Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Ig-pay Atin-lay (Sorry)

Episode Date: December 30, 2020

Turns out we have little kids from the 19th century, the Three Stooges, and an odd musical composer named Arthur Fields to thank for pig latin. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck and Dave and Jerry are both here

in spirit. And this is short stuff. I'm sorry. This is or Shay of stay. I had a hard time with this episode research wise because this house stuff works article keeps talking about what a joke it is and how easy it is. And it's like, it's not the enigma code, but I didn't do pig Latin growing up. So it just still confuses me. Like I get it, but I like, I don't just hear someone speak it and I can say, oh, this is what they're saying. And I have to write it down and move a bunch of dumb letters around. Right, right. Yeah, you I'm right there with you. Like I have to stop and think about it, you know, how to say a certain word or spell it or what somebody's saying is very difficult too.

But I think that's kind of because pig Latin, it wasn't like the cool thing when we were growing up where we younger, we probably, or I should say way, way older, we probably would have been a little better at pig Latin. It's just, it is very easy to learn the rules of it are very easy, but to speak it fluently would be, I'm sure very difficult and take a lot of practice for sure. Sure. Yeah. And there are so many more things that you can do with your time. They're more constructed to try and be fluent in pig Latin. But when you're a little kid and the only, the only thing to play with is a hoop with a stick that you chase down the hill, pig Latin is pretty attractive. You know what I mean? Yeah. So pig Latin is, we'll talk a little bit about

the history in a sec. But basically, if you take the word cat, and we got this from the House of Works article at way, is way, IgPay, at and lay, what is pig Latin? See, that annoys me just reading it. So what you do with cat, it would end up as at K. So you take the letter at the beginning of the word, move it to the end, add the syllable A Y, and that's sort of it, right? That, I mean, that, that is all there is to it. So you'd have at K. That's pretty simple, at K. And that's it. I mean, that's all there, there really is to it. Like if you run into a word that has a couple of syllables, they use the example of curtain. There's a couple of things you can do. You can say, Erton K, that's what I would do. But if you were like fluent in pig

Latin, you might say, I don't know, each syllable gets messed around with this. So you have Erkay 10 A, no, Erkay 10 A, which I mean, like almost no one's going to know what you're talking about, especially at first. But if you and your buddy are really good at pig Latin, then you've got your own little language that no one can, can come into. And in your world, this is a shatter proof. That's right. And there were some predecessors to pig Latin, dog Latin and hog Latin, which they think the name hog Latin might have eventually gotten to pig Latin, even though dog Latin and hog Latin were not anything like pig Latin. Apparently, it was just like a fake Latin that people made up like Shakespeare. I think it did a little, I think dog Latin. And it's funny, they

really explained the Shakespeare passage, which I don't even think we should get into. But at the end... Oh, no, no, no. You be costarred, I'll be holophonies. All right, geez. Okay, everyone, we present to you a dramatic reading from Shakespeare's Love's Labor Lost. Oh, I'm costarred. Yeah, you're costarred. Man, this is why our TV show didn't work. Oh, wait, I'm Chuck. All right, costarred. Go to thou hast it, add dunghill at the fingers ends, as they say. Oh, I smell false Latin, dunghill for ungum. And then... Oh, wait, wait, wait, and scene. Oh, okay. And scene. We can't go over that again. So this article takes great pains to explain all that.

And then at the very end says, the joke is much funnier when you explain it at length. I'm like, no, that's never been true for any joke ever. Right. Well, so, but the point is, is like what Shakespeare was calling this dog Latin or hog Latin or dog Latin is basically more like cockney rhyming slang than what we think of as pig Latin. He was replacing dunghill for ungum, which is fingernail, which was... Right. Pretty clever wordsmithery, right? And it's funny, like it's pretty rich. The two of us just mocking Shakespeare right now, but this was like not... It has nothing to do with pig Latin, even though they're like clearly hog Latin, was a direct predecessor of pig Latin. Even if they aren't similar, somebody said,

oh, we'll call this one pig Latin rather than hog Latin. Yeah. And I think even Edgar Allan Poe mentioned both dog and pig Latin, sorry, dog Latin and pig Greek. Yeah. And this was pretty disparaging of those. But again, it was not the pig Latin that we know. And maybe we should take a break and talk about when that dumb thing came around right after this. KOA. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there

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Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, Chuck. So Pig Latin, as we understand it, was around by the late 1800s at the latest, they think. Yeah, that was, I think in 1896, it was in the Atlantic, rather. It says, they all spoke a queer jargon which they themselves had invented. It was something like the well-known Pig Latin that all sorts of children like to play with. And it looks like it was invented by kids to talk about stuff that their parents couldn't understand. That totally makes sense. And again, here's where that famous enigma code line comes in, that the parents could crack it pretty easily. The point was, I think maybe that it became

cute and just widely appreciated because maybe, this is my own personal theory, kids thought that they were speaking in a way their parents couldn't understand. And their parents did fully understand, so they allowed it to keep going on as the secret language with this kind of like little bit of delight at the childhoodness of the whole thing. That's what I think. That's why I think Pig Latin got traction originally. Yeah, and it's kind of weird that I have such contempt for it because I've seen examples in movies and in real life where it usually seems like young girls have made up their own little secret language. And I just find that exhaustively adorable and very funny and cool. But

there's something about Pig Latin that just Uggs bae me. Oh, good one. Good one, Chuck. That was very good. Yeah. So one of the things that I love about Pig Latin are twofold, and they both come in the early 20th century. So Pig Latin basically had its golden age, its heyday, where it was part of the popular culture in like the first three or four decades of the 20th century. And it showed up, Chuck, in this song called Pig Latin Love, which was an Arthur Fields record from 1919. And did you listen to it? Of course. It's adorable. I looked. It's cool. I looked everywhere to see if it's in the public domain and couldn't find it. So I'm not sure if we can play anything. Oh, it's got to be. I would think so too. So we'll say, let's play a little bit here. And then if

you don't hear anything, it means that we found out it is in the public domain, in which case, go look it up yourself. But here's a little clip of Pig Latin Love by Arthur Fields, maybe. Crackly goodness. It really is. And so I just think it's an adorable song. But the fact that somebody had a popular song about this shows just how popular it was at the time, how prevalent it was in Pig culture and pop culture. I'm sure in pig culture, they're like, stop making fun of us. We don't talk like that. Yeah. We used to have an old Victrola with some old records. And it was always kind of fun to put those on. Like we never did it as a family, like sit around and listen to them. But when friends would come over at Pop One On, it's kind of cool. My dad had Jackie Gleason

records. Oh, nice. And I used to tell him that they were so square, the records themselves were square. He would be like, what do you mean? That's great. So the other use I think you were probably talking about was the Three Stooges, right? Yeah. Did you watch that too? I didn't actually. I didn't get around to that one. It's just adorable. I can't wait to do our episodes on the Three Stooges, or five, six, seven part episodes on the Three Stooges. But there's a particular one in 1938 called Tassels in the Air, where Moe and Larry are trying to teach Curly Pig Latin. It's a good like full minute or so lesson on Pig Latin. Curly just can't quite pick up. But so he's like, so I'm O. May, and that's Airy Lay, and you're early, and Curly goes, cue. They're like, no,

I think he gets slapped as a result, but it's pretty cute. So here's the deal though. Pig Latin is not, I mean, technically it's a language, but it's really something called back slang, or a coded language. It's not like, I know we covered Esperanto many, many years ago on the show, and like Klingon, those are really invented languages with vocabulary and grammar and syntax, and they don't rely on English as the basis of it. This is not that. No, there's no Pig Latin without English. That's it. And it follows all of the same vocabulary rules. And like you said, syntax and everything that English follows, it's just you're rearranging it a little bit. One of the other categories that Pig Latin qualifies

is a coded language. Like the reason that this is done is to disguise what you're saying, even if it is not just kind of a feeble attempt at disguise, it still qualifies it as a coded language. Yeah, and there are examples of stuff like this in other countries. Apparently in France, there's something called Verlán that switches up the first and last syllables of a word. Spanish has heregonza. Oh, nice. I guess that's how you pronounce it. I would guess so. Where you double the vowels and put a P between them. So Gato, which is cat, is Gabatopo, which sounds kind of cool. It does. You take Japan. Okay, Japan has something. I was asking Yumi about this. She knew exactly what I was talking about. Of course she did. It's called

Babigo, B-A-B-I-G-O. And G-O indicates a language in Japan. So like English Go or something like that would be the English language. This is like Bubba language. And it's because you insert B sounding syllables into the already extant syllables of a word. So Sushi becomes Tsubushibi. I love that word. Yeah, Tsubushibi. Tsubushibi? Yeah, and that's Babigo in Japan. Let's go get some Tsubushibi. I just think it's so great that everybody's like, this language is interesting, but we could make it even better. Let's try. Yeah, kids. Yeah, kids are great. Well, you got anything else? Got nothing else. I don't either. So, here we go. Or stay off, no. Or she off stay to away. What's that? All right.

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