SARAH: Hello and welcome to Linguistics After Dark. I'm Sarah, ELI: I'm Eli, JENNY: and I'm Jenny. JENNY: If you've got a question about language and you want experts to answer it without having done any research whatsoever, we're your podcast. SARAH: Settle in, grab a snack or a drink, and enjoy. ELI: I am excited for this… month's episode. I always want to say "week," but we don't do weekly, we do monthly. JENNY: we definitely do not do weekly SARAH: I mean it's like, this week, which is part of this month? SARAH: I don't know. I mean, because we also could say "today's episode," but like we don't do one every day. ELI: I guess that's true JENNY: I mean, I feel like there's something involving like Gricean maxims here, like I feel like this is a maxim of quantity kind of thing. ELI: I guess I just am so used to like other podcasts or TV episodes being weekly that I have to remind myself that it's like, oh, no, we actually can only do this once a month because we all have jobs [SARAH and JENNY laugh] JENNY: True. ELI: Are the two of you excited about any language things lately? SARAH: I'm excited about all of the language things, all the time. JENNY: Yeah, I feel like the better question is are there language things we're not excited about? ELI: Oh, that's an interesting like, Uno reverse card. *Is* there any language thing that we're not excited about? [SARAH laughs] JENNY: I mean, there's gotta be, it's such a broad field, what are… Wow, I'm trying to think like, what are linguistic things that I actually *haven't* been interested in learning SARAH: I was reading actually through some of our old chat logs, when we were preparing for the first, like, panel that started this whole thing, JENNY: uh-huh SARAH: I was reading through some of the old chat logs a couple nights ago, and apparently I had gone on a, like, linguistics 101 YouTube binge SARAH: Because there was so much stuff outside of my narrow focus areas that I had completely forgotten, and apparently I got to theta roles [JENNY laughs] SARAH: and got about 20 seconds into that video and said "hmm, that's nice," and noped right out of there. ELI: Oh man, theta roles. We're gonna have to do a "thing of the day" one time that is theta roles. SARAH: Yes. ELI: or someone could ask us about them. ELI: Hey ling 101 students, ask us about theta roles and then decide if you want to be a linguistics major. [SARAH and JENNY laugh] SARAH: Eli can talk about them, because I'm gonna hide under a blanket ELI: I mean— JENNY: I can also not talk about those at all ELI: Like, I can vaguely talk about them, but theta rules are like one of those things that is in this weird in-between ELI: where there are some linguists who like really truly still use them, and there are a bunch of linguists who are like, "we left theta roles behind in the '70s. It's 2020, get on the train." ELI: Like, I don't… SARAH: what are they doing instead ELI: Man, I—so many different things. I don't know, maybe semantics is dead. I don't—who knows. [SARAH and JENNY laugh] SARAH: Semantics is dead. Long live semantics? ELI: I guess. Yeah, I mean, theta, lambda. They're both Greek letters. [laughter] SARAH: Fair enough. ELI: Shall we learn a language thing that isn't theta roles? SARAH: Oh my god. Can we please? JENNY: Sounds good. ELI: Okay, so I have a classic for us today. I am excited about this. ELI: I know the two of you are excited about this, because if anybody has looked at our logo and they've seen a little bird thing, and they're like, "what is that?" I'm here to bring you the gospel of the wug. SARAH: YES. JENNY: Yeahhh? ELI: It's spelled W-U-G and it is sort of an unofficial mascot of linguists ever since a pivotal role that it played in a study and a paper by a linguist—a fantastic linguist—named Jean Berko Gleason. ELI: The paper is called "The Child's Learning of English Morphology," and it is all about how kids learn to generalize language things. ELI: so, this is also a sneaky way of talking a little bit about acquisition and about, like, regular forms and so on. ELI: But I'm gonna ask both of you some questions JENNY: Cool ELI: Feel free to jump in right at the end, either one of you. ELI: Here we go. SARAH: Okay. ELI: Okay, so I know a man who knows how to SPOW. ELI: He is in all likelihood right now SPOWING, and he did the same thing yesterday. ELI: What did he do yesterday? Yesterday, he… JENNY: SPOWED. SARAH: SPOWED. ELI: All right. ELI: I also know a man who ZIBS. what do you think a man who ZIBS is called? SARAH: a ZIBMAN. JENNY: a ZIBBER. ELI: Ahhh. Interesting. We're gonna come back to that in a second. ELI: This is a NIZ who owns a hat. Whose hat is it? SARAH: The NIZ'S hat. ELI: And now there are two NIZZES, and they both own hats. Whose hats are they? JENNY: They are the NIZZES' hats. SARAH: Or the NIZZES'S hats? ELI: hmm? ELI: and then of course, there is the big one, which is— and this is basically how a lot of these this test was done, is that they got some kids, or a kid, and showed them a picture of this little blue bird, and said, "This is a WUG." And then showed them a picture of two of these blue birds, and said, "This is another one. Now there are two of them! there are two…" JENNY: WUGS. SARAH: WUGS? ELI: Yes? ELI: so we have WUG and WUGS, we have SPOWing and SPOWED, we have ZIBBER, or— ZIBMAN is really interesting, because ZIBMAN is sometimes given instead of ZIBBER, and— SARAH: Nice? ELI: —it's a way to tell— SARAH: I didn't break it? [JENNY laughs] ELI: No? ELI: Although you might be a preschooler. [JENNY and SARAH laugh] ELI: It's a way to tell whether the kid has acquired the -ER ejective suffix yet ELI: And there are some other cool ones. There's, like, talking about how compound words came to be, so like, why is a birthday called a birthday or like why is sunshine called sunshine? ELI: And those represent being able to diagnose stages of development, where like, really young kids will say a birthday is called a birthday because you get presents, ELI: Rather than a birthday is called a birthday because it's the day of your birth. SARAH: Mm-hmm ELI: Or like, why is breakfast called breakfast, and being able to determine that it's "break + fast" like break the fast of the night, versus like it's called breakfast because that's when you get eggs, right? SARAH: Cool. ELI: Yeah? ELI: But there's also a little bit more, which is like, if I were to say, ELI: "this is a FRAK. Now there are two of them. There are two…" SARAH: FRAKS. ELI: Right, so in that case you pluralize with -S, instead of -Z, which is what you pluralize with WUGS, and so you can also test that kids have learned to assimilate the plural morpheme, and use -[s], or -[z], or -[ɪz], as in "NIZZES." ELI: So that's, that's the wug test. ELI: And it's a whole bunch of these different tests, but everybody remembers the wugs because they're the cutest ones. JENNY: They are the cutest ones. SARAH: So I have two things to add on to this. SARAH: One is when I was taking my morphology class, and we talked about this, and we talked about the types of morphemes like the plural -[s] or -[z] or whatever sound it is, that are very productive and like you can add them to pretty much anything. SARAH: And then there's also the types that like, you know, SARAH: We make "child" into "children" and you can't really pluralize things with -ren most of the time in English. Unless you're being silly. SARAH: But anyway. My professor always wanted to call that "morphological productivity," which is totally fine, But I just want to state for the record that we are missing out on a great opportunity to use the phrase "wugability." SARAH: Or to use the term wugability. Or "wuggable." JENNY: wugability is definitely better ELI: Yeah, I have heard people use "wuggable" to mean "morphologically productive." SARAH: right, and I would just like to encourage all of you LING 101 students and all of the rest of you, SARAH: get rid of the phrase "morphological productivity." It's boring. SARAH: Wuggable. SARAH: That's the true gospel here. ELI: Is this the official position of Linguistics After Dark? JENNY: This is definitely the official position of Linguistics After Dark. SARAH: Yes. ELI: Yeah, we don't take geopolitical stances, but absolutely wuggable should take over morphological productivity. JENNY: Yes. SARAH: Excellent. SARAH: The other fun thing that I want to add to this is you can do these tests in every language, and you can do them with all kinds of different morphemes, and different kinds of language acquisition stuff, and some other people— not Jean Berko Gleason, to the best of my knowledge, but some other linguists— did a similar test to this in German, and in the same way that English uses -ED as the kind of like most wuggable past tense suffix, there is a most wuggable past tense suffix in German, SARAH: and it is the least common past tense marker, by token, in German. [ELI laughs] JENNY: huh. SARAH: So when you—there's like, I don't know how many, I don't speak German, but there's like, say, nine or ten past tense patterns, and the quote unquote "regular" one, the most wuggable one of all of them, is the smallest by number of words that use it SARAH: which I just think is hilarious. JENNY: That's awesome. ELI: you can actually do a little bit of that in English, because we have the strong verb pattern, or the, like, Germanic consonant-vowel-consonant pattern, ELI: so there were actually a couple of these tests that Jean Berko Gleason did in her thing, and I didn't use them up top because I wanted to be sure of getting the right answers from the two of you, which is not a scientifically sound methodology, ELI: but is OK for a podcast. EI: but it is stuff like, oh, this stone FRINKS, yesterday this stone… SARAH: FRANK. JENNY: FRANK. ELI: Right. Right. ELI: So like, there is this ablaut thing that happens, that I think most English speakers would be inclined to do, if the verb follows that consonant-vowel-consonant pattern. JENNY: Mm-hmm SARAH: In the same morphology class, actually, we were talking about that whole ablaut thing and how it is a pattern that English speakers recognize, SARAH: and I believe in that test, they found that English speakers were more likely to do, like, FRINK to FRANK, if—not only it was the consonant-vowel-consonant, but especially if it had an -ING or an -INK ending? ELI: Mm. SARAH: Also, especially if the action denoted by that nonsense word was in any way similar to another word. SARAH: So like the example that my professor gave was someone taking a glass of water and like tossing it back really fast, and that was "shlinking," and because that's similar to "drink," people were more likely to say "shlank" than "shlinked," and he also pointed out that we have other "irregular," quote-unquote— well, the ablaut pattern is not irregular, but—we do have other words that have a more irregular past tense SARAH: that you're not likely to see wugged in that way. SARAH: So he also pointed out that "blink," you get "blinked," and it could have been "blank," but it's not. SARAH: "Think," you get "thought," and where you might accidentally—or especially as a kid—you might assume that "blank" is, or "blunk" is, the past tense of "blink," I distinctly remember my professor saying you are never in your life going to accidentally say I "blought." to mean that yesterday I blinked, and I was like, "mm, true." ELI: Yeah, the the thing that I was gonna bring up is that you actually have this interesting variation right now between two past tenses of "sneak"? ELI: You have "sneaked" and "snuck," and we don't do research, but I actually think "snuck" is newer than sneaked. I think "sneaked" is the actual original past tense, and that the ablaut is so wuggable in that pattern that people have started to say "snuck" and it seems fine. ELI: You also get "yeet" and "yaught," or "yeet" and "yote." SARAH: YES. JENNY: Yes. SARAH: All of the past tenses of "yeet" are the best. ELI: Yeah, JENNY: Agreed. ELI: So that's like, it—I don't think that there is a verb that it particularly patterns on, ELI: but people are aware of this ablaut change, and again, you have this consonant-vowel-consonant, like, like, strong movement-oriented verb? ELI: and so like, yes, you do hear "yeeted," but I think, uh, I have, I have—and—yeet is playful, also, which I think encourages people to be a little more playful with the morphology? ELI: So you get "yote." Or "yaught." JENNY: I have heard "yeeted," but exclusively when followed by someone else shouting whoever said it down, and being like, "no, it's 'yote'." JENNY: Or "yaught," or whatever. Like I've never heard it, I've never heard "yeeted" used uncontested. SARAH: Oh, I've heard that. JENNY: Also, can I just share my favorite example of—I guess it's sort of wugability? but it's an anecdote about my baby brother, who a couple of years ago was hanging out behind the couch, like between the couch and the window, bouncing, and he said "hey, Jenny, ask me what I'm doing." I was like, "what are you doing?" JENNY: And he said, "I'm jamping!" "Jamping?" "Yes! It's a word I made up. It's the plural of jumping." [SARAH and ELI laugh] SARAH: That's adorable. What does the plural of jumping entail? JENNY: [laughs] uh… jumping repeatedly? SARAH: That's adorable. ELI: Doesn't—doesn't Russian have a thing where they have motion verbs that you change the morphology of if you are doing them once, versus repeatedly, versus like in a temporal circularly manner? SARAH: I'm sure. ASL does that, American Sign Language. ELI: Mm. SARAH: Jamping. JENNY: Jamping. JENNY: Spelled like "jumping," but with an "A" instead of a "U." SARAH: Perfect. ELI: One of the other cases of wuggable things that has happened… fairly recently? No, actually, guess it would have been a while ago. ELI: Another case of a wuggable word was when the Toyota Prius came out and people started to try to figure out how to pluralize it, ELI: Because I think we are influenced by the -US Latin thing, to turn -US into -A, or into -I, and also, I think people were just like "'Priuses' sounds weird." ELI: So I, I remember that Toyota had a contest, actually, and I think the winner was "Pri-i," ELI: But I think also that has settled down, and I think people now just kind of do whatever nonce form they think works best. SARAH: Yeah. Um, I'm also very fond of the Latinate -I plural on words that end with an -S, but not a -US SARAH: so a family that we were friends with when I was growing up, their last name ended with -LESS, and we never called them the lastname-lesses, we always called them the lastname-li, SARAH: even though like literally no one in any actual language that we speak pluralizes -ESS to -I, but we just do that all the time SARAH: because it was funny ELI: Oh, yeah, I've heard of like the plural of "Kansas" as "Kans-i" SARAH: How have I never heard that? that's delightful. JENNY: That's fantastic. SARAH: Why do you need plural Kansas? SARAH: Kans-I. ELI: I mean, there was that meme with two Ohios SARAH: True ELI: Maybe we will have many Kansa. 'Cause I feel like it should be Kansa, rather than Kans-i SARAH: Mm. JENNY: That does sound more natural, you're right. SARAH: we should just do a whole thing at some point of like all of the plurals. ELI: All the plurals. SARAH: All of them. JENNY: Walrus. SARAH: Like there was that meme with all the different plurals sitting at different lunch tables and you had to like tag yourself, SARAH: which lunch table would you sit at? [ELI and JENNY laugh] ELI: All right, look for that on our Instagram story SARAH: Yes, I'll have to find it, but SARAH: Anyway. We should just like do a thing. About plur—anyway. okay. JENNY: Yes. ELI: So, that's the wug test, which is basically, wugs are basically the unofficial mascot of linguistics, I think. ELI: You can get lots of stuff with wugs on them. ELI: If you want a thing that has a wug on it, you should go get it from Jean Berko Gleason because she sells wug things, and she invented it and should get credit for it. SARAH: Yes. ELI: But wugs are cool, SARAH: wugs are the best, ELI: Please don't sue us for our logo. [SARAH and JENNY laugh] SARAH: All right. All right, so, we are going to move on to real language questions submitted by real listeners SARAH: If you want to send us a question, please do email it in text to questions@ linguisticsafterdark.com or send us an audio recording of you speaking your question aloud, Especially if you are asking about phonology or accent or "I say something one way and my friend says it the other way," send it to us so we can hear it, and play it for our listeners. ELI: And speaking of questions, we are well on our way to the Lawyers After Dark special episode goal on Patreon, ELI: So help us get there, sign up for our Patreon, and also start sending us some questions for drunk law students to answer, because they are tee'd up and ready to go SARAH: I'm so excited for that. JENNY: That's gonna be great. SARAH: Become a patron, get your friends to be patrons. Let's find out about the law. JENNY: Okay, question number one. Bex asks via Slack, are clicks consonants or something else special? If something else, what differentiates them from consonants? SARAH: Am I obligated to answer this phonology question? JENNY: You are definitely obligated to answer this phonology question. SARAH: Oh shoot, now I'm like, on the spot. I'm gonna say what I think is true and I hope I'm right. SARAH: Um. JENNY: We don't do research? SARAH: That's true. SARAH: As far as I'm aware, they are consonants, because the options are "vowel" and "not vowel." [ELI laughs] SARAH: And they are not a vowel. SARAH: So there's "vowel," which is all of the vowels, they're secretly the same thing, they're a mess, we don't talk about them. We talk about them a lot. ELI: Yeah, all vowels are secretly the same vowel. SARAH: This is the other Linguistics After Dark official take, JENNY: yes SARAH: vowels are a hot mess and words are fake. ELI: Yes. JENNY: Yup. ELI: [laughing] Absolutely. JENNY: Yup. Those are our official Linguistics After Dark stances. ELI: but clicks are not vowels? SARAH: Right. Clicks are not vowels. SARAH: So we have vowels, which are a hot mess and we're not talking about them, and then we have consonants, which break into… SARAH: I'm gonna say… four? maybe? groups. So there's the clicks, there's the ingressives, which are not super common worldwide as far as I remember, which are made by, like, inhaling and touching your tongue or your throat to something, SARAH: and I actually can't make those sounds because I don't know how. ELI: Did you did you never do that thing as a kid, where you tried to speak both on your exhale and on your inhale? SARAH: Oh, I did, and I was terrible at it JENNY: Same. SARAH: Would you like to demonstrate for us? ELI: [laughs] I guess I—I'm on the spot now, aren't I? JENNY: Yes. ELI: Do I have to—okay. Um. ELI: I don't know, I guess that when I was a kid, [breathes in] [breathes in]— ELI: I can't even do it. [SARAH and JENNY laugh] ELI: I have trained myself out of this. SARAH: Yeah. All right, listeners, hit up Google for that one. SARAH: So, there's ingressives, there's clicks, there's… I guess, is egressives the name for the kind of normal ones that we use in English? ELI: I don't know if there is a name for them SARAH: or it's just the default category that may or may not have a name, I dunno. SARAH: and then there's also ejectives, which are, like, like the normal ones? but very forceful and you actually, like, kind of cough as you say them, almost. I don't know. I'm bad at those too. ELI: So that's like—that's different than, like, an aspirated version of a consonant. It's like, ELI: it's like even more—it's—'cause aspiration has to do with like the timing between, ELI: between sound and voicing, right? SARAH: Yeah. ELI: This is more like the force of the breath. SARAH: Well, ehhh… yeah. SARAH: Aspiration also—it doesn't have to be with voicing, because you can aspirate, like, a [t], that has no voicing but yeah, it's like, how—not just how forcefully you stop the air in your mouth. So if you say like [t] or [k] you can be like, [tʼ] or [kʼ] SARAH: Actually, is that ejective? Is that what I'm doing? ELI: I mean, I would tell you to go look it up, SARAH and JENNY (simultaneous): But we don't do research. SARAH: Anyway, okay, so there's four kinds of consonants. Ingressive and ejective are things we know exist and are not good at reproducing, please look them up. SARAH: There's the kind that has a name that we don't know because we didn't research that either, SARAH: and there's clicks, which is what you asked about in the first place. SARAH: Um, and clicks are different from those other types of consonants, because they are not made with the air coming in and out of your lungs, but they are just made by clicking your tongue or your lips against each other and creating vibrations that way. SARAH: The two that I'm actually… well actually, no, I guess there's three that I can do, and I never remember which one corresponds to which symbol, SARAH: but there's the one of, like, what english-speaking children often learn like a chicken does? like [!] SARAH: and then there's one that like, I think we kind of sometimes spell in English, as like, "T-S-K"? like [| | |] and then there's everyone's favorite bilabial click, which is just smacking your lips together like [ʘ] ELI: But so there's—is there one for every place of articulation? ELI: like with, um, like with the— SARAH: yes ELI: —nameless group of consonants, you basically have a stop that you could make ELI: at every place of articulation in the mouth, so is there a click at every place of articulation? SARAH: I don't think there's one at every place of articulation. ELI: I guess a glottal click would take some real muscular control, wouldn't it? [SARAH and JENNY laugh] SARAH: Yeah, [CLICK] uh, well, I just made one, SARAH: like not glottal but a little bit in front of that? ELI: A pharyngeal click or something? SARAH: So yeah, I think there are clicks— there's at least five, SARAH: because there's the three that I can make reliably and there's two more that I know exist and don't know how to differentiate them from the three that I can make. SARAH: So yeah, there's there's several different ones at various points forward and back in your mouth. ELI: And because they're not in English, we can't really tell the difference between them. SARAH: Yeah, especially not in the middle of a word. Like, it's very easy to differentiate sounds when you're just sitting here going [| | |] [! ! !] [| | |] [! ! !] SARAH: 'Cause like those sound different, but when they are in a word with other words and sounds around them, it's a lot harder. ELI: I mean, that's like in the same way that you might sit there trying to distinguish between like [f] [v] [f] [v], SARAH: Right. ELI: Y'know. SARAH: Yeah, or like, in a vacuum I can distinguish between, um… SARAH: Yeah… I don't know, I actually distinguish most things is the problem. ELI: Well, you are— SARAH: Actually no, in a vacuum, I can distinguish between /[mεɹi], /[me͡əɹi], and /[mæɹi], and in real life I can hear the difference, but I almost never produce like a wedding and like a person's name separately, SARAH: I usually say those both as [me͡əɹi], and my husband separates all three of those very distinctly and loves to give me grief for it. ELI: Actually, that's a really good way to figure out whether you have the merry/Mary/marry merger? ELI: Which I don't—I don't think I have, ELI: but I also whenever I say the name of the merger, I just say the same word three times, [JENNY laughs] ELI: because I don't know what order I'm saying them in? ELI: but I guess if you say the boy's name Aaron [æɹɪn] and the girl's name Erin [εɹɪn] differently. JENNY: Oh you did say those differently, wow? SARAH: I have a cousin whose name is Aaron spelled with s, and when I was a kid and I learned that there was another way to spell Aaron/Erin, I used to—I thought it was the funniest thing ever to tell him that his name was actually E-R-I-N, SARAH: and ZERO people, including him, found this either offensive or funny or worth noting in any capacity. [ELI and JENNY laugh] SARAH: But I would just say it over and over, hoping to get a rise out of him, and no one cared. SARAH: But yeah, I say both of those names [e͡əɹɪn], like the same as air that you breathe, and I heard Eli say /[æɹɪn] the same way that my husband says, like, get m[æ]rried, and /[εɹɪn] the same way that he would say M[ε]rry Christmas. ELI: So I have—I have a cousin, and I have a stepbrother, and they both are men, and they both have a name that's spelled A-A-R-O-N, ELI: and because they are from different places, one of them is named [e͡əɹɪn] and the other is named [æɹɪn]. SARAH: Oh my god. I could only barely hear that difference. That's amazing. JENNY: Wow, that's so funny. ELI: because one of them has the merger and the other doesn't. SARAH: That's delightful. ELI: All right, so clicks are consonants. Also, there are vowels, which are fake. Also, there are tones, which we're not going to talk about. SARAH: One last thing about clicks, first. SARAH: As with most sounds, clicks can exist in languages where you don't think they exist, as what we call, like… paralinguistic? is that what it's called? ELI: I don't know where you're going with this, so— SARAH: Sounds or—or gestures that you use that aren't part of words, but they are communicative? ELI: Oh, yeah, okay, so like, SARAH: Is that "paralinguistic"? ELI: Yeah, paralinguistic. SARAH: Yeah, so, clicks actually, like I was saying, in English are super—are like a paralinguistic thing because you can like //[| | |] at somebody if you're disappointed in them or like [! ! !] ELI: Yeah, it has—it has a specific meaning, too, right? SARAH: Right ELI: Like, like if somebody's going //[| | |], ELI: like, they're either disappointed in you or they are calling over a cat. JENNY: Yes. SARAH: [laughs] Right. SARAH: And English uses tone, like rising and falling tone on vowels, for sentence structure, where other languages use it for word structure. SARAH: So, people often think of clicks as these really unfamiliar, like, interesting sounds that we—we don't use, and how can you communicate with them? And it turns out that actually we communicate with them even in English pretty frequently. SARAH: And there's probably sounds in English that other people, other language users, are like, "What is that sound? Why is it happening?" And maybe they use it sort of paralinguisticly as well. ELI: Cool! Moving on to the next question, Claudia asks via email, "Why do people love some words and hate others? Is it the sound, the denotation or the connotation of the word, or a mix of the two? Most lists of prettiest and grossest words have the same few crop up every time So clearly there's some consensus regarding what makes a word good or bad. Is it just subjective or is there logic behind it?" SARAH: Yes. [ELI and JENNY laugh] ELI: I mean, you're not wrong. JENNY: I mean, I feel like it—like there's not a hard yes or no to any of that, I think it's "Yes, some of all," to like, the—like, each of the individual bits to that question. SARAH: Mm-hmm. JENNY: Including the "why do" bit, the answer is also "yes" to that. [SARAH laughs] JENNY: But yeah, I think it's a combination of the sounds we associate with the denotation and connotation of words? JENNY: And so people will think that it's the… like the sounds themselves, and it's actually more influenced by the word, the word's meaning, than you might assume, JENNY: although I've done no research so I cannot actually back that up with any facts, but that seems like a probable thing that I suspect is true. ELI: I think some of it might be societal, also. JENNY: Yeah, cause like the— ELI: Fair warning, we are gonna say the m-word, [JENNY laughs] ELI: so if that is a thing that you can't stand, skip forward and miss this question. ELI: But I, I do think that there is a little bit of a phenomenon of like, people finding out that words are like, ELI: a gross word or a word that people don't like, and then adopting that? SARAH: Mm-hmm. ELI: Right? ELI: But there's also this thing where a lot of food writers have gotten into this conundrum ELI: where the word "moist" is the only way to describe a certain kind of texture in a baked good. SARAH: Yes. ELI: Like, you don't want to say "damp". You don't want to say "wet"— SARAH: I don't want damp cake? ELI: Right, exactly. ELI/SARAH: Nobody wants damp cake. (weird audio glitch, sorry!) ELI: Right. So, but what you want is you want like, a nice, like, moist crumb on your muffin or whatever—ah, Linguistics After Dark, everyone? ELI: You want—y'know, you can't—you can't not use that word, because there is— it's a term of art. It's a piece of jargon, for food writing. ELI: So people who really do have an aversion to the word "moist" must really really hate that, but I think that if you are fine with it in the context of describing baked goods or, y'know, other appropriate food items, ELI: then that really does go to show that a lot of times it's contextual. SARAH: Yeah. JENNY: I'd actually be really interested to find out if there is some sort of correlation, between like, where you learn it, or how you learn it, being related to whether or not it bothers you. 'Cause I feel like my primary association with the word is in food contexts, baked goods, JENNY: and it doesn't particularly bother me, and I wonder if like not making any guesses at causation, because maybe people who mind it don't go into, like, food-writing contexts, or maybe if you go into food writing contexts, even if you minded it you learn to not as much, I don't know, JENNY: but I wonder if there's some sort of correlation going on there, at least. ELI: What about some really nice words, like there's that—was it CS Lewis who said that "cellar door" is supposed to be the nicest sounding phrase in the English language? although he probably said it with a British accent, so… ELI: —With one of the many British accents. [JENNY and SARAH laugh] ELI: What are your favorite or your like nicest sounding words? SARAH: I have no idea. JENNY: I've never thought about that before. JENNY: I really like "shimmer". ELI: Mmm. JENNY: Like I feel like that's just a very pleasant combination of sounds. ELI: Yeah, I dig that. SARAH: I was gonna say "glimmer". [JENNY laughs, surprised] ELI: Ahh? SARAH: But for a slightly—I mean because I do like how it sounds, but also because it gives me a chance to talk about the thing that actually popped to mind when I read this question? SARAH: Which is, some of it is—I mean it—I think it all is subjective, but interestingly there is this pattern, I think in many languages but definitely in English, of things called "phonesthemes" which is like P-H-O-N-E-S-T-H-E-M-E-S, phonesthemes, which are not phonemes, because they're bigger than a single sound, but they're not morphemes either, they don't inherently carry a meaning, but they kind of do? SARAH: So, like, "gl-", especially at the start of a word, is one of the most iconic ones, SARAH: where we have all these words like "glimmer" and "glisten" and "gleam" and "glow," JENNY: "glow," "glint" SARAH: "glint," SARAH: and— ELI: Even "glean," to a certain extent. SARAH: mm-hmm, JENNY: uh-huh SARAH: and you can't take the "gl-" off those words and get other words. Like, "int" doesn't mean something and then "glint" makes it the shiny version of that. SARAH: "immer" doesn't mean something and then "glimmer" is the shiny version of that. ELI: but you do sort of get this like glimmer/shimmer thing? SARAH: Right. ELI: Right. JENNY: Mm-hmm SARAH: Or like even worse, if you take the "gl-" off of "glow," you get "ow." [ELI and JENNY laugh] SARAH: Very different. SARAH: And like, "glowing" is not like the shiny version of being in pain. [JENNY laughs] SARAH: Let's… not interrogate that too far. SARAH: But the—like "gl-", um, even though inherently by itself—like, a glove isn't shiny. There's nothing shiny about that. SARAH: Like "gloom" is not shiny. It's actually the opposite of shiny SARAH: But somehow there's still this kind of idea, that especially if you have "gl-" and then a high vowel—high front vowel, like an [i] or an [ε] or an [ɪ], SARAH: that like, it, for whatever reason, in English, kind of, like, makes you think about sparkles. SARAH: And there's definitely other ones of those too, that's just the one that I remember, but I would imagine that there is also some level of that type of thing playing into what words people do and don't find appealing. JENNY: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. ELI: Yeah. There is actually a set of linguistic tests and phenomena that are associated with this, that are sometimes called the "bubu and kiki" tests or shapes, that involves matching made-up words to shapes, and it involves showing a test subject a shape that is sort of like roundish, kind of like a cloud almost, and a shape that is like very angular and spiky, and saying, "One of these is 'kiki' and one of these is 'bubu.' ELI: Assign—like, which do you think is 'bubu' and which do you think is 'kiki'?" and the overwhelming majority of people put "bubu" with the more roundy one and "kiki" with the more spiky one. ELI: That phenomenon is sometimes called sound symbolism, where we think of this, you know these, like, de-voiced stops as more spiky or rough, that kind of thing, ELI: and this kind of more voiced—I mean B is a, [b] is a stop, but you know, you get fricatives and stuff that end up being more round-y, symbolic things. JENNY: Yeah, do we know—like I don't remember the reading I've done on that well enough, do we know whether it has more to do with the vowels or the consonants? because like I know vowels are fake, but my initial assumption would have been that it had more to do with the vowels than the consonants, and I can imagine like, JENNY: like, you switch which way around it is, so you switch the B and we make it like one of these is "bibi" and one of these is "kuku," or whatever. ELI:Yeah, JENNY: Do you know if they did that? ELI: So my understanding is that the vowels do have an effect on it, ELI: but the consonant effect is more—is stronger than the vowel effect, if I remember correctly. JENNY: Huh. ELI: But that they both have discernible effects. So like "bibi" versus "bubu" would show a direction, ELI: but not as strong as like "bibi" versus "kiki"? JENNY: Huh? ELI: Also, this one I'm not gonna guess on but I know that they have also tested this cross-culturally. ELI: I think… I think that they found that the effect holds cross-culturally, though the strength is different. ELI: But— SARAH: That sounds right. JENNY: That does sound right. ELI: But we don't do any research, so nobody cite us. ELI: Nobody cite us for anything, basically? SARAH: You can cite our show notes, I do actually research those? ELI: That's true. ELI: If you want to know what the actual research is, go to the show notes at linguisticsafterdark.com . JENNY: Do not take our verbal word for it SARAH: [giggles] Yes. ELI: I would be remiss to let us leave this question without mentioning my favorite word, which is "sussurus" SARAH: Mmmm. JENNY: Oooh, nice. ELI: Which sounds exactly like what it is, which is like a small murmuring such as might make the sound "sussurus". SARAH: "Murmur" is also good. ELI: Oh, yeah? JENNY: "Murmur" is very good. SARAH: Onomatopoeia! Not as a word, but as a concept. Although also as a word. ELI: Yeah, that is very good. ELI: You actually, you get this interesting spectrum from like, onomatopoeia through sound symbolism up to phonesthemes, SARAH: Mm-hmm. ELI: where it's like, on the like "Is a real word / isn't a real word" spectrum, ELI: and also like a, almost a strength of effect kind of a thing, SARAH: Mm-hmm. ELI: where they're all related to each other. There's some scale happening there, SARAH: Yeah, I never thought about that, but that's true. SARAH: All right, good question, Claudia. Thank you. JENNY: Yeah, very good question. ELI: Yes, that one was fun. SARAH: All right. Um, our next question comes from Mitch, via email, and he says, "Should this word, S-U-B-M-A-R-I-N-E-R, be pronounced sub-mariner [ˌsʌbˈmæ.ɹɪn.ɚ], as in a mariner, but under the sea or submarine-er [ˌsʌb.məˈɹin.ɚ] (or [ˈsʌb.məˌɹin.ɚ]!), as in one who submarines?" ELI: I'm calling rule three on this one. [JENNY laughs] SARAH: Okay. SARAH: We're not answering this, everybody take a drink. [sound of utensil knocking twice on glass] JENNY: All right. SARAH: I am taking a drink of winter spiced coffee from Dunkin' Donuts, [laughs] JENNY: Oooh. SARAH: because I'm a New Englander. JENNY: I've got a warm milk drink with honey, it's very nice. ELI: I also have a drink made of honey. I'm drinking some homemade mead. [JENNY laughs] SARAH: Oooh, fancy? ELI: Made with local honey and local apples. ELI: Yeah, uhh, fun question! but like, I don't know. JENNY: See, I was just gonna say, I vote "submarine-er," because otherwise I'm just thinking of the Marvel Comics character, Namor the Sub-Mariner ELI: Well, I was gonna say, I would lean "sub-mariner," ELI: because of the Marvel Comics character, Namor the Sub-Mariner? [SARAH and JENNY laugh] JENNY: That's extremely valid. SARAH: Allllrighty? ELI: But the real answer to the question is, Sarah is drinking Dunkin' Donuts knockoff pumpkin spice latte, Jenny is having a milk drink with honey, and I'm drinking mead. SARAH: Ah, but see this is not knockoff pumpkin spice, because they do have that too and it's terrible. SARAH: This is just like, chai but coffee. Anyway. Moving on. [JENNY laughs] ELI: I think we all learned a valuable thing today. JENNY: I think that's the real takeaway from this episode. SARAH: [laughs] Okay, well, since we are drinking instead of answering that question, um, let's move on to a different one which comes from a different person named Sarah she sent us an email and said, "I was skimming through a chapter of my Ling 100 textbook about gendered speaking— the chapter about gendered speaking, not the whole book. It seems fairly outdated in its interpretation, for example, according to the book, women tend to wait in turns using back-channeling and share speaking time equally whereas men seem to have a hierarchy where one speaks as much as possible while they quote/unquote 'have the floor'." and then she went on to say that that doesn't really ring true with her, she thinks that doesn't match her experience, and so she wants to know what kind of differences we've noticed, if any, in people who hang out mostly with people of similar or opposite sex, or even with people of similar or varying ages. ELI: This is a good question, and it's a tough question. ELI: Any linguistic question about differences between the genders always has to make it through that, like, pop linguistics filter about things that quote-unquote "everyone knows" about how the different genders speak, and so on. SARAH: Actually, one thing that occurred to me as I was reading out this question was a recent episode of Lingthusiasm, which is another fantastic podcast I'm sure we've recommended previously, but they did a episode recently about, like, actually how to have a conversation, and the different kind of conversational styles different people have. They pointed out that these two styles of like, back-channeling/taking turns and kind of speaking while you have the floor and waiting to be interrupted, those are two very prominent conversational styles, but I don't think—and I definitely don't think that Gretchen and Lauren in this episode like made the claim that—these are gendered in any way, but that there's a level of individual personality that comes into that, there's a cultural level, or like a familial level, of what conversation style you grew up speaking? SARAH: So, um, I think Gretchen made a point that she is what they were calling "high-engagement," SARAH: Where she will just keep talking, ELI: Mm-hmm. SARAH: um, and wait for someone to interrupt her SARAH: Or she'll jump in and interrupt someone to like, show that she's engaged with them, she wants to contribute her part in conversation, JENNY: Mm-hmm. ELI: right SARAH: whereas other people—haha, which I think her point was "not-Gretchen"— [ELI laughs] SARAH: —don't do that, and they have this like, "high-consideration" style, where they're going to wait for you to finish talking, they're not going to interrupt you, because by letting you speak that shows their interest, and so people who have those two different styles, uh, have a really hard time talking with each other sometimes, because if you're a high-engagement speaker and you keep talking, and you're waiting for someone to interrupt you, SARAH: but they're waiting for you to finish talking, because they don't want to interrupt you— JENNY: —then you both feel like the other person isn't actually interested in the conversation. SARAH: Exactly. SARAH: And so interestingly the kind of bottom-line recommendation that they made was, if you're in a conversation where you feel like the other person is not engaged, do the opposite of whatever your instinct is. SARAH: Because if your instinct is "keep talking, fill the silence," they might be waiting for some silence, so they can jump in. SARAH: And if your instinct is "wait for someone to stop talking," don't! Because they might be waiting for you to jump in and interrupt them. SARAH: And the other option is of course, if you know the person well enough you can be like, "Hey, can I interrupt you?" or "Do you want me to let you finish?" or like, have a little bit of meta-conversation about how your conversation's going, SARAH: but I don't think it's specifically a gender thing, I think it's a kind of cultural thing. JENNY: Yeah, I like—I am very, very strongly high-engagement, and I've—so I've done a little bit of research about it, like a few years ago while I was in college, and was like, "why am I having so much trouble talking to these people like this?" JENNY: and I remember coming across those terms and having it be like, "oh this explains so much about… so many conversations I've had my entire life, actually," JENNY: but I've never seen it linked to gender before, only as, like, a cultural thing or a regional thing. SARAH: Mm-hmm. ELI: See, this is very interesting, because I don't think that at its core it is a gendered thing, but a lot of the ways where I have encountered this, the high-engagement being a problem, It's not put in those terms and it's not in those guise, but it is under the idea of, if you are at work and on a team where there are more men than women, that a lot of times you will see efforts being made, or complaints being made, that men talk over women, or talk a lot, or dominate a meeting, and that there is sort of a lot of advice out there, or exhortation out there, for men in meetings to be making sure—making a conscious effort—that women at the table get to talk, or that they are invited, like that you make explicit space, or say, "I haven't heard from you in a while, is there something you want to add, or does everything seem fine?" ELI: And I know that personally, I have had to work to get to a place where I sort of started by saying, "I have been talking a lot, and now I'm going to stop," and have tried to pull that back explicitly. ELI: Again, I don't think that at its core, the two conversational styles are, like, fundamentally linked to different genders? ELI: but I do think that societally—and maybe my experience comes from like a workplace, like a business, space that there is, at the very least, the perception, and I think the actuality, there, that men are seen or noticed more, when they are high-engagement.. ELI: And that that can be counterproductive, in those scenarios. SARAH: Yeah, I would also say two things with that. One is because of certain societal prejudices and whatever, I think it is more likely that a high-engagement woman would be seen as rude than a high-engagement man in a similar situation. ELI: Mm-hmm. SARAH: And so then sometimes women, like, teach themselves to be less high-engagement, especially in those situations. SARAH: So it may not be inherently a gendered thing, but it might be a learned thing? ELI: Mm-hmm SARAH: And secondly, especially in a workplace environment, if you have a group of predominantly high-consideration people, it's not going to be a problem that people's ideas are not recognized, because people are going to take turns and like give space for everyone to speak. SARAH: If you have a group of predominantly high-engagement people, on the other hand, regardless of gender, and you have one or two high-consideration people, unless they learn to be more high-engagement, and unless the high-engagement people, like you said, learn to specifically step back and say, "hey, jump in here," it's very easy for those high-consideration people to get pushed aside or get spoken over, or just not have a chance to speak. SARAH: And so I could definitely see where that kind of dichotomy favors the high-engagement folks in a workplace environment, whereas in a one-on-one conversation, as long as both parties are like, aware of what's going on, then it's fine. SARAH: But in a bigger group, especially with people you don't necessarily know super well, I think the high-consideration people are much more likely to be bowled over. SARAH: And if that like, does end up tying into learned behavior or other prejudices, aside from just like what your conversational style is, then that could amplify it. ELI: Yeah, I hadn't actually thought of it that way but it—it makes a ton of sense. ELI: I don't know that I have ever been part of a team where the majority of people were high-consideration, although that again might be people learning and adjusting themselves to be high-engagement because they have found that the other style doesn't work at a workplace. SARAH: Mm-hmm. ELI: Yeah, that's really interesting. I hadn't thought about that, and I also, until we were answering this question, hadn't connected the terms from the Lingthusiasm episode to my workplace experience. ELI: But now I'm really glad that I have another tool to talk about those things. SARAH: um, yeah, and also just like, I don't know it's something—so as a high school teacher, it's something I think about a lot, like, some of the metacognitive and metalinguistic vocabulary, um that we use all the time amongst teachers, you know, we talk about whether kids are able to articulate their thoughts, or prove their understanding, or… all these different things, and we don't always actually have those kind of "meta" conversations with the students. ELI: Huh. SARAH: And that's something that I try to do as much as I can, because I think it's really valuable to have the words to describe what you're doing, not just be able to do it. SARAH: And this is also a reason that— this is, like, a whole can of worms, please no one actually ask me a question about this, but— SARAH: there's a lot of tension in the language-pedagogy community around different styles of teaching, and the difference between acquisition and learning, and teaching grammar or not teaching grammar, and all this stuff. SARAH: But one of the reasons that I feel really strongly that we should be teaching grammar and grammatical terminology is not because I think there is one right way to do everything—we obviously talked about that last episode—but that having the terms at hand to be able to talk about what you're doing really allows you to, like, organize that information and access it more easily in your head, or even if it doesn't help you access it in your own mind, it helps you communicate with other people about it, if you have that metalinguistic terminology SARAH: And I think the same is true—like, now that I have—and like you said, now that we have this framework of high-engagement vs. high-consideration conversations, like, that's a framework you can apply to people all over your life, and you don't just have to think about it in your own head, you can be like, "hey, buddy, I noticed that you don't like to jump into conversations and I often feel like I'm talking over you. I'm gonna try to step back so that you have a chance to talk, but if you notice that I'm not doing that, please don't feel like you're being rude if you interrupt me. Please interrupt me," or vice versa, or whatever, and like— ELI: Yeah. SARAH: —that just leads to better and like relationships all around ELI: communication! all around? ELI: Maybe we ought to put a Teachers After Dark episode on our docket. SARAH: Oh god. Okay. JENNY: Yes. ELI: So that if somebody does send you a question about the current holy wars in language pedagogy, that—you could save that for when we have a bunch of teachers on. SARAH [pained]: Yeah. Okay. SARAH: Someone me send that question in like two years when I feel like I have a strong opinion about things [ELI and JENNY laugh] JENNY: Didn't you literally just say like two minutes ago you do have a strong opinion about this? SARAH: Yeah, let me rephrase that. SARAH: Send me that in two years when I have a coherent understanding of my opinion. [JENNY laughs] ELI: Ah, there's that metalinguistic description again. SARAH: Yup. ELI: You need to be able to have the language to talk about the things that you know. SARAH: Yup. JENNY: Mm-hmm. ELI: So I think that's a pretty thorough examination of this kind of high-consideration/high-engagement, waiting in turns with back-channeling vs. holding the floor as much as possible thing. SARAH: Mm-hmm ELI: Is there any other places where we wanted to go with this? SARAH: "What kinds of differences have you noticed in people who hang out with mostly people of similar or opposite sex, and even with people of similar or varying ages?" ELI: I think someone made the point before—I can't remember if it was Sarah or Jenny—but I feel like there is a… if not a register component here, then a social, situational component here? SARAH: mm-hmm ELI: Where… ELI: Again, you do get that high-engagement, hold-the-floor-for-a-very-long-time-thing, but you do also, I think, act differently, or are more conscious about it, when you are in a casual social situation, than when you're in a formal workplace scenario. JENNY: I think that was what I said about—I grew up with a very high-engagement style talking with my family and my friends, but then went to college and, like, was in conversations with a lot of, like, high-consideration people, and got really, like, kind of confused and uncertain for a while about why I felt like the way I was trying to engage in conversations wasn't right, somehow, anymore. JENNY: But yeah, that was very much—like it was—that was very much something that I noticed in, like, the more formal kind of settings where it was, like, in classrooms, in office hours with professors, that kind of thing. JENNY: I didn't notice the disconnect in conversational styles nearly as much just hanging out with a bunch of my friends or whatever, and it didn't occur to me until I had found those terms and some discussion of them and whatever, that there was that distinction, JENNY: it wasn't just, "I talk one way with my family and people at college talk another," it's also situational even at college, there are situations in which a high-engagement style are still normal here. SARAH: Mm-hmm. I think the only other thing that has struck me in terms of, like, "how do people speak who hang out with different groups of people," or whatever, is just that yeah, you're gonna have those register shifts, and you're gonna have, like, differences in vocabulary, and, I don't know, like, sense of humor almost? like— ELI: Yeah, JENNY: Yeah ELI: you're gonna have a different way to have those meta-conversational conversations with each other. SARAH: Yep, a friend of mine—we were hanging out with a whole group of friends, I think there were like six of us, and two of us are high school teachers, and someone made a comment, and—like totally innocent, totally off-hand, like, germane to the topic and everything, and Caroline and I just lost it, because it sounded like something high schoolers say that is funny to high schoolers [ELI and JENNY laugh] SARAH: And we spend so much of our time with high schoolers that now we also follow that train of humor, and so we're sitting in this group with a bunch of late 20-somethings, and she and I are cracking up over something that's, like, a joke for 15-year-olds that no one else in the room has even registered is a thing. ELI: Is this a bonus of being a high school teacher, do you get to be hip with all of the dank memes of the youth of today? SARAH: Like, yes? more than my other friends? and yet still my children say things and I'm like, SARAH: "I know you're speaking English, I know you are." [ELI and JENNY laugh] SARAH: "And I even know what those words mean!" SARAH: "I just can't put them together into a sentence that has a coherent whole." SARAH: But then I learn things? ELI: You realize once this goes out on the internet, the whole world will know that you're old. SARAH: Oh yeah. no, I—I've gratefully accepted that now. ELI: Okay. Well, other-Sarah, I hope that that answers your question. I don't know if we came to a coherent answer on it, but as you will learn in the rest of your Linguistics 100 class, we don't have a lot of coherent answers to a lot of these sticky questions in linguistics. ELI: Which, honestly, is for me what makes it such a fun thing to study. SARAH: Yes. JENNY: Agreed. JENNY: I mean you may have noticed that one of our only firm official opinions is that vowels are all the same vowel, which I feel like is a pretty good— JENNY; Like, that should establish what to expect in terms of firm linguistics opinions, from us and also from linguistics. ELI: I mean, but here's the thing, is I bet that there are a few phonologists who are listening to us, who heard us say all vowels are the same vowel and they're like, "…yeah… That's true…" [JENNY laughs] SARAH: There was a thing going around Twitter a few weeks ago that was like, "quote-tweet with the secret fact about your field that everyone knows but won't speak out loud for fear everything comes tumbling down," and I can't tell you the number of linguists I saw who quote-tweeted that and said "words are fake" or "we don't know what words are," [JENNY and ELI laugh] SARAH: and I was like "good." JENNY: See, that doesn't seem like an appropriate answer at all to me, because I've had professors say that in linguistics classes. ELI: Oh, yeah, JENNY: Like, that's not a secret opinion. That's just one that no one else will listen to us say? SARAH: Yeah, that's fair. ELI: I mean, we know what phonemes and morphemes and lexemes are, we know what constituents are, but like "what a word is" is, like—is—is not a thing—I mean I think part of it is that words are actually, like, not nearly relevant to all of the things that linguistics wants to talk about. SARAH: They're all—yeah. ELI: Like, in a weird way, "word" is the least useful chopping-up of language. Like, it's the least useful unit of language for talking about language. SARAH: By far. ELI: So like, words are fake. SARAH: No one cares. [ELI laughs] ELI and JENNY: And no one cares. ELI: All right, let's talk about last episode's puzzler. I almost said last week's puzzler again. ELI: So, last podcast we had a puzzler, and that puzzler was "what do these three words have in common," and I will spell them for you: J-O-B, P-O-L-I-S-H, and H-E-R-B. ELI: So, did either of you get the answer to this puzzler? JENNY: They've each got two different, like, very distinct, pronunciations, one of which is a proper noun, and the other of which is not. SARAH: Yeah, I only got to the two pronunciations. SARAH: Although, I will also point out, in some dialects people pronounce the H on "herb," even if they're talking about like parsley and stuff. JENNY: Yeah, but they're wrong. ELI: Yeah. SARAH, I mean, yes. It's true. [ELI and JENNY laugh] ELI: Yeah, I think the, the sort of straightforward way to say it is that they change pronunciation when you capitalize the first letter. SARAH: Ahh. Okay, cool. JENNY: Oooh, that's a way better—that's a way better phrasing. ELI: Yeah. ELI: So, congratulations if you got it, this was a cool one that took me a little bit of time to figure out. ELI: Also, if you do pronounce the H in "herb" ELI: when you're talking about flavorful leafy greens, like— JENNY: We don't actually think you're wrong, that was a joke. ELI: Yeah, no, you're valid. SARAH: You're wrong, but you're valid. [ELI and JENNY laugh] ELI: You're—you're marginal. We're gonna put a tiny question mark next to your—next to your pronunciations [SARAH and JENNY laugh] ELI: No asterisk, definitely no pointing hand. Maybe a flower. SARAH: What? ELI: Sorry, that's a—that's an optimality theory joke. SARAH: Okay. JENNY: I know nothing about optimality theory and I'm very intrigued. SARAH: Yeah, I'll take your word for it. ELI: [laughs] There's a optimality theory easter egg on our website actually SARAH and JENNY: Oooh. ELI: Yeah. ELI: But I'm not gonna say anything else about it, because— SARAH: Well, I'll go digging later. ELI: —I don't want to talk about optimality theory. SARAH: Okay? [JENNY laughs] ELI: Anyway? JENNY: Have we found another linguistic topic we're not actually interested in? ELI: Uh, I mean, optimality theory is really interesting. I just have some real strong opinions about it. SARAH: We'll save that for the same episode when we talk about linguistic pedagogy. ELI: All right, that's a deal. JENNY: Cool. [simultaneously] ELI: Ah— SARAH: All right, well, SARAH: in the meantime— [ALL laugh] ELI: No, go for it. Go for it. SARAH: Cool. So in the meantime, I have a new puzzler, and actually the opening text is exactly the same? SARAH: "What do THESE words have in common?" Okay, not exactly the same. There's more than three. SARAH: So, the words are "assess," "banana," "dresser," "grammar," "potato," "revive," "uneven," and "voodoo." ELI: All right. Well, think about that puzzler; if you know the answer to it without looking it up, then fantastic? ELI: If not, you can wait for our next episode, ELI: And you could always, I suppose, look it up on the internet, JENNY: but that's cheating. ELI: That's it for this episode. Thanks for listening? SARAH: Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Audio editing is done by Eli, Question wrangling is done by Jenny, show notes are done by me, and transcriptions are a team effort SARAH: Our music is "Covert Affair" by Kevin MacLeod. JENNY: Our show is entirely listener supported. You can help us by visiting patreon.com/emfozzing E-M-F-O-Z-Z-I-N-G and by telling your friends about us! Ratings on iTunes and other podcast services help as well. ELI: Today we want to say thanks to these awesome patrons: Geoff, Bryton, Dre, Inga, Mitch, Bex, and Tim. SARAH: Find all our podcasts and show notes online at linguisticsafterdark.com or on all your favorite podcast directories? JENNY: And send those questions—text or audio— to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com or tweet them at us, @LxADpodcast. JENNY: You can follow us on Facebook and Instagram, also @LxADpodcast. ELI: And until next time, if you weren't consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are. [beep] ELI: You know, walk— SARAH: Y'are! ELI: Yes! Yes, w'are! [ALL laugh] [beep] SARAH: sitting here going [attempts to make click sounds] SARAH: Aghhh, I put on chapstick [beep] JENNY: Sorry, there's a weird bug on the bed, and I'm trying to make sure it's not about to crawl on me but it kind of is. SARAH: okay. ELI: Alright, you should yeet—yeet that bug far away! JENNY (distant from the mic): No, because then I'd have to touch it! [beep] ELI: Do bugs feel fear? I mean— JENNY: I… don't know? ELI: This isn't Biology After Dark. I don't know if we—that's a whole different podcast by the way, is Biology After Dark [beep] ELI: They're all words that Dan Quayle spelled with an e on the end of them. SARAH: I don't… know. [JENNY laughs] ELI: Sorry, I'm gonna cut that joke because it's… [laughs] SARAH: Old? [ALL laugh] ELI: Because it's old. [beep] ELI: You know, we're supposed to be… your neighborhood linguistics bar! [beep]