Factually! with Adam Conover - How the Internet is Transforming Language with Gretchen McCulloch

Episode Date: August 12, 2020

Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch joins Adam to break down how technology has changed the way we write, reveal the hidden truth about what your texting style says about you, and finally solve the mystery of why boomers can’t stop using… ellipses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Factually. My name's Adam Conover, and let's talk about language. You know, the linguistic invention I'm using to communicate with you right now through this microphone. Look, so it goes without saying that words have meaning, right? But they don't always just have the obvious meaning you see in the dictionary. The words we choose and how we use them spray a thick fog of association and connotation around us,

and they can reveal hints about our age, our social class, or even our ethnicity. I like to think of the words I use, for instance, as the clothing that I wear. Depending on my word choices, I could be wearing the linguistic equivalent of ripped jeans and a t-shirt, or a tailored three-piece suit, or JNCOs and a fedora. Pretty sure the word m'lady conjures the image of that last one into your mind, doesn't it? The point is, there is no neutral use of language. When we speak or when we write or when we text, our words are telling stories about us, regardless of the specific thing we're trying to say. Here's an example from my own life. I am, in general, a really ingratiating emailer. Maybe you're like this. All

of my emails end with either way is fine. Whatever you want to do is good with me, right? I don't want anyone to be mad at me. So I tend to make sure my emails come across really nice and light, right? But that's a problem for me because in the last few years, I've been in charge of making a few television shows. And as uncomfortable as I am with the idea, I'm a boss. And in a professional setting where I'm going back and forth with some powerful network executives, for instance, being so ingratiating is kind of a bad look. So last year I made a change. I decided that from now on, I was going to stop using exclamation points in my emails, cut them out completely. We're going with periods, no more exclamations. And it had an instant effect. The effect was it immediately made me feel more confident,

adult and mature when I wrote those emails. You know, saying, sure, we'll do with an exclamation point sounds chipper, but adding a period makes it sound matter of fact. It becomes, sure, we'll do. Getting rid of all those exclamation points made me feel less needy. No longer was I trying to cheer somebody up with my email or make them feel extra positive about, I don't know, my email about script notes or whatever. I still use exclamation points with my friends or my parents, people who I want to communicate friendliness and enthusiasm to. But in work emails, I find if I get rid of them, I can adopt a certain steeliness, which is useful if you need to get things done, which I often do. Losing the exclamation point has given me the same feeling of confidence I get when I dress up a little bit, right? I'm trading my

linguistic beat up hoodie for a business suit when the occasion requires. The point is the language we use can change the way we feel about ourselves and how people feel about us. And in fact, language is so powerful that it can even change how we perceive the world. One study found that perceptions of color differed based on people's native language and the way those languages categorized color. Another study found that people's perceptions of time could actually change depending on the metaphor their native language used for time. Language shapes us in profound ways, and it is so complex that we are constantly discovering more about this thing that we use all the time. It's just like the ocean, something that we're still plumbing the depths of, except that it's in our own minds and our culture. Take the internet. It's transformed the way that we use language and it's created totally new

contexts and forms for us to communicate in. With the internet, we're communicating more than ever with new rules and new meanings. And we are still discovering how those new changes are affecting the way we speak, the way we think, and the way we conceive of ourselves. And to talk to us about that today, we have the ideal guest. Gretchen McCulloch is a linguist, podcaster, and writer who's the author of the book Because Internet, Understanding the New Rules of Language. This conversation was so fascinating. I had an incredible time talking to her. I can't wait for you to hear it. Let's get right to the interview with Gretchen McCullough. Let's just start the conversation here because I want to make this point.

I can't stand looking at myself while I'm on a video conference. And I can't believe that the default is to show you your own video because it makes you completely neurotic in a conversation. Because when are you talking to other people in real life and also constantly looking at yourself it makes you it's like being at a bar with a mirror like sometimes you go to a bar and they have a mirror back when we went to bars uh and they have a mirror and you're like oh no i'm just sitting here just like looking at my teeth like do i have anything in my teeth the entire time and yeah Sometimes what I do or what I suggest that people do is get like a sticky note and just manually attach it to your screen to block your own video of yourself. I mean, yeah, because if I don't do that,

I'm just constantly looking at myself like getting what's my best angle? Like, you know, are my glasses on right? Like, it's bizarre, da. It's bizarre. It changes our behavior. And it's just one example of the many ways in which the Internet changes our behavior. This segue is sounding too practiced. But you're a linguist, and you research how the Internet changes our language. Yes. Give me some examples of that. How has it done so?

Well, one of the things that I'm really excited about that, uh, you know, especially before the, you know, tremendous rise in video content, which I think if they, if they ever give me a second edition and I get to add another chapter, I might, I might have video, but the paperback with a bonus chapter, we didn't do that because the paperback came out quite quickly. But if you, you know, if we do, we're to revised edition in five or ten years, because the problem is, I'm sure there are several people who are currently writing their PhD dissertations about TikTok or video streaming and video conferencing. They haven't been written yet.

So I have a strong interest in video, but not a lot to cite. And so the thing where I do have stuff to cite is on how we communicate with each other in text and how we use informal text and informal writing in the online context in a way that's sort of, you know, different and exciting and interesting compared to the sort of traditional, like, oh, you know, you learn how to read, you read books, other people have edited these books, and it's a very sort of formal context. So how we write now is a big question that I'm trying to figure out an answer to. And because internet, because it's, you know, we're, we're doing a lot more writing than we used to do as

a society and we don't even think about it, you know? Yeah. Uh, and it strikes me that we're talking about language and linguistics here, but like, I feel like there's an easy way to pigeonhole that and say, oh, that's just like, oh, what kind of grammar do people use, etc. And that's fun to learn to, you know, write these long form works, people started to spread ideas in a different way, started to think in a different way, started to act in a different way. Like it changed the new communications technology changed not just our language, but the shape of human society because of how the language changed. And so to me, it's like it's this is a very big, fascinating conversation and topic. It is a big conversation. And what's interesting about looking at Internet communication in terms of informal writing is that you can also find pre-Internet precursors to it. So one of the things that I find really fascinating is looking at so things like postcards.

I looked at a bunch of archival postcards when I was writing because internet and what's really fascinating is if you take them and you, you type them up, they look like texts from your grandma. Like, what do they say? They've got like the dot, dot, dots between the sentences or like all of these hyphens or like, you know, dear, you know, dear so-and so and so like hope you're having fun dot dot dot uh you know we're we're at this place dot dot dot you know love so and so xo and sometimes they have little doodles in the corners which you could think of as sort of precursors to emoji because people did draw on things yeah very strange and have little happy faces or hearts or these kinds

of things um the xx that's very common in british messages, a lot of British people end their text messages with an X, is also there in the postcards. Wow. And this is a thing that people keep cornering me over is why do these older people in my life, my parents, my grandparents, my boss, why do people use this dot, dot, dot? And you can find precursors of it in postcards so what this generation is actually doing is importing norms from a different medium to something that's kind of similar cool but in a in a digital form yeah like they're not just sort of because this is a big question for me is right so so how is it that a bunch of people's parents and grandparents and so on who don't actually use the internet that much, how is it that they're all doing the dot, dot, dot thing? They're not talking to each other.

Like, they're not getting it from each other online because most of them are communicating with, like, their younger relatives. Yeah. They're not getting this dot, dot, dot. And it seems like one of the answers is it's because it was this thing offline that they're just importing into a new communicative context. Wow. But there's a mismatch there, right? Because to me, when I see a dot, dot, dot, it means something very different than maybe when they write a dot, dot, dot, that means like trailing off like a lot, a lack of interest or boredom or maybe maybe you died halfway through the sentence and you because you fell down a bottomless pit or something like that. And so it's very rude and weird to write or kind of something left unsaid.

Like if you say like, yes, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, that. I'm indicating that I'm leaving some sort of reservation here. I'm leaving some sort of, I have some reservations, but I'm not expressing them. Yeah, I'll see you there at three, dot, dot, dot. It's like, will you really? Or are you going to do something to me horrible when you get there? What is with the dot, dot, dot? Ominous.

Do you want to meet up tomorrow and you're like, I could, dot, dot, dot. You're really trying to say, actually, I'd rather not. Right. And where that comes from. So there's a linguistic, you know, principle of analyzing, not just what people say, but also what they could have said in that context and what they chose not to. And looking at sort of what the, what the possible alternatives for what someone could have said and what they chose not to say in a particular context. And in this case, what's relevant is our idea of defaults and our idea of what's the sort of default break between a message. And for younger people who have been sort of, you know, acculturated online, the default break between a message is a new line or a new message. the default break between a message is a new line or a new message.

So you might send several texts in a row, and each of those message breaks is a new message, or you might have some line breaks, and that's the sort of default spacer if you're of an internet native generation because line breaks are really cheap on a screen. And new messages are really cheap in text terms. This wasn't true in paper, right? You can't just put a dozen line breaks in a postcard because you'll run out of postcard.

Yeah. Or if you're leaving someone a note on like a post-it note or like a note on, you know, note by the kitchen table or like note on like a – remember when people used to leave like notes by the telephone when like so-and-so called? They want you to call them back. Yeah. We had a little special chef chef this is like a chef uh i it's weird that i described it as a chef it was like a little notice board in the shape of a chef and it had a roll of receipt paper on it so you could leave an infinite note on it and i i'm only remembering this because my mom just sent it to me sent a photo and was like i'm gonna throw this out and i was like oh i remember it so don, Oh, I remember it. So don't know. Nevermind.

Throw it away. We don't need this anymore. It was just like, it's a relic from the past of this, this specific thing to write notes down by the telephone. And so there's, there's two things there. One is that, you know, people used to write notes on, on pieces of scrap piece of paper, little piece of paper that we're supposed to specifically like narrow or smaller. Um, and line breaks weren't free in the same sort of way. Line breaks were expensive. And so instead of leaving a line break, in order to indicate a sort of casual break between thoughts,

where you don't necessarily want to commit to, is this a full sentence? I'm going to put a period there. I'm going to put a comma there. People would put either a dash or a dot, dot, dot, because those are punctuation that kind of split the difference between is this a full sentence or not they can they can be used for both types you see this in poetry like emily dickinson does this in her poetry she has dashes all over the

place um you see this in these postcards there was some old recipe cards that i found that had like dot dot dot between each of the steps of the. And it's a way of sort of indicating a casual break between thoughts, exactly the way that you or I might use a line break, but in a more sort of casual way. And that's what this older generation is trying to do when they're putting a dash or a dot, dot, dot. And the thing is, is that for this younger generation that's using line breaks or message breaks

as their sort of default separator, that means that the dash and the dot, dot, dot have the potential to take on other types of meaning. And so you start looking around and being like, well, what else could someone mean with a dot, dot, dot? Because it can't mean it's a default message break because we already have one of those. What else could it mean? And then you start thinking, oh, maybe it's trailing off,

or maybe it's something left unsaid, or it's sort of a pregnant pause, or any of these sorts of things. You start inferring other types of stuff from it. And because you talk to people who use dot, dot, dot by default, and they're shocked and horrified that this is what they could be expressing, right? Because for them, it be expressing right this is just my default space it's like if somebody told you every time you send like enter on a new line you're sending this message you never realized you're like oh my god no i just it's just a new message like come on guys it's just what happens when two but either of these norms are totally fine by themselves it's just when they start like running into each other as this sort of norm train wreck. Is there something also with older folks? And I'm not trying to harp on older folks here.

I'm many older folks listen to this podcast. I love you, older folks. Mom, if you're listening, I love you. But I am going to call you out right now because do they just maybe also not pay as much attention to how their language works? Like, you know, I'm like I am on text all day and i'm sort of constantly calibrating for the person i'm talking to but my mom will just text me she'll text me adam all on one line call me all on one line and that's such a hot that's like a that's like a yeah it's like a red alarm it's like the alarm went off in the submarine your mom is dying or she's mad at you

and i'm like mom what and she's like oh i just wanted to ask you if i should put this chef notepad on ebay like all right well that was such an extreme use of that is is there that kind of mismatch as well well i i don't want to overstate this because i think to some extent it's it's very easy to look at another group of people and say you know, they must not be thinking about what they're doing because they're not doing what I'm doing. And if I were thinking about it, I wouldn't be doing that. And you get that reductivist discourse a lot when we're talking about, you know, younger people, like, do the youth just not know what

they're doing? And so I'm hesitant to say, well, the olds, they don't know what they're doing. In the same way, I'm hesitant to say, well, the youth, they don't know what they're doing. Because it's not like, oh, I have the monopoly on being right and everyone else is just not thinking. That's, you know, that seems like a very sort of non-charitable attitude to have towards everybody who's not like, like, fair enough. What I will say is that there are older people who have, who have told me this, that they think that text is sort of fundamentally incapable of conveying these sorts of subtleties, or at least that if it, if it does, that they think that text is sort of fundamentally incapable of conveying these sorts of subtleties, or at least that if it does, that's a thing that like professional writers do.

And that if you as an ordinary person want to convey emotional subtlety, that's why you would pick up the phone. And so this idea that voice has this sort of advantage over text and being able to communicate emotional subtlety, and that you don't need to think that hard about how you're doing communicating in text because uh it's you know text just isn't capable of that meaning and of course i think to people who who do think that text is fundamentally capable of it uh they're there that means that if you're not thinking about it you're still giving off messages um i don't think it's strictly speaking an age split. I think it's age combined with how long you've been on the internet. Because there are people who are now what you would call older people who have been online since the 80s, maybe even since the 70s, been using computers for a long period of time.

And they're like, no, I have the old smileys that we used to use back in the day. On like this system. Like we used to use back in the day on this system. We used to do this on Usenet. We used to do this on wherever. And people who've been aligned for a long time definitely think that text is capable of having this type of subtlety. But people who are a bit older and also weren't early adopters at the time, back in the day when one could be an early adopter, whereas these days everyone just kind of gets things at the same time. It's not just a question of age, it's a question of having defined yourself as a non-technological person for so long. So, to speak like a particular group of people or to talk like a particular group of people, to want to adopt the characteristics of a group of people, it means that you have some sort of

interest or respect or affection or, you know, positive sentiment towards that group of people. And so if you don't have a positive sentiment towards being online and communicating with technology, you also don't have, you don't think of yourself as a tech person, even though you've now been using, you know, computers and so on for maybe a decade or so at this point or more at this point. But you still think of yourself as not really a tech person, which means you don't really feel like tech-ish features of language are yours to use. But you're still using them. put something you said just a minute ago uh reminded me of a conversation i had like a decade ago with a college friend um we were talking about clothes and he said this this friend is like you know uh a t-shirt and cargo shorts guy you know uh and he was saying adam like i don't care what other people wear and i don't care what what i wear when i'm when i'm dressing i'm not trying

to say anything i'm not trying to communicate anything about myself. I just don't care. And I was like, well, hold on a second that you are communicating something. You're communicating that you don't care. I can tell that from the way that you dress, like you can't opt out of the system of clothes saying something about you, even if you don't understand it. The very least you're going to you're going to communicate is I don't understand how my what my clothes you're going to communicate is I don't understand what my clothes are communicating. Because people are gonna be like, oh, this person is, they're dressed in a confusing way. And I feel like your use of language would be similar. Right. I think, you know, you do have people who say, I'm not going to try to adopt, you know,

the trendy thing that the youths are doing. I'm going to communicate like I swallowed the AP style book. And you're still communicating something about yourself that way. Yeah. Or you're going to communicate like, you know, in this, this style of using dot, dot, dot, I'm going to communicate like I'm not a tech person, or I'm going to communicate like I'm, you know, I refuse to use emoji because I'm too, I think I am too good for them or something. You're still saying something about yourself. Yeah. And I think that there's been an interesting, the people that are like the most discomfited by Because Internet, which I think is great because they get to be very comfortable for all of the other language books. The most discomfited are the ones who said, but I communicate,

you know, like I've followed the AP style book. I communicate like I'm in this very formal style. I had this whole time and you're telling me that this thing that I thought was neutral isn't actually neutral. And what it says about me is that I'm uptight. And I'm like, yes. If you refuse to make typos in an internet context, because you can't possibly let anything go out of your, you know, go out of your hands without, you know, double and triple checking it, you are definitely communicating that you're uptight and you're maybe a little bit judgy of other people. And if people don't like that, that's kind of a reasonable response on their part. I'm not saying you can't do it. It completely depends on the context. I was asked to be more involved in a nonprofit that I was semi-involved with, and they asked me to join their fundraising board and stuff like that. Right. And one of the things they said to me was like, Adam, we thought you'd be good at this

because your emails are really good when you reply to us. They're like really well written. And and, you know, I've like adopted like a very professional email style with them. Right. But then on my group DM about like basketball, it would be very inappropriate to write that way. They'd be like, what is this weirdo doing in, you know, our basketball DM? Right. And I think that, you know, this is something that we do in speech all the time is we communicate in different ways with different types of people, right? This is the fabled code switching. I've heard of this. It's the fabled code switching. This is the whole like, you know, you don't, you don't talk to your dog the same way you talk to your boss, or at i wish i did who's a good boss yeah that's the

other way around yeah i want to talk to my boss the way i talk to my dog who's a good boss who's who's got some work for me to do who's got some work oh you want me to do it don't you you want to go for walkies we're gonna have a one-on-one at the park. Wonderful. So, you know, we talk differently with different people and we don't think there's anything weird about this. You know, we don't think that there's something wrong with this or something weird about this. We can talk differently with different people. And I think that's also, that can also be true for writing, especially because we're writing in so many more contexts than people might have written 50 years ago. You know, there was this sort of postcard genre, but it wasn't as common as the amount of times you can tweet or text somebody.

A lot of those would have happened in speech before. So this idea that, you know, we're writing in different ways and you can write differently in emails than you do in like, you know, group chat with your friends or whatever. That's, that's fine. That's, that's great. You don't have to, what I like about when people have read because internet, they're like, oh, I was already using internet slang, but I felt bad that I was doing it. And now I feel okay about myself. I'm like, this is great. I like this response. I don't feel bad about using, about using slang or about, you know, talking differently with different groups of people. It's OK. You're OK. Now, it's amazing to me how fast language changes over time. Like I was recently I forget what the context was, but I was noticing how even in like the 80s, when people wrote letters to each other, like business correspondence was so much more formal than today.

Like today, business correspondence has like this, you know, it actually has a little bit of casualness to it a lot of times, like people emailing each other within a company, right? But, you know, in the 80s, people were still writing like, you know, Mr. So-and-so, I read your article of June the 28th with great interest, like that kind of thing. And like, nobody, nobody writes like that anymore.

And it's kind of like everyone wearing the office or something. It feels like it's gone alongside with like, Oh, you know, now you have your dark denim or whatever that you wear to the office or you have your, like, you know, your, your dress up yoga pants or like your, you know, your formal t-shirts that you wear to the office. If you wear a tie, you're the weird guy at the office. Like, I literally remember wearing a tie to my job at College Humor one day and feeling so uncomfortable and awkward and like getting made fun of. I was like, what? Like, why am I doing this?

Well, it's but it's still a type of uniform and it's still a type of expectation. Right. But it's still a type of uniform and it's still a type of expectation, right? Yes. Because if you address someone, your email to somebody, you know, dear sir, I hope this letter finds you in good health, you know, like I read with interest your article of May. I think you're like, who the heck is this guy? Why is he so formal? Yeah. You know, it's just like wearing a tie becomes a more marked behavior. There's still a sort of, you know, there's, it doesn't,

it doesn't mean that there isn't a sort of a, still an expect, a set of expectations just because those expectations have shifted. Yeah. There are, it's just a different set of norms. Like something I think about a lot is like, um, I follow a lot of journalists on Twitter. Um, and journalists are like out of every profession, like the most on Twitter. And there's a certain sort of accepted use among them of like Twitter language and like joke making that like certainly wouldn't have existed in the 80s. Right. Like you wouldn't have had all these sarcastic journalists like publicly writing little snippets. It exists in the 80s. OK.

Which was something that I was really interested to encounter when I was researching Because internet was uh this genre of xerox lore and fax lore oh I love oh this is so excited I don't know what this is but I'm so excited to hear about it this sounds like this is my shit right here right so you may have seen some of these from like maybe your parents or something like that and this was people would repeatedly photocopy or fax to each other, other offices, things like political cartoons, like jokes, running jokes, various types of just like cartoons in general, and often sort of commentaries on office life, they'd often be like tacked up on top of the above the photocopier. As like, here's this, here's this funny joke. I found this funny cartoon.

My friend sent it to me who works at this other office, sent it to me. Now I'm going to photocopy it. I'm going to share it with like 20 of my buddies. Yeah. Here's this, here's this thing that's really funny. Or like, I'm thinking of the kinds of things that are like, you know, so-and-so arrives at the, like a lawyer arrives at the pearly gates and says,

blah, blah, blah, like those kinds of stock jokes. Street jokes is what we call them in comedy those are memes those are memes yeah they're memes i can't believe i never i literally smacked myself in the head i can't believe i never made that connection that memes are street jokes and they're because they're templatic like a meme like you have a pearly gates joke or you have a you know like a lawyer and a doctor and a whatever walked into a bar joke like you have a pearly gates joke or you have a you know like a lawyer and a doctor and a whatever walked into a bar joke like you have a walked into a bar joke you have the professions joke you have you know some that are not you know particularly sensitive you know blonde jokes and all these sorts of like you know racial stereotype jokes which are terrible they're still templates

though and it's not that means don't also sometimes do that yeah it's really funny i remember talking to uh my girlfriend lisa a while ago because i was i was frustrated but i was like man twitter sucks it's just people repeating the same template jokes over and over again um uh you know uh that ain't if it chief just like that over and over again um and then she was like yeah except the cool thing is the best people make up a new one and then everyone else copies it. And that's like sort of the being like the, the fashion influence, not influencer.

That's being like a being of the fashion designer of sentences, right. Where you come up with a new trend. And people were repeating templatic jokes before we called the meet. Yeah. Yeah. Right? Like, you know, yes, maybe you make a new, and a lot of people, like, they'd retell, you know, my grandfather always used to have one of those, like, page-a-day joke calendars. Remember those?

The page-a-day calendars? Yeah. And they would have these, like, jokes that were, like, kind of original but kind of not, and just, like, mostly extremely plagiarized from who knows where. Cause like, and he'd like save the best ones and like share them with us when we would visit him. And this feels like very,

this feels like having, you know, having a Tumblr in the early 2010s, you're like, I've got to reward all my best memes so that yeah i'm gonna appreciate them well and that's exactly the same behavior before social media in like 2005 i was more online than most of my friends and i had a folder on my hard drive where i saved all my favorite meme images and videos and when friends would come to my dorm room i would show them like on a slideshow of memes that I had collected from parts of the internet they didn't know about.

And then like that, of course, just, just like, you know, that was completely obviated by Reddit and everything else. There's like no reason to do this anymore. Or you have like these chain email forwards. Yeah. Like you remember, you know, forwarding people emails like here, you know, here's a bunch of jokes about like cute things that like funny things that kids have said or something like that. Like here's this thing. I remember, you know, forwarding people emails like here, you know, here's a bunch of jokes about like cute things that like funny things that kids have said or something like that. Like here's this thing. I remember, you know, there was the dancing baby one, the dancing baby gif or like there was like a penguin that pushed another penguin into a water, into the water gif. And people would email them. And they were like, you know, so and so would be like your friend who always found the funny emails and like sent you them.

And then so and so would be your friend who didn't send you very good funny emails and wouldn't send you them anyway um like but this was a kind of social currency of like oh yeah we're gonna forward these around one of them that i encountered you know in back when email forwards were were cool like late 90s early 2000s i think this is uh was so it's this one that's like in mock German and it's about a computer and it's, it's called blink and lights. And it's like, you know, this is sort of very bad fake German of like, you must not touch the blink and lights. Don't, this is fancy machine. Don't, don't touch it. But it's in, it's in bad German. Uh, like clearly designed to be legible for English speakers. Um, and when I was writing because internet, I actually was like, wait a second. I wonder where

this came from. How, how old can we trace it trace it back? And this has been traced back to World War II. Wow. It's been passing around and then eventually made the jump. And then eventually somebody typed it up or possibly several people typed it up. It traces back to this. There was a sort of mock German doggerel style that hung in Allied machine shops. Yeah. In World War II where like,

of course they're mocking the Germans because like they have this, you know, obviously enemy relationship with them. And, you know, like blinking lights and fancy machinery doesn't have to just be the computer. That can be like earlier kinds of fancy machinery as well,

whether it's the telegraph or something. And so there's this sort of connection. Yeah. Of one of yeah of uh one of the early one of the examples that gets cited a lot cited a lot in the meme literature because like of course there's a meme literature this is yeah this is every every cool online grad students uh thesis right now is on meme literature as on meme literature uh so one of the examples that gets cited a lot in the meme literature is kilroy was here, which was like a handwritten sort of chalk meme that people would, you know, people would draw this face with the nose peeking over the wall and write Killroy was here. And that was like the thing that you did kind of like now if someone if you see the number like 69, you say nice and you just say that, you know, people would just write the Kilroy was here thing like, oh, there's a wall.

I'm going to write that on it. And but I think this the the rate of change of memes in this or jokes in this early sort of proto space is slower because the rate of communication itself is slower. Yeah. Like on Twitter twitter you can have a meme that becomes a meme for like one day um like i think we're recording this on the same week as the one year anniversary of the you know 30 to 50 feral hogs meme which really took over twitter for one day yeah yeah yeah absolutely and then people and don't even try to say it the next day people will be like,

what the fuck are you doing bringing around the feral hogs to my timeline on Friday? Fuck you. That was yesterday, idiot. That was yesterday's meme. Or sometimes you show up. Like I remember, I remember this is a number of years ago when you remember when the dress, you know, took over for a couple of days. Everyone remembers that that day I had happened to be taking a nap and I woke You remember when the dress took over for a couple of days? Oh, yeah. I remember that. That day, I had happened to be taking a nap, and I woke up. And in the previous two hours or whatever, I went back online the previous two hours.

Suddenly, everything was about this dress, and I was just so confused. It was so intense i was hosting a live show live comedy show that day and me and my co-host emily heller uh put up a we were we like okay let's talk about the dress in the show and we're like so everyone we want to talk about this and then we put up a screenshot of the dress and the whole audience started screaming at once they all went blue gold it was so funny about it and it would have happened the next day the next day we would have been bored of it yeah uh but you i don't think you can get this kind of speed with the killer was here mean right or even speed with like you want to say like the early lolcat memes like when you go back and look at the early lolcat memes there are like a handful of them that are your canonical lolcat memes and they're the same one everyone knows everyone knows i can has cheeseburger everyone knows i made you a cookie but i eat it you know um and

they they lasted for years that's so long yeah yeah they lasted long enough to be a canon text and there were so few of them so few people had like graphics editing capability to make new ones. That's a really good – I never thought about that. You're right. Like Law Cats lasted for like five years or so. And now like if you go to like a meme Instagram account, nothing lasts that long. It's just like the internet screaming insanity, like constant chaos and change. And some things do come back when they get mashed up with other things, right?

Yeah. You know, like the nobody meme, the kind of nobody joke template where you have like nobody colon blank. And then, you know, I say something that's, you know, nobody asked for. That's been kind of just percolating along kind of under the radar and it gets sort of brought back when something new happens um and so you can but it gets kind of brought back and remixed with stuff so some of sometimes like the you know like the faster something rises the faster it descends as well but sometimes something kind of similar way in the background for quite a long time as well. The, but yeah, like it's interesting for me thinking about what, like, because we have even compared to,

you know, 10 years ago or 12, like before, if you compare this to before social media enabled things to spread as quickly, you're relying on like, okay, you know, someone has to forward me this email so that I can see it. And then I have to forward it to someone else.

Whereas you can disseminate things faster. You have like big, you know someone has to forward me this email so that i can see it and then i have to forward it to someone else whereas you can you can disseminate things faster you have like big uh you know big meme accounts whether it's on twitter or instagram or whatever like buzzfeed picks it up or something and that can disseminate to a much faster audience yeah um and make a meme really like take off very quickly and therefore like subside very quickly um the interesting thing i think about memes and like where they're going is the the so there's also been a shift in the last five years or so from uh interior monologue captioning memes to object labeling memes um these are the terms that know your media uses for them and i think they're good yeah okay internal monologue okay wait yeah break this down for me yeah let's break this down so interior monologue captioning memes a lot of them are animals but they're not necessarily

the the text on the meme so if you think of a meme as an image which not all images but like if we think of a meme as an image for a sec um there's the the text on the meme represents the interior monologue of the character in the meme yeah i can't has cheeseburger that's what the cat has cheeseburger that's what the cat is saying or the or the you know the shiba inu is like such something wow uh and like that's implicitly what the dog is saying right um the same thing like the entire advice animal genre that's implicitly what the animal in the advice animal is saying um and then you get this switch and one of the early well-known memes in the in this uh in this switch is the distracted boyfriend meme so the distracted boyfriend is not

saying anything right the distracted boyfriend is labeled in a relationship yes the girlfriend and the other girl he's looking after yes and. And so there's this switch from that the entities in the image of the meme are implicitly talking to the entities being labeled. The meme as a metaphor or an analogy for a different relationship where we have a meme that means a relationship between three things. Thing A is more interested in thing B when it should be interested in thing C. And then you can apply that to any real world situation, which is a lot more complex of an idea than just a cat saying I can't has cheeseburger where the joke is cats want cheeseburgers. Well, it's a it's a complex idea, but it also relies it's more versatile, exactly adaptable to different different subcultures.

Yes, because there isn't just one meme culture now. There may have been, disputably, there may have been at some point a single Unitarian meme culture. There isn't now. We can say that. Something that we used to do on the College Humor Writers Slack

to amuse ourselves was find hyper-specific memes from subcultures that we didn't understand and share them with each other because it would be like, you know, that feeling when you're taking the bar exam in alabama and you're it was like just these really long thing or about like try like memes that triathletes would make to each other about their training schedules and share on facebook accounts and they're always

fascinating to look at because you can recognize it as being a meme, but you have no idea what the fuck experience it's talking about there. I mean, there have been linguistic specific niche memes since at least 20, uh, 2012, 2011 was when I started being aware first of linguistic suspicion, like linguistic specific niche memes. Um,

but like that was mostly because I knew enough linguists at that point that I was exposed to them. Maybe they were around earlier as well like maybe there were linguistics versions of low cuts that i just didn't see um but so you know there's there is there is a certain amount of niche niche gym that's been around for a while um but the uh oh so what's interesting about so the object labeling style starts out as an image meme thing you have the distraction boyfriend who gets labeled or you have the like is this a butterfly or is this is this a pigeon when it's actually a butterfly right it's a relationship of three things it's like a person asking and then an entity and then a question that's bad um the

but you also get this is the kind of meme that you see a lot on Tik TOK these days where you have the, the meme text, the thing that was the picture in an image meme is the audio track. Yeah. And then the person who's in the picture is often labeling themselves or characterizing themselves as different entities. Yeah. Um,

so maybe they're putting on different hats or they're putting on different wigs or they're putting on, you know, fake makeup and various types of things. And they're being, you know, like me and then my chemistry teacher, like does this thing to me or whatever. Or they're putting on, like, sometimes they're holding up captions like written on paper, you know, so there'll be like, you know, study, this is a lot of like, you can tell when it's like kids studying for like their ap history exam season because it'll be like i don't know you know like

america the british well like yeah they're making a meme about what they're learning in school absolutely how wholesome is that you know who's gonna complain about that it's really wholesome um and uh or the so they'll hold up a piece of paper or they'll write that text on the image itself with various video editing tools that you can use. But the idea that the common thread that the meme template gets based on is this audio file rather than it's this image

and then you add more text on top of the image. That's one of the interesting things that I think TikTok has done to the meme genre. Okay. We got to take a break. Every time I'm about to take a break, you say something fascinating that I have to reply to. And then we go back and forth and now my producer is going to be mad or

at least ad sales are going to be mad because we got to take a break and listen to some ads, but we're going to be right back with more Gretchen McCullough. I have a huge question for you after this. So stick around. going to be right back with more gretchen mccullough i have a huge question for you after this so stick around we'll be right back with more gretchen mccullough okay gretchen i have a question that i think about a lot and I apologize if this is a little bit like spacey, like, you know, big picture, like we're smoking weed during grad school kind of question. Right. But, you know, I think a lot about, you know, there's been so much change in human society, not just society, but like the way humans as a species operate in the last 10,000 years, right? You know, if you look at human history, we were, you know, basically pretty advanced apes

for like millions of years, right? And then around, you know, well, you know, I'm not a historical anthropologist, so it's, I don't know the exact date, but, you know, things started accelerating, right? Like the amount of change that's happened in humanity in the last, you know, a couple thousand years is much greater than what was happening before. And that looks like that comes along with the development of language, with the development of culture, and that you start having this process of like cultural evolution, right? That starts happening in our minds, as opposed to just like, instead of just genetic changes, you have cultural changes happening as well well and they start iterating on each other and creating these feedback loops where you're describing where like okay now linguistics are the way we use language is changing faster and faster because of the

internet starts to make me think well is that sort of process like is that is there something that's fundamentally speeding up about the way that humanity is on earth i told you it was a really smoking weed on the porch during grad school question but so there's there's three different things there to unpack one is is that language is is actually very old uh language as a as a human capacity whether it's spoken language or sign language is really old and as far we don't know exactly how old because unfortunately like sound waves and hand signs don't leave fossils if you haven't noticed uh the so we don't know whether it's more like 50 000 or more like 200 000 that's approximately a a date range for how old language is writing is much newer writing is a technology language is a human capacity writing is a technology. Language is a human capacity. Writing is a technology. And it's a technology, like, we've never encountered a human society that doesn't have language. And they're all really complex. You know, there are about 7,000 languages that linguists have cataloged these days. They're all really complex. They're all really interesting. They're all fully-fledged languages by whatever metric you want to define a language.

Writing is different because writing is a technology and because it's a technology, it can be transmitted. It can be lost. It can be adapted. It can be, it could break. It can be saved. It can be saved and it can be, you know, so, and writing, you can, it's a much easier also to track how writing spreads because of course it makes physical records in at least many cases. If you're writing on wood, uh, it might not last super well, uh, because wood rots and so on. If you're writing on stone, it's great.

Um, so, uh, so writing is a lot more recent to that. What writing lets you do is it gives you, um, on the one hand, it gives you a more durable way of communicating with the past and with the future. Yeah. Because communicating with people in the here and now is still, you know, fairly easy, but communicating whether that's with your past self, because you're writing yourself a note to remind yourself the next day to do something, or they're communicating with like the state tax collectors to be like, yes, I've paid my taxes. Here is the goat that I gave you or whatever. Writing gives you this ability to communicate across displacements in time and displacements in space. And that's one of the reasons why in many cases, you know, societies that encounter writing, they're like, oh yeah, that sounds like a cool idea. Let's borrow

that for us. But it sort of spreads gradually in this sort of diffusion sense and there are also places where you know like the romans were really keen on writing uh and then you know after the roman empire collapsed there was a lot less literacy there was still some literacy but there was there was less literacy uh overall the um or you know people were learning latin just to kind of gain access to the writing technology because the writing technology happened primarily in Latin, which you can think of in the modern age as like people learning English to gain access to, you know, communications technology. Yeah.

Oh yeah. Cause, cause that was what, that was what all the books were written and that was like what the, that was the, the medium of the written technology was all in latin at the time right i mean why why learn latin to write old english because there wasn't much there to read in old english you want to learn latin so you can read uh you know caesar or something yeah which is or but yeah the same thing of like if you want to if you want to code these days a lot of

programming languages are based off of english yeah there's no intrinsic reason why they have to be based off English. If you have a command for bold or italic or something, why that has to be based off English mnemonics. Rather than, it could be based off Russian, it could be based off Japanese, it could be based off any language. There are a few programming languages that are based off other human languages, but this vast majority of them are based off English. I never thought of that. that yeah they're all saying dominance yeah they're they're all saying go to line 10 well that's very dated code but yeah they're saying go to 10 or like if then they're not saying the equivalent in yeah they're not saying the equivalent in mandarin right and like you know

mandarin has words for if i assume that you could use that word but it it becomes this sort of prerequisite of like oh like it's really easy if you're an english speaker to be like oh yeah here's of course you're going to have like a body text and a you know header text or something like that because these are words you recognize even if they're used in a specialized sort of way but like imagine this isn't even a script you're familiar with yeah you have to learn a new alphabet and then you have to like learn this mnemonic uh i wrote an article about that about programming languages being based off English for Wired. And it's like the one that I got the most both positive and negative comments on. Because I had a lot of people being like, yes, finally, thank you.

Thanks for saying it. You know, this is a thing, especially for children learning how to code and something. And then I also had people being like, well, they should just learn English. Well, yeah, I mean, of course, those people, those people are just looking for an article to write that in response to, learn English! They're just people driving around America looking at people to yell, learn English at.

But yeah, but it's very interesting. But you can, when you make the Latin analogy, because it seems strange to us as English speakers in, you know, the 2000s, say, to be like, why was everyone so keen on learning Latin for so long? And it was because it was this, but it's the same reason that people these days are keen on learning English. Because it gives you access to this particular type of internationalized global discourse and gives you access to this particular type of technology.

It was the learn to code of of the middle ages good reason because maybe people should have access to this in their native languages as well but that was a reason why people people learn we're so keen on learning latin for so long um but just to go back to writing writing being a technology. So, and I'm, I'm not a historian. This is, this is not, this is not me being a historian. I, one of the hypotheses that I like, and I, I got this from an historian, Ada Palmer, who's also a sci-fi writer, is this idea that as the speed of communication increases, that, that's what makes change happen faster or seem to happen faster. So like the faster, you know, if it takes a letter three months to arrive from one corner of the Roman

empire to another, then the speed of change of things that can change is, is constrained by that three months of like how fast can a person with a horse transmit that or a person in a boat transmit that letter right and that's assuming they even have a letter they have writing as a technology which lets them send the exact message the person wanted to otherwise you're sending a messenger and you're telling this messenger like memorize the message that i want to send which people did memorize this message i want to send they had memory techniques for a lot of these

things uh and then arrive at this place three months later and recite the message that I wanted to send them. And then memorize the message the other person wants to send and come back three months later. So you can have change potentially happen faster when people are able to communicate with each other faster. You're talking about change in the ways that people are using language or changes in how the language develops. Well, change in anything, but especially the sort of broader reaching societal change. So, you know, like if you want to say changes in fashion, right? So if you want to know, oh, how are the cool people dressing over there? You need to find out what they're doing first in order for you to do it. Right. Because if you don't know how the cool people are dressing over in Paris or whatever,

you can't then mimic them. If you only find out how they've been dressing in Paris like three years later, your fashions are always three years behind Paris. So when you're watching, I just watched a whole lot of Jane Austen movies and they're always going like, oh, the new fashion in Paris is hats.

And they just found out because someone just came from Paris to like the little London country town that they're all living in English country town. And so that means that that sort of like puts a limit on the rate of speed at which fashion changes. But today where we're all doing it on Instagram and you're seeing it instantaneously. Right, so someone in Paris takes a selfie, puts it on Instagram and I'm like, oh, hey, look what they're doing in Paris. Right. So if I wanted to, I can I can be aware of what people are doing in that sense. And even if you think about meme diffusion, like we were talking about with chain emails, like if the fastest way for me to find out like, hey, there's this cool GIF

is for like someone who I happen to know personally to email it to me. Yeah. Even if they can email it instantly, the fact that I can choose, oh, here's this funny person who posts a lot of cool GIFs. I can go follow them on social media somewhere. I can find out about the cool GIFs at source rather than wait for them to arrive like three email chains later. Even though the technological communication

happens instantly, it still has to go through people somehow. How does something become viral? It goes through people somehow. So this actually affects like how fast fashion might change, like the faster the communication happens, then fashions themselves might change faster. In theory. But there are other things that slow things down. Right. So there are also things like fashion, like supply lines and how fast the fashion industry like plans its seasons in advance. You know, how fast can

your manufacturers copy this other thing? Right. You know, how fast can they gear up to make something? You're still going to be looking at months or, you know, sometimes longer for how fast can anything happen? It's still constrained by like atoms in the real world. The other thing though, is that technology because of communications technology, and this is true of writing as a technology and also of the internet and like the computers and so on,

is that it can also be a force for conservatism in the other direction because you have the records of what people were doing. And if you're the kind of person who doesn't like change, it gives you more ammo to say, let's not actually change it. So you have, for example, after the Roman Empire falls, you have Latin evolve into the modern Romance languages, spanish and italian and so on right and that's happening that change is happening because change is a constant there's never a period when there's like oh well there's no change now um right language is always changing just like if you're

if you're trying to stop it from changing it's your your it's a fool's errand well it's like i mean it's the same thing with anything right like you can't just stop a river from like eroding the banks a little bit or like you can't stop like like entropy is a force in the universe you can't stop change from like humans grow up you know this is just this is a thing that happens you can't stop your kids from growing up um so the so you can you can have the ability to look back and say, oh, here's what people were doing back in this generation. I'm going to learn this word that was older. I'm going to keep remembering this word that was older.

So on the one hand, you have like Latin splitting off into the Romance languages. Cool. So that's change that was happening organically, especially because they weren't communicating with each other anymore as much. And so they were able to develop these more distinct local dialects, which, but also they're able to look back at the sort of classical Latin

and keep looking back to it and keep drawing things from there and keep borrowing things from there and try to reverse the course of some of these changes. So some cases people added in silent letters because that letter had been there in Latin. So, like the English word debt, for example, came from a French word, which was also debt, and it was spelled D-E-T-T-E at the time. That seems more appropriate. Seems more reasonable, right? Yes. And then some people

looked at Latin and they're like oh this word originally comes from latin debbie tomb where they pronounced that b in the internet sense we can see technology also makes us more conservative because of things like spellcheck yes spellcheck the little i use it i use it i keep it off all the time. I don't ever want spellcheck looking at what I'm saying. Having a little algorithm looking over my shoulder, like not understanding the things I'm writing. Terrible. I mean, it's useful sometimes. Like I use spellcheck, especially on your phone. It makes you type. You can type faster when it's predicting the words. But at the same time... Oh, yeah, yeah. That's autocorrect. That's different. Oh, it's autocorrect. Oh, okay.

I don't like the little red line. I hate that. But all of these, autocorrect, spellcheck, predictive text, all of them are training... They're helping us write words the way that they've previously been written. Yeah. And sometimes that's like you type a new word, you type some sort of jocular re-spelling,

and then spellcheck like thinks that you want to use it all the time. Like my phone now thinks I always want to write actually with a capital A because I've done that like sarcastic actually good at, you know, turns out sleeping is actually good like one too many times. And now it's like, would you always like to be sarcastic with your actuallys? i'm like no no no not all the time um but the general principle of things so if you're talking about like the silent b in debt which like if we had a more decentralized writing system we could one day stop writing that silent b there's no reason for it to be there yeah because our phones are you know helping us uh quote unquote, helping us, you know, write things in this way that they've previously been written. It reinforces all of these sort of weird fossilized spellings that, you know, arrived one day. And it makes it actually harder to change things as quickly because you have the phone like helping you.

Yeah. With respect to spelling. own, like helping you be more conservative with respect to spelling. We have a force sort of pulling us back from the big changes that we might otherwise make or keeping us on the straight and narrow, like sort of keeping things mainstream a little bit. So I'm curious what you think about, you know, the idea of correcting each other, right? Or language staying the same. This is I feel like the first question like linguists get asked a lot of the time is prescriptivism and descriptivism and this sort of debate.

I remember I did an interview with Ann Curzan. Do you know Ann Curzan? She's wonderful. She was on my older podcast, Adam ruins everything podcast and on the show. And she used this great example of I've been corrected my whole life for saying, you know, how are you doing? I'm good. Instead of I'm well. And she and you should say I'm well, like my friends in college would say this to me. And she was like, that's wrong, because I'm good means something different than I'm well, right? Like I'm good means like I'm doing I'm doing good. Like I'm good. Like things are good with me. As opposed to like, I am I'm in good health. It's like it has a different meaning. And so I feel like we often have this rejection. I love that argument, right? Because I'm like, yes, fuck all those people who tell you how to speak, right?

Who say that this is how the English language works. We should really just be describing how people use it in practice and allowing it to change because that's natural, da, da, da, da, da, right? But is it also the case that these forces keeping us on the straight and narrow are helping us communicate by sort of standardizing our language a little bit? Or how do you view that as someone who like is exploring the wilds of internet language or languages it's most chaotic? Yeah. Well, Anne Curzon, actually, it's funny that you brought her up because she makes this

argument in her book, Fixing English, about how she asked a bunch of her colleagues who were, you know, English professors and so on, where do you think Microsoft Word gets the words that are in its spellcheck? Like, what list does you think it's pulling from? Where did it get its ideas of what good grammar or bad grammar or what is a word or what isn't a word? And they were like, huh, I've never really thought about that. And, you know, if English professors who question words for a living haven't thought about it, what help do the rest of us have? Like, where are these kinds of things coming from? And so, I think, you know, the idea that we should be looking at language how it actually is and not

trying to make people conform to some sort of abstract idea of correctness, this is really the least controversial idea in linguistics. Like, I go out, you know, on like radio interviews and people are like, wow, what an interesting, bold idea you're advancing. And I'm like, no, no, no, I don't think you understand. Like this is like the first lecture of Ling 101 type content. Yeah. But that's among linguists, not among English teachers, right? Not among like grade school and primary school teachers who are very much, you know, I think a lot of people have had the experience of being hovered over with a ruler while they're writing and saying, no, you wrote wrong, you know? Right. And like, it is definitely still very common in education. And a lot of people internalize that and they

internalize that they're somehow, you know, a better person because they're very persnickety about language. And I think that there has been a trend away from that, especially a lot of people saying, look, you know, maybe I'm going to do this one thing in essays or on a resume or something, but I'm going to do this other thing with my friends and that's fine. And I think it's, you know, there's, there are a lot of, there are a lot of things going on. They're going on there. And I think this idea, like, it's not necessary to correct other people. Like if you go around correcting other people, you know, when they haven't asked for it, that makes you a annoying person. Yeah. You're being a bad person when you do that because it doesn't fucking matter.

You shouldn't be surprised if people don't like you because you're actually just being an asshole. That's like going up to someone with a clothes metaphor again. It's like going up to someone and saying your clothes don't match like your shirt like who asked you you know if i bring you in as my fashion consultant and i'm like all right you know like tell me what i should be wearing for this fancy event like i want your opinion then you give my opinion if i don't ask you what you think of my clothes or even if i like if i bring a friend to the store or something uh and i'm like hey you know what do you think about this shirt should i buy it i've asked you for your opinion but you don't go up to random people on the street be like i hate your shirt yeah and as a and as a corollary to that some people don't say that to to individuals but they'll just complain about i hate when people use the wrong form of you're

they say you're instead of you're it's like this is really bothering you like all day long like you know what the fuck they meant that's like this is really bothering you like all day long like you know what the fuck they meant that's like having a rant about jeggings like what did jeggings ever do to you you don't need to have a rant about jeggings it's fine you don't have to you have your opinion but why are you wasting your breath talking about it well like why like other people want to wear them like it's fine you don't have have to wear them. I think the other thing is, is that there's, like, linguists also need to exist as people in the world. So, as academics, we can say, hey, we want to analyze everything. Let's just figure out how everything works. But existing

as people in the world, the kind of ethical standard that I like to think about for me is, am I using this, you know, form of language to try to connect with people, to try to like be friends with people, be kind to people, be polite to people, or am I trying to use this to be like sanctimonious and annoying and like to prove my moral superiority over people? So, if you're going around with like a red pen and apostrophe, you're using that because you're trying to prove your superiority over people. But if you're going around trying to use people's correct pronouns, that's because you're trying to prove your superiority over people. But if you're going around trying to use people's correct pronouns, that's because you're trying to connect with them and be polite to them and be nice to them. That's not a, I'm trying to prove my intellectual superiority.

That's, I want to respect people. So, you know, there's a question of like, you know, why are you doing this? Are you doing this, you know, because you're trying to be, you know, a decent human to other people? Or are you doing this because you're trying to make yourself feel better and like, you know, put other people down. And so I think saying like, oh, well, this is wrong because we didn't used to do it this way. Like, what has that apostrophe ever done to you? But like, not using slurs sounds like a good thing. That is in some respect also prescriptive, but that's prescriptive in the favor of like being respectful to people, which I think is good. Yeah.

I think about crossword puzzles. I really like doing crossword puzzles and crossword puzzles, like rely on a certain shared understanding of how language works of like, what words mean what? And like, you know, like i'll do a crossword puzzle and be like you know when i read the clue it limits the number of answers that could go in because i'm like no they wouldn't use that word that way in that clue so the answer is

probably this right um and so you need a certain amount of you know uh guidelines or or uh guard rails on the side of the road in order to make the puzzle possible. But at the same time, it's a format that's fundamentally about playing with language, about finding new uses for language. And the best crossword puzzles are the ones that like, you know, radically introduce new words and new, you know, new forms of speech and include internet speech and that sort of thing as the language is actually spoken. So it feels like there's a healthy, like, yes, we need a common frame of reference, but then we're using that in order to be expressive and have fun. That's what the

common frame of reference is there in the first place for. Well, I think like if you think about this point of English as a lingua franca, you know, a lot of people learn English as a second language to communicate with, you know, sort of the broader world of English speakers, whether that's first or second language. And there are ways in which people who are English native speakers are some of the worst at doing this. Because, you know, we talk too quickly and we use too many idioms that are like obscure vocabulary words. And in some cases, it's easier for people who both speak English as a second language to communicate with each other than it is when you have a native English speaker going in and being like, oh yeah, like here are all these things that you didn't

need to know in order to do this sort of level of communication. So, you know, are you actually trying to accomplish communication? Because communication is about meeting somebody where they are. And it's about both people or everybody involved in the situation trying to find some sort of common ground and not like saying, well, the way I do things is objectively right. And so you all need to be doing this. And all of the common ground is my common ground. Right. So I think adapting the way we talk to different contexts, you know, there are certain idioms, you know, that I know are Canadian that I'm like, okay, well, I'm not going to use this with Americans because they're not going to understand. You know, you can have this sort of sense of awareness of like, what am I doing that might not be understood internationally? Or what

am I doing that, you know, I'm deliberately trying to, you know, index a more Canadian identity in this particular context. So, but it requires this sort of awareness of other people, but that doesn't mean that, you know, this, the previous thing that we thought of as sort of an unmarked default, that got created by a very particular set of people, right? That didn't just like appear. Right. So where, where is that default? Who creates it? And, you know, how can you sort of both validate all of the ways of talking while also trying to have people, you know, somehow meet, meet in the middle or meet at a place where they can understand it. It goes back to this question of like, well,

why learn Latin? Because it gives you this access to this. Yeah. This goes back to what you were saying about how people respond to your book and they say, oh, I thought I was speaking in the default. And you're saying I'm actually communicating in a way that's kind of uptight. And I certainly also feel that I speak in the default. And by the way, this is like, or that's what I felt throughout most of my life. And this is really emblematic of like white culture in America is like the belief that, no, this is the default. What everyone else does is weird. But what you're pointing out is that like, no, this is this one is the neutral and is the right way and everything else is weird, you're actually making an error because

you're going to fail to communicate with people in the proper context. I think about like what you were saying with with foreign sorry, with second language speakers. And I've noticed myself sometimes when I'm speaking to someone with English as a second language, I'll change the way I speak in a way that like, I'll just use simpler syntax and stuff like that. And that's me. I used to think, yeah, that's, that's me. Like community, like making an effort to communicate more clearly. Yeah. And I think it's, you know, like there's, there are,

a lot of people are very self-conscious about like, if I, if I change the way that I talk with other people, does that mean that I'm like parroting them or that does that mean I'm making fun of them? And you don't want to end up at so far that you're, that was what I almost said. That was like, my concern is like, Oh, am I doing a, am I doing like a voice here that I shouldn't be doing? But I think I, you know, so much of this is so context specific, you know, like linguists like to say that everybody has an accent.

And it's not just like, Oh, some people, those people have accents. And people who talk in the sort of majoritarian way, we quote unquote don't have accents. I mean, if nothing else, you have an American accent. If you talk to a British person, they're like, no, you have an American accent. But the, you know, everybody has an accent. Everybody has ways of talking that are different. And the question is, you know, at a societal level, we've chosen to privilege some accents over others. But that doesn't mean

that there's an intrinsic feature. Like, nobody had a beauty contest for accents of English and tried to find them. There's a really interesting study, actually, where they looked at, they had a variety of accents in Britain, because, of course, there are lots of British accents. And they have different, people in Britain believe different things about them. You have, they have different sorts of sort of associations, but those associations don't always cross the Atlantic. So they had a bunch of British accents. They played them for Americans. And they asked the Americans to rate them on various qualities of, you know, pleasantness and attractiveness and you know, how, how, how cool of an accent this is. And the Americans found the Birmingham accent,

like, the best. They rated that one the most highly. And the interesting thing about this is if you say this to a British person, they're like, what? Because in Britain, the Birmingham accent is specifically stigmatized. Yeah. But the Americans who came in without knowledge of the particular social features that were assigned to this accent like no this accent's great it's lovely i really like this one this is the best of the british accents so none of these features are intrinsic to like the consonants and the vowels and the intonation and all of these like like granular linguistic features that you're producing they're all imposed. You know, like jeggings are morally neutral. Yeah. Like it's just who you associate the kinds of person who wears jeggings or who wears, you know, sunglasses or who wears any of these, you know, cool jeans or non-cool

jeans or whatever. You don't hate jeggings. You hate young women. That's basically what it comes down to. You hate young women. You don't hate vocal fry. You you hate young women that's basically what it comes down to you hate young women you don't hate vocal fry you also hate young women i mean everybody hates young women and it's very odd they're everyone's making that very clear yeah like the and you know and it's it's it's this like weird funny coincidence except it's like completely not a coincidence that like all of the language versions that people that people dislike also happen to align with all of the various groups of society that people dislike yes like people dislike african americans people are racist like oh no now they're going to stigmatize african american english that's not a coincidence yeah that's like it's the same thing yeah it's like entirely the yeah it's the social value of the way of speaking that people are putting onto the way of speaking rather than some high-minded concern about linguistics or something like that.

No, because linguists will tell you there's nothing there. Yeah. You know, like there's, here are all these interesting features and like, you know, every dialect, every language, every accent has its own interesting features. And you can find somebody who's studying and be like, oh, yeah, here's this interesting thing that this one does. None of them are wrong. And again, I want to couple that with, I think it's important to respect people, you know, if they want to language is just objectively better or it's good English or it's standard. You know, none of none of that is even linguistically defined because it's not real. How to bring us in for a landing here. I could talk to you for a thousand years. Just let me say I have a podcast.

You can listen to me anytime you want. Oh, please do. And it is called Lingthusiasm. Yes, it's going to start listening to this fucking podcast. I mean, I'm sorry that I haven't listened to it so far. This is wonderful stuff. No, it's fine. Well, so let me ask this.

The sort of linguistics that I never studied any linguistics, but my peripheral understanding of it from other things that I studied was a lot of like, you know, what is the structure of language in the human mind? And what are the sort of rules that we can intuit about where language comes from? And these sort of much more, you know, psychological, you know, explorations of language. And what you're describing, a lot of the work that you've been describing is very almost sociology. You're talking about the way that people communicate on the Internet, like what they want to do, you know, their choice that they make in language, like the way that they use the line breaks, for instance, is like it sounds like half sociology to me. And so I wonder there are fortunately for you, there is both psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics. Ah, OK. All right. OK, so thank you for schooling me on a very elementary part of the field. All right. Okay. So thank you for schooling me on a very elementary part of the field. So I was just asking about the difference between those two extremely broad subfields of linguistics.

Exactly. But linguistics is really exciting for me because it kind of touches everything. You know, there are so many subfields and there are so many different things that it can talk to. And so like, it's, it's cool that there is both a psycholinguistics that looks at the sort of brain capacity for language, and also the sociolinguistics that looks at the, you know, society level, and also things that look at, you know, the sounds of language or the structure of, you know, sentences and this, these types of things, like, there are all these different things. And I think it's, it's fun to take this sort of broad tend approach to linguistics and say, how can we understand how language works, whether that's in internet linguistics or whether that's in some of these more cognitive areas, which are also interesting. Yeah. And so what I, what I was wondering is the, you know, I feel like your, your part of the field must be incredibly exciting because there's this incredible volume now of written speech and recorded speech. That's like orders of magnitude greater than anything that would have existed, you know, a couple of decades ago.

And you're able to observe it. I'm wondering if that's changing linguistics as a field at all or if it's shedding any light on older debates. Right. About, you know, that in psycholinguistics, a word I just learned. Well, I mean, one thing that I think is interesting is just sort of the general, you know, both like there's so much language that exists in a sort of searchable form now, which didn't exist previously. And so you're able to do richer, what they call corpus linguistics, where you look at large corporate data and you can find out all sorts of interesting things from corpus linguistics. And, you know, looking at things like, okay,

how can we do better computer models of language? So you have computational linguistics. And how can we find better computer models of language, which might tell us something about what is needed for humans in terms of coming up with language? Or how can we, you know, train your phone to talk back to you more, and thereby maybe find out some things about the structure of language itself. So I think a lot of areas of linguistics are being touched by technology in some sense, and some of that is like specifically how we talk online, which is the kind of bit that I'm interested in. But there's also the sort of like, well, you know, can we get computers to do some

stuff for us, you know? Or can we get computers to, you know, when it comes to trying to make resources available in underrepresented languages. So, you know, some languages don't even have a dictionary. Not even like, you know, English has many dictionaries. We have Oxford and Merriam-Webster and these types of things. Some languages haven't had a dictionary made for them at all. And so using technology to even make a dictionary or to make audio recordings in different languages and stuff like that. Like all areas of linguistics end up getting touched by, you know, increased advances in audio processing. There's a whole area of linguistics called gesture studies, which looks at how we gesture, obviously. We have a whole episode of Lingthusiasm, but we have several episodes of Lingthusiasm about gesture

because my co-host is a gesture linguist, including a video one where you can actually see the gestures. Because one of the analogies that I like to make is that people are using gestures in a similar way to how we're using emoji in terms of how they combine with the words that you're saying. And the neat thing about gesture studies, which has had a tremendous increase in how much it's been studied

in the past, you know, probably five or so decades, and you look at that and you think, ah, that's when video recording came in because it became so much easier to record gestures and pause them and play them back and really do this sort of fine-grained granular analysis once we had even things like vhs tape so you had some sort of videotape to do that and of course it's easier to do that now um i know uh some sign language linguists that are working with youtube videos of people signing because you have you know you have access to that kind of data as a as a corpus as well so the internet is transforming various areas of linguistics, partly because it's this explosion of sort of language data and how we can process it and what we can do with it, which touches on various aspects of how we do language.

Yeah. I mean, even like, you know, AI text generation, right? Like GPT-3, what it is outputting now, I just saw, I saw a headline in the article, but that a GPT-3 generated piece of text made to the top of Hacker News, which is like a Reddit type, you know, site, like fooled the user base of that site into like upvoting this piece of AI generated text. And just that is like, wow, what a door to open to like what the fuck does that mean right well and in some respects you know that's this is where i think knowledge of linguistics is also really useful because you know like thinking about things like the turing test like the turing test for you know have you have you created a machine that can you know fool somebody on the other end of the chat bot to thinking that there's actually a human at the other end. And that's a linguistic test, right? That's a test of language.

It's a test also of knowledge of the world and you have to say things that don't totally not make sense. But it is ultimately sort of a linguistic test and the idea of if we want our phones to talk back to us or to communicate us with natural language or if you want something like GPT-2 to generate this sort of language, it's interesting to have this understanding of language from a linguist perspective of like what's what's been going on there we also did an interview on linkthusiasm with janelle shane who does uh these really fun uh weird robot uh like um ai experiments so she tries to like get robots to generate like ice cream flavors and stuff like this and they're all like really weird and funny to sort of figure out the, uh,

problems with AI. So we were able to do a, uh, neural network generated episode of the podcast where we fed in the transcripts of all of our previous episodes. Whoa. And then we had it spit out like dialogues between me and my cohost and being like,

here's what's going on. And then we like read out the best dialogues for like what has the what has the machine generated and the thing is is like if we were using gpt2 because gpt3 didn't exist yet the thing is is like gpt2 was able to figure some stuff out like it was able to figure out that like my co-host and i take turns talking um it was able to figure out the sort of general tone of the podcast, which is very enthusiastic and positive. It began a lot of our sentences like, yeah, and, which I guess is something that we do.

Its linguistics was very, very bad. Yeah. I'm not really worried about my dog being taken by a robot anytime soon because it would like, some words about linguistics, but they'd be very false but well let me just say gbt3 is like a huge advancement over gbt2 in terms of like how how what it spits out but the other thing that like always is underrated i think about those uh language generation tools all the stuff we trained an ai to write a seinfeld episode yada

yada kind of thing all of those sorts of things are they had an ai spit out a Seinfeld episode, yada, yada kind of thing. All of those sorts of things are, they had an AI spit out a bunch of text and then humans selected the best text and combined it in every single case. It's not the raw output. It's someone who's basically doing magnetic poetry and then saying, look at the poem my fridge wrote. But in reality, no, you wrote the poem, you used a tool to write something. and then the comedy of it is us imagining that a computer did it all by itself but in reality you selected the funniest bits um which is as a comedy writer always bothered me that people are acting like humans aren't creating this comedy yeah like we performed the the best bits and then we also

uh released a document that's just like a hundred pages of all of the stuff that it generated so you can see how weird the raw output is yeah and even that is somewhat curated but it's you can see how weird that is it's kind of like saying like my keyboard wrote this poem because my keyboard had 26 letters i just combined them right right exactly exactly uh i i mean but you know that that field is moving so fast that you know who knows how true that's going to be in a couple of years. But I think there, too, understanding linguistics can be really helpful because you go back to the sort of socio side. What kinds of English or what kinds of language are available in these sorts of texts? So like GPT-3 is trained on like billions of words of stuff that's been written on the Internet. Well, what exists on the internet, right?

Like there's a whole lot of English text. It's like if you train it on news sites, it's going to be a certain type of English text. It's not going to be a representation of how English is spoken, which is a lot more diverse than how it tends to get written down. Or it's going to get trained on like here's a bunch of Harry Potter fan fiction, which is written in a particular style. It's going to get trained on like, here's a bunch of Harry Potter fan fiction, which is written in a particular style. And it's hard to make those types of tools for any other language really at this point, even like the big languages like French or Chinese or Spanish or something. But it's hard because you need so much training data to get these kinds of results. And we just don't have that much written text in really any other language or maybe in many other languages beyond like the top 10. So how do you do this?

And like humans don't require this much input in order to start talking. They take quite a lot of input, but like by the time you're two or so, you, you know, you're, you're talking in sentences. How can you do this with like less input? Because that's where you could get something that might actually work for more languages. Well, again,

I could talk to you for a thousand years. And I'm loathe to even ask you a closing question. Cause we'll be here for another 45 minutes. What do you, what do you hope people take away in terms of like their, their daily, their daily use of language? I think that.

their daily use of language? I think that a lot of people have this sort of fundamental linguistic insecurity of like, you know, maybe I'm not doing it right. Like maybe I'm just constantly saying things that are wrong. You have that sort of red pen hangover. And just to be able to think through that in a more reasoned sort of way, you know, if you're not doing a specific person harm, if you're not actively insulting somebody or being rude to somebody, you're fine.

You're probably fine. It's okay to wave at the end of your Zoom calls. It's okay to be creative with language and be expressive with language and be doing interesting things with language. Like, you're probably fine. It's okay. Thank you. That's a wonderful. It's okay. Thank you.

That's a wonderful message to end with. Thank you so much, Gretchen, for being on the show. The podcast again is called Lingthusias and the book is called because internet. You are called Gretchen McCulloch. Really appreciate you being here.

Thank you so much for having me. Well, thank you again to Gretchen McCulloch for coming on the show. Her book, again, is Because Internet, and her podcast is Lingthusiasm. I hope you check them out. That is it for us this week on Factually. If you like the show, hey, send me an email and let me know what you thought about it. If you have any questions for me, feel free to shoot them to factually at adamconover.net. And please, please, please leave us a rating or a review wherever you subscribe. It really does help us out. I want to thank our producers, Dana Wickens and Sam

Roudman, our engineers, Brett Morris and Ryan Connor, Andrew WK for our theme song. I've been Adam Conover. You can find me at adamconover.net or at Adam Conover, wherever you get your social media. And until next time, we'll see you next week on Factually.