SciShow Tangents - Language with Deboki Chakravarti

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive knowledge showcase starring some of the geniuses that make the YouTube series SciShow happen. More geniuses than usual even this week because Hank's not here. Joining us this week is editorial assistant Deboki Chakrabarty. Deboki, how are you? I'm good. I'm feeling so genius. Good. That's important for you to feel because it's basically your job to be really smart. Deboki, what's your catchphrase? Old gym bags. Oh, oh disgusting also joining me as always not a special guest stefan chin stefan i'm gonna ask you a hank type question what is your favorite wattage of light bulb favorite wattage of light bulb uh-huh you know a good old 60 watt is pretty

Starting point is 00:01:02 good oh you have one okay i mean that's normal, that's just like your standard bulb. And then if you, you know, you put it on a dimmer, you dim it down, you get a nice warm glow. I like the new LED bulbs. I don't know. The wattage doesn't really matter as much on those. Here's a question for you. What about color warmth?

Starting point is 00:01:21 Does that matter to you? Most of the time I prefer daylight. I replace all my bulbs with daylight bulbs. What a surprisingly fertile question for Stefan. Stefan, what's your tagline? Or your catchphrase? What are they called? Catchphrase?

Starting point is 00:01:33 Catchline. Okay, catchline. What's your catchline? Jumpin' Jehosa fidgets. Also joining us, as always, is Sari Riley. Hello. Sari, what's your catchline? Grasshopper stew. stew oh stew of the future

Starting point is 00:01:48 yeah that's accurate i am by the way sam schultz and my catchphrase is i'm gone fishing every week on tangents we get together and try to one-up amaze and delight each other with science facts we're playing for glory but we're also keeping score and awarding sandbox from week to week we do everything we can to stay on topic, but judging by previous conversations with the group, we will not be good at that. So if the rest of the team deems a tangent unworthy, we will force you to give up one of your sandbox.

Starting point is 00:02:13 So tangent with care. And now, as always, we introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem. This week from Sari. Words are weird if you think about it. With writing and speaking and signing to fit into our brains, our mouths, our tongues, gestures with hands, or air from our lungs. Sounds and or signs, both little and small, make up every language, slang, and drawl. They help us argue, they invite us to play, and say, way-hey on a sleigh, or crochet away.

Starting point is 00:02:42 Most importantly here, because we're a podcast, they let answers be pondered and questions be asked. Jokes to be told to a laugh or a groan, ideas from us straight into your home. So when you have so many linguistic choices, thank you for listening to our English-speaking, sometimes science-y, definitely goofy, not quite pristine for radio voices.

Starting point is 00:03:03 Wow. You turned it into an advertisement for us. Yes. Really just like coming back to the brand. So this week's topic is language, which I admit when we picked it, I was kind of like, what the heck? But there's tons of science on language. So it was okay.

Starting point is 00:03:21 Sari and Deboki, what is language? There are a few key things that distinguish a language from other ways of communicating. So one is this thing called duality of patterning. And so language exists at form and combinations of form. So there's like your words or letters or like the pieces that make things that on their own don't mean anything.

Starting point is 00:03:46 Like without us assigning like rain is the wet thing that falls from the sky, rain doesn't mean anything. But there's combinations of those things where we're like rain is falling from the sky that we know what rain is. So that is a characteristic of language. That is a characteristic of language. And then we can use languages to talk about things that happened in the past or will happen in the future or all these like hypothetical cases. And so if we can only use a communication system to talk about things right here, right now, then that isn't considered a language. What? So if you're like. Who makes that?

Starting point is 00:04:22 Why is that a rule? I don't understand that. I think it's to distinguish what animals do. A lot of cases from other. It's to distinguish what non-human animals do from human language. Because if a dog barks, it's like, oh, there's a squirrel. Or, oh, there's a mailman. But they can't bark about something in the future or in the past.

Starting point is 00:04:42 All right. I want to push back on that. in the future or in the past all right i'm gonna push back on that because they can because they can be like they can use body language to be like i would love to go for a walk because they know that they've been on walks before but they can't be like remember when we went on a walk yesterday like it's not necessarily about them like having a sense of time i think i think it's like uh they can't communicate that sense of time. Like it's all very present. If you say so. Like they can bring you a thing from the walk yesterday and be like, here is that thing. But they can't communicate with you just sitting there on the ground through barks or body language.

Starting point is 00:05:18 Remember when I found that really stinky rock? Okay. And then another characteristic is we can use language to talk about language, which is called reflexivity. So we can use language to be like, we are talking right now. And when a bird is singing, it is not like I am singing right now to our knowledge. So does anything besides people have language? Like is a computer language even a language or I mean, I guess it is because they can do all those things you said. So is it just people and computers? That's it? Definitely feels like we've stacked the definition in our favor here.

Starting point is 00:05:52 Yeah. I think that's probably true. I think we have looked at humans being like, what we're doing is language. And then we build the definition around that. Where does the word language come from? and then we build the definition around that. Where does the word language come from? It comes from the Latin word lingua for tongue, which also means speech or language. And then it's just pretty much adapted from there.

Starting point is 00:06:17 If you want to learn more about languages, we are releasing now, as of September 2020, a series on the YouTube channel crash course about linguistics it's where i got a lot of this definition information from is from working on crash course linguistics what about okay so what if like an ant makes a smell and the smell is like hey don't go this way there's a big spider i'll eat your ass is that language he's reminding you of a spider going to eat your ass. So this idea of like language being used to communicate things like far from you temporally or spatially. So that's called displacement. Right. And there are animals that can like hint at that, it seems like. So like there are honeybees that like waggle around to like say where there's a patch or something like that. So I think there's just a sense of just like how limited it is compared to what we can communicate i think that's probably

Starting point is 00:07:09 part of it but again we could just be like really full of ourselves and just be like we can say things are super super far from us so what you're saying is that i had a pretty smart idea yes well anyway now it's time for Truth or Fail. One of our panelists has prepared three science facts for education and enjoyment, but only one of them is real. The other three panelists have to figure out either by deduction or wild guess, which is the true fact. And if they do, they get a sandbook. If we are all tricked, then Deboki gets a bunch of sandbucks because it is Deboki's turn to do truth or fail. Yes. Like we were just saying, whether or not animals have language is an ongoing question. But even if they don't have language, they're still communicating using things

Starting point is 00:07:56 like vocalizations and sounds. And at times, the sounds they use can follow patterns and behavior seen in human languages. Of course, there is no more important time for good communication than when you're trying to find a mate. The following are three descriptions of animal vocalization patterns in mating inspired by actual patterns and behaviors that have been described in our own use of language, but only one of them is true. Which is it? Fact number one, the longer a text, the more unique words it's likely to have, which is great if you want to show off your vocabulary. That's what the male mustached bat does to demonstrate their prowess over the 33 types

Starting point is 00:08:36 of sounds or syllables they can make, serenading their female counterparts with long phrases to integrate as many of those sounds as possible. Oh, that's beautiful. Fact number two, the words we use most frequently tend to also be the shortest words. Male African penguins employ this pattern when honking to grab the attention of female penguins during mating season, emitting their shortest honks most frequently in order to be noticed amid the crowd of other honks. Oh, that's annoying.

Starting point is 00:09:05 And fact number three, people on speed dates are more likely to end up on another date with someone when their language style matches, which is something we have in common with black-tailed prairie dogs. While flirting from their respective boroughs, female prairie dogs are more likely to invite over males whose mating calls resemble their own. So the choices we have are the male mustached bat uses long phrases with as many sounds as possible to impress potential mates. Number two, male African penguins use short frequent honks in order to be noticed by potential mates. Or number three, black-tailed prairie dogs look for mating calls similar to their own and are more likely to fall for prairie dogs with similar calls to their own.

Starting point is 00:09:47 That seems like you might run into a little bit of a family incident. I think it seems plausible. Animals are weird, and I don't know what voices are linked to. It could be behavioral, but it could be a demonstration of health or something like that. Or similar other biological things where it's like, we're going to be compatible in our shared burrow because we can talk to each other and communicate well. Oh, okay. Maybe that makes sense. That's too cute for nature.

Starting point is 00:10:14 These are prairie dogs. They're pretty cute. That's true. So bats have language, like bats have distinct words they can say to each other. They have distinct sounds that they can make. distinct words they can say to each other. They have distinct sounds that they can make. This is like a dude with a mustache coming up with elaborate poetry and reading it.

Starting point is 00:10:30 Oh, poetry. These just sound like pickup lines to me. No, it sounds like you go up to somebody and you recite every single word that you can remember. Look at my vocabulary. Male African penguins use short, frequent honks in order to be noticed. This sounds extremely likely to me. This one feels like a lie to me because

Starting point is 00:10:49 short honks, I feel like would get drowned out by long honks. Like you'd have some long, loud honker who would just drown out all the little short honkers. And then he'd be the one that would get all the penguin ladies. Okay, imagine, let's put this in terms that Stefan can understand. Imagine someone's honking their horn loud and long

Starting point is 00:11:11 and then someone else is going beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. Which one would you notice? I am more drawn to the long honk, to be honest. Okay, well, I think we have to make our choices and I am going to pick the penguin one.

Starting point is 00:11:23 Oh. I think Stefan's being contrarian. No. I'm going to pick the pra one oh i think stefan's being contrarian no i'm gonna pick the prairie dogs i think it's weird and i think i gotta go weird i'll pick the penguins too i don't like it i don't like any of these but one of them's true all right before deboki tells us the answer go to twitter.com slash sideshow tangents where there will be a poll you can vote for which one you think is most likely to be true. Pause the show, but please remember to come back and listen to it. And you pause it now.

Starting point is 00:11:51 Okay, are you back, Deboki? What's the answer? It's the penguins! Oh, man! Okay. Penguin vocalizations, it turns out, are pretty incredible. They actually have a lot of their own identity encoded in the sounds that they're making. So like you can figure out, like there's acoustic information

Starting point is 00:12:09 in there to figure out who they are. So the African penguin is known as the jackass penguin, um, because it makes a donkey-like braying sound. So it's like, ah, ah, ah. It like turns its head up, like has this whole thing. And it's just like making this donkey-like sound. Like that's, the name is appropriate. And you can actually break up that braying sound into different syllables.

Starting point is 00:12:35 So it starts with a series of shorter syllables followed by longer syllables. This sets the African penguin apart from other penguins, like the king penguin, which makes these really repetitive sounds that contain a lot more redundant information about who they are. And that's partly because they're living in Antarctica. So there's a lot of wind and it's hard to see and everyone's close together. So having a lot of redundant information inside of a single syllable makes a lot of sense for them. of a single syllable makes a lot of sense for them. But because African penguins are living in like a more mild climate, they don't necessarily do that. So they don't have that same redundancy built into any individual syllable, but they still need to be found. So during mating,

Starting point is 00:13:15 they'll repeat these shorter syllables more frequently to help like kind of stand out. So researchers studying the vocalizations of African penguins living in zoos found that these patterns were consistent with what's called Zipf's Law of Brevity, which says that our most frequently used words like the, of, or is are also the shortest. There's some other linguistic laws associated with human languages that these vocalizations also fit in with. So I think this was like the first evidence for these laws in a non-primate species. in with um so i think this was like the the first evidence for these laws in a non-primate species can the penguins themselves hear the sounds and and glean information about the individual it's not just something we can do no it's so it's for the other penguins so like with with the penguins

Starting point is 00:13:55 um the ones that are living in antarctica apparently all you need is like a third of the syllable to be able to like identify which penguin it is which is like pretty remarkable and it's like why they have that kind of redundant nature like they still are repeating that sound and within that sound there is like excess information was there any truth to the others yes so the mustache bat is actually capable of 33 different types of sounds or syllables and they can string them together in like their own syntax. I have not found any proof that they like to create poetry out of it. But there are the female horseshoe bat is documented to prefer mating with bats who have higher frequency echolocation calls. And then

Starting point is 00:14:38 the last fact. So there is like actual studies, like a psychologist looked at people who were going on speed dates and saw like they were more likely to end up on a date with someone if their language styles match. So that means like you use different parts of speech in similar ways and at like similar rates. And so they like attributed this to like a tendency where if we're like genuinely interested in a conversation with someone, like not even like a romantic interest, I think just like generally interested, will be more likely to like match language styles, even if we're not aware of it. But sadly, this is not a thing that the prairie dogs do. They do have like an extensive call repertoire,

Starting point is 00:15:15 but what the mating calls, they're made up of sets of two to 25 barks, and there are some pauses between each set, but they just make these sounds at like the burrow like either right before or right after mating they don't do it i think to like attract mates so they've already they've already got the mate and then they start yipping that's what it sounds like weirdly apparently this call sounds a lot like the same calls that they make when there's a predator but only if you're like really untrained, like prairie dogs have no problem like telling the two apart.

Starting point is 00:15:46 But just high adrenaline either way. Yeah. All right. Next up, we're back. Hello. Here are the scores so far. Sari has one. Deboki has one.

Starting point is 00:16:15 Sam has one. Stefan has one. It's really working out well for all of us. But now, either me or Stefan will pull ahead because we are going to face off in the fact. Two panelists, me and Stefan, bring science facts to present to Deboki and Sari in an attempt to blow their minds. The presentees each have a sandbook to award to the fact they like the most. And to figure out who's going to go first, we're going to be asked a trivia question by somebody. According to the 2020 edition of Ethnologue Languages of the World, how many recognized living languages are there?

Starting point is 00:16:49 I'll say 2,000. Oh, I'll say 40,000. Whoa! The answer is 7,117. That's a lot. Stefan was way closer. Stefan was way closer. You overshot, Sam.

Starting point is 00:17:09 Cool. Well, Sam, why don't you go first? Oh, what the hell? That sounds fine to me, Stefan. People spend countless hours on social media using language to share their opinions, jokes, and basically anything that happens in their lives. But researchers have potentially found a way to use what people don't say on their social media accounts

Starting point is 00:17:29 for potentially life-saving purposes. So in a study published earlier in 2020, researchers got permission to look at Facebook posts of about 3,000 patients who were in the hospital after an emergency visit, so like an unplanned visit to the hospital. And they applied machine learning to their Facebook posts to sift through all of them. And what they found was that most patients' languages changed significantly as the date of their emergency hospital visit got closer. So patients started using less like fun words, like talking about vacations or like playing

Starting point is 00:18:03 sports and stuff like that, or words relating to leisure. So they used like the word nap less as one specific one that they said in the paper. And they were way less likely to use informal language and alternate spellings of words. So like they stopped using like just the letter U and they would type Y-O-U and they stopped using internet slang like LOL. And instead they started posting more about their families or they talked more about not feeling very well. And they generally used more like depressed and anxious language. So essentially these people had no idea that they were about to go to the hospital or like the emergency room. of like internal unease was seeping out into their social media presence and making them talk less about fun stuff. So the researchers propose that in kind of like a minority report sort of situation, we could apply machine learning to people's social media accounts and then skim the posts that like everybody makes and set up a system that would reach out to people who started to

Starting point is 00:19:05 talk less about fun and more about not feeling so good. And so they could get preventative care instead of having to go to the emergency room. The same team did another study where they used machine learning to detect depression in people. So it was people who had already been diagnosed with depression. and then they applied machine learning to their posts and they figured out that they were depressed three months before the person went to get checked out for having depression. So it's kind of like RoboCop, but it's like RoboDoctor or like Robotherapist. And I don't know if it's a good or a bad thing. If it could be shown to have a very very high level of predictive

Starting point is 00:19:45 accuracy i feel like some like it could be useful for a lot of things but i worry about like especially with the depression thing like sort of putting people in a frame of mind where they're like oh i now i have this machine said i had depression so sorry for the emergency room stuff it was just like people had just gone to the emergency room oh yeah they didn't know that they were going to go to the emergency room before they were typing. And it was like anything. Like it could have been a heart attack, a car accident, like anything. Well, no, not car accident. It was like people who had been there for sickness related reasons and not accident related reasons.

Starting point is 00:20:20 Two of the examples I had in the paper were people who were there for pregnancy related issues and people who were there for like heart attack related issues. So it kind of runs a gamut. And it also talked about how people reach out to family more often when they're not feeling well or like they want they seek out community more. Yeah. So it's based in like a non-internet thing too. Yeah. Just like trying to feel like you're not alone the worse you feel. Yeah. of just like trying to feel like you're not alone, the worse you feel.

Starting point is 00:20:47 I guess the question is like one way or the other, if we want things to be able to pry into our lives so much, like programs to pry into our lives so much that they do something about that or not. And it's hard because it's like health is really complicated. But maybe Mark Zuckerberg doesn't have to like have a big monitor that tells him how sick everybody on facebook is i don't know that i would want someone monitoring me in that way but that's also easy to say when you're like yeah everything's okay right now but if i had like a big health issue would i be like

Starting point is 00:21:21 oh yeah actually three months ago i made a Facebook post that could have warned you about, I mean, I never post to Facebook, so I feel like that would be the warning sign, but like. Well, part of your healthcare plan will be mandatory posting to Facebook. All right, Stefan, you want to tell us your fact? Sure. The paper that I found was looking at potential language issues that would happen on a space voyage that was multi-generational. So if you were sending a ship to go colonize another planet, it would probably take us hundreds, maybe thousands of years to get there. So this is all very speculative, but it's interesting and lets us look at how languages diverge. And I thought it was cool because language is not the thing that you think about when you're like, the dangers of space

Starting point is 00:22:04 travel. But it's a thing because languages can change pretty quickly. And so in the paper, they present, there's two examples of comparing Polynesian languages, which would be more like the spaceship example versus Malagasy, which is the language on Madagascar, which is also in the same family. It's kind of a cousin of Polynesian. Theoretically, there's a proto-Polynesian language that's the parent to all of this. And then over a period of a couple thousand years, they settled various Pacific islands. And they did trade a bit with each other, but otherwise they were fairly isolated. And so

Starting point is 00:22:41 Polynesian languages, each community sort of developed on their own. And these days, I think there's about 40 Polynesian languages contrasted with Malagasy, which on Madagascar, very close to Africa. And so the language there borrowed features from the local African languages and ended up with like including those features. And that's like a unique thing that you don't see in other languages in the same family. Going to like multi-generational space mission, like the idea being that, like in the Polynesian example, by the time like this ship has been in isolation for hundreds of years and reaches its destination, that would be enough time for the language to have completely diverged from,

Starting point is 00:23:28 like, let's say they start with English. Like, they're speaking some version of English, but it's probably not English anymore. And additionally, like, English back on Earth is also changing in different ways at the same time. So that increases the amount of divergence. And then there are different factors that it can affect how quickly languages change. So compulsory education is a thing that tends to slow it down because you're teaching kids these prescriptive rules of how to use the language. And so that tends to push them more towards converging. But that tends to slow down the change in written language.

Starting point is 00:24:07 But like local dialects or the things that people speak on a day to day basis still change pretty quickly. And children are sort of the key driver of change because they will learn the language from school and then they like tweak it. They learn some cool slang on TikTok, whatever. And then as the older generation is dying out, like those changes become a version of English that existed when you launched so that the descendants can read the manuals that came with the ship, or there could be some rituals, like you have some pledge of allegiance or something that you say, but you say it in 2020 English, whereas nobody actually speaks that language anymore. And then if we send future ships to the same planet, it will go through that same process.

Starting point is 00:25:12 And so when they get to the new planet, they'll have a whole different language that's completely separate from what's back on Earth and what's on the newly colonized planet. And so you'd probably have to have some sort of fossilized, locked-in old version of something that everyone could speak just so that there wouldn't be a language barrier. And then the other thing that affects it is the fact that we've become so interconnected because we have quick telecommunications and just like planes, people have become less isolated on Earth, which also slows language divergence. And in some cases, this promotes people converging towards one national dialect. And then in other cases, people end up diverging more because they see their local dialect as a way to signal their identity. It's a way to stand out in a very homogenized culture.

Starting point is 00:26:06 And so that could happen too if the crew of the spaceship is large enough. They were hypothesizing that the different jobs on the ship could stratify and people could develop like, well, this is engine bay language because you need to signify your like socioeconomic status on the ship or something. This is not the thing that you think about when you think about the, the difficulties of interstellar travel. I guess if we had a warp drive, we'd be fine.

Starting point is 00:26:34 But you know, but it's like that, that happens like all the time on Twitter. Anyway, it's like, I feel like I'm always trying to figure out what the hell people are talking about. And if I fell asleep for a thousand years and woke up, then there would be no way.

Starting point is 00:26:49 I like the idea that you'd be communicating with Earth. And already you're screwed by time, just in general. But also you're sending letters in old English to them. You'd be saying YOLO and stuff. I really want YOLO to be the sign the sign off that gets locked in sign up this will never change and i never thought about how much of like when people lived without the internet it must have been a mess to like go to a different community and try to talk to people or like not to mention other languages but just like across a mountain that you've never been across.

Starting point is 00:27:25 In different contexts, we designate, I think they call it lingua franca. There's a specific language that everyone agrees on. We're going to use this language for this thing. So I think French and Chinese were used for diplomacy at a certain point. In international aviation these days, English is the common language.

Starting point is 00:27:46 So all pilots learn English so that no matter what crew you're on, you can communicate with everyone on board. That's interesting. Terry and Deboki, are you ready to pick which fact you liked more? Yeah, it's hard, but yes. Three, two, one.

Starting point is 00:28:02 Stefan. Whoa. Brutal. Snap. That meanshan's in first place i think oh rats i should yeah yeah keep stepping out of there you dummy all right now it's time to ask the science couch where we ask listener questions to our couch of finely honed scientific minds and this week's question is from wayhan Lim. What would a language with maximum efficiency look like? I don't even really understand what this means. And I think that's a good place to start. It's like, what does an efficient language look like to you? And so what my brain jumps to first is how can you pack the most information? So like language is a method of transmitting information into the shortest amount of time or syllables or something like that. Like if I can make a

Starting point is 00:28:50 blah noise and then you could understand like I'm eating chicken for dinner from that, then that would be like a very efficient language. So while I was looking up ways to define language efficiency, the more I looked, the more confused I was. I think that's normal. I think that is actually kind of the point is that it's actually really difficult to define efficiency in language. Efficiency in general, obviously, you can, like language itself, you can come up with the definition for it and then see what fits those definitions. So there are, you know, there are examples of studies where people have, like, measured the time it takes to read a certain passage in different languages and seeing, you know, like how many syllables there are and stuff

Starting point is 00:29:29 like that for different languages. And like in those studies, they found like the English language, I think, was like more information dense than like a language like Japanese. But like because of the speed of being able to speak one versus the other, Like, it kind of seems like a lot of things even out. Sorry, did you read that study? Like, I'm trying to remember if that was actually the takeaway. Yeah, they found after studying 17 languages and, like, a lot of quantitative methods on them. So, small fraction of the 7,000, but generally that languages with more syllables are spoken faster than the languages with fewer syllables. So you make up the time by like, if you have to have more syllables to convey your

Starting point is 00:30:12 information, you like get those out a lot faster than if you have fewer syllables, like in English, maybe to, to convey information, we speak slower than someone who would speak in Japanese or Spanish or something like that. So do they even out to the same amount of information, basically? Yeah, this one study was like 39 bits per second. They like translate it into computer type information. Yeah. The one last thing I looked into for this question is sort of related to that,

Starting point is 00:30:41 but computer languages where we have other ways of measuring efficiency, so like particularly energy use, like how much energy does it take for a computer to process a certain thing written in a certain language? People have done a little bit of experimentation on these kinds of things. And the biggest difference is that compiled languages tend to be more energy efficient and running faster, whereas interpreted languages are slower and more energy consuming. And those are like differences in how the target machine that you are programming is reading the program essentially, are programming is reading the program essentially. And like whether or not in a compiled language, to my understanding, the machine directly translates the program. And in an interpreted language, there's something else. There's an interpreter program that is like a middleman

Starting point is 00:31:37 between the program and the machine. So if you pick a language that is more directly talking to the computer, then it is more efficient, which makes sense logically to me. But I haven't looked at an array of these different languages. It's possible that it's much easier for humans to write in an interpreted languages because it'll mimic English more so we can understand it more rather than talking closer to how a computer can understand. If you want to ask the Science Couch, follow us at SciShow Tangents,

Starting point is 00:32:06 where we'll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Thank you to Fergana340, Rebecca underscore Rebecca4, and everybody else who tweeted us your questions for this episode. So final scores for everybody. Sari, you have one point. Deboki, you have one point. Sam, you have one point. I freaking cleaned up.

Starting point is 00:32:26 Okay, okay. And that means that Sari has 69 points. Hank has 61 points. He's not here. It doesn't matter. Sam has 64 points. Kind of sad and pathetic.

Starting point is 00:32:35 Stefan has 70 points. One point in the lead. I'm ready for Stefan Bucks. Let's go. Deboki, thank you so much for being with us. Is there anything that you'd like to plug?

Starting point is 00:32:44 Watch Journey to the Microcosmos in Crash Course Organic Chemistry. That sounds like a good idea Let's go. Tweet out your favorite moment from the episode And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents Just tell people about us That was a very gentle nice one Thank you for joining us I've been Sam Schultz I've been Stephen Chin I've been Sari Riley I've been Deboki Chakrabarty SciShow Tangents is a co-production of Complexly

Starting point is 00:33:15 And a wonderful team at WNYC Studios It's created by all of us And produced by Caitlin Hoffmeister and me Who also edits a lot of these episodes Along with Hiroko Matsushima Our social media organizer is Paola Garcia Prieto our editorial assistant is the book chakrabarti our sound design is by joseph tuna medish and we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on patreon thank you and remember mine is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be lighted But one more thing.

Starting point is 00:33:56 There are a lot of stories about how the bread called pumpernickel got that name, but the most likely explanation, according to linguist Ben Zimmer, is that pumpernickel is made up of two old German words, pumpern for fart and nickel for devil or goblin, which means that pumpernickel loosely translates to farting devil, a testament to the difficulty of digesting it. Oh, I don't know if I've ever eaten pumpernickel bread. I'm not sure if I want to. We're all isolated. That's true. If any time you need to become a farting devil now is the time yeah you got to eat all your stinky foods now get them out of the way yeah you can have as bad a breath as you want and as stinky of farts as you want

SciShow Tangents - Language with Deboki Chakravarti

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