being canceled.”
BEN: I’m wondering why they don’t see the irony in that. It’s really annoying.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: You’ve just had a massive Netflix special that has been the talk of the globe, Dave Chappelle, I don’t think you’re being canceled.
HEDVIG: I don’t know if it’s because I’m in my 30s now or something but I know that the algorithm feeds on engagement, including my negative engagement, and even though I know someone is wrong, and I’d like to call them out and tell them that, I have stopped doing it a bit more just out of care of my own mental health, and just avoid certain discourses. So like, I saw this thing about Joyce Carol Oates, but I just blanked on it, because I don’t… that seems, [SIGHS] yeah, like a lot.
BEN: You’ve got sore internet knees.
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: That was a call back, in case that gets cut from the show. [LAUGHTER] There was a backstory to that statement!
DANIEL: The reason it got to me was because as a science communicator, I’m always thinking about how do we respond to people? How do we bring people on side? You list facts for people, and it could just do nothing. And you could also say, “Hey, that’s anti-human. Did you mean to do that?” And they could say, “Yes, actually, I did mean to do that!” Those people aren’t really convincible. Then your job changes.
BEN: Yeah, then you just have to stop listening to Sam Harris, or whatever it happens to be.
DANIEL: Yeah, but also if you do decide to fight on, now you’re not addressing the person because they’re not convincible. You’re addressing people who are uncommitted or unaware of the issue. I do think facts can help there. So, maybe everything works.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: You goddamn optimist. Jesus.
DANIEL: Or maybe nothing works.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Your sickly, sweet, saccharine optimism, it’s killing me over here!
DANIEL: Hedvig, take us to our next one. There’s been a study about how children learn when they’re dropped into, let’s just say for example, an English-speaking classroom, and their first language isn’t English.
HEDVIG: Yes. This is a recent paper in Nature, from three researchers from Aarhus University in Denmark, and they found that children who speak another language besides the majority language — in this case, Danish — at home, will get improved school results if they receive instructions in that language. They did this really cool and really well-done, methodologically controlled study where they had 200 plus kids, some of which received extra instruction, I think up to three times a week in the other language, and they found that they showed improvement in what was known as behavioural problems, increased school satisfaction, increased engagement of their parents, and also increased skills in reading the majority language. And they hypothesised that the general better feeling of being in school and reduced what was classified as behavior problems might be what causes the improved reading skills, as opposed to the actual instruction in your other language, increasing your majority language reading skills, that can not be a direct correlation. Yeah, I thought it was really neat.
DANIEL: Just to clarify here, so they took some kids and instead of giving them — sorry, this is… the majority language was Danish — they didn’t teach the kids chemistry or maths in Danish, they taught them in their original language?
HEDVIG: No, they had school in Danish, and then they had extra classes in their home language.
DANIEL: Extra classes in their home language. Okay, got it.
HEDVIG: Yes, and only in their home language.
BEN: They weren’t extra ancillary classes, right? They were classes in, say, Thai or Somali or something like that?
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: It was like teaching them their own first language.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: And I’ve seen this approach used sometimes, the whole dual language thing, but this would seem to be good evidence that giving them instruction in the language they know helps them behaviourally, and that has knock-on effects for the whole thing.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Is this not… I thought this was, like, a fully settled thing. And the reason I say that is because language educators that I’ve spoken to, just very openly are like, “Oh, yeah, when you learn a second language, you actually have to learn two languages. You’ve got to learn your language first, which you don’t know because you just learned it from being a numpty human and you don’t understand how, like, verbs and clauses and all that shit works, so, you’ve got to learn how English works… And then you can start learning how a different language works, because I’m going to try and tell you how to do verbs in Spanish. You can be like, “What do verbs do again?” [CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: Yeah, but that could be partially it.
BEN: This is one of those studies that comes along, and I’m like, “Oh, did we not know this?”
DANIEL: I think some people get the impression that immersion is just the best and just drop them in because they’re children and it’s fine. But what we don’t always realise is that being dumped into a new language is super hard for kids. It’s very stressful, and it can lead them to act out sometimes. And I think that we know this in the research, but I don’t think enough people are doing it, and it’s good to see this confirmed.
HEDVIG: And remember, the average age of these kids was 7.1 years. So, we’re talking quite young kids here. And I’ve taught at a primary school and part of what you do when kids are aged six to eight, is not necessarily teach them math or writing or something. You’re teaching them how to be in a school.
BEN: Yeah. You’re socialising them, yeah.
HEDVIG: Like, you sit down and you do the exercises, you’re socialising them into what it is to go in school.
BEN: I’ve got one of those students right now and it’s real hard work to socialise them. They’re not easy.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: And then, you’re trying to teach them math in a different language that they’re not used to, so they’re having to learn, like, say English and maths at the same time, like maths through English. That is tough!
HEDVIG: Yeah. And they have to learn also just what it’s like to be in a school, how that works, how breaktime works, how you make friends, and how you do things. I looked into some of the supplementary material, so it was a bit of variation exactly how this extra instruction was carried out. And some of the teachers in this first language would also collaborate with the other teachers, and I think attend lessons or tell them, like: Oh, so this is how things work in Somalia. So, you could tell them, like: This is a thing from Somalia. Part of it was also the school and the teachers showing an interest in the children as saying, “I take your background seriously.”
BEN: Right, so the students got far more comprehensive pastoral care than baseline.
HEDVIG: Yes. I think that was part of it.
BEN: Well, good on them for acknowledging that in the study. That’s good of them.
DANIEL: And don’t forget, as you say, Hedvig, these are children aged seven-ish. We act like learning a language is effortless for children, and it’s really not. We need to remember that.
BEN: Yeah, they probably feel left out and excluded and, like, they don’t understand what’s going on a lot of the time, and it must be really tough.
HEDVIG: And it’s not effortless. We go through nine plus years of school, most people, but it is, like, an artificial social environment. [LAUGHS] It’s the thing you need to learn how to be inside of and it’s not trivial, and if you have more barriers to that, you know, that is going to be harder. Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah. All right. Last thing, I wanted to just tell you about a meme that my son found and told me about, my son, Drew.
HEDVIG: [CHUCKLES] I love this segment! Is this going to be a returning segment?
DANIEL: Stuff My Son, Drew, Sends Me. Okay, yes, I will.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: I’ll get him to tell me more things.
HEDVIG: He’s a proper Generation Y, right?
BEN: Yeah, he is definitely…
DANIEL: He is.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: …the one under us, Hedvig. Well and truly.
HEDVIG: Okay, cool. Okay, let’s hear what the cool kids are doing.
DANIEL: Yes, we all know about the Google Ngram Viewer.
BEN: Ah. Everyone’s favorite way to waste time on the internet.
DANIEL: It is great!
HEDVIG: But explain it to our listeners, please.
DANIEL: Okay. So you look at a word or maybe two or a phrase. For example, you could look at Star Wars. You look for Star Wars, and it plots a chart for you to show that term’s popularity over time going back to the 1700s, 1600s if you want to. There’s just millions of books, hundreds of years. It’s great. But if you do a chart right now on the Google Ngram Viewer for Star Wars, you look that term up…
HEDVIG: Okay, opening [TYPING] Ngram Viewer Google. Uh-huh. I’m clicking on it. And I’m searching for Star Wars, am I?
DANIEL: Yep.
HEDVIG: Star Wars. I’m listening to a Star Wars podcast right now. So, okay, I see a chart. I see a biiiig peak that reaches its height in 1986.
DANIEL: Okay. But now…
BEN: Ohhhh but there’s…
HEDVIG: …and I see almost nothing before… Oo, there’s a bump in the 1860s! Unclear.
DANIEL: What you will see in this TikTok video is: the person who’s looking at this chart goes to that little bump, and clicks on it, and then when you see it…
BEN: [LAUGHS] I’m watching it now, it’s great!
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: What are you seeing, Ben?
BEN: I’m seeing really awesome Romance-era paintings with like R2-D2 in an English naval jumper and stuff with, like, cracked paint and whatnot.
HEDVIG: What?!
BEN: Oh, this is dope. I like it a lot.
DANIEL: That’s it. And there’s lots of these. So, there are a lot of fun historical in grams of viral TikTok trend that uses these charts.
SYLVIA: Hmm. I’m seeing it now.
BEN: Sorry, I’m now distracted because I’ve got the TikTok of the cat kicking a duckling and it’s great.
DANIEL: What? Hang on.
BEN: So, now I’m scrolling now. I’m in the “for you” page, you guys. It’s all over.
DANIEL: Focus. Focus.
BEN: Okay, I’m gone. I’m done.
DANIEL: I guess we better wrap it up, but the historical Ngrams is a fun meme that takes off on the… what is it? Is it just data noise? Is it bad OCR? Is it coincidental terms?
BEN: No, I reckon there must have been…
HEDVIG: It’s a coincidental term.
BEN: …some reason why in that time period there was call for the two words STAR and WARS to be next to each other for obviously, totally unrelated reasons.
DANIEL: It could be, but it could be bad metadata.
BEN: Maybe.
DANIEL: A book is mislabeled as being from 1840, when it’s not.
BEN: Or, alternatively, Star Wars actually was from, according to this, 1698, and George Lucas just blew the dust off some ancient tome and he was like, “Jedi! Planets! All right. Let’s do this.”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
SYLVIA: Well, let’s also not forget that there’s… I guess, George Lucas acknowledged that Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress largely inspired Star Wars. So, there was that, but obviously, it wasn’t called Star Wars, so.
BEN: Like, the Jedi was a class of samurai, I’m pretty sure.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yeah, there’s a great documentary you can watch on YouTube called Everything is a Remix where they do shot-by-shot comparisons between Star Wars and Kurosawa movies. And some of them are the same angles, the same editing. Like, it’s obviously a homage. Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay, let’s move on.
HEDVIG: Let’s move on.
BEN: Yes. Please let’s use our guest for her intended purpose.
HEDVIG: Yes.
SYLVIA: This is all relevant, honestly, because we’re basically talking about intertextuality and repetition.
BEN: Right, I’m expecting bulk callbacks.
DANIEL: Exactly.
SYLVIA: I’ll do my best.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: We’re here with Dr Sylvia Sierra, Linguist and Assistant Professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University, and the author of the new book, Millennials talking media: Creating intertextual identities in everyday conversation. Sylvia, thanks so much for hanging out with us today.
SYLVIA: Thanks so much for having me on.
HEDVIG: Thank you for writing a book about my generation. I love it. I feel very special.
BEN: I’m really sorry that Daniel just pronounced the book as if he was William Shatner.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: ~Creating. Intertextual. Identities.~
BEN: ~Every. Word. Is. Its. Own. Sentence.~
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Okay, you get extra points for using Shatner in this discussion. So this book is a big analysis of conversations that you had with your friends. Is this book the equivalent of Friends? Is that what’s happening?
BEN: I see what you’re doing, Daniel.
SYLVIA: You know, that’s interesting. Friends never really came up during my research. It’s interesting that it didn’t.
DANIEL: Oh, that’s a gap.
SYLVIA: But actually… you know, it’s so funny because actually my Gen Z students in recent years, they’ve been watching Friends.
BEN: They’re all over it, hey?
SYLVIA: I never really watched it. Yeah.
BEN: The younger generation knows more about Friends than I do, and I was the kid who was alive and a teenager when the trashy sitcom was on every night on rerun.
SYLVIA: Exactly, yeah. I never really watched it.
HEDVIG: Me neither.
DANIEL: No, I didn’t. Never seen an episode.
SYLVIA: But Seinfeld is actually one that gets referenced in the book. I do have more memories watching that for whatever reason.
BEN: Seinfeld feels like, yeah, the real millennial one and then Gen Z has — yet again we have found a turf war.
[LAUGHTER]
SYLVIA: Reappropriated. Right. I also refer to the Big Bang Theory in the beginning of the book, not because it’s ever brought up, but because the communal living situation of a lot of the participants was similar to what’s represented in The Big Bang Theory in terms of millennials living in these extended friend/family groups.
HEDVIG: That’s fair. I think that’s fair. That is something we can take from Big Bang Theory, and maybe some of our listeners are not going to like me now, but otherwise, I don’t like that show at all.
SYLVIA: Yeah, I don’t really care for it either.
DANIEL: I think that’s a pretty popular view.
BEN: Yeah. I don’t think you’re going to lose listeners from our listenership.
[LAUGHTER]
SYLVIA: Yeah, that’s another one. Actually, my younger brothers, one who was like right on the border of millennial and Gen Z and one who is Gen Z, they kinda actually grew up with that show, but I didn’t and haven’t really enjoyed it the times I have seen it.
DANIEL: I want to share… Ben, I hope it’s okay, if I share this.
BEN: Uhhh, let’s find out!
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yeah?
DANIEL: We were having a discussion about having kids, and whether it’s fun or not. And I said: it’s kind of fun in its own way. And, Ben, you responded with a with a meme. Do you remember the one?
BEN: Ahhhhh, no.
DANIEL: It’s one of the ones with a Chris person. Someone named Chris in the Marvel Universe, saying…
BEN: Oh. Is that the one…? Yeah, yeah, sorry, sorry, sorry. It’s Chris Pratt from… is it the one where Chris Pratt is in Parks and Recreation, and he’s like, “No, I’m fine. It’s just like: I’m not sleeping and everything is meaningless, and all of my hobbies don’t interest me anymore,” and blah, blah, blah, is that the one?
DANIEL: No, not that one. I think it was a Hemsworth. And he said, “Is it though?”
BEN: [LAUGHS] Yeah. Sorry!
DANIEL: Is it fun? Really?
BEN: You said meme and so I wasn’t thinking of GIFs. Yeah. On our little Discord chat, Daniel was just like… because Daniel — I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, listeners — is just an unbelievably infuriatingly upbeat and positive person. And that’s not like a…
DANIEL: Oh, god, not today.
BEN: …on-air persona. Like he unfortunately maintains that kind of disposition in all manners of his existence. And so he was like: you know…! I was whinging about my son being a douche one day, and Daniel was like: “Oh, but it can be fun in different ways.” And yeah, I just had to drop that Thor Ragnarok thing of like, “Really? Is it though?”
HEDVIG: Is it though? Is it really?
DANIEL: The facial expression is the one that does it for me, because his facial expression is the one that says, “It’s not really, and I think you know that it’s not really. Come on.” [LAUGHTER]
BEN: I was calling you out in GIF form.
DANIEL: “Let’s drop the pleasant fiction here.” Sylvia, what’s going on here? Why did Ben drop that reference? He could have typed it. He didn’t. He did a much more complicated thing of finding a GIF calling on that reference. What’s going on?
SYLVIA: Yeah. So, I actually don’t really analyse this kind of thing where it’s people using memes and GIFs online. I look at how people use them offline in face-to-face conversation. But there is other work that laid the groundwork for what I do that examines the functions of this and this makes me think particularly of this paper by, I want to say — I might butcher their names, but I think it’s Tolins and Samermit — have this paper about the function of GIFs in online interaction and how they stand in for our embodied response, like our emotional response that is difficult to convey across like text-mediated communication where we don’t have facial expression and embodiment and we rely on things like punctuation and emojis. So, this kind of thing sort of, like, fills in for expressing that emotion, is the argument in that paper.
HEDVIG: Yeah, text is such a poor medium in many ways. You lose intonation, you lose facial expressions, you lose the in-real-life context of where you are, the place. So, I think it’s really interesting that people try and find places… things to replace that. But then what are people doing when they are using GIFs in real-life conversations? What’s that about?
SYLVIA: Well, so another part of it is, when you share something like this, you’re kind of relying on some previous shared knowledge, that the other person has maybe seen this before, they know what movie it’s from. And that kind of creates this extra bond as well, like people can identify through sharing this media. I guess, I shouldn’t say real life, but in face-to-face interaction, when people are referencing things like that, that’s often a big part of what they’re doing. You’re sharing over the shared knowledge source, and you’re bonding as people who can recognise that.
And you know, in my book at the time, I didn’t actually record any interactions where people referenced GIFs specifically, but definitely memes, there’s a lot of memes.
BEN: So what does that look like in a face-to-face exchange? Is that someone going literally sort of explicitly spelling out, “Oh, it’s like that meme”? Or, is it just a glancing reference with the tacit understanding that they’ll get it?
SYLVIA: It’s more of the latter, at least in the data I looked at. I was looking mostly at places where this was more seamlessly embedded and referenced in a way, not explicitly pointed to. So for example, one of the memes that gets quoted in the conversations is, like, the “bro, do you even lift?” meme.
[CHUCKLES]
BEN: Right.
SYLVIA: Or, “Friends don’t let friends skip leg day.” But it’s totally recontextualised in my study, because they’re actually playing a boardgame called Myth with these miniature rats. And they’re kind of making fun of this nerdy activity. So, they start saying things like, “Friends don’t let friends skip rat day.”
[LAUGHTER]
SYLVIA: And like, “Bro, do you even paint?” And that’s what a lot of the examples are, as people tweaking pieces of these memes or other media, like films and songs and TV shows, they’ll take it into a new context, and they’ll adapt a piece of it to fit the current context.
HEDVIG: I’ve even seen people though do the first thing that Ben mentioned of like…
SYLVIA: Oh, yeah.
HEDVIG: It doesn’t happen that often, but you know that meme of the woman who’s thinking and then lots of algebra appears as if she’s thinking really hard about something?
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES]
BEN: Do you know the worst part? I can go meta-meta on this because I saw a meme about explaining memes to people today, [LAUGHS] which is like: When you’re on your phone, and you laugh at a meme, and your partner sees it, and then you realise it’s like a seven-tiered deep meme that requires like 10 years of internet citizenry, and you just can’t be bothered.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: It made me laugh because it’s a real thing.
HEDVIG: I know exactly what you mean. There’s very popular Facebook group called “Useless, Unsuccessful, and Un-something else Memes,” and they are so layered. They can be extremely layered, and they’re all very, very blurred and stuff. And they’re just like… yeah, you need to have been on YouTube since 2007, or something to get them. It’s quite funny. I enjoy it.
DANIEL: I have an ex-Mormon t-shirt that requires 20 minutes to explain and touches on four different aspects of Mormon culture.
SYLVIA: Yeah, there’s a lot of knowledge required to get these things.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: And that strengthens the relationship.
SYLVIA: Exactly.
DANIEL: I’m thinking of Keith Basso, Portraits of the Whiteman and how that’s a study of how joking strengthens relationships. But in his example, it happens through antagonism. Joking someone, making somebody the butt of a joke, is the way that they soften up relationships and strengthen them. But in this case, it seems like the relationship is strengthened because of shared mutual knowledge and shared mutual history.
SYLVIA: Yeah, and sometimes that can take teasing kind of antagonistic forms, though. Like in the example I gave, they’re teasing the people about this nerdy like rat painting activity while they’re drawing on this very specific meme knowledge. There’s other examples of that, like when some friends are talking about a horrible camping trip they went on, and one friend says, “Sounds like a bad Oregon Trail trip.” And they’re referencing the Oregon Trail video game and they actually start teasing me because I was the one who was injured on this trip and they’re like, “Sylvia hit her head. Sylvia can no longer carry food.”
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Sylvia has got dysentery and is dying.
SYLVIA: Yeah. [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: That’s the only Oregon Trail meme I know.
SYLVIA: Yeah. So they’re often doing both. There’s actually some teasing and very light antagonism, I would say. There’s one other example where someone is preparing themselves a gin and tonic to drink and no one else is drinking. So, maybe it’s a little awkward and they start teasing her by saying: it’s like that Disney Beauty and the Beast song where everyone pops out and they’re like, “Bonjour,” but they switch it to be gin and tonic. And they start saying like, [SINGING] “Oh, there goes that girl. She’s drinking gin and tonic.”
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: This is my kind of teasing, I love it.
SYLVIA: Yeah, there’s like a whole musical thing that happens around that. [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: Okay, let’s talk about singing for a second, because that’s one way that you can signal that a joke is happening, that a reference, that a callback is happening. How else do we do this?
SYLVIA: It’s actually really interesting to look at how people signal these phonetically and spoken American English, which is my data set. Oftentimes, singing is a very obvious way, right? If someone starts singing, that’s a pretty clear clue that they might be referencing something. But there’s other more subtle ways that we still pick up on, and these have to do with altering our intonation patterns. So, oftentimes, specific quotes will actually have a unique intonation pattern that makes them stand out. So for example, in Seinfeld, the quote, “not that there’s anything wrong with that…”
BEN: [laughs]
SYLVIA: Right? that has a very specific intonation contour, and it makes it stand out and it makes it funny. And then people repeat it, and they do that same intonation contour. That’s one way. Often, there’s something going on with stress, maybe just a single-word stress. I don’t know if you all are familiar with the show Arrested Development. There’s just a one-line kind of inside joke… or one-word inside joke where they keep referring to this girlfriend of the character, George Michael, named Anne, and she’s known for being bland and almost like she’s not there, and why would he date her. And his father is always saying, “Her?” like that, with that question intonation, like, “Her, why her?” Right there, it’s marked and funny because, just it’s one word, and it’s that rising question intonation, so that’s something people can reproduce when they quote that.
Then there’s other things like, you might change your pitch, right? If you’re trying to mimic a character, so if you’re doing like the Arnold Schwarzenegger, like, “I’ll be back,” lowering your pitch. So people will do these different manipulations with their voice, or they might do a different accent. If someone switches to a different accent, they might be referencing something. So, there’s all these different ways that people can signal these media references in their talk.
HEDVIG: Do you think that people do this more than they used to? Because I thought about when I tried to explain various subcultures I’m a part of to my mom, and how much of my… Sometimes, I’m worried about… it’s hard to explain, part of one, because I don’t think my parents’ generation was part of as many specific niche subcultures that had such a detailed back catalogue. The other part is just how much it forms my identity, which I’m like, I don’t… it feels weird that a part of my identity is formed by Hollywood executives in a way, right?
SYLVIA: Yeah. Mhm.
BEN: But there were writers at the start of that journey. It’s okay, there were creatives involved!
HEDVIG: Uh, yeah. Yeah. But anyway, the first part, do you think that there’s an increase? Or do you think this is just a similar thing that my parents’ generation was doing, just with other topics that I don’t know as much about?
SYLVIA: Oh, yeah, I’m sure they were doing it. This goes back a long ways. We have evidence when people were writing letters and things, they would reference other written texts, like the Bible was a really commonly known text. For a long time, that would get referenced in letters, at least in the Western context, I guess. And then, people would quote other writers and things like that. So, I think what you’re thinking of now is just that we have so much more media, right? It’s not just written texts. Well, now with the introduction of radio, and then film and television, and now we have the internet culture, there’s so much more to draw on. So, it might seem like we do it more or that the references are more difficult to get or require more specific insider knowledge, just because there’s so much more media than we used to have. So, I would guess, like your parents’ generation, they probably quoted popular films or maybe TV jingles or songs and things like that. But, yeah, they didn’t have quite as much as we do now and then they didn’t have, like, internet culture to reference.
HEDVIG: And maybe more people… how to say this? Like, Sweden in the ’60s and ’70s, there were only two TV channels. So, everyone watched the same movie. So, if you reference something, there was a large group of people who could understand it. Whereas, I feel like I can reference… increasingly, there’s fewer people that overlap with my particular niches, if that makes sense!
SYLVIA: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Because of what you said, there’s just more, so I can form a more unique profile.
SYLVIA: Right. Right.
BEN: I have a really embarrassing story around this, which caught me out just two days ago. Can I tell it?
[PAUSE]
DANIEL: Okay!
SYLVIA: Please do.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Who here is familiar with the early 2000s television show, The Mighty Boosh?
DANIEL: Oh, yeah.
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: Okay.
SYLVIA: I’m not.
BEN: Okay, that’s fine. You will get to experience what my babysitter experienced the other night.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: So a babysitter who is the 20-year-old child of one of my friends came to look after my kid while I had to go to graduation at my high school. And as a good millennial, I was like, “Oh, by the way, you probably want to jump on the Wi-Fi while you’re here because like #WhoLikeReadsBooksOrWatchesTVAnymore.” And then, I just had to pause and stop, and I was like, “Oh no. Oh god, okay.” And then, I looked at her, I was like, “I need you to understand that this is a reference. The Wi-Fi password is lesbianham.”
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: She just stared at me, and she blinked. And then she laughed, and she was like, “It’s okay. It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.” [LAUGHS] I was just like, “Cool. Thank you for being good about that. I’m going to go now.” But no one… I’m sure even you two, who have watched The Mighty Boosh, that’s a really bespoke specific part of one episode from the first season! Like, it’s not well traveled and yet here we are in a world where I am now telling people that.
DANIEL: Who were you trying to form community with by making that the Wi-Fi password?
BEN: Straight up? Me and my friends, whenever something… like, we replay that little scene where it’s just like, one of us will just be like: “Can you do something for me?” And the other person will be like, “No.” And they’ll be like, “I can give you riches beyond what you could possibly dream.” And then, they’ll just kick off the whole thing. They’ll be like, “Like what?” And then I’ll say, “Rubies.” I can dream of rubies. And then, I’ll go, “Lesbian ham?”
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
SYLVIA: That’s a good example too, of where your babysitter and me in this case are a bit excluded, actually, from the reference. So, that could be like the…
BEN: Sorry 🥺
SYLVIA: No, but it’s important to point out that anything that can be used to include people — right? — and bond them together can be used intentionally or unintentionally to exclude people or people might feel like they’re excluded. Actually, it goes back to what you were talking about earlier with students learning a new language at school and how they often might feel left out, especially if they’re not getting a lot of these intertextual TV and movie references and things like that, not to mention just other aspects of the language. They can feel very excluded.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Which is kind of the point, isn’t it?
HEDVIG: I mean, it’s not the point. It’s a side effect of the aim, which is to include people, or maybe sometimes is the point…
SYLVIA: Yeah, generally!
HEDVIG: …but I think most of it, the intention is to include people. I’ve heard people say similar things about academic writing, that there are a lot of academics who don’t have English as a first language. And there are some people who say that native speakers of English should avoid expressions or metaphors, or things that are hard for second-language learners to get. So, sometimes in academic writing, people will use really unusual words, or really unusual references, or metaphors, or proverbs that second language speakers just are just going past them. And some people are saying that: Yeah, native speakers need to adjust themselves and not… Because by being specific and in a way sharing of their personality, they’re actually sort of accidentally excluding people.
BEN: I think there’s probably merit to that actually. You could form, not a simplified English, but a not too heavy on the textual/metaphorical reference English, like stuff that you could possibly only understand from having spent 25 years immersed in English around you all the time. Just drop those things. I think that’s a good… there’s a compelling argument to be made for that.
SYLVIA: Yeah, it’s something I actually think about sometimes, because I used to teach Spanish and I spent some time living in Mexico. Sometimes, I just notice I do… if I’m speaking to someone, and I’m not entirely sure of their level of English proficiency, I might switch out certain words for others that I think… and especially if they’re a Spanish speaker, ones I know will translate a little bit better. And it’s something I think about in my writing as well. You always have to explain, especially when you’re talking about internet culture, and memes and all these different things, it’s like you have to imagine your audience, as people who maybe don’t speak English as their first language or people in the future who have no idea what you’re talking about. So, you have to be careful to explain all those things.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay, that takes me to another meme, which is: [DIFFERENT ACCENT] “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” And that makes me think about using accent as a signal because there’s a very fine line between using an accent to refer to a character and maybe making fun of somebody’s accent in a problematic way. The one that I’ve caught myself doing that I’ve tried to stop myself doing is, “Let me play you the song of my people,” which…
HEDVIG: Where’s that from?
DANIEL: I don’t know. I just saw it on Reddit a bunch of times. It’d be like a cat. Cat is juxtaposed against bongos, and the caption is, “Let me play you the song of my people.”
HEDVIG: [TYPING NOISES]
DANIEL: And the more I thought about it — and it’s not just about accent — the more I kind of thought: yuck, because anything anthropological like that seems kind of ick. You know what I mean?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
SYLVIA: Yeah, that sounds like an example of… actually, Barbara Meek has this article called Hollywood Injun English, which is the representation of how Native people supposedly sound in Hollywood. That’s what this reminds me of. And the fact that it’s kind of generic and you can’t even pinpoint a specific source speaks to that as well. That’s something I found in my data, because this was used in my data set as well, and people didn’t really know where they got it from. And actually, how you mentioned that something about it being used with pictures of cats or something on Reddit, that’s actually another problematic thing I found in my data: when people tend to do these accents of minoritised groups, they’re often associated with animals, which is actually something Rosina Lippi-Green found in Disney movies, that a higher percentage of animal characters speak these stigmatised dialects. And then, it’s something I found in my data, when people were voicing these pet cats that were a part of this friend group, they would often use these kinds of accents to represent them.
So, you know, it’s something I think we’ve all been guilty of at some point or another, doing some kind of language mocking or linguistic stereotyping. But it’s good to raise our awareness about this and how it’s a problem and how to try to change it.
HEDVIG: I just looked up this meme that you’re referring to, Daniel…
BEN: So did I. [LAUGHS] Did you go to Know Your Meme?
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Tippy tippy tappy.
HEDVIG: …on the great website knowyourmeme.com. Tippy, tippy, tap, Ben and me both. And it does seem like the origin is quite problematic indeed. It features an image of a musician who… I don’t know where they’re from, but they are wearing a loincloth, and I think people are making fun of them. Yeah, I don’t think it’s very nice.
SYLVIA: I see it, yeah. I’m not surprised.
HEDVIG: Yeah. I can really recommend this website, by the way, in general, Know Your Meme.
SYLVIA: Oh, yeah.
HEDVIG: It’s often so good. So many details, like the first occurrence and up to date. Yeah, extensive.
BEN: I’ve got to say, just as a brief aside, although this meme is making fun of the person in this image, now that I’m staring at this image, I would love to see this dude in real life! He’s like jacked,
HEDVIG: Yeah, he looks really cool.
BEN: …playing a violin in some sort of traditional dress, or perhaps a carnival outfit. Either way, I would watch the crap out of this guy! Looks like heaps of fun! Anyway, sorry — if you guys want to see this person, you should go to Know Your Meme and check out “I shall sing you the song of my people.” Because, damn, I don’t know who this person is, but I would love to be friends with him.
DANIEL: Link on our blog.
SYLVIA: What was the quote, Ben, that you did from the Princess Bride? Was that Inigo Montoya?
BEN: Yes. It was Daniel, but yeah, it was.
DANIEL: That was me.
SYLVIA: Oh, okay. Sorry. That’s an interesting one because I think that came up in my book as well, and that the actor is not Spanish but he’s performing a Spanish accent.
BEN: No. Mandy Patinkin is Jewish?
SYLVIA: Yes. That’s an interesting thing that happens too, is getting people to mimic these accents in films and then we mimic them. Actually, going back to the Native American tropes, are you all familiar with this… well, it was a North American public service announcement.
BEN: Is it the crying Indian?
SYLVIA: Yeah, the crying Indian and that was an Italian actor…
BEN: Really?
HEDVIG: Huh?
SYLVIA: …playing a Native American. And I actually recently found out that that PSA was actually funded by plastic corporations to try to make people feel like, “Oh, we should recycle plastic.”
BEN: Oh, man. That is so fucked up.
SYLVIA: Yeah, it really is. But that’s one of the ways that trope gets reproduced.
BEN: So for everyone who hasn’t seen it, because I could hear Hedvig going, “What are you talking about?” There was a very famous ad from, I’m going to say, late ’80s, early ’90s, about then?
DANIEL: Oh, I remember from the ’70s, I totally remember.
SYLVIA: I think it’s the ’70s.
BEN: Where it was basically, like, “Don’t litter.” Someone throwing something out of a car window, and then we get this like, super schmaltzy slow pan up a person until it just settles on a Native… well, an Italian American playing Native American, just crying about the destruction of the natural sort of world and landscape. And, yeah, even I remember in cartoons. Like, I’m pretty sure there’s a Simpsons riff and bunch of other ones. So, it’s been memefied before Dawkins even came up with the idea of memes, I think.
HEDVIG: Okay, yeah. It was plastic corporations that were trying to shift the blame of the harm they’re doing to the environment to their individual consumers, instead of taking any action themselves, was that it?
SYLVIA: Allegedly. That was something I learned more recently.
HEDVIG: That sounds plausible. That sounds like a thing, for sure.
SYLVIA: Hedvig, did you say that your family was Swedish earlier?
HEDVIG: I’m Swedish.
SYLVIA: You’re Swedish. I’m kind of going back now, but there’s this chapter by Kristy Beers Fägersten, about Swedish American family members quoting, I think, it’s TV shows and maybe films, but it’s called Intertextual quotation: references to media and family interaction.
HEDVIG: Oh, interesting.
SYLVIA: It’s in this awesome book: The appropriation of media in everyday life.
HEDVIG: I wonder what they were referring to…
SYLVIA: Exactly.
HEDVIG: …because as a person growing up in Sweden, definitely, there is the Disney medley we all watch at Christmas, which everyone can quote verbatim, and which is popularly referenced by everyone. And then there is…
DANIEL: Wait, which one is that? Is it the Donald Duck one?
HEDVIG: It’s the Donald Duck. It’s Mickey Mouse on the caravan holiday. It’s Ferdinand the Bull, and a couple of other ones. It’s… Cinderella’s in there. There are just quotes from there that people can use as proverbs, and they’re just universally, like, everyone knows them. But, yeah. I wonder what families who grew up in America would be referring to, that’s interesting. Thank you for that tip.
SYLVIA: Yeah. I’m trying to look over it now. But, yeah, I thought it might be relevant.
DANIEL: We are running out of time. I do want to ask this though. A KFC ad that’s running as a bumper to YouTube clips, uses the phrase, “Shut up and take my money,” a Futurama reference. And it just blows, it just fails. Occasionally, people try to use these references in advertising and they are cringe. What’s going on?
SYLVIA: I mean, it’s like when something inside goes mainstream, I guess it kind of ruins that insider rapport benefit you get from quoting it among you and your friends. All of a sudden, like, it’s not an insider thing. So, that might be a part of it.
HEDVIG: It’s a bit, “How you doing, fellow kids?” feeling.
[LAUGHTER]
SYLVIA: Yeah.
BEN: Doing it with a meme. Love it.
SYLVIA: I’ve seen some stuff about Gen Z, like how their humor and their sense of humor online is getting increasingly absurd, and it’s to try to subvert that kind of appropriation of these things, and make it more difficult for them to get lifted and used in advertising and things like that. Now, there’s been this joke on Tiktok lately using the chair emoji as laughter, like just repeated chairs, instead of ha, ha, ha. I don’t know who’s going to be able to reappropriate that and put it into advertising, maybe a furniture company or something. So I think that’s part of it. I think that’s part of why they’re kind of cringy when they get put into advertising like that.
HEDVIG: It’s like they’re trying to be mates with you, but you know they’re not.
BEN: It’s funny how we will allow it for some things, but not for others. Right? Like, we…
DANIEL: Like what?
BEN: I mean, musicians have been selling out ferociously for years when it comes to advertising, just eons. And we all sit there and cry at the car ad that features, like, a baby asleep and being brought home or whatever it happens to be, and there’s like some Coldplay song underneath or whatever. And we’re all just kind of like: meh. We give that the free pass to tug on our heartstrings but when someone gets a bit meme-y or they try… and I think it’s more about not so much about popularity, but a perception of coolness. When people try and do something that is unironically cool, we all collectively be like: Boo. Whereas no one’s about to accuse Coldplay of being cool. It is what dads listen to. It is dad rock, it is uncool, and it’s tremendously popular, but we’re not going to sit there and be like: “Look at these tryhards, trying to get in with the young kids,” or whatever it happens to be.
DANIEL: It’s like when somebody tries to build rapport with you, and it’s not even an annoying person trying to build rapport with you, but it’s a corporation trying to build rapport with you. That’s never going to work.
BEN: Yeah, I guess that’s fair. I don’t want Coles, which is a large brand of… sorry, I’ll do a better reference than that. I’ll do a more global reference. I don’t want Apple trying to make me laugh the way my mates make me laugh.
HEDVIG: Yeah. I think John Oliver did an episode about this when foreign corporations on Twitter try to enter themselves into conversation where they don’t really belong. One of them was a company that tweeted something about 9/11, and the company was one that makes Fleshlights.
BEN: Oh, no. Wow.
HEDVIG: Which is a sex toy for men. And it’s just like, just make Fleshlights, that’s fine. Just do that. You don’t need to try and sympathise in grief or be funny or do anything else. Just focus, you don’t need to insert yourself into every conversation.
BEN: God, that must have been a bad day for that social media manager! [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Right.
SYLVIA: Yeah. I think it’s like the outsider trying to be an insider. We don’t like that. Maybe it’s part of us being territorial or just protective of our in-groups. But yeah, we just don’t appreciate that kind of behaviour.
DANIEL: The book is Millennials talking media: Creating intertextual identities in everyday conversation, available from Oxford University Press. It’s a good read. It’s by Dr Sylvia Sierra. Sylvia, thanks for sharing your work with us today.
SYLVIA: Thanks so much for chatting with me about it.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: But we’re not done, because it’s time for Words of the Week.
BEN: Ech.
DANIEL: And Sylvia Sierra, you’ve got to word for us, I believe?
SYLVIA: I tried to think of one.
BEN: I feel like Silvia surely must have her finger on the pulse. You have enmeshed yourself in trendy language.
SYLVIA: Yeah, I try. I don’t know. I try to keep up through my students. So that’s actually where this word comes from, that I’ve been thinking of. On the surface, it might seem like kind of a blah word, but it’s the word SIR. And I noticed in my students’ recordings of conversations, I have them go out and record conversations they’re a part of and transcribe portions of these conversations for us to look at in class. And often, they’re referring to each other as DUDE, BRO, and then things like SIS, and stuff like that. But in this one student’s transcript this semester, she was referring to her friend repeatedly as SIR. And it was used in this ironic way, like, “Sir, how did you not know that?” And we talked about it, and we seem to think it’s from TikTok and some other students that they use it to, but that kind of like, “Sir, this is an Arby’s” construction.
DANIEL: Oh, yeah.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah. It’s the Wendy’s.
SYLVIA: Yeah, like: “Sir, this is a Wendy’s.”
BEN: Oh, that’s fascinating.
SYLVIA: My students are taking that now, and actually referring to their friends kind of ironically, as SIR or even MA’AM some of them have said, obviously, it’s gendered but doing that when their friends are being kind of thick or they’re not like behaving in the way that is sanctioned by the group, and they’ll call them SIR or MA’AM.
HEDVIG: [GIGGLES] I like that. That’s funny.
DANIEL: That is good. You know what? I’ve been wondering, just like I wondered about Karen starting off as Janice and various other names and finally landing on Karen, do we know what other restaurants were tried before we landed on Wendy’s? Because we’ve really landed on Wendy’s.
SYLVIA: Hmm.
HEDVIG: Maybe we should explain this meme for our listeners maybe a bit more. I take it to be that if someone comes in at the Wendy’s and asked for something unreasonable, or is behaving unreasonable in some sort of way, or it’s like — I don’t know — asking for marriage counseling, and then the employee says, “Ma’am, this is a Wendy’s,” meaning, “We make fast food. I can’t solve your marriage.” That’s what I take it to mean.
DANIEL: I’ve noticed it being used when somebody makes a bold philosophical declaration. Like, “You may think that vaccines blah, blah, blah, but I tell you, I want my freedom! And I will cut down anybody who tries to stand in the way of it!” And then the next commenter will be, “Sir, this is a Wendy’s.”
[CHUCKLES]
BEN: I like that.
DANIEL: What it does is it provides a frame that the original speaker did not intend and makes the first person seems silly by contextualising it in an unexpected way. Is that what’s meant by a frame?
SYLVIA: Yeah, essentially. People use frames in different ways. But an interactive frame is one where you’re referring to the activity of talk and what’s appropriate for that activity. So, in this sense, we have a restaurant script and a set of expectations of what’s appropriate and not appropriate to do or talk about in a restaurant or fast-food setting. Actually, it’s a good observation. They’re kind of reframing it and being like, “Look, we’re in a Wendy’s. This is not the appropriate frame for this kind of talk.”
DANIEL: Are we saying that SIR is kind of taking off on this, “Sir, this is a Wendy’s”? Is that you think it’s being used?
BEN: It seems, if I’ve interpreted you correct, Sylvia, it’s drifting from its original meme usage and now it’s entering sort of just average address. So, it’s another contender for DUDE or MAN or whatever.
SYLVIA: I think that might be right because my student actually… she didn’t even know the original, like, “Sir, this is a Wendy’s,” thing. She had to look that up and she was like, “Yeah, maybe.” She’s like: “I think I started using this after getting on TikTok.” And it seems like maybe it populated across TikTok more broadly and then, she’s using it with her friends. So, it has this kind of like semantic drift almost, away from the original context.
BEN: So what I’m seeing on TikTok, if I can add my detective magnifying glass, clues to the puzzle, is that TikTok — or at least the sides, plural, of TikTok, that I find myself on — seems to have a bit of a kind of an underdog focus. A lot of TikToks come or are made from the perspective of the underdog. And I think the service industry is one that is generally seen and felt to be of underdog status, especially by TikTokers. Right? So, you’ll get a lot of people communicating in their TikToks in a service industry vernacular. So like, a lot of sirs and a lot of ma’ams. Even if they’re not necessarily pretending to be or doing a skit or reenacting anything, they’ll literally… you know, like, a TikTok might just be a lady talking to her cat being like: “Sir. No, sir. That’s not appropriate behaviour, sir.” I think that’s… what we’re seeing is that sort of stuff happening.
SYLVIA: Mhm.
DANIEL: Okay, that’s a good one. Next one, Great Resignation or the Big Quit. This, I noticed from articles by (for one) Lisa Leong at the ABC Australia. Derek Thompson’s been hitting it pretty hard in the Atlantic. It looks like people are leaving work, and it’s hard to find people to replace them. According to Microsoft, 40% of the global workforce are considering leaving their employers this year. And Thompson points out that in the accommodation and food services sector, 7% of employees left their job in August. He says “that means 1 in 14, hotel clerks, restaurant servers, and barbacks said sayonara in a single month.”
BEN: Now, just to be clear, in these stories, which I haven’t read — #ThatIsMyWay — are these people positing that this isn’t normal frictional unemployment, whereby people quit a job and then spend a shortish period of time unemployed before getting another job? They’re talking about, like a more permanent choice to be unemployed?
HEDVIG: I think they might want another job. What I interpreted from… I’ve seen this story as well in other news sources, is that during this past now almost two years of the pandemic, a lot of people have come to reevaluate what they see as meaningful in their lives and maybe decided that working for a wage is maybe not as important, or they don’t need to work as much, or they would like to do another job so that they could spend more time on other things in their life.
BEN: So, like a bit of a proxy for other people’s, like, cancer diagnosis or losing a loved one or something like that.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: I feel like people looked at their lives and said, “Hmm. Life is uncertain. If I died next month, and let’s face it, that is on the table as far as possibilities. If that happened, how would I feel about what I’m doing now?” You go back to look at work, and you just realise that this is not offering a good tradeoff.
HEDVIG: I think it’s a similar experience that a lot of people have gone through before, when losing a loved one. It’s just that it hasn’t been happening at this great…
BEN: Scale.
HEDVIG: …rate before. Yeah.
SYLVIA: I’ve also heard it analysed as a more general kind of labor strike, like people are not happy with the wages they are earning at a lot of jobs. In the US, minimum wage still hasn’t increased in years. We don’t have a living wage here. And I think a lot of people are just done with that out there.
HEDVIG: Yeah, that’s fair.
DANIEL: This could take us into the anti-work meme, which could be another Word of the Week, but maybe next time.
HEDVIG: I mean, it’s also maybe part of what we’re seeing as a movement happening in various places where people want to move out of big cities, move to smaller cities, move to the countryside, start doing their own farming, working less, start doing… I hear of people in Sweden who started trading things with their neighbours instead of using money, stuff like that.
BEN: Hedvig, you’re on Cottage Talk, aren’t you?
HEDVIG: [CHUCKLES] I’m not, but I think it’s a thing.
DANIEL: Welcome to Cottage Talk with Hedvig.
HEDVIG: And so much of it goes together with like New Age and, like, antivax and scary stuff but some of it also seems to be sane.
DANIEL: Let’s also notice that these articles are focusing on people who are lucky enough to have options. Many people have to work. The pandemic… there was never a lockdown for them, they just kept on working right through it. There is a little bit of centering the well-off in all of this.
HEDVIG: Yeah, no, that’s for sure.
SYLVIA: And the pandemic probably disproportionately affected a lot of the people that were in the lowest wage-paying jobs. A lot of them just had to keep working and got sick and died. So, that’s probably also contributing, I would think, to this labor shortage.
HEDVIG: Fuck, yeah. That’s depressing but that’s a good point.
DANIEL: I did the same thing. I’m among the group who’s lucky enough to be able to have some options and when academia called, I said, “No thanks.” And made this podcast what I’m doing.
BEN: Daniel and I are also in the especially privileged position of being in one of the few bastions of the world that hasn’t really been actually all that touched by covid basically at all.
DANIEL: No.
HEDVIG: And also, Australia has a decent working minimal wage, right?
BEN: Oh, yeah.
HEDVIG: And have a decent social security net.
BEN: We are very lucky.
SYLVIA: I’m very jealous [LAUGHS] being in the US.
DANIEL: Okay. The Great Resignation, the Big Quit. Let’s go on to our next one. And it’s suggested to us by Pontus, also known as MoonMoon.
BEN: Moon Moooooon!
DANIEL He says, “Hey, it’s ya boy Moon Moon. I’m on D&D TikTok, and there is a really interesting discussion there about languages right now. It’s about the term HUMANOID.” He pointed me to user Phoebe Lady of Chaos @deontoillogical. And the crux of it is, why do we call elves, dwarves, and gnomes humanoid? They’re like elvenoid, and at that point, I got lost. But I was able to glean enough to follow the discussion. I regained my bearings enough to tell Pontus, it reminded me of how everyone speaks English in sci-fi and Pontus agreed and said, “Yeah, it’s like in sci-fi everyone speaks Common,” and I was lost again. So, can you help?
BEN: Daniel, you absolute numpty.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: In D&D and many other fantasy enterprises, there’s usually a language that is known as Common. I think it’s slang for whatever the speakers at the table are using. So, if you’re playing D&D in Swedish, then Common is Swedish. If you’re playing it in English, it’s English. It’s like whatever you’re sharing. That’s that part. The thing about HUMANOID, this is also a thing in sci-fi. A lot of aliens that you meet — for example, I’m rewatching Star Trek now — are humanoid on the outside, like they have two arms, two hands, they have legs, but often their internal organs are different. Like, I think Vulcans have, like, three hearts.
BEN: The bits you don’t have to show, or spend money making prostheses for!
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yes, precisely. So, I always took HUMANOID to mean that you have the outside bits that look more or less like a human. You have two eyes, you have a head, you have two arms, you have a torso. There’s some variation that’s allowed, like you can have pointy ears, or you could maybe have one eye, like I think Leela in Futurama might be humanoid, even though she has one eye.
BEN: I want to put an honourable mention in herefore often-forgotten-about sci-fi franchise Farscape, which used Jim Henson puppetry and had some genuinely nonhumanoid characters throughout the series. Having said that, still heaps of humanoid characters, and just all the other properties. I find I’m really pissed off at animation. I’m like, “There’s no limitations for you guys. You can draw whatever the fuck you want! You don’t have to keep doing this.”
HEDVIG: But it’s really hard to get humans to look at a non-humanoid character, be it animated or real action, and sympathise and understand and be able to read their emotions.
BEN: Yeah. That’s true.
HEDVIG: I’ve encountered more nonhumanoid aliens, I think, in books, where characters are revealed through their actions and through their lines rather than necessarily their appearance.
BEN: I don’t know. I resonated with Kevin from the Pixar movie, Up, with a giant bird character. I’m just saying. They managed to make me really just connect with that character.
HEDVIG: But they still have, like, two eyes and a mouth and a nose.
HEDVIG: Yeah, okay.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS]
BEN: Look, if we’re drawing everything underneath two eyes and a mouth as “humanoid”, that is a pretty broad church!
DANIEL: Well, what could our term be? I mean, they mentioned ELVENOID if you’re talking about elves. What could we say?
HEDVIG: …I don’t understand the problem! [LAUGHS] I think HUMANOID is fine!
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: The problem seems to be that we as humans have an innate human bias, and this is coming out in our D&D and in our fiction.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it is.
DANIEL: And this might be a little bit… Yeah.
HEDVIG: It is, we are humans. We find it easy to relate to humans.
BEN: Yeah. And when there is another sentience species that can take umbrage with that, I think it’ll be a real thing.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Okay. Then let’s put that on the back burner for when that happens. that’ll be great. We’ll do that for a future show. Next one. This one was suggested by Running Brain on Discord. “Hi, Daniel. I’d like to propose SOAKING and JUMP HUMPING as a Word of the Week.”
HEDVIG: Oh, no.
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: I know what this is.
DANIEL: Do you?
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: I actually do as well, Daniel. Your former peoples’ dark secrets are well known.
DANIEL: …are manifest.
SYLVIA: Oh, I did see it about this. Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: Well, it came up a couple of years ago in the ex-Mormon community and I didn’t really mention it but it’s back on the radar because TikTok noticed it and blew it up.
HEDVIG: Is it real?
DANIEL: So… [EXHALES]
SYLVIA: Purportedly.
HEDVIG: Maybe let’s let… Ben, why don’t you explain?
BEN: Okay. Just because I know Daniel will need to do the more granular stuff later, I will paint the broad brushstrokes here.
DANIEL: Thank you.
BEN: Supposedly, allegedly, in Mormon communities which, the more devout of which have a pretty stern “don’t fuck people before you marry them” kind of approach, like a lot of Christian and other faiths do, a creative workaround that has been established — and this is some real mental gymnastics, so prepare yourself — has been a practice called SOAKING. Whereby, if you are possessor of a penis, can insert that penis into a vagina or an anus or a mouth of a willing participant. But if you do not thrust…
DANIEL: Um, it’s just a consensual vagina.
BEN: Okay. Oh, whoa. So, anal is like no, no? You can’t soak the anus?
DANIEL: That has not been described as soaking in my reading.
BEN: Okay. Okay! Well, thank you so much for clarifying.
DANIEL: My pleasure.
BEN: So, basically, heterosexual couples…
HEDVIG: Also, good luck getting a non-erect penis into an… Yeah.
BEN: Like, what?
DANIEL: Anyway.
BEN: Anyway. So basically, the creative workaround is if you are to insert a penis into a vagina, but not thrust or in other ways, sort of engage in what might be considered…
DANIEL: Rumpy-pumpy.
BEN: [CHUCKLES] Okay, I was going to say just widely understood, penetrative intercourse, then that’s okay. If you’re not doing the back-and-forth motion, if you’re just staying still…
DANIEL: Sitting there.
BEN: That’s…
DANIEL: God’s a T-Rex.
BEN: …which is called soaking, that’s fine in some unbelievable justification. I don’t know.
DANIEL: A sexual loophole. The sex you’re having when you’re not having sex.
BEN: Now, I’m going to ask the question Hedvig asked. Is this a thing?
DANIEL: I want to be fair. I’m not as well versed in the Mormon culture as I used to be. But I was a Mormon for 38 years and I did degrees at Brigham Young University. And I have seen how toxic and horrible Mormon sexual discourse really is. Let me just give you a taste of this. For example, Mormon scriptures, Mormon leaders, and Mormon lesson manuals describe having consensual sex as not just sin, but the sin next to murder in its seriousness.
BEN: Just to be clear, premarital. Yes?
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: Like, they’ve got no beef with you having sex with your wife?
DANIEL: That’s right. Fucking someone you’re not supposed to. One step away from literally killing someone, which is fucked up. Those are the stakes.
BEN AND HEDVIG: Wow.
DANIEL: So, I do not think that young Mormons are seriously engaging in this thing called soaking. If anything, I think it’s a joke that Mormons are in on, sort of like a form of self-critique. Even so I’m going to categorise this as only half-joking. And here’s why I say this. When I was at BYU, there was another only half-joking saying and it was, “Stay moral, go oral.” The reasoning behind this was that real sex was P-in-V. And if you had oral sex, that wasn’t really sex. It was more like foreplay, if anything. So, the soaking thing, which I do think is maybe a bit of a joke, is nonetheless right in line with legalistic Mormon thinking on sexuality. Like, I can get right up to the line and if I don’t go over the line, then I’m okay. And the line is now in this weird place because I’m super horny and pent up. And that’s part of Mormon culture too.
HEDVIG: Right. Did you explain JUMP HUMPING as well?
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] We didn’t mention that one. What’s that?
BEN: That one’s new to me.
HEDVIG: As I understand it, from what I have seen about this half-joking thing about Mormons on the internet, jump humping is when you have a third person next to you while you’re engaged in this act, while two people are engaged in this act, who jumps on the bed.
BEN: Oh my god.
HEDVIG: And the idea is that they create friction because they are the source of the motion and you’re not to blame.
DANIEL: They create the movement. That’s right. “I’m still not doing it! I’m still not doing it!”
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: That has to be it. That has to be a joke.
DANIEL: I’m almost certain that it’s not real, but it is right in line with toxic Mormon, weird, sexual, fucked-up culture. So, what do you think, Mormons? I know that you’re out there. Only half-joking? Grain of truth? I see both.
BEN: I never ever, ever, ever underestimate the power of hormonally charged sexual frustration of people in their late teens and early 20s. Right? Like, I genuinely believe that that particular cocktail of terribleness can lead people to do just about anything.
DANIEL: Yeah! So not only horny pent-upness, but also raise the stakes by saying this is a sin next to murder. This is literally next to killing somebody in seriousness. Oh my gosh, what are you going to do? You’ve got a culture where nothing’s okay. And when nothing’s okay, you don’t learn what really is okay. And that’s really messed up. Last one! We have a new sarcasm indicator.
BEN: Oh, another one?
DANIEL: Another one. The triangular flag on post emoji. It’s triangular! It’s a flag! It’s on a post and it’s red. And it’s for saying things that would be a red flag if somebody told them to you. For example, “I don’t see colour. Red flag, red flag, red flag, red flag,” or, has anyone seen other uses of the red flag?
BEN: Well, I… I’ve noticed the way that, in the example you’ve just done here, it’s not a sarcasm indicator. It’s something else.
DANIEL: Okay, help me out then, if I’m getting it wrong here.
HEDVIG: Isn’t it just literally what it says on the tin? It’s a red flag. If someone says, “I don’t see colour,” that is a red flag, you should not talk to them anymore.
SYLVIA: I read that this started on Black Twitter and that people were using it specifically about relationships, which is what I associate the red flag notion with, and then it’s spread to be more broad about warning signs about all kinds of things.
DANIEL: But somebody’s not gonna… If somebody does say seriously, “I don’t see colour,” They’re not going to include a red flag.
BEN: No.
DANIEL: You’ll only do it when you’re talking about something.
BEN: It’s not sarcasm though, is it? When performing…
DANIEL: You’re performing.
BEN: …another person’s idea, you’re signaling that it’s a very bad idea.
SYLVIA: Yeah.
BEN: I don’t have a good way to sum that up. Sorry! [LAUGHS]
SYLVIA: You’re intertextually quoting someone else’s viewpoint or something they said, and then you’re including the red flags to indicate that it’s bad.
BEN: Do you know… It’s closest to me of air quotes. It’s like a textual version of air quotes. It’s saying, “I don’t believe the thing that I’m saying.”
DANIEL: Upper and lowercase mixed, it’s a bit like that that too.
HEDVIG: I was going to say that! Yes. Like the SpongeBob, like: I dOn’T sEe CoLoUr, or whatever.
SYLVIA: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] Which I try to stay away from, because that sounds like it’s making fun of the way somebody talks.
HEDVIG: Yeah, maybe.
BEN: No, no. I will always be here for all the times that Hedvig wants to try and vocally articulate the capital-lowercase interchange. It’s always fun, and I will never let it die.
DANIEL: Anyway, it seems that the flag is proving to be a bit of a problem for people with automatic readers. There’s an article by Amanda Silberling in TechCrunch. “The red flag meme is a red flag for accessibility.” And she points out that if you’re using a voiceover text reader to use Twitter, it says, “Triangular flag on a post.” So, you can imagine how that sounds if there are like 72 of them in a row.
HEDVIG: Oh, wow.
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: That’s tough.
HEDVIG: Isn’t that emojis in general?
DANIEL: Yes. Clapping hands. If 👏 clapping hands 👏, you 👏 clapping hands 👏.
BEN: Oh god.
DANIEL: Yeah, annoying. So Silberling recommends using maybe three in a row, and that way everybody can read your memes and join in the fun.
HEDVIG: Yeah, let’s, like, not do so many. Yeah.
DANIEL: Just do less.
HEDVIG: I like it when people read out emojis, it can be quite fun. I’m watching The Circle right now, the Netflix reality show. And on there, people need to dictate what they’re saying in the chat. Have you seen this?
DANIEL and BEN: No.
HEDVIG: It’s a reality show where people chat and they say their chats. They say like, “Message: I don’t like what Tracy said last night about me, crying emoji. Send.”
BEN: Oh. So, it’s just me using my phone?
HEDVIG: Yes.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: But it’s not actually using a dictation because it must be a real person doing that because they say, “What do you think about it? Monkey who hides his eyes emoji,” and no text dictation thing is going to understand which emoji they mean. You know what I mean?
BEN: Mine does.
HEDVIG: Why, what?
BEN: Yeah. If I dictate and I throw in… it doesn’t get it right all the time, but I’ve definitely dictated some emojis and it works.
HEDVIG: Huh. Okay. Interesting.
DANIEL: Hang on.
BEN: And this is what makes me an elder millennial and you a not-elder millennial, because I’m old enough to be daggy enough to like…
HEDVIG: Trying to do that.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: [TO PHONE] So I was just hanging out with Ben Ainslie, nails emoji.
[CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: It didn’t work. It didn’t work.
BEN: Hold on. Let me try mine. Okay, I’m going to send it to Daniel specifically right now.
DANIEL: Please.
BEN: [TO PHONE] Gosh, I love Word of the Week. Smiley face emoji.
DANIEL: [TO PHONE] I love it too, upside down smiley.
BEN: Daniel?
DANIEL: I did receive it, it looks like a smiling face, but mine to Ben back doesn’t do upside down smiley. I actually literally got the words: upside down smiley.
BEN: Look, I will say, as I’m so prone to say, is you chose a trash phone ecosystem and I did not.
DANIEL: I will defend my phone ecosystem.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: And I’m getting a MacBook Pro for next week’s show. Whoo!
BEN: Anyway, we are in the weeds.
HEDVIG: Yes, truly.
DANIEL: So: SIR, GREAT RESIGNATION or BIG QUIT, HUMANOID, SOAKING and JUMP HUMPING, and Triangular Flag on Post or Red Flag Emoji 🚩: our our Words of the Week.
Let’s get to a couple of comments. We had a two-parter on generativism. It was a deep dive. Some of the concepts were tricky, even for an experienced linguist! We’ve tried to make it accessible and explain things as we went. But this came from Dermot on Patreon. Dermott says, “I’m now slightly less confused by generativism and realise why Chomsky is the devil!”
HEDVIG: Oh.
DANIEL: Yay.
HEDVIG: I’m not sure that’s what we wanted to get out of it, but that’s okay.
DANIEL: Dermot says, “Loved your guests, and also realised just how much more there is to know about linguistics and how much work you guys must have to do to keep it simple for us lay folks, because your guests cracked out some serious scientific jargon and I was sometimes lost but generally now understand more about the dichotomy. So, good. I enjoyed that in my ears and my brain,” brain emoji, thumbs up emoji, clapping, clapping, clapping.
From John on Twitter: “Wow. In the latest episode, way too academic. The terms are coming so rapidly and definitions so abstract that my brain just shut off. I think I missed somewhere what the base of generativism and functionalism are before it all kicked off.” Ben, I think this guy was on your wavelength.
BEN: I don’t want it to be classified as my wavelength! All right? Like, I freely acknowledge that some of our listeners are like hardcore, academic, uber nerds. And others like hearing us talk shit about silly things! This was for one of those two groups of people.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: What do you think, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: I think it was very hard to make the shows, and I think it was very hard to make it super accessible. We tried. But I’m sorry, John, that we didn’t succeed,…
DANIEL: I’m sorry, John.
HEDVIG: …so that you can follow along. Shorthand: generativists believe that you can boil everything down to one system and functionalists do not. There we go.
DANIEL: Fair.
HEDVIG: There we go! [LAUGHS]
BEN: But always remember, John, it’s not for you. It’s not yours.
HEDVIG: No, it is for you.
DANIEL: It is!
HEDVIG: We do a variety of topics on this show, because we want to have something for everyone. I hope you listen to other episodes.
BEN: Don’t worry, John. I’m just playing, mate. I’m just playing. I’m just playing.
DANIEL: Generativism is hard to understand because it really does involve a high level of syntactic knowledge. And syntax is not for me, it’s not for everybody else either. We try to explain things as we go but we don’t always succeed. I’m glad we did the shows. I’m actually really proud of those two episodes. I really am. I feel like we did something.
HEDVIG: And I feel like I also want to make sure that our listeners don’t take away… One of the things that came out from these two shows, for me personally, was that a lot of the schisms between generativism and functionalism aren’t as relevant anymore, and maybe aren’t as the deep schisms as they might appear, and Chomsky is not the devil and generativists are not the devil, and generativism is not necessarily dead. It’s evolving. It’s becoming a new thing. It might be concerned with research questions that you don’t find interesting.
DANIEL: Hello. 👋
HEDVIG: But that’s fine.
DANIEL: I think so too. Okay. Sylvia Sierra, thank you so much for hanging out with us today.
SYLVIA: Thank you all. It’s been a lot of fun.
DANIEL: And Ben?
BEN: …yes?
DANIEL: Change your Wi-Fi password.
BEN: Oh, you’re right. I know I should. But much like your bank, it’s just a thing you don’t ever change! [LAUGHTER] You just take that router from place to place to place and it just hangs… I seriously think I’ve had that router for like 14 years or something, like, it’s that old.
DANIEL: Let’s do the reads.
[END THEME MUSIC]
BEN: If you have a question, comment, or just want to say hi or critique my choice in Wi-Fi passwords, you can get in touch with us. We are @becauselangpod on all of the many things. I would personally love to hear all of your terrible Wi-Fi passwords and how heinous and embarrassing they would be if you shared them with your babysitters. Send us an email at hello@becauselanguage.com if you prefer the old-school ways. And if you want to help the show, which I’m sure you do — because we’re great, obviously — you could do the very simple thing of telling friends about us. Just good old word of mouth, just tell them, tell them we’re great, and that we do a great show and that you love us and… just please, please tell people! Or, the alternate version, tell a stranger about us by leaving a review in all of the many places that you can leave reviews.
HEDVIG: And I just want to say that our Wi-Fi password is really embarrassing, and we’re not changing it. We were really into space and sci-fi, so we made it Exploring Uranus.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Classic.
HEDVIG: Because we just thought it was funny to sort of mildly freak people out. Anyway. So, yeah, I encourage people to tweet at us with their funny Wi-Fi passwords. Obviously, if you… maybe you don’t want to tweet… I just realised that people maybe shouldn’t tweet their passwords to us.
DANIEL: Are you encouraging a security breach in Sector 7?
HEDVIG: Yeah, maybe I am.
SYLVIA: You can share parts of them. Actually, now I’m remembering, at the house where I shared, collected most of my data, the password had Dank Memes in it with a bunch of other characters and things.
DANIEL: Wow.
HEDVIG: Yeah, we also had some other characters and things in ours.
BEN: Look, if you happen to be in possession of nuclear launch codes, fine, don’t share your Wi-Fi password. But if you’re like me and the stakes could not be any lower, by all means, share.
HEDVIG: Or, you can share an old one that you don’t use anymore.
DANIEL: No, they never change. They never change.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I’d like to say a big thank you to all of our supporters on Patreon. They help us make episodes and release them for free without annoying ads and also make transcripts, and a special big thank you and a sendoff to Maya Klein of Voicing Words, who has been for many episodes now, transcribing all of our episodes and all the things we say, and all of the funny references that I later get messages like, “What did you actually mean?” We’re very grateful.
BEN: We finally did it, Hedvig. You and I collectively broke Maya Klein.
HEDVIG: Yes!
DANIEL: It was so great to have her doing the show for so long, and we’re really grateful. So, thank you, Maya. You are awesome.
BEN: I’m so sorry, Maya. I really am.
HEDVIG: Thank you Maya for all your work.
BEN: You have done the Lord’s work of typing up my nonsense bullshit.
HEDVIG: Exactly. Thank you so much, Maya.
DANIEL: Like, like, like, like.
HEDVIG: The great thing about having transcripts is that our show is accessible for people who can’t listen or don’t want to, and also it means that our shows are searchable, so if you are in Perth and you want to find Ben’s Wi-Fi password two years from now, you can search for it! It’ll be great!
BEN: Yeah. I fully endorse you doing that. I’m not even joking. You go nuts. Just every Wi-Fi password you come across, just lesbianham, give it a try.
HEDVIG: This is such a bad idea.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Anyway, a shoutout to our top patrons. Dustin, who is not the same Dustin of Sandman Stories, I found out, but our very own special different Dustin. Termy, Chris B, Chris L, Matt, Whitney, Helen, Bob, Udo, Jack, Lord Mortis, Kitty, Elías, Michael, Larry, Kristofer, Andy, Maj, James, Nigel, Kate, Jen, Nasrin, River, Nikoli, Ayesha, Moe, Steele, Andrew, Manú, James, Rodger, Rhian, Colleen, glyph, Ignacio, Kevin, Jeff, Dave H, Andy from Logophilius, Samantha, zo, Kathy, Rach, and the wonderful Kate B. And most recently, we’ve had some new addons, and they are Diana, Cheyenne, Felicity and Amir. Thank you so much.
DANIEL: Our theme music has been written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who’s a member of Ryan Beno and of Didion’s Bible. Thank you so much for listening. We’ll catch you next time, Because Language. And remember, don’t let your dreams become memes.
BEN: Yay.
HEDVIG: That’s fine. You can let your dreams become memes.
[PAUSE]
DANIEL: Okay, but make sure they’re good dreams.
BEN: No, Sylvia, I fully think you’ll back me on this. Teenagers should absolutely not let their memes become dreams because it is terrifying out there in Teen Memeland.
SYLVIA: Yeah, it can be.
BEN: It’s monstrous.
SYLVIA: I guess we didn’t really get into that, but yeah, it definitely can be.
BEN: Oh my god.
[BOOP]
BEN: I did not realise this. Were you guys aware of the second half of the “imitation is the highest form of flattery” quote? Do you guys know the back half of that?
DANIEL: No, what is it?
BEN: So it’s just like…
HEDVIG: Imitation is the highest form of flattery, and…
BEN: Yeah. So, it’s Oscar Wilde.
DANIEL: But satisfaction brought him back.
HEDVIG: Oh, Is it “real artists steal”?
BEN: No.
HEDVIG: Oh.
DANIEL: “Genius steals.”
BEN: Imitation is the highest form of flattery… that mediocrity can pay to genius, I believe.
HEDVIG: Ohhh.
DANIEL: Ohh, interesting.
SYLVIA: Ouch.
BEN: This also comes to me by way of my partner, who is smarter and better than me in every single way. And it’s just reminded me of all the other quotes like that, that we know of, like…
HEDVIG: Great minds think alike and fools never differ.
BEN: Yes. Or: Blood is thicker than water. Or… what’s the one?
DANIEL: My country, right or wrong. When right, to be kept right. When wrong, to be put right.
BEN: Jack of all trades, that sort of stuff.
DANIEL: Ah, Jack of all trades, master of none. But… oh, no, I know this one. I know this one.
BEN: I do as well but I’ve forgotten it.
HEDVIG: What’s the blood’s thicker than water one?
BEN: Blood thicker than water, in common usage, tends to mean family is more strong than other bonds in your life. But the original saying is that the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb, which is the exact opposite of what the thing means now!
HEDVIG: Oh. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: Here it is. Jack of all trades, master of none… though oftentimes, better than master of one. It’s the opposite meaning, right?
BEN: Well, it’s gone full circle. It’s cycled, if you will, because now we say “Jack of all trades”, which is a compliment. Then, if you feel a bit snooty as I did for many years, I was like, “Um, actually, that ends with jack of all trades, master of none.” So that’s a negative.
DANIEL: And then, I come in. [LAUGHS]
BEN: And then if you read the full thing, it’s like, “Oh, we’ve gone full circle. Jesus.”
DANIEL: It often goes like that though.
BEN: Yeah, I know. It’s almost like there’s a spiral or a cycle or something.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: It’s a kind of… Yeah, hm.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]