Valerie Fridland (on linguistics)

[0] Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert.

[1] I'm Dan Rather, I'm joined by the Duchess Obdelut.

[2] Hi there.

[3] We are...

[4] Still, on vacation.

[5] On vacation.

[6] We're on vacation, and we have a very fun guest today.

[7] Yeah, this one really blew our mind.

[8] Valerie Friedland.

[9] She is a linguist professor and an expert on the relationships between language and society.

[10] This was so fun.

[11] we got to just ask her about every word we use or hate or love, and she knew everything.

[12] Absolutely.

[13] And she helped destigmatize some words that were overusing, and she gave reasons why.

[14] She defends some words you might hate.

[15] Yeah.

[16] And in fact, the name of her new book is called, like literally, dude, arguing for the good in bad English.

[17] Oh, this one's tasty.

[18] So please enjoy Valerie Friedland.

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[23] Valerie, welcome.

[24] Thank you.

[25] I'm so excited to have you because it's very relevant to our job.

[26] Your work.

[27] Talking.

[28] Talking.

[29] Talking.

[30] Talking.

[31] And the vocal idiosyncrasies.

[32] that I try to edit out.

[33] Wait, Rob doesn't like it when our chairs are next to each other.

[34] Oh, okay.

[35] So you're using a gap.

[36] You don't want that rubbing noise.

[37] But I can't stand if I can't see Monica out of my peripheral vision.

[38] Yeah.

[39] It feels disrespectful.

[40] I feel like I should lay on the couch.

[41] Oh, get calm.

[42] You can psycho analyze me. You can't imagine being in a place where no matter what you would do would not ruffle any feathers.

[43] We don't give a shit.

[44] Some people go in there and they use the bathroom.

[45] There's no door.

[46] We don't care.

[47] Yeah, I notice that.

[48] Yeah.

[49] I will pass on that option.

[50] But I appreciate the thought.

[51] And this is kind of in keeping with the work.

[52] We already found a through line, which is on some level you go, oh, this is uncouth, this is not right.

[53] But it tells you a lot about the person.

[54] And then ultimately, you're like, I kind of like that Milakunis just through a whiz right there in front of everybody.

[55] That tells me a lot about her.

[56] Well, for me, it makes me like them more, but it doesn't make me like anyone less for not doing it.

[57] Because I would never do it if I was in somebody else's attic and people were around.

[58] I would never be able to pee.

[59] And they were recording things.

[60] Actually, one time I was doing the great courses, and they mic you up, and I had a microphone that was underneath my dress, and I had forgotten about it.

[61] Oh, yes.

[62] And so, you know, there's a whole studio of people, and yes.

[63] So it wouldn't be the first time that I had such experience.

[64] Did you watch the Robert Durst documentary?

[65] What was it called, Monica?

[66] The Jinks.

[67] The Jinks.

[68] No, I did not.

[69] Oh, my God.

[70] One of the best dogs ever.

[71] Was it great?

[72] Valerie, I'm so jealous of you right now because you have that waiting for you.

[73] But it is a documentary about this man, Robert Durst, who it is suspected he killed both his wife in New York when he was younger.

[74] We know he cut up a man in Galveston, Texas.

[75] That's a positive.

[76] But he got off of that because they tried him for a crime and they proved self -defense.

[77] He totally walked.

[78] And then he probably killed someone in Hollywood.

[79] But he's out free and he's participating in this documentary the whole time.

[80] And I won't spoil anything, but he's wearing a mic a lot of times.

[81] Okay.

[82] I'm going to make that part of my requisite weekend then.

[83] There's so much good stuff.

[84] It's kind of hard to stay on top of it, no?

[85] I know it is.

[86] What have you most recently watched that you loved?

[87] I'm actually watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

[88] I had not seen that fifth season, so I'm watching that.

[89] And actually, one of the things I love about is the language.

[90] They have such cool stuff.

[91] And I don't know if you ever heard that joke they talked about with the word moist.

[92] No, tell me. Very triggering word.

[93] Yes, it's a very triggering word.

[94] I love moist, and in fact, I have a best friend who hates the word.

[95] So it's part of the glee of my existence to say it as often as possible.

[96] So if we ever eat something, I'm like, isn't this moist chicken?

[97] I love the moist chicken.

[98] Can I pitch you something really quick to even amplify it?

[99] I changed it to moise.

[100] So for people who hate moist, they really hate moose.

[101] So when I'm eating, I'll go, this is so moist.

[102] You don't have that nice soft tea to mitigate it.

[103] It's gone.

[104] And I feel like it makes it even more.

[105] Moise than Moist, if that makes sense.

[106] It does.

[107] And, you know, there's actually a whole thing about why maybe we hate Moist.

[108] Okay, yeah, we have to know.

[109] There are a number of different things.

[110] Well, there were some studies that looked at the associations we make with Moist.

[111] And if you look back at the history of the word moist, I'm sorry, trigger warning probably on this.

[112] Well, it's too a little late for that.

[113] Yeah, probably so.

[114] You've already thrown up while driving your car on the way to work.

[115] It's coming more.

[116] It's going to come at you.

[117] All right.

[118] So if you look back at Chaucer, Chaucer actually used the word moist, and do you know what he describes with the word moist.

[119] Mold or something dead.

[120] No. Better.

[121] Beer.

[122] Oh.

[123] Ail, actually, to be exact.

[124] It's a moist and corny ale in Chaucer.

[125] Interesting.

[126] Because moist originally meant fresh.

[127] Oh.

[128] That somehow coincides with my grandfather whenever he would swim in the pool.

[129] Not always.

[130] He was specific about when it felt this week.

[131] He'd come out of the water.

[132] Water is very wet.

[133] Sometimes for him, the water was very wet, and sometimes it wasn't.

[134] Oh, wow.

[135] And I feel a little bit like moist is in that category.

[136] I feel like it could be, yes.

[137] I mean, waste names, a bunch of different things.

[138] You have different senses for how moist it is.

[139] So I can see that you'd have different senses for how wet.

[140] Still in a pool, a little odd.

[141] It is weird.

[142] But liquid is intrinsically moist, so it doesn't really need the word.

[143] That's what I'm saying.

[144] Calling water wet feels similar to calling a liquid moist.

[145] Or a beer moist, right?

[146] But beer would actually be fresh.

[147] So what they were saying was moist.

[148] So you refer to vegetables as moist, or you refer to ale as moist.

[149] That was the original meaning.

[150] Nothing wrong with that, right?

[151] People love that.

[152] Just like you say, cake is moist, very similar.

[153] Like, it's fresh, it tastes good.

[154] But what happened is then the scientific community got hold of the word moist.

[155] In around 1 ,500, 1600, we start to see moist as a descriptor of wounds, gangrene.

[156] Oh.

[157] Right?

[158] Although it wasn't related to the 1900s we see panties.

[159] But a lot of things that start going bad for moist.

[160] Usually, yeah.

[161] It's just scratching a body part.

[162] But even, let's fast forward to the underwear.

[163] I feel like if I say panties, I'm a pedophile.

[164] That word to me is weirder, yes, than moises to me. Like when an adult man says panties, yeah, panties is wrong.

[165] I don't trust you around anybody.

[166] So let's just say underwear.

[167] It's weird to me that that would be a pejorative in a sense because that should be associated with arousal.

[168] No?

[169] Well, I think maybe it is, but often in a way that boys would describe.

[170] girls, and so it has that negative association.

[171] And also, women don't necessarily want to walk around and be reminded of that.

[172] And what we find when we do studies of who hates moist, and let me tell you, a lot of people hate moist, but the majority of them are female.

[173] Yeah, we do find more women that find that word disturbing.

[174] Well, because it's not all that comfortable if it's moist.

[175] When you're out around town, you want to keep that moisture to a certain area of the house.

[176] Yeah, sounds kind of like yeast infectiony or something.

[177] Exactly.

[178] So we don't want that.

[179] Yeah, it brings up.

[180] bad thing.

[181] And I think that's the idea, right?

[182] The word moist has these associations, and we do find that it does tend to co -occur.

[183] It's called co -allocation with things that we don't like and that we might find disturbing.

[184] We don't talk about moist cakes and moist chicken as much as we talk about moist damp basements or attics, perhaps, those kinds of things and underwear.

[185] Yeah, moisture is generally a signal that there's some kind of structural failure happening.

[186] Right.

[187] Water's the great enemy of all things.

[188] Right.

[189] But it also has weird sounds.

[190] What's fascinating for me as a linguist is how sounds get involved in how we feel about things.

[191] And there are a whole host of people that study something called sound symbolism.

[192] Oh my gosh.

[193] Look at that face.

[194] You look excited.

[195] I am because I think I have the word.

[196] Okay.

[197] Tell me. I want to hear your ideas first.

[198] This is a word that I always hated.

[199] Plethora.

[200] It sounds like a damp fart.

[201] Like that would be the description you would give to a damp fart.

[202] It has no basis for that.

[203] Other than just that word.

[204] to me, in an Anamonopoeia way, it's just like plethora.

[205] It sounds gross.

[206] Huh.

[207] Does pleather do that for you, too?

[208] Pleather is innocuous.

[209] I don't mind pleather.

[210] Pleathera is, I don't know.

[211] It's something there.

[212] But is that in the world, the sound itself?

[213] In general, what we look with sound symbolism, are there universal feelings about certain sounds suggesting that some sounds carry meaning themselves, which is really against the theory of linguistics, right?

[214] In linguistics, we think sounds arbitrary.

[215] Words are arbitrary.

[216] They just take meaning by convention.

[217] Think about the word for that canine furry thing that runs around and sits by you.

[218] Well, why do we call it a dog?

[219] Do you have a guess?

[220] It feels like a riddle, but I don't know.

[221] I have a couple of quick thoughts.

[222] One, kids need to know how to say it.

[223] The dog itself need to keep it one syllable.

[224] I don't know, like some simplicity to it so that the dog itself can get it and then the little kids can say it.

[225] Well, it's a convention that we agreed upon that word dog.

[226] So I think those things are important, right?

[227] because we want it to be simple to say.

[228] Also, maybe a dog can be more responsive.

[229] Although back in the old English period when that word first came as doca, I doubt that many people talk to their dogs.

[230] Doxen?

[231] Is that the same derivative?

[232] No, probably not.

[233] There's a fascinating history of the word dog.

[234] But the idea of dog is it's just that we've all agreed that those three sounds go together and mean dog.

[235] Because in French, it doesn't mean dog.

[236] In Spanish, it doesn't mean dog.

[237] In Russian, it doesn't mean dog.

[238] In fact, they have completely different words for dogs.

[239] Yeah, for example, in French.

[240] Beto is the word in Spanish.

[241] Everybody just agrees these are the sounds that we're going to put together, and the meaning's conventional.

[242] So it's arbitrary.

[243] There's no intrinsic meaning to the word dog.

[244] It's just the sounds we chose.

[245] But the idea of sound symbolism is there is some sort of intrinsic meaning to sounds, and that those affect the sounds that we choose for certain things.

[246] Yeah.

[247] And that they have emotional response in us because of that.

[248] Yes, I can think of one.

[249] Okay, tell me. Shushing babies is universal.

[250] No matter where you go.

[251] And they respond and you get this Pavlovian calming, right?

[252] That would totally be one.

[253] This sort of high frequency, white noise kind of replication.

[254] Absolutely.

[255] So that could come across as soothing.

[256] Or a great one with babies is the first sounds they utter.

[257] Dada.

[258] Mama.

[259] The stop consonants are universally the earliest sounds that emerge.

[260] Stop consonants?

[261] Stop consonants.

[262] So you actually stop the flow of air in your mouth when you make them.

[263] So go touch.

[264] It's like punctuated.

[265] The air stops.

[266] They're called plosives are stopped.

[267] So these are the earliest emerging sounds in addition to vowels.

[268] So pa, ma, da, those are the sounds that emerge first.

[269] So what happens is Dada is there and he's like, hey dude, he's calling me. Yeah, yeah.

[270] Right?

[271] So then all of a sudden you become Dada.

[272] And what we find if we look across all languages, even unrelated ones, things that didn't develop from the same sorts language that we can find out, they all have very similar words for father.

[273] And so there is some sort of intrinsic meaning because of those first sounds that seems to be about fathers or parenting.

[274] So that's what I mean by sound symbolism, things about how they're pronounced, how they're articulated, or things that are naturally associated with them because of how they're spoken, start to get in the meaning of that sound itself.

[275] So another great example is if you look across world languages, the word for nose almost always has a nasal sound in it.

[276] Oh, wow.

[277] Words for breast almost always have a bilabial sound because of baby sucking on the breast, which are MMs or B's.

[278] So think about English words for breast.

[279] Mammary.

[280] Mambes.

[281] Mammary.

[282] That's crazy.

[283] Bongas or bongos, whatever.

[284] Does tithis work?

[285] Oh, yeah, no. Well, titties doesn't work.

[286] It doesn't work.

[287] But that's the trick, right?

[288] These things are tendencies, not universals.

[289] And then what we find is the arbitrariness of language takes over.

[290] And the reason we say, most of things we say have nothing to do with sound symbolism.

[291] But circling this back around to Moist, the sounds in Moist are sounds that we tend to find associated with things like depressive poetry.

[292] If you look at world literature and you look at poetry and they analyze the sounds, a lot of them have nasal sounds like M or N. They have sounds like L's or R's, which seem to be this intrinsic melancholy.

[293] Think of melancholy.

[294] Melancholy.

[295] Moody.

[296] Yeah.

[297] All have M. So moist.

[298] And then the oi also back vowels are associated with less.

[299] Happy sort of idea.

[300] So EEEE is a very happy sound.

[301] And we find that actually if we make people say words with E in it, they report being happier.

[302] Well, because you have to kind of smile.

[303] It actually activates the same muscle.

[304] So it's a feedback loop.

[305] So all sorts of cool stuff.

[306] I mean, language is super cool.

[307] Well, I was just going to say, Valerie, what is very clear is you are on fire for language.

[308] I love it.

[309] It's wonderful.

[310] So my question is, before we get into all the fun stuff with like literally dude, your book, Why are you interested in this?

[311] Were your parents' word files?

[312] How do we get here?

[313] I'm just laughing because doesn't it always start with the parents somehow?

[314] You'd think, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[315] Or lack their up.

[316] Yeah, right, right.

[317] Well, I was fortunate to have two great parents who both are still around.

[318] And ask quickly what part of the country you grew up in?

[319] I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee.

[320] Oh, wow.

[321] And you bear no. I don't.

[322] I do have very subtle trait.

[323] So I think, Monica, you grew up in the South too, right?

[324] I did.

[325] And I also lived in Tennessee for two years.

[326] Memphis.

[327] Oh, did you really?

[328] No, Collierville.

[329] Oh, okay, yes.

[330] Well, I went to school out near Collierville in Germantown.

[331] Yes, Germantown right there.

[332] Yes, yes, that's so funny.

[333] What a small world.

[334] So you also don't bear much of an accent, and a lot of times I think that has to do with having parents that are not from the South.

[335] Although her mother is a hillbilly.

[336] Her mother is from India, but she sounds like a straight hillbilly.

[337] That's great.

[338] I love it.

[339] But it's balanced out with a father with an Indian accent.

[340] Yeah, so you had different norms that you were.

[341] get into all that because that's the coolest part.

[342] And a master assimilator, so really conscious.

[343] Yeah, but I was in Georgia with other...

[344] That's true.

[345] Did you grow up in a big city?

[346] Suburb of Atlanta.

[347] Okay.

[348] Yeah, that has another big impact, actually.

[349] I cannot even tell you, I'm so excited.

[350] There's so many things, but it's going to be hard to get to them all.

[351] So we'll start with the Southernness, because neither of my parents were from the United States.

[352] I'm actually the first American in my family.

[353] Where are they from?

[354] Well, my father's Belgian, but he's a Holocaust survivor and he was orphaned by the Holocaust.

[355] And so he spent a few years hiding with a family in Belgium and then was sent to Israel to an orphanage there.

[356] Really quickly, he might have lived in the little enclave community in Belgium where Esther Perel grew up.

[357] There was a huge displaced population in Belgium of Holocaust survivors and or orphans of him.

[358] And she grew up amid almost exclusively people who had just come out of the Holocaust.

[359] And all of her work eroticisms based on her observation of who survived that post -Holokos experience.

[360] What was the essential ingredient they latched onto?

[361] And her conclusion was eroticism, finding this appetite for life in whatever form that might be.

[362] Interesting.

[363] Well, he was only five.

[364] And he was hidden with a family that had snuck him out of the Jewish ghetto through this really interesting network of priests that saved him.

[365] And there was a school teacher who just died recently that spearheaded the whole thing at great risk to herself.

[366] He was smuggled from Brussels into this small little coal mining village called Jume, Belgium.

[367] And he was actually hidden in the backyard of this family.

[368] I mean, he was in the house.

[369] Something let him sleep inside.

[370] They were a wonderful family, actually.

[371] What kind of residual stuff did he have from that?

[372] Oh, we don't have time for that one.

[373] Okay.

[374] There's some video of him giving testimony about his life and how to live on your own.

[375] Everything's in your imagination.

[376] You have no friends.

[377] You don't exist.

[378] You are a false name.

[379] You don't know how old you are.

[380] He didn't know if his parents were living.

[381] Wow.

[382] They found out his parents were killed at Auschwitz six months after he was smuggled out.

[383] And he didn't know this for two years.

[384] He was waiting for them to come back.

[385] He was waiting for them to come back.

[386] And even though the people who had adopted him or taken him in for that time knew, they didn't tell him.

[387] Oh.

[388] So there's a lot there.

[389] Then my mom is French Canadian.

[390] Okay.

[391] So she grew up in Montreal, from Quebec or something?

[392] And so my father lived in Israel for most of his life.

[393] And then he had some surviving relatives that had made it to Montreal.

[394] And when he turned 18, they said, why don't you come and learn the fur trade?

[395] And he had never gone to school.

[396] He taught himself stuff.

[397] But he decided that wasn't for him.

[398] He really found it hard work to be a furrier.

[399] And he ended up putting himself through night school and then going to college.

[400] And then going to get a Ph .D. And that's what brought us to the United States.

[401] No kidding.

[402] Yeah.

[403] Where did he go to school?

[404] He went to Miguel.

[405] He got his PhD.

[406] and then he came in what taught?

[407] Well, he was a biochemist.

[408] So he came and actually developed medicine for AIDS.

[409] He was at Pioneer and AIDS research.

[410] Wow.

[411] What an incredible person.

[412] He's a pretty cool guy.

[413] The stories he would tell of in Israel, he and the other Holocaust survivors built the cabots.

[414] So they basically lived in tents while they built their orphanage.

[415] It was crazy stuff.

[416] But he spoke many languages, had lived this incredible life before I happened along.

[417] My mother also was not a native speaker of English.

[418] My father got his Ph .D. and then ended up doing a postdoc at University of Wisconsin in Madison.

[419] And then he got his first job at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Tennessee.

[420] Uh -huh.

[421] Uh -huh.

[422] And that was the start of me. Wow.

[423] Oh, you weren't in Wisconsin?

[424] Well, I was born there, but we left when I was about seven months old.

[425] Because that could have been its own fun accent to shake.

[426] Yes.

[427] Well, and I lived in Michigan, so I am familiar with that whole accent.

[428] I think you're from Michigan.

[429] I am.

[430] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[431] So I have some whole lovely vowel.

[432] things we can do later.

[433] Well, and my wife intentionally lost that accent, and I have made no effort to and don't ever intend to.

[434] It gives you character.

[435] I mean, that's the thing about accent.

[436] It's part of your social identity.

[437] And the reasons we want to keep it or lose it are very complex.

[438] Sometimes we keep aspects of it that are less noticeable.

[439] So they still unite us and combine us with those people and that group, but we lose the things that people ridicule or mock or that we're self -conscious about.

[440] And so we form this really interesting composite identity.

[441] age, do you start recognizing I'm abnormally interested in this?

[442] Well, I think I've always been because as a child in Memphis, Tennessee, with parents that were not from the area, I was definitely not the country girl.

[443] Yeah.

[444] It definitely felt like an outsider.

[445] And people would come over to my house, and it was something they constantly talked about.

[446] So my mother couldn't say my name without one of my friends.

[447] I wouldn't say mocking because they weren't doing it in any mean regard.

[448] She was exotic and for her to say, Valerie, Valerie.

[449] I could never have her say that without one of my friends saying, my Valerie, Valerie.

[450] Oh, I felt the compulsion to mimic you just as you did.

[451] You kind of want to make that noise.

[452] It feels fun.

[453] It's beautiful, isn't it?

[454] My mother says my name is such a beautiful way.

[455] She is delightful, but not so delightful when you're five or six and your friends are constantly saying, Valéry.

[456] So I did a lot of listening to other people comment on my parents' accents.

[457] I was very aware of the fact that I sound different.

[458] And in fact, I think it was first or second grade, I was talking about this giant teddy bear I had gotten that I really, really wanted.

[459] Like from the carnival?

[460] Yeah, they were so cool.

[461] I wanted one so desperately.

[462] And I begged and I begged and I begged.

[463] And finally for my birthday, I got the giant bear.

[464] I was so excited.

[465] I go to second grade or whatever.

[466] I'm telling all my friends about this huge bear.

[467] Huge.

[468] Huge.

[469] Huge bear I got.

[470] And they cared nothing about the bear and everything about the fact that I called it a huge bear.

[471] Yes, yes, yes.

[472] a huge bear because obviously in French you don't have ages.

[473] In English, we spend a lot of time trying to get them back.

[474] Oh, that's a French thing.

[475] I never knew that.

[476] Honestly, now I just associate it with Trump.

[477] Sure, sure, sure.

[478] So now I don't know where to place it, but French.

[479] There we go.

[480] Okay.

[481] And I will argue that they love H's in the South even more than anywhere else because they will pronounce that H in White.

[482] Which is the original H, right?

[483] So White, Whip, Wine, W -I -N -E, and H -E -N -H -E, and H -E -E -E -N -E.

[484] are actually not homophones originally.

[485] H -dropping is a huge thing all through the history of English.

[486] So what happened is Latin had a lot of H's, but the process of H -dropping is a very natural one, and it started even back in Latin, which is why French doesn't really have any H's, because by the time it got to French, the ages had already been dropped, which is why words like hospital and hotel that are French in origin were Lopital, the hotel, and we put them back in, not the Americans, the British did, because age -dropping was so ridicule.

[487] that they put them back in to sound more erudite and educated because they're fighting against this losing battle of not dropping H's.

[488] So a lot of our Hs have been dropped.

[489] So words like nail and nut originally had H's.

[490] They were chnail, chnutt.

[491] But those got dropped.

[492] So we sort of stopped that process at a certain point when it started to get noticed, usually around the 18th centuries when we started to get really pissed off at how people said things.

[493] And that's what really slowed down that rate of attrition.

[494] But you can even find Noah Webster in the 1800s talking about those lazy, sloppy pronunciations of white and whip where they were dropping the H's.

[495] So that's really just a continuation of this long process.

[496] Okay, what is the chronology?

[497] I know the Latin languages are Italian, Spanish, French.

[498] These are Latin.

[499] What is the chronological order of those three languages?

[500] Language families are really interesting.

[501] So all of those languages, the romance languages, along with English or all Indo -European languages.

[502] So they're all from the same family that also spawned ancient Greek and Sanskrit.

[503] So they're all related at some level.

[504] But what happens then it splinters off.

[505] So English is a Germanic language because it came from proto -Germanic.

[506] So what happens, though, is it's hard to say exact timing of things because proto -Germanic is the mother language of modern German, modern Dutch, Norwegian, and English.

[507] But German and English, for example, are kind of sister languages that develop from these different offshoots almost simultaneously.

[508] And wasn't it Scandinavian -speaking speaking German that became the Britons that created our English?

[509] Vikings taking over Normandy, then going from Normandy over to England, having adopted Germanic language with the whatever Scandinavian language, and it becomes modern English?

[510] In a nutshell, yes.

[511] But I think it's tricky because what we're talking about is on the great Germanic plains, there were northern Germanic and Western Germanic.

[512] And so Scandinavian languages are northern Germanic, but.

[513] English is actually Western Germanic, along with modern German.

[514] So none of those differentiations really existed at that time, but there were different dialects of Germanic languages, and that's what came over.

[515] Around the 5th century, we end up inviting the Angles and the Saxons and the Jutes over because we wanted to get like the picks and the Scots who were seen as barbarians out of the way because the Romans had left and left us on our own devices or left the people living there in Britonia at the time.

[516] Those groups from the Great Germanic Plains came over, and they're like, huh, this is kind of a balmy island.

[517] I think we'll just settle ourselves here for a while.

[518] Right.

[519] So they ended up in different areas.

[520] You have the Angles that settled in the north and the Saxons that settled in the south of England.

[521] And they had dialects of the same language, basically.

[522] So there were quite substantial differences between the north and south of England, even at that time.

[523] You know, England, the word is Angla land.

[524] Yeah.

[525] Right.

[526] Then you also have the Jutes and the Frisian.

[527] So you have all these different groups coming over, and then the 8th and 9th century.

[528] You have who we now refer to as the Northmen or the Vikings.

[529] But really, they were all Vikings.

[530] They were all from that same area.

[531] And those are more the Scandinavian languages.

[532] They brought over Old Norse.

[533] And that was another sort of impact, especially in the north of England, which really led to a lot of the differences between the north and the south of England today.

[534] But it's not a Slavic language, right?

[535] The Norwegian language.

[536] But they're so close, right?

[537] Then isn't that the other big pocket of early language?

[538] Baltoslavic, yes.

[539] So was the Norse language completely independent of the grander, bigger language?

[540] Well, they're Indo -European.

[541] So at one point, they go to this tip and that kind of spreads out with these different things.

[542] But what's really fascinating is how many things that we think of as being English, being good language, have nothing to do with the actual English that was our founding language, which was really very Germanic.

[543] And modern English is hardly Germanic at all.

[544] We still say it's a Germanic language, but if you look at the wordstock, I think about 80 % of the wordstock is non -Germanic at this point where there were a few exceptions here and there from some indigenous languages, but basically 100 % of word stock at its onset was...

[545] Well, I took German in high school, I didn't see a single word I recognized.

[546] I mean, you can maybe see some overlap of some of the words, like they're related a little bit, but everything felt completely proprietary as I've endeavored under that.

[547] Yeah, so they've changed quite substantially, too.

[548] I mean, one thing that English has lost is pretty much all case, all grammatical gender, all plural marking, which were all facets of old English.

[549] Oh, interesting.

[550] But around the 12th century, we lost gender marking.

[551] What prompted that?

[552] All right, so that's where it's sort of the book begins, right, with this massive changes that were happening in English around the 11th and 12th centuries.

[553] And what happened is you had old English, which had all these things.

[554] So it had noun cases marked on every noun.

[555] Also adjectives had to be in agreement with the noun.

[556] So they took these endings.

[557] You had different classes of verbs.

[558] So you had strong verbs and weak verbs, which is why.

[559] we still have things like Sing Sing Song that change internally, because the strong verbs usually had these internal changes called suppletion, where they would have a vowel change.

[560] But the weak class verbs were actually the ones formed with things like ED.

[561] That wasn't as simple as ED at the time, but that's really where that AD comes from.

[562] Meaning adding ED to make past tense, right, as opposed to changing the vowel.

[563] Right, to changing internally the vowel.

[564] And it was about 50 -50 at that time.

[565] So there really weren't more ED verbs like there are today.

[566] But what happened is we've lost those over time, the strong.

[567] strong verbs have regularized, which is a very natural cognitive tendency over time to make things simpler.

[568] And they've all taken that form of ED, which was just one way of marking past tense in Old English.

[569] What body is making those decisions?

[570] Is it just happening colloquially, like around it's evolving, but there's no body overseeing it.

[571] It's not like the church is saying we got to do this or the king is saying we got to do this.

[572] It's just happening.

[573] Absolutely not in Old English because Old English was the language only of the people.

[574] I mean, it's our bodies that were doing it.

[575] There was no regulating body.

[576] I mean, there still really isn't in English of any institutional form, but we do have standardization now.

[577] Absolutely not at that time.

[578] English was a colloquial language until the early modern period.

[579] And really till the 18th century, we don't have grammar books about English until about that time.

[580] It was a vulgar language.

[581] It was the language of the people.

[582] It's kind of like if you look at Latin, you have the Latin you have in religious services and in books.

[583] And then you actually had vulgar Latin, which is what people actually spoke.

[584] Well, English was only vulgar English.

[585] There wasn't educated English at all.

[586] There wasn't literate English.

[587] We do start getting some texts written mainly by religious orders by monks and sort of chronicling for kings in their old English period.

[588] And we do have a few literary work.

[589] So, for example, Beowulf is a literary work in Old English at the time.

[590] I think it was written in Saxon in a dialect.

[591] But we don't have like one dialect of Old English that was better than others.

[592] Like we tend to think of certain dialects is better today.

[593] And we didn't really see it as a literary language at all.

[594] If you wanted to do anything important, like write laws or go have religious ceremonies or get an education, you did it in the classic languages.

[595] So in Latin, most likely, sometimes in Greek.

[596] But at that time, Latin was really the elevated language.

[597] And would people communicate at parties in Latin or they would simply do their reading and their writing and their research and all their academic pursuits in Latin?

[598] Or would they speak it?

[599] Because my next question was going to be, when do we start seeing these very very?

[600] very, very distinct class structures based on these different language techniques.

[601] Even back in Old English, only the really scholarly types, only those who had elevated positions would even know Latin.

[602] Everybody spoke English.

[603] But would they speak Latin or just write in it?

[604] They would speak Latin.

[605] Certainly more than we do it today.

[606] If you know Latin, you don't speak it.

[607] I mean, you're weird at cocktail parties if you speak Latin.

[608] Unless everyone else there.

[609] Unless you, yes, you have a weird set of friends.

[610] If you do, then go for it.

[611] Have a conversation in Latin.

[612] But at that time, no, you probably wouldn't have even conversed in Latin just to shoot the shit.

[613] Right.

[614] You would have operated professionally in Latin and then hung out and talked in English.

[615] Except once the French came over and then that totally threw everything into disarray.

[616] But if we go to modern England or here in the U .S., whatever, we have all these class distinctions in the way we speak.

[617] So when did those start becoming pronounced or delineated?

[618] Were they existing back then?

[619] We're like Cockney or something or something that's supposed to be lower clouds.

[620] Did they already exist or everyone's just speaking gibberish at that point?

[621] They definitely exist.

[622] I mean, they've always existed.

[623] It just was very different in how it worked with language.

[624] So in old English period, which is the sixth through the 11th century, you had a hierarchy in terms of your clan.

[625] So you would also have sort of feudal kingships, basically, or land -owning.

[626] So lords.

[627] And those would have been higher class, but you wouldn't have really indicated that with language to the same degree.

[628] The people that would have spoken, the classic language would have been really the few literate people.

[629] And there was no literacy at that time.

[630] Even a lord was probably unlikely literate.

[631] But the king and his minions that wrote their chronicles of their history, that would be where you'd get literacy.

[632] So a lot of religious fellows were literate and women, not at all, obviously, at the time.

[633] So English would have been what everybody spoke.

[634] And the dialects of English at that time, I'm sure, you know, when they were sitting around eating their giant legs of things and drinking their...

[635] They were like, yeah, he talks so bad, man. Yeah.

[636] I'm sure there was some of that, like, oh, my God, did you hear how he said that?

[637] There wasn't an age to be found in that sentence.

[638] I'm sure people notice things, but we don't really have records of that.

[639] What we do have is a few literary works in different dialects.

[640] So we don't have any indication that different dialects of English at that time, like if you spoke in Sax or if you were an angle, that that made a big difference.

[641] Right.

[642] It wasn't like we have dialects today where we sort of frowned on Southern.

[643] speech or think New Yorkers sound funny.

[644] Yeah, it makes you really think about that education wasn't even a thing.

[645] So much of our class is organized around what level of education you have.

[646] And then with these advanced levels of education come different ways of speaking and standardized within all those.

[647] But yeah, in a land with zero education, how could that have been an indicator of class?

[648] Because even rich people aren't going to school.

[649] Not really until the French come over.

[650] They take over in Anglo -Norman French is the language of the land.

[651] So in 1066, of course, William the Conqueror comes over.

[652] And then French becomes the language of the ruling court.

[653] And that's where we really see these class distinctions.

[654] No wonder they hate the French so much.

[655] I know.

[656] I feel bad considering that both of my parents are French speaking.

[657] I feel like I can diss the French along with everybody else because of that.

[658] So what we see at that time then is if you don't speak French, you're nobody, which is really fascinating in terms of what that lends to our modern vocabulary.

[659] So it's this class distinction is based on, birth, really.

[660] So there were still the wealthy aristocrats of Britain, but laid on with the wealthy aristocrats of French.

[661] And so you could speak French if you wanted to be a member of that group.

[662] And that was the language of court.

[663] And that's what you would talk about at the cocktail parties.

[664] You'd be talking in French.

[665] But if you were serving those people, you would be serving them with things you talked about in English in the kitchen, but served in French, which is how we get that distinction between like a cow and beef, chicken and poultry.

[666] Those are the difference because the words that we serve were French.

[667] The things that we killed were English.

[668] Oh, my God.

[669] That's how we have that distinction.

[670] Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare.

[671] We've all been there.

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[676] Hey listeners, it's Mr. Ballin here, and I'm here to tell you about my podcast.

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[690] The French thing still pervades.

[691] Like when someone says they have a certain Geneseeco, that's a lofty thing to do.

[692] No one's throwing out like Vivo Costa Dain Puli to impress anyone, like dropping some German anywhere.

[693] I don't know.

[694] I say it's been crunk all the time.

[695] Oh, you know.

[696] What's that mean?

[697] I am sick.

[698] No one does it, but still, it's very present that people will throw out a dash of French still to seem educated.

[699] Pista resistance.

[700] They have four or five.

[701] They like the cycle.

[702] Yes, that makes you sound kind of like you're scholarly and educated, absolutely, or even think about words.

[703] So I live in a house because I'm just, you know, every day, everybody, but other people live in mansions.

[704] And guess which word is French?

[705] Ah, mansions.

[706] Right, from Maison.

[707] So we have this really interesting dichotomy between the thing that seems really shi -she, you know, in high class.

[708] Those are the French words.

[709] Colloquial, just, yeah, here, picking my nose, hanging out.

[710] I live in a house, man. On my porch, really is where I live.

[711] So was mansion actually just a regular house?

[712] All these words are just the word that French used for those things that then got associated with these different qualities by the people that spoke English and learned those words, but they were in a mazah when they were serving the aristocrats, and they lived in a house or a hut, probably.

[713] Or they were just a cook in their own kitchen, but a chef in that kitchen, right?

[714] So this is what I really wrote this book to let people know, is the stories behind the things we say are unbelievable.

[715] And they tell us so much about who we are and how we relate.

[716] Can I say that's why McMansion is one of the most delightful paradoxical words, McMansion.

[717] Yes.

[718] It's wonderful.

[719] It's oxymoron.

[720] It's McDonald's and French.

[721] It kind of makes it down home, doesn't it?

[722] I love it.

[723] Okay.

[724] When I read what you've written about like literally and dude, I guess the first thing I thought of is something that we learned in anthropology, which was, I think most of this work came out of U of M at some point, but someone had the bravery to say African American vernacular English, ebonics, whatever word you wanted to describe as African American vernacular vernacular language, was in fact very complex, worthy of all the same esteem that any other form of communication is, and set upon studying it and kind of solidifying it as a real and legitimate language.

[725] And I remember reading that and thinking like, well, yes, they're clearly making a winning argument here.

[726] This is quite obviously just some weird classes thing that's trying to further discriminate or alienate or disenfranchise when in fact it's more complicated.

[727] You have to have more going on to be able to speak proficiently in AVA.

[728] Does that remind you, at all, the work you're doing?

[729] Because you're kind of defending some things that are regularly used to distinguish people as low class or stupid.

[730] Absolutely.

[731] So a lot of the people that you're talking about that did that work, Walt Wolf from Ralph Fassold.

[732] Do I remember right?

[733] Were they U of M people?

[734] Well, they weren't U of M, but they were in Michigan.

[735] Oh, okay.

[736] And actually, Ralph Fassold did a lot of his work in Detroit, where he first started describing the African -American vernacular system.

[737] And Bill LeBove was at University of Pennsylvania, but he did a court case in Ann Arbor where some parents sued the school system because they said that they weren't giving their children the tools to succeed because they were treating African American English as sort of a bastard tongue rather than a separate language that would require some resources for second language learning, which was really the whole idea of ebonics as well in the Oakland school system.

[738] So they were all sociolinguists, and actually I studied under Ralph Fessold at Georgetown.

[739] And I also worked with Bill LeBove in graduate school.

[740] Michigan is the heart of everything, right?

[741] Oh, it's the heartland, the mitton.

[742] And I did my doctorate at Michigan State, so it all goes back to Michigan, dude.

[743] My cute sister who's inside is an alumnus, alumni, whatever the word is, for Michigan State, a Lansing.

[744] Yes, yes, I spent many a winters in Lansing.

[745] Oh, I'm so sorry.

[746] My apologies.

[747] I know.

[748] I know.

[749] I should have gone to Hawaii.

[750] Also, I don't want to throw any shade on Lansing, but if you're picking between Ann Arbor and Lansing, you want to be in Ann Arbor.

[751] I'm going to have a lot of hate mail after this, but I'm with you.

[752] I loved Ann Arbor.

[753] I used to go spend a lot of time there.

[754] But yeah, so there was a lot of important work with African American English that went on there.

[755] And basically, those were the people that trained me. And what we're looking at is language from the social perspective.

[756] And what people don't understand about language is they think there's one pure good form.

[757] And that anything that isn't that form is bad or decay, which is why we hear people, say that, you know, changes decay.

[758] It's constant.

[759] Chronic complaint tradition for the last 200 years whenever we hear something new in language, oh my God, those young people, oh my God, those African -American people.

[760] Oh, my God, those Southern people.

[761] It's always ruining the language.

[762] But what that points to is just you haven't had anybody teach you how to look at language as a linguist rather than a prescriptivist because prescriptivism in English is only about 200 years old.

[763] How would you define Prescriptivism is the idea there's one good form of English, that there's one way to speak.

[764] Like math.

[765] Right, right, there's one pure form and we should aspire to it.

[766] And when we move away from that pure form or somehow we're degrading language or decaying or going downhill.

[767] Devolving.

[768] Yeah, and we're about a thousand years too late to worry about that shit in English.

[769] I'm telling you.

[770] Well, you do have to step back and ask yourself the most generic question.

[771] Does this form of communicating accomplish the goal of communication?

[772] Bingo.

[773] And once you have a checkmark, it's not like any two people.

[774] People speaking AVE are at a loss for what's being talked about.

[775] You just have to observe, is there a ton of miscommunication in this system?

[776] Are people regularly bringing you eggs when you thought you were asking for ketchup?

[777] That's a problem.

[778] But if this thing functions and accomplishes all the goals of communication, then obviously it has to be respected in the same way.

[779] Absolutely.

[780] And people think of it as a bastardization without realizing there's actually a really significant history in the development of African American English.

[781] So you don't have to like it.

[782] Sure.

[783] But you have to recognize it as a valid system.

[784] And if you look at the history of the development of African -American English, it's quite fascinating.

[785] And there are different theories on exactly how much role West African -African languages played.

[786] But they certainly played a role.

[787] And a lot of the distinctions that we hear in African -American English probably got their start in the system of West Africa.

[788] I'm guessing now I've not read this or know this.

[789] But I have to imagine also, if ever a group needed a secret language that the ruling class didn't know what they were saying, I mean, it would be black people in America.

[790] Absolutely.

[791] And there's a fascinating book by Geneva Smitherman, who was at University of Michigan.

[792] By the way, I went to UCLA, but I still act.

[793] Right.

[794] So she wrote a book, and it's pretty old now, it's called Black Talk.

[795] And it's actually a dictionary of African American English terms.

[796] And there's a new dictionary coming out, too.

[797] That should be exciting.

[798] Oh, it moves quick, A -A -A -A -V -E.

[799] Yes, it does.

[800] So her terms are kind of older, but what she talks about in that book is that it is a language born of history.

[801] It's a language born of people who were in struggle, working for survival.

[802] And this is the coded language of survival.

[803] A lot of African -American hymns during the time of enslaved people were sung to give coded messages to other people trying to escape.

[804] So, you know, run through the water, he will be watching.

[805] Isn't about God or a river Jordan.

[806] It's about go through this lake so the dogs don't find you because he knows you go that way.

[807] They were secret codes.

[808] And this idea of semantic reversal where you're taking a word and flipping.

[809] the meaning.

[810] It's sort of this coded way of having a secret language.

[811] Fat, P -H -A -T, again, Sridth word.

[812] That's great.

[813] It's good.

[814] That's actually a semantic reversal, which all versions of English have.

[815] We have other semantic reversals in more mainstream English.

[816] But African -American English was born to, first of all, mark in -group stature, right?

[817] So it's a language born of community because you're experiencing these same experiences.

[818] You're encoding the world in a way that's shared, but it's also because you need a language to confirm the different ways that you're going to do things and be different from the man in linguistic terms.

[819] And a lot of times it was because you wanted to give coded messages, but also it's really sort of thumbing your nose at the man. It's a rebuttal or a rejection of, I'm not talking like you because I will not be you.

[820] This is who I am.

[821] I don't want to talk like you.

[822] This may shock you.

[823] I know you're telling me I'm doing this wrong, but that is intentional.

[824] Right.

[825] And so is the shock.

[826] I mean, the fact that we often seem sort of in rap and hip hop this obscenity, it's sort of aggressive.

[827] That's because it's like in your face, right?

[828] And that's part of the purpose of it.

[829] Yeah.

[830] I will not allow you to shame me. Exactly.

[831] Right.

[832] And I don't have to talk like you to be valuable.

[833] And I don't have to whisper.

[834] Absolutely.

[835] Absolutely.

[836] And I think what we find is language evolution is natural.

[837] There's so many things in our language that just naturally happen because of the way our mouths work and the way our brains work.

[838] And this is universal.

[839] We all have them work in the same way.

[840] is why we see a lot of the same changes happen over time with languages that are unrelated.

[841] And that's how we went from old English with case and grammatical gender and plural marking to the English today that has none of it, which means that, man, if we are in trouble, we were in a thousand years ago, so you should stop bitching about people that drop an S from the plurals because that happened a long time ago.

[842] None of us say ion or shoe in anymore.

[843] We say eyes and shoes because we got rid of that old English ending.

[844] But all of that happens because of natural tendencies meeting social forces and the social forces that got us from having all those endings and grammar were the social forces that had weapons and came with army.

[845] So it was the Norman invasion, really, that sealed the deal on all those endings in old English because it changed up the stress pattern of English from influence of both Vikings and also French, which then had us dropping off the endings because the final syllables were not accented anymore.

[846] So when you start removing stress from final syllables, they basically all start to sound the same because you're saying them in very fast speech.

[847] so all the vowels become like uh instead of having distinctive vowel sounds and if you're using those distinctive vowel sounds to mark differences for case endings differences for plural marking things like that and they all sound the same then you kind of screwed yourself so you might as well just get rid of them all together which is why we have ease on words like tail and stone that we no longer say because those are remnants of old english endings i'm most annoyed by all the vestigial shit that still clutters up English.

[848] As a dyslexic, it's maddening.

[849] I bet.

[850] What the fuck is all?

[851] Why is that there?

[852] The spelling sucks.

[853] It's so illogical.

[854] It's maddening.

[855] Well, and part of that is just because of this weird drive.

[856] We have to think what's older is better.

[857] Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[858] It's so, I mean, that's really what makes us still think, okay, English has this one form it's supposed to be and we're going to hate on people that change it.

[859] Ben Franklin famously came up with a new alphabet.

[860] Yes, he did.

[861] Didn't take off.

[862] No, I mean, unfortunately, we're not very phonetic in English, but that's because when the printing press came around in the late 1400s, there was something just starting called the Great Vowel Shift, which really just changed up our vowels completely.

[863] But we still wrote based on pre -vowel shift pronunciations and spelling.

[864] So what happens is we encoded those old vowels in our writing system.

[865] So words that used to be different, like greet and great.

[866] So then that's an EE -E and E -A, right?

[867] But then you have meat and meat, which is an E -E and an E -A.

[868] This is why English spelling drives you crazy.

[869] Yeah.

[870] And it's meat and meat.

[871] Yeah.

[872] But it was actually met and mate.

[873] Also I before E, but except after C. And then, of course, in this situation as well, and also over there.

[874] So they sounded different at one point.

[875] And then what happened is those actually went on to change and they both ended up rising in the tongue, where the tongue is positioned to be articulated, to an e -s sound, so it became meat and meat.

[876] And neither of them were meat or meat.

[877] Right.

[878] Meas back in the day, but greet and great did not do that rising.

[879] They got halted, and so they have the same spelling, but sound different.

[880] So it's all screwed up.

[881] Oh, my God.

[882] I always felt sorry for my kids when they were kindergartners and first graders because my son would like, what the hell?

[883] Yeah.

[884] What is wrong with English?

[885] And I'm like, I'm sorry.

[886] Can't you just accept it?

[887] Math two and two is always.

[888] There's no situation.

[889] Great.

[890] I'm in.

[891] I can predict this.

[892] Yes, exactly.

[893] very appealing if you're struggling.

[894] Do you call it math or math?

[895] You can never get away from language.

[896] We have about six episodes of this show have been dedicated to math or math.

[897] You stumbled on.

[898] We have another show, Phyllisberg, where we did a whole episode about this.

[899] Because the host is from New Zealand.

[900] I see.

[901] Did you ever figure out the solution?

[902] Well, no, but people had stuff to say.

[903] Oh, you will not believe my inbox, man. When you start talking English and how it should be.

[904] Do you know why the S is there?

[905] I think it came along the 17th century because, that's how Greek sort of borrowed words often formed the words for different fields.

[906] As a plural, it became fashionable in the 17th century.

[907] And so in Britain, they added the S, but it didn't happen in America.

[908] I'm winging it, but I think that's why we have an S. Well, it turns out that the way we do it predates the way the English do.

[909] That's the most important thing we took from it.

[910] Yes.

[911] It's a call to the English version, but in fact, the English version was itself a weird.

[912] deviation from the original.

[913] Right.

[914] They added it on, I think, to seem more.

[915] So if your whole claim is a historical or traditional argument, and then you find out something existed before that that is the way we do it, then your whole argument falls apart.

[916] Well, that's exactly what every chapter of my book tries to put forth.

[917] That's the whole thing, right?

[918] These ideas we have about why people say like or whether I'm an uh or wrong.

[919] Let's jump into like, okay?

[920] Because like is, the vein of my existence.

[921] So what's interesting is you persuade me in your argument, but that's not.

[922] to say I'm going to enjoy hearing someone say like a bunch.

[923] I'm fine with that.

[924] You can just like things before you write me and tell me how you hate these things and I'm destroying your world.

[925] I don't care if you like it or not.

[926] I just want you to understand where it comes from and look at it more legitimately from a social and historical perspective.

[927] That's my only concern here.

[928] Evaluate it with some real scrutiny.

[929] So like, I don't think until I read this would I have recognized how insanely versatile the word is.

[930] It's amazing.

[931] It's got to be among the most.

[932] most versatile words we have.

[933] That and okay.

[934] Okay is really versatile if you break down how many different ways we use okay.

[935] Although okay, unlike like is a sort of invented word in the 1800s.

[936] It's actually not as old as like and it was a joke in an article about copy editing from the 1830s that inspired okay.

[937] But it's also very versatile.

[938] But yes, like I would say is probably tops the list.

[939] So yeah, so like is a verb.

[940] We know that.

[941] I like that.

[942] It's a noun.

[943] These are my likes.

[944] These are my dislikes.

[945] It's an adjective can be swan -like, buffoon -like.

[946] I'm quoting you now.

[947] But we see it start to change.

[948] One great way you point out is in the 50s, there's a cigarette ad for Winston's.

[949] And they wrote, Winston's tastes good like a cigarette should.

[950] And that's the first known example.

[951] No, it's in place of as.

[952] Wait, say it one more time then.

[953] Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.

[954] So it should be, or prior to this, it would have said Winston tastes good as a cigarette should.

[955] Oh, cigarette should.

[956] Okay.

[957] That's a hard one to say, right?

[958] Cigarette should.

[959] Cigarette should.

[960] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[961] Sounds kind of like a cool 70s R &B singer, cigarette should.

[962] That would be like a good, you heard cigarette should play the six train?

[963] My God.

[964] Okay, so tell us what a discourse marker is.

[965] Because this is where the like that we're now most exposed to, or at least it seems to be the most triggering version of it?

[966] Yes, it is.

[967] I mean, quotative like as well.

[968] But discourse markers are essentially words we use that aren't maybe literal in meaning in terms of the contribution they make to a sentence.

[969] But instead, they signpost things.

[970] They connect things.

[971] They provide conversational cohesion.

[972] I like to think of them as conversational glue.

[973] They help us tell our listener what to expect, what we expect from them, how what we're about to say is connected to what we just said, and we use them all the time.

[974] Like is simply one of them, but we have things like, well, or I mean, or you know, or even okay, actually, actually, however, thus.

[975] I mean, you go from really informal colloquial ones to really, really obnoxious legal type ones.

[976] We have a variety of them, but if you don't use them, you sound very robotic.

[977] So you might use O as, oh, I finally got a job, right?

[978] And then that O is a shorthand way to prompt the listener to mimic their surprise.

[979] Exactly.

[980] So O is signaling a change of state.

[981] Yes.

[982] It tells your listener sort of the behavior you expect from them.

[983] So if you say, oh, I got the job or oh, I won a lottery, someone answers like, oh, great.

[984] You're like, hey, dude, I just told you how to act.

[985] And that's not appropriate.

[986] So it's a social signal we get together.

[987] Oh tells me you're excited.

[988] I got the job.

[989] That's neutral.

[990] You could not want the job.

[991] You could want the job.

[992] could mean anything.

[993] It could.

[994] And so also, well, is a good one.

[995] And when someone says, well, it often means, I'm going to say something slightly off from what you're expecting.

[996] So be prepared.

[997] Like, be ready, dude.

[998] I'm going to go something against you.

[999] Not always.

[1000] A lot of times.

[1001] No, I just used it.

[1002] See, you got me. Yeah.

[1003] I was on the fly.

[1004] Yeah, I like it.

[1005] I like it.

[1006] Well, it's also the delivery of well is crucial.

[1007] Yeah.

[1008] Well, now, now you know, I'm about to disagree with you, but in a very polite way.

[1009] It's politeness, Merker.

[1010] And one thing that's really interesting is we find that women tend to use more discourse markers.

[1011] They're masters of mitigating.

[1012] Yes.

[1013] Well, they've been forced to, right?

[1014] This is the way that women have been policed for centuries for their language.

[1015] The problem is, of course, when you go into professional worlds, because discourse markers haven't been part of that world as much since it has been run by men most of the time, that women using discourse markers can be negatively perceived in that context.

[1016] And women are often accused of being hesitant.

[1017] And so a lot of that is simply the language that women have evolved to make sure their place in the world and their conversational structure is heard and not threatened.

[1018] So a lot of marking for attention, for listenership, which is why you know is used.

[1019] It's a listenership check.

[1020] The other one that gets a lot of people upset is I mean as a discourse marker.

[1021] A lot of times because it can either be snarky.

[1022] Well, I mean, I didn't say that.

[1023] But more often, it's sort of a clarification of I'm trying to tell you a little more clearly.

[1024] what I meant by that.

[1025] Yes.

[1026] I had this whole conversation with a friend.

[1027] At one point, he said, you know, you always end your sentences with, you know what I mean.

[1028] And I said, oh, I never thought that before or thought about it.

[1029] And he said, I always know what you mean.

[1030] You're very clear.

[1031] You speak really well.

[1032] You're incisive.

[1033] So you don't need to say that.

[1034] So I've been trying to stop.

[1035] And I've been trying to stop like, it is so hard to stop.

[1036] I think you should embrace.

[1037] you're like, man. No, I don't like it.

[1038] Okay, well, let me tell you why you should like, like.

[1039] First of all, what I think is interesting there is that someone commented to you about your own language and you as a response are changing your language.

[1040] Think about that.

[1041] But there's a good reason to and a bad reason to.

[1042] If someone points out, you're mitigating and soft selling your point every time you do that and you should have conviction because you're a genius and believe in it, that's one reason to change your language.

[1043] And I would say worth doing.

[1044] That's what he was saying.

[1045] That's not natural.

[1046] Now, if someone says you sound like an idiot because you use like, you can say fuck you to that.

[1047] Yeah.

[1048] But don't mitigate yourself is a good, I think, tip to give to a friend you love.

[1049] Well, you know, it's interesting because we have different reasons that we say things to each other.

[1050] A lot of times it is because we like people and we want them to come across well.

[1051] I think one thing we often don't think about is the ideas that have informed the reasons that we tell people those things.

[1052] So they're often built on these sort of social.

[1053] historical biases that we have about the way we think people should talk, which aren't always helpful to those people that are being asked to change, because sometimes the reason people talk the way they do is because they've developed those habits to help them get ahead in the world or be listened to because the forms of language they would use otherwise would not.

[1054] And I think for women, a lot of times that's the case.

[1055] So when you say something like, you know what I mean at the end or you know, a lot of times what it does is invite inference.

[1056] So when you're saying something like that or right.

[1057] A lot of people don't like it when people end a sense with the right or put it in middle sentence.

[1058] That's actually an invitation for inference.

[1059] And a lot of times that's because women use those things because they have been historically in positions where they're not necessarily listened to and they're not understood.

[1060] Or that a woman with a strong point of view is unattractive.

[1061] Look, we've witnessed it for six years on this show.

[1062] If there was a computer analyzing everything that was saying, the amount of times women will end a statement with, But I don't know.

[1063] I guess it's like this little soft landing to not trigger whatever mail's listening.

[1064] But I think it'd be okay for someone to aim to eradicate that.

[1065] If what you're trying to do is make the male feel more comfortable that you have an opinion, I'd say fuck that male.

[1066] I'm not arguing for anybody to use these features.

[1067] What I'm arguing is for us to be more sympathetic and compassionate.

[1068] And understand that they're there for reasons that historically have been forced.

[1069] And often we respond to those by divisional.

[1070] developing these linguistic tricks to help us make our way in the world.

[1071] And this is true, not just of women, but often marginalized communities elsewhere.

[1072] Men do things because we have certain cultural norms and expectations we put on them.

[1073] When you zoom all the way out, I think there is also an important question asked, well, it does imply a little bit that women should join how men talk, as opposed to maybe men should join how women talk.

[1074] So that could be a bigger global, like who should be joining who?

[1075] Yeah.

[1076] So when I edit the show, and I have someone else to do this now, but when I was first doing it, I took out all those things.

[1077] I'm still pretty dead set on those being out.

[1078] Women mitigating what they just said.

[1079] All of it.

[1080] Yeah, yeah.

[1081] Like sometimes it's fine, but for the most part, I want them gone because I want the most pure version of what people are saying without the mitigation.

[1082] But I have noticed in doing it that men don't say like nearly as much as women.

[1083] And I wonder if that's because men are different.

[1084] differentiating themselves.

[1085] Now at this point, like is equivalent to women.

[1086] So it'd be feminine to add that in.

[1087] There's a lot there of what you just said.

[1088] So much.

[1089] So much.

[1090] I'm excited, but also let's get it all organized so we can address all those points.

[1091] So one is who uses like.

[1092] We have a lot of work that looks at the distribution of like.

[1093] And one of the things I would be interested in is if we did some sort of sociological experiment here at the show was to look at the age of most of your participants and to see whether the men that are not using like tend to be over 3540 because when we look at research on who uses like one thing that's abundantly clear every single study supports it is younger speakers sure people under 30 tend to use like at much higher rates than older speakers that's the predominant pattern when we actually look at who uses it the most among the genders when we look at older speakers it's absolutely true that women tend to use like more than men.

[1094] When we look at younger speakers, it's not so clear.

[1095] It depends somewhat on the type of like.

[1096] So for people that are trying to get rid of like, we treat it as this monolithic thing, and it's actually really complex and has a lot of different functions, and they're completely different.

[1097] And if you're trying to lower the amount of likes you use, but you don't understand them, it's really hard to do that.

[1098] So part of the point of my book is, let's understand these things that's understand their function.

[1099] But if you don't like them, one thing you can do is pay more attention to the patterning, and then you can really approach it from a more scientific perspective of how to reduce the use of them in your speech.

[1100] But what I'd be interested in is if you had men under 30 and women under 30, if you'd actually find that difference in like use.

[1101] Maybe we should do a little armchair expert analysis.

[1102] Well, look, you know we're five seconds away from AI being able to go through the entire catalog, and you give it a command like that, and it'll tell you in one second.

[1103] Yes.

[1104] Actually, in a couple of years, I don't even need to be here.

[1105] It can just tell you everything I know.

[1106] Nor us, believe me. So an example of what you're hinting at, which I think is really relevant, and I don't know that I had ever thought about like in this way.

[1107] An example of this sentence, I worked for like 80 hours, is incredibly useful because communicators do want to maintain their credibility.

[1108] There's no use communicating with somebody who's lying or full of shit or talking out of their ass.

[1109] No one wants to do that.

[1110] So it is a nice way for you to say, look, this is a generalization.

[1111] I don't want you to assume I really mean 80, and I don't want to lose my credibility going forward.

[1112] So this is a tool I'm going to use.

[1113] I worked like 80 hours last week.

[1114] It might have been 70.

[1115] It might have been 85.

[1116] I'm not going to lose my credibility because I've added like.

[1117] They're a one -to -one substitution for about.

[1118] That's what's interesting about the like that we often hear people say they're vacuous, they're empty, they're meaningless.

[1119] But the majority uses of like that are used non -traditionally are actually quite semantic because they're one -to -one substitutions for things we would use other words to say.

[1120] So in that case, as an approximator, being used in an adverbial sense.

[1121] It might be a preposition part of speech, but it's used adverbially to degree or manner things.

[1122] And it's being used one to one for about.

[1123] So if I said, how old is he?

[1124] And you said, ah, he's about five.

[1125] That's exactly the same meaning as saying, he's like five.

[1126] And one's just hipper and cooler.

[1127] So if I say he's about five, I seem like an old person.

[1128] If I say he's like five, it makes me a little more young, chill, and colloquial.

[1129] And in fact, that's exactly the distribution.

[1130] People over 40 use about, people under 40 use like.

[1131] And that distinction is a great tool to police your own judgment.

[1132] Because you're right.

[1133] They're exactly the same.

[1134] They achieve the same goal.

[1135] What's the problem other than I prefer about?

[1136] It has to do with really social preferences and what values we put on that word.

[1137] The other one -to -one substitution is quotative like.

[1138] And that is one that women do use more of.

[1139] I think where you say, I was like blah, blah, blah.

[1140] Yeah, that's the one I'm trying to get rid of.

[1141] I hate it.

[1142] Okay.

[1143] And that is something that we still find women use.

[1144] using more of, even when we look at younger men and women who both use a lot of like.

[1145] So that's a quotative one.

[1146] That's instead of the verb to say.

[1147] But let me tell you something really fascinating about quotative like.

[1148] If we look at the distributions for where it patterns, we find that if we study when people are telling stories or having conversation about something where they're trying to go through events, we find that people alternate between the verb to say and the verb be like for effect.

[1149] So one of the effects is to switch perspectives.

[1150] A lot of sometimes we find that I was like is the more prominent or we were like.

[1151] So first person narration.

[1152] I was like, get out of here.

[1153] And he was like, no, fuck you.

[1154] And I was like, you better get to moving.

[1155] I'm going back and forth between he and I. Right.

[1156] He and I. And a lot of times what we find is people actually say, well, they said this.

[1157] And then I was like this.

[1158] So that we actually see it used to switch perspective.

[1159] But the other thing is what you just indicated when I'm sort of saying, this is the gist of what we talked about.

[1160] I'm not saying this is exactly verbatim what he said.

[1161] That's why I don't like it.

[1162] It's messy because you're quoting.

[1163] In fact, you've just endeavored to tell me the conversation.

[1164] And again, you're mitigating or you're telling me this is an exact while you're also telling me this is a quote.

[1165] Tell me what makes it a quote?

[1166] Because I used, I was like.

[1167] Well, my wife was like, get your shit out of my suitcase.

[1168] Now, either I should say, yeah, Kristen said she didn't want my stuff in her suitcase.

[1169] Or if I say Kristen said or is like, then that should be a quote.

[1170] That's my frustration with it.

[1171] It's an approximation as we're using in the discourse marker, but here it is a quote.

[1172] A quote is supposed to be a quote, unless you're paraphrasing.

[1173] Interesting because I see that as its power.

[1174] It's allowing speakers to have a more subjective response that they're indicating by using that verb instead of to say.

[1175] And the reason it's arisen is because people don't want to feel like they're violating the quote.

[1176] So when I use the verb to say, there's such association with the verb to say as if this is a direct quote.

[1177] It's so factual.

[1178] It's so factual.

[1179] But the reason we've enjoyed like is because it allows us to talk about our processing of events or our thinking about events, which seems to have coincided with an increase in our narrative style of monologic performance when we're talking about things.

[1180] So if you look back 50 years when people talked about a fight with their boss, they would just sort of relay the events.

[1181] They didn't tell people what they were thinking about during those events or their emotional response to it.

[1182] In the last 50 years, we've really increased this monologic performance that we're doing where we're really like, oh, this is so dramatic, and I'm going to tell you what I was thinking and how I was feeling.

[1183] That's really a social change, and we have basically then enacted that social change with our language.

[1184] And like allows that subjective sensibility, because look at the history running through Like.

[1185] In all cases where we are using it as a preposition in a simile, as a conjunction to connect to phrases or as a discourse marker to add some subjectivity to what we're about to say or to hedge it a little bit so it's not exact.

[1186] All of that is about approximation.

[1187] It's about saying, look, this is imprecise and I'm noting it's being imprecise by marking it with a word so that you are entirely clear as a listener that I'm paraphrasing.

[1188] Do you think that the intention always matches that?

[1189] Because I think quite often people actually are trying to give you the direct quote.

[1190] They're claiming a direct quote.

[1191] But now it's so ubiquitous that they just think you would say I was like he was like.

[1192] Like can be both things.

[1193] That's why I call it messy.

[1194] Is like, hold on, are you telling me this is actually what was said or not because it goes both ways?

[1195] I think it depends on what your goal is.

[1196] A lot of people don't really care if it's verbatim.

[1197] What they're trying to give you is the gist of how they were feeling or what happened.

[1198] And it's sort of this narration of an event.

[1199] And it doesn't matter to them if you think it's exactly how it was stated or not.

[1200] What you're saying is I would prefer to have it exactly stated.

[1201] A friend said, we broke up.

[1202] He was like, I can't date someone who lives in a one -bedroom apartment.

[1203] If that's exactly what was said, we've got a real thing to talk about.

[1204] If you've paraphrased, I don't really know.

[1205] What did he actually say?

[1206] Are you interpreting that he thought you were not worthy?

[1207] But to me, in a conversation like that, you'd say he really said that.

[1208] You would get a little bit deeper in.

[1209] But that person would probably say, yes.

[1210] Like, in their head, I just did it.

[1211] I just did it.

[1212] But in their head, they heard that.

[1213] So then maybe they shouldn't use like, though.

[1214] Yeah.

[1215] I mean, I say it a lot when I'm talking about how I was thinking.

[1216] So if I'm telling a story, I'll say, and then he said, get out of here.

[1217] And I was like, what?

[1218] Yes.

[1219] But that's my thought.

[1220] not what I said.

[1221] And I would interpret it as such.

[1222] Right.

[1223] My issue is when people are using it, I guess, in a literal way, when they mean it in the paraphrase way.

[1224] I don't know.

[1225] Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare.

[1226] You know, language is messy.

[1227] That is the reality because it means different things.

[1228] And I do want to say, so I've had people that, you know, I'm telling him there's all these different likes.

[1229] There's the approximator like, there's the discourse marker like, there's the quotative, like there is value in all of them, but I'm not justifying people using it every word either because there is overuse of things.

[1230] It's sort of, you know, like potato chips.

[1231] You can have five, but you don't need 80.

[1232] And so I'm not telling people you like every other word.

[1233] There are people who are ineffective communicators and there are people that are effective communicators.

[1234] That's also the reality.

[1235] Sure, you could have your cake you needed too, but when you've just talked to me for seven minutes and you walk away and I really don't know what the fuck you just said or I don't know what your point was, I think it's okay for us to say, like, oh, I think some of these things are getting in the way of you actually communicating your point to me. And I think the issue there is larger than a simple word you're using because if you're leaning on those words to that degree where it's difficult to understand you.

[1236] It's not your strength.

[1237] It's not your strength, right?

[1238] I mean, I think what we do is we put a lot of baggage on these features when the baggage should be on the person.

[1239] You know, we are not all great at communicating.

[1240] That's not our strength.

[1241] It's okay.

[1242] And I'm not justifying that kind of use.

[1243] People might read that chapter and think, yeah, it still drives me crazy.

[1244] Well, that's okay.

[1245] Disliked is different than saying something's bad.

[1246] One is a judgment of a social preference.

[1247] The other one is a moral judgment.

[1248] And that's what I don't want people to do.

[1249] I agree.

[1250] But some people don't have the gift of speaking eloquently at all times and clearly.

[1251] And that probably has less to do with using like and more to do with just how they've learned to talk or how comfortable they are in that context.

[1252] And that's when we start to see a lot of likes or ums come in because um also is very, very valuable.

[1253] Ums are amazing.

[1254] If you look at the research on what um does for us, It's pretty freaking amazing.

[1255] But again, if you um every other sentence and I can't understand what you're going to say, that's a different question.

[1256] So I'm not at all arguing for people to um all the time.

[1257] When you're talking to someone in person and you see them, it is a much different beast than when you're only hearing.

[1258] Because if you are only hearing people, you hear those things so loudly.

[1259] You hear every um, every like, it does feel messy.

[1260] When you're communicating face to face.

[1261] There's no physical communication going out.

[1262] Yeah, it just is different.

[1263] Absolutely.

[1264] Or when you're listening to someone give a talk, that's also a time you focus in on the way they're speaking.

[1265] And that's a really different context than having a conversation.

[1266] Well, it's presumably written.

[1267] That's the assumption one makes.

[1268] So if someone hears someone at a public speaking event use a lot of those, the logical conclusion is either they didn't write this out.

[1269] That's concerning.

[1270] I would have expected this expert to put some time.

[1271] You know, there's a lot of clues in there.

[1272] Or they're bad at public speaking.

[1273] They're kind of muddling their way through this thing they've written.

[1274] I'd like to hear the thing they wrote, executed correctly.

[1275] You know, there's a lot of things you could imbue from that.

[1276] Absolutely.

[1277] So I'm with you.

[1278] I don't want to hear a public speaker use a lot of likes and ums because my expectation is those are spontaneous conversational features.

[1279] They're not ones for practice.

[1280] They're not ones for writing.

[1281] And I will say that I have a lot of students that use like.

[1282] In fact, we joke when we talk about it because I make them study it and we have to analyze.

[1283] their like use.

[1284] And they joke about how they cannot get away from like after that for the rest of the class period.

[1285] Everybody's like stand out.

[1286] And so they do use a lot of likes.

[1287] But I have yet to get a paper with like in it.

[1288] So we recognize that difference.

[1289] And so when I'm writing, I don't use like.

[1290] When I'm writing, I don't use um.

[1291] And the assumption I'm going to make when someone's giving a presentation or giving a public talk is that they have actually practiced what they're going to say.

[1292] We find a much higher rate of um and uh when we're unfamiliar with things and when we haven't practiced them.

[1293] Naturally, if you've practiced, you should use less.

[1294] I mean, uh, so my expectation when someone's using a lot of up there is that they violated that norm of practice.

[1295] So it's completely appropriate.

[1296] Let's just hate on people that are public talkers and use them.

[1297] But in conversations, we shouldn't really hold people to that same standard.

[1298] Yeah, I agree.

[1299] Okay.

[1300] Now, I know your argument on like, I read it thoroughly.

[1301] I'm agreeing with you.

[1302] And I think it's true.

[1303] Yeah, I'm like totally like, yeah, I was reading it.

[1304] And I was like, yeah, this makes sense.

[1305] Now, the one I need you to convince me about, because.

[1306] my hot take on it, which is probably ubiquitous, when you render a word completely useless, I have an issue with that.

[1307] So literally means nothing now.

[1308] Essentially is heading that way.

[1309] I've been arguing for a while that essentially is replacing literally.

[1310] That'll be the next thing that people just say every fourth word.

[1311] They don't know why they're saying it.

[1312] This overuse of literally, what's the case for it?

[1313] Literally, my head caught on fire when I found this out.

[1314] It's like, well, now literally means figuratively.

[1315] It's actually the opposite of what it means.

[1316] Yes, your hair didn't catch on fire, but you're saying it literally caught on fire.

[1317] So what are we doing now?

[1318] Two different things to talk about.

[1319] One is sort of this idea of intensifiers, which is what literally is.

[1320] These things that add emphasis are their boosters to what we say, so they make it more hyperbolic, which is what literally has done.

[1321] And when we look at the history of intensifiers in English, which is really fascinating because it is probably the most rapid recycling of words in English of any type.

[1322] So that's things like very, really so absolutely complete.

[1323] Absolutely, terrifically, terribly, essentially, amazingly, right?

[1324] All these things that add something to what we're saying.

[1325] Their whole point is to be hyperbolic.

[1326] They're to attract attention to say this is more than average.

[1327] Intensity gets boring fast.

[1328] It's like having loud music.

[1329] Eventually, you just get dulled to it.

[1330] My teenage son is a perfect example of that.

[1331] I'll tell him that.

[1332] Don't you turn that down.

[1333] It's not loud.

[1334] I'm like, the whole house is shaking.

[1335] It is loud.

[1336] And there I just used a like for you.

[1337] Yeah.

[1338] And you got to win.

[1339] I didn't even hear it.

[1340] I wish people could have saw it.

[1341] I like that.

[1342] So, you know, the trick with intensifiers is when we're using the same intensifier over and over again, it stops being intense, which is why they recycle so quickly.

[1343] So the old English intensifier that was really popular was suave, which originally meant strong, but became to mean just intensification.

[1344] So you might go up a Swede High Hill.

[1345] In fact, there is a biblical verse that uses it in this exact context.

[1346] They went up a Swive High Hill.

[1347] A literal high hill.

[1348] Literally a high hill.

[1349] Yes, it was a high, high, high hill.

[1350] So high, it was suave.

[1351] And that word originally meant strong.

[1352] But what happens is the idea of strong is it has a lot, right?

[1353] When someone's strong, they contain a lot of strength.

[1354] And so that has an intensity to it.

[1355] And so that's repurposed as a word that just means intensity.

[1356] It's called semantic bleaching, where the original meaning starts to fall away and we just keep one aspect of its meaning, often not the dominant aspect.

[1357] which started it.

[1358] Very is another great example because very didn't just mean a lot in older forms of English.

[1359] It actually came with middle English.

[1360] It is from the French word Vre.

[1361] The old French was Verey, but the modern French word is Vre.

[1362] Do either of you know what that means in French?

[1363] We're low -brow.

[1364] She's higher -brow.

[1365] See, look, she got it.

[1366] She's pretty high -brown.

[1367] I was in the middle of saying she's higher -brows than me. Because severity in Latin is true.

[1368] Look at her.

[1369] Yes.

[1370] Look at her go.

[1371] Whoa.

[1372] You can like, you can like.

[1373] like all you want.

[1374] You have nothing to do.

[1375] Thank you.

[1376] Wow.

[1377] Monica.

[1378] Whoa.

[1379] So Frey means true.

[1380] If only you were a male professor, things would absolutely exploding.

[1381] Same thing for me, man. I feel you.

[1382] So it started out as Verre in Middle English, and it meant true.

[1383] So we actually see reference in the 1400s to a man that was Verre in word indeed, which meant true in word indeed.

[1384] Or we see in the Tinsdale Bible, which I think was in the 1500s, that Jesus is described as a very prophet, which meant a true prophet.

[1385] The word very did not mean very.

[1386] It meant true or actual.

[1387] And it wasn't until about the 17th century that we start to see the degree aspect of very become the most dominant meaning.

[1388] So even in Chaucer, we find an alternation between him using it as a word meaning true or very and then as a word that meant somewhat degree so one line in the kind ofberry tales he talks about him being a very proper fool which meant a true proper fool but that true is being used for emphasizing a degree so an extent to which he was a proper fool a very proper fool so you can see how it comes through proper's doing the same thing as well right it's both it's like a very big very very very very big card that kind of thing.

[1389] So basically, that degree sense, that it had so much of being true that it was 100%.

[1390] That gets to be its most prominent meaning.

[1391] And by the 17th century, that is the most extensive meaning of very, where the other meaning has fallen away, except do you ever say, on this very spot, here I stood?

[1392] Always.

[1393] Okay?

[1394] I can see that Dak says that all the time, right?

[1395] And what do you mean there?

[1396] You don't mean to a high degree you mean on this actual or exact or true spot.

[1397] So we still see some remnants of its original meaning.

[1398] So this is all called semantic bleaching.

[1399] Literally is also undergoing the process of semantic bleaching where the idea when something is true or actual, because that's what literally means, the same thing as true.

[1400] Think about what really, really means actual are true.

[1401] It is just the third in the line of those words that have lost their original sense to mean degree.

[1402] Because if something is actual or true, that means it represents whatever you're talking about to the highest degree.

[1403] But what's frustrating to me is what's so frequently happening is that the example they're giving isn't what happened.

[1404] Well, that's the point.

[1405] That meaning has gone.

[1406] Saying it's just to give the extra punch.

[1407] It's that extra punch of just the most.

[1408] When you say something is terrific, what does that mean to you?

[1409] Good.

[1410] What did terrific mean originally?

[1411] Terrifying?

[1412] Frightening, terrifying.

[1413] But yet no one slaps you around because you're using it in a completely opposite meaning of its right?

[1414] original meaning?

[1415] They should.

[1416] You should have slapped me. If I say that was hardly a problem, what does that mean?

[1417] Wait, the other one that freaks me out like that is...

[1418] Awesome.

[1419] Awful?

[1420] No, it means it's not believable, but we use it.

[1421] It's such a positive.

[1422] It's funny because the only thing I'm getting my head is, Encriable in French.

[1423] That's it.

[1424] That's exactly what I was thinking of Ancriabba.

[1425] No, no, no. Well, Incredible.

[1426] Incredible.

[1427] That's the word.

[1428] See, I was thinking in French.

[1429] There you go.

[1430] Incredible.

[1431] Not credible.

[1432] Yes.

[1433] So it's exactly the same thing.

[1434] Language morphs.

[1435] This is what it does.

[1436] So if you use hardly to mean not a problem, you are using the opposite meaning from its meaning as late as the 1600s.

[1437] So I'm just bristling that I'm witnessing.

[1438] That's it.

[1439] We're in the middle of it.

[1440] And let me ask you, if someone said I literally fell down when I hit that rock, would you be like, are you being emphatic or are you being literal?

[1441] These days, that doesn't mean they fell down.

[1442] Well, generally speaking, from context, you should hopefully know.

[1443] You need to listen to more people on airplanes talk.

[1444] Eaves drop on more people.

[1445] My head literally exploded.

[1446] You know how do you hear that?

[1447] No, I think you know the reality.

[1448] Yeah, yeah.

[1449] I get what you're saying because a lot of people hate literally.

[1450] But what I'm saying is you can dislike it.

[1451] I'm good with that.

[1452] You can say it's confusing to me when I please drop on people that will not hold its progress.

[1453] Yeah, it's as good as it's going to get probably today.

[1454] I'm telling you it's following the natural evolution of so many other words in English.

[1455] You could twist it into, it's exciting that you get to witness a semantic bleaching transition.

[1456] Fast forward.

[1457] I'm going to fast forward.

[1458] to it means absolutely nothing though because my whole goal and i'm thinking about it even while you're talking about all this you're literally thinking about it i'm realizing so much of your objection to this stuff is what your own personal approach to life is so i am someone who was punk rock i am a self -identified outsider i don't want to be saying what everyone's saying when i recognize the thing that everybody's saying i make a mental note like that's not going to be me so that's my own personal take on a desire to be original.

[1459] That not everyone has.

[1460] Many people have a desire to blend right in.

[1461] So my own personal proclivity towards originality makes me hate some of these words more than someone who doesn't have the goal of originality.

[1462] But let me twist this for you.

[1463] I would say that the people that are doing this are the true originators.

[1464] They're not.

[1465] The first person who said my head literally exploded, yes, that person and maybe the next 10 ,000 that came after it.

[1466] But when 90 % of young people are saying literally and they mean figuratively, yes.

[1467] The no. Everyone's doing this.

[1468] And in fact, I don't want to be associated with it.

[1469] So that's my own proclivity towards being original.

[1470] I'm owning my bias.

[1471] I get that.

[1472] But the trick is it's the creative innovation of those first 10 ,000 people.

[1473] I love those people.

[1474] That's rap.

[1475] That's hip -hop.

[1476] So they're still allowed to say literally, the rest of us go to hell.

[1477] It's hip -hop.

[1478] Hip -hop is the first 10 ,000 people.

[1479] And I love those people.

[1480] But when it gets down to my shopping mall, nine years after Tone Lokes said it, I'm like, hey, you don't want to say been there done there.

[1481] But that's how novelty becomes norm.

[1482] That's how novelty becomes norm.

[1483] Why use it all the time?

[1484] I love it.

[1485] Artisanal.

[1486] Can we talk about artisanal?

[1487] That's my hate the word artisanal.

[1488] I mean nothing now.

[1489] You want to get into that.

[1490] I really hate the word housemaid.

[1491] Here we go.

[1492] Right from homemade.

[1493] Thank you, join us.

[1494] Only because it's totally uppity.

[1495] Homemade is like Betty Crocker.

[1496] It's like your mother.

[1497] Housemade is this snobby.

[1498] I never even heard that.

[1499] I know.

[1500] you to feel uppity.

[1501] And so it's really just trying to make someone else feel lower.

[1502] Sort of like these different names for the different places you sit on an airplane that really is all about, you're a rich asshole that gets first class and I get to be in the cattle car, but we're going to call it something like Economy Plus to make you feel better.

[1503] I objected those kinds of new words.

[1504] But I honestly, I still accept them.

[1505] When you're walking by subway and it says, come in for an artisanal sub.

[1506] Are you not like, well, great, artisanal doesn't mean anything now.

[1507] I think that's fun that they did that.

[1508] I think what it's doing, I think it's all about class decks, right?

[1509] Because what you're doing there is you're saying that these things that's the upper class get, we can enjoy as well.

[1510] I think it's the opposite, to be honest with you.

[1511] I am low class.

[1512] So the notion that we're going to adopt this stupid word artisanal to make ourselves feel better, I'm like, fuck those people and fuck artisnal.

[1513] Let's have some subway.

[1514] It's actually one step beyond it, which is like, why are we taking on the master's language here?

[1515] They're the ones that use this shit to be Hoidey.

[1516] Why are we trying to join them?

[1517] I'm more in the hip -hop fuck you way.

[1518] Right, totally get it.

[1519] And I love it because what it shows you is the power of language.

[1520] The power of language goes so much further than expressing some informational content.

[1521] In fact, I would argue that what it does even more than tell you to get groceries is tell you our relationship, tell you how I feel about the world, tell you what your status is, and also sort of what I want you to take away from what I'm telling you, whether I'm angry, whether I'm happy, whether I love you, whether I hate you.

[1522] All those different things are wrapped into these very simple things we say.

[1523] And if we didn't have these kind of social linguistic varieties that we use, think of how little we'd be able to communicate that kind of information.

[1524] Oh, it's all fascinating.

[1525] It's pretty magical.

[1526] It is wonderful.

[1527] I love exploring it all because everything you just take for granted.

[1528] It is the most mundane thing because it's the thing we do the most.

[1529] And we're usually wrong about what we think, right?

[1530] We usually don't really know anything about language.

[1531] Not you, Dex.

[1532] No, that's why we have a back -jerk section of the show.

[1533] I'm sure you know everything, but the rest of us.

[1534] I couldn't even remember incredible.

[1535] I mean, encriabla.

[1536] You got it.

[1537] Monica, I did not realize you were fluent in French.

[1538] I mean, I'm not shocked.

[1539] You're so smart.

[1540] Hoyty.

[1541] It just sounded like incredible.

[1542] Okay, dude, I don't object to, but tell me why dude is fine.

[1543] Well, dude is cool because it has gone around from a different meaning to a completely opposite meaning.

[1544] So it's done exactly what you were talking about.

[1545] Literally, we just don't remember the original meaning.

[1546] But it is a true semantic reversal.

[1547] So in the 1880s, when dudes first appeared, they did not appear in a popular way.

[1548] They were actually a mockery or ridicule of a man who was very ostentatious in his self -presentation in his dress.

[1549] In fact, it was another word for a dandy or a fop.

[1550] Now, interestingly enough, people probably don't know where the word dude comes from, but it's actually from Yankee Doodle Dandy.

[1551] It's a fusing together of the doodle and the dandy because, of course, Yankee Doodle Dandy is sort of a joke on the Americans.

[1552] The British used to sing it to the Americans to talk about these pathetic Americans trying to be British and trying to put on the airs of a macaroni.

[1553] Have you ever wondered why you stick a feather in your cap and call yourself macaroni?

[1554] You're not a piece of pasta.

[1555] I know this is going to be heartbreaking for all of those kindergartners out there because I remember thinking about having those little macaronis that you used to paint when you were kids.

[1556] Yes, sure.

[1557] Make a little.

[1558] And putting it in my capping, that's really what the image that song gave me. But macaroni's were 17th century British dudes that would go over to Europe with these continental airs.

[1559] And they would eat macaroni, which was the signature dish.

[1560] And they loved it.

[1561] They were basically the original drag queens.

[1562] They were probably always bragging about the macaron.

[1563] They were just eating on the man. They were bragging about those delicious macaroni.

[1564] So their name was macaroni.

[1565] It was sort of a joke.

[1566] And so basically a dandy, a dude, is 18th and 19.

[1567] 19th century macaroni.

[1568] So the idea of macaroni was really more, they were very, very effeminate with a dude.

[1569] They often weren't necessarily in drag in the same way that I think people sort of thought about these macaroni's, but they were generally effeminate.

[1570] They were overly concerned with their dress.

[1571] They were very self -affected.

[1572] I mean, essentially it was like the first like gay pejorative.

[1573] Yes, it was.

[1574] And you would use it towards someone that you weren't fond of.

[1575] And in fact, there were often in the New York Times in the 1880s these articles about people being challenged to a duel because they were called a dude.

[1576] And there was one case where it talks about, well, the matter of the duel is the deciding point because a dude, effeminate and manner, would never undertake a duel.

[1577] Because then dude ranch is some other thing.

[1578] Well, dude ranch is actually related.

[1579] So what happened in the 1880s, it was this effeminate dandy, not behaving in line with masculine norms that were culturally governed at the time.

[1580] So at that time, the cultural norms you were violating was the masculine cultural norms.

[1581] And this was because of At the turn of the century, there was obviously women that were begging for the vote and for equal rights and that upset the masculine norm.

[1582] But also there was an increase of gay visibility.

[1583] So that upset the masculine norm.

[1584] So people that were viewed in opposition to that kinds of behaviors, those cultural norms of masculinity were called dudes.

[1585] And that was in a bad way, never positive.

[1586] But what happened around the turn of the century is dude fell away from this effeminate affectation and became about the clothes because the dude had always been about the clothes.

[1587] this very particular style of dress.

[1588] And then in the early 1900s, a dude was anybody that stood out because of their clothes, which is how the term dude ranch came.

[1589] So it's actually related to that original meaning.

[1590] But it's because you stood out.

[1591] It was east coasters that went to these western ranches, and they would be all dressed up in their eastern clothes.

[1592] And they looked funny on these ranches.

[1593] So they started getting called Dude Ranches.

[1594] So Dude can really refer to anybody.

[1595] Yes, yes.

[1596] Anybody that stood out because of their clothes, a lot of times, If you were a police recruit and you just came out for your first day and your uniform was all pressed and nice and didn't have any blood on it, you were a dude because you had this brand new spanking uniform.

[1597] Where a dude became cool was actually in the 1930s and 40s with African Americans and Mexican American Pachuchos that were very participatory in the zootsuit culture.

[1598] Yeah, Zoot suits.

[1599] And they called each other dudes.

[1600] Which still is clothing in some ways.

[1601] Very much again about the clothes because that's what they're calling out.

[1602] But it was really interesting how they sort of converted the meaning away from this idea of these feminine dudes to these really hyper masculine, subversive, dangerous, edgy, counterculture dudes.

[1603] And it was like a callout, yes.

[1604] And it's also like, hey, thumbing your nose at mainstream society who's not accepting you.

[1605] It's an in -group solidarity marker, taking that word and subverting it.

[1606] They were dressing like gangsters.

[1607] Yes.

[1608] It was considered very wasteful because of the constraints on.

[1609] material.

[1610] And a lot of the cities even band wearing zoot suits.

[1611] So they were standing up against this mainstream culture that viewed them as dangerous and subversive and calling each other dudes, which gave it this really edgy, cool, counterculture vibe.

[1612] And that's where we start to see it in music.

[1613] We start to see it in druggie subculture, in surfing subculture.

[1614] That's where the dude was transported from this effeminate fop of the 1800s to the cool, chill, slacker dude of the modern era.

[1615] And then the Coins take it even further.

[1616] Absolutely.

[1617] They kind of an aspirational state of zen -like being in a weird way.

[1618] Absolutely.

[1619] And that's how the dude came to be today's dude.

[1620] So again, a complete semantic reversal.

[1621] It's kind of like literally, just saying.

[1622] Literally is.

[1623] But if literally meant literally so, but it doesn't because you're trying to destroy it.

[1624] That's my job.

[1625] That's my job.

[1626] That's why they pay me the big bucks.

[1627] You're going to be able to remember the title of Valerie's book.

[1628] It is like literally, dude.

[1629] Yeah, that's a good one.

[1630] And you're going to get a deep dive on the origin and the evolution and the power and the functionality of all these things.

[1631] So cool.

[1632] Yeah, it's very fascinating.

[1633] You're going to pick three more triggering words.

[1634] For me, it would have been like literally artisanal.

[1635] But regardless.

[1636] No, essentially is your new.

[1637] Essentially.

[1638] There you go.

[1639] I'm going to put that one in the next book.

[1640] Essentially.

[1641] You know, it was funny because my editor and I have.

[1642] had lunch.

[1643] And originally the book was called, I hate when you say that because that's what people always tell me. That's what inspired the book is people would come up and, you know, I'd give a talk on vowels or something that I study.

[1644] And people would be like, yeah, that was really fascinating.

[1645] But why do people use dude all the time?

[1646] Or why do people say like all the time?

[1647] I hate it when people say like or whatever.

[1648] So originally that was the title.

[1649] And then we're like, no, we need to see, there's another like.

[1650] We need to come up with something from the chapters.

[1651] Because every chapter is a different vocal tick.

[1652] So singular they's in there, things that bother people.

[1653] They don't know how to use um and uh are in there.

[1654] And so we just went through and all of a sudden I was like, like literally dude.

[1655] And she's like, yes, that's it.

[1656] So it was truly born of trying these out.

[1657] Yes.

[1658] Love it.

[1659] Oh, it's wonderful.

[1660] I hope everyone checks out like literally dude.

[1661] Valerie, it's so nice to have you in.

[1662] This was really, really fun.

[1663] You are on fire for language and I thank you for it.

[1664] Yeah.

[1665] I love it.

[1666] It is fun.

[1667] Thanks for letting me share it.

[1668] Of course.

[1669] Next off is the fact check.

[1670] I don't even care about facts.

[1671] I just want to get into your pants.

[1672] It's nice to be together.

[1673] We've been on Zoom for a minute.

[1674] We have.

[1675] Yeah, but now we're together in, what town are we in?

[1676] We're outside of Palm Springs, just a little outside of Palm Springs.

[1677] Kind of by Lakeinta.

[1678] Same exit as Lakeinta if you've been to Lakeinta.

[1679] Wow.

[1680] One of your faves?

[1681] My absolute fave.

[1682] Yeah.

[1683] Written a lot of screenplays.

[1684] You're absolute, even more than four seasons?

[1685] No, not nearly as much as four seasons.

[1686] Okay, that's what I thought.

[1687] I love Four Seasons.

[1688] Yeah, we're still looking for sponsorship by Four Seasons.

[1689] And you don't even have to pay.

[1690] That's the thing.

[1691] That's what we're offering you Four Seasons.

[1692] No pay.

[1693] Just let us stay, please.

[1694] At any four seasons for however long we were on.

[1695] 365 days a year, please.

[1696] Pretty much.

[1697] What would be our preference?

[1698] You were just at one.

[1699] I was.

[1700] I hate admitting it.

[1701] But yes, I was, and it was glorious.

[1702] In Jackson Hall.

[1703] I'd never stayed there.

[1704] Yeah.

[1705] Oh, man. It was lovely.

[1706] Just Jackson Hole in general.

[1707] all outrageous.

[1708] Complete opposite of this.

[1709] So yesterday we left Jackson Hole, Wyoming at 8 .15 in the morning in the bus.

[1710] It was 70.

[1711] Yeah.

[1712] There's snow in the mountains.

[1713] There's water everywhere.

[1714] You can't look 80 feet and not see a river or lake or something.

[1715] Okay.

[1716] And then we got here last night at 10 .30.

[1717] It was 115.

[1718] There's no water to be found.

[1719] It's so hot.

[1720] Yes, it's so hot.

[1721] And so opposite of what we were just at.

[1722] Yeah.

[1723] Couldn't be more opposite.

[1724] Yeah.

[1725] All on a car ride.

[1726] And we both look different.

[1727] How so?

[1728] You got a longer hair and a longer beard.

[1729] I don't.

[1730] This is what's being said, but I don't know if I agree.

[1731] But remember even last night when I saw you for the first time?

[1732] Because I was plugging shit into the motorhome in the dark.

[1733] Yeah, but you looked like a different boy.

[1734] Because my hair was so long.

[1735] Yeah.

[1736] I know.

[1737] It's too.

[1738] I don't like it.

[1739] In fact, I was deciding on this trip.

[1740] and I might want to go back to short hair.

[1741] But I can't decide because I know as soon as I do that.

[1742] It's like girls and bangs.

[1743] Sure.

[1744] But do you have to go all the way?

[1745] Could you just trim up the long into smaller long?

[1746] Like more playful.

[1747] Yeah.

[1748] Yeah, but I've been desiring shape sides because summer.

[1749] Okay.

[1750] Also, when your hair is that short, you don't have to think about it.

[1751] It only does one thing.

[1752] It's just short.

[1753] That's true.

[1754] Yeah.

[1755] That's lovely.

[1756] Now, you have been out here for several.

[1757] days.

[1758] Yes.

[1759] And I've been here for three days, I think.

[1760] Okay.

[1761] Yeah.

[1762] And what happened before I got here?

[1763] Anything?

[1764] It's been really fun, really hot, but so fun.

[1765] And we have been in the pool.

[1766] Uh -huh.

[1767] Oh yeah.

[1768] The reason I look different is because I'm much darker.

[1769] Can you tell?

[1770] Yeah.

[1771] Okay.

[1772] Yeah.

[1773] You've been sun worshiping.

[1774] I sun worship anyway, but it's impossible here not to sun worship.

[1775] It's prime sun worshiping.

[1776] It is.

[1777] Yeah.

[1778] We've been playing.

[1779] games we have been mainly playing games and in the pool what games there was a birthday yes it was a birthday on his birthday yes happy birthday on coming for you coming for me coming fast yeah and okay there's a new game yeah it's really fun okay i'm gonna tell the arm cherry so okay make it very literal and step by step so people can actually play right okay it's called how's yours okay and you play in a group of people, and one person steps out of the room, and the rest of the people decide on something everyone has, like a cell phone.

[1780] Oh, uh -huh.

[1781] We all have one, right?

[1782] Yeah.

[1783] Then we call the person back in.

[1784] The person will say, Dax, how's yours?

[1785] And you might say, black.

[1786] Okay.

[1787] Monica, how's yours?

[1788] Stolen.

[1789] Ah.

[1790] Wait, so the person who left the room can come in and they ask the question, Monica, how's yours?

[1791] Yes.

[1792] Oh, wonderful.

[1793] Now, do you want them to guess?

[1794] So this is the part.

[1795] It seems inherently broken this game.

[1796] No, no, no. Because the fun would be that they don't guess it, but you could probably make it really easy for them to guess it.

[1797] Exactly.

[1798] So the hope is that you pick one that's not so obvious.

[1799] Yeah.

[1800] So it's fun.

[1801] But there's no winners or losers.

[1802] Like, you want them to eventually guess.

[1803] After some big laughs, probably.

[1804] Yeah.

[1805] And we've played some fun rounds.

[1806] My favorite round so far.

[1807] was Eric left the room.

[1808] Okay.

[1809] And I said, I think the category should be our opinion of him.

[1810] Wow.

[1811] Wait.

[1812] Yeah, which is obscure.

[1813] Our opinion of him.

[1814] Exactly.

[1815] So when he comes in and he's like, how's yours?

[1816] Yeah.

[1817] You'd say.

[1818] Scatterbrained.

[1819] Yeah.

[1820] You know, we gave really nice ones.

[1821] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1822] Great dad.

[1823] Yeah.

[1824] But only one word.

[1825] Oh, only one word.

[1826] Mm -hmm.

[1827] Oh, yeah.

[1828] Sorry, that's part of it.

[1829] Oh, so you know what I would say.

[1830] What?

[1831] I bet this was said.

[1832] How's yours?

[1833] Tortoises.

[1834] Oh, well, that wasn't said.

[1835] Okay.

[1836] Because when I try to sell Eric to people, I go, my friend Eric, you remember him.

[1837] He has 10 giant tortoises in his yard.

[1838] Yeah, it's his, like, defining trait.

[1839] It is.

[1840] So eccentric was said.

[1841] Okay, great.

[1842] Which is in line with that.

[1843] So that was a fun.

[1844] How many did it take before he got it?

[1845] A long time, because we were all saying really nice.

[1846] things and of course he's a bad opinion of himself which is why he's so lovable which is why he needed to have that yeah yeah it was fun um anyway so that's a fun game to play more fun than you'd think yeah i want to play yeah um and what else knew uh since i spoke what well i already update everyone on the phone right everything's updated with that the phone is yeah we went through the whole phone okay the laminated piece of paper with gibberish on it the laminated piece of paper with gibberish on it That may or may not have had two -sided tape.

[1847] Okay, so of course, when I told everyone here, Eric said the same thing immediately.

[1848] Two -sided tape.

[1849] He said, oh, was it sticky?

[1850] Yeah.

[1851] He said that's what Dax said.

[1852] No one else said that.

[1853] Well, he and I both think like criminals because we're the worst people here.

[1854] Yeah.

[1855] We've both committed crimes, so it's very natural for us to imagine.

[1856] People's reactions to the story.

[1857] It really says a lot about you, like anyone, you know?

[1858] Yeah.

[1859] A lot of them are like, oh, that sucks.

[1860] Very compassionate.

[1861] And then Ryan was like, that's so cool.

[1862] Oh, why was it cool?

[1863] Just because it was a story.

[1864] Oh, okay.

[1865] It was clever what she did.

[1866] I see.

[1867] You respect.

[1868] Yes.

[1869] Right.

[1870] Which was sort of my first opinion too.

[1871] It's like, wow.

[1872] And a woman.

[1873] I like that it's a woman.

[1874] Because that's dangerous to steal people's shit.

[1875] You don't know how anyone's going to respond to stealing their phone.

[1876] It's strong.

[1877] Yeah, it's very strong and brave.

[1878] If I hadn't locked the phone, I would have texted her and said, do you want to work for us?

[1879] Yes, that would be incredible.

[1880] Do you want to go straight?

[1881] Do you want to try this straight?

[1882] That's the thing is you work so hard and you take such big risk, but there's really not much money in it.

[1883] Unless you're robbing a bank, all this petty theft, it's less than minimum wage.

[1884] I know.

[1885] And what I was told is it's not even, they're not even selling the full phone because they can't or something.

[1886] So it's just for parts.

[1887] It's like the glass.

[1888] I know.

[1889] I know.

[1890] Well, hopefully she got like 30 or 40 phones that night.

[1891] I wonder what her record is on a, how many?

[1892] But I hope she only stole from rich people.

[1893] Like she, it was good she stole from me. I feel fine about that in this world.

[1894] It feels even.

[1895] But that's the thing about a phone.

[1896] Sure, I can handle giving you $800 or whatever the cost of an iPhone is.

[1897] it's the inconvenience I'd rather just go like oh hey I see you're about to steal my phone can I give you $800 100 % that's also what I said when I was we're in the middle of the hassle I just said I wish I could have told her I'll just buy you a phone right and then you can take it apart for parts or you can sell the whole thing because it's not it's brand new yeah yeah so it's fun friend vacations are just so fun when they're dialed in and you have a new member this is the First time for Liz.

[1898] We have a couple new members.

[1899] Julia and Liz.

[1900] Yeah.

[1901] And how are they taking to it?

[1902] I think great.

[1903] Okay, wonderful.

[1904] I think really, really well.

[1905] You and Liz are sleeping in the same bed I just found out.

[1906] Well, it's progressed.

[1907] The first night.

[1908] I can't wait to see what happens.

[1909] By tomorrow.

[1910] The first night, she was in another room because Molly and Eric weren't here yet.

[1911] Oh, okay.

[1912] So she had her own room.

[1913] Then she moved into my room.

[1914] She moved on to the air mattress.

[1915] I said, do you want to sleep, you can sleep in my bed or you can sleep on the air mattress.

[1916] So then she slept on the air mattress and then she was obviously uncomfortable.

[1917] Yeah, yeah.

[1918] But although it's a very nice air mattress.

[1919] Yeah, it's just not inflated.

[1920] I just sat on it and then I was immediately the meat in a taco.

[1921] The whole thing folded up around me. But I think it was when she slept on it.

[1922] But she's also right by the window and it's light anyway.

[1923] So then last night she said, can I sleep in the bed?

[1924] I said, yes, of course.

[1925] Yeah, naturally.

[1926] And then she did.

[1927] Did you, any snoring, did you detect?

[1928] No. Any no nocturnal emissions, toots?

[1929] No, I didn't hear anything from her.

[1930] I mean, she rolled like a little tiny bit, but she was a very good sleeping partner.

[1931] I mean, I, okay.

[1932] All right.

[1933] Let's just be honest, because that's what we do.

[1934] Of course she should sleep in the bed.

[1935] Yes.

[1936] Where it's the most comfortable.

[1937] And I would offer that to anyone.

[1938] But I do have to jump a mental hurdle.

[1939] Which is?

[1940] Which I realized, you know, there's a part of me that's like, God, I'm so selfish.

[1941] Like, why do I just want this big bed in the room to myself?

[1942] Yes, yes.

[1943] What's wrong with me?

[1944] That's what you thought?

[1945] Yeah.

[1946] But then I realized what it is because she went to bed early.

[1947] Okay.

[1948] And for me, the thought was like, oh, no, now I'm going to wake her up.

[1949] You got a tiptoe around.

[1950] I have to be quiet because I really don't want to wake her.

[1951] And so then I felt a little better because it was more about I don't want her to be disrupted by me. Right.

[1952] So my own space makes that fine.

[1953] I don't have to care.

[1954] Yeah.

[1955] So then I was talking to Eric and I said, man, I don't know if I should get married because I don't want to live where I'm like worried about rolling in my own bed.

[1956] Well, let me alleviate that fear for you.

[1957] You just don't give a fuck once you're married.

[1958] That's what he said.

[1959] Yeah, you're stuck with me and I'm going to fart all night and I'm going to cough and snore and I'm going to come in the bedroom and be loud.

[1960] That's kind of part of the deal.

[1961] That's the tradeoff for the security, I guess.

[1962] Oh, yeah.

[1963] Security is nice.

[1964] Everything's tradeoffs.

[1965] Wow.

[1966] So, yeah, you wouldn't have any of those thoughts.

[1967] You probably actually be more concentrating on how they're annoying you coming in.

[1968] the bedroom more than you're annoying them.

[1969] It flips.

[1970] Oh.

[1971] When you're dating, you're like, oh, I've got to present my best person to them.

[1972] And then when you're married, you're like, oh, this person is so loud.

[1973] It just flips.

[1974] Sure, sure, sure, sure.

[1975] Yeah.

[1976] All right.

[1977] Well, I'm still not convinced.

[1978] Okay.

[1979] Well, TBD or earmarked or something.

[1980] Yeah, or Easter egg.

[1981] Easter egg or duck, duck goose.

[1982] It's just weird because I've never, well, besides like a vacation with friends or something, I've never shared a bed.

[1983] Right.

[1984] Like for months or something.

[1985] Right, right, right.

[1986] So that's going to be an adjustment.

[1987] That really is.

[1988] Maybe we just have separate rooms.

[1989] That is, you know, I worked with this actor one time on a movie.

[1990] And he was obscenely rich because of family wealth he had inherited, like to the tune of several hundred million dollars.

[1991] Yeah.

[1992] And he said to me, he said, are you in the same room as your wife?

[1993] wife?

[1994] I was like, of course.

[1995] He's like, oh, God.

[1996] Yeah, no, I'm not.

[1997] Well, that'll change is what he said to me. And then I was like, well, why even get married?

[1998] Well, no, because...

[1999] I mean, if you just live down the hall from somebody?

[2000] No, no, no. You would...

[2001] You guys sometimes don't sleep in the same bed.

[2002] So we don't because Kristen sleeps with the girls on the weekend.

[2003] Right.

[2004] And let's be honest, more than the weekend.

[2005] Yeah.

[2006] Okay, so two things.

[2007] I do.

[2008] like, like, I don't mind those nights because I can, yeah, I can have the TV on as late as I want.

[2009] Right.

[2010] I can, yeah, there's some.

[2011] And it doesn't mean you're not married just because you do that.

[2012] Yes, but I also think you have to avoid or attempt to avoid just becoming roommates with your spouse.

[2013] Because then, in my opinion, then why do it?

[2014] Well, companionship.

[2015] Yeah, but you could have that with a roommate and then still date other people in the weekend.

[2016] And you wouldn't have to compromise as much.

[2017] Well, the security, like you said.

[2018] Yeah, well, you could sign a really long lease together as roommates, so you would know they're going to be there forever.

[2019] No, I think there are a lot of really strong, positive marriages that are...

[2020] That sleep down the hall.

[2021] Yeah, and that are companionship fully based, just like this.

[2022] And we're committed to that as you being the person.

[2023] Yeah, that's true.

[2024] But, yeah.

[2025] I heard, I do not know if this is true, but I feel like I read at one point that Tim Burton and his wife, which is Helen and Bonner -Carter.

[2026] I think they have separate houses that are next door to each other.

[2027] I heard and or read that.

[2028] And now this one I actually know, which is when Tom Arnold was married to Roseanne, they had houses next door to each other.

[2029] Yeah, in the flats of Brentwood.

[2030] Wow.

[2031] Yeah.

[2032] That seems more roommatey or not even.

[2033] Because you're not, no, you're not even rooming.

[2034] Neighbors.

[2035] Yeah, so what if your marriage just evolves into neighbors?

[2036] I don't know.

[2037] Yeah.

[2038] I mean, I don't know.

[2039] I guess you have to keep an eye on it.

[2040] For me, I guess maybe best case is you're in the same bed and you're watching TV together and you're snuggling and huggling.

[2041] And then when my eyes are drooping, then I walk into the other room.

[2042] Or since you're creating a dream scenario, he walks into another room because you're drowsy.

[2043] You want to now shut your eyes and be asleep.

[2044] But look, this whole thing is individual.

[2045] So I'm actually not saying I disagree with people living in separate houses.

[2046] But I'm in it for more than a roommate.

[2047] You know, I want to be in a love bubble.

[2048] I'd like to be in the same bed and stuff.

[2049] Yeah.

[2050] But that's me. Yeah, different ways of doing it.

[2051] Sure, there's a million ways.

[2052] I'm trying to think of some highlights from Jackson Hole, drove into the park to the, I think it's called the Grand Teton National Park.

[2053] I could be wrong.

[2054] Went to my favorite restaurant, which is a teepee.

[2055] There's a huge teepee.

[2056] And then next to that, this big outdoor grilling thing in it.

[2057] All they make is they make pancakes, eggs, and bacon.

[2058] Oh, my God, yum.

[2059] Which do you want?

[2060] Or do you want all of them?

[2061] All.

[2062] And it's very affordable and it's very quick.

[2063] And then you eat on picnic tables or you can eat inside the teepee.

[2064] Oh, my God, yum.

[2065] A little warm.

[2066] But there's something so fun and picnic -y about.

[2067] Campy.

[2068] Yes.

[2069] You don't ever have breakfast.

[2070] as a picnic.

[2071] And that's what it is.

[2072] And you could say eggs now.

[2073] I had four eggs, four eggs and bacon, crispy bacon.

[2074] And I was with my idol, Tom Hansen.

[2075] He met me at the TP.

[2076] He and Judy, we had a lovely breakfast together.

[2077] And I also got to hang out with him the day before because Lincoln left her purse over at the house.

[2078] So I went to get it.

[2079] But then we secretly watched qualifying together.

[2080] Wow, secrets.

[2081] He turned into a two -hour visit.

[2082] And the day before I got to hang with them too.

[2083] So you got a lot of good Tom Hanson time.

[2084] A lot of great Tom Hanson.

[2085] Uh -huh.

[2086] Uh -oh.

[2087] I'm sorry.

[2088] Hold on.

[2089] You getting a call?

[2090] Well, there's going to be a delivery.

[2091] Oh, fun.

[2092] Oh, no. That's not it.

[2093] That was a shopper.

[2094] Oh, okay.

[2095] Telling you they're out of the thing you ordered?

[2096] No, it was, well, actually it wasn't a shopper.

[2097] It was an employee from a store because we went shopping yesterday, Molly and I. And you gave an employee your phone number?

[2098] Well, you know, they asked for it.

[2099] when you check out yeah just give them a fake one i know but i always feel unethical about that you have you have no moral obligation to give your phone number to strangers i just i just say no thanks no thanks yeah that's good she said what about email i said oh nah see i would way rather have someone my email than my phone because my email can't ring but i could block i could block on phone but email i already have too many emails more is bad okay more is worse to each their own some people want to be neighbors some people you know some people would rather have their phone number out there than their email yeah true oh the last thing this will mean nothing to you but tom has a perfect Myers manx the cutest little doom buggies that were made in the 70s that were street legal and he has a mint condition one there's no roof or windows or anything it's this tiny doom buggy with a roll bar and he was like please drive that with the girls because the girls were obsessed with it.

[2100] So we drove around this little doom buggy with more roof.

[2101] On the street.

[2102] On the streets.

[2103] And the girls were in back with the roll bar and they were just in hog heaven.

[2104] That is so cute.

[2105] It was really fun.

[2106] It was so funny last night because we were outside playing cards.

[2107] And yeah, you guys came in at 1030.

[2108] And it was, I can't describe the feeling.

[2109] But when Big Brown was driving in.

[2110] Threading the needle down the side of the property.

[2111] Yeah, I had like a feeling I can't identify.

[2112] Like your parents had returned home from a trip?

[2113] I don't know.

[2114] So this isn't a good story because I can't.

[2115] You haven't figured it out.

[2116] I haven't processed it.

[2117] TBD Easter egg.

[2118] It must have looked funny to see a bus that size going through the backyard.

[2119] That's the first thing, right?

[2120] It's like, oh my God, there's this.

[2121] I think it did, I did feel like a kid.

[2122] Like when a kid, a kid, I think you're right, actually.

[2123] Wow, which is, it's like when a kid is waiting for the, their mom to come home from work.

[2124] Yes.

[2125] And then you see the car pull into the driveway and it's this, it's.

[2126] And it took a long time to get it to get it.

[2127] Yeah, like when you're waiting for your mom to get home and she pulls them to and then I was like, what is she doing in the garage?

[2128] Yeah.

[2129] She's in the car, her car forever, right?

[2130] It's like, what are they doing in there?

[2131] But just like seeing it turn the corner and pulling in because I used to be so scared they wouldn't come home.

[2132] Right.

[2133] And when I was at my grandparents, when my grandpa would come home from work.

[2134] Or like when you heard the garage.

[2135] door yes yes Pavlovian yeah I think it was like that when you heard the churn of the diesel when I saw the light coming by it's a long driveway anyway okay Valerie Valerie I loved this episode I love learning about language it was really fun and we've had a lot of great experts on but her knowledge of her field I found to be about as deep as any expert we've ever had I agree she knew you could bring up anything And she could tell you the entire history of where it came from, how it started.

[2136] She answered some questions.

[2137] She answered some questions about Moist.

[2138] Yeah, she knew.

[2139] Yeah.

[2140] I've decided to bring Moist back.

[2141] Okay, you want to rebrand?

[2142] Reboot?

[2143] Yep, I want to reboot Moist.

[2144] And we're coming up on Fourth of July.

[2145] It's tomorrow.

[2146] Yesterday.

[2147] It was yesterday.

[2148] Fourth of July was yesterday.

[2149] Two days ago.

[2150] A couple days ago.

[2151] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[2152] And I want to rebrand the flag.

[2153] Oh, my God.

[2154] It's sacrilegious.

[2155] No, no, I mean, I want to take back the flag.

[2156] Oh, from the, yes, from the bumper stickers.

[2157] Yeah, it's like we're not allowed to wear it or use it.

[2158] And I'm like, no, they don't get to take the flag.

[2159] The flag is meaningful.

[2160] Absolutely.

[2161] I love our flag.

[2162] I do too.

[2163] It means a lot to me. Absolutely.

[2164] I will say that we had an interesting moment at the truck stop.

[2165] I'm fueling up Big Brown, which takes, you know, half an hour.

[2166] In this dude, I'm filling it.

[2167] And all the motors are running.

[2168] around me. So I can't hear anything, but I see this guy in a huge semi has pulled up in front of Big Brown but side like perpendicular.

[2169] And he's yelling out the window.

[2170] But Kristen's out front too.

[2171] So I'm like, oh, let her worry about what he's saying.

[2172] Well, it turns out he recognized us.

[2173] So he went and parked his semi and then he got out and he was wearing a shirt that said Trump was right.

[2174] And he came over and he was so nice and he was so excited to meet us.

[2175] And we took a picture And we're all smiling in a photo together And I thought, oh, this is great You know, he's got these two liberals with them He's got his Trump is right shirt on And then he asked us that before he left He said, you guys seem so normal Is Hollywood as weird as they say it is?

[2176] And I go, no, brother, everyone's just like us Like just normal people There's no different type of people, you know?

[2177] Yeah And he's like, oh, okay.

[2178] And then he split.

[2179] And I just liked the whole thing.

[2180] I really liked that humanity won.

[2181] He knows we're crazy liberals.

[2182] He already thinks it's called Holly weird.

[2183] He's wearing a shirt that says Trump was right.

[2184] And yet our shared humanity won the day.

[2185] We smiled and we were kind to one another.

[2186] Yeah.

[2187] We took a photo together.

[2188] And I was delighted with that.

[2189] I like that.

[2190] I like that for you guys.

[2191] You don't like it.

[2192] Well, I do think that's sweet.

[2193] It's hard for me to not go to.

[2194] If I was with you guys, or if it was me. Yeah.

[2195] It's my favorite thing about you guys.

[2196] You're white.

[2197] Your favorite thing about us is we're white.

[2198] You're not threatening to him.

[2199] And what Trump, what he spews is not anti -you guys.

[2200] It is anti -liberalism, but not, like, I think he could be like, not you guys.

[2201] Well, no, I mean, we're very vocally for marriage equality.

[2202] But he doesn't not necessarily know that.

[2203] But I actually think if he had seen Will Smith at the gas station, he would have been excited to and he would have been kind.

[2204] I don't know that the race would have prevented it.

[2205] I think what happened was a more carnal, primitive thing happened where he's like, those people are famous.

[2206] And he didn't stop to think of all the reasons he disagrees with us.

[2207] He just let that feeling park his semi and get out interact.

[2208] And then once we're interacting, I think him saying the thing about Holly weird was that, he was having a little cognitive dissonance which is like, oh, these people aren't crazy libtard, wacko, trying to have sex with people in the past, whatever they think liberals are doing.

[2209] Yeah.

[2210] I think he was having a look, wow, so if I'm wrong about them, is Holly weird really is weird?

[2211] I thought it was like a really wonderful, he wouldn't ask that question, I don't think, if he wasn't thinking, wow, they're actually normal.

[2212] They're not the enemy.

[2213] Yeah, maybe you helped push the needle a little bit.

[2214] the next time we see him it says Hillary 2016 Beards the dream.

[2215] Okay Valerie, a couple facts here.

[2216] She said that she thought Beowulf was written in a Saxon dialect.

[2217] Okay.

[2218] Yeah, Beowulf is written mostly in the late West Saxon dialect of Old English.

[2219] Speaking of, when I was at the rare bookstore in London, there was a fuck what was it there was a book that I thought about getting you it was a first edition um what was it what was it what's the book that you read that made you on the road uh huh and Jack Kerouac yes oh there was an what was the price thing on that it was like probably three or four thousand I guess if I were ever going to get a first I probably would want a Bukowski book yes that was the thing I was like I don't know how much you can care about it.

[2220] It's interesting.

[2221] For me, it encapsulates a time of my life when I had fantasies about being an adult, right?

[2222] Like it expanded my imagination and what I might do with my life.

[2223] Of course.

[2224] And I did that.

[2225] I did that for a year with Aaron and lived in the car and went everywhere.

[2226] And then at some point I was like, no, I want to go to college and I want to get into acting.

[2227] I want to start my life.

[2228] So once I said goodbye to that whole fantasy, the book in itself probably got a little more right -sized.

[2229] Oh, interesting.

[2230] Whereas my books would be, it would be like, Catcher in the Rye.

[2231] Oh, God.

[2232] I mean, that's going to be $7 million.

[2233] Like a first edition, Catcher in the Rye.

[2234] And he famously never signed anything.

[2235] So if you had a signed one.

[2236] Seven billion.

[2237] And then the Crime and Punishment.

[2238] Oh, the Dostaski one?

[2239] Yes.

[2240] Yeah, those would be the two other than Bukowski that I thought were most impactful on me. Okay.

[2241] Good to know.

[2242] Yeah.

[2243] It's a world rare books.

[2244] It is, and you're really getting into it.

[2245] No, I'm not, I'm policing myself, but I don't, I'm deciding.

[2246] Is this a world I want to enter because it's an expensive world?

[2247] I'd way rather see you get a T -Rex skeleton.

[2248] Yeah, sex hotel.

[2249] Who was telling me, was it Tom Hansen?

[2250] This is something he would tell me, but apparently, yeah, I think it was Tom Hansen.

[2251] Apparently the guy who actually invented windows that Bill Gates licensed, that guy ended up being a bazillionaire.

[2252] Uh -huh.

[2253] He went on to become the most successful amateur archaeologist, and he has a full T -Rex in his house that he fucking found.

[2254] What?

[2255] Yes.

[2256] The full thing?

[2257] Yes, he went and dug it up.

[2258] Oh, my.

[2259] And now he has a full T -Rex skeleton, but he got it himself.

[2260] That's so much cooler.

[2261] Someone comes in your house, and at first they're like, whoa.

[2262] But how did he's his house?

[2263] Well, he's a bazillionaire, so very large.

[2264] It's like if I found a first edition Harry Potter, Or you wrote a first edition.

[2265] Oh, no, because he didn't invent the dinosaur.

[2266] No, he didn't.

[2267] He just simply dug it up.

[2268] I guess it'd be like if I went to a random library and I looked at the Harry Potter's end, it just happened to be first edition signed.

[2269] And then you checked it out and then steal it.

[2270] And then they charged you $20 to replace it.

[2271] Could I live with myself?

[2272] I think every time you would show it off or look at it, you would get a pang of like, I stole that.

[2273] Because you're not a sociopath.

[2274] I'm not.

[2275] But what would I do?

[2276] I'd go to the library and say, hey, just so you know, this is worth 250.

[2277] What if you go, I'm going to tell you something, but you have to promise to split it with me. And if you don't promise, then I'm not going to tell you anything.

[2278] Oh.

[2279] You might be able to get into it that way.

[2280] Okay.

[2281] No, I could say I want this book.

[2282] So can I buy it?

[2283] Okay, great.

[2284] What if I replace this book with 10 copies of it?

[2285] Yeah, and I'll pay also just because...

[2286] And I'll donate $1 ,000 to this library.

[2287] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[2288] Then everyone's happy.

[2289] Okay, great.

[2290] And you screwed him out of a quarter million.

[2291] Everyone wins.

[2292] Okay, you said alumnus or alumni.

[2293] Yeah, I don't know what it is.

[2294] Yeah, so now we're going to say what it is.

[2295] Okay.

[2296] Traditionally, alumnus refers specifically to a singular male graduate.

[2297] What?

[2298] And alumni is the plural form for a group of male graduates And for a group of male and female graduates Meanwhile, the term for singular female graduates Is the lesser spotted alumna Ooh, alumna?

[2299] That sounds perverted.

[2300] Alumni and alumna.

[2301] Ew, it does.

[2302] It sounds like a vagina.

[2303] Lobna, too.

[2304] Yeah, and it sounds like vulva.

[2305] I'm glad you said that because I thought that immediately And I was like, don't say that.

[2306] Well, it does.

[2307] That's what it sounds like.

[2308] But I guess it's all Greek, or Latin, rather.

[2309] And since vulva is Latin, I'm sure.

[2310] Oh, yeah, ding, ding, ding.

[2311] Yeah, it must be, right?

[2312] Do you think vulva's Latin?

[2313] Yeah, everything medical is.

[2314] Oh, okay, let me see.

[2315] Dams and ears.

[2316] Is vulva is the word.

[2317] I can't wait to see what comes up.

[2318] Two images.

[2319] I'm not.

[2320] Latin.

[2321] You'll see Italian vulvas.

[2322] Oh, my God.

[2323] Yes.

[2324] There we go.

[2325] job there it is the word vulva is taken from Latin and is derived from its earlier form Oh, it also says The Sanskrit term Olvum stands for Womba The fuck?

[2326] That doesn't name of a vacuum Orumba And could be the origin of the term Okay, so it sounds like they don't know Either Sanskrit or Latin Okay Wow, but that was still good That was still good Okay, she said 80 % of the English wordstock is non -Germanic at this point about 24 % of English words have Germanic origins and the other percentages are as followed.

[2327] Latin, 29%, French 29.

[2328] That's all it says.

[2329] Okay.

[2330] So the rest is...

[2331] So she was right.

[2332] She was right.

[2333] Of course she was right.

[2334] She's always right.

[2335] Yeah, she's the rightest.

[2336] She was fun.

[2337] She was a blast.

[2338] And she was spunky.

[2339] Very spunky.

[2340] She had a blast, I think.

[2341] I'm going to go out on a limb and say she had a blast, which is always fun.

[2342] Well, it's always fun when someone can teach us stuff real time.

[2343] Not philosophy, but real.

[2344] on the fly she could get into anything that's what i like it's not like she had a ted talk that she came and laid out for us yes it was like anything you wanted to hit her with she could answer i know it was very impressive and to be honest way more interesting than i was expecting i was really excited going in since i'm so you're a word file no no no but ding ding ding ding the rare bookstore yeah where i got my cool art piece nick smith yeah they had another one you know I had to debate between all these words.

[2345] Petit, they had kerfuffle.

[2346] They had a lot.

[2347] But one of them was logophile.

[2348] What's that?

[2349] Someone obsessed with words.

[2350] Ah, that's what you are.

[2351] Or language or vocabulary or something.

[2352] No, I thought that was you.

[2353] I was going to send it to you.

[2354] I would say I'm a logophile.

[2355] Yeah.

[2356] So you should know that word.

[2357] Okay.

[2358] Now it's in.

[2359] It's weird that I wouldn't know that word and I'm super into words.

[2360] I know.

[2361] That's the word describing being into word.

[2362] I know.

[2363] Log a file.

[2364] That's life for you.

[2365] It sure is.

[2366] That's it.

[2367] Okay, wonderful.

[2368] Well, I hope she comes back.

[2369] I think we could hit her with a million.

[2370] We just should collect words throughout the year.

[2371] And then we have her back and have her tell us, like, what's going on with this word?

[2372] She didn't convince me that we should surrender literally.

[2373] Oh, she didn't?

[2374] No, I mean, I acknowledge she's correct about the pattern that's happening, but I don't like that pattern.

[2375] I still don't like it.

[2376] That's okay.

[2377] Her point is not that you have to like it.

[2378] Okay.

[2379] But that you just have to accept it and understand.

[2380] Yes.

[2381] And I liked that.

[2382] We're going through a big shift.

[2383] We sure are.

[2384] It's pretty cool.

[2385] We're literally going through a big shift.

[2386] All right.

[2387] Well, happy Fourth of July that was two days ago.

[2388] Yeah.

[2389] Yeah, you too.

[2390] All right.

[2391] Bye.

[2392] Bye.

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