106: Is a hotdog a sandwich? The problem with definitions

Introduction

0:00Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Gretchen McCulloch. And I'm Lauren Gorn, and today we're getting enthusiastic about what even is a sandwich, and how does meaning even work anyway? This episode totally blew our minds when

0:32we were researching the classic internet debate. But first, this episode was originally posted as our ninth bonus episode in November 2017. Oh my gosh, it's from our first year. We have been doing monthly bonus episodes since 2017 for people who support us at the Lingthusiast level or above. The support of patrons is literally the way the show keeps running and helps us not have to think about running ads or exposing you to other things you don't want to listen to. We now have over 100 bonus episodes in the Patreon bonus feed for you to listen to right now,

1:05and new ones that come out every month. Our bonus episodes are often a little bit more playful and less likely to be used in a linguistics classroom, like our several swearing bonus episodes. Or the whole bonus episode on the linguistics of kissing. – But overall, we have as much fun with bonus episodes as our mains, and we love them so much we wanted to share one from the archive on the main feed. – It also gives us a chance to catch a bit of a break between preparing new episodes. – This is something we did last year as well, and it really helps us during a busy period.

1:35– Indeed, there are multiple reasons to love this tradition that we've started. We're going to play the original episode. We are going to skip the intro with updates from 2017. – Ooh, what was the hot news in 2017? – We were heading towards full-length bonus episodes, a thing we have been doing for almost eight years now. – I had almost forgotten that these bonus episodes weren't full-length to start. – Yeah, we literally didn't have the money to pay Claire to edit full-length

2:06bonuses for us a year into making the show. – That explains why this was only about 20 minutes of tape, and we were also celebrating our first official anniversary month. – Oh, of course, because it was and is November, our anniversary. That's so lovely. – We're going to revisit an episode from when we were a year in the show. We'll listen along with you, and then I look forward to chatting with you at the end about other things that we've observed about this topic. – Our most recent bonus episode is a discussion about gesture in science fiction and fantasy with

2:38Eric Malinsky, who hosts the Imaginary Worlds podcast. – Go to patreon.com slash linkthusiasm to access this and many other bonus episodes, including the original version of this episode with the announcement still intact.

Sandwich Debate

2:51– We ran a poll with a very simple question. Which of the following 20 items is a sandwich? – If any. – People had opinions, I think it's fair to say. – Yeah. This was, I think, maybe one of our more participated polls. Definitely got the most comments because we didn't manage to include a none of the above option because we ran up

3:21the max on the Patreon polls. We're not going to list all 20 because I assume you can see those, but I think of the most sandwiched things, people were kind of most content to consider a hamburger a sandwich, maybe bagel and cream cheese a sandwich, and an ice cream sandwich a sandwich. I mean, it's got sandwich in the name. It has to be a sandwich, right? – Yeah. Things like burritos, pop tarts, ravioli, apple pie didn't really rate very highly. – Macarons, I don't know. They seem very sandwichy to me. They've got things on either side and a filling. Same with Oreos. They're sandwich cookies. That's their genre of cookie.

3:54– Yeah. – Do you have sandwich biscuits? – Yeah. Sandwich biscuits is a type of biscuit, but are they a type of sandwich? – And apple pie has a crust on the top and bottom. That's why I picked apple in particular. Anyway, I came to the conclusion on making this list that actually a book is a sandwich. – On what grounds? – It's got covers on either side, which is like the bread, and then it's got the pages in between, which is like the filling. – And I guess I am known to devour a book, too. – I mean, some people might say

4:27that a sandwich needs to be edible. – Yeah. Some people who are me might say that you are deliberately picking features of sandwich and applying them to book. – Some people might say that that's true and that I am going slightly loopy working on my own book too much. – You do have books on the brain. – I have books on the brain. – Patron Lauren, thanks for mentioning in the comments of the poll an episode of a podcast in which Anne Leckie argues that a cheesecake is neither a pie or a cake, but it is actually a sandwich.

4:57– See, I think a book is more of a sandwich than a cheesecake is a sandwich. – But it shows that even if we can't articulate – and we might say some features – we clearly have some idea of what a sandwich is, and some things either fit that idea or they don't fit that idea. – The other thing is it's not just sandwiches that we have these kinds of problems for. – No, it is not just sandwiches. That would make life very easy. – If you could say, is a cheesecake instead a type of pizza? – No, no. – Is a pizza a type of sandwich?

5:27– Probably not. I can have these very, like, yes, no reactions. – Yeah, you've got these gut reactions. It's less about somebody playing devil's advocate and advocating for sandwich anarchism or sandwich orthodoxy. It's a fun game to play with your friends. Try it with your friends. But there's a bigger question, right? There's lots of things where the boundaries are not completely clear.

Boundary Issues

5:49– And they sometimes have really important implications. There was a famous piece of British case law where there was a discussion about whether Jaffa cakes were a cake or a biscuit because they attracted different levels of taxation. Or maybe there was one about breadsticks – whether breadsticks were a biscuit or a bread. – Oh, yeah. – Because bread is taxed lower than biscuits. – And there's the famous, like, is the tomato sauce on pizza or is ketchup a vegetable for the purposes of your food guide? – These things have really important implications, even though we joke about it sometimes. I think

6:22it's worth – we're, again, going to talk about English because that is a language that people listening to the show have some level of introspection about. But these things do happen across different languages, and they differ across different languages. Chris, again, in the Patreon comments on the topic of whether a cheesecake was a cake or a pie, said, you know, as a non-native English speaker, a very high-functioning non-native English speaker, he really struggles with these categories in English because in German, there are completely different categories where different

6:52things fall into. So, Kuchen in German covers pie and cake, and Tort is something that is neither a pie or a cake. It's like a fancy, fancy cake. – I always just assumed, because I speak enough German at least to be able to kind of pronounce these words, but not enough to have intuitions about it, that Kuchen was basically cake and Tort was basically pie because I figured it was like tart, but I guess that's not true at all. – Your limited intuitions are insufficient for a native speaker. – Yeah. And this is a problem that I run into in Montreal as well because – so, French has – the word for cookie is biscuit, which is fine because you're like, oh yeah,

7:26that's like biscuit. We can do this. But then some cookies are also galette, and I have still not quite figured out what makes something a biscuit or what makes something a galette. I think galettes tend to be bigger and maybe flatter, but I don't know if I see a given. – You're trying to build up your own concept of what it is. – Yeah. Clearly, I need to just eat more pastry in order to solve this problem. – What I find really difficult about sandwich is that I am someone who has quite a narrow prototype of what a sandwich is. It needs to be made of sliced loaf bread, generally at least one on each

8:02side with some kind of filling. But as soon as the bread is like – if it's toasted, then that's a toasted cheese sandwich, which is a subtype of sandwich and not a prototypical sandwich. But having said that, the verb to sandwich something for me is incredibly broad. You can sandwich any – you can sandwich two books together. I think the thing that's really difficult for me is I can sandwich any foodstuffs together and eat them, but it's not a sandwich. – Oh, dear. That runs into problems. I mean, that's kind of like an ice cream sandwich problem, right? Because an ice cream sandwich very clearly takes a sandwich as a model and says,

8:35okay, well, if we put a cookie on either side of ice cream, then it would be an ice cream sandwich, and it's got sandwich in the name. – It's a subtype of ice cream, not a subtype of sandwich. – But yeah, it's ice cream sandwiched. – Yeah. – Rather than a sandwich made out of ice cream. – Yeah. You could have an ice cream sandwich – you could have a sandwich with ice cream in it, which is how – in Singapore, you can get ice cream between two wafers, or you can get it in a piece of folded bread. – Oh, okay. – And that is a closer approximation of a sandwich. – I've not tried that. – It's very fluffy, sweet, white bread. – But then is it kind of like cake?

Prototype Theory

9:08– Yeah. All of this debate is actually a really important thing to deal with when you study semantics, which is the meaning of words. A lot of it has been discussed within something that's called prototype theory. Trying to understand what prototypical representation of a word people carry in their head and how that affects whether they agree that something is or isn't a type of that thing. – I love prototype theory because it just makes everything make so much sense.

9:39If I say, Lauren, give me an example of a bird. – Robin? – Yeah. What, another bird? – They test reaction time in prototype theory. I think that's very important to note. Another bird would be a magpie. – Okay, good. Like a crow. – Yeah. – Like a raven. – Cockatoo. – Yeah. These are the types of things that people often say immediately when you ask them about a bird. Then it takes a lot of prodding, and they're much less likely to say initially, oh, penguin, or emu, or ostrich. – Or a very specific type of eagle.

10:10– You know, like the Canada goose as opposed to goose in general or something like that. – Oh, yeah. Ducks are birds, aren't they? – Yes, they are. A prototypical bird has a beak, has feathers, has wings, or they're unlikely to say like a dinosaur. – Yes. – True. – But if you ask someone for a prototypical dinosaur, they're gonna say like a T-Rex or like a brontosaurus – if we still think brontosaurus are real. I'm not caught up on the latest in dinosaurs. They're less likely to say like a pterodactyl or like a – – And not a chicken. – The other ones, I don't know. – You did pretty good. You named like three or four. These are exemplars. They're the most

10:43prototypical items that people will come up with. – Yeah, and they're the easiest to identify, they're the easiest to come up with. And there's a certain kind of – like if we're trying to create a category of birds, we could be like, hey, well, they have wings, they have feathers, they can fly, they have a beak. And then you're like, oh, but what about a penguin? They don't have feathers, do they? They definitely can't fly. – No. – They do have a beak, though. – Yeah. – Do all birds have beaks? I don't even know. I'm doubting myself now. – I'm gonna say yes. Well, ducks have bills. – Is a bill the same as a beak?

11:15– Is a bill a some type of beak? – I don't know. – See, this is – so this is the kind of – this is what most semantics classes descend into, sitting there going, is a bill a type of beak? – Right, but like there definitely are flightless birds, there definitely are featherless birds or mostly featherless birds. Or if you get something like a prototypical mammal – which mammal's a scientific category, so it's defined more precisely – but like a prototypical mammal is gonna be something like a horse or a dog. And then you're like, yeah, okay, an elephant is a mammal because it does have hair, but it's got

11:45like 14 hairs on the top of its head. It's not furry like a dog is. But one of the really interesting examples about this is if we think about birds, in the Bible, what I've been told, the word for bird is actually used to also encompass bats. – Huh. Why not? – And now we're like, aha, those silly ancient people, they didn't realize that bats were different. But realistically speaking, for most practical purposes, bats are a lot closer to birds. Like they swoop around your

12:16head the way birds do. They're not very useful like farm animals, like mammals. And so practically speaking, their ontology for what their equivalent word for bird meant was flying thing in the sky. It wasn't a thing with feathers and so on and so forth. It was flying thing in the sky and they didn't really have penguins in the Middle East thousands of years ago. I think I'm probably pretty safe to say that. – Big claims there, big claims. – Definitely make some zoological errors in this episode. – But that's because we're working

12:49with our native speaker intuitions and not with a scientific categorization.

Categorization Problems

12:53– Yeah, exactly. So, the categorization of how they were slicing up the universe was actually recreated and remade by scientists centuries, millennia later. People at the time, they were using the same word to name both of those things. – So, I teach prototype theory when I teach semantics because I love it. People who don't say anything else for the rest of semester suddenly start having opinions and talking and you get a whole class arguing. So, one famous one…

13:24– This is Lauren's teaching tips. – Yeah, Lauren's teaching tips just get everyone really angry. So, one very famous one that was used by – I think it was used by Bill Lebov to get examples of people saying particular words. – Yeah, I think he was looking at vowels. – He would give them pictures of things that could be cups or mugs and a whole range of things in between and the pictures are up as a link on the show notes. So, you get people saying, that is definitely – that is not a mug. What are you talking about? – That's clearly a cup.

13:54This one's definitely – no, are you serious? What is this? A mug? – Look at that ring. That handle is not the handle of a cup. – But what he's actually looking for is for the vowels. – Yeah. – And what it does is it reduces people's self-consciousness because everyone really wants to have this argument. So, you get thousands of tokens of the –uh – in cup or – and mug and then you can do phonetics on them based on these arguments people are having. You can tell they're not being self-conscious about their vowels because they're so busy caring about the meaning. – I worked in a homeware store for a while and one day we had

14:28a new range of stock and I lost my mind because they carried something that was called a kug. – Whoa. – And I was just like, this was the solution. Like, we just needed to eliminate both of those prototypes and come up with a hybrid prototype. – Yeah, I guess a mup sounds like a Muppet. – It is much less transparent. I also have a friend who taught semantics with me like many, many years ago and still will occasionally bring up how she is unable to decide whether a fake da Vinci is a da Vinci and whether a fake gun is a type of gun. – Wait, what?

15:02– They're two for you to introspect on. So, is a fake gun a type of gun? – Um, I guess? Maybe? – Like, people will use them in criming and you can be charged with carrying a weapon for having a fake gun. – Okay, okay. Yeah, and you're not allowed to bring them on an airplane. – But is a fake Mona Lisa a Mona Lisa? – Yeah, that's not the Mona Lisa because the Mona Lisa is the Mona Lisa. But like, if it's not – if it's like trying to pass as the Mona Lisa, but if I buy a poster of the Mona Lisa from the gift shop and like, I know it's not the Mona Lisa,

15:33but I put it up in my house and someone's like, yeah, oh, you have the Mona Lisa on their wall. Like, everybody knows that I am not wealthy enough to have bought the actual Mona Lisa. I've just bought a reproduction. And so, in the context where it's like, not trying to pass itself off as the Mona Lisa… – This is really hard. – But trying to think about why is quite difficult. And thanks to Melanie, in the comments, who mentioned she did one of these prototype assignments when she studied semantics about what is a type of shoe. – Yeah, like, is it a shoe or is it a boot or is it a sandal? – And she said, when you'd ask people why this is or isn't a type of boot,

16:08they'd be like, well, it just is. I just know, okay? That's how it is. And it's difficult. And it does vary. As we mentioned, it varies across languages, but it also varies across cultures or social contexts. So, I remember when I came to visit you in Montreal and we went on a Canadian Tire excursion, and you were trying to explain to me what type of store it is. – Yeah, so we were having the live show. We actually had so many people come that we had to buy them extra chairs to the bookstore, which is a great problem to have. But it meant that

16:40I got to take Lauren on an 11th hour excursion to Canadian Tire to buy some more folding chairs. And so I was trying to explain, because obviously, Canadian Tire, I assume, is only a Canadian store, because I don't think… – You assume correctly. – Yeah. And I was like, well, initially, they started out as a tire store, obviously, and they had other stuff you could repair your car with. And then you can buy hammers and nails and stuff. So I guess that's a hardware store. But they also sell folding chairs and clothes and dishes.

17:12– But they're not a department store. – They don't sell all the things a department store sells. – Well, department stores generally sell clothes. Well, they kind of sell some clothes, but not many clothes. – Not reliably. – Yeah. You wouldn't go there for clothes, but you might happen to see some clothes there. – And so part of trying to explain what Canadian Tire is, is finding a prototype analogy. – I don't know. I don't know what kind of a category of a store is, but I know what kind of stuff would be there, even if I don't know specifically what's there. I'm like, oh, yeah, of course that would be there. This is a problem

17:43that I run into in stores because in my mind, oatmeal is a baking ingredient. – Right. Where it's a cereal ingredient. It's a breakfast ingredient. – But in the minds of most people who design grocery stores, it's a breakfast ingredient. And so I'm always sitting there by the flour being like, where the heck is the oatmeal? – Not near the flour. – No, it's not with the flour. It's not with the flour and sugar and vanilla and stuff. It's with the cornflakes. – Yeah, where it should be. It coincides with my prototype, so I'm happy for that. – No! – I feel like I also have really strong intuitions about what a meme is, and occasionally you get people who don't know what

18:19an internet meme is and you're like, I don't even know where to start. Or you get people who have very different intuitions about what a meme is. – Oh, man. Like, what even is a meme? – For me – and I think this is just because I did some linguistics papers on it and so I had to think about it a lot – but for me, like a lolcat – lolcats were the prototypical meme in my head, but now they're a retro meme. No one even really thinks about them anymore. And so having to get used to GIF-based memes was actually a thing. I had to expand my category of what a meme was.

18:53– Yeah, I was reading this book about – I think it's called Memes in Digital Culture by Lim Moore Schiffman. And I was reading it as research for the book because, you know, you have to do a deep dive into the meme-ish literature, of which there are like three books. – Very deep. – But – and so her examples – she was citing a lot of her prototypes for memes, like YouTube videos. – What? – And I was like – – Really? – Say what now? – YouTube videos? But some of the examples were like Numa Numa, the Numa Numa video. – Yeah, that is – yeah. – Or like the Harlem Shake,

19:25where you have this thing that everyone's doing that they're making videos of. – True facts. – Right? And I was like, wait – or like Gangnam style, like everyone's making memes – like videos of this. – Yeah, that – there we go. – Yeah. – Already just had to expand my introspective category right there. – So definitions don't work, but prototypes work. – Yes. And prototypes are kind of the way we learn, you know, we kind of give someone a lot of examples of something and they create – and like relatively consistently, we all create an agreeable prototype of what a bird is and what

20:00a cake is and what bread is as we grow up. – Yeah, this is a fun example from – it's from another podcast. The podcast is called No Such Thing as a Fish, and it's named after the fact that scientifically there is no definition of a fish. – It's a prototype semantic category. – It's a prototype category only. Like scientists – like there's no like – the way there's like definitions of a mammal where you're like, yeah, it has – you know, feeds milk to its young and has fur and gives birth live, not eggs and so on, except for platypuses because – but yeah,

20:30so like there's no – there's no actual fish. Scientifically speaking, scientists don't talk about fish. You have like all of the different subspecies, but there's like more differences between the different subspecies like in the ocean than there are – like there isn't a unifying thing that all of them have in common except for the fact that they're in the ocean or lakes. – And we think of them as fish. – Yeah, so we call them fish. You're like, but a trout is a fish, a salmon is a fish, but like maybe they actually don't have enough in common with each other. Like is a squid a fish? – That is a very good question that I

21:03don't have any immediate introspection on because my semantic categories are now completely broken in my head from this episode. So thank you very much, Gretchen. If you want to – this is like one of those linguist party – like if you ever want to get people chatting at a party, just throw in some very contentious like pizza is a type of sandwich discussions and people really get into it because people have really strong opinions about these things. As we saw in the poll,

Semantic Implications

21:33as you've seen in this episode, and as you'll be unable to escape when you look at anything for the rest of the day. – And one of the best ones – here's your homework question – is, what is furniture? Is it chair furniture? Is it lamp furniture? Is it microwave furniture? – I'm currently using packing boxes to record this episode on, and they are currently functioning as very functional furniture. – But is it floor furniture? Because you can use a floor as a table. – I totally forgot that we used to run polls on Patreon a whole heap. – Yeah, now we have the

22:10Patreon Discord, so that's where that type of stuff happens. – Yeah, it didn't exist for at least two years after this episode went up. – Yeah, we launched the Patreon Discord in January 2020, which turned out to be a rather well-timed decision because people were at home and online a lot more. – Yeah, I was incredibly sceptical before we set it up. It's turned into such a lovely space, not just for us to run occasional food semantics polls, but a place for enthusiasm fans to hang out

22:40and chat. – And if you want to, you can run your own food semantics polls on the Discord, or chat about other linguistically and non-linguistics-y things. Anything else you noticed about revising this episode, Lauren? – I forgot we talked about Canadian Tire, a retail outlet that is still completely mystifying to me. Although, to be clear, the Canadian part is actually very clear. – I also love that I was mysteriously referring to the book. – Oh, yes, the book. – At the time, I was very much actively writing

23:11Because Internet. It had Because Internet as a working title from the very beginning, but we were still not sure if we were going to change it. – Oh, I forgot about that. It seems so obvious now, but it was really not – it was just a working title. – Yeah, and we went through a whole couple months of trying to come up with a better title. In the end, nothing was better. – How funny. It was just cryptically the book for a very long time. – For a very long time. I don't even remember any of those old candidate titles because all of them were just rejected instantly. – I also think this bonus does something

23:43that ended up becoming a really important and recurring theme for Lingthusiasm, which is that having some knowledge of how language actually works can actually be really beneficial for your general wellbeing and your levels of anxiety. I still love picking these semantic prototype fights, but purely from a like, this is a fun game and not that there's anything at stake. – Yeah. When we put this episode up for the first time as a bonus, someone wrote a reply that I'm

24:16still thinking about years later, which is that it made them feel better about not really knowing what it means to feel like a woman or what a definition of womanhood would look like. Because it turns out that we have an equally hard time coming up with an exact definition of what a sandwich is, or a bird, or a cup, or basically any common word. – But if we approach these common words through prototype theory, we can point to a bunch of examples of, like, here are a lot of different

24:47women and how do I relate to women in the context of this, like, broader possibility space. – Right. And there doesn't have to be an exact set of criteria that, like, all women can fly and have four legs and, you know, all these specific features. – Um, I think you're talking about a pegasus. I'm open-minded. – But yes, prototype theory is a way of holding together our understanding

25:18of the world that doesn't just have, like, really restrictive definitional criteria. – I think it's an interesting reflection that dictionaries have this tendency – and, like, you know, when I was a kid and I asked him any other words, sometimes my parents would be like, well, why don't we look that up in the dictionary? Which have captured our imagination for how words, quote-unquote, work? – Yeah. – When they don't seem to correspond to the psychological reality of how we learn most words apart from their technical words. – Yeah, and I think prototype

25:49theory really helps us remember that, like, a dictionary definition is a post-hoc, end-result creation of people and not the way meaning is necessarily arranged in our minds. – Yeah, it's an attempt to describe the outcome of being exposed to a bunch of prototypes, but the way we learn most words is by being exposed to, okay, this is a dog, and this is a dog, and this is a dog, and this is a dog, and then having this sort of fuzzy generalisation based on all these examples.

26:23– It's nice that eight years after recording this episode, we finally understood what the lesson we were trying to impart in this episode was. – I feel like also very concretely the prototype theory has helped me feel more relaxed about learning words in other languages that don't necessarily have an exact correspondence to words that I'm already familiar with in English. – Like, you could actually just figure out what a word is from some examples being given to you, and that is how your brain usually works anyway. – Right. Like, if you take something like big

26:58and large and you're trying to explain to people who don't have English as a first language what's the difference between these two, it's not really a difference in meaning. – Yeah. – But there are certain contexts in which big is just the word that's used or which large is just the word that's used. Like, we don't go around talking about the large bang. We talk about the big bang. – Yeah. It's not that big or large are necessarily more bigger or larger than either of the other one. – Yeah. So, I was recently trying to learn the meaning of a word in French, which is molleux.

27:29– Okay. That's going to be spelt with a whole bunch of letters that aren't – – Oh, it's got some silent letters in it. M-O-E-L-L-E-U-X, if you want to know. Molleux. – There you go. – And I was like, is it like molleux, which is soft? And it was like, kind of, but it's hard to – but ultimately, the way to have an understanding of this word is to think about what kinds of objects can it describe. – Right. – And so, a wine can be molleux. – Because of its texture or its taste or –

28:00– Yeah. The translation I'm getting online is that a wine can be mellow. – Okay. Yeah. That is an adjective I've heard used for wine before. – But also, like, whipped cream is probably molleux, which does not feel like it really has much in common with wine to me, or, like, seafoam. Or a pillow can be molleux. Not all pillows, but a really fluffy pillow is molleux. – Okay. Like, soft and fluffy and foamy and – – And maybe a bit spongy. – Right. – Because molle is originally, like, the marrow of a bone, so the inside of the bone is spongy.

28:35– I feel like spongy and, like, soft and fluffy exist in an overlapping prototype space. There are things that, like, can be both of those things in my English speaker brain. And then spongy is far enough away from soft and fluffy to have its own prototype centre. But in French, there are things that all come towards that as a single point. How interesting. – Right. And the same thing with something like mellow, which now that I'm looking at it, maybe mellow has a relationship with molleux,

29:05because they're spelled quite similarly. – Okay, let's look that up. As always, my brain is just like, I'm intrigued. Let's check. – Oh, wow. Okay, no connection at all. – There we go. – Mellow comes from an Old English word meaning soft, tender, and was especially originally meaning soft, sweet, and juicy as of fruit – like, as of ripe fruit. So, a little bit of that softness, but much more in this sort of fruit juice sense. – Yeah. – Not really related to – – Not in the spongy marrow sense.

29:37– Yeah, not from French at all. So, always look up your enumologies. But yeah, coming up with just sort of going through and naming, okay, can this food be molleux? Can this thing be molleux? This doesn't have to be a food. It gave me a much better sense of the conceptual space than trying to translate it to an English word that just wouldn't totally map onto it. – And again, a part of why you can't have elegant, easy translation across languages, because languages are operating in different semantic spaces and have things that are prototypes

30:13in one language that don't quite fit other languages. – And I think that relaxing our sense that every word must have a definition. And then sometimes when you actually go to a dictionary, there's like, okay, there's 17 different things and you can feel that they're related in a conceptual way. But the way that the lexicographer is trying to capture that is by writing out 17 definitions or context in which you can use molleux. But the way that humans actually acquire those isn't by memorizing 17 different definitions, it's by learning all of the

30:44contexts in which a word is used and the prototypes that it's attached to. – I have to say, this is one of the bonus episodes where I talk about it and forget that it's been a bonus episode. – Yeah. I try to send this bonus to people all the time and then I'm like, oh, no, wait, you've got to become a patron? So this is why we've made this one available, because we keep sending people to it. Please enjoy your new found use of prototype theory. Tell us about other prototype theory, long discussions that you've had

31:15that we didn't get to in this episode because almost any word, if you look at it long enough,

Conclusion and Discussion

31:19you can start having prototype theory discussions around it, which is the fun part. For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on all the podcast platforms or on lingthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode at lingthusiasm.com slash transcripts, and you can follow at Lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. You can get scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them, including the IPA, branching tree diagrams, boobin kiki,

31:50and our favourite esoteric unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch, like scarves and t-shirts with a leaping rabbit and the word gavagai written on them, ask me about linguistic stickers, and aesthetic IPA charts at lingthusiasm.com slash merch. Links to my social media can be found at gretramcculloch.com, my blog is allthingslinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. – My social media and blog are Superlinguo. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you want to get an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every

32:23month, our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now, or if you just want to help keep the show running ad-free, go to patreon.com slash lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk to other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus topics include linguistic landscapes, an episode full of linguistics advice, and an entire episode on the linguistics of kissing. If you can't afford to pledge, that's okay too. We really appreciate it

32:54if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who's curious about language. – Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gaughan. Our senior producer is Claire Gaughan. Our editorial producer is Sarah Doppirella. Our production assistant is Martha Tsitsui-Villens. Our editorial assistant is John Crook. Our technical editor is Leah Vellman. Our music is Ancient City by The Triangles. Stay Lingthusiastic.