Juxtapose. Obfuscate. And of course, absquatulate.
All these words appear in a new dictionary for young people. It’s The Dictionary of Difficult Words, and we’re talking to the author, lexicographer Jane Solomon.
Activate your sesquipedalian proclivities 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
Daniel has yet another test for Teri: will she know all the words from The Dictionary of Difficult Words? Daniel certainly doesn’t.
Also at https://www.patreon.com/posts/27182091
Indigenous Australian Word of the Week (IA-WoW): arri-m-kuk-yi-durnde
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 arri-m-kuk-yi-durnde meaning “we are coming back with the fish” in Bininj Kunwok. It comes to us from the research of friend of the show Alexandra Marley, who recorded Bininj Kunwok speaker Janice Nalorlman saying this phrase.
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.
Cutting Room Floor
More dictionary fun. How did Jane Solomon learn the meaning of peckish? And is it gondola, or gondola?
Also at https://www.patreon.com/posts/27210824
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Show notes
Apple brings back the peach butt emoji | TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/15/apple-brings-back-the-peach-butt-emoji/
No, someone hasn’t cracked the code of the mysterious Voynich manuscript [Updated] | Ars Technica
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/05/no-someone-hasnt-cracked-the-code-of-the-mysterious-voynich-manuscript/
Dr Claire Hardaker: Has the Voynich Manuscript Been Solved? No, but Here’s What We Know – History Extra
https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/has-voynich-manuscript-code-solved-cracked-no-peer-review-process/
Language Log | Voynich code cracked?
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=42749
University backtracks on disputed Voynich manuscript theory | Science | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/may/17/university-backtracks-on-disputed-voynich-manuscript-theory
Cheshire reCAsT | Voynich Portal
https://voynichportal.com/2019/05/07/cheshire-recast/
Cheshire Reprised | Voynich Portal
https://voynichportal.com/2019/05/16/cheshire-reprised/
Latin, Hebrew … proto-Romance? New theory on Voynich manuscript | Science | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/may/16/latin-hebrew-proto-romance-new-theory-on-voynich-manuscript
Belgian monks resurrect 220-year-old beer after finding recipe | World news | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/21/belgian-monks-grimbergen-abbey-old-beer
Sami sounds in Eurovision 2019 | Joiking the northern lights
https://www.visitnorway.com/about/sami-people/sami-sound-in-eurovision-2019/
Dymocks – The Dictionary of Difficult Words by Jane Solomon, Louise Lockhart
https://www.dymocks.com.au/book/the-dictionary-of-difficult-words-by-jane-solomon-and-louise-lockhart-9781786038104
World Wide Words: Humdudgeon
http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-hum1.htm
What is a ha-ha? | National Trust
https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/what-is-a-ha-ha
The Significance of the Ha-ha | Farm and Ranch | Garden landscaping, Traditional landscape, Landscape walls
https://www.pinterest.com.au/pin/364439794831242762/
23 Best Ha-Ha images | Landscaping, Ha ha wall, Landscape architecture design
https://www.pinterest.com.au/trishtidball/ha-ha/
New Heinz condiment Mayochup has an unfortunate translation in Cree | National Post
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/new-heinz-condiment-mayochup-has-an-unfortunate-translation-in-cree
Kraft Heinz acknowledges unfortunate Cree translation of Mayochup | Montreal Gazette
https://montrealgazette.com/life/food/s-face-kraft-heinz-acknowledges-unexpected-cree-translation-of-mayochup/wcm/2e6cfa95-0526-46ed-8d43-b6dc389e9e19
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 theme]
Daniel: I am the grandiloquent Daniel Midgley.
Ben: I am the nucivorous Ben Ainslie.
Hedvig: I’m the frabjous Hedvig Skirgård.
Daniel: And this is Talk the Talk.
Hedvig: And I don’t know what that means.
Ben: You are wonderful, joyous and amazing. This word is made up by Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland.
Hedvig: Yes.
Daniel: Hmm, you picked a good word. Nice.
Hedvig: Oh, excellent. Very pleased. Well, yes, obviously know.
Daniel: Why the adjectives you ask? That is because we have a special guest this time, and it is Jane Solomon, lexicographer, and author of a new dictionary for children, The Dictionary of Difficult Words. Hello, Jane.
Jane: Hi.
Daniel: Great to have you on the show.
Ben: I know we’re supposed to wait until the end to just give a shameless plug to the thing that guest has made. But I just want to say straight out of the gate that everyone should immediately go when they can and buy this book, because it’s so cool. I’m looking at it now and I want it, I want it bad in my life. I want to read it to my son. I want to read it to myself. It’s so cool.
Daniel: Ben, we do that later.
Hedvig: It’s very, very good.
Ben: Argh, fine, fine, fine.
Jane: But thank you. I’m glad you were impatient to tell people to buy my book.
[laughter]
Ben: It’s delightful. I’m looking for a word from the book that encapsulates my feelings about the book. I’m not there yet. Hopefully, I will be by the end of the show.
Hedvig: Is it frabjous?
Daniel: Frabjous goes pretty far.
Hedvig: Yeah. I mean I just learned it. [laughs] I have no idea.
Daniel: Jane, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Jane: My name is Jane Solomon. As you already covered, I just wrote a children’s book called The Dictionary of Difficult Words. It’s really more like a children’s book for adults. Well, I wrote it with adults in mind, but kids can enjoy it if they want to and if they must, or if the adults in their lives need an excuse to buy a children’s book. I also work at Dictionary.com. I’m a lexicographer there. I think about words all the time. And then, I’d say the last qualification I’ll bring up is that I think a lot about emoji. I’m on the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee.
Ben: Wow.
Daniel: What does that mean? Is that when you decide what goes in?
Jane: I go to meetings where we review proposals that people, just members of the public, anyone who wants to submits for review, that will possibly end up on emoji keyboards in future. I’m in that small group, and I think about these proposals.
Daniel: Holy crap. Can you give us any insider view?
Hedvig: Guys, huddle. We need to huddle together, we three. What are we going to do? This is immense power.
[laughter]
Hedvig: I know.
Ben: I think, Hedvig, you feel like you have just secured the influence of the Hand of the King. But really what’s happened is a very important and famous person has walked near us, not necessarily like…
[laughter]
Daniel: With us.
Hedvig: No, she has to do everything I say. [chuckles]
Daniel: I’m just curious. What’s one that you the team has rejected out of hand, like any just bad ones?
Jane: [chuckles] Okay.
Ben: I’m going to go straight to sex stuff again.
Jane: Yeah, this is going to be a sex thing. I think it was a joke, I’m almost certain it was a joke, but I’m not completely certain. Someone submitted a proposal to have skin tone modifiers added to the eggplant emoji.
[laughter]
Jane: We all laughed a little bit. I’m pretty sure it was a joke. I’m so sorry to the person who earnestly submitted it if it wasn’t a joke, because it made my day.
[laughter]
Hedvig: That’s such a good… [crosstalk]
Jane: What a strange thing to spend time on.
Hedvig: Did you ever get the same request for peach?
Jane: I haven’t seen a request like that for peach, but I only joined in 2017, and peach was regularly being used to refer to butts before then. So, I’m not sure. I hadn’t heard of it. I know that when… I think, it was Apple changed their peach emoji to not have that cleft in it, so it looked a lot less butt-like.
Daniel: Butty.
Jane: But it turned that part away.
Hedvig: Buzzkills.
Jane: People were very upset.
Ben: Well, because how dare you, Apple?
Jane: Yeah, how dare you?
Ben: Police my-
Daniel: Police other fruit.
Ben: -image speak.
[chuckles]
Jane: It gets really complicated because maybe Apple wants the apple to be exciting representation of sex. I’m pretty sure that’s not what it is.
Hedvig: Of a butt?
Daniel: [laughs]
Jane: But anyway, Apple restored the more butt-like peach design to their emoji set, and people rejoiced.
[chuckles]
Ben: [crosstalk] -recitation of the tidal wave of unhappiness from horndogs, they capitulated.
Jane: [laughs]
Daniel: Thank goodness.
Jane: Yeah, this is hilarious because I thought I was going to be like, “Hey, I just wrote a children’s book and now we’re talking about sexual emoji.”
Hedvig: [laughs]
Jane: I do both.
Daniel: [laughs]
Jane: There’s a lot going on in my interests. It covers everything.
Hedvig: Oh, my god. Yeah.
Daniel: Well, it’s great to have you. Thanks for being on the show. And let’s get to the news. First story we’ve got is about the Voynich manuscript again.
Ben: Ah.
Daniel: You might have read that this mysterious book has been solved, deciphered, but not so fast.
Ben: I feel every couple of years, we have this story. A new bit of the Voynich manuscript has been solved, which journalists, god bless their ever…
Daniel: Incredulous.
Ben: Incredulous socks have gone, “It’s solved. It’s done. It’s fixed.”
Daniel: Yeah. It was this time. What is the Voynich Manuscript? Anyone? Anyone?
Ben: Okay, so here’s Ben Ainslie is nonlinguistic take. The Voynich manuscript is the hallucinogenic fever dream of a dude who clearly tripped out sometime many hundreds of years ago and made essentially what amounts, I think, to like a… Is it like a beast diary for a fantasy world? Or am I confusing it with another insane text?
Hedvig: What? Is it?
Daniel: [chuckles] No, I think that’s about…
Hedvig: I’m not an Indo-Europeanist. I feel people who are more into European languages are totally on top of this. It went past me and then every now and then, it comes up in the news, and I get a bit confused.
Ben: Was I accurate?
Daniel: Yeah, that’s pretty good.
Jane: But it’s not just beasts. There’s a lot of like naked ladies bathing.
Daniel: Yep, and plants and stars.
Ben: Back to the sex stuff.
Daniel: And words that no one can read in a mysterious script. It dates to about the 1400s. It was discovered about 100 years ago, and ever since then, people have been trying to crack this thing. The latest effort is from Gerard Cheshire, a University of Bristol academic, put out a paper in the journal, Romance Studies. He claims to have cracked it in two weeks using “A combination of lateral thinking and ingenuity.” What a guy, huh?
Hedvig: [chuckles]
Ben: Oh, man. What a humble flex that was.
[laughter]
Daniel: He claims that it’s written in Proto-Romance, and it’s a therapeutic reference book composed by nuns.
Hedvig: Why has it got naked ladies in it if it’s by nuns?
Daniel: Bathing is very salubrious.
Hedvig: Oh. This is going to be the entire episode, isn’t it?
Daniel: Yes, it is.
Hedvig: Okay, cool.
Daniel: I’m going to ding a bell whenever…
Hedvig: [chuckles] That’s fair.
Daniel: …we get a word that comes from The Dictionary of Difficult Words, I’m going to ding.
[ding]
Jane: Oh, that’s great.
Daniel: He took this to the University of Bristol PR department where they dutifully ran with it. And then for the last week or so, all the news outlets have been saying, “Oh, it’s done. It’s done.” But then, medievalists and linguists said, “No, it’s not.” And now, the University of Bristol has backtracked. They put out a thing saying, ahem, “Yesterday, the University of Bristol published a story about research on the Voynich manuscript by an honorary research associate. This research was entirely the author’s own work and is not affiliated with the University of Bristol.” [chuckles] Yikes.
Jane: Oh.
Hedvig: What?
Ben: Whoa.
Jane: So harsh.
Hedvig: Brutal.
Jane: That’s really harsh.
Daniel: Tough but fair. So, why is this not a solve, anyone?
Hedvig: From what I understand from a very studious historical linguistics student at my department, it’s just not done vigorously enough. It’s sort of haphazardly, sometimes dividing words and sometimes… not being consistent is what I understood. Is that sort of it?
Daniel: Yeah, he translates words, but only if you [chuckles] reshuffle the spaces between them. One of the things about the Voynich manuscript is that it doesn’t seem to have vowels. The only letters that look common enough to be vowels don’t even appear in some words. This thing might not have vowels. If this were really proto-romance, which I don’t even know what that is. I mean, what is it like Vulgar Latin? Vulgar Latin, a couple 100 years later? We don’t have any texts and proto-romance. Where did they get this from? But if it is in something like Latin, then we should expect it to have a lot of the letter “u” because Latin does, whatever that is in the text. But we just don’t see that, and his translation is gibberish. Proto-romance is just such a weird thing to say that you have. There’s just so many weird things here.
Jane: Do you think that the writer of it wanted it to be deciphered? Is it in a code, or is it intentionally indecipherable or was this a lost script that people actually used at some point, we just don’t have any other evidence of it?
Daniel: Those are all good possibilities. Another possibility is that it might be a fake book that he wanted somebody… There are two authors, apparently, there it seems to have handwriting into different styles. But maybe they wanted someone to think that they had the secret knowledge and so give me lots of money.
Ben and Hedvig: Oh.
Ben: A grifter. That’s a fun option.
Daniel: I think that’s possible. I mean…
Hedvig: Is it possible that they used to be lots of books in this variety of between Latin and the modern romance languages, and it just happens that this is the only one that survived?
Jane: There’s a lot of unknowns.
Daniel: There’s a lot going on here.
Ben: That strikes me is pretty unlikely though, given how many rules this thing seems to break about how language is just baseline function.
Daniel: And as far as this translation goes, it’s just gibberish. It seems to be bunches of words that don’t relate to each other. Sometimes, he’s even translated the same strings of characters to mean entirely different things, which I know, word sense ambiguity is a thing. But, hmm.
Ben: My question to you, Daniel, is do you think that this gentleman was being rambunctious or rapscallion?
[ding]
[ding]
[laughter]
Hedvig: Or conniving.
[ding]
Daniel: Perhaps a little of all of those. Lisa Fagin Davis, the Executive Director of the Medieval Academy of America tweeted, “Sorry, folks, ‘proto-romance language’ is not a thing. This is just more aspirational, circular, self-fulfilling nonsense.” I think there are a few things in science journalism that we can say for sure. Number one, sign language gloves don’t work. Number two, animals are not talking to you in language. And three, the Voynich manuscript has not been deciphered. At this stage, I think anybody who claims to have cracked it is automatically a crank. That’s it.
Ben: [chuckles] There we go.
Hedvig: [chuckles]
Daniel: Boom.
Ben: You heard it here first, folks.
Hedvig: Well, I’ve got some… the Belgians are very good at making beer, and they’re very known for associating monks and cloisters with making beer. And there’s been a 220-year-old recipe for beer that has been translated and made again. So, we have something real from the past.
Ben: I have heard a number of stories about things like this. Like people finding old absinthe recipes, and people finding old wine recipes, or recreating wine from the Roman era and stuff. Every single story-
Hedvig: Yeah, it’s delightful.
Ben: -I read, usually ends like an American sitcom, where… that scene from Parks and Rec where Leslie Knope is recovering from something and she’s got a waffle in her hand. She’s like, “Ah, let’s try it in the chicken soup.” And then she dips it in a chicken soup. She’s like, “No, no. I’ve made a wrong turn here. This is bad.”
[laughter]
Ben: Every story I’ve seen, people try it and then they’re just like, “Oh. Okay, so what the Romans drink tasted like bottom. Okay. That’s awful.”
[laughter]
Hedvig: Unfortunately, Ben, you’re kind of right.
Daniel: Everything’s rubbish.
Jane: Oh, [crosstalk] that was made.
Hedvig: Yeah. So, the monks at the Grimbergen, what they’ve done is they’ve gotten a bunch of volunteers together… And it wasn’t undecipherable. It was just old Latin and old Dutch. But they got a bunch of volunteers and they translated these old recipes. They made the beer and they found it to be kind of bland. Not bad tasting, but just not interesting. They said, “Oh, well, we can’t really market this to a modern audience, because they won’t really find it appealing enough.” So, they’ve just incorporated elements of it into a new beer.
Ben: I don’t know if that’s true, because if you go back to like my dad’s generation, the era of Budweisers and Victoria Bitters and stuff, beer was very bland for a very long time.
Hedvig: Yeah. They aren’t so much anymore and Grimbergen is like a cool beer brand, who wants to be cool.
Ben: Right, they need to be hip.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Jane: Well, people used to drink beer instead of water.
Hedvig: Yeah, exactly. In large parts of Europe, drinking just plain water from the stream wasn’t necessarily clean enough, and you might get various illnesses.
Ben: Right. That’s how you get cholera and die.
Hedvig: So, everyone would just constantly drink low-alcohol beer, or even high-alcohol beer. [chuckles]
Jane: It’s a completely different use case for drinking alcohol than we have today.
Hedvig: Yeah, exactly. So, it being bland makes sense.
Daniel: If it tastes bland, that’s one thing, but how is it olfactorially?
[ding]
[laughter]
Ben: Oh, that was cheap.
Daniel: Okay, fine.
Ben: I want it noted that rapscallion and whatever my other one was very on point.
Daniel: Ben’s feeling pugnacious. Okay.
[ding]
Ben: There we go. That’s better. I’ll allow it.
Daniel: Well, now it’s time for our weekly segment, the Indigenous Australian Word of the Week. We want to do this segment so that we can highlight the great things about Australian languages, but we also want to make sure that we do it in a way that highlights the contributions and the identities of speakers of these languages just so that it’s not us talking about them amongst ourselves. To help us, we have Alexandra Marley. Alex, thanks for joining us.
Alex: Hi. It’s great to be here.
Daniel: Tell us a bit about yourself.
Alex: Well, I am a linguist at the ANU. I’m doing my PhD. I’ve been working with an indigenous community up in the Northern Territory, and in Park Kakadu and West Arnhem Land. I’ve been working with them, looking at how their language is changing.
Daniel: Well, yeah, thanks so much for coming to help us out.
Hedvig: We really appreciate having someone who knows about Australian languages coming in helping out. Throughout this year, we’re also going to have some speakers come on and talk about words. We’re also going to try and highlight resources because there’s a lot of resources out there if you want to learn about an indigenous Australian language. And this week, Alex has brought us a word from her research.
Alex: True. So, because the theme of this week was difficult words, I thought we’d have a look at what it means to have a difficult word in a language. Bininj Kunwok, which is the language that I work on, it’s also called Kunwinjku or Mayali. It has very, very long words, which we’re going to hear one of them. This particular we’re listening to was spoken by a woman who I call great grandmother, although she’s only about 50 something. Her name is Janice Nalorlman, and she’s from a small outstation called Mamardawerre, which has been Gunbalanya and Maningrida. This word that we’re going to listen to, she essentially has what we would consider a whole sentence in English. And she says, “Arri-m-kuk-yi-durnde.”
Daniel: Let’s listen to that now.
Janice: Arri-m-kuk-yi-durnde. Arri-m-kuk-yi-durnde.
Daniel: Arri-m-kuk-yi-durnde.
Alex: [laughs]
Hedvig: It’s a lot of consonants in one word, but we’re just trying our best.
Alex: It is.
Daniel: Can you break this down for us?
Alex: Oh, sure can. All these elements which in English, for example, are separate words. In this particular language, they all just mash together. They all connect like Lego bits into one word. This is why you can have a whole sentence in English become a whole single word in a polysynthetic language like Bininj Kunwok.
Hedvig: Wow.
Daniel: We’ve got arri-m-kuk-yi-durnde. What does all that mean?
Alex: It basically means something like, “We come back with fish.”
Daniel: We come back with the fish. Okay.
Hedvig: So, we’ve gone fishing and we’ve come back with the fish.
Alex: That’s right.
Daniel: Break that down for me. It’s got at least five pieces. Let me just go one by one. So, the first bit is ‘arri,’ which means?
Alex: That’s a pronoun that’s telling us who’s doing the verb.
Daniel: That’s “we.”
Alex: We, but it’s a little bit more complicated than we have in English, because in Bininj Kunwok, they like to distinguish between we inclusive and we exclusive. In this case, she’s saying exclusive. That means ‘we,’ but not ‘you.’
Daniel: Oh, so if I said we exclusive, that would mean me and Hedvig but not you, Alex. But if I said, we inclusive, like English had we inclusive, then it could be all of us.
Alex: Exactly. I think really lots and lots of languages have this. I really think English needs it, because so many times I need to emphasise that, “We’re going to the pub, and you’re not.”
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: You’re not coming. [laughs] We’ve had this on our show earlier when we had the episode about what English should add.
Daniel: Yes, things to make English way cooler.
Hedvig: And we got a lot of listeners writing in about adding inclusive/exclusive. I think both Daniel and I also felt like it would be a great addition.
Daniel: It would. So, that’s the first bit, we still got four more. There’s ‘m.’
Alex: ‘m,’ yes. There’s just a tiny little segment, that’s just a little nasal tap in there. In this case, it’s modifying the verb and it’s saying that the verb is towards. This is outback.
Daniel: Okay, and then the ‘kuk’ part?
Alex: ‘kuk.’ This is a complicated one. I had some trouble trying to figure out how to best gloss this, but basically this means body.
Daniel: Body.
Hedvig: Oh, okay.
Alex: Yeah, but when you use it in this context, it means like a bunch of dead things. [laughs]
Daniel: Yeah, okay, the fish.
Hedvig: That’s fine.
Alex: That’s right, because they’re dead, because they’re now meat, they’re not animals anymore, you can just use this ‘kuk’ form.
Daniel: And the ‘yi,’ that’s part number four ‘yi.’
Alex: ‘yi,’ now this is basically what we would use as a preposition in English ‘with.’
Ben: So far, we’ve got ‘we’ ‘towards’ a bunch of dead animals, bodies, and ‘with’ and then we’ve got the final bit.
Alex: Which is the verb. This is the important…[crosstalk] We’ve got this word ‘durnde.’ This means to go back, and it’s in a nonpast form.
Daniel: Okay, so you put it all together and you’ve got ‘arri-m-kuk-yi-durnde.’
Alex: Right. Yeah. Excellent. [laughs]
Hedvig: You’re getting really good at this, Daniel.
Daniel: Thank you.
Hedvig: Yeah. Now that we’ve been through it, it sounds like it’s a lot of parts and things. But of course, if you’re a speaker of a language like this, it’s no biggie. That’s how you say this thing that you want to say, right?
Alex: Yeah, that’s right. I was thinking about this notion of difficult words, and what constitutes a word in some languages, is not necessarily the case in other languages. In English, our words, they might not be that long, although we do have some long ones. Whereas in something like a polysynthetic language, what is the word actually, it’s got so many parts to it, and it’s actually part of the whole sentence. It’s the whole phrase.
Daniel: Yeah, I thought you were just giving us the word for a butterfly or something.
Alex: No.
Hedvig: [chuckles] Okay, thank you so much, Alex, for coming and helping us tease that Kunwinjku word apart. Thank you very much to our speaker, Janice Nalorlman, for letting us listen to her speaking.
Ben: Well, now that we have been thoroughly schooled in one of the languages that existed long before the whities arrived, shall we take a track so we can ruminate on that and maybe think of some questions you might want to ask us about indigenous words that we can put to all of these wonderful speakers of those words. If you want to get in touch with us, you can always drop us a line, you can email us talkthetalk@rtrfm.com.au.
Daniel: You can get me in the studio right now, 9260-9210.
Hedvig: And you can also hit us up on all the social media. We are @talkpod on Twitter, and on everything else we are @talkthetalkpodcast.
Ben: But now let’s take a track.
Daniel: This one’s going to be What About Fish by Yomi Ship on RTRFM 92.1
Ben: You are listening to Talk the Talk, RTRFM’s weekly exploration of matters linguistic, and we, and by ‘we’ I mean I, very excited this week because we have a very cool person on the show with us. Her name is Jane Solomon. She has written a truly delectable kind of children’s, kind of not book called The Dictionary of Difficult Words. I have it in front of me. I love it. I want it. I want it all up in my stuff. Jane, welcome to Talk the Talk.
Jane: Thanks for having me.
Daniel: You’re now joining our second-timers club. Woo.
Jane: Oh, yeah. It’s an honor.
Daniel: I have been reading The Dictionary of Difficult Words with Ms. Two-and-a-half, the young one that I have. Even at this age, it is rather absorbing.
Jane: [chuckles] When I was first given the project, because this is a project that came to me. I didn’t come up with the title or the overarching concept, the publishers at Quarto Books came to me and said, “We want to put out a title called ‘The Dictionary of Difficult Words’, and we need a lexicographer to write it.” I asked them how they found me. They said they googled “cool dictionary editors”.
[laughter]
Jane: Cool American dictionary editors, lexicographer. [chuckles] That’s how they found me.
Ben: Man.
Jane: Great. I have a wonderful SEO, I’m very happy for that. I got on the phone with the publisher and the editor later that week. The publisher had told me, “When I was younger, I won a spelling bee on the word…” I think she won the spelling bee on the word, “photosynthesis.” She was super excited about it. She told all the adults she knew, everyone she knew that the meaning of the word, how to spell it, and she wanted to commission a book that would bring that joy of language-
Hedvig: Aww.
Jane: -especially when you’re really young and learning a new word. Photosynthesis is not actually in the book, because we decided to go harder. On that first call, I was like, “I love the word ‘photosynthesis’. I think that’s really good. I think that should be the easiest level for it in the book.” I threw out the word “moonbow,” which is a rainbow, essentially, that appears at night from refracted light of the moon. I don’t use the word ‘refracted’ in the actual book. They both the publisher and the editor were really excited about that word. Then, I started working on the book.
Daniel: I have to ask here, did you have any struggles with deciding what kinds of words to include? Because it’d be fun to fill an entire book with all the fancy words, like ‘absquatulate,’ to leave a place very quickly. But did you have to strike a balance between the words you thought it’d be fun and then the words you thought that young people might really need?
Jane: Well, I wanted to not make it a totally useless book. [chuckles] I wanted to put in words that the kids who are using it and who are reading it would actually encounter in their lives and be able to use and be familiar with when they heard them. There are three levels in the book. One level is like at, absquatulate, moonbow level where these are really rare words, you’re not likely to encounter them, unless you’re reading a really old book or very specialized resource about nature words, and natural phenomenon. That’s the top level. Then, there’s the middle level, which is words that adults would probably be familiar with, but maybe have a difficult time explaining to small children. Maybe ‘happenstance’ or ‘harbinger’ are in that category. I have the H page open right now, that’s why I’m giving you some Hs. And then, the third level is words that adults definitely know and will make them feel very, very good about themselves when they read the book.
Hedvig: [chuckles] Like naïve.
Ben: Or nocturnal.
Jane: Sure.
Hedvig: Nepotism.
Jane: Arid. These are very common words, and those are words that kids could start using right away. So, those are the three levels of the book. It’s really funny, because so that that third level, I heard from a friend yesterday, she had left the book around her house, and she happens to have two kids. One of them is eight. Then later, she was like eating food and she was like, “I’m savoring the taste of this food in my mouth.” My friend, her mom, was like, “Oh, that’s a really good word. Where did you learn that word?” And then, she said, “Your friend’s book.” Well, savor is not in my book. [chuckles]
Ben: Oh, that’s [crosstalk] I was just thinking.
Daniel: [crosstalk]
Jane: I think that it’s encouraging kids to use these big words or these more difficult words, because that’s a pretty good word for an eight-year-old, that’s more advanced than many eight-year-olds in their vocabulary. So, it’s encouraging people to use it, and then they forget what’s actually in here because it doesn’t have all the words. It only has about 400 words. It’s just supposed to be the good parts, the exciting parts of the dictionary.
Ben: It’s a really cheap question, but which word didn’t make it into the dictionary-
Daniel: That was my question. [chuckles]
Ben: -that you were pretty gutted about?
Jane: Let’s see. The word ‘bane’ is not in the book and that was on my list.
Hedvig: Oh. As in, “He is dragons’ bane?”
Jane: Yeah, or the bane of someone’s existence. That’s not in the book. The note for my editor is, “This seems a little negative.” We wanted to balance the tone of the book and have a lot of whimsy and wonder in the book. And then, there are some words like ‘cockalorum,’ which is a pretty negative word, but we didn’t want too many of those.
Ben: But it’s funny as well. It’s like bane is a very sort of simple and succinct word, whereas cockalorum is hilarious in just how it’s constructed.
Jane: ‘Ghastly,’ I think that was probably because it was negative. ‘Gaffe.’ I’m in the G section now. ‘humdudgeon,’ it was cut because I had “humdinger” and “humdrum.” So, it was too similar. I didn’t want so many ‘hum’ words.
Hedvig: What is it?
Daniel: What is a humdudgeon?
Ben: Ooh, yay, let’s play the game where we guess, “I think it’s a dungeon where people are subjected to humming.”
Jane: Do you want me to spell it for you first?
Hedvig: Yes.
Jane: H-U-M-D-U-D-G-E-O-N is the spelling I have on my list, but I could have misspelled it when I…[crosstalk]
Ben: Curmudgeon, but humdudgeon.
Daniel: I am guessing that a humdudgeon is a bad mood, but not a really bad mood. Just kind of a bad mood.
Ben: Or like “Bah! Humbug!”
Daniel: But also, you’re in highdudgeon. This would be lowdudgeon.
Ben: [chuckles]
Hedvig: “Bah! Humbug!” is usually… hmm.
Jane: I wonder if that’s related to highdudgeon?
Hedvig: Ah, I think it’s going to be something positive, but like violent. I think I’m very influenced by humdinger, which has a really good punch.
Ben: I’ve got the answer.
Jane: Okay.
Daniel: I do too.
Ben: A Scots word of 18th century vintage, it has appeared infrequently, but is usually used to refer to a depressed state being down in the hypochondriac dumps.
Daniel: Thank you. I think [crosstalk] was the closest.
Jane: That’s a little bit negative for a kids’ book that’s supposed to be full of whimsy.
Hedvig: [crosstalk] -little bit just.
Ben: Had it been a dungeon of humming, I’m sure it would have made it in.
Jane: Yeah, maybe that’s a little bit too complicated to pick apart in a children’s dictionary that you really don’t have that much space for each word, you really are only showing one definition. You’re not showing etymologies. So, it’s really the barebones that appears in this dictionary. And that’s intentional because we want it to be the kind of dictionary that anyone could sit down and read and learn from and be excited about once you get excited about words, and you go off to all the other dictionaries that exist, and you could get more details. We’re doing right now for these words I haven’t put in the book.
[chuckles]
Daniel: I really like the definitions you’ve written. I’m looking at the one for happenstance. If something occurs by happenstance, it’s a coincidence. And there’s no real reason why it happened. They all just seem really nice and simple like that, and I like that.
Ben: I liked penultimate. When someone uses the word ‘penultimate,’ they’re talking about the second to last thing in a list or series. It’s simple, but it’s not dumb. It’s not like dumbing it so far down that you actually have to kind of add things into getting a kid to understand it or anything like that. It walks a very wonderfully fine line between simple and clear.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: How is the job of writing a definition for kids different further task of writing definitions for older people?
Jane: Well, I want to add something to that question, which is how is it reading a definition for kids that’s intended to be read aloud different from reading definitions for older people who are not going to be reading it out loud. For every definition, I read them out loud to test them. I don’t have any seven-year-olds floating around my apartment, unfortunately. At the time, he was three and a half years old, now he’s four, my nephew. I tested a couple of the scarier things on him and it gave him nightmares. I was like, “Well, he’s young for this book.” Like spaghettification, that could lead to some existential dread.
Daniel: That’s pretty phantasmagoric.
[ding]
Jane: Yeah, [chuckles] for sure. Then, he became really interested and invested in the ideas of black holes and how does someone get out of a black hole. Which I think a kid who’s a little bit older can handle, but maybe don’t read spaghettification to your two-year-old.
Daniel: Okay.
[chuckles]
Daniel: I won’t. I wasn’t going to. Well, look, before we get too ramfeezled, I think we better take a break and listen to a track.
Ben: Ding.
[ding]
Daniel: Thank you. We’re talking to Jane Solomon, author of The Dictionary of Difficult Words. Jane, do you have a track that you’d like to play, something kind of old indie, interesting?
Jane: Oh, let me think I actually have a playlist called “Dictionary” that I have a bunch of word-related songs on it.
Daniel: What? Please.
Jane: So, let me look at that.
Ben: I can hear Daniel breathing heavily.
Jane: Okay. Let me tell you some of the songs on it. I would love to hear Metaphor by Sparks.
Daniel: RTRFM 92.1.
Ben: Jane got mad indie game up in this.
Daniel: I’ll say.
Jane: I’m not just a lexicographer. I’m a cool American Dictionary Editor Lexicographer.
[laughter]
Daniel: Apparently.
Ben: This week on Talk the Talk, we have Jane Solomon on the show. She has written a truly and I really wish I had, I’m going to use the word pithy.
[ding]
Ben: A truly pithy dictionary of wonderful words that you could read to kids or you could just read by yourself. Either way, it’s sick.
Daniel: Can I just also say your Illustrator, Louise Lockhart has done a fantastic job on this. It’s lavishly and gorgeously illustrated.
Hedvig: I was going to say the same thing. The illustrations are just amazing.
Jane: Oh, yeah. Louise Lockhart is such a great illustrator and artist, and I wasn’t aware of her work until my publisher paired us up. Actually, I did not realise this but for many children’s books, the writer and the illustrator don’t really directly contact each other. All my notes that I had, I sent through my editor and it was a huge surprise anytime I got pages back with illustrations, and so exciting because I’ve never been in a place where people have been illustrating words that I was writing, and it feels so much more real when you see the illustrations because I was working just like a blank Google Doc that I was like, “Okay, I hope this is going to be good. I don’t know how good these definitions are. We’ll have to see what happens.” And then once I got back the illustrations, I’d get them back a few letters at a time, I was thinking, “Okay, people beyond my mom will buy this, hopefully.”
[chuckles]
Ben: Can we all name our favourite illustration? Because I’ve got one.
Daniel: Looking.
Hedvig: Okay, what’s yours?
Ben: Mine, it’s such a minor one. It’s tucked away towards the end of the book, and it’s one of the minor illustrations as in one of the little thumbnails. But it’s the musk ox for qiviut. It’s under Q.
Jane: That’s a good one.
Ben: It’s just a tiny little cute musk ox, and I love him.
Daniel: He’s standing on a mountain.
Ben: But yeah, he’s just so cute.
Jane: Yeah, there’s a lot of cuteness.
Daniel: I like the onomatopoeia ones where all the animals are saying the things that they say, like, “Meow,” and there’s a goose with a horn, honk. Oh! My favourite illustration is the one of you, Jane.
Ben: Where is Jane?
Jane: [chuckles]
Daniel: You’re there under lexicographer. If you want a picture of Jane, she’s under L.
Jane: Yeah, maybe you don’t know what I look like.
Daniel: [laughs]
Jane: I don’t actually own a typewriter. I did not write this book on a typewriter. I want that to be clear. But about that, I love that illustration. I did not know that they were going to put me in the book. The first version of this illustration I got back had the wrong glasses. I felt like such a diva, but I went back to my editor and I said, “Can you can you update the glasses to my current pair?” Because I basically don’t age. I look the same. I look like I’m in my early 20s now even though I’m in my mid-30s. So, it’s like the only way people can tell my age is through my changing eyewear.
[laughter]
Jane: Then, she was like, “That’s totally fine.” That’s another weird flex of mine.
Daniel: No, that’s you maintaining the personal brand. Like, how do you think people found you on Google? This is you constructing the character that is Jane Solomon.
Jane: But my editor was so nice about it. She was like, “I have glasses. I totally understand.” I definitely asked a few of my friends. “Am I really… is this messed up?”
Daniel: “Am I difficult?”
[chuckles]
Jane: “Am I difficult to work with?”
Hedvig: No, I wear glasses too. I totally know what you mean.
Jane: Yeah.
Hedvig: My favourite illustration was the one that’s a bit of a narrative, the wanderlust. There’s a little tiger that goes on adventure under W.
Jane: Yeah, that’s an Instagram influencer, for sure.
Hedvig: Yeah. I just liked that there was chronology. It had a sort of a story. I thought it was very cute.
Daniel: Wow. Likes martinis.
Hedvig: Yeah. It’s just a whole thing.
Ben: Oh, there we go.
Jane: And has at least two bathing suits.
Hedvig: Doesn’t everyone?
[laughter]
Daniel: With a hole for the tail, that’s cute, and climbs mountains nude.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Jane: Well, it was hot.
Hedvig: It’s a tiger.
Daniel: It’s a tiger.
Ben: Also, the tiger is wearing boots, the important item of clothing when mountaineering.
Daniel: Okay.
Jane: That’s not naked.
Hedvig: I’m also all for the Donald Duck narrative of putting on swimsuits, animals not being clothed, but then going in the water and putting on swimsuits. I love that idea. It’s just so good.
Jane: Maybe when the tiger is around-
Ben: People, yeah. Okay.
Jane: -other people, the tiger is modest. And then, when the tiger is out climbing this mountain that’s really far away from everyone…-
Ben: That’s actually pretty close to the Ben Ainslie approach, like naked most of the time, and then-
[laughter]
Ben: -you go out into the world, and it’s like, “Oh, no, I’ve got to wear pants because everyone will be like, ‘Ah, I can see your bits.’” So, I get that.
Jane: Okay. I didn’t realize that this was going to turn into a conversation about our fashion choices.
Daniel: It does. It always does.
Jane: But, there you go.
Daniel: Right now, the book is out and you’ve been doing the press rounds. I would like to know what questions people have asked you. Had there been any weird questions? Or do people have misconceptions about dictionaries? What’s the chatter?
Jane: Some of the interesting questions go into, what are dictionaries existentially? All the people talking right now, we grew up learning how to use physical dictionaries. Dictionaries were these books that were in alphabetical order. There was maybe one dictionary in our house or classroom, and that was the dictionary and we trusted it and we knew that’s where we are going to get all our answers. The relationship people have with dictionaries is really changing. Whereas, you would have this one dictionary that you would always go to before because dictionaries are expensive, now you find answers wherever you can get them. People are definitely a lot more source agnostic than they used to be. It might have been that you got a dictionary as a present for graduation or some big life event. And now, we look things up online or maybe we’re talking to voice assistants, and we’re asking what’s the definition of this?
So, there’s really different look-up habits and behaviors than there were before. People want the answers to meet them where they are. If I’m reading a book, and this is some sort of like digital reader, I want to have the dictionary or a dictionary or definitions embedded into that so I don’t have to leave that experience to find out what a word means, because I’m just not going to look it up otherwise. I’ll just say, “Okay, I think I get it from context.” So, I think that is really, really interesting. The thought that a lot of kids who are going to get this book, it’s going to be possibly their first time encountering a paper dictionary, encountering things organized in alphabetical order.
Hedvig: Oh, wow.
Daniel: Possibly their last.
Jane: [chuckles] Possibly. It’s a special experience. That’s why in the front of the book, I explain how to use this book. It says “How to read this book.” I explain you don’t have to read this book in order. You can read it backwards to front, or you can open up to a random page, put your finger down, and then read that.
Daniel: Has anybody said to you that they think that it would be good for kids, like some sort of moral corrective? Are there any language ideologies around this book?
Jane: Well, there’s a note at the back of the book, and it all goes back to the front and back matter about the word ‘they,’ and I use the word ‘they’ to refer to individuals and stuff, like one individual person, singular ‘they,’ which is a common use of ‘they’ that’s gone back 700 years. But there are also other reasons that you might want to use ‘they’ each refer to one individual person. If you don’t know a person’s gender, or if they tell you they want you to use ‘they’ to refer to them. This book uses “they.” I don’t think that the kids would notice it at all, it’s very common. I don’t even think that the parents who would object to that would notice it until they come to the note, but I wanted them to notice it and think about it. Then, also see that there’s 700 years of history there.
For an example, in a definition, I’ve opened up to the D page, for ‘dumbfounded.’ When someone is dumbfounded, they are so surprised by something that they don’t know what to do. Now, someone is historically for… as I was growing up, I was taught someone should be used with a singular pronoun. When someone is dumbfounded, he or she is so surprised by something that he or she doesn’t know what to do. But I think that that’s problematic.
Hedvig: Yeah, gets awkward.
Jane: It’s clunky read aloud, and then it also is exclusive. It’s not inclusive of someone who doesn’t relate to he or she as a pronoun, and wants to use a different pronoun. So, ‘they’ is a solution that sounds natural, but also, if you’re reading this book and you’re trans or nonbinary, or whatever gender identity, hopefully you don’t read this book and think this book is not for me. But I think ‘they’ is a great solution for this book. I really don’t think that anyone reading the definitions would notice it, but in the end, I just wanted people to just know that it was intentional, and it’s there for a reason.
Daniel: Yeah.
Hedvig: No, ‘they’ is very smooth way of doing it. Yeah.
Daniel: Yeah, we’re big fans of singular ‘they.’
Ben: Oh, yeah.
Jane: Yeah.
Daniel: I’ve got to say the book is a lot of fun. I’m reading it with my two-year-old, she enjoys the pictures, but we’re actually starting to use some of these words like “borborygmus,” which is defined as the rumbling sound that comes from someone’s stomach. And “yepsen.” A yepsen is the bowl shape two hands make when they’re kept together. So, I say, “Give me a yepsen of sand when we’re at the playground.”
Ben: Oh, my goodness.
[laughter]
Daniel: It’s a lot of fun.
Jane: It’s really useful word.
Daniel: The author is Jane Solomon. The book is The Dictionary of Difficult Words. It’s available from Quarto UK, online or all good bookstores. Hey, Jane, you want to hang out with us for Word of the Week?
Jane: Yeah, I’d love to.
Daniel: Okay, fantastic.
Ben: We best go to that and we need to get there with a track. What are we listening to?
Jane: The next track we’re going to listen to is Alphabet Aerobics.
Ben: By Blackalicious.
Daniel: On RTRFM 92.1.
Ben: It was a cooperative effort.
[laughter]
Daniel: Sure, it was.
Jane: Yeah, cooperative.
Ben: I’m not going to do a fancy-pantsy improv intro to Word of the Week this week because I feel we’ve got company. You know how when people come over your house, you got like fancy eating rules and stuff?
Daniel: Yes.
Ben: I feel like that’s happening.
Hedvig: Your uncles [crosstalk] do the same jokes.
Ben: I’m just going to go, hey, everyone. We’ve got Jane Solomon on the show. She’s great, and because she’s great, I’m not going to be me today. Welcome to Word of the Week.
Daniel: [chuckles] Jane Solomon is, of course lexicographer, works with Dictionary.com, author of The Dictionary Difficult Words. This is the part where we usually get words that are new, prominent, breaking, or just on our minds. And of course, because we have a real lexicographer, Jane, would you like to give us your Word of the Week?
Jane: This is actually not a word that’s new. It is a word that it just happens to be on my mind.
Ben: Jane, don’t worry. They never ever are.
[laughter]
Jane: This is a word that just happens to be on my mind. It’s in my book. It is such a strange word that I want to share it. It’s the word “ha-ha.”
Daniel: I saw that.
Ben: I’m so glad you mentioned this. I saw this as well, and I want it.
Daniel: I looked it up, and I thought, “What the heck is this? That’s not right.”
Hedvig: Wait, what? What’s going on? I’m out of the loop.
Jane: Shall I read my definition?
Daniel: Go for it.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Jane: I’ll read my definition. A ha-ha is a type of fence that is dug into the ground around a garden or park so it’s hard to see. This is so the gardener park looks larger than it is. It a sunken fence and it just makes a property look like it goes on past the horizon, and it’s not interrupted by an ugly fence. So that’s what a ha-ha is.
Daniel: That’s it.
Ben: Yeah, it’s the infinity pool of fences.
Jane: [chuckles] Yeah, except infinity pool is a very clear name for what an infinity pool is.
Ben: Yeah, probably.
Hedvig: Ha-ha doesn’t make any sense. It makes you think of hoo-ha, which is something else.
Jane: I can’t say the same.
Hedvig: Okay.
Daniel: I’ve had a hard time with this one until I started looking up the actual pictures. And yeah, it’s like you’ve got some green grass, and then it dips. On the other side of the dip, there’s a stone wall right there that shores up the wall. But there’s sheep and stuff, and so they’re down there. They don’t come up didn’t start nibbling your laundry, and that’s a ha-ha.
Ben: So, if you stand at the manor house and you look upon your fields, your lands, all you see is green grass. But if you stand away from the manor house and look back towards the manor house, you essentially see a fence, what amounts to a fence. It’s just like a trickery of design to give the rich people the illusion that they have a large open vista upon their doorstep.
Hedvig: It’s but like an asymmetrical ditch.
Ben: Yes.
Daniel: Yes.
Ben: That’s a really great way to describe it. An asymmetrical ditch.
Jane: That acts as a fence.
Daniel: And is it called a ha-ha because you don’t see it, and then you see it, and then you go, “Oh-oh, look at that. Ha-ha”
Jane: It comes from the exclamation of surprise, “Ha,” and it comes from French. So, yeah, it’s that sound of surprise when you realize that you’re about to fall into a ditch. It’s been around in English since the early 18th century.
Hedvig: Wow.
Ben: Yeah, for about as long as we’ve had giant-landed gentry manor houses.
Daniel: Yes.
Ben: We now look back on it through the lens of history and it seems like lovely and quite, but I just imagine at the time people talking about these things. If you were in the historical context of the time, god, it would just be the same kind of really annoying home reno barbecue talk that just plagues barbecues now.
[laughter]
Ben: It’s like, “Oh, yeah, mate, no, what you want to do right is you want to install a ha-ha because then that whole that fence just goes, you know. And then you can look out for as long as you want to. Oh, mate if you haven’t got yourself a ha-ha by the end of the year. I’m calling my mate, Dougie. He’s coming. He’s installing ha-ha. All right?”
[laughter]
Daniel: Let’s go to our last one. Heinz, of course, makes lots of condiments like tomato sauce or ketchup, barbecue sauce and mayonnaise. But now, they’ve blended two of them together ketchup and mayonnaise and created something that they’re calling, get ready, mayochup.
Ben: No-oh, that is bad.
Daniel: That’s a bad portmanteau, isn’t it?
Ben: That is bad.
Daniel: We need to put our heads together and do better.
Ben: It’s bad for two really important reasons. One, because as a person who is a devout mayo acolyte. I have mixed mail with many things to dip my chips/French fries in, and most of them are spectacular, but mayo and ketchup? Oh, not necessary.
Daniel: Really? Huh.
Hedvig: But people like it though. I mean, I don’t.
Ben: Not the thing that the world needs.
Hedvig: But you know that it’s a thing.
Ben: Yeah. It’s bad. This is just Ben Ainslie being like the world is wrong. So, we’re just going to do that for a second.
[laughter]
Jane: I don’t like ketchup or mayo either.
Hedvig: Oh.
Daniel: Wow.
Jane: If I were to be in a place, and the options were ketchup or mayo,I’d be like, “Do you have like honey mustard? Do you have like vinegar?”
Ben: Sorry, do you see these glasses all right or do you think [crosstalk] who eats mayo or ketchup?
Daniel: What are we calling this stuff? Ketchonnaise?
Hedvig: There’s a topic that I’d like to talk about in recent episodes, which is Hedvig’s favourite sleep casts. One of them is called Old Time Radio [crosstalk] and on it, wait. I have a link. On it, they run old ads, and they run ads for Del Monte Catsup, because ketchup in the 1950s also went by [crosstalk] Catsup.
Daniel: They said Catsup?
Hedvig: Or, Ketsoup[?] sometimes they say. Maybe we can do something instead of chup, because I think chup is the worst.
Ben: Mayosup still sounds bad. It sounds like supper, like a supper of mayo. Mayosup doesn’t work.
Daniel: Mayosoup is just even worse. Can’t go there.
Ben: Oh, yeah.
Daniel: Oh.
Hedvig: Why don’t we delete the ‘o’ as well, Maysup?
Ben: Oh, that’s better.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Jane: Well, I feel like you want it to be recognizable as the elements of the mixture of the condiment.
Hedvig: But then you have to say mayochup.
Ben: To get really linguistic for a second, like we have a bunch of portmanteaus with mayonnaise already. Why did they do it this way? Why not just like, tomatonaise or something?
Hedvig: Ketsonnaise.
Jane: Wait, what are the mayo portmanteaus?
Ben: Like dijonnaise and that sort of thing.
Jane: Oh, I’m actually not familiar with that because I don’t like mayo.
Daniel: What about tomayo?
Ben: Yeah, tomayo works.
Hedvig: Tomayo is good.
Jane: I’ve wrote down some ideas.
Daniel: Oh, please.
Jane: Some names. Ketcho.
Ben: Oh, Ketcho. I like Ketcho.
Jane: Ketchupo.
Daniel: Uh, no, that’s a cereal.
Jane: Maychup.
Hedvig: Yeah, maychup. I’m into maychup.
Ben: No. It sounds like a chop-chop.
Jane: Mayup.
Daniel: I think we need to workshop this.
Jane: because chup is might be bad, but up is great.
Hedvig: This is what happens when we invite a proper lexicographer to the segment.
Daniel: There’s a bit of news surrounding this about the Cree language in northern Ontario. It has an unexpected meaning.
Ben: Oh, really?
Daniel: This one isn’t for the kids.
Ben: Oh, yes. This is my kind of… [crosstalk]
Hedvig: This [crosstalk] is not for the kids.
Daniel: This is some information from Arden Ogg, Director of the Cree Literacy Network. Apparently around the community of Moose Factory in Northern Ontario, well, mayo sounds like the word mayi which means poop. I think that’s appropriate so far. Whereas chup sounds eye or sometimes face. So, mayochucp would be-
Hedvig: Poop face.
Daniel: -poop on your face or even if you’re super drunk faced. That’s what Cree speakers hear when they hear mayochup.
Ben: I love it.
Hedvig: That’s good.
Jane: Well, maybe that actually makes sense because you only drink it when you are shit faced.
Ben: Yes, that’s exactly right.
[crosstalk]
Jane: Sorry, not drinking. I don’t know why I said drink. But maybe you would drink it. [laughs]
Hedvig: You know why you said drink.
Daniel: As for Heinz, the success of this product, which apparently is pretty tasty, despite the fact that it contains mayonnaise, it is leading to the creation of new portmanteau, hybrid condiments like mayomust and mayocue.
Ben: No. No, what the… We have these things. It’s not… Argh.
Hedvig: Also, there’s a lot of other things you can put on fries. In the Netherlands, you can get like 19 different things, and some of them are like curry and peanut sauce.
Ben: Yeah, delicious.
Hedvig: You don’t have to just use mayo and ketchup.
Ben: Yeah, absolutely. Like dijonnaise already exists. Come on, people.
Daniel: I was wondering about ranchup.
Jane: I guess, Americans just need to open their minds about dipping sauces.
Daniel: It’s true. Ha-ha and, ahem-ahem, mayochup are Words of the Week. Jane Solomon, lexicographer, author of The Dictionary of Difficult Words. Thanks so much for hanging out with us and giving us your words today.
Jane: Thanks for having me and listening to me talk about words.
Ben: Always.
Daniel: If you want to get your words to me, you can do that, 9260-9210 to get me in the studio.
Ben: You can drop an email, talkthetalk@rtrfm.com.au.
Hedvig: And you can also reach us on social media. We are @talkpod on Twitter, and @talkthetalkpodcast on everything else.
Daniel: But now it’s PTMC with Lost in the Digital Sauce on RTRFM 92.1.
Andrew sent us one of his difficult words. He says:
The setting, a few people watching a rugby game on TV.
Commentator 1: Look at that front row. It’s a pogonophile’s dream.
This is the front row of the scrum. Two props and a hooker.
Commentator 2 and 3: Odd silence.
Commentator 1: “Ah, come on, gentlemen. It’s a person who appreciates facial hair.”
The couch in front of the TV: Much hysterical laughter.
It’s pretty much been the favourite word of all involved ever since. Pogonophile. I like it. Probably not in The Dictionary of Difficult Words.
You know Radio Love Month is upon us, and RTRFM wants you to share the love. You know who he’s feeling the love? Kurt. Kurt’s feeling the love and I know this because he phoned up and said he has every radio in the house tuned to RTRFM, loves it. If you can send something, a bit of cash, bit of coin, to the station in the month of May, that would be very special, rtrfm.com.au/subscribe.
In other news, Perth’s own Louisa Fitzhardinge, musical comedian and grammar nerd, is taking her very funny show, Comma Sutra, to Canberra for a one-off show on Friday 31st of May. I’ve seen it. It’s a fun show. It does come with a Talk the Talk content warning for mild prescriptivism and language ideologies, but it’s all part of the act. She’s funny. She’s talented. There’s music and grammar. And you should totally catch it. You’re going to be listening to Mark Neil pretty soon. So, that’s somebody that you should be checking out.
And thanks to Carolyn, Chris, dcctor woh, Jerry, Liz, Nikki, Termy, and our friends, Elias, Helen, Jack, Matt, Michael, and Sabrina. We’re going to be back with a live Q&A next week. So, be listening for that and check us out in all the usual places. Thanks for listening. 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’re 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]
