Written Language Versus Spoken Reality

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And are we entering a new era of self-censorship? We're here with linguistic titan John McWarter, one of the leading minds in language, to discuss pejoratives and pedantry on this episode of Words Unraveled. I'm so excited about this one Welcome to another Words Unraveled. I'm Rob Watts from the YouTube channel Rob Words. And I'm Jess Seferis, author of etymology books, including useless etymology. And today we are here with a legend of the linguistics space, John McWarter, who is a longtime professor of linguistics and authored how many books? How many books have you written? Technically, 24, actually. Okay, that was gonna be my estimate. So I'm glad I'm not too far off. And these books have covered American English dialects, Creole languages, race and language, profanity, and so much more. Do do you have a favorite that you have written? My favorite of my books is probably The Power of Babel, which was one of the early ones, and I wrote it just basically saying exactly what I wanted to say, sharing what I wanted to share, not feeling like anybody was looking over my shoulder, not writing it, thinking about making money. It was just a labor of love. And now it's it's getting a little antique, but that's always gonna be my favorite effect. That one is just me, basically. Have you considered uh another edition? Thought about it, and um actually there is an editor who I've talked about that with and it might be worth it. I mean I'd have to really get rid of the pop culture references, you know, writing about married with children and you know, all these things that, you know, nobody has any idea what they are now. And a lot of my thoughts have changed. But yeah, I would do it if the if the if the opportunity were right, yeah, that one could be refreshed. Yeah. I'm glad you brought up pop culture references because that's part of what we want to talk about a little bit today, right? Actually it's it relates mostly to one of your books called Nine Nasty Words, which is particularly relevant now. It's about words that are taboo to some extent, profane, slurs. Actually, that is exactly where I want to start with you, is asking what the differences are between those terms. Swears or curses or cusses indeed. Profanity and a slur. What makes something one of those things? Well I think that um we happen to apply certain labels to certain words because of when in history they were taboo and what word happened to be used. And so we can say that, you know, hell and damn and if I may f are profanity, they are profane. They go against certain rules, they're not properly religious, etc. But really, I'm a lumper rather than a splitter. And when I wrote nine Nasty Words, I was thinking at first, I really don't think I could get anything out of a book that was just about damn f I thought frankly it's been done and or that doesn't really interest me. What really grabbed me was that those things in my mind are no longer our profanity. The profanity is the slurs. Now you can say that when you use a word to refer in a pejorative way to some group, we call that a slur. But in the grand scheme of things, it's what is profane at any given time. And I honestly believe that, you know, from the Martian anthropologist's perspective, there is no difference between how people felt about saying damn um a thousand years ago and how people feel about using the N word now. I think they're the exact same thing. It's just what makes you shudder. And so for me it was really the nine, although in the book, after a while you can tell it's really twelve, but nine, nasty, because that sounds better. Words. And I thought it starts with damn, but then it ends with something like, you know, C-U-N-T. And that's the human nature of these words as they change In the answer you've just given. You said various words that we may or we may not bleep when we put this out, but at the end you did not say the C word, you spelt it out, which is just one approach to it. In American English, that's that's the worst one next to the N word, which even I don't say. I think that frankly it's a little overdone that now you're not allowed to say it at all, but you know, you you choose what hill you're gonna die on. But then also C U N T. No, I will only utter it once, say, in a class, to indicate that that's the topic. But it's just it's too it's too strong. In other words, it's profane in the way that f was a hundred years ago. But it's interesting that the C word is not a slur. Against women, yeah. Yeah. Well exactly. But that's that's interesting, isn't it? Because it's usage in Yes. And it's it's it's um and it's almost loving, you know. Oh it can it it can be, yeah, not as much as I the Australians. I mean it's if y you're your best friend. In Britain, it y I you've got to be very, very close to get away with it. Right, right, exactly. It is interesting in general that casual swearing has become more visible and more socially acceptable on the internet in recent years, probably because online discourse is couched in like humor. And if not humor, then it's meant to be seen or generate a reaction or shock value of some kind, right? Yeah. I mean it's the internet is a casual space. And so even though we're writing, we're using our fingers, it's kind of what you call a sort of fingered speech. And so it's casual speech. It's the bar stool, and so therefore the profanity happens and a lot of what goes on online is trying to get attention, and the way you get attention is by breaking rules. And so yes, there will be a great deal of swearing online for that reas Aaron Powell But there's also a category of word we we've started not saying things in some online spaces that weren't profanity at all. In I I think it started on TikTok in particular, Elgo Speak has started including the avoidance of words like die and kill and suicide because there's a notion that those might cause your video to be taken down or suppressed by the algorithm of some kind , which I have not noticed to be true. Yeah, I I mean I was I was watching a channel the other day, a lady called Lauren the Mortician, and she specializes in she's an i an influencer, but she is a a mortician and and and she she analyzes tales of murder and and and uh bodies and stuff but she was talking about a very high profile suicide recent. The biggest one in the news right now. Yes. And avoided all the way through it using that word suicide referred to self-unaliving , referred to unsubscribing from life. What are we calling this kind of self censorship? And does it how does it fit in with the dis with the the definitions that we've already talked about? To be honest, I see that as a kind of an almost self gener ated new profanity because in using the substitute, you're doing something kind of interesting , you are making it look like you're going against the grain and therefore having to disguise yourself. And so it means that all of those, you know, ways of talking around it, those those those recre ationally awkward new terms or ways of using emojis. All of that is a way of you know N-wording and and f ing and in a new creative way. It makes you look a little bit na ughty and daring. I'm not I'm not surprised that that's happened. You could almost have predicted that there would be kind of neo profanity based on how word processing and search engines work. It reminds me a bit of sort of saying DAGNamit or something, something that's very But it isn't. But in its own way as a sort of creative thing. Although I I tend to agree with Jess, I think either people are over estimating the effect that the use of these words will have on the performance of their content, which is ultimately what it comes down to. Either they are overstating that or they are they are very deliberately trying to do something that is interesting. And I would go with that partly because it's rather obvious at this point that people aren't being, you know, pulled into a dark black hole because of using some word. It doesn't happen enough to justify how proliferate how proliferated this new slang is. And so I think it's it's all a kind of it's fashion. It's just, you know, it's changing things up because we crave novelty. That's been my interpretation of it. I hope it is that because uh one of the other arguments is a financial one, right? Which is that so I know I upload things to YouTube all of the time and as I will have done this video. And at one point I will have had to state whether or not this video contains certain references. And the reason I have to do that is for its ad availability. It's for whether or not it will receive the maximum number of different adverts from the maximum possible number of advertisers possible. And so if I say, well actually it does contain talk of suicide or it does include slurs, then all of a sudden you know the little green dot turns orange or it turns red, and I we are gonna make less money. That's interesting. So there's a financial incentive for using cell phone alive, for example. I'm not I'm not accusing Lauren the Mortician speci fically of of that. But but I I would be I would be a hundred percent sure that that is a driver for some people. I don't think the algorithm either I I think it allows for to some extent, people to talk about these terms and subjects in an academic way, otherwise news organizations wouldn't be able to talk about things that happened in real life on YouTube. Yeah. It's still though, it's it's a very creative use of language because somebody, and I don't think we can usually nail down who, somebody has to come up with the euphemism. And then the question is whether it's going to catch on. And if it does, then you know we've seen the birth of something new, which then I mean, the other thing that's gonna happen is that a lot of those terms are gonna settle in and have specific shades of meaning that stick around even when it's no longer about, you know, search engines and cancellations. So if this issue of on alive, for example, that could start to mean something very specific. It would settle in gradually, and it would be one more word for dead that has a certain shade. And so all this is also probably helping That's an altogether more positive outlook on it than than I I had. It's a persuasive one though. I would love to pivot to something Rob brought up before we were when we were preparing for this episode. Um, and it's a it's another taboo word, one that we're not allowed to say. And I'm going to say it, but like retarded is the insult that has become one that I think a lot of people feel uncomfortable saying. It felt uncomfortable when I said that too. I was When a child, I had an aunt who had a mental disability, and her sister, who was her age, comfortably said she suffered from mental retardation, which is not quite the same as when we throw that as an insult at someone for who is misbehaving on the internet or so the person says. Can you talk a little bit about how that word has become what it is today? Yeah, that word is is interesting because , you know, people tossed it all over the place in the 70s and into the 80s when I was growing up, and after a while it became it became a taboo term because of the associations with it, well, many of which are for, better or for worse, negative. And so there were new ways of referring to somebody who was what you might call cognitively challenged. And it changes about every 10 years. Special needs covers some of it. Nobody was called special needs when I was a kid. Now that's a common term. And what it meant was that retarded, if I may say it once, got gunked up in the same way that first there was the word bum in America, which my mother as a social worker very casually used, and then homeless starting in the nineties. Now homeless sounds the way Bum did in nineteen seventy, and so we say unhoused. It's that euphemism treadmill. And that happened with the R-word. But of course, the internet is all about transgression. And um teenage and 20-something boys are especially about transgression. And the American Republican Party right now is especially about transgression. And so all of a sudden we're seeing that word used, which at first I found kind of antique. It reminds me of being in summer camp in like 1976 and the way the little boys would say, you, you, you, retard, or something like that. But now it's grown people, you know, sitting in studios and using these words. And part of it is because they know that they shouldn't. And so Joe Rogan has even said that retarded is back and I'm glad because he didn't like the idea that you weren't allowed to say it. So that's why that has come back. And I don't think there's anything we can do about it because transgressing is so much of what communication is about. We think it's about saying, oh, look, the moon is yellow. But one thing that communication is really much more about than saying the moon is yellow is to say, hey, look, the moon is blue. It counterintuitive is something that a whole lot of language mach inery is all about. If you say, oh my God, he had a pink ass piano, that doesn't mean that the piano had buttocks, and it doesn't mean that the piano was hot pink or something like that. It means the piano wasn't supposed to be pink. And so counterintuitive. And then another thing that we tend not to think about, because it's not in the grammar books, is that a lot of what we say is based on getting attention. It's almost a kind of counterintuitiveness. You you want to transgress. And that's especially if you're young. It's also partly personality type, but it's there. And so when we see the rebirth of the R-word, we can just think of it as part of that. And so if you know you're not supposed to say it, well, big surprise, a certain kind of person is going to say it. And that's what that's what inevitably happens. What I thought was interesting when I encountered this issue just today. I was just doing my usual lit-washing my YouTube videos. And it was John Oliver actually. He referred to the word that you guys have both said now, and I don't need to say it. But he referred to it as the R slur, which is not the R slur. I know he's British, but R ur. And I thought that was interesting because I hadn't heard it referred to as that. I've heard that R word uh perhaps. But I I wonder if and I'm I'm asking you both as as people who are your side of the Atlantic, because I feel like it's a bit more of a thing a moment that you guys are having over there. Whether the sides are so sort of moving further apart from each other here, and actually the word is becoming even more taboo on one side because of its proliferation on the other side. Is that what's happening? My impression was that before there was a movement to use the word to put it in people's faces, that the R word , I had never classified it as a slur, but I remember what is it? It's 20 11. I was doing a class and there was a girl from Brazil, undergraduates, and there was a girl from Brazil. English, absolutely excellent, just a slight accent, full idiomatic command, but you know, one of these internationals who's grown up with like three languages, but she had spent most of her life in Brazil, and she just made a casual usage of the R word, and what she meant was she was condemning somebody who, as a matter of fact, had had killed a cap ybara. And so she said, and this person was rah. And the whole class just ex ploded with laughter. The idea being that why would anybody use that word? So r retard was a slur then, and yet I would never have thought of putting it in nine nasty words because we don't tend to classify it that way. Calling it the R slur makes that more likely. But yeah, it's a word that in my demographic would never be used casually. It would be improper at the backyard barbecue. And so yeah, it's it's it's definitely one of them. But I think that happened before Joe Roganitis and stuff. It is interesting that it r it echoes the same trajectory as words that similarly used to be used in clinical spaces like imbecile Moron. If you yeah, if you call someone a moron or an imbecile, mostly they are not that offended because it 's just not a word that we we typically consider as being offensive or or even having teeth, you know? Whereas this one still seems to have teeth. And and it it is interesting that this happens so frequently with words for mental disabilities. The R word ends up being particularly taboo because it seems to zero in specifically on the nature of the condition that you have your that your thought is slower, that it's held back, as opposed to more on an imbecile, which are one, foreign to the English root stock, and also kind of opaque. You know, we don't know what a it somebody's an imbecile. What's a bistile? You know, it's just there's you know, the R word says something. Yeah, that's true. That's one of our uh orphaned negatives that we've talked about on this show before. Exactly. Yeah, without a stick, I think we came we we discovered events. Yeah. It's a more of a physical uh disability reference. Is that what a debacle is? Yeah, it is. It's it's it's the idea I mean it is it is also transferred to the idea of your your brain by that, but it's the idea of it being sort of unsupported. Oh wow. I didn't know that. It's it' its's an interesting one, yeah. 'Cause I was looking up these words 'cause even the word like idiot, you know, doesn't begin as a a slur, it means you know a private individual. It means that you're the way you are, right? Yeah, well idiot, like idiosyncratic means now. But but originally like to the Greeks, uh Idiotes is is a private individual, right? And and I guess someone who's in their own world, perhaps, would be a good way to transfer it. And in the Romance languages , idiotisms are just sayings and so just s specific little sayings and idiotisma. And then we have it as meaning well, it's not just what you're like, but you're that way , which is called the pejorative of a word. Lovely. So our regular viewers are gonna be delighted to hear some proper etymology in this all of this discussion of some some words that we're very uncomfortable with. It's interesting how we're still handling taboos around we talked about health, mental health already, but also just general general health, right? I mean we still prefer sometimes to refer to cancer as y the big C. We refer to tuberculosis as T B and I don't think that's just because it's it's quicker. I think people zero in on it, yeah. You don't want to zero in on it. I just learned that that during the the Black Death they refer to the plague as Saint Christopher or St. Giles or something like that. Them too. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So so not just it's not it's not just that you don't want to tempt the badness, you also want to counteract it with some extra holiness thrown in as well. But but we still have these sensibilities. And death is obviously another one. Right. I mean we 'll do anything to avoid saying someone's dead. They are resting in peace, right? Just say that somebody passed Yeah, exactly. It's a movement. But to just say they died is a little rude in many circumstances. Yeah. But what are these? Are these are these profanities? Are they they're certainly not slurs? They're taboos. Well what we have is um something else that is a big part of language that we're not taught because we're always taught you know past, tense, future, or etc., is that there are softeners. And so to really speak a language is to know that there's a direct way of saying something. And then the way that you probably say it amidst normal social intercourse. And so for a party, if you're leaving, you you cannot say, I'm leaving. That's that's just not within the grammar. You say, well, I'm going to head out , and then you gradually leave. There's no such thing as saying I'm leaving. I had a question about words that we might no longer associate with the more taboo or more pejor ative senses that they come from. The one that comes to mind for me is the word GIP, which people in recent history I think have re-associated with the word it came from, which is gypsy, right? But at the same time, people, I have noticed people avoiding it recently, but then I have also seen people just using it in normal in common parlance without knowing what it means. Do you have any thoughts on that kind of process and this rediscovery of of words like that? Well I think part of the issue with JIP is that the person known as the gypsy is relatively marginal to the American consciousness. Gypsies aren't of as a problem, et cetera, the way they often are in European countries for better or for worse. And I think that an awful lot of people in American English haven't been aware that it was wrong to use the term gypsy. You know, there's a musical called gypsy that's you know constantly you know produced. And so , yeah, I think I, like as you know, a relatively language sensitive person, gypped, of course, was commonly used in the 70s and 80s, then kind of stopped being used. And I think I've vaguely known that it had something to do with the Roma, but I'm not sure if I did know. And I think it's partly just because you know the Roma are not a significant demographic element here. It'd be interesting to see how that went. Maybe for example , in the UK, where there are more quote unquote gypsies. But here it's just such a marginal thing that I imagine that's why it's coming back. Like I don't know anybody who's using JIT as a way of being a smarty pants. It's just don't know what you know the the person in question is. What's interesting here is I have no idea what word you guys are talking about. So the idea of being being gypped, that means something, does it? Because I don't think it means something in British English, which I think speaks to exactly what you were just saying. It was very much the the slang term for getting cheated through the 70s. There's a a peanut Charlie Brown strip that very casually used it, called something a chocolate jip cookie, and that was considered very funny. But it wasn't it wasn't a slur. But yeah, by the nineties I would say it's not something I would have said. To be honest, a part of me just thought that the term became outdated. You know, you'd now you get screwed or something like that. But it used to be gypped, G Y P P E D. Yeah, very very third grade, as I recall it. Maybe it's the the renewed modern interest in etymology that has made people more aware of such things, right? I don't want to speak for all Brits and all of Britain when I say that I but I d I personally have not heard that word used. It may have been c current at some point. In British English, what is the word for getting cheated? The kind of slang peanut butter word? Duped, maybe? Duped. Which even to me has a sort of American ring to it. Part of speech seems to matter with slurs in particular too. Like the the R-word we were talking about before as a noun versus an adjective was I think more pervasive or more negative in the past than the adjective. Yeah. Yeah. To call somebody A. Yeah. Exactly. What's interesting here is we're talking about the a return of a word by the people that it doesn't refer to, but you have written a lot, John, about uh words that being reclaimed by the people to whom they refer, which is a a phenomenon of of its own. Yeah. It's um it's one of the oddest things, and there's a reason people write whole books about the N word in particular, because one way that human beings who are looked down upon defuse a slang term is to just start uh a slur against them, is to use it themselves, and that's just you know,, in any language, you know, a Pizon in Italy or something like that. And that's what people do. You could have predicted that that would have happened with the N word. And so what it really means when black people use it among one another is deer or or buddy. But then we have this idea in America that we're gonna possibly ban ever saying the word in any meaning and even extending that to people using it as a term of endear ment. And that's a really hard ask because you're asking people to go against a human tendency that's about self-definition and pride and fellowship. But the usual thing is that, for example, there are gay men who, I'll say once, will use fag among one another. That's also happened with the term dike among among women who are using that term. And so that's just normal. You you you know it's coming. Um and yet, you know, with the N word it's become so sacred, so to speak, in America that we're asked to go against our natural impulses, which is why the word always remains so sensitive and controversial. Yeah, so that usage by one group has not actually it's not it's not improved anything about the word, has it? You essentially just have two parallel meanings. The the the offens ive one remains and is used by a completely different set of people. Precise people that are that have reclaimed the word. I'm putting air quotes around that for our for our for our listeners. The awkward thing is that because in some ways not always, but in some ways the races in America are coming together in a way that they weren't in the past, that you know, slowly we are getting past it. And there's some people who would burn me an effigy for saying it. Let them. It is not the way it was 50 years ago. It means that a lot of younger non-black people have a natural impulse to want to say N-I-G-G-A because they're using it as a term to mean buddy, and even if they don't mean it to a black person, they'll often use it among one another, because they figure it's in the music they like, it's in the movies they watch, why can't we use it? And it's natural for them to think it's a word meaning buddy and, that we're signifying among ourselves the same kind of fellowship that we watch black men signaling among themselves. And a lot of black men are okay with it too. But it's it's sensitive because really what the language wants to do is have the one that ends in ER as the slur, which is almost never heard in polite company now, and then the one that ends in A meaning yo my buddy. That's where the language wants to go, and we would say, well, it emerged among black men and then it jumped the rails and became general, like many black English terms do here. But with that one, because there's the whole argument as to whether it's one word or two and that they sound alike, it ends up in it that it's partly about dialect and how you pronounce even the ER one. It's always tricky. I've seen recently discourse around people saying that a a lot of Gen Z terms in general come from black music , which I think is really neat to observe, like uh like busin' comes to mind or no cap or things like that. Sus originally is black music and black culture. Um, and it seems like Gen Z kids or and Gen Alpha kids increasingly, because Gen Z isn't kids anymore, um, they almost like don't don't consider that to be significantly culturally different. No, it's it's it's m music and also just um gay black ballroom culture and that whole space, which I don't really know that much about, but it is linguistically always has been linguistically extremely creative. And so a lot of the terms now that are thought of as just kind of slangy and cute come from that. And so what's what's the latest one I learned? Um the the s I almost want to ask my fourteen year old . Um she it's the term that means something like picked up on and it involves tea. Well also also the whole tea thing. Tea all of that is from that culture. And that's a wonderful thing. I mean, America wasn't talking blackly in 1925. And it just shows that the old lines are fading, even if they're not there. But yeah, at this point, if there's a new colorful slang term that the kids are using, chances are it came from darker skinned people. You know, the what what's interesting is if it d if it didn't, you know, six seven is not something that people black and gay and dancing were saying. That one has its own history. But with a lot of them, it's based on that pathway. No one would have expected that in even nineteen eighty. And here we are. T is a particularly interesting one, isn't it because it's not only from black culture, but it's also black drag culture as well. Yeah, a specific sub culture within the culture, exactly. Yeah. That's excellent. And then we've also we have more entertainment that focuses on that subculture so it enters more uh common usage. Clocked my tea or something. It's the it's the usage of clot. Sorry I had to get there. Oh no, that's great. Is that is that to notice someone's truth? Oh he clock ed me. That's one that I heard this summer from young people. yes I'd say clock my tea. And you do you imitate a teacup while you say it. Oh, that's part of it.. Mm-hmm I mean, yeah, I would say clocked, like I clocked that, but not I hadn't heard I clocked my tea. That's great. It's around. It also sounds very lady chablis, right? Extremely. And yet I heard it from thirteen year olds. Right. Speaking of dialectical terms, which you write about extensively and one angle of it, which is something we've discussed a lot before. And that's why so many people, even when they are aware of other modes of communication, feel that they need to champion a certain mode of proper English. And in the process, they can end up either frustrated or marginalizing people based on the slang they use, why do you think people have an impulse to, even if you know a lot about language and grammar and dialect, why do you think people feel in the need to protect a particular mode of communication Aaron Powell Part of it is that it's perfectly natural to think that the language that's used in the most formal or vanilla circumstances is somehow the real thing, especially because print looks so permanent, and then there's all this stuff where people are just talking. It's perfectly natural, almost I keep using this word in this episode, but inevitable for people to think that way. Then also it's also part of being human to like feeling superior to some other group. That's just what we do. And because more morality does advance and being openly racist is considered something to get past. Being openly sexist is something that we justifiably police. There is one last remaining classism, and it's about language. It's very easy to say you don't know how to use the word whom, what's wrong with you? That is the equivalent of, you know, rapping somebody on the head with your cane in eighteen eighty five and calling them a ruffian. And so I think that that's part of what's going on there. But it's also it's also just natural. And so for example, I, you know, have been now preaching for decades about how all human fluid speech is um is is cognitively equal, that there's no such thing as a cognitively normal human being speaking some sort of bad version of a language. And I've meant it and I've written with great affection about the newish now not new, but newish usage of like and how it's subtle and there have been dissertations written about it. I must admit, I have an eleven and a fourteen year old. They say like every five words, and there's a part of me that thinks stop it. You don't sound and I don't say it. I have told them say that all you want. Just, you know, pull back on it in formal circumstances. But I must admit in real life, I find myself thinking, must you say that word every five times and it doesn't make any sense, but I have a certain ingrained idea that the language of the Wall Street Journal is the real thing, and I'm a fussy cardigan kind of person, and so the way I talk casually is kind of close to that. And I don't say like every five words. And I'm too old ever to have. And so yeah, it's natural. You know, even a me can't help but see some ways of communicating as as more lowly. And then I can smack myself. But most people haven't been studying languages and dialects for forever, because there are a great many more interesting things to do. And so you can't help but think that there's a sloppy way of talking and then the real way of talking. There is a sentence that occasionally pops into my head, and I'm pretty sure it's from your magnificent bastard tongue. And it's along the lines of you know, I I don't know if you remember it yourself, verbatim, but it's it's something like the idea that people are stumbling around getting the language wrong is nonsense. Right. Because if people are s successfully communicating, that is the language, I I think was the point you were sort of making. That sounds I love that book. I'm I'm looking at it right now. That that may have been what I said, or it may have been in the next one, which I'm looking at too, what language is, but yes, the idea that people are walking around stumbling linguistically, it's just not the case unless somebody has aphasia or is drunk or something like that. But uh it's part of it that people invest in learning grammar and I quite literally, financially though they'll they'll you know their parents will invest in them being taught this stuff, but people invest time in it. And therefore when they witness someone doing it differently, wrongly, to their to their mind, and maybe in some cases wrongly. I don't know. I think some things are wrong. Yeah, because it looks like the other people didn't do the work. Or you're kind of proud of yourself. Or it means that their the work that they put into it doesn't matter. Right. Exactly. And so w what did I do all this what did I go to all this effort for if you're just gonna walk around talking like that? Yeah. Yeah. It's still getting your McDonald's order just as quickly as me. Exactly. It would be that. I have noticed that people want me to be a champion of a a style guide of some kind or a mode of communication. And uh I'm my I edit many things for a living too. And I'm like, well, I have to work with three different style guides for my three different publishers, so I don't really get to be an advocate of one over another. No, and the style guides are often quite arbitrar y. I mean, but by very well meaning people, but these rules are often based in I mean that that's the thing. People don't get, I just happened to have this prop. Those rules are made up by people writing with a feather in the 1700s. Don't ask me why I had this feather sitting right here. People who are now I assume that's how you wrote your books. It's a long story. But it's by people from that long ago who died. And they are the ones who decided what we're now being told is correct. And it's it's easy not to know that, but it's hard. But then again, you have to what hill are you gonna die on? I don't say my daughter and me went to the museum in any kind of public setting. I've learned to say my daughter and I. The rule itself is an utter absurdity. But people are people, and things are going to be heard in certain ways. And, you know if, I insist on saying my daughter and I, then who am I to say that there is no room for arbitrary rules? But the thing is they're arbitrary. They're just as arbitrary as fashion rules. And that's what I think it's easy for people not to know. Um you have to put on clothes and gets to the point where you have to put on certain clothes and not others. You know, no woman now walks around in a hat wearing a girl and wearing a dress and high heels. That's n luckily that's no longer necessary. But still these fashion changes are arbitrary ultimately. But here we are. I think the best perspective for me comes from looking at the the rules of dialectical English and because they do have rules. They're just not written down in unless by people like you. Which I think is really neat. Because the internal logic applies just as much. And if you break those rules, then then people notice and it sounds weird. Yeah. Yeah, the most counterintuitive thing is that black English has rules and ones that speakers themselves have no way of knowing. In other words, it's normal human language, but it's so hard to hear it that way Trevor Burrus So there is a written form of English, and I don't think we we necessarily talk about it as being the case, right? We t we I think we automatically think of written English as being, you know, the the spoken form committed to paper, but it it isn't in in much the way that uh when we read old English it it's or or or classical Latin is maybe a better example of it. You know, it's a sort of idealised perfect version of the of of a language that is being actually spoken in a very very different way by almost everyone. Almost everyone who speaks English does not speak the same as we're taught to to write it. And and we should write it because you you're gonna be understood by the the broadest number of people if you do stick to those rules. Yeah you have to learn the written form and it has rules and some of them are arbitrary, some of them are just that you can make a longer sentence more easily in writing. That's important. You use a capital I for the first person singular pronoun in writing. You have to. That's just the way it is, based on, you know, conditions a long time ago. And in general, written language can often be more precise because you have a chance to think about it, and the person reading it has a chance to go read back, as opposed to just talk , which is quite different. But yeah, it's easy to under it's easy to miss that writing and casual speech are going to be very different, but that doesn't mean that casual speech is bad or lesser than writing, because casual speech is where language actually begins. Writing only comes along, you know, much later. But that's a that's a tough one too. Writing versus speaking. I teach that in my linguistics classes. That's not usually very much in textbooks, but I Yeah that's interesting, isn't it? five thousand years old. Think it's being revised, but the old factoid was if humanity had only existed for 24 hours, writing only came around during the last five minutes of those two minutes. Five to new it is. Yeah. So that's real language is what we're doing right now. And then about two hundred languages are written in any real way. And that means that six thousand eight hundred are just talked. So that's why we linguists like casual speech and spoken language, because that's most of what language is. And then there's this written artifice that happens in certain societies at a certain time about ten minutes ago. And that's interesting too, but it's not the main meal. I mean Danger taking us really far away from what we're talking about here, but but it's interesting, and I and I wonder what your take is on this. That languages that uh uh do have a written form take up a lot more space in the brain of linguists and linguistic res earchers in a way that perhaps and I you have written about this, um that perhaps comes to the detriment of our actual understanding of English. And the reason that the thought that's just popped into my head is the Celtic influence on English, which you've definitely written about, um, and that the fact that we potentially have a lesser understanding of that as a sort of sp species or I don't know we describe it, because the Celtic Britons didn't write anything down. Right. Or not back then they didn't and so No, it costs you yeah, sure they're they're writing plenty now. Yeah, and so yeah, it ends up being it's lost to the record what those interactions were like, what Celtic was like, what early spoken English was actually like, and so there's so much that you just have to guess. But yeah, you get an artificial sense of how language really works by only going from what the big written language is. In one book, um I think that was definitely what language is. I said that the way we often think about language is as if we're on the shore, we're at the seashore, and we can see some fish in there, and you know, maybe there's some lobster or something and you know the things that wash up and you figure, well, that is sea life, as opposed to actually being underwater and seeing all of what's under there. And there are these pictures in Victorian books