69 - Mailbagussy

944 turns

• linkDaniel Midgley - If I want to know about all the words, do I have to get on TikTok?What do I-- you know, come on.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah, probably.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Nah.
• linkBen Ainslie - Certainly if you want to find out about young people's words, definitely.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I just have to open it up and just, like, start watching.I got shit to do.
• linkBen Ainslie - Because young people don't read Twitter.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I've seen you on Twitter, Daniel.You don't have shit to do.
• linklaughter
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay.No, it's just that Twitter is one of that shit, one of those shitty things that I got to do.
• linkBen Ainslie - What I would say is just do a bit less Twitter and a bit more TikTok.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Because Language theme
• linkDaniel Midgley - Hello, and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language.I'm Daniel Midgley.Let's meet the team.We have the hardworking, the capable, the one who cats love to sit on.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Hedvig Skirgård.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yes.Hello.It's cold in Europe, so my cats sit on me because it's cold.It's science, baby.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I think it's charming.Heat seekers.
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh, yeah.Heat-seeking purrmissiles.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.I have two hot water bottles with very cute covers.This is one of the covers.
• linkBen Ainslie - I really feel like you should have more respect when you talk about your cats.That’s not right now.
• linkDaniel Midgley - It's not the cats.It's actual hot water bottles.
• linkBen Ainslie - laughsI'm joking.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - But I have placed these around a bed and around the house, and the cats actually do not particularly go for them.
• linkDaniel Midgley - That’s funny.
• linkBen Ainslie - Well, that would suggest to me, Hedvig, that something is at work beyond simply warmth.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Exactly, so.
• linkDaniel Midgley - They want to take up the space that you're taking up.
• linkBen Ainslie - laughsYes.Baser level dickheadery-crosstalk
• linkDaniel Midgley - Trying to drive you out.They don't care about the water bottles.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - We also have the lovely and talented Ben Ainslie, who has a cat who probably sits on him.
• linkBen Ainslie - Nah, nah, not as much.Australia is pretty warm.My cat, as affectionate as she is, and she is a very affectionate cat.She'll come in for it, and she'll be like, "Oh, hey, what's going on?I'm in a real purry mood.Hey, I should definitely sit in your lap and purr away." And then, you start patting her, and after about five minutes, she clearly is like,growls"It's time to go, bro.I got to go.I'm sorry.This has been nice, but I'm out."
• linkDaniel Midgley - My kids do the same thing."Daddy.Ugh, you're hot.Oh, my goodness."
• linkBen Ainslie - "You've been way too warm."
• linkHedvig Skirgård - What is the temperature in Perth right now?
• linkBen Ainslie - It's actually been a very mild summer so far.
• linkDaniel Midgley - It's been very temperate.
• linkBen Ainslie - Not too many stinkers.So, it's just been sitting around, like, 30, 32, 33 kind of thing, which for us is, like, luxurious.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Hmm.And has everyone had a good break?We have taken a bit of a break, but now we're back.I've enjoyed the holidays.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I had a pretty good holiday.
• linkBen Ainslie - It's really nice to see you guys.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah, great to be here.Hey, in our earlier episodes, we did our Words of the Week of the Year for 2022.Of course, our Word of the Week of the year was--
• linkBen Ainslie - I can't even remember.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yes.
• linkDaniel Midgley - It was "Yes".Yes for nonpolar questions.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - How many meatballs do you want?Yes.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yes.laughs
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yes.But earlier this month, members and friends of the American Dialect Society piled into a room, as they do every year, and voted on their Word of the Year.I wasn't able to attend this time because it was live only, but it sounds like it was a lot of fun, as always.It's always kind of fun to see which ones of our words get selected.Of course, we nominated many of ours.We nominated "bachelor's handbag" even though it was Australian, just for fun.
• linkBen Ainslie - How do we tend to do out of interest?How on the money does Talk the Talk tend to be?
• linkDaniel Midgley - What show?What's the name?What?
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh.laughsShit.Ooh.
• linkDaniel Midgley - That's a dollar in the Talk jar.
• linkBen Ainslie - Hedvig has clearly infected me with her slow, getting started of the engine.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Don't blame Hedvig.Hedvig doesn't do that shit.
• linkBen Ainslie - laughs
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Have I been slow in this conversation so far?
• linkBen Ainslie - No, not at all.
• linkDaniel Midgley - laughs
• linkBen Ainslie - But I am desperately grasping at straws to justify my own-crosstalk
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, okay.
• linkDaniel Midgley - We just know that it's early for you, and you just woke up with cats.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - You can throw me under the bus, it's okay.
• linkDaniel Midgley - You woke up with cats on you.We don't blame you at all.
• linkBen Ainslie - How does Because Language end?In a prior incantation, the show that shall not be named, how do we stack up?How do we tend to do are we, like, tastemakers who never fail to miss a shot?Or are we on our own little weird level?
• linkDaniel Midgley - We're about 50/50.There are only a few that I've never, ever heard of, and then most of them have been at least featured if they didn't make our top 10.There are a lot of emoji that we didn't get.There are some forehead slappers.It's like, "Oh, I can't believe I missed that one."
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Can I just say, I'm not confident that I care?
• linkBen Ainslie - About emojis?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - No, I would be quite happy if Because Language was a little separate universe sphere.
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay.You wanted to find our own weird, wild, and wonderful parts of linguistics.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay.I understand that.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I feel like I'm very happy with that.I don't feel like we need to conform to the rest.
• linkBen Ainslie - Cool, cool, cool, cool.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay.
• linkBen Ainslie - Well, gee willikers, Daniel.Now, I want to know, what do we got?Lay them on me.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Well, let's start with their Word of the Year, because it's the one that everyone's seen around the place, and, boy, is this one polarizing.Their Word of the Year was a combining form, a piece of a word that you stick on to other words and it’s…
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh, I know what's coming.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Ussy.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yup.
• linkDaniel Midgley - A suffix that started its life as pussy.It then moved in the gay community to bussy, a boy pussy, which is your ass.Also, ussification, the process of creating new blended words with the 'ussy' suffix.Man, oh, man.It won, and it was not close.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - And people were mad.
• linkDaniel Midgley - And people were elated as well.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkBen Ainslie - What are the other productive endings of 'ussy'?Because I know bussy.Boy pussy.What else is-
• linkHedvig Skirgård - There are not that many.
• linkBen Ainslie - -more than just like, a flash in the pan?
• linkDaniel Midgley - You can fuck somebody in the thrussy.
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I think people argue that you could also do it for, like, mailboxes, a mailussy or USB--crosstalk
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay.I'm sure people could argue that, but are they using it?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I-- Umm.
• linkBen Ainslie - I sense a strong vein of doubt in Hedvig.That's what I wouldcrosstalkis.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - It's like when we had on the show a couple of episodes ago, we were talking about the 'fucking' infix, and people are like" Abso-fucking-lutely." And then people can think of, like four more--
• linkBen Ainslie - Fan-fucking-tastic and like a few--
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Fan-fucking-tastic.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Unbe-fucking-lievable.
• linkBen Ainslie - Now, we're going to get listeners coming in with the other three members of this category.
• linkDaniel Midgley - It's not three.It's terribly productive.You can do it with any--
• linkBen Ainslie - Then, bet, buddy.Give me a list.Come on, let's hear it.Ones that you have used.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Give me a four-syllable word.
• linkBen Ainslie - No, as in--
• linkHedvig Skirgård - No, ussy.
• linkBen Ainslie - Not the in fucking-crosstalk
• linkDaniel Midgley - Oh, with ussy.Oh, okay.Well, we featured a TikTok video where a TikToker said, "Hey, there's only one chargeussy in this room." I like electrussy personally."Hey, this stereo has a cassettussy.I didn't know we still use those."
• linkHedvig Skirgård - But that was a comedy TikTok video.
• linkDaniel Midgley - It was.
• linkBen Ainslie - They're making fun of the ridiculousness of it as a, "I want numbers.Damn it."laughs
• linkDaniel Midgley - Let's be clear.Anybody who does use this is doing it so that they can be funny and a little bit offensive and creative.That is true.
• linkBen Ainslie - I've got to be honest though.Can I be like the curmudgeon?Oh, that's unusual for me, I know.Just be like, is the vaguely funny-- I'm not ruling on the quality of the funny because obviously that's super subjective, but more just the fact that it's not that popular as a satirical motif.Is that really what we think should be Word of the Year?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Here's the other aspect.You wouldn't believe how happy some people were that this one-- but there was a sense of lightness of frivolity.We've had so many political dark words.We've had so many cohort words.The idea that this was something fun and silly and gender neutral-- I wasn't even there, and the sense I got from reading all of the tweets was just this palpable sense of joy and disgust.
• linkBen Ainslie - Look, I guess I kind of get that.But at the same time, I'm also like, "Is this just the tragic desperation of a bunch of people who just don't want another sad thing?"
• linkBen Ainslie - laughter
• linkcrosstalk
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Also, I think it's masquerading like-- a lot of people, in particular Americans, and for good reasons, don't want to talk about the pandemic being over.Right?
• linkBen Ainslie - Hmm.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Hmm.Because it's not.
• linkcrosstalk
• linkDaniel Midgley - It's fucking not.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Last Word of the Year was something at least crisis related, right?
• linkDaniel Midgley - What was the ADS Word of the Year last year?I should remember this.This is the problem with the whole enterprise, isn't it?
• linkBen Ainslie - Well, look, I think within our show, we can pretty clearly see there's two nays and one yay to this being the Word of the Year.Daniel seems pretty chuffed by it, and the Hedvig and I, we're both against it--
• linkHedvig Skirgård - It's fine.
• linkBen Ainslie - It's fine but you don't want fine to be the thing that wins.You want something awesome and really productive and linguistically impressive and all those sorts of things to be the thing that wins the Word of the Year, in my opinion.Anyway, what did it beat out?Let's really get our pitchforks sort of like--crosstalk
• linkDaniel Midgley - I'm not done.I'm not done with ussy.I think the emergence of a new productive form is something interesting, like "because" it's an old word, but it got used in new ways, and so they liked it.
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh, like the no--
• linkDaniel Midgley - No, because.
• linkBen Ainslie - Like that.I'm seeing that way more than ussy, like everywhere.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay, all right, here's the other thing.There's another template that ussy is used for, and that is putting one's whole ussy into something.I used it when I was talking about Grover on Sesame Street during the Grover Dance.He put his whole groverussy into it.One of the items that our patrons are going to be getting is a sticker.Put your whole linguussy into it.
• linkBen Ainslie - gasps
• linkHedvig Skirgård - It's a funny joke.I agree with you.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - laughter
• linkHedvig Skirgård - It is funny how it is so evocative of something like fleshy.
• linklaughter
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yes, very much.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Immediately, right?
• linkBen Ainslie - It is.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - If someone says electrussy or USBussy or something, you're like, "Hmm.It's now wet and fleshy and moist."
• linkBen Ainslie - For me, it's really reminiscent of the lack of a word, in English certainly, for the butthole.There's no--
• linkDaniel Midgley - I feel like there are many.
• linkBen Ainslie - No, there are many.What I mean is there is no authentically neutral way to refer to that thing.Like, you could say-
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Anus.
• linkBen Ainslie - -penis.No.Yeah, you can say penis.You can say vulva or vagina depending on where you fall on that particular one.But if you say anus, it sounds weirdly scientific, as opposed to the other ones, which just sound like normal descriptors.But if you don't go with anus or sphincter-- like if you've got a problem that you need your partner to look at, for instance, and you need to say to them, "I need you to have a look at my--" if you say anus-
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Butt.
• linkBen Ainslie - -it's like you're doing a weird doctor thing.If you say butt, you're not being clear enough because they're going to ask, "What part of your butt?"
• linkHedvig Skirgård - No, they're not.
• linkBen Ainslie - And you will say--laughs
• linkDaniel Midgley - My bussy.That's what I need.I need you to look at my bussy.
• linkBen Ainslie - And then, you have to say, I mean, "my anal sphincter," or "my butthole." And there's just no neutral-- there's no middle line.There's no pun intended.
• linkDaniel Midgley - laughsFor some people, there is, Ben.
• linkBen Ainslie - I find pussy and ussy a similar thing.It's a deeply--
• linkDaniel Midgley - Deeply.
• linkBen Ainslie - If you say butthole, a person is just like, "Hah.Yep, that is just right there in my head now." I feel like ussy is exactly the same thing.Like, if you say vigussy or groverussy or whatever, there's just an instantaneous likeonomatopoeia.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Oh.That’s the look that Hedvig gave just a second ago,Hedvig gigglingthe squashy Kermit face was the same.
• linkBen Ainslie - That wasn’t me.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I was describing ussy to my 27 year old son and he just sat there with a look on his sour lemon face and then he said, "No."
• linkHedvig Skirgård - No.That's not the thing you want your father to describe to you.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah, exactly.Right.Okay.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Sorry, kid, your father's a linguist.
• linkBen Ainslie - Anyway, ussy is the Word of the Year.Are we done?Can we talk about what it beat?
• linkDaniel Midgley - The other ones that it beat out:Dark Brandon, the sinister, powerful alto ego of Joe Biden.
• linkBen Ainslie - Ah, boo.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Quiet Quitting, boo.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah, I'm also not done with that.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Slava Ukraini.Glory to Ukraine.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Is that a Word of the Year or a sentiment we have?That's the question.
• linkBen Ainslie - I haven't come across Slava Ukraini much myself.I don't know if that's more prevalent in European blogosphere or something.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I've heard it a lot at demonstrations in TikToks and things, but I don't think anyone would call it the English Word of the Year.
• linkDaniel Midgley - It's something that I've seen people say and write and stick on their profiles.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, but people-- yeah, anyway.Mm-hmm.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Special Military Operation.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - That's an interesting Word of the Year because it doesn't mean what it looks like it means.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yes, it's a lie.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - It's a lie, which is--
• linkDaniel Midgley - It's a euphemism.I think we'll see it come up again in the Euphemism of the Year, but anyway.Let's see the one that I missed.Rizz, short for charisma.
• linkBen Ainslie - A fresh entrant in the oh-so-special category of words you should not use if you are over the age of, like, 25, 26, lest you run the very real risk of seeming horrendously, tragic and out of touch.It is a very young person's word.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Come on, I got the rizz.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - That sounds like Hedvig Catnip.
• linkBen Ainslie - laughsI'm trying to warn you now, mate.It's not for us.
• linkDaniel Midgley - chuckles
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I'm going to walk up to some young people.
• linkBen Ainslie - I will say this though, rizz has definitely taken off.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh, yeah?
• linkBen Ainslie - It is the word that everyone under the age of 25 uses to mean essentially how sexy they are or how attractive they are to the people that they want to attract in the world.No one says, "Oh, you're looking good," anymore, if you're young.I see predominantly young people be like, "Oh, check out the rizz," or like, "Look at this person's rizz." "Look at my rizz."
• linkHedvig Skirgård - It's like swag.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah, basically.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Cool.
• linkBen Ainslie - But specifically, from an attracting a mate kind of dimension.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.Okay.
• linkDaniel Midgley - That quiet confidence, that effortless, attraction, power.
• linkBen Ainslie - And then, you see a lot of people playing with it, like people in wheelchairs making jests about, like, "What's my rizz?" And then, the camera zooms out to, "My wheels and my rizz," and stuff like that.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Ah,okay.
• linkBen Ainslie - Next one, most useful or most likely to succeed, the word, Climate Criminal, somebody who flies in jets a lot.
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Long Termism, a view toward improving the distant future.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wait.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah, I kind of like that.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Question.This category is the word that people think is going to stick around the most?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Correct.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Okay, this sounds like a good Word of the Year.
• linkBen Ainslie - laughs
• linkDaniel Midgley - It's a good category.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Like that category sounds like what Ben and I want the Word of the Year to be.
• linkBen Ainslie - Sure.
• linkDaniel Midgley - You want it to becrosstalksomething that'll stick around?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Let's focus in on this.
• linkBen Ainslie - Cool.
• linkDaniel Midgley - All right, all right.Nepo Baby.
• linkBen Ainslie - Hmm.Wow.crosstalkA late entrant, right?
• linkDaniel Midgley - A late entrant.
• linkBen Ainslie - But ooh, but hit the scene strong.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah.unintelligible [00:16:45was the one who put that out there.Switching to a different document, there was an article by Nate Jones in New York Magazine, possibly a tad deranged in its completeness revealing that supermodels actors, photographers, people in the industry are there, they may not be there because of their parents, but they definitely have parents.And Hollywood and politics.
• linkBen Ainslie - laughsWhat does that sentence mean?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - They got a privileged start.
• linkBen Ainslie - Everyone gotcrosstalkparents, Daniel.
• linkDaniel Midgley - They got a privileged start.I'm not saying I know why they're famous because, of course, they work hard, it's like that.
• linkBen Ainslie - Well, the article is very much saying that.You can just say what the article was saying.The article was definitely saying that they are famous because their parents parachuted them into fame and success.
• linkDaniel Midgley - That's what the article alleges, yes.Hollywood acting and politics, definitely dynastic.You know what else is dynastic?Academia.One of the best indicators of being an academic is that your parents were academics, like my dad was.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkBen Ainslie - Absolutely.Shame you're not, Daniel.Oh.Pew, pew, pew.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I escaped.laughs
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I'm the first in my family to have a PhD, though.No, I'm a second.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Congratulations.
• linkBen Ainslie - No one cares about the sophomore PhD.
• linkDaniel Midgley - laughs
• linkHedvig Skirgård - My cousin, Frederick, were the same kinship tier and he--
• linkDaniel Midgley - You're still special.
• linkBen Ainslie - What PhD did he get?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - He is in computer security, cybersecurity stuff.
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh.That's a good one.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Ooh.Okay.
• linkBen Ainslie - crosstalk-PhD.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - He gets interviewed on the news sometimes when they're like, "Oh, no, someone is being hacked."
• linkBen Ainslie - crosstalk-what a wanker.Oh, we hate Frederick.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - laughs
• linkDaniel Midgley - When we're talking about nepotism, we often don't talk about the flip side of nepotism, and that is that poverty can be passed down from generation to generation.There are certain kinds of professions that aren't paid well, and they get taken up by successive generations too.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - It's passing on profession, but that is not what the word 'nepotism' means.
• linkBen Ainslie - No.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Nepotism is passing on privilege and success.Do you know where 'nepo' comes from?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Go ahead, Hedvig.I know this one, but I want you to say.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I think it's Latin for nephew, right?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yes, it is.Italian.Yes, nipote.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkBen Ainslie - There we go.I think nephew is a good spot.
• linkDaniel Midgley - What if it's not your nephew?
• linkBen Ainslie - It's just nisotism?
• linkDaniel Midgley - laughs
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Nibblingism.
• linkBen Ainslie - Nibblitismcrosstalkgot the same time.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Nibblingism.We need that.That's the word.The winner in this category, quiet quitting.Drawing a line between your work and your life and not letting it invade.
• linkBen Ainslie - Here's my thing on why I don't particularly love quiet quitting.Sorry, I want to be clear.Here's my thing on why I don't like the phrase 'quiet quitting' as a representation of the idea behind it.The idea behind it is perfectly valid.It's just exercising professional boundaries.That is a very acceptable thing that all people should be doing.
• linkDaniel Midgley - That's not quitting at all, in any respect.
• linkBen Ainslie - It's not that for me.Quiet quitting for me, it has an inherently negative connotation to it, which I feel like people who want to work against it, bad actors who want to bring it down, like this ideacrosstalkcan latch onto and just be like-- it's got laziness connotations.It's got all this stuff.And none of the stuff that happens when you exercise professional boundaries and when you say, "I am fulfilling my fiduciary responsibilities, but not more than that." None of that is lazy.That is just a perfectly-- not only reasonable, but a healthy societal thing to have in place.So, I don't love the fact that it's so easily sneered at.
• linkDaniel Midgley - People will demagogue it definitely.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wasn't there another competitive term that had a better vibe?
• linkBen Ainslie - It was "act your wage," I believe.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Act your wage.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Act your wage is one of ours.But the way people have described it is "work to rule." Work to rule is a tactic that's been used, it is the same as quiet acquitting and it's been used effectively for a long time.Let's call it that.Work to rule or act your wage.
• linkBen Ainslie - What does work to rule?Rule what?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I don't understand.
• linkBen Ainslie - Or like working to the rule, as in working to your job description.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I have underresearched this one.Work to rule--
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Is this like work to a ruler?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Work to rule has its own Wikipedia page, and why is it called that?Yes, that's correct.You are working according to the rules required by your contract and strictly following the rules.Yes, that's right.
• linkBen Ainslie - In Australia, we call those duty statements, like doing your duty would be just fulfilling the dot points in your contract.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Which for a lot of people's-- yeah, okay.
• linkDaniel Midgley - No, please.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - There are a lot of professions where that is not obvious, unfortunately.
• linkBen Ainslie - That is true.I would say the vast majority of professions is like that, actually, if we're being completely candid.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.It is tricky because-- Veronica, right?Like the TikTok, Sketch with Veronica.
• linkBen Ainslie - The cup lady?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.She is seemingly at a call center or something--
• linkDaniel Midgley - Or on a phone all the time, something.
• linkBen Ainslie - I think I might have started there, but then it just broadened to just be a general like amorphous work situation.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Right.Because I've been thinking lately about the similarities between academia and being an artist.
• linkBen Ainslie - Go on, please.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - They're a bit similar actually, because in both cases you're a bit working for yourself.I'm employed somewhere to do research, but I am also employed to develop myself.Right?
• linkDaniel Midgley - True.
• linkBen Ainslie - Academically speaking, like your body of knowledge, you--
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Academically speaking, like my CV.If I publish things that I think are interesting and I publish a lot of papers, then I'm doing my job for my employer.But when I go to a new job, that still benefits me, that's like building my thing.And similarly, if you get a grant--
• linkBen Ainslie - Can I ask, is that hugely different from any professional development in any line of work?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - In the sense that you're sort of-- I don't know how to explain it.I feel like you're a bit like a freelancer in a way.
• linkBen Ainslie - It's a little bit more amorphous rather than like, "We need you to go and do this course so you can build this specific thing for our company." It's like, "Go to this conference-- I don't know, what you pick up is good, I guess."
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - laughs
• linkBen Ainslie - I do feel like a lot of places and professions do that though.They're just like, "Oh, okay, there's a symposium on blinds," so the people in our blinds industry are going to go to the symposium or whatever.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.But they're going there to then go out to customers and get better at putting up blinds.Whereas I feel like I'm not sure if we ever do that part.
• linkBen Ainslie - And have affairs, obviously.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Anyway, what I wanted to say, and we're going to circle back-
• linkBen Ainslie - laughsSorry, Daniel.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Daniel is making signs, is that acting your wage sounds great and quiet quitting sounds great.Part of that, if we're going to give practical advice, is also figuring out what that is and having a frank conversation with your employer about what that is, because it might not be obvious.
• linkDaniel Midgley - True, that's a good point.
• linkBen Ainslie - That's also really contingent on having a good boss who is a good communicator, which like fucking vanishingly few people are lucky enough to have.I am one of those people.I count my blessings every single day.But I know many, many humans have just really unhelpful humans in that position in their lives, and my heart goes out to them.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Mm.Let's go quickly to Digital Word of the Year.Here were the nominees.Chief Twit, meaning Elon Musk.That's how he described himself on Twitter.Crypto rug pull, which is where there's a crypto scam and then the guy with the hat disappears out of town a monorail.
• linkBen Ainslie - Can I ask on this one, why did they go with crypto rug pull and not just rug pull?
• linkDaniel Midgley - I think crypto rug pull is specific to the way that scammers will start NFTs and then just disappear with the money.
• linkBen Ainslie - No, I totally get that.I think the thing that I-- if you are in those spaces, because I definitely descended into those spaces, not because I wanted to be part of them, but because I wanted to see and understand, they do not call them crypto rug pulls.They call them rug pulls.Pump and dumps and there's rug pulls.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Let's go with that.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I feel like I need to explain to our non-English listeners, because I had to read.The word that Daniel and Ben are saying is 'rug', as in the thing you have on the floor and 'pull' rugby, as they know you pull it.They're saying it very quickly, and they're saying 'rug pull,' and it sounds like they're saying rugby, but it's not.
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay.I apologize.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - No, it's okay.
• linkBen Ainslie - My Australian is showing.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I heard you speak and I read the thing, and I was like, "Now, I get it."
• linkBen Ainslie - To literally pull the rug out from under someone is where this comes from.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Isn't it funny how expressions start out as an entire sentence and then they just go to a two-word phrase, like a rug pull--
• linkBen AinslieHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I'm supposed to know what that is.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - How everyone is wishing me a Happy New Year.
• linkBen Ainslie - What?
• linkDaniel Midgley - They are?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Instead of a Happy New Year.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Happy New Year instead of a Happy New Year, it's stress.Did people wish you a Happy New Year?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Ben, please wish me something.
• linkBen Ainslie - Here it is.I hope you have a super Happy New Year.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Okay.
• linkDaniel Midgley - That was pretty even.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - That was pretty even.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Happy New Year.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - A lot of people are wishing me a Happy New Year instead of Happy New Year.
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh.Okay.Emphasis in syllable.Yeah, got it.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - We also had touch grass, which we know about.
• linkBen Ainslie - Love it.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Go and touch grass.
• linkBen Ainslie - Big fan of the idea.Big fan of the linguistic sort of encapsulation.Love it.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I think that was one of ours for the previous year.But the winner 'dle' suffix for Wordle like games.Yeeesss.
• linkBen Ainslie - I do not like this.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Why not?
• linkBen Ainslie - Because it's not the D-L-E suffix that gets used.It's the L-E.The D gets dropped all the time.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay, Ben.
• linkBen Ainslie - All the time.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Movie?
• linkBen Ainslie - No, global.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay, but if it's movie, it's not moviele, it's moviedle.The D is in there.
• linkBen Ainslie - To be fair, the better one is framed anyway.
• linkDaniel Midgley - laughs
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Ben, there's this thing in linguistic called allomorphs.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yes, please.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - You know how in English you can do plurals by adding an S?
• linkBen Ainslie - Yes.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Word words.Sometimes, you add an 'es'.
• linkBen Ainslie - We are really digging deep on the linguistic situation here.Yes.I knowlaughs's' creates plurals.
• linkDaniel Midgley - But do you?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - But do you?What's a good example when it's 'es'?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Horse.
• linkBen Ainslie - Like buses.Horses, whatever.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Bus, buses, right.Okay.We say that 'es' and 's' and 'za' are all the same thing.They're just realized a bit differently in different contexts.
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Would you accept the same thing for 'dle' and 'le'?
• linkDaniel Midgley - They're allomorph, so the same morpheme.
• linkBen Ainslie - I'll allow it.
• linkDaniel Midgley - laughs
• linkHedvig Skirgård - There we are.We arrived.
• linkBen Ainslie - So begrudgingly, but I'll allow it.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - laughsI saw that.I heard and I saw it.You were not happy.
• linkBen Ainslie - laughs
• linkDaniel Midgley - Had to extract that 'D', I had to extract the 'dle'.
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay.With the 'le' suffix, as I will think of it and refuse to think of it any other way.laughs
• linkDaniel Midgley - Next.Informal Word of the Year.There was the ick.Feeling gross about one's date, gives me the ick.
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh, hang on.Can we rewind one second?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah.
• linkBen Ainslie - My understanding of ick is that is absolutely not, A, where it came from, or B, where it most gets used.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah, I think so too.
• linkBen Ainslie - My understanding certainly the place I see it used the most is people from the autism spectrum disorder community talking about the things, both physical and nonextant, that cause them significant aversion.So, like, microfiber cloths seem to be one thatcrosstalkautistically for the world overcrosstalkthe ick for.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I totally agree.crosstalk
• linkBen Ainslie - I just wanted to really just get in there and say I feel we've, first of all, appropriated ick from the autism community.B, it has such a wider connotation than just romantic dating.You can absolutely get an ick from a person, no question, but it's bigger than that.Carry on.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Cool.Thank you.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - There is a weird thing that's happening that I don't know if it's this show's thing to talk about, buthonkdid you guys hear that?
• linkBen Ainslie - Whose house is that?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - That was on my street.Someone honking.
• linkBen Ainslie - Damn.That was not someone.Surely, that was a truck.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - No.I don't know.There's a problem in Leipzig with buckaroo parking.
• linkBen Ainslie - laughs
• linkDaniel Midgley - Well, there's a Word of the Week.
• linkBen Ainslie - What is buckaroo parking?Is it double parking?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - It's what Germans call illegal parking, a wild parking.People are parking in weird places.And the Leipzig municipalitycrosstalkBen laughing hilariously
• linkDaniel Midgley - Buckaroo parking.That's so Texas.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I was reading Leipzig News, and I've been annoyed with people park in strange places here.At intersections, they park on the corners.
• linkBen Ainslie - What are we living in like a post-apocalyptic hellscape?No.Come on.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - No, exactly.Anyway, my guess is the film was honking because someone was buckaroo parking.
• linkBen Ainslie - We're coming back to it, by the way, buckaroo parkingcrosstalk.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Totally.
• linkchuckles
• linkHedvig Skirgård - About the ick thing, there's a weird thing that happens if you are in TikTok and if you almost enter from anywhere and are in any of the TikToks, sooner or later, it seems like a lot of people, me, and I think Ben included, will get content that are about having ADHD and/or autism.
• linkBen Ainslie - And I'm nodding firmly.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - And it is a little bit odd because it's not something that I think I have, but it's content that is popular because sometimes it overlaps with feelings that people that don't have those things also have.Like, when you feel hyper focus or something, or when you feel you're procrastinating, but it gets framed as, like, when you have ADHD, and it's like, "I'm not sure I have that." So, it means that this term, ick, when people in the autism spectrum are talking about it ends up on mine and Ben's pages.It's like, "I don't know how it got there, but okay."
• linkBen Ainslie - Look, I think we can all agree, just working purely by the numbers, it was either pilfered from gay people or black people probably, originally.If we really had to take a stab, I think we are really well placed to feel like that's probably where it was originally appropriated from.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Or taken from black people and then queer people.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Our run sheet says black drag culture.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Oh.Wait, wait, wait, wait.
• linkBen Ainslie - Double header.
• linkDaniel Midgley - No, that's for the winner.Which was it's giving X.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh, yeah.Sorry.
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh.Okay.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Description of something exuding a particular vibe or energy, and it comes from black drag culture, and it's not one that I've ever, ever, ever heard.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - What?
• linkBen Ainslie - Can you give us an example from your research, Daniel?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Hedvig, please.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - What do you mean?
• linkDaniel Midgley - You seem to know.
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh, it's giving like big nose vibes or something.Like something is that--?crosstalk
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.Or like if I went and said, like, "Extra-extra," you can say it's giving newspaper boy.crosstalklaughs
• linkDaniel Midgley - The X is just a noun, is that it?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.Or an adjective, but usually a noun.But it's like--what's a good--
• linkDaniel Midgley - If I throw up on the rug, it's giving cat.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yes.I am currently obsessed with painting things in bright colors, and I think that's giving millennial women an existential crisis.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yes.Okay, cool, gotcha.There can be a lot of nouns.laughs
• linkDaniel Midgley - Wow.An entire noun phrase.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Right.I have had to switch to almost entirely decaf coffee.I think that is also giving millennial women existential crisis.
• linklaughter
• linkDaniel Midgley - That is fascinating.Thank you.I didn't know about that one.There are two here that seem to trade on the platty jubes templates.Remember how we talked about platty jubes for the platinum jubilee?I said, "I feel this is a template and I just don't know what it is," And many people have been very helpful.Kitty gave us a whole list, not PharaohKatt, but the other Kitty.But Helen on Twitter and Lord Mortis on Discord pointed me to cozzie livs.There's a possibly fictional conversation."I can't go that low.Sorry, babe.Especially with the cozzie livs and all that jazz," and the-crosstalk
• linkBen Ainslie - Cost of living, got you, yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Slang, cost of living, prices.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Ah, cost of living.Thank you.
• linkBen Ainslie - Took me a second, I was struggling.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkBen Ainslie - laughs
• linkDaniel Midgley - But the one that made the informal Word of the Year nomination was one that I'm not too keen on, menty-b, having a bit of a menty-b, mental breakdown, which I feel like I want to bop that person upside the head and say, "Talk better about mental health issues," but those two things do seem to follow that template, so I thought I would point them out.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - That reminds us that all of these dictionaries of the word and things, everyone is using different ways of measuring what that is.It feels like some of the things is, "We want to talk about a phenomena that we like or that got a lot of attention, and not like--" Daniel, when you just said that you don't really love the term, menty-b, for a mental breakdown because maybe you feel like it trivializes or makes it smaller or something.You're speaking as a subjective person about your judgments and opinions about it.It's not obvious what this exercise of picking a word is doing, because if it's just like picking the most unique word for this year that wasn't around much before and that popped up a lot this year and signified something, then it should just be a numbers game.
• linkBen Ainslie - I would also say as well, that is definitely informal.Like, it takes a very serious thing and very informalizes it, like that's its category.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh, yeah, the menty-b.Yeah.
• linkBen Ainslie - I thought you were going to say, people might be doing it to work through their own issues and came upon that phrase and words, so okay, if that's the case, maybe.Let's just run through a few little scraps here.The euphemism of the year was special military operation, but I noticed also leg booty.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - What?
• linkBen Ainslie - Please.
• linkDaniel Midgley - laughsNo, it's not the same as under bum.It's substitution for LGBT, and they might be using it for fun.They might be trying to use it to disguise what they're talking about in places where that might be illegal.LGBT becomes leg booty.
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - It's like boomstick for gun on TikTok.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yes.It's another example of Voldemorting.
• linkBen Ainslie - Unalived.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Unaliving.Yeah.Okay.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Grape instead of rape and that sort of thing.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Elon becoming El-no and then Elmo, rather amusingly.crosstalk
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Okay, leg booty.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Leg booty.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I thought Alphabet Mafia was like-- I liked Alphabet Mafia.
• linkDaniel Midgley - That was good.That was one of ours.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I thought that was pretty funny.laughs
• linkDaniel Midgley - Another one of ours that didn't win the Phrasal Template of the Year was "hits different." That was one of ours last year, and hits different was good.The one that did win the Phrasal Template of the Year was, "not X." That was ours.So, yay for us.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Ah, okay.
• linkBen Ainslie - I've got to say that I am seeing that in many places.I'm seeing it on Twitter, I'm seeing that on TikTok, I'm seeing that in Facebook posts.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.I think we need to expand the template to make it more understandable to listeners, maybe.If I, for example, tweet, "Not me eating the same food three days in a row because my husband's out of town."
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah.Not me desperately trying to cross my legs on the subway because I got a giant mustard stain from the hot dog.I am hoovering into my disgusting more kind of thing.
• linkDaniel Midgley - It's always not person doing action.That's the template.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Another one.The Emoji of the Year.The skull was the winner.Dead.Dead from laughter, dead from frustration.But check out the roster of non-winners.The melting face.Love it.The saluting face.
• linkBen Ainslie - crosstalk-these are actually showing up in the run sheet because they're so new that they're not in the-crosstalk
• linkDaniel Midgley - They're not on your computer?Oh, I'm sorry.
• linkBen Ainslie - That's okay.
• linkDaniel Midgley - The saluting face.The dotted line face.One of my favorites.I'm just going to vanish here into the background.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh, that one.
• linkBen Ainslie - The Homer Simpson into the hedge face.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Colored boxes for Wordle results.But I think that the one that everybody was sleeping on, and I tweeted this was the pointing finger up, which you use as a reaction to someone's comment, "Meaning, I agree with this." I'm seeing a lot in Discord.
• linkBen Ainslie - This one is the right one.
• linkDaniel Midgley - This.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - There are also gifs of people pointing or saying the word 'this', or you can write the word this.I would argue that those are all allomorphs.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yes.Very good.Allomoji.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Let's get away from the ADS Word of the Year.Congratulations to ussy.There were also some recent words that our listeners suggested.Diego suggested--
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Before that.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Oh, yes, please.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - You asked me in previous episodes to report on the Swedish Word of the Year.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yes.Hedvig, would you please report for us on the Swedish Word of the Year?What did you find?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Well, Sweden has mainly one institution that issues something that's similar to Word of the Year, and it's called the New Word List.And it is not one word.It is several words that the Institute for Language and Ethnology, you could call it, folkminnen, like people memory, issue a list of words that are being added.They are a little bit mysterious, if I'm honest, about how they select them.Sometimes, I disagree with the process by which they get them.But there's a bunch of words.Most of them are somehow crisis related in nature.For example, energy, poverty, energi fattigdom or energy, war, energi krig or hunger stone.I think we had hunger stone one episode.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah, we did.What was it again?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - In some European cities, when you have a river going through--
• linkDaniel Midgley - Oh, yeah.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - You have stones on the bank of the river.And when the river is low enough, there can be certain stones that become visible and that have inscriptions that are very old that say, "If you can see this shit--"
• linkBen Ainslie - "Fucking watch out, because a bunch of people died when this river was this low."
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah."If the river is this low, it's not a good time, man." I looked through the list and I was trying to find one that wasn't depressing.I think I have two for you.One of them is Epa-dunk.
• linkBen Ainslie - Epa-dunk.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Epa-dunk.It's a fun word to say.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Epa-dunk.
• linkBen Ainslie - It sounds very onomatopoeic.Is it throwing a stone into a pond?Like, you go, "Epa-dunk."
• linkDaniel Midgley - laughs
• linkHedvig Skirgård - It's a compound, if that helps.So, Epa and dunk.
• linkBen Ainslie - Neither of us speaks Swedish.I'm not getting anywhere near this definition.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Well, let's go with dunk.It's a dunk tank, naturally, when you--
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I don't know what a dunk tank is.
• linkDaniel Midgley - When you dunkcrosstalkwater.
• linkBen Ainslie - Is itcrosstalkdunking?Like when you dunk on yourself?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Okay, I'm just going to put you out of your miseries, none of these things.
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay, fair enough.That's good.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dunka-dunka is an old term for dance music.
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay.Like duff-duff music?
• linkDaniel Midgley - That's good.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay, cool.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Epa is a kind of vehicle that is similar to a car, but it's not a car, and you can drive already when you're 16.
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - It's like in between a car and a moped, I'd say.
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh-kay.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Wow.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - If you screw with it a bit and trim it a bit, it's a lot like a car.If you live in a rural area and you want to drive because you want to have a license as your friends and do stuff, you are probably going to get an Epa license.And Epa-dunk is a music genre.
• linkBen Ainslie - It's the kind of duff-duff music that comes out of cars that 16-year-olds drive.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yes.I think if you can imagine-- it has connotations of bogan.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah, okay.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah.Oh, youcrosstalklaughsthat for me.As soon as you say the young, rural men in cars music, I'm right there with you.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I mean, duff has the same connotations for me.
• linkBen Ainslie - Exactly.This is a guy who is a devout EDM fan.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.That one I thought was pretty cute.Most of the other ones are somehow crisis related.There's one that is not crisis related.That is just a word in English.So, Barbiecore.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Oh, yeah.Cool.
• linkBen Ainslie - Cool.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Which is a visual aesthetic inspired by Barbies.It's like the same as nerdcore, normcore, golfcore, blah, blah, blah.
• linkBen Ainslie - Can I ask a potentially-- um.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yes.
• linkBen Ainslie - Rude question?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Uh-huh.
• linkBen Ainslie - From a pop cultural perspective, Swedes as an export pop culturally to the world, have you not all been Barbiecore exemplars since like the late 70s?Like, if I go onto Google Image Search right now and type in "Swedish woman," will my image results not 100% conform with Barbiecore?Like, there's just going to be beautiful made-up blonde--
• linkHedvig Skirgård - No, you're wrong.What you're thinking of is, there's an American movie I think it's Dumb and Dumber, where they get stranded somewhere and, like, a bus of Swedish women pick them up and they're all like--
• linkBen Ainslie - I'm sorry.I'm so right, and you are so wrong.
• linkDaniel Midgley - laughs
• linkHedvig Skirgård - No, no, no.
• linkDaniel Midgley - You did it, didn’t you?
• linklaughter
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wait, okay.Sorry.When you say Barbie, I think of like silicon boobs, platinum blonde and bright pink clothing.
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay.Except for the pink clothing, if you put light blue and yellow clothing in its place, that is certainly the image that it's like-crosstalk
• linkDaniel Midgley - But it's got to be a-crosstalk
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I don't know how to explain, that is what-- as a Swedish woman living abroad, I can tell you that that is what people think Swedish women look like.And it's not what Swedish women look like.
• linkBen Ainslie - 100%, that’s all I was talking about.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Which is why you talked about export.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah.I completely-- in the same way that people go, "Oh, Swedish,gibberish."
• linkHedvig Skirgård - We don't export to Swedish chef.You guys made that up.
• linkBen Ainslie - Exactly.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - No.I feel like export is something we're trying to export.
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh, sorry, you're absolutely right.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - You're talking about extorting, like pulling.
• linkBen Ainslie - The version of this is Australians liking Foster's beer, right?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yes, exactly.Which you don't.
• linkDaniel Midgley - No one does.
• linkBen Ainslie - Which precisely zero Australians drink or enjoy that beer, and yet the entire world thinks of it as the quintessential Australian beer that everyone is drinking.That's all I was saying.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Exactly.
• linkBen Ainslie - It's hilarious that this has risen to prominence when, to an outsider perspective,laughsthat was the main thing people would associate with Sweden.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - It's just not like, we're more classic Continental European, like wearing black, trying to look elegant and suave and Persian, it's like Swedish fashion.
• linkBen Ainslie - I've watched my share of Scandinuva.I know what you guys look like.You are, like beautiful but stern 45-year-old women who will not rest until you find the murderer.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - That is all of us.You're correct.
• linklaughter
• linkHedvig Skirgård - We're all one 45-year-old woman.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Even the men.
• linkBen Ainslie - Chic but capable.Beautiful, but--
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Chic.There we go.That's the aesthetic ideal.Barbiecore is not necessarily chic.
• linkBen Ainslie - Fair enough.Sorry, we have digressed so far.I'm sorry, Daniel.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Sorry.Anyways, there were lots of words I'm going to give you Epa-dunk and Barbiecore.
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Thank you.What would you have chosen for if you were on the board for your Swedish Word of the Year?Perhaps, I'm springing this on you.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - You are.
• linkBen Ainslie - You just want to say Epa-dunk because it's so fun to say, don’t you?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I think-- yeah.Epa-dunk is really fun.
• linklaughter
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay.Hey, sometimes the fun captivates you, and that's what we want.Thank you, Hedvig, for your report.There were a couple of words that slipped under the wire.Diego suggested this one, sudden Russian death syndrome.
• linkBen Ainslie - Ooh.Now, that could mean two things.That could be the euphemism Russians use to describe why a whole bunch of the young men from their country are no longer alive.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Not that.
• linkBen Ainslie - I can absolutely see that being like a really caustic thing that Russians would say to each other.Be like, "Oh, where's Ivan?" "Well, he's succumbed to sudden Russian death syndrome." Instead of like--
• linkDaniel Midgley - It's not that.What else could it be?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - It could be the opposite as well.It could be being killed by a Russian.
• linkDaniel Midgley - No.Secretly not.
• linkBen Ainslie - Could it be the thing that happens to Vladimir Putin?
• linkDaniel Midgley - It could be the thing that happens to Vladimir Putin's former supporters.
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh, okay.Either way.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, it'scrosstalkshock.
• linkDaniel Midgley - It refers to the way that about 20 to 25 Russian oligarchs have met their demise, strangely in suspicious circumstances, like falling out of buildings and so on.
• linkBen Ainslie - Man, look, if history has taught us anything, you got to watch using that as a solution to your problems, because it seems to very reliably end up happening to you.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Hmm.It's true.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Did you know that one of the assassins' attempt on Navalny, who's a Putin critic, a common thing they've tried to use is Novichok, which is a particular toxin.At one point, they put it in his underwear.
• linkBen Ainslie - Hey, man, if it's good enough to try and kill Queen Elizabeth poisoning clothes, some things never go out of fashion.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Just another reason to go commando.
• linkBen Ainslie - laughs
• linkDaniel Midgley - There are some people who reckon that they may not all be getting killed.They may have killed themselves.They are facing sanctions, they're losing their money.It is possible for some people to die by suicide under those circumstances, but by golly, doesn't it look suspicious?
• linkBen Ainslie - I think, given the geopolitical reality that exists in the world right now, it is definitely not possible to say that categorically didn't happen.laughs
• linkDaniel Midgley - Did we learn anything from the Words of the Year this year?Are there any larger lessons?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I think we learned that picking Word of the Year is a very subjective exercise.If people are clear-- I think we learned that Hedvig's and Ben's favorite category is most likely to succeed.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yes, definitely.That should be the Word of the Year category.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkBen Ainslie - Like, what will people be saying 15, 20, 50 years from now?I reckon, to be honest, I wonder if by that logic-- I'm going to put my hand in the air here.Going to do a real, like, Hail Mary call.I reckon, of all of the words, nepo baby will be around in 50 years.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Oh, okay.Nepo baby.I think you're probably right.I think the one that we're still going to see--
• linkBen Ainslie - Now, what Daniel-
• linkDaniel Midgley - I'm looking over my list.
• linkBen Ainslie - -thinks will justify my answer simply because, unlike all the other things, I think nepo baby describes an aspect of humanity that is just so fundamental to us that it won't stop being a thing.So, we won't stop having reasons to use that as an insult and a pulldown on people.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Counterargument.
• linkBen Ainslie - I'll cede the floor.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - It has been a thing for thousands of years, and this word is not doing a better job than any other word.
• linkBen Ainslie - What are you, a linguist or something?Jeez, get off my back.laughs
• linkDaniel Midgley - I'm just not seeing any long-termers here.I'm just not.Not like app.Remember app?
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah.Okay.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Where are the apps of today?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I think that "it's giving" is actually a pretty-- I would bet a lot of money on "it's giving."
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay.Well, we'll just have to wait and see.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I guess we will and we'll be reporting on all the words we can.
• linkBen Ainslie - Check in 50 years with you, Hedvig.And, Daniel, before you die, if you could just, like, let us know.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I will.Hey, Ben, ask me what I'm doing.
• linkBen Ainslie - Hey, Daniel.Whatchudoing?
• linkDaniel Midgley - I'm addressing envelopes.
• linkBen Ainslie - Why are you doing that, Daniel?Such an archaic form of communication.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Because I'm sending our special yearly mail out to every last one of our patrons.
• linkBen Ainslie - Get right out of town.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yep.It's got our special designs that we've made.If you are a patron, make sure your physical address is right with Patreon.I was going to say sorry for not getting these out by Christmas, but actually, you know what?I'm glad that we wait until after the Word of the Year vote because I always get some inspiration from it.That's the case this time with our "Put your whole lingussy into it" sticker, our design.I expect to see it on chests all over the world.I'd just like to say thank you for being a patron.We enjoy seeing you on Discord.If you're listening to this later and you're not a patron, why don’t you get on?There's patreon.com/becauselangpod.You'll get all kinds of goodies.Thanks for supporting the show, everybody.
• linkBen Ainslie - We really appreciate it.
• linkBen Ainslie - Because Language music
• linkDaniel Midgley - Let's get to that mailbag.We've got time for a couple of questions.
• linkBen Ainslie - Let's pull them out of the mailbagussy.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Thank you.Ooh, sounds like a title.
• linkBen Ainslie - laughs
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I had just recovered from lingussy.
• linkBen Ainslie - crosstalkSorry.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Matias via email, hello@becauselanguage.com, says, "Hi, Daniel and the team." That's you too."Whenever I see lists of names in alphabetical order, like lists of popular baby names or class, lists of patrons at the end of YouTube videos, etc., there's always a bias toward names starting with a letter from the first half of the alphabet, A through M." Is it M?
• linkBen Ainslie - whispering
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yes.A through N.Mathias says N, but actually the first 13 letters are A through M.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - For English boring alphabets, yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Correct.Thank you."Like if the alphabet was put into random order, I'd expect half the names to start with the letter from the first half of the alphabet.But instead, it seems like it's always about two-thirds of the names to start with a letter between A and N.I've noticed this in both English-given names, Danish-given names, and in online nicknames that people choose for themselves.M I just imagining things or is this something that has been studied previously?Did humans arrange the alphabet so that the most popular letters are first?Or did the first letters on the alphabet become more popular because they were in the beginning of the alphabet?Does this happen in other languages and cultures with other scripts?Also, why are almost all the vowels at the start of the alphabet?"
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Okay.
• linkDaniel Midgley - There's a lot here.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Okay.
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I have theories, Ben has theories.Ben, go first.
• linkBen Ainslie - Wait, no, before I even want to get into theories, I'm not even getting that far yet.Can we just acknowledge that Mathias has like one awesome stoned question of the fucking decade award?Like every aspect of this question is God-tier linguistic genius.As the question kept going, I had mind blow after mind blow revelation where I was like, "Oh, my God.Oh, does it?What?How?Did we--crosstalk" So, Mathias, I salute you, sir.Now, let's try and answer the many different ideas that you've brought up in your question.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay, first thing.Is this really happening?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I think it might be happening and I have a theory for why.
• linkBen Ainslie - I'm just going to trust Mathias.If he has had this level of insight into these things, I'm just going to assume his base knowledge is correct.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Well, I didn't trust Matthias, so I decided to check it out.
• linkBen Ainslie - laughs
• linkDaniel Midgley - I grabbed the top 200 baby names from this year.Boys and girls, 200 names.Take a guess.What number do we see the first N at?You'd expect it to be at 101, where it wasn't, really.
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay, I'm going to go with him.I'm going to say 140-ish.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Hedvig?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Is this American babies?
• linkDaniel Midgley - It's not.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Is it boys and girls mixed?
• linkDaniel Midgley - It's English-speaking babies.I mixed the names, yes.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Okay.Because I think there are more Ns in the boys.They have like Nicholas and shit.Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Mm.I decided to mix them up because--
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, fair enough.60?
• linkDaniel Midgley - What, the first N?
• linkBen Ainslie - Ooh.You're going in the opposite direction.So, you're saying there's vastly more-crosstalk
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I don't know.I just got to do something interesting.
• linkDaniel Midgley - It was.It was Nicholas at number 150.
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh, so Mathias is like 100% on the money here.Like he even got the ratio right.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Well, what about 1920s New South Wales?First name, why not?It was available Nancy at 142.Top 100 cities in the world by population.Top 100.Nairobi at 62.
• linkBen Ainslie - Wow.
• linkDaniel Midgley - So, this is happening.
• linkBen Ainslie - Mathias absolutely hit on an extant phenomenon, like this is definitely-crosstalk
• linkDaniel Midgley - What's going on?Hedvig, your hypothesis, please.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Okay, so first of all, alphabets are a thing in some languages, and they mean that you have one character that roughly represents one language sound.There's some,crosstalk'sh' is something and 'ng' is something, blah, blah, blah.But generally are one character, roughly one sound, and then you get things like how English people spell, like, I don't know, cough.
• linkBen Ainslie - Let's just leave 'gh,' please.We know we don't have the time.
• linkDaniel Midgley - It's a rough guide.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Through, though, thought.Fuck you, guys.Okay.We're over that bit.
• linkchuckles
• linkBen Ainslie - crosstalk-fuck us, that’s just the worst.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - And then, we get like, okay, the particular alphabet that we use in most European languages starts with A, and it goes ABCD, blah, blah, blah.As far as I know, it's usually traced back to Phoenician.So, before Latin and Greek, there's something called Phoenician writing and it's all around the Mediterranean and East Mediterranean.But as far as I know, you keep adding letters as you need them for a while.So, I think that you start with the more common sounds in some sort of order that might have to do with the physics of it, like how many lines you're doing.Because I think also, if you think about it, they get more complicated the further you go a bit.
• linkDaniel Midgley - A bit.Chinese script, especially by design, their so-called alphabetic order is based on stroke numbers.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, because that's definitely true for numbers.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yes, it's true for numbers.It's true for letters as well.For example, in the English alphabet and the Roman alphabet, Y and Z just came later.And so, they had to go to the end.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, exactly.So, if that's true, then I think that there are more common sounds at the beginning of the alphabet.And therefore, what Mathias observed just falls out of that.
• linkBen Ainslie - And Mathias basically said that.Is it just a case of the ones were using, we started with and then as went on, they got rarer and rarer?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I think so.
• linkDaniel Midgley - There is something else at work though.I think that might be part of it.The order of the alphabet is the way it is because we needed those sounds first.In some cases, there's been some slop, but there's something else going on.
• linkBen Ainslie - May I guess?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yes.
• linkBen Ainslie - Is this a self-fulfilling prophecy?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yes.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh, no.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah.I'm essentially going to posit that this is a phonebook phenomenon, for lack of a better phrase.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - You mean that people are like, "I've given birth to a child, I'm going to choose a name that is earlier in the alphabet because I think it'll benefit them more."
• linkBen Ainslie - I'm going to say in terms of big data, over many years, yes.Like little tendencies in one way or another have resulted in that.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - There is a name for this effect.It is called the primacy effect.We remember the first items on a list better.We remember the last ones pretty well too, but the ones in the middle is like, blah.In fact, there's been a 2019 study from Jeffrey R.Stevens and Juan F.Duque published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review where they found that surnames earlier in the alphabet were cited more often than those later in the alphabet when journals ordered citations alphabetically compared with chronologically or numerically.
• linkBen Ainslie - I can't remember where I saw it, but I did see a journal article that was just the unfair advantage conferred to alphabetically earlier names, and it was written by like a Ziegler or Zana or somebody.
• linklaughter
• linkBen Ainslie - I just thought it was so funny.laughs
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I can believe that.
• linkDaniel Midgley - This actually reminds me though of Benford's law as well.And Benford's law points out that if you have a list of numbers of populations of cities or phone numbers or whatever, there'll be more ones at the top.There'll be more that start with one either thousand or hundred or ten or a billion or whatever.So, Benford's law--
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh, okay.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah.There is just this weird-- even in stats, it's not even people choosing, it's just this weird feature that ones, there's a lot of them.
• linkBen Ainslie - laughsHedvig is pulling a face right now that I just have to describe to the audience.I have very rarely seen her unhappy with an answer the way I am seeing her unhappy with this answer.She looks like a video-- and I say this with so much love in my heart, Hedvig, I promise, you were pulling a face just then like when people give dogs lemon,laughslike an animal that has been given a treat and then has just goneonomatopoeia.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I was trying really hard in my brain to think.
• linkBen Ainslie - Accept this answer.laughs
• linkHedvig Skirgård - And also just to think about numbers and be like, "Okay, so what he was saying, that was numbers starting with one, not like large numbers, but numbers starting with one, like one million, one thousand, one hundred, ten, are all starting with one, but they're very different quantities.And that they would occur more at the top instead of like--"
• linkDaniel Midgley - They would occur more often than numbers beginning with two or three.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Right.
• linkBen Ainslie - Is Benford's law also the thing that governs street name popularity?The most common name in America, I believe, is probably Main Street.Then the second most common is First Street.
• linkDaniel Midgley - First street.
• linkBen Ainslie - The third most common is Second Street.The third most common is Third Street.
• linkDaniel Midgley - You're never going to have a Third Street without a First Street.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - You have streets name First Street?
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah.Like, Firstcrosstalkand stuff.
• linkDaniel Midgley - All the time.Yeah, I grew up in Fifth Street.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - That’s just great American--
• linkBen Ainslie - But, but, but the phenomenon holds true.Yes, there are going to be a lot of First Avenues, for example, but there's probably not going to be anywhere near as many 11th Avenues.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Right.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Right, but that's people naming things.How many people live in a city is not--
• linkBen Ainslie - But, Hedvig, when we name babies, that's people naming things.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - No, no.Daniel said the hundred top most populous cities in the world.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah, people name those too.
• linkDaniel Midgley - laughs
• linkHedvig Skirgård - No, wait, you said the name?I thought it was a population number.
• linkDaniel Midgley - No, hang on.We're talking about the primacy effect, which is words, but then I switched over to Benford's law, which is about numbers.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.Which has nothing to do with people choosing anything.
• linkDaniel Midgley - No, that's right.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - No one chooses how many people are born in a place.If they're-crosstalk
• linkDaniel Midgley - No, just one of those things where if you've got one thing and then two things and then ten things, now it's all ones, eleven things, twelve things.Those all start with one.You might get to 20s, you might get to 30s and they'll show up as well, but then you're into the hundreds, and then it's all hundreds for a while.So, that's ones.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, but it's hundreds, then there's two hundreds for a while.
• linkDaniel Midgley - And then, it goes on.And you might get to those.You might get up to 500, but then you might get up to a thousand.And then, it's thousands for a while.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - There you go.crosstalk
• linkDaniel Midgley - You won't suddenly jump into the two thousands, without getting into the thousands.
• linkBen Ainslie - The answer to Mathias' question though is essentially the primacy effect.
• linkDaniel Midgley - That's what I think.That's my answer.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - blows raspberryOkay.
• linklaughter
• linkBen Ainslie - Hedvig is just so unhappy with that answer.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Why are we unhappy with this answer?How can I help you?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Still thinking about the numbers.I'm going to call my mathematician husband later and talk about the numbers.The shit about people--
• linkBen Ainslie - Just let go of the numbers.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - No, I'm not.The shit about people naming their daughters Amelia and whatever, fine, whatever, fine.Like cities in the New World being like, "Oh, yeah, First Street, Second Street," whatever.Humans do crazy stuff.
• linkDaniel Midgley - But it's population too.
• linkBen Ainslie - crosstalk-your idea of crazy is just the absolutely most boring, logical way to do a thing.
• linkDaniel Midgley - But it is bonkers.Benford's law, I don't know of a good explanation for it.We talked about it with Caleb Everett on the Talk the Talk episode, Numbers and The Making of Us.It's just this weird artefact.
• linkBen Ainslie - Here's a fun game.I genuinely think you should do this because I just feel like this will be so fun for me in particular.But I assume if I enjoy it, other people will enjoy it too.Can you just record you sitting down with Steve at your kitchen table with like two microphones or whatever or one Bluegrass, I don't care.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yes, please.
• linkBen Ainslie - Just being like, "Steve, can you please explain Benford's law to me?"
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, I can do that.
• linkDaniel Midgley - And he'll be like, "Oh, Benford's law, yeah."
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I talked to him about math a lot, and it's good time, but it is like painful times.
• linkBen Ainslie - I'll hear this.
• linkDaniel Midgley - If you would allow us to sit in.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah, let us be the-crosstalk
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Okay.I'll ask Steve if he wants to do that.
• linkBen Ainslie - crosstalk-fly on the wall for that particular conversation.
• linkDaniel Midgley - That's coming up on our Discord.Thanks, Mathias.Okay, Ignacio has a question about ee-ither or is it ei-ther?Ignacio says, "Random question.Do people usually have a consistent way of saying neither or either or neither or either?I can't figure out what I say.I know I use both long and short 'e' sound.I can't even really figure out if there's a pattern that has to do with surrounding words, stress, emphasis, place in sentence, etc.It just seems random.But it's not that they both sound normal to me all the time.Some situations make me use one sound or the other, and the alternative doesn't seem to sound right, but I'm not consistent from what I can tell." What do you think?
• linkBen Ainslie - I just ascribe to buckaroo usage on this one.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Oh, really?Free variation.This is what's called free variation.No pattern.
• linkBen Ainslie - I don't think I have any rules or rhyme or anything.It's just like whatever little neurons are firing through Ben's teeny little brain at that moment is what he says.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - That's good that you feel that way because you make for a good subject.
• linkBen Ainslie - I've got to be honest, guys.Whenever someone says, "You'd be a great research candidate," my immediate brain is like, "Oh, no."
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I mean, linguists famously do this to people around them a lot, and I'm sorry.And you're around us a lot.
• linkDaniel Midgley - And you're around us a lot.
• linkBen Ainslie - laughs
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Free variation is what we call things we haven't figured out yet.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah, that's right.So, I decided I was going to try to figure it out.You know our transcripts?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh, yeah.
• linkBen Ainslie - laughs
• linkDaniel Midgley - You know how it's got every single word that we say in there?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Uh-huh.Yes.
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay.So, you've got a really interesting dataset.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh, my God.Can we do what is the most common word Ben says?What’s the most common word Hedvig says?Oh, my God.drumming the table
• linkDaniel Midgley - The transcripts are made by the wonderful people at SpeechDocs.And I found every instance of either and neither as said by Ben.And then, I hunted them down in the audio files, and I have just sent them to you.
• linkBen Ainslie - How much time do you have?
• linkDaniel Midgley - laughs
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Too much.This time, you can spend on TikTok.Oh, my God.
• linkDaniel Midgley - This is every instance of you saying ee-ither, ei-ther, nee-ither or neither.Go.
• linkBen Ainslie - Ben's clip uttering either and neither in free variations
• linkBen Ainslie - laughter
• linkHedvig Skirgård - That is so funny.
• linkBen Ainslie - That is the most fucking, surreal--
• linkHedvig Skirgård - That is so good.And it is mostly ee-ither.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Now, in our Discord, I am also pasting what you said.At the top, you've got ee-ither, and then a little farther down, you've got ei-ther and all the sentences that contain those.Then there's nee-ither and neither.I hope that's clear.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Mm-hmm.It is.I love this.I love this.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I'm posting these on the episode page for this episode.That's becauselanguage.com.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - This is brilliant.I forgive any, any love you've ever shown for Elon Musk.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - laughter
• linkDaniel Midgley - There is none.There is none.I'm a Tesla guy who doesn't like Elon.But anyway.
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay.Wow.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Okay.Tell me, give me the--
• linkDaniel Midgley - I know this the-crosstalk
• linkBen Ainslie - I can't be bothered reading all of this, but just going from what I heard, there was a fair amount of back and forth to my ear.I heard--
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Oh, and what I really loved, I'm going to send you this now.There was a sentence, I actually found a sentence where you alternated ee-ither and either.Here that is.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh, my God.Yes.
• linkDaniel Midgley - In the same sentence.
• linkBen Ainslie - "You know how when you walk into a home for the first time of someone ee-ither you know well, or perhaps you don't know well, but either way, if it's the first time into that space."
• linklaughter
• linkBen Ainslie - Just based on that sentence alone, my tiny little neurons firing explanation seems to hold up.It's just this weird mish-mash.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - The second one was either way.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Either way.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - So, you know your brain is like a, "Imma my way to way, so I go--"crosstalk
• linkDaniel Midgley - Let's start there.And then, we pour through the data, and I see that the expression "either way" exists in both the ee-ither and the either camp.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Fuck.Argh.
• linkBen Ainslie - laughsThat's right, bitches.I'm just a dice man.Every time I use the word, I'm justonomatopoeia.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - People complain about me.But like, fuck, yes.
• linklaughter
• linkDaniel Midgley - All right.
• linkBen Ainslie - I am chaotic neutral.That is my alignment.
• linkDaniel Midgley - So, we have ee-ither way, either way.They both appear in the list, but there may be a slight pendency.I only have a few instances here.I noticed also, as far as the end of the sentence, you're just as likely to end a sentence with ee-ither as you are with either.There's, "I don't ee-ither.I didn't know that was the case ee-ither." But then, there's also, "there no fuzziness about what people would be talking about either." Maybe that one was a fluke.I don't know.
• linkBen Ainslie - Look, what can I say?Some people follow the rules, and some people are just buckaroos.
• linkBen Ainslie - laughter
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Can I say, I have some theories about some patterns, but I would like to open up that if you are a linguistics teacher and you have some students who are taking a sociolinguistics course and you are looking for a term project for their term paper, then all the transcripts are there, our material is already transcribed, the audio's there.
• linkBen Ainslie - Use me.Use me, my delightful-- Look, I'm going to say it right now.I'm going to use the words in this episode right now so they have to hear this bit.Ee-ither use me or don't use me.Neither way, I don't care.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh, my God.
• linkDaniel Midgley - laughsThis is a genuine gap, I think, because the literature on either and neither are kind of scanty.There was the linguist, Louise Pound.She wrote about it in the journal American Speech in 1932.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - 1932.See?
• linkDaniel Midgley - She doesn't discuss how this varies within the same individual, but instead she writes about how Americans say ee-ither and British people say either.Actually, this is really fun.She quotes WD Whitney from 1874, who didn't like either.Check this out.Whitney says, "Whatever actual foundation either may have in the native usage of any part of the English speaking people, it has spread in recent times far beyond that foundation by a kind of reasonless and senseless infection, which can only be condemned and not to be stoutly opposed and put down."
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh, my God.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I know.
• linkBen Ainslie - laughsThis man would not have enjoyed me.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Ooh.There really isn't that much going on here.But I do notice this, I will drop a crumb that in my goings through this data, take a look at neither and neither.Ben says, "No.Nee-ither do I.No.Nee-ither can I." Then he says, "Neither of you." And then, he says, "English is neither in Australia--", talking about official languages, "English is neither in Australia, correct?"
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I'm noticing that there's a vowel at the beginning of the next word for neither and there's a consonant at the beginning of the next word for neither and it doesn't hold all the time.
• linkBen Ainslie - That's a dataset of two as well.
• linkDaniel Midgley - But then I went back to ee-ither and either, and it holds pretty well.I mean, either way, it can go either way.chuckles'va'is a bit of a semi-vowel.There's also 'ya'.What was the one, "Can either of--" no, "Ee-ither you do this." Here's the either.I don't say either of those phrases, ean either of you.A weird lumpy shape that tails off toward either end.It's got nothing to do with either election.So, it's vowel, vowel, vowel, vowel.
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay, okay, okay.Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Mm-hmm.
• linkDaniel Midgley - That's just the posit rule of the--crosstalk
• linkBen Ainslie - We justcrosstalkthe term paper for everyone, Daniel.Good one.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - No, it's a suggestion for a theory based on a few examples of one weird Australian guy.
• linkDaniel Midgley - It's a conjecture.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - People can do more things.Yeah.
• linkBen Ainslie - No, it begins and ends with me.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Call it Daniel's suspicion.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Honestly, I'll put in a bonus, or maybe a not bonus, but if someone is a linguistic teacher, it's fairly easy to get the podcast mp3 or vob files or whatever.And fuck it, I'll volunteer me and Daniel as co-supervisors.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I've already done the work, so it's there for you.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkBen Ainslie - I just love that we are all three of us the kind of people who are so on board with fair and free usage that we're just, like, "Steal it.Steal it all.Use it, my pretty ones.Use it well."
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I love podcasts for-- just a fucking free RSS link.It's so beautiful.
• linkDaniel Midgley - If I want to take money, do you know what I would do?I would play on people's fears and insecurities.I would say, "I can help you with my plan to speak better so that you can find love and acceptance."
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah, that would be a good way to make good money, for sure.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I'd like do accent stuff.Oh, my gosh, it would be so unethical.Anyway, I'm putting that in your hands.Sorry if that was a little hard to listen to.It'll make more sense with the supporting materials.Once again, those materials will be on our website, becauselanguage.com.We have time for some comments.Do you want to do the boomers one?
• linkBen Ainslie - Ben's in trouble.
• linkDaniel Midgley - This one comes to us from Lawrence via email."I was encouraged by the letter writer who raised the issue of ageism on the show.I have heard it too." Apparently, we're a bit ageist."I was disturbed by the response--" Can we summarize the response?
• linkBen Ainslie - Basically, someone called me specifically, I think, out on ageism for having a massive go at boomers time and time again, and I doubled and then tripled down on why I'm not particularly nice or forgiving of people in that particular age bracket, which is a completely fair encapsulation of my response.I do not disagree with how they characterized how I responded to the criticism.It's true.I did respond that way.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Lawrence says, "I was disturbed by the response, and I became more disturbed as it turned into a hate-filled rant from Ben.He doubled and tripled down.He seems to base it on a notion of collective guilt based on demographics and actually wishing death on older people.Perhaps, hyperbole but he seemed dead serious.Aren't we trying to get away from that kind of thinking?I don't think it makes the world a better place.I don't think this is telling it like it is.This is not fighting against reductive thinking.This is indulging in it."
• linkDaniel Midgley - Obviously, we are as a show against anyone dying for any reason ever, ever, ever, but there's a couple of threads here.I think one is what I was saying at the time was there are lots of awesome boomers.I give talks to boomers who are trying their best and blah, blah.We got to give them props.Ben's response has been something like, if I could put words in your mouth, Ben, generationally, this is the generation that destroyed the housing market, that destroyed the job market.Me personally, if you go to my Twitter bio right now, you will see that my profile pic is that graph of how worker productivity has climbed but wages have stagnated for the past 40 years.That is a situation that boomers have presided over.And then, on top of that, they have continually traduced millennials for being lazy, superficial, blah, blah, for destroying avocado toast or whatever.Even though there are lots of boomers #NotAllBoomers do that, it's not the kind of thing that millennials are going to forget easily.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah, I think there's a bit of that going on.I'm sure Lawrence probably wants to hear from me more than anyone because it was me that Lawrence, who I am assuming is going to be male Lawrence, he, what do we think?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Fair.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Lawrence is usually male--crosstalk
• linkBen Ainslie - crosstalk-assumption.No, Lawrence can be female.
• linkDaniel Midgley - It's a name typically ascribed to men.
• linkBen Ainslie - Anyway, I'll keep it neutral.I'm sure Lawrence would probably want to hear my response to his criticism of me or sorry, their criticism of me.I guess what I would say is I probably did go straight into hyperbole for the sake of a bit of humor and a bit of that.But if you're looking for me to wind back my general position, you're probably not going to find it, because in the same way that I just categorically reject and don't ascribe to the "not all" suffix of any kind, I find that a completely illegitimate form of discourse, like #NotAllWhitePeople, #NotAllMen, #NotAllBoomers, blah, blah.If you are, through the lottery of birth, a part of a privileged class across one of your intersections of privilege, of which I am in nearly every conceivable intersection of my identity.Male, cis, white, now vaguely middle aged, blah, blah, blah.
• linkBen Ainslie - If someone is criticizing white people or men or anything like that, the least helpful and relevant thing you can do as a member of that subset is to say, "Hang on a second, not all" insert whichever defense you want to put in here.Lawrence, I fully, fully accept that you probably feel really upset with the nasty shit that I said about boomers, and I feel bad that you had a negative experience based on the things that I said.I will continue to criticize white people and boomers and men and other people who exist in positions of power and continue to abuse those positions, which, I'm sorry, mate, most boomers still do, and most white people still do, and most men still do.
• linkBen Ainslie - If you're looking for me to go, "Oh, you know what?You're right.It was unfair of me to engage in absolutist thinking about your segment of society," boomers, or transpose that into any of the other ones, white people, men, so and so forth, no, I'm not going to.Sorry.If you want that to be something that happens from me on this show, unfortunately, you're going to be pretty disappointed.If that leaves you feeling like I'm not being the best version of myself or I'm not engaging in the fully most high minded and educational discourse I can possibly engage in, you are fully free to think that, and you are fully free to think that I am just not a very good person.That is absolutely your prerogative.I do not mind.All good.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - chucklesI think there's maybe a conflation possibly happening between-- so at one point this letter writer said, "Aren't we trying to get away from that reductionist thinking?" I don't know personally if I am actually, because I think that there are meaningful things in patterns and generalizations, and they're going to be outliers.The reason I support Ben in this is because I think that for all the groups that he mentioned, it's a fair generalization.It is true of enough members of that category that it is meaningful to talk about it.Whereas if you say something that is--
• linkBen Ainslie - If I can jump in here really quick, sorry.Just because I'm very confident that Lawrence's response to that would be, "Well, why shouldn't I do that about things that aren't privileged classes?" like we know that it's wrong to do that about black people or indigenous people or poor people or disabled people or gay people or so on and so forth.To that, I would say, absolutely.It is wrong to do it to all of those things.The only groups of people that I would say that I engage in reductionist thinking over are people who exist in positions of unquestioned power.If Lawrence is sitting here going, "Well, hang on, but being old isn't necessarily powerful," I would say, mm, generationally, I have to disagree.
• linkBen Ainslie - Boomers are absolutely the most powerful generation and from a generational perspective, hold all the cards, just as white people do in a racial spectrum, just as men do in a gender spectrum, just like straight people do in a sexuality spectrum.Being a member of a privileged class means you're going to have to cop a lot of licks.That's my philosophy.You just have to take them with grace.If you don't accept that, that's fine.You totally don't have to agree with me but you are not probably going to hear me being very recalcitrant about offering out those licks for members of those protective classes.Sorry, not protective, privileged classes.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - No, exactly.Whenever people say that, "Oh, then why can't I make fun of a generalizing pattern I've found of one of these other groups?", it's like yeah, but you know the difference between those two groups, like you just said, one hand, on the other, which means you know that there is a difference between the groups.Like you're aware of something.Ben and Daniel chucklesWe can use that information, you have some knowledge, but also the point about it's not an entirely untrue generalization, even if it's not true for all members of the category sometimes.I don't know.You don't, Ben, say that, "Oh, I don't like boomers because they always buckaroo park." I don't know if that's true.I'm not sure that's true.
• linkBen Ainslie - And you know what I've been just really making sure I don't do, which is a real strong impulse in me, and I think it's probably an impulse in a lot of people, is I immediately wanted to start talking about, "The members of that generation that I'm really good friends with and have great relationships with," all that kind of stuff.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - It doesn't matter.
• linkBen Ainslie - It's not at all relevant to this, I don't think.I genuinely am bummed that one of our listeners has heard a thing that I've said and they've felt like real shit about it.I don't like that feeling.I don't like the idea-- It's so easy when you do a podcast, especially when it's a podcast where three people sit in various rooms of their house and talk shit to each other,Hedvig laughsit's so easy to go on a bit of a rant and lose your way.I definitely, definitely invite people offering me feedback on all of the things that I say, which is why we're talking about this.I'm super happy to hear what people think about the things that I have to say.This one, I think, unfortunately, it's just a bummer that I think Lawrence probably isn't going to like me and the things that I think and the things that I say very much, and that sucks, and it's not a great thing.
• linkBen Ainslie - I'm certainly not ever going to be the person who revels in fucking people off.I'm not sitting here being like, "Yeah, I got the fucking Lawrences of the world with their knickers in a twist.Oh, aren't I great?" It does not-- None of the reward centers of my brain are firing off right now.It still feels kind of yucky in my tum-tum.But it doesn't mean that I'm probably going to change very much in the way that Lawrence would want.Sorry, mate.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - It's an old conflict, isn't it?We exist as members of a generation, but we experience life individually.There is this thing for me, when someone criticizes white people, it's like, "Hey, I'm one of the good ones.I've really worked hard to uncover my prejudices, and try to--", well, you know what?Maybe I haven't fucking done enough.
• linkBen Ainslie - laughsAbsolutely.For the longest time, like, "Yeah, man, I'm one of the good ones."
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Or even if you have, who cares?
• linkBen Ainslie - It turns out maybe I'm not.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay, how about this?White people, not enough of us have done enough to change things.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Clearly not.Even if in a situation you think that you are, that doesn't entitle you to say to other people that they cannot criticize that group.Even in those cases, it doesn't make sense.You can just be quiet and smile and sit back, it's fine.
• linkDaniel Midgley - And learn from this.Learn from this and take your callouts well and say, "You know what?I'm going to have the intellectual humility to say."
• linkBen Ainslie - Which Lawrence would argue I'm absolutely not doing right now, I'm sure.Like, I'm not taking my criticism well.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I think you are.
• linkBen Ainslie - I hope that Lawrence feels like I have spent the time and the energy to map out what they think about what I said and to hear it and to understand it.Unfortunately, at the end of that, my position is, sorry, mate, I don't agree.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Thank you for that.I appreciate hearing that.And it was cleansing.
• linkBen Ainslie - I hope you still listen, Lawrence.I hope you still listen, and maybe you just fucking hate my bits, but you really enjoy Daniel and Hedvig.laughs
• linkDaniel Midgley - laughsOr like, "I like Ben, but not when he starts talking about X," which is how I feel about a lot of people.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I mean, I want to Ben, so I don't think this is going to go well.
• linklaughter
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh, shit, no one should want that.That is definitely a suspectcrosstalk
• linkHedvig Skirgård - You are a great role model.
• linkBen Ainslie - laughsDaniel, don't you dare allow that to make it into the show.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I'm going to use that sentence as our clip.
• linkBen Ainslie - Authentically dangerous information to have in the world.
• linkDaniel Midgley - That goes on the promo.Pontus on our YouTube channel comments about the word spicy, because Hedvig and I talked about spicy cough special.
• linkBen Ainslie - Spice is fun, spice is great.
• linkDaniel Midgley - The most famous one is perhaps spicy accountant.
• linkBen Ainslie - Well, I don't know about the most famous, but certainly the most recently big.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay.The meme is that sex workers often claim they are accountants, and the actual accountants were like, "I'm actually an accountant." From there, we started getting spicy accountants, as in sex workers, which I didn't know.That's a great Word of the Week.Thanks, Pontus.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I think it's partially from this comedy music song saying, "If you don't want to tell people what you do, say you're an accountant.No one ever asks an accountant what to do," and it's like a funny-crosstalk
• linkHedvig Skirgård - laughter
• linkBen Ainslie - It's a conversation-ending statement.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.No one's going to ask you follow up questions.I actually do because I to as well.Okay."What do you do every day?What kind of accountancy do you do?What program do you--" I don't know.I'm just curious.I ask hairdressers a bunch of shit as well.There's another one, the euphemism, that's just a little spicy, but for sex workers I've noticed on TikTok, I don't know why, but people say, "My job is to offer people side quests."
• linkDaniel Midgley - laughsOkay.
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh.That’s completely new to me.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I'm an NPC.
• linkBen Ainslie - I'mcrosstalkTikTok yet.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, it took me a really long time to get because I got all these videos of people looking, and I kept watching them because I was like, "What the fuck is going on?"
• linkBen Ainslie - That is interesting.It seems like a very niche nexus of both sex working and video game enjoying.laughs
• linkHedvig Skirgård - That's why I was so confused because it was coming up in my gamer feed and I was like, this woman is raising her eyebrows and being like, "So, I work with giving people side quests." I was like, "Okay, what is that?"
• linkBen Ainslie - laughs
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Daniel, if you ever go into TikTok, problem is people sometimes make intentionally confusing videos so that you keep watching.
• linkBen Ainslie - There's a whole gaming algorithm thing that happens that can be really-- and then, the really fun thing is there's like a cottage industry of creators who subvert that, which I really like.I'm subscribed to a bunch of people, a video will start and it'll go for about like five seconds where you establish whatever the hook or bait of the video is, and then it'll just cut to someone being like it was strep throat went too far and then they lost their fingers.It cuts straight to the end of like-- it takes a minute's worth of watching and possibly a part two video and a part three video and they cut all of that out and they put it into five seconds of information--crosstalk
• linkHedvig Skirgård - And, like, here are the five celebrities they're going to list.Blah, blah, blah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - And I'll be like leg booty?
• linkBen Ainslie - laughs
• linkHedvig Skirgård - It's the opposite of clickbait.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Thanks to everybody who asked questions.Thanks to Dustin of Sandman Stories who still recommends us to loads and loads of people.Thanks to the team at SpeechDocs who transcribes all the words, or--
• linkBen Ainslie - All of the neithers and the nee-ithers and eithers and ee-ithers.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah, but they don't split them up into category.That would have made things so much easier.Could you please just transcribe everything into IPA that'll make it all so much better?
• linkBen Ainslie - laughs
• linkHedvig Skirgård - laughsOh.No.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Most of all of our patrons who give us so much support and make it possible to keep the show going.We heart you with both of our hands.Mwah.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - laughsIf you like the show and you want to keep us going and support us and keep us talking, but you don't want to give us money directly, there are things you can do that work that has to do with how humans work, which is you can go one of these social media platforms and tell the algorithm that you like us by actually following or liking us on the various places.That helps.You can also leave us a message on SpeakPipe so we can hear your beautiful voices.You can do that on our website which is becauselanguage.com.And you can also send us an old-fashioned email, hello@becauselanguage.com.Then, the most important thing that I think you can do is you can tell someone you like about us.That is how I get most of my podcast recommendations and I think that's how most people get them.We would get more listeners if you told people about us.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Doesn't that sound like a lot of work?Wouldn't you rather give us money instead?Ben will tell you how.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - laughs
• linkBen Ainslie - Now if that isn't your thing and you would prefer to just give us some cash, oh boy, is there a way to do that?You could become a patron.You'll get bonus episodes before they come out to like gen pop.You can hang out with us on Discord and the rest of the people who are patrons with us, of which there are some truly stellar human beings.Like Mathias' question today on the show, which blew my mind in three successive mind blows, that's like Tuesday on our Discord, honestly.You'll be making it possible for us to transcripts of our show, so Daniel can do the same kind of data analysis that genuinely made Hedvig squeal with joy today.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - It was so good.So good.So good.
• linkDaniel Midgley - We're going to have a conference on the linguistic uses of Because Language transcripts.The first conference on Because Language.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Fuck yeah.
• linkBen Ainslie - The patrons who are currently just doing their all to make all of those things possible and reaping the many, many benefits are Iztin, Termy, Elías, Matt, Whitney, Helen, Jack, PharaohKatt, Lord Mortis, gramaryen, Larry, Kristofer, Andy B, James, Nigel, Meredith, Kate, Nasrin, Joanna, bumpting up to the supporter lever after years of being patron.Thanks, Joanna.Ayesha, who, word on the street is the most beautiful person who have ever lived.Moe, Steele, Margareth, Manú, Rodger, Rhian, Colleen, Ignacio, Sonic Snejhog, still love it, even if it's hard to say.Kevin, Jeff, Andy from Logophilius, Stan, Kathy, Rach, Cheyenne, Felicity S, Amir, Canny Archer, O Tim, Alyssa, Chris W, Felicity G.And to our newest patron, Ryan.Welcome at the friend level, Ryan.Also, Elliott newest smasher of the onetime donation button on our website, becauselanguage.com.Thanks to all the people I just named and all of the people that I haven't named.Person listening who hasn't donated or liked anything on social media, thanks to you, buddy.
• linkDaniel Midgley - There were 42 names just then and we didn't see an end until Nasrin at number 32.
• linkDaniel Midgley - laughter
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh, my God.
• linkDaniel Midgley - It's still a thing.It's a thing.
• linkDaniel Midgley - 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 for listening.We'll catch you next time.Because Language.Cozzie langs.
• linkDaniel Midgley - beep
• linkDaniel Midgley - all make pew-pew sounds
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wait, what exactly is Ben's problem?
• linkBen Ainslie - So, on my phone, I'm in the gallery view, but the gallery tiles, for some reason, are proper teeny, dial-up internet, save as many of the kilobytes as possible thumbnails.They're like teeny-tiny.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Switch to landscape.
• linkBen Ainslie - I am on landscape.That's what I mean.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Okay.Hide yourself.
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay, hiding.No.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - There should be a hide yourself somehow.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Hide Ben from himself.Oh, if only.
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh.Yeah.laughsTherapy has tried and failed, guys, I'm sorry.
• linklaughter
• linkBen Ainslie - Actually, no, if I'm honest, therapy tries to do the exact opposite.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Tries to do the opposite, and I don't like it.
• linkDaniel Midgley - beep
• linkHedvig Skirgård - We hosted Christmas dinner at our house and then we were like, how can we do this as low effort as possible, but still hit the right marks?
• linkBen Ainslie - Notes.Yeah.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - We drove to Ikea-
• linkBen Ainslie - Naturally.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - -and bought large amounts of meatballs.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah.Sounds like a Thursday.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - And then, cooked up some potatoes and other things and parsnips.British people are obsessed with root vegetables for Christmas.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yes.In their defense, until wheat and stuff made it to England, it was literally everything they could eat.laughs
• linkHedvig Skirgård - No, fair enough.I mean, that's the rest of Europe too, but they really go for it.Steve did all the root vegetables and we did a bunch of meatballs, and I can recommend it.If you don't want to cook like a turkey or a ham or bird of any kind, just get pretty processed food and serve it to your guests.
• linkBen Ainslie - With authentic reindeer meatballs.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Sorry?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Reindeer?Nobody eats reindeer.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah, Ikea sells reindeer meatballs.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - People do that.It's just you can't get it out of Ikea.
• linkBen Ainslie - You can get it at our Ikea.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Reindeer meatballs?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Reindeer meatballs?
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah-huh.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - At your Ikea?Wow, that's very luxurious.No, we could just get the regular bland stuff and the plant stuff and that was it.
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh, okay.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I'm having a credibility gap.After we finish this call, I'm going to drive there and I'm going to make sure.
• linkBen Ainslie - They've closed the cafeteria in the Perth one now, and I very much know for sure that they used to sell the reindeer meatballs for you to eat on the spot in the cafeteria.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Goodness gracious.I didn't know they closed the cafe.That's huge.
• linkBen Ainslie - If they haven't, they're going to, one of the two.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah.Okay.Probably too low margin.Anyway, enough about that.
• linkBen Ainslie - We should probably start a show eventually.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - chuckles
• linkTranscript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription