The Lowdown on Lowkey

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Lexicon Valley Podcast

0:52From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm John McWhorter, and I'm stepping in for this episode, as I want to keep doing. I want to use what I'm beginning to think is a kind of podcast grammar, where I get some miscellaneous stuff over with first. And so we're going to start with miscellany. Why that word? My mother taught me that word. I remember when I was a kid, and in my bedroom, there was a dresser, and she had the drawers labeled.

1:27And one of the drawers, you know, it was like underwear, socks, and one of them was labeled miscellaneous and sundry. And I think now, I've never thought about this until now, what a strange thing to have on a drawer for like your four or five-year-old. Miscellaneous and sundry, and that meant the things that just didn't fit into any category. That said, a lot about her, it said a lot about me, and a lot about my childhood. But whatever, the miscellany.

Collective Names for Animals

1:53And so, I want to talk about collective names for animals, because it came up between me and a colleague not long ago, and it really got me thinking. And a lot of you probably already know what I'm going to say, because this pops up online all the time. It pops up at parties. It's fun to know. You know, there are herds of things, okay? You don't just say a group of cows. It's a herd of cows. And then there's a flock of birds. And maybe a person who's not concerned with such things might know that technically it's a gaggle of geese.

2:26That seems to be a real word. But then there's that list of other things. And so, we're supposed to think that we're a little bit inadequate, because there's a full list of these collective names for animals that none of us really control. And so, a murder of crows. People seem to like that one. A clowder of cats. A flamboyance of flamingos. It's a tower of giraffes, don't you know? Or a charm of goldfinches, if you're ever going to be talking about those birds. Or a conspiracy of lemurs, an ostentation of peacocks, a congregation of alligators.

3:00But really, if you think about it, do you know about those words as opposed to actually using them? And can you imagine anyone actually using them? At first, you assume that other languages must have these. And so, think of whatever other language you know best. And notice that actually it doesn't. Everybody's got things like herds and flocks, but the idea that you have 50 different words to refer to animals in the plural.

3:30Dina of Wellesley, if you're listening to this, you're the one who started this. As we noticed, you know, not in Russian, not in Hebrew. And so, then you think, well, it must be something about the English. It must be something about being Anglophone. We're going to presume that this happened across the pond, across the pond from me here in New York. But the thing is, what cultural trait would this be? I mean, do Anglophones cherish the variety among animals or their collectivity more than other people? If anything, you'd think it'd be the other way around.

4:02You'd assume that there was some language spoken on the African Velt where they had 50 collective terms for animals. And maybe they do, but you would not expect it. Of some European language, or you certainly wouldn't expect it after a certain point in history because of, you know, whatever we're like culturally. And then, notice there's kind of a jokiness in it. You know, a dazzle of zebras, a tower of girasskas. They're tall. It's a surfeit of skunks. You know, I've never said that word.

4:32Is it surfeit or surfeit? I like surfeit better, so I'm going to use that, although I'll bet it's wrong. It reminds me of when I was little, well, little-ish, and I thought that albeit was albeit. I thought it was a German word. Well, here we go again. I know it's not surfeit. But anyway, a surfeit of skunks because you don't want there to be too many skunks. You know, it might as well be a stink of skunks or something like that. Isn't this just some joke that's gone on too long? And you know what? It is. It actually is. These cute collective terms go back to something from 1486, get that, 1486, called the Book of

5:07St. Albans, or Boca, as it was spelled way back then. And it's actually, it was by a woman, a priestess, apparently, Juliana Berners. And it's this weird book about hunting and such, huntinga. And she wrote it in, you know, about as close to Rye, W-R-Y, as you get in the Middle Ages. And so she talks about, well, wouldn't it be funny if we said a melody of harpas? Like harp, like that. And she doesn't say, wouldn't it be funny?

5:37But the idea is that she's kind of making it up. It's all kind of whimsical. It's all kind of Winnie the Pooh. A blast of hunters, because the hunters have their, you know, trumpets. It's just something that she was putting forth as a kind of a wordplay, a whimsy for people who didn't have anything to do because there wasn't an internet yet and everybody was going to die of the plague in 10 minutes anyway. And so she kind of makes this up in this book that happens to get around. So here we are today feeling a little guilty that we didn't know that it was a murder of

6:08crows or a conspiracy of lemurs. Well, we don't have to feel guilty because really it's a contrivance. It's a cute little thing. If you know these things, you have memorized a charming list. It's not that this is a genuine vocabulary. So I thought I'd just get that in. You talk about a smack of jellyfish. How natural could this possibly be?

Ethel Merman Musical

6:30Speaking of hunting, Ethel Merman, this, believe me, it makes sense. Ethel Merman actually did a musical. Yes, this is that part of the show. She did a musical that involved, among other things, there was a scene where she's fox hunting. We won't get into why it was, but it was this strange episode in her career, in between two huge hits. She had had Call Me Madam in 1950 that had been made into a movie, and she was about to do Gypsy, one of the most important musicals ever, at the end of the 50s where she was Mama

7:03Rose. And that was one of the signature moments of her career. But in between, for reasons I've never quite understood, she allowed herself to be sucked into this kind of Call Me Madam clone by oddly talentless composers. They really, they couldn't write great songs, and she was just stuck in it. Anyway, one of the worst songs in it. And if you're just insane, and you're an honorary gay man like me, and you've heard the album 4,000 times, then you start to like this song, even though it's one of the worst songs ever written.

7:34Ethan Morden, the musical theater chronicler, said, Happy Hunting, that's what this musical is called, has some of the worst songs ever written for a musical in it. This is one of them. This is the title song. It's called Happy Hunting. I dare you not to tap your foot a little bit. Ethel Merman, 1956, the Happy Hunting title song. To the hunts! To the hunts! To the hunts! Happy hunting! Happy hunting! Happy hunting! Tally ho! Tally ho! Tally ho!

8:08Everyone's on the hunt for whatever they want and whatever you want. Happy hunting! What a day for a hunt! Keep that eagle eye peeled and look over the field! Happy hunting!

8:27Saying. And it's Loki. You can actually think of it as L-O-K-I because that's really the way it's pronounced, but Loki. And what it's used for is it's in the like family. And so it'll be something like, Loki, we don't have to do it this way. So instead of just saying, we don't have to do it this way, Loki, we don't have to do it this way. Meaning, just saying, I don't want to push it too hard, but. Or you'll hear somebody say something like, this Loki sucks, you know.

8:57Not just this sucks, you know, but this Loki sucks, you know. As in, we don't want to talk about that it sucks, but I'm going to say it anyway. Or, she Loki needs to stop wearing those pants. That sort of thing. That's Loki. And people don't say it anymore as Loki. It's Loki. The first few times I heard it, I was thinking, is that Loki the god or something like that? Then I realized, no, it's Loki. And so the kids have taken Loki, and they're making it into a marker of not wanting to

9:28push too hard. Now, one way of looking at Loki is to think that it's just some damned little slang, something the kids are saying, but no, it's actually something more interesting than that. And you know what helps us to understand that is a language I don't speak, and it is Cantonese. But Cantonese has got a beautiful example of these things. In that, it's a language that makes heavy use of little particles after sentences. These little one-syllable words, there are a few dozen of them in Cantonese, and you're

10:02not really speaking the language if you don't use them. You could just say, that's the sun. But really, you have to indicate the reason that you're saying that's the sun and what your attitude is. And so it's going to be, that's the sun. And you put these particles afterward. And so in Cantonese, for example, if you want to say this, and what you're intending is this intonation, what's the difference? Now, the words themselves, the what's the difference, is roughly, in Cantonese speakers, I'm so sorry. This is the best I can do. I don't have a speaker to consult today.

10:33But, what's the difference? Okay, that's what it is technically. But, you have to say more to get in all of the nuances of, what's the difference? Exactly that pitch of it. And so, after matfanbid, you say get-se-bo. Get-se-bo. Now, get-se-bo is not a word get-se-bo. It's these three particles. Get-se-bo. And each one of them means something.

11:05Now, it would be hard to get a speaker to tell you they feel this as deeply as in English you feel how to use a and the, or low-key. But, nevertheless, these things have meaning. And so, the get is asserting it. It's saying that you mean it. The that is kind of pulling back a little bit. And then, the ba is the agreement seeker. You're looking around, and you're making sure that everybody agrees with you. So, that combination of asserting, pulling back a little, and seeking agreement is, what's

11:37the difference? That's what all of that is. What this means is that Cantonese is, in a way, more of a real language than Standard English is in many. Because Cantonese can get all of that stuff in, and English wants to be a real language. Of course, you know I'm being facetious. But it's always trying to fill out and mark more things more explicitly. But the problem is, because we hear language change as something decrepit, as some kind of departure from a standard, which is the real thing, that's called your brain being

12:08on writing, it means that when the language is trying to do that, we just hear slang. So, we think of it as marginal, as not the real thing. And so, Black English is realer than Standard English, and not in the sense of it being dynamic, et cetera, et cetera. But I mean, it's more like Cantonese. Am I crazy? No, because this is what I mean. Let's say somebody says, um, he needs to try some new shoes, yo. Now, that yo at the end sounds just, well, black. And you imagine somebody with pants worn a certain way or something like that.

12:41He needs to try some new shoes, yo. But the yo is actually a marker of assertion. It's saying, I'm serious. I really mean this. The yo is very similar to the ge in Cantonese. Now, the person could say, he needs to try some new shoes, yo. I'm saying, that is something that especially black men have been saying a lot over the past 40, maybe 50 years. It's, you know what I'm saying? And it's said so much, that little question, that it's really just become a particle.

13:15I'm saying, I'm saying, that thing is very much like the seeking agreement that you have in the ba in Cantonese. You can assert and say get if you're in Hong Kong, but if you're in Detroit, then you're going to say, yo. You can seek agreement by saying ba in Hong Kong. But if you're in Detroit, you might say, I'm saying, and then a person might say, he low-key needs to try some new shoes, yo. I'm saying, just this string of, you know, black, you know, ebonics, youth lingua franca

13:49speech. Well, the low-key, L-O-K-I, that is the pulling back. It's the same thing that the tse in Cantonese does. And so, in, he low-key needs to try some new shoes, yo, I'm saying, is the same thing as bapfanbiketsebo, same thing, but it's only the same thing when you go into language that actually does what language naturally does. And if you think that the tse is kind of forced, that is that really something that comes from, do you know what I'm saying? That is how particles happen. They tend to start as something much longer.

14:22And so, classic example, actually, if I say bye, well, that started out as God be with you. God be with you. Goodbye. Bye. Bye. That's how that started. Or there's an example that has just come over my transom from my fellow Creolist and Creolist who understands truth, Bart Jacobs, and he has a paper out with a co-writer, the wonderful Aymeric Daval-Marcuson, and they have discovered there is a small word in Martinican

14:52Creole, so not Haitian Creole, but its sister language, Martinican Creole, also the Creole spoken in French Guyana, which is a whole different language, but they're all really variations on the same language. But in Martinique and Guadeloupe and some other places and French Guyana, you have this little word, ca, and ca is how they say ing, basically. So, I'm eating, I ca eat. And it's funny because the ca doesn't seem like it's anything French. It's something that you find in the Creoles based on Spanish and Portuguese, and it's from

15:25things like a ca for hither, here, in this direction, or there's some other things that you can think of in those Creoles where it would come from. But in French, the ca has always been a mystery. Haitian doesn't use it. This just happens in certain French Creoles. Well, actually, Bart and Aymeric have solved the mystery. They have figured out that where that ca comes from, this is just like, do you know what I'm saying, becoming 10, is you can say in French, he is only two kilometers nearer. And the way you say it is, il n'est qu'à deux kilomètres plus près.

15:58Deux kilomètres plus près, I think you can figure out is the two kilometers closer. But il, that's he, il n'est qu'à, and so what that means is, he's not, but il n'est qu'à deux kilomètres plus près. And so only, if you know French, you know that's what it means. So he's only, okay, but if you are listening to French and you are an African and you have been enslaved and you're only understanding so much and you learn that people are talking about n'est qu'à deux kilomètres plus près, you just get a sense that this ca has something

16:31to do with being at, you're at it. And so he's not at two kilometers. Okay. But the thing is, often what starts out being about location and space ends up being about time. That's something that happens in language change all the time. You know, where are we in our relationship? You know, that sort of thing. Where are we? As the time has gone by and so space becomes time. And so if you're thinking that ca means roughly being at something, well then after a while,

17:06you might think that it means being at doing something. And so I'm at eating. And if you are an African and you are enslaved and nobody's teaching you a language, you're just hearing it on the fly. No matter who you are, you're having to grab at it. And so your version of French might be, he, ca, eat. So that ca comes from this ne ca expression in French that you only are familiar with if you're pretty familiar with the fluent language, colloquial language.

17:37That's where it came from. And in the same way, you can get, do you know what I'm saying? Becoming sent. And we can be quite sure that the dze in Cantonese originally was, if not a word, it may have been a whole little sentence 400 million years ago. And since we're in the Caribbean and we're talking about rumbas and such, there's a song that I've always wanted to do here. And it is Bad Cole Porter. Cole Porter in the early 40s. This is his weakest period.

18:09He was in a lot of pain. When musical theater was changing, a horse had fallen on him, actually, and broken to pieces, both of his legs, but he refused to have them amputated. And so he was in terrible pain. In the meantime, we have Bad Cole Porter, but it's a wonderful recording. And actually, come to think of it, the song is in Argentina. So Caribbean makes no sense. But Porter is the one who's doing rumba in Argentina instead of the tango. So this is one where the song is whatever, but it's the arrangement and the performance.

18:41And so the singer is a woman named Hildegard. She was a cafe, society, supper club singer. And she keeps it held back. Just a little rumba-numba who she met. Just a little something that she had with someone. It's not about a rumba-numba, yeah, honey. It's just keeping it, you know, kind of held back, elegant, very 1941. And the arrangement is good. And so it's kitschy Latin of that era. Kitschy New York Supper Club Latin from Cole Porter's Let's Face It. A little rumba-numba down Argentina way

19:26Made him forget to slumber As through a dance she'd sway Singing aye-y-yay-yay Aye-y-yay-yay Aye-y-yay-yay Aye-y-yay-yay The little rumba-numba And he fell so in love That while the world would slumber Expedia and Visit Scotland

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Language Change and Expansion

20:27You know with Loki and things like that It makes English more explicit Makes English more expressive And yet all we can hear in it is bubblegum And weed And social media And street shit We should hear language change As expansion As extravagance As birds pecking with their beaks Remember in the last show that I was saying That I can just imagine There must be some language Where you actually say Birds pecking with their beaks Well you know what folks I found one

20:58And it is the wonderful Shoshone language Native American language Remember I said it was going to be Native American I could just feel it I think maybe I happened to know this way back in the past Or I think it was another language But Shoshone I found Shoshone And in Shoshone This is a language spoken in Wyoming Idaho, Utah And Nevada And there's a revival movement And I wish it well Fascinating language But remember I talked about somebody saying That she bit something with her teeth Or birds are pecking with their beaks

21:29Well you know in Shoshone You say I bit it with my mouth Shoshone speakers I apologize for what I'm about to do But believe me I'm trying my best I bit it with my mouth Would be The k is the mouth And the t is the biting And so you're saying I bit it with my mouth Now it's important to note That they're not actually explicitly saying that I don't think that would be the case In any language That it's really openly

22:00Bit it with my mouth But think of the prefix The k As like I'm saying Where people know That if you stretched it out It would be Do you know what I'm saying But you say And so imagine If we were saying You know With my mouth I bit it Bit it with my mouth And imagine if With my mouth We start saying Mal Mat Mat And it's just A prefix And so now we know That in this language Whenever we're talking about Things going on with the mouth We always say Mat And we know intellectually That it's with my mouth

22:30All squeezed together But you're not Thinking that And so it's kind of like If we didn't just say bite But we said Mat bite We used to say With my mouth bite Mat bite That makes perfect sense And Shoshone keeps on Making sense that way And so they say I thought with my mind I kicked it with my foot I hit him with my fist I said it by talking It's very much like that song With the pecking And the beaks But really It makes Shoshone Just better Than English In a lot of ways

23:00And so for example I kicked it With my foot And that's Tasuukute The ta Is the With the foot So with my foot I kicked it Tasuukute So we think of that As well explicit But it also means You can say I broke it with my foot With one word It's Takupa I broke it with my foot Now Think about it That they have one word For that And so for example If you are You're at a Jewish wedding And they break the glass With the foot Well we have to say

23:31I broke the glass With my foot But they would just have to say For the Shoshone Jewish wedding They would just have to say Takupia And so I broke it With my foot Because you've got this ta That means With my foot Just sitting right there And then it just gets They go some places And this is my favorite If a horse bucks The horse bucks with its butt Okay So that's the way You do it But then It also means If you jam yourself Into a hole Which you might

24:01You can specify That you did it With your butt As in there is a verb That means That you jammed yourself Into a hole But first Which is something That probably happens Now and then To a lot of people I imagine It's maybe happened To me at least once But that means That you can say Pesukwe Because the P is the butt In any case I found it It's Shoshone And there are Other languages Like that Languages in Shoshone's Family often do it And William Foley Who is a linguist

24:32I teach I shouldn't say Alongside Because really It's under He knows everything In the world He tells me There are languages In New Guinea That do this As well Oh and by the way In case you were wondering With all those Animal words What is a clowder Of cats What's a clowder Clowder Is kind of Medieval for clutter A clutter Of cats Which seems to imply That you don't want Too many cats Around at a time And you know The truth is I am a great Lover of cats But do you want Grey Gardens 13 cats around

25:03At a time Probably not Hey everyone This is Mike Volo I really enjoyed That episode By the way All those Collective nouns For groups of animals Those are called Terms of venery V-E-N-E E-R-Y That's an old word That comes from The Latin verb Venari Meaning to hunt Lexicon Valley Is produced by Livia Bloom Ingram Who From her window There in Brooklyn Will sometimes

25:34Spot a scurry Of squirrels Or A pretension Of hipsters Hey If you're not A premium subscriber Give it a thought You'll have access To our many Bonus episodes And every Regular episode Is entirely Ad free Check out the Details at Booksmartstudios.com I'm Mike Volo There's a pill Version of Ozempic Hello I'm Ozempic

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