Gesture is everywhere. We wave our hands when we talk, even if we’re alone. Signed languages are, of course, full languages that use gesture. And it could even be argued that emoji are the online equivalent of gesture. It’s inescapable. And why would we want to do without it, when it’s so useful? So we’re talking about gesture and language with Dr Lauren Gawne, author of Gesture: A Slim Guide.
Our chat with Lauren is available on video, so you can see all the gestures! Link: https://youtu.be/kHPgyXhl8Kk
Timestamps
Intros: 0:19
News: 7:42
Related or Not: 23:20
Interview with Lauren Gawne: 44:10
Words of the Week: 1:32:53
The Reads: 1:48:10
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Become a Patron!Show notes
News
Is the Southern accent fixin’ to disappear in parts of the US South?
https://www.abccolumbia.com/2025/05/12/is-the-southern-accent-fixin-to-disappear-in-parts-of-the-us-south/
Georgia’s Accent is Fading, New Research Shows
https://modlangs.gatech.edu/news/item/669523/georgia-accent-fading-research-shows
Boomer Peak or Gen X Cliff? From SVS to LBMS in Georgia English
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/language-variation-and-change/article/boomer-peak-or-gen-x-cliff-from-svs-to-lbms-in-georgia-english/6AEA44E9263DFAE376F3BB20E087E5F9
One Class, One Day: On the Trail of Boston’s Missing Rs
https://www.bu.edu/articles/2016/one-class-one-day-boston-accent/
Do accents disappear?
https://theconversation.com/do-accents-disappear-192548
Boonta Vista podcast
https://boontavista.com
Ancient Filipino script making a comeback with new generations
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/baybayin-ancient-filipino-script-winnipeg-1.7485942
RETRO FIND: Filipinos preserved dying language through tattoos in 1999
https://www.kcci.com/article/baybayin-preservation-filipino-tattoo-1999/64729515
Baybayin | Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baybayin
Baybayin: The Ancient Filipino Script Lives On
https://narrastudio.com/blogs/journal/baybayin-the-ancient-filipino-script-lives-on
Gesture
Gesture: A Slim Guide by Lauren Gawne
https://academic.oup.com/book/59637
A Manual of Gesture (1875) | The Public Domain Review
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/a-manual-of-gesture-1875/
How Humans Went From Hissing Like Geese To Flipping The Bird
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-humans-went-from-hissing-like-geese-to-flipping-the-bird
Inferno 25 (figs)
https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/inferno/inferno-25/
Listeners use gestures to predict upcoming words
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/04/250422131205.htm
Cappuccio, M. L., Chu, M., & Kita, S. (2013). Pointing as an instrumental gesture: Gaze representation through indication. Humana.Mente: Journal of Philosophical Studies, 24, 125-149.
https://www.mpi.nl/publications/item1835877/pointing-instrumental-gesture-gaze-representation-through-indication
Object-Choice Test | Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior
https://link.springer.com/rwe/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_100-1
Goats Follow Human Pointing Gestures in an Object Choice Task
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00915/full
One-year-olds comprehend the communicative intentions behind gestures in a hiding game
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2005.00440.x
Graham and Hobaiter: Towards a great ape dictionary: Inexperienced humans understand common nonhuman ape gestures
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001939
language and choking
[PDF] ‘Colin McLeod quips that “The human vocal tract evolved so that we could cry out ‘Help, I’m choking!'”‘
https://unstable.nl/andreas/ai/langcog/part3/arbib.language.pdf
see also a footnote in this DOCx file from Michael Arbib:
‘The Perth psychologist Colin McLeod [personal communication] quips that “The human vocal tract evolved so that we could cry out ‘Help, I’m choking!'”‘
but the observation has been made since Darwin, for instance:
Tracking the Evolution of Language and Speech: Comparing Vocal Tracts to Identify Speech Capabilities
https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/tracking-the-evolution-of-language-and-speech/
Descent of the larynx in chimpanzee infants
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC165807/
[$$] Hands speak: how casual gestures shape what we hear | Nature
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00125-9
The Timing of Beat Gestures Affects Lexical Stress Perception in Spanish
https://www.mpi.nl/publications/item3582989/timing-beat-gestures-affects-lexical-stress-perception-spanish
Beat gestures influence which speech sounds you hear
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7893284/
“Thus, we provide converging evidence for a manual McGurk effect: relatively simple and widely occurring hand movements influence which speech sounds we hear.”
Superlinguo
https://www.superlinguo.com
Words of the Week
What Are Dirty Sodas, and Why Is Everyone Drinking Them?
https://www.eater.com/23041658/dirty-soda-trend-tiktok-coffee-mate-creamer
Dirty Martini
https://www.liquor.com/recipes/dirty-martini/
What Is Dirty Chai?
https://www.thespruceeats.com/dirty-chai-definition-765697
Popping a manu: New Zealand’s unique water jumping obsession
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/24/popping-a-manu-new-zealands-unique-water-jumping-obsession
‘Manu jumping’: The physics behind making humongous splashes in the pool
https://theconversation.com/manu-jumping-the-physics-behind-making-humongous-splashes-in-the-pool-255837
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]
DANIEL: Hello and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics and science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley. With me now, it’s linguist, Hedvig Skirgård. Hey, Hedvig. Great to see you.
HEDVIG: Hello. Thank you for having me. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: What? No. I think we’re having each other. We’re being cohosts. We’re cohosting, aren’t we?
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: I’ll leave that…
HEDVIG: We’re cohosting.
DANIEL: That’s what we’re doing.
HEDVIG: It’s really fun to be here today. Thank you.
DANIEL: You know what though? It’s a little less fun because there’s no Ben today. Ben couldn’t make it. He is doing his thing. He’s doing Ben stuff.
HEDVIG: Is he overrun with either his own or other people’s children? I believe.
DANIEL: No. I think he’s completely engaged in moving a house. Lifting that… houses are heavy. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Houses are heavy.
DANIEL: …when you move them.
HEDVIG: House moving is terrible, and I don’t understand people who do it often. I want to do it as absolutely rarely as possible, and I feel pity for him.
DANIEL: You’ve chosen a very nomadic lifestyle though for someone who hates moving house.
HEDVIG: Well, I lived in Australia for five years. I’ve lived in this…
DANIEL: Yeah, you did.
HEDVIG: …apartment for almost five years.
DANIEL: Oh, gosh.
HEDVIG: I think that’s a decent chunk of time.
DANIEL: It is a decent chunk of time, but you haven’t really lived until you get into a place and then you just stay there for the rest of your life and you just accumulate. Ah, it’s so good.
HEDVIG: Yeah. So, what I do is I watch a popular American reality show called Hoarders, and then all those accumulation instincts get significantly reduced. I can highly recommend it. You start looking around your house and your wardrobe and being like, “What of this do I not use?” And then, you get rid of it.
DANIEL: I love that. That is fun too. See, it’s accumulation and then expulsion. Accumulate, expel. Accumulate, expel. It’s great.
HEDVIG: Okay. Yeah, no, just acquire less.
DANIEL: That’s a good idea too. I’ll try that. All this is going at the end. [HEDVIG LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Are we a house moving domestic advice podcast?
DANIEL: We are now.
HEDVIG: Is that what we are?
DANIEL: Yes, we are. But I have a question that I want to ask you about gesture. Now, you know how when we talk, we use our hands to make rather idiosyncratic movements, gesture unrelated to what we’re saying, semantically untethered, but we just can’t stop doing it.
HEDVIG: Oh.
DANIEL: I believe they’re called co-speech gestures. And I was wondering if you have one that you know that you do and is classically Hedvig.
HEDVIG: Oh, I don’t know a classically Hedvig one, but I have, in recent years, started doing this one a lot more.
DANIEL: Okay, describe what you’re doing.
HEDVIG: So, I take both of my hands and make them flat. Make all the fingers point in the same direction. Upwards, for example. And then, you tilt them both 90 degrees and you put your fingers underneath your cheek, and you say, “Oh, I’m so cute.” And it means, “I’m so cute.” So, you can do it when you’re trying to be charming and get away with something, or when you’re trying to describe how you got away with something by being charming.
DANIEL: Oh.
HEDVIG: It says maybe a lot that this is something that I have started doing.
DANIEL: Okay, well, that’s very interesting. I have noticed that when I talk to you, I have my hands in what I’m going to call the invisible oranges pose…
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: …like I’m holding invisible oranges.
HEDVIG: That’s the thing you do.
DANIEL: And I bring it to… So, I guess my amateur assessment of what I’m doing there is, I say, I have a thing, I have knowledge, and I’m bringing it to you in my hands. I think that’s what I’m doing when I do this, but that’s just my…
HEDVIG: But they’re not entirely unfettered, are they?
DANIEL: Are they?
HEDVIG: You said semantically unfettered… tethered [ONOMATOPOEIA]
DANIEL: Unfetterered. [LAUGHS] Yes, I did.
HEDVIG: That’s part of English that I’m apparently, like, I’m no longer trying to attain. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Dentals are hard. Dentals are hard.
HEDVIG: They are.
DANIEL: You know what we need though? If we’re talking about gesture, we need an expert. That’s what we need.
HEDVIG: I don’t know anyone. Do you?
DANIEL: I think we could probably find someone. I think we have someone here to help us on the pod today. And it’s one half of the podcast, Lingthusiasm. It’s the friend of the pod. It’s Dr Lauren Gawne, who has just written a book called Gesture: A Slim Guide, and I think we’re going to get her to talk us through it very soon. I wonder what she’s going to say.
HEDVIG: And Aussie to boot, love it.
DANIEL: Yep. Hey, did you know that the podcast Lingthusiasm, I was trying to think of how I would describe their podcast, and I would say that they’re really enthusiastic about language. I think that’s the word I would use, enthusiastic. What do you think?
HEDVIG: I think that is officially their motto. Yes, the lovely Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne have a podcast, Lingthusiasm. How many years have they been going now?
DANIEL: Almost as long as we have.
HEDVIG: Almost as long as we have? No…
DANIEL: It’s been a long time.
HEDVIG: …because we have the Talk the Talk pre-show.
DANIEL: Oh, I know…
HEDVIG: Running start.
DANIEL: …we did. And yet they’ve been going for quite a while. So, they’re really worth a listen. Check out Lingthusiasm when you get a chance. But I’m looking forward to hearing what she has to say about gesture, including these co-speech gestures and whether I’m right that they don’t have much connection to what we say. We’re going to find out.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I wonder about that because you do the melons, for example, in line with your stress and intonation, I think.
DANIEL: I think they might not be as large as melons. I think they might be a little more like mandarins…
HEDVIG: Oh sorry, sorry, oranges.
DANIEL: …or clementines. That’s what’s happening today. But you know what? Pretty soon we’re going to be doing a bonus mailbag and we are taking questions. And if you want to listen to that episode as soon as it comes out, you can do it by being a patron at the Listener level. All kinds of benefits that come from being a patron, supporting the show, getting warm fuzzy feels, getting invited to live episodes. All the stuff, you know it. Why don’t you head on over? That’s patreon.com/becauselangpod.
HEDVIG: Yes. Do it. Do it. And I can also recommend in general, what’s fun about Patreon is that there are lots of other shows on there that you can also support. And if you are a Patreon supporter, you can have… I do, for example, you can have the Patreon app and it’ll give you the notifications when they say like, “Oh, someone that you support made a post or did something or something.” And personally, I just like it. You also just get an RSS link that you can put into any podcatcher. So, you definitely don’t need this app. It’s not important. But once you’ve hooked up your payment and your information and everything, you can also check out other people on there that you might want to support. I started supporting one and now I support a number of shows. And as someone who spends hours every day listening to podcasts, I feel like it’s nice to be actually supporting the people I listen a lot to.
DANIEL: It’s true. I think we’re to this point now where we’ve learned that if we get it for free, we are the product. So, if we want something good, we’re going to have to start paying for it. So, I like doing that as a way of giving back.
HEDVIG: Or at least some people have to start paying for it. Yeah.
DANIEL: Yep. And if you want to give us a question, you can do that by emailing us at hello@becauselanguage.com. All right, are you ready for some news?
HEDVIG: News? Okay. Yes.
DANIEL: We got some news.
HEDVIG: Oh, I’m Ben. I see. Okay. Oh, shit.
DANIEL: No, I think I’m Ben.
HEDVIG: Daniel…?
DANIEL: Yes?
HEDVIG: Oh, you’re Ben. Okay.
DANIEL: Yes. No, no. Be Ben. Be Ben.
HEDVIG: Daniel.
DANIEL: Yes, Ben?
HEDVIG: I have had such a boring time here in Germany and in Europe. Nothing ever happens. And I just want to know something novel, something interesting, but I don’t want it to be anything else but about language. Hit me up.
DANIEL: Something to rouse your jaded palette. Is that what you need?
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: I got just the thing, this story… Actually, you know who’s got the thing? Diego’s got the thing because he suggested this story to us.
Now, this research goes back a little ways, but it’s come up again in the popular press. And so, I thought it was a good opportunity to give it a thorough airing. And the story is: is the Southern US accent disappearing? Is it possible that it might vanish like frost before the sun? Now, what’s your view? What do you know about accents and whether they’re sticking around or not?
HEDVIG: Oh, my god. What do I know about American…?
DANIEL: Well, not even American ones, just…
HEDVIG: I know that there’s a stereotypical broad US Southern accent that is, like…
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: …I don’t know exactly where it’s mostly spoken, but people associate it, I guess, with Texas.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: And when Europeans make fun of Americans, they’ll often put this one on, and there’s like a stereotypical version.
DANIEL: Ooh, this is a little bit ouchy for me because I have noticed that when I’m being unkind about somebody’s political views…
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: I do something really unfortunate, and that is …
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: And I’m trying not to do it. I’ve made fun of and I’ve used an accent to make fun of a view, and that is something that I have learned to catch myself doing and cut it out.
HEDVIG: That is something I think a lot of us do. Not necessarily also accents, but also maybe just speech styles to be like, “And then, he said, [IN AN ACCENT] ‘Oh, I don’t know about that.’”
DANIEL: Blah, blub blah, blah.
HEDVIG: And it’s like oh, everyone else in the story sounds really weird except for you that sound like the voice of reason, okay.
DANIEL: Yes. Why are you giving me the dumb voice?
HEDVIG: Like, insecure about our actual content much?
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: But, yeah, there’s a broad Southern accent. I have learned through consuming a lot of American media that there’s a lot of distinctions that the Southern states actually have a variety within them. And there is the Appalachian stretch of it as well, and then there’s South Texas. But what I imagine might be happening is that Americans, A, move around a lot. So, you probably get people from like, I don’t know, Philadelphia moving to Austin, Texas, and people having ties and connections all over. So, maybe what’s happening is that they’re starting to develop an urban, neutral dialect and that is pushing out the regional varieties. Is that roughly what’s happening?
DANIEL: I think that might be what’s happening. This is work from linguist, Lelia Glass, of Georgia Tech’s School of Modern Languages and a team, published in Language Variation and Change. Now, to understand what’s going on, we need to look at two different accents. And this is what they looked at, the Southern Vowel Shift, or SVS. And this is the one where we see words like PRICE, which for me, the vowel for PRICE is a diphthong.
HEDVIG: Price.
DANIEL: Aa, ee. Pra-ece /pɹa is/. I start with an aa and I go to an ee sound, something like that.
HEDVIG: Oh, what would a Southern PRICE… What’s the…? Oh, how am I going to do this? Let me guess…
DANIEL: Go ahead. I’m curious.
HEDVIG: Price, price. You said diphthong, which makes me think what they do is not going to be a diphthong.
DANIEL: Correct.
HEDVIG: But how do I not do a diphthong on PRICE?
DANIEL: Well, you talk about prass /pɹæs/. What’s the prass?
HEDVIG: Prass. Ah.
DANIEL: One vowel, right?
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Okay. And then other vowels in the southern vowel shift can be things that I pronounce as one vowel, but they can be a diphthong, like the word KIT. For me, it’s just an /i/ sound, but for them, it can be a diphthong, kiet /ki ət/, ee-uh, something like that. Yep.
HEDVIG: That one is the one that I think sounds… feel terrible for saying it, but that shift is the one I would label as the most hick.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] Okay, okay. So, that one may be diminishing a bit. And instead, what we’re getting is something called the Low Back Merger Shift, which is a lot more like the way that I’ve described myself as doing these sounds. And this team has looked at seven generations of people.
HEDVIG: Seven.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Seven generations of speakers, seen how they pronounce different words.
HEDVIG: Let’s everyone remember that would be your grandchildren or nibblings, your parents. Now, we’re only up to three…
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: …right? And then, we’re going up. Oh, my god. Okay. Did they just find really old recordings of their great-great-grandparents or something?
DANIEL: They did, they did use recordings…
HEDVIG: Oh, wow, okay.
DANIEL: …and they noticed that this shift seems to have happened somewhere between Boomers and Generation X. They call it the gen X cliff. The Southern Vowel… The Southern accent has dropped off a cliff with Generation X.
HEDVIG: Wow. It’s all your fault.
DANIEL: Others… [LAUGHS] Sorry about that. Usually, it’s Millennials that kill everything. What can I say? This time, it was my generation.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Now, other studies have pointed to two different reasons why this might be happening, and one is increase in migration. Lots of people are moving towns in the South. And also, negative social connotations of the Southern Vowel Shift.
HEDVIG: Right. Which I feel is a bit cruel, because I actually enjoy some certain varieties and I think it is cruel to draw everyone with a broad stroke and just write them off. And I mean, yes, there are correlates between how you present yourself and your identity and your sort of politics and lifestyle, etc., but it is quite cruel. Also, like a lot of… if we unfortunately think about like politics and like Democrat, Republican, aren’t there a lot of Southern states where yes, they tend to swing Republican, but there’s still a great amount of Democrats in there, so it tends to be just over 50 for Republican. I think Texas is like this, right? And it feels a bit cruel to then just be like, “Oh, Texans are all Republicans, and I don’t agree with them.” It feels quite mean.
DANIEL: I think that the city versus rural divide.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: What do you got? You got Georgia. And yeah, a lot of folks do have a certain accent and there may be some political views that go that way. But then, you’ve also got Atlanta, which is going to be really, really different. Stereotypes, we can talk about tendencies, that’s fine, but stereotypes don’t help anyone. And I will also point out once again, I’ll tell this story again because I love it.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: I used to have bad attitudes about the Southern US accent and in my pre-linguistic past, I tied it in mentally to a lot of different things. And then, I happened to meet a strikingly intelligent and beautiful young lady from Arkansas. And suddenly, all those feelings I had about that accent vanished from my mind.
HEDVIG: Did they?
DANIEL: I found that it was easy on the ears. They did. And I didn’t mind listening to that a lot.
HEDVIG: Oh, so beautiful.
DANIEL: So, that was where I learned…
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: I learned that early, that it’s never about the language, it’s about the people.
HEDVIG: Oh, that’s so nice.
DANIEL: And Mary, if you’re out there, hello, wherever you are.
HEDVIG: I have a question about Southern US accents.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. I’ll try.
HEDVIG: There seems to be a stereotype that it is spoken by white working-class people, but I imagine that there are, A, not working-class white people who speak like that, and, B, black people who speak like that.
DANIEL: Yep.
HEDVIG: What’s up with that?
DANIEL: Well, it is like you have pointed out, Southern US English is not just one thing. There are Black varieties, there are white varieties, and they’re going to go in on a spectrum. And then there’s something else that I wanted to point out. We talk about, “Oh, accents disappearing. Are we all going to speak the same way?” And what I’ve learned from sociolinguistics is that accents aren’t necessarily facing massive extinction. It is true that some are shifting, but it could mean that what is considered the US Southern accent is changing and always has been changing.
HEDVIG: Oh, I see.
DANIEL: The important thing is whether the people who speak that accent consider it to be a marker of their identity. The actual accent can change.
HEDVIG: Weren’t we talking about this recently with something in further North of the US where people were asked, like, “What do you think of as like…?” I think it was Illinois or something? Am I making sense?
DANIEL: Yes, it was Ohio. That was not very long ago.
HEDVIG: Ohio. Yeah. Where people were like, “Oh, do you think this person sounds like they have a strong Ohio accent?” And people were like, “No.” And then, yeah, but this is what an actual Ohioan sounds like.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] And they just failed to pick it entirely.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s a good point. Sometimes, there’s a mismatch between the reality of accent and what we expect. Look, accent leveling is definitely a thing, and there are some broad patterns that are going to make things happen. Boston, another example. The R-lessness of Boston. People have kind of pivoted away from that because they feel like they’re going to be made fun of. And when stigmatisation happens, yeah, there’s going to be some movement. So, we’ll see what happens with that pattern. I don’t expect extinction, but there will be movement.
HEDVIG: I’m interested in the future of these things because I think they’re going to be tied less to geography. But I think that diversity and groups arise from social networks and who you’re interacting with a lot and who you want to sound like and who you maybe don’t want to sound like and who you’re actually talking to. For example, whenever I listen to the wonderful Australian podcast, Boonta Vista, people in my vicinity say, “Oh, Hedvig, you sound more commonwealth. Like, what did you do today? Did you talk a lot to your husband?” And I’m like, “No, no, no. I was literally just listening to Australians and that’s what happened.”
DANIEL: Yep.
HEDVIG: By the way, big recommendation, Boonta Vista, comedy podcast, if you’re having…
DANIEL: It’s in the show notes for this episode.
HEDVIG: It is very good. Anyway, we’re spending a lot of time online, and so who we’re experiencing and who we’re listening to is changing. So, it’s not necessarily the people who are in the same village, town, suburb as us. It’s people we’re interacting with globally. So, does that mean that, I don’t know, people hang out a lot in the same… I mean, people don’t use Second Life anymore, but Roblox.
DANIEL: Virtual spaces, people in the same virtual spaces, are they going to start talking?
HEDVIG: Roblox, Roblox. What’s happening with the kiddos?
DANIEL: I don’t know.
HEDVIG: Are your kids on Roblox?
DANIEL: No, they will never be on Roblox, thank you very much. What I’ve always told my students and what I’ve always heard is that accents happen when people are separated. And typically, that has been geographically separated, but they can also be socially separated. And that’s why in the same place we can see sociolects. And so, I think it’s an open question as to whether what kind of pull online spaces have. Whether those can form really enduring sociolects such that it goes beyond lexicon, beyond grammatical structure, and delves right into accent. I don’t know. I don’t think anybody knows.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: But we’ll be looking.
HEDVIG: Interesting.
DANIEL: We’ll be watching out for that on Because Language.
HEDVIG: We’ll watch.
DANIEL: Let’s finish up our news with another story by Diego, who gave us a couple here. This is about ancient Filipino script called Baybayin. Are you aware of this? I wasn’t before Diego pointed us to this.
HEDVIG: I wasn’t aware of it. Everything I know about scripts in Island Southeast Asia, I have learned from the wonderful Australian linguist, Piers Kelly. And I don’t think he’s taught me about this particular one.
DANIEL: Ah, yes. Somebody that we need to have on the show sometime soon.
HEDVIG: Yes, we should.
DANIEL: This one is used in the Philippines. It’s ancient Filipino script. The name means spell-spell, something like that, It is thought to date to the 1400s or even earlier. And then Spanish happened. Spain colonised the Philippines, and the Baybayin writing system slowly, gradually was replaced by the Latin writing system, darn it. But now, it seems that Filipino speakers are enthusiastically taking up the Baybayin script and have been doing so for a long time in the form of artwork, tattoos and typefaces, very exciting. We’ve got a couple of links there. For example…
HEDVIG: You love typeface.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] Yeah, well, I’m excited about that one, naturally. There’s a story from CBC Manitoba that has an article featuring Ally Gonzalo, a Filipino Canadian who immigrated to Canada and now teaches the script to others and is helping the uptake.
HEDVIG: I’m looking at it now because it is a writing system, so I think it’s interesting to see how it’s written. And it looks like it’s a syllabic system so that you form consonant vowel pairs, and then that makes sort of one symbol, roughly. Is that true?
DANIEL: It is kind of. This is not exactly a syllabary like Japanese hiragana, for instance. It’s called an abugida, which is kind of halfway between an abjad, where you only write the consonants and just ignore the vowels.
HEDVIG: Oh, like Hebrew.
DANIEL: Yeah, like Hebrew, except there’s a little bit more to that with the way it’s written, but let’s go on. And a syllabary where there’s a separate symbol for every syllable, every consonant-vowel combination. For an abugida, take a look at it, you’ll see that there’s… I’ll just pull this up myself. For example, the symbol for ba, it is what looks like an inverted heart shape. It doesn’t have a pointy top though. It’s got a rounded top.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: But if you put a dot above the shape, it’s no longer /ba/, it’s /bi/ or /be/ and if you put a dot below the shape, now it’s /bo/ or /bu/.
HEDVIG: Oh, that’s a bit similar to Devanagari. Like, you put…
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: …a squiggle underneath, and then you get an O.
DANIEL: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, this is what abugidas look like. It’s got a main symbol, but then little things to suggest what the vowel is going to be. And I think that’s a really cool way to do it. I think it’s super-efficient.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Especially if you don’t have tons of vowels, you can probably above, before, after, underneath, facing left, facing right, you can probably get, like, eight different characters. I mean, a lot of languages have three vowels, so you get pretty far, hey.
DANIEL: Yeah. So, I’m really encouraged to see the rise of scripts that were thought to be lost and people taking them up again. It’s really cool. So, thanks, Diego, for showing us that story.
HEDVIG: It’s really pretty. Hey, I’m looking at it now, I think this would make for very nice tattoos. I think this could be really pretty.
DANIEL: Some of them are. They’re lovely. Let’s go on to Related or Not. This theme is from Camden.
RELATED OR NOT THEME: [TO THE TUNE OF AQUALUNG BY JETHRO TULL] Do these woods share a root? Or are they merely false friends? This is etymology, done on the fly to no serious ends. Related or Not.
DANIEL: Thanks, Camden. That rocked.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] That was very cute. I like that.
DANIEL: We’ve heard that one before. That was Camden singing. And then there was a little bit of an assist there from a YouTube video that I found by YouTuber Lucas Kn for the backing guitar track. Okay, are you ready, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: Okay. All right. Pen, paper.
DANIEL: Pen and paper. Here’s one from Cesar.
CESAR: Hello, Because Language. Longtime fan. And over my morning coffee, I thought of a word pair that I felt might be fun for Related or Not. The words AVOID and EVADE. Just thought I’d suggest them in case we haven’t covered them yet. Thanks for what you do.
DANIEL: Aww, thanks, Cesar.
HEDVIG: That’s very good. That’s very good, Cesar.
DANIEL: AVOID and EVADE. Now, just to say… sometimes, we say, “Wait a minute, what counts as related?” I’m going to say for this one, we’re going to focus on the VOID / VADE. It’s not enough for it to go back to the same language. It has to be the same word, just in two different forms. All right? So they have to be from the same root to be a match…
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: …or are they different?
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: I can go first or you can go first. What do you think?
HEDVIG: I’m going to go first.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Okay. Okay. So, yeah, we’re ignoring the first vowel, sort of. Meeh. So, we’ve got AVOID and EVADE.
DANIEL: Yeah, because I’m pretty sure that’s going to be just like EX-, or something.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And let’s make sure we understand. So, I avoided to finish the exam. No, that’s not very good. I avoided him at the party. There we go.
DANIEL: I saw somebody, and he avoided me. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah. I didn’t manage to evade him.
DANIEL: He evaded capture.
HEDVIG: He still came for me. [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: Yeah. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah. I played Crusader Kings, and I was trying to imprison someone and they evaded. And it was, uh, it was very disappointing. Okay…
DANIEL: Okay, yeah, [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: So, they have that Latin feel, don’t they?
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Latin by way of French. Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: Yeah. So, and I’m wondering if it’s to do with the word WAY and VIA.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: Which could mean road and path.
DANIEL: Yep.
HEDVIG: And here I pull in my non-English languages. So, in Swedish, I would say that one of the related words is probably [SWEDISH 00:26:23] which means to avoid.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Wow. I didn’t realise that.
HEDVIG: Yeah. [SWEDISH 00:26:27] Oh, it’s like when two cars… If you’re in a car and you hit someone with a bike, then you didn’t [SWEDISH 00:26:35]. You didn’t avoid them…
DANIEL: Interesting. You didn’t avoid them.
HEDVIG: …for example, I’m going to say they’re related. And I also think there’s some sort of like not causative, but some sort of argument extension thing. So, like, I avoided them, they evaded me. There’s something going on with roles there.
DANIEL: All right. Okay.
HEDVIG: It’s not like fall, fell. I understand that it’s not, but it feels like it’s in that realm of, like, it’s flipping the roles around.
DANIEL: Okay, well, I was looking at EVADE, and I thought, well, that E is just EX-. Away from or out of. And VADE, I went to invade, invasion. I couldn’t think of any other VADES.
HEDVIG: You’re right about INVADE.
DANIEL: I think so. I think that’s a root. And then avoid, I thought of Latin AB-, away from. But then, I thought of VOID. I thought, “Hmm, what’s VOID?” The VOID was giving me tremors because if you avoid someone, that’s a place you didn’t go, and that left a void or an empty place. You try to empty yourself away from a thing. So, I thought, “Hmm, that’s interesting.” But I said that they were both related. I think that they both went to the same root. Okay. We both said related. Turns out the two roots are not related. We were so wrong.
HEDVIG: Argh. At least, I’m in good company.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: You were righter.
DANIEL: I was righter because the French AVOIDER comes from ES-, which is out. It’s the Latin EX- and then VUIDIER, which means… It actually goes back to VOID, an empty place. So, I did get the VOID part right.
HEDVIG: Oh, VIDE is empty…
DANIEL: It is.
HEDVIG: …in French. Yeah. Okay.
DANIEL: Le verre est vide, the glass is empty.
HEDVIG: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: That’s AVOID. Now, EVADE is also a borrowing from French. The E- means out. But the VADE part is a completely different word. It’s something like Latin VADERE, to go or to walk. Has nothing to do with emptiness.
HEDVIG: Does that have anything to do with road? Via?
DANIEL: Hang on, hang on. Let’s find out.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Via doesn’t seem… Oh, wait. Oh, oh. Maybe, maybe. Hang on. So, it goes back to proto-Indo-European root, *wegh-, to go and evade, no, it goes back to a different one, wad, to go. So, it appears to be two different things.
HEDVIG: Boo.
DANIEL: Weird. Okay, that’s number one. Thanks to you, Cesar. Now for number two. Now, this is part of a longer message, and we’ll hear more of it later. But for now, a Related or Not suggestion from January via SpeakPipe. We’re getting a lot of great SpeakPipe folks here.
HEDVIG: Nice.
JANUARY: Hi, Because Language. Are the words SPRUCE as a tree and SPRUCE, as in clean or renovate — SPRUCE UP — related? I looked up the etymology, so I know if they’re related. But I would still love to hear your thoughts. I hope you enjoyed this challenge and thanks for the answers.
DANIEL: Hey, thank you, January. All right.
HEDVIG: Thank you. What was the… Can you repeat them for me, please?
DANIEL: The question is SPRUCE, the tree, and SPRUCE, to spruce up, to make things nice. I’ll go first for this one because I know that Christmas trees are often spruces. I took a look at a spruce tree, like a photo of spruces, and they’re really, really nice trees. They’re very treelike, they’re very arboreal. That’s how I would describe them. And, I have spruced up a Christmas tree once or twice in my several years. So, I think that those things are related, that people got the name of “sprucing up” from the name of the tree. What do you think?
HEDVIG: So, first of all, this is where I need to tell people. So, spruce is like a lot of different trees.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: It’s a big family of trees with needle-type leaves. They’re popular. They grow a lot in the Arctic and the Nordic parts of Eurasia and North America.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: And I have…
DANIEL: Why is nothing ever just one thing? Nothing is ever just one thing, languages, trees.
HEDVIG: Well… So, this is where like when I’m speaking English and people talk about Christmas trees, I try and understand which one they’re talking about, because they could be referring to a number of different things. So, they’re usually referring to one member of the spruce family.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: Anyway, anyway, that’s just… So, I definitely think they’re related because also in Swedish, we say there’s a wooden thing that you put on as a decoration on houses, which we call [SWEDISH 00:31:26] and I think that’s related to spruce and I think it’s made out of spruce trees. So, I’m going to go hard on the related here, and I’m also going to look up what spruce is.
DANIEL: Okay, now here’s the question. Since we both think the same thing, do you think that sprucing up came from the tree or the tree came from sprucing up or something else?
HEDVIG: Ooh.
DANIEL: Because I’m making my vote for, I think the name of the tree came first because it was nice looking. People decorated them. I think people “spruced up” the tree and that came later. Would you agree, or is there another possibility?
HEDVIG: I think it’s the SPRUCE UP first and then to the tree.
DANIEL: Okay, here’s the answer. Spruce trees are called spruce because they were from Pruce! Prussia. That’s why. How about that?
HEDVIG: [GASPS]
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: That’s fun. That’s really fun.
DANIEL: We see the name of the tree by the 1400s. And by the 1590s, the word meant fine or attractive. “My goodness, you look spruce.” But why? Well, the answer is that people weren’t just getting the trees from Prussia, they were also importing lots of nice things from Prussia. And those things were spruce. And so, you spruce things up.
HEDVIG: It’s like… So, in Australia, they call bedlinens Manchester, right?
DANIEL: Yes, yes.
HEDVIG: And in Sweden, we call corduroy Manchester.
DANIEL: Do you?
HEDVIG: Yes, Manchester. And it’s because they both came in boxes from Manchester, the town in the UK. And we’re like, “We got a lot of bed linens. Let’s just call them Manchester.”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] We got a lot of Manchester over here.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: So, the mistake that I made was: I thought that one came from the other. In fact, they both came from a common source. So, we both win, But, hmm, somehow our victory seems a little hollow.
HEDVIG: I have to say that I am not… My Swedish link is not working, because I’m looking up the etymology for [SWEDISH 00:33:46] and I don’t think it’s working. I don’t think it’s related to either of them.
DANIEL: Oh, okay. So, hang on. You had the thing that you hang up and it… What is it? Describe the thing again.
HEDVIG: It’s just when you make… You have a house and you have a window, and then you add little wooden details to make it pretty.
DANIEL: Is it like a shutter or little frilly bits on the side?
HEDVIG: Frilly bits.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Frilly bits on the side. And also, the middle bit, the rectangle thing, I think, is also [SWEDISH 00:34:20]…
DANIEL: Yes, okay.
HEDVIG: Like the thing you put on top of the glass.
DANIEL: So, that’s known as something like [SWEDISH 00:34:24]
HEDVIG: Yes. And I was like… And you can also say [SWEDISH 00:34:29] like to spruce it up. This is spelled the same, but it looks like…
DANIEL: Surely that’s related.
HEDVIG: And this is where I have to say if any listener… So, the Swedish etymological dictionary is not easy to use.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] Okay, okay.
HEDVIG: I am very sorry. I love the project and it’s very nice, but it is…
DANIEL: It’s hard. Okay.
HEDVIG: It’s hard.
DANIEL: So, what is this saying?
HEDVIG: It seemed to be saying that it comes from sprout. Something more like SPROUT.
DANIEL: Whaaat?
HEDVIG: Which… Yeah, I’m confused.
DANIEL: That is so interesting if it managed not to… If it managed to be made of wood…
HEDVIG: I know, right?
DANIEL: …something that looks nice and it’s not related to either… It’s not related to Prussia at all. That would be weird.
HEDVIG: And it’s related to [SWEDISH 00:35:19] And then, we go [SWEDISH 00:35:20] And then, where we get [SWEDISH 00:35:22] and then we go [SWEDISH 00:35:24]. Yeah, different kinds of sprouts.
DANIEL: Like sprouting. Like a tree, a bud.
HEDVIG: Roughly. Oh, here we go. We go back to [SWEDISH 00:35:35]. Oh, god.
DANIEL: Thank goodness. The universe snaps into a recognisable form.
HEDVIG: Well, it’s established in 1544, so it’s old.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: At least.
DANIEL: Well, it goes back to almost as far back as it does in English. Must have been…
HEDVIG: You know what? It might be Prussia somewhere behind all of this, but I can’t tell yet.
DANIEL: Oh, I think we need more research on this one.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay. Well, tell you what. Thank you, January. Sorry we didn’t get to the bottom of this one, but we are going to leave Prussia. And instead, we’ll go to our last one. This one comes from Dax of SpeechDocs. You know SpeechDocs, they transcribe all the words for us.
HEDVIG: I know. And someone there is called Dax. That’s so cool.
DANIEL: I know. Dax is cool. All right, well, here it is. Dax says. “Here’s one submission for Related or Not. HAIL as in a hailstorm. HAIL as in hail a taxi. Maybe HAIL MARY figures here too. HAIL as in originate from a place, like, “I hail from Washington.”
HEDVIG: Oh, fuck. Okay.
DANIEL: I hail from Perth.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: What do you think? Related or not? So, HAIL as in hailstorm, HAIL as in hail a taxi, and HAIL as in he hails from Perth.
HEDVIG: I do think that we need to just touch on the elephant in the room…
DANIEL: What’s that?
HEDVIG: …very briefly, that these are probably all related to one of the words in the salute of the Third Reich.
DANIEL: I know what you’re telling. Yes, I was wondering if we were going there. So, HEIL, obviously.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Definitely related to Hail Caesar. All right, but let’s leave that one alone. That’s a different gesture. When I think of hailing of hailing a taxi, I think of raising my hand, but not with a stiff arm.
HEDVIG: No, but they’re all what I would qualify as a kind of interaction starter or a greeting.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. I mean, it’s a gesture, right? That’s what this episode’s about.
HEDVIG: Well, meaning… remove the gesture for a moment. The word, just like, I think it’s sort of like hello, like you’re trying to call attention. You’re like…
DANIEL: Ah, yes.
HEDVIG: …hello, taxi, come over here, please.
DANIEL: Ave.
HEDVIG: Yes, exactly. Ave. And you get modern neo-Nazis saying things like, hail whoever that they like.
DANIEL: Gross. You leave Caesar out of this.
HEDVIG: Okay, so. But we… I find the interesting part. So, I think that to hail a taxi, the third one was, I’ve written something that doesn’t make sense to me now. What’s the third one?
DANIEL: There was HAIL a taxi, HAILstorm and HAIL, as in he hails from Perth.
HEDVIG: Oh, but I’ve written four of these, so I’ve just…
DANIEL: Oh, well, you might have gotten HAIL MARY, which I think we’re…
HEDVIG: Oh, Hail Mary. Mary is the word. Yes. Okay.
DANIEL: We’re conflating that.
HEDVIG: So, I think HAIL taxi, HAIL Mary, hail from… Hail taxi, Hail Mary, obviously same.
DANIEL: Yes, same, same, same.
HEDVIG: I HAIL from Washington, I think, might be the same. The hard one for me is HAIL rain, the thing that falls from the sky and it’s like ice things and in 2019, devastated Canberra.
DANIEL: In 2010, we had a huge hailstorm. It was horrible in Perth. I think the connection is that when you hail from a place, you come from there, you walk down the road, and you wave your hand and you say hi.
HEDVIG: Right.
DANIEL: And that’s like, he hails from Perth, that’s where he comes from and he greets us from Perth.
HEDVIG: Where he says hello from.
DANIEL: He says hello from.
HEDVIG: He greets us from Perth. Yes. Yes.
DANIEL: Yep. Yep. I don’t think hailstorm is related. I don’t think it’s related at all.
HEDVIG: I’m also thinking it’s not.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: I don’t think it’s related. I think the storm one is out. But HAIL from Washington, HAIL Mary and HAIL a taxi, I think are related.
DANIEL: Okay. I think that too. So now that we agree, I’m going to add in an extra tiebreaker, which I didn’t know the answer to.
HEDVIG: This is what happens when Ben’s not here, we just agree.
DANIEL: Yeah, I know.
HEDVIG: And we’re wrong together and we’re right together. How nice is that?
DANIEL: And it’s lovely. It’s so beautiful. The bonus round.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Have you ever heard somebody say that someone is HALE and hearty, which means that they’re very healthy?
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: It’s one of those binomial pairs like KITH AND KIN, that kind of thing. So, we say that someone is healthy by saying, well, this person is hale and hearty. Hale is a bit of an oxbow. It only exists in that one place.
HEDVIG: It’s like he arrived home safe and SOUND.
DANIEL: Yes. SOUND? What’s sound? Now, remember, in this case, HALE is spelled differently. This is spelled H-A-L-E, related…
HEDVIG: True.
DANIEL: …to the waving kind of HAIL?
HEDVIG: Well, so first of all, I have to again, reference Crusader Kings here, because there is an inheritable trait that your characters can have that is hale. Not hale and hearty, just hale. And if you have that, you’re less prone to disease and…
DANIEL: Interesting.
HEDVIG: …various physical problems.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: So, when you’re trying to marry off your offspring, if you see hale as a trait in one of their prospective partners, you might be like, “Oh, that’s nice.” The greeting thing, like Hail Mary, hail from Washington, hail a taxi. How could that be related to being healthy?
DANIEL: Well, they sound the same. So, are you saying nah?
HEDVIG: I’m saying nah.
DANIEL: Okay. I also said nah. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: No way.
DANIEL: Okay, so we’ll go down together. Here we go. You ready? Here’s the answer. We were right. Hailstorm is not related. That kind of HAIL, that comes from a totally different word, hægl, probably from Proto-Indo European *kaghlo- meaning pebble. I mean, it does look like pebbles, doesn’t it?
HEDVIG: Also, a hail gun.
DANIEL: Hail gun?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: I don’t….
HEDVIG: It’s a gun where you have tiny… Don’t you call it a hail gun in English? We call it a hail gun, [SWEDISH 00:41:41]
DANIEL: Really?
HEDVIG: It’s the kind of… When you don’t have a bullet, but you have a scattering of little pebbles in your gun.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: You go hunting with it.
DANIEL: I’ve referred to that as BUCKSHOT, but I don’t know why.
HEDVIG: Buckshot is hail gun in some other languages.
DANIEL: Fascinating. Okay, now, all of the other ones, hailing a taxi, hailing Caesar, hailing from a place are all related. And they are all also related to hale and hearty. So, we were wrong on that one. Yep.
HEDVIG: What? No way.
DANIEL: They all come from a word… This is going to be so obvious when you hear this. They all come from a word, HAL, which means to be well. Of course it does.
HEDVIG: Oh, shit. It’s WELL MET.
DANIEL: Of course it does.
DANIEL: If you say hi to somebody, you say, “Be well, hale. I hope that you’re well.” So obvious in retrospect. There we go.
HEDVIG: Okay. Boo. I just said the words, “Oh, how could a greeting possibly could be related to healthy?” And then it’s like, good day, well met. Like, how stupid am I?
DANIEL: How could it be anything else? How could it be? So, okay.
HEDVIG: But then sometimes, in this game, Daniel, we say to ourselves, “Oh, this thing is round and this thing is about something. Ooh, semantic connection.”
DANIEL: I know. We fool ourselves. We fool ourselves. Good to be skeptical.
HEDVIG: And then we’re like, “That makes sense.”
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: And then sometimes that’s just… I like to think that’s just not how the dice fell in that particular historical path, but sometimes it could have. And it goes to show we’re good thinkers.
DANIEL: Meaning is unpredictable, and it’s good to be skeptical. Thank you, Hedvig, for being a skeptical player with me today. I think who really won here was science.
HEDVIG: I think who really won here was that you and I are a good team.
DANIEL: I think so too.
HEDVIG: And that we think alike even when we think wrong and that’s kind of nice.
DANIEL: But the real winners are Cesar, January, and Dax, who gave us some great questions. And if you want to give us your Related or Not, go to SpeakPipe on our website, becauselanguage.com, or hit me up, hello@becauselanguage.com, and we will play them. Also, if you have a Related or Not jingle you would like to share with us, we’re always looking for new ones. Thanks to Camden for giving us the one from today, and we’ll keep on going.
Hey, it’s time for our chat with Dr Lauren Gawne. But you don’t just have to listen to it. You can watch it, and then you can see all the gestures. The link to that video is in the description, but you can also find it at becauselanguage.com, Episode 120, Gesture!
[MUSIC]
[INTERVIEW BEGINS]
DANIEL: We’re talking to Dr Lauren Gawne, linguist at La Trobe University, one half of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics, and the author of Gesture: A Slim Guide. Lauren, thanks for coming on the show and telling us about your book.
LAUREN: Thank you so much for letting me come and talk at you about gesture.
DANIEL: Yay. Gesture’s great. And this is your third time as a cohost as well, so that means…
LAUREN: Third, amazing.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Means you get to crash any episode you want, anytime. It means you get the honorary cohost t-shirt/velvet jacket when we get it going.
HEDVIG: Yeah, we should get it going.
LAUREN: I’m so excited for that in the future. And I will use this newfound power responsibly.
DANIEL: Wow, that’s almost too much to expect. Now, let’s see, there are lots of different kinds of gestures, and you talk about them in the book. What kind of gestures do you find the most interesting? Where on the continuum do you live? And maybe you could tell us about the kind of gestures that there are.
LAUREN: I love all of my gestures equally…
DANIEL: They’re my children.
LAUREN: …but I love them for different reasons. They are all my children, but I love them all for different reasons.
DANIEL: Okay, I want to hear let’s do the rundown. [LAUGHS]
LAUREN: And let’s go through them all. So, the gestures that we make alongside speech are use the same hands, use the same body as the materials that are available to people who have signed modality languages. But they do very, very different things, like so different that we can split them all the way apart, where the gestures that we make with speech don’t make a lot of sense in the absence of speech. They tend to be, like, they’re really different between people. They’re different sometimes between you telling the same story twice. And it’s because that’s their superpower when they combine with speech, you make this bigger, more complicated thing because they’re doing different stuff. If gestures and speech were doing the same thing, you wouldn’t need or benefit from both of them.
And then all the way down the other end, with signed languages, they don’t need speech at all. They get along without the spoken modality. And in fact, because they have all the same structure and syntax and things that spoken languages have, you end up coming full circle. It’s a spread, but it also goes full circle because you can have gestures alongside and in as part of signed languages.
HEDVIG: I was just going to ask that because while you were talking, you were making gestures with your hands accompanying your speech.
DANIEL: Yes. Yes, you were.
HEDVIG: You were saying all the things that come like a thing.
DANIEL: That come full circle. Yeah.
HEDVIG: She was making… And for people who listen to this only in audio, she was making various, like, balls and circles with her hands mainly.
LAUREN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: And I imagine that if you are using a signed language, you’re already doing things with your hands. So, what are the kinds of gestures that can accompany signed languages?
LAUREN: So again, with… And signed languages are superior to spoken languages in that they are making use of this complex space around the human body. So, they can do really great things with space that you can’t do with the poor, impoverished spoken languages just have that single voice channel. It’s very hard to do two things at the same time with the voice in a way that you can be gesturing about two different people in a story at the same time. And so, what you find is that there are things that signers will all agree are signs, are words, are units of meaning that are consistent, and you’ll find them in a dictionary or a grammar. But then, there are also these things that you can do in a signed language that are those spontaneous, idiosyncratic. They’re not obligatory, they’re not part of the grammar of the language. And those elements are the same types of things that we see in gesture for spoken languages.
HEDVIG: Mmm. Nice.
DANIEL: Okay, so we’re looking at opposite ends of the continuum. Sign languages, which are full languages of their own. They have their own rules, they’re one side. And then, these idiosyncratic, you call them co-speech gestures in the book, sometimes called gesticulations. I’ve heard that term as well. And what fascinates me about those is they don’t seem to contribute much to the meaning. They don’t seem to… Oh, oh, I’ve done it wrong. Oh, oh. To a brainless layman like myself, they don’t seem to contribute much to the meaning, but we’re unable to stop doing them when we talk. I’m doing them right now, a pleading, sort of invisible oranges gesture toward you. So, I guess I’m wrong. What do they contribute?
LAUREN: They contribute so much to the way we do language and the way we receive language as well. So, the gestures that we make alongside speech sometimes do contain really important information, I think, because especially as English speakers, we have a real love of the written language. And we can get by with writing. It does okay. We can get by with… I mean, hello to everyone listening to this, purely in an audio format. I am a big fan of podcasts. I think it’s safe to say…
HEDVIG: Are you?
LAUREN: …I’m on the record as being a big fan of podcasts. And we get by without the gestural channel for podcasts. So, we can do it. Even when we do it, we are still gesturing. If you’re on the telephone to someone, they can’t see you and you’re gesturing. And that’s because speech came about for humans as part of a package, and that package includes gesture. And for all people who speak or sign a language, gesture comes as a bonus part of the package. And so, we can’t… While we can try and separate out speech from gesture, it gets really hard. You get people making more errors, being more hesitant, telling less rich stories if you stop them from gesturing.
DANIEL: Hmm.
HEDVIG: So, as podcasters, and when you know that the medium you’re using doesn’t include a visual element, you might try and compensate in certain means, so, you might say, “Oh, I’m sorry, you guys can’t see this, I’m making a circle with my hands to or something.”
LAUREN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: But when we do have the visual medium available, we tend to use some sort of gestures along with our speech or instead of speech with some signs. But I was thinking about news presenters. People when they’re presenting the news, they’re a bit weird because they sit and they usually don’t… They give them a piece of paper, they have something to hold in their hands and they do very little. Like, morning shows when they sit in a sofa, people do leans and gestures. But when they just present the news, they do a weird thing which the visual is available but they’re not using it. And I don’t know, does it make them more roboty or what is it and why do they do it?
LAUREN: I’ve also seen some really beautiful work about students learning to do mediation in their law degrees, and they’re actually trained really explicitly to keep their hands on the table. And any gesturing is seen as… I think lawyers must have gone to like the Vulcan school of public speaking because they’re taught that any gestures are considered too hectic and you’re being too emotional and mediation is meant to be this like very calm and measured…
And this goes back to… There is a multi-millennia tradition of this where not gesturing too much is seen to be restrained and elegant and formal to the point where there’s this great book on rhetoric from like the First Century A.D. by this dude called Quintilian. And he’s just like, “Don’t gesture too much. It’s too hectic,” basically. He’s like, “You look common as, don’t gesture.” And this is where if you think about like all those portraits of Napoleon with his hand tucked into his blazer or his jacket…
HEDVIG: Yeah.
LAUREN: He and a whole bunch of other young European people were totally obsessed with classical Rome and it was like the classical revival. And they were obsessed with all these stone statue portraits of these old philosophers and leaders who had their hand in their yoga… I almost said a hand in their yoga.
DANIEL: In their yoga.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS]
LAUREN: Their hand in their toga to be restrained because that was like I am restrained, I am measured, I am cool headed. And so, newsreaders are really just doing something that we’ve had a bee in our bonnet about for like 2000 years.
DANIEL: That’s funny though, because then you fast forward 100 years to the 1800s and you mention these works they had for oratory, the Chirologica and the Chironomia, where… I should share this. This is a book from, I forget where this…
LAUREN: Oh, this one’s great.
DANIEL: Yeah, check it out. It actually lists. This is the gestures that you’re supposed to do during oratory. And it’s got somebody doing a gesture and it tells you the name of the gesture. It shows you a picture of how you’re supposed to do it and what you’re supposed to be saying when you’re doing this. Like, are you exhorting or what are you doing?
LAUREN: Yeah. And this idea that there is a correct way to speak and a correct way to publicly perform is something that is definitely very culturally ingrained.
HEDVIG: The only thing of that I’ve ever paid attention to is when people talk about close and open and threatening body language. Sometimes, I catch myself sitting with my arms like this and…
DANIEL: Like what Hedvig? Like what?
HEDVIG: Like I’m crossing my arms and I’m putting my hands on my upper arms.
LAUREN: You look very defensive there. Are you okay?
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly. So, supposedly this makes you look defensive and sort of like a bit aggressive kind of. So, sometimes when I catch myself sitting like this, when I try to put my arms down, I don’t know if that counts as gesture.
LAUREN: So, one of the things I love about gesture is it feeds into all these other areas as well. So, this whole idea of body language and stance and how we interact with people and how close people feel like they can get and whether how much I’m facing you before it’s rude or not rude, all of these things come into play.
Gesture as a very specific element of that is really focused on what is intentional and communicative. And unfortunately for the body language experts who are [LAUGHTER] obsessed with making a whole story out of a single fragment, like a single still photo, a single moment, unfortunately for them, there’s actually just too much that is not intentional about a lot of those ways that we hold ourselves and a lot of the ways that we interact and trying to come up with this shared vocabulary, when it could just be actually, my shoulders are really tight today and I’m feeling a bit fragile. So, I might just have my arms crossed more than usual or this is just how it’s comfortable for me to sit.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Yeah.
DANIEL: It’s pseudoscience, isn’t it? I see alerts on body language or nonverbal communication and it’s like, “Check out this photo that shows how much the Queen hates Megan,” or something. And I’m just like, “Oh, this is pseudoscience.” Am I right or…? Mm-mm?
LAUREN: A lot of the time, yes. And often it is a single frame taken out of context.
DANIEL: Yeah. Okay.
LAUREN: If you see anything analysing a single still photo…
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
LAUREN: …you can assume that they have deliberately chosen the most creative image to interpret.
HEDVIG: Yeah, for sure. You’re right. I definitely don’t mean a communicative intent with, for example, crossing my arMs but sometimes people perceive it as one, right? So, you have to be like that’s why sometimes when I cross my arMs I take them down because I’m like, “Oh, I didn’t attend.” Same thing apparently, my husband has informed me that when I’m thinking very hard, I make this expression with my face that makes me look like the person has said something very, very stupid, but it’s actually just that I’m thinking very, very hard. So, yes, he says like “Oh, you’re looking at me like I said something wrong.” And I’m like, “No, no, no. I’m just thinking. I’m just desperately trying to think.”
LAUREN: And facial expressions fall into this really complicated space where some of them really are unfiltered just how you are processing things. And we see this in the way that the earliest looks of pain and discomfort or happiness for babies seem very reflexive and just responding to the moment. And then on top of that, you add this layer of culture, and then you add this extra layer of elements of… There are elements of facial expressions that are very gestural as well. And elements of head, like nods and shakes, are very cultural. So, you have this like… We all just happen to have a body, and sometimes it functions in these ways that are kind of similar across people. And then, you add these layers of language and culture on top of that, and you start telling this really complicated story.
DANIEL: Well, now that you’ve mentioned language and culture and gesture and culture, let’s head for the middle of our continuum. We’ve talked about signed languages. We’ve talked about co-speech, gestures. But now, I want to talk about what’s known as emblematic gestures, maybe the hand signals or the arm signals or something that mean the same thing to people within a culture, but then you go somewhere else, and it means a totally different thing.
LAUREN: Yeah, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: I made at least two… [LAUGHS]
LAUREN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: …because I was just thinking about. We said about facial expressions that an eyeroll. I think that an eyeroll… Well, Europeans like to blame everything on Americans. Am I right with the eyeroll? Is that an American invention? Does that sound right?
LAUREN: So, you raise a really important question in general, which is trying to pin down the origins of gestures and particularly these emblems that have cultural stories is a real challenge, because unlike words, where we have these increasingly large databases of historical documents online, it’s really, really hard to go back we don’t have photographs from beyond a couple of hundred years ago at the best. And a lot of people weren’t doing informal emblem gesture things at us in those photographs. And so, you’re looking at really patchy historical records of the origins of these gestures.
And sometimes, it can just be really… People be like this gesture that we all use, like finger guns, where did that come from? The okay hand, we don’t…
HEDVIG: So much.
LAUREN: We don’t seem to have a lot of evidence that things like the okay hand and the thumbs up for good are much older than a couple of hundred years. There’s this really beautiful paper about the middle finger, which is often treated as pretty reliably sourced. Thank you, Hedvig. [LAUGHTER] Pretty reliably sourced.
DANIEL: I held back.
LAUREN: Just for people on video, it seemed to be reliably sourced back to classical Rome. But when you actually go back and look at those Roman sources and these Greek sources, he’s like, oh, actually, it’s a bit more complicated. I think we can say that one is definitely a raised middle finger.
HEDVIG: Also, which way?
LAUREN: All kinds of things like that. So, I’m always pretty hesitant because we just have so few that we have the research for. And for people who do the research, the reason is often… I tried my hardest and I don’t have a whole lot of certainty to say with things. The ones we do tend to have certainty for are literally because someone invented it and they tell us that they invented it. So, the Vulcan salute from Star Trek, for example, where the ring finger and the pinky are separated from the index and the middle finger with the thumb out, Leonard Nimoy invented that because he just felt like he had to do something for this very non-body language, effusive alien character that he was portraying. So, he took a gesture from the rabbinical tradition of the synagogue that he attended as a child. And he says this in his biography, and no one has any reason to contest that origin for it. So, it’s a handful of gestures like that where we have a very clear story of origin.
DANIEL: The figs as well. I think the figs where you put your thumb in between first and second finger and it’s supposed to be very rude gesture. That one comes up here…
HEDVIG: Oh, this one.
DANIEL: You’ve got it between finger two and three. Am I doing it wrong between first and second? Expert, please tell us.
LAUREN: I think usually between the index and the middle finger.
DANIEL: Okay. That one comes up in Dante, I believe, Dante’s Inferno, somebody does it there and it’s described. And there are lots of sources that talk about the figs.
HEDVIG: Yes.
LAUREN: So, one of the advantages that we have with emblems over historical records of other gestures is that embleMs because they have a fixed meaning for a particular culture, that often comes with a name and a sense of like, “You have to do it this way.” You can’t raise any other finger and have it mean the same as the middle finger for most people. So, that increases our chances of finding these things in the historical record.
HEDVIG: Many of these emblems are also different from what we talked about earlier in that they’re not necessarily co-speech gestures, right?
LAUREN: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
HEDVIG: If you could say they are sort of words in themselves. You can say you cannot speak at all and do one of these and mean something. I’m having so much fun. I actually don’t know what is the bad. What’s the vulgar meaning of this one with the thumb? Is it just like “fuck you” as well, or what is it?
LAUREN: I think the gloss is usually, it represents female genitalia for the fig.
HEDVIG: Right. And it’s an insult?
LAUREN: It is indeed an insult, [HEDVIG LAUGHS] as are many emblem gestures, because they’re really good, as you said in these, they don’t need words to be understood, but they don’t have the same full grammar and structure that you have for a signed language. So, this is why we talk about them sitting somewhere between a full signed language and the co-speech gestures.
DANIEL: Yeah, you can do it all by itself or you could be like, “Hey, up yours, buddy,” and do it at the same time.
LAUREN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: And you can do it from afar. I used to have a friend who knows some sign languages and when he got drunk and was in a loud environment, he would sometimes start signing at me because he was like, “Oh, it’s very loud. So, I’ll sign because then you can hear me.” And I was like, “Except I don’t know Swedish sign language. So, it’s useless.” But gestures, you can do them from afar and get your point across, which is not always possible with sound.
LAUREN: And this is why there’s been a lot of theorising about the fact that emblem gestures tend to center around either like insults or greetings and leave-takings or thanks and like a thumbs up as a like, “Yeah, I got you.” They tend to kind of coalesce around these particular functions because these are the kind of things you need to do at a distance or on a noisy street. And this is why they kind of fill this particular communicative niche.
DANIEL: At a distance, so you can run away superfast and you’ve already got a lead on the guy.
LAUREN: Yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: Yep. I wanted to ask about this. When I knew I was going to talk to you, I got really excited because I found a piece of research about gesture and speech working together. This is from some researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Radboud University in Nijmegen, looking at how gestures help people to predict the words that people are going to use, which I found just kind of amazing. I’ll just read from the press release. “In a study using virtual avatars, scientists show that listeners use the avatar’s gestures to predict upcoming speech. Both behavioral and EEG data indicated that hand gestures facilitate language processing, illustrating the multimodal nature of human communication.” We’re going to have a link up on the show notes for this episode.
LAUREN: It’s a really lovely study. And the reason that avatars are so important there is because they’re really nice. This kind of animation has come a long way. They look very naturalistic and they’re there so that you can change the timing relationship between the gesture that you want and the speech in these really fine grained ways that seem very naturalistic. Rather than trying to get someone to act out all this variation, you can make these really subtle distinctions and then test the way people respond to the gesture in these experiments. So, it’s a really, really elegant study.
DANIEL: Yeah, we use what we got.
HEDVIG: So, we can use co speech to help reduce surprise, so to predict what’s coming next. And if we have a bit of a noisy channel or something, or if we don’t know someone very well, the more cues of information we have about the communicative content, the better, right?
LAUREN: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: So, we can use gesture for that. And that brings us to part of your book as well where you were talking about gesture in… maybe not gesture in written form, but when we do write, we are bereft of these resources because we can’t see each other. So, we have to sometimes invent things like emoticons and emojis or maybe sometimes punctuation does some of these things.
LAUREN: Yeah, absolutely.
HEDVIG: But it is… How do you say? Like, you were talking about earlier, saying how there are some things you can do in sign languages that you can’t do in spoken. And there are a lot of things you can do in spoken than spoken visual… I don’t know how to say it, [CHUCKLES] that you can’t do in written at all. So, all of these mediums have pros and cons and they’re all trying to make do. So, what are the things we do in writing to sort of make up for this channel that we have with gesture?
LAUREN: I have a whole theory that I’ve been working on and keep coming back to because I think it holds up pretty well that when we have our co-speech gestures with speech, the equivalent that we have for writing are things like emoji. And sometimes, that’s very literally, like we have a whole subsection of emoji that are hand shapes and they are hand shapes that are embleMs I mean, especially this is unfortunately because of the very Japanese and then American history of emoji. They’re very skewed towards those two cultures in terms of what is in the set, but they create this way of putting gesture back into and alongside speech.
And emoji are very, very good for this compared to… I mean, we also can send pictures a lot more easily now and photographs and send each other videos instead of text. But emoji are really good for this because of a little technical weirdness to them, which is that they exist right there alongside text and they work the same as the A-to-Z characters or your Chinese logograph symbols, if you’re typing in standard Chinese, because they are managed by Unicode, which is the same group that do those symbols as well.
HEDVIG: What is your most frequently used emoji?
LAUREN: My most frequently used. I really love the little party dude with the party hat and the confetti because it’s just a like, “Yay.”
HEDVIG: Nice.
LAUREN: That one is used a lot in the family chat if someone’s had a very good day on the Wordle.
HEDVIG: Daniel, what’s your most used one?
DANIEL: Most used one for me is smiling guy with the squinchy eyes.
LAUREN: Really emphatically smiling. Very nice.
DANIEL: Yeah. How about you, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: Mine is the smiling guy with a little sweat drop.
LAUREN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: I find embarrassingly that it is very often appropriate to accompany what I say, which is I’m like, “I found out this slightly embarrassing but fun thing,” or like, “Look at my awkward this thing,” or something. So, I think that’s something about all of us.
LAUREN: Such a perfectly subtle nuance that you get to add to whatever you’re sharing for the day.
HEDVIG: We were talking earlier that emblematic gestures can have a cultural-specific meaning. And as a lot of us are learning on the internet, all of emojis also have a specific meaning.
LAUREN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: There’re the obvious things like waterdrops and aubergines, etc. But there are also some of the ones that are hand shapes or face shapes can also have a very particular meaning sometimes.
LAUREN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: And also, just the writing, like I encounter someone who uses a lot of dot, dot, dot, in just half of the sentences and isn’t insinuating something I found out which…
LAUREN: I guess I’m…
HEDVIG: …is very confusing.
LAUREN: …known by many people and I think largely thanks to my Lingthusiasm cohost, Gretchen McCulloch, and her book, Because Internet, as the boomer ellipses.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: That was a big me.
HEDVIG: This was a young person though which is what threw me, but they were from a country that is quite foreign to me and that I haven’t been to. So, I was thinking maybe it was a cultural-specific thing as well.
LAUREN: Yeah, very potentially.
DANIEL: I want to get off of emoji, but since we’re making the emoji-gesture link, I’ve always thought of them as tone indicators, as discourse pragmatic markers, but you’re arguing they serve the function of gesture in language. Can you make that point for me?
LAUREN: Sure. So, they can absolutely do tone as well. They’re doing a lot of embodiment. So, they are returning those things that we can do with our body. So, tone is one of them. But emoji help explain why people use illustrative gestures. So, if I say happy birthday, I can send you a balloon and a party cake and a present, or I could send popping champagne and some balloons and a heart. And there’s no obligation to send any. There’s no fixed grammatical form. There’s no order that I have to put them in. So, in many ways, they are doing something like an illustrative gesture for those co-speech gestures. They feel the same kind of optional, not obligatory, illustrating, adding extra meaning.
DANIEL: Oh, I get it, I get it.
LAUREN: Also, there’s just a bunch of pointing emoji, not just the literal hand shapes that we have, but we also have a bunch of arrows as well.
HEDVIG: That one.
LAUREN: And pointing is something that the human body is very good at doing as well. I love pointing. It’s one of those co-speech gestures. Within co-speech gestures, there are subcategories. And I love pointing because it is just such an obvious but absolutely magical thing that if I extend an index finger and point, you will follow my index finger rather than just staring at the end of my finger.
DANIEL: Yes.
LAUREN: And that is actually an impressive psychological trick. We can’t get chimpanzees to do it reliably…
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
LAUREN: …but we can get dogs to do it.
HEDVIG: I was just going to say I sort of got my dog to do it, but it was like when my hand was basically touching the tree almost really and at that point was doing half of the job. One of my favorite pointing co-speech gestures is the, “Oh, you know Daniel,” and then you point to where he lives or his office or where he usually sits in the room.
LAUREN: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: Yesterday, I was doing that sign and I was pointing and then I realised that I was in a different location than I thought and I pointed wrong and I went, “Oh, I’m sorry,” and then I pointed the right way. [LAUGHTER] But I don’t think anyone… There was no miscomprehension when I pointed at those times.
DANIEL: They weren’t going to hunt them down or anything, no.
LAUREN: That’s because English and a lot of other European languages isn’t particularly caught up on the absolute orientation of how you point. But there are languages, there’s quite a few languages across Australia, where if you want to point to… If you’re talking about the city, and the city for me is over there, and it doesn’t matter where you are, your spatial reference is always kind of absolute and geographic. And so, it doesn’t matter where you are, you’ll always point to the city if it’s over there. If I’m facing another direction, I would point to it. Feels very wrong to do it, but if I turned around 180 degrees and I’d have to point that way to it.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
LAUREN: And this is something that is not in my language, but I have learnt to do a similar spatial trick only when I’m in Melbourne. Everywhere else, I’m horribly lost. But yeah, pointing also comes with a whole bunch of other nifty tricks as well.
DANIEL: Pointing is great. It reminds me of the object choice task, which we’ve talked about on the show before. You have two containers and one of them holds a tasty treat and there’s an animal watching you and you point at the one that has the treat and then you go away. And then, you see if the animal can choose the one that has the treat. You’ll never fool the animal. You just point to the one that has the treat. You’re not pulling a swifty. But most animals just do terrible at the object choice task, no better than random chance. There’s only two that do an okay job. Dogs do okay. And chimpanzees, but only if they’ve been hanging with humans for a long time because it’s about relevance and seeing relevance in human actions.
LAUREN: Yeah. The data that we know about pointing is that it seems to be domesticated animals have got the hang of it. So, wolves can’t, but dogs can. Horses. There’s some evidence that domestic goats will attend to pointing.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: I’d buy that.
LAUREN: The only non-domesticated animals that there seems to be good evidence for are dolphins, which is just like a classic curveball that makes sense in terms of kind of stereotypes about animal communication. Seems like the dolphins really are clued into something.
HEDVIG: When we do animal communication tests, the most… I mean, so it’s like parrots, dolphins, primates, domesticated animals that are easy to handle like horses and dogs and maybe goats, we tend to not test, like, I don’t know…
DANIEL: Wolverines.
HEDVIG: …chameleons, wolverines. So, there might also be a little bit… Well, I don’t know, maybe they do test all that and it just doesn’t get any attention.
LAUREN: Yeah, there’s been no evidence I’ve come across in the literature. And I mean, we’ll see, but it does…
HEDVIG: Maybe we should do more tests.
LAUREN: It does seem to be something… you’ve really got to hang out with humans and be motivated.
DANIEL: Now, I know about finger pointing and I also know about lip pointing. Mm.
LAUREN: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Is there anything else that we use?
LAUREN: So, the answer is yes. But there are two different yeses for you.
DANIEL: I’m ready.
HEDVIG: Ooh.
LAUREN: The first is that there are some culture specific ways of pointing. So, for example, in various parts of Papua New Guinea, there’s an eye bulge which is like pointing with your eyes, which we all do, but this is a very… Like, you raise your eyebrows and you make it very prominent as a form of pointing that is used just as frequently as hand pointing in some of the data that was presented for this analysis. And then, there’s different culture… Pointing with the index finger does seem to be a tendency to point with the index finger that seems to be related to something very early in human physiology, but…
So, you get… Babies will extend their index fingers separate to their other fingers more frequently, but it’s not communicative. So, there seems to be some kind of evolutionary physiological thing happening there. But having said that, there are lots of cultures that will point with a middle finger just as naturally as an index finger. Or there are cultural taboos on pointing at particular things or in particular ways. So, like in Malaysia and other places, it’s very common to use the thumb over the fist to do like a polite point in public if you’re pointing someone like, “Go over here.” So, those are kind of cultural restrictions.
And then, there’s just the individual variation that we all have. So, for example, you’ll often see people do a thumb point behind them. It’s just easier to articulate rather than reaching behind yourself with an index finger. If you’re pointing behind…
HEDVIG: Oh, that’s true.
LAUREN: …you don’t have to be very specific. And so, you’ll find people will often point behind them with a thumb. And then, if you’ve got full hands, you could point with a knee or a foot and no one would find that strange. They might find it more strange if your hands are completely free and you choose to point with a foot for fun. Try that experiment tomorrow. [CHUCKLES] But we are very good at making them… Even just a subtle head nod or a kind of lead with the nose type head point or a chin point in some places is the preferred kind of subtle point with the chin rather than we kind of lead with the nose. So, lots of, lots of variation in pointing.
HEDVIG: I noticed when I was, like, I think in my teens that it’s very important to follow your gaze, usually especially when you point with your fingers. So, if you say, “Over there,” you’re supposed to look. So, I tried what would happen if I just pointed places and didn’t follow my gaze? And you can try this, yourself, it like really messes people up, it does. Maybe the behind would work. But if you do for anything that’s in front of you, if you don’t follow your gaze, people do get weirded out, it’s quite fun.
DANIEL: That’s right. And in fact, I remember a study about, again, the object choice task with babies, like, from 12 to 18 months, and they found that if the pointer, this was once again a toy that the child might want, but it’s in one of two containers, the other one’s empty, and the person points. And when the person points to the toy, the container with the toy under it, and also gives them a look and kind of gives them some eyebrows, then the baby chooses that one more often. But if the pointer just sort of seems to be absently pointed, they just got their finger out, but they’re not following the finger with their gaze, they just seem to be doing it, almost mistakenly, babies ignore them and I thought that was a fascinating result.
LAUREN: They’re coy, those babies.
DANIEL: They’re smart.
HEDVIG: Intention really matters. Yeah.
DANIEL: Yep. As far as gesture and the origins of language, you have mentioned that there are a number of hypotheses about how language got started, but you go for the gesture-first theory, is that right? Could you tell us a bit about your views on that?
LAUREN: Sure. Let’s say that’s where I come down in this.
DANIEL: No, you tell me. You tell me.
LAUREN: I think when we look at what our closest living relatives are doing, unfortunately, it turns out that speech and gesture both fossilise very badly, [DANIEL LAUGHS] makes things very hard, but it keeps a lot of people very busy, having very busy debates. And they all seem very happy to have them, and I’m glad they are having them. And we can just like check in occasionally and see what’s happening.
If we think about what our nearest relatives are doing, but also what language is, for me, language is something that’s multimodal. You don’t get speech without gesture. Gesture is always along for the ride. If you think about language as just a slow accumulation of skills that all came together to then give us this really cool party trick that our species has, the current living relatives we have in the ape family are all doing interesting things with gesture. And there’s some really, really beautiful work with gorillas in various populations in Africa. And Cat Hobaiter and her team have wonderful data where they see these recurring communicative meanings that are being made in these communities, and they are interpretable by humans. And I just think if that’s what our nearest living relatives are doing currently, it’s probably something like what our scroll back on the timeline, a couple of hundred thousand years, ancestors were doing. And so, it just seems like something gestural was happening.
Now, I don’t think that became a fully fledged signed language, because I think once you have a fully fledged sign language, why would you get your articulators in your mouth to do complicated things? So, I think it was more of a kind of levelling up together.
DANIEL: Absolutely.
LAUREN: The jump from signed language and then putting all that in speech but keeping a bunch of it in the gesture channel doesn’t quite sound particularly coherent to me. But I’ll check in with the debates in another 10 years’ time and see what they’re up to.
DANIEL: I think so too. I think we use what we got.
HEDVIG: Because as cool as gesture is, and it’s definitely very cool…
LAUREN: Thanks.
HEDVIG: …there are a lot of things we can do with our vocal folds and our articular apparatus that is very cool. And some of them… So, you guys can help me. So, usually people say that something along these lines, we gave up being able to not choke on food in order to have our larynx a bit lower so we can make more different distinctive sounds. So supposedly, compared to other primates, we can choke on food more easily, but we can also make more sounds. And therefore, the theory is that we sort of sacrifice that mortality in order to speak. I don’t… Because I’ve heard this little bit so often and I no longer know where it comes from, and I no longer know if it’s a myth or if it’s true. Do you guys know if that’s a true statement?
DANIEL: Some primates do have descended larynxes.
HEDVIG: Okay.
LAUREN: But also, if you look at, like, you know that mid sagittal where they like cut a person in half with an Mr machine, if you look at one of them for an adult human and a human baby and a chimp, the human baby and the chimp look very, very similar.
HEDVIG: Yes, I’ve seen that.
LAUREN: Yes, that’s not a very compelling argument and I don’t want to oversimplify the knowledge of anatomy that other people have, but that is definitely the story I’ve been told as well.
HEDVIG: But it does… Like you were saying, it’s probably a sort of like co-bootstrapping up to get this complicated communication system because we clearly make use of gesture now as well. So, yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me.
DANIEL: My next question was going to be, what’s a misconception people have about gesture?
HEDVIG: That’s good.
LAUREN: Oof. That it’s extra as in extraneous, not extra as in fabulous, [LAUGHTER] because it can definitely be that. As I mentioned briefly before, there’s lots of work where we’ve tried to stop people gesturing. It does very bad things to their language production capacity. We use it in how we interpret speech as we saw from that wonderful paper out of MPI, people taking the cues from gesture. We can use it to like process and understand language, so there is this wonderful effect where if you manipulate… you can play the same audio, but if you have an emphatic gesture at a different point in the word or the sentence, you can change the way people process it.
So, there’s this great work on Spanish compound words where if you play the beat on the first part or the second part, you get the different interpretations. So, like blackboard versus black board. And it’s called the gesture McGurk effect because the visual channel is messing with your audio processing skills. So, gesture is, yeah, absolutely a part of the way that we communicate with our bodies.
DANIEL: We’ll find that study and we’ll put up a video on the McGurk effect as well. That’s on becauselanguage.com.
HEDVIG: And we should probably also say that the study we’ve been referring to about the predicting things from MPI Nijmegen, it’s by Ter Bekke, et al. And so, they’re from Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Donders Institute for Brain Sciences. And it’s, as far as I understand, open source. It looks like open access. I mean…
DANIEL: Love it.
HEDVIG: So, you’ve written this book?
LAUREN: Yes.
HEDVIG: For Oxford University Press called A Slim… is it Slim Guide?
LAUREN: It is A Slim Guide.
DANIEL: Gesture: A Slim Guide.
HEDVIG: I really like the illustrations in it and I think it’s really nice. And as I was looking through it, I thought, “Oh, this would be so nice in like a first-year linguistics course.” Not just for people who do like, I don’t know, some sort of sign language program or something, but just general intro to linguistics. Because you touch on a lot of different things. You touch on language evolution, you touch on sign languages, obviously, language and culture, Hockett’s design features and so many different things that are usually… Is it called part and parcel? Is that the correct…
DANIEL: Part and parcel?
LAUREN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Part and parcel of a Linguistics 101. So, is this book intended for an intro to linguistics audience? Is it intended for… Yeah, who did you write for?
DANIEL: Who would benefit from this book, Lauren?
LAUREN: Okay, so I wrote this book for Gretchen.
DANIEL: Okay, it’s for Gretchen, audience of one.
LAUREN: Solely for Gretchen. So, when she was putting together Because Internet and there’s a whole chapter in that where we lay out our theory about emoji as gesture for written communication. And she was like… Because I said, “I think gesture could solve a lot of the interpretation problems you’re having with making sense of emoji.” And she’s like, “Great. Do you have an intro to gesture for me?” I was like, “No, no.” I was like… I for many years got to teach a second-year undergraduate subject on gesture and language which was very, very dear to my heart. So, I bundled up a bunch of lecture slides and articles and a couple of very useful but very, very dense and detailed and analytical books which are wonderful, but not that kind of like breezy, chatty, let me just tell you the fun key highlights that you need.
And then, once I was like, I don’t have that. And it just ate away at me until I was like, but I want that. And I want something where if you are a linguist and you’re like, “Huh, maybe I want to think about what’s happening with all this video data I’ve collected.” Or you’re a historian and you’re like, “I keep having a desire to badly interpret historical records about gesture,” instead of having that desire of introducing people to the world of gesture studies through this book. So, I mean, Gretchen was my first audience, but I kind of wrote the whole thing with this like, “You might know a little bit about linguistics, you might know nothing about linguistics. How quickly can I bring you up to speed on the many ways in which gesture is part of language?” So, I would love it if people used this book as part of undergraduate subjects. I would love it if researchers in a whole bunch of fields used it to add gesture as a part of their research. That is the expanded answer of who the audience for this book is.
DANIEL: The book is Gesture: A Slim Guide. It’s out now from Oxford University Press. We’ve been talking to the author, Dr Lauren Gawne. Lauren, how can people find out what you’re up to?
LAUREN: They can listen to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics, or this podcast whenever I apparently choose to gatecrash from this point on.
HEDVIG: Yay.
DANIEL: Precisely.
LAUREN: And I am on a variety of social media at various points, but always at my blog, which is superlinguo.com.
DANIEL: Lauren Gawne, thanks so much for hanging out with us. This has been a lot of fun.
LAUREN: So great chatting.
[INTERVIEW ENDS]
[MUSIC]
DANIEL: And now, it’s time for Words of the Week. These words were all suggested to us by James on our Discord. Thanks so much, James. He curated the entire collection.
HEDVIG: Wow.
DANIEL: We get so many good bits of feedback from James and in fact all of our listeners. Let’s start with this one. SWERVE, to swerve.
HEDVIG: Similar to AVOID.
DANIEL: Yes, or EVADE possibly. But notice what’s happening. Usually, you’d say, I was in the car and something was in the road, so I swerved.” Verb, intransitive. Now it’s being used as a transitive. So, “Oh no, I got swerved,” when someone avoids you or, “Someone tried to talk to me, but I swerved him.” To SWERVE someone.
HEDVIG: Oh, nice.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: To swerve someone or something. I swerved the col… No, I’m thinking a lot about Crusader Kings. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: There were some evangelists and I swerved them.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, cool. I like that.
DANIEL: Yep. So, it’s the SWERVE construction. Lovely.
HEDVIG: Love it.
DANIEL: Next one James has alerted us to, DIRTY SODA. A DIRTY SODA. Have you run across this?
HEDVIG: I have run across other dirty things. So, a DIRTY CHAI, I think, is an Indian, like, South Asian style milky drink, but with I think coffee instead of tea? Or something like that?
DANIEL: It contains a double shot of espresso, steamed milk and spiced black tea, masala chai. That’s from Spruce Eats.
HEDVIG: So, you actually have both tea and coffee in the same drink, which is…? [SINGS] Doo-doo.
DANIEL: And that’s a dirty chai.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And I think you can dirty other things, but I think some of them mean add alcohol and some of them mean add coffee.
DANIEL: Yeah, it’s funny because I’ve been trying to track this for a long time. It’s been on the periphery of my understanding. What does it take to make a drink dirty? Because I know that there’s a dirty martini that’s been around for 100 years.
HEDVIG: Right. What’s that? What do we do then?
DANIEL: Well. It’s gin or vodka, Dry vermouth and olive brine, olive juice. Whoa.
HEDVIG: All right.
DANIEL: Apparently, people like it.
HEDVIG: And then one of my favorite drinks, Negroni Sbagliato, of meme fame from a couple years ago is like a Negroni, except instead of one of the things, you have prosecco. I forget what it is you replace with.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: And sbagliato means spotted.
DANIEL: Oh, like macchiato.
HEDVIG: Yeah. So, it’s like a dirty Negroni, except you just say it in Italian because you’re cool.
DANIEL: Yeah. Okay, cool. There’s also a dirty coffee. It’s got espresso on the top and then chilled cold milk or cream at the bottom. And that’s known as a dirty coffee. Okay.
HEDVIG: Wait. If you said you were going to make me a dirty coffee, I would assume you would put rum in it.
DANIEL: That is not a definition that I saw, but I wasn’t able to do a ton of research here. But now there’s dirty soda, what’s a dirty soda? Take a guess.
HEDVIG: I do know that in some places, people put milk in sodas. Is it that?
DANIEL: It is that.
HEDVIG: I’ve had that.
DANIEL: It’s soda spiked with cream. We need to do SPIKED at some point. Cream and flavored syrup. It’s growing in popularity because Mormons, people in Utah don’t drink a lot of coffee or alcohol, at least they’re not supposed to if they are Latter-day Saints. And so, because of the popularity of Real Housewives… what is it? Real Housewives of Salt Lake City? Or is it — I don’t know — Ogden?
HEDVIG: Something like that. Yeah, they’ve all got the same hair, is all I’ll say about that.
DANIEL: Well, they do. There’s a look. I scarcely recognise the LDS church that I grew up in, personally. But anyway, that’s another story. They have been getting creative with soft drinks for a really long time because, you know, that’s kind of where they tend to lean toward.
HEDVIG: So, Mormons are not allowed to drink… The scripture says something about hot drink, and it has been interpreted to not mean tea or coffee.
DANIEL: Correct.
HEDVIG: But then, someone said it’s also… even if you make a cold brew, so the water has never been hot, you put it with the coffee, that’s still not allowed.
DANIEL: Still a hot drink.
HEDVIG: But you are allowed sodas with caffeine in it. Is that true? So, like Coca-Cola is allowed.
DANIEL: It is now. It wasn’t when I was a kid, no, that one’s changed.
HEDVIG: Right.
DANIEL: Also, hot chocolates are a hot drink, but perfectly fine in Mormon circles. Is that making sense?
HEDVIG: Oh, god. This is so complicated. Okay, all right.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] I know.
HEDVIG: But you all get a planet when you die, so it’s all beautiful.
DANIEL: No, the planet doctrine has been deprecated since the Book of Mormon musical because people thought it sounded silly, and silliness… well…
HEDVIG: Fuck. It’s so good though. I want a planet.
DANIEL: Now we’re getting into an area that I didn’t mean to get into, I’m trying to stay positive about…
HEDVIG: Okay, sorry! Anyway, dirty sodas are… You put milk in it. I had only had this Indonesia. When you order a soda at a restaurant, they would be like, “And is that with or without milk?” And the first time I was like, “Sorry, I didn’t mean coffee.” And they were like, “Oh, no, no. You ordered a Coca-Cola. Would you like that with milk?” I was like, “Uh, yes? Mm?”
DANIEL: Why would I want that? Yeah, but have you ever had a SPIDER or a FLOAT? A root beer float? See, that’s just cold milk.
HEDVIG: Yes. Yes. I have.
DANIEL: Ice cream. Drop some ice cream in there, yum.
HEDVIG: That’s a soda with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top. It’s very nice.
DANIEL: Ah, so good. Okay, so here’s the recipe for the original dirty soda. I’m getting this from an article from eater.com by Amy McCarthy. A Diet Coke.
HEDVIG: Diet Coke. Okay.
DANIEL: Diet Coke poured over ice, then spiked with a shot of coconut syrup. Okay. Lime juice, mm-hmm. And half and half which is, in the USA, half milk, half cream. So just thickened. Not thickened cream, but something like that. Anyway, I think it sounds quite good and I would love to try a dirty soda. If I ever find myself in Utah, I’ll give it a shot with my coffee.
HEDVIG: You can probably do it at home.
DANIEL: Well, you can if you can get a hold of Coffee Mate, because they make that weird coffee creamer powder stuff. They’ve got a product that’s expressly devoted to dirty sodas. They call it Dirty Soda Creamer. And you can put some of that in your soda. How about that? That’d be good. It’s got the coconut flavor, bit of the lime.
HEDVIG: Okay. All right.
DANIEL: Okay. So, I guess we could say that dirty in general means something that’s been adulterated with something else, but what that is depends. I guess if I had a dirty soda and stuck some coffee in there, that might be good. That’d be good.
HEDVIG: But in various ways, it’s like making it a bit more naughty. Like, it’s like adding fat or alcohol or coffee. Right?
DANIEL: Yeah! Something good, yeah!
HEDVIG: You’re not like diluting it with water.
DANIEL: No. That’s not dirty.
HEDVIG: You’re adding something. Yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: You’re adulterating it.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yes. Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Last one: MANU. MANU. One of our patrons is named Manú.
HEDVIG: I was just going to say that. Manú is…
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] It’s a French name.
HEDVIG: …one of our patrons, Manú…
DANIEL: But that’s not about him.
HEDVIG: If I just thought of the word, MANU… Ugh, MANU, It’s hard because it’s just two nasals and two very common vowels. So, it could come from any language basically, right?
DANIEL: Yep.
HEDVIG: Tell me about it. I think…
DANIEL: Well, this one comes from New Zealand. English. It’s from Māori.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Yes.
DANIEL: And it’s about making a gigantic splash. What do you call making a gigantic splash in the pool in your variety of English?
HEDVIG: BATH BOMB. Bath bomb.
DANIEL: Okay. I’ve heard BOMBIES in Australia, but of course it was the CANNONBALL in the USA. Well, around there in Māori circles, they call it the MANU. And this is an article from Pankaj Rohilla and Daehyun Choi in The Conversation. They’re postdoctoral fellows in fluid dynamics at Georgia Tech.
HEDVIG: Nice!
HEDVIG: We’ve been doing a lot of Georgia Tech stories today. They launched an investigation into what makes an optimal manu. And they made a manu bot, which is like a V-shaped plastic clip that can spring open underwater. [LAUGHS] This is empirical.
HEDVIG: Okay. Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Okay. So, the physics of it is this. When you jump into the pool, you make a splash, but there are actually two splashes. The crown splash is the first one when you hit the water. The water kind of goes…. But then, there’s also a big giant galoop! and that is the Worthington splash named after somebody named Worthington who, I guess, must have been very good at them. That’s the one that you want. So, to make a really good manu, you hit the water like a V, and then you open up at the right time.
HEDVIG: Above or under the water?
DANIEL: Slightly under the water, but not too far, depending on what your body is like.
HEDVIG: Ah, okay.
DANIEL: What happens is you hit the water like a V, and then there’s a little bit of air near you. You make a cavity and then you open up and the cavity collapses and that makes the water go gabloop.
HEDVIG: Gulb… Yeah, yeah. yeah.
DANIEL: And then you get that splash. How about that?
HEDVIG: That’s fun. I like that.
DANIEL: You can see some videos. We’ve got that conversation article up on the show notes for this episode becauselanguage.com. And you can watch videos of how they managed to find the way to make an optimal manu, and you can maybe do some manu-euvers yourself.
HEDVIG: This is a fun one. Thank you so much, James. Manu jumping, I had actually been seeing a lot of videos on my various social media feeds of people in New Zealand jumping into water. And I just thought it was because I get a lot of general Polynesian New Zealand content. I didn’t know it was happening outside, but it’s a fun thing to be doing. Yeah. Nice to splash it.
DANIEL: There you go. So, SWERVE, DIRTY SODA, and MANU, our Words of the Week. Thanks to James for all of those words. Let’s take a comment from Andy from Logophilius who says, “D, B and H, I haven’t even finished listening to Episode 117 yet, but I am compelled to jump in like an incel in the comments section of a feminist website.”
HEDVIG: Ooh.
DANIEL: “I was surprised there was so much hemming and hawing about whether CALLUS,” that is the hard bit on your foot…
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: “…and CALLOUS, meaning unfeeling, are related.” Remember that? We were like, “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know.”
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Andy says, “This isn’t some one-off noun adjective pair. There is a small but noteworthy set of English word pairs in which the noun form ends in U-S and the of or related to adjective form ends in O-U-S.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: “The most common pair has got to be MUCUS, the stuff, U-S, and MUCOUS, O-U-S, the adjective, like mucous membranes.” Which I didn’t even realise wasn’t spelled -US. Mucous membranes are -OUS. What?
HEDVIG: I didn’t understand it was an adjective. I thought it was a noun compound thing. Huh.
DANIEL: Okay. It was time to hit the Google Ngram Viewer. Hang on. Okay, hang on, we’re doing to…
HEDVIG: I believe Andy.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] I tend to believe Andy as well because he knows his stuff, but I’m going to…
HEDVIG: I do think Andy should choose another metaphor than an incel in the comment section of a feminist debate. [LAUGHTER] But I see here that Andy has written that there are some more ones. Should I go on reading while you look it up?
DANIEL: Would you please?
HEDVIG: “There are others. Some are medical/technical. Some have been superceded by different forms Some have seen separation in use.” So, he writes HUMUS or HUMOUS. If you are in primary school or something, we’re taught that there are different layers of soil. There is the HUMUS layer, not related as far as I know — Oh, Related or Not? — to the nice chickpea spread.
DANIEL: Not related. Not related.
HEDVIG: Not related, you say? Okay, right. We’ll find out. FUNGUS and FUNGOUS, this one is starting to tickle… I have a paradigm here, fungous, funguous.
DANIEL: It’s not fung-u-ous. There’s no extra U. Fungous, no wonder these things are sort of collapsing, because they sound just exactly the same. Why are you pouting, Hedvig? What’s… [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Because I thought it was funguous.
DANIEL: Okay, well, maybe it is.
HEDVIG: You pronounce it.
DANIEL: It could be. This is English we’re talking about here.
HEDVIG: Am I supposed to say FUNGUS / FUNGOUS [SOUNDING THE SAME]?
DANIEL: Which makes no sense at all. You say it your way makes more sense. This is a very fungous place.
HEDVIG: Yeah, that’s make sense.
DANIEL: You’re looking rather fungous, Hedvig.
HEDVIG: All right. Okay. And then ESTRUS, which is this thing that happens to… It’s sort of like periods for other mammals. It’s when they are in heat.
DANIEL: Reverse periods.
HEDVIG: Did you know humans is one of the few animals in the world, generally, that has menstruation?
DANIEL: I did not know that.
HEDVIG: It’s us and the elephant shrew. And maybe one more too.
DANIEL: Fascinating.
HEDVIG: Which is weird.
DANIEL: So, when you’re in estrus, then you are in an estrous condition, -OUS.
HEDVIG: Yes. And I think it’s related to Easter as well, right?
DANIEL: I think Eostre is the name of the goddess.
HEDVIG: I think that’s just Easter.
DANIEL: I don’t think they’re related. I’m going to say no.
HEDVIG: I think they are. I think they are. Comment in and tell Daniel he’s wrong.
DANIEL: Discordians, we need you. We need you.
HEDVIG: Yeah. So, Andy has written ESTROUS again, but now there’s an O in there, and you’re just going to have to believe me. GIBBUS and GIBBOUS.
DANIEL: Which is like the moon, right?
HEDVIG: God knows. And then, Andy’s favorite, SARCOPHAGUS, which is where you put dead people.
DANIEL: I’ve heard SARCOPHAGUS.
HEDVIG: SARCOPHAGUS and sarcophagi… Again, there’s going to be an O in there and I don’t know for the life of me, how to do this.
DANIEL: SARCOPHAGOUS. Okay. So, I have never… You know what? This is all a whole new world to me. I have been unaware of the variation…
HEDVIG: Me too.
DANIEL: …in these endings, but it’s fascinating. Andy, thank you very much. We give you the Because Language salute.
HEDVIG: Andy, if you could send a SpeakPipe saying these things…
DANIEL: Yes, please.
HEDVIG: …because we’re very confused. Because if I saw this in the wild, I would just assume it’s some sort of American, British spelling thing that I didn’t know about.
DANIEL: Totes.
HEDVIG: Like COLOUR or something. I would be like, oh, there’s an O in there, they’re probably British somehow.
DANIEL: I will, however, point out that MUCOUS MEMBRANE is overwhelmingly -OUS in the Google Ngram viewer in books. So, mucus membrane, not even a bump. Nope, nope, nope.
HEDVIG: This smells like Latin declinations.
DANIEL: Sure does. Seems like a lot of unnecessary fuss and bother, that’s what I think. Thanks a lot, Andy. Thanks also to our guest, Lauren Gawne.
HEDVIG: Yeah, lovely to have you on, Lauren.
DANIEL: And thanks to everyone who gave stories, words and comments. Thanks to SpeechDocs who transcribes all the words. And thanks to you great patrons. Shall I take the first bit?
HEDVIG: Okay, you take it.
DANIEL: Hey, we’re really thankful to everyone who gives us all their support. And here are the ways that people have done it, and it really keeps us afloat. Lots of people follow us on the socials. We are in most places, becauselangpod, although on BlueSky we are becauselanguage.com. People are also sending us lots of great stuff on SpeakPipe. That’s on our website, becauselanguage.com. We love playing those. They’re a lot of fun and we love hearing your voices. People are also emailing us stuff, hello@becauselanguage.com. And some people tell friends about us, and that’s probably one of the best ways that people find us. Or, writing us a review. We love review. Hasn’t the review seen been a little empty lately? I’ve got to see if we could. I’ve got to go through the traps and see if there have been any reviews about us saying stuff about us, because I’ve got a theory.
HEDVIG: You’ve got a theory?
DANIEL: Why don’t you take this next part, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: Okay. All right. And like we said earlier, one great way of supporting us and also a lot of other shows is to go into Patreon.com and become a supporter. You can support at any level you want. You can give 50 Australian dollars. You can give 50-cent Australian dollars. I don’t know if you use cents anymore. I think you do.
DANIEL: [WITH A SURFER ACCENT] You give us $50,000. That’d be awesome.
HEDVIG: [WITH AN ACCENT] You can give us $50,000. You can support us however you like. You can also become a free supporter on Patreon and then you get little updates and news and then when, if ever you want, you can raise and lower it. Patreon’s very flexible with raising and lowering. So, if you do find yourself that you need to cut back on certain expenses, you could later reduce it or cancel it entirely.
DANIEL: We understand.
HEDVIG: If you become a supporter of our show, Because Language, we try to do some nice things for you besides just that good feeling in your heart that you are helping fund, for example, Hedvig’s new mic boom, which is going to arrive soon, which is going to make Daniel’s life better. You can also get some stuff depending on your support level. So, we invite you to live shows where we do public polls deciding fate of the English language and possibly also other languages to some point. We do bonus episodes regularly. We mail things out, physical format to you, little stickers and stuff like that. We do shoutouts at the end of shows, and we also invite you to join us at our Discord server, if you would like that.
The support, what we do with it? Well, you give us a little bit of money and we pay various bills that we have. So, for example, we pay SpeechDocs to make transcripts of our show, which is very helpful. We compensate our guests, and we use it for other expenses we have for the show and also compensation for our time and labor that we spend on the show as well. So, Daniel got… Someone said, I think it was one person, many, many moons ago said that…
DANIEL: It was Andy.
HEDVIG: It was Andy. Ah, darn it. Andy from Logophilius said that at the end of the show, when we read out the support and names from Patreon, we read them out in the same order. And I think Andy was starting to feel like the order was the same and that was a bit boring, so asked us to spruce it up a little.
DANIEL: There’s that word again.
HEDVIG: Spruce it up a little.
DANIEL: Wow.
HEDVIG: And what has Daniel been up to since then? Well, he orders it by… Let’s see. Oh, it doesn’t say in my notes.
DANIEL: No, it doesn’t. So, do you want to hear? Here’s how I ordered the names this time. I got my children to do it. I took all the names, and I cut them up into little separate slips. And I said, “Young ones, I want you to order the patron names this time. Just put them in a big, long list from top to bottom. It doesn’t matter how you do it as long as you’re happy with the way that you’ve ordered it.” So, they did.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: So, this is Kidsort. And here’s what they did. They started off mostly alphabetical. Here’s the first bit. Aldo, Amir, Amy, Ayesha, Andy B, Andy from Logophilius, Ariaflame, Alyssa, Chris L, Canny Archer, Colleen, Diego. And then they got bored…
HEDVIG: They’re done.
DANIEL: …and they stopped…
HEDVIG: Yeah. Yes.
DANIEL: …leaving the rest of them in random order. And so, I’ll read them now. James, Keith, Whitney, Rach, Lyssa, Wolfdog [HOWLS]. J0HNTR0Y, Kathy, Laura, Sydney, Larry, Rene, Rodger. Linguistic Chaos, Nikoli, Tony, Tadhg, Kristofe, Faux Frenchie, Ignacio, Kevin, stan, Fiona, Termy, Sæ̃m, Rachel, Manú, Hey. Hope you probably liked us doing your name. Oops, did I just… Steele, Nasrin, Joanna, Meredith, Elías, gramaryen, LordMortis, Chris W, Sonic Snejhog, Margareth, Jack, PharaohKatt, Nigel, Felicity, Helen, Molly Dee. And of course, do you want to say O Tim with me?
IN UNISON: O Tim.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] So, there you go, Kidsort. It’s like roughly alphabetical at first and then run off and play, leaving the rest random. Did you enjoy that? I enjoyed that.
HEDVIG: I enjoyed that. That was nice. I like that. It reminds me of the adventures on when they get one of their kids to do design dungeons for their roleplay. It’s very funny.
DANIEL: Oh, wow.
HEDVIG: We also have some new supporters on Patreon. At the Listener level. We have Jan with yearly membership and David. We also have a number of free patrons. Like I said, you can become just a sort of follower on Patreon. These are Yedda, Ben C, Ines, Ian, Ekans, Sabrina, Ulla, and Vee. Thank you to everyone who supports us, however you do it.
DANIEL: Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who also performs with Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We will catch you next time. Because Language.
HEDVIG: Pew, pew, pew.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]