The Blindboy Podcast - Yeh, Yeh, Yeh, Yeh

Episode Date: August 18, 2021

A podcast about when your ma Inhales the words "yeh, yeh, yeh, yeh" when she's listening to her friend on the Phone. Also known as Ingressive Speech Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ease back you queasy Kierans. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. If you're a brand new listener, maybe go back and listen to some earlier episodes. I often encourage people to begin at the start, so you can familiarise yourself with the lore of this podcast. If you're a regular listener, you know the crack. If you were listening last week, you know that one of my cats is quite ill, so loads of people have been asking me for an update so she's slightly better she's not dead she's not poisoned which is good that's what i thought last week um most likely what's wrong with her is she has a like an abscess in her mouth or her tooth

so she can't eat she's drooling she's quite weak i've been in contact with vets I've been in contact with animal rescue people the only way for me to help her is if I can catch her because she's a wild cat she's feral and I can't get anywhere near her so the vets weren't able to give me a trap neither were animal rescue people

they're all out on hire at the moment people must be trying to catch a lot of fucking cats so currently I'm feeding her beef broth. She's drinking water. She's recovering very slowly. And then when I get that opportunity. To fucking actually catch her.

And bring her to the vets. That's going to happen. So not ideal. But she hasn't been poisoned. So that's fucking. I'm happy with that. And then my other cat. He just keeps eating her fucking beef broth.

Her brother. And I'm like would you stop. Don't be eating your sick sister's beef broth. You capitalist bollocks. I'm feeling contempt for him. Which I don't like. And he's. What was he doing yesterday?

He. He. A moth landed on his arsehole perfectly on his arsehole it was like the the film poster

for Silence of the Lambs with the moth on Geordie Foster's face except it was his arsehole so this moth landed on his arsehole and he just

jumped six feet into the air he's an odd boy but that's the update on the cats she's slightly better it's not ideal but it's not as bad as i thought it was going to be so last week's podcast was it was about irish cultural artifacts it was a podcast that was request requested of me i did a podcast about. The cultural significance in Ireland. Of.

The deodorant Lynx Africa. And Irish teenage discos. So I did that. Because people were asking me. And even after I did it. A few people said to me. On social media. Oh.

After you put out that podcast. About teenage discos and Lynx Africa. They were talking about teenage discos. and Lynx Africa on the radio. They must have been listening to your podcast. And it's like, no, they weren't. It's just that teenage discos and Lynx Africa is the most clichéd thing to be spoken about right now in Irish media, whether it be podcasts or radio. Probably because the people who are making

the content are what you'd call geriatric millennials which is a terrible term but geriatric millennial is the term that's used for millennials who are in their 30s and moving into their 40s

but I enjoyed doing last week's podcast I did enjoy it I do like investigating Irish cultural artefacts and it's a lot of fun and I get to tell anecdotes that I'd forgotten about so I think I'm

veering towards something similar again this week because my brain has just been in that territory like even this week on Twitter there was this really funny viral thread amongst Irish people where someone pointed out that in Ireland if you try and be in any way fashionable in Ireland, if you wear a hat or a piece of clothing that's out of the ordinary in Ireland, especially if it's a

rural place, you run the risk of someone giving you a nickname that will stick with you for the rest of your life. And it can be terrifying. So it forces people into conformity. Unless you live in Dublin, then it's a different story. Then you can wear what you want. But if you live

outside of Dublin and you decide to do something adventurous with your clothes you better be careful because you'll get a nickname that sticks forever I'll give you some real examples ones that I know of like there's a fella in West

in a village in West Limerick and his name is Stile because he wore a leather jacket once to the pub 15 years ago and they decided to call him Stile or there's a

there's a fella and his his name is Spider because his friend saw him buying four pairs of jeans in the shop once which is very good I like that Because his friend saw him buying four pairs of jeans. In the shop. Once.

Which is very good. I like that. Or. This one isn't clothes related. And I can't confirm this. I can't. I heard this one. So I can't confirm if it's true.

But it's too good not to say it. There's a fella. And his real name. Is Wayne Bruce. So his nickname is. Man Bat. Not going to explain that. But that's very clever. And then there's just silly examples.

Like someone said on Twitter that. There was a fella who went to school. And. He ended up with ingrown toenails. So because he had ingrown toenails he had to have them seen to or taken out or something which meant that he had to wear sandals to school

for a week and from then on into adulthood he's called Moses and I don't know how uniquely Irish that phenomenon is but everybody had a fucking example and then the thread went so viral that a lot of americans had seen it and the americans are like wow ireland sounds like a horrible place to live

in but i think i think what i want to do the podcast on this week like i was going to do a hot take this week about the history of wellness culture and how it's rooted in Victorian Germany this is something I was researching but I just I was like I'm going to save that for another week because I couldn't keep my mind away from specific

very strange specific Irish things and just going what the fuck's that about and one thing I'd like to investigate because it's too mad it's just too insane to walk away from it is Irish people and our unique relationship with telephones right and this is a bit of it this is a real geriatric millennial topic because I'm old enough to remember when mobile phones didn't exist. Now it was in my childhood but I remember mobile phones not existing and you had two types of

telephone. There was the public telephone which was in the middle of the road in a box, in a phone box and then there was the phone in your house the house phone of which there was just one most people just had one and it was at the end of the stairs in your hallway and then there was the hybrid between the two

and this was quite rare this is what we had this is what you had if you had a fucking large family because I come from a family of 8 people if you had a fucking large family because i come from a family of eight people if you had a large family then the telephone bill would be very high if eight people are using the phone so we had in my house a hybrid between a fucking public phone and a house phone it was basically a kind operated phone in hallway. So if one of my brothers wanted to fucking make a phone call, my dad's like, there's no way I'm having fucking Ali-E ringing your friends.

I won't be able to afford the telephone bill. So you had to have your own money to put into a phone in your own fucking house. You had to have 20p to put into a coin-operated phone in your own hallway. And that's what we had for a while but Irish people, as a culture we never really relaxed around telephones we kind of treated telephones like a wild animal that needed to be tamed rather than a piece of technology that worked for us it's as if we didn't fully believe, like when we used the telephone,

we didn't really believe that it was doing what it was supposed to do. So we developed these kind of weird adaptive behaviours to try and tame the telephone that we're using. A classic example, and this is something that dads used to do. This is a real male use of a house telephone. So, and I blame this one on emigration in Ireland. So many people having to leave the country. So, depending on how far away the person is that you're ringing,

shouting to accommodate that distance. So if my dad was ringing someone up in Dublin, he would slightly raise his voice because it's like, I'm ringing Dublin from Limerick, I better raise my voice. And if he's talking to someone in London, he's screaming down the phone. And the Irish person that he's talking to in London is screaming down the phone and the Irish person that he's talking to in London

is screaming down the phone at him and both men fully believing that it is perfectly rational to the point that they are destroying the conversation to scream into the phone because the person they're talking to is over in London so that doesn't exist anymore that was house phone behavior mobile phones have

gotten rid of that I think only the oldest of our lads would scream into a mobile phone if the person they're speaking to is that is in another country but mobile phones got rid of that another bizarre Irish phone behavior which still exists which still exists in the mobile phones got rid of that another bizarre irish phone behavior which still exists which still exists in the mobile phone era i fucking do this right is when an irish person says goodbye on the phone we we bid farewell as if it's a type of very friendly automatic weapon like I could be I could be on the phone to someone who's someone I'm working with who's English okay or Welsh and they think I'm insane

because we'll be having a conversation and then they'll say alright goodbye and then I'll say alright best of luck god bless alright bye bye bye bye bye bye bye bye bye bye bye bye bye on this descending, a descending hill of

byes. Bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye. Now, if you're not Irish and you hear that, that sounds fucking demented. That is incredibly strange behaviour. A very bizarre way to say goodbye. And I guarantee

you there's people now working in, people now working in Irish people working in Australia in offices being really professional friendly, doing a fucking great job coming across as otherwise fantastic

people and then Paddy's on the phone to his Australian colleague everything going great and Paddy finishes the conversation with, all right, goodbye, all right, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck, gluck now that shouldn't exist in the mobile phone era but I can understand so I'm trying to contextualise it I can't tell you why it's exclusively Irish I can't tell you that I have a theory around the physicality of house phones

or even public telephones right so in Ireland especially rural Ireland and in particular in older Ireland Ireland before the Celtic Tiger, there was once a time where we as a country were not absolute capitalistic pricks. And in that Ireland, saying hello to people was very important. Saying hello to strangers, you would just say hello to strangers and say

goodbye to strangers this is what happened in Ireland it still happens in rural areas it's quite um socially important so I have two theories two theories as to why Irish people say goodbye 19 times on the phone first theory very simple the fear of the other person thinking that you didn't say goodbye because all telephones weren't reliable they would crackle they would cut out so the Irish person is thinking if I say goodbye once what if that cuts out and then I hang up the phone and I sound rude so instead what I'm going to do is I'm just going to saturate the end of the conversation with as many goodbyes as possible and if one of them gets cut out

grand there's another 18 and I definitely didn't leave the conversation without saying goodbye that's theory number one theory number two is a bit more extreme theory number two again has to do with distance so if your dad is like I better shout really loudly into this phone is a bit more extreme. Theory number two again has to do with distance.

So if your dad is like I better shout really loudly into this phone so the person over in London can hear me because they're so far away. It doesn't necessarily mean that he doesn't understand the phone. It means fundamentally in his heart he doesn't trust it. He doesn't believe

the promise that the phone is making. He's like, I'm going to go along with this phone, but nah, there's something, I don't trust this. So I'm going to scream so the person in London can hear me. We have a cultural distrust of telephones. We view them as a type of English trickery. Classic example, and this is real grandmother behaviour, but your grandmother could be on the phone to like an electrician and then she comes off the phone and she says I was talking to the man in the phone

and in your grandmother's mind at that time like she wasn't talking to a human being on the other end of the phone she was talking to a a miniaturized changeling clone of that person that lived in the phone so what's my other theory as to why Irish people say goodbye 19 times on the phone if you think of the mechanics of using an old telephone so you're holding it up to your ear and then you literally hang it up you take it from your ear and you place it on the receiver. So that's a journey of about a quarter to a half of a second. And I think that when Irish people say goodbye 19 times, they're trying to create the aural effect of walking away from someone.

So if you say goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, it sounds like you're walking away. It's an inverted version of your father screaming on the phone when he's talking to someone in London. It's I'm going to keep saying goodbye as I move the phone away from my mouth and down to the receiver. And that will sound like I'm slowly leaving the room. But yet we still do it. We still do that now with mobile phones. Which makes that particular phone, Irish phone quirk, more bizarre. Because now I'm on a WhatsApp call. High fidelity audio WhatsApp call.

And I'm not taking the phone away from my ear as I hang up because I'm not hanging up I'm pressing a button so I'm not taking the phone away from my ear and I'm just saying goodbye 19 times really quickly and really loudly to a fella called Simon from Northumbria and he's just like what's wrong with this man and I've tried saying goodbye once I've tried just saying goodbye once, it doesn't feel right

it feels like it feels like leaving the toilet without zipping your pants up you know, so I just have to gluck gluck goodbye talk to you later, alright goodbye gl So I just have to. Gluck gluck goodbye bye. Talk to you later. Goodbye. Right.

Gluck gluck gluck gluck gluck gluck. Alright. Gluck gluck. Gluck gluck gluck gluck gluck gluck. So now we're going to get to this. The strangest. Behaviour. That Irish people exhibit.

On the phone. And this is the one. That. I'm going to have to dedicate. The entire of this podcast to. Because. I was battling with it all week. Saying to to myself I can't do a full podcast on that can I?

and then I was like the fact that I'm asking myself that question so much means I have to I have to try like sometimes sometimes it's good to go with the most stupid idea you can think of you know to avoid the fear of failing

go with the most stupid idea you can think of so I'm going to try and dedicate a whole fucking podcast to this one specific thing so this is mostly Irish women occasionally Irish men but very heavily Irish women of a certain age.

Do you remember being a kid, right, and you're listening to your... Your mother is on the phone, usually with a friend, and their friend is telling them kind of bad news. Nothing terrible, but their friend is venting. Their friend is venting their friend is venting and your mother is listening and then as your ma is listening on the phone she starts making this really

alien sound she starts going yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah all of a sudden your mother who you've known only as someone who breathes out

when they speak when your ma speaks usually words come out of her mouth now she's on the phone and it's like the fuck is she's inhaling yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah She's on the phone and it's like, the fuck is... She's inhaling.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's universal. That's Irish women of a certain age on the phone listening to another person. And then the word yeah, agreeing, is now being inhaled. It's now being sucked back into their body. Like, so tell me, Cassandra, did your son wash your Labrador as he promised on Saturday? Did he wash it? He didn't.

Why not? Oh, no. What happened to him? Are you serious? Oh, tell me. And then sometimes they'll go on a tirade of like

and they're inhaling so much in agreement that it starts to colonise the sentences. So they're like, he didn't wash the dog. Oh. What a terrible thing happened to him. Awful.

Terrible. And now they're inhaling a sentence. I'm out of breath even doing that. It's because it's so impractical. When we speak, we breathe out, we don't breathe in. But yet, there's this odd little artefact in Irish speech, specifically older Irish women,

and they do this when they're speaking to other women. It's a marker of empathy. It's a way of listening. And what the fuck is that? What in the love of fuck is that? So I had to embark on a journey to find out what is it called? Has anyone studied it?

Is it present in other parts of the world? Is it uniquely Irish? And why the fuck does it exist? So that's what I want to look at with this podcast. Now it is worth noting too, I don't hear it as much anymore. It's very, very rare that you hear, especially a younger person, you hear a younger person. No one is like. It doesn't. I don't hear it. I don't hear it anymore. But.

One thing I'm wondering is. Do I need to apply white dog shit theory to this? Which this is a theory I've used before. So. White dog shit. When I was a child. There was lots of white dog shit. Okay? Now I'm an adult, I don't see white dog shit anymore. Does that mean that white dog shit doesn't exist because they've changed the diets? Or, because I'm not a child child I'm just not in the areas where white dog shit is.

When I was a child hanging around on the road, hanging around fields, spending a lot of time on the ground I was encountering a wealth of dog shit in general and therefore I saw a lot of white dog shit. Okay so here's the thing with yeah yeah yeah yeah is that the white dog shit of Okay. So here's the thing with, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Is that the white dog shit of the linguistic world? Like that's the name of this thesis. I heard that a lot as a child because, okay, number one, we had an actual physical telephone in the hallway of my house. So that meant there was no privacy around telephone conversations and when you're a little kid when when your ma's on the phone to her friend it and she's like on it for like an hour you just get bored and start bothering your ma or hanging

around your ma or listening to her conversation so I was hearing way more also it wasn't just it wasn't just phone conversations it definitely happened mostly on the phone but if I was in a supermarket with my ma and I was a child and she met a friend and she's having a conversation with a friend, then her and her friend are going to mutually start going, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I was around a lot of ma's when I was a child, basically. I was around a lot of mothers. So did I just hear it more? Or now that I'm an adult, has it actually disappeared?

And what the fuck is it? And what's the point of it so firstly my own kind of uninformed theory around it this is something I've been thinking about for a long time like I remember

being at least 7 and noticing it really noticing what the fuck is that noise that my mother and other women make what's that. What the fuck is that noise. That my mother and other women make. What's that? What's the point of that? And.

I call it now. I call it. An empathic. Inhaled vocalization. Because. If you think of the context. That that noise is used in, it's a listening noise. So when your ma was speaking to her friend and her friend was, like I said, venting, not giving terrible news, nothing really terrible, but not necessarily good news, just venting.

Right. terrible but not necessarily good news. Just venting. Right? So when your ma's friend was venting your ma would say as a signifier that she's really listening. So it's an empathic way of speaking but we have to address the

fact that all words are exhaled when we speak we're pushing air out of our lungs so what's going on in this very moment of empathy where Irish women feel that in order to listen you must not in agreement

but inhale every word now my theory was that you're trying to you're trying to make your mouth like your ears so it's like i'm listening so much to what you're telling me that i'm not just taking your words in in my ears but I'm inhaling the words from your mouth I'm listening so much that I am inhaling your words and my mouth in this moment is temporarily also

an ear, it's also a gasp you know when someone is venting to you you kind of want to be shocked at it performatively shocked at the news that they're telling you oh shocking oh that's terrible that's shocking that's shocking so yeah yeah yeah is also a shock because when you get shocked, you gasp, you know. Oh, Jesus Christ. Like that.

So it's an amalgamation of that. So you're shocked and you're inhaling the other person's words because your mouth is now an ear. So it's actually quite beautiful as an empathic tool. I think that's actually a very beautiful empathic tool to suck another person's words into your lungs if they're venting their frustrations and to let them know that you're present I think that's really beautiful now another theory

I had which I don't think stands up but I'm going to say it anyway because there might be something in there is I was of the opinion that this type of vocalization emerged because of the physical that this type of vocalization emerged because of the physical labor of using an old phone

so if you think about like if you make a phone call nowadays on a fucking iPhone there's no physical labor involved you can put it on speaker phone you can sit back in your bed you can throw in a set of headphones there's no physical labor involved in a long phone call now alright

back in the day in a long phone call now all right back in the day it was a house phone you had to sit on the end of your stairs your arm got tired sitting on the end of the stairs isn't particularly comfortable you're crunched forward so i was thinking maybe this inhaling vocalization was something that emerged as a coping mechanism to the physical constraints and labour of simply speaking for an hour while sitting at the end of the stairs holding the thing up to your fucking head. But I don't think that stands up because A. It doesn't explain why it's an Ireland only phenomenon. And it doesn't explain why that vocalisation was also present in real life conversations. that vocalisation was also present in real life conversations. Like not just your ma, but... Like I remember school teachers,

like I remember being a little kid, being a child in school, and I'd have a female teacher, and then one of the other female teachers might visit the classroom, and then while you're sitting down working, the two female teachers are having a private conversation at the top of the room so they're whispering to each other and I always remember, because we had to be quiet

because when you're a child in fucking school the teacher's like everyone be quiet so you're there and the two teachers are at the top and they're going and you'd hear the inhaled vocalizations louder because they couldn't regulate that volume so that that was my opinion on that was i didn't look into it further i'd kind of formed my own opinion on it i decided myself what it was I'd called this an inhaled empathy noise

like I said I thought okay something has happened in Irish culture whereby if someone is venting we try and inhale their words as an act of listening with our mouths isn't that lovely and I left it at that and then one day I was on YouTube and I heard this clip of a woman from Norway speaking and it shattered my entire world view somebody who

it's a bird who has taken out the it's not in there anymore it's a shell it's only a shell a bird who has taken out the... Yeah, so it's not in there anymore. It's a shell. A bird ate it. It's only a shell. A bird ate it? Yep. So fuck me.

I heard that and I'm like, that's a woman from Norway. Now she's speaking English, but I clearly heard her twice go, the inhaled agreeing listening sound. So it was that point that I started to go, right, I need to fucking research this. I went down to my academic sites. I went looking through linguistic journals to try and figure out, does this have a name? Why is a woman in Norway doing this. What is the crack with. You know. But before we do that.

It's time to have. Will we have an ocarina pause. Or will we have a. Pause. No fuck it man. I need to blow out. No. We'll compromise.

I'm going to suck the ocarina. I'm going to faint. I'm going to. I'm going to do. There'll I'm gonna faint I'm gonna do there'll be so much inhaling sharp inhaling happening with this fucking podcast that I'm gonna faint ok why am I

alright ocarina pause but I'm gonna fucking inhale and not knock myself out. the Center for Addiction and Mental Health, to support life-saving progress in mental health care. From May 27th to 31st, people across Canada will rise together and show those living with mental illness and addiction that they're not alone. Help CAMH build a future where no one is left behind. So, who will you rise for? Register today at sunrisechallenge.ca. That's sunrisechallenge.ca.

On April 5th, you must be very careful, Margaret. It's a girlallenge.ca. what? It's the most terrifying. 666 is the mark of the devil. Hey! Movie of the year. It's not real. It's not real. It's not real. Who said that? The First Omen. Only in theaters April 5th. Fuck me. That was the inhaled ocarina pause you would have heard an advertisement for some fucking shit

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to make fucking ideas like Jesus Christ I would love to go to like RTE which is ireland's national broadcaster and say to rte let me make a one-hour documentary about the irish phenomenon of yeah yeah yeah god i guarantee you i will make you a one-hour documentary that will be really fucking good i guarantee you just give me a budget to do it. Not a fucking hope. I won't even be allowed in the door. Not a chance.

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twitch.tv forward slash the blind by podcast yurt so the Irish linguistic phenomenon of, yeah, yeah, yeah what the fuck is that so another little there was that clip of the woman from norway clearly doing it that sparked my brain and then another thing i saw which really was like wow okay this is a big deal i saw this thing shared online right and what it was was like a cultural guide for Australian people who were visiting

Ireland so it was like here's an example for Australians here's an example of some little quirks in Irish culture that you might need to understand before you visit Ireland and one of them was and I'm going to read it out. Ingressive sound. Some Irish people may inhale or inject short breaths while saying yes during a conversation to show agreement. It sounds similar to a gasp accompanied with the word yes. This linguistic mannerism may be unfamiliar to many Australians so don't be alarmed if you hear your Irish counterpart make this noise. Nor ask Fuck me. So, there's this, the Australian guide for Australian people visiting Ireland had to warn them that when you go to fucking Ireland,

Paddy's going to start gasping right and don't be rude and don't be rude and ask them if they've trouble breathing and what was helpful for this for me is it now had a name because I can't

go into Google and type in when your ma goes yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and expect to find an answer but now I have a name for it it's called an ingressive sound so immediately I started fucking typing ingressive sound

into my academic search engines and I came across an incredibly fascinating paper that was published by a linguist called Eleanor Thom in 2005. And it was her MA thesis in linguistics. And the title of it was The Gaelic Gasp and Its North Atlantic Cousins.

So the actual name within linguistics for is Ingressive Pulmonic Speech. Atlantic cousins. So the actual name within linguistics for is ingressive pulmonic speech. That's what it's known as, ingressive speech. And it's present in Ireland, parts of Scandinavia, Norway, Denmark, Scotland, especially in the islands off the north of Scotland, Newfoundland, which is an island off the coast of Canada, Prince Edward Island, which is another island off the coast

of Canada, and an island off the coast of Maine in America. So only in these areas do we find this examples of aggressive speech where people inhale when listening to other people. And this study that I found is exhaustively, it draws on a lot of other studies as well, exhaustively examined how this type of speech was being used in all these individual countries and who was using it and why they were using it and when they were using it. And what I found particularly interesting is, first off, the relationship between gender, right? So the study had this to say about the use of ingressive speech in Dublin, right?

So it said almost all of the ingressives he heard were used in female to female conversations, but one was uttered by a female talking to a male. No ingressives were heard in male to male conversations, and there was only one example of a male using an ingressive in talking to his female supervisor. The informants were aged from their early teens to late 60s and that study took place in 1981 in Dublin. So that backs up when we think of why we associate it with our mass, why we associate it to listening to women speaking, that the study showed that it is 10 to 1 more likely to be used in female to female conversations.

Now what's mad intriguing is when they investigated it more and not only looked at the use of ingressive inhaled speech when it comes to gender they looked at it in terms of power dynamics in the societies where ingressives are present

and it appears to follow the structures of patriarchy so there's an island called Vinalhaven which is off the coast of Maine in America and this little island had huge amounts of Norwegian, Scandinavian and Irish immigration.

So pretty much everyone there is descended from either Irish people or Scandinavian people. And ingressive speech is used quite a lot on this island of Vinilhaven. So they did a huge study in Vinilhaven about who is saying yeah, yeah, yeah and who isn't. The results are mad. So in the Vinalhaven study, the sometimes sudden, sometimes gradual decrease in the use of ingressives in adolescent males seems to go hand in hand with the decision or indecision

about taking up marine employment and the progression of their apprenticeships with the non- ingressive fishermen learning the trade and seeking acceptance so in Vinilhaven where people say if an adolescent male decides

it's an island so if an adolescent male decides he wants to become a fisherman or work in some way within the marine trade then this man stops using aggressive speech and the study says to make sense of these unusual findings Peters had to consider the hierarchical structure and social codes of Vindelhaven. The men who worked on boats either for fishing or for the ferry were at the top of the social scale and commanded the most respect.

Peters found a similar situation in Ireland. In Ross Lair and in Wexford, he mentions overhearing two men and one woman using aggressive speech. In each case, the aggressive user was in a position of inferiority and was expressing defensiveness or respect. So what's emerging there which is fucking bizarre is that to speak aggressively like my initial analysis of it me who knows fuck all i'm just guessing i saw it as quite a beautiful thing it's like this this is this is

empathic you're listening with your mouth you're inhaling a person's words to show them how much you you can listen but within a society that's patriarchal which means male dominated it appears in the studies that to use aggressive speech is to actually signify lower status in a power dynamic. So in Villhaven, off the coast of Maine, and in Ireland, men who consider themselves to have status or power or trying to achieve this, they don't do, yeah, yeah, yeah, because that would connote weakness within the social construct of patriarchy. And the person who has less power in the conversation,

most likely a woman within the social construct of patriarchy, is going to be saying, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which, that's fucking fascinating. And it leads me to think about a possible hot take which I can't verify but just I find that really fucking interesting when I spoke about my white dog shit theory earlier

about we don't hear aggressive speech in Ireland as much anymore well I don't think we do is that because like if you so i'm thinking back to the fucking 90s and 80s and the women who would have been saying yeah yeah they were born in the 40s 50s whatever and they came from an ireland whereby like women weren't allowed a married woman was not allowed to work in Ireland up until the 1970s okay

and I'm not saying that today we have equality we have full gender equality in Ireland we do not, there's massive problems but I think it is fair to say that there is, there's greater gender equality now

than there would have been, we'll say, in the 1960s or the 1970s. And is the disappearance of ingressive speech an indicator of more gender equality? If this study is finding that ingressive speech is a marker of gender inequality and patriarchy in Ireland and in Vinilhaven and also in parts of Scandinavia too. That's just a little hot take. That's the

with white dog shit the theory is why is there no more white dog shit? Because the EU brought in laws that meant that dog food had to be better standard and the dog shit stopped being white. So that's the accepted theory about white dog shit. Is, can we say the same about,

ingressive speech and greater gender equality? Is that too hot a take? Now the other way to look at it is, so this study is saying that inhaling, Is that too hot a take? Now the other way to look at it is, so this study is saying that inhaling, aggressive speech, is used by the less powerful person within a conversation or within a society. And if that society is patriarchal, women are more likely to use it, or a man will use it if he is of lower power status in a conversation it's kind of reductive because you can also view that as

a patriarchal society is one that tends not to value things like empathy compassion and listening value things like, empathy, compassion and listening, like, I still think that, aggressive speech is an act of empathy, I still think that, because,

it's a way of saying, I'm really listening to you right now, I'm sucking your words in, my mouth is an ear, that's powerful I think that's really fucking powerful and a lovely thing to do for another person to lend them that much of yourself in a conversation but in a society which is patriarchal and And power based. And based upon. The retention of wealth. Or the retention of property.

Or what can be passed down to sons. In that society. Things like. Listening. Compassion. Empathy. Aren't given any value. Because they don't make fucking money.

And therefore are considered. Of lower status. But if you have a society. actually properly values something like communication, listening and empathy, then that doesn't become something associated with status. That actually becomes something quite powerful. The ability to give another person your time. Another reason aggressive speech might be considered lower status under the social construct of patriarchy would be the act of inhaling during the transaction of speech. The act of inhaling could be viewed as submissive.

If you think of things that are valued within patriarchy so within sex a man is powerful if he has sex with loads of women so that sex is a thrusting act he gives his penis which is received by the vagina inhaled by the vagina are the act of fighting the powerful man hits the weaker man the weaker man, the loser inhales and absorbs and receives the punches of the stronger man the more powerful man so if you look at it

if those are the constructed rules of a society and then you start looking at men going in a conversation inhaling another's words instead of booming their voice out instead of giving something out like from their chest out

to all of a sudden start going taking it in you can see how under patriarchy that then demasculates that man under those rules which is all harsh shit. That's why I'm calling it social construct. It's fucking harsh shit.

But I'm trying to show the. The scaffolding. Of the power dynamics. That this study is kind of shown. With people who are. Using aggressive speech. Now another thing the study did. Is they went at it from.

Like an anatomical point of view. So like why is. Aggressive speech mostly a female thing well they found that because of smaller vocal cords that women have it becomes something that's a lot more easier to do in speech whereas for men you get out of breath quite quickly one thing quite interesting too about the study, away from the power dynamic stuff, they tried to look at it from a historical context. What's going on in these countries? What commonalities in these countries do you have where people are inhaling when they talk at certain points? And one thing they found common was the Irish Gaelic tradition of the Wren or mummering, right?

So there's an Irish pagan tradition, which is very, very old, called the Wren. And it happens on the 26th of September, St. Stephen's Day. And one of the traditions here is people would dress up usually in like straw costumes or they would cross dress they'd dress as members of the opposite sex and disguise themselves and then they would

hunt a wren which is a type of little bird and they'd call to people's doors knock on people's doors and the people have to it's kind of like trick or treat but what these people would do on their end day when they're disguising themselves and disguising their gender is they would engage in a type of speech called mummering and mummering is where to disguise your

voice instead of speaking outwards you inhale all your words so you start talking like that so that's an ancient irish tradition you dress up as like a mad fucking ghost on saint stephen's day hunt a wren call around the people's houses and inhale when you talk a long-standing irish tradition and this then via irish emigration found its way to Newfoundland, to Scotland, and up to that place off the coast of Maine. And also King Edward Island, which contains an awful lot of inhaling.

So there's one theory that mummering, or sorry, that fucking aggressive speech, yeah, yeah, yeah, comes from the tradition of mummering, which is hundreds and hundreds of years old, and it's an Irish pagan tradition, but the most generally accepted theory, about where this,

aggressive, inhaling speech comes from, is, it's most likely from the Vikings, the Vikings coming to Ireland Ireland in the 800s. So if you look at where people do this, it's Denmark, Norway, Scandinavia, where the Vikings came from. And the theory is that the Vikings brought this style of speech to Ireland.

Because you have to remember, like, the Vikings were a big deal in Ireland. All our cities, like Limerick, where I'm from, the Vikings founded Limerick City. The Vikings founded Dublin. The Vikings were a big deal. And they brought a huge amount of culture and language to Ireland 300 years before English colonisation so most likely

what it is is that the Vikings had this way of inhaling they brought this to Ireland the northern part of Scotland where we hear it except in Scotland it's I and it's used mainly in rural communities and they go like I, I, I where we hear it, except in Scotland it's aye and it's used mainly in rural communities and they go like

aye, aye, aye, like that the Orkney Islands all those islands between Scandinavia and Scotland where, Jesus, if you listen to some people from like Orkney, they literally sound like they're from Scandinavia

and then it's present in Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland like if you've ever heard someone from for the laugh go onto YouTube and look up a Newfoundland accent Newfoundland is an island off the coast of Canada, you will not

be able to tell the difference between a Newfoundland accent and an Irish accent so many Irish people em difference between a Newfoundland accent and an Irish accent so many Irish people emigrated to Newfoundland two, three hundred years ago that their accent didn't change so when you listen to the Newfie accent it's like that's a 90%

Irish person, they sound a bit like they're from Wexford or Waterford do you know the way Waterford people kind of sound like they're from Dublin sometimes Newfoundland sounds a bit like that so the Vikings gave it to us then

through our emigration we gave it to Newfoundland and through that island off Maine and that's where we have it and they haven't been able to come to an understanding as to why the Vikings started it. Is it something to do with the cold weather?

I don't know. So there you go. The next time that you hear your ma or whatever going, that's most likely over a thousand years old and came from the Vikings. And I think we should bring it back. That's most likely. Over a thousand years old. And came from the Vikings. And. I think we should bring it back. I think we should fucking bring it back. Because.

Let's not view it as this. Fucking patriarchal thing. Where it's a sign of weakness. Or submissiveness. Place value on. Listening and empathy that's what it is listening to someone

letting someone know I hear you that's what it is I hear you and I'm not going to interrupt you and I'm sucking these words in that you're saying also so as not to drown out what you are saying.

I'm all ears and I'm responding to you in this really respectful way that invites you to continue so I can hear and listen to whatever it is that's bothering you. And I think that's really nice and it's really nice. And it's really beautiful. And it's just a mad Irish thing that we have. And it's so much nicer. Than your father. Screaming into the phone. Really loudly. So that someone can hear him in London.

Over the phone. You know. Alright dog bless. Didn't think I could do a full podcast on yeah, yeah, yeah, but I fucking did. I fucking did. I fucking did. And it's always good to

follow the ideas that sound absolutely fucking ridiculous. To follow my heart on it. Alright, dog bless. I'll catch you next week. I think I might have a little hot take that was a hot take yeah what was the hot take in that podcast

the big hot take for me there which I can't verify is if we take the patriarchal theory of ingressive speech as found by that as referenced in the study by Eleanor Jossett-Thom if ingressive speech is a signifier of gender inequality, essentially, if that's what that study is saying, that aggressive speech is a signifier of gender inequality, are we hearing less aggressive speechgressive speech. As.

Society becomes a little bit more. Gender equal. Is. That's the hot take I think. Is that the reason. Or is it something else. You know. We don't talk as much on the phone. We don't talk as much anymore.

Quite a lot of these. Conversations are happening over WhatsAppapp now you know your friend is venting about their day you're listening this could be happening over whatsapp either via voice messages where you have no like if someone's sending you a voice message of wait you hear the shit day i had you're not gonna go yeah yeah yeah back you're just gonna respond back or you might give an emoji and what's the emoji equivalent now of yeah yeah yeah I would say it's shocked face followed by a love heart because that's oh my god that's shocking but I'm listening and I care about what you're saying. So shocked face, love heart might be the emoji equivalent of, you know what I mean?

So the way that we communicate is different. So that could also be a huge, there's no point or no need to do it anymore. All right, I'll talk to you next week. night on Saturday, April 13th when the Toronto Rock hosts the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton at 7.30pm. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game and you'll only pay

as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com.