146: Beyond Words (with Karen Stollznow)

Welcome to Because Language

0:00I don't, I mean, I don't believe in like really punishing your cats, but when he does bite me, I just put him down on the floor and he wants to cuddle. So that's punishment. Daniel really wants to do a show, but we better let him do a show. Here's the theme.

0:24Makes me think of a beach. Is this the first time Ben's heard this theme? Yes. No.

0:32Hello and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name's Daniel Midgley. Let's meet the team. We've got linguist and researcher Hedvig Hrgaard. Hi, Hedvig. Hello. Hi. I want to ask you about something. There's been a lot of discourse lately on Blue Sky concerning the spreading of y'all, the plural you. Okay. It's something we're watching out for. A guy named Jack Tyndale became the main character on Blue Sky when someone used y'all and he bleated or skeeted back.

1:03Minor point, but I really hate this performative y'all. People do to try to appear more folksy. I don't type in a Yorkshire accent. And if I did, people would rightly tell me to shut up. So that's what started the whole wave of discussion on y'all. How do you feel about y'all? Would you use it? I first of all want to say that it sounds like not a very productive internet debate and it has passed me by even though I've been on Blue Sky and I'm a little bit glad for it because it sounds like, I mean, I think it's fun when you're in certain domains on

1:35the internet to write a bit more like how you speak. I do that too. And if you're from a park where you write y'all, that might come in handy. Sometimes it makes sense. More registers should be written. There are lots of different adaptations to things. Like, I don't see what the fuss is about. Just chill. Let's just let people do it. Just chill. Let people enjoy their pronouns. Yeah, it's fine. We've got friend and smart person, Ben Ainsley. Hello, Ben.

2:05Good day, everybody. Same question. How do you feel like y'all? Would you use it? I wouldn't. And I don't use our version, which is use or use. Use. Our plural you here in Australia. I don't like the performative use of this thing. My brain is kind of like, I mean, yeah, sure, but we are all fundamentally pretending 100% of the time and doing a little performance of us to everyone constantly.

2:40Like, it's all performance. Spoken like, I mean, so I think that too. Yesterday when I was. That's interesting, Hedwig, because your tone says you don't. No, no, no. Like, we were performing some music yesterday and I was all hyped up when we were on stage and doing things. And then at one point I went to the bathroom and I saw myself in the mirror and I did feel like a full body snatcher. I was like, I am controlling this little person. Yeah, there's a little homunculus inside you pulling all the levers. That is not good and not healthy. That's called disassociation. And not everyone is performing at all times, Ben.

3:15Okay. I, well, sure, whatever. Thanks. Clearly my therapist has been in touch with you at some point to get you to call me. I don't know what that's like. What I would say is there's appropriation, right, which isn't very cool and we don't like this, but y'all is not restricted to a particular ethnicity or group or culture. It's a pretty freaking wide range. It's a lot of people use y'all. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's no like my culture is not your costume element to this particular vocal thing.

3:48In which case, okay, fine, we're not all pretending all the time maybe, but like all words are fundamentally abstract, meaningless, like nonsense. And like, it's, it's the Kurt Vonnegut thing, right? Like if we're stuck on this fucking world, why not play a little bit? And it feels like saying y'all on blue sky is just a very mild and fundamentally quite harmless form of play. But, and I don't think this person was doing this necessarily. Um, I've, I'm also just so wary of people confecting storms in teacups for views.

4:26I see it all the time on, on TikTok and reels and that sort of thing. There's just these like take merchants essentially who are just putting takes out there to see how much like heat they can generate. And that I find that doesn't seem like play. That seems like the evil empire grinding away with a workforce. And so that, that's another reason. If I can just sniff someone trying to get more views, I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Everything's a skit.

4:56It's like, it's what Andrew Tate dictates to his followers. He's like, you should have at least 30% haters in your comment section at all times. Cause that's how you grow on the internet. So you should have spicy takes. And it's like, well, you pay way more attention to that guy than I do. I just, I actually just listened to like academics talking about him. But, um, um, but I also would encourage this poster who said this to do right in Yorkshire accent. That'd be really fun. I know a little bit about Yorkshire dialect.

5:28It's really fun. Do it. I love when a person's example of like, well, here's the bad behavior I wouldn't do. And Hedby's like, that sounds like fun. You should do that thing. Yeah. They say words funny there. It's fun. I would probably use y'all. It's not my variety, but it's gender neutral. It's gendynooch and it works. So why not let it spread?

Interview With Karen Stolzno

5:52Hey, we're having a show. And on this show, we're talking to a guest we haven't talked to for a really long time. Not since Talk the Talk episode 176, Language Myths. We're going way back. What year of our Lord, Daniel, would that particular sarcophagus be sort of excavated from? Was it 2016, 2017? Not even sure. It's Dr. Karen Stolzno. She's a researcher in the Department of Linguistics at Griffith University. She's also the author of Language Myths, Mysteries and Magic, which was the subject of the last show we did,

6:25but also The Language of Discrimination and also a book called Bitch, the Story of a Word. We're going to be talking about her new book, Beyond Words, which is about how we acquire, how we use, and even how we lose language. So language acquisition, language attrition, language use, it's all happening. We're going to be talking about it. Also, we're having a great time with our patrons on our live shows. Our last live show was with Keith Houston, faced with tears of joy about Emoji.

6:55It was a lot of fun. We missed you, Hedvig, but we had fun anyway. Time zones are a bit. We replaced you with approximately two dozen plus patrons. We'd like to thank everybody who is a patron, and for anyone who's not, we hope that you'll join us in supporting the show. Sign up and become a patron. We'll make it worth your while. Just go to patreon.com slash becauselangpod. Hedvig, would you like to give a big welcome to our newest patrons? I would. We have a bunch of new people. At the friend level, we have Brody and Johanna B, who's upgrading from the free tier, and Tessa.

7:30And we want to give a special shout out to Sequoia at the friend level, who entered on a yearly membership, which saves you a bit of money. Very smart, very economical, and clever. We also have a number of people who have joined us as free followers, which you can do on Patreon as well. Those people are Thornus, Storytelling Princess, Marvin W, Davore, M.R., Katerina S, Muncy, Picture My Name, Stefan, and Varayus. Thanks, everybody. And if we ever pronounce one of your names wrongly, you can tell us.

8:03We try. You should speak Pipas.

Shop Signage in Strathfield

8:06That's a good idea, too. You should speak Pipas. Well, it's time for the news, and I've labeled this one Strathfield, New South Wales, back on their bullshit. Well, you're going to have to remind me what their initial bullshit was. Oh, I will. So, last month, the Strathfield Council, now Strathfield is a suburb of inner... Is it Sydney's inner west? It's sounding quite inner west. It is. It's a suburb of the inner west of Sydney in New South Wales, noted for its strong minority language population.

8:38So, in June, Strathfield Council passed a motion saying that the signs on shops must, and I quote, clearly and prominently, display English and not some other language. Does this story sound familiar? Yes. Yeah. What I don't understand about this one is, because sometimes there are rules, like, if you sell a product in a country, you have to have a list of ingredients in certain languages. Sure. This is great in the Nordics, because what they do, I don't know if you've ever seen it, is they just mush up Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian.

9:11Yes. And they do the words in usually Swedish, and then whenever the words are really different, they'll do, like, slash. You get three languages for the price of one. But that rule says you have to have it in at least these languages, so that people know what they're buying, etc. But there's no ban, as far as I know, on, like, if you want to put it in Vietnamese as well, like, fun times, go ahead. So, this isn't, but this, Hedviggy, this isn't packaging legislation. This is for the signage of shops.

9:41Is that right, Daniel? Yep, that's right. So, this is the notion that you can't have a shop that just has, like, Mandarin characters along the top as the only thing that denotes what that shop is. But, sorry, but it's the rule that you have to have it in only English or also English. Okay, well, this is the story that we covered in 2018. At that point, they tried to make a rule that the foreign language text could be there on a sign, but it had to say it in English. The foreign language text couldn't say anything other than what the English said.

10:16And they tried to make a rule that the foreign language text had to be no higher than 30% the height of the English text. That was what they were trying. Okay, I am so petty. It passed, but then because of public pressure or just everyone said, what the heck? They dropped it. Well, now they're trying it again. It was Councillor Esther Kim of the Liberal Party. It was at their June 2026 council meeting, so we only just noticed it. Oh, but this one was raised to us by Ignacio on our Discord, so thanks to Ignacio for that one.

10:51They haven't had a height requirement, but they're saying that it must clearly and prominently show English. The Guardian also reports that a council spokesperson says, no changes to signage requirements will be made until a planned report on any existing policies is considered. So they're having a try. They're trying this again. A lot of shop names are not like words. They're just names. I really like to go to a Chinese restaurant in life called Chang's, and there's no meaningful English version of that name other than Chang's.

11:25So is this like words like restaurant and supermarket that need to be, like what is the thing that needs to be in English? Anything that's in a foreign language. So if let's say it said Chang's traditional medicine supermarket emporium and discount store, and that was all in Mandarin, then all of that would need to be in English as well. I've been thinking about how to think about this, and I've got an angry version and I've got a more reasonable version. The angry version of this is something like,

11:56this is on the way to linguistic fascism. These idiots tried it in 2018. They're trying it again. This is a language majority trying to push policy onto a language minority community. I mean, the people who have the shops, they've made language choices, and those language choices make sense in the context of that community. They're doing fine. But this council is trying to control the conditions under which communication happens and say whose language deserves to be represented in the public square. That's the angry version.

12:28Am I too angry or am I not angry enough? Give us the quote-unquote reasonable version and let's compare and contrast. The reasonable version is this is probably not a big deal. It may actually be kind of good because more people will have access and accessibility matters. The people on the council probably think that they're helping. Esther Kim, the Korean-born councillor who put this motion up, probably doesn't intend any harm to anyone, probably is not a fascist. See, Daniel, I feel like I've got an argument that doesn't touch on any of the stuff that you've just said.

13:00Go for it. Which is, in the cyberpunk slash dieselpunk slash solarpunk future that I want to live in, I really like suburbs with all sorts of shops with whack-a-doodle signage, some of which I can't understand. I like that aesthetic. I like being able to walk down the street and be like, Pam, Pam, Pam. Just like all of this, like Cyrillic, followed by like Mandarin characters, followed by Thai, followed by this, followed by that. That's just such a cool place to live. I just- Ben, why should I be reminded constantly that I don't know stuff?

13:30Yeah. Why do you want to tell me that I need to learn things? And I like not knowing, like, what the hell is that? Going into that shop, being assaulted with just this like wall of incense, the scent of which I've never smelled before, and be like, okay, I think, I think that's a man who is like playing one of those little like music box things and there's a monkey jumping up and down or something. Like, I just like how like fun and unpredictable things are. Ben scores high on openness to experience.

14:02I guess one of the questions is like, do they want more people to go to these non-English language shops? In which case, if the shop owners, if they thought they could get more customers by having signage also in English, they would have signage also in English, right? They would already be doing it, right? Yeah. I'm trying to figure out like, is it your right when you walk down a street to understand, is that like a citizen's right that like, you understand everything around you?

14:34That's certainly what the right-wing people think. I think it kind of is if it's like a, like a hospital or a train station or an airport. I think it's good if there's clear and obvious signage in a very big language that most people know. That seems good to me. We usually have laws around that stuff specifically, right? Like when it comes to the provision of care and other like, quote unquote, fundamental things. But like, I don't know if a Chinese acupuncturist goes on that list.

15:05There's a story by Adesho Laore and Achol Arok in The Guardian where one of the shop owners says, you know, 90% of my customers are Nepalese and they can read this stuff already. It's not going to increase accessibility that much to have it in English too. I guess then the question is, if it's like acupuncture, for example, is there, is there a risk that someone will go in and not understand what they bought and harm cuts? You're just describing the most Mr. Bean-esque episode of a person's life.

15:35Right. Don't worry, Hedwig. Acupuncture doesn't actually do anything, so nobody's going to be harmed. It's all right. I think it's good to know that you're not getting a massage or someone's going to stick needles into you before it happens. I think it's good to be pre-warned about that. But I also suspect that, like, places like that, they are, in that case, orally going to tell you in English or something? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's layers of protection. This person does not understand Mandarin. Let's tell them that we're going to stick needles into them. So, Hedwig, I like how you're making the argument that having the language accessible to people is a good thing.

16:05I agree. Accessibility matters. It is a very good thing. When someone is concerned, very, very concerned with the rights of the powerful or of the majority, that tells me that something is wrong. The race discrimination commissioner for Australia, Giridaran Sivaraman, says, and I tend to trust this person, he calls it systemic racism in operation and says communities of color, communities that are different, are simply told that they must do a particular thing as part of a process of assimilation rather than being consulted, he says.

16:43I think most of the time, like, cafes and stuff, like, the harm element is very low. The harm element, if it's not accessible to you in an airport, in a train station, in a university hospital, is very high. If you're buying a baked good, very low, right? Arguably, the larger risk is that we live in a situation where right-wing authoritarians are being emboldened, and this is a signal to all of them, that this can work for you, right? You can do this, and it's going to work. So, I highlighted this story because we need to expect this.

17:16When there are English-only laws, or laws to clamp down on certain kinds of script, or certain kinds of language, you've got to watch out for it, and you've got to expect it to pop up again and again. If it fails, watch for it to come back in another eight years, because it will, and it needs to be beaten down wherever it pops up.

Watermarking AI Generated Text

17:35This next story was suggested by James on our Discord. It's about watermarking. Watermarking. Oh, yeah. See, I think that if there's text generated by a gen AI system, a generative AI system, I would like to know that it came from a gen AI system. The European Union agrees. So, in Article 50 of their new AI Act, they say providers shall ensure that AI systems intended to interact directly with natural persons—hey, check it out, I'm a natural person—are designed and developed in such a way that the natural persons concerned are informed that they are interacting with an AI system.

18:15And so, Anthropik announced in August that all text generated by Claude would have a watermark. I have had multiple people try and explain this to me, and I think I get it. Okay. Okay. So, large language models, when they generate text, they do this kind of, like, we're calling it next word prediction. It's a little bit more than just next word, but something like that. And sometimes you ask something like, what do you think about the Great Gatsby? And it's going to say, like, oh, it is a very good book, but it could also have said it's an amazing book, it's an extraordinary book, it's a splendid book, etc.

18:55And it's sort of choosing between those in a sort of semi-random, probably, when it comes to some probabilities, because, like, amazing and splendid are kind of the same words a lot of the time. So, while before it was using some sort of, like, semi-random probability choosing between those words, what it's going to do now is it's going to, in a predetermined way, select, in those contexts, a certain word, such that when you have a long string of text, you probably have many occurrences of those kind of synonyms popping up, and there's going to be a predictable way of saying which one Claude would have picked.

19:28And you can trace back that it was Claude due to that, that it should have picked, if it had picked splendid here, it should pick great here, etc., etc., something like that. What this means is that the watermark is there in the actual text you get, so it doesn't matter if you, like, copy-paste it over to a text edit and change the font or do anything. The thing that would erode the watermarking is if you individually go through the text and, quote, rewrite it in your own words, because you're like, I don't like the word splendid, I think excellent is better.

20:02You won't know which of these words you should change in order to remove the watermark. But you could do it because a human won't do it in this predetermined process. It is possible, though, that this watermarking is produced by Anthropic for Claude models. I have a suspicion that what people might do is just paste that into another model and say, hey, can you phrase this a little bit differently? And if that model doesn't have any watermarking, then it might go away.

20:37Anthropic says that it's going to release a key, because right now, if somebody generates text from Claude, I have no idea which words are the tell. Unless I have the key that Claude used to tweak the probability so that certain words would come up in a way that's recognizable. But if I have the key, I can look at the text and say, oh, yeah, it's leaning on certain words in a manner consistent with the key. The public doesn't have a way to get the key yet. There's not a tool that I can use to verify. But give it time.

21:07The E will only pass this requirement in July, and it only came into effect like on the 2nd of August, 2026. Have you seen any reactions to this? Yeah, I saw someone being like, why are they making these models so good and we use them, but then they're punishing us for using them or something like that. And I was like, well, I mean, no, if you're using them and you don't declare that you're using them and you're submitting it for your homework or for your job or something, you didn't say. You were actually just cheating. You weren't like doing a legitimate use of it.

21:41So you're being punished for cheating, not for, quote, using large English models. That's not the same thing. Someone was very upset about it and tried to explain to me that even if people use Claude for uses that are considered OK, like maybe generating some ideas, just getting some ideas on paper, that then people will still get flagged for using Claude, even if you change it a lot. And the answer is not really. Just use your own words, which is what you should be doing anyway. Or the other thing is, like, if you are using AI and you are in some way ashamed of people knowing that you're using AI, then you clearly like what this because there's versions of using AI that aren't cheating, right?

22:25That aren't against the law in any way, shape or form. They're just some people seem to be self-conscious about other people knowing that they've used AI. I don't want to speak to that. Like, a person's shame is their shame. That's not my business. What is interesting to me is it reminds me in a weird way, way back in the day, we're talking like 15 years ago, when they first introduced red flags, R-E-A-D flags, into instant messaging software. I don't know if you guys remember this, but there was quite a few people, certainly people I knew who were like, this is fucked, because they really liked the ability to leave people on red, right?

23:07Like, that was a thing that was a useful management tool for them, for whatever reason, to just sort of, like, figure out their, like, spoon allotment and when they could have the energy to respond to certain people, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they didn't like the fact that they were now being, like, that their shitty friend communication style was now visible to people. And after a while, I think we all just kind of went like, sorry, Bucko. You can turn those off. Sure. Yeah. Some people can.

23:38I don't know how to. I should. I think the more pertinent thing was we all just accepted that, like, if you are embarrassed of a thing, you end up not doing that thing. Like, continuing to be, quote unquote, outed for the embarrassing thing. It's like, well, bro, maybe you should not do the embarrassing thing then. Maybe. As someone who does have spoon management techniques that involve, but I just mark them as unread. And most people I know, well, now the problem is if someone didn't like me, would they tell me?

24:10Yes.

24:13Might be worth checking. I think I am known among my friends for maybe not being the best at group chats. The amount of hedging that you are doing here is so funny. No, I appreciate it. People love me for other things. That's right. I like to hope. That's right. But going back to the watermarking and Claude, we read a paper recently in our department's journal club called Expertise Before Augmentation, a Practical Guide to Using Generative AI During Research Training by Arjun Krishnan.

24:46And I thought it was pretty good. I didn't agree with, like, everything that they recommend in that paper. But overall, I thought it was pretty good at saying, like, if you are starting your education, there are certain uses of large Irish models you should probably avoid because you actually want to develop those skills, like certain critical thinking or research hypothesis. And if you are more experienced and you can check work in a more detailed way, you can use. So your use should differ depending on your skill level. And that paper is available freely, and I can recommend reading it.

25:19We will have a link in the show notes. One concern I'm having is the public freakout. Every AI system is going to have this, but it's going to take public buy-in.

25:29And if the rollout doesn't go well, as in some ways the Claude rollout hasn't, then it's going to make it hard, and it's going to subvert the goal of making sure that everybody is informed when they're dealing with a human and when they're dealing with a gen AI system.

Star Wars Dubbed in Welsh

25:42Finally, suggested by James on our Discord, it's Star Wars, and Star Wars has been dubbed into Welsh for the first time. Oh, fun. Welsh has joined the Star Wars Club. The name in Welsh is Star Wars. Seems like every language just chooses Star Wars for that. They just borrow that as a loan word. Star Wars Gobath Newith, which means New Hope. And it's going to be aired on the Welsh television channel S4C and its platforms from Christmas Day 2026.

26:15That's a pretty good Christmas Day movie, by the way. Like, I don't know why we haven't been doing that the whole time. That slaps. That's wicked. You know what? That's a really good point. Maybe I'll check it out in Welsh or not. Yeah, yeah. There are maybe 50 other languages that I could do, including Navajo, which we talked about quite a while ago. There are tons. I just wonder, let's play Family Feud. If I asked you the literary works that have been translated into the most languages, what would you say?

26:46Slap the buzzer. Beep. Ben's got it. Bible. Yep. Number one. Pating. All right. Easy, easy. Like, so easy. Then I think it's Little Prince is pretty high. Number two. Pating. Get the fuck out of here. Wow. Okay. Little Prince. 610 languages. And then, do you want to go back? Hang on. Ben's turn. Ben's turn. Turn it to the time. We're going to play it unlike Family Feud. Turn taking. Okay. The next one. This is according to Wikipedia's page.

27:16Link in the show notes. is, I feel like, something like the Communist Manifesto. Number six. Hot damn. Hedwig. Alice in Wonderland. Number seven. Nice going. Up to you, Ben. Okay. Can I get before six? Okay. Um, again, I think there's a very big series that we haven't mentioned yet that might be up there. Not Harry Potter. No, no, no.

27:48I don't want to guess that. Um, what about the Quran? Not in the top 10. What about Thousand and One Nights? Not in the top 10. It's up there, but it's not in the top 10. Biscuits. Okay. Shall I spill the beans? What? One more age. One more age. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. One more age. One more age. Where the Wild Things Are? Oh, good guess. No. Ben, what was yours? I said, uh, maybe some of the Brothers Grimm tales. Number eight. Correct. Yeah!

28:17Here's the list. Yeah. Okay. It's the Bible. Okay. Sure. Number two, The Little Prince. Number three, The Adventures of Pinocchio. Wow. Oh, fuck. I knew that. Shit. Okay. Fuck. Shit. Fuck. Number four, Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu. Number five, Pilgrim Spons. Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan. Strange. Number six, Communist Manifesto. Seven, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Eight, Grimm's Fairy Tales. Nine, Steps to Christ by Ellen G. White. What the fuck? Christian Science.

28:48They have reading rooms. That's all over the place. I feel like those are possibly translated also languages. Those are not very well- Read. Like the Book of Mormon. Yeah. Translated into 600 languages, and there was 603. 603 copies.

29:04Maybe that's cruel. Sorry. Rounding out of the top ten, Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. Oh, very good. Wait, sorry. Did you say the Book of Mormon was number nine? No, Book of Mormon was 12. Okay. But congratulations to Welsh for joining the Star Wars Club. That'll be fun. That was, that is fun. And what a way to spend a Welsh Christmas. Yeehaw. I'll say.

Related Or Not Word Game

29:30And now it's time for Related or Not, and our theme comes from Hugh. Ready? Yes. Always. Bring your sweet lips, darling, closer to my ear, and whisper the words that I'm longing to hear. Whisper them sweetly with all the love you've got, and I'll tell you, darling.

30:03If they're related or not.

30:13Lovely. Thank you, Hugh. This picture two old gay cowboys dancing to that tune. Oh, that's really sweet. Very nice. Very, very nice. Thank you. One from my mom. I was texting my mom, and I sent her the doctor emoji. And the reason I sent her the doctor emoji is because I was prescribing more pats for her cat. I was the cat doctor. She texted back, what a cute doctor. But she made a little mistake, and she wrote acute, like an acute angle or an acute pain.

30:45And then she corrected it to what she really meant. A cute doctor. So we wondered, cute and acute, related or not. Ah, I've got an immediate sense on this one. Have you? I am? I'm going no. Okay. Just a coincidence.

31:08Possibly, or like co-evolution or something like that. I think that's, uh, acute being, I think in the medical sense, possibly earlier than the mathematical sense. Right. Okay. In which case, knowing medicine, as I do, as Daniel, I know you do too as well. Boy, howdy. Does medicine love itself a good classical language? So there is no way in this world that that word did not come from some fucking Greek Latin

31:40bullshit root, because they were being all like, wow, look how fancy I am with my diagnostic language. Whereas, I don't know, cute just seems like little and, yeah. I'm going no. Okay. Hedvig, do you want me to go? I also probably think no. Um, the old detective radio plays that I listen to, they use cute in a sense that I don't think is common anymore, which is like the villain says to the spunky detective, uh, that makes

32:12a little funny joke. Then he says, don't be cute. Don't be cute with me. Don't get cute. Which doesn't mean like sweet and adorable. It means, what does it mean? It is kind of though, like, look how cute I am. I made a joke. It's kind of bad. Yeah, that's, that's, that's always been my interpretation is that like, they're being almost childlike in there. But it's like uppity. Or like, like, it's like, um, don't, don't, don't have confidence sort of. Don't, don't sass me. That's what it's being like. Don't, don't you give me that sass.

32:43A little bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, um, whenever I listen to it, I'm reminded that like, that is not, no one uses it. No one uses that anymore at all. I've never heard anyone use that anymore. It's very like. I'm bringing that back. The next time a kid's naughty in class, I'm like, you being cute with me? Don't you be cute with me?

33:01I just watch these poor kids just be like, what the fuck are you talking about? It's kind of fun when you listen to shows like that because you hear words and they're changing. You're like, yeah, 70, 80 years. It's just, things do change. Hey, you can actually hear it. Um, but going back to acute and cute, acute, I think is probably Latin. Sounds like Latin stuff. Okay. Um, and, uh, I know that in like, uh, German and Swedish and much of other ones, it also means like emergency, like acute is like emergency cesarean.

33:33Yeah. Oh, right. Okay. Which is related to the medical sense, I guess. Um, but it's related to cute. You already said no. Uh, you know what, just to get a point, why put all eggs in the same basket? I'm going to say they are related. There's something, there's something about being uppity and emergent. Okay. I said yes as well. I thought there might be something there. Answer is, they're the same darn word. We'll get the fuck out of here. No, you son of a bitch.

34:07Acute comes from classical Latin acutis, which meant sharp or pointed or having sharp needles or keen. And it turns out that cute is just, they just dropped the A. And by the way, Hedwig, when you say that people were saying don't get cute, they actually were meaning don't get smart because by the 1700s, cute meant sharp or quick witted. And then by the 1800s, it had moved to attractive or precise.

34:37So they're the same word. Acute and cute. I don't care for this at all. Related. That's just. Consuming old media helps me. Mmm. Thanks, mom. One from David via email who says, greetings, Daniel. I trust this is an acceptable way to send you three a suggestion for related or not. And we're going to take this in rounds. So here's round one. Okay, shit. Pen and paper? Okay, here we go. I guess. The first. What is this? We're doing skip and skip.

35:07The first kind of skip is like hopping to raise yourself off the ground lightly and easily to spring. And the other one is a kind of bin, a container. Oh, skip in. A skip bin. So, related or not? I guess I'll go first. My guess is that skip and skip are not related. I don't see the connection there. There could be multiple ways for a word to get that way. I would have said related because I can see the immediate, I can see the link straight away.

35:44What is it? Skip bins are all universally bins that get picked up and dropped off. So, the lifting, like you literally, like the bins will like skip from place to place to place. I guess they kind of do. Or they get skipped if the guy doesn't come to pick them up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I reckon skip in this instance is literally the act of like lifting and moving. And I think we call it skipping when children do it gaily down the street because they are lifting and moving their feet in such a way. Hedwig, your guess?

36:14I also think they're related, but I think it has some more to do with like how you throw things into it. Ah. That you're kind of tossing them. And that's similar to jumping in a way. It's going to really annoy me if I'm right, but you're right-er. I just want that knowing right now. Oh, extra point. Like last time. Like last time. Well, so I said not related. You both said related. The answer is not related. Oh, boo. For round one. Skip to hop. Probably, the OED says, probably from a Scandinavian source such as Old Norse skoppa to take a

36:49run. Did that sound familiar, Hedwig? No. Not speaking Old Norse, I see. Whereas the skip bin is from a different Old Norse word, skeppa, basket or bushel. I don't know if that strikes any chords. It sounds like the word for ship. Well, it's funny you should mention ship, because that's round two. We're moving on to ship. Oh. Is that one related to either of those two words? Or none? Yeah, to the second. For the reason that you've just outlined.

37:20I think she just broke your game, Daniel. Oh no. Stupid old Norse. I said no and no. I didn't think that ship was related to skip hop or skip bin. I'm, yeah, I'm going to just almost certainly lose and say no, but mostly based on my belief that all like nautical and sailing words are like universally ancient and unique, basically. This is a homebrew theory that I've been working on for quite some time. I think that might be quite a good theory.

37:52So we all say no, ship isn't related to any of those. No, no, no. Have you said yes? Oh, but did you? I said yes. Sorry. Yeah. The skip bin. Oh, the second one. Okay. Yeah. Because you said flip bat, which is to the verb ship something from one place. Oh, you said the second one, which I miscounted. When you said the second one, you meant skip the bin, and I thought you meant like neither one. So I said neither one. Okay, the answer is not related to either of them. These are three distinct words. No. The OED says possibly, ultimately from shed, why would shed be a thing?

38:24Well, because one of the meanings of shed was to split, and you split a log to make a boat. Ultimately, shed would go to ship, says the OED. You know, this is why like, you can try and learn patterns of change, like metonymy, or certain sound changes, or like there's certain semantic extensions. But sometimes people just go fucking rogue, and they're like, oh, the word for splitting a lock. Exactly. And then like, we'll have another relator or not, and Ben and I will make up some like,

38:55oh, it's kind of like when you, you know, you suck on a straw, that's a bit like going through traffic, or something, like, you know, like just like random stuff. And then we'll get it wrong. But then like, sometimes, this just reminds me that language change is very often not like functional and like logical and like has like a clear path. Sometimes shit just. Yeah, the word shed for the splitting of a log turning into ship is, that one's a wild one.

39:25That's a real left turn. Observers will notice that the word shit is also related to shed because you separate it from your body. No. That makes more sense. You shed your shit. Yeah, okay. You do. Last round, round three, we've done skip and skip and ship. But now, skipper, the captain or the master of a ship, is it related to ship, skipper and ship? Yes.

39:55They're related. Wait, hang on. Ask the question again, Daniel. Which, which related are we asking? Ship and skipper only? Only. Okay. Is a skipper just a shipper? Yeah. No. I think Ben says no. I say yes. I think that there's that Norse thing. You know how some words are like sh, like shell and skull or skirt and shirt? The Norse one is the sk. Hang on. Some of this, like, but the, the skip word was like from. Yeah, that didn't work out so well.

40:26Yeah. Yeah. Not only that, but the old Norse that it comes from was like skoppa and skappa or something, right? Like, which were like super distinct words, apparently. This time around, I feel like the, we have established that ship comes from shed to split apart, if this is going back to any kind of Norse thing, I could see this being a Norse word and we've established that the Norse words are not related, right? Yep. I could see this being like some weird loan word that we brought in from the age of Vikings

41:01or something like that, where we saw that like all of the people in the Viking era were like, wow, they all call that big main guy on the boat, like skipper or whatever. And so that became like skipper. Um, I'm going not related. Okay. So I say yes. Hedwig says yes. Ben says no. Answer. Yes. A skipper is just a shipper. Um, OED says it's just middle, low German ship plus er.

41:33And that became skipper. And there's just an H to K thing that we just all accept is like a thing that happens, I guess. Well, it's the only thing I know about old Norse is the sherska thing, but I'm not even sure that it worked in that way there. You know, it's obvious to me when I'm tired because I stopped being able to do some of the Africans in English. Is that right? Like it happened yesterday. I was really, really tired and I could probably have said ship skip. Like I could, that would have been a plausible change.

42:04Like as in like you might've been like, oh, I've got to catch the skip. There's a part of my brain that needs to filter, that needs to add some extra phonology for English. And if I get tired, electricity no longer runs to that component and things merge. Wow. This is fun. Thank you, David, for that one. Our last one is from Arjun. That's right. The king has returned. Our favorite young linguistic student has sent us another one. Arjun says, hi guys. A triplet of words I was thinking of recently are tribe, tribute, and tributary.

42:41Are they etymologically related? Thanks. Arjun. No, thank you, Arjun. Tribe, tribute, and tributary. I would like to ask Arjun how many hours they've logged on Crusader Kings 3 so far, because these words come up a lot. Even tributary, which is a little river that flows into a big river. It's also a kind of relationship between two different regions. Oh, right. Well, oh, that might influence your answer then.

43:14Yes. Well, yeah. I think Edving and I are going to have very similar answers in this regard. Well, I was thinking that tribute and tributary are definitely related. They have the notion of giving. You pay tribute by giving something, and a tributary is a small river that imparts water to a larger river. Tribe? I'm getting tremors. I'm saying no. I'm also less certain about Tribe. I'm currently running a campaign where I have a lot of tributaries in the game, and they regularly make tribute journeys to my capital to give me gold.

43:46But Tribe, yeah, you're right, Daniel. There's something about how short it is, and I don't know. But I'm going to say all related. I'm going to go oops, all related for basically all. Oops, all related.

43:59You've definitely got this wrong, Hedvig, because I also wanted to say all related. And so far in today's show, this is like, if you're on the same team as me, it's not going to go well for you. Don't talk yourself out of the right answer, Ben. No, no, no. I'm going for it. I'm going to go, it's all related. And I'm actually also wondering, I'm just going to throw another fucking word in the mix, tribunal. Good idea. Good idea. I think, yeah, I think tribute is like a thing offered to the head of the tribe originally, all the way back in the day.

44:30Okay. Well, let's start with tribe from Latin tribus. And it's tribus because it's one of the three political or ethnic divisions of the original Roman state. And that is how tribe is related to the number three. If there had been four divisions, it might have been a quadribe. How about that? Wait, no, sorry. Hello. So, sorry. So, tribe and three are related. Correct. Fuck. Okay. How about that? Then I want to know about the first and the second one.

45:02You could have a unibe and a dibe.

45:07Duabe. Doesn't work. Don't they just have feudal and colonies?

45:14Okay. Well, I'm going to pivot away from that and I'm going to go on to tribute. It is from Latin, tributum, which is to give something to the members of a tribe. Yes! It's related. Yes! And tributary, related again. It's just liable to tax or to tribute. And it's been used for rivers since the 1600s. The answer was all related. They both got me on that one. Daniel, but hang on. This is an instance where I have an opportunity to be more right than Hedwig.

45:46Can you quickly tell me if tribunal is also related? Because I'm going to feel like such an absolute fucking word lord if that's true. Tribunal. I need this. Come on, man. I'm sure that this is related. I mean, it's got to be because you're bringing brought before the tribe to be judged. Okay. Ben, you are more correct. According to the online etymology dictionary, it's from tribunus, which it was an official in ancient Rome or magistrate, literally the head of a tribe.

46:19Yes! You're brought before the head of the tribe and therefore you're at a tribunal. Nice going, Ben. Oh, what a clutch save at the end of a fucking terrible session. Nice going, Ben. And thanks, Arjun. Thanks also to Hugh for the theme. You know, you can send those related or nots to us or those jingles to us in all the usual ways. We love speak pipes. We'll play them. Or you can just send an email to hello at becauselanguage.com. I'm here with Karen Stolzno, linguist at the University of Colorado Boulder, author of

47:01many books on language, including Bitch, The Journey of a Word, On the Offensive, Prejudice in Language Past and Present, Language, Myths, Mysteries and Magic, and most recently, Beyond Words, How We Learn, Use and Lose Language. Hi, Karen. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Hi. It's great to be here. I'm also affiliated with Griffith University still. That's right. Yeah, still got that Australian connection.

47:31Fantastic. We haven't talked for a really long time, not since the show was called Talk the Talk. We talked about language, myths, mysteries and magic. So it's great to have you back. I really, really wanted to have you on so we could, you know, catch up a little bit. Yeah, it's been a while and it's not your fault. It's really just the time zone difference. It's early-ish here for me and super late for you. I'm so sorry. The worst coast. Yeah, it is. It doesn't match. Now you're here. So it's great to have you. It's great to be here.

48:02This is a huge book. This is a lot. So once again, the subtext, How We Learn, Use and Lose Language. Man, there's a lot there and you've certainly packed it full. Do you feel like you've brought everything you know to this one? It certainly does bring together a lot of research over many, many years since I was an undergrad and was learning about psycholinguistics and was just fascinated with verbal slips and just the mistakes that we make. And over the years, having people ask me, oh, I forgot a particular word.

48:36Does that mean that I'm developing dementia or Alzheimer's? So I think it's really the sum total of all my research and all the kinds of questions that the general public have about language. But it's even more than that because when the book began, I took the idea to Cambridge University Press and I said, I'd love to write a book for a general audience about psycholinguistics. And they thought, that's a fantastic idea. It's such an amazing topic. And people always have questions about this topic, but just don't really know, well, what area is this?

49:10And people just don't know anything about these particular topics, even though they're huge questions. But then I had to bring to bear other areas, too. I realized I couldn't talk about psycholinguistics, which is the marriage of language and the mind. I couldn't write about that without talking about, well, what is language? And if you have a look at a lot of textbooks for psycholinguistics 101, they have a section on the building blocks of language. What is language? So it is a fundamental question to have to bring up first.

49:41And so I felt like I did the best job I could of really easing people into the topic to talk about, well, what is language? And then I thought, well, you know what? I'm going to have to talk about some historical linguistics here. Where did it come from? How did it emerge? I can't talk about that without talking about these other elements. And then to go into language acquisition. Okay, so now that we've evolved to have language, how do we individually learn language as children?

50:11And what happens when things go wrong? Then to talk about, well, how do we process language when we hear it? How do we understand it? How do we comprehend it? And so the questions just kept getting bigger and bigger. And the more questions I answered, the more questions would arise. So, yeah, it's just a huge topic. And I'm pretty happy with the result. I think it's a good way to ease people in. Okay. Well, we better start at the beginning, though. Before we start on this massive journey, I was amused to see at the end of chapter one, now that we've defined what language is.

50:47And I thought, okay, hold on, because we better start from the beginning. Karen, what's language?

50:58Please, please purchase my book and read that chapter. I know, I don't want you to give away the whole thing. Absolutely, I couldn't. So, yeah, language is communication in really simple terms. But it's so much more than that. I think this book is a book of big debates and big arguments. What is language is just such a – it's a bag of snakes. It's a Pandora's box. So, when you ask that question, again, so many other questions pop up. So, it's communication, but then it's different, again, because we have symbols which we use to represent ideas and concepts.

51:36So, I do have a whole section on animal communication and vocalizations. But human language is, indeed, a little bit different. We're finding out more and more about the capabilities of our relatives and non-human primates and what they can do. And certainly, again, there would be people who would argue with that and say, well, some animals have sign language capabilities and can be taught aspects of language. What animal thing that you know of has been the most impressive to you as far as our animal friends doing language-like things or things that seem kind of language-y?

52:13Is there anything that you look at and you go, oh, wow, that's close. That's pretty good. Yeah, well, yes and no. I mean, certainly, if we look at recent attempts like Coco to learn sign language, Coco the gorilla, and attempts with chimpanzees. I mean, these studies go back to the previous century where chimpanzees have been raised as babies, often alongside human babies as well, to see how, if they can possibly develop language, develop words.

52:46And there are a lot of claims. And ultimately, I think that when you do evaluate those claims, then they're not as impressive as they seem on the surface. So when you have examples of chimpanzees being able to say particular words and you go back and you listen to those audio recordings, some of which are still around, it really just sounds like vocalizations rather than words. And obviously, the animals are doing an amazing job of learning and they have great learning capabilities. They just don't have the same vocal apparatus that we have and that we've evolved for language.

53:21But ultimately, I think that some of the results are kind of fudged a bit. And a lot of it is trainers and researchers from other areas, too, not always from linguistics, who are desirous of being the one to have an animal that can speak like humans do. I have found that one thing that helps me be a good linguist is to be a good skeptic. Yes. And I know that you've been involved in the skeptic movement. I tend to look at ape language experiments and say, yeah, that's probably human wishful thinking.

53:53And not because I don't think that they're smart or that they can do language things, just that it's my skepticism that says, oh, I think there might be some other explanations for that. Do you find that you bring your skepticism into linguistics? Oh, absolutely. I think that was one of the reasons that I fell in love with linguistics was the capabilities for all of this myth busting, all the ideas, the folk linguistic ideas that we're raised on and the ideas about language and all that certain languages are better than others or certain dialects are better than others.

54:27And just the basic beliefs that you have when you haven't had any background training in linguistics really made me very skeptical and finding out that linguists were so much more open-minded and skeptical about these kinds of claims really attracted me to linguistics because I think I was a skeptic before I was a linguist. And certainly it's something once you learn the tools of skepticism and critical thinking, you do carry those through your career and you apply those. So, yeah, absolutely. Being a skeptic really helps you to look at things objectively as much as possible and claims and to say,

55:05hey, this would be great, wouldn't it? But the evidence just isn't there to support the claims. I think it's cool that you mentioned about being a skeptic and being open-minded because I think those two things really do go together. But for a lot of people, it doesn't. And we've had discussions with animal researchers who have said, oof, linguists are pretty tough on us because they're not really open to the idea. But linguists, I guess, of a certain era,

55:35seem to be a little bit closed off to the idea that animals have language. Well, that's the biggest bunch of crap I've ever heard. Whereas I think we're starting to say, you know what? Our animal friends are doing some things that kind of go that way, like vocal learning or social learning, things like that. Right, right. Yeah, even some basic syntax and, you know, combining of words. There's some evidence to support that.

56:06And a lot of studies out there, too, if listeners are interested. And I'm sure many will be familiar with those. But as for skepticism, yes, certainly linguists are scientists. Over the years, I've copped a lot of flack being a linguist and people thinking within the skeptical community, oh, that's a soft science. That's the humanities. Like there's something wrong with that. Ouch. Yes, indeed. But linguistics is absolutely a science. This book is about the science of language. And certainly it brings a lot of areas of science to research, particularly areas like anatomy and neuroscience, cognitive science.

56:46So it's absolutely scientific in our approach. The way that we experiment and the way we do research is scientific. But yes, I think that skepticism is seen often as negativity and as cynicism and conflated with cynicism. Whereas really a good skeptic anyway, or a true skeptic. A true skeptic. Like a true Scotsman, right? Yeah. I don't mean to other. But yeah, I think when it comes to applying critical thinking, you really do need to be open-minded.

57:19But absolutely, people will say skeptics are closed-minded. And you know what? Some are. Some absolutely are. And they venture outside of their areas of expertise and waffle on about things they don't know about. So I think keeping an open mind, and certainly linguists are doing that more and more. It's one of those areas where we need to be anthropologists. So linguistics comes from anthropology. We need to be good anthropologists and say, look, these are differences. In no way are we better when it comes to language. We're just different. Well, I guess talking about anthropology takes us now to the story of how we, as early humans, got language at all.

57:56Take me through what you know about this. Because there's a big debate right now about, you know, when language arose. And part of that's going to be what language even is. So people are saying, two million years ago, Homo erectus, they probably had language. They did stuff that was really smart and would be difficult to imagine people doing it without the capability of doing language. Or people say, no, it's going to be like 200,000 years ago when we have anatomically modern humans.

58:26I don't know. What's your view on this? Well, it's another tricky area and it's something that I don't really put forth my views about so much as looking at all of the different theories and the research that's been conducted that's out there. Because we don't know and I think it's very likely we may never know exactly when language emerged, exactly how language emerged. We obviously know that it did. But whether it's Homo habilis or Homo erectus or even Australopithecus, there are theories as to, well, they might have had language capabilities.

59:04And Homo erectus, they had travel, they traveled and they would have had commerce of some kind and perhaps they had art. There have been some shells that are found with markings on them that are millions of years old. So perhaps they had some kind of writing system or language then. So it's really impossible to know exactly who had what. I think it's pretty safe to say that Neanderthals would have had some capabilities similar to ours.

59:34There are claims that they had a similar kind of vocal apparatus and structure, hyoid bone, and that they had similar hearing to us as well, which would lend itself to comprehension and processing too. What was it like getting the book written and getting it looked up? By so many people. It's really difficult. And if I can go back to Bitch as well, that was really tough, that one, because I had about eight peer reviewers. So I don't know what your experience has been.

1:00:05But typically for me, if I have a book peer-reviewed or an article or anything, it might be two, maybe three, maybe four reviewers, if you're unlucky. But I had, yeah, about eight for Bitch. So what happened is I had the idea and everyone loved it with the marketing department and the linguistics department. They thought it was great. But then when it was taken to a kind of higher level meeting, they said, well, we need some people from gender studies to look at this. And I thought, oh, no, because that's a different area.

1:00:36And I certainly have respect for other areas, other fields, but they have different terminology. They have different views on topics, different ways of doing things and doing research and approaches and methods. So it was a real nightmare and it took a long time to get pushed through. And I was very hopeful that it would all come together and it did. But I'm sure you've seen that meme on Blue Sky and elsewhere of the pizza with the chicken on top and the turkey and M&Ms and someone saying, yeah, I think I've put together all of the feedback from the peer reviewers.

1:01:14And that's what it was like, not only with Bitch, which was just an extreme case, but certainly with Beyond Words too. And then on top of that, you have to have a kind of exit peer reviewer. So when you've finished the book, you need to resubmit it and then they can get up to maybe six months or even longer if they request it to review the book. So if you have someone who has a particular perspective or way of viewing things that is at odds with your book at that point, I mean, typically it's going to get passed through.

1:01:48But up until that point, you do feel like anyone could kind of put the kibosh on your book and it might not happen because they've got a different opinion. They're from a different school of thought. So, yeah, it's a difficult process to go through peer review and it can really influence a book and can really make or break it. Well, since you've mentioned Bitch, which I have read, I do have a copy here and enjoyed it. You've also done On the Offensive, Prejudice in Language, Past and Present.

1:02:20I've got a copy too. Hey, two copies. You seem to enjoy going for the salty language, for the saucy language. Does it hold a fascination for you? Well, look, I was born in Australia, Aussie at heart. Yes. I think like a lot of Australians, we love our colourful language. I grew up with so-called foul language around me. My father, he used to love to swear in that true Australian way or sailor way.

1:02:51He would just let out a stream of obscenities. He'd listen to horse racing and if his horse lost, then just everything he would say would be expletive. And it's just amazing the way that he could talk. And he was just full of Aussie insults and terms of abuse that you just don't really hear nowadays. I'd always wish that I could have spent some time recording his language because it was just that real ochre way of speaking. I mean, give Paul Hogan a run for his money. And so, I think that he instilled in me a love for this language because my mother, and she passed last year, but she just detested bad language.

1:03:29I mean, she wouldn't even use minced O's. If someone said sugar or shivers, it was like, oh, that means something else. So, I don't think I ever heard her swear in almost 80 years of her life. I don't think anyone heard her swear. And so, I think she was always so offended by my father. I guess opposites attract. They did divorce. But she was always so offended and she thought, well, if you swear, that makes you a bad person. I thought, well, that's not true. I think there's a lot of kind of baggage attached to swearing.

1:04:02And again, profanity is a different thing to necessarily terms of abuse and slurs and insults. But I was just really surrounded by them in my childhood, watching them change too in terms that my father would use and say, dad, you can't say that anymore. But the good thing is he was very open-minded to that. If I said, you can't use that word anymore now, that means something else. Because he would, oh, thank you for telling me and was very open-minded about that and open to change. And so, I just had this kind of push pull with both of my parents.

1:04:34And I was also influenced by when I was doing my honours at the University of New England. Someone had done an honours thesis on swear words. And I thought, oh, I wish I could have done something like that. And so, my supervisor, Professor Cliff Goddard, who was at UNE at the time, he said, well, you can – that topic, just because he treated these particular words, doesn't mean that there isn't just a wealth of other areas that you can look at and research. And so, that's where I started.

1:05:05And I think there was quite a bit of stigma back in those days. Nowadays, everyone is interested in this kind of thing. I think going back a couple of decades ago, it was a bit more taboo and stigmatized. And people thought, well, what's a nice girl like you doing talking about the F word? That's interesting. Nobody's ever said that to me, by the way. You know, what's going on there? And maybe that's gendered somehow. Maybe there is something there. Girls don't speak that way. And men do. Boys do.

1:05:35So, yeah, I think just being linguists, we're a bit more clinical about looking at language. Yeah. Yeah. And you do mention in the case of bitch that this is a word that – it's not just as simple as, oh, this is a term of abuse. It's also a term that has been reclaimed by the community that it was meant to pertain to. And it's also shifted in lots of ways to men and as a way of censuring men as well. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. And it has been used – applied towards men for almost as long as it's been applied towards women, if you go back and look at the etymology of the term.

1:06:12And, yeah, there are hundreds of uses of the word and more being added all of the time. It's just truly – the words discovered the fountain of youth and is just so malleable and used in so many different ways, positive and negative. I mean, that's a story in itself how that came to be. I was approached by another publisher and they said, we're doing a series of just looking at a deep dive into a word. And do you have any word that you might like to look at?

1:06:42And I thought a word like cool would be interesting. It's got such an interesting background and its application to jazz and how it's used today. And because a lot of slang, as you know, is ephemeral. It's just not around very long. But other terms do stay with us. So I thought cool would be good. Cool is still cool. Yeah, it's a cool word. But I thought bitch was something I was interested in because, again, it is in that realm of insults and slurs and profanity. But I thought, how could you write a complete book just on one word?

1:07:13And, anyway, so that project fell through because the acquisitions editor left and went somewhere else. And so I took it to Cambridge University Press because they'd been interested in on the offensive. And, again, there was that, how do we write a book about one word? And, again, as you know, Daniel, linguists do that all the time with PhDs. So I managed to convince them. And the book grew and grew because originally it was going to be maybe $30,000. I was going to start it at 2,000 words and then 30,000.

1:07:45And then, oh, do you think you can push it to 60? Do you think you can push it to 75,000? And it just grew and grew. And I get emailed all the time with people sending me tropes and memes with bitch in it. And I post them. And, I mean, there are just more coming out all the time. It's truly a remarkable word, very, very powerful word. Well, I'm glad that we were able to take a tour of that area of your work because I've been wanting to talk about that for as long as I've had a copy of the book.

1:08:16Two for one. Yay. But now let's talk about language acquisition because as a dad several times, I have kept daddy diaries, which is a long tradition in linguistics. You mentioned those in the book as well. They're a lot of fun. Yeah. Charles Darwin and others. Yeah, I guess before there was a study of child language acquisition, this was an informal way for parents to do it. Not the best way. I mean, it's subjective and you keep what you think is interesting.

1:08:48But today, my youngest said to me, Dad, the kids at school, I think that they're saying animal. Animal. And she, of course, has said for the whole of her life, aminal. Aww. And that's my reaction every time, right? Because I imagine that some adults, teachers and things would be all over that. They'd say, no, no, no. You must not say aminal. It's animal.

1:09:19Look at the spelling. But I just, I treasure that little error. And so I kind of just died a teensy bit when I thought that maybe that would go away. She says aminal and also you could be a friend or an eminy. She says that one as well. And I've often wondered about what is it that makes that sequence a little more likely? But a quote from the book, from Beyond Words, you say, a large part of using language is misusing it.

1:09:50How do you mean? What I mean by that is that we learn, we absorb social input. So part of the acquisition of language is biological. So we have that ability there and part of it is social and environmental. It's the input that we have. And so if we encounter forms that we haven't encountered before, and I think we even find this as adults, I still come across people who mispronounce certain words like paradigm or quinoa.

1:10:23And I do provide some examples in the book too, where if you see something spelt, but you haven't heard it said, and you're not exactly sure how to pronounce it, that can just continue through to adulthood. But certainly with children with grammatical forms, when they want to say something, but they haven't heard that used before, for example, suppletion. So go versus went, the different forms that we use would lead a child to say something like goad instead, or foots for plural of feet,

1:10:56if you haven't encountered those anomalies in language. So I think that the way we often learn, and that's not invariably the case, but often we do learn by making mistakes and being corrected. And as you say, there are lots of different ways to handle it. And certainly an English teacher might say, oh, no, no, no, no, you say it this way. And I've had the same thing with my son. He's now 11, but he's made lots of very cute mistakes over the years,

1:11:26and even had a little bit of a lisp at one point. And we had to have some language assistance at one point too, because of some delays. So each child is different in the way that they learn. And we continue to learn too throughout our adulthood, our entire lives. We're still learning our native tongue. And when people learn second languages too, they might hear mistakes or different ways of pronouncing words, and then they incorporate those. So that's where our idiolect comes in too. So our kind of individual way of speaking that is just unique to us.

1:11:58And it's just a sum total of everything that we've learned, whether it's correct or incorrect. Linguists, we just love language and observe language in the way that people speak. And there might be things that are ways of saying things that are different to the way that you would say them in a standard variety. We don't judge. There's no judgment there. But we're interested and curious about language and how people speak. And I think it's a really freeing way to view things,

1:12:30because if you're always coming down on people, we were talking about skepticism earlier, and they tend to be bad when it comes to this kind of thing. Well, this is the correct way of speaking. We should be saying cave, not cafe, because we don't use the ague on the E anymore. It's like, oh, look, this is language evolution. This confuses no one.

1:12:51I know quite a famous person. He's no longer with us, but he used to really rail against that. And people do rail against language, and they've always railed against language, haven't they? I mean, we look at the different usage, and people will really go to bat for certain usages or spellings, ways of saying things, and then get very upset when evolution kicks in. And there's, again, nothing you can really do. In that sense, language has its own mind,

1:13:21and it's really just humans as a sum total who dictate where language is going. And just to have one person say, no, I'm going to fight for this particular pronunciation, or we won't use the term mob instead of mobile bulgris. Ultimately, language is going to do what it does, and it changes, and we don't have much of a say in it as individuals. Mobile what? That was an example in an old Kate Burridge book.

1:13:54I think she was talking about, I can't remember who it was, but someone who'd written about mob as an abbreviation for a mob of people. Take it from the Latin term. Yeah, I think it's like mobile bulgris, and people were very offended by that and thought, no, no, no, you need to use the correct term. And now we still talk about a mob of people, and it's used in different ways and indigenous varieties of English too. And yeah, we just don't think about it, but certainly there have been lots of linguistic battles

1:14:25that have been lost. I had no idea that that was an abbreviation of a Latin phrase, mobile vulgus, fickle common people. I'm getting that from edamonline.com. Oh my gosh. Yeah, Kate Burridge and her book on Australian and New Zealand English. Which is an old textbook that I had, but yeah, still such a valuable resource for just great examples. Kate Burridge is the best. Kate Burridge is the best. That's going to be the title of this show.

1:14:57Sure, yeah. Okay. You know, recently, since you mentioned other languages, I was talking on the Australian ABC, I do a weekly thing called the Speakeasy, where it's a call-in show and it's a lot of fun and it's hurly-burly. But I was talking about false friends. These are these words in another language that look just like a word that you know in English. And so you go ahead and use it, but it didn't work because it means something different in that language.

1:15:27And I was talking about when you're embarrassed in English, you are not embarazado in Spanish because that means that you're pregnant. Oh, you knew that one. Do you have any favourites? I think one I like is maybe bra in Swedish. Oh, what's that? So that means in Swedish, I like good or fine or well. So yeah, if you were to use that abbreviation, then you get tripped up. But yeah, I mean,

1:15:58there are just so, so many of them. And yeah, a lot of them can absolutely cause embarrassment. They're all naughty. Why are they all naughty? Well, I think they're the ones that we tend to remember, you know, when we think in terms of pejoration and amelioration and how pejoration happens with, you know, we end up keeping the naughty words, the bad words, and then the ones that are more neutral, if you can have neutral terms

1:16:28that don't have negative connotations, they're the ones that fall by the wayside. So I think that that's kind of what's happening with false friends that we're remembering or we're taking note of the ones that cause us embarrassment. I think you're right. I think there's a bit of availability bias going on there. But I think there's something else happening. In addition, semantic shifts can happen because meaning is underspecified. Like, we pick words that say less than we want to say

1:16:59and then we allow context to fill in the blank. And things are often underspecified when they're taboo because you don't want to say the taboo thing. You just kind of leave it. So, for example, the word constipated in English. In Spanish, if you are constipado, it means you have a head cold. You're blocked up. Okay, congested. Congested. So there's two different ways of being congested. So when you say I'm blocked up, you're saying I'm blocked up,

1:17:30but I'm not saying why. So when we're conveying taboo notions, we say a little bit less and we count on listeners to fill in the blanks. And not everyone in every language is going to fill in those blanks in the same way. Their minds will go to something else because something else will be relevant. And maybe that's pregnancy for one group of people. Maybe it's poop for another. And so you get a split there and those false friends are very often taboo. Yes, yeah. And they make me think of an example.

1:18:01I don't know if you've ever read the book, Almost French. We used to teach it in intercultural communication. So an Aussie who went to France and became engaged to a French man and then at a party really had great difficulty trying to find friends in France because a lot of people in Paris have these friendships going back to childhood. And so it's difficult for them to assimilate and integrate. And so she's trying to make friends with everyone and at some point offers her fiancé his pipe. And that turns out to be a euphemism for a blowjob.

1:18:34And so there is just that phenomenon there. And it's very interesting, very intriguing the way that we go to the dirty interpretation first. And I think it is because of just that shame element of taboo, just forbidden language, you know, where our brains go to the place that it shouldn't. Shouldn't. Ceci n'est pas un peep. I guess as we're talking about language learning, you do have a bit on how we learn language

1:19:07in the book, Beyond Words. Is there an approach to language learning that has worked for you? Like, I tend to be really analytical and I tend to stay away from social interactions, which I think is valid. You can learn a lot by analysis, but I guess interaction is where it all happens. What's your favourite approach? Are you a polyglot? Well, unfortunately, I'm not a polyglot. I wish that I was,

1:19:38but I work more with dialects and varieties of English. So I certainly learnt, you know, a smattering of various languages back in school, learnt some Indonesian, at tertiary level did some French and have been trying to pick up some Spanish and gone to Mexico a number of times. It's really fun to learn when you're there immersed in that environment. And I do think it brings in a lot of other areas of learning language

1:20:08where we talk about aptitude and we talk about motivation and we talk about even elements of age. How do these influence second language learning? And they have a huge impact on the way that we learn a second language. And some people really just have a kind of natural gift for learning languages and an ear for accents. But I do think that just having the confidence, really, to get out there and speak the language and to practice it is a big thing because children certainly don't have that fear.

1:20:41And there used to be a lot of research to suggest that children become confused when they're exposed to more than one language, more than their mother tongue. And we're finding out now that this isn't the case and that children can be exposed to a bilingual environment and can really flourish and pick up second languages very easily to some extent. But yeah, so in terms of what my favorite method is, I really think just throw everything at it. I know that sounds a bit kind of... No, no, I think there's a lot of room

1:21:11for enlightened eclecticism in language learning. There really is. Yeah, I think, you know, find out what learning style works for you. And it's going to be different for everyone and kind of go with that. But really having as much exposure as you can have in whatever format works for you. If it was watching movies or TV soaps or reading books in that language, you know, using programs, trying to travel to that place and being prepared to make mistakes again. So there are a lot of parallels

1:21:43with first language acquisition. If you're prepared to make mistakes, you're prepared to learn and improve. Maybe it's a bit like exercise. You know, what's the best kind of exercise to do? The kind that you like, because if you like it, you'll keep doing it. Well... You'll be motivated. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, motivation is very important. You've been writing about linguistics and language for a really long time. Have you noticed that the public is different now? Have you noticed any shifting trends?

1:22:14Do people know more? I feel like now most people would be aware of the idea that language changes. And I think that 20, 30, 40 years ago, people weren't as aware of that. And now people seem to have that idea. Well, yeah, I think there's some truth to that. And I think that good science communicators like yourself and Kate Burrage and others out there are doing a wonderful job of popularizing linguistics and language theory and really just bringing it

1:22:45to the public because you have a lot of those folk linguistic beliefs that we've had to dispel over time and just misunderstandings and miscommunication when it comes to talking about language, ironically. But I think that people are still very biased. There's still a lot of blind spots when it comes to language. And so I think people are more aware of linguistics and linguistic theory than they've ever been because of communication, science communication. But I think that, so, you know, talking about theories now

1:23:15to students, they will be, oh, yes, I know about that. Whereas 20 years ago, that was news. People didn't know about that. But I still think you have personal biases and, you know, people will understand things to a certain point, but then they'll have their favorite ways of looking at a language or a particular thing that they say or a way something's pronounced and, you know, oh, I don't like this word. I don't use this word or I say this differently or this is how this should be done. And that's, you know, again,

1:23:45just that human element of interaction and people liking what they like and we're all products of our socialization and our pasts and we're influenced by certain things and so that's what leads us to where we are and our ideolects. So, yeah, I think people are a little bit more informed, but then there are just those kinds of areas that they have an opinion and that really influences their perspective. Yeah,

1:24:16and that's partly just part of being human. Being a linguist doesn't prevent you from having linguistic attitudes as well. You know, no matter how you fight it, there's still a social component. Yes. Oh, yeah. It's going to get in. Absolutely. I'm still becoming aware of little ways in which I sort of retain bias. I guess what we need, coming back to skepticism, is we just need to be aware of our biases,

1:24:46ready to ferret them out and try to change and be better. Yeah, and I think we can apply that when it comes to discriminatory language when someone says, look, this is how I want to refer to myself or this term as offensive to people with disabilities and here's why. I think if we keep open minds, allow ourselves to be educated by others, check ourselves to, and I find myself doing that too, I really do think it's a good skeptical approach to language. Of course, we can apply those tools to linguistics

1:25:17and to language and just being aware and thinking about what you say and what you feel and having that mindfulness about language I think is really important and it also plays into the fact that we continue to learn language throughout our lives. We continue to evolve with language as it evolves. The book is Beyond Words, How We Learn, Use, and Lose Language. It's available now from Cambridge University Press. We're talking to the author, Karen Stolzno. Karen, how can people, there you go, there it is. How can people find you?

1:25:49Where are you hanging out these days? So, I'm all, all over the internet. I've got a website if you go to karenstolzno.com so K-A-R-E-N-S-T-O-L-L-Z or L-L-Z-N-O-W depending on where you're from .com and I write for The Conversation, I write for Psychology Today and I've written, done lots of guest pieces for Scientific American Mind and Aon and other outlets and publications. You can find me on Amazon too,

1:26:19my books. I've got a number of non-fiction books and also some short stories published on there. You can find me on Facebook and social media or Twitter X, whatever you want to call it, Blue Sky, Instagram. Yeah, I'm everywhere that you are. You're on all the platforms. You're just smashing everything. This is great. Like you. They're fighting the good fight.

1:26:42Karen, thanks so much for coming on and having a chat. It's been really nice to catch up and find out about your work. Yeah, thank you so much. It's really good to catch up with you and anytime, always happy to come on and chat with you.

Words of the Week

1:27:00And now it's Words of the Week. Woo! Got a bunch. Just a few. Let's go. The first one that I wanted to throw in which I haven't seen a lot of people discussing, forever war. A forever war. It's a war with no clear goals or endpoints and it looks like the USA is mired in one now. Trump campaigned on avoiding forever wars, that phrase specifically, and now the USA has one. So this term seems fitting. I notice the forever war,

1:27:31the phrase seems to be coined as far as I can tell. The first instance I can find, a 1974 novel by Joe Haldeman. It's science fiction but also about the Vietnam War. Yeah. So I'm adding that to the list of terms first seen in a work of fiction coined by that author. Another one on the list? Bucket list. A work of speculative fiction. Oh yes, thank you. My very favorite kind. Oh my god, speaking of recent origins of things that are really well spread, do you know who coined the term

1:28:01friends with benefits? No. Ooh, hang on, hang on, hang on. I wouldn't even know where to start guessing. I think it's going to be this like surprisingly ancient, was it like Jane Austen or something? It's not surprisingly ancient. I'll tell you for free that it's a song that came out in 1995. What? That recently? Yeah. Wow. Lay it on me. What is it? Who? It is Alanis Morissette's song Head Over Feet. There we go. She sings about having someone

1:28:31in her life and she calls them friends, we're best friends, friends with benefits. Amazing. That's just like Bucket List. Yeah, it's really fun when something is like, imagine ever doing anything like that in your life where you like say something and like it spreads. Yeah, and so many people are convinced that the phrase Bucket List predates the, what, 1994, 93 film? No, it doesn't, mate. Bucket List was like 2003. What? Yes,

1:29:02Bucket List is so recent. That spread really, really fast. 2007 American buddy comedy drama. This is what I was saying when I said the Bucket List thing. I was like, yeah, like it's wildly recent. Wow, wow. To be fair though, the term kick the bucket is older. Sure, sure. Fair enough, fair enough. Imagine ever, there are very few people in this world. There's like fucking eight, why are we up to nine, ten billion people? What are we at? Eight billion and some.

1:29:33Eight billion, all right. So a lot of people, very few people have ever had ideas that spread this far. Imagine ever having one idea that spreads. I want to have, that's my life goal. That's my Bucket List. I want to have one like funny little word, you know, like Gretchen with fetch or something. I just want to do one thing. You want to make fetch happen? It can be really silly and dumb and not important. I don't mind. Next one is from Papoyla on our Discord who says, this is new to me, links us to an article on Dazed Beauty by Tiana.

1:30:04Why the internet is praising celebrities for their natural A-E-G-Y-O-A-G-Y-O. Korean, right? Korean, yeah. It is Korean. It's a K-pop fandom term. Does anyone know what it means? Is it similar to aura? Yeah, you got it. Is it actually a Korean transliteration of aura? I don't think it is. It's got different sounds. It's different enough. I'm not an expert on Korean etymology.

1:30:35Oh, sorry. I have, I looked up now what it means. It's not just aura. There's more? There's more. It's a particular kind of, I think Wikipedia has it right, gender performance. It's like a cute thing. Didn't we hear from Lauren Hall-Liu and Jennifer Nice about how Korean men are actually at the head of some kinds of cuteness? And this is one. Yeah. It's a K-pop fandom term meaning sort of charm,

1:31:06lovableness, but also genuineness, authenticity, like lack of media polish. That's a way to farm that aura if you're in that zone. So thanks, Papuela, for that one. And this one suggested by James, what a lord, on our Discord. Also, Andy from Logophilius tagged us on Blue Sky. Now, we've had terms like slopper, people who are engaged in just handing on

1:31:37stuff, taking stuff that's been generated and just handing it on uncritically. But here's a new one. They've linked to an article in Business Insider by Henry Chandonet. Meet Proxy. That's right. You're taking stuff from the computer. You're just passing it on. You're that worker who just generates text or generates code and hands it on. The first instance I can find is from Nicholas Grun's blog from the 3rd of August, 2026. The post is called

1:32:07Don't Be a Meat Proxy. He says, who has done the implementation? The reviewers did using Claude Code and you as a meat proxy. What do you think? It actually sounds more to me like the phrase that a successful legal challenge by the meat lobby on like meat imitation products would force meat imitation products to be called. Like this is like the meat version of like nut fluid or whatever. Fake meat is now called

1:32:37Meat Proxy. Yeah. And you know, I love Meat Proxy. I'm a big fan of Meat Proxy. I think it's too, yeah, I reckon it's too, yes, I love Slopper. It's my one true love obviously and I will never stray from my one true love but I think my criticism here is like it's not actually very clear what it is. Slopper just hits so hard and this is like what are they talking about? What is this? But this does have the sense of it's the computer that's doing the work and you are just this wrapper for whatever output

1:33:09the computer's doing but you're made of meat so you're the meat proxy. Have you ever been in a situation where you have a maybe older person than you who needs help with something and it used to be that they just couldn't Google and you had to like Google for them and now it's like I ask Claude for them sometimes and I'm like you could have asked Claude like for certain simple problems I inadvertently become the meat proxy

1:33:40even though I actually don't want to be just because this happens to me sometimes. Well let's go on to a related one and this is from Laura on our Discord Ben what can you tell me about Cyrano de Bergerac the character from fiction? Oh this is not one that I know off the top of my head was he like the guy who worked with the three musketeers? No not the same character he was not a part of the three musketeers averse no he was the guy

1:34:10with the big nose he really likes a girl and there's another boy that also really likes this girl and for reasons I can't remember exactly why he decides to help this boy get this girl so he's like feeding him lines and being like you should tell her this you should do this she'd really like this so he's sort of coaching it happens in like comedy drama movies sometimes they'll have this trope and it's from there's a Shakespeare play about this as well right? Well there was Roxanne with Steve Martin

1:34:40you might remember and Daryl Hannah well this is when men use AI chatbots to write their text messages to prospective dates and I read it wrong I thought it was getting Cyrano de Bergerac no it's getting Cyberno de Bergerac ah there we go isn't that great? oh layers on layers there's a person who shares this and says what should I say to this guy? and the response is you got Cyberno de Bergerac confront the imposter which is

1:35:11I suppose a bit like a meat proxy but in romance see look I know I'm banging this drum a lot but what a great opportunity to just drop a big fat slopper on someone right? just be like you fucking slopper get out of here I got no time for your slopper nonsense works for everything I don't understand why some men who are looking for romantic relationships with women are it's weird to me because like there's so much like

1:35:41fucking agitate people trying to teach them like pick up artistry and stuff which is bad and then there's this which is bad and I don't understand how there isn't like why can't they just have a normal conversation like why are these social skills so missing? what is not about to happen is me writing to the defense of like mediocre men one of the things no no no no but if there are people who are like encountering restaurant menus and then going to AI and being like

1:36:11what's good on this menu not because they need it translated not because they have like some fucking accessibility issue but because they literally are just externalizing all fucking thought to AI it is unsurprising to me that the realm of dating is also falling under the ways of this when there are people out there who are just doing it for fucking everything these dirty god damn sloppers no I kind of get that part and I kind of suspect that like

1:36:41it's better than the agitate pickup artistry negging the secret bullshit I have a suspicion that the large language models are going to be like hi how was your day I like to watch videos on a YouTube channel called Social Catfish which is about people scamming like romance scams and the things that some of the women say like every day he asks me how I am he's just so special and I like him so much like the bar is so low the these scammers are like

1:37:11they're saying like you look very nice in that dress have you eaten today and that's like flooring these ladies nobody does that to me yeah yeah be better men yeah so forever war meet proxy IQ and getting cybernode to berger act are words of the week let's just hear some comments this one's from Maisie via email hello because language dot com hello because language hello Maisie in a recent episode Hedwig mentions looking for a word

1:37:41similar to ambiguous but referring not to a situation where you have options it's just not clear which one but rather to a situation with insufficient evidence to get to the answer if I'm not mistaken is the word she's looking for just vague I remember my semantics professor in an unusual move for a semanticist pinning down the definitions of these two words as used to describe technical phenomena in linguistics she said vague words or phrases are what's called undetermined in mathematics they provide

1:38:12insufficient evidence to determine what they refer to I've heard Daniel casually use vague and ambiguous in a way that suggests he is making this distinction although of course people mix and match these meanings when they use the words in casual conversation at least in my experience P.S. I'm new to the show and it's bringing me much joy Maisie what do you think is vague what we're talking about thank you Maisie you know what I think you might be right I think Maisie's on the money here I think that might be vague and I don't know why I couldn't grab for it then but sometimes when you think

1:38:42about things you don't think about all the things I don't know how to say it I think you're right I think it probably is vague so if something's ambiguous it's like this could mean different things but I know what they both are vague is like I have no idea what the referent is for this right so like if I say like we are going to the movies you don't know if you're invited or not but you know that there's two things like either you're invited or you're not invited whereas if I said what's now I need to try and say something that's vague we're doing a thing

1:39:12we're doing a thing there we go then it's like one of million options infinite options thanks Maisie this one's from Ash via email hi gang as someone who teaches languages and spends their spare time learning old dead languages I wanted to add two things to the discussion on the most recent episode about Nikhil Krishnan's New Yorker article you know is it okay if a language dies point one what is the cost

1:39:43to Ben's point about the cost what didn't come up directly was the opportunity cost of teaching fading languages when those communities often have far more immediate survival concerns I deal primarily with refugees learning English so maybe that informs my perspective on it this isn't an argument in favor of linguistic youth in Asia just to note that when dealing with populations this issue is likely to most impact resources are pretty scarce to begin with and we can't even get politicians to spend money educating their own general populace in line with pedagogical research

1:40:13that is 30 students in a classroom designed for 20 teacher workloads let alone language reanimation that's fair it is but the anime is like the military industrial complex inventing new robots for killing people per distance and spending money on that yeah I think if I can just put words in Ash's mouth like that that first point is one of like okay but people are spending billions more dollars making killer drone robots

1:40:45and we are trying to afford the provision of care in that reality so well may we say we should spend less money on tank shells and more money on saving languages but no one is and no one cares and so in that reality I think Ash is acknowledging that when the rubber meets the road and that opportunity cost bites that's when you probably that's I think they're saying like maybe this is about as close to what Nikhil was saying that I could possibly get to

1:41:16the charitable reading I think the second point Ash makes Cambridge hypocrisy Nikhil Krishnan as a Cambridge academic in the field of philosophy I would bet a modest amount of money that he is at least passingly familiar with classical Greek and Latin I'm Australian but I live and teach in the UK and they are very happy to spend money teaching fully dead languages at high school and beyond so it seems a little rich to argue that we should let marginal languages die of natural causes due to budget

1:41:46constraints while keeping the prestige classical languages alive like the emperor of man from Warhammer 40,000 propped up as a living corpse on a golden throne what an evocative image Ash thank you thank you Ash very much finally from Kazumi via email hello I am writing here from Japan to show off my knowledge about Japanese pronunciation in regards with Sudoku which we have pronounced variously Sudoku Suduko

1:42:16etc the original pronunciation is Sudoku and the accent well Japanese is the pitch accent language rather than a stressed accent language is Su low tone U high tone Do high tone and Ku again high tone this kind of long vowel shortening in the English equivalent is quite common such as Tofu becomes Tofu Tokyo becomes Tokyo and Kyoto becomes Kyoto however none of them get schwa situation unlike Sudoku doesn't it

1:42:48well loan words are always fascinating we Japanese call McDonald's Makudanaro Du they're all all high tones except for the ones on either end loving your show Kazumi big thanks to our guest Karen Stolzano thanks to everyone who gave us news words and related or nots thanks to speech docs and to you great patrons for keeping us going Ben and Hedwig love spending time with you guys just as always take it to the bridge one of

1:43:20the things that makes this show really fun to do is our listeners who are really sweet fun and kind intelligent people who get in touch with us and who support us in various ways such as becoming supporters on patreons or following us on various channels and liking or spreading our content which also really helps and you can find us on a lot of social media platforms we are becauselanguage.com on blue sky and becauselangpod on most other places including I think the tiktok handle is also becauselangpod correct that's correct

1:43:51yes if you ever have listened to the show and wondered what we look like you can go to our tiktok channel and you can see our cute little faces um daniel always makes me try and put my face in the middle so it can line up really nicely for the tiktok and sometimes that takes some efforts to me because i like to move around so go to the tiktok channel and watch it so that my face centering efforts are paying off you know Hedwig i just wanted to say yes i do have a lot of trouble with you moving around in frame and and for some reason it touches me that you know that that means so

1:44:22much i didn't know that you knew it's so great when you know you're a burden isn't that just the best i mean the better thing is to also do something about that that would be like even more like care and respect and etc um but somehow that is beyond me i know oh by the way new chair less squeak yeah thank you do you know what it is do you know what you need though head big is a non swivel ball chair i

1:44:54reckon that would fix a huge amount of your like moving around now it's fine i really like to move around all the time why aren't you guys moving around i don't get it because i don't have a swivel chair i just stand here so fun look i can really go back on this one too it's really fun oh daniel a new axis yeah you can uh send us ideas news and words the two best ways of doing this is speak pipe on our website so go to because language

1:45:25dot com and then look for the speak pipe thing i think it's on the right of the web page if i'm correct um you can also send us a good old fashion email which i think is what several of the contributors to this show today did and that goes to hello at because language dot com and if you like the show feel free to tell a friend about it and leave us a review pod chaser is a great place to leave reviews for us and all of your other favorite shows or in in addition to not all and and become a patron uh you

1:45:56get all sorts of cool goodies um you can be part of live shows you get mail outs you get shout outs you get discord access discord access is no joke the discord people are good people not most of them obviously most of them are terrible people but the because language discord people are very good people it's a great place to hang out if you become a patron if you give us a little bit of a little bit of cash money um you help keep the show running you keep us in supplies and software like every time my little pop shield like breaks and falls off um daniel can

1:46:26buy me another one from the money that like uh you guys have supported us with um we can also offer stipends to the people who come on the show which is nice and and and we can pay to have the show transcriptified so um in addition to people who cannot hear being able to access the show you can also search through all of the many many many things that we've said um which is really handy when you've been doing the show for 14 years 15 years um can i put in a

1:46:58push again i've said it before but i think we should put the transcripts in a bunch of plain text files and allow like linguistics 101 students to do their corpora research on us bad idea this show is edited out the wazoo it wouldn't be lifelike they can still find all of my failed verb agreements that's true they can yep the hedvig corpus nice now speaking of shout outs it is now time for us to do our patron shout out which has been a

1:47:29never-ending fever dream of insanity thanks to one mr daniel midgley so daniel what things have you done to the list this week what abominations are about to spill forth from your fetid mind well on our words of the week channel diego shared ogtober ogtober we're kind of in ogtober now which is where it's not even halloween yet but in the northern hemisphere it's getting cooler and crunchier and people

1:48:00are buying candy and decorating og it's like august but also october october gotcha also from diego summer ween summer ween that lovely warm period in the northern hemisphere i believe that a outdated term for this period is also indian summer is that correct is that the same thing yeah we don't use that one much anymore i barely know what it means but i think it means this well i and i love summer ween because i'm all about

1:48:30productive ween first noticed it when some christians got really scared of halloween decided to call it jesus ween giving out bibles worse than toothbrushes anyway others of our patrons followed up tiger tronia said i think we should have a halloween analog for each month and diego shared things like janu's scary fear brewery and scream timber james then shared a list of portmanteau months or port monthos like junuary or movember there's a

1:49:01link to all these things on the show notes so then elias leetmoger issued a challenge on our discord transform all patron names into port monthos and then complexify or organize as if you fit i accept the challenge every patron is getting their name as a month or a time period or something like that i didn't my best here i go all right this is this is not chat gpt this is not a language model this is all from me now ben i'm gonna get you to read the person's name and

1:49:32then i'm gonna read the equivalent of their name as a month got it like if i'm celebrating them okay and we're gonna do this fairly rapidly let's see let's see how we go okay uh all right starting the list off strong with amy janu amy aldo aldober amir ampril aminita aminitinesday andy from logophilius anduary from logofebruary

1:50:03andy v i was gonna do anduary but i used it so i went with januandy i like that lissa like it aprilissa lucy lucember aria flame aria flember which is fun to say aisha aishuary becky becktober canny archer canny archuary chris l chris elmas

1:50:35colleen what else could it be ben what else could it be for colleen colleen colleen right oh i was gonna go with colleen ween but colleen is very good okay let's do that daryl darecember oh interesting diego diegust oh yes very good uh elias eliasember foe frenchie foe february

1:51:05roger februager fiona fiona fest wouldn't you like if wouldn't you go to a fiona fest i totally i would indeed i would grammarian grammaryember hedvig hedvember helen halloween yep fair enough oh that sounds like a fun party doesn't it i know right welcome to helloween helloween heather

1:51:36heavyuary ignacio ignaugust ben independence day nice i like that very much i thought you would john troy john tober james jamesmas larry january joanna joe lye john k johnuary

1:52:07kathy kathmas keith keith ween kevin kevin kevin teenth or kevin tines day oh kevin tines day is very good uh christopher christoph tober lance lansgiving day yep laura laugust linguistic chaos about this time i was running out of steam so i just did linguistic chaos month oh i love

1:52:40that daniel you're always so ambitious and so good and you know i can't sit still in the frame i just love people listening to this if you've gotten this far in i just have to share the visual image i have not seen hedvig more overtly activated in in kinship than that moment when she laughed she said she just i could just see her it's not like the most functional person ever okay sorry

1:53:12sorry sorry lord mortis lord mortis lord mortuary yes i liked because it had the airy ending but also mortuary just in there yep louis louis mas martha martha ween manu may new meredith musing meredith marching mignon mignobber molly d

1:53:43molly december nazrin nazmus nigel nigel ween just be grateful if you got a ween ending because those are fun nikolai nicojuly oh tim tim otember oh yep very good tony octony barracat ferro katober rosh

1:54:14rosh sember daniel ramadanyol i felt like i gotta be honest daniel i felt like you put a bit more effort into our three than the other people's renee wait i got like head head headvember oh okay nevermind it was the v the v was the hinge i've spent a lot of effort into all these renee renee pril rosemary rosemary season

1:54:45because it's a seasoning sam sam hain okay i know that the irish festival isn't pronounced that way it's more like samhain but i still thought that orthographically it fit oh sonic snedgehog sonic snedgewn stan stanuary steel steel timber sydney sydneyquinox oh good one whitney whitneyster

1:55:15wolf dog wolf tober zekri zectember oh zekrimus zekrimus oh i like that oh zekrimus oh that is good oh let's do that zekrimus yevod yevorgust oh and uh one for karen stolzno the karen stolz dis oh that's a good one that's a very that's a strong ending big thank you to all of our patrons our theme music was written and performed by

1:55:47drew kriplianov who also performs with ryan bino and didion's bible thank you all for listening we'll catch you next time because language thank y'all i'm just gonna stop the recording yeah and you were looking at eclipses how was that oh yeah i am i live in europe and it means you can relatively easily go to other countries and we went to valencia to see the full solar eclipse that was happening here in august

1:56:18okay can i can i can i ask was it was it was it like was it like a little bit religiousy like was it like that kind of special like when the sun like fully went away not to me oh okay we went to this hilltop and the community like village had like organized like music and stuff so uh they were playing like really good euro dance music like ecuador which i really enjoyed and then when the eclipse happened they did turn it off and it was not religious for me but it was a nice community experience that like when the full eclipse was happening everyone sort of shut up and if anyone was talking people would shush them and be like

1:57:02yeah yeah we're all experiencing the thing now that's well but like that seems pretty religiousy to me like when i say religious as well i just i essentially mean so special that like something inside your body happens kind of thing you just go quiet because i've always just imagined if i ever saw a full solar eclipse i would just spontaneously start crying i don't even know why like i just oh wow i cry very easily and i did not cry at this um do you know what i almost never cry another thing you've probably talked to my therapist about

1:57:34um and i i genuinely feel like for whatever reason i would just start being like okay the thing i found the most fascinating with the solar eclipse was that even when it was fully uh fully happening we were in the full 100% time period um there was still so much light yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah like the sun is really really strong i don't know if you know how did we know who would have guessed

1:58:05it's so bright you guys don't realize and i had the eclipse glasses on and when it was like let's say like 90% covered if you took the eclipse glasses off and like looked around you'd be like yeah that's just the sun the day this is the completely uninterrupted day yeah the sun is really really really strong is what i took away from this experience okay because i thought it was going to be like night time when it was literally all life on earth turns out it's quite big it's also really spooky how the moon fits like

1:58:37yes the distance between the moon and the sun and everything it fits really really well over the sun this and the coconut water being possible to it in blood plasma which some people have told me is false if i have a third example i might go full intelligence wait what was the second one go back go back go back coconuts oh supposedly you can take coconut water and substitute it for blood plasma in an emergency that might be misinformation i'll flag that real high on top don't try this at home someone told me this one i can give you another one for the moon if you want head big

1:59:08like in addition in addition to the moon being the exact like you know like 300 times further away 300 times smaller kind of thing yeah um the fact that the moon's period of rotation and period of orbit is the same is fucking crazy yeah but that's not independent those are like we always see the same side of the moon that's what i mean though but that's just normal that's actually geosynchronous orbit is actually a normal thing no but it's not not no but hang on

1:59:39it's not geosynchronous with us it's geosynchronous with itself while it orbits something else and that isn't as usual i i'm not sure those two things are independent are they yeah well think about this none of the other fucking planets in the solar system are doing this with the sun daniel i'll find out okay yeah that's interesting because i thought that was i thought that was a thing um we should say that maybe like we're a linguistics and languages podcast and anything we say about like blood plasma or astronomy

2:00:11or physics probably don't trust us it's good to know our limits can i do a short small plug for this game that i've been playing uh sure go ahead my uh friend and fellow linguist tiago tresaldi has created a game called glottal uh it's available on glottal.app and every day there are four difficulty levels where you're going to guess a language so let's say that the language you're supposed to guess is mongolian

2:00:42um it works a bit like other wordle or uh le games i don't know how to describe them the all games the all games yeah the le the l games whatever we're going to call them um so let's say i like to start with guessing persian and then i get to find out if mongolian is in the same language family tree and if so how closely related and how many kilometers apart it is and then i can go on guessing uh and get closer and closer so this is a game for people who like to browse like ethnologue and glottalogue

2:01:16and like look up like small languages in sumatra it is a very nerdy game but it's also very very fun i can really recommend it we have been enjoying it in the discord in our games channel so uh check it out we'll have a link to glottal in the show notes and then we'll have a link to the video