121: Vampires, ghosts, imposters and more linguistic monsters

Announcing the linguistic zine challenge

0:00Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Lauren Gawne. And I'm Gretchen McCulloch. Today we're getting enthusiastic about linguistic monsters, such as vampires, werewolves, witches, ghosts, zombies, imposters, and frankenwords.

0:36But first, we have been making some zines about linguistics. And we've been blown away by how much people are responding to them. People have been saying things like, oh, I'm going to leave these in a little free library, on a take-a-zine-leave-a-zine rack. I'm going to share them with my friends, my kids, my students, my classmates, my co-workers. I've got my own idea for linguistics, a language-related zine, and I want to make it. So, in honour of our 10th anniversary, which is coming up in November – Whoa, 10 years! 10 years. We're launching the Linguistics Zine Challenge,

1:08where you make or share a linguistics zine and tell us about it by the end of November, and we'll give out prizes. You know, World Linguistics Day is also in November. That's November 26th. And last year, people from 70 cities in 34 countries participated this year. So, if you're looking for something to do for World Linguistics Day, here's an option. All the more reason to make or share a linguistic zine in November. So, you can enter the Linguistics Zine Challenge in two ways. One way to enter is to print off and share an existing linguistic zine.

1:40We have many at lingthusiasm.com slash zines by both us and other people. So, you can pick one or more that speaks to you, download the PDF for free, print off some copies, fold them up, share them with people, whatever way you want. I've been carrying some in my bag and just giving them out at picnics whenever linguistics comes up. I made a folder in my department corridor with free zines, and I've already had to refill it. Also, taking some with me to hand out at conferences and events. And I'm going to leave some at my local zine store's free shelf. It's a very Melbourne situation

2:12there. I'm pretty sure we've got some of those in Montreal as well. I'll have to have a look. The second way to enter is to make your own zines. This is your chance to share something you love about linguistics. Maybe it's something you learnt from a lingthusiasm episode. Or from some other pop linguistics, a linguistics class. I made one about my own research on gesture. And the participants in my first zine workshop made some really cool zines about their own linguistics experiences. We have a whole zine about how to make and fold a single piece of paper into an eight-page

2:44booklet mini-zine. And then share your zine with someone or several people. Whichever kind of zine you choose to share, we want to know how it went. We've set up a little web form where you can tell us about your linguistic zine stories. And if you're really keen, you can do both types of linguistic zine challenge. To enter twice, just fill out the form twice to tell us about making your own zine and sharing existing linguistic zines, and then you are eligible to win prizes in two ways. If you've already been doing linguistic zines activities, because many linguists inspired

3:16us to set this up, you can still enter. Just tell us about what you've been up to before the end of November. So we can give you prizes. Lauren, what are some of these prizes? We've got a Lingthusiasm zine multi-pack with really nice colour prints of all the Lingthusiasm zines so far. And a couple of Lingcom books to give away, including a signed first edition of Because Internet. Ooh. Wonder who's going to sign that. Not me.

3:43Aw, dang. And keep an eye on social media for more books as they get announced. Plus some Lingthusiasm merch and some free one-year memberships to the Lingthusiasm Patreon, which gets you bonus episodes and access to the Lingthusiasm Discord. We're going to save some of the prizes for submissions that are particularly cool or heartwarming or impressive or anything else just makes a strong impression on us if you want to get really creative. But we're also going to have a random draw for some prizes for all entries, so there's no entry that is too big or too small.

4:15Also going to record a special bonus episode of Lingthusiasm sharing some of your linguistic zine stories, so you might get featured there as well if you give us permission to share. And for people who make a zine, we might share some of those zines as well. Again, if you give us permission, we'll hopefully have some cool additional zines to add to the Lingthusiasm zine page over the next few months. Go to lingthusiasm.com slash zines for more details about the Linguistic Zine Challenge, including the link to tell us about your linguistic zine story by the end of November 2026. We're looking forward to seeing what you come up with.

4:46Our most recent bonus episode was a journey into Lingthusiasm inbox. We get so many emails trying to sell us on things. And some of them are about things that are actually kind of related to linguistics, like pop linguistics books that are coming out, which is very neat. And then there's the ones that leave us wondering, what's going on in someone's head?

5:13Does someone really think that us, a linguistics podcast, is going to talk about this? But wait, what if we figured out a linguistics connection anyway? So, we dive into our inbox and prove that even the most irrelevant pitches can truly be an example of how linguistics is everywhere. Go to patreon.com slash lingthusiasm to listen to this and heaps more bonus episodes, and to help us give out lots of fun prizes in the Linguistic Zine Challenge.

Vampires as longitudinal linguists

5:40It's linguistic spooky season, Gretchen, and there are lots of linguistics monsters out there for us. I want to start with vampires. Okay. Because if there really ever are vampires, I think they'd make excellent linguists.

6:11Because you have these supernatural creatures who live for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. What could they tell us about language change during that lifespan or undeathspan? Our own paranormal longitudinal language development specialists. Right. And are they speaking in Proto-Indo-European or Old Church Slavonic or something like this? If you live long enough, how many languages do you hold in your head? Right. And even 100 years, if you're trying to masquerade as a teenager because you're going to go to school again so many times,

6:47I have some questions about why the vampires seem to go to school with teenagers. I think we can answer this now because the teenagers are requiring their next iteration of a generational dialect. So that's how they learn not to sound like they're 200 years old. They have to go hang out with teenagers in a concentrated way for like six years. Yep. There we go. Oh, we figured it out. We figured it out. But can a person learn hundreds of languages if they have hundreds of years to do it in? This reminds me of a classic Specgram article, which I found it and it's from 2009, Gretchen.

7:23Oh, we've really been doing this for a long time because I remember when that one came out. Yes, the long-running satirical linguistics magazine, Speculative Grammarian. We're hypothesizing about what linguists could do with long-term access to human data. You know, could we find vampiric speakers of ancient languages to see how good our hypothesized reconstructions are? These are the types of important questions. But in the original Dracula story, there is actually some linguistics. Okay.

7:54I haven't read it for ages. So I read Dracula relatively recently as part of the newsletter Dracula Daily that was sending out emails in the original time span of the letters that Dracula is based on. In the OG Dracula, Count Dracula, who lives in a spooky, scary castle in Transylvania, hires an English lawyer, Jonathan Harker, to come and visit him in his spooky, scary castle. He explains that even though he speaks excellent English, he doesn't fully speak like an Englishman. He wants to pass as an Englishman when he goes to

8:30England so that he can drink people's blood, to be clear. He should have gone to high school. He should have gone to high school.

8:39I don't know if he's supposed to look like a teenager. I don't know if he could pull that off. But he brings this young lawyer over to try to instruct him in how to sound like an Englishman. So vampires, possibly the best hypothetical candidates for field linguists. Possibly he should have just gone to a linguistics department and all the linguists would have been like, yeah, turn me into a vampire. Sounds great. I'll enjoy doing this.

Werewolves and plural suffixes

9:03Vampires, very good at studying language. Werewolves, I find very useful for teaching language. Is this because of their etymology? No. What is their etymology? Well, werewolf is literally were. It means man in Old English. It's cognate with Latin ver as in virile, also meaning man. And interestingly, the word were is also at the root of world. Really? So I knew this etymology, but I was looking it up just to make sure. And then I found – this is

9:36why it always pays to look up your etymologies – I found that the world is literally the age of men. So it comes from were, as in werewolf, and old, age, you know, like old. It's the oldness of man. Well, I'm glad that your data verification led to this fun bonus fact. Yeah. But how do you use werewolves for teaching? Okay. So werewolves, famously, when there's a full moon, become a werewolf. At every other time,

10:06is a person. Yes. We agree on that fact. Good. Okay. That means that you can never have a werewolf where you would expect a person and a person where you would expect a werewolf. So, you know, if you, Lauren, are a werewolf, then either you are human Lauren at some times when it's not a full moon or you're wolf Lauren at other times when it is a full moon. Yeah. And there's never human Lauren and wolf Lauren in the room at the same time. And this is how some rules of language work. Oh. So, if we think about wolf, if we have one werewolf, if we have many, we have many werewolves.

10:42Yeah. Thank you for extending that plural there. We've got that buzzy, it's written as an S, but it sounds like a Z. And if we were also haunted by one bat and many- bats. Okay. And here we have that hissy S that's written like an S sounds like what we expect an S to be. For plurals, there is this set of rules about which flavour of S we have, and that is influenced by the sounds that come before it. And you don't ever get a hissy S where you expect a

11:17buzzy S. And so, the sound just before that T in bats is like everyday life. And then that V that is also a bit buzzy in wolves is like a full moon, and it creates this environment.

11:33And so, we can create these rules. Human becomes a werewolf when there's a full moon. Plural S becomes plural Z in the environment of a voiced buzzy V and other sounds like it. That's very clever. I did end up with another etymology fun fact when I was double-checking the were thing. And this is that in Old English, the counterpart of were, man, was whiff, meaning woman. Okay. So, I could be a whiff-wolf. Exactly. So, you should have werewolf and whiff-wolf.

12:05Yep. Which sounds very dignified and serious. And this whiff survives in midwife, who is someone who is with a woman giving birth, and also words like fishwife and housewife, which are a woman who takes care of fish and or houses. But housewife became pronounced huzif and developed two different pronunciations. So, huzif became hussy, which is not a very complimentary word for a woman. No. No. And then started being re-pronounced the former full written form that had smoothed out in the

12:42same sort of sounds next to each other becoming similar process that gives us wolf-wolves and things like that. Who's if people started saying, no, no, no, let's go back and say housewife because that sounds more dignified so we have the respectable one as well as the one that's undergone – The less respectable hussy. Yeah. The less respectable hussy. And this takes us to another

Witches and botanical herbs

13:02gendered split in spooky terminology, which is witch versus wizard, which underwent a similar process. Yes. Yes. I can see that because witches are seen as meddling and wizards are seen as dignified magicians. Historically, they are from different gendered forms of the same root. Old English, wika, female magician or sorceress, versus wika, sorcerer or wizard, man who practices witchcraft or magic. You need a vampire here to help with your old English pronunciation.

13:34Yeah. Someday. Oh, I didn't realise that they were cognate, that they were exactly the same root. I knew they had different vibes, but I didn't realise just how much those vibes were put upon them by language users and not just from different histories. Yeah. They're both from the verb wikian to practice witchcraft. Which is where we get modern wika from. That would be true too, yeah. Going back closer to the old English source. They underwent a what's called semantic perjuration, as in becoming worse in terms of connotation.

14:08In a plot twist that I don't think will surprise anyone in this haunted house, happens to terms for women a lot more than terms for men. Yeah. Not coincidentally, in both hussy and witch, the word associated with women underwent this semantic perjuration process. Some particularly famous witches, the three weird sisters from Shakespeare's Macbeth, also have some interesting linguistic things going on. They have their famous double, double toil and trouble, fire burn and

14:38cauldron bubble. It's like the opening scene of Macbeth. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Chant that they do. Their recipe for a witch's brew, which contains things like eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog. You can tell I like reading Shakespeare. Yes. I've always wondered about this spell. Yeah. Because you're thinking, did they really go chop up all these animals in this particular way? But these are terms for particular types of herbs

15:10in many cases. I did not know this. The eye of an herb is the round part, like the seed. The eye of newt is a mustard seed, especially with black spots. The tongue can be like the leaf or the petal that has a sort of tongue shape. Or in this case, tongue of dog, there is a particular herb called hound's tongue. The wool of bat or the wing of the bat can be holly because that looks like a bat wing. It does look like a bat wing. I'm enjoying how well this is decoding. Yeah. It's like I'm doing a little cryptic crossword puzzle but with herbology. The toe of frog

15:45is apparently a plant called a bulbous buttercup. Well, that sounds fake. Which I have to say I'm not familiar with but I looked it up in a source that we will link to which seems like it's relatively reputable. Speaking of Banquo, shall we talk about ghosts?

Ghosts and Indo-European duals

16:01Sure. Let's talk about ghosts. Another classic spooky monster. I love it when you have something in a modern form of a language that you're like, I don't know, this is just one of those quirks of English or whatever. Then it's actually like, oh, this is because this thing used to exist in this language thousands of years ago and there's only these three words left that show that it was there. But we still have those three words. So we have these sort of trace prefixes. Haunted by history. Do you want to know something from Proto-Indo-European that haunts the English language?

16:32Oh, yes, please. So in modern day English, we have the singular as in ghost. We have the plural as in ghosts. Oh, and we know why. It's an S and not a Z there. Uh-huh. But we don't have a specific form for when there's exactly two of something. Nope, we do not. Other languages do, I know, and I miss them. It's a very useful feature. Except we sort of do. Ooh. Where is the ghost of jewel marking past?

17:04It's in the English word both. Or as I like to say, both.

17:12So what's both doing? If you want to say, you know, I have the one of it, I have both of them. Yeah. But then you have to start saying, I have all three of them, I have all four of them, I have all 17 of them, right? Yeah. There isn't a specific form for all 17. Hmm, yeah. But we do have a specific form for all two of them, or the two of them, and that is both. And that's because Proto-Indo-European had a dual, and modern day Indo-European languages have a few words that are vestiges of that dual form, one of which is both, and another

17:47which is ambi. Ami. As in ambidextrous. Ah, yeah. So that's both hands being right, being right-handed, which as a left-handed person, I find frankly rude. I would – what if this word was ambicinsterous? Sure, yeah. I think we should start with that movement. Another Proto-Indo-European ghost, we can go back to our witches. So we have the witch doing the tongue of dog situation. Yep. And we have which, as in which of both of these would you like?

18:20Ah, which witch is which? Which witch is which. And that little overemphasis that I use that is now mostly seen as a relic of maybe two or three generations ago and is found in a handful of dialects is a ghost. Every time that we have said on this podcast that people don't say the wha anymore, we get at least two people telling us that they say it, which is some people, but not very many compared to the number of people who have presumably heard it.

18:51Yeah, it's dying out. And they are the last living ghostly vestiges of the fact that English which, where, when are cognate with – yes. Oh, I can draw on your French expression. So can you translate those into French for me? So which would be quel, Q-U-E-L. Where would be – well, where is ooh, so we're not going to touch that. Ignore that. When would be ca, Q-U-A-N-D.

19:23Also, quando in languages like Italian and Spanish, where you can hear that W a little bit more. The U has become silent, making the W sound in French, so it's a little bit less straightforward. You also have words like hu, hu, hu, hu, which is ki, or kui in languages that still pronounce that U. So all the Romance languages have this kuh beginning. This kuh beginning, in fact, yeah. Kuh, yes. And we can go all the way to the other geographic extreme of the Indo-European family to the Indo-Aryan

19:54languages. So in Nepali, where is kaha, and what is kuh, and who is kun? Those are still k's. The k's are still there. It is a cognate all the way from Indo-European, and that hu in the hu is that last little vestige of us creating that same sound at the back of our mouth. So the kuh became a hu. I mean, there were also words like if you have like canine and hound, the K to H correspondence, or cornu as in cornucopia, and horn, the K to H correspondence is there in a whole bunch

20:31of places. But in particular in the question words, it's all through Indo-European. Question words, we're just left with this last hu in our hu in our which. That's haunting them. Yes. It doesn't quite work. No, but it was a valiant effort.

Etruscan and pre-Greek place names

20:45Thank you. Etymological ghosts don't just haunt the language, they also haunt places. One of the things that particularly interests me is we talk a lot about Proto-Indo-European because it is the ancestor language of a whole bunch of languages in an area of the world we're familiar with. But the Proto-Indo-Europeans didn't just arrive into an empty Europe. That is true. There were people living there already. Yeah. And many of those groups of people have left ghostly traces on modern-day European languages,

21:19including words that are super familiar. Yeah. Although unlike straight-up Basque, which is still there. But there were many groups like the Basque. Oh, yeah. But Basque wasn't the only language that was spoken in Europe at the time. For sure. So across Italy, the earlier civilization was the Etruscan civilization, of which we have a handful of written records, but we also have enough to figure out that a lot of what we think of as very Italian place names had Etruscan origins.

21:51And there are nice big lists of these, which is really nifty. So classic Italian place names you may have heard of like Pompeii. Actually Etruscan? Was Pompeii in the Etruscan. Yeah. They also found the coastal living very nice down in Naples area. Parma was either something like Parma or Parma or Paruma. Pisa, where the Leaning Tower is, was Pisna or Pise, something like that.

22:24Cool. Even places like Florence, which is Firenze in Italian, was either Firenze or Firenze. So you can see these parallels. There are some cities where it's just like, oh, they are not cognate. But there are many where when the Indo-European speaking kind of early pre-Romans came in, they also kept the names of places. I also recently learned about place names in Greece that are from – we're not quite

22:54sure exactly what the name of this society was. There have been many different names. People just call it pre-Greek. But one part of it may have been the Minoans who were famously on Crete, you know, the Minotaur people with the labyrinth. Uh-huh. Yeah. I have heard of them. Yeah. Big monster, middle of the labyrinth guy. And in fact, the word labyrinth seems to have entered Greek from Minoan. Oh, how did they figure this out? Well, the Minoans have two writing systems known as Cretan hieroglyphs and Linear A, but neither script has been fully deciphered.

23:26That's totally true. But another writing system known as Linear B was used to write Mycenaean Greek, which is a sort of form of Greek that had a lot of contact with the Minoans. And so words that show up there but don't show up in any other Indo-European language, especially when they seem to have certain suffixes in common with each other, like that nth ending, both in labyrinth and corinth and words like that. But other words like elia, olive, seems to be from –

23:58I guess olives were already growing there. Yeah. Some famous mythological figures like Achilles and Odysseus were in this – spoke at least one of these pre-Greek languages. There may have been several in addition to Minoan. And also Athens, Athena. Oh, yeah. I've heard of it. Have you heard of that one? Again, seems to have been from this pre-Greek language or group of languages. Fascinating. There's a whole lot more information about loanwords from pre-Greek in a newsletter by Danny Heber, who's a linguist friend of the podcast who writes a fun newsletter about

24:31linguistic discovery, facts about language. Thanks for sharing that one. That's cool. I didn't know about the Minoan influence on Greek. Yeah. I didn't realise that even though we hadn't actually deciphered Linear A, we could still figure out some of their influence on Greek. We also see this kind of influence and cultures coming into places that are existingly populated with much more recent history and where those languages and cultures are still there to a greater or lesser extent. But this happened a lot in Australia, and I assume in Canada as well.

25:02Absolutely. Especially with place names. Yeah. I learnt relatively recently that the Yarra River in Melbourne, which is like our big river – it's the river in Melbourne. The word Yarra or Yarra Yarra was actually a Boonwurrung name from the community that lived around the area. And it was a big meeting place for the Boonwurrung in the south and the Wurundjeri in the north. But even though it is a Boonwurrung word, it is not the name of the river.

25:35What does it mean instead? Yarra Yarra is like sparkling or glittering, and it appears to be the name for some waterfalls that were in the river. That then the white people that came over and decided this was going to be the place for their city without really asking, they just got rid of the waterfall because it was very inconvenient for their harbour economy. But the river itself is the Birerang, which is the river of mists because it gets quite misty

26:08down there. And so, we have the wrong name for the river because of this misinterpretation. I mean, speaking as someone who lives in a country known as Canada, which was originally a word-meaning village. Oh, how did that happen? Your country is very big, Gretchen. Yeah, so Kanata or Ganata was originally a word-meaning village in several related languages of this area. So Mohawk or Ganyegeha and Huron or Wendat and this sort of area of Iroquoian languages

26:45all have a related word-meaning village. I don't think it's entirely sure that it's exactly one of those languages that contributed that word. So there was a village called Canada that was occupied by early European settlers and then that got expanded to a whole region of upper and lower Canada along the St. Lawrence River and then that gave the name to the entire country. But I was interested to see that that word you're talking about meant sparkling because the name Ontario, which is originally the very large lake, still is Lake Ontario.

27:18But also one of your provinces? Also, a province named after the lake is from a word Ontario. I'm not sure if I'm getting the stress right, meaning a large lake or a large beautiful lake. The word for large and beautiful, the Ontario part means lake and the I-O ending is a verb meaning both big and beautiful together. So Ontario is a beautiful lake and the province is named after this. And that is, again, in this whole related language family of Wendak, Ganyegeha, Oneda, Onondaga,

27:57this whole Iroquoian language family. We'll link to a video of Ryan Decare, who's a Mohawk speaker pronouncing Ontario, and also Toronto, or Tikaronto, which is also a word in the same language family. Cool. I learned some things about Canadian names. I learned some things about Australian names. And it's all very well and good to be like, ha ha, the Minoans, and can you believe those Etruscan names? But it obviously feels very different in the moment of these two civilizations negotiating this.

28:29When there are still lots of people around who have connections with the societies that these place names are coming from. Yeah. And there are amazing Boon Wurrung revitalization efforts happening at the moment. It just makes me so happy to see that work. And like, so a very different situation to where we definitely have no record of just how long Etruscan or Minoan speakers continue to live in the same place as other people.

Zombie linguistics and endangerment

28:58It reminds me of our next linguistic monster, which is zombie linguistics and zombie language, which was a big provocation and discussion that came up around like the early 2010s in language documentation. So, this was an article by Bernard C. Purley, who is an anthropology professor. He's a malicite man from Tobik First Nation in New Brunswick, which is another one of your provinces.

29:32Sure is. And he was reflecting on the way we talk about language documentation and recording minoritized languages is about like language death and language extinction. And these linguist specialists come in and record people as their languages are dying. And then you have these zombie voices and these zombie languages that are recorded and continue to speak even though they're not living. And he was like, maybe we need to rethink how we're talking about what languages are experiencing.

30:06And we need to rethink how we talk about speakers and these artifacts that are left. Yeah. And I think that the analogy of language endangerment is like endangered species of whales or cod or birds or all of these sorts of things, the panda. And that is meant to try to bring more attention to or more resources towards helping people connect with languages and bring them back to regular use. There was a lot of discussion about it in terms of that endangerment, I feel like,

30:39in the early 2000s. And that discourse was shifting in the 2010s, partly as a result of things like this article by Bernard C. Pearlie. Yeah. I mean, it's really complicated and it's tied up in a lot of how we have to talk things up to speak to funders who aren't familiar with any of these contexts. But it's also the challenge of these are both the individual experiences of different communities that have their own ways of thinking and talking about this. So, some communities talk about their languages are sleeping

31:10or some communities are really invested in the language death metaphor because they really want to draw attention to it. The challenge is how do we account for all these different narratives while not speaking for any one group? And in the interview that I just did with Sophia Smith-Gaylor, where she talks about how to kill a language because she wants to bring more attention to that it's not just sort of an agentless thing that happens to occur. It's active forces of states and governments and powerful people saying,

31:42no, we think you should all speak our language, rather than just sort of this passive process that sort of happens mysteriously for no particular reason. But she acknowledges that there's a controversy there and that some groups of people are much more into reclaiming and revitalizing and a lot of these sort of resurgent words. And I don't think there's just one answer about that. – No. And I think it's useful sometimes to come back to this zombie linguistics idea and really sit with the difficult question of what we are trying to do as linguists in the service of different languages and different communities. – And speaking of the word zombie itself –

32:16– Oh, yeah. This is a word that's got an interesting etymology. So it's got a plural history that has links to Haiti, to the practice of voodoo. It's usually said to be of West African origin. So there's a Kimbundu word, nzumbi, which is a ghost or kind of spirit apparently of or associated with a dead person who torments living people. But there are potential other sources as well, like the Congo word zumbi, denoting a kind of spirit, or even the French word sombre, as in

32:47shadow, that sort of come together as part of the transatlantic slave trade and get incorporated into different narratives and have this sort of combined history with the Caribbean, West Africa, and also this relationship with Europe. – Again, a really complex historical legacy of colonial activity.

Grammatical imposters and pronouns

33:06On a lighter note, we have the linguistic concept of imposters, which I don't know if it's a traditional monster, but I feel like a lot of people were dressing up as imposters from the video game Among Us a few years ago. – Yeah, I think they're a monster. – Great, because they're a very interesting linguistic phenomenon. – Okay, cool. – So your correspondent would like to introduce your majesty to your correspondent's favourite linguistic phenomenon. – Okay. I think it's going to be a struggle for you to keep that up for the rest of this

33:40section. – I really should have scripted it better. But this is the use of phrases like your correspondent, yours truly, this reporter referring to the speaker in what's actually a third person grammatically. – Okay. So when you were saying your correspondent, you were referring to yourself. – But I would say your correspondent is currently addressing this question, not your correspondent am. – Right, okay. – Even though I'm referring to myself,

34:10and I would say I am. – So imposters get in and mess with the syntax of a sentence. – Yeah, so it's like they've got this little colourful sheet over their heads being like, ha-ha, I'm secretly a third person, even though inside I'm actually a first person. – This is one of those ones where I just can't hear your correspondent as anything other than referring to you. I really have to take a step back and be like, there's nothing in that sentence that says it's about first person. – Right. There's also a whole bunch that refer to the addressees, like, my lord, the baroness, madam. Is madam not feeling well? Which I

34:47have to say with a sort of fake British accent. – Because in that context, I know you're talking to me, and that you've weirdly become temporarily British. But there's nothing about madam that indicates that's a third person reference, not second. – Yeah. So I would say, are you not feeling well? – Yeah. – Rather than, is madam not feeling well? But that is, looks like a third person. You know, grammatically, it's a third person. But semantically, in terms of meaning-wise, you pull off the sheet and it's an imposter because actually it's a second person inside.

35:19– Ah, it's so interesting that all these seemingly unrelated uses of language, like, it's actually the same phenomenon. – Right. And a lot of them are quite formal, you know, your honour, your majesty, madam. – Yeah. – But I do want to point out the most informal imposter. – Yep. – And that's your ass or my ass. So if I say your ass is not going to believe this, that is grammatically a third person because it's your ass is. – Yep. – But inside, we pull off the sheet and it is actually a second person in terms of meaning

35:55because it refers to you. – Wow. My ass did not believe that. – Exactly. This is sort of related to another kind of thing, which is, for example, if you have a bunch of children at your door and they're wearing a bunch of cute but mystifying costumes, you might say to them, what are we dressed up as? – Okay. And now I'm thinking with my imposter hat on and I'm like, that person at the door is not also dressed up. So why are we using we, which includes the person at the door? – Right. So I can be wearing my normal clothing and I'm saying to the kids,

36:28what are we dressed up as? And so the sheet that this we is wearing is that it's a first-person plural. But it's not first person because I'm not dressed up. It's actually a second person because I'm addressing the children. – Do you think it's an imposter as well? – Well, it doesn't seem to be the kind of imposter that's described in this book by Collins and Postal where they define the term. But I really want there to be a term for it because I think it's a really interesting usage. So I want to call this like an imposter of an imposter because it's like

37:02not the real imposter. – Okay. I'll let you have that one. – Maybe it's got imposter syndrome. I don't know.

Frankenwords and Frankenstein etymology

37:12– So words that begin with Franken are related to Frankenstein. – Ah. Yeah. I guess that's like a – Frankenfoods is the one I know really well. – Yeah. So Franken from Frankenstein, you know, a body put together from other bodies, has been adopted as a sort of reanalyzed as a prefix. It wasn't really a prefix. Frankenstein – well, we'll get to that in a sec. Frankenstein was not a prefix meaning a stein put together from lots of other bits. But Frankenfoods or Frankenchicken or Frankenpets or Frankenviruses are referring to

37:48genetically engineered versions of these things. – All terrifying. – And we can refer to this whole category as Frankenwords. – Yeah. – Which are delightfully self-referential words that are made by – put together little parts of other words. – Yeah. So Franken has detached from stein and become this productive thing. – Originally, it just meant pertaining to the Franks, as in the founders of France. – Oh, yeah. Frankenstein is like a castle on a stone mountaintop. It seems like Mary Shelley

38:21probably encountered one of those on her way to Switzerland where she was when she wrote Frankenstein. – Incredible. That's all the linguistic monsters that I can think of. If you encounter any other monsters that need linguistic phenomena named after them or linguistic phenomena that should become other monsters, please let us know in the Patreon Discord. – For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to

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40:58McCulloch and Lauren Gaughan. Our senior producer is Claire Gaughan. Our editorial producer is Sarah Doppiarella. Our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Villens. Our editorial assistant is John Crook. And our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is Ancient City by The Triangles. Stay Lingthusiastic! END

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