Accent Expert Breaks Down Language Pet Peeves | WIRED

hi i'm eric singer i'm a dialect coach have you ever noticed that people tend to have some really strong feelings around language use around the words we use and even the way we say them today i want to talk about some of the most common language peeves where they come from and maybe even debunk a few of the most persistent myths search the internet for language or grammar pet peeves and you're bound to find people venting about other people using expressions like for all intensive purposes or a new leash on life these are called egg corns no no not acorns egg corns the original expressions of course are for all intents and purposes and a new lease on life but you can kind of see where those misheard ones come from they sort of make sense and they certainly sound like the originals i'm going to bring in my colleague fellow dialect coach eliza simpson to help me here hi eliza hi here are some other examples you may have heard or maybe you use them yourself it's a doggy dog world dog eat dog world you need to nip that in the butt nip that in the bud he's a social leopard he's a social leper curl up in the feeble position fetal position do you have any favorites curve your hunger right that's to curb your hunger cold slaw otherwise known as coleslaw card shark which is a card sharp originally there's a great rick and morty clip with an egg corn in it let's have a look really makes you think huh morty we should never take things for granted what i'm just saying life's short we shouldn't take things for granted are you saying granite well yeah what i love about this clip is that i think it demonstrates the kind of really strong feelings about language that we're talking about it's granted with a d take things for granted did you actually think it was jesus christ rick even super educated super genius rick oh you like that huh i bet that really blows your mind i mean yeah it's kind of great he's misheard to take something for granted as to take it for granted all his life so i love egghorns i think they're really fun and creative they're also an example of the way that language changes over time egghorns are a kind of transitional stage there are lots of words and expressions in the language completely official correct words and expressions that began as the same kind of creative mishearings as these egghorns these are called folk etymologies a folk etymology is basically an egghorn that has crossed over the line from being wrong or incorrect or misheard to being in fact the only right correct accepted version of a word or a phrase a burger actually comes from hamburg the city of hamburg with the er at the end meaning someone who comes from there but it gets reanalyzed as ham plus burger so we can take that part out and go oh it's a burger shameface was originally shame-fast with fast meaning to be frozen or stuck in place so to be stuck in place by shame shame fast but that's kind of archaic and so shame face seems like it makes more sense but that's now correct the word female is not etymologically related to the word male at all it comes from old french female and when it came into english it was like oh that's like male so it became female cockroach comes from spanish cucaracha and has nothing to do with or roach both existing english words at the time that it was brought into the language and woodchucks have absolutely nothing to do with either wood or chucking it the name comes from an algonquian language in narragansett it's okuchwan which sounded like woodchuck so by all means enjoy the egghorns that you find in the wild and maybe don't use them in formal writing but let's have a little perspective here today's creative mishearing is in fact tomorrow's unquestioned correct usage next i want to talk about vocal fry and up talk you might associate vocal fry with speakers like kim kardashian and i realized it was just the lighting or lena dunham my team's just been amazing and i've gotta give all my love to my team so what is vocal fry your vocal folds which are right here vibrate very very rapidly when you're producing normal voice what we call modal voice uh that's probably about 180 200 times per second it's so fast you can't even hear the individual pulses but if i slow that way way way way down by using a little bit less air maybe i'm putting a little extra tension in here you can start to hear the individual pulses of my vocal folds coming together [Music] so you can try this at home let's all start on modal voice going uh and then lower your pitch down until your voice starts to creak it may help if you start to sort of run out of air a little bit uh now i'm almost so what is up talk or up speak it's going up at the end of a sentence going up with your pitch using a rising tone hi my name is eric linguists call this high rising terminal terminal at the end of a sentence so these two vocal behaviors fry and up talk come in for a lot of criticism so what do people complain about well they complain that fry and up talk both can make you sound less intelligent less sure of yourself less trustworthy less competent less educated even less attractive vocal fry is sometimes claimed to damage your voice in fact one thing that's hard not to notice is that most of the time when people are complaining about vocal fry and up talk they're complaining about women's voices and especially young women and it's not just women who do this let's try our own experiment shall we let's take one sentence the first sentence from the gettysburg address i'm going to do it with some creak in my voice four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal eliza would you do the same four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal so what did you think do you have different associations when you hear it from a male voice four score and seven years ago and then when you hear it from a female voice four score and seven years ago so creaky voice actually has a linguistic function in some languages in danish for example the word without any creak in your voice means she but the word means dog so you have to actually put that creek in and you can change the meaning of a word in burmese ka means shake and ka means attend on you have to add creaky voice and it means something totally different otherwise the syllable is exactly the same the mexican language khalapa mazatec actually has a three-way contrast between modal voice creaky voice and breathy voice so we could take the same syllable which with that tone means tree but if i do it with breathy voice yeah it means he carries and if i do it with creaky voice yeah it means he wears same syllable so if creek is a linguistic feature of some languages you're doing it all day long it can't be damaging for your voice i think we can put that one to bed next up grammar rules eliza sometimes people literally light their hair on fire when other people mix up your and your or use apostrophes for plurals or those signs in the grocery store that say 10 items or less right because we're supposed to use the word fewer for that right where did that come from the idea that we should say 10 items or fewer instead well let's let's talk about that but you know i can't help but notice that you just ended a sentence with a preposition where did that come from yeah you got a problem with that can we table that for now did you just use the noun table as a verb yes i did let's start there because that's actually something that really bugs people the verbing of nouns shakespeare wrote but now to task the tasker and in another play dust dialogue with thy shadow turning both tasks and dialogue into verbs it's been happening for hundreds of years here are some examples of some really common verbs that began life as nouns divorce model male host diagnose salt pepper highlight mastermind it turns out a lot of these grammar rules rules that you learned in elementary school were just made up in the 17th or 18th century so ending sentences with prepositions the first person apparently to have a problem with this was john dryden in 1672 who criticized ben johnson a playwright colleague of shakespeare's for saying the preposition in the end of the sentence a common fault with him that rule against splitting infinitives to boldly go has a really similar backstory it shows up really in 1864 in a book a plea for the queen's english by henry alford so these prescriptions are both based in latin grammar in latin an infinitive is one word you literally can't split it you can't put something between it the way you can between two go to boldly go in english and you can't put a preposition at the end of the sentence in english you can of course latin was sort of held up by very educated people in the 17th and 18th centuries as the perfect language grammatically it's really a very very different language with different bones different structure different rules so to say english should be more like latin is really pretty ridiculous less versus fewer it was a guy named robert baker in 1770 and he was really just even expressing a preference for the way he thought they should be used or the way he liked to use them but that then got latched onto and hardened into a prescription and beaten into us by our third grade teachers it's kind of a weird thing it doesn't change the way most people speak most of the time so most people don't walk around saying from where did you come and with whom did you go and on what did you step we just don't do that but nevertheless we still have this idea that somehow it's incorrect it's not okay next up word usage almost everybody has pet peeves about words they feel should absolutely not be used in certain ways literally anybody literally of course means exactly precisely just like that as i said right in a literal manner i am literally talking to you right now i am literally sitting on a chair it has another meaning and that meaning is not the opposite of literally it's not figuratively as people sometimes say it's used as an intensifier i'm literally dying right now but this is the thing about words they acquire new meanings all the time meanings can drift but meanings can also be added to it's part of the process of language change here are some other examples disinterested traditionally doesn't mean uninterested it means dispassionate uninvested not having a stake in the outcome it is often now used as a synonym for uninterested actively not interested in something so it's acquired that meaning as well ironic this is a big can of worms so irony is when something happens that is unexpected that is the opposite of what you expect an example might be rain on your wedding day if you got married in a desert specifically to avoid having it rain on your wedding day that would unambiguously be ironic verbal irony is just when you say the opposite is the literal opposite of what you actually mean now people sometimes use the word ironic to describe situations that are maybe just unfortunate uh or coincidental a free ride when you've already paid or even the good advice that you just didn't take so i actually sympathize with the desire to complain about at least some of these usages sometimes there's a shade of nuance or meaning that feels important and useful and like it's being watered down or like it's being lost the thing is this is just something that happens and it is also part of the inexorable process of language change the word nice it originally meant silly or foolish the word silly did almost exactly the opposite it originally meant something like blessed or worthy before it came to mean what it does today so you just can't stand against the tide it's going to change no matter what here's something that might help though english is really flexible language is really flexible and words can have more than one meaning we go on like that just fine we even have a bunch of words that can mean their own opposite take a word like sanction sanction can mean to approve of or to forbid and condemn consult can mean to either seek advice or to give advice to dust can mean either to sprinkle with a fine powder or to remove it from something so i think we're going to be okay with literally you can use it to mean exactly what you want to use it to mean and be understood and other people can use it in a very different sense and also be understood that can all coexist together the central fact of language is that it changes and is changing all the time some of the richness of english in particular comes from some of these borrowings and mistakes and transformations and permutations and you're allowed to have your own personal opinions and preferences we all do but it's important to have a little humility and some perspective and to realize that the forms and meanings of words are ultimately determined by the speakers of a language not by any centralized authorities and that you simply can't freeze it in place and nor should we want to the diversity of expression of forms of meanings is one of the richest and most fascinating things about language it's something to be celebrated and to be enjoyed

Channel: WIRED

Views: 2,873,281

Rating: 4.9537783 out of 5

Keywords: accent expert, dialect coach, erik singer dialect coach, erik singer wired, vocal fry, vocal fry pet peeve, language pet peeves, pet peeves langauge, eliza simpson, eliza simpson wired, eliza simpson dialect coach, vocal fry women, uptalk, vocal fry men, literally meaning, ironic meaning, pet peeves, dialect coach erik singer, dialect, dialect wired, dilect coach reacts, dialect pet peeve, annoying voice, language, language pet peeve, kim kardashian vocal fry, wired

Id: JTslqcXsFd4

Length: 14min 0sec (840 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 23 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/millionsofcats]

Moderator note:

Many comments complaining about certain usages or descriptivism run amok have been removed for violation of this rule:

Comments that contradict major findings of linguistics or its related disciplines are expected to provide academic sources that support their claims.

If you're about to make another comment along those lines, you should probably not. We expect claims about languages to be based on familiarity with relevant concepts from the field of linguistics, not personal opinion, misinformation about the degradation and laziness of language, and so on.

[u/brigister]

one of the better series by Wired. Erik is so good at presenting this (and at writing it too, if he does).

[u/Berandiepe]

Would also recommend the first episode of the Vocal Fries podcast, which is about why they named themselves this and why there’s absolutely nothing wrong with vocal fry.

Despite everyone frying a lot of the time - particularly celebrated actors with some of the most distinctive voices like Benedict Cumberbatch and Jeff Bridges - it’s only ever criticised in young women.

EDIT: While I’m at it, I recommend the whole podcast. It’s all about linguistic discrimination of all kinds.

[u/raspum]

In Spanish there's a tendency to use the word "Bizarro" as "Bizarre" in english and there's a lot of people that gets offended by this cause "it already means brave!" (But nobody uses this meaning since like the 18 century). Even the RAE (Royal Academy of Spanish Language) discourage this use, I found this so pedantic... Trying to control how words are used is just ridiculous. A Language is not something that follows an institution guidelines, this kind of institution MUST adapt to the usage of language not the other way around.

[u/GrazingGeese]

I've only recently been educated on the matter. I used to be a prescriptivist and a grammar nazi who thought AAVE was broken English. Now I know better. Keep educating :)

[u/vitaminbillwebb]

I thought a folk etymology was just what it says: an etymology made up by “the folk” and not verifiable in the historical record. Like the idea that “rule of thumb” refers to wife beating or that “fuck” is an acronym. Does it have to have a change in pronunciation too?

[u/LimoneSorbet]

Rip all those prescriptivists in the comments though

[u/Cayenne_West]

Different but related topic, this reminds me of a heated argument I got into on the internet over someone saying “put up” instead of “put away.” So many commenters said that it was objectively wrong to say that, one even comparing it to using “then” instead of “than.” These simpletons could not wrap their heads around the notion of regional expressions/dialect.

[u/PattuX]

I wonder how much of this comes from the increased international use of English, especially on the internet. There are many sayings, especially older ones, where I don't know what the word even means. I can imagine this resulting in some new egghorns.