135: Linguistic Illusions (with Dan Parker)

0:25What are we going to do with you, Midgley? Honestly. Yeah. I know what you're going to do with me. You're going to do a show. That's what you're going to do. Game on. Okay. Hello and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. I'm Daniel Midgley. Let's meet the team. First up, it's linguist friend and esteemed colleague, Hedvig. Hi, Hedvig. Hello. Hi. How are you doing? Swell. Not ready for that. And educator, friend, and my podcast mate for 15 years, Ben Ainslie. Hey, Ben. Daniel. How does that make you feel? Permission to wither on the vine, please.

1:00Let's all move on. You know, what's coming up on this episode, one of the areas that I've been fascinated with is when we think something should be one way, but under certain conditions, our brain tells us it's a different way. And we see this in optical illusions. Do you have a favorite optical illusion, Ben? Um, I mean, it's hard to go past a good Escher, right? Like, like OG optical bro. I went to the Escher Museum in Danhagen. Oh, cool, man. It's very cool. And they have like a little interactive thing where you can take pictures where

1:33there's like rooms set up to make optical illusions so you can go with your buddy and like... Did you get caught on the stairs just infinitely going upwards? They don't have the stairs, but they have like the room that's like, it looks like you're standing next to each other, but you're actually very far apart and one looks tiny. Oh, yeah, the Lord of the Rings effect. Oh, the forced perspective of... As you can also call it, yeah, yeah. I'm a huge fan of the checker shadow illusion, even now.

2:04That's my choice, yeah. But I do like a good rotating snake. Would we say that we're going back in time now, magic eye counts as optical illusions? Why not? Because that stuff always, I realize it's very hokey and very gimmicky, but there is a part of me that has maintained a kind of fascination with it because of like the brain hack nature of it. Like if you do just the right thing with the focal distance, an image appears. That was always really fun. It is cool. And I'm really good at it.

2:35I just go back with my eyes and I just, I can see them very closely. Well, this is what happens in optical illusions, but we see this in language too. There are cases when the grammar of the language kind of works one way, but under certain conditions, our brains tell us something else should be happening. And these are linguistic illusions. So when we see linguistic illusions, we find that a number of things are going on. By the way, Ben, did it sound strange when I just said a number of things are going on?

3:07No. Should it have? Does it sound better if I say a number of things is going on? This is one of the ones where my brain doesn't care. Yeah. Don't care. Yeah. My brain is like, no difference. Like if you had said one and not the other and then one and not the other, I would be like, you said the same thing twice. That's strange. Why would you say the same thing twice? Now, according to the prescriptive rule, you would say a number of things is going on because it is a

3:38number of things. One number of things is going on. Right. For some reason, saying a number of things are going on sounds okay. Sounds better, doesn't it? I mean, I feel like I can answer that question why it's okay. Because whilst the grammar, if interpreted literally, would suggest that it is a specified number, the way it is used is an unspecified number. When we say a number of things, very few people are thinking like 11, 11 things. It's like they mean some, a few, several. So, conceptually, some plural number could be going on.

4:10Exactly. But Benjamin, it sounds a bit like you're mixing specified, unspecified and singular and plural because they're not the same thing. Okay. Fair enough. Because a number, the number, it doesn't matter as long as it's singular, right? Yeah. So, a number of things, in terms of usage, I still would put forward as an unspecified, amorphous kind of thing. I always explain this by saying that the word things is plural and because it's really close to the is or the are, it's kind of like pulling it over to plural.

4:41Interesting. Yeah. So, that's a linguistic illusion. And today, we're going to be talking with Dr. Dan Parker of Ohio State, the university. He's written a book, Linguistic Illusions, and we're going to be talking about them. Spoiler alert, my mind gets blown. Will he pierce the veil of illusions, Daniel? We might get to step behind the curtain and find out what's really going on. Take that, wizard. Besides the entertainment value, I also really enjoy talking to Dan because I think that these kinds of cases can also reveal more like foundational truths or knowledge about how language works generally.

5:15So, this is like a good way of like setting up experiments to learn things about language, more than just sort of coffee table entertainment. And learn things we will. I'd like to say a big thank you to our latest patrons. New at the supporter level, it's Lance. Woo! And at the friend level, Emma and Susa K with a yearly membership. Our newest free patrons, Adam W, C41V, Bodil, Sneaky Lemur, sneaking back into our mentions. Nice to see you. And Leon, you know, we love our patrons.

5:48We have a great time on the Discord. We share photos and words. We get ideas from you. And we hope that we take up a little bit of your day in a pleasant way. I want you to come and join us. If you're not a patron, it can be as little as a buck a month or even free. Just come see us at patreon.com slash becauselangpod. I think that one of our newest patrons would appreciate me saying that I suspect that this name is Bodil. Bodil. Bodil.

6:21Yeah. This is a familiar name to you. That is it? That is a name from Svenska? It's a Scandi name. It occurs all over Scandis. Oh, thank you. Bodil is probably a woman, I would guess. Hello, Bodil, and welcome. What's going on in linguistic news, Daniel? This one was sent to us by Flaviano, who says, my name is Flaviano Matos from Brazil. Hi, Flaviano. Hi. And I have always listened to the podcast since the times of Talk the Talk.

6:52Oh, that's pretty good. As we've established in the opening of this episode, that's a really fucking long time ago. Yep, it's been a while, and they're still there. It may interest you the news that a federal prosecutor is seeking 10 million Brazilian real, just shy of US 2 million, in damages from the main TV broadcaster in Brazil, TV Globo. Over the pronunciation of the word, Hecordia. I'm not a Portuguese speaker, so I hope I'm doing okay there. Hecordia. On that channel, presenters and newscasters have always pronounced the word as Hecordia.

7:27Did you notice how I normally I said it with the second syllable? Hecordia. That is, to a non-Portuguese speaker, and let's assume that you're doing an okay job at this, that is a subtle difference. It's a stress shift, so it would be the difference between, like, a record and a recorder. Here's what's going on. Many Portuguese speakers say Hecordia on the second syllable, second syllable. Okay. Whereas sports folks in that are saying when somebody sets a world record, they say it's a Hecordia with

8:00the stress on the first syllable. Oh, okay. It's only the stress shifting, but the question is, how on earth is this a lawsuit? A $2 million lawsuit. Okay. Let's... I haven't read ahead, Ben. We should guess what we think it is. Yeah. What's behind this? My first question is, Brazil speaks Brazilian Portuguese. Another place that speaks Portuguese is Portugal. Maybe it's a... They're trying to be too much like the colonizers' mainland Portugal variety of Portuguese. So maybe it's like anti-European Portuguese. That's my guess. Okay.

8:32I was actually going to go in the exact opposite direction. I was going to guess that it's like old biddies in Australia getting up in arms about people not saying appreciate or something like that and are saying appreciate instead. So it's like some old guard entity who's just like, no, the language of the colonizer must be maintained because that's how we know that the rich people are good and the good people are rich. Right. Okay. Well, I think what's really happening here is you might have guessed that hecorde, R-E-C-O-R-D-E, is a loan

9:08word from English. Okay. It's spelled with no accent mark and that means that according to Portuguese rules, which I barely understand, but I assume they're kind of like Spanish. This is a good linguistic basis. Yeah, sure. Why not? The penultimate syllable, the second to last syllable, usually gets the stress unless there's an accent mark somewhere else, in which case put it where the accent mark is. There's no accent mark. So there's a tension here because many people would say that word hecorde, but people who know the word from

9:43English would be tempted to put the stress on the English way and say hecorde. Okay. So this is like a hiding on English thing. Maybe, but also there's something else. And that is that sometimes the word is said hecorde and sometimes it's just, hecorde. Oh. Which means that the stress would go there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Oh, there's a lot of things going on. But hecorde would be even more English-like, right? It would be, wouldn't it? And we're suing each other for, what is the basis of the loss?

10:18Yeah, what are the damages here? Yeah, what are we doing? Well, Flaviano sent a copy of the document in Portuguese, the legal document, which has been translated automatically. Here we go. The Brazilian Federal Prosecutor's Office in Minas Gerais has sued Globo for the incorrect pronunciation of the word hecorde record. The lawsuit was filed by Prosecutor Kleber Estacioneves, who is asking the broadcaster to pay 10 million Brazilian reals for, here it is, quote, damage to the intangible cultural heritage of the Portuguese language.

10:50Oh, dear. Right. Okay. So this is some Académie Française. Yeah, that's what I'm picking up here. It really is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's more. According to the prosecutor, quote, when a nationwide broadcaster repeatedly and systematically propagates a pronunciation error known as a prosodic error. See how they dress it up a little bit there? I'll continue. It violates. Violates. The collective right of society to access programming with an educational and informative purpose. How? How are people going to know how this word is pronounced?

11:22That is. If everyone's saying it wrong on the public broadcaster. That is a big woof. That is. So, honestly, I reckon this would be, the Australian version of this, if we were to see it, would be someone taking the ABC to court because a presenter said, yeah, nah, at some point. Like, this, for me, is that. Or learnings. Saying the word learnings. I suspect that what would come up in Australia is more Americanisms. That fits the vibe a little bit more, I think.

11:55So, if there was something that is a very American thing to do and Australian broadcasters thought of doing it, it would feel like an affront to Australian national identity or something like that. But even that's a bit weird, right? Because Daniel and Hedwig, actually, because you've both had to write in official academic like published ways. Yeah. So, we, most Australian style guides do not agree on whether program is two M's and an E or whether the words should have a Z or an S in the various words that have

12:30Z's or S's and, you know, blah, blah, blah, et cetera. Yeah. So, like, we, even we are just kind of like, moo. Yeah. It's not something you'd haul somebody to the court over, is it? I mean, really. No, it might feel different because Brazil and the U.S., which I'm taking as like this supposed pollutant origin, that's a different relationship than Australia, U.S., I think. I suppose that's true. I would be really interested to hear from any Brazilian Portuguese speaker listeners who could tell

13:02us a little bit more about the breadth of, shall we say, like accent diversity within Brazil, because just from a purely looking out in perspective, I would imagine it would be tremendous, right? Like, Brazil is huge. It's got massively divergent populations of people in like all sorts of different ways and spaces and places and means and income and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I would imagine there's heaps of different like versions of Brazilian Portuguese. So that's a really great point. If you want to hear some Brazilian Portuguese, I can recommend the Oscars winner

13:36for at least one reward, The Secret Agent. I haven't seen it yet. I'm so excited to, though. I really want to see it. Have you seen it? I've seen it. I think it's good. Okay. There's some, all of the movies that are nominated for everything are too long, but Secret Agent was also a bit too long, but that's just all of them at this point. Thank you, Flaviano. Flaviano, I was very interested in that, and it's good to know that other people are weird about language, not just English speakers. So thanks. Our next story is from Diego.

14:11Good old Diego. I have a Quiznight question for you. Ooh. What are the most common languages of the world by number of speakers? Oh, we've dug into this recently, didn't we? Well, yes. So it should be Mandarin, Spanish or English, and now we're getting into the tricky ones. So it depends on if we merge Hindi and Urdu. They should be pretty high. Japanese is higher than you think. Russian is higher than you think. I just want the top five. Okay. Hold on. Top five. I'm going to take a stab.

14:43Mandarin, Spanish, English. Oh, spoken. First and second. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. Now, this is the problem, right? This is the problem with that kind of list. Okay. So Ben, why don't you get us going here? So the way that you phrased the question in terms of total number of speakers, which would include second, third, however many languages down the line. How do we define fluency? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway. I'm going to guess that two languages that Hedwig didn't mention are probably higher than we

15:14would think, which would be Arabic and French. Okay. I'm thinking both Arabic and French will sit quite high because, you know, in one case, hashtag colonizer. And in another case, there's just fuck loads of places to speak Arabic. With Arabic, we have the same quote unquote problem as to do with Chinese, Hindi, Urdu. Oh, okay. Yeah, right. That's like, so Egyptian Arabic, I believe is the largest first language speaker Arabic variety, but Iraqi, Syrian, there's a lot of Arabics. And then a lot of them similar to like German in Austria and

15:47Switzerland, a lot of people learn so-called standard Arabic as school. Yeah. And then, yeah. Okay. I think Mandarin obviously goes on the list. I think Hindi goes on the list. I think English goes on the list and then I'm chucking Arabic and French at the end. Okay. So here's, and by the way, I hate getting this question at quiz nights because there's like, it's such a difficult question. Let's all observe Daniel lose all friends in one night. I know, right? Because I don't know what list they used.

16:18I don't know how reliable. And then I say, well, this is a complicated question. And then when I get it wrong, they look at me like, you had one job, Midgley. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I always just ask, like, I ask the quiz master, like, just tell me what, what, what webpage did you, like, what, wait, is this Business Insider or is it like at the log? Like, what did you get this from? What'd you use? Just tell me that. Yeah. Well, depending on what we count as a language, yes, you're absolutely right.

16:51Hedwig Arabic is not exactly a language. It's like a macro family, like Chinese. But a pretty good estimation, if you count first and second speakers, is English up the top because so many second language speakers. Next, Mandarin. Then Spanish. Okay. Tons of countries. And then you'd have French and Arabic. Okay. But here's the story. Used to be you'd say Arabic and French. Arabic at number four, French at number five. But now French has pulled ahead and passed Arabic to become world's fourth most spoken language, according to what you

17:25count as a language, what you count as a speaker, what you count as fluency, and so on. Hmm. So, French has overtaken Arabic, according to a report from the International Organization of Francophonie. You don't say. Alliance Francaise has made them a little survey. Yeah. Almond milk consumption booming, says International Organization for the Promotion of Almond Milk. Yeah. It's important to remember that French is spoken in a lot of former French colonies, but also other places.

17:56Am I right in that Morocco was never officially colonized by France? Good question. Not sure. Good question. They do speak French, though, which suggests that they are. And then also, do we, and this is another, I know you alluded to this earlier, but like, at what point does it stop being a regionalization dialect of French and start being a Creole that is functionally indecipherable to French speakers, like mainland French speakers? Well, let's check the claim.

18:26I wanted to know if these numbers sounded right. So, for Arabic, Wikipedia has 380 million, depending on what you count as Arabic, still lower than the claim to 396 million for French. And a correction to what I said earlier, I just looked it up. So, Morocco has been a French protectorate for about 40 years. Ah, okay. Very good. We will never colonize. Oh, cool. We will protect you, though, and you don't get a say in it.

18:56Yeah. Yeah. Let's pull some quotes from the article, at least. It seems that people in France only make up 66 million of the total. By 2050, French is expected to be spoken by 590 million people, quote, nine out of 10 of whom will live in Africa, says Louise Mouchikouamo, who is the secretary general of the International Organization of Francophonie. She says, the future of French will no longer be shaped in Paris, but rather in Abidjan, Beirut, Brussels, Dakar,

19:28Kinshasa, Montreal, Port-au-Prince, Tunis, or Yaoundé. For any French learners out there, I can really recommend West African French. If you're learning French, I find it easier. My mom has some friends from Côte d'Ivoire, and I've listened to West African French, and it's much... Hedvig, for those listening to the podcast, Hedvig just did chef kiss motion. It's much, I don't want to go for it to say better, but I think it is more easier to pass and to hear word differences and stuff like that than in, like, European, French, French.

20:04Well, there's an interesting point that's coming out, I think, and that is that we've been talking about how Arabic is not just one thing. There are multiple varieties of Arabic, but French isn't one thing either. There's a ton of them. Maybe one day we'll classify it as a macro language. Ooh, that'd be fun. Boy, wouldn't the Academy love that. And it never was one, you could argue, as well. So it's like... Yeah, exactly. It's like a bunch of kids going into a trench coat, and then we're, like,

20:39ripping away the trench coat, and like, there's a bunch of children in here. We're French. Always was. Well, a big happy International Francophonie Day to all who celebrate. That was on the 20th of March, and thanks, Diego, for that story. All right. Next story. This one's about inference. Hey, Ben. I want to ask you a question. Okay. Actually, Hedwig, this one's for you, too. So this happened tonight, and I asked if I could share this story, and my neighbor said yes.

21:11Our neighbors were planning on coming over for a visit. Getting ready. We were making some pizza. Actually, my partner was making some pizza, which she's very good at. But I got this text. Here's the text. Hi, Daniel. Okay if we head over after our daughter has cleaned her room? Question mark? Mm-hmm. Hmm. What's going on? Are you supposed to know when the daughter... Is there, like, oh, she always cleans her room at three o'clock? I think I get what they're saying here. I would have... Here's how I would interpret this text, had I been the recipient of it.

21:45Mm-hmm. So I translated in my head to, hey, Daniel, we will be over in the next 15 to 30 minutes. Is that okay? Question mark. Okay. I got something else. Okay. I thought it was unusual that they mentioned her cleaning her room. I thought that was kind of funny. Wouldn't you just expect her to say, okay, if we come over in about 15 minutes? Yeah. Oh, yeah, that doesn't make heaps of sense to me. Why would he bring that up? But Daniel and Ben, you both have kids and parents, parents be weird.

22:17Parents be overstimulated, overwhelmed, do weird. Okay. So maybe he threw that in because he wasn't in control, sort of, in some sense. Couldn't help himself. Yeah. Or was he doing an implication? There's a lot about people that doesn't really make that much sense to me. And so if someone goes, oh, we'll be over after my daughter cleans her room, that's weird. But if they'd said, we'll be over in like 45 minutes, my brain would be like, that's weird. That's too long. Like there's all sorts of weird. And I just kind of put it all in the big,

22:50people are kind of weird bucket, I guess. Like it's got to be quite weird to sit outside of the acceptable weird parameters, I find. And I kind of sometimes secretly wish that there was like a little rule manual that everyone just followed and didn't have to talk to each other or you could just like, anyway, let's not talk about that. That's not Northern European of you at all. Anyway, but is it possible that the parent in question was trying to get Daniel to participate in a thing about his daughter? Because like, for example, I went to a theme park where the staff were handing out chocolate

23:27coins and I winked at the waitress and I said, oh, is it the case that if my nephews eat their dinner, they might get a chocolate coin, you know? And she was like, oh no, they can have one right now. And gave them chocolate coins right away. And I was like, didn't get it, didn't pick it up. You were trying to rope in the person to get them to eat. I thought it was going to be Daniel saying that you can't come over until you've cleaned your room.

23:57Oh, that's exactly what I thought. Maybe there's some foot dragging on the room and he's like, now you, Daniel says that you can come over, but only after you've cleaned your room, right? So I'm going to text Daniel and I'm going to say, hey, after she's cleaned it. And when they came over, I said, is that what was going on? Which he confirmed was in fact the case. Nice going epic. Do you know, here's how Ben Ainslie is weird. I would resent that a little bit. Okay. Yeah. It's like, don't rope me into this. This is not about me.

24:31I'm not in this. I'd be sitting there being like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you fucking knock. How come I'm now suddenly the person who's like laying it out for- I'm the bad guy here. I'm just pleased that like, Ben, how many children do you have? How many children do I have? Zero. Exactly zero. Yeah. And I got it. The non-parent worked it out. That's true. That's true. Well, we're always making and interpreting inferences, but how do we interpret them? And usually in a linguistics class, like the ones that we've all taught, except Ben, we go to Grice's maxims,

25:05like relevance. Like my daughter says, dad, I want food. And I say, I've just sat down, which sounds like a total non sequitur. But because we assume relevance, we say, oh, he's doing a thing where he's explaining. I can read between the lines and I can say, dad's just sat down. That's why he's not going to get me any food. Dang it. Yeah. This is like something that a former guest on our show, Steve Levinson, has written a lot about, which is like how people work this out. And so the Gricean maxims are four maxims that were made

25:40up a long time ago. Some people use other versions of it or newer ones. But basically the rules, the informal rules that we use to sort of derive what's in there, which can be really hard and also can be very culture specific. Like sometimes you're in a culture and someone says something, you're like, I don't understand how that follows from that. And then someone says, oh, it's because, don't you know? Inference is complicated. It is. Well, this is work from Dr. Sammy Floyd of Sarah Lawrence University and a team published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

26:16They wanted to know if this ability to do inference was one skill or was it a lot of different skills. The way that they decided to work this was not by sticking people in fMRI machines and having them answer questions. Instead, they gave people lots and lots of examples of inferences to figure out, lots of question-answer stuff, and seeing if they could work out the meaning. Like maybe one of the utterances would have like a different intonation, like, oh, I wanted the red one. And the implication there is the one you gave me was wrong

26:50or something. Or maybe connecting the dots would require somebody to be good at knowing stuff. Maybe somebody would be good at doing all of these, in which case you could infer that they all used the same one skill. Or maybe some people were good at some of the inferences, but maybe not good at the others, implying that this would hinge on different skills. What's your guess? I'm thinking different. Okay. I'm scrolling through the paper to see what kind of participants they had. I'm looking for the answer. No, I'm looking for what kind of people were in it.

27:26It was 400 people doing tasks. In English. Good point. Thank you. I'm assuming. I think it's a bunch of different skills. I think that the knowing things is going to be really helpful because if you don't know what things mean, it's hard to connect the dots. Yeah, but you've got to have like real-world knowledge as well, right? Yeah, to a certain level, you do have to have that. Okay. I struggle sometimes with inferences because I think that like everything is possible. Oh, you've got to know what's unlikely. Like everything's possible, but only a few things are likely.

28:01Yes. And I'm very, I'm bad at, I think everything, I think a lot of things that other people, things are unlikely. Like the thing I've told before when someone talked about a submarine, but they were talking about a boat. I've done this one before. Like someone said boat, but they meant, I heard you boat and I thought they're talking about a submarine. But apparently it's very unlikely that private people own submarines, but I don't know that. What? That would make interpreting that rather difficult. That was such a great insight into your brain for a second.

28:35That's so wonderful. Like, what do you mean? Is that not a thing many people have? Like just private submarines? Well, as we know, Hedwig grew up in a very privileged environment where submarine ownership was pretty high among the two. I've been on a retired submarine for a 40-year party when I was a kid. I have. Okay. There we have it. First of all, who your parents knew as a 40-year-old that was renting out a fucking retired U-boat type shit? He wasn't allowed to go underwater.

29:06That doesn't matter. It's still cool as hell. I know, right? That is awesome, hey? That's wicked. Anyway, so for working out the emphasis, there has to be some level of knowledge about what's likely and unlikely. Like, you have to not be me. And then you also have to, like, be able to work out, like, logical combinations of things. And those feels like at least two different skills, quote-unquote. Yes. So it's not one skill. It's got to be me. Okay. Okay. Well, that's what the team found. They found three different skills.

29:38You could collapse all the different talents you need into three different skills. Here they are. Number one, understanding social conventions. Oh, dear. I'm in trouble. I'm in trouble. So, for example, if I say, Ben, you're coming in hot, you know what I mean, right? You know that I'm doing a thing, and it's a request. It's not just a simple description. Yeah. The second thing they found was you had to understand intonation patterns, like, I want the red one. The third thing was making causal inferences based on world knowledge.

30:09Here's one of the tests they used to measure that one. Sometimes a truck drives by the house. The dishes start to rattle. Do these sentences form a coherent story? Yes. How did you know that? I lived next to a railroad, and the house shook every time the train went past. I was about to say exactly the same thing. I lived on a major trucking route, and we would have things rattle off the table. There you go. That's a piece of real-world knowledge that you needed to know to

30:39establish the coherence of the start of that story. So, three different skills. I like this because it helps us to get to the specific mechanisms that we use to unwind inferences and read between the lines. I guessed multiple straight out of the gate just because language is really weird and tricky, and it uses heaps of different parts of the brain. So, I was like, well, it probably is the same thing. It's not all general knowledge. There's this anthropologist from the 60s and 70s called Edward Hall.

31:09There's also a guy called Hofstetter who have done these theories about that cultures can differ in how much they expect the other person to be doing the inference work. The theory goes that there are some cultures where the person who's speaking assumes that they have very little shared knowledge with the other person and is likely to sort of state a lot of basic things. But in some cultures, you can think of it as like a trade-off. Like, it's either more the hearer or the speaker. Now, naturally, saying anything broadly about cultures is a gross oversimplification.

31:43Every situation is going to be different. A teacher in a classroom talking to students, a parent talking to a child, two people who have been married for 50 years. These are all different interactions. But the idea was to sort of help actually part of the American diplomatic service and military personnel station abroad to sort of understand that just because you know French doesn't mean you understand French conversational pragmatics. Right. So the idea was that, for example, that Americans might be more on one way and other

32:13cultures on another. Would this track to like high context and low context stuff? Like if you're a high context coach? Yeah. Okay. So high context and low context comes from Edward Hall's work. That's the original. Yes. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, there's a really cool piece in Medium that someone wrote on like an overview of Hall's work. And I'm very interested in this, both on a personal level and on a like professional research level. I've submitted one, two research applications that have gotten rejected doing work on this kind

32:44of topic. That's all right. Most applications get rejected. So it's just par for the course. But the idea is sort of that, yeah, people might have different cultural expectations. The problem is that if you come from a place where you do spell out a lot of things and you talk to someone who's not used to it, that person might feel themselves getting like, you know, over-explained, treated like they're an idiot. You're getting over the head with your meaning. Yeah. Like, of course I know that dishes rattle when a truck drives by because of the vibrations in the

33:19ground. Why are you telling me that? Whereas the opposite can also occur when someone is like assuming shared knowledge that isn't there. And they say like, I have no idea what this person is talking about. They mentioned trucks and then dishes. I don't know what's going on. And then the other person thinks, man, this person's thick. Oh my gosh, I have to spell everything out for them. Yeah. So for me, thinking about that has sort of helped some interactions I've had.

33:51Like, I'm like, ah, this person expects this. I should do this more. What I tend to do, because that's just how I'm wired, is I just tell people, I might say a lot of things that you already know. It's not because, like, I know that you don't know them. It's just because I deal with a lot of uncertainty all the time and I assume very little as a basis. That's cool. That's great that you sort of background it like that.

34:22That's really adaptive. Well, yeah. I don't know if it is. The more tired I get, the less social flair I have. I'll just say that. Aw. Sounds normal. Yeah. Probably normal. And that's the news. And now it's time for Related or Not. Our theme comes from Hugh. Related or Not. Related or Not. Related or Not. Related or Not. I like it. I think we're getting further away from copyright infringement, which I think is good. All right. This one comes from Tigertronia on the Discord.

34:54Here we go. Shrew, the animal. Yep. Oh, okay. Shit. Paper pass. And shrewd, having keen judgment. Okay. Mm-hmm. Interesting. You know, these little animals are pretty canny, I gotta say. And that's it. Only those two. Just those two. Okay. I have a fun fact about elephant shrews. Oh. Please. I was about to. Okay. Are we going to say the same one? No. I was going to tell you a completely different fact about shrews. And it's not about menstruation. We've each got a fact.

35:27We're taking it in turn. Hedwig first, me next, and then Daniel. A lot of mammals don't menstruate like humans do. A bunch of the primates, I think, do. But, like, other animals don't. Like, there's something else they call estrocycle that, like, dogs have, which also includes bleeding. But that's not the same as menstruation. That's actually a kind of opposite thing. They're more fertile while it's happening. But elephant shrews do menstruate like humans. So whenever I see them in the zoo, I see these little tiny little animals, and I look at them,

36:02and I'm like, you and me. Or you and me, sister, doing it together. Isn't it, like, every nine days or something? How quick is their cycle? They do live shorter lives, though, so maybe. I don't know. Yeah, I know their tracks. All right. Okay, my shrew fact is if you have never looked at the skeleton of a hero shrew, a shrew that is a hero. Googling. You should do so now. Be warned. It is approaching kind of semi-body horror how drastically different their skeletons

36:34are than any other mammal you have ever seen. Okay. Oh. Oh, I'm looking at the pictures now of a hero shrew skeleton. Yes. And, I mean, it looks like a tiny, like, dragon or something like that. Right. So, what you're seeing, that weird conglomeration of, like, armor-looking stuff running down its back, that is its spinal column. That interlocking network of, like, reinforced plates is its spine. Wow. I just saw the skeleton from another angle. Now I'm seeing it from above, so I can see the

37:07spine. And that is crazy. So, the hero shrew gets its name because you can stand on one. With your full weight on one foot, and it will survive that experience. Wow. Have you ever seen a skeleton of a snake? Yes. Not the same. I would note, snake and shrew, quite distant relatives on the animal tree. Yeah, but you get parallel evolution solving similar niche problems, like hyenas and dogs with similar jaws, etc.

37:38Well, thank you for those shrew facts. I feel like we've all gotten shrewd. Yes. Nature corner. Shrew and shrewd. I'm going with unrelated. Okay. Any reason? I think that the temptation of the ED being the explanation for shrew turning into shrewd, like shrewed, is too juicy. It's too tasty. It's too easy. I think that instead, that D has a different genesis, and we've morphed down to shrewd over, like, we've lost some stuff along the way. Okay, okay. I like what you're thinking.

38:12Hevig, what do you think? I would like to ask whether the Shakespeare play, Taming of the Shrew, has any bearing here, because that is a sort of smart and not very attractive woman, right? Is that what a shrew is? A shrewish woman. Yes. Is that what that is? So we use shrew to describe, like, sort of homely women. Who act in ways that we don't like. Yeah. Yes. Are they also too smart for their own good? Yeah.

38:44So it was like a word that we would use to describe women who had the audacity of wanting to be people with agency and that sort of thing. Right. Which sounds similar to being shrewd. That's true. I think the female thing, the Taming of the Shrew, shrew, is a shrewd woman. And all Billy Shake Shake, he did make up a few words. This is a thing he did. Yeah. I'm going to say they're related, because I think, yeah, I think, I

39:17don't know. I have a vibe. Maybe he was trying to make a funny thing about taming, because taming is something you do to animals. So maybe he was making a funny point about, like, shrew being an animal and a woman. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. I'm just about positive that shrew the animal and shrew the shrewish woman are related. But I also do think that shrewd is in there. I just went by, I looked at the beginning of the word.

39:51I thought, sh and an er, and I just thought, those two sounds, that's just too coincidental. So I'm saying related. Okay. The answer, they are related. Ah, boom. So, shrew probably comes from some Proto-Germanic root, scraw, going back to Proto-Indo-European, screw to cut or some kind of cutting tool and then apply to the animal. Shrewd, for its part, Edom Online says, and Oxford concurs, probably like a bunch of words that we used, that

40:21we just added ED to. Like, if you have something that looks like a crab, it's crabbed. If you have someone that follows someone like a dog, they are dogged. And if you have someone who is like a witch, they are? Add an ED. Witched. Ewitched. Witched. Witched? Bitched. Wicked. Oh. Oh, my God. We were so... How about that? We were so failing. So, this was part of a pattern that was being used.

40:51And shrew and shrewd, very much related. Damn it. The juicy thing was exactly the thing. I hate it when that happens. I just dangled it right in front of you like a piece of meat before a shrew. And I walked past it being like, that's a trap. Thanks to Tigertronia for that one. Now, this one's from Cameron via email. Hello, becauselanguage.com. How quaint. Cameron says, hi, I had another related or not inspired by my current anatomy of speech

41:24class. What do we know about the anatomy of speech? What kind of things do we use? First of all, question for the dummies in the podcast. Are we talking about anatomy in the human sense of the word? So, literally like the articulators and the resonators and that sort of thing? Okay. Yep. I think that they're going to ask about... Okay. So, there could be labia. Okay. Oh, no. Labia and lips. Interesting. Labia and lips and other labias. And, okay, what else could they be asking about?

42:00Glottis and glott other things that mean like wordy things. There's all kinds of tantalizing things going on right there. We've already talked about uvuli, I think, before. Oh, oh, oh. I've got it. I've got it. I think I've got it. Mm-hmm. Willem. Is it glottis and guttural? Oh, interesting. Those are all tasty, but not where Cameron was going. Okay. We have a bone called the hyoid bone. And it's a free-floating bone, not connected to anything.

42:32It doesn't. But it's thought that it helps us to speak. It's right near our chin. So, Cameron asks, are genio, like the geniohyoid muscle, meaning chin, genius, and genie related? Thank you, Cameron. I thought perhaps genial could go in there. Interesting. I was going with ingenious, so I'm going to chuck on ingenious. Now, to keep it simple, we're going to step through this pairwise, step by step, and see who manages to

43:02make it to the end. Okay. Okay. So, it's a knockout round. Okay. Question. The first one. Please spell it for me, please. Geniohyoid. G-E-N-I-O. H-Y-O. Okay. Okay. H-Y-O-I-D. Geniohyoid. Okay. So, the first pair, genius and ingenious. I say yes. I think they're related. Yeah. I'm going with yes on that one as well. Yeah. I'm going with yes. Also, fun fact about ingenious, I'm not that good at spelling always, and I type

43:33really fast, and very often when I want to spell indigenous, I spell ingenious instead. That's good. That's a nice one. Ingenious. That would be so, that's such a good save, right? Like, if you're going to talk about, like, indigenous researcher, Samantha Schmarmanar, ingenious researcher, Samantha Schmarmanar. Like, you're doing great. They're both good. They're both good. Ingenious languages of Australia. Yeah. Yeah. Ingenious languages. We all said yes, and we're all correct. The two of them are related. Starting off soft, I notice.

44:07We know about the root gen. It means give birth or beget. That's where we get words like our genes. Generate. Generation. What else? Genos. Genesis. Genealogy. And, yes, indigenous. And, of course, genius. So, ingenious uses the gen root, and it means of good natural capacity, full of intellect, and innate qualities. Okay. Second round. Okay. Genius and ingenious, they're both related. And a genie. No. Unrelated. Because that's from jinn. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

44:37I've played too much Dungeons and Dragons. Jinn, it's like pre-Islamic era Arabic peninsula stuff, I think. Hang on, is Arabic proto-indo-European? No. Nope. It's Afro-Osiatic. Okay, then I'm going a hard no, then. People borrow stuff, though, so that doesn't help, but I don't think this is one of them. Yeah, and sometimes things grow together. If they have a slight similarity, they grow together more. Okay. Genius and ingenious, plus genie, all three related. Get the fuck out of here.

45:09What the fuck? Yep. Okay, explain to me how jinn has tracked that. Well, first of all, jinn is Arabic, but when we found the word jinn, we just repurposed the word genie and kind of lumped them together, because we thought this thing's like that thing. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Hold on. Hold on. So jinn and genie aren't related, is what you're telling me. Jinn and genie are not related. Correct. What the fuck? What? How is that possible? Okay, let's take it back to the beginning.

45:39I mentioned that genius went back to the jinn root. Turns out the real path has an interesting bend to it. Latin, a genius, doesn't mean a smart person. It means a guardian deity or spirit, which you sort of get when you're born. It guides you through your life and then takes you to the other side when you're done. And so if you're a genius, it's because you have a genie that inspires you. Like literally a guardian spirit. Okay. Wait. So we've been using the word genie for a lot longer than we've

46:11had the loan word jinn, or we encountered Arabic and found out about jinns in their folklore. And so we already had the word genie. It sounded a bit like jinn. And the creature in the folklore was a bit like the genie we had. So we just used it. Yep. We started out with genius and that meant the little being. And then we started applying that to a person who has a really good genie. And when we found jinn, then we sort of used genie for that.

46:42That blows my mind. I literally just thought we encountered the word jinn and we were like, well, you can't put a D and a J next to each other. So we better call it something else. And then we just did the best we could with genie. Okay. Last round. Now let's add to this, the prefix genio, as in the genio hyoid bone. I thought, yeah, why not? It's something having to do with your head, which means like being smart. So I said, yes. I reckon this is where we fall off the wagon.

47:15There's got to be a point where we fall off the wagon. Well, Ben, we play this game a lot. Sometimes it's a double jumper. Inside baseball. Yep. Okay. So let's just think about the actual words instead. That doesn't always help us that much because the words are pretty short by this time. So we have like gen. Not a lot to go on. I mean, actually, yes, I think they are related because the bone we are hypothesizing, like to the best of our knowledge, the bone is used in the generation of sound and language.

47:48So it would make a lot of sense that we're using like a genio kind of prefix there if we accept that gen is genesis and generate and, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay. Yes. But I feel like things have to do with birth should be like groin area. What? Sorry. Unless you're born with a good brain. Unless you're born with innate qualities. I need help. This isn't brain. I think we've just had a thing where you've assumed that everyone has a submarine. Could you help me on your mental path for just a second?

48:22Everyone has a submarine. He was telling us it's got to do with birth, right? Well, I heard it as creation, right? More than like just like outright human mammalian birth. Okay. All right. Ben and I are saying yes. I'm going to say no because I am contrarian. And at this point, I have no clue what's going on. The genie-gin thing fucking threw me. Like I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm seed in my past here. The answer given by my sources, Edam Online plus the Oxford English Dictionary, not related, but I have questions.

48:54Oxford says this goes back to a different place. Ancient Greek, genion, meaning chin. In fact, you can see how genion and chin are kind of related. This goes back to a Proto-Indo-European root, genu, meaning your chin or your jawbone. Now, this is different from what we've been seeing with genius. It's genae. You can hear the difference genu and genae. And my sources are saying, well, these are different Proto-Indo-European roots. Dang, they sound kind of similar to me, but I'm calling this one for now, not related.

49:24Yes. All right. There we go. I can't believe I was studying with Hedwig. Why was I doing that? What an idiot. Congratulations for navigating those twists and turns. And thanks to Cameron. Thanks also to Hugh for giving us that jingle. If you'd like to contribute anything like that, please do. Hello at BecauseLanguage.com. We are here with Dr. Dan Parker from The Ohio State University. He's a linguist and the author of a new book, Linguistic Illusions, a case study on agreement attraction. I've decided that every time I say illusion, it's going to be linguistic illusion.

49:57Yeah, there has to be some magic, you know, like, you know, pulling a rabbit out of a hat or something like that. Well, these things are rather magical, I think. Tell us how you got into this study of linguistic illusions in particular. So, it stems back to when I was in graduate school. So, when I was, you know, a very naive, fresh-minded student in grad school, I came in and my advisor was like, hey, there's these really cool things that we're working on in our lab here.

50:27You know, gave me a couple sentences. We're confusing the heck out of people. Yeah. Yeah, exactly, right? So, it was, like, hard to make sense of these things. And they were trying to, you know, at the time, they just started doing this, like, kind of systematic research on these things, trying to figure out what's going on with them. I got swept up into that. And after that, it was, you know, downhill from there. Okay. Well, tell us your favorite linguistic illusions. I've got some. Hedvig, you might have some that we've talked about. No?

50:59Okay, never mind. I think I've got some. But I've got some. Dan, you've got some. Tell us one of yours. Sure. Yeah. So, the ones that I always give in my class are these, what are called, like, the Moses illusions, right? So, these are cases where you ask something like, how many of each kind of animal did Moses bring on the ark, right? And you ask students to respond as quickly as possible. Go on, Hedvig. What's the answer? Two. Two, right? And that's what they always say, right?

51:29And then you say, no, it's zero, right? You're wrong. And they look puzzled. And then you repeat the question to them. And you say, like, oh, it wasn't Moses who brought these animals on the ark. It was, that's right. It was Noah. And anyway, he brought two of the clean animals and seven of the, wait, I got it wrong. Seven of the clean animals and two of the unclean animals anyway. So, there you go. That's right. Yeah. So, there's a whole series, like, there's a couple other ones from the

52:01Bible. Hedvig's looking confused. Hang on. I feel like what you're doing is, you're hijacking my, like, efficiency parts of my brain that is trying to, like, pragmatically guess. And, like, I don't hear everything. I get to the end of the sentence. I'm like, okay, I heard some things. What could it have been? You might mean Noah and you said Moses, but I'm going to be kind to you and just assume. So, like, you're exploiting me. Yeah, right. So, I'm playing a little trick on you, right? Yeah.

52:31You're taking advantage of my kindness. As you mentioned in the book, the trick doesn't work if you say, how many animals of each type did Nixon bring onto the ark? Because that doesn't work at all. Right. Yeah. So, there's these cases, right, where you can make, like, one small change to it and then all of a sudden, like, you don't overlook it, right? So, it says, like, you're not, it's not just that I'm, like, hijacking your attention, right? Like, you are paying attention. So, like, if I make a change, as you said, to, like, Nixon, then all

53:04of a sudden you realize, hey, that doesn't make any sense, right? And so, that's, like, kind of the cool thing about these, right? When you try to, you make one small change and then all of a sudden they see what's going on. They see what you're trying to do. And that's really informative about what's going on, right, under the hood. I've got another one. One of my favorites is gratuitous negation. For example, it's not like it isn't the kind of thing you don't see every day. Oh, again, with the unnatural, like, wasn't there famously, have we talked about this, wasn't there famously a speech by

53:39Trump where he, like, didn't use a negation and then was like, everyone, no, there was supposed to be a negation in there. Like, negation seems weird. No, yeah. I mean, negation can trip people up really quickly. Like, either they'll admit it or they add gratuitous negation. Negation trips up people all the time. And it doesn't help that there are, like, a lot of constructions where you do this, like, negative concord. Like, I didn't see nothing is, like, a perfectly legit way to say that you, I don't know how to say this without saying negations.

54:10You were blind to things. I'm trying to get by without saying blind. Anyway. Yeah. And another thing about negation is that there are certain words that aren't expressly negative, like not or no, but they have a slightly negative valence, like anymore, right? Yeah. Or even something like, I'm not going to unravel the thread versus I'm not going to unravel the thread, which could mean the same thing. That's right. Yeah, so those are cases of, like, these NPIs that have to, like, link up to something negative. And then you have these, in the same vein, you have, like, what we

54:43think of as, like, negative verbs, right? So, like, doubt. Lack. Right? Where it conveys some sort of, like, something negative, right? And that can throw people up. It's not your standard, like, no or none. Yeah. Negative existentialists famously, yeah. You mentioned also, Dan, the comparative illusion with the very famous sentence, more people have been to Berlin than I have. Right. More people have been to Berlin than I have. Wait, I'm going to be the dumb little kind person who's trying to, like, make sense of all the nonsense you two are spitting out. So, more people have been to Berlin than I, I've only been once.

55:18There are a lot of people who have been more than once. So, more people have been more times to Berlin than I have. Yes, yes. That's probably the intended meaning. And yet, the sentence is constructed in such a way that you start off, and then you get to the end, and it sounded like a grammatical sentence. There's nothing that pings your, this is not grammatical. And yet, then you try to figure out the meaning, and you go, ew, no, something went wrong here. What was it? What was wrong with that sentence? Yeah, right? I mean, what you're trying to do is, you end up, you're

55:53making a comparison of quantity, two quantities that aren't comparable, right? Like, the number of people, right, to the number of experiences. Those aren't two things that you normally, like, compare, right? Right, right, right. And as it turns out, that exact sentence was what got me hooked into all of this. So it was, you know, as when I was doing my on-campus interview for grad school, my, who would become my advisor, gave me that sentence and told me, asked me, like, what does it mean? And I thought there's, like, you know, the first time I've heard it, and I thought there's a correct answer.

56:27And I, you know, I was trying to find this correct answer, and, you know, I stumbled. But that was the exact point, right? These things don't mean anything. As soon as you try to make sense of it, you stumble, and it's fun to watch people in this kind of weird, sadistic way trying to come up with a response. And you get a whole range of different responses. And the fact that you get all these different conflicting responses, it engages everybody, you know? It's part of the reason why you get so many different responses, because a lot

56:58of these types of illusions are more easily solved if you have more context. So if you know who you're talking to, and you know who, like, many people are, it's everyone in this room or something like that, you have more information to go out to unravel what might be going on. But in linguistics and in writing, we take things out of all of that. We take them out of the world that they occur in, and we put them on a blank piece of paper, and some sadistic grad mentor or interviewer just takes it, like, entirely in isolation and says, like, what is

57:32this? And that's not really how language, like, occurs naturally in the wild. Right, yeah. So, I mean, you're highlighting a really good point here, right? So as soon as you put these things into some context, what it invites is the opportunities for students to make these rational inferences. Like, what is it that the speaker's trying to communicate? What are some potential targets? And, you know, what's the delta between what they're saying and what I'm hearing and trying to make sense of that, right? And so when you have things in a natural context, they're willing to

58:04overlook certain errors, repair certain things, and make inferences about what it is they think you're trying to say, right? And so there's a very active, productive line of research thinking about when and where these rational inferences about speaker intent, what they're trying to communicate, where does that come into play here, right? And then there's the related question of when you don't have that context, when you don't have the opportunity for those inferences, what are the kind of the base mechanisms that you're using or you're recruiting to make sense of these sentences, right? So you can do it in the lab or you can put it in context.

58:40This is all reminding me of optical illusions. Right. There's a very interesting optical illusion where it's like a dragon's head. Have you seen the dragon's head? No, I haven't. No. You walk past it. Googling. And the whole thing seems to be turning toward you as you walk past. It's a stationary object, but it seems to be turning toward you. And then you get to a certain angle and you realize, oh, what I thought was the outside of a convex box was actually a concave box. And the face that I was seeing was actually on the inside of

59:12this concave surface. And we never see that kind of thing. Our visual system is completely unprepared to deal with faces in concave objects in reverse because faces are always convex. Faces are just faces. I mean, a listener can definitely write into us and tell us if there's any animal on this planet that has a concave face. So a face where the nose part is further in than the edges. But generally, we're not set up to recognize those type of things. And some of these illusions are also maybe not things that don't occur, but maybe things that don't occur so

59:45often or don't occur in isolation. So they sort of we have to make use of like weird parts of our understanding to like unravel what's going on. Most of the time we see, you know, faces that are coming out into the world. We don't see things, you know, like that are going in, right, that's giving the illusion of the dragon. But a lot of that work in the vision sciences has come about from the fact that sometimes you do see things where there's an imprint, right? So you have to make sense of like, say, a footprint in the sand, right?

1:00:19And your vision system has to determine is that like coming out or is it going in, right? And so I think what vision scientists have done is they've figured out these nice little cues that your visual system might be tuning into. And they're trying to figure out what are those cues that tells you that that's a footprint rather than, you know, something coming out of the sand, right? And so these illusions actually come about by seeing something in the real world. And then you like manipulate it in a little bit of a way to see what's going on.

1:00:51And then all of a sudden you're like, oh, that's how we determine that a footprint is, you know, a footprint rather than coming out of the sand. And the same thing happens with these linguistic illusions. Somebody will make some error out in the world. They'll say something nonsensical that you notice still works fine in communication or the inverse of that. And you're like, hey, something's interesting about that. And then you go into the lab and try to tease that apart. So when you take things out of the context, what you're saying is that when we have all that context,

1:01:25we can guess the inferences and we know people. We have so much material to guess. But what you're interested in and what a lot of people are interested in, like, what is the bare skeleton of the skills we have to tell these things apart when we don't have that context? Yeah. So, I mean, that's a reasonable starting point, right? So you can sit there and say, wow, you know, context and all these inferences that you make and natural communication, that's really rich, right? And if you want to make sense of that, you kind of have to first

1:01:58scale back. So let's start off like just very simple things. And then ultimately the goal, right, is to scale up to natural language use where we're, you know, as we're doing here, we're communicating, just talking back and forth. We want to be able to build a model of that. But in order to do that, you have to kind of just scale back and just make these small little changes in controlled environments and then eventually scale that up to see what's going on in the real world. Isn't Chomsky famous to say that in some book that, like, we should first, like, try and understand an idealized

1:02:34conversation between only two people where no one is overlapping and they know what each other means? And then if we can understand that, which we don't yet, we can maybe understand what the fuck goes on when you get on a bus and the bus driver is mumbling. Yes. I mean, there's a wide difference and wide range between those two contexts. Like I said, it's a reasonable starting point to say, like, let's just do the simplest case where we don't have the context. And then you systematically add things in to the experiment, to the context, and you see what

1:03:08systematic differences these make. If they make a difference, if they don't, then you can start to get an idea of, you know, what's contributing, what's not, what are people paying attention to, what are they not paying attention to, and so on. Okay. And we're going to hear some examples of especially subject-verb agreement where you've constructed experiments to just find that little hinge, which is the difference between not confusing and slightly confusing. I was just interested in one more thing, though. Garden path sentences are a fascinating kind of linguistic illusion where

1:03:39the structure of the sentence leads you down the garden path into one interpretation, and then you realize that that fails completely. And I've been collecting, or I've been enjoying collections of headlines. Now, headlines are very interesting because they do remove a lot of context in the form of grammatical words. So they do have a tendency to get a bit tricky. Here's one. Honduran military chief quits saying he is fatigued. Oh, thank goodness, because that guy was just bugging me. He was just, yeah, complaining. No, he quits saying he is tired.

1:04:10And then a classic one, eyedrops off shelves. Oh. Oh, wait. No. No. No, no, no, no. No? Was there an S on the I, the first I? I? It was eyedrops. It was eyedrops off shelves. There are no more eyedrops on the shelves. Okay. Yes. Oh, did an I drop off the shelves? Okay. It's the drops of shelves. Yeah, you get a whole bunch of these in the headlines. You know, like one of my favorite ones is the stolen painting found by tree, you know, where I found

1:04:40it. Yeah, like this tree all of a sudden, you know. Large church plans collapse. Oh, sorry. Large church plans collapse. There we go. There we go. Yeah, you have to get the right probability with this to make sense of these. See, if you were speaking a language where verbs had a bunch of stuff on them, that meant that you know that they were verbs, like if they had a bunch of little markers on beginning and end, and like, they couldn't be confused for nouns, so plans and plans is both a noun and a verb, then this

1:05:14wouldn't really occur as much. These kinds. That's right. Well, Dan, now it's time to get into subject-verb agreement, which Hedwig, I know, is one of your favorite things because you're such an expert at it. I famously, so I speak on this podcast and have done for many years, and I'm not a native speaker of English, and subject-verb agreement seems to be like one of the last things. Also, some of the voicing contrast, I'm not very good at it. And I am very bad at learning it. I do it in writing as well.

1:05:45I fuck it up all the time. Maybe for the listeners who don't know, what are we talking, can you give us an example of a sentence where you might get tripped up? Yeah, so if I was planning to make a church, I would say I plan to build a church, and if she does, she plans with an S. Yes, it does. That's the easiest. Okay. But was and were can be tricky, right? Was and were really hard. And the thing is also, I don't get any negative feedback because no one misunderstands

1:06:17this. Half of the time, they don't even seem to notice I don't do this. So what's up with that? Yeah, I mean, that's the whole thing, right? So, I mean, the classic example is, you know, as you were pointing out, wasn't were is the tricky thing, right? So you can take something like the key, if I say the key were rusty, right? Like, you know, I can give this to my class and everybody will be like, that sentence is horrible. That's bad, right? But if I all of a sudden put in this intervening plural item, like the key to

1:06:51the cabinets were, right? It's still bad for the same reason that the original, like key and were, right? You still have a mismatched singular and plural item, right? But as soon as all of a sudden you put in that plural cabinets, it sounds better than it should, right? So let's just go back over this because I think this example is going to be key. So the sentence that was unambiguously wrong was the key were rusty. Obviously, it's the key was rusty. Was has to agree with key because key is singular.

1:07:23You all had like a strong reaction. You were like, don't like it. Can I just say that like there are, I think there are things you would have a stronger reaction to, like the key be rusty, probably you guys would like even less, right? So there's gradients here, right? Like your little sentences go off, but they're not like, you know, flipping out. You can still continue. Oh, yeah. And there are some varieties where the key were rusty is completely fine. Oh, the key were rusty. Yeah. So, you know, we are making assumptions about standardized English and we, that's fine.

1:07:57We can, we can talk about that. But now we started off with the sentence, the key was rusty. Sounds great to everyone. The key were rusty. Sounds not so good to some people. Then we stuck in the key to the cabinet. Cabinets, plural. The key to the cabinets. The key to the cabinets. Were rusty. Yeah. Bad for the same reason that the key were rusty is. And if I'm understanding correctly, the to the cabinets thing is a bit of a distractor or rather an attractor. That's right. That's where, that's where the terminology comes from.

1:08:30It's agreement attraction, right? Okay. It kind of attracts you. And, you know, in standard cognitive psychology, we would talk in, in experimental psychology, you would call that a distractor or a lure, right? But, yeah, it attracts the, it seems to attract that, that plural agreement in there. It's as if your brain goes like, well, I saw a plural and were is plural. So, like, all should be fine. Not paying attention to the fact that were was supposed to agree with the first subject, the head of the noun phrase, the key.

1:09:01Right. Yeah. So, right. We try to figure out what's going on with these, right? And, you know, at first glance, you might say like, oh, hey, this is, I mean, admittedly, these agreement things are not the first things that I jump out of the gate with, with illusions, because it's like, you know, they're not the most exciting ones, right? But they're also super informative. And so, at first, you might think like, oh, this is just something where I had to learn this back in grade school. These are just these stuffy rules that, you know, my grade school teacher had to impose on

1:09:36me, or these are things that linguists just kind of make up into the world about how language should or shouldn't work, right? And as it turns out, right, you don't make these errors, you don't hear these errors all the time, right? If it was just something that we were just flouting, we didn't care about the rules, we would have a whole range of different types of errors. We'd have was and were, they just would go all around, and you'd use them very freely. But as it turns out, not everything is susceptible to that.

1:10:09If you make it like, if you do it with the same equivalent with the singular was, then people are very good at detecting the errors, right? So, it's not just the case where you get misled all the time. Now, let's try it the other way, because you mentioned there's an asymmetry there. Right. So, our sentence right now is, the key to the cabinets were rusty, which the were is kind of, people are misapplying were, you might say, the key to the cabinets was rusty. Let's try it the other way. The keys to the cabinet was rusty.

1:10:42Yeah, that's bad, right? You get the same, you ask a group of people, they'll give you the same, like, oh, something's off about that. And then, if you try to put in, so you need that, that was says, I need something that's singular, let's now put a singular attractor or a lure in there, right? And you say, the keys to the cabinet was rusty, right? And you get an asymmetry. It doesn't sound as attractive, as you will, as the, you know, the plural example. And to be clear, you know, it's hard to intuit these things in spoken language like this.

1:11:17What we do in the lab is we pose these very rigid time constraints on people, right? So, you ask for, like, judgments, right? Like, within, like, three seconds. Or we look at, like, word-by-word reading times. And so, we can see what's happening at each word. And so, one of the things that I've shown in some of my work is, in that moment-by-moment timing, people are really susceptible to being misled. But when you give people a little bit more time to think about these things, it's easier for them to detect the error. But you do get this asymmetry between was and were, singular

1:11:53and plural. So, you don't get these errors all the time. And if it was a case where we were just flouting the rules of agreement, we would expect all of these cases to be equally as susceptible to being misinterpreted. But we don't see that, right? And so, when we take these in the lab, then we see these effects coming out here, but not here. And then that's really informative about what's going on underneath the hood, right? So, that's what we try to do. And these are the kind of psycholinguistics experiments that historical linguists or language

1:12:26typologists sometimes like to use as evidence for certain paths of change. So, like, oh, would we expect if a language is losing its verbal agreement and there's a singular and a plural form of the verbs, would we expect it to keep the singular or the plural? And these experiments can show that, like, people have certain asymmetries and cognitive biases already in their heads. So, we would maybe expect certain changes, which is a really fun way that, like, different domains of linguistics can, like, actually inform each other. And I don't think happens enough, but it's really fun.

1:13:00No, it's certainly ripe for cross-fertilization there. Yeah, yeah. Let's talk for a second about why this is happening. Because this asymmetry, the fact that cabinets is attractive for plural, but cabinet isn't attractive for singular, even though they could both be just as wrong. I thought that it was just as simple as proximity. Like, there's a word back there, but then you threw me cabinets, plural. So, now I'm just going to remember the last verb, and it's not structural agreement, but it could be considered sort of proximal agreement. But then you've just kind of blown that theory because cabinets attracts plural, but cabinet doesn't

1:13:36attract singular. It should go both ways. Yeah. I mean, so, okay, we've got this asymmetry between singular and plurals. Um, what might be going on with the plurals, right? And, um, it could be a proximity thing. But then, as it turns out, if we take that attractor and put it before the thing that we're supposed to be agreeing with, right, um, we, we make it such that it's not intervening, right? Um. Like what? Like what? Like what? A really good case of this is it's hard to construct these things, um, but, um, they're usually done with,

1:14:10like, say, relative clauses, right? So you say something like the driver who the runners waved to, right? Um, the driver who the, these are always hard to construct. The drivers, plural, who the runner waved to, right? So you have this relative clause verb is plural, waved. It agrees with, it should agree with, uh, the runner, the subject of that relative clause. But, and, and as it turns out, it's that distant first noun that you hear, the drivers, right? Uh, that trip people up. So it's, as soon as you take it into a context where it's not in

1:14:44a proximal, uh, relationship, then we still get misled. So it's not proximity. Yeah. And so what happens, right, is we, we start to tease the spiral. Maybe, maybe it's about proximity. So let's, if it is about proximity, that makes this really nice prediction. If we make it such that it's not in a, uh, nearby position, then we should, uh, fail to see this, elicit this effect. As it turns out, the effect persists, right? So now, uh, that starts to narrow down the space of possible causes for this, right?

1:15:15Um. Okay. Yeah. Let me ask another question. Sure. Are trees real? Like, in your book. Like syntax trees? There's a lot of syntax trees, and you do a lot of explaining of, oh, well, you see, this thing should hook onto, but this thing should agree with the noun back there. Mm-hmm. And not with the thing that's nearby, because that's a completely different, because that's a completely different branch of the tree. Um, linguists, like, certain linguists in particular, a lot of linguists like to draw syntax trees to represent

1:15:46sentences. That's how we can, for example, in the sentence, uh, the keys to the cabinets, were, something, something, we can see in the little representation of the graphical that the were is attaching to a certain place on the noun phrase and the other things. And we can tease these things out that people can sort of naturally do, and we can find this experimentally by asking people to, like, oh, what happens when you remove this? What happens when you add this? And we can figure out the tree structure.

1:16:17However, is that what is going on in people's heads? Because these proximity effects, which might not explain everything, but maybe it's explaining some things, at least some of the time, don't act through the tree, right? They just act through linear time. This was the most recent thing I heard. So what's up with that? Yeah, so I think there's two things. There's one question of what's the nature, what's the kind of the mental status of the trees that we might draw on a whiteboard for a syntax class or in a syntax textbook,

1:16:50right? And there you can, the way that I think about those is, um, are we, you know, mentally drawing trees in our head? Absolutely not, right? That seems kind of farcical. Um, but at a very fundamental level, right, what we need to do is we need to figure out as we're getting words coming in word by word, we need to figure out how they are grouped together to interpret their meaning, right? And, uh, syntax trees can be thought of in one way as kind of just like a

1:17:20history. Here's one way in which we put these words together to make sense of them, right? Like these things go together, like, uh, a determiner and a noun go together and this thing operates as a unit that I meant, like I mentally represent this as a unit. And we can, we can represent that as a tree and we can say that maybe that's, uh, like a, a representation or a history of, uh, the mental steps that we took to put those things together, right? Are we putting those trees together? Um, am I, or like I said, are we drawing trees in our head?

1:17:54No, they, they, I think about them in the same way that when you look at like say a model of the solar system, right? So remember you, you can, you see those models where it's like a crank gear thing of the sun and the planets go around and they're on this wire, right? And so we can think of the solar system as this model where these wires go around. We can, uh, talk about the orbits in this circle here, right? Or this ellipse, you know, but we go out into space and of course there's not these actual wires or

1:18:27these lines in which they, they follow. Um, so, so you have this, the, the representation of that and we, there's different formalisms to say like maybe how things are represented and so on. So we can think about things in that way. And then there's another question that comes from that, that says, if that is how things are represented and that's how we want to represent things during moment by moment communication, are we interpreting things and building some sort of, uh, kind of internal representation of those words in that way that we might draw on the whiteboard, right? And that's a really active area of, of research, right?

1:19:03Are we constructing hierarchical representations of the input? And it turns out that, you know, some evidence is in cases we're just paying attention to like linear order, right? What comes before, like, just, you know, what, what are we doing? And that seems to be imposed by like, I'm just quickly trying to get a quick understanding of the sentence. So like, I'm not going to take the time to build all this hierarchical structure. That's just too much work. Right. And then, um, there are other really interesting findings coming out that saying like,

1:19:34Hey, in order to do the really subtle nuanced things that you need to do for language and, and hooking things up and understanding how words relate, the only way that you can do that is to, to understand the real, the abstract relationships between those words, right? So you have to, you have to pose some structure behind that, right? Um, you have to, you have to structure the input in some ways to, to make sense of that, right? And so the question then becomes under what conditions are we just looking by word by word linear order

1:20:05or building words on a string? And what are the conditions under which we have to actually do put in the work to, to figure out the structure, figure out the details of how things are going together to make sense of the input, right? And some of those ways that we might be grouping things non-linearly might also be structured, but not be tree-like. Yes, exactly. Right. Or they might involve like what we think of as little tree lids, right? Or templates, like things that, uh, it, so it's, you know, we like to think of things as

1:20:37either you do or you don't build this structure and those are, that creates this really nice debate that, uh, gets, gets papers published, you know? Yeah, I was gonna say, it creates a fun playground, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it turns out that like, you know, when you, when you take a careful look at the literature, it's not an either or, right? It's like sometimes you're doing it and then if we're looking at natural language, there is research showing that as soon as you feel like you've got an understanding of the sentence after

1:21:08you've put in the hard work, then you just start paying attention to linear order, right? So it's not, it's not an either or, it's what we're interested in is like, what causes us to, to build that structure? Why do we have to build that structure when we do build it? How can we get by when we don't have to build that structure, right? And so, um, I think that's the really interesting question is not if you do or don't, but why do you have to do it when you do? Why don't you do it when you don't have to do it,

1:21:41right? I agree with you. I think you're, you're a hoot, you're a fun guest. Um, I think, I think part of what you're saying is, is what I also find interesting about, about studying language, which is like, what are the, the, the bare minimums? What are the skeletons of what we need? And where do some of these theoretical models predict things that are too complex that we don't need or people don't make use of or don't really, like people don't embed sentences, you know, five levels deep, really. Yeah, exactly. Right. And even when we do, we have ways of trying to,

1:22:14uh, you know, one, one of the illusions I talk about in my book is if you, when you start to embed things, people will like skip out on a verb. They'll, they'll drop one of the verbs and, you know, and so we, we have ways of trying to get around it. And, you know, of course, if you, when you, when you, if you omit a verb from the structure, then something, something is, you, you can't build a full fleshed out hierarchy, like the structure of that. You can't do the entire robust, complete tree. Right. So something has to happen where you're, you're kind of skipping

1:22:48some steps. You're, you're skipping over things. Um, and what, what are the consequences of that? You know, I think that those are the interesting questions. I keep coming back to constructions, constructions, these form meaning pairings that are maybe multi-word expressions that we could just sort of rip out and use if we want to, or maybe, you know, single words or pairs of words that may be connected to each other via, I don't know, maybe tree, let sort of hierarchical things, or maybe not, but do you have a place for constructions in your view?

1:23:19There's always a place for these things. Right. And so the, the question becomes, when are you using those things? Right. Um, and how are they used? My, the question that interests me is, um, right. So maybe we have these, uh, particular constructions or templates that we like to slot in the input. Right. Uh, that is a very reasonable, valid way to think about how we might structure the input. Right. The question then becomes, when are you using those? When, uh, do you have to go beyond the template or the construction template that you're trying to fit the

1:23:50input? Because the, the input is always so variable, right? Like you, you're going to always get something that deviates from that. And so I think those are reasonable approaches to how you might structure the input. You're, what are you bringing to the table to say like, Hey, I need to make sense of all of this input that's coming into me. Like what do, let me throw in everything that I have to make sense of this. I know that, uh, there are certain constructions out in the world that, uh, I frequently encounter. And so I'm going to use that information. At the same time, I have this very detailed, stuffy grammatical constraints

1:24:26that says, for whatever reason, here's how my language works that I have to put together these things. And so now I'm going to have to recruit those things to, to guide what I'm doing. And then that's impacted by other things like how crappy your working memory system is. And you're, you're trying to navigate all of that at the same time, right? And so it creates, uh, this very dynamic process where you're, you're trying to balance all of these things out at the same time, not waste too many cognitive resources. So you can actually move on with the conversation, right?

1:24:59Um, so, so I think there's certainly a place for these things. And then, like I said, the question is not if there is or isn't, but when do these things come into play? And why are we using it under these conditions and not these other cases and so on? There are also like, like you just said with the Moses and Noah thing in general, there are expectations about who is a likely agent or object in certain sentences. So like trees generally don't speak and stones don't eat. So like if someone said that the stone was eating something, you would, you would assume they meant something else

1:25:34or stop them or something aware. But if you took like a pure, like non-semantic grammatical view, then there's no reason why stones can't speak. This happens sometimes with friends I have who are like field linguists who want to, you know, they want to get the full paradigm of the word speak and they try out all different types of agents and then they get to like, I don't know, a stone or something. And then people are like, what are you, why do you want me, what is this? This is madness. Or something like gendered, like no, men don't do that or women don't do that.

1:26:09So I can't say that sentence because, and that's a, that's a fun way of viewing because I think in a lot of Western European countries in particular and generally in sort of like heavily standardized school education, you get taught that grammar sort of exists like devoid from the semantics a bit as if it's like a separate set of rules where you can say anything. But that's not how everyone else conceives of what a rule in a language necessarily is. If you know what I mean. Yeah, I mean, the way that I like to think about

1:26:42them is they're kind of like instructions on, on what to do. So you're getting this input and the grammar is not so much a rule, but it says like, hey, here's a set of instructions for putting things together. What do I need to find? How do I, how, what do I need to link up? How should it link up? How, what are not possible ways of linking things up? They're just kind of like instructions for you to figure things out, right? And sometimes you pay attention to instructions. Sometimes you don't, you know.

1:27:13We recently covered a study that showed that some languages just don't show attraction effects. If you try to tempt them with a plural or something, they just don't go for it. Like, for example, Czech is one of these. Yeah. Why do some languages just not show these effects? You know, for the small group of people in the world that care about agreement attraction on a daily basis, that's like a huge puzzle for them, right? It's like, um, it was a case where for the longest time, every, every language that we've sampled, it was like, hey, susceptible to these errors, right?

1:27:47And they all seem to be showing the same sort of patterns, right? Language after languages, some nuance across languages. Of course, um, languages make different pieces of information available with their morphology and syntax and so on. And so we see some nuance across languages, but then all of the languages that we've tested have always shown it. And then all of a sudden, recently, it's like, hey, Czech is different, right? It's like, what? Like, all of a sudden, you're not, you're not, it's not susceptible. And so that's really surprising, right? When, so when, um, I mean, that's just, A, just a super cool, like,

1:28:22finding, right? And so the question then becomes, what's going on? And like I said, you know, in my book, I put together this survey of like, hey, we have like nearly like a hundred studies on, on attraction. And they all show this except for this like one case, right? And so anytime you see this, you know, the question in any kind of science is like, is there something really unique about the language, which would be super informative if that's the case, right? Or is it that we just haven't figured out the right manipulation to elicit the effect, right?

1:28:55We haven't, we haven't figured out the trick to do it yet, right? And, you know, that, that's hard because like Czech is not some like completely obscure language that linguists haven't, that they just discovered, right? We, we, we, we know about this there. We, we have a good understanding of the, um, the grammar of the language. Unfortunately, they have found these kinds of attraction effects in other Slavic languages, right? Yes, right. So family related languages show the effect, right? So what's going on, right? And so the question becomes, is there something truly unique about Czech, which would be

1:29:30super cool? And then what we would have to do is figure out what it is that's unique about Czech that all these other languages that we've tested, like what, what's the difference, right? Um, that's going to be whatever, if that's the case, whatever that turns out to be, that's going to be super informative, right? That's going to be informative, not just for psycholinguists, but also, uh, syntacticians, morphologists, right? That's going to be really interesting. Um, or what it is, is there's something about the methods or the stimuli

1:30:03or the constructions that we're using to try to elicit the effect where we just haven't tapped into the right thing yet to show that there's a case, right? So, you know, in some of my previous work, what I've tried to do is take cases where we predict for the longest time, we predicted that you shouldn't be susceptible to an illusion. And then if you dig, dig hard, like deep enough, right, you can, you can do something that will all of a sudden flip the switch and make the, the, the illusion come on, right?

1:30:37But maybe that's what's going, maybe we can do that. We just have to dig a little bit deeper. Maybe, like I said, it's just something, there's something fundamentally unique about Czech and, you know, maybe if we test other languages, there might be other languages that don't show the effect, but maybe there's something unique about Czech and it's either what is unique about Czech and, and, or why is it so hard to elicit the effect in it? If there is, turns out to be effect, why is it so hard to do that, right?

1:31:11Right now, or those, those are the questions on the table. Well, it's minimally true that like the methods by which these evil psycholinguists have tried to trick everyone else isn't tricking Czech people yet. Yeah. That is minimally true. Yeah, exactly. So, so there's either, like you were saying, maybe we just need to work harder at more complicated tricks or there's something very special about Czech, time will tell. I mean, when there is one outlier out of so many languages, you're always tempted to go, well, maybe something went wrong in that experiment or like maybe something, time will

1:31:47tell. But, but it's a, it's a fun avenue of research. This has been a really high level grammatical discussion, but I think it's time to bring it home. Sure. I'm going to ask you to distill the book a little bit and say, from all your work in linguistic illusions, what have you learned about the way that we perceive and process language? What I've learned is that it's a very dynamic process. It's an extremely sophisticated system, right? So when we are interpreting language, just as we're talking here right now, right?

1:32:20It's not a hard thing, right? I feel, you know, it's something that's intuitively easy to talk and communicate, right? We make these errors, right? So what it suggests is that we have these very sophisticated mechanisms that allowed us to do what we're doing right here, right now. Very smart things, very rich interacting systems, right? But those systems are not infallible, right? And so they can go wrong. And what I've learned from my work on all of this is it's a very dynamic process.

1:32:51And I think what's most interesting is trying to figure out the kind of the nuts and bolts of all of that, right? So trying to figure out how all of these things work together. And when things do go wrong, can we pinpoint what's going wrong? So you're kind of playing the version of a mechanic of the human mind for the language system, right? Somebody comes in and says, hey, my system's making this error, right? You have to diagnose what's going on. And when you start to do that, you learn something really cool about

1:33:24the language. You learn something really cool about how the language is working and hooking up with all these other different cognitive systems like working memory and cognitive control and attention, all of the things that say you care about in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. And putting all of that together, you end up getting this really rich picture of a very sophisticated system that's interacting and it's very dynamic and trying to figure out how all of those pieces are going together and how I'm able to put all of that together when there are days where I can't

1:33:58even remember why I put my keys, right? Like, I can do this, like, easily, you know, after a cup of coffee, but I can't figure out where my keys are, right? So, like, something very rich and sophisticated is going on. What's going on there? I think that's just an absolutely fascinating, you know, question. I love how it has to work, but it doesn't have to work perfectly. It just has to work well enough. Yeah, right? And so what are the conditions that, where am I pushing

1:34:28things just to get by? Where do I, where do I have to put in the real work to make sense of things and so on? Those are all super interesting questions that I think are kind of the forefront of where things are going. Like, it's not so much, like, if you do or don't put in the work, what's the dynamic process that determines when I'm doing the work and when I'm not doing the work and that sort of thing? I think what I've learned is there's a lot more that we don't know about that than

1:35:02there is that we know about it, right? It's like that kind of classic problem in science. The more you learn, the more you realize you don't know. So it just opens up all these interesting questions about what we don't know yet. This reminds me a lot of the chat we recently had with Steve Levinson, which I believe is also now as a video on our YouTube channel where... Oh, okay, great. We were talking about, like, how, like, sometimes I get this feeling of, like, you know how people describe when

1:35:34they're very high or something? You, like, look at your hand and you're like, what the fuck is this? Like, how does this work? And as soon as you start thinking about language and communication, it's like, I have ideas in my mind and then I, like, manipulate some fleshy bits in my throat and then, like, similar ideas occur in your head. That's bonkers. Like, that's wild. Like, and that it works so well most of the time. Right, yeah. I mean, you make these little perturbations of air molecules that hit my ear, right?

1:36:06And then all of a sudden, like, bam, like, almost instantly, within hundreds of milliseconds, I'm able to, like, comprehend, put together thoughts, and have this very rich experience of communication, right? And, but at the same time, I make these really stupid errors, right? These, like, simple things where, like, I mess up subject-verb agreement. Like, huh. Like, if this system is so sophisticated, why am I messing up something so simple, right? Like, I think that's just a very, like, fascinating set of conflicting results. At one time, I'm doing something rich and sophisticated. At the same time, I'm doing something, like, incredibly stupid, right?

1:36:42And why is that, right? And as it turns out, it's, like, it's really informative about how these different systems interact. You have your knowledge of language. You have your working memory. You have your cognitive control. And figuring out, like, where the problem is. And that just tells us something about what we're building, what we're paying attention to, what we're not. I think that's just, for me, that's just fundamentally fascinating, right? And then you can extend this to other domains. Like, when things do go wrong for cases of, say, health

1:37:15purposes, right? Somebody has some language deficit or some cognitive deficit that affects language, right? You can start to figure out and diagnose the problem in a little bit more straightforward way. You can figure out, oh, this is a memory problem. This is a control problem, right? You can start to apply these things to large language models and so on, right? And so I think it's just a very rich area of work. The book is Linguistic Illusions, a Case Study on Agreement Attraction.

1:37:47And we're talking to the author, Dr. Dan Parker. Dan, thanks so much for hanging out with us today. It's been a lot of fun. Thanks. It's been a pleasure. And now it is time. Wow. Do you know what I've realized, Daniel? I've forgotten that for a good, solid chunk of our podcast relationship, I performatively hated Word of the Week. Like, for a solid eight or nine years of doing the show, I had completely forgotten about that. Like, I know it wasn't hidden from you guys, but what I mean is.

1:38:22It's been so long that I was like, oh, yeah, I used to pretend to hate Word of the Week. How strange. And now you kind of look forward to it, right? It's like the one thing. It's like your special thing. Yeah. All right. Well, here we go. First one. I noticed this one in the pages of the West Australian, and it was the first time I run across it, so I'm mentioning it. Trumpflation. Oh, that's fun. Yeah. We're all seeing a bit of Trumpflation, aren't we?

1:38:55We've got a few flation productive endings, don't we? Yes, indeed. Shrinkflation. Stagflation. Deflation, naturally, all the ones. Yeah. As things get worse and worse, including this. So, I'll move on. That was quick. When can I do mine? You've got one, Hedwig. Why don't you hit us with it? I've got one that Benjamin might know about. The reason I'm calling him Benjamin is because he put that name on the... It is also my name, so fair enough. So, my word of the week is double dutch. Double dutch.

1:39:29Double dutch. Oh, okay. The jump rope technique. There's a double dutch. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, Daniel, yes. Hedwig, also yes. I know about both strands of this meaning. Strands. Right. So, there's a popular dance craze swiping TikTok, and it's... Molly Long has done a choreography to a very funky song. That came out in 1981, and the song is called Double Dutch Bus. And now the question is, Daniel, you remember this song? It's back in my consciousness because I was a music dork in the early, early 80s.

1:40:03Right. What do you think double dutch means? Oh, well, I do know this one. I mean, double dutch in the jump rope sense means you've got two jump ropes. It's a way... I don't know exactly how to do it, but I've seen videos of young girls playing together, doing this jump rope technique, and it's called double dutch with two ropes. So, that is most likely the meaning that's evoked in this song. It's about playing a game on the street and jumping around.

1:40:35There are three other meanings of double dutch. Cool. What are they? Okay. All right. Let's take it... Let's see if we can take a stab at this. I'm actually thinking that the jump rope has appropriated one of these names, probably. So, and when I say appropriated, I just mean like it came to be called that from something else. There's going dutch. So, I'm wondering if there's a version of going dutch that became double dutch to do with

1:41:06like sharing resources or something like that? Not to my knowledge. So, I'm getting these four meanings from a dictionary because a lot of places didn't list all of these. And two of them are actually very similar to each other. So, you can just guess. One of them is not appropriate for children. Okay. I'm guessing that one or two of these are extremely derogatory because we've got a lot of dutch expressions. Like a dutch uncle is an abusive uncle. Dutch courage is fake courage from drinking liquor.

1:41:37Dutch ovens, a big pot that you stick in the fire because they wouldn't... They wouldn't have... They've been too stupid to have a real oven. And going dutch, which is a bit of a slur. You're saying that they don't like to pay for stuff and so they'll make you pay and you go dutch. So, is double dutch like language that's not understood because it's just gibberish? Double dutch is incomprehensible language. Yes. That is one of the meanings. So, it's similar to like, that's all Greek to me.

1:42:09That's gibberish. There's also apparently a language game similar to Pig Latin that is called double dutch. So, two of the meanings are like incomprehensible language. The other meaning I don't think you're going to get, so I'm just going to say it. But apparently double dutch can be used as slang for when you have sex and the girl is on the pill and the man has a condom. Double dutch, okay. Gotcha. Yeah, double protection. You're all sort of belts and braces really not getting pregnant.

1:42:40Well, that just sounds like responsible safe sex to me. Yeah, it sure does. Yeah. Yeah, doubling up. So, apparently that is also another meaning of double dutch. But the meaning that's evoked in the song that's currently having a bit of a revival seems to be the jump rope game one. Okay. Can I suggest as well, anyone who might only be encountering this in passing, can I please implore you to watch more than the first sequence of the dance? Because the dance is actually quite long. And everyone, nearly all of the clips that I've seen cut off after

1:43:16about like maybe 30 seconds. And yeah, exactly, Hedwig is now doing a second phase of the dance, which is so good. Like it is a really, really good dance. It's one of those things of like just sit and watch some people be excellent at a thing for like three minutes. It is a well-spent three minutes. Well, we'll be slapping up a link in the show notes for this episode. Thank you, Hedwig. Next one. This one was suggested by Bill on Blue Sky.

1:43:46Thanks, Bill. So, something happened with Grammarly recently. I don't know if you noticed this one. Yes. I contacted Grammarly and asked them about it. You did you? Sorry, hang on. Yeah. Backtrack. Say more. Well, you can just file a support ticket and ask stuff. It's not hard. I know people can, but no one does. I'm the annoying person who does. So, what Daniel is alluding to, I believe, is the thing that happened where Grammarly, a popular online service that can help you sort of correct grammar, has recently expanded a lot of the

1:44:20services to include more text generation and more sort of comprehensive edits and stuff. AI-supported large language models, AI-supported large language models, and recently they've come up with this function that is supposed to be like, oh, if you're writing a text and you want to know what Mark Twain would have thought about your text. He is us sort of impersonating him using his text and suggesting edits that would make it more Mark Twain-y. I hate this very much. Same, same. It's not just Mark Twain, either.

1:44:51There's an article by Julia Angwin in the New York Times, why I'm suing Grammarly. Some of the people were Stephen King. Oh, dear. Bell Hooks, the late Bell Hooks. Oh, that's a big oof. The journalist and podcaster, Kara Swisher. These are people who are alive. That's... Yeah. I don't like that. I can understand why they would really not like that. So, if you've had someone create an AI of you, what do you call that person? It's your... Sloppleganger. Sloppleganger is phenomenal. Isn't that great? Very, very good.

1:45:22I like that. I mean, I am on record as being a tremendous fan of Slop in all of its many, many forms. It's such a wonderfully disgusting, derisive term. Like, the mouthfeel on Slop is just exquisite. Bunch of Slop. So, what had happened was I saw a lot of these news reports about various names being mentioned and people using the service and finding them occurring and not being very happy about it. So, I couldn't find a list of these so-called experts that you could ask for writing advice.

1:45:54So, I wrote to Grammarly as a... I think I have an account there and I thought, I'll just ask the support if I can see a list because it's a sort of paid service and I thought, I want to know what it is. I don't have that tier yet. And they responded to me and said that... They responded to me, I think, on the 11th of March and said that tomorrow, 12th of March, we are cancelling this feature. Okay. Because we... And I said... Everyone hates this. Yeah, cool, cool, cool.

1:46:26Can I still get a list of that? And they were like, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They sniffed you out real good. The class action lawsuit had its intended effect. You know, technology needs to be consentful. That's not consentful. That's infuriating. It really doesn't though, Daniel. I don't know if you've been paying attention. It doesn't need to be. I think what you meant to say was, it would be really nice if... Oh, that would be nice. How about, I'd be willing to fight for a consentful technology.

1:46:57We need to fight for the world we want, but there are so many corporations to fight with and they all have so much money. So one fight we need to have is to have the rules and regulations in place. And one of those is, data, technology needs to be consentful. You don't get to impersonate actual people. That should be a hard line. Even dead grandparents or dead celebrities. That's just... That's gross. That's gross. That is gross. And it's one of the reasons I'm happy to be living in the European Union,

1:47:29where the European Union as a whole takes more of these stands, compared to, I think, both Australia and certainly compared to US, where move fast and break things seems to be the preferred mode. Mm-hmm. Do it before anybody knows what you're doing and you don't need to get permission. So a sloppleganger is a digital agent impersonating you. Thanks, Bill. Diego also suggested sloptimization. Oh, okay. Then we've got two of my fave coming in strong. What is sloptimization? Here's the Blue Sky post. This is from GameFiend.BlueSky.Social.

1:48:00My son came up with the best term for the DLSS5. Do you know about this? I do. It's a modeling engine. Now we're talking Ben Ainsler's language. Okay. So if I understand correctly, it's a photorealistic rendering engine. Okay. I will do this as quickly as I can for the sake of people listening. And my fellow gaming nerds, please don't come at me for, like, being overly simplistic, but it's very complicated and we need to boil it down quite a lot. Um, in recent time, uh, various graphic chip manufacturers have invented

1:48:32essentially a new way of rendering graphics that is essentially a form of, like, AI upscaling. Um, but this was happening before we had this big AI revolution and generative text and all that kind of stuff. It's been going on for, like, maybe, say, like, 10 years. Um, NVIDIA's version, one of these, is called DLSS. And the most recent one, there's been, like, four generations up until this point, and they're just previewing the fifth generation. And it's done some rendering passes on existing games. And people, specifically game designers, are unhappy with the results of

1:49:06this, um, new version of DLSS. Uh, I'm not actually hugely across why they're hating on it so much because, to me, it looks like a relatively boring next step towards photorealistic graphics, which, from my perspective as a gamer, has been a conversation that's been going on for, like, 30 years. And for at least 25 of those years, it's been a very boring and uninteresting conversation about, like, how many more polygons we can squeeze into a thing and how many more light beams we can reflect off a thing,

1:49:38um, to the detriment of, like, good game design a lot of the time, in my opinion. Anyway, um, but a lot of game designers are, I think, quite irate about the fact that this hyper-realistic rendering is sort of gazumping their design choices around characters and what they look like and that sort of thing. Okay. Is this similar to that AI feature that was built into some people's TV's that was doing some sort of weird smoothing, filling in? Do you remember? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:50:09So it is a bit like that. And, um, as in, it's not a frame rate thing. It's like a, it's a rendering thing. So it's about how, like, light is falling on characters' faces and that sort of thing, rather than the smoothness of the motion. But I think fundamentally you are kind of conceptually right in the sense that, I mean, one of the things that I don't quite understand about it is a lot of people are talking about, like, Uncanny Valley stuff.

1:50:40But if I'm being honest, I feel like games have been in the Uncanny Valley for a solid decade already. And a lot of the games I look at and play, I'm like, your digital puppet creeps me out. Aren't we at the level that, like, some video game footage of games where there is war is taken out of context and then being spread. It's like, this is a little clip from what's going on in Iran right now, which is crazy. But it has happened, I think, a few times and people are not able to spot

1:51:15it. Though some gamers are like, that's whatever game is. Yes, I think that is a thing that exists. But I would also say that it is as prevalent as, like, AI deepfakes of politicians saying things that they've never said or something like that, right? Like, it happens, but it's not actually as, like. Okay. Well, let me get back to the skeet then. My son came up with the best term for the DLSS5 and other weird gen AI non-improvement, at least the first time I've heard it, slop-tomization.

1:51:47It's perfect. No, no. I like it. Yep, slop. Always good. I love seeing slop as a combining form. I think that's what it's breaking into. Yeah. Finally, this one was suggested by James on our Discord. It's a combination of a sneaker and a ballet flat. It's the sneakerina. Okay. Do a little search for sneakerinas. I'm doing this right now. Oh, comfy, secretly. It's an amalgamation of a ballet flat and a sneaker. I think I would wear these. I'm going to be completely honest.

1:52:18I don't understand how this is that different from a ballet flat. No, it's quite different from a ballet flat. I'm looking at the pictures here, but it is also a type of sneaker shoe that I thought I'd seen for a while. Yeah. It's kind of like it's giving a bit loafer as well. Yeah. There's a bit. I think I would wear these. As a kid in the 80s, I actually wore China flats. A lot of us did because I was an arts and theater kid and I was cultivating an effete anti-jock

1:52:52aesthetic. I feel you, Daniel. I get you. I get who young Daniel was. Yeah. Say, does anyone have a favorite hybrid word for fashion? For me, nothing comes close to jorts. Jorts is on the jean shorts. Skorts are also pretty good. Skirts. Yeah, skorts. Skirt shorts. Skirt shorts. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's pretty good. Brilliant. What else is there? I've always thought the way, I think it's Americans, say jean jacket is really cute and quite twee. Oh, right. Instead of a denim jacket. Yeah, exactly.

1:53:24It's a jean jacket. I'm trying to think of, yeah. I can't think of anything else. Portmanteau clothing. Sneakerina is interesting. I'm not feeling it. I don't like it. Okay. As in, the things themselves, fine. I'm not liking Sneakerina as a name because we don't call them ballerinas, right? No. One says, check out my ballerina shoe. No, but remember, if you're going to do a portmanteau, each bit of it has to be recognizable. And I think Ina is the ending that works.

1:53:56So thanks, James, for that. Sneak lays, yeah. Sneak flat. Sneak lay flats. Doesn't work. So, Trumpflation, double Dutch, sloppelganger, sloptimization, and Sneakerina. This is fun to say. Our words of the week. Let's talk about a comment. Actually, a bunch of comments because we had a TikTok video go nuts last week. Oh, fun. Yep. It was one with Corey Stamper about colors. It got 150,000 views and hundreds of comments. I know, right? It's like the XKCD thing, man. When you get people talking about color, they lose their fucking mind.

1:54:31They do. They certainly did. We'll never be this famous again. That's it. That's it. I like it. What's really nice about it in the conversation with Corey is that you've color-coded so you can actually... Like, when we speak like this and we say chartreuse, we have to describe what the color is. But what's so beautiful about video is that you can just put in the color, which Daniel wrote... You just put chartreuse on the screen. I just dropped it in.

1:55:02Yes. You can just show what the color is, which really helped. Kind of weird to have hundreds of people commenting on our stuff. People that just don't know the show. They just saw the video. They're just coming in cold. Also, TikTok comment sections are fucking, like, loose as all hell. They really were. So, there was some discussion, me and Corey, we were talking about why people don't get what color vermilion is or chartreuse. So, people had comments. One set of comments focused on, people think vermilion is green

1:55:37because chameleon. Oh. Interesting. Some focused on the movie Coraline. Elven Princess says, Chartreuse is a button color option for Coraline. Roses Are Prettiest says, it's Coraline. That's why. They say vermilion and chartreuse in that movie, so everyone always mixes up the colors. There's a TikTok video of that bit, and I'll link to that. Also, many people focused on Pokemon. Jacob 2 says, Vermilion City and Pokemon is where the water gym is, and I always thought it was like a seafoam color. That's why I've been, vermilion for me has been like firing

1:56:13off a little fucking disused neuron in the back of my brain this whole time, and that's what it is. Vermilion City, yeah, in the Kanto region, Joto region, one of the two. Momo says, I used to think vermilion was yellow because of Pokemon. I misassociated the coloring of the city with yellow because that is where the electric gym is, and upon further recollection, the city is actually very red. I like one of the comments, JB, who said, I thought chartreuse was

1:56:45a red shade because of ruse, which sounds like rouge, which is red in French, and I agree with that. I did make a joke about how chartreuse had to be from the chartreuse region, otherwise it's just sparkling green. I made a joke about that, but little did I know how right I was. Q333 says, cool fact, the color chartreuse was named after the spirit chartreuse of the same color. There's two varieties, but the original yellow is where the color comes from, and yes, it is the chartreuse region,

1:57:17or the monastery of the Carthusian order. There you have it, folks. There you go. So thanks to all you commenters. Thanks to Corey for our one shot at fame. Wow, what a productive TikTok comment section. I know, it was really great. For the rest of my life, I'll be chasing that dragon. We'll never be famous again. It's all downhill from here. As opposed to Daniel, you and I are more active TikTok users. We can come up with another thing that will do this. What will that be? No, we can't. No, we can't.

1:57:47Don't. No, no, we can't. There is no rhyme or reason. We just got to throw lots of shit at the wall and then something. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that same video was dog shit on Instagram. Yeah, that's what I mean. We can try and get Daniel to do the lush life dance. Not doing it. Or the double Dutch dance. Okay, I'll do it. Hey, thanks to our guest, Dan Parker. Thanks to everybody who gave us ideas, words, and news. Thanks to Speech Docs for transcribing all the words. Thanks to you, great patrons.

1:58:18And Ben and Hedvig, thanks for hanging out with me every once in a while. I really enjoy it. I want to put a call out before we go any further because now that I am a desiccated grape upon the vine, 15 years a swaying, we would love people who are currently listening to my voice in your ear holes for you to spread the word about Because Language. You can follow us. We are at becauselanguage.com on Blue Sky and at Because Lang Pod. And if you are thinking to yourself, well, you said spread the word, but now you're getting us to join

1:58:51socials. In the weird media hellscape that we exist in now, that kind of is spreading the word. Like, engagement is spread and stuff. But more importantly, far more importantly, you can send us ideas, you can engage with us. Daniel is a red-hot good guy at getting back to people. Like, if you are the Hedvigs of the world and you want to lodge a support ticket with Because Language, Daniel fucking talks to you. He will get back to you. I do. I do. And if you are a listener of this show and you listen to us all the

1:59:23time, we have been doing more TikTok videos. So if you ever wonder, like, I can't tell Ben and Daniel apart, I don't know why that would be a thing, but like, let's pretend it is. You could see them and you could also see that they kind of look a bit alike as well. So it wouldn't really help that much. You do look a bit alike. You've got blondish hair. You've got similar face structure somewhat. So what Hedvig is saying is we are two balding, middle-aged white men. Yes. You're not balding, are you? Yes. Definitely. Anyway, if you want to see videos, there are some on the

1:59:57YouTube channel, but there is also the TikTok channel where you can see. You can also see videos sometimes of our guests because we record them as well. So Corey Stamper, we've recorded and other people. So that's really nice if you want to put faces to voices, which is not something you have to do, but if you do. And if you want to put your voice into this show, you can do that as well by going to SpeakPipe. You can get to the SpeakPipe from our website or you can email hello at becauselanguage.com like someone did

2:00:29today in the quaintest and most adorable old school form of getting in touch with us. And of course, the most important one of all, you can just tell people about our show and be like, you should give them a listen. They're really fucking good, bro. Or a different voice of your choosing. Whatever you like. No, that was good. You can also become a patron. You can get stuff depending on your level. There's live shows, bonus episodes, mail outs, shout outs, Discord access. We get your support, which helps us to keep the show running.

2:00:59It keeps us in supplies and software, which is considerable. Keeps the regular episodes free for everybody. So, hey, you're doing a public service there and you get shout outs like this one. I'm going to give a shout out to our patrons at the supporter level. So, you know how I love to order the names in weird and wonderful ways. And this time... Yes, what is this week's insanity crawl? We're doing an alphabet walk. An alphabet walk? What's that? Yep. So, let's just say that I look at your name and I just want to see how many letters,

2:01:36how many steps it takes to get from one letter to the next one. So, Ben, I start with B and then I walk over to E. That's three spaces. C, D, E. And then I walk over to N and that's a certain number of spaces and then you get a score. Divide by the number of letters, of course, so that it's roughly normalized. Oh, okay. And it doesn't matter if it's in the order, right? So, B, B would be not penalized that you go back and forth.

2:02:11It's just steps. Oh, well, if there's double letters, then that's a zero. But also, I decided to add a little twist. I decided that you could only go forward, not backward. Oh, okay. So, B to A is 26 plus one. Yep. Okay. So, the first one on our list is, Ben, you had the shortest steps to take. Does that mean I win or does that mean I lose? You win the alphabet walk. Okay. You're the simplest. Yes.

2:02:42Thank you, Hedvig. I am the simplest. You know who's also simple? Rosh. Had a score of four. Oh, okay. Tied. Well, then I'm not the... Yeah, tied. Tied for first. Yeah, exactly. Yep. There's Stan. There's Molly D. And Lord Mortis. I can't believe that many letters is that low. Divide by the number of letters to get the average. Okay, yeah. So, it's normalized. That's around the fives. Around the sixes, we get... Oh, Tim. Tim. We get Steele and Sam. Up to the sevens, Joanna, Diego, Zechri, Rachel, and Larry.

2:03:17Now we're up to eight steps. Amy, Lissa, Luis, Ignacio, Manu, and now at nine, Colleen, Lance. Hi, Lance. Thanks for joining. Fiona, Grammarian, Sydney, Lucy, Renee, and Keith. Now we're up to ten. Aldo, John Mack, Chris L, Andy B, John K, Rosemary, Amir, Faux Frenchie, Kenny Archer, Linguistic Chaos. Now we're up to eleven. Kevin, Martha, Amanita, Iztin, Whitney, Helen, John Troy, with the zeros converted to O's, Laura D, James C. Now for number twelve. Twelve steps for Aria Flame, Nikolai, Pharaoh Cat, Christopher, Meredith, now

2:03:51it's getting a bit long. Now Aisha is thirteen. So is Nasrin, Roger, Mignon, Elias, Kathy, Andy from Logophilius. Whew, it's getting a bit of a walk now. Tony, you're on fourteen and a quarter. I'm here. Fourteen and a third steps on average. Nigel is fifteen. Wolfdog is sixteen. So is Sonic Snedghog. And the winner for the longest path, it's Hedvig. Yeah. Daniel, did you do this deliberately? Did you seek to find something that would put Hedvig and I at

2:04:23the beginning and the end of the list? I don't have that much time. Okay. Let's look at this as well because, so Nigel, fifteen point twenty, and then it's Wolfdog and Sonic Snedghog, which are not, I'm going to call them not common first names. No, perhaps not. And then Hedvig. A relatively not, like, not crazy name. Yeah, but look what had to happen. We had to start at H and go all the way around the

2:04:53alphabet to E, then all the way around the alphabet again to D. Then a fairly straightforward word to V, all the way back to I, and then all the way back to G. Yeah, so you lose because you've, you've kept having letters that are actually one letter after the letter. One or two before. Yep. That's what's happening. This would have been shorter if you could go backwards, but nope, I'm not allowing it. Thanks to all of our patrons.

2:05:25Sorry, it's just, yeah. Okay. Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Capiano, who also performs with Rambino and Didion's Bible. Thanks for listening. We'll catch you next time because language. Thanks very much. Thanks, team. I now confer upon you honorary linguist status. No, no, no. The highest honor that I can bestow. Do you know what? I don't want it. Not because I'm like, ooh, I don't want to be a linguist, but more. Just like, I don't want to besmirch linguistics with my addition.

2:05:59Foul. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't want to foul up the linguistic waters with my presence. Daniel and I can say that you're not the worst thing to swim in the linguistics pool. You're right. We've done shows about this, by the way. Just to be clear, not the compliment you think it is. Ben, there's scum at the bottom of the pool that is slightly worse than you. It's true, though, and we know it's true. Thank you for aging me and withering me in one unified statement,

2:06:33Daniel. Do you know, it's so funny that we bring this up because I was sitting in traffic today and I was gazing at some signs absentmindedly. And I saw what I think might be the single, like the full spectrum of amazing Australian graphic design. Like the very, very best anywhere in branding and the very, very worst. And they were exactly alongside each other. What do you think the single greatest logo in Australian branding is? And what do you think the single worst is? And I'm talking like really, really big names.

2:07:09These are two giant signs I saw on the side of the road. Okay, okay. Hold on. I quite like JB Hi-Fi. Oh, it's good. Yes, it's a good bit. It's not flashy, but it's good. It's clear. Hedwig might not know the best one because it's a rebrand that happened maybe in the last three or four years or so, maybe five. Is it food? It is food. One of them is food. The good one is food and the bad one is banking.

2:07:42Is it cheese? Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, didn't you like the ComBank branding? No, ComBank is adequate. Okay. Okay. I'll put you out of your misery. You better tell me, please. The very worst is the weird little, is it a ghost logo thing that ANZ has? The three kind of like semicircles that are stacked together and it doesn't mean or look like it is just the most abstract piece of nonsense. Right? I think it's a person reaching out for a hug.

2:08:14It's a person doing this, right? Yeah. But is, like, is it? So what's that got to do with Australian-Island banking? They tried for the negative space and I just don't think it worked. Okay. Now, for the very, very best, and Hedwig, I implore you to look at this. I'm Googling everything. Red Rooster's new logo. Red Rooster's logo. Oh, that is good. It's ours. Oh, it's the two R's? But it forms a chicken head. It's the two R's, but it makes a chicken face. And that shit is fucking brilliant. Oh, I see. It's good. That is as good as the hidden arrow in FedEx.

That's like Saul Bassgood, in my opinion. I would argue that it makes an owl. Mm-hmm. But. That's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. That's true.