147: The Language Beat (with Michael Erard)

Introducing Michael Erard and The Language Beat

0:00Hello, and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name's Daniel Midgley, and with me now is linguist and esteemed podmate Hedvig Hürgaard. Hi, Hedvig. Hi, how are you doing? Doing all right, doing all right. Now, this is a very special episode because we have a chance to get really nerdy about lingcom, that's linguistic communication, and that's

0:36because we have with us linguist, journalist, and author Michael Erard. Hello, Michael. Hi, Daniel. Hi, Hedvig. Michael is the author of a new book, The Language Beat, Essays and Reporting on Language and Life. It's not just a book, it's a compendium of articles, essays, knowledge, dating back to the before time, and so now it's time to delve. Do we still say delve? Yes. We can say delve. Into lingcom. First, a huge thank you to our patrons who keep the show going, who give us

1:10ideas and inspiration, and keep the regular episodes free for everybody. Hey, if you're not a patron, why don't you join us? Patreon.com slash BecauseLangPod. But now it's time to talk about the language beat. Was this fun to put together, or was it difficult to look at your past work like it is for me? No, it was super fun to put together. I wanted to look at the past work, and it kind of started with a project where I was wanting to resuscitate old essays and kind of talk about them. So I started a little recording project, actually, where I was reading

1:41things and then recording myself talking about things. But the core of this collection is the stuff about naming, the pieces about naming, rock bands, cocktail, craft cocktails, research, animals. And I thought, oh, I should put those together as a little language core. And then I realized, oh, that actually, you know, there's quite a lot of stuff that I could put into that basket. And I started pulling it all together. One tip for beginning creatives, always save

2:17your contracts, you know, because I wanted to look at pieces that I did in 2003 or 2004 from the new scientist, for instance. But, you know, those lawyers are long gone. And I wasn't able to get anybody to send me a note about, you know, what the terms of those, you know, do I still have the rights? So it was fun to go back into the pieces and look at those. It was also interesting to look back at all of the contracts because I had to see what you what's in the collection are only the

2:52pieces that I had the rights to reproduce. So that was even more. I mean, all of the stuff that I did for Wired, all this stuff I did for the New York Times, all the stuff I did for New Scientist, it's not in there. So, you know, they don't have lawyers ready to answer questions from freelancers from 20 years ago. But you better believe that they have lawyers on retainer ready to come after your ass if you violate that contract. So I didn't want to test that. That's an aspect I hadn't thought of. I see. I think the oldest writing in this

3:23compilation is from 95. Is that correct? Yeah. So already you could go back that far. But yeah, I hadn't I hadn't thought of that. I am. I publish usually open access scientific literature where I don't have to worry about this, but I understand it's a concern. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the licensing fees for say the New York Times stuff, even when they offered me the friends and family rate was going to be half of what I was paid to write those pieces 20 years ago. So I said, you know, let's just skip

3:59it. I'm just imagining you opening up a forgotten trunk and pulling papers out like like prints at the end of Purple Rain, throwing them around and realizing what you've got. Yeah, I mean, if a trunk even exists, you know, uh, save your contracts, people, save them.

Finding the language beat path

4:22You've been doing this for a really long time. And one of the quotes that jumped out at me is I didn't set out to create the language beat. Rather, it found me. What happened to get you onto this LingCom path? So, you know, as I write in the introduction, I was leaving an academic career. I was, uh, setting out on a freelance journalism path and just kind of set free after the PhD. I found that I was interested in

4:54absolutely everything. Right. And being interested in absolutely everything is a way to like very quickly starve because, um, you know, you, uh, the, the projects that, that I was interested in were just so incredibly vast. And, uh, so I stepped back and sort of thought about what it is, what is it that I really kind of know, uh, and that I know well, and looking out in the world and thinking about what's being

5:26done. So that was really the, the, the start to it, right. Was pitching pieces about language, about linguistics, mainly stuff that was sort of either slightly seamy inside baseball, you know, in the discipline or, or some, some new research findings that were coming out that the, the, the one about the northward spread of y'all, for instance, or the piece about, uh, words for butterfly, both of which were done for, uh, for lingua franca. And I was writing about a lot of other stuff, not just about

6:03language, but at a certain point I stopped and looked back and thought, you know, the stuff about language was the easiest for me to write. And, uh, it was the most engaging stuff to do. And it was kind of the easiest stuff to sell. So I realized that maybe I should make that, uh, the, the area that I focus on probably up until 2012, when my book babble no more came out, uh, I was writing about a bunch of different things, but after 2012, it became mostly focused on language.

Navigating audience interest and editorial choices

6:38How do you find it balancing what you are interested in when it comes to languages and linguistics and what the audience is interested in? Because a lot of audiences are often interested in sort of like very specific prescriptivist debates, for example, whereas like you might be interested in, in, in broader things. I really enjoyed, for example, reading, uh, and I thought it was very worthwhile that you had brought up like, um, the origins of ethnologue and what might be considered more like insider baseball, but I think it's very interesting. So have you felt that sometimes things that you've written that you're really interested

7:09in hasn't gotten as much of a response as you would like, and things that you thought were not as interesting suddenly blew up? I mean, I think the prescriptivist stuff was never interesting for me to like, I was never going to pursue those sorts of pieces anyway, unless it was a piece that could be critical of that, you know, sort of perspective. I think even writing about descriptivism versus prescriptivism, that's kind of an area that I avoided in some ways, you know, it's like battlegrounds where there's an ongoing war and there

7:46has not been any sort of ground one in, in a long time. What is the point for me to like, take a, to bring you on a tour of that battleground, you know, uh, again. And I think there's a couple other things I think that I've avoided, one of which is, um, endangered languages from the perspective of here's a group of people, let's go kind of investigate their, what we assume to be grief

8:19or project our own kind of ideas about what it must mean for them to quote, unquote, lose a language. So I never did a kind of typical, uh, story like that. Other people were doing it and other people were doing like a fine job of it. Other people were doing like a very cliched sort of job of it. I just kind of let them, let them do that. I mean, I think at the end of the day, I wanted to look back and I wanted to be doing work that interested me, you know, and as long as the, uh, the editor

8:56took the piece and as long as it got published and I got my check, the way in which, you know, it didn't register a certain number of clicks or likes didn't matter, you know, because I could look back and say, I didn't cut any corners on that in a way that I'm, I'm ashamed of. And I look at some of the stuff that is out there, some of the stuff that was done, some of the stuff that's done now and without naming any names, I just think, how could you live with yourself really seeing that,

9:34uh, seeing that piece out there. So it was more important for me to, to be able to feel like I pursued my own curiosity. Right. And, uh, that I didn't compromise any of my principles in doing stuff. So, but sometimes there are things that maybe don't compromise your principles, but that like, if you had to like rank what you thought was the most interesting, you might've written about something that is sort of interesting to you, but then it got a big reaction. So you were like, oh, people are really interested in this. That's, I didn't expect that. Has that ever happened?

10:09There's one not in this collection, but for the New York times, I wrote about a new letter that was added to the IPA back in 2004 or 2005. And, um, maybe it was just because that piece came out right before the LSA meeting. And I went to the LSA meeting like that really, like everybody wanted to talk about new letters in the IPA and people wanted to come up and share stuff that they were working on as well. It's not the H with two hooks, is it?

10:43I thought it was the V with the flip.

10:47Oh, okay. So do you feel like you've got a grip on what the public likes? Do you have a sense of it or does it just come out of nowhere and you're surprised? I mean, is there a public to like stuff? I think is the question. Is there a coherent general public, you know, to like stuff? And I think in my work, I was always thinking about, okay, what are the cliches? What are the, the stereotypes about language, language speakers, language users, linguistics, and how can I expand that for a general audience? Which is why I was shooting for,

11:24you know, publications, print publications that had, you know, general interest readership, right? So now I think that probably the scene has gotten so fragmented and so focused on, on data, right, about engagement and attention. And I mean, people will probably be, you can probably tell how long people have listened to this episode, right? And what Michael was talking about, you know,

11:55when there was just a piece in the Columbia Journalism Review the other day, you know, about the kinds of data metrics that journalists now use, um, to measure engagement on their stories. And like they wake up in the morning and they check their app about how their stories from yesterday did. It's all data driven. It's all clicking and liking and reading. And if that is the some way that we understand the impact that our work has in the world, you know, like I realize that you need to

12:29justify things to people who are, you know, investors and who ultimately are driven by, you know, quantification. I get that, but I would love to be able to think and talk about impact out in the world, very far from the moment, uh, from the place of broadcast, from the place of consumption. You know, how far does the stuff carry into conversations that people are having and into the way that they think about, about language in general? I don't know if you caught that, but like earlier this year, um, there's a comedian in the US called

13:03Caleb Heron, who's quite funny. And I think like New York Times or something listed him as like the 10 most like influential or impactful comedians or content streamers. And Mr. Beast got very annoyed because he technically has like more views or something, but the consensus has formed that like Mr. Beast is still not impactful. Like it's not, I don't know if everyone knows who Mr. Beast is. He's a streamer on YouTube who does these like grandiose challenges, like a hundred people run to this thing

13:34and I'll buy them all a Tesla or something. And he gets a lot of click base and he gets a lot of views. And I'm sure he makes a lot of ad revenue and stuff, but he's not changing anyone's minds. He's not seeding new thoughts, I think. Um, and I think sometimes you can get stuck in these kind of metrics. As far as I know for our podcast, because we run as like a traditional sort of RSS podcast, I don't think we have access to anything besides if someone's downloaded the episode. And I don't even know. I don't even keep track of it. Daniel, you might get more insight through Patreon. Maybe

14:06we do have stats. I know exactly how many downloads that we've gotten, but it's a funny thing about us is that we kind of haven't been justifying our existence in quite the same way. It's a double edged sword because on the one hand, we don't have to tailor things to people, but on the other hand, we're not actually in publications. Like we're not in the Atlantic or the New York times. So we don't have the requirements that other people put on us. We get to make our own requirements,

14:37but that does mean that maybe there's a little less reach. Um, and we've have had discussions about, are we cool with that? So that's a discussion. Yeah, sure. I mean, I think, I think autonomy and I think being able to work on vibe and be able to work on, you know, vision as it changes from moment to moment, I think those are actually things to be prized over some very highly engineered kind of machine for farming engagement. A tractor. You mentioned, however, in the book,

15:14eventually I grew into a way of seeing stories that was entirely mine. What did that look like

Developing a personal approach to stories

15:19for you? What is your way of seeing a story? So I think, you know, in the media stuff used to show up as news because there was some item that kind of tangled in editors spidey sense that there was something going on. I mean, editors are really brains in vats, right? And if you're a freelance writer, you're providing sense information to the brain in the vat. Sometimes it's, you know, something is canonically new, uh, and that's what gets it in. But I think that my way of seeing stories was to

15:54write about stuff that was tingling my spidey sense, you know, and then trying to sell the, the result of that and to say, Hey, have you ever thought about this other thing? I bet no one has. Um, you know, there's a, there's some investments it about the, a thing that need to be seen, or there's an institutional arrangement that is really interesting, or, um, there's something that expands, uh, or pushes the dominant story. So one example of that I think is the holy grammar story,

16:30which is about the ways in which tiny little, uh, evangelical churches in America support the project of Bible translation, right? So in contrast to what academic linguistics does, somehow these people have been able to make, you know, very conservative, uh, Americans in the middle of the country care about small languages. Now, you know, the reason that they care about those

17:01languages is problematic, uh, in, in and of itself, but, um, you know, they were giving money to support these projects, right? I read that article and I thought, geez, are missionaries still doing all the linguistics? Oh my gosh. But it's true. That was what, that was, that piece was 07 or 08. And I think probably the situation might have changed a little bit. Not by as much as you'd like to think, like, I, I work in a project where we read

17:32a lot of grammar from all over the world, and there are many small languages for which the only things available are, uh, a summer institution of linguistics grammar sketch from the 1950s. Um, and I have mixed feelings about it because one, I, I am glad that there's some documentary work going on at all. Uh, there's ulterior motives, um, which is, is difficult. Um, what frustrates me a little bit in academia with SIL is that, um, they're also the shepherds of the ISO 639-3 codes and also another data set on writing systems and a bunch of those.

18:09So they're in charge of integral infrastructure for how linguistics and like natural language processing tools work. Um, and that's not a neutral. So other shepherds of, of these kind of data sets are, for example, the U S national library of Congress or something like that, which is a, you know, public funded, more transparent institution. So I, I have mixed feelings about it. Um, I've written a series of blog posts for like linguists about it because people often don't know exactly what, what goes on. And, uh, and I think a lot of the general public don't, don't know

18:41about it, uh, at all. And, uh, yeah, as long as it's a bit more transparent, I think I'd be a bit more, a bit more chill with it. I have to say though, I have some friends who are SIL linguists who do great work. Like it's. Yeah. It's a nuanced issue. Yeah. So, but I think, um, uh, Daniel was asking me about stories or coming up with stories. And I think that, you know, that that's really a kind of religion in America story from a language angle, um, for the, the pieces on ISIS. Right.

19:20Which are about how is it that you get a group of people to fight together, uh, if they don't all

Surprises from the book tour

19:27speak the same language. Yeah. At the moment, you're doing a lot of publicity for the book that we talked about, which was Bye Bye I Love You, where you're actually getting a sense of the public. They're actually coming to you, listening to what you're doing. What are some of the surprises from the book tour? Well, what are you, what are you hearing from people that maybe isn't what you expected? You know, what I really loved about talking about that book in, in groups of people

19:59were not just the stories that people told about first words or about last words. The first word stories were, you know, very familiar territory. And a lot of the, the sort of deathbed stuff was very familiar to you. And a lot of times those stories were ones that clearly have been told many times, had clearly been, you know, polished and they were kind of stories about canonically meaningful,

20:30um, you know, final utterances. But there were also people who like had real, like genuine questions who are like, I saw this happen. Is that normal? Uh, or I heard about this happening. Should that have happened that way? Where they were like still in this space of trying to make sense of an experience. They were outside of any kind of, uh, frame for making something meaningful. And, uh, I really liked those

21:05because I thought, oh, that's, that's why I wrote the book, right? That the book really informs those kinds of, those kinds of experiences and, and tries to open up the space of those experiences to say, it's not just, you know, these cut and dried utterances that then get carried off into stories or into the rest of our lives. It's like, there's real, um, you know, puzzlement and, and ambiguity there. And that is

21:37actually the space of the normal that is actually more normal. So I was really happy to, to be able to encounter that and felt like, I mean, I'm not a minister or anything like that, but there, there would be this moment of, um, having to like take care of people and having to take care of a group of people who were hearing these stories too. There was also something that, you know, I learned about, um,

22:06content warnings or trigger warnings, you know? So there was a one point when I was presenting online and, uh, some people dropped off and then got in touch with me later and said, sorry, I just lost someone and I had to get off. I didn't realize it was going to be that intense. So the next time I spoke, I just warned people. I said, look, I'm going to be talking about this. And someone came up to me afterwards and almost shaking her fist was like, why did you do that? Did you think that we couldn't

22:39handle this? I'm like, okay, well, so now I tell both stories, you know, and tell people, I'm sure that you can handle this, but you may think that, you know, what you're getting into rationally, but you don't know how you're going to feel when you're hearing these stories and encountering this material. So if you need to, uh, take some time, do whatever you need to do to take care of yourself. So discovering the part of, uh, the process that was taking care of an

23:16audience, you know, and not just serving them content, I thought was that, that was a real lesson. I'm noticing that as well, because I find there's a little bit of, I don't know, pastoral duty when you're talking about language, making sure the audience doesn't just feel like you're dishing out the facts or that you're beating them on the head, telling them not to be prescriptive, but it has to do with the way they feel about language, but also the way that they feel about themselves, the attitudes they carry around with them and how those attitudes contribute to

23:48their self-image. And so you really are in some ways helping to preserve their self-image by saying instead of, you know, well, everyone thinks this, but this is wrong. And instead saying, let me show you something interesting. Come along with me. Let's, uh, let's find out about a thing together. Wow. I really liked that example you gave. Thank you so much for, for bringing that to me and being really sensitive about it because language is a sensitive area and it's about life and life is sensitive. Being able to have that sensitivity has been something I've really

24:21had to work at and, and grow. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. I think that people, you know, operate not in terms of what is it that language is doing, but in terms of a kind of vibey meta-linguistic sense. And it's that vibey meta-linguistic sense that when you're doing this kind of communication work, like you're saying, you really need to attend to and, and take care of, um, and that that's where you can move people in their understandings of the content. I think often a lot

24:56of this, uh, about the sort of listicles that are like your myth about language, here's the facts, you know, um, that, that is a kind of, that that's an insensitive way of approaching people's vibey meta-linguistic sense, uh, that, um, people want to have some sort of belief about language. They want to have something that informs that, uh, those, those, those intuitions, right? Not in

25:27terms of grammatical intuitions, but those folk intuitions of the way that language works and things, and that taking those away from people saying, no, those don't matter, I think is really threatening and we shouldn't do it. I think it's, it's hard to be sensitive sometimes because especially on the internet, a lot of people want to prefer this kind of like hyper rationality, emotional, emotionless way of speaking, um, and might come at you with those kinds of statements. So it's, it's, I appreciate both of you wanting to handle it sensitively. I think it's,

26:04it's, it's hard. Yes. And I have the benefit of, uh, doing this show sometimes with Daniel, but then the rest of my life, I get to be like, uh, a research scientist and write to my colleagues online number 11, you are wrong because of these and these reasons. And I don't care that much. About their feelings though. I am starting to realize I actually, I am, I am starting to get better at even there. Yeah. But, but I think even there, there, there, there, there are,

26:34there are some emotions to, so my day job is helping people write grant proposals, right? And teaching them that a grant proposal is supposed to sort of trigger an emotional response, curiosity and engagement and excitement, you know, is one that people haven't heard that much before. You've been doing this for a while. I've been doing this for, we've all been doing this for a

Shifts in the language landscape over time

26:58little while. How has the landscape changed since you started? How are people different? Or I've, I've noticed in my own work that the audience seems to come along with you. I used to get a lot of prescriptivism. I don't anymore. Not even on the, the big, like on the Australian ABC where you'd expect, you know, it's got an older audience. It's got a audience that doesn't know much about linguistics or care much about linguistics. They just know about language. And I think a lot of

27:29people started out prescriptivist and grumpy, but I, I feel like there's been a shift at least as far as the people I'm talking to that the awareness seems to be sinking in, or at least it definitely has sunk in since I was doing my first shows in 2010. What have you noticed? Is there any growing awareness or is, is it just an intractable battle that will never change?

27:56You know, uh, I think that's an interesting observation that you're, that you're making. And I, I want to kind of agree with that, but I, I don't know to what degree that is something that I'm filtering through, you know, editors responses, uh, as opposed to having direct contact with, with audiences, you know, like the stuff that I have done, um, is still pretty highly mediated, you know, like I'm not online. I don't have a podcast, you know, it's not a blog.

28:32I'm not really in spaces where I'm encountering commentary or reaction, you know? Um, and I think also maybe the fact that I'm in more of an academic environment as opposed to a non-academic one that, that may be coloring some things. So it's hard for me to say from that perspective, it would be great to turn that into a study or like ask that as an empirical, like pose that as an empirical question.

29:04And then to think about like, why, why is that, you know, and is that a function of linguistic communication, right? The stuff that we've been doing for the last, you know, 25 or 30 years. I was actually writing some things about like that history and some of it appears in the introduction to the language beat, but, you know, thinking about how language, you know, how it is understood as a matter of concern

29:37and how that's changed over time. So like that really in the seventies and eighties, that language was, it was a, uh, an object of some anxiety about class and about society in general. And that anxieties about language were really a proxy for anxieties about social change. And in the U S you had, uh, William Sapphire who had like really the only language column in the New York times magazine,

30:09uh, from 79 to 2009, he was very strongly prescriptivist for most of that time. But towards the end, he started to become a little more descriptivist. I think because the importance of language had changed. So language became and language abilities became, uh, an asset or a commodity with the rise of knowledge work and globalization. So it wasn't just a matter of whether or not you were doing something right or wrong, but did you have enough of this thing? And it wasn't just, you know,

30:43do you have enough English? It was, do you have French and Spanish and Chinese and, uh, well, what other language should you have as, as a commodity? Right. Um, and then after the turn of the century becomes particularly with smartphones and texting and emoji and things, then it becomes language as infrastructure. So it is so much a part of our daily lives in a way that we just can't get away from then that, that sort of is another, another shift. Do you mean like autocorrect and emoji and

31:19the tools that we use to communicate? I mean, uh, that, um, I mean, there were all kinds of moments over the last 10 years when I was seeing articles in the New York times or whatever about some punctuation sort of innovation in texting, you know, it's like, what does it mean if you don't put a period at the text? And I was thinking, you know, back in 1995, if I was trying to pitch that story or 2000, I was trying to pitch that story. No one would have been interested. It just would,

31:55you know, even if you could point to that and say, this is a really interesting phenomenon linguistically, and it's happening all the time on, you know, like internet relay chat sort of spaces or things like that. Um, that editors at these publications would have been like, ah, well, it's happening there. It's not happening to me. So therefore it's not interesting. But as soon as they themselves are on the subway going, oh, wait, what does that mean? They didn't put a period. Um, they find

32:25themselves the subjects of some of that anxiety, then it becomes, then it becomes interesting. I think that's a really good point. I think we've talked about that before on the show as well, that like, just, it's not only that more people are literate today, but also we write in more different kinds of registers, which really shifts things. Like, if you think about direct messaging, you're essentially writing in a style more similar to how you would spontaneously speak. So, uh, this is also what, uh, Gretchen and Lauren, uh, talk about, about emojis being gesture and stuff

32:56like that, because you're supplanting a different kind of medium. If you look at like old letters between different European important people in the 1800s, that style is, is very particular and very sort of different. It's still more casual than the, you know, the, the academic books they wrote. And it sort of has opened up like a different level, I think of, of writing and that people are more aware that there are not only different registers when speaking, but also different registers when writing. Um, and it's fun when there are contrasts, like, I don't know if I told this

33:31before, but like I had a colleague who used to use like dot, dot, dot at the end a lot. And I had to tell him, I had to be like, you know, I don't think you mean it, but like, for some people it comes across as like some sort of insinuation and I'm left like guessing what it is you're doing. And it's a bit weird. And he was like, no, no, no, that's not what it means. It's just the boomer ellipsis. I was just like, you go ahead with that in your life. And, uh, that's okay. And let me know how it goes.

34:01Yeah. See how that goes. Yeah.

Moving beyond the word fixation

34:03Yeah. Yeah. Have there been any misunderstandings that you've had to correct over and over again? What are you still noticing? Where are the gaps in public knowledge? You know, I think still the idea that language is words, uh, and that, I mean, and you, and you see that now, I know it's depressing to hear because, you know, that's, people have been working to try to push against that for a long time, but you see that particularly with, uh, articles about, um, LLMs and language change, you know, we're using a word that we didn't use to language is changing.

34:38Like, well, let's define language change. Uh, I'm actually, I'm actually writing about that right now and not writing about words, but trying to like go deeper into things. Um, so there's that. Okay. Let's drill into that a second. Uh, so, um, I would easily have the impression that language is words. We do tend to, we have a segment words of the week where we're talking about the words. Um, I try to squeeze in equally weirder and weirder things into that segment, but

35:11it's still words. I think it is, it is. And sometimes a combination of other things, but okay. So as a linguistic communicator, help me out of that. What, what is there besides the words that's changing that I need to watch out for? I mean, something as, um, the ways in which when we talk to each other, we entrain, right? So we don't only use words that are more similar to each other, but we do things like speak at the same rate. We speak at the same volume. Our utterances

35:45have the same lengths and things like that. So we accommodate, we align with each other when we are when we like each other. Right. And that's a part, you know, language in use, right? That is language. Now think about how LLMs, were you asking about LLMs or you were just asking about the bigger problem of how you, how do you get people off the word fixation? If you want to take that crowbar and crack them away from words, what examples do you give? I wasn't thinking of large language models,

36:19really, but okay. Yeah. Um, yeah. So talking about language and use, right? Talking about interaction, what do people do in interaction, uh, or what is language for, right? Language is for more than just communicating, referring to things in the world. Language is about getting things done, right? With lots of the resources that we have with our bodies talking about embodiment, right? Talking about multimodality, I think is really productive. Talking about, uh, individuals investments in

36:57talking a particular way or signing in a particular way, thinking about regional variations, um, or variation in time in phonetics, right? Those would be really productive ways to get people not just thinking about thinking about words. Um, and then maybe give them lots of examples where there is communication evidently happening without words, right? Or with minimal words. So one of the studies that I wrote about in Bye Bye I Love You, where they were looking at simple and complex communication

37:34communication in cancer patients, uh, in cancer patients, uh, who were dying categorized simple communication as, uh, single words, right? Which is astounding because if you're a linguist, you're like sometimes no or yes. It's like, yeah, it's one word, but the meanings of that are super complex. There's no way in which it is like, it's a simple phonation or it's a simple kind of gesture, but the meaning of that is incredibly complex. So, you know, that's, that's another study where there were no linguists involved

38:11evidently. So that's what I would just throw at you to say. Um, those are things to communicate about to get people away from words. I think a lot of those things people can intuitively, I think sometimes people just need like a little push to intuitively get there. Um, there, there are examples like this and other examples I can think of where you can point to things that are larger than words, probably one that's most popular in the popular press is like negative concord or those kinds of grammar things. But I thought the ones that you brought up about like utterance length, uh, and matching, um, is

38:45a little bit more under the surface, but can still intuitively make sense. I still remember when I, um, I'm a second language speaker of English, so I usually accommodate my dialects to who I'm speaking to. I'm not really stuck. And, uh, I heard a friend of mine who speaks very like British English and another friend who spoke American English were talking one time and I couldn't put my finger on it, but I thought they were fighting because neither of them were accommodating their dialects. Hmm. And I was like, the vibe is off. Why are they, why don't they like each other? I don't get

39:21it. And then I took like a bit more of another round in my head and I was like, oh, it's because none of them are adjusting their vowels at all, which is perfectly, you know, normal. Um, but, uh, and I think, I think people hear those kinds of things. I mean, with English vowels is probably the clearest thing that people hear, but other things as well. That was a very interesting point.

Decentralization and quality control in communication

39:46Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. So the sense I'm getting is that a long time ago, there were very few inputs and now we're facing an explosion of podcasts and writers and sub stacks and social media, people writing, people talking about language, uh, YouTube videos. There's lots of linguistic YouTubers who come up and, and are trying to make it happen. Am I getting the right sense here? And how do you feel about the way things are going now in linguistic communication?

40:21I mean, I think the fact that, um, it's not centered in the academy is really great. I think though that sometimes, you know, if you're outside of the academy, finding a good place to sort of launch your language media project, right, is a little frustrating. And I think that's the role that planet word, which is the language museum in Washington, DC, that that's the role that that

40:51plays and that's, you know, really necessary. I think that there is no center to all of this, you know, is a good thing. Uh, but I think it would help if, you know, it's almost time for a kind of meta podcast or a meta blog or something like that, or someone is reviewing, not just listing stuff, right. Which we, uh, you know, uh, Lauren, uh, gone does very collegially, you know, and other

41:22people do collegially, but sort of goes like this episode, you know, was the wrong take or this guest was problematic because, or like this person's in a discussion about, um, I think there's a kind of hands off, uh, let a thousand flowers bloom and the market will market. The invisible hand will sort it all out. Um, but, and, you know, do people really want to spend their time doing that or use their expertise in, uh, critiquing other people? You know, that's an open question, but, um, where's the,

41:59You mean something like, um, what's that show called on the media is one, which does a similar kind of job media watch on the media. And then has numbers. What's it called numbers in the news? Um, that is like a sort of meta journalism about journalistic stories. I quite enjoy those kinds of outlets. I suspect that for like popular science things, a lot of journalists like to leave it alone because it's like, let the nerds talk. And sometimes maybe the perception is also that we're not talking about

42:32important things anyway. So if we get something a little bit wrong, it's not major news. We're all really nice to each other, you know? Yeah. It sounds like, it sounds like you want to start a little bit of a fight. I'm interested in this, like a bit of, uh, Not, not, not fighting, but a little bit of maybe quality control or just like, I mean, I think where do people learn from each other, right? There's the LingCom conference, but, you know, frankly, I've never considered what I do to be LingCom, right? It's journalism, right? LingCom is,

43:09it's, it's something, you know, it's, it's, it's more of an online sort of set of activities and genres. Um, whereas I'm coming from something that's closer to public scholarship or something that is closer to traditional journalism, right? Where there are traditions, there are tools, there are other things that I can point to and say, I do that because I was taught to do that

43:40in a newsroom in 1987, right? Or something like that. So you were, so I think the decentralization, I think though, is an asset, but maybe, uh, some, some more kind of metacritical thing might be, um, advantageous. Sorry. And I was gesturing to Daniel, I think along the lines of, of what you were suggesting, which is where is the evaluation and going,

44:12are we really achieving anything or what have the effects of this been over, over decades? Is there a tradition here? And, and also, um, we're all talking in English, right? Um, where's the sense that, um, we're looking at what happens in Spanish or what happens in Chinese? How much of an awareness is there of the diversity of, there's a lot of attention to diversity in other ways, but, uh, I remember one of the first LingCom conferences, you know, was restricted to people

44:47working in North America and to people working in English. Um, and that has changed at the time it was, it was problematic. Uh, but so where are the venues where people get to learn and learn about language and language audiences, audiences for, for language material, um, across media markets and across language spheres is the francophone. What is the francophone, uh, language? What are they

45:17talking about? Yeah. I mean, this was a perfect, uh, I was sitting in a Mexican restaurant in San Antonio two weeks ago and my in-laws were talking and I didn't want to participate, but there was a television on, it was tuned to Univision or something like that. And the subtitles were on and they were having a fascinating conversation about the use of formal and informal pronouns. Like it makes the news where there was someone from Columbia where two is used quite frequently,

45:51right. Uh, who used it, uh, with an older person and the older person who was Mexican was like, you don't do that to people. Um, and there was like a, like a public clash and someone had video, videoed it. And that's what they were playing. Like, that's the kind of stuff that makes the news like that. I found that super fascinating and was so happy that I know Spanish to be able to follow along. Hmm. I tried to keep up a little bit, but not enough as much as I'd like. I know that in Netherlands, there's been quite a lot of debate about various kinds of pronouns, right? Like it was a

46:26bit of a few years ago, there were some researchers, I think from Rabbi University that were also like sort of on the news and like politicians were weighing in about like what plural third person to use and stuff like that. So, so it's quite interesting whenever I see it. Um, I think I should make more of a, uh, maybe dedicated effort to seeing it because I mainly get it from like, yeah, from Swedish and English media channels. And then usually when we do word of the year, um, that's when we see it the most, isn't it Daniel? Cause we see like German new word of the year, Mandarin word of the year.

46:58Japanese. That's the one where it's not perhaps the most interesting, uh, interdimension to meet at. Um, but you at least get the sense that there is, there is something happening in other spheres, um, which is quite fun. Yeah. Yeah. That could be an episode or that could be a spinoff podcast or something like that, that, you know, where you import those, you know, um, and it's not translation work, but it's comparative work really. It's going, this is the way that we would, this is the

47:29kind of language thing that we would find interesting. What is it that's happening in another, in another sphere? Michael, I want to turn your question back on you. Are we doing any good

Evaluating the impact of language advocacy

47:42with the, with this stuff we're doing? Are we, are we actually doing anything or are we just talking to each other? Have we helped over the last 10, 20, 50 years? Are we trying to help Daniel? I'm trying to help. Okay. Maybe we are. I think, I think, okay. So, well, maybe, maybe let's stay at our goals. My goal is I want there to be a little less ignorance and a little less meanness about language. I'd be happy if that happened. I'm more understanding. What else is there? What other goals are there? I mean, if your observation about encountering less prescriptivism is right, then,

48:17then yeah, then it is helping. It's also the possibility that prescriptivists just like have learned to tune out Daniel. There might be a filtering mechanism going on. No, I don't know. I'm not sure that's the case. As long as I don't have to hear him, that's all right. I have like a very deep-seated instinct to be like antagonistic. I'm not really just talking about prescriptivism. I just, you know, are we engendering a kind of curiosity that's going to show up in maybe better policy decisions or

48:50if there's a regressive sort of person who's promoting linguistic discrimination, are enough people going to say, ah, no, wait a minute. That's not what I'm about. I heard this, this per, I heard this podcast once, you know, that would be a worthy goal as well. I mean, I think it goes back to that question about publics, you know, is there, is there a public to serve or are the language, you know, the blogs and the, is it really serving a tribe, right? Of language files, language learners,

49:26language industry people. Um, and that it doesn't, it doesn't filter out beyond that. Like, however, I think there's a number of like high profile books about language recently. I know that you, I saw that you had, um, Sophia. Sophia Smith-Gaylor, yeah. Yeah. And, uh, I read her book and blurbed it. And, um, you know, I think that's a great piece of work and I don't, haven't looked at how it's doing market wise, you know, but if it does well, I think that speaks to maybe a broader interest in

50:01language. Um, and then there was, um, I'm not remembering her name right now, but who wrote about the history of Proto-Indo-European, right? That was also a pretty, uh, prominent book. So that maybe speaks to the, the existence of, you know, maybe there is a sort of general audience for this stuff. So what's happening? We're not harming anything, I think, by doing this. Um, I wonder sometimes if we're taking as many

50:32opportunities as we might to, uh, use linguistic expertise and commitments to understandings of language to mount kind of moral critiques of things, right? I mean, you know, if you are opposed to, um, to generative AI and to large language models, to what degree is the discipline of linguistics responsible for the LLMs that we have, right? I don't know that anyone has brought that up

51:09as a topic, but, um, I think that is hanging right there. I think there's also the issue of whether or not language concerns matter in terms of climate, right? If you think about what the world is really actually facing in terms of the massive problems, like, okay, sure, there's climate communication, there's issues of, you know, uh, lost knowledges with, um, about climate in the

51:39past with, you know, loss of indigenous languages. Okay. Um, but linguistics, like, I don't see a way right now for linguistics to be playing a role in any aspect of addressing the climate crisis, right? And how does it feel? Like, what does it mean to be irrelevant? There was a point at which, you know, the brain and what's going on in the brain, communication, um, cognitive science sort of explained everything like that was the future. And if you could get a hold of that, then you had

52:15the power of changing the world in your hand. But when changing the world is actually a matter of real literal power, like military power, what happens in the brain kind of pales in, in importance. So I think those are, those are frontier issues. Those are frontier issues.

Disciplinary boundaries and global relevance

52:36Well, sometimes I wonder what, um, it's always hard to define, uh, what a discipline is. Uh, I was recently at the Cultural Revolution Society meeting and they were talking a lot about like, is the study of cultural evolution a discipline? Is it a field? Is it, what is it? And if it is a discipline, what does that mean? And when you think about it, a lot of disciplines like linguistics or history or sociology have a lot of fuzzy boundaries. And part of why something gets called a member of that discipline or not is, is partially just like historical path dependency. Um, and especially

53:13when it comes to things like, uh, what do we call it in English? Like rhetorics, like how you make speeches, how you convince people that sometimes, for example, or like how framing, so for example, how newspapers frame an event in like a passive voice or an active voice, like this woman was assaulted versus like someone assaulted this woman, et cetera. Um, I find those discussions really interesting. I'm not always sure linguists are the best ones to handle it. And I feel like that is more the domain where language interacts with politics and language change. And while most

53:49linguists I know are, are interested at like a much more granular and a much more general level than sort of interpreting, for example, argumentation and framing and political agendas. Sometimes I feel like that belongs in like, yeah, sociology, political science, philosophy, maybe. Um, but maybe disciplines always have fuzzy boundaries and maybe that kind of thing is linguistics. And I don't know. What do you guys think? I mean, I think if you, if you reconfigure what I was saying as about the language sciences,

54:25you know, which would get you cognitive science, it would get you psycholinguistics, speech language pathology and things like that. It's still relevant for climate crisis stuff. Uh, I don't know, Daniel, what do you think? Well, I was thinking about our episode with Mary Walworth, where we were talking about the Island of Inusi, where it's going to sink, people are having to leave. And what happens to the language after that happens? Does that impact the climate? Can we, can we fix the climate by talking about that? Or are we just, well, I guess we're doing is we're saying, Hey, this

54:58is also relevant. This is another reason why we need to fix this. This is another thing that's going on. And it's, and we can speak to this language wise. So I don't, I feel like language is as big as life because language is what we use to talk about life. And so I bet I can find it in somewhere. I bet I can find something. I can find an angle. At that point, if you're like almost everything, you are nothing. No, I'm not. Okay, nevermind. But I can talk about anything in terms of linguistics. Maybe. At least I haven't found

55:33an end yet. Michael, help me out. Am I barking up the wrong tree here? I just think there are other expertises that are valuable. Anyway, yeah, maybe this is... We're not going to have a linguistics podcast about the climate. What would that even be? No, but there are topics where it touches with it, like our discussion about these, this community in Papua New Guinea. And, and we already know there are like climate change refugees moving into Fiji, for example, which is increasing the language and cultural diversity of Fiji. So that's an aspect that linguistics can say something about the language part of

56:07that. Maybe not the actual sea levels rising. Right, right, right. Yeah. I mean, thinking about trying to sell a language story, you know, if I tried to sell to an editor a story about AI changing language, no problem. If I tried to sell a story about climate migration changing language in communities, you know, in, in sort of marginalized communities or far away, it would be much harder sell.

56:37Not to us, but to, to the editors. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're all having a role here. That's another benefit of being like an independent show. We can just be like, no, that is actually interesting, everyone. Yeah, no, it is. Yeah. I'm glad that we get to do that. But Michael, I'm also glad that you're there because you're the one who's doing the work of appealing to the bigger audiences. You get a lot of eyeballs, whereas we don't get a lot of ear balls, ear holes, whatever.

Where to find Michael Erard online

57:05We get enough. That's fine. The book is The Language Beat. It's available where all good e-books are sold. We're talking to Michael Arard. Michael, where do you hang out these days? Where can your hungry public find you? Well, I am on Blue Sky. I'm on LinkedIn. Is that what you meant? Like that sort of thing? Yep. Yeah. And you can find contact info through my website, which is www.michaelarard.com.

57:35Michael, thanks so much for hanging out with us today and talking about your book. I hope it goes well. And it's been really interesting to review the history and the where's and what for's of LingCom. Thanks, Daniel. Thanks, Hedwig, for the conversation. We'll be back with another episode very soon. But until then, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time because language.