16 - Mailbag of Speedrun

833 turns

• linkINTRO MUSIC
• linkDaniel Midgley - Hello, and welcome to this special bonus Patron edition of Because Language, a podcast about linguistics, the science of language.My name is Daniel Midgley.Let's meet the team!It's the person with all the answers, Hedvig Skirgård.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - SURPRISEDOh, yes!
• linkHedvig Skirgård - LAUGHTER
• linkBen Ainslie - Yep.I was figuring out how I would have to, like, unctuously slither out of that compliment.And then I didn't have to, so I call that a win.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Is that how I come across?That's not great.
• linkDaniel Midgley - No, I don't mean that…I don't mean to say she *acts* like she knows all the answers.
• linkBen Ainslie - She performs.Yeah, no, no, she just has them.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Okay.
• linkDaniel Midgley - And the person with all the answers…
• linkBen Ainslie - Ugh, god damnit…
• linkDaniel Midgley - …Ben Ainslie.
• linkBen Ainslie - I don't care for this at all!
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I like it.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I wasn't gonna do that.But based on your reaction, I thought I would just…
• linkHedvig Skirgård - It’s very cute!I like it.
• linkBen Ainslie - I have so few of the answers.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Tried to weasel out of it, and then I weaseled you right back into it.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah.I like that.I like that.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - When you choose to answer things, you answer them well.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Well, I think so!
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh, there we go.That makes me sound like that really annoyingly thinks-he's-cool kid in class who's like:~Yeah, I could totally ace it if I wanted to, I just don't want to.~
• linkHedvig Skirgård - No, no, no.It’s just you’re a mature adult who chooses to interact when you think you have something to contribute.
• linkBen Ainslie - LAUGHSI'll take that.
• linkDaniel Midgley - And he does.Well, this is a very special patron edition.So this one's for you, folks.This is the one where we incriminate ourselves a lot.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh, no.Yes.Okay.Mhm.
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh, the Mailbags.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Has anybody gotten back to you on any of your confessions of illicit behavior?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - No!That's true!
• linkBen Ainslie - Hedvig looks really confused.Do you not remember?Do you not remember this?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I remember some of it.I remember, maybe something to do with…
• linkDaniel Midgley - It’s all a blur.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - …German bureaucracy and trying to get an apartment?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yes, that one.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.LAUGHSNo one.Yeah, no one.I mean, every Swede I've mentioned it to is just like:Well, that's ridiculous, and we're glad you did what you did to survive.You know, so…
• linkBen Ainslie - LAUGHSPlay that card.Just fling it out of the sleeve, like Spider-Man's web.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Well, this is an episode where we do the questions, we do the answers.And we're doing this for you.And I actually enjoy these most of all, because I learn lots of new things.And it's really fun.
• linkBen Ainslie - Because our listeners are substantially smarter than we are.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Oof.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - What is it we bring to this?Are we…funnier?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - LAUGHTER
• linkDaniel Midgley - Lots and lots of time looking up answers.That's what it is.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Okay.
• linkBen Ainslie - Right, Daniel, now that you've done all of the work, please.Ferry us into the start!Are we gonna do the news?Or are we just straight into questions?
• linkDaniel Midgley - We are going to do the news.Oh, but before we do, remember our Redbubble store is open.Just look for talkthetalk.redbubble.com because…they can't change it yet.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Eh?Oh no!
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah, you're kind of stuck with it, which is why it's…if you think your show might change in the future, just give it an arbitrary name that belongs to you, and then you can use it for whatever.Give it something nonsensical.
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh, well.Look, Talk the Talk did us good for many years and it’s just ticking along in the background.
• linkDaniel Midgley - LAUGHSIt'll always be a part of us.
• linkBen Ainslie - Close to our hearts and our e-store.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Exactly.All right, let's start off with the news.This one was picked up by a lot of places.And I want to cover it because I think it's funny, and also I'm kind of immature.The town of Fucking, Austria…
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Ooh, yes.I was noticing that.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - LAUGHTER
• linkDaniel Midgley - You noticed this one?
• linkBen Ainslie - I knew this was coming.I knew this was coming.You big ex-Mo.You just love the swears, deep down.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I just think it's funny that there was a town with the name of Fucking.I thought, what does it mean?How did you get it?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - It's about breeding animals, right?
• linkDaniel Midgley - No.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - What?!
• linkDaniel Midgley - It's not.Any other guesses?
• linkBen Ainslie - A totally arbitrary thing that doesn't have anything to do with the English word?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeees.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh.But isn’t FIKKEN in other Germanic languages to do with like, breeding?And upbringing cattle?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Well…!
• linkBen Ainslie - Is it from the same root as FECUND?
• linkDaniel Midgley - No.If you take it way back, it goes back to a Dutch word FOKKEN, which means to thrust or to strike.A jolly good…
• linkBen Ainslie - I feel like this is definitely what Hedvig is saying.LAUGHTERTo thrust or to strike?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - No, but I thought it was like a thing you like…I have reared.REARED as in like, reared my children, reared a hoard of whatever kind of thing.
• linkBen Ainslie - SIRED, kind of thing?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, I thought that was it.Anyway, tell me what it is.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I did a little bit of research on this.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Thank you.
• linkDaniel Midgley - And found out it goes back to a person's name.
• linkBen AinslieHedvig Skirgård - Oh.
• linkBen Ainslie - All riiiight!
• linkDaniel Midgley - Get this:Adalpert von Vucckingen.
• linkBen Ainslie - Adalpert von Fucking.I like that.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - But von Vucckingen would mean that he is from a place.Like, von is usually that you’re from a place, right?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Rrright.And…
• linkBen Ainslie - Ooh, the plot thickens!
• linkDaniel Midgley - So that that name dates from about 1070.But it could be that it goes back to a sixth-century Bavarian aristocrat called Focko, who founded the settlement.
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh, okay.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh, okay.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Lord Focko.And that is probably just a coincidence.It's probably not related to fucking at all.
• linkBen Ainslie - Like, that was just probably a name.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Probably just a name.
• linkBen Ainslie - Like, a boring old fashioned, not a name that means a thing.Just a name.
• linkDaniel Midgley - It meant something, we don't know what it is.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - So it feels like they had three choices here.The village town on Fucking.
• linkBen Ainslie - LAUGHSThree?!
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, three.They could either change the name to something completely different.They could change the name so the spelling reflects some older version, so it doesn't sound exactly like Fucking, that it’s…Fuckoville or something.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - LAUGHTER
• linkBen Ainslie - Fuckostan!Yeah, these are all way less bad!
• linkDaniel Midgley - Fucksberg.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Or they could just, like, way lean into it…
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yes!
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Have lots of merchandise.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yes!!
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Have a little museum.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah, yeah.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - And just like charge people for taking selfies with their signage.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Or just say— you know, because their sign got stolen loads of times —they finally had it up on a two-meter pole…
• linkBen Ainslie - Just sell signs!
• linkDaniel Midgley - Sell signs!Have a thing say:Don’t take our sign…just…
• linkBen Ainslie - Here is…here is a bloody, like, a replete sign shelf, full of all of the Fucking signs you could possibly want.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Here's a QR code.We will mail it to you.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah.Free of charge.
• linkDaniel Midgley - You know?Something like that.It would have been a source of income.No, they piked out.They changed…and they changed it to something…Oh, man.They changed it to Fugging.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh, this is my second option, yeah.
• linkBen Ainslie - Isn't that what…some some variety of English uses that as the swear word, right?In the same way the Irish say SHITE, there is someone who says FUGGING instead of FUCKING, right?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Or FOGGING?
• linkDaniel Midgley - I don't know about that.I do know that that in the '50s— 1940s and '50s —what with the laws being what they were, Norman Mailer in his book The Naked and the Dead had to change the word FUCK to FUG, which prompted the actress Tallulah Bankhead to come up to him and say, “So you're the young man who can't spell FUCK.”
• linkDaniel Midgley - LAUGHTER
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Great old story.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, that's good.Well, I can understand them being tired of being the butt of a joke.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah, for sure.One of the things– as an Australian –that I found really weird when I went to Austria— and this really took me by surprise —is how kind of, like, a bit weirdly insecure Austrians are about not being Australia?Like, there has been zero times in my life ever where I have ever had to explain to someone:I'm from Australia, not from Austria.But like, many of the stores and pubs and bars I went into had, like, "We’re Austria not Australia" paraphernalia, and many Austrians that I met were like:Oh, you're Australian!We get confused for you all the time!And I'm like:That's odd, because I've never been confused for you ever!
• linkDaniel Midgley - Uh-uh.Not by English speakers anyway.Does that have anything to do with nearness?
• linkBen Ainslie - When I went there, I was like:This is the first country on earth that I've been to that, like, values the perspective of Australians!
• linkBen Ainslie - {LAUGHTER]
• linkDaniel Midgley - Well, the Fuckingers— which is the name of the people in the town —
• linkBen Ainslie - Love it.
• linkDaniel Midgley - The Fuckingers will have to just get used to a different name.No word on whether– by the way this comes from the BBC –no word on whether the towns of Oberfucking and Unterfucking will have to change those as well.
• linkBen Ainslie - Out of interest, are they called that because they're further up and further down the hill that all of these towns are on?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Oberfucking and Unterfucking are some distance away from Fucking, but they're still pretty close to each other.Anyway, so now we will have to settle for other towns with risque names like Condom, France;Wankdorf, Switzerland;Gofuku, Japan…
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Pretty good.
• linkDaniel Midgley - And Anus, France.Which is weird because Anus…ANUS means ANUS in French too.It's like the town is literally called Anus.
• linkBen Ainslie - Well, if I've learned anything from all the French people I've ever met, is that they don't give a fuck.LAUGHTERThey’re just like:Yeah, my town’s called Anus, what up.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - My friend’s in Europe, when I told them I was going to ANU, they immediately were like:Do you realise that whenever there's going to be possessive, it's going to be ANUS?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Thank goodness for that little apostrophe.
• linkBen Ainslie - Thank you.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - But, like, no one at ANU really cares much.They make like…ANU Sports has, like, big t-shirt that says ANU Sports and stuff.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - LAUGHTER
• linkBen Ainslie - See?Option number three, lean into it.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I just figure that calling your town Anus is, like, the thing everyone does when they say:God, this town sucks.
• linkBen Ainslie - No, well surely they'd call it Cock then, right?
• linkDaniel Midgley - We could have named it something else but, but it's like:no.
• linkBen Ainslie - No, I like it.If I lived in a town called Anus, and in my language that meant Anus, I'd be like:This is us.Welcome.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Let's go on to our next item.And this one is about the phonetic alphabet.When I say phonetic alphabet — Ben, just as the non-linguist of the team, what do you think of?
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh, I would have…
• linkHedvig Skirgård - SINGSFoxtrot, Unicorn
• linkBen Ainslie - If something…if someone said that to me, I would assume they were talking about IPA.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Oh, okay.Like, you mean the one that linguists use?
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Hmm.
• linkBen Ainslie - Because…
• linkDaniel Midgley - Because you've been on the show for 10 years.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah.Well, because like, English isn't phonetic.And you don't…you…the…this is breaking my brain a little bit because I'm like, well, the letters that are in the Roman alphabet can be put together phonetically as in Spanish, and they can be put together non-phonetically as in English, so….So that's why I would assume they meant the IPA.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I was gonna– because I know where this is going –I was gonna try and lead Ben down the path.Do you think of something that isn't really like…So, so:A very generous interpretation of phonetic?
• linkBen Ainslie - Sounds…looks like what it sounds like.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, no, no, but like, actually just remove the word phonetic!LAUGHTERBecause it's not, it's not…
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay, now we have alphabet.I'm aware that alphabets exist.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - This isn’t going very well Daniel, you’re better at this.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - LAUGHTER
• linkBen Ainslie - I like that, I like the world leading me to the answer.And we are now substantially further away from the answer than when we began.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I'll lead you back the other way.
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Tiger Webb did a tweet recently.“When I say”— here's the tweet —“When I say phonetic alphabet, which of these do you primarily associate that with?” And one answer was IPA.Only got 40% of the vote.
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay.
• linkDaniel Midgley - The other one was NATO with 60%.If I say NATO phonetic alphabet, does that mean anything?
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh, do they mean radio alphabet?Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, that sort of thing?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yes, that's correct.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - That's why I was humming the Blink-182 song.SINGSFoxtrot, Unicorn…
• linkDaniel Midgley - Uniform.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - SINGS…Charlie, Kilo.See, I link to news items!
• linkDaniel Midgley - Bloodhound Gang, actually.
• linkBen Ainslie - Ooh!
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh, no!Yes, so it is!Aargh.They’re very similar.
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh!!Shkshhkshhkshk, pop culture knowledge fail!
• linkDaniel Midgley - Thank you.Thank you.
• linkBen Ainslie - I can do it.I can do it all, thanks to my very militaristic high school.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I have some gaps.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Why?
• linkBen Ainslie - Because we did those things.Like, we would march in unison into the hall every Friday.And we did, like, militaristic, scout-y things all the time and all sorts of…very, very fun stuff.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Wow.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Are you good with knives?
• linkBen Ainslie - I'm good with knives in the sense that I can butcher an animal.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - That's good with knives!
• linkDaniel Midgley - You can slaughter a shoat.
• linkBen Ainslie - A shoat?Is that a sheep and a goat?
• linkDaniel Midgley - I don’t know.LAUGHTERI have never understood that Yosemite Sam line, but I like it.Anyway.
• linkBen Ainslie - So what about the phonetic, the what I would call the radio call sign alphabet?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Well, we are talking not about the one for English, but the one for German.Germany is changing its radio alphabet.
• linkBen Ainslie - So I'm assuming German does a similar thing that English does, which is that it takes existing words and attaches them to the letters so that you can say them out loud, and if garbled things come through, people can still kind of, like, muddle their way there.
• linkDaniel Midgley - It is exactly that kind of thing.And the reason why they changed them was because back in the '30s, they purged all the Jewish names.
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh…
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah.Mm.
• linkBen Ainslie - How many?How many left, out of interest?
• linkDaniel Midgley - There were…
• linkBen Ainslie - So if I followed you correctly, just for the sake of our listeners, right?Like, the military has been using this style of call signs for letters for a really, really long time, since the birth of radio, because you need to.And it had an existing set.And then because of da Nazis, a bunch of things got dropped because of Jewish connotations, or just explicitly being Jewish names?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Replaced.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah, sorry.Dropped and then replaced.So how many were dropped, and will now be coming back, I assume?
• linkDaniel Midgley - I'm just looking over the two lists, just quickly.It looks like four that I can see right now.D for David became Dora.N for Nathan became Nord Pole, the North Pole.S was Samuel— it turned into Siegfried —and Z was Zechariah, but it became Zeppelin, as you might expect.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah, well, that's definitely got much better connotations!
• linkDaniel Midgley - Mmm, yeah.So they are changing them back thanks to Michael Blume, an anti-Semitism Commissioner for the state of Baden-Württemberg.So.
• linkBen Ainslie - Baden-Württemberg?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wait, so only one of the states is changing?
• linkBen Ainslie - I reckon what's happened is this person, on behalf of this place has done it, and then everyone's gone:That's a not terrible idea.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah, it's all of Germany.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Okay, good.
• linkBen Ainslie - Because it's definitely not a thing that can happen in a localised way.Right?Like, there's no way you can just have one tiny little sect doing it differently.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - No, exactly.Yeah, no, it doesn't work.However, like when I have to spell my name.I don't know, I’d be curious Daniel to know some of the other words, because often, people seem to use names.So the American alphabet has these, like, Foxtrot, Unicorn…that we just discussed.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah, so like yours would be like:Helo, Echo, Victor, India….I’m trying to spell your name in my head, sorry.I missed D!Delta.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Gulf.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - That’s okay.When I do it in German, like on the fly, on the phone, and people ask, we tend to say like:Heidi, Eric…Like, it's always names.
• linkBen Ainslie - Huh?Mind you, that’s what English speakers do who don't know that alphabet, right?Like, P for Paul.J for Jill.That sort of thing.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah.This is weird.M used to be Marie, but it changed to Martha.Martha, which I didn't think Marie was that…
• linkBen Ainslie - To be honest, I was surprised that some of them got ranked.I have a feeling— I mean, we should probably pause here and just grab someone of Jewish extraction and just ask them, but… like your son who speaks Yiddish for example —But I wouldn't…it sounds to me like some of these names just kind of got caught in this huge Nazi like, Jewish scare kind of campaign.Like, Nathan isn't explicitly Jewish.
• linkDaniel Midgley - It is.It's…it's Old Testament.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah, right.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Anyway, so some of those names are gonna be coming back.So I thought I would mention.
• linkBen Ainslie - That's cool.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - That is cool.
• linkBen Ainslie - I like that.And phonetic alphabets, which is not what I've ever heard them called before, but man, they are fun!Like, of all of the really bizarre things that I had to do because of my high school, I like that thing the most.I love the radio call sign alphabet.It's just heaps of fun!
• linkDaniel Midgley - I think I'm gonna take it on because I'm sick of saying N for uh…uh…numbnuts or something, you know, just having to make up something on the fly.
• linkBen Ainslie - What is wrong with you today?You know, you've got the Fucking story.You’re just dropping numbnuts all over the place.Just like:~hehe, there's a town called Fucking.~
• linkDaniel Midgley - You know, I let my hair down.
• linkBen Ainslie - You’re particularly mature.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - What is numbnuts?I only know NUMTOTS.
• linkBen Ainslie - NUMTARTS?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Well, explain numbnuts first.
• linkBen Ainslie - No, I want…we must stop immediately and explain NUMTARTS!
• linkHedvig Skirgård - NUMTOTS is a very, very popular Facebook group called New Urbanist Means for Transit Oriented Teens.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - DANIEL SNORTS
• linkHedvig Skirgård - It's for people who are into infrastructure and urbanisation and anti-NIM…you know about NIMBYs?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yes.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah, anti-NIMBYism.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - So NUMTOTS are the reaction to NIMBYs.
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh, okay.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - So a lot of memes about trains.
• linkBen Ainslie - I would mock you, but I am part of two different infrastructure shitposting groups from PerthLAUGHS.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Why are they not YIMBYs?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Is one of them called something…something something memes for something something teens?
• linkBen Ainslie - No, though Ayesha does follow a couple of those.Yeah.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - And I think NUMTOT is the originator of that pattern.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah, right, okay.Cool.I will tell her about that.I think she'll be very interested.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - What are numbnuts?Are they what I think they are?
• linkBen Ainslie - Numbnuts is just, like, a dickhead, like, stand in.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.Okay.
• linkBen Ainslie - I don't know why it would be bad to have nuts that are numb, and why that would make you a bad person.For me, having a dick on your head is a far more obviously bad thing.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Maybe you sit on them in the library and they go numb?
• linkBen Ainslie - Possibly.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Because you didn't realise?
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah.Okay.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I think we could look that one up for next time.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah.Okay.Etymology search.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah, we’ll throw it on.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wow.Are we through the news section?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - TRANSITIONAL MUSIC
• linkDaniel Midgley - Welcome back.We are having the Mailbag episode on Because Language.You know how it works:People send us great questions, we give them great answers.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Great.
• linkBen Ainslie - And then Daniel does a whole bunch of work, and we ride his coattails all the way to the stratosphere!
• linkDaniel Midgley - Not so, dear friend.Not so.
• linkBen Ainslie - What's the first question?We can let you answer, Daniel.
• linkDaniel Midgley - This one comes from PharaohKatt on Twitter.
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh good ol’ PharaohKatt.She gives us the best questions.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I've learned so much from her questions.“We have pro-nouns and pro-verbs.Why don't we have pro-adjectives and pro-adverbs?What is the PRO?"
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah.Okay, great.I'm gonna need you guys to stop where you are, and do a whole bunch of linguistic explaining.What is a pro…verb and a pro…What is the PRO-?
• linkDaniel Midgley - So what's a pronoun?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - So I always thought that the reason why it's called pronoun is that it can stand in for the noun.So you can say, “Daniel looks very nice today” or “He looks very nice today.” Right?
• linkDaniel Midgley - That is correct.It is PRO-, in place of, and NOMEN is the name or the noun.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - And I have actually heard people discuss pro- other things.But pro-verb as in, like, a saying…
• linkDaniel Midgley - A proverb.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - What's a good one?I can only think of Swedish ones right now.
• linkBen Ainslie - “Loose lips sink ships”
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, there you go.
• linkBen Ainslie - …Was a proverb in World War II in Britain, meaning like:don't talk about what's going on, because the spies might hear you.
• linkDaniel Midgley - “Young pigs grunt as old pigs grunted before them.”
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay, I like that.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I want a Swedish proverb, Hedvig.COME ON, GIVE ME A SWEDISH ONE.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I have one that’s the same thing as Ben.I don't know if it's a proverb:En svensk tiger, can either be a noun for saying a Swedish Tiger, or a Swedish person is silent.It's not a proverb, it’s more like a slogan.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Oh, okay.Cool.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - It was for the same thing, Ben.
• linkBen Ainslie - YEAH.Same idea.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - For don't talk to Russians.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah.Okay.
• linkBen Ainslie - LAUGHSSuch good advice.
• linkDaniel Midgley - The PRO- in PROVERB is not the same as the PRO- in PRONOUN, because the PRO- pronoun
• linkHedvig Skirgård - That’s what I was going to say, they don’t sound the same.
• linkDaniel Midgley - No, that…Well, no, that's true.The PRO- in PRONOUN is in place of a noun, but a PROVERB, it comes from VERBUM, which is word, and PRO- means forth, like forward.So these are words that you're putting forward.I put this forward as a proverb.
• linkBen Ainslie - Just laying it out there.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh, like an announcement or something.
• linkBen Ainslie - Pontificating.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Hmm.So why don't we have…?
• linkBen Ainslie - Do we have PRO- anything else?
• linkDaniel Midgley - We don't.
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Or do we, Hedvig?We don't have pro-adjectives?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - No.
• linkBen Ainslie - What about the other ones?The other kinds of…the other modifiers.So we've got verbs, and we've got adverbs.What other modifiers?Like, how do the modifiers work for all of these things?
• linkDaniel Midgley - So adverb:AD- is TO.So it's something that's added TO a verb.
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh, okay.So adverbs aren't verbs.They're things that happen next TO verbs.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah.
• linkBen Ainslie - All right.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.“She ate the porridge very quickly.” Very quickly, QUICKLY is the adverb.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Well, I suppose if PRO- means in the place of, and a pronoun is in the place of a noun, there isn't really anything that we use in place of adjectives or in place of conjunctions.
• linkBen Ainslie - I'm sure that if we actually sat down and nutted it out for a while, we could come up with something.Surely somewhere in like, how people are using English, or languages generally on the internet, like in the way that we're seeing BECAUSE change, right?Because language.Surely there is now some standing in of words for other words in the same way pronouns stand in for the nouns of that original place.That must happen!
• linkHedvig Skirgård - What about things like “She had a certain je ne sais quoi”?Like, when you…when you don't have the word for it and use a generic big word for it.Like, there's something she has.
• linkBen Ainslie - An X factor.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - She has it.Or like, there is something about him.When you say something like that.
• linkBen Ainslie - And the only way you can understand it is if you are in tune with that speaker enough to understand that they are sort of linguistically genuflecting towards this thing that everyone has to understand is a thing, but we can’t really…yeah.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - They don’t really have a word for it.
• linkBen Ainslie - Hmm, yeah, that's interesting.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Is that?Is that?
• linkDaniel Midgley - I think that's just circumlocution.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, but, but if I can get philosophical here, HE instead of a name is also…you need a lot of…the other hearer needs to do a lot of work to know who that HE is.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah, there’s a lot of heavy lifting there, right?Yeah.Absolutely.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah, that’s true.Well, so I guess the short answer then, is that the PRO- in pronoun and the PRO- in pro-verb— proverb —are not the same thing.It's just a coincidence.And there aren't other kinds of PRO-, because we just don't do that with anything but nouns.Not really.
• linkBen Ainslie - That's the short answer.The long answer is, that's quitter talk and we should find some.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I was also thinking about DO and MAKE were verbs.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Hmm?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - When you say “do it”, when you mean "bike"?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Oh, wow.Yeah, that's right.That's kind of a pro-verb.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah.Right.So a non-proverb, a pro-verb.I like that.That's fun.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Hmm.
• linkBen Ainslie - Do it!
• linkDaniel Midgley - Thanks PharaohKatt, for that great question.Next one is from Brendan via email— he emailed us at hello@becauselanguage.com —“I was speaking with my father the other day and used the expression ON ACCIDENT when referring to a mistake I subconsciously had made the other day.My father immediately commented that the proper expression is BY ACCIDENT and although I do realise…”
• linkBen Ainslie - GROANS
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah, you got to watch your prepositions, right?“And although I do realise that absolutely is the proper use, I feel that I certainly have heard the expression ON ACCIDENT at some point before."
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh, yeah, for sure.
• linkDaniel Midgley - “I mean it just makes sense.You do something ON PURPOSE or ON ACCIDENT.I was wondering if you've ever heard someone misuse this expression in the same way I have or if you have any similar experiences."
• linkBen Ainslie - Definitely.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I wouldn't even call it a misuse, it’s super common.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yes, I will cut straight to the end here and just be like:that is a thing that a lot of people say.So you get to have that really fun conversation with your dad about like:MOCKING TEENAGE VOICE?~Hey dad, in linguistics there’s prescriptivist and descriptivist, and one person says you should do something and blalalajajdlkjfdjf.~NORMAL VOICEAnd so you could have that conversation, or you could just be like:Shut up, I’ll say what I want.
• linkDaniel Midgley - It depends on your relationship.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Daniel, did you check the Ngrams for this?
• linkDaniel Midgley - I did.And I found that BY ACCIDENT is far and away the more common in writing, all the way through history.
• linkBen Ainslie - Sure.
• linkDaniel Midgley - But like Brendan says, ON still makes sense.And then I also found, I found a post by Grammar Girl Minion Fogarty, who found a paper on this by Leslie Barratt, Professor of linguistics at Indiana State University.And Barratt points out that if you're under 30, you're probably likely to say and accept ON ACCIDENT – the less common one.If you're over 40, you're probably likely to reject it and say BY ACCIDENT instead.So this is a…you know, one of those up and coming changes in progress.
• linkBen Ainslie - This reminds me.This tugs a little, like, memory string in my brain of one of my pet peeves, which is people who get very sort of demanding around the correct formulation being AT THE WEEKEND, not ON THE WEEKEND.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh my god, what?AT the weekend?What is that?
• linkBen Ainslie - And it just…Ohhh, it breaks my brain because it's like one of those…it's the same thing…I find it's just like one of those, like, “look how clever I am” dog-whistling moments, in the same way that people make sure to sort of pronounce APPRECIATEəpriːsijeɪtWITH A ROLLING R AND AN Sthat way.And I'm like:Yeah, okay, we get it, you've read some books, whatever.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - (It's APPRECI…əpriːʃ…
• linkBen Ainslie - Like, it seems like one of those really, annoyingly difficult, like…being all up in arms about it being BY MISTAKE, not ON MISTAKE, I think says a lot about the person who gets up in arms about that thing.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - But at least BY ACCIDENT is more common, at least with writing.So like…So I think the dad has got a bit of a point.Whereas AT THE WEEKEND, ON THE WEEKEND, the frequency there is…like, they can't be…ON THE WEEKEND has to be more common.Right?
• linkBen Ainslie - You would…I don’t know
• linkHedvig Skirgård - And appreciateə.pɹi.si.jeitand appreSHiateə.pɹi.ʃi.eit…Who…?What…?
• linkBen Ainslie - Daniel, I want to quickly write a question to Because Language, if you could just check the inbox and then just add it to the end of this show and research it while we do the rest of them, that'd be great.
• linkBen Ainslie - LAUGHTER
• linkDaniel Midgley - Sure, great.I had to get used to AT THE WEEKEND, when I came to Australia.I also had to get used to AS AT March 30, instead of AS OF March 30.
• linkBen Ainslie - I hate this stuff.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - What?I've never heard this.
• linkBen Ainslie - Maybe it’s…maybe it's because I grew up in the States or something.But I just find it so conceited and unnecessary.Like, everyone understands this.It doesn't….What did you get up on the weekend?PRETENTIOUS VOICE~Oh, I think you mean, what did I get up to AT the weekend?~And I'm like, just stop.I don't care anymore.Don't answer my question.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, exactly.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Could it be that you did something in the past ON the weekend, but when something is coming up, it's gonna be AT the weekend?
• linkBen Ainslie - Bahhhh.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Ohh!
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Prepositions in time expressions are super weird, but Brendan continues, “Also I just want to say I absolutely love the podcast.I frequently have to drive long-distance to see my partner, and nothing breaks the monotonous and mind-numbing music better than listening to an episode or two.I hope that you're all doing well in these times.And just want to thank you again for the countless hours of intellectual engagement.”
• linkBen Ainslie - Well, if you are listening to this while you're on one of your long drives, Brendon, let me be the first to say:Cow.Tree.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Let me be the first to say:you need some better music.May I recommend Tycho.
• linkBen Ainslie - Sign.Another sign.Fence post.Sorry, anyway.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Hey, speaking of music, can I know what you guys's top song on Spotify was this year?
• linkBen Ainslie - I don't use Spotify because I am old and crotchety, but I can give you my most listened to song on YouTube, which is where I do most of my music these days.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - But isn't that going to be something from from Ellis, isn’t that going to be…?
• linkBen Ainslie - No.No, no, no, no, no, no, no, nooo NO.I don't let him pollute my YouTube Music feed that way.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Okay.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I don't use either one.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh god.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I have all my mp3s.
• linkBen Ainslie - What is your most listened to track then, Daniel?
• linkDaniel Midgley - My most listened to track?Of all time?
• linkBen Ainslie - No.This year.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - No.This year.
• linkDaniel Midgley - If you give me 15 seconds, I can get it.
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay.Well, while he's doing that, I can tell you almost certainly what mine would be.It would actually probably be a song called Holy Harbour, by a German marching band called Meute.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - LAUGHSWhat?!Okay.
• linkBen Ainslie - Look it up!
• linkHedvig Skirgård - That's…okay.
• linkBen Ainslie - Look it up.Daniel’s busy doing other things.So Holy Harbour, Meute.And I reckon Meute will be like so far up your alley, it's gonna get stuck, by the way.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wow.
• linkBen Ainslie - M-U-E-T-E.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - It’s a marching band?
• linkBen Ainslie - Yes.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Didn't know you're…well, now that I learned about your military upbringing, maybe I'm not so surprised.
• linkBen Ainslie - So so so, it's not that.It's not that at all.It's…they mostly do covers of EDM tracks and I love EDM.So that's how I got into them.But this is one of their originals and it's really really good.
• linkDaniel Midgley - IS BACKOkay.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - M-O-E-T-T-E?
• linkBen Ainslie - M-U-E-T-E.It's…I pronounced it Mute for a long time, but it apparently it’s pronouncedmwe.te.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Track number one is Bâton Rompus by Nick Duffy, because my daughter loves it.The one that is really mine is First Class by Khruangbin.And then number three is HTRK with Real Headfuck.And number four is Yumi Zouma, Cool for a Second (the Japanese Wallpaper Remix).There you have it.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Ahh.Very interesting.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Thanks, Brendan, for that great question.
• linkBen Ainslie - Absolutely.And by the way, Brendan, now you just get three tracks.Oh, wait, no, Hedvig, what's your most listened to track this year?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Um, it's a song called Softly by Clairo.Basically, my top lists were all, like, my PhD writing playlist.It’s all very soft pop.
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh right, yeah, okay, so not a super representative kind of sample necessarily.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - No, I’ve been listening a lot to lo-fi pop all year, regardless of writing or not, actually.
• linkBen Ainslie - Lo-fi is…man, I don't know who 10 years ago was like:Let's just lo-fi everything, but that person deserves a medal.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, yeah.No, it's great.My number two was actually New Slang by The Shins, which, fair enough.
• linkBen Ainslie - You definitely have a Manchester husband.
• linkBen Ainslie - LAUGHTER
• linkDaniel Midgley - Next question.Matthias on Facebook says, “What's the past tense of 'to speedrun’?I thought it was ‘speedran’ but I just heard ‘spedrun’ and now my life is in shambles."
• linkDaniel Midgley - BEN LAUGHS
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I like SPEDRUN, I like SPEDRUN.
• linkBen Ainslie - I like them both, actually.SPEEDRAN, SPEDRUN.I like SPEDRUN actually, yeah, absolutely.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I like SPEDRUN.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Ugh, I hate it.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I think intuitively I would say SPEDRUN.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Well, what do you think about SPEEDRUNNED?
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh, no!Nooo.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Why not?Why not?
• linkBen Ainslie - Gross.Do you know why?Because it sounds like— and it's another one of those really annoying, annoying things that just always really irrits me —when you HANG a person to kill them, they have never been HUNG, they have been HANGED.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yes, yes.
• linkBen Ainslie - And I've just always found that pedantic.
• linkDaniel Midgley - It is.
• linkBen Ainslie - Sort of really dumb and annoying.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wow.I have never had to discuss that, such that I knew that.
• linkBen Ainslie - Don't you play D&D?That's never come up?Never?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - No!
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh, you clearly have a much nicer DM than I ever am!
• linkHedvig Skirgård - What?People were hanged?
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh, there are gibbets in most of my campaigns.I like a nice sort of Eastern European, the Witcher style sort of fantasy mythos, where things just get grim as hell.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wow.Okay.Yeah, no.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Let me ask a question:SCUBADIVE, past tense.Do you like SCUBADOVE?Or SCUBADIVED?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - SCUBADOVE.SCUBADIVED.
• linkBen Ainslie - I would actually probably, I would say, I would be a cheat.I would say “I went scuba diving.”
• linkDaniel Midgley - Oh, no, you don't get to!
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I was gonna say that about the speedrun, that I was gonna say “did a speed run”
• linkDaniel Midgley - Did a speed run.That is not available to you.
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay.All right.Scuba….Scuba….Aww, they're all bad!SCUBADIVED.
• linkDaniel Midgley - If SCUBADIVED sounds good, why does SPEEDRUNNED sound terrible?
• linkBen Ainslie - Because RUNNED isn't a thing.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah, but neither is DIVED.Well, okay it kind of is, isn’t it?
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah it…What?!Yes, it is.
• linkDaniel Midgley - He DOVE under the water.DIVED is.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - DIVED is a thing.
• linkBen Ainslie - RUNNED is just…it’s just an abomination.It's like a healthy animal with a giant growth on its side.It's just wrong.It's abhorrent.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Or it’s something a child says.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah, I runned.
• linkBen Ainslie - Which is also terrible.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Well, I was thinking it also sounds okay, SPEEDRAN sounds okay.Because we have so many RAN verbs like “they outran the storm” or “they overran their budget”.
• linkBen Ainslie - SPEDRUN for sure.SPEDRUN all the way.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Why SPED?No, I don't like SPEDRUN.He SPEDRUN?
• linkBen Ainslie - SPEDRUN is good…it’s something like…
• linkHedvig Skirgård - It's short.
• linkBen Ainslie - It just fits!Like there's something about it, how it just kind of clicks into the puzzle pieces of that context.Like, have you ever like engaged in speed running, Daniel?Have you ever tried it?
• linkDaniel Midgley - When I run, I can't get up to any speed, so…
• linkBen Ainslie - PAUSESo…you do know that it’s not to do with running…
• linkDaniel Midgley - I do know.You finish the game, and then you try and finish the game again faster.
• linkBen Ainslie - We had to just clarify.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I was doing a bit.
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay.It was a very good bit.You did well, dad, good job.
• linkDaniel Midgley - But if that's the case, then why…Okay, tell me about HANGGLIDE.What did you do yesterday?You HUNGGLIDE?Come on.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - No.HANGGLIDED.
• linkBen Ainslie - HANGGLIDED, yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - You don't past tense the first…
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Also, GLIDED is a word.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yes.Exactly, Daniel.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yes.Yes, it is.Okay.Okay.So you're, you're proposing a fairly complex set of rules here.You're saying if it's a thing…
• linkHedvig Skirgård - That’s not a problem.Speakers can deal with it.
• linkBen Ainslie - All I'm saying is if it feels good, it works.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Exactly.
• linkDaniel Midgley - But can you think of any other compound verbs that are kind of irregular, where the first one gets the tense?
• linkBen Ainslie - But that's…That doesn't have to be the rule.This could be a thing.This could be a beautiful unicorn of vocal manifestation.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Mhm.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay, but what we try to do is we're trying to look for patterns, right?Is this part of any pattern that you know?
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay, let's see.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Let’s start with the pattern:speed, sped, run, ran.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeees.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, that’s enough for me.
• linkBen Ainslie - What about this, Daniel?What if, given the context in which it takes place, which is to say a hyper-specific clique-y sort of in-dom of human beings?
• linkDaniel Midgley - And pretty new too.
• linkBen Ainslie - What if, for lack of a better phrase, what if the uniqueness of it is its appeal to the users of that community?Right?We want to set ourselves apart by…and this happens in gamer lingo all the time, right?
• linkDaniel Midgley - It's true.
• linkBen Ainslie - There is a constant sort of treadmill of:First you would be “elite” at something, then you would be “leet” at something then you would be “1337” at something.All of these things being a manifestation to make them less and less sort of, like, accessible to the layperson.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - What is NOOB from?
• linkBen Ainslie - Ooh, good question, actually, I don't know.What is the etymology of NOOB?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Oh, it's from a NEWBIE.You're someone who's new at the game.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Okay, there we go!
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah, but what is NEWBIE?
• linkDaniel Midgley - So it's NEW plus BIE, but then the B jumped.It got re-bracketed, so now it’s NOOB.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah, right, there you go.SPEDRUN.
• linkDaniel Midgley - And in fact, you know, Hedvig, you have said that we often underestimate— I think it was Öst…, was it Mikael Parkvall? —who said that we underestimate the influence of humour on language change and language innovation.
• linkBen Ainslie - Absolutely!
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, people like to have fun.
• linkBen Ainslie - If internet linguistic, like, change has taught us anything, it's that fun drives a lot of this stuff.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Have you seen all the people online?There's various Facebook groups and things where they they pretend that N is a forbidden letter and they only use M.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - LAUGHTER
• linkDaniel Midgley - The forbiddem masal.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah.I love that.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - So there’s like chickem mugget.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - LAUGHTER
• linkDaniel Midgley - You just dom't.You dom't type it.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Chickem…mugget??God, I can't even.
• linkDaniel Midgley - You mever do.
• linkBen Ainslie - Why?!Like, why?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - It's fun!It's so much fun!
• linkDaniel Midgley - Because you can't have a group identity if you just do normal stuff.You have to do weird stuff.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, right.
• linkBen Ainslie - Gotta be weird, true.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - And this is wholesome weird, at least.Like, it’s not, like, Pepe the Frog or something.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Oh, yeah.Okay, Matthias, is the verb is SPEDRUN.There you go.
• linkBen Ainslie - Daniel has been pooh-pooh-ed.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - We decide.We are the Alliance Anglaise…no!Why do I keep calling it that?The Acadamie Anglaise, sorry.
• linkDaniel Midgley - It’s two against one.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I keep mixing up Alliance Française and Academie Française.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Hmm, common mistake.This one comes from Matt on Facebook, “So I have questions for linguists.I was watching a TikTok."
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yes.A tikitok.
• linkBen Ainslie - A tikitok?
• linkDaniel Midgley - What?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - A tikitok.
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh, is this the Svedish or is this the Hedvig-ish?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - No, no, it was a joke.There was some NBA players.I don't understand, it’s American sports!One of the players was really popular on TikTok, and the other one came over and said, “Hey, my son really likes you, can you put me in one of your tikitoks?” And I thought that was very funny.
• linkBen Ainslie - That's amazing.That sounds wonderful.I like that.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Tikitoks.
• linkDaniel Midgley - “I was watching a tikitok— started as a rebellion against a certain person trying to ban the app and now I'm addicted —where an English teacher in Japan was explaining that students shouldn't use Japanese in English class.” Fair enough.Very common.“But some Japanese words are okay, like SUSHI.”
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay, well, okay, because they've been, because they've been adopted into the English language.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Mhm.“But” says Matt, “if a word like SUSHI is borrowed into English, it's now an English word, right?”
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, exactly.
• linkDaniel Midgley - “Meaning that saying SUSHI wouldn't be using Japanese in English class, just an English word of Japanese origin.Or how does that work?”
• linkBen Ainslie - But isn’t that what the teacher said?Isn't that just how you told the story?Like, the teacher said you can't use Japanese words.But there are some Japanese words you can use, because they're in English.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, but they aren't Japanese words anymore.
• linkBen Ainslie - Ah, okay, I get it.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Also, probably SUSHI the way English people pronounce it isn't the way that that word sounds like in Japanese.Right?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Mm, that's gonna come up in a second here."So the TL;DR is when does the word borrowed from a second language become part of the first?” Do we have any…do we have any indication?
• linkBen Ainslie - I'm thinking Hedvig’s probably on the money here.Like, when it substantially changes pronunciation in common usage.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I think that's one thing.Definitely.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yep.
• linkDaniel Midgley - So I think another thing, not only pronunciation, but when people forget that it's a loanword.When enough people forget that that’s where it came from.
• linkBen Ainslie - Ooof, that’s a tough bar to clear, though.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I know.
• linkBen Ainslie - Like, that's gonna be centuries before we're there with something like SUSHI, surely.
• linkDaniel Midgley - And it can happen really quickly.Like, PIZZA is only…less than a century old but it's fully English now.Any other guidelines, Hedvig?We got pronunciation, we've got sort of opacity of etymology.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Can you take morphology?Can you say “I had lots of sushis yesterday”?
• linkDaniel Midgley - That was my next thing.Yes.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Or EMOJIS.You know, right now everybody pluralises it EMOJI, but I think if enough people say lots of EMOJIS…
• linkHedvig Skirgård - To be fair, I think SUSHI is like a mass noun.So you say, like:"I had lots of SUSHI yesterday", the same way you say "there's lots of water in the room."
• linkBen Ainslie - I saw lots of sheep.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah, that's right.This isn't an easy question.Words don't get an induction ceremony, but it can happen really quickly.And I think it has to do with pronunciation.
• linkBen Ainslie - What's an example of one that's happened really quickly?
• linkDaniel Midgley - I think EMOJI is…Is it fully English?Maybe not.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh!yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - You just gotta feel for these things.
• linkBen Ainslie - I would assume so.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, I think a lot of people don't know it has other origins.They just think it's like a cute affix to, like, EMOTICON, which it’s not.
• linkBen Ainslie - I would imagine it…The rapidity with which that's been inculcated into English is to do with the thing that birthed it?I’m not making a lot of sense here.IE, emoji, the actual thing that the word represents, came about very quickly and rose to popularity very, very quickly, right?In the West.SUSHI, like, spent a long time building itself up in first sort of the United States, and then other Western nations as, like, a food item.And you have to go to a Japanese store to get it, right?But on your phone, you don't have to go into the Japanese part of your phone.You don't have to go to the Japanese district of your iPhone and be like:Oh, but I really need like the crying eyes emoji, like, I'm gonna have talk to this vendor who I don't really understand and it's gonna be really difficult.Like, no.And so I think because of that, the lineage of SUSHI is going to remain super clear for a really long time, whereas something like EMOJI just doesn’t.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Do you know what I also think might be happening?I think that a word from a language is going to feel more adopted in quicker, if that culture is more similar to ours.If they are not “the other”.You know, I feel like there's some social othering.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, sure.
• linkBen Ainslie - But by that logic, EMOJI should have taken just as long as SUSHI should have, right?Because Japanese and Western culture are not super similar.
• linkDaniel Midgley - But we still feel like SUSHI is a foreign word, or do we?
• linkBen Ainslie - But we don’t feel like EMOJI is.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wait, do we?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Do we?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Maybe that part, that domain of Japanese society feels more similar to our behaviour, like texting.
• linkBen Ainslie - Hmm, yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Because it’s in everybody's pockets.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, I dunno.
• linkBen Ainslie - And it's…and if I'm being fair as well, I think it's more…it's mostly that what happened was the rest of the world caught up with how Japan had been living their lives through their phones for many years before the West got to it.So I was surprised to learn that computer ownership in Japan is actually quite a lot less than in the West.Right?So like, in the same way that a lot of people now don't really have laptops or computers or whatever— like us three do, obviously, because the work we do in podcasting, that sort of thing —but like a lot of people just don't have a computer, right?Because they've got a phone, and it does most of what they need it to do.And if they go to work, there's a computer there.And that's that, right?Which is how Japanese society had been running for, like 10 years before we figured out that, like, smartphones were a thing and a bunch of stuff, right?Like, Japan had made smart phones smart a long time before Apple came along.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Wow.Okay.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - That's really wild to me.Like, I still…like, I know people who use pad…what are we calling them again?
• linkBen Ainslie - iPads.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, but the things that aren’t Apple?
• linkBen Ainslie - Tablets.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Tablets.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I know a lot of people use tablet computers instead of a computer.And I just can't…like, they type on it.And they like connect a keyboard.And I'm like:why don't you have a computer?Just buy a computer!Don't understand.
• linkBen Ainslie - Mate, if you really want a really fun time, what you should do is come and do my job and see an entire generation of kids who have no computer literacy, because everyone's just like:MOCKING VOICE~oh, they’re digital natives, they’ll just like figure it out.~And it's just like, no.You need to discrete instruction.You absolutely do.Kids don't know how to copy and paste a file.They don't understand the concept of a file, and like, hard drives and folders and stuff.Because Apple was just likeMOCKING VOICE~I'm not gonna like, people don't need to know how to store things.~NORMAL VOICEScrew you, Apple.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.No, I've had to…because I teach like beginning programming to some people sometimes.And it's one thing when the older people, like, I'm like:download this file, put it in a place where you know where it is in your file structure.And I see the look of some of the older people and also some of the younger people looking like:folder structure, don't know really how comfortable I am with that.
• linkBen Ainslie - Do you know?It's at the point now where I would rather a 55 year old than a 15 year old.If I was just to roll the dice, if I was to like play the averages, I would definitely go trying to explain the concepts to a person who was there before computers came along, then someone who's just been born into it but doesn't know.Because they're just used to total ease of service, right?They are used to being able to look at a phone screen and with very few sort of, like, contextual clues be able to like tap their way to whatever it is they want to do.Whereas a computer you have to, like, know stuff.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Hey, Matt, thanks for that question.Interesting stuff.
• linkBen Ainslie - You got Ben ranting.Matt!Well done.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Let's go on to a question from Moxie from Your Brain on Facts— that's @BrainOnFactsPod —who tweeted us:“If anyone will know this it's y'all.Does the recent phrase GOING HAM descend from GOING WHOLE HOG or maybe GOING HOG WILD?” Do you, have you heard this one, Ben?GOING HAM?
• linkBen Ainslie - I have not.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I had not either.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I have no idea what you’re talking about.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay.
• linkBen Ainslie - We are OLD.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Going hell for leather is going ham.But where does it come from?Okay, well, your best guess?Does Moxie’s guess sound pretty good, or do you have a better one?
• linkBen Ainslie - Going full ham.I wonder.I like to call things biscuits in place of like, stupid or dumb or whatever.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - What?
• linkBen Ainslie - Like:Oh, you biscuit.I don't know why, I just do.And I'm wondering if it's just like one of those funny word games where you just put a deeply nonsensical word in.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay, well, let's see.
• linkBen Ainslie - Is it WHOLE HOG?
• linkDaniel Midgley - No.I took a look at Green's Dictionary of Slang and they've got…John Green has an entry for GO HAM.Comes from the 2000s:“to put in maximum effort or to go hard as a motherfucker.” H-A-M.
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay.HAM meaning, like, the genitals with which you are like, fucking this task to destruction?
• linkDaniel Midgley - I don't think so.I just think it's like somebody who's completely mad.Somebody who's completely crazy, like:rawwwrrrr, like a berserker.
• linkBen Ainslie - That's strange, though, because HAM is very sedate and boring an idea.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Now this was popularised in the Jay Z and Kanye West song HAM.
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh, okay.
• linkDaniel Midgley - But I'm not sure if this is a backronym.If the term was in fact, you know, came from somewhere else but then people sort of attached this "hard as a motherfucker" acronym to it.I don't think so.But I'm reserving that possibility that maybe it was popular like around 2000, 2005, people were saying it for some other reason.And then the motherfucker interpretation sort of took over.
• linkBen Ainslie - So, like a folk etymology essentially.Like a Fornication Under Consent of the King type of thing?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Excuse me?!Oh.I got it now.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Well, just like people think that BAE, if someone's your bae…Before Anyone Else.Or THOT, t-h-o-t, is That Ho Over There?Neither of those are true, but people have this history of when it is a term, they love to invent backronyms.
• linkBen Ainslie - It’s got to be an acronym!
• linkDaniel Midgley - Everything's an acronym!No, it's not.So Moxie, at this point the best I could do is say it looks like it's the motherfucker interpretation, going hard as a motherfucker.But people could have been using it earlier and it could have been a backronym.At this point, it doesn't look like it, but there you go.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Ham…
• linkHedvig Skirgård - LAUGHTER
• linkDaniel Midgley - …why HAM…?
• linkBen Ainslie - It feels like Hedvig’s has just now caught up to the very first part of this question!
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Well, I’m just trying relate back, I’m just like:why…okay, never mind.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Two more.Dynasty‘dɪ.nə.sti.This one's from Diego on Patreon.“Hi there.Listening to episode seven, Mailbag of One Wrong Answer.I noticed Hedvig’s pronunciation of DYNASTYdɪ.nə.stiwith the first syllable as dindɪninstead of dinedaɪn
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yep, what's up.
• linkBen Ainslie - Both are acceptable, right?Dynastydaɪ.nə.sti, dynastydɪ.nə.sti
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah, it's fine.Yeah, I say dynastydaɪ.nə.sti, I'm from American English.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I play more Crusader Kings then you, so my opinion rules.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - BEN LAUGHS
• linkDaniel Midgley - Ah, there you go.You play infinitely more than I do.
• linkBen Ainslie - Have you spent 300 hours meticulously crafting a dynastydɪ.nə.stidigitally, Daniel?No?Then you can shut the hell up, you serf, good for nothing.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dying twice in a day?I died twice in a day the other day.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Is this what this is about?Okay, okay.A challenge.CARTOON KNIGHT VOICEA challenge?!
• linkBen Ainslie - How do you lose Crusader Kings?Does every member of your family have to die out?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I lost twice in a day.No, your heir, the character you're playing…So for everyone, Crusader Kings is a computer game where you play a character and you try and advance your dynasty, your lineage.If you don't have any heirs that will carry forward your legacy and you die, then the game ends.
• linkBen Ainslie - Gotcha.Gotcha.Gotcha.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay.
• linkBen Ainslie - Sorry.Carry on.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Diego continues:“It got me thinking about how there are several words in English with a syllable that can be pronounced as either Iaɪor a schwa.Civilaɪ-sation, daɪ-rection” — civilə-sation, də-rection.“I know the modern Iaɪsound is a result of the Great Vowel Shift, but my question is, does the Great Vowel Shift have anything to do with this?Have these words always had both pronunciations?Have these syllables always been in flux between a schwa and anaɪ?Was REALISE ever pronounced realEEze instead of realAIse?Thanks.”
• linkBen Ainslie - Wow.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wow, this is some galaxy brain thinking.
• linkBen Ainslie - Diego.This is fucking…This is hard shit, man.You have really like…other people are like:what do you think about proverbs.And you're just like:Listen, I know the Great Vowel Shift…
• linkHedvig Skirgård - That was a good question!
• linkBen Ainslie - No, no, I don't…none of these have been bad questions.But this is like, this is rolling in the deep cuts, I think we can say.This question has touched on the Great Vowel Shift, and the like vocalisation unit, schwaʒwaAll right, this is not some Johnny come lightly bullshit.This is like:ahhh!
• linkHedvig Skirgård - We need to explain both those things, I think.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay, let's do it.So the Great English Vowel Shift was somewhere between 1400 and 1700 CE.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Sure.
• linkBen Ainslie - And if what…as the nonlinguistic, for everyone listening who is about to learn about the Great Vowel Shift for the first time, like, take a massive hit on a doobie you've got nearby, because this shit is gonna bake your noodle.Straight up, like when someone's just like:Oh, by the way, at a certain point in history, everyone just said vowels, like, a different way!
• linkDaniel Midgley - And no one knows why!
• linkBen Ainslie - What?!What?!
• linkDaniel Midgley - Hedvig, you want to take this, or have you got a good bit on this?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I'm not sure I'm the best…So basically, what you need to do in your brain, first of all, is to make a little triangle, where you havei,u, andaat the extreme ends.And then you imagine that there's a space between that, and you plot in all the rest of the vowels you can think of in that space.Now what happened was that what you can think of as letters and how they map onto these sounds, they all sort of just did a little roundabout, swigabout movement.
• linkBen Ainslie - They did a do-si-do, didn't they?They were doing a barn dance, and they all just went:And now swing your partner round and round!
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, they all step one step forward.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yep.Everybody said:Hey, you know that word, RIDEri:də, which means:Hey, I need ari:dəto the bus station, right?I'm just going to start saying that RIDEɹaɪdinstead.I'm just going to make that totally long.And then what used to bei, I’m going to take all the sounds that areeand I'm going to move them up toi.So now clæneklænəbecomes CLEAN.All right?So everything's just swirling around here, and nobody knows why.And it happened, you know, for over the course of 300 years.
• linkBen Ainslie - If ever there was…I know, like, archaeologists love to point at pyramids and be like:Mm, aliens.I feel like this is the alien thing.100%, right?Like, a bunch of aliens came down with and were drunk, first of all, and were just kind of like:Hehehe, you want to do something fun?You just want to change how this entire civilisation speaks for, like, the next two millennia?Hah hah hah!
• linkDaniel Midgley - No, no, no, no, no, dude, let's wait 100 years until they have books and their spelling gets mostly settled.Let's do it *then*.After that.That'll stuff 'em!
• linkDaniel Midgley - LAUGHTER
• linkBen Ainslie - It's so weird.Okay, so that's the Great Vowel Shift.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - The vowel shift, so this Great Vowel Shift is an interesting thing that people mostly have talked about.I mean, so we're talking about English here.But there's no reason to assume that this kind of phenomena doesn't occur in other languages as well.But we just don't know really about them yet.It would be really fun if, if anyone knew the same thing.
• linkBen Ainslie - Well, I just worry about like…when I heard the story for the first time, there's the initial like, what?!That’s crazy!And then I assume like everyone who hears about the Great Vowel Shift, eventually, my brain was like, it could happen tomorrow!LAUGTERNo one knows why it came.No one knows where it went!It could come back again.And so tomorrow, I could be, like, RUDING to work instead of RIDING to work, and a bunch of other crazy nonsense.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Well, there is…there are shifts in progress.I mean, there's the Northern Cities shift in the US where instead of saying Bob, they say Babbæb.
• linkBen Ainslie - Bab, bab, bab.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Well, Bab…
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Well, that also underlines the why historical linguists don't really use vowels that much, because vowels are so…
• linkBen Ainslie - Just make no sense.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - They're on such a continuum.And you can…it seems like humans are able to accept so much variation with vowels.Like, a lot of different people have different vowels, and people don't seem to have a massive problem understanding each other.
• linkBen Ainslie - And I guess that's mostly how accents work as well, right?
• linkDaniel Midgley - That's our next question!
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.A lot of…
• linkBen Ainslie - Like, when you go to Liverpool, right?It's the vowels that are really doing the legwork of making that accent, right?DRUM becomes DROOM, and all that kind of stuff.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - It seems like vowels, and also, maybe intonation and maybe stress placement are things where people…the human brain is like:yeah, I'll accept variation, because I'll still understand what you're saying.Which means you can grab on to it if you want to use it for identity marking, because people will notice it, but they won't…they won't have comprehension.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - This is my personal theory that there are certain things…like, you can't just start pronouncing all the consonants differently, because then people won't actually understand you.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah, unintelligible.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - But if you want to mark where you're from, you can just shift your vowels around a bit.Yeah.It's like, I'm watching The Crown right now.And the Queen's vowels famously.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah.Okay, we got…We'll come back to this for Nikolai’s question next, but let's go back to dynastydɪnəstidynastydaɪnəsti.So you know how, so dynastydɪnəstihas three syllables, dy.na.sty.You know how it's proNOUNce— two syllables —but when it turns to three, it's proNUNciation?Or like SERENEsə.ɹi:n, but SERENITYsə.ɹen.ə.ti?
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay.So this is happening, because this is part of a process called— get ready, this is the term —trisyllabic laxing.
• linkBen Ainslie - All right.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Okay.
• linkBen Ainslie - God bless you!
• linkDaniel Midgley - So what's happening here is that you got a long vowel in a three-or-more syllable word.And instead of being really tense— like SERENE, [i], really tense —it turns more to anə, SERENITY, serenity.
• linkBen Ainslie - So what’s longer version, like DYNASTIC?What's the bigger word that we're trying to get to here?
• linkDaniel Midgley - What's the short, what is the shorter word?I don't even know what that would be.
• linkBen Ainslie - Dyn, dyn…
• linkDaniel Midgley - What was the…what's the tense version of dynasty?Well, dynasty’sdaɪnəstithe tense version.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dynastic was the closest thing, I think.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah, that's interesting.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dynastic head.
• linkBen Ainslie - Dynastic.
• linkDaniel Midgley - But we do it in words like this.And the interesting thing is that in British English, it's more likely to lax than American English.And that's why we have words like DYNASTYdɪnəstiinstead of DYNASTYdaɪnəsti, PRIVACYpɹɪvəsiinstead of PRIVACYpɹaɪvəsiand VITAMINvɪtəmɪninstead of VITAMINvaɪtəmɪn.
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh!Interesting.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Ohhh, so TOMATOtəˈmeɪtoʊand TOMATOtəˈmɑːtəʊ.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah, so it's PRIVATEpɹaɪvət, but PRIVACYpɹɪvəsi, VITALvaɪtəl, but VITAMINvɪtəmɪn— all right? —and American English just keeps the tense versions.Now, back to Diego's question:Does this have anything to do with the Great English Vowel Shift?And the answer is no, this stuff happened way before the Great English Vowel Shift.Once again, the vowel shift was between 1400 and 1700, and this goes all the way back to Middle English and even to Old English.This is a constant thing that's been going on in English for a long time.So nope, they're not related.
• linkBen Ainslie - Interesting.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - That’s pretty cool.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay, finishing up.Let's get back to our earlier discussion.Nikoli asks on our Discord channel:"Why is it so common for English dialects to differ mostly in their vowels?Do other languages have similar dialect contrasts?Is this related to our having tons of vowels?My linguistics final paper is on the cot-caught merger.Muahahaha."
• linkHedvig Skirgård - So I feel like…I feel like we all have, like, theories that we keep returning to.Ben, for you…did we talk about this, that children have an easier time learning because they don’t have much else to do?
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah, like, yeah.Like, children are no better learning languages, they just have literally every need taken care of.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, they have nothing better else to do, and the only thing they want to do is control their environment and they need language to do that.And mine is, there are certain things in language that people are able to accept variation in and still keep comprehension, but they accept variability, and you can use that variability to do something else that isn't meaning.That is, for example, what we call indexicality, which is identity things.
• linkBen Ainslie - Identity.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - So that's my…so I call that theory.So if any of our…if any of our listeners listen to this show, and are gonna write a paper, you have to write, like, H…there's probably…they always want to have good ideas!
• linkBen Ainslie - But someone’s also had them first.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Someone wrote a book on it in the '80s.
• linkBen Ainslie - Didn’t you discover this when you were doing your PhD?It's really hard to come up with new ideas!
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, yeah.LAUGHTERNo, I…my professor in Stockholm, Östen Dahl, I would sometimes, like, go around and think I had a good idea, and then I would research, and he would almost always have written a paper about it.It's like, he like, set me down a cognitive path.And it just led…
• linkBen Ainslie - That he'd already trod very well.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah!And then I came across something, and I was like:Oh, this is a wonderful landmark!And then like:No, no, no, he's put a flag here.
• linkBen Ainslie - Damn.Damn!
• linkDaniel Midgley - Well, okay, so Hedvig, it sounded like what you were saying earlier is that vowels…there's a lot of shift possible in there because they're kind of slippery.And also, there's a great deal of tolerance for variation in vowels, whereas for consonants, you wouldn't have that much variation.So this kind of thing could happen anywhere?Accents in different languages are going to be also vowel based, like they are in English, mostly?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkBen Ainslie - Ooh, but hang on, though.What about tonal languages?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, I think they do too.I think vowels are a thing.Yeah.And the tricky thing is also— I would argue, based on, what was it, Lithuanian and Swedish, a couple more? —that if you have some sort of tone intonational stuff, you can maybe use that as well.Not if you're a super tonal language, but if you have a little bit of it, you could…what’s a good…?For English, for you guys, it's probably stress placement rather than intonation.
• linkBen Ainslie - Right.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Mm.I feel like Nikoli’s question is interesting though, because like, I'm thinking of my one point of comparison that I know really well, Spanish.You know, Spanish doesn't have…like English has 14 vowels or 15 vowels, depending on how you want to slice it.And Spanish has maybe five or six?And I can think of lots of consonant-based variety differences, like the L in MILLION, some people say millionmɪlion, some people say millionmɪλon, and there'smɪʒon.There's the S turning to H thing?MISMOmizmoturning to MISMOmihmo, and there's an S to theta thing.
• linkBen Ainslie - True, actually, yeah, no, Spanish does a lot of consonant shifting, doesn't it?
• linkDaniel Midgley - But I can't…I can hardly think of any vowel differences in Spanish.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - But is that because…okay, so the other thing we got to think of is:if we have our vowel space, and if you have 15 or 14 things in there, then as soon as you…if you imagine them as little districts, they sort of carve up the space.In English, as soon as you move a little bit, you might move out of your designated space and then people will be like:Ah, it’s a big change.But what I'm seeing is that maybe Spanish are moving within those districts.It's just that people don't think about it, because they don't get out of the neighborhood.
• linkBen Ainslie - Right, So,aandeɪare different in English, but in Spanish, that would just be the same vowel.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.This…I'm happy for this…I like hypothesis to be disproven.So, so far my "vowels are prime territory for identity marking"…I'm happy for it to be disproven.
• linkBen Ainslie - But I mean, Daniel brings up a good point, which is that you were kind of saying I can't think of a lot of…like, a lot of examples of how consonants shift, but it's true.In Spanish, like, that is where a lot of that work does happen, right?
• linkDaniel Midgley - So is Nikoli right?Do we perceive lots of accents because we have such a detailed vowel space?
• linkBen Ainslie - Maybe.I mean, the thing I think about— and this kind of adds to Hedvig’s theory —is like, we've all seen those dumb internet things of like:If you can read this, you're a genius, and they've just removed all the vowels from all of the words.Right?And you’re not a genius.It's just that the consonants are the things that do a lot of the work.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - That’s also just how Hebrew works, right?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah.And Arabic, right?Like, you just write without vowels?I think.Yeah, I think that the consonants, certainly in English, the only language I actually speak, are the things that are actually letting you know the meanings of words.And, and as I said, this is sort of backing up Hedvig’s theory, and the vowels are like flavour text.Like, it's just like:make it a bit nicer.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I just think this is such a good question.And it could lead to so many interesting ideas coming out.
• linkBen Ainslie - Who wants to do a PhD?Not this guy!
• linkDaniel Midgley - Not me.No way…Okay!Hey, that was a great question.And they were all such fantabulous questions.I feel like I learned a lot through all of this.So thanks to everyone who suggested them.
• linkDaniel Midgley - TRANSITIONAL MUSIC
• linkDaniel Midgley - And now it's time for Words of the Week.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - TELETEXT NOISESBoop boop boop!
• linkDaniel Midgley - Let's start with one that I think you won't know, because it's a neologism.Take a guess as to what this one means:ORBISCULATE.Orbisculate.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Excuse me?Orbisculate.
• linkBen Ainslie - Orbisculate.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Is it used BISCUIT to mean NUMBNUT?
• linkDaniel Midgley - No, not this time.
• linkBen Ainslie - It reminds me of DEFENESTRATE, that unnecessarily complex word to throw something out a window.ORBICULATE.Is it to do with, like, maiming or injuring someone in a certain way?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yes.
• linkBen Ainslie - Ah!
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Is it ORE, as in gold?
• linkDaniel Midgley - No
• linkBen Ainslie - ORBISCULATE…orbs…like, taking scoops out of a person's flesh?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Ohh, it’s gouging eyes out.
• linkDaniel Midgley - You're on the right track with the eyes, but it's not that terrible.
• linkBen Ainslie - Just poking someone's eyes.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Put your finger in the eyes.The thing you're not allowed to do in wrestling.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Hedvig, I feel like you're so close, so I'm going to describe what this means.This word comes from the late Neil Krieger, a dad, father of Jonathan and Hilary Krieger, the latter a journalist.They say, “Our father invented ORBISCULATE in college to describe when a citrus fruit squirts in your eye,LAUGHTERand then proceeded to use it so often when we were growing up that we were shocked to discover it wasn't in the dictionary.” So they are trying to get ORBISCULATE into a dictionary.They're on a campaign.
• linkBen Ainslie - I've got to say, their dad needed better technique, if so regularly did this occur that he needed a word for it.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Or just stop eating grapefruit.That's all you got to do.So you can go to orbisculate.com, you can use it, you can type it.If people start using it, then dictionaries will notice and it will make its way in, and it will be a fitting tribute to their dad.
• linkBen Ainslie - It's good.ORBISCULATE.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I like it.I'm much for using one word for a thing when you can.Ste’s learning Swedish right now and he's finding that we have a lot of, like, one word for things that English just like phrasal verbs for and I'm for it.DEFENESTRATE, ORBISCULATE.Thumbs up.
• linkDaniel Midgley - This grapefruit ORBISULATED into my eye!
• linkBen Ainslie - Disagree.
• linkDaniel Midgley - And now I'm going to defenestrate it.
• linkBen Ainslie - Disagree.That's okay.We can.We're allowed to.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Next one:MONOLITH.
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh god!
• linkDaniel Midgley - We like a bit of mystery, don’t we?
• linkBen Ainslie - It's not a mystery!
• linkDaniel Midgley - No, it's not.So these enormous metal things about three or four meters tall, about as wide as a person…
• linkBen Ainslie - Plinths.I’m going to call it a plinth.
• linkDaniel Midgley - A plinth!Yes, it's a plinth.These silver things have been appearing.The first one appeared in Utah and then was subsequently carried off by people who objected.Romania, one appeared there.And then lately California, because of course California.
• linkBen Ainslie - Naturally.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wait, I don't know what this is about.Also, monoliths are stone.
• linkBen Ainslie - Have you not seen this story, Hedvig?Have you not seen any of the internet stories about this?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - No.I've been LARPing parent for two weeks.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - LAUGHTER
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I don't…And then tried to do my job.I haven't followed news at all.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah, fair enough.It is a large metal pillar thing.Think 2001:A Space Odyssey, that thing, but like silver and shiny.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I reiterate, monoliths are supposed to be stone.That's what LITH- is about.
• linkBen Ainslie - Well, then what would you call it out of metal?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Plinths!
• linkDaniel Midgley - No, that's…that's true though, etymologically these are not monoliths, because LITHOS is stone.PLINTH is good, metal plinth.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Why am I like this right now?I don't know.I'm choosing this hill.LAUGHTER
• linkBen Ainslie - Seriously!
• linkDaniel Midgley - ~That’s not a monolith!And a house can only be DILAPIDATED if it's a stone house, because LAPID.~
• linkBen Ainslie - So to catch you up, Hedvig:there was, as you can imagine, there was a bunch of like:~Is it aliens?!~Like, that clickbait-y stuff.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah, but people are just being silly because they like it.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Is it to do with Elon Musk?
• linkDaniel Midgley - No.
• linkBen Ainslie - I think it's pranksters, I genuinely think it's like…did you ever watch the Ghost in the Shell television series Standalone Complex?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yes, I did.
• linkBen Ainslie - Right.So I believe, personally, that it's one of those.A standalone complex, right?Like where someone did a thing.And then some other people did a thing.And now it's becoming like, like a Baader-Meinhof complex, right?Like, where it’s, like, a self-sustaining sort of thing.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Copycats.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I love that that was your reference for that.You could have picked so many other things.Good job.
• linkBen Ainslie - Nerd!
• linkDaniel Midgley - And David Astle, the crossword constructor has tweeted:“Monolithium:Narcotic effect of misery, in a year of general misery.”
• linkDaniel Midgley - Finally, ZOMBIE.Back in 2018, we commented on ZOMBIE compounds like the ZOMBIE ECONOMY, ZOMBIE BANK, ZOMBIE MEME.Well, I got a few more zombies for you.ZOMBIE BATTERIES.You know, lithium ion batteries are extremely flammable, and sometimes they get disposed of wrong and damaged.They can cause massive flare up fires.Nasty, nasty.Yeah.ZOMBIE OIL WELLS.These uncapped wells that are spewing methane gas.And ZOMBIE COMPANIES, which are like ZOMBIE BANKS, in that they don't make enough money to pay off the interest on their loans.So we're seeing an expansion of ZOMBIE.I like it.So I thought I would throw it in.
• linkBen Ainslie - I've always thought that it needed to be applied to botnets.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Mhm.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Speaking of zombie batteries, and lithium batteries catching fire, I'm very bad at doing this.But if I can, it's prob…I've heard that you're not supposed to charge things when you're sleeping.Because weird things can happen when you overcharge things.Is this with lithium batteries…is this crazy?
• linkBen Ainslie - I would be flabbergasted if that was true with contemporary consumer electronics.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I know!I know.But I've been told it is, and now I’m scared of charging things when I'm sleeping.But maybe that's…
• linkBen Ainslie - What I've heard of that is legitimately a thing, is that you— because a lot of people do do this —you shouldn't charge your phone under your pillow, because the shorting of, like, charger cables can start fires, kind of thing.As you, like, move around and that sort of thing.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, that's good.
• linkBen Ainslie - But no, like, surely…surely we're not in an era where, like…
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I know, right?
• linkBen Ainslie - …this gets damaged by being plugged in for too long.Like, my phone today, I spilled some water on it.And I got a little message that was like:Hey, um, some water got in your USB jack so we're shutting it down for now and we'll let you know when it's safe to be, like, rejiggered, kind of thing.So if my phone has the intelligence to do that, surely it has the intelligence not to overcharge.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I've heard that even if it doesn't start fires, if you overcharge your battery, it might make the lifespan a bit worse.
• linkDaniel Midgley - That is true.That one is true.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - It's not gonna start a fire, but it might not be the best thing for the battery in the long term.
• linkDaniel Midgley - They tend to like being charged up between 20% and 80%.100% all the time, you might see some decrease in battery life.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkBen Ainslie - But also like our phones don't last long enough for that to be a thing.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Mine did.
• linkBen Ainslie - Like, my previous phone went for, like, five years without a problem.Then again,~I don't buy Apple because they're trash.~
• linkHedvig Skirgård - ~I don’t buy Apple either.~
• linkDaniel Midgley - Away with you!We’ll have the Apple debate some day.ORBISCULATE, MONOLITH, and ZOMBIE:our three Words of the Week.And don't forget to participate in our annual Word of the Week of the Year vote.It's going on right now on Facebook and Twitter.Every word is a separate comment in our massive thread, and you can react, and that's a vote.You can also make funny comments about any of the words, and you can advocate or disadvocate some of them.So that's a lot of fun.We'll have the results for our next episode.
• linkBen Ainslie - Get in there and roast some words!
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I’ve forgotten the ones that I've suggested.I'm going to go in and figure out which ones I've suggested and upvote them in pure narcissism.
• linkDaniel Midgley - A few comments from Stig Martyr on Twitter.“Hey, @becauselangpod, can we make SCREENSHAT the past tense of SCREENSHOT?” Done.
• linkBen Ainslie - GIGGLINGI like that a lot.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Not that.To be fair, Apple encourages me to use the word SCREENGRAB.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Oh, that's all right.Well, I think according to your rule, it should be SCRONESHAT, right?
• linkBen Ainslie - There’s no past tense of SCREEN!
• linkHedvig Skirgård - SCREEN is a noun!
• linkDaniel Midgley - SCREEN is a verb, come on, y’all.We're gonna…we're gonna SCREEN the picture.Never mind.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - SCRONESHAT.
• linkDaniel Midgley - SCRONESHAT.Thanks, Stig.And from Elías, “Currently listening to the episode, and since you're struggling to find a city rhyming with Hedvig, I'm offering you Hedvig à Martigues, a cute little town in the southeast of France by the Mediterranean Sea, where I'm sure you'll find decent coffee."
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Ah, that's super cute!I love it.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Thanks, Elías.What do you think of Hedvig, would you go?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - That's lovely.Thank you.I love it.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I still want to watch the Netflix show "Hedvig in Leipzig".
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Well, I'm not in Leipzig right now.
• linkDaniel Midgley - It’s the show’s concept.I'm not sure it would translate to the south of France.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Isn't the show's concept Hedvig is somewhere in Europe?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - LAUGHTER
• linkDaniel Midgley - I guess so.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - And with a bad microphone.
• linkBen Ainslie - Where in the world is Hedvig today?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Well, I think I would like to watch Hedvig à Martigues.That would be cute as well.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - That is very cute.I like it.Thank you very much.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - OUTRO MUSIC
• linkHedvig Skirgård - If you have some fun Words of the Week that you want to suggest, words that have been buzzing around in your brain during the week, please send them to us.And also other reactions, comments and praise.Please don't send negative things.No, I'm kidding.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Abuse.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - You can send…you can send abuse.Well, not abuse, but you can tell us when we've been wrong in a way you think we care about.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yes, please.
• linkBen Ainslie - Ugh, this is the most qualified over-justification of how they should comment.
• linkBen Ainslie - LAUGHTER
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, no, but it'd be fun to get some Word of the Week ideas actually, maybe.Yeah.If you want to do that, you can send your reactions, comments and praise to Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastadon, Patreon.We are @becauselangpod everywhere on those.You can also send us an old school email at hello@becauselanguage.com.And you can check out our Redbubble store where– reminder, reminder –we are Talk the Talk still.Better still, if you like the show, and you want other people to find it, tell a friend about it.Or leave us a positive review somewhere where you get podcasts.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Good time to mention Sandman, who for the last two or maybe three weeks has been absolutely relentless in promoting us, and other linguistic podcasts.It's like he searches for people who are looking for podcast recommendations and then mentions us, so we're very grateful.Thanks Dustin.Check out his show @StoriesSandman.
• linkBen Ainslie - Now if you're listening to this as it comes out, that means you're a Patron, because this is one of our shows that we do for Patrons.We'll drop it for the general public later on, but you get a tasty early listen in your ear holes.And it’s Patrons like you who are able to allow us to keep this show going and to do bonus episodes like this one.We use the money for a bunch of good purposes.It’s not just lining our pocketbooks, I give you the big tip.No, we are using this money to transcript our episodes so that those who are Deaf or non-hearing can access our fun interesting linguistic show as well.So you are definitely doing good work for other people.If you're a patron, make sure your details are up to date at patreon.com/becauselangpod and we will be sending you postcards and stickers real soon.
• linkBen Ainslie - Among our wonderful Patrons areBIG BREATH:Termy, Chris, Lyssa, The Major, Chris, Matt, Damien, Helen, Bob, Jack, Kitty, Lord Mortis, Christelle, Elías, Michael, Larry, Binh, Kristofer, Dustin, Andy, Maj, Nigel,— sorry, had to scroll —Kate, Jen, Nasrin, Nikoli, Ayesha my wonderful partner, Emma, Andrew.And new this week:Moe and James.Thank you, our patrons.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Our music is written and performed by Drew Krapljanov.He's in the band Dideon's Bible.Their new single "John Candy" is on their Bandcamp page right now, and it's a packing listen.Drew is also a member of Ryan Beno, another great band.Thanks for listening.Catch you next time.Because Language.
• linkDaniel Midgley - PAUSE
• linkHedvig SkirgårdBen AinslieDaniel Midgley - Wooo!
• linkPAUSE
• linkDaniel Midgley - Did you know that some people are actually…we've had two people buying stuff lately?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah, one was the Lingusitic sticker and then the other one was the t-shirt…the Language Police t-shirt with you on it, Ben.
• linkBen Ainslie - LAUGHSWait, which one?The sweary one, or the non-sweary one?
• linkDaniel Midgley - The non-sweary one.
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh, boo.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I know.But somebody is gonna be walking around with you throwing an emoji into a crowd ofæ
• linkBen Ainslie - Looking like the whitest of all revolutionaries.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Well, antifa, you know.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - That is still funny.