Something You Should Know - SYSK Choice: How to Train a Human (or Dog) & Why English Has Changed

Episode Date: December 17, 2022

We are taught that jealousy and envy are not particularly productive emotions. Well, maybe – and maybe not. This episode begins with a look at how jealousy and envy can actually help you achieve your goals. Plus, you’ll hear what the difference is between jealousy and envy because they are not the same thing. https://www.womenshealthmag.com/life/a19918585/jealous/ Successful dog training is all about conditioning and giving rewards for good behavior. However, when we want people to change their behavior, we are more inclined to criticize and correct the negative more than we reward the positive. So what if we treated people the way a dog trainer trains a dog? That’s what Dr. Karen London advocates. Karen is an experienced dog trainer and behaviorist and she is author of a book called Treat Everyone Like a Dog (https://amzn.to/3m9y1w1). Listen as she explains how to take the principles of positive dog training and use them to get people to do what you want. Our language is constantly changing in some interesting and unusual ways. That is why the English of William Shakespeare sounds so strange compared to the English spoken today and while the English spoken in North America is different than the English spoken in the UK. How and why does it change? That is what David Shariatmadari is here to discuss. David is a writer and editor at the Guardian and author of the book, Don’t Believe a Word: The Surprising Truth About Language (https://amzn.to/3ngvp0x) Why is it that we get a runny nose when it is really cold outside, even when you aren’t sick? Listen as I explain how it is a by product of how your body works to actually keep you healthy and happy. http://archive.boston.com/news/globe/health_science/articles/2007/01/01/why_does_my_nose_run_in_the_cold/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Go to https://CozyEarth.com/SOMETHING to SAVE 40% now!  All backed by a 100-Night Sleep Guarantee. Tune in to Planet Money every week for entertaining stories and insights about how money shapes our world! Listen now to Planet Money from NPR -- wherever you get your podcasts.https://www.npr.org/sections/money/ Cancel unnecessary subscriptions with Rocket Money today. Go to https://RocketMoney.com/something - Seriously, it could save you HUNDREDS of dollars per year! Shopify grows with your business anywhere. Thanks to their endless list of integrations and third-party apps - everything you need to customize your business to your needs is already in your hands. Sign up for a FREE trial at https://Shopify.com/sysk ! Did you know you could reduce the number of unwanted calls & emails with Online Privacy Protection from Discover? - And it's FREE! Just activate it in the Discover App. See terms & learn more at https://Discover.com/Online Drive Sober or Get Pulled Over. If you feel different, you drive different. Drive high, get a DUI. Paid for by NHTSA. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, why jealousy and envy aren't always a bad thing. Then, the next time you get upset with someone, maybe you should treat that person the way a dog trainer treats a dog. If you're in that situation and you're feeling enraged or frustrated, offer yourself the same kind of grace that I would give to a dog. If a dog is doing something that's just really wrong, I often like to think, that dog doesn't need a correction, that dog needs help. Also, why do you get a runny nose in cold weather even if you aren't sick? And the quirks of the English language.

Like, why do we spell the word night one way and pronounce it another? When that spelling was first devised, it did reflect the way the word was pronounced. So that word was pronounced something like nicht. So the spoken language changed and now we say night. But the spelling stayed the same. All this today on Something You Should Know. This is an ad for better help. Welcome to the world.

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That's BetterHelp.com. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi. Welcome to Something You Should Know. I want to start today by reminding you, because I forget this all the time when I'm listening to other podcasts, that our podcasts, like most podcasts, have show notes that accompany every episode, so that if you hear something in the episode, you can get more information in the show notes. If we have a guest who has a website, or they have a book, or whatever, there's a link to it in the show notes.

Also, all of our advertisers are in the show notes, and if they have links and promo codes that you might be interested in, they're all right there in the show notes. First up today, jealousy or envy may not be flattering, but they're not all that bad either. A dose of envy or jealousy can actually be good for you. According to family counselor Jennifer Coleman, it's perfectly normal and can even be healthy. She explains that envy or jealousy is a defense mechanism

that kicks in when we feel vulnerable. She says, think of jealousy or envy as the personal trainer of your emotions, motivating you to work harder for whatever you want, like a better job, a stronger relationship, or even a smaller pant size. Of course, you'll want to try to keep your green-eyed monster on a leash if you're feeling jealous about something you have no control over or something that is completely unrealistic.

Remind yourself that it's a waste of emotion and try to channel your efforts towards something more attainable. And just for the record, and you're an English teacher, jealousy and envy are not the same thing. Jealousy is about people. Envy is about things.

So you can't technically feel jealous because someone has a nicer car. That's envy. But if someone is a nicer car. That's envy. But if someone is dating your ex, that's jealousy. And that is something you should know. Have you ever watched a really good dog trainer and a really well-trained dog run through their paces and thought to yourself, wouldn't it be great if you could train people that way? I mean, imagine how great it would be if people could be trained

to do what they're supposed to do or do what you want them to do without you having to prod them or remind them or scold them when they forget. Well, maybe you can. And I don't mean this in an insulting way, but using the same theory and often the same methods, you can get people to do what you want, according to Dr. Karen London. Karen has been a dog trainer and behaviorist for several years. She believes, and she's applied this to her own life,

that treating people as good dog trainers treat dogs is a thoughtful, kind approach that influences behavior and works in a wonderful way. Karen is the author of a book called Treat Everyone Like a Dog. Hi, Karen. Hi, thanks for having me. So here you are working as a dog trainer, and you realize, well, wait, wait, maybe we could apply this to humans. Maybe we could get people to do what we want them to do using these same methods. So what was that lightbulb moment?

When did you go, oh, aha? The lightbulb moment really came, I guess, as it does for so many people in interactions with my family. And I am so interested in the ways that behavior is influenced since that's my job, although I mainly do it with dogs. And one day, when my kids, who are now teenagers, were really little, preschool-age kids, I was yelling at them, not super crazy, but yelling and saying, Where are your shoes? Why did you not put your shoes in the bin yesterday? Now we can't find them. And my kids' eyes got kind of wide, and I felt terrible, as the way many parents do

when you have a bad parenting moment. And I thought, wow, I never would do this to a dog. If a dog hadn't done what I asked, I would figure out, well, how can I make this work for the dog? How can I make it be better? And don't I deserve, shouldn't, don't my kids deserve the same loving, respectful kindness that I give to dogs all day, every day at work? Yeah, because when you hear the phrase, you know, you should treat people like dogs, I mean, it has a very negative connotation to it, that, but, but that's not what you're saying. What you're saying is that

dogs are pretty easy to train in the sense that you can see what works and what doesn't. I mean, if you're constantly giving your dog food in the kitchen, and then the next day the dog's in the kitchen waiting for food and getting under your feet, and you're upset, well, who do you have to blame for that? Exactly. And the idea of treating everyone like a dog, I mean, in the most respectful, loving and almost reverent way, because I think that it is a reasonable wish for many people to die and come back as the dog of someone they know. We see how beautifully and wonderfully people treat their dogs. And I would love to have that kindness and that positivity and that clarity of instruction be extended from dogs to people, because I think that it would be good for people's relationships. It makes people's lives better, and it's just a

more pleasant, nicer way to be. And that's what I mean when I say treat everyone like a dog. Right, right, of course. Going back to your example of, you know, you can't find the shoes and you're yelling at the kids, what should you have done? What should you do better that that doesn't happen? The important thing is to teach everyone, like in the case of my kids, teaching them what I want them to do instead of yelling at them afterwards if they haven't properly been taught. So we began soon after that a system where my kids got reinforcement for putting their shoes in the bin every day. I had a chart up on the refrigerator. Every time they put their shoes where it was supposed to be, they were supposed to be, we put a little X mark and after the chart was filled, they got good things. And what that did was, and this is what we do with dogs when we give them treats for doing what we want.

We line up what they want to do with what we want them to do. So there's just less conflict. And so that's the general philosophy that works with people as well. But at work, for example, let's say, you know, you can't put a chart on the wall and say, you know, good boy when your boss does something you want because that might not work too well. So translate it into like the workplace or adult to adult. So a common work problem is people whining, like a negativity and a complaining and a whining at work. We can use a dog training technique to prevent that problem. And the technique that I specifically think of for this situation is putting an undesirable behavior on cue. And then you don't

give the cue for that behavior very often. So with dogs, if a dog is jumping up on you, you can teach your dog to jump up when you ask her to, but then just don't ask her to do it, except on the rare occasions when it would be okay. And you can do the same thing at work by basically asking people, you know, what's bothering you? Like what really gets on your nerves? What's the worst thing that happened to you yesterday at work? And then they specifically basically whine and complain when you've asked them. But if you haven't given them that cue, which is saying, you know, what do you want to whine about in essence, then you ignore them. You suddenly have to, you know, run and get coffee or you look at your phone or you head off to your own cubicle or office. So you only reinforce the behavior with your attention when you've given the cue for it. And that often sets up a situation at work where people only

basically whine and moan when you specifically ask them, and then you don't have to ask them very often. Well, see, I would think that that wouldn't work, because if you ask people occasionally to whine and moan, it's like permission that you're the person to come to when you want to whine and moan. That could happen if you didn't do it exactly correctly, but part of asking somebody to whine and moan on cue part of what you're doing is teaching them you'll only get reinforced for that if I've given you the cue so in the example of the dog if a dog jumps up when you've given them the cue they get attention which is what they want but if they jump up when you haven't given the cue you just walk away so they learn that only

the cue allows it basically gives them a green light to offer that behavior for any kind of positive reinforcement. Isn't there a hierarchy with dogs that, you know, there's the, that you have to be pretty much the alpha in order for a dog to follow you, correct? And do what you want him to do. No, I disagree with the idea that the human-dog relationship is based on that kind of hierarchy. It's an old view of the dog training world that's generally not very accepted now. In fact, if you just get in a group of dog trainers and sort of mention alpha, you can almost start a fight because people are so adamantly opposed to the idea because it's done so much damage to the relationship between people and dogs.

It's a lot more like if you think about any kind of individual that might be a leader, if they have that real alpha kind of approach to it, it often doesn't bode very well. That really hierarchical approach doesn't really lead to the best behavior because it causes so much animosity. Well, you talk a lot about positivity, and I think where trouble exists in human relationships, parent, child, boss, employee, is the lack of positivity. It's a negative. That's where the trouble lies is in the negativity. It's what's wrong, not what's right. The whole idea of the wave of positive dog training that's been going on for a couple of decades, partly is about adding positivity, trying to catch your dog doing something right. The same thing I think that we should do for people, but it's also removal of the negativity, the loss of the fear of making a

mistake and the removal of punishment or other aversives. So I completely agree that it's important both to be positive and to actively avoid the kind of negativity that can cause the kind of issues you're alluding to. So let's go through some of the skills that people could actually put to practice in dealing with people that come from dog training that you know work? For example. One of the examples I think that's not often thought of because people are so focused on positive reinforcement is the idea of using classical conditioning.

And this is the idea from Pavlov's dogs that a bell, if it's consistently paired up with food, can actually cause a dog to react as though there's food when they hear the bell. And it's the same way that dogs, if you pick up their leash, they've been classically conditioned to associate that with a walk. So when you pick up the leash, they get happy. But there's no reason that a dog should be happy about having you pick up a strip of nylon or leather unless they know what it means and what it means as a walk. So this classical conditioning is really powerful. It's really a powerful form of learning across all kinds of species. And it can be used with people too. Just to give a simple

example, if you have a roommate, and that could include a spouse, who's crabby every Monday morning, you can, rather than trying to positively reinforce nicer and more pleasant behavior on Monday mornings, you can simply make Monday morning something to look forward to by always having, you know, really wonderful, like expensive, fancy coffee and a really nice pastry for breakfast so that the person begins to associate Monday mornings with feeling better. And they don't need to act nicely or do anything particularly to, quote, earn that nice meal. It's just associated with Mondays. And that can make Mondays a happier time simply by classically conditioning the behavior.

Similarly, one of my sons had a math teacher who never gave homework the days that kids had tests. And this was fifth graders at that time. And kids would say things like, oh, yeah, I'm so happy that I have a test today because that means I don't have math homework. And how lovely is that in a world filled with test anxiety that's getting affecting younger and younger children for them to be classically conditioned to feel happy about having a test. We're talking about treating people like dogs, but in a nice way, with Karen London. She is a dog trainer and author of the book, Treat Everyone Like a Dog. Bumble knows it's hard to start conversations.

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when you screw up. And that is completely opposite of what you're talking about here. But is there not room for that? Anytime anyone is very extreme in one view, like they absolutely would never do anything outside of their main approach, it can be problematic. I mean, sure, sometimes I would say something to my child, like, I would have liked to see you remember to open the door for that person or to say thank you right away. But that's very rare. Most of the time, by catching them doing the right things and encouraging those behaviors, you don't need to do that much correcting. So my kids are now 15 and a half and 17. But one time when one of my sons was eight, one of his friends says, wow, your mom doesn't yell like my mom does. And my son said,

yeah, she hasn't yelled at us in about five years. And I really haven't yelled at them since the time of the Shubin incident where I realized that that wasn't the best way to do it. Kids do so many things that are right that if we focus on that and save the corrections for something that's really pressing or really dangerous, it's not that there's not room for that. But the more we're doing the positive aspects right, the less that is necessary. So that's the idea of, you know, catching somebody when they're doing something right rather than correcting them when they do something wrong. But when they do something wrong, what do you do then? If in the absence of correcting, do you just ignore it?

Well, it would depend. I mean, if it's something dangerous or, you know, potentially hurtful, I think that you can offer instruction without it being a correction. So you can say something like, you know, like the next time that same situation is coming up, you can prompt them ahead of time. Please remember to and then say what you want them to do I find that Corrections make people feel bad enough that they're not as effective as an instructional technique and I just really take it strongly as sort of a philosophical view like when I'm teaching I teach at the local university and when I grade exams I don't subtract points I don't say oh the exam was perfect till you messed it up by writing this wrong answer. I really focus on, okay, the exam is blank until you've added value

to it by being smart during the exam, by studying and hard work. So you've added, say, 87 points to this exam with what you have contributed. To me, that's so much more effective than saying like, oh, oh well you messed up to the tune of minus 13. One of the differences between people and dogs at least in my mind is that seemingly dogs want to please you but sometimes people kids don't want to please you so what do you do when say for example you have a kid who doesn't do his homework? So there's no behavior to reinforce because they're not doing what they're supposed to do. So what do you do then? What I would do, what I would like to think I would do is offer that

child reinforcement that's external to the homework. If they don't care about the homework, then I think that the goal in order to help them do the work that you want them to do or perform the behavior that you desire in them is to find out sort of what their currency is, what matters to them. Do they want to be able to stay up a little bit later? Do they want to get to pick the movie? Do they want to go to the certain park on Saturday? You can use those things as reinforcement so that the behavior that you want becomes more frequent because you're reinforcing

it. Can we talk about some more examples? That example of Monday morning I thought was so great because most people would never think to do that. They would just think to stay out of somebody's way if they're going to be grumpy on Monday morning. And your idea just sounds right, you know. But so some other very practical examples would really be good. In terms of setting people up for success, one of the things I think about is when my kids got retainers from the orthodontist, they were told you can only have your retainer in your mouth or in your case. Those are the two options. And so I asked for extra cases so that if they forgot their case, they still, they had one in their locker at school, say if they forgot one. So setting them up for success. Another example is in dog training,

we talk about poisoning the cue. If you call your dog to come and then cut his nails, he's not going to want to come in the future. And lots of times people poison the cue of a person's name because they'll say someone's name. They'll say Fred. and that always means, oh, you did something wrong. Fred, weren't you supposed to pick up milk on the way home? Fred, I thought you were going to fix the rain gutters. Fred, you forgot to put gas in the car. And people can get attention. Their own name has basically become poison. And that's something I really learned from dog training that I try really hard not to do to people. That, that is so good. I love that because how often does that happen? But I'm curious, when it is time to cut the dog's nails, how do you get him to come?

Well, you certainly don't call him to come because that's going to poison that cue. The way I like to teach dogs to have their nails trimmed is to cut one nail at a time every day and then head out for a walk. So they learn, oh, she's grabbing my paw. She's cutting my nail. I'll suffer through this because I know we're going to get to go for a walk. That is, and yeah, I mean, as soon as you say these things, they make so much sense. But I think what often happens is in the moment where we're so conditioned to correct bad or wrong behavior that we don't think, people don't think the way you think. I wish I could think more the way you think. Well, thank you.

And I do think, though, that when people are thinking in the negative way, a phrase that I find so useful is that force is the absence of real power. If we have the power to influence other people's behavior in the most gentle, calm, humane way, almost everyone would choose that. We tend to do the reverse when we're not sure what to do. So if you see someone pulling on their dog's leash and trying to get them in the car, if they had a way to just say, you know, Max, get in the car, they would do that. But when they're stuck and they don't have the options, that's when we revert to the forcefulness or the negativity. In what other ways is dog training applicable to people? One of the really important ideas about dog training is that prevention and management

is important and it's not a cop-out. I hear clients say to me every day, every time I take my dog to the dog park, he bites another dog. So the first advice I'm going to give them is don't take your dog to the dog park. And I think keeping dogs out of situations that are challenging for them is something that we can definitely transfer to kids. So if somebody knows that they are not going to be able to resist their ex at a party, you know, maybe don't go to the party. I don't like the flavor of mint. So I buy mint chocolate chip ice cream because the rest of my family eats it. But I don't, I set myself up for, you know, I manage the situation by not having what I can't resist. So there's no rocky road in my house. It would be catastrophic. Tell the story because I

think it's really interesting and instructive of your neighbor. It's kind of a story of when the trainer becomes the trainee. I used to have an elderly neighbor, we called her the bonus grandma, who lived across the street. And she was elderly enough that we were really worried about her. Like if she called, that was a call I would never screen. The second I heard anything from her, I would go and check on her. And I began to notice that sometimes if she was having a rough day and maybe was having trouble getting out of bed or perhaps had fallen, she left her newspaper out in the front driveway. And so if her newspaper was out past about 10 a.m., I would go and check on her.

And then I noticed she was doing it all the time. And she lived by herself because she was a widow. And I think that I accidentally reinforced her for leaving the paper out on the front driveway. And I loved spending time with her. So that wasn't a problem. But I had ruined the emergency code, essentially, that, oh, gosh, if she's not out by mid-morning, maybe something's wrong and I should go check. So I had ruined that alert system. So that is definitely where things certainly did not go as planned because I reinforced the wrong behavior. Yeah. So she had you trained. Absolutely. That's what I always said. She trained me. She was a lovely dog person, so it's no surprise she trained me good and proper. I think one of the big challenges with this advice, as good as it is, is remembering to do it. Because when you're upset with someone or they're not doing what you want them to do, it's easy to revert to your old ways and

to get upset and mad and not remember what you're talking about. Absolutely. And I think part of the problem is that if we do yell at someone or punish them, it temporarily is reinforcing to us. So when I was yelling at my kids about the shoes, after their eyes got wide, they went running around the house looking for their shoes. I got what I wanted, but at the cost of, you know, the relationship and not having future, you know, success. And one of the things I think that can be helpful if you're in that situation and you're feeling enraged or frustrated with someone and you're sort of stuck in terms of you're not progressing with what you want is to offer yourself the

same kind of grace that I would give to a dog. If a dog is doing something that's just really wrong, I often like to grace that I would give to a dog. If a dog is doing something that's just really wrong, I often like to think that dog doesn't need a correction. That dog needs help. They're confused. They don't know what's going on. They're frustrated. They might have a very good reason for wanting to do what they want to do compared to what I want them to do. And I think that that's so often true with people that they don't need a correction. They need help. And I had an issue with that with my son because he was being at his new school when he was in the fifth grade.

He was late for school for classes a lot and he wanted to be there on time, but he couldn't and he was getting yelled at and chastised in the hallways and he didn't need a correction. He wanted to be on time, but he didn't know that he had to spin the lock of his locker a few times before doing the combination. So it would take him many, many, many tries to open his locker. And finally, one of the administrators at school figured out the problem, showed him to do that, which my husband and I, you know, his dad had not realized was a problem either. And then he was on time to school. So he didn't need a correction. All that yelling accomplished nothing, but the help solved the problem completely. And if we can offer that same grace to ourself,

I don't need to sort of berate myself for this. I just need help to be able to do this better. I need a plan. I need assistance. I need advice about how I can do this. I love this. I just, I just imagine the world, if it worked according to your rules, it just would be such a better place. It would. You know, I say that all the time, but no one's really taken yet. Well, keep trying because I think your message is really important and could help a lot of people. Karen London has been my guest. She is a dog trainer and the name of her book is Treat Everyone Like a Dog.

And you'll find a link to that book in the show notes. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So, I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives,

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And I have always been fascinated by the English language, particularly how it changes and evolves over time. You go back and read Shakespeare and assuming that that is the English that was spoken back when those books were written, I mean, that's very different than the English we have now. And how it has changed, and what causes it to change, is what I find so interesting. And so does David Sherriot Madari. He is a writer and editor at The Guardian. He studied linguistics at Cambridge University, and he's author of the book, Don't Believe a Word, The Surprising Truth About Language.

Hi, David, welcome. Hi, Michael, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. So let's start, because I think this is so interesting, if you stop and think about it, how the language you speak affects how you think, because you think in your native language, I think in English, and that must affect the way in which I think. This whole area has a name in linguistics. It's a hypothesis. It's called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, after a couple of linguists in the 20th century. And that basically describes the idea that the language you speak determines the way you think, determines your way of being in the world. And one of those figures, this guy, Benjamin Wharfe, studied the Hopi Native Americans

and decided that they just thought in a completely different way to Europeans because of the nature of their language. But when I say Europeans, I mean people who speak, as he called it, standard average European languages, English, French, that kind of thing. Now, he sort of exoticized the Hopi Native Americans really a bit too much. He kind of thought they were privy to all sorts of mystical insights just because of the words they used, and he got a lot of stuff wrong. But there is still some evidence that the words you use can sort of guide your thinking, even if they don't completely determine it.

So, for example, some languages have gender kind of encoded in the language. In German, you have masculine, feminine and neuter nouns. In French, you have masculine and feminine nouns. In English, we don't have that kind of system. Right. But there is some evidence from experiments that whether a noun in one of those languages is masculine or feminine influences the way that people think about them. So, for example, the German word for key, which is der Schlüssel, it's masculine, right? It's feminine in Spanish. And I'm not a Spanish speaker, so I'm going to pronounce this wrong, but it's la llave. Now, if you ask German speakers to use adjectives to describe key in English, they say things like hard, heavy and jagged, which are maybe words that stereotypically in our culture are slightly more masculine. Whereas Spanish speakers, remember the Spanish word for key is feminine, will use words like little, lovely, shiny, words that might be stereotypically associated with femininity. So overall, what we're saying there is that certain aspects of the language, like gender in this case, can influence the way you think about world and

influence your associations and guide your habits a little bit. Is there any reason to believe that because of air travel and people moving around the world that language is somehow getting homogenized into like one that eventually it'll just be one big language or will there always be separate languages and you've got to learn that language if you want to speak the language? I think there'll always be separate languages because there'll always be communities that primarily speak to themselves, right? You know, that's how languages evolve in the first place. You have people who primarily talk to one another and their languages gradually separate off from other people's. But it's interesting what you say about travel because if you think about a language like

English, what some people have argued is that travel and TV and consumption of the same media and the same shows and the same movies has actually sort of leveled off some of the subtle differences in accent and in vocabulary between different forms of English. So there is a school of thinking that says that the quirks and peculiarities of British English or even like Liverpool English or Manchester English and New Zealand English and English in Alabama, you know, are all being somewhat homogenized by the kind of global culture of English that exists at the moment. There's some evidence for that, and it makes intuitive sense, but I don't think we can

say for sure. Since you study languages and how people use them, are there any misconceptions about how languages work that really stand out for you? Well, I think one real misconception that people have is that English is kind of deteriorating, that English grammar is deteriorating and standards of pronunciation and so on are going down.

And that's a real threat to the language. And it's a threat to communication and to almost our ability to think. So people worry about that kind of thing a lot. They get upset about words being misused. They get upset about what they regard as sloppy grammar and maybe bits of words being left off when you pronounce them. And I think that's really interesting because it's something that people have been saying for hundreds of years. And if you believe that, then you would have to imagine that the people who were saying it 600 years ago were

right. And kind of with every generation, English has got worse and worse and worse. But if that were the case, then, you know, from the point of view of someone in the 15th century, the great Victorian novels would be written in terrible English, because it would have decayed so much by that point. But we know that's not the case. So there's got to be some other explanation. I mean, there are some fascinating quotes about this. You can go back through the centuries and read literary figures and aristocrats and so on complaining about the terrible state that English is in. So, you know, you had Jonathan Swift in 1712 saying that the corruptions of our language have increased. But, you know, a couple of hundred years before him, you have

George Putnam saying, many dark words, not usual nor well-sounding, are daily spoken in court. So I just think it's interesting that people have been complaining about that kind of thing for hundreds of years, the kind of final degradation of English, which you would imagine would have taken place if all these people were correct, has never occurred. But the language has certainly changed in the last 600 years. And some people, I guess, would consider that change to be a degradation. but really it's more like an evolution. Exactly. That's the key, really. You know, language evolves all the time, but it's silly to say that it's degrading because, you know, there are words that we use now, which are absolutely the standard, which at the time might have been regarded as silly mistakes and might have annoyed people. So, you know, an example of a mistake like that, which became embedded in the language, is this, right? So there are a bunch of a whole bunch of words that used to begin with the letter N and now they don't.

So apron, you know, the thing you wear in the kitchen when you're preparing food, your apron, that used to be napron. And something weird happened here and with other words like that, because they began with an N and because the indefinite article ended with an N, that's like the word an, it's difficult to tell whether someone is saying an apron or an apron. So that mistake actually got embedded in the language. And now no one says an apron, they say apron, or uncle is another great example. This word used to be nunkle, believe it or not. And that mistake is embedded in the language. And now no one would say, hey, why are you saying uncle?

That's a mistake. Do you realize, you know, that's sloppy and you're using the wrong kind of word. So that's just a counterexample to anyone who says, well, mistakes are going to destroy the language. Because ultimately they build the language's structure. They build new words and those become the standard forms. But at any point in time, there is proper English that I mean, that's what's taught in schools. That's what and so you have to kind of stop time and say, OK, this is English right now and this is what we're going to learn. And the phrase proper English would imply that there is one English and that that's the right way to do it.

But English doesn't stop in time. It just keeps going. But at some point you have to say, well, you can't just change it any old way you want. Well, what there is is there are prestige forms of English. There are prestige forms of English and there are stigmatized forms of English. Now, it's right that people are taught the prestige forms of English because that is an important way of getting on in the world. And if people in schools aren't equipped with the ability to recognize what forms are considered to be the standard, then they could be at a disadvantage. So it's important that those things are taught

clearly. But we shouldn't be under any illusions that those forms are the natural form of the language or the greatest form of the language or the most correct and proper form of the language. They just have a particular social prestige. You can learn the rules of that prestige form, and it's right to do so. But it's not intrinsically better. It's not intrinsically more proper. Well, but it is sort of in the sense that if you're a teacher and you say, write this paper, and I turn in a paper that is just gobbledygook and say, well, you know, it's my English. I changed it well there is a standard and that's not it well I guess in that case the paper

is testing the prestige form is it of English so what you're being asked to do in order to pass the paper is to demonstrate your knowledge of that standard form of English but again that doesn't mean that that standard form of English. But again, that doesn't mean that that standard form of English, the one that is conventionally regarded as the prestige form, doesn't mean that it's better or more proper. And from a linguistic point of view, it's just another variety of English. Of course, we regard it as the prestige form. You know, if you write in a non-prestige form, if you write your answers in a non-prestige form, then you've kind of failed the test because the test was testing you on this particular form, not the other form. But if you're going to change napron to apron, you've got to be

wrong many, many times before somebody finally says, well, okay, all right, I guess it's okay. Okay, we've shifted. Yeah. Yeah. But you know, there are these mistakes, if you right i guess it's okay we've shifted so yeah yeah but you know there are there are these mistakes if you like and it's just a question of a tipping point when they become the prestige form are there other things like apron uncle that example because i think that's really interesting other things about our language that has changed or things that it does like that that people might not know because i'd never heard that before. You may have heard a way of saying ask, which sort of swaps the sounds around, which is axe.

And that's often used in what we call African American vernacular English. So it's, it's a fairly familiar form, axe, you know, I'm going to arcs you for something. But it's often kind of disparaged or it's seen as a kind of nonstandard form or somehow less than the proper form. But actually, what arcs represents is a really common change in language, a really common type of of change which linguists call metathesis and there are some really common words that have undergone that change right so if you think about just like the word bird that used to be brid so the two sounds there have swapped around horse used to be cross so the the o and the R have swapped around. At some point, you know, someone, maybe you could argue, someone made a mistake and it caught on because they were using

it and they were an influential person and it caught on in their network. And then a kind of critical mass of people started saying horse instead of frost. And then it becomes the standard form. Another example is wasp, the insect, right? That used to be wops. So the s and the p sound swapped around. One of the things I think people wonder about in English is why we have words that are not spelled the way they're pronounced. So English spelling is kind of crazy because we know that there are lots of letters or combinations of letters that don't correspond in a one-on-one way to the sounds.

And that's because English has been written down for a long time and some of the ways we spell things actually reflect pronunciations from quite a long time ago. So, for example, the word night, like day and night. Why is it spelled that way? Why is there a G, H and a T? Because you don't say those letters. Actually, when that spelling was first devised, it did reflect the way the word was pronounced.

So that word was pronounced something like nicht. So you can sort of hear there, well, you've got the I and you've got a kind of sound, which the G and the H represent. So the spoken language changed and there was a shift. And now we say night, but the spelling stayed the same because it was already used in books and on documents and so on. So that's an example of the spelling being more conservative than the spoken language. It does seem that swear words are a lot more in use today than before. They're more acceptable, although, well, I don't know how acceptable, but they seem more acceptable that people don't cringe like they used to perhaps. But where do they come from? And do they pretty much stay the same? It seems like they do. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, swear words

are an unusual class of word. Apart from anything else, we know that they're not stored and produced in quite the same way in the brain as other words. So, you can have people, for example, who've had strokes which have affected their language and they're really unable to articulate kind of simple sentences. And yet they're able to do things like sing and swear. So we think that there is something slightly different about swear words compared to normal language. They maybe arise from a more visceral, emotional place. So they're kind of preserved when people's language is affected by a stroke.

They seem to be pretty ancient. I mean, certainly the kind of primary English swear words seem to be fairly ancient. You can find them in Chaucer. Maybe there's something about the fact that they're used sparingly and relatively rarely, which means they are preserved. I don't know. I'm just speculating there. It's true that use of swear words has become more acceptable. There's no doubt about that. And I think that's a cultural shift. That's about a loosening of norms. What about in other languages? How does swearing work? Is it much the same as it is in English? There are some interesting examples of slightly different swearing strategies in languages like Italian or Spanish. Soci societies that have had a really, really strong attachment to the communion wafer. They make reference to

the Virgin Mary. They make reference to God. And they combine those phrases with the most provocative, most insulting phrases you can imagine. And that's the swear word. So it's just interesting that probably what is most taboo in your language reflects something about the culture that that language is associated with. I know that sometimes the meaning of words change over time, but how do they change? And what kind of words have changed? So words that we're really familiar with have actually meant completely different things in the past. So an example is the English word silly, right? It's a kind of it's a lighthearted word.

We all know what it means. In the 12th century, silly actually meant something different. It meant happy or blissful. And then that changed. And by the 16th century, it meant innocent or blessed. So it really had completely different connotations to to the present day use. Another example of that is the word nice. So nice in the 12th century meant foolish, ignorant. Stupid. Again, by the 16th century, the meaning had evolved and it meant something that was very precise.

So you might have nice needlework. So it had been done with great precision. That's what nice meant then. And of course, now we know that it means something generically pleasant. And it's just so interesting to trace the journey of words across time and how they zigzag this way and that and develop in unexpected ways. I agree. And I appreciate you sharing all these language backstories. They're really interesting. David Sherry at Madari has been my guest. He is a writer and editor at The Guardian, and he is author of the book, Don't Believe a Word, The Surprising Truth About Language, and you'll find a link to his book in the show notes.

Thanks for being here, David. Okay, thanks, Michael. Thanks for thinking of me. If your nose gets runny in cold weather, well, that's perfectly normal. But why does it do that? Well, no one is exactly sure why, but here's what we do know. Your nose is kind of a fancy air conditioner. One of its jobs is to warm and humidify the air when we inhale. When the air is unusually cold, the nose kicks into high gear to warm and humidify.

Blood vessels dilate, mucus tissue swells, and secretes extra mucus, and that mucus results in a runny nose. In addition, as the newly heated, newly moist air is exhaled, the moisture in it condenses when it hits the colder outside temperature

and then drips out as fluid. There isn't much you can do about it unless it becomes severe, and there is a prescription medication available if it does. And that is something you should know. So we think this podcast is pretty good, and if you will help us find people to sample it, we think they'll likely become listeners like you.

So please share this podcast with someone you know, send them the link, tell them about it. We'd appreciate it. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced.

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