Ologies with Alie Ward - Phonology (LINGUISTICS) with Nicole Holliday

Episode Date: June 5, 2018

Vocal fry. Code switching. Black Twitter. Valley girls. Culture vultures. WE'RE TALKING ABOUT TALKING. Alie battles traffic to sit down with linguistics professor Dr. Nicole Holliday about intonational phonology: how tones and pitch help us bond with others and construct identities. Inspired in part by former President Barack Obama's masterful linguistic variability, Dr. Holliday's work focuses on how language is used in the crossing and construction of racial/ethnic boundaries. She graciously fielded tons of questions for a fascinating dive into the nuances and strict grammatical rules of African American Language, cultural appropriation, our educational system, honoring your identity, what not to wear in Paris and the roiling debate over who is the best rapper. Also: Alie is maybe a lizard person.Follow Dr. Nicole Holliday @MixedLinguist on Twitter and InstagramMore episode sources & linksBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Steven Ray MorrisTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Oh, hi. Hi. It's your weird co-worker, the one who brings in lemons from their tree, but also sometimes microwaves fish. Alleyboard for another episode of ologies. Okay, so guess what I'm doing right now? I'm using a big glob of fat in nerves that I keep in a bone bowl behind my eyes to make noises to represent my thoughts. And then I beam those grunts to a satellite using invisible data transmission. And then your nervy fat glob is like, totally. Yeah, I get it. So my brain to your brain, it's magic people. So today we're going to be speaking about speaking. I'm pumped as heck about it. But first, let's grunt about you. So hello to all the new listeners who heard about ologies through my friends on Forever 35 and Chris Hardwick's

ID10T podcasts. Welcome to the dusty clubhouse of oligites. Come on in. Thank you to everyone who's out there in the world strutting about inwares from ologiesmerch.com, where you can go if you want a $20 science t-shirt. A tip of the cap to all of the patrons who submit questions for the podcast and support the podcast for as little as $0.25 an episode. My heart is that cheap, $0.25 an episode gets you into that club. And thanks to everyone who tosses some free love my way just by tweeting or gramming about the podcast and getting the word out and for subscribing and rating on iTunes and Stitcher, which is super important and helps so much in getting the show seen. Are you guys ready for this? So this week ologies,

number six on the iTunes science charts, like up there with like invisibilia and radio lab and hidden brain, all like respectable podcasts. Ones that don't use the F word about neuroscience or talk about ductics as much. So thank you so much for the reviews. I creep them all. I read every single one and to prove it, each week I read one aloud. So this week I'm going to say thanks Brooke Basone for saying, Allie, thanks so much for making a podcast that makes scientists seem like rock stars. Your interviews are fun and interesting and go into the science while still managing to remain a little goofy. I think she's being generous with that. But okay, let's get into this topic. So intonational phonology, what do those sounds together even mean? So it has

nothing to do with international telecommunications. So phonology is a branch of linguistics that deals with sounds. So what are emotional word grunts sound like? And intonational means the pitches we use to convey different things like ask a question or be sarcastic. So this week we are taking something that you do every day, which is talk with all the hidden cues and meanings and signifiers and we're breaking it down a little bit. So how do things like gender identity and racial background play a role in how we signal and bond and communicate with other people? It turns out it's fascinating and so complex. So this oligest has both a bachelor's and a master's in linguistics and has studied the nuances of speech in everyone from pop stars to professors

and people in both politics and prisons, which I feel like there's a Venn diagram, those things are just getting closer and closer together. She got a PhD from NYU with a dissertation entitled Intonational Variation, Linguistic Style and the Black Bioracial Experience. She's now an assistant professor of linguistics at Pomona College and we set a date for me to come out to her office on campus. It's about 35 minutes away from where I live and because I am very smart and also responsible, I gave myself an hour and a half to get there. I started out driving all was well and then my GPS just kept tacking on more minutes. It was horrifying. Suddenly it was like you're going to be four minutes late. I was like, shit, I sent her a message. I'm so

sorry. A few miles down the road, my GPS is like, you're going to be 15 minutes late. I was like, what? And then 20 minutes late and I just kept sending her emails from stop and go traffic being like, dude, I don't, like maybe there's like a dinosaur in the road or a tanker truck exploded. Anyway, I hadn't realized that the Friday evening Los Angeles traffic on Memorial Day weekend would start before noon. So I was in the car for over two hours to go 30 miles and I was just sweating in so many places. So by the time I arrived, I was one hour late. I was the most mortified ever and I just, I was wishing I had been fitted with a catheter for the drive. So I started rolling tape in the car and just ran into her office. I'm proud to report I went the whole

interview without having a potty accident, but thisologist was as gracious as a human being could have been. And in the 45 minutes we had to talk, she gave me one of the most frank and enthralling interviews I could just ever hope for. I had about 10 hours worth of questions to ask her, but I've included more info on her work at the end of this because we had limited time. And it's also up on my website. So feel free to tenderly stalk her to continue learning about this field. Also, if there's anything language wise I can improve on, feel free to reach out to me. I really wanted to learn more about this work because I knew nothing about it. And I wanted to kind of open up the discussion and just get people thinking about these experiences, both their own and others.

So in this episode, we cover the origins of our own voices through socialization, code switching, Obama's voice, Twitter grammar, questions that linguistics hate getting, and how difficult it is to change your identity to fit in. Also, what not to wear in Paris and how I'm a shapeshifting lizard member of the Illuminati. So tell your brain glob to please listen up to the significant and brilliant word machinations of intonational phenologist Dr. Nicole Holliday. Oh god, this is a nightmare. Okay. All right, I've arrived at the college. I'm an hour late. This is my nightmare. Oh god. I'm so every, everything is a red zone. All right, I'm parking in

some parking lot. It doesn't say I can't. So I'm doing it. Friday afternoon, holiday weekend, I have to pee so fucking bad. Two hours in the car. I am over an hour late to this interview. This doctor is like, hmm, he's waiting in her office for me on a holiday weekend. Linguistics. Okay. Heavy breathing. This building is empty. Dr. Holliday. Good. I'm already rolling. I'm like, we're ready to go. Hi. How are you? Good. How are you? I'm so sorry that you had such a traffic drama. Oh my god. This is so embarrassing. I'm just

so sorry. I was like, I started running it in the car. I was like, I'm going to roll in there. Hi. I'm so excited to talk to you. I'm glad you made it. I'm sorry. The traffic. No, it's me. I should have left yesterday. I should have left and camped along the side. We should have thought about the fact that it was Friday. We really screwed it up. I didn't even think about that or the holiday weekend and I was like, oh my gosh. So first off, so now you are a linguistics professor here now, right? Yes, I am. Now you've been a linguistics professor here pretty recently, right? This is my, actually, I was a postdoc for one year here and then I just finished my first year as faculty. So like a baby professor. That's so exciting. Now, I understand that you started

studying Spanish in high school, right? Can you tell me a little bit about when you started becoming so interested in language? Yeah. So I was always a kid that was like super interested in maps and geography. And then I think when I was in fifth grade, we had like three weeks of French or something. I was like, this is so cool. But like, you know, the US kids don't really learn second languages. Yeah. So it wasn't until, you know, I got to high school, basically, or eighth grade when I started taking Spanish. And I had, was a kid that was good at school, but I wasn't like super good at anything in particular until we started doing Spanish. And I was like, oh, this is the easiest thing for me. Like this must be the thing.

Side note, I'm learning Spanish on Duolingo in case anyone wants to be my friend on it. I'm not very good at it. Which means I cheated and made the computer say this. So when I went to college, I was like, I'm just going to study a bunch of languages. I'm going to study Spanish and Arabic and whatever. So I got into it and I was studying Arabic and it was harder than Spanish, obviously, for an English speaker. Quick question. How much harder is Arabic in English? I was curious from everything I just read about it, it is hella fucking hard. So though there are 28 characters in the Arabic alphabet, the vowels are totally left out or represented as these wee little dots and swishes around the consonants. So in one study,

neuropsychologists found that the left hemisphere of the brain, which handles like linear reasoning, like grammar, tends to analyze these intricate little letter freckles and swoops of Arabic writing. So learning other languages with simpler alphabets like English or Hebrew, the left and the right brain both helped you decipher the meaning and the emphasis. But in Arabic, even native speakers, the left brain kind of rolls up its sleeves and is like, oh man, this shit is complex. I got to analyze this. Also, Arabic has a bunch of pronunciations that are unfamiliar to English speakers. It's got some next level grammar, not to mention tons of regional dialects. So if you can read or speak Arabic, please accept my robust cosmic high fives. That

is life in the fast lane, linguistically. So Nicole was studying that and then... And then somebody suggested, my friend's dad suggested I should take introduction to linguistics, thought I would like it. And I took it and I got to day one and I was like, yeah, this is the thing. Like it was never the languages. It was like the theory beneath the languages that I was interested in. But I didn't really have a way to talk about that because who learns about linguistics in high school, right? Like almost no one. Zero people. Yeah. It's never, it's not something that's thought of even though it's something that we do all day, every day. Yeah. And the way that we teach this kind of anything allied, right, is like we teach grammar,

which everyone hates because we teach it so poorly and it's so prescriptive. There's so many rules and so many limitations. And so people are just like, oh, sentence structure. I want to run away from that. So even when people do hear about linguistics, they're like, oh, you're just diagramming sentences. It must be horrible. I'm like, no, I don't do that at all. I'm actually horrible at that. Now, tell me what, what about it? Did you love so much? Is it because you love communication? Is it because you love how thought is shaped by language? Yeah. So I like the structure. So some one of my students last semester described linguistics as like language plus math. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of like procedure and theory and like ways that you go, we do problem sets,

right? When we're teaching students. So there's like a very orderly way about going, about analyzing this thing that doesn't necessarily seem really like rule governed to us, just as people who are walking around speaking, you don't think about like all of the things that you have to know in your mind sort of cognitively to be able to use your first or second language, but also socially, right? So we teach, it's a subfield of linguistics called pragmatics that I teach about, you know, when I teach introductory level classes. And I will just say things that strike the students as absurd. So I told that like one of the examples is like, what happens if I walk in here and I'm like, Drake is the greatest rapper of all time. It's

like the first thing I say in class today, like what, and they laugh, right? And I said, why is it funny? They're like, Oh, it's like not appropriate. I'm like, but why do you know, like, why? Like, you know, all these social things that make you know that this is not like a thing that you can do, right? Right. But nobody ever taught you that. Do you ask them why do you ask them their opinions on why was that not appropriate? Like, what are some of the responses that they get? Right. So they get, well, it's not the theme of the class, right? Okay. So they know what class they're in. It's not what they would expect from me as a professor to like come in and talk about hip hop, I guess, right? So all of these, and also like, it's a formal setting, right? We're in a

classroom. So it's like not the type of thing that you expect here from a professor in a classroom. So that's why it's comical, right? Because all of these things are unexpected. They expect me to come in and say, today class, we're going to do, you know, whatever. And also it's weird because it's the first thing, like, we don't make statements apropos of nothing usually. And when we do, we apologize. Like, oh, sorry, I was just thinking about, right, we have to kind of couch it. Right. And then it does a discussion follow of who the greatest rapper of all time really is. And do you ever settle on that? No, no, they have a lot of opinions. People used to say Nas, but he's like on the blacklist now. So is he really? Okay. He's not good. Okay. So perhaps not

Nas. Yeah. Okay, I had to look this up. I was like, huh? So Nas was married to Kalise, a hip hop artist and a chef, two talents, which blended beautifully in one of her hits that we've all sang despite our personal lactose intolerances. So Nas and Kalise divorced in 2009. But just a few months ago, she divulged that they had a terrible physically and mentally abusive relationship. So Nas, not good. So who is the greatest rapper? I was like, I got to know what is the consensus. So I did some digging and I got lost down a very deep tunnel of opinion and abyss of thoughts. And a lot of people say Kendrick Lamar. And then I found a list on MSN of the top 20 rappers of all times. I was like, I wonder what they say. Just so you know how much I love you all, it was

a click through article, 20 slides to get to number one with ads in between. But I still clicked all the way through and it named Nas's number three, Biggie Smalls runner up and at the top, Tupac. Now, Rekim and Jay-Z were also in the top five. But according to MTV's top MCs in the game, Nicki Minaj, by the way, only female rapper to ever appear on it, Kanye and Drake frequently hover in first and second place on that list. Although some people, especially Pusha T right now, may dispute Drake's ranking. Also, one more thing, if you love beautiful pastries and frosting calligraphy of hip hop lyrics, I highly suggest following the Instagram account, Drake on a Cake, by the wonderful Joy the Baker. I love it so much. But any who's

the best rapper, big debate, not something you would expect your professor to profess straight out of the gate before laying down the syllabus is the point here. When you really started to go down the line and get your PhD in this, by the way, congratulations. How did you choose what your dissertation subject was? I essentially steer your boat. I think I have an unusual story because I remember the moment when I figured out my dissertation topic and it was when I was in college. I think I had just decided on my linguistics major and I grew up in Ohio. I was undergrad at Ohio State and I had been in Peru studying abroad. I was initially kind of interested in the language rights of indigenous people in

India and South America. I do some research on that too, Peru and Bolivia. I'd come back, but I started to have all these thoughts about language rights in the United States, who gets discriminated against, and particularly being black, thinking about the ways in which that contributes to racism. I came back and this was 2008 and I wanted to volunteer in the Obama campaign. I walked into the Obama field office and they told me to sit down and some guy was going to come talk to me. So I'm watching this guy who reads to me as biracial, which he was, right, like me too. And he's on the phone, presumably with some wealthy donor, presumably like a white guy. He's like, excuse me, Sarah, we really need you. Obama really could use your

support and the senator is counting on folks like you to contribute this very formal kind of register. And I guess the guy gave him money so he hung up. Five seconds later, a young black guy, teenager comes in and he's like, what up, dog? Like, yeah, yeah, Obama, you know, he could really use your support. We're looking for volunteers who go knock on some doors. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. And I said, somebody has to like know about this. I need to read about it because it just was so clear to me. Right. What a moment. And also in terms of the Obama campaign, I think a lot of people observe that Obama is really deaf with that as well, right? Did that click for you as well?

Yeah. And I have maybe not exactly at that point, but I have a few papers about Obama. Obama is also one of my research interests. So I'm just casually in a hotel room perusing Dr. Nicole Holiday's 185 page PhD dissertation I found online. I was super tickled to see the 44th president mentioned right in the opening paragraph. She notes up top that Barack Obama is a masterful code switcher between mainstream US English and African American language, AAL. So some of Dr. Holiday's other papers, they're great. Influence of suprasegmental features on perceived ethnicity of American politicians, suprasegmental features, by the way, are things like loudness, pitch,

length of vowels, et cetera. So she also wrote a paper examining Barack and Michelle Obama's rates of CSD and CSD. Of course I looked that up. No, I did not know what it meant at first. It stands for coronal stop deletion or leaving off the hard D or T at the end of words like didn't or hard. Now, if I were to attempt to give a rundown of phonological features of African American language, which some scholars on the subject have also called African American vernacular English, this episode would stretch like into next week. So Nicole's work involves changing the perceptions and fostering appreciation for a dialect of American English that has a super complex and very specific set of grammatical rules as well as a bunch of social

and sociolinguistic functions. There are so many nuances to it that the seminal reference book on the matter is called the Oxford Handbook of African American Language was published in 2015. It weighs in at a hefty 944 pages. So the study of the dialect isn't just about coronal stop deletion or dropping a G at the end of a word. She does a lot of research on code switching. And this is a term that originated almost 70 years ago from a study of Norwegian villages. And it means to switch into different conversational tones depending on who you're speaking to or to whom you're speaking. And it applies to so many different cultures and languages. I hadn't heard of the term until recently when my bilingual Latina friend, Dylann, told me about it

and she was like, yeah, dude, of course, this happens all the time. And while I'm in Detroit, I met up with some allergies listeners and I told them I was working on this episode and one listener, Paul was raised in England, but came to America during grade school. And he says, he switches back and forth between a British accent when he talks to his parents versus his American friends. And another oligite, Ron, grew up in Detroit and said, of course, he switches tones if he's talking to his friends he grew up with or people in business settings. So it happens all the time. But the pressure within ethnically diverse communities is particularly heavy. So either you've never considered this before or you're like, duh,

duh, yeah, this is daily life for me. I am sort of very interested in this idea of what it means to sound black, sort of from the perspective of something that you can perform as part of your identity. But also when people make that judgment, like what are they hearing? And so a lot of the work that I do, sort of the quantitative work that I do, looks at what people are attuned to when they're making those kind of social judgments about race. And what did you, what conclusions did you come to? If someone asks you in a nutshell, explain your work, explain your findings, where do you start? Yeah, so I study intonation. So it's not exactly an ology, sorry.

Intonational phonology, totally. Yes, intonational phonology is an ology. We'll use that one. And so a lot of times when I talk to just people that don't know as much about linguistics, when I ask them like, oh, what do you think makes somebody, your ability to judge somebody black? If they, if you can't see them, like why would you make that judgment? And they usually say they think about the grammar. And you know, there's a stereotype like they'll say that it's bad grammar or like bad English or something. Even black people will say that. Really? Yeah. There's the racism runs deep. And it's really entwined with language in complex ways. But so they'll say that. And I said, yeah, but you know, what about somebody like Obama?

What about somebody like even Al Sharpton, right? Like they're not, they're people that are known as using actually a very standard kind of grammar, but still like unrecognized, like unmistakably black, right? If you hear Al Sharpton's voice, you've never seen him in your life. You know, you're like, that is a black guy. So it must be something else. But when I started to look into the literature about this, we don't actually know much about the voice, what it is about the voice and the tone and the way that the pitch of the voice goes up and down this kind of movement that causes this kind of judgment. So that is primarily what my research focus is on. Really? So is it, so there, I imagine there's two different ways of looking at it. It's the actual

physiology of why people's voices sound a certain way, the actual voice box. And then it's also how much it's used. So how do you separate that when you are studying? So the social things are kind of more what we're interested in, right? So there's always going to be individual level variation. And our minds are really good at that. Like when we hear a child and an adult say the same thing, we can process the same information, even though they're vastly different sizes, right? Their vocal tract is actually similar shape, but the scale is really different. So what I'm interested in is the ways in which these patterns are socialized. So one thing, for example, like if we look at pitch, just the numbers don't matter. But like

the average man in the United States has a pitch that's like around between 100 and 150 hertz. And the average woman has one that's between like 200 and 250 hertz, but only half of that variation can be explained by physiology. Really? And what's really shocking is like if you look at kids, like four year olds, right? Four year old boys and four year old girls, their vocal tract is physiologically the same, right? Before puberty, they have the same sort of voice and they're the same size too, right? The girls have already learned been socialized into raising their voice and the boys have already been socialized into lowering it. So even though there's no physiological differences, you can tell the difference between a four year old boy

and a four year old girl because they've already been socialized into it. Oh my gosh. So intonations are picked up socially. Of course, the very purpose of language is to communicate within a social system. And evidently, younger folks and women tend to be the drivers of linguistic trends. So like uptalk started in California, but it's now spread geographically and to men, although they don't like to admit it. And the purpose it may serve conversationally is to convey empathy, just to make sure you're being understood. So as Nicole said in a previous interview, I found, she said, you can go anywhere in the world and ask who speaks the quote, bad version of the language. And invariably, it's the people who are marginalized, who are rural,

poor, or belong to religious minorities. And now maybe more marginalized groups use nuanced language to bond and communicate for social survival. And then later it spreads to less marginalized parts of the population. I'm just theorizing. Now, if you're like me, you may be thinking, wait, what is the big diff between a dialect and an accent? Well, I looked it up, as I do. And a dialect has its own unique vocabulary words and grammatical rules, as well as pronunciations. But an accent is just the variation in pronunciation. Now, if you're also like me, you just ate a huge bag of jalapeno cheese potato chips for dinner and hotel room. No, okay, that's fine too. Whatever. Now, is that a little bit where

creaky voice is coming from? I understand that like the modern like kind of Kardashian like creaky voice, even vocal fry is a way of getting our voices lower. You did a really good vocal Friday. Yeah. So what happens when when we have creaky voice or vocal fry is our vocal folds, we don't call it, they're not actually chords or vocal. Yeah, they're folds. So they kind of vibrate together and they vibrate together periodically, sort of like a wave, right? But when we do creaky voice, they vibrate a periodically. And so what happens is the pitch actually drops out. So we get to the bottom of our range when we do that. And lots of languages, some languages use creaky voice to do actual like grammatical encoding information. But in English,

it's stylistic variable. And so recently it has been sort of associated with young women, like modern young women. But people have had creaky voice on and off and actually men do it. Most of the studies show that men do it as much as women. It's just stereotyped as being associated with women. And so when women are really creaky, they get this sort of social association that it's a particular style. So we get kind of a bad rap for it. Yeah. And we shouldn't anyway, it's just like a way of moving your vocal folds. Like it doesn't mean that you're more or less intelligent. All right, quick aside to address what might be driving the increased prevalence for vocal fry the last few decades. So it may be a way for women to lower the register of their voice

as lower voices are perceived to be more authoritative. So given that women weren't allowed to wear pants on the Senate floor until like the 1990s, we're just we're doing what we can, we're pulling out all the stops. It's like, what do we need to do for you to treat people equally? Now, a study by Caitlin Lee at the University of Kentucky found that participants also rated male and female speakers totally differently. So I'm just going to casually repeat Nicole's statement, quote, you can go anywhere in the world and ask who speaks the bad version of the language. And invariably, it's the people who are marginalized, who are rural, poor, or belong to religious minorities. I mean, until of course, it spreads. And then it's fine.

Do you think that the way people have changed, does it goes through trends like that? Yeah, for sure. So there's it's very complicated. But basically, we language is like social contagion. So we always talk like the people that we talk to, you might have noticed this, like people will say this to me like, Oh, I went to the south. And like now I sound like the people in this when I'm in the south, I sound like the people in the south. Right. Because we do actually, this is a thing called speech accommodation theory, we do actually accommodate to the people around us, we converge towards them. If we like them, if we don't like them, we diverge away from them. No way. Yeah. So like, it's contagious, right? So as you see communities

in contact with each other that maybe weren't before, like they're going to start to converge and diverge based on the way that people those communities interact with each other. So one example of this is thinking about like the California, like the creaky voice thing that you're saying people will talk about like the valley girl thing as aspirational, particularly in the 80s. PS, I just went into the way back machine and I listened to portions of this song, which is supposed to be comedic, but it's incredibly viciously homophobic. And it made me very, very sad. And it also made me reflect on how important social progress and empathy and tolerance are, and that it's a battle worth fighting to have a more loving society. Anyway,

so you had these girls in the Midwest that were like trying to approximate a California identity because they like it. So they started to sound like California because they were, it was a style that was now available to them, right? Because they could see it, they could hear it, people were traveling more, they were interacting more. And so they started to change the style. I imagine that must be true too for like trans continental, like the old movie voice, like that was an aspirational kind of dialect as well, right? Yeah, it was. I mean, it's really funny because no one ever really talked that way, right? It was nobody's like first dialect. But it is definitely like a style. It's funny. When they were talking

about Kevin Spacey's character on House of Cards, he has this kind of like weird aspirational old south thing that nobody really sounds like, but it's an idea of what somebody like that is supposed to sound like. And so when you're looking at this, because I know that you've, you've obviously studied a lot of people doing this, do you find that there might be kind of aspirational tones depending on who they're talking to? I started telling Nicole a story I had heard the day before from Michael Yeoh, a comedian who's biracial, he's Korean and African American. And he was about to interview a very famous rapper on the radio and apparently the musician. Right before he was like, hey, nice to meet you. And then as soon as he got on the air for a radio station,

he had a completely different voice. Is that aspirational as well, depending on kind of who you want to connect with? Yeah, so we all have, you know, everybody has styles, right? So you're not going to talk to your doctor and your priest and your mom and your best friend the same way, right? Right. Hey, mom. Hey, dad. Sorry, I say that F word on this podcast sometimes. I know it's uncomfortable for you. But for some people that have to negotiate moving in between this like mainstream and not mainstream or like this different racialized groups, communities, whatever, the difference can be sort of more contrastive. So I'm presently working on a project with Lauren Squires, who's she teaches English at Ohio State.

And we've been interviewing black students there about their experiences on campus with linguistic discrimination and linguistic insecurity there. So like, maybe they don't feel comfortable speaking up in class, right? This was the where we started. And the students will sort of overwhelmingly talk about like the way that they talk in class, which is this kind of way that they deem acceptable to white people and the way that they actually talk or the way they talk with their friends or they talk at home. So in this way, this kind of commanding of different styles is a, it's a social survival strategy for people that have to move between worlds that they see as very different and sometimes incompatible. It's interesting how

many layers of adaptability you have to have in your speech every day. Like I was on the phone with someone at a bank today and my friend was in the room and I was so self conscious because the way I was speaking to this banker was like, yes, fantastic. I'll go ahead and compile the profit and loss statement for my S corp and then I'll circle back and ping you with the figures for the underwriting team. So speaking in the font of mortgage lender conference call and walking on linguistic eggshells just to be in this like constant high stakes shape shifting mode is so unpleasant. I got off the phone and I was like, I'm sorry, I'm a lizard person. That was weird. And I was like, who am I? But if you find in like in biracial and black communities,

how it must be difficult, I imagine, because it's part of your identity, there must be a huge struggle between wanting to hang on to that identity in community, but also having to adapt socially. How do you propose navigating that? Yeah, it's really hard. So one of the things that I teach a lot is about African American English and linguistic discrimination. So, you know, black children are much more likely to be labeled as learning disabled in reading. And one of the reasons for that is not that they're learning disabled, but the materials are not designed for them. They're designed for middle class white kids who speak standard, some kind of approximation of a standard English. So it's not that black children can't read, it's that when

they are evaluated by white teachers and a system designed for middle class white kids, of course, they're not going to perform as well. It's not made for them. So a lot of the movements from teachers, sort of especially back in the day where, okay, well, we need to transition them away from this, we need to teach them standard English. And it's still a controversy because everybody knows like if you want to get more economic success, like you do need to command standard English, but you're asking a lot of those kids, right? So the white kids get to speak the same way at home and at school. And now all the black kids have to command two varieties, one for home and one for school. And by the way, the one that they speak at home is constantly devalued

every other place in their life. You know, so I have students ask me that sometimes they're like, well, if African American English is so stigmatized, why does the community hold on to it? Like, why hasn't the language just died? And I'm like, because it means something, right? Because it establishes solidarity, because it establishes in group, because it tells a historical narrative of the history of black people in the United States, like it's not something that people really want to get rid of as much as they know that it's stigmatized. Do you find historically that it has roots or it has connections from a tonal level closer to Southern American English? Yeah. So African American English started in the South. So there's actually a lot of similarities

between Southern white and Southern black varieties. It is harder for listeners, people have done studies on this, it's harder for listeners to tell the difference between rural black people and rural white people in the South. Really? Yeah. So it's, and it's because they're kind of more similar, but also because people have these stereotyped expectations going in, like the, if you sound rural, that's white, right? Even though there's lots of rural black people. Right. But you picture a farmer and overalls who's like an old white guy with a straw hat or something. Yes, exactly. Like the ideas that people have going in. And so, yeah, like all of the black people in the United States were originally brought to the South because we were enslaved,

right? So... Side note, if you're like, I could become better educated on the history of American slavery, which I'll wager many Americans fit this category. There are so many good books and resources. There's one HBO documentary, Readings from the Slave Narratives, which features transcripts of first person accounts. And they're read by actors like Samuel Jackson and Angela Bassett and Don Cheadle and Oprah Winfrey. It's on YouTube, just there for you, waiting to be watched. We only really got out of the South in big numbers in the last hundred years, right, with great migration. And even then, only got out of sort of very dramatic, segregated ethnic enclaves even more recently than that. And you could argue that we're not even out of them,

right? Because like, look at what neighborhoods look like, not diverse. And so, for that reason, it actually has the effect of keeping the language more insulated, right? Because you talk like the people you talk to, well, if you live in a segregated community, you're going to sound like the people in your community, right? Exactly. So, it's kind of an interesting, like you can look at the language evolution as like the rings of a tree. See the dendrology episode on trees. That tell the like you cut the tree open and you can see like every layer of the history. Like you can see that in the language too.

Wow. I'm so curious what you think of how, especially with social media, how social media has changed maybe spread or appropriated African-American English. Because I feel like with, there's, I hear that there's black Twitter is a different thing. If you have not heard of black Twitter, by the way, it has its own Wikipedia page. And to paraphrase that, it's a cultural identity focused on issues and experience of interest to the African-American community. So, issues of social justice are brought to light and amplified with these powerful hashtags like hashtag if they gunned me down, black lives matter, Oscars so white, you may remember. And the community also generates some really great jokes and memes. And I feel like

I see white people maybe try to borrow this style. And it's, and I feel like it's, it's almost appropriated by comedians or for comedic casual effect. And how do you feel about that? Yeah, it's really interesting. So there is this thing that's like online imagined black English. So there is a way that black people like on black Twitter, for example, communicate their norms of the community, like just with any community. But also, there is a way in which like that is appropriated by the white gaze. So like what people thinking, people think is going on. And it's really funny because whenever someone makes the argument, like, oh, African-American English is just poor grammar. I try to explain to them that they don't

understand the grammar. Those people, if you ask them like, okay, well, what does it sound like, like, make a sentence for me, they will always be wrong, because they don't understand the grammatical rules. And so like, you know, people that are on black Twitter, like in the community or whatever can tell when it when it's a parody, because people will break rules that they don't know about. Oh, tell me everything. Yeah. So like, it's even hard for me to do. But there's, there's a thing in African-American English that's optional called zero copula. So if you think about like Kanye, whatever, like that ish cray, right, you don't need an is there. And that's fine. Um, but you can't just do that with every subject, like you can do it with a third singular like

that. But you can't really do it with a first person. So you can't say like, I cray. When you get white people like mocking this, they'll say things like I cray. And you're like, no, no one, no speaker of African-American English would ever say that. I was curious about people imitating African-American language grammar. And sure enough, I found a tweet posted seven hours ago about someone homesteading chickens with the words I cray. Now the user, according to her bio, is a blonde holistic doula from Michigan who gardens. So yeah, Nicole kind of nailed it. I'll see it appropriated and I'll cringe a bit. I guess what are the differences between written and spoken African-American English? Yeah, it's hard, right? So actually, white people have been

appropriating African-American English since forever, right? So like the word cool comes from African-American English, like over 100 years ago, right? So I started reading up on this topic and I came across an Oxford Dictionary's blog titled, quote, when is lexical innovation cultural appropriation? It was a fascinating read and it was addressing the use of words like shade and yes and woke. And I scroll down to see like, who wrote this amazing piece? And the guest blogger was Dr. Nicole Holiday. Of course, she is the coolest. I mean, we're cooler, so they take things from us. It's fine. I mean, well, in a certain way, right? But I mean, it's also a lot of pressure to always be cool. So, you know, this is a well established like long term trend. It's interesting with the

internet because you can't see people or hear them in the same way. So you can't, you don't actually know if the speaker is black sometimes, especially on Twitter, right? You read a tweet and you're like, who is that from? And you have to do like a deep investigation into like, are they black? I don't know. Because is it appropriate for them to like, I have this problem on Twitter, right? So that's one way in which social media is like really throwing people for a loop because you can't contextualize people online the way that you can in real life or at least make educated guesses about them the way that you can when you see them in person. But I also think like, yeah, there is some kind of cool cachet, like teenagers are cool, right?

But teenagers are also in a certain way, like more free to violate like mainstream language norms, because we expect it from them because they don't have to use their language as a commodity to make money in the same way. So they have to use it in school for that kind of economic advancement. But they're a little bit more free to actually sound how they sound adults, right? Who are once in a working world, particularly black folks who have to work in majority white communities all day, right? And then raised kids who they want to have like a kind of standard style are always under this pressure to sound respectable quote unquote, but teenagers don't have that. And all of this stuff on the internet is driven by young people, right? So there is this kind of

freshness, this coolness that gets adapted. But I do think that, you know, just like with every other kind of appropriation, people in the community get frustrated, particularly with people using things wrong. So I was talking to a reporter from NPR a couple weeks ago. I don't know if she ever ended up writing this, but she was talking about thirst trap. Okay. And like the meaning of thirst trap. Okay. So originally, what it meant is like a picture that you would put up to like, kind of get comments like that you were sexy or seductive or whatever, right? So that's, it's a particular type of photo that you put up like for that reason. Also just see Instagram in general. You can have a whole Instagram account. That's a thirst trap,

I guess. But what she was saying is like, somebody had written a thing about James Comey in the interview that he was giving and was like, James Comey is a thirst trap right now, because he was like seeking attention for in these interviews. Oh, it's really transformed meaning. And as a linguist, it's funny because I'm like, well, words are allowed to change meaning like, especially online, they change meaning really quickly. Right. But also like that very clearly came like from African American English, like from, you know, black Twitter, black communities online. And now you've just ruined it. Right. I think is, do you think Urban Dictionary ruins all of the good, like all of the good kind

of like insular terminology? I mean, by the time it gets to Urban Dictionary, people aren't using it though. Like that's the thing. So we're thinking about this as sort of as adults, like if you have to look it up in Urban Dictionary, like it's already over. Oh, yeah. Right. Yeah. If you're ever on Urban Dictionary, which I have been, it's like, there's nothing more embarrassing than like, then taking your, your, for me, like my old white ass to Urban Dictionary, like, what does this mean? By the by, I looked up Urban Dictionary's history and it was created by some white guys and they don't moderate super racist and sexist stuff on there. So that's awful and fuck them very much. I feel like when you get older, you, you look to

cues from the younger people to be like, what, what is everyone talking about? Yeah. And it's like, it's hard for me because like, first of all, I'm a linguistics professor, but I'm also pretty young and black. So I'm like, I'm cool. Like I should know, right? And the students here say stuff to me that I'm like, Oh my God, I have no idea. Like I, like I have to look it up in Urban Dictionary. And I'm like, yeah, if 30 years old in the world of slang is ancient, like I haven't been qualified to speak on it in like seven or eight years, probably. Oh my God. And how, how has it changed since you started studying linguistics? Because you used at 30, which is super young to have a PhD and be a professor, but you've, you've been studying it

for a number of years. Have you seen terminology change even in how we talk about it? I feel like ebonics was a word people used for a while. And I feel like that is not an okay word these days. People will still use it, but it does seem like antiquated to me. How is the conversation changing? And how shouldn't we talk about it? Or how, or what, or what things are already ancient and embarrassing? Ebonics actually was a word invented in like 60s, 70s. And it's actually a cool word. It's ebony plus phonics. But linguists don't use it. We stopped using it like in the 90s because it had such a bad connotation. Right. So now we say all African American English, right? Which is not as much fun to

say as ebonics. It does give it sort of a more like, right, we have a scientific term. I think this idea of code switching is much more widespread. People know about it more than they did even, you know, when I started studying like 10 years ago, maybe when I was in college, when I started studying linguistics, people that I talked to out in the world that are not linguists will talk about code switching in a way that's like very informed. And I don't think that people had a kind of meta awareness of it before. So that is good, right? People having this awareness that they command different styles and that they have to do the work of it, right? And also just being able to talk about kind of what I was explaining to you, like we're asking

so much of these kids to command two styles. We ask that of some kids, but not others, right? I think definitely in the realm of education, teacher training, I've had met so many teachers that now have had some linguistic training like in their master's degree or something like that, which obviously makes it more equitable for their black students in the classroom. And I mean, other students too, but that's definitely a positive thing. The internet is really interesting because you do get all of this like moral panic about like the kids are ruining English, but they were saying that in the 1600s. People have been saying the kids are ruining English since the, you know, invention of English. So no, like there's no, you know,

for linguists, like there is no ruining, like language is alive and it moves and changes. It's like saying like, you're ruining the galaxy, like, you know, like it's just a thing that exists and we describe it. And it's going to change and that's a natural part of it. And it changes in response to social stimuli. I know like when it changes because of oppression, like we have a problem with that, but it's not because of the language changes because of the oppression. So my sort of hope going forward is that people will learn to be like more linguistically tolerant in the way that they are allegedly learning to be more like tolerant of variation and race and gender, but those things are connected, right? How does it, how should curriculum change?

Yeah. Well, it's hard at the sort of, you know, fifth grade level when we're talking about teaching kids to read. I'm not like qualified on that exactly. But I think when we teach grammar, quote, unquote, as such, like in, you know, middle school or whenever fourth grade, whenever people have that, they should learn it as linguistics, like kids in other countries, like the, when I studied abroad in Peru, like the Peruvian kids that I was studying with had learned some basic linguistic stuff when they were in elementary school. So one of the very first things that my students learn on day one is like language has variation. Variation is conditioned by social factors. It is not a problem. Like variation is not a problem. Variation is a feature.

Just to emphasize that again, variation is not a problem. Variation is a feature and language, of course, is elastic. But we teach kids in school right now, like this is proper English, everything else is bad. And by the way, not only is everything else bad, it's a sign of like a moral failing if somebody uses ain't like heaven forbid, right? But then we're so hypocritical because then we go on Twitter and we say ain't for stylistic reasons and whatever. So I think we could be less dogmatic, but I also think we could teach kids the science of how language works as opposed to just a set of rules that scare them into conforming linguistically. And if you had to break down the difference between grammar and linguistics

in a nutshell for someone who is not not schooled in it, what is the difference? So we talk about linguistics as descriptive rather than prescriptive. So sometimes like I'll go to a party or something and I'll tell people that I'm a linguist and they're like, oh my God, I have to watch my grammar around you. I'm like, actually, I am the person that you least need to watch your grammar around because I'm not here to judge. Like I understand Rach. I, I ain't, you know, I've been socialized here just like everybody else, but I aim to be like more understanding of the variation that I encounter rather than jumping to the conclusion like, oh, somebody said ain't like they must not be educated, right? That's the prescriptive thing.

And that's the thing that we teach people. Like, you know, you must follow this set of rules, don't end a sentence with a preposition, which is like everyone does anyway. Everyone does it. We all do it. And it's weird when you doubt sometimes. I know. That is a thing up with which I will not put. Like no, no. That is not, and we're going to look back and be like, people spoke like that. Like no one, I think we look back on, on, on ancient texts or, and we look at it, we're like, this is so awkward. And so, I mean, yeah, a language is elastic, so it's going to change and it changes as we use it. But like, why can't that be okay? Like, why do we have these crusades about like,

no, we have to preserve this, you know, like, we're still spelling through T-H-R-O-U-G-H. There is no reason for that. No reason for it. It's too many characters. Yeah. Don't even get me started. So linguists are really interested in speech, but like, don't even get me started on writing because like the writing system of English is a nightmare. It's, and I imagine it makes it a harder, harder language to master as well. Yeah. In terms of writing, right? So actually people think, oh, English is so hard to learn. It depends on the language you're coming from. So your first language determines the difficulty of the second language, the relationship between the first and second. So sort of the

farther away they are, the harder it might be for you. But also the writing system is really bad, right? So French is also very hard to learn to write in. Like for the same reason, Spanish is so easy to learn to write in because like there's a sound and letter correspondence. So like, you don't get this thing in Spanish where like, oh, could be 800 vowels. Yeah. That's a good point. Yeah. You see an E and an I in the same word. You don't know what's going on there. Yeah. Yeah. And so are there any, I always ask this of all theologists, are there any, anything in media that addresses what you do that you really like or you really think misses the mark? I always think about that key and peel sketch, one of the first

key and peel sketches I ever saw. I was like, oh my God. Is it when they're on the phone? Yes. Yeah. Okay. So for everybody listening out there, yeah, I teach with key and peel a lot because I'm interested in biracial people and they're just so on the market. Right. So this is, this is a skit in which key is like on one side of a street and peels on the other and they're like walking towards each other about to pass each other and each of them's on the phone and they don't know each other because you're my wife and you love the theater and it's your birthday. Great. And they're talking in a very sort of standard way like, yes, okay, I'm going to go to Whole Foods later. Like each of them is talking like this. And as they get closer,

they speak more African-American English. So then keys like the orchestra is already filled up, but they do have seats that are still left in the dress circle. So if you want to, me to get them theater tickets right now, I'm going to do it right. What's up dog? I'm about five minutes away. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Cool. No, they're all good singers. They all good singers. Yeah, son. Nah, man, I'm about, I'm telling you, man, I'm about to cross the street. I think Peel gets to the other side and he's like, oh my God. Christian, I almost totally just got mugged right now.

So they were so standard. And then they felt this need to like perform African-American English when they passed each other. But then he bought into like all of these white ideologies like at the, it's crazy. Are there any questions that you cringe when you get asked in what you do? How many languages do you speak? Never ask a linguist how many languages do you speak? Really? You're like, do you speak a few though, to be fair? I know, but it's like not important. Like I could, you know, sometimes I joke with people in like zero, like clearly English is my first language. And I studied Spanish for a long time. I have a degree in Spanish and I studied Bolivian Quechua for a while and Arabic for a while,

but I don't speak super well, right? So in asking Nicole her least favorite question, I asked Nicole her least favorite question. I am the worst. I know a lot of things about a lot of languages, but we're not, that's not what linguists do. Like sometimes people think we just go around collecting languages, like their stamps or something. Yeah. And like, we don't like, we care a lot about the structure of the thing. And I'm a sociolinguist by training. And so like, I care a lot about the people, right? I care about the language in as much as I need to understand it, to be able to understand what's going on with the people there. So all of this stuff about inequality that I mentioned earlier,

like when I went to Peru, well, I needed to know some Quechua to be able to see the ways in which this prejudice like operates, right? I need to know something about African-American English because I need to be able to see the ways in which this operates. And of course, like, these are my first, this is my first language, so it's fine. But like when we talk about studying other languages, we are often using them to answer our scientific questions, not to be like, especially communicative. So if you're hanging out with a linguist that, you know, has studied French, like that doesn't mean that they're going to help you in Paris. They'll tell you all about like the structure of old French, but they will not be able to like

help you order a coffee. You're like, don't get subway directions from them. Yeah. No, don't do it. Side note, if you ever go to Paris, two things, let old uncle Ali help you out. Don't wear athletic sneakers unless you're actively participating in a triathlon. Also, just learn how to apologize in French. It's literally the most useful linguistic tool to have in your pocket. Just groveling, ashamed to be American-ness, and then everyone's so nice to you. They're like, oh, you're cute. You're like a sad dog. And do you find yourself from on a personal level, do you find yourself code switching? Do you, do you, are you more aware of that in your own life and in your friend's life? Yeah. I can't even like control it. It's hard to,

it takes a lot of cognitive load to be able to understand what you're doing at the same time as you're doing it. So when I interview people, they're like, yeah, code switch. And I'm like, what do you change? And they're like, I don't know. And I feel the same way. Like I know the things that people change, like because I'm a scientist, but if I, it's like I have my voice, right, that I use with my grandma or like I'm going to historically black sorority, skiway sorority. And when I'm there, like I have a style, right? And it's different than the style that I have, like with, you know, my white students or like with my white mother or, you know, things like that. But to say exactly what it is, like, yes, it's in the intonation,

probably, but I can't even really tell you what is. And I, and normally I run through listener questions, but because traffic, I'm going to run through the most popular one I got. Yeah, we have 10 minutes. Good. I think the most popular question I got, because we had a lot of questions, but is what happens to me when my accent comes out when I'm drunk? What is going on there? I love that as a question. That's the most popular question. Yeah, what happens when you're drunk? A couple things. There's some lowered inhibitions that happen with alcohol, right? So say that you are a speaker of a stigmatized variety, like you are from the South and you sound Southern and you are in California. You probably do some work in your

mind, maybe not even consciously, to sound less Southern because you get tired of people either making fun of you or just commenting on it even. You're like, no, I'm just going to sound like a Californian so I can like order my stupid coffee and not have to like have a conversation about where I'm from, right? People do that. But when you drink, your, your cognitive abilities decline. So you actually can't necessarily manage that at the same level that you would if you were sober. Like your brain is slower, right? So you, you, you can't do it as well. The other thing is your brain is slower, but also like you might just not care anymore, right? Whatever, I'm from the South and I'm just going to do it, right? I am this way with dancing and karaoke,

but it's not all mental. There's another thing sort of physiologically, right? So alcohol can cause sort of a loosening of some of the pieces of your vocal tract. So that's why you get slurred speech, right? You lose some control. So if your speech is kind of slurring or something like that, because you're really drunk, then you'll sound different. I tried to find a good movie clip with a drunk Southerner here, but I just started going down rabbit holes of drunk people like barfing on YouTube and it started making me sad. Anyway, I wanted to ask her so many more questions, but she had a hard out and LA Memorial Day traffic is the devil's evening board game. And I'm so sorry. What do you think my last two questions are always the thing that you hate the most about

your job? What do you hate about it? Is it is it commute or hours or certain prejudices you face? What irks you the most about what you do? Yeah, it's really hard to be an expert on language because language is a thing that everybody has, right? So if I was like a geologist, I always dream of like my alternate world in which I'm a geologist and I study rocks and people leave me alone. They don't ask me how many rocks I have. But people assume that you're an expert, right? They're like, oh, you know way more about rocks than me. So like when you come across rocks in the wild, they're like, hey, geologist, tell me about this rock. And you're like, cool, I will, because I'm an expert. When you're a linguist, everyone wants to tell you about the thing that

you're wrong about. And I'm like, I am actually an expert in this thing. And what's maddening is every native speaker is an expert about their language. Like people know things about language that I don't know. But I do have some scientific training that, you know, I wish people would like give me credit for. So I have had people like straight fight me when I say like African American English is rule governed. They're like, no, it's just bad grammar. I'm like, I have a phd. So that is the thing. And you to get that phd, that must have required so much data collection. And did you have to do sentence structuring? I mean, did you, did you have to come out with formulas? Yeah, so I spent five years in grad school, which is not even that many, um, comparatively.

Side note, average time to get a phd looked it up 8.2 years. Now the average length of an American marriage, 8.2 years. So someone please write a dissertation on how long a person can withstand something difficult yet illuminating. And I had to study every aspect of linguistic analysis. So like I study tone and social factors, but like I had to study the way that sounds are put together, the way that words are put together, the way that sentences are put together, like meaning in a logic theory kind of context. I get to study so many things about the nature of language that I don't necessarily use every day now, except for when I'm teaching. But also just thinking really deeply about the nature of sound, which is the thing that I do and the nature of

like how language works to do social things. Like we use it to accomplish social things. Yeah, it's a tool. So even if, you know, it's not necessarily that like having the phd is the big thing. The thing is that I've spent like years and years reading and thinking and talking and writing about these things. So I feel, you know, somewhat qualified to speak on them. It's great that you're talking about talking. Yeah, talking about how we do is talk about talking. And then what's your favorite thing about it? What just like gives you butterflies? I really like teaching students. So, you know, I teach in a liberal arts college and it's

undergrads and people are like, Oh, you don't want grad students. I'm like grad students are a pain. Have you ever met a grad student? I was the worst grad student. I don't want people like me. I love teaching undergrads because I will walk in to like day one of intro to linguistics and be like, I am about to blow your mind. Just with even some of the things that have come up here about like, you know, what happens in the educational system, like the ways in which language is prejudice, the ways in which people that are trying to mock African American English get it so wrong, right? The physiology stuff, the things about like kids exaggerating gender differences, like the way that the vocal tract works, like I am a big nerd, but all of this

stuff is super cool to me. And it tells us a lot about the social world that we inhabit. So, my favorite thing is just like watching the eyes light up and be like, no way. Just seeing like light bulbs go off, like illuminating. Right. Oh, that's got to be so exciting because that's you've had those so many light bulb moments like that coming to do what you do. Yeah. Oh my gosh. And then is there anything you think people who are more curious about this, like anywhere to see your writing or any resources you think people should look down, anything people should do or be more aware of? Because I could sit here and ask you questions for 10 hours. Like, I'm so pissed at traffic right now because this is so fascinating. But

anything you can point to, any do's or don'ts? Yeah. So, I will say, if you like podcasts, which you might, there's one that's called Lingthusiasm. It's really good. It's got a lot of sort of introductory topics on linguistics. There's a few language podcasts. There's also one Lexicon Valley, which is hosted by John McOrder at Columbia, University's Linguistics Professor. So, I'll put links to those on my website, alleywar.com slash ologies, as well as links to some books Nicole recommends about linguistics and discrimination. I recommend a book called English with an Accent by Rosy and Elipi Green. It talks a lot about sort of language and social issues and social justice.

I teach with it in my linguistic discrimination class. But there's a lot of good stuff out there. So, those are some beginning recommendations. And where can people find you? I'm on Twitter, regular Twitter, and Black Twitter. Both Twitter. I'm mixed linguist on social media. And I like to respond to inquiries from, you know, people. So, get at me on the interwebs, I guess. Cool. And we'll get you out of here. Thank you so much. You're welcome. It was really fun. Oh, my God. So, to continue learning about and exploring intonational phonology, you can look into Dr. Nicole Holiday's work. She's brilliant. And I want her to give like

50 TED Talks. And for links to books and documentaries that we talked about, you can go to alleywar.com slash ologies. I'll put a bunch of links there. You can also join up in the ologies podcast Facebook group. And thank you to my, my dear sisters, Hannah Lipo and Aaron Talbert for being admins of that. Ologies is on Twitter and Instagram as ologies. And I'm on Instagram and average white lady Twitter as Ali Ward with 1L. And thank you as always to the patrons who support the show. You allow me to pay my wonderful editor, Stephen Ray Morris, to chop this all together. Hi, Stephen. And thank you. If you'd like an ology shirt or a pin, or a tote bag, ologiesmerch.com, has you so covered. Thank you, Shannon Feltis and Bonnie

Dutch for managing that. The ologies theme song was written and performed by Nick Thorburn of the band Islands. And if you listened to the end of the episode, have you guys been doing that? Do you know that? You know, I tell a secret at the end. And this week, the secret is that my face was like, Hey, I know you have some shoots this week. What if you want a big blemish on your face on your chin? And I was like, that sounds great. I read somewhere that you can use haemorrhoid cream to decrease the size of under eye bags or a blemish. And I didn't research it ahead of time. I just happened to be at the drugstore and I purchased some and then I put it on my face. And now I'll research whether or not that was a bad idea. But I want you to know as I recorded

all these asides. In this hotel room in Michigan, I have but cream on my face. I'll let you know how it goes. Okay, bye bye. Pack a dermatology, homeology, cryptozoology, lithology, technology, meteorology, nephrology, nephrology, seriology, zoology. Oh my God, I just saw a squirrel. It doesn't have a tail. That was worth the drive.