#630 - Valerie Fridland - Why Is Everyone Saying ‘Like’ and ‘Um’ All The Time?

26:58And what they found is a silent pause didn't have the same effect. Nor did something like a cough that also gave the same amount of time but was a different kind of distractor. And in fact, things like coughs actually hindered comprehension. So clearly we are treating and I'm differently than both other distractors and silent pauses from a cognitive standpoint. So silent pauses don't give us the bump that seems to give us. On the flip side, silent pauses are sometimes better in a context like giving a presentation. So I'm not telling people go stick into your presentation because unless I've talked to that audience before you get there, it probably will still not be taken as great speaking.

27:37But especially at the beginning of a sentence, because we do find that people either are, or are, um, at the beginning of the sentence, depending on how long they think it's going to take them to answer the question. So it does seem to be taken as a marker of uncertainty, particularly at the very beginning of a sentence. So that might be one to stay away from. But when we, again, do studies that look at how people take silent pauses versus fill pauses, in some cases, they can take silent pauses as greater signals of anxiety than when someone filled their pause with, or probably because they weren't sure when someone paused in that context, whether they were just not sure what they were going to say or whether they forgot what they were going to say.

28:17It doesn't give the listener the same clue that you know you're working on it. Instead, it might lead to some misconception when you silently pause that either you haven't finished, but you don't know what you're going to say, or you suddenly abruptly did finish and it's someone else's turn. So it can be a little more confusing whereas uh, and um, our signals to a listener specifically I'm working on it. I'm going to keep talking So while silent pauses certainly in speeches are sometimes very effective Especially when you want to add power to what you're saying so you give people a moment to think about it It's not always beneficial in casual conversation to do that I have a friend who does a lot of debates and he uses Turn transition cues in a similar way to what you're talking about but he doesn't use Omar Er and he learned this from Christopher Hitchens.

29:04So he's having a debate with somebody and One of the things that he's conscious of is that if he gets anywhere close to a pause point within his sentence Do you other person is potentially going to jump in and then try and make a point? So what he does is he'll start the Beginning of a sentence like that take a sip of water Give himself the breathing room to go through things and then keep going because you know no one's going to jump in it After a the e -cat me that's so rude, but if he started it before the beginning of the sentence or halfway through at a point that seemed like a monatural break, it allows somebody to come in.

29:39So yeah, I understand that ums and a nice foam finger that you can wave in the air that says, I got a little bit more to talk about here. Just hang fire one second. May I know that I might not get the next word out immediately, but just I require a bit more. Don't jump in here, right? It's sort of like, hey dude, I'm still talking kind of signal. But that's exactly right. In turn, transition cues, I'm impressed. That's a big linguistic term. And it basically, to just, as anytime we're indicating to someone that it's their turn, and that can be something that we do spoken, like, saying, you know, stop talking and just have silence.

30:12Or we can select somebody. So I can say, Chris, what do you think? And that is definitely a turn transition cue. I can even just look at people. But it's very, because there's so many of them, and they do different work in terms of how people interpret them, it can be very confusing when someone just stops talking or doesn't use some sort of signal that they're either not done or they are done. So, ah, and are a great solution for that. And they do seem to work that way. I know that you're coming at this from a linguistic perspective, but I would be stupid of me not to bring this up with you. No one on the podcast that's ever listening to this is ever going to see the volume of nods that I put in while the guest is speaking.

30:51So as I'm here, I'm just going away like a little nodding dog sat on the back of a car. That has to be kind of not quite like a turn transition cue, but it's like an encouragement. So what I'm doing while I'm here is, yeah, that's good. Keep on going, keep on going. That's good. Yeah, enjoying it, enjoying it. And then if I need to take, if I stop, it's go, oh, maybe he's got something to say. So this is a silent equivalent of a whatever the whatever the opposite of a turn transition keep my turn transition queue Of a keep going queue. Yeah, you know that it's called back channeling what you're talking about You're doing a silent back channel But a lot of times we do it when we say things like yeah, right?

31:30Uh -huh, which of course we try not to do on a podcast because you can talk over the other person my first ever episode was filled with Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm. Yeah. Mm -hmm. It took a long time for me to do program it. And the person that I picked up the nodding thing from was Oprah. Oh, that's a perfect person to take cues from. And you know, it's funny because actually it signals that you're a more conscientious, nicer listener. Turn transition. I mean, that back channels are actually a very lovely thing to do. It's conversational support. You're encouraging someone to keep going. you're showing listenership, it has all those sort of aspects to it.

32:09But when you do things like interview guests or I have learned not to back channel too much because I do a lot of social linguistic interviewing and the last thing you can do is analyze someone's speech when you're talking over their speech with uh -huh uh -huh. Yeah, great. Wow. So you just sort of learn not to do it. But in casual conversation, it's weird if you don't and in fact there have been some really interesting studies about how people take people that don't back channel very much or how they misread their intentions. A famous study of course was done between men and women with the idea that men tend to not use back channeling as much as women, which is why women think men are assholes.

32:47I mean, I'm sure there's other reasons that we think that. Is that true? Is there a sex split? Is there a gender? There has been some in some. There were some studies when I'm thinking about was done in the 80s by Pamela Fishman who did some research on conversational discourse and she found among couples that men tended to not back channel or did delayed back channeling which is worse which is where you don't do it in time. So you know there's very normal places to insert that uh -huh yeah uh -huh that shows excitement and like you're right there and you're keeping up with them and you're listening and you know yes keep going and And then there's the, yeah.

33:26Uh -huh. That really slow kind of three seconds too late. That means I'm reading the newspaper. I'm not even paying attention. So what she found was men used more delayed back channels than women did. That's right. I think, you know, it's changed. I haven't read any recent studies of that. Hopefully it has changed. I think a lot of things have changed at that time. and we don't find it quite as distributed by male and female anymore. And it certainly can be personality type. You know, there are people that are really avid engaged listeners, more conscientious listeners, and you can do psychological tests to test out those people.

34:01And there was a really interesting study on discourse markers, and those are things like, you know, well, so, and we found that more conscientious people, I wasn't my study, but it was found that more conscientious people tend to use more of those as well. So I think it also is by personality type and it's probably by sociocultural background as well But yes, there was there was a gender difference initially in back channel Okay, what about the wood like why does anybody use it? Oh, I love like I mean what's not to love about like You know a lot of people hate that word they hate it in except for the verb, you know where they like Ice cream for example but the like that's used as a discourse marker are quotative verb, so those would be things such as, I'm gonna have to watch my like use here.

34:49Like he goes to school like, you know, or, and that's sort of discourse marker like, that's overdone, but that's an example, or a quotative like would be something where you use it instead of the verb to say. So if you're talking about a party and you're talking about what John said, you might say, what John was like, I don't think I'm gonna go tomorrow and I was like, I think you should, right? That's a quotative verb. So those are very different likes. And in fact, there are at least three, if not more different, very legitimate uses of like that are not the traditional uses of like, which would be like as a verb, like as a noun, or like as a preposition.

35:24So in a similarly construction, for example, the ones that are less accepted are like as a conjunction. So if you say something like, I feel like, or it seems like, or he pretends like, those types of likes, even that we all use those, are actually found upon by the grammar mavens. But the newest forms that we really dislike are those discourse marker likes that sort of dot our linguistic landscapes when we're saying things. But if you think about where they show up and it's not random or chaotic despite what people might believe, they actually tend to show up when a speaker is trying to do some sort of subjective approximation, an estimation or apply the sort of imprecisance of meaning.

35:59so that their listener gets that sense that this is their own evaluation of a situation. So if I said, like, he was a lawyer or something, that means I'm telling you, this is my own opinion, I don't really know for sure, but I'm estimating or approximating what I think he was, or she's like popular or something. Means it's not quite that, that's not the exact fit, that's not exactly how I describe it, but that's the best I can do because there's not really words available to describe my meaning. So those are actually very valuable because what they're communicating to you as a listener is I'm not making any strong clandings about this is exactly how the world is.

36:36I'm telling you this is my perception of how the world is in this case or it can intensify or emphasize something. So if I said I ran like 20 miles today. Well, you know I didn't run 20 miles. I don't look that exhausted or that fit. But what I'm saying is I ran a lot. I'm emphasizing just for effect how much. So in all those cases, whether I'm using it as a quoted divirb, which then tells you I'm not verbatim, quoting what someone says, but sort of estimating what they said, or if I'm telling you an estimate of how much I ran for emphasis, they're actually serving a really useful purpose. It's simply that age -wise older speakers tend not to use them.

37:17They about instead or they use, you know, as a discourse marker instead or some sort of other discourse marker, younger speakers, people under 40 tend to use like a lot more. And so that's where we really see a generational divide and how acceptable people find it. When did it get introduced? Well, for, you know, the popular belief, you'd say the Valley Girls in the 1980s with I think was Moon Unit, Zappa, who sang that fabulous song, Valley Girl, you know, where she liked and gagged me with a spoon, all over the place. But that was actually just picking up on an undercurrent of something that was already in Southern California speech at the time.

37:55And in fact, and Chris, you're going to like this, like is a British feature. And we find it traces back centuries in British speech. And if you look at old criminal court transcripts from the 1700s, the old bailing proceedings, which are great documents for linguists to look at how colloquial speech was back in the day when before we had cell phones and smartphones to record everything. And we find that like actually occurred as a discourse marker as far back as a 1700. So it's been around a long time and I'm afraid we have to blame the Brits for this one. Okay, I've got a little video that I wanted to show you to see if this can work.

38:32Can you see that? I see that, yeah, okay. I think the biggest thing that annoys me in the whole dating world is like fucking talking stages. Like that shit's so annoying. like the whole like and just like the inconsistency and then like I literally like hate that like so much but I think that's like my biggest thing It's just like what specifically just like the fact of just like you like I don't know how to word this Like in like talking stages, and it's just like you're like labeled that and it's like people like are considered like You can't like you're just like confused and like most of the time like the girl gets like gets like a touch or something and they like see it, like it's gonna lead to a relationship and it's always not.

39:13And it's just like, that's like my biggest thing is like I just hate the whole like, how like talking stages are so like normalized. Like traditional dating does not exist in this generation. So that was 27 likes in 48 seconds there. All right. And you know, when you draw attention to it, it really stands out, right? So the fact that we're talking about like, it definitely stands out. A couple of things I would say is that's obviously a young woman and that tends to be who we sort of diss in terms of like use more than young men, although actually studies don't show that there's really a significant difference generally between young men and young women.

39:50Older men and women, there is some difference, but generally speaking, it's a young feature. And what we find with like is if we look at how it distributes over a lifespan, younger speakers tend to like at a much higher degree than they will as the same speaker 10 years later. So part of that is the stage of life she's in, but notice when she was talking, it's all estimation. She's giving her own impressions, her own opinions, her own sort of approximation of what she likes, what she doesn't of her opinion. And so for example, she was saying, I hate when it's like, I can't even remember what she was saying truthfully, but you know, she was talking about how she feels when things happen.

40:30And so this is a perfect example of why life was so prevalent in her speech, because almost every instance she's talking about something that is her own subjective sensibility. Now, was it excessive? Certainly. But a lot of times when we look at young speech, we find an overuse of something and that's called age grading, which atrophies as they get older. Because it's sort of cool in their set to talk that way. It's part of just sort of learning to use that feature and it's a novel feature coming in so it gets overused. Then as they go into the working world, and people frown upon them as the, you know, one million people probably wrote nasty comments under that.

41:09You tend to lower your use, especially in settings where you would be expected not to use them. So for every parent out there who's freaking out about how their daughter or son uses like all the time in that context, don't worry, I promise they're still employable despite what you might thing. What is the social interpretation of the use of the word like? Well, I think it depends on the age group among younger speakers. So I think when that young woman is talking to other young women, it's not noticed at all. I have a teenage daughter and she uses like quite a bit. And when she has her friends on the way to volleyball in the back of the car, it is a like fest.

41:49I hear a lot, I hear a lot. There's a lot of Loki, there's a lot of Slai, there's a lot of like. But again, that's in her own peer group and that's very normal. And it's kind of, I think part of the reason that she used a lot is it gives this very young hip kind of urban sort of sense and that's very much what young women and young men are trying to pull off when they're with their friends. So as she gets old dry, I'm expecting she won't use it. But the social benefit to her is it gives off that sort of cool hip, not too concerned with academics and scholasticness. Yeah, it's in precision in a way it's relaxed, it's approximate.

42:29Kind of the chill vibe, the sort of Southern California chill vibe, and that's what I think young women are going for. I'm young men. It is also quite prevalent with young men. But I do know that people all the time bring up just like that example, people that use it excessively and I think the reason we notice and call those out is because they are excessive and unusual. So I teach 20 -somethings every year and they're delightful and I will tell you they're very concerned about their like use. At the very first day of class I said, you know, I'll say, what do you notice about speech? Just tell me something.

43:03I don't say, tell me something bad about speech. I just say, tell me what you notice. Every single year, every single class period, like, like, like, like, like, I hate like and they'll even say, I hate like how people use like all the time. Which is then of course the rest of the class we laugh every time so that person uses like because once you've noticed it, it's very, very sailing it. But young people are aware of it and they are self -conscious about it. My students are very self -conscious about it. So I make them study it. I make them analyze their speech. I have them have a conversation and record where they use it and how they use it, which gives them two tools.

43:36It first lets them see that it's purposeful. Most of the time people don't use it as excessively as that example and you use it in cases for example where you're using this quotitive where you're using as a approximator at Virbil or you're using it as a sentential at Virbil. So if you can put a name to it it makes it seem a little more like it has a function. But the other benefit is if they want to lower their use and they know how they use it you can take thing to yourself. Okay wait I know I use it as a approximating at Virbil I'm going to use about instead. So instead of saying I ran like 10 miles you You can just think to yourself, I ran about 10 miles.

44:11And so if you give someone the tools by understanding their speech, then they have tools to help themselves, whether they want to justify it, use or change it to use. So I think that's my approach to like. Right. So rather than feeling as if like is a curse that gets thrown and scattered across a sentence and it's essentially impossible for you to get rid of, what you're doing here is saying, it's their purpose. Here are three different distinct purposes. if you want to reduce the usage of the word like, one of the things that you need to do is look at where it gets brought in. And then in advance, perhaps at the start of that sentence, just take an extra half beat and think, I will use about.

44:50I will use one of the other replace alternatives. Exactly, exactly. As a socioling, what I love like, you know, I think it's a fascinating thing to study. And I love the fact that it's actually much more powerful and purposeful than people give a credit for. But as a person and as a mother, I do get the concern with women and men using like. And especially women because we dis their speech so much that a man can use a young man, can use the same amount of like and not be judged in the same way. And it can have professional consequences at least we worry about that. So I want to give people the tools to look at like either way.

45:26And as long as they realize there's nothing bad about it, there's nothing wrong with it. But it may not be professionally and socially beneficial for you to do it. And in fact, the case, understanding it will give you some tools as well. What's happening with vocal fry as well? Speaking of dissing women's voices, right? Now, this is vocal fries a really interesting feature. And for people that don't understand what vocal fry is, it's that sort of crackly, poppy sort of noise that sometimes comes into particularly women's voices as they get through the end of the Senate. So that would be something like, I don't know about that.

46:00Where you can hear that kind of fry, that cracklingness come in. We call it creek in linguistics. We actually don't refer to it as vocal fry. We refer to it as creek of voice, which I think is way more descriptive of what it sounds like. And actually, what happens with creek or vocal fry is that you have the vocal folds, and I'm going to give you, for those of you that are looking, you can see that these are sure to your vocal folds, which are kind of these muscular flaps at the top of the So usually we have them kind of pulled tight and long and so you can either open them a little to make a voice List sound where the air flows through freely and that would be like a tata sound or you can close them and Push air through and that makes them vibrate As you do your pitch too you push them through the vocal folds and the Vibration of the vocal folds is what determines your average pitch?

46:46So in normal cases just your everyday average pitch the thing we recognize when we talked to our our husbands or our wives or when someone we know calls us on the phone, that's just normal phonation it's called. That's just a certain vibration of the vocal folds. But when we get into creaky voice, what happens is we take those same vocal folds and we kind of bunch them up so they're thicker. Do you see how they kind of get thicker? And think of a rubber band. If you have a rubber band in its pulled really tight and it ping it, it's going to, well, if it doesn't snap you and you go shit, that really hurt.

47:16If it stays together, It's going to vibrate at a very regular rate. But if you kind of let it fall and get soft and you kind of ping it, it's just going to be like, yeah, right? It's not going to really do much. It's not going to be a regular vibration. Well, when you bunch your vocal folds up and you make them thicker and heavier, they vibrate at a slower rate because they're heavier and they tend to vibrate irregularly. Now lower pitch in general is just a slower vibration of vocal folds. If you add on top of that in a regular vibration, that's when you get creaky voice. and so it happens at a low pitch.

47:47What happens is we actually find that men do it too, but because men operate at a lower pitch more generally, that drop in pitch to make local fries not as obvious. So when we notice women doing it, it's because they go from a higher pitch at the front and of their sentence to a much lower pitch to enact vocal fry. What we find as women have been doing it in professional settings, particularly. So one of the biggest complaints you hear is in radio shows or broadcasting where people have women's voices. So NPR is an area where people have complained. In fact, there was a show, this American life that was completely dedicated, one of the episodes to Vocal Fry and how many haters wrote in because of the women on that show, the broadcasters, the journalists that actually had vocalfrying their voices.

48:31What we find is early studies in the 1990s and the early 2000s showed that women in broadcasting settings actually vocalfried more than men in those settings and more than women elsewhere, which suggests that they're actually responding to that pressure for women in broadcasting to have lower pitch voices, which is something that they've had a pressure on them since the 1950s. I mean, I think Barbara Walters spoke a lot about the fact that as a women broadcasting, she was expected to put a certain voice on. There have been lots of complaints by women saying that their high voices were called shrill and unacceptable on the airwaves.

49:04Well, what's the solution? Throw in a little low pitch, focal fry. And why don't you do lower pitch just in general? Well, because women get the double bind of being less attractive in terms of ratings that people give them when we hear them with a lower pitch voice. So women with high pitch voices are more attractive, but not very professional or competent. Men with low pitch voice are both professional, competent, and attractive. So women have this double bind in a workplace where they have to adopt a lower pitch voice to be taken seriously, but then their judge is less attractive. So what if you have a high voice with a little vocal fry that gives you a little bit of two birds with one stone, right?

49:42Where you get this attractive rating with the higher pitch voice, it's your more normal voice. You have a little vocal fry on the end to kind of get that more professional urban feel, which is really how women hear that feature. And that kills the problem of being not attractive but professional or being not professional but attractive. So it's kind of a really cool solution, I think. I'd not love. loved. Yeah, what you're saying there is other women seem to interpret vocal for more positively than men do, is that right? Well, I think young men actually don't dislike it. There are a lot of times what we see is the judgment of older speakers, particularly the ones that would listen to NPR.

50:20Not many of my 20 -year -old males listen to NPR in my class, nor my females. Not all of them, I'm sure there are some, but they tend to listen to a little different kind of more you know, hip stuff. So, you know, when you get to be older, an older speaker, you have these ideas and norms in your head and you might be more judgmental. But young women hear vocal fry as urban, as professional, as sort of chill and relaxed, as intimate. So we find positive attributes with vocal fry among younger speakers and those don't seem to translate so much to older speakers. And part of it's also just the fact that we diss women's voices in professional context.

50:57So So when women do it and we notice it, it's a bad thing. But if you look at longer term research on vocal fry in British speakers, which is where it was first studied, British men actually use vocal fry at a rate of three to ten times more than British women. So it wasn't considered an epidemic or sort of a vocal pandemic until women in America started doing it at much higher rate. But even today, it's still men that fry more. Are you familiar with David Putz? Do you know him? Evolutionary psychologist? Yes, I do. I know. He has done a lot of research on voice and evolutionary theories of voice.

51:33Correct. Yes. So he was on the show a little while ago and he was telling me, I think his master's thesis, perhaps, or his PhD, was done on vocal pitch and he was looking at, he uses this brilliant example from when he was at uni doing his undergrad. Apparently he was stood in a checkout queue and there was a couple of guys behind him and he heard how low both of their voices were and couldn't believe it. He thought he's going to turn around and see these man mountains or a guy with a cyme's twin that's got a second neck. It's impossible to have such a low voice and he turned around and it was just two normal dudes but stood in between him and the normal dudes was a pretty hot girl.

52:12I was going to say I'm sure there was a hot woman somewhere in this story. Right. You know interpretations of both prestige and dominance, like lower vocal pitch is associated with longer and bigger vocal folds, which is associated with being a bigger animal over time. That's the same reason that before animals try to fight, they're actually going to growl or make rose at each other. This is how big you don't want to fight. And you look at the amount of sound that I can make. If you can hear the amount of sounds, you don't want to come near these hands, bro. So yeah, I'm going to bang my chest while I make low guttural noises.

52:46Precisely. Yeah, I actually saw a gorilla do that. A silverback gorilla did that five yards away from me and the Bwindi impenetrable forest in Uganda and that was not too much It was just a little reminder that he wasn't happy that we were lurking around him so one of the trying to tie together a Bunch of the different trends that were seeing at the moment it seems like We're leaning towards less formal language. It seems to be like going toward an informal style of languages is something that's happening at the moment. How much has social media contributed to the changes that we've seen in language and given the fact that probably for the first time ever we have a higher proportion of people communicating with each other non -verbally, probably ever ever in history ever, Have you considered how this and the introduction of social media and its propagation and mass use has changed the way that people relate to each other linguistically?

53:47Well, you know, that's a pretty new thing social media. Of course, there have been studies on more sort of traditional forms of media. So television, for example, and radio, and sort of to look at how that affects speech. And certainly I think the last few years, the last several decades, not only has social media opened up the world, but transportation networks. So I mean, you really are no very few undiscovered parts and that you can't just go on vacation and hang out, right? So it's really changed massively our communication networks and how we we talk to each other. So, you know, there have been some studies.

54:22I know the ones on television use about how that spreads changes. What we tend to find is television is one of those things and social media is the same thing. is it doesn't have natural social engagement in the way that everyday conversation does. And so if you stick a baby in front of, you know, TikTok or if you stick a baby in front of Tom Broca, you know, or some sort of television show, they're not going to learn language from that, not because they're not hearing it, but because they're not having engagement from it. And what we find with language is its social engagement in an authentic kind of space that really leads to both child language acquisition being optimal and adult transmission of changes.

55:03So most of the things we see on social media are most of the things that we see in the world on television are things that are already there at some low level. So they're already in the community. Television in social media doesn't invent anything, but what it does is disseminates it. So once it gets in a place where it's done by someone who has some sort of quality or some sort of emotional resonance with people. And they do something cool with their language, whether it's something they're aware of or not. Then if I see it on social media, and I'm sort of young and influenced easily, or even if I'm old and influenced easily, or they have some quality that I want in body, it's a very natural thing to kind of move towards that speech style or move towards that word, or move towards the way that they physically move or the way they dress.

55:51And of course, the language operates the same. So I would say that the impact social media has is one of dissemination, not innovation. So no one is doing things on social media and starting a trend in terms of language change. But what they're doing is they're disseminating changes that were in their communities. So I've got an example and this is a really superficial one, but a good example is the word Riz. I don't know if you've heard that word. So if you have maximum Riz, it means you're kind of, You're really sexy with the ladies. Generally, it was started by a young African American male.

56:25So it's usually used by men and it became the TikTok storm. In fact, I know it because my kids were both joking about who has maximum risk in their high school. And that just means you can just like look, serious risk is when you just look at someone, with this sort of zoo lander gaze and they come running to you. And in fact, there were all sorts of TikTok memes where boys would go in front of the tag track team and be like giving them the eyeball and then of sorts all these track women start running towards them because he's at the finish line Not because he actually had Riz but that you know, it was kind of became a joke Well that went viral and not in the community where it started which was sort of the hip -hop African American kind of genre But because that embodies something that a lot of young men and want to emulate a lot of young white men love to talk with a hip -hop kind of vocabulary, so they pick up words like that to take those qualities of sort of Maki's Mo and toughness, which are actually stereotypes about the people that use it, not really why they use those features, but those are the stereotypes that young white men have about young African -American men that they're tough and they're physical, they sort of have a lot of physicality and they're hot with the ladies, and therefore we take those stereotypes, we see those features that embody it, and then we pick them up, and that is the power of social media, and it certainly has been very influential in that.

57:45I think the question you asked about informal language use is not something that social media has inspired. That's been a tendency in our language over time. And if you think about the 18th and 19th century, who wants that kind of formality? I mean, it was the height of formality, where you had to wear like 50 layers and you had to use these very, very extravagant politeness routines and it took you forever to just get a coffee at Starbucks. I mean, it was a real pain in the ass. Who needs that? So what we've done is we've become more efficient, I think, in our communication and what has changed is not our language, but our culture.

58:21And our culture has become more informal. And language follows culture, not the other way around. And just like our forms of trust have become less formal. So if you look at most workplaces, people don't wear through pea suits anymore. Not happy workplaces, at least. But no one is saying, okay, my god, the downfall of man has happened because we're not wearing really uncomfortable suits and ties. And I think we have to look at language that way as well. There's nothing wrong with being less formal in our language. And really, formality in language is a relative cultural belief. If you look back to Old English, the Anglo -Saxons were not the height of fashion or formality.

59:01So, you know, more blood feuds and killing. So I'm sure they weren't saying, sir, Kym sir, would you buy and shall we do this? I mean they didn't say that kind of stuff. So they were very informal in their speech. In fact, you didn't ask someone to do something. You told them to do it. You shout do X was how you would say it. Not, would you mind please, Kym sir, do X? So that kind of really fancy formality is really something that was an early modern and early true modern period. So it's really not the death of modern decorum. It's simply we've changed to be a more informal society and language is changing with us.

59:40And still when we go to formal cases, formal places and give speeches or go to workplaces, we know how to ramp it up and be dressed up in our speech. So anybody who's worried about that, I think you can rest easy tonight. The black Twitter to white boy pipeline for language is one that is not lost on me. Like, words like bus in no cap. It's just, I find it's so funny and one of my friends is tapped in hard to black Twitter and he will be able to tell me about trends that are going to happen six months before they do. So there definitely is a trickle down effect coming from black Twitter. One thing that I read probably about six months or a year ago now, a judge in New York had had to work out the interpretation of an emoji because a big chunk of a case rested on what this emoji had meant in the form of the conversation.

1:00:36I'm not surprised that probably did happen. Yes, I haven't heard of that specific case, but we actually find a lot of hip hop lyrics being used in criminal trials to the detriment of defendants usually because of the misinterpretation. Well, a lot of times rappers, for example, will be put on trial and we're not talking about, well, big name rappers, but just sort of every day, people that have rap as part of what they do. And, you know, rap music is built on sort of the experience of being in a place where you're fearful for your life, you're having to fight. A lot of times it's sort of a makismo as well.

1:01:11It's sort of building yourself up. It's not truthful or necessarily reflective of anything that actually happened. But lyrics can be very misogynistic and very violent. And in cases where the hip hop sort of lyrics were done by the defendant, they've been used in those trials to suggest that they were actually talking about what they had done. This is not performance art. This is an indication of what this person's true nature is like. Absolutely. And not only that, but actually if we look at research on when defendants or witnesses use African -American English, when giving their depositions or when being a witness at a trial or when speaking on their own behalf, the outcomes for them tend to be much more negative than the outcomes for a speaker that would have used more mainstream English.

1:02:00So there are a lot of problems with the way that we interpret African -American English, even though we glorify it in some context, young white men love it. But what they don't do is recognize the negatives that are faced by people that use African -American English and can't just put it on the way that they do. Yeah, part of the reason as well is with the white guys' antique talk that you're using the language trickled down from Black Twitter is that it feels a little bit like a lap, right? It's them playing with the language as opposed to being locked into it, as opposed to it being almost native, it's something else.

1:02:35So one of my favorite stories that I came up with, I'd learned from a few years ago, was the development of goodbye going from God be with you to God be with you to just goodbye. have you got a favorite or any other favorite word stories of where something developed from that we all use nowadays? Well one of my favorite is hello, right? Because actually hello was in competition when the phone was first created as a way to answer and it hello used to be used in British English for sailors a lot of time. I mean that's sorry for sailors but for people that wanted to call to someone who was not near them.

1:03:19So if someone was walking across the street, you wanted to get their attention. It was sort of be a way to yell out at them. Hello, hello, you don't like look over here, dude. I'm here. It wasn't a greeting in the way that we use it today. And it certainly wasn't the way it entered the telephone. But I think it was Alexander Bell and Thomas Edison, we're having a little war at the beginning of the phone creation about what should be the way that you get someone's attention on the other line because the old phone lines didn't have a ring or anything. You'd have to say something like someone be walking through the house and be like, hello, hello, pay attention.

1:03:52So you'd say it because it was the same sort of attention getting device as yelling to someone on the street. But Alexander Bell, who had created a similar technology as Edison, but you know, for competing, I think it was, um, novel, right? For a competing group, he thought a Huy made more sense. So people just say a Huy when they entered the phone because this was a way you agree, you know, people on a ship. So he would enter the phone, oh, oh, oh, oh, that was his attention getting way. But obviously, what happened is Edison won out in the end. And the reason is because in the first phone book, when they were giving instructions about how to use the phone, instead of a hoi, they suggested hello.

1:04:34And so that was really the way that hello one out for our attention when we want to talk on the phone, or just now when we greet each other. So we think of hello as being this really long -term formal way to do it, but it's actually instead of a hoi, which I think we should go back to a hoi because I kind of like that. What about hi? Is hi short for hello? I think I don't know the history of hi so much, but I'm pretty sure it is short for hello. I'm not sure. I know I've read that, but it's been a long time. I'm trying to think about what a hoi and hello have in common. and they're both similar sounds.

1:05:10They both don't have any hard like, plosives or any of those fricatives or there's not, it's the sort of thing I imagine that you could shout at a pretty loud volume quite easily. Is that what's a hoi and hello, what do they have in common? Well, hello is voiced, right? A lot of voiced sound would tend to be louder and vowels which are the loudest and high. I think, you know, I'd be curious. I'll have to look up the history of high and figure out how it happens. but a lot of times something might be optimal in its full form, but we as speakers tend to like to shorten things and so it probably just came up in sort of a simple greeting of the shortening of hello.

1:05:49A lot of times what we'd see is these things happen when people are very intimate and they know each other well, they sort of do these cute shortening of things and so high probably evolved that way. It's not that different than any other word that would have a vowel because all words have to have a vowel. So, high on its own doesn't stand out more than any other word because basically high is just a vowel sound. Hello has two syllables, so it gives you two chances to get someone's attention and Ls, which start the second syllable, or tend to be louder than a voiceless consonant, so that could be it.

1:06:22But I don't know from a sound symbolism standpoint that they've studied, hello. There are a lot of interesting sound symbolism studies, but I don't I think hello has been among them. Your area of work is absolutely fascinating. I think it's so interesting to look at the, it's almost like linguistic archaeology in a way. It actually, you know, a lot of anthropologists studied linguistics. So linguistics in the special field I do is kind of a cross between sociology and linguistic anthropology. So we look back in time. That's really cool. Some of the old sociological linguistics where they go back and we try to recreate how sound change happened and by looking at written documents.

1:07:00But in modern speech, I get to go on interview people and talk to them and figure out what they're doing differently. So, for example, Chris, I could record you, stick you on a machine and then sort of do an analysis of your vowels and sort of show just by looking at your vowels, I would be able to tell who's Chris versus, who's an American male, just from where your vowels are positioned. And plus your Arles, right? So you delete your Rs, post -voically. Have you not noticed that? You've probably noticed. So he says I'm like, the, the instead of there or here, you right, you don't have your art.

1:07:33You have the Northeast of the UK. I managed to reintroduce. I had a brutally bad glottal stop because yeah, you don't have really glottal stops that stand out. Not too bad, but that's been I've worked with the vocal coach miles for two years now to try and just give myself a little bit more of a middle England. I already did quite a lot. I didn't have a massive notice at the UK, but when I was growing up, I would miss the teas out of the word butter, and I'd get slapped on the back of my wrist by my mom who would say, there's two teas in butter, Christopher, and you're not pronouncing either of them.

1:08:08So, which is just, half the course, northeast of the UK, that's the way that you would speak. Right, well, now if you're American, you don't have any teas in that butter. Oh, it's D's. Well, it's actually called a flap. It's actually called a flap. But that's for a different episode. So, you know, that's an interesting right because you have the glottal stop, which is a perfect example of a feature that has a really strong social stigma attached. And what I study is why do we get these really strong social feelings about something that's a sound? You know, glottal stop is a sound. And when you say the word up, every English speaker, if they say the word up, actually has a glottal stop at the beginning of that word.

1:08:45So think about up. You can feel that your glottis catches, right? It's because you're making a glottal stop. So no one, you know, criticize you when you're saying up, but yet if you say, but or what? Oh my god, like, you know, linguistic argument, argument, or no, what's that even, I can't even say that word. It's linguistic hell. So that's a perfect feature there that exemplifies why I study what I study. Okay, but you gave a great example of your art. So you said, yes, instead of years. Yes, that's two. Another one is yeah, I get the piss taken out of me by a lot of friends for years and years, but it's yours.

1:09:27Right. That's a perfect, and you know, that's a fascinating one from a historical perspective because that is really sort of high class British speech, right? To drop your Rs. So if you have your Rs. not so not so fabulous and Britain. Now in America if you drop your Rs. your kind of pretentious and uppity, or you're a New Yorker, right? You're either a New Englander and you're like a Brahmin, you know, kind of upperclass, or you're a New Yorker and you just sound cool. But generally Americans don't do it. But fascinating fact about those Rs is British speakers until the 19th century did it because it was considered bad English to not have your Rs.

1:10:04But in the 19th century it flipped around because it started to be the way that speakers women, particularly in court, in the royal court spoke, and then it became cool to drop your Rs. But prior to that, you actually will find write -ups from the 1700s that criticized that nasty vulgar R -dropping that some British speakers in London were. I'm part of the new era of R -dropping, okay? You are. You're the cool swav R -dropper. Thank you. I knew that you would understand all of the people in America that take the piss out of for the way that I say yours no longer need to because I have the seal of approval from someone who's professionally trained.

1:10:40You do, do. Well, I mean, Americans love British accent. So I don't think you have to argue with that. I, in fact, was talking to somebody very, very successful who has a regional dialect he doesn't like. And so on his voice, Mel, he had a British speaker recorded it for him because British speech is so fancy. Well, look, if my accent is a competitive advantage over here then I'll take it as a win. given the fact that I had to survive Independence Day last year, which was very difficult for me personally, obviously as I was. Watching your country dance on the ashes of mine's lost ambition. But look, where should people go if they want to check out more of the work that you do?

1:11:19This is fascinating. Well, first of all, it's been really fun to talk to you about it. And yes, I think if you're looking for a second career social linguistics would be for you. But if people want to learn more about me, they can obviously pick up my book, which is like literally dude. but you can also go to my website, which is just valoryfreedlin .com and you can read some of my other work and sort of learn about the types of research I do. You can even participate in a research study. If you click on that link, there's all sorts of fun to be had there. Valory, I appreciate you. Thank you. Sure, thanks for having me.