Reading Habits and Audiobook Research

I sold my car in Carvana last night. Well that's cool. No, you don't understand. It went perfectly. Real offer, down to the penny. They're picking it up tomorrow. Nothing went wrong. So what's the problem? That is the problem. Nothing in my life goes to smoothly. I'm waiting for the catch. Maybe there's no catch. That's exactly what a catch would want me to think. Well, you need to relax. I need to knock on wood. Do we have what is this tablewood? I think it's laminate. Okay, yeah, that's good. That's close enough. Car selling without a catch. Sell your car today on Car. Pick up these May apply. Hi everyone, welcome to this week's episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, where we were join by the lexicographal legend. That is Susie Dent. Now for people in the UK, Susie needs absolutely no introduction. She is a bona fidee. national treasure as she has been on my TV in my living room. every tea time for as long as I can remember, um, in her position as Chief Wordsmith on Channel 4's countdown. As well, of course, as eight out of ten cats does count down the comedy show with Jimmy Carr. Uh, she has done so much other stuff. Uh, she's written loads and loads and loads of books. Uh, they're all fantastic. We have read most of them, I would say, in the QI office. Uh, the best thing you can do, really, about Suzy's books is to just go to your Repository of choice and ask them for Suzy Den books because every single one of them is an absolute banger and you will find so many facts in there. She has also written some novels. She's written one called Guilty by Definition, which is out in the bookshops now. And there is also another one upcoming called Death Writ Large, which I dare say you will be able to get. On pre-order. Susie is also on tour right now. She is going around the UK uh telling people loads of facts and loads of amazing anecdotes about words. They're gonna be absolutely fantastic shows, I'm certain about it. So if you live in the UK anywhere, then just go to the internet and search for Suzy Dead Tor. You could go to no third.co.uk, n-o-t-h-i-r-d.co.uk, but I've just tried it. If you go to Google, search for Susie Dentor, you will find the information there. One more thing to say, of course, is to remind you about Clubfish, go to patreon.com slash Club Fish to find out more about that. In the Plenty More Fish tier, you can hear more from Suzy in our extra long episode, but there's so much more stuff on there. I'm not gonna go into it all now. We've said it enough times. There is stuff for free there, there is stuff for paid. It's supporting the podcast. We appreciate if you do it, we understand if you don't. Don't worry about it. The podcast, as we always say, will always be free. And speaking of said free podcast, it's time to get on with it. So no more to say apart from on with the podcast. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn. My name is Dan Schreiber, I'm sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin, and Susie Dent, and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one. And that is Susie. My fact is that the original Todd in the phrase on your Todd Died on his Todd. So this was James Foreman Sloane, but Todd Hunter was his middle name, and the Todd bit was a bit of a cruel. a nickname that his father had given him because he was extremely small. And he was originally called Toad. Uh by his father. And he was a jockey. Uh because of his small stature, that was the one thing that he was hugely successful at. And he was the toast of society, um, in the in the US. He was incredibly successful jockey. And then Yeah, if she came over to England, he rode for the for the King's, he rode the King's horses, but then he was accused of insider betting. Yes. Uh which he was later exonerated of actually. But um he was effectively cancelled in today's terms. And he wrote a kind of autobiography which uh talked about him basically being on his own, but he did very much die a sad death from cirrhosis of the liver, in fact. He he was it wasn't just a celebrity jockey. for the fact that he was great at his sport. He was quite a socialite as well, wasn't he? He sort of was all over uh at parties. He was hanging out with the rich and famous. Um he did a pretty special thing, which is that he opened a bar in France. It was called New York Bar. And he basically bought an existing bar that was in New York. put it in boxes, brought it over. And he opened it up in Paris and it became Harry's Bar. Which is the famous bar which Hemingway used to go to. Ian Fleming has James Bond visit it in one of the novels. Like it's an iconic bar during World War One. Yeah, I mean, yeah, we all know Harry. So he was a great jockey. I'm more interested in the horse racey side of it. He said that his biggest trick in horse racing was that he would whisper in the ear of his horses and ask them to run faster. Is that the inside of betting? Uh it was rumored that he was giving his horse some substances that makes it run faster. Not in the air, sorry. Probably usually it happened up the bubble. He was pretty close to the because he pioneered the monkey crouch position, didn't you? Yes, that's the amazing thing. So he would sort of crouch on his horse and ride it. And when he first came to Europe, everyone took the Mickey out of him. They were like, Oh, what are you doing? This you look like an idiot. What were you do what were people doing before then? Sitting on the horse, maybe? Sitting back like a And what's he doing? He's doing it. Think of think of the classic position in jockey racing where they're leaning on the front of the horse. They're sort of crouching forward. Yeah, like imagine if you're cycling in the tour de France, you might be crashed for that. Okay, okay, okay, I'm on that. Pretty stunning to invent a new way of riding on a horse. It's like, yeah, I think you think humans have been doing for eight thousand years. But I think I can improve it. I think to be fair, I think he popularized it as opposed to being the very first person to do it. I think it people were testing it out, but they didn't expect the Todd Sloan to suddenly be monkey crouching everywhere. He was in the movies as well. Was he? Yeah, he was an early Hollywood star. How was he alive? So this was in the 1930s that you'd be making the movies. Um and He was in a movie called Painting the Town, in which he plays a jockey called Todd Sloane. Ah then he was in a movie called Madison Square Garden, in which he plays a jockey called Todd Sloan. Then he was in a movie called When Romance Rides. Uh, I'll give you a clue from the plot. Lucy Bostil, daughter of a Colorado ranch owner, is led by a dog to his master, Lynn Sloane. Now what do you think he was called in that movie? Uh James. Holly. Yeah. Did not have the name. Outrageous. And he was in that movie with another actor called Frank Hayes. Does that name ring any bells with you guys? Yeah. Do you remember in nineteen twenty three there was a jockey who died halfway through the race. Yeah, and won the race while dead. No. It's a different Frank Hayes. Uh but who also died in nineteen twenty three. What is going on? What is going on? You two are murder mystery riders. What's going on? Two Frank Hayes die? This is bad plotting, I'm gonna say it. Yeah. Influence, influence. Todd Sloane is an example of r rhyming slang, right? Yes. Yeah. I'm on my Todd. Todd Sloane. I'm on. Yes. Yes. That's what I should have interest in. Because you read about rhyming slang. And then it sounds like people say, Oh, it's thieves' language from the nineteenth century but I don't understand how thieves would gain an advantage and you know, it'd help them avoid the police or whatever. I don't understand how saying use your loaf instead of use your head like red head. It's not like he escapes up the apples and pears and that's also actually looking for the green gross. Exactly. I can really get it. It's quite murky. Best theory uh that I know is that actually it originated amongst the costumongers of London who sold costs, which were these sort of sour apples. So they're called costumongers, and they would want to talk about their deals in a coded shorthand that other people couldn't understand. But it was also banter, you know. It had this sort of playful element to it. These guys would be the worst possible people to use different words for apples and pears, wouldn't they? Exactly. Yes, you're probably apples and pears. But they do draw that the quite a lot of them do draw on those kind of basic sort of food stuff that they sold at the market. So I'm so sorry. We talked about butcher slang, which they still use, don't they? Yes, they pick up in in a way. Yeah. And they say words backwards. Yes. Oh in Australia. Yeah. I spoke to a couple of butchers and they literally would be sent home to learn stuff for the next day. And they talk about their customers. They would um yeah, it was it was I loved it. It was a very deliberate shorthand. We we talked about this on the show. I don't think you were on that episode, Susie, and I think I got it from you. Because you wrote this extraordinary book, which is all about the current day slang that's being used by every different kind of group in the show. Yeah. Yeah. Who had the most? Um butches were great. Um, Freemasons as you would expect, um had quite a few. Birders had loads. Um paramedics. I mean we all have them only we're not tuning into other people's because we're so busy lobbying our own at you know at others. I mean cyclists. Uh honestly it would be very hard to say who had the most, but it might well be butchers in terms of sort of keeping it going as a deliberate sort of tribal thing where you exclude others. And paramedics I suppose is useful if You're trying not to say this this person's um you your arms come off. They're trying they need to say they to their colleague this this patient's arm has come off. Yes. But without alarming the patient. Yes. Exactly, lots of euphemism. And they also a group of paramedics told me the which you will have heard, but um whenever they were being told off by their bosses, they would just say, Yeah, there we are then. And there we are then is an acronym for exactly what they thought of the person telling them. There we are. But it's interesting you're talking about uh Todd uh being a socialite because so was Gordon Bennett. Uh he was the son of a newspaper magnate and he was a huge socialite and that was why his name really stuck in the imagination. And plus it's a handy sidestep for, you know, he was big. He sent I believe he sent Stanley out to find Livingston. Gordon Bennett. Yes. Um and so many people just don't know that name. They just think it's an exclamation. But there was a Gordon Bennett. There was a Jack the Lad, there was a smart Alec. We think that there was a Mickey Bliss who gave us taking the Mickey. Taking the Mickey Bliss piss. Bob's your uncle? Uh Bob's Your Uncle was um Robert Balfor who gave his Nephew. a job in government even though he wasn't remotely suited for it. Uh I was looking up Jimmy Riddle. I wondered where that Yes. I haven't heard that as a phrase or a Jimmy Riddle. Yes. I don't know if this is the origins of it, but I looked in the newspaper archives for the earliest mention, uh, and in eighteen sixty six there was an American song called Jimmy Riddle. So it was Communion Men one and all and learn how to fiddle, will vote all day and sing all night for good old Jimmy Riddle. And it looks like it was related to James Buchanan. President because the rest of the song it's about Martin Van Buren. And slavery and all this kind of stuff. So it seems I think that it might be from this from James Bu Cannon, but I'm not a Lexicopter. How how do you prove that these are true or false? It's it's so hard. And often people think um, particularly with the Oxford English Dictionary that uh that a words journey is complete and it's locked in, but That's absolutely not the case. So we're always finding new evidence. Are you as one of the leading UK people in this area, are you someone that if a new bit of info is found, they sort of come to you subtly before it gets released to the public? Uh do you get inside Sometimes I do, but honestly there are there are brilliant people um out there who are doing the, you know, the detective work. So there was um one lovely discovery, must have been maybe ten years ago now, of hot dog and where that came from. And that was from students at um Harvard who generally were eating from pretty dodgy man since than generally thought that they were eating dog. Um and so we were able to kind of date that. So it's things like that which are wonderful. But when you say the the the leading Let's go. I'm the only one people people know. So I always feel such an imposter. There they are brilliant people. You're on your todd. I'm on my top. Yeah. But I would I would have thought hot dog was um 'cause sausage dog. 'Cause you get a sausage dog and then you're eating a sausage. Yes. Yeah. How interesting. Yes. No, it was a poor joke. Bad meat. I have a question, Susie. Yes. Is there a word for Things do you get also get people coming up to you saying new words. Is there a word for thing? Things that you think are named the way they are for an ostensibly obvious reason, but actually they're named after a person. Who's got an amusing apt name. So for the example that you will know is Sideburns, which was named after Burns side, but you would think it was the side of the face, right? Yes. That's why it was flipped. Because you've got the side people thought these were your burns. I'm working on a short Of one thousand of these. Wow. So well. He's got the one. So for example, you guys haven't heard this one yet, yeah. I've been doing I've I've been torturing these two with these for A really long time. A long time, C recently I found out about a New Zealand coffee company which is called All Press Espresso. It's named after the co creator, Michael Allpress. Yeah. Yes. Um Or French Park in Ireland, which is named after the French family. The Oberlin, Ohio, there's a there's a place called the Carpool. Which is named after Robert Carr. Okay of the of the college. Do you remember there's a town in America called Snowflake that was named after Mr Snow and Mr Flake. Exactly. It's that kind of thing. I don't think there is. I think you need to invent one. And that can be the title of your book. Yeah, nice. Have you got a title? Well it at the moment it's called the Book of One Thousand and One things that you think and name the n reason they are for an obvious reason but actually they're named after someone with an interestingly apt name. But the the the editorial phase might winner that down a bit. So your books have excellent names, Susie, I have to say. How do you think that one stands out? I think it's novel. Yeah. It's actually nonfiction. I know. Uh Do you think there's ever been a book that's had more words in the title than the book itself? Yes. Does it form a neat acronym? that title. That would be orthological then. If you could come up with something that that fits then. So they're like an eponym that's named after a person. So they're like eponyms, but They they are Eponems, but you don't think they're gonna be Eponems. Yeah. Someone actually em someone emailed the fish inbox with one of these, podcast at QR.com, uh and they suggested homonymes. Like homonyms. I think that's not bad. Yeah. Why are you laughing though? I just can't believe that we've got it to this territory. We're gonna talk about my book. I'd like you to write the forward to me, please. I know you did brew as phrase and fable, but this will be is gonna be as eliminate. I'm just trying to think of other other eponyms. No, I like it. Thank you. Very nice. Like it. There's the quote for the first. That's all we needed. Thanks for coming in, Susie. Yeah, yeah. I sold my car in Carvana last night. Well that's cool. No, you don't understand. It went perfectly. Real offer, down to the penny. They're picking it up tomorrow. Nothing went wrong. So what's the problem? That is the problem. Nothing in my life goes as smoothly. I'm waiting for the catch. Maybe there's no catch. That's exactly what a catch would want me to think. Well, you need to relax. I need to knock on wood. Do we have what is this tablewood? I think it's laminate. Okay, yeah, that's good. That's close enough. Car selling without a catch. Sell your car today. On car! Pick up these mayoply. Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast. Hey everyone, this week's episode of Fish is sponsored by SquareSpace. Yes, Squarespace is the place to go if you want to make a website. And who doesn't want to make a website these days? I've heard that this internet is a really up and coming Place to be. Yes, it's a it's an amazing place. We're actually setting up a new website at the moment, which is Murray's Film Pitches. Uh these are all of the cop dramas that Andy has been pitching on No Such Thing as a Fish over the years. And it's going to be amazing because Squarespace allows you to build extraordinary things within the body of your website. It gives you templates, it gives you fonts. It gives you images that you can use. It has a shop, so you could buy one of Andy's pictures on paper and read it for yourself. Uh you can donate. There can be funding. There are so many things that you can do. And if you're one of those people who just doesn't know how to make a website use the internet in that way, this is the kind of place that just makes it as simple as anything. Absolutely. So if you would like to make yourself another website, perhaps it's not about a random words next to the word cop and turning that into a show, then you can do so by going to squarespace.com for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, if you go to squarespace.com slash fish. you can save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's right. So save that 10% now. Go to squarespace.com slash fish and use the offer code fish when you make your purchase. Okay, hear me out. Oh yeah. Website designer card. Beautiful. On with the podcast! Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is James. Okay, and my fact this week is that the smarter your best friend's mum is, the smarter you will be. Uh And your best friends might must have been a real pickie. I don't have any friends. How rude. I'm telling Debbie and you will regret that. So this is research. Um there Like old research would say that the smarter your family are, the smarter you might be. Now that might be genetics or it might be just because your family, you know, are richer, for instance, or or lots of different reasons. But there have been some new researchers who have looked at something called the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. which followed students for more than a decade and asked them loads and loads of questions. They did loads of questionnaires and in part of it they were asked the name of their best friend. And so these people could look at the best friend and then look at their family and work out If there was any correlation. They found actually there was a real correlation between the success of the best friend's mum and the success of the child. Uh, and they don't know why it is. There's lots of reasons it could be. But they actually they checked it against various different things like you know, affluence and and all that kind of stuff, and they still reckon that this works out really well. And they don't know why. It's crazy. Because your best friend then is modelling their mom. So that you were surrounded. I did a bit of first time research on this. Oh yeah. Find out my best friend. Asked about his mum. Yeah. She's got two degrees. Oh. Oh okay. Yeah. So you know there's always except for the outliers. But this is all about like how do you judge people's intelligence, really. Yeah. Alfred Binair or Binnett. Uh depending on your pronunciation. Um he was the sort of proto IQ test creator. He was creating a test that were looking specifically at children to work out what schooling they would need. And they were trying to find less able children by these tests so that they could receive more help academically. Yes, exactly. Yeah. But he never thought that it should be used in the way that we are currently using it in order to assess what intelligence is. No. That sort of just grew out through different evolutions by further scientists and psychologists down the line. He was French, wasn't he? Um He coined the phrase erotic fetishism in nine in eighteen eighty seven. So he's a man of hate. I've not really heard that as a as a phrase. It's not a day to day phrase that we all come across. You just see it because of the pop up ads on your Google. And you can't escape it. Um but yeah, genius. Uh one interesting thing is etymologically women can't have genius. And that's because in ancient Rome it was a godlike soul that lay in the foreheads of men. Only uh and the female equivalent was called the IUNO. So men would have genius and women would have iunos. Oh really? Right. Isn't that interesting? Yeah. I've just worked on a on a series called Secret Genius. Yes. Where there were so many women who were geniuses. Sorry, I'm not saying the women are not geniuses. I know. The phrase etymologically speaking was doing a lot of heavy life thing about that. No, it's really interesting. What kind of people did you find on your show? Well, primarily we wanted to find people who didn't know how brilliant they were. Um and all their friends knew that they had something special. they hadn't been validated at school or they bunked off school because they knew they were different but felt embarrassed by it and that kind of thing. So it was actually really Lovely. Were you tracking people via their children's best friends? Was that the method that you I that's I think that should that would be the logical thing now. That should be one of our criteria when we when we research. Because there are so many different ways of cutting it, you know, is it It it w there are the there are creative arts, there are scientific forms of genius, there are engineering forms of genius. Yeah, so much. And actually it's very difficult to sort of have a hard and fast rule as to, you know, you fit this category and you fit this one. And emotional intelligence now I think is also being really recognised, which is great. Yeah, I think that's interesting because there's there was a fact that did the rounds a few years ago that said sixty five percent of Americans thought they were above average in intelligence. Right. And everyone's like, Oh, idiot Americans. But actually If someone asks you, Are you intelligent, and you say, Well, yes I am because I'm emotionally intelligent or because I'm good at puzzles or because I'm good at word games or whatever, which you naturally would think whatever your best thing is, you'd be like, Yeah, I am great. Of course sixty five percent of people think they are and they probably are. Yeah. You guys. Yeah. Do you think that your Um partners? Your wives? Uh Um Attractive or intelligent. I think Dan's uh Vanella, yeah, absolutely she is. Dan's that was plural. How do you know about my secret wife? Vanella's listening go, Well I've neither of those things, so there must be at least two others. Well the interesting Yeah, of course. Of course you do. You marry them. But um you tend to think you've attracted someone gorgeous. Like w if you're if you're with someone, you tend to think your partner's really attractive, naturally. Um but y so you d we do know there's a there's an effect where people over rate how attractive they think their partners are. I'm not saying your partner is overrated. I think this is in general. I think you're just asking basically, of course, because you're with them, you will say, Well, I think that person's really gorgeous, whereas maybe a a neutral jury of their peers might say they're reasonably good looking. This is so dangerous. I know, I'm I'm listening, I can hear listeners' marriages cracking up all over the place. The trick is not to ask the people at the wedding what they think. Well the fascinating thing is that people also overestimate their partners' IQs by a thumping amount. Because surely you think well they're smart because they pick me. Right. Right. Between Thirty six and thirty eight IQ points. that people overrate their partner's intelligence. What it turns out is that your partner is a hideous moron. I'm so sorry. Much better to do that than underestimate though, surely. Be awful if you just were completely disrespectful. You know, you're with them, you love them, you think they're terrific, you think they're attractive and intelligent. I think that's really good. There's another test which is called mega. It's the mega test, which is like an IQ test. That's Meg Castoni Greater Gun, isn't it? Um and uh There was someone who was a very high scorer on it, and in fact there was a record in the Guinness World Records up until nineteen ninety for the highest IQ that someone has ever got. And it was a woman called Marilyn Vos Savant. Oh that is wonderful. Yeah totally bearing out her name. About her. Yeah. I'm smart. I'm so sorry. And you married her. Um She in nineteen eighty five she was ten years old and she was recorded as having answered every single question right on an adult test. Wow. According to the way IQ is done, which is where it's Basically your your IQ is comp It's like a version of mental age. I mean it's it's all it's dependent on your actual age, isn't it? It's dependent on your actual age. So if you're let me get this right, if you're ten, but you get the same as an average fifteen year old, supposedly you have an IQ of a hundred and fifty. Ah it it's roughly like that. So if I'm forty seven and I get the same as someone who's seventy years old, do I get 150 as well? I'm not sure when the baseline age is. That's a really good point. That's a really good point. Um but she was at the at the age of ten, she did this test, which apparently gave her an IQ of two hundred and twenty eight. She became extremely famous. And for her work, she d spent more than twenty years as an agony aunt. People's dilemmas. Ask Marilyn, it was called. Yeah. And there was a big moment in it where she popularized what is quite a famous mathematical problem now, which is the Monty Hall problem. Oh really? Yeah, so the Monty Hall problem. James, you'll probably explain it better, but if let's say you're on a game show, which I believe is why it's connected to it, Monty Hall was the host of a show. Uh and you had three doors and you had to pick one that you think the treasure is behind, or the prize that you're gonna get. And then behind the two other doors are say goats or something. So you select your door, and then Monty opens one of the other two doors and shows A goat behind it. It says, Okay, there's only one uh two options now. Do you want to stick with your choice or do you want to change it? The problem suggests that you should then change it because your odds are higher. Almost everyone says I should stick, or they say it doesn't matter, it's fifty fifty now. Why do that change? Sorry? Why are the odds higher then if you switch one way of looking at it is if there's a hundred doors. And you choose one and then he removes all of them apart from the last two. So he's taken out ninety eight doors. You now know that it's either in your door or the other one. But most of the time when they removed ninety eight doors, yours would have been one of them. But in this case it wasn't, so there's a decent chance that yours is empty. You're going from odds of one and three to odds of one and two. And you're re choosing. You're now going into odds of two and three, actually. Oh, of course. Of course. And this But it's very counterintuitive. I believe it it breaks everyone's brain, honestly. It's it's crazy. And it did at the time because she popularized this idea. I think she might I I wanna say she came up with it, but I'm not a hundred percent. But Ten thousand people wrote in saying no, that's not the case, including a thousand, nearly a thousand, who had PhDs. Um, and in fact, Paul Erdos, the mathematician Hungarian mathematician, he's is kind of noted as one of the most prolific in the world. He refused to believe it and was only convinced when a computer simulation showed that her predictions were correct. It's m mystical almost, isn't it? Yeah. Uh do you know a quick way to score higher on your IQ test if you do one? It's not something you're trying to cheat though, is it? But what's interesting is they have noticed that the same person doing an IQ test actually can get differing scores based on a certain thing. So it must be something physical you can do in the room to quickly improve the blood flow for your brain, for example, like checking your head really fast. Okay. Run into the wall. Run into the wall. Bugging your head into the wall. Mr Hawker and Mr Murray were off to leave the IQ seven up. Pencils up your nose. Yeah. What is it? It's not that no Is it is it just practice? Like 'cause those puzzles, I tend to be able to get a lot of those puzzles, but I don't think it's 'cause I'm smart. I think it's 'cause I've seen the puzzles before. Yeah, no, it's not that. Then this is some research that was done by friend of the podcast Angela Duckworth, who appeared on the twenty hour marathon that we did. She was over in America. They found so if I was let's say my oldest son Wilf, if he was about to do it, if just before I said I'm gonna pay you twenty dollars if you do well on this. Oh incentives. The money incentive will make him do better in the IQ test. It will change his did you try this. Did you try this on your show? You said before, I think, on this show that that's how you get your kids to do everything, like brush their teeth, you give them twenty quid. I'm really broke. We we need more please subscribe to the Clubfish on Patreon, everyone. Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Andy. My fact is, by the year 1600, everyone's tongues were slightly higher in their mouths than in the year 1400. And nobody knows why. Not that high split the difference. Oh, so it's on that 'cause when you said this, I thought it was like in the palette, but it's not that. It's well, okay, this is a thing that is one of the most bizarre elements of the English language, and it's really well established that it happened in our language. Other languages around the world may definitely have had it. But it's a thing that started in roughly the fifteenth century and lasted for roughly two hundred years, where everyone started saying Uh a particular kind of letter, long vowels. So that's things like the A in cake. Uh rather than the O in hot. That's a short vowel. Yeah. But so if it sounds like the vowel, A K it's a long vowel. Yeah, yeah. Which by the way is impossible to teach to kids. Like I'm teaching my daughter how to read right now and she keeps reading the words slightly wrong. I'm like, no, that it is actually an I This is exactly it. If you're teaching anyone to read like a child, you have to in English you have to keep saying, No, that's just one of these funny things. Yeah, yeah. Because you can't talk about the great vowel shift, which is what this is called. But it basically Middle English you would hold vows for a long time and then People started moving their tongues slightly differently while saying these long vowels, and it caught on. And there is not a guaranteed explanation of why this happened. There are lots of theories, but it's why you have to say, Oh yes, cough doesn't look at all like dough. And and it's why Chaucer doesn't rhyme to us. If you read the Canterbury Tales, you think this guy was a moron. Actually a hideous moron. Actually Chaucer's like Well actually for me. He was a beautiful genius. And you know, all of these words have changed their pronunciation. So you know, um sheep uh Sh what we would call a sheep, they would call a shea. Yeah. You know, your wife I think this settled, by the way, the scone versus gone debate because I think we should just call them skids. And that would be fine. It would be no. It sounds like you're from Yorkshire though when you say uh Sk it might yeah. Well probably regionally it's it's a bit different. You know, your wife was one of your wee Yeah. But is this the same as the wife of Bath being the wife of Bath? Or is that a slightly different thing? I think that's different. Yeah, that is more regional. Yes. And the wife we've just meant woman, by the way. Yeah. Was the there's old spelling and new spelling. Does the old spelling reflect how it was being pronounced, as in, we obviously don't have recordings from the fifteen hundreds. So that's how we know it was being pronounced differently. This is the whole problem. Right. Spelling hasn't changed and the pronunciation didn't we know. Spelling and sound divorced centuries ago. Well we know because um we can interpret from rhymes. Uh quite. quite a lot. Right. Um, and w we literally are just sort of sifting through evidence to try and work out how they were pronounced at the time because as you say we didn't have audio. So d and but did no one at the time think to do a phonetic With the books that were teaching. They were not. They were busy. That sounded ruder than I meant it to. Apologies to the Middle Ages. Um when that goes back in time. He's going Come on, guys, you just need to think of a phonetic Because even then they didn't have the international phonetic alphabet or anything. So even then we wouldn't have been able to interpret they if they they could have said, you know And then Yeah. But we wouldn't know how cart was pronounced at the time. So a phonetic glossary wouldn't exist. But poetry, poetry is massive for it. Yeah. What so you're telling me that right now the theory we've gone for is that our tongues were in a different bit of our mouth. They were. They were Why? Well, one theory is that the Black Death was just m shuffling everyone around and people were migrating more towards London and Londoners were uh more fashionable and more elite, or that the French More elite, so we copied them. I mean there are later there's there's um it could be the the thing you can say in any history essay. The growing middle class. So at any point in the last two thousand years exactly there was a burden in the middle class at the time but this changed how things were said, you know, possible. It could be due to speaking French or avoiding speaking French. Both of those theories. Um which is basically either because The aristocracy were switching from French to English and the middle class were kind of speaking French a little bit, but speaking it wrong a bit like Yeah, the guy from a lower low I kind of think. Good morning. Uh or that there was anti French sentiment 'cause we were at war with them quite a long. Yeah. And there was a lot of that going on. Yeah. And but the printing press kinda came along mid shift. So the printing press w did more than anything to sort of solidify uh spelling. Well not solidify it, but to standardise spelling. Um thanks to Caxton, because before that was completely chaotic. the sound changes kept happening. So we are still typing as they were in the fifteenth century, but we sound much later. Not develop the printing press, or if we only had had the great vowel shift two hundred years before. It would be easy to learn English now. And you would there wouldn't be all these mad exceptions where you just say, I'm sorry, you're just gonna have to remember that for the rest of your life that it's a bit different, that one. So crazy. But now but now because spelling has been pretty well pinned and isn't changing, I guess it's not changing as fast as it would have done, you know, a thousand years ago because it was things were sliding out all over the place. But we'll never spell. Hambag. Hambag. Which is what people say. Well we might do. I mean hope so. Yeah. Bring your handbag. Hambag? That was what the confusion was in the play. No one talks about that. So weirdly by researching this fact, I've sort of developed a personal theory about my accent because I have I do have a weird accent. Um I so I was born and raised in Hong Kong, lived in Australia and then moved here. And I put R's I have a forced R in a lot of stuff. So listeners of the show know that I say Coverant Garden. Uh as opposed to Covvent Garden. Covent. Covert. I know. I put an R right at there. Or Borin instead of Hobin. Or Chicago I put in there. And what I realized was when I moved to Australia I had a very American accent and Got that. Because you went to an international school. In Hong Kong, yeah, that's right. And in Australia I went to a very um uh just down the line Aussie school and I was worried about the accent, but the first day, a girl who I found very pretty called Penny said, Love your accent. And I thought, oh, okay, cool. I'm gonna keep this. And I think I made an active effort to not lose my accent at a period where I would have been losing it. And I think the forced R is what that was. I think Penny's fault. Yes. Yes, it's the attractive, not the intrusive R. Well you think it's an attractive R. But yeah, I think I think that's probably it. That may be how accents develop. It's as you're saying, a reluctance to not be French, you know. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. How interesting. Um on a little other element of Middle English, there's a brilliant piece on I don't know why it was on BBC Future, 'cause it's about language a thousand years ago. But anyway, it was a brilliant piece about how a thousand years ago everyone had uh more pronouns than they do today. Because English had all these pronouns that we just have have have naturally sanded off the language. So uh there was wit. Which w we have the word we meaning me and one person. Or more than one person. We can be two people, three people. Yeah. Yeah. Anyone. Wit is specifically we two. Okay. So it's a word. Yeah. And it's a you know, there are poems where it's it's we two and it's sort of used as a romantic thing. You know. Um Weo. Weo. Exactly. If you're with a owl. Um, and if th there's our as well. But our can be l multiple people or it can be two people, and you would have unker for mine and one other person's So there were all these pronouns that we used to have. So in the old days, if you ask someone what are your pronouns, like you'd be there a while 'cause you know there were loads more. Um yeah, just find that so interesting. Or git for you too. Git. In serious. I like that. That's so interesting. Cause English, I think, used to have Well like in a real, real long time ago we had more cases, right? That we've just lost over the years. Yeah. So like in German or Russian, you have all these different genatives and datives and all that. And you can still see some of them, especially in short words like the and they and all that kind of stuff. They've still kind of hung around a little bit. Yeah. I love that. 'Cause we are we are Germanic at heart, but then we we kind of As you say, so many influences. Do you speak more than one language, Susie? Uh I speak German. Okay. Um so German was my first love and uh French and tiny bit of Spanish, but don't test me. And a tiny bit of Finnish 'cause I was an O pair. Oh Finnish ambassador for a world. Yeah, I can talk about going to buy an ice cream, but it um Finnish must be the most difficult language to learn, surely. So many declensions and things. Yeah. Is it Kitosh and Finnish means thank you or Thank you. Yeah. I was taught you basically say mosquitoes with a soft ending and then lose the moss. That's how you say it. Right. And if you have to learn that for every single word in the language. Yeah. We did a fact quite a long time ago on the show, which was I think It was either Icelandic or Finnish, where there was a translator of Agatha Christie novels who spent over a decade trying to work out how to translate just two words in this one novel because it was the giveaway. It was the reveal. Ah and Just couldn't work out to do it. Yes, it took over a decade. Um we talked about the phonetic alphabet earlier. Yeah. Um the most recent consonant added to the international phonetic alphabet. is the labial flap. Crums. It looks like a V with a little tail at the top. I know what it looks like, James. Grow up. Uh it's a very rare speech sound produced by quickly drawing the lower lip back behind the upper teeth and then releasing it forward. Ha ha ha. And it's found in some sub Saharan languages. Um but the rarest one I could find, I think this is the rarest. This I re saw this on TikTok with someone called Human ten eleven. Uh, and they talked about the voiceless labial villa implosive, which is like pronouncing a K and a P at the same time, but instead of putting air out of your mouth, you suck it in. I couldn't do it. Well he did. Um but it's in a single dialect of a single language, um of the Igbo, which you get in Nigeria. But yeah, it's only used in that one tiny bit, but it's uh cool. Very cool. Yeah. There must be more out there that we haven't discussed. I'll be honest, it was mostly about just saying labial flat all that stuff. Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast. Hey everyone, this week's episode of Fish is sponsored by NordVPN. Absolutely. VPN's very important things in the 2026 world, especially for me as I've just been to China. And they have the great Chinese firewall, which means it's very difficult to go on any website. If you want to go on the BBC and see how Premier League football results are going, it's impossible in China unless you have a VPN. And so I got myself a non-VPN. when I travelled out there and I managed to see that West Ham and Spurs are really struggling. Hooray That's amazing. I mean this is the extraordinary thing. A VPN does allow you access into 137 countries that you can realign your VPN to so that your computer thin that country. And if you're on things like Netflix, for example, it means you can access all the movies that are blocked off from your country, and now you can sit and watch them. So it's a really useful thing to get. And if you yourself want to get involved with that, we've got good news. We've got a little plan for you here. NordVPN are offering a two year plan plus four months extra, then all you need to do is go to NordVPN.com slash fish. Absolutely. NordVPN, that's n-vpn.com slash fish. And it's risk free because Nord give a 30 day money back guarantee on their VPN plans. Go then now. On with the podcast. On with the show. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that many of Charles Dickens' readers in Victorian England consumed his works as audiobooks. This is uh this is a little fun little detail from a book by Amy Cruz called The Victorians and Their Books. And there's an extract in it, uh an account from the time of when Charles Dickens was over in Paris and his son was sick and he was staying in the lodgings and I believe that the boy's grandmother was looking after him and so She said to the carer of the house, Mr Dickens is coming, and the uh housekeeper. believed to have been illiterate. but said, Oh, Mr. Dickens, I love his work. She thought, How how do you read? And so she explained um that There is a little snuff shop and uh the man who works there would invite people in on the m first Monday of every month and he received a little payment and in return they got some tea, but they also were read extracts from the latest bit of a Charles Dickens novel. So effectively, if you couldn't read, you might pay someone to be the audio book for you. Yeah. And you get groups of people to do that. Even if you could read, I can imagine that would be quite nice. Yeah. big thing wasn't it? I mean in the earlier 19th century, Jane Austen's time, reading to your family was was one of the things that's the same after dinner, wasn't it? Yeah, poetry. But Dickens was a huge performer of his own works, wasn't he? I mean they said that it really damaged his health in in the end. Yes. Yeah. Bill psyches and things, he gave so much sort of of himself. Yeah, and his performances that it um he was warned not to do it by his doctors. How interesting. 'Cause he did there was a train crash that occurred not long before he died, where he got very ill. So he was still performing afterwards. He was he wasn't hurt himself, I think, but it was incredibly psychologically. We said before that like before his shows he would drink a lot of champagne. Yes, like a pint of champagne. Yes. Yeah. So that might have had an effect. We don't know. Maybe all the raw eggs he also had before he was. Yeah, it could be. Um so this is interesting. Audiobooks didn't exist. Yeah. But We have a recording. of a Christmas Carol, exactly as Dickens would have read it. And in fact Read by Dickens. But Dickens died with no recordings of his voice being made. Little me is AI. AI. That's it. It's AI. It's the new Robo Dickens. Uh every household will have one in ten years' time. It's really exciting. Uh no. Is it uh is it a descendant who just looks very similar to Dickens and It's that is it. It's so annoying. Dan's got it. It was read by A Dickens. It was read by Monica Dickens, who is his great granddaughter, herself a novelist. She was. Uh she wrote forty novels. Oh my god, I picked up a book by her today. Yeah, yeah, they're really good. She had listened to her grandfather, i.e. Charles Dickens's son. Reading a Christmas carol. Lots. And he had a version of a Christmas Carol which had all of the original Dickens annotations in it, where to which words to stress Which was to leave out which w you know, which way to lean this and that. So it was properly annotated. And she in nineteen fifty recorded that version of a Christmas carol. So weirdly, through three generations we have four generations we have the Dickens approved version of a Christmas Carol. Have you seen the Great Christmas Feast? Which is uh a brilliant performance that goes on every Christmas where they they recreate Dickens reading a Christmas feast to all of you who sit around in Dicken clothes eating great Dicken food. It's brilliant. I don't know about he definitely would have a Patreon, wouldn't he? He really was. Not that there's anything wrong with having a Patreon, or being a podcaster. Yeah. Yeah, what are you trying to say? And he went to America even and starred it round there and um Apparently didn't really like it very much. Uh he complained to his friends that he could do nothing that he wanted to do, go nowhere I want to go and see nothing that I want to see. If I turn into the streets I am followed by a multitude. We've been on tour though it's like that. It's just like that, you know. Oh yeah. Couldn't wander through Times Square without being mobbed. But when he was in America he was there, he did his show and stuff, but he also wanted to put the idea of an international copyright forward. Oh because at the time everyone was copying his works in America. And he wasn't getting any of the cash for it. And so he went around saying, Okay, I'm gonna do my bit, but then also you guys should pay me for your books. It's not really fair And the press, the American press really just did not like him and they said he was mercenary, they said he was only coming to America for monetary gain. All this kind of stuff. And then in his next novel that he wrote, Martin Chuzlewit, he Martin Chuzzlewit goes to America and says this place is a shit And they really felt he really fell out with the Americans. Wow. Copying and the plagiarism. I think we might have mentioned before that that Dickens was pirated a lot. Cause he released them bit by bit. People could piggyback on that and then overtake him. So people w plagiarists would pump out works like Oliver Twists. Martin Guzelwit or whatever. And there was one particular press baron called Edward Lloyd who hired 10 or 15 writers to just churn these things out, get them on the streets before Dickens has released his next uh chapter or whatever it is. And Dickens did sue over one. Saying this is outrageous. But the judge in the case, I love this, who was callancelot Shadwell Yes please. Yes, please said these are so bad that they don't meet the test of plagiarism or pirating. No one could possibly be fooled by by Nicholas Nickelberey. Or whatever. It just is that is not good enough to be plagiarism. Yeah. How interesting. I think there are laws about parody and there are tests Do you remember the moron in a hurry? Oh, the man on the omnibus or something. Yeah, like if the if a moron in a hurry can still tell the difference between your work and the original, then it's fine. That is that's it. But if they would be fooled, then it might be a problem. Do you do any of you know about um UK red? U K Red. Have you heard about this? This is a open access database um housed at Open University and it contains thirty thousand easily searchable records documenting the history of reading in Britain from 145 to 1945. And you can put in someone like Charles Dickens and it will show you a track record in time. of who has been reading, let's say in this case, Charles Dickens. Um I found this in an article by uh someone called Mary Hammond. So for example, it shows Victorian professional criminals when they were reading books in prison. There's an example of the novelist in the eighteen fifties, Elizabeth. reading a little bit of little Dorit over the shoulder of a passenger on a bus and being frustrated that she had to get off before her companion turned the page. Uh there was AA Milne who read Oliver Twist at the age of nine and it gave him nightmares. Um, a man called Newman Flower, who in nineteen oh one rose at four a.m. to watch the funeral procession of Queia pass by, but whiled away the hours reading Bleak House, but got so engrossed in the book he completely missed it. No offense, but depending on the bit of bleak house, it's not always totally easy to completely lose yourself in, as I say. You're quite distracting. But isn't that amazing? U K Red. Highly recommend checking it out. So cool. I find it quite interesting that Um, because there is a sort of silent shame about audiobooks these days, isn't there, that you just sort of said, I've read it technically. Yeah. But it's a deep Victorian tradition. And I think I think this is brilliant. I think we should we should be proud. Do you think it's if you read the audiobook you get as much out of it than if you read the actual words? Um if you listen to the audiobook, um Times. I would say it depends it depends so much on the narrator design. I think science pretty much agrees with sometimes it depends. Yeah. Um, because I found a few studies. There was one in twenty sixteen uh where they played sections of a book to some people and then the other ones read it. Uh and then they did a quiz and actually everyone kind of tuck in the same amount of information. And then there's one slightly more recent where They um did the same thing, but this time they asked some trick questions. Um, so it's like the kind of trick question is like how many of each animal did Moses take on the ark? And the answer is Moses depends. So it's that kind of question. So they asked the people that kind of question uh and they found that the people who had read the book were less likely to be tricked. So it's almost like you still take it in, but you don't process it quite as much. That's what they said. Often often you're listening to an audiobook while doing something else. Whereas reading a a paper book you you you can't be driving a bus. For example, you know. So I think that probably makes a bit of a difference in the real world. I wonder if the brain also provides a little bit of white noise when you're reading, 'cause you can sort of pause or whatever, 'cause There's also really interesting research that um involved two recordings being played to an audience, one with all the white noise, the ums, the Rs, the fillers and things kept in, and another one where it was entirely stripped out. And the one where it was kept in was was remembered. And that's interesting. As long as it's not over the top. I sent to allow one uh um per sentence. Really. Yeah. That's probably enough. We could double our numbers if you look at our stumbles. That's a sweet spot, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Like in Love Island just drives everyone. mad isn't it? So I think too many and then it it the reverse is true. But yeah. Interestingly Any time we read, this is for most of us. We are listening to the audiobook as we're doing it. Sub vocalization. It's a thing that happens where most of us when we're reading the words in our head, we can hear our voice reading it. And in many cases the muscles uh in the in your throat that would be moved. to make sound are very subtly making those movements as well. Yeah. Some people mouth quite often. And some people mouth. And so apparently you also can only go at the speed at which you read. Um But you can't read faster and slower. Yeah, you can, but you can't break any kind of you can't trick your brain into going faster. Yeah. Um how interesting and there was all this debate about whether people in olden times had the capacity to read silently. Yeah, 'cause there was one guy, wasn't there, from like the ninth century, and someone wrote amazingly he can read without talking gossip. And that was taken as evidence that actually no one could do that before. But I'm not sure that I don't know. I think there's still debate going on about that. Well it's a bit it was a bit of a dubious one. It's quite fun. I was um I was thinking about uh Audible and how you get uh any kind of book you want now. And you can put an actor's name in and you can get whatever they've read. So there are some people who have quite iconic voices and it's quite funny when they're paired up with certain books. So for example, you can read a book called The Saviour Is Born. Uh, which is the story of the Nativity from the voice of God. Morgan Freeman. Oh, yeah. You can be read the Bible by Mufasa, uh, which is James Earl Jones. Or arguably Darth Vader's reading it to you. It's it's quite fun, these kind of iconic voices that that's the thing. But they strip out all the Yeah. But in the future we'll be able to just pick a voice, pick a text, and match them, won't we? Yes. Which is quite scary. James Jones is a good example because he's given over the rights to his voice for any future Star Wars so they can now AI Darth Vader into the legally I reckon. Like pretty much you probably wouldn't take much to take Susie's voice and then do an audio book just with AI, I reckon. Um Melania Trump's memoir in twenty twenty four. Not doing that one. Um she announced that it would be the future of publishing 'cause it was an AI voice. that was doing her audio. One of the main companies in the field, Eleven Labs, said that the product lacked the nuanced emotional expression of an actual person. Sorry, d are we talking about the book or the readings? Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found online. I'm on Instagram on at Shreiberand James. I'm on TikTok. No such thing as James Harkin. Andy? My instrew hunter M. And Susie, where do we find you? Uh Instagram at Suzy Dent. Nice, cool. And yeah, Suzy, you're on tour at the moment, right? Uh yes. Um it's call Word Perfect and it is just a one woman show where I just talk Words, uh we have a laugh, I hope. Uh, some silly videos, s sort of facts that you guys hopefully would love. And uh I have a QA section, which is my favourite bit. So there's a sort of word surgery where people can ask me anything they want. And yeah, do folly on Instagram and if you want to write about any of the stuff we've spoken about in this episode generally to us.