Culture Study Podcast - The Ridiculously Interesting History of Weird English Words

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00:00:51.940 thanks. On with today's show. Hi, everyone. This is the Culture Study Podcast, and I'm

00:01:04.320 Anne Helen Peterson. And I'm Colin Gorey, linguist and the author of the Dead Language

00:01:08.380 Society Substack. So, Colin, we were talking before we started recording about how both

00:01:14.360 you and I are, what's the right word here? I don't like using, like, refugee from the 1.00

00:01:20.240 ivory tower. I also don't love escape because I didn't escape so much as like there was no space

00:01:26.120 in the ivory tower. We both used to be within academia and now we are no longer technically

00:01:33.240 within academia, but still very devoted to our discipline. So you've said, and this is kind of

00:01:38.720 your mission is to bring linguistics to a larger audience and talking to people about how language

00:01:44.480 works, specifically how older language worked and continues to work in the way that we speak

00:01:50.280 today. So how did you get interested in this? How did you become a word nerd?

00:01:54.840 My fate was sealed at a very young age when I saw this gigantic shelf of books, Encyclopedia

00:02:02.120 Britannica. My parents had probably bought from some sort of a traveling salesman back in the

00:02:07.280 70s or something. And I opened up to the very first page and I saw that there was a discussion

00:02:12.720 of the letter a and you know at this point i was pretty young i you know i had my command of uh of

00:02:19.180 all 26 letters but i was thrilled to learn that they actually had a history like these letters

00:02:24.620 didn't just pop out of the ether and just fully formed yeah as we have them today the the letter

00:02:30.360 a had a history it had origins in the greek alphabet and the phoenician alphabet and there

00:02:35.920 was this young kid's greek alphabet what do you mean greek alphabet there's only one alphabet

00:02:41.020 Right. I didn't know how to pronounce Phoenician at the time. So I was like, right. Okay. Let's

00:02:47.600 look this up. And then, yeah, my fate was sealed from then. I did such a nerdy project in elementary

00:02:53.680 school on different calendars. And like that, I think there's something revelatory when you're a

00:02:59.640 kid about decentering, like the way that we organize the world. Like when you first have

00:03:05.360 that realization, like, oh, there are different ways that people have understood time or people

00:03:10.520 have understood how language is amassed that it's hard to get our brains around them but then you

00:03:16.160 can spend the rest of your life trying to get your brain around it you can it's sort of like the

00:03:20.680 moment as a child when you learn that your grandmother's your mom's mom and wait a second

00:03:25.960 how does that so you're telling me but it's similar for language you learn all these little

00:03:31.260 words that you're using that you you say without thinking actually came from somewhere and had

00:03:36.360 sometimes a very, very interesting history. And you start to look at your own way of speaking,

00:03:42.260 which might seem perfectly natural, as something strange and something that you actually

00:03:46.220 might want to examine and might have to examine. And I think that's a healthy experience for a

00:03:51.360 young mind. What questions do you get? Like, I used to always, when I told people that my PhD

00:03:56.560 was in media studies, people would be like, what's your favorite movie? So what questions do you get?

00:04:02.940 What are the interesting and not so interesting questions that you get?

00:04:07.320 So the big question for linguists is how many languages do you speak?

00:04:11.060 But when someone asks that, they should be prepared because then the answer is always,

00:04:16.680 well, now it's very interesting because you have to understand that, you know,

00:04:20.060 the boundaries of what means for a language to be a language is very hard to define

00:04:24.380 and the language versus dialect and what does it mean to speak and blah, blah, blah.

00:04:27.220 And then they scuttle off and realize that they shouldn't have asked.

00:04:30.520 Right. Or you could be like dead languages or living languages, languages that I can read or languages that I know how to speak. Like, yeah, it's very, how can I ask you that question?

00:04:39.640 now yeah i i can't really answer it i um i dabble in a lot um but i have my my languages that are

00:04:47.880 sort of more my specialty and the biggest one uh for me these days is old english um which i'm sure

00:04:54.280 will will come up a bunch uh it's hard to talk about the history of english without talking about

00:04:58.360 old english but it's sort of the earliest written phase of the english language from around uh say

00:05:04.220 600 to 1100 yeah so i i teach this um day to day i sort of write neo old english um textbooks and

00:05:14.160 things like that so i'm immersed in that phase of the english language which is quite different from

00:05:19.000 english as we speak today but then i have all my other i'm really into sanskrit as well

00:05:23.980 yeah too many languages too many languages no i most of them dead i i find it so fun like with

00:05:30.940 different alphabets too in different ways of describing like places that I've gone in the

00:05:35.760 world where the alphabet like you know in like the Greek alphabet there's some familiarity that

00:05:40.340 you can kind of parse it out in your brain very slowly but then like I was in Myanmar and

00:05:46.600 the complete dislocation of not knowing like having no cipher essentially like just being

00:05:54.120 like here are a ton of words and I have no way of knowing how to interpret any of these words I

00:05:59.480 I think it's, in some ways, it was very useful.

00:06:01.660 It was very clarifying, but it's also very disorienting.

00:06:06.360 Yes.

00:06:06.900 What's interesting is that all of these writing systems,

00:06:10.420 even the ones that are super, super foreign, not all of them,

00:06:13.900 but most of them have the same origin,

00:06:16.420 which is in the writing system of ancient Egypt,

00:06:19.500 the hieroglyphic system, Egyptian hieroglyphs.

00:06:23.560 And it's strange how one system can give rise

00:06:26.680 to all of these different expressions,

00:06:28.840 all these different ways of writing that look nothing like one another unless you're looking

00:06:33.320 at ones that have diverged very recently like say the greek alphabet and the latin alphabet

00:06:36.900 and nevertheless these are these are relatives yeah yeah and if once you learn some of them

00:06:44.180 that like it's sometimes you just have to learn that kind of basic basic part and then you are

00:06:49.280 able to to build and build and build and build but until you do take the time to learn that then

00:06:54.960 you're kind of at sea I was for a short period of time I was in a master's program that was an

00:07:01.320 English program that would led me into media studies but everyone had to take or was like

00:07:06.620 on the road to having to take old English and there was this feeling of like dread and I think

00:07:13.140 that it was because people had maybe taken some medieval lit and struggled in it but then they

00:07:18.300 took old English and it was like opening a world it's like a whole door of new things that they

00:07:24.800 could appreciate so can you talk a little bit about how that happens in the classroom like

00:07:29.100 how you're able to appreciate these texts more once you have more familiarity with the language

00:07:33.440 it's really an interesting thing old English when you first have a look at it the first

00:07:39.360 experience is what is this this is not English right you know you see all sorts of crazy endings

00:07:46.620 the words look different different symbols here and there but then the second if you get into it

00:07:53.320 bit. Then the second layer of that is, oh, actually, wait a second. I see a lot of similarities

00:07:57.960 here. So what's the word for house? Hoos. Oh, okay. I see where you're coming from. What's the

00:08:03.300 word for hand? Hond. Okay. Okay. And then it seems, oh, this can be, I can domesticate this. 1.00

00:08:10.340 I can make this my own. This is not so different from my language. And then you get farther in

00:08:15.340 and you realize, oh yeah, actually it is. And so it's this push and pull that you have of the

00:08:22.320 the strange and the familiar.

00:08:23.960 And this is what I think is the fascination of old English because it's right

00:08:27.960 on the border.

00:08:28.840 It's right on the border of,

00:08:30.100 I feel like this is still English,

00:08:32.400 but it's really not at the same time.

00:08:34.400 And it becomes important if you want,

00:08:36.900 if you have literary interest,

00:08:38.580 if you're interested in reading early medieval literature,

00:08:41.660 going through translation is always an option,

00:08:45.500 but the problem is the stuff that most people want to read is the hardest

00:08:49.280 to translate.

00:08:50.420 Really?

00:08:50.540 So the, yeah, the classic example is Beowulf.

00:08:53.780 Yeah.

00:08:54.320 So the poem that everyone knows about, if they know anything about old English literature, is Beowulf.

00:08:59.420 And Justly Famous is probably the only old English poem that has movie adaptations.

00:09:03.520 Yes.

00:09:04.140 Yes.

00:09:04.780 I don't know.

00:09:06.440 Some of the extra book riddles I think could work.

00:09:09.520 But when you read the poem in translation, you end up having to, or say, approach it from the translator's perspective,

00:09:18.880 you have to make a lot of decisions and you have to decide how much am I going to accommodate this

00:09:23.780 to the way of the mode of expression in modern English and how much do I want to keep it sort

00:09:29.260 of strange and foreign right and because the distance between the two languages is relatively

00:09:36.840 speaking great you have to make decisions that will close off some possibilities of interpretation

00:09:43.200 you have to make some of the decisions for the reader as a translator whereas with if you

00:09:48.700 read it in old english you don't you don't have to have those decisions made for you you can make

00:09:52.560 them yourself yeah and you can have there are often and this happens all the time in beowulf

00:09:57.000 there are cases where there are two ways of interpreting a particular passage and it actually

00:10:03.020 does end up mattering you know who hit whom it's a battle scenes and like and i suppose it's

00:10:09.980 appropriate when you see the rough chaos of a battle you don't necessarily know who's hitting

00:10:16.280 whom and the experience of reading the battle scenes in Beowulf is like that it's like he hit

00:10:20.840 him and he hit this who who are you talking about I somewhat think the poet intended that yeah but

00:10:26.520 the translator will have to often make a decision who hit whom whereas there really isn't enough

00:10:32.240 information in the old English to do that so you you will read in translation you'll think you know

00:10:36.920 what's going on yeah and then if you ever end up reading an old English you realize oh no I actually

00:10:41.080 didn't know entirely what was going on i had one person's opinion yeah no that's so smart and

00:10:46.340 interesting it gives you like you have to be much more open to some of that like ambivalence or

00:10:52.240 uh liminality in terms of like what what the actual meaning is whereas i think

00:10:56.820 sometimes when you're trying to be so precise with the translation like i'm thinking of some

00:11:01.440 very contemporary translations of the new testament that are trying to use like very like

00:11:06.920 2000s language to be like Jesus's voice. Right. And it makes it like so direct and so in the

00:11:16.280 parlance of the time that it doesn't leave a lot of room for interpretation. It's too comfortable

00:11:21.580 almost. That's interesting. Yeah. Okay. We have so many good questions. We have a lot of nerds

00:11:28.740 in our audience and I appreciate all of them. And some of them are kind of more grammatical

00:11:34.340 and some of them are about specific weird words.

00:11:36.800 People were very excited to learn

00:11:38.260 that we were having you on.

00:11:39.800 So first question comes from Faye

00:11:41.420 and Melody's gonna read it.

00:11:43.220 What do you mean it's raining?

00:11:45.840 It is raining.

00:11:47.420 What is it?

00:11:51.380 This happens in French too, I've noticed.

00:11:54.200 So what do you think?

00:11:56.240 I hear the passion in that question,

00:11:58.120 which I really love.

00:11:59.760 What is it?

00:12:00.780 It is raining.

00:12:01.500 so this is a quirk of english and of some other languages um but many languages don't share this

00:12:08.740 quirk which is that the english language requires every verb to have a subject yeah um so to rephrase

00:12:16.080 that whenever you have an action you have to say who's doing it you can't for example say goes

00:12:23.240 who goes he goes she goes who goes you have to say who goes but many languages don't require

00:12:31.100 you to do that so um perhaps listeners will have had experience studying spanish as an example of

00:12:37.020 language which doesn't require you to say who goes if it's clear from the context but when you think

00:12:44.360 about raining it is raining what is it there is nothing that's it it is reality itself yeah it is

00:12:50.460 the universe i don't know what it is the universe is raining the universe rain is you know that's it

00:12:57.300 And there's nothing in particular that's raining.

00:12:59.540 It's just occurring.

00:13:00.520 And so this is the kind of verb or verb phrase that we would call impersonal because it doesn't have a person or thing doing it.

00:13:10.960 It's just happening.

00:13:13.320 So the fact that English requires you to have a subject for every verb necessitates that something go there.

00:13:20.100 And we don't want to say much about what's raining because there really isn't anything.

00:13:24.440 So we put this dummy pronoun in, which is it.

00:13:28.640 Although, interestingly, it wasn't always so.

00:13:31.360 In Old English, you didn't absolutely need an it-style pronoun when you're talking about things like raining or snowing.

00:13:37.800 But this developed over the later Middle Ages.

00:13:40.900 And it got to the point where English really fossilized this restriction or this requirement that every sentence, every verb should have a subject.

00:13:49.140 And then after that, the die was cast.

00:13:51.860 It is raining.

00:13:52.600 Hmm. That makes me think of when sometimes when I'm editing my own work or editing someone else's work or when I was grading papers and I would often ask them at the beginning of a paragraph to say, like, please restate what the antecedent is here.

00:14:08.100 Like, what is it? Because sometimes it might be clear in your head what it is. Right. And it's clear in all of our heads what it is.

00:14:16.800 but we could say the sky is raining even though that's imprecise too is it that that's

00:14:21.440 it's an example of something it's an example this is an example of the actual subject itself

00:14:28.360 is somewhat imprecise like the cloud is raining the sky is sunny i think it's that this the

00:14:34.220 subject kind of doesn't exist yeah because if you say that if you say the cloud is or the sky is

00:14:40.520 sunny that's it means the same thing more or less but it's not exactly the same no no it's sunny

00:14:45.480 you're not specifically referring to the sky you're referring to situation the situation in

00:14:49.640 general and there's really no word that you can substitute for it that will have that same

00:14:53.260 effect right it's just a formal quirk of english yeah that requires you to have this little it here

00:15:00.880 it's very strange not every language does it but english does

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00:18:50.500 Next question is so in your wheelhouse.

00:18:52.360 I just read a piece where you get into some of this.

00:18:54.520 So this question comes from Andrea.

00:18:56.740 Why are the letters G-H pronounced as an F, like in the words cough or laugh or tough?

00:19:03.980 but also it's silent sometimes gh is the great um the great shame of the english

00:19:11.800 spelling system um i once described this in particular as a cruel joke um you have words

00:19:18.960 like daughter and laughter where you have gh silent or pronounces f and you get things like

00:19:24.740 through and night and it's it's chaotic what happened um is that this spelling actually

00:19:33.360 it does make sense as long as you are in the year, you know, 1300.

00:19:39.000 Yes, great.

00:19:40.860 Unfortunately, we're not in the year 1300.

00:19:42.800 Things have changed since then.

00:19:44.420 So there actually used to be a sound that that GH represented.

00:19:48.460 It's the sound that you get in the German, in the name of the composer Bach.

00:19:54.460 I don't know if that always comes through over the mic,

00:19:57.440 but it's this this harsh kind of sound made at the in the hard palate at the back of the mouth

00:20:03.440 and this used to be a part of english um but with time that sound dropped out around the year 1400

00:20:13.020 and we can tell this because people used to write it really consistently well as consistently as

00:20:20.200 people wrote anything in the middle ages which is not super consistently but yes actually the

00:20:24.660 word through has over 200 spellings uh in the sort of later middle ages so yikes that made me laugh

00:20:32.000 so hard i just wheezed okay keep going seriously some of them are very strange but um around 1400

00:20:38.760 you start seeing people making strange kind of what we might think of as mistakes there aren't

00:20:44.100 mistakes but um they started becoming confused about what words had gh and what words didn't

00:20:50.180 So people started writing a word like night, as in not day, but night, they wrote it N-Y-T-E in some cases, whereas before they were very careful always to put a G-H or something that looked a little like that in that position.

00:21:06.080 And so this indicates that people perhaps didn't make a difference between the word that would have formally sounded something like nicht, nicht, not day, but nicht, and a word like, well, actually, we don't have another word that's like that.

00:21:23.400 But if there were a word N-I-T-E in modern English.

00:21:26.920 Yeah.

00:21:27.580 So the distinction between nicht and something like niet became collapsed and they lost that sound.

00:21:34.520 And then you also see people starting to add GH to words that never had them.

00:21:39.420 So a word that was pronounced d'élite, d'élite, becomes delight in modern English, but it comes from French.

00:21:47.980 Right.

00:21:48.200 It gets spelled with a GH because people didn't know.

00:21:51.540 They knew that the GH is used in some words, and it seems to be kind of random where because they don't say any of those GHs.

00:21:58.760 So they just guessed.

00:22:00.580 And sometimes they guessed wrong.

00:22:02.080 Yeah, they just added it.

00:22:03.340 This happens a lot.

00:22:04.520 they just added it and we're stuck with it so now we have delight looking like it has something to

00:22:08.900 do with light but it doesn't how much did this have to do with the fact that like because printing

00:22:13.860 presses and because just like moving text around was so limited and like oftentimes just by hand

00:22:20.980 they're just you you weren't surrounded by that many examples so you often had to guess

00:22:26.400 yeah in terms of in terms of the spelling yeah absolutely yeah we don't get the printing press

00:22:30.700 in in england until 1476 right right so for all of the history of english before then we don't

00:22:38.320 have printing we have manuscript copying by hand yeah and not a great deal of literacy in general

00:22:45.320 so yeah you get this this lack of a check because literacy and in widespread mass media say printing

00:22:55.820 presses and newspapers and things like that can act as a bit of a check on change because it gives

00:23:01.180 people constant a constant reminder of how things are spelled by others yeah yeah yeah yeah and

00:23:08.320 later we get this ideology that there are proper ways to spell things and each word has one spelling

00:23:13.440 which enters in sort of a little bit later after the the printing press so it's crazy but the thing

00:23:20.880 is not every person in england lost that sound at the same time some lost it later than others

00:23:28.820 in different dialects yeah and some people moved that sound that at the back of the throat to an

00:23:35.420 equivalent sound made at the front of the mouth with the lips the f sound like f because if you

00:23:43.500 are just closing your eyes and you know everyone will be able to do this really easily because it's

00:23:47.520 the podcast the and first sound are not super acoustically different yeah they become more

00:23:55.020 obviously different when you can see people's lips and and things like that but acoustically

00:23:58.940 they're not super different and so sometimes you get you get sort of flow between one and the other

00:24:04.620 and what happened for those dialects is that back of the mouth sound became an f and that's where

00:24:10.600 you get things like laugh yeah all those people start to flood into london as the city grows and

00:24:16.480 you know history takes its course and people industrialization and things like this so you

00:24:21.600 get people all mixing around yeah in london actually this predates industrialization this 0.97

00:24:26.920 is i think more due to the sort of black death leveling things out and um you know getting rid 1.00

00:24:32.740 of so much of the population of london and people having to come the city has to really find new 1.00

00:24:37.780 people and opportunities are knocking and people from the countryside come to london so you get

00:24:43.480 this huge increase in population but a lot of people from different places and they're all sort

00:24:47.360 of mixing and mingling and as a result the English that we speak today is a descendant of this London

00:24:52.820 dialect in the sort of later middle ages early modern period and some of the people they they

00:25:00.740 had their pronunciation of gh in some words and some had another pronunciation so what happens

00:25:05.220 is that what we call English today is a bit of a mishmash and so we have gh being f in some words

00:25:10.940 and silent and others and that's what we're stuck with okay i have another toughie for you this one

00:25:17.100 comes from bridget what the fuck is with the word yacht which just took me three tries to spell 0.76

00:25:23.460 and my phone had no idea what word i was trying to spell correctly 0.66

00:25:27.500 oh yeah what is with that so we have this really weird spelling that we don't have anywhere else

00:25:36.140 in English where yacht, ah, is spelled A-C-H. What's going on there? Well, it's important to

00:25:44.320 look at the period in time in which this word comes into the English language, because this

00:25:49.100 is actually not a word that originated in the English language. This is a loan word that comes

00:25:53.480 in from Dutch. And it comes in in the 16th century. So after the period where this ch sound

00:26:03.140 has fallen out of the language for the most part why is this relevant because it comes from dutch

00:26:08.780 which does have that kind of sound yeah i'm no dutch speaker but we had something like

00:26:13.600 for this type of ship which it means a hunting ship a ship that that moves quickly and and can

00:26:21.980 can hunt other ships presumably um but when that sound comes into english people a don't know what

00:26:30.980 to do with it they don't know how to spell it so they just sort of randomly type some not type at

00:26:37.100 the time but right randomly write some things or print some things um and and as a result if you

00:26:42.640 look in um the Oxford English Dictionary you will see tons of different spellings of this you'll see

00:26:47.860 even things like Y-A-T-C-H yes yes yes um which I mean I think a lot of us who want to spell that

00:26:56.120 word yacht can identify you know can we can empathize with that because we're like what's

00:26:59.700 going on there and this is essentially a word that we don't know how to pronounce we don't know how

00:27:07.500 to spell so we do our best with spelling and we just forget about that sound and the pronunciation

00:27:11.160 yeah so yacht y-a-c-h-t why not yeah no that makes sense to me sometimes when i

00:27:19.120 there's a word like similar when it hits my brain i do definitely just like throw some consonants

00:27:25.980 at the keyboard and then it won't like if the spell check doesn't catch it then I try to google

00:27:32.940 it and then it's like oh yeah there we go but when you didn't have google or you didn't have

00:27:37.480 spell check you just threw some consonants and then I understood that people would like

00:27:42.480 figure out what you were talking about exactly yatch yatch maybe I'm going to start calling it

00:27:47.280 that. The Culture Study Podcast is sponsored by Blissey. My hair sometimes, I don't know,

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00:31:45.940 Next submission has two questions, so we're going to break them up into two and answer

00:31:54.760 them individually. These come from Kristen. What's the deal with weird? Why do we spell

00:31:59.840 it that way? It does not follow the I before E rule. You know, I before E except after C

00:32:05.340 or sounding in A as neighbor and way. Why is weird so weird?

00:32:10.620 So weird is a weird word. This is a bit of a convoluted history and there are actually

00:32:14.140 still some mysterious aspects to the spelling and pronunciation and meaning of the word weird

00:32:20.700 originally it dates back to an old english word which is spelled w-y-r-d weird which means fate

00:32:30.760 or destiny something like that and it's really a noun form of a verb that means to become or to

00:32:37.700 happen so it's literally that which happens this sort of becoming itself that's fate that's destiny

00:32:44.500 and it has a it's very important in old english poetry poets are always talking about how

00:32:49.860 inexorable fate is or fate always does what it must do it's you know very kind of

00:32:55.700 sort of harsh and windswept reality that those poets are inhabiting and they talk about fate a

00:33:03.940 lot. For whatever reason, in the later Middle Ages, after you get the Norman Conquest, which

00:33:11.600 if that's not familiar to any listeners, it's in 1066.

00:33:16.980 Guillaume le Conqueror.

00:33:18.580 Right, right.

00:33:20.140 William the Conqueror arrives. The weird fact that I know from French history. Yes, keep going.

00:33:25.120 He comes over to England, not on holiday, but to, as the name might suggest, conquer. And he

00:33:32.840 ends up taking the English throne and bringing a bunch of his French-speaking buddies over and

00:33:38.020 forming the new aristocracy. As a result, the English language doesn't go totally underground,

00:33:43.160 but from a literary perspective, it's replaced by French as the language of administration and

00:33:48.800 high culture in England for a few centuries. And we get a lot fewer texts written in English. And

00:33:55.320 during that time, the English language morphs a lot. And when it finally comes back a few hundred

00:33:59.660 years later um approaching the era of chaucer uh it looks a lot different because it's had

00:34:05.280 you know a few centuries away from the halls of power away from being written down and so

00:34:09.900 everyone was you know writing and speaking how they wanted because there was really no one to

00:34:15.800 say don't um they were just doing it for themselves for the most part so um when you get to the time

00:34:21.920 of chaucer this is the late 14th century then english re-emerges as literary language why do

00:34:28.200 I mention this? Because weird is one of those words that sort of we lose track of during that

00:34:33.840 period. Yeah. It seems, however, it's not there was no English literature. So we do have some

00:34:39.700 examples. It seems particularly associated with Northern English and Scottish sources.

00:34:46.180 And it continues this meaning fate, but it ends up being spelled W E I R D, which is a Scottish

00:34:53.980 spelling convention um for this this vowel that was it was probably pronounced at the time something

00:34:59.900 like weird weird with this a um which is itself kind of interesting because it suggests that

00:35:06.660 the word came from the very very southeastern part of england kent and then migrated to scotland

00:35:14.240 this is where the mystery is because the vowel is from the south the spellings from the north

00:35:19.660 and all of our texts are from the north.

00:35:22.320 Well, something happened.

00:35:24.620 We don't know what it was, 0.99

00:35:25.720 but it ends up in Scots as weird

00:35:27.700 with the spelling W-E-I-R-D.

00:35:30.440 Then that A vowel turns into E.

00:35:32.440 So we get weird.

00:35:33.560 That's why it's spelled strangely

00:35:35.040 because it's a Scots convention.

00:35:36.920 Yeah.

00:35:37.720 Why do we keep it?

00:35:39.160 Right.

00:35:39.920 Because of Shakespeare.

00:35:41.740 More or less.

00:35:42.680 So in Scottish literature,

00:35:45.780 they talk about the weird sisters

00:35:48.040 who are the fates.

00:35:49.660 Yes. And because Shakespeare is working with Scottish material to write the play Macbeth, obviously, what other kind of material would you want? It is the Scottish play. You get this literal rendering of the Scots word weird into English as the weird sisters who are the witches in Macbeth.

00:36:09.100 then people sort of i don't want to say misinterpret but they reinterpret what weird

00:36:16.260 sisters means because really what weird sisters meant at the time was the sisters of fate the

00:36:21.480 sisters who control destiny but they were a bit weird as well they were a bit strange right uncanny

00:36:27.960 and so you get this secondary meaning of weird which is having to do with the supernatural

00:36:33.700 natural strange uncanny foreign weird and that's where we get the modern usage of the word weird

00:36:40.260 from amazing i love it okay second question i feel like that's gonna like people are gonna hear that

00:36:46.220 and they're never gonna think of that word the same way again let's hear kristen's second question

00:36:51.680 why don't we say more countries and cities the way the people who are from there do

00:36:56.300 apparently no one from that region has ever called the city rome not in italian or latin

00:37:02.520 they say Roma, which is not difficult for English speakers. I understand when different languages,

00:37:08.380 you know, it's harder to make certain sounds, but what gives when it isn't?

00:37:14.200 Okay. This is a really cool question because it also has to do with history. As most of these

00:37:20.360 questions have historical answers. In this case, we originally did say it like they said it,

00:37:26.080 and then english changed ah so these names of cities that we say differently for the most part

00:37:34.020 yeah are names that were borrowed into english at a much earlier phase of language then english

00:37:40.840 changed and we just kept saying it the way we've always said it at least so we imagine but from

00:37:47.140 one generation to the next it changes slightly right and we just imagine we're just saying how

00:37:51.340 we've always said it don't they say rome my my parents and their grandparents and they always

00:37:56.060 said Rome actually some of them said something like Roma in older English but nevertheless now

00:38:02.660 we end up having Rome we don't have the memory that it changed but we took it from the way that

00:38:07.200 they would have said it at the time so it's just we we actually do say it like the people there

00:38:12.160 said it but then 2000 years of history or whatever have elapsed so this works in a condensed way like

00:38:19.940 with place names in the united states say right with like at some point someone said it similar

00:38:27.220 to that and then it just kind of like changes over time and how people pronounce it does that

00:38:33.120 make sense so like in idaho there are a number of different place names that are pronounced

00:38:39.340 that are french from the french trappers and that sort of thing and then but then they've been

00:38:44.400 like slightly altered. So like there's a town called Coeur d'Alene, which in some places might

00:38:51.060 still like might be where you pronounce every single vowel, right? You'd say like

00:38:55.100 Coeur d'Alene or something like that. And because you see that in different parts of the United

00:39:00.040 States where the French has just been like turned into English. With English and French,

00:39:04.880 there's a bit of a history. And so there are English speakers are very aware of what sounds

00:39:10.780 french because of our right the two languages long coexistence long and somewhat uncomfortable

00:39:17.140 coexistence um you know going back to the age of the norman conquest uh so what happens uh now

00:39:24.440 there may be some specific details about particular cases but i think in general what we can say is

00:39:29.420 that there are there's precedent for how to anglicize french words because we have so and

00:39:36.740 so much of the English language is anglicized French words and some of these words come from

00:39:42.620 you know a thousand years ago like people as an example people has been well and truly anglicized

00:39:49.800 to the point that it's very hard to recognize it as originally a French word but you have words

00:39:56.440 that have come more recently that are that wear their French on their sleeve a bit more

00:40:02.700 and then it becomes a sort of a social thing to say how how french do i want to say this what am

00:40:08.600 i signaling about myself as someone who i know how things are pronounced in french or i don't

00:40:13.400 care how things are pronounced in french this is an english word right these kinds of factors come

00:40:17.560 in and there is a lot of controversy in um the sort of 1700s 1700s thereabouts about excessive

00:40:26.360 use of french in english and people being getting a bit fancy and using french too much yeah the

00:40:32.420 ends up being a controversy that gets mostly resolved so that we now generally tend to take

00:40:38.140 French words into the English language in recent years, more or less preserving the French

00:40:43.880 pronunciation, modular what we're capable of as speakers of English. Croissant, you know, as an

00:40:50.960 example, rather than croissant or whatever it might be. But that ideology wasn't always there.

00:40:57.120 and it wouldn't it's not even always there in all speakers of english today so you get these

00:41:02.820 different options of how to pronounce french and i think that's what's going on with these place

00:41:06.860 names yeah yeah no that makes sense and i think there would be a very complicated and interesting

00:41:11.420 history of pronunciation if you could like because we can we can track how a place was spelled right

00:41:18.160 on maps and that sort of thing but it's much harder to figure out how every 10 years how people

00:41:24.340 pronounce that place name right we just don't have those sorts of recordings available to us

00:41:28.140 and there's also the fact that french has changed too so a lot of the times the pronunciation

00:41:33.380 especially in the french colonization of the americas this is pre-french revolution

00:41:38.620 and a lot of linguistic linguistic changes happened with the revolution and as a result

00:41:44.820 and so you get things like um the the pronunciation of the oi um sequence which is now

00:41:51.820 wa but which was originally earlier something like we and earlier still oi which makes sense

00:41:58.620 because it's oi right um yeah actually even french spelling has logic believe it or not

00:42:04.740 you just have to go back far enough that's usually true of writing systems there is logic if you

00:42:09.320 understand when the writing system was sort of fossilized it makes sense then right and then you

00:42:15.600 can just go backwards um okay so this one i can't wait for your answer on this one this question

00:42:20.520 comes from alexa i saw a post once that pondered words like cutthroat turn cloak pickpocket or

00:42:27.840 maybe my favorite lick spittle these words are flipped from a normal convention of verb noun er

00:42:33.660 construction like firefighter or peacekeeper and coincidentally most of these words are insults

00:42:40.260 i'd love to hear more about this so this is a i love this question this is a really interesting

00:42:45.080 um this is a really interesting one because it's something that is actively being researched

00:42:50.240 now. Like, wow, there are 2025 citations about this topic. There are citations from 2025 about

00:42:57.360 it. And they're called sometimes pickpocket or turncoat compounds. And they're not sort of

00:43:05.880 native to the English language. They come from French influence. They first actually appear in

00:43:10.740 French. And in fact, French has a ton of them. Yes, it does. This is the romance languages in

00:43:17.320 general have a ton of them uh but especially french i'm thinking like cast that uh like a

00:43:23.000 puzzle a breakhead breakhead yeah yeah yeah so this is a thing that originated uh seemingly in

00:43:32.000 the romans languages probably in french uh fairly early um maybe something like uh you know 11th

00:43:40.360 century um in french i think they start to show up um although there's some talk that there may

00:43:46.420 have been earlier uh earlier versions you can see certain people's names look like they might

00:43:50.380 in very very early texts be these kinds of compounds but they come from french into english

00:43:55.760 they're always sort of marginal in english they never become an extremely well-used device

00:44:02.200 and they even in french they tend to be used in the earliest texts for people and they tend to

00:44:08.960 be kind of playful so even in from the beginning they have this quality that they they end up

00:44:13.380 having in modern english but they're on english in this structure the the old english way of forming

00:44:19.020 these compounds is just like the modern the more typical modern english firefighter way so you have

00:44:23.140 actually lucifer of all people is referred to as leuchtbeerend in old english light bearer right

00:44:31.020 it's a literal translation of lucifer in you know theological discussions and this is the typical way

00:44:37.340 of forming these compounds in old english you only see them in you only see the opposite the

00:44:41.500 pickpocket turncoat style in the 13th or 14th century and they tend to be insults and the reason

00:44:48.680 for this is a bit mysterious but it may be because they are so uncommon that they are eye or ear

00:44:57.700 catching and they they um they have that bit of creativity you know a good insult should be 0.97

00:45:04.660 creative yes if you're trying to insult someone if you just say oh you jerk okay i'm not really 0.72

00:45:10.020 insulted but if you've taken the time to like craft something that shows sort of an artisan 0.96

00:45:16.260 level of of insult that's a better insult that's more that's more biting and i think that that may

00:45:22.020 have something to do with why these survive as insults because they're the less common option

00:45:26.820 um so but they are strange and what's really strange about them is that most compounds

00:45:32.700 contain the thing uh that or how to put this in a more clear way think of a compound like

00:45:39.620 school bus yeah it's a bus fundamentally yeah um or firefighter it's a fighter fundamentally what

00:45:47.560 kind of fighter a fighter of fires what kind of bus a bus to do with school yes but a pickpocket

00:45:53.780 is not a pocket yes this is kind of odd right um a pickpocket is not a pocket a turncoat is not a

00:46:02.080 coat. Yeah. So these are what are called exocentric compounds and that the thing they refer to is

00:46:09.180 outside of the compound itself. And this is not something that's particularly common in English.

00:46:15.880 Saber tooth is another good example. Not quite the same, but it's also exocentric.

00:46:20.800 Yeah. And so perhaps all these factors go into making it kind of a marginal thing, but sometimes

00:46:26.500 the marginal things have their place. Can I tell you a quick theory and you can totally shut it

00:46:31.060 down so i think that these were used in french as like insults or swear words by people who maybe

00:46:37.960 spoke french in english context and then like at some point someone translated them and but still

00:46:46.040 then use them as the insult right like you used it like you still used this great word the same

00:46:51.700 way that like i don't know i feel like we use like swear words in other languages or various like

00:46:57.560 i don't know like sometimes i say like mail right like i like say words in different languages

00:47:03.440 because it softens the curse word or like makes it into a secret language almost right yes so

00:47:09.460 i remember and i the the details are escaping but i remember a study where people were putting their

00:47:15.740 hands in ice water and they were allowed to swear and they could do it for longer if they were

00:47:20.320 allowed to swear but i don't i wonder if it would be the same if you're swearing in second language

00:47:25.140 because it doesn't seem real you know you don't have those the the prohibited words that we weren't

00:47:30.740 allowed to say as kids there's still even as adults there's a little bit of like a cool aspect

00:47:36.120 of saying them but you know in some other language you never had that experience of being forbidden

00:47:40.760 from saying these you just know that oh this means something bad and it doesn't have much of an

00:47:45.400 emotional charge so I think there might be something like that going on as well my secondary

00:47:49.380 theory is that these were used in like mysteries like cutthroat and turncoat both like they feel

00:47:54.580 Like something that you would use in an actual mystery novel and that more literary people are like, I'm going to use this clever word from French and put it into the text.

00:48:03.980 Like it's almost like a flourish.

00:48:05.800 And this is actually something that might be coloring our understanding of the history of these phrases is the relationship to literature.

00:48:15.720 Because they are so colorful.

00:48:19.100 And if you look at early texts, they tend not to be that colorful.

00:48:22.300 you know earlier texts tend not to be that cover not a lot you know fiction is is something that

00:48:27.160 is well arguably you know people will get into uh fistfights at conferences over when you know

00:48:32.460 what the first novel was but um you know something Robinson Crusoe is a typical guess or opinion

00:48:40.040 relatively late in the history um 18th century we're talking the Haiti of these compounds is

00:48:46.560 earlier these really start to decline after the 15th century and and um very very few uh get

00:48:53.540 created in in modern times scoff law is i think the only one that was coined in the 20th century

00:48:59.240 so in those earlier texts when it had its heyday maybe it was super popular but not in the kind of

00:49:06.540 text that people wrote people wrote more you know highbrow philosophical theological

00:49:13.340 scientific texts in english yeah okay this is great because this is the the segue i was going

00:49:18.900 to take was i did an interview with the author of this great book um about the proliferation of

00:49:24.500 wound man which i'm sure you're familiar with and we'll link to in the show notes like

00:49:28.900 how wound man showed up in all of these different texts over the course of the middle ages and um

00:49:34.480 and how a lot of like the spellings and the and the language that's used during the time he's

00:49:39.820 talking about both it's in the actual documentation of the wound man which is a depiction of a man

00:49:45.200 who has been like basically like has had all all means of injury visited upon him and it's a way

00:49:53.740 that like they learned that people transmitted information about how the body worked and how

00:49:58.840 the body was injured and how pain was experienced but also part of the way that they learned this

00:50:05.720 how people were talking about it was through court cases and i don't know if we always think about

00:50:11.420 that that like oh part of the way that english was written or one of the primary ways that english

00:50:16.400 was written was in documentation of like legal cases against one another so interesting and you

00:50:23.960 even that only starts at sort of in the later very towards the very end of the middle ages when

00:50:29.720 you're allowed to to you know the pleading in english act i think it's called um where you're

00:50:35.080 allowed to use English in court which prior to that was all French which is why a lot of legal

00:50:40.320 English is French it looks very French because yeah when they suddenly started all those sorts

00:50:45.920 of things yeah yeah exactly when they suddenly started to be able to plead in English they

00:50:50.880 didn't have words for all these things so let's use the French once that's why we have things

00:50:54.660 like defendant plaintiff defendant yeah plaintiff wow okay sorry you're just taking me down so many

00:51:02.980 from places. We clearly need another episode. Last question, though, I think Melody sent me

00:51:08.100 this yesterday and was like, we need to add this because this is a great way to end the episode.

00:51:11.860 This comes from Erin. One of my early memories as a child is of my dad telling me not to say

00:51:16.620 ain't because it sounded ignorant. In middle school, my best friend's dad would mercilessly

00:51:21.620 tease one of our other friends for using like as a filler word. The unstated message was clear.

00:51:26.560 The way that you speak advertises your class, your race, and your education level,

00:51:29.880 and you'd better make sure that you're signaling you're belonging to the right group.

00:51:34.260 But language is always changing.

00:51:36.640 There are things that my children say that set my teeth on edge

00:51:39.140 because they sound wrong to me, but which seem totally normal to them.

00:51:42.600 As the kids would say, it hits different depending on when and where you were born.

00:51:47.260 Are there any words, phrases, or grammatical constructions commonly used today

00:51:51.040 that you predict will cease to be considered quote-unquote bad English

00:51:54.180 and will transition into standard usage?

00:51:56.800 I'm thinking of filler words such as like, but also search it up using less and fewer interchangeably and saying me and melody instead of melody and I.

00:52:06.400 And what are some features of the ways that we speak now that used to be considered déclasse or otherwise wrong?

00:52:12.940 Oh, that's a good question.

00:52:15.220 okay so yeah the the stuff that people disapprove of today yeah yeah that i think is going to go

00:52:25.560 mainstream i think the number one almost certainly is the be like construction and i'm like this and

00:52:32.940 he's like that and they're they're like i think that is going to be 100 mainstream in 100 years

00:52:38.160 i don't think i think it's going to be so mainstream that people won't even

00:52:41.300 remember that there was a controversy about it yeah um there are lots of things like this um that

00:52:47.720 are very very very very normal for us but they actually if you go back in the victorian books

00:52:54.280 people are fighting about it um so this segues into the second half of that uh of the question

00:53:00.220 which is mainstream stuff that used to be looked down upon yeah uh and there's one that i learned

00:53:06.600 i remember learning i can't believe this was a controversy and the word is it's about it's about

00:53:13.360 the usage of a particular word which is transpire so we use transpire generally in day-to-day speech

00:53:20.880 if we use it at all we mean to happen it's a fancy way of saying happen the events which transpired

00:53:26.200 on that day but if you look at the etymology of transpire it consists of two parts the trans which

00:53:33.640 is a latin prefix which means a cross and then um the spire which is like respiration inspiration

00:53:42.580 is about breathing yeah so it literally means to breathe through and when you look at the earliest

00:53:48.280 text it means to pass through some sort of porous surface like a vapor might to leak out that's how

00:53:54.520 i understand it that's so interesting when you still if you think of transpiration in a scientific

00:53:59.600 sense that's exactly what it means still yeah yeah okay but when people use it casually they

00:54:03.940 say oh the events which transpired what transpired at that meeting and how did we get from one to the

00:54:08.600 other well people used to metaphorically talk about secrets being let out of you know there

00:54:15.360 was a secret meeting but the event you know the constants of that meeting transpired they leaked

00:54:20.360 out they flowed out of that sealed room and now everyone knows but then people misunderstood what

00:54:26.700 that meant they thought trans the events which transpired at that meeting it must mean the

00:54:31.800 events that occurred at that meeting but just in a fancy way and so people started in the starting

00:54:36.900 in the late 18th century to use transpire to mean happen and people were very upset about this they

00:54:43.700 wrote you know this is this is just this is ludicrous this is this is bad english but dickens

00:54:50.780 used it so i mean i don't know once dickens uses it you sort of no that's so interesting like and

00:55:00.200 it's always like with this like incredible rage or just like disappointment right that's how i

00:55:07.040 think i receive emails sometimes i don't get them as much as my um my partner who's he writes for

00:55:12.840 the atlantic and i will just say that his audience is a little bit older and they are so much more

00:55:18.200 angry about the use of like than I think our peers. I've thought a lot about this because I

00:55:24.500 also get similar things from time to time. And I appreciate all of them. They're all lovely

00:55:28.980 because they indicate that people care about language, which is exactly what I'm all about.

00:55:34.460 It's a good reframe. Thank you for that. I try, but sometimes it's hard. But I was writing about

00:55:39.960 this recently. I did a lot of research as to where the passion comes from. Why would we care

00:55:46.020 what another person says if they use a word in a particular way oh it's not like this it should be

00:55:51.400 like that but okay true maybe but why expend any energy correcting them where does that come from

00:55:58.120 and um it seems to be wrapped up in this kind of anxiety about status that starts to emerge in the

00:56:05.720 18th century when people who previously were of a class that previously didn't have access to

00:56:11.480 education suddenly did they suddenly entered the middle class and were very worried that they would

00:56:17.760 be sort of found out that they wouldn't that they don't belong because they don't have the education

00:56:22.480 that the others have and they have to you know they're middle class have respectability and

00:56:27.960 and you know appearances to consider and so they invested a lot of money and time in these books

00:56:33.040 which are how to use hard words and these are the first dictionaries of english yeah the first

00:56:39.460 dictionaries of english don't include every word in the english language only the hard ones

00:56:42.860 and some of these dictionaries are so horrible um i'm sorry they were they i'm sure they took a lot

00:56:50.940 of work to create but they create new words that you can use just to sound fancy what's an example

00:56:57.340 how they do this is they literally go uh we don't uh we don't use them anymore most of these words

00:57:02.560 thank goodness um but um un-mortalize un-mortalized for to kill because you wouldn't want to say to

00:57:11.600 kill like you're some sort of and that's kind of like on instagram right where you can't say

00:57:16.880 some of these words so people are coming up with words like on alive that sound ridiculous different 0.88

00:57:21.500 function in some ways right but the exact same structure yes and what's sadder is from one

00:57:28.700 perspective, at least, a lot of these words made it into the English language. And so not all of

00:57:34.620 them did. And yes, they're all lovely. I love every word equally. But they had this origin in

00:57:40.580 sort of motives that I, you know, I wouldn't ascribe to myself as I'm not so concerned about

00:57:48.840 being found out, because I live in the 21st century. And so do all of these people, but they

00:57:54.680 seem to consider it a favor you know I'm helping you out by letting you know that you've shown

00:58:00.040 that you don't know what you're talking about right basically that you are a class driver

00:58:05.040 and the history of the history of the English language is full of this yes so so in this sense

00:58:11.080 you know you understand that this is just a process that's been going on for for many centuries

00:58:17.000 and you're just a part of it you're just in that milieu well and the difficult thing too is that

00:58:23.200 I think people do it in a more subtle way by using words that they think other people

00:58:29.260 will not know.

00:58:30.760 Like, this is a way of establishing-

00:58:32.380 A little pause afterwards.

00:58:33.240 Uh-huh.

00:58:33.740 Like, do you know that one?

00:58:35.640 Do you know that one?

00:58:37.480 Or like, you just said milieu, right?

00:58:39.760 Like, how do you pronounce milieu?

00:58:41.260 Like, do you say it the actual way that you're supposed to?

00:58:43.840 Or what do you think about contractions?

00:58:46.400 Weren't they kind of gauche?

00:58:48.220 Yeah.

00:58:48.760 Yeah.

00:58:49.140 Certainly not appropriate in writing for a long time.

00:58:52.020 even well into the 20th century it's only in the i think the late 20th century when you start to

00:58:56.200 see contractions used in formal ish writing um like in journalism or that kind of thing yeah but

00:59:03.640 it was definitely uh looked looked at as improper in some sense or not appropriate um and yet i

00:59:11.200 would say i dare say contractions at this point are completely completely without controversy

00:59:15.620 in uh almost all situations uh there are probably some exceptions in like school

00:59:21.120 essays and things like that but but not ain't but not ain't well ain't's a special one

00:59:26.840 ain't's a really interesting one because um it actually fulfills a very useful function

00:59:32.860 what's the contracted negated form of am we don't have one no i am if you opposite way he is

00:59:42.840 isn't he yes they are aren't they i am aren't i oh what what's going on there that's wrong

00:59:50.720 that's where age should be yeah but because of history we we've uh it's been a prescribed form

00:59:57.680 it's been looked down upon uh for a long time even though it has you know if you were going

01:00:02.400 from the sort of logic of the structure of the system it would belong right there oh my last

01:00:07.580 question was that I think that I have a similar response when I would be grading like a 10th

01:00:14.440 grader's essay and it was so clear that they had used the thesaurus tool and I was like that word

01:00:20.220 doesn't mean what you think it means and if you use it in this way it's going to make you look

01:00:24.020 silly but it's the same impulse as someone who's 70 emailing me to say you use like too much

01:00:31.100 it's supposed to be compassionate none of us is without uh without nitpicking 0.71

01:00:37.440 and it's it's funny because linguists have uh you know a reputation of as uh endorsing

01:00:45.100 descriptive attitudes towards language as opposed to prescriptive attitudes

01:00:48.660 yeah however if you are a linguist and you submit a paper to a journal

01:00:53.480 with creative spellings you see how far that extends right

01:00:59.380 oh that is a great place for us to end so uh i'm just going to say to everyone

01:01:06.080 you must subscribe to colin's newsletter can you tell us about it and where people can find it

01:01:11.700 yeah it's uh it's called the dead language society and it's at deadlanguagesociety.com

01:01:16.300 um also on substack and uh yeah we basically every week look at another one of these strange

01:01:22.540 sort of stories it's a weird word quirk of the history of english spelling some historical

01:01:28.020 event that's had linguistic consequences, we basically dive backwards through the history

01:01:32.800 of the English language and uncover all the fun stuff. One of my recent faves is the history of

01:01:37.660 the word dog. So you can look forward to that. Thank you so much for joining me. This was such

01:01:42.200 a pleasure. Thank you for having me. Thanks for listening to the Culture Study Podcast.

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Culture Study Podcast - February 11, 2026

The Ridiculously Interesting History of Weird English Words

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