Lexicon Valley

You may have noticed, among widespread coverage of looming Russian aggression, an unfamiliar pronunciation of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv. What does that have to do with Joe Rogan’s use of the N-word? Listen to find out. X: @lexiconvalleyFacebook: facebook.com/LexiconValleyWebsite: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A hot mic caught President Biden using the epithet to describe a Fox News reporter. Where did “son of a bitch” come from, and why are modern speakers increasingly choosing other insults? X: @lexiconvalleyFacebook: facebook.com/LexiconValleyWebsite: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Actors Sidney Poitier and Max Julien and law professor Lani Guinier — all of whom died this month — have last names that reveal fascinating stories about pronunciation, etymology and language change. X: @lexiconvalleyFacebook: facebook.com/LexiconValleyWebsite: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Self-styled language experts have lamented the decline of English for centuries. From shifting pronunciations to newfangled words to evolving grammar, everyone from Jonathan Swift to John McWhorter has a pet peeve or two. X: @lexiconvalleyFacebook: facebook.com/LexiconValleyWebsite: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Happy New Year! In the warm and generous spirit of the holidays, we’re making this week’s bonus segment free to all. But there’s more: Until the end of the year, you can get 30% off a subscription to Booksmart Studios. You’ll get extra written content and access to bonus segments like this one. More importantly, you’ll be championing all the work we do here. Become a member of Booksmart Studios today.“The Twelve Days of Christmas” is a slog. It's repetitive, replete with archaic imagery and long — and so one can be forgiven for getting a bit sloppy with the lyrics. That's what happened with the phrase “colly birds,” which eventually mutated to “calling birds.” Wait, what's a colly bird? John explains.JOHN McWHORTER: For our bonus segment, I want to share something that I think is just a joy. The Twelve Days of Christmas — you know that Christmas carol that kind of goes on and on? You know, you’re singing it wrong and the kids are singing it right. Think about it: You're standing there and somebody starts singing that song and you've got some eggnog, or hopefully something stronger. And you know that eight-year-old who's standing there next to you, and maybe they've got the lyric pretty much down? But there's something that you always hear them do. I'm almost sure I did this at a certain age. And so it's (singing): “fiiiiive golden rings!” Well, everybody does that. Then you hear the little girl next to you: “four colly birds, three French hens, two turtle doves,” because they don't know what a “calling bird” would be. 🎶 MUSIC (Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters) 🎶So “four colly birds, three French hens,” right. But you know what? Do you know what a “calling bird” is? And yet, if you were writing the lyric, would you put that? Like, OK, a bird that calls, but who ever says, “Ooohhhh, look, it's a calling bird.” That's not something anybody says. And you know what? “Colly birds” is right! Nobody wrote about calling birds! That's something that people thought it was, because nobody knows what a colly bird is anymore. A colly bird is a bird that's black. It's coal colored, it's coaly. And then the sound changes. And so in earlier British dialects, you talked about, “Oh, that coaly bird,” except you'd say, “Well, it's a colly bird.” And so it's a colly bird!So five golden rings and then four black birds — not that they're calling; if you think about it, when you give people birds, usually they're petrified. They're not calling unless it's a talking parrot, and you just know that this song is not about parrots. So it's not “five golden rings, four calling birds, three French hens”; it's colly! From now on, you should listen to that girl next to you — you know, let's call her Delia — and she's going “five golden rings, four colly birds, three French hens” and you say, “Oh no, no, no, Delia, it's calling birds.” No, it isn't.🎶 THEME MUSIC 🎶You think about yourself. It's colly birds and then the French hens — why are they French? That's another story. Then turtle doves and then a partridge in, apparently, an entire tree. You can see that’s a show in this song itself. But they're colly birds. Isn’t that nice? So there's the bonus segment for this episode.If you'd like to leave a comment or check out our other great podcasts— Banished and Bully Pulpit — or subscribe, please visit BooksmartStudios.org. Our producers are Matthew Schwartz and as always, Mike Vuolo, and I am John McWhorter. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lexiconvalley.substack.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An alphabet, one of humanity’s greatest innovations, is far from intuitive. Our own English lettering was borrowed from the Romans, of course, but where did they get it from? And where did the concept originate? X: @lexiconvalleyFacebook: facebook.com/LexiconValleyWebsite: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bob Garfield and Mike Vuolo discuss what it means to be happy, both lexicographically and philosophically. X: @lexiconvalleyFacebook: facebook.com/LexiconValleyWebsite: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The late philosopher Paul Grice formulated four brief maxims by which conversations are generally governed. Most humans find it relatively easy to observe them. Machines, on the other hand, not as much.Normally, John’s Lexicon Valley bonus segments are behind the subscriber paywall, but we’re making this week’s bonus segment free for everyone. With more content now than ever before, we are deeply grateful for your attention and hope that you’ll become a Booksmart Studios supporter. Happy Thanksgiving week!* TRANSCRIPT *🎶 THEME MUSIC 🎶JOHN McWHORTER: So what we learned about today with the irony was, in broader perspective, about maxims. It's the maxims created by the philosopher of language Paul Grice — we linguists call them the Gricean maxims — and what the maxims are about are certain underlying assumptions that we make about conversation, about how we use language. These things are unspoken — nobody would teach them — but they are yet another way that we can see that speaking is not just about describing things and giving orders and asking questions. It's more than that; social interaction is weirder and richer than that.So with irony, what goes on is that you are breaking one of the maxims, and it's called the Maxim of Quality. The Maxim of Quality is an unspoken agreement that we make as people to, when we are communicating, tell the truth. The idea is that the default assumption is that we are calling upon somebody's attention in order to tell them something that is true. If you flout, as we say, the Maxim of Quality, it means that you don't tell the truth. Irony is all about flirting with, flouting, the Maxim of Quality. So “very funny” when it wasn't very funny. You flout the Maxim of Quality in order to communicate something, but the idea is that you broke this maxim. Now there are other maxims. The nice thing is that there aren't like 34. It's one of those things where you would imagine that Grice would have become one of these people to whom he has a hammer, and therefore everything is a nail. No, there aren't that many. There are only four. But another one — and one you end up thinking about after you think about the Maxim of Quality — is the Maxim of Quantity. What's the Maxim of Quantity? That is an underlying agreement that when somebody asks us for information, we tell them enough — not too much, and especially not too little. There's an agreement that we're actually going to give what the person was asking.And so let's say you have two children and somebody asks, “Do you have one child?” You're not supposed to answer “yes,” knowing that you actually have two because of course, it is true in the strict sense that you have one child. If you have two, you have two “one childs.” Yes. But if somebody says, “Do you have a child?” and you have two, you don’t just say “yes”; you say “Yes. As a matter of fact, I have two children.” That is, if you were going to fulfill the Maxim of Quantity. This reminds me of an anecdote somebody told me about being very far away and they were in a restaurant, and it had been a long day, and they asked, “Well,” [to] the waiter, “you have Kingfisher beer?” and the waiter says, “No, sir, we don't have Kingfisher beer.” So then he asked, “Well, do you have Sierra Nevada?” “No, sir. We don't have Sierra Nevada beer.” “Do you have an Amstel light?” “Sir, I'm sorry. We don't have Amstel Light.” “Wait a minute. Do you sell beer at all?” “No, sir. We don't sell beer.”That's not the way it's supposed to go. If somebody says, “Do you have Kingfisher beer,” you don't say, “No, we don't sell Kingfisher” knowing that you don't sell any beer at all. That's underselling it. You are flouting the Maxim of Quantity. It's not quite the thing that one does. And you know, there are two more of these maxims, and they're all about what it really is to talk. And this is the sort of thing that makes artificial intelligence hard, because how does the machine know that if it's asked, “Do you have one child?” — when its truth condition is that it has two children — that the answer is not “Yes, I have one child.” A machine is relatively easy to teach to answer a basic question, but how do you make the machine understand context? That is one of the massive challenges. And for reasons like this, actually, as the maxims go, quantity is the hardest one. There's an interesting study that was done recently by Mako Okanda, Kosuke Asada, Yusuke Moriguchi and Shoji Itakura — I am not going to pretend that those four names were not lots of fun for Anglophone me to say — but they did a study where they show that in terms of these maxims, quantity comes in the latest. Some forms of flouting quantity and understanding that that's what happened and that that's how language goes, people don't get until they are about six. This was done with Japanese kids. And so not until about six are you fully getting that.And if you think about it, that's about right. It's around six when your kids are understanding language completely in that contextual sense, where, within reason, you can use irony, etc. That is certainly the case with my two children. But that means that language is partly about maxims. We are in a Maxim House. Maxwell House Coffee! Remember the old commercials?Commercial Announcer: Mmm, smell good ground coffee!Where they used to somehow get across that Maxwell House is better than other coffee because it's good to the last drop? What did that mean? You know, what are the coffees where: Well, these are some of the last drops and it's not very good ‘cuz these are the last drops, and for whatever reason that would be — backwash or something like that — how is that different with Maxwell House? And of course, Maxwell House is not what most of us would consider good coffee. But here, just to close it out, this is an early 50s TV commercial. And it's about how Maxwell House is good to the last *whoop!* drop. That's the way they used to do it on the radio.Commercial Announcer: Pour a cup of this good smelling coffee. It will taste as good as it smells because it's good ground Maxwell House. Maxwell House Coffee is good to the last drop. Enjoy the rich, fresh taste of Maxwell House Coffee: The ground coffee that tastes as good as it smells every time. Maxwell House.🎶 THEME MUSIC 🎶This bonus segment has been about maxim house, but it got me thinking about coffee, although I, of course, drink better coffee than Maxwell House.If you'd like to leave a comment or check out our other great podcasts, Banished and Bully Pulpit, or subscribe, please visit BooksmartStudios.org. Our producers are Matthew Schwartz and as always, Mike Vuolo, and I am John McWhorter. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lexiconvalley.substack.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Language doesn't often do what you think it should. It’s as messy as almost anything that’s created by natural selection, but that’s what makes it so fun. X: @lexiconvalleyFacebook: facebook.com/LexiconValleyWebsite: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Scrabble and other similar games have been the subject of an ongoing lexicographic debate in recent years, with some arguing that ethnic slurs have no place in the official dictionary or on the board. Many tournament players, however, decry the banning of words — the game, they say, is merely descriptivist. X: @lexiconvalleyFacebook: facebook.com/LexiconValleyWebsite: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices