Science Friday - Ice Cream Science, Online Language. July 26, 2019, Part 2

Episode Date: July 26, 2019

Have you ever tried to make your favorite rocky road flavored ice cream at home, but your chocolate ice cream turns out a little crunchier than you hoped? And your ribbons of marshmallow are more like frozen, sugary shards? Chemist Matt Hartings and ice cream maker Ben Van Leeuwen, co-founder of Van Leeuwen Artisan Ice Cream in New York City, talk about the science behind how milk, sugar, and eggs turn into your favorite frozen desserts. They’ll chat about the sweet science behind other frozen delights, too—like how the size of water crystals affect texture and how you can make a scoopable vegan ice cream.  Are you a fluent texter? Are you eloquent with your emoji? DOES WRITING IN ALL CAPS SOUND LIKE SCREAMING TO YOU? Maybe you’ve become accustomed to delivering just the right degree of snark using ~~sparkly tildes~~… Or you feel that slight sense of aggression when someone ends a simple text to you with a period.     In her new book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch explores some of the ways that online communication has changed the way we write informally, from the early days of computer bulletin boards to today’s Facebook and Twitter memes. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Molly Webster. I reflato is away. Later in the hour, we'll be talking about how online communication has changed the way we write. It's the topic of a new book, because internet. But first, summer means it's time for ice cream. Have you ever had one favorite flavor you keep ordering? And then you thought to yourself, you know what? I could probably make this. Admittedly, I've never had that thought. But if you were the person that had that thought, you got home, you mixed all the ingredients together, and then you kind of got to you kind of got. like a frozen vanilla ice cube or a chocolate chunk that was just like a chunk of chocolate. Ice cream and all frozen desserts are not just delicious. They're very complicated chemically. They're a mix of ice crystals and emulsifiers and a lot of air bubbles. So my next guests are here to tell us about the science behind these frozen treats and to help you get the perfect homemade scoop each time. So I would like to welcome to the table, Matt Hardings, a professor of chemistry at American University in Washington, D.C. He's a home ice cream maker and author of the book, Chemistry in Your Kitchen, and Ben Van Llewin, co-founder of Van Luin Artisan Ice Cream based

here in New York. And if you have had a frozen dessert fail, we want to hear from you, what are your science questions about getting the perfect ice cream or frozen custard? You can give us a call. Our number is 844-724-8255. That's 844 SciTalk or tweet us at SciFRI. So, Matt, I'm going to start with you down there in D.C. You call ice cream a mesh network, something I've never heard ice cream described as before. What do you mean by that? And what do you mean by that, scientifically speaking?

Right. Well, think about just a sponge, right? And when a sponge is dry, right, it's sort of dry and crumpley, but when you put it in water, it soaks all that water up. and it's squishy and it has a completely different texture. And not only does the sponge change in texture, but the water changes in texture too, right? You go from liquid water that sloshes around, and now it's stuck inside of that sponge. And that's kind of what ice cream is, is we kind of want to stick that water into place and keep it from moving around so much, and it makes a really nice, smooth, rich taste on your tongue.

Matt, at what point did you start thinking about ice cream scientifically? Well, it's one of the burdens of being a chemist, right, is I'm always thinking about things scientifically. Probably when I really started making my own ice cream, when I wanted to start doing it better. Again, I think of things in terms of science, and so when I started making ice cream and wanted to do better, my immediate thing was to start thinking a little bit more about what was happening, and that helped me a lot. So, Ben, what's the difference between, this is really my question, is one. What is the difference between ice cream, soft serve, and frozen custard? Because when I go to the ice cream truck, it definitely doesn't taste like ice cream I get out of my freezer.

So frozen custard and soft serve would be ice cream. Soft serve tends to be lower in fat and highly stabilized, meaning there's a lot of gums and sometimes natural, sometimes unnatural compounds that are used. And the reason you need to do that with soft serve is because it's a lot of gums and sometimes natural, sometimes unnatural compounds that are used. soft serve is because it's a sort of on-demand frozen product, it's constantly spinning around in this partially frozen barrel. And if you don't have a lot of stabilizers in there, the fat's actually going to churn out and you're going to get butter. So the only way to really do soft serve well is if you have really high velocity, if a lot of it's coming out and you're selling a lot of it. So we actually tried to do soft serve years ago, but it didn't work because we weren't selling enough.

So it just sat in the barrel and overchered. And frozen custard is defined, at least by the New York State Department of Agriculture, is having more than 1.3% egg yolks. So if you have more than that in your product, you have to either call it frozen custard or French ice cream. Our ice cream, depending on the flavor, is 5 to 8% organic eggs. So we call it French ice cream. And then ice cream is the sort of definition of all of those things, including, you know, people often ask me what the difference between gelato and ice cream is, and gelato means ice cream in Italian.

You can make it in all sorts of different ways. Matt, I think this has been a controversial statement on your end. Something about ice cream and gelato. Are they different? Are they the same? Is it just the Italians being awesome? Well, the Italians are awesome. And gelato is awesome.

And I think there's a lot of bickering back and forth between people who make this. But I think the biggest difference between ice cream and gelato is the temperature that you serve it at, right? So gelato is served at a higher temperature than ice cream is. And so you can make it differently. But I have seen recipes from Italian cookbooks that look just like ice cream recipes. And I have seen recipes from non-Italian cookbooks for ice cream that look just like gelato.

Really, the biggest difference is the temperature that you serve it at. And that temperature difference gives you a little leeway in what you can do with bringing out flavors and making something creamy or smooth or whatever you're looking for. And the only way you can serve it at a higher temperature is if it's pretty stabilized. So if it has a lot of gums, natural ones would be guar gum, caragene, and locust bean gum. So those sort of old-fashioned gelato recipe or Italian ice cream recipes we can call them that Matt was referring to, which is it's such a good point. You know, they'll have more egg yolks than, you know,

any recipe you've ever seen in a super high butterfat. Those served at a higher temperature wouldn't work as well because they would, they might collapse without the stabilization. Hmm. So much to know here. So we've been collecting listener questions all week through our Vox Pop app. And so here's one on crystallization from Ronnie in Pennsylvania. Why does ice cream sometimes crystallize?

Pretty cut and dry. Ben, do you want to start with that one? Sure. So the crystallization you're tasting is usually going to be from water, freezing. And the bigger the ice crystals are in the frozen water, the more detectable they'll be on your palate. The way you prevent that sort of ice-crystallie taste is by freezing the ice cream really, really quickly. So the example I always use is if it's snowing on a warm day, the snowing. The snow flakes are really big because it takes them a long time to turn from water to solid to ice, so the crystals sort of slowly build and become very large. If they rapidly cool on a freezing cold day, the snowflakes are super small.

And the same thing happens with ice cream. So in the production facility we use, and it would be the same for a home ice cream maker, when you spin the ice cream from your mix, your sort of liquid base into a soft serve consistency, after that you want to do what's called hardening and you put it into a freezer. And the faster you harden it, the smaller the ice crystals are going to be. But the crystallization you're tasting at home is usually happening with the failure in what's called a cold chain, which is like a supply chain that's cold. So if your ice cream is being delivered to the local grocery store and the delivery trucks arrive

and puts the pallet of ice cream onto the loading dock and it sits in 90 degree heat for, even 20 minutes, it might melt, and then when it refreezes, it's going to freeze really slowly, and you're going to get some ice crystals. And you get that weird, like, film on the top that's, like, ice crystally? Yeah, exactly. Matt, what would you say to Ronnie? Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, a lot of times, you know, when, again, as a chemist, I think, of molecules moving around all the time, right?

And so the warmer things are, the faster things move around. And so those water molecules are still moving around in your ice cream when they warm up just a little bit. And so those water molecules can go from liquidy water and they move around a bunch and then they find an ice crystal to stick to and it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And so you can stop that motion by freezing it down really quickly. Is that like, Ben, when you're making ice cream, is there like a magic frozen point that you're going for or like a speed in which you want to freeze it by? Well, you want to freeze it as quickly as possible. But is that like seconds or minutes or hours? Hours.

So theoretically, the faster you do it, the smoother it's going to be. But there's sort of a point where the value, you kind of like top out at how much better it's going to taste. So one example is some ice cream makers are using liquid nitrogen to freeze the ice cream. And theoretically it makes it creamier, but to me, you're going to be able to achieve the same creaminess with a really good formula. but exact time. So we like to pull our ice cream out of the ice cream making machine at around 21 degrees, which is fairly low, and then we put it in what's called the hardening freezer. And depending on the size of container we're putting it in,

it takes anywhere from four hours to 24 hours to harden. Because our ice cream is so high in fat, we're 18% butterfat and super high in egg yolks, we can take longer to harden it and still get a really awesome texture. If we were a super low-fat ice cream, you would have to harden it really, really rapidly and put it through what's called a hardening tunnel. Matt, I think you're actually one of those people that experiment with liquid nitrogen. And I was going to ask you anyway, I don't know a ton about how all this stuff folds together. So what does an egg actually do in ice cream? Right.

So this gets back to that mesh I was talking about earlier, right? When you make any kind of custard, right? whether it's creme brulee or ice cream or scrambled eggs, you're taking the coiled up proteins in that egg, and as you heat them, they sort of unravel and start to stick together. And that's where they make this mesh, right? This sort of network inside of whatever liquid it is you're cooking. And so that's really what's going on with those eggs,

is you really want them to sort of set up into a custard. And in effect, that's what helps to slow the water molecules down as you're freezing it so that they can't find one another. They have a hard time finding one another because they keep running into these little pockets of egg protein. Ben, I think your ice cream has a lot of eggs in it. It's something like five times the usual amount. Can you talk about that?

So, as Matt just described, using tons of eggs, combats the potential iciness. But when we formulated our ice cream, you know, we started 12 years ago. We actually, we had a basic understanding of that. But the reason we used more eggs is because we like the taste more. And so using a ton of egg yolks gives it this, like, amazing chewiness that we've not been able to achieve without using a lot of egg yolks. And we really, really love that. It's such a good flavor. It really is. Yeah.

That's great. So we're here talking about ice cream. After the break, we'll be talking more about the science behind ice cream and taking your questions. So call us. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Molly Webster. We're talking this hour about the science of ice cream and other frozen desserts. My guests are Matt Harding, a professor of chemistry at American University in Washington, D.C., and author of the book, Chemistry in Your Kitchen, and Ben Van Llewin, co-founder of Van Llewin Artisan Ice Cream here in New York. And if you've had a frozen dessert fail and have questions, we want to hear from you. Give us a call. Our number is 844-724-8255. That's 845.

for SciTalk or tweet us at SciFry. Matt, before we went to the break, we were talking about eggs using eggs in ice cream. Are there alternatives that we can use in ice cream? Yeah, absolutely. And Ben, I was looking at all your recipes earlier before I came in, and I'm curious at how close in texture your vegan options are, right? There's lots of different options that you can use for stabilizers. Many of them come from different plants.

Cornstarch is one of them. And I believe Ben uses locust bean gum. So you have a lot of options, right? Gelatin is another one. Lots of different options that you can find in your regular grocery store for replacing egg. So it's great that you actually brought up all the different types of flavors of Ben's ice cream because we happen to have a box here in the studio. I hate you people.

I'm just going to, Matt, I'm very sorry. We couldn't ship any to you down in D.C. We should have said the Bring Your Own bowl. should have been a requirement. So I'm opening something now. It's beautiful. It's called Earl Grey. This is my first cooking demonstration ever.

I'm tasting it. And then you're going to tell me a little bit about how you make Earl Grey happen. Maybe you can say that while I'm eating it. So the Earl Grey is a dairy flavor. So we start with milk, cream, sugar, and organic egg yolks. And we heat that up in a big 200-gallon kettle. And then we use mesh nylon bags and fill them with an amazing organic black tea with Bergamont citrus oil, which is what makes it Earl Grey from Rishi tea.

And we steep that tea as we're cooking the custard. And we pull the tea bags out. We homogenize it. We cool it. And then we put it through the ice cream freezer. So you actually cook it like you steep the tea in the mess of the making it, like in the middle of everything? Yeah, in the big custard-making cauldron. And Earl Gray, I mean, it is like a very pungent flavor as a tea,

but you do have to steep it for a long time. Like, how do you get a subtle flavor like that to actually come through in ice cream and not get drowned in eggs? So we slightly over-steep it. We don't over-stipe it to a point where you're getting, like, too many tannins, but we steep it more and we use more per volume than if you were just making a cup of tea. Because as you pointed out, there's 8% egg yolks,

18% butterfat, really muting a lot of the flavors. Yeah. Matt, now that we're talking about flavors, are there like, I just wonder once you start mixing flavor into the chemistry, how that affects things or if there are flavors that are really hard to do? Right. So, you know, one of the things that you need to think about

when you're making ice cream is that it's cold, right? The ice cream is cold, and that low temperature really affects how you taste flavors, right? And so they're not as strong when we taste them cold. So one of the reasons why, you know, Ben can oversteep is because those flavors don't come through as strong when we're eating cold ice cream versus a hot tea. And so sometimes you need to over flavor to really have something that you're going to get on your palate. But, you know, another thing is it's fun to play with different flavor combinations, right?

And there are all sorts of things that you can do, all sorts of crazy things that you can try. And I love the idea of playing around with flavors and finding new things that no one's ever thought of before. So we're going to bring in a caller who has a flavor question. This is Deborah from Ohio. Deborah from Ohio, do you want to tell us what your question is? Yes, my question is, I make a custard with a... and cream and all the good stuff, Madagascar, vanilla, et cetera. My problem is I like to fold in fresh fruit.

I use old-fashioned ice cream freezer, but my problem is when I'm hardening the ice cream, my chunks of fruit seem harder than the ice cream around it. So, yeah, 100%. And if you're using fresh fruit, it's going to be impossible to avoid that. I mean, Matt probably has even more data on, like, percentages, but the fruit is going to get really icy because of the water and sort of lack of sugar in it.

So what you could do is you could lightly compote the fruit, but really what works even better is sort of macerating it with a lot of sugar, cooking it a little bit to get the water out, and then you're going to get a sort of smooth texture on the fruit instead of a hard icy texture. And Matt, what would you say in your data-driven? I would echo what Ben said. That is exactly what you want to do, is you want to pull some of the water out of the fresh fruit.

And it's sad because you want that flavor of fresh fruit. And when you macerate it, you lose that a little bit. But it's the playoff you have to take when you're trying to make ice cream. What I would do on that is do the vanilla ice cream and then just put the fresh fruit on top. Yeah. So then you're getting the perfect texture on the fresh fruit. the perfect vanilla. I feel like this is a good segue for me to have more ice cream.

Yes. Which is the cookie crumble strawberry jam. We were talking about fruit, so it felt appropriate. While I'm sampling this, Ben, you said that strawberry might have been one of your hardest flavors to make good? Strawberry was a really hard flavor to master. we were adding strawberries, which is increasing the overall volume of the mix, but you're adding no fat. So the fat drops.

And I'm not sure why it took us so long to get to this point. But five years in, we said we shouldn't be using any milk in this product. In order to get enough, you know, as much strawberry taste as we wanted, we had to add so many strawberries that the butterfat would come down. So now we use only cream, strawberries, and sugar. And the lady who just called in from Ohio, if you want to do a fruit-flavored ice cream, better to incorporate the fruit fully. And then you have sort of complete control over your fat and sugar level of the entire mix because it's uniform. So you can get the fruit flavor.

And for us, because we're not using stabilizers, we always want to stay above 16% butterfat and around 12% sugar. And this strawberry ice cream I just ate is vegan. Yes. Tell us about how challenging it is to make vegan ice cream or not, I guess. I mean, for us, it's pretty easy. We started making vegan ice cream seven years ago, which was five years into our business, and the goal was to make delicious ice cream that happened to be vegan, not delicious vegan ice cream.

So we tried to match the solids, fat, and sugar levels to our classic ice cream. All of the ingredients behave differently. so we had to tweak it. But we're making the vegan ice cream with cashew milk, coconut milk, raw cocoa butter, which is the fat from chocolate, organic coconut oil, and a little bit of locust bean gum, or we call it carab gum, which is an organic stabilizer. And we use that not as a way to make it creamier,

but a way to sort of give it more body because we're not using eggs in the vegan. We're going to take a call from Jordan in Phoenix, Jordan, what's your question? Is it possible to over-chern sorbet? And if so, how can you do it? No. If it's a fat-free sorbet, it's impossible.

And no sorbets I've ever seen have dairy in them. So, yeah, impossible. Matt, for someone who cooks at home, I know that you do this, talk to me about getting recipes or getting ingredients from stores. Like, are you just looking at the ingredients you're throwing into the bowl or are you paying attention to what's in those ingredients?

Right. So that's a great question. And Ben alluded to this just a minute ago when he started talking about making vegan ice cream, right? So I have a little thing up online with Science Friday talking about how I look at changing ice cream recipes. And you just try, you want to try to get your fats the same and your protein, your thickeners the same, your sugar amounts the same.

And so really paying attention to what's on the nutritional labels is. is a great way to start with understanding how to change a recipe. Hmm. Interesting. Okay, one more call, Dustin from Salt Lake City. Dustin, what's your call? Hi. I have a question about sugar and corn syrup.

I've made ice cream from recipes in America's Test Kitchen Cookbooks, and they suggest using park corn syrup to make it smoother, and I want to know how the chemistry works. behind that. Matt, do you want to lead? Yeah, so corn syrup has a lot of fructose or invert sugar in it, and so that doesn't crystallize as much in terms of the sugar crystallizing out, but it also prevents in general the ice cream from crystallizing as well.

And so you can dampen that a little bit. I haven't used that just because the recipes that I use, I don't see much crystallization from the regular sugar, but that is definitely one way to do that. to try to get its smoothness. Ben, any final thoughts? You're nodding. I just don't think it's necessary for home use. If you're going through temperature shock, that can help.

But when you're making a few pints of ice cream at home, I don't think it's necessary to use the corn syrup because it's harder to find, and it's certainly harder to find an organic version of, too. All right. Thank you so much. I would like to thank my guests and thank everyone for the ice cream. It was awesome.

So we have Ben Van Luhin, co-founder of Van Luin Artisan Ice Cream, based here in New York. And Matt Hardings is a professor of chemistry at American University and author of the book, Chemistry in Your Kitchen. And Matt wrote up an article about chemistry tips for perfecting your ice cream. You can read it on our website at sciencefriiday.com slash ice cream. For the rest of the hour, how online. communication has been changing the way we write informally. So when did you first get online? Was it way back in the early days of the computer bulletin board or during AOL? I think I signed online for AOL instant messenger. And then you gradually have to pick up the lingo.O.L. meant someone was laughing.

It didn't mean lots of love. And then there's writing in all caps. You kind of discover that might have been a bad thing unless you really were shouting. Or maybe you're just a person who has grown up online. You've always had text. You've always had emails. You understand the ins and outs of Snapchat. And you know what emoji to drop into a message to convey your meaning. So Gretchen McCullough is an internet linguist. You may have seen her articles in Wired. She co-hosts the podcast Linguism. And she's the author of the new book, Because Internet, Understanding the New Rules of Language. Welcome back to the program, Gretchen. Hello. It's so fun to be here again. It is so fun to have you.

I felt like when I was reading this book that I was essentially just, you were, had been listening in on my day-to-day conversations with people and then were like, okay, let me analyze this for you, Molly. Yeah, I'm sorry. I've actually had you bugged, Molly. I hate to break it to you on radio, but. Yeah. I feel like so many people reading this book would think that. I mean, like, what made you, I think it's one thing to observe a thing. What made you think like, oh, I can answer.

analyze this. We can dig in here about what's happening with language because of the internet. I find as a linguist, I have a hard time turning that linguist part of my brain off. And maybe I don't want to. So if you go out with me to a pub or something and you say something, I might pause you and say, wait a second, can you say that vowel again? Oh. I'm just kind of that type of person. And so I spend a lot of time on the internet, as many of us do. And when I see stuff going on online, I just want to analyze it. It's very exciting for me. And so what did you start? I mean, what made you focus on the internet? You were obviously noticing something there. The Genesis for thinking, okay, there's actually maybe a book here or there's some sort of longer thing here came from an article that I wrote for the now sadly departed website, The Toast, back in 2014.

I missed the toast still. And I wrote an article for them analyzing the linguistics. of the Doge meme. That was the one with the Shiba Inu a few years ago. And I got to the second last paragraph of the Doge meme article. And I found myself thinking, huh, there's something interesting here. I was comparing Doge with the earlier generation of your kind of classic Lowell Cat memes and thinking there's an additional layer of irony in Internet writing now. There's this level of double meaning that we use now that you didn't see in the early days of the Internet.

And that it seems like the time is right to try to expand on that again. So I was feeling like there was more there. And that was actually the first time that a literary agent contacted me from writing that article. And so the timing worked out really well. That's great. So I'm Molly Webster. And this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I'm here with Gretchen McCullough, an internet linguist.

And you're telling us all about the things that we do every day, but don't even realize we're doing them. So I often think about linguistics as something that's spoken. Like, I don't think of it necessarily with writing, but you've brought the two together here. Like, how has the Internet and writing helped you understand the way we speak better? Yeah, exactly. Like, a lot of linguistics is still focused on the spoken word because it's seen as, you know, that's the bit that hasn't been filtered, hasn't gone through an editor. It hasn't been altered by someone else.

It just comes out. And that's what you say. that can kind of help us understand how the human mind creates language if you go in its least filtered form. But of course, that's only true of some kinds of writing that it gets through an editor. And the informal kind of writing, the kind that happens online in our texts and our tweets every day, that doesn't go through an editor. That does give us access to what are people doing, you know, with their first rush of intuition. And it gives us access to some of the very same interesting things about how we use language.

So when you're looking at the internet, what were some of the key, I don't know, grammatical rules or linguistic rules that you see playing out online? One thing that I'm really fascinated about is the use of punctuation and other typographical resources to convey tone of voice. So, you know, you can use a question mark to indicate something's a question. That's kind of the boring use. But you can also use a question mark to indicate a rise in intonation at the end of a sentence. when it's not necessarily a question, but it indicates that rise. And then on the flip side, you can say something that is syntactically a question, like what could possibly go wrong, but not put a question mark there.

And that indicates a wry or a deadpan or an ironic rhetorical question. And so this kind of four-step possibility, do you use the question mark or not, is it syntactically a question or not, gives rise to a whole bunch of layers of possible meanings and interpretations. That's like I feel like I use exclamation points, not really because I'm excited, but because I'm trying to be sincere and like show the way things are done. So before we keep talking, I'm going to say we need to take a break. We'll be back with more internet linguistics in a moment. This is Science Friday and I'm Molly Webster sitting in for Ira Flato. I'm talking with internet linguist Gretchen McCullough.

She's the author of the new book, Because Internet, Understand. the new rules of language. So Gretchen, when we left, we were talking about punctuation, identifying tone. And I want to go to one of our callers. He has a very interesting question about ellipses. Nate from Dayton, Ohio. Hi. I was wondering if you could explain the use of ellipses on the internet. It seems to vary from generation to generation. Gretchen? Yes, there is absolutely a generational different ellipsies, and it's one of my favorite things that I figured out when I was writing because Internet. So the brief nutshell version of what's going on, and we'll get into why in a sec, the brief nutshell version of what's going on is you have predominantly older people who use ellipsis as a generic separation character. So between any sort of utterance or phrase, you might say, hey, dot, dot, dot, dot, how's it going?

dot, dot, dot, dot. Do you have time to chat soon? Dot, dot, dot. And this is used as a way of separating remarks. They might be full sentences. There might be phrases. The younger generation also separates their sentences and phrases with a generic mark, and this is generally for them the line break or the message break. So you send them each as a new line. Hey, new line, how's it going? New line. Just want to know if you're have some time to chat. That is what my text messages look like. I just want to say, one sentence, one sentence, one sentence. I got this from your phone. I did not. And you have some older people who also use the hyphen or the dash as the generic separation character as well. The ellipsis

is common. Sometimes you see like a string of commas as well, which is kind of an even older thing to do. But you have a couple different types of generic separation characters. And for, for So everybody has their generic separation character. It just depends which one you use in the different generations. The thing is, is that because the younger generations don't use the ellipsies as a generic separation character, because they're using line breaks, they instead have a different meaning for the ellipses. And that is indicating something left unsaid. So kind of trailing off meaningfully. And that thing can be a lot of different things.

Sometimes it's, I'm actually a little bit annoyed, or I have some reservations here, like, okay. dot dot dot like I guess I can come pick you up dot dot dot I just got uncomfortable while you did that sometimes it you know it could be flirtatious it could be like oh wow you know it could be kind of insincere it could be passive aggressive there's a bunch of different things but what it does is it hints at something left unsaid deliberately hints at that kind of thing the problem comes when these two sets of norms clash into each other because if you're using ellipsis as generic separation character, as long as you're communicating with someone else

who also does that, you're doing totally fine. But if you're using ellipsis as your something left unsaid character, and you're talking with someone who uses it as a generic separation character, you think they're being incredibly passive aggressive when they just think they're being normal. Well, this is funny, because one of the things people talk about is that tone is so hard to express through text.

Is that something you would agree with, or do you just think that? that's just because of clashing. We all have tones. It's just when they clash. That's the problem. I think we're developing ways of expressing tone through text. And it really depends on kind of what internet generation you belong to and where you, who you're thinking of as your imaginary authority when you're composing a text message. So I see the biggest divide here between people who are thinking, what is the other person going to assume about my tone, which tends to be younger what isn't exclusively and people who are thinking, what is the correct thing that I could be doing? What is the

imaginary standard, you know, the imaginary English teacher or the imaginary copy editor in your head? So if you're writing to an imaginary English teacher, if you're writing to an imaginary copy editor, you're not thinking about how your tone is interpreted, you're thinking about an external list of standards. And the big clash comes from people who have one system communicating with people who have a different system because the kind of imagined audience that you have is different, and you're writing differently because of that. And do those systems, those different systems come just because of age? Or are they there because of geography or somehow something else is causing different systems to come into play? This is why I like talking about what your formative internet social

experience was like. So, you know, you could have somebody right now who say, you know, 40 or 50, who joined the internet before there was even technically the World Wide Web, like joined back in like the the BBS bulletin board system dial-up, you know, pre-dial-up days, or was on Usenet or was on chat rooms, or these kinds of old systems. And they've been using internet-mediated tone of voice for 30 years. And that 40- or 50-something is going to be very different from a 40- or 50-something who joined, say, around either year 2000 or who just was dragged, kicking and screaming onto the the internet two years ago, you know? Especially in that older group, it's really hard to tell from someone's age what their internet social experience was because there's a big divide between early

adopters and mid adopters and late adopters in those older demographics. Within the younger groups, I think it's a lot more homogenous. But in the older groups, there are huge differences, and you can't always assume that just because someone's on the older side means they don't have this facility with internet media to tone a voice. So you're aligning more with experience on the internet than with age? And especially not just experience on the internet in general, because if all you use the internet for is like, you know, booking flights and looking up the weather, that's not a social internet for you. Fair.

I mean, it's totally reasonable to look up the weather. I look up the weather every day. But that doesn't make the internet social for you. So if you make friends via the internet, if you have relationships in your life that you keep up via the internet and via the text-based medium of the internet, and then you think of the internet as a possible way to, like, be a full person and have, communicate tone of voice and communicate important ideas for you, then you're on an internet that you figured out a way to communicate a sense of tone of voice, even if it's not exactly the same as everyone else. So the question is

the social potential of the internet for you. Yeah. Yeah. So we talked about a little bit about tone and how things can vary in different pockets of the world. If I think about speech, I think about the fact that, you know, people have accents while they talk. Does that show up in, you know, informal internet communication at this point? There are some really interesting studies using geotagged tweets to look at how people tweet differently in particular areas. And you can find some things that map up with the sort of traditional sort of dialect maps that were made by doing, you know, telephone surveys or by sending people around in quote-unquote word wagons to do these surveys. And you can, so for example, you can find on Twitter that like people in the American South are more likely to use y'all. people in the North are more likely to say you guys. Like Pittsburgh has yins, its own little pocket.

And you can map on some of these things we've found in traditional dialect map findings onto what people are saying on social media as well. So I want to bring in a caller. We have Tom from Ames, Iowa. Tom, what's your question? Oh, Tom has left us. Well, let's try where, oh, I like this one. Let's try Jordan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, since we're talking about yins. If I say anything wrong about yins, then I'll find out. Jordan, what's your question? Hi, I love the fact that you used yins, by the way. I just had a question about the use of images in text messages. So I know that infographics are really great way to express information really quickly.

And since we're more of a pictographic culture these days, what is the way that pictures play into text? messages like memes or so on. Yeah, absolutely. I love how the analogies that I really like using for images, whether that's gifts or memes or emoji or even emoticons, kind of making pictures out of punctuation characters, is they're a lot like a digital version of gesture. So you can send someone like, good job with thumbs up. You could put a physical thumbs up or you could send a thumbs up, or you could send a thumbs

up emoji or GIF or something. And that reinforces your message. It's pretty positive. But if you say to someone, good job with the middle finger, you're now really changing the interpretation of the exact same words that you're saying. Yeah, you're being like really friendly. So maybe really friendly, maybe really ironic. So you're doing this sort of additional layer of interpretation on top of what's being said. And you can do that with physical gestures. And the most popular emoji are the hand and face and heart emoji, which are also very gestural. The most popular gifts have people or like humanoid animals in them. Like you could do a gift that's just a tumbleweed rolling by, but it's not as popular as something with a face. Yeah. Well, so in your book, you talk about memes,

and I equate memes with a very, you know, 2000 teens kind of like the ends of the the ends of the aughts. But you say memes have actually been around for a while just like in different ways. Yeah. It's really interesting, the continued evolution of the meme. Like which which one do people think of as prototypical memes says a lot about where you were on the internet at various times. And more about like where you were with respect to the culture. So the earliest example that we have, you know, the term was coined by Richard Dawkins, but it was like a social science term at the time. The example that we have of it from. in the internet sense from the first time, comes from Mike Godwin, who is better known as the guy that came up with Godwin's law. What's that? One of these laws, kind of like Rule 34 or something, that was on, one of the early internet things, it was on in the 90s, and Godwin's law says, the longer a discussion thread continues,

the probability of a gratuitous Hitler or Holocaust or Nazi's interpretation converges to one. In other words, like, everything becomes a Hitler analogy. The longer the conversation, you'll eventually get to Hitler. Eventually get to Hitler. And Godwin came up with this as an experiment in social engineering because he was annoyed at this tendency. He felt that it trivialized the actual horrors of the Holocaust, and he wanted to get people to stop.

And so he decided to make it a meme so that people could call each other out on doing it. Be like, oh, here's Godwin's law again. You know, to be like, this is a bad argument. And we should be taking very seriously when we do and do not make this comparison. Not that you can never make this comparison, but we shouldn't be doing it about like how bad the pizza was. Right, right, right, right. That seems fair. Yeah.

And so he seated this on a bunch of Usenet forms back in the day. And then a few years later, he wrote an article forward about in Wired talking about this experiment that he'd had and the fact that this meme was now replicating on his own. Other people were citing Godwin's law. It wasn't just him. That's so interesting. That's so interesting. And the meta article kind of introduced the term meme to an internet audience of like, okay, this was a meme I came up with. We need to be careful kind of what we're propagating with the memes. It's really interesting because, like, Mike Godwin's still around. This wasn't that long ago. He has a Twitter account. And a couple years ago, he tweeted that, you know, just to be clear, this law that I came up with only applies to Gratwin's still around. gratuitous comparisons. And, you know, by all means, if someone is actually doing that, you know,

is actually being a Nazi, you can definitely call them that. So it's really interesting. That's so great, Gretchen. So I'm Molly Webster, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I'm here in studio with Gretchen McCullet, and she's telling us about the internet and linguistics. Gretchen, one of the things that came up in your book is that the role that tools like spell check and autocorrect have in helping us evolve language. Because I find at this point, personally, I actually find them very annoying. I'm constantly trying to turn them off. Yeah, absolutely. It's fascinating because on the one hand, you have the Internet potentially changing language faster because you can be exposed to more new words.

You can learn them from people. But on the other hand, you have all these tools that are aiming to help us with language. But the way they do that is by predicting stuff that they've already seen. And we know that language is fluid and dynamic and changes. It's part of a living culture. It's part of living people. It never stands still in one spot. But so far, what we have with the tools is only the ability to predict stuff that they've already seen before.

And that kind of leads to a certain conservatism. Like if they're only going to predict words that are in the dictionary, if they're only going to suggest phrases that they've seen before, that's pushing us in a direction of stuff people have already said. And we know that the human brain is incredibly, you know, generative and like creates new words all the time. You can create a new sentence that no one's ever said before. And it's not even hard. Like you can look at your last, like, text messages. And pick the last one that had more than like 15 words in it and just search for that phrase in quotation marks. And it's probably no one has ever said this on the internet before.

The odds are really high. Like the last sentence you wrote that wasn't just like a stock phrase like, hey, has it going? But like pick the last phrase that you wrote. It doesn't have to be like funny or original or witty. The last like 10, 15 word sentence you wrote in an email or text message, just like search it in quotation marks and like probably no one said it before. Well, I like this idea of coming up with like original language in a way we're all writers. And that makes me want to bring in a caller from Reno, Nevada. Katie, you have a question about or a thought really about how the internet affects our speech.

Like with young people, you know, in teens and stuff, how the changes in language online are reflected. Because this came from, I was hanging out with a bunch of cousins and, like, I couldn't understand what they were saying. He kept referencing me with me, like, oh, it's like this and stuff. And I had no idea. So that is sort of, like you said, the thought of fresh. So Gretchen, we're looking back at how what is now happening online actually is affecting us in real life talking to each other. Yeah, absolutely. There's some really interesting research by the linguist Sylvia Sierra who looks at how people make meme and video game and pop cultural references in conversation.

And she, her, the study group is on kind of the like late millennial Gen X, X. group. And she's studying, she finds, for example, people use like Oregon Trail video game references in conversation. You know, like you have died of dysotry, et cetera. Yeah. And so that's the particular group she's studying, but I think it applies to other groups as well. And what she notices is that, you know, people use these as ways of bonding within a group. So you make, you make a reference that other people can understand because it, you know, it promotes that sort of social, social bonding thing. and you can also use it to diffuse tension. So if you're bringing up something that's stressful, like, you know, money problems or illness or something like this,

you can use that pop culture references a way of diffusing that. But pop culture references are older than just memes, right? It's a question of like, are you going to make references from movies? Are you going to make references from songs? Are you going to make references from, you know, various types of literature or like popular culture? And it's just that the domain for where those pop culture references come from is shifting from not just mass produced media, but also user-generated media. And it's a different set of pop culture references, just like your parents might be referring to movies that you've never seen before. Your younger cousins, I'd be referring to memes you've also never seen.

Gretchen, this is so wonderful. I could talk to you all day. We've run out of time. So I just want to thank you so much for joining us. Gretchen McCullough is an internet linguist, and she's the author of the new book, Because Internet, Understand. understanding the new rules of language. Thank you for talking me today, Gretchen. Thank you so much for having me again.

A quick program note, a few weeks ago in our degrees of change segment, we asked you to tell us on the SciFri Vox Pop app. If you've changed what you've eaten in response to climate change, we're gathering your opinions and ideas on all kinds of topics for upcoming shows. All you have to do is download the Science Friday Voxpop app wherever you get your apps. Ira's back next week in New York. I'm Molly Webster.