[Music]
L: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's
enthusiastic about linguistics.
I'm Lauren
Gawne.
G: And I'm Gretchen McCulloch.
And
today we're talking about how we talk
about time.
L: But first, we have very
exciting news for 2018, which is: twice
the number of full episodes of
Lingthusiasm every month!
G: So, up to this
stage, we've been doing Patreon bonus
episodes, which are sometimes a little
bit shorter, one of them is a text chat
episode, and sometimes they're
cut bits from the show – now we actually
have enough support on Patreon to do
full-length bonus episodes.
So that means
two Lingthusiasm episodes a month for
people who support us on Patreon.
We are
really excited to have grown this far in
this short amount of time.
L: We'll still
have free episodes every month through
the main channel, but we'll also have
another full-length episode, which means
you get more bang for your Patreon buck.
G: Yeah!
So, thanks to everyone who has
brought us there so far and it is not
too late to start listening to these and
all the previous Patreon episodes as
well!
We also released Lingthusiasm
merch last month – IPA scarves, T-shirts
and mugs and bags that say "Not judging
your grammar, just analysing it", and
Lingthusiasm stickers.
And they have been
very popular, we have been very much
enjoying seeing people's photos of them
and stories about who they got them for,
so feel free to keep sending us those.
We're excited to see what you end up
doing with them!
L: We were so excited when
we put this – especially with the scarves
and the "Not judging your grammar" –
yeah, we were so excited when we were
putting this together and it's been so
nice to actually be able to share it
with everyone and everyone else also
getting really excited about it.
G: And
we're really excited to see some of that
gear and some of our listeners at the
Linguistic Society of America annual
meeting in a few weeks in January.
So,
we'll hopefully see some of you there!
L: Our current Patreon episode to round out
the year is a question and answer
session that we did at our Montreal live
show.
So if you want to know what it's
like to have the opportunity to ask us
some questions, if you want to relive the
live show experience, that is available
on the Patreon now!
G: It had a really good energy, people asked
really good questions.
And it was really
fun to have that kind of more back-and-forth
than we normally get to do in the
episodes.
So you can check that out and
all the previous episodes.
[Music]
L: There's a quote that circulates around
on the internet, one of those ones where
the original author is lost to time, that
for me sums up I think a lot of what
we're going to cover in the episode
today, which is, "You are a ghost driving
a
meat-coated skeleton made from stardust."
G: Hmm.
That is both weird and cool.
L: And I
really like this quote because for me, it
takes something that we take for granted,
our lived experience of how we
move through the world, and it kind of
just unhinges that for a second and makes
you reflect on how really weird human
bodies and human social interaction is.
And I feel like a lot when I teach
linguistics classes, a lot of my class is
just me going, "Look at this really
obvious thing you've done your whole
life, think about how weird it is for a
moment, think about how weird it is that we
actually communicate with each other
functionally."
G: I think a lot of the times
when we're talking about linguistics, we
end up talking about the
"meat suit" part of, like, this is what your
tongue is doing.
Just think for a
second about the fact that you have a
tongue!
It's pretty weird!
Or this is what
your vocal cords are doing, or
the weird flaps of skin and the rest of
your throat are doing, or the, you know,
neurons that you can't see.
And there's
there's a lot of physical aspects to
language that says, okay, well, spoken
languages tend to have certain kinds of
similarities because that's just how the
human vocal tract is designed.
Or
sign languages have certain
kinds of similarities because that's
what your hands can do.
Like, there aren't
any sign languages that require you to
stand on your hands.
Or
spoken languages that require you to, like,
bite your tongue to make the word,
because humans don't want to do that!
And
I think the part that we often miss is
that in addition to being in meat-coated
skeletons,
we're also on a planet.
And we're on the
same planet.
And some of our experiences
as speakers of any of the languages on
this planet have certain kinds of
similarities with each other because of
that planet, and a lot of those are
related to time.
L: And so that is our topic
for today.
We're gonna talk about talking
about and thinking about how time works.
G: So Happy New Year's, Earthlings!
We're gonna talk about time.
L: We are
being a bit end-of-year,
just-after-first-anniversary reflective here,
but
we think it's relevant all year round.
G: Yeah!
And, you know, one of the big things
is that we're on a big
ball of rocks and water and we have this
sun in the sky, and so languages have
words for day and night, and mark the passage
of time with days and with years, because
those are things that all different
human societies have observed.
And we
have a moon, which gives us things like
months.
And there are roughly twelve of them in
a year, so twelve is this important
number for different measurements
of time.
L: I didn't really think about how
important twelve was for time until we
started listing places where it crops up!
So it crops up, obviously – we talk about
twelve-hour cycles in the day, and we have
24
hours, so that's two sets of twelve there.
G: We have things like twelve signs of the
zodiac, or twelve months in a given year.
And we also have other types of time-related
things that are divided up into
twelves, like the minutes and the hours on
a clock get divided.
So an hour gets
divided into sixty parts, which is, you
know, divisible by twelve.
And then a minute
gets divided into sixty parts, and so I
looked up – because I was thinking, you
know, why is it that a second is called
the same as, you know, the "first, second,
third, fourth"?
And that's not actually –
L: Is it a coincidence?
I had always
assumed it was.
G: No!
No!
It's not a
coincidence!
I kind of vaguely assumed it
was a coincidence.
But actually, in
medieval Latin – and this is according to
Etymonline, which is great – they divided
the hours into various kinds of small
parts.
And the first part of the hour was
called the "pars minuta prima", or the
first small part.
And "minuta" there is
related to, like, "minute" or "miniature."
L: Right,
yeah.
G: But it just means small.
And so
that's where a minute comes from.
And
that's the first small part.
And then the
pars minuta secunda – L: Ahh, I see where
this is going!
G: – is the
second small part!
And that's the second.
L: Right.
G: Which is another sixtieth.
And
there actually used to be a term for a
sixtieth of a second –
L: Right...
G: – what we would now use a
millisecond for, which was called a
tierce,
or a third, which is the third small part,
which is yet another sixtieth of a
second.
L: Ahh.
Like, seconds are so simple
and salient to me, having grown up with
them, that a tierce, like a third, just sounds
so weird?
But a millisecond is completely
fine.
You can see the modern decimal system
of influence – G: Modern decimal system
kind of encroaching on the second!
Yeah!
L: Wow, imagine if we still measured things
in thir... thirds?
G: Thirds!
L: Thirds.
G: Or tierces,
if you want to be Latin-y about it.
L: Tierces!
Yeah.
G: But, I
mean, we could have ended up – you know,
we
have milliseconds now.
The French
Revolution, which was one of
the things that introduced the metric
system, also tried to introduce a ten-day
week instead of a seven-day week.
L: Ah, yeah,
I heard about this.
There's a great
Twitter account that just tweets out
whatever day it is in the old French
revolutionary calendar.
G: Oh, that's great.
Yeah, they named them all after, like,
agrarian things, right?
L: Yeah.
G: So, there
have been attempts to do that,
but for some reason the
seven-day week and – I guess the nice
thing is is that if you divide a 28-day
month, which is kind of a lunar month,
into four parts, you get this seven-day
week, even though there's no other reason
to use seven because it's this weird
prime number.
L: And a ten-day week, it's a
long time to the weekend.
G: But if you have
a three-day weekend, maybe?
L: Like, you're
never gonna win people over.
I would
rather get a two-day weekend after five
days than a three-day weekend after
seven.
G: I don't remember exactly how they
gave the days off, maybe they had one
halfway through?
So it would be like
three and then one and then three and
then... how do you do math?
What's left?
Two more?
L: I'm not a French revolutionary,
I'm sorry.
G: Well...
L: We'll have a link in the
show notes page.
G: So, there's all
these different ways of slicing
and dicing time and yet we've also ended
up with this very weird
calendar system that has all of these
artefacts in it, like the fact that
September, which has "sept" in it, which
means seven, is actually not the seventh
month, it's the ninth month.
And October,
which has "oct", meaning eighth, and it is
actually the tenth month, and so on and
so forth, because January, February didn't
really use to be a thing, and so if you
started counting at March, they work out.
But yeah, there's lots of
weird things about weird
artefacts that get snuck into our
time-counting systems.
The other really
cool thing about time – so, this is a study
about children called "Learning the
Language of Time: Children's acquisition
of duration words."
L: Right.
G: And it's by
Katharine Tillman and David Barner, and
they noticed, or people have noticed, that
kids start using time-related words
around the age of two or three, even
though they have no idea how clocks work
for like several more years.
L: I would say
definitely several more years, yep.
G: Until
like eight or nine.
L: Yeah.
G: So what do they
mean if they're saying the word minute,
or if they're saying the word hour, if
they don't actually know what a clock
means?
L: Right.
G: And so they got dozens of
three- and six-year-olds in the lab and
they asked them to compare several
different pairs of durations.
So their
example was, "Farmer Brown jumped for a
minute, Captain Blue jumped for an hour.
Who jumped more?"
L: Uh-huh.
G: And they also use
seconds, days, weeks, months, and years.
And
by age four, the children tended to get
more of these questions right than you'd
expect if they were just guessing.
And as they
got older they got better and better at
that.
L: So they know an hour is longer.
They
may not be able to tell you exactly how
long.
G: Yeah.
L: Hmm!
G: But then!
They asked them
things like, "Farmer Brown jumped for
three minutes, Captain Blue jumped for
two hours.
Who jumped more?"
And adults are
like, yeah, this is still really
obvious, and the kids were like, I don't...
I
don't know?
L: Wow.
Stumped them!
That's like, oh, yeah, as an adult,
you're like, this is so painfully
obvious, how can you not get this.
G: Like, why are you asking this?
But this is why we have science, right, so
you're
not just like, this is so obvious.
But yeah, so kids get thrown by this: well,
it's
three minutes, but it's two hours, like
what... what... what are you gonna do?
Whereas
we know that an hour is an
order of magnitude larger than a minute,
it doesn't matter if you just add one.
L: Yeah.
G: And kids also do this type of
things for numbers and colours.
They have
these kinds of general concepts
of them before they have a very good
idea of the specific details.
So a kid
might be able to use a word like hundred
or thousand, probably – this is me
inferring from their study – but they're
not actually
counting all them, they just
see a lot of cookies and be like, "Wow!
There's a hundred cookies!"
And there's
actually twenty.
But they have the sense that a
hundred is a lot.
L: I'd still be happy with twenty
cookies.
G: You know, so would I.
But, you know,
counting is a thing.
L: Yeah, and so we have
the kind of general semantics.
And it's
that thing, like, we do it as adult
speakers as well, right.
Like, we say, you
know, I'll often message you and I'll be like,
"I'll be online in two minutes!"
And you
can expect me any time within the next
one to ten minutes.
G: Yeah, oh yeah, and
if you're ten minutes there I'm not like,
oh, you're eight minutes behind, it's like,
ah yeah, that was kind of in the order of
magnitude.
L: I've started the stopwatch!
G: Especially if
you think about how parents or adults
talk about time to kids, it's like, "Yes,
yes, yes, I promise, we're gonna
go in a minute!"
And then like twenty minutes later the
parent's like, "I guess we're going now!"
L: Yeah, it is very confusing to learn to
navigate this.
G: Yeah, "You can
watch TV in a minute!" and it's
actually like, you know...
Or like, "In an
hour!" and it's actually three hours or
it's actually half an hour.
I think
parents know that kids don't really
understand those those times, and they're
often not very precise about
them with kids because it's just easier
to give a general impression.
But
I think the classic way that I remember
counting time when I was a kid was with
sleeps.
So you would say things like,
"Three more sleeps until we're gonna
go visit your grandparents!"
And that was
three more days, but somehow it was
easier to count sleeps.
L: I think there
are only like four or five sleeps until
Christmas when this episode comes out?
G: There you go!
L: Depending which time zone
you're in.
G: Depending on when you listen
to it.
Maybe they're listening to it like
a year from now.
L: You can only listen to
this episode on any given 21st of
December.
G: So, yeah, there's like three more
sleeps!
French also has this word, but
they don't use the normal word for sleep,
they use a baby talk word, which
is "dodo".
So you can say, like, "Trois dodos!"
And that means three more sleeps
because you're using the baby talk
register.
L: That's cute!
I mean, I guess sleep, A
Sleep, is a weird... like, I think I only
use it with children.
G: Yeah!
L: Use sleep as a noun?
G: I mean, I think you can say like, "I
slept the sleep of the just" or
something if
you want to be more formal.
L: Yeah, but not to
a three-year-old!
The other thing I've always
found really hard to get my head around
with time is that different cultures
obviously have different times that they
celebrate the new year, that the concept
of a new year and counting years is
completely arbitrary.
And in Nepal
there are about five different ethnic
groups that have five different dates
that they measure New Year's on.
G: Oh, that's exciting.
L: It's always so amazing!
It's
like this thing that you think is this
really important thing, and then you discover
that other people, for other people
your new year means nothing and they've
got their own thing going on.
G: Yeah, and
it's interesting how the year
itself is so universal, but the time when
you when you pick it is so arbitrary.
Whereas something like a day, like we
all have the same kinds of dawns and
sunsets, because that's built in, but for
a new year, sometimes people go for a
solstice or an equinox, sometimes people
go for a lunar calendar, where the
years don't actually quite match up
because you're caring more about
the months – you know, there's lots of
different types of years.
L: There's also a lot of cultural variation
in how people conceptualise where they
are in time and how time happens.
And
this is more or less a really elaborate
culture-wide metaphor that different
cultures can have.
So when you hear
"metaphor" you might think of, like, school
comprehension classes where you've
learnt that, like, "the sun is a
big yellow balloon" is a metaphor and "the
sun is like a big yellow balloon" is a
simile and both of them are equating
something with another property.
And that
is true and you can use them as a very
specific literary device, and in those
cases the more novel, the better.
But
we also have these metaphors that are
really pervasive in how we see the world
and our place in them.
G: And they're so
ingrained that you don't even think
about them as metaphors, they're just how
things are.
L: No, so we really have to think
about ourselves as souls in meat-covered
skeletons on a bowl of rocks hurtling
through space.
And this kind of area of
semantic – it's really a kind of a property
of
semantics and cognitive linguistics – is
probably best encapsulated, or kind of
kicked off through a work by George
Lakoff and Mark Johnson.
So a lot of the
work in this area is inspired by them
and their book "Metaphors We Live By,"
because they're so pervasive.
So, for
example, we have a lot of things like
"last year is behind us," "we can move
forward," "I can't wait until Christmas,"
like, "Christmas is coming up really
quickly" are all – G: So, time can
move quickly in a way that's kind of
weird.
I think even just saying like, "Oh, I'm
looking forward to when we're gonna do
this," that's like, the future is
ahead of us, the past is behind us.
Or,
like, "let's just put that behind us,"
meaning let's just forget about it.
L: Yeah.
So we have an orientation where the
future is ahead and the past is behind
us.
And so we have two slightly different
ways of thinking about this in English.
We can say, like, "I just have to get to
September and then I can go on holiday"
and so we're moving through space
towards September or the future or
whatever is happening, and then – G: Hmm,
okay.
L: But
we have a slightly different one where
like, "Christmas has come up so quickly!"
where we're kind of stationary and
time is flowing past us.
But what's
common to both of those is the future is –
G: Like, "I can't believe we've arrived at
December already."
L: Yep.
But future, pretty safely anchored in
front of us.
Whereas there are other
cultures, and the most famous one is Aymara,
which is an Aymaran language of South
America – so with Aymara, the future is
behind us and the past is in front of us.
And if you think about it, it makes a
kind of sense, because we know what
happened in the past.
You know, I know
what happened to me yesterday.
I am not
psychic and I don't know what's gonna
happen to me tomorrow.
So it makes sense
that the future is in the part of your
vision where you can't see and you don't
know what's there, but you can look out
over your life and where you've come
from as you've travelled through.
So it
actually, like, it's a really robust logic
and it's totally the opposite metaphor,
but it's encoded in their language the
way our way of talking about time is
encoded.
Another common one that's often
talked about is,
especially in various Chinese languages
where you have a vertical orientation of
time, where the past is above and the
future is below.
And that's partly the
the writing system that motivates that,
and we have, even though it's not in our
speech, we often see in our gesture, not
only do we have this forward-backward
space orientation, but we have a
left-to-right orientation.
So if you
think about plotting out everything you
have to do in the next couple of days on
a timeline, then you're more likely to
put events earlier on the left and
events later on the right.
G: Right, so, okay,
I'm gonna do this and then I'm gonna
do this and then I'm gonna do that.
L: Sometimes we have these metaphors that
are so deep in our consciousness they
don't even show up in our speech but
they show up in the way that we orient
ourselves.
G: But if we were using a
right-to-left writing system like Arabic
or Hebrew, we would probably plot out
things on a timeline in the other
direction?
L: Yeah, there's been so
little research that's really nailed a
lot of this down.
Lera Boroditsky is
a cognitive psychologist who's done some
work on Chinese and English monolinguals
and bilinguals, and she's found that,
especially with Mandarin
speakers, you can get them thinking
vertically or horizontally depending on
how you prime them before you do the
experiment, which is cool.
G: Interesting.
L: So there's both
long-term, like it's very hard
for us to think about time
forward and backward, but you can also
prime people to think about these
metaphors in more short-term ways as
well.
G: And people often use, you
know, even just an arrow going from
left to right to indicate things about
the future.
L: Yeah, so Hillary Clinton's
2016 election campaign logo, which was
very unpopular at the time, and I
wrote about it and what the arrow was
doing in the H as it pointed to the
right.
And also FedEx has that little
optical illusion arrow in the logo.
G: Oh, yeah!
L: And
if you look at it, they would never have
done that logo if the writing was
such that it went from right to left,
because that wouldn't be indicating kind
of future-y dynamic forwardness.
G: Yeah.
Oh
that's kind of like – so email programs
do
this, right, if you have, like, the reply
arrow has this kind of circle back
pointing to the left, and the forward
arrow has it going towards the right.
And
those are just arrows, like, your
email contacts don't exist
in time and space, but they're
using those arrows to kind of
transmit those ideas.
L: Yep.
So these metaphors are really pervasive
in how we talk and think about time.
G: So FedEx doesn't want to make you think
that they're gonna run off with
your package and take it back to the
factory.
L: FedEx your package, just comes back to
you every time.
G: And that's what would
happen if they used the arrow in the
other direction.
L: Yeah, that would be... that would be a
not-good...
And, you know, it's – I've
written some stuff about emoji direction.
So, they're oriented so they make sense
in terms of Japanese word order.
G: Mm!
L: But
in terms of English word order it makes
it look like people aren't moving
forward from left to right and so
they're not moving forward in time.
And
English speakers get really irritated by
that.
So the vehicles and the people
walking all point from right to left.
And
we interpret that as like they're going
backwards.
G: Oh, okay.
Whereas if you spoke Japanese, because
that language is subject-object-verb and
then you want to put the verb
at the end of the sentence so that you
can be like, yeah, this refers back to the
thing that was at the beginning.
L: Yeah, so
in that language it's pointing the right
way, but for English speakers
it doesn't gel with our sense of things
moving forward.
And so I love this way
because you really, you know, time is so
hard to get our hands on that we have to
use whatever strategy we can and these
metaphors are a really nice way to do
that, but we really take them for granted.
Sometimes you're just like oh, wow, yeah,
that's how we... that's how we move through
the world!
G: Yeah!
Another thing that I take
for granted a lot is that, you know, time
is this abstract concept, but for some of
us, and I'm one of them, we
actually have this kind of intuitive way
of visualising time.
So there's a
phenomenon known as synaesthesia, which is
when you have kind of cross-sensory
perception.
So the classic
example of synaesthesia is grapheme colour
synaesthesia, which means that certain
letters or numbers have particular
colours associated with them, and I have
that as well and we'll probably talk
about that in some other episode, but in
this particular context
I want to talk about time-space
synaesthesia a little bit, because this is
actually one of these kind of – it's less
talked about and it's a lot more common
I think than people were realising, that
a lot of people have instinctive visual
metaphors, a kind of a mental image or an
image in your mind's eye, of where
different times of day are, where
different days of the week are, where
different months of the year are, hours
in the day.
So...
L: Hmm!
Yeah, I definitely haven't heard of that
as much as I've heard of colour letter/grapheme
synaesthesia.
G: Yeah, the grapheme
one, I mean, it's easier to visualise
because you could just put that stuff
in different colours,
whereas the – you know, I think I've
looked at some of the diagrams
that come with the studies and I'm like,
"That looks really weird!"
But also I know
I have this thing, mine just looks
different from that.
So the classic
example that you generally see in
time-space synaesthesia studies is – so,
I think most time-space synaesthetes
visualise time as a circle.
Which kind of
makes sense, because all of our time
things, like hours in the day,
months of the year, they repeat and
they're cyclic around each other.
L: Yeah.
G: And the classic one that you see in
the visualisations is that someone will
be standing in the centre of this big
ring.
And in the ring are the
different months of the year, in order,
and the one that's in front of the
person will be the current month.
So
let's say you're looking at December and
you're like, this is the month that we're
in right now, and then beside it will be
January 'cause you're flipping over to
the next year, and you'll just keep going
around.
And it'll kind of move in front
of you as time progresses.
L: Right.
G: And some
people have it in kind of a bit of
an elliptical shape, like it's not just
generally a perfect circle, it's not like
a hula hoop.
L: Hmm!
G: It's this kind of elliptical
shape, and sometimes it's tilted a bit,
sometimes there are colours involved...
This
is this kind of thing that people
have.
For me, I have it as a loop, but I
have it as a up-down loop that circles
around in the back.
L: Okay.
G: So rather than like
the hula hoop thing – L: So you're not standing
in the middle of it.
G: I'm not standing in
the middle of it, I'm looking at it.
It's
kind of like if I was going to take my
watch off and hold it in front of me so
I could see the face of it, then that
would loop behind itself as well.
L: Okay.
G: Except it's bigger than that.
And it doesn't have a watch, it
doesn't have a clock face on it.
And I
have the same mental loop for both hours
of the day and months of the year.
So
midnight is where January is.
L: Okay.
G: And
it goes through.
And noon
is around where June is, and it goes
through – like, midnight and
January are at the top and then it kind
of loops in the back very quickly
and it just kind of goes around there.
So,
I was trying to look for this
visualisation that I'd seen before of
the months around the person, and I ended
up
on this article that was trying to
describe this.
And it was saying that,
oh, people who have time-space
synaesthesia, they're like Time Lords!
And
they have all these...!
And I just...
you know, I don't have magical powers here,
people.
L: Do you use it mentally
when – if you're like, okay, I have to do
this thing in September, so I have four
months to do it, like, is...?
G: Yeah, I mean I
use it in – like, I do use it to
kind of keep track of where I am, going
about my day, or knowing when
something is, or "how soon is
that," "how far is that."
Like, "this feels far
away," "this feels close by."
I use it for
that.
And I did notice – so I was in Hawaii
in March this year.
And I left Montreal
in the cold and then Hawaii has these
beautiful, balmy temperatures, obviously.
And I noticed that I was in the wrong
spot in my mental calendar?
And I felt
like I was in July, because that's what
the weather was like, even though I was
in March?
So I had a really hard time
calculating times for several weeks
afterwards, because I just – my body had
decided that I was in July now.
Like, my
brain had somehow decided that I was in July
now and I was really not.
It's kind of
like a macro version of – you know that
thing where you have this sense that
it's Tuesday but it's actually Thursday?
L: Yup.
G: And you don't know why it feels like a
Tuesday, but it feels like a Tuesday, and
there's a way that Tuesday feels?
L: That, for a year.
G: I had that for like several months, 'cause
I got really thrown off.
L: Oh, how disconcerting.
G: It was pretty bad.
Now that
it's getting cold here again, it's
better, I'm like, it's definitely winter now.
But it really messed me up, yeah!
So, yeah,
it's like, I'm
not a Time Lord, my
apartment is not bigger on the inside...
L: How disappointing.
G: I know, I tried, but
they don't sell TARDIS apartments.
L: It'd be
very convenient.
G: Yeah.
L: Do you find that
you assume other people are kind of
visualising time in this way as well, or
do you find that it clashes with those
other cultural metaphors about time?
G: Um, I
just kind of take it for granted, like,
I don't really think about it very often,
it's just there?
It's kind of like you
don't think about how what your
mother looks like, you just know.
Or
like – L: You don't think
about the fact that you're a meat-puppet
skeleton.
G: You don't think about the fact
that you're a meat puppet in space!
Sometimes
I do see calendars that for some
inexplicable reason will put their
earlier times at the bottom.
So there's
this count this website that I've been
visiting a lot lately which tells you
when the sunset and sunrise times are
for your location – because I'm really
counting down the days to when we can
start moving out of this darkness, and
I'd like my sun to start rising again at,
like, earlier than four o'clock – and for
some inexplicable reason, this sunset
website, it starts its midnight,
1:00 a.m., 2:00 a.m., at the bottom and
its evening at the top.
L: That is very
confusing.
G: And that just throws me every
single time, and I don't know why they're
doing it!
But yeah, that really messes
me up.
But I think that would mess most
people up, because – L: That would definitely
mess me up.
G: Because if you're using an agenda or
something, all of our metaphors at,
like, later in the day is at the
bottom?
L: Yeah.
G: So I don't know what these people
are – maybe they have synaesthesia and
that's how their synaesthesia works!
And
they were like, "Finally!
I could make this
thing the way I like it!"
That's my best
guess.
But I think one of the things when I
think about being a
ghost in a meat suit, meat skeleton, is
that there's a certain amount of
similarity that linguistics has to
another hobby that I've been taking up
in the recent couple years, which is
stargazing.
L: Yeah?
G: And before I started
stargazing, you know, I would go outside
at night and I'd look up at the stars and
be like, wow, there's stars, that's nice!
L: Yeah.
They're there.
G: They're there!
Look, pretty!
Sometimes there's a moon!
And, you know, I
knew one or two constellations, but if I
couldn't find those, if
Orion wasn't up, then I was just like,
oh, there's stars.
And now that I've been
stargazing for over a year and I know
what most of the constellations are
and how they move through the sky at
different hours of the day and different
times of the year, and I have names
associated with them, I go outside and I
look at the same sky and what I see
there is different.
Because all of the
individual pieces have meaning
now and have associations with
them and have patterns that I can see.
And obviously the sky hasn't changed,
I've changed.
But in many cases,
language is kind of like all those stars.
We're surrounded by it all the time, you
hear it all the time, you see it, it's
there, but being able to look at language
like a linguist looks at language is... now
you have words, and you have frameworks
that you can put in, here's what all
these sounds are.
And they're not just
a bath of sounds, they're
constellations.
So you have this way of
making sense of all of this stuff that
you're seeing and you're experiencing it
and putting it into some sort of context.
I think for me that's one of the things
that's really magical about linguistics.
And stargazing!
[Music]
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[Music]
