Something You Should Know - “The Bystander Effect” & Modern Idioms Explained - SYSK Choice

Episode Date: July 20, 2024

The consensus seems to be that drinking coffee has several excellent health benefits – and now there is another one you probably haven’t heard before. This episode begins with the explanation. https://rightasrain.uwmedicine.org/body/food/can-your-coffee-habit-help-protect-you-skin-cancer You have most likely seen a bully in action and were maybe reluctant to intervene. After all, it’s not your problem. There is actually a name for this – it’s “The Bystander Effect.” It is when people don’t step in and call out a bully. Why does that happen? Why do we sometimes leave it to someone else or no one at all when clearly someone has stepped over the line? Have you ever thought what would happen if you did step in? And if you do decide to intervene, what’s the best way to do it so you don’t escalate the situation? Here with some answers and insight is psychologist Catherine Sanderson, a professor in Life Sciences at Amherst College and the author of Why We Act: Turning Bystanders into Moral Rebels (https://amzn.to/3vfUgrs) You know what an idiom is – right? Idioms are little phrases that work their way into our conversations that help us make a point. For example, play with fire, move the goal posts or drink the Kool-Aid. Ever wonder where these phrases come from and why they take on this new meaning? Do other languages have idioms? Joining me to explore this fascinating quirk in our language is Gareth Carrol a senior lecturer and researcher in linguistics at the University of Birmingham and author of the book, Jumping Sharks and Dropping Mics: Modern Idioms and Where They Come From (https://amzn.to/3J5XnaX). Summer is the favorite time of year for many people. Still, too much of a good thing can be a problem. Listen as I explore how summer weather can impact your mood and mental state. https://www.livescience.com/21431-hot-temperatures-mood.html 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, there's yet another benefit to drinking coffee you probably haven't heard. Then the bystander effect. You know, when someone's being harassed or bullied and no one steps in to intervene. And yet... We certainly see in children who are being bullied effect. You know, when someone's being harassed or bullied and no one steps in to intervene. And yet, we certainly see in children who are being bullied that when somebody calls out the bully, other people really appreciate that person who stepped up to the bully. So in reality, stepping up can make you a hero. Also, what summertime weather can do to your state of mind.

And idioms, those phrases we use to punctuate our meaning, like play with fire, kick the bucket, or throw someone under the bus. If you throw someone under the bus, you get a sense that it's never going to be a good thing. You know, if you're throwing or pushing someone under a bus, and it tends to be that way with idioms, that you can get a sense of what they mean either from the image they evoke or from the context that they're used in. All this today on Something You Should Know.

Metrolinks and Crosslinks are reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals. Be careful along our tracks and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware, and stay safe. 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 there. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Most of us coffee drinkers, and I am a member of that club, we don't really need another good reason to drink coffee. But here's one anyway. Researchers have found that drinking coffee can help protect you from skin cancer. They say consumption of caffeinated beverages

reduces the risk of developing basal cell carcinoma, which is the most common form of skin cancer. And the more you drink, the better off you are. The threshold seems to be about three caffeinated cups of coffee per day. It does seem to be more preventative for women than men,

but it offers protection for everyone. Now, it doesn't work with decaf. That's because caffeine inhibits an enzyme called ATR, which plays a key role in the survival of cells damaged by ultraviolet rays. Inhibiting ATR can eliminate UV-damaged cells that are precancerous. But because there's not caffeine in decaf, it doesn't have that effect. According to Masoki Kawasuma, who is a medical doctor and a skin cancer researcher at the University of Washington,

about 400,000 skin cancers are prevented annually by drinking caffeinated coffee in the U.S. And that is something you should know. Have you ever been in a situation where you saw someone being yelled at or bullied or harassed or someone was acting inappropriately towards another person and you wanted to speak up, you wanted to help, you wanted to intervene, but you did not? Maybe you were afraid of getting hurt because you thought it was dangerous. Maybe you felt it wasn't really your business. But for whatever reason, you stayed

silent and maybe regretted it. Maybe you still do. It's probably happened to almost every one of us. I'm sure you've seen or heard examples of people being harassed or yelled at on a crowded bus or train, and no one steps in. Why is that? Well, there's actually a name for it. Here to discuss it is psychologist Catherine Sanderson. She is a professor in life sciences at Amherst College and author of the book, Why We Act, Turning Bystanders into Moral Rebels. Hi, Catherine, welcome.

Thank you so much for this invitation to talk. So what is this thing? It has a name. What is it we're talking about when people don't intervene? So what we're really talking about is something called the bystander effect. And it's been well established by empirical research in psychology that people are much less likely to step up and act in the face of an emergency when they're in a group setting. So people often describe incidents of seeing something problematic in a restaurant or an airport or a supermarket and not really knowing what to say or do. People often can think about times in which they've been in a meeting or at a family dinner, and somebody has said or done something racist or homophobic or sexist. Many parents can think about times in which their kids complain

about bullying or being bullies. And we've all had those different experiences in our personal and professional lives. There are many people, most people, stay silent in the face of those kinds of problematic behaviors. But not everyone does. I mean, there are people who do. They speak up. There are people who I call moral rebels. And these are people who basically are willing to stand up and call out problematic behavior. And they don't seem to have sort of the normal inhibitions about doing so as other people.

So those are the people who are called moral rebels. They're willing to speak up. They're willing to act even when most people will not. And why will most people not? Right. Which is really the essential question. So there basically are three reasons. First, in some cases, we see or hear something, but we're not really sure of what it is. I call this the challenge of ambiguity. So is this person actually unconscious and in need of medical attention, or are they just drunk or sleeping? Is that harmless flirting, or is that actually sexual harassment? Is that joke funny or is that kind of racist or homophobic? So I think in some cases, we don't know how to interpret something and it's

ambiguous. And the challenge is when something's ambiguous, we look to other people to figure out how should we respond. But the challenge is if each of us individually is looking to other people for how to react and no one wants to appear stupid for overreacting, there may really be a problem and everybody may privately think so, but publicly we give off kind of a poker face and don't step up. So that's one factor, this challenge of ambiguity. Another factor is that in a group setting, we don't feel responsible. So in some cases we see or hear something problematic, but we think, well, I mean,

I don't have to be the one to step up. I'm not in charge in this situation. So in other cases, people are conscious that there's something problematic happening, but they don't take personal responsibility. Psychologists call this diffusion of responsibility or one of my favorite terms, social loafing. But the third factor that leads people to not step up in an emergency is what I think

is the most prevalent, and that's fear of the consequences. We're worried if I stand up and say something, maybe I'll get physically hurt or maybe people won't like me or I'll get rejected in some way. And I think this fear of the consequences is the factor that is the most prevalent in terms of leading to inaction. So, for example, I don't know, you know, in almost every city now, there are homeless people and people will be lying on the sidewalk and people just walk by. And they walk by maybe because they think something bad would happen to them, or maybe they think it's not their job to do anything. But some people stop. So why do they stop? So one of the key findings is that people vary considerably in their level of empathy. If we feel empathy for someone, we are much more likely

to step up and help in all different kinds of situations. So your example of the homeless person, I think a big predictor is, well, do we identify with that person in some way? Maybe we have a family member who is homeless, or maybe there's something about the homeless person that really touches us. Maybe you're a dog lover and they have a sign saying, my dog needs food. And so you are then connecting with them on that personal level. So this power of empathy seems to be a really strong predictor. Let's talk about the times, because with the homeless problem, it's an ongoing problem. It isn't sudden. It's here today, it'll be here tomorrow. But often we hear stories or we see videos of things that happen. They're like emergencies. It's like bullying or road rage or someone screaming at somebody on a street corner and there's almost like no time to think and do you intervene? Do you not intervene? How do you intervene? What about those instances?

So here's one. Right after the pandemic hit, so think back to March of 2020, one of my friends called to tell me a story about her daughter, Claire. Her daughter, Claire, is Asian. She was adopted from China when she was a baby. And Claire is now 22, 23 years old, a recent college graduate heading to work on a crowded city bus in Boston. Now, remember, this is March of 2020. It's right around the time the coronavirus was really kind of sweeping through the Northeast. So a man on the bus stands up and points at Claire and says, you should go back to China. You and all of your Chinese people are killing Americans. You should leave. And he's yelling at her and the bus is crowded. So lots of people are seeing it. There are lots of potential helpers, but not a single person on the bus did anything. No one on the bus stood up and told the man to

shut up. No one on the bus went over and sat with Claire and reassured her, etc. She sat in silence as this man physically, well, emotionally, verbally assaulted her and got quite close to her on this bus. But here's the challenge. Many people, of course, recognize that Claire single-handedly was not bringing coronavirus, but they also worried if I stand up and tell this man to shut up or if I intervene in some way, maybe he's going to pull out a knife, maybe he's going to pull out a gun, and they worried about their physical safety. So what we see in many cases is that people do recognize that there's a problem, but they're really worried, well, what will happen if I speak up? When people are, I don't know if you looked at this,

but when people are afraid that something bad would happen to them, if I intervene here, I might get hurt. This guy might pull out a knife. Well, he might, but usually is that what happens? Right. So that's a good example. So let me say two things to that. One, obviously I think personal safety is essential. And so in a case in which you have a personal fear for your safety, such as that example on a bus, I think it's important for people to remember that there are lots of ways in which you can intervene that does not have to be directly confronting the guy. So one of my favorite examples is you could just simply go over and sit with Claire on the bus and pretend you know her and be like, hey, what are we doing this weekend? Have you seen this movie? So there are ways in which you can support somebody who's being targeted in some way without actually confronting the person who's doing the problematic behavior if you fear for your personal safety. I think it's also really important to acknowledge, however, that in many cases, we see or hear problematic behavior and we're not worried about our personal safety.

So it's pretty clear that many people understood what Harvey Weinstein was doing for many, many years and didn't intervene. And the reason they didn't intervene is that there was gonna be a cost for doing so. Harvey Weinstein was making and breaking careers. People weren't worried that he was gonna pull out a knife and stab them.

People were worried, I'm not gonna make as much money or I'm not gonna get this part or I'm not gonna get an Oscar. So in many cases, the analysis is not really about personal safety. It's more about the personal or professional consequences. And again, though, are we overly sensitive to that? I mean, are we more, are we thinking harder about this than anybody else is that really, there aren't going to be a lot of, normally a lot of consequences, but we just were kind of hypervigilant about it? Yeah, I think that's a great example. And

in fact, that's one of the reasons I love talking about this is that I think many people think, oh my gosh, you know, if I step up and do something, I'm going to get in trouble. But in reality, in many cases, once you stand up and say something, other people are very, very appreciative. After doing this work, I have found myself being much more active in meetings and saying, you know, hey, well, I don't really agree with that. Or wait, you know, maybe you didn't really mean that. But you know, that could be offensive. And one of two things invariably happens. At some points, people in the meeting or the situation will say, hey, thank you so much for stepping up or thank you so much for saying that. But in other cases, people will email me privately

and they'll say, that's exactly what I was thinking. Thank you so much for speaking up. We certainly see in examples in children who are being bullied that when somebody calls out the bully, other people really appreciate that person who stepped up to the bully. So in reality, stepping up can make you a hero, not a victim. What about the idea that if someone's being bullied on a train, when someone does speak up, do other people join him or do other people look the other way? Yeah, in many cases, and of course, it's hard to study this in the lab because it's a real world situation. But in many cases, all it takes is one person to speak up, that if one person speaks up, other people, in fact, join them. Having information

when somebody immediately speaks up, then other people say, oh, okay, I'm not the only one who's feeling this is problematic. And it also gives them an example of, okay, this is what I could do. So in many cases, it just takes one person stepping up or calling out problematic behavior, and other people will in fact support them. It's just really hard to find that first person to act. We're talking about stepping up and intervening when there's bullying and bad behavior going on. And we're talking with Katherine Sanderson. She is a psychologist and author of the book, Why We Act, Turning Bystanders Into Moral Rebels. This episode is brought to you by Melissa and Doug. Wooden puzzles and building toys for

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So, Catherine, it also must be true, well, I'm sure it's true, that how you intervene, how you present yourself as the intervener matters. And I know police are trained in something called command presence, where they very confidently intervene in a situation, implying to the person who's the bully or whoever that they may suffer some consequences if this doesn't stop, as opposed to, hey, you know, you better stop that or I'm going to tell. You have to confidently intervene and not wish-washy intervene. And that's true in all different kinds of settings. So that's true in boardrooms and in law offices and in fraternity houses and in locker rooms, that standing up and confidently calling

out problematic behavior can make a giant difference in all different kinds of settings. The people who do speak up and intervene in these situations, do we know anything about them as a group? I mean, do they tend to be the same type of person, Or will almost anybody in the right situation be willing to speak up or somewhere in the middle? So they are different in fundamental ways, and it does seem to be across different situations. And there basically are three characteristics. One, we've already talked about, empathy. They are very good at putting themselves in somebody else's shoes. Imagine if that was my daughter on a bus. Imagine if that was me being bullied, et cetera. So they're very good at doing this perspective taking. Two, they often don't really worry about the normal social

inhibition. So they don't embarrass easily. So other people might say, well, I really don't want to look stupid or feel foolish. And people who consistently speak up are like, yeah, you know, whatever. If I look stupid, I look stupid. They don't really care. And the third point, which I really take a lot of solace in as the mother of an argumentative teenage daughter, it also seems to be people who argue with their parents. The people who argue with their parents seem to have practiced standing up to authority in some way and playing through that experience seems to give them greater confidence in speaking up. Well, and it does seem to be a different thing, speaking up against authority versus speaking up against something that is clearly wrong

that is not authority. True, although you may get practice at having that kind of uncomfortable dialogue by playing it through at home. Because part of it is that stepping up, speaking up is hard. And so if you can do it with an authority, your parents at home, you're also more likely to do it against a peer or a colleague. And so you study this because why is this important? I study this and I write and talk about it because it's something that we see and hear all the time in our daily lives. I began writing the book, Why We Act, following my oldest child starting college. Andrew started college just about five years ago now. And two weeks after the start of his first year, he called me one night and said, Mom, a student died in my dorm last night.

And then he told me the story, which again is a story that even if you don't know this particular school or this particular student, it's very familiar. Student was drinking one night. He fell and hit his head. His friends and roommates watched over him for hours. They put him in his bed. They checked to make sure he was still breathing. They watched over him. But what they didn't do for 19 hours was call 911. And when they finally did call 911, it was too late. He was 19 years old in his first two weeks of college. And when my son told me that story, I was just struck by how different that could have been, that these weren't bad kids, these weren't evil kids, but they were kids who didn't call

911 promptly. And it certainly is possible that making a quick call would have saved that student's life. And when I talk about this topic, overwhelmingly to interviewers, to students, to general audiences, to reporters, et cetera, someone will invariably say at the end of the interview or before it even starts, hey, I have to tell you about this story. And then they tell me about a story in which they remember seeing or hearing some kind of problematic behavior and not stepping up and feeling guilty for not doing so. Or they remember being the only one

who stepped up and wondering why other people didn't do so. One of the reasons I think people don't speak up is because they don't know what to say. They don't know what to do. Your example of the woman on the bus being yelled at by someone, if you get mad at that guy, you may escalate the situation as opposed to your idea, which I really like, is to sit with the woman, pretend you know her, and now he's got two people to contend with, and that's much more of a de-escalating approach. So what about having some sort of specific ideas of what would I do in this case? So what I tell people is have a set of things that you feel you could say or do that feel safe to you. So maybe that would be assuming that somebody is making a joke and saying, ha, ha, ha,

you know, you think that's funny, but it's really not. Maybe it's, I'm just going to go and sit with somebody who's being targeted on public transportation in some way. I often tell people, if there's something problematic happening in your school or your workplace, maybe find a friend who can go and report it with you so you don't have to do so alone. So what I think people should do is to kind of think through different situations they've been in, in which they saw or hear or heard something problematic and didn't speak up and think about and really play through in your mind, well, what were my other choices and what would feel comfortable? It's almost as if you're kind of like recruiting an army, like you want people to really pay attention to this. Because like in high school or whatever, you know, kids got bullied and kids got bullied.

And that was just kind of the way it was. And maybe now people speak up more than they used to. But it sounds like you're trying to wake people up to this problem that mostly we just kind of ignore. Yes. I mean, I like the idea of recruiting an army. So this is what I think. Many of us have been in a situation in which we've seen or heard something problematic and we haven't stepped up. And it's very normal not to have done so for all of the different reasons that I've described.

However, it's also the case that we want to live in a world in which problematic behavior is called out. And here's what's astonishing. In many cases, in many situations, most people in a situation think that there's something problematic going on and yet no one will step up. So my example of the crowded city bus, I bet every passenger on that bus thought that man was being inappropriate and yet no one spoke up. Again, we can kind of go through all the different examples. Most people don't think there should be corporate fraud, you know, and so on. And yet in all of the situations, most people stay silent because they don't have a sense

from other people, oh, other people share my view. So frankly, talking about how very normative it is to not speak up can help people gain real insight into, oh, I'm not the only one who feels or thinks this is problematic. One of my favorite examples, I had a student, a very good student, very strong student on the basketball team, and he was in my office one day and we were talking about this topic and he said, every day in the locker room, someone says something offensive. And sometimes I speak up, but often I don't.

I've always wondered why. And what occurred to me was, I bet when that person says something problematic, everybody internally is saying the same thing. Boy, that's a problem. And yet no one is speaking up. So the key thing is that understanding that we're not alone in our thoughts and feelings can actually give all of us the confidence to speak up in the face of different kinds of problematic behavior because we learn we're not alone.

You know, I'll bet there isn't a person listening to this who doesn't remember a point in their life, a situation where they wish they had said something, they wish they'd stood up, and they didn't? This is the case for virtually all of us. I can remember times in which I was in a meeting, in which I was on a playground, in which I was in an airport, and I had an opportunity to step up and do the right thing, and I didn't do so. Just recently, I remember reading or hearing about a story about a waitress, and I won't remember all the details exactly correctly, but essentially she was waiting on a family in a restaurant, and one of the kids in the family, something looked off, and she passed the kid a note, are you in trouble, are you whatever? And the kid nodded his head. She called the police and it

turned out this kid had been abused for a long time and she intervened and probably saved that kid's life. That's such a powerful example. And that really is the perfect illustration of what we've been talking about. It wasn't her responsibility to do so. Being a waitress does not mean that you have to intervene in cases of child abuse. And yet she stepped up and did the right thing. And imagine if she hadn't done so and two or three or four or five weeks later, she had heard about that child's death, right? Because of child abuse. And so that's a really vivid example about how one person stepping up in that small way can make a world of difference.

Well, as I said, I think really everybody's probably been in that situation where they didn't speak up or they didn't intervene and found themselves later regretting that. And it's interesting to hear from you why it is so difficult for people to speak up and maybe hopefully you've inspired people to try to overcome that the next time it happens. I've been speaking with Katherine Sanderson. She is a professor in life sciences at Amherst College, and the name of her book is Why We Act, Turning Bystanders into Moral Rebels. And you'll find the link to her book in the show notes.

Thank you for being here, Katherine. All right. Take care. Have a nice day. Bye-bye. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue.

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podcasts. 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, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's

pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson, discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. I've always found the English language to be really interesting. There's so many parts to it and quirks to it, and it's always changing. And something I've always found interesting in English are the idioms that we use, these odd little curious phrases we use to make our point,

like throw someone under the bus, kick the bucket, move the goalposts, drink the Kool-Aid. We use these phrases for emphasis, but where do they come from? Why do we have them? Do other languages have them? Here to discuss all this is Gareth Carroll. He's a senior lecturer and researcher in linguistics at the University of Birmingham and author of the book Jumping Sharks and Dropping Mics, Modern Idioms and Where They Come From. Hi, Gareth. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi, Mike. Thank you for having me. So first of all, just from a linguistic point of view, how do you define an idiom? What is it? So idioms are phrases, these kind of general phrases that we use all the time in language that express figurative or non-literal meanings.

And the best thing to do is give a couple of examples. So in English, we might say that someone is playing with fire, meaning they're doing something that's quite risky. We might talk about someone spilling the beans when they reveal some news or a secret or something like this. And the point is that they are quite fixed phrases. You can't really change the words. You can't really change them and then still mean the same thing. But most people who speak a language are going to understand what you mean by these kinds

of phrases. But the meaning itself is non-literal. It's figurative. You have to sort of apply a metaphorical meaning to it. An idiom that I like, because it works so well, and you know exactly what it means when you hear it, is to throw someone under the bus. So that's a really interesting one. I think this is one that's become really popular in the last 20 years or so. And it means to sort of sacrifice someone to save yourself. And I think it's really common now in two main areas. And one is politics. And people often talk about a

politician or someone in a fairly prominent place sort of throwing someone else under the bus, maybe in the context of sort of sacrificing someone they used to be friendly with so they almost try and distance themselves from someone else when there's a scandal and the other seems to be sports so the same idea someone kind of tries to distance themselves from a particular scandal or a sort of unpleasant situation and it seems to have emerged in around about the 1980s. And actually, originally in the UK, people talked about politicians sort of falling under a bus or being pushed under a bus. I think it's quite a sort of a phrase that's quite easy to envisage,

so you can sort of see the imagery. And those are the kinds of phrases that tend to stick around in the language, I think. Well, it is it is great phrase because I think the first time you hear it, you get a sense of what it means, even if you don't know what it means. And this is often the case with idioms is there's that sort of underlying metaphor that you can still see what it means. Play with fire is the really good example, I think. If you'd never heard the phrase play with fire before, you could probably work out what it means. Play with fire is the really good example, I think. If you'd never heard the phrase play with fire before, you could probably work out what it means. Fire stands for something dangerous. If you play with fire, the chances are you're going to hurt yourself. And in exactly the same way, if you throw someone under the bus, you get a sense that it's never going to be a good

thing. There's never going to be a good outcome there. If you're throwing or pushing someone under a bus, they're obviously going to get hurt. And it tends to sort of be that way with idioms, that you can get a sense of what they mean, either from the image they evoke or from the context that they're used in. Who hasn't used or at least heard the phrase, take one for the team? Come on, you got to take one for the team. Sports are a really good source of idioms and take one for the team is on you gotta you gotta take one for the team sports are a really good source of idioms and take one for the team is is a good example so um if you take one for the team you

sacrifice yourself in order to help everyone else and i think it's now used quite commonly in sort of business or or sort of an office environment where something is done for the greater good but it doesn't necessarily benefit you but as far as as I can tell, the origin is baseball. So the idea being that in baseball, if you allow yourself to be hit by the ball, then you automatically get to walk to first base. So the idea is that if you're not a great batter, and therefore you're probably not going to be able to hit the ball or hit a home run, then if you do that, then you get hurt in the process, but it benefits the team by you doing so. And that, again, it's one that I think you can get the imagery for. You can understand the idea of sort of taking one, even if you don't necessarily know what one is in that context. But it sort of has that imagery of,

you know, someone being hurt, but it benefiting the greater team. Something I've always wondered about these kind of things in English is, do other languages have idioms like this? Absolutely. It's a really good question. And as far as we know, idioms are universal. They do exist in all kinds of languages. There's not really any reason to think that they should be particularly common in English, although English does have a lot of idioms. There's not really a kind of definitive list, but best guess is something like 20,000 idioms in English,

if not more. But all of the languages, as far as we know, do have their own idioms. And they're a really interesting example of how hard idioms can be if you've not heard them before. And one of the reasons for that is that they're so tied into culture. So they take one for the team, for example, if you know about baseball, and you probably get the imagery, you can work that out. If you're in a culture that doesn't play baseball, or that doesn't mean

anything, that's going to be much harder. And if we look at some examples from other languages, I think you get that idea really easily. So one that I love is a Swedish idiom, and it translates roughly as, there's no cow on the ice. And I think that's an idiom that's quite tricky to work out if you don't know the meaning. So maybe that's a good test case. Can you guess the meaning of no cow on the ice? Well, it's got to have something to do with the thickness of the ice. Either the ice is too thick or it's too thin and the cow fell through. I'm going to say it's because it means that the ice is too thin. Well, kind of the opposite in a way. So if there's no cow on the ice, then it's fine. There's nothing to worry about. So if there is a cow on the ice on a frozen lake,

then you probably need to be panicking because your cow might fall through. So your guess is sort of going in the right direction. But because it's not an idiom that we would use in English, you know, we have to try and work it out and we have to try and guess what it might mean. So I really like that because when you know it means that, you can sort of see why. But all languages have these kinds of idioms and sometimes they can be quite universal. So lots of other languages have a version of to kill two birds with one stone, which we would say in certainly in UK English. And it's slightly different. It's not always exactly two birds with one stone. Sometimes it might be kill two rabbits with one bullet, something like that.

But the image underlying it is exactly the same. So often it's very easy to see what the phrase means even if you don't recognize the specific words themselves. But I imagine that in many cases, English idioms when translated into other languages sound just as strange as no cow on the ice is to us. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And this is one of the big challenges when people learn languages. So I work at a university, I teach a lot of students, I teach a lot of international students. So we have students from all over the world. And one of the things that I've had to learn to do is try to not use idiomatic language in my classroom because that's when you start to lose people, that's when you use phrases that you think everyone's going

to understand but actually they can be very confusing because you know if people don't have them in their own language then they can be just as tricky so if we were to translate what I would think are very common English phrases into other languages, they really just wouldn't make sense. And think of English examples that when you actually stop and think about the words, they just don't make sense. There's lots of examples. Kick the bucket is the very clear one in British English that we use to mean die. And it's one that's an unclear etymology. There's some ideas about where it comes from. But it's certainly got not, in modern English,

not got anything to do with kicking. It's not got anything to do with buckets. So if you were to use that phrase with international students or learners of English, they wouldn't have any hope of understanding it really. And if you translate that into another language, it's just as meaningless. Well, but it's kind of fun i mean

you think about it i mean i can just imagine someone who doesn't speak english being told you know having something translated for them and to hear kick the bucket and they would go what what what are you talking about absolutely and this is I think, where modern translation has come a long way in terms of things like translation software or automatic translators. But for a long time, this is where these kind of things were a real problem because you would sort of translate things almost word by word. And if you do that, you run into these kinds of problems. You can't translate, kick the bucket into another language and retain the meaning unless you try and translate it into the equivalent idiom, for example. So they can be both fun and infuriating at the same time. Well, since the title of your book is Jumping Sharks and Dropping Mics, let's tackle those. Sure. So Jump the Shark, I think, is one that I certainly find much more familiar amongst

American English speakers than Brits as a phrase meaning sort of the point at which things go beyond the realms of credibility. They become ridiculous. They become unbelievable. And it relates to the American TV show Happy Days. So Happy Days, I think, is a TV show that lots of people remember very fondly. And in Happy Days, there was the very famous character, the Fonz. And in one episode, the gang all went to California and the Fonz took part in a water skiing competition where he literally water skied over a shark. So he jumped a caged shark. And the sort of response to this at the time was fine. But years later, people looked on this and said it was really quite a ridiculous thing to happen in the TV show.

So it was sort of suggested that this was the point at which the TV show kind of ran out of ideas and started becoming ridiculous. So if something metaphorically jumps the shark these days, then it has become so ridiculous that we just can't take it seriously anymore. And then there is drop the mic or dropping mics or, you know, a drop the mic moment. Where did that come from? So again, dropping mics, I think, is one that has become more common. I think this is one I've heard certainly more and more in the last 10 years or so. If you drop the mic, then you do something that's so show-stopping that no one can really follow it. So I think it's often accompanied with a gesture, which is not always the case with idioms,

but people literally mime dropping the mic. So you can imagine someone on stage with a microphone saying something that they feel is just kind of one, an argument or people can't respond to, and you literally drop the mic and walk off because you can't get any better than that and this seems to to trace back to the 1980s seems to have its origins in two areas one is rap and and rap battles where rappers would literally kind of um have a an argument or trade insults as part of a sort of a rap on stage and the idea was that if someone said something that they felt was so good, the other person couldn't come back from it, they

would sort of drop the mic and walk off. And a similar idea in standup comedy. So apparently Eddie Murphy was one of the first people to drop the mic at the end of his set and walk off in triumph. You pick one, you must have a favorite or two. So I'd like to know what ones you find either because of what they are or the story behind them. Sure. So I think one of my favorites is one that I always use as a really classic example. So it's what I call a modern idiom. All of the ones that we're talking about are modern idioms in the sense that they've emerged quite recently. And the benefit of those is we can be much more confident as to where they've come from. And the phrase I always use to sort of explain this is Groundhog Day. And Groundhog Day, most people will recognise as a film, a comedy film from the 1990s.

But the whole point of the film is that a person bill murray who's the star lives the same day over and over again um so groundhog day very quickly after that entered the language to mean a sense of sort of deja vu a sense of things repeating themselves and now is i think almost universally used to describe things that are exactly that, that are very repetitive and that have this sort of sense of the same thing happening over and over again. And I think what's interesting about Groundhog Day is it entered the language almost instantly. So 1993 the film came out and even later that year there were examples of people describing things as like Groundhog Day and describing sort of quite mundane, repetitive

situations as like Groundhog Day. So that almost sort of fed into, I think, an idea that people needed something to describe, you know, the kind of mundane, repetitive situations that we all experience from time to time. So that one, I think, took off very quickly. One that I remember that I always liked because you knew exactly what it meant, but you don't hear it so much anymore, and that's Catch-22. Yeah, so Catch-22 I think is another good example of a phrase that has just become completely a part of the language. And lots of listeners will know the phrase, lots of them will know that it's the title of a book. But again, Catch-22 is quite an interesting one because it refers to a famous book by Joseph Heller.

And the idea is that the book is about people flying planes during the Second World War. And the idea is that they didn't want to fly planes because obviously it was a very dangerous thing to be doing. And therefore, people might sort of pretend to be crazy or mad to try and get out of this. But the argument in the book is that the only people who would go up in a plane in the first place would have to be crazy to do it. Therefore, that's not a reason to get out of flying. So the idea of a catch-22 is it's something that goes around in a circle and it sort of traps you in its own argument, if you like. But again, I think this is one that really sort of captured the imagination. It described that situation, that sort of paradox, so perfectly that it really stuck around in the language. And I think people would almost

universally know what it means now, and lots of them won't have ever read the book the interesting thing about that is people often assume either that there is some kind of deeper etymology there so there's a reason why catch 22 um or that they're sort of tapping into something that that hella had kind of found in in in the language but the reality is he just chose a number um he's been interviewed about it many times, apparently. And he simply said, well, I had to sort of think of a number. And he decided on Catch-22, basically because it kind of sounded catchy or it sounded good. One that you included in your book that I never really thought of it as an idiom is the usual suspects. Because it is what it is. I mean, it isn't metaphorical. It's the usual suspects because it it is what it is i mean it it isn't metaphorical it's

the usual suspects sure and and i think this is where idioms sort of exist on a bit of a sort of spectrum so some will be very obviously metaphorical and quite hard to work out and some will be quite close to literal and you're right that the usual suspect simply means kind of the usual set of people or things. And I guess the reason that I would consider it an idiom is that the word suspects very obviously refers to people suspected of a crime. But we apply it now to things that are not in that context. So we find examples of things like it might be an article writing about sort of causes of heart disease, for example, and it might talk about the usual suspects being, you know, unhealthy eating, lack of exercise. So in that sense, those things are not suspects. They are not criminal suspects, but we apply that phrase. So idioms can be quite transparent. You know, it's very easy to understand what that means.

But again, it's sort of a fixed way of expressing that idea. And it's a phrase that people would use and that others would understand quite easily. I think it's another interesting one because people, quite rightly, I think, would assume that it comes from the film of the same name. So another 1990s film, The Usual Suspects. But it's actually a quotation from the much earlier film Casablanca. And someone in that sort of asks someone to round up the usual suspects. And actually it was it was used as the title of the film, I think, partly in homage to that. Is the is the phrase bucket list refer to kick the bucket? Is it all part of the same thing?

It is. And that's another really interesting one. That's one that I think I assumed and a lot of people assume has been in the language for a while. And the idea is exactly that, that a bucket list is a list of things that you want to do before you kick the bucket, basically. So we make these lists of places we want to go or things we want to achieve before we die. It seems to be the case from all the evidence I've found that it didn't exist until a film of the name Bucket List came out in 2007. And again, my assumption was that this was called The Bucket List because that was a phrase, but it seems to be the case that this film really invented the term.

And it was Justin Zachman, or Zachum, who coined the phrase when he first sort of wrote this film and decided this is what he was going to call it. And so it's an interesting one. It's definitely related to kick the bucket. And again, if you don't know what kick the bucket means, then you have no way of knowing what a bucket list is. What about the phrase sleep with the fishes yeah I think people may tend to think it's like a real old mafia term or something but but I suspect it's really a movie term about the mafia definitely again that's where the evidence seems to point so this was made famous by the Godfather and so this was in first the book of the Godfather and then the film. So they talk about someone sleeping with the fishes, meaning someone's been murdered and thrown in the river, basically.

And in the film and the book, they themselves describe it as an old Sicilian message. But this idea that it is an old mafia phrase doesn't necessarily stack up from the evidence. And it's actually from the Godfather itself that that's then sort of entered the public consciousness. Well, it is a fun little quirk of the language. I mean, we all we all use idioms all the time without giving much thought to them. So I appreciate you coming on and diving in and explaining what they are and and where many of them come from. Gareth Carroll is a senior lecturer and researcher in linguistics at the University of Birmingham, and the name of his book is Jumping Sharks and Dropping Mics,

Modern Idioms and Where They Come From. And you'll find a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Gareth. Thank you very much. It's been really interesting. Could you be suffering from the summertime blues? People usually associate seasonal affective disorder, or SAD, with winter, but it can also apply to summer. Being hot, sweaty, and uncomfortable can take a toll on your body and your mind. Clammy and muggy weather and humidity can really fuel some tempers and even

lead to an increase in violence and aggression in some people. To beat the heat and stave off some of those summertime blues, it's important to stay hydrated and pay attention to the cues that your body's giving off. If you or your children start feeling cranky and irritable out in the sun, it means you've had enough and need to cool off before tempers flare. And that is something you should know. When you think of all the things you learn listening to this podcast, I'll bet you know people who would love to learn it as well. So please tell a friend or two or three about this podcast. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

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