49 - Mailbag - It's that T Again

564 turns

• linkBen Ainslie - Sorry, a cat's just ran into my room and now it's being quickly ferreted out.But yes, we can start the questions.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Wow, it enters a cat and leaves a ferret!How do you ferret out a cat?Are you sure you're not making a category error?
• linkMIGNON FOGARTY - Magic.
• linkMIGNON FOGARTY - BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME
• linkDaniel Midgley - Hello, and welcome to Because Language.A show about linguistic science of language.My name is Daniel Midgley, and with me now:he's never been into word games, but now, he's fallen in a big way for Semantle.It's terribly sad.It's Ben Ainslie.
• linkBen Ainslie - I'm not proud of my addiction, but I will not run from it.
• linkDaniel Midgley - You love it.
• linkBen Ainslie - I have been enjoying it.And I'll say this, Semantle so far is the funnest co-op permutation of all of these -LE games.I don’t know how to…
• linkDaniel Midgley - The -LE games?Yeah.
• linkMIGNON - What is it?Can you tell me?
• linkBen Ainslie - Semantle, we've covered it on the show.Hedders is actually the one who brought it to our attention.But then some students of mine— some year 9s —were the ones who really cemented my love for it.You have unlimited guesses of any kind of word that you want, but instead of being it close letter-wise— a la Wordle —it's just semantic similarity.So, you'll get a little out-of-100 score.Basically, it's a really fancy version of 20 questions.Right, Daniel?You basically go, "Okay, CAR.No, sorry.That's like a two out of a hundred.
• linkDaniel Midgley - It's like a 5.Never mind.INJURY — oh, that's a 12!Oh, I'm getting close.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yesterday's final word was POT, and my partner and I were working at it probably for about half an hour.We were walking down a pathway where we'd got, like, GEMSTONE, JEWELS, JEWELRY, FINERY, CASINO, POKER, GAMBLE, because in poker, you have a pot in the middle of the table.But of course, that was just such a red herring for us.So, eventually, we got to PIPE, TOBACCO, that sort of stuff, ALCOHOL, and then eventually, I was like, "MARIJUANA!" and it was one word away.I was like, "Ha, ha, my misspent youth finally comes to…"
• linkDaniel Midgley - Fruition.
• linkMIGNON - Oh, I have to try that.That sounds fabulous.
• linkDaniel Midgley - It's really good.
• linkBen Ainslie - And then, the really, really fun thing I found was that after you get it, then you can back-trace other semantic pathways.Right?So once we'd got pot, we could then go, "Okay, PAN.Okay, that was another really close one.CUTLERY, ah, okay.We could have come at it that way."
• linkDaniel Midgley - That was the way that I came at it, because I came at…the first word that I got in the top 500 was FISH.I'm like, "Fish?" Then, to SOUP and then to POT.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah, there you go.
• linkDaniel Midgley - All the kitchen words.Oh, by the way, we have a very special guest, cohost.The original language communicator, the original LingCommer, you know her as Grammar Girl.It's Mignon Fogarty.
• linkMIGNON - Hi.Thank you.Yeah, I'm a podcaster.So, I just couldn't keep my mouth shut even during the intro.LAUGHS
• linkDaniel Midgley - LAUGHSWe haven't introduced you yet!Be quiet!
• linkBen Ainslie - No, no, no.I completely back the— and I'm just going to take a guess here —the deep nerd impulse of, "Someone just mentioned a game.I need to know more about this new game."
• linkMIGNON - Absolutely.I have to know.LAUGHS
• linkBen Ainslie - I get that.I definitely get that.
• linkDaniel Midgley - The nerd urge to know the game.
• linkBen Ainslie - Someone mentioned the game.Must find out more!
• linkDaniel Midgley - Thank you for being here with us.You've got a lot of projects, you've got your Grammar Girl column and podcast.You've also got Quick and Dirty Tips, which is just all over the place with great information.What else have you got going on these days?
• linkMIGNON - Right.Well, I have games.So actually, speaking of games, I have a card game called Peeve Wars that I love.LAUGHS
• linkDaniel Midgley - Oh, okay.
• linkMIGNON - Yeah, I always imagined pet peeves were these little monsters, like, fuzzy monsters that you could play with, you know?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Oh, they are.
• linkMIGNON - Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - They are.
• linkMIGNON - I'd wanted to make a game about them for years and then when I lived in Nevada, I met a guy named Joe Kisenwether, who worked at a game company.He made slot machines but he's a mathematician, who was really into games.That was right when crowdfunding came about too as a thing you could do.Suddenly, it all came together and we could make this card game that I had been had in my mind for years.So, that's one of my love projects is Peeve Wars.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Wow, okay!That sounds fun.
• linkMIGNON - The goal— you'll love this —the goal is to annoy your opponent to death.laughs
• linkBen Ainslie - I'm on board.
• linkDaniel Midgley - IRREGARDLESS!
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah, you see.
• linkLAUGHTER
• linkDaniel Midgley - I'm impervious to this kind of thing.I really am.There's no way to get to me.Mm-mm.
• linkMIGNON - Mm-mm.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah, linguists would be terrible…Well, a certain kind of linguists like descriptivists would be terrible to play with, because they just be like, "Ooh, fascinating."
• linkDaniel Midgley - 🤔 "Really!Where you from?"
• linkMIGNON - LAUGHSAnd Joe just begged me to put "no educational value" on the box, but I resisted.LAUGHS
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay.Cool.And you've got a new show coming up under your Quick and Dirty Tips imprimatur.
• linkMIGNON - Yeah.So the Quick and Dirty Tips Network, which is my network, we have a new show called Curious State and the host is Doug Fraser.It's about all these fascinating questions you never wondered but now you want to know like, "Why babies don't have kneecaps?" and "If dinosaurs live today, what would they eat?" It's all these just fascinating questions.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Us!The answer is us!
• linkMIGNON - They would eat us!
• linkDaniel Midgley - It's obviously us.
• linkBen Ainslie - If Jurassic Park has taught us anything.
• linkLAUGHTER
• linkMIGNON - Quick and Dirty Tips Network to date has been a single host, a scripted show.Just get, in get out, give you a good answer on one question every week.This is more of the NPR-style, conversational, exploratory kind of shows.So it's a little branch out for our network.So, we're very excited.That's called Curious State.
• linkDaniel Midgley - We will drop a link on our website, becauselanguage.com.Thanks for being with us.We're going to answer some questions today.Oo, but wait, are we spruiking stuff?'Cause this could be the bit, where I say:Hello, patrons.You're here for a bonus patron edition.Thanks very much for listening.If you are listening to this slightly later and you're not a patron, you can hear episodes like this bonus episode the minute they come out.Just go to patreon.com/becauselangpod.That's us.
• linkBen Ainslie - And you also get to join our Discord, where all of these questions get asked, and all of our wonderful, wonderful, tremendously smart, nerdy listeners hang out and talk about this stuff.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Ben, you can be posting your word results too.It's fun.
• linkBen Ainslie - I really want to p…I don't know if I've still got the capacity to screenshot it, but the day before yesterday— the day before POT —was ASSEMBLE.I didn't get it.But I, within 15 or maybe 20 guesses, got within 10 words.
• linkDaniel Midgley - So tantalising.
• linkBen Ainslie - It was…I Ahabed on this bad boy so bad, like I was…
• linkDaniel Midgley - laughs
• linkBen Ainslie - …there was some Edgar Allan Poe Lenore type shit going down.I was fixated in a big way.I was like:SYNTHESISE!Ah, BUILD, CREATE…AAAAAAAAH!
• linkDaniel Midgley - Organise!Marshall!
• linkBen Ainslie - Ah, it was terrible.It was really bad.
• linkMIGNON - LAUGHS
• linkDaniel Midgley - That was the one that I got in 12.
• linkBen Ainslie - You.Can die in a fire.
• linklaughter
• linkBen Ainslie - All right?I got…Okay, I'll call you Ishmael for the rest of the show.Fine.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Thank you.Ishmael, it is.Thanks to all our patrons.Mignon, I want to talk about Grammar Day for a sec.
• linkMIGNON - Sure.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Because when it was Grammar Day on March 4th— March 4th! —someone tweeted— and I retweeted —"National Grammar Day is cop shit."
• linkMIGNON - LAUGHS
• linkDaniel Midgley - Because we know that people use grammar as a way of making language prejudice acceptable under the guise of education.You know this, I know this.But then I realised this wasn't really fair, because grammar is awesome and fun.And knowing the names for the pieces of language and how they fit together, it thrills my soul.And then I found out that you're the rep for Grammar Day, and I’ve followed your work long enough to know that you get it, all right?You're aware of variation, your advice is usage based.So, I wanted to get your take.What's your take on Grammar Day?How do you encourage enthusiasm for grammar, but discourage language policing?How do you thread that needle?
• linkMIGNON - Yeah, most of all, it's about trying to make people think about how fun language can be.That's what I'm all about.And I've been in charge of National Grammar Day for about 10 years.Martha Brockenbrough founded it.I think she was a junior high school English teacher when she founded it, and it was sort of a way to help make it fun to teach her students about grammar.Then, she went on to do just amazing things with children's fiction.She writes children's fiction and nonfiction, fabulous books.And she really found that grammar wasn't so much her thing anymore, and so she handed it over to me.Yeah, over the years, I'm always trying to find interesting ways.We made a National Grammar Day theme song a few years ago.There's a music video.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Wow.
• linkMIGNON - We have quizzes, and John McIntyre always writes a grammar noir short story, which is just so much fun.
• linkDaniel Midgley - He's from the Baltimore Sun?
• linkMIGNON - Yeah, he did copyediting at the Baltimore Sun, and this year he imagined that Paula Froke, one of the editors from The AP style book, had been kidnapped by grammar peevers and had to rescue her.It does happen that people know that it's National Grammar Day, and they post things that are harping on language, and things that annoy them.And we just try to, I don't know, ignore those.LAUGHS
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah.
• linkMIGNON - And I retweet a lot of things from people who talk more about the variety of language, and how it's fun, and how we aren't out there grammar copping everyone's language, and trying to nitpick.Also, I think it's important to learn how to write in standard English.I do think that is something that's worth learning.And then, you have to find a way to do it that isn't demeaning to other forms of English, because there are many other forms of English, and they're all valid.So, it is a needle that I have to thread.I also think nobody learns— this has been my founding principle —people do not learn when you're telling them they're bad or they're stupid.Going around criticising people about their language isn't going to help them get any better.Even if you think that there's a better and a worse, that's not going to help.So, I just encourage people to be positive and supportive, and I'm always trying to talk about dialects and all valid forms of English.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I don't want to criticise people for their language use.I want to criticise people for their rotten attitudes about language.
• linkMIGNON - LAUGHS
• linkDaniel Midgley - That will help them change.
• linkMIGNON - I think it's so weak, too.If you're arguing with someone and suddenly, you're criticising their grammar, well, you're not engaging with their argument.So, it's kind of a weak attack anyway.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah.
• linkBen Ainslie - My most recent account or recounting of just the worst permutation of…I'm going to call it para-grammar policing, because it's not strictly grammar.It's like, spelling.But a Noongar woman— that's the local Indigenous family group where Daniel and I live —was at a university arguing with the person in charge of publishing a particular text.This person was basically saying, "We have to spell this Noongar word in this way" and she was just going, "It was never a written language.Just…you can do many different…" and he's like, "No, the book says you got to do it this way." She was like, "Who wrote the book?"LAUGHTERApparently, yeah, after half an hour of trying to argue with this person, they just didn't budge.They would just like, "Nah, the rule." She was just like, "I'm out." For me, things like that is what we need to constantly hold the line against, where we just keep saying to those people, "Think.Just stop and think for a second about what's going on here."
• linkDaniel Midgley - Like, you want to do what's right.But what's right is situational, and this is a situation.
• linkMIGNON - Right.You might like this.When I first started…The show's entire name is Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing.The publisher at Macmillan is my partner in Quick and Dirty Tips Network always joked that I was educating one errant porn seeker at a time.LAUGHTERMore recently, I know that people come to Grammar Girl because it sounds prescriptive.And so lately, like the last few years, I've joked while I'm educating one errant prescriptivist seeker at a time.
• linkLAUGHTER
• linkBen Ainslie - So true.If it's funny and true, it has meaning.
• linkMIGNON - LAUGHS
• linkDaniel Midgley - Oh, boy, Grammar Girl, somebody who's on my wavelength!Whaaaat???
• linkMIGNON - LAUGHS
• linkDaniel Midgley - Boy, were they disappointed.All right.Well, we've got a lot of questions from our listeners, from our readers.We should get to them.
• linkBen Ainslie - I'm ready.Let's go.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay.This one comes from O Tim on our Discord server.
• linkBen Ainslie - O Tim.
• linkDaniel Midgley - O Tim asks, "What is the past tense of the verb 'text'?At least in Minnesota, USA, it can be texted or textd with a D or just text.I've heard it in the Twin Cities metro area and in the New Ulm very-not-metro area, I text my sister yesterday." What do you think?
• linkBen Ainslie - I say 'text' as a past tense.
• linkDaniel Midgley - She text me?
• linkBen Ainslie - Same word for present and past tense.But I have also said 'texted' before.I feel that usage for me personally has waned.Yeah, I texted.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay.It seems it's…
• linkMIGNON - I don’t talk about it too much.
• linkLAUGHTER
• linkDaniel Midgley - No?
• linkMIGNON - I've definitely seen TEXT, just plain old TEXT as the past tense.I think I say texted.But it's slurred at the end, like texted.It's hard to say.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Texted.
• linkBen Ainslie - I imagine this is a usage that is far more salient to people, say, under 30 and the lower you go, the more salient it becomes.And so I'm well and truly on the other side of that barrier now!So, I think, like Mignon, I'm like:I guess I say this, but I'm not having a lot of conversations about the people that I communicated with via text.
• linkDaniel Midgley - What do you think's going on?Why are people doing this?
• linkBen Ainslie - I think it's the D in FRIDGE.
• linkDaniel Midgley - The D in FRIDGE?
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I sort of remember that question.
• linkBen Ainslie - So like, why is there a D in fridge?Because it's nicer.Like it just…It's cleaner, it works better in our brains, because otherwise, we'd be going like FRIEG?And this is just a version of that where…exactly like Mignon said, TEXTED is just clunky.It's not very nice.It has a bad mouthfeel.So, we just drop it and it works.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Whereas, in people's minds, if there's a /t/ sound, it just works.Like, there are three ways that the regular past tense can appear.You can have a /t/ like WORKED, you can have /d/ like PLAYED, and you can have /ed/ like SORTED.And in people's minds, if there's a /t/ sound at the end, then the brain says:that's past tense enough for me!So, she text me.
• linkBen Ainslie - I'd also go further than that.I don't know about other accent varieties of English.The way I pronounce the T, the second T in TEXT is the same way I pronounce the T in city.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Oh, not with a /t/ but a /ɾ/.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah, for a lot of people— not all English varieties, but certainly, for Australian English —when you say CITY, it's a /d/ sound and I texted them or I textd them.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Textd them, text them.Okay, interesting.
• linkMIGNON - There are so many ways to pronounce T.
• linkDaniel Midgley - There's so many ways to pronounce T.There's…Let's count 'em.
• linkBen Ainslie - T, you vagabond, you scarlet woman of the letter world!
• linkLAUGHTER
• linkMIGNON - We did a show.Neil Whitman wrote a show for me about pronouncing T, and I think there are 10 different ways, 10 or 12 different ways to pronounce T.
• linkDaniel Midgley - What are they?How many can you do?
• linkMIGNON - Oh, god.No, I don't know.
• linkLAUGHTER
• linkMIGNON - That's why I hire people to write these things.LAUGHS
• linkDaniel Midgley - I'll do it.I'll do it, I'll do it.There's aspirated Ttʰlike as in TEXT.There's regular Ttas in STEP.There's unaspirated Tt̚like as in POT.Those three sound different.There's glottal stop Tʔas in KITTEN, there's…What else?There's a tapɾas in CITY.That's five.
• linkBen Ainslie - I feel that one's a cheat though.That's just T stealing Ds job.That's not a unique pronunciation of T.That's just T being like, "I'm taking this."
• linkDaniel Midgley - No, it's not really D, because D would be like "impordant".But this one is slightly different.It's not a /d/, where you're sitting on it.It's a tap.So, CIDY would be /sɪdi/, but CITY /sɪɾi/ is very quick.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah.Okay, fair enough.It was kind of like MC…no, not MC Hammer.Who was the old white rapper?
• linkMIGNONDaniel Midgley - Vanilla Ice.
• linkBen Ainslie - It's like a Vanilla Ice borrowing, like, Queen and Bowie.
• linkDaniel Midgley - That's right.
• linkBen Ainslie - It's very subtly different, you guys.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I got up to six.
• linkMIGNON - We both got that right away.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah.
• linkMIGNON - LAUGHS
• linkDaniel Midgley - I'm going to have to listen out to that podcast and find out what the other four are, because I haven't got them.
• linkBen Ainslie - There you go.But yeah, I have to imagine the listening experience for our listeners is really frustrating where you're just like, "T.I know what T is about.There's how many??"
• linkLAUGHTER
• linkBen Ainslie - You just sit there going, "Why?Why would you make me aware of this?"
• linkLAUGHTER
• linkDaniel Midgley - Thanks, O Tim for that great question.Okay, let's go on to the next one.This is @meredithmusing on Twitter has tagged us in on this one.It's about the Mandela Effect.Please.
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay.I'm sure most of you know this even if you don't know the name for it, but it's been doing the rounds now in the various blogospheres, and podospheres, and vlogospheres, and all that thing.It's when a thing from your past isn't what your very, very, very firm memory of it is.It gets its name, because— bizarrely to me, because this is not actually a Mandela effect for me —is that heaps and heaps of people apparently believed that Nelson Mandela died in prison decades ago, despite the fact that he was like the President of South Africa for a really long time after that point.
• linkLAUGHTER
• linkBen Ainslie - But there are other Mandela Effect things that have worked on me very, very firmly.The one that I find firmest was The Berenstain Bears.That one to this day, I still will go to my grave believing there is a grand unified conspiracy working against me.
• linkDaniel Midgley - They replaced all the books that you read as a child to be Berenstain- A-I-N, instead of what you know it is:E-I-N.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yep.Literally, in every possible place in space, they have gone and replaced thousands, and thousands, and thousands of texts to fuck with me, specifically.
• linkDaniel Midgley - You know this one, Mignon, right?
• linkMIGNON - Yes, I will go to my grave thinking that I was taught to spell dilemma, D-I-L-E-M-N-A.I'm one of the Dilemna People with the Mandela Effect and I went into Google Books searching for 'language arts children's books' to see if I had been taught.I've talked to people I went to school with in grade school, and they think so too.They think we were taught to spell it D-I-L-E-M-N-A and there are thousands of people who think this, but there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever.
• linkDaniel MidgleyBen Ainslie - Wow.
• linkBen Ainslie - Look, I think the reason the Mandela Effect has such indelible poignancy and it just doesn't seem to go away is because when you find one that works on you…like I was just saying:You are utterly convinced there has to be another explanation.You are like:No.No!
• linkMIGNON - It's just that nobody's found it yet.
• linkDaniel Midgley - My memory could never be constructed.
• linkLAUGHTER
• linkBen Ainslie - There is a real sense that someone has inceptioned you.Someone has gone into my dreams and laid all of these memories that like, "How else could this be a thing?" I'm guessing, Daniel, there's another new Mandela effect coming down the pipe.
• linkDaniel Midgley - There is.It's the cartoon, The Flintstones.
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay.
• linkMIGNON - Whaaat…?
• linkDaniel Midgley - People are convinced that it was just Flin-S-T-O.Flinstones.
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh, no T.
• linkDaniel Midgley - But in fact, if you look at the logo, there's a T in there and there always has been:The Flintstones.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - People are saying, "When did the T come in?That T wasn't there.I never grew up with a T."
• linkBen Ainslie - For me, this is another one like the actual namesake Mandela effect, where I'm like, "Yep, Flintstones," right?because…
• linkDaniel Midgley - Of course, it's Flintstones.
• linkBen Ainslie - Flint is like that thing that you make sparks from.If you're a caveman and you're making fires, you'd probably use flint, Flintstones.
• linkMIGNON - That darn T again, right?
• linkLAUGHTER
• linkDaniel Midgley - There it is, you mischievous letter.
• linkMIGNON - That darn letter.I guess, it's hard to say.When you said the Flint-stones, it sounded odd.We say The Flinstones.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yes.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Flin-stones.
• linkBen Ainslie - That's the thing.I don't think I've ever pronounced the T in Flintstones…Sorry.The first T in Flintstones.
• linkDaniel Midgley - LAUGHSAha!
• linkBen Ainslie - But I've always known it was there.Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - So, what's going on with this process?Any good guesses?
• linkBen Ainslie - I reckon some of it would have to do with the fact that for a lot of people…Flintstones is really old, first of all, we're talking 50 years old now.Half a century ago is when The Flintstones were at peak popularity.And yeah, absolutely, I remember watching them when I was little on like reruns and stuff, but not all the time.And so I think for a lot of people, their only real access to The Flintstones was probably when they were quite little themselves.And so, what do we most remember about The Flintstones?
• linkMIGNON - Yabba Dabba Doo?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Well, the song.
• linkBen Ainslie - Exactly.Well, the song:SINGS"Flintstones, meet the Flintstones…
• linkMIGNONAYELETMIGNON FOGARTYBen AinslieDaniel Midgley - SINGING"They're the modern stone age family."
• linkBen Ainslie - Right?Most of us can just rattle off a bit of that.And the one thing we remember is, "Flintstones, meet the Flintstones." If your primary memory of this text is the sound of the name, yeah, of course, you wouldn't think that first T is there, because you don't say it.
• linkMIGNON - Maybe they weren't even old enough to read.
• linkBen Ainslie - Very good point.Yeah, absolutely.
• linkDaniel Midgley - But why do we as English speakers drop that T customarily when saying that word?
• linkMIGNON - It's hard to say.
• linkBen Ainslie - Linguists?
• linkLAUGHTER
• linkMIGNON - Yeah, you're the linguists.LAUGHTERWhy?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay.Here's what's going on.There's a process called epenthesis, which means sticking a sound in where there isn't one.For example, in a word like PRINCE as in the king and the prince, we stick a /t/ in there.It's such a Reader's Digest joke, by the way.You're waiting for your photos to get developed and you say, "Someday, my prints will come."
• linkMIGNON - LAUGHS
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay.But the reason we stick in a /t/ into PRINCE is that you're going from /n/ to an /s/, you're going from nasal, the /n/ comes out your nose, the /s/ comes out your mouth, and so you have to close…You're doing a couple of things.You're closing off the nasal cavity to go oral and then you're going from /n/ with your tongue on your alveolar ridge,— make an /n/ —and then you're going to /s/, you're just opening that up a little bit.If you go from nasal to oral, just a hair before you let go of that /n/ and drop it to the /s/, drop your tongue down to the /s/, it's going to have a /t/ sound.I don't want to say sloppy articulation, because that sounds judgy, but it's imprecise articulation and you get a T in there.So, that's sticking in a T, but we're talking about dropping a T.I think what's happening is if you can insert a T that isn't there, you can drop a T that is.People are hearing FLINTS and maybe thinking, I hear T's that aren't there all the time and I mentally delete them from the word, like PRINCE.Must be one of those!
• linkBen Ainslie - Do we think, because in that fun little tongue exercise you just asked to do…
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yes.
• linkBen Ainslie - You can feel your tongue moving past the point where you would make a T, right?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah.
• linkBen Ainslie - As you go from the N to the S, the tip of the tongue slides past where it would be to make that T sound.So do you think there's almost a little thing in our brains where we go, "I did it.I made a T."
• linkDaniel Midgley - Did the thing.
• linkBen Ainslie - My tongue is doing the thing that the tongue does when I make a T.So, like, it's there.It's depowered maybe, but it's there.I did a T.It's a thing.Flinstones.First T!
• linkDaniel Midgley - It's the de-aspirated T, but it's still a T, yeah.But it's funny how people are just mentally not only deleting the T sound, but also just deleting the T letter in the word.I just think that's fascinating.
• linkMIGNON - Is this the same reason I can't say the word CONTEXTS?The plural of the word, CONTEXT.
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh, yeah, CONTEXTS.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah, it's very chunky.That level of precision is just not required if you're in certain contex.You can just say CONTEX, C-O-N-T-E-X.This is the thing with evolution and with speech.It just has to be good enough not to break down completely.All you have to do is just be good enough not to fail.And contexts, desks…masks, people are telling me that people are saying, "You can axe me a question." A linguist told me that she's hearing people say, "They're putting on a max".
• linkMIGNON - Huh.
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh, yeah.In a similar way to AAVE has flipped those things for the word ASK?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah, right.Okay.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I found out something new, by the way.The Coverdale Bible, 1530s.There's the passage, "Ask and you shall receive." That's printed in the Coverdale Bible:A-X-E, axe.Axe and you shall receive.
• linkMIGNON - Nice.
• linkBen Ainslie - Ooh.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah.
• linkMIGNON - Very cool.
• linkBen Ainslie - I hadn't realised that but there it is.
• linkBen Ainslie - Man, spelling used to be so much cooler, didn't it?
• linkMIGNON - Yeah.
• linkBen Ainslie - It was just like seat-of-your-pants stuff, like…
• linkDaniel Midgley - Come as you are.
• linkBen Ainslie - I'm doing it this way!
• linkDaniel Midgley - LAUGHS
• linkMIGNON - Love that.
• linkDaniel Midgley - All right, thanks to @meredithmusing for sending us that one.I really enjoy new Mandela effects.
• linkBen Ainslie - Just on CONTEXTS, Mignon…
• linkMIGNON - Yeah.
• linkBen Ainslie - I use it.It's one of my little…and I'm probably going to make an enemy here, but that's kind of what I do on the show.I use it as my wanker shibboleth.I've got a couple of them.So, there's that and there's also APPRECIATE./æpɹisieɪt/
• linkDaniel Midgley - Apri-see-ate.I know your wanker shibboleths.
• linkBen Ainslie - That's my other wanker shibboleth.If someone is making a real point when they're speaking to say both "I appreciate" or 'ah, the various contexts".I'm like, "Okay, then."
• linkLAUGHTER
• linkBen Ainslie - Right.
• linkMIGNON - Yeah, I edit it out whenever it shows up in one of my scripts, if I…
• linkMIGNON - LAUGHTER
• linkMIGNON - I don’t want to say that word.That is way too hard.
• linkDaniel Midgley - LAUGHSOh.
• linkBen Ainslie - No shibboleths for me!
• linkMIGNON - No, we are going to say SITUATION, instead.LAUGHS
• linkBen Ainslie - I like that.
• linkDaniel Midgley - You've just got to realise that it's just people doing what they want to do in a situation to be as clear as they think they need to be, or as formal as they think they need to be.
• linkBen Ainslie - Mm, flexing.That's what it sounds like to me.A big bunch of flex offenders.
• linkDaniel Midgley - You know, I guess it's punching up.So I'm going to allow it.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah.LAUGHSWe can always make fun of rich people!Sorry.
• linkDaniel Midgley - It's fine.Let's go to one from Hillary via email, hello@becauselanguage.com."I am a middle school English teacher in San Francisco…"
• linkBen Ainslie - ✊ ✊ Respect.
• linkDaniel Midgley - "…with a bachelor's in linguistics.In the past two or so years, I've noticed students using the word MINES instead of the word MINE.Example sentences, 'Can you grade mines?' or 'I finished mines.' I initially observed this among students who are English learners which didn't fill me with concern, because second language acquisition is different.However, I have started to hear 'mines' now from students who are monolingual English speakers, possibly because they're hearing it from peers and it's starting to fill me with confusion.I would say, I've heard this, seen it, and writing from somewhere between 40 and 50 students at my school." Wow, have you heard this?
• linkMIGNON - I have not.
• linkBen Ainslie - Not me.No.
• linkMIGNON - No.
• linkBen Ainslie - Not amongst the young people that I am in front of.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I got curious about this.So, I headed to Twitter just to see if there was any…oh, and Google Books to see if anything was going on both in informal writing and in formal writing.And there are so many examples of "somebody ate mines" or "I already finished mines".
• linkBen Ainslie - Recent examples, or we going back aways here?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Very recent examples on Twitter, often from African American folks.
• linkMIGNON - Wow.
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay.
• linkDaniel Midgley - It appears in a novel "On the Come Up" by Hannah Weyer, 2014, "I ain't finished mines."
• linkBen Ainslie - I was gonna have two guesses.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay.
• linkBen Ainslie - The generous guess is that this was a relatively school-specific thing, because little micromemes happen like that.I see that from time to time in the schools I've worked in where a funny little thing happens, and it sort of memetically spreads just amongst the immediate group of people.So, it could have been that.I think the less generous and far more likely example is this is yet another example of Black stuff being cool, so I'm going to steal the cool stuff, because I'm not Black and thus, not cool.So, I want to aspire." Gosh, Black people must be really sick of just having everything just pilfered and appropriated linguistically.I've got kids…Now, I've changed jobs recently, so I'm working at a school that has some astounding wealth amongst the families who attend the school.And I've got white kids saying like, "Oh, that's pretty drip." meaning, like, cool gear or good kit, or whatever.I'm just like, "Just no.Just on every level, no." The really rich white kid from Perth Western Australia, it's so tragic.
• linkDaniel Midgley - So cringe.
• linkBen Ainslie - It's pretty cheugy.Anyway!
• linkLAUGHTER
• linkDaniel Midgley - Interesting.
• linkBen Ainslie - I reckon given what you've just said about the fact that it's actually showing up a lot recently, I think this is just mainstream society once again reaching into AAVE and being like:~Ooh, this seems fen!~
• linkMIGNON - LAUGHS
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah.It's been said:I wish that people loved Black people as much as they love Black culture.
• linkBen Ainslie - I like that.
• linkBen Ainslie - DANIEL:What do you think, Mignon?
• linkMIGNON - Well, I think you're probably right.What I was going to say before you convinced me otherwise is just that possessive pronouns are kinda hard.I've never seen MINES, but all the time I see I's.Like, Daniel and I's conversation, like I-apostrophe-S.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Oh, that's true.
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh, yeah, that's fun.I definitely do that.Yeah, for sure.
• linkMIGNON - Yeah.people have asked me about it.I search Twitter.It's rampant.You find lots and lots of examples…
• linkBen Ainslie - Rampant!I love that.
• linkMIGNON - …on Twitter.I think…people often ask me why people can't get the right spelling of YOUR or ITS.Why do people put an apostrophe on ITS, when it's a pronoun," and I think the possessive pronouns are confusing, because they end with S, but they're possessive.We learn that apostrophes are about possessives and then these words have…they're possessive and they end with S, but they don't have an apostrophe and that just seems to blow people's minds, or at least confuse them.
• linkBen Ainslie - It's yet another example of, like, whoever just sat down and invented English all at once, put the beer down.LAUGHTERYou use it for a plural, you use it for possession, come on, those things both happen a lot.Could we not pick one of them to be different, please?
• linkDaniel Midgley - And that one has changed actually, because if you go back to the 1700s, like, Thomas Jefferson's Tree of Liberty letter.He's got IT'S…"It is it's natural state." That today would be I-T-S, no apostrophe, but he has an apostrophe.Because John's house, Mary's house, it's house.So, that one has evolved.But yeah, that is confusing.
• linkBen Ainslie - Also, like you said, that's the good old days where you could just do what you wanted.One S, two Ss, five Ss, it's a thing.
• linkMIGNON - Ammon Shea says people have always been confused about apostrophes.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah, just drop them.What do you think about dropping apostrophes, Mignon?I had this thing.
• linkMIGNON - That I saw a lot when I was teaching.I was a college professor for a few years and so many kids would write CANT, C-A-N-T with no apostrophe.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Ohh.Love it.
• linkMIGNON - I saw it a lot and it really surprised me.But then I'm like, well…
• linkBen Ainslie - We don't need them.We really don’t!Like…
• linkcrosstalk
• linkDaniel Midgley - The NT is one where…I think that's the first one to go.I mean, some things are already going like place names.But if we have COULDN'T, and WOULDN'T, and CAN'T, and DON'T, then yeah, we could just drop that with no ill effects.
• linkMIGNON - I know.You could.
• linkDaniel Midgley - No, sorry.No I'll effects.Anyway!
• linkDaniel Midgley - LAUGHTER
• linkMIGNON - Yeah, it's really interesting to think about, okay, language in 200, 500 years.If the drive is towards simplifying language, then that's a no-brainer.That's going to happen at some point.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah.Hillary also mentioned this, and I think it's probably what I wanted to say, but she said it first, "As a linguist, I can understand the appeal of morphological leveling." Morphological leveling?
• linkBen Ainslie - Once again, I turn to the linguist.Linguist?
• linkBen Ainslie - LAUGHTER
• linkDaniel Midgley - Steamrolling everything flat to be the same.
• linkBen Ainslie - Right.
• linkDaniel Midgley - "Morphological leveling to have possessive pronouns in the noun position all systematically end in S." We have possessives like HIS— ends in S —HERS, YOURS, THEIRS, and OURS.So, why not MINES?MINES is the only one.
• linkMIGNONBen Ainslie - Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah, it's interesting that we're seeing MINES.I'm keeping an eye on that one.I expect that it won't be very popular among the prescriptivists.
• linkBen Ainslie - No.
• linkDaniel Midgley - But it's cool that I haven't seen anybody complaining about it.In fact, you know what, Hillary, I'm thrilled that the first time I hear about it is somebody commenting on how interesting it is, instead of how benighted and dopey it is.So, thank you for that.Thank you for bringing this to our attention.
• linkBen Ainslie - I think if you're in Hillary's position and you're teaching English in middle school, if you genuinely…like, being a prescriptivist in that job would suck.So hard.LAUGHSYou would just be under assault constantly.So I think, Hillary, you've definitely…for your own mental health and wellbeing, you've taken the right direction and being like, "Ah, isn't this fascinating?" rather than, "Hmm, the kids these days."
• linkDaniel Midgley - You would just feel under siege all the time, like, society was collapsing.Once again, religion causes unnecessary suffering.
• linkBen Ainslie - And anyone who's ever taught anything alongside other people knows that there's definitely teachers out there who just hate their job.Like, it's a thing.
• linkDaniel Midgley - LAUGHS
• linkBen Ainslie - I'm not just talking at high school.There's people at university where you just like:Why are you doing this?You clearly hate it!
• linkMIGNON - LAUGHS
• linkBen Ainslie - But yeah, Hillary is obviously one of the good ones.
• linkMIGNON - Yay, Hillary, yay.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yay.Mignon, you're also one of the good ones.You know what?I've also found that copyeditors…you'd think that copy editors would be like:No, no.I'm taking my red pencil and scratching through everything you write.I have found that copyeditors are just super solid on all of this stuff.
• linkMIGNON - Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Don't you think?
• linkMIGNON - Absolutely.Copyeditors:one, they're so much fun and they understand the difference between, "Okay, I'm doing my job.I'm editing an annual report for IBM or whatever and it has to have a certain register, a certain style of language.It has to be formal standard English." But outside of that, like, we work in words, we like to play with words, we think it's fascinating when people are saying MINES.It's the fun part of our job.I don't know, it's like:we love language.There's a time when you need to enforce standard English rules.There's a time when it's perfectly fine to play with it and it's always fascinating.
• linkBen Ainslie - I've always imagined with copyeditors that the parallel is being a very, very good dancer in a traditional school of some kind, like being amazing at ballet, or flamenco, or some other tradition that has really strong rules.But you know:you take that person out and they are getting *down*.You know what I mean?
• linkLAUGHTER
• linkBen Ainslie - It's not always going to look like that, and they probably have a love for the art that extends well beyond the very formal boundaries of whatever it is that they have to do in one realm of their life.
• linkMIGNON - That's a great analogy.Yeah.My favorite meeting of the year is the American Copyeditor Society Annual Meeting.Just so much fun.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I want to go.I want to go 'cause I think it'd be a scream.
• linkBen Ainslie - LAUGHSWhenever I'm part of this show and we have people on who are like, "Oh, you've got to get to the Annual Meetup of the Grammarians." And literally, any…!if you said that phrase in any pub anywhere in the world, the people would just be like:"Okay, sure.And after that, I'll go…"— and I always rag on accountants. I'm sorry, accountants —"I'll go to the accounting seminar or whatever." But yeah, I think it would actually be really fun.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I think it would be a hoot.Do you know if it's online only this year or are they meeting up again?
• linkMIGNON - It actually just happened.It's at the beginning of January.So, it just…Or, no.Actually, no.You're right.It's soon!
• linkDaniel Midgley - No, it's April.Yeah.
• linkMIGNON - Yeah, it's coming up.I'm not going because of COVID.But I think it's like half and half.I think it's hybrid this year.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Oh cool.
• linkMIGNON - They have a spelling bee.I learned from Kory Stamper a few years ago, when she was at Merriam-Webster, she gave a talk about the history of English and I learned that, I think it was Lindley Murray, who said, "You should not use WHO to refer to children, because they aren't logical beings.That children should be called IT." That's the trivia you get at that kind of meeting.GIGGLES
• linkDaniel Midgley - You know what?The other thing about ACEs is that's when they bring out, the MLA will bring out all their changes.It's like, "All right, folks, this is the dumb stuff that is now okay."
• linkMIGNON - Yeah, it's the AP Stylebook.They make their announcements every year at that meeting.
• linkDaniel Midgley - That, that, that.
• linkMIGNON - Yeah.I would go and I would live tweet my heart out from that talk.
• linkLAUGHTER
• linkDaniel Midgley - I'm going to see you there one year.I swear to Zeus.I'm coming.
• linkMIGNON - LAUGHS
• linkDaniel Midgley - All right, this question comes from Ayelet, who sent us her voice on SpeakPipe.Easy to do.Just head to our website, becauselanguage.com.It's right there.So, here is her question.
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay.
• linkAYELET - Hi.I'm Ayelet from Israel.I teach Hebrew as a second language and I really love your podcast.I think a lot lately about how technical limits of technology shape and change language.It could be little things, like the meaning of number one directly after an exclamation mark.I call tell you I find myself using this also when I write by hand.But it could also be larger things.For instance, my Japanese friend says Japanese people tend to forget how to write kanji characters nowadays, because they only get to write them phonetically using a keyboard.Or my South African student says autocorrect made her develop all these spelling mistakes, because it takes away the need to actually remember the correct way of spelling words.I guess I should be asking a question, right?So, my question is what do you think about this?
• linkMIGNON - Okay, first, you have to tell me what the number one after an exclamation point means.
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh, I know what that means.LAUGHSI can guess that.
• linkMIGNON - I have no idea.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Go on.
• linkBen Ainslie - When you're smashing the exclamation mark, 1 is the number underneath it.So if you let go of shift, or if the shift lock drops on your keyboard, or something like that, like a 1…am I wrong here?
• linkMIGNON - It's just a mistake.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah, but it's a mistake that is happening often enough.When you get a text like, "Oh, my god!!11!!," it's just being replicated now as, I guess, almost like a funny para-meme or something.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah, they do it when they want to be funny or they mock somebody that they disagree with.
• linkMIGNON - Ah, okay.So it's a mistake that's taken on meaning.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah, that's right.Notice how this is an artifact of keyboard era, not phones era, because phones, you can just type exclamation points all you want.But with the keyboard…Yeah, like when you're mocking somebody you disagree with and you want to send up their viewpoint, you say, "Oh, my gosh, the communists are coming!!!!111!!!."
• linkMIGNON - Okay.I'm going to save this for future use.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Well, it's kind of an old joke, around 2005 when I started seeing it and I've actually seen people type the word ONE in that string of…
• linkMIGNON - LAUGHS
• linkBen Ainslie - Wait, we're really drifting now.
• linkMIGNON - No, but that's important.Actually, because one thing I've noticed is everyone says texting language is lazy.Right?And it's not, because people go to way more effort to type O-N-E than the number 1.So, it's not that people are always trying to save keystrokes.It's not.
• linkBen Ainslie - I am definitely guilty of typing B-E-E space A-R-E space B-E-E.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Oh, right.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Oh, gosh.
• linkDaniel MidgleyBen Ainslie - BRB.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Be right back.
• linkBen Ainslie - Can I just clarify as well from Ayelet's message.Her Japanese friend, do we think that what she's saying there is because they type in romaji, as in the Roman characterisation of Japanese, much more often…
• linkDaniel Midgley - And then it turns into Japanese characters.
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh, I see.I didn't know that.I wasn't aware of the fact that that's how you would type on a Japanese keyboard.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Hmm.Yeah.Has been for a while and then of course, don't forget Pinyin, the Chinese version of that.Yeah, you type 'sayonara', you start S-A and then it turns into 'sa', and you can choose which 'sa' it is, because there's different ones.
• linkBen Ainslie - Right.Then that becomes the kanji character of 'sa', but you've typed S-A.
• linkDaniel Midgley - There you go.
• linkBen Ainslie - Right.Now, but I also understand that in Chinese, you've actually got a bunch of different methodologies for typing and some of them don't look like Roman characters even remotely.Is that not the case?
• linkDaniel Midgley - That's right.You can do it by typing in pinyin letters, Latin letters.Or, you can do it by scanning through radicals.There's even a drawing sort of thing you can draw in a square.
• linkBen Ainslie - There was a fascinating podcast where they talked about the decades-long alterations to how you type Chinese.Before the end of the show, I'll dig it up and I'll find where it is actually supposed to be, because it's a bloody good listen.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay, cool.So, true or false.Spell checking is ruining our spelling.Have you heard this claim?
• linkBen Ainslie - I've heard it.I also anecdatally probably agree a little bit.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay.
• linkBen Ainslie - I would describe myself as being…I've noticed my spelling in the last five or six years deteriorating and needing to kinda go…When I'm writing something on a whiteboard and my kids'll be like, "Umm…" and I go, "Umm."
• linkLAUGHTER
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay.
• linkMIGNON - I have not really noticed that.You know what?What I have noticed is spellcheck making people doubt themselves about things they actually know to be true.So many, many years ago, Microsoft Word used to correct, if you wrote "everyone else's", it would mark that as wrong, and it would say it should be "everyone's else".
• linkDaniel Midgley - Whoa!
• linkMIGNON - Yeah.This was maybe 14, 15 years ago, it would do this.And I got multiple messages from people who were like, "I always thought it was 'everyone else's', but Microsoft Word couldn't possibly be wrong.So, can you tell me like which it is, and why am I wrong, how did I learn it wrong?" It really made people doubt themselves.So I think people do rely too heavily on technology, sometimes.People often ask me about Grammarly.Do I recommend Grammarly?And it's like, you know, if you have nothing else, it's probably fine.It's going to correct, you know, I don't know, 30% of your errors.If you're student, you don't have someone who can read your paper for you or whatever, it probably helps a little but I'm like, "Do not trust it for everything, because it makes all sorts of errors."
• linkDaniel Midgley - It's so weird that you would mention "somebody's else", because this was actually a real piece of grammar advice from the 1800…Hang on, hang on, hang on.Here it is.It's Alfred Ayres in his book, The Verbalist.And he argues that you shouldn't write "anybody else's" or "somebody else's", because ELSE is the modifier and you shouldn't add things to it.You should add it to ANYBODY or SOMEBODY.So, "anybody's else"".
• linkMIGNON - Yeah.
• linkBen Ainslie - This is like a weird 'governors general' type nonsense.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah.
• linkBen Ainslie - Or 'attorneys general' or whatever.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Ayres says, "It is better grammar and more euphonious to consider else as being an adjective and to form the possessive by adding the apostrophe and S to the word that else qualifies.Thus, anybody's else, nobody's else, somebody's else." Which is just not what anybody says!It's just completely weird.
• linkMIGNON - Yeah.
• linkBen Ainslie - I almost immediately distrust the advice, because it describes it as 'more euphonious'.I'm like, "Nope!You lost me at 'more euphonious', which were the first two words in your recommendation." So, no.
• linkMIGNON - So, maybe Microsoft Word originally used some really, really old grammar book.I don’t know.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I don't know if that was ever popular advice, but it has been advice.Just like saying, 'the man down the street's car', which sounds fine.But "the street's car""?No, the man's down the street car.It's the same problem.
• linkBen Ainslie - NOISES OF PROTEST
• linkMIGNON - You're right.
• linkDaniel Midgley - We're in a weird area.
• linkBen Ainslie - I'm not having that!I'm not tolerating that.No, I will be pushed so far and no further.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I did some digging around.People have always wondered about this.There has always been this suspicion that the tools we use to write are influencing our writing.People fretted that ballpoint pens were killing cursive or making people bad writers.And the one thing that so many people have suspected as killing language or ruining writing is…?
• linkMIGNON - Text messaging.
• linkBen Ainslie - Autocorrect.Or, like…yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Those darn phones.This shows up in spellchecking suspicion.There was a study by Dr Andrea Lunsford, Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford.Took a look at the most common mistakes in 1988, and then again, the most common mistakes in 2008 in student papers.Made a big list of the mistakes.On the 2008 list were:the student chose the wrong word.That was number one.It was number four in 1998.Then, spelling (including homonyms), which was number five on the 2008 list, wasn't even in the top 20 on the 1998 list.So, this professor is saying that she thinks that maybe spellchecking is having an effect on our ability to spell.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Not the strongest evidence and this kind of thing existed in Japan as well even as far back as the '80s.There was a word, 'wāpurobaca', it means 'word processor crazy'.'Wāpuro' is a word processor and 'baka' is mad.And so if you were wāpurobaka, it meant that you were using a word processor too much and you were losing the ability to spell Japanese words.For me, it sounds a bit like a moral panic."Oh, those darn phones and kids these days.Oh, those darn emojis.We're going to go back to hieroglyphics," or something like that.Doesn't it just smell like a moral panic?
• linkBen Ainslie - My question here, as with quite a few moral panics, is just to follow up with letting someone run on about all of the badness, and then just going, "And?"
• linkLAUGHTER
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay?
• linkDaniel Midgley - And?
• linkBen Ainslie - Are we potentially choosing to just ship off an entire section of our cognition to technology, which is more or less completely ubiquitous to a pretty substantial part of the world now?And we're talking even in developing nations, right?phones are an absolutely fundamental tool for people all over the world.A version of autocorrect or predictive text is available even in really, really rudimentary phones now.Like, it's not a particularly complex computing task for the tier of technology that we have available all over the world.So, if we just as a global society were like, "Let's just let devices do it" in the same way that we did with long division, we just went, "This is just not a thing I'm ever going to need to know." And yes, I know we still technically teach kids grammar and we still technically teach kids long division and stuff, but we all immediately forget it.
• linkDaniel Midgley - We reach for that calculator, yeah?
• linkBen Ainslie - If you got me to divide, I don't know, 4,659 by 23, I wouldn't be able to, long division.Not physically, not on a piece of paper.Not anymore.I have definitely forgotten that knowledge.Because buh?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Because that method was devised to overcome our own cognitive limitations.We needed to set it up in a bracket like that, because we don't think that way.We had to break it into smaller chunks.
• linkBen Ainslie - And now, it's just kinda like, "Do we as a human society…" and I don't think this question is settled by the way.I'm not sayingLAUGHSthrow out all formal education in your language.You don't need it anymore.But more just kinda going, "Okay, if that's the way things are going— and it really looks like they are —why get the paddle out and try and push the tide back in?" You know?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay.Well, if you want to see what spellchecker anxiety looks like in Asian languages, here's the term for you.Character amnesia.
• linkBen Ainslie - That's fun.
• linkDaniel Midgley - There are lots of speakers of Japanese and Chinese languages, who are willing to say, "Yeah, you know what?I think my input methods are probably making me forget how to spell words." You can find videos.There's one from Asian Boss about people being asked, native Chinese speakers being asked to spell normal words like ELBOW and TOOTHPASTE, and just coming up blank.Just not being able to do it.There's an anecdote on Language Log where a commenter said, "I asked three professors at the most educated University in China how to spell SNEEZE.It was SNEEZE.And they all three just went:🤷?
• linkMIGNON - That kinda does seem like a shame, doesn't it?
• linkDaniel Midgley - LAUGHSYeah.Maybe.
• linkBen Ainslie - How many characters in the simplified Mandarin character set?
• linkDaniel Midgley - I mean, you need about 2,000 or 3,000 to be basically literate, but there are about 50,000 all up.
• linkMIGNON - Wow.
• linkBen Ainslie - In the simplified.
• linkDaniel Midgley - In the simplified version.
• linkBen Ainslie - Okay.I'm sorry.
• linkLAUGHTER
• linkMIGNON - I don’t know.I'm going to say it's a shame.
• linkBen Ainslie - We have 26 and we fuck it up.Jesus.
• linkLAUGHTER
• linkMIGNON - Well, you know what it made me wonder though is thinking about the different ways of putting ideas into the world.So I type, and I write by hand, and sometimes, I do voice dictation, and I feel it uses my brain differently to convey an idea using those different methods from getting the idea from my brain out into the world.I think there might be some…whether we're talking good or bad, I think there might be some benefit to brain health from using different methods over and over, switching it up sometimes.It's good for your brain to learn another language.Maybe it's good for your brain to sometimes write by hand, sometimes type, sometimes do voice dictation.
• linkBen Ainslie - A bit of neuroplasticity.
• linkMIGNON - Yeah, that's the word.LAUGHS
• linkBen Ainslie - I have space in my brain for that.I find that persuasive as a concept.I would also wonder as natural language processing gets better, I don't think we're ever going to get around the dictation issue that we currently already face which is— and I'm sure you've both experienced this as well —if you want to give written feedback via dictation that is of a formal register, you gotta use your radio voice.You've really got to say, "Good afternoon."
• linkDaniel Midgley - And.Put.Spaces.Between.Your.Words.
• linkMIGNON - Comma.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah, literally.You say grammar, you do all that kind of stuff."Derrick, comma, I'd like to say that I found your feedback helpful, but the truth of the matter…"
• linkMIGNON - Open quotation mark.
• linkDaniel Midgley - LAUGHS
• linkBen Ainslie - You have to actually really slow down, formalise it, put all the grammar in, all that kind of stuff.I also wonder if that's going to be the direction where we still find a bit of that neuroplasticity, because we'll have to practice speaking in a very, very…And it's stuff that all three of us right here on the show, I'm going to assume, either have formal or informal training on, having been on podcasts for many years.I studied broadcast journalism when I was in uni, so I sat down and had lessons of like, "This is how you speak in simple sentences and all this kind of stuff." I'm wondering if that's the thing that we're going to start teaching people more broadly.
• linkDaniel Midgley - So do you think this is a thing?Obviously, lots of people are willing to say, "Oh, yes, the medium is destr…" I also find some work by Shu Ting Huang Huang and a team publishing and in Language Sciences.They found that people who write Chinese have forgotten characters, but just because of normal things.Because they were rare, because they acquired them later in life, and because the characters within the word were less familiar.But nothing about input method.It's just that it's hard to keep track of so many characters.And then, Guy Almog, who I think I would like to talk to, he's from the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Haifa.He argues that even though, a lot of people are willing to say that the device is killing their spelling or killing their memory for writing, he says that the bulk of the empirical support is unreliable or invalid.So, what I'm thinking at this point is:yeah, maybe a little bit of a thing, but it also sounds a lot like a moral panic, those darn phones.I think establishing causality is going to be a problem, But I'll be looking for more on that.
• linkBen Ainslie - Thank you to Ayelet.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Thanks, Ayelet.That was an interesting question and we'll be looking more into this later.
• linkMIGNON - Yeah.
• linkBen Ainslie - And thanks so much for using SpeakPipe, so we get to hear your awesome voice, and accent, and just all of it.We would love to hear more people's voices more often.So, if you have a question for us, by all means use SpeakPipe, and then you too can be on the show.
• linkDaniel Midgley - You just have to go to our website, becauselanguage.com, and it's in the upper right-hand corner, you can just start going immediately.Not that hard to do.It's easy.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay, Samuel on our Discord sent us a Wiktionary screengrab about Hong Kong, which is of course a city, but also means ORGASM?
• linkMIGNON - LAUGHS
• linkBen Ainslie - Hhhhwat?
• linkDaniel Midgley - And Samuel says, "Now, I'm really interested in how this came to be."
• linkBen Ainslie - Can we go back a step, please?
• linkMIGNON - No idea.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yup!It seems that 'Hong Kong' or to 'go to Hong Kong' in Korean is a euphemism for having an orgasm.For example, there's a commercial.So imagine this:A boy and a girl in a sunny field, and he's lying on his back, and he is airplaning her, by which I mean…
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get you.
• linkDaniel Midgley - He's got his feet up in the air, her stomach is on his feet, and he's lifting her up, and she's got her arms on, like she's an airplane flying.
• linkBen Ainslie - Like a little bit of acro-balance fun times kind of a thing.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Like you do with a kid, right?
• linkBen Ainslie - Yep.
• linkDaniel Midgley - But he's having a hard time keeping her up…keeping it up.She gives him a drink of a certain product and then, wow, he has no problem keeping her up in the air!And he says, "Where do you want to go?" And she says, "To Hong Kong!"
• linkLAUGHTER
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay.
• linkMIGNON - Creative.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah.
• linkBen Ainslie - I want to give whoever came up with that particular erectile dysfunction ad idea.There's some Mad-Men-level shit going on there, that's genius.
• linkMIGNON - Absolutely.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah, big time.Big time.
• linkBen Ainslie - I really think that's awesome.
• linkDaniel Midgley - So, any guesses?Why would 'Hong Kong', 'going to Hong Kong' mean cumming?
• linkMIGNON - Is it a romantic place to go for people from Korea?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay, that's a good guess.
• linkBen Ainslie - I was going to kinda guess something similar.I was actually going to wonder though if Korea has pilfered it from mainland Chinese usage, because— and this is just a complete guess —I'm wondering if for the decades that Hong Kong was still a colony, for lack of a better phrase, of England and thus had majority Cantonese language, and speakers, and all that kind of stuff.If, as a mainland Chinese person, Hong Kong was the really, really cool, fun, interesting place you could go to escape communism for a while, and to do all the fun things that you can have access to the west.Like wear blue jeans, and have cool food, and all the rest of it.But then, it ends, right?Like, you go home.So, I was wondering if maybe that's where it came from.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay, I think both of you are definitely on the right track.I did a search for 'Hong Kong orgasm' and eventually, I found…
• linkMIGNON - I'm sorry!So sorry.
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh, wait.Whoa, whoa, whoa.You did a search for what now?
• linkDaniel Midgley - And eventually, I arrived at that kind of answer.I also asked Dustin of Sandman Stories, because he's a Korean speaker.I asked, "Do you know this?Is this a thing that you're aware of or have you heard it lately?" So Dustin says, "I don't know how popular it is, but my wife is familiar with it.My students haven't used it around me that I know of.I also can't remember the last time I saw it in media.My wife said that 'Hong Kong' isn't as special anymore and that trend is kind of past.Plus as it is sexual slang, that wouldn't be easy to see it in popular culture." But he did find this for me from PrinciplesofKnowledge.kr.And it's basically what you're saying that Hong Kong was seen as a Western place, a fun place.We have an expression in English 'going to town', which is sexual, but also not.It's like, "Man, they went to town on that pizza" or "Oh, we got to her place, and we went to town." And that's just a way of saying, when you into town, that was an exciting thing, a special thing that you did to do fun stuff, and so that became a metaphor for doing something— sexual or not —with great enthusiasm.Oh, and also PrinciplesofKnowledge.kr— link on our website —says that also, Hong Kong is known for adult products and adult services.
• linkBen Ainslie - Oh, okay, like in a similar way to Amsterdam having it notorious Red Light District kind of thing?
• linkDaniel Midgley - That kind of thing.
• linkBen Ainslie - Right.This just reminded me of one of my very favourite linguistic TikToks that I ever saw, which was a young woman who was talking about how her mum, who was Lebanese…In English, we have the usage of 'Timbuktu' to mean the most remote and insanely ridiculously far off possible conception of geography.Like, "Oh, he went to Timbuktu," means, you could not have gone further "off the map," which is obviously very colonial, and racist, and all the rest of it.She talks about how in different languages, you use different places.And so in Lebanese, her mum would say and her friends would say, "I've gone to Honolulu." Honolulu, the capital of Hawaii, being the place that could not be more remote and farfetched, which I've got to be honest, actually, makes a lot more sense, because Honolulu is…It's so far from everything.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Experientially, too.LAUGHS
• linkBen Ainslie - But what I loved about that story was that, much like Timbuktu, being an actual real place that many, many millions of people live, Honolulu is a real place, and her mum went to Honolulu on her honeymoon, and then had to tell her friends, "I went to Honolulu." And they're like, "Where did you really go?"
• linkLAUGHTER
• linkDaniel Midgley - No, I really did go to Honolulu.
• linkBen Ainslie - I just liked this idea that places can actually mean completely different things.Like, for the vast majority of English speakers, Timbuktu means very far away rather than the actual very real city that it is.
• linkMIGNON - Reminds me, I've heard that people in Norwegian, they use TEXAS to mean crazy.They'll say…
• linkDaniel MidgleyMIGNON - "That's so Texas."
• linkMIGNON - Yeah.
• linkBen Ainslie - LAUGHS
• linkMIGNON - They mean it more in the wild out there, Wild West, I think conception is where it came from.But yeah, it's really funny.LAUGHS
• linkDaniel Midgley - Ben, is there an actual Australian town called Woop Woop?Because we use that expression 'going out to Woop Woop'.
• linkBen Ainslie - I don't fucking know.Hold on.
• linkDaniel Midgley - If you're in Woop Woop, please let us know that you're real.Also, double for Kalamazoo.
• linkBen Ainslie - No, I don't think it is.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay.
• linkBen Ainslie - We do however have several different towns that are very close to that.My partner, for a substantial part of her life, or a nontrivial part of her life, lived in a place called Wagga Wagga.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Oh.Yeah.
• linkBen Ainslie - Two words, Wagga Wagga, which really isn't that far from Woop Woop as a concept.
• linkDaniel Midgley - No.
• linkBen Ainslie - But I think that's probably to do with the fact in a lot of Indigenous languages…Ooh, here we go, here we go.Can I get the right word?Reduplication is a feature.
• linkMIGNON - Mm-hmm.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Oh, Ben.I'm so proud of you!
• linkLAUGHTER
• linkBen Ainslie - YES!I'm fuckin' crushing it.We have a town here near where Daniel and I live called Gingin, because its original name was Gingin-up and Jin is the word for hill and there were two hills with water in the middle, UP means water, Gingin-up.So, I think Wagga Wagga probably had a similar thing.It's not the bad thing, I don't think, Daniel.Note: coincidentally a slur — D
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay, thank you.No, no, I'm making that expression because -UP is often thought to mean water and there often is water, but -UP really just means place.There's often water in a place, but it's the place of two hills.That's cool.We have in Washington State, where Mignon and I both hail from apparently!You know the town I'm thinking of, right?
• linkMIGNON - Walla Walla.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Exactly.
• linkBen Ainslie - LAUGHS
• linkDaniel Midgley - Which means water.Walla means water.Am I right?Am I getting that right?
• linkMIGNON - I have no idea.I've never even thought about what it means.It's just Walla Walla and they have wonderful Walla Walla sweet onions there.
• linkDaniel Midgley - They do.You can bite them like apples.Yum.
• linkBen Ainslie - What song am I thinking of?There's a song that has "Walla walla--"
• linkDaniel Midgley - You're thinking of Witch Doctor.
• linkBen Ainslie - Am I?
• linkDaniel Midgley - SINGSOoh ee ooh ah ah ting tang…
• linkBen Ainslie - Walla walla bing bang.
• linkMIGNON - Yeah.
• linkBen Ainslie - Walla walla bing bang.Yeah.There we go.
• linkMIGNON - LAUGHS
• linkDaniel Midgley - Walla Walla, Washington.
• linkBen Ainslie - There we go.
• linkDaniel Midgley - All right.Last thing, I just want to say.You notice how you 'go to Hong Kong', you don't 'come to Hong Kong'.I really want to do a map of how languages handle ORGASM, whether it's COME or GO.What verb do they use?I think that would be a really interesting chart.
• linkBen Ainslie - LAUGHSYou're such a nerd.I love it.
• linkLAUGHTER
• linkDaniel Midgley - But extremely comfortable with sexuality, as you'll notice.
• linkBen Ainslie - A sex-positive nerd.Well done.
• linkLAUGHTER
• linkDaniel Midgley - All right.Well, that's all the questions we got.I'm so thankful to the people who gave us such great questions, all of our Discordians, all of our listeners.Thanks to you, Ben, for being here today.
• linkBen Ainslie - Always a pleasure.
• linkDaniel Midgley - And huge thanks to Mignon Fogarty.Thanks for being on our show!
• linkMIGNON - Yeah, that was an absolute blast.Thanks for asking me.
• linkBen Ainslie - I demand more Mignon.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I do too.
• linkBen Ainslie - And remember, what's our thing?Three times?and you are essentially a co-presenter of the show.
• linkMIGNON - Oh, let's do it.
• linkDaniel Midgley - That's right.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Honorary cohost.
• linkMIGNON - I love titles.LAUGHS
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah.Mignon, how can people find out what you're doing?
• linkMIGNON - Oh, probably, I'm on Twitter most of the time.So I'm @grammargirl at Twitter.But I'm also at the Quick and Dirty Tips Podcast Network, quickanddirtytips.com, and you can find the Grammar Girl Podcast wherever all fine podcasts are free.
• linkBen Ainslie - And a quick plug.What's your new thing?
• linkMIGNON - Oh, and the new show is Curious State, and the host is Doug Fraser.We're so excited from Quick and Dirty Tips, the Curious State podcast.
• linkBen Ainslie - This by the way, I hope this doesn't sound like an indictment on all of the other things you do.But the description you gave of Curious State being, "Could dinosaurs live today and if so, what would they eat?", that went so far up my alley, it got stuck.Like, that…that's my jam.So, I am definitely gonna be listening out for that.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Got to go to Hong Kong to get it out.
• linkMIGNON - LAUGHSI know.I think it's going to be great.
• linkMIGNON - END THEME
• linkBen Ainslie - If you like the show, here's what you can do to make sure there's more good show for you to like.You can send us ideas and feedback.We are becauselangpod on all of the possible places.You can leave us a message with SpeakPipe like Ayelet did today, and it was so great to hear her voice.That's on our website, becauselanguage.com.You can send us a good old-fashioned archaic…I was about to say snail mail, but that's not right.Email.Tell a friend about us or leave a review, like Dustin from Sandman Stories does as an ongoing act of outright heroism.People are just asking Twitter for recommendations of podcasts and god, what a wild ride that must be for an individual to do.But Dustin is out there fighting the good fight and giving people really solid recommendations of which we are one and that's awesome.Thank you, Dustin.
• linkBen Ainslie - And you can always obviously become a patron.To do so, you'll get to listen to episodes like this when we first air them, the bonus episodes before we put them out for gen pop.And you help us transcribe our shows, which is really awesome.It allows them to be searchable and it also allows people who can't hear to be able to access our shows as well, which is really, really wonderful.And bonus, bonus, bonus, you get to hang out with us on Discord.It's sick, you should come and stop by.
• linkDaniel Midgley - It's true.Speaking of transcripts, big shoutout to SpeechDocs who are doing a great job on ours.If you have a podcast, they will transcribe things for you.
• linkBen Ainslie - Once again, SpeechDocs, I am so sorry.Oh, and I have something to say to one of our SpeechDocs transcribers.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Oh, yes…?
• linkBen Ainslie - I received simply a statement:Tai'shar Manetheren, Tai'shar Malkier.And all I would say to that:I feel you, bro.I feel you.I know I should bust out like a really good Wheel of Time reference here, but I just wanted to convey to that person:that was so lovely and wonderful.Thank you.It made me feel so good!
• linkDaniel Midgley - LAUGHSBig shoutout to our top patrons.They are Dustin, Termy, Chris B, James S, Matt, Whitney, Chris L, Helen, Udo, Jack, PharaohKatt, LordMortis, Elías, Larry, Kristofer, James, Nigel, Meredith, Kate, Nasrin, Ayesha, sneakylemur, Moe, Steele, Andrew, Manú, Rodger, Rhian, Colleen, glyph, Ignacio, Sonic Snejhog, Kevin, Jeff, Andy from Logophilius, Samantha, zo, Kathy, Rach, Cheyenne, Felicity, Amir, Andy R, O Tim, and wonderful human being Kate B, who didn't contribute via Patreon, but with the one-time donation button on our blog, becauselanguage.com.Also, hello to our newest patrons at the listener level Hannah and at the Friend level with Caitlin.It's great to see you all thanks for hanging out with us on Discord.Thanks to all our amazing patrons.
• linkMIGNON - Our theme music has been written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who's a member of Ryan Beno and of Didion's Bible.Thanks for listening.We'll catch you next time.Because Language.
• linkMIGNON - MUSIC ENDS
• linkDaniel Midgley - Nice reading, Mignon.
• linkMIGNON - Thank you.
• linkBen Ainslie - I think she skipped the other two.Like, if you close off the show, surely that's a cheat code for being a co-presenter, right?
• linkMIGNON - What?Oh!
• linkDaniel Midgley - I think so.
• linkDaniel Midgley - BOOP
• linkDaniel Midgley - Speaking of cheugy.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yes.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I just want to drop a bit of wisdom, because this is a saying that really resonated with me and maybe it'll work.It won't work for you, because you're not as cringe as I am, but I've always felt like my life was cringe.Growing up in the milieu that I do and also looking at my past work and going, "Oh, geez, really?", everything that I've done up to this point is cringe, but what I'm doing now is great, but then that'll be cringe as it recedes.
• linkBen Ainslie - Yeah, I was just about to say like, "I'm sure we've all thought that at all of the various points."
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay, maybe.
• linkMIGNON - But is that like the opposite of:"God.I didn't know how hot I was when I was 20.I wish I had known," you know?Looking back at pictures, "Oh, my god, I thought I was cute."
• linkDaniel Midgley - I thought I was gawky and awkward, and instead I was flamin' hot.
• linkMIGNON - Yeah.
• linkBen Ainslie - So no matter where in your past you look, there's something to flex over.Is that what you're saying, Daniel?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Well, no, the opposite.
• linkBen Ainslie - You used to be hot and dumb, and now you're smart and ugly.Is this like…?
• linkDaniel Midgley - No, I'm hot and smart now.It's just that everything in my past is cringe.But the saying— here's the wisdom, the saying that I learned —it's an old internet saying and it goes like this."Do not kill the part of you that is cringe.Kill the part of you that cringes."
• linkBen Ainslie - Ah, okay.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Isn't that great?
• linkBen Ainslie - I think there is a nugget in there.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I think there is.I think it's very wise.
• linkBen Ainslie - A cheeky noog.
• linkDaniel Midgley - So I'm living by that for a while.