#145 The Algorithm is God Now - The Etymology Nerd

19:34Alex O'Connor:So what is new?

19:37Adam Aleksic:Well, I mean, the presence of AI, the presence of algorithms are slowly shifting our language. I think when I mentioned that vibe about how we use words, we use words when we feel like other people are using words. An example of AI changing our language is the word Delve. So we know that ChatGPT uses the word Delve way more than humans do because there is a problem in the reinforcement learning process. And now we have a lot of evidence that humans are also starting to say Delve at higher rates because we see it being used by ChatGPT. And even if you're not on ChatGPT, your friends are going to start saying it more from ChatGPT, and then you're going to get it from your friends.

20:08Adam Aleksic:So we're all being kind of linguistically infected with this idea of using delve more. And it spreads both through AI and through algorithms. And in the same way that I was getting at, algorithms have certain biases in the words they represent. These words become more culturally available, and then we start saying them more. And these trends move a lot faster because they've literally replicated the networks along which ideas diffuse.

20:34Alex O'Connor:But then I wonder if it's kind of the same stuff that we've been doing for a long time, like you know we've been symbolically replacing language since 1901 and this is just kind of the new stage and a continuation of an inevitable linguistic story then then why the book why this why not just a book about the history of language why algo speak why about today and i don't just mean because you know the publishers probably said that would be a good idea and make it into

20:59Adam Aleksic:a hit you know no i mean it was always my idea i think it's so important to be stuck and the reason i focus so much of my social media content on modern slang modern trends is i think it is our duty to be incredibly aware of what's going on in this exact moment. The exact moment has fundamentally changed from where it was six years ago. The presence of these AI and algorithms are changing how we communicate and how we think. And yeah, while a lot of the trends are the same in the past, we've never had language so optimized around attention metrics. We've never had so many ways of measuring and commodifying humanity and representing that through our words.

21:35Adam Aleksic:Each word is now a piece of metadata that reflexively points back to who we are as individuals, which I find kind of really unsettling. I think we should be paying attention to, if we do look at these words, we start learning a lot more about what the social media platforms are doing to us. And that's what I always like about etymology. Etymology means the study of truth in Greek, etymos is truth. And if we look at where a word comes from, we can understand more about the underlying reality.

22:01Alex O'Connor:Interesting. I didn't know that about the etymology of etymology. Isn't it true that we don't, know where the word slang comes from i've always found that to be a bit of an irony i mean it makes a lot of sense i guess um it's it's related to that sluh stuff slang is something

22:15Adam Aleksic:you sling around it's it's kind of it's it's loose right it's not a rigid thing um so it's

22:20Alex O'Connor:a slippery concept in and of itself and it definitely seems like it's related to some

22:27Adam Aleksic:english or irish dialect or something like that i think um but i think so i i wanted to ask about

22:33Alex O'Connor:this attention stuff. You wrote a piece on your substack, I think it was, about how it's called something like you're literally worshipping your phone. You just talked about how people fear the algorithm more than they fear God. And I think that's an indictment of our culture. But here's another religious term, worship. What did you mean when you were coming up with that title?

22:56Adam Aleksic:I think there are these micro-religious aspects we kind of take in our lives that are increasingly as we are kind of replacing God itself with whatever is going on in modern society, we're finding replacements for God. One of those ways is through social media. When you scroll, you are kind of hoping for a good video. You're hoping for a dopamine hit. You're hoping for a reward for this action you are taking. Your attention is kind of like an offering and you get something back to it. So that's like one example of a micro-religious action. I think I've been thinking a lot about ritual, for example.

23:35Adam Aleksic:A ritual being just a segment of time that we feel is extra special. I think generally I feel more extra special in my real life when I interact with people in these beautiful, effervescent occasions. But also, any bounded period of time is kind of a ritual. Anything we segment off and say, this is a period of time. And so you enter sort of a ritual when you get onto social media. The rituals are always distinguished by a marker starting the ritual. and this period of liminality and then another marker ending the ritual. So clock strikes noon on inauguration day, an oath of office is taken, and then you're now the president of the United States.

24:13Adam Aleksic:Or the pomp and circumstance starts playing and then graduates walk across the aisle and then I now confer these degrees upon you. There's always some kind of marker and then something happens and then another marker. And so you open TikTok, for example, you see this kind of loading screen that is a marker you are entering a different phase of existence. It is a kind of a comforting glow. And then you're in this kind of just timeless stage. It's kind of, you're hoping something will be different, you know. And by closing the app, you end that stage of your life. So it is a segmented portion of reality in which we perceive some kind of signs and symbols.

24:54Adam Aleksic:I think it is at least helpful to look at it through a religious framework. I want to look at it through a lot of different frameworks. I think the best way to approach your feeling about what's going on in social media to build up this phenomenology of what's going on is to attack it from many, many different angles and get a sense of the overall picture. So I don't want to use that as just one frame. It's reductive by itself. But I think there is this feeling first that you are God, right? Because you have control. You feel like you have control over your videos. You get to choose what to like.

25:22Adam Aleksic:You get to choose when to scroll. But then at the same time, it's like a matrioshka doll. The algorithm is the God. it has control over you you want to worship it and I also see this with like AI this sort of like mise en o 'bim about how we God created us in his image now we're creating AI in our image and it always loops kind of backwards that we use these human brain terms to describe AI like memory and neural networks and all those terms and then that starts affecting how we think about ourselves that we come up with psychology ideas like cognitive processing theory because of computer processing.

26:02Adam Aleksic:And then it affects how we think about God. And so there's this kind of line between God and man and machine. And there's a really good book on that by Megan O 'Giblin called God, Human, Animal, Machine, which I highly recommend. But I'm kind of interested in applying those ideas. If we are replacing God, we're searching for meaning. It comes out of these mundane things.

26:26Alex O'Connor:yeah and that that seems to be like a i kind of feel like each platform has its own language its own subtleties its own culture like i can i can sit for ages scrolling on like instagram reels and i'll be like right i'm sick of that and then i could like move over to tiktok and kind of feel like i'm i'm gonna get something different i feel like i'm gonna do something there's gonna be a different culture it's gonna be like different people it's like it's hard to explain but it It sort of feels like I'm moving from one city into another or something. Absolutely.

26:56Adam Aleksic:I mean, these tech companies, you got to start there. They have different priorities in what they're rewarding. They have different business incentives for what kind of content. Their algorithms are all secret, so they're designed to reward different things. And there will be a different kind of content recommended. I completely 100 % agree that the feeling of being on Instagram is different than the feeling of being on TikTok. I notice more like racist slop on Instagram. um but i noticed more like um you know direct to shop links on tiktok or something like that um those are just two examples there's so many small cultural variations in what kind of content gets recommended for some reason my videos always do better on instagram and i have no idea why

27:35Alex O'Connor:are you ever are you ever like ahead of the curve on this like do you do you start to see people say things in comment and you start to and you can if you could like bet on the stock market you could be like that's i think that's the next big thing like do you know where we're at right now are there things that are sort of cropping up that we should be on the lookout for yeah i think

27:52Adam Aleksic:one of my rare privileges as an etymologist who does like public work as opposed to somebody in academia is that i do have access to these words people will tag me in videos when new words start trending a few weeks back i conducted a public poll of what words do you think are popular right now and so at the time of right now i see the word chud and um void and femcel coming from the incel communities maybe larp which stands for live action role play but people are using it in different contexts like i'm uh larping being on a podcast i don't know something um and then um there are also like new words coming from african-american english all the time uh at least last fall i don't know whether it's still trending the word folk as in like a synonym of bro like what's up folk um yeah it was trending i think it has potential to get uh bigger um there's words coming from twitter i see the word egregore getting more popular this uh idea of the collective um awareness of our unconscious uh which is kind of interesting um the word whimsy is i mean it was already a word right but it's getting way more popular right now people are talking about whimsy and gesture maxing i see this as like a reaction to um ai perhaps or just a desire for more of these in-person meaningful moments um but yeah we're seeking out more whimsy in our lives for sure uh so little things like that it's really fun to pay attention to sometimes these words are

29:18Alex O'Connor:just like borrowed from it's not anything new it's not like a new developed slang term or something it's just an old word that people stop using that that got sort of rediscovered um like lore or

29:31Adam Aleksic:function i i think there's a lot of this genre of like gen z rediscovering a word that was already a word but then they start using it in their own kind of tongue-in-cheek way yeah and i've seen

29:42Alex O'Connor:some people try to brute force it like um it went semi-viral that there used to be a phrase it might have been like victorian england or something where people used to say they've got the morbs as in morbid if they're feeling a bit like you know melancholy and depressed and nihilistic they they've got the morbs and everyone was like this is really cool and i i really thought that that was gonna that was gonna take off but unfortunately unfortunately not what was this word for the collective consciousness thing you said aggregate aggregate a lot more people are

30:10Adam Aleksic:talking about egregores um which is yeah this this idea that we're collectively aware of each other's thinking and that this thinking is building towards something it's related to the idea of the new sphere, which is this zone of human cognition and thought and where it's building toward. And egregore is sort of the product of that. I think I'm explaining that correctly. But it's, yeah, I think we're more aware of each other. And that's so interesting that there's always discourse about the discourse about the discourse. There's always the people who are commenting on the words, and I'm saying this kind of, it's kind of interesting for me to say this but the people commenting on the words are often influencing the direction that these words take um i see a lot of like meme words for example be popularized through accounts like hoopify which are purporting to explain slang to you but they're playing a part in the meme community and they are pushing these words themselves um and since every creator has a vested interest in using trending words um we are helping build toward those words um it's interesting that you mention like predicting or almost putting money on new words because people are doing that there are these cryptocurrency um cabals which are creating meme coins directly tied to new slang so if like the word chud is getting popular there's definitely a chud coin that rises in value as the word chud gets more popular because it represents a fractional share of your attention i'm almost positive that prediction markets are going to get in the business of like predicting new words as well i'm staying out of it because i'm trying to remain objective but um and also i I think maybe these things are bad that we're commodifying everything.

31:50Adam Aleksic:But it's definitely...

31:51Alex O'Connor:If we've started commodifying the etymological development of language, I think we've maybe taken it a bit far. You always think it's gone too far.

32:02Adam Aleksic:It's definitely happening and it will definitely happen more. And I only see it happening more. And what's very interesting is that now there are actors with vested financial interests in helping words get more popular. So if you invest in Chudcoin and you make a bunch of Chud memes, you profit because the value of the coin goes up because more people are drawn toward your pump and dump crypto scheme. Same with if we do prediction markets, we're already seeing a lot of like these insider trading scandals. We know right after right before the Maduro capture, there was a Maduro whale who bet a bunch of money on Polymarket that Maduro would get captured.

32:36Adam Aleksic:We know that somebody on Polymarket edited the battle lines of somebody in the Institute for the Study of War edited the battle lines for Ukraine versus Russia to cash out on a Polymarket deal. There's suspicious stuff with Caroline Levitt ending her press conferences right before the cutoff for like the 98 % certainty, stuff like that. I think we're definitely going to see this role of prediction markets, this role of meme coins, this role of influencers commenting on things. All these people are kind of doing the same thing. They're building toward the egregore, this collective awareness of the trend as the trend occurs.

33:12Adam Aleksic:And that puts us in a weird place where the map starts to precede the territory. Like we are at this. Our ideas about what's going to happen kind of end up manifesting what happens.

33:25Alex O'Connor:Yeah. Yeah. What's the most short-lived internet slang that you can think of that you remember that everyone's just kind of forgotten about?

33:36Adam Aleksic:Short-lived. I mean, Chugi had like a moment for a week on TikTok, and then it just immediately went passe. I think perhaps because there was a New York Times article about it, which like kind of killed the vibe immediately. But also when words stick out too much, when they don't seem like they work. I wrote in my book an example of the chair emoji, which was used for like two days as an example of like a laughing emoji. And there was a similar phenomenon with like a gondola emoji last year where people try to force these substitutions. And if it's a big enough creator, they can kind of make it happen for like a very brief flash in the pan moment.

34:13Adam Aleksic:But the thing about that is when a trend feels too forced, we very rarely adopt it, which is probably another reason

34:18Alex O'Connor:the the morbs thing didn't didn't work out yeah like you know if um if it feels a bit forced like yeah that was was that that was a ksi thing the chair thing i remember you writing about it and i have a feeling it was it was meant to troll ksi yeah well basically people just decided but then it kind of took the idea yeah of just like wouldn't it be funny if we all just like started commenting a chair and he couldn't figure out why and then it sort of became this thing for like for like two seconds and yet within communities there are there are probably there are probably slang terms anyway like i'm not sure i'm not aware of any slang terms that exist in my sort of ecosystem but surely if i if i tried hard enough i could probably come up with a series of like slang words that would only make sense to somebody who watches this channel referring to like myriological nihilism and no i mean well that's kind of especially on youtube

35:15Adam Aleksic:you get a culture built around the creator more than on the other platforms. If we're talking about how the feeling of a platform is different, you know, my YouTube comment section is always blowing up with memes relevant to previous videos I've made. And it kind of exists on TikTok a little bit, but it's way more of a community-centered thing on YouTube, which kind of affects your experience of scrolling through the medium.

35:41Alex O'Connor:Do you think we'll, we sort of hinted at this earlier, do you think we'll get to a global language there'll be a point and say like maybe not even that long now maybe like a a few hundred years or something where anywhere you go in the world you will at least be able to communicate with people even if they've retained some you know vestiges of of whatever if you go anywhere in the world and say okay they'll understand you if you say lol they'll probably understand you you know that kind of stuff but do you think we're going to sort of move towards a uh what what's that that is that one language they try to do it right they try to come with the global language i think i think

36:15Adam Aleksic:major countries and uh identity groups will continue to have their own languages um indefinitely because it's a part of their identity um i do think i mean right now 50 of the internet is in english english is the lingua franca the french language of the internet um and people lingua franca means yeah because that used to be the uniting language and diplomatic discourse I've never noticed that before. That's so funny. Now it's English. English is the French language. But yeah, people will revert to the English language when they're speaking on the internet between different nationalities. And it's insane how much these trends travel.

36:54Adam Aleksic:I was talking to a friend whose brother in a remote Chinese village, somehow the kids there knew about 6 '7". And I've seen similar videos like that of this random Philippine island. you know knows you know um but actually philippines are very tapped into american culture so that's not that surprising i would say like japan korea and the philippines are like half of their like language right now is just english slang words or yeah they're mixing in so tagalog is now like not spoken nearly as much as just like taglish this like fusion between um tagalog and then the tagalog gay slang and then just english all intermingled you'll hear if you listen to japanese or Korean, so many English words all the time.

37:34Adam Aleksic:China kind of has its own thing going on because of their social media ecosystem is more isolated. But they kind of, it's so funny how much they replicate English language kind of stuff, the same thing that's going on here. They have their own like gaming slang that bleeds into Chinese language. They have their own memes and trends in the same way because these mediums are doing the same thing, even if it's siloed in a different

37:55Alex O'Connor:country yeah um did i do we know if these slang words like um sort of get translated like if the six seven thing is like popular everywhere do you get like french kids going like whatever it would be cc set whatever it is or are they yeah american way of saying it that that goes viral sometimes it gets calked and sometimes it gets loan worded

38:22Adam Aleksic:And a calc is when it's sort of translated into the equivalent expression. And a loaner is when you just take it as 6-7. I think, for example, like 6-7, most people just took it like that. I use in my book the example of Desvivir and Unalive in Spanish. They don't say Unalive. They kind of create an analogy of Desvivir. So sometimes it turns into either one.

38:46Alex O'Connor:Yeah. How familiar are you with UK slang? I'm sure you could educate me. It's interesting. Every time I speak to Americans, I can't think of really any American slang that Brits don't know about, but there's so much British slang that Americans don't know anything about. and it's also really difficult to explain there's a lot of jamaican influence in u.k slang so for example the phrase wagwan is is really popular here sort of coming from like what's going on in a jamaican accent and sort of say wagwan um which i don't think americans really do it's a shame because that's quite a good one it's fun to say um no it's like your equivalent of african

39:28Adam Aleksic:american english like you always borrow from these uh socially prestigious yet um kind of culturally um marginalized uh communities that's that's a very normal thing yeah exactly and that

39:39Alex O'Connor:that's sort of going on i don't know about the the origins of a lot of the other ones but like um you know we'll we'll say things like uh there's this the most confusing one to me that i can never explain is the word still like in the uk people just say the word still but they say it sort of almost arbitrarily you'll be like um you'll be like how you doing today man you'll be like i'm good still and then oh cool like whereabouts are you from it's like from london still it's it's sort of it's almost like a bit of punctuation it's like a discourse marker or something i'll

40:13Adam Aleksic:have to look into that maybe i'll make some videos on british language give me kind of an idea here

40:17Alex O'Connor:um but yeah it's more obvious like the the term um you know if if if you get stabbed somebody might say that you got chefed up which i i've always thought is quite it's quite charming um we say um as a greeting we often say like what are you saying like what are you saying instead of like it's sort of like how's it going or whatever you're not literally asking the question you say like what are you saying and so if you're texting a british person you might get like wys as a greeting what are you saying or it can also be a question it can also mean like you're supposed to be meeting someone in an hour and you text them like what are you saying like you know what are we what are we that's so interesting um i mean the weird the ones i've

40:57Adam Aleksic:looked into always come from like multicultural london english or something yeah it's bound to

41:01Alex O'Connor:be it's bound to be but i i don't and also it's associated with the road man which is like england's equivalent of the gangster um and it sort of it's got this this this slightly sort of you know if you're like on the road slinging dope and wearing a wearing a puffer jacket that then you're more likely to be the person using yeah i've gotten like roadman tiktoks on my for you page yeah see i thought you'd be all over that like yeah roadman slang is like its own world and it's so it's so beautiful it's it's it's poetic and it takes a long time to master it but also it means that if you then listen to uk rap music it all begins to make sense because i think because actually interestingly uk rap just like doesn't really make it in america even if it's like super catchy or whatever because rap is so much about the language it's so much about the puns and it speaks to the culture that you're in what resonates with your community yeah you just sort of can't it literally just like doesn't translate it's like listening to french music which you can you can do but if it's rap you're unlikely to really enjoy that much because it's so integral that you get the meaning but but for some reason you know america just always manages to make its way to to this aisle but yeah i'd recommend i'd recommend it a video on on roadman i'm gonna look into that yeah yeah wow so i'd also just love to see your like raw reaction to to some of these words and like where they where they come from and stuff it's uh it's some of them you know some of them more sensible like the word loud kind of meaning kind of meaning good you know something can just you just sort of say that which loud does have this like intensifier effect you know um do do Americans say dead to mean something's not very good you'd be like oh that's a dead song

42:42Adam Aleksic:oh you could say like the party's dead like there's nothing happening but you wouldn't say it's a dead song I'd say like this language use of dead is like I'm dead for like

42:52Alex O'Connor:that's funny no like in the way you would say this party's dead that's just been like universalized in the UK you know that's a

42:59Adam Aleksic:I could see that like taken off if that you know if given the right because it just you need an application you need it like it makes sense the song is dead like that makes sense um and or bear which weirdly i think a lot of slang

43:13Alex O'Connor:comes from like inverting right so like the way that something if something's bad it means it's good if something's sick it means that it's great you know if a if a if a drum and bass like baseline is nasty it's a good thing in the uk we sometimes say uh bear like b-a-r-e to mean lots or very which is kind of counterintuitive like we'll be like you know that that that was bear expensive or it's it's bear loud in there um to mean like to mean like very and i'm not sure like that now i'm thinking about it that does seem to be an example of like it meaning the opposite but is that like a yeah is that a common thing uk in

43:57Adam Aleksic:particular has such a long history of inversion but uh yeah exactly these examples like um oh that's fire versus oh that's you're cool or like you know like um sick uh stuff like that um it is always kind of comes out of uh minority communities who are trying to subvert the expectations of the majority language um so i i guess like it doesn't even have to be like um a marginalized community like look at surfer slang like you have like stuff like gnarly and wicked from um like californian surfers in the 80s but they're just trying to like show that they're different than the rest of america and so they um it sounds counter-cultural to say things that don't seem right you know uh and then eventually it does end up seeming right and then we find new ways for a language to reroute

44:45Alex O'Connor:yeah it's like i wonder if it's a kind of almost a reclaiming you know like a lot of the time like slurs are quite um uh intentionally reclaimed but also just like sort of attitudes if you're a member of a community that is that is either like marginalized or just kind of looked upon with suspicion or annoyance like you know uh like chavs i don't know if you've got an equivalent of chavs in the u.s but kind of like you know delinquent kids you know running around on the streets and stuff are often described as rude like they're they're rude little kids and again in the uk like if someone plays a really really like cool song you might be like that's rude that's rude okay yeah it can and again it can kind of come out the way and i wonder how much of this is is a kind of like more subtle um yeah no it is i mean the most important thing to

45:42Adam Aleksic:understand about language is a form of power. It is a form of building your identity. Who gets to use which words structures our ideas about society and each other. And so when the reason African-American English comes up with so many new slang words, and I'm using slang in quotation marks, that filter into mainstream English is because they have a need to differentiate their identity from English, which is, has straight white norms about what words should be. The people writing the dictionaries and the academics are like historically all these old white men. And, and so this is like a different group, especially like, um, the, the ballroom scene, which is like a gay black scene in New York city in the 1980s seems to be the source of like half of Gen Z slang.

46:28Adam Aleksic:Um, the reason is because they were trying to differentiate themselves and, and build something that was separate from how society was supposed to be defining them. And so that's a big thing. The language is always this tool of identity and differentiating yourself. And the same way we open the conversation by talking about middle schoolers and how they are always timelessly finding ways to differentiate their identity. The reason we come up with new words and adopt new words is it says something about who we are. To use a word is kind of identifying with it. It's saying I am a speaker who is okay with using this different word or no, no, I have my ideas about what the English language is.

47:08Adam Aleksic:I'm not going to use this new word. And so it becomes a cultural marker.

47:12Alex O'Connor:Yeah. Do you have, zooming out a bit here, do you have a view on like the origin of language? The reason I ask is because as an etymologist, I feel like that's either the kind of question which is like foundational to your studies or like one that you see is completely outside of it. And I'm not sure where.

47:29Adam Aleksic:No, it's such an interesting question. And first I'll say I have no idea. And I think any linguist who tells you they have an idea is lying to you. And there's like a bunch of different like origins, like hypotheses that it might be from singing or it might be from mimicking the calls of animals. I mean, it's just no documented evidence of anything, and we can only ever speculate unless you give me a time machine. Personally, I do believe that language is, at least started when we started abstracting things from the present moment. So if you point at something that's still not language to me because you're pointing at something real right now.

48:12Adam Aleksic:The second that point, maybe language could have been gestural before it was spoken as well, I don't know. But if you somehow a sign becomes about something that didn't happen here, the second we're like recording buffalo on a cave wall and the buffalo is no longer in front of you, that's when we're in this abstract mode where we're thinking about this symbol as something that refers to something else. So whatever origin it is, I think it's at the same time as we start treating it as this abstract thing, because otherwise it's just communication and not language. When you want your spring break to feel like...

48:49Adam Aleksic:And your kids' pool day to feel like... And your hotel bed to feel like... Ooh, and room service to feel like... Because at Hilton, hospitality feels like...

49:04Alex O'Connor:Your cabana's ready. Would you like fresh towels?

49:06Adam Aleksic:It matters where you stay. Book now at Hilton.com. Hilton. For this day.

49:16Alex O'Connor:Do you think it's appropriate to call what LLMs are doing, like ChatGPT, language? Or should it be better thought of as a mimic of language?

49:26Adam Aleksic:I think simulation of language is way more correct. And I think one of the biggest mistakes you can make when talking to ChatGPT is thinking that it's speaking English to you and you're speaking English back to it. We know that there's these misrepresentations like the word delve. And even if you're avoiding the word delve, there's crucial, meticulous, commendable, potential, all these like words that are slightly overrepresented because they recorded the language incorrectly. There's this idea, tracing back all the way to Wittgenstein, but like popularized through John Firth, that language is contextual and that we can understand language by understanding the context of what's going on.

50:03Adam Aleksic:So these LLMs are storing words in proximity to other words and kind of making this complicated map of what language should be. but your mental way that you store words is dependent on what your vibe of the language is and everybody will have a different idea of it and what you'd end up getting is this like homogenized, weird, inaccurate map because sometimes it'll draw from if the input is wrong or if the training process is wrong some words are going to show up at way different rates and so it's not speaking language it's speaking this statistically inaccurate misrepresentation of language and speaking is also anthropomorphizing it which I don't really agree with it's predicting new output And also, it is programmed to mirror your behavior back to you.

50:43Adam Aleksic:It is programmed to use first-person pronouns. All these things sort of create this illusion that tricks you into thinking, oh, I'm speaking, I'm having a normal conversation. Even look at the user interface. Look at how ChatGPT is structured like iMessage. This text bubble interface that we've been trained for decades to think that we're talking with a real human when we see this interface. Now we see this AI. And so everything trains our brains into thinking this is real language, even though it's this pseudo language. But because our sort of immune system is lowered, our guard is lowered, we are less suspicious of this as AI language, we are more likely to adopt these overrepresented words and phrases too.

51:22Adam Aleksic:Like it's not just X, it's Y, or a lot of kind of collocations like that.

51:28Alex O'Connor:Yeah, it's a shame. I was a big user of the M-dash long before.

51:33Adam Aleksic:I'm still using it. They can take that away from me when I'm dead. But I think there's ways humans can use it that's like, chat gpt has a way of using it in the negative parallelisms or something if you use it creatively and beautifully i think we we still have a chance of reclaiming the m dash yeah i use it i i use it

51:50Alex O'Connor:in texts as well which i've been told before is a little bit odd like it's that is a little odd just like i won't do that not an m dash but like as in i use a dash and it does it's supposed to be a dash but it's actually just a little dash but it's it's like saying something because you know people when they text they text oftentimes in like multiple texts it's like a it's like a form of phrasing like you're gonna yeah that's a form of punctuation ending the text sending the

52:14Adam Aleksic:text is the form of punctuation that's also why it's weird to use a period in a text message because the act of sending it already shows it signals that you've completed a thought and so actually it makes a lot of sense to it's a form of para communication that you're sending multiple messages um and yeah i think if you add punctuation like periods or m dashes no offense i think it's it's you're less literate in the uh the format of how texting operates yeah well i think i'd

52:41Alex O'Connor:never thought about hitting send as a form of punctuation but that makes so much sense which is also why like if you put a period or a full stop as we call it uh it's one of the few few occasions where the british version is is more just like on the nose and obvious than the american you know the full stop um it seems a bit passive aggressive right even though it's like a natural way to end a sentence for me the dashes are sort of like i don't know i get also when i'm when i'm actually just writing uh i i have this particular formula i always follow it's it's always like an intro phrase then a colon then another phrase then a dash then another phrase i don't know why i keep using that kind of kind of thing and i guess i'm replicating that in in texts um it's like the way i talk when i talk on videos i'll sort of say something and then i'll say this and then i'll say that but this but that and i'm sort of going a bit back and forth kind of thing and i do that with i do that with dashes so maybe i'm coming across as a bit passive aggressive but people have told me it's a little bit odd to it is a little odd yeah uh no but you

53:44Adam Aleksic:do you that's great i mean everybody should just communicate the way they they feel like it if again language is a tool of identity and you feel like the m dash or n dash speaks to your identity go ahead and use it um yeah but if your identity changes to yeah if your identity is more like i I want to seem like, so personally, when I text, I'm one of those annoying Gen Z people that will do everything lowercase. But it's because most of the friends I'm texting, their expectation of texting is that you should be speaking lowercase. And there's kind of a beauty to that, that now when you make something uppercase, it has more expressive power.

54:17Adam Aleksic:Instead of this just being the default, it serves as this extra linguistic cue. And we need as many linguistic cues as we can get without things like body language. so texting takes on it there's a really good book called because internet by gretchen mccullough that people should should get on this uh for more uh explanation but um yeah uh i my identity is that i want to make other people as comfortable as possible in each medium so when i am using email maybe i'll speak more formally but when i'm using text i'm going to switch into what i think other

54:47Alex O'Connor:people's idea of text is yeah that's that's interesting i just makes it seem like i'm using chat gpt to respond to people's texts a lot of the time which is a bit of a shame i don't know it'll just be like it'll be like um i might be like oh uh what's the address again um trying to work out travel and i'll just i'll just put it as one message i'll just put it and i'll put a dash in between you know it's a it's like a it's like a gap i'm trying to save energy save water save electricity you know all of that kind of good stuff i think it's um i think it's admirable um

55:21Adam Aleksic:Yeah, I think the thing with AI is that it speaks predictably. And if you want to be different, just speak unpredictably and use things and vary your rhythm and change your kind of phrases you use and make it a musical jazz like thing instead of this formulaic thing.

55:39Alex O'Connor:yeah language is a bit of a dance um i sometimes compared it to like a chess game in that most conversations start in a very limited sort of manner of ways it's it's very often a sort of like how's it going yeah good man how are you it's like it's it's uncanny how i remember when i was first trying to learn how to play chess i'm still not very good and i thought that i'd have to memorize all of these different like roots and lines and stuff yeah and it turns out that Yeah, like you should learn a few openings, as they call them. But once you're like five, six moves into a game, you're probably playing a game of chess that like no one in the history of mankind has ever played before.

56:16Alex O'Connor:So there are no rules. And I think language is kind of the same.

56:19Adam Aleksic:There's also a conversational endgame. There's like a usual way we end conversations. Yeah, right, right. Well, I got this thing coming up. Yeah, all right, I'll be seeing you. Have a good one. You know, there's a, yeah, we perceive there to be certain rules in language that we don't communicate to each other. when you're opening something like a greeting isn't is normal and then you have to start with some degree of small talk um and then you then you can get into deeper stuff i mean i think is not yet it's not really possible to go straight into the deep thing because people would would perceive it as like this socially strange thing to go up to someone and say what's your sense of self um you gotta really kind of work your way into that one uh and also there's an abruptness if you suddenly cut off so like it's it's normal and there i find these social niceties to be beautiful.

57:06Adam Aleksic:I think a lot of people don't like small talk. I think it's a way of ritual. It's a way of bonding. You know, there's two models of what language is. One is transmission of information per second. So like how many bytes of data are you communicating? And that's the kind that the algorithm is like. That's the kind that AI is trained to understand. And the second model of communication is a ritual understanding of language, that this is a bonding act between two human beings and that you are treating this as like a special meaningful exchange where it is less about the exact amount of communication and more about just the moment you're in.

57:41Adam Aleksic:I really like that. And small talk to me is kind of beautiful because it is definitionally ritualistic. If you're just trying to communicate bits of information, you're not going to do it.

57:51Alex O'Connor:Yeah, I was thinking about ritual and how you said earlier, you've got like a marker, then the thing, then a marker. That's exactly what a conversation is. Yeah. conversations do but why do you think it is that people like euphemize even just like even when everybody knows what's what's being being done here like if i sort of if we were hanging out and i sort of went like you know right or i sort of like hit my legs and i'm sort of or i'm like oh i think um it's like are you got are you are you thinking of having are you gonna have a dessert it's like a difference between saying like hey should we look at the dessert menu and like, do you think, do you think you'll, you'll have a dessert?

58:29Alex O'Connor:No, should we just get the bill? Yeah. Okay. Like, why can't we just like, everyone knows what's going on. Why can't we just finish this conversation? And then I just sort of go, that's the end of the podcast. And then just hang up, you know, why, why do we need, maybe we should do that today and today alone. Um, why do we need it? Why do we need this punctuation?

58:48Adam Aleksic:Exactly. Because it is a bonding signal between humans. Um, well, you know, also So you don't know different people because we've at this point, once we've built up the ritual, it's very hard to get rid of it. You don't know who cares about the ritual, who doesn't care about the ritual, because you should think of conversations kind of like game theory. Right. If person one wants to not do small talk, but doesn't know what person two wants, and you're not going to communicate this in advance. and person two doesn't want to do small talk, but doesn't know what person one wants, the national equilibrium is actually they both do the small talk because, you know, they are operating on a limited understanding of what the other person is expecting.

59:32Adam Aleksic:If we had perfect knowledge, yeah, we would just skip the small talk. But we never have perfect knowledge about another human being. It's always, well, this is the social norm. I think you'll be normal to do the social norm. And I want to make the other person as comfortable as possible. So I'm going to engage in that norm. And then, and then, you know, once we've exchanged our niceties, then I can get into the deeper stuff.

59:54Alex O'Connor:Yeah. It might be like a form of, um, it might be like a safety net as well in that maybe you're at a party and you want to talk to people about your, your deepest desires and philosophical outlook. But if you go and do that, and then it turns out that the person is like, you know, dangerous or like some kind of psycho or something like that and you regret doing it, you can kind of test the waters a bit, you know, just by saying, how's your day going? And you can just sort of start to get a feel as to whether you essentially trust someone enough to have the real conversation. It's like vetting someone before you open the door to your home.

1:00:29Adam Aleksic:It is a game. From an evolutionary standpoint, it's thought to be that it's kind of a way to weed out who is a normal member of society. And so you engage in the small talk and you also pick up a lot of things immediately. you pick up class signals you pick up social in-group signals you figure out whether somebody is regardless of whether they're normal or not whether they're one of your group and if they're not like you you know you don't have to commit to the conversation um yeah i saw someone say um

1:01:03Alex O'Connor:about tv shows and films how for some reason whenever they they depict phone calls um they never have people hang up normally like if you're on a phone call you'd be like you don't do the all right well i'll see you later goodbye you know yeah you just yeah that kind of thing they just like finish their sentence and then just hang up and one i can't remember where i saw this somewhere online but since then every time i'm watching a phone call on a tv show it's like it's it's so conspicuous i don't know what's going on there something to do with the way that they're scripting dialogue but people will just literally finish the message and hang up the phone it's so

1:01:35Adam Aleksic:so strange people never talk normally in tv i mean we use all these like uh back channels i just said the word oh i used a filler word right we we not you're nodding right now um i don't know there's like you you might say things you write right you know you might say the word right when someone's saying or like yeah yeah uh just things like cues to the other person that we're still talking uh and that you're paying attention but that kind of stuff doesn't work well in like conversational dialogue and tv a lot so they'll just skip it and part of it might be because i

1:02:04Alex O'Connor:I mean, like, well, I think part of that might be because of this, probably not because it's too long. But I think you also have to remember that those filler words and those indicators change over time. So, like, I have to remind myself, particularly when I'm reading the Bible, constantly you've got Jesus saying things like he'll be like, verily I say unto you and stuff like that. And it sounds really sort of dramatic and crazy and weird, but it's probably just the ancient equivalent of him being like, right. You know? Listen up, guys. listen up listen up kind of thing and it it sounds very dramatic but there is a difference like if if you um if you were like oh i'm gonna go and you know go and watch this show or eat this go to this restaurant or something and i say like oh don't do that you know it's not very nice versus going like listen trust me listen to the words i'm saying do not do that kind of thing it's just like an emphasis thing and those things are important in human communication and i guess they're somewhat missing in our in our media um but they're not it's because language is very intuitive and very natural and so that's very difficult to fake you'll find this interesting

1:03:14Adam Aleksic:there's a lot of controversy over the first word of beowulf which is quat and and so many scholars have debated about what quat means but you got to understand that beowulf is like a bard retelling a story in a tavern and he's basically saying yo guys listen up yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah like

1:03:31Alex O'Connor:there's a lot of that in in particularly like older or an ancient texts where it's just it's just not quite clear what is meant to be expressed here um the word hevel from the book of ecclesiastes is another one you can sort of contextually pick it up but you know it's variously translated as meaningless or absurd or vanity when it really means something like wind and i sometimes think you almost like it's almost better not to translate it because the word is so clear and so context dependent just just the whole reason it's using the word over and over again is so that you can it's sort of trying to give you a really long convoluted definition and um this problem of

1:04:12Adam Aleksic:translation i mean is a yeah the problem of translation is like a huge underlying problem in linguistics that, you know, nobody can ever agree how to properly translate a text because you can kind of try to go word for word. But again, the vibe, the lens you have up, the frame you're putting on this language is just different. And so people, sometimes the best translations are closer to vibe translations, where it's just like the feeling that this evokes in you rather than word by word, Google translate style. This is what this means. That's robotic language. That's transmission of bits of information.

1:04:44Adam Aleksic:And the other ones that kind of just our feelings about words um so i mean it's interesting that some of the like uh yeah one controversial translation of beowulf um just starts out with the word bro but it might be

1:05:00Alex O'Connor:closer to the the vibe translation yeah um of course like the bible is a great example of this because there have been so many translations and the reason is that language just keeps on changing like i mean the the king james version which is maybe the most famous is it's practically unreadable as like a theological text like you'll probably roughly be able to follow along but you you'll just miss which is so much and it'll be so silly because it's it's meant to be readable it's

1:05:29Adam Aleksic:meant like you're already doing this weird translation of another language um and so why are we looking at this old thing because if the bible is meant to be understood accurately it should be understood like the present vibe so it's closer to the vibe of beowulf to actually have it translated as bro um i think a really interesting example with like the catholic church is like priests cassocks which were meant to be like relatable it was like the what the peasants were wearing so the priests wear the cassocks and eventually the peasants started wearing different things and then the priest just kept wearing the cassocks and now this symbol it's kind of like our clothing is basically language as well that this symbol of like relatability becomes a symbol of like old-fashionedness and i think one of my biggest issues with like churches and religions is they get stuck in these crystallized aesthetics of what their interpretation is supposed to be rather than constantly reevaluating the ongoing moment.

1:06:17Adam Aleksic:Because we only live in the present, we should keep thinking about the present as it exists. That's kind of why I really like tracking the slang words of now, tracking the trends that are happening now, because as an etymologist, there's plenty of interesting things with history and we can look at the history, but remember that it is history and that it is only the current moment in which we live that we should really strive to understand and not get stuck in this past idea of what language should be. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Brewing Company. No matter how you do game day, on the couch, in the crowd, or manning the snack table, Athletic Brewing fits right in.

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1:07:12Alex O'Connor:Yeah, and I think people often forget that these particular traditions, as you say, like these crystallized aesthetics, are themselves just historical contingencies. I have a lot of debates with people, not so much recently, but about the Latin mass. In Catholicism, you know, Latin was the French language, the lingua franca of the Catholic Church. and it was basically universal for the mass to be said in Latin. And then in the 1960s, the Catholic Church decided you're allowed to say mass in your own language. And it was actually extremely controversial because lots of traditionalists thought you're sort of breaking this chain of tradition and it's going to sort of dilute through translations the message and stuff.

1:07:58Alex O'Connor:And so even now - Wasn't the point of the Latin for people to understand it? Exactly. You know, it was originally like the first Latin translation of the Bible is called the Vulgate, as in vulgar, as in like common language. The whole point was it was supposed to be this demystified, localized version. And so today you get a lot of Catholics who go to Latin masses. You can find them like everywhere. And it's traditionalists who are like, we want to be in keeping with the church. And I find it very strange. I've debated people on this. I had a debate with Michael Knowles about it once, and I was like, look, I kind of would understand if you were insisting on saying the Mass in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, or even Greek, the language of the New Testament.

1:08:46Alex O'Connor:But Latin, just because it so happens to be the language that came to dominate the Catholic Church, it just seems like such a historical contingency. And so it now has the opposite effect.

1:08:59Adam Aleksic:Yeah, on one hand, to argue the other side, it's kind of cool how that forces you to focus more on the form of the language rather than the content. And now, because you perceive the church as a special place, you perceive the mass as a special time, and you perceive this language as a special language, we begin to draw more meaning out of it and we get closer to that experience of whatever God is. so that maybe it's better to focus on this crystallized aesthetic but then the problem is you get stuck in only feeling special when you're in church or only feeling special when you're connecting with god in the sanctioned ways there was a really interesting rabbit hole i went down recently about how you're supposed to celebrate the eucharist in sign language because that was that was a huge controversy when the first sign language eucharist was like 1970s or something um um but also you're supposed to like raise things while uh doing like you're um also it's thought that the um christ is the word made flesh and the word has such a power in like enacting this um uh trend you know this whole thing um but what happens when it's through sign through hand it can the same process be done through your hands and i mean the the church says yes but there's there's a lot of people who are upset about that yeah that that's interesting and i think these problems

1:10:16Alex O'Connor:only come up when you're insisting on well crystallizing your your approach which is what the the catholics have always been extremely good at doing i think um but yeah the latin thing in particular is a is a i think a perfect example of what you're talking about and also i understand yeah there is this argument that like if you don't understand it it makes it feel a bit more sort of mystical and and reverent and like fair enough but but then it's a you might as well do the whole thing in silence and let the priest just do it in his head. In fact, you know the words,

1:10:47Adam Aleksic:the words, there's a feeling of being with other people as this thing is done, the collective effervescence, right? I think another thing that we've lost with the increasing transmission view of language that's getting popular since the telegraph, since we can rapidly communicate information that we've moved more towards the bits per second model of communication and we've lost the ritual communication. One thing that we've really lost is our sense of language as a spiritual or magical thing. If you look at any of the oldest languages, ancient runes were thought to be magical. Oracle bone script is literally called that because it was meant to prophesize the future.

1:11:20Adam Aleksic:Hebrew being the sacred language of Judaism and Latin being the sacred language of Christianity. And all of these languages had a special power to their speakers. I think even as they were being spoken, they were considered more special. And the more we reproduce something, Walter Benjamin, work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, the more you make a copy of something, the less special it feels to you. And we've made so many copies of language. And look at AI now, which is, I think by the year like 2050, it's supposed to, there's supposed to be more AI generated images than human made images in the entirety of human existence, right?

1:11:53Adam Aleksic:And we're having a similar thing with language. I don't know the stat on that. But the thing is, we're having so much of this reproduction of language that it starts to feel like it's not as special. And I know I'm a rapid talker, and I say a lot of things and maybe I could take a word of advice myself from this, but if we deliberate over our words more and we choose to regard them as these insanely powerful things that have the power to change the course of reality that can change other people's minds, then we start to understand it more in that magical term, even if it isn't English. We should just really hang on each word and think about the meaning behind each word.

1:12:31Adam Aleksic:And that's another reason I like etymology. It's an act of presence.

1:12:34Alex O'Connor:yeah me too and you discover so many interesting things um i i was just thinking about the latin mass there i i was going to tell you you might already know this but you know the phrase hocus

1:12:45Adam Aleksic:pocus as in yeah uh hoc et corpus right yeah something like that like like uh yeah hoc s

1:12:53Alex O'Connor:this is my body i think yeah hoc est enim corpus meum or mayum okay this is my body and you get this sort of this parody of because transubstantiation the turning of body of the bread and wine into the body and blood of jesus is seen by outsiders as literally this kind of like ridiculous magic and so you get them mocking the magic of the of the church with this hocus pocus this fake latin and it just embeds itself into our language and it's it's awesome i just think it's like the coolest thing in the world how how words just crop up like that

1:13:24Adam Aleksic:i i think we should think about i'm i'm not coming at this as somebody who's religious or spiritual you know but how you know god says let there be light um and he goes on to name it light i think that's so powerful that the first thing that happens is the act of uttering um and there's this idea in in linguistics of the performative utterance and not performative in the performative male sense but performative in the sense of enacting kind of like how you perform gender um a performative utterance is something that physically changes reality that we agree it does So like a minister pronouncing someone husband and wife or kind of at the end of a ritual often.

1:14:05Adam Aleksic:Right. It's I now pronounce you graduates of the university. The pronouncement doesn't happen. It doesn't happen. So both you're saying something and you're physically changing reality. But I think on a smaller level, this is called an illocutionary utterance. Every statement we make also changes reality. Your headspace and our listeners' headspaces are getting closer to my headspace as I articulate things, which is so powerful. We are literally changing reality with every single utterance. And why don't we feel the weight of that more? Why don't we ascribe more to the impact we're having? Mm-hmm.

1:14:44Alex O'Connor:So I'll go speak, to take it from ancient Latin back to TikTok. Do you see this book as like, I mean, you're sort of diagnosing what's going on online. Are you sort of identifying like a problem to be solved or is there like a mission statement or is this just kind of like, hey, isn't that interesting?

1:15:05Adam Aleksic:There are problems for sure. I think the language stuff is interesting and I'm just diagnosing it on that level, on the linguistic level, right? I have two hats that I like to wear. One is the linguist hat and one is the cultural critic hat. And I want to wear them in different contexts. So one is saying, look, this is what's going on with language. And the other is saying, okay, if this is going on with language, language is kind of a canary in the coal mine of what's happening in broader society. It is true. If we see a lot of our language coming from incel communities, that incels are broadly influencing culture.

1:15:35Adam Aleksic:And it's not just the words that they're influencing. People's political ideas are, we're normalizing this rhetoric through the Overton window, that range of acceptable discourse. I find that very concerning. I find it concerning how these tech platforms have this gross mediating power over everything we can say and that they structure our discourse and our conversations. And in tracking how these platforms are changing things in real time, I always see them align our speech with their business priorities. And then we have no choice as creators who have to follow the monetization or the virality incentives of these platforms.

1:16:11Adam Aleksic:We have no choice but to communicate in the way that they want us to communicate. And that is deeply disturbing. And these platforms have far too much power and they are clearly misusing their ability to mediate our conversations for their financial benefit in a way that extracts value from our attention and our presence online. So yeah, I think there's a lot of problems. From a linguistic angle, though, if I'm putting linguistic hat back on, no, there's a bunch of cool stuff happening. Language is doing this cool thing that it's always been doing. So I guess you can look at both things at once.

1:16:46Great.

1:16:47Alex O'Connor:That's the end. That's the end.