Everybody Hertz

Like this show and want to make your own, let me tell you about anchor. It's free, and they have creation tools that allow you to record and edit your podcasts right from your phone or computer. And now you can even add any song from Spotify directly to your episodes. The possibilities are endless for what you can create, whether it's music analysis, your own radio show, or something the world's never heard before. Anchor will distribute your podcast for you so it can be heard on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and many more, and you can also make money from your podcast with no minimum listenership. It's everything you need to make a podcast in one place. So download the free anchor app or go to anchor.fm to get started. Hi, and welcome to the VocalFriest podcast, the podcast about linguistic discrimination. I didn't really meet anybody, but I did speak to, briefly, Mikella Watkins. That sounds familiar. So, Mikella Watkins is in a world among other things. Oh. Okay. That's from a while ago. That's 2013. Yeah. I should have been in more recent things, but nothing, I don't think that I've seen plus TV. But anyway, so I recognized her and I did actually talk to her because she asked a question. Yeah. Sure. I mean, you're a volunteer. Sometimes people are going to ask you questions. Exactly. Exactly. But yeah, I saw Felicity Jones, I saw Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne and Green Goblin, who, my name, the name is Blank Gang. Ryan Reynolds. Nope. That's Green Lantern. See it? Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Right. That Green Goblin. Okay. Okay. So three of them were eating dinner together and Chris and I were at the bar at the same Thai restaurant. And Chris was like, oh, there's any Redmayne that I turn around. I'm like, oh, my God, there's any Redmayne. And then William Defoe walked in and he's like, there's William Defoe and I will turn around. I'm like, oh, my God. That's William Defoe. And then he's like, wait a minute, Felicity Jones is also sitting there. She's sitting there the whole time. But she just looks like a normal person. So it took a long time for us to realize, oh my God. They were all eating together. All together. What a world. Well, Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones were in a movie together that was playing called Aeronauts, which I did not see, so I have nothing to say, but that. And then I guess from William Defoe just knows them because all famous people know each other. I don't know. Well, well, you're having fun. Tell you right. I watched the cinematic classic Speed for Keanu Reeves birthday and stood the test of time. Have not seen it. Perfect movie. Have not seen it. Nope. Nope. I think it came out around the time. It was not really watching movies. Yeah, you know, I was in like university being, you know, boring. Well, I was like seven years old and I thought that's how all relationships should be from that all out. If someone didn't save you from a speeding bus that was going to explode, then what are we doing here? We also want to thank Clarence Barton Pagan. I hope that is the right way to pronounce that for being our newest Patreon. And if you want to join him in supporting us, you can you can support us at patreon.com/vocalfrizepod. And then oh, so you're traveling again to Boston in when October? In October. Ninth through 12th. I'll be in Boston. You can see me at the sound education conference at Harvard. Yes. Yes. Which I mean, you know, some of the people at Harvard are good. Well, not everyone is not everyone's terrible. I guess that's true. Oh, my God. I mean, yeah, yeah, both Harvard and MIT have had recent issues to do it. Come on, Boston. Oh, speaking of Boston, I saw a license plate that said, like Boston, but they then they had a bumper sticker that said, um, shit, what did say, um, use, use your turn blinca with like a BL I N K a that reminds me of one of the things we're going to talk about today. Yes. Beth Rigby says someone has been kind enough to update my Wikipedia page. I don't know what they're talking about. And so someone actually added to her Wikipedia page, severe speech impediment. She vehemently refuses to ever pronounce the ending G in words, which makes her sound like an uneducated idiot who should not be allowed to work in broadcast media. This is an affectation, although others have tried to call it a speech impediment. First of all, just all the ableism there, can we point out it's disgusting? Yes. Also, it's neither of those things. It's neither an affectation. Sure. Nor a speech impediment. Absolutely not. It's just a different pronunciation. Talking. Instead of talking. Yeah. That's it. This is a British person. She's British. Sure. Sky news in the UK. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, not that that matters. I'm just saying, you know, it depends on a number of factors, like where you're from. It also like the sentence or the context of the conversation, or if you use the G or not, because I sometimes use it, sometimes I don't. Well, we should point out there's nothing to do with G. It's just written with a G. Sure, sure, sure. Yes, yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's one sound. So when it's written like I and G, maybe tricky ones are thinking it's like, you know, three sounds that end that word instead of it being, yeah, like you pronounce each letter. The two letters N and G are pronounced in for most people. Although there are some people who pronounce it in G. So then there are people who do have a G. But I don't think that's the case for her. I think even if she pronounced it in, she wouldn't say in G, probably, right. Anyway, I don't think I've actually heard someone say in G. Really? Oh, it's pretty common in East Coast, the United States. Oh, maybe I'm just not noticing. I don't. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty common. I mean, you might not hear it in your day to day, but if you watch certain TV shows, you might. Yeah. Okay. So this is all sorts of terrible and I'm not surprised at a woman's Wikipedia page was updated to say something like this at all. Well, I'm a little surprised because it's a whole, like, subcategory. You know, like, you have, you know, you have like a heading, this person created a whole heading for it. That is to me beyond anything I've seen on Wikipedia before. I've seen certainly really work, like, worst shit in terms of, like, like, grossness. But the fact that they put a whole heading about it, I'm surprised. Well, I thought it was a sick burn. They definitely did. They're like, they're like, they're like, they're like, this is adding a heading. This is making it like a whole thing because we all know, like, you know, kind of from context, if we didn't really, like, learn in English class, that headings to know, like, a separate section of information, whatever. So we're like naming it. So him adding this section is like, yeah, I said he, I'm assuming it's a man who's really angry at a woman's speech. It's like 99% likely. Right. But yeah, so it's, it's, uh, yeah, go away, go away. And it's perfect because we're actually interviewing the interview today. This will be perfect for it. And another thing that's perfect is an article in New Yorker talking about sound again. So it's called a century of shrill. How bias and technology has hurt women's voices. And so I expected it just to be like any other article I read about shrill or how people hate women's voices. But this was about how it's actually like technology and how we developed technology has fucked over women. It talks about how everything from something like a microphone as simple as a microphone has been optimized for lower voices. So we're talking about hurts here. And then apparently the, um, the, what is it called voice band? So what's transmitted over AM radio was also optimized for a certain range of voices that are lower. Yep. Yep. Women's voices don't sound as clear or anyone's voice who's over this, this voice band range won't sound as clear because of how they've optimized, um, this. And other things like how some people will turn up the volume on a microphone when a woman comes to speak because they believe that she's going to be speaking lower. So then it sounds terrible because that's not necessarily true. And by lower, I mean, like softer, sorry. Yeah. It was going to ask so they think that she's going to speak softer. So they preemptively like turn up the mic and then it sounds like she's yelling. So all of these things that are just really undermining the any sort of message the woman could be trying to express. Yeah. I mean, I shouldn't have been surprised by this because of course, of course, it would be optimized, um, optimized for male coded voices, but I mean, I just, I just didn't think that it would be because you know, there are children, even back in the day, there were children on radio. So like if you didn't even optimize it for boy children, right, right, right. I don't know. I was just, I was actually surprised by this. And I guess I shouldn't be right, but you know what else would it also reminds me of? Um, film was optimized for white skin course. Yeah. Yeah, so, oh, wow, yep. So technology is not the great equalizer that everyone, blah, no white men claim it is. Yeah. No, not at all. And this is important too. And I think we, um, we do our guest today helps us, um, make this point. It's important because it's affecting the way that we view people like our presidential candidates. So even in this article, it says that at the first democratic primary debate, um, Kamala Harris is measured tones as she addressed Joe Biden. We're widely lauded. Whereas, um, Kirsten Gillibrand was labeled as shrill, affected, and inauthentic. Shall we get to it then? Let's get to it. Today we have Dr. Lisa Davidson, who is a professor in chair of linguistics at New York University. She is director of the phonetics and experimental phonology lab. Thank you so much for being here with us, Lisa. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to talk to you because I feel like all of the insights that I get about a vocal fry come from you. So, so just to, um, to orient our listeners first, your phonetician and I just think phoneticians are the coolest because you do stuff that I don't dare touch, um, same, um, but you've done some really important work on creaky, foundation/focal fry and we want to get to that last, um, because we want to spend a little bit of time on it. But first, we want to just, um, what we're doing here today is, I guess, being a little bit more media savvy and kind of like diving in to kind of the words and descriptors that we see in articles and media about accents and the way that people speak. And this is something you've been following. Yeah. So, this is, um, I guess I could call it a side project. Um, it's something that I've, I noticed, you know, years ago, right, what we were linguists, we all read articles and think about how people write about language and I, as a phonetician, I've noticed that people use words to describe sort of phonetic aspects of language or phonetic aspects of accents and lots of times I, like, as a professional, I don't really know what they're trying to convey because they're using words that look like technical terms but they're not using them in the way that linguists use them. And so, I wonder if you think that this might be worse for a phonetician than someone like me who's not a phonetician because I'm like, I don't really understand what they're trying to get at, but I'm like, okay, I guess that might be a way I would describe something. If really? I don't know. I don't know about that. I get just as annoyed, I think. It's, I, if I'm getting in the mind of a non-lingualist, I'm like, I kind of see how you got there, but I feel like that might be harder for a phonetician. Uh, well, the problem for phoneticians is that either a technical term gets misused, right? It doesn't mean what a linguist would use it to mean or phonetician would use it to mean or it's not a technical term. And then I'm just frustrated because I think, man, if we just had better education about linguistics, then everybody could just have this set of terms at their disposal, and we could all just, you know, know exactly what we're talking about. Can we start with some of the non-technical terms and then get into the technical terms? Sure. I feel like the non-technical ones are so much fun. I mean, fun, I say this laughing, where I'm also like this has a problem where it could perpetuate some really bad stereotypes about the way people speak, but it's just like so out of left field, so bizarre, some of these words that they use. So, um, what is your favorite, what is your favorite non-technical term? Well, one of the ones that I first encountered and I thought, man, this is so weird. Like, where did they come up with this? And then I realized that actually it's a descriptor that gets used, seems to be used much more than I realized, which is with reference in particular to British speakers. So I think it's probably referring mainly to receive pronunciation or RP. And in particular to royal speech, so it's this phrase cut glass. So I discovered this article, I don't know, I was just reading some article in the BBC and they were talking about Queen Elizabeth and how she has lost some of the cut glass vowels of her youth. And as an American, I didn't realize that this was a thing, but I've since seen it in a couple of other places and I guess it's used to mean, you know, upper crusty, but more than upper crusty, like royal, you know. Oh, okay. So I was like, okay, does that mean like sharp and what does it mean to have a sharp accent or a sharp pronunciation, right? I think it means like, really perfectly, you know, quote unquote, perfectly enunciated. Yeah, but of course, like that itself is can't possibly be right, right? Because like even the royals, you know, just speak, when they speak, they just speak. So they're using, you know, the same kind of connected speech implementations that the rest of us are, but, but yeah, so I take it to mean like, especially higher class. Like I just, you know, I take it to refer mainly to something about the class of the speaker rather than about the accent itself. It means the class, but it also means it's also a reference to the idea that the royals speak with the correct accent and the correct pronunciations. I know this because I have like many British friends who would yell at me saying, no, no, there is a correct way to speak English and it's the queen. Right. Right. In fact, I realized, I've forgotten I did this, but I looked it up in the Cambridge English dictionary and it's there as a, as a, you know, an entry and it says used about a way of speaking in which words are pronounced very clearly and carefully in a way that is typical of someone from a high social class. Yes. Exactly. Right. Okay. Interesting. Yeah, I would just want to say someone who pronounces things very carefully or I've never heard cut gloss before in this. Really? Yeah. Oh, it's very common. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I mean, this was a, so this was a British journalist writing about a British speaker. Yeah. So, so there's obviously a lot of things to get used for American dialects, right? Okay. So, if we start with one that is non-technical, but very common, I guess we could start with something like "lilting." Lilting is an interesting case, right? Because I think we all have an impression of what "lilting" means, but like if you look at lots of different articles, it gets used in a variety of different ways, right? So, one thing I noticed when I was looking at a variety of articles is that it often gets used to, for particularly to the Irish, like to Irish English, that's what I was thinking when I saw that word. Or Scottish. I've also seen it used for Scottish. When it gets used with respect to American English, it's a variety of things. So, I've seen it used, so here's a quote, for example, "Well, now that's an interesting story." Thelma Crowder started in her "lilting" Virginia accent before launching into the story. So, it gets used, I've seen it used with respect to Southern accents before, but then here's another one that I think is also kind of interesting. So, this one is about Ayanna Presley, who's the Congresswoman from Massachusetts. And it says, "Presley talked with a lyrical lilt about growing up in Chicago with a single mother." So, I find that kind of interesting because, say, she's from Massachusetts now, she grew up in Chicago. These are not usually places that are referred to as being lyrical. So, one thing I wonder about this is if it's in this sense, a euphemism for African-American language. So, I'm not super familiar with the way Presley talks, but I just think this is kind of a, it's interesting, it's not necessarily how it's often used, you know, when you pair it with various dialects or various regions, it's not exactly a common one from what I've found. So, would you say, do you think that sometimes these words, these descriptors are used in a way to get around saying that someone spoke like their African-American or someone spoke like their Chicano or something like that? Are people avoiding saying what they really mean? Well, I think there's two things here. One is that I think there might be some avoidance in that sense, and the other thing I think is that lilt in general, right, it's a positive term. So, it gets used when somebody wants to convey that they have a positive attitude toward the accent that they're listening to. I'm wondering, because I don't think Presley has, like, she sounds pretty standard mainstream English to me, so I'm wondering if it's like, she's black, but she doesn't sound black. Working for Congressman Kennedy, and Senator Kerry, what was crystallized for me, is that at the core of all things, politic is relationship. So, it's curious, though, because, I mean, if we want to, you know, briefly transition to another term here, so when you're talking about Chicago in the Midwest, right, usually what you find there is a term more like flat or broad, right, so if she doesn't really have identifiable Chicago features, and she doesn't really have identifiable Massachusetts features, then I think lilt is kind of a curious phrase to use there when for Chicago, normally people would do something more like broad or flat, because that seems to be used to represent like, you know, the Northern City shift type of ass sound. So, maybe what they're saying instead is she doesn't sound Chicago. Yeah, that could be. Because what do people normally mean, then, when they say flat? Yeah. You want to have this one? That's always like, I've always been curious about, because I'm obviously, I've heard about it for like 20 years now, and I'm like, I don't get what it's supposed to refer to. Yeah. Yeah, so I've sort of identified two ways that flat is used. One is that it means, quote unquote, right, no accent, which obviously we're not going to condone. It either means, also quote unquote, mean stream American English, or standard American English, neither term of which I love, but I don't really have a good alternative. So it either means something like that. So here's a quote, her broad flat quintessentially American Midwestern accent doesn't hurt. That's one. Or here's another quote about a guy who grew up in Georgia. But now he says, in this article, he's not very identifiable, and he says, I speak English with a flat accent that gives no hint as to my origins. So that's one way in which it's used. The other way is more specifically about the Midwest, which that first quote did refer to. So here's some other things that people have written. So this is about Gina Haspel, right, the former CIA director. I welcome the opportunity to introduce myself to the American people for the first time. She said in a flat accent that belied her Kentucky roots. Okay. Actually, I guess that one is more like the no accent, right? Yes. Yes. So it belies her Kentucky roots. Okay. But here's another one. They described him as an aloof and awkward, saying that for all his every man, Rust Belt Persona, marked by a flat nasal Midwestern accent. He bristled at criticism and didn't form relationships with colleagues easily. But for some reason, it's incompatible to me to use flat and nasal. I don't know why I just, I don't know what it is. And I also, there was another aloof, aloof. So like, there's a lot of descriptors in this sentence that I feel like are incompatible. I don't know. It's just my feeling like that. A lot going on. Well, saying that aloof is doesn't go with Midwest. Huh. Because me, maybe that's some sort of unconscious bias I have, but I'm like, you can't be a aloof. I don't know. I don't know if it is. Well, that's why I think these things are so interesting because whoever wrote it or however we read and perceive it are going to play on our unconscious biases and all these things that we've learned about how people speak. So I will say one thing that I don't want to forget to say while I'm talking to you, which is that there is a, there is a branch of linguistics called folk linguistics, right, where people have looked into people's attitudes toward using these kinds of words, right? From what I've read, the two of the kind of accent related terms that people have most focused on are nasal, which we can get to, and twang. So there's some, some literature by Dennis Preston and by Bill Above on words like twang and nasal, but it's a little bit different, like what I'm interested in is how journalists use these terms, right, which seem to be a little bit different than how people seem to be using these words because journalists want to convey something, right, it's not just about their own attitudes towards things, although it's obviously influenced that by that, but they, they want to convey something. So they're trying to find these terms that they think we're all going to understand or that we're going to be able to interpret what they mean, it's not always clear to me that they're successful in that because we don't share a common understanding of how to interpret these words. Absolutely. Yes. So you noted in what you sent to us that flat get you's differently outside of the United States as well. So I'm from Canada originally, maybe that's part of the reason why I don't understand what flat supposed to mean, right, but yes, so what does it mean outside of the United States? So I think the example I had of flat was coming from somebody who is East Indian, but lives in Canada now. And he says, as an Indian, East Indian to you who has a flat accent, people are even more curious about me. I look Indian, I am Catholic and it sounds like I have a British accent. And so that caught that quote is so interesting to me because so this is from the Vancouver sign, which is my hometown newspaper. And flat and British going together is interesting. Yeah, right. So at first you want to interpret that use of flat as I have no particular regional accent. But then since he's an Indian person with a British accent in Canada, he can't be using it that way. No, not at all. So it's, yeah, it's unclear to me exactly what this writer himself thinks that he sounds like to people, which is, you know, an example of like you're picking these terms or journalists are picking these terms, and they're not exactly interpretable to everybody who's reading them. Yeah. Right. And so I'm actually, I find it interesting that flat would be associated with like Chicago or the Midwest for some people because I actually, I took a screenshot of this beginning of an article and posted it on Twitter. It was describing it as Chicago accent as "brash." Right. And so, yeah. So with a "brash" Chicago accent, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so I posted and I was like asking people to tell me what how they have, how their accents or how they speak has been, have been described. And so what you're getting at is like exactly what people are saying. But sorry, going back to the Chicago accent, "brash" is actually something that I think I've seen more than flat. Yeah. Like Chicago. Yeah. So Chicago may be different than the rest of the Midwest in that sense, in terms of words that people use to describe Chicago, whereas something like the Midwest writ large, right? Like just like generically the Midwest, that gets referred to as flat. But Chicago may have, you know, people may perceive that Chicago has its own separate version of a quote unquote Midwest accent. I mean, they do, right, because like when they mock it, they mock it with different features than Midwest. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. Chicago is definitely different than I think what people mean by this. We are coming to you live from Dickers here on Thanksgiving Day, a day for giving thanks for or taking punishment from a team that is known as Stabbers. Stabbers. Stabbers. It's so, uh, but somebody else said that they, from their permission again, they get nasal a lot. So can we talk about nasal? Yeah. Let's talk about nasal. Yeah. Let's not bother me so much. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. So nasal is super interesting, right? Because this is a technical term. So, um, when you read the literature about this, like the, the people who have done work in folk linguistics. So, um, in the 70s, I guess, Bill above wrote an article where he also was sort of, he had some consternation about how people use nasal in the sense in the folk linguistics sense because he observed that it can be used both to mean hyper nasal and totally denazelized. And right? So, so he was, you know, kind of critical, I would, I don't want to ascribe meaning to him, but, you know, so he observed that people are not using it consistently because it really could mean either of these things. Now, Preston's response to this in a later article is something like, yeah, but, you know, at least they notice that there's something about the nasality, whether it's hyponazel or hyper nasal. Right? Now, I don't know for sure that that's really what's going on, like I am, I'm always super doubtful of these kinds of things unless I have the recordings in front of me and can, you know, measure something like nasal airflow or a one minus p0 or whatever, you know, what is a one? It's an acoustic measure that allows you to kind of determine how nasal something is with respect to something else. So, okay. Yeah, it's looking at the, at the amplitude of various harmonics that are said to be related to each other that allow you to look at nasality in the acoustic realm. Okay. Thank you. You're welcome. So, but I don't think that's what people are doing. I don't think that's what journalists are doing, right? So, even if above was right and even if Preston's analysis of this is fair, this isn't what people are doing, I think, right? So, if you look at a bunch of quotes, that people just mean like a whole variety of different things, right? So, so here's just like a boring one. So, this is about Natasha Lyon in the show "Russian Doll" and she's described as elongated vowels sung in a nasally pitch reflect the unforgiving life of a true urbanite. What? That might be my favorite quote so far. What? Yeah. Yes. So, that's so much there. Yes. That's awesome. Are you even telling me what's going on? I keep dying and we living the same night. Here's another one. So this is about an actor in a version of Mama Mia that was done in Spokane, Washington. And it says "Muzatko gives an impressive performance, maintaining a perfectly nasal British accent throughout the show." Huh. Which is like, okay, really? Is that the right description of a British accent, I'm not certain? Yeah. I don't know what it would mean in that case at all. Yeah. Or here's, you know, here's to get to our all-time favorite topic of women's voices. If you can get over the nasal quality and unrelenting anoyingness of presenter Wendy Zuckerman's voice, then you're in for a scientific treat. So this is about the host of science versus. Right. The podcast. Right. So one thing about Wendy Zuckerman, right, that's interesting is I listen to this podcast, so I know she's Australian. Well, what scientists have shown is that the rage that's shown towards cyclists is really coming from the motorists dividing cyclists into another. So it's unclear there, again, like, do you recognize that she's not a speaker of American English? I'm sorry. Well, this is actually from a New Zealand website, so I don't, well, that's, you know, other research has shown that there's some rivalry between Australians and New Zealand with respect to their accent. So 100%. So there you go, there it seems to be used. It's almost always used in a pejorative way, right? Yes, it definitely, yes. Yeah. Here's another one that I'm surprised about because, so this is written by an author that has an undergraduate degree in linguistics and previously has written some, what I consider to be really impressive, descriptions of people's languages or people's dialects anyway. So this is about Gwyneth Paltrow's daughter, Apple, which is, I'm so tired, Apple says, frustrated, rubbing her eyes with her fists. She sounded exactly like her mother down to the slight soft nasal on the vowels. High Apple, guys, wow, tired. So these are written with multiple vowels, right? Like, high is hi, hi, hi, hi, that kind of thing. So this is, this one's kind of confusing to me because this is like, well, do you not like that she elongates things or that you perceive that she elongates things? Or do you really think that there's a nasal quality to her speech? Is it, and is it more noticeable because the vowels are longer? Right. If it's there. Right. Also. Is this, I feel like this is some insight into why nasal is often used with women and in a very pejorative way is because of this like elongated vowel thing that is associated with the Kardashians and how that's associated with uptalk and vocal fighting all of the, like, the whole package kind of thing. I wonder if that's what you're seeing. It's certainly another thing you can stick in there. It's not exclusively used with female speakers though for sure, I mean, so here's a, here's a quote about a man while they ate, he told them stories in a nasal Brooklyn accent. Right. So that's just like, you don't have a better descriptor to use of this Brooklyn accent. So you just say nasal. It's kind of like a catch all, I think. A catch all for sort of like an accents that are dispreferred by the list, by the journalist maybe. Yeah. But it seems more negative than something like wilting for example. So people really like, so so wilting is like I said, it has a positive connotation, whereas nasal usually has like a pretty pejorative connotation. And so the person that had said the nasal, Michigan accent, when I asked Twitter, he also provides some insight that says that his accent is not particularly nasal. We just really like, ah, the bell, ah, not great. Is that the north, like the shift, the, the vowel shift happening there, is that what he's picking up on? Yeah. But I mean, that would be about vowel quality being different than, you know, standard American English slash machine American English. Not about the fact that the ad itself is particularly nasal. Although, you know, without like getting into the weeds too much, right, that vowel does change its quality even more when it's in front of a nasal consonant than when it's in front of a non nasal consonant. So if for some reason they're observing that, you know, that vowel is a little bit different depending on whether it's followed by a nasal or not, then I suppose that might have something to do with it. Right. So in the nasal context, maybe it's, it just sounds so different from the a from other areas of the United States that so the nasal is kind of helping you pick up on the fact that it's shifted more. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, presumably there are some people who have really good linguistic intuitions in that way and would notice that. So maybe this person that you talked to is somebody like that or they might not even know that that's what they're picking up on is just that it's so different when it's nasalized that like they're noticing the difference, but that without noticing why maybe, yeah, maybe. I've been thinking about the ones that maybe seem like they're, they're kind of like nice or like a compliment, but are just, I don't know if that's necessarily what they are, but uh, where it's like, um, old, timey or quaint, yeah, like what, what is going on there? What might people be picking up on with that? Well, I mean, I suppose what could be going on there is if somebody has a particularly noticeable regional accent, right? Then if people are assuming that our accents are getting more and more, you know, leveled as time goes by maybe because of more social media influence or more, just more media influence in general, that I think that actually people are showing that this isn't really true that people think that regional, don't think that regional accents are leveling as much as one might think, right? So the assumption might be that in fact, they are leveling quite a bit, but the truth is that actually regional accents are, you know, pretty much going strong still, but I suppose if you take somebody who speaks of more standard variety and then hear somebody with a more regional accent, then it might seem kind of an agronistic in the sense that the standard speaker would think, aren't we all becoming the same? Why aren't you the same? You know, that makes sense. But in fact, that's not even really true. Like regional accents are, you know, very much a lot in the United States. Right. And so do you think that if someone used that descriptor, they might have some experience with that accent that they're talking about or is it people that have maybe no experience and are assuming that this is like something they might hear on like an old movie or something like that? Well, that's a good question. I don't really know the answer to that. Although that does remind me, I was just reading an article when I was looking into some of this stuff. I was reading an article about, I don't know if either of you watched the TV show "Shit's Creek." To earth. It was an article about Moira Rose's accent, right? And she speaks that, you know, there's tons of articles about this that mid-Atlantic, right? The writer's hypothesis is that she's supposed to sound like that mid-Atlantic accent that actors in the '50s and '60s used to use, right? And so that kind of accent strikes me as something that you could kind of plausibly describe as old-timey. Well, can I ask them there? Some things that are just not done, smoking in a car with a baby unless you crack a window, tipping before attacks, mixing drinks with cola and giving away a coat that doesn't belong to you. Because nobody realistically speaks that way anymore, neither in the media nor another example of somebody that they talked about in that article was Jackie Kennedy. The thing I care about most is to make it more of a museum with more pieces of beautiful furniture that belonged to our president. It's very little antique furniture here now. But not even politicians sound like that, you know? So that's a kind of example of something that, like, it wouldn't hurt. I don't think it would be too bad if you described that as old-timey because really nobody speaks like that anymore. Yeah, the only person who sort of speaks kind of like that, and it's a slightly different accent, is Christopher Plummer, has what's called Canadian D.T. She was a marvelous part, and I loved the Lord of the Rings. I grew up on it, actually, it's a great, great, great book, and it became a great film. And then Ian played it, Ian McKellen, who was absolutely marvelous in it, and he couldn't have been warmer, which I might not have brought to it. I might have been a little cold and imperious. He was warm, and I hate the son of a bird. Oh, yeah. That was mentioned in that same article, too. I'd never heard that term before, but I liked it. Yeah, me, too. So another one, I just have to bring up, since it's your neighbor. Someone said that Pittsburgh English gets called "gritty." Oh, yeah. What is that? For some, like, my instinct is to think that maybe they're picking up on, like, vocal fry, just because of that, or "gritty," but what I would guess that is because they're working class. Yeah. You're describing the people, right? I mean, it always goes back to describing the people, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't go back to look at this, but one thing that might be useful is a couple of years ago, Galker had this world's worst accent bracket. Oh, good. And I forgot about that, which is definitely terrible, and, you know, something I bring up in my classes about, you know, how we, we talk about accents in a way that we wouldn't talk about anything else, right, like about people's appearances or about their weight or whatever. You know, all the things that are generally gone from, from conversation these days, but you can definitely see examples of these things where people will talk about accents in these virally pejorative ways, right? But I bet that if you go back to that bracket, you'll find you'll be able to mine it for some really good terms for the discussion we're having right now. Yeah. I'm hoping that people that listen to this show have become, have begun to realize how terrible something like that is because we are speaking ultimately about the people. And so that makes me think of, okay, so a lot of, since ultimately this is always about, like something deeper, like sexism, classism, whatever, of some accents, like an Australian accent by an American might be described as sexy, but then we're going to have very more pejorative terms of, for people that we may not admire so much, or, you know, like people that we denigrate in our society somehow. So, and not every but not all Americans would describe Australian as sexy. I've definitely seen very negative terms used for that. Yeah, and it depends on what, you know, what regional stuff as well, like, you know, maybe people are thinking about like a crisp, crisp hymn's worth Australian accent when they're not really thinking about like crocodile dundee or something. That's a nice, that's a nice, one descriptor that I find particularly problematic and hurtful as shrill. So, can we talk about shrill? Yes. So yeah, I mean, we've talked about shrill before, right, like out there in the world. Shrill is not about accents, right, usually it's about somebody's voice quality. But it, again, it's not a technical term, like no linguist uses that phrase to mean anything. I didn't look this up, but my guess is that if, you know, if you categorized how many times it was used to refer to a female speaker's voice versus a male speaker's voice, there might be the occasional case where it gets referred, where a man gets referred to a shrill, but like 90% of the time it's going to be a woman. And then I got to wonder if a man is being described as shrill. If it's some, like, in some way saying that this person is speaking like a woman usually speaks, or female-coded language is being used by this person, so they're shrill. I wonder if that's what's happening when it's not used with that. That would be a really interesting thing for somebody who works on big data and text analysis does. Yes. We could use, you know, we could do corpus mining for good and look at how many times shrill is used to mean something like that. It's funny, but he needs a research idea out there, so mind corporate for this. And then come on a show and talk to us about it, because I'm very sure. Um, so the big, I mean, you couldn't get away from the word in 2016, because of the presidential campaign and Hillary Clinton. So she was called shrillery, just, it's so many pieces that I read, um, shrill was used a lot with her. So what do you think shrill is getting at? I mean, doesn't it mean nagging, you know, like what you would think that it would, like, if I had to, if I had to assign a phonetic quality to it, I would think of it more as something like high pitched or loud, right? But it doesn't mean that, like, you know, I don't think people use it to mean that. And I don't think you, you know, you couldn't really use that to mean what Hillary Clinton sounds like, because she isn't particularly high pitched. She isn't at all high pitched, actually. And she's not loud or, you know, normally speaking, she's not like a yellow or anything like that. I went to the inauguration with that hope and it was a painful and disappointing, yeah, experience. It was the start. But the March, the next day, was really terrific. So it can't really mean that, right? So it has to mean something more about how people perceive, you know, something more like a discourse interaction, I would guess. Many people brought up the point that she reminded men of their mothers or their wives. And so I think it's, yeah, I think it's about nagging, yeah. And horribly, since I grew up in this society, I always associate the word nagging with women. Because, of course, or wouldn't I? Yeah. Oh, yeah. I'm sure if we do the same corpus analysis, we'll find that nagging is always associated with women. Yeah. I'm probably very similar percentages. Yes. As sure. If you're out there, somebody will give you a list of words and you can look at how they're distributed. Happily. In my various texts, yeah. One thing I found that I thought was really, really funny. I posted about this on Twitter a while ago is there was this article on her finery 29 about Elizabeth Warren. And it was kind of hilarious because it says she's very definitive when she makes a statement. Her voice comes down at the end. No. Oh, wow. So it's like observing that she doesn't use up talk. Yeah. That's some shade. But what's funny about it is I think the joke that I made on Twitter when I posted about this was that it's surprising to me that she didn't get called too old as a result of this, right? Because if up talk incorrectly, but if up talk is attributed to younger people or younger women, then it's, you know, that here's an opportunity where you can take this woman and insult her by pointing out that she has this quote unquote positive, you know, aspect of her speech that people like to think is a positive. But criticize her for it by calling her too old, right? Like, this is a marker. That's not what happened in the article, but I just, I thought in a way, like in terms of these, these political observations, it was like shocking to me that she wasn't criticized for this. Yeah. Absolutely. I have definitely noticed it's better than 2016. I don't know if people have learned or if we've shifted to talking about different things, but it feels like the way that we describe the female presidential candidate's voices has improved from 2016. Except that recently the Washington Post had an article, like, of their cover article in the magazine about Kirsten Gillibrand. And it says, "Gillibrand begins with a 15 minute, very well rehearsed, one woman biographical show delivered in her creaky trill." What the hell is a creaky trill? I know it's a new one, right? Yeah. Well, at least to me. I know. I was like, "Wow." So Gillibrand is, so, so I will say, she, she's my son and her, right? And I like her a lot, but I noticed that her, her pitch is actually quite high for a politician. It is, yeah. And I had a choice to make whether it is day silent or not, whether to say it's not okay with me. And I decided to say that. And so she inspired me to actually look at the pitch of, I think, 30 female elected officials, mostly senators and congresspeople, and to look at the range of the pitch and to see whether the pitch of, you know, politicians was, American politicians is generally higher or lower than the average. And what I found is that it does span the range that has been reported for American English speech, but that it is on average much lower. It's lower by about 30 Hertz, which is quite a bit lower, but Gillibrand was definitely one of the higher people on that list. So I think Creekey Trill here is probably trying to describe that she has a higher pitch than you might otherwise hear in a female politician. Huh. Interesting. Who did you notice or who did you find where on the, the lower end of the pitches? The lowest is Claire McCaskill. Oh. Okay. What's happened today and how, how the future is brighter than we all think it right now. It is. And I wonder if that has to do with age as well? Maybe. I did look at their age at some point. I did factor their age into it and it didn't really seem to be super correlated. And the other thing is that a lot of the, what I, what I used wasn't necessarily current. So the way that I did this was to pull out there from their advertising, the phrase, and I approved this message because every single one of them had to say the same phrase, right? So that's what I looked at to assess their overall pitch. So, so it was, you know, the context was held constant there. So Claire McCaskill was the lowest. And Gillibrand is not the highest. So Tammy Baldwin was actually one of the highest. So she was the third highest. In the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, the NYPD rated the Stonewall in and arrested several people. Uh, Gillibrand was not as highest, Tammy Baldwin. She was like in the upper third, around 190 Hertz, but, but Baldwin was 200 Hertz. The highest person was 240 Hertz. The very highest is, is a, a congresswoman named Vicki Hartzler from Missouri. I'm a lifelong farmer, I'm a public school teacher, I'm a small business owner, I'm a wife and a mom. Oh, yeah, no hurt, no hurt. You know, so when I know how Tammy Baldwin sounds, I know how, um, Claire McCaskill sounds. And, you know, maybe I'm just, I've taught myself not to notice these things, but I, I wouldn't have noticed their pitch, either one of their pitches before it being pointed out. But like, I, when you say it, I'm like, okay, I can, I can hear that. But before then, I'm not really paying attention to it. Interesting, because I definitely did notice Kristen Gillibrand's voice being kind of high. Yeah. That was definitely something that, that stuck out to me. And also, AOC's voice is kind of high too. Yes. What we don't have is the required report to Congress. And while there's all of this debate about whether a citizenship question should be included or not included, the question I have is, why are we violating the law to include any question whatsoever in the 2020 census? Well, that's a, is that a younger thing? Like, maybe, no, not related to you at all. Yeah. I don't think so. Gillibrand's always been this high as far as I can tell. Okay. Um, as high as she is. She, I don't know if she's higher or lower than AOC. I didn't look at her because she hadn't run yet when I did that work, but, uh, my impression is that AOC is really on the high end. And I have definitely noticed that. And I think it's great. I think it's really great because I think that there is this skew. Like either, whether it's, um, intentional or not, like either, I don't, you know what I mean? Like, either women who have lower pitch are the ones who are more likely to run for a variety of reasons, or they run, but they lower their pitch because they probably, you know, perceive it as being an asset to have a lower pitch. So I think AOC could pave the way for women who have higher pitch to, to really flourish. Except, you know, I, I was saying that I feel like it's getting better in journalism. I'm not using words to describe Congress women in particular in negative terms, but AOC is described as infantile or the way that she speaks is like babyish. It's, it's kind of like talked about as if she sounds very young, but they say in a very pejorative way at, you know, so that is something that I have noticed for sure. Yeah. Right. That's true. And I think that is probably because of her, especially high pitch, um, I should probably pull out one of her ads and do this using my same methodology because she has to have them, right? Like anybody who runs for office and had ads somewhere has to say, and I approve this message. So I could, I could find it and pull it out and see how high she is relative to the others. Yeah. Now I want to know, yeah, I want to know she's going to be the highest. But yeah. So saying stuff like this is just another way to undermine women's messages. Yeah. For sure. In, in this case, right? So she definitely gets described with respect to her voice in a way that, you know, I don't think lots of politicians necessarily do specifically unless, I mean, of course, some do, right? So we would be remiss if we didn't talk about then how somebody like Lindsey Graham or Jeff Sessions gets described in the media, uh, because their accents are also reviled, right? At least with respect to, um, Lindsey Graham, I also think there's some homophobia in there. Regardless of whether he actually is gay. Yeah. There could be. Yeah. Definitely. So since we just talked about shrill and we were talking about, um, women's pitch, let's talk about volume. All right. All right. So a creaky foundation is what a phonetician would call it, right? Yes. I prefer that. Do you just give us a quick, um, what's the difference between vocal fry and modal voice? Because I, or sorry, creaky and modal voice, because I think that's important before we go forward. Yeah. So, so creaky. So modal voice is, you know, the, the kind of regular vibration of the vocal faults, um, what you, what a speaker would produce if they didn't have any pathological, uh, aspects to their speech. And if they're not trying to implement any other kind of phonation like breathy or creaky or, um, harsh or whatever, I often think about that as somebody's habitual voice, right? Or their habitual pitch. So when I have measured people's pitch and they're not producing any other kind of phonation and they're just producing the sort of normal vibration of the vocal folds, that's what I think of as their habitual fundamental frequency or their habitual pitch. Um, and then creaky is, it, you know, it has, it has certain, um, articulatory properties and certain acoustic properties. So, um, you know, some of the articulatory properties are the vocal folds in a cycle of vocal fold opening and closing, they're closed for a longer period of time, uh, the vocal fold vibration is damped between the opening and the closing more than they normally would be. Um, it's also a little more irregular. So the, the rate of opening and closing isn't, isn't perfect, right? There's going to be some irregularity between the, the period of the opening and the closing. And of course, it's a much longer period. So that's the main thing. And that's what leads to the main acoustic property, which is that people hear a low pitch when they hear creaky voice. And what, what is the difference between when people perceive someone as having vocal fry, quote, quote, quote, quote, all of the time versus maybe having it only sometimes. What is the difference there? Yeah, that's a good question. Um, so, so the, the main way that, that creak is used in lots of languages, not just American English, but, you know, since we're speaking English on this podcast, we'll start with that, um, is that it's used to mark the ends of sentences, right? So I'm sure you guys have covered that before, but that's like, that's like the prosotic use of creaky voice. And that's used in lots of other languages too. People have observed it in Spanish. They've observed it in Finnish, they've observed it in a variety of other languages. Um, and so I think in that case, when, when somebody just has phrase, final creak, that's when it doesn't really get noticed, because in fact, it's expected there. And as listeners, we use it to understand that a speaker is coming to the end of an utterance. So it's, it's, it's useful, right? Um, if it extends beyond that location, I think that's when people start to think of creaky voice as more than normal. Um, that said, you know, there's now a lot of sociolinguistic work where people are starting to look at how creaky voice gets used other than just in phrase final creak position. And, um, depending on the speaker and depending on the context, it can be used to meet a lot of different things. So for one, in one paper, for example, one researcher found that it seems to be used to mark parentheticals. So that's one thing, right? So if you say something and then you describe it in a parenthetical, the parenthetical itself is going to be creaky. That actually makes a lot of sense when you think about how you do it in writing. You're kind of like putting it off, offsetting it from something. And then so like maybe if you change your pitch, you're offsetting it from like the bigger discourse or something. Yeah. So that's kind of cool. Do people that use vocify all the time, like, are a lot of time, like me, what does our modal voice then look like? Do I made a look at your modal pitch in a recording of you and let you know? Yeah. I do. But we still have someone who uses vocify a lot would still have a modal voice, right? Absolutely. Yeah. So I mean, so I mean, even if you use, you know, phrase final creaky voice, and even if you use it extensively, like maybe you start your sentence, you start it further back in the sentence than, you know, other speakers do, you almost always start a phrase with modal voice, right? The first half of a sentence usually, at least half of a sentence, often more than that, is going to be modal voice. You know, the other thing that people will say, and it's true, is that of course, creaky voice is found at the end of the sentence because it's when we're losing air pressure. And one of the aerodynamic properties of creak is that it has lower pressure. So when we're, you know, running out of breath, basically, we don't have as much air to force through the vocal folds, and that is one thing that leads to the kind of vocal vibration that is creaky. So that's, you know, that's the phonetic precursor to it. And then the question is, like, can you extend it and start using it for other things? And the answer is, of course, because that's always what we do with things that have a phonetic precursor. We turn them into all sorts of things. What's your favorite use of vocal fry in the media and journalism? Or just use of the term, like my favorite description of it? Yeah, or someone, use of the term, that may be incorrect or that's horrible. So here's, this is from an article in Fast Company. And the title of this article is The Verbal Tick of Doom. Why the vocal fry is killing your job search? Yep. I've read that one. The vocal fry? The vocal fry. But the vocal fry. I think this is actually really the most shocking one that's out there in a way of all the ones that are out there. So this, right, so he tells the story about how his assistant gives him a stack of resumes and he says, the staffer did a great job because the resume on the top of the pile looked like a perfect match of background and experience. Okay, so great, right, a perfect match of background and experience. But when I spoke with the candidate, I ruled her out immediately. Why? Because of how she talked on the phone. Every sentence ended in a gravely low vibrato. It was a grating kazoo-like effect that made the candidate sound immature, unconfident, and frankly, annoying. There was no way we could risk having her represent us with a senior executive audience in spite of her considerable track record and credentials. Yeah, that one also shocked me. I wrote about it in Babel because I was like, how dare you? How dare you? You're admitting what you're not supposed to say out loud, basically. Yeah. The quiet part out loud. It seems like she could sue him for this or something, maybe. Yeah. She definitely could if she knew that she was the one. Yeah, right. So, I mean, that's one of my favorite media descriptions of it because it's just so straightforward, right? It's like, did you, you didn't think that, you know, maybe you shouldn't, maybe you shouldn't rule out your best candidate just because of this. So, what I've been looking at more recently is actually the perception of vocal fry rather than the production of it. So, a study that just got accepted, both the media and also other academics have been wondering about, right? This has been conjectured about a number of times in both kinds of publications is whether people who have, you know, habitually higher pitch, so women, either women who are, you know, in a professional setting or I think you guys talk to Laosim and about this also, right? So, one at one possibility is that trans men also, it's been conjectured, but I don't necessarily think it's been kind of conclusively shown. But that one option for speakers like these two groups would be to use vocal fry to lower your pitch in a professional setting, right? So, that's something that people have talked a lot about. But it was, I was curious about this because actually, I mean, this is related to the question you just asked, Megan, which is, you know, what is your habitual pitch sound like? And so I wondered, when you hear somebody who uses both habitual, their habitual modal pitch and also creek at some points when they speak, what is a listener hearing in terms of their pitch? Are they hearing, right, just their modal pitch and assessing their pitch based only on their modal pitch, maybe because they know that creek is not modal? Or are you kind of combining the two, right? And the reason this is relevant is because if you're, if you're a speaker who's trying to use creaky phonation to get a lower pitch, can not even work for you, right? So I didn't talk to anybody about whether they're, you know, actively trying to do this, whether they're consciously trying to do this. I didn't, like, I didn't interview, you know, people in a workplace setting, for example. But what I did do was take three types of stimuli. So I looked at both completely modal stimuli, completely creaky stimuli, and then I looked at things that started off as modal and ended as creaky. So it had phrase final creek. And they were, and I was able to find the same speakers producing all three of those types of utterances because I use podcasters. That's how I get my stimuli for these studies. So there's hours and hours and people usually have all kinds of those utterances. So that's cool. And so I presented these, there are four women speakers, and I presented them to I think 70 some listeners. And I looked to see whether people make, you know, if you just rate somebody's pitch on a scale of one to nine, do you make a distinction between these three different kinds of stimuli? So there were two speakers who were higher pitch. So around, there are habitual pitch was around 200 hertz and 200, and sorry, and two speakers who had lower pitch, so their modal habitual pitch was around 150 hertz. And it turned out that listeners, when they rated their pitch on a scale of one to nine, they, for the higher pitch speakers, they made a three-way distinction. So for the fully modal tokens, they rated them as the highest of all. For the fully creaky tokens, they rated them the lowest of all. And for the ones that were a combination of modal and creaky, they rated them in the middle. For the lower pitch speakers, that didn't happen. So there, they're already so low that going creaky doesn't gain them anything. So there, the modal pitch and the partially creaky pitch were rated the same. And then the fully creaky pitch was rated the lowest, significantly lower. Huh. Did you say that these were all women that voices you used? The speakers were all women, yeah, the participants were men and women, but they behaved the same. So there was actually no effect of the listener gender on these ratings. Oh, that's? That's actually nice. Yeah. That's very nice. Yeah. Huh. That's really cool. Yeah. So if you are somebody who, look, I'm not advocating that people should use this technique, because of course it's, you're going to get dinged for it, right? So you can't win if you use this technique, because it's what, the reading of the, the vocal fire literate whatever the vocal fire popular articles on the creaky voice literature tells you is that, you know, you're not, this is not necessarily the best technique to use if what you want to do is lower your pitch, because you're going to get dinged for it. But it is, it will actually lower what people perceive your pitch to be. I just don't know that it's going to be a winner for you. Well, now I really want to see how people perceive accents and voices that are, are described as old-timey or quaint or all of this. So the folk linguistic nasal, so you said the folk linguistic stuff just kind of looks at nasal and what's other. Twang. They looked at twang. Yeah. We need to have like an extension of that and see what people are picking up on, because it's really interesting. We should talk about twang actually, now that you bring it back up. I had to look it up when we were doing our Southern American English episode, the first episode. But what is twang supposed to mean? Twang also means regional dialect, right? I mean, like very generally it seems to mean regional dialect, but also, and this is also something that the people who have worked on on folk linguistics have looked at. It also gets used in sort of the rural versus urban descriptors. So it's not just regional accents, so I don't think that Pittsburgh, for example, would be described as twang, although I'm sure if you go out there and look, you'll find that. But it's probably, it seems to be more representative of rural dialects, like rural regional features. Yeah. I mean, that's just, again, I haven't done like the corpus study that needs to be done to look at this, but that's my impression of how it gets used. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah, now that I'm thinking about it, I'm sure I've seen it for rural Washington state accents. There's one article, like one scholarly article looking at the use of twang by speakers in Oklahoma, and Oklahoma is kind of an interesting geographical region because it's not Southern and it's not Midwestern, so it kind of doesn't have a great classification in that respect. But twang is something, you know, the author interviewed a whole bunch of just people who live in the region, who use the word twang to describe their own dialect. Interesting. I totally think of Oklahoma as being self. I do too, just because my, I have family there, and they sound like what I associate with the South in my head, or maybe I've associated Oklahoma with the South because I do have family there, so. Oh, maybe. I don't, yeah, I don't have a strong feeling about it myself, but I'm also not really familiar with that familiar with the dialect, but I don't know, has Elizabeth Warren been accused of speaking in twang because, you know, she's from Oklahoma, not that I'm aware of, but she also does not sound like an Oklahoma to me. He says the Green New Deal is a dream. I'm assuming he says it. I don't know what he'd say. I'm just saying where he is right now is a nightmare. All of this stuff is like fantastic fodder for like, just like having discussions like these and doing research. I wonder as kind of like the last thing, what might you want to see journalists do instead? So, I will call out one journalist, the one who does have a background in linguistics. That's Taffy Brotter-Akner. She writes for The New York Times, and she writes really well in this way that's interesting right because she knows she has to write in a way that's interesting, I'm sorry, she knows she has to write in a way that's understandable to her lay readers, so she doesn't use technical terms that, you know, linguists would use. The thing is what I ideally want is for people to have like basic understanding of linguistic terms. Like if people could take the first like three weeks of my phonetics class, you know, not a super huge time commitment, just like just a small time commitment, then for people who write about language, I think it would, you know, be worthwhile to invest in understanding some linguistic terms and how linguists use them and then deploy them in a way that is, you know, maybe not, it's most technical use, but in a way that isn't contradictory to their technical uses, because the problem right now is not only, look, we're expendable as linguists, right? It doesn't matter that we get upset about this, but to me, the real problem here is that because these terms aren't universally agreed upon by speakers, they don't, journalists aren't conveying what they mean to convey because we don't all have the same, you know, background knowledge of these terms, and that seems problematic to me, and it seems like something a journalist would want to avoid. Yeah, absolutely. The solution to this is we should teach some linguistics in schools, or at least in your foreign language acquisition classes. That's what it always comes down to, right? Yeah, absolutely, and I think a lot of people would like it. I mean, they'd realize it's like kind of a, I don't know, I first saw it as a science that I felt was like very relevant to being a human being, and it was really cool. Yeah, and it also helped me understand what the hell the French vowels were. Yeah, yeah, definitely with respect to second language learning it, we would have benefits for sure. Like how many hours of French was I in before I finally understood what was going on, anyway. Yeah. That's another option, right? If you haven't done that, you should definitely get somebody to come in and talk about that. Yeah, absolutely. Oh, so many people we need to talk to you still. Yeah, I'm so glad we got to talk to you though, you've been somebody we want to have inviting us. Absolutely. I, you know, someone that we wanted to have on for a long time, and we could have talked to you about so many things, but I'm glad that we talked about this because it's so relevant and so, like, out there, and so everyone can connect with it in some way. Well, and also, like, you know, we talk, as linguists, we complain about this stuff all the time, but we don't really do anything about it. So at least this is like something to send to German. Maybe it's incumbent upon us to fight a guy for describing, oh my god, I'm like finding myself up in this. Yeah. Oh, well, maybe in a future project, yeah, you are one thing I could do or people could do. It doesn't have to be me, but maybe somebody, if not me, could take on, you know, writing a guide for terminology use for journalists that would help to start to standardize these uses. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a really great idea. Yeah. Yeah, because then we get away from these kind of racist, sexist tropes, classist tropes that we see being played out over and over again, which is really important. Yes. That would certainly be a benefit of that. Absolutely. Awesome. Thank you so much. Well, thank you, guys. Thank you. And we always leave our listeners with, don't be an asshole. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. The vocal fries podcast is produced by me, Carrie Gillan, for Half-Tone Audio, The Music by Nick Granham. You can find us on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @vocalfriespod. You can email us at [email protected] and our website is vocalfriespod.com. 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