What happens to language when newcomers move in?
Language isn’t just for communication — it also signals membership in a group, and this is especially clear in a gentrifying community in Washington DC. Black residents are using African-American English to stake out their place and show a sense of belonging in a changing neighbourhood.
Dr Jessi Grieser, author of Talking Place, Speaking Race joins Daniel on this episode of Talk the Talk.
Listen to this episode
You can listen to all the episodes of Talk the Talk by pasting this URL into your podlistener.
http://danielmidgley.com/talkthetalk/talk_classic.xmlPromo
The Would You Rather Bot @WYR_bot gives Daniel a language question.
Also, what horrible microparties are hiding behind their names? Daniel reveals all.
Also at https://www.patreon.com/posts/26845714
Indigenous Australian Word of the Week (IA-WoW): ngudda kamak?
In honour of the UN declaring 2019 the Year of Indigenous Languages, we will be sharing words from Indigenous Australian languages.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware that episodes of this show may contain voices or names of deceased persons.
This weeks IA-WoW is the phrase ngudda kamak? meaning “you good?” in Bininj Kunwok. It comes to us from the site kunwok.org (managed by Steven Bird & Alexandra Marley) where you can learn words and everyday phrases in Bininj.
You can listen to more Bininj Kunwok at kunwok.org, find the language on the Gambay language map and learn more about it through Glottolog and AUSTLANG.
Full interview
Dr Jesse Grieser is a sociolinguist and the author of Talking Place, Speaking Race. Daniel had the opportunity to sit down and have a chat with Jessi in a café with very swanky music in the heart of New York City. They talked about her own history with African-American English, poetry, and her work on the conjunction of language and race in a gentrifying community in Washington DC.
Thanks to Dr Grieser, and to the Linguistic Society of America for making this interview possible.
Also at https://www.patreon.com/posts/26820773
Cutting Room Floor 363
Daniel and Hedvig explain the notoriously hard-to-explain ergative case to Ben, and — everyone — it is amazing. You will understand ergative case after this.
Why do children seem to learn language so well? Ben’s Homebrew Theory of Child Language Acquisition makes a reappearance.
Are any words truly synonymous? In a word, no. But on the plus side, we’ll always have skräpkultur.
Also at https://www.patreon.com/posts/26901779
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Show notes
Australian election 2019: how to avoid voting for a terrible micro party in the Senate
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/may/10/australian-election-2019-full-list-of-micro-parties-standing-in-the-senate
France asks: Can you solve the riddle of the rock? – BBC News
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48212442
Reading to Your Toddler? Print Books Are Better Than Digital Ones
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/well/family/reading-to-your-toddler-print-books-are-better-than-digital-ones.html
Getting Started – Kunwok
https://kunwok.org/wiki/Getting_Started
The Neighborhood Is Mostly Black. The Home Buyers Are Mostly White.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/27/upshot/diversity-housing-maps-raleigh-gentrification.html
The linguistic dominance of white, western, English and how to recognize and disrupt it | News | Pittsburgh | Pittsburgh City Paper
https://www.pghcitypaper.com/pittsburgh/the-linguistic-dominance-of-white-western-english-and-how-to-recognize-and-disrupt-it/Content?oid=14230061
Perfective done | Yale Grammatical Diversity Project: English in North America
https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/perfective-done
There Goes the Neighborhood : NPR
https://www.npr.org/podcasts/555340969/there-goes-the-neighborhood
self-critical infrastructure: “Interesting language fact: “vanilla” (as in “plai…” – chaos.social
https://chaos.social/@strangeglyph/102054768486185378
vanilla (n.) | Etymonline
https://www.etymonline.com/word/vanilla
Lexiculture: vanilla | Glossographia
https://glossographia.wordpress.com/2014/03/14/lexiculture-vanilla/
How vanilla became shorthand for bland.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2005/08/how-vanilla-became-shorthand-for-bland.html
Neapolitan Meme on ME.ME
https://me.me/i/neapolitan-neaneanea-polipolipoli-tantantan-neapolipoli-neaneapoli-politantan-polipolitan-neatantan-neaneatan-0b9f8847f6f845b195decdcdc33e73a7
No humans allowed: Main Roads building WA’s first animal bridge
https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/no-humans-allowed-main-roads-building-wa-s-first-animal-bridge-20180726-p4ztre.html
How wildlife bridges over highways make animals—and people—safer
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2019/04/wildlife-overpasses-underpasses-make-animals-people-safer/
skräpkultur – Uppslagsverk – NE.se
https://www.ne.se/uppslagsverk/ordbok/svensk/skr%C3%A4pkultur
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
Daniel: The following is an RTRFM podcast. RTRFM is a community organisation and relies on volunteer and listener support. To learn more about what we do, visit rtrfm.com.au.
[Talk the Talk intro]
Daniel: I’m Daniel Midgley.
Ben: I’m Ben Ainslie.
Hedvig: I’m Hedvig Skirgård.
Daniel: And this is Talk the Talk.
Ben: We have reconvened the Order of the Three. What do we think? Order of the Three, are we liking that one?
Hedvig: [laughs]
Daniel: Dang, that sounds kind of ominous. What’s going to happen?
Ben: I don’t know. All we could be the Triumvirate.
Hedvig: Sorry, the what?
Ben: The Triumvirate.
Hedvig: The Triumvirate.
Ben: Yeah, that’s a word.
Daniel: Triumvirate.
Hedvig: Uh-huh.
Daniel: The team of three, three rulers.
Ben: I’m not going to lie to you. I’ve got a lot more of a response from you guys from the first one and the second one. So, we’ll roll with the first, the Team of Three.
Daniel: The Team of Three.
Hedvig: [chuckles] Three Team, yeah. I like that. I like team.
Daniel: Yeah. Hey, team. Talk the Talk is, of course, RTRFM’s weekly show about linguistics, the science of language, and this area is going to take us into a well-known variety of English known as African American English. We are going to see how people use it to navigate issues of race and to show membership in a community. And we’re going to do it with the help of linguist Dr Jessica Grieser.
Hedvig: That sounds so good.
Ben: I am pumped.
Daniel: Me too.
Ben: But before we do that, we better find out what’s going on in the news.
Daniel: This one was suggested by Isabel via email. It’s a link to an ABC article called “The Riddle of the Rock.”
Hedvig: I feel we’re already on to a fantasy theme for this episode.
Daniel: [laughs]
Ben: For sure. There’s a wizened crone who’s just like, [mimics old woman] “You may pass, but only if you answer the Riddle of the Rock.”
Hedvig: “Can you solve it, Team of Three?”
Daniel: [chuckles] The title of this is going to be “The Team of Three and the Riddle of the Rock.” I like this.
Hedvig: Hmm.
Ben: Yes, it’s such an…[crosstalk]
Hedvig: It’s so good.
Daniel: [crosstalk] -adventure or something.
Ben: I love it. Yeah.
Daniel: There’s this village in Western France, they’re offering a prize for help in deciphering some mysterious carvings into a rock. They seem to date back a couple of 100 years. In fact, there are two years visible, 1786 and 1787. But the letters are odd, and some of them are upside down. And there’s even a Ø in there.
Hedvig: Ø?
Ben: Like the Danish Ø?
Daniel: Yeah.
Hedvig: That’s funny.
Daniel: Uh-huh.
Ben: Oh, interesting. The Ø sound.
Daniel: Eh.
Hedvig: Eh.
Ben: Yeah.
In Unison: Eh.
Ben: Okay, well, we should definitely stop that, Team of Three, because we are not being effective problem solvers.
[laughter]
Hedvig: That was entertaining though.
Daniel: The 1786 was a few years before the French Revolution.
Ben: Mm-hmm.
Hedvig: Mm-hmm.
Ben: So, we’re thinking spy codes?
Daniel: Pass– well, you know what? It’s probably just Jacques Loussier.
Hedvig: Yeah, isn’t it probably just that is madly unstandardised because one thing that French Revolution led to was standardisation?
Ben: Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah, of course, it is.
Daniel: So, that hasn’t happened already.
Hedvig: Before the 1800s most writing systems were just-
Ben: Loosey-goosey.
Hedvig: -entirely unstandardised and bizarre.
Ben: But, surely, but, but, but, but, but, but if I may, as a layperson, we know we have lots of examples of how loosey-goosey and bizarre they were. We can look back at Old English and presumably Old French texts-
Hedvig: Yeah, exactly.
Ben: -and understand why they’re loosey-goosey. So, why would this baffled people? Because surely, the right person will be like, “Oh, yeah, it’s just like the wacky way people in this region did French back then.”
Daniel: I think the answer might be in this one sentence in the ABC article. Some think it may be in old Breton or Basque. When you hear Basque, you just throw your hands up and you say, “Oh, no, no, that’s it. We’re done.”
Hedvig: [laughs]
Ben: [crosstalk] -language that’s related to any other language on Earth. Cool. Cool. Cool. Cool.
Daniel: It is. It’s probably the best-known language isolate. You’ve heard the story about the devil when he tried to learn Basque?
Ben: No, tell me.
Hedvig: No.
Daniel: The story goes that he wanted to learn Basque so that he could corrupt them. So, he tried learning for 40 years. After 40 years, all he could say was yes and no, and the number seven, so he gave up.
Ben: What? What story is that? Where did you get that story from?
Hedvig: Is that the story?
Daniel: I didn’t say it was a good story but that’s the story that Basque people like to tell.
Ben: Right.
Hedvig: That’s bizarre.
Daniel: I’m just hoping this isn’t one of those Voynich things, because give me a break.
Ben: Yeah, because we’ve got enough of those. I also still don’t know where MH370 went. So, there’s enough stuff that I don’t know. The world needs more certainty, not more uncertainty.
Hedvig: [chuckles] I’m sure it’ll be figured out.
Daniel: Well, if you think you can do it, there’s a prize, €2000.
Ben: That’s not so bad.
Hedvig: Oh.
Daniel: Head on over to our blog, talkthetalkpodcast.com. And you can find the article we’re referring to in our show notes, and you can give it a try.
Hedvig: Hurray.
Daniel: Let’s move it on to the next story. I’ve got a couple of stories here about what helps kids to learn language because this is something that’s on my mind. One of the things I love doing with my two little girls is to read them stories, and we have a big pile of books around the place. But there’s a bit of research here in the Journal Pediatrics, researchers from the University of Michigan. They wanted to find out if print books showed any difference to parental child behavior than digital books. What’s your view?
Hedvig: Oh, yeah, for sure.
Daniel: It’s a for sure from Hedvig.
Ben: I’m not quite sure what they’re actually trying to measure here. What difference were they expecting to see or not see?
Daniel: They wanted to see if the adults and children would talk about the pictures that they were seeing, if there was any dialogue going on, any back and forth.
Ben: I am going to say yes, but I’m assuming Hedvig was of the camp that like traditional books result in more and I’m going to say that digitals result in more.
Daniel: Okay. Well, this team found that print books led to more verbalisations between parents and children.
Hedvig: [excitedly] Yes.
Ben: Damn. I hate losing to people.
Hedvig: Yeah. You knew that though. You only pick the other option because you thought it was edgy.
Ben: No, it wasn’t that it was edgy, it’s because kids now interact with devices far more readily than they do with other stuff.
Hedvig: That’s true. But do they do that with adults? I don’t know. Maybe you’re right. Yeah.
Daniel: They tried to figure out why this was the case and they thought that maybe because interactive books, especially the kind that you can touch and it does something, they’re a little more distracting. Whereas books are more boring, so they talk to each other.
Ben: Ah. [crosstalk] [laughs] I love it. “These thinly sliced dead trees are pretty dull, so we’re going to have to spice it up.”
Daniel: They are. Also, there was some squabbling over control of the device. “No, give me that. Get back here.”
Hedvig: Or like just pressing the home button and whatever.
Ben: But doesn’t that constitute more interaction though?
Daniel: [laughs] Well, they study the quantity but also the quality of the direction.
Ben: Oh, okay. That was not made clear to me before.
Daniel: [chuckles] Sorry. This research goes back to other research from the American Academy of Pediatrics that shows that excessive screen time under 18 months of age can result in lower language skills later on down the road. So, I don’t know. I’m not a technophobe, but this kind of thing makes me go, “Hmm.”
Ben: Do you know the really bizarre thing– just making it more about me again, because #BenAinslieStyle. As we know in this show, I’m the most technologically happy. I’m always the person like-
Hedvig: Really?
Ben: -in this–
Hedvig: Let’s have a tech happy fight-off. I think I’m happier.
Ben: For instance, in this particular instance, my inclination was, like, “Oh, the tech thing. The tech thing is a better thing, obviously.” And that tends to be how I sort of approach a lot of this stuff. And yet when I look around, I’m like you, Daniel. I’m so far from being a technophobe. But, man, people give their kids screens a lot, like a lot a lot.
Daniel: Yeah.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: It’s crazy.
Daniel: I don’t begrudge anybody what they’ve got to do to because parenting can be spectacularly boring. Sometimes, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do, but it’s also really important to be present. Being present as guests a great thing that you can do for your kids. Hey, now it’s time for our Indigenous Word of the Week. Of course, it is. International year of indigenous languages. Hedvig, what we got?
Hedvig: This week’s Word of the Week is the phrase, and it means how are you in Bininj Kunwok. Here it is.
Daniel: Ngudda kamak.
Hedvig: It’s spelled N-G in the beginning, but when I was listening to it, it sounded more like ‘wat’ sound.
Ben: Yeah, for sure.
Daniel: Yeah, it does.
Hedvig: I’m not entirely sure why that is. Or, if it’s just this person speaking, or if that is how all those sounds sound like. I’ve heard from friends who work in Bininj Kunwok that “ng” the sound in beginning of words can often be dropped. So, it could just be an effect of the vowel after.
Ben: Oh, okay.
Daniel: Right, okay.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: What do we know about Bininj Kunwok?
Hedvig: Oh, we know quite a lot of things. It’s one of the larger indigenous languages of Australia. I’ve seen estimates of around 2000 speakers, but I found it a bit hard as usual to track it down exactly.
Daniel: Dang.
Hedvig: Bininj Kunwok is also known as Gunwinggu. It can be spelled in a number of different ways. Most noticeably the G and the K, you can have either. They had a spelling reform fairly recently, but you can still see more than one different spelling. Basically, it’s because there’s no voicing contrast for the “ka “and the “ga.” It doesn’t really matter which one you pick. It’s an Australian language spoken in the Northern Territory in Arnhem Land. Also, the Charles Darwin University and the Australian National University, they’re offering a language course in Bininj Kunwok this year.
Daniel: Cool.
Ben: That’s awesome.
Hedvig: In honor of the Year of Indigenous Languages. If you do want to learn it, it might be a little bit late in the semester. But there’s a great website, which is where I got this clip from, kunwok.org. So, that’s K-U-N-W-O-K dot org, which is run by Steven Bird and Alexandra Marley, in collaboration with Bininj Kunwok speakers. They have a lot of great material on there, and it’s all creative commons. And yeah, I can recommend going there.
Ben: Awesome.
Daniel: Our Australian Indigenous Word of the Week, it’s a phrase in Bininj Kunwok, and it’s “ngudda kamak.” How are ya?
Hedvig: Yeah, I thought it’s good to get some everyday phrases, isn’t it?
Daniel: Yeah.
Ben: I like it.
Daniel: I noticed that it translates as, “You good?”
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: That’s very fun.
Hedvig: Kamak is good. Yeah.
Daniel: Let’s take a break. And if you want to tell me what’s good, then you can do that. Get me in the studio, 92-609-210.
Ben: You can catch us on the socials. We’re @talkpod on Twitter, and we’re Talk the Talk Podcast everywhere else.
Hedvig: And you can also reach us by traditional old email. We can be reached at talkthetalk@rtrfm.com.au.
Daniel: But now, let’s listen to Lucy Peach with Be So Good on RTRFM 92.1.
Ben: This week on Talk the Talk we are coming around the horn again to a topic that we have touched on a couple of times before, but this time we have a cool guest who is going to be able to give us some wonderful insights into this topic, which is, Daniel?
Daniel: Well, we’re talking about African American English. What do we know about it?
Ben: Uhhh.
Hedvig: That it has a lot of cool grammatical features that are distinct from other dialects.
Daniel: Really? Like what do you think of?
Hedvig: Like the way you can use ‘be’, she says without being able to produce a good example. [Ben chuckles] Isn’t that true that you can just use ‘be’ unconjugated in a lot of settings that you can’t in Standard American English? So, you can say…
Daniel: Yeah. For example, you could say, for instance, “She be telling people she eight,” which means, “She’s always telling people that she’s eight.”
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: Right.
Daniel: Notice also that in that sentence, you can drop the ‘be’ or the copula in some places like in present tense, and we’re going to see some examples of dropping that copula.
Ben: I also notice, it’s given the pop cultural machine, it’s also probably the most appropriated minority version of English.
Daniel: It is.
Hedvig: That’s totally true.
Daniel: And yet, there are still a lot of people who think that it’s somehow ungrammatical, but in some ways, it’s actually more regular than standardised English. Let me just give you an example here. Here’s a sentence. “It’s my mirror, and I look at myself.” All right, so we got ‘my’ and ‘myself’. Fill in the gaps. It’s her mirror and she looks at?
Ben and Hedvig: Herself.
Daniel: It’s our mirror and we look at?
Ben: Ourselves.
Daniel: So, it’s her and our, but it’s his mirror and he looks at?
Ben: Himself.
Hedvig: Ah. [crosstalk] -hisself.
Daniel: Right.
Ben: [crosstalk] -is crazy, it shouldn’t exist.
Daniel: Yeah. Standardised English has his mirror but himself, but African American English keeps it consistent, his and hisself. Same for them. It’s their mirror and they look at?
Hedvig: Theirselves.
Ben: Theirselves.
Daniel: In African American English, yes.
Hedvig: That makes sense.
Ben: Right.
Daniel: When I was in New York City for the Annual Conference of the Linguistic Society of America, I got to meet Dr Jessi Grieser of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. She’s been writing a book called Talking Place, Speaking Race. Now, I’m just this moment looking at an article in The New York Times called The Neighborhood Is Mostly Black. The Home Buyers Are Mostly White. Gentrification in a lot of cities is coming up as white people are moving into traditional black areas.
Hedvig: Yeah, because, well, poorer areas in general tend to sooner or later maybe get a patina of being cool.
Ben: I think it’s a little bit different in the States as well because there’s a far more striking divide between the sort of the supposed inner city and the burbs. In England, in Australia, in Europe, the inner city has never stopped being prestigious. Like if you live in Melbourne’s inner city, or if you live in the inner city of London, or if you live in any of these places, they’re all consistently still very prestigious places to live. But in America for many decades, the inner city was relegated to a sort of quasi-ghetto status.
But now gentrification is the process of a bunch of people who grew up in the burbs kind of going, “Oh, wait, no, cities are cool, because you can like walk around and catch trains and stuff. I definitely want to be in the inner city again.” So, they’re migrating back to these places that they demographically abandoned 40 years ago, and in so doing, displacing all of the entrenched minority culture that has flourished there for many, many years.
Daniel: Yeah, it means more amenities for those areas, but it also means rising prices. And really, the original residents are having to navigate this change. And there’s this desire on the part of these original residents to show that they were here first, that they are a part of this community in a way that maybe these newcomers aren’t so much.
Ben: From the stuff that I’ve read, there’s a real sense of, “No, no, you all abandoned this place. And we’ve been here, and we’ve kept it and we’ve sort of made– we didn’t basically. We kept the faith with this neighborhood. Basically, how dare you just want back now that it’s nicer?”
Daniel: Yeah. Well, Dr Jessi Grieser is a sociolinguist who studied the language of urban Washington DC, and it is a community that’s seeing its share this gentrification. So, these speakers are using African American English to show and to construct their identities in the face of what they regard as encroachment. I started off by asking Dr Grieser for an example that would help us understand how speakers of African American English use language to show their identity.
Dr Jessi Grieser: My absolute favorite example, which was also talked about at length by Geneva Smitherman and Samy Alim in their book about Obama, was when Obama about three weeks into his presidency, went to a known black haunt in Washington DC. And hands over his bill, they try to give him change for $100 bill and he says, “Nah, we straight.” And that was the “Nah, we straight,” the dropped copula heard around the world.
Daniel: People went bananas. 1
Jessi: Absolutely crazy. The way I tell it to my students is that was the moment that everybody went, “Well, we were excited about electing a black president. But it turns out, we elected a black president.”
[laughs]
Daniel: I was fine with it, as long as he sounded white.
Jessi: Right.
Daniel: [chuckles] What was he doing in that moment?
Jessi: He was performing his black bona fides. Really similar to my work, he was making a way of adjusting to that black space. And so, Ben’s Chili Bowl in DC, they used to say the only person that they would comp their meal for was Bill Cosby. Now, it’s Bill Cosby and the Obamas.
Daniel: Is it still Bill Cosby?
Jessi: I’m not sure.
[laughter]
Jessi: I don’t know now how that’s going. But it is known as a black space, and so he was staking his claim as someone who had a right to be there.
Daniel: Do you think it was put on or do you think it was real?
Jessi: Oh, I think it was real. I would imagine, much like myself, that it was put on in the sense that he probably had to learn to do that. But then, it became natural to do that, to navigate those spaces later on. I think he’s actually talked about that in Dreams from My Father.
Daniel: You interviewed people in Washington, DC.
Jessi: Yes.
Daniel: What’s their situation?
Jessi: The neighborhood that I’m looking at is called Anacostia, and it is one of the last neighborhoods in Washington DC to gentrify. Like many cities in the country, Washington DC gentrification, kind of going crazy. You could see it happening over like weeks if you were driving the same road over and over again.
Daniel: So, the white people are moving in.
Jessi: White people are moving in. Except that in Anacostia, when I started my research, white people were still afraid to move there. The first wave of folks who moved in were upper- and middle-class black folks. There was this real tension happening in the early 2010s of, are these gentrifiers? Are these brothers and sisters who’ve come into their own? What am I supposed to do with this? Also, with them are coming more amenities, and this is good for our neighborhood.
Daniel: I guess so.
Jessi: But we’re worried that other people are going to want these things.
Daniel: What did you notice about in your interviews about how they talked? What kind of features did they throw in?
Jessi: Really everything. Most of my findings with regard to individual features, mapped straight on to all the rest of the literature of these are the things that people are most commonly going to do. For example, dropping the copula. There’s a thing called third-person singular ‘s’ deletion. When you get “he run” instead of “he runs,” which of course, why are we still marking the third person when we have decided to make pronouns obligatory in English?
Daniel: Just a leftover.
Jessi: It’s a leftover. 200 years from now, we probably won’t see it. However, we do see that pretty wide swing in terms of these racialised topics, and then my big finding was that it turns out that location is racialised. And so, it patterns right along with this other stuff that we would expect.
Daniel: Now, I want to go through a few examples of things that you notice. Tell me about this sentence. “They ain’t make improvements for us.”
Jessi: Yes.
Daniel: You mentioned this in your five-minute linguist talk, which I quite enjoyed.
Jessi: Thank you.
Daniel: What’s going on with that sentence? What’s the backstory?
Jessi: There’s a bunch of things happening in the neighborhood. A street car’s going in. Homeland Security’s moving into that neighborhood and building a brand-new big office in a historical landmark, St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. Red bikes, the little shareable bikes are coming in. What this interviewee, Gus, who is 75, lived there his whole life, had to say about that. So, he said, “They’re making vast improvements over there. They ain’t make improvements fo us.”
Daniel: Whoa, that is a real contrast between the first bit and the second bit.
Jessi: Exactly.
Daniel: Wow.
Jessi: Which is amazing, because like that shift between those two sentences was where he moved from talking about it to explicitly saying, “I am not okay with this.” So, he does a bunch of different things. He uses “ain’t” instead of “aren’t.” He uses “make” instead of “making.”
Daniel: I noticed that too. Yeah.
Jessi: And so, he gets rid of that progressive. Then, in addition, the sound and I’m not going to produce it quite how he did, but he also dropped “they are” and “for”, so it was they make improvements fo us. All of these features, and that’s actually one of the things I found consistently, is that you’ll even get a speaker, and Gus is pretty AAVE as a speaker.
Daniel: He’s pretty AAVE?
Jessi: Uses a lot of AAVE…
Daniel: African American Vernacular English.
Jessi: Yeah.
Daniel: We’ve seen how when your interviewees were talking about the improvements in the neighborhood and feeling maybe a little bit defensive about this sort of change, all these changes that were happening in the neighborhood, they would go to African American English to show their identity or show their status as old-timers.
Jessi: Right. Yeah, that is exactly my conclusion is and it’s that what this does is it racialised is the space and so it says, “This is black space. I am a black person who belongs here, who has always belonged here, and I’m staking my claim on this neighborhood.”
Daniel: Dr Jessi Grieser of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Ben: Do you know what this reminds me of, Daniel? This reminds me of way, way, way, way, way, way back when I started on the show with you back when I was just a greenhorn on the linguistic [crosstalk], I distinctly remember one of the very early shows, you said something along the lines of, “Well, language does a couple of things.” I’ve never ever forgotten it. For me, the story is just like, proof of the pudding of how language, its primary function sometimes can be denoting membership of a group rather than conveying information or whatever it happens to be.
Hedvig: I think is a good point that language does so many more things than just carry information. Roman Jakobson talked about the indexicality of language which is that the words you choose say something about who you are, which is sort of separate information besides the thing you’re saying something about. In this example, “They ain’t make changes for us.” The words you choose says something like a meta bit of information besides the referential content.
Ben: Yeah. I was actually going to use the same phrase. It’s like metadata.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Yeah.
Ben: And then we go back to like, “Man, I can’t believe like when we MRI people’s brains, the whole brain is involved in languages.” “Yeah, well, it does a lot of things.”
[laughter]
Daniel: It sure does. We’re going to see another example of that, but first, I think we should take a track.
Hedvig: Can we have that lovely background track of music that you guys had?
Ben and Daniel: Oh, my God.
Ben: The [crosstalk].
Daniel: Sorry about that. I’m going to see if I can get rid of that.
Hedvig: No, no, it’s lovely.
Ben: That was so good. Don’t get rid of it.
Hedvig: No, no. Can you have that every time when you’re doing interview? Can you just add it on?
Ben: Can you just conduct all interviews in fancy hotel lobby foyers?
Hedvig: Yeah. I love it.
Daniel: I will go back to that place and I will just get some room film.
Ben: Yeah, get it– [crosstalk] I love it.
Daniel: Well, for now, I’m going to play us some Grace Barbe with her track, Afro-Sega, on RTRFM at 92.1.
Ben: This week, we are talking to Jessi Grieser, a wonderfully well-informed human being about AAVE, African American Vernacular English, who has written a book that I forgotten the name of, Daniel?
Daniel: The book is Talking Place, Speaking Race. Did you know that the V might be disappearing?
Ben: Well, as in just African American English? Well, that’s how I heard it first. And then, I saw AAVE written down. I was like, “What is the V?” It was vernacular.
Hedvig: But I love that adjectives that she used, AAVE.
Daniel: [laughs]
Ben: Yeah.
Hedvig: And you can’t say AA-YE. That doesn’t ring as good.
Daniel: It’s pretty AAVE.
Hedvig: If for nothing else for the adjective, yeah, I like it.
Daniel: Yeah, maybe
Ben: I got to call it though. Like the V is pretty denigratory though, isn’t it?
Daniel: It’s not all vernacular.
Hedvig: Wait, doesn’t vernacular just mean nonformal?
Daniel: But there are formal varieties of African American English.
Ben: That’s what I’m getting at here. There is a denigratory sense that race’s version of a language is a lower status. [crosstalk]
Daniel: Just automatically vernacular? No, of course not.
Hedvig: I just assumed that there was a distinction, that there was more formal language, and that was not the same. So, people use vernacular for this one.
Ben: You’re absolutely right. No, I think you’re spot on. It’s just so happens that all of the people who make those distinctions don’t speak that and so that becomes the not prestigious version. Like Daniel said before, yeah, it’s vernacular, because everyone said it was. Does that make sense?
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: I asked Dr Grieser if she could tell me another example of how someone used African American English to position themselves within this kind of gentrifying community in Washington, DC.
Dr Jessi Grieser: I had another interviewee about the same age as Gus. Her name is Dolores. Again, she’s a person who uses a lot of these features more generally. But we see them start to just cluster, cluster, cluster, cluster, cluster, like they’re just all packed into one sentence. She was talking about the streetcar that was coming in.
Daniel: Seemingly an improvement.
Jessi: An improvement. She said, “They’ve done had them trolley tracks laid down for five years. I haven’t seen no trolley car run yet.”
Daniel: Oh. Wow, there’s a lot of African American English going on there.
Jessi: A lot of features.
Daniel: Before that, she wasn’t doing it?
Jessi: Before that, I might see one or two, and then see several phrases go by with nothing. And then all of a sudden, we just get bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.
Daniel: Talk me through that sentence, because I’m not an AAVE speaker, or African American English speaker.
Jessi: We have completive ‘done’ which is something that shows us the results of state. My second language is Mandarin, Chinese. Mandarin Chinese marks ‘done’. And so, there’s a particle ‘le’. This is a thing that languages can do, and non-standard English is can do it too. And they can say, “Okay, we are going to mark that whatever this thing is has been completed.” So, they done had. And then “them” instead of “those.”
Daniel: They done have them…
Jessi: Them trolley tracks laid down. There’s, of course, the choice to use trolley instead of streetcar, which I think is a southernism and probably part of the local African American English style.
Daniel: Interesting.
Jessi: And then notice that she doesn’t use ‘ain’t’. So, she said “I haven’t seen,” which is very typical for an AAE speaker. Even one who uses a lot of vernacular features, you’re going to see them sometimes be there and sometimes not be there. She said, “I haven’t seen,” and then “no trolley car,” which is that-
Daniel and Jessi: Negative concord.
Jessi: [chuckles]
Daniel: Wow. It’s so interesting. When you hear that, your ears must just perk up.
Jessi: Oh, yeah.
Daniel: [laughs]
Jessi: I’m so like, “Yay. I’m getting what I wanted.” Of course, I did that before I do what I was finding.
Daniel: Yeah, true. What do you expect to happen in this community going forward?
Jessi: I have my hopes, and I have my suspicions. A lot of focus has been put by the local media, by the local business development communities and so on. Their local NPR station actually did an entire series of narrative documentary about the community. So, emphasis has been placed on keeping this community’s identity as it is, and helping people preserve their ways of life, helping the black community that has always been there stay there. It is a bellwether, people are paying attention to the need for that community to retain these deep, black historical roots.
At the same time, when there is what’s called a rent gap where you have housing that is substantially cheaper in one part of a city than in another, people start to move in. People are really starting to look at that part of the city. They were probably, it seems, scared of it 10 years ago, in a way that they are not now, now that houses in the rest of the city have just gotten insane. Where they are $750,000, $800,000, $900,000 and in that part of the city, they’re more like $250,000, $300,000. People are starting to go, “Well, there is a subway there.” I think especially as grocery stores start to open, as they start to have some more of these, they’re going to build a big park across the river on the old pylons of a bridge that they moved over a little bit. There’s going to be this beautiful park connecting the neighborhood into Capitol Hill. On the one hand, it’s this beautiful bridge that’s going to literally build a bridge between these two communities. But it means that people are going to walk over that bridge and can come in.
Daniel: And there’s going to be an uneasy relationship, not only personally, but also linguistically.
Jessi: Right. It will be interesting to keep tabs on this over the next 10 years and see what happens as these changes develop.
Daniel: Dr Jessi Grieser of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, author of the upcoming book, Talking Place, Speaking Race.
Hedvig: That was super cool.
Daniel: We got to see a lot of African American English, didn’t we? We got to see dropping copula, we got to see aspectual ‘done’, we got to see negative concord.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: If anyone finished that episode like me, equally curious about the process of gentrification, as you are about the linguistic implications, there’s a really cool podcast put up by WNYC studios called There Goes the Neighborhood.
Daniel: Wow.
Hedvig: Ah, yeah, that’s what it’s called.
Daniel: And that New York Times article I mentioned earlier, link on our blog, talkthetalkpodcast.com, you can actually check, I think, it’s only for the USA, but you can check any neighborhood in the USA and see what the demographic change has been in the last few years. So, that’s kind of interesting.
Hedvig: Can I do another linguistic observation?
Daniel: Sure.
Ben: Oh, dear. [laughs]
Hedvig: [chuckles] About the ‘done’ aspect thing.
Daniel: Oh, yeah.
Hedvig: So, it’s actually quite common in the world’s languages that for something meaning, this has been completed– Like Dr Grieser was saying, for example, Mandarin ‘le’, which comes from I think ‘liao’ meaning to finish or to complete, all over the world, you get words that mean to finish or to complete, or to be complete, to then grammaticalised and become just a tiny particle that just touches on to the sentence and just reduces in form often. So, it goes from done to done or something.
Daniel: Hmm. For example, in African American English, you might have, “I done done all you told me to do.” So, the first done is the completed aspect and then the next one is the actual verb that you mean.
Hedvig: Yeah, exactly. In different language families, you get the same origins for this marker. So, there’s something people call these grammaticalisation paths that are just super prime origins that just tend to sprout into this grammatical marker. Regardless of which language it is, that they’re just very suitable for this purpose. So, you get, I think, instead of the sign languages, you have particles meaning ‘finish’ that become this. You have it in several West African languages, which might be why African American English has it.
Daniel: Is that because it just makes so much sense to our brains just to have a ‘finish’ thing or because it’s so useful?
Hedvig: Yeah, it’s almost trivial to finish to complete something. Of course, that’s going to start meaning completed action. What else would you take? Some European languages have gone this weird route of taking the possessive verb ‘have’. So, like, “I have done it.” “I have written my paper.” Most languages in the world don’t get their completive perfective aspects from ‘have’. It’s weird.
Daniel: No, it is weird. In Russian, you’ve got to decide which version of the verb you’re going to use before you can even start making the sentence. You’ve got to choose whether it’s perfective or not. Whether it’s done or not.
Hedvig: That’s good. That’s– [crosstalk] [chuckles]
Ben: Y’all language nerds, you chill the fuck out.
Hedvig: Okay.
Daniel: Ah, we’re nerd [crosstalk] but, hey, it’s the place, right?
Ben: You have fallen so far down the word rabbit hole, stop it.
Hedvig: Okay, sorry.
Daniel: [chuckles] Sorry, Ben. This was part of a much longer interview with Dr Grieser, and you can hear the whole thing on our Patreon page. Thanks to Dr Grieser, and to the Linguistic Society of America for making this interview possible.
Ben: While you both fawn over each other’s linguistic prowess, shall we take a track to let you cool off a little bit under the collars?
Daniel: Sure. Let’s take it to a 1975 track by the Jelly Beans. This one is You Don’t Mean Me No Good on RTRFM 92.1.
Ben: It is time. Once again, it is time to say the sacred words, to be the sacred souls as the Team of Three once more, engage in Word of the Week.
Daniel: Wow, I feel like we should have better words now.
Ben: Yeah, you totally should.
[laughter]
Ben: But then, I say that every week, so let’s do this.
Daniel: Fine. The first one is ‘vanilla’.
Ben: AKA the greatest ice cream flavor.
Daniel: Thank you. I’m so glad to hear this.
Ben: Mm-hmm.
Daniel: Yeah.
Ben: I am so sick. I know what vanilla is going to be used for in this Word of the Week. I just want to talk about how frustrating I find it that vanilla is considered the blank flavor It is the king of flavors. Like vanilla essence and vanilla seeds from vanilla pods in a crème brûlée or something is seriously the most delicious dessert spice in the world, like [crosstalk]
Daniel: It’s a complex spice.
Ben: It’s so good.
Hedvig: But it also is often done not well. Sometimes, you get those icy ice creams where it’s not enough vanilla in them, right?
Ben: Well, look, fake vanilla obviously sucks. Fake vanilla is as good as those banana lollies are in comparison to actual bananas. We know this, but real vanilla, like vanilla bean ice cream, is spectacularly delicious.
Daniel: With the little black bits in there?
Ben: Mm-hmm.
Daniel: Mm-hmm.
Ben: So, anyway, sorry, I detract. I’ve always had a real bee in my bonnet about how denigrated vanilla– People say vanilla sex to mean the most boring kind of copulation it’s possible to have. For me, I really want us to turn that around. Vanilla is the most pristine, most perfect encapsulation of sexual congress. That’s what I want it to be.
[chuckles]
Ben: I know that it won’t get there. But God, vanilla is just great, you guys. I just really like vanilla.
Daniel: Yeah, me too.
Hedvig: But it’s not necessarily boring. It’s just that the regular, the plain, like the thing most people do.
Ben: Look at all of the synonyms you just used.
Hedvig: Plain, the thing most people do.
Ben: Regular. [chuckles]
Hedvig: Sometimes being regular is fine.
Ben: Okay.
Daniel: Be that as it may, listener, @strangeglyph has spotted this one in an August academic publication, telling us, “Interesting language fact, vanilla, as in plain or standard seems to have moved into mainstream enough to be used in papers.” And they include a screenshot from a paper, the text says, “An extremely modest addition to a vanilla Damas-Milner type system.” I’ve been noticing in the papers of the Association for Computational linguistics, since about 2017, we’ve started to see things like vanilla classifiers, just simple and unadorned, classifiers. Nothing added.
Ben: Interesting.
Daniel: Here’s a question. What other V word in English is most closely related to vanilla?
Hedvig: Oh.
Ben: Ah, villain?
Daniel: Nope.
Ben: Closely related in terms of spelling?
Hedvig: Can I ask, is vanilla a name of a flower?
Daniel: It was named after the shape of the pods.
Ben: Oh.
Hedvig: Oh, okay.
Ben: [crosstalk]
Daniel: Nope.
Ben: Vagina.
Daniel: Vagina.
Ben: Oh, really?
Hedvig: Ah.
Daniel: They thought it resembled a sheath which was vina, but this was a little sheath, vinea. And this word ‘vianna’, is where we get the word ‘vagina’.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: Yeah, right.
Hedvig: Second time we have vagina, vulva in the Word of the Week. Yay.
Daniel: Yay.
[chuckles]
Daniel: That’s the way it was. It was the flavor until about 1942 when Life magazine gave us an example. Wilkie evolves a plain vanilla foreign policy for Republicans. And in fact, even in the 50s though, we had instances, William Safire wrote that it’s soda parlors, the counter boys would say vanilla, and that meant there was an attractive girl coming in.
Ben: Hey, there we go [crosstalk] Ben Ainslie’s thinking.
Daniel: There we go. However…
Ben: The casual sexism, I’m not stoked about, but that’s how I want the word to be, not the casual sexism, but the good thing.
Daniel: Well, in the 70s, things changed a bit as gay men and people in the LGBT community used it to describe people whose sexual tastes ran to the commonplace. So, that’s kind of what this…
Ben: See what I mean?
Daniel: -means sexual usage and then the more general boring usage got started. It was started in the 40s, but then it was pushed along in the 70s. But I think it’s mostly because of ice cream. You know, ice cream? [crosstalk] It was so popular, so omnipresent, that it became a bit of a default.
Hedvig: Do you think that there was as much plain, boring, cheap, fake strawberry ice cream that we would ever–? Or, is it the fact that the vanilla ice cream is white?
Ben: I think it’s both.
Daniel: There’s a lot of fake strawberry out there.
Hedvig: Yeah, there’s a lot of fake strawberry that tastes pretty terrible.
Ben: Nothing like vanilla though.
Hedvig: No.
Ben: Not only is vanilla the sort of presumed default flavor but inside every Magnum, inside every– inside all of those things is vanilla ice cream, usually. Unless you get one of the super fancy macadamia burnt chocolate blah, blah, blah. But even those are the minority. If you get a giant sandwich, it’s got vanilla ice cream. It’s just the overwhelming majority and then everything else is different.
Hedvig: But isn’t it also that vanilla–? How much of those, the center of Magnum vanilla ice cream tastes much vanilla? Is it actually a lot of fake, bad, washed-out vanilla?
Ben: Yes, definitely. I think it’s just…
Hedvig: And [crosstalk] just tasting fat and like cream and sugar.
Ben: Yes, absolutely. I think we’re at the point now, because vanilla is insanely expensive, a lot of people don’t actually regularly consume that flavor. They don’t really understand the truly, mind-bendingly, spectacular flavor explosion that they could have.
Hedvig: All right, yeah. Cool, cool, cool.
Daniel: Has anyone seen the Neapolitan meme?
[laughter]
Hedvig: What?
Daniel: The Neapolitan meme?
Hedvig: Oh, no, I have.
Ben: Tell me, tell me, tell me.
Daniel: It’s got a picture of the Neapolitan ice cream. It’s got strawberry, vanilla, chocolate, and it says Nea-Poli-Tan. And then it’s got all strawberry and it says Nea Nea Nea. All vanilla, poli, poli, poli. All chocolate, Tan, Tan, Tan. And then, it’s got all possible combinations. Nea-Poli-Poli, Nea-Nea-Poli. Tan-Tan-Tan.
Ben: [laughs] I love it.
Daniel: Let’s go to the next one.
Ben:
Hedvig: Once again, this is the Swedish radio program that Ben thinks is a rival of ours, [unintelligible [00:40:40] on Swedish Radio where they have Words of the Week and that’s where I learned eco-duct.
Daniel: Eco-duct.
Hedvig: Do you want to have a guess of what it is?
Ben: Is this like those animal highways, so that large wildlife preserves/nature areas that have been bisected by large developments actually offer like passageways for animals so they don’t get smashed by trucks and stuff?
Hedvig: Yeah, exactly. It doesn’t have to be the big things either. It can just be a tunnel underneath the road as well, for like frogs and smaller…
Ben: We have some here in– not only in Australia we have them, but I’m just here in WA where Daniel and I live, just down south, if you drive down the Bussell Highway, sometimes you’ll see large– and by large, I mean animal-sized rope bridges that are strung…
Hedvig: Animal-sized.
Daniel: [laughs]
Ben: Yeah, like– Okay.
Daniel: That’s a pretty big range there.
Ben: Possums.
Daniel: Bacteria size.
Ben: Possum sized. Well, if I say possum, a whole bunch of people, not from Australia are going to be like, “What’s a possum?” Small cat-sized rope rigid, strung up high, way up high, like many meters above the ground and it’s to-
Hedvig: Wow.
Ben: -allow possums and presumably in other parts of Australia, things like koalas, travel across without having to get their feet hot on the road/squashed by trucks.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: I’ve read an article last year that Perth was getting one for the Tonkin Highway, did that ever happen?
Ben: I don’t know.
Daniel: I think I need to check that out.
Ben: Anyway, these things are great. I like them.
Hedvig: Ecologists have found that having eco-ducts actually just dramatically can improve the health and the growth of a population. It’s not just that they get more land, it’s more diverse land, and that they can move when conditions change on different parts. So, the added benefit of having more access to space isn’t just linearly to how much space you have. It actually has a much larger effect.
Ben: I would see that as a really interesting opportunity to measure predator behavior with these things being installed because you’re now funneling all of your prey and [Daniel laughs] food through these like tiny bits. Surely, enterprising predators are going the best land, the best territory to be your territory, is where these things open up.
Hedvig: That’s a good question. I don’t know the answer to that. We might need to find a biologist and ecologist. What’s it called? It’s called etho– Can someone with internet– it is ethology.
Daniel: Oh, okay.
Ben: Eth. E-T-H.
Hedvig: Yeah. A person who studies animal behavior would be an ethologist. And, unfortunately, none of us are ethologists. So, we’d have to find someone, but that’s a good point, and that’s probably the case.
Ben: Yeah, I really want to find that out, because I can just imagine in Sweden, for example, foxes must just be hell to the yeah on these little eco-ducts.
[crosstalk]
Ben: There is a conveyor belt for foods, you guys.
Daniel: There’s a lot of names for this thing. By the way, there’s eco-duct, there’s fauna passage, animal bridge, and of course, wildlife crossing, although that could be other things too. Hedvig, you had one more because we were giving you crap last week about liking Robyn.
Hedvig: [chuckles] Yes. I know that we’re on RTR, and that RTR has a reputation for being a cool indie station where you play cool current music.
Daniel: Yes.
Hedvig: And I like cool current music as well.
Ben: Listen to the disdain just dripping off her voice.
Hedvig: No, I’m just defending myself because I like cool contemporary music as well, and I would like to listen to more Australian music, and I try and make an effort when I’m in places to listen to more local music. But I also sometimes like what people consider to be quite trashy hits like Vengaboys, Blümchen, which was a great artist from Germany in the 90s.
Ben: Where does [unintelligible [00:44:16] fall on this list?
Hedvig: Oh, [unintelligible [00:44:19] is too indie.
Ben: Okay.
Hedvig: Robyn, the Swedish pop star. Britney Spears. What’s another good example?
Daniel: My goodness, we are tied to a certain decade, aren’t we?
Hedvig: Yeah, maybe.
Ben: [laughs]
Hedvig: But the thing that tends to happen with skräpkultur, which means garbage culture, is that once it gets old enough, it gets heightened to good culture.
Ben: Of course, like this is…
Hedvig: Take for example like, Beatles. Beatles was garbage culture when they came out. It was only teenage girls that liked it. The reason I’m having a hard time finding examples that are from the ’80s or the ’70s is just because whenever those people who were young at that time get old enough, suddenly they decide to call it good culture and then everyone else just has to agree. The great word, garbage culture, skräpkultur also applies to things like TV series, or soda, or just anything that’s considered sort of a bit trashy.
Ben: Low class.
Hedvig: Maybe also a bit vanilla actually.
Ben: Yeah, right.
Hedvig: Like, you can’t be very edgy and be skräpkultur.
Daniel: What would a good English translation be for skräpkultur?
Hedvig: Garbage culture.
Ben: No. I know what Daniel mean.
Daniel: What do we call that stuff?
Ben: Like a translation– [crosstalk]
Hedvig: Isn’t pop trash [crosstalk].
Daniel: I think trash is the best translation.
Ben: Lowbrow. Highbrow and lowbrow.
Daniel: That’s the name for the genre.
Hedvig: The thing about trash music or culture or whatever, we’re deciding to call as skräpkultur, I was trying to point out earlier, is also that sometimes people also assume that it doesn’t have the artisanship, and that really bugs me. When people think that it’s easy for Britney Spears, and her thousands of producers to write Toxic. That just baffles me that people because they think it’s poppy and they don’t aesthetically like it, that they also think that the people who do it aren’t competent, or aren’t putting effort into things, that grinds my gears.
[laughter]
Hedvig: Because they obviously do, and they make millions and lots of people like it and are happy because of it. And they spend like months perfecting these summer hits and, argh.
Ben: I can go some of the way there with you, Hedvig, but not all of the way, because…
Hedvig: You don’t have to like it, but you just don’t have to say that it’s badly made, and that stupid people like it. That’s what I don’t get.
Ben: I agree with the first part. I don’t necessarily agree with the second.
Daniel: Nobody get it though, because like…
Hedvig: That stupid people like it?
Daniel: No.
Ben: There’s a bunch of stuff out there that I can 100% put in the camp of things that stupid people like. Like the Kardashians, as a reality TV show.
Hedvig: The Kardashians, yes, they are also skräpkultur.
Daniel: Are the Kardashians trash? I don’t mean like trash in a people sense. Are they…
Hedvig: [laughs]
Ben: Oh, we’re about to start such a huge Twitter feud. Oh, this is going to get so ugly, you guys.
Daniel: Are they trash culture?
Ben: Kanye West is going to be @ing you directly, Daniel. I hope you’re prepared for it.
Daniel: I can’t wait. Gosh, look at the time.
Ben: Yeah. [laughs]
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: I think we need to bring this to a close, but VANILLA, ECO-DUCT and SKRÄPKULTUR: our Words of the Week. Hedvig, since you brought us that word, I think you’ve got to give us an example.
Hedvig: Oh, okay. Now, we’re going to listen to an oldie that maybe isn’t skräpkultur anymore, but probably is. This is Carola Häggkvist with Tommy tycker om mig.
Daniel: What does that mean?
Hedvig: It means Tommy likes me.
Daniel: Okay.
Ben: Aww.
Daniel: So, if you want to get us a message about anything, get me in the studio 9260-9210.
Ben: You can drop him an email, talkthetalk@rtrfm.com.au.
Hedvig: And you can also hit us up on social media. We are @talkpod on Twitter and Talk The Talk Podcast on everything else.
[music]
Daniel: Carola with Tommy tycker om mig, a bit of Swedish skräpkultur, thanks to Hedvig. I was going to see that one through to the bitter end. I just wanted to know and I didn’t fade that out. And in fact, the longer it went, the kind of the more on board I got. Maybe that’s one of the things about skräpkultur. Martin emailed and said, “Ah, ich liebe Blümchen,” which apparently according to Google Translate means “I love Blümchen.” No, you love Blümchen. I’m not sure. Everyone, just send me Swedish comments and I’ll try to read them to the best of my ability, but if they turn out to be dirty, then the deal’s off.
Robin on Facebook listened to me and Hedvig talking about shouting around and why they call it shouting, says, “Shouting around started in pubs when the noise from loud talking was too high for normal chat. My round was the call from [unintelligible [00:49:00] for a short time, [unintelligible 00:49:04] he had to shout to be heard, so he shouted a round.” I think that sounds as plausible as anything that I found while I was trying to research the origins of this.
I did notice one thing though. In 1855, we start seeing, for example, in Oxford ‘to shout for.’ “You shouted nobblers round for all hands, that’s all right; it’s no more than fair and square now for the boys to shout for you.” It was always to shout around for someone or to SHOUT FOR someone. But by the time we get to about 1916, then we start to see the ‘for’ getting dropped and people talking about whose turn it was to shout, which I thought was kind of interesting there.
Let’s see. What’s going on next week? Next week, we are having a Mailbag. That means that you should get any questions to us. It’s just about full, but I think if I shake it a little bit there’s time for a few more questions to fit in. So, get those to us in all the regular ways.
This month is Radio Love Month for RTRFM. We’re trying to get a thousand people to show us some love by donating at rtrfm.com.au. We love RTRFM. There’s no other place. Is there that would let us do an entire show on language for an entire hour? So, we really are grateful and we would love for you to donate. I did. Radio Love Month, it’s rtrfm.com.au.
Big thanks also to, new this time, Carolin, Chris, dcctor woh, Erasmus, Lyssa, Nicki, Termy, Ann, Elías, Helen, Jack, Matt, Michael, and Sabrina, our special friends who give us so much encouragement. And you encourage us too. Thank you so much for listening. Stay listening to Mark Neal, Out to Lunch. And until next time, keep talking.
[music]
Ben: Talk the Talk is an RTRFM podcast. RTRFM is an independent community radio station that relies on listeners for support. You can become a subscriber at rtrfm.com.au/subscribe.
Hedvig: If you like Talk the Talk and want to help promote good language science podcasting, you can become a patron at patreon.com/talkthetalk. You can also leave us a review on iTunes, Facebook, or your podcast of choice, or tell some friends about us. All those things will help people find us.
Daniel: Our theme is by Ah Trees and you can find them on Facebook and Bandcamp. And you can find us on Twitter @talkpod. We are talkthetalkpodcast on Facebook and Instagram. We’re on Mastodon, and you can find out about all our episodes on our website, talkthetalkpodcast.com.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
