Something You Should Know - The Proven Magic of Being Outdoors & The Curious History of A, B, C

Starting point is 00:00:01 Today, on something you should know, many ballpoint pens are designed to save your life, if necessary. Then there are extraordinary health benefits to spending time outdoors, and it doesn't take much. 17 minutes a day. Give your body biological inputs that it's currently missing because we're indoors so much, and because so much of the time that we do spend outside, is incidental. Also, what do women find attractive in a man? Not what a lot of men think. And the fascinating story of our English alphabet and the story keeps changing.

Starting point is 00:00:41 The way that the letters look has changed, the way that they're written on the page, the direction of writing. The only thing that has remained constant is the overall principle that it should be one symbol for one sound. Everything else is in flux. All this today on something you should know. Something You Should Know. Fascinating Intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life.

Starting point is 00:01:09 Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. When you look at a ballpoint pen, what do you think would be the deadliest part of that pen? It's not the ink. It's not the ballpoint. It's something else entirely. And I'm going to tell you as we begin this episode of something you should. know. Hi, I'm Mike Carruthers. So take a look at the cap of almost any disposable ballpoint pen, and you will see a tiny hole in the top. Now, most people assume it's there to keep the ink from

Starting point is 00:01:44 drying out or to equalize the air pressure, and it does help with that, but that's not why it was added. The real reason is much more dramatic. The hole was first introduced by the Bick Pen company in 1991. That little hole is designed to keep a person alive. If someone accidentally inhales a pencap and it gets lodged in the airway, that hole can allow enough air to pass to delay suffocation and by precious time for emergency treatment. In fact, international safety standards now require many pencaps to be designed this way, so that tiny hole you've probably never noticed is actually one of the simplest life-saving inventions you'll ever use. And that is something you should know.

Starting point is 00:02:35 Your mother was right about a lot of things, including the fact that you need to get outside more. This isn't just a piece of common-sense advice. Scientists are increasingly discovering that spending time outdoors isn't merely beneficial, it may be essential for your health. And that's becoming a problem. because we now spend about 93% of our lives indoors. Think about it.

Starting point is 00:03:03 We wake up inside. We work inside. We drive. We exercise inside. And then we come home and stare at screens under artificial light inside. In the process, we're cutting ourselves off from many of the natural signals that help regulate our sleep, energy, attention, metabolism, and even how we age. My guest believes we're living through what he calls and,

Starting point is 00:03:27 indoor epidemic. Dr. John Lapuma is a board-certified physician and best-selling author whose latest book is called Indoor Epidemic. And he joins me to explain why spending so much time indoors may be affecting your health more than you realize. Man, what you can do about it. Hey, John, welcome to something you should know. Mike, it's so great to be back with you.

Starting point is 00:03:50 So I've always believed, because my mother told me, you know, that outside is good, that the fresh air, sunshine, the bird singing, you know, all of that is good for you. But clearly, it's more than that. So what is it you want people to understand? What I'd like to get people to understand is that we spend 93% of our time of our lives inside and that nobody chose that number, but it's behind the four things that people feel every week. Burnout, belly fat, bad sleep, and brain fog. and it's a new idea about the root cause of those problems that kind of ties them all together.

Starting point is 00:04:33 And when we, you say we spend 90 plus percent of our time indoors, that's different than the past, like how, like 50 years ago, 100 years ago, do you know what those numbers were then? Yes, 100 years ago, it was about 50-50. And that breaks down to 86% in buildings and 7% percent. in vehicles on average, but that indoor confinement is something that your biology reads as confinement. And it's depriving us of essential biological inputs that our brains, our bodies, or microbiomes, all of us need to function optimally. And I think it's in part responsible for the four bees I've just mentioned.

Starting point is 00:05:20 And so what's the goal? What's the sweet spot? We're not going to get it down to zero, but what are you hoping, where do you think the sweet spot is? Or what does the science say? I don't think there is any need to get it down to zero. But I do think that there's a minimum effective dose for being outdoors in an intentional way

Starting point is 00:05:41 that optimizes your biology and helps to get rid of some of the problems that we're experiencing. And that minimum effective dose turns out to be from the science. 17 minutes a day. 17 minutes in a green or blue space of intentional time outdoors helps to, that's where mood and focus and blood pressure and blood sugar start to move. This isn't magic.

Starting point is 00:06:10 It's just a minimum effective dose, like a minimum effective dose of a pharmaceutical. 17 cumulative minutes over the day or 17 consecutive minutes at one time. 17 cumulative minutes over the day. I'm glad you asked that because some people say, I don't have 17 minutes in a row, which is fine. You actually don't need it. You need 17 minutes cumulative over the day to give your body biological inputs

Starting point is 00:06:39 that it's currently missing because we're indoors so much and because so much of the time that we do spend outside is incidental. We happen to go from car, to coffee shop, from parking lot to home. And that time is not, shall we say, biologically rich or helpful to our bodies, except that we're moving outside, which is good.

Starting point is 00:07:07 But too often, we have our phone in our hand. And when your phone is in your hand, not only can you not watch where you're going, but your brain thinks you're still working. And one of the great purposes, and the, saving graces of being outdoors, is that it's kind of a neurological reset, which you need because so much of our lives are digitally saturated, surrounded by pixels. And so we know this because why?

Starting point is 00:07:40 Because it sounds logical. It seems to make perfect sense. Everybody has a sense that they're probably spending too much time indoors. But peek behind the curtain here. Says who? Who says this is important? Well, actually, the 2,200 studies I read for the book in the period medical literature and agricultural literature and scientific literatures seem to add up to just this. For example, one of the most powerful inputs of light to the human body has been shown

Starting point is 00:08:16 in a study where people were hospitalized in 1984 in Pennsylvania. studied by a guy named Roger Ulrich, who found people on either side of that hospital hallway. And the hospitalized surgical patients on that hallway with a tree view used 22% less opiates, went home from the hospital 0.8 days sooner, and the nurses thought they had a better hospital stay than the same people, same operation, not same people, but same operation, different side of the hallway. and those people had a view of a concrete wall. This actually changed hospital architecture. In 1982, in Japan, an endocrinologist named Kee Ling took men at that time were hypertensive and executives into a forest for forest bathing, which really should be called no endocrine optimization.

Starting point is 00:09:15 It's a way of being around trees and using their might. microbial benefits and measured their blood pressure after two hours, which dropped 5 millimeters, which is the equivalent of a 14% reduction in risk for a stroke and a 9% risk for heart attack. But more importantly, they had an immune boost of 56% of their natural killer cells, which are white blood cells that are the Navy seals of white blood cells and go out and kill tumor cells and virus cells in your body. effect lasted a month. So this isn't a cancer cure but it's a real immune nudge that stacks on top of moving outdoors. There are literally thousands of studies on

Starting point is 00:10:04 gardening, on forest bathing, on green exercise deliberate movement outdoors and of course outdoor light is 25 to 50 times brighter than indoor light and that has a direct effect on your vision. So talk about, because I could spend 17 minutes walking outside down Fifth Avenue in New York, or I could spend 17 minutes walking through the Redwood Forest in California. I imagine you're going to tell me that the Redwood walk is better, but is it and why? It is better, but the Fifth Avenue Walk is not meaningless. It's just not as good for your health.

Starting point is 00:10:49 And here's the reason why. In that redwood forest, you get what King Lee described as fightensides, which are active aromatic chemicals that trees make to communicate with one another and have this direct effect on our own immune system, actually working in the brain, crossing the brain barrier, and improving our immunity, lowering our blood pressure, and allowing our senses to kick in, which is how we experience nature. So how do the numbers work in this sense? I could be out all weekend, outside most of the weekend. So am I good to stay inside the rest of the week?

Starting point is 00:11:30 Or is it a day-to-day thing or month-to-month thing? Or like, how do you add up the numbers? I love these questions, Mike, because they're the questions that other people ask me too. And just like the 17 minutes total, a minimum effective dose, And by the way, the optimum dose is 43 minutes a day of intentional time in a greener blue space. It's like drinking. One a night is really different than seven on Friday night. This is a cumulative phenomenon.

Starting point is 00:12:03 It works cumulatively. You need to get 17 minutes daily. If you skip a day, not the end of the world. Skip two days, you're kind of offset. Skip three days and your circadian rhythm is gone. That's rounding the corner. a bit about the science, but it's the big thrust of the correct point. And their circadian rhythm is where this biology really lives. As you know, the circadian rhythm that we all have is our body

Starting point is 00:12:30 clock, how our body runs. Our bodies have a clock, and each organ actually has a clock as well. And it is only set with sunlight. And it's only set with sunlight that is bright, which is almost all sunlight, and it's most effectively set in the first hour of waking, because that's when your retinal receptors are most receptive to bright sunlight. So the first prescription, if you will, is to get out, use some of those 17 minutes in the morning, a minimum of 10, without sunglasses, not through a window, and look at the sky, because your eyes need, distance, like your lungs need oxygen. And they need to, your A, giving them a reset and B, focusing on something other than the notifications and direct messages on your phone. And C, you're allowing that

Starting point is 00:13:34 strong photic input, strong bright light input to meet the back of your retina, which is what sets your body clock for the day. And then all kinds of good things happen. If you're you get that minimum 10 minutes, preferably in the first 60 minutes of being awake without sunglasses and not through a window. And I'm curious if it matters when you go outside, if it matters what you're doing while you're outside, and we'll explore that in just a moment. We're talking about the benefits of being outside. And my guest is Dr. John Lapuma, author of the book Indoor Epidemic. So, John, you said that 17 minutes outside is what you need to do, but when you're outside, does it matter? Can you make it better depending on what you're doing?

Starting point is 00:14:25 Or can you just sit in a chair and just be outside? You can sit in a chair, enjoy the outdoor light, sip your coffee, and then just, and do something else. Look at the sky, as I suggested, watch the clouds change, see if the leaves move. you incorporate activity, that is even better. So what I like to think of as a single, going outdoors and getting bright light, can be turned into a double if you're walking with someone. Because if you're walking with someone, you also got a boost of oxytocin and you're moving in the morning. And movement in the morning is another what we call zeitgeber. A zeitgeber is what sets your body clock. And light is by far the most important, but movement is second. So you're doing

Starting point is 00:15:19 two good things for yourself and your body clock at once. You're moving and you're getting bright light. And if you're doing it with someone, that's even better. If you're doing it with a dog or a companion animal, even better. And if you meet somebody while you're walking outdoors in the morning light with a dog, that's a home run. When people do this, and I'm sure you've worked with people who've done this, is there a noticeable difference or is it mostly internal things going on that are good for you? But there's no gigantic change in, wow, this is awesome, or is there? No, there is, actually.

Starting point is 00:16:03 The people who have followed the protocols, I mean, a number of them anyway, have written to me or said to me, I can't believe how much better I'm sleeping. People's sleep improve dramatically. And the reason is within a few days and sometimes a week, in my experience, and the reason is that when you set your body clock in this way, you get more deep sleep, which is the phase of sleep that's non-REM sleep, during which you do all kinds of things that are good for yourself. First of all, you allow yourself, when you get morning light to make melatonin that night so that you can have better quality of sleep. Second, your brain engages or has the opportunity to engage in brain cleaning using what's

Starting point is 00:16:52 called the glymphatic system. It was discovered in 2013 and the Nobel was given in 2017. It's a phase in deep sleep where the spinal fluid washes over the brain. Brain shrinks actually up to 40% and takes out toxins that have accumulated during the day. So you allow yourself to have efficient brain cleaning if you get morning light because deep sleep only really occurs in the first half of sleep. And also you rebuild bone and you repair muscle during deep sleep.

Starting point is 00:17:28 So you get this much more substantial phase of deep sleep if you get morning light and it affects And that sleep is restorative, just like REM sleep or the phase of sleep that you dream, is restorative to your body. And that's why people feel so much better. Do you think from talking to people that the general idea here is a surprise? I mean, my mother told me when I was four to get outside and play, that there was a real push to go outside, that being outside is good for you.

Starting point is 00:18:04 I can't imagine that's a surprise to anybody. Oh, yeah. And the reason is that much younger generations are so used to having a screen-centered existence. When I was young, I was told to go outside and play and not come back until dinner, and that seemed normal, but it no longer is. And it's resulted in real medical problems, not just the burnout and belly fat and bad sleep and brain fog I ticked off before. But in young people, especially, it's resulted in myopia or near-sightedness. And half the planet actually will need glasses by 2050. As I've said, we need bright daylight. And outdoors is 25 to 50 times brighter than indoors,

Starting point is 00:18:51 even though indoor light, especially in TV studios and grocery stores, seems really bright. It's actually not compared to the outdoors. Bright daylight releases dopamine in the, the eye, which tells the eyeball to stop growing longer. And when you're indoors with dim indoor light, even with screens, there isn't enough release of dopamine. So the eye keeps stretching and elongates. And that elongation and almost distortion of anatomy is very common. So for people who don't spend a lot of time outdoors, what do you suggest they do when they get there? Like,

Starting point is 00:19:32 okay, so I'll go outside, but now what? I like to start with listening when I take people on tours, because often when you hear sounds within the first 30 seconds of listening, wherever you are, it's not in the middle of Fifth Avenue, let's say, but in a green space, in a park, you hear a number of sounds right away, and then if you listen for 30 seconds more, you almost always hear sounds you didn't hear the first time,

Starting point is 00:20:02 but we're actually still there. And that's your parasympathetic nervous system, your breast and digest nervous system kicking in so that you can use your senses. And of course, my favorite thing to do outside is move. You know, if you sit 10 hours, your DNA reads that as eight years older than your birthday age. But 30 minutes of movement daily offset it.

Starting point is 00:20:26 So there are a lot of people who sit 10 hours a day in front of a computer on a couch, watching a T-3, that is making them biologically older. So what you want to do is move a minimum of 30 minutes a day, and that can be simple walking, because walking outdoors is the most effective exercise for lowering all-cost mortality. When we move outside, we are doing more than simply exercising our muscles.

Starting point is 00:20:52 We're getting a lot of other biological input from air quality, which is almost always better outside than inside. and from the microbes in that air, which help us, from the distance that we see, your eyes need distance to reset. And we are using soft fascination, which is how our brain interprets the leaf movement or the bird song. Soft fascination is allowing the brain to make sense of a natural shape,

Starting point is 00:21:29 which is actually much easier for it to make sense of hard rectangles and pixels on a screen. And the timing matters. It's not just minutes outside. It's when you go and what you do when you're there really matters. And this just feeds directly into sleep. Going to bed every night at the same time actually cuts mortality risk by 19%. This is a study of 60,000 people using wearable trackers over eight years. And we don't think about sleep as a lever with going outside, but one bad night of sleep flips two hormones.

Starting point is 00:22:07 Your ghrelin, which is your hunger hormone that climbs up and your leptin, with your fullness hormone drops. So when you have bad sleep, you wake up hungrier and you stay hungrier all day. And your cortisol level goes up and you begin to store visceral fat more. And visceral fat is an inflammation factory. And that's, you know, for men, it turns testosterone into estrogen. And it's one reason why one bad about the sleep makes the next pound harder to lose. Well, based on what you said, clearly this is important. And yet with younger generations not used to being outside, and then, of course, COVID didn't help that at all,

Starting point is 00:22:49 it's not only getting them outside, but getting them to enjoy being outside and engaged and having fun because of the benefits that they'll get. I've been speaking with Dr. John Lapuma. He is a board-certified physician and author of the book, Indoor Epidemic. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. John, thanks for coming on. Thank you so much for speaking with me. You use it every day. You learned it before you could read.

Starting point is 00:23:19 And yet, most of us know almost nothing about it. It's the alphabet. Why does English have 26 letters? and why are they in that particular order? Why does the letter Q seem incapable of going anywhere without the letter U tagging along right behind it? The alphabet may seem simple, but behind those 26 symbols is a story filled with ancient civilizations,

Starting point is 00:23:45 accidents of history, power struggles, and some surprisingly odd rules that still shape the way you read and write today. Here to uncover this fascinating hidden history is linguist, writer, researcher, and broadcaster Danny Bate. He's author of a book called Why Q Needs You. Hey, Danny, welcome to something you should know. Hello, Mike. Thank you very much for having me. You know, we've had several guests on through the years talking about the English language,

Starting point is 00:24:15 and we always talk about words and phrases and sentences, but we so seldom, if ever, really talk about the alphabet. And I claim to not know much about it. Yes, absolutely. And firstly, nobody should ever berate themselves for not thinking about the alphabet in certain ways. I think it's kind of a victim of its own success. It fits so unobtrusively into our modern lives that we don't really give it a second thought, and that's just fine. But I'm here to tell people where it comes from.

Starting point is 00:24:46 And the short answer is Egypt a very long time ago. And is it possible to drill down into actual... people or small groups of people? Not people that I can name for you. I mean, I can't give them a snappier title than, say, West Semitic dialect speakers in Egypt, which is pretty long-winded, but it's as close as we can get to the Alphabet's innovators. To unpack that term, what I have in mind is a population of people working and living and well-integrated into ancient Egypt. But crucially, at least linguistically, they aren't Egyptians. They are native Egyptian speakers. They have their own language, a language that's kind of like a great,

Starting point is 00:25:29 great uncle to today's Arabic and Hebrew, and they look at Egyptian hieroglyphs, which are already very old, and say, well, we want in on that. Your writing system's working really well for you, so we're going to take it as the basis for our own brand new system. And when they do that, our alphabet is born. And so how did the English alphabet emerge from Egypt where they weren't speaking English? Sure. I mean, there's a few thousand years in between the ultimate invention of the alphabet and eventually meeting the English language, to be clear, the spoken English language, which is in England. So if we put the birth of the alphabet in, let's say, 1900 BC, the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, as I mentioned, it goes on this long journey, and via the Greeks and via the Romans,

Starting point is 00:26:18 it eventually meets spoken English in England, specifically southern England, round about the year 600 AD. So, you know, 2,000 years really between invention and meeting English and being put to good use in the writing down of English. And English and the alphabet have been partnered up ever since. I think everybody who uses the language, which is, you know, everybody listening to this, wonders why the language and the alphabet is the way it is. Why, for example, the title of your book, is there always a U after Q? Why is A the first letter?

Starting point is 00:26:57 Well, let's start with that. Why is A the first letter? So this is part of the joy of studying the history of the alphabet. A is clearly one of the original gang of the alphabet. Certain letters have come and gone. Certain letters have been added or developed out of others over the history. history, but A is right there at the very beginning. It doesn't really look like A. It looks actually more like a cow's head, because it is a cow's head to begin with, a sort of pictographic

Starting point is 00:27:23 version. It doesn't even stand for a vowel at this early point in time. And even things like the alphabetical order, which we still sing in our English lessons to this day, is a little bit mysterious. Clearly there was a logic that is somewhat lost to us. My favorite theory is that it's a sort of mnemonic to begin with, a kind of aide memoir that would help young Bronze Age learners of the alphabet to remember all the letters. But when you say A is one of the original gang and that letters have come and gone, what letters have come and gone? It all depends on what part of the family tree you take. So if you take, let's say, the English branch of the family tree, we can see slowly in English and the use of the alphabet in Western Europe over the Middle Ages.

Starting point is 00:28:14 We see things, for example, like J emerging. J slowly develops out of I. We also see U and V slowly separate themselves from each other. And that's a process that's really not complete until the modern era. Someone like Samuel Johnson or Noah Webster might have still thought of them as kind of one in the same letter, but almost two letters. by that very late point in the day. Other ones that have been invented since the early days, like W, for example, that comes in slowly after the days of ancient Rome, and then English has lost them. So if people know a little bit of Old English, that's 2,000 years ago, very, very different, it's basically a foreign language. There are letters in Old English that we don't use today,

Starting point is 00:28:58 like Thorn, which is used to write down the T-H sound, Th, and also the slightly different version. That's very useful, but it's just fallen by the wayside for various linguistic and social reasons. Well, can we bring it back? I mean, that's great. You know, the TH sound in English is so common, it'd be great to have one symbol for that double-letter sound. Can you, I mean, you're a linguist. Can you bring it back? Well, the short answer is yes.

Starting point is 00:29:28 I'm afraid that people who take great pride in the alphabet, and that's absolutely fine. But if they are working with the idea that the alphabet's fixed, it's really not. It has never been fixed. You only need to go back as far as, say, the year 1900s. And to find a full written-out version of the alphabet, you'll find a slightly changed version. For example, you might find ampersand, the little and-symbol. You'll find that typically at the end. That's a quite common hallmark of the alphabet in English usage in the 18th and 19th century. It's never. been fixed from day one. The way that the letters look has changed, the way that they're written on the page, the direction of writing, what sound they stand for. The only thing that has remained constant is the overall principle, the overall ideal, that it should be one symbol for one sound. That's the fundamental alphabetic principle, and it's still arguably there. Everything else is in flux. So since it is the title of your book, I really, and I have always been curious why Q can never stand by itself. It always has to have a you after it, because who says so?

Starting point is 00:30:40 I would say, who says so? I would pin this on the door of the Romans. Basically, Q, just like A, is one of the original members of the gang, and it probably starts out life as a kind of a pictographic monkey. I think that's the strongest theory that Q looks like a. monkey and it stands for the consonant at the beginning of the inventor's word for monkey, like a kind of k' sound, it's not quite k' but it's a bit different. So it fully deserves its place in the alphabet to begin with, but as the alphabet and as that letter passes through very different kinds of spoken languages with very different sounds, it becomes superfluous.

Starting point is 00:31:21 It passes through the hands of the Greeks, where it stands for k, plain old k, the Greeks then drop it because they have cappa, they don't need this Q letter. It survives long enough to make it into Italy, where the Romans are based, and the Romans are really ruthless with the ancient alphabet. They really prune dead letters that their spoken language, which is Latin, doesn't need. They get rid of K, for example, and they, in favour of C, but they keep Q around, because for their ears and in their brains, quo, as in a word like quis, who, in Latin, or, I don't know, equit meaning knights. Because of that, that slightly different quh sound, it's, they think of that something different. And consequently, consequently, it can keep its own spelling so long as it's

Starting point is 00:32:09 partnered up with you. So it's, it's no, there's no, I'm not being dramatic to say, you to spell that particular sound in combination with Q, save the life of Q. If it hadn't been for that, and that Roman sort of system of sounds, Q would have gone the same way as K. Is it an absolute rule? In other words, you know, English is so full of exceptions. Are there any words where Q stands alone that defy that rule? Oh, absolutely, yes. They just tend to be more recent arrivals in the language, or rivals or inventions. So I have a quirky keyboard before me right now, but also people who either love Chinese culture or the game Scrabble, maybe particularly fond of the concept of chi, which because of the Chinese,

Starting point is 00:32:57 Chinese romanization of letters is spelt QI. Also lots of words that come in from, say, Arabic, where we're trying to spell a particular Arabic consonant. We might use Q on its own for that. But these are more recent. The vast majority are spelled with a U because that's the Roman way. And English has just been so influenced by Rome. So English does have all these bizarre things in it.

Starting point is 00:33:21 And my sense is it's just because it's been around a while and things get, but we have like silent letter? Why do we have silent letter? If they're silent, why do we need them? So the thing about silent letters, I'm a fairly reluctant defender of them, because sometimes they can serve a purpose. I mean, I don't know, if you take out the silent GH from night and fight, the pronunciation changes. You get knit and fit. So they can contribute things maybe without much appreciation. Some silent letters have just always been silent and they contribute nothing. they're there for various cultural reasons. So big fans of the Renaissance and the humanistic period, people who love Latin and Greek, they're responsible in, let's say, the 15th century, 15th, 16th century,

Starting point is 00:34:08 for putting the B back into words like debt and doubt, because they come from Latin words that had B. They've never been pronounced in English, though. Other examples of silent letters are actually cases of letters that have fallen silent within the history of English. So we know. say from poetry, a literative poetry of the Middle Ages, that a word like Neil with a silent K was once canale. It was pronounced. It's just the standard spelling is set and then the letters fall silent because speech drops them from pronunciation. Totally normal sound change. It just happened after English spelling starts to solidify and a standard starts to emerge. So I don't know, words like I mentioned silent

Starting point is 00:34:55 G.H. That was once always pronounced. And if you start pronouncing the GH in night and fight, it starts to sound like German or Dutch for good reason. And yes, silent K at the beginning of no, silent G, at the beginning of nor, silent W at the beginning of write and writing, they were all once pronounced, but they've fallen silent. We also have words in English where we have double consonants, where it seems as if one would be fine. You know, we have two C's in raccoon. But if you took one C away, you'd still say raccoon. And it happens a lot. So why do we do that? Yeah, it is interesting. It's something that I think doesn't get that much love as a system of English. We like to double our consonant letters and yet not pronounce them as two. So I don't know, an Italian

Starting point is 00:35:42 speaker has absolutely no problem pronouncing a double D or a double C as if it were a long consonant sound, as in a word like, I don't know, Capuchino is slightly held for longer, but English doesn't do that. So we spell words, really common words like, I don't know, letter and better, and I don't know, something like grammar with a double M. And we don't pronounce it grammar. It's just a single sound, grammar. What's going on is that English has innovated this system where the double letter is not telling us about the sound, the consonant that it represents.

Starting point is 00:36:19 It's actually telling us about the value. that comes immediately before. So you can test this for yourself. If you take out one of the T's from better, you might instinctively pronounce it beta. It's the E. The first E is going from an E to an E vowel. And this is something that English has been doing for centuries. And it works. It really works. It allows us to spell the difference between a hatter, as in the mad hatter, and a hater. It's all a matter of the double T, despite the fact that the T remains the same in pronunciation. I've argued that this is actually still alive in English reading and writing today because you have the platform Instagram, if I may mention an app, and if you want

Starting point is 00:37:04 to be Instagrammed and not Instagrammed, you need to double the final M. So this is very much a living process where we are computing a system that tells us about the sound of vowels. I just think that's genius and it really does deserve to be better known. Explain if you can why we We very commonly in English have a silent E at the end of words like cope, dope, where the E makes the O long. But it's two letters away. So it's like, how does it, how does it, how does it seems like a weird thing? It is this, it's one of the quirks of English. It's something that other languages would find a bit odd in the abstract.

Starting point is 00:37:47 But nonetheless, we manage it. and in the same way that we're using constant letters to spell more sounds, we're also using, you know, magic E. It's often known as magic E, or the technical and duller term is split digraph, that as you correctly say, the E is at a distance, it's separated by some other letter. And this is basically that English has more vowel sounds than the alphabet can spell. So we've had to innovate somehow. Once upon a time, that final E, that magic E, that's fallen silent would have been pronounced. It would have been pronounced at a distinctive sound if you go back over the centuries, but being at the end of the word, being very liable to kind

Starting point is 00:38:28 of be muffled in pronunciation, unstressed in the words, it falls silent. And yet at the same time, in spelling, it can require or it can gain new employment, which is then, as you, as you quite rightly say, helping us to pronounce more vowels. Because, you know, we think of the vowels of English as A E-I-O-U, but that's just the alphabet. That's just the letters that we've been given by antiquity. English vowel sounds, so much more of them, so many. I mean, you know, there's the O and A, and O, and O, and A, all of these letters that don't have their own distinctive letter. So since the late medieval period, we've had to innovate, and one of the ways we've done this is to use that silent magic E. And, hey, it works. The order of the alphabet, is it

Starting point is 00:39:16 random, is there a method and of the madness to it, or it isn't really worth discussing? I mean, why is it ABC, D, EFG? Well, this brings me back to that really quite mysterious point in time, where we're just working with fragments. And this is the kind of frustrating thing that, you know, you might think, well, it should be obvious. We have all this evidence for the history of the alphabet. But if you think about your own daily life, how often since school, have you, in general, as native English writers and readers, written out the full alphabet. It's something we do when we're learning, but it doesn't really tend to come later on in life.

Starting point is 00:39:57 And that will affect our sources. So it is a little bit mysterious, working through a few fragments of basically Bronze Age homework and hoping they can tell us something about why the order is that particular way. As I mentioned, it's probably a mnemonic. It's probably a kind of way of remembering the letters. But it's not the only way. There is not a way. There is an alternative that we do have evidence for. And in some, most, you know, of the branches of the family tree, this ABC order becomes the norm. But if you go into related members, other branches in what is East Africa, the Horn of Africa,

Starting point is 00:40:34 languages like Amharic in Ethiopia that use a distant relative of our own alphabet, they actually use a different order, an equally ancient different order. And basically either could have done the job because it's not fixed. It wasn't a given. Yeah. Well, when you think about it, I mean, the order is not all that relevant today. I mean, the order of letters today is probably more relevant on the QWERTY keyboard than it is on the alphabet on top of the blackboard in the classroom. Well said.

Starting point is 00:41:06 Absolutely well said. It's all about does it serve a purpose? And the layout of the keyboard or the layout of the keyboard on your phone, for example, is perhaps the most. is perhaps the most relevant to lay out for us today. As I say, none of this is eternal. It's all bound up with the needs of whoever happens to be using the alphabet. Is it in other languages, as it is in English, and I don't know why it is in English, that we have letters that have two very distinct sounds.

Starting point is 00:41:34 And in some cases, both distinct sounds in the same word like circus, where the C is hard and the C is an S sound. Is that unusual in language or and why do we have it? If you set sounds as the foundations, they're going to get away from you because speech naturally changes in a way that really doesn't come naturally to writing. So let's take the Roman version of the alphabet around the year one, one AD, 1 BC. It works really well for Latin. They've been very ruthless. They've pruned the letters, any dead weight that they don't need that they got from the Greeks. And yet then, the sounds of everyday spoken Latin, especially in other regions of the empire, are changing.

Starting point is 00:42:20 They're shifting. So the difference between soft and hard sea, in a great word like circus, is all to do with changes in speech. And that's not really reflected in spelling. The spelling with the two seas has remained perhaps conservative and has remained the same. That's something that's happened in what you might call late or vulgar or popular everyday Latin. affected the pronunciation of French and Italian and Spanish, and the spelling has been taken on into English as well.

Starting point is 00:42:48 Then we have English's own versions. So something like the A in a word like ant and the A in a word like Able, once upon a time would have sounded much closer to each other. But a distinctly English shift at the end of the medieval period called the Great Vowel shift, and trust me, it really does deserve to be called the Great Vowl Shift, it separates the pronunciation of the vowel in these two words. They go in two different directions. So it's, a long story short, sound change.

Starting point is 00:43:17 And sound change is basically stretch the alphabet's capabilities. Well, what a great explanation of the alphabet and how it got here. I just, you know, I've never learned this before. I find it really interesting. Danny Bate has been my guest. He is a linguist, a writer, researcher, and broadcaster, and he has a book out called, YQ Needs You.

Starting point is 00:43:38 And there's a link to his book in the show notes. Danny, great job. I appreciate your time. Thank you very much for having me. It's been a pleasure to talk to you. What do women notice first about a man? If you think the answer is six-pack abs, think again. Researchers who study attraction have found that while physical appearance certainly matters,

Starting point is 00:44:03 it's often not the first thing women respond to. eye contact, a genuine smile, posture, and the way a man carries himself can have a surprisingly powerful effect. In fact, one of the most consistent findings in attraction research is that confidence boosts attractiveness. Not arrogance, not showing off, confidence. Men who appear comfortable in their own skin, relaxed, and self-assured, they tend to be rated as more attractive than men who are physically similar, but seem uncertain or insecure. As for physical features, studies suggest women often notice the face first, especially the eyes and smile, along with overall grooming and style.

Starting point is 00:44:49 Height can play a role, but it's far from the whole story. So if you're looking to make a good first impression, forget obsessing about your biceps. The simplest way to appear more attractive may be to stand up straight, smile, make eye contact, and act like you belong in the room. And that is something you should know. I always appreciate your willingness to help, help us grow our audience, and the best way to do that is to tell someone you know,

Starting point is 00:45:16 share an episode with a friend, and it's amazingly effective, and we appreciate it. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

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