Factually! with Adam Conover - Why Language is Always Changing with Valerie Fridland

Episode Date: June 14, 2023

Language changes, and that's not a bad thing! This week, Adam is joined by sociolinguist Valerie Fridland to uncover how language is much more malleable than we're led to believe, and how the resistance against new slang often disguises an attempt to limit the influence of marginalized communities. Pick up Valerie's book at factuallypod.com/books Like the show? Rate Factually! 5-Stars on Apple Podcasts and let Adam know what conversation you'd like to hear next.Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.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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Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me once again as I talk to an incredible expert about all the amazing things that they know that I don't know and that you might not know. Both of our minds are going to get blown together. We're going to have so much fun. This week, we're talking about language. You know, people are constantly arguing about what the right and wrong ways to use language are, as though the rules of language were encoded by some grammar god from on high. But they're not. Language isn't a set of objective rules like math. No, language is created, changed, and used by people. And that means it will always resist our attempts

to control it. There was actually a funny example of this the other year in the UK. A London primary school made a bold attempt to ban slang. And by bold, I mean pointless and stupid. I mean, how are you going to stop teens from beginning sentences with because, like, or basically? This school even tried to ban phrases like, he cut his eyes at me, which, I mean, come on, that's not just slang, that's poetry. That sounds like Shakespeare, man. And it's a phrase, along with many others that were banned, that originated among marginalized people. Controlling language like this seems to be more about limiting the influence of certain

people rather than the words themselves. And at the end of the day, it won't work. Because again, language is created by people and people are irrepressible. If you set up a linguistic rule, you had better believe some enterprising kid is going to come along and break it. And when they do, they are going to use that new word, phrase, or sentence structure to mean something new, because that is what language fucking does, bro. Now, none of that stops language from being a constant culture war target. From the battles over Ebonics in the 1990s to conflicts today over the use of supposed woke language. But those battles ignore something fundamental.

The way people use language reveals something about them, about who they are and where they come from and what is happening in their world. So instead of telling people not to use language a certain way, what if we took the opportunity to learn from how they actually do use it? Well, fortunately for us, there is an entire field of study that looks at the relationship between culture and language called sociolinguistics. And on the show today, we in fact have a sociolinguist who has written a fascinating new book on this very topic. Her name is Valerie Friedland, and she's a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and the author of a new book called Like Literally Dude,

Arguing for the Good in Bad English. And you are going to love this interview with her. But before we get to it, I want to remind you that if you want to support this show, you can do so on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover for just five bucks a month. You get every episode of this show ad free. You can join our community discord. We even do a live book club over Zoom. It is so much fun. Hope to see you there. And if you love standup comedy, please remember I am on tour this year. If you live in Illinois, Maryland, Missouri, or Rhode Island, come see me. I got a brand new hour of standup. I'd love to see you. I do a meet and greet after every show, adamconover.net slash tour dates to get those tickets. And without further ado,

let's get to my interview with Valerie Friedland. Valerie, thank you so much for being on the show. Absolutely. I'm excited to be here to talk with you. So you're a sociolinguist. Tell me very briefly, what does that mean? Well, first of all, I am impressed with how well you pronounce that. That trips a lot of people up, which is part of the reason I went for that as my title. I love language. That's how I know how to pronounce everything. I love it. Because I know the English language front to back. I love it. All right. Well, we're going to test that as we go today. Okay. I would love to. I'm a linguist, a theoretical linguist, which means that I study the underlying

structure of language, how language is formed in the brain, how your articulatory structure helps get language out. But my particular interest is how social triggers and these underlying linguistic tendencies interact and become language changes and evolve over time. So that's why I'm a sociolinguist. And so give me an example of that. Like, I'm sure your book is full of them, but give me an example of how that social world will affect how language evolves. Oh, absolutely. So I think a really seminal example is just looking at how English has come to be the modern English we speak today versus being German or something more like Icelandic, which hasn't changed much since its proto-Germanic

days because we all started as a different language. But it's social forces that came into the history of English's development that changed it from a Germanic language, almost 100% Germanic wordstock, to a language that has only about 30% Germanic wordstock because we had wars, we had invasions, we had Vikings, we had all sorts of fun stuff, but we also had class and class plays a huge role in shaping language. And during the middle English period, class was seminal in forming the English that we speak today. So the lower class spoke English and the upper class spoke French. And whenever you have unregulated language change going on

without a lot of upward pressure on keeping it standard or codifying it, natural evolutionary processes in language, natural cognitive processes in language take place, and they meet with that social trigger of social class and social standing. And that's really what formed the modern English of today. So that's a really good example of how language triggers that are always there and social triggers that come into play at certain times and places interact and create something new and novel. You know, an example of this interaction with a class that I heard, and I hesitate to repeat it because I worry it's like a just so story that I heard, but maybe you can correct me and tell me if it's real or not, is that the reason we have different words in English or in modern American

English, at least, for the animal versus the meat that comes from the animal is because of that class distinction, that other languages, they use the same word or many others they do. But in English, cow versus beef. Beef is French because it was the cow is the English because it was the peasants who were dealing with the animal and the lords and ladies who actually ate the meat. And so we ended up with this French descended word. That's a story I heard many decades ago. Is that true? It seems to match the phenomenon you're talking about. It is true. That's a great story. Actually, you can even read about it in Ivanhoe when they talk about the peasants and what they called the food and the nobility and what they called the food and the nobility

and what they called the food, it was very different because English had the words for the animals. So cow and swine, for example, are the English words. But French was the language of nobility and it was language of the upper class at the time. And so the words that were used when you actually served as a servant, when you served that animal, you used the French word. So cow became le boeuf. And that is exactly why we have that two-faced way to call animals and meat in English today. Well, now you mentioned the idea

that in the absence of a pressure to standardize the language, these evolutionary things will happen. But that's also a big feature of languages, especially English. I grew up being told there's a right way to speak and a wrong way to speak. I used to say, I'm doing good. And my friends would say, Adam, Superman does good. You're doing well. And I was like, fuck off. You're being an asshole, right? We're used to these sort of battles in English. And so in your view, very broadly, what role does that, those standardization forces play?

I mean, is that a beneficial effect on languages? Is it something that we should leave behind? Like, it seems like a battle that never ends. Well, I think it's actually a fairly new battle, which most people don't realize. What you're talking about is prescriptivism. And we seem to think prescriptivism has been around forever because we learned it. And we remember our parents saying, no, it's not him and you that went to the party. It's he and you that went to the party, or he and I that went to the party. But reality is that language has evolved so much since the old English period, precisely because there weren't a lot of codification and standardizations that existed in

the Middle English period to tell us how to speak. And so it was natural evolutionary processes, natural articulatory forces that led language to where it is today. And it really wasn't until about the 18th century that we had people that were like, wow, you know, I like the way I say this better than the way you say it. So let me write it down. And now everybody's going to say it this way. So these prescriptivist tendencies, these grammar books, these dictionaries really didn't start being written until about 1700. And that's where we get this really strong complaint tradition, starting about that era where you don't do it right, but I do it right. And you should do it like me. I think the

big question is not whether one opinion is right and one is wrong, but can they coexist? And we understand where these two different beliefs about language stem from and what their purpose might be. So a prescriptivist might say, you should say it this way because first of all, that's how people in power say it. And if you want to achieve that kind of economic or political power, you should say it this way because that will get you in the door. They might also say that this is tradition and tradition is valuable. So there is some benefit to that kind of speech. A descriptivist or someone who just lets language naturally evolve might say, well, almost everything you say that you think is correct today was wrong at some point in time and is an evolution from some previous

point. And if we didn't allow language to proceed naturally, then we would still have case markers in English. We would still have grammatical gender in English. We would still have plural marking on every word in English. We would have strong and weak verb classes, none of which do we have today. And our language is no less for it. In fact, we are as expressive and creative and inventive as ever so that there's nothing wrong with natural evolutionary processes and they're more authentic to speakers' personalities? My answer would be, I think both are right. There are times and places where prescriptivism might fit.

So for example, in writing, it's probably important to have codification and standardization. And even in more formal speaking contexts where I'm giving a talk or I'm a CEO of a company and I am in a leadership position and I want to make sure everybody understands me and that I'm a model in some way, that might be an appropriate place for prescriptivist notions. But if it's a teenager or somebody talking on the street or my friend or my neighbor, then if they start using that kind of language, I actually think they're an asshole. So it doesn't really serve. Yeah. You're lecturing someone in person. You're lecturing someone in person on the proper

use of the semicolon. And they're like, dude, I was just fucking talking to you. Like, I don't, I wasn't using semicolons. Like, well, you actually raised a really good point that I didn't even think of because I often think of a prescriptivism as being simply wrong that, you know, people claim that there's a right way to use language and a wrong way to use language. And I think that's incorrect. I think that language is, as you say, it's socially determined. And when someone says there's a right and wrong way, they're really making a statement about society, about people, about I'm the right kind of person and you are the wrong kind of person and you should be more like me. I'm standard.

I'm normative. I'm dominant. I'm the rule and you're the exception. However, you do make a point that writing is very different from speech, that there are rules that I do sort of believe are rules in writing about, I don't know, I think you need to close the parentheses, you know, very basic stuff, punctuation marks and things like that. And that made me, just you saying that made me realize, oh, wow, yeah, writing, just English writing for someone else to read is far more rule bound than speeches and is actually a completely

different way of using language. They barely, if you were to write down what I'm saying to you right now, it would be incoherent because I'm interrupting myself. I'm like inserting clauses in the middle of sentences and then trailing off. They're completely different ways of using language. And yet I understand every word that you said, because in real speak context where we're face to face or, you know or television screen to television screen, we have context and we have background knowledge. We also can read other signs from our bodies,

eye gaze, various things like that that allow us to fill in those holes. But in writing, you're absolutely right. We don't have that contextual information and it wouldn't make sense. So we need more conventions in writing than we need in speech. But I want to clarify that speech has a lot of rules. So I think a lot of times people misconstrue what I'm saying to mean, okay, we don't have to have rules when we talk. It's not important because I absolutely agree with you that when we are judging someone on their speech, because it's different from a prescriptive norm, We're just being prescriptivist assholes who think we're right and they're not. And that's not an appropriate way to frame someone else's speech. You can say, I don't like your speech. It's not my preference. But saying something is disliked

is very different than saying something is bad, which makes a moral judgment. And when I'm telling you that you're not good enough because of the way your speech is, I'm telling you that you're not good enough because of the way your speech, your speeches, I'm telling you that I'm morally judging you on the basis of something that's just different than my own views and beliefs. But that doesn't mean that speech is not governed by rules. If we didn't have rules governing speech, we wouldn't be able to understand each other. We have lots of rules that govern speech. They're just not the time type that appear in a grammar book or a dictionary. They're the type that we know in here, that we learn as babies, that we understand whenever we have a conversation, no matter who we are and whether we're literary or not. So for example, if I tell you, Ted thinks that John knows himself well. Well, who does the himself

there refer to? You know, it has to be John. It can't be Ted. Because of the rules that I understand as a speaker of human language and a two year old, if you give them like two different puppets to play with and to pick out, you say, Ted knows that John knows himself. And you name one puppet Ted and the other puppet John, they will always pick the right puppet to refer to himself because that's an underlying rule of language that allows them to find the right antecedent. But these are unspoken rules that we don't need someone to put in a dictionary. And if we did, we'd have to wait until a kid could read, which would be way too late for language. So language is fundamentally a different skill than writing, and we shouldn't expect the same rules to apply. Wow. That is so cool. And my mind is blown whenever I encounter a rule like that. One that I learned a couple of years ago, and you'll tell me the proper version of it. This'll be my dum-dum recitation of it. But it's that there's a particular order of modifiers or adjectives in English that if I were to say, you know, the big red scaly British dragon, right? Those words all come in a particular order. If I were to say the scaly red British big dragon, that immediately sounds wrong to me. And it sounds wrong to you too. And there's like an order of there's like quantity size, where it comes from, what its demeanor is. And those all come in a particular order that I intuitively know, despite the fact I was never taught this in school.

No one ever sat me down and said, hey, if you're going to apply eight modifiers in a row to a particular noun, here's the order they have to come in. And yet I know it. So where do rules like that or the himself one that you described, where do they come from? Are they socially determined? Are they specific to languages or what? Well, you just walked into a big controversy in linguistics. Oh, no. Oh, actually, not oh, no. That's exactly what I love to wander into is an academic controversy. Break it down for us. What is the controversy? Well, if you're a Chomskyian,

meaning someone that follows the syntactic theories of Noam Chomsky, which has been a very influential field of thought in modern American linguistics, you would say, well, a baby is born with that. It's part of our innate grammar that we're born with. We are born talking so that we're not physically talking, but we're born talking in our brain that we have a specific area of the brain that's devoted to linguistic processing and syntactic structures. And all it needs is sort of activation or triggering by input from the environment. And once it hits those triggers, certain, you know, little boxes are checked and it develops language, this it being the baby. Others are functionalists. And this has become a little more prevalent in American thinking, I think, in modern eras versus maybe

20 years ago when Chomskyian philosophy was really the only way you would think. And this says that, okay, we are born with some capacity for language. There do seem to be some fundamental structures that help guide the way that baby's brains process for language, but it's not language exclusive. It's learning exclusive, that brains are made to learn in certain ways. And those ways that it learns interacting with the way the world is certain facts about the world, create a knowledge form that, that is universal. And so I think a good example of this would be, um, when we, when we have case in a language. So for example, I in English is subject case and him is an object case pronoun, right? So you see that there's different changes

in the saying or I and me or he and him. What we find is in languages that are subject, verb, object, like English, where the subject goes first and then you have a verb and then you have an object like I saw him. Those languages often don't have case or can lose case without too much difficulty because the subject and the object are widely separated and there's a marker in the middle saying, okay, I'm the verb that acts back on the subject and forward on the object. So it has a clear separation between that subject and the object. So it's easy for your brain to process who did what to whom without case marking, right? That's just a functional fact of the way that that sentence is structured. But what we find in languages that have the

subject and the object close together, like a subject-object-verb language, I think Japanese is a good example of this. German is like this. I learned it in college. German is like, you're like, I, him, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, on Tuesday met. And then you, so you have to wait all the way into the end of the sentence a lot of the time to find out what the verb is. And to see who was doing what to whom. Right, exactly. So exactly like German, what you find is if you have the two subjects and the objects right beside each other, it would be very hard if you didn't mark with case to understand which was the subject and which was the object because they both precede the verb. And so we just found as a natural functional

tendency, languages that have that kind of structure have case. Languages that don't have that kind of structure don't have to have case. So these are functional developments that arise for our brain's ability to process information. So again, there are two very different arguments about how language occurs in the brain and how we learn these rules. But fundamentally, it's from the way the brain is structured and how we're structured as humans to process the world. That's really fascinating because whether you're a Chomskyite or a functionalist about it, and we could, I don't think we need to dive deeper into the difference. work rather than something you need to learn in a style manual or, you know, that you need to be taught in school.

It's actually absent from the rules that, you know, you would learn in a setting like that because it's sort of built into us, which is really, it's really fascinating that like, you know, the language pedants don't even bother to tell you about it. But there's all these other rules that they feel that they often need to enforce. Never split an infinitive. You know, that kind of thing is very fascinating to me that we end up, that some folks feel a need to have that kind of rule. Let's move on from the talk about prescriptivism, though. One thing I'd love to ask you about, I know you write about, uh, uh, you write

about like interject. I literally put it into that sentence, you know, interjections like, uh, or, you know, and I would love to talk to you about this because as someone who talks for a living, I actually happen to use a lot of them because I think a little bit faster than I talk. Sometimes I have a lot of ideas. I tend to use those, you know, words. There have been times that people in the industry have told me, you should really watch yourself for that and make sure you don't use those that often because

they make you sound stupid or whatever. And then I go through a little period where I try to stop myself from saying, you know, so much. Uh, but it's so much a feature of my speech that I, I don't know. Uh, I don't know if I'll ever be able to completely eradicate it. So what is your view as a linguist of, of where those interjections come from and what purpose they have? Well, first I want to apologize because after we talk about them, you're going to hear them every time you say them for the rest of our

conversation. So we should have saved this for the end because people are going to hear me do it for the entire rest of the, of the podcast. That's going to drive them fucking insane. Exactly can't unhear it once you hear it once and people talk about it. So I apologize in advance to everybody listening, but the nice thing is we shouldn't be so upset about it because those things are doing great work for us. And as you said, you talk for a living, it's different than writing. If I stuck a lot of,

you know, and all those things in my writing, then it might be distracting and it might detract from the purpose. But when we're in conversation, our job is not only the strict literal semantic information that I'm trying to transmit. It's also the relationship we have, the ideas we have about it, and also my personal beliefs about what I'm saying, how I came to that knowledge, whether I'm sure about that knowledge or less sure than that knowledge, something called epistemics in linguistics. So all these different things are competing for our ability to phrase them somehow. And so things like, you know, actually, well. So all of those help direct the listener to have certain expectations

about what the speaker's intending. And this is actually very helpful as a listener to have someone point out to you how you're supposed to take something because we all have been in those situations where we say something and it's not quite taken like we intended it. A lot of times if you don't signpost or provide these conversational cohesion markers, then you increase the tendency of other people to misunderstand where you're headed, your own relationship to what you're saying, or how certain you were about what you're saying. So when I say something such as like, when I use like as a discourse marker, So when I say something such as like, when I use like as a discourse marker, what like communicates in many cases is a subjective sensibility. This idea that what I'm telling you is not precise, but it's sort of the sense that I want you to get from what I'm saying.

Or I want to use it for emphasis. So, for example, if I said I was waiting like 20 hours for you, dude, what I probably wasn't doing is waiting 20 hours and I don't intend for you to take it that way. What I'm emphasizing by putting that like in there is that, hey, asshole, you made me wait for a really long time and I pissed off about it. Right? So it's communicating that versus saying, I was waiting for 20 hours, which certainly doesn't communicate the same force, the same emphatic force. So all of those little markers are extremely meaningful in our everyday speech. And in fact, if we look at studies that remove those discourse markers like you know and like and well and so from the speech of subjects, and we have other listeners listen to them and rate them on how sociable they were, how likable they were, those well likable, how likable they were, those kinds of

things. We find that when we remove those discourse markers, people hear that speech as less friendly and more robotic. So we want them in there. So you're just friendlier and not a robot. So isn't that good? That is good, except that I often find that other people in my position, broadcasters, if you watch someone on CNN, you watch a CNN guest, they've likely trained themselves to remove all the us from their speech. And it's sort of seen as a mark of professionalism. And but do you think that that maybe that's counterproductive because it's making those folks less friendly? It makes them seem stiffer or more broadcasty?

Or I suppose it depends on the medium, but. Well, that's actually a really good question because I think what you're drawing attention to is two different things than what we were talking about previously. So I was mentioning discourse markers like like, you know, some and well, but what you're talking about is am and a,

which are actually filled pauses. So those are fundamentally and functionally different than filler words, which is what you were talking about previously. And they do very different work. So where things like, you know, well, so they actually are for conversational cohesion, and they signpost and provide some epistemic value often. So how someone is to take something. I'm an are actually markers of speech planning, and they don't themselves have any kind of literal meaning that they contribute to what I'm saying, whereas so does and well does. They actually contribute some sort of meaning. I'm and I,

in fact, are usually more likely to occur when someone has not rehearsed what they're going to say, when we're in spontaneous discourse, when we're saying something that's more abstract, more difficult, less familiar, those kinds of situations will increase the numbers of uhs and ums that we use. So when we're in a context like a CNN expert, and we expect someone to know what they're talking about, um and uh would signal to us that they are not practiced and they are not familiar with what they're saying and therefore would be taken as a disfavorable sign of their ability to communicate. In conversation though, I want to know people are working hard to come up with interesting things to say. So if we're in a regular back and forth conversation at a party or at a bar and you say, um, or a couple of times,

what that tells me is that you're actually spending some cognitive effort on coming up with what to say. So in those cases, I don't think there's anything wrong with using them in a case where I'm giving a public talk, for example, or I'm on television as a host, I would expect it to be more practice. And therefore it would probably be less valuable to use those in those contexts. Oh my God. This is, that's such an incredible breakdown of when it's useful and when it's not, and when we actually might want to remove those words and when we might not want to. And I think a lot of my conversation here, part of what I'm doing in conversations like this with you, I am thinking on my feet because I'm sort of the, I'm the interlocutor here. I'm

not the expert. I'm asking you questions. I'm trying to be surprised by what you're saying, you know? And so it makes sense for me to be puzzling through my thoughts as I'm talking to you, because that's the sort of conversation I'm trying to have. So in this context, this is a good context for me to go, ah, ah, oh, that's really interesting, Valerie. Ah, ah. But if I'm in the opposite context, maybe I'm being interviewed about something I know a lot about, then perhaps it might be better for me to be a little bit more locked and loaded. If I'm trying to communicate more expertise. Also, when you're talking about conversational markers, like, like one that I've heard come up more recently is, is putting right at the end of

a sentence. I find myself doing that in interviews. Actually, sometimes when I am the expert in a context right now, I'm, I'm being interviewed a lot about, uh, uh, union matters because I'm, uh, uh, in the leadership of my union and we're, we're in the news a lot lately because we're on strike. And so something I'll do a lot is I'll explain, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right. And I'll just sort of toss that little right at the end. And it feels like a similar sort of social lubrication where I'm trying to I'm trying to draw the audience along and communicate that I'm making an argument that I hope is going down easily. It seems like a cousin to like rather than a cousin to perhaps. Perhaps. You know, it's funny because I actually have an anecdote in the book where I was talking to a podcaster and they were so relieved to hear me talk about all these different features of

having a purpose and being useful because they said that they're often called out for their over frequent use of right in just the same context you talk about it. So it must be a podcaster, right? Another person who is regularly taken to task for their use of right in that same way is actually Mark Zuckerberg. He uses right a lot in that context. So see, you're in very good company. That right is. Well, I don't want to be in company with Mark Zuckerberg personally.

That's what we can get. That's a different episode. But, you know, I have my beefs with Mark. But, OK, I understand that we might be using it the same way. Please go on. Well, so what you're doing there is actually inviting the audience to make inferences. So when you use right in that context, you're pausing to let them catch up and say,

okay, I'm checking that you're making the right inference and you're keeping up with me. So it's a listenership device where you're using it to help give them a moment to get up to speed and then making sure that they're getting the inference you're intending. So a lot of times people have disliked that because it causes work on the side

of the listener. If you're inviting someone to make inferences, you're asking them to do work. And some listeners may feel like that's asking a lot of them to do actual work. So, you know, I think it's funny that that bothers us, but I've heard that one in particular, that inferring right to be something that people remark on quite often, as they've noticed more and more in people's speech. But I think what it really is, is just the sign that we're in conversation and we recognize we have a listener in conversation. It's not just us talking, right? You're actually, and I just used it. We're actually making sure that someone is there with us and moving along with us.

Now, I think where people sometimes get upset is when they're listening to people on the radio or on a podcast and they're using that right. And maybe the people are not agreeing or not making that same inference. And that's where they're getting a little tweaked about it. Yeah. They're like, oh, no, not right. I disagree with you. Like, I think taxes should be higher or whatever it is.

But no, you're, you're completely correct that I do it because, um, I am trying to lay out an argument for the person listening and I want them to come along. I was like, Hey, are you still on the, are you still on the wagon? Like, are we still traveling together here? Um, we're, we're, we're in this together. I'm not just like, blah, blah, blah. I'm trying to, you know, lay out a trail of breadcrumbs for you and, and hope that you follow it and we're in it together. And I, I'm trying to remind them of that. At least that's what I, what I think I'm doing. It is wonderful to talk to you. You are like a therapist for podcasters. And I honestly think this is a

fee that you should offer, should offer where you just talk to people about the linguistic ticks that everyone in the YouTube comments is getting on their ass about. Cause it does, it is something that happens to us as public speakers is that as soon as someone comments on something like, Oh, do I need to, do I need to change it? And Oh God, everything I'm doing is wrong. You know it's,'s very, you can really get in your own head. And I guess I wonder what is the value of trying to restrict your own speech in that way, trying to control your own speech and be rigid with it versus doing what comes naturally. Like a lot of times on a podcast, I just want to be my natural self, a little bit more up and talkative than my natural self. But I'm not trying to, I worry that if I were to police

myself for the rights and the ums and the uhs too much that I would become stiff and it wouldn't be as good of a conversation. What do you think? Well, I think then you'd get angry emails saying that you were too stiff and, you know, sounded like a uptight stick in the mud. So you're never going to make people happy. It doesn't matter what it is. There's always going to be something in your speech that people will respond to and dislike. And the more that you are not white and male, the more often that will happen.

So women in particular in broadcast settings get a ton of voice hate mail, much more than men in similar positions. And African-Americans likewise. So it really, what's really interesting is we have this set belief about here's how someone should talk, but that belief is actually fairly fluid in the sense that even if someone talks the way we think we want them to talk, then something else in their speech is going to irritate us. So, you know, for every like that annoys somebody and someone's speech, then they'll say,

I hate how you use like, well, they use so a lot, right? And then for every so at the beginning of a sentence that they use that someone else hates, that person uses well too much or uses okay all the time or uses right in the middle of their sentences. So there's always going to be something that someone doesn't like. And if we try to spend most of our time worrying about what people like and dislike in our speech, then we're not going to be authentic and real and have connections. And that's the point of speech in the end. And if we can move away from the idea that there is a right way to talk and a good way to talk, and then there's a bad way to talk. Instead, we look at it as there are ways that we have in common that help bond us as speakers and other ways that help point to the fact that

we are not the same person and that's okay. Then I think we can be a more connecting, empathetic audience and speaker at the same time. It's just getting our head wrapped around that I can dislike the way that someone talks, but that doesn't mean that the way they talk is bad. And that's a crucial distinction. That is a wonderful message to take us to break with. But when we get back, I want to talk to you about teenagers and slang

and all these crazy words that kids are always coming up with. But we have to take a really quick break. We'll be right back with more Valerie Friedland. Okay, we're back with Valerie Friedland. Before the break, we were just talking about how women are often criticized excessively for the way that they speak, their use of language when they're speaking publicly. That's certainly true. I want to talk about another group of people who are often criticized for their language, which is young people. Teenagers or even kids are constantly being told that they're speaking

wrong. In my intro, I talked about this case where a UK school is trying to ban the use of slang entirely, which obviously seems completely excessive. Why is slang such a sore spot for adults and what purpose does it serve for young people? Well, first of all, anybody trying to ban slang, good luck with that one. There's just no way. You know, young people are the innovators in language and pretty much we have them to thank for all the features of language we use today. Without young people, we would have no linguistic revolutions.

We would have no innovations. We would have no new words to describe the experiences that we have in our world. So it's funny that we want to eradicate what they add to our language instead of embrace it. But I think a lot of it is because what we notice that young people do is invent novel slang that's maybe a little counterculture or rebellious or even taboo in some ways. And a lot of what they say is never going to hit mainstream and become the language of our future. But the more underlying things that they introduce, the new ways of using language innovatively, like saying adulting sucks from adult. They follow the pattern that many of us have trod before. So for example, parent was a noun long before it was a verb. So if I say

parenting sucks, nobody blinks an eye. And most of us that are parents would approve of that message. But when I say adulting sucks, I roll my eyes because teenagers are using language in a bad way. But when I say adulting sucks, I roll my eyes because teenagers are using language in a bad way. But we didn't really see the word parenting come into widespread use until the 20th century. It was always a noun before that. Shakespeare was renowned for using nouns as verbs and verbs as noun. So this is just part of the natural evolution of language. But it's all in the mouths of the young, the young who are more creative and innovative and more free to do creative things with language, but it's all in the mouths of the young, the young who are more creative and innovative and more free to do creative things with language that these types of forms come forth. And because they're different than what we say, and because we think we say everything correctly, we judge

young people for doing it. A lot of times because they are doing it a little bit to piss us off. I mean, admit it when you were a teenager, you wanted to piss your parents off. And the first thing you want to do is speak differently than your parents. And that drives a lot of this creativity and innovation. But the thing we forget is that young people also have more neuroplasticity than us old folks, which is really unfortunate for us. But they can make much quicker nerve fiber connections. They have more neuro connectivity and they also are able to analyze really underlying distributions, really subtle variations and things better than adults can. So that primes them for linguistic innovation because they notice these low lying tendencies at a rate much higher than old people do. So then the problem is they start to use it

and it's different than what we say. And then we hate it. So that's really the cycle of language change. This is just there. They have a special ability as young people that we have lost and we're angry about it. It's like when you see, you know, when you're look, I cannot ski. I'm so bad at it. And now I'm I also would never do it because I am too worried about my joints at this point in my life. I'm not going to take that risk with my body. And when I see a five-year-old on skis

or a four-year-old on skis, and you see them and you're like, man, when they fall down, they don't even feel it. They bounce, you know? And I resent them for that because they have this ability of youth that I have lost. Maybe that is why we get mad at them. We're like, you're coming up with new words. I can't do that anymore. Exactly. Well, also remember that when you're five, you're only two feet from the ground.

That helps when you fall. But yes, it's partially that. It's partially that we are a little resentful of their creativity. But I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that we see young people as not quite fully formed. And a lot of times they use language in ways that are slightly rebellious. I mean, the attraction to new forms of young people is usually because it's different than what parents do. And it's a little bit rebellious and nonconformist. And then as adults, we are constantly telling our kids to slow down when they're screaming down the mountain, right? And we're doing the same thing with language. So even though we might teach them to ski, we don't teach them to go 100 miles per hour skiing.

Same thing with language. We give them the fundamental structure of language. That's our role as parents. And when they're born and we're giving them input, they're getting our system as the fundamental system. But then they go to school and they do something called vernacular reorganization, which is just the fancy linguistic term for they look at their peer group and go, wow, they're so much cooler than mom. I'm going to be like them. And then they adopt that because that's really who they want to model themselves after. But I think parents can rest assured that all of that finds its place. And we go through these periods in adolescence where we're really attracted to these rebellious, nonconformist, maybe even nonstandard, maybe even offensive things at times. But what we find is

something called age grading. As kids get into the professional work world, as they become adults and become parents, they naturally start to adjust their speech towards those old, boring, traditional norms that older speakers adopt. So whatever was coming up as a new feature in their speech, that's not stigmatized will become the new norm, but stigma stigmatized or rebellious features tend to get dampened in their rate and they don't get used as much. So like use is a good example. A lot of people hate like, they think their kids use it too much. They want to kill, you know, kill it in their kid's speech. But as kids move from being a 17 year old, you know, like user in every Senate to a 25 year old professional, they will naturally start to use like less often, even though they won't

eradicate it completely from their speech, but they'll use it at a level that's not highly stigmatized anymore. It's just a natural transition that happens. That's so cool. One of the things I think is coolest about the way teenagers or young people use languages, there's like a natural creativity that is so exuberant that like every school in America has its own slang that no one else has ever heard. I had a friend who was teaching school at a high school in Brooklyn for just a couple of years. He's a substitute teacher. And he was telling me the kids slang. This is about 10 years ago.

He said that kids were using the phrase, it's quiet for that now to mean that something is boring or that it's like old hat, you know, it's it's it's passe or that you shouldn't do something because it's the wrong time. You know, like you shouldn't you know, if you're if you're like singing a song during study hall or it's quiet for that now, we're not doing that right now, you know. And I love that phrase. I just love saying it. I still say it to my girlfriend around the house. That's quiet for that now. You know, she's like, you want to watch that show? Nah, it's quiet for that. Now I don't like it anymore, you know, but it's like this particular piece of slang. I mean, maybe people know, maybe other people in the comments have heard it. Maybe it was all over New York city in 2012 or

whatever. Um, but, but I never heard it except from my friend who reported it, hearing it, you know, in the wild. And I'm sure that kids at that school are no longer saying that they're that they're on to something else new. And that is, I think, the coolest thing is, I mean, that's the true folk process. That's people coming up with their own exuberant uses of language that means something to them. And then it sort of dissipates over time. I think that's an amazing thing about language. It is.

It's remarkable when you watch young people in language and how they engage with it, create it, innovate it, and then leave it behind or embrace it for the future. So a lot of the things you're talking about are slang terms or words themselves. So my daughter's always using the ones like, they're such a pick me. And I'm like, what? A pick me? What do you mean a pick me? But what she meant was they're a, you remember in school when you would be the one wanting to be on the

volleyball team and he'd like, pick me, pick me. Well, now they use that word to mean they're, they're always trying to get out in front and be the person chosen. So they're always somebody who needs to be the center of attention. So my daughter's like, oh my God, what a pick me. So they've used this creative knowledge of, you know, this idea of what you do for sports or gym class to become a descriptor of a person's specific style of interacting or engaging. Or she'll say, yeah, I'm so aggressed, which is, you know, I'm angry. It's just, they're really creative and wonderful with language, but those are vocabulary words, which are actually pretty ephemeral in language. So they can pick them up and use them. And then

when they're not cool anymore, or too many people do it, or especially if adults start to pick it up, then it's bye bye, right? I'm not interested. But what we don't understand is that young people are actually the heart of language evolution more generally, so that what they're doing with language at a much more subtle structural level, the changes that they're making in very small tweaks and refinements are actually going to be the future of our language in bigger ways. So let me give you an example that maybe you hadn't noticed. When you're using words like everybody, somebody, nobody, do you even say buddy anymore? Or do you say everyone, someone, no one?

Everyone. I actually couldn't tell you. I would think I would think I use, let's see, everyone was there. Everybody was there. I'm not sure which I'd use more often, to be honest. I'm sorry to not have a good answer. Well, you probably know it's actually not surprising because people are not very reflective on that, right? You don't think about it. I'm not saying everybody or no one. And that's how language change happens, where one form starts to be used more often by people that are somehow cooler or hipper or better than you in some way socially, often in adolescence. And what seems to be happening is buddy is being replaced by one, especially among younger speakers. You see very few younger speakers say everybody, somebody,

nobody. In fact, almost all of them say everyone, someone, no one. Now that's a much more underlying structural change. It's not a slang word. It's not a vocabulary word. But when we look now at older speakers, we find that starting to creep into older speakers' speech. So when we do a study and we look at different age groups, what we find is that everybody, the buddy in those words is losing ground to one, which will be in 10 years, 15 years, probably the only form that we use anymore in everybody. And nobody will seem very archaic and old. So these are actually the more substantive types of change that young people bring into our language. Another good example is using wait as a discourse marker. So I might,

if you're somewhere and I need to go get something, I might say, could you wait five minutes, meaning physically stand for some time to wait for me. But what we find now is people are saying, wait, I don't think so. Where they're actually using wait as a discourse marker, which doesn't really mean wait any particular amount of time. When I say, wait, I don't think so. I'm not telling you to physically stop and wait for me. What I'm saying is a metaphorical pausing. I'm taking a metaphorical pause here.

What we find is that's also a new change coming in. Young people say wait a lot more than older speakers who don't say wait. They say wait a minute. And so it went from no discourse marker where wait was only used as a main verb that actually meant pausing to wait a minute used by older speakers to mean metaphorical pausing to now younger speakers that only say wait, not wait a minute. And what we find is we look 50 years ago, we start to study that change. Not only was it young speakers, it was lower class young speakers.

And lower class and young are the magic sauce to language change. And that seems to then suggest that that will be what we say going forward, that wait a minute is gone the way of the dodo and wait will be the new discourse marker. So these are really cool things that we don't even realize we're doing. And then they work their way into our language because young people started them. Yeah, that is so fascinating. Now, I was about to ask you about race and language because that's, you know, there's a lot of interactions there in American life. You just brought up class, though. Class and race often intersect in American life.

So how do those elements come into it? I mean, obviously, there's a history of race in America is very fraught. A lot of our, I think, greatest language innovations come from marginalized groups throughout American history. How do those things work together? Well, absolutely. Just like lower class speech features being something that is often a triggering impetus for change, so is ethnicity. impetus for change, so is ethnicity. And not only that, but it could also be things like, not necessarily ethnicity, but other subcultures that are marginalized, like drag culture.

Drag culture has actually brought a lot of words into our language. So for example, vogue is a word that came from drag culture. And I think the word of the year this year was a suffix called ussy, which was the ussification. Whose word of the year was that? Was that Merriam-Webster? That was the American Dialect Society's word of the year, because that was also from drag culture, where it was the ussification of all things could be ussified. The American Dialect Society is cool, man. You're with it.

I assume you're a member. I am a member. I am a voting member. Yes, I am. You voted for us-y. I did not, actually. There was another word I really wanted. I have to say, us-y was a runner-up, but I can't remember what my...

See, it's gone. I don't even remember it anymore because it didn't win. Oh, wow. Because it's not the word of the year. Well, no, us-y is like, look, all you got to do is look at the TikTok comments and you'll see that that ussy is indeed the word or the suffix of the year. So, yeah, I mean, tell me more about about that phenomenon. Well, you know, what happens is things happen in adolescence that are cool and interesting that have nothing to do with the types of things that we value as adults, especially standard speaking

adults who disdain anything associated with marginalized groups or groups that we disfavor in society. But when you're a young person and you're in school or you're in a community, what you really want to do is stand out in some way. We also want to sort of project these different kinds of identities. And a lot of times that's tied into these groups that are marginalized in society, such as African American culture or drag culture or whatever culture that you're identifying with. But particularly in inner city schools, if you want to not get beaten up for your lunch money every day, one of the ways to do that is project speech features that signal toughness,

non-conformity, physical strength. And one way that particularly young white men do this is to be adopting the features from groups in school that they identify as physically tough, as rebellious, as nonconformist, as dangerous in some way. And even though these are stereotypes about those cultures that are not true to the cultures themselves, they have much more depth than that. The features that those groups use, African-American features in particular, are often then appropriated by these young men to personify those identities, like being tough, being cool, and being macho, to help them fit in in the world. And then these features then grow up with them. So they become part of the language of the larger mainstream culture, which is how we get a lot of

features like even the word jazz, which was actually an African-American word, get into mainstream culture. And I think one way we see it now is woke. The word woke was actually an African-American English word that now has made it into mainstream culture for better or worse, depending on how you look at it. Well, then depending on how it's used, I mean, the problem is that even though these are the folks who are being incredibly innovative with language, right, as you say, the intersection of youth and class and marginalization that sort of caused the innovation and also caused it to be adopted by the more, you know, by the dominant, you know, normative folks. It's the marginalized groups who get criticized for their use of language or attacked for the use of language. I mean, just, you know,

having gone through, you know, in the 90s, growing up and, you know, the war over ebonics as a phrase where that became a punchline, right? As, you know, a pretty well-meaning linguistic project was turned into a joke that was, you know, on the everybody in white culture made fun of for a couple of years at the same time that they were then appropriating those same words and those same speech patterns is like a really pernicious cycle, is it not? Absolutely. I mean, the funny thing is that a really pernicious cycle, is it not? Absolutely. I mean, the funny thing is that we really hate language change. We think it's somehow bad that it points to some sort of decay in society, but it's really because language change typically begins in the groups that we have stereotypes or prejudice against.

And because of that association, we dislike it and we try to push it away. But it's very much the fact that we don't police our language when we are members of marginalized communities, according to the norms of the dominant society, that we allow in-group markers to develop, that we allow different linguistic tendencies that are underlying all language to just effect change in our varieties, that those things come out of those groups rather than the groups that maintain these standards and forcibly don't let their language adapt. And then it becomes stayed and boring and it doesn't have much life. I mean, look at Latin, right? We don't allow Latin to change and no one's using that to hang out and go to the bars and form solidarity and connection. But when we allow language to emerge and become

naturally communicative, naturally connection-making, naturally part of our identity process, then it becomes something that other people look at and basically want to take over because we want what that represents. We want the social connectedness that we feel those features amplify. So when I hear someone using really low, sort of informal, low class speech, it might seem bad to me as a speaker of standard English, but it also means like they're informal, they're intimate, they're relaxed, they're familiar, they're friendly, right? It has these other associations. And when I'm an adolescent, that's really attractive to me. I want that. I want to have that. And also even when I'm a

standard speaker, when I go home and talk to my kids or I go home and I talk to my spouse, I don't want to come home talking like the office. I want to use the speech that's connection, the speech that's familiarity, the speech that's intimacy. And you can't get that without some emphatic senses, some subjective senses, some natural laid back kinds of features. And those are what we draw from in marginalized group speech, because that is what that has come to represent, the connection, the community, the social identity of friendliness, of companionship, of solidarity. That's something that even the most priggish people who want to criticize marginalized groups, and by the way, when you say we don't like that

speech, I like to think that I do like it. I think I'm more broad-minded about it. But even if somebody is that priggish about it and they're like, oh, how dare they talk that way? They're still hearing that language going, oh, I wish I had that level of community. I wish I could partake in that a little bit. And they end up adopting those words because it like communicates a certain level of, of informality and, and, and ease with other people that we all kind of crave in our lives to, to have, as you can, oh, you hear another community talking we all kind of crave in our lives to, to have, as you can,

Oh, you hear another community talking with that kind of ease. You're like, I want to use those words too, because they communicate comfort and, and community in a way that I, that I crave and that I don't get from my, from my formal rigid office,

white, you know, affluent talk. Right. Right. And I think there's also, especially with African-American speech, there's an edginess and a counterculture-ness that we tend to find associated

with those kinds of speech forms. And a lot of that has to do with the very fact that we marginalize those communities, right? When we push a community to the extremes, to the edges, then we also create a situation where we almost envy their status as outsiders and as rule breakers and as sort of being non-traditionalists. group, that's the kinds of qualities that get put on their features of speech, put on their styles of dress, put on cultural things that they have associated with them. Music. Right. And so then that becomes enviable because it seems cool and edgy and chill and laid back and whatever qualities, edgy and even gangster, right? I think a lot of young speakers, young male speakers are attracted to that kind of dangerous, rebellious sort of sense that it has. And that's really something we put

on it because we've pushed it to the outside. But then by doing that, we want to bring it back in and make it part of our speech so that we can get those qualities that now those features have when they're used by members of that community. So it's this really interesting cycle of pushing out, pulling in, pushing out, pulling in. But then, of course, what happens is young speakers adopt it, and then older speakers who don't see the value in it disdain their speech as well, until those become more dominant and are used in wider culture. So when words like jazz or woke start to get picked up and move more mainstream, we almost forget where they came from, which then is a disservice, of course,

to the people that started them. So it's a weird, vicious cycle. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you're describing really the structure of how racism and marginalization eventually leads to appropriation and, you know, in some cases, theft, in some cases, productive borrowing. But, you know, it's it's you're just describing the entire problem of American culture and race and it just through linguistics. I mean, and it really goes to prove the point that you learn so much about people and the structure of a society through language, which sort of, it gets to my point that I made in the intro to this episode that, you know, we waste so much time criticizing the speech of others, whether that's marginalized groups or each other or ourselves, when we could be learning from that speech. We could be understanding,

oh, wait, this says something about the speaker, about the structure of our society that we use language in this way, does it not? Absolutely. And I think if we think back to the history of English, one great example of us doing this, and now it's so assimilated into our language that we don't even remember that we did it, is how many, many of the words that we use in modern English and even our pronouns, for example, come from the Vikings, who were definitely not looked upon favorably when they were pillaging in the eighth and ninth centuries. But a lot of the words that we have, so for example, the pronoun they and them, those are Norse. Those are Norse words, words like window and sister and skirt. Those are Norse. Those are Norse words, words like window and sister and skirt. Those are Norse words. And the interesting things about the words that we borrowed from

Norse, from the Vikings, are their everyday words, their words about life. Because when we interacted with the Vikings, when it wasn't vicious, obviously, when it was, you know, in everyday interactions, it was about the day-to-day work of life. It was about seeing each other in the farms and learning from each other in those casual interactions. But when we interacted with the French, it was up, right? It was because they were the rulers. It was us as the servants and them as the rulers. So the types of words that we have from French tend to be the highfalutin words, words for medicine, words for law, like the word judge, the word prison, the word government,

those are all from French because that's the kind of interaction we have with them. So when we look at even the types of words that come in from these different subcultures, we learn a lot about our relationship with those speakers. Yeah. And man, it's just, as soon as you start looking for this stuff, you see it everywhere. You know, I mean, even, even what I do stand up comedy, right. It has its own language. It has its own way of speaking. One of my favorite things to do is talk to other standup comics in a green room. And we have our own, it's, it's not quite a dialect or even a, you know, sort of a, uh, you know, carny language or anything like that.

It's just like, there's a few, there's a few unusual words. There's a few, a few unusual ways of speaking. You know, there's a, there's extreme casualness that like connotes a, uh, uh, you know, that were participants in a certain, uh, in a certain world. And some of those words, if, but not all have made their way into the, into the broader language. Uh, George Carlin famously did a bit about how you kill, you crush, right. If you did well and you die, if you, if you bomb, you bomb, right. There's all these words about violence. But you know, it's like this is happening in a million subcultures around the world at every

single moment. And it's such a beautiful thing about language. And all we can really do is hope to describe it and use it to understand each other rather than make rules around it, I think. I don't know. Absolutely. And I think once you start unraveling that thread, it's so cool where it leads because you have these ideas about language that are formed from this weird thing you do in school, right? You go to grammar class and that's really your only knowledge of language. If you think about what have I learned about language in my lifetime, it is simply, I have learned that there are nouns and there are verbs and how I'm supposed to string

them in a sentence and that I'm not supposed to end my sentences with prepositions or split my infinitives because I learned this thing in grammar class from the time I was five to the time I'm 25 you know, 25, or whenever you finish graduate school or whatever you're doing. But we never learn about language as a system. We never learn about language as a science. We never learn about language as a history. But all of those things are what brought language to where it is today. They're so much embedded in the culture of language and the science of language that we could really learn from. And that's what I was trying to do with my book. I'm trying to bring that history and that background and that science out so that people can understand

why we say the things we do. Where does like come from? Well, like 300 years old. So it's pretty cool that we still use it today. And it's not new. It's not American. It's actually British. So, you know, these really cool little threads that once you untangle them, it opens this whole new way of looking at language. It's very, very cool. Amazing. Valerie, it's been so incredible talking to you. Tell us once again, the name of the book and where people can get it. Sure. The name of the book is Like Literally Dude, Arguing for the Good and Bad English. And you can buy it wherever books are sold. Amazon or your local bookstore.

That's my preference. If you want to go give them some money and some book sales, that would be great. But anywhere books are sold, you can find it. And of course, if you want to buy it through our special bookshop, you can get it at factuallypod.com slash books. Factuallypod.com slash books. You'll be supporting not just this show, but also your local bookstore as well, if you buy it from there.

Valerie, we didn't even get to talk about dude. I'm afraid that people will have to buy the book in order to learn about it. Well, dude, dude, I can't believe it. Thank you so much for being here, Valerie. I hope you'll come back again and talk to us about this again sometime. I would love to. And I think I can only end it by saying later, dude. again sometime. I would love to. And I think I can only end it by saying later, dude. Later, dude. Well, thank you once again to Valerie for coming on the show. Once again, the URL to pick up her book is factuallypod.com slash books. And if you want to support this show, you can join our community at patreon.com slash Adam Conover. I want to thank everybody who supports this show at the $15 a month level. In particular, our recent $15 a month subscribers include The Spicy, Nick Frazier, Transient Astronomer, Ken Rower, Rebecca Bahia,

and Andy Smith. Thank you so much. Novel uses of language in that list of usernames as well. I want to thank our producers, Sam Rodman and Tony Wilson, everybody at HeadGum for helping make this show possible. You can find me online at Adam Conover, wherever you get your social media or adamconover.net. You can also get my tour dates on that very website. We'll see you next week. Thank you so much for listening. Catch us back next week on Factually. I don't know anything.