148: On the Mark (with Florence Hazrat)

Punctuation in literature and show introduction

0:00I encountered punctuation in the wild, and I don't mean that I saw punctuation, because obviously- It's everywhere, Ben. Yeah, it's all around us. Right, Ben? I'm reading this really, really tremendous book called The Everlasting by Alex Harrow. And in it, to give you just a very small amount of backstory into this quote, our main character is a historian, and he is a graduate student, and he has a stern, very unforgiving, very,

0:36very talented master at this college. I've been there. And so he's busted into her office, because something important has happened, and that's where the quote takes place. She looked up as I entered, and beamed at me, Mr. Mallory, what can I do for my favorite protégé? I, pardon? I wasn't sure I'd ever heard her make use of an exclamation point before.

1:06That's clever. I liked it a lot. That's very clever. I really enjoyed it. And that is just one of many ways that, although this book is not an inherently comedic or funny book, I've laughed out loud a bunch of times from just some really, really wonderful dry

Meet the team and punctuation habits

1:21wit like that. I've never seen her use italics in my life. Punctuation. There you go. Very good. Hello, and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language.

1:51My name's Daniel Midgley. Let's meet the team. First up, we got Ben Ainsley. Hello, Ben. Hello. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Whenever it is that you access. Great to see you. Hey, Ben, this episode's about punctuation, and I was wondering if you have any hot takes about it. I don't have hot takes. Anything you like, anything you don't? But much like if I had children of more than a number of one, I would have favorites. I have favorite punctuation. Okay. I'm a mad fan of parenthetical statements in my writing, so commas, brackets, em dashes,

2:26anything that'll allow me to be saying a thing and then be like, hold on a second, I've got to say this other smaller thing in the middle, and then I'll go back to the thing I was originally saying. I love it. I froth on it. You know what, Ben? This brings a whole new level to your ability to derail us when we're recording, doesn't it?

2:44Well, maybe all that's been happening this entire time is that's just vocal parentheticals. That's just what's happening. I am speaking how I write, or maybe I'm writing how I speak. I don't know. It's one of the two. It's Ben's style. We just know that. And we've got Dr. Hedwig Hrgaard. Hello, Hedwig. Hello. Good morning, good evening, good night. That's the correct Truman quote, I believe. Yeah, I think so. Same thing. Same question. My hot take on punctuation is that I also like a thing that often gets accused of being

3:18AI, which is that little kind of like resumptive thing. So say one thing, and then do a little dash or comma or something, and then sort of the same thing again, but shorter. I quite like that. I think maybe I do it in speaking as well. I certainly do it in text. And when I write something and I go over it again, I'll notice this pattern, and I get worried. I'm going to get accused of not being a human. I got to tell you, I've been accused of not being a human because, you know, I use em dashes, and nobody's going to take them away from me. I'm not going to let the machine take that from me.

3:50But my thing is, I keep saying that I'm going to avoid apostrophes, but it's just too annoying to do so because autocorrect puts them all back in. And I want to not have an apostrophe in don't and won't and couldn't and things like that. Yep. That makes sense. I mean, like, what's it really doing there? What work is being achieved? I never say them. It's like what my French teacher used to say about the circumflex. It's a gravestone marking something that used to be there.

4:22That's very fun. But sometimes in French, we throw little circumflexes in just to show that a word is fancy, like throne, throne. That's an ahistoric circumflex. Window, fenêtre. Oh, the fenêtre used to be there because there used to be an S in old French. But like supreme, didn't used to be there. It's un-etymological. That's hilarious and very French. This kind of takes me to something that we're going to probably talk about with our guest because we talked a little while ago with Jennifer Nice and Lauren Hall Liu.

4:53When sounds can vary, we attach social meaning to them. And I think that's true for punctuation as well. When the usage can vary, we start attaching social meaning to it. And I think that's very interesting. So I think that's something that we'll have to ask our guest because on this episode, we're talking to Dr. Florence Hazrat. She's a researcher and a writer. She's the author of An Admirable Point, A Brief History of the Exclamation Mark. But now she's ripped the lid off the whole Pandora's box of type with her new book, On the Mark, From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World a 5,000-Year History.

5:28So we're going to be talking to Florence Hazrat. Sounds very fun and exciting. 5,000 years. That's a long time. I thought we've only had writing for 5,000 years. Yeah, I thought that the first couple of thousand years, there were no spaces and no punctuation. I'm excited to learn what there was. Yeah. There had to be something. There was nothing. There was nothing. Clearly, either she's lying or you're wrong. So let's find out which it is. Is math symbols punctuation? Uh, for this episode, I'm treating them as such because it's going to come into play during the patron name bit.

6:05Right. So if a plus is punctuation and the first type of writing is often accounting. Dang, you might have me there. Speaking of patronage, you know, we've got a lot of new patrons lately. There's been an influx. A deluge. A flood. You know what? I'm happy to have patrons on board in any capacity. It doesn't matter whether you're giving us a positive number of dollars per month or zero. As long as it's not negative. Yeah. You don't take money from us.

6:36That would be bad. I don't think it's possible to give a negative amount of money to us. Oh, hmm. Well, maybe if you asked very politely. But I've noticed that people sometimes come in for a bit and then they dip out and then they come back in again. A patron hokey pokey, if you will. That's all right. It's a party. You can come and go as you like, just like with any good party. So if you've been out for a while, come on back when you're ready. You are not a vampire. You don't need permission to come back in. However, if you're on the fence about supporting the show, let's just each name one thing that you think would be a great selling point.

7:10What's going to get people off the fence? I reckon it's our community. Don't worry about us three jamokes. We're nothing. We're like, we're ridiculous. The people in the Discord who are fans of Because Language or who are patrons of Because Language, they just hang out and have a great time. And they're just the sweetest, gentlest, loveliest humans you're ever likely to meet. So, yeah, you couldn't do much better, quite frankly, if you're sitting there being like, I would like a community of cool, interesting people from around the world.

7:40We've got you, Calvin. Sure do. What do you think, Epic? I think that, I mean, so I subscribe to different podcasts, not ours, on Patreon. Though I do think I could also subscribe to ours on Patreon. But I don't know what that would, that would, that would create this sort of infinity loop and I'll collapse the universe. I think we'd chuck an exception somewhere. Yeah, I don't know. Anyway, but there's a warm, fuzzy feeling that you're contributing to something. And there's a lot of creators out there who create a lot of quite good things for free.

8:12And this is the way the market sort of works online with this kind of content is that you either get free content because you get ads and you are being targeted. Or you get free content because some people, out of the goodness of their heart, give a little bit of money to the creators. So, I would advise that you go into your podcasting app and look at what you listen to the most in general. And if there's any other kind of free software that you use, like, I don't know, VLC or Wikipedia or one of my favorite, FB Purity, which removes ads from Facebook.

8:46These are all free things that people create out of the goodness of their heart and they restore my faith in humanity that people do create it out of the goodness of their heart. And it only works because other people are nice and give a little bit of money to keep things rolling. So, if you want to be part of that sort of like, I don't know, open source freedom internet thing and get those nice feelings, then one of the things you can do if you listen to a lot of us, support us on Patreon. Think about it like OnlyFans for your brain. OnlyFans for your brain.

9:19Yeah.

9:21What? I like it. Look, not the worst metaphor I've ever heard.

9:27OnlyFans is for my brain, but that's not the story. Oh, dang. What is going on there? Watch people sell Sudoku? Yeah. I bet you that exists, though. Some extremely buxom human just doing Sudoku. Sudoku? Oh, no, not again. So, my pitch would be, here we are. We're out here spreading the love of language, trying to explain what's what in the world of linguistics. And if you like what we're doing, you want to help us cover our costs and make the regular episodes free for everybody. And sign up, as little as $1 a month or even free, patreon.com slash becauselangpod.

10:03Hey, who wants to give a shout out to our newest patrons? Hedwig does. One, two, three, not yet. I was just, I'm trying to get better for the TikTok video of, like, looking at you guys here. And whenever you see something like that, I need to turn around my head and look at the run sheet, which I can do. Absolutely. I can turn my head. Go ahead. So, we have a couple of new people who have joined us on Patreon. We have new supporters, David B. and Linganth. I have seen Linganth before, so I suspect this is a returning customer. Pokey Pokey player.

10:34At the listener level, we have, and this is the hard, this is the one I was looking at earlier before the show. So, it's linguistics and then the ampersand and then either a capital I, a one or an L, R-T. So, it's linguist, linguistics, linguistik, an, an, rant. I would have interpreted that as linguistics and lit. Thank you. Yes. You know, lowercase Ls are just a problem.

11:06I wish that they had a hook on them. Linguistics and lit. Okay. Linguistics and lit is upgrading from the free level, so that's really nice to see them here. Who else? And then at the friend level, we have also been joined by Unleashy and Gage. Gosh. Something like that. I'm sorry for the pronunciation. And we also have a couple of new people who have joined us at the free level. Those are Hugh, Emily, Bengt, Abraham, CK, Amelia, and Ruth Sparks. Thanks, everybody, for joining us. You're helping. Welcome to the family.

Language tests for Irish citizenship

11:37Ready for some news? Oh, boy, howdy am I. We've been having shows about the Irish language this year. And also, we're always on the lookout for news items about language policy. Well, they came together recently, and I'm not sure how to think about it. This is some news from the Taoiseach of Ireland, Michael Martin. Now, the Taoiseach, we would say prime minister of Ireland, but they don't say that. They say it's the Taoiseach, which means the leader. And his party, Fianna Fáil, is conservative.

12:07And they've had a brainstorming session. So now the journal, we'll have a link in the show notes, reports as follows, quote, Currently, those seeking Irish citizenship must be resident in the country for five years. This is to change to eight years and will also require a language test. Now, I see a language test. I get a little worried. Do you? Am I off base with that one? We've talked about this before, and here it's tricky. Because at one level, when most of the services in a country is provided in a certain language,

12:41it is helpful if you know it. On the other hand, this is often a dog whistle shorthand for just kicking, especially certain immigrants out, usually. So I feel conflicted about it because I know that if you lived in Germany, I know I live in Germany, and I know that I'm going to have an easier life here, the better I speak German. As evidenced by my life getting easier, the longer I've been here and the more I've spoken German. But these language tests are often, they can be a bit draconic. It depends on the spirit in which they're pitched.

13:13I don't think they're necessarily always a bad thing. Being a citizen means being able to partake in certain debates and certain services, and a lot of them are in a particular language. That said, a lot of countries are now multilingual. So, for example, Ireland has both English and Irish, a Celtic language that is not Germanic. So, Daniel, what is this language just going to be in for Ireland? Well, the journal article says, Justice Minister Jim O'Callaghan says the language test will show if people have a proficiency in,

13:48and quoting him, Irish or, most probably, English. It's Irish or English or, indeed, Irish sign language for people, he added. So, you don't know until you take the test which one they're going to test you with? Oh, no, it's Irish sign language. Yeah, I think maybe you get your choice. Well, because, I mean, the reason I ask is, if I'm not mistaken, this exact ambiguity was used to enforce the White Australia policy.

14:21Yes, it was. Tell us more. Well, I believe in the sort of the interwar period and leading into the postwar period, Australia was like, damn, we sure as hell need some people to, like, cut down sugarcane and other jobs we don't want to do. Better get some migrants over here. Oh, no, not brown ones, though. So, they would apply a language test to all migrants, and they could choose, in the moment, the language that they would test them on. And so, wouldn't you know it, if an Italian rocked up, they'd be like,

14:55hey, why don't you give us a few sentences in Italian? But if a Chinese person rocked up, they might be like, hey, why don't you give us a few sentences in Italian, for instance. And then if they could, they had to take the test again in another language that the tester chose. And there was a 1903 memo where the then head of immigration said, this is explicitly so that people can fail. That's mental. Also, it seems to work on the assumption that, like, Australia is, like, a multilingual country officially in English and, for example, Italian,

15:28which it isn't. No. No. We really needed that sugarcane cut down, Hedwig. That's what I think you need to understand. No, Australia needed that sugarcane cut down and the people who were cutting it down not to vote. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. That's it. We found that laws that demand competency in some language are usually part of an agenda to crack down on minority language speakers. But in this case, Irish is a minority language, which is interesting. But it's still a soft way of making things harder for immigrants. And as an immigrant myself, I say, patui, patui, this sounds terrible.

16:02Can I also ask, on the dog whistle side of things, what does Ireland's net migration look like these days? No idea. The reason I ask is because there is approximately 700 billion Irish people in my city. Oh, is that right? Yeah. Yeah. Daniel, have you been to hospital or a school in the last 20 years in Australia? I do believe that I have. And you would have heard some Irish accents in both of those places.

16:32I sure have. Yep. And I want to be very, very clear. What I am not doing is like, bah, this dirty Irish wave. Like, it's not a bad thing. But my understanding was that Ireland is hemorrhaging its young people. So I'm not quite certain, like, look, I would need to look into it. But if Ireland is losing its native-born population, you would think that it might want some more people coming in to fill up some of those empty gaps.

17:05Well, it does show just how complicated these matters can become as good things are used for bad ends, especially in a world where we're seeing a wave of right-wing populism. We'll see that a little bit later in the show. But Ireland could also want to be like some of the Gulf states with having a huge immigrant population that don't have a lot of rights. Ah, capitalism seems to depend on that, doesn't it? That's a thing that people want to be. We've got an update on some work that we covered in episode 117 about compositionality in bonobo

Bonobo call compositionality debate

17:41calls. Bonobo calls. That was work by Dr. Melissa Berthet of the University of Zurich. They examined the calls of bonobos, and they noticed patterns in how they were combining them. And they did some statistical tests to conclude that the bonobos were combining their calls to mean more than the individual units themselves. Like call number one would mean maybe a thing, we think. Call two would mean something different. But if they combined those calls, it wouldn't just be whatever call one meant plus whatever

18:14call two meant. It would mean a special third thing, which would be a big deal because that's what we do. I love the list of these combinations, by the way. They are, the combination is, for example, peep, peep, yelp, and peep, or hi-hoot, low-hoot. That was kind of obvious. But I love all the ones that include peep. So there's whistle, peep, peep, yelp, whistle, and whistle, and peep, yelp, peep, grunt. Peep, yelp, grunt. Fun. Fantastic stuff.

18:45I didn't know that they could whistle, to be honest. I think I've got to be honest. Peep, peep, yelp, grunt. Was that the last one you said? Peep, yelp, grunt. Peep, yelp, grunt would be the name of my debut punk EP, for sure. Interesting. Well, this is new work from Dr. Andreas Vartal of Stockholm University, Sweden, and a team published in PeerJ. First time I'd heard of that one. It's peer-reviewed and it's open access. Now, they cast doubt on the findings of that earlier paper, and I've tried to understand

19:17exactly why that is. So here's my best explanation. The original paper showed relationships between certain kinds of calls, and they used a technique called multiple correspondence analysis, which is basically like Piemantle or Semantle, but for bonobo calls. Do you know what I mean? It's, if any of their listeners have ever done math or a statistics class and heard of principal components analysis, MCA is like PCA, but for binary data.

19:49Yeah. Like when you start playing Piemantle, you see all the words in the game arranged on a flat screen, your screen, and it's kind of a spiral. Well, this is what that does. It maps their calls onto a grid so that we can look at them and find clusters, and the idea is that the calls in the clusters mean different things. That's the old work. Okay. So this new team generated thousands of simulated data sets where they knew that there were no relationships between the different data points, and then they ran that data through

20:20the pipeline used in the old paper by Berthet et al., and they found that lots of this data that was really, really random showed false positives. Now, you'd expect up to 5% false positives normally if you're trying to use a 95% confidence interval. Well, this was anywhere from 34% to about 84% of random data showing false positives. So that was one thing. Showing this kind of compositionality behavior. And this sort of illustrates something that's happening right now in, I would say, in like

20:54data science statistics in general, where people are emphasizing this kind of simulation work. So you have a method, you have some data, and you have a method that you think is going to tell you something. For example, in this case, if your data features its compositionality or not. But then just to test the method, you should generate some data that you know is compositional in this case, and generate some data that you absolutely know is random. And then sort of like reality check if your method will recover the right things. So this kind of behavior is spreading more and more into papers, this kind of like, because

21:29earlier with like frequentivist statistics, there were certain assumptions, like you were comparing, I guess, this kind of like null, random scenario. But your particular scenario might not be the kind of random scenario that the test has previously be tested again. So you might even in your individual study want to do this kind of reality check of your methods. And this is becoming more and more common. I think it's generally a good thing. And in this case, these authors from Stockholm University are saying that this method generates

22:02too many false positives to be trusted. They did one more thing. They took Berthet's data and re-ran the experiment. But they used a more rigorous test than the multiple correspondence analysis that the old team used. And they found that the patterns that the Berthet team had found just disappeared. So this is just part of the discussion. People are going to keep writing about this. And that's science. But for now, maybe this casts the findings of Bonobo call compositionality in doubt.

22:32They might not be combining their calls to mean new things like we do. Can I ask Hedwig something? Yeah. As a doctor who works in academia, if we just pretend for a second that this was your study that got a bit of a professional swipe offered, how would you be feeling? What's the reality of being an academic? Because this is part of academia, right? Like this is this really good, rigorous thing where other people like look at your work

23:05and kind of stress test it and figure out where you might have gone wrong. Would you like, would you be like, oh, okay. Or would you be like devastated right now? I would honestly be, I would be devastated. And I think if I had a less precarious working situation, I would be less devastated. I feel like if I was in a tenured position, I would be like, cool, this is science. That didn't feel great. Maybe I was wrong. Let's figure this out. Move on.

23:36But if I don't have a study job, have a fixed contract and I'm applying for grants and stuff, which is, for example, the position I am in now, I would be really worried. And this is why we go to conferences and present our ideas to get feedback. This is why we present to our colleagues in the department and why we have peer review and things like this because we want to really stress test it as much as possible before it's out there. But the truth is there might be some angle on the stress testing that you haven't thought of that none of the colleagues and none of the peer reviews have thought of.

24:09And these kinds of things might happen. And that's why science works, you know, in the aggregate, right? Like there's like a consensus forming of multiple studies rather than one study. This is why a lot of science journalism is really problematic because they'll have to focus on one paper that comes out and use like super high impact journals and be like, coffee is good for you. Bonobos have compositionality, etc. And as scientists, that's not really how we tend to work.

24:40We tend to work in this kind of like vibey consensus way. So for the science itself, it's less of a blow than maybe it might seem because if we're all like morally good, you know, humble consensus researchers, then this is just part of the deal. But the material reality is that people, you know, don't have jobs, are not getting grants probably. I mean, most of us get rejected all the time. And it feels emotionally bad.

25:10Yeah. Thank you for affording us an insight into the life of an academic. And something I've been thinking about a lot lately is also that feeling of bad when you get rejected and when people critique you and you get a lot of shit and you don't have a job, you can become paranoid, territorial, irritable and not a nice person to be around. And I have seen this happen to people I know are fundamentally good and smart people. And I am currently trying to figure out how to vaccinate myself against that because I'm

25:44going to enter a period of getting a lot of shit at me. Yeah. I don't want to become resentful and bitter. And I hope the authors who wrote this original paper, they wrote it in the spirit, you know, of wanting to add to our mountain of knowledge and science. And it's really cool to research animal communication. And they've, you know, transcribed all this material and done a lot of cool things. And maybe something, well, we'll find out because I also saw there were two more comments on this paper that I can't access because they're behind some sort of wall and I'm trying

26:14to access them. But yeah, it's going to be rough and I hope they'll be all right. Well, thank you for the science chat. We're going to keep an eye on it. Okay, this next one is about analogy.

Analogical communication and language evolution

26:28If I say that some company is going to sunset a technology that we use, what does that mean? It's going to be supporting it? Yeah, like Windows 11, was it? 10. Something like that, yeah. They just, yeah, they wound back support for 10. But why would you say it that way? What's the benefit? Sunsetting a technology. I mean, it is faster than saying we are going to procedurally offer less and less support for this over time. Like it's quicker. Everyone knows what you mean. Well, this is, of course, metaphor or we could call it analogy.

27:01This is like that. It's very useful because metaphor allows us to take knowledge from one domain and carry it across to a domain that we might not understand so well. In fact, the word metaphor actually etymologically means carry across because you're carrying knowledge across from one place to another. So, this is work from Dr. Thomas Holden of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Sorry, I didn't know this when I selected it. These people. Yeah, no. So, either Daniel's feed is getting a lot of Max Planck in it or Max Planck is just publishing

27:33a lot. Can people submit papers in our new language chat that are by people who are ostensibly my colleagues? Just not all the time. So, yeah. It's very awkward for Hedwig. Now, you know what? I'm going to keep doing it because then I could get to watch Hedwig squirm. Squirm. Just remember, everybody, it's me picking the articles and occasionally Hedwig. Okay, here's what they say. Analogical communication, in other words, that sort of metaphor thing, is not merely a byproduct that came after the development of language, but is likely to have played a

28:05key role in facilitating how we cognitively process and communicate about our environment at the most basic level. That's not hugely surprising. I've always thought metaphor was on the same level as, like, laughing or nodding and shaking your head. Like, it's this thing that exists in all conceivable human cultures, which that usually suggests something is, like, really fundamental and basic. And it's, like, one of the main ways that language changes.

28:38I don't know, like, you take in information, for example, that's already arguably a metaphor because take is, it often goes from the physical to the more abstract, right? We do that all the time. Imagine if you could only describe things. Like, ultra-literally. I don't think I even appreciate how much of what I say is inherently analogous. Yeah, because, for instance, take in information. I would never have thought of that as an analogy. But, of course, it is because it's not a literal.

29:08Yeah. It was Dr. Mark Ellison and Dr. Uta Reinhold, who I remember first made the point, at least as far as I read, that all human languages have metaphor and no non-human communication system has anything that you could call an analogy that I could think of. Oh, are we setting up a new target for the animal communications people? They don't have enough drama as it is. Let's move those goalposts. When the sea otters can talk about their little whacking stones, metaphorically, now we know.

29:38Yeah, yeah. They'll be like, whacking stones together is like when I fight with my wife. I imagine otters have wives.

29:47In their view, communicating by analogy allows us to transmit information with high fidelity, draw on shared cultural knowledge, and that's good because you're tapping into something your listener already knows. So I'm going to tell you about how their experiment worked. They use something called an NK model, and the best way to describe this is with an analogy. So Ben, I want you to imagine that you are dropped into a rugged landscape with hills and mountains and also little pits and dents and depressions in every direction. We're playing D&D. I'm in. Yep. And you're trying to find your way to the top of the highest mountain in the land.

30:19All right. Oh, okay. Yep. So if you see a higher place, you'll go toward it. Sure. Problem is, you might think that you've already found the maximum highest point in the land, but you're really just on a local maximum, and everything looks down to you because you just can't see the actual highest point right now. And you don't want to go down too much because that's down. Maybe you're on the highest point already. You don't want to leave it. All right? Sure. Or you could even, let's say you're on a very high peak, and in the distance, you see a higher peak.

30:49But you're like, well, I have to go down to get there. I don't want to go down. Yeah. I mean, this isn't even really metaphorical at this point, because you are just describing what all humans seem to want to do when they go walking around outside. That's true. Well, what they did was they made lots of little software guys, and they put them in pairs. One member of the pair was trying to find the best solution to the hill climbing problem. I say hill climbing. It wasn't a real hill. They were just trying to get closer and closer to a string of characters that represented

31:22the best solution. Right. The other member of the pair was giving instructions, like maybe through a walkie-talkie or something. Imagine that. Okay. So, you're trying to find the best solution. You're the little climber. In this experiment, that looks like a string of characters, and there are millions of these possible strings. But I'm helping you, Ben. I'm helping you with my messages. I know some good solutions, and I'm going to teach you the best approach. Sound good? Okay. Okay, now, how do I teach you? Sometimes I just communicate a message, but that's really hard because in this experiment,

31:54some of the instructions were quite complicated, and I might not know the best answer. But I could also use an analogy, and I can do that by knowing what I want to say, but I can also look through a list of shared items, a list of shared strings that we both have, shared messages, shared strings of characters, and then I can choose one of those. That is a lot like what I want to transmit. I think I'm understanding. So, both pairs, or both individuals in this pair were pre-loaded with a list of shared

32:32understandings. So, if we break out of the metaphor for a second, we're talking about people from a similar culture who understand sun rises and sets in a certain way, or the wind blows in a certain direction in the afternoon, and all that kind of stuff. Potatoes are good. Potatoes are good. Yeah. That is obviously independent of culture, but sure. Now, some agents used analogies and some didn't, but the ones that did use analogies learned better and found better solutions. They say, quote, Our analysis suggests that analogical communication enhances the fidelity of social transmission

33:07and can evolve even if costly, provided that there exist sufficiently complex problems that cannot easily be solved through individual learning alone. End of quote. And this team thinks that analogy works, and it's also really important in language evolution. So, I think I've followed, I just want to see if I can wrap this up for lay people, because this is a pretty complicated idea, I think. And I'm not entirely sure I've got it right. So, this was, this entire thing was a simulation, right?

33:37Like, it was, it was almost as if someone was playing Dwarf Fortress, which is like a very, very, very lo-fi video game with like little gremlins running around and stuff. Um, and so they were creating bots, essentially, that would need to try and solve a problem with this, within this landscape. And they wanted to put to the test what certain kinds of communication would do in terms of the pairs of bots being able to solve the problem. And if they had a, like a digital version of analogy available to them, they just did better.

34:10Their communication was probably faster and therefore allowed them to do more communicating in the given time resource that they had available to them. And I, you didn't state it clearly, but maybe they could also update their, um, their, their list of things. So, like, as you went along, you could build more and more things that would be available for analogy as you, like, progressed through the task, which would also be, I think, relatively realistic to, like, how analogy works in language. Ben, do you know the site TV Tropes?

34:40Mm. Okay. I do. I love that site. What's great about tropes in, in fiction is that they are shorthands. You don't need to explain a whole thing. They're stereotypes. So, when you see, uh, what's a good TV trope, uh, example. The one I always go to with my students is, like, in sitcoms, there is always the smart kid, the weird kid, and the dumb kid. The stoner. In, like, the family. Right. Yeah. Or, yeah, friend groups mainly come in groups of three, and they have distinct characteristics,

35:11and if they meet another friend group of three, they will pair up similarity-wise. This is Alvin, the chipmunks, and the chip hats, or whatever. Um, so, those kinds of shorthands are similar, in a way, to metaphor and analogy. And, in a way, these agents, when they have access to this background knowledge that they can draw on, they can actually bake in more information into one utterance by referring to it by a shorthand, in a sense, right? So, if you say sun setting, like you said, you don't have to say, we're going to roll back support, blah, blah, blah.

35:41So, in a way, I'm wondering if these agents are not just, like, packing more information into their utterances, and that's why it's better. That's really cool, and it's really interesting, and I also like that somewhere out there, people figured out how to be academics by running little dolly simulations. I'm going to make my little dollies do things, and I will do science this way. I'm not even, I'm, it sounds like I'm making fun of these people. I'm actually not. That's sick as fuck. I love that. This is my husband's whole job.

36:11Actually, knowing what I know of your husband, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. He has little agents running around, and they, like, diversify, and they tell words to each other, and sometimes they maybe do things that you could describe as fighting. And they run around all over little islands, and then we look at their assault, and we're like, huh, that's neat. Yeah. Hey, last news item.

Searching archived TV news online

36:36We have a lot of ways to search for language information, and I just found one more. Ooh. The Internet Archive. We love the Internet Archive. It's saving the past. We do love Internet Archive. It's not just saving the past versions of webpages. It's also making, like, playable versions of Flash games that have been deprecated, that have been sunset. Homestar Runner lives on the Internet Archive? All there. All the 80s ROM, video game ROMs, they're all there. But here's something I just found out about.

37:07They've been collecting TV news from 2009 to today. Wait, hold on. Let me just check here. Yep. When you say collecting TV news, that is an outstanding amount of data and information, right? Are you saying, like, okay, so in Australia, for instance, off the top of my head, I can name you five mainline news institutions in terms of television, right? So you've got the three commercial broadcasters, seven, nine, and ten.

37:37You've got SBS, which is like a hybrid one. And you've got ABC, which is the national broadcaster. And all four or five of those guys are doing a nightly news broadcast every night. And you're saying the Internet Archive has all of that vision? Now, I haven't checked for the Australian sources, but it does have BBC, all the American ones, Deutsche Welt, France 24, Al Jazeera, some Russian state television, transcribing it, putting it on their site, making it searchable. You can look up. I just looked up Goblin Mode, and I pulled up loads of clips that had that in there, and

38:10I could watch the context. It was in 30-second chunks. That's crazy. That's very cool. I just, I can't, I just, I cannot impress upon our listeners, like, that's so much, that's so, oh, like, we, sorry, I'm losing my mind here a little bit, because, like, I think we forget that, like, okay, so Friends, right, was, like, a really long-running TV show, and it was, like, 22 episodes a season. It went for, like, nine seasons or whatever it was. So you're like, wow, damn, that's a lot of television.

38:43The TV news would blitz that in, like, a year. One station would absolutely destroy the entire nine seasons of Friends in terms of how much content they'd made. That's so big. It's bananas. You can look at what multiple news sources are saying about the same thing, or even at the same time. It's fantastic. So, we'll have a link to the site in the show notes for this episode, but I'll just say it now. It's archive.org slash details slash TV. Archive.org slash details slash TV.

39:14If you need to donate to archive.org, this is a good excuse, right? We already do. We're already on board. Also, a tip of the hat to at Kyronis Talks on Twitter, who showed me the link. There we go.

Related or Not word etymology game

39:29And that's the news.

Related or Not word etymology game

39:30All right, it's time now for Related or Not, and our theme comes from Camden. This is the hard rock version. Let's hear it. Do these words share a root?

39:41Or are they merely false friends? This is the etymology done on the fly to no serious ends, related or not.

40:04Thank you, Camden. And thank you to the YouTuber who made the guitar track. I'll have a link to credit that person in the show notes as well. All right. First, Related or Not comes from me. Ooh, Daniel. The word is stick. Stick could mean lots of things. Like a tree part. Many senses. Yep. Like fetch the stick. It could be a verb to adhere. I'll just stick this to the wall, right? Or it could be a verb to place. Like, oh, I'll just stick this in the corner.

40:38So stick the tree part to adhere and to just put something down someplace. Related or not?

40:48I have thoughts. I don't know why we're discussing this. They're clearly all related. They're all about attaching, adhering something to something. Okay. Interesting. Maybe. We've got to vote for all related. See, I was going to say tree part. Differtante. Putting something somewhere and adhering something somewhere. Very clearly related. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Okay. But I think I'm also wondering if stick, oh, it could be one of those funny little words

41:21because it's for such a common thing that it's been around for, like, donkey's years. As in tree part one, I mean. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Whereas, like, the adhere stuff could have come to us through a different thing. Okay. So, yeah, I'm thinking that, like, tree part is really old, really, really old, and adhering is, like, a romance language thing or, like, a loan word or something like that. Okay. I thought they were all related.

41:53I can see a through line there. And I'll give you the answer. The answer is, Hedwig, they're all related. Oh, you son of a... They all go back to Old English sticka, the noun, or Old English stickion, the verb. It's just something pointy that can pierce things. And when you stick something with adhesive, it, you know, it stays there. And when you stick a stick into something, if you stick a stick into something, it stays there, too. So, it's the same darn thing. Okay.

42:24All right. Oh, a great question. Yes?

42:29Steak. Stick and steak. All right. Time to vote. Look it up. Wait. Steak as in, um, I stake my claim or, like, a steak to the heart? Yeah. A steak to the heart. And then there's steak, the thing you eat. No, I wasn't thinking about that. No, no, no. The meat is unrelated. Yeah. I'm saying that stick and steak, I think that they are related. I think it's... Is it one of those breach and break pairs? I'm not sure, but I'm going to say related. Okay. Okay. So, steak comes from Old English stacca, which is a different word from, from sticca.

43:04Um, it comes from Proto-Germanic stacon. Now, I'm going to go back to stick. Hmm. Proto-Germanic stacon for stick. So, so it looks like the difference between stick and steak goes all the way back to a change in the verb from one to the other. I'm, I'm not seeing a similarity until we get back to Proto-Indo-European steg, something pointed. If it's Proto-Indo-European, are we, are we saying it's a match? That's related. Yeah.

43:35Are we, are we, are we, are we, okay. But like, how, how confident are we on what we know about Proto-Indo-European, right? If all those historical linguists agree that there is something in Proto-Indo-European, we should be confident. If they don't agree, we shouldn't be confident that there isn't a connection. Bad news. Different root. Proto-Indo-European in Proto-Indo-European, but, but it's, but it's not that different. The one for steak is steg, S-T-E-G.

44:06You're seeing it on your screen now. The one for stick, S-T-E-I-G. It's got an extra I. Now, come on. How confident can we be? Oh, I love it. I love it. When I'm sitting here being like, hmm, how are we feeling about Proto-Indo-European? You guys are just like, no, no, no, this is science. This is absolutely it. And when it's like a bit off, you're like, oh, we could fudge it. It's fine. That's complete. Yeah. I'm not sure what to think. Let's go on to number two. This one is from ProaliasedGlyph on our Discord, who says, two out of three, vacation, vaccine,

44:41vacuum. Which one is the odd one out? Hang on. You just pronounced what I think is the word vacuum really weirdly. Vacuum. Yeah. What the fuck was that? It's got two U's. I don't know what to do. I panicked. Okay. I mean, vaccine, we know, is from cows. Vaca. Okay. Yeah. Vaca. Why is it from cows? Because the women who were milking the cows weren't getting sick in the same way because

45:11they were getting exposed to something in a small dose. And that's like a vaccine. Cowpox. Yeah. Cowpox. And so we had a thing before we had vaccinations, which was inoculations, which I think a lot of people think is like the same thing, but it actually means something different and way grosser. It's when you take the pus from the blister and you stick it on yourself. It's what Catherine the Great did in the Russian Empire. Just moosh that puppy in. Liddle that in. Oh, no, we have to make a wound first. And then, yes. Oh, God.

45:41But Catherine the Great famously, I think, did it on herself to prove to her citizens that it was a good idea. But going back to vaccine, vacation, and vacuum. I think vacuum and vacation are related. I think they're about emptiness. Yeah, I agree. And I think vaccine is about cows. And I think cows are not empty. We all agree. And we are all correct. Nice going. I love the idea of a vacation being an emptying out. That's so cool. To vacate. Yeah. Thank you, Proilius Glyph. And finally, one from Gordon.

46:12Now, this one is three pairs of words, but only one pair are related. You have to spot the pair. Get your pen and pencil out, Hedwig. Here we go. Compound in the chemical or linguistic sense. So you've got a compound of stuff put together. And compound in the sense of buildings. I walked around the compound. That's one pair. Next one. Focus and focaccia, the bread. What is with your pronunciation today?

46:43How do you say it? Focaccia. Focaccia. I didn't want to presume. Focaccia. I've heard focaccia. Vacuum and focaccia? What is this? Like a weird disease to do with the follicles? I'm sorry. I couldn't hey-ar you. I was vacuuming the focaccia. Good Lord. It's like you've got the linguistic version of the yips or something. Shall I go on to the third pair? Yeah, might as well. Barrier and barricade.

47:16See, I did that one normally. Barricade. Barrier and barricade. Okay, so there you go. There's your three pairs, but only one of them is a related pair. Compound and compound. Focus and focaccia. Barrier and barricade. I think it's got to be the last one. It's got to be the last one. That focus and focaccia, that's bait. That's what that is. You think a compound noun and a bunch of buildings together are not similar? Yeah, I was hearing that as well. Like a compounding chemist is someone who takes a bunch of stuff and mixes it together,

47:50and a compound by its very nature is like an enclosed space with lots of different things. So that's what really jagged my attention as well. But then barrier and barricade, I agree with Daniel. It just seems so clear there. However, metagame time, that one seems just way too juicy. Like it's too clean. It's too simple. Gordon's a pro. But, but, but, but, I could also see compound, especially because of the way we pronounce it.

48:21If it came like, this sounds like one of those words that would come to us from like Spanish, right? Like compando or something like that. And I wonder if it's a different Spanish word that we've actually just like let slide into being this thing that ended up sounding like compound. Yeah. And then the other form of compound like influenced the way that we wrote it and said it. Like, I bet it just gives that. Okay. I'm going to not go with my first instinct because that always leads me down the path of doom.

48:53I will go with barrier and barricade as well. And I actually secretly hope it's focus and focaccia so we all look like dicks.

49:03Okay. Hedwig. I think it's compound and compound. I think it's too, like I don't, it's, it's a triple bluff. Okay. All right. Uh, it's not compound. Those are not related. Gordon says the first sense comes via French and ultimately from the Latin componere, meaning to put together. The second was influenced by the first, but originally came from Malay, kampong, meaning village or group of buildings. Oh, fuck off.

49:34That is, that is, Gordon has left to you. That's a very clear, not related. I can't publish it. There's no wiggle room there. Not related, but influenced, right? And that's a, that's a kind of relatedness, but not the kind we're looking for. No, no, no, no. All right. It's not barrier and barricade. Hot diggity dog.

49:55Barrier, says Gordon, comes to us via French and originally was used to describe the stake or the stick. You would put across a door to hold it shut. And that word came from the Latin. It was a bar. It was just a bar. So, barricade comes from the Spanish barricada, simply meaning made of barrels. Wow. That's, that's a different word. Gordon has got game. He has. Got us all. He has. Wow. What a savant at related or not. He just knows us.

50:26That's the thing. He knows us. Wait, hold on. Hold on. Okay. Now that we know it's focus and focaccia, let's all do a very best guess at how the fuck these two words could possibly be related. I already know, but go ahead. When you make focaccia, you have to make little holes. Yeah, true. Yep. That's kind of like focus.

50:55What was that? Okay. What do I know? So, Ben, you've played this game long enough that you know making holes and being focused are kind of samey. Hmm? That's a long bow to draw. Especially when you poke it with a stick, you know. Okay. I'm going to say, what do I know about focaccia? It's a very, very high hydration dough. It's a very, very wet and sticky dough. You tend to use heaps of oil. Maybe oil was used in like lens making in some way.

51:30Okay. Yeah, I got nothing here. I don't know how you could get. Yeah. Okay. Let's hear it. When you see a big focaccia on the table, it's like, oh, that's what I want. I'm going for that. I mean, that's true. I want some of that. Gordon says, focus in Latin meant hearth or fireplace. Oh, well, there you go. And as it was often the center of activity, it gave us the sense of the point of convergence or the place of interest and attention. No way. So, it's nothing to do with lenses or optics or anything like that.

52:04It's an oven. Because of the original hearth meaning, many Romance languages used it for certain dishes or cooking methods. We have the French cake for us, the Spanish or gasa, possibly even the Vietnamese pho from the French pho for fire. And the Italian focaccia for a type of bread baked under the ashes of a fire. Gordon, our hats are off to you. I doff it in the strongest possible terms, sir. You, you, wow. Thank you, Gordon. Thanks to Camden for the jingle.

52:36And if you want to send those to us, you can do it. Just send it to hello at becauselanguage.com or get it to us in the usual ways. And Hedvig, we're going to say goodbye to you for this episode.

Interview with Dr. Florence Hazrat

52:45Ben and I will take it from here. Bye. We're here with Dr. Florence Hazrat, researcher, writer, author of An Admirable Point, A Brief History of the Exclamation Mark, and most recently, On the Mark, From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World. Hi, Florence. Thanks for coming on the show. Hi, thank you for having me.

53:16I'm very happy to be here. Wow, you've been doing punctuation for a long time. I think that you might be a little bit interested in it. You could think maybe that I'm a little bit obsessed with it. Also, by all of the punctuation pictures that I have when I walk around the city and I see some punctuation, of course, I have to take a picture and interpret and see what's going on. Oh my gosh, you're a typography nerd just like I am, but like even more specific. Yes. My mom, you know, sends me stuff.

53:47People send me little, you know, trinkets or something like that with punctuation on it. And yeah, I think I'm addicted to punctuation. Do you like ASCII art? Oh yeah, yeah. Love. Yeah, yeah. Totally. All of that nerdy stuff. Well, now I guess I have to ask, what's the most interesting artifact that you have with punctuation on it? Have you got like a plexiglass semicolon trophy thing? Oh, I wished.

54:17I have some like very, very blown up balloons, not here, somewhere else. I wished I could, you know, buy the exclamation mark, this really beautiful mark by an artist whose name I have now forgotten, of course. But I'm writing about him in my first book and I was able to have a look at this mark in an exhibition in Berlin a couple of years ago and it's made from rubber spikes, kind of, and like yellow,

54:51very, very garish yellow. And it's strange and beautiful at the same time. And it also costs something like 200,000 euros or $150,000, something like that in that area. So maybe not something. Art is a strange industry, yeah. Yes. Well, why are you so interested in punctuation marks? What got you into this? I was actually doing my master's degree, I think, and I was doing it in Renaissance literature and I looked at Renaissance romance.

55:23So these are like stories of knights and like going into the woods and then meeting a lady and going somewhere else and so on. And I compared them, these original printed 16th century texts with modern editions and a lot of the parentheses were taken out and generally the punctuation changed. And I was wondering, why is that the case? And then I asked myself, where do these parentheses actually come from? Where does punctuation actually come from? And that original question, this original curiosity was then so impactful in my life that I just

55:57started to dig and like go down these many, many rabbit holes. And here I am, maybe something like 10 years later and still interested in that. And I think what fascinates me is that punctuation marks are supposed to be semi-transparent. You know, they're supposed to be like traffic signs that navigate how we read and how we write and they're supposed to help us. And we're not supposed to trip over them, but they're supposed to still be there. Like we should see them, but not too much.

56:27And so how can something that is so small have such a huge impact, change the meaning of a word, change the tone of a sentence or something like that? So I'm always interested in like formal aspects of language and writing in particular. So all instances of punctuation that I can think of have to do with linking to what in spoken language would do with like pausing and prosody and rhythm and the melody. So you might say something and then you might do a little detour and you might do both like

57:00facial gestures and intonation signals that you're doing a little detour. Whereas in writing, you don't have access to these. So punctuation is one of the tools you have to do that. Is there any other use cases for punctuation? Is that it? That's one of the big aspects of it is tone, right? Compensating for us not being present in a conversation. So maybe something, as you mentioned, that we would do with a hand gesture or posture even or the tone of voice.

57:32Punctuation is taking over, but that came quite late. So that's from the Renaissance onwards, maybe the 16th, 17th century onwards, we really have this established repertoire that we can use to be so nuanced in our writing. And I would maybe also say that the Renaissance was looking for this nuanced pausing, the maximum ultimate control over the sentence. But very early on, the first punctuation marks, which I'm sure we will get to as well, were more based on showing grammar. So rather than the tone or the performance or the prosody, more sort of the grammar and

58:07the bare bones of a sentence. But then we could also maybe contend, okay, isn't that also rhythm? And... Yeah, I was going to say that. Yes, exactly. And sadly, I don't have a very great command over ancient Greek and Latin. But back in those days, they really were looking also for a beautiful rhythmical sentence that they probably knew what that shape was as well, combined with the grammar. I sadly, and I would maybe say a lot of us don't really have that access anymore necessarily. But yes, back in the day, so it was both grammar and tone or rhythm sound.

58:45Of course, now we have a third thing, and that's social meaning. Because as we've seen, whenever there's variation, that can be picked up and employed to form us into groups, social groups, because I think punctuation isn't spoken, it's only written. So it's part of a written register. And some people have knowledge of that register in real detail, and some people don't. And so, you know, people have strong opinions about certain kinds of commas, or people have

59:15strong opinions about semicolons, and we're going to get to all those. But it feels like it's been employed for social meaning and maybe social division a bit. Yes, absolutely. That's one of my favorite topics. I think all my goals with these books that I'm writing is to give people permission to explore and experiment a little bit with punctuation and get away from this rule-based thinking. I'm sure a lot of teachers are going to scream when they hear me say that, and maybe linguists as well.

59:46But for me, it's more interesting to see what people can do with punctuation, how we can go into the bounds of what's possible and hang out in these border areas rather than this is correct or this is not correct. I'm not at all interested in that, to be honest. I think I'm not that great of a punctuator myself in terms of just really comments that need to be here because it's a restricted whatever adjective or something like that. So I punctuate in an elocutionary way so where I would also pause.

1:00:19So my punctuation in English is a little bit actually crowded potentially. Some people might not like that, but I do that in order to guide the reader along as if we were sitting together. I do the same. And I think also like in Swedish in general, people use more commas like that than in English. So like with people reading my English, they'll often say similar to you, it's crowded with commas. And I'm like, well, yeah, they come naturally. I don't know what to do about that. Yes.

1:00:50And I also think that the commas help the eye to move along. There are not many studies in terms of eye tracking and punctuation, but some that I have found had people read Jane Austen texts, for example. So really kind of complicated texts or like parts of prose with and without commas. And the eye tracking found that the eye lingers on the commas, but can then process the text after that faster. So it helps us, you know, it does slow us down, but then it helps us to, you know, move

1:01:25along in a safer way, in a faster way. So I feel like there were reasons why our ancestors for so many thousands of years have come up with these things. And, you know, it's kind of perfected to our biology without even having these scanners and all the rest of those kinds of things. So just to come back to your comment, Daniel, I think this over-focus on what's correct and what's not correct came relatively late, sort of late 18th century, very much in the

1:01:5519th century of the standardization of language, the invention of dictionaries and the fixing of spelling and then schools, you know, schools everywhere and people going to school, which is great on the one hand, and we want to be able to communicate. And if everybody spells in their own way, that wouldn't work out either. But this over-focus on this is correct, that's not correct, this is a too idiosyncratic way of spelling or of punctuating, that would be very foreign to people in the past.

1:02:26Tell me something that people often get wrong about punctuation. Are there any misconceptions that you're always having to correct? I think that it's boring, again, because, you know, we were just talking about these, like, the encounter with punctuation at school, which can be quite forbidding, depending, of course, on the teacher. Also, for example, my native language is German, and we have rules, and you have to follow these rules. And I suppose a good writer will be able to extend and enlarge these rules a little bit

1:02:59in German, but mostly it's really according to grammar and not so much a more playful approach. And you are really being downgraded if you misplace, misplace, comma, somewhere that, you know, the rule says don't. And so I think people are a little bit worried of being judged because it is such an easy and kind of cheap way almost to judge people based on whether they know how to place something relatively arbitrary. And so I'm trying to have people distance themselves a little bit from this school atmosphere and

1:03:38become more playful and give themselves permission. And it's kind of an invitation to see what does this actually do? And not actually only on a language level, but I'm very interested in the stories that punctuation has to tell. So, of course, in my work, there's also poetry analysis and, you know, reading about styles. But it's very much also, for example, who chose the punctuation in Shakespeare? That was not Shakespeare. We have very few Shakespeare autographs. So maybe just three pages that we think are by Shakespeare.

1:04:10They might very well not be. And in those, he only has a couple of commas and some full stops. I don't even believe there's any exclamation marks or question marks or nothing that is more nuanced. So who then put this punctuation into the plays? That was the typesetters or the readers? Or maybe he did that, but somebody else copied and then put something else. So I'm kind of interested in these stories that it has, that punctuation can tell us about groups of people or politics or relationships and that kind of stuff.

1:04:45Okay. Well, in that case, why don't you tell us, I have a list here. I want you to tell me who you think has been the most influential in the world of punctuation. All right. Here we go. Ancient Greeks. Can't be bad. There you go. Celtic scribes, 9th century, Italian scribes in the Renaissance, or somebody else. Who do you think are the heavy hitters? Who are the big bosses of punctuation? Maybe in order to sort out the frameworks for that in the background a little bit for the

1:05:21listeners, it's important to say that punctuation grew historically for thousands of years and that at least in Latin and Greek, we didn't have spaces between words. So a text would be written in one long line, like a continuous line, and scholars aren't entirely sure why and aren't agreeing why people did that. So some people say they didn't have a notion of the word, the shape of the word as its own

1:05:52parcel, kind of. Yeah. We just say words in one long string, so why wouldn't we write them in one long string? Exactly. And, you know, maybe when we walk on the street and we hear somebody speak a language that we don't know, it's very difficult, actually, to be able to tell where's the beginning of a sentence. Okay, maybe they pause, but with words, it becomes much more difficult to know the ending and the beginning of a word. And so when we speak, we do make very, very slight pauses, but they're so imperceptible to the conscious brain that maybe it just wasn't something that people thought that the

1:06:24thing that comes out of our mouth also has pauses, and hence we need to mark this somehow. However, there is evidence for, in ancient Persia, I think, the cuneiform kind that they were using, they had wedges, you know, specific wedges for beginning and end of a word. So they would, you know, embrace a word. So, you know, on the one hand, some cultures had this kind of concept. On the other, ancient Greece, ancient Rome partially didn't. And it's perfectly possible for us to read text without spaces.

1:06:59It just takes much longer. And, you know, we need much more education, again, because, you know, we need to see where is the beginning and the end of a word. So these ancient or these medieval Irish scribes introduce spaces between words, which then creates kind of an access to text, an immediate access to text that is world-changing. So partially, I want to say these scribes, where text became much easier to read, and then

1:07:29Charlemagne, you know, the emperor, took over this kind of writing and spread it throughout his whole empire, all across Europe. And then, you know, all of the manuscript scribes are doing that from that point onwards. There you go. Irish scribes, solid choice. Love it. Okay. Wait, is there more? Yeah, yeah. I feel so torn because the Greeks invented punctuation in terms of really the marks that we would also recognize as punctuation. And the Renaissance, of course, the Renaissance humanists, the lovers of language and manuscripts

1:08:05and writers, they gave us all of the marks that we can now use today, like parentheses, semicolon, dot, dot, dot, dash, or exclamation mark, or apostrophe. So everything that helps us write in this very nuanced way comes from that time. And also, the looks of the page, the title, you know, everything that we expect a book to look like is from then, from that time.

1:08:36Wow. Is it fair to say that that change was also a part of, like, democratizing writing? Because one of the things when you read everything in a long line is you have to have training and stuff on, like, how words are spelled and what's likely to be a boundary and all this common knowledge, which, if you only have a few people in your population who can read and write and they're specialists in it, they have all this, like, mountain of expertise. But if you want lots of people to read, it's hard to build up that expertise maybe among

1:09:08everyone. So would you say that punctuation is like a, yeah, a democratizing force? Yes, absolutely. And we see that really throughout this entire history of punctuation that it always came from an impulse to make writing more accessible. And that might be ancient or, like, Greek-influenced Egypt, you know, this library in Alexandria that might be Ireland in the 8th century or that might be Egypt in the 19th century. So there's always this impulse to make writing more accessible and understandable for a larger

1:09:40amount of people. In Greece or in Alexandria, it was the librarians who tried to develop this point system, this, you know, or dot system for learners or for readers of their manuscripts who were not native speakers of Greek. And then we have the monks who are themselves speaking Gaelic. So they're, like, Irish. And they are translating the Bible from Latin into Gaelic. Or, like, they were copying the Bible.

1:10:11And then they were trying to figure out, okay, which, what does this word mean in Gaelic? And they were kind of copying it above the Latin. And so, again, these are learners that try to get access to something. In 19th century Egypt, people or, like, the Egyptian elite or Arab writers saw Arabic not being used so much for more mundane day-to-day writing, more for, like, theological stuff or philosophical writings. And they saw how Arab writers or thinkers were using French or English.

1:10:43And so they said, okay, we need to stop this. We need to give access to people whose Arabic might not be so incredibly erudite, who maybe didn't have 10 years of Arabic teaching. And they eventually also imported European punctuation to divide writing and then make it more accessible. And then at the same time, if you have this, you open up this potential to gain knowledge and power and money and all of these, you know, development kind of things, you give access to that to foreigners, to women, to young people, to people who are maybe of a lower

1:11:18social class who haven't had these long years of education. So punctuation has always been a way to democratize and then also has been in danger of being locked up because of that power. That's a very interesting perspective. Yeah. Who would want women to read and write? It's a terrible idea.

1:11:38And, you know, if we're talking about punctuation being political, we can point to hyphens. We had a chat quite a while ago with Dr. Pardis Madhavi, University of Arizona, about her book Hyphen. And like you do in On the Mark, she mentions the hyphen as a signifier of identity, but also it's something that's going away. Could you tell me a little bit about how you feel about hyphens? Mm-hmm. I love hyphens. Of course, I don't want any punctuation to get lost or to be buried or something.

1:12:12And I actually share with Pardis Madhavi that we're both Iranian. And I have Iranian-German roots. So my parents are German. My mom is German. My dad is Iranian. And for me, the hyphen was really a way of rethinking identity and getting out of having to choose one thing or the other or having to say I'm half-half or having to constantly mention my parents because definitely I'm more than my parents, right? And I'm more, you know, identify myself through more than that. And the hyphen between these two origins really helped me kind of calibrate them out as well

1:12:49that, you know, they're both equally strong. And with this hyphen in the middle, there's like a quality between them. And the same then happened also. And Professor Madhavi talks about that in her book in the U.S., for example, where you had Italian-American or you still have that. A lot of people in the U.S. are so interested in their origins. And then they have the Irish-American and they identify themselves or, you know, Latinos or something like Hispanic-American. And on the other hand, then you get singled out potentially.

1:13:19So it makes you a little bit more vulnerable. So this hyphen can, again, help us think about identity, for example, or power relationships between two words or two concepts. And then at the same time, the question is, why are we pointing that out? Why are we pointing these roots out? And that question maybe was behind the drive of the Short Oxford English Dictionary in 2007 to kick out, I think, 16,000 hyphens. So instead of having something like ice cream with a hyphen, they just pushed the words together,

1:13:54not even with a space in between. It just became one word. Yes. No, but like as a Swedish speaker, I was always confused why there was a hyphen in that one, to be honest. Same with videotape and Datapoint. Here's the convention, and I've seen this in books before. Ice cream is usually two words. But when you pick up a multi-word expression and use it as a modifier, like ice cream cone, and people don't do this anymore, but in older books, you do see this.

1:14:25So I'm having ice cream, two words. I'm having an ice cream cone hyphen. Same with like, you only get to do this once in a lifetime. Separate words. But if you pick that whole thing up and you use it as a modifier, once in a lifetime opportunity, it gets hyphens. So now we're finally seeing hyphens dropped in ice cream cone, because you never see an ice hyphen cream cone. You just see ice cream cone. But lots of words are actually losing their hyphens and getting jammed together, like good

1:14:56night or bookstore or things like that. But it's just when you're a speaker of other Germanic languages, it just feels like English is putting spaces and hyphens in a lot of places just for some sort of inertia, just for like, ice cream has been one word for a really long time, as has like data point and video cassette. And then you get the opposite as well. You get to fetishizing of like, ooh, I bet there's a really long word in German for this and that. And I'm like, there probably would be in English too, if you just remove the hyphens in some

1:15:27places. If you were just sensible. I don't know. I just, I don't, I just think these are choices. You can make different choices. These are not like objective, rational, one way of doing it. I get what you're saying, Daniel, but like, I could also see doing it another way. Oh, I could totally see it too. This is just the standard that I've observed. And, you know, these are conventions. These are choices. And we can make different choices. It wouldn't matter. No, it wouldn't matter as such. I mean, I suppose it matters in terms of being able to read faster because what is connected

1:16:01through the hyphens is potentially being captured by the I as one word, I feel. And that helps potentially to process. That's my subjective experience. And so the falling away of the hyphen by this very, you know, this institution of the Oxford English Dictionary has also to do with that because they say that people have become used to these words like bumblebee or email. Nobody's thinking of email as electronic mail anymore. And so because we're used to that, we can now safely discard it.

1:16:33And we have seen this word so many times that we wouldn't stumble over it anymore. Whereas something with anti, for example, anti-inflammatory, where we have two eyes meeting each other, that is a bit of a different matter where it really does substantially help the comprehension of the word. And on the one hand, you know, I'm again, like I'm a friend of punctuation. I wouldn't like things to be discarded so quickly. On the other, that's very normal. It has happened throughout, you know, for centuries, we have changed punctuation, we have changed

1:17:03spelling. And sometimes, you know, every year you have one or two Guardian articles that say, okay, the English language is ruined by loss of punctuation, use of emojis, texting, all these kinds of things. And that's not something to completely dismiss because there are worries, you know, and I think we can really validate that and be interested in these worries. And on the other hand, it's not going to destroy the language. And yeah, so I'm again, I'm more interested in why do we have such big emotions to do it

1:17:36or not to do it? I find it particularly annoying that Oxford English Dictionary made this choice now because a lot of language technology is set up with English as the basics. And for writing Swedish, for example, still today, in 2026, all of my spell checkers struggle with compounds.

1:17:56And a lot of, especially younger generations in Sweden who encounter a lot of English will insert spaces in what should be a compound without a space. And it's called Staslidning and people hate it. And it's considered like a plague on the language brought on by English. And now English is removing spaces and hyphens. Like it feels, it feels, I feel like I'm getting gas lit. And also I don't, if anyone knows how to get my phone to understand compounds. It's been like 15 years of writing on phones and I still can't do it.

1:18:31When you say you're being gas lit, is that gas hyphen lit or is that like... Surely that's got to be one word. I don't understand. That does take us to maybe like digital punctuation or digital communication because as humans, we go the path of least resistance, right? And so we like things to be there at our fingertips and then we can use them. And if they're not at our fingertips, we have to make an effort that's meaningful. Either that means this person is really keen on writing in a proper way, or it can also

1:19:04mean the person tries to distance, put a bit of distance between what I'm writing and you who is receiving it. Because nobody, unless they're really pissed off, is putting a full stop or is putting a proper punctuation or something in a message that's just a dashed off yes or no, or, you know, something very informal. And the full range of punctuation that we have on the smartphone is only possible if we have, you know, we shift into another offer of the keyboard and, you know, there we might

1:19:36find the semicolon or something like that. And everything that's hidden behind these layers of just even minimal effort in such an informal medium and informal technology as the smartphone and as texting, for example, that will potentially become discarded or be, you know, used less than in an official email, for example. So our technology has such a huge impact on how we write and communicate. And so, yeah, I can totally see how that trickles from texting into other kinds of writing then.

1:20:13That makes sense, though, because we were talking about writing being a high prestige, formal sort of thing. But now it's just really not. We just do all kinds of writing that isn't formal at all. And of course, I guess that means we should expect to see some punctuation get shed. You mentioned the abruptness of the full stop. Are there any other ways that you can identify where digital communication is changing punctuation? My pet peeve, maybe it's not even a pet peeve, it's actually, I think it's a huge problem

1:20:44that we are losing the notion of the paragraph or definitely changes because phones are so small. We encounter text in a way that makes it look far more long, far longer, far more as a sort of an almost like I feel like I'm assailed with these, attacked by these words. So, we tend to write in one sentence paragraphs. And I think if one looks at the BBC news website or Al Jazeera or some of the most news websites

1:21:14actually do that nowadays. And you compare the website on the computer, on the desktop and on the phone, you see how one sentence looks quite large on the phone. And so, they put paragraph blanks between every sentence. But the paragraph actually is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, mark of punctuation or phenomenon of punctuation. It's not a mark as such, right? Like a full stop or a comma, but it's part of dividing text. And what is a paragraph? Is it an idea?

1:21:45Is it a thought? What is an idea? What is a thought? What is a couple of things hanging together in a language, right? Or in a text or something. So, traditionally, a thought is longer than a single sentence, right? Like, what can we say in a single sentence? And so, I would be worried now that people are losing the ability to create proper, like proper. Now, I'm using these pejorative words myself. Can't get away from it.

1:22:15Yeah, can't get away. That we are losing the capacity to produce a unit of thought in language. And as long as we still write essays, for example, or, you know, we write longer texts, that's not going to be a problem. But if someone was only texting or was only encountering text on the small screen of the phone, then they would get used to this very brief, kind of bite-sized, Twitter-like bursts of text.

1:22:45So, yeah, that's my worry. I think I sometimes forget, because I have a job that includes using a computer. And I'm of the kind of, like, European millennial generation where, for example, big purchases go on big screens. Like, I don't buy flights on my phone. That's incredibly weird to me. Or, like, anything expensive. Like, you sit down with your big screen and you compare all the different prices and blah, blah, blah. But I encounter, like, people who don't, like, for example, use a computer a lot for

1:23:16our work. And some of them, like, only use their phone or tablet for almost everything all the time, including, like, paying rent and making huge purchases and stuff. And for them, like, yeah, this, like, wall of text when it's, like, more than one sentence in a paragraph. Like you say, it appears very different on the screen. And I can understand why BBC and Al Jazeera is such as trying to make it more comfortable and convenient for that kind of viewing. But I just, yeah, I have to remind myself that not everyone uses a computer. Mm-hmm.

1:23:47Yes. Yeah. I remember when I decided I didn't need a desktop computer anymore and I've just been doing things on laptops. But even that, for some people, is a bit too much. Wow. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. The thing that I was going to go to was people avoiding M-dashes. I'm a big M-dash user and people are avoiding them because they think that it's a tell for generative AI. Mm-hmm. And I'm keeping them. Yes. I'm still doing them. I still, and I do, I have been mistaken for a bot. Oh, really? Oh, wow. Maybe, you know, you should also avoid words like, honestly, you know, honestly, comma.

1:24:24Delve. That's a good, Delve. Exactly. Yes, yes. So it's like a combination of markers, but it is true. I mean, some people say that AI doesn't use these M-dashes, but in very few conversations I've had with it, it consistently used them at the end. Even when I said, don't use it, like I have this transcript in the book as well between me and ChatGPT, and I'm like, don't use dashes. And it says, okay, dash, ending right now.

1:24:58And so it's so fascinating how we change our behavior based on what the computer is doing so that we seem more human. And then other people like you have heard this many, many times. They were like, no, I insist on my M-dashes. Personally, I have toned them down. I have to say. I leave them in, some of them, I leave them in, but I am very self-conscious about them as well. Do you guys want to try, many people have tried before, to explain to me the difference between all the dashes?

1:25:31So there's actually, there's just two dashes. So there's an M-dash with the... Well, we're talking hyphens. Is that one? Yeah. There's a hyphen, a dash. Exactly. No, I wouldn't call it a dash because it just connects to words, whereas a dash stands on its own and it separates. Everything that is a line in the middle of the row. Not all lines are dashes. Yes. Yeah. Not all lines are dashes because the hyphen, now it looks like a smaller, a shorter dash,

1:26:02right? Like a sort of little sister or something of a dash. But the hyphen is way older than the dash itself. So the hyphen comes from ancient Greek, from this library in Alexandria, where if you write everything together as one big line, you might get confused in terms of which two words belong together or which syllables even belong together. And we have this in English as well. You know, there's a adder, that's the snake. For example, maybe Swedish has that, German has that. But in English, an adder became sort of jammed together.

1:26:36And then now we say a nader, right? So the N of the... It's the opposite. It used to be a nader and now the snake is an adder. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Then it's like that. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like that. You're right. You're right. And in German it's natter. Yes. Yes. So we have this... Still. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Okay. Schlange as well or natter. And so we have this potential for confusion. And so in ancient Greek, that would be with a little bridge under the two words that they are, the syllables that are supposed to be locked together.

1:27:07And then that wandered up at some point. Whereas the dash potentially comes from... The dash has always been a straight line, a horizontal line and comes from the 16th century. Okay. Well, now it's time to talk about n dashes and m dashes because those are the two. Yes. So, exactly. And the m dash is as long as an m, like with the three kind of... Yeah. And n is just a little bit shorter.

1:27:37It's as long as the letter M. Exactly. Exactly. And there's a lot of different uses in terms of British English, American English, but mostly editors are interested in that. Hang on. And I just got to ask, Hedvig, what's going on for you right now? I mean, so to me, I'm really sorry to say they all kind of blend into one. And when I write, my auto program is like, hmm, she probably wants an m dash here and we'll make it into that.

1:28:08But I don't actually know how on my keyboard to make an m dash. I think I know in LaTeX because I think it's three dashes. On your Mac keyboard, the n dash is option dash and the m dash is option shift dash. I have a Swedish layout, so... Well, have you tried it, Hedvig? Do you want to give it a shot? Okay, all right. Okay. Going to a random text document. What did you say? Testing this live. So, you're doing option dash. Maybe just do a hyphen first.

1:28:38Option dash made what looks like a kind of a long dash. Yeah. It looks about the size of an m, yeah. All right. Well, hang on. That's the n dash. Now, the option shift dash, that's going to give you the m. Check that out. It's a long e. Look at that thing. Are they the same ways in what I'm doing? Nah, they're not.

1:29:00Screenshots here. It didn't happen. All right. Maybe it's on your keyboard layout. But I think this confusion is telling because, again, this is the nitty-gritty that editors, will be very interested in, right? Yeah. Because they're so thorough. I was so just overwhelmed in a positive way by how thorough my editor was for this book in particular and how much she picked up on that. Again, I wouldn't even. The dash, what I love and I'd be interested in hearing what it means in Swedish, in German means thought stroke.

1:29:32So that's precisely. Okay, nice. Yeah, yeah. That's so interesting because in the 19th or like 18th century, when the dash really came into its own in all of these novels about people having these internal journeys, you know, Dickens or Richardson, Clarissa, Pamela, you know, some maybe English speakers will know these novels about people's internal journeys and subjectivity and so on. You have these thought strokes where they change their minds, for example, and where punctuation comes to present the movement of the mind.

1:30:06And so, again, I feel that there's a connection between how our minds work and how thought, you know, how associative it potentially is. And then the representation of that on the page through punctuation. So I loved that the German and the Swedish then is the thought stroke, although dash is also very powerful. You know, you dash the sentence, you dash the more regular flow of the sentence because something else interrupts. Well, now it's time to go for a question from some of our listeners.

1:30:38James asks, are there punctuation marks that were common in edited prose 100 or 200 years ago that have mostly disappeared from use? I can think of a couple right now, but what comes to mind? Actually, the colon and the semicolon were almost interchangeable, potentially. So like 100 and 120 years ago, the rules were not what maybe we think they are today. And again, this goes to show how potentially artificial this is and how we could make these

1:31:09choices to change things. I guess more punctuation was definitely used than today. I would say that in the late 19th century, early 20th century, there was a bit of a purging of punctuation and people were encouraged not to write in such an individualistic way anymore and a bit more clean. Does that make sense? What have you encountered in? But are there any that have just completely dropped out? Like I'm thinking of the pilcrow, the paragraph marker. I never see it. Yes.

1:31:40It looks like a P. I mean, you might see it sometimes if it's really specialized and most people don't use it. Hard to find even on the keyboard. Mm-hmm. Yes. That's true. Google what I thought you said and I got a bunch of pants. P-I-L-C-R-O-W. Oh, a W at the end. Mm-hmm. It's also called paragraph sign, paraf. Yeah. I know it as paragraph sign. I know it when I need to look up German laws. Don't forget the section marker as well, which looks like two S's doing this.

1:32:10Yes. True. Yeah. There's also the manicule that I think they used to use, which is that punctuation? You know, that's the question, but it does point something out. I would, you know, in my greater, more enlarged definition of punctuation, I would say anything that is not text, that does something to the eye, how we read something. So bold face or italic would be part of punctuation or footnotes could be part of punctuation. Anything that moves the eyes or that gives a different layer of meaning.

1:32:43And then the manicule that's just like pointing out some stuff might be in the kind of circle, circle, like penumbra or something of punctuation as well. You mentioned ivy as well. And I wish that we still did ivy. Yes. Because I think ivy is very cool. It's so beautiful. Yes. The hedera. What was it for? In ancient Greek, that was used for sections. So you have the pill crow or the paragraph sign for the paragraph, and then smaller sections in this bigger paragraph of one idea, one thought, you had this ivy.

1:33:17And that was also just for decoration. And so maybe going back to the beginning where we said punctuation is about tone and rhythm, but also grammar. In some ways, it's really also about beauty. And Arabic and Persian, for example, before they had the European punctuation marks imported, they would use flowers, for example, to mark different sections or teardrops or stars, you know, like decoration that I definitely think we could bring back because it just looks

1:33:49beautiful on the page. I think someone is probably going to say that, you know how a lot of large language models like to spit out a lot of emojis in lists? Yes. Like here are three things you should think about. A firetruck. And like the start of that line has a little firetruck. And the next one is like a flower. And I have not seen anyone do it before the large language sort of models became so popular. And I think it is similarly like pretty and fun and makes the text like topographically

1:34:22like a bit interesting. However, because it is so heavily associated with large language models for me, I, when I see it, it gets tainted by that. And I'm like, oh. Maybe you've really been mistaken for a bot. Yeah. That's so interesting you should say that because that seems to equate then punctuation with emojis, which is the question whether that's the case. Because, I mean, it's also questionable whether an ivy leaf would be punctuation, right? Because it is a representation of an ivy leaf. But if we have just a dot that's decorated or the paragraph sign or something that's a bit

1:34:58more of like decoration proper. And with emojis, for example, they pick something out of the sentence or whatever the topic that they're talking about. And then they create this little image. It's not even a symbol necessarily, right? Unless maybe they talk about love and then they put a heart. But that's the cultural associations that we've given that image, right? To make it into a symbol. But I feel like emojis are so, and I know you had a session on emojis. I think they're so complicated. And they kind of make my head explode with trying to think about what do they do?

1:35:34How do we use them? Are they part of punctuation? Are they something else? They definitely have some functions of punctuation because we don't just drop them in randomly. We do use them at the end very often. Let's move on to a question from Tigertronia on our Discord. What forgotten form of punctuation should we really be using, but for some reason just don't? Is there anything we've lost but that we still need? What would you bring back? There's been lots of attempts to suggest a mark for irony or sarcasm.

1:36:08And that is, of course, the ultimate challenge, the tone. Which is also part of why we have invented emojis, because we want to somehow say something about the tone of a message. I don't mean this really winky emoji, winky face emoji. And so throughout some 400 years now, people have experimented with sarcasm signs, irony signs. And maybe there's one that I like, which is the interrobang, and that's also part of the title of the American version of the book.

1:36:39And that is just a question mark and an exclamation mark superimposed on each other. It's not even like a super necessarily creative or new mark, but it's like a rhetorical question. You know, we put them one after the other, but then interrobang looks just a bit more sort of snazzy and sexy, you know, one on top of the other. And it was invented or suggested in 1962 by an advertising agent, Martin Spector, who said that our times, his times, and definitely also our times are so chaotic and so full of, you know, new changes, emotions, and so much danger and so much just like noise that we need a sign to represent that.

1:37:21It's something punchy, something that captures the zeitgeist of, oh my God, maybe like today would be the emoji, you know, the scream emoji or something like that. But this interrobang, so a mixture of interrogation, so question and bang, which is another word for the exclamation mark, didn't really make it outside of like special interest groups. And although it did exist as a key for typewriter to add to that, so you had to, you had to kind of attach it to your typewriter in the 1970s.

1:37:57So, you know, it did, it did travel a little bit, but I think we should bring it back just because it looks so fun. It has its fans. I do have a shortcut set up so that if I do question mark, exclamation point, it will correct that to an interrobang. Very good. And so you'll see me using them sometimes. This one from Cycle Goose. What is there to say about reading comprehension in languages where punctuation is more minimal and spaces aren't used?

1:38:28I often genuinely struggle to understand what someone writes if they don't use punctuation at all or not enough, but maybe this doesn't happen if the language is never written with abundant punctuation like many European languages are. Do we know anything about this? Oh, that is such a great question. Because back in the days when punctuation was invented even in ancient Greece or ancient Rome, there were a lot of people who didn't want that. They didn't want people to have access, but they also didn't want their writing to be dumbed down in quotation marks.

1:39:01And they considered punctuation as clutches for a text that should be written in a way that doesn't need any punctuation. So you have a Cicero who said, my rhythm is so amazing, my Latin is so great, that you should just be able to intuit where it starts and ends and where all of these different kind of grammatical sections are. And some writers today also think that, for example, Cormac McCarthy, this American writer, so full stops is the maximum of punctuation that he wants to use.

1:39:32And he kind of looks down on writing that relies on punctuation, so to speak. I mean, if you are like that, you either ask a lot of your readers in terms of interpretation, or you just, like you described as Cicero, you just have a very high belief that the way you would interpret that string is the same way that everyone else would and that it's effortless, which I doubt. Yes, absolutely. I mean, I've read books that experiment, for example, I think Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other, if I'm not much mistaken, is just using spaces and not a lot of full stops or something.

1:40:13Or, for example, Duck's Newberry Report by Lucy Elman that won the Booker Prize in 2020, 19 or 20, has, I think, a million words or something crazy like that. It's a huge book, and most of it is just separated through semicolons. And then, as you said, you really ask a lot of your readers, you ask them to sit down. It's a heavy book. It's a physically, materially heavy book. And you also ask for a lot of attention. And I sometimes feel punctuation can be a mercy because it allows us to have a bit of a rest.

1:40:46And just as a little aside, maybe that's why someone like James Joyce is a master of his craft, because in Ulysses, he just has one section that has less punctuation. He doesn't text us with this incredible cognitive work of adding all of these connections and so on. But just to come back to that question about how about in other languages, I asked some Arab friends, and they said that in Arabic, there is the punctuation, the kind of European repertoire, but they use it much less.

1:41:20And she said that the language somehow doesn't seem to need it. So if you have a particle at the beginning that tells you that that's a question, which you have, for example, in French, but technically also German and English, they swap the verbs, you know, then you don't necessarily need a question mark. And so I would say that probably languages whose grammar can take on more work, potentially, and doesn't necessarily need that much grammar, or, you know, you can get the nuance in a different way, maybe.

1:41:56That's an interesting thought, because, yeah, one of the things that is really different about writing than speaking, obviously, is that you don't have all these, like, gestures and tone and eye movement and stuff like that cues. And there have been some people who have said that the longer you've had a written tradition, the more you get used to communicating with sort of less context. So, like, if most of the time you talk to people you know fairly well and you talk to them in person, you might be able to, like, make your sentences a little bit less informative,

1:42:31just because you can rely on all this, like, surrounding. But if you write in particular, and then the idea is, like, if you, as a people, write a lot generally, that over time, your language will develop more context-free ways of doing things. Yes. I think it's also the more you are used to reading, in this case, maybe just speaking of reading, you'll be able to actually pick things out.

1:43:01Again, punctuation isn't absolutely necessary. It's an added bonus that we've been developing for so long to make things faster and safer. So, if I want to really make sure that you understand my message, I try to add as many controlling factors as possible, right?

1:43:18And when we read a certain genre a lot, then we don't need so many markers anymore. We don't need these introductions. You know, I know when Hamlet was written. I don't need to have the date there, for example. And I think also in terms of speed reading, for example, if you read in a certain genre all the time, you can read it much faster, if you are a lawyer, a legal text, than something else, because people have experimented with punctuation to speed up reading.

1:43:49For example, they just flash, like, one word on the screen, which is super against the biology, actually, of reading because of recursion. You know, 25% of the time we go back and we reread again without really consciously noticing. Our brain does that. And I don't think, as far as I know right now, we have found out why that is happening, and also exactly which words are being reread. And so it's kind of a bit of a miracle, but it's necessary and it's happening for all of us.

1:44:19We don't actually choose to do that. And just in terms of punctuation, for example, there's this Swiss business called Bionic Reading, and they allow people to turn certain syllables, or even just letters, individual letters, into bold, boldface. Because they say that because of this difference, then you have boldface and you have normal type, you will be able to read faster. Or this is like for neurodivergent people, for people with ADHD. And this is total bullshit.

1:44:51Because, again... What's going to say? It sounds like stress. It's super stressful. You can also experiment... No, I mean, like, stress in a word. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, that too. It looks like stress, depending if you're used to that for maybe poetry reading or something as well. But we just don't choose what kind of syllables or letters stand out for us or help us pause, right? Our eyes pause when we read. We don't read in a kind of flow. We read in jumps. And, again, this is something that our eyes and our brain just does.

1:45:23We don't really have control over this. So to have these potentials, even just two letters, not even syllables or something in bold can actually counteract sometimes the jumps. And I wrote to this business and I asked them, like, what's your model behind this? What are you trying to do? Like, where is the research? They never replied. And for me, this is part of punctuation. As I said, you know, the bigger vicinity of punctuation is also something like bold, boldface or capital letters or just, you know, upper lowercase letters.

1:45:56And so part of punctuation is that, too, the kind of attempts to read faster. But actually, reading is as good as it can potentially ever get. And punctuation is a part of making it so good. So we've talked a lot about punctuation in history, the social functions of punctuation and punctuation readability. Is there anything you'd like people to do as a result of reading on the mark? Yes, I hope they become more aware of the huge task that punctuation actually carries,

1:46:31especially something as unassuming as a comma. You know, maybe the exclamation mark is very bold and very much there. And I love to, you know, give them a personality as well, of course. But a comma is very unassuming. And still, it's the workhorse, really, of sentence that carries everything along. So I would like to invite people to pay attention to something really small and ask, you know, what is it doing here? What is it doing to me? Why am I using this? Maybe next time they send a text message and they pick a certain emoji that they ask themselves,

1:47:05why am I doing this, actually? Or they put three exclamation marks or one, but not two. And then the question is, why are we not used to the two exclamation marks or something like that? And so I want to maybe encourage everybody to understand actually how amazing their brain is working, how sensitive we are to these nuances. Even if you're not a great writer, text, reader, whatever, every person that's somehow in touch with text, which we all mostly are, is so sensitive.

1:47:39And maybe just to stop and stare and like be in a bit of awe at this brain of ours. And yeah, not to kind of let everything float by so quickly, which it does nowadays on TikTok, on Instagram and whatever, right? But just to spend a little bit of time with something that we don't often see because it's less in our face. Conscious punctuation. I like that a lot. The book is On the Mark, From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World.

1:48:15It's available now from Basic Books or in Australia. Alan and Unwin, we're talking to the author Florence Hazret. Florence, how can people find you out there on the big wide webs? I have a Substack newsletter that's just a platform, Substack. And I write maybe once or twice a month about what's going on in the world with punctuation. For example, I looked at the Rocky Horror Picture Show and punctuation when Tim Curry passed on, or Dolly Parton's punctuation, you know, something very current. Odysseus, when the film came out. So I try to always link punctuation to what's kind of going on in our life,

1:48:49which is why it's the gift that keeps on giving, because there's always more to tell. I also have an Instagram account, ThePunctuationLady, and I make like very short videos about punctuation and also what it's like to be an author. So kind of giving a bit of a view into our life. Florence Hazret, thanks so much for coming on the show. It's been great to talk to you. Thank you for having me.

Words of the week: Parachute, Lake America, and Doom-Trolling

1:49:13And now it's time for Words of the Week. Ben, did you have any feelings about the Secret Harbour by-election in Western Australia? Oh my.

1:49:30For those outside of the extremely local, local politics of Western Australia, we have a party here in Australia called One Nation, and it is the sort of Australia's... AFD. What's the one in UK called? UKIP. UKIP. No, Reform. Reform, yeah. I knew it used to be UKIP and now it's Reform. It used to be UKIP. So it's our version of the Reform Party in the UK. I guess just the outright Republicans in America. But, you know, it's our far right, righter than the mainstream right party.

1:50:04And they have just recently won their first ever state lower house seat in government, I think. I think that's right. And this is sort of a big deal in the sense that it would suggest that there are certain parts of the Australian political, like electorate landscape that may swing heavy towards this far right party in subsequent elections. And because of that, and because this is kind of like the first time this has happened and

1:50:35a few other bits and pieces, a lot, and I mean a whole heck of a lot, has been, hay has been made in the news cycle on this thing. If I read one more fucking article with the headline along the lines of like, soul searching required by major parties or like whatever. But yeah, I was disappointed to find out that unlike what some people had been saying, which is that, oh, the polling support of One Nation is just like this flash in the pan thing.

1:51:07It's not representative of how people really want to vote, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'd heard a lot of pundits kind of say that. And this was just like, no, no, people will vote for the racist bad guys. They did about 57% to 43. Well, one possible reason is that Labour did not put up a strong candidate. It was Georgia Tree. I'm just reading here from The Guardian. Georgia Tree, a government relations advisor to Woodside Energy, was, and here's the word, parachuted into what was considered safe territory.

1:51:41Yeah, I've heard this in relation to political campaigns quite a bit, especially in relation to Labour for some reason. Like, we don't seem to use this very much for right-wing parties. I think the presumption is right-wing parties just do this, like, de rigueur, whereas the working man's parties need to be, like, salt of the earth and, like, local and, yeah. So what is parachuting? How would you describe it? Well, I mean, in a show where we talked about metaphor earlier on, what a wonderful example,

1:52:14it literally, sort of, literally, figuratively, one of those two words, it is when you take a candidate who has no real meaningful connection to an electorate and sort of put them up for the main candidate for that electorate, because I think perhaps some people forget that that is exactly how, at least in Australia and in a lot of democracies, the parliamentary system is supposed to work. You're supposed to have a local representative.

1:52:44One of the people who lives in your little suburb or whatever is supposed to be like you folk and you go, yeah, I like that folk that's like me folk, that one of the three folk that I get to vote on from this spot, I like that one best. And then that person goes across to parliament or congress or whatever your little, like, collection of doodads is called, and then they, like, advocate for you in a perfect world, right? Like, that's the mechanism involved. So parachuting someone in is to take someone from very far away, a la the commandos, and

1:53:18fly over the top and you're like, shunk.

1:53:21They didn't even walk here, they just got dropped in by somebody else. That's an important part of the metaphor, I think. So this was first used in 1951, the first English citation in 1954 in a book called Political Parties, Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State by Maurice Duverger, The Parachuting of Candidates. But that's a translation. The book was originally in French 1951, so it would have been parachutage. So we borrowed this metaphor from French. But it does signify a kind of resentment that the electorate might have toward that candidate

1:53:57that got parachuted in. And not, and I'm not trying to rag on labor here, like, One Nation winning is not ever going to be a good thing. But not unfairly so, right? Like, an electorate, I think, inherently is always going to feel a bit pissed off if you've just got some rando. So I think the other word that you would hear a lot here is apparatchik, right? Which is, I don't actually know the true definition of that word, but it just basically means like a party man or a party woman, someone who has been affiliated with the party for a long time. And so, like, it's their time.

1:54:29And people don't like that, I don't think. Mm-mm. Yeah. Let's go on to the next one, reluctantly suggested by James. This one is Lake America. Oh, yes. Yep. Trump got pissy because the trade talks with Canada didn't go well, and so he signed an executive order to rename Lake Ontario, Lake America, in the Canada trade war. This is after last year where he signed a order- Gulf of America. Saying that the Gulf of Mexico is going to be the Gulf of America.

1:55:01Renaming stuff. What is this? What is this? Is it that if you get to name it, then you own it? Can we also acknowledge how silly it is? Who is it? Vespucci Americano? Amerigo Vespucci. Amerigo Vespucci. Thank you. When we think about this word, it's just some fucking Italian guy's first name. So, it's Italy now? Is that what's going on? It's very silly. Double silly because if you're going to change Lake Ontario to a thing, shouldn't you use like the nearest state? And I realize there's already Lake Michigan, but does Lake Ontario border like Vermont or

1:55:34something? I don't know. Like, I'm not great with my northeast geography. I'm West Coast. Don't ask me. Okay. So, you should have gone a little bit more regional. Like, if you're replacing a regional name, at least go regional. We used to know how to name things. We used to be a country of men. However, it does help the mnemonic because, you know, the way that I remember the Great Lakes is Homes, Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior. But now, with Ontario being an A, you can make the mnemonic shame.

1:56:06Hmm.

1:56:08All right. Next one. This one was suggested by Yavod a few months ago, but it's evergreen because tech companies keep doing a certain thing. Here's what happened. Programmer guy Jacob Coxon got a lot of attention recently when he posted on Twitter. Here it is. I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pre-training research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,

1:56:40dot, dot, dot. The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. Dude, it's going to kill us. What do we do? Um, I get that eventually one of the canaries in the coal mine is one we're going to have to pay attention to. Hmm. So, I always keep that in the back of my mind before I begin immediately just, like, shitting on someone's histrionic thing. Um, this does really remind me of the guy who fell in love with, do you remember this?

1:57:18Like, there was a programmer who was working inside, like, the coal face and basically started advocating for, like, we need to already afford these entities, like, rights and dignities and, like, I love this thing and... I don't, I don't know if he fell in love. The employee was Blake Lemoine, who has stood down from Google over his, uh, his belief, I guess, or his weirdness, but his belief that this is actually a sentient... Right. ...critter, that this... And it was, I think it was only Lambda Tooth, that he thought it was a person, that it should

1:57:50be accorded people status. There's another one as well. Sam Altman is pausing the OpenAI IPO. He says, I actually think that given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public and we don't feel pressure on that. I'm wondering if he also is, just, like, can't help but be aware, like, how precarious the bubble he has constructed is. Truly, every voice in this discussion that I've listened to that is a person that I think is very smart and who I respect, like the Cory Doctoros of the world and that sort of thing,

1:58:23every single one of those people is just like, this is the craziest bubble bullshit. Like, this is so insane how much money and resources is being poured into a thing that still fundamentally does not have a solid use case or profit stream or like... Or revenue stream, yeah. Or anything that would make this a justifiable spend of the trillions of dollars that is being dumped into, like, server farms and that sort of stuff. Well, now let's get to the word.

1:58:54Yes, sorry. Because many AI anti-hypers are pushing back, saying that AI companies are, and here's the word, doom-trolling. You've heard of doom-scrolling. Well, this is doom-trolling. Yavodas directed us to a video by Cal Newport, link in the show notes. It's called, Dear AI Companies, Stop the Doom-Trolling. I like that. I guess it's one of the things that I don't quite understand is that, like, when you doom-troll, is it still evocative of this, like, endless cycle thing? Or is it just sort of taking this thing that we have and just kind of funnily using it as

1:59:29a bit of a, like, rhyming slang, essentially? Doom-trolling does sound like doom-scrolling, but I don't think that they're meant to be the same thing. I think the tech companies are trolling us. They're fooling us. But they're doing it with doom. Like, they're trying to troll us and scare us at the same time. Okay. Just a little bit of analysis. Why do you think they do this? Why are they saying, oh, no, we're making a thing and it's going to kill everybody, possibly? What's the benefit here?

1:59:58Well, I mean, if I'm my most generous self... Oh, I like this, Ben. I would give the benefit of the doubt so far as to say that this person believes what they are saying and they are not being duplicitous or deceitful, right? I can imagine a world where when potentially, I'm doing a lot of prognosticating here, but when you spend as long as I presume the people who work in this field do looking sort of relatively

2:00:29myopically at just this one thing, the ages, you know, there is a real, I think, danger of sort of huffing your own fumes and not, I really don't mean this in a flippant or derogatory way, but I sometimes resent the fact that like go out and touch grass has become like a really flippant, lazy thing. I think it is actually as a statement evocative of something that is really important to do in any field that you work in, which is to say like, do not lose touch of, like the big criticism

2:01:06that we have for billionaires is they have zero fucking idea what the everyday human life is like.

2:01:13And I can imagine, you know, like doctors who work too hard, lawyers who work too hard, any of these fields where you just like on this one thing. There is a huge danger there of losing sight of like the core mundane everydayness of like human existence. And I think that is what happens here. And people are like, the thing that I think about all the time is like fucking scary and it's huge and it's intense. I think they do like that. I think it makes their work seem dangerous and exciting, but also it makes their work seem

2:01:46inevitable. And I think this aura of inevitability is what's keeping partly the bubble afloat. Like, oh no, it's going to happen. It's not going to pop. It's going to be around. But also there's an appeal for them to think they're the only ones that can protect us. They might also be making fear into a kind of moat that will scare off potential competitors. Don't get into this field. We're building something that we can't control. But the interesting thing is we, the public, we just eat it up because it's kind of what we believe anyway. So, you know, it's working. It doesn't help that, and I know we're getting into a field which is sort of like personal

2:02:20to you. It doesn't help that we've had a lot of companies not get corrected in terms of redonkulous overvaluation, right? What are you saying? Tesla is wildly overvalued by any possible conceivable understanding of like finance. We can have that discussion. Because what Tesla is not going to be is the only electric car manufacturer in the world, right? And currently its valuation would suggest that it is about to be the only car manufacturer

2:02:54in the world.

2:02:56And so I think places like OpenAI are looking at the reality that like, yeah, it's fine. Things can be wildly overvalued. And that will just go on for a really long time. So they're probably not that worried about it. Too big to fail is a thing. So yeah, it potentially could like limp along sickly for a really long time. Let me read this tweet by Timnit Gebru. The same dudes at Anthropic are telling us the actual existential risks exacerbated by their

2:03:26products, like the climate catastrophe exacerbated by their data centers, are fake. It's their magical god we should worry about. So ridiculous how everyone falls for this. End of quote. Yeah. Don't worry about this thing that's real. Worry about this other thing that's not real. Yeah. So when you hear AI is going to kill us all, I haven't fully fleshed out how I think about this. But when I hear that kind of talk, here's what I think. Here are some lines to think along. How is this going to do that?

2:03:58What exactly is the mechanism by which AI is going to kill us in a decade? Is it not possible that they are causing real harms that all of this doom trolling are meant to distract us from? And why would people at tech companies be so concerned that their software will cause an extinction level event and yet keep working so hard to build it? It sounds to me like a distraction. Yeah. Like, if I think about real existential threats that we have constructed, I can think of a

2:04:31very small handful. You've got nuclear weapons, biological weapons or illness, like weaponized illnesses. Which could be designed by an untethered AI. Right. But still, okay, sure. But we've successfully, like the thing that has stopped a biological weapon wiping out life on Earth is not because we don't have the means to make them. It's a series of treaties and agreements.

2:05:03Like, we've just not been largely making biological weapons at all for like nearly 100 years now because we all looked at it and we're like, well, fuck, guys, mustard gas is heinous. We should never, ever do shit like this again. And then we didn't, largely. So, yeah. Okay. So, like, an untethered AI, what? We're also interfacing it with, like, advanced biotech manufacturing. Like, this is wild fucking sci-fi shit.

2:05:35Not even, like, a little bit in the future sci-fi. This is, like, June shit and stuff. Yeah. Okay. So, Doom Trolling, one of those. Thanks, you vote for that. And finally, Suggested by James, you know the country, Nauru. I do. It's changing its name to one that's a little more traditional. The new name is Nauru. Not Nauru, but Nauru. The president, David Adenang, says this proposed change seeks to more faithfully honor our nation's heritage, our language, and our identity.

2:06:06That joins the club of what? Turkey? And... Turkey. Chechya? Eswatini instead of Swaziland. Okay. And I think there are a few more. Well, that's fun. So, interestingly, I wonder if Nauru was always the... Is it... Is the word endonym? Was that always their endonym? And they've just now changed their exonym to match their endonym? I think it was probably an endonym that was filtered through colonial language. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

2:06:36Okay. Cool. So, Parachute the Verb, Lake America, Doom Trolling, and Nauru are words of the week.

Listener comments and patron shout-outs

2:06:46Let's just have a comment from Scott via Speakpipe. Hi, gang. Scott here. Hi, Scott. I just listened to If This Be Magic, and it made me wonder if you or Dan Hahn are aware of the late anthropologist Laura Bohannon's essay on Shakespeare in the Bush, where she tries to explain the plot of Hamlet to Nigerian villagers. And the language and cultural differences end up with the villagers understanding a completely

2:07:23different story than the one English readers and speakers know. Also, the hog called Sui, I've always assumed, had something to do with the fact that the family of pigs and their relatives are the Suidae. Where we get suet from. That's all I had to say. Thanks. I love your show.

2:07:54Thanks, Scott. Yeah, the domestic pig, Latin name Sus domesticus. Well, we'll add it onto the pile with the others. Oh, man. And is that, do we think that is related to suet, which I think is the name for pig fat? According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, it doesn't appear to be, it appears to come from Latin sebum, which is where we get the word for grease, like the kind that comes out of your pores. That's, wow, I wish I hadn't looked that up.

2:08:25You're not a Dr. Pimple Popper fan, I take it? Ew. Thank you, Scott. Thanks also to our guest, Florence Hazrat. Thanks to everybody who gave us news, words, and related or nots. Thanks to Speech Docs for transcribing every last one of the words. And thanks to you great patrons for keeping us going. You know, our listeners help make this show much better, and you can too. But if you're asking yourself, Daniel, how can I do that? How can I help the show? I'll tell you. You can give us some ideas. There's words, news, related or nots.

2:08:57You can do that a number of ways. You can use SpeakPipe on our website, becauselanguage.com, or just email me, hello, at becauselanguage.com. You can tell people about us, or you can write us a review. Lots of places where those can be put. And you can follow us online and become part of our community. We're becauselanguage.com on Blue Sky, and we're becauselangpod just about everywhere else. But of course, what you could also do is become a patron. It's what all the cool kids are doing. You don't even have to pay money to become a patron.

2:09:28You can become a free patron, which is absolutely what I would do if I was not very moneyed in my life. You get lots of treats and goodies, depending on your level, like live shows, mail-out, shout-outs, and Discord access. That last one's pretty juicy. We get your support, which allows us to keep the show running. It helps us buy supplies. So I've got like a little pop screen in front of my microphone. And the more money you spend on a pop screen, the better the pop screen works. So if you've ever been listening to a podcast with like kind of, you know, I'll take it off for a second. If you ever, like, if you've ever been listening to someone and it sounds like this all the time.

2:10:00Oh, this sounds like garbage. Right. Oh, stop it. And now I'm putting all that expensive stuff back on. Um, I personally enjoy a podcast much more when it sounds like nice and smooth and gentle. Um, and your money helps us just get like a couple of nice things like that, which is really good. And it's, it's one of those ridiculous things. It's really is you like get what you pay for with some of this like fancy audio technology stuff. So yeah, that pop shield costs $6,000. Well, I know it didn't cost $6,000, but you know, a good microphone costs money.

2:10:31A good pop shield costs money, a good arm to hold all of this stuff costs money. And so, you know, it, it does help. And it also allows us to pay someone to transcribe our shows so that people who can't hear things can still access them. And so you can search them when you have that like shower thought where you're like, hang on a second. They talked about this and because language, how do I find it? You search our transcripts. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. Hey, you know, I like to do a thing where I take our supporters names and I, I munch them and alphabetize them and do different things.

2:11:05What have you done this time, you psychotic man? Well, I decided to do it according to punctuation. You know, there's lots of punctuation marks and those punctuation marks have names. And I just clustered them in terms of which punctuation mark was the most like their name, the shortest edit distance to get from one to the other. Right. So if you wanted to go from something like my name to, I don't know, bullet or whatever, how, how many letters would have to change to get me there?

2:11:36Yeah. You could delete the U, the L, the L, the E gets to stay, but the T, well, anyway, just count them up and there you've got it. So here we go. The and sign. Here's the team that got the and sign. Andy B, Nasrin, Hedwig, Amanita, and Ignacio. Took Ignacio a few steps to get there. Took six steps, but we eventually got to and sign. Now, did you use the phrase and sign or did you use ampersand? Nobody matched ampersand. It was so disappointing. It was just and sign. Yep.

2:12:11Who got apostrophe? It was Andy from Logophilius. Oh, he's got a PH in it. Yeah. The asterisk was Lord Mortis. Mortis. Who got the at sign? Well, I'll tell you, it's Kevin, Amir, Tim. The back tick was Becky and Ben. You got bullet. How did you know? Did you look? Yeah, I did. Molly D also got bullet.

2:12:43Good company. Care of, that's the C slash O. I've never once seen that symbol in my life. This is the first goddamn time I've ever seen that. How is there still a symbol I haven't seen? What? Right to Ben. Care of, because language. And that was Chris L and Martha. The carrot, which is like a little circumflex sign over the top. What I think of as to the power of. Oh, yes. Or a little hat. Larry, James, Daryl, Manu, Kathy, Laura, Amy, Lance, and Kenny Archer.

2:13:17Now it's time for Team Colon. It's Helen, Colleen, Johanna, Fiona, Tony, Wolfdog, John K, Mignon, and Nikolai. Ben, take it from here. I'm flagging out. All right. Tapping in. WWE stuff. I got you. With the commas, we have Lyssa and Rosemary. With the dagger. Is that what that's called? I always assumed it was a crucifix. It's a little crossy shape and you use it when you've done clearly far too many footnotes.

2:13:49Good company, by the way, because I feel like Team Dagger is close to Team Bullet. We've got Roger, Daniel, Diego, Heather, and David B. Diameter symbol, which is the circle with a slideway slash through it, kind of like the cancel sign, Christopher. The N dash, the lame, shorter. Like, yeah. It's about the width of a letter M, yeah, and it's used for, do you know what it's for?

2:14:21I would presume for M dash stuff, but different. It's between numbers usually, like pages 16 to 32. You put an N dash there. I did not know, for instance, M and N dash meant the width of those letters. That's very fun. N dash is Elias and Linganth. Grave accent. Ooh. Is grammarian. That makes sense.

2:14:47The Guimet. Guimet? Is that how I pronounce that? Guilmé. Guilmé. Those are the French little angle quotation marks. Again, I've never once seen this in my life. Guilmé is Aria Flame. The hybrid, which is a little times symbol. Zachary and John Troy. I like that Zachary's there, even though the X isn't involved in any way, because it's all a hybrid, but even still, that's fun. The hyphen is Sydney and Whitney. The lozenge, which is a little diamond, which you might use with, like, bullet point things.

2:15:21Florence Hazrat, who, ah, Florence is our guest. Oh, no, that's because she's our guest. Whoops. I'm necessarily doing it. Uh, the manicule, which, hold on, I've actually got to get close to see this. One sec.

2:15:35Which looks like a pointing finger. Yes, it is. It's a pointing finger. Like, kind of old-timey. It's kind of cool. The manicule is Sonic Snedgehog. The minus sign is Linguistic Chaos. The paragraph mark, which you only ever see if you are one of those balls-to-the-wall editing symbol users in, like, your word editing software. The power user. The power user. Oh, man. Yeah. Or a medievalist. Farrowcat. Hello, Farrowcat.

2:16:06Congratulations on being that. My very favorite punctuation, the parentheses, is Meredith Musing. But she gets a comma because she's got one in her name, so she gets that, too. She's like both. So she gets an honorary comma. And faux Frenchie is also in team parentheses. The period is Keith and Yvord. The pipe, which is the very long lateral dash. Wait, lateral? Yeah, lateral dash. Vertical line. Vertical line. Rene, Nigel, Luis, Lucy.

2:16:38The sextile. That's what we're calling the asterix? It's a star pattern. It's a name for... I guess it does look kind of asterisk-like. I don't know why. But, you know, who gets it? That's so funny. Well, Steel does. Steel gets the sextile. Steel gets the best ones. Steel just gets it. The slash goes to Stan, Rash, Aisha, and Sam. And the tilde goes to Aldo. Oh, hang on. There's a whole second goddamn list.

2:17:09Jesus, Daniel, what is this? Nah, don't worry about that. Just so everyone who's listening knows, though, I want to out you on this. Daniel is so full send on the crazy, ridiculous name reorganization game. He has done a whole second list with a different wackadoodle punctuation thing. I'm sitting here looking at it. I'm not going to subject you to it. I want you to know that I am throwing myself on this grenade for you, dear listener. But it's there. It's terrifying.

2:17:39I think you should put it up in the show notes just so people can see just how sick a man you are. Okay, I will. Do you know what made me sad, though? What? Nobody got in Terabang.

2:17:52I just feel sad about that. It's dumb. It's a dumb punctuation mark and it shouldn't exist. Yeah, I said it. Oh, my God. I said it. Oh, our friendship has never been this endangered. Daniel, no one. And I mean, no one in the world uses it. And do you know who misses it? No one other than you. There is literally no one I have ever met in the world who's like, I think there should be more in Terabangs being used. Thanks to all our patrons. Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Kriplionov, who also performs with

2:18:24Ryan Bino and Didion's Bible. Thanks for listening. We'll catch you next time. Unless I've strangled Ben in his sleep. Not with an Interabang, though, because no, you wouldn't be able to find one. Because language. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, All righty.