Something You Should Know - The Psychology of Brand Loyalty & The Strange History of Everyday Words

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Starting point is 00:00:27 Today on something you should know, Just how safe are elevators? Do accidents happen? Then the strategies major brands used to earn our loyalty, like Starbucks. Pumpkin Spice Latte was a winner for Starbucks from the first year they launched it. It took a lot of courage for them as a brand to turn it off. And you could imagine that if Pumpkin Spice Latte could be bought in May, would it be as exciting? Also, why your grocery store moves things around just when you learn where everything is? And where do words come from, and why do some stick around and others fade away?

Starting point is 00:01:08 The way that words stick around is when they bubble up naturally, without you're really noticing, like the word selfie, for example. It's such a useful word, and we didn't have that word, you know, 30 or 40 years ago. All this today on Something You Should Know. It's the matcha or the three ensemble Cicot of Cephora of the FET that I've been deniches who energize all the time? Mm, it's the ensemble.

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Starting point is 00:02:03 advice you can use in your life. Today, something you should know with Mike Carruthers. You know, I'll bet there isn't a person alive who has ridden in an elevator and not wondered, well, what if the cable snapped?

Starting point is 00:02:19 What if this thing went into free fall? Well, that is the question. we're going to begin with today on this episode of something you should know. Hi, and welcome. I'm Mike Carruthers, and well, here's the good news, first of all. The chances of you riding in an elevator and the cable snapping and the car going into free fall is almost zero. In fact, there's only one case of a free-falling elevator caused by a snapped cable. It happened in 1945 when a B-25 bomber crashed into the Empire State Building. The elevator plunged 75 floors, and incredibly the woman inside survived.

Starting point is 00:02:59 What happened was the broken cable coiled beneath the car, acting like a spring, and cushioned the fall when the elevator hit it. Engineers at MIT later calculated that if you ever found yourself in a falling elevator, your best chance of survival would be to lie flat on your back in the center of the floor. That spreads the impact evenly across your body. But the reality is almost all elevator-related injuries and deaths, and there's about 30 of them a year, they're all because of door malfunctions or maintenance accidents, not falling elevator cars.

Starting point is 00:03:39 And when you compare the risks, you're 60 times more likely to die on a staircase and 15 times more likely to be hurt on an escalator than in an elevator. So the next time those elevator doors close and you feel that little bit of anxiety, you can relax because statistically speaking, you're standing in one of the safest places you could possibly be. And that is something you should know. So every day you buy from certain businesses and stores and restaurants, and you don't buy from plenty of other ones. You choose where to spend your money. but why? Why do so many people default to Amazon when they want to buy something? Why are some

Starting point is 00:04:25 restaurants packed and others sit empty? Why does Apple have customers who'd never dream of switching brands? The answer lies in behavioral science, the subtle forces that shape our decisions without us even noticing. My guest, Michael Aaron Flicker, has spent his career studying exactly that. He's an entrepreneur, founder of the Consumer Behavior Lab, and he is a regular contributor to Fast Company. He's author of a book called Hacking the Human Mind, the Behavioral Science Secrets Behind 17 of the World's Best Brands. Hi, Michael. Welcome to something you should know. Thanks so much for having me. So I have thought about this topic many times. Why do people, why do I choose certain stores, certain brands, certain restaurants, and not choose others?

Starting point is 00:05:20 And we'll get into some specific brands that are quite fascinating. But generally speaking, what's going on here? So it's our contention that great brands are led by great strategists, great CEOs, CMOs, and they come up with a way to position the brand in the minds of buyers. that's really effective. Sometimes they may know the behavioral science underpinnings of why that's the case, but many times they just are uniquely good at getting us to feel a certain way and then want to buy a certain product.

Starting point is 00:06:00 Behavioral science helps us understand why that might be, what maybe gave them a leg up that maybe they knew about or maybe they didn't. So an example of what you just said that comes to my mind is Amazon and how people just kind of default when they want to buy something to buy it on Amazon. And I'm a prime customer, and we buy a lot of things on Amazon in this house. But I think a lot of it is that, and you talk about this, the sunk cost fallacy that I'd like you to explain, where if you're a prime member, you've already paid for the shipping, so you might as well use Amazon.

Starting point is 00:06:39 The story of Amazon Prime is documented, and his executive leadership team was very worried that offering free two-day shipping could absolutely be abused by customers and drive massive financial disruption. They were worried that it could bankrupt the company by giving such a good offer away for one fixed fee. And so when we talked about some people that just have this amazing insight into humanity, The credit goes to Jeff Bezos, who said, I just believe if we give them this offer, it will really increase their love of Amazon, increase their use of Amazon. And he was right. Today, approximately 83% of U.S. households shop on Amazon. And Amazon Prime shoppers spend, they spend a one-time upfront fee of $139. And then wanting to be consistent with having now invested that upfront fee, they are coming back to the brand more and more. And what the data shows is not only do they come back,

Starting point is 00:07:51 they spend more than their non-prime counterparts. So it's really a win for Amazon to have them made this investment and then come back and shop and spend more because of it. So if the prime strategy is so effective for Amazon, why aren't more retailers using it? You know, it's an interesting question. Walmart, I believe, now has two-day free shipping. So finally, they've gotten to the spot where they're matching the service. But there is something about being a first mover in a category that gives you authenticity in a way replicating other success, sometimes falls short. We call what Amazon has really established here the sunk cost fallacy because it's not necessarily rational, meaning I spent this money for my Amazon Prime membership, but it could be

Starting point is 00:08:54 less expensive at Walmart, and yet I still buy it at Amazon. That desire to want to be consistent with my past behavior may not be rational. It's more emotionally driven, but it is how we act. And it's really a very interesting topic to observe how humans actually behave. Talk about the gold dilution effect and five guys, because it's reminiscent to me of McDonald's in some ways. We're back in the early days of McDonald's. There wasn't a big menu.

Starting point is 00:09:24 It was just a couple of things. Isn't that kind of the same thing? It sure is. But let me set the stage for everybody. it's 1986 and founder jerry morel is walking down the maryland boardwalk with his four sons and so the four sons and jerry become the original five guys and they're walking on this boardwalk and they notice that only one food stand has a massive line and its name was thrash or fries lots of food shops lots of options only one with this massive line and jerry comes up with the

Starting point is 00:10:00 I wonder if that's because they only do one thing, and they do one thing really, really well. They make French fries. And because of that, with that insight, he starts five guys. And today, they have 1,800 stores. They do a $1.6 billion in sales. And they still are basically a burger and fry joint. They do no chicken. They do no salads. They do no ice cream. And they're tapping into what you raised, which is the gold dilution effect. And it's this very counterintuitive insight in behavioral science that if you say that you're good at many things, it is less believable than if you say you're only good at one thing. And the academic study for this comes from University of Chicago 2007. We have a study where we're asking participants to say if they believe

Starting point is 00:10:59 eating tomatoes would be effective at one goal, preventing cancer, and then another group says, how effective would eating tomatoes be at two goals, preventing cancer and helping stop eye degeneration? People rate eating tomatoes as 12% more effective at preventing cancer when it was given as the only benefit compared to when it was listed with other benefits. It's not logical, but we as humans are more confident when we're presented with just one advantage. And of course, this has lots of insights and effects, not just for brand marketers, but for us as buyers and for us as humans that communicate with one another. Let's talk about Apple, because Apple has an extraordinary, devoted customer base like no other.

Starting point is 00:11:52 I mean, people love that brand. Why? Apple has done an encyclopedia's worth of things right to make its brand so successful. When you think about some of the most creative uses of behavioral science that Apple has ever taken advantage of, there's a very clear moment when they first launched the iPod. When Steve Jobs got up on stage, he stood there, he looked out at the crowd, and he pulled the iPod out of his pocket and he said, imagine a thousand songs in your pocket. And that was revolutionary in that moment because other companies had MP3 players.

Starting point is 00:12:39 But the predominant way you spoke about them was five megabytes of storage, high fidelity audio, how many hours of battery life. and what Steve Jobs and Apple took advantage of that in that moment was this idea of concreteness and we become more graspable, more emotionally resident when we use concrete phrases rather than abstract ones. And the behavioral science behind this is really quite interesting. It's 1972 Ian Begg at the University of Western Ontario. Ontario, recruit students, and he reads them two-word phrases. He reads them 20.

Starting point is 00:13:25 I'll just give you a few examples, Mike. Impossible amount, rusty engine. White horse, subtle fault. And he challenges the participants, listen to those phrases, and now write down all that you can remember. And on average, of the 22-word phrases he read, they could recall 23-3. percent of the terms. Now, that's interesting, but what was striking was that only nine percent of the terms were abstract phrases like impossible amount versus concrete terms like white horse were 36 percent recalled. That's a fourfold difference. And what Begg argues is that vision

Starting point is 00:14:14 is one of our most powerful senses. So if you can picture something in your head like a white horse, or a rusty engine, you are much more likely to hang on to that thought and insert it into your mind. And if you think of amazing brands today, Red Bull, it gives you wings, M&M, it melts in your mouth, not in your hand, Skittles, taste the rainbow, Maxwell House, good to the last drop. These are taglines that you can imagine they're concrete and it imprints a vision in your brain. And because of that, they're much more likely to stand out and much more likely to be remembered. Well, I want to ask you about a couple of those because some of them aren't around anymore, and I wonder why. I'm speaking with Michael Aaron Flicker. He's author of the book, Hacking the Human Mind, the Behavioral Science Secrets Behind 17 of the World's Best Brands.

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Starting point is 00:15:39 Yep, it's the most powerful iPhone ever, plus more peace of mind with your bill over five years. This is big. Get the new iPhone 17 Pro at TELUS's dot com slash iPhone 17 pro on select plans conditions and exclusions apply so michael you mentioned like m&Ms melts in your mouth not in your hand Maxwell house coffee good to the last drop people remember those but they don't use them anymore i don't think i don't think they use them and they clearly stuck in people's minds so why don't they use them anymore you know you're getting to a very critical part of brand marketing that you might not expect if you are just a

Starting point is 00:16:25 normal buyer or a normal consumer. And that's that there are humans in these marketing teams and those humans that work in these jobs, they get tired of the campaigns before the consumers get tired of them. And sometimes human nature is they get tired of them even when they're still effective. And people want to be recognized in their corporate jobs. They want to get raises and promotions. And it's much more exciting to say, let's change the tagline or let's change the ad campaign than saying Maxwell House coffee, good to the last drop, was a great tagline for 40 years. Let's continue it. As your new CMO, I say, let's continue it for its 41st year. You know, you can imagine the pressure on white-collar workers to try to change and innovate.

Starting point is 00:17:20 And I agree with you, Mike. I don't know if it was because it was any less effective than the day they started. I'd like to talk about Starbucks pumpkin latte. And I don't know if they're the ones that sort of started this whole pumpkin latte, pumpkin spice thing. They might be. Yes. But tell that story because they're, well,

Starting point is 00:17:43 Go ahead and tell that story. So we're really interested in Starbucks pumpkin spice latte for exactly the reason that Mike you just said, which is that there seems to be an incredible emotional attachment to PSL, pumpkin spice latte. And the question is, why is there such an attachment? And what we really, as we looked at it and we thought about it, there's something emotional that happens with this holiday feeling, this time that once a year it comes around that there's going to be holidays, and it brings up a sense of happiness, a sense of nostalgia.

Starting point is 00:18:30 There's lots of behavioral science academic studies that show that if you can get people to reach into their memory, you can get them to think nostalgically about the past, they a have more of a positive view of you but listen to this b they are less price sensitive to you so if you can get that nostalgic feeling evoked in people they will literally spend more money on your brand how big a part of that whole pumpkin spice thing is the fact that it's only around for a short time. Scarcity is a very powerful human emotion. And when you feel there's only so much of it, it can drive outsized reaction in your own mind,

Starting point is 00:19:22 therefore outsized action in the world. And so Pumpkin Spice Latte was a winner for Starbucks from the first year they launched it. It took a lot of courage for them as a brand. to turn it off. And you could imagine that if pumpkin spice latte could be bought in May, if you could buy it all year, you would have to wonder, would it be as exciting? Would it conjure up nostalgia that creates brand affinity and reduces your price sensitivity if it was available all year? So by making it intentionally scarce, by taking it off the menu for almost 10 months of the year, they create this sense that if you want it, you got to get it now,

Starting point is 00:20:11 and that then helps reinforce the change of season and then nostalgia that you feel. Briefly want to ask you, because it's kind of a legend in the sense that I think it's, well, it's fairly old anyway, is Hagen-Daz. There was this idea that it came out, and I remember people saying that that's not even a real word, and it doesn't mean anything, and it's really an American company. But for whatever reason, it took off. And what was going on there? Foreign branding has been used by lots of brands, even when it's not where they're really from.

Starting point is 00:20:50 Take super dry, super dry, very popular clothing brand, uses Japanese style lettering, but it's actually from the United Kingdom. Or the brand Atari was the word, the word. in Japanese to mean to hit for a target, but it was actually made in Sunnyvale, California. So even Starbucks, which we talked about, by the way, uses lots of Italian-sounding names, espresso, macchiato, Americano, but even Venti, you know, Grande, Trenta, these are all meant to imply Italian lineage, even though they're not Italian. But what's so interesting about us as humans is that just the use of the word Trent Day, just the use of the word Atari implies so much.

Starting point is 00:21:48 So two academics, Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer, 1974, are really interested if they can show the impact of a single word on how we feel. So they bring a number of study participants together, and they show them a clip of a car crash, and everybody sees the same clip of the car crash. And the challenge is to estimate how fast the cars were moving when the accident occurred. Simple enough, straightforward enough. But here's the twist in the experiment. They changed the word, only one verb in the question.

Starting point is 00:22:29 They ask about how fast were the cars going when they, A, contacted the, the wall, B, hit the wall, C, bump the wall, how about collide it with the wall, or how about smashed the wall? Those that heard the word, how fast was the car going when it contacted the wall, guess 31.8 miles per hour. Whereas those that were asked how fast was the car going when it smashed the wall, they guess 40 miles an hour, actually 40.5. There's a 27% increase in their estimate of the speed by just changing one word. And that has real impact for brands, for us when we work interpersonally with people. Even think about the impact on the legal system.

Starting point is 00:23:19 One change of a word when there's a lawyer asking a question of a witness can really change the way they feel and how they respond. So a lot of power in this idea of naming and the power of words. Well, I always enjoy these peek-behind-the-curtain discussions that reveal things about why we buy what we buy and why certain companies are more successful. I've been speaking with Michael Aaron Flicker. He is the founder of the Consumer Behavior Lab, an author of the book, Hacking the Human Mind, the Behavioral Science Secrets Behind 17 of the World's Best Brands. There's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes.

Starting point is 00:24:00 Hey, Michael, this was great. Fascinating. Good stuff. Well, thanks so much for having me on. This was really a pleasure to chat. Hit pause on whatever you're listening to and hit play on your next adventure. This fall get double points on every qualified stay. Life's the trip.

Starting point is 00:24:17 Make the most of it at Best Western. Visit bestwestern.com for complete terms and conditions. You think you understand how this business works, but you don't. Landman, TV's biggest phenomenon returns to Paramount Plus. from Taylor Sheridan, co-creator of Yellowstone, starring Billy Bob Thornton. You have to know the rules of the game and bend them, and you really have to know them to break them. Demi Moore. I want success. Get it for me.

Starting point is 00:24:42 Andy Garcia, Ali Larder, and Sam Elliott. You don't even know the game we're playing, do you? Landman, new season, now streaming. Only on Paramount Plus. Our language is what connects us, but it also divides. us. We have rules for spelling and grammar and pronunciation, but who made up the rules, and who says those rules can't evolve? Is there really just one correct English, or do all the variations that we hear every day have their own kind of beauty? My guest, Martha Barnett, has spent her

Starting point is 00:25:20 career exploring the quirks and creativity of the English language. She's co-host of the radio show and podcast Away with Words, and she's author of a book called Friends with Words, Adventures in Language Land. Hi, Martha. Welcome to something you should know. Hey, thanks for having me, Mike. So I guess we need to know where you stand on all of this. Are you a stickler for proper English, or do you embrace all these variations on English as part of the language where do you fall? Well, that's a really good question because I am an English teacher's kid. And when my beloved mother would hear something mispronounced or misspoken in her class, she would walk to the chalkboard and take her fingernails and put them at the top

Starting point is 00:26:11 and drag them all the way down and say, that's what this sounds like to me. But, you know, over the years, I've learned that there are often good reasons for this or that pronunciation, first of all, that there are a lot of different pronunciations that are perfectly valid. There are actually, I think, something like 20 different pronunciations of the word water just in the United States. You know, you have water in Philadelphia and water and other parts of the country. And, well, think about, for example, we used to get a lot of calls about the expression needs washed. You know, the car needs washed. And I'd have somebody say, you know, I just had a new coworker move to town. And he always says, the cat needs let out or the baby needs picked up.

Starting point is 00:27:00 And that's a vestige of Scots and Irish immigration, because you'll hear this in eastern Ohio, western Pennsylvania, and it's a kind of linguistic fossil. I sometimes wonder, and I imagine people who speak other languages, wonder about their language, if the language is adequate in the sense that there are some things where it's kind of hard to find the words. There aren't really exact words to describe what you want to say, it seems, sometimes. And I wonder if that's true in other languages. It's not as if English is inadequate in expressing ideas. I mean, you can use a lot of words to express an idea more or less.

Starting point is 00:27:46 But, you know, you think about a Portuguese word like Sao Dagi, which, you know, means a kind of homesickness. But it's got all these layers of meaning that we don't have in English. And I think that I have a certain envy about that word because it just, it connotes so much more than I think you can say in English with just the word homesickness. But I suspect that Portuguese speakers probably have the same feeling about English. You know, English is this rich, rich vocabulary. I like to say that if all the languages gave a party, English would be the one going around and looking at everybody's plate and saying, are you going to eat that? Because it picks up words from all over the world. Yeah. But there are words like boyfriend and girlfriend,

Starting point is 00:28:37 which we use like when my dad was, you know, 85, he had a girlfriend. And it just, you know, it doesn't seem right. It's like, you know, a teenagers have girlfriends, but 85 year olds don't have I mean, there's no better word, though. You're exactly right, Mike. And this is a perpetual problem. I mean, everybody I've talked to about this question is frustrated. You know, it's really hard to come up with that right word because paramour doesn't really do it. There's an old word lemon, L-E-M-A-N, which means a lover.

Starting point is 00:29:14 But, you know, it's hard to impose a word like that that doesn't arrive. naturally for people because that one's old and obsolete and I'm I'm not aware of a word like that I mean it's the same thing with with senior citizen that's a question that comes up all the time you know is there a better word for being an older person I still haven't settled on on what I want to call myself yeah but that's that's another good one because that's a horrible term senior citizen it says nothing and it means nothing.

Starting point is 00:29:51 And it conjures up images of some old decrepit, sick, sickly. It doesn't, you're right. It's just so inadequate. Yeah, yeah. And, I mean, think about elderly. That's somehow fragile to me. I've seen recently people have been suggesting welderly if you're in good shape and you are taking good care of yourself.

Starting point is 00:30:16 You're welderly. No, that's not going to be. work yeah exactly exactly because these self-conscious coinages like like seasoned citizen or vintage citizen i mean it's just you know it's it's manufactured it's imposed by somebody else what you want to see in words that the way that words stick around is when they bubble up naturally and they just sort of sort of bubble up without your um without you're really noticing like the word selfie for example it's such useful word. And we didn't have that word, you know, 30 or 40 years ago, but it just kind of began to be used sort of unselfconsciously, you know, somebody, we didn't have a language academy

Starting point is 00:31:02 that said, okay, everybody's going to use the word selfie now to describe this, this term. But, but yeah, if you ever hear of a better word than senior citizen, which just makes me shudder, I would love to hear it. Some people... But that's the problem. If somebody comes up with a word, it's going to be too clever, like, seasons. It is going to be too forced, and no one's going to like it, so. Right. So I guess we just have to grow into that word and see how we keep describing ourselves. So quick turn here and change the topic, but I'm curious, since you study this so much,

Starting point is 00:31:39 like, what are a couple of words that have really interesting origins that I probably don't know? Well, one of my favorites is the word cocktail because you might be surprised to learn that the word cocktail probably comes from an old use of the word cocktail referring to a kind of horse. Because it used to be that people would dock horses' tails. You know, if they were just a mixed breed working horse, not a thoroughbred, they might dock the tail. and the tail would sort of stick up like a cock's tail, like a rooster's tail. And so people would refer to these kinds of horses with docked tails as cocktails. And around the same time, in the early 1800s, people were thinking about mixed drinks as this new thing. It was kind of adulterated.

Starting point is 00:32:36 You know, why would you add ingredients to a perfectly good whiskey or a perfectly good spirit? it. And people consider those mixed drinks adulterated and impure. And so people started referring to these mixed drinks the same way they referred to these horses that were not thoroughbreds. So they refer to these mixed drinks as cocktails. Wow. Well, I've never heard that before. What's another one? What's another word that the origin is something I probably never heard before? Well, I'm struck, of course, by your very voice it's mellifluous and by that I mean it's it's it's beautiful it's got this beautiful sound to it and we use the word mollifluous to describe something that's

Starting point is 00:33:24 that's sweet sounding or or just beautiful and it turns out that the word mellifluis comes from two Latin words that literally mean flowing with honey the melifluis comes from the word for honey that you also see in the French word for honey and the Spanish word for honey, all these languages are connected. And then the fluis in molyfluous has to do with flowing. It's a relative of fluent and flowing. One of the things that I find annoying about English is sometimes there are words that it's kind of the word you have to use and it's really hard to pronounce. I, in fact, just did an interview the other day with someone talking about anthroposurial.

Starting point is 00:34:12 morphism. And it's, every time I say it, I screw it up. It's like, well, couldn't there be an easier word? Well, yeah, that's one of those single words that has a big meaning. I mean, you could say, instead of anthropomorphism, you could say applying human qualities to something else, like an animal or something, right? But we have these handy words in English that come. from Greek and Latin that you hear, for example, in medicine as well, all these really long words. But you're talking about the actual pronunciation of the word, right? Not like reading it in, you know, actually saying it out loud should be easier because this is my native language. You should, you would think it would be fairly easy to say. But that's a tricky word to say. And in fact, even the guy who wrote the book said when he did the audiobook, he screwed it up like every third time.

Starting point is 00:35:15 Yeah, I can understand that. Yeah, I had the same experience reading my audio book. I thought it wasn't going to take time, and it took a good 23 hours to record it. Oh, I would imagine your book would have taken forever because there's so many words in here that I've never heard of. Well, no, there actually aren't that many. What do you find that people tell you they're fascinated by the language,

Starting point is 00:35:39 either because they heard you talk about it or they've always been fascinated or things that bubble up that I might be interested in hearing. Everybody has a story about language. You know, whether it's your little kid who adorably mispronounced a word back in the day and your family just latches onto it and keeps talking about it, keeps using that word.

Starting point is 00:36:05 I'm thinking of a little kid who kept talking about something in the havinet. And the family was saying, what? The habit? And they finally realized the kid was saying cabinet, and they just kept saying that word, even though the kid kept getting older and older and understood the meaning of cabinet. So there are words that people like to talk about that are in their family, that is the language, the individual language of a family. I mean, we have that in our family, and it always comes, or seemingly comes from the child. The child will say something incorrectly or try to say something. And then somehow it's clever or it's cute and it sticks. And we have those words. I imagine everybody has those words. Yeah, I think they do.

Starting point is 00:36:52 And you're right. It's often the child. And sometimes it's even a couple between the two of you. You know, you'll mishear something that your partner says and then you just adopt that because it's so hilarious. And I think another thing that really catches people's ears is regional dialects. You know, you grow up with a term and you've used it your whole life and then you move to another part of the country and people just, I call these conversations, conversations, I call them two-headed conversations where people say, I moved across country. I use this term and people looked at me like I had two heads. I mean, that happened to me. I grew up in Kentucky And that happened to me with the word tump.

Starting point is 00:37:36 Do you know the word tump? Spell it. T-U-M-P. No, never heard it. Gosh, yeah. I mean, my entire childhood, I knew the word tump, as in don't tump over the canoe, don't tump over that glass of water.

Starting point is 00:37:51 And then I went to school in upstate New York, and I said that to somebody once. Don't thump that over, and everybody laughed at me. Nobody had any idea what I was saying, but I'm telling you that your listeners in the South. they're going to know the word tump. Yeah. Well, that's, that is interesting.

Starting point is 00:38:08 And I, you know, I had a similar experience when I was 12 and moved to England and talked American and they looked at me like I was like talking a foreign language because so many of the words I use, they don't. And many of the words they use, I don't. So it just, it's just differences. Oh, yeah. Well, that must have been a really enriching experience, though. I mean, every day you're probably learning new words and phrases.

Starting point is 00:38:33 Right. Well, I was, but I was also saying, well, why are they? I remember this English teacher. I was reading out loud to the class and I, and the word came up vase. And she said, no, no, no, no. It's vase. I said, no, not where I'm from, lady. It's vase. And she said, no, it's vase. And we had to agree to disagree. Well, exactly. And they say of England and America that, you know, there are two countries separated by a common language. But I like to think of languages as this great, diverse, just wealth of different ways of speaking and different ways of pronouncing things. I mean, if you look in dictionaries, you'll see both of those pronunciations, vase and vase as well. You know, I mean, some people put a Z sound in there. So, you know, language is really personal, but it's really important to, if you're going to correct somebody's grammar, to make sure that you're right because some of those rules that you were taught as a kid aren't really valid rules when it comes to linguistics. You know, some of those so-called rules of grammar, even that my English teacher mother taught me, are just arbitrary things that were imposed by 17th and 19. 18th century grammarians who were trying to fit the swollen foot of English into the two tight shoes of Latin grammar. So you are perfectly justified in splitting an infinitive. William Shatner was perfectly justified in saying to boldly go because in Latin you can't split an infinitive. In Latin, the infinitive is one word. So it's just silly to say that you can't do that in English.

Starting point is 00:40:31 And the same thing, I should say, with ending a sentence with a preposition. If anybody tells you otherwise, just tell them that's nonsense up with which you will not put. I'm not going to say that. So what's a word that has a weird origin or just an origin that is very obscure that nobody knows? Well, the term algorithm is really interesting. It is a very modern word, of course, but it goes all the way back. to the ninth century when Baghdad was this international center of learning for scholars. And there was a guy there who did some amazing things with algebra and blew the minds of

Starting point is 00:41:15 European mathematicians with some of the things that he came up with. And his name was Al-Hurizmi. And when they translated his work into Latin, it was Latinized as Al-Goritmi. And that's the source of our English. word algorithm, which is, of course, a set of step-by-step instructions for solving a problem or completing a task. So the word algorithm, you know, it's on everybody's tongue these days, but it goes all the way back to the 9th century. But so much of that time between the 9th century and now, it wasn't used very much, but now it's used all the time. Exactly. And that's what happens a lot

Starting point is 00:41:56 of times with words is they get, they get reappropriated and given different meanings. Talk about silhouette. I like that one. Oh, that's a wonderful one. Yes, silhouette. Goes back to 1759 when France's newly appointed minister of finance was doing all this budget cutting. I mean, he was very unpopular because he just went in there and was cutting people's pensions, he put a tax on windows, for example. He put a tax on trouser cuffs. I mean, he was really, really doing every bit of cost-cutting that he could do. And his name was Etienne's De Silhouette. And he was so unpopular that he got thrown out of office after just eight months. And about the same time, there were these kinds of portraits that became very popular, that were just, you know, just a

Starting point is 00:42:55 well, a silhouette, a little shadow, rather than an expensive painting. You know, you would just trace around the shadow of a person's head, and that would be their portrait. And so those became fashionable, and this was around the time that silhouette was thrown out of office. And so these portraits that were just simple black and white things were called silhouettes after him. Well, I find it interesting that when we talk about language, we talk about the English language as a fairly static thing. Yes, words come and go now and again, but English is English. But it really changes a lot more than people realize. Definitely, language is always changing. It's always evolving.

Starting point is 00:43:45 I mean, the English language has been around for hundreds and hundreds of years, and it certainly sounded different in the time of Beowulf, you know, what we gotter done and yada dogum is the beginning of Beowulf. And we don't talk that way now. It's kind of unintelligible. And every 500 to 1,000 years, you know, a language turns over. It's hard to understand English as it was spoken hundreds of years ago. And that's going to be the case hundreds of years from now. But, yeah, language is always changing. I would say that it's changing faster now because of the Internet and mass media and mass media culture. Because you can just see slang terms pop up so quickly now, like skibbity, you know. I don't know if you've heard youngsters talking about skibbity.

Starting point is 00:44:40 That was a term that kind of has a bunch of different meanings. Skibbidi is kind of a Swiss army knife of a word that can mean really good or really bad. And it comes from this online series that involves a guy's head in a toilet and I won't go into all that. But that just got added to the Cambridge Dictionary, which kind of surprises me because that word has not been around very long. And so we're always watching language change like that. And I think it's changing faster because of the internet and because we're all cross-pollinating each other's language every day. Well, you know, it's so interesting. When you go to English class in school, it's presented as this, you know, this is English. It's very formal. These are the rules.

Starting point is 00:45:25 You must follow these rules. But in real life, the way English seems to work, it's all these influences crashing into each other and evolving and changing the language in a way that's so fascinating. I've been speaking with Martha Barnett, who is a co-host of the radio show and podcast, Away with Words, and author of the book, Friends with Words, Adventures in Language Land. And there's a link to her podcast and the book in the show notes. Martha, thank you so much. Have you ever walked into your favorite supermarket, grocery store, and noticed that everything's changed.

Starting point is 00:46:07 They've moved everything. I already got to know where everything was and now it's somewhere else. Well, why do they do that? Oftentimes, it's done on purpose, because if you don't know where things are anymore, well, you'll end up spending more time in the store looking for them, and more time to browse means more chances to tempt you into buying things. Here are a few other ways that stores get you to spend money. Ten for $10 sounds like a great deal.

Starting point is 00:46:38 However, usually you get the same savings even if you only buy one. And a grocery store survey found that people bought more items when they saw 10 for 10 deals versus 5 for $5 deals and one for $1 deals. Bigger carts. Shopping carts have gotten bigger, so you put more things in it. Research found that when the size of a cart doubled, consumers bought 40% more. And then there's the old eye-level trick. Items that are placed at eye-level on the shelves tend to be more expensive, name brand goods, which are the products the supermarket wants you to buy.

Starting point is 00:47:17 So it's always good to check the shelves that are a little higher and a little lower. And that is something you should know. Something you can do, a small active kindness that would be greatly appreciated, would be to share this podcast. It helps build our audience and keep this podcast going. It's the best thing you can do to support this podcast. And there's most likely a share button on the app that you're using to listen to this. it's really easy to do and tell your friends.

Starting point is 00:47:46 Thanks. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thank you for listening to something you should know. Okay, only 10 more presents to wrap. You're almost at the finish line. But first... There, the last one. Enjoy a Coca-Cola for a pause that refreshes.

Starting point is 00:48:13 Era, you might know it as the time when Bridgeton takes place, or the time when Jane Austen wrote her books. But the Regency Era was also an explosive time of social change, sex scandals, and maybe the worst king in British history. And on the Vulgar History podcast, we're going to be looking at the balls, the gowns, and all the scandal of the Regency era. Vulgar History is a women's history podcast, and our Regency Era series will be focusing on the most rebellious women of this time. That includes Jane Austen herself, who is maybe more radical than you might have thought. We'll also be talking about queer icons like Anne Lister, scientists like Mary Anning and Ada Lovelace, as well as other scandalous actresses,

Starting point is 00:48:52 royal mistresses, rebellious princesses, and other lesser-known figures who made history happen in England in the Regency era. Listen to vulgar history wherever you get podcasts.

Something You Should Know - The Psychology of Brand Loyalty & The Strange History of Everyday Words

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